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Wednesday 20th March 2019 – AND HERE I AM …

… back in the comfort and safety and privacy and warmth of my own home.

And how much I like being here too. i’m glad to be back.

However, as seems to be usual these days I had yet another bad night. I always seem to whenever I’m travelling. Going to bed early doesn’t help, especially when you have found the radio alarm clock and set it to work, so that you can watch it tick on past 03:35.

But at some point I must have gone off to sleep because I was awoken by the alarm. and I’d even been on something of a voyage too – doing something with the Wales football team from last night.

Once I was awake, I didn’t hang about. I was up (almost) immediately and with everything already packed, I was on the road even before the alarm at 06:20 went off.

And to such an extent that never mind the 06:42 train – I was on the 06:32 to Oostende.

You can see it pulling in, 2 minutes late, being pulled by one of the Class 18 electric locomotives from 2011

As a result, I was in Bruxelles-Midi station even earlier than normal. I had plenty of time to go to Carrefour for my raisin buns for breakfast.

Surprisingly I didn’t have too long to wait at Bruxelles-Midi even though I was in early.

We were called up to the platform somewhat earlier than usual, and when we arrived on the platform we found that our TGV was already in.

It’s another one of the Reseau 38000 “PBA” (Paris Brussels Amsterdam) transets, number 4538

My neighbour was a nice young lady but she was extremely taciturn. She just sat gazing out of the window all the way to Paris Gare du Nord and I had a little relax.

At Paris, I dashed down into the Metro and leapt aboard the train, only for it to be held up at almost every station. In fact, the journey that usually takes me about 45 minutes took just about 65 minutes. It’s a good job that the TGV arrived on time.

My train to Granville was on time too. My neighbour was an elderly lady who needed quite a lot of attention which meant that I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to do.

But in my reading of “Wineland the Good” by Arthur Reeves, I came across something quite interesting. Reeves refers to some documents relating to the discovery and voyages to Vinland – the ‘Breve Chronicon Norvegiae’ – that were discovered in the files of the Earl of Dalhousie and which dated to the mid 15th Century.

Dalhousie is of course not too far away from Roslin and the presence of these documents up the road may well provide some kind of link that led to the voyages of Henry Sinclair and their relation to the strange carvings at Roslin Chapel.

Despite almost everything, our train pulled in at Granville bang on time.

Here it is in the station, parked up next to the train to Rennes – one of the Bombardier X76500 series of multiple-units.

As an aside, I’ve discovered that I can actually catch a train from Granville to St Malo if I change at Dol de Bretagne. And there’s talk about laying on a direct train some time in the future.

This time I managed to walk all the way back home, admiring Normandy Trader being loaded up at the quayside as I did so.

There seems to be an enormous amount of goods down there waiting to be loaded up on board. That should keep them out of mischief for quite a while with all of that.

Seeing as there were some men around there today, I should really have gone down to talk to them.

Further up the hill, I noticed that they were working on the city walls.

Part of the pavement has been closed off for as long as I have been there due to some loose stones that have been falling out of the wall, and I had heard some story that they might be doing some work on it.

So it looks as if they have already started. Probably hammering the loose stones back in and repointing the walls.

And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I spent a couple of summers doing that on my house and it’s a long, heavy, difficult job.

Back here I had a really good relax for a couple of hours before attempting the unpacking. Definitely feeling the strain.

Tea was easy too. One of the portions of shepherd’s pie out of the freezer with veg and gravy. However, the slice of chocolate cake that i’d left out of the freezer had turned. But those in an airtight container in the fridge were fine and there was some soya dessert left.

later on, I went for my walk around the headland. It was quite pleasant out there but yet again I was the only one out there.

There was still a touch of light left – enough to take a few photographs of the coastline, like this one of St Martin de Brehal.

It’s come out really well, all told and I’m quite pleased with it.

So now I’ll go to bed. There’s not much food in here so it’s a shopping day tomorrow. A nice walk up to LIDL I reckon.

I’ll see how I feel.

night donville les bains rue du nord granville manche normandy france

night st malo brittany baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

night cancale brittany baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

night baie de mont st michel jullouville granville manche normandy france

night trawler baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

Sunday 10th March 2019 – HAPPY BIRTHDAY …

… to me again!

This afternoon I was invited out for a birthday treat by Liz and Terry, so I went hot-foot out to Roncey.

We had a really good chat about this and that, Terry showed me the bathroom that he’s been building (and it really is nice too) and then we had the pièce de resistance – which is not, as you might be forgiven for thinking, a French virgin.

Liz had cooked a giant cornish pasty full of a vegetable stuffing based on chick peas, lentils, onions, garlic and mustard. Together with roast vegetables, green mange-tout peas and a tomato sauce, it was absolutely delicious and I’ll have to try this at home.

Pudding was a kind-of raspberry mousse on a speculoos base, and that was just as nice.

And then Liz gave me a birthday present, and you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see what it is.

Last night, as you will know, I went to bed fairly early. But there’s no point in going to bed early if you end up wide awake at 04:11, is there?

The water heater switched off at 06:25 as usual (off-peak electricity ends at 06:30) – I heard that – but I must have gone to sleep at some point afterwards because I remember waking up at 08:25.

08:45 was when I hauled myself out of bed.

We had the usual morning routine, and then I spent most of the morning making a start on classifying the photos of September 2018.

Only 1730 of them from when I was in the High Arctic and I reckon that I’ve done about 90 of them. It’s not just a case of classifying them but I need to work out where I was at the time and to make brief notes of some of them where necessary.

As you can see this is going to be a very long job. Especially as I’m stuck because I can’t remember the name of the derelict US Air Force base where we inspected the military installations and saw the Greenland ice cap.

Even half an hour’s searching on the internet couldn’t come up with the name because it’s formerly a restricted site so it would never have been published back in the old days.

After lunch I carried on for a while and then headed off to Roncey.

And on the way, I ground to a halt because something caught my eye. It’s a case of “get thee behind me, Satan” because there’s a nice field with a long tree-lined drive that leads to a stately home, and this field has been divided into building plots that are up for sale.

A nice little two-bedroomed bungalow on one of these would be beautiful, but really given my state of health and my life expectancy, it would be a total folly.

I shall have to put that idea out of my head. And pretty quickly too!

Tuesday 5th March 2019 – IT’S MARDI GRAS …

… and there’s been the afternoon parade of floats around the town.

But the day started off with me ignoring the alarms and staying in bed until about 07:20.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble or two.

We were having some kind of meeting at school with a few of the kids and I was on the interview panel. The first kid to be interviewed was my own daughter (which of course I don’t have, as far as I am aware) but was in fact Zero. I had to give her something of a lecture about one or two things that she hadn’t done, or had done incorrectly. And in the end I asked her if she was going to wait for me and we would go home together. That was what she wanted to do so I told her to wait “over there”. The next girl was a little think rake of a girl who had, apparently, failed her dancing exam. She’d put in a lot of effort and it was a shame that it hadn’t been rewarded. We needed to encourage her and bring her forward, and so we’d set up a little rehearsal lesson for her and one or two others. But this was going on far longer than it should have done and I ended up being worried about being late.

Later on, there was a crowd of us with my father in his old black Zephyr 6 3816TD. We were bowling along down the motorway and hit a traffic queue that slowed everyone down. The third lane was open so we swerved into there and passed the obstruction but ended up crawling along behind some motorist going really slowly. Eventually we pushed him (metaphorically of course) out of the way and even in fourth gear, tried to pull away from almost a crawl. I was interested to see if the car would do it. I mentioned that if my father wanted to fit a diesel engine into the Zephyr I had a Peugeot 2.3 diesel lying around out of a Sierra (I actually do, believe it or not) and that would go in quite nicely, especially as now all of my plans had changed and I was not going to use it. My father came up with a few objections about how all of the gearing would be wrong and much too over-geared, but I remarked that it seems to be coping quite well with the 2.5 litre petrol engine that’s in there right now.

We had the usual morning medication ritual, and later on a breakfast. Following which, I caught up with the outstanding photos from Sunday.

One task that I’ve been trying to do on a kind-of ad-hoc casual basis is to go through a few of the older web pages and update them with stuff that I’ve discovered subsequently, or with photos from subsequent visits.

I’d noticed that on one page from 2005 I’d missed a couple of photo shots that I had taken when I was there in September 2017, so this morning I attacked that web page and it’s now up-to-date until the next revision.

But here’s the exciting bit.

I was looking for yet another paper, and this led to a major tidy-up in here and filing of papers. That took a good couple of hours and things are looking much more optimistic in here now.

But surprisingly, while I was looking for something else, I came across the missing taxe d’habitation certificate for 2013. So that folder is now up to date and that’s good news.

A whole pile of stuff ended up in the shredder too and that went down to the paper container outside, and another half-bag has been shredded in here too, for finishing off tomorrow.

After lunch, I carried on tidying up in the bedroom and a lot of stuff has been put away. It’s certainly made a difference.

Later on, I went down to the harbour to see the floats arriving from their lap around the town. I took plenty of photos and videos and I’ll sort those out tomorrow.

The tide had turned while I was down there at the defilé.

As I was climbing back up the rue des Juifs I noticed that all of the fishing boats were starting to come in on the tide.

It was quite impressive watching them all come in in line-astern like this.

And you can tell that the tide had only just started to come in.

The channel is deepest nearest the left-hand side of the harbour entrance, and you can see that the fishing boats are keeping well over to that side of the entrance

And you’ll notice at the bottom of the image the seagulls are forming a queue for the leavings

With it being Mardi Gras, I had some taco rolls with stuffing and pasta, followed by apple pie and coconut-flavoured soya cream. That pie is getting better and better.

Following that I went back into town.

Despite the high winds, all of the big attractions at the fairground were in full flight, so I went down to photograph and film them.

I was down there for a good hour or so with the big Nikon taking photos and the Nikon 1 J5 taking the films.

ambulance attending emergency rue des juifs granville manche normandy france On the way back, I encountered something of a medical emergency in the rue des Juifs.

There was an ambulance parked blocking the street, with the personnel attending to someone in the driving seat of a car parked by the pavement.

I’ve no idea what was going on ther, and it didn’t seem to be the bet moment to enquire

Only a vague wave of fatigue today – no crashing out. So I’m off to bed now and hopefully I’ll have a good sleep ready for tomorrow and yet more work.

Meanwhile, If you want to see all of the photos from today, you need to go to THIS LINK

Friday 22nd February 2019 – HAVING HAD …

… a really bad night last, I couldn’t wait until 08:30 came around.

At 08:33 I was on the telephone. “Could Dr Plunet see me for 5 minutes some time soon?”
“How about 09:30?”

Eat your hearts out, NHS.

With not having had even a wash since Monday and not daring to try a shower, I had as good a scrub as I could and then headed off – in Caliburn because I couldn’t walk and I wasn’t really all that much up to driving either – down to town.

I was seen immediately – by a locum as the doctor is on holiday. He examined me, had a good listen to my bronchites wheezing away and identified straight away what was the problem with me. And I was right too. The viral infection is back.

So loaded up with medication, a loaf of bread and some pears, I headed off back home.

And having dosed myself up – back to bed where I lay and sweated myself to sleep.

However, the medication must have done some good because a while later I was up and about feeling better. The cough had eased, the streaming head had calmed down somewhat and I could actually think straighter.

This afternoon, Shock! Horror! after a bowl of soup I started on doing some work. I have so much to do that I haven’t done, and so much that I should have done these last few days.

So now is the time to press on. One of my web pages from 2005 is attracting media attention – positive attention too for a change. But the style is quite dated and needs rewriting, so that was my first task today.

And that took me longer than I expected too. But I kept on plugging away and even found time to make a start on the missing blog entries. They might be up to date sometime soon.

But not right now. It’s late and I’m off to bed. It’s Saturday tomorrow but I’m not going shopping. I’m not eating anything so there’s no need to buy anything. I’ll have a leisurely day instead and build up my strength.

Friday 15th February 2019 – AS WHAT SEEMS TO BE …

… the normal procedure this morning, I heard the alarms go off and then turned over and went back to sleep.

The irony about that is I was wide awake at 04:40 and lay there tossing and turning until 06:00. Going back to sleep straight away and not waking up at 07:25 is bizarre.

During the night I’d been on my travels. On a bus holiday too but the bus was huge – it was more like an aeroplane with over 200 people in it, although it was rather laid out like a bus. I had a double-seat to myself but I had noticed a girl who would have been an ideal companion to share my seat. The driver announced that those people going on the optional excursions needed to alight and board another bus. That meant me, but I hadn’t been to my hotel yet. So I had to fight my way down to the front to speak to the driver. He told me that it did include me, so I had to fight my way to the back again, pick up my possessions, struggle through the crowds with my huge suitcase and find my bus. The driver looked at me and laughed. He said that it was the first time that he had ever had a passenger wishing to bring all of their possessions on an optional excursion. I replied that this was because I hadn’t yet been allowed to go to my hotel, and what was he going to do about it? But he walked off.

A late breakfast of course, and then a relaxing day without doing anything exciting.

And by the time that I’d finished, I’d finished the web-page with the photos of Cologne back in December and put it on line. The photos are a little disappointing, mainly because the weather was so dreadful, but one or two of them have some remarkable effects.

Having attended to that, I could then press on with the blog entry for that day too. That’s now on-line too.

That doesn’t sound as if I have done very much today but, believe me, it wasn’t particularly straightforward. And having done the difficult bit, I can press on with the rest of the blog.

That hummus that I made the other day is even more wicked than it was when I made it. It’s maturing nicely and the garlic smells delicious. It should keep me going – in many more senses than one – for a considerable time.

This afternoon was one of the nicest afternoons that I have ever experienced in a February.

It really was a pleasure to be out and about in it – so much so that I actually went out earlier than normal.

There was a light sea mist that prevented a really good view down the coast, but the skies were blue and so was the sea – a really deep summery blue.

And I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the weather either, as you might expect.

There were hordes of people milling around on the grass on the Pointe du Roc around the old military installations of the Atlantic Wall. And who can blame them?

In the foreground on the left is one of the rotation tracks for one of the large guns that were positioned here, and on the right in the background is the former military athletics track that is now the playing field for the College Malraux.

There was plenty of activity on the sea too.

A yacht was quite happily sailing past the headland of the Pointe du Roc and I went to take a photo of it – and just at that very moment a seagull flew past the camera.

That’s what they call a “photo-bombing with a difference” and I couldn’t reproduce that photo if I tried for a hundred years.

Round the corner and today’s walk took me on the cliffs above the chantier navale.

As I mentioned the other day, there’s a lot of activity going on in there right now. They seem to be very busy and that’s always good news.

There are a couple of new boats in there today too. We saw the yacht and the trawler in there when we went past on Monday, but the third one in there is new.

She’s Armor owned by a leisure diving company from near Lannion in the Côtes d’Armor, in between St Brieuc and Roscoff. So she’s come a long way to be serviced here.

I had to fight off a wave of fatigue round about 17:00, which is an improvement from just recently.

Tea was a vegan burger with pasta, veg and tomato sauce. Quite delicious it was too.

I was alone on my walk again this evening. And I can’t think why because it really was pleasant out there. Not at all like a February night.

I had a wander around the walls and spent a couple of minutes looking at the traffic driving up the hill and round the slalom of the Avenue de la Libération.

No-one – not even a seagull – disturbed me at all while I was out there

No cats either tonight, so I trudged on homewards.

There’s a small house in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame that has attracted my attention. Some evenings it’s illuminated by a lampt outside, and tonight the building was looking particularly attractive.

It would come out even better if I had a better camera that would stop down even lower. This was taken with the 18-105mm lens at f3.75 at ISO800.

Saturday tomorrow and ordinarily I would be going shopping. But on Sunday I’m heading off to Leuven again so I shan’t bother.

I might have a little wander into town tomorrow morning though and visit the market to see what is going on. They should be starting the preparations for the Carnaval too and I’ll be interested to see where they are up to.

brehal plage granville manche normandy france

marker light rocks waves granville manche normandy france

waves on rocks pointe du roc granville manche normandy france

fishing boat english channel granville manche normandy france

lifeboat memorial port entrance marker light baie de mont st michel st pair sur mer granville manche normandy france

sailing boats yachts baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

trawler fishing boat refuelling port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Sunday 23rd December 2018 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER .

… thing crossed off my list of things to do.

Back in the early 1970s when I first started coming over to Oostende, I was always puzzled by the train that was waiting at the station for the passengers. Its destination was always Welkenraedt and I didn’t have a clue where Welkenraedt was.

A little later I had a look for where Welkenraedt might be. It’s a small town nestled in the Ardennes miles from anywhere.

That puzzled me even more as to why the boat trains from Oostende would be going there.
I eventually found the reason. It’s a junction station where lines from Spa and from Eupen come in.

But more importantly, it’s the last station of any importance before the German border. The electricity current in Germany used to be different to that in Belgium, so that was where the Belgian engine came off, and then a German locomotive would be attached to take the train on into Europe.

Alison and I went to Welkenraedt on one of our excursions out back in July to see what was going on. But it was always my ambition, strange though it might seem, to change trains there.

So here I am, on a windswept, soaking wet freezing platform huddled under a tiny shelter at Welkenraedt in the middle of winter waiting for a train to come in.

And no coffee for miles around either

Despite it being Sunday I’d left the alarm connected and at 06:00 it duly rang. No breakfast, no medication, just packing my backpack and then out into the dark, stopping off on the way to take a few photos of around the station area because I had plenty of time..

At 07:24 the train to Eupen came into the station and I leapt aboard. And at Welkenraedt I hopped out. These days the trains don’t go on into Europe but go round to Eupen.

We had to wait for a diesel multiple-unit to come rattling in from Spa.

We didn’t have long to wait until this filthy, dirty disreputable ancient thing came staggering into the station.

Old, covered in grafitti and all kinds of things, and the train was even worse. I’d be ashamed to be seen in something like this, and the idea that the SNCB would be content to send such a machine into a foreign country where it could be compared with the pristine stuff on offer over there is an absurdity to say the least.

But here it was and here I was. So I climbed aboard and rattled off into Germany.

Here I am finally in Germany, in Aachen in fact, at the Hauptbahnhof.

I have to change trains here, and there’s a wait of about 20 minutes for my connection, so there is plenty of time for breakfast.

German bread is probably the best in the world and so a couple of bread rolls of different varieties and a coffee were just what the doctor ordered.

My next train was already in the station. A newish double-decker that put the SNCB offering to shame. This rolled off out of the station, 10 seconds late, and an hour later, I was in Koln.

That was where I took this photograph, by the way.

Interestingly, the announcements on the train were in German followed by English. I imagined what might be the response from the xenophobic racist Brexiters if this kind of cosmopolitanism were ever to happen in the UK.

It’s years since I’ve been to Koln. About 2007 if my memory serves me correctly.

Looking for something to do to pass the time, I’d been idly scanning through the SNCB website and I found that a voyage by train from Leuven to Köln and return would cost me a mere €68:00 – that’s a four-hundred kilometre round trip.

With nothing much happening in Belgium, I decided to come for a day out.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the city, visiting all of the places that I had visited on my previous trips. But at midday I had to return to the cathedral.

When I was chair of the North European Regional Forum of Open University students, one of the committee members lived here in Koln. And by coincidence she was a big friend of my old friend Liz. Hence the regular visits to Koln. Jackie and I hadn’t seen each other since those days, but she had heard that I was coming to Koln and we were going to meet for lunch.

It was at that moment that the heavens opened. As I picked my way through the crowds I was becoming wetter and wetter, and so I was glad to meet Jackie and go for a coffee.

When the rain eased off a little we headed off into the town and an Italian restaurant. It was a strange place for an Italian restaurant. They wouldn’t do me a plate of vegetables with pasta and tomato sauce. I got the pasta and the tomato sauce, but they couldn’t do the vegetables. That can only mean one thing, as I’m sure that the more astute readers will realise.

By now the rain was coming down even worse, but we headed off regardless. Down the main shopping street and through a couple of the Christmas markets, looking at the products on sale.

We ended up at a hot drinks stall. Jackie had a gluhwein and I had a hot cocktail. The mugs were beautiful so we forewent the deposit and I took them away in my backpack.

Jackie’s partner came down to meet us. They were off to a carol concert at the end of the afternoon so I said goodbye

Now on my own, I retraced my steps back through the markets and down to the River Rhine, thinking that I could have done with a good Rhinecoat.

I walked up along the side of the river and then up the steps to the Hohenzollern Bridge – the huge railway bridge with a pedestrian footpath that straddles the river.

It was a dismal dreary walk in the dark and the rain but even so, it’s good to stand there in mid-stream and watch the fleets of barges and cruise ships passing by underneath.

Eventually I found myself back at the railway station. And to my dismay, the rear of the station has all been cleared up and modernised and the excellent fritkot that I remembered from the past has been swept away.

Nevertheless I did manage to fit myself up with some food. Back inside the station, I found a Thai restaurant in the subterranean shopping gallery that had a range of vegetarian and vegan food.

I had a stir-fry tofu with rice and it was really good.

My train was a few minutes early and already in the platform. To my surprise it was pulled by the same locomotive that had brought me out.

I hopped aboard and grabbed myself a comfortable seat. And here I had an interesting encounter with a German ticket-collector. It had been so wet that the damp atmosphere had caused the ink on my rail ticket to run and he couldn’t read it.

In the end, reason prevailed.

Another wait at Aachen for an even more disreputable Belgian multiple-unit. And which, surprisingly (or maybe not) it was likewise the same one that had brought me out.

There was graffiti all over the inside of the train and rubbish strewn all over the floor. Not a very good advert for the SNCB, sending atrain like this across the border into foreign parts.

And then another wait on the cold and wet at Welkenraedt for my train back to Leuven.

So now, I’m back home, looking and feeling like one more haggard, drowned rat, although I had no idea where I would find one more haggard drowned rat at this time of night.

And straight off to bed because I have the hospital in the morning and I need to be on form.

On my travels today, I took well over 100 photos. Some are in the text and some more below.

But if you want to see the rest, I’ve prepared a web page where you can see them in all their sodding and dripping glory, such as it was.

christmas lights tiensevest leuven louvain belgium

martelarenplein leuven louvain belgium

railway station war memorial martelarenplein leuven louvain belgium

war memorial railway station martelarenplein leuven louvain belgium

war memorial martelarenplein leuven louvain belgium

railway station martelarenplein leuven louvain belgium

train station leuven louvain belgium

hauptbahnhof aachen germany

automotrice sncb 644 653 hauptbahnhof aachen germany

Wednesday 19th December 2018 – HAVING GONE …

… to bed at some kind of reasonable time last night, I actually managed to have a reasonable sleep.

I was off on a travel too, but I’ll spare you the details. It’s another one of those that will catch you just as you are eating a meal or something and you won’t thank me for it.

There was something of a lazy daze which took me a while to overcome, but it wasn’t as late as it might have been which is always good news. Even better news is that the arrangements for my new computer have been confirmed and it might be here in a fortnight if I’m lucky.

After breakfast, I arranged some images, and then started on the High Arctic pages again. A slow ramble through a couple of pages – nothing as exciting as I have been doing in the past, but much better than recently. I’m feeling a little better, but not as much as I would like.

We’ve had lunch and then the first of our two walks. But I didn’t get too far out of the building before I came to a resounding halt.

Remember the green machine that was parked out here the other day? Here it is, fully erect and doing a really good impression of a cherry-picker, with some people on board doing some work around the flashing of the dormer window up there.

It looks quite impressive.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a while back they were drilling into the wall above the window of a house along the rue du Nord.

Whatever it was that they were doing, they seem to have finished it. And it’s not easy to see where it was that they were working.

You can’t see the join in the stonework where they were pulling stuff out and, presumably, putting stuff back in.

We had a beautiful early moon as well this afternoon.

I was out there taking a few photos of it, during which I was the victim of a really good photo-bombing.

Here we have a seagull performing a celebratory fly-past. Quite by accident on my part of course, but who knows what goes through the mind of a seagull?

We were having a very strong wind this afternoon, and out on the Plat Gousset we were reaping the full rewards of it.

The waves were piling into the sea wall and every now and again, one was getting the timing perfectly right and the spray was soaring up over the unsuspecting passers-by.

And serve them right too.

A day or two ago we saw a strange-looking crane parked up on the Square Maurice Marland.

I heard a story a while back that there would be some work being undertaken on the medieval town walls. And here they are with the crane looking as if they are actually doing something.

Loads of bags down there filled with all kinds of building material;

A stuffed pepper (one of the best that I’ve ever made) with spicy rice for tea, and my second walk in the dark. That’s the sum total of my day’s effort. I’m going to go to bed.

But before I go, although I have promised not to fill up my pages with politics, I see that the British press is full of comments about a remark that a British politician is alleged to have made about another one. And it’s caused page after page of drivel pouring out over all kinds of postings on all kinds of communication.

All I can say that with the UK descending into total chaos with talk of troops on the streets to keep order, stockpiling food and baby milk, all this kind of thing, the silly Brits are so stupid and so lacking in any kind of sense of priorities that they consider this to be the most important topic of debate just now.

They need to have their collective heads examined, the stupid people.

canoe fishing boat ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

fishing boats ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

canoe sea granville manche normandy france

fishing boats ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

storm sea wall plat gousset granville manche normandy france

full moon granville manche normandy france

storm sea wall plat gousset granville manche normandy france

Tuesday 18th December 2018 – TODAY WAS …

… probably the worst that I have felt for a long time. In fact, it is quite a long time since I felt like I did today, although I do have to admit that at one time it was a fairly regular occurrence.

It wasn’t such an early night as I was hoping to have, and it was a struggle to rouse myself from my bed at anything like a reasonable time. I’d been on my travels too, discussing football results with a group of people, one of whom was a former friend of mine from Stoke on Trent. For those of you who are not clued up on these things, TNS – The New Saints of Oswestry Town, perennial winners of the Welsh Premier League, are having a bad time this season by their standards, and are adrift in third position. but last night they had apparently been playing Connah’s Quay Nomads who are out in the lead, and beaten them 7-0. Such an astonishing (but not surprising) result given the inconsistency in the WPL, and there we all were on our nocturnal ramble last night discussing the result.

After breakfast, I drifted around for a while not doing very much because I couldn’t concentrate on anything, apart from stirring around a pile of photographs. For part of the morning I was even flat out on the bed trying to gather my wits. Not quite sleeping, but not far off either.

Lunch wasn’t much better either I could feel myself slipping downhill until round about 15:00 when I went off with the fairies. And there on my chair I sat in a stupor until a loud noise on the computer awoke me. 15:45 it was too.

With something of a struggle I staggered off out into the hurricane and torrential rain. No-one was out there at all which is hardly any surprise given the circumstances.

But Thora was in port again, moored up at a different berth again.

She could well have come in yesterday evening from St Helier because I might have seen her outline at the quayside as I drove past her berth in the night.

There must be some serious kind of work going on somewhere in the old medieval walled town.

There were several pieces of heavy equipment such as this concrete mixer parked up here or hereabouts.

The streets of the old town are very narrow and the two archways through the walls are narrow and low. This prevents this kind of vehicle from going in and they have to park here and trans-ship their load.

We also have a visitor – a piece of heavy equipment – parked up on the forecourt of our building.

It’s some kind of cherry-picker with a large working platform. So it looks as if we are going to be having some kind of roof or guttering repairs to our building within the course of the next day or two.

I’m glad that I live on a lower floor.

Still feeling like death, I remembered that I had some of those high-energy drinks that I had bought last winter when I was ill. And so I liberated one from the Stores and drank it. Surprisingly, I felt a little better after that and I began to perk up.

So much so that a little later I was even working away on my High Arctic web page and it’s been a while since I’ve done that. It’s amazing what a little something like that will do.

For tea tonight, I found a Pepper and Green Bean curry from 14th November 2017. With some rice and vegetables and a leek from the weekend, it was delicious too. It’s amazing the stuff that I’m finding in the freezer.

The wind and rain had died down this evening so it was a reasonably-comfortable walk around the walls.

The sky was pretty clear too for a change and the photography was quite good tonight.

This particular shot of the Plat Gousset and the houses on the top of the cliffs on the rue de la Falaise came out really well. It’s a shame that the tide wasn’t fully in

And now that I’m home, I might try for an early night. I hope that this improvement in my health keeps up tomorrow.

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night plat gousset granville manche normandy france

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Friday 23rd November 2018 – FOR THE FIRST TIME …

… for quite some considerable time, we’ve had rain today.

Not enough to prevent me from going for my series of perambulations but enough to make me put on the raincoat and do up the hood. And it’s not a long knee-length raincoat, Rhys.

With having had a reasonably early night, I had a good sleep too.

During the night last night there was something of a family reunion. I’m no longer sure of the beginning or even the middle but right at the end I can remember going to bed – in Vine Tree Avenue of all places. But when I went to get into bed with Nerina, my younger sister was asleep in there too. When I awoke her to find out what was going on, she told me that there was someone else asleep in her bed so she had to find somewhere else to sleep. I went to look in her bed and found that one of my friends had actually gone to sleep in there.
As an aside, in real life whoever was asleep in her bed later became her husband. But that’s another story.

It wasn’t a particularly early start this morning either. I had a bit of a lie-in, and then I attacked the breakfast.

This morning I’ve been a busy little B. The blog for the last week or two is up to date and you can see where I updated starting from this page and working forward.

When I’m more organised, I’ll be starting from the end of October and working backwards, doing three or four a day until it’s all done. It might take me several years to do it but if I don’t start, I won’t finish.

Another task that I’ve done this morning that took me far longer than it ought was to merge the clipbook libraries.

The program that I use the most is a text editor called Notetab. I do evrything with it, from making brief notes right up to hand-coding my own web pages.

The main advantages that it has are that

you can have several *.txt or *.html files open at any one time
you can build up a whole series of clipbook libraries, so that you can save a regular block of text or coding that you use on a regular basis, and just one click inserts it into your document, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall

There are enough old computers here to sink a ship, and there are backups that date to about 1999, so this morning I started to extract the libraries from the various machines and merge them together.

having done a couple this morning, I then did a big back-up of the laptop and I’ll be backing up my data a couple of times a day from now on, always assuming that I remember.

While I was searching for something else, I came across a rare book going back to AD731 that has now been uploaded to the internet and available for free download. And so I’ve now added a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People to my virtual library.

This is one of the very earliest histories of England and, along with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was the basis of much of what was known about English history in the Dark Ages.

And that reminds me. I brought my Domesday Book with me from the farm, but did I bring my Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?

This muesli that I made really is wicked. It went down a treat on my butties at lunchtime and there is still plenty left. And after lunch I came back into my little office and carried on with Day Four of the High Arctic.

There was a break for a walk around the headland. Although it was raining, it wasn’t all that bad-certainly not bad enough to stop me.

At the ship repairers, Aztec Lady was still there, up on blocks. There was a ladder up to her deck but I couldn’t see any sign of any work being done.

The trawlers are still up there too receiving attention. I’m not sure what they are doing to the pink and white one that we saw being lifted out of the water.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back when they were dredging out the harbour, they had a digger in the tidal basin here at low tide.

It was digging out a deep channel at the outside of the fishing quay by the fish processing plant.

This was done presumably with the aim of making a cut there that would provide access to the quay for a greater part of the day

There’s a whole line of smaller boats that have been queueing up outside the harbour now on their way in to tie up and unload.

If you look at the surrounding tidal harbour, you can see that it’s a long way from being submerged right now.

It certainly seems that the little channel that they dug out is working, and in spades too, which is good news for the port and the town.

More time available to unload means that more fishing boats can use the facilities

Just by way of a change I’d been chatting to a couple of neighbours too – one as I left the building and the second as I arrived back. It’s all go here, isn’t it?

In the mail today I’ve had the bill for the taxe d’habitation – the Council Tax – for next year for my house in the Auvergne. Eat your hearts out, you UK dwellers. My council tax for next year is all of €24:00.

Ingrid phoned me up after I came back. And we had a lengthy chat for a good hour or so about all kinds of things. She’s not too well right now, so I told her that some nice, relaxing sea air would do her the world of good.

There was a pepper left over so tea tonight was a stuffed pepper. I need to rid myself of the perishable stuff before I go away on Sunday.

Then, back into the rain. There was just one other person out there this evening but Minette, the black cat, was there on her windowsill. She had a good stroke and even allowed me to pick her up for 30 seconds.

But for some reason or another, I’m feeling quite tired. No idea why – it’s not as if I had a bad night. But I do seem to think that I’ve not had my usual afternoon doze so that might account for it.

It’s a good enough reason to go to bed.

Thursday 22nd November 2018 – I HAD A …

… better night last night, just for a change. Asleep before midnight and slept right through until the alarm went off.

I was off on my travels during the night. I vaguely remember being on board ship somewhere, but apart from that, nothing at all.

Once I was up and out of bed, I had breakfast and then organised the photos from last night which I had forgotten to upload. And the *.ftp program seems to work fine, which is good news.

A check of the thermometer showed me that last night the temperature had dropped down to 1°C. Won’t be long now before freezing point is reached.

Thursday is shopping day so I had a shower and a clean-up, and then put a load of washing on. What an exciting life I lead, hey?

On my way up the rue Couraye, I was noticing all of the signs for “Black Friday”. yet another Transatlantic custom that people over here have started to embrace.

But there are clearly some people who haven’t quite grasped the principle of Black Friday. How can you possibly have a Black Friday sale that lasts for a week?

But it’s something that I’m seeing more and more. People are losing all of their traditional customs and habits in the relentless search for profit, although some of the instances that I have quoted on here just recently would bring that into question.

We feature every now and again the progress of the installation of the fibre-optic cable around the town.

Here in the Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc just a little higher up the hill from the railway station they are now digging out a channel on the pavement so that they can pass the cable higher up the hill presumably in the direction of the telephone exchange

The date of connection is getting closer and closer. And I for one can’t wait.

The other week we saw them erecting the Christmas Tree in the Place de la Gare and on Saturday we saw it in position.

To further add to the chaos in the Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc, they are now erecting the Christmas decorations across the street.

The local council was there with a cherry-picker, and a couple of municipal police personnel directing the traffic around th obstruction.

I shook my head and went on to LIDL where I did a pile of shopping. Nothing special but they have now run out of grapes which is a tragedy, and the packets of nuts that I use in my muesli were still on offer so I bought a few more packets.

A few weeks ago I posted a photograph of a building with “Residence des Granvillaises” emblazoned thereupon.

On the way back from the shops I took a little diversion to the Rue Etoupefour to have a good look at the entrance to the building to see what it looked like at street level.

It’s not anything at all significant, which is probably why I haven’t noticed it at all during all of the times that I have passed by.

Back here I had a coffee and then carried on with the photos from earlier. As well as having a little doze for a short while. It seems to have become a regular thing these days after any kind of exertion.

Lunch was the baguette from LIDL with salad and more of my home-made hummus. It really is quite a fiery concoction and tastes delicious.

This afternoon I added the photos to a couple more blog entries. if you go to this page and work your way forward you can see them.

There wasn’t a great deal of excitement going on during my afternoon walk.

There was a speck of something out to sea and thinking that it might be Thora coming back, I took a photo of it and enlarged it when I returned home.

But it wasn’t Thora at all but a fishing trawler out there doing the business offshore. And I for one am looking forward to the excitement when the UK leaves the EU and we start to have fishing fights between the French and Channel Island fishermen.

I can still remember the 1960s when a bunch of Icelandic trawlermen took on the might of the Royal Navy during the Cod Wars – and defeated them hands-down. French fishermen are far more resolute than the Icelanders, and the Royal Navy is a mere shadow of what it was in the 1960s

My perambulations took me around the headland where I could overlook the shipyard.

Remember the pink and white candy-striped trawler that we saw the other day being lifted out of the water at the ship repairers?

We caught a glimpse of it last night up on blocks, but here it is today in the daylight. I’ll be keen to see what they are doing to it and how the work progresses over time.

And that wasn’t all the excitement down in the shipyard either.

It seems that the mystery of why the Aztec Lady has turned up in Granville has been resolved. Here she is, in the shipyard, up on blocks like the rest of the ships in here.

It looks as if I missed out on the hoisting ceremony which is a shame because that is something that is quite interesting.

Anyway, it enables us to have a good look at her while she’s here.

And we can also keep our eye on her and see what work is being done. It must be important.

On that note, I came back here for a coffee and to start work. And the work in question is Day Four of my trip to the High Arctic.

I need to push on with that otherwise it will never be finished. And there are plenty of pages like that already.

Tea should have been vegan sausages, but I didn’t notice until I’d started the vegetables that the sausages were somewhat iffy. Instead, a vegan burger was rustled up and it tasted just as good with the vegan cheese sauce as the sausages would have done.

No-one about at all during the evening walk, except for a solitary jogger. Nothing at all worth photographing zither tonight, so I can have an evening off.

On that note, I’ll go to bed. Plenty of work to do tomorrow.

Monday 19th November 2018 – IT WAS RATHER …

… a late night last night.

Another 01:30 finish as I was pushing on with doing things, and this was reflected in the struggle that I had to leave my stinking pit this morning.

During the night I was off on my travels again and although I can remember almost nothing of what I was doing. But there was one thing that struck me, as it has on many other occasions during the night. And that is the impeccable timing that goes on. There I was and I heard, in my voyage, the ping telling me that the telephone was just about to ring, so I reached out my hand and right on cue, the alarm went off. Absolutely perfect timing, and it’s not the first time that I’ve noticed this.

As soon as I awoke I went to look at the thermometer. 3°C right now, and that’s the lowest that it has been so far this autumn. We’re definitely in Autumn.

Breakfast was quite early too and that left me plenty of time to push onwards with work.

And sure enough, by lunchtime I’d finished all SIX of the web pages for the third day of my voyage to the High Arctic. You can go to this page and then work your way forward, if you have a couple of hours to spare, and admire the photographs.

Dozens and dozens of them.

That took me up to lunchtime so I had my butties in the apartment. It’s definitely out of the question now, this idea of sitting on the wall outside.

This afternoon I had a letter to write. Someone whom I met on my travels had written to me and now that I have a functioning printer I can reply. I’ll have to take it down into town tomorrow morning and post it off.

It was really windy out this afternoon but there was a crowd of people gesticulating wildly out on the peak.

There had been a couple of dolphins playing around just offshore and they had been giving a really good performance.

At first, I thought that I had missed it all, but on enlarging one of the photos that I took, I found that I had indeed captured one of them on film.

It’s rather blurred because it was way out in the bay and I had to crop and enlarge it, but it’s a dolphin all the same.

While I had the camera handy, I wandered round to the harbour.

We have Marité in her usual berth, but also, alongside, at the commercial dock is Thora. She must have sailed in from Jersey on the morning tide.

One of these days I’ll go down there and have a closer look at her.

Back here, I found myself away with the fairies for a while, which is hardly surprising after the night that I had. But once I came back round again, I had a good go at the blog entry for Day Four of my Arctic trip.

It’s been rewritten slightly and I’ve added a couple of dozen photos as a taster, just to keep things going until I can do the web page, which I’ll start tomorrow some time. In the meantime, you can see the blog entry here, with all of the photos.

There was an interruption during the early evening though. Someone telephoned me about my digger. He’s interested in buying it. But I don’t think that he’ll be buying it though. He was talking about “a couple of thousand Euros”, which isn’t even in the same library, never mind on the same page.

He mentioned that he would chat with his partner, but if he couldn’t rustle up the cash that I want he would borrow a digger off his friend. So he can do that then. I might be keen to move on a lot of the stuff that I don’t need these days, but we aren’t having a fire sale.

Tea was steamed veg and vegan sausages with cheese sauce. And using three times as much cornflour as I would normally use, I did get the sauce to thicken.

Freezing cold outside again. 4.5°C outside and getting colder by the minute. I wound up the heating when I came back in.

But I’ve hit a problem right now.

About 6 months ago, Firefox went all commercial and hacked off a lot of add-on utility programs. Presumably the utility developers wouldn’t buy a development licence. One of the utilities that went was the *.ftp program that I used.

There is however a lightweight browser – Waterfox – than runs on the Mozilla platform and the *.ftp utility ran on that. It’s been nagging at me to upgrade it for a while, which I haven’t done. But I’ve had to download it onto this laptpp, and the latest version to boot. And it’s running the new Mozilla platform and all of the utilities have gone.

Now I’m having to upload via my webhost’s control panel, and that is just so painful. Fire.ftp was just like a Windows Explorer platform and so simple to use. In fact it’s the only reason why I ever used Waterfox.

So that’s a waste of time then.

And on this note I’ll go to bed.

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fishing trawler port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Sunday 18th November 2018 – AS KENNETH WILLIAMS …

… and Alfred Hitchcock once famously said, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

There I was, down at the brocante this afternoon admiring the head of a wild boar affixed to the side of a van. So I went up to the stallholder and asked him “don’t you find it rather inconvenient when you are loading up your van?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Having the body of that wild boar going crossways across the van. Doesn’t it interfere with the loading?”
So he looked at me with a rather bewildered look in his eye.

As for other matters however, waking up at 03:45 didn’t help me very much last night.

And neither did 04:40. Or 05:40. Or 06:45. but 07:45 I’d had enough though and couldn’t go back to sleep, so at 08:20 I was up and about.

I’d been away during the night though – to see a former friend of mine in Stoke on Trent (and it’s a long time since he’s appeared in one of my voyages, isn’t it?). I was walking down a street that bore more than just a passing resemblance to Coleridge Way in Crewe. I arrived at his house and had to walk in the street as the pavement was blocked by two huge Jaguar Mark X cars of the like that we saw the other day. One of these two was silver and the other one was red like the Daimler that I owned. Up his drive I walked and couldn’t quite get into his garage because there was a third Mark X Jag blocking the entrance. He was inside the garage, sweeping the floor and fixing something. I noticed that his inspection pit had been filled in and the floor of the garage had been painted red. He told me that I shouldn’t have come down to the garage without letting him know I was coming, but I go the impression that he was implying that I shouldn’t come down to his house at all.
A little later, I was thinking about buying a new coach. I needed to think about what I wanted and to see a few examples, so I asked a (female) friend who lived near a coach sales place to see what they had for sale. She was thinking that she would have to buy it for me but I explained that all that she needed to do was to look at it, see if the body had any rust on it or something like that.

With a rather late, leisurely breakfast, I didn’t do all that much this morning. However, that didn’t prevent me from changing the habits of a lifetime and actually doing some tidying up in the bedroom. Putting away a pile of papers that have been loitering around here for a while.

Another thing that I have done too was to change the plug over on the record deck. There was a British plug on it but if I’m going to use it here, which I shall do in early course, it needs a French plug on it. And looking for something else yesterday, I came across a couple doing nothing very much.

Once that was working, I had a play around with Audacity – the audio program that I used to use to edit my live tracks for the radio program. I’ll be using this to record all of my LPs and I need to make sure that I can remember what to do.

After lunch (and wasn’t my home-made hummus delicious?), I went for a walk down into town. No football today. It’s Cup week and all of the local clubs have been eliminated.

I retraced my steps from yesterday and went down the steps to the Rue du Port. And then across the road and onto the docks again right by the fish-processing plant.

However the tide was in so the harbour gates were open. I couldn’t come across to the other side but instead it gave me an opportunity to photograph then.

You’ll remember that I took a photograph of them while they were closed yesterday.

While I was down there in the beautiful sunny afternoon I took the opportunity to have a good mooch around the fish docks for a while and take a few photos

The pile of gravel down at the edge of the quayside is now growing rather quickly. It looks as if we will be having a visit of the gravel boat quite soon.

She’s not been here for a while.

On my way down into the town centre I had a good look at the old railway track embedded on the quayside.

In an early photograph that I had seen, there had been something that looked as if it might have been a broad-gauge rail-mounted crane.

And on closer inspection, what this looks like to me is not, as I had originally thought, a double-track line, but a single-track railway in the centre. The two outer rails are raised slightly higher than the two rails in the centre, so I reckon that they might well be rails for a crane.

I’ll have to find an imperial tape measure and go down to measure the gauge. That will tell me what I need to know.

The stupid, ignorant racists from Britain First are launching a campaign to boycott the Subway chain of sandwich restaurants because they are offering halal food in certain outlets.

It’s all quite reminiscent of the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops in the 1930s – and they say that they aren’t racists!

But here, our local Subway is offering a promotion involving that famous cartoon character Shaun the Sheep.

I wonder if it is he who is rotating on the skewer. And whether he has been killed humanely.

It does rather remind me of the story of Larry the Lamb and when the BBC abandoned the series.

When they came to sell off the assets of the programme, someone asked how much they had received for Larry the Lamb.
“Three and six a pound” was the reply.

Something similar happened when they stopped “Children’s Playtime” on the BBC.
Someone asked “what did they get for Muffin the Mule?”
“Eighteen months” was the reply.

Back here later, I organised a few photos on the internet and then did some more work on Day Three of the High Arctic. As well as a little … errr … repose.

Tea was a vegan pizza of course, and it all worked out rather well. One of the better ones that I’ve done.

Back out tonight for my walk around the headland and I was the only one there. Hardly surprising because it’s freezing outside. Well, 6°C actually, but that’s still the coldest that it’s been so far this half of the year.

Winter has definitely arrived.

The sailing ship Marité in the harbour in the Port of Granville

The harbour and port and the walled town of Granville

Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou in the walled town of Granville.

The sailing ships Marité and the little La Granvillaise mooored here in the harbour of the port of Granville.

Friday 16th November 2018 – THIS WAS A …

… really bad day today.

Mind you, this was only to be expected considering that I was still awake at 02:30 this morning working.

It takes quite a while to extract the data files from the failed hard drive on the other laptop and to make sure that absolutely everything was saved onto the external back-up drive.

In fact by the time that 02:30 came round and I was seeing double or even treble and there was still a long way to go, I created a little batch program to do it automatically. It’s amazing how much I can remember of T223 when I put my mind to it.

The net result of all of this was that when I awoke at 06:00 it was all done.

And then I had the job of configuring the other laptop.

This is one that I bought a few years ago when I was living on the farm. I wanted a cheap laptop to work the auto-diagnostic kit. It had to have a CD-ROM but not much else, and someone produced one in which the on-board mouse wasn’t working. And an external mouse is no big deal.

But going back to the issues of the UK’s engagement with the EU, I decided that I ought to go back to having a desktop computer as a main set-up. There’s a company in Stoke-on-Trent that is well-known for making bespoke computers and they would do whatever it was that I needed.

So I sent them a mail and the reply was “we don’t sell our products abroad”. Yes, the UK has never ever got to grips with the idea of the European Union. After all, it’s not the first time that this has happened. Far from it, in fact.

And the Rosemary rang me up and we had a good chat for an hour and a half. We were laughing at the clueless rabble who are running the UK right now, where the guy who negotiated a deal with the European Union then resigned because he didn’t agree with the deal that he had just negotiated. Does it get any more clueless than this?

Finally I could get down to dealing with the High Arctic, only to be immediately interrupted by the pompiers. You can tell that it’s getting close to Christmas – they are now collecting their funds for the annual p155-up, selling their calendars.

This was the cue to have a little doze – hardly surprising – and when I awoke it was almost 13:30 so another late lunch.

This afternoon, I really did attack the High Arctic Day Three and spent a good deal of time on it.

That was despite an interruption to join the crowds milling around the Pointe du Roc in the glorious late-autumn weather.

It really was a beautiful afternoon and I spent quite some considerable time watching the waves come crashing down on the rocks just offshore.

It was a typical late autumn scene out there today

Walking around the headland to the point overlooking the harbour, I noticed that we seem to have a new arrival in port.

I don’t recall having seen this boat before so I can’t tell you very much about it right now.

What I’ll have to do one of these days is to have a wander around down to the harbour one day if she’s still there and see what I can find out about her.

Despite these interruptione, I’d finished all of the meta tags for the photos on Day Three of the High Arctic, split the page into four (or is it five?) and started the meta tags for the pages, when I was overwhelmed.

Not just slumping with my head on the desk either, but on the bed under the covers flat out for well over two hours. And you’ve no idea just how painful it was to awaken. It took me a good 20 minutes to gather up my wits which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days.

Tea was pasta and falafel and then a walk around the walls of the medieval town.

Now provided that nothing else goes wrong, I’ll have an early night and catch up with my beauty sleep. You have no idea just how much I need these days.

Tide on the rocks

Diving platform on the beach at Plat Gousset

The beach at the Plat Gousset

The tide coming in at the Plat Gousset

View across the town of Granville to the Port de Plaisance

Restaurants down on the port de plaisance.

Thursday 15th November 2018 – I’M FEELING …

… a little better right now.

After having a couple of really good days, it was odds-on that sooner or later I would have a bad one. And yesterday evening I could feel myself sliding down into the abyss.

By the time that I had finished writing my blog from last night, at about 22:00, I was feeling so miserable that I went straight to bed.

It didn’t take me long to go off to sleep either. And apart from one brief awakening, and I’ve no idea when that was, I slept right the way through to the alarm.

The first time for a while that I have had a decent sleep, and as you might expect, when I awoke, I felt even worse. But that’s not really due to the sleep, but due more to the fact that I was having a health crisis.

It took me a considerable while to tear myself out of bed and an even longer time to force my breakfast down.

Eventually I went into the bathroom for a shower and a shave and a good clean-up for it’s shopping day today. In Caliburn too and for several reasons, not the least reason being the fact that on Saturday we might be having a few blockades on the road so I needed to do a big shop today.

LIDL had nothing special, but the next stop – the Leclerc drive-in – certainly did. I’d had an e-mail on Tuesday to say that my printer had arrived and needed picking up. Today was as good a day as any.

At NOZ I swapped the glasses that were broken, and I bought a few other things. Including a 2-foot high Christmas tree complete with 6 silver balls and a set of fairy lights – all for €3:99. I’m really getting into the Christmas spirit, aren’t I?

Leclerc itself came up with nothing special and I was soon back home again, to find that I’d had a power cut while I was out.

However by now I didn’t even have the strength to put away the shopping. There was some coffee in the pot so I poured one out and came to sit down in here – where I promptly crashed out. And I was gone for an hour or so too and it was very uncomfortable.

This meant that I had a rather late lunch. Inside the apartment of course because it was quite misty outside.

This afternoon I had a very pleasant surprise. The people who had organised our voyage to the Hugh Arctic had sent me a promotional video of our journey. And it brought back many happey memories. There was a beautiful shot of Yours Truly and His Nibs on our way to the Brother John Glacier at Etah in Greenland.

And not only that, one of our party was lucky enough to be filming an iceberg when it suddenly capsized in front of her – and she had a beautiful film of it going over. She sent it to the company and they have sent it to us. It is really phenomenal and when I finally manage to organise myself I shall post a link to it.

This afternoon I started to feel a little better and I made some more progress on my third day in the High Arctic

We had the usual afternoon interruption for a walk. I have to keep this up as best as I can.

The tide was slowly going out and there were several people down there on the rocks searching in the rock pools for crustaceans and molluscs and so on.

Which, I imagine, they share with their friends because, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … that one mustn’t be selfish with one’s shellfish.

They weren’t the only people out there interested in the local marine life.

Out there just offshore close to the old diving platform were two men in a boat. One man and a dog short of Jerome K Jerome’s famous story of his trip up the River Thames.

I’ve no idea what it is that they catch just down there. One of these days I’ll catch a friendly fisherman and make suitable enguiries.

There was much more excitement on the car park round by the lighthouse on the end of the Pointe du Roc.

Parked up there was a pretty rare Triumph Thruxton.

I remember very well the original Thruxtons from the late 1960s – a series of Triumph Bonneville motorbikes specially modified for competition. However the modern reincarnation of the company launched a limited range of sports motorcycles with the same name in 2004

Back here and back on the High Arctic pages, and t won’t be long now, I reckon, until Day Three is finished. Always assuming that I can find it because the laptop has now crashed and it won’t restart at the moment. I’m having to type this on the laptop that I use as the media centre.

All of this took me up to teatime and I had a nice plate of steamed vegetables and vegan sausages. But once again, the vegan cheese sauce failed to thicken. I notice that I’m using a different brand of soya milk to the one that I usually use, and that might account for it.

I went out for my evening walk as usual after tea.

Despite the fact that the moon is a long way from being full, there was plenty of moonlight about. I hadn’t taken the tripod and the zoom/telephone lens with me so I had to make the most of the equipment that I had

Considering that it’s a hand-held shot, it hasn’t come out at all too badly.

Around the corner, I nearly collided with someone lurking away in the darkness. But he was the only person whom I saw, apart from the people loitering around at the bar and the pizza van.

But now I’m off to bed – something of a late night I’m afraid. I’ve managed to get the laptop to fire up but that’s all that it’s doing. Using a technique that I dredged from the back of my mind with good old T223 at the Open University, I’ve been able to force access to the files and I’m now copying them onto a back-up drive.

I can see me having to do this every couple of hours rather than every night. I don’t want to be losing work like this.

Fishermen in a boat near the old diving platform at the Pointe du Roc

Wednesday 14th November 2018 – 01:35 …

… 03:30 and 05:20.

This is getting quite ridiculous, isn’t it? There’s absolutely no point whatever in going to bed early if I’m going to keep on waking up like this in the middle of the night.

But there was still plenty of time for me to go on a nocturnal ramble. I had a silver Ford Cortina MkII and it was ready to go for its MoT. Someone who had had a look at it reckoned that there was no problem with it passing its test but I’d had a drive in it and I didn’t like the brakes at all. I was convinced that it wouldn’t go through with brakes like this, but everyone else was certain. So I parked it up in Osborne Grove in Shavington and went home to Crewe. Wondering, of course, how I was going to get back to Shavington in the morning to pick it up. I was even considering asking my brother to drive me down, and that will explain to you just how desperate I was. I do have to say that the idea of driving home in the car and then driving it back next morning never occurred to me at all. However, there was another problem. In order to take the car for its MoT I needed a medical (don’t ask me why) and so I presented myself at the doctor to make an appointment. And if I couldn’t have the appointment on the spot, I was going to be well cooked about all of this.

After breakfast, I had a little sit around for a while not doing too much except a few odds and ends, and then set down to work on the High Arctic pages.

And by the time that I knocked off, there was just 16 photos to write up and that’s quite impressive, even though it didn’t feel as if I had been as focused as I had been yesterday. But I’ve arrived on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, organised my cabin and I’m on my way back upstairs for the official reception.

There were a few distractions, but nothing of any note. Lunch of cpurse, inside the apartment because the weather is now turning rapidly towards winter. It had been a nice beautiful morning with bright blue skies but by the time that I was thinking about going for lunch, it had clouded over.

But talking of winter, it wasn’t too cold for this person just here.

Another one of the interruptions was the usual afternoon walk and my attention was caught by this guy up to his waist in the water.

At first, I couldn’t see what he was doing but enlarging the photo back home I could see that he was fishing, either with a net or with a line with many hooks. And he seems to be doing quite well with it too.

Further around, overlooking the harbour, I noticed that the pile of gravel had been moved round now to much closer to the edge and the machinery has been brought up.

This seems like an indication that we are going to be having a gravel boat in here in the very near future.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one come in here and so we must be overdue.

We also had the usual stop for tea. The rest of the stuffing that I had made the other day, I put into two taco rolls, with vegetables and spicy rice. There was also a brief 5 minutes of … errr … repose.

By the end of the day the wind was back, although nothing like as strong as it had been.

There was a sea fog and a little of the damp fine rain on the north side of the Pointe du Roc but not enough to stop me going for my evening walk.

There was a beautiful night-time view over the harbour of the Port de Granville. And it came out quite nicely in the photo. You wouldn’t think that thisis a hand-held shot.

So now I’m going to have yet another early night. And one of these days I might actually have one.

Fishing with a net off the Pointe du Roc

EPIC HALL

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