Tag Archives: stuffed peppers

Monday 23rd March 2020 – ANOTHER DAY …

… of quarantine. And the question that I’m now asking myself is “will I die of boredom before the virus gets me?”

Not that I ought to be bored because I have plenty to do. But I’m beginning to understand how a canary in a cage might be feeling right now.

Much to my own surprise, and to any other one of the regular readers of this rubbish (and hello to my new subscriber from the East End of London – why not say “hello”?) I was awake long before the first alarm went off, and well up and about before the third one started up.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been. And what surprised me was that I’d been able to leave my bed refreshed so early, having travelled so far during the night.

I’d been out on a bike ride. It had started off by being in a car, a right-hand drive British car and I was driving somewhere near Macclesfield way. Suddenly as I was driving, this car and van were coming towards me but they were driving on my side of the road. This was in the UK so I was on the left but they were trying to pass me up my left side like you would do in Europe. I thought “this is wrong” so I moved over into the centre of the road and let them pass up the inside of me. Somehow I managed to transform myself onto a pushbike cycling away and the road petered out, the main road and I ended up on a dirt track that took me round a very sharp bend and back on myself. The end of the road was closed so I had to turn round and go back. There were these young boys fishing there by this river and all these net curtains hanging up on a hedge as if someone had been washing them in the river. I cycled round and found where I should have gone, up a really steep hill and it was so steep that I couldn’t cycke up it. I had to carry my bike up. It was a narrow dirt track thing underneath a modern bridge, fenced off with a very high fence. I’d gone underneath this modern bridge and up to the top and it was a modern bridge into Macclesfield. There was a kind of rest building on it. The coffee was free and this girl showed me how to make a coffee – well, showing everyone how to make a coffee and how I could get a really strong really full cup. She made one for this other person and told him to drink it very slowly as it was very strong and did the same for me. After that I went to find the bathroom and then went outside. I ended up sitting on the entrance to the driveway of a girl whom I knew (well, I don’t know here – she’s no-one whom I’ve ever met), a young teenage girl. She was playing outside and I was watching her for some reason or other. While I was there watching her on the corner of her driveway to her house a car pulled up. A Ford Escort caravanette type of thing, badly brush-painted white with the side window that I could see painted over, drove into the driveway. A youngish guy with a black beard was behind the wheel. I thought “that’s that girl’s father, isn’t it?”. I thought that I won’t hang around because he’s bound to be wondering why I’m here. I stood up to go but had this enormous attack of cramp so I couldn’t go very far. I had to stretch my legs to ease off this cramp. While I was doing this I found loads of Canadian money on the street that had fallen out of someone’s pocket and had been covered in weeds and so on. All cents and quarters, that kind of thing. But the silver money was huge, probably 3 or 4 inches in diameter really big. I thought “how the hell has someone managed to lose this? You’d know when this fell out of your pocket”. There were three or four of these so it was all cents and quarters. While I was doing this, I was thinking “this guy behind me is going to come over in a minute”. I heard this girl’s voice behind me saying “no, don’t! I don’t want you to!” and I wondered “what on earth is going on now?”

Of course, I’ll never know now how all of this ended, which was a shame because it was quite interesting. But one thing is certain – I might be in quarantine but my spirit isn’t. I just hope that it doesn’t catch the virus while it’s out. It’s having far more fun than I am right now.

After breakfast I attacked the digitalising of my record collection. I managed to find another complete digital soundfile which was just as well because it belonged to quite a rare album. So I downloaded that and split it up.

Interestingly, the times did not correspond at all (and by a significant amount too) to the published times on the album sleeve. And there was only one version of this album too, so that was a mystery.

Then I attacked three others. No complete sound file so I had to do them bit by bit and it took ages. And one of them was an album that I was keen to digitalise because if I had to pick a top-20 of albums, this particular one would be well in.

That one of course took so much longer to do because I just had to listen to it as it was going round – and it was a very long double-album too.

But now I’m just down to one shelf, so that means about 100 albums remain to be digitalised. And then there are the cassettes …

Once I’d done that, I had another go at sorting out the files.

But TRAGEDY! Because there’s a file size limit (999 files) on the hi-fi that I use in the living room, I’ve been working my way through a stock of 2GB memory sticks. And woe is me! I’ve reached the last one today. And I probably won’t be able to buy any more.

What I’ve done is to divide my music up arbitrarily into different lots but keeping albums by the same groups together. I have directories AA, BB, CC, DD and ZZ. ZZ is the directory into which the current downloads go and that’s on a continual playlist all day long.

Eventually, I weed out the earliest stuff from ZZ and merge it into the other four directories, having first copied it onto a memory stick that then goes into the hi-fi in the living room. And this is where I’ve run aground because I’ve now created a directory EE

And Why am I doing this?

It’s because for my radio shows I like to vary the artists so that there’s never a case of the same artists being played in consecutive shows. But even though I keep good records of what I play, I quite often forget where I am.

So one week, I’ll play artists from AA, the second week from BB, and so on. and then the cycle goes round again and again. Hopefully I can avoid any unnecessary duplication.

That took me up to lunchtime, so I had my butty and then came back to work.

This afternoon I made a start on the music for project 034 (from directory BB if you are really interested). It’s all been selected (apart from the final track which of course all depends on the length of time left over when the speech is edited in) and I’ve written half of the text. I was aiming to do so much more but my heart wasn’t really in it.

For tea, I had stuffed pepper followed by my jam pie with more of the coconut soya dessert stuff. And the jam pie has worked quite well too.

There’s plenty of stuffing left so I can see myself with taco rolls at some point later in the week.

If things keep on like this, I’ll be going stir-crazy long before this quarantine thing is over.

But we are allowed out for exercise and so I make the most of it. late at night when there’s no-one else around.

And for two reasons too

So that I don’t catch this virus thing
So that no-one else can see the pathetic way in which I run

No-one about at all so I was able to have my first run in comfort – all the way along the north side of the city walls.

My track is about 250 metres but I’ve been extending that little by little and I reckon that I’m another 25 metres further on from that though now.

This run took me to where there’s a good view across to Donville les Bains, which you saw in the previous photo, and also of the totally empty and deserted Plat Gousset that you see just here.

It’s the same place where I stopped to take a photo of the Escalier Du Moulin a Vent last night.

With nothing else better to do, I had a play around with the settings and took another photo of it to see if I could have an improvement on yesterday’s photo. And the verdict?

“Not very much”. I’m going to ahve to work so much harder on my technique but as far as the lighting goes, there isn’t a great deal I can do here. Some of it is too bright and some of it is too dark and there’s no happy medium.

Another thing that I did was to play around with the settings again and retake the photo that I took twice last night of the Eglise St Paul.

Again, not much of an improvement, although I’m sure that with a tripod and a slow shutter speed I could do something quite nice with that.

My second run along the square Maurice Marland was good again. I made it all the way up the first ramp, along to the second one and then four or five paces up that one.

This is an improvement on how things were a few weeks ago and it’s a good sign of the times. It might be only 250 metres or so on this leg too, but at my age and in my state of health it’s pretty good.

A couple of years ago I met a woman in France who had family connections in A&R for a record company. She moved back to the UK and we occasionally said hello when we passed by on our social networks.

But tonight she must be lonely because we’ve been chatting about music and the like for a good 90 minutes just now. I’d no idea that I was so popular.

But all good things come to an end and I’m off to bed. I intend to see if I can keep up this “early rising” lark. And apart from that, I might have some exciting places to wisit during the night.

We can but hope.

Monday 16th March 2020 – I WAS STROKING …

… the big ginger cat Gribouille outside the building this afternoon when a woman approached.

She saw me, wrapped a scarf around her face and gently skirted around me, keeping a good two metres distance all the time.

And the thought going through my head was “couldn’t she have picked a more polite way to remind me that I didn’t have a shower this morning?”.

And indeed I didn’t have a shower this morning. I’ve forgotten that I’m heading to Belgium on Wednesday (Government legislation permitting) so I don’t really need anything. So much for the big rice pudding that I made on Sunday.

But yes, Belgium. That hotbed of disease where everyone is in a panic, yet you have about three times as much chance of becoming a multi-millionaire by winning the lottery than you do of catching this disease.

Of course, the situation could change at any moment but that’s something to worry about when it happens. I’m under no illusions. I’m elderly, I’m in poor health and I have no immune system. And so if I do happen to catch it, I’ll be the first to go under. But there’s no point in worrying about it.

Mind you, I did worry about last night when I crashed out writing out my notes. It’s only half-finished and I did reckon that I’d finish it today but that wasn’t possible. That’s for another time, I reckon.

Just for a change these days, I beat the alarm this morning and I was up and about having my medication long before the third alarm went off. It shows the benefit of an early night.

And back here, I had a look at the dictaphone. And I’m not at all sure what was going on here. There was a building that was probably Hankelow Hall where I squatted for a certain time. There was some kind of football match going to take place between two ad-hoc teams and I was on one of these. We assembled to play our match. It was in the harbour of a town, something like the harbour where this abandoned building was. So we met and again I realised that I didn’t have all of my things. I needed some more before the match would start. I needed to go home and pick them up but would I have time before the kick-off of our match? Yes so the house was plunged into darkness again and we were going to have to have another search around to find ourselves, find our boots and find the people with whom we were supposed to be playing.
later on I was in Montreal last night with someone but I don’t know who. The two of us were on a STM bus and something was happening. The passengers weren’t very happy with the driver and they were having a go at him and he was having a go at them. At a bus stop, “Denbigh” in the rue Denbigh (which doesn’t exist, by the way), the driver stopped the bus at the bus stop, got out from behind his seat and came down the bus to try to attack one of the passengers. The passenger hid amongst the crowd of people so the bus driver couldn’t get him, so the driver took out a bayonet-type of thing, went outside and started to unscrew the window of the bus so that he could get at the passenger. At that moment I called the police and the police started to take all the details ready to send an emergency vehicle I imagine, but the driver just disappeared. So he was gone.

For breakfast, I tried some of that apple-and-apricot purée that I made yesterday, followed by some of the apple and apricot cordial. And it wasn’t at all bad. I’ll remember this because every now and again they do have tins of fruit in at NOZ where the labels are torn, something like that. And this is a good way to use them up.

Having done that, I had a look at the digital sound files that needed splitting. Another four have disappeared today. Much to my surprise, they were all reasonably straightforward and it’s been a long time since that has happened

Today’s project was to send off a radio project for this weekend and then to do another one to replace it. And by the time that I’d finished I’d chosen all of the music (except the last track), written the notes, dictated them and was half-way through editing them.

No supermarket today of course, but that didn’t stop me from going out for my three walks today.

having chosen the music, I went out for the bread and for a look to see what was around. There wasn’t anyone walking around but there was plenty of excitement out to sea, like this yacht threading its way through the archipelago that is the Ile de Chausey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the number of islands out there varies between 365 and 52 depending on the state of the tides at the time.

Plenty of other stuff out there too.

Apart from the fishing boats, there’s a cabin cruiser too floating around in the Baie de Mont St Michel and that wouldn’t have been a sight you would have seen a week or so ago when we were having all of those storms and high winds.

But it does go to show you the liberty that exists on the open sea and it’s making me quite envious. I wish that I had a boat right now.

And how are you spending your enforced absence away from work?

These two guys have the right approach. They’ve gone fishing. And I can’t blame them because as the virus starts to bite and more and more people become sick, hunting and gathering might be the only solution so you may as well start early.

What I did like was the size of the bucket in which they were intending to store their catch. I was never one to dampen the spirit of optimism at all.

My wanderings took me down past the chantier navale to see how they were getting on with .

No change there – she’s still sitting up on her blocks with half of her sides torn out. But there was no-one working on her at all. They’ve probably all been struck down by the Bubonic Plague or the Black Death or whatever it is.

And that fishing boat there at her side – that’s a different one to that which was there on Saturday. We seem to have had a tactical substitution of fishing boats.

The harbour gates were open so I couldn’t cross. Instead I continued down the rue du Port.

One thing that I have mentioned in the past is the mechanism by which the floating pontoons are attached to the supports, and I promised that one of these days I would have a closer look.

There seems to be two sets of rollers, an outer set and an inner rollar that ride up abd down depending upon the state of the tide. It’s a very clever arrangement and I hope that it works.

The town was deserted today. I counted no more than a dozen people scurrying around, most of whom were carrying bread. Only the bakeries seemed to be open – after all, people have to eat and bread is an important part of life here in France.

La Mie Caline came up with a dejeunette – at least the boulanger hasn’t succumbed to the plague as yet – and I came back home. I was tempted to go and take my butties and sit on the wall outside, so nice was the weather, but as usual I was sidetracked by something else.

My afternoon was even quieter. I counted two people out walking and another couple waiting at the bus stop.

My aim was to wander around to the chantier navale because on looking at my photos, I appear to have overlooked that there was actually a third boat in there this morning – and it was still there today.

No idea why it’s in there, and even less of an idea why it isn’t next to the other two, but that’s something else to keep my eye on. Although if I do go to Belgium on Wednesday I’ll miss all of the excitement in here.

Back in the apartment I dozed off for ten minutes or so but I still carried on with things until 19:00 and knocking-off time.

First thing was to deal with the carrots. They were peeled, sliced and diced and then par-boiled with bay leaves and left to drain.

While they were draining I made myself some of my patent stuffing and had stuffed pepper with rice. Tomorrow night I’ll finish off the left-over stuffing and whatever else is lying around in an Anything Curry ready for my departure on Wednesday morning.

This rice pudding will be a problem though. What am I going to do with all of that? A man can only eat so much, no matter how delicious it is.

My walk tonight was even more lonely. I was the only one out there except for a couple of people putting something into a car boot I managed my two runs though. The first one, I put about 20-25 metres onto my usual distance and the second one, I actually made it all the way up a couple of metres onto the second ramp. Yes, I seem to be improving in that respect and that’s good news.

Rosemary rang later on for a chat. She’s feeling the pressure and being so far from home, it’s not easy for her. But there’s not much that she can do about it right now.

So I’ve finished this entry and it’s already late. Yesterday’s entry will have to wait for another time while I go to bed.

But these days, imagine going to bed and wondering if you’ll wake up in the morning. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages, isn’t it?

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about those piles of gravel that had been appearing over the last couple of days on the quayside down in the harbour.

This blurred and illisible photo (I still have a lot to learn about the NIKON 1 J5) shows a ship that I have every reason to believe is Neptune moored at the loading bay by the conveyors where they ship the gravel on board.

At long last we’ve had a gravel boat in the harbour and I shall go out tomorrow (and try to be early) just to confirm that it is indeed she. It would be just my luck for her to have a rapid turn-round and for me to miss her.

But here’s something else quite interesting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular topic in these pages, particularly in the boulevard Vaufleury which is on a service bus route, is just 50 metres from the High School and is an access road for the fleet of school buses that come in the opposite direction to the service buses.

Where Madame (it is indeed a Madame) is parked is
1) the wrong way round
2) half on the pavement
3) blocking the buses
4) at school chucking-out time
5) just about 20 FEET from a huge free car park
so finally, at long, long last, the local police are doing something about it and they are making her move her vehicle.

That is pretty much encouraging news.

What else is encouraging news is that I was awake before the first alarm went off, and I was out of bed before the final alarm. Crashing out half-way through last night’s entry and so giving up and going to bed was good news in that case.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in this labyrinth of a theatre complex last night all the way through this underground reception hall place with doors going off leading into theatre auditoriums and all kinds of things. There were all kinds of announcements about the place, many of them were out of date, 2011 I noticed. There were all kinds of things happening here. But I was just wandering through listening to the radio. They were talking about “hypocrites of the year” I suppose – some guy who was telling us all about how keen he was for this and how good he was going to be for that but while he was doing that he had increased all your library charges. Someone else was going on about how brilliant a cricketer he might have been, all this kind of thing, but he made one fatal mistake and that was heroin. I was drifting through this auditorium that had a couple of very faded leather chairs and the leather was worn out in certain places. Something to do with catching a London Underground train somewhere. There was a thing too about caring for your vans if you were on a limited income, like a hippy, and a warning that the supply of LDV vans even in scrapyards was drying up now – the van that was chosen for an example was a silver LDV M-reg.
A little later I was outside with someone who was supposed to be Liz’s husband but he was more like the father of a couple of friends of mine. He had Liz’s daughter with him. She’d been on a student exchange and she had a student back with them. He was saying “you’ll have to come round for a game of pinocle or something one of these days. We’ll have an evening of five people”. He indicated roughly a place in eastern Manchester, Hyde or that area Stalybridge where he was living but he didn’t go into any further details about that. I was wondering who this “five” was because I knew that he was on his own, the daughter had her friend and there was me, so who was the 5th? I couldn’t think.

After breakfast I had a look at the digital sound files. I managed to unsort three of them too. One of them however needs much more attention because for some unknown reason there’s a load of “additional music” which seems to be a mixture of selections of various tracks, so I’d like to know what was going on there.

It isn’t the first one like that that I had found either.

By now it was time to go for my shower and to clean myself up somewhat, and then head up into town.

Not that I actually got very far before I was interrupted.

Remember yesterday when I photographed all of the pontoon-supporting pillars on the quayside and I mused that they might be assembling them in two rows of four?

Here’s the big floating pontoon travelling across the harbour with one of the pillars within its clutches almost at the place where one would expect to see it if we were going to have a fourth pillar in that row.

And the scaffolding too. We talked about that as well.

My attention was drawn from a distance that the masts of Marité were not where they would usually be. And that was strange because she doesn’t usually roam around the harbour but stays put in her habitual little corner.

But she’s definitely moved, and the reason for that is that they’ve put the scaffolding, complete with OSB wallboards, in her usual berth and there are a couple of guys down there doing something.

So at least I know that the scaffolding is actually a working platform for some kind of task.

From here I headed down into the town centre and up the rue Couraye towards LIDL.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago we watched them fit some kind of protective shuttering around the front of the boulangerie here and start to smash out the old window.

The protective shuttering has now gone and, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the new shop front is in glorious display. That’s quite a nice job that they’ve done there. It looks quite good.

Now for the first time ever in my whole life, I’ve seen every till open at the same time in a LIDL. And that will give you some kind of indication of just how busy it was in there today.

No cucumbers, which is a problem, and nothing else of any real interest as far as I was concerned. All in all, a little disappointing. 3-kilo bags of apples was about the closest that I was to a bargain. And they won’t last long now that I’m making my purées myself.

On the way back I headed to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but i was held up outside the shop as Birnam Wood went past on its way to Dunsinane.

There was actually a tractor and trailer parked around the corner with several large plants stacked thereupon, and presumably this machine was busy distributing them around the town.

It’s certainly a different approach to beautifying the town. I’ve said often enough … “indeed” – ed … that there isn’t enough greenery in this town and we ought to have some more.

Having picked up my dejeunette I headed back home again.

Only half-way up the rue des Juifs before I was distracted yet again. Not that I would know much about these things but they look pretty much like new pontoon supports and new pontoons over there on the west wall of the harbour.

What with one thing and another, I can see that I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow having a look at all of these things. But at least the harbour gates will be closed again by 09:30 or thereabouts so it doesn’t have to be an “early” early.

And in other news, there’s activity in the chantier navale today too.

It’s been quite busy in there up until very recently, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the boats have been going back into the water one by one until just now we had none whatever left.

But that’s all changed now. There are two boats in there now, one of which is a large yacht that might actually be La Granvillaise. I’ll go for a stroll over there this afternoon to check on that.

Back at my apartment I made myself a coffee and then split up a fourth music file. Pretty straightforward except that there were three extra tracks on it that aren’t on the LP that I have, so I had to track down which version of the master tape I had obtained so that I could identify the tracks.

There was still time before lunch to send off my project for this weekend and to start a new one to add to the stock.

After lunch, I carried on with the radio project but didn’t get too far before I was overwhelmed with a wave of fatigue. I didn’t quite crash out but for about 15-20 minutes I was teetering on the edge and didn’t actually do any work or anything while I was sitting there

By now it was raining outside when I went for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was due to come into port, that I knew, so when I saw an object the same colour as Neptune far out to sea in the English Channel I took a photo with the intention of enlarging it back in the apartment.

Which I did, and it wasn’t Neptue at all but one of the fishing boats heading back to the port. Neptune must still ne well out of range, which wouldn’t be a surprise because there’s a while yet before the harbour gates will open and she won’t want to sit around outside waiting.

She might not want to, but everyone else is.

The tide is well out and the little creek that leads up to the side of the fish-processing plant is only just starting to fill with water. It’ll be another half an hour or so before she’ll be deep enough to accept the fishing boats but they are all starting to congregate just outside.

There were at least 10 of them out there – maybe more but I had run out of fingers by this point and I wasn’t going to start taking off my shoes and socks. Mind you, had I had my hands in my pockets, I might have been able to count up to 11.

While I was walking round across the lawn by the War memorial, I noticed this.

We haven’t had an earthquake or a landslide or anything. That house is actually built like that. It’s what they call a trompe l’oeil – “something that cheats the eye” and it’s the window thats aligned strangely to follow the contours of the roofs rather than being in the hotizontal/vertical plane.

What’s bewildering me right now though is why I never noticed that before. It’s not like me to miss out on something this.

Anyway, enough of this. I continued on my way around the headland to go to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And I was right here too. It’s my lucky day, isn’t it? The “G90” painted on the side of the yacht tells us that it is indeed La Granvillaise down there on blocks.

Crowds of people milling round her too so there’s clearly something important going on with her. At least, I imagine that the people are there for her. It’s unlikely that a fishing boat would receive that much attention unless she had caught the Loch Ness Monster.

Yesterday, you’ll recall that we saw a couple of kayaks out there in the baie de Mont St Michel.

And so when I saw something else quite small out there in that general direction, I reckoned that it might be another one so I took another photograph of it to examine back in the comfort and safety of my apartment.

But it wasn’t a kayak at all but one of the small flat-bottomed boats that they use for transporting the boxes of seafood to the quayside from boats that have for one reason or another not been able to moor at the fish-processing plant.

And earlier this morning we saw the large flaoting pontoon carrying one of the pillars across the harbour.

A short while later the noise of the pile-driver started up and it’s been going on for most of the day. And so I had expected them to have made substantial progress, and I was quite right about that.

It’s been pounded quite well and quite deeply into the bed of the harbour and I imagine that they’ll be connecting up some pontoons to it in early course.

It’s certainly interesting.

And while I was musing on this, I witnessed the “police interaction” that I mentioned earlier.

Back here I did a little more to the radio project but ended up having an hour or so playing with the bass guitar and the 6-string electric/acoustic. It’s been a good while since I had a decent play about and I must work harder on this and make more of an effort.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper with rice, followed by some apple pie and coconut soya stuff. And despite the absence of spices, it was really nice. I’ll have to make a few more like that one of these days.

But I’m really going to have to buy a bigger fridge and a bigger freezer.

For my evening walk I went to see what was going on with the winds.

The tide is well out now but the wind is still causing the waves to smash against the wall down on the Plat Gousset. I bet that they didn’t do much repair work on that wall today.

My two runs weren’t a problem, except that my first run had to be on a different course due to waterlogging. And then I went to have a look at Neptune.

Now i’m back here and ready for bed. I’ll finish (I hope) the radio project tomorrow and then I can deal with another outstanding matter.

However did I find the time to go to work?

Tuesday 25th February 2020 – THE WIND OUTSIDE …

… tonight is probably one of the most wicked that I have ever experienced in all the time that I’ve been here.

You might be wondering how come it is that the fete foraine – the funfair – is still managing to operate in this kind of weather.

In fact, firstly only part of it is. Several of the rides have closed down, presumably due to the high winds. But then again, the Parking Hérel, where the funfair is situated, is pretty well sheltered.

Where I’m situated is on a headland right on the English CHannel with nothing between me and North America and I’m certainly taking the brunt of it. There’s another headland to the south of the Parking Hérel and there’s a high cliff right behind it.

But returning to our story, a rather strange thing happened to me during the night. I had the same dream no fewer than four times, one after the other. I couldn’t believe it when I listened to the dictaphone.

We were at school. I was with a friend of mine and we were taking photos of all of the school children. They were all sitting at the big long tables eating their meals. At the end of the session we went over to the headmistress and asked “what about our meal?” She asked “haven’t you had yours?” “No, we’ve been busy taking the photographs”. It developed into a long, lengthy discussion about how we should have had a meal which of course we knew. She couldn’t understand anything because of this issue about the photos. She knew that we’d applied for the contract and that we should have had the contract as our quote was the best, all this kind of thing and we were entitled to a meal. She went on and on for a while. In the end she went off and my friend went off. She came back with a pile of paperwork and asked “who’s filled in these forms?” They were forms to show the directors and officers of the company. I could remember filling one in when i was appointed but my name wasn’t there. It was still directors of the company from school years ago who were still there. She said “I remember (… someone else from the past …) filling in this form only yesterday about taking kids for a walk. It’s clearly something that wasn’t right and it had to be put right so that the situation could be regularised. When my friend came back in I asked him what he would be doing on Wednesday night. He came out with some kind of comment about getting ready for school on Thursday. I told him that we had a pile of paperwork to fill in. I started to explain to him about the paperwork
I had this dream four times this evening as I mentioned earlier. But in the third one the headmistress was going on about cupboards in front of the radiators which were small with close-fronted cupboards and doors. She was saying that in the old days they were porous so that the heat could pass through and warm the room more but the ones they have now are solid and so the heat doesn’t pass at all.

So explain that if you can!

After breakfast I set about cutting up a pile of digital sound files into the component tracks. And once more I had the misfortune to find a pile that were out of order and it took a considerable amount of time to unravel them.

What with having something of a late start this morning, it was about 11:00 by the time I finished my morning tasks.

That was the cue for me to go for my bread before I actually settled down to do some work.

For a change I had no intention of going out to see the parade this afternoon so I went for a long morning walk all around the headland, which would give me an opportunity for a close-up view of the chantier navale to see what was going on.

And we seem to have acquired another new resident. We now have three fishing boats in there receiving attention

The tide wasn’t quite in so the harbour gates were closed and I could pass over the path on the top to the other side of the harbour.

The big pontoon with the cranes was hard at work again over by the rue du Port. They are cracking on with the installation of the new pontoons for the landing stages and they might well be finished sometime soon.

But I was more interested in that very large grey post that now seems to have appeared over there behind the floating pontoon. That’s something else that I shall have to check.

But there was one thing yesterday that I mentioned and that I said that I would check up on today.

That was the crane and the mysterious scaffolding construction that it seemed to be erecting. So down at the quayside today I had a look to see what was going on, and there is the scaffolding bolted to some poles that are screwed firmly to the quayside and clamped down.

So it looks as if there’s some kind of serious and semi-permanent arrangement of things happening here right now.

Having picked up my dejeunette at La Mie Caline I headed back home. The crowds were already starting to assemble and I didn’t really want to be caught up in it.

Instead, in the run-up to lunchtime I began the notes for the next radio project.

After my butties I spent an hour or so in the kitchen. The orange and ginger syrup is running out and having bought a pile of lemons yesterday, I decided to make a lemon and ginger syrup.

First step was to slice up the rest of my ginger root (I must buy some more) into tiny pieces and put them in a little water in a saucepan, bring it to the boil and let it simmer.

Meanwhile, peel the lemons and remove as much pith as possible, put them in the whizzer and give them a whizz around to extract as much juice as possible. That was strained off, poured into a bottle that I had sterilised and put in the fridge.

The rest of the lemons went into the whizzer again and properly broken down, and then added to the water and the ginger and left to simmer.

In the meantime I cracked on for a while with the notes for the radio project and then went out for my usual walk.

If you are wondering why there are no photos of the afternoon walk, it’s because the heavens had by now opened and we were having rain like I haven’t seen for a long time. I did have my camera with me but it was tucked up inside my wet weather gear and I had no intention of taking it out.

However, I did find a dry bit of my walk, one of the places where I usually go for a run, and so I took the opportunity to clock up another couple of minutes.

Back in the apartment I took the ginger and lemon off the heat and added a couple of tablespoons of honey to sweeten it. And then the whole lot went into the whizzer for a really good whizz around until it became a syrupy mass.

Final step was to take out the bottle of lemon juice that I had earlier put in the fridge, add the syrup to it and give it a really good shake up so that it was all mixed well in. And that will be the drink for the next week or so, diluted with my filtered water.

However, I am tempted to see what it might be like with some sparkling water.

Having finished writing the notes, I turned my attention to tea. Stuffed pepper with rice and veg, followed by rice pudding.

And I bet that you are all wondering how I make my stuffing too.

So, a handful of either bulghour or quinoa – whichever is first to hand – goes into a saucepan with a very small amount of water and some spicy chili power. It’s brought to the boil and left to simmer.

In the meantime, I chop up some onion, garlic, mushrooms, olives and anything else that looks as if it might be suitable and chuck it all into a bowl. And then I add a fistful of salted peanuts.

By now, the quinoa or bulghour should be ready (it doesn’t need to be competely cooked) and you add that to your mix with herbs and black pepper.

Finally, add some tomato sauce (I have some nice arrabiata sauce that they had in Noz and I bought a few jars) and olive oil and mix it all up together.

Cut round the stalk of your pepper and pull out the core, the seeds and the pith. Then stuff it with your stuffing and pack it well in with a fork.

Finally, 6.5 minutes on medium-high wattage in the microwave (in a microwave-proof bowl of course), followed by whatever time it needs on full power to finish cooking until the pepper itself is nice and soft. And there’s your stuffed pepper.

Outside, I was absolutely whacked by this thoroughly wicked wind that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere.

My original pla was to go around the walls for a second time today rather than around the headland which would be … errr … somewhat exposed. But it didn’t quite work out like that.

The wind was so violent that it was impossible to walk at all in the rue du Nord and that’s the way that I go when I’m off on my travels out around the walls.

Instead, what I did was to go for a walk through the narrow streets of the old medieval town where there was at least some kind of shelter.

One of the streets was actually quite well-sheltered from the wind and as there was no-one about I broke into a run.

It wasn’t as long as I would have liked but it wasn’t the kind of weather to be out there discussing things like that. It was one of those occasions where I was obliged to go with what I had and make the best of it.

The route that I took brought me back into the Place Cambernon and there, a little surprise was awaiting me.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on Thursday evenings we have a pizza van parked up in the square. But tonight we seem to have acquired a burger van.

Whether it’s going to be a permanent arrangement every Tuesday or whether it’s just a temporary arrangement for the period of Carnaval remains to be seen. But whatever it is or will be, it’s nice to see some life coming back into the medieval town.

By the time I made it to th city gates there was still 6% of my daily target to have a go at so I went for another little extension to my walk.

From the top of the walls there was a good view down into the funfair so I experimented with different speeds, exposures and ISO settings to see what I could produce.

And then I came back to write up my notes.

Now it’s bed time, later than I was hoping, but still …

The wind is sill howling away outside but in a minute I’ll be tucked up under the covers. I wonder where I’ll be going tonight. And how many times I’ll be going there.

Tuesday 18th February 2020 – I CAN NOW ADD …

… to my list of accomplishments that of “tying up a trawler”.

I arrived at the harbour at exactly the moment that the harbour gates opened, and I actually do mean that because I was walking across the path on top when they started to close and I had to scramble underneath the barrier.

There must have been eight or nine fishing boats of various sizes sitting in the queue outside the gates waiting for the off.

Anyway, as soon as the gates opened, they shot in like greyhounds out of a trap and headed for their berths.

One of the later arrivals pulled up right by me as I was walking down the quayside. The skipper shouted “tie us up, will you?” and hurled me a rope. I missed the first time but the second time I caught it and looped it over a bollard and wound it round.

he seemed quite satisfied that I’d done it correctly so I cleared off. I had no idea that passers-by – civilians like me – were expected to know how to do things like this and be roped (if you’ll excuse the pun) into participating in the antics of the fishing fleet.

You learn something new every day.

Nothing new though in this morning’s antics. I missed the alarms again and it was about 06:45 when I finally arose.

But I’d been awake a couple of times during the night and on both occasions found myself dictating the account of a nocturnal voyage … into my hand. Dictaphone still on the chest of drawers.

It’s enough to make me wonder how many times I’ve done that in the past and what I might have missed.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone and … GULP there’s enough on here to keep me busy for a week or so, enver mind half an hour.

There was a group of kids, 7 or 8 or 9 and it was some kind of adventure quest. They had to travel to France for some reason or other, all dressed up, even two of them dressed as a pantomime horse with a girl dressed as a princess sitting on top, all dashing off down to Dover docks. I was one of the monitors – I had to follow them around and make sure that they weren’t getting up to any good. They had challenges that they had to meet on the way, like one where it was the task of this pantomime horse to actually involve itself in the encounter, this kind of thing. I pile of them made it down to Dover so I said “what happens now? Do you have to get your tickets?”. One said “ohh no. They said we could get our tickets at the other side” which sounded strange to me but they all seemed to agree that that was what was supposed to be happening. They were all jostling around for a place to sit. One of the girls was Helena who was probably a little older, 10 or 11 I dunno so i got talking to her. “What have you been doing?” “Well apart from having to drive my car to the Isle of Man, not a great deal” so I asked her to tell me about her kind of adventure in this particular thing but she didn’t have the chance to before I awoke
And I’ve done it again, haven’t I? Dictating a dream in my sleep without the Dictaphone. Strange. I was up on the Elm Drive estate in what should have been a council house but it was a big private house of mine. I was doing it up but I’d been taken ill as you know and couldn’t work so the work had really slowed down on this place. But Castor and Pollux were there and Jerry Kobalenko (welcome into my nocturnal rambles, Jerry) too. We were preparing for an expedition and it had started and we had lost a lot of equipment and I’d fallen through the ice. We’d had to arrange this kind of thing and ended up with no clothes so we were back at my house again drying off. I started to lend Jerry some clothes and stuff like that and get myself organised. Jerry borrowed my car which was a Mark IV Cortina RHD but with the gear lever on the right up against the door. He went off and did something and then I came back and took the car for a drive. Went down West Avenue and Richard Moon Street and out to Nantwich. Round Nantwich and back again all the way up Middlewich Road. I can’t remember where I ended up then, some town or other and had to do a U-turn. I pulled out of a side road and nearly knocked a lorry off over into the centre of the road. There was a huge power station where I did my U-turn and came back. Castor and Pollux were talking to me. They asked me what I intended to do about the house. I said that I was going to finish it off and live here. They were surprised and asked if I ought to be taking more care of my health. I gave them the usual story about wanting to enjoy what life I had left rather than being afraid and not doing anything. They were a bit surprised by this but I told them that was how it was. They asked what I was going to do for money. I wasn’t going to say anything but yes I’m OK for money, plenty of it. I said “you don’t need a job”. Castor said to Pollux “but everyone needs a job, you know” and Pollux was still wondering how you manage to live, all this kind of thing. I was trying my best to explain to her. I’d forgotten that bit about taxis when I was out in the car. I wasn’t supposed to be taxiing and I had to stop thinking about being a taxi driver. So this discussion went on and then was when I awoke to find myself dictating this dream out loud into my hand not the dictaphone so I’ve no idea what has happened there – and how many other times I might have dictated into my hand during my sleep and never been aware of it.
Interestingly, it proves the point that dreams are connected with memories and not out-of-body experiences – at least this one was. The area of West Street around West Avenue, Richard Moon Street and Middlewich Road has undergone all kinds of changes since the demolition of the railway works after I left the town. But not one of these changes appeared in my voyage around that area.
Somewhat later I was doing exactly the same thing again – dictating my dream into my hand while asleep. It was a cowboy situation – the James Brothers. One of them was an outlaw, fed up of them being on the run and wanted to go straight. He was talking to me about it. I went outside and there was the other brother trying to break in a horse. That was when I awoke to find myself dictating my dream in my sleep again
Later on I was with Nerina and we’d been working on a taxi. We’d had to have some letraset done to make some stickers and Karen Brierley had done it. The job was absolutely perfect and I wouldn’t have had the patience to do this, as I told her, but this was really good. In fact we’d been talking about business cards prior to this. Someone had taken us to a place and the guy had opened up a set of drawers that he rented out, right by the doorway. “You’ll know what’s in here” he said and opened the top drawer but there was nothing in it. he opened the next one and it was full of business cards and that’s how we got talking about stickers. We much preferred stickers for the taxis because you could stick them everywhere. Anyway then people then were going on about this taxi, painted white and letraset it but it was really late. My family were all up and Nerina was really tired, and I needed her to do some more work. In the end I smiled and said “yes, go on Nerina, go to bed”. I said to my mother that I won’t be up very long either. Even though they were planning to be up all night I’d go to bed and do this first thing in the morning. She went off to bed and I went out to work on this car. But I came back because I was in a suit. I took off the jacket and shirt and went to get an old tee-shirt. And as for jeans I’d but on a pair of overalls to protect the trousers.

As you can imagine, it took me much more than half an hour to type out all of that. I had a break for breakfast at some point and then came back to carry on and it was right into mid-morning by the time that I’d finished all of that.

That meant that finally I could start on the notes for the radio project on which I’m working, but I wasn’t at it for long because I needed to go for my bread.

First task was to leave the house of course. And it was a bright sunny day so i’d planned a nice long walk.

Not that i would get very far though before I had to stop. regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m quite interested in the plant life around here – this kind of plant of course, not the other kind. So when I saw this mobile crane pull up on the other side of the harbour I stopped to photograph it.

No idea what it might be doing there. There’s already enough plant and machinery over there as it is.

As I walked down the boulevard des Terreneuviers I noticed that the fishing boats were now jostling for position at the entrance to the inner harbour even though the “traffic light” was showing red.

That could only mean one thing – that the harbour gates were closed but would be opening very shortly. I had a brief look at the chantier navale but there was nothing there any different from the last time I looked.

And so I pushed on rather rapidly, not even stopping to take a photo of the shellfish that they were hauling up from a boat at the fish-processing plant.

Just as I set foot on the footpath across the top of the gates the siren sounded. I moved rapidly but the barrier came down and the gates started to open before I could cross over.

Luckily I was on the far gate so I didn’t have to jump for it, but I still had to scramble under the barrier at the far side. But I’m glad I did because it gave me an opportunity to inspect the fishing tackle on one of the fishing boats.

So now I know where everything goes and what it’s for. I’ll have to get myself out there on a fishing boat one of these days and have a first-hand look at it.

So as all of the fishing boats cleared off into the harbour, I cleared off after them. And that was when I had my encounter with the other fishing boat that I had to tie up.

The guys were there with the pontoon and the large mobile crane. Having been rebuffed the other day I decided not to waste my time asking them anything but to wait and use my own eyes to see what was going on.

And I wasn’t to be disappointed at all, as you will see in due course.

Another one of the things that I’m doing right now is to go round by where the fête foraine – the funfair – will be for the carnival and see how they are getting on with arranging everything.

In the Place Godal, where some of the caravans of the entertainers are parked, there was this popcorn, toffee apple and ice cream stall.

Not that i reckon that it’s supposed to be set up there (although it wouldn’t come as any surprise) but my thinking was that they are waiting for the funfair to erect itself and then these stalls will fit in around the amusements.

So down to the Parking Hérel to see how they were doing.

And the big machinery is going up together quite nicely – and quickly. In fact the apparatus on the left was actually working, swinging back and forth. It made me wonder whether the inspectors were actually there today checking it over.

These machines are impressive but they are quite dangerous and can’t ply for hire until they have been inspected and have a permit to operate.

The Palais de Rire – the Palace of Laughter – looks impressive and they must have worked impressively to have it done this quickly. They had barely started on it yesterday.

But I learnt something today too, and I’m always in the market for learning new things.

There was a lorry there that was towing a couple of trailers – the typical “showman’s goods” lorry. So I asked someone with it what licence yuo needed to drive with more than one trailer.

The answer was (the Fench equivalent of) “a HGV Class one licence – nothing else”. In other words, any ordinary Heavy Artic licence. And I have one of those, don’t I?

But don’t worry. My days of driving all this heavy stuff are over.

From there I walked into town and La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette

And here across the road is something that wasn’t here this time yesterday. Clutching my bread quite tightly, I went for a closer look.

They are pushing along quite rapidly with the features for Carnaval as we can see. This is the stage from which they will make all of the announcements I reckon and where there might be some kind of entertainment during the evening – I dunno.

Yesterday I’d been past the car park in the Cours Jonville and seen them laying out the edges of the chapiteau – the big marquee where the Friday night Ball will take place.

And so I went that way today to see how they were getting on with it. And “getting on with it” they certainly are. It’s quite impressive the speed with which they are putting up these things and the marquee is certainly one of the more exciting things

So Friday night we’re going to ba having a Ball. Well, they are. I shall be tucked up in my warm little bed ready for the onslaught the following day.

The roadworks in the place des Corsaires have gone now and the street is open. Me though, I pushed on up the rue des Juifs until I was interrupted.

Excuse the dreadful shot but the sun was right in my eyes and in the camera lens. But here’s our mobile crane, now on this side of the harbour in the rue du Port and the big pontoon has sailed over here too.

And between the pair of them they are manoeuvring one of the pontoon supports into place ready for fixing against the harbour wall. I was lucky to catch this photo today.

Back here I had a late lunch and then set about my afternoon project.

Peel some ginger, dice it into some very tiny squares and then put it in a small amount of water to boil, then leave to simmer.

Meanwhile, peel four good juicy oranges and put them in the whizzer. Whizz them round and then filter out the orange juice which goes in the fridge in a bottle.

The left-over pulp goes into the pan with the ginger and it’s all left to simmer.

While that’s doing, put about 5mm of water in the bottom of your nice new big saucepan and add plenty of lemon juice to it.

hen peel, core and dice seven apples and three pears. When they are finely cut, add them to the water and lemon juice as you go along, swirling them around so that there’s some lemony liquid covering all of them to stop them browning.

Then add desiccated coconut and some cinnamon to the apples and pears, take off the orange and ginger and put the apples and pears etc onto the heat and bring to the boil and leave to simmer.

With the orange pulp and ginger add a couple of dessert spoons of honey and stir well in. Then add to the whizzer and give it a really good whizzing around to liquidise almost everything. Then when it’s cooled down, add to the orange juice and give it all a really good shake.

There’s a nice orange and ginger syrup to add to filtered water.

That was the cue to go for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds of people out there today because it was so nice, and I’m glad that I went out when I did because I saw a most unexpected sight. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the new pontoons stacked up on the quayside the other day, but here’s one in the water heading across to the cranes that we saw earlier.

But how are them moving? They aren’t rowing them so maybe there’s an outboard motor somewhere, I suppose.

There had been a heavy rainstorm briefly a short while earlier but it had passed and was gone.

Not too far though because we had this gorgeous rainbow. We’ve certainly seen some impressive rainbows since we’ve been living here but this one is one of the best.

Back here I checked to see that the apples were done, and then strained off the liquid. That’s in a bottle ready to be diluted in early course.

As for the solids, they went into the whizzer and turned into purée for me to bottle. That’ll keep me going for a week or so.

Now I could finish off writing the texts and dictate them, just interrupted by a little 10-minute crash out. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to finish editing them before it was tea-time which was a shame.

For tea I had a stuffed pepper with rice followed by apple turnover and Alpro soya almond with chocolate sauce. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that now that i’m much better-organised my diet is improving 100%

Cutting out these shop-bought sugary drinks and their plastic bottles was really a good New Year resolution.

For my walk I managed my two runs and then headed back here to write up my notes.

And now bed-time. After my marathon adventures during the night last night I’m ready for a good sleep. I just hope that I remember to use the dictaphone if i want to dictate any notes.

Monday 3rd February 2020 – SHE’S BACK!

Yes, there I was this afternoon out for my walk, looking across the harbour, and there she was.

Yes, the Bond heroine Plenty O’Toole, named for her father of course, has turned up again in Granville. It must be a couple of years since she was last here but here she is.

Who is going to be next to put in an appearance here in Granville? Foxxy Cleopatra? Or Godzilla?

Last night, I was on something of a roll. Somehow and for some reason (probably the very late lie-in that I had) I didn’t feel like going to bed. And so making the most of it, I carried on attacking the notes for the current radio project. By the time that I was overwhelmed there was only another 5 or 10 minutes left to finish so that was a good plan of work.

And even despite the late night, I was just on the point of putting my feet on the floor when the third alarm went off. So we’ll call that a draw today.

After the medication I checked the dictaphone but I had nothing on so instead I chopped up a digital sound file into the component tracks. That was interrupted by breakfast and by the fact that the sound file bore no resemblance to the details that I had and I had to hunt down a revised description.

A little later I had a shower and then headed off outside.

And it was my lucky day because for once there was plenty going on outside. Chausiais was on the move again, heading out with presumably another cargo for the ile de Chausey

That’s a couple of times now that I’ve seen her on the move. I’m intrigued to know what her plans are in the long term because it’s a lot of money tied up for just the occasional crossing to the ile de Chausey

That wasn’t everything either, because Joly France was on the move too.

At first I was wondering whether or not she was taking out a load of passengers to follow in the wake of Chausiais but I eventually came to the conclusion that where she was, she was preventing Chausiais from leaving her berth.

And that would account for her manoeuvres in port this morning, I reckon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there’s this big project going on in the port right now.

They are ripping up the abandoned railway lines from when this place was a thriving deep-sea fishing port and “improving” the car park. Here today, their work has advanced out of the protected zone and there’s a mini-digger with a hydraulic drill attachment breaking up the surface where there ware more railway lines buried.

It makes me wonder just how long they are going to be at this project and what it’s going to be like when it’s finished. It was something of an eyesore so almost anything will be an improvement, but I hope that the plans include some greenery too.

And out in the Place Charles de Gaulle I’m not quite sure what’s happening here.

We have a tractor and trailer and another piece of heavy equipment parked up outside the old Tourist Information office. That’s now an ephemeral display room so it might be something to do with that, or else they are starting to kit out the Square ready for Carnaval, which will take ^lace in 3 weeks time.

We shall see what we shall wee.

Around the corner in the rue des Carrosses we are faced with a more mundane, even banal problem.

Something is clearly up with the guttering or the chimney of this building because they have brought in a cherry-picker and sent up a couple of men in the nacelle to deal with the issue.

As for me, I pushed on up the hill towards the Centre Agora for our weekly meeting

Regular readers will recall that I’ve mentioned in the past all of the time that is wasted in these meetings … “not ‘arf” – ed … but in the past there was nothing like as much wasted as today.

For a change I was second there and the others arrived after me. But they stayed outside having a smoke and a chat and didn’t come in until 10:30. And most of the meeting was spent discussing a subject that could have been dealt with in about 2 minutes.

Someone turned up from one of the Council’s committees and she was introduced to us. The guy in charge told her about what we did and while he was very careful to mention several programmes that we had done, he very carefully omitted anything that I had done from the list.

If they don’t like what I do and are ashamed of it, I wish that they would tell me and either stop me doing it or tell me how it can be improved. It’s quite true that the stuff from the last couple of weeks has been light years ahead of what I did at the beginning, but that’s because I’ve worked it out for myself.

If they have something to say, I wish that they would come out and say it.

The real business of the meeting didn’t come out until everyone was almost ready to leave – at about 12:30. These are hours of my life that I won’t ever get back.

On the way home I stopped at LIDL. I needed some olive oil and a few other things, but forgot the stuff to make my muesli and I’ve run out of that. If I can’t find all of the stuff it might be porridge for the next few days.

Back down in town again I picked up my dejeunette at la Mie Caline and came back home for a late lunch.

This afternoon I pushed on with the radio project and although I hadn’t quite finished it at knocking-off time, I hung on in and had it done regardless. And so a late tea.

But there had been a couple of interruptions to my day. Firstly, and unsurprisingly after my late night and early start, I crashed out on my chair for 20 minutes in a really deep sleep

Secondly, there was the afternoon walk as usual. Mustn’t miss out on that!

And this photo will tell you exactly how things unfolded during the course of the afternoon. There’s a huge, powerful rain cloud about 8 or 10 miles out to sea and judging by the wind right now, it’s heading this way.

This kind of thing is looking quite ominous for later on.

And although it’s not as windy as it might be and indeed has just recently, it’s blowing a terrific gale somewhere out to sea.

We’re a good hour or so away from high tide but even so, there’s enough power in the sea to send the waves crashing right over the harbour wall. No wonder I couldn’t see any fishing boats out there today.

It’s not the kind of day at all to be out there on the ocean waves in the kind of boats that hang around in this harbour.

Talking of fishing boats, there’s been another change of tenant at the Chantier navale.

One of the fishing boats has now left and presumably gone back into the water. There’s only the one left now and judging by all of the people on board working away at here, it doesn’t look as if she’s going to be there for much longer either.

So new tenants all round in the near future, I reckon. It will be interesting to see who comes in and who does what to it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen this boat before just recently.

Seeing as it’s in the national colours, I thought at first that it might be something to do with the Government but judging by the large bucket of seafood on her deck and the van there that has come to take the stuff away, it’s probably just a private fishing boat.

And that’s something of a disappointment. I was hoping for a lot more excitement around here now.

While you admire another photo of the raging sea, let me tell you about teatime.

With plenty of mushrooms lying about here and there I made myself a stuffed pepper with pasta. And I’m not sure quite why but it was one of the best that I’ve ever tasted even though I forgot the herbs.

It was followed up by rice pudding and that was delicious too. I may be eating quite simply but by ‘eck I am eating well these days.

By now the storm had arrived, the weather had broken, and how! There was the deep puddle outside the roor and the streets were like running rivers. I went for my walk regardless, even managing two runs.

Not on the north side of the walls though – that was about a foot deep in water. I had to find a place a little further on even though the ground underfoot isn’t as smooth. And of course, my run across the Square Maurice Marland.

So now I’ve finished, I’ve re-heard my radio project and it’s fine, so I’m going to listen to some music for half an hour before going to bed.

A little luxury is something that I deserve.

Wednesday 15th January 2020 – IT’S REALLY NICE …

… when someone’s project that you have been following for quite a while finally comes to fruition.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been following the renovation of the big old building in the Place Cambernon for a couple of years now on and off, but now here it is, the Restaurant La Contremarche, in all its glory. Open to the public this evening

And it’s a right place too. There’s a piano, and waiters in aprons, all that kind of thing. Definitely not for the likes of you and me.

And there’s another reason why I won’t be going there either. And that’s because, although I did look, I couldn’t see a menu on display outside.

There are two reasons why that fact would disappoint me too –

It’s not possible to see whether there’s anything that I could eat. And with my rather restricted diet, that kind of thing is very important. In fact it will put a lot of people off going.
With not knowing what’s available, I can’t see the prices. It’s like the old saying about Rolls Royces, which is quite apposite seeing as I lived for several years in the town where Rolls Royces were made – in that “if you have to ask the price, then you can’t afford it”. Rather than being embarrassed about the price, I wouldn’t go in at all.

So Fritkot for me.

But more importantly, where are they going to put the pizza van now? I don’t think that the owners of the restaurant will want it outside their front door.

We’ll find out tomorrow.

But never mind tomorrow, let’s talk about today. It was a night that was rather later than intended last night, and as a result I didn’t quite manage to beat the third alarm. Only a couple of minutes in it but still disappointing.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I can’t remember now who I was with but we were in a hotel waiting to be called for our aeroplanes. We had been told that they were going in 5-minute intervals or 10 minute intervals. The last plane had been called at something like 12:00 and it was now long after 13:00 and we still hadn’t been called. We’d all packed and had everything ready and were just sitting around waiting, getting more and more annoyed and stressed out about this. In the end I was actually staying on for an extra week so it didn’t really concern me that much but the two people I was with, they were going back. IN the end I picked up the hotel phone and tried to dial out to try to find out what was going on. These two people told me the number but as I was dialling I had this light voice saying “doing my best, doing me best”, a female voice, obviously an automatic machine. As I was doing this a noise started up in the hotel corridor as if everyone was moving out. I had my old shoes on, the ones with the broken laces and whoever I was with came up and said “here, look at this” and he tied my laces in a realy peculiar way that ended in a dead-knot. “How’s that?” I said “if you can remember how to undo it, it’s fine”. My laces were a nice lime green and with black trainers that didn’t look right at all.

After breakfast, I’d still had no news of what I was supposed to be doing with the audio files from the Press Conference at the Stade Louis Dior yesterday. It’s all very well sending me to this meeting, but I have to know what I’m supposed to be doing.

Deciding that any action is better than none at all, I went through the one with Johan Gallon, the trainer of US Granville, all 25 minutes of it, and made copious notes.

It worked out that there was an opportunity to ask about 25 questions to be inserted into the interview, so I set about and recorded them.

There was a brief interruption in the middle of all that to go and fetch my bread. The wind had stopped but we were now having a rainstorm.

It’s half-day at schools in France on a Wednesday.

They close at midday and sure enough there are hordes of people milling around. And load of cars like these here.

Bit I watched the one across the road pull up. I’m standing right by an approved parking place which is vacant, there’s a huge public car park 50 metres further up the Boulevard Vaufleury but the selfish driver chooses to block the pavement by parking with two wheels upon it, and blocking the access down the road for the service buses and school buses that come down here.

And if that’s no enough to be going on with, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that the driver is parked on a bus stop. You can’t see the yellow hatching on the road but you can see the “bus stop” sign right in front of the car.

My walk took me onwards towards the Chantier navale

Our old friend Spirit of Conrad is still in there of course and so are the two fishing boats that have been there for a while. But they are now joined by a third one, to the right of Spirit of Conrad.

It looks as if there’s a lot going on in the Chantier navale right now and that’s always good news. The port needs to be kept busy with as much work as possible.

The tide was well in today so the gates were open and I couldn’t walk across.

It also meant that the earth-moving equipment doing the dredging at the ferry terminal weren’t out working, They were parked down at the rue du Port so I could go and inspect them,

Two large diggers and two huge earth-moving lorries. And whaen I was “huge eath-moving lorries” I do mean huge. I could have hours of endless fun with one of those.

Having bought my dejeunette at la Mie Caline, I headed for home, chatting to a neighbour on the way.

It wasn’t quite lunchtime so I had a listen to what I had dictated. It needed some background white noise, a little echo and some background noise so I spent a while adding some of that.

By now it was lunchtime so I knocked off for half an hour or so.

After lunch I set to copying and pasting the audio files and my questions and I’d done half of it when the telephone rang. I finally know now what I have to do with it all, and it means that my morning is wasted.

As I’ve said before, the lack of professionalism is really annoying me.

Instead, I carried on with this blasted, flaming translation. By the time that I knocked off for tea I’d reached 46 minutes – that’s about 83%. With a bit of luck I can finish that tomorrow before I go to the shops.

The afternoon walk – in the bright sunshine now, was interesting. I only managed half of my run along the square Maurice Marland but I wasn’t disappointed because with no-one about at all, I’d done the run along the north side of the walls.

But I don’t understand why I hadn’t taken any photos at all.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by rice pudding. And it was delicious as usual. Mind you, I forgot to put the peanuts in the stuffing.

Outside, the wind had dropped but the ground was sodden as if we’d had a sudden rainstorm.

The views though were really excellent tonight. I could see dozens of fishing boats right out in the English Channel and there was one of them heading in to port seeing as the tide was in.

The sea was comparatively calm too, so there can’t have been much intensity in the storm that passed us by over the last couple of days. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have on occasion seen waves still come roaring in days after a violent storm.

“A really clear night” I thought to myself.

Out there in the English Channel you can see a couple of the trawlers – or, rather, the lights of a couple of trawlers out there fishing off the coast of Jersey.

But even more importantly, you can see the large red lights on the extreme left of the image. I’m not sure what they are but my best guess would be that they would be warning lights for something like a radio antenna or a radar mast over on the Jersey mainland.

Picking this up with my equipment in the darkest night is quite something.

That wasn’t all either.

The lights of St Malo were nice and bright and clear tonight. With no tripod to take long-delay exposures, I had to do my best with a hand-held shot.

It’s hard to think that 18 months ago I might have been lucky to produce this image but it’s rather small beer compared to what I’ve been able to produce with the new camera and the tripod.

We mentioned a little earlier the parking issues in the Boulevard Vaufleury.

In the future though it’s going to become far more difficult. They’ve blocked off half of the car-parking spaces with a row of cones and I’ve no idea why.

Perhaps I’ll find out tomorrow when I go for my walk. But stopping to photograph them interrupted my evening run (yes, I’ve done a lot of running today). And stand by for some more “pathetic parking” photos of cars whose kids are far too lazy to walk 50 metres.

The fishing boat that I had seen earlier was now at the fish processing plant and was busy unloading.

If you look very carefully you’ll see the fork lift truck that is taking away the boxes of whatever the boat had brought in.

As for me, I carried on with my walk. I was on 90% of my day’s activities so I pushed on for a while. That’s how come I found myself in the Place Cambernon.

But a good walk around brought me up to 100% eventually so I could come home.

Listening to my recordings just recently, I’m well aware of the fact that my equipment for the radio isn’t producing the quality that I would like. In fact, I’m really surprised that it’s doing as well as it does.

But anyway there’s a Special Offer on at the moment on recording equipment and there’s a professional piece of equipment that does exactly what I want on sale at just €88:00. So that, and a microphone desktop stand and (at last) a water filter are on their way here.

There are a few bits and pieces missing for the camera following my aquatic adventures and they are on the way here too, as well as some sticky labels for the new laptop to convert it to a French keyboard.

Money is being spent like water right now but I’m having to do it if I want to move on.

There’s a new electric kettle to be looked for too. The one that I have has just blown every fuse in the house.

Monday 30th December 2019 – I BET …

… that when you first saw the photo of this car in this parking place, you thought to yourself “he’s off on this pathetic parking lark yet again!”

But not a bit of it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my perambulations around Paris two weeks or so ago and I featured one of the new electric vehicle charging points that are springing up like mushrooms all over the developed world (except of course in the UK, for obvious reasons).

Well, here’s another one. Or two, to be precise, right outside the railway station in Granville. As I said a couple of weeks ago, the world is racing ahead.

And quite right too. The EU is to phase out the production of the internal combustion engine by 2040. The biggest obstacle to electric vehicles is the lack of charging points, but this is changing quite rapidly.

Other things that I wish would change quite rapidly are my sleeping habits. What with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised how many other things there are) it was about 01:45 when I eventually went to bed last night. 4:33 of sleep last night, of which 3:42 were classed as “restful”.

This is getting beyond a joke.

Even so, there was still plenty of time for me to go off a-voyaging. I had to get up early next morning and there was a bit of an issue. There were two girls at my house. One of them was part of my family but I can’t remember who she was and the other one was her friend who was staying with us. Round about 11:00 they got up and about 11:15 or 11:45 something like that they went out. That was the last we’d seen of them. We knew that they were going to a dance. There we were, sitting there, a big group of us, drumming our fingers on the table wondering where they hall they had got to. I thought that this is no good – I need the car. I have to get up in the morning and everything like that. Round about 02:30 they suddenly appeared back again. They’d been on a dance, off to a night club all this kind of thing and we were all making disparaging remarks about “WHAT time was it you went out this morning?” All of that kind of thing. These girls weren’t giving a straight answer because they were a bit embarrassed something like that about it. But the situation concerned one of my Cortinas. I’d been driving around in it and the MoT had expired a while ago. I remember thinking to myself that I ought to have this vehicle on two number plates so I can get two different MoTs which would overlap so that if one expired I’d just put the plates on it for the other MoT and run that for another few months and so on. I can’t remember what on earth that was all about but that was when I awoke for the first time – round about 04:00.
But later on there was something going on to do with the radio. Some young boy had been at the radio who was doing his stuff with very primitive equipment (something like I’m doing at the moment I suppose) and tired of being pushed to the bottom of the pile because of that he went out and bought some decent stuff which improved his quality and improved his output and annoyed all of his colleagues because he’d now got some superior kind of stuff.

It was something of a struggle for me to leave my stinking pit this morning, which should not be a surprise after the night that I had, but I did make it up before the 3rd alarm.

Having taken the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes and then went for breakfast once the medication had worked.

After breakfast I checked my communications and found that Alison had replied to me with her plans for the weekend when I’ll be at Castle Anthrax. And so I could go ahead with making my travel arrangements.

Thursday 9th January
09:00 – Granville to Paris Montparnasse, arriving 12:05 – and in the main arrivals hall too if my reading is correct.
13:15 – Paris Gare du Nord – Lille Flanders arriving 14:18
14:41 – Lille Europe – Bruxelles-Midi arriving 15:17
and then a local train to Leuven
Sunday 12th January
08:43 – Bruxelles-Midi – Paris Gare du Nord arriving 10:05
10:57 – Paris St Lazare – Caen arriving 12:58
14:10 – Caen – Granville arriving 15:44.

Of course, all of this is somewhat … errr … facultative. It’s all very dependent upon the availability of transport in the middle of a General Strike and I can see myself as having as many exciting adventures as did the Knights of King Arthur as they went to visit Castle Anthrax.

With booking my accommodation too, and my local train between Brussels and Leuven, it was quite late when I went for my shower.

And SHOCK! HORROR! – I’ve gained 2kgs since my last shower. That can’t possibly be right and seems to indicate that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood count readings from Castle Anthrax.

Off I went into town and up to the railway station (and the electric vehicle charging point) to pick up my tickets. And there was quite a pantomime about getting them from the machine.

That’s why I always like to pick them up before I travel. There’s no-one in the ticket office at the time my train leaves so if the machine has a seizure on the morning of my travel then I really am cooked.

At LIDL I spent more money than I was expecting.

One thing that I said that I would do is to take more care of my living arrangements, and forgetting to change my bedding for weeks isn’t helping things. Today though at LIDL they had some flannelette sheets on offer so I bought a couple. A dark blue one to go with one bedding set and a light blue one to go with the other.

They weren’t very expensive for what they are and the quality isn’t brilliant but alternating them around more regularly means that they will last somewhat.

On the way back home I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then headed for home.

At the recycling centre across the road from my building the lorry had come to empty one of the containers.

Not being in any particular rush, I watched it for a while as it emptied the plastics bin. And then watched for a couple more minutes while the crew of the lorry went scampering around trying to catch the pieces of plastic that where Blowing In The Wind.

The moral of this story is – don’t empty the lightweight plastics containers in a gale-force wind.

Back at the apartment I had a few things to do that took me up to lunch, and once lunch was out of the way I had a little project to attend to.

My “recording sessions” take place at the moment using an external microphone with the dictaphone, and then plugging the dictaphone into the computer to download the files and then to enhance them etc with my sound editing program.

But there’s no reason whatever why I can’t plug the mike into the computer and then record directly and edit “on the fly”, which will save me a couple of steps in the process.

And so I had the computer out of its cubby hole and plugged the mike in, and then had a play.

The result was awful. The sound level was abysmal, even on max input, and there was a persistent hissing on the recording. It needed so much “enhancing” to remove the hissing that it sounded as if i was speaking with my head in a bucket.

And so it’s back to the dictaphone while I think of Plan B. I hadn’t really realised just what good quality I was getting from the dictaphone with an external mike.

But all was not lost. It gave me an opportunity to reroute a few cables that needed rerouting, even if I did plug the HDMI cable into the incorrect socket and spent 10 minutes wandering why I wasn’t receiving a signal at the screen.

That was the signal for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And what a beautiful afternoon it was. We had glorious sunshine even if it was quite low down in the sky. There were plenty of people out, even walking along the beach today seeing as the tide was out.

And the wind had dropped dramatically from how it was earlier too. And that was very welcome news.

It wasn’t just around on the grassy field on the north side of the headland and on the beach that the crowds were massing.

Although they are the most popular places to be, they aren’t the only places. There were the hordes of people on the southern side by the big car park on the boulevard Vaufleury too.

They seemed to be admiring the harbour and the view across the Baie de Mont St Michel towards the Pointe de Carolles, as well as soaking up the best of the late afternoon sun.

With the tide being right out, there wasn’t much action down in the outer tidal harbour. But there were a few things of interest though.

The other day we talked about NAABSA harbours – the “Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground” situation where ships are allowed to settle on the silt in tiday harbours where there isn’t enough water to keep them afloat.

Over there at the ferry terminal, Joly France is there, and as there is no water underneath her, she’s in a NAABSA state and it doesn’t seem to concern her owners at all.

She wasn’t the only one either.

In front of her, likewise in a NAABSA state, is Chausiais, the new freighter that the owners of the Ile de Chausey have bought, presumably to provide a freight service over to the island, even if I can’t see what would be going over that couldn’t be carried in the hold of one of the ferries.

Still, we shall see in due course, won’t we? I sense a Cunning Plan.

That was my cue to come home where, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out, leaving my coffee undrunk.

And if ever there was a moment where I really did feel like hauling myself off to bed to crash out definitively, then that was it. But I fought off the feeling, even if I did feel like death.

As a result, my plan to attack the dialogue for my next radio project fell flat without very much progress having been made. I need to finish that one off as well as do another one by the end of the week, although I’m not sure quite when I’ll fit it all in.

But whatever happens, I mustn’t fall behind otherwise I’ll never get back in front again.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with the stuffing left over from late last week. And I don’t know why, but it was the best one that I’ve ever made.

If anyone is interested in my stuffing mix, it’s as follows –
Start by boiling up some quinoa or bulghour with a little water and some really spicy chili powder, and leave it to simmer.
Meanwhile, dice up some onion, garlic (have to have garlic of course!), a tomato, mushrooms, olives and whatever else you might have lying around that is suitable, a handful or two of salted peanuts, and then some herbs. I use oregano, basil and tarragon, as well as ground black pepper.
Then, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a couple more of tomato sauce (not ketchup, of course!)
Mix it all up together and then add the bulghour or quinoa, which should by now be ready, and mix that well in too. You need your stuffing to be very moist, but not runny.
Cut round the stalk of the pepper and scoop out the core, the seeds and the pith. Then stuff it with your stuffing mix.
Into the microwave at medium-full (that’s 640 watts on mine) for 7 minutes 30 seconds while the rice and veg are cooking.
The when the rice is cooked and you’re rinsing it out with boiling water, give the pepper 90 seconds on max (that’s 800 watts on mine)

If you try it, let me know how it turns out, and let me know if you have any suggestions to make it differently. There’s a “contact me” link down at the bottom right corner of the screen.

After that I went out for my evening walk in the freezing cold, because the temperature has dropped dramatically. I was the only one out there, which was no surprise.

But while I was out there, I checked and sure enough, Granville really is back in the harbour, tied up alongside Victor Hugo.

It looks like her a-roaming is over for a few days.

And so was mine. For tonight anyway, I headed for home. I managed to fit in my run, although I was dead by the time that I reached the ramp and only made four or five paces up it.

It’s really disappointing that I can’t seem to push on and run for longer. I remember when I went back running in the mid-90s, when after a few weeks I suddenly found my second wind and could run for miles. I can’t seem to break this barrier these days.

Mind you, I’m not sure what I’m expecting at my age. It’s not every OAP who goes out running late at night every night, especially one who is supposed to be on his death bed. I should be grateful for what I can do.

This evening I didn’t see Minette the old black cat but I saw her mum who was on the doorstep chatting to a couple of people. So I had a little chat, wished them the compliments of the season and came home.

Now I’ve written up my journal, I’m off to bed. 6.5 hours of sleep if I’m lucky. That’s a luxury these days so I need to make the most of it.

But not quite yet. I’ve been listening to No Smoke Without Fire by Wishbone Ash. It’s an album that I’ve owned for probably 30 years but I haven’t heard it for probably 29 years. And while it won’t ever be anything like as good as the first couple of albums, I’m astonished that I haven’t played it more often because some of it is really excellent.

And as that finished, onto the playlist came Fur by Jane Wiedlin. Not an album that you would normally associate with me but Janet Marsden played it to me late one night and there are a couple of tracks on it that are totally unexpected in their brilliance. They bring back a couple of memories of one particular night in Crewe, and how things could have been different had I been in a better place in my head back then.

Monday 2nd December 2019 – MY FITBIT …

… has told me some surprising things in the pas, but none more surprising than what it told be today.

Having coupled it up to the laptop while I went for my shower this morning, it told me that over the month of November I had performed 103% of my daily fitness routine – the first time ever that I have gone over the 100% for a month. I’d done almost 350,000 steps and I’d travelled an unbelievable 261 kilometres on foot.

Even more interestingly, I had run for a total of 1 hour and 27 minutes.

And if you think that it’s not all that much to crow about, remember that I’m slowly dying and that three and a half years ago I couldn’t even walk.

The hospital wants me to lie about in bed and take it easy to preserve my strength for the struggle that lies ahead, but there’s no chance whatever of that. In the words of Neil Young, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”.

And I’m going to go with a bang, hopefully with a nubile nymphet a quarter of my age. That’ll give everyone something to talk about, won’t it?

However, there wasn’t much to talk about last night. I was in bed rather later than I would have liked, and up and out of bed long before the third alarm.

As for the dictaphone, not a word. It seems that I didn’t go off anywhere during the night and that’s a disappointment. As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … there’s far more excitement going on during the night when I’m asleep than there ever is when I’m awake these days.

In fact, probably my only hope of ever grabbing hold of a nymphet a quarter of my age will be at some point during a nocturnal perambulation.

With nothing to transcribe from last night, after the medication I attacked the backlog of dictaphone notes. With an interruption for breakfast and another one for a shower and clean-up, by the time that it came to leave the apartment the backlog was reduced to a mere 25.

And it goes to prove my point about these nocturnal ramblings because I seem to have passed through the extremely turbulent seas full of whirlpools and turmoil and moved back into calmer waters where I can carry on doing what I do best, whatever than might be.

It’s Monday so I have my regular Monday morning meeting at the Centre Agora at 10:00.

Just for a change I was late getting away, which was a disappointment because when I realised that I had forgotten to bring the little Nikon 1 with me.

That’s the camera that I usually take with me when I’m walking out because it’s small and light, and easy to carry in my pocket. And if I don’t ask it to do too much, the results aren’t all that much less in quality than the big Nikon D500.

And how I wished that I had remembered to bring it because the camera on the telephone is total rubbish. But it’s the best that I had with me so it had to do.

Nevertheless I would have loved to have had a decent high-quality shot of this beautiful image of them preparing the Christmas tree at the Place Pierre Semard.

Health and Safety in the UK would have had a field day, seeing this kind of thing going on. As Isambard Kingdom Brunel once remarked late in his life during an enquiry into procedure at the beginning of the Railway Age, “what would be said of such a mode of proceeding today?”.

But here’s a more normal photo of them erecting the Christmas tree. It’s nothing like as exciting, is it?

So I carried on to the Centre Agora for our meeting. I had a couple of ideas that might have been useful but because they came from me and not from any of the organisers, they were discreetly brushed aside.

But not to worry. I’ll just keep to doing my own little job and let them get on with it. I hate empire-building but it seems that i’m stuck with it right now. At least they didn’t ask me to make the coffee.

After the meeting I walked all the way back home, calling in at LIDL for a few bits and pieces. Carrots were reduced to half-price and as I’m running a little low, I bought a kilo to freeze.

How, though, I don’t know because there’s no more room in the freezer. I really did make a mistake buying this one. It’s far too small for me.

On the way back I picked up my dejeunette (they are recognising me now in La Mie Caline) and bumped into someone who had been present at the meeting just now.

After lunch I started on Project 004. I need to have about four or five all organised pretty quickly as there seems to be no-one working over the Christmas period and if I want to have my stuff dealt with, it needs to be in by 15th December at the latest.

By the time that I knocked off, I’d done all of the music that I need. I just need to do the speech but I can’t do that yet as my mixer panel still hasn’t arrived and I don’t want to use the dictaphone again.

We had a pause as usual for my afternoon walk around the headland.

The wind had died down somewhat and with the sun being out it was quite a beautiful day. The fishing boat that was out there at the northern tip of the Ile de Chausey was having a good time

And so was Gribouille, the big ginger cat who came for a stoke.

But out there today the skies were totally clear and while the Brittany coast was in haze, the view over to Jersey was the clearest that I have ever seen it.

We had some good shots of the Brittany coast the other day while Jersey was shrouded in haze, but it was the other way round this afternoon.

We’ve never seen the eastern corner of the island looking like this.

That’s St Helier there, and that’s about 54 kilometres away from where I’m standing right now.

We’ve seen the town before, but never with this much clarity. While it’s a tribute to the quality of the camera and the lens, it also has a lot to do with the weather too.

Probably more so in fact.

So as you admire some more of the beautiful Jersey coastline to the west of St Helier, I carried on with my walk.

Surprisingly, given the really nice weather, I counted no more than 5 other people out there taking in the air around my circuit.

This was really a day for being out and about

While you look at the western corner of the island of Jersey, I went to have a look to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And the answer to that question isn’t “nothing” as you were probably expecting, but “nothing any different from the last few days”.

Just the usual suspects and no new additions.

And that reminds me. I haven’t seen a gravel boat for ages and ages. I wonder why.

It’s no surprise that there isn’t a gravel boat right now and I wouldn’t expect to see one because the tide is well on its way out just now.

All of the boats in the harbour are slowly setting down on the silt in the tidal harbour.

Except for the yellow and white on. That’s careening over quite alarmingly, although careening is a well-known technique in old ship-repairing. Ancient mariners in leaky ships would find a harbour like this where they could careen their boat to one side to repair the bottom of the boat.

And when the tide came back in and the boat would float up with the rising water they would turn the boat round so that when the tide went out next they would careen it over so that the other side was up and they could repair that.

There was no haze down at the bottom end of the Baie de Mont St Michel either. The hotels at the foot of the Mont St Michel were standing out quite clearly and that’s without any effort on my behalf or that of the camera and lens.

The Pointe de Carolles looks beautiful in this weather and the Cabanon Vauban that we visited a couple of times is perching proudly on the top.

Even the little town of Carolles-Plage and the beach is looking quite nice with its reflection in the damp sand

Back here I did a little (just a little) tidying up. The big suitcases for which I don’t have a place, I lifted up the mattress and the bed base and put them underneath the bed. I only use them once a year so they don’t need to be out in the way.

Another thing that I needed to do was to book my next trip to Leuven and Castle Anthrax. As you might expect, it’s on Friday 13th of December.

One of the things that I had been considering was to take myself off into Germany for a couple of days but there was nothing suitable. So I’ve booked my return journey for the Sunday.

And due to rail works, there’s no 08:13 again so I’m on the 08:43. And having to come home via Paris St Lazaire and Caen, I’ll be back 10 minutes early if all goes according to plan even with a wait of over an hour at Caen.

But it’s going to be an exciting trip back because I don’t know the way back across Paris from Gare du Nord to St Lazare and I don’t have much spare time if I miss my way.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, and it was quite delicious too. They’ve been selling some cheap spicy tomato sauce with garlic in Noz so I’ve bought a few jars of that and it adds a certain something to my stuffing.

Pretty cool outside tonight, so there wasn’t anyone about at all as I went for my eveing walk.

A great number of lights out in the English Channel though. Plenty of fishing boats were out there tonight, like this one slowly chugging back to harbour.

I remember saying a few days ago that I don’t think that I’ve ever seen as much fishing activity this close to shore in previous years.

We’ve seen plenty of activity in the bay near Bréhal-Plage just recently too and that’s something that I haven’t noticed previously.

There’s another fishing boat out there tonight having a go at trying to haul in a decent catch.

As for me, I continued my walk and as usual broke into a run on my little track. And I made it all the way to the ramp and half-way up there without too much effort.

So back here and I’m off to bed. 146% and 11.7kms today. Start the month as I mean to go on!

Monday 25th November 2019 – I MISSED …

… my evening walk this evening.

There I was, sitting at the dining table (I’m all posh these days) round about 20:00 eating my rice pudding when the phone went.

Fetching it back again, I discovered that Rosemary was on the end of the line and she wanted to chat.

And chat we did. I had a lot of news to tell her, all about my weekend and people whom we both knew, and she had a lot of news to tell me. Really good, maybe even stunning news too, but there’s this old medieval saying about “never be sure of the bird on your plate until you have your fork stuck in it” so I’ll wait for a few weeks and see how things develop before I say anything.

And while I was chatting on the phone to Rosemary, I was also having an internet discussion with TOTGA. Yes, two conversations, eating a bowl of rice pudding, ohh yes, I can do multi-tasking!

By the time that Rosemary and I hung up it was well after 22:00. I did say that we had a lot to talk about!

And indeed, there was a lot to say about today. It wasn’t a late night particularly and so being up and about before the last alarm wasn’t too much of a problem.

No nocturnal ramble either which makes a change. So nothing much to do. While I was waiting for the medication to work I attacked some of the outstanding dictaphone notes.

In fact I’ve been whittling away at those throughout the day and now there are just 83 left. They won’t be finished for the end of the month though, which was my target. That’s a disappointment but I’ve had so much going on just recently.

After breakfast I had a shower and some clean clothes and then headed out up town in the rain.

There had been a report in the local newspaper that the town was taking a electric bus on trial to see how it would function on the bus routes here, bearing in mind how hilly the place is.

And sure enough, as I was up the avenue LeClerc here was the new electric bus, being overtaken by one of the old diesels.

Excuse the blurred photo but it was a fleeting glimpse in between two passing vehicles and I didn’t have time to focus properly.

At the Centre Agora we had our weekly meeting. And I do have to say that I have never met so many people with a capacity for fitting the least amount of thought into the greatest amount of words.

These are the kind of meetings that should be held outside – standing up – in the rain. They would be over in seconds with just as much decided.

It also seems that the people are very jealous of their “babies” and guard their empires carefully. We were discussing the port and the subject of Thora, Normandy Trader and Chausiais came up.

As I know the crew of the two British ships, I suggested that I could interview the skippers and see how the new rules and regulations affecting the commerce of the port post-Brexit is going to affect them.

“Ohhh” piped up one of the guys. “I’ve been thinking about doing something about the port and the maritime commerce, but I’m not sure how to go about it”.

So I sat on the edge of my chair waiting for him to ask for suggestions (of which I have more than a few, as regular readers of this rubbish might realise) but instead he moved on to another topic. It’s his baby, and he won’t let anyone else share it with him.

Shame as it is to say it, I can see this project not lasting all that long with this kind of ego that seems to preclude teamwork and co-operation.

And I was told that the transmitting quality of my broadcasts needs to be improved, and I was given some technical guidelines in this respect.

Yes, after I’ve recorded four of them! Obviously no possibility of giving me the technical guidelines 4 or 5 weeks ago, before I recorded any at all, is there?

So everything that I’ve spent the last few weeks downloading at 96kbs – all about 70 hours of it – now needs to be re-recorded at 192 kbs! That was a waste of my time and effort, wasn’t it?

One thing that always gets my goat is a lack of professionalism.

Remember the other day when I was coming back from the Centre Agora and I saw what looked like an old well in the middle of the street in the Allee des Sycomores?

On my way back I went for a butchers to see what it was. And I was right. It is a well.

Not an old well though. Although it might be old, it’s still in use as you can see and a lady in a house nearby chatted to me about it for a while.

And that’s not all the excitement either.

Walking down the main street – the rue des Ecoles – I happened to notice another similar object in someone else’s garden.

Just think! Ther emight be a third one somewhere else in the vicinity. Well, well, well!

On the way back home I called in at LIDL. There wasn’t much that I needed but seeing as I was there I went in regardless. A couple of bananas, some soya milk and sparkling water.

And I stopped at the boulangerie for another dejeunette – that last one in the shop.

I’d also been stopped by a man in one of these microcar-based van things. He wanted to know where a certain street was, but how would I know that?

After lunch I made a start on the web page for the weekend’s events. And it was only meant to be a brief thing with photographs but, like Topsy, it “just growed” and at one point I found myself in mid-rant.

I really do need to calm myself down sometimes.

This afternoon I went for my usual walk around the headland again in the wind and the rain.

And it seems that I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the weather either. There was a fishing boat coming back from the English Channel and also a yacht out there have an enormous amount of fun.

And quite right too.

There was something else going on out there too.

Whatever it was, it looked important because someone had had his chopper out again. The Air-Sea rescue one in fact and judging by the way that it was flying – quite slowly about 50 feet above the water, it was looking for something.

Maybe there will be something in the news about it tomorrow.

My walk took me around past the chantier navale so as usual I had a peek down there to see who was about.

Three of our boats from the other day – Spirit of Conrad, Aztec Lady and Omerta – are still in there up on blocks, as is the fishing boat over on the far side.

And Omerta looks as if she’s receiving some serious attention out there too. They seem to be stripping off all of the paint, presumably to give her a respray.

All of that is all very well, but there was no sign of the old Pecheur de Lys who was with them the other day.

She wasn’t back in the water either so I had a good look around, and there she is up on blocks right round at the back of the sheds.

Her stay in the water didn’t last all that long and it looks as if she might be out for good. And that’s a shame.

While I was standing there looking for Pecheur de Lys, I was interrupted in my reverie by a diesel engine coming from around the headland.

And a matter of just a couple of seconds later, the fishing boat that we had seen earlier out in the English Channel came a-sailing … “a-dieseling” – ed … into view.

She must have made some really good time to arrive here so qickly. Perhaps someone in the port has put the kettle on.

It was all go in the harbour too with the tide being in.

Plenty of fishing boats unloading, and some must already have unloaded their catch because this one here has turned round and is on its way back out to sea.

And Joly France, one of the ferries for the Ile De Chausey, must have been out on a crossing today because she’s tied up at the passenger terminal rather than in the inner harbour

“Plenty of fishing boats unloading” I said. And “it was all go in the harbour today”.

As you can see, I wasn’t wrong either. Here’s one of the fishing boats unloading its catch. And I don’t think that I have ever seen so many crates of mussels or whatever they are piled up on the quayside.

There’s enough on that trailer at the back of the tractor to keep anyone going for several days, I reckon.

Back in the apartment I carried on with what I was doing until tea time. And seeing as there was some stuffing left I had another stuffed pepper. And then my rice pudding as I mentioned earlier.

But now it’s about 01:30 and I’m off to bed. But not for long. Up at 06:00 and I have the tax Office to visit tomorrow.

That will probably be very taxing.

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

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

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.

Sunday 13th October 2019 – I SAID YESTERDAY …

… that I was hoping to have a really good sleep last night. And to be honest, I said it without too much conviction.

So consequently, having closed my eyes at some time rather like 22:45 or thereabouts last night, no-one was more surprised than me to notice that when I reopened them, it was … errr … 09:45.

Out like a light, totally painless, didn’t feel a thing.

Even more surprisingly, all of my old good humour, positive thought and optimism had reappeared too. That led me to the conclusion that the deep depression in which I have found myself over the last … I dunno … seven or eight weeks and which affected my sea voyage around the High Arctic so much was caused by nothing more than good old plain and simple fatigue and exhaustion.

That’s certainly borne out by the facts, where in the latter stages of that journey I was existing on about three hours of sleep each night and being kept running by nothing more than adrenalin.

So this morning, with it being a Sunday, everyone else was having a lie-in too and no-one surfaced much before 11:00. The breakfast brunch ended up being much later than it usually is but it was delicious all the same.

After lunch I took Zoe down to her house in Woodstock. And by the time we got … “ohhh not again!” – ed. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I used to hire a Dodge Caravan I had a mattress that I used for sleeping. Almost new, it didn’t have much use and so when I emptied my storage locker I brought it back and gave it to Zoe for when she has visitors round at her house.

We went back up to Bob and Ellen’s afterwards to drop her off for a Thanksgiving Dinner. On the way we called at the tyre depot and a mammoth search around the premises turned up my missing notebook for which I shall be eternally grateful.

Ellen made me a coffee and we had a little chat, and then I wished them all goodbye. They wished me a pleasant voyage back to Europe, which was nice of them.

When I returned, everyone was out tidying up the yard. I was put on fire duty, in charge of the rubbish burning. We ended up with fire everywhere except where it was supposed to be, but armed with a big metal snow shovel I was able to deal with the matter before the house burned down.

I ended up smelling like a fire myself, so a shower and change of clothes was called for.

Some more stuff disappeared out of Strider too – into the garage downstairs.

Thanksgiving dinner here tonight. Rachel was cooking lamb for everyone so I made stuffed peppers for our little visitor and me. They were quite delicious. As a special treat I had saved two of the vegan muffins and the two of us ate them to celebrate our own Thanksgiving.

Plenty of carrots left over so the plan for tomorrow is to make a carrot soup using coconut milk, ginger and bay leaves. Meanwhile, I put the lamb bones in some water with some sage, thyme, rosemary and olive oil and I’m boiling them down to make some lamb stock. Not for me, I hasten to add, but for the basis of the weekly work soup for the carnivores.

But it did remind me of the story about when the BBC closed down the children’s programmes on radio and went to sell off all of the assets
“How much did we get for Larry the Lamb?” asked the BBC’s accountant.
“Three and six a pound” was the reply.

Rachel and I are chatting right now as I’m typing, and I’ll be off to bed in a short while. Desperate for another long sleep tonight (without the alarms because it’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow) but who knows?

And I need it too. Tomorrow is going to be a very long and painful night and I won’t be having much sleep at all.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: stuffed peppers

Monday 23rd March 2020 – ANOTHER DAY …

Monday 16th March 2020 – I WAS STROKING …

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Tuesday 25th February 2020 – THE WIND OUTSIDE …

Tuesday 18th February 2020 – I CAN NOW ADD …

Monday 3rd February 2020 – SHE’S BACK!

Wednesday 15th January 2020 – IT’S REALLY NICE …

Monday 30th December 2019 – I BET …

Monday 2nd December 2019 – MY FITBIT …

Monday 25th November 2019 – I MISSED …

Thursday 21st November 2019 – I WAS RIGHT …

Monday 11th November 2019 – WE ALMOST HAD …

Monday 4th November 2019 – I’M BACK …

Monday 28th October 2019 – FOR PUDDING TONIGHT …

Sunday 13th October 2019 – I SAID YESTERDAY …

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