Friday 25th September 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you were wondering – there has been a change in the weather.

It’s deteriorated.

You might not thnk so from looking at the photos but in fact these photos are taken at about the same time as yesterday, which means that the tide was half an hour or so lower than yesterday.

The wind was totally wicked, and just for the record, there was a gust of wind recorded during the night at 121 Km/H. It’s a good job that they dismantled the beach changing cabins earlier in the week.

It must have been the gust of wind that blew me out of bed this morning because by the time that the third alarm went off, I was already out of bed

And despite the fact that there was much less time in bed last night, I seem to have travelled quite far during the night.

We started off filming a western in the POWDER RIVER COUNTRY last night. There was a scene in it whereby the hero had to do something – travel a couple of hundred yards and do something on his horse and then get back to the main body of his troop and at the same time a group of native Americans was attacking him. There was this woman out in front. There were quite a few pages of plot line about this with speech and stage directions rather about how this was to be performed. But when we actually got round to performing it, there wasn’t really enough time to do these stage directions about how to handle the approach of these native Americans so in the end he did the basis of what he had to do and fled back to the main body. The natives led by this woman pursued him and was captured. It ended up being quite a different plot than the one that they were trying to film in the first place.

And I’m sure that there was much more than this, but I can’t remember it.

Later on last night I was at the football. TNS were playing and we must have arrived late because when I arrived, to my surprise they were already one goal down. A couple of minutes later someone passed the ball back to the keeper but it was one of these high balls that was bouncing around and then keeper had to trap it. But as the ball bounced to the ground is swerved with the spin and went into the back of the net (this brings back an unhappy memory of a match in which I played in goal 50 years ago) and TNS were 2-0 down. People couldn’t believe this so they had a look and it wasn’t the usual goalkeeper but some young lad they had in goal. As if TNS would ever concede two goals with Paul Harrison in goal.
Someone else counted the players and TNS only had 10 on the field so we began to wonder what on earth was going on here.

Some time later I’d been at school or college or somewhere. We were in a big room taking notes on something. It was something like a free study period. I was doing whatever it was that I was doing and there was a load of girls busy looking at maps. They kept on picking up these maps looking at them. In the end it was time that the lesson was over so they put these maps away. We all had to move off. I moved off behind a girl of mixed race with curly hair. There was some dry toast lying around so I picked up three or four slices to take with me to eat on the way. A few days later there was another free study period taking place outside. Everyone was sitting there around these little tables in this square surrounded by these old ruined houses. I found a vacant seat, sat down and started to look through my papers. I was feeling hungry so I was thinking of going to see if there was any food again. The guy sitting at our table facing me who had chosen his seat first – I mentioned to him that I was going to go. What I had also seen were some pictures of people jogging around in another square nearby. I thought that it was ages since I’d been jogging so I thought that I’d go and do some jogging and then get some food and then come back. This guy said to me “is your chair comfortable?” I replied “yes”. He said “you don’t mind if I sit in it for 10 minutes while you aren’t here. It’s a bit hot where I’m sitting”. I didn’t say much about that. I stood up and took my camera off the table. I noticed that there was a really nice cool breeze so we moved the table a little so that it would be in the centre of all this breeze

Now that the arrears have been dealt with, instead I carried on with some other work, of which there is more than enough.

Much of the morning was spent alternating between two tasks. Firstly, the photos from the trip on the Spirit of Conrad and also some rearranging of the kitchen. I alternated between one and the other as I became bored.

A pile of the photos bit the dust and I’m beginning to sense that I’m reaching the end of this batch (still plenty more batches to do though) of photos and all of the storage jars that I bought are now out of the bedroom and stacked on the shelves.

Some of them even have things in, and if that isn’t a sign of progress, I don’t know what is.

Even more exciting, a couple of weeks ago the metal retaining clip on an old one broke. And when I was sorting through the jars back in the Auvergne, I had a jar with a broken lid. So the idea was to fit the lid off the one with a broken clip onto the jar with the broken lid.

And if that sounds straightforward, it might be if I had a set or two of mole grips, because trying to keep two very strong spring metal clips in tension at the same time with your bare hands as you wrestle the one over the other is not easy.

At one point one of the clips soared off down the whole length of the apartment and it took me 20 minutes to find it. But it’s all done and assembled now, and I wonder what my next trick will be.

After lunch, I rekindled another old project of mine. Rewriting the web pages from the early days. I’m somewhere round by the Bay of Fundy in Canada at New Year’s Eve 2001/2002 and that’s making me so nostalgic you couldn’t imagine (or maybe you can). And I incorporated something from the course that I did a couple of weeks ago too.

While I was doing that I was continuing with the tidying up and also recording LPs with the USB turntable. Another 4 of those have gone the Way of the West.

But I’ve been giving more thought to the issue about the recording of cassettes. Knowing that my ZOOM H1 will record off the hi-fi via a direct line from the headphone socket, I wonder if it will record from the cassette unit from the old hi-fi stack via the RCA plugs and a suitable adapter.

There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

The walk outside this afternoon was horrendous. So much so that I elected not to hang around too long. Particularly after my hat took off in a gust of wind and I had to run after it.

The waves were being whipped into a frenzy by the storm that was raging flat-out right now. Trying to walk up the path towards the lighthouse was incredibly difficult in the teeth of this howling gale.

Round the other side of the headland at least I had the wind behind me. And you saw for yourselves earlier what it was doing to the waves and the sea wall for the tidal harbour.

You can tell how bad it was out there too by the fact that I didn’t hang around to take a photo of the pathetic parking at the College Malraux.

After the guitar practice was tea. But before I mention that, I found myself spending my half-hour bass session working out the bass line to one particular song.

And writing it down too. Not in proper musical notation – that’s a bit too far – but I’m amazed that I can still remember something from that music course that I did earlier this year too.

Tea was a curry out of the fridge, followed by rice pudding. And then I took my life into my hands by going outside.

Here’s a photo that you don’t see too often. I notice that they’ve managed to find a shilling at the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou because at long last they’ve illuminated the church spire again.

The Porte St Jean is looking quite nice too in the dark and lit up by the floodlights. I have to say that this is a really nice area to live despite the wind.

No-one else about at all, which was hardly a surprise so I didn’t have much company tonight.

The wind on the footpath underneath the walls was swirling around something wicked and running was extremely difficult. I made it to my mark though, which much effort and on looking back behind me I could see one of the buttresses illuminated by the street lights from the street above.

Despite the headwinds, I managed my two other runs all the way back here – and not without some difficulty. Not simply because of the winds per se but also because of the overturned street furniture, panes of glass (some second-home owner is going to be in for a shock when he returns) and the like littering the place.

Still, what do you expect with winds gusting well over 100 Km/H?

It’s shopping tomorrow so I imagine that not only will we have the gale-force winds but also a driving rainstorm and plagues of locusts too.

We’re definitely heading for winter now.

Thursday 24th September 2020 – NO PRIZES …

… for guessing what the weather is doing today.

Summer has well and truly gone and we are now full in the grip of autumn. I mentioned yesterday about the winds and perhaps I ought to have added – but regular readers of this rubbish will recall – that not only do we have the highest tides in Europe, we have some of the highest winds too.

Just one look at the dark and rolling sea (whatever happened to the emerald-blue sea that we have been having) and the waves doing their best to clear the sea wall a good hour or two before high tide tells you everything that you need to know.

What else that you need to know – I mean – you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested – is that I beat the third alarm clock out of bed.

After I’d sorted myself out I had a listen to the dictaphone and I was surprised that given the short time that I’d had in bed last night, I’d managed to go so far.

So while you admire a few more photos of the storm that we were having this afternoon, I can tell you all about my various journeys.

There was something going on about babies last night. She was feeding them Spam. The two smallest ones had 3.6mm thickness of Spam and the other one had 4mm – it was slightly older. I thought 11.6mm of Spam (so much for my maths when I’m asleep) – that’s less than half an inch between three. They’ll just have their particular size of helping and they are going to be hungry immediately again. Even the woman with me too raised an eyebrow when she heard me talking about the measurements.

Mind you, that could be because she probably didn’t think all that much of my maths either

Later on there was a group of us kids larking around last night and and one of them was called Heather or Hilary, something like that. We’d been having an exchange of banter or something then she had to go home for her tea. We all finished talking and so on. Then the subject came up about this girl and I said “I suppose we’ll be seeing her at school tomorrow” to which someone replied “Eric, you’re certainly going to see Heather (or Hilary) tomorrow”. I said “what do you mean?”. He replied “well you’ve arranged a date with her, something like that”. “Have I really? That surprised me”. “Well the way that she was talking when she left she seemed to be of the opinion that that was the case”. So we carried on chatting for a while and the question came round about this girl. I said “I’ll have to find out her school number”. I knew that it was a 4-figure one that ended something like “33” so I asked someone to find it. They found a number that was 5 figures and totally different but in the end someone went and asked this person to have another look and they came up with a number something like 4933. I thought “that must be it so I’ll make a note of that”. As we were chatting a policeman came up. He asked “did you know that there was a cucumber stuck in the lock of your gate?” “What they heck is happening there?”. Someone said that they has seen this Hilary/Heather girl when she went home she took a cucumber with her so she’s probably stuck it in the lock of the gate to make sure that we get it back. The copper said “it doesn’t want to stay there. You want to get it moved”.

There was another incident later on with a girl with a similar name, a very quiet, shy girl also called Heather or Hilary – I dunno why I got stuck on that name last night. She and her mother and a few people had been around to see us and I’d been chatting to the girl. She was very quiet, very shy but very nice. I was thinking that I might go round to her house to see if she wants to come out for a walk or something. But then we had visitors round and I couldn’t. It got to being rather late, about 20:30. So I found her phone number – my mother knew it so I rang her up. I knew that it was in West Street somewhere. I mumbled her name to see if it was her and it was. I basically said that I was going to come round and invite her for a walk but as we had people round I couldn’t so does she fancy coming round one evening later in the week? She said “yes” which cheered me up. I suggested the following day but she had something on, and the day after that she had something on and it wasn’t convenient and so on. But she seemed keen enough but it didn’t seem to fit for the dates. In the end her mother took the telephone and said “why don’t you come round to our shop? We have a second-hand shop in West Street”. That rang a bell with me because we’d been talking about shop valuations and how they had had a good valuation on their house and how they were going to borrow some money to deal with it. Although the number was something like 475 West Street it was right up at the Hightown end which of course the numbers were the other way round – the lower numbers are at the Hightown end. She said “why don’t you come round here during the day and have a talk to her?”. That seemed to be a much more logical way of going about it if she was keen and her mother was keen enough that I could take her for a walk or something.

So I’ve no idea what was going on last night. Me in my mid-teens (we didn’t move to Crewe until just before my 16th birthday although that’s not significant) chasing after young girls called Heather or Hilary.

And my mother being helpful too – that’s something of a change of lifestyle. I’m surprised that I wasn’t overcome with shock. Normally, if there were any works going on anywhere, all my family usually used to go around and shove spanners in them as a matter of course.

But I definitely seem to be trying to recapture my lost youth right now. And I wish I knew who this poor girl was.

There was still plenty of time to look at the arrears and SHOCK! HORROR! they are all done and out of the way. It serves me right for taking a steam-driven laptop with me when I went away instead of one that works properly.

After a shower and a clean-up I went out to the shops.

More activity taking place by the Porte St Jean. One of the workmen fixing the kerb at the edge of the pavement. Probably someone has dislodged it while manoeuvring in a car.

My shopping in LIDL ended up being one of the most expensive that I’ve had. Apart from all of the fresh fruit, it was a sale of motorcycling gear and they had motorcyclists’ thermal winter underwear on sale.

Despite everything, I still have high hopes of going back to the High Arctic one of these days and the thermal underwear that I bought in Canada didn’t seem to do the job as well as I liked. This stuff should be better – at least I hope so.

Before I went, I had half-an-hour to spare (the new dynamic me seems to be still chugging along right now) so I made two bread mixes – a large one with bread flour and cereal and sunflower seeds and a small one with banana, ground almonds, raisins and a banana.

While I was out at the shops I’d left them proofing and when I came back, I kneaded them and left them for the second proof.

To warm up the oven, I baked a rice pudding while the bread was on its second proof.

Once the pudding was cooked and the bread had risen sufficiently I put them both in the oven.

While the loaves were cooking, I diced some ginger very finely and brought it to the boil with a small amount of water and left it to simmer.

There were three kiwis and two lemons that needed eating so I peeled them, whizzed them to a purée in the whizzer and then added them to the ginger and water and left it all to simmer for an hour.

At the end of that time (which I’d spent washing up) I took the giner, lemon and kiwi mix off the stove, added two tablespoons of honey and some turmeric, and then whizzed it all into a nice cordial and put it into a nice clean bottle.

By now the bread was cooked so I took it out of the oven. But a minor disaster in that the bread had stuck to the bottom of the mould so it came away in two halves.

Greased or not, this porcelain dish thing that I used isn’t up to the job and I’m going to have to think again

After lunch I attacked the photos from my trip on the Spirit of Conrad and I made good progress. We’re now anchored in the roads at the Ile de Chausey.

And while I was at it, I made a startling discovery. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the small ship that we’ve seen a few times. It looks like a French government ship except that while the markings are the same, this has white where you would expect to see grey.

But looking at my photos of the Ile de Chausey I found that it was in port and under a microscope I could read her name. She’s called Les Epiettes and she is actually a French Government ship – owned by the Ponts et Chaussées – The Roads and Bridges Department

This afternoon I’d hardly set foot out of the door on my afternoon run before I was buzzed yet again by a low-flying aircraft.

Not the red microlight this time – since I commented last week about it, I haven’t seen it since, which is what you’d expect. Today, it was the turn of the Air-Sea Rescue helicopter to get me. Someone there has decided to get his chopper out this afternoon.

And being able to see the serial number today (it was so close that I could even see the pilot’s pimples) which is F-ZBPF, I can tell you that she’s an Airbus Eurocopter EC-145 built in 2003, build number 9012, and owned by the French Securite Civile – although at one time she was registered in Germany.

There were just me and three or four other people out there this afternoon. It really was a wicked wind.

Strangely though, the sky was a lot clearer than I expected it to be even if it was very cloudy too. There was a really good view all the way down the Brittany coast and we could clearly see that those objects that I have thought once or twice might be ships going into St Malo are in fact islands.

The white caps on the waves are quite impressive too, so far out in the bay. We really were taking “a hell of a beating”, just like the England football team did in Norway in 1981.

Round at the chantier navale we’ve had yet more movement

Our Ten Green Bottles have reduced themselves yet again as another one seems to have fallen into the sea We are now down to just four in there today, down from five yesterday and a far cry from the heady days of a week or two ago when there were as many as eight up on blocks.

You’ve seen the storm and the waves so I won’t trouble you any more with any of that. Instead I came on back to the apartment.

Another 4 LPs have been recorded this afternoon, reducing the pile of those. And then there was the hour on the guitars too.

Tea tonight was something different. I’d been giving some thought to the idea of meals when I’m away at Castle Anthrax in 2 weeks time. For some reason, beans and chips came into my head. it ended up being such an overwhelming feeling that tonight I cut up a couple of potatoes into chip-like objects and put them in my microwave griller with some olive oil.

While I was at it, I cooked some beans and a burger and that was that. The chips were, well, different but as a substitute for the real thing they really did go down a treat.

Rice pudding for afters of course.

Tonight’s walk was something of a disappointment.

Once more I was the only person out there which was no surprise given the howling gale. Running along the footpath under the walls was no real problem but it was impossible on the Square Maurice Marland. A howling gale hitting me full-on in the face stopped me dead (well, almost) in my tracks halfway across.

Having taken a photo of the boats in the tidal harbour, I could just about manage to run all the way home but opening the door was something else. It’s heavy and the wind was doing its best to fight me off.

And now with the notes written up, I’m off to bed. I’ve been feeling much better this last couple of days and I haven’t even crashed out. but I’m not going to push my luck. I’m going to have an early night.

Tomorrow I have no plans so there will be another pile of photos and some more tidying up, that I didn’t do today.

And the place needs it too. i’ve been letting things slide just recently.

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 – NOW HERE’S A THING .

For much of the morning, ever since I awoke, I had a song – the title track from the album ZOOROPA – going round and round in my head.

When I’d finished doing what I had to do I switched on the music here. There are somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 tracks on my computer and the playlist is set to “automatic random”. And the first track that came up on the playlist was, of course, the title track from the album ZOOROPA.

That was uncanny – if not eerie.

Doing what I had to do didn’t take all that long this morning because there wasn’t all that much to do. When I listened to the dictaphone, I discovered that it was rather like my bank account right now – nothing in it.

That means that I can’t have gone anywhere last night – something that surprised me completely, and for two reasons.

I had an early night last night
I treated myself to a lie-in this morning – to wit – I didn’t leave my stinking pit until about 08:30

You would have thought that with an early night like that I would have gone off for miles.

With nothing to download, I did take full advantage and transcribed another pile of the arrears. Now there’s just a handful left and hopefully I can deal with them tomorrow.

“Hopefully” is the correct word too because I’m going to be busy. I have to make some bread quite early on and leave it to proof while I’m out at the shops. Then, of course, I have to come back and bake it.

Something else that I did this morning was to attack a pile of the photos from my trip up the Brittany coast in Spirit of Conrad. We’re now just pulling into the harbour at St Cast le Guildo where we spent out third night on board

After lunch I set about doing some tidying up in the bedroom. Much of the time was spent sorting through a large pile of post that I’d brought back from the Auvergne.

Mixed up in there was all kinds of stuff that I’d wished that I’d found two years ago and which would have saved me a lot of effort.

But at least you can walk around the bedroom without walking on anything and you don’t have to move anything to go anywhere else. It’ll be even better tomorrow after I’ve had another go at it and put some more stuff away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other evening we saw another heavy machine parked up in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame and I mentioned that I would look out for where it’s working.

Here at the side of the church there’s another roofing job going on. They have ripped off the slates and the old laths and are currently fitting new laths.

And helping them in the task is the big machine that we saw the other evening. So now we know.

Mind you, I don’t envy the men up there on that scaffolding. It’s freezing cold this afternoon, quite a dramatic drop over the last couple of days and there’s quite a gale blowing. Definitely not the weather to be up there.

And so it’s hardly surprising that there was no-one about having an afternoon walk.

It had it all to myself – to such an extent that seeing as the footpath under the walls was in the shelter out of the wind I ran all the way down the path.

But this is what I call courage. As I said, the weather has turned and it’s just like winter outside this afternoon. But these brave souls have brought their fold-up chairs and are sitting there on the beach evidently enjoying the weather.

And so are the seagulls too by the looks of things. They are evidently waiting for exciting things to happen but I think that they might well be in for a long wait.

No-one in the Square Maurice Marland either so I had a good run all the way across there too.

But there was plenty of activity in the port this afternoon. I noticed that the big crane was in operation so i wondered if one of the Channel island freighters, Thora or Normandy Trader, was in port.

But it was nothing to do with them at all. Two of the town’s trawlers, Coelacanthe and her little sister Tiberiade were moored up in the unloading bay this afternoon and the crane was busy relieving them of their trawl nets.

Whether they are to be repaired (because we’ve seen plenty of sailors sewing up trawl nets in the harbour) or to be replaced remains to be seen.

But it looks as if Normandy Trader will be in port some time soon. I’ve heard that the company that owns her has bought a lorry to do its own transporting, and the the one that I saw in a photo looks pretty much like that one down there.

There’s still more excitement down there as well.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing throughout the summer the Big Wheel in the car park down in the Place Godal. But there it is – gone! A sure sign that the summer season is finished.

My walk around the walls continued and as there was still no-one about I ran the final few hundred metres back home.

After I came back I recorded another album with the USB turntable. But I must remember not to go banging about while I do it. I’d completely forgotten about the effect that knocking the turntable has on the LP that’s playing, and I had to re-record one of the sides to eliminate the jumping about.

Thinking about it (which I do quite often these days) it’s been 20 years or so since I’ve played an LP. I didn’t have it set up in Expo, I’m sure of that.

After the guitar, I had tea. Taco rolls and rice, using the left-over stuffing with some kidney beans in it. And the rest of my apple crumble with some vegan chocolate ice cream. While I’m baking the bread tomorrow I’ll make a rice pudding too.

I can also cook a sheep’s head, and if I leave the eyes in it, that’ll see me through the week.

Outside tonight, I didn’t hang around. If I thought that the wind was bad outside this afternoon, it was totally wicked this evening.

The people on board Joly France, the ferry that goes out to the Ile de Chausey who were returning from the island will have known all about the crossing, that’s for sure. They were being tossed around like corks.

And that reminds me of the time that I was on board a cross-Channel ferry with Percy Penguin once, bringing back a coach from France. This was 1992 and there was a hurricane in the Channel and the crossing took 19 hours as we couldn’t get into port.

One guy was leaning over the rails “feeding the fishes” quite dramatically.
“The trouble with you” I said “is that you have a weak stomach!”
“Weak stomach rubbish!” he retorted. “I’m throwing it as far as everyone else!”

Despite everything, I’ve managed three runs this evening too, so what with 6 altogether today I’m feeling quite impressed with myself.

But tomorrow should be a better day. Cooking the rice pudding, baking the bread, making some more cordial and going shopping too. I suppose that I ought to have a look at making this kefir and kombucha too, seeing as I have had the book for two years, the container for 12 months and the powder for 6 months

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what happened today but I’ve felt better and accomplished more today than I have done for quite some considerable time.

And it wasn’t the coffee at midday that fired me up either because I was well on my way long before then.

In fact, I was once more up and – well, not exactly about but up nevertheless – before the third alarm.

Last night I had my cars dotted around in 3 or 4 lock-ups or buildings in this old factory place. I was waiting there because we were all about to go off with Adventure Canada again. People suddenly started leaving, swarming off to the reception area so I followed them. i was chatting to a load of people about the Arctic, saying how much I liked it, listing all the times that I’d been. People were really impressed that I’d been so often. When I got towards the meeting point I could see Jerry there. I asked “what number am I, Jerry? I don’t know and I can’t find a list and I can’t think”. He had a look and replied “Eric, you’re n°71 – you have a long time to wait yet”. I went back to my unit and was sorting through some wheels. There was one that matched THE A60 VAN THAT I HAD YEARS AGO so I went to put that back in the back of the vehicle. There I was thinking that I was short of wellingtons but there were about 5 pairs and various other pairs of shoes, loads of other stuff like that in the back of the van. It was all looking pretty good in there with all the stuff. Then the thought occurred to me that when I’m called I’m going to have to take a Ford Anglia with me – a 100E model but I would never ever get it through the personnel door. It would be absolutely impossible to get it out through the vehicle door because there was so much stuff in the way. How was I going to do that? Would I have to get the vehicle out sideways on its side and slide it through the personnel door? Would it fit? I was busy thinking about all of this and I awoke in a fever.
There was another voyage last night too, this one involving an old sailing ship, something like Marité. I knew that there would be some kids on it but that’s pretty much everything that I can remember now. I can’t remember anything else.

And having done that, I actually excelled myself by dealing with another batch of the arrears and we are now down to single figures.

Having dealt with that I did a little (only a little) tidying up and then had a good look over my Welsh notes ready for my lesson.

There were just three of us at class today so it was pretty intense and fast-paced. And to my surprise, not only did I manage to keep up with it, I found that I could remember much more than I thought that I did.

This afternoon I cracked on with the radio programme and that’s actually finished now. I missed out on one of my guitar sessions but I would rather finish the programme and worry about the guitar rather than the other way round.

There was the usual break mid-afternoon for my walk around the headland.

There were quite a few people out there enjoying the walk, and the brats were there orienteering too. There’s also a big change in the chantier navale too. The Ten Green Bottles that were hanging on the wall in there have now reduced themselves to Five.

But strangely, while that was the situation in there, there was nothing much else going on involving boats. The fog of yesterday had lifted somewhat, so at least I could see that there was nothing out there at all.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a while ago I posted a photo of a strange van that has been transformed into a mobile home, with an advert on the side seeking a (female) companion to accompany the owner on his travels.

The van is now back and the adverts (slightly differently-worded than before) are still on the side and the rear door. Here’s clearly not had much luck in his quest.

Back here I finished off the radio programme and then had half an hour on the guitar before tea.

Tonight I made falafel with steamed vegetables and vegan cheese sauce followed by some more of the apple crumble. That’s almost all gone now. Tomorrow will see it off and as I’ll be baking more bread on Thursday I’ll make a rice pudding for a couple of days.

This evening I went out for a walk and my usual runs, and ran slap bang into a young-adult orienteering competition, followed by a group of people having a late-night conducted tour of the walls.

All of this rather cramped my style and while I managed my three runs, the photos that I took didn’t come out well enough. The ones that I wanted to take, I couldn’t as there were too many people in the shot.

It’s rather early now and I’ve already finished what I wanted to do. i’ve not had a day like this for quite a while. I know that there will be a downside to all of this but I hope that it won’t be for a while.

There’s a lot of catching up that I need to do.

Monday 21st September 2020 – I DUNNO …

… what happened today but this was one of the best days that I’ve has for some considerable time. And that has surprised me as much as it’s probably surprised you.

It started off with me being out of bed before the third alarm went off and it’s been a while since that has happened.

Plenty of time though to go off on a few travels. I was with a group of policewomen last night and they were doing a house-to-house visit down this road enquiring about bicycles for some reason, asking if the bicycles present belonged to the people there. They worked their way down this road and came to the final house, a fine stone 3-storey house built of granite blocks, a bit run-down, unkempt and so on. She said “right, this is the house here”. She went up and knocked on the door and spoke to someone – another guy – about it. he was in fact Derek Nimmo. I went for a wander round to look at the side of this house while she was talking. When I came back, my partner had transformed into Marianne, she and someone else arguing with this Derek Nimmo type and he was being extremely difficult. It turned out that there had been some kind of collision between Marianne and him in a car. She’d gone to have a form signed, one of these constats. He was of extremely bad grace, doing all kinds of lecturing, all of that. They wrote out this form but in the end he just picked it up and tore it up and gave it back to her, then hit her. That got me extremely angry. I stormed over there and even though he was a good foot taller than me I gave him an absolute lecture “no-one ever hits a woman in my presence”, all of this kind of thing. If he wanted to hit someone he could start by hitting me. I awoke quite feverish again.
Later in the night I found myself busy dictating again to my hand and not my dictaphone. This is becoming rather too much of a habit as well. But it seems that last night there were concerns that German commercial and public television was not being prosecuted over its failure to examine footage of demonstrations that it had filmed in 2009 involving I think Martin Luther King which could have resulted in criminal prosecutions being brought against people who were mishandling the demonstrators. This in turn led to all kinds of demonstrations. There were people everywhere chanting and so on and the forces of law and order moved in. For some reason I was with them and we were gradually pushing these demonstrators back. We had them crowded up on some kind of top row of steps but no-one seemed to be doing anything to move them any further so I gave them a big push. 4 or 5 people at rhe far end fell off the steps down to the next level. That was basically when the demonstrators abandoned the protest and we could move freely up. I went to have a look at the other end of these steps. It was quite a drop over the end, about 10 or 12 feet, but 1 or 2 people were thinking that this is the best way to get away from the police so they dropped over the edge at the back. I thought “how was I going to get away from here?”. My only solution was to drop over the edge at the back as well so I had a look. It seemed to be very high to me. I didn’t really want to jump over that. I thought that I could dangle down from my hands from the top and let go, slide down but that still looked an overwhelming drop for me. It was steeper in some places than others. Perhaps I could find a lower place I’d be more comfortable doing it.

Once I’d transcribed all of that I had another back at the arrears and after a good session on that, I’ve whittled it down to just 13 remaining. With a bit of luck (not that I have too much of that these days) I’ll finish it on Friday or something like that.

That took more time than it ought to have done, and the rest of the day has been spent working on the next radio programme, not having overlooked to post this week’s off.

By the time that I knocked off for my guitar sessions, I’d chosen all the music except the last one, combined them in pairs as usual, written the text, dictated it, started to edit it and even prepared the speech for my invited guest.

The afternoon walk was a bit depressing today. Gribouille the big ginger cat was there for his afternoon stroke and one of my neighbours was out there, so we had a good chat together.

But that was basically all that was interesting. There was nothing much happening out in the English Channel today – or, at least – if there was, I couldn’t see it.

That’s because even though we had that thunder and lightning storm last night, today was shrouded in fog and we couldn’t see very much at all out to sea.

It reminded me of that British newspaper headline in the 1920s – “fog in the Channel – Continent cut off!” which just about sums up the insularity of the xenophobic Brits.

nevertheless, the fog didn’t prevent everyone from doing their own thing this afternoon.

My walk took me around the headland and there by the seafarers’ memorial there were a couple of zodiacs down there in the Baie de Mont St Michel with a group of fishermen in each one.

You can see just how foggy it is. Le Loup, the marker light for the entrance to the harbour is just about visible but you can’t see very much at all beyond there.

And so I continued on around the path but there was nothing at all of interest to see so I wandered on home.

After the guitars, I had tea. A stuffed pepper tonight followed by apple crumble – at least, the part of the apple crumble that I didn’t drop on the floor.

There was a little wave of fatigue (the first of the day but not actually a crashing-out) but I fought it off by going for my evening walk.

And outside on my travels I didn’t see a soul. It was just like one of these North American ghost towns and I was expecting any minute to see a tumbleweed blowing through the Porte St Jean and off down the street.

But it looked so photogenic tonight that I had to take a photo of it yet again. Only this time there are no traffic lights or road signs to obscure the view.

Down along the Rue du Nord I walked, in splendid isolation, and then ran on down the footpath.

No-one around in the Square Maurice Marland either so I could run all the way down there too.

But my eye was caught by a very slender new moon up in the sky tonight so I had a little fun trying to photograph it. But I was intrigued by the green light to the left of the moon. I couldn’t see it with the naked eye.

But in a couple of the other photos that I took, it wasn’t there either. The only thing that I can think of was that although I couldn’t hear anything, a low-flying aeroplane travelling from left to right was going past at that moment and I was lucky enough to press the button just as the plane’s flashing navigation light was illuminated.

So how do we know that the plane was going from left to right and not right to left? The answer is that there are five letters in green, and five letters in right.

Port is red, and there are four letters in “port”, just as there are in “left”. So if the aeroplane was travelling from right to left, we would see the red light.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are constantly seeing all kinds of building repairs, roadworks and the like going on in the old medieval walled city quite regularly.

It looks as if we are in for another batch of work starting quite soon. Some time during the day this large piece of mobile plant has appeared and is parked up in the Parvis Notre Dame.

It’s going to be interesting to see where they will be working and what they will be doing. It’s a good job that I don’t have to drive through the old town on my way around.

But while I was there looking at the machinery I had a look behind me.

Not that there was anything of any interest going on there but the Rue Notre Dame but the view made a very good photo this evening.

From here I walked on around the walls and then ran on home. Three runs again today and I’m hoping that I can keep this going. It’s not as athletic as I was in the Spring and early Summer before I was ill but if I can keep this up I’ll be happy.

Welsh class tomorrow so I need to be on good form. An early night will do me a world of good.

Sunday 20th September 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… today and so I had a nice lie-in. And, for a change, I was up by 09:45 too, rather than the ridiculous times of just lately.

First task was to write up the notes for yesterday and that took longer than it ought to have done too. I hadn’t realised that I had done so much.

Second task was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

There was something going on last night about some TV host in Brazil who was planning to blow up the entire Brazilian Government to stage a coup d’état. He was going to get them all into a hall while he entertained them and then press a button to blow them all into smithereens. But what happened after this I really can’t remember because I ended up with other preoccupations.
For later on i was out with TOTGA last night – she put in an appearance for the first time for a while. We were in Stoke on Trent, in some kind of museum of exhibitions. I was thinking of going sort-of half-heartedly but I met someone who had been and they were saying how wonderful it was. And then TOTGA was talking about one or two of the exhibits as well so the two of us went off. It was nothing special – a bit what you might expect from Stoke on Trent, plenty of industry and a few sideshows and stalls, all this kind of thing. We were walking around there and after about half an hour or so I held her hand and that was great. We carried on talking and we’d been setting suprious alarms off in different places so that alarm clocks were going off at strange times, rather like in CARRY ON TEACHER. Off we went scrambling through this museum because it was an industrial museum and there were things that one needed to do like climbing around machinery, this kind of thing. By the time that we got close to the end I actually had my arm around her and she was snuggled up to me and you’ve no idea how disappointed I felt when I awoke.

Well, you probably have in fact.

And it will be no surprise to learn that it was another feverish night too.

But later on, once again I awoke to find myself dictating into my empty hand, and how many times have I done this during all these years? And even more importantly, what exciting events have I missed? As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … what happens to me during the night is far more exciting than going to the shops and not finding any frozen broccoli, which seems to be the highlight of my existence right now that the High Arctic is (temporarily) out of bounds.

But I digress (and not for the first time either).

Anyway, last night I’d been working on the taxis. I’d finished my shift and I was exhausted. I was lying down in a corner and there was this TV programme. We had this thing about spacemen and you could tell that they were fraudulent and the commentator in this room was ripping these people to shreds, like telling them to “remove the green flourescent effect from their film” – the people had presented a “video” which was in fact an animation and you could even see the name of the program that they had used to create it on their screenshot as well as a list of the effects, incuding “green flourescent”. We all agreed that it was reasonable acting and a reasonable plot line so why didn’t they just do it as a film instead of trying to just hoodwink everyone? Then some Scotsman complete with kilt (and nothing underneath) came in and started to do some high wire and acrobat trapeze formats. He seemed to be interested in doing his trapeze act right over where I was lying so I told him basically that I wanted to go to sleep, I didn’t want to watch like this. Another thing is that I can’t stand being touched (except maybe by TOTGA earlier this evening and Percy Penguin last night of course) so don’t come so close to me. He performed a few tricks and cleared off. I thought to myself that if this place is going to be full of all kinds of weirdos which seems to be the case I’d better go and do something about my taxi money so I got up and went to get the taxi sheets and calculator to hand to the girl in charge so she could cash me out.

All in all it was quite a busy night.

A few more from the pile of arrears bit the dust too and that’s looking more manageable these days.

Apart from all of that I didn’t do very much else at all.

There was of course the afternoon walk and today I went around the footpath underneath the city walls. There were a few people on the beach this afternoon which is a surprise seeing as there was plenty of beach to be out on. The low tides are really impressive when they are this low.

We can see, in the centre-right of the photograph, part of the medieval fish-trap – that nice pointy bit of stone wall that in the olden days closed off the outgoing tide so that the fishermen could get in with their hands and pull out the piscatorial presents.

There may not have been all that many people out and about on the ground or on the beach this afternoon , but in the air it was something else completely.

We had a hang-glider out there this afternoon practising his manoeuvres over the houses at the back of the beach by the Plat Gousset.

He managed to keep clear of the rocks on the beach, but he didn’t advance very far along the headland. But then again, there wasn’t actually all that much wind this afternoon – not enough to move them down the coast very far.

There was further activity in the air too.

Our yellow autogyro was out and about (but it was too far away to photograph) and while the red microlight wasn’t out there this afternoon, we were joined by a Cessna U206F Stationair aeroplane, registration F-GNEB, that had taken off from the airfield.

It’s difficult to find out any information about her, but it is known that she was in the air certainly in 1989, at which tile she carried registration number OO-SPA.

There may well not have been too many people on the beach but that was because they were all elsewhere.

There were plenty of people out taking the air by strolling around on the promenade at the Plat Gousset. One or two of them have managed to make it onto the beach to sit in the sun but they weren’t exactly numerous.

There was no-one in the Square Maurice Marland either this afternoon so I went for a run along there. Not all of the way because someone came in to join me and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

My walk carried on round the where the American Chevrolet is dumped but I stopped dead in my tracks before I got there.

We seem to be suffering a surfeit of exceptional vehicles right now, and today’s offering isn’t a Jaguar, for a change. What we have here is something really exceptional, to wit an Austin Healey 3000.

These were the classic “Big Healeys” of the Austin-Healey company and are quite a bit different from the more common and smaller “Sprog-eyed Fright”

They were made from 1959 until the company ceased to trade in 1967.This one here is an early model, as you can tell from the rear light assembly

We talked the other day about Jaguar XK sports cars, and how I would have been happy with one of those. But failing that, I would have been content with one of these had I been able to find on of them.

That’s because only just about 18,000 were made, and of those, over 16,000 were sent for export, mainly to the USA. What’s interesting is that the best that BMC could find to replace it was a stretched MGB and that lasted in production just two years before they threw in the towel

It’s pizza night tonight so I used the last dough in the freezer. Folding over the edges again produced an excellent spongy dough and it all tasted really delicious.

Outside tonight on my walk around the headland I was treated to a beautiful light display.

There was quite a storm raging out somewhere over Sartilly and the lightning was impressive. I had to wait a good while for a flash of lightning to appear through a gap in the clouds and I ended up being quite lucky.

There were my three runs tonight too and that’s tired me out a little. But at least I’ve managed to go for a whole day without having to crash out and that’s quite a novelty for just recently.

Bedtime now and then back to work tomorrow. We’ll start off with a radio programme but the way that things go these days it’ll take me all week to do that. I shall have to get a wiggle on.

Saturday 19th September 2020 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

Having spend some time today pondering upon the question of this little matter about recording my old cassette tapes, round about 15:00 this afternoon the light suddenly went on in my head.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a ZOOM H1 that I use for recording outside broadcasts for the radio. So this afternoon I went plugged the audio cable out of the headphone socket in the big hi-fi and into the mike socket of the Zoom.

The settings are a bit all over the place and I’ll have to be doing some kind of further research to improve the sound balance, but it’s already a great improvement on not being able to produce any sound.

But sometimes I really wonder however I managed to get so far in my life as I have done when I spend days trying to solve a problem when there is a simple solution like this at my fingertips.

You might also think that getting out of bed is a simple solution too, but it wasn’t today. It was another 07:30 start.

Mind you, it’s no surprise that I had such a lie-in because I’d been off on quite a considerable and lengthy voyage or three or four during the night.
There was another one of these little flighty girl-types of people and we were all somewhere in Crewe – the Nantwich Road end. We were all flirting around and I had a quiet little word with her because there was someone in our group who was’t particularly appropriate for her to meet.
So this larking about went on but then there was some kind of issue about tidying things up and putting them away and so on. There had been an old Vauxhall estate abandoned on wasteland on Mill Street, like the one that’s been dumped outside here for a year or so, and that needed to be tidied away. They asked me if I could arrange that. I asked what was the deal – they replied “you take the vehicle, you can have it”. I said “I’m sure that I can arrange something”. I contacted a friend of mine and he said that he would come down to join me. In the meantime this girl was flirting and she ended up with another young guy. I had a little whisper in her ear about one or two things and she asked “is this the guy you were warning me about?”. I replied no it’s not. It’s actually the one who’ll be here in a minute. Anyway he turned up and he wasn’t in a car but on foot. He asked “where’s this vehicle that you want us to go and have a look at?”. We had to walk down some stairs into the foyer and he got on his radio. He had a police radio and he was radioing back to the police station about some guy who’d been seen prowling around. They eventually managed to track him down to some kind of street somewhere, not hanging around somewhere dangerous – and I awoke all hot and sweaty in a fever again.

The call had gone out to Wales for everyone to rise up on behalf of the Welsh monarch against the English one. This is one of those things where I’ve completely forgotten absolutely everything
Later on we were at University. I was with a couple of girls and someone came along to say that they had left something. They described accurately what one of these girls was wearing and they said that she came and sat here after they left. After much discussion debate and argument she went off to have a look in the clothes that she was wearing that morning to see whether she had it. I was having a chat with one or two of these girls who had come over. The subject was about the University, my friends and so on. The girl who had gone off, she said that she had to tell everyone that she was 21 but she was actually 15, one of these child prodigies who had gone off to University early but she didn’t really want to draw attention to herself. We were having a chat and one of these girls was being a bit forward, talking about a few racy subjects and I wasn’t sure if she was trying to lead me on somewhere so I replied in a non-committal kind of way but I was very interested to see where this discussion was going and that rings a very familiar bell, doesn’t it? Again all hot and sweaty.
I was with Liz and Terry and there was something happening about a racing car. There was no-one to drive it and they asked me if I would. I said yes even though I didn’t know how and we went off to this racing circuit. I don’t know what happened about the race but on the way back we stayed at this really posh hotel. I had to go out for a walk or something and there I met a woman with two girls, Germans. They were discussing different things I suppose about patriotism, whatever. The elder of the two girls, a little thin blonde probably about 10 or so was saying how proud she was of her country, all this thing, how proud she was of her navy, whatever. I overtook them walking back to the hotel. I walked past a house that wasn’t there any more. It had been redeveloped and a new house was built there. I remember one of my school friends having a house on that site and I used to go there regularly but I couldn’t for the life of me remember who it was. All these names came ticking through my head only to be ruled out. I got back to the hotel and these people were coming in. I had to help them over the patio wall into the main room – it was quicker than going all the way round to the door at the main entrance. They summoned the receptionist and there was confusion about the car machines, which one they had to use. These people were booked in. This blonde girl came over to me and said that she had lost my phone number and could I give it to her.

It’s hardly any surprise that I was so late getting out of bed after all of that.

After a shower and a general clean-up I went off to the shops. At NOZ the prize was a beautiful olde-worlde porcelain mixing bowl to replace the smaller metal one that I’ve been using.

It’s becoming quite professional in here now.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that pathetic parking is a regular feature of these pages.

Here’s some more from the car park of LeClerc and this is something that’s going to cause a big problem in the future. The supermarket was heaving today – I’ve never seen it so busy – and parking was at a premium.

The charging bays for the electric vehicles are close to the entrance so two motorists have taken it upon themselves to park in them rather than out in the wilderness.

Purists may argue that one of them (if not both) is an electric vehicle but neither of them is plugged in. And as there are only four charging points at the supermarket, that’s 50% of the potential capacity blocked off for no good reason.

It makes me wonder how long it will be before we start to see the warning notices like we see at disabled bays.

Despite the crowds in the supermarket and the fact that they had run out of my favourite traditional Saturday baguette, I was in and out in half an hour.

Mind you, I’d forgotten my bread flour and one or two other things too, but nothing that I can’t live without. And they had no frozen broccoli either.

Such an exciting life I lead when an absence of frozen broccoli in the supermarket makes headline news.

Back here I attacked a couple more of the arrears and that’s becoming even more manageable now. And then, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out on the chair. The excitement of finding no frozen broccoli in the supermarket is clearly proving too much for me.

After a late lunch I recorded a few more albums from the USB turntable and then had a session with the Zoom.

I was pleased that at last I’ve been able to digitalise probably the rarest record in my whole collection. I’ve seen the value (not that it means very much of course) of some of my records being in the thousands, when they are available, but what would be the price of the only rock LP (of the early 70s of course) being sung in the native Greenlandic Inuit language?

That’ll make my listeners sit up a little. They are still struggling to come to terms with rock music sung in Scots Gaelic. They can’t say that they aren’t having their money’s worth, considering that they are getting it all for free.

later on I went out for the football.

By now, the tide is well out on one of the lowest-tide days of the year and you can see now how far it goes out when it has a mind to. When it’s right in, you can see the tide mark on the harbour wall to the right of centre.

On my way through town I bumped into Maryline from the radio – she who does the film and cinema programmes – and we had a chat for five minutes or so before, in the best traditions of the late lamented News of the World, “I made my excuses and left”.

SM Caen must have been kicking themselves tonight on the way back home from the Stade Louis Dior.

On several occasions they carved their way through the Granville defence like a hot knife through butter but their finishing was even worse than Granville’s, who never ever looked like scoring if they were still playing now.

Nevertheless it was an exciting match as you never knew who was going to be the next to kick the ball into the keeper’s arms when in a one-on-one situation or to completely miss connecting with the ball when presented with a free header on an open goal.

And it all turned up on its head with 4 minutes to go when a Granville player was brought down in the Caen penalty area. For once, Granville managed to find the back of the net.

But after all of the chances that Caen had, they must have been totally devastated to lose a game to Granville like this when they should have been out of sight and down the road a long time before half-time.

On the way back home I noticed the crowds of people loitering around the harbour so I went to see what was going on.

Actually, I had an educated guess seeing as on the way out to the shops this morning I saw Marité heading out of the harbour and across the bay, and that her berth was empty when I went out earlier to the football.

And sure enough, into the harbour, full sail ahead, came Marité, heading for her berth again.

She had quite a crowd of people on board, and I’m not quite sure how she managed that, as regular readers of this rubbish will well recall the issues that I’ve had with the personnel who operate her.

A more unfriendly bunch of “customer service” people I have yet to meet. They actually make Belgian shop assistants sound friendly.

But nevertheless, it makes quite a magnificent impression when the old Newfoundland cod-fisher is out there with all of her sails out in a full gale.

Even manoeuvring into the harbour is quite an impressive sight, as the crowds out there watching it will testify.

She wasn’t the only large boat out there heading for home on the evening tide.

This one that I vaguely saw in the gloom (in a heavily-lightened photo) was also heading into harbour. When I first noticed it I thought that it might have been la Granvillaise but even with having thrown plenty of light onto the subject, I stil can’t say.

Back here, it was tea out of a tin and then time for more football. In the Welsh Premier League, or the JD Cymru League as it’s now called, Newtown who have been misfiring during the season so far were away at newly-promoted Haverforwest County.

Haverfordwest have a beautiful, modern little ground thanks to a good deal with a local supermarket who bought their old ground from them, but the team has never had any particular success. They survived relegation from the WPL for several seasons due to lack of suitable promotion candidates or due to licensing issues of other clubs but they fell out of the league a few seasons ago – 2016 if I remember correctly – and have gradually clawed their way back.

They are another team who I haven’t seen so far so i was looking forward to this game.

And the match was particularly interesting. Newtown were the quickest out of the blocks and looked the better side, but Haverforwest, having signed the cream of the second tier, looked nothing like the patchwork team that they were said to be and in fact actually played more like a team than Newtown’s experienced regulars.

The final score, 2-2, was a fair reflection of the match and while Haverfordwest are not going to set the league alight this season, Newtown are going to have to be doing some rather serious looking over their shoulder. Even after three matches, they are adrift at the foot of the table and that’s not a very comfortable position for one of the only two teams who have been in the WPL for its entire existence.

But now it’s late and I’m tired. Far too tired to write up my notes so I’ll have to do that in the morning instead.

Friday 18th September 2020 – I’VE MANAGED …

… to make my computer record albums in stereo from the USB turntable. As I suspected, it was a question of configuring the input on the sound card.

But it’s rather disappointing because the album that I wanted to record is in fact two mono tracks superimposed side-by-side and the result is exactly the same as I managed to do with the computer the other day.

And I know that it’s an issue with the album because I went and recorded another one to check, and that has perfect (given the limitations of what I’m doing) stereo sound.

Unfortunately, the issue about the tapes is not so simple.

Recording from the hi-fi to a laptop doesn’t work via the headphone output and the multi-jack input, and neither does recording from one of my old hi-fi separates (stacked on top of the shelves with, evidently, the one that I wanted on the bottom of the pile) to the big computer, whether by the headphone output to the mike input or the RCA sockets to the mike input.

Playing about with the soundcard settings or switching the input setting from microphone to line in and vice versa didn’t make the slightest different – the program that I use won’t pick up any sound.

It seems that I shall be having to spend much more time on this to get it to work but I still have confidence – I think.

This morning I couldn’t quite manage to beat the third alarm but there wasn’t very much in it. It’s still disappointing that I couldn’t manage it.

As for the night’s events, I was doing something with some people and it involved getting some bits to repair a car or something but they were at Percy Penguin’s and I had to go round to their house. I didn’t really want to confront her parents so I would wait until everyone had gone to bed and I would slip into her house, get them and slip out again. This happened a couple of times but then I nearly stumbled uponhem on one occasion to I started to get cold feet. Next time I went I could hear them moving around so I hid round the corner but round there I bumped into Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves) herself who was making a cup of tea. She said she hadn’t seen me for ages and wondered how I was. She had contacted the hairdresser in Shavington because she used to work in the chemist right by it and she asked to be disconnected from something. Anyway she was making a cup of tea so she invited me in. They were having a kids birthday party. Even though she had invited me in she didn’t stay with me. She was wandering around talking to all kinds of different people. The subject of of another name from that era came up. She said “what’s he been doing in our house?” Someone said “he’s fixed so-and-so’s car now” and something else he said that I can’t remember. I said that I have to go and get back to these people with these bits who were waiting for me. But I wanted to spend some time alone with her but this wasn’t going to happen the way things were working out at the moment with all this kids party thing going on. They pulled a great big wooden bench from against the wall and sat in the middle of the room for all of us to sit on. It was quite clear that we were going to be there for a long time and that wasn’t my plan at all.

There was time to spend working on some of the arrears as well. That lot is going down slowly, rather too slowly than I like.

The rest of the morning – right up to a rather late lunch, was spent dealing with the outstanding week’s course work. It involved plenty of work but I knew most of the stuff.

Nevertheless I did learn a few new things and SHOCK! HORROR! I have been awarded a Certificate, something that I find rather amusing because it’s a rather juvenile thing. It’s not going to change my lifestyle all that much.

The afternoon was spent trying to experiment with the recording issues, about which I explained earlier. I used the background time profitably too by editing a few more photos from my trip down the Brittany coast on board Spirit of Conrad in early July.

There was the break in mid-afternoon for me to go for my usual afternoon walk.

And either I was early or the microlight was late because it wasn’t there this afternoon when I went outside the door. But it wasn’t long in coming. As I walked across the car park outside it came along behind me from the direction of Donville les Bains.

It’s becoming something of a regular thing to encounter the microlight and I wonder how long it’s going to be going on that I’ll be meeting it.

The weather today has changed. The wind is back and the clouds have come along. The day was quite overcast.

It was still warm though. Warm enough for there to be more people out there on the beach again having fun. No-one in swimwear and no-one in the water either. It’s not as warm as that.

And no boats out at sea. I suppose that the tide being right out will have something to do about that, but it is rather strange given the last few weeks when we’ve not been able to move without tripping over a boat of some description.

The kids are out there again today orienteering. This looks as if it’s becoming a regular occurrence too.

But there was activity at the old Atlantic Wall bunker that they finally opened up last year – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had a guided tour of it at the time. I’m not sure what they were doing there today but I admired the vehicle in which they arrived.

Maybe I should have gone to find out more about it but having offered my help to them last year and then let them down (I broke my hand and damaged my knee about 2 days later) it’s not the moment, especially as I don’t have the time these days to become involved.

Instead I went on across the lawn and around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen plenty of photos from this point of view. In the foreground down there is the memorial to the crews of the lifeboats that were lost during attempted rescues.

But in the background we have the Baie de Mont St Michel with the tide right out as far as it can go. The rock on which Le Loup, the warning light at the entrance to the harbour, sits is clearly visible today.

We’ve seen it almost totally submerged when the tide is right in.

And it’s all change once more in the chantier navale today.

My walk took me along the path on top of the headland over to the viewpoint where there’s a good view of the work going on. We had eight boats in there the last time that we looked, but today there’s only seven again.

And some of those are different too. It looks as if there has been considerably more than just a shuffling of the pack. The pink one in the mobile crane is new, and the blue and yellow one that has been here for a while is missing too.

Back here I had my hour on the guitars and then went for tea. Steamed vegetables and vegan cheese sauce followed by apple crumble.

Outside on my walk this evening I had to direct someone to the railway station. I’ve no idea why he thought it was up at this end of town. It smelt rather fishy to me but being just a couple of hundred yards from the fish-processing plant, everything smells rather fishy around here.

He was the only person who I saw while I was out. It was pretty quiet, and not only as far as people went, but as far as everything else went too. The only thing that I photographed was the Place Marechal Foch and that was more out of desperation than anything .

The wind was really strong again and brought me to a dead halt on one of my runs but for the other two, I had the wind behind me and that helped me home.

Saturday tomorrow, and so it’s shopping day. I don’t need too much but it’s still going to be an early start – I hope, if I can manage to beat the third alarm.

Thursday 17th September 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you are wondering, “comments” have been disabled for a short while.

The spammers are back and I’ve just had to delete 126 “comments” from the queue for moderation. That’s taken me a while so I’ve disabled “comments” until the spammers become fed up and move on somewhere else.

If you want to contact me, use the link at the bottom-right of the page.

In the meantime, despite not going to bed until about 12:30, I managed to beat the third alarm out of bed, and that surprised me as much as it probably surprises you.

During the night I was in Manchester in a student house, a modern apartment by the side of a big wide dual-carriageway road, not an old run-down place like Whalley Range where we used to live. One of my old friends from my time in Chester was there, sharing a house with some people. I was speaking to him for the first time for years. He was explaining that his surname was now Stavrakali and he was known as “something (I can’t remember now) Ali”. I asked why and he said that his parents used to write to him regularly but they always forgot to put stamps on the letter. We were looking at albums and he was looking at my record collection and making a few pleasant remarks about it.

There was so much more to it too but I can’t remember anything else about it now.

So having transcribed that, I did a few more of the arrears too. And some of them are quite interesting as you will find out in due course.

Today is shopping day so off I went to LIDL. First stop was the railway station to pick up the tickets for my trip to Leuven. Quite often, the ticket machine at the station doesn’t work and as the train departs (in principle) prior to the opening of the booking office, I always like to have them in my possession a few days beforehand to avoid any complications.

LIDL came up with nothing special so I didn’t buy much, and there was nothing much going on in town or in the harbour either, so I just came straight home.

For the rest of the day I managed to finish off the radio programme on which I have been working. I ended up with 4:50 of speech which needed to be edited down to 3:16 and then merged into the front of the concert.

And even though I say to myself, it’s all gone together quite well. I can only detect one joint in the whole concert and that’s pretty good. But it’s more work than you might think to make it work properly.

There was a break in the middle too while I went for my usual afternoon walk in the sun.

And here’s a thing. I hadn’t taken two steps out of the building before I was dive-bombed by the little red microlight. He was actually flying past the building as I went out but as soon as I stepped outside he did a U-turn the kind of which a Tory Government would be proud and headed straight for me.

There was just about enough time for me to take a quick snap before he disappeared over the roof and round the back of the building.

There were crowds of people out on the beach this afternoon.

You wouldn’t have actually thought so had you been here during the night. Brain of Britain went to bed last night with the windows open and we spent the small hours being buffeted about by a howling gale that rattled just about every window in North-West France.

By this afternoon though it had died down and the sun was out so the late-season holidaymakers were making the most of the final few days before autumn arrives.

My walk this afternoon was along the headland.

From along that footpath there’s a good view out to sea and we’ve seen plenty of photos of the view in the past. We’ve also seen plenty of fishing boats too – cabin cruisers, zodiacs, even kayaks – out there at the foot of the rocks fishing for sea bass.

There’s another one out there today with a couple of guys on board with a pile of fishing equipment. However, they don’t seem to look all that interested.

On the other hand, these people out here look much more committed.

As I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed … we have some of the highest tides in Europe here. As well as this, the area is famous for its shellfish and when the tides are at their lowest, as they are today, the water level is below the area that is leased to the shellfish farmers.

Consequently the general public can swarm onto the beaches and scavenge in the rock pools for whatever they can find. There are guidelines as to where they can go and what they can take away.

My walk continued on around the headland and I came to the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a new record of eight boats in there being worked on and I was keen to see what the position would be today.

Unfortunately it was one of disappointment. We have gone back down to seven boats today. Mind you, there are piles of workmen down there and there is plenty of activity with them all rushing around like mad getting things done.

Back here I finished off the radio programme and then worked on some photos while I listened to it to make sure that it was what I wanted.

That led up to an hour on the guitars and then I stopped for tea. With the stuffing that was left over from Monday I had taco rolls followed by apple crumble.

Later on I went for my evening walk and runs.

And it wasn’t easy ether because the wind is back. As I ran around the corner at the end of the footpath underneath the walls, the howling gale hit me full in the face and brought me to a staggering stop.

With the wind being as it was and the tide being well in, I was hoping for some kind of spectacular wave show but there can’t have been much of a build-up of power as yet because it was somewhat disappointing.

Instead I ran on across the Square Maurice Marland, with the wind at my back this time so it wasn’t so bad at all.

There wasn’t much going on around there either so I carried on around the walls.

Yesterday we’d seen a fishing boat unloading at the fish processing plant. Today there’s one heading out to sea to go and fetch back another load.

As for me I ran on home again and that was that. I’ve written up my notes and I’m planning to go off to bed. Tomorrow I have my outstanding course lesson to complete and then I can attack some more arrears

There’s plenty more of those to deal with.

Wednesday 16th September 2020 – AS I WAS SAYING …

… only the other day, having my body clock disturbed is not really a good idea.

And as I said yesterday, being awake at 03:00 isn’t a very good plan either. And going to bed at 04:15 (and not being able to sleep either) doesn’t help matters.

It goes without saying that I’d switched off the alarms. I wasn’t going to be out of bed by the third alarm and it’s pointless trying. It ended up being another 11:30 today.

There was something on the dictaphone but it seems that I hadn’t gone too far. We were on board a ship last night and the question came round about ancient Egypt. For some unknown reason I imagined myself as a young baby wrapped in a nappy being worshipped as a god or something like that, an immortal. And it was very like a voyage that I’ve had a couple of times in the past.

Or so I said. While there are plenty of examples of me going on nocturnal voyages on board ships, I actually couldn’t think of a nocturnal voyage that bears any relationship to this one with similar events to these.

While I was at it, I dealt with a few more of the arrears from my voyage around Europe. At least that is now getting down to manageable proportions from the 70-odd that were there at the start.

There wasn’t much time to do very much. I spent some time working on the notes for the live broadcast that I’m doing, but I had another thing in mind to do as well.

There are the albums to digitalise, but also some cassettes. I’d borrowed a cassette player from Liz for the task and while I was messing around with the big desktop computer, I came across an input socket on the front, one that I hadn’t noticed before.

And so I had a rummage around and came up with a stereo audio cable, plugged it into the earphone socket on the cassette player and the other end into the input on the laptop.

After much playing around with the selectors I finally managed to make the computer record a cassette – but in mono only. Yet again!

But the word “earphone” on the cassette player should have given me a clue. Sticking a set of headphones in, I found out that there was only one channel working, but that was broadcasting both tracks.

So that’s a mono output and consequently of not much use. I’m going to have to think of a plan B – which might involve having to bring the big hi-fi into here.

Failing that, I know that my DVD player in the living room will record, so maybe I could even plug the big hi-fi into the DVD, record onto the hard-drive, burn to a DVD and then copy it onto the computer.

But I’ll find a way.

After a shower, I had to set out on my travels. It’s that time of the year again – one of our three-monthly meetings of the radio station.

It’s a long walk out to the Centre Agora but it does me good. The road goes past the top of the harbour where I can look down and see what is going on. Normandy Trader has disappeared into the sunset, and a long time ago too, and her place has been taken by Chausiais.

After a nice long walk I ended up at the meeting where we had to listen to a few people taking several hours to say nothing at all. At one stage, on my notes I had written “Oh God! I wish that this woman would shut up!”

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … these are the kinds of meetings that should be held, standing up in the open air in a rainstorm.

The weather was really pleasant later on and so I had a lovely walk, the long way around, back home.

It’s not very often that I have the chance to see the town in the dark and so I took a couple of photos on my way home. Like this one of the sea front looking across the beach and the port to the old town (where I live) perched on the rocks.

The photo was taken with the little NIKON 1 J5 which I take with me on walks like this. It’s quite compact and light, fits in a jacket pocket and does well enough in normal lighting conditions (but struggles in abnormal condition).

My route went through the town and then up the Rue des Juifs.

From the top of the Rampe du Monte Regret there’s a good view down towards the port. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned the Bar Ephemère, called Chez Maguie, that has sprung up on the little square at the Square Pléville.

It’s open until quite late at night and it looked quite good from up here with all of its lights working so I took a photo of that while I was at it, to add it to the collection.

From there I continued up the Rue des Juifs to the viewpoint overlooking the port.

There wasn’t too much excitement there tonight, except that there was a fishing boat in the harbour, moored up and unloading at the Fish Processing plant.

When I arrived back, I hardly had time to take off my jacket before the phone rang. Rosemary rang me and we had a really good chat for 90 minutes, putting the world to rights, and I ended up missing my tea. But that will do me some good, I suppose.

So, later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow so that’s a nice early morning walk. And I have to go via the railway station to pick up my rail tickets, if I remember.

Tuesday 15th September 2020 – DESPITE NOT …

… doing everything that I wanted to do, I’ve still had an extremely busy and active day today. I’ve never stopped and, even more surprisingly, I didn’t crash out either. That’s not really a surprise – it’s a shock!

So while you admire some photos of this evening’s beautiful sunset, let me mention that while once more I missed the third alarm, it was only by a matter of seconds and I was immediately up and sitting on the edge of the bed.

Mind you, it did take me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and summon up the strength to move, but that’s par for the course these days.

During the night I was in my old office in Prince Albert Street. I’d had a shave and a wash but the hairs that I had shaved off my face weren’t flushing down the drain of the sink. There was a young guy sitting there by the side of the sink waiting for me to finish but I was just taking longer and longer and longer because of these hairs. In the end I told him that I was ready to get up but I can’t leave it like this because of the hairs. He said “let me have a look” and he tried to move it as well. He said “what you need is a new sink because the capacity on this isn’t enough. We need to go along and get another sink” which I thought was silly because they just don’t issue sinks like this but off we went, clambering over a few items into the main office and out again over another pile of stores. We were asked what we were looking for and we explained about the new sink. Someone said “you’ll be really lucky finding a new sink like this. You want to try a new plug hole”.

A few more of the arrears from the dictaphone disappeared too which is good news as I slowly catch up.

After that, I tidied up in the kitchen and the dining area. We have our Welsh lesson this morning and that’s on line. I don’t really want people to see the chaos in which I live these days.

And having put all of that behind me I sat down and did some more revision of the previous course. I’ve forgotten almost everything that I learnt in the Spring.

At least, that’s what I thought because I found that once the lesson started I could actually remember some of the things that I had learned. More than I thought, more than was necessary for our opening session and more than some of my fellow-students.

Interestingly, we have a student from Romania living in Connah’s Quay who is learning Welsh. That’s certainly something quite extraordinary.

Instead of two hours, these lessons are 2.5 hours so we didn’t finish until 13:30. That meant a rather late lunch.

Having used the last of the bread, this afternoon I baked some bread. Some ordinary bread, into which I added a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds, and also a smaller loaf with a banana, some sultanas and a pile of ground almonds added to it, brushed with soya milk and sprinkled with brown sugar.

While all of that was rising in the corner, I attacked the carrots that I had bought the other day. They were peeled and diced, blanched in boiling water with some bay leaves and then drained and left to dry.

While they were drying, I peeled and diced a lump of ginger into some tiny fragments and then boiled them in some water.

While they were boiling, I peeled the lemons that I had, put them in a whizzer and whizzed them gently to separate the juice. That went onto a glass and then the remainder was thoroughly whizzed round into a pulp and then added to the ginger and water that was boiling. This was then set to simmer.

While the lemon and ginger was simmering away, I went out for my afternoon walk.

It was a beautiful afternoon again, hot and sunny with very little wind. And plenty of people out there too enjoying it. The fishermen were out there as well.

At least, I reckon that they are fishermen because I can’t think of what else they might be doing in those boats down there so close inshore by the diving platform at the Pointe du Roc.

There were quite a few other boats out there too. Not very many yachts today, with it not being weekend, but quite a few others.

Here’s one of our old friends again. She’s La Grande Ancre and she seems to spend much of her time engaged in fishing activity and the rest of the time transporting items out to the Ile de Chausey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw her go out a year or two back with a tractor on her deck and she’s had many other things to transport as well, although she doesn’t seem to do as much in that line since Chausiais arrived.

But here’s something interesting down there on the rocks.

One thing that I have noticed about the coastline here is that driftwood of any sort is very rare. We haven’t seen anything interesting, despite all the storms that we have. But this down here is the first substantial item that I’ve seen in all the time that I’ve been here.

The kids were out here again playing around on the grass. And I now know what they are doing, because I had a close look. They are having sessions in Orienteering – being given various sets of co-ordinates and running from point-to-point armed with a map and a compass.

Strangely enough, that’s the one thing that I know something about because in 1971 I came 15th in the North West England Schools’ Championship.

And no – there were not only 15 entrants.

But anyway, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the proceedings over the next few weeks to see how they are doing

On that note I wandered off around the headland to the other side of the promontory.

And there’s some excitement today in the Chantier Navale. Over the last week or two there have been as many as seven boats in there and that’s been the most that I have ever seen – up until today, that is.

As I went past this afternoon, I noticed that they had just pulled another fishing boat out of the water with the mobile crane. That’s eight boats in there today and I’ve never ever seen that many at any one time.

So we’ve seen crowds on the land and crowds in the sea. I’m sure that you are all wondering what is going on in the air.

The answer is that despite the apparent lack of wind this afternoon the Bird-Men of Alcatraz were flying around somehow. At one particular moment I counted three of them in the air all at once and I’m not sure how they are keeping aloft.

As an aside, I’ve not had any news about the bird-man who came to grief 10 days ago on the rocks by the tidal pool. I wonder how he’s getting on.

One of the things that features quite regularly on these pages is the question of pathetic parking. The Rue St Pierre by the entrance to the College Malraux at school chucking-out time is notorious in this respect.

But not today.

Obviously the local constabulary is a keen reader of my pages because today we have one of Macron’s Finest on duty keeping an eye on things, including, one assumes, the wild parking.

If everyone can park properly in the free car park round the corner when there’s a copper on duty, why can’t they do it all the time?

Only one thing remained to be done before I could clear off home.

We have a visitor in the harbour this afternoon. One of the Jersey freighters, Normandy Trader, has come into port on the morning tide.

She’s been in a couple of times since we last saw her but the ship is very busy with plenty of work so there have been some really rapid turn-rounds just recently. She’s been in like Flynn and out again on the same tide which means that I’ve not been lucky enough to be present to snatch a photograph.

We’ve not seen Thora, the other Jersey freighter, for a while either. Things must be hotting up with the run-in to Brexit.

Back in the apartment I put the oven on to heat up and when it was warm enough, I bunged the bread inside.

Taking the ginger and lemon mix off the heat, I put it in the whizzer, added two tablespoons of honey and the lemon juice that I had decanted earlier and then whizzed it all around into a nice pulpy syrup. Then put it into a bottle with some turmeric.

When the bread was cooked I tipped the loaves out onto a wire rack to cool down.

And here are the finished product. The bread is cooling down on the rack, the carrots are now freezing nicely in the freezer and the bottle of lemon and ginger cordial is in the fridge.

And the cordial is delicious too. I tried a sample of it just now.

Tea was a burger on a bap with baked potatoes (I did them in the oven while I was baking the bread) followed by apple crumble and soya coconut dessert.

That was the cue to nip out for my evening walk and runs. We’ve seen the beautiful sunset this evening, and I reckoned that while I was out there I would take a photograph of the Rue du Nord and the Place d’Armes.

You can’t see very much of my own building, but in the background to the right is the College Malraux, the local High School.

And, of course, you can see some of the decaying medieval wall that is fenced off to stop people putting themselves at risk by walking close to it.

It’s one of four parts of the wall that are fenced off right now and there seems to be no effort being made to fix them, which is a shame. The whole place is falling to bits.

From the rue du Nord I ran on along the footpath, walked a while to catch my breath and then ran on along the Square Maurice Marland.

While there was nothing particular going on as far as terrestrial objects go, there were huge flocks of birds taking off, flying around in a couple of circles and then landing again – only to take off again and repeating the process ad infinitum.

It’s difficult to make assumptions of course but it seems to me that they are practising their formation flying en masse with all of the young newly-born fledgelings ready for their flight south in a couple of weeks time.

There were hundreds and hundreds circling around, so I stopped and watched them for a while and then ran on home.

But with it being quite light this evening you are probably wondering why I’m out and about so early. The truth is that there’s football on the internet kicking off at 20:45 – Newtown v Caernarfon Town in the JD Cymru (Welsh Premier) League and I wanted to be home in time for the kick-off.

It wasn’t a very exciting match and, to be quite frank, these two teams are not going to be up there challenging for the honours at the end of the season.

The fire has gone out in Caernarfon and their central defence was somewhat conspicuous by its absence. Newtown were probably slightly the better side but their attack was rather wayward and they failed to take full advantage.

However Caernarfon ended up winning 3-2, which surprised me considerably, but it was down to one moment of magic from Paulo Mendes, another from Noah Edwards (aided by some miserable Newtown defending out by the corner flag) and some excellent work from Mike Hayes, who Bala will end up regretting releasing.

It’s now long after 03:00 and I’m still not tired so I’m carrying on working and I’ll switch off the alarms for the morning. I’d written half of the speech for my radio programme this afternoon so I can finish that off and then get on with the internet web lesson that I missed.

Monday 14th September 2020 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether this has been a good day or a bad day.

When the third alarm went off this morning I was still in bed but surprisingly, I actually sprung up out of bed and sat on the edge. I’ve no idea what happened there – the “springing up” bit, I mean.

And neither will you when I tell you that I was still up and about at 01:40 this morning too. Having a lie-in is one thing but not when it adjusts my body clock quite like this.

As usual these days, it took an age for the bed to stop spinning so that I could get off, and once I’d gathered my wits I had a listen to the dictaphone.

We started off with a voyage that went on for ages and ages. I thought at first that it was a dream about football but it’s not. It took me a while to think about what it was actually about because when I tried to dictate it, it had all gone completely out of my head for a while but suddenly it all came back to me, as the skunk said when the wind changed.

It was actually about skiing. We were all going skiing, a huge group of us with a couple of friends of mine from the Wirral. I had some people whom they knew from the past but couldn’t remember very well some of the people. We’d all met up and having a ski around in the mountains. I was explaining to them my favourite ski runs particularly in the summer when there was still snow up in the mountains and skiing was still possible. We were making plans to all go and they were asking me “did my friends like this? Did my friends like to stop for regular breaks?” All this kind of thing. I hadn’t really got round to telling them that there was only me who was interested in going with them to do this. This conversation about my favourite ski runs in this mountain went on – you get to the top and you get the drag lift up here and you take this nice beautiful red run all the way down here. This went on for ages. Then it was time for break and we were sitting around. I was waiting at a table with this particular group. People were asking “do we want to continue? Do we want to go on?” I said “my group hasn’t asked for any food yet” so I said to them “do you have any requests? And make sure that they are physically possible”. Everyone burst out laughing but no-one actually asked for anything.

A little later it was a beautiful afternoon and I was walking around the little park/lawn place by the Boulevard Vaufleury and is this the first time that I’ve dreamt about Granville? Even though it was beautiful there was no-one really taking advantage of it except a group of schoolkids doing physical exercises under the supervision of a teacher who might have been called Taylor. There were people discussing a murder and whether a certain guy had done it and someone else chimed in “well they’ve got the wrong Taylor there haven’t they?” to which everyone wondered what he was meaning. I’m not quite sure where it went after that.

Not only that, I attacked a few of the arrears and I’m slowly whittling them down. As well as that, while I was listening to this week’s radio programme before I sent it off (I did remember), I spent an hour or so on the arrears of photos for July.

Having sent off the broadcast, I extracted the digital record turntable. Not being able to find the software for it, I had to hunt it down on the internet. But once it was all installed and connected up, it seemed to work quite well and I was able to record an album – the one that I wanted to record.

The only downside is that it recorded in mono. That’s not as big a deal because I can convert it into stereo. It was true mono too – not just one track of a stereo recording, so the fault either lies with the album (it might be a mono recording) or with the settings that I’m using. I shall have to check.

But once I’d done it, I was able to use part of it to complete some old stuff that I have from another time in order to recreate a rock concert that I had seen in 1971. That took the rest of the day but now it’s a nice live concert of almost an hour, including the legendary track about which I shall one of these days recount a very long story.

As usual, I went out for my afternoon walk. And in the heat too. My thermometer at home was showing 29°C and it felt like it too.

The crowds of people who were out there were enjoying it too. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many people out there on a working day. Not so many people out a sea today though, which isn’t really all that much of a surprise. But this boat was out there again, towing a dinghy behind it this time.

It’s been a couple of times that I’ve seen it now and I’ve still not been able to work out what it is and who owns it.

But anyway I carried on around the headland to the other side and there I was treated to an interesting nautical danse macabre.

The lifeboat was coming out of its berth in the port de plaisance and it crossed the mystery boat right outside the harbour. We had a couple of toots on a siren and then a complicated manoeuvre as they avoided each other.

The mystery boat, which has an interesting heavy-duty crane in the bows, then carried on into the Port de Plaisance. And I carried on home.

There was the session of Welsh and the time on the guitars and then I stopped for tea. Stuffed pepper followed by my delicious apple crumble with the left-over ice-cream out of one of the containers in the freezer. I need to make some more room in there.

It was still stifling hot when I went out for my evening walk and runs.

There were quite a few people about this evening here and there which is hardly surprising given the heat. There was a heat haze out to sea so the view wasn’t as clear as it has been just recently.

However the view of the promenade at Donville-les-Bains along the coast was particularly impressive tonight and the photograph that I took came out rather well.

The Rue du Nord on the right of the photo has come out rather well and on the left you can see the red lights on the wind turbines round somewhere near Cerences.

But my reverie was disturbed by a noise coming from down below on the beach so I had a look over the wall.

Pitch-black is one thing for most of us but for young people it’s something else. These two down here checking messages on their mobile phones seemed to be having a very enjoyable time. And why not?

As for me I walked up to the old gate in the walls and then ran down the path towards the viewpoint over the Plat Gousset.

But I didn’t get very far and actually had to break off my run which disappointed me, because the excitement yet isn’t over.

As I was running down the path I was overtaken by a helicopter that flew along the coast and then went to ground down near the promenade at Donville-les-Bains.

“This is a strange time of the night to be having your chopper out” I mused to myself, and then carried on with my run. On reflection, the helicopter is quite probably the local air-sea rescue machine.

Nothing much else happened so I headed home. I managed my three runs although I do have to say that I never ever felt less like it. Having crashed out for 15 minutes after tea has taken its toll.

Tomorrow it’s Welsh class so I need to do some more revision, and then there’s the concert to finish off, followed by the missing week of my internet course.

Then at last I can turn my attention to other stuff. And not before time either.

Sunday 13th September 2020 – WITH IT BEING …

… Sunday today I had a lie-in as usual.

And while you admire some photos of beach scenes from this afternoon’s beautiful weather, let me just mention that while a lie-in is one thing, 11:40 is something of an exaggeration.

Even when going to bed is as late as 02:30 and still not being able to go asleep straight away (despite the comfortable clean sheet), I was still hoping to be up and about long before then.

Consequently the most important part of the day was wasted away as I lay sleeping in my bed.

Once I’d gathered my wits (which took longer than you might expect given the small amount of wits that I have still remaining) I attended to the dictaphone.

Last night we were round in Berlin in May 1945 just at the moment when the city was about to fall. We were there urging everyone to get away as far as they could. A lot of people refused. They were thinking that it wasn’t going to be any problem at all. Someone was even saying that it would be things like probably they’d just issue little notes like “get your hair cut” or something like that. I exploded with disbelief because I knew exactly how the Russians were going to behave once they had taken control of the city. No civilian should be expected to suffer anything like that at all. I was just so unbelievably annoyed by the attitudes of the average Berliners who refused to do anything to save themselves.

It sounds rather like the UK and Brexit, doesn’t it?

There are still plenty of arrears to be dealt with, and I had time to deal with three of them. The backlog is disappearing slowly. This time next year I might be somewhere near catching up.

Apart from that I had a very quiet day and didn’t do too much else.

There was the usual afternoon walk of course. And today I went around the medieval city walls instead of around the headland.

The weather was gorgeous and the view was magnificent. All down the coast you could see for miles, just like the other days. The Channel islands, and Jersey were as clear as a bell despite being 58 kilometres away and the town of St Helier was easily visible with the naked eye.

On the photograph even the tall buildings on the quayside came out quite clearly.

There were crowds of people out there today enjoying the beautiful weather and who can blame them?

We’ve already seen all of the people on the beach at the Plat Gousset and also just outside here at the foot of the steps. There were plenty of people in the water there, as we have already seen, and there were also quite a few clambering up onto the diving platform and leaping off.

That’s something that we’ve seen quite often, but what is new about all of this is that the lifeguards are there too – two of them sitting on a paddleboard in the immediate vicinity keeping a close eye on the proceedings.

Having observed from the viewpoint over the Place Marechal Foch the crowds in the water and on the beach down on the Plat Gousset, I headed off.

Of course with the crowds, I didn’t run across the Square Maurice Marland but walked across instead. And as I was doing so, I saw a rather large yacht come sailing into the inner harbour.

My first thought was that it was Spirit of Conrad coming into the harbour. It certainly looked quite like it and so I wondered where she had been.

But on closer examination it turned out not to be at all.

Leaving aside the fact that Spirit of Conrad was already moored in the harbour, this boat has a very large solar panel on the stern.

And that makes me think that I’ve seen this yacht before because I recognise the solar panel. But I can’t think of when and where and I certainly can’t remember the name.

Incidentally, Joly France I is there moored up against the harbour wall. It can’t be all that busy out on the Ile de Chausey today which is quite surprising.

Having said that, however, there was still plenty of business today going across to the island.

As I watched the boats in the harbour, around the headland came Joly France, the older one with the larger upper deck superstructure and smaller windows. And, of course, without the figure “1” next to the name on the front underneath the windows.

You can see the crowds on there too. It looks to have been really busy today and I bet that there isn’t very much in the way of social distancing going on aboard.

But never mind all of the people on board the boat in the water, what about all of the boats actually in the water?

The Baie de Mont St Michel is crowded again today, just like yesterday. All kinds of beautiful boats out there but what particularly caught my eye was this lovely collection of yachts, sails billowing in the breeze and other extremely poetic metaphors.

None of them that I particularly recognise of course. Loads of people come here with their boats in trailers from all parts of north-west France.

So we’ve seen crowds of people walking, crowds of people on the beach, in the sea, on board boats and everything. But I’ve not mentioned anything about the air yet.

Plenty of movement up in the air today too, including the microlight powered hang glider that we’ve seen on a couple of occasions just recently.

Back at the apartment I sorted out a pizza base. I’d taken a ball of dough out of the freezer earlier so as soon as I came back I flattened and rolled it and put it on the baking tray to sort itself out.

As it overhung the edges I adopted the simple expedient of folding the overhang back into the pizza tray.

While that was settling down I made an apple crumble. being rather extravagant with the mixture I ended up with far too much so I had to make two. With not enough apples I had to use some of my eaters.

As to what they came out like, I really don’t know.

Once the crumbles were in the oven I assembled the pizza and then cooked it in the oven. It came out really well and the edges were perfect. I’ll have to fold them over next time too.

However, so filling was it that I didn’t have room for any crumble. That’s going to be as of tomorrow.

There was nothing much going on outside tonight for my evening walk.

The sunset (even though the sun had long since sunk below the horizon) was really nice this evening and it was so clear that all of the lights were clearly visible.

Nothing else of note so I completed my lap around, including my three runs, and then came home.

Back to work tomorrow and there’s plenty to do. There’s just getting to be more and more building up and I really need to get myself moving.

One thing that I’m going to have to deal with is the situation about my LPs. I’m hoping too have a go at recording them and there’s one that I particularly want to do for my radio programme.

Always assuming that I remember to send it off this week.

Saturday 12th September 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a photograph of an old car on these pages?

It’s not very long, of course, but nevertheless it’s still nice to see them when they are out and about. And, interestingly, the last few old cars that we have featured on these pages have been Jaguars and today, we came across another one.

This one is the cream of the crop, to be sure. It’s one of the classic XK-series of Jaguars and if my memory serves me correctly, it is an XK-140.

If I could have my choice of cars to come home with me, this one would be pretty close to the top of the list.

When I was a kid, I always dreamed about owning one of these but today it would cost a King’s ransom. This one was parked up on the car park of the LeClerc supermarket when I went to do my shopping this morning.

And, much to my surprise, despite the fact that the supermarket was crowded, there was just me and one other person admiring it. That’s a real shame because it’s worth much more than that.

What else was a real shame was that I missed the third alarm. 07:40 when I finally crawled out of bed.

So while you admire the activity that was taking place in the area this afternoon, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

And it really was a busy night too. No wonder that I couldn’t haul myself out of bed at 06:00. I probably wasn’t even here.

To start off the events we were on board ship last night and playing a real pantomime of pirates, that kind of thing. I was the hero and someone else was my sidekick pirate who was Irish and speaking in an Irish accent and had to go round camping up all of this thing about priates and Irish in it. We decided to do the scene again but this time with me as the Irish pirate thing but there was no time to learn the lines so I just went away and ad-libbed. At the crucial moment I forgot my accent which caused everyone to laugh and was embarrassing to me as I couldn’t recapture the comic accent after that. When this finished they talked about how this would have been presented in the Middle Ages. Someone actually produced a Middle-Ages speech guide from the 15th Century, round about then which basically used speech bubbles and so on. It was a very complicated way of doing it and of course you wouldn’t expect to follow the play by reading the speech bubbles as it was just so complicated. but I was being interrogated in this by someone or other almost as if it was real. I’m sure that there was much more to it than this as well but I’m blowed if I can remember it.

Later on there was something about a series of magic wands last night but I can’t remember much about that either. There was however one called a Disravu and predicted the future itself, found in the USA in a shipwreck and was supposed to be extremely elderly, something to do with St Paul. Marianne was with me last night and we were getting ready to go out. She said she was going to take her only two jackets with her and save her third for tonight when we went out. I thought that that was presumptuous of her. She went off and the postman appeared. He was obviously sticking stuff in the letter boxes down the end of the lane. As he turned round a black CA Bedford taxi pulled out of the side verge and nearly forced him off the road. There were a couple of other people looking at the horses as well. I went out but I remembered that I didn’t have a mail box so I looked around to see where he might have lodged the letters. It occurred to me that maybe there wasn’t any post for me – whether it was for someone else, a neighbour in the area. The two young kids who were with me and Marianne came down the drive in a sort of fancy dress, chanting and singing. I pretended to be scared. Then Marianne put in an appearance.

Later still I found myself again last night dictating a dream without the dictaphone in my hand, thinking that I had it in my hand and wrestling with it to switch it on, all that kind of thing to get it to record. But of course it wasn’t in my hand so I couldn’t. It’s not the first time that this has happened either.

But when i finally did get round to switching it on to record I’d forgotten what it was that I was going to talk about. It was something to do with a furniture removal and I can’t remember if it was Hans but we had to go into the East of Europe, sitting outside this row of houses trying to work out which one we had to visit. We were in somewhere like Albania and all the car registration numbers were weird. We were watching them and I was making a particular note of them. We saw these people pull up with a trailer loaded up with stuff on it. We watched them for a couple of minutes getting it into the driveway and starting to unload it. In the end we said “right, that must be them”. We got up and walked down to them. Hans got there first and shook hands. When I got there 30 seconds later Hans had gone. There was just a big cow that came round trying to push everyone around. Of course I don’t like big animals so I was rather uncomfortable about this idea.

And we haven’t finished yet either.

Even later on we were all rehearsing for a music competition like we did for the last night on the boat in September last year. At first I thought that I was being excluded by this group of people but then they started to include me and STRAWBERRY MOOSE and sit down and discuss the plans. There was one girl, an Indian girl who they were trying to rope in who wasn’t really sitting down with us. She was wandering off somewhere and we had to go and fetch her back but no-one could remember her name. I’d written her name or someone else had written it down for me on a piece of yellow paper but I couldn’t find it. I could remember the cleaners picking it up. This got me into a panic about “what the hell am going to do about this girl’s name?”. I was searching my room all over for this piece of paper and then we started to sit and go through this list of songs that we were going to play. Luckily I was the only one with a guitar so it looked as if I was going to be the one who would be playing all the music.

Is it any wonder that I couldn’t crawl out of bed with all of that.

Following a shower and a machine-load of washing, I went out to the shops. Nothing much at all on offer in NOZ and nothing much from LeClerc either. Grapes at €0:99 per kilo was a must-have of course, and a pile of other fruit too seeing as it was cheap.

But if it hadn’t been for the Jaguar it would have been a pretty miserable morning.

Back here I hung up the washing and cracked on with a few more dictaphone entries from the backlog from when i was in Central Europe. One of these days I might actually be up to date, but that’s going to be several weeks away yet.

There was the afternoon walk as usual today but I had a change of plan. I went around the city walls instead.

We’ve already seen plenty of activity out there this afternoon but there was even more that merited a special mention, like that rather large wind-powered ship on the horizon right out there in the centre of the photograph.

It certainly looked impressive and I wondered which ship it might be.

One ship that it won’t be is Marité.

She’s still in port tied up at her berth with a couple of people loitering around. It’s actually quite a surprise to see her here because we’re still officially in the tourist season and I would have expected her to have had a full schedule for this time of the year.

No point in going down to ask them because their stock reply will be “it’s all on our web site” and then they’ll go back to chatting amongst themselves and ignore the paying passengers.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

There wasn’t just a question of crowds of people on land and boats in the sea either.

The air was pretty full of aircraft of all different types this afternoon whizzing around above the town and the sea. Just like this microlight in fact. We’ve seen this a couple of times and I really am going to have to talk my way into a little trip around.

The autogyro that we’ve seen quite often wasn’t out there today as far as I could see. It was about the only local aircraft that we didn’t see up there today.

There wasn’t the possibility for me to go for my run across the Square Maurice Marland. I didn’t want to embarrass the crowds.

That meant that there was plenty of time to see what was going on, and whatever there was on the north side of the headland in the English Channel there was just as much on the south side, including La Granvillaise having a sail around the bay by Le Loup

You can always tell her when she’s side-on. She has her serial number, G90 (you can tell how old she is) on the sail.

Back home and just as I closed the door, Rosemary rang me so we had a good chat for about an hour.

The football season in Wales has now restarted and there was a live game on the internet. As US Granville were playing away today, I had the football on in here.

Connah’s Quay who won the Championship last year were at home against Bala Town and that was the broadcasted match. And, surprisingly, Connah’s Quay were distinctly second-best and when Bala took the lead, through something of a rather flukey goal, no-one was in the least surprised.

They failed to take advantage of their dominance and a rather shaky Nomads keeper, and they paid the penalty with what was almost the last kick of the game when Nomads winger Sameron Dool scored probably the most unlikely goal you’ll be ever likely to see. You can see it AT ABOUT 2:30:30

later on, I went for a walk outside.

it was too late for me to go out with the tripod which was a shame because the sky was really clear tonight. You might not think too much of this photo but you can see on the far right of the image the flash of light from the lighthouse at Cap Frehel 70 kms away.

There were all of the street lights from down the Brittany coast too, as far as St Cast le Guildo where we stayed for a night on Spirit of Conrad

My walk continued around the headland and along to the viewpoint over the chantier navale.

There was no change in the occupancy but it did occur to me that I haven’t taken a proper night-time photo of the place just recently so I put that right.

And having done that I carried on home. Complete with 3 runs of 900 paces in total to fit in with my attempts to recover some of this fitness that I had back in May.

It’s now gone 02:00 and I can’t sleep at all which is a surprise seeing as I haven’t crashed out today yet. Luckily tomorrow is Sunday and a lie-in so that I can recover.

Then Monday, back to work again.

Friday 11th September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what has happened this week. I really don’t.

With all of this pressure that I seem to have put myself under with doing these radio programmes, it seems that I overlooked to actually send the one in for this weekend.

Luckily they had something in the pipeline, but it’s really pointless me doing all of this work if I’m not going to send it in. It’s pretty much a waste of time.

And not only that, it seems that I’ve also overlooked to do my second week of internet course.

What with one thing or another, it’s been a pretty miserable week and I’m going to have to be doing better than this.

At least I managed to be out of bed before the third alarm. Sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the world to stop spinning round so that I could get off.

During the night I’d been in hospital and there had been some kind of operation. I was eventually allowed up. Someone from the hospital phoned me up to see how I was. They were interested to know if I was capable of doing my own shopping and they asked me about my plans. I said “the nearest LeClerc is 20-odd kilometres away so are you happy that i’m going to be cycling 40 kilometres just to go to the shops?” but they didn’t reply very much. It was a very non-commital answer that I had from them. The woman said that she lived in a small town where the nearest supermarket was only a minute or two away by car so she could do all her things like that. That didn’t help my matter very much. As I was walking around I came across a pub. It was a Sunday morning not quite before lunchtime. The pub was on a second level higher up. There were a few people whom I knew in there. I thought “should I go and have a drink?” but then though “that’s a stupid thing to be doing, going drinking”. So I carried on walking and came to the second one and there were even more people whom I knew in there. One of them was a boy whom I knew in school and with whom I shared a flat for a short while later. There was a group of about 4 boys and they were playing a few songs. On bass was another boy who was in my class – someone with whom I had very little contact whatever so how come I suddenly remembered him? I was extremely jealous because they were playing a couple of numbers that we used to play. I thought that they were going to steal a march from our bow and get themselves established in this pub.

While I was at it, I transcribed a few more days’ worth of dictaphone notes from the pile of arrears. There are still 47 entries remaining that cover a three-week period of my voyage to Central Europe.

Apart from that it’s been another slow day with something of a lack of motivation and an excess of fatigue. I’ve finished all of the arrears of photos from June and I’ve now started on those from July.

Only three days from my trip down the Brittany coast in Spirit of Conrad remaining, and then I can start on the photos from Central Europe. I’ve already done some of those but there is still a huge pile to do.

And then there are the photos from my two trips to the Arctic.

At least I managed to remember to book my trains and accommodation for my trip to Castle Anthrax. That’s one thing. Here’s hoping that I remember to print out everything and that my appointment isn’t cancelled.

We had the usual interruptions this afternoon too.

The afternoon walk was one of them of course. There were crowds of people out there today walking around in the beautiful weather. Crowds of people on the sea too. Plenty of small boats out there such as this speedboat that was roaring past.

Nothing in the way of large boats though. No Joly France no fishing boats and no Channel Island freighters. It seems to be quite quiet out there in that respect these days.

There was plenty of activity in the air too.

Our autogyro was flying around but rather too far out of range to take a decent photograph. This aeroplane here was flying quite high but with the NIKON D500 and the BIG NIKON ZOOM LENS I could take a good photo of it, and even tell you what it is.

According to the official register, it’s a Robin DR400 180 light aeroplane.

Incidentally, you are quite lucky to actually see it. On 22nd May 2019 it suffered an engine failure and crash-landed in a field near Eurodisney. Luckily no-one was hurt and damage was said to be only minor.

It could have been much, much worse.

It was no less busy around the southern side of the headland in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

This beautiful yacht was on its way around and into the port de plaisance this afternoon. Just one of several small boats out over there this afternoon.

But apart from that, there wasn’t very much else going on. It was actually quite quiet as far as excitement went. I slowly wandered on home.

Much of the remainder of the afternoon was spent revising my Welsh ready for the start of my course next week. but shame as it is to admit it, I fell asleep on the chair again. To such an extend that I missed half an hour of my guitar practice.

Tea tonight was taco rolls with the remainder of the stuffing from yesterday’s pepper, lengthened with a small tin of kidney beans.

But while I was preparing it, I noticed plenty of movement outside at the Public Rooms. The lifeboatmen, sauveteurs de mer, were congregating outside the building.

As an aside, later on in the evening the band stuck up and there was a lot of music and noise coming from the building.
I enquired as to what was going on there.
“We’re holding a Lifeboatman’s Ball” came the reply.
“Well for God’s sake let go of it” I urged. “He’s making far too much noise!”

Later on I went for my evening walk around the walls.

The lights of Jersey were twinkling quite brightly in the distance and I took a couple of photos of them with the camera. Unfortunately, with them being hand-held and in the dark, they didn’t come out very well and I discarded them.

From there I ran on along the path and then across the Square Maurice Marland.

The roadworks in the Rue Notre Dame were finished and the barriers and traffic lights dismantled. I walked past them and carried on around the walls.

But what caught my eye tonight was how nice the port area and the town looked in the streetlights, with the water tower on the skyline in the background just to the right of centre.

The big wheel was looking particularly nice so I reckoned that I had better photograph it tonight. This is going to be the last weekend that it’s here this year

But I’m not quite sure what was going on here.

There were two people with a rather large briefcase and a couple or portable radios hidden away in a corner up on the walls. i’ve no idea what they were doing and they certainly weren’t too keen to enter into conversation.

Having observed them for a couple of minutes I ran on home. My three runs of about 600 or so metres in total once more. There’s only Saturday that I’ve missed in this respect but then again I’ve been well over 120% of my day’s activity ever saturday that I’ve missed.

it’s Saturday tomorrow and US Granville are playing away. I have shopping to do of course and I’m hoping that I remember everything. I’m having a really bad time right now and I don’t know what i’m going to do about it.

EPIC HALL

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

Friday 25th September 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

Thursday 24th September 2020 – NO PRIZES …

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 – NOW HERE’S A THING .

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Monday 21st September 2020 – I DUNNO …

Sunday 20th September 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY …

Saturday 19th September 2020 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

Friday 18th September 2020 – I’VE MANAGED …

Thursday 17th September 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

Wednesday 16th September 2020 – AS I WAS SAYING …

Tuesday 15th September 2020 – DESPITE NOT …

Monday 14th September 2020 – I’M NOT SURE …

Sunday 13th September 2020 – WITH IT BEING …

Saturday 12th September 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Friday 11th September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

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