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Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

Before sewing up the hole in your pocket, make sure that you’ve left nothing down inside the lining, because once it’s in, it’s in for good.

Yes, pride always comes before a fall, doesn’t it? Well, actually, that’s a misquote from Proverbs 16:18 which states “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”. But even that’s correct as well.

But never mind that. here’s an exciting photograph.

It’s not every day by any means that the local wildlife co-operates with the photographer. In fact, wildlife, children and females are notorious for never doing what you want them to do when you want them to do it. Like my friend who once proudly told me “one word from me, and my wife does exactly as she likes!”

But here, we have a seagull doing a very passing resemblance of a dive bomber pulling out of a dive having dropped a bomb on something onshore.

And you’ve no idea just how long I had to wait to take this photo.

And that’s not the only piece of wildlife that appeared in my photos today.

This seagull bottom left appeared by accident, making a really good photobomb as I tried to take a photo of Joly France pulling out of the harbour and heading off with passengers this afternoon for the Ile de Chausey.

A good 10 minutes I was waiting there too for there to be a calamity with Joly France having to negotiate a flotilla of yachts just outside the harbour.

But she made a clean getaway without colliding with a yacht or sinking a speedboat, much to my dismay.

However, there is some good news about clean getaways, and that is that even though today is a Sunday and a lie-in with no alarm, I made a clean getaway from my bed by 08:10 this morning.

So don’t ask me what happened there because I’ve no idea. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been days when I can’t even manage that when I’m supposed to be getting up early.

During the night I’d been on my travels, right enough.

I’m not too sure about what was happening for the first part of the night but it certainly involved a cricket match on the beach and the limit of the field was like a hexagon and there were people standind at each angle of the hexagon to field the ball.
Later on there had been a new EU ruling for the removal of trees. We’d planted a double row of cypress leylandii down the edge of a field next to a main road so the decision was taken to pull up one of the rows. I had to be there with a tractor and my father was there with someone else – a girl. She was in charge of this operation so I had been given instructions as to where I was to drive this tractor and go down and pull these trees. There was also at about every foot or something like that, chicken in rosemary with potatoes in rosemary fried in oil and she wss taking away the meals as well, except for one every so many when she was just taking out the hot potatoes. I was intrigued by what was going on so I asked her about this. She replied “ohh yes we’ll be making many friends with this job.” The whole point and purpose of this job totally bemused me and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. Anyway it wasn’t my father, it was a friend of mine who was there with this girl and that reminded me of something that had happened a little earlier. He was due to come round to visit me the previous day at 10:30. I’d been doing something, I can’t remember what, but it involved tidying up this hotel. I was with another guy and we were tidying this up. He suddenly said “do you have any beds in this hotel?” I asked “why, are you tired?” and it turned out that he was. he’d been on work since 04:00 and he wanted to go off and have a sleep somewhere. She – the owner of the hotel – found him a bed and I carried on. I noticed a stain on my jumper and had to go and wash this stain out. I had to find two or three different bathrooms before I could find it. So I was there taking off my jumper, washing out this stain. I was hearing all of this noise in this hotel and I’d been interested in staying here because it was near to where I used to go quite often but when I heard all the noise coming from the guests in there I thought that I’m glad that I didn’t. The we were walking through the streets of Manchester, the back streets round near where that hotel was where I used to go to when I had the coaches and I suddenly realised that my friend was to have come round at 10:30. but actually I had been at home at 10:30. Then I realised that we had actually finished that hotel job and we had been home, and it was 10:40 when we had set out again.So yes, we had been there at 10:30 and he hadn’t turned up. When he turned up with this girl about these trees and removing these potatoes and meals he didn’t say anything about us not being there the previous day so I imagined that for some unknown reason he just hadn’t come.

But don’t ask me what I’ve done today because I don’t really remember doing anything. I had a really lazy day, to which I’m entitled every now and again of course.

But it was such a beautiful day today that I had to go out, of course.

And it goes without saying that I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the sun at lunchtime. El Moggo was up there sitting on his thrid floor windowsill taking in the rays, looking as if he owned the place, which he probably did.

It looks as if he had seen something down below, so here’s hoping that he didn’t decide to pounce.

With it being such a beautiful day I took my butties to go and sit on the wall above the harbour and see what was going on down there.

And just as I arrived, so did one of the Joly France boats coming back from the Ile de Chausey. It’s the older one with the smaller window and doesn’t have the step in the stern, as you probably noticed in one of the photos above as it was pulling out.

And have I noticed the crane in the bows before? I’m sure that i might haven but I don’t recall it being extended like that while she’s been sailing.

Much to my surprise she didn’t pull up at the ferry terminal as she would normally do, but at the harbour wall.

In all the time that I’ve lived here I’ve never seen the ferries moor there. And it’s interesting that she’s there next to Chausiais who hasn’t moved from that impromptu berth fora few days now.

That makes me wonder if they are still working on something over at the ferry terminal that is stopping the boats mooring there. But anyway, she did pull over tothe ferry terminal to load up and then she cleared off.

And that was far from being all of the excitement for today.

With living in civilisation as I do these days, old cars are few and far between. It’s not every day that you see them, but when you do, they certainly are interesting, like this car, which I believe might be a Morgan.

Not the old Morgan three-wheeler with the JAP V-twin engine in front, for one of which I would give all that I own and more besides quite happily, but something much more modern.

Always assuming that it is a Morgan of course, because these days there are so many kit cars around that are clones of something famous. So you can never be sure.

It went off down the road, closely followed by this machine.

Once more, this could be anything, although the prancing animal on top of the radiator suggests “Jaguar”. In which case it might be one of the old “Swallow Sidecars” SS jaguars from the 1930s, although the front wings don’t look very Jaguar to me at all.

So I shall have to make further enquiries about this one too and report back.

But this is much more like the kind of scenery that I should be expecting.

He came roaring into the harbour as if the Hounds of Hell were clutching at his coat tails – avec le feu dans ses fesses as they say around here.

The people who had been picnicking next to me and now playing beach skittles on the grass were quite alarmed by it all.

After my butties I went back to my apartment and had a look (just a look!) at the next web page to be edited.

There was an unknown lorry on there that needed identifying so I posted it in a newsgroup that I follow that concerns itself wit abandoned lorries. And that I think was the sum total of my work today

The beautiful weather at lunchtime had made me feel like another ice cream so seeign as it really was a beautiful day, I decided to walk into town – the long way round – to go and pick one up.

And if you thought that the sea was busy earlier, then you should see it now. We’re quite used to long lines of vehicles towing trailers with boats thereupon queueing up down the street awaiting their turn to discharge their cargoes into the sea

The whole town become littered with cars and trailers parked up just about everywhere while their owners take to the waters.

Yachts are fine because they are beautiful and graceful – and silent.

That’s more than can be said for the speedboats and the other powered marine craft that are in the water and go round shattering the peace. And it can’t be much fun to be in a small yacht and hit the wake of a fast-moving boat like that.

But at least there’s no kayak out there right now. There have been one or two incidents just recently of kayaks being swamped for one reason or another, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

And it isn’t just on the roads or in the se or on the beaches and the lawns that we have the crowds of people.

It’s becoming pretty densely populated in the air too around here. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the flocks of the Birdmen of Alcatraz hovering above us like Nazgul, but there are one or two people who are fitting motors to their contraptions and roaring past overhead.

There’s no peace for the wicked, is there?

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen this machine on a few previous occasions too.

We first encountered it A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO during our visit to the Cabanon Vauban and we’ve seen it sporadically since then flying around and about. It’s certainly an interesting machine.

And reading what I’ve just been typing, anyone would think that I’m turning into a right grumpy old do-and-so in my old age.

But that’s far from being the truth. I’m the first to realise that all of these people coming here like this are actually bringing money into the town and the reason why we have so many facilities here is because we have so many visitors spending their money in the town.

We should all be grateful for that.

Not much chance of any peace and quiet anyway with the crowds on the beach.

This is one of the more inaccessible parts of the beach here. There’s a very long series of steep winding steps that come down the cliff to just there and you can see that the hordes have even swarmed onto here. And finding the gap in the wall that leads to the steps isn’t the easiest thing to do either

I shudder to think of what it must be like round at the Plat Gousset this afternoon

These persons here have found an ideal way to get themselves far from the madding crowd.

Nothing like an aqualung or snorkel and a pair of flippers and a spot of deep-sea diving for some peace and quiet.

But what’s interesting about this is what they are supposed to be doing. That area just there is uncovered during low tide and there’s nothing of any particular interest at that spot.

It’s not as if there’s a shipwreck or buried treasure or anything like that might attract the attention of a frogman – or frogperson as I suppose we have to call them these days and even if there had been, it could be accessed at low tide without even getting your feet wet.

At least there aren’t four skin divers down there

And so I continued on my way around the headland and down the old track into the port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been noticing just how clear the water in the sea has been just recently. I’ve seen much worse than this in the past in the harbour as well.

It’s a very rare event indeed to be able to see the bottom of the harbour when the tide is this far in. Nevertheless, it’s still not clean enough to entice me in.

The new pontoons that they have installed are proving to be quite popular.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw all of the seagulls enjoying them, and today with very few of the fishing boats being out, they are clustered around too.

But right on the extremem left of the photo the pontoons come to an abrupt stop. I wonder if they are going to continue along to the harbour wall.

Another mystery was solved here today as well.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw what looked like a vacuum cleaner nozzle down into the hold of one of the fishing boats and I speculated that it might be for sucking up the shellfish.

However, that’s not the case at all. I went to have a closer look and it is in fact an ice chute – for pumping ice into the hold of the boats presumably to keep the shellfish fresh

Picking up my ice cream (which was one of the reasons why I came down here in the first place) I went for a wander around on the other side of the harbour.

But while there were plenty of people milling around over there, there wasn’t anything that particularly caught my attention so I headed back for home.

It wasn’t easy though. The fine weather had brought everyone out and the streets were crowded with no thought whatever about social distancing. I really do hope that we don’t have a second wave of the pandemic because with people thronging around like this, it’ll spread liKe wild fire.

Back home, I was going to attempt something exciting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on Thursday I’d bought a pack of frozen strawberries. During the course of the day I’d had them out of the freezer to defrost.

Now that i was back, I made some pastry – and I do have to say that it came out perfectly because I could roll the ball around in my hands without any of the pastry sticking to my fingers.

With the rolling pin I flattened it out, put it in a pie dish, trimmed it off and stuck it in a hot oven. And with the excess pastry I made an apple turnover.

Meantime, being very brave, I burnt my bridges and made the Sunday pizza on the last of the shop-bought pastry rolls. It’s goign to be my own dough from now on.

When the pie base was cooked, that and the turnover came out and the pizza went in.

With the strawberries, I filled the pie and then prepared some agar-agar to pour over it so that it would set like a vegan gelatine, and stuck it in the fridge to set.

After I’d eaten my pizza, I looked at the strawberry tart and unfortunately, the agar-agar hadn’t set. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but this was not one of my triumphs. However, when I’ve finished the apple pie, I’ll attack that and see how it tastes.

On that note I went out for my evening run. Another struggle up the hill and down to the cifftop. It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier these days.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one little peccadillo that I have is to stick my nose into other people’s photo shoots. Not photo-bombing them bu to take photos of people taking photos.

And up on the lawn at the Pointe du Roc, which seems to be a very popular place for photo shoots these days, there was another one going on. So i couldn’t resist the temptation to join in with my own three ha’porth.

But you can tell what the weather was like this evening simply by looking at the crowds of people here.

There were parties of picnickers all over the place and more coming along to swell the numbers even as we speak. Not very good or the social distancing but who can blame them in weather like this?

Around the corner by the coastguard point I even bumped into one of my neighbours taking the air and we had a good chat for quite a while – and that was mainly for an opportunity to soak up the sun as well

From there I ran on all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and with my usual two resting places, ended up at the viewpoint at the rue du Nord.

But on one of my rests I happened to notice that the moon had already risen. And it really did look beautiful in the evening sky tonight.

Considering that I didn’t have the tripod with me – or even the monopod, the photo has come out really well. But I suppose that I ought to be making more of an effort to go out with the tripod one of these days and take some decent photos.

And I’ll have to work on the time-delay functions too. I’ve not used it yet on the NIKON D500

At the viewpoint at the rue du nord I stopped to catch my breath and then to have a good look around.

And as seems to be usual these days, we have the crowds on the beach enjoying the evening sunshine, and having a picnic too in the pleasant weather. They’ve certainly chosen a nice evening for it.

But one thing that I have noticed about the evening picnickers is that it always seems to be a different crowd in that spot. I don’t think that i’ve ever noticed the same group of people there consecutively. I think that if I had a group of people with whom I enjoyed picnicking, then in weather like this I’d be down there every night.

And the setting sun this evening was splendid. I recall a gasp of admiration from a couple of people who had followed me down to the viewpoint when they noticed it.

Still half an hour or so before it sets, and unfortunately I don’t have the time to spare to wait. I don’t know where all of my time goes these days.

Instead, I ran on back to my apartment to write up my notes.

While I was writing up the day’s activities, a piece of music came onto the playlist.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my computer is awash with music – a couple of thousand albums almost all digitalised these days after our ptoject of the winter – and there is music going on in this apartment from the moment I awaken until the moment that I go to sleep.

Some music though I have to be very careful about playing, and for various reasons too. Some songs I can’t hear at all, even if I happen to like them, and others I can only listen to when i’m in the right kind of mood.

A couple of songs in that latter group always seem to appear on the playlist when I’m in the wrong kind of mood to hear them and sure enough tonight, while I was “hiding in a room in my mind” as Kate Bush used to say, onto the playlist came THIS SONG.

Magnificent song though it is, it’s the kind of song that I have a great difficulty hearing, much as I want to. I’ll always end up playing it two or three times one after the other even though I know exactly what’s going to happen.

And on that note (well, we are talking music here), with my notes not even half-finished, I went to bed. I’ll finish these tomorrow.

Friday 29th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of today’s calamity – and before you ask, NO, I haven’t been baking today – I can tell you about my day today.

It was another unsuccessful day in the “getting up before the third alarm” stakes and I’m as sick of doing it as you lot probably are of me telling you about it.

But then, it wasn’t actually an early night last night (although I have had much later nights than this and still been up before 06:20) so it’s my own fault right enough.

And according to my dictaphone, I’d been on my travels too.

There was a group of kids playing cricket in the street. There was on particular couple, a boy and a girl, they boy hit the ball and the young girl ran up the hill after it, got it and threw the ball back. It went over beyond the batsman and I caught it. I decided “right, I’ll bowl the ball back to her past the boy”. But the first one I got I dropped it short and it landed right in front of my feet and bounced up so I caught it. The next time my arm went over my head as I went to bowl and was caught up in some wires, telegraph wires or something like that. While this was going on there was some kind of news item going on about the cricket and about a big cricket score but I can’t remember what now.

That wasn’t all either.

Although there was nothing else on the dictaphone, I had an image going round in my mind of a situation where at some point during the night I was with a girl and i wish that I could remember who she was. We were in a relationship but she was having all kinds of personal problems which were causing her to want to put an end to our relationship, but I was equally determined not to let it end and I was having quite a discussion with her in my car – a British right-hand-drive car too.

so I don’t know about that one.

With not getting up until … errr … 07:35, which is no good at all, everything was running dreadfully late.

Breakfast wasn’t until about 09:00 which meant that I didn’t start work until about 09:35.

And at first glance, it doesn’t look as if I’ve done very much. I’ve amended one page off one website to bring it up to modern standards.

That took longer than it might have done because it needed a considerable amount of rewriting. Another one that was written in 2008 and which hasn’t been edited at all since.

And in connection with rewriting a page a day off the other site, I’m about three quarters of the way through doing that.

That’s a page from 2001 and which has had a little desultory editing over the years since then. However, it’s long been overtaken by all kinds of events of all natures and a total rewrite is long overdue.

Furthermore, it’s now grown to such a size that it’s practically unmanageable. I’m trying to keep my pages down to no more than 30kb (that’s about 18kb of text) but this one is already at 49kb and growing rapidly.

It’s going to have to be split, and that means resurrecting a project that I started in 2007 and stopped some time round about 2010 – a list of web pages and cross-references to other pages.

That’s because if I do split the page, some of the cross-references are going to be wrong.

There were a whole variety of interruptions too during the day.

Lunch was one of them, of course, and I do have to say that even though my bread looks strange, it was absolutely perfect – felt like bread, tasted like bread, everything. Even the correct number of airholes.

The truth though will be whether I can do a second one like it, or whether this one was just a flash in the pan.

Round about 14:30 I went to fetch something from the living room.

And that was when I noticed, with a quick glance out of the window, that things aren’t what they were were supposed to be.

“What’s afoot?” I asked myself.
“About 30 centimetres” – ed

It seemed to me to be a good idea to go and make further enquiries

It was an absolutely, stunningly beautiful afternoon and I’m glad that I nipped out for a quick walk around.

And I can safely say without any fear of contradiction that I have never in my life seen the sea as clear and as transparent as this. It’s the kind of colour that you always associate with the Mediterranean, and reminds me of the week that I spent WITH TRIXI ON A GREEK ISLAND called Agistri.

We’ve seen a few photos just recently of the Baie de Mont St Michel and how the sand looked a lot more evident than it has been at low tide, but this is something altogether different.

There weren’t all that many people around this afternoon which is hardly surprising, given the acrid nature of the smoke.

But these people out here on jetskis were enjoying themselves. There were three of them altogether – the third one put in an appearance just after I had clicked the shutter. They looked as if they had come from the beach at Bréhal-Plage, that neck of the woods, but it wasn’t clear where exactly they were going to.

But as long as they were enjoying it, that was all that counts. They had the right kind of weather and I bet that the sea bed looked really good where they were.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago we saw a digger digging out years of accumulated sand out of the old tidal swimming pool.

And this is the result just here. You can see that it’s holding water – and holding it quite well too. And although there was no-one actually in it, there were several people loitering with intent around it.

As for the column of smoke, it was becoming thicker and thicker and we were being treated to several loud bangs too. “Oxygen cylinders” was my immediate thought.

But it wasn’t possible to see what was causing the smoke or where it was coming from. Too many houses in the way. But the sound of sirens from fire engines dashing to the scene told me that it was something major.

Despite having had my little walk around to check on the inferno, I still went out for my afternoon walk.

The tide was still well in and the fire was clearly still raging because the plume of smoke was thicker and there were fewer people around. Down on the rocks, though, it wasn’t too bad and this person here was quite unperturbed by all of the commotion going on around him

It did make me wonder whether he was fishing for herring. If so, and the wind veered round a few points to this direction, he’d finish with a lovely batch of kippers.

He wasn’t the only one out here getting his rod out.

My hat goes off to those two intrepid fishermen over there because there is no easy way of getting to that position. They must have scrambled over quite a few rocks and I hope that they will be able to scramble back.

And that reminds me. Yesterday’s emergency – nothing in the newspapers apart from a rescue of a couple of canoeists down near Carolles-Plage. I wonder if it was nothing but a training exercise.

But as for their canoeists -I wonder if they had been rescued because they lit a fire in their canoe. You have to know that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

There wasn’t as much maritime traffic today aswe have seen over the last few days and I’ve no idea why.

The fishing boats I can understand. They don’t want to end up with a hold full of kippers either. And it can’t have been much fun on that zodiac either, or the one being pulled along behind, if they’ve been round the corner in the smoke and fumes.

But we’ve not seen the yellow zodiac for a few days. It looks as if it’s departed as quickly and dramatically as it came here.

This was interesting though.

The little baby cabin cruiser thing drifting around out there just offshore. And drifting too, because if you look very carefully, you’ll see that the propellor of the outboard motor as out of the water and one of the crew looks as if he’s calling on his mobile phone.

Normandy Trader was supposed to be coming over today too, with a pile of stuff that should have gone to St Malo. But I didn’t see her.

Subsequent information told me that she had actually been in, made a dramatically rapid turn-round and gone back out again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that one of the things that I enjoy doing is taking photos of people taking photos.

There have been a couple of occasions were photographers have brought models up here to pose for the camera and we’ve managed to snap them. And there was another one her today – a heavily-tattooed woman taking a few photos of a young woman.

They were clearly having a good time, although I hoped that the young woman had a good sense of balance. That’s a 100-foot drop to her left.

So back here to make a few enquiries and it turns out that it’s “la Sphère”, the recycling centre in Donville les Bains, that’s gone up like Joan of Arc. And the explosions that we heard were a couple of gas cyliners and several tons of vehicle batteries.

More news follows.

The music course lost me completely in week 2. We were working on major scales, minor scales, Ionian, Doric and Seventh scales. Basically, every note might played in a particular key except a flattened 2 and a flattened 6 which, apparently, are never played at all.

And it’s a tribute to the course that while I might not be technically able to keep up with the proceedings, at least I know what a flattened 2 and a flattened 6 is, which is something that I didn’t know before.

And when I translate it all onto the bass guitar as I did with my hour on the guitar between 18:00 and 19:00, with triads and minor 7ths or major 7ths, it all makes perfect sense. So for things like that, the course is fulfilling its purpose.

Tea was one of the bean burgers on a bap with a baked potato, followed by a slice of apple pie and the last of the soya coconut dessert. My pie really is excellent and I did well with that

Back out for my evening runs tonight. There was a headwind but I pushed on regardless and made it all the way up to my breathing stop at the end of the hedge, and then down to the clifftop.

Around the corner in the Baie de Mont St Michel there was a huge line of these marker buoys going round almost in a circle. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single fishing boat anywhere that I could see

There were probably no more than half a dozen people out here too. The smoke was probably keeping them all away from this end of town

There wasn’t all that much pleasure traffic out there either.

This beautiful yacht caught my eye though. Just sitting there not doing all that much, out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel underneath the headland where the Chateau de la Crete is.

That’s what I call peaceful and relaxing and it made me quite envious. And I wonder if the person over there near the shore has anything to do with the yacht.

My run took me all the way down the Boulevar Vaufleury and round the corner to my marker. And then i walked back to the harbour to see what was going on.

And the answer to that was “nothing”. There was nothing at all moving about. Victor Hugo and Granville, the two Channel island ferries, are still tied up over there. The local restauranteurs have been telling me that they are allowed to reopen on June 2nd, and so i was wondering if that means that the ferries to the Channel islands will resume on that date.

There was something to say that they had given all of their stocks of snacks and drinks to the local food bank.

Because of my extra little walk this afternoon, my fitbit was showing 89% of my day’s activities.

Keen to push on to the 100% I ran round and up to the Eglise de Notre Dame de Cap Lihou and did a lap around the church. There’s a square around the back of the church with this cross in it and I wondered if that square was where the medieval market took place.

Crosses in the market place were quite common. They were the local assembly point and where the news was read out and announcements made.

So back round to the other side of the church.

And I hadn’t noticed this statue before. And you can see that it’s made of some material other than Chausey granite because there’s hardly a trace of erosion on the stone blocks, yet acid rain has really done for this statue.

When I was doing some research into an article that I was writing about CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE, it was interesting to compare the different rates of erosion of the hieroglyphics on the different needles, due to the different levels of acid rain.

So I ran on down to the Rue du Nord and the viewpoint there.

Nothing at all happening out at sea, although my picnickers were there again having a good time – and who can blame tham?

Nothing for me to hang about for so I ran on back to the apartment where I had to close all of the windows because the wind had indeed turned and the acrid smoke was now blowing right into my living room.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow and there’s a football match on the internet tomorrow after noon which I don’t want to miss

Mind you, if I don’t organise myself properly any time soon, I’ll probably still ba asleep at kick-off.

Thursday 28th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… all of the excitement that has been going on this evening – and is still going on even now judging by the noise just outside my window – just offshore in the English Channel, let me tell you about my day today.

It started off as we meant to go on – with me having yet another late night. Due primarily to me taking too much time to write out my notes from yesterday.

There weren’t any other distractions, which makes a change just recently.

And in accordance with usual procedures just recently, I missed the third alarm.

Not by very much, I have to say, but a miss is as good as a mile, as they say. Nevertheless, 06:30 is not an unreasonable time to be out of bed when I didn’t get into same until about 00:45.

Surprisingly, there was nothing on the dictaphone yet again. And I have the disctinct feeling or impression that at some time during the night I was somewhere else

It rather reminds me of the old story about the man who dreamed that he was awake. And when he woke up, he was!

After breakfast there were a few little things to deal with around here, and I even did some tidying up. But I still can’t find my magnifying glass.

And then a shower and weigh-in. And I’ve put on another 100 grammes. I’m not working hard enough on my health, I reckon. I have to be doing better than this.

With it being Thursday, that’s shopping day. And I hadn’t forgotten that I was going to go down to the port to see what was going on down there with the big cranes.

And the answer is that it’s not really evident. They’ve worked hard on the pontoons of course, and they’ve edged and trimmed them now, presumably with the bits and pieces of metal or aluminium that were on there the other day.

But with just one row of pontoons, with the supports poking through, that’s not really wide enough for people to pass carrying boxes of fish and the like.

We’d seen the traffic lights in the rue du Port and I wanted to see what they were for, seeing as they are still here but the cranes are gone.

Nothing to do with the cranes at all – just digging a trench across the road. It’s a company called Cegelec that’s doing the work so it’s likely that it’s something to do with electrical work.

There are some now power boxes on the pontoons, but I would have thought that they would have been connected into the existing circuit rather than having a new one.

When I was up on top of the cliff I’d noticed that Chausiais was moored up in the loading position underneath the big crane.

By the time I’d come down and walked along the harbour she had pulled away. There were several fishing boats pulling away from the quayside too so it looked as if at any moment the harbour gates are going to open and let everyone out.

As for me, I pushed on to the labroatory where I went to pay for my blood test last week and pick up my results.

And my blood count is down – by 0.3. Not that that’s any surprise. After all, I’ve not had my essential four-weekly treatment since January

At LIDL there were quite a few people – more than there have been for a while. There was nothing in the specials that I needed but even so the bill was somewhat large for a mid-week shop, due to the fact that I needed a lot of stuff.

But remember those frozen red fruits from the other week? They had bags of frozen raspberries in there today so I bought a pack. Somewhere lying around I have some agar-agar so I’m going to have a go at making a strawberry flan next week.

On the way back, I called at La Mie Caline for a dejeunette and then headed for home.

The harbour gates are now open and the queue of boats had long-since departed . It was now the turn of those coming in to pass through the gates, like this one is doing right now.

Back here, I had to shuffle things around in the freezer to fit the strawberries in and then, coffee in hand, I attacked a dozen or so of the photos from July 2019.

Right now, I’m back on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and just coming in to Reykjavik harbour on a grey and miserable Sunday morning.

Lunch was exciting because it was such a glorious day that I went and ate my butties outside, sitting on the wall overlooking the harbour.

And I wasn’t alone either, as you can see. Sometime during the course of the late morning while I was working on my photographs Thora has sneaked into port and tied up at the loading bay underneath the big crane where I had seen Chausiais earlier.

Word has reached my ear that there’s a strike on in the port of St Malo, and a lot of freight from there is being delivered here instead

It wasn’t just Thora and a fishing boat that was using the harbour either.

It looked as if the whole world and his wife was either coming or going in and out of the port today. Dozens of people were making use of the facilities in the glorious weather.

For ages I sat and watched them, and I was accompanied by a lizard. I bet they missed me last summer when I wasn’t here. In previous years I’d fed tham with my pear droppings.

Do you remember the big navy blue yacht that we saw the other night? I’m sure that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the photo.

She must have moved into here – or, at least, the Port de Plaisance – because here she is again taking advantage of the breeze that was blowing out to see.

But she didn’t hang around for long and disappeared out of my view. So I finished my butties and cme on back to the apartment.

While you admire more photos of this evening’s activities, I worked on my web pages.

Firstly I rewrote one of the pages on one of the websites – a project that I’ve started just recently.

And secondly, I treated a couple of pages on the other website to the new modernisation procedures. One of those pages had a substantial rewrite while I was at it because events have moved on since I first wrote it in 2008 and it’s one of those rare pages that has never had an amendment.

There was time to finish off this week’s accountancy course (next week, it’s Maths!)and then go for my afternoon walk.

Such a beautiful afternoon it was, and so I went off and snapped a beautiful photo of the marker light by the entrance to the harbour, with St Pair sur Mer and Kairon Plage in the background.

Crowds of people out there today. Restrictions here are being further lifted on 2nd June but you would be forgiven for believing that they have been lifted already, with the crowds who were out there.

Not just crowds of people either.

The tide is well on its way out and so the flocks of seagulls were jostling for position on the rocks ready to dive down onto the mudflats and scavenge for the shellfish.

It’s impressive how they seem to understand about tides and the like. Animal instinct is a wonderful thing and it’s a shame that most humans don’t use theirs.

My walk carried me on around the headland, past the chantier navale where there were still the two boats.

But I was intrigued by the work that was going on in the tidal harbour. There are mooring chains all over there, marked by buoys that presumably float the chains up and down with the tide.

These guys were cleaning out around one of the chains. It’s probably become bogged down in the silt and isn’t moving as it’s supposed to znd needs freeing off.

But you can tell that the schools are back, can’t you?

It’s chucking-out time at the High School down the road and the parents are here, parking on the pavement in a narrow road because, presumably, their little darlings are too tired to walk the extra 20 yards to the huge free car park just across the main road in the Boulevard Vaufleury.

As for me, I carried on with my walk and came back home

And you won’t believe this but me, not having played the piano since I was about 12 (and that’s over half a century) I can now play quite happily a 12-bar blues two-handed with Cmaj7 as the root chord in the American blues scale. It’s so impressive!

It did involve a little cheating – I had to label my keyboard (I have one of these 5-octave keyboards) so that I could see the notes at a glance rather than think about how they relate to middle C – but it was still pretty good and I completed the first week’s course with some kind of comfort.

What was even better was that for my hour on the guitar later, I sat down and worked out the note spacing for the blues scale and then did a half-hour of walking bass up and down the scale followed by half an hour of lead guitar solo

It seems to me that I’ve learnt more in an hour this afternoon than I have in about 50 years of playing guitar.

So week 2 tomorrow. And at this rate I might even catch up with the course. That’s rather more optimistic than yesterday, isn’t it?

Tea tonight was the leftover stuffing with kindey beans made into taco rolls, and a slice of my totally delicious and juicy apple pie – the best one that I’ve made so far.

Outside for my evening walk – and straight into controversy as when I finally reached the clifftop after my struggle up the hill I – and everyone else there – was buzzed by a helicopter.

We all stood and watched it for ages at it circled round and round and round the same spot, going lower and lower each time.

It’s the local air-sea rescue helicopter that regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen before, so the conclusion that we reached was that there had been an “incident” of some description.

We noticed, as you can see in this photo, that it’s attracted the attention of a fishing boat that has changed course and now come over to where the helicopter is.

A couple of minutes later, the lifeboat came around the corner to join in the fun.

So whatever it was that was going on, it was clearly important and I’ll ptobably find out about it tomorrow in teh newspapers.

So knowing that this wouldn’t be resolved in a minute I decided to carry on with my run and presumably by the time that I got round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord they will still be out there working.

The presence of the air-sea rescue operation wasn’t deterring the rest of the nautical craft.

Commercial operations would hardly be affected and it seems that leisure activities weren’t halted either. these guys in their open boat are still chugging on their way regardless of the commotion that was going on around them.

Back at the apartment I enlarged the image and I could see that they were loaded up with rods and lines and the rest of the fishing gear.

There was some excitement over at the ferry terminal too.

While Chausiais was out on her travels today, it looks as if someone, the little blue and white boat, has ppinched her berth and moored herself to it. That means that poor Chausias has had to go and moor herslf somewhere else, as you can see.

That certainly seems to be something new. I’ve never seen a boat moored there before and I’m not convinced that it’s a good place to moor either, with the force of the rising tide risking smashing her into the wall.

So I carried on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round and across to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

The lifeboat was there now, and the crew was alongside the rails presumably looking for something – or someone.

They were there for quite a while too. I stood and watched them for an age but it was clear that whatever they were looking for, they weren’t going to find it in a hurry.

And I was right to, for they were still at it long after I returned home.

And it’s no surprise that I wasn’t alone there either.

My picnickers were there again this evening. And out in force too. They must be multiplying or something because there seems to be more and more of them each night. If I remember correctly, we started off with four.

So I turned round and ran back home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow is a day with no planned interruptions (I say “planned” because we know all about unplanned ones). No accountancy course so I’m going to have a good go at the music course to try to catch up with the arrears. it’s certainly piqued my interest

But of course something is bound to happen to disrupt all of my plans. We all know how that works out.

Saturday 23rd May 2020 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day today.

Not that I’m complaining, because it’s all my own fault and I’m well-aware of that. Going to bed at about 01:00 or thereabouts and not being able to sleep for ages, and then expecting to be up and about somewhere in the vicinity of 06:00 is pushing it a bit in my state of health.

What was even more surprising was that I actually did make it out of bed by 06:00 too. Well – not exactly, but I certainly beat the third alarm by something of a comfortable margin and that’s astonishing as there have been times when I’ve not been able to do that even after a good sleep.

Plenty of time to go on my travels too. I was driving a Mercedes 800 series minibus last night. As I pulled up to a set of traffic lights in Crewe some woman came up and started to talk to me about the condition of the bus. She pointed out the chassis, in fact the front engine subframe which had corroded through in a few places. There was all kinds of little things, no speedo on the bus so someone had strapped something onto the speedo cable. It was quite clear that she was an official person although she didn’t produce any documents . I was waiting until she was goigng to make some kind of formal report before I asked to see them. She was generally pulling this bus to bits. Then she went and unscrewed the oil cap. As she did so a jet of hot oil and caught me right on the side of the body all down my clean white shirt. Of course it was really hot and in my anger and shock I shouted “you bitch”. She took a great deal of exception to that remark. In the meantime there were two guys standing nearby and they were making notes. They started to take my side in this matter and started to argue with this girl. I awoke in the middle of this which was a shame because I would have loved to have known where it was going.

There’s also the distinct impression too that there was much more too but I’m blowed if I can remember anything and there’s nothing on the dictaphone to help me.

After breakfast, I went shopping. First stop was at LIDL where I should have gone yesterday. Nothing of any great excitement there except that those nice vegan burgers were back and I didn’t have any room in the fridge.

Next was NOZ where the new hygene regulations are being enforced (it’s the only shop that has them). No-one is allowed in without disinfecting themselves and store-only trolleys, no private bags.

Just now I said that there was no room in the freezer. However when I first went to live in Belgium in 1992 all that I could get for vegan meals was a kind of soya steak in breadcrumbs which were delicious, but I’ve not seen them for years.

NOZ is renowned for having all kinds of end-of-ranges short sell-by stuff from all over the EU and there in the freezer were packs of these. €0:84 for a pack of two so I thought that I’d squeeze one in the freezer somehow.

At the checkout “there’s 30% off those” said the girl. So I went back for another packet regardless.

Things are looking up in LeClerc. Flour is now back on the shelves (so “Flour To The People”, everyone) and boxes of yeast are there too. Only boxes though – they are empty – having been stripped bare by the first visitors this morning.

Give it another three weeks and we might be somewhere with that.

Back here I had a coffee and put the frozen stuff away but that was all that I was good for. I was thoroughly exhausted by this point.

After lunch I had a go at a couple of web pages but crashed out – crashed out good and proper too and nothing was done at all.

At this point I went out and found that there was a wicked wind blowing away outside. I didn’t remember this earlier this morning.

It wasn’t very good for walking, that’s for sure, but as they say, “it’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good”. Someone was taking full advantage of the wind that was blowing and the heavy seas that were coming with it, and having a good old kitesurf.

He was the only one out there with his kite though. I think that any other kitesurfer must have had more sense than that.

The Birdmen of Alcatraz were absent from the air too. Even though the groundsman’s daughter would have had no difficulty getting off the ground in this wind, Heaven alone knows where she would have ended up.

There were however a few other sportsmen and sportswomen out there, like this group setting up as if to play beach volleyball. That should be exciting with this north wind blowing right off the sea.

It reminds me of the time that a couple of us played a game of table tennis aboard The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour in a Force 8 gale. That was … errr … challenging

While I was idling gazing out along the beach to see what was going on, my eyes fell upon this object.

At first I thought that it was a horse – after all, there are some horses that train on the beach – so I took a photograph with the aim of cropping it out and blowing it up (the photo, not the object) so that I could see more clearly.

It’s certainly not a horse, but apart from that I really don’t have a cue. What I’ll have to do is to wait until the tide is right out and go for a walk over there to see if it’s still there and if so, what it might be.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they’ve been ripping off the roof from a building in the Place Marechal Foch over the past few days.

Yesterday while I was passing I forgot to take any photos of it so today while I was down that end of the medieval walled town I leant over the ramparts for a closer view.

It looks to me if they are well-advanced with the work that they are aiming to do and if they start to put on the slates next week they should be finished in a few days.

Mind you, the trimming of and edging takes some time to do and then there’s the tidying up of the work and removing the scaffolding.

My walk took me through the Square Maurice Marland, where the abandoned clothign was still there in the waste bin, and out to the other side where I had a look over the wall and down to the harbour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen some real heavy engineering stuff around here just recently, and there are a couple of big diggers that have recently put in an appearance. But what I want to know is what they are going to do with these?

This is the kind of stuff that you call serious engineering and they haven’t come here to play about – of that i’m pretty certain. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.

Back here I stirred a few papers around but didn’t accomplish all that much. My hour on the guitar was interesting because with my new way of playing with the bass it’s much more exciting and the half-hour passes quite quickly.

For the half-hour with the 6-string, I’ve started to give myself some impromptu concerts.

There’s also an on-line music course that I’ve found for blues improvisation on the piano. That sounds interesting and while I can’t play the piano (there is a little electric one here) I can follow the theory and see what I can churn out after 8 weeks.

Tea was one of my breaded soya steaks with a baked potato and veg in vegan margarine, and it brought back many happy memories of life in my little apartment in the Avenue Reyers in Brussels. The apple crumble was equally delicious.

My run tonight was misery. If anything the wind had increased and I was getting the lot in a real headwind coming down the hill towards me as I was trying to run up it.

Eventually I made it to the top, not without difficulty, and after a breather ran on down to the cliff. And you can see from the waves here what I was having to put up with.

The tide wasn’t far enough in right now to send the waves over the harbour wall but it would have been the kind of stormy sea that would have been really intense at high tide.

There wasn’t much happening at all this evening as far as movement went.

There was this little pilot tender boat taking someone over to Joly France at the ferry terminal, but that was about it.

There weren’t very many people about either, and the sunset from the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord was miserable too. Consequently I didn’t hang around too long and came home. I’d done all of my 6 runs, not without difficulty

Totally exhausted today, and a bad day where I’ve accomplished nothing at all. I’ll have to be doing better than this, but at least tomorrow is Sunday – no alarms so with a bit of luck I can have a really decent lie in. I have to admit that I need it.

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a parking issue on these pages?

At one time there was one almost every other day but there hasn’t been one for quite some time so I reckon that it’s about time that I put that right.

Another thing that gets my goat, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the issue of caravanettes. Apart from reversing into road signs and knocking them over and clearing off without saying anything, they think that the rest of the rules and regulations of the road don’t apply to them either.

So here we’re killing two birds with one stone. “No Parking for Caravanettes” is clearly written on this sign but the driver clearly believes that it doesn’t apply to him.

And there are two reasons why they are banned from parking in the street, apart from the obvious sanitary ones.

This is a historical medieval area with all kinds of apartments crammed into the old stone buildings. I’m lucky in that my building has private parking. Almost all of the others don’t and the streets are so narrow that it’s almost impossible to park within the walls. The locals who live here need all of the parking that they can get
It’s a bus route with the big 12-metre coaches that service the College here coming round that corner and it’s really tight. They need all of the space that they can get and wide vehicles like this overhanging the parking spaces especially right on the corner is giving the drivers an added complication.

But none of the foregoing seems to bother our visitor here as long as he has somewhere to come and spread his virus around.

The local council provides a parking space (a mere 200 metres down the road) for caravanettes and there are plenty of other places, like acres of abandoned docks, for example, where they can park as they please without inconveniencing anyone.

Signed “Grouchy of Granville”.

As for me, I didn’t go to the shops as I said that I would yesterday. But I’ll explain all about that in due course. Firstly, it will be an enormous surprise to regular readers of this rubbish (as indeed it was to me!) who will recall the issues that I’ve been having just recently, to learn that by the time that the third alarm went off I was actually up and about.

During the night I’d been up and about too. I was taking two girls to a night club in Manchester. The night club was in the North and I knew where it was vaguely situated but I didn’t realise that I was coming from Brussels. So I picked up these two girls and put them in the car, a Morris Minor I think, and set out and drove. We got to join the inner ring road in Brussels and they wanted to know why I was going that way. “doesn’t this road end in a field or something?”. I said “no” but then I thought that maybe the way they wanted me to go was the right way so I said “OK we can go that way”. But then I saw a sign for Bolton saying straight on. I thought that Bolton was near Manchester so we could go that way. But then I started racking my brains about how to get across to Manchester, to the north side to this Night Club. I really couldn’t think how to do it. At one point I was trying to drive on the wrong side of the road, I don’t know why and cars were coming that way towards me. But it would have been the right side of the road in the UK but the wrong side of the road whee I was apparently.

After breakfast I sat down and looked at a couple of the website pages that I’d planned to be dealing with. And this is how I spent my day – absorbed in this – and by the time that I’d finished I’d totally rewritten several pages and modified several others too in order to conform to the new specifications. It had been a really good day, just for a change.

There was even time to edit a pile of photos from July 2019 too – catching up somewhat with those.

During the day there had been a whole pile of interruptions too.

Firstly there was a shower and a general clean-up. Not just of me either but of the apartment. That needed to be spick and span, because I was having visitors.

Sure enough, the travelling nurse came round and took a blood sample. We had a really good chat too and he was surprised about the relaxation of the health regulations here too, and is of the opinion that the rates will be going up again as people are misled into thinking that this is all over and drop their guard.

In the meantime I’d had a look around the apartment to see what I needed from the shops and apart from bananas, there was nothing that I really needed. And as for the lack of bananas, I have a few oranges that needed eating so it wasn’t as if I was desperate. Instead I made an Executive Decision (that is, a decision that if it goes wrong, the person who made it is executed) to push on with my work.

My lunchtime bread was really nice. There’s room for improvement of course but it was much better than previous attempts and I shall have to work harder at it. But I’m on the right track, I reckon.

There was the afternoon walk of course, out there in the sun and the wind (because the wind is now back again).

We had the people back out on the beach again now that yesterday’s sea fog has lifted. Not as many as I was expecting to see, with everyone going out to faire le pont between the Bank Holiday and the weekend.

This kind of social distancing is pretty much acceptable of course. But having seen the crowds on the beaches in the UK and the USA, then they are going to have some really serious problems in a week or two’s time.

Regular readers of this rubbish might recall whether or not I’ve mentioned this object before but I can’t remember – although it’s extremely likely.

And you can see exactly how it works in this photo because the tide is quite right. It’s a medieval fish trap and the idea is that at high tide the water overflows the stone walls and as the tide recedes, the water drains out through the joints leaving the fish stuck behind.

The medieval citizens just walk out and pick up the trapped fish, and there’s your lunch. Not mine, of course.

While all of this was going on, I was disturbed once more by a rather dark shadow passing over me, rather like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings that so frightened the Nine Walkers.

No prizes though for guessing what it is. With this nice sunny afternoon and te high winds that we are having, the Birdmen of Alcatraz are out in force.

This one here was being buzzed by a seagull. They don’t take lightly to intruders and, if the rumours are true, they made pretty short work of the surveillance drones used by the police to patrol the beaches during the detention à domicile

A girl and I (keeping our social distance of course) spent a while looking at them waiting for the collision that we felt was going to be inevitable. Not much of a social distance between them even in the air.

It’s amusing (to people like me, anyway) that they take off over there from a field right next door to the local cemetery. If the take-off goes all wrong (which it has done in the past) they don’t have to carry the failures too far.

But then, that’s why they build walls around cemeteries of course. Because people are dying to go in there.

I’ll get my coat.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that yesterday we saw a pile of abandoned personal possessions on the wall of the ramp leading down to the Square Maurice Marland.

Even more surprisingly, they are still there today. Not exactly where they had been left, but someone had come along and filed them under “CS”.

Just imagine that in the UK. They wouldn’t have remained around for 30 seconds had someone put them down somewhere. It just goes to show how different people have different moral values in different parts of the world.

By the time that I’d knocked off I’d been hard at it and had a really good day for once. My hour on the guitars was profitable and I enjoyed it so much more because I’ve adopted a new tactic as far as the bass guitar goes and I’m going to work hard at this.

Tea was an “anything curry” made of leftovers and a small tin of lentils, with the last of the rice, the making of which resulted in me throwing the turmeric all over the floor. The apple crumble for dessert wad delicious and I’ll make some more of that.

Time for my evening run, I reckon, so off I set.

The usual struggle up the hill (I just can’t seem to push on any more than I’m doing even after all of the practice that I’ve been having). Eventually I arrived at the cliff top just in time to see this yacht go sailing past me towing a little dinghy behind it.

It was well on its way out of the harbour and I had no idea where it might be going. But it made me quite envious to watch it sail out – to such an extent that I put a couple of plans into operation when I returned home.

That wasn’t all of the maritime activity either.

There’s no point whatever in gratuitously posting pictures of trawlers but this one was quite interesting. As I rounded the corner at the tip of the Pointe du Roc this speedboat flashed by me with a driver who clearly had his pedal to the metal.

You can see how lively the sea was with all of the wind that blowing about, and it looked quite impressive as he carved his way through the waves with all of that sea spray splashing around.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is different phenomena of strange effects and patterns in the sea.

As I did my run along the clifftop on the south side of the Pointe du Roc I noticed another one so when I stopped for my pause for breath I stopped to take a photo of it.

Whatever it is and whatever is causing it I really couldn’t say. It looks like foam or something similar but whether it’s from someone who has been emptying their washing machine into a grid or whather it’s a natural phenomenon I really couldn’t say.

But the evenness of the distribution was fascinating. Despite the rough sea right now it was in a perfectly straight line with a right-angled bend further out.

While I was stopped getting my breath and photographing the sea phenomena, I had a good look down at the chantier navale .

There has been more movement of the occupants down there over the last 24 hours. We are now down to just two boats. The big black and green one that was up on blocks right at the bottom seems to have gone back out to sea.

So on that note I cleared off and ran all the way down the Boulevard vaufleury and my breathing point around the corner at the second pedestrian crossing.

While I was on my way down the boulevard I noticed something in the inner harbour that made me go back to look.

Sure enough, the black and green trawler that was up on blocks in the chantier navale for weeks is now moored underneath the crane in the inner harbour. I’ve no idea why but if Normandy Trader comes into harbour we’ll have a problem.

It goes without saying that when I went out earlier today, Thora was long-gone back to the Channel Islands.

There was nothing doing at the viewpoint in the rue du Nord. The clouds had come down and the sun was well-hidden, so I ran back home.

As I started to type up my notes, Rosemary rang and we ended up chatting until long after 00:30. I have an early start in the morning so I didn’t bother finishing them off. I went straight to bed and I’ll catch up tomorrow.

Wednesday 20th May 2020 – HOW MANY

… boats do you see in this photo?

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few days I’ve been talking … “quite a lot” – ed … about the amount of maritime traffic out there since the detention à domicile ended, and this is exactly what I mean. In just one small segment of the ocean just here I count at least 8 boats. And there are more all over the water too.

We never saw anything like that amount of traffic when we were all locked up in our rooms, and I’m hard-pushed to think whether I was this much even when there was freedom of movement.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish won’t recall seeing is me up and about on my feet before the third alarm. Perhaps “up on my feet” is something of an exaggeration but I was certainly sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet touching the floor. So that counts as “being up” in my book.

After the medication I consulted the dictaphone. Apparently World War I had just started and they were disposing troops on the Western Front ready to face the German assault and the battle plans were now being changed and buses were having to be brought in to move the troops around to different places. In the end they manned Thiepval Ridge and a few other places and then the Germans attacked. But they weren’t sufficiently numerous and they were pushed back with some losses and we were detailed to go out and check the wounded and the dead. So we went out and found the wounded and had to persuade some of them too that they should be rescued and taken back behind the lines. There was the usual looting of the dead of course. In the end there was just one person left and the Germans were massing ready to attack again so we grabbed a blanket – there were four of us and we each took a corner with this wounded guy on it and took him back to our lines by holding on to the blanket. And I had to go and wait in the town hall place for the clerk of the court – a woman, Miss Doyle now Mrs Williams – to come down with the death certificates. She asked me if I wanted to say a prayer over the corpses but I hadn’t really thought about that so I don’t know. That was when I awoke. There was one bit earlier on where I came to join the unit. I’d picked up a library book about the fighting on the Somme but in previous wars like Marlborough and all of that. I walked into the room as a new boy and a group of people on the sofa moved up and tried to let me have a place on there but I put my book down before I sat down as I didn’t want to dismay them with my choice of reading matter.

As to what must have been going on in my mind I really don’t know because I haven’t given the matter of World War I much thought over the last while. Although, interestingly, looking up the details of Marlborough and the other Flanders campaigns from earlier years has always been something on my mind ever since I stumbled by accident across the battlefield at Malplaquet about 25 years ago.

This morning I’ve been busy baking.

To start with, I added a little sugar to 350ml of lukewarm water and then stirred it in. When it had dissolved I added the yeast.

While that was rising, I took 500 grammes of flour and added a teaspoon of salt and mixed it well in.

By now the yeast mixture was bubbling nicely so I added it into the flour and salt and kneaded it well in with my hands for a good 10 minutes. It was too wet so I added a couple of tablespoons of flour until I had the consistency that I wanted – a nice rubbery elasticky dough that didn’t stick to my hands, or anything else to that matter.

It had a really good kneading, probably about 15 minutes or so, and then I put it in the mixing bowl covered by a damp cloth on top of the overn, which I then switched on.

150 grammes of flour next, and 75 grammes of vegan margarine, all well rubbed together. And i’m told that I’m not rubbing it together long enough so I did it for an age. When I was satisfied that it was rubbed together adequately, I added 150 grammes of oats and rubbed all of that really well in too.

Then I peeled, cored and diced two large cooking apples and put them in a baking bowl with lemon juice, desiccated coconut, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, stirred it all well together, pressed it down really well into the bowl and then added the flour and oat mix.

That was pressed well down too and then put that in the oven.

Next task was to peel a big lump of ginger, dice it into very tiny bits, stick it into a large saucepan with a small amount of water, bring it to the boil and leave it to simmer.

The bread dough was rising nicely in the warmth so I spent another 15 minutes really pummeling it and working it with my fingers. It had a really beautiful texture.

Then I shaped it and put it in the backing dish that i’d bought last weekend, and then back on top of the oven under cover.

Three lemons were next. They were peeled and as much pith as possible was removed … “that’s taking the pith, yeth?” – ed … They were put in the whizzer and whizzed round just enough to separate the juice, which was strained off and put in a sterilisied bottle.

The rest of the lemons was put back and whizzed around until it resembled something like a purée, and this was then added to the ginger and water, brought to the boil and left to simmer again.

One mug of coffee later, the apple crumble was cooked to perfection so that came out of the oven and the bread went in instead (I must buy a bigger oven).

It was so well mixed, I have to say, that it really did rise before my very eyes, and it was so impressive, it really was.

By now the lemon and ginger had simmered enough, so that came off the heat and two tablespoons of honey were added. It was all tipped into the whizzer and whizzed around for an age until it really did look like a puree and then it was added to the lemon juice from earlier, and shaken well in.

The bread wasn’t ready for lunch but there was a little of the previous loaf left and a stray taco floating around so I polished those off.

But now my bread is done and just look at it all. I hope that it’s as good as it looks. I suppose that I’ll find out tomorrow lunchtime.

This afternoon I crashed out for a really good and deep half an hour, much to my dismay. And so i didn’t do all that I had planned.

There were a few pages of one of my websites that were brought up to the new standards and a web page on one of my other sites was rewritten. There’s a lot more information available these days than there was 20 years ago and I’ve even managed to track down the owners (at the time) of a vehicle that featured on that page.

And there was still time to edit half a dozen photos from Iceland in July 2019. And how I would have liked to have done more than that too.

But there has to be a break of course for the afternoon walk. I need to stretch my legs.

Maybe it’s legs that these people will be stretching in very early course – and arms too because it looks as if they are about to take the plunge into the waters.

It’s certainly pretty brave of them and you wouldn’t get me going in there for all the tea in China – not even in mid-summer. Call me “nesh” if you like, but I don’t care.

However, at least I took off my jumper and walked around in my tee shirt. I can manage that.

Over the last few days we’ve seen a speedboat in the English Channel off the coast of Brehal-Plage with some guys in it doing some fishing.

There’s another speedboat out there today too, although I’m sure that it’s not the same one that we have seen in the past. This one has a covered cabin, but the other one (or ones) didn’t.

And there is a pile of buoys out there in the water too. Too many to be anything to do with the fishermen, I reckon, so I’m wondering if they are connected with the yachts that come out of the harbour over there.

My walk continued along the top of the cliff underneath the walls and round the corner where there’s a really good view over the Plat Gousset.

And it’s just like a Bank Holiday weekend down there, isn’t it? You wouldn’t believe that there’s a deadly virus on the rampage with all of those people congregating together down there.

Plenty of people in the water to a greater or lesser degree too, and the usual sandcastle builders are hard at work with their latest edifices.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we watched them erecting a scaffolding up against a house in the Place Marechal Foch.

One of the things that I wanted to do today was to have a look and see how they were getting on with what they were doing so I pushed on along the path. And they seem to be doing quite well too. Ripping off all of the slates and, by the looks of things, the wooden rafters too.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the storms and high winds have had anything to do with all of that.

And so my walk continued across the Square Maurice Marland to the viewpoint over the harbour.

And here’s a thing. We’ve seen them installing the pillars to support the floating pontoons of the new walkways but today they have actually installed the pontoons and there is even someone walking on them. That’s progress.

In the background we have three yachts which I reckon are Aztec Lady Spirit of Conrad and La Granvillaise. I heard a story about Aztec Lady that when the virus broke out she was around Svalbard somewhere and ended up in quarantine in the Lofoten islands.

How true that is, I really don’t know but it sounds typical to me.

The harbour gates were closed but there was a lot of movement inside and outside the port as if the gates would be open at any moment.

A couple of trawler-type fishing boats were jostling for position and this one, Pescadore looks as if she’s getting ready for the open sea.

And judging by the amount of refrigerated lorries at the fish processing plant (there were four today) they are expecting another bumper catch today.

But what are these guys doing here?

While I was waiting for things to happen (which didn’t happen, but that’s another story) I watched them for a few minutes. They had lines with large-ish weights on the end and they were throwing them across the harbour entrance. You cans ee the “splash” as one of the weights goes into the water and you’ll see the lines for a few others that are already in.

Fishing is, as far as I am aware, forbidden in the harbour so it probably isn’t that. But it’s bizarre just the same.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there has been a lot of heavy engineering going on in and around the port just recently.

As I was observing the goings-on in the port a heavy low-loader, empty, passed by underneath me and I wondered what it had brought. But here’s the answer. We have a couple of diggers and a tractor and trailer parked on the slipway again.

It’ll be interesting to see what they’ll be doing over the next few weeks.

Back here I finished off my tasks and then had my usual hour on the guitars. My bass-playing is slowly (very slowly) improving but I seem to have run aground now with the 6-string. I’m not managing the rapid chord changes as well as I might.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with pasta and vegetables, followed by a slice of the redfruit pie – just one more slice to go now before I can start on the crumble – with that soya coconut stuff. And it’s just as delicious as it was when I had the first slice.

So back out to hit the streets again. And I ran, with some difficulty, up to my marker at the end of the hedge and then, having recovered my breath, down to the clifftop.

Regular readers of this rubhish will recall that we saw a bright yellow zodiac out here yesterday and at first glance I thought that they might be back again today. But it’s a different zodiac and these people seem to be fishing with rod and line.

Perhaps it’s they who were in the speedboat over the last couple of days, I dunno.

having seen the hordes of people out here during the day having little respect for the social distancing rules, it’s no surprise to see that this evening it’s the turn of the younger generation.

All over the lawn were little groups having picnics and listening to music and the like, and this little group here down by the stone watch-cabin is just one example of many that I could of photographed.

There’s no particular reason why I photographed these instead of any other group, except that their pose was better. So don’t think that I’m singling them out for any special reason.

There’s no question of any social distancing here, is there?

The tide turned a couple of hours ago and what I imagine is happening here – based on no evidence whatsoever – is that the birds are waiting for the tidal flats to drain off so that they can get stuck in there for tea.

Not that I would know anything about the habits of birds, because the only birds that I am interested in studying are not birds of this type at all, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There’s a change of occupant in the chantier navale too today.

We had four boats in there for the last couple of days but today we seem to be doing our “Genesis” impressions – for Then There Were Three. The boat Joker that was on the far left-hand blocks now seems to have gone back into the water.

And if you look on the extreme left-hand edge of the photo, there’s a yellow zodiac just creeping into the photograph. I wonder if it’s the same one that we saw last night.

But talking of boats, it looks like we are going to have a new occupant joining the fleet in the port.

This artic has just turned up and on the back of it is a luxurious cabin-cruiser thing and that has to be worth a few bob, doesn’t it?

It beats me why they want to use the big crane to lower it in to the water though. Round at the port de plaisance – the pleasure-boat harbour, there’s a portable sling like the one at the chantier navale with a safe working load of 100 tonnes that’s specially made for purposes like this.

But maybe the artic is too long to negotiate the harbour over there.

In the beautiful evening sunshine I ran all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord, with the usual pauses for breath of course.

There was still 15 minutes or so to wait before the sun finally set but I had too many other things to do this evening, not the least of which being to go to bed after my long day, so I contented myself with the photo of the setting sun as it was.

The days are lengthening rapidly now and it won’t be long before it’s after 22:00 when the sun finally sinks beneath the sea.

But before I leave I had a look around because, for a change, there wasn’t anyone else around here with me.

But I wasn’t as alone as I might have thought because the picnickers are just arriving down on the beach and settling themselves down for the sunset.

It seems to me that most people have given up on this “social distancing” thing, which is a shame. Because if it comes back in a second wave, which is usually the case in pandemics, it’ll be even more virulent and it won’t be just 7 weeks that we’ll be confined to quarters.

On that note, I ran back home to write out my notes, and managed to do about half of them before I crashed out on the chair.

Tuesday 19th May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a decent old car on these pages? After all, it’s not like the Auvergne where old cars are two-a-penny round here is it?

The answer is “probably about as long as I managed to beat the third alarm to feet to my feet” which is another sore point around here, especially this morning.

And so, in order to whet your appetite for a decent old car, here’s a “Traction Avant” – one of the Citroen front-wheel drives made over a 20-or -so period between the mid 30s and the mid 50s and which featured as gangstermobiles in almost every French film of that period – driving along the Rue du Roc this evening.

Horsepower was calculated in different ways in different countries so in the UK this would be known as a Light or Heavy 15 depending on whether it was a “4” or a “6” cylinder model, whereas in France it’s either a 7L or an 11L. And, of course, “Traction Avant”, or “front wheel drive”.

It’s one of the very last models too, which you can tell by the boot lid (the earlier ones had the sloping boot lid with the impression of the steering wheel in it) and the rear bumper (which is straight, not curved).

And if you want to know how come I know all about these vehicles, there’s one of them SITTING AT THE BACK OF MY BARN in the Auvergne.

It was supposed to be a retirement project when I’d finished my house but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, what we need now is a miracle.

While we’re on the subject of miracles … “well, one of us is” – ed … I think that I’m going to need one to get me back into getting out of bed at a decent time in the morning before the alarm.

Whatever it is that i’m doing right now, it’s not working. It was about 07:20 when my feet touched the ground and that, dear reader, is simply not good enough.

After the meds I had a look – or rather, a listen – to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

Last night I was visiting some kind of zoo and we went to see the chimpanzees although another name was used for them I can’t remember who I was with. The animals were being kept in really squalid conditions in a place the size of a lock-up garage. There were about 10 chimps in there and a few of them, mothers and babies, were in a mass huddle. I asked if they were de-fleaing each other but the person there told me that each animal de-flead itself. I was interested to know what happened to the young female chimps when they reached maturity because if they stayed there they would be inbred which wouldn’t be good for the stock, so did they exchange animals with other zoos to mix the gene pool around? But by this time we were walking away and I couldn’t find anyone to ask.

After breakfast I finished off yesterday’s notes, having crashed out last night in the middle of writing them, tidied up little and then brushed up on my Welsh. The course got under way at 11:00 and finished at 13:00 and the teacher is going at a cracking pace, not leaving us very much time to draw breath. This course goes on for 10 weeks and if I’m still here at the end of it I’m going to be out of breath!

There will have to be a bread-baking session tomorrow morning because at lunch I used up almost the last of my home-baked bread. I’ve already run out of cordial so that, I reckon will be my morning taken care of.

After lunch I started on finishing off the radio project. And by the time that I was ready to knock off, it was finished. Not without much effort either because for some reason that I don’t understand, I’d miscalculated the length of the last track.

And so I had to do the last part again and with a different song and – badger me – I miscalculated again. I’ve no idea what was happening to me today, I really haven’t.

At least I didn’t crash out, which is, I suppose something. But there was an interruption while I went for my afternoon walk.

And as I walked out of the door I walked straight into something going on. A few people (there were masses of folk outside) including a couple of my neighbours were gazing at something going on offshore so I went to join them.

The local lifeboat, which regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing on a few occasions, was doing some kind of what looked like a rescue at sea.

Whether it was a trial run, a practice or an actual rescue we really couldn’t say, but it was quite exciting to watch it as the events unfolded and did what it was supposed to do.

But it’s hardly surprising that there’s some kind of “incident” out at sea just now.

There are the sailing schools here of course, one in Granville and it looks like one in Bréhal-Plage. We saw the other day some yachts that might have come from there and there are a few out there today with a couple of rows of buoys that, presumably, the yachtsmen have to sail around.

And that speedboat that we saw yesterday with the rod-and-line fishermen in it – there’s a similar boat out there today in the same place with similar people doing a similar thing.

But if I told you how many water craft there are out there today, you wouldn’t believe me.

So here’s a photo that I took of the view out from the top of the cliff towards the Ile de Chausey and you can see for yourself how many there are just in this shot.

There’s the lifeboat of course, the yacht far out in the distance toward the island, a couple of fishing boats and a speedboat. It’s hardly any surprise that there’s been some kind of “incident” out there this afternoon

It’s not just on land and sea that there are crowds of people either

As I was concentrating on what was going on out at sea I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. It was actually a shadow and when I looked up to see what was causing it, I noticed that it was one of the birdmen of Alcatraz floating on over my head.

It always amuses me that their point of take-off is right next to the cemetery in Donville les Bains. If they have any serious problem they don’t have too far to do.

My walk took me around the headland and onto the south side of the headland.

And if anything, it was just as busy there. There was any number of photographs that I could have taken to illustrate the point but I contented myself with this one because it was rather symbolic of the dirty working diesel-powered fishing boat and the clean sleek lines of the wind-powered craft propelled (at least nominally) by the wind.

There are a lot of symbolics in my photos of course. Some people say that they are just “sym” but other people say something else.

We haven’t finished with the water craft either today.

It was odds-on that with all of this water craft about, there was bound to be some kind of commercial traffic too. We haven’t seem our two little freighters from the Channel islands for a week or so but this afternoon, here in port we have Normandy Trader

These days the turn-round is very quick and so it was today because when I went out for my run later on in the evening, she had loaded up and gone.

Regular readers of this rubbish will remember the other day that we saw four refrigerated lorries parked up at the fish-processing plant.

Today it looks as if we’ve gone one better and have a nap hand of lorries here – 5 of them in fact. And you can see all of the fishing boats tied up at the quayside. Coupled with the number of boats out at sea, it’s hardly a surprise that they need 5 lorries to take away the catch.

As for me I came home to finish off my radio work and have my hour on the guitar. I mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I added some kidney beans into the left-over stuffing and had taco rolls with pasta and vegetables.

Thatw as followed up by another slice of my nice redfruit pie with soya coconut dessert stuff.

This evening, somewhat earlier than of late, I went out for my evening run.

We saw the Traction Avant that crossed my path earlier and I’m sure that you don’t want to see any more of the trawlers and fishing boats that were fishing away offshore. Instead, as I walked around the corner of the headland there was this bright yellow zodiac.

It wasn’t easy to see what they were doing either, so I took a photograph of it with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the zodiac of course) back in the apartment for a closer look

But I was destined to be confounded because the moment I clicked the shutter he put his machine into gear, put the pedal to the metal and piddled off out of it.

So whatever it was that they had been doing just there, they had clearly finished and there wouldn’t be all that much point in looking.

Consequently I carried on with my run down past the chantier navale (no change there) and the port Normandy Trader has piddled off too, as I mentioned and with the usual pause for breath, headed off for the viewpoint at the rue du Nord.

Too early for the sunset so I admired the view for a minute or so.

Once more, a noise from down below attracted my attention and sure enough, the young people who have been there for the last few days are down there again having another picnic.

It doesn’t look too much like “social distancing” to me but that’s their problem, not mine. As long as they realise the consequences then that’s fine by me.

Not wishing to wait for another half hour for the sunset I ran on home to write up my notes and listen to some good music.

So tomorrow morning will be a cookery morning, I reckon. Bread and perhap a small apple crumble because there are only two slices of my pie left. I’ll have to make some cordial too – lemon and ginger this week, I reckon.

Here’s hoping that I’m on form.

Saturday 16th May 2020 – IT’S THAT TIME …

… of the year again and the paragliders are out in force. So while you admire them in full flight I’ll tell you about my day.

As for this morning I won’t tell you anything because regular readers of this rubbish will recall what has happened. The same on many far-too-similar mornings just recently.

And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been and, more interestingly, who had been with me.

Last night started me off on the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour pulling into a fjord in Iceland. This was going to be the end of our journey. There was all snow and ice everywhere and the sea was frozen and the boat was crashing its way through. I was busy doing something, like washing my clothes whatever when I learnt that we were going to finish the tour here. I thought “all my clothes are going to be wet. This is no good”. Then we had a kind of meeting, a group meeting. I was going through my clothes. Some wee dry and some were still wet. I thought that I would have to take them back and hang them up. I noticed that everyone else was streaming off the ship. I asked what was happening. They replied that we all had to get off and stretch our legs. I thought “I’ve far too much to do. I can’t possibly go off and stretch my legs” but we all had the appearance of being ushered off the ship. I couldn’t find Marianne. I was with her but couldn’t find her. I thought that maybe she had left the ship already or maybe she’s somewhere still on board. I had to go and fetch my camera and all my washing needs to be sorted out and everything and I’m never going to get anything done at this rate messing around like this.

As an aside, it was 7 years ago yesterday that I stood by Marianne’s side and watched her die.

Later on I was back on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again and we were all getting ready to get off. Our trip had come to an end. I’d been co-opted into this committee to go to do something about the ship finishing its trip so I’d missed all of the socialising that had taken place. As we were all sent back to our posts I walked back onto the ship and there in the queue, the first passenger ready to leave was one of the passenger with whom I’d spent a great deal of time back in 2018. I was so pleased to see her because I really liked her and I wanted to see her before we went and I was sorry that our trip was over. She was equally delighted to see me so I suggested that we went for a drink because there was so much that I wanted to tell her. We worked out that while there was five minutes before people started to get ready to go so arm in arm we went off down into the hold to look for the bar while everyone else was streaming up the steps with their suitcases. Just as I went to sit down and the waiter came with the drinks and as I started to tell her all about my problems I awoke. And this was another one of these senses of disappointment.
Even later, we were all on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and we were just coming into port. Our cruise was coming to an end. I’d been co-oped onto this committee to do something so i’d been off on a meeting. When it came to getting back on board again who should be standing at the first position ready to get off the ship was the aforementioned woman. I wanted to see her and was really sorry that I was going to miss her. I said “let’s go for a coffee, a drink” so while everyone was staggering up the steps with their suitcases we were going down and ended up in this cafe. Just as I was about to tell her what it was that I wanted to say, I awoke. But yes that was one thing where I wanted to see Inspector Japp because I don’t know what was planned already, and that was so puzzling.

It goes without saying that you’ve noticed a great deal of similarity between all of these voyages. and the final two are more-or-less identical (except for Inspector Japp of course – I was watching a Hercule Poirot adventure while I was eating my tea).

Strangely though, according to the timestamps on the dictaphone, there was about two hours between voyage one and two, and one hour or so between voyages two and three so it’s unlikely (although not impossible) that it’s the same voyage that i’ve dictated three times.

And, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been several occasions now where I’ve had repeat voyages on the same day and even on different days. All I can say is that I hope that MCI isn’t going to charge me for these trips that I am making on their ship during the night.

After breakfast I had a shower and set the washing machine off on its travels, and I went to the shops.

The town was heaving and the market was in full swing. You would never guess that there was a global pandemic. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything like it.

NOZ was open and I bought a few things here and there, including a six-pack of that cranberry and rosemary alcohol-free beer that I like (and even as I write, I’m polishing one off).

LeClerc was total mayhem with the whole world and his wife in there. Flour is back on the shelves and tomatoes are a reasonable price again. But no yeast at all still.

What they did have which was interesting was some new pure coconut dessert stuff. It was expensive but a two pack was a special offer with a considerable reduction so I bought a pack. We’ll see what it tastes like in a day or two.

One thing that didn’t impress me though was the surly cashier. They are usually cheerful and happy in LeClerc but this one wasn’t.

And we are on the verge of a tragedy. I went into la Vie Claire, the Health Food shop and there isn’t a gramme of vegan cheese or Manuka honey in the whole town.

This afternoon I’ve been a very busy boy.

This new template seems to work so I set about a few of the pages from that web site and brought them up to the new specifications. And then had to go back and do some more work on them because, for one reason or other that I haven’t quite understood, I didn’t put an index on the pages.

There was also this plan to rewrite a web pager per day for my main site. And the one that I chose took some rewriting too because since I wrote it over 20 years ago, the area has changed out of all recognition.

It took me up to 18:15 to finish it and so I missed out on editing any photos.

There were a couple of breakes in between though.

No crashing-out today, but lunch was one and my afternoon walk was another. And outside was a seething mass of humanity. We’ve had the paragliders and we had pedestrians too, but there was an awful lot of nautical activity too and we even had a couple of canoeists.

And you know that you must never light a fire in a canoe, don’t you? After all, you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

It wasn’t all canoeists and kayakers either.

Right out over there offshore at Bréhal-Plage they had the yachts out. I’m not sure whether it’s a yachting school or similar, but the boats seem to be of an identical type. And then there’s the speedboat roaring past.

Crowds on the beaches over there at Bréhal-Plage too, all enjoying the beautiful weather because even with a wind it was quite nice out there this afternoon.

Crowds on the beaches down here on the Plat Gousset too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday and the day before I queried the situation with regard to access to the beach during the post-quarantine.

The local newspaper came up with the answer this morning, which was that, with certain restrictions applying to the dunes and to the use of the beaches for picnics and sunbathing, the ban was lifted on Thursday afternoon.

So now we know.

We saw a seagull settling down comfortably on the roof of one of the houses in the rue des Juifs the other day.

The council has been cutting down the weeds around here just recently and you can see that this seagull here has collected some of the freshly-cut weeds in order to make a nest. The weeds are still green, and I suppose that the heat given off during the decomposition will help incubate the eggs.

Not that I’m a birdwatcher of course (well, not this kind of bird anyway) but it’s fascinating to see how their lives evolve over the year.

My route took me round and through the Square Maurice Marland.

And although I can’t be certain it looks as if the harbour gates have just opened – you can see the algae at the high water mark – and this boat has just come sailing … “dieseling” – ed … through.

At first I wasn’t sure what kind of boat it might be but as it turned towards the quayside along the rue du Port I could see that it’s one of the very small inshore fishery boats. It must have been interesting out there in that boat in those winds and waves earlier in the week.

On the way back, I encountered Minette, the old black cat that I hadn’ts een for ages and whose disappearance perplexed me. Anyway, she’s back and wherever she went, she had a very good grooming. She’s a long-hair and she certainly needed it.

Tea was a huge disappointment. I’d seen the remains of a bag of oven chips in the freezer yesterday and that had fired up my appetite. And so I prepared everything that I needed

And then I found that in the bag were just half a dozen chips, so that was pretty much a waste of time. I ended up with a baked potato with my beans and burger.

The apple turnover that I prepared yesterday with the leftover pastry, I baked that as well and that was pudding.

On my evening walk tonight there were even more caravanettes on the camp site, so I’ve given up moaning about it as it’s clearly doing no good. However I did check the numberplates and while there were one or two “50” plates (that’s a number for round here) most of them were not.

However, apart from the grockles, there weren’t all that many people around. My run up the hill and then down to the clifftop was a solo effort, although two girls sitting on the old gun emplacement wished me a good evening.

Yesterday, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had some sunlight reflecting off a window in St Pair sur Mer across the bay and into a tidal pool on the beach. Tonight we have a very similar phenomenon although even more so

Disturbing a bunch of boys eating a take-away meal, I ran on down to my resting place on the clifftop for a breather and then wandered over to the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Despite the headwind I made it all the way down to my marker and then after a breather, carried on down to my next resting place at the viewpoint in the rue du Nord.

There were several people there already, and I arrived just in time to see the sun sink slowly down behind a cloud. Timed to the second, it was.

For a good few minutes I stood there soaking up the atmosphere because out of the wind it really was a pleasant night – the idea night to be out and about admiring the scenery.

And as I said, I wasn’t alone here. There were far more people than I was expecting to see.

The rules for the use of the beaches might be relaxed, but not as relaxed as these people here are suggesting. It’s not what I would call social distancing and they seem to be having a forbidden picnic.

It looks as if they have constructed an inukshuk too, in good old Greenland or Canadian Arctic Inuit tradition. They are going to have to wait for quite a while if they are planning on slaughtering a seal for supper.

So the sun and I said goodbye and I ran on back to the apartment.

An early night tonight, I hope, and then a decent sleep with no alarm.

where shall I go tonight? And, more importantly, who shall be coming with me? And even more importantly after last night’s antics, how many times will I be going there?

And I have to be on form tomorrow too, because I’m having visitors late in the morning. I told them to ring me before they set out because we’ve seen some silly times of leaving the bed when there’s been no alarm.

And some when we have had an alarm too. We can do without any of that

Friday 15th May 2020 – I MISSED …

… the alarm again this morning and it was 06:45 when I finally arose.

My own fault, of course. Just when I was thinking of going to bed onto my playlist came THE KNIFE, a vastly, criminally underrated album by a relatively unknown progressive rock group from, of all places, just across the bay here in Jersey

No possibility of my switching off the computer while that is playing. I’ll quite happily give up sleep in exchange for good music, make no mistake about that.

So with a late start, everything else ended up being late too. And there was enough on the dictaphone to keep my busy for a good while typing it out too.

My mother (what the heck is she doing intruding into my night-time voyages? As if I didn’t have enough of this back in those days!) was in this and she was doing the housework, all this kind of thing and a girl whom I knew (and how come she’d suddenly appeared out of nowhere too?) who worked on the sandwich stall on Crewe market and later came to work with me. I was quite keen on her and she was talking about how she wanted to find some more money. My mother was ironing and folding up clothes, putting them away, this kind of thing so I mentioned “does anyone know anyone who wants some help around the house?”. My mother said immediately “well I do” so we talked a little about the girl.
A bit later on I’d been to the swimming baths and they were in Nantwich and freezing cold. I’d never been so cold in the water as I was then. There was a kind of regatta taking place in there but I was all for packing up and turning round and going home
Somewhat later, I’d been for a walk at a market stall type of place (not the one at Crewe). They had home-made bread in it so I went to try to get a loaf of bread. I walked in and it had just opened. The mother and the little girl who ran it were running around handing the keys back to the admin and so on. I went in and who should be sitting at a table right by the bread but a girl whom I used to know. I didn’t really want to see her so I just wandered around the shop and move out. Just then they shouted that the shop was closed so everyone else got up and moved out. She was walking some times in front of me, some times behind me, some times beside me and didn’t say a word but she got out of the building first and I followed. This was quite unsettling but I didn’t know why.

After breakfast I made a start on the rewriting of the website and attacked another page. This took some time to do too because there were a couple of old American cars, an old American bus and a railway locomotive on it and they needed identifying.

In the end I posted the photos into various discussion groups on the internet and while they ended up being the subject of a considerable amount of discussion and interest, everyone was as bewildered as I was.

For once, the collective power of the internet has let me down.

After I’d done that I reviewed the template that I had written (and resolved) for the other web site that I have and then amended a couple of pages from there to reflect the new design.

Well, it’s the old design really but all of the text menus for each individual page are being replaced by a common iframe with a common javascript menu, as well as a couple of other items of not very much importance.

Doing this is saving me about 4.5kb per page (and there are about 500 in total) and also a considerable amount of time and effort for the future when something needs to be changed throughout the site.

While I was having lunch (and the bread that I baked was delicious) Rosemary rang, so we ended up chatting until … errr … 15:00. These marathon discussions go on for ever.

And I also had an on-line chat with Josée. The area where she lives in Montréal has been pretty badly hit so I wanted to speak to her for reassurance and to keep up her morale. It’s strange that there are this little hotspots here and there around the globe like this.

That meant that there was only enough time left to deal with a few of the photos from July 2019 before I went for my walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a windsurfer practising his art in the sea off one of the beaches between Donville les Bains and Bréhal-Plage.

Today we have no windsurfers but what we do have instead is a kitesurfer enjoying himself out there. The wind has dropped today, but not by all that much so he’s certainly taking his courage, as well as his kite, into both hands.

And once again, we have crowds of people on the beach over there in the sun.

And that’s not all either.

There was a noise down on the beach here at the Plat Gousset that caught my attention so I had a look down to see what it was. Nothing gave any indication of anything but my eyes did fall upon a couple of people making the most of the tide being somewhat out.

All I can think of is that there must have been a further relaxation of the rules about which I know next-to-nothing.

And if you think that that was everything, that’s far from the case.

It seems that people have been taking to the waters too. Out there half-way over to the Ile de Chausey are a couple of pleasure craft. That’s a yacht of course, and what is accompanying it seems to be a cabin cruiser.

That’s the life – if you can afford it, of course. You won’t run much risk of catching anything – in a virus sense, that is – out there.

At first glance I thought that this boat out there over towards the Brittany coast might have been Thora. She had a similar silhouette.

But back home I could crop and blow it up (the photo, not the boat) and, peering through the reflected sunlight, I could see that It was a fishing boat – one of the trawler-types.

Thinking on, though, we could do with some new blood in the harbour. We haven’t had a gravel boat in for quite a while and the port really should be trying to attract more commerce.

But plenty of fishing of course.

We keep on seeing mysterious buoys sprining up offshore every now and again with no indication of what they might be for or who has left them. And there’s another one here today just offshore over near Donville les Bains

It was pretty busy round by that little corner of the walls, and I carried on and ended up back at the apartment without having noticed anything else of interest at all.

There was the usual hour on the guitars but from 17:00 until 18:00 rather than 18:00 to 19:00.

There was a good reason for that, though.

Yesterday I used the last of the apple pie and so i wanted to make another pie, using pastry that I made myself to make sure that it wasn’t just beginner’s luck.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had bought a bag of frozen red fruit from LIDL yesterday. I’d left it out to defrost and this morning I put it in a colander to drain off.

350 grammes of flour and 175 grammes of soya margarine all well-mixed together seemed to make it too oily so I added more flour.

At about 400 grammes it seemed to have the correct consistency so I added a few tablespoons of water and mixed it in until it went into a nice elasticky mass, then, having coated it with flour, I rolled it out for the base and the top.

And here’s the finished product – totally delicious is was too.

It wasn’t ready when I finished my pie and potatoes so I went for an early run.

My run of course took me up to the top of the hill where I stop for breath. And this sight here is becoming ridiculous now. Just look at all these caravanettes parked up here.

There are more and more of them arriving every day and they don’t seem to have grasped the fact that just because detention à domicile is over, it doesn’t mean that it’s safe to go out to play.

And this is even more crazy too.

At least in a caravanette you are isolated of a sort but just look at all of these people. The group over towards the right were having a yoga session here on the lawn and the ones on the left were having a picnic.

As well as that, there was a pile of kids playing “tick”, of all things, over by one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall on the extreme right.

What will it take for people to understand what’s happening?

Anyway, I left them to it and carried on with my walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the other day that the British flag by the war memorial to the Resistance was on the point of being ripped off its pole by the force of the wind.

But it looks as if they have repaired it now. The don’t want it going fluttering off to some obscure corner of the globe. It would be something of a public relations disaster.

The weather though was beautiful and the air, at least down the coast to the head of the bay, was perfectly clear.

There was an excellent view of Carolles-Plage, the Pointe de Carolles with the Cabanon Vauban perched on the end, and then down at the head of the bay there are the hotels and other buildings that serve Mont St Michel.

You can’t see the Mont St Michel though because the Pointe de Carolles is in the way, which is a shame. That really would be something to see from here.

Something else that we can see in this photo is a group of more marker buoys.

It would be very surprising if they relate to nets being out because they are really far too close to the harbour entrance. That makes me wonder whether they might be something to do with the sailing school in the port de plaisance

On that note I ran all the way home and had a slice of my home-made red fruit pie with soya coconut dessert.

It’s still fairly early but I don’t care. I’m going to bed. Shopping tomorrow and I’m hoping that NOZ will be open. It will be interesting to see what they have accumulated.

And I have an apple turnover, made from the left-over pastry, to cook. So I’m planning on oven chips for tea if I remember.

With burger and baked beans too. I’m looking forward to that.

Thursday 14th May 2020 – THAT WAS A …

… better day today!

For a start, I actually made it out of bed before the third alarm. And after yesterday’s disaster, that was really some kind of progress.

And I was off on a voyage as well during the night. Not quite as graphic as the previous night’s, which is a good thing, I suppose. There were three of us wandering around central London last night, me and two girls. I know these two girls and I just can’t think who they are. It was the time of a vampire attack on the city and we’d been doing something, fighting off these vampires and a fourth member of our party, an elderly gentleman dressed in Victorian suit and top hat was helping but he was taken ill on one occasion. So I went over to see him although it wasn’t me – but it was me in the dream if you know what I mean – and I undid his shirt. I found that he had a bandage wrapped round his chest so I had to undo the bandage. He snarled and snapped at me and I realised that he was a vampire. Someone had pushed a stake through his heart at one time. I grabbed these two girls and I stuck a cross in his way or his hand or something and we ran off. Somehow we became separated and I ended up with one of these girls and she ended up going home. I escorted her home and we came back out. We were on this street, something like rue St Catherine Est (near the CHUM) in Montreal. Down at the bottom of a hill was a church and that was where I’d arranged to meat this other girl. We were late so I said to this girl who was with me “stay here” and I ran on down to see the other. There she was outside this building and she was curling up, settling down on the floor going to sleep to wait for us on the pavement. I grabbed hold of her “God, don’t do that!”. She asked “where’s the other girl?”. “I’ve left her on a street cornerto come and fetch you. Now we have to go and fetch her back”. We were loaded up with valuables (…like the camera…) but we couldn’t find anywhere to put them. There were all these boxes where you could leave stuff but there was no key. We had to scratch around for a key or a lock or something – we didn’t have one. Time was getting on and in the end I thought “God just put the stuff in there. If someone pinches it, too bad”. The door didn’t close, the camera strap was dangling out right by a fire, everything like that. We ran back up the hill and as we ran back up we were really afraid of what we would see – whether the vampire had hold of this girl again. Should I have left a cross in her hand or wrapped garlic around her neck or something? I started to have all of these weird ideas about what was going to happen and what I should have done.

After breakfast I assembled the radio project as far as I could and checked the timing. Knock off 30 seconds from what was left out of the hour, and that was the length of track for which I was looking.

A shower was next, and a shave and general clean-up. And of that 300 grammes of weight that I had lost at the last weigh-in, I’d put 400 grammes back.

It’s Thursday today, and so that means shopping of course. But once again, I didn’t go very far before I stopped.

One of the penalties of living in a medieval walled city is that quite often the old gates are too low for lorries and the like and regular readers of this rubbish will have seen plenty of examples of trans-shipment

There’s more work taking place within the walls, I imagine, and they can’t pass the lorry and the trailer here through the gateway. They are going to have to unload all of this, I imagine, and take it through as best as they can.

We’ve seen all of the ferries – the two for the Channel Islands and the two for the Ile de Chausey, parked up during the confinement.

But today it looks as if things have eased off. Joly France, one of the passenger ferries that goes out to the Ile de Chausey, was just heading off out of the harbour and by the looks of things, she has a good complement of passengers.

Here’s hoping that none of them are infected because the virus would spread like wildfire out on the island.

First stop was the Post Office to post of Rosemary’s Christmas present. I know that it’s May but she was away from home until the day of the lockdown and as she came home, the Post Office closed.

We had to queue outside and were allowed in three by three.

At the Bank, where I went to pay in a cheque and to change a standing order, it was even worse. Facemasks compulsory (luckily I had taken with me the one that I was given by a neighbour the other week), oOnly one person in at a time and so the queue was down the street.

The counter clerk was very scrupulous about cleaning off the perspex window and all of that, and then handled all of my paperwork and bank card, which made the scrupulous cleaning of the perspex screen rather superfluous.

At LIDL I spent more than intended, but a large part of that was spent on a folding rucksack. It’s a reasonable size but folds up into a large pocket and it’s just the job for when I go on excursions.

The apple pie is on its last slice too but they had on special offer some frozen red fruits – €1:79 for a 750 gramme bag. So I bought a bag and I’ll make a pie with that tomorrow.

On the way back I bought a dejeunette from La Mie Caline for lunch, but was once more interrupted walking up the Rue des Juifs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen them floating the new pontoons across the harbour by pushing them with a motor boat, but this one is actually being pushed out of the inner harbour.

We’ve also seen the mounting brackets that they installed at the ferry terminal. It looks as if, now that Joly France has gone off on her travels, that they are going to install the new pontoons.

Back here I wrote the text for the final track, uploaded it to the computer, edited it and assembled the final track. I was over time by 5 seconds but a quick edit of some speech soon dealt with that.

After lunch, while I listened to my handiwork, I had a look at the template issue for one of my websites – the issue that I mentioned the other day.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that I resolved the issue in less than 10 seconds. In fact, I’d been thinking about this problem here and there and I had a very good idea of what I had done. And I was right.

It will also be no surprise to anyone that I also had a little doze for a few minutes here and there.

Once I’d recovered my composure I set about installing the new hi-fi. And I rather think that I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat.

It was necessary to drill a couple of holes in the furniture and then perform a complicated rewiring job which meant practically dismantling the computer and a few other things too.

It led to something of a tidy-up too (and putting away a pile of papers) and then I connected everything up. And as I said, I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat because this system is somewhat overwhelming.

But the quality is phenomenal nevertheless and I’m as impressed with this as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Somewhat later that anticipated, I went out for my afternoon walk.

On the way out with the hi-fi box I bumped into a woman from the Mairie who was handing out the free washable face masks that the commune had ordered for their inhabitants. I asked her for an innuendo so she gave me one.

“Corona virus?” I enquired.
“No” she replied. “The school next door starts back up next week. We don’t want you frightening the kids”.

The hurricane was still blowing and it was a struggle to walk around the walls. But I wasn’t struggling half as much as some people. The trawler out there in the English Channel near the Ile de Chausey was really making heavy weather of the journey home.

You can tell by the whitecaps on the tops of the waves that far out (that’s probably about 10 kilometres out) just how wild the wind is right now.

And the trawler wasn’t the only one out there in the wind.

Never mind the story about the beaches being closed and so on, we have a windsurfer out there enjoying the storm. And I suppose that he parachuted in from the air too.

But there must be a good handful of people out there on that beach between Donville les Bains and Bréhal Plage and I have no idea why they are there and what they are doing.

There was still half an hour left to enjoy the music before the hour on the guitar, which was spent mainly playing around with two Dire Straits tracks – “Sultans of Swing” and “Tunnel of Love”. Despite all of the time that I’ve spent working out “Telegraph Road”, i reckon that right now it’s beyond what I’m really capable of doing.

Tea was a nice stuffed pepper followed by the last of that delicious apple pie that I made, so tomorrow is going to be a baking day, I reckon.

Back outside in the teeth of the gale and my run up the hill which was agonising tonight.

And at the caravanette park in the rue du Roc we have yet more grockles who haven’t quite grasped what all of this virus thing is about. I’ve seen the local police on their patrols and I reckon that they ought to be doing something about this.

But anyway having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop to see what I could see out to sea.

And the answer to that was “nothing at all”.

Around the corner to the south side of the headland and I noticed something glistening on the beach over across the bay at St Pair Sur Mer.

Being of a curious bent … “errr … quite” – ed … I took a photo of it to crop and blow up back here. And what I can see is that it seems to be the sun’s reflection on the window there reflecting into a tidal pool on the beach.

It’s quite amazing what you can pick up with a good zoom lens.

Earlier on today we noticed that they were pushing a floating pontoon out of the harbour.

At the time I speculated that they might be finally going to fit them to the mounting brackets that they fitted to the harbour wall over at the ferry terminal.

And sure enough, there they are in position. But I’m intrigued to see what is going to happen when the tide goes out because it dries out over there. And what happens to the pontoons then will be interesting.

Despite the howling gale I struggled on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury and I was pretty done in when I finally reached my marker.

Back down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what they had been up to down there. And it looks as if some of the floating pontoons down there (we’d seen three rows yesterday) have gone.

The missing ones are probably those that they installed at the ferry terminal.

My next run took me round to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord but there was nothing going on over there so I turned round and ran back home as best as I could in the wind.

So now I’ve finished this, I’m ready for bed. This was a better day today and I felt a bit more like myself. Here’s hoping for an even better day tomorrow.

Tuesday 12th May 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

… had one of those days when you’ve been trying to do something straightforward and simple and it just doesn’t work?

Right now I’m having one of those. I’m making a new template for one of my websites – a task that I’ve done on countless occasions – and for some unknown reason it just won’t work out.

For three hours now I’ve been at it, and I’ve spent a similar amout of time on this template too, but I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve even gone right back to basics and started from the beginning but that’s not working either.

What has happened, I reckon, is that I’ve made a spelling mistake with one of the *.div boxes, or forgotten a quotation mark or something, but I’m badgered if I can see where.

After all this time I’ve abandoned the quest for the evening because my eyes have turned to mush and I can’t see straight.

The day started off so well too. I actually beat the third alarm to my feet, which is something to celebrate these days. And I’d been off on my travels, as I discovered when I listened to the dictaphone later after the medication.

Last night I was coming back from Shavington into Crewe and down by Gresty Brook was a row of lock-up garages. Something had happened and there was a black Lamborghini-type of sports car with all of its front end stoved in and some of these garages were open and there were motorbikes everywhere. It looked as if this Lamborghini had lost control and smashed into these garages. As I walked past I could see that there had been some work doing but there was more to do. Anyway, all of the traffic coming out of Crewe had stopped so I was able to negotiate my way through. Then it came to updating my website so I moved some information around and wrote in a bit about this accident to fit in with a few of the images. Roxanne came to talk to me about something and we ended up talking about hot air balloons that she had seen as a very small child and where they fitted in to the story of Montgolfière, these balloons
We were all on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, a huge mob of us. I was interested in a woman or girl or somebody. I was doing what I could to become friendly with her. At the same time there was another guy trying to do something to be friendly with another girl and everyone kept on butting in on him like they usually do with me. So one one occasion someone said something about this girl – that Stephen from Brooklyn, so I explained to him that the other guy had first dibs and he was quite put out by that. One evening we were having a meal and it was a huge refectory kind of place, not like the dining room. I grabbed my evening meal and went to sit down and I couldn’t see this girl whom I wanted to sit next to. I thought “she can’t be here yet” so I chose a place a bit away from everyone else but there was no cutlery or anything for anyone else so i started to assemble some cutlery to make a place for her. Just then I was overwhelmed by half a dozen people who appeared at once and all sat down at this table all around me and left no space for this girl. One of them was this Stephen and he explained to me that ‘I was having a nice friendly chat with so-and-so and this girl and thank you for putting me right to the situation”, things like that, and i was thinking “God I wish that someone would put these people right about my situation”,
A hot, sweaty, sticky night again, which I have to note, and I ended up somewhere in all of this in a big 1960s American estate car, a beige one, right-hand drive. For some unknown reason whenever I left a standing start I had to push it to make the car roll forward and then leap in. It was really heavy too but one in started to roll it was fine. I remember having to do this at a certain traffic light where opposite, the road narrowed and made it an interesting procedure. So I bought a different, smaller and lighter American estate car and at the same junction I had to do the same thing and that was for some reason even heavier to push.

After breakfast I had a good go at cleaning up the kitchen and dining area. And then configure a laptop so that it would work “Zoom” – this on-line meeting thing. It had to be done on the laptop because there’s no microphone or webcam on this big machine here.

Promptly at 11:00 we had our first lesson. There was the initial teething trouble with the programme as you might expect as no-one (not even the tutor) knew how to do it, but we were soon organised and the two hours passed quite quickly.

One of the attendees had her daughter of about 6 with her, and she had brought a dolly with her. So it goes without saying that at some point Strawberry Moose joined in the Welsh lesson.

Apparently the Welsh Government body that is sponsoring these courses expected about 100 attendees and made the appropriate provision. However there are a total of 1039 people who enrolled. It seems that the events of the last four years are swinging the pendulum over towards the side of Nationalism.

It did not escape my notice that one of the choices for “reasons for studying this course” was “to establish my national identity” or something very similar.

That took me right up to lunch where I finished off the last of the bread that I had made 10 days ago. I’m surprised that it had lasted so well.

This afternoon, as I said yesterday, has been a cookery afternoon. And you cans ee the finished products here.

We have a loaf of bread, one and a half jars of apple and apricot purée for breakfast, and some apple and apricot cordial. And once again, I forgot the cinnamon and nutmeg.

The loaf was made with 400 grammes of flour.

We started off with 250 ml of water had a teaspoon of sugar and a sachet of yeast added to it. It was all stirred together and put in the microwave until it was lukewarm.

Meanwhile, 400 grammes of flour had a dessert spoon of salt added to it, and it was all mixed togather.
The lukewarm water was slowly added, every so often stopping to give the mixture a really good mix. make sure that your hands are well-floured so that the bread mix doesn’t stick to them so badly.

Eventually, you’ll end up with something rather like plasticene, nice and elastic. Then, you have to really knead it with your hands to make sure that the water and yeast are really well circulated throughout the mix. This can take 10 minutes or so and it’s quite an art.

Then put a towel over the bowl and put the bowl in a warm place for 45 minutes or so, to give the yeast a good start.

Meanwhile, peel, slice, core and dice 10 apples and but them in a saucepan with just a dash of water and plenty of lemon juice, stirring them well round as you add them to make sure that the lemon juice and water soaks the outside to stop them browning.

Then bring them to the boil and once it’s boiling, turn the heat right down to simmer gently until the apples are really soft (this could take 45 minutes even), giving it all a really good stir around every ten minutes or so.

Once the apples are simmering away, go back to the bread. It should already have started to rise now. So turn your oven on and while it is warming up, you need to knead the bread again for a while to make sure that the nitrogen being released by the yeast it distributed evenly through the bread.

Then put the mix in your bread mould and put in a hot oven 230°C for 10 minutes and then 210°C until it’s done.

When the apples are cooked, open a cheap tin of time-expired apricots from NOZ, drain off the syrup into a sterilised jar and add the fruit to the apples.

After about 5 minutes when the fruit is all thoroughly heated through, strain off all of the liquid into the jar with the syrup and whizz the fruit up in your whizzer.

Sterilise a couple of large jars (I put a small amount of water in them and run them for a minute in the microwave on medium-high and use boiling water on the caps) and put the purée in the jars and seal the lids.

Then check the bread by poking a large skewer into it. When it’s ready, it should sound good and the skewer should be clean when it comes out

Rather later than usual, I went out for my afternoon walk with the madding crowds – although nothing like as many people as I was expecting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw them yesterday digging out the sand from the old tidal swimming pool. They’re not there now … “the ground’s all flat” – ed … but whether it’s because they have finished or simply knocked off for the day I really couldn’t say.

What i’ll have to do is to go that way tomorrow too but somewhat earlier so that I can see how they are doing.

I carried on walking around the walls, past more people than I have seen for quite a while, until I came to the Square Maurice Marland.

Between the chimneys I noticed some movement in the harbour so I took a speculative photo to see what it might be.

It’s beautifully focused on the chimneys, which means that it’s out of focus deeper in the image, but I could see that it’s one of our floating pontoons for the new walkway being pushed across the harbour by a motor boat.

A little further on there was a better view of what it was doing. It looks quite impressive too.

But we can see that whatever was keeping Marité out of her berth seems to have been resolved because she’s now back in her little corner.

The two Channel Islands ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, are moored up over there, and today there’s just one Joly France boat, the ferries that go over to the Ile de Chausey, moored up. The other must be out on a run.

Back here I had another bash at this web site problem and then had my usual hour on the guitars.

Tea was steamed veg in vegan cheese sauce with falafel, followed by some of my apple pie and soya coconut dessert stuff.

There were a few people out there this evening but that didn’t prevent me from going running.

It was yet another struggle up the hill in the wind but I made it all the way up there. There was nothign much going on offshore tonight so I wandered around the corner to watch the fishing boats unloading at the fish processing plant.

It was really busy there tonight. There was a queue of boats there waiting for a berth to unload their catch.

But there seems to be plenty of activity down in the chantier navale

We’ve had five boats in there for the last couple of days but today it seems that one of them has gone back into the water. I wonder if we are going to be having another visitor any day soon.

Despite the strong headwind I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury and was almost bursting by the time that I reached my marker.

having seen them pushing the pontoons over this afternoon I went down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see if I could see what they had been doing.

It’s not evident at all but I think that they might be adding a third layer to the bit that’s perpendicular to the harbour wall. That’s all that I can think of that might be different.

My next run took me up to the viewpoint at the rue do Nord but there was nothing at all happening out there so I ran on back home.

Bed now, not as early as I had hoped. But there’s a lot to be done tomorrow. I want to finish off this radio project, sort out this perishing web template and do the chores like photos and rewriting other web pages

And I need to find time for another play around as my new hi-fi has finally arrived today. I’m looking forward to that.

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

… time since I really don’t know when, I haven’t put my sooty foot outside the door today.

And that’s no surprise because right now we’re in the middle of a howling gale the like of which I have rarely seen, with torrential rain lashing down everywhere.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been out in all kids of weather but I ain’t going out in this one.

With it being Sunday, I had a nice lie-in without being disturbed and it was a very reasonable 09:45 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I had been anywhere during the night. And I wasn’t disappointed. I was actually told off last night! I’d gone to watch the football at Granville and Granville were winning so we were all chanting. We were making a lot of noise and it sounded really good but the manager came over to speak to us and to thank us for coming but said that it’s going to be a bit peculiar for everyone at the football club that all that they can hear are applause and cheers and people shouting in English. He said that that was giving the wrong impression of the club. “We’re not an expat club, we’re a French club” and gave us a bit of a lecture, although I don’t know what he expected us to do about it.
Anyway a little later I was off with a girl – I can’t remember who it was now which is a shame because I always like to know who I’m with – and we were walking in the countryside. We saw a road sign and I’d seen a road sign going to the same place, something like Pound Hill, somewhere else so i wondered if these two roads connected with each other. “So let’s go and find out”. This road or track petered out after about 50 yards and went through a field. In this field was a cow and I wasn’t sure if it was a cow or a bull so I was a bit wary. The animal didn’t really do all that much attacking – it just nuzzled a bit. Then a dog appeared and was quite wild – a medium-sized dog he jumped and grabbed hold of my jacket by the back of the neck and pulled my jacket. In the end I had to get this dog and drag it off my back, put it on the floor and stamp on it a few times until it calmed down. It was a strange thing.

With there being something of a late breakfast and with it being a Sunday anyway, I haven’t done too much today.

Some of the morning was spent sorting through the music to prepare in advance some kind of playlist. That’s a project that I started half-heartedly while I was digitalising the record collection and I’ve been expanding it as I go along. Today I started adding into the playlists the tracks that have already been played, but that’s not an urgent task.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned that I would be reviewing a past web page every day and rewriting it. Today I’ve done the first page but there wasn’t an awful lot that needed doing.

The other web site needed a revision in the same way that the first one has had. It took me an age to design the template and then the home page that I was going to use (it was superseded by events in 2010 that have in turn been superseded) was so out of date that I had to rewrite all of the text.

But having done that, I now want to redo the template into another, more logical fashion, so I’ll have to start again. But the thing about all of this is that it takes hours to set it up correctly but then once it’s correct it take minutes to deal with it.

There was even time left to spend an hour or so working on the photos of July 2019 and right now I’m standing on the edge of a lava field on the island of Heimaey.

There was the hour on the guitar of course and I was quite enjoying what I was doing this evening – not the least of which reason being that I reckon that I have got the hang of this 6-string guitar business, although I’ve a long way to go yet before I’m going to be any good, if I ever am.

Sunday night here is pizza night of course.

Just one more ball of dough left from the batch that I made a couple of weeks ago and I’d left it out of the freezer to thaw overnight so that it was ready to use.

So I flattened it out onto the baking roll, dusted it with flour and then rolled it out.

As I mentioned last week there wasn’t really enough pastry mix so it ended up being quite thin and wouldn’t lift off safely from the baking roll, so I simply picked up the baking roll and flopped it over onto the pizza tray.

All of the usual topping of course and then into the oven. And there’s nothing wrong with this whatsoever.

For pudding there was of course a slice of that delicious apple pie that I made, with the almond soya dessert stuff. And that was just as good

While I was waiting for the pizza to cook I went to check something on the internet and found, much to my surprise, that the missing football match that I had mentioned yesterday (Bangor City v TNS, not Rhyl as I had thought) had just started and I had missed the first 100 seconds.

So while I had my pizza I watched the football.

It was the championship decider for the season 2010-11. TNS were in front by one point but Bangor had home advantage. And they duly made it count in the 68th minute. But both teams had a couple of chances to have added to the score during the 90 minutes.

Heady days, of course, which Bangor City will never see again of course, having been sold a few years later to a bunch of crooks (and I use the term in full confidence in view of the nature of the criminal convictions, which include inter alia Defrauding the Exchequer, of the new owners) who promptly added the club to the long line of sports clubs that they have trashed during their ownership.

So no walk or run this evening, but it’s still late. I’m off to bed ready to start work. I’m interested to see how much time this “sorting of my music” will save me when I come to start the next radio project tomorrow.

Thursday 23rd January 2020 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not sitting in a rainbow but sitting in a posh living room in a duplex apartment here in Leuven.

The one thing about being a very regular customer of these apart-hotels is that if there’s a higher-grade accommodation vacant, they give me a free upgrade and I’ve struck lucky this visit.

A lovely big double bed, nice and comfortable. All I need is a nice and sweet young lady to share it with me and I’ll be well away. Ohhh yes – even at my age I can still chase after the women. I just can’t remember why!

The only down side is that I have noisy neighbours who seem to be partying. But I can’t hear a thing because I remembered to bring my really good headphones with me and with Colosseum Live going full-tilt into my ears I can’t hear a thing.

But that album has its downside, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. Although it’s one of the top five live albums ever recorded, it was the one that was going round and round on an endless loop while I was on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour in 2018 and 2019.

Of course it immediately brings back all kinds of memories, mostly good but some quite bad and there are people like The Vanilla Queen and Castor and Pollux going through my mind as I listen to it.

Somewhere I read something along the lines of “anyone who spends any time in the High Arctic will come back a different person” and that’s certainly true.

Just for a change, this morning I was up quite smartly and it didn’t take me long to get everything ready for leaving. I’d had a shower last night before going to bed so I didn’t even need to deal with that.

Plenty of time to go a-voyaging too. The first little trip had something to do with the website and about how I’d changed round the radio programmes or something like that so that there was a whole new series of numbers starting on 1st January 2020 on the first January of the year with all kinds of different – there were two different strands of numbering now one of which was the radio concerts and one of which was something else but I can’t remember any more about it now unfortunately
Later on, there was a huge dispute between us over something or other and it led to someone coming storming round to our house going to throw a cup of cold tea over everyone. I had a cup of cold tea ready and he came storming in. I told him to sit down but he said “I’m going to throw this cold tea over you. What are you going to do?” I replied “I’m at my house. I’ll throw a cup of tea over you and you’re the one who is going to have to suffer”. He looked at me for a minute and then said “I can see that you aren’t going to flinch. You are brave enough”. I asked “so how are we going to sort this out?” He said “we need foue elastic bands like this size” and he showed us one of them. Of course I didn’t have any that size so I had to go across the road and ask one of the neighbours. We were in Vine Tree Avenue at the time during all of this.

Back in the Land Of The Living, I finished getting ready. The rubbish went out of course and then I followed it up to town.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking plays a prominent role on these pages.

Hardly a day goes by without me seeing some new depths to which the general public has sunk and here’s another prime example. We’re at the roundabout at the end of the rue Lecampion and this motorist has decided to park his car right across the entry to the new block of flats.

The motorist in the big SUV can’t get his car out of his own car park because of it, and I would have loved to have had the time to hang around and see how this story would unfold.

Instead I headed off to the station and there I was treated to the delight of the train being already at the platform.

No coffee though. Once again the coffee machine is out of order and this is really annoying. How am I expected to go on a journey like this without being armed?

The ticket-stamping machine was having issues too and it took several goes before it would accept my ticket and stamp it.

Bang on time we set off and I fell asleep. A right deep sleep too and it took the ticket collector a good minute or so to awaken me from the dead to check my ticket.

We were 15 minutes late arriving in Paris but it didn’t quite matter so much because, as predicted, out train now arrives in the main station rather than in the vaugirard annex and that saves me a considerable amount of time.

The metro was running too and was quite rapid, so I had a good half-hour to spare before my train to Lille.

That half-hour was spent in a queue at the SNCF office. I’d had an e-mail yesterday telling me that my seat had been changed and I would have to make further enquiries.

Eventually I managed to make someone deal with me quickly and, armed with a new seat number, I could take my seat on the train.

It’s one of the older “Reseau” TGV trainsets, number 226 which puts it in the first wave that were delivered between 1995 and 199.

Nice and comfortable they are, and I could sit and eat my butties and fruit in comfort, which is always nice. And have another little doze too. I’m not in any great rush to do anything.

Due to “affluence on the line” our train was 20 minutes late arriving in Lille- Flanders.

With only 15 minutes (and having to cross town to Lille-Europe) between trains, you might think that I would be panicking by now.

But not a bit of it because if there was “affluence on the line” for us, there would be “affluence on the line” for the Marseille – Brussels train that would be folllowing behind us too and that was the one that I was catching.

Sure enough, that one was half an hour late so I had plenty of time to ring up the hospital and check my appointment time. 13:30 it is tomorrow.

The trainset that came for us is a model that we have seen before on a regular basis because it’s this type that does the Paris-Brussels service, The Thalys PBA trainsets, albeit in a different livery.

My place here was quite comfortable too and I even managed to doze off for half an hour or so yet again.

In Brussels I only just missed the 15:58 – I had my hand on the door when it pulled away.

But there was another one right behind – the 16:13 to Genk. It’s one of the push me – pull you train sets and coming into the station in reverse so I didn’t get to see the identity of the locomotive pushing it.

So by 16:50 I was in Leuven after a relatively painless, straightforward voyage for once and wasn’t I a happy bunny?.

Having organised my room I went shopping at Delhaize. Tons of stuff for the next few days to keep me out of mischief and I shall have to add “herbs and spices” to the list of things that I bring with me from home. I’ll make up a sachet of oregano, basil, tarragon, garlic, chili powder etc and put it with the coffee.

So tea tonight was a vegan burger with mixed vegetables, spinach and pasta, all tossed in a tomato sauce and it was delicious. Pudding was peach halves with mango sorbet.

The party next door seems to have finished so I can go to bed. Nothing much to do tomorrow morning so I’ll have a lazy day before I head off to the hospital round about 12:30, something like that.

I wonder what they will tell me.

Monday 20th January 2020 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… they are getting ready for Carnaval right now.

The one big event of the year here in Granville is the annual Carnaval. We’ve seen THIS TAKE PLACE BEFORE in previous years and this year it’s the period 21-26 February.

And so on my way out up town I noticed that while they were taking down the Christmas lights, they were also putting up the bunting and the location points for this year’s Carnaval in the rue Paul Poirier and the rue Couraye.

This year is passing by quicker than anyone thinks.

Last night, I had a frantic search around for my telephone before going to bed. I couldn’t find it at all and I needed it for the alarm. Eventually, after phoning myself up, I managed to locate it and I could go to bed in peace of mind.

Not that I needed it though. I was wide awake at 05:30 for some reason that I haven’t quite understood, and up and medicating when the alarm went off.

With just a brief pause for breakfast, I bashed on with my editing of the interview that I had had with US Granville’s Chief Coach and I finished it just about. 8:30 of question and answer there was, and it’s not too bad.

There was also time to look at the dictaphone and I had indeed been off on a voyage here and there. There was an OUSA meeting taking place in the USA so off I went. I was in this town looking at all of the food shops and saying to myself “God how I love being in the USA with all of this food on offer here, all of these bakeries and all of these things even though I can’t eat any of it”. The a girl came out – a young girl with glasses and she had a limp, something like that as if she had had polio and I recognised her. She was a student at the Open University … “no she wasn’t” – ed. We ended up having quite a chat and she was saying how she wished she could go to this Conference and so on and for some unknown reason I couldn’t get out of my head the phrase “give me your e-mail address and I’ll add you onto my mailing list”. I could have sent her loads of stuff and could have developed some kind of relationship with her, I suppose.
A little later on there was a group of us in a house and amongst these people was, of all people, someone who has made a dramatic appearance in my life just now … “it didn’t take her long to come a-voyaging with you, did it?” – ed … my brother and a few other people. It was my house in Gainsborough Road and the back part of the back garden was overgrown in weeds and we ended up having a game of cricket. I was the first to go into bat for my team which was my family and the aforementioned person was going along to bowl for her side. I took guard at the entrance to my house and she decided to bowl up the hill Clifton Avenue. She bowled an over that went nowhere near my bat so I couldn’t hit it and score any runs. She went off to get someone else to take over and I was thinking that I hadn’t even asked my family if they wanted to play yet. They would probably tell me to clear off. Anyway that’s how that ended.

Once I’d done that I had a shower and then headed off for my radio meeting, saying “hello” to the builder guy with the cement conveyor as I passed.

It seems that having done the radio programme for MY VERSAILLES TRIP totally alone and unaided from start to finish, I’ve trampled upon an ego here and there because not a single person said anything about it at all – despite the fact that it’s the second most-listened-to podcast that we’ve ever broadcast.

But they can’t be too dismissive because they told me that my interview with Johan Gallon will be broadcast TOMORROW (TUESDAY) AT 17:00 CET (that’s 16:00 UK time, 11:00 Toronto time).

Having worked my feet into the door now, I’ve suggested one or two more things that have been accepted, and there are a couple more that I have simmering away on the back burner.

Bhere was a huge dispute at the meeting about someone’s plan. The idea is to present the “Top 10 of the decade” films, music, TV programme, books etc. The plan is to ask the Literary correspondent, Music correspondent etc to suggest their choices.

A dissenter or two however suggested that everyone on the committee put forward their Top 10 and we have a poll.

No-one was interested in my opinion so I went for a ride on the porcelain horse while they fought it out. But in my humble … “quite!” – ed … opinion they are all wrong. People don’t listen to the radio to hear other people, they listen to hear themselves.

Had it been me organising this, I would have announced that I would be at a Saturday market on one weekend (say the 1st in the month) – then a Brocante the next 1st weekend of the month, a football match at another. anywhere where there is a crowd of people, and then interviewed members of the public to ask them.

Now that’s good radio. You never know what responses you are going to receive and some of them will be absolute gems as my Versailles programme proved. But no-one listens to an idiot, do they?

On the way back I stopped off at LIDL for the shopping where I forgot the bananas and something else that I can’t now remember what it was.

And picking up my dejeunette at la Mie Caline, I came home. Not straight home though because I was sidetracked.

This vehicle is telling us that it’s a Saviem, and on the front wing is a badge telling us that it’s a Saviem SM6. Now as far as I’m aware (and I may be wrong) Saviem was absorbed by Renault and the marque was dropped some time round about the late 80s, and this vehicle is clearly later than that.

Furthermore, the SM6 was a medium-range lorry of about 7.5 tonnes and this certainly isn’t. And so I’ve no idea at all about this.

Having spent so long at this meeting, it was lunchtime already so I grabbed my butties while the grabbing was good.

After lunch, it was time to turn my attention to the radio projects. I’d offered a “live concert spot” to someone but he never came back to me so I resurrected a concert that I’d broadcast in the past.

That took much longer than intended too because you’ve no idea how difficult it is to write 3:07 of text when you only have the sketchiest of information. But at least it’s a foot in the door because I wrote to tell the agents of the artist that the concert was being broadcast and I invited them to send me some more stuff from some more of their artists for broadcast if they like.

Next month’s concert, if this guy still hasn’t got back to me, will involve some German input and I have a cunning plan.

Another reason for the delay was that I was using the new ZOOM H1 dictaphone that I bought. It took an age to configure it and an even greater age to find a memory card that would work in it (one out of five) and an even greater greater age to get it to work, but when I finally did, the quality is miles better than anything that has gone before.

As a result, I’m really impressed with this – almost as impressed as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk. The high winds are back again and so there weren’t all that many people out there.

There was plenty of activity out there on the ocean waves though. The tide is quite high but nevertheless there were still several trawlers heading towards the harbour.

This one here for example, just sailing … “dieseling” – ed … in past the Ile de Chausey.

There was another whitish blob right out there in the distance somewhere in the direction of the Channel islands.

Thinking that it might be Thora or Normandy Trader on its way into the harbour, I took a photo of it with the intention of blowing it up, because, despite modern anti-terrorist legislation, I can still do things like that.

But it’s actually another trawler heading into the harbour to unload its catch.

And that’s not all either.

There’s another one that’s even closer to home0 It’s rounded the Pointe du Roc and it’s now in the Baie de Mont St Michel on its way into port. Right now it’s just passing by the marker light that indicates the entrance to the port.

Yes, it’s all go out there this afternoon with these trawlers coming home.

But there’s clearly been some excitement today somewhere because we have rather an unusual visitor in port.

This is one of the Customs launches and I don’t recall having seen one in here today. And there’s no traffic of any kind in port today – especially not over there by where he is moored – that might warrant the kind of attention that he would bring

So I dunno what’s going on with him, and I wasn’t about to go down there and ask him. I came back home instead.

Once I’d finished the radio programme I made tea. There was one of those vegan galette things left over so I had that with rice and veg and a thick onion gravy.

For my evening walk it was freezing outside and I was alone. So I managed my two runs again. But seriously, I didn’t see a single soul out there tonight.

Rosemary rang up when I returned home and we had a really long chat that went on for almost 2 hours – hence I’m running very late and things that I planned to do won’t be done yet again.

So a very late night tonight. I’m taking one pace forward, and ending up two paces behind.

And the apple pie was delicious.

Tuesday 14th January 2020 – I WAS WONDERING …

… how long it was going to be before we had a catastrophe.

The answer is “this afternoon at about 14:00” when this tree came crashing down. It was bound to happen sooner or later because the winds outside are horrific. They aren’t quite the worst that I’ve ever encountered but they are pretty close.

And this tree took the full brunt of it and came crashing down. Lucky that there weren’t any cars parked just there on the car park of the other block of flats.

As for me, I had a really bad day today.

By the time that I finished what I was doing, it was 02:30. Sure enough, the elarms went off at the usual time but it was 07:05 when I finally crawled out of bed.

There was the medication of course and while I was waiting for it to work I attacked some more of this translation. In fact over the course of the day I’ve been nibbling away at it here and there and I’m now at 65%. But even so, my good humour hasn’t returned quite yet.

Round about 11:00 I headed out of the apartment for this Press Conference.

And as I was leaving my apartment this fishing boat from Jersey was leaving port and heading out into the wicked wind. I don’t envy him at all heading that way in all of this.

At least the rain wasn’t all that heavy, which was one good thing. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen horizontal rain.

At the Stade Louis Dior I was one of the first to arrive and so I had another good chat with the Vice-president, Guy Lefevre.

We’d met each other ON THE BUS THE OTHER DAY GOING TO VERSAILLES and so we continued the interesting conversation that we’d had back then.

But then everyone else began to arrive and we all settled down.

None of the players were available today but the team’s chief coach, Johan Gallon, came to talk to us.

He gave us a little talk and we all asked loads of questions. What interested me was that I was the only one there asking questions about tactics and the like. Everyone else was much more interested in the emotional side of the match.

He did his best to answer them but without giving away anything that might be of use to the enemy.

He’s well aware that the match is going to be difficult, much more difficult than against Bordeaux and much more difficult than when US Granvillais met Olympique de Marseille back in 2016.

There were about a dozen of us all told, and two television cameras too. One or two of them were interested in me too – where did I come from and what was I doing there.

I suppose that I’m really something of a novelty around here, being British, asking tactical questions in French and gatecrashing press conferences like this

After half an hour or so Johan gallon left us to carry on with his other business.

However the Vice-President Guy Lefevre stayed behind and a couple of us continued our chat.

We also discussed the Carnaval because he has a char that parades there and it’s another idea that I have for the forthcoming.

One thing I learnt, which was of great interest to me, was how they transported the chars from their hidey-holes to the Parade.

Apparently the operators of the chars have to have Public Liability insurance but the road risks are arranged by the municipality. The Police provide an exemption from the Road Traffic Acts to cover journeys to and from the parades and the parades themselves.

Another thing is that there is a limit on the number of chars. Just 47 are permitted to parade. Motorised chars, that is. Push-along chars can turn up in any particular number that they fancy.

By the time that we finished, the rain had stopped so I walked home in something like comfort. On the way back I popped in to la Mie Caline for my dejeunette and then came back here.

By now it was 14:15 so that was it. Lunchtime.

This afternoon I started to listen to the recordings that I had made. The quality isn’t up to much but, rather like Samuel Johnson’s dog, “I’m surprised that it is done at all”. I spent some time enhancing the recordings so at least I could hear what was being said.

The plan is to listen to the recordings to hear parts that are obvious “answers” to questions that haven’t been asked, then to record the questions and edit them into the recording.

It’s an old radio practice that has been done for years – in fact when the Beatles first toured the USA they sent over to each radio station a recording of “answers” so that the reporters there could ask their own questions and have an “exclusive live interview”.

On that point I went out into the horrendous gale. There were just four of us out there in total today and I was surprised that there was that many.

The wild wind hadn’t stopped them working down at the ferry terminal. They were digging out the silt, tipping it into the dumpers and taking it off to be dumped.

They can’t be going to be spending too long on it because sooner or later they’ll be wanting to send the ferries back out again and they won’t want to be working all around a ferry timetable as well as a tidal chart.

Another thing that’s cracking on is the work on the car park in the rue du Port.

They’ve devastated that pretty much over the last 24 hours as you can tell if you compare it to THIS PHOTO TAKE 24 HOURS AGO. It won’t be long before that will be finished and they will have all gone.

What’s going on in my mind is what it will look like when it’s finished. I hope that it’s not simply going to be a bare patch of asphalt. And I hope that they plant some trees in there too.

Back here I was intending to start work but I’m afraid that I simply crashed out on the chair. I was gone for a good hour too in a deep sleep, the kind of crashing out that I used to have before that last spell of good health.

It’s something that has depressed me completely and I don’t really want to dwell on it.

Instead, I had tea. The last of the falafel with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce, followed by the last of the Christmas Cake. It was delicious too.

So tomorrow I’ll have to start on the rice pudding that I made on Sunday.

If anything, the wind outside had worsened tonight. It bowled me along the street on the way out and on the way back there were times when it was impossible to make headway, so strong were the gusts of wind.

You can’t see it at all well but the waves were smashing over the sea wall at the Plat Gousset with the most astonishing violence.

It’s a shame that they’ve taken this decision to turn out the lights along there in winter. No-one can see a thing out there now and it’s terrible for photography.

The wind was so powerful across the square Maurice Marland that is was impossible at times to walk, never mind run.

But having anticipated that, I’d done my running (such as it is) in the sheltered spot on the north side of the city walls. The huge puddles there made it difficult but I pushed on for a few hundred metres.

It might not be much but at my age and in my state of health I think that it’s pretty good.

There’s a spot on the city walls that is protected from the wind so I went there for a moment.

There was a trawler unloading at the fish-processing plant so I could snap off a quick shot of it through the trees. Winter is my favourite time for photography because there are no leaves to obscure the shot.

On the way back I bumped into a girl walking her dog and smoking a cigarette. We exchanged pleasantries and then I came back.

By now, THE PODCAST OF MY RADIO PROGRAMME WAS ON-LINE so I had a listen.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a lot of time for kids – sometimes (in fact, quite often) I find them far more interesting than adults – and some of the kids in my radio programme didn’t let me down.

They performed admirably and gave a really good filling to the programme as well as providing some comic relief.

It’s the one thing that I regret – not having a kid of my own and I get quite broody at times. But then if I had a kid I would have to have the partner that went with it and I’m not made for living with other people.

Anyway, it’s later. later than I want to be. Marillion has passed by on the playlist so there’s no reason to stay up any longer. I’m off to bed and tomorrow I’ll crack on and do this radio programme.

Whenever am I going to find time to do my own stuff?

johan gallon guy lefevre stade louis dior us granville manche normandy france eric hall

EPIC HALL

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

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Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

Friday 29th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Thursday 28th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Saturday 23rd May 2020 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Wednesday 20th May 2020 – HOW MANY

Tuesday 19th May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Saturday 16th May 2020 – IT’S THAT TIME …

Friday 15th May 2020 – I MISSED …

Thursday 14th May 2020 – THAT WAS A …

Tuesday 12th May 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

Thursday 23rd January 2020 – HERE I ALL AM …

Monday 20th January 2020 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

Tuesday 14th January 2020 – I WAS WONDERING …

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