Tag Archives: cefn druids

Saturday 13th January 2018 – ISN’T IT NICE …

NEW TELEVISION place d'armes granville manche normandy france… to be able to watch the football on the big screen?

Unfortunately the laptop with the broken screen didn’t work – it’s quite an old laptop of course and the software in it won’t run the video plug-in for the browser.

But the laptop that I’ve been using as a media centre up until recently did the business, that’s for sure, and I was able to watch the first half of Cefn Druids v Llandudno in perfect comfort.

Unfortunately it wasn’t such a perfectly comfortable night? I was awake in the middle of the night and took a while to go back to sleep again. But I was dead to the world when the alarm went off and it was a struggle to leave the bed. How I’m looking forward to a nice lie-in tomorrow!

After breakfast I had a shower, a good clean-up and change of clothes, and then off to the shops, where I spent another pile of money.

LIDL had some hand towels of the type that I bought the other day so a pack of three disappeared into Caliburn, as did a battery charger. All of mine are back at the farm and in any case are over 30 years old. A little hi-tech modern one will do much better when I might need it.

At Mr Bricolage I bought a knob for my saucepan lid – the one on which I broke the handle the other day, and NOZ came up with the usual stuff.

Centrakor provided a new washing-up bolw of the correct size (so my wok and my pizza platter will fit into it), a few other bits and pieces and a box with a tight-fitting lid – just the thing in which to keep my socks and undies.

At LeClerc I went to look at the HDMI cables because the one-metre cable that I have isn’t really long enough for what I need. And with -metre ones on offer at just €9:99, that’s long enough for just about everything.

LeClerc was also having a sale on suitcases. And a small cabin-sized one on wheels at just €15:99 – just the thing for my trips to Leuven – also ended up in the back of Caliburn.

And I’m glad that I had bought that TV last weel, because there wasn’t a cheap one anywhere to be seen in the shop.

After fuelling up, I came back home, made myself some soup and then … errr … had a little rest for half an hour. And then cracked on with organising the shopping and sorting out another pile of papers. There’s actually some room in the drawers here now, and isn’t that astonishing?

At the end of the football I had to leave.

football us cerencaise us mouettes de donville cerences manche normandy franceCaliburn and I went off to Cérences where we were the other week.

It’s the nearest Saturday night match and the home side were playing the Mouettes of Donville.

The first half was all one-way traffic towards the Donville goal. But the Donville keeper put in a performance that neither he nor I will ever forget, including a magnificent “Banks” reverse save. It was the performance of a lifetime and I don’t think that I’ve seen better.

At the start of the second half Donville made two substitutions and the two players that came on, playing down the left, changed the balance of the game and we had a much more even contest.

However it didn’t last. The new left winger had clearly unsettled the defenders and after about 25 minutes he was on the receiving end of a bad challenge and limped off the field. We then went back to the one-sided match that we had in the first half.

The Donville keeper was finally beaten with just 10 minutes to go – a long-range shot that dipped and curled out of his reach and in underneath the angle of the post and crossbar – but he still made a couple more top-class saves to make the result look a lot closer than it deserved.

But there was a lot of naughty stuff going on in this game about which the referee didn’t seem at all concerned. One Cérences player made two tackles in as many minutes, either of which merited a red card in my opinion but nothing was given. And so a minute or two later a Donville player exacted his own retribution by giving him a kick that would have felled an ox. No card for that either.

And that’s just a couple of examples. There were many more.

So, frozen to the marrow, I drove back here and now I’m going to bed.

A nice lie-in, I hope. I deserve it.

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Saturday 16th December 2017 – AND AS BARRY HAY …

… once famously said – “there’s one thing that I want to tell you, man, and that it’s goof to be back home”.

Mind you, I nearly didn’t make it, because I didn’t have a very good day.

Sherlock Holmes – or rather Arthur Wontner – did the trick last night. I managed about 2 minutes of the film before I was away with the fairies. All of my walking – 155% of my daily exercise – had seen to that.

Mind you – if I do lay my hands on the person who decided that it would be fun to slam all of the doors in the building at 04:18 this morning he would be someone else who will be drinking soup through a straw for the foreseeable future.

None of that prevented me from going off on my travels though. I was in some kind of warehouse plece with a few other people chasing after a long-haired cat – a black mangy type of animal – with the intention of stroking it. But it disappeared from my view and I couldn’t remember what it was that I was supposed to be chasing and found myself chasing after a large wasp. Just imagine trying to give that a stroke!

This morning I wasn’t feeling so good. I had a bad attack of nausea that made me quite unsteady on my feet. But I managed to calm myself down intime to go searching for a bakkerei. I trawled the streets for 15 minutes before I found a supermarket, and only realised on the way back that had I turned right out of the alley instead of left, the first door in that direction would have sold me a baguette.

I made my butties for the journey but had run out of time so no shower – I can wait until I return home for that.

The train to Brussels was pretty uneventful but the bad news there was that to catch the earlier train would have cost me an extra €46:00. That’s not part of the plan at all so I sat down quietly in a very cold, draughty waiting area and read my book for a while.

The Thalys was one of the older generation of trains with everything manual and I couldn’t make the wi-fi work. But that’s not the end of the world at all really. I have plenty of other things to do.

Apart from visiting the bathroom I slept almost all of the way to Paris, and then I managed to cross Paris on the metro without any incident – and isn’t that a change for just recently?

The walk down the platform to Vaugirard was pretty uneventful, except that some woman was urging her mother on, in the most ungracious terms, to hurry for the train. Mummy was about 80 and so this situation brought back some memories from a previous existence.

They missed their train but there was another one in half an hour so they had to run all the way back to the ticket office to swap tickets and then run all the way back.

The look of despair on this old woman’s face was something that I shan’t ever forget.

But Vaugirard was packed out completely. I’ve never seen it so busy. Apparently it’s school holidays starting today. I grabbed a seat in the waiting room next to a nice girl who was going to Granville from Martinique for Christmas – the last seat available. We had quite a chat and I had to fight people out of her seat when she nipped to the bathroom.

The train was packed to the gunwhales with people and once again, I slept most of the way back. But on the station I bumped into my girl from the waiting room and I wished her a Merry .

Then began the long trudge back here.

It was cold in here, which is no surprise, but I had the heating on full blast while I watched Bangor City beat Cefn Druids on the laptop. The little laptop because the big one decided that it would do an upgrade as soon as I switched it on, and that took hours.

Tea was once more out of a tin, and then I went for a walk – for no good reason other than the fact that I was at 89% of my daily activity. I might as well wind it up to 100% – as it has been for every day this week.

Now it’s an early night. i’ll watch a film too. That seems to be working well right now.

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Tuesday 9th December 2014 – BRRRRR!

Minus 2.4°C outside just no when I went outside to take the stats. And it’s getting colder too. Winter is definitely here and no mistake.

This morning though, when the alarm rang, I’d been awake for over an hour and had been polishing off a bottle of fruit juice. That’s what happens when you have an early night. And I’d been on my travels too. I’d been playing football for Cefin Druids but running up and down the wing off the pitch, just to take the throw-ins. But someone else started to take them so I thought “sod this” and went onto the field.

Afer breakfast I fitted the rest of the important cables to the second part of the second layer of the power board in the barn, and fitting it into place.

After that, I started on the front panel. First job was to find the battery isolating switch that I was looking for on Friday. I didn’t find it, but I did find all of the others so now I have one in place. I also found something else that I had lost ages ago – part of the centre of one of the batches of hole saws. No idea how long that I’ve been looking for that but it does just go to show that you always find stuff you have lost whenever you are really looking for something else.

As for the front panel itself, all of the holes have been cut for the gauges and meters as well as for the battery isolator and the light switch. What I’ll do tomorrow is to do the cutouts for the British mains socket, the Euro mains socket, the 12-volt standard socket, the 12-volt overcharge socket and the cigarette lighter socket. When they are wired in, I can install the front panel.

Tonight, I cooked a mega curry of lentils, potatoes and mushrooms. Enough for another three meals and they should keep for a week or so in these new storage jars that I’m using.

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