… of this rubbish will recall that a good few months ago I spoke about some kind of plan or other involving the abandoned railway network that ran through the port at one time.
This morning on my travels up town to LIDL I happened to look over the wall down to the harbour, and here they are, digging out the infill from where they had covered it up in the past.
It goes without saying that I’m really intrigued with what’s going on down there and on my way for my dejeunette tomorrow I shall be making further enquiries.
With lots of activity going on in the harbour down there right now, you could be forgiven for thinking that that was that.
But not at all. In fact one thing that was conspicuous in one sense was that Victor Hugo was conspicuous by its absence. That means that both of the Channel Islands ferries are out somewhere because Granville, the newer one, is also absent and has been for a day or two now.
It must be all go at the Channel Islands right now
But it wasn’t all go here this morning. The night was reasonably early and I did hear all of the three alarms, but I couldn’t somehow find the intention to leave the stinking pit. It was gone 08:00 when I finally saw daylight this morning and that’s no good at all.
After the medication I attacked the dictaphone and I’m not sure exactly what I was doing in some kind of poor mountain village in poverty-stricken USA but it was doing some thing like a radio programme or whatever, I suppose. I had this young girl with me – she might even have been my daughter. The story goes that she was found kissing one of the boys in this village. They rounded up this girl and me and started to change our clothes and gave us nice clothes to wear. It suddenly struck me that this is marriage, isn’t it? This girl is going to be married off to this boy presumably but she was nowhere near old enough for this kind of thing. She was admiring the clothes that she was wearing and started to hum “here comes the bride” and suddenly had this appalling look of horror on her face as she too realised what was going to happen and started to snatch the clothes off her. These people were trying to grab hold of her to keep the clothes on and that was when I awoke.
After breakfast I was straight into the shower and as I seem to be struggling for clothes right now, I stuck a pile of dirty ones into the washing machine and let them have a run round.
And then the excitement began.
Wit my train being cancelled this morning I mentioned that I was changing my travelling arrangements. So off to the railway station in the pouring rain.
Hardly had I presented myself at the ticket window when the girl there beckoned someone else forward and let them have their say before me. Needless to say, there were words said about that.
She then couldn’t piece together my itinerary so I had to help her put the tickets in order (which had been in order until she had started messing around with them)
So eventually I was able to ask –
Our Hero – “as my train has been cancelled today, I’d like to change my travel and go again in two weeks time”
Girl at Window – “what date is that?”
OH – “two weeks from today”
GAW – “what date is that?”
OH – “whatever date two weeks from today is. The 23rd is it?”
GAW – “I don’t know”
OH doing some rough calculation – yes, 23rd
GAW – “the same trip?”
OH – “Didn’t I say that?”
GAW – “I don’t know”
so eventually after much prompting and grumbling she did it.
OH – “now what about the return?”
GAW – “what date?”
OH – “Just what I said earlier – the same trip but in two weeks time”.
GAW – “What date is that?”
OH – “whatever date is two weeks from the date on the ticket”
GAW – “but you haven’t told me what date”
OH by now rapidly losing his patience and his temper was surely bound to follow – “two weeks from the date on that ticket”
GAW – “but what’s the date?”
OH doing some more rough calculations – the 26th
GAW – “that will be €15:00”
OH – “what do you mean €15:00? I’m having to rearrange all of my trip because the outward train isn’t running. You’ve cancelled it”
GAW – “but the return train is running”
OH – “so how am I supposed to get the return train if I can’t travel out to get it?”
GAW – “I dunno”
The net result of all of this is that they will need to repaint the interior of the station booking office where the paint has blistered under the heat of my incendiary comments. I’ve not changed my return trip as yet but I shall be doing so in very early course once I’ve spoken to the SNCF head office.
LIDL next. And nothing of any excitement there, although I did forget to buy the peppers and mushrooms. I dunno what’s the matter with me right now.
Calling at La Mie Caline for my dejeunette, I then headed off for home.
Most of the day has been spent doing this football thing and by the time that I knocked off it was almost finished. There are 7, or possibly 8 main threads now with all of the isolated soundbites incorporated in to one of the threads as appropriate.
The linking texts have been dictated too but all of that needs editing and some background dubbed onto it, and then I can link it all together and dictate a closure to add in.
It’s about an hour’s work, I reckon, but knowing me, it will probably take most of the morning.
And then I have that stupid, pointless translation to do. It hasn’t escaped my attention that with the project owner not having had the time to edit it, I’m going to have to translate everything. I reckon that I keep about 15-20% of whatever I record on an interview and discard 80-85%, so this tells me that 80-85% of my work is going to end up filed under CS.
And that’s a thought that depresses me greatly as you can imagine. As Sheriff Buford T Justice put it so well in Smokey and the Bandit
There were the usual interruptions today. Lunch was one of them of course and that hummus that I made the other day is tasting better and better as the herbs and garlic spread through it.
We had the afternoon walk of course, around the headland.
The sun was out and it was quite bright now. The rain had stopped. But there was a fierce wind blowing around and whipping up quite a wave down there. Some of the waves were crashing over the sea wall with an impressive force.
Not the kind of day to be out there at all.
Nevertheless, there were quite a few people doing their best. There was a line of about a dozen fishing boats heading into port.
If you have any doubt about what the phrase “making heavy weather of it” means, just one look at this boat will explain it to you better than anything I can say.
She was up and down and in and out of the waves all the way around the headland.
You probably noticed that I mentioned the line of fishing boats out there heading into port.
This is where they are heading and they’ll have to ride out at anchor because there isn’t any room at the inn. Apart from our old friend La Grande Ancre, I count another 8 of them just there.
The pink one that we saw heading this way is going to take the last empty berth and the rest of them out there will have to wait.
Not for long though.
The unloading takes place pretty quickly, as you can see. There’s quite a load on that boat there and they are using the cranes to stack it onto the trailer that is pulled by the tractor.
Where it goes after that I don’t know, but one of these days I’ll track it down.
Back to the apartment now to carry on working.
And the day that I might be able to work even faster might not be far away. That’s the company that’s installing the fibre-optic cable and they are doing something out in the street just outside the Place d’Armes.
Here’s hoping that it’s the cable being connected up.
Tea tonight was a burger – or, at least, it should have been a burger. But in the packet that i bought “on spec” from NOZ were some galette- thinks, like small thick crepes made with vegan components. Quite different from what I was expecting but tasty all the same and I’ll look out for more of these.
For the evening walk I was on my own at first.
Cold and windy but the sky was reasonably clear. Donville-les-Bains was looking quite nice in the dark but I didn’t stay around long to admire it. I went off and had my run.
However I have never ever felt less like it than I did. The strong headwind didn’t help but even so I was all for giving up after the first 100 yards. I kept on going though, and just about made it to the ramp.
There were crowds of people outside La Rafale, the bar in the Place Cambernon, and the pizza van that wa sparked there was doing a roaring trade.
My attention was distracted by a woman taking a rather small cat for a walk. She explained to me tearfully that it had been diagnosed with this cat disease that goes around. It’s survived a couple of attacks but it now had it again and its days are numbered.
And so i commiserated with her and gave her cat a stroke, poor thing.
Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. It’s later than I hoped but for some reason I can’t concentrate on anything today.
But at least I didn’t crash out. That’s always something to be grateful for, I suppose.
