Tag Archives: roncey

Sunday 18th March 2018 – US GRANVILLE’S 2ND XI …

cite des sports as brecey us granville manche normandy france… beat AS Brécey 3-0 this afternoon in a league match at the Cité des Sports, the football pitch of which is photographed with the camera on the new phone.

And isn’t that an improvement on the cheap Chinese one?

And a casual observer watching the match will wonder why I’m not saying that the score was 13-0, and that’s because Brécey were, quite frankly, awful.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen such a one-sided match and had US Granville played with a couple of forwards who knew where the goal was, we could have had a cricket score. The Brécey goal was under continual siege with shots going everywhere except into the net.

cite des sports as brecey us granville manche normandy franceGranville could even afford the luxury of taking off Marius, their star central defender after an hour because he was totally wasted out there.

There’s no point in risking him with an injury to rule him out of a more important match.

In fact we had to wait until the 89th minute for the Granville keeper to make a serious save from a Brecey (playing in red and black) player. Up to that point, he had been as much a spectator as we were.

Last night was another bad night for me, despite all of my efforts. At one point, I noticed that it was 04:26 and I was still awake. But 10:01 is a much more reasonable time to leave my stinking pit, that’s for sure.

It took me a while though to come round, and an 11:00 breakfast on a Sunday is always welcome.

The plan today was to go into town to the shops and the brocante, but with the news about Granville’s football match I put everything on hold.

With having had a late breakfast I didn’t need lunch, but I took some biscuits and a banana along with the thermos flask (and of course the building was open, wasn’t it?) to keep me going.

It had been snowing out at Roncey but here it was a nice sunny afternoon, with a little wind and not too cold. A quite enjoyable day in fact.

st pair sur mer kairon plage manche normandy franceAnd the walk back was excellent too, and I retook all of the photos from last weekend.

You can enjoy this photo of St Pair sur Mer and Kairon-Plage away there in the distance, taken with the Nikon DSLR and the telephoto lens. You’ll notice the haze, and also the crowd of people enjoying the late afternoon sunshine.

I’ll put them up in early course – I have tons of photos that need attention right now and for some reason that I don’t understand, I don’t seem to have very much time.

But you’ll have observed that there’s not much wrong with this image here. If there is a fault anywhere with this camera (which is why I stopped using it), it seems to be with the standard lens

la grande ancre granville manche normandy franceBut the clouds were closing in the closer to home that I came, as you might have gathered from the previous photo, so I didn’t hang about on the way home.

But long enough to notice La Grande Ancre come sailing … "dieseling" – ed … into harbour. And this good photo is taken with the old Nikon again but this time with the standard lens.

And so there’s not much wrong with this, so there’s definitely something strange going on somewhere. If only the new Nikon could do stuff like this.

As for the pizza – the best one that I’ve ever made. It was totally perfect. And as for my remark about the weather closing in, when I went out for my late evening walk it was raining. I was right there.

So an early night is called for. Supplies are low so this means a shopping trip. Just you watch it pour down.

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Saturday 24th February 2018 – HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

And it was so nice to receive so many greeting from so many different people.

And it’s so nice to be here too. It’s been a long, hard road this last 27 months or so and there’s plenty more to come as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But despite everything, I wasn’t here last night. I was away with the fairies.

I’m not sure now who I was with at the start of last night’s travels but it quickly developed rather distressingly into a family affair and I don’t need that right now. But first I was with two other people – whom I forget right now – and I can’t remember what it was that we were actually doing. But it had snowed quite heavily and there was plenty about. All of these kids were enjoying themselves in the snow and we quickly organised them into two teams, one of boys and one of girls, and arranged for them to have a snowball fight. My father made an appearance and made a ribald remark, to which I replied that the boys were at the top of the hill and the girls at the bottom, and no doubt they would all meet in the middle at some point in the fullness of time. But what depressed me was that here the kids were, having no end of harmless fun and the headlines on the local radio news programme were all about “gangs of marauding youths rampaging through the town” – and it was nothing like that at all.
From there we repaired to my brother’s house. He was having all kinds of printer issues so I spent a while examining everything. It appeared that he was putting too much paper in, for a start, and was aligning it wrongly so that only one of the guide wheels was picking up the paper, and so pulling it in off-centre. So I told him what to do and showed him how to do it, and left him to it. Half an hour later he told me that it was still doing it, so I went to see. And not only had he changed the printer from the one that we had used before, he had the bad habit of pulling backwards on the paper – just like you would do with the elastic of a catapult – just before the printer went to drag it in. And so the paper missed.
Next stop was my niece. She was printing her right-wing revolutionary tracts in a kind of purple-red ink but she too was having printing issues. Her scanner had an automatic feed but it was feeding all of the papers in at a time rather than feeding them in one by one as it was supposed to. And as a result we ended up there for hours having to feed them in one by one by hand.

And it was cold in the living room too when I awoke. The temperature outside had fallen to minus 1°C outside during the night. And while that’s a far cry from the minus 16C and minus 19°C that we used to have in the Auvergne, it’s nevertheless the coldest that I had recorded since I’ve been here.

After the medication and breakfast and so on, I had a shower and then went off to the shops. And I spent more than I intended too too. I’ve let supplies run down a little this last few weeks and I needed to stock up somewhat.

So LIDL And LeClerc felt the benefit of my largesse, as did NOZ. I treated myself to three DVDs – an obscure spaghetti wewtern and a couple of 1950d cowboy series collections. As well as that, there was a kind of shoulder bag thing, quite small but with several pockets and just the right size for the new camera and telephoto lens. Only €4:99 too.

Almost every petrol station had a queue at it this morning too, and so as I was quite low I fuelled up with diesel. And then had a close encounter with a motorist who decided to reverse out of a car parking space without looking, right in front of Caliburn.

Back here, I … errr … had a relax for a while and so consequently had rather a late lunch. And then set about to organise a load of washing. However I was interrupted as one usually is when one is in a rush so I was rather late going out.

Liz and Terry had invited me for a Birthday tea so I went for a good chat too. Liz made me a nice vegan birthday cake but with no candles on it. Apparently she’s rather concerned about Global Warming. I did tell her that these days you work backwards and count the years that I have left, but that cut no ice with Liz.

ON the way back the floodlights were on at Cerences so I stopped to watch the last 20 minutes of football. I couldn’t tell you who they were playing because the guy whom I asked mumbled something that I couldn’t understand. So I asked him again, and he repeated it in exactly the same fashion so I’m none the wiser now.

And in the time that I was there nothing exciting happened either.

So now my birthday is over. And I’m off to bed. Will I still be here next year? Who knows. But what I do know is that my next six-month session of treatment starts at 08:50 on Thursday 15th March.

I am not looking forward to that at all.

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Tuesday 13th February 2018 – THE BEST-LAID SCHEMES O’ MICE AN’ MEN …

… gang aft agley, as the old saying goes.

And that’s certainly true of many people, particularly of me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall only too well.

I’d had yet another decent sleep, and been to Brussels to see my old friend Enzo, who proudly told me that he had a job of work to do at 16:00. And that was a shame, as I also had a jo for him to do at 16:00. But never mind. With a smiling grace, he cheerfully accepted both jobs, so I left it to him as to how he was going to work it out. My next port of call was to wander around Nantwich to a small marquee where several expensive cars were on display. One of them was a Rolls-Royce – or maybe a Bentley – and the salesman was showing a surprising disinterest in his product. When I queried it with him, he told me that he has just been sacked for having made, in what he thought was a secure confidence, some kind of derogatory comment about the product that he was selling. It had reached the ears of his employers and they had told him that when he goes home at the end of the day, not to bother coming back. He was complaining that he now had no work to do, and so I told him that my friend Enzo had two jobs to do at the same time, and he wasn’t complaining.

I just about beat the second alarm, organised the medication and then had my breakfast. I put the heater on in the bathroom and was settling down waiting for the bathroom to warm up, and the telephone rang. Terry was once more having vehicle issues.

He’d been taken to a garage down in Avranches but had no way of returning home. So I quickly had a shower, set up the washing machine and then headed off down there.

Finding the garage was not easy, and then we had to wait ages while they sorted out all of the paperwork. As a result it wasn’t until midday that we arrived at Roncey. Luckily Liz was back from work so she made coffee and lunch and we had a good chat.

After that I headed home, only to find that all of the post offices are closed for Mardi Gras. So all of the letters that I had written yesterday – they’ll have to wait for a few days now.

Up to that point the weather had been absolutely gruesome – one of the worst days of the year. And that didn’t bode very well for the Carnaval procession. But dramatically, the clouds cleared and we even had a little sun.

Consequently I nipped down to the town to watch it all go by yet again, was once more pasted in confetti and had a couple of dances with a couple of female performers. That’s not like me, is it?

But I couldn’t keep it up for the rest of the afternoon and came back here, for a … errr … little relax.

For tea I finished off the tortillas and stuffing, with spicy rice, and then had my usual walk.

Tonnes more photos to edit and upload, something that I was planning to do this morning. But that will all have to wait now. I’m not sure when I’ll find the time now to get around to it.

But now it’s bed-time. I have an early start in the morning as you know. With it being Shrove Tuesday today, it must be Sheffield Wednesday tomorrow.

And as I’m writing this, I realise that, in the confusion, I have forgotten to do my urine sample for the hospital. So I won’t be taking the p155, which is a shame.

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Sunday 3rd December 2017 – THE ONE PROBLEM …

… about going to bed early is that there’s a tendency to wake up early. We all know this and we are all prepared for it, but even so, being wide-awake at 01:30 is rather an extreme example.

And so, after a couple of miserable hours of being awake and not being able to go back to sleep, I was resigned to being still there when dawn broke.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go back to sleep, and even managed to go a-wanderding.

We started off in a very rare coach – a “P” (as in 1975)-registered Duple Viceroy-bodied coach but fitted with a MAN diesel engine (in the days when the only foreign-engined coaches on the UK roads were the very occasional Volvo B58s) and how after about 30 years the company was considering upgrading it to a more modern one, and there was I hoping that I would be chosen to drive it.
From there we passed to much more exciting things. Some young guy was arrested for belong to some kind of secret organisation -and these people were possessed of a certain power in that firstly they could fly, and secondly they could change identity with anyone of a similar grade in their organisation. how they did that was to hold up their hads with a number of fingers visible – the number of fingers visible being the grade to which they belonged. Anyone of a similar grade seeing the sign would hold up a similar number of fingers and they would exchange identities. This young guy escaped from police custody and there was a hue and cry, but he succeeded in exchanging identities with several people, including the policean who was chasing him and taking his girlfriend as part of the deal.

It was 09:20 when I finally crawled out of bed. That was much more like it for a Sunday.

However, that kind of behaviour means that a great deal of the morning has gone – and with it my plans for (thinking about) tidying up the apartment. So why is it that when your living accommodation is spotlessly clean and tidy, no-one ever comes to visit; but when your place is like a disgusting tip because you’ve been too ill to clean it for the last three weeks, half of the building comes to call?

After lunch, I had a shower and then I hit the road. It’s Liz’s birthday very soon so we were having a little party. I’d picked up some chocolates for her from the manufacturer in town.

The road were greasy and muddy, and Caliburn is in a right filthy mess now. But we all had a good chat and Liz had made some vegan meat loaf, with enough left over to make a doggy bag for me.

But I didn’t stay too long, because I’m not up to much just now. I came home, clutching a Christmas present. And I can guess what it is.

Back here, I went straight to bed. No walk tonight and no surfing about on the internet. I’m definitely feeling the strain. Let’s hope I have a better day tomorrow.

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Sunday 5th November 2017 – I’VE HAD A …

… very nice, busy day out today.

I’ve been round at Liz’s for most of the day. We decided a while agos ago to have a bake-in one of these days – an so we fixed on today.

We spent most of the day baking and making soups, and ended up with a huge pile of stuff. There’s –

home made baking liz messenger roncey manche normandy france

  • carrot, coconut and ginger soup
  • pepper, squash and tomato soup
  • apple crumble
  • vegetable piee
  • coriander hummus
  • beanburgers

There’s enough here to keep us going for a couple of weeks, I reckon.

We split the proceeds between us but I could only bring a few bits and pieces home as my freezer is, as you know, pretty full right now. And I do wish that I had bought a bigger one.

I can pick up the rest another time.

This morning it’s Sunday and so there was no alarm. And so no-one was more surprised to see when I awoke that it was all of … errr … 05:10. But badger that for a game of soldiers. I went back to sleep until a more realistic 09:10.

I’d been on my travels too. A long complicated voyage but all that I remember of it now is being on a couple of cable-hauled barges going in opposite directions on the Manchester Ship Canal.

After breakfast – and nice fresh muesli too – I had a shower and a clean-up. And then I hit the road in the driving rainstorm. Liz’s two neighbouring kids were there and were in quite a chatty mood. Once they had gone, we could attack the cooking.

Lunch was carrot, coconut and ginger soup, and tea was pie and mash with peas. And delicious it all was too. But it was quite exhausting doing it all and I found it hard to keep awake. In the end I had to come home and crash out for an hour.

In view of the weather I didn’t feel like going for a walk. It’s not a good diea too because I seem to have acquired a streaming head cold after my night out last night. I’m going to bed in a moment instead.

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Tuesday 8th August 2017 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN STRIKES AGAIN!

I had to go to the Bank this morning. And as I was running a little low on fruit and stuff I decided to make a list and go to the fruit shop in town and pick up a baguette while I was there.

So down I strolled, picked up my fruit, picked up my baguette – and then came straight back up here having forgotten all about the bank!

I’ll just have to go another time, won’t I?

Bu I don’t think much of the fruit shop though. It’s quite expensive and the quality is nowhere near as good as in the Leclerc.

I’m still not getting the hang of this sleeping thing though. 02:30 when I went to bed last night and awake after just 4 hours and 28 minutes of sleep, of which 3 hours and 58 minutes was restful sleep and the other 29 minutes was restless. Maths is clearly not the strongest suit of my Fitbit, is it?

A minor crisis in which I have run out of muesli, but I’m not making a batch just for a couple of days. Luckily there’s a packet loitering around here from when I was living in “digs”. That’l do until I go.

And talking of going, I’ve been synchronising the computers today. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I bought a new laptop in the sales in June. I still have the old one, slow that it is, because of its light weight and extraordinary battery life. That will be coming with me on my travels.

Despite being the worst, slowest computer that I’ve ever owned, it’s done some sterling service and been on some incredible travels. And it will be on some more too. The synchronisation isn’t finished, but I’ll be dealing with that on Friday.

Not possible to go for lunch on the wall today. Every time one sets foot outside one’s apartment one is drenched with a squall of rain.

This afternoon I was on my travels again. I’d been invited for tea chez Liz and Terry as a pre-holiday treat.

Having had a shower to make myself look pretty (hence the Fitbit stats – I charge it up while I’m under the shower), I took the opportunity of

  1. going to the railway station to pick up the railway tickets for Saturday (you can’t trust these machines to work when you need them).
    That was exciting because there was nowhere to park (I pinched a car hire space in the end) and also because the machine wouldn’t give me the tickets either without the bank card that I used to order them.
    “See the clerk in the ticket office” said the machine. And so I did. And she asked me for my bank card too.
    Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me being stranded in Arizona in 2002 when a bank card was “suspended due to unusual transactions – and so now I have six different cards – and so we had quite a performance trying to decide which the card that I had used.
    Eventually we sorted it out and I went outside to be greeted by the manager of the car hire concession and we had words.
  2. going to Centrakor to buy some luggage labels. All luggage has to be fully-labelled these days and my suitcase – would you believe – does not have a luggage label supplied. At that price too!
    So I bought a pack of flourescent lime-green ones. They’ll stand out on a baggage carousel.

But the traffic through the town was horrendous. One of these huge mobile home things driven by a novice having difficulty in manoeuvring through the streets. And so much time at the railway station that I was stuck in the rush hour and it took ages to move through the town.

Liz had made vegan burgers, which went down nicely with chips and peas, followed by fruit salad and vegan chocolate cake (and a doggy-bag for me). Liz let me borrow her printer to print off my flight tickets too, so that’s all sorted out.

But I was struggling to keep awake all evening so I made my excuses and left. No walk this evening – it was pelting down outside so I sat down to do wome work on the laptop.

But having fallen asleep three times in the middle of a couple of keystrokes, I gave it up and went to bed.

Totally wasted.

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Tuesday 25th July 2017 – I KNEW …

… that it was going to be a lot of hard work today when Terry offered me a slice of Liz’s home-made vegan ginger cake as I arrived.

And I wasn’t wrong either.

I’d had a bad night too. With crashing out so convincingly earlier, it was well after 01:00 when I went to bed. And it wasn’t half an ungainly stagger into the bathroom this morning when the alarm went off.

Having done a bit on the blog (I’m trying to update at least 2 entries every day no matter what) I hit the road. But it wasn’t so easy as it might have been as the telecommand for the barrier didn’t work. I had to rely on a helpful neighbour.

Calling at the Casino for some fuel and the boulagerie in Cérences for some bread, I arrived at Terry’s for coffee and cake.

A quick dismantle of the remote control showed that the battery wasn’t seating right. So I took 10 minutes to repair it properly and even made the warning light function – and that’s a first.

All morning was spent sanding down the walls that we had filled yesterday. Terry had the machines and I was doing it by hand in the corners where the machines wouldn’t reach – Terry couldn’t do that because of his shoulder.

By the time we stopped for lunch we were looking like snowmen.

This afternoon we finished off the sanding, and then we had the cleaning. And I’m not sure which took the longer either.

Final job was to sweep the chimney, which was blocked. This involved a trip around all of the neighbours until someone produced a brosse de ramonage – Terry had packed his so well when he had moved house that he had no idea where it might have been.

Terry was up on the roof and I was down below holding the ladder and checking the fire.

By 17:00 I was totally finished off (remember that I had given up all of this work) and came home. First thing that I did was to have a shower (I forgot yesterday) and rinse my clothes of the plaster dust.

Second thing was .. errr … have a snooze, and until 20:00.

I’d had the remains of Liz’s apple flan for lunch, but Terry had sent me home with the remains of Sunday’s hot-pot so that was tea quickly organised. And just as well too because I’ve seized up, aching everywhere and in far too much pain to move.

But I’ve freed off a little now so I’ll go for a short walk around outside, just to say that I’ve been.

And then an early night – I reckon that I’ve deserved it.

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Monday 24th July 2017 – I HAVE JUST MADE …

… one of the best curries that I’ve ever made.

It’s a chick pea and mushroom curry, and I’ve no idea why it should taste so different (or so nice) but it certainly was. And there’s enough for three more days too.

And I’ve been out this morning too. Apparently there was home-made vegan ginger cake being prepared at Roncey so of course Terry needed a hand with the plasterboard in his living room, didn’t he?

So after breakfast I bunged a load of dirty clothes into the washing machine and Caliburn and I hit the streets for Roncey.

I went out there via Intersport. Liz had seen my fitbit on Saturday and was having a play around with it. She asked me if, next time that I was passing, I could pick one up for her.

And it was a good job that I was outside the shop already when it opened its doors, because they only had one left! They don’t have any now!

Terry had fitted the plasterboard but having pulled a tendon in his shoulder, couldn’t reach up to infill the joints. And so I spent a pleasant morning with a pile of pollyfilla (I thought that I had left all of that kind of work far behind me).

There’s plenty of vegan ginger cake left, so I reckoned that the pollyfilla would need a good 20 hours to dry, and I could go back tomorrow morning and sand it down.

Back here, I crashed out for a good hour. Clearly even doing that amount of work was too much for me, but you will be amazed at the lengths to which I will go in order to get my teeth stuck into a slice of Liz’s home-made cake.

So curry for tea tonight, and now a walk. And then a shower (for my nice, clean bedding) and an early night. I need to build up my strength in order to justice to another slice of Liz’s cake.

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Saturday 22nd JULY 2017 – SO WHAT …

standard lens nikon 1 j5 granville manche normandy france… do the following four hotographs all have in common then?

Apart from the obvious fact that they were all taken from exactly the same viewpoint.

And I’m sorry about the choice of viewpoint, but if anyone really thinks that I was going to look for a more scenic viewpoint in all of the torential rain that we had for most of the day yesterday, then they are mistaken.

standard lens nikon 1 j5 granville manche normandy franceRegular readers of this rubbish will recall that about a week ago I told you that I had just made (yet another) major expense.

And I also said that the other day I’d had a visitor. The visitor was the man from FEDEX and he had brought me my parcel from Germany.

And I’m now the proud possessor of a new camera.

Cost me an arm and a leg too, but I’m sure that it will be worth it.

The Nikon, after many vicissitudes, has temporarily given up the ghost. It needs a new lens at least I reckon, and I have just the aforementioned – sitting back in Virlet. No good there, of course.

So being rather stranded for my holidays, I’ve splashed out.

Rhys (and a couple of other people too) are extolling the virtues of these new mirrorless digital SLR cameras – small, lightweight but very rugged, and there have been some good offers going around just recently.

And I’m now the proud possessor of a Nikon 1 J5.

It’s quite small, not the thing if you have big fingers or are wearing gloves, that’s for sure, and it’s comparatively heavy for its size, but it really is pocket-sized, which will be very handy.

And it’s with this camera that the first two photos were taken.

The lens with which it comes is a 10 – 30mm, so it’s a 0.6 to 1.6 zoom – the first photo taken at min and the second photo taken at max.

With all of the photos scaled down to 800×533 from their standard format of … gulp … 5568×3712, quality to 60% and size to 170kb from … gulp … 11,000kb, they aren’t bad at all

30-110 lens nikon 1 j5 granville manche normandy franceAs for the following two photographs, the camera was not the only thing that I bought.

While I was at it, seeing all of the fun that I had had with a cheap telephoto lens, I lashed out and bought a zoom lens.

30-110 zoom it is, so with the focal length of a standard lens being 18.5mm, this is something like a 1.6 to 6-times zoom.

30-110 zoom lens nikon 1 j5 granville manche normandy franceNot as powerful as the big one that I had, but these cameras are in their infancy and good second-hand stuff is hard to find right now.

The first shot was taken at maximum zoom, and the second one is at minimum.

It’s a little grainy and not as sharp as I would like at maximum zoom, but like I said, it will be a while yet before decent second-hand stuff comes on the market.

So when I was wondering where most of the day went, now I know.

I was up early – and reasonably brightly considering my late night last night – and I did manage to dodge the rainstorms down the pick up the baguette – but that was about the limit. No going out for butties on the wall, I’ll tell you that.

I cracked on with the blog for the morning and I’m advancing quite well, but knocking off for a coffee round about midday I started to play about with the camera.

Later this afternoon I was invited for tea round at Liz and Terry’s. Vegan home-made hot-pot followed by vegan glazed apple flan and soya cream. Terry is busy plastering the living room but has hurt his shoulder and finding the rubbing down of the joints very painful.

So in a moment of weakness (my spirit easily succumbs when it’s tucking into Liz’s baking) I shall be out working on Monday – and maybe for a couple of days afterwards too. Talk about the blind leading the blind!

But the drive out to Roncey was a nightmare. And living here might be bad for my health – I’ll tell you that.

Grockles wandering down the street pointing to the sky going “oooh look Doris, a seagull” and stepping off the kerb without looking – I bet that he had to go back to his hotel and change his trousers when Caliburn let fly at him with a volley on the motor horn.

And perishing grockles driving along at 10mph admiring the seagulls when I’m in a hurry. And bleeding grockles simply driving out of side streets totally oblivious of give-way signs and road markings – I bet that he had to go back to his hotel etc etc.

And blasted Belgian grockles who can’t figure out how the cash card reader at the petrol station at the Casino supermarket works (and I bet he had a surprise when I told him what I really thought of him – and in Flemish too!).

And the flaming road closed at Donville-les-Bains as they lay out the street for some kind of street festival tomorrow.

I didn’t go for a walk either – what with the rain this evening.

Ahhh well!

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Monday 26th June 2017 – I SEEM TO HAVE ACQUIRED …

… a washing machine. And it’s sitting in the back of Caliburn right now.

Terry rang me up – and at 08:30 too. “Doing anything? I can’t get the dumper to start”

Actually, I wasn’t in the mood right then and there. If you had been through what I had been through during the night you would not have been either.

I had had a dreadful night, and there was a time round about 02:00 where I thought that I would never ever go to sleep. So much for the early night that I promised myself.
But I must have done at some time or other because I had a visitor during the night.

I’m not sure why Nerina came to visit me but, as this little girl who was in my room at the time remarked, she was wearing a black cloak – and there were various references to all kinds of famous fictional characters. The meeting at first was quite acrimonious but after quite some time it mellowed and in the end we finally agreed to a division of our assets. But not our physical assets – agreement was reached over that years ago – but all of the paperwork. And there we were, during the night, dividing up all of the paperwork sheet by sheet, regardless of whether the division made any logical sense for the accounts or the correspondence that were involved.

Ohhh, how I didn’t want to get out of bed, but I did, and managed some breakfast -and while I was vegetating over a hot mug of coffee the telephone went. Fetching it back, I answered it and it was Terry.

I had a few things to do – like updating a couple of entries on the blog (I am determined to do some of it every day) and having a shave and a shower – and then I hit the road to Roncey.

Terry was right – the dumper wouldn’t start. But I made it start by pouring some drops of neat petrol down the air filter. Fired up a treat but it wouldn’t run on.

So knowing that it fired up, then it can’t have been an electrical or mechanical fault – must be fuel. Plenty of fuel in it and it was going down the fuel lines into the carburettor and the float chamber was full.

Here we were interrupted.

Liz has an old washing machine that only works on one programme and which rattles about the floor of the bathroom like a jive dancer on sherbet dabs. But having had a good month at work, she’s bought herself a new super-duper mega-washing machine and it came today. We signed for it and spent an hour mauling it into the laundry room and installing it.

What a beast.

And the washing machine is awesome too.

“Right, let’s sling the old one into the trailer. I’ll run it down to the dechetterie this afternoon”
“Why?” I asked. “Has it finally handed in its chips?”
“Ohh no” said Terry. “It still works like it always did – maybe more rattly these days – but it’s no use to anyone now we have this one”.
“I can think of someone who will have a use for it” I said. “Let’s sling it in the back of Caliburn”

I know that I decided that I would only have new things here in this apartment, and a new washing machine is high on my list of things to purchase, but you’ll remember that the other day I told you that I wasn’t going to spend any more money for a while and go to have a good time in Canada instead.

So it’s the launderette for me then for the rest of the year and that’s extremely inconvenient for all kinds of reasons. So any old washing machine that will keep running for 6 months or so will be a big bonus for me. It’ll save me €50:00 down at the launderette as long as it keeps on going.

Back to the dumper, and with fuel getting into the float chamber, it was time to take off the carburettor.

The carburettor is held on by just two bolts. But if I were to tell you the performance that we went through in order to gain access to the two bolts, and then to disconnect all of the throttle and choke linkages, you wouldn’t believe me. It was like that stupid Hyundai Trajet that I did two years ago – all assembled onto a subframe on a bench and then fitted into the framework, so you can’t get at anything.

That took us to lunchtime.

After lunch with the carburettor in my sweaty little mitt I went to take out the jets – but they are fixed in – can’t be dismantled. So I had to work out where all of the air passages were and use a compressor to blow them out backwards.

Sure enough, I eventually discovered a passage that was blocked and so with a fine wire I probed the orifice and eventually cleaned it out. And then a few more blasts of air to make sure.

I checked the float to make sure that it wasn’t holed, and then reassembled the carburettor. And then, I had to stick it back on the engine – which was even more interesting than taking it off.

The good news was that with the first pull (it’s a recoil starter) of the starter it fired up correctly. And Terry and Liz (who was by now back from work) reckoned that it was running better than it had for quite a while.

Liz made a gorgeous tea and afterwards we sat around in the beautiful evening sunshine chatting about this and that.

And now I’m home. And with a washing machine too. Terry and Liz think that they might be on their travels at the weekend so they will pop by and help me bring it upstairs and install it. So this weekend I might even be able to do my own washing. And isn’t that progress?

It’s looking more like home every minute.

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Friday 2nd June 2017 – HAVING A RIDE …

sand sculpture crocodile montmartin sur mer manche normandy france… on Rosie the Crocodile – and just look at those big scary teeth!

While I was out doing my shopping his morning I had a phone call from Liz. “We’re all going down to the beach at Montmartin sur Mer this afternoon after lunch. Would you like to come with us?”

Do bears go for picnics in the woods?

Last night was a really bad night for me. I was still wide awake at 04:35 and wasn’t sure that I would ever go off to sleep. But I must have done, and crawling out of bed at 07:00 wasn’t very easy either as you might expect.

A shower brought me round somewhat, and then I noticed a little calamity – something along the lines of the fact that I seem to have run out of clothes again. I had a good rummage around and managed to find a few clean things but I really shall have to go to the launderette next week. I have actually found one in the town by the harbour.

Once I’d organised myself I headed off to the shops. Going on a Saturday morning, is, as we know, a waste of time. I went to the Bio shop for some vegan sausages (I fancy sausages, beans and chips), to Mr Bricolage for some fittings for the curtain rail in the bedroom, and to LeClerc for the groceries and some diesel.

But I’m going to have to think again about the bio shop. The stuff in there is quite expensive, the choice isn’t up to much and the staff is quite surly in there. I shall have to see what I can find in the way of mail-order outlets once my bank account is FINALLY organised.

And we weren’t alone on the streets either. By one of the roundabouts was a police motorcycle patrol who was interested in vehicles entering the town. Not quite sure why, but he took a note of Caliburn’s registration number.

After lunch I headed for the beach at Montmartin sur Mer.

french army aeroplane montmartin sur mer manche normandy franceWhile I was on my way up the coast I was overflown by a flight of four aeroplanes. Big four-engines French Army transport planes of some description – I’ve no idea at all what they might be.

But when I was walking down onto the beach after parking up Caliburn they flew back again, directly overhead. This gave me a good opportunity to take a close-up photograph of them as they roared by. They were certainly impressive – and noisy. Just imagine what 500 Avro Lancasters going by overhead must have sounded like. No wonder you needed an intercom

french army aeroplane montmartin sur mer manche normandy franceAt the end of the beach, away in the distance, they performed a U-turn and flew back off at a tangent somewhere inland. They were clearly up to something, that’s for sure.

As an aside, it was explained to me later that there’s to be a drop of parachutists over the Invasion Beaches to commemmorate D-Day in a couple of days time. I reckon that these would be just the type of aircraft to carry paratroopers and so maybe they are having a quiet rehearsal of low-flying over the beach.

lighthouse pointe d'agon montmartin sur mer manche normandy franceWhile I had the camera out – do you see that lighthouse across there? That’s the lighthouse on the Pointe d’Agon where we were the other day. We’re actually at the mouth of the River Sienne (not the Seine) and the currents offshore are gradually shifting the mouth southwards by that huge sand bar over there.

Built in 1856 on the site of an old fortress washed away in 1776 by an exceptionally high tide, the lighthouse is now a good kilometre from the mouth of the river today.

We had fun building Rosie the Crocodile and then the lack of sleep last night took hold. I can’t think of any finer way to spend a sunny afternoon out at the beach than by having a good crash-out for a couple of hours. I was well away. And everyone was laughing because I’d put my cap on my face to protect my face from the sun, and as I was breathing in and out, my cap was going up and down like in one of these cartoon films.

Liz and Terry very kindly invited me back for tea and we all had a really good chat, as Kate, Darren and the kids are going home tomorrow. And then , I came home.

It had been a long day and so it wasn’t any longer that I hung about before going to bed. I have no plans for tomorrow so we’ll see what that day brings.

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Friday 26th May 2017 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we featured a proper “Ship of the Day” on these pages?

When I was in Montreal or somewhere down the St Lawrence we could take our pick of dozens each day, but it’s usually pretty thin pickings whenever we are elsewhere.

victress port de granville harbour manche normandy franceBut not today though, because today our ship really has come in.

It’s another really high tide this week and it’s brought in the Victress, who has sailed in from Southampton to pick up a load of gravel. Built in 1992, she flies the flag of Barbados and displaces about 1500 tonnes.

Not the biggest ship we’ve seen, but the biggest that we’ve seen in recent times and the biggest that we are likely to see here in Granville. She’s not there now, though – the ground’s all flat. And she’s somewhere out in the Channel so it seems. And I’ve not been able to find out where she’s heading.

She was formerly known as Uranus but this was changed due to ribald remarks from captains of other ships – something along the line of “with my binoculars I can see Uranus from here”

After breakfast this morning I had a quick shower and shave and change of clothes and hit the streets in search of the bus stop. Of course I have a choice of two, and of course it was “the other one” but just €1:00 and pretty painlessly (and I’ll do this again) I was decanted at the top of town to rescue Caliburn. He’s had his service, and the strange noise seems to have gone, and he’s had his controle technique. That gives me two years motoring without any major worries, which is always a bonus.

And on the way back, I picked up my oven. That’s now installed and working – and I had to change round my kitchen a little to fit it on the shelves and things don’t fit as well as they did before, which is a shame. But tomorrow I’ll be tracking down a pizza tray, some bread-making stuff and some oven chips. THis is going to start to become interesting.

For lunch I headed off to my usual spot – the clifftop overlooking the port – and this was where I made the acquaintance of Victress. But not for too long because once more I was burnt out of my position and head to retreat to here where I promptly crashed out for an hour.

granville manche normandy franceAnd while we’re on the subject of photographs … "well, one of you is" – ed … it occurs to me that you have yet to see the view out of my living room windows.

It’s not very inspiring unfortunately (although I’ve seen much worse) but if I look over to the right-hand side I can in fact see the sea.

It’s not exactly the sea view that I was hoping to have, and I don’t have a terrace which would have been perfect, but here in Granville I can’t do much better than this. Especially as if I just step outside the front door of the building the view is stupendous as you know

Later on, I went out to Roncey. Liz’s grandchildren (whom you have seen many times on these pages) are coming to stay tomorrow and it’s important that Strawberry Moose is there to greet them. So now he’s playing hide-and-seek down the bed.

Back here, I had another dollop of the kidney bean stuff that I made yesterday and it was just as delicious too.

So tomorrow it’s a mega-shop again. So just you watch me forget something important.

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Friday 5th May 2017 – SO HERE I AM …

… about to spend my first night in my new chez moi.

Last night I had a really good sleep and was awakened from the dead by the alarm. I knew absolutely nothing about anything in between. I’d been on my travels but all memory of them had disappeared by the time that I had come round.

It was something of a painful breakfast – I’ve clearly been doing too much just now – and I ad to sit around for half an hour or so before I could hit the road. But I ended up at NOZ just as it opened.

NOZ was something of a disappointment. It’s a shop that sells all kinds of ends of series, bankrupt stock, all of that, and I was hoping for a pile of stuff to help me set up home, but it had almost nothing whatever.

I had much better luck in Centrakor where I spent almost €100. Tons of stuff in there that I needed, but most important, after a decent big waste bin of course, was some bedding. A single quilt, pillow and quilt cover. I’m sleeping on the sofa until I can sort out a bed, and I’ll need these to keep warm. It won’t be wasted because if I have friends to stay, they can use the bed and the double quilt that I’ll be buying, and I’ll use the single on here.

After that I went to LeClerc and stocked up with whatever I couldn’t get and also a pile of food. And then I came here.

Still creaking and groaning, it took me a while to bring everything up and then I sat down and made my butties – only to be disturbed by the man from EDF. It took him just 5 minutes to reconnect the electricity and another couple of minutes to show me how to figure out the switch to the immersion heater so that it works on off-peak hours only.

Once that was organised I went into town. I had to pick up the lease for this place, but the estate agent wasn’t in. And then I had to go to my internet provider to pick up a new box. On the way back, seeing as how I now have a working fridge, I picked up a box of strawberry sorbet. I may as well make good use of the freezer drawer I suppose;

This new portable halogen hob thing that I bought in IKEA a couple of months ago isn’t half the bee’s knees. Once I’d worked out how to make it function, it cooked a quick meal for me in minutes flat. It just shows you how out-of-date this old technology is. When I organise the kitchen I’ll be having a couple of halogen hobs to cook with, and I’ll see if I can’t find a halogen oven to go with it. I’m very impressed.

There’s no internet here for another week but I’m in luck because seeing as I am so high up here on the rock, I can pick up some really good signals and my internet supplier has a public wi-fi point in the vicinity to provide a service to the hostel for young workers just down the road. With my own ID and password I can connect into it, so here I am. I’m not sure just how reliable it might be though.

So now I’m going to try for my first night here in my new place. No curtains on the window so I’ll be awoken early.

And that’s the cue for an early night then, isn’t it?

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Thursday 4th May 2017 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY

My last day here at Roncey today. And I can’t say that I’m sorry.

Well, actually yes I can because I’m here in the best of company with Liz and Terry and with food that is second to none, but the last time that I had a home of my own was in mid-November 2015 – over 18 months ago. Ever since then I’ve been living out of a suitcase in all kinds of different accommodation of varying quality. Now that I’m within touching distance of having a place of my own, I’m in a hurry to go there.

Last night I went to bed early-ish and took ages to drop off yet again. But when I did I was Gone With The Wind until about 06:45.

I’d been on my travels too. I had a selection of vehicles, one of which was the Escort van that I still have somewhere. It was taxed but not MoT’d, and I had other vehicles which were MoT’d but not taxed, or there was no insurance on them. And it occurred to me that I was dissipating my energies and why didn’t I put everything into just one vehicle and keep it properly taxed, tested and insured? Instead, I went to catch the bus. One bus drove past me while I was crossing the road. This was the bus 31 – a green Crosville single-decker of the mid-late 1950s. I could have caught that if I had hurried but instead I went across to a house where an old lady (formerly a passenger of mine on the taxis) and a few other women too (regular readers of this rubbish will recall what I mean when the word “beguiled” springs to mind). When I arrived the woman let me in and I noticed that she had a suitcase already packed as if she was ready to go on holiday. I wondered if I was disturbing her but apparently not.

Breakfast was with Liz and after she had gone to work Terry and I filled the cracks in the plasterboard that we had fitted yesterday and then insulated the walls. And seeing how easy all of this went together with metal studding and sheets of Rockwool I really wish that I had done my house like this.

We had to put a waste pipe in this afternoon and this was where the fun began. The soil at the rear of the house is backed up against the wall so we had to dig out a hole where we were passing the waste pipe through. It’s a good job that my digger is here. And then the hole filled with water off the water table so we had to pump it out. And then the wall is 1 metre thick and we only had a 24mm drill that long – and we needed a hole of 40mm. So we had to drill through as a pilot with the 24mm drill and then go in from either side with a shorter 40mm drill – but the holes didn’t line up exactly so the first try with a length of waste pipe fouled up and broke.

That meant a trip to Coutances for another length (in fact I bought two, to be on the safe side) and that’s where we ended up.

Now I’m stiff, aching all over, thoroughly exhausted and worn out. I’m not as young as I used to be.

So when I wake up tomorrow I’m heading off back to my new chez moi in Granville and I hope that the electrickery will be there some time during the course of the afternoon.

And then I’m going to sleep for a week.

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Wednesday 3rd May 2017 – I’VE BEEN TO COUTANCES …

… more times today that I have been in the rest of my life.

Well, anyway I reckon so, because when I was there a couple of weeks ago I didn’t see anywhere or anything that made me think that I had been here before when Nerina and I did out Grant Tour of Normandy and Brittany in 1991.

But last night, once I finally managed to drop off to sleep, I slept the Sleep Of The Dead and it wasn’t until the alarm went off that I awoke.

Terry and I were on our own today after breakfast and I had to go into Countances for the stuff that we needed for today’s exertions – the pipes for the plumbing of the heating in the kitchen, some more metal studding for the walls and a few other bits and pieces too. While I was out at the shops Terry started to fit the wooden bracing supports on the wall where the kitchen units will be.

Upon my return I helped Terry finish off the bracing and then we had a mega-tidy-and-clean-up, which took us up to lunchtime.

After lunch we fitted the insulation and the plasterboard on the ceiling in the hall, and that was quite exciting seeing as there was just two of us. And then an inventory of stock showed us that we were still short of what we needed and so I had to return to Coutances.

While I was there, I noticed that the Intermarché had a couple of small 6kg washing machines on offer at just €199. There’s plumbing for an automatic washer at my new place and so this could be a possibility.

Back here, we finished off the day by installing all of the studding down the wall that runs down the front of the kitchen and the hallway. That took a while as there were many fiddly bits to be done.

Liz had done a machine-load of washing for me before she went. I’d found a bag full of dirty washing at the bottom of the pile of stuff in Caliburn and so I’d put it all in an empty black holdall similar to the one that I use for travelling that had a set of clean clothes and stuff like that. And then I’d brought the wrong one with me and left behind in my apartment the one that I should have bought. And so tonight I had a shower in the gorgeous new shower here and a change of clothes to make me smell nice – if that’s at all possible.

The Electrickery Board has changed the time of my re-connection on Friday to between 13:00 and 17:00 so I’m staying here tomorrow to give Terry another day of help, and I can sleep here until Friday morning. That will take me nicely into town on Friday morning to do the essential shopping to start myself off.

The big question is, though, will I have faded away by Friday morning? At this rate I wouldn’t rule it out.

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