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Tuesday 26th March 2019 – I WAS WONDERING …

… why I was planning on having pasta for a change with my stuffed pepper. And so while I was preparing the pepper I decided on rice instead.

It wasn’t until I sat down to the pudding that I realised why. Rice as a main course followed by rice pudding was not really a good idea.

Last night, I was in bed by 22:00. And it was a rather restless night too, with me waking up on several occasions. I’d been on a few travels as well, some of which were quite interesting.

There was a whole pile of us and we’d been walking or something like that and we’d ended up in a really big shop. Eventually I found myself at the front of the queue and I ordered a pound of minced beef (and I’ve no idea why I would order that). The conversation then moved around to a discussion of Belgian trains. Someone shouted something at me and I couldn’t hear them properly and understand what they were saying, but it came out that they wanted to know the price of a train fare from somewhere. I replied that I could remember a certain station where we used to get on at one time – a station right out in the sticks and it cost us €18:00 to go to there. The most that I had ever paid to go anywhere on Belgian Railways was €22:00. This conversation then ended up as a length discussion about Belgian trains
Everyone has the right in post-Brexit Britain to be on the right-hand side of the road in queues and this is just one occasion where people were suddenly being confronted with all of everything that they had bought or collected and it needed to be sorted out and cars needed to be moved over to the other side of the road to be parked. It was all extremely complicated, and all for nothing. I remembered being in the south of Germany and falling over the back of a settee on the border and ending up in Austria on the other side of the settee – the seat bit (and what that voyage was all about, I have no idea at all).
A little later I was in the High Arctic again with Natalie and I was trying to get on board the ship, but I was totally unprepared. I had a couple of lockers and a bed inside a wooden hut. I was trying to pack my rucksack with things that I needed to take on board ship. With natalie being there I couldn’t get at the secret box of supplies because I didn’t want her to see it. Everyone was hurrying about and I was getting p155ed off and Natalie went off, so I started to stuff more things into my rucksack. She then came back and told me that someone had said not to forget about the ghetto blaster so I had to hunt that down and stuff that into the rucksack too. It was all quite chaotic and I was panicking. Everyone was assembling ready to go on board the ship and I was nowhere near being ready.
Finally I was out again somewhere sitting on a table talking to someone who had been on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour (but he hadn’t of course). He was an Inuit (although he wasn’t). We were talkig about the High Arctic and he was telling me that Nunavut had now become chair of the Arctic Council and how pleased he was about it all. We were talking about all kinds of things so I asked him if he was planning to go back on the Adventure Canada runs this year. he said that he wasn’t, so I then tried to get in touch with the Company to try to get myself on board the ship this year, but he didn’t seem to pick up on what I was saying, and I was really disappointed at that. I was trying to make him interested in what I was doing but he was more interested in telling me that they now had street lights out there in Nunavut so it was much safer to move around at night – you could see if there were any polar bears around. We ended up wandering off and I was talking about all of this to him but it wasn’t him at all but two other people. I said something about the fact that the people in there – indicating the building from where I had just come – weren’t al that interested, so that had them scratching their heads wondering what I was talking about. I came across a phone box by the Square in Crewe in the ice so I was trying to ring them but it was the wrong time of day, no-one was answering their phones. In the meantime I was planning to do some kind of radio programme on one of these internet radio stations where I could have a couple of people talking in Inuktitut while I played rock music.

Just for a change I left the bed quite early this morning and I was all set for a good day’s work.

I started off with a shower and a general clean-up. And a haircut too. It didn’t need it, but I want to keep it under much better control than I have been doing.

Following that, there were the dictaphone notes and I’m back now into mid-August. But there are plenty for the period from early Spring to then, including a whole voyage around central Europe, so this is going to be a rather long job. 358 files to be transcribed in fact, so it’s not the work of five minutes.

The next thing to do was to bring the blog up-to-date – at least, in recent times. I did all of the photos back until when I set out to Leuven.

All of that took me up to lunchtime.

This afternoon I started on the searchable photo database for September 2018 when I was in the High Arctic. Another hundred or so photos were indexed, but this took far longer than I intended because not only has it involved some research, I also had another closer look at some of them.

Basically, the editing that I did on board ship isn’t very satisfactory and now that I have a much better computer and a better graphics program, I can do far better than I did on board the Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and I’m planning to go back and do them all again.

Furthermore, with the better screen and higher resolution, I’ve been picking out bits of the photographs with interesting items that I missed. So I’ve been cropping those out and blowing them up – which I can do these days despite modern anti-terrorism legislation.

So there are a few more photos to merge back into the run of things now, and by the time that I finish there will probably be a few more too.

My walk around the headland this afternoon was a reasonably solitary one.

But not as solitary as it might have been because we were being observed from above.

It’s that kind pf the year when all of the hang-gliders come out. And there they are soaring up over the old barracks building. On eof these days I might have one dropping in for tea.

But there have been changes in the chantier navale.

The big yacht, that might have been Spirit of Conrad has gone, as have a few of the other ones too, including Charles-Marie.

They’ve obviously finished what they were doing to them, but not to worry – it’ll be full again soon, I imagine.

But one of our old favourites has come back.

The ancient Bedford CF caravanette that appears here every now and again on a regular basis is back in its little hidey-hole.

One of these days I’ll go down there for a chat to the owner.

And I’ve solved the question about the strange annex to the house down there in the rue du Port. It seems that the plans include installation of a lift. So the space above will be for the machinery.

Tea was as I mentioned. And it was extremely delicious. And there’s enough stuffing left over for another one too.

The wind had risen for the evening walk. I was pretty much alone there too and I didn’t hang around all that long either.

So I’ve had my cocoa for supper and now I’m off to bed. I had an enormous wave of fatigue later in the afternoon and ended up curled up asleep on the chair for 20 minutes.

I really need to have a decent sleep one of these days, and I do hope that it’ll be soon.

Monday 25th March 2019 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day it’s been today.

Although I was out of bed round about 06:45, by 09:50 I was back in bed again. And I’d already fallen asleep twice on the chair in the meantime.

So in bed I was and in bed I stayed until about 11:30. That was a horrible start to the day.

What was even worse about all of this was that I had had an early night last night, and a decent sleep until the alarm went off, even though I did wake up twice during the night.

But there was enough time for me to go on a nocturnal ramble during the night. I’d been sent to prison and it was something like Alcatraz – a big grim grey stone horrible, stinking place. There were all kinds of horrible people and things in there, but what stood out were 4 elderly Confederate soldiers still in their uniforms – Confederate blue-grey but with a big Union Jack on the front as if they were British volunteers who had been caught by the North. Although they were imprisoned there, they were trying to negotiate some kind of good deal to have their conditions eased. But the Commandant was something of a swine who might well take advantage of their willingness to negotiate by doing good things, while he remained intransigent. I was ushered in to this meeting and I could see myself there. There was someone else there who said that he was a brewer, and the Commandant’s eyes lit up at this news. I was thinking along the lines of “those who work get paid” so I told the Commandant that it might be possible for the inmates to have an easier life if they could all do things like this for the good of the community (ie him) and he seemed to be quite open to the idea. He started to offer a little bit of a concession, although I knew deep down that there was no reason to become excited by this as he was probably being hypocritical. He would probably end up by taking advantage of everyone anyway, but there was no harm in trying to ease our conditions anyway.

I awoke at about 03:50, but it wasn’t long before I was back to sleep again. And I stepped right back into almost the same place that I had left earlier.

Back to the plot of our prison encounter. We were all having lunch and only the starter arrived. No main course, and we were all sitting there waiting. In the end, I was fed up so I stood up and leaving the table and mindless of any reprisals, I walked all the way up Edleston Road to near the top where I thought the food came from. It turned out that the food didn’t come from there but from next door – an old chapel that had been a car sales pitch. But that was closed down and the windows were all whitewashed over with rude messages written into the whitewash by a finger. There was no-one around at all and it looked as if the whole place had closed down and we weren’t going to receive our food.

After the medication and breakfast I made another start on catching up on some of the dictaphone notes, but I wasn’t at it for long. As I said, I went back to bed.

Once I’d awoken and was out of bed and back in the land of the living, I carried on and did a few more dictaphone notes. That took me almost up until lunchtime.

This afternoon I attacked the previous blog entries and added the photos back until last Wednesday.

On my walk this afternoon there were a few people around enjoying the nice weather.

However, I seemed to have interrupted some kind of photo session going on on on the public car park. There were a couple of girls there, a photographer and an assistant.

Why, I don’t really know, although there was some kind of fireman’s helmet involved in the proceedings.

Back here, fighting off another wave of sleep, I worked on editing the database for the photos of the High Arctic. That involved some research too and it’s amazing what you come across once you start to look.

Carrying on around the headland, I passed by the chantier navale.

There seems to have been a big change-around there right now. La Granvillaise seems to have left there, and so does Charles-Marie.

The large boat is still there, but we now have another yacht that might be the Spirit of Conrad together with a couple of other assorted smaller boats.

I’ll have to go for a wander around down there one of these days.

Back home to carry on work, but at 18:00 I came to a dead stop. I peeled the kilo of carrots that I had bought the other day and then par-boiled them. Rinsed, drained and par-boiled again, they were rinsed again and then left to drain right through for an hour while I had tea.

More shepherd’s pie out of the freezer, with plenty of frozen veg and gravy followed by rice pudding, which didn’t quite work as it boiled over in the microwave when my attention was elsewhere.

There was still some light in the sky when I went out for my evening walk around the walls.

Mind you, it was quite early. I’m eating my evening meal earlier these days, in an attempt to aid the digestion before I go to sleep.

I spent quite some time out there on the walls enjoying the sunset and photographing a trawler coming into the harbour.

Its lights stood out nicely as the boat was silhouetted against the sunset with the Ile de Chausey there in the background.

But now, I’m off to bed even though it’s early. Today was a dreadful day so I’m hoping for something better tomorrow. I’m sick of all of this.

sunset trawler ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

trawler entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Wednesday 20th March 2019 – AND HERE I AM …

… back in the comfort and safety and privacy and warmth of my own home.

And how much I like being here too. i’m glad to be back.

However, as seems to be usual these days I had yet another bad night. I always seem to whenever I’m travelling. Going to bed early doesn’t help, especially when you have found the radio alarm clock and set it to work, so that you can watch it tick on past 03:35.

But at some point I must have gone off to sleep because I was awoken by the alarm. and I’d even been on something of a voyage too – doing something with the Wales football team from last night.

Once I was awake, I didn’t hang about. I was up (almost) immediately and with everything already packed, I was on the road even before the alarm at 06:20 went off.

And to such an extent that never mind the 06:42 train – I was on the 06:32 to Oostende.

You can see it pulling in, 2 minutes late, being pulled by one of the Class 18 electric locomotives from 2011

As a result, I was in Bruxelles-Midi station even earlier than normal. I had plenty of time to go to Carrefour for my raisin buns for breakfast.

Surprisingly I didn’t have too long to wait at Bruxelles-Midi even though I was in early.

We were called up to the platform somewhat earlier than usual, and when we arrived on the platform we found that our TGV was already in.

It’s another one of the Reseau 38000 “PBA” (Paris Brussels Amsterdam) transets, number 4538

My neighbour was a nice young lady but she was extremely taciturn. She just sat gazing out of the window all the way to Paris Gare du Nord and I had a little relax.

At Paris, I dashed down into the Metro and leapt aboard the train, only for it to be held up at almost every station. In fact, the journey that usually takes me about 45 minutes took just about 65 minutes. It’s a good job that the TGV arrived on time.

My train to Granville was on time too. My neighbour was an elderly lady who needed quite a lot of attention which meant that I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to do.

But in my reading of “Wineland the Good” by Arthur Reeves, I came across something quite interesting. Reeves refers to some documents relating to the discovery and voyages to Vinland – the ‘Breve Chronicon Norvegiae’ – that were discovered in the files of the Earl of Dalhousie and which dated to the mid 15th Century.

Dalhousie is of course not too far away from Roslin and the presence of these documents up the road may well provide some kind of link that led to the voyages of Henry Sinclair and their relation to the strange carvings at Roslin Chapel.

Despite almost everything, our train pulled in at Granville bang on time.

Here it is in the station, parked up next to the train to Rennes – one of the Bombardier X76500 series of multiple-units.

As an aside, I’ve discovered that I can actually catch a train from Granville to St Malo if I change at Dol de Bretagne. And there’s talk about laying on a direct train some time in the future.

This time I managed to walk all the way back home, admiring Normandy Trader being loaded up at the quayside as I did so.

There seems to be an enormous amount of goods down there waiting to be loaded up on board. That should keep them out of mischief for quite a while with all of that.

Seeing as there were some men around there today, I should really have gone down to talk to them.

Further up the hill, I noticed that they were working on the city walls.

Part of the pavement has been closed off for as long as I have been there due to some loose stones that have been falling out of the wall, and I had heard some story that they might be doing some work on it.

So it looks as if they have already started. Probably hammering the loose stones back in and repointing the walls.

And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I spent a couple of summers doing that on my house and it’s a long, heavy, difficult job.

Back here I had a really good relax for a couple of hours before attempting the unpacking. Definitely feeling the strain.

Tea was easy too. One of the portions of shepherd’s pie out of the freezer with veg and gravy. However, the slice of chocolate cake that i’d left out of the freezer had turned. But those in an airtight container in the fridge were fine and there was some soya dessert left.

later on, I went for my walk around the headland. It was quite pleasant out there but yet again I was the only one out there.

There was still a touch of light left – enough to take a few photographs of the coastline, like this one of St Martin de Brehal.

It’s come out really well, all told and I’m quite pleased with it.

So now I’ll go to bed. There’s not much food in here so it’s a shopping day tomorrow. A nice walk up to LIDL I reckon.

I’ll see how I feel.

night donville les bains rue du nord granville manche normandy france

night st malo brittany baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

night cancale brittany baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

night baie de mont st michel jullouville granville manche normandy france

night trawler baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

Friday 8th March 2019 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

the grass is riz
I wonder where de boidies is;

But never mind the birdies for the moment. We have the first sighting of buds on the plants today and I can’t believe that this has grown overnight, so I don’t know when they first appeared.

But nevertheless, it’s a welcome sign and always cheers me up when the buds appear. The sun can’t be far behind.

Last night was another good sleep, right the way through until the alarm went off. I’d been on a little voyage too. I was planning to travel to Canada one evening, and so sometime during the precious small hours I decided to go for a walk, despite the fact that I hadn’t even started packing. I was going along Nantwich Road in Crewe and on the corner of Ruskin Road where Chatwins was, there was an open-air bar with people sitting outside on long tables and benches. At that moment this really beautiful petite girl turned up and I was overwhelmed by her, but just as I was about to go over to talk to her, she took out a cigarette and lit it up. And nothing is more guaranteed to turn me off is someone starting to smoke. I ended up back somewhere where there was an array of television screens hanging from the walls, with a row of comfortable spacecraft-type seats in front of them. There were two people sitting on them – an older man and a young girl aged about 12 or so. I sat down on one of the chairs and pressed a button to select a film, which was something like a Star Wars film or similar.

07:00 when I finally arose from my stinking pit and I do have to admit that I could have forced myself out a long time before that too.

But having had the medication and then the breakfast (I’m enjoying my porridge) I set to work.

My trip around my blog and the searchable text database had brought me back to 14th October, and I could see why I had stopped there, because the previous day was our trip to the Ile de Chausey, with about 80 photographs.

And so I revised the blog entry for 13th October to make it much more readable, and to remove most of the photos from there.

Instead I created another web page specifically to show the photos and while I was at it, I noticed a little problem.

It seems that I have put an extra closed division in the coding of the web page that had forced some of the coding out of its container. I must have done that when I changed the web counter over.

So I had to go through and identify where it was, and remove it. And from all of the pages for the Carnaval too. And there were one or two other coding issues that needed correcting.

All of that took me up to lunchtime – a good morning’s work that was.

After lunch, talking of the carnaval, the first task was to vacuum the apartment. I think that I’ve shaken all of the confetti out of my clothes and the apartment was looking as if it had dandruff. So all of that was dealt with.

I seem to recall that last year I was still vacuuming up the confetti 6 months later, and it’ll probably be the same this year.

Next task was to shred another load of paper. The European Paper Mountain is looking much more manageable now and it won’t be long before it’s all gone.

The rest of the afternoon, such as it was, was doing a few more blog entries and, unfortunately, a little repose for 10 minutes on my chair.

Of course we had the usual walk around the headland this afternoon, and I stopped to see what was going on in the chantier navale

As well as Armor and La Granvillaise, we seem to have acquired another boat down there. She’s the Charles-Marie, another one of the tourist boats that hangs around the harbour.

I’ll have to go for another wander around down there to see what they are doing to her.

Tea tonight was a potato and lentil curry from 5th December … errr … 2017 and it really was delicious too.

And then I went for my walk around the walls. There was a strong wind and rain but the sea had died down so we didn’t have anything whatever compared to last night.

No-one around at all again so I was on my own. So I didn’t hang around.

Tonight will be an early night. I’m hoping for an early start tomorrow because it’s shopping day.

I don’t need much of course because I’m leaving on Thursday

Wednesday 6th March 2019 – I’VE ONLY BEEN …

… out once today, and that was this evening.

I did intend to go out mid-afternoon as usual, but I only made half-way down the stairs before I saw the rainstorm raging outside. Not the kind of weather to put a dog out – never mind me.

I tuned round and went back.

We had the usual alarms this morning, and the usual lie-in until 07:25 before I crawled out from under the covers.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble. Last night I was in my house – which could have been anywhere, and a group of us was discussing the floor in the place. We ended up coming to the conclusion that what was needed was a layer of self-levelling cement. This involved moving absolutely everything off the floor so that we could lay the cement, but while everyone was in agreement with the decision, no-one wanted to do the work and it was a very dispirited crew that set to work in there.
Some time later I was in Crewe, wanting to go to the Aldi supermarket. And this was somewhere over at the back of Mill Street in the old terraced houses that had been demolished in the late 1960s. There was a big ruined brick building overgrown with branches and trees. Someone was throwing into the tree a kind of boomerang with a knife blade edge in order to try to cut off a few branches for firewood, but the resounding thud was shaking him up and he was retreating, in a style reminiscent of someone with St Vitus’s Dance. Behind there, amongst all of the weeds and rubble and wild trees was the Aldi Supermarket, all swathed in ivy. It all looked pretty desolate until you were very close to it. Outside was a kind of wire display basket with bananas in there. And what a price they were too. Brexit is beginning to bite.

Most of the day I’ve spent working on three web pages for Carnaval and Mardi Gras for this year. One page for each day.

Some of the photos have come out really well and I’m pleased with them, although others aren’t quite as good as I was hoping.

Whenever I fancied a break, I shredded a few papers and now there’s a huge mound of the aforementioned waiting for me to take them to the container.

If I keep on at this rate, they should be all gone in a few days and that will be a weight off my mind.

And, unfortunately, round about 13:00 I dozed off on my chair for half an hour.

With having made progress on the tracks that I’ve been playing on the bass (I can even play on the bass the guitar riff from Tom Petty’s track “Makin’ Some Noise” off Into The Great Wideopen – probably the best album Tom Petty ever made), I downloaded a few more tracks to work on.

These are going to be much more complicated to work out but I need to push onwards.

Tea tonight was a lentilburger with pasta and tomato sauce followed by more apple pie and coconut-flavoured soya cream. Delicious it was too.

The rain had stopped this evening so I went out. Windy it was though, so I was all alone except for a jogger with a LED headlight thing.

The sky was quite clear and there was a nice view across the tidal harbour over to the quay where the ferries to the Ile de Chausey and Jersey tie up.

In the background are the lights of the southern part of the town.

So tonight I’ll have an early night and try to have a decent sleep. Thursday tomorrow so I’m going to try to go for a walk to LIOL and do my shopping.

There’s a few things that I need.

Tuesday 5th March 2019 – IT’S MARDI GRAS …

… and there’s been the afternoon parade of floats around the town.

But the day started off with me ignoring the alarms and staying in bed until about 07:20.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble or two.

We were having some kind of meeting at school with a few of the kids and I was on the interview panel. The first kid to be interviewed was my own daughter (which of course I don’t have, as far as I am aware) but was in fact Zero. I had to give her something of a lecture about one or two things that she hadn’t done, or had done incorrectly. And in the end I asked her if she was going to wait for me and we would go home together. That was what she wanted to do so I told her to wait “over there”. The next girl was a little think rake of a girl who had, apparently, failed her dancing exam. She’d put in a lot of effort and it was a shame that it hadn’t been rewarded. We needed to encourage her and bring her forward, and so we’d set up a little rehearsal lesson for her and one or two others. But this was going on far longer than it should have done and I ended up being worried about being late.

Later on, there was a crowd of us with my father in his old black Zephyr 6 3816TD. We were bowling along down the motorway and hit a traffic queue that slowed everyone down. The third lane was open so we swerved into there and passed the obstruction but ended up crawling along behind some motorist going really slowly. Eventually we pushed him (metaphorically of course) out of the way and even in fourth gear, tried to pull away from almost a crawl. I was interested to see if the car would do it. I mentioned that if my father wanted to fit a diesel engine into the Zephyr I had a Peugeot 2.3 diesel lying around out of a Sierra (I actually do, believe it or not) and that would go in quite nicely, especially as now all of my plans had changed and I was not going to use it. My father came up with a few objections about how all of the gearing would be wrong and much too over-geared, but I remarked that it seems to be coping quite well with the 2.5 litre petrol engine that’s in there right now.

We had the usual morning medication ritual, and later on a breakfast. Following which, I caught up with the outstanding photos from Sunday.

One task that I’ve been trying to do on a kind-of ad-hoc casual basis is to go through a few of the older web pages and update them with stuff that I’ve discovered subsequently, or with photos from subsequent visits.

I’d noticed that on one page from 2005 I’d missed a couple of photo shots that I had taken when I was there in September 2017, so this morning I attacked that web page and it’s now up-to-date until the next revision.

But here’s the exciting bit.

I was looking for yet another paper, and this led to a major tidy-up in here and filing of papers. That took a good couple of hours and things are looking much more optimistic in here now.

But surprisingly, while I was looking for something else, I came across the missing taxe d’habitation certificate for 2013. So that folder is now up to date and that’s good news.

A whole pile of stuff ended up in the shredder too and that went down to the paper container outside, and another half-bag has been shredded in here too, for finishing off tomorrow.

After lunch, I carried on tidying up in the bedroom and a lot of stuff has been put away. It’s certainly made a difference.

Later on, I went down to the harbour to see the floats arriving from their lap around the town. I took plenty of photos and videos and I’ll sort those out tomorrow.

The tide had turned while I was down there at the defilé.

As I was climbing back up the rue des Juifs I noticed that all of the fishing boats were starting to come in on the tide.

It was quite impressive watching them all come in in line-astern like this.

And you can tell that the tide had only just started to come in.

The channel is deepest nearest the left-hand side of the harbour entrance, and you can see that the fishing boats are keeping well over to that side of the entrance

And you’ll notice at the bottom of the image the seagulls are forming a queue for the leavings

With it being Mardi Gras, I had some taco rolls with stuffing and pasta, followed by apple pie and coconut-flavoured soya cream. That pie is getting better and better.

Following that I went back into town.

Despite the high winds, all of the big attractions at the fairground were in full flight, so I went down to photograph and film them.

I was down there for a good hour or so with the big Nikon taking photos and the Nikon 1 J5 taking the films.

ambulance attending emergency rue des juifs granville manche normandy france On the way back, I encountered something of a medical emergency in the rue des Juifs.

There was an ambulance parked blocking the street, with the personnel attending to someone in the driving seat of a car parked by the pavement.

I’ve no idea what was going on ther, and it didn’t seem to be the bet moment to enquire

Only a vague wave of fatigue today – no crashing out. So I’m off to bed now and hopefully I’ll have a good sleep ready for tomorrow and yet more work.

Meanwhile, If you want to see all of the photos from today, you need to go to THIS LINK

Sunday 3rd March 2019 – IT’S CARNAVAL PART II …

… and I nearly didn’t go.

And I wish that I hadn’t either. Standing around for four and a half hours in the cold and wet waiting for things to happen. Being poked and pushed and prodded, having my camera knocked out of my hands, having my foot stamped upon full force by a demented dancer …

I don’t do crowds at the best of times, and this wasn’t the best at all.

Having gone to bed early last night, i was away with the fairies until sometime while it was still dark, but I simply turned over and went back to sleep.

09:30 when I finally awoke, and 10:45 when I finally crawled out of bed.

That’s what I call a Sunday.

There was time to go a-rambling too. Off with a friend of mine who sold me a scam about a kidnap ransom fee and obtained £130,000 from me. And even though I knew what was happening, I couldn’t do anything about it.

And so a breakfast so late that I didn’t even bother with lunch. In fact, there wasn’t time to do all that much at all.

Instead, I put on the heater in the bathroom and while that was warming up I went out to check the times of the procession.

Not 14:30 as I had thought, but 13:30. So I dashed back here for a quick shower and then dashed back out.

Fighting my way through the throngs, I picked a good spot and waited for the procession.

Never mind 13:30 – it was more like 14:45 when the first one went past. And then the others (there were 47 in all) appeared. One after the other, with huge gaps in between. Probably 10 minutes on some occasions.

In the end, I was so cold that I headed for home regardless, and that was where I finally found the final 5. 17:40 and they still hadn’t set out yet.

Beaten, battered and bruised, I ended up back home where I crashed out on the chair, totally fed up and exhausted.

Before tea, I finally made my apple pie. And delicious it might be – but it’s far too wet. Too much liquid in it, and I knew that the moment that I added it.

But it was nice with some of that coconut soya dessert stuff, after my excellent vegan pizza.

So even though it’s not even 22:00, I’m off to bed. I’m still not feeling very good.

But before I do, I’ll just mention that I’ve solved the problem of the exposure on the big Nikon camera. I have one of the function buttons set up to work the exposure correction override. And what seems to have happened is that the button has been pushed too far in and wedged under the lip of the hole, so it’s permanently switched on.

So now I’ve noticed, and freed it off, it all works fine again.

That’s one less thing to worry about.

And if you want to see all of the photos for today, you need to go to THIS LINK

Saturday 2nd March 2019 – IT’S “CARNAVAL”!!!

And I was actually out there for part of the time joining in the festivities, even though I didn’t feel all that much like it.

It all started to go wrong even while I was still in bed.

It wasn’t as early as I would have liked – more like midnight in fact. And when the alarm went off at 06:00 (and 06:10, and 06:20) I didn’t actually haul myself out straight away.

Plenty of time though to go on a voyage, and It was certainly a weird one last night. Something like a sketch from “The Men From The Ministry” where someone (and it might even have been me but I doubt it) was trying to shave, but here seemed to be no soap so I’ve no idea what was being used and the blade was so blunt that it was merely smearing it around on the face. It wasn’t until much later that the realisation dawned that, sitting there half-shaven and in a mess, it might have been better to have simply used a new razor with a decent blade. And this ended up somehow with two people, the poor shaver and his sidekick, sitting in a car in the driveway of a country house doing everything wrong, and I’ve no idea why.

07:00 when I finally crawled out of bed and attacked the medication. And later on, we had breakfast of course.

There was an hour or so while I had a bash at the photo database, and then there was work to do.

I’d forgotten that I’d filled up a 32GB memory card on the Nikon 1 while I was away in Canada in September. I hadn’t saved the files and the card that’s in there now id filling up.

When I say “saved” the files, everything is saved onto the laptop and then on an external hard drive. But before I reformat the memory cards, I copy the images onto DVDs as an extra back-up.

These hadn’t been backed up as yet onto DVD so I spent a couple of hours copying them all onto a pile of DVDs, labelling and saving them. And then, of course, formatting the memory card.

I’m running out of space too in the hard-storage bit so I had to shuffle all of the disks around to make enough space in a storage container.

I had a quick lunch, and the went outside to head into town.

On foot of course because we are hemmed in right now. Just look at all of these caravanettes parked up on the public car park just outside our apartment building.

You can’t move for the blasted things and the blasted grockles that drive the blasted things.

And they are everywhere. Every last square inch of space has a caravanette parked on it.

Even our old friend the ancient CF Bedford isn’t safe. A couple of caravanettes have crammed themselves in around it.

And if you look across the port, you’ll see a few dozens more scattered around all over the place.

Anyway, I struggled up the road nevertheless to see what was going on

Including the unedifying spectacle of watching some unkempt middle-aged man struggling to keep control of three large dogs that were jumping up and down on a girl of about 7, and getting all upset when I told him that he ought to keep his blasted dogs under flaming control.

We almost had an “incident” there.

So I took up my place half-way up the rue Couraye and whatched the children’s parade come down.

It seemed to be strangely quiet this year – not even half the floats and parades that I remember from last year.

Tomorrow and Tuesday are the big days of the carnaval of course but even so …

After the parade, I went for a walk down town into the place Charles de Gaulle to see what was happening there.

Not all that much either compared to last year. I seem to recall that it was heaving in there back then.

But at least it gave me an opportunity to study some of the costumes of the paraders, and I was suitably impressed with some of them.

So while you admire a few more photos of the people and paraders, I climbed back up the hill for home.

And for some strange reason it was a long, weary climb back up here.

I could tell that I was not feeling myself right now yet again, and that’s no good.

Back here, I spent most of the time fending off waves of fatigue until near tea-time.

Two taco rolls with the last of the stuffing, with pasta and vegetables. Followed by one of these soya almond desserts.

The plan was then to go out and inspect the night-time carnaval activities, but a couple of things delayed me.

Firstly, I wasn’t feeling as well as I ought to have been. A kind of general fatigue and tiredness I suppose – the after-effects of my illness.

Secondly, I suddenly went freezing cold.The temperature in here is reasonably warm, but it was just how I was feeling I reckon.

Thirdly, a football match appeared on the internet. Barry Town v Cambrian and Clydach from Tonypandy, in the Welsh Cup.

I didn’t have the strength to plug in the laptop to the big TV in the living room.

Instead, I curled up on the chair and watched it on the big computer.

For a while anyway. I was just getting colder and colder so I ended up in bed under the covers watching it from there.

And then Rosemary rang me up, so I was chatting to her down the bed while watching the football.

Who says men can’t multitask?

We were chatting for almost all of the second half of the game and then my bad throat gave out so I had to hang up.

As for the football, Barry Town were clearly the better side (which is no surprise seeing as they are one division up) and they soon went into the lead.

But then they missed half a dozen easy tap-ins. One after the other was miskicked or sailed over the bar from three feet out.

And I remember thinking that they’ll pay for these misses.

Which they did, because all of a sudden they found themselves 2-1 down – two goals out of nothing had caught them cold.

But class will out and in the end they scored two goals later in the game to make the score look better than it ought to have done at one time.

Fitness and perseverence told in the end, for Cambrian and Clydach were puffing and blowing at the end.

So having missed the fair, I’m off to bed. Fatigue, headache and all.

I’m definitely not so good right now, but a good lie-in tonight and tomorrow might make me feel better.

At least I hope so. It’s the big parade tomorrow.

And if you want to see the rest of the photos of the carnaval for today, you need to go to THIS LINK

Friday 1st March 2019 – DYDD GWYL DDEWI HAPUS …

… to everyone.

And haven’t I had a big surprise today.

Remember when I went into the Mairie the other day to have a discussion with the Maire and ended up with the secretary?

Well, the secretary phoned me back today. Apparently the Maire has taken on board my remarks, made a few enquiries and come back to me.

I wasn’t expecting that, that’s for sure.

It’s not advanced things very much, as I didn’t expect that it would, but having someone like the Maire on your side is a comfort in these difficult times.

And difficult times they are.

Being completely wound up last night as I was, I was still up working at 02:00, totally unable to sleep. More like 02:30 when I went to bed,. And as for sleep, well, there wasn’t very much of that. I was tossing and turning all night.

There was enough time to go off on a travel. I was in Greece in some kind of primitive café helping with moral support (although what support I could ever give anyone would be considered as being moral) some girl who was trying to run it despite all of the opposition and difficulties that her family – the nominal owners – were putting in her path. The strange thing was that when the alarms went off, I totally ignored them and stayed in bed. And although I was by now awake, the journey carried on. And carried on for miles too from exactly the same place where I awoke. Not something that happens every day.

By 09:25 I was ready to awaken, and straight into controversy yet again where a couple of self-important auto-sycophants were bragging about how they had “briefed” a politician and “won a famous victory for UK citizens in Europe” by getting him to look at at. Completely oblivious of the fact that the EU had thrown out this idea weeks ago.

And so this totally shameless display of self-serving egocentricity caused me to explode yet again. And even deeper into the abyss.

I went for a very late breakfast after that. and then came back to start on the blog and the text database.

But not for long, because the Mairie interrupted me.

And then, almost immediately, another phone call from someone else who is on my list of things to do.

This started me off on a wave of work. From somewhere, I summoned up a piece of energy so went on a tidy-up in the bedroom.

Bank statements are fairly tidy now and I found a couple of other papers. And so I then sat down, made a few more phone calls, sent out some e-mails and wrote a letter too.

It may sound not much, but it certainly made an impression on the stuff in here.

My lunch was a light one, and that made me feel a little better.

I did manage to do some work on the photos and the database. Not a lot, but I’m back as far as 18th October 2018. It’s going a little quicker than I was expecting.

Later on in the afternoon I went for my afternoon walk.

I went around the headland at the Pointe du Roc through the crowds and hordes of tourists up there

And there was a beautiful view across the harbour right over to the coast on the far side by the Cale de Hacqueville.

There were quite a few people at the Chantier Navale, loitering around that big wooden boat that I mentioned last time, so I went over for a chat.

The boat that is on there is in fact La Granvillaise – a yacht that we have seen on many occasions around the harbour.

She’s been taken out of the water for a complete refit and overhaul by the volunteers, and she’s going to be there for a while.

While I was down there at the Chantier Navale, I went over to have a look at Armor – the ship from the diving place down the Brittany coast.

They’ve stripped off most of the old paint, and are currently giving it a good go over in white primer, ready presumably for its top coat.

They have put a lot of work into it. It will look good when it’s finished.

My route into town took me past the place Charles de Gaulle.

Here I could admire the stage that they had erected the other day. Events will be getting under way tonight, although I won’t be down there.

Instead, I went to the Post Office and sent off the letter that I had written. It won’t go until Monday afternoon but it needs to be on its way.

Back up the hill, I stopped to watch one of the ferries from the Ile de Chausey coming into port.

And there was a weird commotion going on behind me.

Some woman pulled up in her car, shouted to a passer-by “watch my vehicle” and ran off down the road shouting “Chantal” or something.

Everyone was standing around there shaking their heads.

Back here, I had a pleasant surprise. A friend of mine in the UK has sent me a little present for my birthday to help me along my way. That was just so very thoughtful of him and I’m overwhelmed.

Tea was a small stuffed pepper with a little rice followed by a pot of soya dessert and a banana.

And then football. The Welsh Cup, Caernarfon Town v Connah’s Quay Nomads.

Connah’s Quay were strangely subdued, michael Wilde was at walking pace and Callum Saunders was somewhere else in his mind, I think.

But Caernarfon seem to have gone off the boil too – a shadow of the impressive hard-working side of earlier in the season.

The Nomads won 2-1, but it was a very long game.

So it’s bedtime now.

I’m feeling a little better, and maybe a decent sleep might cheer me up again.

It’s Carnaval tomorrow.

And I seem to have lost one of the camera gloves that my friend Liz bought me for my birthday of 2008. I’m dismayed.

coastline granville manche normandy france

chateau de la crete granville manche normandy france

harbour light st pair sur mer granville manche normandy france

chantier navale port de granville harbour manche normandy franc

Wednesday 27th February 2019 – DESPITE MY …

… early night I took ages to go off to sleep. And when I did, being wide-awake at 04:45 was not what I actually had in mind.

I did manage to go off again to sleep at some point but much to my, yours, and everyone else’s surprise, I was up and about before the final alarm went off.

There had been time to go off on a voyage too. I’d been out driving in one of my own vans – that might even have been Bill Badger, my old A60 half-ton van. There was something about extracting digital images off kerbstones so I had a little electrical kit that could do that and I was driving up and down the streets doing it. At one point, there on the street corner was a girl called Carolyn (it’s amazing who appears in my travels) whom I knew probably about 35 years ago and who I encountered quite by chance under strange circumstances 10 years later. She was much younger than she was when I knew her, and dressed in a fashion that would have been inappropriate for the house, never mind standing on a street corner. I was having difficulty extracting these images, to which she replied that the electricity was usually turned off at midnight. I explained that it wasn’t midnight as yet and carried on, but with no result. In the end I decided to move on, but I told Carolyn that I’ll drop by later to see if she was still there.
A little later I was in my room – or, rather, not my room in Davenport Avenue. I was wrestling with a couple of different computers (as usual these days) trying to make sure that all of my confidential files and open web pages were just on one computer being run off just one web browser so that I could close down all of my searches and research in a hurry if some unauthorised person came too close.

We had the usual morning procedure of course, followed by a some what later breakfast – a bowl of porridge and some orange juice.

Interrupted by the sound of crowds assembling on the car park of the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs. No idea what’s happening there.

And while we’re on the subject of breakfast, that reminds me – apart from a coffee at the football on Saturday night I haven’t had a coffee now since the Tuesday morning that I was in Leuven.

Once I’d done what needed doing, I settled down to work. And haven’t I been a busy boy today?

I’ve amended all of the blog entries all the way back from 13th December 2018 to the 1st November 2018.

Not only that, I’m a long way down the text database for November 2018 too.

When I have finished that, whenever it might be, I’ll be starting on October. So you can see – I’ve hardly been idle.

For lunch, it was yet another beautiful day so I went to sit on my wall.

I was going to say “with my butties” but I forgot to defrost some bread from the freezer.

So in the end I took the little bread left over from the weekend and a packet of crisps that needed eating, and watched the fishing boats unloading at the quayside.

That wasn’t all of the action down there either.

Down there at the bottom end of the commercial harbour is our old friend Thora. She must have come in on the morning tide from Jersey.

Loads of merchandise all around the crane, presumably awaiting loading. But I couldn’t see any of the crew around there at all. Presumably they have all gone off for lunch too.

Over the past week or so I’ve been telling you all that it’s soon to be Carnaval, and I’m going to be locked in up here for the weekend.

But I shan’t be alone.

The public car park outside our premises is being transformed into a mobile home park full of caravanettes as all of the grockels turn up to come and pollute the atmosphere again.

But why should I complain? It’s activities like this out-of-season that keeps the town ticking over for the rest of the year.

And that’s why I’m here.

There was the usual mid-afternoon walk too.

The day really was beautiful and the sea was gorgeous and a nice deep blue colour.

It was one of those days here when it really was a pleasure to be out and about – me in just a sweater (and trousers too of course) in late February.

My little walk took me around the headland of the Pointe du Roc.

At the bungalow round by the lighthouse and the coastguard station, there was a lorry there. This brings back many happy memories of my time in the Auvergne.

No mains drainage there of course, nor here, apparently. The tanker is here busily pumping out the contents of the septic tank.

Presumably to treat its 75mm gun with Dettol.

The air was very calm and still, but there must have been a long rolling sea coming in right across the Atlantic with some terrific force.

You can tell that by the power of the waves as they break on the angle of the sea wall down there.

It’s quite surprising really, comparing the wind speed with the force of the water.

While I was watching the waves, we had another one of our residents returning to the fold.

There must have been a ferry trip out to the Ile de Chausey today, because she turned up back here on the end of her round-trip while I was out there.

I was feeling rather envious, because this would have been a marvellous day to have gone out for a sale, and I suppose that with Carnaval, the tourist season is starting up.

And I missed out the chantier navale today too, didn’t I?

It’s quite busy in there today. We have the yacht in there of course, and Armor halfway through its respray down there.

The modern little fishing boat is interesting too, by my attention is drawn to the big wooden boat of some description in the centre of the photo.

I wonder what that is and what they are doing to it. I shall have to go for an investigation.

We saw yesterday the workers repairing the flashing around the roof windows of the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs

It looks as if they might now be finished. They were busy loading up a lorry with all of the left-over building stuff.

Presumably the container and the machine will be leaping aboard too and disappearing off into the sunset some time soon.

I’ll probably find out tomorrow.

When I returned, I got on the ‘phone again.

I tried another tack with the bank, going in through the soft-underbelly. Not for nothing do I have friends. And about 15 minutes later, they discovered a way that might help me out and which will really upset the Worst Bank In The World.

Back to work with the text database, and then a stop for tea.

While I was finding my crisps, I found a pack of tortilla wraps, so I made myself a pile of stuffing with kidney beans and had a couple with some pasta.

I was stuffed too. No pudding or anything, so I’m doing my best to cut down my appetite. It will probably help if I keep on drinking as much liquid as I am right now.

But then I’ll have my water retention issues.

On my evening walk around the walls, I almost flattened a pedestrian skulking in a dark corner with an obviously secret cigarette.

But apart from that, not a soul. No matter how nice and pleasant it was out there.

Well, not quite alone. Minette was sitting on a car bonnet taking the air and enjoying herself. So I gave her a good stroke and came home.

I’m off for an early night now. Although it’s Thursday, I’m going to be doing a good shopping round.

No sense in going out on Saturday. The town will be heaving with tourists, the streets will be blocked and I probably won’t be able to get out at all.

Do it first before it’s too late.

fishing boat coming in to unload port de granville harbour manche normandy france

yacht speedboat granville manche normandy france

Friday 15th February 2019 – AS WHAT SEEMS TO BE …

… the normal procedure this morning, I heard the alarms go off and then turned over and went back to sleep.

The irony about that is I was wide awake at 04:40 and lay there tossing and turning until 06:00. Going back to sleep straight away and not waking up at 07:25 is bizarre.

During the night I’d been on my travels. On a bus holiday too but the bus was huge – it was more like an aeroplane with over 200 people in it, although it was rather laid out like a bus. I had a double-seat to myself but I had noticed a girl who would have been an ideal companion to share my seat. The driver announced that those people going on the optional excursions needed to alight and board another bus. That meant me, but I hadn’t been to my hotel yet. So I had to fight my way down to the front to speak to the driver. He told me that it did include me, so I had to fight my way to the back again, pick up my possessions, struggle through the crowds with my huge suitcase and find my bus. The driver looked at me and laughed. He said that it was the first time that he had ever had a passenger wishing to bring all of their possessions on an optional excursion. I replied that this was because I hadn’t yet been allowed to go to my hotel, and what was he going to do about it? But he walked off.

A late breakfast of course, and then a relaxing day without doing anything exciting.

And by the time that I’d finished, I’d finished the web-page with the photos of Cologne back in December and put it on line. The photos are a little disappointing, mainly because the weather was so dreadful, but one or two of them have some remarkable effects.

Having attended to that, I could then press on with the blog entry for that day too. That’s now on-line too.

That doesn’t sound as if I have done very much today but, believe me, it wasn’t particularly straightforward. And having done the difficult bit, I can press on with the rest of the blog.

That hummus that I made the other day is even more wicked than it was when I made it. It’s maturing nicely and the garlic smells delicious. It should keep me going – in many more senses than one – for a considerable time.

This afternoon was one of the nicest afternoons that I have ever experienced in a February.

It really was a pleasure to be out and about in it – so much so that I actually went out earlier than normal.

There was a light sea mist that prevented a really good view down the coast, but the skies were blue and so was the sea – a really deep summery blue.

And I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the weather either, as you might expect.

There were hordes of people milling around on the grass on the Pointe du Roc around the old military installations of the Atlantic Wall. And who can blame them?

In the foreground on the left is one of the rotation tracks for one of the large guns that were positioned here, and on the right in the background is the former military athletics track that is now the playing field for the College Malraux.

There was plenty of activity on the sea too.

A yacht was quite happily sailing past the headland of the Pointe du Roc and I went to take a photo of it – and just at that very moment a seagull flew past the camera.

That’s what they call a “photo-bombing with a difference” and I couldn’t reproduce that photo if I tried for a hundred years.

Round the corner and today’s walk took me on the cliffs above the chantier navale.

As I mentioned the other day, there’s a lot of activity going on in there right now. They seem to be very busy and that’s always good news.

There are a couple of new boats in there today too. We saw the yacht and the trawler in there when we went past on Monday, but the third one in there is new.

She’s Armor owned by a leisure diving company from near Lannion in the Côtes d’Armor, in between St Brieuc and Roscoff. So she’s come a long way to be serviced here.

I had to fight off a wave of fatigue round about 17:00, which is an improvement from just recently.

Tea was a vegan burger with pasta, veg and tomato sauce. Quite delicious it was too.

I was alone on my walk again this evening. And I can’t think why because it really was pleasant out there. Not at all like a February night.

I had a wander around the walls and spent a couple of minutes looking at the traffic driving up the hill and round the slalom of the Avenue de la Libération.

No-one – not even a seagull – disturbed me at all while I was out there

No cats either tonight, so I trudged on homewards.

There’s a small house in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame that has attracted my attention. Some evenings it’s illuminated by a lampt outside, and tonight the building was looking particularly attractive.

It would come out even better if I had a better camera that would stop down even lower. This was taken with the 18-105mm lens at f3.75 at ISO800.

Saturday tomorrow and ordinarily I would be going shopping. But on Sunday I’m heading off to Leuven again so I shan’t bother.

I might have a little wander into town tomorrow morning though and visit the market to see what is going on. They should be starting the preparations for the Carnaval too and I’ll be interested to see where they are up to.

brehal plage granville manche normandy france

marker light rocks waves granville manche normandy france

waves on rocks pointe du roc granville manche normandy france

fishing boat english channel granville manche normandy france

lifeboat memorial port entrance marker light baie de mont st michel st pair sur mer granville manche normandy france

sailing boats yachts baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

trawler fishing boat refuelling port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Thursday 14th February 2019 – TODAY’S BAD NEWS …

… is twofold.

Firstly, my TGV to Brussels on Sunday is cancelled. Due to a perturbation, or disturbance, so they say, but more likely it’s under-subscribed and there’s plenty of room on the ones before and after.

Secondly, I had a letter back about my taxe d’habitation. I asked for the years 2013 and 2015, but instead they sent me the ones for 2016, 2017 and 2018. Just as did the Tax Office in Montaigut-en-Combraille.

So I’ve no idea what’s going on there. I’ll have to ring them up to find out.

Last night wasn’t as early as I was expecting, and I left the bed … errr … somewhat later than the alarms. i’d been on a nocturnal ramble too, but all that I remember was going into someone else’s office to sharpen my pencil – the plot of something that I was watching on a DVD at teatime last night – to write it down.

We had breakfast and a shower and general clean-up, and then headed off to the shops. Just LIDL today of course. And the only thing that I bought was a new balaclava helmet to wear under my crash helmet. The old one that I have is ancient and filthy and so it’s high time that I replaced it.

But I was waylaid on my way to the supermarket.

Normandy Trader was in port this morning, moored up at her usual mooring place next to Marité. She was unloading what looked like piles of shellfish, and the empty crates were being loaded back on board.

There were also sacks of what looked like sand or gravel just there on the quayside, presumably waiting their turn to be loaded up on board.

Back here, I made myself a coffee and attacked the remaining carrots that needed preparation and freezing. They were peeled, diced and blached with a couple of bayleaves, and then stuck in the freezer.

That was anough for the morning. I had a little relax while I reviewed what had been going on during the morning.

No excitement as yet – that is to come later.

After lunch, I carried on with my text database and all of December is now complete. I’ve done a few more blog entries and I’ve now reached back as far as 24th December 2018. The 23rd is the day that I went to Köln to see Jackie, and there are so many photos from there that I’m working even as we speak on a web page to display them all.

later on this afternoon, I went out for my usual walk.

Around the walls in the glorious winter sunshine. It was such a beautiful day today.

And I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the weather. There were crowds of people swarming around on the pathways and down on the beach making the most of the school holidays.

The tides and currents were interesting too, and the crowds on the beach down there at the Plat Gousset weren’t the only ones enjoying them.

There were some beautiful swirling waves coming onto the beach with the tide, making some spectacular patterns up and down the beach.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything look quite so artistic as this. Nature can do some wonderful things sometimes.

Carrying on around the walls, I looked down on the rue Paul Poirier. They have strung up a pile of decorations across the street – probably today because I don’t recall seeing them yesterday.

This year, Carnaval is the weekend of 2nd/3rd March and it looks as if they are setting their stall out already.

The Carnaval here in Granville is certainly special, and attracts crowds from hundreds of miles away.

Down in the harbour, Normandy Trader had cleared off – presumably fully loaded with whatever it was that was piled up on the quayside.

But it looks as if the sailing school was in operation today because there were a few yachts outside the harbour doing a little manouevring around in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Everyone seemed to be out there enjoying the weather today and I can’t say that I blame them.

Back here, I had a coffee and carried on working, fighting off wave after wave of fatigue. In the end, I went to bed where I stayed quite comfortably for 90 minutes, most of which was spent asleep.

I’ve gone on from an occasional 10 minutes here and there to a regular flat-out 90 minutes and it’s worrying.

For tea tonight I didn’t have my potato curry. In fact, by the time I’d been through and sorted out the bit of a leek and the mushrooms that were remaining in the vegetable rack, the rest of the stuffing from yesterday made a decent-sized proportion.

And it was delicious too.

Outside tonight for my walk in the calm, cool evening, and almost colliding with a couple of shadows making their way around in the dark, I noticed that there wasn’t anything to see in the tidal harbour.

Probably something not unconnected with the fact that the tide was too far out.

Instead I noticed that the restaurant down on the rue du Port was open and, presumably, frying tonight. I’ve taken a few photos of the street down there but I’ve never noticed the restaurant before.

This photo and the next one might not be of any interest to you, but they are to me.

Right out in the distance there was a bright light slowly moving across the horizon. And so I took two photographs of it, messing around with the exposure controls and the camera speed.

The first one (this one) is over-exposed, and the second one, below, is underexposed.

They aren’t very clear at all and you can’t see what they feature, because after all, it’s only a 50mm lens, but I can have a wild guess.

It was round about 21:15 when I took the photos, and so that tells me that the lights could well be those of the Brittany Ferries ship Pont Aven setting out on its 20:35 sailing to Portsmouth.

I really need a better camera to bring out the best in this kind of shot.

So back in the apartment again, and I’m getting ready for bed. If I can go to sleep after my repose later on this afternoon.

I need to sort myself out.

And today’s excitement?

Mrs Mayhem put her proposals yet again before Parliament. And once again, she was defeated.

But is she taking this latest humiliation seriously? Not in the least. She’ll keep on going by keeping on presenting her proposals every week, wearing everyone down with the threat that if they don’t accept her plan, they’ll have to accept a no-deal pull-out.

Something that will suit her husband – and piles of currency traders and Futures dealers – down to the ground.

She will go down in History as having laid down her country for her life.

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beach tidal swimming pool plat gousset granville manche normandy france

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Wednesday 13th February 2019 – THIS WAS ANOTHER …

… day when things started off by going wrong.

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 etc – I know because I heard them – but despite having had an early-ish night it was 07:25 when I awoke. And 07:50 when I crawled out of the stinking pit.

I’d been on my travels during the night too. Back in Crewe again in fact, with a group of people planning to travel to a football match – as we did a few times back in the mid-70s. But this time, the match was somewhere near Wrexham and even on a nocturnal ramble I was able to realise that this was something that would be extremely unlikely.

After breakfast I cracked on with my work.

The blog is now done as far back as 28th December 2018, and the text database for December 2018 is almost finished.

But apart from that, the fact that I now have my passport means that I can set in motion a couple of other little projects that I have in the back of my mind. I sent out a couple of mails and I’ve even had a reply from one of them.

That was quick!

As well as that, I have a contact whom I met on board the Good Ship Ve… errr … Ocean Endeavour. He’s an agent for Nikon cameras so I’ve been talking to him today about a new camera. He seems to think that the new mirrorless Nikon Z6 would do what I want, but after my bad experience with the Nikon 1 J5 I’m just a little bit wary of mirrorless cameras.

We had lunch of course, and a session on the guitar.

And then a walk out this afternoon.

And it was another gorgeous day. A real pleasure to be out in the sun and it was actually warm out there which was a surprise.

The beach looked really inviting and I was tempted to go for a walk thereupon but I have too much to do right now than to go off idly passing the time.

There was a sea haze out there looking northwards and visibility wasn’t all that good today.

There was a yacht in the distance off the coast of Bréhal-Plage, but there were also a couple more of these buoys that we have been seeing just recently.

I still haven’t worked out what they might be for. They appear as if by magic and the next day they are gone.

For tea tonight, I had a stuffed pepper with spicy rice. And it was just as delicious as normal. But there’s plenty of stuffing left so it might be a potato curry tomorrow to finish it off. there’s half a leek from the other day that will go in there nicely.

Out for my walk again tonight. And once more I was the only one out there, which is a shame because it really was quite nice out there;

You couldn’t see anything to the north because the mist had closed in, but to the south we were treated once more to the fishing boats going around the harbour.

Only the small ones because the tide was only just coming in. The ones with a deeper draught will be in there later.

So while I go to bed for an early night I’ll leave you with the news that the British Defence Minister has said today that The UK will use Military force to protect its interests after Brexit.

He went on to say “we must strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality, and increase our mass”.

“Increase our lethality”! Just what planet are these fools living on?

To think that these are the people who are going to lead the UK into the Brave New post-Brexit world. They are insane!

It’s this kind of 19th-Century sabre-rattling that makes me more and more ashamed and embarrassed to admit that I’m British.

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coa

Tuesday 12th February 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… today (because there has been some) is that my new passport arrived.

There was a telephone call this morning asking me if I would be here this afternoon because the courier intended to pass by.

And so having confirmed it, I received a second phone call at about 15:35 to ask me which was the door to my block of apartments. Instead, I went downstairs and a charming lady handed me a big yellow envelope.

So now, being all legal again, that’s one less thing to think about. That is – until I lose this one.

For some reason or other, I was still awake and working at 01:30 last night. That’s usually a recipe for disaster but then again there’s no point in going to bed when I’m not tired and when I can carry on working.

Despite that, I managed to wake up when the alarm went off and I was out of bed comparatively early.

A comparatively early breakfast and then I settled down to work. And by the time that I had finished, I’d finished the blog back as far as 1st January 2019. And it’s not as easy as it might be either because until I fathomed out the depths of this new blog upgrade, the blog was itself inserting all kinds of redundant and surplus *.html code that bears little or no resemblance to the coding that I use.

It all has to be stripped out and while I have a computer program that does that, it strips out everything, including the coding that I want leaving in. And so I have to start again.

As far as the text database goes, I’m now back almost to the beginning of December. That was, by the way, a heavy month for photos so it’s going to take longer than it otherwise might.

I went out and about for my walk this afternoon as usual.

And was treated to the delightful sight of a group of British people blocking off the rue St Jean while they unloaded a trailer of furniture – because they were too lazy to carry the furniture 50 metres from the car park around the corner.

It’s this kind of thing that I hate, because it gives all of us a very bad name when they treat the locals with contempt like this.

However, leaving aside a really good rant for the moment, the weather this afternoon was beautiful.

It was sunny and warm (for the time of year) and the sky was quite clear. There was a beautiful view of the coastline all the way along from Donville les Bains down to Bréhal-Plage.

On the right of the image is of course that old hotel where I saw that miserable apartment that was to let.

And hardly surprisingly, I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the beautiful weather;

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s school holiday so there were crowds out there strolling along the Plat Gousset and walking along the beach.

No-one actually in the water, though. And I can’t blame them. It wasn’t that warm out there.

And not only that, there was some activity in the port too. Our old friend Thora was in the harbour this afternoon tied up at her berth by the dockyard crane.

I could see that she was loaded up with a dozen or so of these enormous gravel bags, but whether or not there was gravel in them I couldn’t really say.

But whatever there is in there, it’ll all be off to Jersey in early course.

having been up on the top of the walls at the back of the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou to take a photo of Thora, there was a really good view of my apartment building.

It’s the building on the right there, part of an old military barracks with the parade ground in the middle.

Part of the old parade ground is closed off and is our private parking. You can see Caliburn in his little parking space just there.

The building in the background is now the College Malraux – the local secondary school. Their playground is the old military sports ground at the back of the College.

Back here, I had the usual strum on the guitar followed by a coffee. No Christmas Cake because I finished that off on Sunday. And then I started work again;

But not for long though. I was soon tucked up in bed under the covers fast asleep. And there I stayed for about 90 minutes. I wasn’t asleep for all of that time but it’s difficult for me to tear myself out of bed.

There was some of that potato and lentil curry left over from the other day. So I added half a leek and some sweetcorn to it to lengthen it.

And followed by tinned fruit salad and that soya cream stuff (almond this week, not coconut) it was thoroughly delicious.

Later on after tea I went out for my evening walk. Around the headland tonight, looking at the trawlers coming in with their catch.

And I tried a little experiment. The photos that I’m taking of various things at night are sometimes coming out poorly because I’m struggling to set the exposure correctly to stop pinpoints of light being too bright and distorting the image.

So tonight what I did was to set the exposure to where I would ordinarily have set it, and then reduced the ISO by one stop and increased the exposure by a couple of stops.

And it’s coming out much clearer – but there’s still room to go.

There was a large collection of lights just outside the entrance to the harbour. It looked as if it might have been a gravel boat such as Neptune standing off and hove to, waiting for the tidal gates to open.

But with the photo being much better and clearer than usual now, I could see that it was actually a couple of trawlers having stopped to have a little chat before they came in and tied up to unload.

But the harbour was really quite busy tonight.

There must have been eight or nine fishing boats in the outer harbour either tied up unloading or waiting for an empty berth. And half a dozen more here or hereabouts on their way in.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … I would have loved to have been here in the heyday of the port when it would have been packed with Newfie trawlers.

So now I’m going to try to have an early night. I probably won’t sleep, what with having crashed out this afternoon, but I ought to make an effort.

I can’t keep on going like this.

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Sunday 10th February 2019 – AS YOU MIGHT …

… have expected, going to bed really early meant that I was awake early too. At 04:35 as it happened, and that’s ridiculous really for a Sunday.

I was still awake at 06:00 too because I remember noticing the time. But I must have gone back off to sleep again because I finally awoke at 07:45.

Mind you, at some time or other I had managed to go off on a nocturnal ramble. I was at a school last night, not any of my old ones but a boarding school. there were a couple of boys who were the domineering type whom no-one particularly liked. They were on the verge of committing an enormous indiscretion by misunderstanding something important, and so I scooted off to the dormitory to awaken a couple of boys who I thought would love to see this. So they came downstairs just in time to see these other boys come in, but they seemed to take ages to reach the whole point of this matter and I could see that interest amongst the spectators was slowly starting to drop off.

07:45 I awoke, but it was more like 08:30 that I arose. Still not good enough for a Sunday and I’m pretty dismayed by it all. I seem to be going to pot these days.

After breakfast, I started to attack the blog and the photos.

As for the photos, it’s been tough work today as I’ve reached all of the 100-odd photos that I took in Koln. And I need to research the internet to find out where I was when I took them, and that’s not easy.

But as for the blog, I had a good-ish day with that and I’ve reached as far back as 9th January.

Another thing that I did was to scan a pile of documents and print out copies. These are important documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates and the like. Whenever I receive an official document like that, I always scan it and keep a copy as a graphic image. If necessary, I can always print out a copy and I’ve done that on several occasions, like when I lost my driving licence and lost my passport.

Seeing as it was Sunday, I also spent some time doing nothing at all except vegetating. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … everyone should have a day where they can do nothing at all and not feel guilty about it.

That hummus has matured nicely and it almost took my head off. It’s no wonder that I don’t have many friends if I can churn out stuff like that.

I went out for my afternoon walk. The rainstorm of the morning had stopped and the sun had appeared, although the wind was quite wicked.

It was blowing the waves all along the beach and there were some impressive whitecaps out there.

Just the kind of day to be out there on a small boat, I reckon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they are building a new house on the rue du Nord overlooking the walls and the sea.

Every now and again I like to see where they have reached with the work. They seem to have put a spurt on just now because they have actually started to do the roofing.

The heeavy beams and the like are in position. I don’t suppose that it will be long before they start the tiling.

There were quite a few people out there on the beach today at the Plat Gousset enjoying the sunshine, despite the wind.

And I don’t remember seeing this building before, and I was wandering what it might be. It’s made of concrete, and there seems to be some kind of encased concrete pipework leading from it.

I shall have to go down there one day for a closer look.

Round the corner and in the Baie de Mont St Michel the storm really was raging.

Although the tide was miles out, we have the concrete pylon with the navigating light for the entrance to the harbour, and that was receiving quite a considerable battering.

As an aside, when the tide is right in, the water level is above the top red band. We have the highest tides in Europe here.

Tea was a pizza of course. And while that was cooking, I peeled some of the mound of carrots that I had bought yesterday, sliced and par-boiled them and now they are in the freezer.

I hate shop-frozen carrots. For some reason they seem to taste all rubbery.

This evening was another nice evening. Really windy but the sky was perfectly clear.

There was only a small crescent moon but it was really bright. And the street lights of Cancale stood out really clearly over there. That’s 18 miles away of course, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed.

We also have the street lights of St Malo reflected off the clouds over there.

One thing about the night was that it was really clear. And the moon wasn’t too bright as to be overwhelming.

And so I reckoned that I would have a try at photographing some of the stars and see how they came out.

It’s not particularly good, but it’s hand-held in the wind on a long exposure. It’s surprising that it’s even managed to do anything at all.

So back here now, I’m going to go to bed. It’s not as early as I would like but it can’t be helped.

Quite surprisingly, I’ve not crashed out today. And it certainly comes to some kind of pretty pass that I feel that I ought to mention it.