Tag Archives: shower

Thursday 30th April 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… last night when I predicted the arrival of either Thora or Normandy Trader here in the harbour today.

On my way out to the shops I had a glance over the wall down to the harbour, and there was Normandy Trader down in the harbour.

Another thing that I was right about was the quick turn-round time these days too. She must have crept in on the overnight tide and is leaving right now – right at the moment that the harbour gates are opening.

And the harbour gates are indeed just opening right at this very minutes, and you can tell that just by looking at the colour of the water coming in on the tide.

You can see that it’s a brown colour – heavily loaded with silt, and that contrasts with the blue of the water that’s inside the harbour.

Whether that’s because the silt that might have been in the water has settled out while the gates were closed, or whether there’s a fresh-water sources from somewhere feeding into the harbour is anyone’s guess.

And I wasn’t just right – I was right in spades too!

Because as I came back from the shops Normandy Trader had long since departed and in her place Thora was now there loading up. That was quick.

Another quick turnround too because when I went out this evening to take the air she had already long-since departed. So when I say at timed that I haven’t seen them for a while, that doesn’t mean to say that they haven’t been here.

The least said about this morning, the better. Not one of my more successful starts to the day, I’m afraid.

But I did make it to my feet and after the meds had a listen to the dictaphone. I was working for the French Government last night on an employment reinsertion project and one of my clients was some young guy I know in back in Pionsat. I had to give him advice and tips about getting back into work, all this kind of thing. Of course it’s pretty evident that he doesn’t need any tips with the amount of work he does on the side but it’s the kind of thing that had to be done. There were all kinds of questions about me, a foreigner advising people on French law. It went on like that for quite some time. At one point I was actually travelling somewhere and I’d come to a strange town that I knew. I tried to buy some fuel but one or two of the petrol stations were closed and there were queues at the other stations so I had a walk around the town for something to eat but I couldn’t find anything to eat. Everywhere was closed as well in this town
And during the night I was getting my carrots ready for freezing, chopping them up and dicing them. At one point I had to measure them but it was a bit late by them because I’d already chopped them up and you couldn’t really assemble them back together again to measure them so that was something as well.

After breakfast I had a go at some music-file digitalising. The first one that I attempted was a nightmare and I had to search everywhere. But I still ended up one track short no matter where I went.

And I was right about one of my assumptions because it was there in black and white in the artist’s catalogue – “this artist is known to be one whose work was lost in the Universal Studios fire” and because he’s a pretty obscure artist, that would appear to be that.

What I’ll have to do is to digitalise the album myself instead of hunting down master tapes, and then upload my versions.

As an aside, I should mention, so that there’s no mistake or misunderstanding, that I’m only digitalising albums that I already own.

Because of all of this, I was late having my shower and late going out to the shops.

And even later than I would have been too. There was so much going on out there this morning and of course it’s been a wek since I’ve seen any of it.

For a start, what is this? Some kind of heavy machinery, that’s for sure, and I imagine that the artic at the side has just delivered it.

But whatever it is, it’s an interesting replacement for the large crane that was parked on there for a couple of days after thay had taken it off the floating pontoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days ago I was mulling over how they were going to get down to the new floating pontoons.

It’s all very well having the pontoons but it’s no use if you cant get up or down from or to them.

But I found out the answer to this conundrum this morning. We can see the new gangway over there that goes down to the pontoon. I imagine that it’s secured at the quayside but unsecured at the bottom so that it can slide about as the pontoon rises and falls with the tide.

And if we can avert our eyes from Normandy Trader for a while we can see yet more goings-on just here.

Our big mobile crane is back again, and here she is just about to wrestle with a gangway for the floating pontoons here. I imagine that the gangway will be dropped into position during the course of the morning.

And on the other side of the harbour you can see the big floating pontoon that was being used as a workstation. It’s now been dismantled and is ready to be taken away in early course.

A couple of days ago, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they set up the flags on the Resistance War Kemorial at the Pointe du Roc.

Here this morning down in the Place Godal the local Council had the cherry-picker out playing with the flags here too.

But what they were actually doing was taking down the British flag. I’m not sure why and I wasn’t quick enough to ask them, but it was probably a symbolic post-Brexit gesture or something like that.

We’ll have to see next week whether it goes back up.

So I pushed on … “pushed off” – ed … to LIDL for my shopping, through the madding crowds.

On the first day of detention à domicile I remember wandering the streets looking for bread and there wasn’t a soul about at all. Today, apart from the few people wearing masks you would never have thought that these were lockdown times, with the crowds that were out and about.

But it seems to be working. Only 758 new cases today, which contrasts with the sad state off affairs in the UK where there were 6032. At a 15% death-rate 15 days hence, which seems to be the norm, France will soon be reaching Germany’s low totals whereas the UK will be out of control. Even more so when an order of “vital supplies” of ventilators ordered in an emergency turn out to be totally useless

There was a security guy on the door at LIDL too controlling ingress and egress. Older, bigger and more out-of-condition than me, he was too. He wouldn’t have been any use running after shoplifters. But then, he’s not there for that.

In LIDL I spent a lot of money, but I needed quite a lot of stuff as stocks were well down. And so much stuff did I buy that it was a struggle to carry it home. But it’ll keep me fit, I suppose.

But fit for what, I really have no idea.

On the way back I stopped off at La Mie Caline for my dejeunette for lunch and then back here I had a coffee.

Having almost run out of hummus I made another batch. And it’s really easy to do.
Drain a tin of chick peas.
Add to the chick peas half the weight of sesame seed paste (400 grammes of chick peas means 200 grammes of paste).
Add some of the chick pea juice, some olive oil, sea salt, ground black pepper and garlic – usually in total about half of the weight of chick peas again
Chuck the lot in your whizzer and give it a really good whizz around – adding a little more oil or chick pea juice until you have the consistency you like.
In the meantime, dice up your flavouring. I’ve used roast peppers, all kinds of things in the past but today it was sun-dried tomatoes and olives with tarragon.
Add them into the mix in the whizzer and just blip the whizzer so that the flavouring is dispersed throughout the mix – you don’t want to purée it, which is what will happen if you whizz it too long.
Put it in small pots, freeze some of it and put a pot in the fridge for immediate use.

And it was totally wicked on my dejeunette with tomato, cucumber lettuce and vegan mayonnaise.

After lunch I had a look at a second album to digitalise. And this was a loooooooong one too and it took an age. And the disappointment was that for some reason or other, two of the tracks on the master tape where, had this been an LP there would have been a change of side, the one seems to have lost its end and the other its beginning.

So that’s a task for tomorrow – to see if I can track them down.

But one track on the album was one that I used to play in a rock group in the 1970s so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to have an extra go on the bass. That brought back some very happy memories.

And I ended up having to dismantle the computer at one point. The mouse has been playing up just recently but this afternoon it handed in its hat so I had to find another one and untangle a mass of cables to do that.

And it wasn’t easy either.

After another session on the guitars I knocked off and went to make my apple and pear purée, now that I had some apples and pears to make it with.

10 apples peeled, cored and diced, added to a small amount of water with a lot of lemon juice (to stop the apples browning) with desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nutmeg.

3 pears followed suit into the water which was them all put on a low heat, given a really good stir and left to its own devices for about an hour.

In the meantime seeing as I’d had the oven on to sterilise the bottles I stick a couple of potatoes in to bake along with some baked beans and vegan cheese.

A simple tea of course but it was delicious, as was my blackberry pie and almond soya dessert.

By now the fruit was ready so I drained off the liquid and bottled it to use as a cordial for breakfast.

The fruit went into the whizzer and was whizzed round into a purée and then put into the other two jars that i’d sterilised in the oven.

They were left to cool, and you can see the finished results right here. It looks really good and, having tried a sample off the end of the spatula, I can say that it tastes good too.

So at this point, about an hour or so later than usual, I went for my evening walk.

And I was glad that I’d done something during the day too because by the looks of things, it wasn’t going to be the right kind of evening to be out there.

There was a famous storm raging out there in the English Channel somewhere round by Jersey and I wished now that i’d put on my rain jacket – or maybe gone out a little earlier.

Despite the howling headwind, which wasn’t quite as strong as yesterday but nevertheless … I managed to run up to my marker point at the top of the hill.

It was something like a struggle – well, a lot like a struggle actually, but I was given the impetus to move on quickly when I saw the storm heading my way from the Ile de Chausey.

As I watched, I could see it getting closer and closer and I didn’t like the look of it at all, so I cleared off.

And even despite the raging weather, there was another fishing boat out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

This kind of weather, rough though it is, won’t stop them at all. But as I have said before … “on numerous occasions” – ed … they seem to be fishing in areas that I hadn’t noticed before.

No change in the chantier navale this evening which was just as well because I didn’t feel like stopping. Still the same four boats from yesterday. They are keeping quite busy in there despite the restrictions.

But while I’d stopped for my breath, I had a look at the flagpoles here in the car park in the boulevard Vaufleury.

They’ve been busy with the cherry-picker because they have put these flags up too. We have the EU, then France, then the province of Normandy and then the flag of the town of Granville.

But on that note the rain started to fall. The storm had caught me up. So I ran off down the street and back home, missing off my two final runs due to the inclement weather.

But I was over 100% on the fitbit so I wasn’t too disappointed.

It’s horribly late now and I’m nowhere near finished. Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday here and that’s usually the signal for a lie-in bit I’m going to defy convention, get up early (if I can, of course) and finish off the outstanding stuff before breakfast.

See you in the morning.

Saturday 25th April 2020 – ANOTHER BAD …

… day today unfortunately. But then, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it all comes and goes in waves and I’ll probably feel much better in a couple of days.

Last night was something of a later night than I was expecting but even so, not as late as some have been. And that’s why I was dreadfully disappointed about missing the alarm again. 07:00 when I finally left the bed.

After the medication I went to find out where I had been during the night. Not very far by the looks of things. We were having a radio meeting but sending our comments to each other as “comments” on a youtube video. That’s all I seem to remember of it so that was a waste of time.

Breakfast was next and then I made a start on digitalising the two albums for today. However, I broke off at some point early on to go and have a shower.

And of the 800 grammes that I lost and then put back on, I’ve lost 400 of them. So I’ve no idea what’s going on with my bathroom scales but as I have said before … “many times … sigh” – ed … my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood testing machine at Castle Anthrax.

NOZ is still closed – I went to have a look – and although the car park at LeClerc was half-empty and there was no queue outside waiting to go in, there were certainly more than 100 people inside.

At long last they had my small tins of kidney beans in stock but no pizza bases again. And no pizza flour either. But I bought some ordinary flour last time so I’m going to have a go at making some bread and maybe a pizza base or two tomorrow and see how it comes out, just for fun.

Hummus is getting rather low too so, for a change, I spent a little money and bought a pot of sun-dried tomatoes in oil. I reckon that minced up with some olives and garlic with basil, that would make a delicious hummus for the next round.

But I didn’t really spend an awful lot in there today but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to the shopping bill because I’m convinced (as are many others) that prices are slowly going up.

By the time that I returned it was quite late so I had a coffee and then made lunch.

There were two albums that I had been digitalising today and it took me until something like 15:45 to finish them. But they were both big double albums with plenty of tracks and I managed to find them all without too much searching and only the odd two or three that needed some persuasion.

These are really classic albums too and almost every track is one that I can use on the radio so it was a very good job.

However, I don’t know why but I crashed out again this afternoon. A really deep, intense one that beats all of the ones that I’ve had to date and I remember thinking to myself at one point that this is no good at all.

It’s right, as well. It is no good. But one thing that I did mention 9 months or so ago was that I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and look on the bright side. Adopt a more positive attitude. That was something going on through my head when I was out later on for my runs.

First thing of course is that I’m still here. That’s confounded many people, especially those who saw me in January and February 2016. Back in those days I couldn’t even walk unaided so what would they say now to the fact that according to the fitbit, so far this month up to Tuesday (21 days) I’d run for a total of 3 hours and 40 minutes, or just over 10 minutes per day.

And just 18 months ago I was standing up to my knees in frozen water at Etah in Greenland, just 600 or so miles from the North Pole? Or 6 months ago I was wrestling with my conscience and my better judgement (not to mention my totally foul humour) as I traversed the North West Passage – a voyage that has killed a couple of thousand people in the past.

Another thing too – and that I’m living in my dream location with the sea lapping at my feet and working in a radio station where I’m given a free hand to write, engineer, direct and produce my own programmes.

None of any of this would have happened had I not been taken ill.

There was still a few minutes to go before guitar practice time so I made a start on bringing up to date the playlist for the Rock show (well, we were talking about the radio just now). It’s fallen way behind and there’s a lot to do. I probably did about a quarter of it and I’ll have a go at the rest tomorrow.

During the course of the day I edited another 25 photos from July 2019 and I’m now climbing up the side of a mountain to a waterfall in Seydisfjordur in Iceland. And I wouldn’t have been here either had I not been ill.

After the guitar session, during which I had some fun with Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath”, I had tea. Burger and pasta in tomato sauce with vegetables, followed by more apple crumble.

It would be wrong to say that I was alone out there tonight. But half a dozen or so people is a lot less than I’ve been seeing just recently.

There was nothing – nothing whatever – going on out to sea. I couldn’t see a boat or a ship anywhere. But there was a beautiful breeze that really made it a pleasure to be out (which was why i started to feel a little more positive) and the new flags on the flagpoles were flapping away wildly.

There hasn’t been a photo of them from this angle yet so I thought that the lighting conditions would make quite an unusual shot

Having recovered my breath I went on round the headland and ran along the clifftop on the other side of the headland.

In the distance I could see a boat parked up in the unloading bay so i was wondering if it might have been Thora or Normandy Trader. We haven’t seen them for a few days.

But it is in fact our old friend La Grande Ancre tied up down there and that’s confusing me because I was sure that I saw her sail out earlier in the day when I was on my way to shopping.

Having inwardly digested La Grande Ancre I carried on with my runs. And I do have to say that i seem to be running a little easier today and my fourth run – the longest – I added another 20 yards. I can’t be feeling too bad.

An additional surprise – I put in another 25-yard run, from a standing start uphill. And that is something that wouldn’t have happened even a week or two ago. This took me round to the rue du Nord where I could go to see what the sunset was doing.

The answer to that question was “not a lot”.

There was plenty of cloud out there this evening and we didn’t have the clear sky that would have given us a magnificent evening as we have had once or twice just recently.

Nevertheless, a little patience brought out a couple of really interesting photos as the setting sun put in a brief appearance between a gap in a couple of clouds.

But it didn’t stay long. A couple of minutes and it had gone again behind the vloud on the horizon.

That must have been something of a disappointment to the girl whom I’ve seen for the last couple of evenings.

She and her friend came down the steps for a butcher’s at the sunset but they were too late tonight. However, at least I had a “bonsoir” and a smile, which is always nice.

So everything is finished – and so am I – just a couple of minutes before 23:00. Even though tomorrow is Sunday and a Day Of Rest with no alarm to awaken me, i’m off to bed early.

It’s some hope, I know, but I hope that I’ll feel better tomorrow. That evening breeze cheered me up a little so I hope that it’s the start of an upward trend.

We shall see.

Wednesday 22nd April 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… this evening’s beautiful sunset, as the sun slowly sinks into the sea somewhere off the shore of the Ile de Chausey, let me tall you about my day, such as it was.

And for a change, it started off rally well too. I was actually out of bed and struggling into my clothes when the third alarm went off, and that’s not something that happens every day, especially these days.

And so I wandered off for my medication, or whatever is left of my medication until tomorrow.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

And not very far, by the look of it.

There was something going on about a zoo during the night. There was a group of us, a Scottish rock group and I can’t remember which one it was. We were going hunting and someone brought a rifle along, but was soon persuaded to change it for a camera. We all had to wear face masks so I put this face mask on a little girl, a weird thing that needed all kind of strange tightening up, then told her to go to put hers on her brother and then come back to put mine on. Her brother was only a year or two older and he didn’t understand about face masks and they were having a bit of a struggle to get his face mask on.

Breakfast was next of course, and that was followed by a shower.

And those few hundred grammes that I had lost the other day – well, they are back. It seems that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as Castle Anthrax’s blood laboratory testing service … “you said that the other day” – ed.

And having had a good shower and clean up, then I cleaned and tidied the bathroom and you can actually see the surface in there now. That’s progress.

Having organised the bathroom I started on the kitchen and the dining area.

The kitchen looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned since Adam was a lad so it was high time that it was done. I usually always do that just before I go to Leuven, but I haven’t been there since January, have I?

And then the dining area. That needed a good going-over too.

So basically the place looks so much better now that it did yesterday.

The nurse (a new one) came at about 10:10 and I’m glad t was this one because even though he wasn’t particularly garrulous, he found a vein and insterted his needle quite painlessly. I’m always grateful for that.

He was in and out and gone within about 10 minutes, which meant that I could crack on with what I’d been intending to do.

We started off with the digital file splitting. Two albums of “Greatest Hits” and, to my surprise, both of them were completed today with just the odd little problem here and there but nothing serious.

That was followed by dictating the notes that I had written yesterday for the two radio projects on which I had been working.

And shame is it to say that I actually fell asleep while I was doing it. That was embarrassing, particularly as it was for about 20 minutes or so.

I can’t last the pace, can I?

But anyway, once they were dictated, I uploaded them to the computer

After lunch, I made a start on editing them, having a little chat with Rachel in New Brunswick along the way.

And even though I didn’t feel much like it and wished that I had something else to do instead of this, by the time that I came to knocking off at 18:00 I had made some quite remarkable progress.

So much so that I wish that I had had a day like this much earlier in the week when I really needed to do it.

The dictated notes have been edited as necessary
they have been converted to *.mp3 files
they have been split into the appropriate segments to match the music that will precede and follow them
they have all been merged together in the appropriate places
the remaining time has been calculated
the final, concluding tracks have been identified
these have been enhanced and edited
I’ve made a start on writing out the notes to conclude the programmes

Yes, I wish that I had more days like that.

An hour was spent on the guitar, just running over “Telegraph Road” again and once I worked out that not only is there a wrong chord, the chord pattern puts the breaks in the wrong place, then the identifying pattern was easy to spot

It’s a lot of hard work on the bass though, and I don’t think that I shall have it cracked any time soon.

For tea tonight, in my nice clean kitchen and dining area, I decided on a burger and bap for tea, with a baked potato.

Now that I know how much mustard to use (this “old-style” mustard is different to the more modern stuff) it comes out really well and tastes extremely delicious.

We’re on the verge of a crisis though. Tomorrow will see me use the last of the apple crumble. At the moment it’s tasting better and better as the spices in the apples have time to mix through

And then I had to go off for my evening runs.

The sun was still quite high in the sky right now, although I reckoned that by the time I had gone once around my little lap it will have gone down. So I put a spurt on and headed for the hills

And that was quite agonising too. For a couple of days I thought that I had cracked this little course of mine but that might have been rather optimistic. This evening I felt every inch of the way.

Eventually I found my way round to the chantier navale where I could stop to see that was going on.

And there’s been a change in there today. For the last week or so there have been four boats in there up on blocks but today there were only three.

The one that was on its own down the quayside seems to have disappeared – back into the water probably. They are clearly cracking on with things down there in the chantier navale regardless of any social distancing.

If you have a look at image, you’ll see that it’s been cropped from the previous photo. The girl in this image can be seen in the previous one right up at the top beyond the boat hoist and near the bright yellow plastic boat in the rack.

What’s interesting in this photo is that while I was taking the one of the chantier navale I could hear someone talking quite clearly, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Being of a curious bent, I had a good look around but couldn’t see anyone so I was puzzled. But then as the voice slowly became louder, I could see the girl approaching, and she was talking on her telephone.

She must have been a good 400 yards or so away from me yet because of the detention à domicile there was no noise of vehicles or other people and thus the sound of her voice was carrying for a much greater distance than you might expect.

The windows in the apartment had been open today and I had heard the pile-driver going off.

So when I stopped for breath on my run home, I went to see what they had been doing.

At first glance I couldn’t see any difference but on a closer look I think that one or two of the support pillars on the rue du Port side are deeper in the water.

They must have been having a hammering today.

While I was admiring the inner port, my attention was distracted by some goings-on in the corner over there.

Horses and hordes of seagulls circling around over there. It suggests that a fishing boat has just come in and is in the process of unloading. The birds will be on the lookout for a free meal as the process continues.

As for me though, I couldn’t hang around as I had things to do.

By now, the sun would be on its way out so I went for a butchers in the rue du Nord.

There was a girl there too, one of about ten people in total whom I had seen this evening, admiring the scenery too. I attempted to strike up a conversation with her as a gesture of solidarity but she wasn’t having it.

And so instead I carried on admiring the slowly-sinking sun. It really was beautiful.

After about 15 minutes the sun finally disappeared over the horizon and so in the nest tradition of the “News Of The Screws”, I “made my excuses and left”.

No-one was around to notice so I ran all the way back to the apartment so as to make up my five runs.

About 30 seconds after I returned, the ‘phone rang. It was Rosemary and she wanted a really good chat so we were there on the ‘phone puttign the world to rights for a good hour and a half.

I sisn’t want an early night anyway.

But now everything is all done and way later than I intended, I’m ready for bed.

Tomorrow I have the doctor’s appointment at 10:00 and then I’m off to the shops. There’s quite a bit of stuff that I need. And so I hope that LIDL isn’t going to have a heart attack if I have the need to take a photo or two.

That is – if I’m awake in time because I was hoping to be in bed much earlier than this.

Saturday 18th April 2020 – SOME PEOPLE ARE …

… becoming very touchy as time goes on.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite often I’m posting photos here of interesting food articles and the like that have caught my interest when I’ve been out at the shops.

Today though, I was just taking a photo of something in leClerc when a couple of security men appeared, gave me a grilling and “asked” me to delete it. It seems that they are becoming rather nervous about what they have in stock and, presumably, their prices too – because, as I mentioned last week, they seem to be slowly going up.

And the fact that I was asked to either delete the photo or to go and do my shopping elsewhere tells everyone more than any photo ever could about what is happening in LeClerc right now

What else is definitely happening right now is that I didn’t hear the second alarm at all. That’s a surprise because it’s Billy Cotton going “Wakey WaaaaaaaaaaKEY” followed by the theme music to the Billy Cotton Band Show, and how anyone can sleep through that I really don’t know.

But I did

Consequently it was something silly like 06:30 when I awoke.

Nothing on the dictaphone so, even though it might have been a late-ish night, it was a complete one with no interruptions. So instead, I made an early start on the digital file stuff.

And today, I ran aground. I’ve reached the end of the first run-through of stuff that I can digitalise easily, and I shall be starting on part 2

That’s the compilation albums. There are quite a few of those that I have, for one reason or other, and I shall have to hunt them down track by track.

But some of the stuff is pretty obscure, like a demo single by Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley long before 10CC ever became thought of, and another by Gordon Jackson, formerly in a group called “Deep Feeling” with half of “Traffic”. I wouldn’t have the first clue even where to begin searching for tracks like that.

But talking of 10CC – where are my 10CC albums? 3 of them, there should be, the early pre-commercialisation stuff? And “Angel’s Egg” by Gong, and “Caravanserai” by Santana? I’ve not found those yet and I’ve been through everything several times. I’m beginning to notice more and more stuff missing, the more that I think about it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Having done one or two albums I went for a shower and a weigh-in. And that weight I put on the other day – it’s gone again. Yes, I think that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood machine at Castle Anthrax.

But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to drop below the 80kg barrier. Well, I did, just once, and it didn’t stick. I haven’t exercised like this for 20 years.

After the shower I set the washing machine on the go. I’ve changed the bedding, for the first time since I can’t remember when. I’ve been letting things slide just recently and I need to get myself back on track.

At LeClerc I spent more than usual – but a good proportion of that was on coffee. They had some decent stuff on special offer – not as good an offer as the last tme that I bought some and I wish that I’d bought more of that now, but enough to tempt me to have some luxury in the near future and I’m all in favour of that.

On the way back home, I saw the most amazing view.

With the market being closed, I’ve been coming back through the town instead of along the coast as I would normally do and as I came over the brown of the hill by the roundabout at the Avenue Marechal LeClerc I could see the Medieval Walled Town in the distance, all swathed in mist.

Consequently I did a U-turn around the roundabout by the station, drove back up the hill, another U-turn at the roundabout at the top, and pulled up at the side of the road to take a photo.

If you see the church right in the centre, you’ll see behind it the roof of my apartment building.

To the left of that is the building opposite mine. That’s the College Malraux, the local High School (and seeing as it’s up there on top of the Pointe du Roc, “High” Is probably right). And to the left of that is another old stone building that has also been converted into apartments like this one.

In case you are wondering, this complex is an old stone military barracks, lately for the 2nd and 202nd Regiments of Line, with a parade ground in front which is now a car park, part of which is fenced off for private use by the residents of these apartments.

The old sports field behind the College, with athletics track and all of that, is now the College’s playing field which we’ve seen a few times in various photos in the past.

Back here I put my frozen food away, made myself a coffee, sorted out another digitalised file and then went for lunch.

After lunch I started on the third laptop – the 8GB one with the failed drive that I can restart using an old trick that the Gypsies taught me (T223 was an amazing course!) and moved the contents of that hard drive over onto the new external drive that I have bought to use as a back-up. And during the course of the day I’ve started on the external portable drives.

Memory sticks and memory cards will be next, and then the desk-top external drives, followed finally by the two desktop computers. I’ll sort this all out yet! Then I can start to lay up some of the old equipment. I can remember when I thought that a 250GB external hard drive for a back-up would last me a lifetime.

While I was drifting about on the internet I came across yet another two albums that seem to have gone missing from my collection too so I attacked those too and digitalised them.

But, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out yet again.

On the positive side though, I had a really good and lengthy time on the guitars tonight all told and I’m at the stage now where I’m really enjoying playing a 6-string guitar. That’s progress, isn’t it?

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and vegetables followed by the last of the apple pie and some coconut soya stuff. Tomorrow i’m going to make an apple crumble, I reckon.

Monday though, I’ll need to make some more apple purée, and bearing in mind my success with the tinned apricots a while ago, I bought a cheap tin of peaches and I’ll see what that does.

After the washing up and so on, it was the time to go walkies outside.

Or, rather, runnies, because I’m running quite a lot just recently. I was hoping for a really nice clear, sunny evening tonight but I was out of luck.

While the air was quite clear and there was a really good view out for miles, there was plenty of cloud in the sky and for that reason it was difficult, if not impossible to see the sunset.

TThe view out to sea was really good, as I said earlier so I had a scan along the Brittany coast to see what was going on.

From my vantage point high up, there was something that looked as if it might have been a ship leaving St Malo, 50kms away.

Not being too certain, I took a photo of it with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, that is, not the ship). My first thought was that it might have been Pont Aven, the big Brittany Ferries ship, but the superstructure didn’t look quite right to me.

What I did was to go to a different viewpoint and take a photo on a different bearing to see if that was any clearer, but if anything it confused the situation even more.

And so the jury is still out on this. Even enlarging the photos and enhancing them couldn’t give me any definite hint of whether it’s a ship or a large island. I’ll have to go again and see if whatever I saw is still there another time.

If it’s no longer there, it must be a ship, not an island of course.

But having said that, while you lot admire the beautiful red sky tonight over the ile de Chausey, I was doing some research.

And what I found was that there was a “Condor” freight ferry, the Commodore Goodwill in port at St Malo at 10:24 this morning. And 12 hours later, i.e. just now, when it sent out an AIS signal (I have an AIS detector and antenna in my apartment as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) she was somewhere to the north of Jersey, east of Guernsey and west of the Cotentin.

And her silhouette is not unlike that of whatever it is in the first photo.

But I dunno.

However, according to A PRESS RELEASE FROM BRITTANY FERRIES, Commodore Goodwill was taken out of service in Winter 2015 to be fitted with scrubbers.

That’s a ferry on which I’ll be sailing once normal service is resumed. Absolutely!

Crowds of people out here tonight. I think that this quarantine thing has had it.

For the first time since all of this started, there was a road block on the way into town where the police were checking motorists and as I drove back through the town on my way back from the shops, a foot patrol was checking papers of people at the bus stop.

But they should have been out here with me tonight because there were people everywhere, especially on the footpaths that are officially closed to the public.

One of the photos that I took was of the head of the baie de Mont St Michel and you can see that above.

But with nothing special to do, I had a play with it and cropped bits out to see what I could see, close-up. This is Carolles-Plage, about 20kms away, with the white beach huts and the old hotel that’s now converted into apartments where I saw a miserable-looking apartment for sale that had once been a shop.

But never mind the apartment, what wouldn’t I give for a room in that house there perched on the side of the Pointe de Carolles? That would do me quite nicely

Here’s another bit cropped off the photo above.

It’s not possible to see the Abbey of Mont St Michel and its island from here because the Pointe de Carolles is in the way, but we can see the hotels and restaurants and so on situated on the mainland. They are the white buildings at the head of the bay about 30 miles away.

And perched on the end of the Pointe de Carolles is the Cabanon Vauban, the old Customs observation post that we visited two years ago.

After that I carried on with my runs and stopped for a breather on the walls.

By now the sun was sinking rapidly and while the Ile de Chausey was obscured by clouds, there was enough of a gap in them to let some red glow seep though and reflect off the water.

While I was here, I was entertained by part of the choir from the local church who were przctising outdoors just here. They clearly believed more in the power of worship than they did in the power of Social Distancing, that’s for sure. I left them to it and ran home.

Tonight has been quite relaxing and much of it was spent playing the 6-string guitar. I’m really getting into that right now.

But I have new bedding tonight so I’ll be getting into that in a minute. Tomorrow is Sunday, no alarm so I can have a lie-in. A day of rest tomorrow and then back to work on Monday.

Thursday 16th April 2020 – I COULDN’T KEEP IT UP …

… this morning, which id something of a shame.

Having done so well this last couple of days, I couldn’t beat the third alarm today. I missed it by about 10 minutes.

Mind you, I didn’t have the early night that I was hoping for last night. I was listening to music again and so enjoying myself, I split up a Louis de Funes soundtrack to extract some more soundbites for my radio shows.

Definitely my favourite French comedian, Louis de Funes, and he deserves to be my co-star on the radio.

So where did I get to during the night, After the medication I could go along and find out.

I was going some kind of post-dated ad for the end of the month – the old men wanted it for some project or other. I’d get them to sign in and anyone who sends me any connections will have a reward because of it. But I was with Nerina for some part of the time.
Later on, a group of us was going skiing. We were all sitting around waiting for the bus to come and pick us up. I had all of the stuff to hand out to everyone for them to take their possessions. But some of the stuff, some of the people couldn’t carry. My brother was lucky – he just had a suitcase there and a guitar. I said “there’s no guy ropes or anything with this”. he said “yes that’s fine, not a problem. It turned out that all the stuff like that was in my suitcase and I’d got tons and tons of stuff like this. Mine was just really really heavy. There was someone who might have been Nerina but I’ve no idea who it was who didn’t have very much either, and someone else who might have been one of my sisters who didn’t have plenty. We were all there with all of these things and there was tons of it all told. I was wondering how on earth we would manage to get all of this onto a bus or a train, however we were going. Each person was responsible for his own but that’s not going to be right with all of the stuff we have. It’s just escalating all of the time out of hand like this
Later still I was just about to go off on a trip with Stuart Graham, the Honda motorcycling racing specialist and tuning guy who lived near Nantwich but just as I was getting ready to go off the alarm rang and put an end to that.

There was much more than this going on too but as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you all the gory details.

After breakfast it was digitalising the cassette collection time. Another four albums have bitten the dust this morning but, once again, they are four albums that I won’t beusing in the radio projects, for a variety of reasons.

And it made me realise that there are a pile of albums that I no longer have and I don’t understand that at all. And bearing in mind what they are, I have an idea where they might be. But I’ll never have them back now. Ahhh well!

But the splitting was reasonably comfortable and reasonably rapid, but somehow I’ve ended up with two *.mkv files, which is what I’ve been trying to avoid.

A shower and general clean-up was next. And I weighed myself too. And after all of this running and so forth I’ve … errr … GAINED 800 grammes. It looks as if my scales are as reliable as the blood machine in Castle Anthrax.

A shooping trip to LIDL was called for next.

And I was right about something else too. Starting on Tuesday earlier this week I’d been hearing strange noises coming from the port and I’d been thinking to myself that it sounds as if they have restarted work on the pontoons.

And that certainly seems to be the case. The big crane on the floating pontoon has one of the large supporting pillars in its evil clutches over there.

And when I came back from the shops later on, they were hard at work on the pontoon.

You can see the piledriver up there, supported from the big crane, pounding away at the pontoon support and driving it firmly into the bed of the harbour.

And just think how much easier it would have been to have done this work two years or so ago when the harbour was drained and they were reinstalling the new harbour gates. What an effort they would have avoided had they done it then.

But in the meantime, my attention was distracted by the excitement going on down at the bottom end of the harbour.

You can see Marité there of course, but you’ll also see a pile of large bags of building material. That would seem to indicate that either Thora or Normandy Trader is on her way to port.

We haven’t seen either of them for a few days, but that’s not to say that they haven’t been here. With us in detention à domicile like this and only being allowed out briefly, and with the rapid turnover that the ships seem to be enjoying these days, it’s not impossible that I’ve missed them.

Onwards towards LIDL and in the rue Couraye I came across something interesting.

There have been reports from all over the world about the disinfecting of the streets that receive heavy use. Here in Granville most of the banks and important local shops are situated in the rue Couraye and here they are out spraying the street.

It’s quite possible that the speech by the President the other day has galvanised them into action.

There’s also a story that the town council has ordered 20,000 masks from a local clothing manufacturer to distribute to the population. This ending of the detention à domicile on 11th May might actually be a possibility.

At LIDL tomatoes were in very short supply and those that they had were expensive. In fact I spent a lot of money there, but much of this was on new cooking supplies. They had some new tart cases and stuff like that today.

On the way back, I discovered that La Mie Caline had reopened, so I bought a dejeunette. Things really are slowly returning to normal, bit by bit.

There was an article in the local paper this morning that the amount of fish products landed here during the month of march had fallen by 30% or so.

That’s certainly some kind of clear evidence that fishing is continuing despite the crisis, albeit in reduced numbers. And as I walked up the hill in the rue des Juifs there was a delightful nautical danse macabre in the harbour.

One fishing boat was on its way in and another was on its way out, and they were having a nice little waltz around each other.

After lunch I started on the remains of the two radio projects that I hadn’t finished. I’d chosen the final tracks and edited them last night so it was just a case of writing the text, dictating it, editing it, merging it into place with the final track and then editing it all down to one hour for each project.

That took me up to about 16:15 to do them both, and I could have done it quicker too except that I … errr … relaxed for a while.

And then, until 18:00 I had some “me time”. I deserve some. And one of the things that I did was to order a new computer hi-fi system.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the one here has its problems and seeing as I spend so much time these days listening to and editing music and so on here, I ought to have some decent stuff.

And so I ended up in discussion with a musical equipment wholesaler and we’ve worked out a package. There won’t be much change out of €300 for what I’ve ordered, but I’ve had this hi-fi here for at least 18 years and it’s due for a change.

After the hour or so on the guitars, I made tea. Now that I had bought an aubergine I made myself an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit – and forgot to use the mushrooms that were left. I had some of that for tea and there are four helpings left for the freezer. I need to build up the supplies again.

The apple pie was delicious too, with the last of the coconut soya cream. But there’s that lovely banana sorbet for the next couple of days to take my mind off things.

Later on I went out for my evening activity.

There was a really beautiful red sky in the distance and by the time that i’d run up to the top of the hill (and that had me in agony) it was lookign even better, with the sun just peeking through the sky over the Ile de Chausey

It looked absolutely wonderful with the cloud just there like that, in exactly the right place.

And so I carried on with my perambulations while I recovered my breath.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have recently been discussing fishing activity deep in the Baie de Mont St Michel. There’s another fishing boat out there this evening – not the one to the left of the photo which seems to be heading into port, but the one to the right.

That one is farther out, deeper into the bay and has its workign lights switched on, so it would seem to be actively working out there.

But by the time that I’d gone round to the other side of the Pointe du Roc, the sun had sunk below the horizon.

And here I’m presented with one of the most extraordinary sights that I’ve ever seen, and I’m glad that I had the big NIKON D500 with me to photograph it. The way that the sun is reflecting on the cloud above it behind the Ile de Chausey is just like the light of a theatrical backdrop and I’ve never ever seen this effect in real life.

It was totally spell-binding.

And I wasn’t the only one out here tonight enjoying the sunset either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned on previous occasions that we are seeing more and more people flouting the regulations about staying in and so on. We had a fair crowd out in the streets today, and here’s someone who has passed the security barrier to go down to the little cove there to watch the sunset.

Still, I suppose that the sight was well worth it.

With my usual two stops for a breather, I ran all the way home from here.

But in one of the breaks I had a little diversion to look at what they had been doing in the harbour today. And they have indeed stuck another pontoon support pillar into the ground.

Not all the way down, so presumably they’ll be back to finish it tomorrow and to install the rest. Obviously the local council isn’t worried too much about this virus.

So I’m off to bed, later than I intended. Tomorrow, with no radio stuff to deal with for the first time since I don’t know when, I can make a start of a few of the arrears that have been building up.

And aren’t I looking forward to that?

Saturday 11th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN PANIC-BUYING …

… today.

Yes, at LeClerc, the pizza base rolls are back in stock. So seeing as I need to replenish the stocks having exhausted my spare one last weekend, I bought two rolls.

So shame on me!

And shame on me too for my morning. It’s no surprise that having not gone to bed until something silly like 01:45 this morning that I missed the alarms. But I had been hoping for something different than 07:55. That was rather an embarrassment.

After the medication I looked at the dictaphone – or rather, listened to it. And last night, Castor came to join me on an excursion. It’s been a couple of weeks since she’s come along, so hello again to you!

Once breakfast (including a hot cross bun of course) was out of the way, there wasn’t time for very much else.

A shower, and set the washing machine in action because I’m running low on clothes, and then I headed off into town and the shops.

and there are far more people out on the streets than there were a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the detention à domicile is getting on everyone’s nerves.

This is the queue going all the way around the Leclerc Hypermarket. And if you think that this is long, this is when I was leaving. When I arrived, it was reaching right down to the end there and a little further on.

It’s never been as long as that as far as I have seen. But in the absence of the panic-buying that we have seen in other countries, I suppose that people are running out of supplies.

But, anyway, this is the reason for all of the queues.

There must be the same kind of measures being applied here that we were seeing a few weeks ago in Belgium, with shops being obliged to restrict admittance, presumably depending upon the size in square metres of the sales area.

Not that it’s particularly effective of course, because it still doesn’t stop people congregating in confined spaces in one corner of the shop.

This is quite an interesting sign too.

Apart from the couple of tips and hints, people are being limited to one shopping trolley person. That’s still a lot of food and so on for someone. It made my paltry load look quite pathetic.

But I was astonished at the price of tomatoes. They have doubled in price this last week or two and that’s a sign of the times.

Another sign of the times is that while the range of flour on offer has reduced dramatically (no pizza flour, for example), leClerc is now selling flour in generic 5kg sacks.

They are clearly confident that these will sell, so this must mean a big rise in the number of people who might be contemplating making their own bread. In fact I know a few people who have resurrected their old breadmakers.

But I do have to say that – 5kg bags of flour. I’ve seen these in places like rural Canada but I never ever in my life expected to see them on sale in an urban environment like this.

But there was one thing that I did stock up. And it isn’t really panic-buying either because I would have done this regardless of the circumstances.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a couple of months ago that they had some frozen beanburgers on offer – a pack of 4 for €3:99 and they were quite nice too. Today, they were reduced to 40% off, and so I bought two packs.

Not that I need them because I have plenty of burgers, but at that price and now that there’s some room in my freezer I couldn’t turn them down.

Back here, one task that I’d been saying for a week or so that I would do is to clean out the freezer. I did a drawer yesterday so I did the other two just now. It’s a lot tidier in there now and things are much better arranged.

And I found a slice of apple pie from … errr … June 2018 so I left that out to defrost for pudding tonight.

Once I’d organised all that, I made myself a coffee and had a start on digitalising some more albums, with a pause for lunch of course at about 13:30.

Three albums went quickly – so quickly that I only had time for half a dozen or so photos. But the fourth album wouldn’t download at all for some reason and I tried two or three locations too.

It’s a pretty rare album too so in the end I abandoned that particular one and chose another. But I’m building up a pile of rare albums that will need me to digitalise them all on my own.

Once that was done I set about the four radio projects that I had on the go. All of the text files are now edited and the first two are now complete, mixed, edited down to 1:00:00 and ready to go.

What was disappointing though was that I could have done much more again, except that I crashed out on the chair for half an hour or so (no surprise there after last night).

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars, much of which was spent having a play with Lindisfarne’s “City Song” as well as “Carey”, “Military Madness” and “Suffragette City”.

Looking at my playlist, it’s all heading off into a certain direction, which is no surprise. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, you know.

A few weeks ago, I’d sorted out the fridge, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. All of the vacuum-packed burgers were arranged in date order and i’d caught up with the expiry dates there.

And so as a special treat I had pasta and vegetables with a lentil-and-curry burger with an expiry date of 20th April. Ohh the luxury!

Followed by the apple pie and some of that coconut soya dessert stuff.

having done the washing up, I went outside and headed off for my evening runs.

Much to my surprise, I made it all the way up to the top again – the second time in successive evenings. i’m clearly improving and I just hope that I can keep it up.

And it was work the run because I witnessed a really beautiful low sun tonight over the Ile de Chausey and so i took a photo of it for future reference.

I ran on down to the clifftop and took another photo, this time having a play around with the camera’s light settings.

And I managed to come up with this really good shot. It can, I suppose, go a stop or two darker but this is how it came out of the camera with no post work. I’m quite impressed with this.

having done that, I pushed on around the headland. And I was right about there being more and more people out there on the streets. Probably a dozen or so altogether enjoying the evening sun, the most that I have ever seen since the emergency began.

And one person who was out there again tonight was my mystery girl from the other day. We said “hello” to each other but we couldn’t say any more than that because she was running one way and I was running the other way.

I wish that I knew who she was.

My run took me past the fish processing plant and there was another fishing boat there being unloaded and its catch being stowed onto the trailer that was being pulled by that tractor.

So having had my five runs tonight, I ended up back in the apartment to write up my notes.

It’s a bank Holiday again tomorrow, and a Sunday to boot, so it’s another lie-in. But I really must put my back into dealing with these outstanding radio projects.

There are two more to do next week of course and I don’t need to be falling behind like this when there isn’t any real pressure on me.

This lethargy is something of a problem though – in fact, it’s the major problem. I know that it’s a symptom of this illness and the medication that I’m taking to try to stabilise it, but it’s still not any comfort to me.

It has been explained to me on several occasions that I’m never going to be any better and more than just a couple of people have expressed their surprise that I’ve been going on for as long as I have at the speed at which I’ve been going. Most people with this illness have long-since given up the ghost.

It’s not going to get the better of me quite yet and i’ll still be in here slugging it out.

But it would be nice to see some return from my efforts.

Saturday 4th April 2020 – ANOTHER DAY …

… when I’ve been nothing like as productive as I ought to be.

And that’s a shame because it all started so well too. I comfortably beat the third alarm to my feet and after the medication I attacked the dictaphone.

Once again, the excesses of the couple of nights just recently seem to have been curbed. But while the quality seems to have been cut down, it’s done nothing the stem the emotion.

Last night I was in hospital and that I was going to have an operation. It was an appendicitis operation but it was on my throat of all places. Af course these were strange times with all kinds of different people having all kinds of different things wrong with them because of this virus and I couldn’t get into the hospital at all, but in the end they let me in. I’d been on board a ship which may or may not have been The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour going round the Far North of Scotland and they had given me some gas anaesthetic. They clamped it over my nose and mouth and started to feed me the anaesthetic and I wasn’t going under. I was just sitting there looking at them, that kind of thing. They got a teddy bear out and started to play with this teddy bear to try to distract me but that didn’t work. In the end they simply turned up the gas until the gas was full on. Eventually I managed to pass out. Even though I was unconscious I could hear them moving all the knives, equipment and everything around. I was absolutely dreading what was going to happen next and this was another occasion where I actually awoke myself in order to avoid it.

There have been one or two like that just recently where the situation has been such that I’ve been obliged to awaken myself to avoid it. I’ve often said … “on many occasions” – ed … that the whole idea of hospîtals and surgery and all of that kind of thing is something that I can’t stomach.

What I’ve been going through this last four years or so, with hospitals, operations, tubes and pipes and all that kind of thing is my worst nightmare and there are medical actions that have been proposed to me that I’ve turned down flat because I couldn’t even stand the thought of them, not the action.

It’s the law in France that any surgical intervention, no matter what, has to be explained in precise detail to the victim and his or her consent obtained. When they wanted to do stuff to me I flatly refused to hear what they wanted to tell me and there was something of a stand-off.

In the end they had to prepare a document to the effect that I would give my consent to the operation but I didn’t want to hear anything about it. They weren’t sure just how that would stand up in Court if it came to that, but that’s all that they were getting from me.

After breakfast I made a start on the digitalising of my album collection. No major issues today except that one of them took a good while to deal with. And Rosemary rang me up in the middle of it all for a good chat.

As a result of all of this, I was late going for my shower and even later going out to the shops. No queue when I arrived (there was when I left) and I was able to buy most things that I needed.

No small tins of kidney beans and still no pizza bases. No pizza flour either, so I bought some ordinary flour and I’m going to have a go, once I’ve used the last base in my stock this weekend, to make a pizza base. I have yeast, salt and oil and I can’t think what else I might need.

But years ago, I used to buy flat round bread in Belgium, slice it horizontally rather than vertically, and use that as a pizza base. There’s always a way, and I seem to remember that the bread base worked quite well.

There was ice cream that needed to be bought but I baulked at the price that LeClerc wanted for the Alpro stuff. However, they had a tub left of that delicious banana sorbet.

Back here, Laurent had returned to me his comments on our project so after a little bit here and there I could send it off for consideration. We then ended up in a discussion about the audio diary that we are keeping.

In between all of this, I was speaking to someone on the internet. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the hi-fi that’s connected to the computer is in the process of giving up the ghost. 18 or so years, 6 of which were being stored in a damp shed, hasn’t done it any favours.

I’m not going to waste my money on any cheap stuff, seeing as how much time I spend here and the kind of work that I do, so I’ve been talking to a specialist place in Germany about what I need to have some really decent desktop quality.

Eventually I was able to turn my attention to my own radio projects, but not as much as I could because I ended up … errr … relaxing for a while. And a proper, deep relax it was too and that was quite depressing.

As a result I ended up not even finishing one, never mind both of them. So although it’s against my principles, I’ll have to work tomorrow – my day off.

After the session on the guitar, I made myself some tea. Saturday night so it’s usually a meal out of a tin, but the way things are, I’m not doing anything with my tins right now.

But I have plenty of vegan burgers which are quick to cook and anyway, I believe that some vegan burger mix is heading my way in the post sometime. So pasta, veg and tomato sauce with a vegan burger it was too.

The last of the apple pie and the last of the Alpro soya ice cream. Tomorrow, it’s the day that I cook a dessert and I haven’t had rice pudding for a good while, so I reckon that we’ll have a rice pudding for the next few days.

That was the cue for me to go off for my evening walk.

It was still light out there, but the sun was quite low in the sky. I ended up with this beautiful image across the day of the sun shining directly into the windows of this building on the hilltop across the bay at the back of town.

It would have been a beautiful sunset tonight, but we had a good one last night and I don’t want to clutter things up with too much of the same photograph.

It’s hard enough as it is for me to find things of interest in the time that I’m allowed out. I mean – we haven’t had a “pathetic parking” photo for weeks.

But returning to the sunset, there were all kinds of people out there enjoying it. Almost every secluded nook and cranny had a couple of people in it, keeping out of the way of their neighbours and, I imagine, out of the way of any surveillance.

What a state in which we are living. We are told that it is for our own good, which is probably correct right now, but it’s also correct to say that it’s usually been a war or a violent revolution that has been required to take back control from a fascist once he’s laid his hands on it.

The easiest way to control a population is to frighten it. It was a principle of the Nazis expounded by Goering. At the moment, the people don’t need any more frightening in order to let themselves be controlled, but it’s going to be interesting to see what steps the Governments will be taking in the future to control the population in this measure.

How many more virus scares will we have once this one is out of the way?

Talking of scaring people, anyone who had the wind put up them by the Hitchcock film THE BIRDS won’t have enjoyed what’s been happening in the old walled town just now.

Whatever is going on I really don’t know, but the seagulls are becoming a lot less nervous of people and are clamouring around so much more. In fact there was quite a flock of them this evening circling around above the old town this evening.

Whoever was out there walking this evening, I hope that he was wearing a hat. These gulls have an accuracy that would put Bomber Command to shame

And keeping up with the routine, I managed all four runs tonight and, much to my surpise, they weren’t difficult. In fact, I overran the first by about 30 metres and had it not been uphill I could have carried on..

And I’m glad that I’m doing it because of that 800 grammes that I had gained, I’d lost 400 since Thursday.

And that reminds me of the time That Nerina told me that during a certain two-week period she had lost 2kgs.
“Keep it up, darling” I urged. “At this rate, by Christmas you’ll be gone completely”.

On that point, I’ll clear off. It’s Sunday and I can have a lie-in. But I’ll have to work, I suppose. These things don’t get done themselves, do they?

Saturday 28th March 2020 – WHAT A WASTE …

… of a day this has been.

For some reason or other, I just haven’t been able to get going at all and I don’t know why. Possibly with all of this doom and despondency, I dunno, but I feel rather like the Lady of Shalott (although where I’m going to find the Lady of Shalott at this time of night is anyone’s guess) and “the curse has come upon me”. And if I can’t find the means to snap out of it sometime soon, the curse really will be here and it will be more than the mirror that will crack from side to side.

The day started so well too.

As luck would have it, I did have my early night last night and, even more luckily, I was up before the third alarm too. Well before it in fact.

And that is something of a surprise because when I looked at the dictaphone after my medication and saw the distance that I had travelled during the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time.

Talking about a blast from the past I was studying history last night and in the same class as me was a girl who I haven’t seen for almost 50 years and about whom I haven’t given a passing thought even when I knew her. So what she’s doing coming with me on a nocturnal ramble I really don’t know at all. That’s the kind of thing that can only happen in circumstances like this. But I digress. She was struggling with her lessons so I was going to make a suggestion that the two of us study together and that was I could get to know her rather better (and why I would really want to do that I don’t have any idea either). But something had happened and she had upset a couple of people, a couple of young black guys and they called her out. Feeling that this could turn rather nasty, I followed. I didn’t want her to be in any kind of danger. As for how all of this worked out, I really don’t know because it reached a point where it was so stressful and distressing that I actually forced myself to wake up (I did too, and that’s probably what is the most astonishing thing about the whole affair) rather than sit and witness it. It was so disturbing and I really didn’t know why.
And a bit later on it involved something similar with Steven Stills of all people making an appearance but I awoke again before that too got out of hand
I was with a former friend of mine last night and someone else, and this other person – we were in an old mini. We’d gone into Stoke on Trent and my friend had gone to fetch an Indian meal. We were waiting, we other two, in the mini. The guy with me said “I have to go to the loo – the bathroom” so we set off. My friend was still in the takeaway so I made a gesture to him “5 minutes”. We drove and first of all we came to a petrol station but we couldn’t find anywhere in there. Then there was the abandoned railway station. But that was locked up and we couldn’t even work out which was the station building where the toilet might be. Then I found a hedge that looked suitable that he could go behind but it turned out that there was a housing estate behind it. We were now on somewhere like Chell Heath and all the ground had been disturbed. These were called “arths”, where the frozen ground beneath had melted and bubbled up and pushed up the soil. We were talking about these and all the time this guy was being extremely flippant about all kinds of things and wasn’t taking the slightest bit of notice about wanting to go to the bathroom again even though that’s why we had pulled away and why we had left my friend in this restaurant and that was about an hour ago now and I wasn’t very pleased about that.
Somewhat later again I was at a Crewe Alex football match watching the game. I saw both goalkeepers make some pretty good saves. Strangely enough it was Garratt in goal for Crewe and the stadium was as it was before it was modernised back in the 90s. Someone was talking about this fitness coach – they’d signed a fitness coach from Melbourne and asking if it was a good idea. I made some comment about his age. Crewe had this player playing, n°25 or 26, I dunno. His name was Ralston. I didn’t recognise him at all so I was keen to know how come he had ended up at the club because he wasn’t one of the players whom I would normally see there.
Later yet again, I was with a couple of girls and we were planning on moving somewhere so we were packing. Something about an object that they had – I’m not quite sure what they had to do with this object but it involved that the only way that they could do this was to unpack it from their bag and put it in a separate bag ready to take with them. And that was when the alarm went off, at that moment.

That was some night, that’s for sure.

After breakfast I made a start on hunting down digital sound files. And after I’d done one, I broke off for a shower, a change of clothes and a clean-up.

At LeClerc there weren’t too many cars on the car park but there was a queue around the side of the building. They were just letting 50 people in to start with, then then one in as one came out.

It took me 10 minutes to get in and I wasn’t there for long. There were a few things missing – out of stock – but nothing of any great importance. Just a few different varieties of tinned stuff. Nothing at all like the UK where they say that it looks as if a flock of locusts have descended on the place.

The only thing that inconvenienced me was the lack of pizza rolls – good job I always have one at home. There were none of the cheap pastry rolls either but the next one up is vegan too. And they had some beautiful-looking blackcurrant jam which, I reckon, will make a beautiful blackcurrant pie like my jam pie last week, so I bought a jar.

This week I spent a little more than I usually do and while I haven’t been panic-buying at all, I’ve been making sure that I’m one week ahead of where I normally would be.

Back here I finished off the digital files – another 4 albums have bitten the dust today, and then I edited that sound file for the Grande Marée that I had missed. What was 03:42 of rambling conversation is now 02:40 of hard-hitting action.

After lunch I carried out another task that I’d been putting off – redesigning one of the home pages for one of my browsers. I don’t use “favourites” at all on web browsers – I wrote several web pages with all of my favourite sites on one or more them as clickable links and use each one as a home page for each browser that I use, depending upon the purpose for which I use the browser. One web page was well out-of-date and needed revising.

But it was round about here that I ran aground and ended up doing nothing at all for the rest of the day and that’s a disappointment and no mistake, with so much that needs to be done.

Nevertheless I found some energy to play the guitar for an hour and to make tea. Pasta and veg in tomato sauce with a burger, followed by the last of the jam pie with vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce. I’m sorry to see the last of that pie because it was delicious.

The evening walk was a shambles tonight.

There’s nowhere for me to go really and the high winds disrupted my running. At one point a huge gust of wind stopped me dead in my tracks. When I stopped to catch my breath I was by the Richard Anacréon Museum of Modern Art so I took a photo of it.

And then I came home to sit and vegetate again and do nothing except to listen to some excellent music.

But I really do need to snap out of this lethargy soon and push on. I don’t have the time to waste doing nothing and I wish that I knew what the answer was.

What I’ll have to do is to write off today as a failure and start again tomorrow.

Friday 20th March 2020 – I MADE IT …

… out and about this morning.

And I’m not the only one out and about either. Sneaking into the harbour unawares under cover of darkness presumably has come Granville, the more modern ferry that runs the route between here and the Channel Islands.

She was in Cherbourg the last time that I heard anything about her and I imagined that she would be staying there while all of this commotion was going on.

As for me, there wasn’t any commotion at all during the night. I had a shower and then went to bed somewhat earlier than just recently. And there I stayed until the alarms went off.

And for a change, i even beat the third alarm to my feet. That’s rather a rare occurrence these days.

After what remained of the medication, I looked at the dictaphone. I don’t remember very much about last night except that there were a lot of us. We’d decided individually of course that we’d go for a walk on our own but we all ended up at the same time on the beach. We were having to walk up and down the beach on our own but with big crowds of people.

Breakfast was next and then I had a look at some audio file-splitting. One file was very long and complicated and at first I had no idea how to do it conveniently. However, after a little pause for thought, the light went on and I started from the end and worked forwards instead of the other way round.

And it worked a treat too.

By now it was time for me to go into town to see the doctor.

Not one for this confinement lark, I went the long way round into town, past the lighthouse and the coastguard station on te Pointe du Roc.

And you can see the kind of weather that we were having too. It’s been nice and sunny for the last couple of days but today the weather has broken and we’re in a deep pervading mist that is really uncomfortable.

But the work must go on for some people. We can’t all be under detention à domicile otherwise we’d starve to death.

The fishermen are out working, even in the fog. And you will notice that in the vicinity of his boat there are a couple of what look like floats or buoys.

It’s been a mystery to me what these floats and buoys are for because I’ve never seen how they mysteriously turn up in the water. I suppose that this will be the nearest that I’ll ever become to finding out.

Carrying on around the headland I end up on the path that passes close to the chantier navale

There were a few people around there with face masks but I reckon that’s more to do with the dust that’s being created from the overhauling of Charles Marie. It’ll take more than fear of a virus to keep them from working on that boat, although I imagine that they will be forgetting all about the summer season.

But the fishing boat that was alongside her seems to have gone back into the water, presumably with her repair work finished.

With the tide being out, the harbour gates were closed and I could walk across the path on top to the other side.

But going past the fish processing plant, I noticed these objects here. Something rather more than buoys, they look like channel markers to me

And that’s going to be rather interesting because I wonder what channel they will be marking. But being here by the fish processing plant rather than on the other side of the harbour by the port office would seem to suggest that they are of more importance to the fishermen.

At the doctor’s, he had a couple of students with him. I forgot myself and he was horrified when I went to shake his hand. The two young students were wearing face masks, as was he, but I noticed that one of them had her mask only over her mouth and not over her nose.

That’s something that I’ve noticed with a few people. And I would have thought that covering the nose was just as important as covering the mouth, to be frank.

So what did the doctor say when I told him my miserable tale of woe?

He can prescribe most of my pills and potions. There’s one that he can’t prescribe but that’s not important
He can prescribe a four-weekly blood test – to be taken at home. And he’ll oversee the results.
If my blood level drops below the critical limit (8.0) he can arrange for me to have a transfusion.
He CAN’T prescribe any of the transfusions that I have. For a start, they aren’t registered or authorised in France.
If I catch an infection – of any kind – I’m well and truly on my own and there’s not a thing that he or anyone else can do about it.

I do have to admit that I would rather have been taken into care in Belgium where at least there would have been access to someone or something that might have been of some help, but there’s no point in worrying about that now.

The thing that surprises me more than anything about all of this is that whenever I want to miss a hospital appointment they give me all kinds of dire warnings about what might happen to me. But they don’t have a problem with cancelling them for four months (it’ll be six months at least by the time that this is all over) when it suits them.

The chemist came up with everything and even made a suggestion about the missing medication. They were all wearing masks and gloves in there, but they didn’t have any to sell to the public as one very disgruntled person in the queue in front of me found out.

Back here I made myself a coffee and then did another pile of file splitting. And I’ve hit a problem with this. One or two of the files are in *.mkv format and there’s something in the recent upgrade to Windows that automatically opens the files onto “standby” so, of course, you can’t delete them. And the more you have in your working directory, the slower the whole “Windows Explorer” procedure goes until the computer hangs up.

Judging by the panic in various chat rooms and forums right now, there are quite a few people affected by this. Here’s hoping that there will be an upgrade sometime soon.

There was a pause for lunch in the middle of all this. The second baguette from Belgium is rather harder than it might be but 20 seconds in the microwave sorted that out.

Later on, when the file-splitting was finished for the day, I started again with the photos for July and my trip to Iceland. I dealt with quite a few but I’m still no further forward because there were such a lot from my walk around Reykjavik.

What didn’t help was that I had a really good … errr … pause during the middle of it all.

This evening I knocked off early – at 18:00 – and had half an hour on the 6-string and then half an hour on the bass. I need to progress with this as much as I can, although my trip to Germany will presumably not be happening this year.

For tea tonight, I came across a bag of vegetable and mushroom curry from October 2018. There was slightly more than one portion in there so I lengthened it with fried potato, spinach, peanuts and brussels sprouts and there’s now enough for two nights. I’ll have the second portion tomorrow.

There’s the last of the rice pudding to use tomorrow too, so it looks as if Sunday is going to be a baking day. I bought a new 16cm pie dish in Belgium so I’ll give that a try-out, I reckon.

No stopping my evening walk either. Round the walls as usual and I managed my two runs – the first into the teeth of a gale and that was difficult, but as for the second I could have even made it up the second ramp had someone wit his dog not come round the corner just at the wrong time.

So now I’m having an early night tonight. Shopping tomorrow and that will be exciting as I’m expecting the hordes to be out and the shops stripped bare of food supplies.

My usual choices of meals – lentils, kidney beans, chick peas etc – are not usually the type that most people go for so I’m luckier than most in this respect but it will be difficult, I imagine, finding fresh fruit and veg . But we shall see what we shall see.

So now I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.

Saturday 14th March 2020 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day this has been for me. Easily one of the worst that I have ever had in recent times.

It started so well too.

Once more I managed (just about) to beat the third alarm call and that’s always good news.

After the medication (more of my delicious orange and ginger syrup) I had a look at the dictaphone to see where i’d been during the night. And hadn’t I gone some distance?

We were in a wagon train or something like that heading to the far west of the USA or somewhere. At a certain moment we came across some kind of supermarket or café, place like that, or shop that was empty. We were having a good look round and there were all kinds of things, cauliflower seeds, that kind of thing, packets all over the floor and ripped open. But there was a lot of food left on the shelves so we started to have a look through the food on the shelves and in the cold store and fridge to see what we could take with us. Someone talked about “yes, we could go to the pub and have chips and a pint there”. I said “oh no. I haven’t been to the pub 5 times in the last 10 years I reckon. I’m going to see what I can make out of all of this”. I was busy wandering around trying to see what there was there in this shop place that I could take with me. My brother and one of my sisters were there too but I’m nor sure what was going on with them. But it was round about there that I woke up. There was beer and all kinds of things in this place.
Having gone back to sleep, a little later I found myself back in the same dream again. The sister was there and she had her handbag but it had holes in it, as if it had a pattern punched through the leather. Of course it might look pretty but I thought “what use is that in a rainstorm?”. I was making a pizza and I had my brother there and I was showing him how to make it. I had to make some room on the worktop in order to have room to make a pizza, just like in my house. You have to unwrap the pastry and tease it out with your fingers to the correct shape, all that kind of thing before you can use it and how carefully you have to put it in the pizza tray.
And so later again, this dream continued. There were four of us by now – me, someone else, a young girl who might have been Percy Penguin and my brother. We were arrested for something or other and marched off. I had my guitar and a pile of other stuff as well. Percy Penguin picked up my guitar and my stuff and walked off with it. We were all ushered away somewhere and for some unknown reason I came back – there might only have been three of us and the fourth person had been taken away previously. She came back and saw me and was trying to find out what was happening. I was trying my best to explain it to her without giving away too much of the game. These people came back to start the interrogation of me. They hadn’t really got very far because I wasn’t sure what they wanted and I don’t think that they were sure what they were wanting. It came to tidying up the room, like in a hotel where you tidy away the breakfast. You cover everything up, put labels on it, stuff goes of the fridge into the main room down to the fridge at the back which is better. One of the guys said something like “can you deal with all of this and all of that” which meant throwing away the orange peel and orange pith and so on. There were some maraschino cherries lying around. I asked “what do you want to do with those?”. One of the guards said “you don’t need to do anything with those because there’s someone whom we took down earlier who’s dealing with all of those”. he meant Percy Penguin who was sitting there eating a lot of them. Anyway I awoke again at that point.
There was also something about Percy Penguin doing a modelling job. We finally caught up with her but I can’t remember what happened then but I had a really bad attack of cramp, awoke yet again and that was my lot.

There was even more to it than this but as you are probably eating your tea right now I’ll spare you all the gory details.

After breakfast I made a start on splitting a couple of digital tracks. The first two were straightforward and it wasn’t long before I was having my shower and preparing for the road.

The streets were empty today, except for by the drive-in collection point for LeClerc. The queue was right down the street as people chose to suffocate themselves in motor vehicle pollution rather than to risk the shops.

As a result, NOZ was empty. There were just three customers in there and that’s nothing for a Saturday morning. I bought a small baking tray, some small pie moulds a few other bits and pieces of no great importance, some more of that cranberry-and-rosemary alcohol-free beer and another pot of that Alpro salted caramel vegan ice-cream that is now back in stock.

They had some of the expensive soya burgers too with a short sell-by date at about two-thirds price so I bought a couple of packets. I can always use those.

Although there were fewer cars on the car park at LeClerc, the place wasn’t noticeably more quiet. Still the usual crowds.

My shopping there today came to very little because I don’t need much. In fact, a large proportion of the bill went on a large pot of thyme. I’ve been wondering for ages what has been the missing ingredient in my cooking and it clicked with me the other day.

For some reason, when I came back, I couldn’t find the energy to put anything away. It was an effort to put away the ice-cream before it melted.

But I didn’t get to rest for long. Rosemary rang up for a chat and we were on the line chatting until almost lunchtime.

After lunch I attacked another couple of digital sound files and then, a terrible thing happened. I crashed out completely, absolutely and definitively. It was just like a couple of years ago when I was totally devastated.

Eventually I awoke and it took me a good 15 minutes to find my bearings. I felt really dreadful too – worse than I have felt for quite a while.

Nevertheless, you can’t keep a good man down. Nor me either. I staggered out for my afternoon walk.

My route this afternoon took me the long way round the headland and down the old path into town past the Chantier navale where there were hordes of people clambering all over Charles-Marie doing all kinds of things to it.

For my part, the tide was out so I headed down to the harbour and crossed over to the other side via the path on top of the harbour gates.

And here’s a boat that we haven’t seen for a while.

Built in 1914 and considerably overhauled in the 1990s, Lys Noir has been up for sale for quite a considerable time and at an asking price of €120,000, I’m hardly surprised.

But word on the streets is that she now has a new owner, and it looks as if they are having a little celebration aboard the vessel.

So we should be seeing her out and about this summer.

A merry and mazy way through the town eventually brought me to the Parc de Val es Fleurs. There wasn’t an awful lot going on there either.

However, I did find a new footpath that I hadn’t noticed before. This one brought me out round the back of the Ecole Primaire Docteurs Lanos – the Doctors Lanos Primary School, whoever the Doctors Lanos were when they were at home, if they ever were.

So I had a little look around, but there was nothing of any importance going on. Just a father and son playing football and the boy hit the post with three consecutive shots, much to the amusement of his father and Yours Truly.

The footpath is called the Allee des Cygnes – the Avenue of the Swans – and it’s a continuation of the Chemin des Moulins.

Why it’s so called is that apparently there’s a river flowing through here that has now been culverted over. It’s supposed to discharge into the sea somewhere, so I wonder if that’s what we saw the other day that I thought was a drain outlet.

But anyway, the path brought me round the back of the town centre and out by the Casino. And so I decided to come on home. It had been a long walk.

Back here, I tidied up the music. It’s somewhat all over the place and it’s very confusing when I’m trying to arrange some radio programmes. By the looks of things, the last time that I sorted it properly was back in 2006.

But now it’s divided into 5 groups of 55 groups or solo musicians each, and that’s about 750 albums that have been digitalised to date. There are probably that many again that remain to be done.

While I was at it, I updated THE PLAYLIST FOR THE RADIO PROGRAMMES. At least, even if I don’t feel like it, I ought to be doing something or other.

Later on, I sorted through the burgers that I have in stock. There were some that were a couple of months past their sell-by date so I attacked one of those with some pasta and vegetables. I’ll gradually work my way through those as I go along.

For pudding, I had the last slice of that delicious apple pie with some soya coconut dessert stuff that I bought. Tomorrow, it’s pizza of course so with the oven on, I’ll make a rice pudding in that new casserole dish that I bought a couple of weeks ago.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a rice pudding and I do happen to like them

And so for my evening walk, even though I didn’t feel much like it.

The NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens came with me, and I managed a rather iffy shot of the College Malraux with the lighthouse beam hovering over it.

Nothing would stop me attempting my two runs and not only did I manage them, I even pushed on beyond my boundaries, making the top of the first ramp on my second track across the Square Maurice Marland. I can’t be as ill as I was thinking.

So now I intend to have an early night, and sleep until I wake up. I’m off to Leuven, trains and Government legislation permitting, on Wednesday and I really have to pull myself together if I’m to sort all of this out.

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about those piles of gravel that had been appearing over the last couple of days on the quayside down in the harbour.

This blurred and illisible photo (I still have a lot to learn about the NIKON 1 J5) shows a ship that I have every reason to believe is Neptune moored at the loading bay by the conveyors where they ship the gravel on board.

At long last we’ve had a gravel boat in the harbour and I shall go out tomorrow (and try to be early) just to confirm that it is indeed she. It would be just my luck for her to have a rapid turn-round and for me to miss her.

But here’s something else quite interesting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular topic in these pages, particularly in the boulevard Vaufleury which is on a service bus route, is just 50 metres from the High School and is an access road for the fleet of school buses that come in the opposite direction to the service buses.

Where Madame (it is indeed a Madame) is parked is
1) the wrong way round
2) half on the pavement
3) blocking the buses
4) at school chucking-out time
5) just about 20 FEET from a huge free car park
so finally, at long, long last, the local police are doing something about it and they are making her move her vehicle.

That is pretty much encouraging news.

What else is encouraging news is that I was awake before the first alarm went off, and I was out of bed before the final alarm. Crashing out half-way through last night’s entry and so giving up and going to bed was good news in that case.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in this labyrinth of a theatre complex last night all the way through this underground reception hall place with doors going off leading into theatre auditoriums and all kinds of things. There were all kinds of announcements about the place, many of them were out of date, 2011 I noticed. There were all kinds of things happening here. But I was just wandering through listening to the radio. They were talking about “hypocrites of the year” I suppose – some guy who was telling us all about how keen he was for this and how good he was going to be for that but while he was doing that he had increased all your library charges. Someone else was going on about how brilliant a cricketer he might have been, all this kind of thing, but he made one fatal mistake and that was heroin. I was drifting through this auditorium that had a couple of very faded leather chairs and the leather was worn out in certain places. Something to do with catching a London Underground train somewhere. There was a thing too about caring for your vans if you were on a limited income, like a hippy, and a warning that the supply of LDV vans even in scrapyards was drying up now – the van that was chosen for an example was a silver LDV M-reg.
A little later I was outside with someone who was supposed to be Liz’s husband but he was more like the father of a couple of friends of mine. He had Liz’s daughter with him. She’d been on a student exchange and she had a student back with them. He was saying “you’ll have to come round for a game of pinocle or something one of these days. We’ll have an evening of five people”. He indicated roughly a place in eastern Manchester, Hyde or that area Stalybridge where he was living but he didn’t go into any further details about that. I was wondering who this “five” was because I knew that he was on his own, the daughter had her friend and there was me, so who was the 5th? I couldn’t think.

After breakfast I had a look at the digital sound files. I managed to unsort three of them too. One of them however needs much more attention because for some unknown reason there’s a load of “additional music” which seems to be a mixture of selections of various tracks, so I’d like to know what was going on there.

It isn’t the first one like that that I had found either.

By now it was time to go for my shower and to clean myself up somewhat, and then head up into town.

Not that I actually got very far before I was interrupted.

Remember yesterday when I photographed all of the pontoon-supporting pillars on the quayside and I mused that they might be assembling them in two rows of four?

Here’s the big floating pontoon travelling across the harbour with one of the pillars within its clutches almost at the place where one would expect to see it if we were going to have a fourth pillar in that row.

And the scaffolding too. We talked about that as well.

My attention was drawn from a distance that the masts of Marité were not where they would usually be. And that was strange because she doesn’t usually roam around the harbour but stays put in her habitual little corner.

But she’s definitely moved, and the reason for that is that they’ve put the scaffolding, complete with OSB wallboards, in her usual berth and there are a couple of guys down there doing something.

So at least I know that the scaffolding is actually a working platform for some kind of task.

From here I headed down into the town centre and up the rue Couraye towards LIDL.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago we watched them fit some kind of protective shuttering around the front of the boulangerie here and start to smash out the old window.

The protective shuttering has now gone and, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the new shop front is in glorious display. That’s quite a nice job that they’ve done there. It looks quite good.

Now for the first time ever in my whole life, I’ve seen every till open at the same time in a LIDL. And that will give you some kind of indication of just how busy it was in there today.

No cucumbers, which is a problem, and nothing else of any real interest as far as I was concerned. All in all, a little disappointing. 3-kilo bags of apples was about the closest that I was to a bargain. And they won’t last long now that I’m making my purées myself.

On the way back I headed to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but i was held up outside the shop as Birnam Wood went past on its way to Dunsinane.

There was actually a tractor and trailer parked around the corner with several large plants stacked thereupon, and presumably this machine was busy distributing them around the town.

It’s certainly a different approach to beautifying the town. I’ve said often enough … “indeed” – ed … that there isn’t enough greenery in this town and we ought to have some more.

Having picked up my dejeunette I headed back home again.

Only half-way up the rue des Juifs before I was distracted yet again. Not that I would know much about these things but they look pretty much like new pontoon supports and new pontoons over there on the west wall of the harbour.

What with one thing and another, I can see that I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow having a look at all of these things. But at least the harbour gates will be closed again by 09:30 or thereabouts so it doesn’t have to be an “early” early.

And in other news, there’s activity in the chantier navale today too.

It’s been quite busy in there up until very recently, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the boats have been going back into the water one by one until just now we had none whatever left.

But that’s all changed now. There are two boats in there now, one of which is a large yacht that might actually be La Granvillaise. I’ll go for a stroll over there this afternoon to check on that.

Back at my apartment I made myself a coffee and then split up a fourth music file. Pretty straightforward except that there were three extra tracks on it that aren’t on the LP that I have, so I had to track down which version of the master tape I had obtained so that I could identify the tracks.

There was still time before lunch to send off my project for this weekend and to start a new one to add to the stock.

After lunch, I carried on with the radio project but didn’t get too far before I was overwhelmed with a wave of fatigue. I didn’t quite crash out but for about 15-20 minutes I was teetering on the edge and didn’t actually do any work or anything while I was sitting there

By now it was raining outside when I went for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was due to come into port, that I knew, so when I saw an object the same colour as Neptune far out to sea in the English Channel I took a photo with the intention of enlarging it back in the apartment.

Which I did, and it wasn’t Neptue at all but one of the fishing boats heading back to the port. Neptune must still ne well out of range, which wouldn’t be a surprise because there’s a while yet before the harbour gates will open and she won’t want to sit around outside waiting.

She might not want to, but everyone else is.

The tide is well out and the little creek that leads up to the side of the fish-processing plant is only just starting to fill with water. It’ll be another half an hour or so before she’ll be deep enough to accept the fishing boats but they are all starting to congregate just outside.

There were at least 10 of them out there – maybe more but I had run out of fingers by this point and I wasn’t going to start taking off my shoes and socks. Mind you, had I had my hands in my pockets, I might have been able to count up to 11.

While I was walking round across the lawn by the War memorial, I noticed this.

We haven’t had an earthquake or a landslide or anything. That house is actually built like that. It’s what they call a trompe l’oeil – “something that cheats the eye” and it’s the window thats aligned strangely to follow the contours of the roofs rather than being in the hotizontal/vertical plane.

What’s bewildering me right now though is why I never noticed that before. It’s not like me to miss out on something this.

Anyway, enough of this. I continued on my way around the headland to go to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And I was right here too. It’s my lucky day, isn’t it? The “G90” painted on the side of the yacht tells us that it is indeed La Granvillaise down there on blocks.

Crowds of people milling round her too so there’s clearly something important going on with her. At least, I imagine that the people are there for her. It’s unlikely that a fishing boat would receive that much attention unless she had caught the Loch Ness Monster.

Yesterday, you’ll recall that we saw a couple of kayaks out there in the baie de Mont St Michel.

And so when I saw something else quite small out there in that general direction, I reckoned that it might be another one so I took another photograph of it to examine back in the comfort and safety of my apartment.

But it wasn’t a kayak at all but one of the small flat-bottomed boats that they use for transporting the boxes of seafood to the quayside from boats that have for one reason or another not been able to moor at the fish-processing plant.

And earlier this morning we saw the large flaoting pontoon carrying one of the pillars across the harbour.

A short while later the noise of the pile-driver started up and it’s been going on for most of the day. And so I had expected them to have made substantial progress, and I was quite right about that.

It’s been pounded quite well and quite deeply into the bed of the harbour and I imagine that they’ll be connecting up some pontoons to it in early course.

It’s certainly interesting.

And while I was musing on this, I witnessed the “police interaction” that I mentioned earlier.

Back here I did a little more to the radio project but ended up having an hour or so playing with the bass guitar and the 6-string electric/acoustic. It’s been a good while since I had a decent play about and I must work harder on this and make more of an effort.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper with rice, followed by some apple pie and coconut soya stuff. And despite the absence of spices, it was really nice. I’ll have to make a few more like that one of these days.

But I’m really going to have to buy a bigger fridge and a bigger freezer.

For my evening walk I went to see what was going on with the winds.

The tide is well out now but the wind is still causing the waves to smash against the wall down on the Plat Gousset. I bet that they didn’t do much repair work on that wall today.

My two runs weren’t a problem, except that my first run had to be on a different course due to waterlogging. And then I went to have a look at Neptune.

Now i’m back here and ready for bed. I’ll finish (I hope) the radio project tomorrow and then I can deal with another outstanding matter.

However did I find the time to go to work?

Wednesday 5th March 2020 – YOU’RE PROBABLY SITTING …

… there wondering why on earth I’m posting a dreadful photo like this in my journal tonight – and giving it pride of place as well.

The fact is that I’m totally surprised by this too.

This evening I went out with just the NIKON 1 J5 to see what damage I could do with it in the dark.

Adn dark it was too – about one-third moon and you could hardly see anything at all out there. Mind you the howling gale was telling us a story all of its own with the sound of the waves pounding down into the surf.

So, I tried to focus. Nothing whatever enough light for it to find a focal point so I set it to “automatic exposure”, focused on a street light an equivalent distance away, swivelled round in the direction that I wanted to face, and pressed the shutter more in hope than expectation.

And frankly I wasn’t expecting anything at all, so no-one was more surprised than me to produce an image as bright as this one.

The automatic settings were f1.74, ISO6400 at 3 seconds exposure, and it’s produced an image as bright as this. That’s impressive.

Of course, I’m going to need a tripod if ever I do it again, and then I’ll have the issue of focusing on a dummy point and then swivelling the camera around.

But I could use the exposure compensation mechanism to darken the image somewhat and speed up the exposure time. But it isn’t half interesting nevertheless.

While you admire the storm that has been raging all day and the waves that it’s been producing, let me tell you something about my day, because it’s been another disappointment.

Once more, I failed to beat the alarms and it was 06:30 when I finally pulled myself together and left the bed.

After the medication, I had a look on the dictaphone to see where I’d been. As well as the notes from yesterday afternoon, which I’ll add in in early course, there were a couple of files from during the night that needed attention.

There was something going on in the street like a gardening club meeting. A couple of people were turning up and going again. I was there with a young girl who might have been Percy Penguin, I dunno but she didn’t hang around long. I was waiting for something and there was another guy there. A girl came up and she got out of a car and started to kick this medicine ball around. I ended up playing football with her and this medicine ball. She was kicking it up the hill towards me and of course the ball was rolling back down the hill again. I was running after it to kick it back to her but I couldn’t get a kick on it at all because it was rolling back down the hill quicker than I could catch up with it. This went on for a while and then gradually people started to turn up. There was a young girl there who was with another man. apparently she’d been someone’s servant or maid before she’d settled down with this guy. They were handing out these old clothes that had been really tatty but someone had sewn up so they weren’t as tatty as they were before. They were passing these around to whoever they belonged to but I always seemed to be in the way, standing in the wrong place when someone was passing round an item of clothing

After breakfast I had a look at some more digital sound files.

Just for a change they were quite straightforward and, more to the point, quite long. One of them ended up with no fewer than 17 tracks, several of which I had no idea existed.

Such it was that I had to break off near the end and go for my shower..

Once I’d had a good clean-up, I braved the hurricane and went out to do the shopping.

Not that I managed to go very far though before I came to a grinding halt. One of the issues about living in a medieval walled city with really narrow streets is that heavy vehicles like this cement mixer can’t go in.

You have to invent a work-around, or Système D as they say in France, like a little fork-lift truck type of thing and a cement hopper.

And you’ll notice the plastic sheet on the floor to prevent cement or concrete sticking to the road surface.

Yesterday, we noticed the pile of gravel that had appeared in the port near the conveyors.

This morning, the big digger was out there and he seemed to be moving more gravel across from the bins to the centre of the port apron. The pile is certainly growing.

This can surely mean that we are at long last about to have a gravel boat coming in some time in the near future – the first one that I will have seen in 9 months.

Here’s hoping that i’m not going to be disappointed.

But here’s a surprise. The big floating pontoon is in a different position.

Does this mean that they will be installing a new walkway pontoon there as well? That’s going to restrict the movement of the boats like Marité that congregate down there in that corner.

For a change I went to the new Bio shop, La Vie Claire, near the Stade Louis Dior in the avenue des Matignon. Josée had bought me a book on making drinks from a product called Kefir so I went there to see if they had any.

They had both lots, the fruit Kefir for making soft drinks and also a pseudo-dairy Kefir for making yoghurt from vegetable milk like soya milk or almond milk. I bought one of each and I’ll be having a play with them in early course.

At LIDL I didn’t spent all that much, except that I did buy a pair of wellingtons. I don’t have a pair and there have been a couple of occasions when I wished that I had.

Not only that, in a week or so I’ll be scampering about in a pile of rock pools so a pair of wellingtons will come in handy.

On the way back I was interrupted by a noise coming from above.

Someone has had his chopper out again and I was wondering if it is the same red and yellow and one that we see wandering around. But it’s a different one that I haven’t noticed previously.

By the way, if you are wondering about the images, the fact is that Brain of Britain forgot to change the lens over this morning and on the little NIKON 1 J5 there’s still the f1.8 50mm lens that I’ve been using at night. It doesn’t “do” distance of course.

Having picked up my dejeunette at La Mie Caline, I headed for home. But we’d had a moment’s amusement in there. Some young woman in front of me was complaining that her colleagues had left her alone in her office for the day. Boththe guy behind the counter and I said at the same moment that we’d go round and give her a hand, to which she laughed.

Ohh yes, I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why.

Back here, I had a major disappointment to deal with. I have a project in mind, an important one, and I have set my heart on doing it. I’ve already set steps in motion in this respect but the disappointing news is that due to this stupid virus thing going around, it’s been put on hold and may be cancelled.

That will be devastating news for me.

After lunch (some more of that delicious soup) I started off another batch of purée and then made a start on finishing off the notes that I’d begun to write yesterday.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk of course.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned yesterday about the path that they spent a couple of weeks laying and then dug up to replace with a different path. Today I had another closer look at the new patch and you can see that they’ll be having to dig this one up and replacing it very soon.

As you can see, it’s cracking already, due to insufficient foundations, I reckon. I don’t suppose that, given the record of this Council, that they expected it to be down this long before there was a change of plan.

But the winds were thoroughly and totally wicked. I was being blown about all over the place and even had to chase after my hat on one occasion.

The fishing boat out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel was making really heavy weather of trying to get into port and I’m not at all surprised.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve been buffeted about so much in a wind like this. At times it was impossible to advance and I really was being blown backwards as I tried to advance.

And I’m sure that you have been wondering, just as I have been, how the big floating pontoon has been moving across the harbour.

This afternoon I was lucky enough to catch it in motion. And it’s being pushed, so it seems, by that boat with the outboard motor.

It’s certainly one of the strangest sights that I’ve ever seen – and, believe me, I’ve seen quite a few strange sights in my lifetime. There’s not as much friction in water as there is on land, but it still must take a lot of effort to move the pontoon.

Back at the apartment I organised the purée.

8 small apples and four small pears, peeled, cored and diced into small cubes. Put into a large pan with some desiccated coconut and cinnamon, with a very small amount of water and lemon juice. All stirred up and stirred well in.

It had been brought to the boil and left to simmer on a very low heat. All in all it had been on there for an hour or so.

The liquid was drained off and put in a glass jar to drink at breakfast, diluted as necessary. The solids were put into the whizzer and whizzed around until they made a purée.

Two large glass jars were steamed in the microwave (a little water put in them and they were heated for a minute) and the tops boiled in water. The purée was then ladled into them, the lids put on and they were left to cool.

Once they have cooled and created a vacuum they can go in the fridge. I’ll start on the first jar tomorrow and see how it is. But the sampling was delicious.

At long last I could dictate the notes that I’d written – but first I had to fight off a wave of sleep, not very successfully I’m afraid. But at least it’s all dictated and I’ve even started to edit it and clean it up.

For tea tonight there was a pile of mushrooms to be finished off that hadn’t found their way into the soup the other day. And so I cut a potato into squares and cooked it with spiced in the microwave while I organised some onion, garlic and the mushrooms with half a stock cube and more spices in the frying pan.

It ended up all being mixed together and stuck in the microwave on a low heat while I cooked some rice and veg. And wasn’t it all delicious, especially when chased down by apple crumble and soya coconut dessert stuff

Out for my walk tonight, and I’ve already shown you the astonishing photo of the waves.

The wind was wicked and at my favourite running spot it was totally impossible to move. I ended up having to run on another stretch that was well sheltered.

That took me to the cliffs overlooking the Place Marechal Foch and the Plat Gousset where I decided to have a little fun with the settings with the camera.

It wasn’t easy to work out what I was supposed to be doing, but I did notice that I hadn’t set the exposure compensation correctly.

Back here I had to edit out some red and blue colour and darken the image three stops, but even so, they haven’t come out too badly. Of course, now that the tide’s not in, they’ve left the lights on along the promenade. They couldn’t do that when it’s needed, when the tide is in and the waves are crashing down along the prom.

Anyway, I carried on with my walk and managed my second run too.

So now it’s bedtime. I’m having (I hope) an uninterrupted day tomorrow – except that the blasted bank has phoned me and I have to go to pick up my document after lunch

One thing that I want to do is to finish off this radio project. I should have done it by Wednesday night but I’m just falling behind.

I must organise myself better.

Monday 2nd March 2020 – CATASTROPHE AFTER CATASTROPHE!

I am having a desperately bad day today.

Nothing is working, nothing is going to plan and everything that I touch seems to be breaking. I’m now at the stage where I’m too scared to go to the bathroom!

And it all started off so well too! I’d had a good sleep for what it was worth and even managed to beat the alarms out of bed.

A nice breakfast, nothing on the dictaphone to copy out, and a good crack on at the splitting of the digital files.

But that was as good as it got. The rest of the day descended into chaos.

First task was to book my accommodation in Leuven for the period 18th – 23rd March. And, surprisingly, all of the cheap accommodation had been sold out already. I’m having to go up-market into a higher class of accommodation – at an additional price of course.

The rail trip was next. And, surprisingly, there were no trains available at all on that day, or the day before. I used the SNCF chatline and whoever was on there confirmed that the trains were running, and that I should call the helpline.

At that point I went for a shower and then headed off into town.

First stop was the railway station. But I didn’t get as far as i would have liked because I was bewildered by the lack of funfair.

It’s not there now – the ground’s all flat. They’ve folded up their tents like Bedouins and crept off silently into the night by the looks of things. I’m sure that they were here for longer than this in previous years.

At the station, the person at the counter told me that the trains were indeed running and there’s no reason whatever to think otherwise. She told me to book on the ‘phone if the internet still isn’t working.

And if I’m stil unsuccessful, to come back and see her.

Outside in the avenue Marechal Leclerc they were tidying up now that the fete foraine has gone.

The guys with the pressure-washers were out again washing the confetti into the drains for it to be discharged into the sea, which is a pretty thankless task, i suppose. It’s a good job that it’s made of paper.

At LIDL I bought a few things – some button batteries which always come in useful of course, and some new vinegar and olive oil dispensers.

The reason why I bought those was because they looked as if they were spray-on containers but when I unwrapped them at home, I found that they weren’t. And that disappointed me greatly.

But they did have leeks in – a bundle at €0:99 and I was thinking only the other day that I really fancied some leek and potato soup. So I bought a bundle and I’ll make some of that too.

On the way back, I had a look at the building work going on at the impasse de la Corderie.

They don’t seem to be making much progress so it’s difficult to see what it is that they are going. What I’ll have to do next time that I’m over there is to go to have a closer look and see what’s going on.

Had I not been running quite late and had a lot to do, I would have gone over then and there. But I had to press on regardless

Instead, today I went on down into town and La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette.

On the way though, I stopped to see what was going on with the big funfair because if the small one had gone, it was quite likely that the big one would follow it quite quickly.

And I was right about that too because they have broken camp and are in the process of clearing off too. But at least it gives me an opportunity to admire the balcony and French windows of that showman’s caravan just there.

As I’d been walking through the town I’d heard a pile of banging coming from down in the port so I was wondering what was going on there.

By the looks of things, they are installing a second one of those big grey pillars that we’ve been seeing. There’s a piledriver attached to the big crane and it’s that which has been making the noise as it drops down and drives the pillar into the silt.

And this is starting to cause me more than a little concern. Are they going to ba having some of these pontoons going out perpendicularly into the harbour basin?

And if so, how are the big gravel boats going to be able to turn round if the width of the harbour is thus restricted? I don’t like the way that this is shaping up one little bit.

Back here, I telephoned the rail booking point. They confirmed that the trains were running normally, They could book me tickets on the phone, no problem, so I gave them all of the details.

And then we had the “ohh dear!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve no idea. The system will let me take you as far as Lille but no further. And on teh way back, it won’t let me book you from Brussels to Paris”.
“Why not”?
“I’ve no idea. It looks as if the TGV isn’t accepting our bookinss”

Well, that’s a badger and no mistake. But at least it’s solved the problem of my morning walk tomorrow. It looks as if it will be a walk up tp the railway station and see if I can book it from there.

Next stop was to order a new glass for the mirror on Caliburn. And having specified a “right-hand” one, when I had the “confirmation of order” in my mailbox, it quite clearly states “left-hand”.

So what the heck happened there? I had to send them an e-mail and hope that they read it before they post the glass.

Next was a phone call from the people at the radio trying to make me reconsider my decision to withdraw from Group activities. Despite their pleading, I stood firm. Not necessarily because I want to withdraw, but simply that if I change my mind, then that won’t change theirs and things need to change – and change drastically – at their end of we are to progress as a team and do things correctly.

With all of this going on, it was lunchtime by now so I made my butties. And then I started work on the radio project that I have to do.

There was an interruption for my walk, and this was where the calamity of calamities hit me. For some reason or other, the BIG NIKON has stopped working!

It’s refusing to read the memory card that’s in it.

So back here, I tried almost every single memory card in the apartment (and there are more than enough of them around here!) and no luck whatsoever. This really IS a calamity!

With something of a bitter taste in my mouth, I carried on with the radio project and, clearly being unable to think straight, I’ve made something of a dog’s breakfast of it and some of it has to be done again.

Tea was some of the leftovers from yesterday – the lentil curry with rice and veg, followed by apple crumble and some of that Alpro soya dessert stuff.

For my evening walk I fired up the old Nikon D3000 but didn’t get very far with that. As for my runs though, I managed to go quite far with them and imrpved my distances more than somewhat.

It just goes to show what having a good diet can do for you.

And not crashing out today either. That’s good news too.

But in view of my dreadful day today i’m going to have an early night and a good sleep – write off today as a total loss and start again afresh tomorrow.

It’s the least that I can do.

Saturday 29th February 2020 – THERE HAS BEEN …

… a change in my kitchen.

Only a small one but a very significant one at that.

On the floor underneath the shelves are two large plastic storage boxes. One has all of the spare food like packets of spices, packets of rice, all that kind of thing. The other has all of the cookery stuff.

Because of the way that things are arranged, one box has to go at the back and the other one at the front and it’s been the cookery one at the back.

But today I swapped them over. The cookery one is now at the front and easier to access, and the spare food is now in the more difficult position at the back. It’s quite clear that these days I’m using the cooker stuff much more than I’m needing to access the spare food, and that’s Progress with a capital P.

Not much progress this morning though. I couldn’t heave myself out of bed with the alarms and it was more like 06:30 when I finally made it to my feet. That’s disappointing.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And we started off at the football too. Yes, a mid-table 12th finish in the Football League I ended up with last night. I’d swapped my managerial job at Oldham Athletic with a manager from somewhere else whose team had been right down near the bottom and over the remainder of the season I’d slowly managed to drag this other team up and into 12th position. But there was a lot more to it, much more to it but I can’t remember anything now. As soon as I awoke it all completely disappeared from out of my mind. I do remember that involved me having to do something that was a disagreeable task yet I managed to do it. I just can’t remember now what it was.
A little later, it was the Carnival procession all the way out past the rue Couraye, down the rue Paul Poirier and out to the harbour. As things were drying up it was a rival across the musicians so I managed to force my way into the airwaves and I broadcast them instead. It was rather difficult broadcasting the musicians because they were of course more interested in the music than any other surroundings but it was a broadcast that had to be made. But again there was a lot more to it than this but I just can’t remember now.

After breakfast I set about cutting up a couple of digital sound files into their component tasks and, for once, that was fairly straightforward. And doesn’t that make a change?

A shower was next, and then I was ready to hit the streets.

These days, now that I’m walking to LIDL twice a week (although that will change starting from next week), I start my little Saturday shopping adventure at NOZ.

And NOZ is always good for a laugh, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall because the parking here is totally ridiculous. Here I am, 5 minutes before the shop is due to open, just one car on the front car park (where there are eight spaces) and just four cars on the rear car park, where there are as many spaces as you would like to have.

But despite the signs all over the place warning people of the penalties for parking in the street, and the empty car park right in front of the shop, Madame (and it was a madame) in the black car on the extreme left of the image decides to park in the street with two wheels on the pavement.

You wouldn’t believe it unless you were to see it for yourself.

Today was a rather expensive day for shopping. For a start, at NOZ they had a big round pyrex casserole bowl with lid, twice the size of the one that I have.

I have to make my rice puddings in a meat tin and cover them over with aluminium foil so I’ve been on the look-out for one of these large casserole dishes for some time.

And then there were loads of other things, including the last container of that delicious Alpro vegan nut ice-cream that I bought, as well as some coconut milk.

At LeClerc, there was €50:00 spent on diesel for Caliburn and then another hefty load in the shop. But a good of that went on coffee. There’s a brand of ground coffee that I like that is sold in three-packs for €8:95 and so I usually buy something cheaper, but today they had on offer some 6-packs for just e11:95. That’s much more like my price.

They also had some big 3-kg bags of juice oranges on special offer. As my orange and ginger syrup worked quite well, I’ll make some more of that and so the juice oranges will come in handy.

Some cooking apples and a pile of pastry rolls too. An apple pie is on the agenda, and there’s also some tofu left over so I recon I ought to have a go at a bean-and-tofu pie. Monday sounds like a good baking day to me because I’m out tomorrow.

Back at the apartment I organised myself a coffee while I dealt with a few more digital sound files and did some general tidying up on the computer.

But one track that I worked on today brought back all kinds of memories – nights on board ships in the frozen North, mornings on desolate windswept airports in the High Arctic. I thought that I’d put all of that behind me but clearly I haven’t.

After lunch I set to work. I’m right down on apple purée and I really should have bought some more apples today (I did buy cooking apples but they are for the apple pie). Only four eaters that I could spare so I peeled them, diced them and boiled them up with some cinnamon. When they were starting to go mushy, I drained off the liquid (and drank it – it was delicious), stuck it in the whizzer, added two bananas and whizzed it all up.

It’s made about half a jar so that’s about four days, I reckon, and it’s now in the fridge cooling off. The first batch of banana-flavoured purée didn’t work too well but I have better hopes for this one.

The afternoon’s walk was a really long one seeing that I didn’t have any plans to go anywhere special this evening.

All the way around the headland and down the old path into town. It gave me an opportunity to have a good look at Joly France sitting on her bottom in a NAABSA position at the ferry terminal.

There are two boats called Joly France – the original which is here and a newer one, Joly France I. To tell them apart, the newer one has larger windows and a cut-out at the back, which this one doesn’t have.

Onwards and upwards, across the harbour gates and around the port.

And then across to the funfair – the fete foraine to see what was going on. There weren’t too many people around and there wasn’t all that much going on. But at least the little kiddies were having a really good time.

As for me, I walked down the rue St Sauveur, round the back of the Mairie, across the car park and through the maze of narrow streets to make my way back to my apartment

By now, the weather had eased somewhat and the sun was now out.

The view across town over to the Chateau Gautier and the Pointe Gautier was really pleasant with the town of St Pair sur Mer in the background.

And how I would have liked an apartment in the new block down there to the left. But I’ve never seen one at all available, whether to let or to buy.

And I’m not surprised either.

Back here, I edited another pile of photos from July 2019 s well as, rather unfortunately, crashing out for some time. That wasn’t part of the plan and it was rather dismaying.

With not going anywhere tonight, I had a proper tea. One of the pile of vegan burgers that I bought the other day, in a bap with potatoes and veg. Followed by pineapple chunks with the Alpro vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce.

There is absolutely no doubt, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … that while I might eat simply, I don’t half eat well. My diet is healthy, quite varied and it’s absolutely delicious.

later on I went for my evening walk. And run!

There were quite a few people about and my first running track was flooded out so I had to run on one of my reserve tracks.

The second part of my run was dry but that was something of a struggle – not as easy as it has been – because I was running into the teeth of a gale and that’s no good for me.

But as I was heading back, I was nearly squidged by an emergency ambulance, blue lights flashing, roaring through the narrow streets.

97% on the fitbit now so I extended my walk and even managed part of another one of my running tracks. This time though, it was more exposed to the wind and I had to abandon after only half of the track as I couldn’t catch my breath.

Back here now just finishing my notes with some good music playing in the background. No alarm tomorrow so, for a change, I’m in no rush to go to bed. And a lie-in will do me good.

Thursday 27th February 2020 – AFTER CARNAVAL …

… this last few days the big clean-up begins.

Here in the rue Couraye this morning was one of the several pressure-washers washing the confetti off the walls and the windows down into the grids where it will be eventually discharged into the sea.

Somewhere in the press I read that there had been a total of about 7 tonnes of confetti thrown during the carnaval, and looking at the state of the town on Sunday evening I could well believe it. It was as if we had had snow.

Talking of the Press, I have an apology to make to one of the local newspapers, Ouest-France. When we had our press conference the other week, only two of the three journalists invited actually turned up. I was told, and so I wrote, that it was Ouest-France that was refusing to cover our radio station.

That however is not the case. It’s La Manche-Libre that is boycotting the radio station.

This morning, I had my own clean-up.

The day started a little later than I hoped, due to the difficulty that I had leaving my stinking pit. Only 10 minutes or so but nevertheless …

After the medication, I attacked the dictaphone. I was in with some kind of circus last night. There were all these people dancing around in this kind of blue-ish costume. They were all ages, from quite young to twenty-something. One of them, a young girl, was covered in henna tattoos from head to foot. I can’t remember who I was with – my brother or someone – but we were remarking on all these people and I was reading a circus magazine, a Dutch circus magazine but it was actually written in English and was going on about all of the activities at various circuses and fairgrounds. It was all extremely interesting as I read one, put it down, picked up another, all these dances. Then it turned into a marriage. My brother poked me in the elbow and said “look over there! That is going to be really something”. There was a young girl standing on some kind of table or other surrounded by all these other young girls. This girl was the one being married. There was an older woman there, probably her mother or something, ginger-haired. The look on this mother’s face was priceless because I think she just realised that with the weight of people on this table it was going to collapse any minute and this was what my brother picked up to (assuming that it was him) and all these people would be decanted all over the place.
Later I was back to doing something around the port as well with different people, a kind-of broadcast with what was going on there. What I remember mostly was the guy who claims to be tax-exempt in the Uk but all of the hoops that he had to go through to get that tax-exempt status. Apparently it’s not granted automatically any more. You have to apply for it even though you don’t know how to apply or what to do. And there was something about me being the only one to wear a hat.

Breakfast was next and then I attacked the digital files. One soundfile was scratched but I managed to edit it out but several others were, as expected, hopelessly out of order and it took me an age to sort them out as they should be.

And I’ve no idea who noted the running times in the library files but they bear no resemblance whatever with the actual times that I recorded.

On that note (seeing as we are talking about music) I went and had a shower and a general clean-up. And a hair-cut too because it was actually becoming rather longer than I liked. It’s now nice and short.

In fact, I wasn’t sure that I like my new haircut at first, but I think that it will grow on me.

That was the cue to hit the shops – rather later than I anticipated.

There was a howling gale blowing outside again. Not as bad as some days that we have had recently but bad enough. Poor Thora was making heavy weather of her way into port, and that was no surprise.

At LIDL I didn’t buy anything whatever that was extraordinary. It was still a reasonably-expensive shop though because I’m going to have to make some muesli tomorrow I reckon so I may as well buy in the stuff that I need seeing as I’m there. I do like my home-made muesli.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and, dodging the rain showers, made it back home just in time to answer a call from Rosemary. She’d “hit the wall” and was looking for inspiration.

We had a lengthy chat, like we always do, and that took me up to lunchtime.

After my butties I wrote and then dictated the text for my “live concert” for the month of April. I like to be ahead. That’s now all edited and merged, and when I played it back it sounded really good. One hour exactly, and that’s just what is required.

There were a couple of interruptions to the proceedings too.

Firstly of course, there was my afternoon walk around the headland. Quite a few people out there again seeing as it’s still the school holidays. And down in the chantier navale we seem to have come down to just one boat.

There were two in there last night, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I wonder where the second one went.

Earlier on today, we’d seen Thora fight her way into port on her trip over from the Channel islands.

She had made it safely in, evidently, for here she is tied up at the usual mooring dock by the unloading crane next to Marité

It’s going to be tomorrow before I can get down there to have a chat to them, and I bet that she will have sailed by then. That’s usually the case. I never seem to be able to catch up with the skippers of the two Channel Island freighters.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that just before Carnaval they had a compactor flattening the surface of the car park that they are refurbishing in the rue du Port.

We’ve not been able to give it a close look since then so I took the opportunity to give it a good looking-over today. There’s more machinery on there today and they also seem to have been digging a trench that they are lining with concrete.

So it looks as if they are pressing on with their plans. I hope that they’ll do a good job, and that they’ll plant a good pile of greenery down there. The twon centre is a little desolate with an absence of growing stuff.

But talking of them growing stuff, the new pontoons down in the harbour seem to be springing up like mushrooms.

Yesterday, we saw a lorry delivering some of the pontoon mounting brackets to the far side of the harbour, and today it looks as if they have not only managed to install them in the correct position, but fitted some of the new pontoons in place.

It’s all looking quite impressive, but I’m wondering if they are going to be leaving any room for the commercial traffic. I know that we haven’t had any gravel boats in for months but even so, there still needs to be the facilities for one to arrive if necessary.

Meanwhile, back on the north side of the harbour, work is likewise continuing apace.

The large floating pontoon with the cranes is over here now and they seem to be fitting a couple more of the floating pontoon walkways.

You can see that the fishing boats are already moored up against it, and so I wonder what they are going to do about the little cranes that they use to load and unload all of the fishing gear that they use.

It doesn’t look to me as if the reach is long enough.

Back here I … errr … closed my eyes for a few minutes and then quickly finished off the April live concert. With the time that was left I had a good listen to it while I edited a few more photos from July 2019.

There was some good news, in that I managed to track down a couple of things that had been puzzling me – like the names of islands out in the Atlantic Ocean and the name of a ship (a mis-spelling that I managed to track down) to name but two.

Tea was frozen pie out of the freezer, with potatoes veg and gravy followed by pineapple chunks with raspberry sorbet and chocolate sauce. Totally delicious

It should have been a burger on a bap but what happened there was that I’m very low on hummus and I have to make some more tomorrow. As I have plenty of peppers lying around I decided that I will make two batches – one with olives as usual but the other with roasted peppers. Hence the oven, for roasting purposes

It was a beautiful evening out tonight, even though it was rather windy.

That light out there – I’m not sure where it was but it was a good way out. And you could even see the lights of Jersey yet again.

As for me, I managed my two runs, overrunning both of them with still a little bit left in the tank I’ve put on 200 grammes since I last weighed myself so I need to run it off again.

There are no plans whatever for tomorrow so I’m going to spend the morning after the digital music exercise dealing with my health insurance repayments.

o just watch someone come along and spoil my day.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality