Tag Archives: welsh

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 – I’VE BEEN BACKING …

… up my computer all afternoon – and a major back-up too, seeing as I haven’t done a proper back-up since August.

It’s not as bad as it sounds because I have a travel laptop that comes to Belgium with me, so that’s only at the most, 3.5 weeks behind. And then there’s a 128GB memory stick in a USB port and every night before I go to bed I copy all of the day’s data files onto it.

What I did do at one stage though was that at the end of the month I’d take a mirror of the data drive in this machine (it has 3 hard drives in it) and store it on an external hard drive. But I’ve not done that for a while, so I set about doing it this afternoon.

It’s also given me an opportunity to merge in some of the stuff off some of the more ancient back-up drives that I’ve had lying around here since as far back as 1999. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a year or so ago I went through all of them and uploaded them to one of the drives in this computer and little by little, I’ve been merging them all in.

That’s a job that’s destined to go on for ever too, but a fair-sized proportion was dealt with today.

We had another day of actually being up before the third alarm, and if I had actually put my mind to it, I could have beaten the first one. But with my Welsh lesson looming, I thought it important to at least have some semblance of a repose.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night. A few of us had been out walking last night and we came to a canal. It was the middle of winter and we were walking along the canal. Everything was frozen and it was really cold, and we were taking a few photos but I went just over a bridge and there we had the most glorious effect of the sun in the clouds and everywhere you could see, there was proper pack ice out in the sea. This was really the most incredible winter scene. I had never seen pack-ice like this. I ran back and fetched the others. There was a girl about 5 or 6 so I put her on my shoulders and we ran back. One was a woman from my Welsh course. We reached a place where we could see it but the sun had gone so the scene wasn’t half as gorgeous as it could have been. We climbed up the towpath on this bridge and had a look. We couldn’t see the really good view that I had seen 2 minutes earlier. Walking back, you could see some of it and I took a photo. It was just so disappointing because it had been so beautiful. I was disappointed for this little girl who I was going to show it too as well. The other 2 people with us, my course-mate and another girl, they were saying that the couldn’t see the photos on their camera after they had taken them because that was a function reserved for men, not for women. They had to upload them to their computer in order to see the finished effect. I said “pass your camera to me and I’ll try to do that for you to enable it to be seen by them.

It took me a while to summon up the energy to start my Welsh preparation. Not even a strong, hot coffee could get me to start up and so I was very unprepared for the lesson and it didn’t go all that well. But there’s an exam in June to test us on the work that we will have done by Easter and I’ve enrolled in it all the same.

And the laptop that I fixed over the weekend worked perfectly with a Zoom program for a whole 150 minutes.

This afternoon after lunch I started on the back-up of the computer and that’s absorbed most of my efforts today.

There was a break for my afternoon walk though.

Today has been a really beautiful day today. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The tide was pretty far in and there wasn’t all that much room left on the beach. But there was still enough room for some people to have a picnic and a little play around among the rocks.

With the schools being on half-term this week, there were quite a few kids running around, all told. The car park just outside the apartment was swarming with them this afternoon. It was like playing rugby trying to dodge and weave between them on my way out

The sea was quite rough too this afternoon, as you can see in this photo. There was quite a gale blowing yet again, as if we haven’t had enough wind right now.

With the tide being well in right now there were plenty of trawlers and other fishing boats either in or near to the harbour. I was lucky enough to see this trawler sailing in towards the port. No hordes of seagulls swarming around the hold but I bet that she has quite a good load on board this afternoon.

She’s not a boat that I recognise and I can’t read her name but she has a CH (Cherbourg) registration so she’s a local boat.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a beautiful afternoon, a bright blue sky with not a cloud in the sky.

And there was a nice moon too this afternoon so I took a photograph. I’d much rather photograph the moon in the dark but of course these days we aren’t allowed out after 18:00 and it looks as if that’s a state of play that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future. No matter what they do here, there’s no sign of the Virus abating.

With the sky being as clear as it was today, I wasn’t expecting anything at all of a light show in the Baie de Mont St Michel this afternoon, so I wasn’t disappointed. No ships or any other activity out there eitier so I carried on around the headland.

And there’s a change of occupancy in the chantier navale.

We’ve seen the same four occupants in there for several weeks now but as I walked along the path at the top of the headland I could see a new arrival. Nothing particularly exciting like a large trawler or one of the charter boats that hang aronnd the harbour but a small pleasure yacht having a little work done upon it.

And despite the hive of activity going on around the big yacht yesterday, it’s still there and there doesn’t seem to be much change in its condition. There were a couple of people working on there this afternoon though so you never know.

There’s also another new arrival down there today – in the port.

Normandy Trader has been in once or twice recently but I’ve missed her, but this afternoon I was lucky enough to catch Thora who has come in from the Channel Islands. There’s still plenty of work for the two little freighters even if some of their freight has to be dropped off at St Malo due to the new Customs regulations.

Back here I had a hot coffee and carried on with the back-up and then had my hour on the guitar. I’ve been trying to work out the chords to Al Stewart’s “Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres”, a song that reminds me of a night that I spent not too long ago and about which, one of these days, I actually might write something when I can think of how to express it.

Tea was the rest of last night’s stuffing inserted into taco rolls followed by an apple turnover. And while it was cooking I fed the sourdough and the ginger.

But now I’ve stopped the back-up and I’m off to bed. I’m off to Leuven in the morning and I don’t feel at all like it.
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Thursday 18th February 2021 – THAT WAS A …

… really nice tea tonight. And I’ve no idea why either.

For a start, it was the same stuffing that I’d used on Tuesday in my pepper (well, not the same, but leftovers from the same batch) lengthened with kidney beans and stuffed into tacos to make taco rolls with rice (which I remembered to put in the pan tonight). All followed by apple crumble with (because I’ve run out of coconut dessert) some soya vanilla cream dessert.

What beats me is that it’s the same stuff that I’ve had on a regular basis over the past ever so many years and yet it tasted far better tonight than it ever has done.

What else beats me is the news that I was up yet again before the third (now fourth) alarm. That’s not like me at all these days, as regular readers of this rubbish will realise. What’s even more surprising was that it was a horribly late night – or, more to the point – early morning. I was half-expecting to be still in bed right now.

So after medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’m not sure what was happening here but it was another hot, sweaty dream. There were a few of us on a bus or train and we had to go to the toilet. The conveyance came to a stop so we all had to rush to the public conveniences. We stampeded like mad to go there. It was obvious that some people who were older or more infirm than us and we overtook them. One of our party became a steward and was letting people in in accordance with how they had descended from the coach or even people sitting at these tables. We had to wait our turn. In the end we could enter a cubicle but in the one that I was in you had to use a bottle. I went to use it but a guy knocked on the door asking if he could have his bottle back. I said that I was just about to use it to which he replied “oh no, I need it back”. I said “you find me another bottle and you can have this one back no problem whatsoever”. He produced something tiny like a nail file brush container thing. I said “don’t be silly, a proper-sized bottle”. He replied “I can’t see one”, something like that. “There must be one here – there are all these toilets”. Despite the intervention from a couple of other people who were trying their best to help out, he wouldn’t supply a second bottle and insisted on trying to take his away. I wasn’t having any of this. I couldn’t move because I was sitting on the toilet by now. This became something of a stupid impasse. Each time I looked at him, there was always something more missing off his car. It was becoming a wreck and he wouldn’t be able to go there anyway but he kept on insisting for his bottle back and I kept on insisting that he find me something else to use and he offering me this little nail file brush thing and it was all becoming really stupid.

You can’t say that you aren’t being overwhelmed with excitement by some of this stuff, can you?

Later on, there we were, 3 of us, me, a young girl and a woman and we were dressed in some quite elaborate and decent clothing for the carnival, to be a police officer, constable or police observer, whatever but we had to travel in civilian clothes so you don’t know. Everyone was lined up there taking off their ex-military underwear and swapping it. This is where I joined in and we had exactly the same argument as we had before about the issue of handing over the tokens.
So what I want to know is “what have I missed off here that wasn’t recorded?”. That must have been good too.

Later on, I had a shower and a general clean-up, and I even went one better than David Crosby because while he almost cut his hair, I cut mine. It was starting to become too long for how I like it so I’ve cut it right back with a n°2. That’ll keep it out of mischief for a few weeks.

Grabbing a slice of sourdough fruitcake and a mug of hot chocolate I had my one-on-one with my Welsh teacher. It should have been for 15 minutes but we were finished long before that. I told her about my Teflon brain (nothing sticks to it) but she thinks that I’m doing pretty well. That’s surprising because I’m sure that I can do much better than I am.

Rather later than usual because of my one-on-one, I headed off for the shops.

Down at the end of the road I had a look over the wall to see what was going on down in the harbour.

Not a lot – no freighters in today so it seems. But the yachting school seems to be in full swing. You can see the little boats with their green sails out there in the bay.

And seeing them there reminds me. That’s one of the things that really needs my attention – to go down there and enquire about taking a course in yachting this Spring. It’s not actually the yachting that interests me but the whole seamanship thing. I know about port and starboard and fore and aft but that’s about it.

However I’m not the worst at this. I know that one of my female friends was most upset when a sailor shouted “avast behind” as she walked past him on the deck.

It had been raining earlier but it had dried up a little so it was quite pleasant walking around the back of the town on the way to the railway station.

When you’ve paid for your tickets on-line you are given a security code and with the code and the bank card that you used to buy your tickets, you obtain your tickets from the machine at the station. But sometimes it’s out of order and the booking office doesn’t open until 09:30 whereas the train leaves at 08:55.

For that reason I always like to go for my tickets a couple of days earlier as I pass on the way to the shops when the ticket office is open. If the machine is out of order the booking office can print them out.

LIDL was expensive today. I spent a lot of money there. But then again I’d forgotten to buy a lot of things at the weekend so I suppose it was about right, I reckon.

On the way back home I went to look at the old cafe on the corner of the Rue St Paul and the Rue Victor Hugo to see how they are getting on with the demolition.

And it’s not there now – the ground’s all flat, although I doubt if there is a man with a bowler hat beneath it. What there are though are a couple of large signs fixed to the fence telling us that planning permission has been applied for so that a block of flats might be erected on the spot. But I’d heard all about that a week or two ago.

The town was quite busy this morning as I passed through. It’s school half-term this week so the brats are at liberty running around with stressed-out grandparents in tow.

On up the hill in the Rue des Juifs I staggered with my heavy load. And I reached the park bench on the pavement at a very propitious moment.

Just as I arrived, the red light at the harbour entrance started to flash and as I watched, the gates slowly started to close. I stood and watched them for a while and I was trying to work out the pressure that the hydraulic rams must have to exert to close the gates against the pressure of water that must be upon them. It’s hardly surprising that they have to replace the gates every now and again.

Many of the trawlers are out at sea by the looks of things, but one that isn’t is our old – or maybe I ought to say “new” – friend Le Pearl moored up over there next to the harbour offices.

Where I was sitting was right by the Rampe du Monte à Regret, the path and stairway that leads down to the lower road at the Place Pelley (in case you haven’t guessed it, Granville is honeycombed with alleys, ramps and stairways due to the steepness of the cliffs around here).

This is where they have been doing the pointing of the retaining wall for the last while, so I was intrigued to see just how they were doing. And the answer is, as you can see for yourself, that they’ve made no progress whatever over the last three weeks at least.

However, I have heard an interesting little story about this wall. Apparently one of the local Employment Project things that they have around here is running a course in stone-pointing starting in March and the only place where they can have some real practical experience is just here on this wall. So I wonder if that’s why work has ground to a halt – they are going to be having the apprentices doing it as the practical part of their course.

And with all of the renovation plans that they announced for the walls the other day, I suppose that they’ll need all of the apprentices they can find.

So having recovered my breath I headed on up the hill to the viewpoint overlooking the fish processing plant.

Although the gates to the harbour are closed, there is still plenty of activity down there. Some of the trawlers must have only beaten the gates by a matter of a couple of minutes because as I watched , a couple of them jostled for position at the fish-processing plant so that they could unload their catch.

Back in the apartment it was lunchtime so I grabbed my sandwiches. I found some smoked vegan cheese with a sell-by date of January 2020 when I was cleaning out the fridge so I’ve started on that today until it’s gone.

Rosemary had rung me while I was out so I rang her back. Just a little phone call today – one hour and fifty-two minutes. I don’t know what it is that we find to talk about during all of this time.

That took me all the way up to walkies-time so I went back out to see how things were doing.

There were plenty of people around today too, especially down on the beach by the steps up to the Rue du Nord. Not as many people as the other day when there seemed to be hordes of them, but more than enough to get into a pile of mischief.

Up here on the car park there were dozens of people milling around, including a couple of brats whizzing around on scooters between the parked cars. Mind you, it was quite warm for the time of year. 9°C on the thermometer that I have and isn’t that quite a bit warmer than this time last week?

So having sorted out all of that, I headed off down the path on my way out to see what the rest of the world was up to.

Today was another one of those days where although there was a sea mist, the coast was fairly clear and you could see for miles down that way even if it was hazy out to sea.

The lighthouse at Cap Frehel was quite clearly visible with the naked eye today, long before I reached the headland and that’s always impressive considering that it’s about 70 kilometres away from here. And one of these days, when I’ve finished the photos and the web pages for my summer in Eastern Europe, I’ll do the photos from my boat trip down the coast and you can see the lighthouse for yourselves in glorious technicolour.

But don’t hold your breath. It’s going to be quite a long job.

Even from down where I was standing I could see a big dirty cloud away in the distance so I was keen to go and have a closer look to see what that was doing.

Plenty of people around on the paths and the lawns and even a broken down car with its bonnet up on the car park so it was rather a slalom course that I had to take in order to reach the end of the headland. And I do have to say that I found that cloud quite impressive to watch.

That must be a really impressive downpour going on over there in the bay, and the coastline over there seems to be taking a real pounding. Luckily the wind is in another quarter so we won’t be getting any of that, which is just as well.

The kind of weather that we were having was so much better.

It was quite cloudy and dry, with not too much wind. But we did have another hole in the sky that was letting through a rather large amount of sunshine that was lighting up the bay right in front of me. And the town of Cancale on the other side was brought out quite nicely in relief by the light.

But I can’t stay here all day. I headed on down the path on the other side but there was nothing at all of any interest in the port or in the chantier navale I came home instead for my hot coffee.

Having drunk the coffee I turned my attention to the kefir that had been brewing for the last few days.

There are still some oranges remaining that need using so it was orange kefir today, and here are three bottles of the aforementioned that I prepared today, with the new kefir mix to the side and the ginger beer from the other day to the left.

Those bottles that I bought the other day don’t look very happy though. I hope that they are reliable enough to work under the kind of pressure that my kefir reaches.

As well as all of this I’ve done a few more photos of our trip to the hot springs in Greenland and also some more work tagging and indexing the photos from Oradour. They are all completed and I’m now doing them for the Chateau de Chalus.

It’s disappointing that they aren’t ready because I was hoping too have had them finished today. But friends come first of course. And tomorrow I have bread to bake, a Course to study and probably half a dozen other things that I’ve forgotten too, so I’ve no idea when they will be finished.

Talking of friends, Terry has had the statement setting out what French Old Age Pension he’s likely to receive on the basis of his own contributions. He’s amassed enough credits for a monthly pension of €25:00. I told him that I’ll chip in my monthly Old-Age Pension from my employment in Belgium – all €30:23 per month – and the two of us can go berserk.

Spend, spend, spend, hey?

Tuesday 9th February 2021 – IT’S SNOWING!

When I lived in the Auvergne all those years ago we would have snow, snow, and then more snow, sometimes from October to May, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Since I’ve lived here in Granville by the seaside in the prevailing winds, I reckon that I could count on the fingers of one hand, and probably just one of those fingers too, the number of times that we’ve had a snowfall here.

But today, we are having a snowfall, a proper snowfall too and a snowfall in spades as well.

The funny thing is that the weather service forecast snow at 18:00 this evening. And while I hadn’t noticed what the weather was doing at that moment, when I went to fetch my camera at 19:00 after guitar practice, it was snowing quite heavily.

That’s quite a thing, isn’t it? A weather forecast that’s pretty much accurate. It’s quite an impressive snowfall too, the kind of which we used to have in the Auvergne. It’s just like being back home there.

But in those days we were used to it and we coped accordingly. But just you watch the chaos in the streets here tomorrow as the motorists around here try to come to terms with it.

One thing that I struggled to come to terms with is being wide-awake at 05:40 yet again. And had I put my mind to it, I could even have beaten the first alarm. But as it happened, I contented myself with simply beating the third alarm … “‘simply’ he said” – ed.

During the night I’d been on my travels too. There was some kind of science-fiction thing going on last night – a large dome that was full of all kinds of things including some scrap cars and we had crept in there for a look around. We weren’t sure who it was who was running the place and which planet they were from. The next night I crept in again on my own and while I was there a digger came in with its bucket down to scrape the soil, being pushed by a grader. Averny now and again the bucket would dig in and the grader would pull it back and push it on again. I made sure to keep out of sight while I watched them and eventually they stopped near the cars and then began to cur up a dark red Ford Escort. After a while one of the guys said in a loud voice “we can see you, you know”. so I came out of hiding and went for a chat. They told me about the cars – that they cut up whichever was nearest. I asked them about what they did with they stuff and they told me that they “put it in the SAAR”. At first I thought the region of Germany but it turned out that it was some kind of collectors’ magazine. But these people were being quite friendly and sociable and it didn’t seem right to me. I was wondering when they were going to turn nasty, which was what I was expecting.

Sometime also in this I had a black cat rather like Tuppence but her coat was in much better condition. She had been sitting on the floor by the chair and I was trying to entice her on my knee but she wouldn’t jump up. But as soon as I stopped, she jumped up. Someone was telling me that another girl had picked her up and had stroked her, somethig that surprised me because she wasn’t the kind of animal that would let anyone else touch her except me.

Another thing was that I was in work in the EU as some kind of messenger but I had nothing to do so I was just standing there. I stood there for ages and no-one seemed to notice. There were people coming and going, talking about their plans for the weekend, going to play golf and whatever. So there I was for ages standing by this door waiting for someone to give me some work and no-one was taking any attention whatever of what I was doing.

After breakfast I worked on my Welsh ready for my lesson and I do have to say that I simply wasn’t in the mood for it. It was quite a dismal Welsh lesson in fact and I wasn’t on form at all. But luckily I wasn’t called on to do all that much so it didn’t make all that much difference.

After lunch I had a couple of things to do, one of which was to crash out for about 40 minutes. But afterwards I carried on with the notes about Oradour-sur-Glane.

My afternoon walk was pretty adventurous in this kind of weather because it was absolutely freezing cold.

There were very few people around, except for the guy standing on the old Atlantic Wall concrete machine gun nest over there on the right and the handful of people up there on the path.

It was absolutely taters out there and it’s a long time since I’ve felt quite that cold. In fact, my woolly hat was of not much use at all in this weather. My ears were freezing. I’m going to have to buy a new one the next time I go anywhere near a sports shop becuase it’s not going to be much fun picking my way through the snow to Belgium if I can’t keep my ears warm.

This photo didn’t really do what I was hoping to do but the effect was nevertheless quite interesting.

Just as I started to cross the lawn a trawler out in the Baie de Mont St Michel put in an appearance. And while I was trying to focus the image on the trawler through the branches, I accidentally clicked the shutter.

There was nothing going on out there in the bay across to the Brittany coast and as you might expect, there wasn’t anything at all in the way of sun trying to pierce its way through the clouds so I didn’t hang around there all that long. I headed off along the path down the south side of the headland.

Down at the chantier navale there was yet more excitement.

The covering that was over the side of the yacht has now been removed after yesterday, and to be honest I couldn’t see anything different to how things were previously. So I’ve no idea what that was all about.

By now I was freeezing so I headed off back to my apartment and a nice hot coffee, which I thoroughly deserved. And then I carried on with the Oradour sur Glane stuff until it was time to go a-playing with the guitars.

The half-hour on the bass worked really well and I worked out a lovely bass line to David Bowie’s “Heroes” which I could actually sing as well at the same time. Things are definitely picking up there. But once again, I wasn’t able to concentrate all that much on the acoustic guitar.

Tea was a burger in a bap with potatoes and veg followed by rice pudding. And much as I have written out my notes this evening, I’ve also been watching the snow settle on the car park here.

This is going to be a good morning tomorrow, I hope.

So bedtime now. And I’m wondering if I might make the hat-trick by having three days on the run before the third alarm. About time I did things properly.

Tuesday 2nd February 2020 – HERE’S AN INTERESTING …

… little story for you.

A while ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I rang up the Corona Virus Vaccination Centre to tell them my tale about the problems that I have about joining the queue for the vaccination. They told me, as you might recall, to ‘phone back 2 weeks later.

Admittedly, it’s not quite two weeks since I rang, but nevertheless I rang up today to find out the latest position. And I wonder if you can guess what I was told.

Only naturally, you will be replying “‘phone back 2 weeks later”. And you will be totally wrong. The actual reply was “‘phone back 4 weeks later”.

As you can imagine, I’m not holding out much hope of having my vaccination by this method. Not if I’m going to be pushed back farther and farther away. But I have now had my monthly rental statement for my apartment and that means that I can now apply for registration with the Sécurité Sociale.

That’s tomorrow’s task so that I can post off my application on Thursday morning on my way to the shops. It’s very doubtful that that’s going to be all that quick either but at the moment it seems to be the most likely way forward.

But never mind tomorrow, let us turn our attention to today, or, rather, this morning. You don’t need me to tell you that I missed the third alarm and didn’t leave the bed until about 07:10.

After the medication I worked on my Welsh until it was time to grab my hot chocolate and a slice of cake, and then I went for my lesson. It was quite successful, surprisingly, and at the end we had a little comprehension test of the type that we would have during our exam in the Summer. And to my surprise, I had 100%.

Of course it’s a long way from the exam, and only a small part of it too. But nevertheless it’s still a good sign.

As a result it ended up being quite a late lunch – later than usual in fact for a Tuesday too. And then I had my telephone call to make to enquire about my vaccine.

That took me up to the time to go out for my afternoon walk.

Outside it was quite sunny looking out towards the west but when I glanced behind me I could see a rather large dark cloud that the wind had blown right over the town of Donville les Bains and that was looking quite miserable. I was glad that I wasn’t out in that down there.

Last night quite late on, there had been a heavy rainstorm and the paths were sodden and flooded in places. It wasn’t pleasant picking my way around the puddles.

But it will probably dry out fairly quickly this afternoon with the sun and the wind. But it wasn’t like that this morning. When I awoke there was a thick fog and you couldn’t see a thing. But by about 10:00 the wind must have picked up and blown it all away.

And it was still blowing even now as I walked down the other side of the headland. You can tell by the waves out there in the bay that they are quite churned up.

No change in occupancy in the chantier navale. Still the four boats that we saw yesterday. Maybe Aztec Lady is going to be in there for longer than I reckoned.

With nothing else happening, I headed on home for my mug of hot coffee which I actually managed to drink while it was still warm, for a change just recently.

There’s no fruit bread here of course so I made some sourdough mix with some of the wholemeal bread flour that I’ve bought. A pile of ground brazil nuts, desiccated coconut, raisins and dried fruit went in there as well, along with a banana.

It’s all nicely mixed together now and it’s in the basin under a damp tea towel busily proofing. Tomorrow morning I’ll give it the second kneading and then I can make some real bread because I’ve run out of that.

As well as that, they had leeks on special offer at LeClerc on Saturday so I’m going to make some leek and potato soup for lunch for the next few days. I fancy something different instead of salad sandwiches.

Tea was pasta and vegetables with bulghour all tossed in a nice creamy cheese sauce followed by my jam turnover and the remains of the raspberry sorbet.

Tomorrow I have plenty to do as I mentioned earlier. And that includes transcribing the mass of dictaphone notes that have been building up. But I managed to catch up a little with that and I can now add in the details of the voyages on which I travelled. And it’s hardly a surprise that it took me so long to transcribe them when you sread how many there are and the distance that I travelled.

I have vague memories of being at work in another office last night. I’d just been transferred there and was going through the opened post and I saw that they had been issuing demands for the year 91/92 which I thought was very quick seeing as it was only October 92. I thought that I was nowhere near this far ahead when I was working in my previous place. I was going through the outstanding post and there was a novel there, one of these Victorian hardback book things with a submission in it from the person who had previously done my job “is it true that this is referring to (and he quoted some kind of oblique formula about feeding people?” and the reply was “yes, it’s how things were in those days”. I had a look but I couldn’t see exactly where it was mentioned in the page concerned.
But then I was having my customary dream about building up arrears of work and not being able to face the consequences of it, something that seems to be a recurring dream just recently.

Later on we were at a seaport and a big strange ship was being manoeuvred and I DO mean “big” too, a huge thing. People were scampering about everywhere and there were guys working the rudder so that it would enter and about 3 or 4 others hanging on to it to make it swing round. Our departure was for the following morning early and it was late afternoon early eveningish and I had to help bring our ship, a big tanker, into the port. I was picking a load of things along while the tanker was manoeuvring in and thinking to myself “people are going to start to come back ready to sail out in surely but I have to do this job, go home, have a bit of a sleep, get my things together and come back ready to sail at a ridiculously early part of the morning so I’m going to be busy”. Someone said “we all know what we are going to get and we’ll all be getting different things” so I said to her – it might even have been Liz “I knpw what you are going to get in a minute”. I took my two golf clubs out of the sleeves in which they had been carried and threw them towards her but I missed my aim. The bounced off on deck but with it being so cold they slid on the ice. I carried on pushing whatever it was that I was pushing and said to Liz “we’ll get them on the way back”. Someone else was walking on the deck and she went over to them. I shouted “don’t worry. I know that they are there. I’ll fetch them in a minute” as I was pushing this heavy load off towards the bow of the ship.

Later I was back on this big tanker thinking that anyone could go and take one of these big tankers and sail it as I am doing. All you need to do is to type out a permit and an unsophisticated dock worker wouldn’t know at all that it’s for the wrong person. When you get in, all you have to do is to type out the details onto the sheets, not that that much would be known about it, a Russian doctor anyway (and at this point I fell asleep) it doesn’t take much skill to do that (I continued when I awoke briefly).

Even later on we were finally getting ready to go on our trip. Down by the industrial estate at Crewe I said goodbye for the moment to Alison or I dunno whoever it was whom I was with and headed off back home which was in an office somewhere. I had to go to my desk and start to assemble all of my stuff and prepare to pack. I had a look at my overtrousers. They were huge – about 3 times too big for me and thought that I could really do with getting another pair. On the way back I’d been to pick up some food for supplies. I had a bag of buns but the bag burst and I dropped half of them on the lavatory floor somewhere. I was making a list in my head of the things that I had to do while I was going around including dismantling my chair and taking the seat of it with me to sit on on the cold grass. I was busy packing all my stuff like that and making a list of what I didn’t have but needed. I thought “I hope Jackie – or Alison – has some waterproof trousers and so on”. I was thinking “I hope that the beige Cortina starts as I have to take that down to the industrial estate with my stuff in it and leave it there while i’m away all this time”.

And later on I was back on the ship – yet again – or rather back in the hotel waiting to board the ship. I’d had something to eat. There was a little old man there with whom I’d become quite friendly. It turned out that he hadn’t actually arranged to travel but he was hoping to so I thought “we’ll get him on board somehow”. I collected up all my plates, crockery and cutlery and took it over to the sink, threw it all in the sink and got one of these washing hose arrangement things and with very high pressure I washed all my cutlery, everything. Just then the girl in charge came in and as I turned round I gave her a full blast of washing up water out of the jet wash thing there that she wasn’t very pleased about. She said that the draw was being made tonight on board ship. “What time are we all actually getting under way?”. She replied “not for a bit yet. We’re still waiting for some more people to come and they have all the forms to fill in but the boss is quite adamant that you can’t do anything unless we have your photograph”. I thought “the photograph is the least of my worries at the moment. I can soon arrange that”.

I did manage to find time though to finish off the story of the siege of the Chateau de Chalus and made a little start on the burning of Oradour sur Glane.

That’s going to be another long-drawn-out procedure I reckon. There are over 50 photographs that I took while I was there.

Tuesday 26th January 2021 – HAVING CROWED …

… yesterday about how well I did in getting up at 04:22 before any of the alarms went off, it goes without saying that this morning I slept through all three of the alarm calls and didn’t awaken until about 08:30.

So while you admire a couple of photos of the Diestsestraat in the early evening dark, I went off and had my medication.

First task today after the medication was to prepare for my Welsh class. And I forgot what I was going (or supposed to be doing), did the wrong homework and generally didn’t do very well at all.

With no fruit bread or anything like that, I had to make do with toast and jam. But with no toaster, that was likely to be a challenging proposition but I’m nothing if I’m not inventive, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

In this apartment it has the old-type resistance heater elements on the hob – the ancient type of solid element.

So simply switching on the larger one and putting the bread on top, and turning it over at the appropriate moment I ended up with a very reasonable approximation of toast. And so armed with toast and jam and coffee I could attend my lesson.

Why the lesson was under way I had a ‘phone call from Belgium’s Corona Virus Centre. But when I called them back at half-time, they couldn’t find any information as to why they called me. So I’ve no idea what they was all about.

While you are looking at an image of the Mechelsestraat, I went off for lunch. Yesterday at the Carrefour I’d bought some bread and some stuff to go on it, and of course it was followed by some fruit.

After lunch, I didn’t do very much at all for a couple of hours. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the trip up to here (and the one back again) takes a lot out of me and I need a pause to recover my strength.

But as it started to go dark outside round about 17:00 I went out for my evening walk around the town to see what was going on.

The University Library always looks nice in the dark when it’s all illuminated so of course I would go out that way past the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein – although I do have to admit that I took this photo on the way home when it was even darker than it was on the way out.

Down the Tiensestraat I went, round past the University Library and into the FNAC to see if they had anything going on in the Sales. There were plenty of reductions of course but there was nothing in there that interested me.

While I was out I went into the shops down the Diestsestraat, the photographs which you have already seen, and then down past the Mechelsestraat ditto.

We’d seen the Mathieu de Layensplein the last time I was here, but I’d taken a photo of it from a completely different angle so I reckoned that I’d take a photo from this point of view.

One of the things that I was doing – I had to admit – was to have a look in the windows of the Travel Agents to see if there were any special offers going on – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d found myself AN IMPROMPTU TRIP TO NORTH AFRICA a couple of years ago by doing just that – but they are all closed for the Duration.

Not that I was planning on going anywhere though even if they had been open. I think that this year is going to be cancelled too as far as voyages go. With today’s casualty list figures, anyone with a British passport is going to be treated like a pariah from now on, I reckon.

And on the way back I went through the Grote Markt to have a look at the Stadhuis – the Town Hall.

Although it’s quite beautiful light up like this, it’s not a patch on how it has been in the past when it was lit up with all different colours of lights. But as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … Austerity seems to have been the order of the day with Christmas decorations this year.

Passing through the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein to see the Library, I headed home to warm myself up. It was freezing cold outside.

Tea was a lovely spicy burger in breadcrumbs with pasta and veg followed by peach laves and strawberry soya dessert.

At some point I managed to find the time to listen to the pile of stuff that was on the dictaphone.

I was in my hotel somewhere when all of a sudden someone burst in, like Robert Vaughan of The Man From Uncle. He said come on, so-and-so (and mentioned a Christian name) we need to sort this out” or something like that. I replied “I’m not (so-and-so)”. He looked at me strangely, basically “don’t be silly” so I showed him some photo ID that I had. Then I went to show him my passport but somehow my passport had become damp in my neck thing that I wear and it came out in about 3 or 4 different parts. But he could see it and look at it and he said something like “trust it to be a Canadian” or “trust it to be one of you Canadians”. Then he picked up the telephone as if to dial someone The phone rang and all of a sudden I looked up and he wasn’t there – he’d gone But the receiver was hanging off a hook and there was a conversation going on, but I couldn’t understand all that much of it. Suddenly the door opened again and 3 people walked in. They were having a look around my room as if it had just been decorated. One of them was a woman whom I knew from the trip around the High Arctic in 2018. They were having a look at my room and in particular the huge mural of the desert that was on one wall which actually looked so life-like. She lay down on the bed, looked at me and said “do you know – one night when we were in a hotel somewhere I was in one room and when there was nothing particular going on in that room I went into the other room and do you know what i saw?”. She looked at me as if she was expecting me to answer but I couldn’t think of what it was she was talking about because I didn’t recall that I was doing anything that I shouldn’t have been doing in one of these rooms in this hotel that we were in, but she was looking at me with that look on her face as if she was expecting some kind of admission or some kind of answer

There were two girls aged about 7 and 9. They had been out somewhere so I’d made tea, a kind-of macaroni cheese thing with meatballs. When they came back I gave them their tea and made a bit of a play about it with the younger one. For dessert I went to fetch some of my special cake but found that it was all gone. In the box instead was some chocolate cake belonging to one of the little girls, a different one so I asked her if the two other girls could have some cake. She told me which ones to get but I couldn’t get them out. She asked me to pass her the box which I did and she worked the correct combination but a pile of little figurine things fell out so she said “you can have those and take them” which was OK but it wasn’t the cakes so I was wondering what I was going to do about the cake that I had promised this girl that she could have and where was I going to get that from.

I was living in France in a village where there was a lot of demolition going on. It was a village around which I’d walked years ago but since I’d been there I’d only visited a bit of it and hadn’t visited the rest so I was surprised when I went to visit the rest and so much of it had been knocked down I was doing some work for the Government that involved rounding up a group of people and a couple of others and we all piled into this big 9-seater huge car type of 1950s American saloon, a red one with a cream top. I made sure all of these people got in and then I had to get into the front. There were already 3 people sitting at the front so I told them to squidge up so I could get in. They grumbled but the fourth person in here was nothing to do with me. We set off and I drove back with these prisoners. When we nearly reached our destination I had to get out check round underneath the car and everything like that. I had a piece of emery cloth and was busy rubbing down the sills and so on to see what it was like and chatting to another one of the guys who was doing something. He was telling me about some new Hurricane cars that had been brought out and was apparently blowing everyone off the streets including him in whatever car he had – yes, he had the same one as this but had talen out the old V8 motor and put in a 9-litre BMW engine in it and this Hurricane had blown him off. I got back into the car but by this time I was the only one sitting in the front and I’d made my report that this was a good solid car and runs quietly but would benefit from a really good rub down of the bodywork and a respray

Some time later I was around with a group of people and there was an old woman who had a collection of vehicles that we had been admiring. We all went back to her house and she had this beautiful old 1930s car parked in her kitchen. I was having a good look around at this. It turned out that she was running some kind of private museum. I asked her if she had had this car valued. She replied that it had been valued in May at $30,000. I said “God it’s worth much more than this”. This woman was a teacher and had a class at a local High School. I was talking to one of the girls who studied there. They’d all done some homework, 6 pages, that was being handed out and this girl had only 5 pages back. I asked her about it and she replied that she had only done 5 but “I hadn’t done them anyway. One of the boys had done them for me”. She added “it was a weak class and I had 30%, that’s what I usually get and the class is pretty weak anyway so it doesn’t make much difference”. There were some boys there fooling around and they were in quite a bit of trouble with different things. This woman was having some kind of party and loads of people had been invited. I overheard these to boys talking about this addiction to painkillers was really hurting them and they were going to have to get some more from somewhere. They thought “this woman is a nurse too so we could raid her medicine cabinet”. I waited to try to get this woman on her own but she was too busy showing the scars of her operation to everyone so in the end I managed to get her to one side and said “by the way let me give you a piece of advice. Keep an eye on your medicine cabinet”. She asked “what do you mean?” and said it out loud so everyone turned round and looked. I said it again quietly and everyone in the crowd basically said “oh no, not them!”. She sailed off inside her house and we could hear a lot of noise and she was yelling at these two boys. She had obviously caught them trying to burgle her medicine cabinet. She sent them home from this party and made them write out an essay for homework as to why this was really a bad thing.

But now I’m off for an early night. I can really have a lie-in tomorrow as my appointment isn’t until 13:30. But I might not even be having that if I don’t have a negative report from the Covid test that I took on Monday.

It would be nice if they would hurry up and let me know.

Tuesday 19th January 2021 – IT’S BEEN …

… another bad start to the morning today.

As you might expect, I missed the third alarm again. When it went off I thought to myself “I’ll just have another quick 5 minutes” and then it was 07:51. And so with my Welsh class due to start and a pile of homework to do, it was rather a mad scramble.

In the time that was available I did what I could (which wasn’t all of it) and then I grabbed some hot chocolate and a slice of my sourdough bread, and we began.

Surprisingly, it was a better lesson today and I quite enjoyed it. I even managed to bluff my way through the missing homework which was quite something, I suppose. But I need to be more disciplined. I keep on saying that I learn to be more self-disciplined – unless I become a Tory MP and pay one of these women in Soho to do it for me.

No time to stop for lunch. I needed a good clean-up and that took up my spare time.

Then it was time for me to go for my doctor’s appointment.

But first I have to take a photo of the guys playing boules or petanque or whatever down on the Place Pléville at the foot of the Rampe du Monte Regret. No social distancing, not a facemask in sight, right next door to the Police Station. No wonder the virus is soaring out of control.

Yes, that’s right. We’ve just had a Christmas holiday with tourists arriving from Paris, haven’t we? And cases of Covid in the département have gone up 250%.

Just what is going through the minds of these people? It’s unbelievable.

At the doctors I had one of my two injections. Now that I have no spleen, and hence nothing to vent, I have to have a series of vaccinations every 5 years and the time is up for the renewal.

Just one today, and the next one in two months’ time.

There’s a problem though wit my Covid injection – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it. I’m a foreigner with a foreign comprehensive medical insurance and so I’m not registered with the Social Services here in France. In Belgium it’s the GPs who do the vaccination apparently but as I’m not registered with a Belgian GP I can’t have it done there.

In France it’s the Social Services who do it. Everyone agrees that I’m a priority case but if the Service doesn’t know about me, there’s nothing that anyone can do. So my doctor rang them up today for a chat. They didn’t know either but they’ll call him back (so they say) and then he’ll call me.

But what he’ll call me, I can only imagine.

Next stop was the Police Station to have my certificat de vie from the Belgian Pensions Service signed to prove that I’m still alive. Not that I’m convinced that I am, but there you go.

There are two police stations in Granville – the Municipal Police and the National Police (and also the Gendarmes but that’s another story). Of course, given a choice of two, I went to the wrong one and so had to go back to the other.

On the way home, instead of walking along the top of the cliffs I cut through the Medieval town to see what they were doing in the Rue St Michel.

They are still digging it up and it looks as if they are going to be there for the Duration. But at least you can see all of the strange hieroglyphics and markings on the roadway. I’ve mentioned them a couple of times.

When I arrived home, very late as you might expect, I stopped and finally had my lunch. And the bread that I made the other day really is good too and I’m proud of this loaf.

It was so late that by the time that I’d finished it was time for my afternoon walk.

If it had been windy earlier, it was now even winder and I was being blown around by the storm. The other day we saw a fishing boat out in the English Channel having a bit of a fish. Today, it’s still there – at least, I think that it’s the same one

And she has some friends out there with her today. I can see two others fishing not too far away from her. But it’s rare to see them fishing so close to shore. The fishing ban seems to be having an effect and I’ll be interested to see what happens when Normandy Trader tries to unload the shellfish from the Jersey< Fishermen’s Co-operative.br clear=”both”>

Regular readers of this rubish will recall the huge firt that took place here last year when we were lost in the billowing clouds of smoke.

There always seems to be the odd fire or two of some sort or another taking place, and we have another one today. That’s out behind the Holiday Camp on the way to Breville sur Mer and round about where the airport is.

At least, I think that it’s round by the airport so I hope that there’s nothing serious going on over there. The last thing that we need is an air accident.

Anyway, I pushed on … “he means ‘pushed off’ ” – ed … along the footpath along the cliffs, which was now drying out somewhat in the wind after the heavy rain.

Just a few people around but no-one got in my way this afternoon although a dog took more of an interest in me than I would have liked. But I made it unscathed to the end of the headland to look out across the bay to the Ile des Rimains that was even clearer than it was yesterday.

Unfortunately, the sun is now so high in the sky that it’s not illuminating the water in the bay. And give it a couple of weeks and it won’t even be illuminating the water at all when I go out.

Yesterday, we saw Courrier des Lies – or some of her at least – up on blocks in the chantier navale.

Today though, we can see much more of her because Joker who was obscuring our view, now seems to have cleared off and gone back into the water. It’s not clear what is being done to her. And, of course, the big yacht is still there. I think she’s put down roots and become a permanent fixture.

It’s not for me to put down roots either. I cleared off too only back home, where I made myself a nice hot coffee and sat down for 5 minutes quietly.

And the next thing that I remembered was that it was 18:15. About 90 minutes or so I was crashed out, I reckon. This is becoming really bad.

Although I managed an hour on the guitars, I was in no fit state to move – hence I had a very late tea of just pasta and veg in a cheese sauce, and I’m going to have a very late night tonight.

One of these days I’ll break out of this vicious circle – but I’ve no idea when that will be. But in the meantime while I ponder on that, I’ll just append the dictaphone notes of my voyages during the night, which I didn’t have the time to transcribe earlier

I was staying with friends and in the apartment building where we were living there was all talk of the supernatural and everything like that. Everyone was panicking because the demons were going to visit the earth – the graveyard or something. They were all going to come down to look for the humans and kill them all off. I suggested that a couple of us went out to confront the demons taking crosses and holy water, things like that, on the grounds that cowering in our attics and rooms, they are going to find us anyway. We’ll be locked in and we won’t have any room to manoeuvre whereas if we are outside we have a chance of taking them by surprise, taking the initiative and with plenty of room to manoeuvre it will take them by surprise and we might be able to actually achieve something. In the end I convinced one person to come with me so I thought that I’d go upstairs and find Marianne’s cross and holy water etc so I went, and found that the door to my apartment was open so I burst in and there was a family sitting there eating a meal. I’d heard that there was a family who had had some accommodation difficulties and had some problems about their kitchen but here they were borrowing mine. There were a couple of cats and dogs running around my apartment and I was most unhappy to say the least, as you can imagine. I started to look for Marianne’s cross and holy water but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Then I realised that Marianne’s cross had been buried with her. We began to run out of time and we needed to be getting off. I wasn’t in the least bit ready for this but it was a case of having to go as you were.

This is another voyage where I awoke and it immediately evaporated. We ended up walking through a town and I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I remembered putting it on the seat of the car and putting my coat over it so that no-one can see it and we walked away, so I couldn’t take any photos. We went for a meal – there was one place open – and had something to eat. Then we came out and walked back to the car and reached a place where there were a couple of old American vehicles. Someone had sculpted the bodywork of one so that it was like a kettle. I went to take a photo and had this horrible feeling that I’d left the camera in the place where we’d had lunch. Of course that place would be closed now. I realised now that I hadn’t brought it with me so we nipped back to the car and I fetched my camera and nipped back to the place where this old American car was. By now about 30 kids had all piled into it and in it and around it. The engine started up and it started to set off. I went to take a photo but once again I couldn’t take a photo – the shutter just wouldn’t let me photograph it.

Later on last night I was in one of these great big coffee places. I ordered a coffee and had a bunch of grapes but I had to hunt to find a table or a sofa to sit on. I found myself a table and sofa and sprawled out on there and realised that I didn’t have my coffee yet. In the meantime the place was filling up rapidly and a family with 2 kids came to sit at the table next to me. I stood up to go and fetch the coffee and reached the island in the centre of the place where all of the coffee was. I had to walk around it and did two laps round but couldn’t see where the coffee was. There were all kinds of different things, teas, chocolate and so on, desserts, ice creams and everything but I just couldn’t find the jugs with the coffee in it.

Tuesday 12th January 2021 – IT GOES WITHOUT …

… saying that I failed to beat the third alarm this morning, much to my chagrin.

So while you admire of the waves crashing down and over the sea wall down at the Plat Gousset in the storm that was raging this evening, I can tell you that I was lying in bed trying desperately to summon up the energy to leave the bed. And it was about 08:10 that I finally managed to haul myself out of my stinking pit.

And that’s a far cry from yesterday where, to my own amazement I actually managed to beat the third alarm to my feet. That was rather a flash in the pan, wasn’t it?

According to the dictaphone I’d been on my travels too. I was with a group of people on a train journey. We set out from a place on the Underground and reached the main station but had to change Metros and there wasn’t many minutes between the two trains. Then there was only about 8 minutes between our train arriving and the next one departing. We installed ourselves in the train and it took off. After a while a ticket collector appeared and asked for everyone’s tickets so I gave him mine. He said “no, this isn’t the correct ticket” so I had a look and it was the ticket around France so I had a look through my pile of tickets that I had but couldn’t see one. It suddenly occurred to me that in all of the confusion I hadn’t actually stopped and picked it up. I asked whoever I was with and they couldn’t remember me picking up the ticket either. I was about to explain it to this ticket collector when suddenly he had to dash off somewhere elsse I was wondering what was going to happen now. This drifted on for 5 or 10 minutes then a woman came back and said to me in one of these stage whispers “you are going to complain about the lack of time between the trains, aren’t you? You are going to say that you didn’t have time to do anything in between the arrival of one and the departure of the next, aren’t you?”, explaining to me what I ought to do.

The kefir that I made yesterday – that was rather far too volatile to use this morning with my medication. I ended up having to open a carton of soft drink that I had bought in NOZ a couple of weeks ago. I hope that it settle down by tomorrow.

After the medication I had to sit down and revise my Welsh. I’d been doing quite well with the revision over the Christmas period bu with the cancellation of last week’s lesson I’d somehow lost the thread.

And in fact it was pretty hard going because I’m finding it extremely difficult to concentrate these days, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. And I’m not sure what I can do about that.

As for our Welsh class, it’s grown in size. One of the teachers of our course has left, and her students have been passed on to swell up our group.

What’s interesting about this course from a student point of view is that previously it’s run with about 100 students per year. But a combination of three factors, namely

the current rise in Welsh nationalism
the move of the courses to an on-line Zoom platform
the start of lockdown, working from home and people having more free time with flexible working hours

there was a record total of 1038 students who enrolled for this course back in March. I’m in France and one of my classmates lives in Dubai. Even more interestingly, there’s a Polish girl living in Connah’s Quay who is in our class too.

So grabbing a slice of home-baked sourdough fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate, I signed myself in to my course. It was painfully slow to start with as we all struggled to come up to speed but by the end we were doing OK.

We had a mock test paper at the end and I had 80% in the oral comprehension.

This afternoon I had a couple of ‘phone calls to make. For one of them, I was disappointed as the office wasn’t open this afternoon. I must get through tomorrow as there’s a time limit on this.

The second ‘phone call that I had to make was something of a speculative enquiry. And if it works out, it’ll be something of a rather silly thing to be doing at this stage in my life, but if there’s an opportunity going, I need to find out more about it.

But that was enough about that for the moment. There will be more to say about this I imagine.

It was now time for me to go out for my afternoon walk. Braving the rain I set off to see what was happening. And the answer to that is that if anything was happening out there, I wouldn’t be able to see it in this weather. This is another one of these white stick / guide dog days, even worse than the weather yesterday.

But never mind. I have to make the most if it. It is the middle of January after all.

It’s no surprise to anyone to learn that there were very few people out there taking the air this afternoon.

As I picked my way around the puddles on the churned-up path at the top of the cliff I could hear the distant throbbing of a long-stroke diesel engine out there in the fog. And as I approached the end of the headland one of the trawlers from the port loomed out of the gloom and disappeared around the far side.

It was all extremely eerie, like something out of a horror film with ghost ships and all of that.

From the path I walked across the lawn and then across the car park down to the end of the headland to see what was happening out to sea.

While I was standing there, a couple more trawlers went happily sailing … “dieseling” – ed … past me where I was standing, and it’s a good job that they were close inshore because I would never have seen them had they been any further out.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve stood in this spot and seen some really beautiful sunsets with the sun reflecting off the water but as you can see, in this wind and rain it would be a waste of time waiting to see it today.

Having waited there and watched a few of the trawlers and other fishing boats come back into port I moved away from my viewpoint, walking along the path on top of the cliffs on the other side of the headland.

Previously, I mentioned the rain that was falling down in a very fine mist, there was also a raging gale going on as you might have noticed from the photos of the boats out at sea. You can see it even better in the couple of photos here of the waves breaking over the sea wall.

It’s a good job that there wasn’t anyone walking around on the sea wall in all of this. They would have known all about the storm down there.

Further on along the clifftop there’s the viewpoint over the chantier navale from which we’ve seen dozens of boats in the past.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw Joker, having unloaded her catch at the fish processing plant, perform an interesting nautical danse macabre in the harbour in the vicinity of the portable boat lift, and I speculated that she was indicating that she needed to be hauled out of the water.

And sure enough, there she is up on blocks down there, presumably about to have some kind of work undertaken on her. The other two boats that have been there for a while, the yacht and the trawler, are still there too.

While you admire another photo of the waves crashing over the harbour wall, I came on home for a mug of hot coffee and a warm-up.

Later on, I had my hour on the guitars and I seemed to enjoy it a little more today. On the acoustic guitar I’ve been trying a new way to play the G chord and the Bminor chord and I seem to have managed to improve on that. But I have to keep it up and keep on improving.

For my evening walk tonight I ran off down the road and despite the weather and the rain and the wind I carried out my usual (for these days) course around the walls.

We’ve seen the photos of the storm and then I carried on for home and tea.

Tonight it was stuffed peppers followed by a slice of the delicious jam pie.

Now I’m off to bed, ready for a day on the arrears and hoping to bring at least some of them to a conclusion as quickly as I can.

Friday 1st January 2021 – I’M GLAD …

… that 2020 had finished. That was one difficult year and the first time that I haven’t been to North America for I don’t know how long.

And in case you are wondering, which I’m sure that you aren’t, I’m not convinced that 2021 is going to be much better.

At least we started off on the right foot because despite not going to bed until about 02:00 this morning, I was up and about, with no alarm, at 09:30. A few more days like that will suit me fine but I shan’t be having them.

After the medication I came back here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

My friend from the Saone valley and his friends came to visit me during the night. I was in Virlet – or what passes for Virlet and I was very embarrassed when they saw the kind of state in which I was living. I was trying to interest them in things like the radio telescope in the valley down below. The he asked where all of my CDs were even though they were in plain evidence all over the walls. It was a very strange meeting and wasn’t exactly how I intended it to be or thought that it would be. They stayed for a while and all cleared off again. I shook my head and couldn’t see the point of that and what was going to happen next.
But next I had to leave the house and I was in the van. Part of this area was a building site round by Joey the Swan in Crewe. One of the ways to get up where I was was to reverse back up the hill past these half-built houses and reach the main road that way, or the 2nd thing to do was to cut through one of the driveways and onto the main road through the back of one of the drives. I must have driven and reversed up and down that road 3 or 4 times trying to work out which would be the best drive to go up. There was one but for some reason I kept on overshooting it and ending up in one that was more unsuitable.

Apart from that, I had a half-hearted go at doing my Welsh homework and at least that’s now up to date. Apart from that I’ve done nothing at all. Even for lunch I just had a slice of toast.

Yesterday I remember saying that I would go out this evening to inspect the Christmas lights that I hadn’t seen yesterday when I walked though the city on my way home.

At least, later on after it had gone dark I managed to tear myself away from whatever I wasn’t doing and headed off into the freezing cold . I ended up in the Naamsestraat to see what the decorations were like, and as you can see for yourself, they are pretty depressing.

At least the lights wrapped around one of the towers of the town hall provide some kind of relief to the start environment.

From the Naamsestraat there are several little alleyways that lead on down to the Oude Markt.

The Oude Markt is, in more normal times, the centre of café life in the city, crowded with people even in the middle of winter and in the past there have been some really beautiful and impressive Christmas lights here. But while these look quite nice, they aren’t a patch on what we’ve seen in the past.

A real sign of the times right here and now is that there isn’t another soul in the image this evening apart from someone on a bicycle heading my way.

The far end of the Oude Markt is a small street called the Kortestraat, or “short street” that leads into the Grote Markt.

This is the street where almost every commercial ground-floor premises is a fast-food takeaway and I’ve had a couple of good meals in one of the fritkots here. But these days they are all closed to customers except for takeway and delivery, and one of the very few benefits of the current situation is the explosion in the number of food delivery cyclists in the city.

There’s a couple of dozen loitering here waiting to be beckoned by one of the food outlets.

Yesterday I took a photo of the Town Hall – the Stadhuis – with all of its illuminations.

In previous years there have been all kinds of other decorations, such as creches and stables and the like in the Square but this year there is nothing at all like that. There’s a Christmas tree and natural tree that is illuminated and in between them is a small creche but that’s just about your lot.

Mind you, the buses are driving around the usual Christmas route deviation instead of driving through the Square

One thing that you have probably noticed is the absence of pedestrians in the city this evening.

From the Grote Markt I walked around the back of St Pieters Church and down the hill into the Mechelsestraat and here I struck it lucky. In this photograph you can actually see five other people, four on foot and one on a bicycle.

What I don’t see though are any really exotic Christmas decorations. A few lights strung up across the street and a few draped over a shop display by a private individual and that’s it.

having inspected the Mechelsestraat I continued on my lap around the church without noticing anything special, and found myself at the bus stop in the Rector de Somerplein.

From there, there is a good view all the way down the Bondgenotenlaan to the Martyrs’ Column in the Martelarenplein and the Railway Station in the background. Every year the trees in the avenue are illuminated with lights draped in the branches and while this has never been anything startling, at least they have maintained the decorations this year.

And before I could regain the pavement I was almost squidged by a family on pushbikes weaving around in the street

Back on the pavement I walked on along the street and then cut down a side street into the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein.

Once again, the lights here in the Square are pretty disappointing. In front of us is the famous University Library, burnt to the ground along with all of its priceless possessions and collection of ancient books by the Germans in 1914 during the Sack of Leuven. And the lights here on this building aren’t anything like they have been.

Even so it looks extremely impressive, illuminated just like this.

On the way back home I walked across the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein towards the Tiensestraat.

Looking behind me, I noticed that the trees had received some kind of decoration to relieve the monotony, but again, I’ve seen much better than this in the past.

When I arrived back home I went to sit down for a couple of minutes but ended up crashing out for an hour. For some reason, this walking thing is taking a lot out of me.

Not feeling hungry I just made a sandwich for tea. There’s no need to eat if I’m not feeling particularly like it.

Now I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed. There’s an alarm tomorrow so I want to be on form. I have a date in the afternoon.

Tuesday 29th December 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the images of this afternoon’s walk through the Groot Begijnhof and along the River Dijle, let me tell you about where I went during the night.

I started off with a lady friend of mine from University last night but somehow I mixed her up with a girl with hom I once worked. She was separating from a black guy. He was still living in the family home in Dantzig Street and finding the payments difficult to keep up and was saying that he would have to sell it. That surprised me because I was wondering what she was going to receive from this because it’s bad enough being the mother of a couple of kids but being kicked out of your family home and living in a little dirty flat isn’t very good for the morale or anything like that. She should be doing much better than this. I can’t remember any more about this dream but interestingly I awoke at 06:00 as I would have done had the 1st alarm gone off even though I’d switched off the alarms this morning.

And the fun was only beginning.

Later on I was with a girl who was a real blast from the past from 45 years ago. We’d been on some kind of date kind of thing. One evening round at her house I suggested going for a walk but instead one of her friends (who was in fact keen on me all those years ago) came with me instead. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea for her to come along (back in those days there were a couple of reasons why I didn’t pursue this line) so in the end I let her go back home. I was wandering around Crewe on my own looking at how disgusting and dirty the place was, thinking that I should drive around videoing it and putting it on Social Media to show everyone what kind of dump the place is. Then the principal girl suggested that we go for a drive. We got into her car and she drove, and she wasn’t a bad driver at all, quite good in this little Mini that she had. We drove off out of town and came to a road junction where we had to turn. She said that we’d turn right so I asked where we were going. She said “you’ll find out”. We were heading in the direction of the hospital and I wondered what was going on in there, whether one of her friends was there, for I was hoping to get her up a dark alley and be much more friendly than I had been to date but if we were going to the hospital to see a friend, that ruled that out, didn’t it?

There was something else that I don’t remember very much, about me being in a bathroom somewhere. There were 2 guys who were the handymen for this building and 1 in particular spent some time in the area where I was. When I went out there was just the other guy there so I said that the light was out in the bathroom that I’d just used and perhaps he ought to tell his friend when he returned to do something about it but I can’t remember where this fitted in at all.

Somewhat later I’d done a big pile of cooking and I had all of these casserole dishes full of stuff all over the place, 2 big ones. I’d been ill and been in bed so they had been sitting in the kitchen for 2 or 3 days. I’d invited Barbara Windsor back, presumably for a right old carry-on. I’d been seeing her a couple of tiles and eventually I plucked up the courage to ask her out. She came back to my place and I started to parcel up these casserole things into individual portions The portions turned out to be a lot smaller than I was thinking and she was saying that maybe I should have done it into fives instead of sixes We were listening to the radio in the background and they announced ‘Top of the Pops” and I’m not going any further along this road because it’s going to spoil a surprise that I have lined up for a few weeks’ time.

But by the time that this voyage ended, it was no longer Barbara Windsor- she had transformed herself into the girl who starred in the previous voyage and this will explain a lot to at least two people who follow these adventures more closely than they like to admit.

What with all of that, that took me up to about 09:30, which isn’t too bad for a lie-in, I suppose.

And by the time that I had finished transcribing all of these and all of the adventures from yesterday, of which there is quite a considerable amount which you will find if you go back to yesterday’s page, it wasn’t all that far off lunch.

And with having no cucumber and no salad cream or equivalent, I set off out to the shops yet again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here last time, we saw them busy working on a house on the corner of the Dekenstraat and the Brabanconnestraat.

It goes without saying of course that I was interested in seeing how they were doing with it so I took myself off that way for a closer loon. And they seem to be fitting an outer skin on it, with these new modern bricks that are quite thin and not unattractive.

It’s a long way from being finished, which is no surprise around here when you see just how the builders work, so we’ll get to see plenty more of this work.

We’ve seen the building across there – the Pope Leo XIII Seminary founded in 1889 and installed in a building that was built between 1889 and 1896.

It’s a magnificent neo-gothic pile designed by Joris Helleputte, one of the finest examples of its type and period in the city, and so whatever was going on in the minds of the city fathers when they granted planning permission for the modern monstrosity opposite it which is the School of Engineering?

It really does destroy the whole effect of the magnificence of the former building, which unfortunately now due to the decline in the number of trainee priests, is now a hostel for devout Catholic students.

It’s enough to make anyone gasp in amazement.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish might recall is that there are still vestiges of the old medieval city walls dotted about here and there in the town.

When we were here last time I showed you a photograph of one of the old surviving towers in the Sint Donatus park, so while we’re passing through today, I reckoned that I would show you a remnant of the old city walls here in the park not too far away.

You may well have seen them before but I can’t remember. Anyway, here I am and here they are.

One thing that you will have seen before is the Kangxi-Verbiest globe, although you won’t have seen it from this viewpoint.

Ferdinand Verbiest was a Jesuit priest who in 1659 went as a missionary to China. trying to impress the Chinese with the knowledge that was current in Europe at the time, he showed them a globe. This prompted the Chinese into an outburst of laughter because at the time the Chinese were well ahead of the Europeans in this manner of thinking.

This is not the original globe. That remains behind in China. This is a copy here in Leuven.

The door to this yard opens up into the Naamsestraat and so I pushed on down the road.

Those two metal lines across the street – they indicate as far as they can the position of the Proefsstraat Gate which stood here from 1156 until 1755 and was part of the fortifications that we have just seen that encircled the city. It’s on the highest part of the street

Despite its age, it wasn’t the oldest of the gates around the city. It’s known that there were fortifications including a gate built somewhere around here in the 9th Century to protect the city from Norse raids.

And this gate here didn’t survive the defortification orders of the Austrian Empire either.

There’s a calvary built across the road from the stones of the gate, and that reminds me of the story about the time they wanted to built a calvary here in modern times and they sent out requests for a design. Due to a misunderstanding on the telephone, one architect sent in a drawing of John Wayne on his horse.

Through now into the Groot Begijnhof which is a part of leuven that I love.

This is the Huis Sint Niklaas, gifted to the city in 1983. And I’ve probably taken a photo of that before too.

In Carrefour I bought what I needed, also plenty of stuff that I didn’t realise that I needed too. In fact I spent more on this second trip than I did on the first.

And then a long stagger home, where I made my sandwiches and then promptly crashed out for a really good hour.

What awoke me was a phone call from a friend in the UK. We’ve been in desultory touch here and there but she decided to ring me to see how I was. We chatted for well over an hour about all kinds of things.

Later on, I went out to buy some chips.

You’ve seen a photo of where I stay before but it looked so nice that I couldn’t resist photographing it again. But my favourite chip shop was now closed so I had to find another one. Beans and chips and burger for tea.

Now it’s late and I’m ready for bed. No watching a film like I did last night. It’s too late for that. Especially as I have an alarm set for the morning. I did 2 lots of Welsh homework today but I still need to push on when and where I can. And Thursday is D-Day at the hospital so I need to be on form.

Saturday 26th December 2020 – I’M HAVING …

… a few technical issues right now. If the computer causing me a few upsets isn’t enough, it’s now the turn of the NIKON D500 to start to give me grief.

Since the computer blew a fuse the other day, uploading photos from the camera to the computer has been a long, laborious process. The USB sockets on the front must be USB 2.0, not 3.0 because it takes an age and quite often it’s stalled and I have to upload them 1 by 1.

The other day in fact it wouldn’t upload any at all and so I had to open them from the camera with the computer and then save them to the Hard Drive. This evening, I went up upload today’s and yesterday’s and nothing happened at all. Wondering if I were to use the XQD card reader I plugged that in, put the card in and waited …. and nothing happened at all.

And so I put the card back in the camera and “please format this card”. So I plugged the card reader and card into the USB 3.0 port on another computer, and sure enough “device not recognised”. So I put the card back into the camera and plugged that into the machine and although it identifies the camera, it can’t read the card.

So that’s that then. It looks as if I’ll be having to make do with the little NIKON 1 J5 for a while until I can organise the solution to this problem.

I’m not having a very good time, am I?

Especially not as I didn’t get up until about 10:45 this morning. But considering that I was still awake and working at 03:30 this morning that’s not too bad.

After the meds I finally sorted out the dictaphone. There were lots happening through the night but I could only remember a bit of it. They were dealing with some important issue at a Government Office and they had asked someone to bring in a huge pile of paperwork relating to his unexplained wealth. It was an enormous stack of stuff that he had brought in. The husband of one of my sisters was sorting the post and some of it he was actually filing away and I didn’t want him to do that as he was having to present it all to the person who was looking at the file and wanted to make sure that it was all there. I left and was walking down this terraced street in London, a really nice modernised terrace and this guy was living there in one of these terraced houses and they were on their way to move house. So I went to have a look round at their old premises. Just across the road were more houses of this type and 2 guys were walking down there. They decided that they would go into this house to deliver a package. When these boys saw what was inside, one of them let out a really camp expression. I walked on round the corner and almost fell down this enormous hole at least 40 feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen workmen trying to clear some slurry away because there was a huge water leak down there. They were presumably trying to get at it to block it. But all the local kids had somehow managed to jump in and were sitting on the edge of this water waiting to get their bath for a swim. As I was taking a photo another young boy in a swimming costume pushed past me ready to jump in and it was very much a busy kind of place. But there was much more to it than this and I can’t remember a thing now.

A bit later they (who did? Have I missed something here?) dressed a girl up as a mermaid and she came out with these bright red vivid clothes and that took everyone by surprise

Later on that night my sister and I went off and came to a restaurant. She ordered her meal but I had to wait though while they organised a few tables, things like, that, washing the floors. It occurred to me that I could have ordered mine and waited for it so I went to order it. I asked what was on the vegetarian menu. The girl said that they had vegetarian food but no menu, and she told me what there was. There was one dish that I didn’t recognise at all. I asked what it was and she said that “it’s only been on the market since yesterday. I’ve no idea what it is either”. I said “yes, OK I’ll try that”. She decided to serve that for me and put it all ready on a plate. I went back to the table. Before I’d gone away we’d sat to talk to someone who lived in Shavington and when I came back there was someone else there, one of the boys of a family who had several of them. I said “God, has everyone else who has been to Shavington come here?”. My sister was chatting away to this boy then off he went and my meal still hadn’t turned up at this time, hardly a surprise as I’s only been away from the counter 30 seconds.

Apart from that, I’ve not done a great deal today either. Mostly just messing around here and there. But I did do two weeks’ worth of Welsh homework to make up for yesterday. And I did have lunch too – my usual Christmas lunch a day too late of toast and vegan butter and vegan mushroom pate.

Two trips outside today too, my afternoon walk with the massive crowds and my evening run when I was practically all alone. And this evening I seemed to be running a lot easier than I have been for quite a while. The weather wasn’t at all bad either – not what you might think for the middle of winter.

Tea was exactly the same as yesterday, listening again to my Christmas rock concert. I hope that those of you who heard it enjoyed it as much as I did.

Despite being tired, I’m not ready for bed yet. I’ll hang around for a bit, add yesterday’s dictaphone notes to the blog, that kind of thing. A day of rest tomorrow but I have packing to do ready for Leuven on Monday.

Tuesday 22nd December 2020 – IF ANYONE THINKS …

… that I’m feeling cocky, firstly I’m not in China and secondly it’s a disgusting habit anyway.

And thirdly, to put a complete dampener on everything, it was 09:40 when I finally arose from the dead, thanking my starts that I didn’t have a Welsh lesson today otherwise I would have been seriously incommoded. Yes, that’ll teach me to crow about how well I’m doing.

But I can’t understand it. I was in bed long before midnight and I should have leapt out of bed with alacrity, even if alacrity wasn’t anywhere near me at the time.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise, there was some stuff on there from yesterday that I must have forgotten to transcribe. So first off I attended to that and put it all on line.

After that I turned my attention to the voyages of last night. And it is hardly any surprise that I was so exhausted after the distance that I must have travelled during the night

There was one of these tribal dance things going on in Europe. I can’t remember too much now but I’d had a lot of difficulty going off to sleep what with one thing or another and I remember saying “just wait until i do my tribal dance before I go off to sleep and I’ll be fine”. Of course there were so many different foreign words in the English language at that time but they were all to do with this tribal dance stemming from all kinds of different countries where every country had one to celebrate or commemorate going to sleep, something like that

Later on there was something happening about a bunch of girls who were travelling around in medieval times and fighting their way through to success or whatever. On one occasion they were being led to storm this citadel. When they got up the steps to what I suppose you might call a landing where there were windows that looked out of this building they were all there ready with their spears and arrows ready to repel whatever it was that was coming along behind them

Some time later I was back in this big Czech castle again and we were attending an auction of paintings. There was a painter I had my eye on – he had a painting exhibited at this auction that was coming up for sale and I really fancied it. I’d drawn out a couple of hundred Euros for it. The auctioneer was selling at a hell of a speed and I was running after him trying to keep up while he was auctioning everything. He eventually reached the painting that I wanted and the bidding he started at €900 and it went up and up and up. I thought that I was totally wasting my time here. No matter how much I liked these pictures I’m never going to be able to afford them. A few people were making disparaging comments about how the lights are going out in the Czech Republic now that all of the treasures are being sold off. It was a real gothic montrosity kind of night and I awoke in a cold sweat.

After that I’d been to see someone in mid-Wales – it might have been Nina or someone like that and to come back I’d got on the train. The line was old and in bad condition and unfit but the price of the ticket was peanuts. I saw that they were having an offer every Sunday that you could go on the Mid Wales line for almost nothing. So the next Sunday I went down to see Esi in Cardiff. We met and she took me back to the University. She was amazed that I’d come and even more amazed that I’d brought my Welsh stuff with me. She went through my bag and laughed at some of the food that I’d brought and wondered what I was doing with it. Then she started to engage is some Welsh dialogue with me and said later on that we’ll go through a student-teacher exchange and we can ask each other questions all that kind of thing based on the text and I could send my answers to her before Wednesday. It was Sunday afternoon now. All in all it sounded pretty good.

While I was in Cardiff Louise and I went for our driving tests. We both took them simultaneously and ended up back at the Driving Test Centre. She returned a little before me. I sat in the car and waited. I didn’t realise that you had to enter the building and queue. By the time that I realised this and went in the queue was enormous. It took hours and hours to get to the front, people pushing past me and fighting their way to the front. I was really unsure about what I was supposed to be doing but everyone else seemed to know. Eventually I reached the window and someone took my details and typed it into the computer. he told me about a roundabout. They had changed a roundabout and they hadn’t marked the street yet and I’d driven straight through it. I ought to know that it’s a roundabout. But I explained that I didn’t know the town at all. he said that I had all the temperament required so he gave me a kind-of green sticky thing like a shamrock. I asked him what I was supposed to do with it but I didn’t get an answer.

The alarm went off instead and I turned over and went back to sleep. But I didn’t get back in touch with where I had been.

Writing all of that out took up most of what was left of the morning and then I had another job to do. I’d been playing the three concerts that I’d done yesterday and there was a join in one of them that I didn’t like at all. And so before lunch I had a closer look

And in fact, I could see on closer examination that there were three or four that weren’t very good. This is one that I joined together but never used when we were working with Radio Anglais and while I suppose that I was really pleased with it back then it shows just how much I’ve learnt since then. Anyway, I did the broadcast again – at least, I overdubbed a couple of joins and rejoined the other couple, and it’s much better.

So this is basically telling me that the ones that I have on the back burner for later (there’s three more from that period, I reckon) are no good and need to be done again. But strangely enough, editing them together is the bit that I like the most.

This meant a rather late lunch (yet again) and I’d missed my morning break too.

After lunch there wasn’t much time to do very much so based on the theory that “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do something – anything” I spent an hour or so editing more photos of the trip in 2019 to Greenland. And there are some pretty good ones in there too and I’m impressed with a few of them.

There is the usual afternoon walk of course and despite the weather I set off on my route.

For the past I don’t know how many weeks there have been seagulls, either adults or juveniles, sitting on one of the window ledges and on more than one occasion seen them tapping on the window with their beaks. And today, with this juvenile here, I could see exactly why.

It seems that the owners have put on the inside of their window a model of a bird and it might possibly be that that has something to do with why the seagulls seem to like to visit that window ledge.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the other building there was a window ledge that the seagulls liked to frequent. The owner cured them of the habit – by buying a cat.

So I pushed on along the path, dodging the puddles because once again it was a grey, miserable and depressing day.

Across the lawn, across the car park and down to the headland to see what was going on out in the Bay. And if there was anything going on in the Bay I wouldn’t have seen it anyway. That, dear reader, is not fog or a low cloud but a good and proper rainstorm.

It was raining where I was standing of course, but out there it was pelters and with the wind blowing my way, I reckoned that it wouldn’t be long before I got the lot. This was not the time to be hanging around admiring the view.

And so I pushed off along the path on top of the cliffs, a path that in places was well under water and I had to scramble up the bank in a couple of places.

We’ve had rain, cloud, and all hat kind of miserable weather but one thing that we weren’t having very much of was wind. But there must have been plenty of it blowing around somewhere out in the Atlantic because we were having some really heavy rollers coming into the Bay and colliding with the sea wall right now.

Eventually I managed to struggle on as far as the viewpoint overlooking the port, and in the chantier navale I could see that the trawler that had moved to a position by the portable boat lift was still there. Obviously, my thinking yesterday that it would soon be back in the water was somewhat optimistic.

But one thing that I wasn’t over-optimistic about is the state of the fishing industry.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the last few nights we’ve seen the fishing boats in their hordes out in the cruel sea of the bay of Granville having a swansong. I made sure that I had a good look around the port this afternoon and there is not one single fishing boat of any kind at all in the harbour.

There’s only Marité and Joly France and the commercial sailing boats in there now. As I said yesterday, anything at all connected with the town’s fishing fleet that will float is currently out at sea catching what it can.

The market is even more vibrant right now with the British being excluded from the Continent, their catch rotting away in the back of a lorry on a deserted and abandoned airfield somewhere in Kent, something about which I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Back here I had a coffee, had a long chat with Liz on the internet, did some more Welsh revision and then attended to a few tasks before having an enjoyable hour or so on the guitars. But if only I could ease some of the pressure by finishing off a few of the arrears I’d enjoy myself so much more.

On the way out for my evening runs I bumped into a neighbour and we put the world to rights, and then I headed off into the wind and rain for my run.

The fishing fleet was too far out to photograph tonight and in any case there was too much cloud and rain about so I ran on and took a photo of the Rue du Nord and the Place d’Armes. And I’ve taken many better photographs of here too during my time.

With all of this rain I reckoned that there would be far too much water about down on the footpath underneath the walls
so I pushed on along the road at a run and then went down the steps to the bottom.

One of the things with which I’ve been experimenting is, with the delayed timer switch, taking few photos of the same object using different settings to see if there’s much of a difference in the output.

From down on the path underneath the walls, on a dry bit, I set up the camera on yet another handy stone to take a few photos of the Plat Gousset to see how they would come out. This one here came out quite well, I suppose and I was reasonably satisfied with that.

And so I fiddled around with a few settings and set the camera up again to take a few more photos.

This next one came out … errr … differently as you can see, slightly darker but the resolution and sharpness are slightly better.

The others that I took weren’t up to all that much and were thus filed under “CS”. But one day sometime soon when the wind dies down I’ll be out there with a tripod and the 70-300mm LENS and see what damage I can do with that.

From there I had a good run home ready to make tea. It was stuffed pepper last night so with the left-over stuffing it was taco rolls tonight. And delicious they were too, followed by apple crumble yet again. I’m getting to be quite good at that.

Having written out my notes, it’s now time for bed. And I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow. I can’t keep on losing hours like this. I won’t every accomplish anything at this rate.

Wednesday 16th December 2020 – MY SOURDOUGH LOAF …

… sasn’t any better than the previous one

And that’s rather disappointing because I had high hopes for this one. I sent a good deal of time kneading it and folding it and I ended up with a beautiful smooth dough that felt really lovely. So much so that I was sure that it was going to be a really good one.

But in the oven it didn’t rise by very much at all – not even as much as the one last week. It’s damp and soggy and as heavy as a brick. So I dunno what I’m doing wrong with it. Perhaps I ought to make a standard loaf next time to see whether it’s my technique that’s at fault or whether it’s my sourdough base. But the sourdough certainly looks, feels and smells like a sourdough does.

What was good though was that I managed to beat the third alarm to my feet despite a rather late night. That was a surprise and no mistake. And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was a western going on last night and someone pulled up inside a town. There was a question of eyesight – you needed a permit or a licence or something and you had to have your eyes tested but where in the Wild West were you going to find a town or anyone that did it? But when this particular guy came into town there was someone loitering in the immediate who looked the suspicious type and when they went to quiz the other guy about his eyesight and so on, this guy was loitering around in the background. Anyway I’m not quite sure what happened about this eyesight but 2 toughs turned up to throw this fellow out. Ordinarily of course he could have dealt with this properly but he was rather cross-eyed and that was having him at a disadvantage and was making extremely heavy weather of this. In the end I went over to help him and between the 2 of us and about 3 or 4 really good punches we managed to lay these 2 guys out. The guy who had come into town then picked up his revolver and said something to the mayor about proving his eyesight and saying “well, I’ll have my 25 cents-worth of the town and leave the town something to think about. he put 2 bullets through the glass face of the town clock and said “right, the town can now fix that on my behalf”. And that was when the alarm went off
But there was something else that I don’t remember very much of at all, to do with the United Nations and the women were not particularly allowed to vote or express an opinion on certain matters but something came up in a small town somewhere and to everyone’s surprise not only was the motion defeated but 2 women actually voted against it. That caused something of a scandal
Someone in another place pulled out a timetable of the tides and the surprising thing about this was that it was the kind of place where there WAS a tide table and someone had actually recorded and calculated them about the arrival of the high tide in the town.
I’m sure that there was something else too that I’ve missed. I certainly remember trying to dictate it and I wish that I knew what it was.

This morning I had a couple of personal matters to deal with that involved the bank. Now that I’m a legitimate (in some respects) OAP I’m entitled to certain benefits and I need to make sure that I can claim them. That meant shuffling a few things around . For one of the things I needed some human intervention so I arranged a video appointment (this hi-tech stuff is great) for this afternoon.

And then I spent the rest of the morning on the arrears from the summer. And, as I said a day or two ago, this is going to be a very long job.

After lunch I did some tidying up and then waited for my meeting host to come on line. And waited. And waited. And after 75 minutes I called it a day. But it wasn’t a waste of time because while I was waiting I had the electric 6-string going and had my guitar practice on that.

That took me up to my afternoon walk so I stepped out of the building – right into a torrential downpour.

That’s no reason to hang around of course so I made it up the path and round the headland as quickly as I could. The only thing that was going on down there was this couple at the peche à pied, having a good scratch around in the sand for “cockles, mussels, alive alive-o, hey?”

No sign of anything different going on at the chantier navale so I had no intention of hanging around out there. The weather this afternoon was enough to dampen anyone’s ardour so I headed on home for my nice hot coffee that I remembered to drink.

having finished off one of the blog entries that needed attention, I spent the rest of the early evening researching into Chateau Gaillard. That’s my next trick – to deal with that. And that will be the last really long blog entry until I’m back in the Czech Republic. Once I’ve done the Chateau Gaillard I’m hoping that the blog entries for the following 2 weeks will be reasonably straightforward.

With another half an hour spare before I had a session with the bass guitar, I did the Welsh homework for week one. While “school’s out for Christmas” as Vince Fournier might have written, I’m going to try to do one week’s homework every day right from the beginning and try to catch up and revise.

After the bass guitar, I went off for my evening runs. And don’t ask me about any delayed action photography because the two photos that I tried on a long exposure and delayed timer were ruined by the rain that was falling.

As seems to be usual these days, I had to keep off the path underneath the walls as much as I could so I wouldn’t be swallowed up in a puddle, but I eventually reached the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

There was quite a row coming up from the waves down there and I couldn’t see much in the half-light so I took a photo “on spec”. But when I looked at it back at home, the tide was still out and there was nothing splashing up against the sea wall.

Waiting around for something to happen didn’t work either, except that I was becoming wetter and wetter, so I cleared off in a homeward direction.

As I ran across the Place Maurice Marland I noticed some frenetic activity over in the harbour so I went up to the top of the walls to have a look.

And sure enough, Thora, one of the little freighters that tramps around between here and the Channel Islands is in port. And she has a full load of cars on board tonight too. It looks as if the ro-ro ferries to St Malo aren’t running again. So moored in the shelter of the illuminated Marité, she’s about to unload them

When I say “about to”, that was poetic licence too. I waited a good 10 minutes while they scurried around on deck to no good purpose and then, soaked to the skin, I headed off home. They can unload at their pleasure without me.

On the way back home I stopped off on the walls to look over the fish processing plant.

On eof the failed “time lapse” photos showed three blurred lights that were trawlers I suppose heading into port. So round at the viewpoint overlooking the plant I could see them all tying up. One of them even performed an impressive danse macabre for me as it swung round 270° to line up with the quay just there.

This photo has actually come out rather well and I’m quite pleased with it. It’s one for the 5-star collection I reckon, and there haven’t been too many of those at all.

One of the things that I mentioned that I would be doing today too was to move the Christmas lights around.

And so this evening you can see the red, white and blue ones in the window in the living room area. It seems that I’m the only one who has illuminated his apartment for Christmas, and that’s not like me at all. Usually I’m pretty … errrr … relaxed in these matters.

Back here it’s now teatime seeing as I’ve shifted my hours around due to the revised quarantine procedures. Tea tonight is taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing from the stuffed peppers, followed by more of the rice pudding.

Having written up my notes while fighting off waves of sleep, it’s bed time. Shopping tomorrow at LIDL, not that I need an awful lot, , and then Caliburn’s battery-fixing. His new windscreen wipers arrived today too but they aren’t being fitted until he’s had his new windscreen, which will be some time in the spring.

Another Welsh homework too, and we’ll see where we go after all of that.

Tuesday 15th December 2020 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… go at this long-distance night-time photography lark tonight

So winding the ISO down to a very reasonable daylight figure and slowing the speed down to an absurd 4 seconds, I managed to produce this shot. And you can tell how long the aperture was open because while the background is perfectly sharp, the fishing boats in the near distance (they are probably 10 miles out to sea in this shot) are comparatively blurred due to the distance that they have travelled while the aperture was open.

And as well as a nice, light background to the shot, we have plenty of stars in the sky because it was a delightfully clear, cloudless evening.

It’s a shame about the smear on the lens which rather detracts from the photo, but again considering the equipment that I have and the fact that the camera was actually perched on a flat rock to take this photo, I’m really impressed with it. Almost as impressed as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

What else that was impressive was the fact that yet again I managed to beat fairly comfortably the third alarm this morning. I seem to be making a habit of this right now, and quite right too.

And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was around on a huge liner last night but I can’t remember very much about a lot of it now. It’s gone right out of my head. At one point I had someone with me, a young girl and and I was going to take her to show her around the ship. She wasn’t sure whether she would go and she was dithering at the top of this spiral staircase thing that led down to the executive cabins. The purser came by and looked at her and said “if you want to go, go!” That gave her the courage and she came down with me. I showed her around the Executive Suites, everything like that. Then we found ourselves in the steerage where people were all crammed in like sardines. We were walking through there and I was saying to her that for us who were 3rd class passengers when we came on a cruise we just had one of these bunks that was together whereas they had 9 crammed in them somehow. They had no privacy, no curtains or anything yet we did. It turned out that she and her friend had been sleeping on a mattress somewhere. She sleeping in her friend’s room on a mattress, should I say. Yes, she knew about that, she knew where that was kept round the other side. We walked all around this ship and I was fighting the most enormous temptation to put my arm around her. It was really a strange kind of situation. I had the impression that this was Castor or someone like that but I couldn’t really see who it was. The face was very blurred all the way through this voyage, as if it was being done deliberately which is interesting. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now, something that has filled me with extreme disappointment, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Later on there had been a dispute about some postings made on a Social Networking conference and someone had complained. It turned out that people were posting in one particular Group and the guy there was referring them to another one. Of course they were way off-topic and people were suggesting that they should be banned but they should have been banned in the other Group where they were and this was the argument between the two sets of Moderators about this. This escalated into something about families, I’m not too sure now. I was working at work, not doing anything at all and my arrears were building up (this is quite a recurring dream, isn’t it?) but I was leaving on the following Thursday, the day before Good Friday so it didn’t really make any difference to me anyway. I was thinking that I’d be back home and then I was thinking that there would be 2 generations of retired people living in our house. That was unusual these days when I retire on Thursday. A discussion took place about various different generations living together. It turned out that in one house there were 5 generations where a girl of 18 who should have been celebrating her marriage ended up in hospital having a baby so there were now 5 generations living in the house where she was living. This dispute about the internet rumbled on. In the end 2 burly Australian farmers were sort-of involved in it. They ended up having to get a car started which they finally managed to do, so where next? They’d hard some kind of description about something happening. 1 of them said “I know, there’s a place not too far away from here where they have sea lions, all this kind of thing, just by where you turn onto the main highway”. Everything he said had the right kind of description about it so 1 of them grabbed the steering wheel of this car they had just fixed and off we all drove in this car.

Having sorted that out, I had some stuff to attend to and then I cracked on and organised myself for my Welsh class

And it wasn’t just revision from last week and preparation for this week that was important, I had to make the place look pretty too – that was part of the activity.

If you look in the photo just here there are now some red, white and blue Christmas lights. I found those while I was tidying up so I strung them up over where I sit, at the dining room table. That’s only a temporary thing – they will be in the other window tomorrow.

Strawberry Moose came to the lesson too, complete with Father Christmas hat. He certainly helps to liven up the proceedings and brings a smile to everyone’s face.

As for the lesson itself, armed with a hot chocolate drink and a slice of my fruit bread, it passed quite well and we seem to be more confident. We were given the same set of questions to answer that we were given in September and the answers were much more rapid and profound.

Interestingly, just as we knocked off for a break, the ‘phone rang. Caliburn’s new battery has arrived, about two days before the suppliers told me that it would even be in stock, never mind delivered. So Caliburn will be having his new battery fitted tomorrow.

But the timing of the phone call was spectacularly precise.

After lunch I set to and made some sourdough dough – 500 grammes of flour and a pile of sunflower seeds together with salt, water and some of my sourdough started. In the attempt to make something decent, I spent absolutely ages folding it in to make it nice and smooth, but having had a look at it just now, it’s not increased all that much in size. I’m feeling that sourdough is not the way for me to go, especially as my fruit bread with yeast worked so well on Sunday.

There were carrots that needed peeling, dicing and blanching too, so I organised them while I was at it. They went into the freezer later.

By now it was time to go out for my afternoon walk (we don’t finish our Welsh lesson until late).

Quite a few people out there walking today, celebrating the semi-end of our detention à domicile. Also crowds in the air too. There were several light aircraft flying by overhead, including this one, F-BUKK. She’s a Wassmer W54 Atlantic, fitted with a Lycoming O-360-A1LD engine.

She’s actually quite an elderly machine, apparently built in 1973. And that might be quite right too because the company closed down in 1977. So it’s a surprise to see her still out and about.

Plenty going on out at sea today too.

Or, at least, there might have been earlier in the day because everyone seems to be coming home now. The tide isn’t yet in but it looks as if we are going to have a queue of boats waiting to get to the fish processing plant.

Not that I was intending to hang around too long. I had plenty of things to do and wanted to return home as soon as I could. I was rather disappointed in that there wasn’t any other kind of interesting movement out there to attract my attention. The correct thing to do was to go and make myself a coffee and move on.

There was some post waiting for me when I returned. The good news is that my Old-Age Pension has finally come through, so Spend! Spend! Spend! The bad news is that the Taxe d’Habitation people have finally caught up with me and there are residence taxes to pay.

So it comes in with one hand and goes out with the other. That’s quite typical, isn’t it?

So having listened to a few radio programmes, I sent three of them off to the technicians. They’ll be on holiday soon and if I don’t have them in stock down there, nothing will be broadcast. And my Christmas Day broadcast is something special.

Another thing to do is to send a bank transfer of cash to my niece for Christmas. She and her family are really kind to me and do such a lot to help me out. And as I haven’t been to Canada this year to repay them, the least I can do is to express my gratitude in another way.

There was the usual guitar practice of course, and then a change to the advertised programme.

We are now in curfew from 20:00 until 06:00 which means an end to my late-night perambulations unfortunately. That made me wonder how I was going to fit it in, because I can’t do without my runs, so I’ve decided for the foreseeable future at least, to go for my run as soon as I finish guitar practice and have my meal afterwards. I’m not sure how this will affect my digestion or my sleeping.

We shall see.

We’ve seen the photos of the Channel Islands tonight anyway, so I carried on with all of my runs, along the Rue du Nord, down the steps and along the path, then through the Square Maurice Marland onto the walls.

There was plenty of activity in the port this evening. You saw in the photo of St Helier that there were plenty of fishing boats out in the English Channel tonight. They were starting to come into port as I reached the viewpoint over by the Eglise Notre Dame.

The Fish Processing Plant is working of course – you can see the lights shining from the open doors into the water, and there’s a refrigerated lorry there parked in the loading bay.

There had been some other bright lights shining in the harbour that I had missed.

There was a trawler parked on this side of the quay so I wondered if it might have been her, but then in the background there are all kinds of lights shining at the Ferry terminal, and while it’s unlikely that one of the Joly France boats would be coming back at this hour, maybe the little freighter Chausiais has had a little run out.

Nothing gave me a clue, so I walked round the corner, photographed my Christmas lights and then ran on home.

Tea was a burger with pasta and veg and the last of the delicious vegan pesto. No pudding because the football was about to start.

With a vital basement clash of Flint Town v Cefn Druids, a match that neither side could afford to lose or draw if they don’t want to be cast adrift at the bottom of the table, the broadcasters chose to broadcast Penybont V Cardiff Metropolitan, a meaningless mid-table match.

And meaningless it was too. I fell asleep towards the end of the first half for 5 minutes, and by the time the final whistle sounded I had long-since gone off to do other things. Penybont scored quite early in the match but they were restricted to maybe just 2 or 3 other shots on goal, and I don’t recall Ashley Morris in their goal having a serious save to make. The Met were clueless up front and never looked like doing anything at all.

We’ve seen some exciting matches in the JD Cymru Welsh Premier League in the past but this wasn’t one of them. A miserable, depressing match without a single moment of excitement. A poor advert for Welsh football, when so much was at stake up on Deeside.

But now anyway, I’m going to give my sourdough dough a good going over and put it in its mould to work away overnight, and then I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I’ll be fitting Caliburn’s battery and making a renewed start on some arrears. I’m making no progress at al with those really and I need to sort it all out.

Friday 11th December 2020 – I RATHER LET …

… myself down this morning by missing the third alarm and not leaving my stinking pit until about 07:15.

But I console myself with the fact that before going to bed last night I’d stayed up and done some work on the radio programmes that I would ordinarily do on Monday morning so whatever I should have done this morning, I can do then instead.

One thing that I would normally do is to listen to the dictaphone. And it seems that during the night I was doing something – making agricultural equipment like ploughs, this kind of thing but I don’t remember very much about it but I certainly ended up with thousands that I’d made and was busily displaying them all in a kitchen sink somewhere, and I wish I could remember what the rest of it was about.

There was something else about home baking as well, making cakes and being televised. There was downloading music off the internet and 2 files had the same number and I was wondering if they were the same length, the same thing that I’d downloaded twice or if they were both different but again I can’t remember very much about that

Later still I was at some kind of police college. I’m not sure whether I was a tutor or an inmate but something had happened and they had been collecting DNA swabs. A DNA swab had been collected from someone in respect of a case and they had been told to discard it. I immediately recognised something and thought that this is probably something else that is going to come in handy for another particular case so I told the guy to hang on to the swab. I went upstairs to his room. They were little cheap kinds of rooms with just two beds. He was there with his room mate and I went to collect this swab. But downstairs they were clearing away the breakfast so I started to give them a hand. The woman was telling me where to put things and what to do with them. I was thinking to myself “I’ve been coming to this place for quite a while and I’ve never been given breakfast here. Should I be having breakfast as well? I ought to find out”. There was some stuff that they obviously couldn’t keep like boiled eggs that had their shells bashed in to check if they were hard. I was wondering what they would be doing with these.

Then the alarm went off and I just lay there vegetating for a while.

After a drink of my nice batch of orange kefir with my medication I came back here and had rather a desultory morning working on my page about Karlovy Vary – something else that’s going to take me a Century or so to sort out, with all of the stuff that I need to do.

After lunch, something else that I have decided to do every week from now on is some Welsh homework. It’s only optional, but having discovered last week how doing it made me think a lot more, I’ve decided that I’m going to do it more often.

And I might have done more had I not had a video to look at (I’ll tell you more about that in due course) and … errr … closed my eyes for a little while

And furthermore, I’m going to go back to the very start of the course and do the homework right from the beginning, one every day. I need to pull myself up by my shoelaces and benefit from what I’m supposed to be learning.

By now it was time for walkies so I set off out on my perambulations.

The wind was quite strong out there this afternoon but unfortunately it was blowing in the wrong direction. What I was hoping to see was the waves crashing over the sea wall, given the force of the wind and the fact that we are pretty close to high tide, but instead the waves were simply rolling off down the side of the wall which was disappointing.

Apart from that, it was grey and menacing when I set out and I hadn’t gone more than 20 yards before I was caught in a rainstorm. Luckily it only lasted for 10 minutes.

But this is something that caught my attention.

We’re quite used to seeing aircraft flying low over the port but these are usually things like microlights and other light aircraft. When did we ever see anything like this flying over the port at just a couple of hundred metres of altitude?

And look how closely the plane behind is flying. At first I thought that this might have been a mid-air refuelling exercise but I couldn’t see the hose. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the serial numbers of the aeroplanes so I can’t tell you much about them, although with them being military aircraft, seeing the serial numbers wouldn’t have done me much good anyway.

Over the last few days regular readers of this rubbish will have seen the rapid arrival and departure of Normandy Trader doing a few shuttles to and from the Channel Islands before the effects of Brexit lock everyone in or out, and I wondered exactly how many visits I might have missed.

But here’s one that I haven’t missed. Thora is back in town today unloading down at the far end of the quayside underneath the crane. She must have come in with the tide a little earlier.

She probably won’t be hanging around for long either. Everyone is quite busy and working to a tight timetable. As am I. I have plenty to do so I can’t afford to hang around.

And so I wandered off home again for my cofee, but not before I’d stopped to see how they were getting on with the roof on the College Malraux across the car park.

And by the looks of things they are pretty well advanced in the area in which they have been workign and I can’t imagine now that there will be too many days before they will have finished what they are doing.

The next question of course is “what are they going to be doing next?”. Are they going to be stripping more and more of the roof off and replacing it, or are they simply going to leave it at that, pack up and go home?

As for me, I packed up and went home for a nice hot mug of coffee.

With the spare time that was left and not having the morale to do anything on my Karlovy Vary stuff, then following my plan of “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do something” I edited some of the photos from July 2019 in Eastern Greenland.

After the hour on the guitar during which I spent some time playing a solo to Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” – on the bass and finding much to my surprise that it actually works too and why can’t I play like that to anything else – I went and made tea.

The lentils had been brewing since early this morning but now I dealt with the mushrooms, potatoes, onions, garlic and spices and had everything nicely frying up together before I added the now well-cooked lentils. Then when everything was ready, in went a tin of Macedoine vegetables and a jar of the Madras curry that I’d bought from NOZ ages ago.

it was all totally delicious with rice and veg, followed by the last of the apple pie. Tomorrow’s pudding will be banana with banana-flavoured sorbet.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening walk Rosemary rang for a chat. And two hours and thirty-eight minutes later we hung up. We had a lot to say for ourselves. So no walk tonight. It’s loooooooong after curfew.

Tomorrow I’m shopping. And after this, just one more shopping Saturday until Christmas. And I’ve never ever felt less Christmassy than I have done this year. I’m not even sure if I’ll have time to start my Ginger Beer mix.

Still, we shall see what we shall see. Right now, far later than I intended, I’m off to bed.

Tuesday 8th December 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

… seen the lighthouse at the Cap Fréhel looking as clear as it did this afternoon?

It’s about 70 or so kms away, as you are probably fed up of hearing right now, but there must be something about the atmospheric conditions and the height of the lighthouse above sea level to make it stand out so well. We’ve seen it on several occasions, that’s for sure, but I can’t think that it’s ever stood out so clearly as it did today.

One of these days I’ll sort out the photos that I took when we sailed right down the coast on the Spirit of Conrad and you can compare the view of the lighthouse from close up with one of these photos taken from the Pointe du Roc.

Something else of note that is worth mentioning today because it doesn’t happen all that often just now is that I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning. And by a good couple of minutes too

That’s twice in two days that I’ve beaten the alarm. Anyone would think that I’ve wet the bed or something.

Last night before going to bed I’d given the sourdough bread mix its second kneading and put it in the mould that I used, and left it on one side overnight. And so this morning as soon as I got up, the first thing that I did, even before the medication, was to switch on the oven at full heat.

And then, when I’d taken the medication and the oven was now nice and hot, I took a large baking tray, put about half an inch of water in it, dropped the bread mould with the dough inside into the water, covered it with another matching baking tray so that the steam off the water would aerate the bread, and stuck it in the oven.

After about 25 minutes, I took off the lid and then left it cooking for about another 40/45 minutes or so on a slightly lower temperature.

While it was baking away to itself, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

Yesterday’s notes I transcribed and added them to the entry, and then I turned my attention to last night. There was a house move to do and we had a flatbed lorry. It involved putting all these personal possessions off this lorry, or were we putting them on because one minute we were putting them on and another minute we were taking them off. It started off with about 10 of us but the number gradually whittled down every week and between us there was a different number of people until in the end there was just 3. We had quite a crowd watching us, sitting on chairs watching us load or unload this lorry. In the end it turned out that we didn’t have a captain. He had left so one of the guys in charged asked me if I wanted to be captain but I ummed and ahhed. Another guy volunteered so there was just 2 of us running back and to, passing these boxes to the guy who was stacking them. I was thinking all the time that an open-sided lorry is not the kind of vehicle to go around with when you are doing a job like this, stacking boxes on top of it. It’s bound to end in tragedy when you go round a corner. There was one part where we were messing around with 7″ singles. They wouldn’t all stay in the boxes. Someone suggested putting them in with the LPs although I couldn’t see how that made any difference. It meant in the end that they were going to be out of alphabetical order and he’d never be able to trace them again if he had them all mixed up like that wil the LPs
Later there was a supermarket in the basement of a big building. An ad-hoc supermarket in the corner of an empty floor with Covid regulations and only a few people were allowed to go there at times. I was down there doing my shopping. I had a trolley with a few items in it and I had to go back and find my car, a yellow MkIV Cortina. I was convinced that i’d parked it outside in the car park so instead of going up and following the directions back, I went outside but I couldn’t see my car on the car park at all although i was convinced that I’d left it there. It must have been on the internal car park in the building so I had to get back into the building somehow with my trolley load of goods and try to remember which flood I’d put my car on or whereabouts, because I didn’t have a clue where it was now.

That wasn’t all either. But seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

Now it was time to turn my attention to the Welsh course. I wrote up my notes from last week and went through them to make sure that I understood them (which isn’t very evident)and then turned my attention to prepare for this week’s lessons.

One thing that I do remember from my grandmother was the imperative, which is only natural of course with my grandmother. Dewch i mewn for “come in”, Edrych for “look”, byddwch yn dda for “be good” and of course paid! – “don’t” and so on so it didn’t take too much preparation today, which suited me fine.

At the end of its time I took it from the oven and here’s the finished product. It’s something of a disappointment to say the least as it doesn’t seem to have risen at all.

Mind you, when I tried it for lunch, it was light and very aerated all the same, so I’ve no idea what is happening here. Had it been this size but dense and heavy I would have written it off as a failure. But I don’t know what to make of this.

It’s certainly the lightest bread that I’ve ever made, even when I’ve been using yeast.

After lunch I made a start on more of the arrears, but not for long. By now, it was time for me to go out on my afternoon walk around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night we saw piles of fishing boats out in the English Channel on their way back into harbour after their day’s work. And here are some more of them today heading back out to the fishing grounds.

But I’m not too sure how long this will go on. Apparently the Jersy fishermen are getting up a petition to revoke the 1836 Treaty of the Bay of Granville that divides the fishing areas up between the Channel Islands and France, and kick the French boats out.

There’s a meeting in a day or two’s time during which the French fishermen and the Regional Council will discuss the matter. The fishermen have already pointed out that 70% of the Channel islands catch is landed here in Granville and that all of the electricity supplied to the Channel Islands comes from the nuclear reactor up the coast here in Normandy that we visited A FEW MONTHS AGO.

We are living in interesting times.

Maybe you might have noticed just how nice the weather was, looking out to sea in the previous photograph.

That’s not the case down there along the Brittany coast. Over by St Malo and Dinard it looks as if they are on the receiving end of a very localised rainstorm that’s giving them all a really good soaking. I’m glad that I’m not over there in the middle of all that.

But it’s really quite astonishing when you consider that just down the coast the sky is as clear as a bell, as we saw with the view of the lighthouse at Cap Frehel. And I thought that the weather conditions in the Auvergne were bizarre.

While we are here, there’s something else that I want to photograph – something that I noticed yesterday but there were too many people around.

The local council has had a man out cutting the grass in his tractor. He’s had his blade set too low because he’s managed to churn up a huge stone right in the middle f the path here. never mind the damage that he’s probably done to his blade, which surely he must have heard, that’s a hazard just waiting for one of our nocturnal ramblers to trip over in the dark.

He shouldn’t have left the rock and the hole like that in the middle of the footpath.

Anyway, I pushed on around the headland and with nothing going on out at sea I made my way along the clifftop.

The wind has died down considerably from how it has been and the sea looks as if it’s quite calm. But there must he a heavy rolling sea out there in the Atlantic somewhere because the waves are coming in with quite some force

Remember that the tide is still a long way out. This would be quite impressive at high tide.

But there was no change of occupant in the chantier navale and nothing much else going on, so I headed off for home and a hot coffee.

One task that I needed to do was to remove some photos from the camera. The memory card is full, I don’t have another and the price of the type of card that I use is prohibitive. That involved coupling up an external drive and you’ve no idea how long it takes to remove 2500 files off the camera onto the laptop via a USB 3.0 cable, the software and hardware in the computer, and a USB2.0 cable to an external drive.

It might have taken less time too had I not unfortunately drifted off with the fairies at some point.

After the hour on the guitar I made tea. A burger with vegetables and pasta with some more of that vegan Pesto sauce which is really good and I must buy some more. And the apple pie that I made in the middle of last week is excellent.

After tea I was straight out and off down the road for my evening run.

And we saw just how nice the sky was this afternoon right down the Brittany coast. it was just as clear along the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula too and the warning lights on the wind turbines at the back of Coutances were clearly visible. You can see two of them towards the left-hand edge of this photograph.

The street lights of the small towns along the sea front were quite visible too. Hauteville sur Mer on the left and St martin de brehal on the right. And in the background, the lights of the main road that runs up eventually to Cherbourg.

If the view up both of the coasts is going to be good, then it ought to be good out in the English Channel too.

This photo might be somewhat blurred but it’s hand-held, and it shows the lights of St Helier in Jersey in the Channel islands 58 kilometres away. And so for that reason it’s not bad at all. The red light on the radio mast at the back of town is clearly visible.

From the viewpoint I ran on all the way down the street, combining two of the legs of my run into one. For some reason I was running quite well tonight. it might have been the head of broccoli that I had for tea, steamed in a pan with the pasta.

When I finally stopped for breath I retraced my steps for 100 metres because I’d noticed that the view across to Donville les Bains was looking quite interesting too tonight.

The promenade was looking really nice with the street lights reflecting off the water tonight, but then the headland by the cemetery from where the birdmen take to the air cuts out a good part of the view. And then we have all of the houses on the cliffs round by where the Musée Christian Dior might be found.

And then of course I had to run all the way back to the Place de l’Isthme. Yes, I stayed “up above” tonight seeing as at some point there must have been a rainstorm here too as everything was soaking wet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve shown a couple of photos of the trench that seems to bisect the fortifications up here at the Place de l’Isthme.

It’s not possible to see from one end of the trench to another because there’s something like a walled-over passage that runs through the trench to the part that’s isolated. And while I was nosying around up here I found what I think might be the entrance to the passage.

There’s a date carved on the lintel over the top too – 1843. I don’t know whether that’s the date of the original construction or not.

Down below, I ran on through the Square Maurice Marland with enough energy to go half-way up the steep ramp at the end.

From there I went round to the Rue St Jean to see if there was any better indication of what was going on here. And it seems that they have made a start digging up the pavement. I’ll have to come here in the daytime and see if I can find out why.

From here I ran on home and made it back to the apartment just in time for kick-off. There was football on the internet tonight, hence my early run out.

Over the weekend we saw an ineffective and anonymous Caernarfon team totally rolled over by Penybont. Tonight they were to take on bottom club Cefn Druids in Cefn Mawr in the suburbs of Wrexham.

With several changes in the team tonight, they looked a totally different outfit and seemed to have recovered their spirit. They went 2-0 up and were unlucky not to have had one or two more. This was a much more professional and competent approach, at least for the first 75 minutes.

They had Josh Tibbetts back in goal and he was extremely busy because Cefn Druids were much better than the score and their league position suggested. They pulled a goal back late in the game and the last 15 minutes saw them camped on the edge of the Caernarfon penalty area.

In all honestly, Tibbetts kept Caernarfon in the game, although the Druids could have been embarrassed a couple of times in the closing stages when Caernarfon had a couple of rapid counter-attacks upfield.

But if the Druids are bottom of the table, then all that I can say is that the standard of the JD Cymru League has improved dramatically over the last 5 or 6 years. The Druids would have rolled over clubs like Afan Lido and Llanelli of that period. And then we turn the clock back 15 years with clubs like Rhayadr and Welshpool, to name just two of a dozen that I could mention.

So off to bed. Tomorrow I have a day at home and tons of stuff to do that I’ve forgotten. One day I might even get ahead of whatever I’m trying to do.

EPIC HALL

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