Tag Archives: aztec lady

Monday 29th March 2021 – THE FIRST DAY …

… back at work after my trips to Leuven is always difficult. And today was no exception.

So while you admire a few of the photos of my trip around the headland this afternoon, I’ll tell you all about it.

At least this morning I managed to rise almost immediately after the first alarm went off. First task was to set the oven off and while it was heating up, I had the medication. After the medication I put the sourdough fruit loaf dough into the oven and set the timer for 80 minutes.

Back in the office I made a start on the radio programme. And that kept me busy for most of the morning. Much more busy than it ought to have done because I was expecting this to be a quick one, seeing as I’d already chosen the tracks and paired them.

At first I was doing well and when I stopped for my breakfast of hot chocolate and nice warm sourdough fruit bread (which was absolutely delicious by the way) I was well ahead of where I usually am.

It all fell apart at the end because I miscalculated the final track. I ended up being a minute over which was a shame because the final track was absolutely perfect for what I wanted and fitted the programme perfectly.

But in the text that I write and record, there is quite a lot that is able to be edited out without spoiling the rhythm or the meaning, but a whole minute-worth is taking things to extremes. It took me quite a while to trim it down into the one-hour slot and I was really struggling but in the end it managed to fit.

The advantage of this is that I have a pile of stuff that I’ve cut out that I can save to use again and as a result, in theory it should take much less time to write out the stuff in the future.

When it was finally finished I had a listen to the programme and also the one that will be broadcast this coming weekend. And they both are pretty good, so I sent off this week’s programme.

The rest of the morning was spent dealing with the photos from July 2019. That’s another pile out of the way and I’m now down to a mere 8 remaining for the month.

Where I am now is at the site where Chief Big Foot (Spotted Elk) was captured by the American Cavalry on 28th December 1890. And the rest of the story is History. I visited the site of the Massacre at Wounded Knee that took place the day after Big Foot was captured and believe me, it’s a very sad place.

After lunch I made a start on the arrears from my trip around Central Europe in the summer of 2020.

That’s a job that seems to be rather like the cleaning of the Augean stables was supposed to be – a never-ending task, especially as there are no rivers Alpheus and Peneus close by to help me.

By the time that it came to knocking off I was in the town of Becov nad Teplou in the Czech Republic admiring an old Czech Tatra Lorry and I still have a long way to go to Karlovy Vary.

I’m hoping that with a bit of luck I might actually finish it this week if I put my foot down, and then I can press on and start to deal with the week when I was on board the Spirit of Conrad down the Brittany Coast. I might have had more luck had I not crashed out for half an hour on my chair.

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

The weather was absolutely beautiful as you can tell by the photos that you have seen so far.

As well as that the tide was quite far out and this is when the view of the Ile de Chausey is at its most beautiful. You can see the big beach out there that we walked on when we were there with Spirit of Conrad. At very low tide there is a kind of lagoon in between the islands over there and that was where we anchored to sleep for the night.

There are a great deal of sunken rocks around the islands with the pillars and warning lights upon them and today, with the tide being so low, they are all clearly visible today

Crowds of people out there this afternoon so I had to fight my way through the crowds down the path on top of the cliffs.

My route took me down to the lawn by the lighthouse and the Semaphore post. From there, there was a beautiful view of Le Loup, the light that sits on top of the rock at the harbour entrance

The two trees here made such a beautiful frame to the image that it was crying out for a photograph. When you see it like this, it’s hard to believe that when the tide is right in at the highest tide the column un which the light sits is almost submerged by the water. As I’ve said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … we have the highest tides in Europe just here.

And looking at the tree on the right just here, you can understand Bob Dylan’s “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, do you?

From the lawn by the lighthouse I walked across the car park and went down to the end of the headland. And there I saw a strange object bobbing up and down in the water.

It was very difficult to say what it was from this point of view. I took a photo of it so that I could crop it and enlarge it when I returned home, but having done so, I’m still none the wiser. It could be a marker for a lobster pot, although I wouldn’t have expected one to be this close to land, or it might ne a 25-litre oil drum washed overboard from a passing boat, or almost anything.

Having taken my photograph I walked off along the path on top of the cliffs on the other side of the headland.

This was something that took me completely by surprise.

With it being the lowest tide of the year today – the famous Grande Marée – and also a holiday and lockdown period that has brought the crowds of people down from Paris there were crowds of people out there today practising the peche à pied and scratching around amongst the rocks for shellfish.

But the surprising thing was the mechanical digger thing that was out there with them. Once they start using mechanical equipment for the peche à pied that will be the end of a tradition.

Actually, it’s me being facetious. I’m sure that he’s doing something totally unconnected with the peche à pied

It may well be that he’s doing something that’s connected to this little task out there.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago we saw a pile of pipes on the quayside and I was wondering what they are for. No need to wonder any more because they are all out there, being laid by a group of men, taking advantage of the very low tide.

It beats me what they are doing with all of those though. I’ve no idea what they would be doing that would require a pipeline to be lad on the beach out there. It’s not likely to be a sewer outfall or anything like that because of Health and Safety or Environmental Issues. I shall have to enquire.

Down at the chantier navale there’s yet another change of occupier there.

That motor boat Freddy Land has now disappeared, presumably gone back in the water. We still have Spirit of Conrad, Aztec Lady, Hermes 1 and Lys Noi down there on the blocks. And it was certainly a hive of activity down there this afternoon with a few vans and a load of workmen buzzing around working away

Nothing at all going on over at the ferry port right now. All of the boats have moved, either into the inner harbour or else they are out running over to the Ile de Chausey.

But here’s something else that’s interesting going on in the harbour this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen these diggers working away in the port a few weeks ago and I wondered what they were up to.

Now I know the answer to this question. There is €6,000,000 made available to a few of the ports around here to improve their facilities. Here in Granville, they have received some of the money to install three more mooring lines to make more anchoring facilities for smaller boats.

It’s just a shame that they hadn’t had the money to do this when they were working on the facilities two or so years ago.

Back here I had a coffee and worked on my arrears from Central Europe up until guitar time, something that was quite enjoyable.

And for tea it was a curry out of the freezer with veg and boiled potatoes. Followed by my delicious apple crumble.

Eventually I managed to listen to the dictaphone too to see where I’d been on my travels. I was driving one of G&B’s old Fords last night, taking the kids to college. One was sitting behind me chatting away saying that Brian didn’t like me and that I talked too much, loads of things like that. I said that I used to work for Europe’s largest coach company until it went bankrupt and I’d driven coaches as far east as Russia, places like that. I have loads of experience and I’m happy to share it with Brian but he doesn’t seem to want to learn or listen. The conversation continued. We weren’t going fast and 2 students alighted to walk in front of the coach. We came to a place where a tree was overhanging so I had to move out into the middle of the road so I had to ask these students to come back in. One of them was John Ashby so he came over to chat. He asked if I was still living on my farm. I told him of my health issues and that I was living in this apartment. He asked “do you have an owl?”. I replied “no”. He said “well you ought to have an owl. I’ll have a friend of mine make one”. We started to have a little chat but we didn’t get far as we came to the yard. The first thing that I noticed was that the drive had been moved. I was half-way up the old drive before I realised. I had to do a dramtic turn-round to get into the new drive. There was a kind of bracket-type of thing with 6 rather large upturned bolts welded to it lying on the path there . I said to the sentry who was busy looking at it “don’t worry. I’ll move it”. I got down, picked it up and threw it out of the way and drove the coach into the yard before he got off. By now it had become a motor bike. I noticed that the front tyre was low so John and I had a scavenge around the workshop to try to find a compressor that I knew was there. We found half of it – someone had dismantled it and left it in pieces. Some of the pieces were missing. We also talked about the cutlery and plates. One of the students had already asked me why things were a bit different on board the coach. I said that I hadn’t really noticed. John told me that all the crockery and cutlery had been changed and he asked me why. I said that I didn’t know. “All I know is that I have a key to the yard, a key to the office and a key to the coach. Brian just rings me up and asks me when he needs any work doing”.

But John Ashby – there’s a blast from the past. Someone who was struck off my friends list at school in 1971 when he stole my girlfriend at the time and about whom I haven’t thought for a single minute ever since. What’s he doing making a debut appearance and sticking his nose into my nocturnal ramblings?

Now though I’m off to bed, later than usual. I’m exhausted despite my sleep this afternoon. I can’t wait to get into bed.

Sunday 28th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of the crowds of people out and about in thr glorious sunshine this afternoon, I can tell you about my rather quiet day today.

It started off as we mean to go on with me not rising from my stinking pit until 11:05 according to my fitbit, only to find out that it was in fact 12:05 because the clocks had altered this morning.

After breakfast I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night, because despite the fact that I’d taken that pill before I went to bed, I’d been out and about during the night and there were some notes about it on the dictaphone that needed to be transcribed.

I’d been to buy a motor bike at Webster’s at Crewe. They told me to come back on Friday and they would have a Honda 50 for me. I went back on Friday evening and as I walked into the shop the guy was selling it to someone else. I was really annoyed by that and I made my annoyance known. He said “don’t you worry. We have something ideal for you”. He took me into the back and there was this ancient Suzuki 250 painted red. I thought “this is a scrambler type of configuration, not very comfortable and I didn’t fancy that. There was another 50cc scooter but it was the type that was renowned for being uncomfortable and I didn’t want that either”. He said “we have a Ford Transit like your old one. It needs some work doing to it, the wheel bearings and a few things”. I took it home and noticed that a few of the exhaust parts were in the back of it. I did the rear wheel bearings and went to assemble the exhaust but found that it was bits of a VW exhaust and didn’t fit at all. That’s why half of it was in the back. I was pretty annoyed and ended up taking it back to the garage. I was going to tell them what I thought of them. There was much more to this dream than this but I can’t remember.

Later on a plane took off from somewhere and the radio was stuttering. It didn’t gain height and all of a sudden it crashed right in front of the sentry box where I was on duty. I summoned help and ran over to this ‘plane to see what had happened. I don’t remember any more of this except that I ended up in a load of trouble. For some reason my superior officer was very unhappy with me and bawled me out for something but I can’t remember what it was. I did notice that in the report that I’d submitted, the second sentence started with 2 capital letters instead of the usual 1. But I can’t remember very much of this at all.

First task today, despite it being Sunday and a Day of Rest, was to synchronise the big computer with the one that I took with me to Leuven. I’d done some work on various files while I was away so they needed to be copied back and to over-write the ones on the big computer.

Of course, if I were to have my files stored on a cloud, there wouldn’t be any need to do that. But I don’t want my files stored anywhere where I couldn’t access them regularly or, more importantly, where other people can access them.

Having done that I made a start on the baking activity.

First task was to make one of my sourdough bread things. I’m not very good with the sourdough as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and it doesn’t rise as much as it should. But adding to it a banana, some ground brazil nuts and a pile of dried and desiccated fruit, it makes a kind of soggy moist fruit cake, a slice of which makes a really delicious and nutritious breakfast with my hot chocolate.

Having set that off I turned my attention to the normal bread. A pile of wholemeal flour, water, salt, yeast, sugar and water and as well as that, several handfuls of sunflower seeds. The yeast and sugar added to the warm water and left to fester, and once it has begun to ferment I could add it to the flour and salt, and mix it all in.

While I was doing that I was talking to Liz on the internet and feeding the sourdough and the ginger while I was at it.

When it was all sitting there festering I went out side for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds and crowds of people wandering around outside this afternoon, including these people here who are playing petanque.

And this is what annoys me intensely because as you can see, not one of these people is wearing a face mask. Never having seen these people before, it’s my betting that they are tourists and if they have come from a Covid-infested area they could be spreading the virus around amongst everyone around here, despite everything that we are trying to do around here to keep the area virus-free.

It beats me, what these people do not understand about the virus and how it spreads after all of this time that we have been suffering. It’s people like this that are responsible to the raging epidemic that is going on at the moment and they should be brought to account.

Crowds of people surging around everywhere this afternoon, as you can see over there in this photo.

That is the footpath underneath the walls, along which I used to run in the evenings when we were allowed out at night. But I wouldn’t show myself up by running along there in broad daylight with all of those people around. I have my pride.

But returning to our moutons as they say around here, you can see where the medieval walls are fenced off from the public because of their crumbling state. I have seen in the Council’s budget a reference to the repair of part of the walls and I hope that this part is to be included. It’s been fenced off since before I came to Granville.

Here’s something that’s extremely exciting and which had happened while I was away in Leuven.

As usual, my route took me along the footpath on top of the headland and down to the lawn near the lighthouse and semaphore post, and on the lawn I stumbled across this.

It seems that a mysterious hole has appeared in the lawn. It’s about 20 cms in diameter and goes down to quite a depth. It seems unlikely to be any kind of natural formation so it’s possible that we are going to be seeing some kind of human activity around here in early course.

That’s something for me to keep at the back of my mind for the future.

While I was observing the hole in the ground, I was overflown by another light aeroplane. It was even quite busy in the air today.

This aeroplane is a Robin DR-400, serial number 1931, registration number F-GIKI and it’s owned by the Granville Aero Club. It’s one of their machines that is used for teaching flying and also teaching navigation, and hasn’t that given me an idea?

As for where it’s going, I can’t say because it hasn’t filed a flight plan and by the time that I returned to my apartment it must have landed because it wasn’t shown on the flight radar.

From there I walked across the car park and down to the headland where I saw the yacht with the wind turbine at the stern whose photo you saw earlier. And then I wandered off along the path on top of the headland overlooking the port.

It goes without saying that I was interested in what was going on down in the chantier navale.

From the viewpoint there I could see down into the yard and I noticed that there was no change in occupancy there. We have Spirit of Conrad, Hermes I, Lys Noir, Freddy Land and Aztec Lady but that’s about it. No-one left and no-one else came while I was away in Leuven.

There’s no-one down there working on them so they can’t be in a dreadful rush to leave here and go back into the water. Not that they could go back into the water right now because as you can see, the tide is right out just now.

And there’s nothing going on at the ferry port either. On the way down to the station I’d noticed that there was an excursion to the Ile de Chausey advertised for today so probably both of the Joly France boats are out there with their passengers.

There seems to be plenty of activity down at the loading bay in the inner harbour. Chausiais is moored up there underneath the loading crane.

The boat behind it is interesting too. It’s shrink-wrapped so it’s possibly a new boat, and it’s looking as if it’s waiting there for a lift to other parts. We’ll have to see who comes along to pick her up.

From the harbour I went on home and partook of what was left of my orange ginger beer – no coffee today because it’s quite warm outside. And it was delicious too. Despite its volatile nature and explosive capability, I’ll make some more – but this time I’ll try some stronger bottles rather than the IKEA ones that couldn’t last the pace.

Back here I carried on with my cooking.

First thing to do was to prepare an apple crumble. Because I have only a small oven I made it in two smaller dishes that I could stack one on top of the other.

While I was doing that I’d switched on the oven and when the crumble was ready I bunged that and the bread in there.

Next was to roll out the pizza pastry that I’d taken out of the freezer first thing. And having greased the pizza tray I put the pizza base in and folded the overhanging edges back into the tray. Then I left to fester for an hour.

Later on I assembled the pizza and when the bread and crumble were cooked I took them out and put the pizza in.

During the various pauses I’ve been working on the photos from July 2019. Another pile has bitten the dust and there are just 38 left for that month. I’m now approaching Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Here are the finished products. Don’t they look delicious?

The pizza tasted really delicious and it would have been even better had I remembered to turn up the oven again after I’d removed the bread. I’ve no idea what the crumble is like because being full after my pizza, I didn’t have a dessert.

Now that I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed. There’s a radio programme that needs doing tomorrow and that’s the first thing to be done. But there’s also the sourdough to be baked so that it’s ready for my mid-morning break and so I’ll have to put that into the oven as soon as I wake up.

Here’s hoping that I have a good cramp-free sleep.

Monday 22nd March 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about all of the tourists having arrived here in Granville. The place was crawling with them this afternoon.

There was this couple sitting on the bench at the end of the headland by the watchman’s old cabin and they were just any one of any number of them that I could have photographed today, all lying around disporting themselves in the sun.

It beats me, it really does, what goes through the heads of some people in situations like this. What don’t they understand about a pandemic? How many more people have to die before they get the message?

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m one of the last people to advocate the presence of soldiers on the streets but in a situation like this I would have the military out at each boundary checking people’s right to travel. The military might not be good for much, but this is the kind of thing that’s important.

This morning I was out of bed just after the first alarm and after the medication I made a start on the radio programme. I was right that I wouldn’t finish it by 11:15 but starting from scratch as I did and finishing by 12:15, that was pretty good going and I was happy with that, especially as I had my usual break for hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread.

And once it was finished and I’d heard it, I crashed out on the armchair in the office and as a result I was late for my lunch yet again.

This afternoon I Had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was in Crewe last night and going to meet Esi. I’d already met her a couple of times around here and there and this time I walked up Earle Street and turned round the corner into Market Street and had the sun full in my eyes so I couldn’t see a thing. There was someone I knew standing on the left so I said “hi” to her but I couldn’t see who the other people were with her. It wasn’t until I’d gone past that I thought that the possibility might be that one of them was TOTGA. As I walked into the Square I heard someone shout my name. It was a boy’s voice, sounded like one of my classmates from school. I turned round but couldn’t see anything. There were some people loading a lorry and trailer with all kinds of mannequins to put into a new shop that was opening next to where the old cinema used to be. I carried on walking past the Bus Station and came to some waste land. I walked all over this waste land round the back of the bus station and the back end of the houses at the top end of Victoria Street but suddenly realised that I was miles away from where I was going to meet Esi so I set off to walk back. I remember at one point having a conversation but I only got 3 or 4 words out before I realised that I was too tired to say the rest.

Having done that I made another start on the photos from July 2019 and made good progress. I’m now down the james River somewhere near the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. There’s only about another 170 to do before they are all completed for the month of July 2019. Only 3 months or so to go after that. The big question is “will I finish all of this, or will all of this finish me?”.

There was the usual pause to go out for my walk this afternoon.

While I’d been working away the sun had been streaming in through the window so I was hoping that the day would be better than yesterday, and I wasn’t to be disappointed.

There was some mist about as you can see in the photo and there was plenty of cloud around too but at least it was an awful lot lighter than it was yesterday. It was cold but not all that windy and that’s the first time for ages that I haven’t been blown away.

No-one down on the beach wandering around, so it seemed but there were plenty of other people up here on the path on top of the cliffs and I had to thread my way through the crowds on the path and reclining on the lawn by the lighthouse.

Down at the headland there wasn’t anything going on except for the tourists of course but the vegetation was looking quite good today.

The trees are starting to sprout their leaves right now and the gorse bushes are in full bloom giving us a lovely carpet of yellow flowers down there by the bottom footpath and on the cliffs lower down.

But there was nothing going on out at sea and the Brittany coast wasn’t all that clear so I pushed on along the path and across the road where I was nearly flattened by someone in a minibus – something that doubtless filled you all with a great deal of dismay.

There was all kinds of excitement going on at the chantier navale this afternoon as you can see. It looks as if we are about to have another change of occupant in there.

The portable boat lift has moved from its parking place and is now hovering about over the trawler Hermes 1. In the absence of any other indication, it looks as if she is preparing to be put back into the water at the next high tide. I waited there for a good few minutes to see if anything was going to develop but nothing seemed to be moving and they weren’t in any rush to do anything.

The other boats are still there – Spirit of Conrad, Lys Noir, Freddy Land and, out of shot, Aztec Lady. But things are starting to become interesting down there right now.

Something else that’s been going on right now is the parking of fishing boats by the Fish Processing Plant and letting them go aground when the tide was out.

The tide wasn’t out far enough today to see whether there would be any there today, but one thing that I noticed is that there now is a fishing boat that seems to be tied up over by the ferry port next to Joly France. Why this is happening is beyond my comprehension but the cynic in me suggests that they must have increased the mooring charged in the inner harbour.

With nothing else going on down there I headed for home and my mug of hot coffee, and continued with the photos until it was guitar time, although a little crash-out yet again didn’t help matters very much.

Tea tonight was a lentil and tofu pie with vegetables followed by apple pie and ice cream. I’m trying to empty the freezer a little as I’m running out of room in there.

Welsh tomorrow so I’m off to bed early. I need to be on form. And then it’s printing out papers and packing ready for the road on Wednesday.

Friday 19th March 2021 – AFTER ALL OF THE …

… excitement last night, I rounded up the surviving bottles and put them in a plastic box on top of the fridge in the bathroom where they won’t cause too much damage in the future if a similar eventuality were to arise.

But making the orange ginger beer is back on again, I reckon, because I don’t think that it was that which caused the problems.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been using an assortment of various bottles here, mostly recycled lemonade bottles and the like as well as a few rather dodgy cheap bottles.

But I also have three new, expensive bottles that I bought from IKEA. Two are used as water containers and the third was a spare. That was pressed into service to hold the ginger beer and, unbelievably, it was that one that blew up. The recycled ones and the dodgy cheap ones are keeping going.

That was something of a surprise.

What else which was a surprise was that despite tempting fate last night, I did manage to crawl out of bed just after the first alarm. And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There was a huge murder mystery going on last night with about 20 suspects. There was a detective giving the final denouément right at the very end, going through each person in turn explaining why he would have done it and and finally saying that they didn’t because … and coming up with some reason. This went on for ever and I can’t remember it at all. At the end I was with a woman, someone whom I knew and I can’t think who it was now. We were discussing the radio system. We had half a dozen different aerials, half a dozen different things and we were all switching between the aerials automatically. We would expect a few problems with the automation and I was thinking about having the whole thing redone so that it would still be automatic but I could manually control the aerials so that I knew which aerial was transmitting what. And again this is another thing about which I remember very little.

After the dictaphone notes I made a start on the photos from Greenland. Another pile of those have bitten the dust now and I’m sitting on the deck of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR watching them unload the zodiacs that will take us to the shore where buses will take up to the airport at Kangerlussuaq. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to break off my Transatlantic voyage here because the ship had been chartered by a bunch of North American schoolkids and being from Europe, I didn’t have a valid police check record. I had to come back 3 weeks later when the ship returned so that I could board her and continue my journey across the Atlantic to the Canadian mainland.

By now it was light so I prepared to do battle with the living room, making myself some hot chocolate and cutting myself a slice of fruit sourdough bread. But just at that moment Rosemary rang with a problem and we ended up having a brief chat. One hour and three minutes to be precise.

The damage in the living room is not as extensive as I thought. One of the windows in the nice unit in the living room has been peppered with shrapnel that has made its marks upon the glass, and the TV screen that I use as a computer monitor has taken a bashing too.

The carpet is in the bath. I’ve scrubbed it, used soap on it, scrubbed it again and rinsed it thoroughly. Now it’s in there drying off. And it’ll have another go tomorrow afternoon after my shower. All of the ginger beer that wasn’t in the tray as soaked into the carpet. There wasn’t much anywhere else.

Tons of broken glass about the place and I’ve brushed up as much as I could. But anyone who comes here now will have to be careful where they sit. We all know what happened to the captain of the Good Ship Venus.

The floor has been washed and it will have another washing tomorrow. And I’ll wash down the furniture etc as well tomorrow.

But some good did come out of all of this. The mechanical stopper of the broken bottle was intact and it had obviously proved its worth by resisting the explosion. So I swapped it over onto one of the cheap bottles and now that makes a really good seal. So all was not lost.

Another task that I had to perform was to speak to a certain young Canadian girl whom I know to acquaint her with the news that I’d received from Rachel yesterday because I imagined that in the confusion she would have been left out. We had quite a chat for 15-20 minutes about the events of yesterday and also about lots of other stuff too.

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

And for something of a change just recently, we were having a really nice day today.

The weather was cool and windy but there was a bright blue sky and for once there wasn’t any fog or haze. The tide was quite far out and there were several people down there on the beach and amongst the rocks making the most of the nice afternoon.

One thing that I have noticed – or, maybe, it’s more correct to say that I haven’t noticed, is that there haven’t been any bird-men around for quite a while. Where they leap off the cliffs is just over there to the right near the cemetery – something that probably means that if they make a mistake on take-off they don’t have far to go.

But to be serious … “for once” – ed … I wonder what’s happened that means that they haven’t been taking to the air just recently.

With the weather being so much better today I had a good peer out to sea to see if I could seee Jersy on the horizon today.

And sure enough, with a GOOD LONG LENS and plenty of enhancement back at the apartment later, I was able just about to pick out the island. Not as clearly as I have done in the past, but the fact that we can see it at all today 58kms away shows you just what an improvement that we have had.

Not like in the Auvergne, apparently. Rosemary told me that she awoke this morning to a couple of inches of snow.

Just one or two people around today, so I had the place pretty much to myself. I pushed on along the path, across the lawn and across the car park down to the end of the headland.

The Memorial to the Missing Seafarers is still there – not that that’s any surprise – but you can actually see it today, which is something.

Yesterday we struggled to see much further beyond Le Loup, the light that sits on top of the rock just outside the harbour entrance, but today with it being clear, we can see the town of Jullouville quite easily across the bay, and right to the water tower on the ridge at the back of the town.

On top of the ridge just to the right of the right-hand flagpole is that mystery tower. I haven’t forgotten that one of these days I intend to go and see what it is

With nothing going on out in the bay across to the Brittany coast I pushed of along the footpath at the top of the cliff.

Down in the chantier navale we have yet more movement and change of occupancy.

Spirit of Conrad, Aztec Lady, Lys Noir, Hermes 1 and Freddy Land are still there, but the trawler Charlevy has gone back into the water. On the morning tide, apparently. So there’s now room for someone else to come in and join the (af)fray.

There might be room for more boats very soon too because the whole place was quite a hive of activity today. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many people down there working on the boats, from private owners in private cars to specialist companies with sign-written vans.

The racket that they were making was quite unbearable. It looks as if everyone is making ready quite rapidly in anticipation of an ease in the lockdown. That’s what I call optimism.

While we haven’t seen to many hang-gliders just recently, we have been seeing a lot of fishing boats abandoned to the tide at the jetty by the Fish Processing Plant.

It beats me as to why. We went for months, if not years, without seeing a one except for special reasons but this last few weeks we see them on a regular basis. Clearly something is up.

My time was also up so I headed off home where I bumped into one of my neighbours and we had quite a chat. And then I came up for my hot coffee.

There was no guitar practice tonight. I can catch up with that another time. But when I returned I attacked that page of my notes from my trip around Central Europe on which I’ve made very little progress just recently, and found that I was advancing quite rapidly. I decided therefore to stick at it until I finished it because I was fed up of it hanging around.

Round about 20:00 I finally finished it and now IT’S ON LINE at long last. I hope that it won’t take me long to finish off this exercise, although there is a page on which I’ve been stuck for a while and I don’t know what I’m going to do about that one.

Tea was taco rolls and rice. I wasn’t very hungry and half of it finished in the bin. No pudding either.

So after the exertions of yesterday and today and having already crashed out for half an hour (and instead of fighting it, I allowed myself to be carried away) I’m off to bed for a good sleep.

No shopping tomorrow. Instead I’ll catch up with the guitar and practice that I missed and wash the living room again.

There’s football tomorrow afternoon and I mustn’t miss that either.

And then I need to slowly thing about going to Leuven. Wednesday, that is. I wonder what they will tell me this time.

Wednesday 17th March 2021 – HAVING SAID YESTERDAY …

… that I was going to give up this fortune-telling lark because I couldn’t see any future in it, I’ve changed my mind and I’m now back in business.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago when the charter yachts started to arrive in the chantier navale for overhaul, I said that I wouldn’t be surprised if we were to see Spirit of Conrad – the boat on which we went down the Brittany coast in the early summer – in there next.

Well, people, guess what?

That’s right. Over there on the far side where Charles Marie had been moored for the last few weeks, she seems to have gone back into the water and Spirit of Conrad is now there in her place.

There’s another pleasure craft in there today too. Nearest the camera is a small boat called Freddy Land about which I know nothing at all.

But there you are. How about that for a prediction?

Another thing about which I complained quite voiciferously the other day was the speed at which they seem to be repairing the roof on the College Malraux across from where I live.

It seems that they must have heard me, or else they are regular readers of this rubbish that I write, because they have put on a spurt that has taken le quite by surprise and in just 48 hours they’ve almost finished the part that they had stripped off

They can obviously do it when they really try, so I wonder what holds them up during the periods when they don’t seem to be making any progress at all

Nothing held me up this morning, I have to say. Once more I leapt out of bed with alacrity at the sound of the first alarm … “well, something like that, anyway” – ed … and went off for my medication.

Afterwards I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There was a girls’ school that was undergoing a considerable amount of reorganisation and at the parents’ Annual General Meeting quite a few proposals were taken, one of which went against the advice of the headmistress, was to reorganise the year 7.5. That was voted on and the reorganisation was agreed. I pressed “refresh” to reload the document on my computer but my computer crashed so I had to switch it on again and reload the document so that I could read it. It came up OK this time but just then I had a bad attack of cramp (yet again and this is making me feel totally fed up) and awoke.

First task after I’d organised myself was to deal with the booking for my trip to Leuven next week. I’m going on Wednesday, coming back on Saturday, all at the usual time and hoping that I’m not going to be held up like I was last week. I can’t do with this waiting around killing time.

Interestingly, if you thought that the rail-fare was cheap last time, it was even cheaper this time. That can only be good news and it’s not as if I couldn’t do with it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Next thing was to have another go at the back-up drive and another pile of stuff has bitten the dust. But very little free space saved. We’ve reached the point, as I explained a few days ago, where the bulk of the big stuff has been done. It’s all little stuff now, 50kb here and there, that kind of thing.

After lunch, I was in great demand so it seemed. Both Rosemary and Ingrid rang me up for a chat – Rosemary twice in fact. But now that I’ve invented a hands-free kit for the phone I was able to take full advantage of the pause by working on the photos from Greenland and I did a huge bundle of those while I was chatting.

The weather outside was another day of mist and fog.

Nothing like as bad as it was the other day of course. The harvesters of Bouchots – the mussels that grow on strings – were out there in force as you can see, over at Donville les Bains near the holiday camp where I nearly ended up staying. The tide is well out just now so they have plenty of room to move about.

Regular readers of this rubbish might recall that I’ve mentioned the Bouchots before. This was a serendipitous discovery where someone left some ropes out in the sea for some kind of purpose and when he came back a while later he found the m all covered in mussels.

The advantage of mussels grown on strings and not on the sand is that they don’t have sand in them so they don’t taste gritty.

Just one or two people wandering around out there this afternoon as I walked down the path and onto the lawn at the end.

The Monument to the Resistance Fighters of World War II was looking particularly attractive this afternoon so I took a photo of it.

The branches of that tree across the car park fitted nicely into the arms of the Cross of Lorraine and Le Loup, the light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour – fitted nicely into the upright.

It’s a shame though that for some reason or other they didn’t treat the metal before they installed it. I’m not sure if a metal plaque streaked with rust was part of the plan at all because it does really look depressing and it will only become worse.

Out in the bay there was nothing at all happening so I walked off down the path to look at the port and the chantier navale.

The chantier navale we’ve already seen, but there was some activity in the wet harbour too.

Our old friend Thora was in there in the unloading bay and there was plenty of other things going on with those two large lorries over there and the tons of stuff piled up on the quayside.

With nothing else going on, I headed back for home and my hot coffee, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon dealing with a day when I was in Central Europe. I seem to be stuck on this day right now and I wish that I could advance.

The guitar practice was enjoyable. I spent my bass guitar session playing a bass solo to “Jumping Jack Flash” just to see how it sounded, and it was pretty impressive. With the acoustic guitar I was having some fun with ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” and “Don’t Bring Me Down”.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by apple pie and then I came back in here to write up my notes. Now it’s bed time – an early night because tomorrow I’m off to St Lô and the Prefecture to have my fingerprints taken for my new carte d’identité. Things are slowly ticking over here and we might slowly reach a conclusion. And not before time.

On the way back, I’ll take advantage of the big shops there and see if I can’t lay in some stocks of stuff that I can’t get so easily around here.

Thursday 4th March 2021 – YOU HAVE TO ADMIT …

… that the standard of graffiti that we have around here is far superior to anything that you’ll find anywhere else.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day on our way to the railway station we saw some banners stuck in the windows of a few of the bars and restaurants, made by someone with some kind of skill in calligraphy. It seems that our phantom calligrapher has been out on his travels elsewhere too.

The town is now littered with more of the same kind of notices talking about all kinds of different subjects. I wonder where he’ll be going next.

As for me, I’ll probably be going back to bed next because once again, I’d been up very early. Just after the first alarm again this morning.

Plenty of time to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d killed some woman and I’m not sure how and I’m not sure why. I didn’t admit to it. This woman was a friend of someone who was something of a tough character and he was trying to find out who did it. I was quite confident that I would be particularly safe. He was talking to me one day and the subject of minivans came up in the conversation. He asked me if I knew what a minivan was. Seeing as we were in North America at the time I said that it was something like an F250 or an F350. He immediately said “it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one who killed these people. I’m going to make you suffer as much as these other people suffered”, grabbed hold of me and went to put me in this car, to take me to pick up the rifle and the books I’d been reading at the time and 1 or 2 other things.

Later on some woman in a block of flats where I was living had had a row with everyone, I don’t know what about but she got into her car and drove it around the car park. She’d bumped into 1 or 2 cars while she was doing it and ended up rolling down the steep bank and ended up with her car in the pond. I’m not sure what else had happened but my yellow estate car MMB was in the pond as well and a couple of motorbikes and so on. I asked my father “what are we doing tomorrow? Do you think we could rescue my car from out of the pond?”. He said “yes, I suppose we could” so I asked “what time? Morning? Lunchtime? Afternoon?” and he didn’t really give me a definite answer. I was just chatting saying “I really hate working in water” which I do. I was loitering around because I was half-expecting someone to come along to call a breakdown truck and winch this woman’s car out of the pond. I was thinking that if they were going to do that I may as well slip them £50 or something and winch MMB out of the pond as well at the same time so I was loitering around waiting for something to happen.

There was plenty of time to have a shower and set the washing machine off on a cycle (a clever washing machine, mine) before I went off out to the shops.

Not that I had gone very far before I had to start to brandish the camera about.

Although the harbour gates were closed, there was a big yacht coming sailing into the port. With her sails not being up I didn’t recognise her at first as she was so far out but as she sailed in deeper to the port I could se the number – G90 – painted upon her bow.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recognise her as being La Granvillaise, another one of the charter yachts that plies for hire from the port. And with the harbour gates being closed, I couldn’t work out why she’d come round here right now from her berth in the yacht harbour, although I did have my suspicions.

There was actually quite a lot of activity in the port this morning.

Marité is still in there tied up in her little corner, and while we don’t have a gravel boat (we haven’t seen one of those in here for a good few months) we have Normandy Trader coming to pay us a little visit. She always seems to be here on a Thursday morning.

Once more she’s fully loaded, and I’ve heard a little whisper here and there that her owners are contemplating buying a bigger ship as they are actually having to turn away freight. It’s one of the very few upsides of Brexit that rather than export their goods to the UK and then into mainland Europe, all of the difficulties that this is presenting means that it’s easier for them to send them direct to here first rather than last.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the pointing of the wall on the Rampe du Monte à Regret ground to a halt a few weeks ago and nothing more was done to it since.

Today, the workmen are back and the work has recommenced. They aren’t working particularly fast of course, but the fact that they are here is something.

My walk up to LIDL was quite energetic and while I wasn’t quite at the “invading Poland” speed I made it all the way up the steep bank without stopping for breath and that’s rather better than it has been of late.

At LIDL I loaded up with tons of stuff and had I been able to carry it, I would have come away with more. But I wasn’t going to turn down 3kg of potatoes at just €1:69 even if I have to live on potato curry for the next couple of weeks.

So loaded up like a packhorse I staggered out into the fresh air (because I’ve never seen LIDL as crowded as it was today) and headed for home.

A little earlier we’d seen them pointing the wall at the Rampe du Monte à Regret – the face that looks down onto the Place Pelley.

But it looks as if they are going to be doing this face too – the one that looks out onto the Rue des Juifs. That’s all been raked out and cleaned out They’ve left a few weeds growing in there, I have to say, but I imagine that they are hoping that the lime in the mortar will do for them.

That’s horrible, nasty caustic stuff as my hands will testify when I was pointing the wall of my house in the Auvergne.

Back here I had a hot chocolate and came in here to work – but fell asleep. It was a short night, an early start and an exhausting visit to the shops so what do you expect?

For most of the afternoon I’ve been clearing out the back-up drive on which I copied all of the data from every single hard drive or memory stick that wasn’t actually connected to the big machine. Little by little I’ve been eating away at it and now there are just 4 items to examine.

Even more interestingly, there is now 715GB free on it and I need for that to be over 1TB so I can start to back-up onto it from the big computer – although a lot of stuff on the big computer will over-write some of the older stuff.

And talking of older stuff, I’ve been finding files dated 1997 and 1998. It won’t be long before I find the stuff from 1992 when I first bought a PC. Stuff from the 80s when I had the Apple II – I think that Nerina might still have that.

There was the usual break for lunch of course, and also the walk around the headland in the afternoon.

Mind you, I’m not too sure about the walk around the headland because it was another one of those days where had the fog been any thicker, I would have had to grope my way around the path.

It beats me what the matter might be the weather just now. We’re going from gale-force winds to this thick oppressive calm that’s letting the fog bank up against the cliffs here and we can’t se a thing. That might explain why there were so few people out and about on the beaches.

The strange thing about this is that around the corner, the fog isn’t anything like as thick.

This is the lower footpath that goes right round the end of the headland and as you can see, that’s comparatively clear. Clear of fog, and clear of people too, which was surprising because up here on top in the car park it was heaving with all kinds of young families going walkabout. No-one braving the lower footpath though.

And nothing to see out to sea either. All of the fishing boats that were going out have gone out and they will be well out to sea by now.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there’s a seafarers’ monument here on the path – in honour of two crews of lifeboatmen who lost their lives going out to sea to rescue distressed mariners.

All of the writing on the monument is very hard to read as it’s long-since faded away but today we had a guy from the local council with his fine paintbrush and pot of black enamel paint busily painting back into the monument all of the names and the details of the events in which they lost their lives.

It’s about time that they started doing things like this to make the place look as if people live here. Everything has become just a little run-down just recently.

And if that’s not enough to be going on with, I’m not quite sure what all of that is over there.

Joly France is moored up at the ferry terminal. It doesn’t look as if she’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. There’s nothing doing over on the Ile de Chausey right now and while sometimes the ferries will do little trips with tourists all around the bay, there are no tourists particularly right now.

But I’m more interested in the rather large red builders’ bags that are being unloaded over there. They are dropping off a couple of dozen from that lorry and trailer so it looks as if there’s something really serious going to be happening there sometime soon and I wonder what it will be.

While we’re up here on the cliffs we can look down and see what’s going on in the chantier navale today.

And I was right about my little thought this morning. We’ve yet another change of occupancy down there today. As well as Aztec Lady, Lys Noir and Charles-Marie down there on blocks, La Granvillaise has now come in to join them. That was why she sailed into the outer harbour when the harbour gates were closed – she wasn’t going that way but coming over here for an overhaul.

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … with no possibility of any yacht charters at the moment the owners may as well take their boats out of the water and have them overhauled ready for whenever the season might start. I shan’t be surprised to see Spirit of Conrad, the boat in which we went down the Brittany coast last summer, in there next for an overhaul.

Just now we’d seen Joly France in a NAABSA (Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground) position over at the ferry terminal but here we have a trawler also in a NAABSA position by the firsh processing plant.

And being a catamaran, she is of course even more safely aground than the others.

Back here I had a coffee and some of my vegan coffee cake and then carried on with my work. I’ve done another 20 photos from Greenland 2019 and some more work on the arrears from Central Europe.

All of that took me up to guitar practice time, which passed quite enjoyably this evening.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by jam pie ad ice cream, all very nice and delicious.

But now I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to mix some sourdough before I go to bed. I have nothing to eat for my mid-morning breakfast so I reckon that it’s time to make a sourdough fruit loaf. I need some real bread too so if I make that in the morning they’ll both be ready to be baked in time.

No point in having the oven on just for one thing when there are two things to be made.

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 – I DON’T KNOW …

… if today has been a good day or not.

It started off as a good day anyway because despite the late night I was up very shortly after the first alarm yet again.

And even though I didn’t have much sleep last night there was still plenty of time to go off on a wander around.

I’d been out looking for cars to use as taxis and I’d been out at the auctions. I’d come back with not one but 2 Cortina either Mk IV or V but they were 2-litres. They needed some work doing to get them ready for the road. I remembered the issues that we were having in Gainsborough Road about the local council not liking me working on cars there and how we were going to cope. My initial reaction was to build a high fence halfway down the garden so that no-one could see over it. Nerina thought that we would be in trouble with the planning permission people but I pointed out that quite a few of their Council houses had high fences halfway down the garden where people couldn’t see over. I thought that if the Council took proceedings against me I could bring them into disrepute because of the story about their fences. There was the issue of wheels and tyres with these 2-litres having slightly wheels we’d have to go through the collection to make sure that we had enough tyres, that kind of thing. It meant swapping over one or two that were already on one or two vehicles that we were using.
As an aside, all Cortinas (except the P100) used 13″ wheels but 1.3 and 1.6 models used 165/80 tyres whereas 2.0 and 2.3 used 185/70 tyres. Even so, when I had the taxis, as long as the four tyres were the same size I didn’t usually pay too much attention to what went on where

Later on there were 3 tough cowboys last night, 1 of whom was black. They were riding together and came into this town. There was a lot of racism in the old Wild West of course and the owners of the livery stable where they were going to leave their horses weren’t very keen on the idea of this black cowboy and were going to make a great deal of trouble about it. Next day the 3 cowboys assembled to ride off and went down to fetch their horses. The 2 white guys rode off first. The black guy had some trouble getting onto his horse so he was a good few hundred yards behind the other 2 and when he rode out of the livery stable the guy who ran it simply drew his gun and shot him 3 times. A passer-by came to investigate but the livery stable owner fired a gun in the air to frighten him away.
And it’s not very often that there’s a voyage without me in it anywhere, is it?

Having deal with the dictaphone first job was to unblock the sink. The water was taking about a week to disappear. While I was at it I cleaned out and tidied the cupboard under the sink.

That’s all cleaned and the sink unblocked but the water isn’t going out all that much quicker. I’ll have to buttonhole one of my neighbours and see if they are having problems too. But it started all of a sudden yesterday evening and I’ve no idea why.

The rest of the morning has been spent in dealing with a mountain of correspondence that had built up over the last few weeks, as many regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having received a reply from me this morning. I think that I’m up-to-date now so if you are expecting a reply from me and you haven’t had it, let me know.

After lunch I’ve been tidying up – some bits and pieces in the bedroom but also on the computer. I’ve come across another raft of stuff that I’ve overlooked on a memory stick so I’ve been organising that. As well as that, I had a phone call to deal with and also an important e-mail to do.

And then, rather sadly, I crashed out for half an hour. Another really deep one too.

There was quite a lot of excitement as I set out for my afternoon walk today.

The seagull was up on his or her windowsill talking to the china or plastic bird on the inside. But it was also tapping on the window with its beak in a kind of morse code. It was quite insistent too. One of the neighbours had told me that the bird did this, but I don’t recall ever having seen it in action.

Having watched it for a couple of minutes, I headed off on my little wander around the headland – in the rain because while it might be dry at the moment the ground was quite wet and there were heavy dark clouds all around.

This is a pretty miserable photo, heavily enhanced, and ordinarily it would be discarded but it’s here to serve a purpose.

Just now I mentioned that the weather has changed. The really nice weather that we were having over the weekend has gone and it’s taken the sea fog with it too, so we can have our view back. Right out there on the horizon we can, if we strain ourselves, just about make out the coast of Jersey

Unfortunately the image isn’t clear enough to see any of the buildings

Down on the beach, the crowds of the last coupe of days have dispersed. The tide isn’t right out yet and in any case, the Grand Marée is over for the next few weeks. The tides won’t go low enough to make it worthwhile.

Another photo that I took today, simply because I could, was of the Ile de Chausey.

That’s a lot clearer today and with the photo being heavily enhanced you can see the buildings on the island. But there’s not a single boat in the image today. It was very quiet on the water. I walked around the headland to look out across the bay but there wasn’t even a boat around there on the water.

No interesting old cars today on the car park either which was a shame but the change in the weather seemd to have kept everyone indoors. I pushed off along the path in comparative quiet.

We have a change of occupant in the chantier navale today.

As well as Aztec Lady and Lys Noir, we have another one of the charter yachts, Charles Marie in there today up on blocks.

I suppose that it’s the right time of year to be overhauling them. No-one has the least idea of when things are going to reopen and the infection figures are not encouraging so they may as well be overhauled when there is nothing else going on so that they will be ready (if and) when things start to get back under way.

Back here in the apartment I had my coffee and coffee cake and then attacked another 20 photos of the Greenland expedition. I’m now ashore at Brattahlid, the goal of my voyage, and the home of Leif Erikson, the original Norse settler of Greenland.

Following in the footsteps – or the wake, rather – of the earliest Norse settler/voyagers was my ambition and we reached as far as Hvalsey and Brattahlid, but the third site, that of Gardar, eluded me. I was making tentative enquiries about going there when the virus hit and Greenland closed its borders

There was time for a half-hour or so on the arrears of Summer 2020 before knocking off for guitar practice.

Tea was veggie balls with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce followed by jam pie and vegan ice cream seeing as I’ve run out of soya coconut stuff. I was going to make custard but I was running rather late.

At the moment I’m listening to a few concerts that I have up my sleeve. I need to find three live concerts to take me up to the summer. I’ve a couple in mind including another one that is extremely rare but it does no harm to listen through them all and make a few editing notes about where they can be improved.

When I listen back to some of the very first ones that I did 10 years ago now, it makes me wince. I must have learnt something, I suppose, after all that time. As for “Strife”, I had some feedback from, would you believe, California. It had been played in a RV Showroom and by all accounts had gone down really well.

So I’m off to bed in a minute. Shopping tomorrow and I’m low on supplies so I’m going to be loaded up like a packhorse on the way home. I need to gird up my loins and gather my strength.

Monday 1st March 2021 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

It’s Saint David’s Day today so Happy St David’s Day to everyone from Wales who is a regular reader of this rubbish, Rhys.

When she came to visit me yesterday, Liz brought me some daffodils that she had plucked from her garden. They weren’t open but I’d left them in a glass of water overnight and this morning I was greeted with this gorgeous sight.

In fact, I have quite a lot of Welsh blood in me – more than you realise – because it’s only because of Welsh bedroom practices that I’m here. Like most people back in the 1950s, my father was a great believer in the use of Welsh letters.

And if you don’t know what a Welsh letter is, it’s a French letter with a leek in it and you need to say that out loud in order to understand it.

This morning, to my own surprise as well as to yours, I actually beat the second alarm, never mind the third alarm, to my feet. Mind you, I was in bed before 23:00 for the first time for ages so I suppose that that might have had something to do with it.

First thing that I did was to vent the gases out of the kefir that I made yesterday.

You can see the bottles on the right here with the new batch that I’m brewing in the large jar at the back. And if you look very closely you can see what I mean about the stoppers on those two cheap bottles that I bought. I’ve replaced the washers with some that are more substantial and while they are certainly working much better than the cheap plastic washers that were on them, the stoppers still aren’t fitting correctly.

On the left is the remaining bottle of ginger beer. That’s definitely a success and I’ll be making more of that. I’ve seen a reference to orange ginger beer and I have some orange juice loitering around that I shall try.

After the medication I attacked the next radio programme and having done some of the work while I was in Leuven I’d completed the work aby about 11:40, only to find that I’d done the wrong programme. But it’s not a big worry because I’m several weeks ahead of myself so I can do the one that I missed next Monday.

For the rest of the morning I did some work on the photos from Greenland. Not very many of those because having now arrived in Qaqortoq in Greenland I needed to find a map of the town in order to identify some of the places that I had visited as I walked around the town.

But even if I do just 20 per day, it’s still going to be decent progress.

One thing that I ought to mention as well is that having edited some of the photos on the little travelling Acer and then on the laptop that I’d bought in North Dakota, the results were pretty dismal because of the poor quality of the screens and the graphics cards and I had to start again with them on this big machine.

But the ones that I’d done while I was in Leuven on the machine that I had repaired were just as they are supposed to be and look quite good on this machine.

All of this is making me think again for the moment about repairing one of the small laptops. This one that I fixed seems to be doing the business and with the CD drive that’s in it, I think that the extra 0.6 kilogramme won’t be such of an issue when I compare the advantages of the machine.

After lunch I had a form to fill in about my Welsh exam, the next radio programme to send off to the tech team and then to carry out some research into the big desktop computer.

The big machine is running with a 256GB solid State Drive as a C drive, a 1TB drive as a data drive and a 4TB drive as a back-up drive. Space is starting to run out on the C drive and the data drive so I’m planning to replace the 256GB SSD with a 1TB SSD, take out the data drive, convert the back-up drive to be the data drive and then add the largest possible drive as a back-up drive.

Or even add more drives in if I possibly can if there are more SATA slots on the hard drive.

It’s also running 8GB of RAM and I’m thinking of upgrading that to 16GB or even 32GB.

All of this means that I have to contact the manufacturers for some further information.

There was also the dictaphone to deal with.

I was up in Canada last night. Darren, one of his daughters and I were in an Artic heading down to somewhere in Maine with a tanker on the back. I was saying how good it was to be back in Canada after all this time. Darren was telling me what he needed me to do. he had a plate off a vehicle and was going to put it on another and I had to block something with this other vehicle so that he could do something with the lorry without having other vehicles inconveniencing him and getting in his way. I didn’t quite understand it but it would all become very clear in due course. We pulled up at a transport café and went in. While we were queueing up in there for something someone pulled up with a Mk I Cortina with British plates on it. I thought that this was really surprising. I had a look at the vehicle and it had some publicity on the side. I went to take a photo with the NIKON J1 but it wouldn’t photograph. We’re back to this thing about photos again and they aren’t working with the J1 (not another occasion with the failed camera!). I was trying for ages. When I looked again it had gone and another vehicle was there with French plates on it, a kind of flatbed mini lorry or something. A couple of minutes later this Cortina was back but with a different number on it now. Someone was playing around because the number ended with “40 G” and someone had written something to do with a lady’s anatomy after the G. Again I tried to photograph it but again the camera wouldn’t work. Those two wandered off out there and I was still trying to make this camera work. One of the guys at the till said something like “they’ve rung up and you have to go”. I made myself a quick coffee but the kettle wouldn’t boil. In the meantime I put milk in the wrong mug so after a couple of minutes and nothing was happening I just tipped it all away and ran off to go back to the lorry to join them again.

Later on I was working in an office and I was being sent on a mission to Germany somewhere. I’d been allocated a room on my own more by accident than design but then we found out that one of the people coming was a woman and they were wondering how best to accommodate her. I suggested that she could have my room and I’d share with someone else. I wasn’t really happy about sharing but there was nothing much you could do in a situation like this. For some unknown reason I couldn’t get them to hear what I was saying. They said “yes that’s the first thing we thought of” but started off on some other rambling explanation that I didn’t understand at all. it seemed such an obvious thing to do so I couldn’t understand why they were going through such a performance and rigmarole and ritual to try to think of another way round this solution. Then I returned home and told my partner whoever i was with that I was off on a mission to Germany. She asked “where in Germany?”. I replied “I don’t really know”. “What do you mean?” she asked. I replied “they are just sending me to Germany, that’s the important thing, that I’m going on a mission and it’ll all work out”. She was surprised that I wasn’t really interested in knowing which town it was that I was going to.

Today was another gorgeous, summer day with a bright blue sky and not a single cloud up there to obscure the view.

The kids are still out on half-term holiday by the looks of things as there were plenty of people around. The beach was swarming with people out and about this afternoon and I can’t say that I blamed them.

While I was out there, I bumped into one of my neighbours and we had quite a little chat about this and that. She told me about the new tenants on the ground floor and one or two other things besides.

However I couldn’t stay out there chatting all day, I had to carry on with my walk.

When I reached the end of the headland by the lighthouse I discovered why there were so many people out there on the beach today.

The tide is miles out today so of course it must be the Grand Marée, the highest, and hence also the lowest, tides of the year when the water drops below the level of foreshore that are let out to commercial exploitation. And so everyone swarms onto the sands and the rocks for the peche à pied, scavenging about in the sand and the rocks for whatever they can find there that’s edible.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we did a radio report on the Grand Marée last year that went down really well.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the situation in the chantier navale.

Yesterday we saw it down from street level but today I’m up on the cliffs on top where I can look down into the yard. We can see Aztec Lady over there on the right-hand side where it’s been for several weeks now without very much happening to it, and over on the left is Lys Noir up on the blocks where it’s been for a while too.

But that’s all there is today. The fishing boat that has been there for several weeks has gone and while I was in Belgium the yacht that has been there for months on end also left the yard.

But where it’s gone to, I really have no idea.

There’s plenty of excitement going on down in the outer tidal harbour today.

While I’d been walking round the top of the cliffs I’d noticed all of the tracks of heavy machinery out there in the silt and I wondered what was going on down there today. But here, there are several heavy diggers down there together with several workmen in attendance and a tractor with a large trailer attached thereto.

There was nothing about that would give any indication of what they were doing, but if anything were to be done in the tidal harbour, the time of the lowest tide of the year would be the right time to be doing it.

There was other work going on in the vicinity this afternoon too.

At the weekend I’d seen “no waiting” signs up on the car parking spaces in the Boulevard Vaufleury and so I suspected that something would be going on there this week. It seems that we’re having a pile of topiary on the trees right now.

It’s quite possible that they are leaving it rather too late though. We’ve already noticed that the birds are starting to build their nests and I can easily imagine that they’ve trimmed out the odd nest or two from the outer branches of a few of these trees.

Back here I made myself a hot coffee and unwrapped the birthday present that Liz had brought me yesterday.

A gorgeous vegan coffee cake made with her own fair hands and so I cut myself a slice to see what it was like. And here’s another one that receives 10 out of 10. It’s absolutely delicious.

The rest of the afternoon, such as it was, was spent working on the arrears of my voyage around Central Europe. But shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep. And how! I was out like a light for a good hour or so and I’d even managed to go off on a ramble while I was out.

I was doing some work at home when Nerina suddenly announced “We’ve forgotten Lil (one of the staff at the Oddfellows Club whom we used to take around in our taxis)”. I said I’d go straight away but she said there’s no real rush. Finish what you are doing. So when I’d finished what I was doing I leapt into a car and set off. I turned up at the pub, the Ash Bank, in Minshull New Road on the Badger Avenue roundabout but it was actually a mirror image of the pub on the other side of the road. When I arrived it was in total darkness and the last two people were getting into a car which then drove off. I looked at the time and it was 00:12 – I was almost 45 minutes late. I followed the car up Minshull New Road where it turned right into West Street. I was quite annoyed that we’d lost a passenger. Had I checked the time I would have dropped everything and gone out straight away. Nerina should have had more of a sense of urgency and I should have paid more attention to the time.

When I awoke, I was totally unsteady on my feet for a good while. I even missed my guitar practice.

Tea tonight was the rest of the pizza with a baked potato, followed by the apple turnover that I’d baked yesterday. And it was all quite delicious. And now I’m off to bed. Welsh class in the morning so I need to be on form.

I wasn’t really feeling much like it last week and I’m hoping to be in a better mood and more enthusiastic about it tomorrow.

Tuesday 16th February 2021 – I’VE HAD SOME …

… good news today. And, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

There’s a website that keeps people up-to-date with the Covid vaccination programme here in France and for the last week or so I’ve been following it closely. Today, I noticed that they had moved away from just “Healthcare Staff” and there was a box to tick for “Over 75”, with appointments from 8th March.

Of course it wouldn’t let me reserve a slot as I’m not over 75, despite how I feel, but my understanding was that the next step was to include Vulnerable People as well so I rang up the Virus Centre again (they must be sick to death of me) to enquire.

And indeed I’m right. It is for vulnerable people too but the centres at Avranches and Granville have a preponderance of older people compared to some regions so they are just concentrating on those for now. But if I were to try an industrial area maybe where there are more younger people, he told me, I might be in luck.

So I let him do his stuff seeing as he has the appointments registers in front of him, and sure enough, I’m off to Valognes in the suburbs of Cherbourg, 100 or so kms away, on Friday 12th March for my first jab.

To be honest, I don’t really care where I have to go as long as they’ll give me the injection. Once I’m in the system, that will be fine for me and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

Another thing that I can breathe a sigh of relief about was that I had the date wrong for my one-on-one with my Welsh tutor. It’s Thursday, not Tuesday that I’m having it. And I’d made a special effort too. I’d even beaten the third (well, it’s now the fourth) alarm to my feet yet again.

Plenty of time to listen to the dictaphone. Yesterday’s entry is now well and truly up-to-date, having found out where I’d been, and now I could turn my attention to where I went last night.

I had been with a former friend of mine and her family in Scotland and they had this most extraordinary cat which was like a square box with legs. Apparently it was a stray and they had found it in their kitchen so they had adopted it. The question came up about war crimes, don’t ask me why, in ex-Yugoslavia. I was worried about this cat that might be connected with that there and might be prosecuted again for its role. It was all extremely confusing. There was so much more to it than this but I can’t remember the rest.

Last night had in fact been a very late night – and I do mean “very late” too. This file transfer thing had about an hour to go after I’d finished my notes so I sat and waited for it. It did indeed take an hour to transfer what it could, but dealing with the duplicates was something else completely .

Anyway, this morning the first task was to go through it, merge with other back-up drives and discard where appropriate. It’s about half-done because I ran out of steam but even so, it’s liberated an extra 100GB of free space here and there.

Incidentally, I always have four or five jobs going on at once because I do have a tendency to run out of steam, so when I lose interest I have other things that I can do to stimulate my interest and I don’t ground out.

The next job, after my abortive attempt at a Welsh tutorial, was to download the drivers etc from the Acer website for the laptop that I’m hoping to repair. And the procedure has changed since I last restored a hard drive set-up. Nowadays you just download a bootable sector onto a memory stick, plug the memory stick in, switch on the machine and follow the instructions.

Mind you, I have downloaded all of the drivers and the BIOS and a few other bits and pieces (including an operating system) because we all know how these things work with me.

What I was going to do was to nip to the shops as I said yesterday but when I looked out of the window and saw the rain I changed my mind a little.

After lunch I had a baking afternoon.

With the extremely volatile sourdough that I have I made a pile of sourdough dough with a banana, dried fruit, jellied fruit, desiccated coconut, sunflower seeds and ground brazil nuts, and that’s quite happily festering away, going to have its second kneading tonight before I go to bed.

And see those three bottles in the foreground just here? I’ve made a start on brewing my ginger beer now that my starter is ready.

Grind up 100 grammes of ginger and add 1 litre of water and bring it all to the boil. Once it’s boiled, add 100 grammes of sugar, stir it all together and leave it to cool.

When it’s cooled down to room temperature,, add the juice of a couple of lemons and 300ml of the ginger bug that you have been brewing for the last week or so. Then filter it through your filter stack into some strong clip-top bottles and leave for 3 days, releasing the pressure every now and again.

Last thing to do of course is to feed the sourdough and the ginger bug so that they’ll be ready for the next batch in due course.

That took me up to my afternoon walk time around the headland.

By now the rain had stopped and it was a lovely summery afternoon. But you can see what I mean about waterlogged paths. That was almost dry the other day and the rain that we have had over the last day or so has caused all of this. Can you imagine what it must have been like after two weeks of continual torrential downpour and then all of that snow?

But still, if the weather keeps up, it might dry out in aa day or two’s time, but the next downpour that we’ll have will bring it all back. For the amount of people who use these paths around here, they might try to do something about all of this flooding or we’ll all have to be buying canoes.

Just now I mentioned that it was quite beautiful out there this afternoon. It was another day where we would see for miles up and down the coast, and out to sea too.

Just recently I’ve been back out with the big NIKON D500 and it was just as well because we could see all the way to St Helier on the island of Jersey, all 58 kilometres, this afternoon and even the houses were visible. The little NIKON 1 J5 wouldn’t pick up the island and the houses as well as this.

There were quite a few people wandering around outside in the lovely weather but they were all on dry land. There wasn’t anyone that I could see out to sea or even in the air.

The sun’s too high for any decent reflections off the sea too. We’ve had that for now.

Instead of waiting for things to happen in the bay, I pushed on … “he means “pushed off”” – ed … to the viewpoint overlooking the port.

Yesterday we had just one of the Joly France boats moored up at the Ferry terminal. Today we have both of them morred up over there, so I wonder where the other one was yesterday. And there’s still no Chausiais. I wonder where she has got to … “she’s hiding down at the bottom amongst all of the trawlers” – ed.

And there are still the same four boats in the chantier navale. Aztec Lady hasn’t made it back into the water as yet. I think that I must have been rather optimistic yesterday.

Talking of ferries … “well, one of us is” – ed … I posted a photo of Granville, the Channel Islands ferry, moored at the port and because I couldn’t see Victor Hugo, the other Channel Islands ferry, I assumed that she was hidden by her colleague.

Apparently not, because she is now back in the outside position of the two ferries. So all that I can think of is that she must have gone out for a quick run around yesterday afternoon to stretch her legs.

And talking of stretching legs, I was going to stretch mine too. I had a letter to post (I’d found some time to do that this morning) and then I needed to do a little shopping for the fruit and veg that I had forgotten at LeClerc on Saturday morning in all of the excitement

Having posted my letter I had a quick look in the window of the Mairie to see what the last Council meeting had agreed. And it seems that they have budgeted something for the repairs to the walls around the Rue du Nord, at long last.

Where I went for my fruit and veg (and forgot the tomatoes) was the Carrefour Supermarket, just opposite the library.

And while the Carnaval might be dead this year (they would normally be parading today) the spirit lives on because the people who have been working on the floats have nevertheless completed some of the artwork and have been to deposit it all around the town to brighten up the place.

This might be Snow-White, I reckon, although doubtless some junior reader might enlighten me, and you’ll notice that she is not only socially distancing herself from the Seven Dwarves but is wearing a face mask and about to give herself an injection.

So on that note I came on back up the hill at a steady walk and spent the rest of the afternoon such as it was dealing with the issue of positioning the photos in the stuff that I’ve written about Oradour sur Glane. And doing some rewriting too in order to improve the style and add in a few more things that I’ve discovered.

The guitar practice was miserable tonight and so I vent off, rather depressed, to make tea.

Stuffed pepper and rice it was. So I brought the water to boil for the rice, switched off the heat as soon as it boiled, waited 12 minutes for the rice to cook, went to strain out the water, only to find that I had forgotten to put the rice in.

Yes, only I could do something like that.

But now I’m off to knead the sourdough and then go to bed. It’s late, I’m exhausted and I’ve already crashed out once. High time that I had a decent sleep.

Monday 15th February 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the heavy rain last night washing away the rest of the snow and ice that was still hanging around after our famous snowfall last week, more’s the pity.

If you compare this photo with the one THAT I TOOK THE OTHER DAY you can see immediately the difference between the weather conditions in the two photographs. I wonder when, or if, we might see snow again. It was a long time coming.

Beating the third alarm was another thing that was a long time coming, but once again I managed to be up and about before it went off.

There’s some stuff on the dictaphone so later on I had a listen. I was at work, working long past my retirement date which I was doing yet again. It seems to have become something of a regular occurrence. Suddenly a memo came down to say that Friday 8th February was to be my very last day. It was the Friday before that at the moment and the next week I was working away so I worked late until everyone had gone and I just took a bag and put some stuff in it, so much that it was really difficult to carry, and then I set off, thinking that I’d come back the Monday after I’d retired and bring a box to put the rest of the stuff in it. I walked all the way through town and ended up at the hospital. I was going there in the hope that I could have my 1st Covid injection before I set off on my business trip

Today I’ve spent all morning working on another radio programme. After the medication I sat down and started work and by the time that I was ready to knock off for lunch it was all done and dusted, the whole hour of it, and I was listening to it to make sure that it was okay.

It’s come out quite well too, and I’ve even managed to squeeze into it a track that has been on my playlist ever since the moment that I first heard it in 1970.

There was of course the morning break for hot chocolate and sourdough fruit-bread. There’s only one helping left of that so tomorrow afternoon I’ll have to make a start on preparing some new stuff.

And talking of the sourdough, after I fed it yesterday it’s gone berserk, erupted, and made a mess all over the worktop. It’s quite active now by the looks of things. I reckon that the ginger bug is ready too so while I’m at it I’m going to have a go at making my first batch of ginger beer.

Having listened to the radio programme and also the one that will be broadcast this weekend, I sent off the latter and for the next while I carried on with tidying up the hard drive with all of the back-up files on it, going through the duplicates.

All of that took me up to my afternoon walk outside.

As we can see, the workmen are now back up on the roof of the College Malraux carrying on with the tiling after their enforced break at the end of last week. And I don’t envy them one bit whatsoever about their job, because there was another gale-force wind blowing and there was rain threatening too.

It’s hardly surprising, given the weather conditions that we experience around here, that the wind blew one of the workmen off the roof a couple of months ago while I was away in Leuven and they had to send the air ambulance out to pick him up and rush him to hospital.

While I was at it, I went over to the edge of the car park to look down upon the beach to see if there was anything exciting going on.

There wasn’t anything special that I could see down there, except for the fact that there seemed to a rather extraordinary number of people down there amusing themselves. This wasn’t really the weather for crowds of people relaxing at the water’s edge.

Despite the torrential rain last night, the paths were fairly dry for a change. I was expecting to be up to my knees in the mud and slush. It was quite easy to move around out there, although there wasn’t anything particular to see out there, and the heavy clouds prevented any sun from seeping through.

With nothing particular going on out to se, I had a walk along the path to the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale and the port.

And there was some excitement going on down there today. Whilst the occupants of the chantier navale are still the same, the area around Aztec Lady seems to be a hive of activity today. There were quite a few people wandering around there looking as if they might be about to start work on her.

They may even be thinking about putting her back into the water some time very soon, although I seem to recall having had a similar fit of optimism a long, long time ago when she was first hauled ashore.

There’s a good view from here too all down the Rue du Port as far as the Place Pleville.

We can see that most of the fishing boats have all gone out to sea today. They must have had Sunday off. Of course, the tide is well out so we won’t be seeing them coming back for a while, especially as we have the curfew at 18:00. There’s no sign of that being lifted right now either given the fact that the casualty figures for the virus don’t seem to be decreasing by very much.

By now the rain was falling as I had expected, so I made my way back to my apartment. My hot coffee would just the job to warm me up after my exertions.

The postman had been today which was good news. He’d brought me a couple of little presents for which I was grateful.

The first thing was the SATA caddy for 2.5 inch drives. I need that to download the BIOS files for the new SSD drives that are on their way. The BIOS needs to be loaded onto the drives before I fit them into the machines so that the machines will fire up properly and I can download the operating system etc. These SSD drives are completely blank. I’ll plug them into the caddies which will then be plugged into a USB port on another machine and I can download the BIOS files like that from the laptop manufacturers.

But it’s also enabled me to carry out another task. I had an ancient laptop 10 years ago that gradually gave up the ghost and died after the charging pin broke off inside the casing. Soldering a flying lead onto the motherboard provided only a temporary repair.

At the time I salvaged the hard drive from it and put it on one side with the view of looking at it and salvaging the files at some time. Now that I have the caddy I can actually access the files and even as we speak I’m uploading the contents from the hard drive via the caddy onto the hard drive in this computer. And it’s going to be a long job.

The second thing that came in the post was the new battery for the little Acer that will be the recipient of one of the SSD drives. The battery had died in it completely and while I was surfing the net I came across a stock of spare batteries for it.

Surprisingly, the difference between a standard battery and a battery of twice the capacity was a mere €4:00 and so for a mere €23:99 including, this will be ready to go when it has its new 1TO SSD.

Even though it’s an old machine running Windows 7, the fact is that everything important is easily accessible in it and I remember when I bought it that I enquired about the memory and ended up ramming into it as much RAM as it could take. The processor is pretty slow but it did everything that I wanted of it quickly enough, and it’ll go even quicker with a Solid-State Drive.

It’s much smaller than a standard laptop, with an 11.6″ screen and very light so it was great for travelling. I need to cut down on the amount and weight of stuff that I have to take with me when I travel.

This took me up to guitar practice time, which went off okay although I wasn’t really in the mood very much..

At the shops on Saturday there were no loose mushrooms so I was obliged to buy a punnet of 500 grammes. They won’t keep for long so I made myself I great big potato and mushroom curry with vegetables and coconut cream. It was absolutely delicious and, even better, There’s enough for another four or five meals so I’ll be stocking the freezer when it’s cooled down.

So now I’m off to bed. No Welsh course tomorrow as it’s half-term but I do have my little 15-minute chat with my tutor. And then I need to nip to the shops. I need to buy a couple of things that I forgot on Saturday.

Sunday 14th February 2021 – WE’VE SEEN THE …

… last of the snow and ice for a while, I reckon.

The temperature has warmed up, the wind has risen and round about 118:00 this evening we had a torrential downpour. That will wash away the last of the snow and ice that’s been lingering around. Unless the temperature drops substantially and the rain turns into snow.

Talking of lingering … “well, one of us is” – ed … I didn’t linger around very long in bed this morning, just for a change on a Sunday. In fact by 09:30 I was up and wandering around looking for my medication. That’s not something that happens every Sunday.

Listening to the dictaphone, I could hear that I’d been on my travels during the night. I was with a friend and some kind of taxi driver person yesterday. My friend had wanted something doing and I had organised some help for him, this Pakistani person whoever it was was the right kind of person so I got the 2 people to meet. My friend and I had a very long chat about all kinds of things, the past, the future, all of that kind of thing. Then I had to go home. Round about, I dunno, it was dark in the evening. I had no socks on and I had to walk to my locker which was somewhere in Shavington in order to get them without any socks. I said goodbye to him and checked the dates for when we’d be meeting again and waved goodbye to this Pakistani guy and set off to walk. I walked back down Crewe Road towards Sugar Loaf Corner and I could hear in the distance the sounds of one of my sisters or brother being beaten for something or other for some act of misbehaviour. I could hear the kid shouting acts of defiance while this beating was going on. It seemed to far away yet seemed so near. I was the only person out there in the street just in my bare feet walking down the street. There was no-one else around at all.

First task was to book my voyages and hotel accommodation for Leuven. And luckily it seems that all of the trains are back up and running normally again. The price that they wanted from me too made it a very worthwhile occupation this morning.

Plenty of room in my little hotel too so it all worked out very well. It seems to have been a very good idea to change my day to a Thursday. The only downside is that I’m having to travel up on the Wednesday which is my birthday, so happy birthday to me, hey?

While I was there I had a little shuffle around of my money. With not going off on any holidays just now, the money that I had set aside was sitting there not doing very much.

Next task was to book an appointment with my Welsh tutor. We are all having a little one-on-one with her next week just for 15 minutes and I needed to reserve my little spec.

The rest of the morning was spent dealing with the photos from Greenland in July 2019. And one or two of them have really come out well too, like THIS ONE and THIS ONE.

After lunch I spent some time working on my Oradour sur Glane stuff. All of the notes are now finished and I’m starting to fit in the photos in the places where they ought to go. And that’s not easy either with 53 photos to go at.

At some point in the afternoon I went out for my usual afternoon walk.

At the end of the car park I looked over the wall down to the beach. There were several people down there on the beach wandering around this afternoon and, just like yesterday, I didn’t envy them one bit. The temperature has warmed up somewhat, but the wind has warmed up too and it’s blowing a gale right now.

The tide is of course way out, almost at its limit. It would be interesting to see how the sea would be behaving when the tide is right in. And I’m interested to know what those two tracks are down there on the beach.

From the car park I walked along the path at the back of the College Malraux and along the top of the cliffs.

Although it might not look like it, it wasn’t all that much later than usual. The clouds were quite dark and heavy, a promise of things to come, I reckon, with the strong westerly wind that was blowing. But there was that great big hole in the sky and with that lucky old sun having nothing to do but roll around heaven all day, the bright spot has now moved around a couple of degrees.

It’s now lighting up the Brittany coast, as much as we could see down there this afternoon with the rainstorm that’s falling down over there.

For a change, I’d taken with me the NIKON D500. I’d had a little play around with it this morning and managed to make the camera recognise the memory card that’s in it.

With having to use the NIKON 1 J5 which doesn’t have an eyepiece viewfinder, I’ve not been able to take any photos of the aeroplanes and other aircraft that have been flying overhead. And so I celebrated the occasion by taking a photo of an aeroplane that went flying by overhead at the Pointe du Roc.

Unfortunately I couldn’t quite read the serial number and there was nothing on the database having taken off from Granville airport this afternoon, so I’m not able to say exactly what it is. I shall have to do some further research.

Down at the end of the headland there wasn’t anything at all going on. Nothing out at sea and of course with the tide well out there would be no fishing boats coming home.

Down at the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale I had a look down to see what was going on. There is no change in occupancy today – the four boats that we have seen for the last few days are still there not having done very much.

There’s no question as to why Aztec Lady and Lys Noir might be in there. With no business to attend to due to the postponement of all holiday activities, this is a good moment moment to have a full overhaul. But the big yacht has been there for months with no sign of moving.

Further on along the path I had a good look down to see what was happening in the port.

There are quite a few fishing boats there in the port this afternoon and of course our two Channel Island Ferries Granville, with Victor Hugo hiding away behind her, are still there too. No sign of them moving as long as the pandemic is still running wild, and as I’ve said before, unless Jersey puts its hands in its pockets, there’s a possibility that they might not run again.

Seeing as I was ready for my afternoon coffee, I headed home, and not running either because of the howling gale that was blowing up.

Having finished my days’ work, Next step was to prepare my food. having taken out a lump of pizza dough from the freezer earlier this morning. I kneaded it, rolled it out and put it in the pizza tray.

While it was busy proofing, I made myself a big apple crumble. That’s going to be my pudding for the next week. Lots of apple, with sultanas, desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar and lemon juice, all topped with a lovely crumble topping.

While that was busy baking, I prepared the pizza and when the crumble was baked I took it out and stuck the pizza in for the usual 30 minutes. And it was absolutely delicious, as usual. It’s becoming something of a production line thing now, these pizzas.

As for the apple crumble, I’ll have to tell you what that’s like tomorrow, because I’m rather full right now.

Having now typed out my notes, I’m going off to bed. I’m working on a radio programme tomorrow so I need to be on form. I’ve already crashed out once and I don’t want to do it again. I may as well go to bed and make a really goos start in the morning.

There’s plenty to do, as usual.

Sunday 7th February 2021 – COLD, GREY, MISERABLE, DEPRESSING AND WINDY.

But that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about the day instead.

With it being Sunday I had a nice little lie-in today.

It was rather a late night last night because I ended up playing the guitar right through into the small hours, for want of anything better to do. So being awake just before 10:00 and not leaving the bed until about 10:30 isn’t of any importance.

Surprisingly, after all the sleep that I had, I didn’t go all that far on my travels during the night. I only remember bits of this but I was with Terry and Liz and we were talking about my Welsh course. I’d somehow led them to believe that I was taking classes physically rather than virtually and taking place in North Wales, Bangor. Terry said that he had to go there so I replied that if it was a Monday I could take him there in the afternoon. He said that it wasn’t. We started to chat about Bangor and he asked where I stayed when I was up there. I replied out by THE MENAI BRIDGE which of course I didn’t stay there at all. I can’t really remember the rest of this.

But anyway it must have been a deep relaxing sleep if that’s all that I did.

As far as work goes, I really didn’t do all that much at all. After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to a day of rest here and there.

One thing that I did do however was to make a start on the ginger bug – the base that you use for brewing your own ginger beer. That’s now up and running and we’ll see how that develops over the next week or so, ready to make into ginger beer. Having over the last couple of weeks accumulated a few more flip-top pressurised bottles, I can do that now.

And while I was at it, I fed the sourdough

Of course there was the afternoon walk – no afternoon is complete without that.

Mind you, I would much rather have stayed indoors this afternoon because it was horrible out there. Only the guy windsurfing offshore at Donville les Bains would be taking any pleasure from the howling gale that was going on out there this afternoon.

With no-one about at all, I even tried to run along the footpath under the walls but gave it up after half a dozen steps because the wind brought me to a shuddering halt as I tried to make progress.

In view of the howling gale I had decided to take the low road under the walls rather than the high road around the headland.

And you can tell what the weather was like because there are so few people out and about compared to yesterday, and those who were had dressed themselves sufficiently to enable them to cope with the Arctic conditions. Even my ears were freezing as the wind somehow found its way to whistle through the woolly hat that I was wearing to keep my woolly head warm.

It was one of those days where I had no intention whatever of staying outside for a second longer than I had to. I was keen to come on home for my hot coffee.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had a few occasions over the depths of darkest winter where we’ve been having some spectacular sunsets on the bay out there by the Brittany coast.

Whilst the day has lengthened to such an extent now, we aren’t having the same effects which is a pity. But there were a couple of holes in the thick, heavy clouds this afternoon and we ended up with another TORA TORA TORA moment this afternoon as rays of sun were shining down onto the sea.

There was someone else out there armed with a camera wandering around looking for objects to photograph but I can’t believe that he missed this view.

While I’d been out on my travels yesterday I’d seen a mural that someone had painted on a gate down in the Rue Carpentier, but there were so many people around it that it was impossible to photograph it.

Today I’d forgotten all about it – until a casual glance down the Rue des Degres brought me face-to-face with it again. There was no-one about here so I could photograph it at my ease, and I’m glad that I waited until today because photographing it like this from the far end of the side street has brought it out quite well.

But I’m curious to know what it’s all about. It’s rather reminiscent of the album cover of COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING but I’d be surprised if anyone recognised that album out here.

Around the walls I walked, to see what was happening. And from up here there’s a good view down onto the chantier navale.

There’s no change in the occupants – the two fishing boats, the yacht that has been there for ever and Aztec Lady which has been there for much longer than I was expecting, but I took a photo of it all because it’s not often that we see it from this perspective.

Seeing as I was dressed for the winter, I took the opportunity to take out the rubbish – the general garbage and the recyclable metal and glass. Such is the highlight of the day, hey?

Having taken out a lump of pizza dough from the freezer at lunchtime, it was now ready to prepare. I rolled it out and put it in the pan to proof again while I came back in here to edit some more photos from Greenland.

Once it had proofed, I switched on the oven and bunged in the rice pudding to cook while I prepared the pizza.

And when the pudding was ready, in went the pizza. Meanwhile, I parcelled up the remaining slices of apple pie, labelled them and put them in the freezer for when the rice pudding runs out.

The pizza was delicious but I can’t comment on the rice pudding because there wasn’t any room left inside me for dessert. So that will have to wait until tomorrow.

So now I’m off to bed for an early night. I need to have a good start tomorrow as I have nothing prepared for the radio so I’ll be doing a programme from scratch.

I’ve not crashed out at all today so despite the late start I’m tired and if I prolong it, it’s going to be another dismally late start tomorrow and I can’t afford that.

Monday 1st February 2021 – THERE’S ONE GOOD …

… thing about being in bed by 21:40. And that is that I can, if I play my cards right, be wide awake, standing up and looking for my clothes at 06:00 when the first alarm goes off.

Yes, never mind beating the third alarm, I actually managed to beat the first one today and that’s something of a red-letter day, isn’t it?

So there I was, wide awake, fighting fit and ready to go and by the time the third alarm went off I had had my medication and was sitting at the computer working.

By the time lunchtime came round, I had completed an entire radio programme from scratch – up and running, a whole hour of it. And I’d had my break for breakfast (the last of my Christmas cake) and drink of hot chocolate too. That was quite impressive too.

This afternoon I sat down and carried on with the siege of Chateau Chalus but later on in the afternoon I had the misfortune to crash out for half an hour and that was disappointed. I might have finished it otherwise.

That was probably due to the fact that I went out this afternoon for my usual walk around the headland.

There were a few other people around out there too, walking around, but the surprise was actually down on the beach. There were about 20 people down there playing some kind of sport and even though I watched them for a good few minutes, I couldn’t work out what it was they were actually doing.

There were a few other people around down there too but they were just doing normal things like walking around at the water’s edge.

And when I say that I was surprised to see them, that was for two reasons too.

Not just because it was strange to see so many people, but also due to the fact that there were some incredible rolling banks of fog moving in off the sea and it was at times quite difficult to see very far.

Despite all of the wind that we have had just recently, there was hardly a breath of it today so while it might have been rolling in off the sea, it was just banking up at the head of the bay and becoming thicker and thicker down there. That’s not the kind of day to be out at sea.

Le Loup, the marker light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, was barely visible and you couldn’t see very much beyond there along the coast.

But one thing that you will notice is that it really is a sea mist or fog and not driving rain. And it’s not very thick either. You can see the blue sky overhead above the mist here at the edge of the fog.

At the end of the headland, I looked out to sea to see what was happening but as you might expect, I couldn’t see anything going on there at all. But most of that was down to the fog. I couldn’t even see the Brittany coast so I gave it up as a bad job and carried on with my walk along the headland.

There’s another change of occupier at the chantier navale.

We still have a total of four boats, but one of the fishing boats that was there seems to have gone back into the water and instead, we seem to have acquired Aztec Lady, one of the tourist charter boats. It makes me wonder what’s the matter with her, but seeing where she’s been positioned, it can’t be anything that’s likely to detain her for long.

Talking of being detained for long, I cleared off home for my hot afternoon coffee but when I went to drink it, it was freezing cold. That’s what happens when you crash out for half an hour.

The hour on the guitar passed really well and I quite enjoyed it, and then I went for tea. Taco rolls with the remains of the stuffing but, most unlike me, half of it went in the bin. For some reason, I wasn’t at all hungry tonight.

You are all probably wondering where I got to (and, more importantly, who came with me) during the night. But just as I was about to start to transcribe my dictaphone notes, Rosemary rang up for a chat – a chat that went on for just over one hour and forty minutes.

It took me a couple of days before I could find the time to transcribe them, but I was playing bass with The Doors or The Grateful Dead or someone last night. We were on our way to a gig, the first that they had done for 25 years. I’d bought some new equipment. While we had stopped for a coffee and an afternoon break I started to wire up the PA but noticed that the microphones had on/off switches that had to be held down. I thought “this is wrong. We have the wrong equipment here. What are we going to do about this because you can’t hold down a mike switch in the middle of a concert when you have both hands on a guitar”. I carried on wiring them up anyway. A couple of boys appeared and spoke to Jerry Garcia or whoever it was. He had them play a little song, all very countrified rock, arpeggio chord-playing guitar, that sort of thing. The guy playing a really weird guitar with the tuning pegs in the body of the guitar and nothing on the neck, which was a very small neck anyway. I went back over to the pile of equipment and sat there suddenly scratching my head. Someone else came along and said “what are you doing?”. I replied “I don’t know. I just walked over here for something and I can’t remember what it was that I came back for”. He asked “was it your guitar strap?”. I said “no but I need to check that anyway so while I’m here I’ll do that”.

Later on I was with a couple and I’m not sure who they were. They may well have been one of my sisters and her husband. Also with me was Zero, who at one time was a very, very regular companion of mine on my voyages who hasn’t been around much of late, so a big “hello” to you in Stoke on Trent. The 4 of us had been to British Salt having my Cortina fixed. It had been a question of having it serviced of course and one of the bolts on the bottom pulley which was held on by two bolts needed replacing. Rather than buy one, they turned one on the lathe. There were all kinds of things going on there with old lorry cabs, an old Dodge lorry cab lying around. Someone had been sent home from work not once but twice. The garage there was absolutely spotless and I’d never seen it looking like that in al my life. They went in to get the paperwork ready. I went in with them but was told that I couldn’t stay. I had to go back into the waiting room. Then they all came out and the four of us walked down the drive. The woman was very slow and her partner was very fast and I was there with Zero. When we went round a bend the guy was suddenly no longer in front of us so we had to wait until the woman caught us up to find out where he had gone. There was something going on in Northwich and it was a lovely afternoon so Zero and I were wondering whether we were going to walk to Northwich or whether we were to go on the bus. We didn’t mind walking and we were sure that the guy would want to walk but she said that her mother (who was this woman) wouldn’t want to as she wasn’t very good at walking. So we waited, and the guy turned up. He’d been reading a notice and that’s why we missed him, a notice about a football competition. Then off we set on foot. We still hadn’t decided whether we would go on the bus or walk but there were loads of things to carry. One of them was a pack of margarine and I ended up with traces of margarine all down the front of my jumper. As we set off the woman said to Zero “you’d better come and sit next to us 2 adults so that you can have a better view” and I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.

But interestingly, as seems to be a regular feature in my nocturnal voyages, the moment that I find a pleasant and interesting character to come along with me, someone from my family always pops up to intervene. That really was the story of my life when I lived back in Crewe all those years ago.

Having written my notes now I’m off to bed. Welsh lesson tomorrow so I have to be on form for that, and then I have the rest of the week to do plenty of things that have been building up. Far too many of them just now and there seems to be more and more.

Sunday 29th November 2020 – JUST BY WAY …

… of a change, I’ve been working today.

Yes, even though Sunday is a Day Of Rest around here, it became a necessity when I failed to show a leg this morning until about 11:30. By then it was way, way too late to start off the sourdough (you’ve really no idea just how long this process takes) mix and as I have no bread in the house and shall be needing some for Monday lunchtime, I’ll have to swap my hours around a little.

Plenty of time in bed therefore to go off on a whole series of nocturnal rambles but not having had time to transcribe them, you’ll need to check back in here in a couple of days to find out where I went. I’m curious to know too.

So after a rather desultory start while I pulled myself together I made myself a mug of hot chocolate and with a slice of my chocolate cake, sat down and chose the music for the next radio programme. And then I had to edit it, remix it all, reformat some of it and then combine them all in pairs.

What didn’t help matter is in this respect was that I had “computer issues”. One of the files that needed reformatting was a *.mkv file and is regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it makes my window explorer “hang”.

In the end I had to save all of my work (which is not easy with a dozen different programs and “alt-tab” doesn’t work) and then reboot the computer.

Finally I made a start on writing the text notes.

It’s not a lot for an afternoon’s work but it will save me a couple of hours in the morning while I deal with the bread and make a pie for pudding.

of course, there was a break in mid-afternoon for my usual walk around the headland.

The weather was really nice outside and the sea fog that had been lingering around on and off had lifted slightly. In fact there was a view farther down the coat today as far as Hauteville-sur-Mer. Although there wasn’t much that you could see beyond there.

There were a few people wandering around there this afternoon too, and not all of them wearing their face masks despite the Préfet having announced that the compulsory wearing of facemasks has been extended to 21st January next year.

While I was looking out to sea, I’d seen a fishing boat approaching from the direction of the Ile de Chausey so I walked on up to the headland of the Pointe du Roc to intercept it.

And I’m glad that I waited until then to take a photo because I managed to catch it in company with a pleasure launch that was heading out to sea. It made quite a good photograph, the two of them combining like that.

But that was all that I could see going on out there today. The rest of the sea was quite quiet today. And so I wandered off around the footpath to the chantier navale to see what was going on.

Having seen a few different boats on the fringes of the chantier navale just recently, I was wondering whether there might be another new arrival today.

No boats today, unfortunately, but nevertheless I’d swap all of them for this gorgeous machine. A Van Hool-bodied coach of what looks like the early 1960s, but as for what chassis it might be, I couldn’t see. It’s a beautiful machine of course although it’s not really comparable with the Volvo-engined Van Hool Alizées that I drove for years all round Europe.

According to the nameplate, it’s owned by a local bus company so I can always make enquiries. But I’m more interested right now in knowing why I cut off the rear of the coach. That isn’t like me at all.

And the coach? it’s a Fiat 314 of 1965 – one of the earliest of the integrals.

Having satiated my interest at the chantier navale, I had a look around to see what else was going on.

That small fishing boat that I had seen just now wasn’t the only one that was about. There was another one that had arrived earlier in port with a huge load of shellfish. They were busily being unloaded by the crane on the trailer on the back of the tractor and the crane on the stern of the boat.

Being loaded onto the tractor and trailer, I wouldn’t have thought that they were destined for the public market in one of the big cities. It’s more likely to be one of the local shopkeepers who harvests his own stock of crustaceans.

One of the things that I wanted to do was to check on a boat that I understand was moored in the harbour.

We can see Aztec Lady in this photograph here but behind her is a boat called Anakena. There was a brief mention of her in the local newspaper over the weekend but I wasn’t able to read the full article.

From what I read, I understand that she was en route for the Far North to spend the winter out there and the family on board had even gone as far as to register their kids in the French “distance learning” programme.

However the confinement due to Covid has seemed to have trapped them in the harbour and they are unable to leave for their destination.

Back here I continued on somewhat with my notes for the radio programme, but even managed to fit in a quick 15 minutes on the guitar – the electric 6-string too.

Earlier on during the day I’d taken out the last pizza dough from the freezer and it had been thawing out in the living room. I rolled it out and put it in the pizza tray and left it to rise for an hour or so.

When it was ready, I assembled my pizza and put it into the oven to cook. And while this was going on, I made the sourdough.

having found that 400 grammes was not sufficient last week I used 500 grammes of flour and adjusted the quantities accordingly, and when it has settled in, I tipped it out and began to knead it. And now that I know what I’m doing with the sourdough, I could feel when it “turned” and it ended up really nice and smooth.

Halfway through the mix, I realised that I’d forgotten the sunflower seeds so I had to add them in. And it all turned out quite nicely. It’s now sitting in a bowl quietly festering where it’ll stay all through the night, and it’ll have its second kneading tomorrow morning.

By now my pizza was ready and I attacked it with gusto. It had turned out really nicely too and I do like how the edges, where I roll them over, swell up quite nicely as they do.

No pudding tonight, firstly because I don’t have anything and secondly I’m rather full. These pizzas are very filling.

And so running rather late yet again, I set off for my evening walk and runs. No-one about at all so i could run around for as much as I liked. And I quite enjoyed that idea too because for some reason tonight, I was able to go around without really putting any effort into it.

It’s true that I was often out of breath but that’s normal these days. I didn’t feel as if I’d been stretched in any way. And doesn’t that sound revolting?

By the time I ended up walking around the walls, the fog that had kept away for most of the day was rolling in rapidly and there were wisps of it now blowing across the harbour.

It was a beautiful night though. The sky was clear and there was a cold breeze blowing but for some reason it was quite nice to be out there.

But it didn’t look as if many people would agree with me. There was no-one else out for a walk tonight, and the fish processing plant was all closed up and in darkness, indicating that none of the bigger trawlers are expected to come in on the next tide with a catch.

From there I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have my radio programme to finish of course, but early on I have the sourdough bread and a pudding to make. I’m going to be busy tomorrow so I need an early night. I’m not sure that I’m going to get one though.

Saturday 14th November 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… the way things have been recently, I actually managed to beat the third alarm this morning.

Well, sort-of anyway. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor waiting for the world to stop spinning round before I stood up.

Mind you,with not having gone to bed until almost 01:00 this morning I did realise that it was going to be a very long day.

There was a sale onlast night and there were one or two things that I wanted so after I’d finished writing my notes I went to make my purchases.

Only to find that Paypal now has this weird system like my French bank does, that in order to make a purchase they will send a numerical code to your phone number for you to enter into a box on the vendor’s website. It’s a system that has never troubled me previously with Paypal so I’ve never had occasion to use it. So when I didn’t receive the text message I found to my dismay that it had been sent to my old number in Virlet which has of course been out of commission for well over 4 years.

Now you can change your ‘phone number, but only if you log in. And to log in, you need the four-figure number that they send to your phone. Which is still in the Auvergne.

The next step is to send Paypal a message. But to do that you need to log into your account, for which you need the four-figure number.

There is of course the option to telephone them, for which you don’t need to log in. But you can only call them between 09:00 and 19:30 Mondays to Fridays.

In the end, having exhausted ever other avenue, I created a new Paypal account, which was not easy, and thanked my stars that there was a one-hour time difference between here and the UK and for having an on-line access to my bank statements.

It just goes to prove a point doesn’t it? If something is going to go wrong, it’s going to go wrong with me.

With what little sleep I had, I still found time to wander off.I was in Nantwich last night. I had a little house there in Welsh Row that used to be an old shop at one time. I had all kinds of various friends and acquaintances. Two of them were people like Walter Billington used to be. They had been to visit me and I’d shown them out but I’d suddenly discovered them back in my house again searching for something. I went to grab them both but one got away. The other one I managed to grab hold of him and got him in an arm lock and stuck his head under a cold tap to cool him down, and phoned the police. It was a sergeant who knew me so I explained exactly what had gone on and where I was. He asked me “are you drowning someone?” I replied “yes”. In the end a black policewoman turned up outside in a Ford Anglia panda car so I dragged this guy downstairs, not caring if he was bumping along the floor or anything, let her in and told her the story. She made him sit in a corner while we went through the kind of things that he might have been looking at.

After the meds and transcribing the dictaphone notes I found some time to do some work on the outstanding blog entries, which makes a change. And then I went for a shower. At least my weight has stabilised – albeit at 100 grammes over one of my target weights. It’s not gone up any but it hasn’t gone down either.

And then I set off for the shops, in a howling gale. And I bumped into the itinerant who is still sleeping rough. I urged him to go to the Mairie to seek help, but he says that he will be OK. I’m not too sure about that but I’ve learnt from bitter experience, as I’m sure you have too, that trying to persuade people to do things, even if you think that it’s in their best interests, quite often rebounds.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were on our way to the shops the other day we saw some workmen busily starting to rip out the front of the cafe on the corner in the Rue Paul Poirier.

In just two days, they seem to have really gone to town with it, for not only have they completely ripped it out, they’ve erected a temporary facade around it to protect the building while they set about installing a new shop front.

It would be nice to think that they would replace it with something nice and aesthetically pleasing rather than something that is simply utilitarian. We can always live in hope, I suppose. It’s better than dying in despair.

Talking of utilitarian, this is what I was talking about.

Regular readers of this rubbish will call that we saw a similar temporary structure across the front of a shop in the Rue Couraye when we were out picking up our rail tickets the other day. That’s all been swept away and we’ve been left with this.

But whatever you might say about “utilitarian”, it’s a vast improvement on the cheap and dated 1960s aluminium shop front that was here before.

However there’s a singular lack of imagination around here because there have been three or four new shop fronts in the town since I’ve been living here and they all look like this. Here’s hoping that the one they are doing in the Rue Paul Poirier will be a little more individual.

No figs at the fruit and veg shop, La Halle Gourmande, and none at the Health Shop, La Vie Claire either. It’s the end of the season. So I asked the guy there what I should use in my kefir instead of figs and he gave me a bizarre look and said “dried figs” – the look being the kind of look that means “why aren’t you using dried figs to start with?”.

At LIDL they had a packet of dried figs and they had tons of other stuff too. But I was limited by what I could carry away. It’s a long walk home and the final climb is long and steep. I wish that they would hurry up and fix Caliburn.

Back here I put away the frozen food and one or two other things, made myself a hot chocolate and grabbed a slice of my banana bread, and then came in here to do some work. I was doing all right too up to a certain point, and then the next thing that I remember was that it was 13:45. 90 minutes I’d been out for, I reckon.

It took me a while to come round to my senses and then I ended up with a very late lunch.

That confused all of my timing and I was running well behind after that.

Later on in the afternoon I took myself off for a walk around the headland in the gale force wind that was blowing out there.

Although it was dry at the moment, there was plenty of rain about and the strong winds were blowing it all about at a ridiculous speed. The clouds were so thick and heavy that we were having some really unusual lighting effects in the sky like this one across the bay over the Brittany coast.

And with the wind, everything was changing so rapidly too. I’d go to take a photo of a particularly impressive scene and by the time that the camera had focused it had changed considerably.

Anoher thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we mentioned the other day is the phenomenon of different colours in the sea – this layering effect that we see every now and again.

There was another beautiful example this afternoon in the sea just off the Pointe du Roc. I’d struggled around the headland in the wind but when I saw this I considered it to be worth the effort.

We’ve seen plenty of photos of this point when the tide has been out and there’s nothing on what is at the moment the sea bed to cause this dramatic change in colouring. It’s not even the effect of the clouds obscuring the sun either because you can see what the weather is like.

With there being no-one about I had a little run down to the viewpoint overlooking the port and then had a slow walk the rest of the way home.

It didn’t turn out to be all that slow though because the rain that had been loitering around just offshore came in and got me and I ended up having to run for it. Not before I’d taken a nice photo of the harbour with the two Channel Islands ferries, Victor Hugo and Granville down there along with Spirit of Conrad and Aztec Lady.

The harbour gates can’t have long opened because we can see the trail of sediment flowing into the harbour from outside. It’s quite a dramatic contrast when you see it in this context.

Back here I played with a few photos, chatted on the internet with Rosemary and then it was time for the football. TNS v Barry Town.

And regrettably, Apart from the first 5 minutes, Barry didn’t start to play until there was 15 minutes to go by which they were already 2-0 down. They pulled back a goal pretty quickly but it was too little far too late.

One thing that I noticed though was that the Barry defenders were giving the attackers of TNS far too much time and space instead of closing them down. With the space that TNS was being gifteg, it’s no surprise that they were running the defence ragged and they really ought to have had a couple more, including what I considered to be a stonewall penalty.

But I really do wonder what Kayne McLaggon had to do to be awarded a free kick in his favour. The TNS central defenders were kicking lumps out of him and when he fell over the outstretched leg of a defender (no penalty, and quite right too) he was booked for diving, which was probably the most extraordinary decision that I noticed.

Tea at half time was out of a tin, followed by another slice of defrosted apple pie.

And then I went out walkies on my evening circuit.

As it happens, I didn’t go far. It was much later than usual, there’s a curfew too and the gale is still howling away like mad but I needed the exercise. The Rue du Nord was looking quite pretty in the streetlights and as that’s one of the bits that I run, I set off down there, to the surprise of a couple of small dogs and their owners.

At least it’s in the shelter out of the wind so that it didn’t bother me too much. I could run down there quite comfortably until I reach the incline, which brings me to a shuddering halt.

There’s an alleyway that cuts through there and leads to the Place Cambernon so I nipped down there instead of going all the way around the walls.

And it looks as if the Christmas decorations fairy has paid here a visit too. They might not be illuminated yet but they have certainly been installed. This is looking quite good, I reckon.

But the Place Cambernon isn’t. The bar La Rafale and the restaurant La Contremarche are closed. The place is like a ghost town. But then again, it would be even more of a ghost town if everyone caught the virus and died. I cleared off too, back home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow is a day of rest but I have carrots to freeze, bread to bake and pizza dough to make. My work is never completed, is it?

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: aztec lady

Monday 29th March 2021 – THE FIRST DAY …

Sunday 28th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Monday 22nd March 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

Friday 19th March 2021 – AFTER ALL OF THE …

Wednesday 17th March 2021 – HAVING SAID YESTERDAY …

Thursday 4th March 2021 – YOU HAVE TO ADMIT …

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 – I DON’T KNOW …

Monday 1st March 2021 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

Tuesday 16th February 2021 – I’VE HAD SOME …

Monday 15th February 2021 – I WAS RIGHT …

Sunday 14th February 2021 – WE’VE SEEN THE …

Sunday 7th February 2021 – COLD, GREY, MISERABLE, DEPRESSING AND WINDY.

Monday 1st February 2021 – THERE’S ONE GOOD …

Sunday 29th November 2020 – JUST BY WAY …

Saturday 14th November 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

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