Tag Archives: Barry Town

Tuesday 4th May 2021 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY!

May the fourth be with you!

It was certainly with me today because I have had one of my better days today. Noy only have I not crashed out today I’ve actually felt quite energetic today and it’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to say that, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Mind you, that’s not to say that it was a lively start to the morning. It was something of a desperate stagger to my feet when the first alarm went off and that’s hardly a surprise. A gale sprang up at about 02:00 and a tin can down in the street spent what seemed like a couple of hours being blown back and to.

But I very slowly improved as the morning went on. I spent a lot of time going through my Welsh and then I had the lesson.

At first the lesson was pretty depressing as I couldn’t seem to remember even the basics of the course and I’m not sure why. But it improved dramatically as the course went on and I surprised myself, and probably the tutor too, during a comprehension exercise. She told us that it was difficult but nevertheless I had the highest marks in the class.

It’s all this watching the football in Welsh that does it, I reckon.

As usual, we overran so it was a rather late lunch yet again and this afternoon I had quite a few things to do on the computer So much so that I haven’t looked at the photos or transcribed the dictaphone notes, of which there are more than just a few, for the last few days.

But I do know now why all of those people were streaming out of the Fish Processing Plant yesterday AND YOU CAN READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE.

As usual this afternoon I went out for my post-prandial perambulation around the peninsula.

First stop was the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down onto the beach to see what was happening this afternoon.

There was even less of the beach today than yesterday for anything to be going on. And even fewer people for it to be going on to. In fact I couldn’t see a soul down there this afternoon.

But that’s hardly surprising because the temperature has fallen dramatically from how it has been over the last couple of days. And while the wind has dropped from how it was through the night, it was still quite blustery out there and I imagine tha everyone has been blown back into their little shelter today.

While I was over there at the end of the car park I had a look out to sea to see what I could see. There was definitely something of some description sailing about so I kept an eye on it as I walked down the path towards the end of the headland.

Standing on the little butte at the back of the lighthouse I took a photo of it with the intention of blowing it up – the photo, not the object – when I returned to the apartment later on after my walk. And having done that, I can see that it’s one of the larger trawler-type of fishing boats.

From this range I couldn’t see which one it was unfortunately. There were a couple of others out there in the bay too but they were likewise too far away to identify today.

As I walked across the car park I had seen the waves breaking on the harbour wall with quite some force and so I went for a closer look.

Even here in the shade of the wind there were very very few people walking around and a couple of people whom I’d seen over the last few days sitting on camping chairs on the lawn above the viewpoint overlooking the harbour had taken shelter behind a handy hedge.

While I was here at the viewpoint I had a quick look down at the chantier navale and there was no change in there. Still just the fishing boat and long-term resident Aztec Lady and no-one else. And so I turned my attention to the waves and the harbour wall.

They aren’t exactly crashing down with the same kind of force as they did earlier in the year when we saw the spray streaming over the top of the wall, but the tide is still fairly far out as yet.

But there really was a rolling sea with the waves being nice and thick, and that’s hardly a surprise. Although we had for several hours quite a storm during the night it was nothing to what they had had elsewhere .

It must have been quite a powerful storm out at sea to churn up waves like this. Remember that there is no land mass between this point and the North American continent so there is plenty of room for the wind to whip up a powerful sea.

Now here’s something extremely interesting that s worth noting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the Rue St Pierre is the street that leads up to the entrance of the College Malraux, the local High School. We are usually troubled by pathetic parking in this street and it’s so endemic that I’ve given up mentioning it.

But today at school chucking-out time we have something completely different. The Rue St Pierre is a one-way street and while this car is only going one way, it’s going the wrong way as you can tell from the no-entry sign on the extreme right of the image and I don’t know what to say about that.

Here’s something else that I’m not syre what I can say about it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that just recently we saw Anakena in the chantier navale for quite some considerable time until last Thursday morning when she was released back into the water and moor up in the inner harbour.

And there she has stayed. After all of that work I was expecting her to have put to sea and continued on the journey that she aborted as a result of the Covid pandemic but apparently not. She’s still in here with Black Mamba to her right and Spirit of Conrad sideways-on against the pontoon.

On my way home I walk down another one-way street outside the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs and would you believe that there was another car going down that street in the wrong direction too. I really don’t know what’s happening to disciline on the roads around here.

Later on I had my hour on the guitars which I quite enjoyed and then nipped off for a quick evening meal. A curry out of the freezer followed by some jam roly-poly. And then we had the football tonight. Barry Town v Connah’s Quay Nomads.

And this evening I was watching a completely different match to the one the referee was watching. He waved away two penalty appeals that I would have given without a moment’s hesitation and later in the game gave a penalty when I thought that the defender had clearly won the ball fairly.

Connah’s Quay would have been 2-0 up at half-time had I been refereeing but instead after about 65 minutes Barry Town took the lead through an extremely soft goal. 10 minutes later we had this mystifying penalty award that drew the Nomads level and then from the kick-off Connah’s Quay intercepted the ball, went upfield and scored a second.

And that was how it ended – 2-1 to the Nomads and they stay top of the table. It wasn’t an exciting match or a skilful exhibition of technique and the Nomads will have to do something rather different and better than this if they hope to progress in Europe.

Anyway now I’m off to bed, much later than I intended. And tomorrow I have work to do, and plenty of it too. Part of this was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night last night. I had been getting married last night and all these thousands and thousands of people turned up. All my family, and people whom I didn’t even know, nieces, nephews, cousins, all of this. They turned up in their droves. I thought “they haven’t spoke to me in 25 years and here they all are, swarming up for a free meal” that sort of thing. A friend of mine was there, giving a speech about my taxi business, how successful it had been and how I was right doing what I did with old bangers rather than buying all these new Mercs and BMWs that everyone was turning up in today when they could be bothered to turn up. He was coming out with all of this speech which was quite embarrassing me because my taxi company was never like that, organised and disciplined, all that sort of thing, the cars well-maintained and so on. it was all embarrassing.
Then it turned into a football match. We were attacking up the hill and my defence was at the bottom of the slope. 3 or 4 of my cousins or nephews or nieces were hanging around my goal, young girls so I expected all kinds of stuff to be happening. It was total and utter chaos. It ended up in a siege. We were in the Navy now but like pirates and everything. We were laying siege to all these quarters belonging to these people. One of them was John Pertwee. He’d barricaded himself in a room and we were trying everything to get him out but not even our explosive would go off. he was quite happily coming and going but we couldn’t actually get into the building to chase him. I was thinking all these plans about actually getting some real dynamite and blowing the front off his building so we could all get in. All total chaos.

Later on I was back on this island again and I’ve forgotten now. it was to do with playing football and we were playing really well but losing, which was the story of our season so far. Played well but not had very much luck. I was waiting for the price of fruit and vegetables to drop to step out my team with it in the hope that it would do better. I was watching these football manoeuvres break down. They started to substitute a couple of these girls. I thought “that’s going to make things easier for us” but the subs were even better than the ones who came off. This was an easy match and we should have won it at a mile but we were struggling to make any headway.

There was more to it than this but I shall spare you the gory details as you are probably eating your meal right now.

Tuesday 9th March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

… a nautical afternoon this afternoon. It seems that every man and his dog were out there doing some kind of maritime activity this afternoon.

So while you admire the yacht that went sailing by the headland at the Pointe du Roc this afternoon, I finished writing my notes last night, only to find that I couldn’t go off to sleep. In the end I gave it up as a bad job and carried on working on clearing duplicates out of the back-up drive.

It was after 01:30 when I finally went off to bed, which was not what I was planning on at all with an alarm call at 06:00 and a Welsh lesson on Zoom later in the morning.

And while you admire another image of a trawler sailing past the headland towards the harbour in the wake of the yacht that we have just seen, I went to find out where I’d been during the night.

And a very welcome return to Zero who a couple of years ago used to accompany me on my travels on quite a regular basis but hasn’t been around for a while.

Last night I was taking her to a football match but it was the middle of the winter so we were putting on layers of clothes. She was dressed in a big heavy coat. When it was time to go I found that I was dressed in some kind of yellow thermal tights but I’d forgotten to put on my trousers so I had to go back. That was annoying because I’d been urging her to hurry up and now she was ready, I wasn’t. Her father wasn’t all that keen on her going – I don’t know if it was because of me or because of the football but her mother was fine with the idea.

This morning, I wasn’t feeling anything like working. It was all that I could do to keep awake and I was really surprised that I’d even managed to crawl out of bed. As a result I was totally unprepared for my Welsh lesson and it didn’t pass very well at all. Most of the time was spent trying to keep awake.

It was a very late lunch too. Our Welsh lesson overran. I was ready for my sandwiches too by the time that we stopped. And to my dismay, the apples that I’d bought the other day haven’t survived.

After lunch I came in to start work but I fell asleep instead. And I was out for about an hour, comfortable on the chair in the office. That was disappointing but it wasn’t a surprise.

My afternoon walk wasn’t disturbed by neighbours or shopping too, but by a flat battery in the NIKON D500. As I went to take a photo of the people out on the Plat Gousset it just petered out.

And so I had to dash back into the apartment where I grabbed hold of the old NIKON D3000 and swap over the camera lens and then dash back out again for my photos.

And when I say “old” NIKON D3000 I do mean “old” as well. It was an end-of-series discontinued range that I bought in a hurry in QUEBEC IN MAY 2012 after I dropped the NIKON D5000 on a concrete floor and cracked the casing.

And to my surprise, it’s kept on going after all this and still producing some kind of acceptable results.

As I mentioned earlier, we were having a nautical afternoon today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last summer we were seeing here and there a bright yellow zodiac roaring around offshore. We seem to be in luck, or maybe it’s a sign that the summer is here, because the zodiac is back out there offshore.

There are two guys in there fishing – or, at least – one of the two guys is fishing. The second one is fixing his fishing line ready to cast off out to sea.

And I suppose that we’ll be back as we have been every year since I’ve been living here, watching hundreds of people fishing and catching nothing whatever at all.

There was nothing else doing out to sea off the end of the Pointe du Roc, so I walked around the corner to the viewpoint over the port.

You have probably noticed that the tide was quite a way in so the outer harbour is flooded.

We saw earlier one of the trawlers coming back into port and here is another one coming into the port, one of the crustacean boats with the roof over the hold to keep the seagulls from stealing the catch. There’s already one of the boats there at the Fish Processing Plant unloading its catch.

The two fishing boats that have been moored there for the past couple of days here seem to have moved on today, but the same four boats in the chantier navale are still there, and look as if they are going to be there for a while as well.

A new arrival in the port today though is Thora, one of the two Jersey freighters.

They seem to be finding plenty of work going on right now and that’s good news for the port. We need all of the business that we can find.

Back here at the apartment I had my coffee and coffee cake and finally settled down to do some work. I’ve managed to edit 20-odd photos this afternoon, some of which involved doing some research and involved the help of a few people in a Group on a Social Networking site who were able to identify a twisting pile of metal as a Bedford JSL.

Such is the power of the internet.

During a few pauses here and there I’ve been going through the duplicate files on the back-up drive and what with last night’s “overtime” and the bits and pieces that I’ve done today, I now have 927GB free. But of course, the farther ahead that I advance, the slower the work becomes.

There was the hour on the guitars of course, and then a hurried tea – stuffed peppers with rice and the last of the jam pie- because there was football on the internet again – Barry Town v Penybont in the JD Cymru League.

It’s easy to see why there seem to be three clubs – TNS, Bala Town and Connah’s Quay Nomads – way out in front of the League because this match was really pretty aimless.

These two teams are fourth and fifth, and Penybont won the match with a deflected shot out of nothing from 20 yards, but apart from that neither team ever looked like doing anything. Long, aimless balls out of defence and plenty of misplaced passes, quite a contrast to the skill that was clearly evident on Saturday when TNS played Bala Town.

There’s a huge gap in skill between the top three and those following on behind at quite a distance.

Right now though I’m off to bed. I won’t have a long sleep tonight, thanks to the football, so I probably won’t be on form tomorrow either. But we’ll see how we go. At least the backlog of photos seems to be shifting and that’s something to appreciate, I suppose.

Saturday 28th November 2020 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money again. I went out somewhat early this morning on speculation now that the “unnecessary” shops are allowed to open and sure enough, my luck was in I found “mon bonheur” as they say around here. It was expensive and I do mean that, but it will be well worth it in due course.

It’s for my Christmas present so I can’t tell you what it is until I open it at Christmas time but it’s what I’ve always wanted ever since I moved here three and a half years ago.

Even though I said “early”, it wasn’t as early as I was hoping though because I didn’t leave the bed until about 07:20 this morning, to my dismay. But at least I was in a better frame of mind than I was last night, which is one thing I suppose.

First thing to do is to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d made contact with my old school last night and I’d volunteered to talk to them about certain things. They suggested that I came round to see them on Saturday. So off I went on a Saturday morning and found to my surprise that a lot of kids were still in school. I thought that it must be something to do with Covid or something like this. I arrived at the front of the school but couldn’t find the door in. All the front of the school had changed. In the end I found a door and went in – I thought that I’d look for the secretariat. All the kids were telling me not to go in through this door for some unknown reason but I went in anyway. I couldn’t find the secretariat but then I saw a hatch that was an opening in the wall and there was a queue of people around there talking to whoever was going on inside. I thought “well, I’d talk to these people, whatever was going on in this hatch and they can point me to the right place”. So I waited my turn. Then a guy came over and said “ohh don’t you go missing now that I’ve got you here. I’m going to give you a class”. I thought “this is strange. he doesn’t even know who I am”. But on my way in parking my car or going into the school grounds or whatever I bumped into one of my old teachers. I said “you must be Mr Lighton” but he didn’t recognise me. But this other guy obviously recognised me, and I didn’t have a clue who he was and I was certain that he ought not to know who I was but he got me right. He said “well …” and we were talking about what I could do. he said “you could give this class a talk on iron ore, the miracle of iron ore”. I replied “yes, I can tell them all about iron ore mining in Labrador”. I thought for a moment “I wish I’d remembered to bring my photographs with me” but then I thought that I had my laptop and they are all on there. Another teacher who was there said “I didn’t know that they mined iron ore in Labrador” so we had quite a chat about that. I had some gold with me and I produced this sample of gold and said “what about this from Labrador?” He looked at it, the amazed guy, but the one who came to talk to me first was totally nonplussed by this gold. he didn’t think that it was anything extraordinary at all.

Next thing was to have a shower and to check my weight. And in the last 2 days I’ve put on 0.6 kilo. That’s clearly incorrect and I shall have to check this again.

Having changed the bedding (I’m going to be in the lap of luxury tonight) and set the washing machine off on a cycle (very clever, my washing machine) I hit the streets with Caliburn.

Our first stop was miles out of town and more of this anon and then it was time for NOZ and LeClerc. Both were open but neither came up with anything of any special interest. It was just more of the boring same so I came on home without hanging around too long.

By now it was quite late so there was barely time to put the frozen food away before I had to make my soup for lunch (more of the butternut squash) and then there was football. Connah’s Quay Nomads against Barry Town in the Welsh Premier League.

Barry Town scored first after just a couple of minutes but from the restart Connah’s Quay went up the field and equalised. Even with half a team out injured or suspended they were still far too good for Barry Town and the final score of 3-1 was fair enough. Barry Town need to find a striker from somewhere if they want to push on up the table.

It was by now way after the time that I would usually go out for my afternoon walk, but I went out all the same.

Winter has certainly arrived. It was cold and quite windy out there, but there was plenty of sun to encourage people to come out for maybe the last fine day of the year. This guy in his yacht was certainly enjoying himself just offshore.

And you can see what I mean about the sun by looking at the sails of his yacht. They are supposed to be white but they are reflecting the late-afternoon sun and are looking a rather bright shade of gold.

And he wasn’t the only one out there in the water today.

There were several people in kayaks having a paddle around the Pointe du Roc too. And it’s a good job that it’s warm because it’s not permitted to light a fire in a canoe. They say that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

Back in the apartment I noticed that someone else had taken a photo of the kayakers and posted a “group photo” on the Social Media. And someone complained about them being allowed to congregate but ramblers were not allowed to do so.

I despair of some people.

And it wasn’t just on the water that there were crowds of people. The air was quite busy too.

A light aircraft had flown over my head just as I was setting out but I wasn’t quick enough to take a decent photo of it. But a few minutes later one of the little microlights went past. This time I was ready and when it turned out of the sun I was able to take a photo to speed it on its way.

What was disappointing was that our autogyro didn’t put in an appearance. We can usually rely on that going past overhead whenever the air is busy.

It’s that time of the month too.

There was a beautiful moon out there tonight – we missed the last one due to heavy clouds, if I remember correctly, but no danger of missing this one. It really was quite beautiful. And as you can see, there isn’t a cloud in the sky to get in the way of seeing it.

So it looks like either tomorrow or the day after, I’ll have to be shaving the palms of my hand. I used to be a werewolf but I’m all right noooooooooooooow”.

And that reminds me, the use of shockingly poor English is even threatening the Film Industry. They are planning to remake an old classic horror film of the 1930s, but the modern version this next year will be called “I Were a Teenage Waswolf”

Enough of that. I turned tail and headed for the headland to look out over the Baie de Mont St Michel to see what was goign on.

And this is a far cry from 21:00 and 21:30 of early this year, isn’t it? You can tell how late it is that I’ve gone out because the sun is quite low in the sky and about to sink into the sea, where it will presumably sizzle.

we are certainly having some spectacular effects just recently. This one I stayed and watched for a few minutes before pushing my way onwards around to the south side of the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a new trawler in the chantier navale and we watched it being hoisted aboard the mobile boat lift.

This morning when I went out to the shops I was half-expecting to see it comfortably installed on one of the sets of blocks so that they can work on it, but to my surprise she wasn’t there. They must have been putting her back into the water yesterday when we saw them manoeuvring around.

Still, Ceres 2 and the yacht are still there. They must be completely fed up of spending all this time together on their own without any company.

With nothing else going on, I walked on back to the apartment.

There were some carrots that needed dicing and blanching, the sourdough needed feeding and then there was the kefir to attend to. The kiwis that I had bought last week weren’t ripe enough and besides I was rather pushed for time so I grabbed a handful of clementines (I’d bought another load today), whizzed them around to extract the juice, and then made another batch of clementine-flavoured kefir.

Having done that, I set another batch of kefir en route. And one of these days when I have more time, whenever that might be, I’m going to look into making my own ginger beer.

Today’s special offer on veg at LeClerc was “Cauliflowers at €0:99”, and large illegitimate ones too. I love them when they are fresh so I bought one and for tea had veggie balls with steamed veg (including lots of cauliflower cooked to perfection) and vegan cheese sauce. And I’ll be having more of that too in due course.

But the sad thing is that I finished the last of my ad-hoc raspberry and custard tart. That worked really well and I was pleased with that. It encourages me for the future now with other fruits.

The moon was incredibly bright tonight. It really lit up the night sky and it would have been a perfect evening for photography had we not had one of the sea mists yet again.
With something of a struggle I ran on round to the viewpoint over the Plat Gousset and took a photo of the beach in the moonlight just to see how it would come out.

And I have to say that I’ve seen worse than this one. And, of course, it goes without saying, a great many so much better too.

Nothing doing at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch so I ran off all the way across thez Square maurice Marland where I stopped for my breather.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on a couple of occasions we’ve had a quick look at the house in the Rue LeCarpentier that is undergoing renovation by this specialist building company. Tonight, I couldn’t help noticing that with the light mist that we were having, the street light wrapped in the scaffolding netting was creating some kind of ethereal effect.

This is the kind of thing that is worth photographing, even if just to let arty people gasp with admiration. I don’t think all that much of this kind of thing

This on the other hand is much more like my kind of photograph.

Only Marité at anchor – or should I say “moored” – down at the bottom end of the harbour tonight. But she’s all lit up and looks quite pretty and for once, I managed to take a decent photo of her that actually worked out doing what I wanted it to do.

But everywhere is like death now with this lockdown due to the Corona Virus. Once more I was the only one out there tonight and I didn’t see another soul. I’m starting to feel quite lonely these days.

Mind you, that’s not exactly true. I wasn’t the only one out there tonight.

As I walked up the Rue St Michel a pretty long-haired cat, looking rather like a heavily-pregnant female, came out of one of the alleyways. I called it and it came to me for a stroke so we had a little bit of socialising. Strange as it is to say it, I miss having a cat, but it’s not possible with my lifestyle.

So having said goodbye to my new friend I ran on home to write out my notes.

Despite being in a better humour than I was yesterday and having had something of a lie-in this morning, I’ve still had a bad day. For some unknown reason I’ve been fighting off sleep (and not very successfully on some occasions) for most of the day and because I’m so tired, everything is taking 10 times longer.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last week because of a few rather extreme, if not ridiculous Sunday lie-ins, I was talking about setting an alarm on Sunday mornings in the future. But not tomorrow. This is going to be one of those “sleep until I awaken” days. I have clean bedding, I’m clean and tidy and I think that a good rest and long sleep will do me a world of good.

It makes me wonder who will come along to spoil it.

Saturday 21st November 2020 – JUST FOR A …

… change, I managed to beat the third alarm to my feet.

And not only is that a surprise in itself, it’s even more surprising when you consider that I didn’t go to bed until long after 01:30.

It goes without saying that I didn’t go anywhere during the night. There probably wasn’t enough time to do very much anyway so it was something of a restful sleep for what it was. And I do have to say that when the third alarm went off I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor, and that’s as good as it got for about half an hour.

This morning I finished going through my mailbox and a pile of stuff has bitten the dust – and quite right too. It’s down to a much-more manageable proportion now.

As well as that I was chatting to my friend with Covid (well, she doesn’t have it now of course) and doing some work on the arrears from my journey around Central Europe. And then, I … errr … fell asleep. And no surprise there after my early start.

After lunch I didn’t do the baking. After all if I’m baking tomorrow as well I may as well have a go at my cake then and use the oven for everything.

But there was football on quite early today too. Barry Town and Y Drenewydd played out an exciting, pulsating 0-0 draw. Yes, exciting, not like most 0-0 draws. The action flowed from one end to the other throughout, ably assisted by Cheryl Foster, the league’s female referee. We had several shots on goal, including one almighty whack from; Nat Jarvis that rattled the Newtown woodwork, but the defences were well on top in this game. Quite an enjoyable game all around.

By now it was extremely late and going dark but nevertheless I went out for my afternoon walk.

Surprisingly there were a few people out there this afternoon and some of them were heading my way as I admired the lighthouse and the semaphore station out on the end of the Pointe du Roc. And of course, that would have to be my luck, wouldn’t it? Not many people around, but all of them right where I would ordinarily be running.

And so instead, dodging the dog, I had a sedate stroll up to the end of the track, across the car park and around the headland to see what was going on at the memorial to the lifeboatmen.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day they sprinkled fresh gravel all around it to make it look pretty.

Today there seem to have been even more changes. The memorial has now grown a few huge bunches of flowers. It would be to commemorate something I imagine but what, I don’t know. I shall have to go tomorrow and check the dates of the sinkings that are recorded there.

What with nothing else whatever going on out there this afternoon, I headed for home and a hot coffee. And such are the way of things around here right now that I switched on the kettle, went for a gypsy’s and then headed for the office, completely forgetting to make the coffee.

Tea tonight was something of a fry-up of vegetables and vegetable balls, in the microwave fryer that Rachel gave me last year. It’s actually too big for the microwave but if I take out the round plate, put a support over the rotator and put the fryer on that so that it doesn’t turn round, it does actually fit.

It takes ages though, so there was plenty of time to make some cheese sauce too. And it was all followed down by the last of the apple crumble. Tomorrow I’m going to have yet another attempt at a fruit tart with agar-agar

That was the cue to go out for my evening runs. And it was just as well that I was all alone out there because for some reason I wasn’t on my best form and my running was rather bizarre.

Have I taken a photo of the Rue du Nord from this point before? I don’t think so, and so I’ll put that right. This is the resting point after the second leg of my runs, the first being right down at the end of that shot. There’s quite a steep bank behind me and I can’t run up there. It brings me to a shuddering halt.

From here I ran on down the path underneath the walls and all the way round to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch where we take our photos of the sea breaking onto the Plat Gousset.

There was absolutely nothing of any excitement here either.

With nothing else to do, I took a photo of the end of the Place nearest the street and then headed for home, running across the Square Maurice Marland.

At one of the houses at the end I encountered a woman. She had let her dog out to take itself off for a walk but instead of coming back home it was simply sitting there by the side of the road and she was trying everything to make it move, but with no success.

After an exchange of pleasantries I continued my walk around the walls and then ran on the rest of the way home.

For a change I’m going to have an early night. And then a nice long lie-in to get myself together for what I have to do tomorrow – like bake a cake, bake a tart, start off the sourdough bread etc etc. And to book my voyage to Belgium, something that I forgot to do today. I really must organise myself.

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?

Saturday 17th October 2020 – WE CALLED IT …

… a draw this morning. I’d just thrown off the bedclothes and was on the point of sitting upright ready to crawl out of bed when the third alarm went off. Just one second earlier would have been a glorious victory.

And seeing that I was in bed by 22:30 last night I ought to have done better too.

And during the night I’d been on my travels as well. I was with Nerina and we were in Gainsborough Road. I don’t remember too much about this but we’d been doing a lot of sorting out. I’d been to see a lock-up garage somewhere near Manchester which would be ideal for me to use as a store to store a lot of stuff that was lying around that I didn’t need but didn’t want to dispose of. Then we were back at the house and I don’t remember a great deal but I seem to remember that I’d bought a house in Winsford – it might have been Plantagenet Close – years ago and I was wondering what on earth I was still doing with it. I couldn’t find the keys so I wondered if the estate agent still had them, or if Nerina had them – I’d given them to her to look after, or her mother, something like that. In the end I went to ask her but each time I started to ask, she interrupted me and said something else. We ended up in the Post Office in Crewe. I was going to go to Winsford the next afternoon but it was a Saturday afternoon and the Post Office wouldn’t be open. The aim was to ask someone in the Post Office about delivering letters – where do they go to, who had a key? All of that kind of thing. I got myself into a queue by a counter but there was no-one there at the time, just a customer but no member of staff so I was idly loitering around. One member of staff came and started to deal with it. When she had dealth with this person, a young guy and his father walked up in front of me straight to the counter. Nerina said “those two guys have pushed in front of you. I said “yes, they haven haven’t they?”. The younger of the two turned round and made a smart remark to me – in Dutch. I turned round to Nerina and said “yes, Ne’erlandssprekers” so this guy made another comment and strolled away. Then I got to the window and the cashier, and that was that..

But it seems that dreaming about a new house elsewhere that I own is becoming another recurring feature of my nocturnal rambles. So what’s going on here?

For an hour or so this morning I tracked down some more photos of my trip around Central Europe at the beginning of August. And one or two of those took some tracking too. German road signs are not the clearest, especially when viewed on my low-resolution dash-cam through a bug-infested windscreen but in the end I managed to do some good with them and they are all properly labelled.

One or two in Munich were likewise difficult but reference to Hans, my friend there, soon resolved that issue.

After a shower and a clean-up (and a weigh -in, and I’ve lost another couple of hundred grammes) I went off to the shops. NOZ came up with one or two things, but nothing to get excited about, and it was the same at LeClerc.

No figs though, but luckily the Fruit and Veg shop, la Halle Gourmande, had a few. The lady there told me that they are seasonal, so I’m going to have to think of a substitute for my kefir.

Back here, I put some of the stuff away and then sat down to continue the photos but ended up falling asleep on the chair after my exertions. A whole hour or so I was out, and that’s good for neither man nor beast, especially when it means a very late lunch.

After lunch I attended to the kefir that had been fermenting away for the last few days.

Four juice-oranges were whizzed up, strained and filtered and put in a large jug. Then most of the kefir liquid was strained and filtered (always leave an inch or two in the bottom of your jar to cover the grains that you are making) into the orange juice.

The whole lot was then mixed together and then poured through a filter into a few stoppered glass bottles, and I hope that this batch is going to be as good as my lime-flavoured kefir from last time, which was excellent.

Finally, I set another lot of kefir en route for later in the week.

By now it was time to go for my afternoon walk

The other day I mentioned the Peche à Pied – the local pastime of scavenging amongst the rocks and the beach during the very low tides when the public areas below the commercial concessions are exposed

It seems that I may well have been right when I mentioned that it looked as if we are having another very low tide – a Grand Marée – this weekend because, sure enough, the crowds were out on the beach with their buckets and rakes, and whatever else they bring with them.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the Peche à Pied at the Grand Marée in April was forbidden due to the virus, so two of us from THE RADIO broadcast a “virtual Grand Marée instead.

and there weren’t just crowds of people on the beach either.

There were the veritable hordes swarming around in the sunshine too, but also plenty going on in the air. As I watched, I saw a couple of light aeroplanes take off from the airport at Donville-les-Bains. One of them obligingly headed my way but before I could take a decent photo of it head-on, it veered off out to sea.

While we’re on the subject of the airport at Donville les Bains … “well, one of us is” – ed … there’s some talk about allowing international flights to land there again, mainly from the Channel Islands. This will mean that a permanent Police and Customs presence will be required.

All of this can only be a good thing.

Back here, a few more photos, and that leaves just 75 to do. But at the rate that I’m doing them, they are going to take forever to finish off.

Then it was time for the football. An early evening kick-off on the Internet for Barry Town v Connah’s Quay Nomads.

It was a game that finished 0-0 which is hardly a surprise because Connah’s Quay are still missing four of their star players – Danny Holmes, George Horan, and their two star attackers Jamie Insall and Mike Wilde. Chris Curran who normally plays on the wing, had a really good game up front for them but he was never likely to score.

Barry Town had a solid central defence for a change after their debacle the other week, but they too were missing their star attacker Kayne McLaggon and they still haven’t recovered from losing Momodou Touray at the end of last season so they were never really likely to trouble Connah’s Quay’s makeshift defence without Horan and Holmes.

The match though turned on a decision made after just two minutes. A Barry Town attacker burst through the defence and broke clear, only to be fouled by a Nomads defender. Certainly a foul, no doubt about that, but a red card for “denying a player a goalscoring opportunity”? The ball was only just beyond the centre-circle in the Nomads area, about 50 yards from goal with another two defenders bearing down on him and with the ball about 10 yards in front of him that the keeper might even have reached first? To call that a “goalscoring opportunity” is rather stretching things a bit in my opinion. I didn’t agree with that at all.

In fact the referee seemed to have a pop-up toaster in his top pocket because it seemed to me that there was always a yellow card popping up. I think that I counted 8 all told, many of which I wouldn’t have given myself. And the red card given to Barry’s David Cotterill, the former Welsh International, in the dying seconds of injury time for “kicking an opponent” was likewise somewhat exaggerated.

So Connah’s Quay played for 88 minutes with just 10 men and you wouldn’t have noticed because Barry never really had a serious shot on goal. A powerful header right into the arms of keeper Lewis Brass is all that I could think of.

Tea was out of a tin at half-time, and after the final whistle it was time for my evening walk

For a change I went around the headland tonight and over some of the runs that I used to do.

The first leg was along the Rue du Roc for some of the way – not as far as I used to go, and then a second leg across the lawn down the side of the hedge to the clifftop where the lighthouse was busy sending out its beam.

Something that not many people know is that each lighthouse has its own individual sequence of lights, to distinguish it from another lighthouse somewhere in the vicinity. Here at Granville it’s four short pulses of light followed by a long pause.

There’s a rotating shield inside the light with bits cut out for the light to shine through which is responsible for that.

There were a few people out there tonight so I wasn’t as alone as I might otherwise have been.

There was even someone inside the Coastguard Station because there was a light on outside and when he saw me about to take a photo he switched it off just to confuse the issue and I had to take the photo again.

At least everyone had cleared off by now so I could run my third leg, along the clifftop. And that wasn’t as good as it might have been because the car park has now become the centre of assembly for all of the adolescents in the town with their motorbikes and music.

But who am I to complain? At their age I was doing just the same. And probably getting into more mischief too while I was at it.

On my way back from the shops this morning I went past the chantier navale and I could see that it really is Les Epiettes in there.

There was also a new arrival, to make the total now three in there, so while I was catching my breath in the viewpoint at the top of the cliffs I could take a photo of it for the record.

And from there I ran on home – two extra legs of my fitness regime runs to make up five.

Back at the apartment I encountered one of my neighbours coming back home so we had a lengthy chat about putting the world to rights. And then I came up here to write my notes.

Having done that, I’m off to bed. Sunday tomorrow and a lie-in, but I also have pizza bases to make as well as some kind of dessert. It’s been a while since I’ve made an apple pie so I might have a go at that – either that or a crumble.

It might be a case of waiting until tomorrow to see how I feel.

Saturday 26th September 2020 – I WAS WRONG …

… about the weather last night. We didn’t have the rainstorm today. Or the plague of locusts either. But we had just about everything else.

The high winds are still here and still wreaking devastation about the town. I blame the baked beans that I had for tea the other night.

We also had one of the coldest days that I can remember for a good while too.

That’s probably why I didn’t feel like springing into action this morning and leaping joyously out of bed. Consequently I missed the third alarm. Only by 10 minutes or so, but missed it all the same.

And that’s hardly surprising as I must have been exhausted after my travels last night. I was with my aunt and we were doing a lot of stuff on the computer quite happliy working away. There was another guy with us as well. Suddenly my computer hard drive caught fire. This boy was all for dashing off for phoning up the fire brigade. Of coure I wouldn’t let him do that – I put it out myself. The fire brigade would just smother it in foam and ruin everything. In the end I managed to put out the fire. Of course the hard drive was ruined. My aunt and this boy were going into the City – Bishopsgate, although I don’t know why I thought Bishopsgate because it wasn’t there that I meant. There was a huge computer shop there. I felt really annoyed because I’d been to a computer fair that day and I could have bought a new hard drive there for peanuts had I known but it’s too late now. I asked this boy if he knew about this computer shop. Oh yes, he knew it very well. I asked “while you’re up in London with my aunt can you nip in there and pick me up a hard drive?”. I told him the one I wanted. He said “wouldn’t it be better to pick up a differet type for a MAC or something like that?”. He only ever uses MACs. I said that I use PCs and I’ve used them for years and I know them pretty well so I’m going to stick with them. He had a little bit of a chunter about that. Then I thought that I would have to get him some money as well and I probably don’t have enough cash on me so how am I going to do that? Then it came to booking the tickets so I went to look on the railway site. It turned out instead that I was looking at the bus site. It took endless goes for me to log in on it because everyone was meithering me and I kept on typing the wrong word. Eventually I got in to find that it was buses that we were looking at because we were now actually living in Bath. The first thing my aunt said was that they don’t have a direct bus service from Bath to London any more. We have to go on the train. We had to start looking for things like that. In the meantime we managed to find the times of the buses which would at least get them some of the way. Then the phone rang. My aunt talked to whoever it was and so on. When she hung up she said “that was George and that’s strange. He’s after his wages for the taxis. He’s on holiday and he wants it posted to him in York by cheque”. She couldn’t understand why he wanted it. I said “he’s probably going to buy something special while he’s in York”. “Yes but it’s early. he doesn’t get paid until Thursday but anyway …”. She had a chunter about that. Then I had to go and get her ready for this bus so they could get on it and this other guy too and head off into London
A little later on there was a girl and she was a lot older than she ought to be and she still had a dolly that she cuddled. People used to make remarks about it (Wiske and Schanulleke, anyone?). They decided that they would pass a Law about it. Somewhere inside there they inserted a clause that people who cuddled a pet or other object or person for the purpose of comfort would be exempt, which of course wiped out the whole purpose of this Law anyway. So we all had a debate about it.
Just then this other girl turned up. She was in a purple and gold kind of trouser suit kind of thing that looked more at home in a Middle-Eastern harem. She had long dark-brown hair that was cut in the style of an Egpytian, really precise cuts and edges and so on.
There was much more to it too but as you are probably eating your meal right now I’ll spare you any discomfort.
And once again I was dictating without the dictaphone in my hand. Either this is starting to become a habit or else it already is and a whole load of stuff has slipped quite literally through my hands.

After a shower, Caliburn and I hit the streets and headed to the shops.

NOZ is always on my shopping list. That’s a shop that buys job-lots of bankrupt stock, overstocks, that kind of thing from all over Europe.

In the past I’ve found plenty of useful things in there and also a whole variety of different foods to vary my diet somewhat. Today they had stocks of Sharwoods products on offer so I now have some vindaloo and madras sauces as well as some mango chutney. Stocks of curry in the freezer are getting low, an I’m also going to learn to make poppadoms, I reckon.

At LeClerc I didn’t spend very much, and most of what I did went on fruit. The place is now looking like a greengrocer’s, which is good for my health (and that reminds me – my kiwi, lemon and ginger cordial is delicious and I’ll be doing that again – hence more kiwis today).

One good thing is that, after much searching, I finally found the fresh figs. So back here, I finally set my kefir en route. How that will pan out remains to be seen.

This afternoon I had a whizz through some more photos of my adventures with Spirit of Conrad in July and we are now in our anchorage for the final night aboard. I reckon that there are about 50 more to edit before I finish.

Then, there are the 400 or so from my voyage into Eastern Europe and once they are completed I can turn my attention to the 3000 that remain from the High Arctic in 2019 and the 2000-odd from the High Arctic in 2018.

And then, finally, I can write up the notes for all of this.

The burning question of the day is not Rafferty’s motor car but whether I’ll finish all of this before all of this finishes me.

A few more albums bit the dust too, some more work was done on revising the web pages, Rosemary rang me and we had a chat for just over an hour, and I even found time to crash out for 15 minutes.

And as for that latter, with everything else that I’ve been doing today, it’s hardly a surprise. I must have been exhausted by then so I’m not too disappointed, even if for the last couple of days I’ve managed to keep going.

The day is far from finished too. There’s football this evening so I headed off into town.

And here’s another sure sign that the summer season has ended. The beach cabins have gone and they’ve taken down the diving platform at the Plat Gousset already, but now the itinerant bar Chez Maguie has folded up its tent and crept silently away in the night.

It’s a very significant sign for some of us, but for others it means that the locals can have their boulodrome back until next summer.

Professional football started back up a few weeks ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. But this weekend amateur football has had the green light.

Consequently I headed off up to the Stade Louis Dior to watch Granville’s 2nd XI play FC Flerien, the team from Flers, in Normandy Regional 1.

For the first 15 minutes Granville’s control of the ball and their passing and movement was extremely fluent, but by the end of this little period they were already 2-0 down – a corner that the goalkeeper dropped into the path of an onrushing forward (he seemed to have a good pair of teflon gloves) and a misplaced header under pressure back to the goalkeeper that went to another onrushing forward.

After that, a couple of heads dropped, and the Fleriens got into their stride. We had to wait 55 minutes for Granville’s first shot on target (and about 10 minutes before the end for their other one) and 65 minutes for their first corner.

It was literally men against boys because Granville’s team was quite youthful whereas Flers had three or four old hands who had clearly been around the block far more times than the Granville players could handle.

The match ended 2-0 but really Flers could have had half a dozen and no-one in Granville would have complained.

And I’m glad that the match finished when it did because I was absolutely frozen to the marrow. It’s a long time since I’ve been this cold. I’ve been much warmer than this in the Arctic and next time I go to the football I’ll put on the thermal undies that I bought on Thursday.

On the way back, here’s something that I haven’t noticed before – mainly because it’s been an age since I went into town in the dark at night.

But now there seems to be blue lights shining down on all of the pedestrian crossings on the main roads. Presumably to give motorists a better chance of spotting civilians trying to cross the road.

It brought back many happy memories of a press release that we wonce received from the Parisian authorities when I worked at Shearings – “The policeman who directs the traffic at the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe will from now on be floodlit to make sure that motorists don’t miss him in the dark”.

My route home had to be extended tonight for the simple reason that “if I’m out, I’m well out” and there’s no point in going home with just 90% on my fitbit. I may as well push it up to 100%.

For that reason I wandered on down into the port to see what was going on.

“Nothing much” was the answer to that. Marité was there of course, tucked up in her little corner and so were the two Channel Island ferries, Granville and the older Victor Hugo.

As an aside, we haven’t seen a gravel boat in here for almost 6 months. I was hoping that this new mayor would do something about stimulating the freight trade to the port.

My route continued along the rue du Port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen several photos taken of this street in the dark, all of which have been taken from the cliffs up above.

And so tonight, in an effort to do something different, here’s the reverse-angle shot taken from the street looking back towards the cliffs.

Not that you can actually see the cliffs in this (lack of) light. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

On the climb back up the Boulevard des Terreneuviers I stopped (for breath) to look at the tidal port.

There was a beautiful bright moon tonight, even though it’s only half-full, and there was a wonderful reflection of light down in the Baie de Mont St Michel looking across to Jullouville and the Pointe de Carolles.

Actually, considering that this photo was hand-held and taken with the little NIKON 1 J5 with the standard lens, it’s not come out too badly, even if I did have to stop it down by 8 (in fact by 10 because normally the camera has to be opened up by 2 since the lens was repaired).

Back at the flabberblok there was yet more football so I grabbed a bowl of rice pudding and settled down in a ringside seat in front of the internet.

Y Fflint, newly promoted to the JD Cymru League this season after a 20-year absence were entertaining Barry Town. Barry, usually a strong competitive side but who misfired so spectacularly in European Competition earlier and then against TNS on the opening day of the season, have yet to grace my screen this season and I’ve only ever seen Y Fflint play once, in a cup match a few years ago.

The match was quite entertaining because while Barry were much more powerful and street-wise (which you have to expect), Flint matched them blow for blow and I was quietly impressed.

There were three significant items in this match

Alex Titchiner, Flint’s ace striker, was carried off injured after just 2 minutes.
Mike Lewis, in the Barry goal, played the game of his life and made a couple of stunning reflex saves (and that’s not to say that our old favourite, Jon Danby, formerly of Connah’s Quay Nomads, now next-door in the Flint goal didn’t have his moments too)
and had a Flint defender kept his head when Matt Jarvis burst into the area and not conceded a penalty

then the new boys would have had something from this game. They are no mugs, and certainly not cannon-fodder like some promotees have been.

And if TNS managed to sweep away this Barry side so convincingly, then just HOW good are TNS?

There is also some exciting news from Deeside too. It seems that the idea to build a new football stadium on Deeside to be UEFA-compliant for junior international matches, and European club competition and to be shared by next-door neighbours Connahs Quay Nomads and Y Fflint has taken a giant step forward.

Who knows? It might even become a reality if the two clubs can keep up the momentum they they have established over the last couple of years. The announcement that “certain funds have been made available” is major news but, as expected, BBC Wales, with its hands so deep in the pockets of the Welsh Rugby Union to an indecent depth that it imposes a news blackout on Welsh football, has totally passed it by.

But by now, it’s late. Long after midnight, so I’m off to bed. I’ll write up my notes in the morning – if I’m here. It’s Sunday and a day of rest and I might sleep in long past midday.

Friday 6th March 2020 – SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!

Yes, I’ve had some good fortune today, and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any. But that’s another story of course, the sea approaches to Kugluktuk not excepted.

In fact, I should really have started this entry yesterday because that was when it all kicked off. Only in my confused state – something that is a regular occurrence these days – I forgot to mention it.

So yesterday I had a letter from the Belgian Old-Age Pension Authorities. After only about a year or so since I made my application, they have finally agreed to grant me an old-age pension in respect of my time spent working for General Electric and for that other strange American company where I met Alison.

So, as of 1st March 2019, I am richer by the princely sum of … errr … €29:47 per month. Yes, I can really go wild with that, can’t I?

But it’s not actually the sum of money that is important. It’s what goes with it that matters. I haven’t yet looked closely into it but there are things like free eye care, free dental treatment and the like. I’m not quite sure what, but believe me, I shall be looking closely into it over the course of the next few days.

And that’s not all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to go to the Bank today to pick up this blasted form. Three weeks since I handed it in, just for a simple stamp to be stamped upon it, and it took until today for it to be completed.

The guy to whom I spoke – he was as bewildered as I was as to why no-one there could have done it on the spot. he suggested that, the next time, I speak to him directly when I need something like this.

But then the subject turned round to the question of my money there. Not that there’s a great deal, but even so, he reckons that I could be doing so much better with it. And he worked out a little plan.

“You have your contents insurance with us” he said “but if you had other insurances, you’d get an even better deal”.
“But I do!” I insisted. “I have my motor insurance, my legal protection insurance (yes, I had a very mis-spent youth and who knows what’s bubbling away somewhere?) and the insurance on Virlet with you”
“No you don’t” he retorted.
“Yes I do” I insisted. “Have a look at my July outgoings”
And so he did. And there were my three annual payments
“But these are with the Credit Agricole Centre-France” he said. “That’s a different organisation”
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the fun and games we had when I moved here and tried to have my bank accounts set up and transferred over. I thought, that after much ado about nothing and all of the time that it took, the situation had been resolved. But apparently not.

Anyway, he picked up the ‘phone and did it all on the spot so that at long last, all of my banking details are under the same roof in France.

“And I have some good news for you” he said. “This is a cheaper area for insurance than the Puy-De-Dome. You’ll be saving on your insurances with us.”

So he’s going to look at them more closely and get back to me with some revised propositions. And, hopefully, some money back too.

This morning I was ever so close to beating the alarms. I failed by a matter of seconds and that was very sad news.

But still, an early start (just about) and after the medication, I looked at the dictaphone. Strawberry Moose starred in last night’s entertainment. he was out somewhere and there was a football match going on with all different people, women and girls just kicking around playing. He was on the sidelines cheering and they were talking about him. Someone was saying, some woman saying that she’d been out for 30 years but had had to go back to work and was working as a typist and was taking Strawberry Moose with her to do some kind of reporting. I said “he’s going to be extremely busy then because tomorrow he’s going to the swimming baths and he has another football match to go to tomorrow afternoon”. I was busy trying to fit a dressing-up costume on him but his paws were too big to go through the sleeve holes and so on. This was another one with a lot lore to it than this but I can’t remember it now.

So that was the best that I could do during the night, and I went for breakfast instead.

Once breakfast was out of the way I had a look at a few digital tracks. No problems with any of them this morning although a couple of them ended up being far longer than I was expecting, and one of them many more tracks than there ought to be. I wonder if this is a “lost studio master” with the discarded tracks left on it. Who knows?

All of that took me up to about 11:30, believe it or not, and then it was time to go out for my dejeunette.

And one part of me wished that I hadn’t because I’ve never seen a rainstorm like it. I was drenched before I’d gone 100 yards. But another part of me was pleased that I went because I caught a gravel lorry just finishing tipping its load on the quayside and then reversing into a gravel bay to turn round.

And you can tell about the rain from just looking at the photo.

My walk took me down past the car park that they are fitting out on the quayside on the rue du Port.

And I believe that I made some kind of sarcastic comment about the roller-coaster concrete track that they had laid in the middle of it.

But it’s quite clear now why they have done it like that, and I’m off to eat some humble pie instead. They’ve fitted some concrete guttering on the concrete strip that they laid, and the dips now have drainage grids installed in them.

So they are obviously like a roller-coaster in order to channel away the water. So I’ll shut up.

Having picked up my bread at La Mie Caline I came back here and as there was still plenty of time before lunch I finished off the editing of the sound file for Project 030.

For lunch I had more of the mushroom, leek and potato soup and it’s even more delicious. Tomorrow will be the last load and then I’ll be back on the hummus butties. Must take some hummus out of the freezer.

after lunch I went down into town for my appointment with the Credit Agricole, as I mentioned earlier.

On the way back, I decided to go for a little walk around to see what was happening.

The fete foraine – the funfair – has cleared off as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. But not all of it has gone. The candu floss and toffee apple stall is still here.

Does that mean that it’s going to stay here for the summer? That will be quite interesting if it does. It will all add to life’s great pageant down here on the coast for the season.

But here’s exciting, isn’t it?

There’s certainly something going on here because the pile of gravel by the conveyor is getting bigger and bigger so there’s clearly something about to happen.

And I’m afraid that curiosity got the better of me when I returned home. I had a look at the shipping AIS map and, sure enough, the bulk carrier Neptune that comes in here sometimes for the gravel in in the English Channel and it’s heading in this direction.

Of course, it’s too early to say what it’s doing and where it’s going, but it’s optimistic.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the installation of these three large grey pillars in the harbour and my theory about that they are for.

And it looks as if I’m right on that score too, because down there they are installing some pontoons heading our perpendicularly to the quayside and anchored to the posts.

Incidentally, I had a look to see how the pontoons are fastened to the mounting brackets. They are on rollers in grooves so that they will float up and down as the water level changes.

Unless they have a puncture, which is always possible I suppose.

My walk took me back around the long way in order to clock up the percentages on the fitbit.

And look who’s coming into harbour right now! It’s our old friend Thora coming in from Jersey on the afternoon tide. So hello to Thora.

As for me, I made it back and cracked on with the Project 030. I joined it all up and found a final track to finish it off, and then dictated the notes for it.

Just for a change, I ended up being four seconds short so I had to dictate a little extra to let into the proceedings. But that’s now all done and dusted and it doesn’t sound too bad.

What makes a difference is that there’s less talking from me.

Tea tonight was a burger and pasta in tomato sauce followed by apple crumble and the last of the Alpro Soya Dessert (note to buy some more).

And while I was eating, I was musing over my breakfast. Home-made muesli (well, home-mixed, should I say because the individual items were brought in), home-made apple and pear purée and home-made apple and pear cordial.

That’s all pretty impressive stuff, I have to say.

For my evening walk I took the little NIKON 1 J5 with me, fitted with the f1.8 50mm lens.

You can see the image that I took with it tonight. That’s darkened four stops on the Exposure Compensation function. Still far too bright. And far too blurred.

What I’ll have to do is to set the camera to shutter priority and use a faster speed to eliminate the blurring, and then give it all some further thought.

Despite the howling gale I managed my two runs, although the first was not where I usually go. The wind blew me out of there.

The football was weird. TNS sprinted into a 2-goal lead in minutes and never ever looked like they were in trouble. Barry Town were pretty poor and the possession – 62%-38% and the corners 8-2 tell their own story.

And if it could speak, the Barry Town woodwork would have a few things to say. It’s no exaggeration that TNS could have had half a dozen against a very poor Barry Town side by half-time.

But football is a funny game, as we all know. After about 55 minutes the Barry Town right-back floated in a speculative cross to the TNS penalty area from the right wing. Everyone, including the TNS goalkeeper Paul Harrison, stood and watched as it floated aimless into the area and be picked up by the slightest breeze that drifted it onto the far post and rebounded into the net.

Deep into injury time Barry Town won their second corner of the game. The high cross was headed by a Barry Town attacker towards the outstretched arms of Paul Harrison,, only for it to hit one of his own players and take a wicked deflection into the net.

So probably the most astonishing 2-2 draw that i’ve ever seen. And I bet that the crowd is still shaking its head over this result because I know that I am.

Shopping tomorrow, and if I’m early, I’m going on a little expedition. “Spend, spend, spend!” as I said earlier.

Friday 13th December 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that my blood count has gone up yet again. It’s now at 9.2 which is pretty astonishing as far as I am concerned. And I made a point to ask exactly what treatment they are giving me for my illness and the answer is “nothing”. The tablets that I take are to counter various side effects and the medication is to boost up my immune system.

But as for the illness, absolutely nothing.

Mind you, it’s pretty disconcerting to see that your doctor needs medical treatment herself. She had problems with her foot. But nevertheless, she can come and soothe my fevered brow any time she likes. This is a University hospital and all of the staff at this level are young University students. There has to be some benefit of my illness and I intend to make the most of it.

But as for bad news, then there’s plenty of that.

Firstly, my train out of Paris has been cancelled on Sunday due to the strike. It’s not the end of the world though because there are other solutions, amongst which “hiring a car” should never be ruled out. But there are options other than that to consider first.

Even so, hiring a car might sound expensive to some, but when you think about the price of a hotel in Paris, it’s not an outrageous proposition at all.

And that’s not all. You’ve all heard about the results of the Uk General Election where 14 million people voted for the Fascists and only 6.5 million voted to revoke the exit from the EU.

That in itself isn’t so important. But what IS important is that I now lose

Some of my UK pension rights
my health insurance rights
my employment rights
my rights of free movement and residence in the EU

And when one of my (ex) friends in the UK posted something bewailing her lot and I replied telling her to make the most of what she’ll be getting because I’ll be getting much worse than that, she called me all kinds of names (honestly!) and accused me of all kinds of things for not sympathising with her, even though she didn’t spend a single moment thinking about my lot.

But that’s the true spirit of the British people. Mean, narrow-minded, selfish, self-centred. I’m better off without these people dragging me down. And isn’t that just why I abandoned everyone in the UK in the first place? It can’t be a coincidence that they all end up like that. They all show their true colours eventually.

It’s definitely Friday 13th today!

Last night I wanted an early night so I tried the usual standby – switch on the laptop to watch a film. And sure enough, it works every time. Within 10 minutes I was away.

And right away too. There are a few files on the dictaphone that weren’t there when I went to bed, so it should be interesting to see those when I make it back home.

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 etc but seeing as my appointment at Castle Anthrax wasn’t until this afternoon I was in no rush to rouse myself. A little lie-in did me good and it was 07:30 when I finally showed a leg.

This morning was spent firstly dealing with last night’s little perambulations.

I vaguely remember something about ships and fuel tankers having to reposition themselves and so on. Some captain had to reposition his ship but he hadn’t brought his money with him so it was rather pointless. i’d ended up at my electronic studio and I was trying to work on something. I managed to produce a really really good electronic music track and while I was at it I produced some vocals and overdubbed them over a piece of music that someone else had written and they were really really good. A few people came round to my house to do something with the computer so I had these tracks playing in the background and they looked really impressed. Although after a few minutes they asked “are we going to get on with some work or are we going to listen to this all day?” and I thought that maybe I had played a little too much and that was a shame because I was so impressed with what I’d done.
Sometime later we were back with the songs again and someone was going to bring some music over and we were going to do all of the singing. It meant getting out of this crowded tram. Someone was fighting their way to the door but the doors closed and there was a cry of “jam the door”. Someone stuck their foot in it so that it wouldn’t close, and it rebounded open. This person had to fight their way out through the crowds and out of the door. We ended up talking about fishing again and the situation of the British having sold all their permits and are now getting upset because the permits that they sold are now making money and the ones that they still have aren’t, and as usual.

Then we had the issue of dealing with the egocentric and selfish Brits in the UK but I did tear myself away to go to the Delhaize for shopping. Pasta, burgers and frozen veg will be on the menu or the next few days.

Back here, I had a shower and a clothes wash, made my butties and then headed for the hospital, calling at the Delhaize in town on the way because I had forgotten the vegan cheese and vegan mayonnaise.

Pouring down with rain now but I pushed on regardless.

My route today took me, as usual, down the Brusselsestraat and past St Pieter’s Hospital. An early and significant casualty of the linguistic war, this huge modern hospital was constructed to serve the French community, apparently (so I was told) who, once it was built, created a new town called Louvain-le-Neuve and moved all of their infrastructure out there instead.

The memory that I will always retain of this place as they make a serious start on demolishing it is that there were still the makers’ labels on the double-glazed windows on some of the floors because the rooms on those floors had never even been occupied.

By the time that I reached the hospital I was looking something like a drowned rat. 13:30 was my appointment but I was treated at 13:45 and then I was sat in a chair for a while as the medication was pumped into me.

Rosemary rang and we had a good chat while it was all going on, and eventually I was thrown out. A call at the pharmacy for medication and then down into town.

Last time that we were here they were excavating a giant hole in the middle of the car park on the Jacobsplein, and I was interested to see how they were getting on and, more importantly, what they were going to be doign with it.

So here I am, and all that I can say is that in the last 4 weeks or so there hasn’t been very much change in the situation. The hole is still there and there doesn’t seem to be anythign to indicate why they have actually gone and dug it out.

It’s probably one of those things where time wil ltell and I should come back in four weeks time where I shall be equally confounded.

A visit to the Origin’O Health Food shop was also on the cards The Delhaize doesn’t sell all the vegan product that I need.

Before I went in though, I took the opportunity to take a photo of the Christmas lights in the Vismarkt. You can do quite a lot with modern LED lighting and this looked particularly good to me.

That was the cue to go into the shop and see what was on offer. They had some of that nice smoked vegan cheese that I had before so I bought some more of that, as well as some more grated cheese for the pizzas and the cheese sauces.

Though the rainstorm had died down by now, it was still wet and miserable going back to my little room.

For that reason, and also for the fact that I had the little Nikon 1 with me and not the big D500 with me, I didn’t hang around too long looking at Leuven’s Christmas lights, beautiful as they might be like these ones in the Bondgenotenlaan.

What I’ll have to do is that if it’s not raining tomorrow evening, I’ll bring the big Nikon out for a walk and go on a prowl around the city to see what I can see.

By the time that I arrived back at my room it wasn’t far off tea time so I made myself some food. And it wasn’t too bad either. It’ll keep the wolf from the door for a while.

There was football on the internet later. While Connah’s Quay Nomads were being turned over by Cefn Druids, we were being treated to Barry Town v TNS.

And it was easy to see why TNS have been Champions of the Welsh Premier League for the last couple of hundred years. Barry Town had been leading the league at one point this season but TNS dealt with them in summary fashion, winning 4-1 away from home without even breaking sweat.

First to the ball on almost every occasion they never looked in trouble at all and had Ratcliffe in the Barry goal not played a blinder, TNS could easily have doubled their tally.

As far as I’m concerned, they may as well give the title to TNS right now because no-one is ever going to stop them. They could even afford the luxury of leaving Greg Draper their leading scorer on the bench until about the 80th minute.

On that note, I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough for now. Nothing planned for tomorrow except to recover from today so if the weather has improved I’ll just go for a long walk.

See you tomorrow.

Incidentally, I did take some photos of the Christmas lights of the city. Too many to put on this page so if you want to see them you need to go to this page

Friday 22nd November 2019 – WHAT ODDS …

… would you have given on me walking into a social centre here in Granville on the West Normandy coast and bumping into three young girls who I have met before … in a small town called Uummannaq in the far north of Greenland?

Yes, it’s true that it’s “Greenland week” here in Granville, but even so, it’s a pretty long shot, isn’t it?

We’ve all seen this smile before, haven’t we?

It’s the smile that I have as the background to the desktop on my little old laptop and the girl to whom it belongs is my friend Heidinnguaq, she who spent half an hour or so posing for me last year when I was there.

And here she is in Granville too, with a few of her friends.

After my marathon session the other evening, last night I was in bed at something like a realistic time last night. Plenty of time to go on a travel or two. And who should I meet last night was my friend Ric. I’m not sure exactly how it had come round to this but I’d come to the town where he lived. I’d been round to where there were shelves and books and like cupboards and so on and it was some kind of description about what I was going to be doing and what I was going to be. Anyway, I knocked on his door, and he came out and we had a little chat. I told him that I was going out with someone later that evening. In fact I was going out with a lot of people but I was hoping that one particular person would be there. He stepped off his door and came in and said “what’s all this about?” and said something like a tree – an oak or a sycamore or something like that. It turned out that that was an euphemism that I had been using on this piece of paper stuck on this wall about the person that I was hoping to see that evening. So I said “yes, I’m going on a date”. I didn’t tell him too much – just enough to get his appetite interested. And that was when I awoke. It goes without saying that the person whom I was hoping to meet was Castor.

The alarms went off as usual and I leapt out of bed (and I did too!) ready for an early start. And after breakfast I did another magnum opus from the pile on the dictaphone. Only one (and half another) but it was certainly one of the longest.

And having transcribed it, I can see why it was one of the ones that affected me so much. It was very similar to one that I had back in May where the world was coming to an end and I was the last survivor. There I was, all alone on the beach watching the world come to an end just like in Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach, and as the narrator brings the story to a close, his prose breaks, in perfect time and perfect scan, into a speech that runs into a slightly amended version of the final couple of lines of the lyrics (which he speaks) of “The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”.

Well, the night in early September that I transcribed this morning was just like that, and it was such a surprise not just because of the event, but because of the fact that I’d been there a short while earlier in almost identical circumstances. And the narrator’s hypnotic speech added a certain amount of tension to the whole thing too.

But I couldn’t hang around doing that all morning. There were plenty of other things to do, such as to prepare my speech and select about 25 photos from my visit to Uummannaq.

That took me up to about 13:00 – usually that’s lunchtime but there’s only frozen bread here so I went down to the boulangerie for another dejeunette down in the town to make my sandwiches.

The tide was well in by now and all of the fishing boats were coming into the harbour to bring their catch to the fish-processing plant.

You can see all of the equipment lined up on the quayside.

And the turn-round in the port was pretty rapid. I’ll tell you that.

It takes me about 5 minutes or so to walk from the top right down the stairs – the escalier des noires-vaches – to the rue du Port. And by the time that had reached the bottom, the yellow and white boat that we saw arriving was just on its way back out to sea.

They don’t hang about in the harbour when there are other fish to fry, that’s for sure.

In fact, it was so busy in the inner harbour today that we had something of a traffic jam.

There was La Grande Ancre waiting to leave port, but she was unable to because there was another fishing boat on its way in. La Grande Ancre had to wait a good few minutes for the other boat to make its way through the gates before she could make her way out.

Of course, that’s no reason to complain. A busy fishing port is an important asset to the community.

After lunch I made a decent adapter cable for the new laptop out of a cut-down North American extension lead that was hanging around in Caliburn. I cut it down so that there was about a foot or so on the socket end, and added an old European plug on the bare end.

And it works to perfection too. Nothing wrong with that! And then I uploaded Paint Shop Pro and made a slide show out of the photos that I had chosen.

While I had Pint Shop Pro and the external DVD dive out, I reinstalled it onto the laptop that broke down in North America and which I managed to restart. I’m going to see if I can make it run again, although I’m not sure why I would want to.

At 15:45 the guy from the Education Department came to pick me up and took me to the Sports Hall at the local High School, and that was where I met Heidinnguaq and her friends.

First thing that I did was to scrounge a huge television and couple up my laptop to it, and then set my slideshow in motion.

It would provide a little ambience to the meeting.

We had a little talk, that didn’t last too long, and having done their drum dance, throat singing and polar bear dance (the one that Jena did for me last year in Uummannaq), Heidinnguaq was prevailed upon to produce her guitar.

She’s an excellent guitarist and singer, and has written quite a few songs of her own. She played a couple and then did a number by Amy Winehouse.

Mind you, having English as her third language, I hope that she didn’t understand the significance of what she was singing. The lyrics, to a native-English-speaking person, are full of innuendo that a foreigner will probably not understand.

There was a question and answer session afterwards, which I translated, and then in the best tradition of the News of the Screws, I made my excuses and left.

Back here, it was tea-time. I had a rummage around in the freezer and found some lentil, pepper and potato curry from 24th August … errr … 2018. That was just as nice today as it was back then, especially as it was followed down by more rice pudding.

Later, I took out the rubbish and braving the wind and rain, made a hurried circuit of the headland, including a brief run for a few hundred metres. Short of my target unfortunately but there you go.

When I returned, there was football on the internet. Barry Town v Penybont (Bridgend to the uninitiated) in the Welsh Premier League.

For the first 15 minutes you wouldn’t have believed that Penybont were at the bottom of the table and Barry at the top. From the action up until that point you would have said that it was the other way round.

However, as the match progressed, Barry began to exert themselves and they ran out 3-0 winners. The result was right, but the scoreline was rather unfair. Barry’s goals were

a well-worked routine from a corner
a screamer from 25 yards that could have gone anywhere
a defensive error where the full_back slipped on the wet surface and lost control of the ball, with a Barry Town player the quickest to react to the loose ball

All they need is to get the run of the green.

It’s quite late now but I’ve been spending all the evening editing photos. All of the photos that I took of the girls I’ll post on a separate page when I get round to it.

Just one more special event, and that’s tomorrow evening. And then I ca get back round to the usual busy stae without any of these extra jobs cropping up.

I could do with a rest.

la grande ancre waiting to leave port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boat entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Friday 16th August 2019 – SO HERE I AM …

… in Toron.to about to start the fourth leg of my journey. So if you don’t hear from me for a while don’t worry. It merely means that I can’t find a reliable internet connection.

Last night was a really bad night and I don’t know why. I couldn’t get off to sleep and when I did, I couldn’t stay asleep for long.

but I was still up and about reasonably early, having medication and then going down to breakfast.

it took me a good while to organise myself after that but eventually I was ready for the shuttle bus to the airport. It was pretty busy and one guy spent all of the journey talking into his mobile phone and saying nothing except basically “how clever I am and how stupid my clients are” to someone else on the other end of the phone. Not one of the rest of us could understand a single sentence that he was saying.

The airport was busy but the wait through security wasn’t that long and after a thorough examination of my new laptop I was able to proceed.

The plane was pretty full but my neighbour was rather bizarre. I said “hello” to her but she looked back at me as if I had two heads. Never had that in Canada before.

At Toronto it took a while for our suitcases to appear and then I trotted off to the hotel. I’m on the 7th floor in the “secure” area – can’t think why.

We had our expedition briefing later and I met a couple of old friends. But the vultures at the head of the queue cleaned out the buffet – and how – before those of us farther behind could be served. Looking at the mountain of food on some of the plates, then some people have no shame.

I trotted off to Subway for a sandwich and then came back to watch the football. Newly promoted Penybont were playing Barry Town in the opening match of the Welsh Premier League – now the JC Cymru League.

For the first half Penybont played quite well with some nice football, compared to Barry Town’s idea of “hoof it upfield and hope McLaggon can run fast”. 60%-32% possession told its own story.

But in the second half Barry improved and ended up winning 2-1. A bit unfair on Penybont who deserved something from the game.

I’m off to bed now. It’s an early start in the morning. And I don’t know when I’ll see you all again but I’ll catch up eventually.

Saturday 15th June 2019 – I’VE BEEN …

… out and about today. and not just once but a couple of times too.

The day actually started off quite well, with me being up and about (well, on my feet anyway) for the third alarm at 06:20.

That’s a rare occurrence these days.

And it’s a surprise because it was the annual firework display last night, as I found out round about midnight when Iw as rudely awoken from my slumbers.

With having an early breakfast I was able to attack the dictaphone notes and deal with a few of those – get them out of the way. And shame as it is to say it, I dozed off for 5 minutes in between.

My little sleep was interrupted by the doorbell. Liz arrived. So we had a coffee and some chocolate and a chat before hitting the streets.

LIDL came up with nothing special, and our next stop was Centrakor.

Here in the apartment I have a big 100-litre waste bin and it’s ridiculous because I never create enough rubbish to fill it (and I’m not talking about the blog either). However I forget to empty it regularly and I don’t realise about the state of it until it comes to look for me itself, by which time it’s rather overwhelming.

As is usual, I need to be pushed into doing things so I bought a nice 20-litre waste bin today. That’s much more like it. It’ll take a week or so to fill and then I shall have to take it outside – much more regularly than I do right now, and that has to be good.

LeClerc came up with nothing special but we had a nice lunch, and that’s always welcome.

This afternoon, there was football on the internet. The Welsh clubs are preparing for the Europa League and Champions League matches and Barry Town were playing a representative side from the Punjabi FA who are on tour in the UK.

The match was streamed live on the internet so I watched it. And Barry will have to play much better than they did if they want to progress in Europe. They were extremely rusty and off the pace.

Tea was veg and pasta, and then I went for my evening walk. First time for a few weeks. It was rather uncomfortable but I have to press on and get myself back on form.

Sunday tomorrow so a Lie-in. And I hope that it’s a good one.

Friday 10th May 2019 – I’VE HAD A …

… better day today, much to my own surprise. Much better than the weather anyway, and that’s saying the least.

Last night wasn’t as early as I was hoping, and I needed to go for a stroll down the corridor in the middle of the night, and it’s been quite a long time since that’s happened.

And on top of all that, I didn’t manage to beat the third alarm. Not by much, it has to be said.

But there was still plenty of time to go off ona little voyage during the night. We had to go to the seaside, four or five of us. One guy with us was an old Italian. I remember him being something like the Italian football team manager and I couldn’t think of his name or put a finger on his career. I asked him how he had been doing since he left Italy – a vague question – and he replied “surely you knew. I won the league with (he mentioned a few clubs) and won promotion with Torquay United” – It all sounded amazing to me. And someone came along with this huge, enormous shopping trolley. I remembered having lent it to someone and was hoping to have it back, but he replied “no, we’re going to take it on to someone” but I ended up carrying it or pushing it. We got on a train and went down to Brighton and ended up in an apartment that was to let. One of us was thinking of taking it but I can’t remember who now. The girl asked about it and another guy said that it was up for let. But someone is going to take it but it needs work doing to it. The tap is leaking or something. IS there anything about it? So we had a rummage round and found a big manila envelope. We pulled it out and went to open it to read what it says. At that moment a young guy with us, very like him in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced started to cook and was serving up pancakes with fruit or veg, giving one to this girl.
That wasn’t all of it either, but there were parts of this voyage that wouldn’t make good reading if you are eating your tea.

After breakfast I settled down to do some work, and I’ve been hard at it for most of the day.

I started off by finishing off last night’s entry and adding the photos. And that wasn’t as quick as it might have been too.

That was followed up by merging the photos and the dictaphone notes for August 2015 in Canada. And then, I went through the blog entries for that month and added in all of the text from then.

That took ages but it has produced quite a copious file, and it won’t take much to edit and expand it into a proper series of web pages.

Like I said, I do one job and the closer it gets to finishing, the more work it seems to spawn.

To finish off the day I started to do the same for September 2015, and I’ve done three days of that. This is going to be quite a lengthy work, so it’ll take me longer than a couple of days to finish it off.

During all of this, I stopped for lunch of course, indoors once more.

And of course there was the afternoon walk. In the rain of course, so there wasn’t anyone out and about.

There weren’t all that many fishing boats out there this afternoon, as far as it was possible to see through the driving rain.

La Grande Ancre was out there however, and she had just performed a U-turn outthere ofshore. She won’t be towing a net behind her with a tight turn like that, I wouldn’t have thought.

There wasn’t anyone about working on the Resistance Monument either. And by the looks of things, it doesn’t look as if anyone has been out there at all today

And that’s hardly surprising given the amount of rain that was teeming down right now.

I’m intrigued though to know why they have dug a big hole on the centre of the emplacement down there. It doesn’t look as if it has any purpose to serve, and it hasn’t been shuttered off.

As it happens, I wasn’t quite correct when I said that there was no-one about at all.

Yesterday we had someone with his chopper out and today we have someone with his rod out. Down on the edge of the rocks off the Cap Lihou is someone fishing.

I’m not sure that he ever caught anything, but it does remind me of the story about why sex has a lot in common. In both cases you take out your rod and you never know what you are going to catch.

Despite the rain, I walked on round the headland to where I could overlook the chantier navale.

Yet another change-round in there. Grand Beau Temps has now departed, which is hardly any surprise in this kind of weather.

But she’s not been replaced. The berth in which she was installed is now empty. But I don’t imagine that it will remain empty for long.

Tea was a burger with vegetables followed by apple pie and coconut sorbet – delicious.

The evening walk, I almost abandoned it due to the rain. But I pressed on none-the-less.

And here’s something interesting that seems to be happening in the rue Notre Dame.

I’ve absolutely no idea what an “enquete policiere grandeur nature” is, and even less of an idea why they need to ban parking in the street in order to carry it out.

I suppose that I’ll have to present myself sur place on 18th May in order to find out.

Fighting my way back through the rain, I made it back here just in time for the football.

Clubs in the Welsh Premier League are entitled to 4 places in European competition. The Champions play in the Champions League , and the Cup Winners (or runners up in the League, if the Cup winners are the Champions) and then the next-highest club in the league. So that’s TNS, Connah’s Quay Nomads and Barry Town.

The four next-lowest teams have a series of play-off matches to decide who has the remaining place, and tonight Newtown (5th) were playing Bala Town(5th).

In one of the most exciting matches that I’ve seen for a while, Bala won 2-1. And the difference between the teams was firstly Keighan Jones’s foot, and secondly Henry Jones.

Henry Jones, one of the most skilful players ever to have played in the WPL, has been off-form for a while but tonight he recovered all of his skill and more besides, and put in a match-winning performance.

And when Newtown broke through the Bala defence, and found themselves on a one-on-one situation with Keighan Jones in the Bala goal, his outstretched right foot saved them on both occasions. He’s only the second-choice goalkeeper too, but that was a superb performance tonight.

So tater later than intended, I’m off to bed.

Shopping tomorrow so I need to be fit.

Friday 26th April 2019 – I’VE HAD …

… another miserable day today.

Not because I’ve been tired – in fact I’ve managed to go the whole day without even the slightest hint of crashing out – but more to the fact that I couldn’t summon up the energy to do anything productive whatever.

I’d had another bad night too, tossing and turning for most of it. And yet I’d managed to go on a few mazy, amazing voyages.

We had been on a ship, a big one, in the South China Sea somewhere and it sank. Three of us were washed overboard and we swam in this sea for quite some time – days, it seemed, – until we were washed ashore on this populated island. We had to climb over a fence and found ourselves in someone’s back garden. The woman had a big sprawly house that had started off as a small cabin and had been enlarged with additional rooms haphazardly as time had gone on. She fed us and said we could stay the night. Next morning I went for a walk around. The guy had this beautiful large yacht and it was clear that he spent a lot of time looking after it. he was talking about going around the Arctic on it and I agreed that this would be the right kind of craft to go up there and he wasn’t the ordinary run-of-the-mill Indonesian or Filipino fisherman, he cares about his boat and done his research etc. We ended up walking through a typical suburban English housing estate but a huge weird animal like a rhinoceros but with a weird head with all kinds of appendages stuck on it. I grabbed my camera and took a photo but the flash didn’t work so it didn’t come out and the animal disappeared before I could try another shot. I went back to the house to ask about staying another night but she said “no, it’s full”. So I asked if there was anywhere else I could stay. She replied that there was bound to be somewhere else in the town. She then cooked me a meal and they asked me questions “do you eat ‘x’, do you eat ‘y’? How long is it since you’ve eaten ‘z’? Did you eat it when you were a kid?” all this kind of thing. But now it was becoming dark and I needed to find a place to stay and, more importantly, a way to get off this island and back to wherever it is that I’m supposed to be
A little later I was with a woman and I can’t remember what it was that I was doing but we’d been detained by someone, a young smallish guy with black hair and a black beard. He said that he had been working for the CIA and should have been an agent but they said that with his perfect memory he ought to be a salesman. He showed a photo of this woman coming out of a department store. This immediately filled her with horror. She looked around and there was this young lad behind her smiling away. He said “do you remember this story?” and produced a newspaper article showing that she had been arrested in it for something or other. By now she was in tears, making some kind of totally incoherent statement. he then produced some kind of small light-blue patterned cushion and said “you always leave your calling card behind in places like this, don’t you?”, waving the cushion around and that put her into even more tears.

I awoke several times during all of this going on, and eventually went back to sleep to step right back into, not the one where I was with that woman, but right back to being on the island again, in exactly where I had stepped out a while before. I don’t recall ever doing quite that before. But anyway I did end up stopping the night at that place on the island and I remember undressing to go to bed. I had my wet-weather overtrousers on so took them off, got into bed and went to sleep. Next morning I was up early and started to dress. Everyone else was getting up and this young girl came in to say hello, and a few other people. The house was busy pretty quickly. I ended up sitting ona bed with a huge collection of cats sitting on me, first a black one and a ginger one, then a white one and all different ones taking it in turns to sit on my knee for a stroke. I heard the buzzer on my phone so I looked and saw a message “your breakfast ready at 09:15”. I thought that I’d better finish dressing. These two women came in and went to a cupboard fetching out little phials of stuff. They game one to me and said “this will do for you”. I worked out that it was shampoo and it hit me that they were “suggesting” that I take a shower. I wanted to finish dressing but I couldn’t find my trousers. the plastic overtrousers were there but not the normal ones.

The alarms went off at 06:00 and so on but I couldn’t care less. 08:25 was when I awoke. But that’s not at all the same as saying that that was the time that I left my stinking pit. Not at all.

So a rather late start to the day, and once I’d composed myself, I attacked a few of the dictaphone notes from just recently that had built up on the dictaphone. And that took me most of the morning too and I don’t know why.

Lunch was inside again, with the start of the last batch of home-made hummus out of the freezer. It’s just as delicious as it was the day that I made it too.

After lunch I made a start on the outstanding mountain of photos that need to be dealt with. And the more I deal with, the more there seems to be to deal with.

There was a brief stop of my walk around the Pointe du Roc in the wind. On the car park were a couple of people on those weird foot-first bicycles.

One of them was towing a trailer on which were two 110-watt solar panels, so I went to have a chat with the rider. It’s an electrically-assisted bike and the panels charge up the batteries while he’s cycling.

On a good day they can give about one and a half charges to the bank of batteries so that’s probably a range of about 30 miles.

But I don’t get the trailer idea though, unless it’s for the luggage. I would have been tempted to go for a roof over the bike and put the panels on that.

The Quebec flag on the front bike is of no significance. The people on board came from La Rochelle.

Back here I continued with the photos in a very desultory fashion until tea time. That was a really delicious steamed veg and falafel in a really tasty cheese sauce. One of the best that I’ve ever made.

My evening walk was interrupted by a collision with a neighbour. We had a lengthy chat about this and that.

And as I continued on my way I was interrupted yet again. Parked in the rue Notre Dame was one of the commercial lorry-type of Land Rovers but what caught my eye about it was this beautiful 12-volt winch.

I have a 12-volt electric winch that I was going to fit onto the Kubota tractor to winch logs and things like that around the farm, but I never actually managed to get round to fitting it.

In fact, there were a lot of things down there that I never got around to doing.

As a result of all these delays I almost missed the start of tonight’s football.

It’s the final round of matches in the Welsh Premier League tonight and Bala Town were playing Caernarfon Town live on the internet. Caernarfon played for the first 15 minutes as if they were asleep, and during that time Bala had scored a goal and missed two or three total sitters.

It took 33 minutes for Caernarfon to threaten the Bala goal, and then the match livened up.

The second half was a wonderful advert for Welsh Premier football, and for the final 15 minutes Caernarfon were camped in the Bala Town half and although they didn’t manage to equalise, they hit the woodwork and and a couple of other good chances too.

Down south in the manth between Barry and Newtown, Newtown didn’t do enough to overhaul Caernarfon so that gives Caernarfon home advantage in the playoffs for the vacant place in the Europa League next season. That’s not bad for a team that was only promoted to the Welsh Premier League this season, and it’s all down to the fact that while they might not be the most skilful players in the league they have a magnificent team spirit.

It’ll also be interesting to see how Noah Edwards plays next season. I didn’t think of him as anything extra-ordinary at the start of the season, but as the season has gone on, the better he’s become. If he continues this progression next season he might become another Henry Jones or Callum Morris or kayne McLaggon.

It’s shopping tomorrow so I’m off to bed right now. It won’t be an early night so I’ll probably crash out in the afternoon but that’s par for the course these days.

sea on rocks baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

waves sea wall baie de mont st michel port de granville harbour manche normandy france

yacht baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

mussel beds donville les bains manche normandy france

Saturday 20th April 2019 – THE FOOTBALL …

… season rolls on towards its inevitable conclusion as Connah’s Quay Nomads threw away 2 points against Barry Town and TNS won 3-1 against Caernarfon Town.

I can’t remember now how many consecutive Welsh Premier League titles that TNS has won. Despite their mid-season hiccup when they fell as low as fourth place, they inevitably pulled themselves together to chalk up an impressive series of victories with a match or two to spare.

There are two reasons for this. And two reasons only.

Firstly, all of the other clubs suffer from an incredible amount of inconsistency. They can put together two or three good results and then blow up, and that’s no good at this level of football in the Welsh Premier League.

Secondly, a close examination of the victories of TNS will show that the crucial goals that they score are always in the last 15 minutes. And that points to one thing, and one thing only – and that is that the players on the opposing teams are just plain and simply lacking in match fitness.

For 75 or 80 minutes the leading teams can slug it out toe-to-toe with TNS, just like Caernarfon Town did last night. They were excellent for 75 minutes, and then they run out of steam.

Barry Town the other night were an embarrassment. For the final 10 minutes TNS were attacking at will without any pretence of a defence and counter-attack.

If these clubs want to compete properly over the whole season, working seriously on the fitness aspect of the game is crucial.

But all of that aside, the biggest difference between TNS and Connah’s Quay is Greg Draper. Easily the best striker ever to grace the Welsh Premier League, he’s not played as often this season as I would like, but astonishingly, he’s scored a goal every 37 minutes that he’s been on the pitch.

On the other hand, the strikers who have played for the Nomads haven’t impressed me at all. If they want to be more successful, they need to find a high-class striker from somewhere.

With the alarm going off early as usual this morning, I was out of bed quite rapidly. Plenty of time to go for a wander though. There were a few of us in a harbour and we went to board an old ship. We walked along the gangplank onto the shop, which was a small 50-tonner something not unlike Pecheur de Lys except that the bridge was set quite far back. The ship had been painted red but it was faded and flaked off quite badly so that we could see the oak planking. The hold was planked over. Everyone else was wandering around up front but I went back to the bridge to look at the instruments. They were brass and, surprisingly, in perfect and clean condition. I noticed that the binnacle was showing 150° so I shouted out of the window to the others “Left Hand Down a bit – course 150°” like any good sub-Lieutenant might do on the Navy Lark.

With having had an early start I had an early breakfast, followed by a shower. I was going out early to the shops too but just as I was on the point of going out, someone to whom I wanted to speak came on line. As a result I was late away.

There was just the usual stuff at LIDL. Nothing exciting, although because supplies had run down, I did spend more than usual.

NOZ was exciting though. Quite a few different bits and pieces and a pile of stuff for a special occasion in the future.

At LeClerc, it was another expensive shop, but once again just the usual stuff, but a lot of it to stock up the supplies.

I did buy a new memory card though to replace the one that was damaged the other day. And also a proper memory card reader to replace the ad-hoc device that I was using which contributed to the disaster.

Another thing that I bought was some frozen spinach. A couple of people have told me that spinach is good for the red blood cells, and I’ll try anything that will help.

Back here I put the frozen stuff away and then sat down for a drink and a relax. That took me nicely up to lunch, which was taken in the glorious sunshine out on my little wall overlooking the harbour.

This afternoon I put everything away (and there were piles of it all too) and then did a few things here and there on the computer. But I couldn’t keep on going and ended up crashing out for a while on my chair.

There was the afternoon walk at some point too. My perambulations too me around the walls and in the general direction of the rue du Nord.

That gave me an opportunity to have a good butcher’s and see how they were getting on with the renovation of the house at the corner.

They don’t seem to have made much of a progression since the last time that I looked. But it’s definitely clear that they are going to be putting a balcony or terrace over there.

And the place was heaving with people as usual in this glorious weather, especially down on the beach at Donville-les-Bains.

With a bit of crop and enhancement, and blowing up the photo (because I can do that these days despite modern anti-terrorist legislation) I could see that there’s actually some kind of showjumping or dressage event taking place down there this weekend.

But we know how quickly the tide comes in, so I hope that the horses can swim. Or maybe they are sea-horses

What with all of the excitement on land and on sea, all that remained was to find some excitement in the air.

And sure enough, while I was wandering around with my camera at the ready, a ULM – or microlight – went flying by overhead.

Not exactly the kind of machine that would ever entice me up into the air. I’d want something more substantial than that.

There was no football in Granville this evening, but there was a match at Cerences. I was trying to make up my mind but had my mind made up for me as Liz rang me up on the phone. We had a chat for a while and by then it was too late.

Instead, I went for a walk around the Pointe du Roc

My little trip once more coincided with the arrival of Victor Hugo in the harbour. She’d presumably just come back from a ferry trip to Jersey in the Channel Islands.

After all, it is School Holiday time and I imagine that there would be lots of takers for a trip.

With all of that out of the way I came back to watch the football from Oswestry on the internet.

With having a few more things to do, I was late going to bed. And I’m planning on a good lie-in because I need it. And it’s a bank Holiday too.

people on beach plat gousset granville manche normandy france

horse showjumping trials beach donville les bains granville manche normandy france

victor hugo baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

victor hugo port de granville manche harbour normandy france

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: Barry Town

Tuesday 4th May 2021 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY!

Tuesday 9th March 2021 – WE’VE BEEN HAVING …

Saturday 28th November 2020 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

Saturday 21st November 2020 – JUST FOR A …

Saturday 14th November 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Saturday 17th October 2020 – WE CALLED IT …

Saturday 26th September 2020 – I WAS WRONG …

Friday 6th March 2020 – SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!

Friday 13th December 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

Friday 22nd November 2019 – WHAT ODDS …

Friday 16th August 2019 – SO HERE I AM …

Saturday 15th June 2019 – I’VE BEEN …

Friday 10th May 2019 – I’VE HAD A …

Friday 26th April 2019 – I’VE HAD …

Saturday 20th April 2019 – THE FOOTBALL …

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