Tag Archives: joly france

Friday 25th March 2022 – AS YOU MIGHT …

… expect, today has been nothing like as productive as yesterday was.

But, quite rarely, the problem was nothing to do with a lack of effort on my part – more on the part of someone else who shall be nameless who had me running around on the internet for three hours for what eventually turned out to be no good purpose.

There have been problems with these people in the past over “certain issues” and a little over two years ago I vowed that that time would be the very last … etc etc.

However I relented over the passage of time and subsequently, over the past few months particularly, I’ve been given the run-around over a couple of issues that have caused me to sigh with dismay but today – well, I dunno.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m living on borrowed time and every hour that I waste is an hour that I won’t ever have back again.

On top of that, the doctors have told me to do everything that I possibly can to avoid stressing myself out. It’s only my heart keeping going that’s keeping me going and it’s showing signs of strain, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. But once I stress myself out to such an extent that my heart is affected, I’ve had it.

It’s simply that I can’t afford the stress. There used to be a time when I thrived on stress – never mind your “Management By Objective” – my motto was “Management By Crisis” and it usually worked. But I can’t do it now.

What was even worse was that for the first time since I can’t remember when, I had a good sleep last night. There wasn’t much on the dictaphone at all.

Well, in fact there was, but one entry was the carbon copy of one over two hours earlier, so whether I simply dictated the same dream twice with a lengthy gap in between or whether in fact i dreamt it twice, well, we’ll never know.

We started off last night at the family pile in Davenport Avenue and there was something going on in the garden. it involved a pile of fruit that everyone was eating. I wasn’t down there with them but there was something about I had to fetch more fruit so I went back into the kitchen and found the fruit but it was all black and rotten and sweating and there were mice eating it etc. I had to chase off what I could. In the end the only thing that was any good was a banana, and that wasn’t any good either but I picked it up. One of the cats – or both of the cats – were in there and there was something the matter with him and they were all covered in some kind of black substance like some of the fruit was so I suhered them out of the room where the fruit was. One of them wanted to go upstairs and I wasn’t going to let it go like that so I picked it up. It wasn’t very happy and it was filthy but I took it in my arms and put it outside

And then I dictated it again.

Later on we were in Germany last night at a town fair. We were running it and helping these German people set up their stall. They were selling tools like spanners and dies and taps, etc. Then it seemed that I had forgotten to formally open the event so I had to formally open it with a speech but when I started to translate it into French everyone shouted “shush”. They weren’t interested apparently in hearing it in French so I went to the office and used the PA system to announce it instead, all over the fair. At the end of the night these German people were packing up. I asked them how they had done and they told me that they had sold over 3 million Marks of stuff. I asked if that was Deutsche marks or Reichmarks. We helped them get together but by now it was pretty late so I said that I could run them to the nearest metro station but they suggested that I run them to Blythe Bridge and the main-line railway station there. I thought “yes, I’d do that” but then it turned out that there was a problem with the lines and a lot of the small local stations had closed so for them to return home to Birmingham was going to be extremely difficult.

There was also somewhere where I was heading off somewhere for a job interview in Vienna. I reached the Underground but my ticket wouldn’t read in the machine to let me into the station. I tried it in 3 or 4 different machines and eventually I managed to make it work. Then I couldn’t find the line that I wanted to take me to where this interview was and even worse, I couldn’t remember which was the Metro station where I had to alight to go to this interview. I was being totally disorganised yet again.

Leaving the bed was once more a struggle but I did manage to beat the second alarm.

After the medication the first task that needed doing was to bake a pile of bread – fruit bread as well as normal bread.

The normal bread tastes as good as it looks, because I had it for lunch but the fruit bread didn’t do so well.

Firstly, I forgot to brush it with milk and dust it with sugar, which doesn’t help matters, and secondly, I forgot it in the oven and it ended up being baked for 10 minutes longer than it should have been.

Still, it’ll be eaten before too long. And it’ll probably taste just as good as it ought to do. Anyway, the odd culinary disaster here and there is par for the course.

Much of the rest of the day, when I was allowed to, I was going through the photos from the Canadian High Arctic. Right now I’m in Quernbiter Fjord among a pod of narwhals. There were some exciting moments on that day.

As usual there were several other more routine interruptions, such as a coffee break, breakfast (with the last of the old fruit bread) and lunch (with the first of the new normal bread).

As usual, I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland, and the first port of call was the wall at the end of the car park.

Despite the fact that it was another beautiful day today, sun shining, quite warm and all of that, therre weren’t all that many people down there this afternoon. Certainly not like yesterday when we had hordes of people down there.

But whether or not there was anything going on out at sea, that was something else completely because the sea mist that we had a few days ago has closed in and I could see very little this afternoon.

So instead I wandered off down the path towards the headland to see what might be happening

When I arrived at the headland, I thought that I might have been in luck.

A couple of people sitting on the bench (minus dog, or polar bear, or whatever it was) by the cabanon vauban looking as if something exciting was happening gave me a ray of optimism but I reckon that the excitement going on down there had nothing whatever to do with anything out at sea.

And in any case, the visibility in that direction wasn’t any better as it was as I was walking down the path.

And so I called it a day and headed off down the path on the other side of the headland.

On this side of the path I was rather more lucky with maritime activity.

One of the yacht schools was out this afternoon, with a big bunch of pupils sailing around in the bay. It’s always the case – at the start of the year there are dozens of them sailing around (although you can only see a few of them). But by the time we reach the end of the season, the numbers have fallen off dramatically.

And just to reassure you, I haven’t forgotten that I’m supposed to be making enquiries. But right now I’m more preoccupied with my Welsh exam in early summer and all of the (free) revision courses that go with it.

Sailing is for some other time – but I will do it.

In the photograph just now, you might have caught a little glimpse of Chausiaise moored at the front of the queue at the ferry terminal.

Behind her, in apparently the same place as she was yesterday, is the older of the two Joly France ferries that go out to the Ile de Chausey.

But what had caught my eye was the little boat that was moored behind her. And when I looked closer, there were actually two – a little shell-fishing boat that presumably came in too late to moor on a mooring chain, and one of the little port runabouts is moored alongside.

And the builders’ material is still over there by the crane. That’s not moved either.

Meanwhile, in other news, a couple of things have moved from here by the Fish Processing Plant.

Yesterday we saw L’Omerta and Jade III moored over at the wharf over there but today they have gone.

Jade III is out in the bay fishing, according to her AIS signal, but as for L’Omerta, her AIS signal tells me that she’s moored in the harbour at Les Sables d’Orlonne where she hasn’t moved since April 2019 so we can forget about that.

On the way home, I didn’t even notice if anyone was parked by the Porte St Jean. I just came in for my coffee.

After a good session on the guitar this evening I started another task that I’ve been putting off for quite a while.

For the photos, I keep a monthly index but it always occurred to me that I ought to make one master index that would make searching for things so much easier without trying to remember when or where I was at the time.

So I settled down and made a start. That’s another job that isn’t going to be as easy as it might be either, due to all kinds of complicated reasons.

For tea, I added a small tin of kidney beans and some tomato sauce to the left-over stuffing and had that with some pasta and veg. I’ve had nicer meals than that, I suppose.

But one task that I had to undertake was to dismantle … “disPERSONtle” – ed … the sink waste pipe as some paper that had slipped down there. That’s a messy job and I hate it, for not the least reason being that I have to empty the cupboard underneath and there’s far too much stuff in there as it is.

So now I’ve written up my notes and done another little task that needed attention (more of which anon) I’m going to have a little 10-minute relax and then go to bed. My Welsh weekend starts at 10:30 and I need to nip into town beforehand for a couple of things, like the mushrooms for the pizza.

So what will my Welsh course bring me this weekend? And I hope that I’m in the mood to profit from it.

Thursday 24th March 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… so busy today that I’ve only just realised that, as I’ve sat down to write up my notes, I’ve forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

And “so busy”? It’s been a long time since I’ve said that, isn’t it? Too early to go crowing though. One swallow doesn’t make a summer.

It didn’t actually start out very well though. When the alarm went off at 07:30 I turned over and went back to sleep yet again. It was at 07:50 when I sat bolt-upright and another minute or two before I fell out of bed.

At least I beat the alarm at 08:00 which was good news.

After breakfast and having made sure that the 3-column page was working correctly (thanks, Grahame) I carried on mounting the … gulp … 184 photos of that group that I saw back at the end of October.

And then came the acid test – would a web page work with three columns of all of these photos?

The short answer to that was “no”. And trying to find an error in 940 lines of code is not easy.

Eventually, I found not one, and not two, but three errors where either I’d missed out a line, missed out a tag or put in a tag somewhere other than where it’s supposed to go.

Eventually, it worked out and I split the page into four to make it more manageable.

So, does it work? JUDGE FOR YOURSELF.

As you might expect, in the semi-darkness and depressing lighting, many of the photos didn’t work out as well as they might have done under other conditions, and in fact some of them never even staggered onto the pages. But a few of them AREN’T TOO BAD.

That took me most of the day to do all that, but to be fair, there were several interruptions like a coffee break, breakfast, and stuff like that.

And lunch of course. And as I was quietly reading a report on a disappeared ocean liner which I was eating my lunchtime butties, I suddenly noticed the time. 13:22.

“Blimmin’ ‘eck!” I cried. “My Welsh revision lesson starts in 8 minutes”.

And despite my pessimism yesterday, that could have gone much worse than it did as well. It shows up how much I don’t know, of course, but at least I managed to struggle through two hours of it without making myself look stupid.

Mind you, I can do that often enough under normal circumstances without practising for it or speaking another language..

As soon as the lesson was over (for it was for two hours and over-run by rather a lot) I cleared off for my afternoon walk around the headland.

First stop was, as usual, the wall at the end of the car park where I can look down onto the beach and see what’s happening.

The weather today was gorgeous and I actually could have gone out without a jacket had I so desired. And it certainly brought out the crowds this afternoon.

There’s probably a dozen people in this shot alone, including the person coming down the steps from the Rue du Nord. And any other shot of the beach this afternoon would probably have shown a similar number of people.

Meanwhile, out at sea, I couldn’t see anything at all. And that wasn’t the fault of the weather because it really was nice out there as well.

There was however quite a racket coming from over where they are repairing the medieval city walls at the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

That prompted me to take a photo of it from over here and I was actually lucky enough to photograph a couple of the guys who are working there, just to prove that there is actually some work being undertaken there.

And then, joining the throngs of people on the path, I headed off down towards the lighthouse in the hope that I might see something of interest going on – but with no success. There didn’t seem to be anything out-of-the-ordinary happening today.

With no-one playing around on the gun barrel at the lighthouse this afternoon I walked off across the car park and down to the end of the headland.

Today, we have yet more people sitting down on the bench by the cabanon vauban looking out at sea at absolutely nothing at all.

And I wondered what it was that was lying down underneath the bench. At first glance I thought that it might have been a polar bear but not even climate change could produce anything like that around here. It turned out to be a long-haired white dog of some variety or other.

So instead I wandered off along the path on the other side of the headland to spy out the land around there.

And after the frenzied activity of the last few days or so, it’s all gone quiet in the chantier naval.

The only boats still in there are Spirit of Conrad and the little Le Roc A La Mauve III. And by the looks of things, the latter won’t be in there for much longer and as I mentioned the other day, Pierre the skipper is keen for the former to go back into the water some time rather soon.

After all, he has plenty of work booked for the summer and after what he has suffered over the last two years with almost everything being cancelled, I’m sure that the sooner he’s back out there earning money, the better for all concerned.

Meanwhile, over there at the ferry terminal is one of the Joly France ferries.

That’s the older one, I reckon. And you can tell that from the stern. The newer one of the two has a step in it. As well as that, the upper-deck superstructure on the older one is larger, although of course you can’t tell that until the two of them are side-by-side.

But it’s interesting in that if one of them is going to be moving and the other one not, it’s always this one that’s on the move, not the other. I would have expected the owners to alternate them so that they have an equal amount of use.

In front of Joly France is Chausiaise, the little freighter that they own that runs out to the Ile de Chausey.

It seems that they have plenty of work for her at the moment because usually she’s tied up in the inner harbour after the occasional trip here and there. Leaving her out here means that she must be off on another trip out sometime soon.

That might explain the sacks of builders’ material that we saw by the crane in the previous photo.

Pretty soon though, they are going to have to start thinking about some other arrangement. If they really are going to restart the ferries to the Channel Islands, as is suggested, they can’t be leaving ships moored up for too long at the ferry terminal.

On the way back home I came across L’Omerta again, moored in the silt underneath the fish processing plant.

At one time she practically lived there. She spent day after day tied up without moving, and then we didn’t see her for a while. But now she’s made a comeback.

And interestingly, Jade III is behind her, also settled down on the silt. We saw her yesterday tied up in the inner harbour while almost everyone else was out at sea. But today she’s made it as far as the outer tidal harbour before she stopped and tied up again.

There’s something strange happening here and I wish that I knew what it was.

Back home, having ignored the glaziers’ van parked by the Porte St Jean, I made myself a coffee and finished off what I’d been doing with those web pages.

After a good half-hour on the guitar I spent some time editing a few more photos from the High Arctic 2019 and the dog that I saw earlier must have been a premonition because I ended up editing a few photos of a polar bear and her cub that I encountered on Baffin Island while we were wandering around in Buchan Gulf.

Tea tonight should have been taco rolls with the left-over stuffing from Monday but one look at the tacos convinced me that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. They ended up being filed under “CS”.

But not to worry. Having worked out the other week what those mystery pies were and found that they were savoury vegan pies, I had the last remaining one with potatoes, veg and a nice thick gravy.

Thoroughly delicious.

So what about that then?

During a previous existence when I was travelling for months around Canada every year I was churning out tons of stuff that found its way onto a web page. But somehow, having been swept away in a tide of whatever it was that swept me away, I’ve done very little of what has been important.

So four in a day is something of an achievement. But as I said earlier, doing it on just one day is no big deal. Margaret Thatcher once said something like “anyone can do a good day’s work when they feel like it. But doing a good day’s work when you don’t feel like it is something else completely”.

Over the last few years i’ve had far too many days when I haven’t felt like it. So let’s see what tomorrow brings. There aren’t (officially, anyway) any distractions but something will probably turn up and knock me out of my stride.

And, on a final note, with 40 minutes to spare before bedtime, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. This was something to do with the Lord of Darkness and somehow there was a technique how you could make a car like you would make a crèpe – pour liquid over a hot surface and make some kind of metal. They had made an experimental version for one group of people from the afterlife. Now they were working on their masterpiece. The Lord of Darkness had appeared with his entourage and took his place inside his car. The first car was vibrating a little and there was a danger that the power would run out so they asked the Lord of Darkness how they would deal with it. he replied that you could fit another element of a battery in there because they were several 2-volt cells and you would put another several cells in there to keep it at 12 volt and increase the amperage so that the amperage would probably match what was in his car

And then I’d ordered some LPs from Amazon. They turned up on a van at something silly like 06:00. Someone had a look to see and they were due to be delivered between 07:00 and 11:00 but it made no difference because they were here and we were here. But he couldn’t put the albums in the box in which they were supposed to arrive. There was a plastic box with lid that had to be assembled to put these albums in but for some unknown reason they wouldn’t go in and the box wouldn’t assemble and stay together. He was there for ages trying to fix this. In the end he asked if I would object if he didn’t leave the box but took it back with him. I thought that if I did object, I’d be here for hours trying to assemble it so he may as well take it and go back on his round. He asked which way to go so I replied “go out of our drive, turn right to the end of the road, turn left down to the end of the road and turn right and you’re heading towards the M6. Someone else who was there started to try to give him some really complicated directions. I thought that delivery and van drivers don’t need complicated directions. They keep it simple so there’s less chance of becoming lost. being lost is losing money for them

Later on I was with two other people last night. One of them was my little Inuit girl from Uummannaq. But she hadn’t half put on weight. She had her little sister with her who was about 3 probably. We were doing something, the 3 of us and then it was time to go. The two of them, my friend and the other person who was with me went to sit in the front of the car. I took the little girl and went to put her in the back. One thing that she liked was to be covered up by something so I took a piece of paper, a sheet of a newspaper to cover her up but she already had one and was covered up in it. She was rather cross that I was going to cover her up with 2 things. I had to fold up this piece and put it away. The other 2 wondered what was happening because of the little girl being cross but I explained and that was that.

Finally I was at an auction sale last night. They were selling things like tins of Pemmican and so on. One was from something like 1758 and another was a few years later all the way through to 1933. It looks very much as if someone had raided some explorers’ caches either in the Arctic or the Antarctic or Northern Canada. They were spending a considerable amount of time discussing the provenance of this stuff. I was hoping that they’d hurry up and start the sale

Where as all of this energy and motivation come from just now? Whatever is going on with me?

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 – A FUNNY THING …

… happened on the way to the for … errr … Physiotherapist’s this afternoon.

There I was walking quietly along the Rue Couraye and suddenly a man dropped down out of the sky right in front of me.

At least, that’s what I thought, but on a closer inspection after he had picked up the paintbrush or whatever it was that he had dropped and was hoisted back up, I could see that he was on a rope.

Cleaning or painting the facade of the building here, I reckon, or doing something of a similar nature.

But fancy a safety harness. When I retiled my roof in the Auvergne I was perched about 50 feet up on a roof holding on with my feet as I nailed down the slates.

And another funny thing that happened was that I walked all the way up the hill in the Rue Couraye to the physiotherapist’s without feeling any agony and it’s been months and months since that’s happened. So what’s going on here?

There was a lot going on last night though. I was in bed early and, for a change, out like a light. Another struggle to raise myself from the dead, and after I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I could listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been.

At first, I was at an interview with STRAWBERRY MOOSE on the radio. The presenter was an extremely dominant and aggressive type of personality who basically shouted at the crowd to make everyone settle down and listen to his story. It was certainly a new departure in radio to hear the way that this programme was being presented. I thought that maybe I could take a lesson from this when I’m presenting some other radio programme some time in the future. It was certainly different, telling everyone to “shut up and listen” and “he’s come all this way to give you this story and the least you can do is pay attention”. it was all quite aggressive

Later, I was at work in the office and the ‘phone rang. I had to bring the Escort estate into Brussels. They were selling it so I had to hunt through my drawers for all of the paperwork for it but I couldn’t find anything. There was nothing at all. The boss had said “make sure that you bring the paperwork because we don’t want to have to come up to your place to look for it”. There I was, looking for ages through my drawers and I couldn’t find it anywhere but then 2 people came in and heard that I was going into Brussels so could they come with me? They hopped in and I thought that i’d better go anyway otherwise I’ll be here all day and I still won’t have the paperwork. Off I set to drive. After I’d gone a few miles I found that I actually had the paperwork in my hand. Of course someone must have had the paperwork to have taken the Escort to be valued. I had that as I was driving. I ended up coming in from the direction of Oostende. I radioed in that I was there and asked where I had to go. They said “the Garage de France”. I asked where that was and they replied that it was near the Gare de Ouest. I didn’t have a clue where the Gare de Ouest was. As I came closer to the office I dropped off these 2 people and stuck my head inside a café. She knew where the place was and she told me but the directions that she gave me didn’t make any sense. Then she said the name of a square where it was. I thought to myself “I wish that I’d brought my GPS in out of my own car and stuck it in the Escort to take it there. I could have solved this problem in 5 minutes had I done that”.

And then I was back in work again. I don’t know if I’d dictated the story of the Ford Escort estate being sold but later I was back in the office. I had a pile of paperwork that I’d picked up on the way in that needed to be sorted. I took it into the office and one of the chauffeurs came up to me and said in one of these high-pitched little baby voices “what’s little Eric got there?”. So I replied “some paperwork”. He asked “what’s little Eric going to be doing with it?” and I replied “nothing whatsoever”. This conversation was on the verge of getting out of hand. In the end the boss came along so as I was in earshot I said to Jef (it’s here, it has a date-stamp on it, it’s been received, it’s been registered, so why don’t you clear off?” or something like that. The boss came over, looked at the papers, took them off me and put them out for sorting. There was no chair at my desk but there were several other chairs dotted around with files on them so I went to take the files off one so I could have a chair to sit. Someone else said “there’s a spare chair up here” but I replied “this one down here will do me”.

At another point I was with one of these American folk singers, someone like Gene Clark, and we were being chased in a car down some kind of road. We turned off up the side down some kind of farm track and were being chased down there but I swerved off the road into a farm gateway and the other car went roaring past. We prepared to drive back where we’d come but another car came the other way. We’d been talking about these huge plants that were growing all over the placen one-eyed I-can’t-remember-the phrase-now but it was in a song by the Byrds, “My Back Pages”. This car came the other way and I asked “is that one of these?” and I said the name. He replied “probably” so we waited until it went. We thought that if he could go all the way through then so could we so I set out to follow it. He said “let’s forget about these plants for now and head off”, something that made me feel rather disappointed

Finally, we’d gone to a big village hall-kind of dance, the whole family, tribe. Our mother had taken us. She was, surprisingly, a big Afro-Caribbean woman. When the dancing took place she danced in a most uninhibited way. It had absolutely no interest for me whatsoever so I was just moping around at the back of the hall. eventually I went over to my mother and said that we really must have to go very soon. She asked the time and I replied “20:20”. For some reason we were due to go at 20:30 anyway. She started to collect everything together. She said that she first came to one of these dances when she was 15 and everyone was shocked and scandalised but even people like James Brown had stuck their head in to see what was happening. I hadn’t really any idea of what to say because I knew how my mother was with her imagination.

Yes, my mother had a very fertile imagination, as we came to realise as we grew older. She lived in her own little world that only rarely had any connection with the rest of the world in which everyone else lived.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that I’d had a problem with a three-column website on which I was working. It didn’t take me long to discover the missing tag (or, should I say, the tag that was in the wrong place) and once I’d done that, I finished it off.

You can see it ON-LINE now. The content isn’t inspiring but it was only a test run for a few other purposes that will become clearer over the course of time.

It’s been checked in C-Cleaner, Waterfox and Tor but if someone has access to an Apple-based machine, if you could check it to see that it does what it’s supposed to, I’d be grateful.

Having dealt with that task, the next task was one about which I’d forgotten. At the end of October last year I’d been to see a rock group called “Reload”. I took … gulp … 184 photos and I’d made a start on editing them but as usual, I’d been side-tracked.

This morning though, I sat down and worked my way right through the lot and they are all now edited. I’m now onto mounting them (I’m kinky like that) and they will be on-line in die course.

That will be the acid test of my three-column photo layout – trying to make it work with all of these.

There were several breaks of course – breakfast being one of them with my lovely fruit bread, and then a shower and a good clean-up.

And while I was at it, I did my Dave Crosby impression. In fact I went one better and actually did cut my hair. Probably because I didn’t have the ‘flu for Christmas.

After lunch I headed out for the physiotherapist.

And we’ve had a change here at the Porte St Jean.

The large lorry and trailer with the digger perched thereupon are not there this afternoon. Instead the place has been taken by a glazier’s van.

In fact that has been there or thereabouts in one of the parking spaces for the past couple of days but today it seems that the driver has taken advantage of the absence of the lorry to move even closer.

In fact, I would have thought that he could have passed underneath the arch. There looks to be enough room.

On the left-hand edge you can see some advertising boards that have been erected. It’s soon to be election time here and they put up these boards for the candidates to attach their posters.

As usual, at the viewpoint on the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne, I stopped to check the camera – even though I’d checked it just a minute before.

There’s no-one about in the outer harbour and most of the fishing boats in the inner harbour seem to be out at sea. The only one that seems to be in there today is Jade III and I wonder why she hasn’t gone out.

Also absent, as they have been for quite a while, are Victor Hugo and Granville, the two Channel Island ferries. If service is indeed starting up in April, they need to finish their overhauls quickly and make their way back here to be ready to go.

Down on the quayside, all of the freight that was there has now gone.

Normandy Trader, one of the little Jersey freighters, came in the other day and whisked it all off to the Channel Islands but there’s another pile that is slowly appearing down there ready for the next voyage.

And you can see all of the old stakes from the bouchot farms on the Ile de Chausey down there to the left of the right-hand crane. That was a good weekend’s work to pull up all of those and replace them.

Whoever is going to take those away will have some work on his hands too.

Meanwhile, down in the bottom corner, there’s been quite a lot happening by the looks of things.

There’s only one boat down there today, and that’s the newer of the two Joly France boats, the one with the smaller superstructure on the upper deck.

We saw Chausiaise out at the ferry terminal yesterday, but Belle France is also missing today. She and the older of the two Joly France boats must be keeping busy running out to the islands today.

And the mystery of why they all had their cranes out the other day is as yet unresolved. I’ve not seen anything at all about it.

A week or so ago I posted a photo of a cherry-picker that looked as if it had lifted some scaffolding up onto a flat roof in the Rue Lecampion.

Over the past few days I’d been keeping a quiet eye on it but today there has been some rapid progress since I last saw it. They’ve removed the tiles from an adjacent pitched roof and replaced all of the woodwork

That was quite quick. It’s not like the typical worker whom we’ve encountered these days.

Carefully dodging workmen dropping out of the sky, I sailed up the Rue Couraye rather more rapidly than just recently for my appointment with the physiotherapist.

She had a good look at my x-rays but told me that there was nothing evident that she could see about why I’m having this trouble with my knee. And that’s bad news as far as I’m concerned because how can anyone fix the problem if they can’t see t?

It’s just like my heart issue, where there’s no obvious problem that anyone can see. I’m not making it all up, I know that.

Anyway she gave me an electromassage, put me on the bike thing for 5 minutes and gave me a few exercises.

After she threw me out, I went to Lidl. I’m out of tomatoes and cucumber as well as a couple of other things. And there’s no big shop at the weekend because I’m on a course and anyway, I’m off on my travels on Thursday next week.

On the way home I went past the new house that is being built on the corner of the Rue St Paul and Rue Victor Hugo.

When I arrived the builders were busy chasing away a couple of kids who were pleying in the building, but apart from that there doesn’t seem to have been a great deal going on. I suppose that they will finish it one day.

My route led me through the town and up the hill towards home but I hadn’t gone far up the hill when a neighbour came past in his car. He offered me a lift, which was nice of him I did have a fair bit of stuff to carry.

Back in here I put some coffee on to brew and then picked up the big NIKON D500 to go outside.

Across the car park went I towards the beach to see what was happening there. The tide was well out and with the weather being so nice, there were plenty of people down there making the most of it. Of course, here in France, there’s no school on Wednesday afternoon.

While I was here, I had a look out to sea to see if there were any fishing boats working out here today. There was something right out beyond the Ile de Chausey that I couldn’t see, but that was really my lot. There wasn’t anything else happening out at sea that I could see.

Ther emight have been nothing going on out at sea but there was something having a go at the Thunderclap Newman impression of “Something In The Air”.

And don’t ask me what it is because its number, 55-QJ, is one of those that isn’t in the series of numbers to which I have access. And it goes without saying that she hasn’t filed a flight plan and wasn’t picked up on radar either.

Back here I had my coffee and then had half an hour or so on the guitar before I carried on with mounting the photos of the concert that I attended.

Tea was a curry with the left-over stuff in the fridge. I’ve not forgotten that I have some stuffing left from Monday, but I fancied a curry tonight. I’ll have the stuffing in a taco roll tomorrow.

So as well as that, I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow. In the afternoon too, not the evening as I thought. I wonder what kind of catastrophe this will be.

Monday 21st March 2022 – IT’S A GOOD JOB …

… that I had the alarm set to remind me about my visit to the physiotherapist. When it went off at 14:30 I was crashed out fast asleep on my chair in here.

That’s probably because I had quite a hectic morning.

Instead of the usual early night on Sunday, I wasn’t tired so I did some work on the text for the radio programme. So when I finally did go to bed and the alarm went off later at 06:00 it was rather a struggle to leave the bed.

But once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages I could carry on with the radio programme. By 09:55 it was all prepared, up and running but I’m not claiming it as a record because of the time that I spent on it last night.

But while I was listening to it and to the one that I was sending off for this weekend, in a mad fit of enthusiasm I wrote all of the notes for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing next week.

Whatever has come over me, working like this?

With no coffee cake left for breakfast, I fetched the fruit bread from the freezer and that had been defrosting. It was quite delicious of course, but not really a patch on the coffee cake.

After I’d finished the notes for the next radio programme I worked on a few photos from the High Arctic in 2019. Progress is slow with them, but at least it’s progress of a sort.

The bread had finished too on Friday but there was half a loaf in the freezer so I brought that out and it had been defrosting. It was nice and fresh, the bit that I sliced for lunch.

When I finished I came back in here to carry on with my photos but that was when I crashed out. But when the alarm went off, I had a very quick shower and clean-up before setting off for the physiotherapist.

When I set out for my walk, I didn’t manage to go very far before I stopped to take a photograph.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen this lorry on several occasions, parked up on the pavement outside the Porte St Jean that leads into the walled town.

He has his trailer attached to the rear and on it is the digger. It seems that they won’t pass under the arch and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre it around the narrow streets.

They probably drop off the digger and it goes into the walled town under its own steam – or diesel.

When I go out for a walk in this direction I usually stop here to try out the camera to make sure that it works.

This is the viewpoint on the outer walls at the junction of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne and it overlooks the outer harbour and the fish processing plant.

The tide is well out so there aren’t any fishing boats loitering around down there. But there are plenty of vans parked there waiting for the shell-fishing boats to come back in on the high tide this afternoon

There were quite a few people milling around here this afternoon and that was a surprise because it’s not on the usual tourist track.

From there I wandered off down towards the town centre on my way to the physiotherapist.

For the last couple of days we’ve seen a big pile of freight on the quayside waiting to be picked up by one of the Jersey freighters. It’s still there this afternoon – or, at least, there’s some freight down there but whether it’s the same freight or not I really don’t know.

And still no Marité either. She’s taking her time in Cherbourg having her annual overhaul. It’s a good job that Easter is late this year otherwise she might be having problems.

But here’s some excitement down at the side of the harbour where the Joly France boats are moored.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen some strange things around here in the past but this is one of the strangest.

One of the Joly France ferries and Chausiaise, the little freighter, have their on-board cranes extended and Joly France seems to have made a fine catch – a couple of wheel rims filled with concrete.

By the looks of things, it seems that Joly France is going to pass the wheels over to Chausiaise but as for why, I have no idea.

Thee wasn’t much at all happening in the town centre, but I noticed that they seemed to have made some considerable advance in what they were doing

They are in the process of tarring over the path, old rails included, and laying stone chippings on the top. This is going to make a pleasant change to how the road surface used to be.

The walk up the hill to the physiotherapist was not as difficult as it has been earlier in the year and I arrived with 10 minutes to spare.

She had me on the couch for 10 minutes while she used her electro-massaging thing on my knee, and then we spent the rest of the time doing some exercises. And she’s asked me to bring my x-rays with me on Wednesday so that she can look at them.

The walk down the hill towards the town centre in the beautiful sunny weather was wonderful and if I had remembered to bring my wallet with me I might have even gone for a vegan ice cream.

Ahh well!

As I walked back up the Rue des Juifs towards home, I noticed that events have unfolded down in the inner harbour.

Having seen Chausiaise playing about with her crane a little earlier, she’s now moored over at the loading bay so I wonder what she’s up to now and what those wheel had to do with it all.

And all of those things that we saw on the quayside yesterday and some of which we can see on the extreme right of this photo? They are the old bouchot stakes from the Ile de Chausey that are in the process of being pulled up and replaced with newer equipment.

Leaving them all to it, I carried walking up the hill towards home.

Earlier I said that the lorries that come here are unable to pass under the arch into the old town. But this one clearly managed to because it’s on its way out – or, at least, trying to.

There’s almost nothing in the way of clearance either side and you can see the guy on the extreme left who is giving instructions to the driver.

And he needs it too. I’ve no idea how long he might have been there before I arrived but he advanced and reversed three times while I was watching before he was satisfied that he could come out without damaging the archway.

And so before I went back in, I went to have my usual look down on the beach to see what was going on.

With the day being so beautiful I was expecting to see crowds of people down there on the beach this afternoon, especially as there was plenty of beach to be on with the tide being out.

And as we can see, there are quite a few people down there this afternoon taking advantage of the beach and the weather. And I do have to say that if I had been feeling up to it, I would have been down there with them.

Back here, I made myself a coffee and then sat down to transcribe the dictaphone notes, especially as I could actually decipher them today.

I was on my way to Winsford last night, going down the Pyms Lane area of Crewe and out that way. As I passed through the end of the Leighton Park Estate I came across all these canvas tents strung from trees. I stopped and looked in, and there were families with young children living in there. I started to talk to these people as I was interested in finding out their names and who was living in here as I was absolutely outraged by the condition in which the people were living in the 21st Century in the UK. Listening to people’s stories about the pressure under which they were living and the little babies who were there, new-borns, etc was really distressing. It was a really terrible thing to have to see and hear etc.

And this one, I started dictating it without the dictaphone. I had to go off to Wardle, somewhere like that. One of my drivers had left a car here, a MkV Cortina so I went in that. When I came back, I said that we were disposing of all of our cars and having MkVs because this was so comfortable and so good to have been in. Then I had to go off with work and ended up in an office where someone showed me all these jobs that were kept in these binders so I ended up on the desk facing her leafing my way through all of these files

Finally, we’d been to somewhere, I dunno. There were 4 of us and at times there had been 5. The 5th was a girl whom I happened to quite like and I would have liked her to have been with us much more often than the few minutes that she was there. Later we were round at my father’s house. It was getting on towards the end of November and with Halloween coming up on the Saturday he decided he decided that he was going to go away for a few days. That meant that we would be at a loose end so I was thinking that maybe I’d go to Colwyn Bay or Abergele for a few days, find a boarding house or something. We went in and my father’s partner was serving breakfast but there was none for me. She said “I didn’t realise that you wanted any” but everyone else was eating. There were all kinds of crystal glasses of all kinds on it but everyone seemed to have taken the wrong glass, I couldn’t find one for me. I filled mine up with water but it ended up that it was someone else’s milk that I had. We then started to talk about the fun that we’d had with the water bottles this weekend, sometimes there were 4 and then 5 of us and we’d all ended up with the wrong water bottle.

Liz was on line as well and so for the first time for quite a while we had a lengthy chat which made a very nice change.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with rice, which was even more delicious than usual and I don’t know why that would be. And there’s enough left to make a taco roll tomorrow and having been left overnight to marinade, it will be even better.

This evening I’ve been dealing with a knotty little problem. There was something afoot that might have involved me but some railway engineering in the UK has put an end to all of that. That’s not going to happen now.

But don’t worry – I had no plans to return to the UK.

Tomorrow is the first day of my third year of Welsh. And I’m no more confident than I was 12 months ago. This teflon brain, to which nothing seems to stick, is annoying me intensely but I have to push on regardless.

Brains do tend to seize up if they aren’t used and so I have to do what I can to keep it working and I can’t really think of what else to do with it. And so I may as well push on.

A good night’s sleep will probably do me some good. It can’t do any harm.

But here’s SOMETHING INTERESTING that I was reading today. I could quite easily identify several points in this article, especially the part about “psychedelic dreams”.

And I certainly don’t panic, unless I’m in hot pursuit of TOTGA, Castor and/or Zero and there’s a chance that they will escape my evil clutches.

Friday 18th March 2022 – AFTER ALL …

… the excitement of yesterday, there’s been even more today.

Unfortunately not quite of the same calibre, but nevertheless it beats the monotony. Especially when they lay down a red carpet at the Communal Rooms at the back of my apartment and set up a film camera to film whatever was going to make use of it.

Whatever or whoever it was, though, I’m not able to say. I had to go out to the Post Office before it closed and so I missed it.

If we’re lucky, there will be something in the newspapers tomorrow, but I’m not all that hopeful. There wasn’t a word about what the Dassault Falcon was doing yesterday.

At that wasn’t everything either.

This afternoon it looked as if it was the local Fire Brigade’s annual outing. There they were, complete with vehicles, standing around and chatting, looking up at the ruins of the houses that were devastated in the fire.

While we’re on the subject of “devastated” … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was pretty devastated this morning.

It ended up being a much later night than I was expecting or hoping, and when the alarm went off at 07:30 I switched it off and … err .. went back to sleep. But it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. I managed to make it out of bed a good few minutes before the second alarm.

Not all that much on the dictaphone through the night either. I must have had something of a decent sleep. I was out somewhere last night on the road that runs between Newcastle and Shrewsbury. I don’t know where I’d been but I ended up down some kind of side road somewhere. I stopped and I’d had a piece of cake and a coffee, standing in the middle of this farm track drinking it and eating the cake while the farmer was driving around in his tractor somewhere. Something had gone wrong but I can’t remember what it was. I looked at the time and I thought “God! I only have 20 minutes to get to work!”. I thought that I’d never reach work on time at all from here because I’m on foot. I put down my mug and plate down in the middle of this track and walked down to the main road thinking that I’d hitch a lift. I walked back towards the road junction that would take me to Crewe which was 4 miles away. First of all a bunch of school kids went past, then an old Austin A40 Somerset followed by an old BMC lorry. I then found myself in this village As I walked through this village I thought that I’d never seen such a village. I didn’t know that there was a village like this on this road and I know it so well. By now I was in Caliburn and. There was some road work in the town centre. Everything was being dug up. There were rocks being cut up with a disc cutter. They were even dynamiting small small rocks. I was just driving over everything, machinery, the lot in Caliburn. Some guy was even putting his feet against the glass windows to stop them vibrating when the dynamite went off.. There was this really sharp U-bend by an expensive estate agent’s. I thought that things were becoming really bad. Some woman went past and said “you’re going to be terribly late for work. It’s 2 days running for me that I’ve had to call in with car problems”. I was back in Caliburn again and came across an auto-electrician. I drove into his workshop. I had to straighten a carpet. A guy came over so I asked him to go to listen to the starter while I turned the engine so he could see if there was a problem with the starter.

Later on I was out near Tarporley in a small village … “Tiverton;” – ed. I bumped into a girl whom I knew but I can’t remember who she was. She had curly ginger hair and I don’t know a girl like that in real life. She was telling me about a family whom I knew who lived by the traffic lights at the Rising Sun. She was saying that they’d all cashed in their chips, sold up and moved on. I asked if she knew where they had gone. She told me of a couple of them but there was one whom she didn’t know. She mentioned his name and I knew the name. He’d gone to Toronto. She said “yes, I remember now. He’s bought a racehorse”. I looked surprised and asked “what’s he doing with a racehorse?”. She didn’t actually know. In the end she said something like “if you’re going to take a chance on buying an unknown racehorse for £1:00 or something you’d buy it from a member of your own family rather than from a complete stranger” but she couldn’t see the purpose of this racehorse. I asked her if it was identical to any others that he owned because there’s always the old “run a slower identical horse in a few races to build up a bad reputation then switch the real one in for an important race once the other one has a bad name”. She said “no, it’s not at all like (she mentioned the name of another horse)” so I thought that perhaps it might be an identical horse or something where in this case this one might be slower. I was about to ask her the question when the alarm went off.

After the medication and transcribing the dictaphone notes, I spent most of the rest of the morning working on the photos from the High Arctic in August 2019. We’re now back on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR after our little walk around Qikiqtarjuaq.

That was where Dennis Minty and I bumped into a local Royal Canadian Mounted Police “Mountie” who gave us a lift in his pickup up to the top of a mountain on the island where we took some superb photos which you will see in due course.

After lunch I had a letter to write. It’s the reply to one that’s been hanging around here for quite a few months and someone somewhere is probably wondering if I’ve died.

“Snail mail” has all but died out for personal purposes but I still have the odd (and I use the term advisedly) technophobe friend who writes letters. Unfortunately, just like me, she has had a hand injury and so I have a great deal of difficulty reading her writing just like people have difficulty in reading mine, and it’s not easy to decipher it.

But anyway, it was eventually ready and in a mad fit of enthusiasm which has sprung up from heaven alone knows where, I actually set off to post it.

As usual, I stopped at the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne to check the camera and see what was happening down below.

As you can see, the tide is right out at the moment. It’ll be a while before it’s back in today. But there doesn’t seem to be anyone taking advantage of it and going for a bit of the peche à pied.

And if there’s anything going on at the Ile de Chausey this afternoon, they aren’t doing it aboard the Joly France ferries.

There’s one moored up over there at the ferry terminal in the NAABSA (Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground) position, and the other two are moored up in the inner harbour along with Chausiaise

As well as the Ile de Chausey boats in the inner harbour, there’s plenty of other stuff too.

One of the boats here is Charles Marie. We’ve been keeping an eye on her over the last couple of weeks while she was being serviced in the chantier naval but now she must be ready for the sea.

There was a trawler parked in the chantier naval where she was, but I couldn’t see who she was. I’ll go for a wander out that way tomorrow and find out more about her.

And by the looks of things, La Granvillaise wasn’t there either. She must have gone back into the water but she isn’t around in the harbour so I wonder where she’s gone.

There are tons of the containers in which they stack the sacks of shellfish over there on the quayside. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many.

Dodging the pompiers who were having their meeting on the pavement, I carried on down the hill to the viewpoint overlooking the inner harbour.

The freight was still there but what caught my eye was the lorry and the digger over there on the track of the old abandoned railway.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw them working on the far end of that track in the town centre. They seem to have made rapid progress.

Down in the town I made rapid progress to the Post Office to post my letter. And then I went off to the Credit Agricole. I’ve received a cheque in respect of my Belgian State Pension but I dont now why. Anyway it has to be paid in to my account.

Now what can I do with €60:45? Spend! Spend! Spend! I suppose.

Walking back into the town centre on my way home I had a quick peek down where the old abandoned railway ran to see how they were doing.

And by the looks of things, they don’t seem to be doing a great deal. They have a compactor down there (which was more than they had on the 1800 miles of the TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY IN 2010 but the road surface doesn’t look much different than it did before they started.

And I’m half-expecting one of those boys to end up like an Austin Powers henchman if he isn’t careful. I suppose that the other boy there would refer to his friend as his “flatmate”.

I’ll get my coat.

So having dome my tasks for the day I set off up the hill for home, feeling rather pleased that I’d actually finished a couple of tasks.

Maybe it is these pills that are giving me energy, I dunno, but sometimes I really think that they could give you absolutely anything, tell you what the imaginary effects will be, and then you psyche yourself up to believe them.

Before I went back inside I went to see what was happening down on the beach outside my building.

Today was a really glorious May day today, really warm, but with a strong wind. And so while there were no Nazguls about, there were a couple of people down there kitesurfing. And having a really good time doing it by the looks of things.

Plenty of people walking around on the beach too having a good time. I don’t know where they have all come from.

One of my neighbours was outside the building too, soaking up the rays. he and I had a good chat before I came in for a coffee.

Later on, I had another session on the guitar. I seem to have rekindled my enthusiasm, having done very little since I fell into this depression several months ago. I quite enjoyed it too, although i’m dismayed at how much of my technique I’ve lost.

Tea was a quick falafel from out of the freezer with pasta and veg because there was football on the internet. Y Bala v Penybont in the first of the Welsh Cup Semi-finals.

And for a match then ended 0-0, this was probably one of the best and most exciting that I’ve seen in a long while. Both teams have star players but they managed to checkmate each other at every turn as the game roared from end to end for the whole 90 minutes. It’s a shame that there aren’t more games like this.

So bedtime now. I’m shopping tomorrow and then I’m going to try to do some exciting stuff. What, I’m not quite sure yet.

Who knows? I might do something wild, like take more rubbish out to the bins.

Thursday 17th March 2022 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… several photos of the excitement that we had out there in the Baie de Granville this afternoon, let me tell you about the somewhat less-than-exciting day that I had today.

It started off rather badly when I switched off the alarm at 07:30 and … errr … went back to sleep. I awoke with a start at 07:59 and I just about managed to put my feet on the floor as the 08:00 repeat went off.

Mind you, it’s my own fault. I did say that I was planning to have an early night but I picked up the guitar for a quick strum and that, dear reader, was that.

Somehow, from out of nowhere, I managed to start to transcribe the dictaphone notes. That was the first thing that I did once I’d taken my medicine.

They were collecting goods for refugees again. I was wandering around trying to find a place where I could set up to co-ordinate the relief and find an office. That means finding a house where there was someone and finding a lorry and driver, all that kind of thing. I could do some driving myself but for some reason no matter where I walked there was always something getting in the way. There was even some moment where all of this became extremely violent but I can’t remember very much about all of this particular part of a dream etc. Just walking past these lorries and not being able to go into a house and the feeling of violence that was going on with this as well

Again, I was doing something else for refugees and I was absolutely tired out completely so I went to bed. When I awoke halfway through my sleep I noticed that halfway through the head of the bed were things like bottled from old-age pensioners and messages from old women. I thought that they had donated but they hadn’t donated. Instead, there were all kind sof things like bottles of spirits and (… I fell asleep here …) so when I awoke all those bottles were empty. Obviously someone had left them there to incriminate me or frighten me or something like that but it wasn’t going to work. I was going to carry on.

There were four of us who had been out working for the local council in a lorry. We had been doing all kinds of things, cleaning up places and so on. But tempers between the two drivers were becoming really frayed. One was working inside the cab of the vehicle so the other grabbed a can of spray paint and aimed the spray at him from the other side of the window. The first guy instinctively ducked and banged his head which made the other guy laugh. But now we couldn’t see out of the windscreen. We had to go back to the depot. I’d warned this guy not to use the spray can but he wouldn’t listen so I said that when we arrive at the depot there will be quite a row about this. He said “so you should” because he’d sprayed something like “vegans rule OK” and they’ll all think that it’s me. I was totally disgusted. The fourth guy decided that he was going to go home so we all decided that we would take the lorry back. The fourth guy was only a young apprentice so I told him that I hoped that he wouldn’t really get into any kind of trouble at all over this. I hoped that I wouldn’t either and maybe we would see each other again but this was a terrible note some kind of day’s work, trying to drive home in this lorry when we can’t see out of the windscreen because of the paint etc. I felt dismayed that these 2 guys, after I’d told them about losing their temper between themselves had gone and done this kind of thing that would land us all in all kinds of trouble

We’d had some kind of family meeting. My brother was there and so were some others. I suddenly noticed the time. I only had something like 45 minutes to go home, change and reach the airport before my flight on holiday departed. When the meeting came to an end I had to dash out quite quickly, picked up my suit and thought that I’d find a hedge behind which I could change while I’m on my travels. I picked up my things and overtook them as they were wending their way home. I found what looked like a likely place. Now there was only something like 40 minutes to my flight. Just as I was about to go behind the hedge to change into my suit I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my suitcase. That was at my brother’s shop. Of course he’d now locked up and gone straight home. I would have to go there first but I wouldn’t have time and if he hasn’t gone straight home I’m never have my suitcase. It looked to me rather regrettably that I wasn’t going to be leaving on this holiday to the Far East.

An East German bank had a large sum of gold on hand. A group of people set out from the UK to try to rob it. They had to work out all kinds of things such as guards tea-breaks, changes of shift and everything so that they could pass frontiers without very much inspection etc. When they arrived at the bank they raided the vehicle that was carrying it only to find that it was empty. It turned out that what had happened was that the bank had put it on deposit with a bank back in the UK to use as collateral for some kind of financial deal that was taking place. There they were in the middle of the street with a double-decker bus full of their own men, raided this place. They had some of their own men tied up as decoys etc. Now they were arguing about what they were going to do next. Were they going back to the UK to raid this British bank or would they try to raid somewhere else in East Germany or were they just going to abandon the whole thing and go home?

So, once more, none of my favourite young ladies came to visit me, although I did have a very strong feeling that TOTGA was around somewhere last night and I was surprised to hear nothing about her on the dictaphone this morning.

The rest of the day has been spent, such as it was during all of the other interruptions, in catching up with the outstanding entries from when I was in Leuven. I’d just done some basic rough notes at the time but now they are complete.

As for the interruptions, we had coffee, and breakfast, and lunch, and taking out a huge pile of rubbish. I’m having a good sort-out here and all kinds of stuff that I’ve been keeping for no good reason have gone the Way of the West.

A few phone calls and booking a few hotels for a little journey I’ll be making were also a few tasks that I also accomplished today.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is to have a think about rearranging the kitchen. In the back of Caliburn are the cupboards that I bought ages ago that will replace the stuff that I’m using as an island. But I’m planning on doing something about a wall unit so that I can have a proper oven.

And then there was of course the afternoon walk.

And I hardly had time to step out of the front door when I felt the cold hand of doom on my shoulder.

It’s that time of year again. The sun is out and there’s quite a wind so it’s brought out the Birdmen of Alcatraz in numbers. One of them flew past on his Nazgul as I went outside.

He was followed by several of his mates as well. Not quite the Nine Riders but it was pretty much almost. Legolas would have had a few easy targets this afternoon.

And once he was out of the way I could wander across to the end of the car park to see what was going on there.

A reasonable amount of beach there this afternoon and there were several people down there on it.

Even this intrepid pair of pedestrians looking as if they are going full-tilt headlong into the water.

As I said just now, it’s a nice sunny day. But it’s not that nice. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the only water that interests me from a bathing point of view is water at 37°C

When we were out in the High Arctic in 2019 Castor asked me if I would like to jump into the sea with her.

“I can’t” I replied. “I have a catheter in my chest”

Someone who had overheard the conversation asked me later “Had you not had the catheter, what would you have done?”

“I’d have thought of another excuse”. Sea water at -0.5°C might be interesting for some but not for me. Not even Castor could drag me in to water at that temperature.

As usual, I was having a good look around out at sea.

There was probably about a dozen trawlers heading back into port right now. The viewing conditions were absolutely perfect today and I could see for miles out to sea. There have been days just recently when I wouldn’t have seen anything at all quite like this.

The tide isn’t far enough in to open the harbour gates right now but I imagine that it might be by the time that they all arrive in the outer harbour. They won’t have to wait long, I reckon.

You’ve seen plenty of photos already of the Dassault Falcon 50M that was flying around in large circles out in the bay.

This is the type of jet that started the genocide in Rwanda when the one carrying the Rwandan and Burundian Presidents was shot down at Kigali, but this particular one here is one of the 8 Falcon 50M machines owned by the French Navy and used for maritime surveillance.

So what’s it doing here? It certainly had a great deal of interest in what was happening out at sea and was circling around the bay for quite some time

We’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Meanwhile, this was quite an interesting situation.

There were two trawlers here outside the outer harbour waiting for more tide to come in and they seemed to have stopped to have a chat.

It’s not often that you see them as close as this in the open sea and I was wondering if maybe one of the had wanted to borrow a cup of sugar from the other

However, when you see two lots of extremely strange activity taking place in more-or-less the same place, like the Falcon circling around and these two trawlers, you have to wonder if the two events are somehow connected.

We’ve seen the larger trawlers loitering around outside the harbour waiting for the tide, but there’s enough water in there already for the smaller ones.

Coming a-chugging into port is Lysandre, the little shell-fishing boat that is registered in St Malo but now just recently seems to have taken up residence here in Granville.

There’s one of the little port runabouts out there too, heading towards the Joly France ferry that’s moored up at the Ferry terminal.

There must be something exciting going on over there too because there’s a small crowd up on the harbour wall having a good look.

Whatever excitement that might have been going on in the chantier naval is well and truly over now

The unidentified yacht that we’ve been seeing in there for the last few weeks has now disappeared.

We’re now just left with Le Roc A La Mauve III nearest the camera, and then La Granvillaise and Charles-Marie.

Finally Spirit of Conrad on which we sailed down the Brittany coast nearly 2 years ago. A few days ago I was talking to her skipper. She’s off on a circumnavigation of the UK quite soon but I have desisted.

Yesterday I mentioned the freight that was on the quayside.

It’s still there today, and it’s not alone either. Another pile of stuff has come to join it And by the looks of things, there’s a third lot that’s just arrived on the lorry that’s parked behind it.

Back here I finished off my journal entries and then had an hour or so on the guitar. I seem to be much more relaxed than I have been just recently.

Tea was one of those meat turnovers with potatoes and gravy and it was really delicious too

For a change, I ate earlier than usual because I wanted to do my notes and have an early night but as you might expect, Rosemary rang me up for another one of our marathon chats. Consequently it’s much later than I would have liked it to be.

Tomorrow I have a letter to write. I hate writing letters at the best of times and this one has been loitering around for a few months.

Monday 14th March 2022 – THERE HAS BEEN …

… some rather bad news about the fire in the house in the Rue du Midi on Saturday evening.

Yesterday evening, the firemen finally worked their way through the rubble to the ground floor where they found the missing person. And as you might expect, they found him far too late to be of any use.

It’s a rather sombre note on which to start today’s journal entry, but I suppose that there are times when sombre notes will creep in to everything at some time or other. There but for the grace of God go we.

Wherever I went on my travels last night is something else completely. For the first time since I don’t know when, one of my young ladies put in an appearance – Zero, as it happens.

And do you know what? I can’t remember why she was there or what we did.

How disappointing is that?

Anyway, I’m sure that you are all dying to know about where I went last night

I started off at a well-known square in Paris – I can’t remember which one – and it had some kind of weird fence and turnstile arrangements to control the flow of pedestrians but that’s all that I remember about this.

And later I was with Zero , for the first time for years, and her father last night and I can’t remember very much of what it actually involved (and isn’t that a disaster?) with them, but it led to me thinking about going to buy a motorbike so maybe I could take Zero around on the back of it. I went into a shop in Hungerford Road Crewe that used to be an old Co-op but was now selling motorbikes. They had a couple of Kawasaki 414 bikes in there for sale but they were more expensive than I was planning to pay although they looked quite nice. I thought that maybe something like that would be quite interesting. I had a good look around their shop but they didn’t really have very much at all. They had a few cars outside of course but it was the motorbikes that were interesting me more because I could go into Stoke on Trent on a motorbike, leave it to be serviced, overhauled and MoT’d while I was at work during the day, that kind of thing and probably Zero would enjoy going for a ride around on the back of a motorbike every now and again but there was nothing there that I liked.

There was something else as well. I was leaving work so I wandered off down the maze of corridors following the yellow arrows and yellow tape as I usually did. At one point I took a turn and found that the yellow arrow didn’t actually go that way which surprised me because I was pretty sure that it was the route that I took all the time I went back and followed the yellow arrow and suddenly found myself in a completely different security room. There was no way out. There were all kinds of security guys in there doing things. In the end I turned round and found another door that took me out. I could see that I was in a completely different place outside than where I would normally be when I was leaving the building. There were a few other people whom I knew around there as well so I went over for a chat and told them about the changes. They couldn’t understand what was happening either. Some girl came along and joined in. She was saying that she was now one of those people whose salary was a secret but she didn’t agree with that because it creates distrust amongst all the other employees. Someone else turned up with 3 daughters. She was talking to 2 daughters about giving their names to someone else and preparing for Christmas but for one daughter it was too late that they didn’t have any of what it was they didn’t have. They didn’t say. Then a couple of others turned up. One of them had had a dramatic cut in the salary that he was receiving as a Life Insurance broker so he was trying to chivvy up all of his friends and contacts to do something about increasing their insurance cover so he could receive a higher commission to offset his decrease in salary.

In fact, all told it was rather a bad night, and for many reasons too. I was tossing and turning around in bed for much of it and that’s guaranteed to set me off on the wrong foot.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 it was a struggle to leave the bed but I did manage – only just – to leave the bed before the second alarm.

The radio programme was the task for this morning and despite a couple of breaks for coffee, breakfast and so on, by 10:45 it was finished. And in a major departure from usual procedure, I’ve reused a song that I first used 18 months ago, simply for the reason that it seemed to fit so well with what I was doing.

“I have been around the world looking for that woman-girl who knows love can endure. And it always will”. And in my case, it endured for all of three days, didn’t it?

There were several phone calls – some of them long-distance – that I had to make and that took me all the way up to lunchtime. And the net result of all of those phone calls was … errr … nothing.

After lunch I had a shower, set the washing machine off on its cycle (a clever washing machine, mine) and then went out for my physiotherapy session.

Of course, the first port of call when I’m on my way to town is to check the camera at the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne where the viewpoint overlooks the Fish Processing Plant.

The tide is on its way in right now – not far enough for the gates to open to let the larger boats into the inner harbour, but far enough for the boats with a lighter draught to pull up at the quay here to unload.

The Chante des Sirènes is easily identifiable with its mermaid painted on the side in a kind of green stripe.

Moored up at the ferry terminal in the background are Belle France and one of the Joly France boats.

Down in the town I walked along the Rue Lecampion towards the centre.

There’s something going on with the roof of one of the houses here. There’s a cherry-picker and a couple of guys doing something with the roof and a scaffolding.

Leaving them to it, I wandered off up the road and to the physiotherapist. And I don’t know why, but I haven’t climbed up the Rue Couraye as easily as I did this afternoon for quite a long time.

The physiotherapist had me on the couch and massaged my knee with her machine, and then had me doing some exercises.

And to my surprise, it was my left knee, not my right knee, that was hurting by the time that I had finished.

On my way home I called in at the Carrefour to buy something to drink. I had a thirst that you could photograph.

In the town centre we had some more excitement.

There were some guys laying a cable in the duct under the street. The had the manhole cover up and had surrounded the hole with cones. And so an elderly woman in a black car drove over the cover and almost ended up in the hole.

And then she had the nerve to bawl out the crew. Some people really are unbelievable. I shan’t repeat on here what the crew replied to the woman. My journal is intended for all of the family, not just the over-18s.

Another thing that noticed was that the kiddies’ roundabout has now gone.

The carnival season is now over here and all of the fairground rides have packed up and gone off to their next engagement wherever that might be and we’ll be back with peace and quiet again until Easter when there will be more crowds descending on the town.

Bringing more cases of the virus with them, no doubt. This kind of thing really depresses me, especially as I don’t have the means to fight it.

When I was up in the Rue des Juifs on my way into town the fire brigade was still there clearing up.

While I was in the town centre, they came through presumably on their way back to base. And it was extremely interesting watching them trying their best to negotiate the hole in the road.

And once they had gone, it was the turn of the school buses and that was even more interesting. The manhole covers and several cones took a right battering and there was what can best be described as “a frank exchange of views” between the drivers and the cabling crew.

While all of that was going on, I left them to it and wandered off down the Rue Paul Poirier.

The other day we saw them with a scaffolding outside one of the buildings in the Rue Georges Clemenceau and it had been intriguing me as to what they might be doing.

When I’d seen the carpenter’s van outside, I imagined that it might have been a roofing job but it actually looks as if they are working on the facade of the building. It could do with a good rendering and a new coat of paint.

In the earlier photo of the boats in the harbour, I don’t know if you noticed a fishing boat that we haven’t seen before.

She was moored in the inner harbour with her crew working on the nets when I came back, and I could see her registration number from here.

It’s CH933900 – a number from this coast – and it’s so new that it’s not in the register that I have. But I was able to track her down from “other sources” and she’s called Carteret. She sails out of … errr … Barneville-Carteret.

She’s only 9 months old apparently and was built to replace a previous boat that was destroyed in a fire.

On the way back, I could have a closer look at the burnt-out house now that the fire engines and the crowds have gone.

It’s not just the house and the one to the right of it that have been affected, the one to the left has been badly-affected too. You can see that much of the roof there has been burnt away too.

This is an appalling thing to have happened. Apart from the loss of life which is a tragedy, the loss and damage is considerable and there are many people in these three houses who have been badly affected.

Before I went home, I went to look at the beach to see what was happening.

The tide is now well in and there’s not much beach down there to be on. It’s no surprise that I couldn’t see anyone wandering about.

As I was looking down there, one of my neighbours pulled up in her car. She’s had some bad news from her doctor about her health and she told me all about it. Of course I sympathised, but there isn’t much that I could do.

Back here I made a coffee, hung out the washing and then came here to spend an hour on the photos from the High Arctic in 2019.

Talking about that, it made me all nostalgic and it reminded me of a poem about which Alison and I had chatted the other day

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again. “

Poetry at school was mainly awful with all of these depressing war poets and all of that. The only bright spark amongst all of that which we learnt was A E Housman and “A Shropshire Lad” is one of my favourite works.

Had I been born 5 miles away from my actual place of birth, I would have been a Shropshire Lad myself.

But seriously, when Housman said “The happy highways where I went and cannot come again. “, I don’t think that he had Covid and World War in mind. We won’t be going anywhere for a while yet.

In another mad fit of excitement I took out about half a ton of paper to the waste bin and then spent half an hour playing guitar. The first time that I enjoyed myself with the guitar since the summer. These pills must be working somehow.

Tea was a curry of leftovers and then I had to fight the good fight on the Internet. A discussion group of which I’m a member has become a very contentious place since War broke out and the Moderator was overwhelmed. She called for another volunteer and so I responded.

And tonight I’ve been dealing with a flame war – just like the “Good Old Days” on “First Class” – pulling warring factions apart, sending a couple of people to the naughty corner and … errr … “saying goodbye” to a couple of them. I’m surprised that I had time to write up my notes.

But now that they are done, much later than usual, I’m off to bed. I’ve a Welsh lesson tomorrow and I need to be on form.

Sunday 13th March 2022 – GONE!

And never called me “Mother”!

A short while ago I mentioned that I expected Marité to put to sea quite soon to find a port with some heavy lifting tackle that could lift her out of the water so that she could be examined for her passenger-carrying licence.

And so here she isn’t. In actual fact, according to my marine radar, she’s in Cherbourg. And that’s a new departure for her. usually she goes around to somewhere around the southern coast of Brittany

Instead, you’ll have to make do with views of La Bavolette II, Philcathane, Chausiaise and Joly France.

Something else that has gone, and which is no laughing matter, is one of the houses in the Rue du Midi.

Yesterday evening it caught fire and it has been totally destroyed. There has also been considerable damage to the adjoining houses too and the situation just there isn’t at all healthy.

The smell of burning is appalling and my hat goes off to the fire crews who were still in attendance this afternoon clearing away the debris. All of the roads in the area are blocked off right now.

There is talk that one of the inhabitants of one of the houses is missing and I don’t know how the situation has developed since I last heard anything.

Last night, I was in bed round about midnight and finally staggered out of bed at 10:45. Not that it was a good night’s sleep either because I was off on a considerable amount of travels during the night.

While you look at a couple more photos of the disaster, I’ll tell you where I went.

I started off picking a team at football for a primary school football match. It turned out to be extremely one-sided with one team winning 6-1. I took some good photos of a couple of the goals and wrote a little piece about it for the local newspaper. The team that had won had a couple of boys in it wo were only 10 as well instead of the usual 11 years old of a primary school football team but even so they were still far too good for the other team that was playing

And then there was a meeting going on at my place discussing photos. It had to take place on the quiet although I don’t know why. I didn’t want anyone to know exactly what was happening about it so everyone was being extremely discreet. In the middle 2 men walked in. They went round to the head of the bed and leant on it. They asked “where’s your car?”. I replied “you’re leaning on it” because it was parked right at the back of the head of the bed. They had a quick look round and there it was. They wanted to know where I’d been, who I’d seen and who I’d met. Of course I could only give them examples of one or two days because I’d been away. I was trying to think who it was that I was supposed to have met and why. I tried to make them give me at least a clue but they wouldn’t at all. I was completely flummoxed. I didn’t want them to know about these photos that we were discussing and I just couldn’t think of what could possibly be of any interest to them with the 3 or 4 people who might have been round at my house over the last week when I’ve been here and not in Leuven.

There were some people wandering around the building, a couple probably in their 50s. They were having a look round and suddenly they stuck their head through my window in my apartment. I walked up to them and said “you don’t look through the window of someone else’s apartment” so they blushed and stammered. They started to ask me a few questions about the apartment. They seemed to be nice people so I invited them in and while I was working at whatever it was that I was doing , just then Tuppence came into the living room and to my surprise she allowed herself to be picked up and stroked. Then Sweep (Tuppence was my cat from years ago and Sweep was one of the kittens that Nerina and I had) came in and the woman did the same to her, picked her up and started to stroke her so I said “it looks as if you are stopping here”. They asked about the empty flat and had another look around mine. I gave them certain information but didn’t mention the price because that’s a personal thing

I started off interviewing Brian Jones for the radio. He turned out to be someone whom I liked very much. I admired his sense of humour, his wit and his outlook on life after leaving the Stones. Eventually I became his driver and we became a very good team together. Gradually he evolved into Stuart Jones … “do you mean Mick Jones?” – ed … of The Clash – I can’t remember who exactly. he was talking about all of the solo concerts that he was doing etc. he was someone who was very simple and straightforward and would play gigs with just a couple of people at small venues – he didn’t need to make a name for himself. He played at a Clash reunion and burst into tears at the end after playing a couple of solo songs of the Clash. Then there was a story about a song that he had heard. Someone sent him a song to hear. After he went home I went round to a museum where I knew someone who was working who knew about this song. Instead I ended up in an aero engine place and I asked about a certain type of aero engine. When I mentioned a German name they said that I couldn’t see it because it was under development, which surprised me so I went back again and asked for this German guy. They couldn’t find him so I went into the engine secretary. They told me that I was out somewhere in the vicinity but I couldn’t get to see him. I tried to find out where so that I could follow him round but I couldn’t manage to do it.

And then I was in a remake of that British comedy film that had McDonald Hobley in it and there was an Indian or an Arab. It was the one with the magic carpet in it and was out in the British Empire in India or Africa with Spike Milligan and Jim Dale and a few other people. It was a surreal film with the idea of people going back to their regiment to spy on the situation and development in the Middle East somewhere. It was all extremely surreal and someone who was excluded from the meeting tried to sneak in but was set on by people with scimitars and all that kind of thing. In the middle of the meeting they all had to stop for tea and because they were British they had to stop for breakfast because it was now breakfast on British hours, all that kind of total surreal comedy type of stuff that took place.

That film started off with the Americans refusing to deal with the British because the British were using substandard Russian scrap steel in their steel fabrication in the Middle East, simply allowing Russian lorries loaded with scrap onto the plant to go straight into the smelter and tip instead of tipping outside the smelter and sorting the stuff so the Americans had no reliance on the metal that the British were producing because of the substandard quality of the scrap. That film was called something like “A Miracle Called Yes” or “A Miracle Called Vest” dated 1964

So in this film there were several of us. There was me, a major, a couple of woman and a young girl had made it so far somewhere in the Straits of Gibraltar where we were holed up in a cave. The young girl seemed to have fallen for the major and this was bound to create problems because the major was drinking and was most unreliable. I had to radio a report so we had to wait there until just before dawn when we’d be picked up and taken away. They sent a boat to pick up the major to take him to the camp where he would be court-martialled. This led to quite a scene between this young girl and the major. I had to order her to stay put while I took him down to get on this boat. I was told that I had to stand by at 04:00 when there would be a radio call to summon us to a meeting by radio. In the meantime we’d have to stay there and make the best of whatever we could until we were sent for. One of the older women who was there was well-aware of the situation and realised what kind of complication all this is going to do and will jeopardise our whole mission just because this major couldn’t keep his hands off the bottle and the women.

And then we were back in the war again last night, defending Nantwich. For some unknown reason the attack was coming from the North. We’d dug in and we had a pile of old anti-tank weapons and were busy shooting up tanks as they came towards us. At one stage ammunition was running low but we managed to find a couple of captured ones and a box of 50 rockets so we were able to equip ourselves and hold out again for another while, brewing up tanks as they came towards us. We thought that there was no reason why we couldn’t hold out for ever here because the infantry was very reluctant to come and engage us while we were busy knocking out all of their tanks

Finally, my mother was looking after the twins again. We had a look and she was receiving almost £160 per week for looking after the 2 of them. It wasn’t easy because there were 2 enforcement notices on them, one on each one. One had killed a man and I don’t know what the enforcement order was for the other. It was extremely difficult and time-consuming to look after them both. Somewhere in this my brother was working in a shop that was having a lot of trouble because someone was off sick. I’d gone in there, wearing 2 pairs of socks so I took off 1 pair. I’d been helping them out and I asked if they needed me to come in tomorrow but they replied that they would be OK. They did ask if I could help them out by paying my brother’s wages for them until they were straight. That would be a good help so I decided that I would go round the next day. I came out of the Co-op which was where the old Ritz Cinema used to be and worked my way down Market Street, out and around the front into Victoria Street where his shop was but I couldn’t remember which door it was that one went into to enter the shop. Later on, I was working on a trailer. He came over to me and said ‘have you ever wondered what the girls do when they are watching us and we aren’t noticing?”. “No” I replied so he started to tell me some kind of story about our youngest sister but he didn’t get very far into it.

After the medication I came back in here and paired up the music for the next radio programme on which I’ll be working. And I do have to say that some of the joins are excellent. And so they should be, given all the practice that I’ve had.

After lunch, I started to transcribe the dictaphone notes and as you can imagine, that took most of the afternoon. Mind you, I did have a pause for half an hour or so while I mixed up some dough for the bread for next week. And it seemed to mix quite nicely too.

There was the usual pause for my afternoon walk to stretch my legs.

The different perspective of the photo of the beach this afternoon will tell you that instead of going around the headland, I went for a walk around the medieval city walls

There wasn’t very much beach to be on this afternoon. The tide is well in right now but there was still enough beach for someone to take his dogs for a good play around down there.

And there were other people down there too but they were out of shot.

And as usual, I was having a good look around out at sea this afternoon too.

No big ships out there right now but instead we had a couple of yachts and a cabin cruiser having some kind of danse macabre out there in the Baie de Granville.

Although it was cloudy and overcast, the view was quite good and although you can’t see it in this shot, the island of Jersey was quite clearly visible, although not clear enough to distinguish the individual buildings.

“Cloudy and overcast” I said just now.

And there were several storms brewing out at sea. The Ile de Chausey is quite clear this afternoon, but just to the west of it is quite a menacing black storm building up and heading this way. And in actual fact, while I was out a few minutes later, it arrived.

The little cabin cruiser out there in the bay probably received it first before I did, and I bet that the crew knew all about it as well.

And so I cleared off down the path towards the walls.

As we wander off along the walls we come to the place where for the last few months they have been carrying out repairs.

What with my state of health being as it is, I didn’t feel up like going down to the lower level of the steps. Instead I stopped at the top of the steps to take a photo of what they had done so far.

We can see a little better today than we did the last time that we were here and we can see that they have a considerable way to go before they are going to be finished at this end of the wall. And the two huge cracks are going to take some repairing if they are going to hold up.

When we were here a few months ago we noticed that they had actually demolished the wall right down to street level.

They have now built it up to the height that it was before and by the looks of things the job that they have done isn’t too bad although at the moment the pointing is somewhat hit-and-miss.

By the pile of stones here they still have some work to do, so it’s going to be interesting to see how it will look here when they have finally finished it off.

And the five tonnes of water in the containers on the scaffolding have done the job of holding the scaffolding down in all of the storms that we have had.

Here on the outside of the walls, we can see the join where the rebuilt wall meets the repointed wall lower down.

It might not be aesthetically pleasing how they have done it, but it’s a vast improvement on how it was before they started and it might even hold up.

And so I headed off through the arch and down the path underneath the walls to continue on my walk, dodging the piles of cyclists who were disturbing the peace and upsetting all of the pedestrians and who think that the path belongs to them.

Down at the end of the path here is a viewpoint that overlooks the beach and the promenade at the Plat Gousset.

Surprisingly there weren’t too many people down there this afternoon. Although it was quite cloudy and threatening rain, it was quite warm again for the time of year and no reason at all why people shouldn’t be going for a stroll.

However, as we saw in an earlier photo, they were all in the Rue des Juifs looking up at the burnt-out house on the walls.

On the way back home I passed the guy who takes his cat for a walk and we had a chat, and then I went to inspect the damage for myself.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall yesterday that I said that I would take a photo of the bike shed when I see a bicycle in it.

They also know that pathetic parking is a regular feature of these pages, and here we have two for the price of one – a bicycle parked in the bike shed and a car that has decided that it would like to park there too regardless of the fact that the space is presumably reserved for bicycles.

A little earlier, I mentioned about cyclists thinking that they own the place. Well, car owners can have their moments too, can’t they?

Back here, I gave the bread another kneading and put it in its mould. And then rolled out the lump of dough that i’d taken out of the freezer earlier and had now defrosted.

That went into the pizza tray to proof for a while.

later on, I put the bread dough into the oven and then assembled my pizza ready to bake it when the bread was finished.

And here are the finished results. The bread is baked to perfection by the looks of things and the pizza was one of the best that I have ever made, even though I forgot to put the olives on, as I discovered later.

After I’d eaten the pizza I tidied up and came back in here to finish my notes. Now that they are finished, I’m going to bed shortly. I have an early start in the morning and a radio programme to make.

The nurse should be coming to inject me too and I have my physiotherapy session in the afternoon too. It doesn’t take long for the cycle of activity to start up again.

Tuesday 8th March 2022 – EVEN THOUGH …

… I was in bed quite early last night, leaving my bed this morning was something else completely.

Apparently, when the alarm went off at 07:30, I turned straight over and went back to sleep. And when the alarm went off a second time at 08:00 ditto.

It was 08:12 when I awoke with a start and then it was a real struggle to leave the bed.

After the medication I eventually managed to concentrate on revising my Welsh and preparing for today’s lesson. And to my great surprise, it all passed off quite well and I’ve no idea why

Lunch was very enjoyable. In fact, it’s been very enjoyable for the last couple of days because having finished off a container of hummus, I started on the vegan cheese that I’d bought in Aachen a few weeks ago.

It’s a type that I used to buy quite regularly in Montlucon when I lived in the Auvergne and it’s the best vegan cheese that I’ve ever eaten. It really is delicious and I wish that I could find it here in Granville.

Having finished lunch, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There was some kind of dream last night about me in Shavington. It was to do with the war and all of these bungalows, where we’d meet up and who we’d meet up with, and how one or two of these bungalows were going to be blown up and erased from the map but I can’t remember any more about it than this.

Carrying on from where I was earlier, the Russians have now invaded and caught hold of a load of people. They were actually dealing with them and quite a few people, they had just thrown into the sea including some pregnant women. 3 women had had miscarriages and the Russians were trying to work out which 3 women they were so that they could take them out og the water and presumably kill them. But these people were swimming around in there doing their best to confuse the issue, mix with all the others and not say who they were so that the Russians would have an extremely difficult job trying to locate them. Everyone was giving the hints on how to pass a Russian inspection etc.

Later on it was young boys being thrown into the sea. There was something about the Russians had put these boys in the sea but a few of them found a way to keep alive and keep afloat, and even plug themselves into the electrical circuit and succeeding in keeping out of the way of the Russians who were trying to capture them.

They were busy throwing things at these young boys in the water or the other boys were throwing things at them and there were things like food packets but instead of reaching the intended person for whom they were intended they became bogged down in the gravel at the side of this lake. This meant that no-one could capture them and some kind of heroes were cheering on the Russians at this instead of trying to help these boys which I thought was awful

Once again there was a group of us. Someone too k a throw-in with a pie. It came towards me and I was facing it so I did a beautiful overhead bicycle kick with this pie. When I turned round there was a woman with half a pie in her face. Of course I appealed for a catch to give her out. At first the referee wouldn’t give her out. He said that it was impossible for that to have happened but I was convinced that it was a good throw-in with this pie, that I’d done a perfect overhead kick and the evidence was there for everyone to see. They asked where the rest of the pie was. I had a look around and it was in the footwell of the car under where she was sitting, right on the floor right by her. In my mind there was absolutely no dispute or doubt whatsoever that it was my overhead kick of this pie that had hit her in the face. But the umpire and referee and everyone needed an awful lot of convincing before they would actually give her out which I thought was extremely strange because it was so obvious.

The first few of these voyages involving Russians was something of a surprise.

When I dictate these notes, I’m usually in some kind of sleep-mode, not really conscious of dictating them. However when I’m transcribing them, usually some kind of deep subconscious memory stirs and I vaguely remember something about them. But for those few, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of anything.

That took me up to walkies time. And on the way out of the building I bumped into one neighbour and then another.

Finally I could extricate myself and wander over to the wall at the end of the car park and see what’s happening down there. and while there was quite a bit of beach this afternoon, there wasn’t anyone down there taking advantage of it.

That’s not really a surprise because apart from the fact that most people have either gone back to work or to school, the weather was a lot more wintry than it has been just recently, and quite windy too.

Not as cold as it might have been though. We’ve still not had a winter this year and I don’t know where this is going to end.

The tide was making some pretty patterns down there in the sand too. It’s one of those things that you have to capture just at the right moment and it looks as if I’ve found it today.

There was just a handful of people out here on the path this afternoon going for a walk so I had the place pretty much to myself, apart from a couple of errant dogs who presumably had owners somewhere in the vicinity.

There wasn’t anyone down on the bench by the cabanon vauban and there was nothing happening out at sea either.

But what caught my eye was the old bunker right out at the end of the headland above the lower path. It’s been a good while since we’ve had a look at that. It’s a shame that (for now, at any rate) it’s sealed off from inspection.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that down there are also some concrete cable anchors. There was probably some kind of German radio mast there during World War II when this was part of the Atlantic Wall and these anchors were for the anchor cables.

This afternoon we seem to have had some kind of change of occupancy in the chantier naval.

Spirit of Conrad, la Granvillaise, Le Roc A La Mauve III and the unidentified yacht are still there, but where is Courrier des Iles?

It looks as if she’s gone back into the water since the last time we were round this way.

Over at the ferry terminal Joly France has now disappeared out on a sailing somewhere, but the little freighter Chausiaise is parked up there as well, presumably waiting for the tide.

Back here I had a coffee and then packed my suitcase for tomorrow’s trip to Leuven. I needed to fill up the coffee container that I take and sort out the mixed herbs. It’s annoying not having anywhere there where I can leave things.

The medication needed sorting out too. There’s plenty that’s redundant now but I still need to check what I have. I need at least three months’ supply on hand in case I’m whisked off on a mission somewhere.

And then of course I can file away the stuff that I don’t need, of which there is more than just a considerable amount.

Tea tonight was the left-over curry from yesterday and it was even more delicious than yesterday.

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. It’s an 06:00 start tomorrow ready for my trip to Leuven. Not that I’m feeling much like it but I have to show willing.

Monday 7th March 2022 – IT WAS A …

… very different experience today at my physiotherapy session. She put four electric pads around my knee, coupled them up to some kind of electric machine and then spent 20 minutes putting electric shocks through my knee.

When the machine wasn’t pulsing, it was as if someone was tapping the surround of my kneecap with a small hammer. And when the current was going through it, it was as if some kind of retired Bulgarian weightlifter was squeezing my leg in a downward direction.

But anyway, more of that later.

Last night I actually had the first decent sleep that I’ve had for quite some time. I was in bed by 22:15 and there was one file on the dictaphone at 23:17 and a second at 05:12 and that was about that until the alarm went off at 06:00.

So where did I go during the night?

The night started off by me getting on a train in Central Europe, a steam train. I was trying to syphon some lemon juice from one empty container to another. I looked out of the window and there was a woman having a row with what looked like an old border guard in an old border guard uniform. The woman with me and I went down to see what was happening. He was trying to detain her but as this wasn’t the border here he had no authority so we simply told this woman to come on board and ignore him. He became quite agitated at this and threatened to arrest us all but he had no authority to do that. We took no notice and in the end the woman with me broke the hold that the man had on this other woman. She could board but my lady-friend was subjected to some rough treatment from this guy so I went over there. It ended up that he let go of her and the 3 of us boarded. As the train was heading away I went to find out where everyone was sitting. I found my friend but the other person, she was now a pair of twins whom I knew from years and years ago. They were sitting somewhere else. Being of African descent they were quite obvious in this 3rd class carriage. The woman and I sat not too far away from them. I wandered over to where one of the twins was. She was asleep but when I was very close to her she awoke so I made some kind of gesture that I hoped no-one else noticed that the two of them should come and sit by the two of us and discuss what our next move was going to be. We certainly couldn’t say that we were inconspicuous with what had happened boarding the train.

And later I was with someone last night who might have been a girl with whom I worked 40 years ago. We’d bumped into each other quite by accident and she told me that she was working out at the back of Chester. She mentioned the place and I said “yes, I know it well there. It’s by the Little Chef, isn’t it?”. She replied that it was further on down from the Little Chef closer towards Shelton Bar … “he means John Summers Steelworks at Shotton” – ed. I mentioned that it must be near somewhere else but she replied that that was in the other direction. I thought that I’d better shut up otherwise I’d make more of a fool of myself than I’m doing at the moment. Of course that’s an area that i used to know years ago all around there. We started to talk about this and that and I asked her how she was going to work. She replied that she was going by train. I thought that the railway line there had been closed years ago but apparently not. They had reopened it with new stations and there was a new station that had opened that very day right where we were. That was where she was heading to catch the train. We set off to walk to the station and quite by surprise I found myself holding her hand and we were having a very friendly boy-girl chat about next-to-nothing. When we reached the station there was a train just pulling in so she let go and ran for it but the train didn’t stop. It pushed on right through the station. I arrived on the platform just behind her. We asked someone and they said “the train you want is the 17:17 which is in a minute’s time. That was a non-stop through train, that one. Her train pulled in and she boarded, and I did as well for no particular reason other than to go with her to her particular station.

After the medication I started the radio programme that I wanted to do today and it took me much longer than it ought to have done, simply because there were so many interruptions of all sorts. Have you ever tried to explain to someone with no braincells the difference between cost-of-living increases and price increases?

No wonder the UK is in such a mess.

After lunch I had a shower and a good clean up and then I left for my physiotherapy appointment.

As usual, I stopped at the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne on the way out to test the camera.

The tide wasn’t very far in at all this afternoon so there wasn’t anyone out and about down there. As usual these days, one of the Joly France boats is over there at the ferry terminal waiting for her next trip to the Ile de Chausey, whenever that might be.

The walk down into town was rather difficult today. There’s a ramp of four steps halfway down the hill where I can test my right knee to see if there’s the strength in it to lift me up.

And today, there was no force whatsoever. I had to climb the steps with the left leg leading and the right leg limping along behind instead of climbing up normally with alternate legs leading.

Down in the Rue Lecampion, I noticed that in one of the side streets … “Rue Saintonge” – ed … they had closed off the street and were busy digging up the surface.

It doesn’t look as if it’s a cable-laying job as there’s no trench there and no cables either. It looks as if they are just digging a hole there.

In the town centre I went to the Post Office. I’d written two letter earlier and they needed posting. Not that anything will necessarily come from them but nothing will anyway if I don’t post them.

Up the hill I went to the physiotherapist. It was quite agonising but I managed it without having to stop for breath. I’m not so sure that going to the railway station on Wednesday is going to be any better.

On the way back down into town I noticed that there were things going on at the Mairie.

We were all across the road from there showing our support for Ukraine, but I hadn’t noticed the blue and white banner that was attached to the balcony and I was surprised that I had missed it.

And there’s a cherry-picker out there too with a couple of people sticking up posters for something else. I’ll have to wander past there when they’ve all gone and take a closer look at what’s happening.

There’s something happening in the Rue Georges Clemenceau down at the end of the Rue Paul Poirier.

There are several buildings that have changed hands down there just recently and this afternoon they’ve been erecting scaffolding up around one of them.

Parked over there too is a carpenter’s van so it looks as if the building over there is going to be having a new roof within the next few weeks or so.

The walk up the Rue des Juifs towards home wasn’t as easy as it has been for this last couple of weeks. I wasn’t feeling too good over the weekend and it seems to have continued into today. I hope that it picks up before Wednesday. I don’t want to be going to Leuven like this.

Before I went into the apartment for a coffee I went to have a look over the wall at the end of the car park to see what was happening down on the beach.

There was plenty of beach to be down on as well today, but only a couple of people down there on it. It seems that everyone has gone back to work or back to school now, and that will be that until Easter when we’ll have the crowds back again.

After I’d had my coffee I transcribed the dictaphone notes and then did a little tidying up. Not for any good purpose because it looks as if the Nurse has forgotten to come round today to give me my injection for Wednesday.

Tea tonight was a curry made of all kinds of bits and pieces hanging around in the fridge. And there’s enough left over for tea tomorrow as well. At least the fridge will be fairly empty when I go to Leuven.

But right now I’m off to bed. It might be early but I’m exhausted. Tomorrow is my Welsh lesson and I need to be on form for that. I’ve been rather flagging over the last few weeks as far as that goes.

Thursday 3rd March 2022 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that the other day i made a few scathing remarks about the 5lack of° repair to the footpath on the top of the cliffs just down the road from here.

And so of course, it goes without sating that at some point between Tuesday afternoon and the afternoon today, they came back and repaired it.

Of course I would like to brag that they obviously must have read my journal entry, but I can’t really claim it as a victory for me.

Mind you, I wish that they would have rolled it because with the rain that we have had, it was like walking in porridge.

So that was the situation about the path. How’s the bike shed doing today?

And the answer to that is that there has been absolutely no activity there today except that someone seems to have moved the fence a little.

So that was that, by the looks of things. Heaven alone knows when they will be back.

Anyway this morning, I was back in bed with a great deal of difficulty trying to leave my stinking pit. And I only just made it too before the second alarm went off.

With going to bed late last night after my long phone call, I didn’t take the tablet that I was supposed to. And so I was off on a considerable series of voyages during the night.

We were busy organising things for the radio, interviewing people and so on. I came across someone from the Ukraine so I asked around to see whether someone else would like to interview them. No-one would do that willingly and instead they all encouraged me to do it which I thought was strange. Someone agreed to do the job but only asked 3 or 4 questions which I thought was strange so I was busy in my upstairs room making a list of questions. There were some people from this kind-of radio commune hanging around. At that point 3 girls decided that they would go to bed. I looked out of the window to see who they were. There was one whom I quite liked . They saw me looking so they said “goodnight, Eric” so I replied “goodnight” and we had quite a chat out of this window across this path. A few other people overheard it too. When I went downstairs some woman appeared. She had gone to the airport to meet her daughter who was flying in from the Ukraine but for some reason her ‘plane didn’t arrive. It wasn’t due to arrive now until Sunday. That meant that we wouldn’t be interviewing anyone anyway so I thought that I would take her around and introduce her to everyone here and maybe there would be somewhere where she could stay. I introduced her to the people in the part where I was but for some reason she wasn’t interested in saying “hello” to the kinds which I thought was strange. We went over to the main house. It was a total tip and overgrown garden etc. She met a couple of people there, one of whom was my German friend from the Auvergne. A couple of young boys were showing her posters that they had made, saying “this is what we do. We make these posters and stick them up in all kinds of places”. It was becoming really anarchic, not that I was bothered at all because I’m really anarchic anyway but I wondered how she would react about having to spend the night or maybe more in this type of untidy, unkempt anarchic situation.

Something else came up about this radio programme when I went back to sleep and I found that I was dictating it without holding the dictaphone so I fetched the dictaphone and switched it on, then I couldn’t remember what it was that I was about to dictate

Later on I was round at the house of one of my sisters last night. There were kids everywhere, cats and kittens, everywhere you went to sit, sleeping in food tins etc. She told me to sit down so I did and she put a kitten in my lap. I asked whose it was so she mentioned the name of one of her male cats who was only about 4 months old but had managed to father a litter of kittens. Another one of my sisters was there with a baby. She was trying on an emerald blue-green jacket and trying to choose a suitcase. I asked if she was going away in that outfit. She replied “let’s not push the boat out too far out at the moment”. This was another one of those depressing dreams that I’ve had.

And when the alarm went off I was busy organising some kind of railway tickets for some kind of journey that I was planning but I didn’t go very far with that.

After the medication I transcribed my dictaphone notes, and then much of the rest of the day has been spent in editing and remixing a new live concert for my radio programme.

And this really did take me quite a long time because, with not understanding very much at all of Ukrainian, I’ve had to use a considerable amount of intuitive guesswork as to where one track ends and another one begins so I could edit it correctly.

In the great scheme of things, I don’t suppose that it matters all that much because I doubt if any of my listeners can speak Ukrainian either, but there’s always bound to be one when you don’t expect it

Once I had done that I then had to track down some information about the group who played at the concert, and seeing that that was written in Ukrainian, that wasn’t easy either. However, I had the most astonishing piece of luck the deeper I delved, and if you want to find out more, you’ll need to listen to my radio programme at the end of the month

There were the usual breaks of course. Breakfast with my delicious coffee cake, a mug of coffee here and there, lunch of course, and then of course there was the afternoon walk around the headland.

Which started off as usual with me going across the car park to see what was happening down on the beach.

And to my surprise, there were crowds of people down there this afternoon. I’ve no idea why either. They don’t look as if they are the usual peche à pied crowd. They don’t have spades, rakes, buckets and all of that kind of thing.

It wasn’t actually the kind of weather to be out there wandering around for no good purpose. While it wasn’t actually raining, it wasn’t far off and there was a mist rolling around not too far offshore as well.

For that reason, I didn’t spend too long looking out to sea trying to see anything.

Now, these people are much more like what you would expect to see when there’s some peche à pied going on.

You can see the rakes, or gratteurs and the buckets in which to carry away one’s catch. Wellingtons are a good idea too if you intend to go wading about in the kind of weather that we are having right now.

There were several pecheurs on the car park too who were busy divesting themselves of their outer garments before driving off home. Strangely, they all had the contents of their buckets covered so that I wasn’t able to see what they had.

No-one at the cabanon vauban this afternoon so I carried on around the headland towards the port.

Down in the chantier naval we have a nex occupant today. Where Tiberiade was moored over the last couple of weeks we have an old friend of ours.

No prizes for guessing who she is because we’ve seen her from close up – actually from within. She’s Spirit of Conrad, the yacht on which we went down the Brittany coast nearly 2 years ago, and she’s being prepared for her summer season as a charter hire boat when she’ll be off on her travels circumnavigating the British Isles.

Meanwhile, over at the ferry terminal, the older of the two Joly france ferry boats is moored up, presumably waiting for the weekend and its next trip out to the Ile de Chausey.

However in front of her is the local lifeboat – Notre Dame de Cap Lihou. So what’s she doing over there and not in her usual berth in the Port de Plaisance?

The boat that’s careening over in the foreground is another one that we know quite well. She’s Les Bouchots de Chausey and we don’t often see her moored in the harbour during daylight hours. She’s usually out working.

Anyway, I’m going to head off for home and my afternoon coffee.

Yesterday, when we were out and about on our travels, we saw Thora, one of the little Jersey freighters, moored up in the loading bay.

She’s gone back out to sea by the look of things and her place has now been taken by Chausiaise, the little freighter that runs out to the Ile de Chausey and, occasionally, the Channel Islands.

They were actually using the crane as well. I couldn’t tell whether they were loading or unloading her but her jib was certainly swinging round. There’s certainly quite a load of freight on the quayside and if they are loading, it will keep them busy for a while.

Over on the far side of the harbour we have one of the trawlers having fun with a fishing net.

She’s Cap Lihou and it looks as if she has caught her nets and tangled them up. They’ve taken them off the boat as you can see by looking at the pulleys on the back, and they are busy sorting them out.

In fact, a closer look at how clean they are and the tangled old mass that you can see on the bollard on the right-hand edge of the photo, she might even be having her old nets exchanged for new ones.

On the way home I noticed that the lorry that we see quite often at the Porte St Jean is parked there again today with its machinery trailer.

There must be some more work going on in the old town and so what I’ll have to do is to go along for a walk in there sometime in the near future for a closer look.

Stopping at the bike shed to take a photo, I came back in here for my coffee and a rest. It’s taking a lot out of me these days.

When I finished my concert I attacked the photos again from Greenland in August 2019 and managed to complete about 40 of them. I’m now walking around on Disko Island off the coast of Greenland in the Davis Strait.

It’s known that Erik the Red visited the island, as did many of the “Golden Age” Arctic Explorers, from whence they recruited quite a few Inuit to accompany them on their travels.

It sounds exciting to be walking around in the footsteps of Erik the Red but don’t forget that I’ve actually stood on the foundations of what is believed to be his house in Brattahlid.

Tea didn’t work out too well. I tried the air fryer tonight and while the chips on the top were nicely cooked, the ones underneath were not. It said to “shake the basket” every so often but I think that it needs a lot more than that, like tipping out and repacking.

But at least it was better and quicker than the chips that I had made in the oven last time.

Tomorrow I’ll crack on with my photos, I reckon. I have to back up my computer too and there’s a letter to write as well. I’ve probably forgotten something quite important but I’ll worry about that at the appropriate time.

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 – IN WHAT MUST SURELY …

… be a new world record even for these days, the new bike shed didn’t last very long.

Not even 15 hours, because when I came home from the doctor’s this morning, the guy who was there yesterday installing it had returned and was now busy dismantling … “disPERSONing” – ed … it again.

Whatever he had done yesterday was clearly not good enough.

It’s not as if building a bike shed is rocket science so there’s no reason why he would need to take it apart again. But all that I can say is that I’m glad that I didn’t take my bike out of the back of Caliburn last night and park it in there.

There has been other news too today, and this news is equally depressing. At 12:00 midday all over France they tested the nuclear alert sirens, not that there’s anywhere these days to hide if there’s a nuclear attack.

We are living in interesting times.

So while you admire some photos of the fête foraine, the funfair, let me tell you about where I went during the night.

I was out on the Wirral peninsula last night. I’d been there before and I’d seen all of these kids coming out of school. There was a bus stop by three different schools, judging by the uniforms. I’d seen some kinds in another street, a residential suburban street and I wondered where on earth it might have been. I was looking for the house of a girl I know and her brother. I was wandering around and I only had the street name but I didn’t have the number or the ‘phone number and I didn’t even know exactly where it was so I had to find it on the map on my phone or something. I was walking around and suddenly came across a place in a street that went from north-east to south-west where I might have seen these children congregating but on a closer look it wasn’t actually the same place but pretty similar. Then I bumped into a little boy and a little girl. They were extremely talkative. They asked me what I was doing so I said that I was looking for this street that might have been called Allison Avenue, something like that, She said “oh, that lot of streets” as if she knew where it was. She said “why don’t you go to the end of the street here and look left? You can see all the way down the road to Liverpool from here”. I thought “maybe if I had time, I might but I don’t know where I have to go yet”. I started to quiz this girl but just then 2 other people came past and started to ask her something and she was talking to them. I was holding this girl’s arm by this time and I started to stroke it basically to keep her attention focused on me while she was talking to these 2 people.

And later I was at a football match last night, watching a game sitting in the stand quite quietly. The ground was pretty full and these 2 boys were sitting next to me and started to crowd over onto my seat. They asked me if I was enjoying the game etc. The one in the middle asked “who was the hardest? me or his friend?”. I eplied that I don’t know his friend so I can’t really say. Then a fight erupted between the three of us and it was all extremely depressing kind of thing.

And then I was in my Opel Senator last night, using it as a taxi. I was parked up somewhere in Brussels and some guy who had at one time been a regular passenger in my taxi turned up. He said “we want to borrow your taxi for a moment to have” and about 10 of his friends stormed into it. They wouldn’t leave when I told them to so I went to ‘phone the police but my ‘phone kept on playing up – I couldn’t remember the password or the password was wrong or the ‘phone screen wasn’t working, all kinds of things like this. No matter what I tried I couldn’t make these people leave my car.

Finally, I’d been out with some of my family again. I’d been out on a motorbike but I had my beige Cortina YLO with me. I was in an awful hurry to leave but they were loitering around. I was sitting there drumming my fingers on the table but my motorbike by now I’d actually coupled it up to the Cortina with a A-frame and so I set off on the motorbike pulling the car from Shavington. When I looked behind, the family was following me so I went quite quickly through the S-bends in Gresty, putting the motorbike well down to go round these bends towing the Cortina. I could hear tham say that I must be crazy or something. I arrived in Crewe and ended up in a subway somewhere. I had to cycle (because it was now a bike, that of Marianne’s that I was on) up the hill to the street-level but the gearing was all wrong on this bike. I couldn’t make it up the slope. No matter how fast I pedalled, it wasn’t advancing any. I had to roll back to the bottom of the slope on this bike pulling this car and then play with the gear arrangements on this bike in order to find the correct gear that would see me, the bike and the car back up the hill again and onto the street level so that we could continue.

But as you can see, it wasn’t a very pleasant night last night and in some respects I was glad when I awoke. That was actually quite early and I was out of bed as soon as the alarm went off at 07:30.

After the medication I went off to have a shower and a good clean-up ready to go to the doctor’s.

When I reached the corner of the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne and the Boulevard Vaufleury, I stopped to check the NIKON 1 J5.

Over at the ferry terminal was one of the Joly France boats, the older one of the two. And they were loading her up with stuff, judging my the crane with its hook dangling down into the forward hold of the boat.

It’s not exactly the best day of the year for a run out to the Ile de Chausey. It’s quite cool and windy and I’m well-wrapped up for a change.

While I was there at the viewpoint I noticed that there was plenty of activity going on down at the fish processing plant.

No prizes for spotting La Grande Ancre. Her silhouette is quite unique and you’ll be able to spot her anywhere.

Whoever is behind her I don’t know, but in front of her is Les Bouchots de Chausey unloading its catch onto the tractor and trailer that takes it away.

And just puling away from the quayside is Lysandre, the St Malo-registered shell-fishing boat that comes into port here every now and again.

There’s quite a lot of activity going on at the quayside in the inner harbour too.

Marité is there of course, but in front of her is Thora, one of the little Jersey freighters that run a regular service over here. Before she came to Jersey, she was a car ferry out in the Shetland Islands.

The other Joly France boat is down there in the foreground, tied up to Belle France. And if I’m not mistaken, Chausiaise is moored up on the other side of her. They can’t have much on today.

At the doctors he gave me my prescription for the Aranesp that pumps me up ready for when I go to Leuven, and also a prescription for an X-Ray on my knee. I’m not sure if I mentioned that the physiotherapist is of the opinion that there has been no improvement to my knee despite 6 months of effort.

“That’s not normal” she had told me, and that’s no surprise because neither am I.

Ther does however seem to have been some kind of communication between him and the hospital, because he also mentioned that counselling is a good idea for me. So God help the person who draws the short straw and has to probe the depths of my subconscious mind.

He has however given me some tablets to take before I go to bed. I’ll try them to see how they go but if it interrupts my nocturnal rambles I shall stop. Quite frankly, what goes on with me during the night is about the only excitement that I have these days.

Plenty of excitement at the chemists though when I took the prescription there. Some French woman was complaining about this that wasn’t right in France and that wasn’t right in France, so I asked her if she would like to swap her French nationality for my British nationality.

Some people don’t realise how lucky they are.

On the way back up the hill I noticed to my surprise that Tiberiade was not out of the chantier naval.

It doesn’t look though as if she’s had a complete repaint. There are still plenty of patches of wear on her hull. She doesn’t have her nets on board though either, so she’s not completely ready to go back out to sea.

As for me, I was more than completely ready for my morning coffee and slice of coffee cake. I’d made it all the way up the hill without stopping for breath and I was pretty exhausted. None of these health issues are doing me any good, but you knew that anyway.

Goinf past the bike shed I noticed that the guy had gone and taken all of the innards with him.

All I can say is that that didn’t last very long, did it?

Back here I had a coffee and my cake and then attacked the dictaphone notes. As I said earlier, it wasn’t a very happy night by all accounts

After lunch, I was back out again. This time to the physiotherapist. She’s back from her holiday and it’s her birthday today too.

Once more, I stopped at the viewpoint at the corner of the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne and the Boulevard Vaufleury to check the camera again.

Right out at the entrance to the harbour there were some people out there wandering around as if they were engaged in the peche à pied.

And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … with all of the stuff that is probably dropped and churned up by the boats that come in and out of the harbour, that’s the last place that I would look for shellfish.

By the time that I arrived at the physiotherapist’s, I was melting. It had warmed up dramatically and I was in my winter coat. But anyway she used a machine to massage my knee and then to finish off she had me doing a few exercises.

After I left the physio I went round to LIDL to pick up a few bits and pieces. With going to Leuven next week I’m not shopping on Saturday.

And here’s an astonishing thing that I haven’t noticed before. Vegan cheese slices – and “English” (presumably Red Leicester) too.

Of course I’ve no idea what they might be like but the vegan deserts aren’t as good as they might be so I’m not too optimistic. However, if no-one buys the stuff they won’t stock any more vegan food so they need some kind of encouragement.

If it melts, it might be good for cheese on toast and there’s only one way to find that out, isn’t there?

On the way back I had a look again at the new building that was going on at the corner of the Rue Victor Hugo and the Rue St Paul.

They don’t seem to have made a great deal of progress since we saw them last, but the road must be closed for some good purpose that isn’t easily apparent.

At the bottom of the hill is the funfair – the fête foraine – so I went for a wander around there for 10 minutes. It’s not as good as it might be when it’s all lit up but I’m already on 105% of my daily activity and I’m not going out again in the dark.

Back here at the building I can’t go inside until I’ve seen what’s happening down on the beach.

By the time that I came back I was rather later than usual but there was still some beach to be on and there were a few people down there actually on it. They were probably enjoying the warm weather.

Back in here I had a coffee and then I had some work to do. We’re doing a series of programmes on the Ukraine and I spent an hour or so tracking down some Ukrainian rock groups. One of them burst into the limelight thanks to an appearance that they made at a concert in Lviv and I actually managed to track down the concert too

Now I shall have to brush up my Russian because this concert was in pre-independence days and it’s 30 years since my last trip to Eastern Europe.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that years ago I used to work for a coach company that won a contract to take tourists behind the Iron Curtain. As I fancied the job as driver, I found a local woman who spoke Russian and she taught me the basics, most of which I have forgotten.

While I was at it I also came across a friend of a friend of a friend who has a daughter in the Ukraine and I’ve been trying to set up an interview for the radio. But that’s not easy, as you can imagine.

Another thing that I did was to bash out a few more photos from my trip to the High Arctic in 2019. Where has this energy come from?

Tea tonight was a potato and mushroom curry, and then I came back in here to write up my notes – and to make a long ‘phone call to Florida. My network of contacts stretches throughout the world and it’s just as well, with all of this going on.

Monday 28th February 2022 – TODAY’S RADIO PROGRAMME …

… should have been one of the quickest that I have ever prepared, but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall from previous occasions when I’ve had an odds-on certainty, it ended up being the slowest. And by a country mile too.

With only 9 tracks of music today and only about 4.5 minutes of text to write instead of the usual 7.5 minutes or so, I did all of that quite quickly and by the time that I stitched it all together I just had to “lose” two or three seconds of text.

And then I listened to it before sending it off, and discovered a hole in one of the music tracks. That was quite depressing.

Searching the internet and a couple of my usual haunts, I came across another copy that was complete, cut out the section that I needed and pasted it in to hide the hole. And that’s not as easy as you might think either, having to make the beats match perfectly.

On playing it back, I found that, to my surprise, the version that I had just found was slower than the one that I had, and it took me an age to work out the correct speed and then paste it in again. So now it overran by 0.19 seconds so I had to find some more redundant text to trim off.

Listening to it again, I then came across another, even bigger hole in the music track.

Having spent so long stitching up a much smaller hole in a recording, I didn’t even try to repair this one. I just completely unpicked all of the work that I had done yesterday and earlier today and started from the beginning with the new slower copy.

By the time that I had finished I was now 14 seconds over my 60 minutes and so I had to lose some more text.

What surprises me more than anything is that in my index I’d made a note that this track was faulty. And so I can’t think for a minute why yesterday I failed to notice my note.

It’s one of those things that I should have noticed this morning too. It’s not as if I was overtired or anything because I was in bed fairly early and I wasn’t all that busy during the night. I don’t know why but I’ve just had some kind of dream about a girl with a Ukrainian flag although it wasn’t actually a Ukrainian flag that she had but I couldn’t remember which flag it was that she was holding now.

And what that is supposed to relate to, I really don’t know.

Later on there were three of us in London and we were on our way to the gym where we go. Sometimes our route went past some kind of fish and chip café and we found ourselves by it today. One person suggested that we go and have a meal there. I said “yes fair enough, but after we have been to the gym because I didn’t want to do any exercises on a full stomach. We crossed over the road to see it, dodging a swarm of bicycles going our way but the two of them headed off in a completely different direction so I said “this is the way”. One of the girls asked “are you sure?” to which I replied “pretty much”. For some unknown reason she had some kind of emotional outburst about “I don’t know why you would just want to sit here and lie”, something like that. What I did was that there was a bench nearby so I sat down and said to this girl “right, you’re leading” and I waited for her to set off and we’d follow her and see where we end up

After the medication I sa down to start the radio programme and that’s where I’ve been for most of the day. Either that or writing up the dictaphone notes. So much for hoping to have things finished quickly and moving on to something else.

There were the usual pauses, a coffee or two here and there, breakfast with my wonderful coffee cake and lunch with my delicious bread.

There was also my afternoon walk around the headland for half an hour or so.

As usual I wandered off down to the end of the car park and had a look over the wall down onto the beach to see what was happening.

And once more, there were crowds of people down there making the most of what was a really nice day. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen so many people down there at this time of year

Not that there was a great deal of beach to be on, and there will be even less of a beach in half an hour’s time.

And how do I know that? The answer is that the fishing fleet is on its way home into port.

While I was looking down on the beach with one eye, the other eye was roaming around out at sea, and seeing some movement out at sea, I wondered if it was the cabin cruiser out there again with the rods and lines out.

However back home, when I enhanced and enlarged the image, I could see that there were a couple of trawlers out there. They were pointing towards the coast so it looked to me as if they are on their way home.

Unfortunately it’s not at all possible to identify them at this distance.

With this trawler though, I had much more luck.

As I went around the corner I noticed her. And with her being much closer to the shore, I could read her registration number with the aid of the telephoto lens.

She’s CH922338, and that tells me that she’s Charles Marie II, registered in Cherbourg, where the registrations for the boats that operate out of Granville are handled.

To my surprise, I don’t think that I’ve seen her before. At least, I’ve not recorded any sighting of her as yet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on several occasions I’ve made some remark about the state of the path around the headland.

Whenever it rains heavily, there are several places where the path floods so severely that to pass them is extremely difficult. Where the lorry is parked is one of them.

On the back of the lorry is a load of gravel and they are slowly tipping it down on the path with a couple of workmen coming on behind raking it out.

When they have finished this part, I hope that they will carry on and do the other places that are in need of repair. But for that, we’ll have to wait and see.

As well as down on the beach, there were crowds of people wandering around on the path so I joined them and carried on with my walk.

Around the corner at the end of the headland there was a really strong wind that was blowing off the sea and making thigs rather difficult.

Not so difficult however that it wasn’t possible to go down to the bench at the end of the headland by the cabanon vauban. I’m not sure that a phone call made from down there though in this wind would have been particularly intelligible.

The trawler that I’d seen earlier had now gone right round the headland and out of sight towards the port, so I decided to follow it and make my way towards home where there was a coffee waiting for me.

When I reched the viewpoint overlooking the port, I caught up with Charles Marie II.

She’s over there on the right-hand edge of the photograph, in front of one of the Joly France ferries moored at the ferry terminal.

In fact, there were hordes of fishing boats waiting in the outer harbour. It looks as if the harbour gates are aboout to open and then they will all surge forward into the inner harbour and tie up.

It’s difficult to identify many of the other boats down there. The green and white one towards the left may well be Chant de Sirenes and the pink one may well be Suzanga, the newest one in the fleet.>br clear=”both”>

As I walked further along the path the harbour gates must have opened because into the inner harbour suddenly came a stream of fishing boats.

On the right just pulling up at the fish processing plant is Charles Marie II. On the extreme left pulling up at a pontoon is SM517594, which tells me that she’s called Rocalamauve. The SM in her registration number tells me that she’s registered in St Malo.

In between the two is Saint Andrews, with a seagull hovering around above her looking for a treat.

Back in the apartment my treat was a coffee, and then I came back in here to carry on working. And I eventually finished what I was doing, about 8 hours later than intended. I was having a bad day today which was disappointing.

Later on I made myself a stuffed pepper again. And having taken some frozen veg out of the freezer there was some kind of room to squeeze in half of the loaf that I baked yesterday. It doesn’t stay fresh for very long unfortunately.

Tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson and I’m really not in the mood for it. But then again I’m not really in the mood for anything very much these days, suffering as I am with these limited mobility issues. I have to see the doctor on Wednesday so let’s see if I can galvanise him into action.

Sunday 27th February 2022 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

… what’s going on right now because, yet again, I’ve been on the kind of travels that would overrun “Around The World In 80 Days”.

Where this energy comes from, I really don’t know but I wish that I had some of it during the daylight hours when I’m awake.

We started off last night with a woman letting out rooms for prostitution in a medieval town somewhere. Someone came along to rent a room – she had a client with her. This woman had to travel somewhere – it was only about 03:00 something like that so she left everything that might have been incriminating, left it out thinking that she’d be back. She came to the next old town where she fell in with some old man who was talking to her about gravy and sauces. They walked over these cobbles in this cobbled area by these old stables or something. She slipped discreetly away and found herself out in some kind of open ground by the medieval city walls of this town. There was some kind of carnival or fête happening and there were people all dressed up in weird clothes , people who were weird shapes, really tall with big heads. She was trying to find somewhere that while not secret, was a special place where the person who owned it didn’t want it let out that he was there. She didn’t want to be caught with any of his effects on her and of course she wanted to escape from this man with whom she walked into town. She had to find him, and there was a back way through the town and around the walls where she could leave and come back again to where she lived without this guy seeing her. By this time it was me walking through this open ground. I suddenly had this awful feeling that I couldn’t remember this back way if I find this person and picked up whatever it was that he had. How was I going to return home without running into anyone I didn’t want to meet if I couldn’t remember this back way? It was all very worrying.

There was something else going on that made me think about the low-loader that was parked up outside here the other afternoon, that it was in fact some kind of ride for the carnival and funfair that was going to be installed in the Place just here, effectively what we had talked about in that first voyage in that medieval town

Here was something rather interesting. Sulky teenagers are getting earlier and earlier aren’t they? There were a couple of girls aged 6 and 8. They’d had a no-uniform day at school. The next day was to take one of your personal possessions to school to talk about it. The 6 year-old was OK but the 8 year-old didn’t really have any idea what she wanted to take. We were there making all kinds of suggestions to her, even the guitar that I gave her a while ago. She just stood there in the middle of the room shaking her head at every suggestion and not really committing herself to anything at all. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have anything because she and her sister were doing quite well out of having so many relatives and friends.

There was another long, lengthy dream, most of which I have forgotten, but part of it included the father of a girl with whom I was once engaged. He was making himself a pair of shorts. He’d bored a hole up the front and up the back and was busy trying to put this metal bracing in there to hold the front and back together. he was trying, but needed 3 hands to do everything so he wasn’t making a success at all. I asked him “would you like me to hold anything?” which he didn’t. He carried on trying and in the end I took hold of something that he was trying to do, one of these metal things that he had to hit with a hammer. I held it so that he could hit it with a hammer and it went in quite easily after that. He could adjust it as he thought fit. I thought that when he’d dome one in the bottom and one in the top he’d done the bars too tight. It’s true that you can adjust them once you had them on but all of the adjusting is going to be quite a task and not going to be easy so I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t having at least some kind of rudimentary effort at judging the distances while he had them on the bench.

And later I was in a clothes shop. I’d gone to change a jacket, a yellow one for another one. The exchange went off quite well. They also had some black ones in there that were the same as one that I’d bought a while ago. I thought of changing that one for a new one while I was at it. I mentioned it to a server and he said “why not?”. A closer look revealed that they weren’t actually identical and a tramp was wearing one. I thought that maybe if I could take the one off the tramp then I’d be able to swap that. However his was so worn and dirty that they would never believe that it was a very recent acquisition. I made a couple of excuses to the salesman but he insisted that he could do something for me. I thought that this was going to be a pretty strange thing and I wished that I hadn’t said what I’d said before about changing it now. This was going to be embarrassing. In the meantime there were a couple of girls whom I’d noticed. It was so cold outside that that were each wearing 2 anoraks, one which had a hood that went over their headq and then another anorak over the top. I thought that it must be cold if they are dressed like that.

I was also with a girl last night whom I thought light have been my Greek friend from Brussels. We were hanging around together but her boyfriend had decided that he was going to leave her and she was terribly upset. I went to console her. I said “never mind, there’s always me and I’ll look after you”. She replied “yes, I know but not quite in the same way”. I answered “even so, we have rows, don’t we, and we soon make them up and maybe you’ll make it back up with your boyfriend”. She said something like “yes but we used to row about all kinds of things” and mentioned a couple of examples about which we had rowed but it wasn’t really anything important but with her boyfriend this was something much more serious. By this time we were standing underneath a porch at the side of a house. I was trying to console her but it was extremely difficult. Somewhere in all of this was the story of a printer. I’d had a new printer and the question came round about tidying up the office. I was told that I couldn’t have promotion unless I was prepared to work longer hours or show some signs of initiative. Wandering around, I came across a box. I thought that this was the right size for my printer. It would look rather tidier if my printer were in a box. I fetched it and started to prepare the printer but I was distracted by something. When I returned the box had gone. Someone mentioned something that one of my colleagues had taken it to put in his printer. I thought “had he taken my printer in the box etc?”. A discussion came about “well we know what kind of person he is. He’ll put the printer in the box and then can’t work out how to use it”. The guy in charge said “I’ve solved the problem. I’ve sent him down to the second-hand shop”. “What? To get a new box?” To get a new printer?”. “No, to sell his old printer. He won’t really need one and can always borrow someone else’s”.

A group of us were round at a girl’s house last night. There were a few of us talking about this and that. prior to this, we’d been at work and someone had been talking about a trip to the Gobi Desert. When they showed me on the map it turned out that the desert was at the north of Siberia. They were telling us about their trip. I thought that that was very easy to reach but they said that they went via Iceland and across to Norway that way. I asked why didn’t they go to Denmark and take aferry across to Sweden? The chat continued and they left. I ended up with these 2 girls in the office somewhere. I’d already been down for two breakfasts and had nipped out and come back into the office in the hope of catching a 3rd. I said to these girls “I have a cunning plan” and mentioned this trip to the Gobi Desert. The said something like it would cost a lot of money and the don’t really have the time which disappointed me. The subject came round to some kind of concert we were going to. One girl asked “are you buying her ticket for her?”. I replied “no, I’m picking it up for her but she’s paying for it”. The couldn’t understand how this ticked system was working about who was paying for what, who was picking them up but it looked quite straightforward to me. Then it ended up with me, my brother and one of these girls. She had to go into her garage for something and pulled up the garage door. It was full to the brim of old motorbike pieces. My eyes were out on stalks. I asked whose it all was. She replied that it belonged to her uncle but he has to find a new place to put it and it’s not easy. I said “he can put some of it in my garden if he can make me a motorbike out of this”. She replied “he can knock you up a Comet” but I said that that was too small. I’d want something bigger. By this time her sister had come to join us. She was in her nighty.

That’s not the end of it either. There was much more than this but as you are probably eating your evening meal right now, you won’t want to know the gory details.

No alarm this morning, and no ‘phone call either but even so it was about 10:20 when I awoke and I didn’t loiter around very much because for some reason I really was wide-awake. But I made myself a coffee anyway and had a slice of my coffee cake.

First thing that I did after the medication was to pair off the music for the radio. And after I’d finished doing that I had another think. Pete Seeger once said “Songs are Weapons” and I have plenty of them and so I need to use them.

And so I chose another set of songs and paired them off instead. It’ll be a very different radio show this coming weekend.

After lunch I set about making a big pile of dough. I’ve run out of bread and I’m also about to use my last lump of pizza dough and so I mixed a couple of big piles.

One bunch was mixed with sunflower seeds and was put on one side for the loaf, and the second one had oil added and that was put on a different side to be turned into pizza bases at a later date. And I remembered the Vitamin C this time too.

And as usual, I broke off to go for my afternoon walk, and that involved, as usual, a walk down tothr wall at the end of the car park to see what was going on down on the beach.

And as you can see, there were hordes of people down there this afternoon, sitting around on the rocks waiting for the tide to come in and chase them up the steps to safety in the Rue du Nord.

In fact, I was amazed at the number of people down there this afternoon. I know that it was a nice day today and that there are a lot of people around but I wasn’t expecting to see so many.

Yesterday, when we were here on the wall, we looked out to sea and saw a cabin cruiser out there in the distance.

Today, looking out to sea, I saw something else moving around but at this kind of distance I couldn’t see what it was.

Back home I enlarged and enhanced it I could see that it was once more a cabin cruiser. Whether or not it was the same one I couldn’t say because it was much further out to sea than the cabin cruiser was yesterday.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we saw a yacht out at sea just off the Ile de Chausey.

This afternoon there was a yacht much closer to the Pointe du Roc where I was standing to I could take a better photo of her and even identify her.

She’s registered GBR 7383R and so is called Captain Corsair. She’s some kind of racing yacht and took part last summer in the Tour des Ports de la Manche race, one of the largest yacht races in the area, crewed by inter alia some people from the Granville Yacht Club.

Another stranger to the area flew past overhead while I was admiring Captain Corsair.

She’s F-GIFN, a Piper PA-28-161 Cadet, and I’ve no idea what she’s doing in the area. She had flown up the coast from the south and then turned in towards the airfield, and then did a sharp U-turn and headed off out to sea over the Ile de Chausey.

She didn’t come in to land at the airfield as far as I can tell, and she doesn’t seem to have filed a flight plan or been picked up on radar anywhere ele and so that’s really that, I suppose.

When I reached the car park I noticed that there was a cabin cruiser heading out into the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Had I waited until I’d reached the other side of the headland it would have gone out of view so I took a photo of it from across the car park.

There were crowds of people out there this afternoon so I was lucky that I didn’t end up with someone’s head in the shot.

And crossing over the car park I was almost squidged by a car that was rushing to take up the last place in the car park. That was pretty crowded too today.

Down on the lower path there were crowds of people wandering around.

There were even some people yet again sitting on the bench at the end of the headland by the cabanon vauban. There wasn’t all that much wind to disturb them this afternoon so they could sit quite quietly.

There were several motorbikes parked on the carpark and judging by the helmets down there, those people mut have arrived on one.

But I was going to head off on the footpath on the other side of the headland.

Over at the ferry terminal, one of the Joly France boats was moored up there.

She’s the older one of the two, as we can tell because there is no step in her stern.

It’s no surprise that they are quite busy today. There are crowds of people here who have been confounded by the cancellation of the carnival and with it being a nice day today, a run out to sea instead would be quite inviting.

Meanwhile, in the chantier naval, there was no change in occupants today.

Talking of the carnival, there were some people who were in the carnival spirit.

No big, official parade or procession this year of course but that hasn’t stopped some people from having their own unofficial one. I’m not sure though what this kid is actually supposed to be but hats of to her for making the effort when her friends couldn’t be bothered.

There wasn’t anything of note going on out here so I decided to come on home and transcribe the dictaphone notes. I knew that there would be plenty to do. No coffee though. I’ve already had plenty of that today.

While I was on my way home, I was overflown once more.

This time it was the red powered hang-glider thing that we see quite often when the weather is fine. She was on her way home after a trip out towards Mont St Michel.

Back here, I attacked the dictaphone notes, and it took an absolute age to finish, with all of the stuff that I’d dictated in my sleep. I really do wonder how on earth I find the time to go to sleep. What surprises me is that I haven’t crashed out at some point during the day.

When the bread had finished rising I put it into the oven to bake.

The pizza dough that I’d made earlier, I divided into 3 and put that in the freezer ready for another time, and then I kneaded and rolled out the dough that had defrosted from the freezer earlier.

Later on I assembled the pizza and when the bread was baked, I bunged the pizza into the oven to bake.

It wasn’t quite as good as last week’s, but it was delicious just the same. The bread though has done something weird but I’m not sure what. It’ll probably taste just as good as it usually does though.

But now though I’m going to bed. I have to be up at 06:00 in the morning to start my radio programme preparation and there’s a lot to do. And so I need to be in the kind of shape to be able to do it.

Sunday 20th February 2022 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… today has been one of those days when I have done nothing at all whatever of any importance.

In fact, it’s been so relaxing that I’ve even forgotten to transcribe the dictaphone notes, as I have just found out. That’s something that I have to do tomorrow after my radio programme is finished.

And when I did, I hadn’t realised just how much there was. I started off with my youngest sister last night but first of all we were in a huge house or something like a castle that was built on a rock. I’d seen a vehicle pull up and I knew whose it was and I knew whom he might have been to see down somewhere else in the building. Later on I climbed down the outside of the building and right the way down the rocks at the bottom where there was a courtyard and there were quite a few people in there having a party, including the woman concerned. It was the mother of a girl whom I know from the Auvergne and who had accompanied me on a few nocturnal rambles in the distant past. I could see that with this party she had obviously known that this guy had been here so I just briefly mentioned it in passing. Then we were chatting away. I thought that I might have been invited to this party but no I wasn’t. I went somewhere else from there and ended up inside and had my sister sitting on my knee. We were chatting about this and that and having quite a bit of fun because she was quite young and I like children of that age so it was all very pleasant. I asked if by any chance my niece and one of her daughters were coming over from Canada. She replied “no they aren’t coming over this year. They came over three times last year and and your brother (who she meant to me) had bean teasing that girl (she meant the one from the Auvergne) about she was having to go into boarding school”. There was a lot more to it than this that I can’t remember.

Something else bizarre happened last night. I don’t know what it was but these two people picked me up, dragged me off and started to interrogate me about something that had happened. I knew nothing about it but they were quite insistent that I did. In the end I had to sign all of these affidavits etc to say that I hadn’t done anything and they were going to give me some money. But they deducted some money for this and some money for that and some money for something else and I ended up with only about 60% of it. But then thinking on it was 60% more than I would have received anyway so maybe it was a good deal although it was something of anguish at the time and rather nerve-wracking as they were quite insistent. In the end I walked away with some cash so I don’t suppose that it could have been too bad and I’m still trying to work out exactly what it was that happened.

There was something else at some point too about a load of new people coming to work in our office so I’d been trying to wrangle a transfer. I was wandering, talking to a few people saying that I hope that they’ll give me a transfer but it won’t be to somewhere exciting like Caithness or Skipton or somewhere like that but to another one of our offices in Stoke on Trent somewhere and that won’t be any good at all.

Laurence and I had been out around Nantwich somewhere wandering around and we came to some kind of museum so we went in for 5 minutes for a quick look around. It was quite nice and I thought that this would be a good place to bring Roxanne. She said “but it would be snowing tomorrow”. I replied “I don’t necessarily mean tomorrow and in any case it’s indoors so she would probably enjoy it anyway”. So we went back out but there was a problem with the trams so we would have to catch a bus. It turned out that there was one in 4 minutes’ time, probably because there was something going on at the cathedral and they had the road up. She set off while I sorted out the tickets and then ran after the tram, which sometimes was a tram, sometimes a bus, and leapt aboard. There was a severely handicapped girl manoeuvring around but I was fighting my way in trying to find Nerina because I was with her now but she wasn’t there. Someone said something like she had just alighted but by this time the bus had started moving. I stayed on but people started to talk about Nerina. Then this vehicle ended up in the wilds somewhere because the normal way home through Wistaston, there was a fight going on between a big group of people and so we must take another way. All the people were running down the street trying to catch up with this bus or something. The driver told me that he was rather confused about where to go so I replied “if you turn right here you’ll end up in Ganshoren and go back over to Jette”. He turned right but it was a road that I didn’t know at all but I saw a sign for Woluwe so I assumed that we were somewhere along the correct road somewhere. All the time this nonsense was going on. We then came to a new part in this road that was even more confusing than what we had come to before and it was a case of guesswork as to which road to take when we reached a certain road junction.

And even later still I was on yet another bus in Belgium. There were a lot of people talking. The subject came round to petrol stations. Someone was saying that there are far fewer petrol stations in Belgium than there ever used to be. She pointed to a Delhaize supermarket that we drove past on the corner of the street and said that in the old days that used to be 2 petrol stations. The talk continued and I noticed one of the people looking at me so I said “excuse me but I’m a foreigner and I’m really interested in what you’re saying”. The carried on talking and in the end we arrived at the terminus and we all had to alight. Someone said to one of the girls “why don’t you take him (meaning me) and show him (something or other)”. She replied “OK” and took me off. It was a shop and she took me down into the basement. I had a wander round in there. Suddenly she started to bake a cake. I wasn’t taking a great deal of notice but when she finished I asked “how did you bake a cake without any eggs in it?”. She replied “I’ve just made this one without any eggs”. I suddenly realised that she had as well and I wished that I had taken more notice of what it was that she was doing. Meanwhile the server from down there came up and said “thank you for being so disorganised. You’ve made me miss my break and you’ve made me have problems serving one of the customers” to which we replied “maybe we’ll offer the customer a piece of cake and it might make them feel better.

After all of that it’s no surprise that I stayed in bed until 10:30 this morning, even though I was wide-awake a long time earlier than that. But Sunday is a day for mending the nets.

After the medication I sat down and paired up the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow. And a couple of the joints that I made are totally perfect and I’m well-impressed.

After lunch, I had a football match to watch. While I was in Aachen last Saturday I missed Caernarfon Town v Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League and I have deliberately refrained subsequently from watching any highlights.

This atfernoon I managed to track down the complete game on the internet and so I watched it. I shan’t say anything about the game because, quite frankly, it was one of the most exciting games that I have ever seen. Maybe some of my readers are football fans and if so, you’ll really enjoy this game. It’s at THIS LINK with, rarely, a commentary in English but, unfortunately, with a couple of holes in the recording.

One thing that I will say is that I found the comments of the commentators concerning the Caernarfon Town’s goalkeeper most inappropriate.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in my youth I was a goalkeeper, although nothing whatever like at this standard, and I’ll promise you that an 18 year-old kid keeping goal in a howling gale against grown men, some of whom have been capped for Wales, is always going to be advised to punch instead of catch when he’s surrounded by other players in a crowded penalty area, whatever the commentators might think.

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

As usual, the first port of call was the wall at the end of the car park to see what was happening down below. And to my surprise, there were dozens of people down there going for a walk around.

In this photo are just a few of them, but why this particular view is that there is something on the sand on the extreme left. It seems to be something with a handle but no matter how I enlarged and enhanced it, I can’t make out what it was.

It’s interesting to conjecture that it might be some kind of flotsam and jetsam tossed onto the beach by the storm but I’m not quite sure how likely that would be.

As well as crowds on the beach, there were also crowds wandering around on the path on top of the cliffs

And strangely enough, despite the storm warning of the other day, I will bet that the winds this afternoon when I was out were stronger than those during the storm when I was out that afternoon.

There wasn’t anyone out at the headland though and that was no surprise. The wind certainly took away my breath and would have taken away the breath of anyone else sitting down there on the bench by the cabanon vauban.

There was a couple struggling along in the distance on the lower path, and “struggling” was certainly the word in this wind.

Once I’d gone round the corner to the other side of the headland we were in a wind shadow so it was much easier to move around.

There were quite a few people walking around on the harbour wall too, and with the tide being right out it was probably as safe as it can be. But in a few hours’ time when the tide is right in it might be a different proposition entirely. The seagull was enjoying itself anyway.

One thing that I noticed was the hold hand-powered crane down at the end of the harbour wall. I must have seen it before because I’ve often walked down there in the olden days when I could walk places, but I don’t remember it.

Meanwhile, over at the ferry terminal we now have two ferry boats. The newer Joly France boat has come along to join her older sister.

They must have been quite busy this weekend despite the bad weather, so hats off to those who have gone down to the sea in ships.

Back in the apartment I had a hot coffee waiting for me and I couldn’t wait to drink it. Although it’s not cold, according to the temperature, I’m freezing.

And I’ve been freezing for several weeks and I don’t know why. I keep on thinking that I’m sickening for something but it’s certainly taking its time arriving.

After lunch I took out a lump of dough from the freezer and left it to defrost.

Later on this afternoon when it had defrosted I gave it a kneading and then rolled it out onto the tray where it proofed to its heart’s content.

When it was ready I assembled it and stuck it in the oven to bake.

And I do have to say that today’s effort was the best pizza that I have ever made. Cooked to perfection (unlike my previous effort) and tasted totally delicious.

So now that I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed. I’m up early in the morning and I have a radio programme to prepare. And then there’s a letter to write, and I need to nip into town to post it.

No physiotherapy for 10 days though. She’s on holiday so I can have a few days off. And I need it too.

EPIC HALL

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