… since we’ve featured a parking issue on these pages?

At one time there was one almost every other day but there hasn’t been one for quite some time so I reckon that it’s about time that I put that right.

Another thing that gets my goat, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the issue of caravanettes. Apart from reversing into road signs and knocking them over and clearing off without saying anything, they think that the rest of the rules and regulations of the road don’t apply to them either.

So here we’re killing two birds with one stone. “No Parking for Caravanettes” is clearly written on this sign but the driver clearly believes that it doesn’t apply to him.

And there are two reasons why they are banned from parking in the street, apart from the obvious sanitary ones.

1. This is a historical medieval area with all kinds of apartments crammed into the old stone buildings. I’m lucky in that my building has private parking. Almost all of the others don’t and the streets are so narrow that it’s almost impossible to park within the walls. The locals who live here need all of the parking that they can get
2. It’s a bus route with the big 12-metre coaches that service the College here coming round that corner and it’s really tight. They need all of the space that they can get and wide vehicles like this overhanging the parking spaces especially right on the corner is giving the drivers an added complication.

But none of the foregoing seems to bother our visitor here as long as he has somewhere to come and spread his virus around.

The local council provides a parking space (a mere 200 metres down the road) for caravanettes and there are plenty of other places, like acres of abandoned docks, for example, where they can park as they please without inconveniencing anyone.

Signed “Grouchy of Granville”.

As for me, I didn’t go to the shops as I said that I would yesterday. But I’ll explain all about that in due course. Firstly, it will be an enormous surprise to regular readers of this rubbish (as indeed it was to me!) who will recall the issues that I’ve been having just recently, to learn that by the time that the third alarm went off I was actually up and about.

During the night I’d been up and about too. I was taking two girls to a night club in Manchester. The night club was in the North and I knew where it was vaguely situated but I didn’t realise that I was coming from Brussels. So I picked up these two girls and put them in the car, a Morris Minor I think, and set out and drove. We got to join the inner ring road in Brussels and they wanted to know why I was going that way. “doesn’t this road end in a field or something?”. I said “no” but then I thought that maybe the way they wanted me to go was the right way so I said “OK we can go that way”. But then I saw a sign for Bolton saying straight on. I thought that Bolton was near Manchester so we could go that way. But then I started racking my brains about how to get across to Manchester, to the north side to this Night Club. I really couldn’t think how to do it. At one point I was trying to drive on the wrong side of the road, I don’t know why and cars were coming that way towards me. But it would have been the right side of the road in the UK but the wrong side of the road whee I was apparently.

After breakfast I sat down and looked at a couple of the website pages that I’d planned to be dealing with. And this is how I spent my day – absorbed in this – and by the time that I’d finished I’d totally rewritten several pages and modified several others too in order to conform to the new specifications. It had been a really good day, just for a change.

There was even time to edit a pile of photos from July 2019 too – catching up somewhat with those.

During the day there had been a whole pile of interruptions too.

Firstly there was a shower and a general clean-up. Not just of me either but of the apartment. That needed to be spick and span, because I was having visitors.

Sure enough, the travelling nurse came round and took a blood sample. We had a really good chat too and he was surprised about the relaxation of the health regulations here too, and is of the opinion that the rates will be going up again as people are misled into thinking that this is all over and drop their guard.

In the meantime I’d had a look around the apartment to see what I needed from the shops and apart from bananas, there was nothing that I really needed. And as for the lack of bananas, I have a few oranges that needed eating so it wasn’t as if I was desperate. Instead I made an Executive Decision (that is, a decision that if it goes wrong, the person who made it is executed) to push on with my work.

My lunchtime bread was really nice. There’s room for improvement of course but it was much better than previous attempts and I shall have to work harder at it. But I’m on the right track, I reckon.

There was the afternoon walk of course, out there in the sun and the wind (because the wind is now back again).

We had the people back out on the beach again now that yesterday’s sea fog has lifted. Not as many as I was expecting to see, with everyone going out to faire le pont between the Bank Holiday and the weekend.

This kind of social distancing is pretty much acceptable of course. But having seen the crowds on the beaches in the UK and the USA, then they are going to have some really serious problems in a week or two’s time.

Regular readers of this rubbish might recall whether or not I’ve mentioned this object before but I can’t remember – although it’s extremely likely.

And you can see exactly how it works in this photo because the tide is quite right. It’s a medieval fish trap and the idea is that at high tide the water overflows the stone walls and as the tide recedes, the water drains out through the joints leaving the fish stuck behind.

The medieval citizens just walk out and pick up the trapped fish, and there’s your lunch. Not mine, of course.

While all of this was going on, I was disturbed once more by a rather dark shadow passing over me, rather like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings that so frightened the Nine Walkers.

No prizes though for guessing what it is. With this nice sunny afternoon and te high winds that we are having, the Birdmen of Alcatraz are out in force.

This one here was being buzzed by a seagull. They don’t take lightly to intruders and, if the rumours are true, they made pretty short work of the surveillance drones used by the police to patrol the beaches during the detention à domicile

A girl and I (keeping our social distance of course) spent a while looking at them waiting for the collision that we felt was going to be inevitable. Not much of a social distance between them even in the air.

It’s amusing (to people like me, anyway) that they take off over there from a field right next door to the local cemetery. If the take-off goes all wrong (which it has done in the past) they don’t have to carry the failures too far.

But then, that’s why they build walls around cemeteries of course. Because people are dying to go in there.

I’ll get my coat.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that yesterday we saw a pile of abandoned personal possessions on the wall of the ramp leading down to the Square Maurice Marland.

Even more surprisingly, they are still there today. Not exactly where they had been left, but someone had come along and filed them under “CS”.

Just imagine that in the UK. They wouldn’t have remained around for 30 seconds had someone put them down somewhere. It just goes to show how different people have different moral values in different parts of the world.

By the time that I’d knocked off I’d been hard at it and had a really good day for once. My hour on the guitars was profitable and I enjoyed it so much more because I’ve adopted a new tactic as far as the bass guitar goes and I’m going to work hard at this.

Tea was an “anything curry” made of leftovers and a small tin of lentils, with the last of the rice, the making of which resulted in me throwing the turmeric all over the floor. The apple crumble for dessert wad delicious and I’ll make some more of that.

Time for my evening run, I reckon, so off I set.

The usual struggle up the hill (I just can’t seem to push on any more than I’m doing even after all of the practice that I’ve been having). Eventually I arrived at the cliff top just in time to see this yacht go sailing past me towing a little dinghy behind it.

It was well on its way out of the harbour and I had no idea where it might be going. But it made me quite envious to watch it sail out – to such an extent that I put a couple of plans into operation when I returned home.

That wasn’t all of the maritime activity either.

There’s no point whatever in gratuitously posting pictures of trawlers but this one was quite interesting. As I rounded the corner at the tip of the Pointe du Roc this speedboat flashed by me with a driver who clearly had his pedal to the metal.

You can see how lively the sea was with all of the wind that blowing about, and it looked quite impressive as he carved his way through the waves with all of that sea spray splashing around.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is different phenomena of strange effects and patterns in the sea.

As I did my run along the clifftop on the south side of the Pointe du Roc I noticed another one so when I stopped for my pause for breath I stopped to take a photo of it.

Whatever it is and whatever is causing it I really couldn’t say. It looks like foam or something similar but whether it’s from someone who has been emptying their washing machine into a grid or whather it’s a natural phenomenon I really couldn’t say.

But the evenness of the distribution was fascinating. Despite the rough sea right now it was in a perfectly straight line with a right-angled bend further out.

While I was stopped getting my breath and photographing the sea phenomena, I had a good look down at the chantier navale .

There has been more movement of the occupants down there over the last 24 hours. We are now down to just two boats. The big black and green one that was up on blocks right at the bottom seems to have gone back out to sea.

So on that note I cleared off and ran all the way down the Boulevard vaufleury and my breathing point around the corner at the second pedestrian crossing.

While I was on my way down the boulevard I noticed something in the inner harbour that made me go back to look.

Sure enough, the black and green trawler that was up on blocks in the chantier navale for weeks is now moored underneath the crane in the inner harbour. I’ve no idea why but if Normandy Trader comes into harbour we’ll have a problem.

It goes without saying that when I went out earlier today, Thora was long-gone back to the Channel Islands.

There was nothing doing at the viewpoint in the rue du Nord. The clouds had come down and the sun was well-hidden, so I ran back home.

As I started to type up my notes, Rosemary rang and we ended up chatting until long after 00:30. I have an early start in the morning so I didn’t bother finishing them off. I went straight to bed and I’ll catch up tomorrow.