Tag Archives: Lord of the Rings

Friday 31st January 2020 – THE NEXT THREE …

night jersey channel islands granville manche normandy france eric hall… images will tell yu a little story.

Basically they are rubbish but it’s not the quality that counts but the circumstances surrounding them. Take this photo for instance – this is not a handful of trawlers out in the English Channel but lights which I think might be the port at St Helier on the mainland of Jersey, 58 kms away.

And that’s pretty phenomenal.

night st malo brittany granville manche normandy france eric hallAnd take this one here.

These over here are the street lights in St Malo, right across the Baie de Mont St Michel from here in Brittany. Not as far away as Jersey and the Channel Islands of course, but by my reckoning that’s about 35 or 40 kilometres away.

And that’s something that’s even more phenomenal too.

night paimpol brittany granville manche normandy france eric hallBut we’ll leave the best until last.

All of those lights down there, that by my reckoning is St Cast le Guildo and Cap Fréhel and all of that is about 60 kms and more away from here.

No sea haze of course to obstruct the view like there is out to sea and that’s why the photo is clearer than the first. But all of that is pretty impressive.

Hand-held in quite a wind that was blowing – too windy for the tripod unfortunately and I’m a bit wary of that since the tripod blew down off a roof on one occasion with a camera still attached.

But all of this goes to show you what a beautiful, clear evening it was.

It was a lovely morning too and I should know, because for once I actually saw it. Feeling like death of course but I still managed to drag myself out of bed before the first alarm, for the first time since I can’t remember when.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes. I’d been out in Eastern England somewhere, a town called Jura near Cambridge or somewhere like that with a huge lake, that was where I was and I remember this huge map hanging on the wall of that part of Eastern England and I used to study it and work out where towns were, all that kind of thing. One day some lady started to talk. She came to Jura and she tried to take my cup of coffee away thinking that i’d finished with it but I insisted on hanging on to it which got off to a bad start but she was going on to her firneds about how her son in law or grandson in law plays football for a Scottish team and how they were drawn against a big team in the Scottish Cup and how they were only part-timers, all this kind of thing. But she was getting everything wrong and I was thinking that i’d have to correct her somehow but of course that’s not the kind of person that you can correct at the top of your voice and anyway you couldn’t get in any words in edgeways with what she was saying

After breakfast I set about splitting up a few more digital recordings. That’s another one of these projects that I have to continue. It’s quite important because I’ll be pulling a load of stuff out of there for the radio projects.

Later on I carried on with the notes for the radio project on which I am working and by the time that I had to go out, I’d just about finished writing them.

The walk up to the Centre Agora was quite pleasant and I arrived bang on time for a coffee before our meeting.

There’s going to be a jobseekers’ meeting here in Granville on 6th March and we are planning to do another live broadcast. 80-odd employers are going to be present and if previous years are anything to go by, there will be over 1,000 jobseekers coming to meet them armed with CVs and the like.

We will be interviewing the jobseekers and the employees and hosting a kind-of round table discussion, to go out live on the air.
However, that day there’s a lot happening and we are rather short-handed so I’ve been roped in as an interviewer.

The purpose of our meeting this afternoon was to meet the person who is organising the event on behalf of the town council and to agree a strategy. Unfortunately it was another one of those meetings where if someone sets aside 2 hours, everyone there will make sure that it lasts two hours too.

As I have said before … “and on many occasins too” – ed … these kinds of meetings should be held standing up, outside, in the pouring rain. Just as much would be decided, and in five minutes or less too.

It reminds me of a story that I heard about the election of a Pope in the Middle Ages. The cardinals were taking forever about it so the local duke ordered his men to remove the roof from the building where they were meeting.

They reached a decision in minutes once it started to rain.

From there I had a slow walk home, retracing my steps to try to find the glove that I had lost – one of my tactile gloves too – only to find that it had fallen out of my pocket in the apartment.

Not very good, am I?

Anyway, for a couple of hours I recorded the notes that I had written and even managed to start to edit them before I stopped for tea.

Earlier on during the day I’d been through the freezer again and I’d found a pack of frozen mushrooms. Now if there is one thing worse than commercially-frozen carrots, it’s commercially-frozen mushrooms. They are awful.

So what I did was to get one of these half-cooked baguettes and slice id and insert garlic butter into the slices. Then clean a couple of potatoes, and finally take out of the fridge the left-over pastry from the other day and the left-over cooking apple, and make an apple turnover.

All of that went into the oven.

Meanwhile, I fried a couple of onions and added some garlic, and when they were thoroughly fried, added the defrosted mushrooms which I had drained (and you have no idea just how much water there is in frozen mushrooms) along with some herbs.

When the mushrooms were thoroughly cooked, the whole lot went into the whizzer and made a thick mushroom soup which I ate with the potatoes and garlic bread that I had made.

Pudding was the apple turnover with sorbet, and delicious it all was too. And there’s enough mushroom soup and another bread thing for tea tomorrow night too.

trawler port de granville harbour manche normandy france eric hallWe’ve seen some of the photos from tonight’s walk, but there are a couple of others that I took too.

The tide is in and this is the cue for the trawlers to start coming home to port. There were already a few of them at the fish-processing plant unloading their cargo and there were several more on the way into the harbour from out at sea.

It’s a really busy place here, even if we don’t have the gravel boats in any more which is a shame.

chantier navale port de granville harbour manche normandy france eric hallAnd that reminded me – I hadn’t looked at the Chantier navale for quite some time, so I went over there.

There isn’t anything very much exciting going on in there right now. Just a couple of small fishing boats, no yacht of any size and no deep-sea trawler-type of vessel.

Still, there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there? We mustn’t abandon hope quite yet.

So here I am and it’s almost 02:00 and I can’t sleep. If you read this, spare a thought for me and my friends. Thanks to 17.4 million xenophobes and racists We are now stateless people with no more rights than your average Somali or Syrian refugee and our continued residence here depends upon the goodwill of various Governments that have no interest whatever in us while across the Channel in The Land That Time Forgot, the Silly Brits are using their foreign residents as bargaining chips.

As the conversation went in Lord of the Rings -“Have you thought of an ending?”
“Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.”

We could be on the verge of the greatest mass forced migration of citizens since the Eastern Germans during the period 1945-1948 if the UK doesn’t come to its senses pretty quickly.

Tuesday 18th September 2018 – AND SO I WENT …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… to bed quite early (and missed all of the excitement too!) and crashed out almost immediately. The record that I was playing Colosseum Live"now THERE’S a surprise" – ed … was still playing when I briefly awoke, so I quickly turned that off and fell back into the Arms of Morpheus.

It didn’t take me long to go off on my travels and a big Hello! to The Vanilla Queen who made her debut. “Vanilla Queen” indeed, living up to her alter ego! The stress is clearly getting to me, that’s for sure.

With having to be up and about so early I was awake at about 04:30. And again at about 05:15. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that and so I Arose from the Dead and started to tidy up and pack.

We’ve now entered Kangerlussuaq, the “Big Fjord” and so I took a few photos. No sunrise today unfortunately and not really all that much else to see. So I toddled off to breakfast where I had a lengthy chat with Dave about Glasgow and GreenocK. Heather came to join us too for a short while.

Afterwards I finished packing my possessions and then I had to wait around for ages to see what was happening.

Before I could check out. We received a USB stick with all of the voyage details thereupon, and I was able to go back upstairs to upload the photos of Strawberry Moose in his kayak.

Eventually we were called down to the zodiacs and were transported to the shore. We passed by Linda, the cruise director, and I’m afraid that I couldn’t resist it. I said to her “I suppose you’ll give me that e-mail address tomorrow”.

I really am wicked! But serve her right.

A fleet of buses was awaiting us – some modern monstrous machines and also a couple of really elderly vehicles, including a Kassböhrer-Setra and, much to my surprise, a DAB-bodied 1984 Leyland bus.

We went past the ruins of Kellyville, an old American radar base and then up the hill to the old American submarine radio base. Long-since dismantled, you could see how tall the antennae must have been by reference to the concrete base and the size of the cable stays. They were massive.

Much to my surprise the diesel generators were still present – a couple of really old straight-eights. I was about to give them a good look-over but before I could do so we were summoned back to the bus.

Back down the hill again and past the cupola for the gun that defended the port installations and the runway for the airstrip at Kangerlussuaq in World War II. In (and out) of the town to look at the Pride and Joy of the urban area – the new bridge that replaced the one that was washed out in an ice-flood in 2012.

We were told of the volume of water that passes through the bridge at the height of the melt-water season and I can’t remember now what our driver said it was but it was certainly impressive. Today we had a floating plaque of ice that was jammed up against the culvert with all of the water passing underneath.

He showed us the site of the old bridge and explained that if we were to dig down in the collapsed morass we would probably be able to recover a digger that was swept away in the confusion.

Up to the top of the mountain on the other side.

There was a beautiful view of Kangerlussuaq from the top, as well as the old radio and radar installations from the Cold War. Some of the equipment is now utilised by the Danes to pick up the data that is transmitted from weather satellites that pass overhead.

And I found some beautiful glacier-polished rock right on top of the mountain. It looked really splendid.

Back down to the airport – the largest in Greenland with the longest runway – another Cold War legacy. Plenty of time to kill before take-off so I went to watch the Air Greenland planes take off. This is the only airport in which the big jets can land so they unload and turn round here and there are endless shuttles of smaller planes that feed the passengers in and out and on and beyond.

I took the opportunity to eat my packed lunch too. Not that it took me all that long. Laszlo and I clearly have different ideas about the size of my appetite.

Still hordes of people congregating around so I spent quite a while chatting to Sherman, Michael, Christopher and Tiffany. They were sharing out the crisps which I thought was quite nice of them.

Eventually we made our way to the departure lounge and I had another stand-off in what laughingly passes as “security”.

“Empty your pockets!” barked a woman with a badge.
“Would you mind saying ‘please’ to me when you address me” I replied.
This led to an extremely warm 5 minutes until she buckled under.

And now our plane is 90 minutes late. isn’t that a surprise? It’s so late that the second plane has in fact arrived first.

I thought that it would be absolutely awful watching the others depart before us, but they sat for half an hour on the tarmac without moving – and then the rood opened, the stairs came out and the pilot descended.

The cynic in me started to work out all kinds of depressing scenarios and in the words of JRR Tolkein “all are dark and unpleasant”.

We were later told a story of what had happened. Apparently some kind of aeroplane had come to some kind of grief on the runway. Our plane couldn’t land and so had flown back to Iqaluit.

But none of this explains why plane 2 had managed to land on the runway, and why another aeroplane from Air Greenland had managed to land. And why they hadn’t grabbed one of the towing dollies that I had seen in action earlier and yanked the plane off the runway.

20-odd years of working in the tourism industry has imbued me with a desperate sense of cynicism that will one day surely be my undoing. However, I am guided by the comment that “a cynic is someone who sees things as they are, not as they are meant to be”.

And seeing the n°2 aeroplane take off before our (earlier) one had landed did nothing to dispel my feelings.

The tour company offered us a meal of sorts. And after much binding in the marsh they managed to rustle up a salad for me. A blind man would have been pleased to see it, I suppose.

But the biggest laugh is yet to come.

After the meal they gave me a bottle of water – unopened and sealed – out or the restaurant so I strode back into the waiting area. And they wouldn’t let me pass with it and we had quite an argument about it.

But behind me were the tour managers with 200 of the identical bottles of water and they passed those into the security area, right enough. And so we had another argument about that too.

In the meantime, the clock in the waiting room had ceased to function. That’s always a handy stand-by when people are feeling the drag of waiting around. They don’t notice the passage of time if the clock isn’t working.

The plane finally arrived at about 20:35 – a good 15 minutes after the “latest update” time and well over 4 hours after its due DEPARTURE time. And in the meantime Sherwin had given us an impromptu concert to pass the time. One suspects that a certain well-filled brown envelope had changed hands at some point. We even had Latonia singing along.

And once the aeroplane had landed, they started up the clock again.

I really must develop a more positive attitude, as I have been saying for quite a while.

Departure time should have been 16:30. We took to the air at 22:15. That was me thoroughly depressed.

What depressed me even more was when I talked to the cabin crew. They told me that there had been a “maintenance issue” and that, together with the associated paperwork, had delayed the take-off

Clearly someone is being … errrr … economical with the truth somewhere.

And I felt really sorry for The Vanilla Queen. She lives in Iqaluit but was having to take the charter flight to Toronto, and then make her way home via Montreal. So where do you think that we stopped for a refuelling break?

Much to my surprise they actually did have a vegan meal on board. And even more surprisingly, it was quite reasonable too, as far as airline meals go.

But that was as good as it got. My good humour that had been slowly disappearing over the last few days – well, the last vestiges have disappeared into the ether now. As Doctor Spooner once famously said, “I feel like a hare with a sore bed”.

I tried to settle down to sleep but no chance of that. I shall have to stay wide-awake with only my good humour to keep me company.

I don’t think.

Thursday 20th October 2016 – NOW THAT WAS A NICE TEA!

Start off with a knob of vegan margarine, and when it’s melted, add a pile of sliced garlic. Fry that nicely and then add a tin of lentils. When that’s all stirred around and cooking nicely, add a couple of teaspoons of curry powder.

When that’s all nicely mixed in, empty a tin of macedonian vegetables into it all, followed by a pile of bulghour and leave to simmer.

While that’s simmering away, put some rice on the go.

When the rice is almost ready, add a Carrefour vegetable stock cube to your lentil, veg and bulghour mix – and there you are. And there’s enough lentil curry for a couple of days.

Downright delicious it was, and followed by a pot of the new Alpro coconut flavoured soya dessert, what else could any man desire? Apart from Kate Bush and Jennifer Agutter of course.

I should have been out wining and dining with Alison but she’s come down with the dreaded lurgy and of course my health is rather fragile. She needs a rest and I don’t need to catch anything at all.

But as for the usual activities, it’s a good job that I went for an early night last night. This morning at blasted 06:45 I was awoken by a couple of residents shouting up the stairs at each other. Some people have absolutely no idea of what it means to “live in Community”.

But I had been on my travels during the night too. I don’t remember too much about it, but I was somewhere in Belgium talking to a group of nouveax arrivants. We were discussing income-generating activities and it turned out that four young boys were involved in making jewellery. They were planning on having an exhibition and so I was giving them advice, like holding in on a Sunday when most Belgians liked to have a day out, and where to go to have leaflets and flyers prepared.

Breakfast was crowded this morning. Hordes of people up there, and that makes a change. It was difficult to sit and read my book. And did you know that they had motor vehicles in Middle Earth? There’s a delightful little paragraph – “Legolas and Gimli were to ride again together in the company of Aragorn and Gandalf, who went in the van with the Dúnedain and the sons of Elrond.”. I wonder which van it was.

After breakfast I had plenty of things to do but for some reason or other I closed my eyes fora few minutes. Next thing that I remembered, it was 11:25. I’d been on my travels too during that … errr … three hours that I was away. Good grief!

I was chatting to a friend of mine on the internet until lunchtime, and then went to purchase my baguette for lunch. And after lunch, the bank in Pionsat would be open, so I needed to telephone them to report yesterday’s little accident. I was pushed around from pillar to post, as you might expect, but eventually I could register the accident and receive a file number. So that was all organised.

I attacked the website after that, and I’ve made some progress with that. Slow, to be sure, but progress all the same. It’ll probably be 100 years before it’s finished.

I had tea after that, and now I’m planning for an early night. After my exertions of this morning though, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be having another difficult night.

Thursday 13th October 2016 – WELL, YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED.

Blood count is down. And protein loss is up. The result of all of that is that I have to go back in just two weeks.

This is a bitter blow to me of course. I need to move on and do things, and I was hoping for six months – or even three months would have done me. But not two weeks.

But I’m not surprised, because I had a horrible night.

I wasn’t in bed all that early, and even so I just couldn’t drop off at all. I gave up trying to sleep at 05:45 and started to read a book – and that had the desired effect, albeit 6 hours too late. It really was a struggle to crawl out of bed at 07:15.

And despite the small amount of sleep, I’m managed to go a-wandering. I was in a car driving down a lane and ended up crossing two railway lines, about 40 yards apart. I’d always believed that they were simply each track of a double-track line built by someone with a sense of humour, but the book that I bought on Sunday in Montreal convinced me that these were just another set of “parallel lines” laid by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian Northern Railway during the Canadian Great Railway Wars.

It’s funny how, even when I was asleep, I was able to think along logical lines like this, because it’s perfectly true. If you think that the Railway Wars between companies in the UK was savage, vicious and extremely wasteful, you haven’t seen anything until you read about what took place between the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Nothern and the Grand Trunk Railroad. The useless infighting and unnecessary duplication of routes cost Canada millions of dollars and bankrupted a couple of the companies for no good purpose.

And so at 07:15 I crawled out of bed, at 07:30 I crawled out of the shower (so much for thinking that it would do me some good) and by 07:45 I was crammed like a sardine along with about 500 other people into an articulated bus, having grabbed a coffee on the way. I was decanted out at St Rafael so that I could go down to Caliburn to drop off the stuff that I had bought yesterday.

Having left all of my vegan cheese behind (that’s bad planning if they had decided to keep me in) I then boarded the wrong bus that led off in a completely different direction. I ended up having rather a long walk.

At the hospital, I had my blood test and a chat with the doctor. 2 hours later, the doctor came to see me. “It’s about yuor blood test …” she began. That sounded ominous, and no mistake. But she carried on to say that the blood testing machine had broken down and I would have to hang around for the results. Clogged up with root beer and maple syrup, I reckon.

Kaatje the Social Services girl came for a chat and I had to fill in a form. And having spent most of the morning reading Lord of the Rings I promptly wrote out “13th Orcober”. Yes, it’s getting to me, isn’t it, all of this?

Anyway, I managed just about to keep awake during the afternoon and about 16:30 they came back with the bad news.

With that ringing around in my ears, I went downstairs for a coffee and to make a phone call. And so here I am – back in the hostel where I stayed during the summer. There was a room available – not at the same good price that I was offered last time unfortunately – and so I took it. It’s cheaper that going back home and coming straight back and far less stressful. Stress – or the elimination of it – is quite important.

I set off for the hostel but within 20 minutes I was back in the Day Centre. Bane of Britain has, once again, gone off with his catheter still plugged in. You couldn’t make this up, could you?

And it’s good to be back on familiar territory with no pain at all. And I can have my old room back on Monday too. In the meantime, this one will do. I settled down for a while and then a bit later nipped down the road for a falafel butty for tea. I’ll rescue all of my supplies from Caliburn tomorrow.

Having organised that, I’m off to bed. Nice and early. Remember that I had a bad night last night.

Monday 14th July 2014 – HAPPY BASTILLE DAY

And it started as it meant to go on with my being wide awake at 08:00. And on a Bank Holiday too. And even worse, I didn’t go to bed until 02:30 and so I was expecting to have a long relaxing sleep today. No idea why I awoke so early.

What was evn worse was that I was on my travels again during the night, working at a home for Eastern European boys, and I do remember a boy from Romania coming to the home, and he had a centipede embedded just underneath the skin of his stomach. From there, I went off with Caliburn. We were on the A556 – the major road that runs between Chester and Manchester and connects the M6 and the M63. Coming from the Chester end, I came to the big roundabout on the M6 and so initially I started to descend the slip road for the southbound carriageway, suddenly realised that I really wanted to go northbound but there was a police barrage across the slip road and so my doing a U-turn would attract suspicion. Nevertheless I turned round and slipped around the roundabout to the northbound entrance, and there was another police barrage there. I was, of course, flagged down and the policeman stopped me spoke to me in a mysterious Eastern European language which I understood but couldn’t reply to.

And it hadn’t escaped my notice that I’d gone widdershins around the roundabout, not clockwise as I would do in the UK where, of course, they drive on the left-hand side of the road.

After breakfast I watched part Two of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and this was much more like it. Even with the same director as Part 1, this film spent much more time exploring the dark side of the whole affair and the tension slowly built up consistently all the way to a climax. In my opinion, it was certainly the best film of the series.

Having said that, the film is full of non-sequitors and inconsistencies and a mature audience will notice the considerable holes in the story, as well as the dozens and dozens of situations and scenarios that anyone who has seen The Lord of the Rings Trilogy will immediately recognise.

And I still say that Ginny is totally the wrong partner for Harry Potter. He would have been much-better suited to Luna and I remain totally convinced of that.

So as the sun came out today, I opened the windows here for the first time for three weeks, and that was the hardest work that I did today.

Tomorrow, I’m back at work.

Sunday 18th September 2011 – SUNDAY IS A DAY OF REST …

… and after my late night last night, I deserved a lie-in. And when I was finally awake I went off to have a nice shower too. But something that I saw made me burst out laughing and I wish that I had a camera with me. Someone came to fill up their 50-litre water container – one of these round ones that looks as if it might be on wheels – and then towed it away with their car. It’s rather sad really.

old volkswagen scrapyard keswick fredericton new brunswick canadaThey say that old Fords never die – they just rust away. But here is the proof that old Volkswagens never die either. They just merge into the landscape.

There’s a good few parked up here, and it did make me wonder what the owner is intending to do with them. There’s a few there that haven’t moved for a considerable period of time.

chevrolet chevelle ss L82 new brunswick canadaI said previously that it’s a rather sad affair when I’m taking photos of vehicles like this and calling them “historic”.

This is a Chevrolet Chevelle SS L82 and it’s a single headlight model that dates it from the very early 1970s I think, although like Eomer in The Lord of the Rings, I would gladly learn better. I do know that the SS refers to SuperSport and that the insurance on one of these would have been unaffordable to most people.

peugeot boxer caravanette german registration fredericton new brunswick canadaThis is however much more interesting.

Not so much that it’s a Peugeot Boxer caravanette, and I bet that you’ve never seen one of these in North America before, it’s actually on German numberplates. I managed to track down the owners to have a chat with them, and it transpires that they came over with Seabridge and Atlantic Containers, the same companies as those whom I met the other week.

So it clearly works and I shall have to look into it. And it’s amazing how quickly my German of 30 years ago comes back when I have no alternative but to speak it. I was impressed with what I could remember.

rick fines harvest jazz and blues festival fredericton new brunswick canadaThere was still plenty of music to be found here and there around the city. Rick Fines and his lady bassist were playing at Officers Square to quite a healthy crowd sitting here in the sun.

I had quite a chat with the bassist afterwards and, to my shame, I forgot to ask her name. That’s rather embarrassing. But she did tell me that she’s been playing guitar since she was 9 and bass since she was 13.

Today is also the day of the Terry Fox run – he was someone diagnosed with cancer who set out to run across Canada to raise funds but died before he could make it.

Now, on the third Sunday in September, loads of people take to the streets to complete a little section of his run.

blue train terry fox run fredericton new brunswick canadaThe run through Fredericton follows the public footpath that was formerly the railway line through the city. and here they had a band to help them along.

They were called Blue Train and while the music didn’t appeal to me all that much, they are local and the vocalist certainly could sing. He had loads of stage presence too so it was quite an enjoyable little concert.

>Now here’s the answer to a question that I have often asked.

tesco truck bodies fredericton new brunswick canadaWhen I worked with that weird American company a couple of years ago I was talking to a couple of people who worked for the giant UK Supermarket company Tesco, and I asked them why they had never set out to conquer North America. And when they did invade North America, they used a totally different name to Tesco, a strange decision when their brand has so much recognition in the UK

So here’s the answer. Someone else owns the trade name in North America. A manufacturer of lorry bodies.

rotten GMC Tracker fredericton new brunswick canadaWe’ve seen a few of these before, and here’s yet another.

Not the GMC Tracker, but the state of the outer sills just in front of the rear wheel. I can remember welding up dozens of cars that were rotten like this back in the 80s but the last welding that I have ever done on a car was to weld up an exhaust pipe on my old Passat in 1997. I haven’t welded up a car body for over 20 years.

And if you notice, the rot here is on the offside, not the nearside. That’s rather unusual as the salty water is usually in the gutter alongside the kerb. One thing though – I can see that there are plenty of openings for me over here. I won’t be short of work.

I went off for a little drive later on and found a Canadian Tire place, where I couldn’t persuade them to sell me their display model AIR403 wind turbine. And here, parked outside, totally unattended and with the engine running, was a big black Jeep.

Could you ever imagine a situation like that in the UK?

Saturday 16th July 2011 – HAVING SPENT THE NIGHT …

… parked up on the Motorway Service Area at Drogenbos, a good (for once) sleep led to a major shopping expedition and I have finally found a new whistling kettle – I’ve been hunting one for ages.

And then after lunch it was round to the apartment.

You might recall that back in the winter we tried everything that we could to undo the lock on the cellar to empty it. And nothing we tried would make it work. This time, I took a couple of enormous extensions and a drill and angle grinder. And of course, trying to unlock the door just one more time “for old time’s sake”, it came undone with no issues whatever!

Just like Sam Gamgee’s rope in Lord of the Rings in fact.

And so that was emptied and the racking dismantled in no time flat and all loaded up into Caliburn. I don’t know how people can function without vans, I really don’t.

And so with plenty of time to spare, another shopping trip, this time to IKEA where I discovered a few exciting items in the sale.

Having called at the Simonis Fritkot for my assiette falafel, I headed off to my motorway service area for a kip. But in fact I spent quite a while fixing a car for a British guy returning from holiday with his family and whose electrical charging circuit had broken down.

No peace for the wicked, is there?