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Monday 4th November 2019 – I’M BACK …

… in business!

This morning I took my completed project up to the weekly meeting of this organisation. I mentioned that I didn’t think all that much of what I had done but they were delighted, saying that it’s better than they expected.

And so I have the green light to go.

But go where? I hear you say. And I reply that you’ll find out on Friday evening at about 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 EST etc etc.

Last night was a pretty late night and I’m not quite sure why because it wasn’t if I had anything special to do. Nevertheless, I still staggered out of bed before the third alarm, for which I am grateful.

Even so, there was plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble. Back on board a ship again last night with two certain people who might (or might not) have been representing Castor and Pollux. We were having some kind of drawing thing, we had to draw something and label it. I was drawing something about the cliffs and the sea, that kind of thing and I was wondering about other people – like these two for example, I was wondering about what what they were doing because theirs didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to what was being asked at all. They had some strange figures that looked like girls and I wondered why they had included those in the drawing when there was no real need to. And it was all in blue too in this dream and I’ve no idea why, everything was in the colour blue (like some of my photos on that trip).

After the medication and breakfast I had a shower and cleaned myself up somewhat, then added yesterday’s photos to the blog and transcribed some dictaphone notes before heading off for my meeting.

On the way back, I called at LIDL and spent a lot of money. Mostly on a thermal ski undershirt seeing as the ski gear is now in the shops. If ever I get back to the Arctic (which is unlikely) it will come in handy.

They had carrots at a give-away price of e0:69 per kilo so I bought a kilo and I’m going to make some more carrot soup. But with less ginger this time.

And I learnt something exciting today too.

Last year in September I was in a town in North Greenland called Uummannaaq and I met a couple of people there. Subsequently I met two others when I was on my travels.

And to my surprise, a couple of them will actually be in Granville in a couple of weeks’ time, playing some music on stage at the local theatre. There were a few tickets left too, so I roped in Liz and Terry and bought some tickets.

It’s been a while since I went out for an evening.

After lunch, I finished off today’s load of dictaphone entries and then went off for a walk.

First thing that I noticed was some weird lighting effect on the sea over to the Ile de Chausey.

It’s difficult to know what’s going on with that. It could be just the way that the low autuln sunlight is shining through a few holes in the clouds.

But it gave the whole thing a really surreal vista, as if we are about to be visited by something from Outer Space.

That is, if we haven’t already had visitors therefrom. I’ve no idea where they find THESE people.

At first I thought “you cannot be Sirius”, but on reflection I’m not ruling this out completely. After all, I’ve always said that anyone supporting Brexit must be living on a different planet to the one on which the rest of us are living.

And while I was musing on the foregoing, I really DID think that I was about to be visited by beings from Outer Space

But the noise that I heard coming from the air behind me was in fact from a helicopter. Someone has got their chopper out by the looks of things and they were flying pretty low round the headland.

Whatever they might have been looking for, they didn’t find it. Instead, they flew off down the coast in the direction of Mont St Michel

Beaten and battered by Storm Amelie, I staggered on around the headland and, for a change just recently, there was a really good view across to the Pointe de Carolles.

Such a nice view in fact that I went to photograph it and was the victim of a delightful photo-bomb from a seagull.

It’s not the first time that I’ve had an intruder in one of my photos, but it’s certainly one of the best and closest encounters that I’ve had. I hope that he doesn’t want royalties.

As I said just now, the storm is raging just as violently as it has done these last few days.

The tide is a long way from being right in, but nevertheless you can see what the waves are doing – sending their spray right up and over the sea wall into the tidal harbour.

It’s surely no coincidence that there are no pedestrians out there strolling around on the wall. The wouldn’t need a shower at all.

On that note I went back to the apartment and much to my surprise I actually ran up one of the flights of steps. And I haven’t done that for years. I must be doing a little better than I have been, and I wonder if this new medication might have anything to do with it.

The time until tea was spent working on this project and trying to organise myself (a hopeless task). I have to focus myself much more now that people are expecting things from me and relying on me to do things. They clearly don’t know me very well yet.

Tea was a stuffed pepper (with plenty of stuffing left for taco rolls) and spice rice followed by rice pudding. The pepper was sourced from a different supplier today and was thicker-skinned, so it hadn’t cooked as well as they usually do, which was a shame. But the stuffing was delicious.

This evening I was on my own for my walk around the walls. Hardly surprising seeing as the rain, which had held off for most of the day, decided to let go about 30 seconds after I put my foot outside.

Brigitte was just coming in so we had a little chat.

And as for my run, I fell well short tonight. Like 100 metres short. I blame all the rice myself, but trying to run headlong into a howling gale didn’t help matters much.

Now before going to bed I’m going to listen to some music and do some web page updating before I’m going to bed. I haven’t done any today yet and I really must crack on.

storm high winds tempete amelie port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Wednesday 30th October 2019 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

… where I didn’t manage to fit in my morning walk. And you wouldn’t have gone either if you had had the rainstorm that we were having.

And for a change, I actually did manage to see the morning. Because while I didn’t actually manage to beat the third alarm, it was pretty close.

So with an early rising and an early breakfast, we had an early start to work. And by the time that I knocked off for lunch I had amended 38 pages of my website to bring it up to date with the newt coding.

That’s some going, I’ll tell you.

After lunch, I took the opportunity to book my accommodation and travel for Leuven. And to my surprise, there has been a change of horaire for the departure. Instead of 09:05 it’s now at 08:24.

And what with one thing and another, because of that I can arrive in Brussels half an hour earlier on a train via Lille.

So something good has come out of it.

But the journey back is going to be a little … errr … tight. I shall have to run.

Accommodation in the usual place at the back of the nick. I must practise.

The afternoon walk in the wet around the headland and much to my surprise there were a few others out there too. Nothing much going on, although there’s a new boat in the harbour. I shall have to go down to the port tomorrow to see who she is.

And I have to go to the bank tomorrow too and pay some money. I’m spending my dosh again and I’ll tell you what on in due course. But the new me is treating himself to a few important things, including something that he has been promising himself for years.

Later on, I hit the dictaphone notes and did no fewer than 11. “Impressive stuff” you might say, but that’s being rather disingenuous. Some of them were only quite small, and there’s one of 20 minutes in the pipeline for tomorrow and it looks as if most of it is actual talking too.

So that’s my work cut out for the afternoon. I’m glad that I’ve been getting ahead.

Tea was some of the remaining pepper stuffing, mixed with kidney beans and rolled into some tacos. With rice and vegetables, it was delicious.

There’s more for tomorrow too but I think that I’ll go for something different like a burger on a bap and have more tacos on Friday.

Still raining tonight but I went for a walk – and a run too seeing as there was no-one about. I’m going to try to keep this up. I may not be able to run the miles as I used to, but I ought to be doing more than I am and not throw in the towel.

And I won’t now either. It’s early so I’m going to carry on working on the web pages.

And a big “hello” to both Castor and Pollux who were there or thereabouts at some point during the night.

Tuesday 29th October 2019 – CALIBURN WOULDN’T …

… start this morning as I discovered when I went to give him a whirl while I was taking the rubbish outside.

The other day when I started him and ran him for a while I mustn’t have done it for long enough to recharge the battery properly because it was pretty low this morning.

Having hunted down a 10mm socket I managed to disconnect the battery and drag it up to the apartment. According to the multimeter, there’s just 11.9 Volts in the battery. Luckily a while back I bought a new small battery charger so I was able to couple it up and even as we speak, it’s simmering away nicely at 13.4 volts with 2 of the 5 bars illuminated.

By tomorrow morning it might be ready.

Mind you, it’s not a surprise. He’s well over 12 years old and he’s had just two batteries in that time. When the second one failed earlier this year, Terry gave me the one off his old van but it had stood around for a couple of years so I wasn’t expecting too much.

So I’ll have to see if this battery holds its charge when it’s done. If not, a new battery might be on the cards.

And Caliburn wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to start today either. I certainly didn’t. In fact it was about 08:45 when my sooty foot I put on the floor.

Mind you, I have a good excuse. And that was that I was still up and about working until long after 03:00.

Anyone would have thought that after my marathon hike across half of Normandy yesterday I would have been stark out flat on my back from round about teatime until the next Preston Guild. But not a bit of it. I kept on going – and working too, right until the small hours, even taking some time out to have a play on the guitar.

Mind you, I felt like death this morning and that’s really no surprise. It took me a good while to find my bearings and that’s not a five-minute job either.

Plenty of time though during the night to go for a wander around and I found myself back on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. And in the company of Pollux too, so welcome back to you. And when I finish scratching my head trying to decipher the incoherent ramblings on my dictaphone, I will tell you all about where I went and what I did.

When I awoke I found that I had run out of muesli so I had to make some more. And in my deadened state I managed to spill half of the contents of the cornflakes packet all across the floor.

After breakfast I reviewed the e-mails and found one relating to the meeting that I had yesterday. That involved doing some work.

Such as dictating a text in French (i had about 9 takes before there was one that satisfied me) and then editing it. And then adding a pile of music and editing that.

And while the music part was no problem, the dictation was – for the rather prosaic reason that I don’t have a microphone here. I had to dictate it onto the dictaphone, upload it and then edit it to remove the crackles.

It’s a good job that I spent all of that time a few years ago mastering “Audacity”.

So that was the morning taken care of – and there will be a few more days like this now until next Monday. And we’ll see where we go from there.

After a rather late lunch I went for a walk in the rain around the headland. There were a few people – only the foolhardy – out there desperately trying to negotiate the lakes that had appeared along the footpaths. I didn’t stay out long.

The historic dictaphone entries that needed deciphering today were all rather on the short side so I did 8 today. I’m trying to get ahead because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there are some marathon ones to come from the time that I was in an emotional whirlpool.

There was also time for me to do some file updating too. But talking of my website … “well, one of us is” – ed … it has been trawled for the last few days by a Microsoft bot with an IP address in Washington State, “Microsoft Way” to be precise, but with a physical presence in Chicago.

I solved the mystery of the New Jersey visitor but this one from Chicago is bizarre.

Tea tonight was an aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit. Aubergines were cheap the other day so I bought one with the intention of making a whatsit this week. And it’s delicious too, except that I might have been somewhat extravagant with the chili powder I’ll need to put the toilet paper in the fridge before I go to bed.

No walk though. It’s teeming down outside and after a few hundred yards I gave up and came back inside.

I’ll just have to go for a longer walk tomorrow.

Friday 25th October 2019 – I’M ALL …

… alone here tonight. And I will be for the next couple of weeks too.

Strawberry Moose has gone off on his travels again to see some more of his fans.

No-one is quite sure when he’ll be back again but I bet that he will have a few stories to tell me when he returns. It’s all right for some, isn’t it though? Some of us have to stay behind and work for a living.

Not that you would notice, though, around here. Despite the three alarms going off this morning, it was still 07:40 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

But then I’d had another late night (albeit not as late as the other night) scratching my head over this blasted Javascript menu. I told you last night when I wrote my blog that I was a just a couple of inches away from a breakthrough. And so by the time that I went to bed I must have advanced about half a millimetre.

It wasn’t all work though. TOTGA was on-line so we had a good chat for an hour or so too. It’s been ages since we had a really good chin-wag and it was nice to hear her dulcet tones again.

The purpose of my chat was to try to persuade her to come and join in the fun in Leuven. But without success. “A Prior engagement” she said. Not like Kenneth Williams who once turned down an invitation on the grounds of “a subsequent engagement”, so I suppose that I ought to be thankful for that at least.

So this morning after the medication and breakfast, I had a stinking hot shower and then dashed round to tidy everywhere up. I was expecting visitors and the place was something of a tip with my having unpacked a l’improviste.

By the time that Liz and Terry turned up, the place was looking something like, and they could at least sit down.

We had a coffee and a good chat about this and that – not about the other because that is of course sub judice right now – and I told them of my (mis)adventures on my voyage just now.

I’d mentioned it to TOTGA last night and she told me that she had never heard me talk like I did at that moment (which is not really true because she remembers me when I was someone else, although she was only a kid at the time) so I made an effort to restrain myself (something that doesn’t come easily to me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) when talking to Liz.

Nevertheless Liz was rather aghast. Not that this means that she was surprised. She used to be a primary school teacher in a deprived area of the UK so she’s seen human nature at its worst, but I suppose that with the voyage being as expensive as it was, we both expected a better class of person with a better standard of behaviour.

So they wandered off and I sat down to crack on with my Javascript menu. I forgot about my additional walk.

By 16:00 I had made a breakthrough – of sorts. I can now make Javascript tags pick up web pages on my own site but not on an external site. Still, it’s progress of a sort and it means that I can go onwards.

To celebrate, I made lunch. Yes – at 16:00 because I had forgotten earlier, being engrossed. And it was something of a disappointment because the bread that I had left in the ice compartment of the fridge and which I had taken out to defrost – well, it wasn’t very good at all and it all ended up in the bin.

But it’s Saturday tomorrow and I’m going for a walk to LIDL where I can buy some more.

Not wishing to forget another walk, I nipped out straight afterwards for a lap around the headland and then back to carry on with my menu.

And, as is quite often the case, the simplest solutions are usually the correct one. I was struggling away for quite a while trying to work out how to display a vertical line. ASCII codes, ALT codes and all of that didn’t work, so in a moment of despair, I tried
document.write( ‘|’);
and much to my surprise, it actually worked. And I’d wasted an hour or so on it too.

Another thing that I tried to do was to figure out how to make a space in Javascript. Once again, after much binding in the marsh, I tried the simple
document.write( ‘ ‘);
and that worked too.

After that, passing onto a new line was easy. Yes. I tried
document.write(‘br /’);
and that just printed out the br /. So I tried
putting the br / bit in the “greater than” and “less that” brackets, and that worked just fine.

There’s probably a far easier method to do it all, but at least I know that what I’ve programmed seems to work well enough for now. And having it all saved in an external file, I only need to update it once for it to update on every page on my site.

Just two tasks to work out now.

The simplest one is how to access an external page via a Javascript link. I’m hoping that that won’t be too difficult, but knowing me, it probably will.

More difficult will be the task of nesting Javascript files. I want to make a sidebar file with the menu, the hit counter, the stats analyser and the Amazon blocks in it. Then I can just import the main Javascript file into every page on my site with all of the subsidiary blocks in it, and an amendment to the main Javascript file will make the amendment on every page.

Iframes or *.php would ordinarily be the answer, but Secured sites won’t display iframes and I know nothing about *.php, and at my age I’m too old to learn this kind of thing.

Talking of being too old, I went for my evening walk around the city walls and at one stage broke into a run. I kept it up for a couple of hundred metres too.

That surprised me immensely, because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that after my operation in January 2016 when they ripped out half of my insides, I couldn’t even walk and had to have re-education.

It really impressed me, that little bit of running did. Maybe it’s something to do with losing all of this weight. I dunno.

This evening I carried on with the Javascript menu, listening to a couple of really belting albums. Elegy by the Nice was the first one. No relation to Grey’s “Allergy to a Country Churchyard”, it’s one of the all-time classic albums that will always be on my playlist.

The second is much more exciting. One of the ones that I picked up in Ottawa.

After Arthur Brown disappeared from “The Crazy World of …”, Vincent Crane and Carl Palmer recruited a couple of new musicians and carried on as “Atomic Rooster”. Palmer left to join ELP, but Crane struggled on for quite a while, with a revolving door of new members and mental health breakdowns until he committed suicide in 1989.

In 1980, during one of their more active periods, they played at the Marquee Club in London. No bassist – and no vocalist either, so the guitarist John Du Cann sang on the vocal tracks. And while he will be the first to admit that he’s no vocalist, he gave it a really good go and the energy and enthusiasm that roared off the stage on Live at The Marquee 1980 is absolutely phenomenal.

But now it’s bed-time. And I have a lot to do tomorrow. All on foot too!

And I almost forgot to say “hello” to Pollux who put in an appearance during the night. First time for a while too.

Friday 18th October 2019 – I REALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND …

… this illness at all. I really don’t!

It has been no less than 16 weeks since my last medical check and treatment. In other words, I have missed four of the urgent treatments that I must have every four weeks to stay alive.

And so, dear reader, you would have expected me to crash in through the hospital doors like the Wreck of the Hesperus on “the reef of Norman’s Woe”.

Consequently you will be somewhat surprised, if not alarmed, to learn that my blood count this time after all of this absence has actually RISEN from 8.4 to 8.9

So just WHAT it going on?

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I expressed surprise at the dramatic collapse in blood count between the examinations in May and June, and also to the fact that when I had my blood count examined at the laboratory at Granville it gave a totally different reading to the one at the hospital.

And so, dear reader, we face three possibilities here –
1) I’m cured (presumably praying to Mecca the other day had the desired result).
2) The high emotion and turmoil through which I went and which I noted towards the end of my trip on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour at the back end of August produced enough natural adrenaline to stimulate the red blood cells all on its own without artificial aids
3) The laboratory at the hospital is hopelessly inaccurate.

Either way, it seems that a sea voyage to the High Arctic in the company of a large group of miserable, depressing people intent on spoiling everyone else’s fun and to whom I could vent my spleen (which I can’t because I no longer have one) at the top of my voice in real anger and actually mean what I say sounds like a good plan to me.

Furthermore I seem to have lost 8 kgs in weight over the four months, and I mused that if I keep that up at the current rate, then by Christmas 2022 I will have gone completely.

But the biggest surprise is yet to come.

Clearly I’m better than I ought to be at this particular point so firstly, they changed my medication. And if my Orcadian medical adviser is reading these note he can tell me all about a medication called Privigen, because that’s what I’m taking.

Secondly, they asked me loads of questions about the voyage and the state of my health while I was away, questions that I have never been asked before.

Thirdly, they brought a specialist in to see me “for a chat”

Fourthly, Kaatje, my Social Worker who is really a psychiatrist assigned to me as part of the terminal illness programme under which I’m registered, came to see me for a chat and she was asking me a pile of probing questions too, about life on board ship and the voyage in general. I told her about the nightmare that I had when I was on board ship and about the emotional roller-coaster that marked my life over that five-week period from towards the end of August to the beginning of October (after all she has to earn her money) when I was in a pit of deep depression and anger after the first nightmare and the even more wild one a week or two later, and she was busy making notes. But she left without getting to whatever point she might have wanted to see me about, had there been a point to her visit, and that set a couple of bells going off in my head.

Fifthly, I was summoned for an x-ray and an echograph of my torso, and that alarmed me too. And I’m no doctor or x-ray tech, but I do know enough about echograph images to know that I didn’t like what I saw on the screen, and I had noticed that he had taken his time and made several passes over a certain part of my torso just underneath the ribcage.

Sixthly, when I went to the reception area to enquire about my next appointment, which they always hand out regularly, they replied “we’ll send a letter to you”.

So I smell something fishy – and I’m not talking about the contents of Baldrick’s Apple Crumble either.

Another surprising thing, not relating to the hospital, or maybe it is, is that contrary to all expectations, I had an absolutely dreadful night. After two more-or-less sleepless nights and a long day yesterday, I was expecting to sleep for a week but in fact it took me ages to go off to sleep and once I did, I was wide-awake by 03:00.

No chance of going back to sleep either – I was up and working on the computer by 04:30.

At 06:00 when the alarms went off I had a shower and washed the clothes that were outstanding, and then set off for the railway station. The Carrefour was open so I grabbed some raisin buns and launched myself aboard the train for Welkenraedt that had just pulled into the station.

At Leuven I heaved myself out of the train and headed off across the city to the hospital. On the way, there were thousands of scouts and girl guides all over the place and they seemed to be having a disco in the town square outside the Town Hall.

At 08:30 in the morning?

There’s a new check-in procedure at Castle Anthrax. Apparently you have to swipe the screen with your identity card. That;s fine, except that being a foreigner I don’t have an identity card. I have to muscle my way into the queue somehow so all of this is going to end in tears sooner or later.

Eventually I was registered and sent to a chair downstairs for my treatment. A few little dozes throughout the day, but nothing violent.

When it was all done (and this new medication is quicker than the previous one) I could leave and pick up my medication for home. And this world is getting far too small for my liking, as I have said on occasions too numerous to mention. The pharmacist looked at me and asked “you’re the guy who went to the North on that ship, aren’t you?”
“Blimmin’ ‘eck”, as the much-maligned Percy Penguin would have said.

There was plenty of time for me to go for a wander, and then I met up with Alison. We went for a coffee, a vegan burger at the Green Way and then another coffee at Kloosters.

She told me about all of her health problems and I told her all about my voyage on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, all about the miserable bunch of passengers with whom I’d been stranded, all about the petty jealousies and squabbles, the spitefulness and selfishness, the mad stampede at the induction meeting where the first in the queue wiped out the buffet for the latecomers and left an indelible stain on my memory before the voyage even started, and the turbulent events that took place on the final couple of days of that miserable voyage.

Strange as it is to say it, I did actually enjoy the trip regardless because we got to some of the places (not to all of them by any means!) that I had always wanted to see, even if the others wanted to see them for different reasons.

The mean-spiritedness of the other passengers didn’t bother me either. I worked in the tourism industry for years and I’ve seen it all before and I had some kind of vicarious pleasure watching to see just the depths into which the behaviour of some of the passengers could descend. Even when some of the vitriol was directed at me, and even more so at Strawberry Moose I found it quite amusing to see the lack of self-restraint and goodwill amongst the passengers.

Even when I mentioned on a couple of occasions to a couple of the organisers that everyone seemed to be going stir-crazy, nothing was done to break up the tension and by the final day, the organisers were as stir-crazy and irritable as the worst of the passengers and one or two of them completely lost all sense of reality by the end.

Many of the early explorers refer to “cabin fever” – where they have to spend several months of winter in confined and cramped quarters in the company of others whom they started off liking by by the time of the thaw they were poised on the brink of murdering each other. It was just like that on board the ship.

Rather reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that the voyage last year when I made so many friends and had so many memorable moments must have been the exception to the rule, and these trips this year are much more the norm.

My social media page contains many names from that trip in 2018, but on this set of voyages this year, then apart from Rosemary who is already on it, and a couple of other people who were not involved in any fracas and who are well-known to themselves, then there isn’t a single person from any part of that voyage who merits a single moment of my time.

Anyone who wants to comment on any of the foregoing, please feel free to use the “comments” facility here. The link is active for a week or so, so if you miss it, add your comments to a later active posting.

I don’t expect you to agree with me, but I do expect you to be polite.

So abandoning another good rant for the moment, I made it back to my hotel by train and here I am, rather late but ready for bed. I have an early start on Sunday so I’m having a lie-in tomorrow with no alarms. That will almost inevitably mean that I’ll be wide-awake at about 04:30.

Friday 4th October 2019 – TODAY WAS A …

… little more optimistic and hopeful than yesterday. Helped quite considerably by the fact that someone who had annoyed us intensely yesterday and who was the cause of everything going wrong kept well away from the premises and we could all concentrate on what we do best.

For my own part, I had a much better sleep last night. Awake once or twice during the night to dictate stuff onto the dictaphone, not that I remember too much about anything. But what I do recall is that judging by recent conversations that I’ve been having with myself during the night, it seems that I’ve managed to lay a couple of demons that have been haunting me for a while.

And having read that final phrase back to myself, I realise that I could have expressed that much better too and in a different way, otherwise my readers in Kugluktuk, Celbridge and Cahors will have completely the wrong idea of what I’m trying to say and that might lead to complications.

This morning the two kids managed to have a lift to school with the neighbour’s boy (he remembered to turn up today) and Rachel was in a hurry, so I had a leisurely start to the day.

A hot breakfast followed by a little relax and then I edited and uploaded another blog entry from my voyage on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. This concerned my visit to Hvalsey, one of the three important places in Greenland that I had really wanted to visit.

Up at the tyre depot I found everyone submerged in work. It’s the middle of the potato harvest but the torrential rain overnight had made digging impossible. Consequently every farmer and farm labourer in the whole of New Brunswick had sorted out all of the jobs that they had put off doing and dashed down to have them done right now.

Added to that, one of the printers, the one that we use most often, ran out of ink. And as the Accountancy program and the inventory are old Dos-shell based programs, the print manager wouldn’t change over the default printer in these programs to the reserve printer. I had to go through and change every single page by hand, and when the new ink arrives next week, I shall have to go back and change them all back again.

Mind you, it could be worse. They could have been GEM (Graphics Environment manager)-based programs and I haven’t worked in GEM since 1998.

And that reminds me – I have a computer that runs on GEM somewhere around.

After we finished work I went to the Irvings to fuel up Strider. Just on a quarter of a tank left and he’s done 479 kms. That’s a dramatic improvement on what has gone before, and I hope that when his new chip arrives, it’ll improve even more.

With everyone being out this evening I finished off the pasta from the other night and then watched the football. Cefn Druids v Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League. Bala were the better team in the first half and the Druids were somewhat aimless, but the score of 0-3 to Bala, and having two other goals disallowed for offside, was rather flattering. But a couple of substitutions for the Druids at half-time brought a much more stable team out for the second half and they actually played with a shape and with a purpose. But no more goals were scored, even though the match was quite entertaining.

That left me with a short time of not much going on, so I added another page to my voyage. I’m now at Brattahlid, home of Eric the Red and a second one of the three places that I desperately wanted to visit.

But unfortunately we didn’t make the third. Gardar, home of the Norse Catholic cathedral, was not accessible to us on this trip. I shall have to go back, but not tonight because I’m off to bed.

Thursday 19th September 2019 – ISN’T IT NICE …

… to be awoken by the dulcet tone of a friendly voice?

It reminds me of the time many years ago on one of my coach trips with Shearings where a passenger asked me if I would awaken her at 06:00 one morning. “Certainly” I replied. “Should I knock on your door or give you a nudge?”. In those days of course you could say things like that and people would laugh and joke about it. But today you couldn’t say a thing like that. No one has a sense of humour any more.

But anyway, just as the alarm finished ringing, the telephone rang. Rosemary had sent me a message yesterday so I has messaged her back to tell her to ring me round about midday her time.

We had a good chat about all the things that had happened to us since we parted company in Greenland in late July. I told her about my more recent adventures on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and she burst out laughing. “Ohh Eric” she snorted. “That’s the kind of thing that could ONLY happen to you”.

And she’s right of course. Looking back, it was all quite amusing really and I’m not sure why I took it all so seriously. But then again, I don’t think that I really did.

I’d had a good night’s sleep too. After all of my efforts yesterday I was in bed by 21:00 and out like a light. I remembered nothing until the alarm went off, although there is a sound file on the dictaphone from last night. I wonder what’s in it.

For breakfast I went down to Tim Hortons and purchased some bagels and coffee to bring back here. Eventually. For it took a good few minutes to find my way into the place.

And then I hit the streets for my storage locker. Pretty easy to get to from here too, except for the traffic. At one point I was in a queue surrounded by brand-new cars with Montreal licence plates. People in suits on their way to an office somewhere. And there I was, faded baseball cap, tatty tee-shirt in an elderly tired Ford Ranger on my way to empty out a storage locker. It looked like something out of the Beverley Hillbillies, but ask me if I care.

Yes – I can remember the Beverley Hillbillies from 50-odd years ago, but ask me what I had for lunch yesterday …

Somehow I’d left the *.mp3 player in Strider playing last night, so when I switched on the radio I had “Foxy Lady” by Jimi Hendrix blasting its way across the airwaves.
.
That’s a significant track, and for two reasons too. Firstly, when I played in a rock group with Jon Dean and Dave Hudson back in the mid-70s, that was one of the numbers that we played and it always went down well.

But secondly, it has a much more significant meaning for someone else who I met much more recently than that and she’ll understand why. The lyrics are quite relevant too, given the particular circumstances.

At the storage place I had to wait for a trolley as they were all in use. But I was soon in business. A pile of stuff was binned but a pile more (much more than I expected) was loaded into the back of Strider for further review. And then I handed back all of my paperwork and cards (and had to negotiate to receive back the deposit on my card).

And that was that. The end of another era. All of my sleeping-out stuff into the bin. But at least on one occasion and probably two I’d managed to spend every night sleeping out on the trail around Labrador, but I’m only fooling myself by pretending that one day I might be able to do it again. It saves me $33:00 per month by binning it all, but it was still an emotional moment.

But we did have a little fun there. I was brandishing a large crowbar when one of the guys came up to me. “That’s huge” he said. “It must be a metre long (it’s actually 1200mm). Why do you need a pry bar that big?”
“I drive an old Ford” I replied.

On the way back we were all carved up by some moron in one of these big Volkswagen SUVs. But I had my own back by running him up to some roadworks amd blocking him in while we all went past. He was not amused – but we were!

Back at the motel I had a shower and a clean-up, and washed my clothes. I need to keep on top of all of that while I can if I’m on the road.

Down to the Metro and off into town. From Berri-UQAM I walked down past the Gare Viger, my favourite building in the whole of the city (and what are they doing in the car park?) and down to the old harbour. A couple of ships in there but I just had a good walk right round.

Up then to rue Sherbrooke and then all the way down to the Atwater Metro Station, thinking all the time about how much I hated Montreal and everyone and everything in it. I could feel myself building up into an emotional rage. But then again, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a very hard time throwing my stuff away, for reasons that any good psychiatrist could explain and it’s all probably to do with that.

I took the metro to the terminus at Cote Vertu (falling asleep for part of the way) and went to the fruit wholesalers. There, I bought grapes and bananas while the buying was good. And then across the road and the Indian cafe for tea. And when was the last time I walked away from a table leaving a half-eaten meal behind? Excellent though it was and perfectly spiced, I was bloated. Having cut right down on food over the last few weeks is certainly working…

On the way back I tried several different places and it wasn’t until the very last place just near here that I was able to find a bottle of Epinette. The last in Quebec, I reckon, and we are now facing a crisis of Brexit-like proportions if I can’t find any more.

So now it’s bed time. I’ve already crashed out twice (and so has the internet) and I’m on the verge of going again. I’m hoping for a good sleep because I have things to do tomorrow early. The battery has gone flat in the big Nikon camera and Bane of Britain has forgotten to bring the Canadian charging lead for the battery charger.

Friday 13th September 2019 – WHAT A NIGHT …

… that turned out to be!

It’s one thing to be accompanied on a nocturnal ramble by people such as Castor and Pollux, but it’s quite something else when a dramatic appearance is made therein by my father and my brother.

And when all of the action (including five children all riding on the same push-bike at the same time) takes place in Edleston Road in Crewe, then that is the stuff from which nightmares are made.

And so it should be no surprise to anyone that I sat up bolt-upright at about 01:30 in the morning in a state of shock, anger and emotion and drenched in a feverish sweat.

I’m not going to go into the gory details of all of this, which I remember totally vividly without having consulted the lengthy notes on the dictaphone, because you are probably eating your lunch right now. But let’s just say that I’m a different person today than I was 30 or so years ago and the rage and anger that was consuming me at the time and for which there is no Statute of Limitations was, I thought, long-since dead and buried like a couple of people I could mention and that I’d moved a long way further on from there.

Consequently the emotion, the violence and the anger that was going around in my head when I awoke was something that took me completely by surprise and knocked me right off balance. It’s a good job that I don’t have too many wits these days because it took me quite a while to gather those that I still have.

Going back to sleep for a while was quite out of the question so I vegetated in bed for ages, musing over the events that had led up to my rather rude awakening. And it ended up as being one of those really uncertain events – did my family connections YET AGAIN contrive to put a spanner into the works and do their best to spoil any kind of enjoyment that I might be trying to have, or did my family all club together once more to save me from a fate worse than a fate worse than death?

Bearing in mind the vicarious pleasure that they once enjoyed from watching me skid towards the precipice a long time ago, I suspect the former. But things have a strange way of working themselves out for the best if you are able to stand back and review them from a detached point of view, and you are quite often able to find a totally different perspective.

Eventually I was off on yet another ramble at some point, to such an extent that I distinctly remember dreaming that I was dictating into a dictaphone some notes of a dream.

I didn’t quite manage to beat the alarms this morning, but I was good and ready for the girls when it was time to go to school (in nice weather too).

And I was right about the garage being empty this morning. There was a queue of vehicles, including a potato lorry, right across and down the yard awaiting attention this morning. We were rushed off our feet.

At lunchtime I came back home for a shower, a change of clothes, some butties and to do some work, such as converting to *.mp3 format a live concert that I tracked down on the internet last night.

The afternoon was spent running to Florenceville for parts and shunting cars around the yard as the pressure slowly eased off. And, of course, fighting off an enormous wave of fatigue.

This evening we had burgers for tea. The carnivores had bison burgers and we two vegans (and Amber) had vegan burgers, followed by lemon whirl vegan mousse.

With it being Friday night, everyone is relaxing. But I have too much to do right now so I’m working.

And I might be some time.

Monday 9th September 2019 – WITH HAVING TO …

… go to bed early last night in order to be on form for today, it goes without saying that I had another bad night last night.

Still awake at 01:30, and when I finally did drop off, it was just in 20 minute segments where I was off on various travels. When I unwind the dictaphone at some point in the future I can tell you all about them, but what I can say is that at one point Castor and I were joined just for a change by Pollux.

Is it the first time that the aforementioned has accompanied me on a nocturnal voyage? I shall have to check

And it was one of those nights where I kept stepping back into the voyage at exactly the same place that I had stepped out. That’s something that I’m noticing is happening more and more frequently these days and when I was having similar situations back 15 or so years ago, I found myself able eventually to move onto a third plane, and that’s when it all became exciting.

That was during the period that we were researching dreams (that lasted from about 1998 to 2006 or so) for someone’s PhD at University and so our individual research was never individually published. But I still have the notes somewhere and I’ll have to look them out when I’m back home.

The spell was however unfortunately broken round about 04:00. The batteries in the dictaphone went flat at an inopportune moment and, determined not to miss a moment, I left the bed for a spare set.

They were flat too so I had to find some more and in the meantime find the charger to charge up the flat ones.

Unfortunately this meant that by the time that I was organised and went back to bed, I’d missed my spot and ended up going off somewhere else instead and isn’t that a shame?

When Amber banged on my door, I’d been up for quite a while. Before the third alarm in fact and that’s a rare deal right now. So we went outside ready for school.

Amber doesn’t like the idea of travelling cramped up in Strider so she had negotiated use of her mother’s car for me. It was cold, damp, misty and foggy outside and I had to clean off the car before we could go anywhere.

We negotiated out way through the queues at the covered bridge (the highway is down) and much to my (and everyone else’s) surprise, the St John River valley was clear of fog and mist. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that’s usually the place that GETS it first.

The girls clambered out at school and I drove back to the Co-op for apples (seems that we have a little fruit-eater amongst us) and to Tim Horton’s for bagels for me for breakfast.

At the tyre depot the morning passed quickly. There were lots of people around there and we were quite busy. I sorted out some paperwork and then, grasping the nettle, I telephoned the hospital back in Leuven.

They offered me a blood transfusion on 11th October on a “take it or leave it” basis. And so I took it. After all, chemotherapy and mapthera didn’t work as we know and the product that they are trying out on me is still in the trial stage so it’s not licensed as yet in North America.

And with having missed already three of my four-weekly transfusions, heaven alone knows what my blood count might be like. It was knocking on the “critical level” back in June.

Nevertheless, I’m going to try to see if I can push it back a week or so. I have may things to do that are as yet undone and there are many opportunities waiting to come my way and that won’t be accomplished if I’m not here.

After that I went to see Ellen. She’s quite ill too and doesn’t look anything like the woman that I remember. It’s a shame but I reckon that we will both be stoking the fires of eternity together, and quite soon too. But I kept her company for an hour or so and we had a good chat.

At lunchtime I took Rachel’s car back home and picked up Strider. Then went to the Irving for lunch. Afterwards I hopped off to pick up my mail from my mail box but SHOCK! HORROR! the whole battery or mailboxes out on the River du Chute road has been flattened.

A brief drive enabled me to find another battery of mailboxes but my key didn’t work. Off to the Post Office then, where she explained that the boxes have been moved and I needed a new key. She confirmed my Canada address and gave me a new key to a different box

But even more SHOCK! HORROR! It seems that my new licence tags for Strider haven’t come through. They expire at the end of the month so I need to chase them up before I go off to Montreal and Ottawa.

And I forgot to add that with the road up there being as it is and with Strider being as he is, it was an exceedingly lively drive. Next time that I go to Labrador I shall need to take with me a change of underwear

This afternoon there was yet more work to be done. Darren needed to take some heavy springs down to the welders in Woodstock so I went along to help. By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong but in the big Chevrolet lorry there was plenty of room.

Having brought the petrol back on Saturday it was the turn of the diesel. But this time, now that the lorry is mobile again, we had a proper licensed fuel tank to move the stuff about.

I have deliberately refrained from mention the world’s worst customer service that I have ever received – service that would knock Belgium’s legendary incivility to its customers into a cocked hat.

I rang Walmart in Fargo about the splash screen on my laptop and after repeating my story 7 times to 7 different people the best advice that I was given was to “reformat your hard drive and tough s**t for your data”.

That’s advice and assistance that I can well do without.

There was a major issue trying to reconcile the cash account this evening on closing so we had to stay behind to resolve the problem. Eventually, at about 18:30 we suddenly twigged – payments received after closing on Saturday lunchtime, credited though on Saturday, had been put into the till on Monday instead of being added to Saturday’s pouch.

Of course, neither I nor Rachel had been there at close on Saturday or opening on Monday, had we?

It meant that we weren’t back home until 19:00 and, much to our surprise, the girls had cooked tea. I went for a shower afterwards and then tried some of Rachel’s home-brew ice coffee, which was delicious.

Now even though it’s early, I’m off to bed. It seems that the school run is required for tomorrow (the school bus arrives too late, what with the issues on the bridge and Amber has already been cautioned once by an unreasonable Principal, and she can’t take a passenger on her scooter) and once more, Yours Truly has drawn the short straw.

And a big hello to my new readers from Montreal and Mississauga.

Tuesday 27th August 2019 – I HAVE SPENT …

… a very pleasant day in the company of those two two very pleasant young girls whom I have mentioned previously. I’m not sure quite why, but I seem to be Flavour Of The Month right now – a situation to which I’m not accustomed at all

When we saw the polar bear the other day the younger one of the two who was wandering around the deck on her own wasn’t able to pick it up with her camera very well To help her out, I put her memory card into my camera and let her take a few photos using the big zoom lens. No kid should ever go around being disappointed if there’s someone around who can lend a hand.

Unfortunately I had my camera set on RAW data rather than *.jpg so her camera couldn’t see it, as I came to realise afterwards. But I was working with the laptop in my little corner in the upper lounge today when they both came past, so I grabbed her memory card, edited the photos for her, converted it into *.jpg format and, for good measure, slipped her a photo of my walrus from yesterday as a little present.

We ended up having quite a chat, that started at about 15:00 this afternoon and went on until … errr … 00:30. And I’ll tell you something for nothing – and that is that they are far more intelligent and interesting and have much more to say for themselves than any of the adults on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour.

And that, unfortunately, is not saying very much either. To tell the truth, this is a pretty miserable lot of passengers on board the ship for this section of the voyage. There’s not even one of them with whom I’d choose to spend any of my spare time, and I’m pretty certain judging by the number of times that I’ve sat at a table and taken my meals all alone that the feeling is pretty much mutual.

Not that it bothers me at all though. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m much happier with my own company and It seems as if I’m condemned to prowl the deck of the ship totally on my own until all kinds of late hours until I fall overboard, rather like Joshua Slocum, which is par for the course these days.

Mind you, I don’t know how I do it because I had another dreadful night. Wide awake at 01:00 and then not going back to sleep at all. And I was feeling dreadful too – fearing a recurrence of my trouble of the other week.

I know what caused it though. Basically, I was in a totally foul mood and it was eating me up all yesterday evening.

Yesterday or the day before, I’d mentioned that we have someone from the Archaeological Service of Canada Parks on board and as a result things are being run “by the book” on board, to the total exclusion of everything else.

Consequently, even though I’ve travelled for 40 days and spent not far short of $40,000 over two years to travel to a certain point and to take a certain photograph, it’s been decided that I won’t be permitted to take it.

I was furious (to say the least) about the idea of missing out on the photo that I really wanted to take, and it was preying on my mind. But being wide-awake enabled me to have a good think and it gave me the opportunity to come up with a solution.

And so at breakfast I buttonholed Rachel the Archaeologist and bent her ear somewhat (poor girl), telling her of my utter dismay and disappointment. She replied that she would “take my concerns on board”.

It was snowing slightly outside and freezing cold, as you might expect up here in the High Arctic, but we all warmed ourselves up in our really warm expedition clothing and hit the zodiacs. 10 minutes later we were on Beechey Island. at last, after all of these years.

We visited the graves of the three sailors who died at the start of the Franklin expedition and I took the photos that I wanted. Permission had been obtained (although, I suspect, unofficially, and I thought it best not to make further enquiries). We then walked on through the rain and the howling wind past a passing gyrfalcon down to Northumberland House (or the remains thereof) built by William Pullen’s expedition to relieve Franklin should he still be alive (which he wasn’t)

The whole place is covered in old tin cans, barrel staves and barrel hoops from Franklin’s and the relief expeditions in the 1840s and 50s and that all adds to the mystery of the place. But at long last I have made it there and that was what I’ve come all this way to do.

But one thing that I couldn’t do was to deal with yet more of this red tape. There’s a shipwreck – the yacht Mary – dating from the 1850s on the island, and known since at least 1854. I was hoping to be able to visit that but because it didn’t form part of the permit that the company had obtained (apparently no-one thought that it would be of much interest to anyone) it had been taped off and an “unofficial excursion’ was out of the question with this official loitering around.

So instead, I cursed my bad luck.

The zodiac ride back was wild, totally wild. You’d pay good money for that in an adventure park. We were all soaked to the skin and frozen to the marrow, so when we returned I had a hot shower to warm myself up.

After lunch I was on deck for a while and then fell in with the girls. They are cousins apparently, both mad on music and keen players of the ukelele. So I’ve been having private ukelele lessons all evening.

There was a concert in fancy dress this evening. Strawberry Moose dressed up for it and won a prize.

Later on in the evening while I was chatting to the girls and learning to play the ukelele, two boys joined in. One of them was no mean guitarist and the other could sing really well and so we had a jam session until long after midnight, all five of us.

And as a result, a cunning plan is developing. But more of this anon. I’m off to bed.

Monday 26th August 2019 – I DID MY FIRST …

… presentation today on an Adventure Canada ship and I was really pleased.

The subject of maps came up in the discussion and in particular Croker Bay where we were. it’s a huge, long fjord that branches off into two at the head. And so the question was raised. Why isn’t it shown on old maps?

The answer to that is simple.

The fact is that when this area was first surveyed in the mid 19th Century there was a glacier down it, as my Admiralty Charts tell me, and for that reason it was never possible to sail into it and explore it.

But when you see the fjord today, how long, wide and deep it is, it’s astonishing how much ice has actually melted away. Anyone who denies the existence of climate change needs to come here and have a look for themselves.

Last night I had a horrible night. Although I went asleep quite early on, I was awoken by I don’t know what at about 01:30 and that was my lot for the night.

Despite that, I still managed to beat the third alarm and was soon up on deck in the fog and mist. But a little later, we were in luck. We saw a polar bear asleep on a rock just on shore, right by where we were planning to land for Dundas Harbour. It was as if he was waiting for us.

It put the kybosh on the landing of course, but at least we had a good hour’s entertainment before he loped off to the other side, to our alternative landing point. So after a while waiting for him to move off, which he didn’t of course, we found another landing site in the vicinity. But not before a family of seals came along to join in the fun.

We had a cruise in the zodiacs around the bay so that we could at least look at the old Inuit settlement at Morin Point and the mast at Inglefield Hill, and then sailed across the strait to shore.

This new landing place is nothing like as historic or as interesting, but beautiful nevertheless. Probably one of the most beautiful places that I have ever visited. I surprised myself by climbing almost all the way to the top, which was quite an effort. Coming down alongside the waterfall was just as exciting. No-one was more pleased than me to have made it up there.

And the weather was perfect too. When I was here last year we were caught in a blizzaed.

After lunch we went for a cruise in Croker Bay (now that we can these days of course) and saw another polar bear, some walrus, more seals and some arctic geese. We certainly had our money’s worth this afternoon.

Tea was a disaster though yet again. Another one that took hours to come. And then they forgot my dessert. All in all I was waiting for two hours for my meal. I’ve no idea what was going on in the kitchen tonight.

This evening I helped the two young girls on board do a jigsaw and then came down here. Tons of photos to edit right now after today’s effotrts but even though we gain an hour tonight, after last night’s shenanigans I’m too tired to do anything.

So I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.

Friday 23rd August 2019 – I’VE BEEN FOR A RIDE …

… in a police car today.

No surprise there, of course, as many of my friends will suggest. In fact I should have been a policeman given the number of times that I have had to help them with their enquiries.

Having adjusted the clocks by two hours over the last couple of days, it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that I was wide-awake at 04:15 this morning. I did manage to go off back to sleep at one point, only to be rudely awakened by the alarm at 06:00.

With the medication and breakfast, this was followed by a lesson in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit people. It’s not easy because isolation and geographical displacement has caused there to be several distinct dialects and of course we have Inuit on board who come from four different regions. But we did our best.

Canadian Immigration people came on board to check our passports. I was shocked, if not horrified, to learn that two immigration officers had been flown out here from Ottawa on a specially-chartered plane simply to check our passports and then fly back. The cost – no less than $50,000 – is charged to the company transporting us and, eventually of course, to us.

Why they couldn’t have come on a scheduled flight, or why the Immigration Service couldn’t simply have chartered a Canadian Air Force plane, totally escapes me. It sounds something like a “make-work” scheme to me, arranged to screw some money out of a captive audience.

Having done that, we could board the zodiacs to take us to the shore. And to our surprise, there was a guy sitting on a beach chair at the landing point checking us off as we stepped ashore.

We’re finally in Canada after all of our exertions, at the settlement of Qikiqtarjuaq, spelt “Kekertukdjuak” on my Admiralty chart of March 1908 and known to generations of Arctic explorers as Broughton island, here just offshore from Baffin Island.

Strawberry Moose and I went for a long walk around the place to see what we could see, eschewing the touristy attractions. There’s a viewpoint up in the hills overlooking the straits so we went there to see the view and present His Nibs with a few photo opportunities.

On the way back I encountered a father teaching his son, aged about four, how to use a sling properly in order to bring down a flying bird when they go out hunting in the future. Naturally, I stayed around to watch and to learn and also to have a good chat. Modern materials certainly, but I was very impressed with the fact that ancient tribal knowledge is being passed on. Father told me too about the effects of climate change on his village and how the snowfall has dramatically reduced and temperatures dramatically increased.

Walking around the edge of the harbour I fell in with Dennis, our expedition photographer. We were having a good chat when a copper pulled up.
“Are you photographers?” he asked.
When we answered in the affirmative he invited us into his vehicle. He was off to check something out in the hills at the back of town where the views are spectacular, and he would take us along for the ride.

It goes without saying that we accepted with alacrity. And I was so distracted that I forgot about the church that I was trying to photograph when the copper pulled up.

Back at the beach we had to present ourselves again to the guy in the beach chair. And I couldn’t help thinking about Brian Hanrahan and the famous “I cannot tell you how many there were, but I counted them all out and I counted them all back”.

Back on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour after lunch I had a shower and a clothes-wash, and then we had a talk on kayak-building and then on the history of survival in the High Arctic.

After tea one of the Inuit guys played guitar and sang for an hour or so, and then I came back to my cabin. I’m having an early night. And I need it too. I’ve been at the photos again and I’m now up to almost 1200.

But I did find a really good photo of the young girl about whom I talked yesterday, which I had taken of her while she was standing perched on a rock, so I gave it to her as a little gift to cheer her up.

I told her that I admired how she had climbed up onto that rock.
“That was easy” she laughed. “Coming down was something else though”
I admired her spirit and sense of humour.

A lie-in tomorrow as we aren’t going far. There’s a storm blowing up down the road and we are going to loiter until it’s passed us by.

Thursday 22nd August 2019 – JUST FOR A …

… change I was out like a light last night quite early, and stayed out until about 05:20 (which would have been 06:20 in real money of course). I ended up going back to sleep for a while and it was something of a struggle to sort myself out when the alarm went.

After the medication etc I went for a walk on deck to take some photos and it took me a while to find the early-morning orange juice, which wasn’t in the same place as usual. People shouldn’t go around changing my early morning habits when I’m walking around only semi-conscious.

One of the staff joined me briefly for breakfast, and then it was back down here to prepare myself for the morning out.

We’re in a fjord off Disko Island and the plan is to go ashore. We’re divided up into different groups, so I chose to go off with Marc the geologist and learn some more about rocks. And we had a great time too. We’re on proper original bedrock from 3.8 billion years ago, layered with dozens of layers of volcanic rock which had been eroded away by glaciers in certain areas so we could see all of the strata.

As well as that, Rachel the archaeologist had found some old fox traps and we inspected them. The traps were used to catch foxes more for their furs than their meat although that would be eaten too if necessary.

And the walk around the island as far as I went was quite interesting too. I even stumbled upon one or two of our party drying some caribou meat ready for one of the Country Food evenings that we have sometimes. Well, they have, because as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m a vegan.

On the way back we were unlucky enough to miss a whale. One or two of the previous zodiacs had seen it but not us.

On board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour I had a shower and another clothes-washing session and then headed off for lunch. I sat with a guy who for some reason that only he knows, didn’t want to speak and who left the table rather abruptly.

I must change my after-shave.

This afternoon we had a series of lectures (during which I fell asleep) and a singles party. But I’m no good at socialising so I didn’t benefit from it.

There was a Francophone table at tea so I joined it and we had a chat, and that was followed by a disco. I dressed up Strawberry Moose and took him along and he proved to be quite popular as usual.

But woe is me. I made a dreadful mistake. One of the little kids on board (the different one from the other night) who I put at about 11 if she was lucky is in fact just 13 and was most put out when I had a guess at her age and got it so wrong. I’m no good with ages at all.

But now it’s bed-time. I’ve had another major go at the photos and am now up to 18090980 and well into the photos of this trip.

Things are looking up.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: lucy horn

Monday 4th November 2019 – I’M BACK …

Wednesday 30th October 2019 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

Tuesday 29th October 2019 – CALIBURN WOULDN’T …

Friday 25th October 2019 – I’M ALL …

Friday 18th October 2019 – I REALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND …

Friday 4th October 2019 – TODAY WAS A …

Thursday 19th September 2019 – ISN’T IT NICE …

Friday 13th September 2019 – WHAT A NIGHT …

Monday 9th September 2019 – WITH HAVING TO …

Tuesday 27th August 2019 – I HAVE SPENT …

Monday 26th August 2019 – I DID MY FIRST …

Friday 23rd August 2019 – I’VE BEEN FOR A RIDE …

Thursday 22nd August 2019 – JUST FOR A …

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