Yes, that six months from winter went pretty quickly, didn’t it? It’s all downhill now until the end of the year
So while you admire one of the Birdmen of Alcatraz entertaining the crowds with his daredevil stunts, let me tell you something of my day today.
And it all started off on the wrong foot as usual, when I found myself wide-awake at 07:40.
And if anyone thinks that I’m going to be heaving myself out of my stinking pit at that time of a morning on a Sunday, especially as I didn’t go to bed until 01:30, then they have another think coming.
09:30 is a much more reasonable time for me to see the light of day on a Sunday.
It’s a day of rest of course and I allow myself one day a week when I can do nothing at all if I so choose and not feel guilty about it.
First task after the medication was one that I had forgotten to do. The dashcam is almost full and the files need downloading onto the computer.
It had to be done quickly because otherwise I’d be tempted to drive off somewhere and forget to take it with me.
26.7GB of files on there, and they all need converting to *.mp4 one of these days whenever I find a moment. There’s masses of them all told.
But while I was doing that, I forgot to do something else – and that was to check the dictaphone.
Well, rather, I did check it, saw that there was a voice file on there (so I must have been somewhere during the night) but said to myself that when I unplug the dashcam I can plug it in.
And then I forgot.
However I did subsequently remember.
There were a couple of little girls who were having some kind of wrestling fight. There had been three of them, one a little older than the other two. This worked its way round to me being in Belgium and having to come home. I had to do it with a whole series of buses and I had plotted out this route and then forgotten it. All I knew was that I had to be at the Gare du Midi at 09:00. It was 08:45 and I had to get back to the hotel, get all of my stuff, check on this route, arrange – make sure that I got on this bus, book a hotel, all this kind of thing. So I was running back to the hotel but the hotel seemed to get further and further away.Eventually I got there, got my stuff together but there wasn’t enough time to look for a hotel. I realised that I was going to be stranded in the middle of the country somewhere in a small town and if there wasn’t a room at that hotel I was going to be stuck for the night. So I ran out of the hotel and ended up in the company of a friend and she was looking at old derelict houses that another friend had told us about. I was trying to push on to this bus station and she was still looking at these houses. In the end I was looking at cars to see if there were any cars that I could buy just to go there. They were old wrecked lorries the kind that even the Africans wouldn’t touch. We ended up looking at this really depressing single-storey building in a really rough area. She went inside and I thought “God at last I can push on”. She came out and I thought that she had finished but ohh no “can you pass me this tape measure?”. God, I thought all my chances of getting this bus have just totally evaporated now.
Next task was to look for the paper from the controle technique where the guy pointed out a few things about Caliburn that needed attention
That ended up being a massive paper-filing job … “at long last” – ed … and general tidy-up, but there was no trace of it. So I grabbed the new door mirror glass for Caliburn that finally came a few weeks ago, the dashcam and the insurance certificate for the coming year to take down to Caliburn because I was going to search in there for the papers.
However, I stuck my nose out of the door and changed my mind. There was a torrential downpour going on out there.
Back up here I carried on with the tidying up. This time the medication in the bathroom needed arranging to see what I have in stock and what I need from Leuven.
That reminded me – I needed to book my travel to Leuven and my accommodation while I am there. So that was the next task.
Mind you, I don’t know why I might need accommodation. I noted that my appointment is for 16:00 and not at the Outpatients department either but at the main entrance. For a 5-hour process that’s not going to be possible in a department that closes at 17:30.
Do they mean to keep me in, I wonder?
By now the rain had stopped so I went to pick up the stuff to take to Caliburn and there, on the windowsill right underneath where I’d put the stuff was the note from the controle technique.
Anyway, all of that is now in Caliburn and he has his new mirror glass. Let’s see how long this one lasts.
There was no hummus for my lunchtime sandwiches (I’d done all of that this morning!) so I went to make some more.
By the time that i’d finished, I had two batches. One with olives and cumin and the other with dried tomato and herbs. Both with plenty of garlic, pepper and sea salt of course.
As for the olive and cumin, I dunno about that but the dried tomato and herbs is wicked, it really is. No danger of any werewolves and vampires coming around anywhere near me tonight.
With it being Sunday, that’s the day for me to go for my walk down into town for my vegan ice cream.
There were hordes of people out there today. We’ve seen the Birdmen of Alcatraz swarming around like Nazguls after a Hobbit, but there were a darn sight more than 9 walkers out there on the paths.
And on the narrow path around the headland we were jammed shoulder to shoulder in places. I don’t think that social distancing was much in evidence today.
These people over there are certainly respecting their social distancing though.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen countless fishermen perched on rocks at the water’s edge casting their lines into the sea and with the tide being right out just now, they have gone right out with it.
And as I have said before – I have yet to see anyone ever catch anything.
With the tide being out the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the path over the top to the other side.
What was interesting me was the pontoons at the ferry terminal. With the tide being out, I wanted to see how they were holding up. And the answer to that question is “not very well”.
Either the silt is building up quickly around them, or else the pontoons are slowly sinking into the mud. My money is on the latter and I wonder how long it will be before they have to send a few diggers in to dig the pontoons out again
Not much else was happening at all around the harbour so I went into town to pick up my ice cream. The guy in the shop recognises me now and that’s bad news.
On into town and life here is definitely back to normal, as the monthly brocante is in full swing.
They aren’t anything like the brocantes that we used to have in the Auvergne which is a shame.
Over there it would be private people clearing out stuff that they no longer wanted or needed. Here, it’s professionals trying to make a living and so the stuff is basically banal rubbish sold at 10 times what it’s worth and probably 100 times what they paid for it in a deceased person’s house clearance.
Just out of interest I had a wander round to see what there was.
A book on the History of Normandy looked interesting, but not €8:00 worth of interesting by any means. And a nice looking work bench with built-in vice and clamp caught my eye, as did the price of €250:00. Free woodwork thrown in – or burrowed in more likely.
So at that point I abandoned my stroll around and headed for home.
The weather might have been quite nice, warm and sunny but there was quite a rolling sea out there this afternoon.
The yacht was quite obviously enjoying the windy weather but the fishing boat was making quite heavy weather of it all. Towing a dinghy behind it can’t have helped much either.
All of this windy weather is making me very nostalgic for the sea and a maritime voyage so somewhere – anywhere in fact. I need to stretch my sea legs at some point pretty soon.
Back here I had a bake-in.
First task was to make a pile of pizza dough. Just like bread dough but wit a little oil in the base. 400 grammes of flour is enough for three bases, and having mixed it and got it really nice, i left it on one side.
Next stop was some pastry. 250 grammes of flour and 125 grammes of vegan margarine makes a decent-side pie. Knead it all together for about 10 minutes until it’s thoroughly mixed through, and then add a couple of spoons of water and mix that until it reaches the right texture.
Take 2/3rds of it, roll it out and put it in a greased pie dish.
Peel, core and slice a couple of large apples and fill in the pie base.
Desiccated coconut, sultanas, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg go nicely in there too.
Trim off the excess pastry, and damp the edges of the pie with some milk.
Add the trimmed-off pastry back to the 1/3 of pastry, roll it out and stick it over the top, pushing the edges down with a fork onto the dampened edges of the pastry base to seal it in and then trim off the excess.
Brush the top with milk, dust with brown sugar, pierce a few holes to let out the steam, and bung into a hot oven.
With the excess pastry that you trimmed off, roll it out into a square, add some of the apple and the other interesting bits, dampen the edges with milk, fold it over and squeeze together, brush with milk, dust with sugar, pierce some steam holes and stick that in as well.
By now the pizza dough will have risen so divide into three.
Lightly dust two of them in oil, wrap in greaseproof paper, put in a plastic bag and stick in the freezer.
With the third one, roll it out to size and stick it in a greased pizza tray. brush with tomato sauce, add your toppings and herbs, then cover with your grated cheese.
Then stick your pizza in with the pie and the turnover.
“And here is one I made earlier” – not out of a toilet roll holder and sticky-backed plastic as we used to do with Peter Pervert, John Dope and Valerie Simpleton.
Well, actually, this is the finished product. Today’s culinary offering. The pizza was delicious but I don’t know about the pie because I wasn’t that hungry so I didn’t try any of it.
My run tonight was painful – really painful – but I pushed on al the same and did it all.
But we have a new visitor on the car park by the lighthouse. Not exactly new – in fact he’s been there for two evenings now.
It’s an old rescue van from the fire service and you can still see where the vinyl writing used to be on it. But now it seems to have been converted into a mobile home of some description.
But I couldn’t help but admire his optimism when I read this notice.
He’s looking for a female companion to accompany him on his travels “in search of the sun” and he plans to be gone a long time.
Judging by the dampness in the plastic and the faded writing, the sign has been up for a long time too so he’s not been having much luck in that respect.
And I can’t say that I’m surprised either.
My walk continued on around the headland to the other side.
There was a strong wind that was blowing and we were having a really rough sea this evening. This fishing boat, which at first I thought was our old favourite Coelacanthe but is in fact her sister la Tiberiade was really making heavy weather of it.
She’s only just out of harbour too – hasn’t even passed le Loup – the light and marker for the big rock that is out there and the entrance light for the harbour itself
From there I ran on all the way down to my first resting place.
And there I was entertained by an interesting spectacle on the roof of one of the buildings in the Boulevard de Terreneuviers. A group of seagulls were having a fight over something, although I don’t know what.
It was a nasty fight too. They chased one away but he kept on circling and coming back for more. This battle went on for quite some time abd the seagull didn’t seem to have any attention of giving up easily.
From there I ran on all the way down on my elongated run right to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.
No picnickers again, but that was hardly a surprise because there was only a couple of feet of beach here right now. The tide is well and truly in. there was a fisherman here on the rocks, so I hope that for his sake the tide was on its way out.
If on the other hand it’s on its way in, he’ll find himself stranded if he’s not very careful
The sunset tonight was a little much – a little too bright to be able to reproduce a good effect.
This is the best of several photos that I took and it’s still not what I would like to see, which is a shame.
So after a couple of minutes and no sign of improvement I ran on home to write up my notes.
Back to work tomorrow and there’s plenty to do. A live concert for a start, followed by my Welsh homework.
We’ll see how far we get with all of that but right now I’m off to bed.
