Tag Archives: football

Friday 17th January 2020 – I BET THAT YOU ARE …

… all wondering where I’ve been with the posting of today’s activities, aren’t you?

The fact is that I didn’t get home tonight at all. In fact, it wasn’t until about 16:40 on Saturday that I put my sooty foot through the front door of my apartment.

And with not having had lunch either, I ended up running considerably later than planned. But then, that’s what plans are all about, aren’t they?

But anyway, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

It was another morning of missed alarms. Another 07:00 start and I really need to get a grip and get myself organised otherwise I’m just going to fade away.

But then after the medication I attacked the dictaphone in order to see where I had been during the night.

Strange as it may seem, I was back in my house back in Gainsborough Road and it was an absolute tip (I know that I live in total chaos but it has nothing on how my house was, last night, I’ll tell you). There was stuff everywhere all over the place and there was the football on – it was the World Cup or something like that – the European Nations match and I was trying to watch it on TV but there was just so much disorder going on around me that I couldn’t. I went into the kitchen to get something and the place was in such a state clothes and bits everywhere and someone shouted something like “come on, your tea’s ready”. It turns out that my brother and a younger boy had been given their tea and it was probably about midnight or whatever. I went into the room and it was the back room and there was one of my sisters sitting on a chair. I hadn’t seen her for ages and she was talking to someone, another one of my sisters. I went up to her and said something like “what are you going to do tomorrow morning, if you get up early?” She said “I’m going to come and wake you up”.
It was some time shortly after that that we found a young boy hanging upside down by his feet in a four-poster bed. We pulled back the curtains of this four-poster bed and there he was hanging upside-down by his ankles. What was quite bizarre was that after going back to sleep after dictating the first part of it, I stepped right back into it where I’d left off. And it’s not the first time by any means that I’ve done that either.

There was lots more to this voyage too but as you are probably eating your meal or something I’ll spare you the unpleasantness.

Once breakfast was out of the way I attacked the radio project that needed finishing. And that took a lot longer than I expected too, basically because the 10-minute audio file that I had dictated turned out to be only 04:20 by the time that I had edited it and so I had to find a completely different song to end the show than the one that I had planned.

Anyway, I eventually managed to complete it and that was mu cue to go off and buy my dejeunette from La Mie Caline

Having seen a white speck out in the English Channel I went to photograph it, only to find that I’d forgotten to put the memory card in the camera so I had to go back upstairs for it.

Downstairs again, I could photograph it and then in the comfort and safety of my own little office I could blow it up (the photo, not the object of course).

The result is inconclusive but probably a trawler-type of fishing boat I reckon. And you can see the Jersey coast in the background behind it. That gives you some idea of how far out the boat was.

Off then on my jaunt into town, but I didn’t get very far.

It’s all change in the inner harbour today. Chausiais and Joly France II have moved position. They’ve crossed over to the other side of the harbour and are now moored up in fromt of their sister over by the old cold store.

That’s a surprise for me. The only thing that I can think of is that they don’t want any debris from the car park renovation to drop onto the deck. And it also indicates that Granville and Victor Hugo are not going to be back home anytime soon

Yesterday, the regular readers of this rubbish and I saw them setting out a pile of “No Parking” signs in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers.

Today I went that way to see if I could pick up any clues about what might be happening down there.

Having had a look, I’m not really a great deal wiser. Apparently we are going to be having travaux – some kind of works – taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. That should be interesting to I shall have to go for my walk that way for a butcher’s.

There was excitement too down at the Chantier navale too right now.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had four boats in there this last couple of days. But in about ten minutes time we shall only be having three of them.

Spirit of Conrad is still there and so are two of the fishing boats but the third one, the blue and yellow one, is just about to leave the scene.

Here she is, in the mobile sling, being lowered down into the water. And in a couple of minutes she’ll be sailing … “dieseling” – ed … off into the wild blue yonder.

So with another empty space in the place, does this mean that we are going to be having a new visitor?

But it also means that the tide is quite a way in, which also means that the harbour gates will be closed which also means that the path across the top will not be accessible and I’ll have to go along the rue du Port.

And as I went along the rue du Port I could see strange goings-on on the boat-launching ramp down into the tidal harbour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen the dredging operations out by the ferry terminal and we had a look at the machinery the other day.

But today they are giving one of the huge dumper-lorries a good hose down with a pressure-washer, presumably to remove all of the silt that has accumulated thereupon while they have been working.

Off I went to la Mie Caline to pick up my bread, and then I headed back home.

What I spend the afternoon (with a break for lunch of course) was to deal with the Johan Gallon (the coach of US Granville)’s speech.

It’s been completed now, with all of my questions edited in, and I’ve been going through to edit out the joins, the silences and the stumbles. When that’s completed I’ll be going through and making another pass to remove the irrelevances and I’m hoping that I’ll have it done for Monday morning – at least, that’s the plan.

At 16:00 I called it a day, grabbed a few things together and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills.

First stop was at the dechetterie. The European Cardboard Box Mountain has now been consigned to a skip along with the old broken office chair and I can now get into the back of Caliburn if ever I need to.

Second stop was at Liz and Terry’s at Roncey.

We had a good chat and I gave them their Christmas present, after which we had tea. Burger and chips with salad followed by ginger cake.

Terry and I then headed off in Calburn down the motorway towards Caen and the Stade Michel D’Ornano. It’s the last 16 of the Coupe de France and Granville have pulled a plum out of the bag for this match.

They are “at home” against Olympique de Marseille but the match can’t be played at the Stade Louis Dior as was the Bordeaux match two years ago. There, there is a capacity of just 3,000 and it’s very uncomfortable at that size too.

But the Stade D’Ornano at Caen is free and has 20,200 places. Even so, it was sold out in about 4.5 hours but I managed to obtain 2 tickets.

We were doing really well until we hit the outskirts of Caen when a road accident slowed our progress. An hour it took to advance 6 kilometres.

Then we hit the traffic heading to the stadium, became tangled up in the mesh of red lights, and then I lost count of the number of roundabouts that we passed in the frantic search for a parking place.

Spotting an ad-hoc parking place, we quickly stuffed Caliburn into it and ran down the road towards the next roundabout. Not seeing the stadium, we asked a passer-by who sent us back where we had started. Brain of Britain had miscounted, and parked Caliburn at the roundabout right by the stadium.

As a result we missed the first 30 seconds of the game.

Having been frisked at the stadium we were allowed in, but finding a seat was impossible. We ended up standing, with about 100 others on the stairs, with a couple of people who had made themselves comfortable sitting on the top step complaining about the “new arrivals blocking their view”.

But at a time like this and in a crowd like this, it’s “every man for himself”. Sardines had nothing on us.

The first half of the match was a surprise to most people.

It was pretty clear that Olympique de Marseille were the better team but it was also clear that US Granville weren’t going to lie down and roll over. They were pegged back for much of the half, that’s for sure, but they were breaking away quite regularly and going forward down the wings, with William Sea throwing his weight around up front.

The Granvillais goalkeeper was the busier of the two but it wasn’t by any means a one-way street.

At half-time we were treated to a display of drumming as the drummers marched around the touchline having a right old bang. There were also two teams of kids having a penalty shoot-out.

What was even worse was that I was dying to use the bathroom and desperate for a coffee but I had no intention of moving away from my good spec on the stairs having fought my way into it.

So we stayed put and waited for the second half to begin.

The second half carried on where the first left off , with Olympique de Marseille attacking, US Granville absorbing the pressure, and then hitting them on the break.

And then the match turned rather sour.

maseille had worked out early on that the danger men for Granville were little Lamrabette with his merry, mazy runs with the ball through crowds of players, and also big William Sea who was showing that despite his injury he still had what it takes to mix it on level terms with the Olympique Marseille central defenders.

As a result, they were flattening the two of them with regular monotony, but being very careful firstly not to do it quite enough to earn a caution and secondly to take it in turns so as no individual would be cautioned for persistent infringement.

It was saddening to watch a display like this from a team like Olympique Marseille against a bunch of amateurs and if that’s the idea of how Villas-Boas wants his team to play then he should be ashamed of himself.

Anyway, it had the desired effect because with round about 15 minutes to go, William Sea was finally fed up of being grabbed from behind every time he had the ball. He lashed out behind him with his elbow and unfortunately caught a Marseille player full in the face.

Having had a yellow card earlier in the game, that was that for Sea and he was off down the tunnel for an early bath and Granville were down to 10 men.

What was sickening about this was that the player who had been fouled them followed Sea to the touchline and taunted him about being sent off. A couple of Granville staff had to grab hold of Sea before he put the Marseille player over the stadium wall and out into the street.

And that, I’m afraid, was that.

At the Press Conference I’d mentioned that the danger time in every game where the professionals meet the amateurs is the final 15 minutes when the lack of fitness shows through and the amateurs run out of steam. And even more so when you are only 10 against 11.

And so it proved. 2 minutes later, Olympique de Marseille went ahead. They added a second 10 minutes later and then deep into stoppage time, a typical US Granvillais “lack of concentration” about which I have moaned on more occasions than many in the past gifted them a third.

Although before the game the general feeling was that had Granville come home with a 3-0 defeat they would have done really well but after the match that we had seen, a 3-0 defeat was a travesty.

And the tactics of a team riding high in the French Premier League against a bunch of students, supermarket shelf-fillers, taxi drivers, teachers and the like have left a bitter taste in the mouths of many, including mine.
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The drive home was no better than the drive out. We had to fight our way through the maze of traffic lights which took an age and then another accident on the way back had us queueing again for yet another lengthy period.

As a result it was 01:00 when we finally reached Terry’s, and he offered me a bed for the night. By that time and after all that, I was totally done in anyway so I took up his offer and here I am and there I stayed.

Tuesday 14th January 2020 – I WAS WONDERING …

… how long it was going to be before we had a catastrophe.

The answer is “this afternoon at about 14:00” when this tree came crashing down. It was bound to happen sooner or later because the winds outside are horrific. They aren’t quite the worst that I’ve ever encountered but they are pretty close.

And this tree took the full brunt of it and came crashing down. Lucky that there weren’t any cars parked just there on the car park of the other block of flats.

As for me, I had a really bad day today.

By the time that I finished what I was doing, it was 02:30. Sure enough, the elarms went off at the usual time but it was 07:05 when I finally crawled out of bed.

There was the medication of course and while I was waiting for it to work I attacked some more of this translation. In fact over the course of the day I’ve been nibbling away at it here and there and I’m now at 65%. But even so, my good humour hasn’t returned quite yet.

Round about 11:00 I headed out of the apartment for this Press Conference.

And as I was leaving my apartment this fishing boat from Jersey was leaving port and heading out into the wicked wind. I don’t envy him at all heading that way in all of this.

At least the rain wasn’t all that heavy, which was one good thing. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen horizontal rain.

At the Stade Louis Dior I was one of the first to arrive and so I had another good chat with the Vice-president, Guy Lefevre.

We’d met each other ON THE BUS THE OTHER DAY GOING TO VERSAILLES and so we continued the interesting conversation that we’d had back then.

But then everyone else began to arrive and we all settled down.

None of the players were available today but the team’s chief coach, Johan Gallon, came to talk to us.

He gave us a little talk and we all asked loads of questions. What interested me was that I was the only one there asking questions about tactics and the like. Everyone else was much more interested in the emotional side of the match.

He did his best to answer them but without giving away anything that might be of use to the enemy.

He’s well aware that the match is going to be difficult, much more difficult than against Bordeaux and much more difficult than when US Granvillais met Olympique de Marseille back in 2016.

There were about a dozen of us all told, and two television cameras too. One or two of them were interested in me too – where did I come from and what was I doing there.

I suppose that I’m really something of a novelty around here, being British, asking tactical questions in French and gatecrashing press conferences like this

After half an hour or so Johan gallon left us to carry on with his other business.

However the Vice-President Guy Lefevre stayed behind and a couple of us continued our chat.

We also discussed the Carnaval because he has a char that parades there and it’s another idea that I have for the forthcoming.

One thing I learnt, which was of great interest to me, was how they transported the chars from their hidey-holes to the Parade.

Apparently the operators of the chars have to have Public Liability insurance but the road risks are arranged by the municipality. The Police provide an exemption from the Road Traffic Acts to cover journeys to and from the parades and the parades themselves.

Another thing is that there is a limit on the number of chars. Just 47 are permitted to parade. Motorised chars, that is. Push-along chars can turn up in any particular number that they fancy.

By the time that we finished, the rain had stopped so I walked home in something like comfort. On the way back I popped in to la Mie Caline for my dejeunette and then came back here.

By now it was 14:15 so that was it. Lunchtime.

This afternoon I started to listen to the recordings that I had made. The quality isn’t up to much but, rather like Samuel Johnson’s dog, “I’m surprised that it is done at all”. I spent some time enhancing the recordings so at least I could hear what was being said.

The plan is to listen to the recordings to hear parts that are obvious “answers” to questions that haven’t been asked, then to record the questions and edit them into the recording.

It’s an old radio practice that has been done for years – in fact when the Beatles first toured the USA they sent over to each radio station a recording of “answers” so that the reporters there could ask their own questions and have an “exclusive live interview”.

On that point I went out into the horrendous gale. There were just four of us out there in total today and I was surprised that there was that many.

The wild wind hadn’t stopped them working down at the ferry terminal. They were digging out the silt, tipping it into the dumpers and taking it off to be dumped.

They can’t be going to be spending too long on it because sooner or later they’ll be wanting to send the ferries back out again and they won’t want to be working all around a ferry timetable as well as a tidal chart.

Another thing that’s cracking on is the work on the car park in the rue du Port.

They’ve devastated that pretty much over the last 24 hours as you can tell if you compare it to THIS PHOTO TAKE 24 HOURS AGO. It won’t be long before that will be finished and they will have all gone.

What’s going on in my mind is what it will look like when it’s finished. I hope that it’s not simply going to be a bare patch of asphalt. And I hope that they plant some trees in there too.

Back here I was intending to start work but I’m afraid that I simply crashed out on the chair. I was gone for a good hour too in a deep sleep, the kind of crashing out that I used to have before that last spell of good health.

It’s something that has depressed me completely and I don’t really want to dwell on it.

Instead, I had tea. The last of the falafel with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce, followed by the last of the Christmas Cake. It was delicious too.

So tomorrow I’ll have to start on the rice pudding that I made on Sunday.

If anything, the wind outside had worsened tonight. It bowled me along the street on the way out and on the way back there were times when it was impossible to make headway, so strong were the gusts of wind.

You can’t see it at all well but the waves were smashing over the sea wall at the Plat Gousset with the most astonishing violence.

It’s a shame that they’ve taken this decision to turn out the lights along there in winter. No-one can see a thing out there now and it’s terrible for photography.

The wind was so powerful across the square Maurice Marland that is was impossible at times to walk, never mind run.

But having anticipated that, I’d done my running (such as it is) in the sheltered spot on the north side of the city walls. The huge puddles there made it difficult but I pushed on for a few hundred metres.

It might not be much but at my age and in my state of health I think that it’s pretty good.

There’s a spot on the city walls that is protected from the wind so I went there for a moment.

There was a trawler unloading at the fish-processing plant so I could snap off a quick shot of it through the trees. Winter is my favourite time for photography because there are no leaves to obscure the shot.

On the way back I bumped into a girl walking her dog and smoking a cigarette. We exchanged pleasantries and then I came back.

By now, THE PODCAST OF MY RADIO PROGRAMME WAS ON-LINE so I had a listen.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a lot of time for kids – sometimes (in fact, quite often) I find them far more interesting than adults – and some of the kids in my radio programme didn’t let me down.

They performed admirably and gave a really good filling to the programme as well as providing some comic relief.

It’s the one thing that I regret – not having a kid of my own and I get quite broody at times. But then if I had a kid I would have to have the partner that went with it and I’m not made for living with other people.

Anyway, it’s later. later than I want to be. Marillion has passed by on the playlist so there’s no reason to stay up any longer. I’m off to bed and tomorrow I’ll crack on and do this radio programme.

Whenever am I going to find time to do my own stuff?

johan gallon guy lefevre stade louis dior us granville manche normandy france eric hall

Saturday 11th January 2020 – YOU LUCKY PEOPLE!

You aren’t just getting one example of pathetic parking today. You’re getting two!

The first one is outside NOZ. The road here is very narrow so the Police are rigorously enforcing the rules here. There’s a Stationnement Génante and a Stationnement Très Génante in French Law, and here this counts as the latter with a much more expensive fine.

There are notices all over the place about this, and also a sign to say that there’s “A Large Car Park At The Rear”.

But even with all of that and the fact that the little car park at the front is totally empty without a soul parked upon it (it was just at opening time), this clever motorist has decided to block the street and the pavement

The second one is even more ridiculous.

This minibus is far too big for a single parking spot so rather than go to the end of a double-row and straddle two places as I usually do, he’s chosen to park en bille, or “on the diagoonal”.

It’s Saturday morning when everyone comes to do the shopping, there are four electric car-charging spots at LeClerc, and our hero here decides to block off 25% of them just so that he doesn’t have to walk very far.

This is bringing selfishness down to a totally new level and it’s absolutely shameful.

What else is absolutely shameful is that once again I missed the third alarm. That’s despite a relatively early night when I fell asleep half-way through writing up my notes and crawled off to bed early.

A late start meant that everything else was late too. After the medication the first task was to finish off the blog entry for yesterday. And the second task, after breakfast, was to deal with the notes that had found their way onto the dictaphone during the night.

Norma Edwards was going through all of my paperwork and had transcribed all of my dictaphone notes. She’s examined every file in detail and built up quite a file on me and was now coming into avenge herself and do her best to get me out of the office and put pressure on me about the work that I hadn’t been doing, all that kind of thing. One thing that was going through their minds too was about my injury where I was saying that I wasn’t able to move around very well so they were following me around this afternoon and I was pushing this trolley around. We ended up going through something like a kids’ library where there were loads of kids sitting around with a stamp collection. I had to go past them and Norma Edwards and this guy were following me, watching how I walked, all of this kind of thing. At one stage they asked to see the photos that I had taken that particular day so I told her to clear off. She asked for my dictaphone notes so I told her to clear off as well. I was half anticipating her to ask for the photos that I had taken when we had got back to the office after this walk and I was ready to tell her to clear off as well. But there was something specific she had asked for and I can’t remember what it was. My intention was to get her to ask it in writing because employers aren’t allowed to ask for that from their employees but she had asked in the past so I wanted her to ask again and put it in writing so that I could take it to the Employment Tribunal and have them look at it for me. This thing with Norma Edwards though – there was a little baby microphone inside my portable radio so that every time you switched it on you could hear exactly what I was saying. She’d asked me a few times to upgrade it so I could get a bigger microphone to put in it and she thought that each time that I refused the opportunity was to spite her.

So I’ve no idea what that was all about.

After that I grabbed a shower, took the glass, metal and plastic out to the recycling, and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills.

First stop was NOZ as I mentioned earlier. Nothing of any great excitement there except a pack of alcohol-free raspberry beer. And it’s delicious too so I hope they have more in next week.

After that, I went to Action up the road. I wanted some small pyrex bowls for the microwave and some glass bottles for my drinks. No luck, of course, but they did have some really cheap luggage labels which I need, and some really cheap memory sticks. I wanted one for the radio stuff and strange as it is to say it, I can’t seem to lay my hand on any of the ones that I have lying around here.

Final stop was LeClerc and here I really did spend up. In my new year resolution to move away from bottled water I went and purchased myself a sodastream.

As well as that, apart from the usual shopping I bought a couple of glass bottles, a proper liquid sieve and a proper purée squidger. They had some cheap glass bowls in too which I thought might be microwavable and they were at the right price to try (and they aren’t and it took me 20 minutes to clean up the debris).

After lunch I put a few things away and then sorted out the cordial that I’d brewed. Filtered it all out with the series of sieves and then squidged the solids to obtain some more strong liquid and added that back into the mixture, and then dropped half of it onto the floor so I had to wash the floor.

At 17:00 I set out up town, firstly to the railway station to change my ticket. I arrived at 17:25 knowing full well that the ticket office is open until 17:30 but it was closed up and abandoned.

It looks as if we haven’t had the last laugh yet.

And so I carried on up the road.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the new building that’s been taking place in the avenue des Matignon just now. It’s now finished and a tenant has moved in.

La Vie Claire is a bio food shop and the town needs one to combat the complacency of the Bio-Coop.

With 10 minutes to kill, I went in for a nosey. The vegan cheese section is very limited and shockingly expensive, but the rest of the stuff is quite competitively priced and I shall be making further enquiries in due course. I was specially impressed with the price of the tahini and the vegan sausages.

And now up the road for the football.

At the Stade Louis Dior US Granvillais were entertaining AS Vitré, a couple of places below them in the table

AS Vitré didn’t really threaten all that much, although they did hit the post early on.

On the other hand, US Granvillais were pretty rampant. They soaked up the pressure and then broke away quite quickly, going down the centre as well as both flanks

And when I say “US Granvillais”, I really mean William Sea at centre-forward.

I’ve probably mentioned at some time or other that he’s a former professional but has been out of the game for a while with an serious injury. I didn’t think all that much of him at first as he didn’t seem all that interested, but now I put that down to lack of match fitness.

This last few weeks I’ve been much more impressed with him. You can see when he’s on the field that he moves about in a different way, much more like a professional, in sharp contrast to most of the others.

He’s quite powerful too and quite prepared to get in and mix it with the defenders, something that the remaining players in the side, all lightweights, aren’t able to do. Any defender who comes up against William Sea will certainly know about it.

He throws himself around and fights for everything, and tonight we were treated to a masterclass performance of exactly how a centre-forward should play.

We had a delicious overhead kick in a crowded penalty area, a header that went just wide, a rounding of the keeper that was desperately scrambled off the goal-line by a defender, all kinds of things. The only thing that we didn’t get from William Sea was a goal, but I’m sure that it will come.

And then with 15 minutes to play, we had another one of these really bizarre substitutions that we see so often. Having attacked the defence in spades for 75 minutes and had them under all kinds of pressure and stress, William Sea was withdrawn from the game.

And I just don’t understand that at all.

But it didn’t matter as Granville won 2-0. The first goal was a scramble on the goal-line with the keeper eventually grabbing the ball, but the linesman reckoned that it had crossed the line.

The second was from a breakaway through the defence and a delightful pull-back to flat-foot the keeper with the player running in behind side-footing into the empty net.

At full-time I walked back home and had tea, out of a tin.

Now I’m off to bed and having a lie-in. And then I’ll try to have another go at changing this ticket. It’s quite a fight, isn’t it?

Friday 10th January 2020 – HE WHO LAUGHS LAST …

… usually lasts longest and loudest too. And that’s certainly the case with me and my rail ticket.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my adventures at the railway station at Granville yesterday and how they wouldn’t exchange the return ticket because the return train was running – regardless of the fact that as the outward train was cancelled, I couldn’t get out to catch the one back.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “hooray” – ed … I had an e-mail informing me that the return train has now been cancelled. So, off to the station tomorrow to have another go at sorting them out.

But talking of sorting out, I still haven’t sorted out this sleep thing. I heard the first two alarms go off and while I was trying to find the energy and courage to get out of bed, the third one rang too, so I missed that.

But anyway, that was the signal to leave the bed. I went and had my medication.

With a brief pause for breakfast I carried on with the radio project about the football. And by 09:45 it was all done and dusted. And even if I say it myself, it was pretty good and I’m pleased with it. It’s all been sent off now and it’s in the hands of the Admin who will decide whether or not to broadcast it.

And now to turn to important things. After their victory against FC Versailles 78, Granville have drawn none other than Olympique Marseille in the French Cup.

The Stade Louis Dior is deemed to be unsuitable so the match is to be played at Caen. And even so, I’m expecting a healthy demand for tickets. Terry wants to come too so I did some searching about on the internet, found the website of the stadium and Lo! And Behold! There are two tickets for the football now sitting on my desk.

No intention of missing this.

That was the cue for me to go off into town to La Mie Caline for my bread.

On the way down there I passed by the Chantier navale to look and see what was happening. Spirit of Conrad is still there of course – I think that she’s moved in for the duration – but there’s a new addition today. The trawler at the back.

She must have slipped in on the morning tide, I reckon.

We’ve mentioned just recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the ships that are disappearing one by one from the port.

Granville went a few days ago, followed by Victor Hugo. Today though, it’s the turn of Chausiais to put in a disappearing act. Joly France is over there at the ferry terminal but she isn’t.

So I wonder where all of these ships are going. It’s a mystery to me.

But here’s a thing.

Walking along the rue du Port after my little inspection of the Chantier navale my perambulations were interrupted by this car going past. a Citroen traction avant of course and a later model one at that. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one of those on the road.

They are usually all black but I’ve seen the odd grey one and a white one, but I don’t recall seeing a blue one before. The one in my barn is black, by the way.

Pushing on (or pushing off, as the case may be) I eschewed the passage over the harbour gates and instead wandered on down to see what was going on at the old abandoned railway network.

We’d seen them yesterday digging up around the railway lines so I had promised myself a closer look. And sure enough, not only are they digging up around the lines, they seem to be pulling them up too.

It looks like the … errrr … end of the line for the railway network in the port

And so it is too.

There was a workman wandering around the site so I buttonholed him and enquired about the project. It seems that they are going to be working on the car park and making it more attractive to visitors. This means that the rails have to go and they won’t be coming back.

Time for me to have to go too. I went off for my bread.

Back at the apartment I started to address the mountain of correspondence that had built up during my work-in. Pile of stuff needed answering and that is going to be today’s task, I reckon.

Mind you it might take longer than today, that’s for sure. Especially as I had another crash-out. This one a really good one too, just like the old days. Not a brief eye-closing affair but a proper deep disappearance into the void, curled up on my chair with no intention whatever of moving.

After lunch, there were the carrots. I’d bought 2 kilos the other day and they were lying about on the worktop so I attacked them too. They are all now peeled, diced, parboiled, drained, dried and and the freezer on the way to being frozen.

And how I wish that I had a bigger freezer because there is now absolutely no room for anything more and I need a bag of peas tomorrow.

Out on my rounds this afternoon, there wasn’t a great deal of anything at all happening.

A few people out there taking the air of course, and the usual fishing boats heading towards the harbour. La Grande Ancre was out there looking as if she’s heading back from Chausey.

She had a tractor on her decks a few days ago and was loading the other day or two at the crane. So maybe she’s been doing deliveries.

Back at the apartment again I could finally get on with the correspondence and sent out about 6 long e-mails to wish people a Merry Christmas (I was that far behind!). Still tons to do and it will have to be done another time as I’m in a rush.

While I was putting away the stuff in the freezer I found a slice of vegan leek and tofu pie from 3rd February 2019. So in the oven went that and a couple of potatoes while I boiled up some veg and gravy on the stove.

And what a delicious tea that all made.

One thing that I would like to do is to make a couple more pies but there isn’t the room in the freezer to store them which is a pity.

Off on my walk around the walls tonight.

The waves were quite impressive but it was too dark to see them properly so I went off for my run. I made 6 paces up the ramp before I ground to a halt – I’m not doing very well with this, am I?

No-one about at all so I carried on alone and passed this little street – the Venelle St Michel. I hadn’t really seen it before but it’s a good example of the streets here in the Old Town.

Three or four main streets, a couple of squares and the rest are all little alleys like these

By the time that I returned, it was the football. TNS v Newtown, and I don’t ever think that I have seen such a one-sided match as this ever before.

Newton were lucky, very lucky indeed to get NIL abut how on earth TNS only managed to score 2 goals with all of the dominance and possession that they had, we’ll never know.

Newton’s “attack” consisted of desperate long aimless punts upfield to no-one in particular and their two forwards hardly had a touch of the ball. They were substituted after about 70 minutes which was totally unfair in my opinion. It doesn’t matter how good you might be, you can’t play football if no-one gives you the ball.

And the man of the match? The commentators chose Ryan Brobbel but for me, it was Adrian Cieslewicz all night long. He had an astounding game down the right flank tonight.

On that note I’m off to bed. I’m so tired it’s unbelievable. I wanted to finish this before I went to bed but I’m afraid that there’s no chance of …

ZZZZZZ

Saturday 4th January 2020 – HERE I AM …

… back home again after my mega-day out on yet another coach outing.

And mega-day out it was too. With a somewhat late night, I was in no mood to leave the bed at … errr … 05:30 this morning, but needs must when the devil drives, although it took me a while to come to terms with the time.

No time for breakfast. Just enough time to throw something in a rucksack to nibble on, to make some butties from lunch, grab my equipment and head out of the door.

We had to present ourselves at the Stade Louis Dior at 07:00. I surprised myself by being there at 06:50

There were only a couple of the “Neva” buses – the buses that provide the public transport around the town – at the stadium so I was anticipating a hard ride all the way to Versailles.

But while I was waiting, I buttonholed the guy who beats the big plastic oil drum at the football matches and asked him a few questions about things.

It seems that my fears about the transport were unnecessary.

About 5 minutes after I arrived, so did the real transport. Autocars Lemare from down the road at Donville-les-Bains had been engaged and sent along three of their Van Hool executive coaches.

For a change, I drew a good number. A seat on the upper deck of an almost-new double decker. It’s been quite a while since I’ve travelled in such luxury, I’ll tell you that.

Even more surprisingly, we set off bang on 07:30 as advertised. It’s the first time that that’s ever happened.

The first part of the journey was in the dark and it wasn’t safe to move about, so I caught up with my beauty sleep for an hour or so. But once the light came up and I could see what I was doing, I set to work.

Having made an executive decision (that is, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, a decision that if it goes wrong, the person doing it is executed) to lead from the front, I took the microphone and dictaphone with me and interviewed the passengers about their support for the club and their reasons for going to the match.

The dictaphone and the mike work passably in “outside broadcast” situations at the budget end of the scale in which we work, and I can make quite presentable “outside broadcast” radio programmes with the computer. So I’m going to make one – not about the match itself because by the time I will have finished it, it will be old news, but about the supporters.

My own personal opinion is that the club ought to do more to encourage supporters to travel to “away” matches and so having a captive audience to work with, I might make something that will knock on a few doors.

Having stopped on the way up for a coffee, we arrived at the Stade de Montbauron in Versailles at just after 11:30, for a 13:00 kick-off.

We had to loiter around for a while. They were only letting us into the ground a handful at a tme so as not to cause congestion. That gave me an opportunity to chat to a few more passengers off the other buses.

But the real reason for loitering soon became apparent. Where we were to be standing was actually outside the perimeter of the ground and they wanted to have the opportunity of checking our tickets and our baggage without being overwhelmed in a flood of people.

Still an hour or so before kick-off and that gave me an opportunity to have a walk around and a look at what was going on.

First thing to do was to eye up the “opposition”. There were about four TV cameras (and maybe more) in the ground and they had a Mercedes Vito van that was kitted out as a mobile control centre.

What wouldn’t I give for something like this? Perhaps I ought to convert Caliburn.

As a treat, I found a bag of chips for myself and eventually managed to track down the stadium’s announcer who let me have a minute of his valuable time by telling me something of his club.

The Stade de Montbauron is another one of these one-sided wonders.

There’s a large concrete stand that could accommodate several thousand people and a large standing area in front of it. The “town end” and the far side are effectively inaccessible and the fourth end is a row of concrete steps that are quite uncomfortable to sit on, and in the open air.

My instincts were telling me that this wouldn’t be a nice place to be in the middle of January in a freezing cold rainstorm.

Before the kick-off, I’d spoken to one of the crowd control people from FC Versailles 78.

He told me that they were expecting a crowd of maybe just over a thousand, of which 300 were from Granville. I’d heard this “300” figure from elsewhere but I suspected this to be somewhat optimistic.

But no matter how many there were, they were making far more noise than the home side and that’s what counts.

As for the match itself, I’m left shaking my head about this one.

For the first 25 minutes or so FC Versailles 78 were like a runaway train as they smashed their way into the Granville defence. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in that period when Granville had the ball in the Versailles half.

In fact, I was fearing the worst.

And that’s no surprise because after 14 minutes, they were 1-0 ahead.

Yet another break into the Granville penalty area. A Versailles player in a marvellous position to shoot when a desperate last-ditch sliding tackle robs him of the ball.

The ball bobbles up, hits the Versailles player and bounces back into the Granville defender and hits him – on the arm.

No doubt about it – definitely a penalty within the Laws of the Game. But how unlucky can you be?

For the penalty, the Granville goalkeeper dived to the right, only to be outdone by a beautiful “Panenka” penalty right down the middle.

After 25 minutes, a most astonishing thing happened.

Granville, who up to that moment had been totally anonymous and had barely troubled the linesman down at that end, suddenly came to life.

Lambarette picked up a loose ball in his own area and set off at a hell of a pace down the field on one of the mazy runs that he does and which usually lead nowhere.

But this time, he had half a yard on everyone else and was clear down the field. As the Versailles keeper came out to challenge him, he simply tried a delightful lob right over the keeper and the ball went into the Versailles net for the equaliser.

By my reckoning, that was Granville’s first shot on goal.

The second half started as the first half, with Versailles throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Granville’s defence but Granville stood firm.

Granville’s response was just a whole series of aimless hoofs upfield in the general direction of Ibaye but usually going nowhere near him.

One of Granville’s midfielders I had particularly noticed because up until that moment he had done nothing at all and as a substitute was warming up on the touchline, my money was on him coming off.

But right at that moment as I was musing on the subject, one of these aimless hoofs suddenly landed at his feet. A little bit of trickery found him free of two defenders and one-on-one with the keeper. The keeper went down far too early so the Granville midfielder simply rounded him and tapped the ball in the empty net.

Granville in front? I don’t think that anyone could believe it from the way that the match had been going to that point.

Late in the game Ibaye was replaced and William Sea came on to go upfront. He’s an ex-professional from the Premier League but had a lot of time out with injury and came to Granville to try to rehabilitate himself.

He’s not done much to date, which is probably not a surprise given how long he’s been out, but he’s big and strong and knows the game. Within about 30 seconds of his entry onto the field he had left his mark on both the Versailles centre-halves, and I do actually mean that.

Granville’s forward line definitely became much more lively and purposeful with him up front. It’s one thing that the club has been lacking – a big bruiser up front, and if ever he recovers even half his form he’ll be a handful for any defence at this level.

So the final whistle went and Granville had surprisingly won it. No-one would have given any sort of odds whatever on that result after 20 minutes.

The players came down to see the supporters afterwards to thank them for turning up. There’s no doubt about it – the noise that the fans had made throughout the game had been impressive.

The FC Versailles 78 fans left the ground shaking their heads in disbelief, and who can blame them?

My work was not over though.

With microphone and dictaphone in hand, I went amongst the crowd and asked several of them their thoughts.

One thing that is important is that I like to engage the youth in any activity like this because youth are the future. So I talked to several kids as well as adults. There were three girls aged about 12 or 13 who I’d seen at every Granville match and who usually chatted away to everyone about anyone and anything.

And they were great, until I produced the microphone. They suddenly dried up and you couldn’t get a word out of them. We saw that phenomenon with one of the girls from Uummannaq the other week.

On the other hand, a boy and a girl aged about 9 could have talked all night to me without the slightest air of self-consciousness and that will be some really good radio if it works.

Having had a bad night, I had a sleep for an hour or so on the way back, but a coffee at a motorway service area awoke me.

So now I’m back home. Tea was out of a tin and seeing as I made almost 110% of my daily activity I didn’t go for a walk tonight.

What I’ll do is have a lie in tomorrow and then try my best to finish the Bain des Manchots. I want that out of the way so that I can do this football supporters’ programme.

There’s this feelign in the back of my mind that for the next foreseeable future i’m going to be up against it.

Saturday 28th December 2019 – HOW ABOUT …

… this as a fine way to start off the morning?

There we were, Caliburn and I, sitting in the car park just above the chantier navale down the road here, watching the sun rise above the horizon over St Pair sur Mer and the Baie de Mont St Michel.

That’s not a sight that I’m likely to see very often – the sunrise. We have seen it before on a few occasions but very very rarely when we are back home.

But just in case you are wondering, which I’m sure you are, this wasn’t at some ridiculous hour like 04:00, this was the situation at just before 09:00 this morning. It’s the middle of winter as you know.

Last night, I was in bed realtively early compared to how its been just recently. And although it was a struggle, I did actually make it up out of bed before the third alarm at 06:20. Only just, but nevertheless …

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes, as I had in fact been on my travels during the night as I discovered. I didn’t remember much about them except at one point I was on a bus as a passenger. I’d been taking an express bus strip from somewhere or other and I’d got to be picked up and I wasn’t sure whether my luggage had been put in the boot or not, my green rucksack and a brown jacket. I went round the back to look and there was a guy there, and I was talking to him but suddenly the bus took off and we ended up the two of us sitting in the luggage boot having a chat about this and that, going around Crewe. I remember thinking that we can’t go all the way to Caen sitting here like this – we’re going to have to get out at one point, but anway that was that.
Earlier, there was a situation where I had a girlfriend and I was doing something and some guy, one of these arrogant pushy types, was talking to my girlfriend. He turned round and said “anyway, you’re with me now” to which this girl replied “no, no no I’m not. I’m with Eric (or whatever my name was at the time)”. He wasn’t used to being turned down like this and became quite annoyed by it.

Once breakfast was out of the way I split another digital album into its component tracks and that’s all looking good. Then I hit the streets.

As well as the gorgeous sunrise this morning, there was also activity at the ferry terminal.

Granville, the modern Channel Islands ferry that came from Sweden a few years ago, is at the ferry terminal and she looks as if she’s loading up ready for a trip out to Jersey this morning.

Thinking hard, I’m not at all sure that I’ve actually seen one of the Channel Islands ferries actually depart from the terminal. I’ll have to give this a miss too as I’m in a hurry.

Having visited LIDL on foot on Friday and not been tempted by anything on offer, I made my way straight to LeClerc.

It’s the tradition in France at New Year to eat oysters and to drink champagne. And sure enough, one of the local oyster-sellers has set up his stall just outside the supermarket today in order to catch the crowds.

And by the way – it’s not true that oysters are an aphrodisiac. I had 12 on my wedding night and only 10 of them worked.

In Leclerc I bought my ticket for the next football match – in Versailles! US Granville are away in the cup next weekend and once more, there are buses provided. If you pay for your seat on the bus (which I did – €10:00) the club will give you a free ticket to enter the ground.

Sounds very fair to me!

And even though I didn’t spend much money in LeClerc today, I was there for much longer than I wanted to be. For some reason which only they will know, a charge of about €3:60 was added to my bill “for Carte Noire coffee” – and I hadn’t bought any.

The girl at the cash desk couldn’t deal with it so I ended up having to go back to Reception where eventually, and not with just a little umming and ahhing either, I had my money back.

But I’ll watch my bill in future.

Another thing that I will watch will be the ice-cream freezer. Today, I found a tub of banana sorbet, 100% vegan. That’s my New Year treat and if it’s any good, which I hope it will be, I’ll be getting some more.

From LeClerc I went on to NOZ. And spent more money in there than I intended to too.

But the main reason for that was that they had a box of 7 high-quality “brand name” socks on offer at just €7:99. I get through cheap socks at an astonishing rate and yet some decent ones that I bought in 2013 are only just now wearing through and need to be replaced.

They also had twin-packs of proper woollen Arctic over-socks there too, so I bought one of those. If ever I go North again, which I hope to do, keeping my extremities warm is important.

And in that respect, rummaging around in the €0:99 bin I found another woolly hat.

Back here I put everything away and then for a little while I started the tidying up. Not for long though because I had to sit down after a while. So I had a coffee and vegetated.

Later this afternoon I went for my little walk around the headland.

There were crowds of people out there today because although it was grey and overcast, it wasn’t all that cold and the wind had dropped considerably too0

But it took me a while to get going. I was “detained” by Gribouille who came for a stroke and I ended up chatting to his mum for quite a while. I hadn’t seen her for ages.

There wasn’t anything else whatever of note going on so I did my circuit around the headland and came back home.

For all of the afternoon I’ve been alternating between cleaning and resting (and crashing out for 10 minutes too, unfortunately). I might be having visitors tomorrow so the place needs to look respectable.

At least the toilet and the bathroom are cleaned and the floors washed. The rest of the place has been vacuumed out and some attempt at tidying has been made.

Another thing that I did was to finish off the making of the rest of the lemon and ginger drink and it’s not too bad at all. 6 litres in all, I made.

The leftover pulp, now not too strong, is in the fridge and I added a little of it to tonight’s tea – a curry from October 2018 that I found in the freezer. It gave it a certain je ne sais quoi.

And while I was in LeClerc I bought some more ginger. I’ll let that ripen for a few days and then I’ll have a bash at doing something with some oranges. That should be interesting.

On my evening walk tonight, there wasn’t a soul about whatsoever. No idea why because it was a lovely evening.

Having been around the headland this afternoon, I took my walk around the walls tonight but there wasn’t anything of interest to photograph either.

With no-one about in the Square Maurice Marland, I could have my run without disturbing anyone or embarrassing myself, and I made it all the way across and half-way up the ramp. I don’t suppose that I should be too disappointed with that.

Having seen Gribouille this afternoon, it was the turn of Minette this evening. She was sitting on her windowsill watching the world go by, and she let me give her a stroke for a few minutes

By the time I reached the apartment I noticed that I had done 83% of my day’s activities. And so with it being such a pleasant evening, I pushed on to continue my walk up towards the Pointe du Roc

Round in the harbour, there wasn’t anything worth seeing. Granville was back and moored up, so I walked on to the chantier navale to see how Spirit of Conrad and the fishing boat were doing.

Both are still there and on their own too, but I did notice that a new set of blocks had been laid out. Are we perhaps expecting another visitor some time soon?

While I was musing on the foregoing, my reverie was interrupted by the sound of a long-stroke diesel engine coming around the headland.

Not sure what it might be, I waited for a while until it came into view and sure enough, it’s another fishing vessel heading back into the harbour.

When I had started my walk a little earlier I’d noticed that there were half a dozen or so out there in the distance. They must be on their way home

While the fishing boat continued its progress towards the port, I continued mine, around the headland and then down the rue du Roc towards home.

And as I crossed the threshold into the apartment the fitbit passed over to 100% of my daily activity and that’s always good news.

And for some reason, that’s 8.4kms today. The daily activity target is slowly increasing. The machine is obviously noticing that my fitness level is improving.

There will be SHOCK! HORROR! an alarm call tomorrow. I’m off out to do another outside broadcast – but recorded this time.

Laurent and I have decided that we’ll do a few of these whenever there’s some kind of special activity going on, and tomorrow there’s the annual “polar dip” so we’re going round to interview the participants.

Not that you’ll catch me going in. I’ve done three of them already – up to my knees at Etah, 650 miles from the North Pole, up to my knees in Cambridge Bay in the North-West Passage around the top of Canada and up to my chest in a river in northern Labrador and that’s enough for me.

In any case I have a catheter in my chest as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and that prevents me from immersing myself.
“What would you do if you didn’t have the catheter in?” Castor asked me several weeks ago
“Ohhh – I’d think of another good excuse” I replied.

On that note, I’m off to bed. Goodnight

Thursday 26th December 2019 – I HOPE THAT …

… you all had a very nice, enjoyable and relaxing break from work. I know that I did – I did badger all today!

What with a really late night (or, more like, early morning) last night, I didn’t feel quite like getting up when I awoke at … err … 07:00. That wasn’t part of the plan. 09:45 was much more like it. At least it wasn’t as late as yesterday morning, was it?

Medication first, of course, and once it started to work I could have breakfast, including my fig roll thing without any jam.

After that, it was time to attack the dictaphone notes from my voyages through the night. And a welcome return to Castor, putting in her first appearance for several weeks, so hello to you!

Yes, she was there last night. I was doing some photography of the Civil War and she was helping me out but then of course I was on the Southern side and we were overwhelmed by the Northerners. I told her to make a run for it, to get out while the going was good but she couldn’t run so in the end she ended up staying with me. I had to think up various ways to avoid us being captured or recaptured by the Union Army, but I woke up almost immediately with a streaming head cold.
A little later on I’d been at work and I’d had all sorts of fun trying to go home. Previously I’d gone along and bought a pass for the train, which had cost me so much money, so I went and organised that. Then I gave the woman at the cash desk a ticket for another €50:00. She asked “ohh do you want another one?” I said “no, I want a 10-ride ticket for the … Err … STIB they call it in Brussels but it’s the De Lijn service in Antwerp”. She said “yes I can give you one of those but you know that it’s for all of Flanders”. I said “yes, but I just want it for Antwerp”. She gave me one of those. I took those and went outside, I wanted to go home but I heard a former friend of mine shout me from across the street “isn’t it tonight we’re going to this auto wiring course?” I thought “yes it is actually” but I couldn’t remember whether it was at 18:00 or 19:00 and in any case I was too tired and in no real mood to go. We got to a road junction, I was on foot, and I had to go to the right but it was getting difficult to turn. I couldn’t work out how I was going to turn in front of all this traffic. In the end I just stepped out and walked across the road hoping that the traffic would stop which was something that I wouldn’t normally do, but I did it then. The conversation then moved on to a discussion about the radio programmes. I said something like “my radio programmes …” but a couple of people said “OUR radio programmes …” because of course they were the audience. Anyway I can’t remember where it went after this. It certainly went somewhere but I just don’t remember any more of it.
But somewhere in that dream just then there was something about music as well – I was having to organise some music for a play in the theatre and I’m not quite sure where that fitted in either. But later on I was with TOTGA or Castor someone like that, someone I was very attached to. I’d been talking to my brother earlier in hospital where he was a patient about working hours regulations in Victorian days. When I came back, there was TOTGA or Castor or whoever poring over some kind of document which was talking about working hours and how they were having to work a lot longer hours in those days. I said “yes, funnily enough I was just talking to my brother about this and how they reduced the working hours from 6 days to 5.5” – or 7 days to 6 days, I can’t remember now. She said “yes but this is only 3 days”. I said that that would be a three day shift – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they’d do Thursday Friday Saturday then they would have a day off”. She said “no, it definitely refers to Yo-Yo here”. That was her way of sounding on three days on and three days off. We had a bit of a discussion about that because I could see her point of view and the logic behind her argument but I was convinced that she was wrong. That’s not the way that I understood working hours to have worked in Victorian times.

After that, I have emulated my namesake the mathematician by doing three-fifths of five-eights of … err … nothing whatsoever. I’ve just sat around doing some personal stuff and drinking a couple of cans of alcohol-free beer. I suddenly realised that back i last January I had bought a whole tray of the stuff from NOZ and it needed drinking.

There was however football on the internet. The Welsh Premier League, Caernarfon v Bala Town. Bala have probably two of the top five players in the Welsh Premier League – Henry Jones and Chris Venables – in their team and they can be devastating when they are on form, which unfortunately isn’t as often as it should be.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … the biggest problem in the Welsh Premier League is the lack of consistency.

On the other hand, Caernarfon doesn’t have any star players but their manager Sean Eardley has moulded them into a proper team. They are one of the few sides that actually does play like a team rather than a collection of individuals, and they are urged on by the largest and most partisan crowds by a country mile in Welsh domestic football.

Caernarfon had by far the most of the play and hit the woodwork on a couple of occasions but Tibbetts in the Bala goal didn’t have too much to do. Bala on the other hand had few chances but took those that they had, although had Alex Ramsey not been stuffed full of Christmas pudding he might have prevented them.

2-1 to Bala it finished, and I suppose that it was about right. And Bala’s goalscorer? Chris Venables got them both.

Before the football though, I went out for my afternoon walk, having missed the morning one again today.

Although it wasn’t raining, it was pretty near enough and you can tell from the photo of this fishing boat out there in the English Channel just how miserable the weather was.

In fact I was glad that I didn’t have to go very far.

Here’s another fishing boat out there in the English Channel. In fact I counted about half a dozen out there fishing today.

So I carried on with my walk. Crowds of people out there braving the miserable, grey skies, but (for a change no-one whom I knew).

And like yesterday, I went the long way round, down the new pathway that reopened in early summer.

All along the watchto … errr .. quayside I went and over to the Fish Processing plant to see what was happening here.

In nautical terms, this is called NAABSA – “Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground” – and you’ll see many harbours described in pilots’ handbooks as “NAABSA” harbours, which means that the ships will sit safely on the bottom when the tides go out and refloat when they come back in.

Some big ships -and big harbours – too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the gravel boats of a couple of thousand tonnes that come here occasionally.

Sometimes they unload at Ridham Dock, near Sittingbourne in Kent, and Ridham Dock is a NAABSA harbour.

But none of the foregoing will explain why this fishing boat is sitting here like piffy on a rock with the tide long-since gone out to sea.

With tha harbour gates closed, I walked across the footway over the top and down that side of the harbour, but there was nothing going on there today. For a change, the gates were open which saved me a mountaineering effort like I had on Christmas Eve.

For a change I walked through a few of the back streets of the town centre and came to a section where a couple of side streets have been closed off.

It seems that the reason for this is to do with this house here in the rue Ernest Lefrant. Reading the notices plastered to the door, it seems that this is a wooden-framed house and the wood on two sides is in such bad condition that there is a risk of it all collapsing.

This is the second risque de péril imminente notice that we’ve seen just recently. A house and shop in the rue Couraye was served with a similar notice just before Christmas.

Also in the rue Ernest Lefrant is this strange graffiti on the side wall of a building.

Don’t ask me to what it’s referring because I have no idea. But I do recognise the style and it’s very similar to a lot of other bizarre graffiti around the town.

That’s something else that I shall have to add to my list of things to do – track down the author and ask him what “legalise crabe extra” is all about

With nothing else going on in town I headed for home and my football match.

Quite a few people out and about in the rue des Juifs, and there was now a lot going on in the outer tidal harbour too. The fishing boats that had been queueing up outside were now starting to come in to unload.

You jusst need to look at the seagulls hovering around to tell that this boat is fully loaded with a decent catch.

But you can see how quickly the tide turns and comes in here in Granville.

There’s just 35 minutes between the photo of the fishing boat aground earlier on and this photo here and the fishing boat is now well in the water.

You can see how many of the smaller fishing boats come in to unload here, and the crowds of people up on top with their vehicles and equipment helping to unload the catch.

After the football I had tea – vegetables and pasta tossed in olive oil, tarragon, black pepper, garlic and vegan cheese. And followed by Christmas cake for pudding.

Only a short walk this evening though. It was raining really heavily and there was what Doctor Spooner would have called a “Sea Pouper” meaning that you couldn’t see very far in front. Soaked to the skin after half a mile so I gave up and came home.

The new strings on the acoustic bass are really good and it now plays like it’s supposed to, for the first time. It was a pleasure to play along to some music on the computer.

So it’s late and I’m tired, so off to bed. Work starts again tomorrow and there’s a lot to do. I need to be on form.

Friday 20th December 2019 – FOR A FLEETING MOMENT …

… I actually had something like a stress-free existence. And it was looking so good too.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long.

It all started so well too. A late-ish night it might have been, but I was out like a light and slept right through until the alarm went off. And I beat the third alarm out of bed quite easily too.

As for a nocturnal voyage, It was something to do with a young girl last night. I can’t remember very much about it but I do remember that she was swimming around in this water and every time that she got close to the edge of the water she ended up being further away again. She then had to swim for the shore and when she’d be close to the shore she would end up back out again. Unfortunately I don’t remember anything about it particularly other than that, which is quite a shame because it must have been exciting.

So having had the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes from last night and then went off for breakfast.

Back here afterwards I cut up the sound tracks of a couple of albums that I had downloaded as part of my digital upgrading. It took me a while because I was having a chat with someone on the internet as I was doing it and it was difficult to concentrate.

Next task was to turn my attention to upgrading the blog entries for last week. I’m now all the way back to Wednesday 11th December and had things continued to go my way I might have done more too.

Of course, I had to go into town to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette for lunch.

We had yet another wicked wind this morning and I stood on my vantage point overlooking the harbour watching a couple of fishing boats battling their way through the waves – one coming in and the other one going out.

And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I don’t envy them in the least having to go out in this weather.

Remember yesterday when we saw the mini digger and the little lorry clearing up some of the rubble at the foor of the city walls in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne where they had been doing all of the repair work?

As you might expect, I took the opportunity to go that way round to see what they had been up to, and it certainly has made quite a difference. It’s actually looking like it’s supposed to and I don’t think that it will be too long before it’s all finished.

On that note, I came back to my apartment with my dejeunette.

At 13:00, as usual, I stopped work to have lunch and then back to my desk and back to work. This afternoon I rather … errr … had a little rest for 10 minutes and that dismayed me because I’d been doing so well. And then I had an internet issue to deal with.

For some unknown reason, none of my *.ftp programs are working. I’m having to upload my files through the control panel of my web server and that’s not ideal at all. I’ve been “in negotiation” with my web host for much of the afternoon trying to resolve the issue.

Another thing that I did was to change the bedding. I haven’t done that since I came back from North America and so it was in the kind of condition that it walked into the washing machine all on its own.

There was the afternoon walk of course and it was fairly pleasant out there because the high winds seem to have died down for the moment.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are starting to see piles of fishing boats trying their luck in the bay here off the coast of Bréhal Plage. There weren’t any out there today but we can see that there’s another one of these mysterious buoys bobbing around in the water out there.

One of these days I’ll catch the boat that’s doing it and then I can go down into port to interrogate the skipper.

The atmospheric conditions were quite good today too.

There have been a few of these days just recently where the sky has been so clear that the views have been absolutely excellent. We had one the other day when the Ile de Chausey was looking splendid in the sun, and it was another one like that today.

In fact the sky was so clear that you could see the waves actually breaking on the shore and on the rocks over there, all that distance away.

Although the wind had dropped, there was still a heavy sea and so I was surprised when I rounded the headland to see Thora in the harbour again.

Not surprised that she had battled the stormy seas becasue I didn’t doubt that for a moment, but surprised that there was such a quick turn-round from her last visit. I don’t know what’s going on but the cynic in me suggests that the Brits in the Channel Islands are busy stockpiling supplies ready for the hardest Brexit ever known to man.

Yes, I’ve read the papers and seen the vote. And if the British want to go to hell in a handcart, that’s their affair.

back in the apartment it was shower time – if I’m having clean bedding I’m going to have a clean me. And here’s a surprise – and a pleasant one too. I’m below my target weight. Yes, a weight that I never ever thought that I would see ever again when I was weighing 13 kilos more than this 12 months ago.

After the shower I set the washing machine going and then headed out up town to the Centre Agora. Tomorrow we’re doing our first Outside Broadcast and we need to be clued up about what we are supposed to be doing.

On the way out I went past the city walls in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne to see what they had been up to now that they had knocked off. And you can see that not only have they managed to clean up a good proportion of the area, they’ve moved the dencing so that people can now walk around on there.

Doesn’t it look quite different from before they started? I’ll have to sort out a photo so we can see the difference.

at the meeting it seems to have been decided that I’m “outside techie” for a couple of the reporters, and it also seems that due to one of our interviewees withdrawing his co-operation I have to do a Christmas radio show live to plug the gap.

On the way back I went to LIDL for some supplies – one less thing to do tomorrow – and just about made it before they closed the shop.

Strange as it might seem, I don’t recall having been out down on the north side of town in the dark since they installed all of the Christmas lights. And so I was keen to see how it had all turned out.

This is the view of the little square where the rue Paul Poirier joins the rue Georges Clemenceau. I dunno about you but I was expecting rather more of the Christmas decoration and lights than this. It’s something of a disappoinment as far as I’m concerned.

They could at least have festooned the rest of the trees there with LEDs to add to the ambience. After all, this is the entry to the town for those coming from the north.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the decorations in the rue des Juifs a couple of days ago.

They didn’t look all that impressive in the daylight, the decorations that they had put over the bollards, and at night it isn’t an awful lot better. The rue des Juifs is said by many to be the trendiest street in town and it’s where all of the art galleries and the like might be found.

And if a bunch of artists and gallery owners can’t get together and produce something more exciting and interesting than this, then that is really sad.

Back here I had tea – taco rolls with rice and veg – and then watched the football on the internet. TNS v Cardiff Met. 1st v 8th.

TNS had, as you might expect, the lion’s share of the game but were undone after a couple of minutes by a beautiful set piece from the Met.

TNS equalised shortly after and it was surely going to be a case of how many they could score in the rest of the match. Will Fuller in the Met goal kept them out with some excellent keeping, and then something astonishing happened.

Fuller pulled of two consecutive saves at point-blank range, either of which could (and should) have ended up in the back of the net. But the second one, he hung on to the ball, then cleared it upfield where The Cardiff Met striker Will Evans slipped his marker and volleyed the ball into the TNS net.

Despite having a man sent off later in the game and TNS throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the Met, they hung on for what was a most unlikely victory and a very rare TNS home defeat.

Then I had work to do. I hung out the washing from earlier and then cracked on with the music. Hans had sent me some of his stuff and I found a few other tracks, all of which needed converting to *.mp3 format and (in Hans’s case) some digital enhancement. Then, adding a couple of songs from my own collection, I ended up with enough to plug the hole.

They had to be sent off to be uploaded to the server, which is completed, so I can finish my blog and go to sleep.

One of these days I’ll have an early night.

Friday 13th December 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that my blood count has gone up yet again. It’s now at 9.2 which is pretty astonishing as far as I am concerned. And I made a point to ask exactly what treatment they are giving me for my illness and the answer is “nothing”. The tablets that I take are to counter various side effects and the medication is to boost up my immune system.

But as for the illness, absolutely nothing.

Mind you, it’s pretty disconcerting to see that your doctor needs medical treatment herself. She had problems with her foot. But nevertheless, she can come and soothe my fevered brow any time she likes. This is a University hospital and all of the staff at this level are young University students. There has to be some benefit of my illness and I intend to make the most of it.

But as for bad news, then there’s plenty of that.

Firstly, my train out of Paris has been cancelled on Sunday due to the strike. It’s not the end of the world though because there are other solutions, amongst which “hiring a car” should never be ruled out. But there are options other than that to consider first.

Even so, hiring a car might sound expensive to some, but when you think about the price of a hotel in Paris, it’s not an outrageous proposition at all.

And that’s not all. You’ve all heard about the results of the Uk General Election where 14 million people voted for the Fascists and only 6.5 million voted to revoke the exit from the EU.

That in itself isn’t so important. But what IS important is that I now lose

Some of my UK pension rights
my health insurance rights
my employment rights
my rights of free movement and residence in the EU

And when one of my (ex) friends in the UK posted something bewailing her lot and I replied telling her to make the most of what she’ll be getting because I’ll be getting much worse than that, she called me all kinds of names (honestly!) and accused me of all kinds of things for not sympathising with her, even though she didn’t spend a single moment thinking about my lot.

But that’s the true spirit of the British people. Mean, narrow-minded, selfish, self-centred. I’m better off without these people dragging me down. And isn’t that just why I abandoned everyone in the UK in the first place? It can’t be a coincidence that they all end up like that. They all show their true colours eventually.

It’s definitely Friday 13th today!

Last night I wanted an early night so I tried the usual standby – switch on the laptop to watch a film. And sure enough, it works every time. Within 10 minutes I was away.

And right away too. There are a few files on the dictaphone that weren’t there when I went to bed, so it should be interesting to see those when I make it back home.

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 etc but seeing as my appointment at Castle Anthrax wasn’t until this afternoon I was in no rush to rouse myself. A little lie-in did me good and it was 07:30 when I finally showed a leg.

This morning was spent firstly dealing with last night’s little perambulations.

I vaguely remember something about ships and fuel tankers having to reposition themselves and so on. Some captain had to reposition his ship but he hadn’t brought his money with him so it was rather pointless. i’d ended up at my electronic studio and I was trying to work on something. I managed to produce a really really good electronic music track and while I was at it I produced some vocals and overdubbed them over a piece of music that someone else had written and they were really really good. A few people came round to my house to do something with the computer so I had these tracks playing in the background and they looked really impressed. Although after a few minutes they asked “are we going to get on with some work or are we going to listen to this all day?” and I thought that maybe I had played a little too much and that was a shame because I was so impressed with what I’d done.
Sometime later we were back with the songs again and someone was going to bring some music over and we were going to do all of the singing. It meant getting out of this crowded tram. Someone was fighting their way to the door but the doors closed and there was a cry of “jam the door”. Someone stuck their foot in it so that it wouldn’t close, and it rebounded open. This person had to fight their way out through the crowds and out of the door. We ended up talking about fishing again and the situation of the British having sold all their permits and are now getting upset because the permits that they sold are now making money and the ones that they still have aren’t, and as usual.

Then we had the issue of dealing with the egocentric and selfish Brits in the UK but I did tear myself away to go to the Delhaize for shopping. Pasta, burgers and frozen veg will be on the menu or the next few days.

Back here, I had a shower and a clothes wash, made my butties and then headed for the hospital, calling at the Delhaize in town on the way because I had forgotten the vegan cheese and vegan mayonnaise.

Pouring down with rain now but I pushed on regardless.

My route today took me, as usual, down the Brusselsestraat and past St Pieter’s Hospital. An early and significant casualty of the linguistic war, this huge modern hospital was constructed to serve the French community, apparently (so I was told) who, once it was built, created a new town called Louvain-le-Neuve and moved all of their infrastructure out there instead.

The memory that I will always retain of this place as they make a serious start on demolishing it is that there were still the makers’ labels on the double-glazed windows on some of the floors because the rooms on those floors had never even been occupied.

By the time that I reached the hospital I was looking something like a drowned rat. 13:30 was my appointment but I was treated at 13:45 and then I was sat in a chair for a while as the medication was pumped into me.

Rosemary rang and we had a good chat while it was all going on, and eventually I was thrown out. A call at the pharmacy for medication and then down into town.

Last time that we were here they were excavating a giant hole in the middle of the car park on the Jacobsplein, and I was interested to see how they were getting on and, more importantly, what they were going to be doign with it.

So here I am, and all that I can say is that in the last 4 weeks or so there hasn’t been very much change in the situation. The hole is still there and there doesn’t seem to be anythign to indicate why they have actually gone and dug it out.

It’s probably one of those things where time wil ltell and I should come back in four weeks time where I shall be equally confounded.

A visit to the Origin’O Health Food shop was also on the cards The Delhaize doesn’t sell all the vegan product that I need.

Before I went in though, I took the opportunity to take a photo of the Christmas lights in the Vismarkt. You can do quite a lot with modern LED lighting and this looked particularly good to me.

That was the cue to go into the shop and see what was on offer. They had some of that nice smoked vegan cheese that I had before so I bought some more of that, as well as some more grated cheese for the pizzas and the cheese sauces.

Though the rainstorm had died down by now, it was still wet and miserable going back to my little room.

For that reason, and also for the fact that I had the little Nikon 1 with me and not the big D500 with me, I didn’t hang around too long looking at Leuven’s Christmas lights, beautiful as they might be like these ones in the Bondgenotenlaan.

What I’ll have to do is that if it’s not raining tomorrow evening, I’ll bring the big Nikon out for a walk and go on a prowl around the city to see what I can see.

By the time that I arrived back at my room it wasn’t far off tea time so I made myself some food. And it wasn’t too bad either. It’ll keep the wolf from the door for a while.

There was football on the internet later. While Connah’s Quay Nomads were being turned over by Cefn Druids, we were being treated to Barry Town v TNS.

And it was easy to see why TNS have been Champions of the Welsh Premier League for the last couple of hundred years. Barry Town had been leading the league at one point this season but TNS dealt with them in summary fashion, winning 4-1 away from home without even breaking sweat.

First to the ball on almost every occasion they never looked in trouble at all and had Ratcliffe in the Barry goal not played a blinder, TNS could easily have doubled their tally.

As far as I’m concerned, they may as well give the title to TNS right now because no-one is ever going to stop them. They could even afford the luxury of leaving Greg Draper their leading scorer on the bench until about the 80th minute.

On that note, I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough for now. Nothing planned for tomorrow except to recover from today so if the weather has improved I’ll just go for a long walk.

See you tomorrow.

Incidentally, I did take some photos of the Christmas lights of the city. Too many to put on this page so if you want to see them you need to go to this page

Saturday 7th December 2019 – WHAT DO YOU THINK …

… of the Christmas decorations in the rue Paul Poirier this year, Strawberry Moose?

Well, of course, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that but nevertheless, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m singularly unimpressed by the (lack of) imagination shown by the city fathers (and mothers) this year.

It’s not a great deal different that in any preceding year and when I see some of the effort that goes into making the chars, the carnaval floats, each year, I was expecting more than this, I have to say.

But talking of imagination, my imagination was working overtime last night. Despite being a night much (indeed very much) later than I had intended, and despite struggling to my feet somewhere in the same vicinity as the alarm calls, there was plenty of time to go off on a ramble.
And that was even though it took absolutely ages and ages and ages to go off to sleep last night. At one stage I thought that it must be getting light by now and I still hadn’t off to sleep, but sleep I must have done and dream I certainly did. I was with a group of people and as is my wont, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’d given a few of them nicknames as would be appropriate. It actually came out in the discussion as I mentioned a nickname about someone or something. These people were all dying to know who it was and what I meant and what other nicknames I had given to anyone or anything else. There was one nickname in particular that I’d given to someone and I really didn’t want anyone to know because it was a very special nickname. So I was there and I decided that I would resist all efforts. One girl in particular came along and started to question me much more about this and this was a surprise really because it was this particular girl to whom I was referring with this special nickname. I told her that it wasn’t something that I usually talked about, who was what, and I was aware that I was fobbing them all off all the time. Just when the questioning was starting to become intense, I told the girl that if she guesses correctly I would give her my farm, something like that. But just as she started to question me intensely the alarm went off and I breathed a sigh of relief.

And I wonder who the girl was. And, much more interestingly, what the nickname was.

After breakfast I started to try to figure out a way of combining these … errr … 68 track fragments from the mixer panel into one coherent track that I could edit down, but after about three or four, I gave up the idea. The lack of a pause control (or “until I can figure out how to pause a recording” more likely) is putting the kybosh on any of my attempts to do anything with that right now.

And so I turned to my faithful old dictaphone. A mike socket in, a headphone monitoring socket, a USB cable connection and – a pause control (I’d made sure of that when I was buying that!)

Switching the mike setting to “unidirectional” instead of “omnidirectional”, I plugged one of the expensive mikes into the microphone socket and did a couple of trial dictaions.

Much to my surprise, the quality was phenomenal. Much better by far that any other recording equipment that I’ve had here. And in stereo too. So I bit the bullet and re-recorded the audio vocals onto that using the mike, and then uploaded it to the laptop.

Once it was on the laptop I started to make a start to edit it. And even though I say it myself, what I have done so far (because I haven’t done it all by any means) sounds quite impressive.

But at a certain point I had to give up. I’m going out shortly and I need to make my butties, so a trip down into town was called for.

The tide was well out this morning so I could go the long way round and over the path on top of the harbour gates and then alongside the quay that way.

And Normandy Trader was conspicuous by her absence. Sneaked out of the harbour under cover of darkness.

having picked up my dejeunette from la Mie Caline, I wandered for a couple of minutes into the town centre to see how the market traders were coping with the decorations.

And we were being entertained too. A duo, backed by digital music unfortunately, were singing “The Pink Aeroplane”.

And I bet that you don’t know of a song of that title, but it is in fact a mondegreen. It refers to the title of the song la Vie En Rose – “Life in the Pink” that was on several occasions misheard, as in any good mondegreen, as L’Avion Rose – “The Pink Aeroplane”

With nothing much else to do I had a good walk around the stage to watch them, but the Nikon 1, good little camera that it might be in normal circumstances, isn’t up to being pushed beyond its limits.

So as I was taking a photo of the girls still singing, someone nearby came into the frame and the camera focused on them and not on the stage.

Perhaps I should say that the Nikon 1 is always set on “manual exposure” as its whole purpose is to be a quick “point and shoot” camera, leaving the big Nikon D500 for the more challenging work, when I have it with me.

The automatic setting though isn’t light enough for my requirements, so I’ve set the function (FN) button to work the exposure compensation and I always go two stops down with that.

If there are any minor lighting challenges with that setting I can edit those out

Strawberry Moose who was with me in spirit, if not in body, drew my attention to this sign just here.

He’s absolutely right, of course. Security cameras are designed to prevent crime of course. But the word volée in French can mean two things. It really and literally means “flown”, but in common usage an article that has “flown” will mean that it has been stolen.

And this little play on words has been used to great effect when I lived in Belgium. The Belgian Army bought a load of helicopters from MV Agusta. These helicopters were totally useless, and it was very strongly believed that a pile of well-filled brown envelopes had passed underneath the table at the signing of the contract.

One Francohone comedian asked the question “what’s the difference between a Belgian Army helicopter and a Belgian Government Minister?”
“Well, in Belgium it’s the Ministers who voléew/em>”

Heading quickly home to organise a shower and make my butties ready for departure, my attention is drawn to yet another piece of pathetic parking – a subject that features quite often on these pages, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

And this isn’t just bad parking, this narrow street is actually a bus route and service buses come up here every 40 minutes or so. And they are pretty busy on a Saturday morning.

But don’t let that fact get in the way of a selfish effort to save oneself a 20-metre walk.

Back here I had a quick shower and clean up, made my butties and headed back out up town.

13:30 I had to be at the football stadium, and I was there by 12:15.

The crowds were already gathering, and quite right too. US Granville are playing away in the Coupe de France at Plabennec three hours or so away, and the club had laid on free transport for the supporters.

And that was a gesture that I appreciated very much and I wish that there were more opportunities to travel to away matches.

There were so many fans wishing to attend that there were actually two buses. Mine was the yellow Van Hool but there was this black one too.

All very nice, and took me back to my halcyon days when I used to drive tour buses like this all over Europe.

We were only about 20 minutes or so late getting away, which surprised me greatly, so I settled down to eat my butties and, shame as it is to admit it, slept for most of the way.

Not something that I really should be ashamed of, because I had had a bad night and it wasn’t as if there was anything else to do on board the bus.

Armed with the obligatory blue-and-white scarf (left over from a cup exploit a few years ago and cost e3:00 – still, the bus was free and the club deserved some reward) and a Normandy flag (free provided by the Normandy Chamber of Commerce) we poured out of the buses at the car park that had been set aside at the local high school up the road.

This young boy was very proud of his scarf and flag, and also his make-up too.

There was a girl on board the bus doing the make-up for free, but I declined. My mush is ugly enough without a load of makeup adding to it.

Down the street we all filed in a crocodile tothe football stadium, where the gates were firmly closed for another half-hour.

One idea that was in my mind was to go for a walk into town for a look around and see what was going on, but the stadium was quite some way out of town.

Much as I fancied a coffee, I could get one here in the ground.

With 90 minutes to go before kick-off I grabbed a coffee (and a bag of chips) and went for a walk around the ground.

The reason why it’s so far out of town is that it was formerly a farm, bought by the town in 1968 and transformed into a sports complex that was opened in 1972.

And, by looking at things, they did quite a good job of it too for a small town and a club playing in the equivalent of the Northern Premier League

There’s a main stand that runs down the side of the pitch like most football grounds, and also a smaller stand behind one of the goals.

That’s where we are installed – some form of crowd segregation I suppose – and I do have to say that the facilities here are somewhat better than Granville offers its away supporters when there was crowd segregation.

It was somewhat embarrassing to see the facilities (or lack thereof) offered to the Bordeaux fans at the stade Louis Dior two years ago.

The club had hired two coaches, as I think I explained earlier, and as they were pretty much full, that worked out at about 100 people or so.

As well as that, several people had come under their own steam (I’m not quite sure why when the buses were free) so by the time that kick-off took place, there were probably about 150 people in the away end.

That’s the figure that was reported by the club and it looks about right to me.

Plabennec play in white so Granville had to play in a blue kit tonight. And it brought them quite a bit of luck too.

It’s probably fair to say that Plabennec had the lion’s share of the game tonight, but they huffed and puffed their way through the match without threatening ever to bring Granville’s house down.

Granville in the meantime sat back and soaked up the pressure, setting out on a few forays of their own.

One thing that I have said … “and on many occasions too” – ed … is that the tactic that Granville adopts of playing the ball quickly down the wings counts for absolutely nothing if they can’t put the crosses into the penalty area and don’t have anyone taking advantage of them.

And so today it was a pleasant surprise when during a foray upfield after a corner kick, the big centre-half got his head to one of these crosses that usually pass uninterrupted over the goalmouth.

Never mind a goal, it almost burst the back of the net and just goes to show what you can do when you have the correct players and when you put your mind to it.

Later on in the match Granville scored a second from a well-worked routine just outside the penalty area.

That must have been a disappointment for Plabennec because at 1-0 down and having more of the ball there was always a possibility that they could pull something out for an equaliser, but at 2-0 down it was a uphill struggle.

That was how the match ended – 2-0 for Granville.

And at the final whistle the players came down to the away end to greet the fans. Something that I thought was a very nice gesture. It was only right too because the noise that the fans had kept up during the match had helped the team push onwards.

A real “12th man” in the stadium tonight.

On the way back, I slept for some of the way, which was just as well. There wasn’t much else going on.

And by the time that we returned to the Stade Louis Dior it was about 23:45. We’d had a really good afternoon out all together, and it was really nice of the club to lay on the buses for the fans.

It was just as well that I’d put on my winter woollies because it was pretty taters outside too by now.

My walk back home was a long, lonely, cold vigil. I was probably the only person out there at that time of night.

Still, it gave me plenty of opportunity to admire the town’s Christmas decorations. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d seen them erecting the decorationsa few days earlier, but I’d yet to see them properly working.

But I was really a little disappointed by what’s on offer.

Not necessarily because of the quality and the amount of decorations, but apart from the famous ski slope that we saw the other day, it’s all pretty much the same as last year.

It wouldn’t be too much, surely, to have a redesign of the Christmas decorations or even to shuffle the decorations around so that they are in different places, just to relieve the monotony.

So while you admire the rest of the Christmas decorations, I’m off to bed. I’ve had a very long day and I need my beauty sleep.

hristmas tree place pierre semard granville manche normandy france

christmas decorations rue couraye granville manche normandy france

christmas decorations gare de granville railway station manche normandy france

christmas decorations place general de gaulle granville manche normandy france

artificial ski slope christmas decorations place general de gaulle granville manche normandy france

christmas decorations place general de gaulle granville manche normandy france

Friday 6th December 2019 – I HAVE JUST SEEN …

… one of the strangest football matches that I have seen for quite some considerable time.

It’s the Welsh Cup this weekend and there are several banana skins lying aound. One of those is Carmarthen Town v Rhydaman, and this was shown on the live internet feed tonight.

Carmarthen are at the foot of the Welsh Premier League and struggling whereas Rhydaman, one division below them in the pyramid, are in 5th place and having a good run of form. Not the match that I would have picked – I’d have gone for Colwyn Bay v Airbus – but’s good enough. It’s the kind of game where you can smell that someone is in for a scalping.

And a scalping there certainly was. Rhydaman, playing away from home at Carmarthen, ran out winners. And not just by the odd goal either but they won 0-4.

You would have thought from the scoreline that this was a right spannering, but that was very far from the truth. Whilst Rhydaman were the better side, they weren’t all that better. The difference was that we were treated to 4 magic moments of Trundlemania

Yes, Lee Trundle. He must be 45 now if he’s a day but still proving that he can cut it with the best and while he’s slowed down considerably as you might expect, he still showed the kind of magic that made him a multi-million pound footballer in the days when multi-million pound footballers were still quite thin on the ground.

I mean – just HOW do you defend against something like this?

Despite a reasonably early night, I missed the alarms again. Not by much – only a few minutes in fact, but missed them nevertheless.

Not only that, although there was nothing on the dictaphone, I had a vague recollection that during the night I’d been on a voyage and found something that was way beyond exciting – the same feeling of elation that I had when I I came across that Santana concert after 42 years of searching.

But what it was, we shall never know now.

After the medication and breakfast, with no dictaphone notes to do, I attacked a couple of digital music files to break up into tracks.

One of them took me four hours to do, and for a variety of reasons too. It was an album of a live concert and with this digital sound analyser program that I have, I could see that it was a series of individual tracks that had been artificially joined together – and by a blind man by the looks of it too.

16 tracks altogether so it took me quite a while to edit all of the joints together properly so that it actually looks like a live concert as well as sounds like one too.

Then I had to break the file down into 16 individual tracks and save each one of those individually, but not before I’d copied about 15 decent applause tracks (some of which went on for half a minute and more) from the file, cut out any speech and unnecessary noise from them, boosted the volume in what are called “S-curves” in places to hide the difference in volume in the joins where I’ve cut things out, and then saved them to disk as 15 individual files.

Applause tracks are good and I love them because I can do all kinds of exciting things with them. But you need a good number of them from the same concert because if you “mix and match” applause tracks from different concerts, the applause doesn’t sound similar and it gives the appearance of being false. And if they are long applause tracks, you can cut them down and that gives you even more opportunity to make something different.

Round about 12:45 I knocked off for lunch.

No bread here and no lettuce either so a walk into town was on the cards. And quite right too. Past the docks where the harbour gates were open sothe trawlers could come inside to unload.

And Charles-Marie is still over there with her winter wrap on.

The gates to the harbour can’t have been open all that long because there were several fishing boats on their way into port right now.

This one coming into port just here gave me a good opportunity for a photo-shoot but as I took a shot, my photo was once more bombed by a blasted seagull.

They get absolutely everywhere, these perishing things.

At the Super-U the lettuce was extortionate. €1:39 for a small one. That’ll teach me to forget one at LIDL, won’t it?

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and walked across to the Place general de gaulle to see what was going on.

Nothing right now as you can see, but clearly something will be going on in the very near future because we seem to have acquired a stage.

That’s going to upset a few of the marketeers tomorrow. It’ll quite take the shine off their sausages, now that they can begin to roast them again with charcoal following a recent Court decision.

But what about our famous ski slope in the town?

No room for any humans on there because we seem to have been overrun by animals. I can understand why they might want to use animals as decoration, but why beavers … or … errr … Castors to the French people around here.

What does a beaver have to do with the festive season?

This is much more like the kind of thing you would expect to see at Christmas, isn’t it?

We have a sledge here and a reindeer pulling it. Presumably there will be a Father Christmas around somewhere to travel in it.

But I have a cunning plan and I shall be having a word with Strawberry Moose in early course and we will go for a little walk together late one night for a photo opportunity.

Yesterday I mentioned and indeed showed you a photograph of the Christmas decorations that they were unloading at the Square Potel in the rue des Juifs, and I remember saying that I would go for a butcher’s today.

So here I am in the Square Potel with the decorations and I do have to say that I’m considerably underwhelmed by it all.

Mybe it’s just me I dunno, but I was expecting much more than this.

After lunch, I attacked the sound mixing desk for the vocals for the current project. It took me hours to figure out again how to record anything with it because I had forgotten what I did last time. And then I had to clean out all of the test files, set the volume levels and the like, and then clean out those test files too.

And then I could start.

The recording level is quite low using the built-in mike but my sound analyser program enhances that with no loss of quality. But there is a major problem with it, in that there’s no “pause” facility. So every time you stop for a think or to clear your throat, it restarts with a new track.

Trying to edit out about 40 of those into one coherent track and then split that down into tis segments is going to take me an age.

But I have made a startling discovery, and that is that the mikes that I bought for the mixing panel, using the adapter that came with them I can plug them into the dictaphone, which DOES have a pause facility. And also an output for headphones.

In view of this, I see a whole new world opening up for me here. For although the sound is somewhat tinny, it seems to be of a much higher quality.

One thing that I didn’t mention today is that the high winds are back. And with a vengeance too.

There was quite a storm raging out offshore and so even though the tide was on its way out, the waves were still rattling down on the rocks.

Not too many people out there today and that’s hardly a surprise given the conditions.

But overcast and miserable and foggy it might be here, over across the bay on the Brittany coast they were having a different kind of weather.

Low cloud, yes, but on the periphery there was bright sunshine and it was creating a most unusual lighting effect over there.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it could do the same thing around here on this side of the bay?

Going around the headland was taking my life in my hands with the wind that was sweeping around there.

narrowly avoiding being squidged on the pedestrian crossing, I went round the cliff to see what the waves were doing on the sea wall.

Not a lot, because the tide was going out rapidly. It must have bee quite impressive an hour or so ago.

Nothing changed at all in the chantier navale today, and Normandy Trader had sodded off too … “that was quick” – ed … so I stood and armired the waves for a little longer.

Every now and again there was a wave more powerful and deeper than the others, and that was providing me with some exciting entertainment.

But after a while I gave it up and headed for home and coffee.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that pathetic parking features quite regularly in these pages. Here’s another example.

I’d seen her pull up as I was on my way home with my lettuce and bread, and I thought to myself at the time “she’s not going to leave that car there, straddling two places and with 6 feet of room in front, is she?”

But yes she is. Gets right on my wick it does.

Back to the sound files and then a break for tea. I made a curry with the leftovers again and there were so many leftovers that there are some leftovers left over. That’ll be a tea for another night then, won’t it?

This evening it was raining when I went out so I didn’t hang around. I had my run though, right up to the top of the ramp and another 20 paces further on. It was feeling good today.

Then we had the football and now, considerably later than planned (like 01:45) I’m off to bed. I’m a busy boy tomorrow and another task has reared its ugly head as well.

Where will I find the time?

Saturday 30th November 2019 – THINGS ARE …

… looking up here in Granville. And not before time either, I have to say.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I posted a photo of a vegan meal on offer at the local take-out bakery. Admittedly that’s a specialty local baker who cooks on the premised, but today I can post a photo of some industrial vegan bread on sale in the LeClerc hypermarket.

How about that for progress?

We’ve had a little progress here today too. I heard both the first and second alarms go off and then began to drift off into the arms of Morpheus again (hardly a surprise seeing as it was 01:30 when I went to bed and it was now about 06:10)

Anyway, I snatched myself out of it in a desperate attempt to beat the third alarm, only to find that it was in fact just 06:14 – still 6 minutes to go. In fact, by the time the alarm went off I was having my medication.

At about 09:10 I hit the streets today but before that I’d had breakfast, had a shower and done some dictaphone notes.

But outside I headed for LIDL. And although I didn’t spend too much, I did pick up a clothes airer, the type that hangs over a radiator. It’s not very big and doesn’t take too many clothes, but at least it’s an improvement on hanging it all in the bedroom window in this weather.

And that reminds me – I did a machine-load of washing while I was out.

Noz was next, and there was nothing of any great interest there. I only spent 4-odd Euros. But they did have some rubbish knitwear in a bin at €0:99 and I found a woolly hat … “to go on your woolly head” – ed … that was just about my size. And that’s important seeing as mine is in the pocket of the jacket that is hanging up in a hotel in Calgary.

Dodging the gilets jaunes who were out if force today – about a dozen of them – I headed for LeClerc.

We’ve seen one lot of vegan industrial bakery and here’s a second. It’s actually a brioche – that which Marie-Antoinette told the peasants to eat when they said that they had no bread.

It’s perfectly true by the way that this isn’t the first lot of vegan industrial bread at LeClerc. A year or so ago we had vegan croissants and vegan pains au chocolat but all of that was somewhat ephemeral. I hope that they stick around this time.

Once more, I didn’t spend much money here although I did buy some fresh ginger. Jackie has given me her recipe for a cold lemon and ginger drink and I’m determined to try it.

One thing that features quite often in these pages is the subject of pathetic parking, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

And it doesn’t get more pathetic than this. A huge car park that can probably accommodate a couple of thousand vehicles, and this guy parks in the access road right outside the front door.

The access road is pretty narrow there and it’s right by one of the three doors out of the hypermarket, so it’s obstructing the pedestrian access too.

That wasn’t all either. Final stop was at BUT. I’d had a voucher for €50 off for this weekend in view of the purchases I made there a while ago. And as my office chair has now officially collapsed, I went to see what they had.

So now in the back of Caliburn is a replacement chair which will be installed in here tomorrow. I hope that it’s as comfortable as the demonstration one was.

While I was having lunch I heard a commotion out at the back.

My living room overlooks the Public Rooms and they are quite often hired out for activities. Today it looks as if we are having a wedding out there.

So here we are then, complete with confetti. And I hope that they will be very happy together.

After lunch I did a few more dictaphone entries and by the time that I had lost interest, I’d reduced the number to just 38. A good week on those should hopefully see them off and then I’ll start on my photos for the four months that I was away this summer.

But having lost interest, I remembered that I had some washing to put out and also some food to put away. And now the freezer is officially full again. Nothing else will go in there at all.

Some tidying up too, and a play around on the new guitar. And I’ve decided that it’s really good. I’m quite enjoying it.

A quick glance at the clock showed me that it was 17:10. I shouldn’t be here because US Granville are at home against FC Lorient.

Back out on foot and I stormed through the crowds and right across town to the ground. On the way though I stopped to photograph this house in the Route de Villedieu.

It seems that Christmas is coming early for some people.

At the ground, some more exciting news. US Granville are away at some team in Brittany next Saturday night and the club has laid on a free bus for the supporters.

There was a free place too, but there isn’t now! I’m going to have a day out!

As for the match itself, it was another one of those rather aimless games where Granville had no shape and no plan either, relying on breakaways out of a congested midfield.

It almost worked too, but they had an early goal disallowed for offside and also a very dubious offside give against a forward who was nowhere near interfering with play.

Lorient took the lead late in the game and never really looked like conceding it. Top of the table they are, and they deserved the win.

But there were some bizarre substitutions out there. Most of Lorient’s good work was coming down the left wing from a combination of left-back and left midfielder. So both of them were substituted, and I’m still wondering why.

Granville were no better than this. They have a forward who doesn’t look as if he does much but he always sticks a foot out and score a goal at a crucial moment. But they took him off and replaced him with someone who hasn’t done very much at all.

And they have a forward whose energy and keenness is unmatched. He was kept on the bench until it was far too late for him to be doing any good.

By the time we left it was raining heavily so I didn’t hang about on the way home – even running up part of the steep hill to reach the apartment.

And tea was out of a tin too, as is usual on a Saturday when i’ve been footballing.

But now I’m off to bed. i’m really tired (no surprise) and looking forward to my lie-in. And I wonder if those two people who buttonholed me in the street did manage to fond an open pizzeria.

Friday 22nd November 2019 – WHAT ODDS …

… would you have given on me walking into a social centre here in Granville on the West Normandy coast and bumping into three young girls who I have met before … in a small town called Uummannaq in the far north of Greenland?

Yes, it’s true that it’s “Greenland week” here in Granville, but even so, it’s a pretty long shot, isn’t it?

We’ve all seen this smile before, haven’t we?

It’s the smile that I have as the background to the desktop on my little old laptop and the girl to whom it belongs is my friend Heidinnguaq, she who spent half an hour or so posing for me last year when I was there.

And here she is in Granville too, with a few of her friends.

After my marathon session the other evening, last night I was in bed at something like a realistic time last night. Plenty of time to go on a travel or two. And who should I meet last night was my friend Ric. I’m not sure exactly how it had come round to this but I’d come to the town where he lived. I’d been round to where there were shelves and books and like cupboards and so on and it was some kind of description about what I was going to be doing and what I was going to be. Anyway, I knocked on his door, and he came out and we had a little chat. I told him that I was going out with someone later that evening. In fact I was going out with a lot of people but I was hoping that one particular person would be there. He stepped off his door and came in and said “what’s all this about?” and said something like a tree – an oak or a sycamore or something like that. It turned out that that was an euphemism that I had been using on this piece of paper stuck on this wall about the person that I was hoping to see that evening. So I said “yes, I’m going on a date”. I didn’t tell him too much – just enough to get his appetite interested. And that was when I awoke. It goes without saying that the person whom I was hoping to meet was Castor.

The alarms went off as usual and I leapt out of bed (and I did too!) ready for an early start. And after breakfast I did another magnum opus from the pile on the dictaphone. Only one (and half another) but it was certainly one of the longest.

And having transcribed it, I can see why it was one of the ones that affected me so much. It was very similar to one that I had back in May where the world was coming to an end and I was the last survivor. There I was, all alone on the beach watching the world come to an end just like in Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach, and as the narrator brings the story to a close, his prose breaks, in perfect time and perfect scan, into a speech that runs into a slightly amended version of the final couple of lines of the lyrics (which he speaks) of “The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”.

Well, the night in early September that I transcribed this morning was just like that, and it was such a surprise not just because of the event, but because of the fact that I’d been there a short while earlier in almost identical circumstances. And the narrator’s hypnotic speech added a certain amount of tension to the whole thing too.

But I couldn’t hang around doing that all morning. There were plenty of other things to do, such as to prepare my speech and select about 25 photos from my visit to Uummannaq.

That took me up to about 13:00 – usually that’s lunchtime but there’s only frozen bread here so I went down to the boulangerie for another dejeunette down in the town to make my sandwiches.

The tide was well in by now and all of the fishing boats were coming into the harbour to bring their catch to the fish-processing plant.

You can see all of the equipment lined up on the quayside.

And the turn-round in the port was pretty rapid. I’ll tell you that.

It takes me about 5 minutes or so to walk from the top right down the stairs – the escalier des noires-vaches – to the rue du Port. And by the time that had reached the bottom, the yellow and white boat that we saw arriving was just on its way back out to sea.

They don’t hang about in the harbour when there are other fish to fry, that’s for sure.

In fact, it was so busy in the inner harbour today that we had something of a traffic jam.

There was La Grande Ancre waiting to leave port, but she was unable to because there was another fishing boat on its way in. La Grande Ancre had to wait a good few minutes for the other boat to make its way through the gates before she could make her way out.

Of course, that’s no reason to complain. A busy fishing port is an important asset to the community.

After lunch I made a decent adapter cable for the new laptop out of a cut-down North American extension lead that was hanging around in Caliburn. I cut it down so that there was about a foot or so on the socket end, and added an old European plug on the bare end.

And it works to perfection too. Nothing wrong with that! And then I uploaded Paint Shop Pro and made a slide show out of the photos that I had chosen.

While I had Pint Shop Pro and the external DVD dive out, I reinstalled it onto the laptop that broke down in North America and which I managed to restart. I’m going to see if I can make it run again, although I’m not sure why I would want to.

At 15:45 the guy from the Education Department came to pick me up and took me to the Sports Hall at the local High School, and that was where I met Heidinnguaq and her friends.

First thing that I did was to scrounge a huge television and couple up my laptop to it, and then set my slideshow in motion.

It would provide a little ambience to the meeting.

We had a little talk, that didn’t last too long, and having done their drum dance, throat singing and polar bear dance (the one that Jena did for me last year in Uummannaq), Heidinnguaq was prevailed upon to produce her guitar.

She’s an excellent guitarist and singer, and has written quite a few songs of her own. She played a couple and then did a number by Amy Winehouse.

Mind you, having English as her third language, I hope that she didn’t understand the significance of what she was singing. The lyrics, to a native-English-speaking person, are full of innuendo that a foreigner will probably not understand.

There was a question and answer session afterwards, which I translated, and then in the best tradition of the News of the Screws, I made my excuses and left.

Back here, it was tea-time. I had a rummage around in the freezer and found some lentil, pepper and potato curry from 24th August … errr … 2018. That was just as nice today as it was back then, especially as it was followed down by more rice pudding.

Later, I took out the rubbish and braving the wind and rain, made a hurried circuit of the headland, including a brief run for a few hundred metres. Short of my target unfortunately but there you go.

When I returned, there was football on the internet. Barry Town v Penybont (Bridgend to the uninitiated) in the Welsh Premier League.

For the first 15 minutes you wouldn’t have believed that Penybont were at the bottom of the table and Barry at the top. From the action up until that point you would have said that it was the other way round.

However, as the match progressed, Barry began to exert themselves and they ran out 3-0 winners. The result was right, but the scoreline was rather unfair. Barry’s goals were

a well-worked routine from a corner
a screamer from 25 yards that could have gone anywhere
a defensive error where the full_back slipped on the wet surface and lost control of the ball, with a Barry Town player the quickest to react to the loose ball

All they need is to get the run of the green.

It’s quite late now but I’ve been spending all the evening editing photos. All of the photos that I took of the girls I’ll post on a separate page when I get round to it.

Just one more special event, and that’s tomorrow evening. And then I ca get back round to the usual busy stae without any of these extra jobs cropping up.

I could do with a rest.

la grande ancre waiting to leave port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boat entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Friday 8th November 2019 – IT REALLY WAS …

… beautiful out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel this afternoon.

And you can tell that from this photo. Plenty of sunshine out there on the water, the Brittany coast (18 miles away if you are interested) in the background, and the yacht sailing with the wind.

Not to mentioned being photo-bombed yet again by another blasted seagull. Although I do have to say that it adds a certain extra something to the image.

But never mind that – I had some tissues and I was wearing a hat.

Mind you, I’m surprised that I managed to actually see anything of the daylight today. Despite promising myself an early night, I was still up and playing the guitar at 01:30 this morning.

And even more surprisingly, I managed to beat the third alarm out of bed, even though I was feeling like something that had been dragged through the cat flap.

Plenty of time for me to go off on a nocturnal ramble too. And a big “hello” to Castor and Pollux who came to join me on my journey, which was yet another one of a long line of tumultuous journeys riddled with turmoil. I’d had a big row with Castor and Pollux so they weren’t really speaking to me. And so I was in the dining hall and I was at a table hoping to catch a glimpse of them because I knew that they would be coming out very soon. In fact there were all these cars already up the street – there must have been 1,000 of them parked up there waiting for the everyone to come out. I couldn’t find which car had come for them and I knew that he would get there early so that he would be close to the gate but I didn’t have a clue. But there in the refectory I was sitting there at a table I suddenly saw them all with about 2 or 3 other people around them. And I sort of half went over to chat, and half didn’t and I couldn’t make up my mind what to do. In the end I went back to my seat. Just then a teacher appeared with a pile of stuff. She was looking for a girl called Kenneth. She had had some work and gave it to this girl called Kenneth and told her something. There was also some more work and I thought that it was for some other person but it turned out that it was for her as well. So the teacher gave her these three loads of work that needed doing, and that was when I awoke. One thing that I did notice was that Castor and Pollux and the other people with them were having quite a good amount of fun and I was terribly jealous in this sense because I wasn’t in there having the fun with them.

Things are really getting at me these days, aren’t they?

We had the usual medication and then breakfast, following which I attacked the dictaphone notes. And what with a few interruptions, I’d transcribed 9 by the time I knocked off.

One of the interruptions was the parcels delivery man. Another load of stuff has come, part of which was the 40-watt amplifier for the guitar. I forgot to photograph it so I’ll do that tomorrow.

Before I could allow myself lunch, I went for a walk. Down the steps, along the rue du Port and back up the rue des Juifs.

No groups of tourists today. Instead, we had groups of fishing boats coming in to harbour on the turn of the tide.

They did well to dredge out that little channel there at the foot of the quay. Those boats that only have a shallow draught can come right in even though there’s a long way to go before the tide fills the outer harbour.

For lunch, I had one of the containers of soup that I made yesterday. And I don’t know why but it doesn’t taste as nice as any one of the others that I have made. That’s not to say that it’s bad of course – just not as good.

This afternoon I’ve been playing the guitar and dealing with the web site amendments. And although the site isn’t half-done as yet, there are a couple of bots even as we speak trawling their way through the revised pages

At 15:45 we had the usual stop for our afternoon walk in the glorious sunshine – even though it was still rather windy out there.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Thora has been in port for the last day or two. But as I was going out, so was she. Braving the stormy seas off the Ile de Chausey on her way back to the Channel islands.

You can see the spray out at the bow of the ship as the waves go slamming themselves into the hull. Even though the wind has died down somewhat, there’s still a great deal of force left in the sea.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back earlier in the year I had a guided tour of one of the old bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. Some group of volunteers has taken them over with the aim of starting a museum of sorts.

There was a large lorry fitted with a hiab parked outside the bunker so naturally I went to see what was going on.

It’s difficult to see of course, but certainly something seems to be being delivered. So it looks as if whatever they are doing, it’s now starting to make progress.

And good luck to them too.

We weren’t the only people out there enjoying the good weather either.

The guys from the Sailing School were out there in the bay too, presumably giving sailing lessons. One of these days I’ll go down to make further enquiries.

Back in the apartment I made a start on my Project n°3. I want to get ahead as much as I can and build up a stock for future reference.

One of the things that this involves is to cut soundbites out of a collection of clips of Louis de Funes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was always doing that out of old British radio shows, but this needs to be done in French.

Tea was pie with veg and gravy followed by, seeing as I had the oven on, a rice pudding. The pie was one slice of that which I made just before I went away and it was absolutely delicious.

This evening I took my walk around the walls rather earlier than usual. Nevertheless I was still all alone on my walk and wasn’t disturbed at all.

Some of my night photography didn’t work at all, but one or two others have come out rather well, such as this one of the town with Kairon-Plage in the background, slightly to the right of centre.

Once more , it’s a hand-held shot with the monopod, so it’s not too bad, I reckon.

This one of the trees in the Square Maurice Marland has come out really well and I quite like this. In fact, I took a couple of good photos today.

This is actually round about the end of my running strip, and I made it this evening halfway up the ramp before I ran out of wind.

But I think that that’s about as far as I’m ever going to get. I don’t seem to be able to push on.

I was wondering if maybe I were to start at the ramp and run anti-clockwise, that might be better and I might go farther.

Yesterday I said that I might stay out with the tripod when we have a nice night, and it was certainly a nice night tonight.

But there was football on the internet – Aberystwyth v Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League.

The score was 5-0 to Bala, and you might be thinking that this was a really one-sided game. But that’s far from the truth. Bala’s second goal was scored from a breakaway following a sustained period of Aber pressure.

But the fourth goal made me weep. How many times have I said to defenders to stop messing about in defence with the ball and clear it upfield quickly?

Sure enough, Aberystwyth were mssing around with the ball just outside the penalty area for a couple of minutes and inevitably, because you can guess what happened just as easily as I can tell you, they needlessly lost possession.

The fifth goal too was extremely unfortunate. Roberts in the Aberystwyth goal made an excellent save, the ball hit the crossbar and could have gone anywhere. But of course it has to drop right at the feet of Chris Venables and he’s not going to miss sitters like that from three yards out.

So now I’m off to bed. Still no Caliburn so I’ll be walking to the shops tomorrow.

But before I go, I was hunting around in the Al Stewart lyrics that I have had for probably 40 years, looking for the source of the quote “spaghetti, two forks, one plate” when I came across these lyrics –
“And so as she slept and the pure morning crept”
“Through the windows to take her away”
“I thought you can’t make people be what you want them to be”
“I could see my self nailed to a dormitory tale”
“Of a holiday night’s escapade”
“And just yesterday she had seemed like a woman to me”

“And so like a child with the sleep in her eyes”
“Where the sadness of age had once been”
“She left on the plane with a “See you again” and a smile”
“And I couldn’t say what I had won or I lost”
“Or even just what I had seen”
“But when I’m alone I just think of her once in awhile”.

Remind anyone of anything?

fishing boat out at sea english channel granville manche normandy france

thora english channel granville manche normandy france

workmen unloading cargo bunker atlantic wall pointe du roc granville manche normandy france

granville by night manche normandy france

Friday 1st November 2019 – I FOUND …

… the fitbit after all that. On the passenger seat in Caliburn where I must have left it when I was fitting the battery yesterday.

And I’d got up nice and early this morning specially to look. Even managed to beat the third alarm – and by a country mile too – and that’s not something that happens too often these days.

It was a reasonably late night too – mainly due to listening to some good music on the computer. And there’s nothing wrong in that as long as I’m working – which I was. In fact I updated some more of the web pages.

And so it was a short night too – but still plenty of time to go off on a ramble or two.

I started off back in the UK last night. I was in Cornwall walking around a headland and it was something (I don’t know what) to do but it was Marc Bolan and camping and he’d written the final verse of his song “Elemental Child” (… which I had been listening to just before going to bed …). They were broadcasting it over the radio and getting everyone to join in so anyone who was walking past or walking in the area they went and asked them if they would join in. This girl – she joined in too and did all of the song and to play it on the guitar or banjo or something. She asked about the lyrics so we pointed to where the lyrics were and she was brilliant. She had a really good go at it, this girl did. It really was a shame that I awoke.
A little later on, we were on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again last night and it was time to go home. There were a couple of coaches come to pick us up. They had already been and we’d packed but then we had to go off on a lecture or something so the buses were put back and were to turn at at 12:00. This lecture finished at about 11:55 and it was all about book-keeping, this kind of thing, and the guy who was giving the lesson afterwards went to print off some stuff and I went to help him but he didn’t need me. he was talking to some other guy and the other guy was saying that in Accountancy they were still using BBC Micros but they no longer dominate anything so they don’t actually see anything of what they do. The other guy said that he learnt his Accountancy on a BBC Micro. I said that I did my Finance First Part on pen and paper – but no-one took the slightest bit of notice of me whatsoever which seems to be normal procedure these days on board that ship. Then I had to get to my cabin and it was 11:55 and there was already a bus on board and people getting on so I had to fly throught the crowds and the ship like lightning to my cabin. Luckily I had packed before hand but there were still a few things out that needed putting away. I reached my cabin which was right at the back of my ship and the porthole was open so I could see the second coach pulling up and feel a nice cool breeze blowing through the porthole. The first thing I did was to grab a drink – some of my orange Vitamin B12 drink. There wasn’t much left but I took a swig of it and thought “Gid this is warm, this drink but it will do me until I get to wherever it is that I’m going and then I can think again”. At that moment the alarm went off.

10 minutes later I was up and about and tackling the notes from the night while I was waiting for the medication to work so that I could have breakfast.

Once it started to become light I went outside with the purpose of retracing my steps from my afternoon walk to see if the fitbit was anywhere about. But as I said, I didn’t get any farther than Caliburn.

Back in the apartment I attacked the 20-minute dictaphone entry from 30th July. And miles of it there was too, starting from when I left the motel in Lamoure all the way across North and South Dakota.

By now it was midday so I headed of for my morning walk. Down to the Super U for some garlic and a lettuce. The lettuce is exhausted and I have no garlic at all and I need to deal with that issue. And as I left the apartment and headed off down the street we were hit with a torrential rainstorm. Luckily I went in my rain jacket and so I managed to keep something-like dry. But there were plenty of others who weren’t so fortunate.

For lunch I had half of the carrot soup (which wasn’t so bad after all) and then attacked my little project. What I did the other day, I’ve undone it and started again because I could do better than that. And it’s all turning out rather nicely, although doing it in French is rather challenging.

There was an interruption in my activities when I went out for my afternoon walk. And I was not alone for even though the weather was miserable this afternoon there were still plenty of people on the beach.

It’s that time of year when we’e having the highest tidal range – the grand marée – and the lower beaches are uncovered.

These areas are beyond the limits that are leased out as commercial fisheries so anyone can go out there for the peche à pied – fishing on foot – to scavenge what molluscs they can.

And I was right about the miserable weather too. Just look at the storm clouds.

But all of a sudden there was a hint of sun and we had the most magnificent rainbow. I managed to take a really good shot of it too.

It seems to be ending down in the town somewhere and I was tempted to back to my apartment to search for a spade.

There was an interruption after that. I received a text message “are you in?” to which I replied in the affirmative.

A few minutes later Terry and Liz turned up, with Darren, kate and the two kids. It was pouring with rain again so we went for a drink and a good chat. When the rain stopped (which it did for half an hour) we went for a good walk all the way around the walls and the headland and then they went home. I told Robyn to take good care of Strawberry Moose and she gave me a hug.

For tea I had two more taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing from the other night. Not enough though so I added a small tin of lentils so there was too much. No good for me, seeing as I’m supposed to be cutting down.

Football tonight on the internet. Not been too many of those this season. Connah’s Quay Nomads v TNS in the pouring rain in the Welsh Premier League.

In the first half, the nomads were dreadful and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times they made it into the TNS half. Meanwhile TNS were rampaging upfield at will and could have had a hatful. As it happens, one goal disallowed for offside and a good save from Lewis Brass the Nomads keeper was all that they had to show for it.

Connahs Quay made three substitutions early in the second half and after that we had much more of a match, with the Nomads taking the game much more to TNS.

And so it goes without saying that TNS finally scored with a breakaway goal after all of that.

We then had bizarre incident where the referee gave a penalty to TNS for a handball, spotted the ball, and just as Greg Draper was about to run up to take the kick, he changed his mind and gave a dropped ball which Brass smothered.

From that, the Nomads raced upfield and with Insall (who should have been on from the start) having a shot saved, Michael Wilde running in fastened onto the rebound and scored – his first shot on goal in the whole game.

So 1-1 it finished, and it leaves me shaking my head. I’ve seen many more much batter games than this one, and I’m totally bewildered by that weird first half.

So not having done too much I’m going to bed and I’ll start again tomorrow. I must get myself going.

rainbow arc en ciel granville manche normandy france

EPIC HALL

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