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Sunday 9th September 2018 – LAST NIGHT …

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

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

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

… round about 00:35 I was just gathering up my things ready to go to bed when I caught out of the corner of my eye a strange reflection on one of the windows.

Turning dramatically round, I could see lights really close by on the starboard beam (said he, coming over all nautical-like)

Grabbing the camera I dashed outside and sure enough another ship, very likely a cruise ship, was sailing past not 500 metres from us in the opposite direction.

Forgetting that the camera was on a low-light setting, I blazed way and ended up with a horribly over-exposed shot of it as it sailed past. But by the time I had corrected my settings, it was already some way astern so that came out rather under-exposed. It’s clearly not my night for anything, is it?

But very strangely, I was asleep quite quickly once I finally managed to heave myself into my stinking pit, and that was exactly how I remained until the early-morning cacophony.

We had the usual morning ritual, and then up on deck where I hoped that a hot coffee would bring me round sufficiently to do more than grunt at people.

A thin sliver of land on the horizon away over to our left tells me that we aren’t quite in a sea as open as I would like to be, but nevertheless we are still going north. 74° 58’N on the AIS plot – rapidly approaching the magical 80°N, which is farther north than almost every explorer had reached 200 years ago before Ross and Parry, but it’s almost certain that whalers such as William Scoresby and countless others had pushed on well beyond this.

Their reports of “seas open one year, closed the next” which were dismissed by the Admiralty as total fiction but which proved to be absolutely correct cannot have been mere guesswork.

We had breakfast and this was followed by a series of presentations. And can you imagine how disappointed I was when I discovered that the “10:00 – Dog-Sledding in the Nautilus Lounge” was just a discussion.

But I really wasn’t paying too much attention. We’d run into an ice belt at one time during the morning and there were loads of stuff drifting by.

At one moment there was a beautiful iceberg off the starboard bow so I took up a really good position to take a photo of it. And then the captain altered course and it slid off in the distance to port.

But that wasn’t the best of it either.

There was a discussion on the health and welfare of the Inuit population. The speaker was talking about mental health and how something was “the tip of the iceberg”. And just as she said that, right on cue, a really large iceberg went sailing past. You couldn’t have had the timing any better than that.

I dashed out and took a photo of it, and then dashed back in again.

And this talk was quite interesting too for another reason.

They were talking about Inuit people being encouraged to keep their ethnic identity when they move out of the community and “go south”. That’s the kind of thing that contrasts sharply with the situation where people coming into Canada are expected to integrate into their new environment and leave their ethnic identity behind.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, they were discussing the new opportunities that tourism was bringing into the region and how this might help go some way towards resolving the chronic unemployment and poverty issues amongst the Inuit people. And here we are on a cruise ship visiting the High Arctic and being manned … "personned" – ed … by a mainly Filipino and Indonesian crew.

What might help the Inuit community would be if the Canadian Government, these cruise companies and tourists on board stopped treating the local people as nothing but tourist attractions but as people and actually engaged them in the economic regeneration of the region.

Lunch was the usual salad for me and I sat with Dylan, the pianist from last night. I complimented him on the event and we ended up having a good chat about music. He also plays the bass too but hadn’t brought his axe with him.

This afternoon we went off on another excursion. There’s an island in the Davis Strait off the coast of Devon Island called Philpot’s Island and our ship had never visited there.

It’s known to be a haunt of polar bear and, more importantly, musk-oxen, so we decided that we would all go ashore for an exploration. We tried to get into one bay but the wind conspired against us and heaped up the ice across the entrance so we had to find another bay.

The bay that we chose was apparently un-named on any of the charts that we could find, and so Tennyson’s “There is nothing worth living for but to have one’s name inscribed on the Arctic chart ” came straight into my head. Who do I see?

Cold comes in three categories – cold, freezing and Jesus! And this was Jesus! cold. We were wrapped up in all that we could fit on underneath our windproof and rainproof clothes and scrambled for the Zodiacs.

The sea was rough and churning too with a 15-20 knot wind, so we were told. And there was fog and a snowstorm too. But then again, if you can’t cope with any of that, you shouldn’t really be in the High Arctic.

By the time we reached the shore we were totally wet and bedraggled, and that was just the start of things.

We were divided into four groups, Expert, Advanced, Intermediate and Leisurely, with a few people who just stayed for a walk on the beach. The days when I could go off on an Expert hike and then go back and do it again are, unfortunately, long-gone, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

Instead I chose the Intermediate walk.

Off into the wilderness we went, in several long crocodiles as each group went its separate way, accompanied by our armed polar bear guards. Our way took us in a crescent-shaped circuit around the south-western quarter of the island.

And while we’re on the subject of crocodiles, I remembered the leader of our expedition telling us at one stage that he wasn’t going to tell us what animals he might see because that would be the Kiss of Death and we would never ever see them. And so the idea that was running around my head was that he should say that we would see crocodiles, lions, camels and the Loch Ness Monster.

And as for the polar bear guards, their guns are loaded with rubber bullets. But they do have live ammunition in their pockets in case the rubber bullets don’t stop the animals.

We picked our way through the snow, through the snowdrifts and the howling wind that blasted along our trail, stopping frequently to pause for breath along the way. I was going to say “and to see the sights” but you couldn’t really see a thing in this weather.

At one point we stopped and did some deep breathing exercises; And then our leader proposed that we lie down in the snow to meditate. Most people immediately refused, but I decided to give it a go. And so I lay there in a snowdrift and let all of the thoughts drift out of my mind – not that there are so many thoughts in there these days that it takes too long.

It was harder than I imagined but after a couple of minutes I could feel myself sliding off somewhere. There was an eerie wind and the patter of snow on my jacket but apart from that I don’t think that I’ve ever felt so peaceful. In fact I was so disappointed when he called us to order again.

We carried on, coming across some lemming tracks on our way but even though the tracks were fairly recent there was no sign of the critters who had made them.

At a certain point the sun looked as if it might start to come out and I took a photo of it. But all that I picked up was a pale yellow disk and a flurry of snow on the lens.

Eventually we arrived at our destination and the more athletic amongst us scrambled up the rocks to the top of the headland that overlooks the sea. And the ship was out there somewhere – we could vaguely make it out in the distance through the fog and driving snow.

Up there in the wind we scanned the horizon for any sign of wildlife but that was something of a failure. There was nothing to be seen. We loitered around for half an hour or so to see what was going on, but in the end we gave it up as a bad job and started back.

Pretty much the same routine on the way back, stopping regularly for breath. And our “long pause” was animated by Lois, an Inuit woman who was accompanying us who told us tales of life on the trail and how easy it is to become disorientated and lose one’s way in weather like this.

Back at the beach, we learned that at least one group had encountered musk-oxen. A shame that it wasn’t ours. We’d seen some musk-ox droppings, and fresh ones too, but no actual beast. Still, you can’t win a coconut every time, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed.

There was a long queue to go back on the zodiacs, so I went off and had another meditation session, lying almost buried in a snowdrift. And this time, as well as the feelings that I had had before, I managed to go off. I could see blue sky and smell something completely different, something that I couldn’t name. It was the most extraordinary feeling that I have had for many years, just lying there flat out on my back in a snowdrift in the middle of an Arctic snowstorm.

Hot tea was available before we boarded a zodiac. And you’ve no idea how quickly hot tea goes stone-cold in this kind of environment. These explorers who go off into temperatures of -40°C and try to make tea and other hot food must really be on a hiding to nothing. I don’t envy them for a moment.

I was last on the zodiac and so was put at the front on the side into the wind. And we hadn’t gone far before we were treated to an astonishing spectacle. An ice-floe calved off with a most enormous splash right in front of us.

We did a U-turn to go to look at it but we were far too late to take a photo of anything spectacular. But just then, I heard another “crack” from another ice-floe nearby. I swivelled round and clicked the shutter just as another calving took place and a huge lump of ice cascaded into the sea.

By now the storm had increased and we were in for a really rough ride. There was quite a swell running with waves of a considerable height. And being on the side into the wind, I got the lot. I don’t think that I have ever been so wet in all my life by the time that I was back on board the ship.

I shudder to think what it might have been like had I not been dressed in rain and wind gear, and I was thinking … "which doesn’t happen all that often" – ed … that it was a good job that I hadn’t taken Strawberry Moose for a stroll ashore.

Mind you, several passengers had enquired about his whereabouts. He’s more popular than I am, which is not really a surprise given recent events. In certain quarters I’m about as popular as a rattlesnake in the Lucky Dip right now and I have only myself to blame.

Strangely enough, as I was writing this, I was listening to some Wishbone Ash and we had the “One Hundred Years In The Sunshine Hasn’t Taught Me All I Need To Know”. I’ll “try again to fight another day”, so God help you all.

Back in my cabin I had a surprise. Strawberry Moose has found a friend – an Arctic Hare. One of the cabin staff clearly has the right kind of sense of humour and I appreciate that very much.

So a really nice hot shower and washed some clothes, and then came back upstairs to the lounge.

Now, I’m fed up of saying that it’s a small world and getting smaller all the time. There’s a couple on this boat – and elderly woman and her son – who speak French and I’ve been having the odd chat with the woman.

Today, it ended up as being quite a lengthy chat and much to my surprise, I discovered that she is actually French and comes from near Gueret – which is only an hour or so from where my farm is in the Auvergne.

And if that’s not enough, her son lives in St-Lô, which is just about 45 minutes from Granville.

With this astonishing news, we had an extremely lengthy and involved chat, which came to a sudden halt as two rather large icebergs came drifting past. I dashed out into the fog and mist with the camera.

Back inside, I tried to start work but my heart wasn’t in it and I was constantly drifting off to sleep. In the end I gave it up as a bad job and went and crashed out in my room for half an hour. I can’t get away from this, can I?

We had a briefing about tomorrow’s events, and I just about caught the tail-end of it too. It looks as if we are in for a storm at some time through the night and tomorrow but it’s not the kind of thing that we can do rush to shelter and heave to, because we have icebergs to contend with. We’ll have to ride it out in the open sea and keep going, which is bound to upset some passengers, and upset them in more ways than one.

For tea, I was one of the first in so I sat at an empty table. I was quickly joined by two of the elderly men with whom I sat the other evening. It looks as if we have become a regular feature, something like the Naughty Corner at Lierse SK where I always seemed to end up.

This evening there’s a film but with having crashed out this afternoon I have too much work to do so I need to push on and do it. I’m in one of the comfortable chairs in the posh lounge as the film is taking place in the room where I sit.

When I’ve finished, I’ll go for my half-naked evening walk and see how the storm is developing. I hope that it’s an interesting one.

And it certainly was. It was snowing fairly heavily and the sea was rather wild. But I’ve known it colder than it was too. Upon the bridge I stayed and watched the storms, and then checked the binnacle. 357° – or in other words, ever so slightly west of North.

I walked round to the back of the ship, and found a little group of people huddled there. That’s the smoking quarter and there was Sherman Downey !:the musician, Michael the young go’fer and a couple of girls. I joined them and we had a good chat for half an hour or so, and then everyone slowly drifted away.

I drifted away too eventually. It’s way past my bedtime.

On a totally different note, I’ve just heard that Burt Reynolds has died.

Saturday 8th September 2018 – IT REALLY DOES COME TO SOMETHING …

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

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

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

… when a person living in an isolated Arctic community on a remote Island in the Far North tells you, without any prompting at all, that the British are totally out of their minds about Brexit.

But never mind that for a moment. I’m wondering what would have happened had I not had a severe attack of cramp round about 05:30 or so – the first that I’ve had for a few days. Whether I would have slept on until 06:00

However I did stay in bed until the alarm went off. No polar bears to entice us out this morning. And after the medication I went for a walk. Not without an element of some panic because I appear to have lost my woolly hat – the one that goes on my woolly head.

Not that that’s too much to worry about because I’ve lost count of the amount of things that I’ve lost already and then subsequently recovered in my room. Nevertheless it won’t be long before something goes missing completely. You can bank on that.

I took my evening walk to the bridge last night. Imagine me – in short sleeves at midnight in the High Arctic in September. Binnacle pointing to 180° – in other words, due south.

But no midnight sun last night. And that’s hardly surprising because for the morning we are swathed in fog again. This weather is really getting me down but then again what did I expect up here in the High Arctic? Some explorers have been stranded for four or five years by the capricious ice and, as we know, hundreds have failed to return.

If it were a cake-walk to come here, it wouldn’t be half the adventure that it is now, would it?

I had breakfast this morning with a couple of members of staff – Christopher the geologist and young Michael the ship’s “go’fer”. He’s excited because Pond Inlet is his home village and the captain has invited his family on board for lunch.

As for our plans today, I’ve no idea what they might be. This morning, anyway.

This afternoon we’re visiting an Inuit community – the one at Pond Inlet and that seems to be a waste of time in my opinion because not only is it not a traditional Inuit community but more of a modern resettlement town, but we arrived there on a plane the other day so we’ve been here. And there are still plenty of other places to visit.

The cynic inside me is once more wide-awake and telling me that maybe someone on board the ship has an aunt who runs the local gift shop or something like that.

But on the other hand, for the last week or so Chris Farlowe has been singing to me “Don’t Start Chasing Happiness – Let It Take You By Surprise. Don’t Go Casting Shadows …”. I suppose that I ought to be adopting a more positive outlook, even if I don’t feel much like it right now.

One positive outlook is the fact that we have seen yet another candidate for Ship Of The Day. It’s useful having an AIS beacon reader on board, so I was able to discover that she is the MV Golden Brilliant.

She’s a bulk carrier of 41500 tonnes, built in 2013 and registered in Hong Kong. She left Gijon in Spain on 26th August and is en route for Rotterdam, and taking a major deviation to a stop called “Camni” in the fleet database – clearly some port that doesn’t have an AIS logger.

Its AIS track puts it up here anyway, so it’s the correct ship, and someone in the crew tells me that there’s a mine out here – the Mary River Iron Ore Mine.

This would seem to place Camni at Milne Port Inlet, 71°53’N 80°55’W, so that seems to fit the bill.

Although I didn’t take too much interest in many of the proceedings today, there was a brief class giving some kind of outline of the Inuit language, so I wandered in for a lesson. It’s really quite simple and some kind of, I suppose, shorthand symbols for the syllables, of which there are probably in the region of 60 – 20 consonants each with three vowel sounds, ee, ah and ooh. And every word is made up of one or more symbols, with various accents to emphasise or detract the sound.

That took us nicely up to our arrival in Pond Inlet. We had a discussion about the town and were given a slide show of the town with the various buildings that might be important.

Pond Inlet is situated at 72’42” north. It loses the sun in mid-November, and you have to wait until February until it comes back.

It was named by John Ross in 1818 for John Pond, the Astronomer Royal of the period.

And good-oh! It’s the village brocante this afternoon. How exciting! Mind you, the cynic inside me won’t be at all surprised if this has been arranged because one of the locals has heard that a cruise ship is coming in with a pile of gullible tourists and the rest of the villagers have a load of rubbish that’s awaiting disposal.

What was this about adopting a more-positive outlook?

The most important, certainly for Strawberry Moose, is the fact that Pond Inlet is the home of the most Northerly Tim Horton’s in the whole world.

If that’s not a good destination for him to make a public appearance then I don’t know what is.

Lunch was taken with the couple who seem to be quite interested in me, the fools. It was nice of them to ask me over to sit with them. I don’t understand my popularity these days.

But only with certain people. I am definitely persona non grata elsewhere, something that is entirely my own fault. It’s a desperate shame, but it’s no use crying over spilt milk.

We all piled aboard the zodiacs and headed out to the town. There was some kind of ad-hoc immigration control in place on the beach but of course none of that prevented His Nibs from gaining a foothold ashore.

An Inuit lady called Joanna was there to give us a guided tour of the town, not that there was an awful lot to see.

The first thing that caught my eye was all of the shipping containers all over the place. In that respect it’s very much like South-Western Newfoundland where the bodies off the old Newfoundland Railway wagons were auctioned off and now litter the countryside just about everywhere.

True garden-shed engineering.

And I had quite a laugh at the bus stop too. As if you really need a bus around a community of about 1600 people. Especially when there are so many cars all around the place. That was also something that astonished me.

It is however the time that Arctic cotton is in flower and that’s a useful commodity out here. It’s really a bunch of flowery seeds rather similar to how a dandelion works, and they are used here to make wicks for qulliqs – the soapstone oil lamps – and similar things.

The Catholic Church was quite interesting, if not tragic. It’s apparently the northernmost Catholic church in the world and a comparatively recent construction too. It will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this rubbish who will recall the almost-inevitable fate of most buildings out here in Canada.

What is the tragic part is that when it went up, it took with it the Catholic priest, Father Guy-Mary Rousselière who was probably the greatest of all of the anthropological and archaeological amateurs in this region, along with almost every single item of his work. All that remains was whatever he had managed to publish during his lifetime.

We were shown a sled that was built up on another larger one and which was built up on a third even larger. It was even covered in. The idea is that in the winter the father of the family would tow it behind his skidoo and if he kept on going at full tilt he could leap over small crevasses in the ice and the sled with all of the kids inside wouldn’t ground out.

There’s an RCMP post here too and it has at one time held as many as 21 detainees at one time. This must be a record for a small town like this.

Another asset of the community, now long-closed and replaced, is the Hudson’s Bay outlet. It’s now being used for mechanical repairs and is guarded by a couple of large dogs who have clearly seen better days.

All of the stuff littered around in the wooden crates is the stuff that has come up in the recent sea-lift.

The biggest employer in the town is the Canadian Government and they have some offices here. These ones here are the offices of the Canadian National Parks Service for the Sirmilk region, which is where we are right now.

There are several traditional habits that are still carried on here. The mothers still carry their babies with them in the hoods of their parkhas and it was quite amusing to see the tourists surrounding one of the aforementioned in an attempt to persuade her to allow them to photograph mummy and offspring.

I’m not sure where the quad fitted in with the traditional habits though.

One of the attractions of the town is the half-built sod house that is used to explain to visitors how the original inhabitants of the area lived. Today, they use 4×2 wood to build the frame for the sealskin roof, but in the past they used whalebone.

Lying around were some bones from a bow-head whale, the type of bones that would have been used in the olden days before wood became available.

They were brewing up too and making bannock. The latter isn’t for me, seeing as they use lard in the peparation, and a new kettle of water hadn’t boiled yet. But I was discussing Labrador Tea with Joanna and she, ferreting around in the box, came up with a teabag of Labrador Tea. And I shall be trying that tomorrow.

Of course, Strawberry Moose had to have a photo opportunity at the sod house, didn’t he?

There’s an Anglican Church in the community too and Joanna was regaling us with tales of the religious wars that used to go on here as each church tried to pinch the other church’s congregation.

One of the guys with her told us a story about how the boats have “evolved” over the years. Up until almost maybe 50 or 60 years ago, the Inuit umiak, made by a company in Trois-Rivières, would be quite common. But people slowly moved over to more modern “European” boats made of industrial materials.

And now the race was on as everyone tried to out-do his neighbour with e bigger, better, more powerful boat.

But the problem was that the smaller and lighter the boat, the easier it is to haul it out of the water in the freeze when the Inuit were on their travels. But with the bigger, heavier boats, they can’t and they are losing countless modern, heavy and expensive boats being crushed in the ice.

There’s quite a big school here in the settlement, and it flies the Nunavut flag. There’s a red inukshuk on it that divides the flag into two – one half white and the other half yellow. I was unable to discover if the colours have any significance.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me complaining about the price of goods in Labrador but it has nothing on the price of goods here.

When you start to see a pack of toilet rolls, €2:49 in your average LIDL, on sale here at $36:99 you’ll understand the difficulty of supplying a remote community out here in the Arctic with just one sea-lift per year and the rest of the time flying it in by air from Ottawa or wherever. And this is just one example of countless similar prices.

But some other people don’t have the same issues. Pond Inlet is home to the world’s most northerly Tim Horton’s, and I unveiled His Nibs in here for a photo session. In no time at all we were surrounded by other locals who wished for a photo opportunity with himself. And I can’t say that I blame them.

What was depressing about all of this was the ship’s kitchen staff all congregating in a corner eating a bought pizza. What does that tell you about the cooking on-board?

I was told that there’s a scenic viewpoint here too and so I wandered that way to see. The North Pole is a mere 1932 kms from here and this may well be the closest that I shall ever be to it, unless things change dramatically.

It might also be the closest that His Nibs gets to it too, so he needs to have yet another photo opportunity too.

My reverie up here was broken by the sound of an aeroplane. Another Air Tindi plane has come in to land and presumably unload whatever it is that it’s bringing.

From here I went for a walk around the town (I decided to miss out on the brocante) and had a few chats with the very friendly locals. The number of times that someone stopped me to offer me a lift was incredible.

And it was here that I met my very vocal local yokel. He was renovating the old ice-hockey arena and had indeed been responsible for building the new one.

We discussed all kinds of things here and there, including the effects of a temperature of -50°C on engine and hydraulic oil and the monstrous folly of Brexit. I did also express my dismay that a cruise ship on a regular route around the High Arctic was manned … "PERSONNED" – ed … by Filipinos and Indonesians and the like, and not Inuit.

His opinion, which I simply relate without making any comment at all, was that the Inuit wouldn’t do the work, and he cited several examples from his own experience.

I carried on with my walk, found the health centre and the school (again) and ended up at the new arena so I nipped inside for a look. In the Community Centre there was an exhibition of Arctic sports so I stopped for a while to watch, but I was roasting in there so I went out for a walk.

At the Library and Information Centre a little girl fell in love with Strawberry Moose so her mother agreed that she could be photographed with him – provided that she could join in the fun too.

And why not?

A few other locals took photos of him too, and someone produced the Centre’s own mascot, a seal, who also wanted to join in the fun.

By now it was time to return to the ship so down we went, passed through Immigration which was now Emigration and sped back to the ship, having to do a U-turn as two of the passengers had forgotten their lifebelts.

I had a shower and washed some clothes, and then waited for the call for tomorrow’s briefing. But in the meantime crashed out and so I missed the first 10 minutes, of presumably all of the important stuff.

Tea was a riot though. The waiters were horribly confused and I’m still not totally convinced that I received what I ordered. And my table companions for today were extremely garrulous, which was very pleasant.

Later tonight, there was an impromptu concert. There’s a folk singer-musician, Sherman Downey, on board and one night he’d overheard another passenger playing the piano. A girl could also sing reasonably well so they had been rehearsing informally and decided to give a concert. I’d been asked but obviously with no bass on board it was rather difficult.

The surprise of the night was that we found another girl vocalist – Natalie who does the yoga. And while it was rather hit-and-miss, she had all of the emotion and it looked and sounded quite good. One photo that I took of her came out really well and really captured the emotion of the moment.

And if that wasn’t enough, we discovered a mouth-organ player in the crowd so by the end of the night we were all rocking away, and quite right too.

We have an elderly blind lady on board, and she had asked for a special request. So when they played it, I went over to her and invited her to dance. We did a kind of jazzed-up waltz which fitted the music, which is just as well because it’s the only dance that I know.

At one point we must have hit the open sea in the Davis Straight because we were swaying around quite considerably. It certainly added a certain something to the dancing.

My midnight ramble was once more taken in a tee-shirt (much to the astonishment of Tiffany wrapped up on the deck as if in a cocoon) and we are heading out at 4° on the binnacle. That’s definitely north, so if all goes according to plan we might be pushing on.

I hope so, because these continual delays are really getting on my nerves.

Friday 7th September 2018 – AND THERE I WAS …

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

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

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

… lying on my palliasse wondering whether I ought to heave myself out of my stinking pit.

I’d had a really bad night. For some reason I was very sensitive to the engine noise. It was constantly changing pitch and consequently constantly keeping me awake all through the night and I can’t recall if I ever managed to drop off to sleep.

And as the 06:00 alarm suddenly started to sound, a voice shouted down the loudspeaker system “Polar Bears at 3 o’clock”.

In my half-awakened state I thought to myself that he’s a good few hours late with this announcement, but then it clicked and I grabbed the camera, dashed out of my room, bumped into a lady, she screamed so I dashed back into my room and put on my clothes and then dashed back onto the starboard beam.

At first I thought that it was two polar bears on the ice floe but as events unfolded, I noticed that there were three. A mother and two cubs.

Mum was in position by a seal hole awaiting breakfast, and the two cubs were in their snow-bank den waiting for mum to come back with the grub.

She was totally unperturbed by the passing of the vessel even though it would keep away the seals, but the thing about living in the Arctic is patience. Never mind the “Ohh God, give me patience. And hurry!” – I once heard a delightful story about a group of Inuit who went to the Arctic meadows on Ungava for some hay, found that the grass hadn’t grown enough, so they pitched their tents there and waited.

And this was exactly what mummy was doing, perched by the seal hole. Not pitching her tent waiting for the hay to grow of course, but you know what I mean.

The photos are unfortunately rubbish but then it’s with the Nikon 1’s light-hungry zoom lens in the half-light from a moving ship when I’m not even half-awake. What did you expect? David Bailey?

After taking a score or so of photos, I went back to my room for my medication and other stuff.

And while I was sorting out my laptop, it reminded me of last night’s later events. The bearing on the binnacle was 121°, so we are going in the opposite direction. 0° is North, 90° is East, and so we are heading more-or-less south-east right now, back down Lancaster Sound.

Breakfast was in company of a couple of travellers who seem to have taken a shine to me, and I’ve no idea why because I’m not usually the kind of person whom others like, and we had a really good chat about this and that.

Not about the other though. That’s a rather sore point right now the way that things are. I think that Strawberry Moose is having more luck than me in that respect.

Later I was up on the bridge admiring the pack ice away in the distance to the south, and looking at the beautiful scenery of this corner of Devon Island. I’ve no idea where we are going next, and I’m not convinced that the crew and the captain know either.

Mind you I did manage to speak to a member of the crew about the ship that I keep on seeing. Apparently there’s another ship – the Fram – that’s loitering around the ice edge waiting for a gap to miraculously appear;

We’ve seen several icebergs go drifting past, some of them extremely impressive but none more so than this one with a hole in the middle, like a floating polo mint.It’s apparently called a keyhole iceberg. The hole is caused by some kind of subterranean river in the glacier

And while I was photographing that iceberg I noticed out of the corner of my eye a ship away in the distance. This time, it was no problem in the light to photograph it at distance and to crop it down to see what it was.

It’s indeed a Canadian icebreaker of the kind that would be on stand-by duty around here to watch out for icebergs and also for ships that might risk running headlong into the pack-ice. There are several ships in the channel and also several communities that have not yet received their winter provisions, so with the seas icing up so quickly already, they will be in for a tough time if the icebreakers can’t open up a channel.

We had a couple of discussion session, several of which didn’t interest me very much so I didn’t take part in them, and the one on the story of Franklin’s expeditions and the Erebus and Terror stories, but I didn’t really learn all that much that I didn’t already know.

I did however manage to buttonhole the camera guy and we discussed the camera, the images and my technique.

He had a good look at everything and had a few things to say about it.

Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with my technique except that with it being a lightweight camera, I’m pressing too hard on the switch and making the camera shake at the crucial moment.

Secondly, the images come out the same on his laptop so it’s not a fault of my laptop,

As for the quality of the images, that’s as good it can be. So the fault lies in the camera itself. Not that it’s a bad camera, but simply that it’s not designed to do what I want to do with it and I’m pushing it to the limit of its technical capabilities and even beyond.

It was then lunchtime so I nipped off and had a salad. And to be quite honest I spent more time talking than eating. The yoga assistant is a big fan of 70s rock music so I’ve invited her to come and listen to some of the stuff that I have on my laptop.

It sure beats etchings, doesn’t it?

On a totally different tack, does anyone still remember our trip to Red Bay in Labrador
and the Bernier?

There’s a girl on board ship – one of the staff – called Bernier so I asked her what she knew about the ship. Nothing whatever, she told me, but she did know that there was a very famous Canadian sea captain called Bernier and one of the pages on the Canadian passport depicts him.

Another member of staff told me that Bernier (the captain, not the ship) worked in the High Arctic and it was he who actually claimed Bylot Island – which we will be passing – for Canada in 1906 and he had his crew carve something emblematic on a cliff face.

I’m writing this now because everyone else is outside looking at a bird colony. But as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the only birds in which I have any interest won’t be found clinging to a rock in the High Arctic.

And this is a fine time for the battery in the camera to start to go flat, and we’re off out in an hour or so. I’ve had to bung it on charge and of course, it’s now that we’re starting to sail through the ice. Good job that I have the phone handy, although what the quality might be like is anyone’s guess.

But it actually worked out, because the sea was so rough at this point that the water in the heated pool was going everywhere except where it was supposed to go, and I was able to take a few videos of it.

The phone didn’t last too long though. There was a huge iceberg away in the distance – more like a large sheet of float actually – and the phone camera will never do justice to that, so I’ve had to go down and fetch the Nikon.

They are still trying to do their best to entertain us seeing as everything that is planned is falling apart. And so we had afternoon tea while we played a kind of game where we had to find out bits and pieces about each other. I sort-of took part in it in a half-hearted way because I’m not really in to being sociable as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There’s a National Park at Tay Bay on Bylot Island which is on our route and it’s been decided that we will go for an evening ramble around there.

We needed a briefing from Parks Canada (done vitually) before we could go and, much to my surprise, we were first to leave the boat. I had to get a wiggle on to get changed into my winter gear, and then there was an almighty panic as I couldn’t find my badge.

Nevertheless I did manage to find it and we struggled ashore onto our beach where the perimeter of our walk was guarded by Polar Bear watchers.

Strawberry Moose enjoyed his ride in a zodiac and he made many new friends. Plenty of photo opportunities for him too.

Introducing new species onto an island here is definitely not allowed and there are no moose here. But I shall be wondering what scientists will be thinking when in 1000 years time they are analysing polar bears with antlers or moose in white coats with claws and teeth.

And for me. I had a good walk around to kill the time, which the cynic inside me tells me is the reason for this stop. There were some exciting views of all kinds of things – nothing that I found really interesting though.

There’s a tent ring on the shore but that’s believed to be contemporary and not historical.

As an aside, anything over 50 years old is classed as historical and so that includes a great many of the passengers on board the ship. Me especially. I’m feeling like 150 years old right now with the weight of the world resting on my shoulders.

And there were several icebergs of some beauty. I even saw the sun, such as it was, disappear down behind the mountains and that was fairly spectacular too.

But I do have to say that, much as I enjoyed the pleasant walk, I’ve come here to do much more than this and it’s leaving me somewhat disappointed.

One thing though really stuck in my mind. There’s a young Inuit boy – probably aged about 20 but then again what would I know – on board the ship and I’ve had many a chat with him. He comes from the area and he was pointing out some of the glaciers to me. he was saying that even in his short life the glaciers have receded dramatically and how he was fearing for his grandchildren.

He told me a story about how, even today, he will come over for a large lump of glacier to take home to melt down as water. This ice fell as rain thousands of years ago when there was no pollution in the air and so is as fresh and pure as anything that you might find. It makes the tea taste magnificent, so he said.

It was a wet ride back to the ship, with His Nibs safely inside his plastic bag. And then there was an enormous queue at the boot-washing station as someone apparently decided to do a week’s washing.

A hot shower and a wash of the undies was called for, and then I came down to tea. In a change to my usual habits, I have decided to mingle with different people at mealtimes and chat about different themes seeing as I seem to be stuck in a big rut right now.

And a good chat I had too. We talked about exchanges as students, Switzerland, the Northern Lights and primitive aircraft. All in all, quite an agreeable time and I shall have to do more of this.

It’s quite late now. We didn’t return to the ship from the shore until late and tea was thus even later. I’ll loiter around for a while and then wander off. I doubt that I’ll be around until midnight or later this evening. I need to bring at least some kind of semblance of order into my life.

One thing that has tired me out though is that I had a very emotional, disagreeable and stressful task to do, one which needs to be done and done quickly too before things take a turn in escalating out of hand.

Rather like MacBeth and his “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.

This afternoon the opportunity presented itself so I bit the bullet and did it. The sooner I do it, the sooner it’s over.

It didn’t work out how I hoped that it would, but that would have really been clutching at straws. And in any case, it’s all my own fault for not listening to myself and all of my best counsels in the first place. Proverbs 19:21 is what I should have kept in my mind, isn’t it?

It’s not the first time that I’ve ended up in a mess like this. Far from it. Anyone would think that I would be used to it, but not at all. I fall into the trap on every occasion and it never turns out well. I always start off with the best of intentions, it all somehow goes wrong, I always end up saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment and it never ever comes out as I intend it to. In fact, usually exactly the opposite.

I am reminded of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon and “In the heat of the action men are apt to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away” and it happens to me all too often.

I really shouldn’t be let out without a keeper. But then, who would want to be responsible for keeping me?

Thursday 6th September 2018 – DESPITE MY …

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

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

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

… rather late night last night looking at the midnight sun, I was still awake before the alarm went off. And much to my surprise, I find that I’m starting to rely on this and include it in my timetable, and that’s something that will never do because in the long run it’s all going to end in tears.

However, I did stay in bed until the alarm went off, and then I was straight out and on deck with the crowds who were also up there early. Our captain had managed to find the pack-ice. My fellow-voyagers were all trying to see the wildlife but as for me, it’s not my thing at all, unless it’s a polar bear of course.

I’m much more interested in the landscape and the historical aspect of it all. But the land was rather far away and swathed in fog, and we’ve yet to touch on the historical aspect, at least from my own point of view.

It was at this point that I realised that I hadn’t had my medication and so I went back down to my cabin.

Breakfast was the usual. Bran flakes with raisins and fruit, with toast, coffee and orange juice. And then I made an appointment to see the Cruise Director about an issue that has suddenly developed.

I was going to add “unexpectedly” but regular readers of this rubbish that I write will recall the fact that the only thing unexpected about all of this is that it’s taken so long for me to get myself into trouble.

After this, I’ve been keeping a low profile. After all, it’s not like me to court controversy, is it? After all, Henry Hudson was cast adrift by his colleagues and subsequently lost on an Arctic voyage after one such confrontation.

Back on the ice and watching the wildlife. At least – they were. And later we were all given a lecture on bird-watching. I had plenty of those from Nerina when I was married, as you can imagine. But again, I wasn’t all that interested. The only birds that I am likely to be interested in watching aren’t likely to be found in the Lancaster Sound.

Later, there was a talk on navigating the North-West Passage. I was really looking forward to this but once again, I was confounded. Rather than a discussion on McClure and Franklin, with maybe Amundsen thrown in for good measure, we had someone else from the staff going on an ego-trip about how he once sailed around the passage in a catamaran.

I really don’t know where they find these people. But the ordinary punters quite like it. So I suppose that we have to cater for them. After all, they are in the majority.

But I’m not here to listen to that, as you know. I’m all out to hear how the ancient explorers did it, and then to go out and do it with them.

We took a diversion up Burnett Inlet to have a look at what wildlife we might see up there.

Someone saw a few walruses, and, well, I suppose that they were once I magnified the image.

Someone else saw a dozen or so musk-oxen on the slope leading up to the glacier. And all that I can say is that I’ll have to take their word for that.

I managed to see the seal though. So at least that’s something. It would have been nice to see a polar bear stalking him but I suppose that that’s a luxury I’ll have to do without.

We settled down for lunch but we weren’t there long. The cry went up “beluga whales on the port bow” so we had another “Gold Strike at Bear Creek” moment as everyone dashed outside.

Quite frankly, I wouldn’t recognise a beluga whale if I were to trip over one on my doorstep, so I didn’t really know what I was shooting at. But later on and the end of the evening, several things that I had photographed that I thought were ice – floes are in fact the aforementioned. So how about that?

Of course, Vera Lynn would have no such difficulty. As everyone knows, she was once a cook on a whaler up her, and the legendary cry from the crew of her boat of “Whale Meat Again!” still echoes out across the icebergs… "are you sure about this?" – ed.

As we exited the Inlet, I was convinced that I saw something black on the horizon that I was convinced was a ship. No-one else could see it, even with binoculars, and were of the opinion that I was hallucinating.

But anyway I took a photo of it and with a little judicial “crop and enlarge” I could certainly see something.

And when I enlarged it even more, I’m even more convinced that it’s another ship.

Back to lunch, and I suddenly came over all peculiar. I’d noticed yesterday evening that I was having a shaking fit which I put down to something that I must have eaten, but it certainly erupted while I was trying to finish my lunch. It’s not very often that I have to walk out on a meal but I did today.

Later on we went into Stratton Inlet, and the cry went up “walruses on the starboard bow” so yet another “Gold Strike At Bear Creek” moment as everyone dashed upstairs.

This time I was lucky and actually managed to see them. And I’m glad that I did too, because there were a couple of dozen of them – dominant males, females, and loads of pups splashing around in the water.

There were several workshops going on later in the afternoon. I was torn between the Geography of the North West Passage or the Camera demonstration and lecture, and chose the latter.

To be honest I didn’t really learn much, except that my equipment is total garbage and my technique is even worse. Seeing other people’s gear and the output that they can obtain makes me want to delete all of mine and send them to the recycle bin?

I’m totally demoralised.

The day’s ice report hadn’t come in and so we all went for a sail in the zodiacs. I had the camera and the zoom lens with me and took a few pics, a couple of which came out okay, but still not good enough for what I want.

When we arrived, we were told the bad news. The channel ahead is blocked and we need to retreat to go around another way.

And this is really bad news for me because the four places that I had wanted to see had now all been by-passed. We aren’t going to reach a single one. I’m now totally inconsolable. I may as well get off at the next stop and fly back home for all the good that this trip has done me.

I was reminded of a quote from a certain Lieutenant Skead who accompanied Collinson on his leisurely stroll around the fringes of the ice back in the 1850s. He said An ordinary yachtsman might have taken his craft (there) and his wife and daughters to boot. I’m afraid to think of what we shall do if we meet with difficulty

However, a little bit of research did tell me that in November 2015 our captain had almost sunk the ship in the Antarctic after a rather injudicious encounter with an ice-floe and this had cost the company a considerable amount of money and prestige.

It’s quite apparent therefore that he’s going to be even more cautious whenever he encounters any ice, and that can only be a disastrous thing from our point of view.

All afternoon, I’d been trying to have a crash out as this illness slowly takes hold again. But each time I’ve gone to lie down, and there were dozens of such moments, something else has come up to disturb me. And so it was this evening as I was invited to sit at the top table.

Everyone is supposed to be dressed to impress but badger that for a game of soldiers. I’m here with three tee-shirts, two fleeces, two pairs of trousers and several undies – washing them in the shower as I go along.

Talking of washing clothes, I’d had another bad attack out there on the way back to the ship in the zodiac. Still quite shaky, I went back to my cabin and had a nice hot shower and a clothes-washing session.

They say that you aren’t allowed to wash your clothes yourself, but the small print says quite clearly “with detergent”. I’m using the soap provided in the dispenser. That will keep my clothes going for quite a while.

After tea I came back and started to work on my photos and to write up my notes – constantly being distracted by thing happening outside, like a glorious sunset, a rising crescent moon as thin as a rake and, despite what everyone has been saying, another ship on the far shore.

Not to mention a wonderful Arctic daylight at midnight
“A wonderful Arctic daylight at midnight?”
“I told you not to mention that!”

And there’s already a record that has been chosen that sums up my currently manic-depressive mood. For the last few days I’ve had Colosseum Live going round and round in an endless loop, especially “Skellington” and “Lost Angeles” which somehow seem to be quite appropriate right now.

There’s one bit in “Skellington” about “Make damn sure your reflection can look you in the eye”. Hmmmmm.Quite!

And I’m going to check the binnacle in a moment because there’s something bizarre going on with the way that the ship has been manoeuvring in the last half-hour or so.

Sunday 2nd September 2018 – HAVING GONE WEST …

… yesterday, I was hoping that we would be emulating Richard Barnes today and, getting rather tired of Southern Comfort we would “Go North”.

And it must be my really bad conscience telling me something, or else the tension has totally swept me away, Or else it was the early night. But I was wide-awake at 02:25 this morning, looking at the aircraft coming into land at the airport.

By 04:00 I was out of bed working, having given up the idea of sleep a long time previously. I really need to do something about this otherwise I’m going to have a catastrophe.

After all of the alarms had rung, I went and had a good shower. And gathered up all my things.

Luckily, at the check-out I managed to locate a coffee machine so I was able to fuel up. Maybe I’ll feel a little more like it when it starts to work. Who knows?

At the baggage check-in at the airport I noticed that I’m definitely losing my touch. My suitcase weighed a mere 16.6 kgs and that included Strawberry Moose. It’s not like me at all. I could have taken a couple of extra children in my baggage allowance.

Security was another total farce. We had probably the surliest member of the Canadian Government Service that I have ever encountered (and I’ve encountered a few, believe me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall).

And then my boots rang the alarm bells at the barrier so I was told (not asked, told) to take them off. And so I made an acerbic remark about the fact that I’d rather take my chances with the freedom fighters than the Security Services, which led to my being “selected for special screening”.

The guy then couldn’t make the explosives detector work so I sat down on his table to rest, to which he took a great deal of exception. My response was that I wasn’t going to hang around like this while he messed around with all of his useless equipment, and we had something of a stand-off as I dug my heels in.

In the end, I was waved through, but not before they confiscated my bottle of water. For some reason or another they took exception to my book too and we had a little argument about that as well.

I really don’t know what’s the matter with these people. It’s almost as if they go around looking for a fight. So the best that I can do is to make their day and oblige them.

While I was sitting down, I started to make a list of the things that I don’t remember packing. I can see it being another one of THOSE voyages. And I must remember to find a large bin-liner in which to wrap His Nibs, otherwise he’ll be rather wet.

Our aeroplane is one of the old British Aerospace BAe146 voriants, either an Avro RJ85 or an RJ100, and the only way to tell them apart withour a tape measure is to have one standing alongside another.

You can tell from the registration number too, but I can’t see it on my photo. It’s a charter flight operated by a company based in Yellowknife and there weren’t all that many people on it, which makes me think that it might be an RR100.

I ended up sharing a row of seats with an elderly British lady who has lived in Canada for 75 years, and a rather garrulous British guy who had clearly had more than just a whiff of the barmaid’s apron.

A meal was supplied on the flight and I was rather dubious about whether it was really as vegan as it was supposed to be.

After a nice relaxing flight we came in to land at Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories for a refuelling stop.

That’s a decision that seemed to me at the time to be a rather strange decision, knowing the likely range of a BAe 146. And the cynic inside me was not assuaged by the news that we received here.

It seems that, once more, we had been confounded by the weather. Instead of blowing stuff away from us, is blowing stuff towards us and blocking our passage, which can be very painful if you have forgotten to bring your ointment.

The bad weather conditions mean that we can’t go on yet again, and we are now stranded here in Yellowknife for a while. Looking at the positives, because I need to adopt a more positive outlook, at least, I can say that at 62°27N this is the farthest north point that I have ever reached, beating Finland 1981 by a good 100 or so miles.

But will we make it any farther north?

That positive outlook didn’t last very long, did it?

While things are being organised, I went for a walk outside the airport.

Straight away, I stumbled across a paid of really old Douglas DC3 “Dakotas” parked up at the end of the runway. I knew that there were some that had been abandoned here but I didn’t think that I would be lucky enough to find them.

This one here is registration number C-GPNR and it was apparently built in 1942, construction number 13333 and ex-USAAF serial 42-93423.

It’s a DC3-S1C3G variant, which seems to indicate to me that it’s fitted with two 895-kW Pratt and Whitney R-1830-S1C3G Twin Wasp radials rated at at 1200hp, so it’s much more powerful than the versions fitted with Wright Cyclone engines.

But it doesn’t look as if it will be going very far in the near future as from what I can see, its last airworthiness certificate that I could find expired on 23rd May 1996

This one is a Douglas C47 version – the Skytrain – of the DC3 Dakota.

Her registration number is C-FCUE, built in 1942 as construction number 12983 and fitted with two Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 Twin Wasp radial engines. It’s claimed to be the first aeroplane to have landed in Yellowknife and can count among its celebrated passengers the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

It’s also been suggested and one very vocal local yokel told me that one of these two aircraft was involved in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944

But it’s a shame to see them here slowly disappearing into the landscape like this. Someone ought to do something about saving them.

There’s another aeroplane here too, away in the distance. This one is on display on a plinth. Yet another obliging local told me that this was the first aeroplane to have landed on the North Pole and so I went to see that too.

And, lo and behold, it’s Arctic Fox, registration CF-TFX.

She’s a Bristol Mk31 freighter and you will have to look long and hard to find another one of these aeroplanes anywhere in the world because there can’t be more than a dozen remaining.

She was built in 1953 to a wartime design as a freighter as you can tell from the clamshell front doors for transporting machinery and vehcles.

She was bought by Wardair in 1958 and used for the transportation of freight around the North-West Territories.

But her claim to fame is much more important and personal than that, because she was the first ever wheeled aeroplane to land at the North Pole, a feat that she accomplished on 5th May 1967 under the control of a pilot called Don Braun.

It was purchased from Wardair in 1968 and installed here as a monument on 22nd June 1968

I went back to the airport afterwards to see what was going on, and eventually we were picked up by a shuttle bus and driven to our hotel. We’re staying in the Days Inn in the centre of the new town, up on the hill.

And much to my surprise, I don’t seem to be alone.

The Vanilla Queen, whom I mentioned yesterday and who is named for all those of you who know your Dutch rock music from the early 1970s – is the Québecoise who was on my plane from Montreal to Edmonton yesterday. She was then in the hotel last night, again on the ‘plane this morning, now on my shuttle bus and she’s staying in my hotel.

We had a lengthy chat and what she told me caused me to give her all of my adulation. She comes from Montreal, south of the river, and had the urge to go to live in the Arctic. So one day, she just upped sticks and moved to Iqaluit, the principal town on Baffin Island, beyond the Arctic Circle.

And how I admire people like that who have that kind of courage.

She’s a hair stylist (NOT a hairdresser) by profession, so I joked that she would have loads of fun trying to do something with what remains of the hair that I still have.

For lunch I wandered off into town and came across a Subway. That’ll do me nicely.

But not before I’d witnessed the total demolition of an old wooden building here.

Half of the town was out watching it, and I thought that it was the highlight of the year, but it turns out that it was a silent protest as almost everyone in the community was up in arms about the whole affair.

Mind you, someone whom I met later said that in her opinion it was a derelict wreck and about time that it went.

On the way back I noticed a sign saying that the town had been built on the oldest rocks yet known in the world,, so I recounted to one of the officials on our voyage the story of the rocks being 4,000,004 years and three months old.

But as Alfred Hitchcock and Kenneth Williams once so famously remarked “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

A little later, there was a guided tour of the town organised so I leapt on board. And so did The Vanilla Queen, and we had quite another chat.

I was expecting to see the sewage farm, the rubbish dump and the brand-new bicycle rack but instead we ended up on the rock at the Bush Pilots’ Memorial where there’s a magnificent view over Yellowknife Bay on the Great Slave Lake.

It was well-worth the climb because You could see for miles from up here over some really beautiful views.

Yellowknife is actually two towns in one.

The original settlement that was founded in the 1930s is down by the lake but when the North West Territories were incorporated in 1967 and the region’s administrative offices were located here, these buildings were constructed up on the hill away from the water.

A modern town, complete with all facilities, to house the staff who came here with the Government grew up around the buildings. Today, about 20,000 people live here.

We walked back down the hill towards town in the company of another couple of people who had spent some time in the town and who knew their way around.

There were several exciting things to see on the way down, including this little photo prop at the side of the road.

It’s the kind of thing that is always worth a good photo opportunity

On our way again, we hadn’t gone all that far when we were sidetracked by some of the most extraordinary people you would ever wish to meet.

Down at the edge of the lake we ended up at the old original settlement of the town. Here we met a guy who makes sculptures by collecting all kinds of abandoned objects and balancing them on top of each other.

Having lived here for a considerable number of years, he told us a whole host of interesting and exciting stories about life down here.

He also pointed out a route along the lake shore where we could see many interesting things, such as house boats that float on large iron pontoons.

Rents in the town are quite expensive, but the lake is actually outside the city boundary so people can live here on a houseboat without paying rent or any local authority charges.

This can on occasion lead to quite a considerable amount of controversy. There are of course no services available to those who live in the houseboats and so they take advantage of those available in the town – without usually paying for them of course.

Many of the local residents and indeed the town council are none-too-happy about this situation and on quite a few occasions the farces of law and order have been involved.

Access to the houseboats is of course by boat during the summer but in the winter the lake freezes over and access is on foot.

And the ice on the lake is so solid that residents can even bring their vehicles right up to the front door.

One of the most famous roads in the town is called Ragged Ass Road.

When the access to the waterfront properties was by water, what is now known as Ragged Ass Road was the rear limit of the properties and at was against this line that all of the outside toilets of the residents were situated.

However there are some people who reckon that this story is at best apocryphal.

Another famous street in the town is Lois Lane. In case you haven’t guessed, one of the houses in the street was for a number of years the home of the actress Margaret (Margot) Kidder.

While we were down in Ragged Ass Road we met a woman who told us that she was a computer programmer and that she had developed the computer program that Sue was using on her tablet.

In the garden of a house right by where we were talking, there were a couple of abandoned lorries.

I thought that this one was exciting. It’s an International Harvester R150 that was gradually being overwhelmed by Arctic Willow.

This is quite a rare vehicle because as far as I could discover, they were only made from 1953 to 1955. The whole range totalled about 250,000 of which well over half related to just one model, the R110.

That wasn’t all that was exciting around here either.

This is an old mining area and as well as the old Ingersoll Rand air compressor that was lying around, there were loads of old air tools and machinery lying around too.

Someone had taken full advantage of all of these to create a very interesting art-deco sculpture that spanned several gardens in the street.

I mentioned that the original site of the town was down here on the waterfront.

It consisted of loads of of old ad-hoc wooden cabins assembled by the miners who came here in the late 1930s in search of the gold that had been discovered in the area in 1934.

There are still a few of the original cabins remaining and this was pointed out to us as being one of them.

By now our little group of people had whittled itself down to just two of us and so we wandered off to the museum of local life, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.

This was certainly quite an interesting place and there were lots to see. We certainly learnt a great deal about local life amongst the indigenous people.

I was very keen on the Polar Bears while The Vanilla Queen fell in love with a stuffed Muskox.

The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre is situated in a very beautiful location on the edge of the city in a small park, in the same area where the Parliament of the Northwest Territories is situated.

We still had plenty of time after the museum closed and so we were able to admire the Government Offices in all their glory in the evening sunshine.

This isn’t the kind of traditional view that you would associate with life on the tundra so close to the Arctic Circle.

Our evening meal at the hotel across the road had been put back by half an hour and so we had plenty of time left on our hands. But there was a beautiful lake at the back of that hotel which looked very inviting so we went for a walk.

And I must have been very distracted because I don’t seem to have taken any photos of it. I’m sure that that can’t be right.

We had a nice buffet tea, with plenty of choice even for me which makes a nice change.

And after tea, we were entertained by some Inuit throat musicians giving a fine demonstration of their art. It was certainly different.

But the procedure was interrupted by an announcement from the admin of our trip that with a change in the direction of the wind we are going to try to go on tomorrow. But to where, we really don’t have much of an idea

So off we traipsed to our hotel and bed. Alarm calls at 04:00 and on the bus at 05:00

And where will we be stranded tomorrow?

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

… that banks would stop employing cashiers who wear low-cut tee-shirts. When this one today leant over the counter to give me my US dollars in a fashion so that we could count them together, I was totally distracted and I have no idea how much she gave me.

It’s definitely bad for my health, all of this.

Last night was slightly better. I slept all the way through until the racket from the fridge and the air-conditioning awoke me at about 04:00. But I soon went back to sleep until the alarms went off.

Breakfast for some reason didn’t start to be served until 08:00 so I had plenty of time to attack the notes from yesterday, and I’d even finished by the time that they opened the dining room, which is always encouraging.

Afterwards, I had a shower and washed my clothes from yesterday. I’ll be washing myself away at this rate if it keeps on like this.

A little later, I went out into town, stopping off for a bottle of water and to explore the shopping mall just down the road.

And why is shopping in North America so boring? Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops, you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Down the road at the foot of the hill by the Parc Viger is this beautiful building.

Dating from the early years of the 20th Century, it was formerly the Montreal Technical School but today it’s the BANQ – the Bibiliothèque and Archives National de Québec.

I’ve taken shelter there from the rain once a few years ago, but I’ve never actually visited it. However, it is my destination for this morning.

While you admire one of the most beautiful interiors that I have ever seen, let me tell you my story.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago I wrote a pile of stuff about the Chemin du Roy, the road that was built by Pierre Robineau de Bécancour and Jean Eustache Lanouiller in he early 18th Century to link Montréal and Québec

I wrote at the time that I would one day have to visit the National Archives to find the original maps of the route, because much has been lost in the subsequent 300 years.

So here I am.

But I’m in for a massive disappointment.

There are indeed record of the route, that’s for sure. But they are held at the archives site in Québec, not Montreal. So I need to go there instead.

And where are the BANQ archives in Québec? Why, on the campus at the University of Laval of course.

Ring any bells?

But all is not lost. It wasn’t a total waste of time.

I’ve been wondering for years about the track arrangements at the Gare Viger – how the platforms were actually laid out in relation to the buildings, and here I struck gold.

On the wall was an exhibition of the area, and one of the exhibits was a map of the area 100 years or so ago which showed everything that I wanted to know.

The station was subsequently modernised and extended, and this meant that the track layout needed to be changed.

And while I wasn’t able to see a plan of how the station layout was configured afterwards, there was a handy aerial photograph hanging on the wall that showed at least some of the train sheds.

So I might not be any the wiser, but I’m certainly better-informed.

The Gare Viger dates from the turn of the 20th Century. But before this, there was an earlier Canadian Pacific railway station in the eastern side of the city – the Gare Dalhousie.

It was from here that the first trans-continental train set out in 1886 (and we’ve all noticed that, once again, the Maritime Provinces have been totally ignored by the official Canadian History. According to them, there’s nothing except eskimoes and indians east of Montreal and they don’t count for anything)

After the opening of the Gare Viger it became a freight depot and then an industrial warehouse. However it’s recently undergone a programme of renovation and they have done a good job here.

It’s now a circus school, and seeing as it was formerly a Canadian Pacific building, that is quite appropriate. Clowns should feel right at home here.

Down on the docks Oakglen is still there, as we might expect, but we have another bulk carrier down at the far end.

She’s the Gullwing, a Maltese bulk-carrier of 39000 tonnes and was built in 2011, although you might not think it.

She’s come in from Quebec after an exhausting tour around the Pacific, and were I going to visit my friend Rhys I would hop aboard because according to the port authorities her next stop is Charleston in South Carolina.

Also in the far end of the harbour was a huge MSC container ship.

No chance of reading its name from here unfortunately but according to the port records, there’s an MSC Alyssa in port and she seems to fit the bill.

She’s of 61500 tonnes and has arrived from Liverpool. And were I to want to go back to Leuven for my next hospital appointment I would immediately leap aboard, because her next port of call is Antwerp.

The brats still aren’t back at school yet in Montreal, and so the children’s entertainment is in full swing.

I was impressed by the pirate ships, and even more impressed by the fact that the kids were being allowed to swing on ropes and slide down zip wires and all of that.

Can you imagine that in the stupid nanny-state UK where the ridiculous Health and Safety rules are such that you even need a fire safety certificate to wave a flag at a football match.

But I haven’t come here to waste my time.

I had it on good authority that there was a cruise ship in town ready to do a voyage down the St Lawrence and the Eastern seaboard of the USA, and so I went for a look.

And here we have the Seabourn Quest, all 32,500 tonnes of her and built as recently as 2011, which is quite modern for a cruise ship. We’ve seen some thoroughly ancient and disreputable ones in our time.

Unfortunately the quay was heavily guarded so if Strawberry Moose and I want to nip aboard, we’d have to buy some tickets.

The little tender alongside her is the Juno Marie.

She’s officially described as a tanker, and being small like this, her task is very likely to be to fuel up the larger ships in the docks as they arrive so that they are ready to set sail as quickly as possible.

There are a few of these little tankers in port and we’ve seen at least one of them before.

When I was here last October I’d finally managed to make it to the real centre of the city where it all was happening back in the 17th Century but I didn’t have time to go far.

One of the places that I hadn’t seen was the old Ursuline convent, or what remains of it.

This organisation of the “Grey Nuns” was founded here in Montreal in 1737 by Marguerite d’Youville and they ended up over time with quite an impressive range of buildings here.

Their claim to fame is that they were the first female religious organisation to undertake the full range of social and charitable aims.

There had been many people engaged in these tasks before, and we’ve talked in the past about people like Marguerite Bourgeoys.

But they just had their little niche of interest, not the whole range.

There was a large hospital on the site too, as well as a very large and impressive church, if the old drawings are anything to go by.

But as the city expanded northwards and eastwards away from the river, and as the port of Montreal expanded along the banks, it was deemed necessary to make a new road network connecting the two.

And so the Ursulines had to go, and so did some of their buildings.

Luckily, not all was demolished. There are still some remains of the impressive buildings that are now classed as Historical Monuments.

And if you look very carefully in the roadway, you’ll see lines of granite setts – there are a couple in the photo here.

When they were doing some roadworks a while ago they came across the foundations of the old walls that had been demolished. They have marked them out on the road with the granite setts so that you can see the extent of the former buildings

As I was making my way round to the Place d’Youville I noticed this building in the distance.

Whilst the building itself is impressive, the exciting thing about it is that over the door is carved the legend “Grand Trunk”.

This was one of the earliest of the main-line railway companies that was involved in the “railway wars” in Canada at the end of the 19th Century.

This was their magnificent Head Office in the Rue McGill, built 1899-1902.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long. The Grand Trunk was one of the biggest losers in the Railway War and it was coming back from a very unsuccessful fund-raising trip in Europe in 1912 that its president, Charles Hays, was drowned on the Titanic.

The company quickly went bankrupt and was taken over by the Government, forming part of the Canadian National rail network.

Montreal these days is basically a very large island, but back in the 16th Century it was several small ones.

The original settlement was on a small island bounded by the St Lawrence River and the Riviere St Pierre.

That latter river was eventually built over, and today, it’s the Place d’Youville, named for our friend Marguerite.

When we were here in October last year, you will remember seeing the excavations that were taking place just here.

This was the site of the city’s first indoor covered market which later became the Parliament Building for the country.

However the building was destroyed in 1849 in the riots that followed the passing of an Act emancipating the rebels of the 1830s and was never rebuilt. The Government of Canada moved elsewhere, much to the chagrin of the Québecois.

A fire station was erected here in 1903 – 54 years too late to save the Parliament building unfortunately.

Today the fire brigade has moved elsewhere and the building is now a museum. I would have liked to have gone for a look around but I was rather pushed for time.

I still have quite a lot to do today and it’s late.

While I was standing by the side of the road taking photographs, I was interrupted by a street washer.

Mind you, he didn’t let me interrupt him, and carried on with whatever he was doing.

As a result, not only did I have a complimentary shoe-wash I had a complimentary ankle wash too and that certainly different. And it wasn’t just me either. Several other passers-by were in the same boat.

Further interruptions were the order of the day too.

While I was a-wandering a little further on (which is rather better than walking by St Paul’s), I heard the familiar wail of a diesel locomotive siren in the distance so I legged it rather rapidly down the street.

Not rapidly enough, as it happens. I was defeated by the pair of locomotives, 4707 and his friend, disappearing into the distance down towards the dock.

And when I return home and have access to myJane’s Train Recognition Guide I’ll tell you all about them.

Instead, I went back to the Place d’Youville and to photograph the stele. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last year when I was here it was all fenced off and it was impossible to take a proper photo.

So having done that, Bane of Britain wandered away from the site, without actually going over there to read the plaque to discover what it says.

I really don’t know why you lot pay me, honestly I don’t.

You DO pay me, don’t you? All you need to do is to click on one of the links at the side and make your next order from Amazon that way. I receive a small commission on your orders, but it costs you nothing at all.

I’m not sure at all what was going on here.

There I was, standing on the edge of the kerb and three or four fire engines pulled up, one after the other. Their blue and red flashing lights blazing away.

They performed some kind of danse macabre in the street and I’ve no idea why. There was nothing like any emergency that I could see in the vicinity and they didn’t seem to be in too much hurry.

I turned my attention to the building that I had come here to see – the old Customs House.

Ideally situated at the exit to the harbour, nothing could come into port without paying the appropriate duty to the Government and this was where they did it.

The Customs people aren’t there now- they’ve moved on down the road into a new modern building that is 10timesasbig, even though trade in the port has declined.

By now, my stomach was thinking that my throat had been cut and I needed to organise some food.

Not round here though as I still had some important things to do.

So onto the Metro at Victoria-OACI and off to Namur (the Metro station, not the town in Belgium) and the big Walmart there. But leaving the metro station was really difficult. The way that the doors are positioned there was a howling gale every time someone opened one of them and it was something of a struggle to pass through.

It all seems to have changed there. New buildings and the like and I couldn’t at first get my bearings. But there’s a Subway at the bottom end of the shopping complex so I installed myself there.

The restaurant next door had a free wifi service so I was able to patch in there and pick up the news.

It was a long hike to Walmart from there – longer than I remember it being – and it was something of a disappointment when I arrived. It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer items on the shelves these days and the place is looking rather untidy.

There weren’t all that many customers there either and I’ve no idea why.

There wasn’t as much choice as I was hoping but I managed eventually to kit myself out with the remainder of the articles that I need. Whether it’s all suitable I really don’t know, but I can’t do any better than this.

But here’s a shop that I hadn’t seen before, even though the staff tell me that they have been here for four years.

It’s called the Bulk Barn and it’s very reminiscent of the old “Weigh and Save” shops that we had in the UK in the late 70s and 80s.

And I’ll make a note of this place because they had everything in there that I could possibly use, including dehydrated vegetables for travelling purposes.

I’ll have to check to see if there are any of these places anywhere else on my route around Canada in the future.

By now it was rush hour and time for me to be heading off.

I was lucky that I was on the train because had I been in a car I would probably still be there now judging by the amount of traffic on the Boulevard Decarie.

Total gridlock and that’s the kind of thing that makes me glad that I don’t live in a city these days. How would I cope with all of this.

Back at my hotel I organised my suitcase yet again to take into account my recent purchases. This suitcase is becoming rather uncomfortably full.

There was some work that needed to be done, so I caught up with that, and then decided to go out for tea.

I walked the entire length of the rue St Catherine Est from my hotel almost all the way down to the bridge and I was not alone.

Apparently the students from McGill University are having their induction week this week and it’s party, party, party. Hordes of them freaking out all over the place.

It made me feel quite old to watch them. These days they don’t look anything like 18 year-olds at all and that’s all very confusing.

But the big surprise for me was the pizza place that was advertising vegan pizzas – yes, vegan pizzas! I’ve never ever seen vegan pizzas advertised in a mainstream pizza place before so I went in to give the place some support.

And delicious it was too.

That was me organised (such as I can be) for the day. I retreated to my hotel and decided to have an early night. I need it too after all of this.

Tuesday 29th August 2018 – NO PRIZES …

… for guessing where I am when you see this beautiful building, are there?

A place on this morning’s flight from Brussels to Montreal miraculously freed when a passenger was declined boarding due to incorrect paperwork (this new visa system is causing chaos) and so I was bundled aboard.

and you won’t have much more luck than that, will you?

But whose silly idea was it to set the alarm for 05:20 this morning? And for the repeater to go off at 05:30?

And what was even more surprising was that I actually made it out of bed at 05:30 too. I must be improving!

First off was the medication. That’s important. And then to start the packing. It didn’t take long to do that and so a shower and good scrub was next.

Breakfast was the rest of the orange juice from last night, a mug of coffee (having those little tubes of coffee in my travel pouch is really a good idea) and one of those cheese baps that I made last night too.

Taking my leave of the hotel staff I hit the streets to the station and bought my ticket for the airport. There was an announcement that there was a train ready to leave so I made it up onto the platform where there was a Nederlands Spoorwegen train for Den Haag. I’ve never been on a Dutch train before so this was another new experience.

The airport was the usual chaos. I’m booked on a Brussels Airlines flight – SN Brussels Airlines, the successor to the legendary SABENA, or “Such A Bad Experience – Never Again!” and that’s enough to give anyone the collywobbles when flying the Atlantic.

But when I presented myself at the check-in, they denied that there was such a flight. After much binding in the marsh I discovered that it was a code share and the flight was organised by Air Canada.

A big sigh of relief.

At the Air Canada desk there was a long queue. It seems that they weren’t ready for us. So we waited. And waited. And waited.

At least it gave me plenty of time to admire the adverts on the television screen broadcasting to the waiting masses.

I have to admit that I quite liked this advert. The last time that I tried anything similar though, I was asked to leave the shop. It might be the in thing to do in Flanders, but not anywhere else.

It did remind me of the story that I heard about the alcoholic who saw the advert “Drink Canada Dry” – so he’s on his way.

Eventually they opened the gate and we filed in, and then we had to wait again while the staff at check-in discussed last night’s television programmes, applied their make-up, and squirted perfume under their armpits (and I bet that you think that I am joking too).

But we were soon checked in. No aisle seat for me again, which is a shame, no matter how had I pleaded. Some times, I really am a miserable pleader.

After all that I have said in the past, going through security today was surprisingly painless. Just the odd glitch here and there, with the queues controlled by a woman who had clearly been bullied quite severely as a child and was thus determined to wreak her revenge on everyone else.

The automatic passport reader was fun too. With all of the messing about, it would have been far quicker to have checked them by hand. With all of this totally senseless automation, no wonder that there is rampant unemployment in the Western World.

A few years ago I made the point about how at Zurich Airport all of the passengers are directed, once they have gone through all of the formalities, to their gates via the Duty-Free shop.

And with the airport here at Brussels having been substantially modified following the events of 22nd March 2016, this is exactly what happens here these days too.

They never miss an opportunity.

Our aeroplane for the flight is, would you believe – an Airbus A330-300.

One of the earliest twin-engined long-haul jets, this one is one of the earliest examples – c-GFAF, serial number 277, built in 1999 and delivered to Air Canada in 2000.

And never mind Air Transat – we were all crammed in here like sardines too and it was really uncomfortable. Not the seats – they were fine – but the lack of room that we had to stretch out.

They even managed a vegan meal for me, which was most impressive and easily the best that I’ve had on a flight. A chick-pea starter followed by a black bean casserole with rice, and an Alpro soya dessert for pudding.

They weren’t very good with the in-flight drinks though and I have a raging thirst these days. But luckily they had one of these charity things in the airport and were selling bottles of water for €1:00. I had bought two just for this kind of emergency.

Another disappointment was the brat. A child of about 3 just a couple of rows away from me who decided to scream for a couple of hours during the flight. King Herod had the right idea, that’s all that I can say.

It stopped me sleeping, but not so the woman sitting next to me (the wife of the man who had been thrown off, hence I know all about the story). She had a good sleep for a couple of hours during the flight, most of it spent reclining against my arm.

She was lucky though. The non-stop turbulence that we had would have been enough to stop me sleeping, had the brat not obliged.

All of the paperwork requirements for entry have been abolished at the airport. Now you fill it all in on an electronic screen, of which there are about 500 in the arrivals lounge.

I imagined that this would take hours, but our fright was the first transatlantic fight to arrive and we were done in minutes. Even the border police were friendly and helpful.

Has there been a revolution in Canada?

The usual 30-minute wait for the baggage (probably because we were through Immigration so quickly) and then out into the airport.

The price of a three-day transport ticket has increased (to $19:00) and you have to pay $6:00 for an oyster card thing. And there’s a new system for the 747 bus to the town, which now takes three times the personnel and three times the wait, with three times as much confusion.

There was a little group of us, two Septics and a young French guy, having a good chat. Mr Septic was telling some real whoppers (much to the chagrin of Mrs Septic who went to sit elsewhere) so I delighted in telling him some real whoppers in return.

I leapt off the bus at Berri-UQAM into the oppressive, clammy heat and headed round the corner to my hotel. My usual one is booked up but the one next door – the Hotel Elegant – had some rooms (I’d checked on the internet in Brussels and booked one) so I went there instead.

It’s a typical “rue St Herbert” hotel – cheap and basic and seen better days – but it’s central. That’s important. If I’m out at an airport hotel or somewhere and overwhelmed by sleep, I can’t get back to crash out.

A shower to cool me off (and to wash my clothes) and a brief crash out for an hour or so, and a chat to Josée, and I was back out again.

The streets were soaking wet too. I thought that it had looked a bit stormy when I arrived, but while I was deep in the arms of Morpheus just now, we must have got the lot.

First stop was to buy some root beer of course, but on the way to the IGA supermarket, something that I saw (or rather, didn’t see) made me pull up.

I can’t remember what was here now, but whatever it was has now long-gone and they are digging some immense foundations for something else to rise out of the ashes.

Meantime, I’d hate to be living next-door.

Something else cheered me up too;

I think that Poutine is the most disgusting stuff on the planet. It’s chips with grated cheese on top and all smothered in gravy. And how anyone can eat it I really don’t know.

And so the world-famous place in Montreal that advertises “more than 30 types of poutine – and create your own too” has now closed down and is up for sale.

That’s what I call good news.

Even better news is that next door a Lebanese restaurant has opened. And it sells falafel too. So I won’t have to walk far for tea any more.

During all the time that I’ve been wandering up and down Montreal, I’m surprised that I’ve never noticed this building before.

It’s on the corner of the Rue St Hubert and the Rue de la Gauchetière, and it’s formerly the Centre Hospitalier Jacques Viger

If you’re thinking, as I am, that it’s a beautiful building, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s on the Register of Historic Places – not that that counts for much.

On the subject of historic places, just down the road is, in my opinion, the most beautiful building in Montreal.

This is the famous Gare Viger, built as the flagship railway station for Montreal by Canadian Pacific.

All of the passenger trains from further east used to come here, but overnight the Canadian Pacific hacked off its passenger services east of Montreal and abandoned it to the elements.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we regularly visited it in its derelict state, and expressed concerns for its future.

However, no need to worry quite yet. It’s been renovated and is being let as offices.

Several tenants seem to have already moved in and there are signs that more are going to follow.

Where do ships go when they are feeling poorly?

That’s right. They go to the doc(K)s.

And here in Montreal we are lucky in that there are loads of docks to visit down on the St Lawrence.

Not as many as there used to be of course, and regular readers of this rubbish will recall having visited a great many abandoned docks with me in the past.

Not much going on in the ones close to hand unfortunately.

But our old friend Manitoba, moored up in this spot for a couple of years, has gone.

She was moved to Sorel in November last year and he er place has been taken by a very sad and sorry-looking Oakglen – a ship that I am convinced that we’ve seen before but I can’t for the life of me remember when or where.

She’s been here since 1st July and doesn’t look as if she’s going anywhere any time soon.

A bulk carrier of 38,000 tonnes or so, she was built as long ago as 1980 so she probably needs a rest.

That’s all the excitement that there was in the docks, so I just wandered around and admired the view.

It was getting late by now and I wasn’t feeling hungry. I’d made some butties to eat on the aeroplane if I couldn’t get a meal, and so as not to waste them I’d eaten them in the hotel.

But it’s a long time until breakfast so I went into a fast-food place in the rue St Catherine Est. They didn’t have chips so I had a plate of sweet potatoes. And they were quite nice too.

Back here, it was still early, and still hot too. But that didn’t stop me.

I had another shower (the third of the day and isn’t that a record too?) and crashed out on the bed.

That was that.

Monday 27th August 2018 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that the blood count has gone up yet again.

The bad news is that it hasn’t gone up enough and the people in the hospital don’t want me to travel.

Despite the racket in the reception last night, I did manage to go off to sleep quite easily in the end and I was flat out until all of … errr … 04:38.

But even so, I was back asleep until the alarms went off at 06:20.

I had my medication and then a shower and a good clean up. But I was so bust sorting myself out that I forgot to have a coffee. And with no water or anything to drink, I had a thirst that you could photograph.

But I was out early and down to the station where, when I was buying my ticket, I heard them announce a train to Leuven. So I RAN – yes, RAN, dear reader (and you’ve no idea how pleased that made me) for the train and leapt aboard.

And it was then that I realised that I had forgotten to buy any breakfast either.

But there’s a supermarket at the back of the station at Leuven so I picked up some bread rolls and at them as I marched across the city.

I was early for my appointment so I settled down in a comfortable seat, and bang on time, the nurse came to see me and I was all plugged in and hooked up.

When the doctor came to see me, he told me that my blood count had only gone up to 9.3. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that this time last year it was at 13.0 and they were happy to let me go a-wandering off.

Not this time, though.

They want me back in 3 weeks time, so I spent the afternoon in between sleeping having a discussion with Rachel about a cunning plan.

Kaatje came to see me too. I’d had two more bills from the hospital so I handed them to her to pass on to my health insurance people.

When they threw me out, I wandered back downtown.

My route took me down to the Kapicijnenvoer for a change, and outside the Sint rafael Ziekenhuis I noticed that they had dug up the street completely.

It’s quite an impressive piece of work that they are doing.

In the town centre I stopped at a couple of places- the Carrefour, the Loving Hut and the Kruidvat for some supplies, and then I caught the train back to Brussels and my hotel.

Later on, I went out again. Alison had discovered a vegan and gluten-free restaurant called Moon at the back of the cathedral so we met there. It’s a simple buffet where you pay for the food by weight.

Delicious it was too and this will go onto our list of places to revisit, although it’s a bit amateurish in the way that it’s run. The rice ran out and “there’s no more now until tomorrow” – that kind of thing.

We went down to the Gare Centrale for a coffee and a good chat afterwards.

Later, we went outside and I put Alison onto her bus home. Once she’s ridden off into the sunset I had a bit of a loiter around outside.

With all of the photos that I’ve taken of Brussels over the years, I’ve never taken one of the Central Station. It’s not very impressive in the daytime, but at night it’s something else.

The exterior of the station at the Carrefour de l’Europe never used to be very impressive.

When I lived here it was just one main street with traffic just about everywhere, but not the traffic has been blocked off and it has been turned into a pedestrian zone.

The addition of a few pillars and arches, and a few cleverly-positioned streetlights make the place look really good.

From there I went for a little wander around in the dark, boldly going where I haven’t gone for quite some considerable time.

My perambulation took me past the Place de la Vieille Halle au Blés where the statue of the famous Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel stands sentinel.

He’s come out quite nicely in the subdued street lighting.

Now back at my hotel, and 205% of my day’s activity – 16.2kms – I’ve walked today. And it feels like it too.

I’ve made my butties for my journey tomorrow and now I’m off to bed. I have an early start in the morning.

05:20 to be precise.

carrefour de l’europe gare centrale bruxelles belgique

grande place hotel de ville rue de l’etuve bruxelles belgique

Saturday 25th August 2018 – HIS NIBS …

… is complaining again.

I’ve been packing my suitcase and it’s almost all complete now except for the things that I have forgotten. And much to my surprise the weight of the suitcase is only 13kg and there seems to be nothing at like there usually is in there.

So I’m not quite sure why he’s getting all upset. At least I’ve remembered to take him and he’s not been forgotten at home, like when I went to Africa.

Just for a change I’d had a good night’s sleep, right the way through to when the alarms went off. And I must have gone back to sleep afterwards because it was 07:30 when I finally came round.

After the usual morning routine I started with the serious tidying up. This involved picking up all of the rubbish off the floor, the table and the worktop, cleaning the latter two objects and vacuuming the floor. No shopping today!

Of course, these days I can only work in short bursts and taking a rest in between, and while I was resting I’ve done a serious back-up of the laptop. Kt’e all stored up on one of the hard drives on the top shelf.

Furthermore, I’ve copied all of the files onto the little laptop that I take with me on my travels, so that’s up-to-date too.

Lunch was on the wall again and two lizards came to join me while I sitting was there.

Although it was quite cold out there, the sky was really clear and you could see for miles.

And so, armed with the Nikon 1 and its zoom/telephoto lens, I went round to the other side of the promontory to see what the Ile de Chausey was up to.

That wasn’t the best of it either.

Out on the horizon the Channel Islands – or Jersey anyway – were standing out really well today.

With the lens and the camera the photo came out really well. You wouldn’t think that it was 54 kilometres away.

The results were so impressive that I could cut out a bit of the image, blow it up (which I can do even today despite modern anti-terrorism legislation) and enhance it to see what comes out.

And I don’t think that you’ll ever see St Helier as good as this, especially with the equipment that I can muster up.

Like I said – it’s 54 kilometres away

Back here I carried on with the housework and so on, and on my way out to the football I washed the floor behind me so that it would be dry when I came back.

Granville were playing C-Chartres Football today, and we had a crowd of about 750 to watch the match in the lovely weather.

It was an exciting match today. The Chartres team was better-organised but the Granville team played some really good football – one 15-minute spell midway through the first half was particularly impressive.

But the problem is that despite the beautiful football, Granville don’t have the strikers to turn it all into goals. And with the Chartres team being much better-organised and far more … errr … streetwise, it was no surprise to anyone that they eventually went into the lead.

5 minutes of injury time provoked a frenetic finish. Granville finally did manage to score an equaliser, the Granville keeper was sent off for punching an opponent, and the entire Chartres technical team was sent to the stands.

But 1-1 was the correct result, although it could have been so much better for Granville if only they could find a striker from somewhere.

It was a pleasant walk back from the football.

And the rue des Juifs – the road up to here – was closed again to traffic with street entertainment and all that kind of thing going on.

It’s something of a shame that I don’t have time to enjoy it, but I have far too much to do right now.

But that’s not all the excitement going on this evening.

There’s still plenty going on out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel. We have Marité still out there entertaining the crowds

There are a couple of other sailing boats out there too, but I don’t know which ones they are.

For tea I used the last pizza base, and while my pizza was cooking I had a shower and then put the washing machine on a cycle. The pizza didn’t work very well through. The pizza base had been in the bottom of the fridge and it had been waterlogged so it didn’t unroll as well as it should. And then it took much longer to cook.

So having done some more work here, I’m redy for bed. I’m hitting the road early tomorrow.

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lighthouse ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

street entertainment rue des juifs granville manche normandy france

Thursday 23rd August 2018 – HAVING HAD …

… a much-more realistic early night last night, no-one was more surprised than I was to find that I slept right the way through until just before the alarm went off at 06:20.

Even more surprisingly, I was out of bed before 07:00 too. I must be changing my habits here.

We had the usual morning performance and then I had breakfast. Rather later than I might otherwise have had it because I was sidetracked by not very much at all, but sidetracked nevertheless.

It was shower time too and then I would ordinarily have gone to LIDL for shopping. But seeing as I’m off on my travels on Sunday and, apart from fruit, I have enough food here until then, I decided not to bother. I can go down into town to the little supermarket tomorrow for a bit of fruit to keep me going.

Instead, there was an important task to carry out on the internet to prepare me for my voyage. I’ve had issues with this before, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and so I can’t put it off just in case I need it. And much to my surprise, despite it being a lengthy process, it all seemed to go quite straightforwardly.

What isn’t quite straightforward are the issues with the Fortis Bank. You may remember that they asked me to send them a letter from another bank (not the Fortis) with my name and address on it. And so I did, from the bank here.

And this morning I had a mail back telling me that it needs to be from the same country that issued my identity document (passport) – something that is not mentioned at all in their correspondence.

Their letter contained the phrase “I understand how you are feeling ….” to which I replied “no you don’t, because politeness prevents me from using the words that I would like to use”.

There were about a hundred photos from the last week that needed editing, and I sat down and attended to that too. They are all done and on-line now.

Lunch was on the wall with my book and two lizards, in the clouds and wind. It was something of a depressing day today.

This afternoon I did another pile of tidying up, and then sat down and started to pack what I need for going away. It would have been much easier had I had an idea of where I might be going. In the absence of any idea I need to take all kinds of stuff with me just in case

But I’m surprised because there is a pile of stuff that seems to be missing from my travel bag and I’ve no idea where it might be. The battery charger and the mobile phone are two items that are evidently missing, and I’ve no idea about the rest.

Tea was some of the stuffing that was left over the other day and put in the two wraps that were left, along with some spicy rice. And delicious it was too.

And for my walk in the wind tonight I noticed Victor Hugo.

She was off out for a trip, presumably to the Channel Islands and that is something that I don’t understand because she doesn’t usually go out as late as this. She won’t arrive in Jersey until after dark.

I tried to take a photo that would give the effect of speed, but it wasn’t easy out there with the wind buffeting the camera around like this.

While I was admiring the ship I bumped into one of my neighbours running around the walls of the town.

So tonight I’ll try for another early night. If I can keep this up until Sunday morning I’ll feel so much better.

Tuesday 21st August 2018 – I’VE BEEN OFF …

… on my travels yet again today.

And it started at about 04:00 when I had to leave my stinking pit for a ride on the porcelain horse, and fell AoT over something in the way, rattling the entire building. All in all it was another bad night.

After breakfast, I had a shower and then we headed off through the town and through all of the grockles admiring the seagulls.

The destination for today was, as you might expect, the Mont St Michel. Despite its reputation, it’s one of those places that everyone has to visit whenever they come to Brittany or Normandy just to say that they were there.

And it was another day when the visibility wasn’t up to much, unfortunately.

I mentioned the prices of the food in the restaurants on the island. And seeing as many people expressed their surprise I decided to take a photograph of a typical menu.

Vegetable soup is on offer at €16:00, and a basic omelette starts at €34:00. If you want a three-course meal you can have one here at €58:00.

A sandwich from the sandwich bar across the street will cost you at least €8:50. And so it’s no surprise that most of the tourists who visit the island bring their own picnic lunch

We’d come here in Caliburn of course, prepared to pay the extortionate car-parking prices, but had I been in better health I would have come another way.

Today is another day when the tidal coefficient is so small that it’s possible to walk over the sands from Genets. And there were quite a few parties coming over the sands.

That is something that you can’t do on your own without a guide. Apart from the treacherous watercourses, there’s quite a lot of soft sand out there which yu can sink into if you aren’t careful.

We went for a good walk around the walls again, our conversation being continually interrupted by a helicopter flying overhead.

There were building works going on somewhere on the island and they were conveying the material to the site by helicopter, in a basket slung underneath the machine.

We were having all kinds of flights of imagination, picturing the helicopter coming to a dead halt and the momentum of the basket underneath swinging into the walls of the Abbey and demolishing them.

When I was here the other week with Alison I had seen an exciting tracked machine away in the distance. It had excited my curiosity and so today we went down to look at it.

It’s a fire engine apparently, and it’s tracked so that it can climb up and down the steps in the city.

It has a trailer too. That is also tracked, and is also driven, with a prop shaft off the power take-off on the rear of the tractor. All in all, an impressive piece of kit.

Most of the tourists when they arrive enter by the main gate, go in over the drawbridge and past all of the tourist traps.

But there is another way in which misses the queues and congestion and goes up to the pathway that leads up to the walls on the western side of the site.

The way in is underneath that beautiful gated building down there and then up the hill towards where I’m standing. But I do have to say that I wouldn’t object at all to a little apartment in the building down there, despite all of the tourists.

Although the access to the site today is from the southern, or Normandy side, there’s also a gateway on the western side facing what was Brittany in medieval times prior to the rerouting of the river that passes around here.

I was told an exciting story about how, in 1424 during the Hundred Years War, the English besieged the island from the Normandy side but they were unable to starve the garrison out.

This was because the people on the Breton side would send food and weapons over to the Brittany gate and by the time that the tide had gone out sufficiently to enable the English to attack the gate here, the island had been supplied and the Bretons safely back on their shore.

We left the island early in the afternoon and set off on our way home.

We went again to the Cabane Vauban to see the view now that the weather had cleared slightly, and I took a couple of photos.

One of the ones that I took was right across the Baie de Mont St Michel over to the town of Cancale, the Pointe de Grouin and the Ile des Landes right across the bay and into Brittany.

It’s hard to believe that it’s all about 12 miles away.

This is the second half of the above photograph, that I had cropped in two.

This one shows another one of the islands off Cancale, which I thought at first might have been a ship, and the lighthouse on the Pierre de Herpin over on the extreme right of the photograph.

Right away in the background is the Brittany coast all the way down almost to St Malo and that’s probably about 25 miles away.

You might have noticed in the previous photograph that there was something on the horizon between the coast and the lighthouse.

I’d been having a good play with the telephoto lens and doing some photo manipulation, what with having plans for going on a holiday in the near future. And so I cropped, enlarged and enhanced that part of the image.

And I’ve managed to bring out what, in my opinion, is a three-masted sailing ship, something like the Marité. That’s actually quite impressive, seeing as it’s at least 20 miles away in my opinion.

The view southwards however is much more banal.

Mont St Michel is about 10 miles away as the crow flies, and in contrast to the other day when I was here with Alison and you could hardly see 100 yards, a little bit of “crop and paste” and image enhancement can bring out the abbey at Mont St Michel quite nicely.

To the right of the island are the white buildings of the hotel complex on the mainland. And I’m sure that this is what we have seen on a couple of occasions from Granville.

Talking of Granville, we can actually see that today from here.

There’s the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou on the far right, and to the left of it are the public rooms and the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs. To the left of that is the other block of apartments that they are renovating right now.

My building is out of sight behind there.

But that’s not all.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I mentioned an autogyro, but I wasn’t able to take a photograph of it. Today however, while we were here, the aforementioned went a-flying by overhead.

Luckily I had the camera ready and I was able to shoot off a photograph of it. It’s a modern machine, not one of the early ones from the 1920s and 30s.

So while you admire another photo of Mont St Michel – the one that the copped image above was taken, I can tell you that there are plenty of photos that I took at Mont St Michel that haven’t made it onto this page.

That’s because it’s my intention, one of these days in early course, to put them all up on a web page of their own.

And then you can admire them at your own convenience.

On the way back here we went to LeClerc. I needed some new bootlaces and Hans wanted to look at the recycled bags that they use here instead of plastic bags, and he took a few to analyse with him later.

Tea tonight was some taco wraps with a stuffing made of this couscous powder that I bought, some tomatoes, olives, onions, garlic and kidney beans, all in tomato sauce. With some spice rice it was delicious.

Having seen Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday last night, we watched a few Bulldog Drummond films on the DVD tonight. That took us nicely up to about 23:30 and then we turned in.

Hans is leaving to head off back to Germany tomorrow. I have a pile of tidying up to do and then I can start packing for my voyage, wherever it might be.

Saturday 18th August 2018 – THEY SELL …

… almost everything in LIDL these days, don’t they?

I’m not quite sure what the point is of it, but it’s here all the same.

I was far more interested in the grapes, at €1:99 per kilo. And yet another load of those disappeared into my shopping bag this morning. I need to stock up while the stocking is good.

I slept right through again until the alarm went off, but seeing as I had something of a late night it wasn’t really as good as it sounds.

An early start to the day followed by an early shower, and then an early trip to the shops before the grockles could get there. And quite right too. I was actually there before 09:00 and the place was fairly empty, quite a surprise for a Saturday.

My bill in there wasn’t all that excessive because I’m not buying too much just now, with plans to travel in a week’s time.

NOZ was more exciting. I turned up just as it was opening at 09:30 and had a good look round. The star of the shop was a pair of curtains. The right width but the length was a little too long. I should have brought my sewing machine back from the Auvergne I suppose but instead I’ll pin them up.

The crowds were starting to build up in Leclerc. Despite buying a pile of frozen food, the bill came to about €11:00. Again, I’m not buying much before I go away.

ON the way back home the traffic had built up and there were grockles everywhere. It took ages to return home.

Three lizards again for lunch, and this new batch of hummus that I made yesterday is just as good as the last lot.

Regular readers of this rubbish will know that I’ve been having issues with the Nikon D5000 camera. I’ve brought the other lens back from the Auvergne and took a few photos with it

It was quite a good moment to do so, because Marite was out there doing her stuff.

I don’t know where she’s been but it looks as if she is coming back.

She did a U-turn just outside the harbour and then headed into the entrance. But what disappointed me was that she didn’t do it under sail, but with what I suspect is an auxillary engine.

That’s a bit of a cheat if you ask me.

But at least she won’t be alone in the harbour.

Parked up at the quayside next to Marité’s berth is this other really fine period-looking (apart from the solar panel) yacht.

I’ve no idea who she might be, so I shall have to go for a wander down there at some point in the near future and have a look. She looks quite magnificent from here.

I should have been having visitors today but there’s a delay on the road so I’m free until tomorrow evening. So in a change to the usual routine I took this afternoon off and mooched around on the internet.

Much of the time was spent chatting to someone in Montreal and someone else in Alaska. I’m starting to become all nostalgic, especially as my social media page keeps on reminding me that I’m usually in Canada at this time of the year. I must stop being so broody.

Tea was the last of the vegan sausages with vegetables and cheese sauce. And just as delicious as the first batch too.

And later on this evening I went for a walk around. The purpose this evening is to do some more experiments with the new lens.

It’s the cheapest lens available for this camera and so I wasn’t expecting all that much. And that’s just as well because the quality is not what I would like to have.

While the lighting is correct, the quality isn’t and the photos have come out extremely grainy.

So while you admire the evening looking over the Baie de Mont St Michel and jullouville, at least it proves one thing

And that is that it’s the original lens that seems to be at fault, so it wasn’t a waste of time after all.

What I’ll have to do now is to set to and order a new decent lens like the one that failed, and see where we go from there.

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Sunday 12th August 2018 – HAVING LAST NIGHT …

… been tucked up nicely in a spare bed at Liz and Terry’s, tonight I’m tucked up nicely in a spare bed at Ingrid’s in Biollet, just 15 miles away from my place at Virlet.

With it being Sunday there was no alarm but we had to rise early and organise ourselves. After breakfast we loaded up Terry’s van with some bits and pieces, including the plastic boxes that I had brought with me, and then hit the road.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but when I was at my house a few weeks ago I noticed that my tractor had been moved. And subsequently I had a message from Desirée and Simon to say that it had been further moved.

It’s an expensive piece of kit, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall, so it needed to be rescued. There’s a little bit of room on Terry and Liz’s car park and so we had agreed that it should go there out of the way and Terry can use it if he needs to.

And with Terry suddenly having a very rare free day from work on Monday, we went off to fetch it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I was there just now, I couldn’t get to the house because of all of the weeds.

But Terry had brought his heavy-duty brushcutter and it made pretty short work of the undergrowth. It didn’t take him long to cut a path through to the house and the barn.

And then I could enter the house, rescue the keys and then load up the tractor into Terry’s van. Terry had worked out the dimensions and there was plenty of room in his van for it to fit.

I have new neighbours too, Lisette and Berry, as Lieneke and Guus have sold their house. I went round to introduce myself and have a chat, and then we went off.

Ingrid had been to Clermont-Ferrand and we had arranged to meet up at the campsite at Les Ancizes. That serves snacks and is guaranteed to be open on a Sunday evening in the summer, so we had a meal there. Much to my surprise, they had a vegan dish on offer, Thai rice with mixed vegetables.

Back at Ingrid’s, we all had a good chat and I had a shower, managing to walk on a thorn that was stuck to my trousers. And that didn’t half hurt.

So here I am now, tucked up in bed. I’m going to have a really emotional day tomorrow so I need to be on top form.

Saturday 11th August 2018 – SO HERE I AM …

… curled up quite nicely in Liz and Terry’s spare bed. We have an early start tomorrow morning so to save time I’ve come here tonight.

This morning though I was up fairly early and manage to make a good start to the day. And after the usual rigmarole I had a shower and then set the washing machine to work. I need to have all of the clothes properly cleaned.

Things were strange in the shops today. I went out much earlier than usual. At LIDL they were still selling their “back to school” stuff but there wasn’t anything else that I needed after Thursday’s visit. Mind you, the grapes at €1:99 per kilo were interesting so I bought a huge bunch.

But NOZ Was certainly interesting.

We started as we meant to go on with yet another fine example of parking round on the car park at the back. I really don’t know what goes on in the head of some people. I really don’t.

As for the shop itself, the place was half-empty as far as stock goes. There wasn’t very much on the shelves at all so there wasn’t very much that I wanted to buy. And when I did reach the check-outs I joined the lengthy queue waiting for someone to appear at the check-outs.

After 10 minutes of waiting for the till to be personned, I abandoned my purchases and left the shop. I have better things to do than to wait around like this.

LeClerc across the road didn’t come up with all that much. But then again, I wasn’t really shopping for much. No point in having food around here if I’m not going to be here to eat it.

Lunch was spent on the wall with my lizards and my book, and then this afternoon I loaded up Caliburn with all of the plastic boxes that had been lying around since I moved in. They are going on a little travel too.

The football season starts today and US Granville are playing Association Sportive Furiani-Agliani -the first time ever apparently that a club from Corsica has played at the Stade Louis Dior.

A whole raft of new players this season, but they seemed to have picked up all of the bad habits of the old players. A careless ball out of defence to an opposition attacker led to a penalty, and only a good save from the new goalkeeper prevented the Corsicans from scoring.

But that was typical of how the game went from a Granville point of view. And two soft goals conceded from free kicks underlined the careless play.

Granville may well have signed a whole host of new players, but not a centre-forward, so it seemed. There was a big n°9 out there but he wasn’t doing too much at all in midfield and I’m not sure why he was on the field.

The fact that they scored three goals (and won the game) was quite by accident.

The first one was from a long throw – one of the longest that I’ve seen – that took everyone by surprise after just two and a half minutes.

The second was a free kick driven low into the crowded penalty area which hit a defender and went in the net, and the third was the Corsican goalkeeper and two of his defenders waiting for each other to clear the ball, giving time for a Granville winger to run in and smash the ball into the net.

Granville did in the end produce a huge n°14 who went up front in the final stages of the game but I couldn’t see what his purpose on the field was either. He didn’t seem to be up to this level of the game at all.

From there I went to fuel up and then out to Liz and Terry’s for tea, followed by an early night.

We have a lot to do tomorrow.

Thursday 9th August 2018 – I’M NOT SURE …

… what to say about last night.

As I mentioned yesterday, I settled down to watch a film hoping that it would send me off to sleep, but it was only a short one and was still awake when it ended.

But not for long because I was soon well away with the fairies.

But not for long because despite having been in a deep sleep I awoke at about 01:35 with a uncontrollable itch. And I know full well that if I start to scratch it I would do myself a mischief because these days I bleed more easily.

So after about 20 minutes of agony I had to leave the comfort and safety of my stinking pit and head to the bathroom where I have some Aloe Vera cream. And I smothered myself in it.

It took a while for the pain to ease off but eventually I was out like a light again, right out until the alarm went off.

After the usual morning ritual the first thing that I did was to have a good shower and clean myself up a little. I’ve not had a shower for a couple of days and in this heat, even I was starting to notice it.

And it was around about here that I looked out of the window and saw the rainstorm. “That’s put paid to my walk to LIDL” I mused.

While I was musing, Ingrid came on line and we had a good chat. We spent some time working out a cunning plan because I have a few things simmering away in the background.

When we had finished chatting, I noticed that the rain had eased off slightly. So I found my raincoat and headed off out.

Another vessel in the harbour right now is Normandy Trader.. She must have sneaked into harbour under cover of darkness from St Helier.

And she didn’t hang about too long either. When I went out for my afternoon walk she had gone and as I write up my notes this evening, she’s well on her way back to Jersey.

Despite the rain, I felt on quite good form striding up the hill to LIDL – it’s been a while since I’ve felt quite like this. And at LIDL it was rentrée, or “Back to School”, so there was quite a pile of papers and pens and the like. I bought a few notebooks.

And not only that, earlier in the week they had a special offer on bathroom scales and I was sorry to have missed it. But they still had a few left so I’ve organised that. Grapes at €1:99 per kilo rounded off my shopping.

And striding out, back in the rain, it didn’t take me too long to return home.

At lunchtime it was still raining so I had my butties inside at the dining room table – now that I have one. My lizards will have to do without their pear leavings today.

There were a few other things that needed my attention this afternoon, and as a result my walk was rather late. There was some kind of event going on in the old town, and there were crowds of people. But whatever it was hadn’t started yet and I didn’t intend to stay out there and wait for it.

Tea tonight was different. There were a lot of odds and ends hanging around so with a couple of potatoes I made a curry and added some soya cream with it. Along with some rice and vegetables, it was beautiful and there’s enough left over for tomorrow.

It was a windswept walk this evening and there were just three or four people out there. I didn’t loiter out there long and came back, chatting to Liz on the way.

And in a week or two I shall be receiving (I hope) something exciting in the post.

So I’ll have an early nice and tomorrow morning I’ll tidy up. I’m expecting visitors.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: shower

Sunday 9th September 2018 – LAST NIGHT …

Saturday 8th September 2018 – IT REALLY DOES COME TO SOMETHING …

Friday 7th September 2018 – AND THERE I WAS …

Thursday 6th September 2018 – DESPITE MY …

Sunday 2nd September 2018 – HAVING GONE WEST …

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

Tuesday 29th August 2018 – NO PRIZES …

Monday 27th August 2018 – THE GOOD NEWS …

Saturday 25th August 2018 – HIS NIBS …

Thursday 23rd August 2018 – HAVING HAD …

Tuesday 21st August 2018 – I’VE BEEN OFF …

Saturday 18th August 2018 – THEY SELL …

Sunday 12th August 2018 – HAVING LAST NIGHT …

Saturday 11th August 2018 – SO HERE I AM …

Thursday 9th August 2018 – I’M NOT SURE …

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