Tag Archives: football

Saturday 3rd March 2018 – OHH HECK!!!

Yes, I awoke this morning to find bright sunlight streaming into the bedroom.

Blasted 08:20, wasn’t it? The alarms hadn’t gone off.

Subsequent enquiries revealed that the battery and gone flat in the telephone. And so I was in something of a panic.

So much so that I forgot where I had seen during the night. But it did involve a spare wheel of a vehicle – the type that hangs on the back door of a 4×4 and how the owner of the vehicle wanted to make sure that we knew precisely what wheel was under the rainproof cover before we ordered a spare part or something for it.

But I medicated, breakfasted, showered and hit the streets – out of the apartment at the usual time. And here I bumped into Mrs Neighbour who had with her husband just come back from 2 months in Vietnam. It seems that he too spent New Years Eve in hospital, with the same bronchitis that I had. It seems to have been an epidemic all around the world, this illness.

I did the usual round of the usual shops today. At LIDL they had a couple of the sorbet makers left over so I blagged one and I shall have a go with it this coming week.

And at Leclerc I ought a computer mouse. The “other” laptop that I use as a media centre has a broken mouse (that was how I bought it so cheaply) and I’ve been using an old plug-in mouse to work it. And it is so easy to manoeuvre for my 3D programs that I went out and bought one for this laptop. It makes a whole world of difference.

But going into Leclerc it was bright sunlight so I ought a ticket for the cheap open-air standing area at the football ground. nd when I came out the rain was asolutely teeming down. That wasn’t a good plan, was it?

After lunch I spoke to Rosemary on the phone but having only given my phone the briefest of charges the battery went flat. And for some reason the phone wouldn’t charge up off the laptop … "it won’t if it’s not plugged into the mains" – ed … and so I ended up doing a few other things before going to the football.

And as for that, the 540-odd of us in the stadium were treated to a rather unusual sight of a linesman and a referee officiating at a totally different match to the one that we were watching, and I’m still shaking my head at some of it.

Tonight’s opponents were the reserves of Stade Rennais – a professional outfit with a professional set-up and a professional approach to the game. And it told, too.

They might be a couple of places below Granville in the table but I don’t know why because they played some very pretty football. They were well-organised and moved the ball around well, and their three goals were all excellent.

What didn’t help matters was that US Granville allowed them far too much room in midfield and it looked to me as if they wre refusing to close them down.

But the three goals of Granville were from the usual breaks down the wing from the rapid wingers and overlapping full-backs.

However, going back to Stade Rennais’s professionalism, they were very careful to punch the Granville n°5 when the attention of the linesman and referee was elsewhere.

And the Granville was stupid enough to punch back as soon as the referee had turned round. The red card that the referee gave him was more for stupidity than the punch.

But that’s the difference between a professional team and an amateur one. THese amateur players are sometimes so naïve.

The referee did however lose control of the match, which is hardly a surprise with some of the decisions, and it all ended rather nastily. I don’t know what went on in the tunnel afterwards but it was greeted with hoots of derision from the crowd in the stands.

And If I’ve read some of the subsequent comments, it looks as if a few red cards were brandished in the tunnel. We shall see.

It was a pleasant walk back and I didn’t feel the strain, surprisingly. AND i4M ON 111% of my daily activity.

Tea was different. With running low on tinned curries? I tried a new line that LeClerc was offering. Mushrooms in the Greek style. And to my surprise, it wasn’t too bad. Not up to curry standard, but nice enough. I always eat out of a tin on Saturday because I’m usually out at the football or something and I don’t have much time, energy or ambition to cook very much.

So we’ll try this time for an early night, and see where that takes us. Sunday is a lie-in and I need it.

Sunday 25th February 2018 – WHAT ODDS …

… would you have had on a team 3-1 down, with two of four minutes of added time played, coming back to snatch a draw?

Yes, an exciting football match in the Welsh Premier League this evening with Aberystwyth Town playing Carmarthen. And Aberystwyth running away with the game until a dramatic substitution late in the game threw on a reserve centre-forward who is clearly made of granite.

And Carmarthen could even have snatched a winner too – they wrestled possession away from Aberystwyth from the restart after their third goal and raced upfield, and only a dramatic save from Chris Mullock at point-blank range saved Aberystwyth from one of the most dramatic collapses that I have ever seen.

As for the football that I saw this afternoon, that was dramatic too, but for different reasons.

With it being a cup weekend, there should have been no local football but several clubs took the opportunity to catch up on some of their postponed matches.

US St Pairaise and ES Saussey in the Departmental Third Division were two of those. So in the nice sunny but windy weather I headed out to St Pair.

Saussey won the match 2-0 which was a rather harsh scoreline. St Pair had their fair share of the play but found a couple of centre-backs who looked far too good for this level – even in the warm-up you could see that nothing would get past them – and when it did they found a keeper in excellent form.

But the difference was really that although Saussey didn’t have many chances, they took the ones that they had. One was a poor clearance headed back over the defence to a forward running on, who rounded the St Pair keeper really well to score, and the second was one of those goalmouth melees with another poor clearance played back into the melting pot.

However that wasn’t the most exciting part of the match. This was really a grusge match between two teams who clearly hated each other, and the referee had his work cut out to keep order. How the teams finished with 11 on each side is beyond me. The Saussey player who scored the first goal – he had loads of skill for this level and St Pair gave him some rough treatment, to which he responded quite often in a manner that had he done so on the public highway he would have been given 30 days without the option. On a couple of occasions his team-mates, and once even the referee, had to drag him away from some unpleasantness and eventually he was substituted for 15 minutes to calm down.

And he wasn’t the only one whose behaviour left something to be desired so no-one should think that I’m singling him out. Several of the other players ought to have a close look at their own behaviour on the pitch too.

Still it all adds to the atmosphere I suppose.

Talking of unpleasantness, I shall be very unpleasant if I lay my hands of the person who sent me a text message at about 06:00 this morning. On Sunday, my day of rest too!

But badger that for a game of soldier, I went back to sleep until 09:30. And quite right too.

And this morning I’m not ashamed to say that I did nothing whatever. After all, it IS Sunday.

After lunch it was the football, and then back here it was more football of course as I mentioned at the start.

Tea, rather late because of the football, was pizza of course and I have to say that it was the best that I have ever made. Just for a change, the base came clear of the greaseproof paper without any problems at all. And the rest was excellent too.

A late tea meant a late walk. And the temperature has dropped again considerably. And now I’m going to bed.

But we’ll finish where we started – with the football on the internet. And I’m really glad that I bought this television because it makes such a difference watching it on the big screen.

Saturday 24th February 2018 – HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

And it was so nice to receive so many greeting from so many different people.

And it’s so nice to be here too. It’s been a long, hard road this last 27 months or so and there’s plenty more to come as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But despite everything, I wasn’t here last night. I was away with the fairies.

I’m not sure now who I was with at the start of last night’s travels but it quickly developed rather distressingly into a family affair and I don’t need that right now. But first I was with two other people – whom I forget right now – and I can’t remember what it was that we were actually doing. But it had snowed quite heavily and there was plenty about. All of these kids were enjoying themselves in the snow and we quickly organised them into two teams, one of boys and one of girls, and arranged for them to have a snowball fight. My father made an appearance and made a ribald remark, to which I replied that the boys were at the top of the hill and the girls at the bottom, and no doubt they would all meet in the middle at some point in the fullness of time. But what depressed me was that here the kids were, having no end of harmless fun and the headlines on the local radio news programme were all about “gangs of marauding youths rampaging through the town” – and it was nothing like that at all.
From there we repaired to my brother’s house. He was having all kinds of printer issues so I spent a while examining everything. It appeared that he was putting too much paper in, for a start, and was aligning it wrongly so that only one of the guide wheels was picking up the paper, and so pulling it in off-centre. So I told him what to do and showed him how to do it, and left him to it. Half an hour later he told me that it was still doing it, so I went to see. And not only had he changed the printer from the one that we had used before, he had the bad habit of pulling backwards on the paper – just like you would do with the elastic of a catapult – just before the printer went to drag it in. And so the paper missed.
Next stop was my niece. She was printing her right-wing revolutionary tracts in a kind of purple-red ink but she too was having printing issues. Her scanner had an automatic feed but it was feeding all of the papers in at a time rather than feeding them in one by one as it was supposed to. And as a result we ended up there for hours having to feed them in one by one by hand.

And it was cold in the living room too when I awoke. The temperature outside had fallen to minus 1°C outside during the night. And while that’s a far cry from the minus 16C and minus 19°C that we used to have in the Auvergne, it’s nevertheless the coldest that I had recorded since I’ve been here.

After the medication and breakfast and so on, I had a shower and then went off to the shops. And I spent more than I intended too too. I’ve let supplies run down a little this last few weeks and I needed to stock up somewhat.

So LIDL And LeClerc felt the benefit of my largesse, as did NOZ. I treated myself to three DVDs – an obscure spaghetti wewtern and a couple of 1950d cowboy series collections. As well as that, there was a kind of shoulder bag thing, quite small but with several pockets and just the right size for the new camera and telephoto lens. Only €4:99 too.

Almost every petrol station had a queue at it this morning too, and so as I was quite low I fuelled up with diesel. And then had a close encounter with a motorist who decided to reverse out of a car parking space without looking, right in front of Caliburn.

Back here, I … errr … had a relax for a while and so consequently had rather a late lunch. And then set about to organise a load of washing. However I was interrupted as one usually is when one is in a rush so I was rather late going out.

Liz and Terry had invited me for a Birthday tea so I went for a good chat too. Liz made me a nice vegan birthday cake but with no candles on it. Apparently she’s rather concerned about Global Warming. I did tell her that these days you work backwards and count the years that I have left, but that cut no ice with Liz.

ON the way back the floodlights were on at Cerences so I stopped to watch the last 20 minutes of football. I couldn’t tell you who they were playing because the guy whom I asked mumbled something that I couldn’t understand. So I asked him again, and he repeated it in exactly the same fashion so I’m none the wiser now.

And in the time that I was there nothing exciting happened either.

So now my birthday is over. And I’m off to bed. Will I still be here next year? Who knows. But what I do know is that my next six-month session of treatment starts at 08:50 on Thursday 15th March.

I am not looking forward to that at all.

Saturday 17th February 2018 – I’M A MISERABLE PLEADER.

Yes, I’m definitely losing my touch.

Maybe it’s trying to do it in Flemish that’s the problem, but on the other hand being a miserable ignorant foreigner who has travelled for for no avail usually works wonders.

But retournons to our moutons as they say back home.

Yet another miserable night as my neighbours awoke me when they returned home at 02:00 and carried on their party until 04:00 or whatever. And as I have said before, it’s not really their noise that’s the issue – it’s more the fact that i’m a light sleeper and the walls are very thin.

I compensated by setting the alarms for 07:30 and 07:40 instead of the usual time one hour earlier. After the medication and breakfast, I had a shower and change of clothes and then attacked a few things that needed my attention.

Alison came through at 10:30. She was just about to leave home so that gave me 15 minutes to gather up my wits (it doesn’t usually take me that long these days as you know) and go to loiter on the corner at the end of the street.

She arrived on time and we hit the road for our day out. She had made several suggestions as to where to go (I always have this problem of people telling me where to go) but the one that stood out above all of the others was Aachen of course – in Germany.

The thing that I like about living in Belgium is that you have a choice of four countries – France, Luxembourg, Germany and the Netherlands – on your doorstep. Luxembourg at 100 minutes is the farthest away and the rest are a lot closer than that.

The weather wasn’t what I expected though. Considering that it was Germany in February I was hoping for sub-zero temperatures and several feet of snow. Instead, we had a glorious Spring day with a beautiful blue sky.

I felt rather disappointed.

Alison is off skiing in a few days so she wanted to look at some of the clothing in the big Sports shop on the edge of the city centre. So that was to be our first port of call

But we were distracted by a café that we hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t the vegan options on offer but the fact that sitting in the window were four rather large cats.

This place is called the “Katzencafé” and the idea is that you can go in there for a coffee and cuddle a kitten. And on chatting to a few friends later I was told that there are these cat cafés springing up all over the place these days. I’m all in favour of that idea of course except that these cats were rather aloof.

Still never mind. The coffee was good and we enjoyed the company.

There was nothing that took Alison’s fancy in the Sports shop (at least, not at a reasonable price, that is) and so we went up the road to the Muller supermarket where I bought some more of that white vegan chocolate that I like

We found a square that we hadn’t noticed before where there was a good view of the rear of the town hall and the rear of the cathedral.

I’d not seen the town hall from this angle before, and I do have to say that it was quite impressive.

As an aside … "you’ll get used to this" – ed … the German for "Town Hall" is Rathaus, which is rather appropriate, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

Our new little route took us on an exploration of the city in places that we hadn’t visited and past sites that I hadn’t previously seen. And that’s always good news.

And to my delight, I discovered a Bio shop that sold the very brand of vegan cheese that I like. They only had two packs of it though, and now they don’t have any at all.

I also discovered a huge model railway shop and we passed a good half-hour in there. I would love to have a little N-gauge layout back at home, but not at the prices they are asking. There was an HO/OOgauge Big Boyof the type that we all know and love and which was on sale at an astonishing €2599.

Passing via several other shops we made it to the Source where I had another drink of the hot sulphuric water. It tastes disgusting of course, but there’s no point in going to the Waters if you have no intention of taking them, even if you have been misinformed.

Unfortunately there wasn’t all that much of a photo opportunity seeing that the building was cluttered with pedestrians and street furniture and the like. I shall have to come along here at 05:00, and bring a Stihl Saw with me too.

The market stall that was selling those delicious fennel-flavoured sweets last time – that wasn’t here today which was bad news. And although our walk was quite interesting there wasn’t really all that much to see that was exciting.

And so, feeling the cold and the exhaustion and the hunger, we detained to the little restaurant that we know – the one by the Roman remains. Alison had a spicy chicken meal and I had the quinoa salad.

Being duly fed and watered, we set off for a slow wander back to the car. But Alison drew my attention to the rays of the early evening sun that were just catching the clock tower right by the town hall.

Alison reckoned that it was worth a photograph, and who was I to argue with that?

Back in the car we headed for Leuven in the early evening sunset – our journey being interrupted by the scenic tour of the roadworks halfway along the highway. And when I arrived back I had a coffee and a little … errr … relax.

Round about 19:30 I set off for the football ground. OH Leuven were playing KFCO Beerschot-Wilrijk, a team that I have yet to see, so I was quite looking forward to the match.

But hereby hangs a tale.

With there having been “certain incidents” in the past, the whole ground and surrounding streets were surrounded by police and admission was by prebooked ticket only. And no amount of pleading on my part would convince anyone at all – Police, admission booth, security staff, stadium management (yes, I got to see them all) would change their minds.

Of course, arguing with Belgian administration – particularly from a position of weakness – is a pointless argument as anyone who has ever tried it will tell you. But you have to go through the motions anyway – I don’t give up without a fight.

However in this case, I was singularly unsuccessful and repaired to a bar across the street where several other people, including someone who had come from Italy, in the same position as me were gathered to watch the match on television.

I’ve never understood the fascination for watching football on TV. Yes, fair enough if it’s the only way of seeing a game, but it’s nothing like watching the match in the flesh – nothing at all. There’s no atmosphere for a start, and the focus of the camera cuts out all of the interesting stuff going on in the background.

So at the final whistle, I headed back home again in the cold – to total silence next door. Perhaps they are out partying and they’ll be back at something silly like 03:00. So I’m going to bed quick and grab a couple of hours sleep.

Friday 16th February 2018 – MY NEIGHBOURS …

… are getting on my wick.

I dunno what they are doing in their room but involves noise – noise that goes on until 04:00 in the morning.

It’s not as if it’s a very loud noise but the walls are paper-thin here and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m a very light sleeper.

And so with my noisy neighbours next door, I had no qualms whatever about my very noisy alarm going off at 06:20 this morning. Or the noisy repeat at 06:30.

But despite everything I was off on my travels during the night.In a shed where a group of young kids had barricaded themselves in to protect themselves against some kind of monster. But they had left their pony outside in its stable in the field and someone was wondering if they should protect that too. But another kid piped up that if you spread out your forces too thinly to try to protect everything you end up protecting nothing. So they didn’t. And the monster’s attack on this shed was very half-hearted and the pony was unscathed.
A little later, these kids were looking for their black kitten that had escaped. The search involved wading up to their knees in some very muddy water much to the amusement of some nearby workmen, and this became even more amusing when one of the kids had made it into the water and the kitten was spotted running across the top of a brick wall nearby.

After breakfast and the usual pause to let the medication do its stuff (yes, I obtained another prescription when I was at the hospital) I went off to the railway station.

There was an Intercity to Brussels that was running late, and it pulled into the station just as I arrived so I leapt on board and settled down in a comfortable corner with my book.

And as a result of the late arrival of the train, I for one arrived in Brussels at the Gare Central before time, which is always very nice.

The metro was quite painless too – took me all the way to Merode in minutes.

Consequently I was early at my health insurance people, even though we had another distraction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a thing about “parking”, and there are no finer examples of bad parking to be had than in Brussels.

Here we have a delivery van stopped to unload a couple of parcels and so he’s blocking the street as he double-parks.

But hed he not been so lazy, he could have advanced not even 10 metres and parked his van for two minutes in front of the dark blue Peugeot.

But obviously walking that extra 10 metres is far too difficult for the poor dear.

So back to the plot.

I presented myself at the reception.
“You’ll have to wait – it’s not 09:30 yet”
“But …”
“You’ll have to wait”.
And so I waited
At 09:29 “it’ll be open in a minute. Can you show me your badge?”
“I don’t have a badge – I’m a foreign visitor”
“Then you’ll need to go to reception to fill in a form”.
“I know. That’s what I was trying to do when you stopped me”

Eventually I was allowed in and, to be frank, I needn’t have bothered. When I’ve been there before, they’ve been most kind and considerate in that office.

But not today. I dunno what’s the matter with them but they just seemed to be more keen to see the back of me. I didn’t accomplish half of the things that I intended to do.

But instead, I went for awalk across the park and down to the Rond-Point Schuman. It was a beautiful morning.

The park is the Parc de la Cinquantenaire – the 50th Anniversary Park, and was established by King Leopold II in 1880 (although the huge arch wasn’t built until 1905) on the site of a military parade ground for the nearby barracks, to host an exhibition to celebrate 50 years of Belgian independence.

Several subsequent exhibitions were held here until the new site out by the Atomium was developed.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have mentioned parrots in Belgium before.

There was an aviary in the city that was bombed during the war and all of the exotic birds escaped. Surprisingly, many of them survived the cold winters and went on to establish breeding colonies in the wild.

There are considerable flocks of these exotic birds all over the city these days, and here are two of the aforementioned sitting in a tree in the park. It’s hard to believe that this is a city in north-west Europe with a continental climate.

At the bank I picked up two of my cards (for some reason the third hadn’t been prepared and I’ll have to go back) and even more surprisingly, they work. That’s all of my financial issues resolved right now – for the time being. I can actually access my money now.

Back down on the metro to the Gare Centrale and Malou turned up on time.She’d been out on the Belgian coast for a holiday and was returning to Luxembourg. We’d agreed to meet up for coffee seeing as it’s been years since we last met.

We put the world to rights for a couple of hours and then we both went our separate ways. She on to Luxembourg and me back to Leuven.

There were still a few things that I had wanted to do here in Brussels like visit the railway museum, and this was what I had planned for this afternoon. But having had a bad night, I came home instead.

Via the Vegan shop in Leuven where I picked up some more vegan cheese. I came back here, made myself a cheese and tomato butty or two, and then … errr … relaxed for a while. I’d had a bad night.

18:00 saw me head off to the railway station for my train at 18:36. And because it was departing before 19:00 I had to pay full price and not a weekend saver ticket.

And the train was 20 minutes late coming in and – would you believe – 23 minutes later still in leaving (just missing the 45 minutes-late threshold for compensation) Which meant that I could have bought a weekend saver anyway.

We arrived in Lier 45 minutes late which meant that I had to scramble over the road for my big bag of chips for tea, and then scramble off in a hurry down the road to Het Lisp.

No prizes for guessing why I had come to Lier, of course.

There’s one game in the Belgian Second Division on a Friday night every week, and this week it’s the turn of Lierse SK against KSV Roeselare.

Lier is easily accessible from Leuven even late at night (or early in the morning) so it’s always a good choice of ground to visit.

With KSV Roeselare being the visitors, I was hoping that we might have the Battle of the Cheerleaders.

Both teams have cheerleaders, which is always very good for the morale, but I do have to say that the young ones of Roeselare can knock spots off the home team. Much better organised and much better choreographed.

But no such luck. It was just the Lierse SK cheerleaders here tonight. It’s better than nothing of course.

Cheerleaders we might have, but fans we didn’t seem to.

I’ve been to Lier and the Het Lisp Stadion on several occasions to see the football, but I don’t think that I’ve seen the ground as empty as this.

It’s not quite the “announcing the fan changes to the teams” that you have at Tubize, but it was disappointing all the same. And there wasn’t much in the way of atmosphere to compensate. It was all very subdued.

The supporters weren’t the only thing that was subdued either. The Lierse SK team played like they were half asleep. They had little enthusiasm, little attacking spirit and, so it seemed, little interest.

Strangely enough, Roeselare didn’t seem to be in all that much of an attackign mood either, content to move the ball around ahead of the defence.

It wasn’t until about the 25th minute when they first tried the ball over the top. And a player running in shot, the keeper could only parry it, and a Roeselare attacker followed up.

Roeselare still kept on pouring forward, and much to everyone’s surprise Lierse SK scored against the run of play.

Well into the second hald, the first time they tried one over the top and won a corner. From the corner we had a carbon copy of Roeselare’s goal.

The match still went on at a pedestrian pace from Lierse SK’s point of view and with about 10 minutes to go, Roeselare were awarded a penatly – which was saved.

This had the effect of switching on the current to the Lierse SK side and they started to attack. The final 10 or so minutes of the game were quite exciting.

In stoppage time, Lierse won a series of corners and had two (dubious) appeals for a penalty turned down. And so as you might expect, Roeselare roared upfield and scored the winner with almost the final kick of the game.

I was back on the station just in time to catch the earlier direct train to Leuven, which cheered me up no end. So I was back here before midnight.

But my neighbours are partying again. I think that it’s going to be another long night.

Saturday 10th February 2018 – IT’S CARNAVAL!!!

And I’ve been out for most of the day.

I have dozens of photos and a good few videos but they aren’t edited yet, so you’ll have to come back over the course of the next few days to catch up with what I was up to.

But during the night I was off on my travels again and found myself, as some people were saying, in Coventry. People in a bar where I was were pointing out the cathedral down in the square at the bottom of the hill, but this was nothing at all like Coventry – the hill was unimaginably steep and it immediately suggested “Oldham” to me – I’m not sure why because in reality it was nothing whatever like Oldham either. Far too “posh”. But as for me, I continued on my way and found a rambling brick complex of buildings, now having the air of being totally deserted and boarded up. I went over for a closer look and found that the decaying noticeboard outside showed evidence of having once had writing in Welsh written upon it. Apparently it was a former school (although what a Welsh-speaking school was doing in Oldham wasn’t clear) and as it happens, there was nothing “former” about it because there were two classes still taking place, despite how derelict and abandoned the place looked. It turned out that one of the classes didn’t have a teacher and seeing as it was the Welsh-speaking class, I volunteered (not like me at all is is, volunteering and teaching?). It all seemed to be going okay until one of the fathers came to see me. He was concerned that his daughter was not doing as well as he thought she should, and that it was all my fault (not hers of course) and wanted me to inflate her marks. “And if I didn’t …”. For the next test she didn’t do so well either so he came back, insisting that I up her marks to 81%. That I refused to do so he whipped out a gun, waved it around under my nose and told me that I would. I gave a weary sigh. I told him that I was old and tired and couldn’t care less, and if he wanted to shoot me then to go ahead because I really was beyond the point of arguing with anyone.

All of this awoke me bolt-upright at 05:21, but no chance of leaving the stinking pit at that time. I curled back under the bedclothes until the alarm went off at the much-more-reasonable time of 06:40.

After breakfast I had an hour or so on the database but for some unknown reason it locked up and that was that. I’m not doing very well with this at all.

But all of a sudden, the memory stick in the hi-fi came to an end. That was the cue for some major amendments.

For the last few weeks the hi-fi has been perched precariously on the bookcase behind me, with wires and cable causing all kinds of problems. So today I moved the old computer hi-fi gear off the shelves where I keep the records and installed it there.

To make that work I had to drill four holes in the back of the unit, and feed all of the cables through for the mains power, the aerial lead and the two speakers – and lengthened the speaker wires with the cable that I bought last week.

Feeding the mains cable through the back meant cutting off the moulded plug – but I’d bought a replacement so that wasn’t an issue.

With the extra lengths of cable I now have the stereo speakers far enough apart to have real stereo sound and that is definitely progress. I’m very happy with my set-up now.

And remember the memory sticks that I bought yesterday? I made up another one (there’s four just now) and made a note of the albums that are on each memory stick so that I don’t double them up.

After lunch I went down to the carnaval to see the childrens’ procession. And I’ll tell you much more about that in due course when I’ve organised all of the photos that I took. I will say that I was impressed.

However, I did feel out of place in civvies. Exactly the opposite to the time when I was in Jerusalem and due to a misunderstanding, I was the only one at the Wailing Wall who was carrying a harpoon.

There was someone there carrying a girl sitting on his shoulders.
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked him
“I’m a snail” he replied
“And what about the girl on your shoulders?”
“She’s Michelle”.

And there was a character there dressed all in brown with little green bits stuck to him
“What about you?” I asked
“I’m a character from ‘Star Trek'”
“Which one?”
“Captain’s log”.

It quietened down later in the afternoon but by now the rain was coming down heavier (it goes without saying of course that it was raining all day) so rather than hang around, I came home for a coffee.

Later on I braved the cold and rain to go up to the Stade Louis Dior for the football. US Granville were playing the reserves of Lorient – a professional team.

And they looked it too – much fitter, quicker, sharper. And I particularly liked the way that they sped about the field to close down the Granville players whenever they had the ball. It’s long been my complaint, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that teams give their opponents far too much time and space on the ball.

But Lorient spent most of the match trying to pass the ball into the net. They had probably 65% of the possession but were comparatively ineffective up front. They just weren’t direct enough and hardly made a single killer pass. And when they did beat the keeper, a Granville defender was behind him to clear off the line.

Their big blond n°9 was quite ineffective and didn’t contribute much at all, but one thing that he did do was to continually harass the defence and the keeper whenever they were playing the ball around at the back. And he harried them on several occasions into hasty, wayward clearances and a couple of occasions into losing possession in dangerous places, situations that would have undone Granville with a more attack-minded team.

Granville were quite subdued today – the efforts of playing three matches in 7 days is probably too much, and so a 0-0 draw was about right. But it was a good match for all of that.

ON the way back I went round the funfair to see what was happening and take some photos, so that’s another pile to organise.

But again I didn’t hang about. I was frozen to the marrow and soaked to the skin. How I’m going to regret this.

A tin of ratatouille with pasta was fine for tea and now I’m off to bed. It’s Sunday – a lie in, and with 148% of my daily activity accomplished, I need it too.

I’ll be dead to the world in a minute, and I hope that I can have a really good, long sleep.

Sunday 4th February 2018 – 07:30 …

… is no time to leave the bed on a Sunday

09:15 is however much more like it, so I’m glad that I turned over and went back to sleep when I awoke earlier.

It also gave me a chance to go back on my travels too. I’d started off living in a room in some woman’s house – some woman whom I know in real life but I can’t think now of who she is. And we were joined by a young girl who had fled her own home and was looking for refuge. This girl was, like most teenagers, not very reliable. She needed an early start every morning so this woman arranged to wake up quite early ready to have her breakfast ready. One particular morning I needed to see this girl so I made a special effort to be up and about early. However when I arrived downstairs in the kitchen, the woman there showed me a note to the effect that the girl was saying that she wasn’t in the house and furthermore, she wouldn’t be back. We both felt rather disappointed that she hadn’t said anything about leaving, especially after the effort that it required to be up and about early.
A little later I was out on my horse on the Plains of North America and came across this sad, tired homestead. In there on her own was some woman in a red dress. For some reason she attracted my attention despite being a very scrawny unkempt woman (but then, on the frontier of North America in those days there wasn’t exactly a very good choice of woman). However at that moment her husband came back, and I had to pretend to be the local doctor giving the woman a medical examination in order to avoid any misunderstanding.
Later still, there was some television comedy series thing being broadcast. Not that it was of any interest to me but the people with whom I was associated found it very interesting and amusing. The series was then transferred to the theatre where it was merged with some other comedy series. My friends were keen to see it so in the end I succumbed and off we went. But I had a look at the poster outside the theatre where the cast was listed, and it seemed that the stars of the two series weren’t in fact going to be appearing in the play. So that was rather a waste of time.

With it being Sunday, I took it easy this morning. Plodding along with my database of photos. And it really is doing my head in without any doubt at all. Even the simplest task is either beyond the capacity of the program or else it’s beyond my capacity to make it work.

Who could ever have imagined that it would have taken an hour to add in an extra column and make the column fit into the order in which I want it to appear – and that’s in addition to all of the problems that I encountered yesterday?

As I’ve probably said before – back in the early 1990s we had a lightweight Office program called “Works for Windows” and that was our introduction to integrated office suites – and we could make the parts of that program do anything that we wanted – in a matter of seconds – never mind all of this nonsense that I seem to be encountering.

The lunchtime soup was delicious with the added herbs and spices that I added yesterday. It warmed me up nicely. And then I hit the streets.

On my way to the Sports Centre I passed by the building that is the headquarters of the Granville Terre et Mer” Comcom – the Community of Communes.

With many of the French communes being quite small – there’s even one with just one inhabitant – several might group together in a “Comcom” to organise a common water supply or a common refuse collection service or engage a public gardener to be shared between them – all of that kind of thing.

And this beautiful building is the headquarters for the “Comcom” that covers the smaller communes around here.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon at the Sports Centre, and it would really have been a nice afternoon to be out, except for the bitter, howling wind.

It was really agony to stand here this afternoon, and it didn’t help by the building being closed and so there was no coffee on offer.

I can’t understand the lack of buvette here. It seems to be open whenever I bring a flask, and closed whenever I don’t, as if it knows that I am coming.

US Granville’s second XI were in action again this afternoon, against FC ST Lo Manche, the league leaders in blue.

The team that is second in the table obliged US Granville by losing, in the only other match to be played in the whole of Normandy, last night. So if can avoid losing today, they will go into second place.

The wind made this match a complete lottery and neither side seemed to be able to play with it and it was rather a scrappy match.

But US Granville did take the lead after half an hour when a cross into the area was headed out indecisively by a defender, right to a US Granville midfielder on the edge of the area. He had all the time in the world to pick his spot and fire into the bottom corner.

At the start of the second half, we had the only time that one of the teams attempted to use the wind to its advantage, and that, I suspect, was more by accident that design.

A high corner taken into the wind that caused a panic-stricken scamble on the St Lo goal-line, and eventually the ball was forced home by a US Granville attacker.

So Granville ran out 2-0 winners, the first team to beat FC St Lo Manche this season and are now in second place in the table. But I still think that their attack is far too lightweight for this level of football.

Just for a change, I came home a different way, walking down to the coast road.

There’s a good view across to St Pair sur Mer from just here so I stopped to take a photograph, almost being run down by a local policeman in the process.

And then I walked back along the coast road into Granville. I’d never been this way on foot before and it made a nice change to see some different scenery.

7It’s carnaval here next weekend, and all of the fairground lorries are coming into town. There were quite a few streaming past the Sports Centre while I was watching the match.

I was convinced that I saw an artic go past pulling no fewer than THREE trailers, and I was right because I tracked it down in the car park opposite the port.

Generally speaking, a “showman’s goods” licence allows a vehicle to pull a trailer containing his act, another containing his living accommodation and maybe yet another pulling the power unit such as a generator. Nowadays with most sites having mains electricity you don’t ever see the generator, and I suspect that this driver may well have been interpreting the rules in an unduly generous fashion.

Unless, of course, the rules for “showman’s goods” in France are different from in the UK, which is always a possibility. But anyway, it certainly puts my North American roadtrains into perspective.

They are apparently also setting up a fairground on the harbour and as I climbed up the hill towards home I could see all of the lorries and caravans set out on the end of the harbour.

I’ve yet to experience a really good mainland European “Carnaval” and I’m told that the Granville carnaval is one of the best that you can find.

And so I’m quite looking forward to being here when it all happens. Especially when the day after it ends, I have to head for Belgium.

Tea was, of course, vegan pizza. And I didn’t go far for my walk as the wind was astonishing. But no matter – what with the rest of my exertions I’ve done 111% of my daily activities today.

I reckon that I deserve a good sleep.

Thursday 1st February 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what I did yesterday, but as well as having a message service on my phone, both of the alarmss now seem to work fine this morning. Ask me how I know.

And last night I was in some kind of public place like a shop where I’d bought a DVD, and I wanted to check that it worked correctly. This involved putting it in my DVD player, passing the signal trough some kind of pre-amp and then into a television to watch. And conveniently, all of my equipment was there on the shelf and wired up. I reckoned that this would be quite an impressive thing to accomplish in this public place so I duly set it all up. But it wasn’t as impressive as I wanted it to be and I was left with a pile of omelette sur le visage because somehow there was a radio programmme running in the background of ll of this with the sound coming out of the television as well as the sound of the image and the picture, and it was all very disappointing.

Not feeling much like leaving my bed this morning, the second alarm did the business which is just as well, otherwise I might still be in bed now. No idea why I was so tired, unless it was the after-effects of feeling so bad yesterday.

But the medication, breakfast and a nice hot shower brought me round somewhat and once the medication did its stuff I braved the high winds and headed for the shops. It was the usual struggle up the hill to LIDL and there wasn’t really anything that I needed or wanted. I just made do with a baguette and a couple of bits and pieces of food.

On the way back I went down to the docks to see if I could see what was going on.

But I was out of luck. It’s not easy to see from there at the best of times and particularly now, because they have fenced off everywhere in the vicinity where they are working.

What I’ll have to do is to wait until the tide turns, and then go off to the other side of the basin with the telephoto lens and see what I can see from over there

Back here I made a coffee and settled down for a relax – but not for long. The doorbell rang. It was the Postie with a registered letter for me.

Yes, my new driving licence has arrived – complete with the authorisation to drive buses and articulated lorries for hire or reward. I really can’t take that seriously. But it’s scanned into the laptop for future reference just like all of my important documents

After my soup I tackled some paperwork that had been building up and ow that’s all filed away. I’m certainly more organised than I have been for quite a while – and quite right too. Let’s hope that I can persevere.

My work was however interrupted by a need to have a little rest. And I don’t know what it was that awoke me but I sat bolt upright for some reason or other.

Despite already having had a good walk, it was a nice if windy afternoon so I went for another walk.

And I was wondering what was making all of the noise yesterday. It seems that they’ve been doing some gardening round at the back of the college and it looks quite neat and tidy now.

High time that they did something about it too. But whatever vehicle they had used had churned up the lawn by the lighthouse. It’s really not the right kind of weather for driving heavy vehicles on there.

But here’s a thing!

We saw the other day that there was a big digger out in the tidal harbour during low tide raking over the bed. He’s still out there, but today there was some other activity in the tidal basin.

Like this digger and a couple of earth-moving lorries hard at work making a deep channel.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, there was another digger and an earth-moving lorry working closer inshore too.

That’s the place where the fishing boats tie up – right by the fish-processing plant. And they seem to be making the channel along the sea wall there much deeper.

Whether this means that we are going to be having bigger trawlers coming into the port I don’t know. But all of this work in the barbour is exciting for a ship-spotting fan like Yours Truly.

Back here I carried on with a few things that I needed to do (without very much enthusiasm it has to be said) and then made tea. The falafel that I had bought weeks ago went straight into the bin untouched – well past its sell-by date. So I had rice with vegetables and a vegan burger.

With only one cooking ring, it wasn’t easy. But a little oil in a pyrex bowl with onions and garlic and cooked in the microwave for three minutes, and then add the burger for 6 minutes (3 minutes each side) and then add a little water and gravy power, and there you are.

I’d planned to go for a walk but just as I was getting ready we had the most astonishing storm. So I stayed here and played the guitar.

But later I did go for my walk, and you can see what weather we had had.

There had been a hailstorm and it seemed to have fallen like snow – fairly deep in places. I’m glad that I hadn’t gone out in it earlier.

Football on the laptop (or on my television of course) later. A Welsh Premier League match between Connah’s Quay Nomads and Bala Town. A pretty sad game, just like the bad old days of 15 years ago on the Nomads’ sodden, waterlogged pitch that gave no hope whatever of a decent match.

So I’ll see what tonight brings. A nice relaxing sleep, I hope.

Sunday 28th January 2018 – I WAS SOMEWHAT …

… premature yesterday with my comments about my new smartphone. We’re back with this “inability to message” again.

I know that I am receiving SMS messages because I set a special tone for them. But where they are going, I have no idea, because they aren’t coming up on the screen.

And then I’m not able to message out. The “Messenger” program that I downloaded simply won’t send them, and when I try with the default message program, I have an error message “no SIM card is allocated to SMS messages”. And in settings, it shows one SIM card in my phone – the “second SIM card” is greyed out because of course it’s empty, and the “change SIM” option is likewise greyed out.

So it looks like a visit to the service provider yet again tomorrow.

GRRRRR!

And I was right about the night last night – well, almost. It wasn’t 05:00 when I awoke but 05:25 instead. But leave my stinking pit at that time of the morning? Not on your nellus secundus. 09:35, that’s much more like it on a Sunday.

And I’d been on my travels too. Sitting in a sloping field close to a stone wall reading a book, and a group of children led by some old woman came past and started to chat to me. And a surprisingly intellectual chat it was too for a bunch of kids of that age.
Later, I was back home again and our eight cats (yes, eight) were feeding. And feeding with Tuppence (and anyone who remembers Tuppence will see just how impossible that might have been) was a big black-and-white cat, which certainly wasn’t one of mine. And so I asked my partner what it was doing here, and just received an enigmatic smile.

After breakfast, I vegetated around for a while (well, it IS Sunday), chatting to TOTGA who came on the air.

And once lunch was out of the way I set off on foot in the light drizzle.

All the way out to the Sports Centre on the edge of town.

It was another agonising climb up the hill, and then the long walk along the plateau to the Sports Centre. Three pitches there are here, and one was set up for rugby, with the rugby team warming up prior to a match.

Not that it interests me at all – I have no time for games played by men with odd-shaped balls.

US GRanville’s second XI was playing, and the match had been transferred to the artificial surface here so at least we had some live football this weekend.

US Granville, who were third in the table and in white, were playing UC Bricquebec who were propping up the rest of the clubs in the table. And for the first half of the match, that’s exactly how it went.

Granville’s wingers, one of whom (the n°7) was called Alexis apparently, were tearing the defenders to shreds down the flanks and the score after 45 minutes of 4-0 was not an exaggeration either. I don’t recall Granville’s keeper having anything serious to do

But at half-time UC Bricuebec made three substitutions which, while not improving the team to the slightest degree, seemed to unsettle US GRanville and they looked as if they had lost their composure.

It took ages for them to get back up to steam before they scored a fifth, and then, unbelievably, they missed a penalty. And that seemed to knock the fight out of them. And even more astonishingly the trainer took off the n°7 after an hour, and with that, US Granville’s attack melted away.

UC Briquebec looked much more like it after that and gave the US Granville defence a few dodgy moments – even scoring from a penalty.

But the scoreline of 5-1 is good enough, although it could have been so much more.

The light drizzle seemed to ease off on the way home, but I noticed that away in the distance over Jullouville they were having a pasting again. This weather really is miserable.

I came back and had a coffee and a little play on the guitar. I’d been listening to Aqualung – one of the finest rock albums ever made, and I had worked out in my head the bass line to the title track.

So I tracked down a copy on the laptop and played along to it for a while. Brought back many happy memories, that did.

And if I keep going like this, I shall have to start looking for a band.

Vegan pizza again for tea (and I forgot the olives) and then another walk. I’m at 114% of my daily activity which is good news of course.

And now bed-time. We’ll see if this alarm on the new phone works as well as the last one.

Tuesday 23rd January 2018 – AND IN NEWS …

… that will surprise, if not shock, regular readers of this rubbish who have been following my vicissitudes with bated breath, according to the medical examination that I was given this morning by a doctor who works in partnership with the French Government, I am considered fit enough to drive a 44-tonne articulated lorry or a bus with 75 paying passengers on the public highway.

Last night was another miserable night, having gone on yet another lengthy travel, the details of which were immediately wiped from my memory as soon as I awoke. And I staggered off into the living room with no medication and no breakfast this morning, for obvious reasons.

Nevertheless I did manage a shower and a change of clothes though – I need to look my best for my appointment at 09:15.

At about 08:00 I hit the road for Countances.

And it’s a good job that I allowed myself plenty of time because I needed it. Quetteville sur Sienne isn’t “Quetteville on Sienne” at all – it’s “Quetteville-in-the-Sienne” right now.

You’re all aware of the weather that we’ve been having just recently. While most of Europe has been swaddled in snow these last few weeks, we’ve had nothing but torrential rain

As a result the Rivier Sienne has burst its banks and the outskirts of the town (the town itself is perched on an eminence) are flooded.

It’s completely cut off to the north and so all of the traffic heading to Coutances and Cherbourg is diverted down a country lane. And by the looks of things, a couple more days of this weather and this won’t be passable either.

It certainly messed up my arrival.

But I was there in good time and, as luck would have it, I found a parking place right outside the doctor’s at the back of the sous-Prefecture. And that’s not something that happens every day either, is it?

Being early, I was first in. And out again after 10 minutes.

And this medical is a total farce. I hadn’t said anything about it because I was convinced that I would fail it, with my well-documented medical history. And I was determined to answer every question honestly, truthfully and completely. Which I did.

The only problem with that though is that he only asked two or three questions – and nothing of any significance.

The scar on my chest from neck to navel and the chemo port in my left shoulder should have given the game away but, unbelievably, he stethoscoped me with my tee-shirt on.

A test of my vision and a few exercises in co-ordination, and that was my lot. I’m fit to drive a 44-tonne artic or a bus on the public highway. And if that’s an example of a medical undergone by every other lorry or bus driver in France, then God help the average motorist.

Being out early, I had plenty of time to kill. And so I went for a wander around the town.

Coutances is a Roman town, named for the Emperor Constantine, but was destroyed by the Vikings in 866, the French in the 12th Century (Normandy was an independent Duchy until 1204), the Huguenots in the 16th Century, the town planners in the 18th Century and the Royal Air Force and American Air Force on 6th June 1944 and a couple of days thereafter.

And so there are traces of ruins here and there about the place, and you can’t really identify them or say who it was who destroyed them.

But the Allies’ bombardments killed well over 300 civilians and there’s a monument to them at the back of the cathedral.

And I do have to say that I was very disappointed in this monument. I could have done something better and more powerful than this, and I expected to see at least a list of names of those who died.

But apparently not. And I can’t understand why

As for the cathedral itself, it remained surprisingly undamaged during the bombardment. Clearly, the Devil looks after his own.

But then again, it has suffered enough.

The first recorded church on the site (this isn’t of course to say that there weren’t earlier ones) dates from about 430, and the story goes that a heathen temple was cleared away to make the space.

This chirch was destroyed in the Viking raids, and when the town was reoccupied at the beginning of the 11th Century, construction of the cathedral began.

When the French took over from the Normans, they completely redesigned the cathedral and what wasn’t demolished was hidden by their modifications.

The interior of the Cathedral is nothing much to write home about.

I was expecting something spectacular give the cathedral’s fame as one of the favourite churches of William the Conqueror and as a pilgrimage venue, but it’s nothing like that at all.

It’s actually quite spartan ad even the stained glass windows are nothing like as flambouyant as you might expect.

The cathedral is the “Cathedral Notre Dame” – the Cathedral of Our Lady, and so ypu might be forgiven for expecting to see statues of Mary and Jesus all over the place.

But you’ll be very disappointed, because I couldn’t see any statue of any significance.

And as for the Chemin de la Croix, we’ve seen some exotic symbolisation on our travels, but here, there were just a few notices with numbers written thereupon – no paintings or statues at all.

The Twon Hall across the square though is certainly splendid and does the town a great deal of credit.

I’ve no idea when it was built, but a great deal of civic construction took place in the period of the “Second Empire”, so it’s quite possible that it dates from that period – the third quarter of the 19th Century.

The fountai in front of it was rather disappointing though. I was expecting much more than that.

I’m not sure how much the town hall was damaged by the bombings of June 1944, but you can tell that the surrounding area was pretty badly hit.

You’ll notice the building on the left – the row of shops with flats over the top (this is actually a hotel here). Go to any French town that was badly damaged during the war and you’ll see this style of building in every town centre.

Designed by architects such as Louis Arretche, they were designed to be thrown up in a matter of a couple of days to bring back the life into the town centres as quickly as possible, and they’ve withstood the pressure of time rather well.

At 10:00 I was outside the mobile phone repairer’s, and at least, they decided to have a look at it. And that’s progress. They would call me back.

I went for a coffee and then to do some shopping. Apart from the usual stuff that I need, I found a cheap shop and bought some stationery and also a new dash-cam – for just €11:95. I already have one but I don’t like it much – it’s big and obtrusive but it will do to take to Canada and install in Strider. The new little one, I’ll put in Caliburn.

They called me back bang on midday. They couldn’t get it to work so could I come by and pick it up?

Not until 14:00 after lunch so I grabbed a baguette and some stuff to go on it and had a quiet relax in the rain.

There’s an Orange shop in the town so I went in to see what they had. Strangely, they didn’t want me to browse the stock, but they would give me a “special deal”. They would knock 50% off one of their phones for me and let me have it at … errr … €349.99.

Quite.

Down the hill at the repairer’s, they also tried to fix me up with a deal. And while it might have bee more attractive, it wasn’t that attractive. So they suggested I try a phone laboratory in Saint-Lô who might be able to repair mine.

But when my new UK credit card arrives (I posted off all of my letters this morning too) I have another idea.

Having done all of that I came home, to find that yet another problem has arisen at the Bank. I’m not saying too much now, but I’m going out tomorrow to buy a pick-axe handle and I shall deal with the issues in the traditional manner by impressing my message into the skull of the bank manager in Morse Code with the aforementioned.

Having exerted myself quite a lot today, I crashed out for a couple of hours too. And I’m not surprised. And then it was tea. Microwaved potatoes with home-made burger in a bun from the batch at Liz’s, and vegetables. delicious it was too.

And then it was walkies. Around the headland.

And that was where I should have been had I been able to exert myself the other day. At the football. And Granville won too – 3-2 in extra time. Just 16 clubs left now in the Cup and I wonder who they’ll draw in the next round.

Rest assured – I’ll be camping out at the ground the night before and I’ve asked if, if the match is “away”, whether there will be any buses running.

But now it’s bed-time. I’ve done over 100% of my daily activity target and that’s enough for today. All 1560 words of it.

Sunday 21st January 2018 – TODAY WASN’T …

… the day that I wanted either.

We started off with another depressing night where it took me ages to go off to sleep. And then I was awake again just before 07:00. Mind you I’d been on my travels during the night. Or, rather, someone else had. One of the football clubs whose results I always check is Greenock Morton in Scotland and someone from the club came to see me and chatted for three hours to me about the future plans of the club, all of which were very interesting.

But never mind 07:00 – it was more like 08:30 when I crawled out of bed – mainly for the reason that any male of my age will immediately recognise.

After medication and breakfast, I vegetated for quite a while (well, it IS Sunday) before I did anything. And when I felt like it, I put away the washing that had been drying in front of the radiator for a couple of days.

And having spent a couple of days looking for the little laptop that I take with me on my travels and which I couldn’t find it, I cme across it, in its little portable carry-case. What a silly place to leave it, hey?

Much of the day has been spent going through another portable external drive that I came across on my travels and discovering another pile of unsorted photos on there that relate to one of my trips to Canada.

They’ll need to be sorted at some time or other but I couldn’t face it this afternoon.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Going through the box that I was unpacking, I found two new ink cartridges. I’m hoping that they are for the Hewlett Packard that I have here (I can’t think why else I would have brought them from the farm) and they don’t look much like the old Canon stuff to me.

There should have been a football match at St Pair-sur-Mer this afternoon but with the depressing weather continuing, I decided to give it a miss. If last night’s games were called off everywhere I couldn’t see this match taking place with the additional downpour this morning and it’s a long way to go to find out.

But I’ve been for my two walks today all the same, and got myself pretty wet too in the process. It looks as if it’s never going to stop, doesn’t it?

And for tea, another pizza. And I’m going to have to stop buying the bases at LIDL. Last week’s was rolled backwards so it took all kinds of effort to get it out of the packet, and this week’s wasn’t any better and ended up being quite a mess. I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy the expensive stuff from LeClerc.

So back to work tomorrow, and I need to continue to write the pile of letters that are awaiting me. I’m out on Tuesday so I want to have as many as possible done for then so that I can post them off.

I shall take full advantage of this printer while it’s still working.

Sunday 14th January 2018 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall telling me … "on many occasions" – ed … that I ought to get out more.

And so with this in mind I went out this afternoon in the beautiful sunlight to St Pair.

US St Pair were playing AS Gavray so I headed to the stadium in the rue du Croissant.

And I found a really nice stadium, well-maintained with a grandstand and even a social club and pie hut – but of course it goes without saying that both of those were closed.

And furthermore, the match wasn’t played there anyway.

One of the players pointed me in the direction of the second pitch here, which was nothing like as comfortable as the first. And there was a pie hut here too, which was likewise closed.

As for the match itself, for the first 20 minutes or so it was all St Pair and they could have had several chances to take the lead had their finishing been any better.

But gradually Gavray hauled themselves back into the match and started to look dangerous. As a result the St Pair trainer made an early substitution, which had the desired effect as with almost his first touch of the ball, he lobbed the goalkeeper beautifully to open the scoring.

In the second half Gavray came out of the blocks quicker and soon equalised. And after that, the match swung back and fro. Unbelievably, in the middle of their best spel, Gavray conceded a second goal from a breakaway with a swerving shot that totally deceived the keeper and instead of parrying it to the floor, he parried it into his own net.

If that wasn’t bad enough, what happened next was appalling.

St Pair broke upfield again and in the penalty area, a Gavray defender madea brilliant tackle to take the ball away from the attacker. Unbelievably, the referee pointed for a penalty. He was the only one in the ground who thought that it was a penalty – even the St Pair trainer with whom I had been chatting, was astonished. He was as convinced as I was that it was a fair tackle.

So 3-1 down out of nothing.

Gavray were well-inspired by this and soon scored a second goal, a really good header from an excellent cross. And they had the ball in the net a third time, but the goal was disallowed for offside.

But while they were pushing forward for the equaliser they were caught on the break again ans St Pair scored a fourth with an overhead kick that, quite frankly, could have gone absolutely anywhere. I think that the scorer was more surprised than anyone else.

But there ere a few really good moments of skill from several players on the pitch – but they eren’t consistent with it. They would do something really impressive at one moment, and then make a hash of something simple.

However, this was the first match that I have seen where teams played the ball early (but still not early enough for my liking) and also here the teams were very quick on cosing down the opposing attackers. It’s a feature of the modern game that defenders seem to give attackers too much space and too much time on the ball, and it doesn’t suit me at all.

FInal word must go to the referee, who, apparently, seemed to be refereeing a totally different match than the one that everyone else as watching.

And so much for my lie-in. When I awoke it was still dark and I didn’t dare look at the time.

When I finally plucked up the courage, quite a while later, it was just 07:46. No chance of my leaving the bed at that time – I had a little relax and finally crawled out at 08:45. Still not what I wanted though.

Nevertheless, I’d been on my travels during the night. Living in some spurious accommodation on the edge of Nantwich at the Welsh Row end. And having to visit the centre of the town, I set off quite jauntily and confidently. My route took me past the Swine Market and up the High Street into the Square. Of course the Square was nothing like what it really is – just a huge open grassy plain on a couple of different levels with some impressive brick-built buildings across on the other side. I only had my phone camera with me at the time so I couldn’t do much with it so I went over to the buildings for a closer look. The basements told the true story though. The buildings had been thrown together any old how, with rising damp so evident that it was actually dripping back into the basement. Some old couple had followed me down into the basement and there was something not quite right about them. It made me uneasy, especially when the old guy started to brandish around like a weapon a large piece of heavy metal rod. I was trying to take these photos and yet every one that I took seemed to have him brandishing his metal rod around in a very menacing manner.

After breakfast I didn’t do much – after all, it IS Sunday. I finished off the soup for lunch and then went to the football.

Back here afterwards, I made myself a hot chocolate and tried to keep warm.

I’ve had a vegan pizza for tea and been for another walk. And my thirst is back. That’s usually a warning sign.

But I’ll be off to bed in a minute. It’s going to be a tiring morning tomorrow.

Saturday 13th January 2018 – ISN’T IT NICE …

… to be able to watch the football on the big screen?

Unfortunately the laptop with the broken screen didn’t work – it’s quite an old laptop of course and the software in it won’t run the video plug-in for the browser.

But the laptop that I’ve been using as a media centre up until recently did the business, that’s for sure, and I was able to watch the first half of Cefn Druids v Llandudno in perfect comfort.

Unfortunately it wasn’t such a perfectly comfortable night? I was awake in the middle of the night and took a while to go back to sleep again. But I was dead to the world when the alarm went off and it was a struggle to leave the bed. How I’m looking forward to a nice lie-in tomorrow!

After breakfast I had a shower, a good clean-up and change of clothes, and then off to the shops, where I spent another pile of money.

LIDL had some hand towels of the type that I bought the other day so a pack of three disappeared into Caliburn, as did a battery charger. All of mine are back at the farm and in any case are over 30 years old. A little hi-tech modern one will do much better when I might need it.

At Mr Bricolage I bought a knob for my saucepan lid – the one on which I broke the handle the other day, and NOZ came up with the usual stuff.

Centrakor provided a new washing-up bolw of the correct size (so my wok and my pizza platter will fit into it), a few other bits and pieces and a box with a tight-fitting lid – just the thing in which to keep my socks and undies.

At LeClerc I went to look at the HDMI cables because the one-metre cable that I have isn’t really long enough for what I need. And with -metre ones on offer at just €9:99, that’s long enough for just about everything.

LeClerc was also having a sale on suitcases. And a small cabin-sized one on wheels at just €15:99 – just the thing for my trips to Leuven – also ended up in the back of Caliburn.

And I’m glad that I had bought that TV last weel, because there wasn’t a cheap one anywhere to be seen in the shop.

After fuelling up, I came back home, made myself some soup and then … errr … had a little rest for half an hour. And then cracked on with organising the shopping and sorting out another pile of papers. There’s actually some room in the drawers here now, and isn’t that astonishing?

At the end of the football I had to leave.

Caliburn and I went off to Cérences where we were the other week.

It’s the nearest Saturday night match and the home side were playing the Mouettes of Donville.

The first half was all one-way traffic towards the Donville goal. But the Donville keeper put in a performance that neither he nor I will ever forget, including a magnificent “Banks” reverse save. It was the performance of a lifetime and I don’t think that I’ve seen better.

At the start of the second half Donville made two substitutions and the two players that came on, playing down the left, changed the balance of the game and we had a much more even contest.

However it didn’t last. The new left winger had clearly unsettled the defenders and after about 25 minutes he was on the receiving end of a bad challenge and limped off the field. We then went back to the one-sided match that we had in the first half.

The Donville keeper was finally beaten with just 10 minutes to go – a long-range shot that dipped and curled out of his reach and in underneath the angle of the post and crossbar – but he still made a couple more top-class saves to make the result look a lot closer than it deserved.

But there was a lot of naughty stuff going on in this game about which the referee didn’t seem at all concerned. One Cérences player made two tackles in as many minutes, either of which merited a red card in my opinion but nothing was given. And so a minute or two later a Donville player exacted his own retribution by giving him a kick that would have felled an ox. No card for that either.

And that’s just a couple of examples. There were many more.

So, frozen to the marrow, I drove back here and now I’m going to bed.

A nice lie-in, I hope. I deserve it.

Sunday 7th January 2018 – HEROES!

The players and officials of US Granville do a lap of honour around the pitch after their match against the Girondins of Bordeaux.

And quite rightly so, because they have just pulled off the Shock of the Century in French football. A part-time team playing Regional football in CFA2 North-West – the equivalent I suppose of the Conference North in the UK, have just knocked Premier League Bordeaux out of the French FA Cup.

And they made it look easy too.

Getting to the ground was quite something because the street was cordoned off and I had to drive miles to meet Terry. But we made it in plenty of time. And I was interviewed on France 3 too! My fame is spreading!

And it’s just as well that we got there early because the Stade Louis Dior was packed.

We ended up standing on the bank on the training ground looking aross at the pitch because it was the only really decent vantage point.

And we were treated to an event that I for one won’t ever forget.

I’d had another less-than-impressive night and despite it being Sunday I was wide-awake at 07:30.

Mind you, I’d been on my travels during the night, and a welcome return to our nocturnal rambles of Nerina and Zero. Formerly regular visitors but have been conspicuous by their absence for a while. Nerina and I were trying to book ourselves into a hotel in West London and having an inordinate amount of difficulty doing so, and I was close to losing my cool. Nerina suggested that we went for a walk to cool down, so we went outside and found ourselves aongst a large numger of Orthodox Jews who were diriving horses and carts laden with goods and produce pretty much as they might have done in the late 19th Century. We ended up walking along the towpath of a canal and Zero went skipping off with her head in the clouds. I was pointing out these tourist signs of historic object and the like and trying to interest her in them but like most kids of that age she was more interested in flowers and butterflies and the like.

I waited until 08:00 to leave the bed and by 09:00 I had breakfasted. And then – SHOCK! HORROR! I went working on a Sunday. I brought up the television and assembled it, and then had to do some rearranging of my living room to find a place to install it. That even involved some more vacuuming!

Configuring it was another thing – not helped by the fact that there were no batteries in the remote control and I had no fully-charged ones lying around. I’m short of good AAA batteries so I need to buy some more.

It took me ages to try to find the “DVD” switch on the remote control and in the end gave up. But I installed the DVD player anyway (and the remote control for that has stopped working) and much to my surprise the TV recognised automatically the signal from the DVD and started to play the disc.

So I sat and watched a film. And it really is nice to watch a DVD on a decent screen after all these years. 80cms is pretty big in my apartment.

And then the football.

Quite frankly, the Girondins of Bordeaux were abysmal. They had a midfielder by the name of Jérémy Toulalan. In his career he’s had 36 caps for France, transfer fees of almost €20,000,000 and when he was in Spain he was on a salary of €4.2 million. And yet if ever there was a player so disinterested in a match I have yet to see it, even in District football. In my own personal opinion he should have been ashamed of himself because it’s players like him who ought to be pulling his team up when they are down, not chickening out of the game.

If there ever was a gulf between the two teams, you would have said that it was Granville who were the Premier League team. They took the match by the throat and went on the rampage from the kick-off. And Bordeaux had no answer.

Had Granville’s finishing been any better they would have been 3-0 up after half an hour. They missed a penalty after 10 minutes and had two other shots at point-blank range either saved or blazed over the bar. And that’s not counting the shot that the keeper completely misjudged and had to hastily scramble over the bar to save a load of omelette sur le visage.

The Girondins of Bordeaux scored with their first attack after 37 minutes, but that was their best effort. US Granville’s keeper didn’t have too much to do.

In the second half, Granville came out as they went in – storming down the field driven on by the n°2 and the n°8 who had the games of their lives. And as the match progressed you could sense that it was not impossible that they might do something here.

And as we drifted into the final 5 minutes with Granville camped in the Bordeaux half the most amazing thing happened. The Girondins began to lose their discipline. We had a rash of yellow cards and then, totally inexplicably, the Girondins right-back put in a dreadful challenge on the Granville winger right out on the touchline. There was no need for it – the winger was going nowhere and it really was a vicious tackle. Result – a RED CARD.

Girondins of Bordeaux down to 10 men.

4 minutes of injury time and with 3:50 played, the Granville n°2 put in a low cross into the area. It took a wicked deflection, right into the path of a Granville attacker who sidefooted it straight into the empty net. He was probably more surprised than anyone else in the Stade Louis Dior.

The crowd was in raptures.

There was just enough time for Bordeaux to kick off before the referee blew for time.

No replays in France – we play on. And Bordeaux for once started to play. They looked quick and keen but by now Granville’s tail was up and they kept them out quite comfortably.

And then a break downfield. No fewer than two Girondin defenders missed the ball and it fell right in front of the Granville centre-forward. Surely he must score with an open goal – but a Bordeaux defender wrestled him to the ground.

Bordeaux now down to 9 men – and the penalty? Well, Stanislaus wasn’t going to miss aanother one. Granville take the lead – and they deserved it.

We haven’t finished yet. Granville, with a two-man advantage, burst forward yet again and a midfielder hauls him back by the shirt. The referee goes over to speak to the midfielder about it, and we will never know what the reply was. But it must have been good because the referee reached into his pocket and pulled out a straight RED CARD.

Bordeaux down to 8 men.

The rest is history. You can’t come back with just 8 men on the pitch and Granville hung on for the most unlikely victory which they richly desrved and did a lap of honour around the pitch.

The manager of the Girondins of Bordeaux said after the match “it was just one long nightmare of a Sunday afternoon”. His side, losing its cool like that and having three players sent off against a bunch of regional part-timers was disgraceful. US Granville came out of the game with credit.

We walked back to the car park and I drove home. Frozen to the marrow and I’m still cold now even though the heating is going full-blast and I cooked a pizza in the oven.

I’ll probably be ill for a week now, but ask me if I care? I’ve had a memorable afternoon and there won’t be another one quite like this.

Saturday 6th January 2018 – I’VE BEEN CHANGING …

… the habits of a lifetime today.

And how!

We started off with another bad night last night. Despite going to bed at something like a reasonable hour I was tossing and turning for ages and spent most of the night watching the clock wind down.

And never mind the alarm going off at 07:30 – at that time of the morning I was up, medicated and thinking about breakfast. And my porridge did go down nicely too.

At about 09:15 I hit the road for the shops and I’ll tell you more about them in due course. But my shopping trip was interrupted by Rosemary phoning for a chat, and we passed a very pleasant half hour or so, with me parked up at the side of the road.

Back here, a late lunch (because I’d been out for ages) was followed by a snooze as you might expect, and then I had plenty of things to do – such as making start on tidying up the paperwork seeing that I bought a binder today.

This was followed by watching Cardiff Met play Aberystwyth in the Welsh Premier League, and then off out I went.

Up to the 3rd floor and Odile’s apartment. She was having a little fête to celebrate Epiphany and I’d been invited, which was very nice of her. Brigitte was there, and Roberte, David, Nicolas and Patrice. We all had a good chat for ages, and I wasn’t the first to leave either.

Not like me to be sociable is it? But then, I was never really invited anywhere before. My reputation hasn’t reached here yet, obviously!

But the shops!

I have resolved to make my life easier and more comfortable, and that includes buying things of a better quality than maybe I might usually do, and also to have one one or two luxuries around the place to bolster my morale.

And didn’t that work in Spades today?

Not that it means abandoning my trips to NOZ of course. IN fact I was there today and another €15 of near-expired food and a few other irrelevancies ended up in Caliburn. And the braderie at LeClerc was hit as well, with a waste bin for the living room and a bucket-waste bin for the bedroom.

But that’s only part of it – and a small part of that.

I seem to only have two towels here and both of them seem to have long-since seen better days. So with LIDL having a sale on and luxury towels reduced to a reasonable price, they had one blue shower towel and one blue hand towel (the bathroom is blue) left, as well as a matching blue bathrobe (my old one is falling to bits).

So they ended up in Caliburn too.

Next stop was NOZ, and then Centrakor for a new wallet to replace the one that was lost.

After that it was to “Happy Cash”, the second-hand shop.

Regular readers of this rubbish will be surprised to hear that I’m looking for a cheap television. I have a DVD player here – the one that I bought in Belgium years ago, complete with hard drive, and I only used it for about 6 months before I moved to France.

It’s been in a cardboard box ever since, and here I am watching DVDs on an old laptop. So I want a cheap TV and the second-hand shop seemed to be the place to go.

No such luck unfortunately, but I did strike gold in a quite unexpected direction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I moved here I went looking for a stereo hi-fi. It needed to meet several criteria, like AM/FM radio, CD, auxiliary input, USB port (for a memory stick or a USB turntable). And how I had been singularly unsuccessful.

And there sitting on the shelf was an old battered LG stereo hi-fi with absolutely everything that I wanted, and as an added bonus, a cassette player/recorder. All powered by a remote control.

A lengthy chat with the manager saw it disappearing into Caliburn for the grand sum of … errr … €49:00.

One very happy little bunny here. I spent part of the afternoon wiring it up and the rest of the afternoon having a nostalgia trip listening to a pile of cassettes from the 1970s. Ohh Happy Day!

And later, having bought a memory stick, I copied a pile of music onto it and it’s running even now in the hi-fi. It recognises 999 tracks, which is quite acceptable

But that’s not all. Ohh no it isn’t!

Still in search of a television, I went, more out of curiosity to LeClerc. They had some televisions advertised at €99:00 and that could have been a possibility. But a 57cm screen won’t go far and besides, no SCART socket – just a HDMI cable, so my DVD player wouldn’t work. And after all of the money that I paid for it (because it was a top-of-the range machine) I didn’t want to throw it away lightly.

But there in the corner in the sale were three or four cheap Chinese TVs – 80cms – much more like it. With SCART and HDMI cable plugs and a USB port. €149:00.

So >copulatum expensium , as we Pompeiians say.

That’s now in the back of Caliburn too and it will be up in here tomorrow.

And if that’s not enough, I lost my carte de fidelité the other week and with this kind of thing it’s important because if there’s a complaint they can track your article.

The girl at the cash desk sent me to the accueil and I had to queue behind another guy. He asked for two tickets for tomorrow’s Cup Match against Bordeaux. I thought they would be sold out but “we only have six left”. So he bought two and that left four.

So badger that for a game of soldiers. I bought two too. And Terry is going to come with me to watch the game.

But shopping did wear me out – the first time for three weeks that I’ve hit the shops. I’ll be hitting the sack in a minute to gather my forces for tomorrow.

EPIC HALL

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