Tag Archives: apple crumble

Wednesday 20th May 2020 – HOW MANY

… boats do you see in this photo?

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few days I’ve been talking … “quite a lot” – ed … about the amount of maritime traffic out there since the detention à domicile ended, and this is exactly what I mean. In just one small segment of the ocean just here I count at least 8 boats. And there are more all over the water too.

We never saw anything like that amount of traffic when we were all locked up in our rooms, and I’m hard-pushed to think whether I was this much even when there was freedom of movement.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish won’t recall seeing is me up and about on my feet before the third alarm. Perhaps “up on my feet” is something of an exaggeration but I was certainly sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet touching the floor. So that counts as “being up” in my book.

After the medication I consulted the dictaphone. Apparently World War I had just started and they were disposing troops on the Western Front ready to face the German assault and the battle plans were now being changed and buses were having to be brought in to move the troops around to different places. In the end they manned Thiepval Ridge and a few other places and then the Germans attacked. But they weren’t sufficiently numerous and they were pushed back with some losses and we were detailed to go out and check the wounded and the dead. So we went out and found the wounded and had to persuade some of them too that they should be rescued and taken back behind the lines. There was the usual looting of the dead of course. In the end there was just one person left and the Germans were massing ready to attack again so we grabbed a blanket – there were four of us and we each took a corner with this wounded guy on it and took him back to our lines by holding on to the blanket. And I had to go and wait in the town hall place for the clerk of the court – a woman, Miss Doyle now Mrs Williams – to come down with the death certificates. She asked me if I wanted to say a prayer over the corpses but I hadn’t really thought about that so I don’t know. That was when I awoke. There was one bit earlier on where I came to join the unit. I’d picked up a library book about the fighting on the Somme but in previous wars like Marlborough and all of that. I walked into the room as a new boy and a group of people on the sofa moved up and tried to let me have a place on there but I put my book down before I sat down as I didn’t want to dismay them with my choice of reading matter.

As to what must have been going on in my mind I really don’t know because I haven’t given the matter of World War I much thought over the last while. Although, interestingly, looking up the details of Marlborough and the other Flanders campaigns from earlier years has always been something on my mind ever since I stumbled by accident across the battlefield at Malplaquet about 25 years ago.

This morning I’ve been busy baking.

To start with, I added a little sugar to 350ml of lukewarm water and then stirred it in. When it had dissolved I added the yeast.

While that was rising, I took 500 grammes of flour and added a teaspoon of salt and mixed it well in.

By now the yeast mixture was bubbling nicely so I added it into the flour and salt and kneaded it well in with my hands for a good 10 minutes. It was too wet so I added a couple of tablespoons of flour until I had the consistency that I wanted – a nice rubbery elasticky dough that didn’t stick to my hands, or anything else to that matter.

It had a really good kneading, probably about 15 minutes or so, and then I put it in the mixing bowl covered by a damp cloth on top of the overn, which I then switched on.

150 grammes of flour next, and 75 grammes of vegan margarine, all well rubbed together. And i’m told that I’m not rubbing it together long enough so I did it for an age. When I was satisfied that it was rubbed together adequately, I added 150 grammes of oats and rubbed all of that really well in too.

Then I peeled, cored and diced two large cooking apples and put them in a baking bowl with lemon juice, desiccated coconut, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, stirred it all well together, pressed it down really well into the bowl and then added the flour and oat mix.

That was pressed well down too and then put that in the oven.

Next task was to peel a big lump of ginger, dice it into very tiny bits, stick it into a large saucepan with a small amount of water, bring it to the boil and leave it to simmer.

The bread dough was rising nicely in the warmth so I spent another 15 minutes really pummeling it and working it with my fingers. It had a really beautiful texture.

Then I shaped it and put it in the backing dish that i’d bought last weekend, and then back on top of the oven under cover.

Three lemons were next. They were peeled and as much pith as possible was removed … “that’s taking the pith, yeth?” – ed … They were put in the whizzer and whizzed round just enough to separate the juice, which was strained off and put in a sterilisied bottle.

The rest of the lemons was put back and whizzed around until it resembled something like a purée, and this was then added to the ginger and water, brought to the boil and left to simmer again.

One mug of coffee later, the apple crumble was cooked to perfection so that came out of the oven and the bread went in instead (I must buy a bigger oven).

It was so well mixed, I have to say, that it really did rise before my very eyes, and it was so impressive, it really was.

By now the lemon and ginger had simmered enough, so that came off the heat and two tablespoons of honey were added. It was all tipped into the whizzer and whizzed around for an age until it really did look like a puree and then it was added to the lemon juice from earlier, and shaken well in.

The bread wasn’t ready for lunch but there was a little of the previous loaf left and a stray taco floating around so I polished those off.

But now my bread is done and just look at it all. I hope that it’s as good as it looks. I suppose that I’ll find out tomorrow lunchtime.

This afternoon I crashed out for a really good and deep half an hour, much to my dismay. And so i didn’t do all that I had planned.

There were a few pages of one of my websites that were brought up to the new standards and a web page on one of my other sites was rewritten. There’s a lot more information available these days than there was 20 years ago and I’ve even managed to track down the owners (at the time) of a vehicle that featured on that page.

And there was still time to edit half a dozen photos from Iceland in July 2019. And how I would have liked to have done more than that too.

But there has to be a break of course for the afternoon walk. I need to stretch my legs.

Maybe it’s legs that these people will be stretching in very early course – and arms too because it looks as if they are about to take the plunge into the waters.

It’s certainly pretty brave of them and you wouldn’t get me going in there for all the tea in China – not even in mid-summer. Call me “nesh” if you like, but I don’t care.

However, at least I took off my jumper and walked around in my tee shirt. I can manage that.

Over the last few days we’ve seen a speedboat in the English Channel off the coast of Brehal-Plage with some guys in it doing some fishing.

There’s another speedboat out there today too, although I’m sure that it’s not the same one that we have seen in the past. This one has a covered cabin, but the other one (or ones) didn’t.

And there is a pile of buoys out there in the water too. Too many to be anything to do with the fishermen, I reckon, so I’m wondering if they are connected with the yachts that come out of the harbour over there.

My walk continued along the top of the cliff underneath the walls and round the corner where there’s a really good view over the Plat Gousset.

And it’s just like a Bank Holiday weekend down there, isn’t it? You wouldn’t believe that there’s a deadly virus on the rampage with all of those people congregating together down there.

Plenty of people in the water to a greater or lesser degree too, and the usual sandcastle builders are hard at work with their latest edifices.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we watched them erecting a scaffolding up against a house in the Place Marechal Foch.

One of the things that I wanted to do today was to have a look and see how they were getting on with what they were doing so I pushed on along the path. And they seem to be doing quite well too. Ripping off all of the slates and, by the looks of things, the wooden rafters too.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the storms and high winds have had anything to do with all of that.

And so my walk continued across the Square Maurice Marland to the viewpoint over the harbour.

And here’s a thing. We’ve seen them installing the pillars to support the floating pontoons of the new walkways but today they have actually installed the pontoons and there is even someone walking on them. That’s progress.

In the background we have three yachts which I reckon are Aztec Lady Spirit of Conrad and La Granvillaise. I heard a story about Aztec Lady that when the virus broke out she was around Svalbard somewhere and ended up in quarantine in the Lofoten islands.

How true that is, I really don’t know but it sounds typical to me.

The harbour gates were closed but there was a lot of movement inside and outside the port as if the gates would be open at any moment.

A couple of trawler-type fishing boats were jostling for position and this one, Pescadore looks as if she’s getting ready for the open sea.

And judging by the amount of refrigerated lorries at the fish processing plant (there were four today) they are expecting another bumper catch today.

But what are these guys doing here?

While I was waiting for things to happen (which didn’t happen, but that’s another story) I watched them for a few minutes. They had lines with large-ish weights on the end and they were throwing them across the harbour entrance. You cans ee the “splash” as one of the weights goes into the water and you’ll see the lines for a few others that are already in.

Fishing is, as far as I am aware, forbidden in the harbour so it probably isn’t that. But it’s bizarre just the same.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there has been a lot of heavy engineering going on in and around the port just recently.

As I was observing the goings-on in the port a heavy low-loader, empty, passed by underneath me and I wondered what it had brought. But here’s the answer. We have a couple of diggers and a tractor and trailer parked on the slipway again.

It’ll be interesting to see what they’ll be doing over the next few weeks.

Back here I finished off my tasks and then had my usual hour on the guitars. My bass-playing is slowly (very slowly) improving but I seem to have run aground now with the 6-string. I’m not managing the rapid chord changes as well as I might.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with pasta and vegetables, followed by a slice of the redfruit pie – just one more slice to go now before I can start on the crumble – with that soya coconut stuff. And it’s just as delicious as it was when I had the first slice.

So back out to hit the streets again. And I ran, with some difficulty, up to my marker at the end of the hedge and then, having recovered my breath, down to the clifftop.

Regular readers of this rubhish will recall that we saw a bright yellow zodiac out here yesterday and at first glance I thought that they might be back again today. But it’s a different zodiac and these people seem to be fishing with rod and line.

Perhaps it’s they who were in the speedboat over the last couple of days, I dunno.

having seen the hordes of people out here during the day having little respect for the social distancing rules, it’s no surprise to see that this evening it’s the turn of the younger generation.

All over the lawn were little groups having picnics and listening to music and the like, and this little group here down by the stone watch-cabin is just one example of many that I could of photographed.

There’s no particular reason why I photographed these instead of any other group, except that their pose was better. So don’t think that I’m singling them out for any special reason.

There’s no question of any social distancing here, is there?

The tide turned a couple of hours ago and what I imagine is happening here – based on no evidence whatsoever – is that the birds are waiting for the tidal flats to drain off so that they can get stuck in there for tea.

Not that I would know anything about the habits of birds, because the only birds that I am interested in studying are not birds of this type at all, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There’s a change of occupant in the chantier navale too today.

We had four boats in there for the last couple of days but today we seem to be doing our “Genesis” impressions – for Then There Were Three. The boat Joker that was on the far left-hand blocks now seems to have gone back into the water.

And if you look on the extreme left-hand edge of the photo, there’s a yellow zodiac just creeping into the photograph. I wonder if it’s the same one that we saw last night.

But talking of boats, it looks like we are going to have a new occupant joining the fleet in the port.

This artic has just turned up and on the back of it is a luxurious cabin-cruiser thing and that has to be worth a few bob, doesn’t it?

It beats me why they want to use the big crane to lower it in to the water though. Round at the port de plaisance – the pleasure-boat harbour, there’s a portable sling like the one at the chantier navale with a safe working load of 100 tonnes that’s specially made for purposes like this.

But maybe the artic is too long to negotiate the harbour over there.

In the beautiful evening sunshine I ran all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord, with the usual pauses for breath of course.

There was still 15 minutes or so to wait before the sun finally set but I had too many other things to do this evening, not the least of which being to go to bed after my long day, so I contented myself with the photo of the setting sun as it was.

The days are lengthening rapidly now and it won’t be long before it’s after 22:00 when the sun finally sinks beneath the sea.

But before I leave I had a look around because, for a change, there wasn’t anyone else around here with me.

But I wasn’t as alone as I might have thought because the picnickers are just arriving down on the beach and settling themselves down for the sunset.

It seems to me that most people have given up on this “social distancing” thing, which is a shame. Because if it comes back in a second wave, which is usually the case in pandemics, it’ll be even more virulent and it won’t be just 7 weeks that we’ll be confined to quarters.

On that note, I ran back home to write out my notes, and managed to do about half of them before I crashed out on the chair.

Sunday 26th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that I was going to have a baking day today.

And so I did too – and here’s the result.

There’s

a loaf of bread (thanks to Catherine for the recipe)
a vegan pizza made with my own dough (and credit to whoever gave me the recipe – I forget now
a blackberry pie (pastry out of a roll
an apple turnover (to use up the remains of the two rolls of pastry)

In fact I made enough pizza dough for three pizza and as I’m told that it will freeze well, it’s in the freezer and I’ll find out next week if it really does.

The bread didn’t really work out. It certainly rose, although nothing like as much as I hoped that it would, and I’m going to need a pneumatic drill to get through the crust.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we’ll see tomorrow at lunchtime how it went. I shan’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t work out – it’s my first ever go and you can’t win a coconut every time.

However, the pizza did, and I was impressed by that.

What else I was impressed with was that I was actually up and about at a more reasonable 10:15 this morning rather than the near-midday of just recently. Much as I like – and enjoy very much – a good lie-in, there’s no need to take it to extremes.

Unless, of course, there was someone else, young and nubile of the female, lying in with me, and then that would be a completely different matter entirely.

Ohh yes – I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why.

And that reminds me of when i was chatting to Rosemary the other day saying that I haven’t seen that mystery girl since we crossed each other’s path while out running a couple of weeks ago.

Rosemary asked my why I didn’t turn round and run after her. My response was that if I had managed to catch her, I wouldn’t have been in any fit state to do anything about it.

After the meds I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night and who had been there with me. So hello to you again, Castor.

I was back playing guitar again, playing bass for someone. We hadn’t rehearsed or anything. Castor was involved in this. But it wasn’t really Castor but some other group of girls a bit like those two in that Agatha Christie Poirot play about the cruise ship in the Eastern Mediterranean. But when we came to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour we were almost the last to leave and I walked up to the top – I must have been somewhere and seen a lot of people – but I walked up on the top deck ready to come off and there were kids “where’s so-and-so?” their friend or father or someone. “He’s waiting for you. You’ve been downstairs since 08:30”. They said “he’s gone down for a sleep”. I said “no, he’s waiting for you ready to go” so they all piled into grandfather’s car ready to leave. They invited a few of us round to their house afterwards so we were allowed to go. They had even invited me which was a surprise so I set off there as well with a couple of other people. There was much more to it than this but I really can’t remember it now and in any case, you’re probably eating your tea now or something.
Some time later I’d been packing up ready to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour last night. I had a load of tinned food stuff and was getting a carrier bag ready to carry it out. I thought that this would be much easier in plastic bottles than metal tins isn’t it to move it. And then some of the product, I can’t remember what, dated back to 1970 from Chile and the time when Allende was making a secret treaty between the Chileans, the Russians and the Americans and no-one ever talked about the sell-out by Allende at all.
Later still I was at a quiz show on the television and the call went out for all of the studio to be evacuated so everyone ran out except for me. We’d been examining bottles of fizzy water and one of the bottles swelled up dramatically and was about to burst. I just put it on the floor and put a wooden box on the top and stood on the wooden box. When it burst it burst inside the box and shook me around a bit but there was no damage done to anywhere. People came back in and I told them what had happened.

Yes, that was a pretty comprehensive voyage or two or three during the night.

With the time that it took to deal with all of the foregoing it was a late breakfast. More like an early lunch if the truth is known. And afterwards I attacked the digitalised file project. Two more albums went the Way of the West today. A couple of complications but in the end I managed to sort things out.

There wasn’t a great deal of time though for editing photos. Only 25 or so but many of them today were cropped out of larger images and I imagine that only about half were actual original images.

As an aside for this, I’m currently on image 0860. A similar image from my first run through on a one-for-one basis was image 0723 so it shows just how many croppings there have been.

Incidentally, that’s for the 11th July. One-third or so of the way through the month.

There was a break for a snack at about 14:30 and then I had my culinary session. Like I say, the bread could be better but for a first try I don’t think that it’s too bad. I shall have to work on it and maybe have better luck with the next loaf, because I’m intending to keep on trying if I can.

Tea was, of course, the pizza (delicious) followed by the last of the apple crumble. Tomorrow’s pudding will be the apple turnover and then after that I’ll start on the pie.

There’s absolutely no doubt about it – I’m eating so much better these days than ever I have been (except for those three months when Liz and Terry took me in).

After the washing-up (three loads of it of course this evening) I went off for my evening runs.

No-one about at all on my travels and that’s hardly a surprise as it wasn’t the kind of day that you would be expecting to see people. It was a cool evening but cloudy and overcast with a heavy sea mist.

It wasn’t the day for photography at all so there are very few photos of this evening’s activities.

Having recovered my breath from my runs up the hill and then down to the cliffs, I had my third run along the clifftop on the south side of the headland overlooking the town.

Nothing much happening down there at all. The place was as dead as a do-do. I could see right across the port, past the hotel and out up the street alongside the beach. All that I could see was just one person walking along the quayside.

Who knows? maybe people have realised that the solution to this problem is in their own hands. The number of new cases of this virus is falling dramatically and we might even be on target for Liberation on 11th may if this keeps up.

But there was someone else out there whom I missed but slamming his van door like that, it drew my attention to him.

He was unloading equipment from that fishing boat just there, putting it in his van and driving away.

At the viewpoint at the rue du Port there was a small group of people hoping to see the sunset. No-one whom I recognised, and not keeping their “social distance” either.

But there was no chance of them seeing the sunset. The heavy cloud and mist obscured everything.

There was however a piece of machinery parked higher up the rue du Nord in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

It crept into a photo while I was photographing something else and I didn’t take much notice of it until I returned home.

No idea what it is so I’ll have to go tomorrow for a proper nosey and make further enquiries about it.

But not now. I have a couple of thing to do and then i’m off to bed. I can’t wait to try my loaf tomorrow and see how it went. I’m not too optimistic but we shall see.

Thursday 23rd April 2020 – THE GOOD NEWS IS …

… that I’m holding my own.

Yes, I don’t want to be holding anyone else’s, that’s for sure.

Mind you, someone else could hold it for me, depending on who it was of course and several candidates spring to mind. And that reminds me, I’ve not heard anything from Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves) for absolutely ages.

That’s right – I’ve been to see the doctor this morning. He’s quite pleased with my progress and thinks that I’m in a stable condition. But then again, so was Mary after giving birth to Jesus.

There’s even better news too, although not necessarily for me alone. I asked the doctor about this virus and how it was doing. he replied that there hasn’t even been a call for a test in Granville during the last 10 days, never mind a case of the virus.

He’s of the opinion that the number of cases is falling dramatically due to the success of the detention à domicile and if this keeps up, then Granville will be one of the first places to have the restrictions lifted.

However, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, statements like this are usually the Kiss of Death for any hopes. So we shall see.

But apart from that, today has been a horrible day for me again.

It all went wrong last night with me being very late going to bed. After 02:00 it was, what with one thing and another.

Surprisingly, I managed to beat the third alarm although I was feeling like death.

With the medication out of the way, I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was standing with a group of people on a square somewhere last night – a “circle” thing that you used to get with Council House estates. This square was being modernised and the road being reorganised and so we were standing in a group there and it was going to be one of these funk, soul R&B blues things but the guys were white and that took everyone by surprise.

After breakfast I had a go at doing some digitalising. Another two albums and, to my complete surprise, apart from two tracks that “stuck” and needed quite a bit of encouragement to work properly it went so rapidly that I didn’t have time to do more than half a dozen or so of the photos from July 2019.

By now, it was time to go to visit the doctor so I grabbed my things and headed for the stret.

It’s been a while since I’ve been out on foot into town in the morning and there was plenty of activity about, like this fishing boat that’s setting off into the English Channel, towing its dinghy behind it.

For a moment or two I thought that it might have been our old friend La Grande Ancre on her way out but I really can’t tell form this image.

And I can’t tell from this image what this thing is either.

It’s some kind of pontoon or raft of some description with a cabin and a crane and several buoys on board. It looks as if it might be doing something with the mooring chains in the tidal harbour.

However, when they’ve been doing that in the past, they’ve done it on foot at low tide, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I couldn’t see why they would want to go to the expense of bringing in a special craft to do the job.

The excitement is a long way from being over too.

Yesterday, we saw that Joly France has moved from her spec at the ferry terminal and was moored up in the inner harbour. I’d noticed earlier that Chausiais wasn’t there this morning either, so I was wondering if she had gone off on a delivery.

But no – she’s here in the inner harbour having a friendly chat with Soirit of Conrad. So there’s something going on at the ferry terminal too, then.

But never mind that for a moment. There seems to be quite a lot going on with the new pontoons at the “Rue du Port” side of the harbour.

It’s difficult to see exactly what they are doing here, but the giant mobile crane that occasionally puts on an appearance here and there around the harbour is back and it’s in position to lift something.

And I can’t think that they will be lifting that will be so heavy that they will need this crane for it.

Bit I carried on and went to the doctoor’s, and then off through the madding crowds (of which there were more than just a few people) up to LIDL.

Although I spent more than usual, much of that went on a new mini-wok. My frying pan is quite small and some of the stuff I make is too big, but far to small to cook in the giant wok.

However, despite everything that i spent, I forgot the carrots, as I found out when I went to peel them this afternoon.

On the way back home I always keep my eyes open for anything unusual or exciting, and this in the rue St Paul is one of those things – something that made me look twice at it.

Rule N°2 (regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen Rule N°1 a while back) of hanging up signs and notices is to make sure that there are no creases or folds in the material that might distort the message.

Or do you think that that is splitting hairs?

Something else on which we’ve been keeping an eye just recently is the new house that’s being built on the corner of the Rue Charles Guillebot and the Impasse de la Corderie.

For quite a while, progress on it was stalled but they started up a short while ago.

And now they have managed to go as far as the roof. If they aren’t careful, they might be in a position to finish it off before too long.

Bu tit’s not going to be anywhere where I might want to be living.

La Mie Caline was open so I picked up a dejeunette and then went across the road to the pharmacy to pick up my medication for the next month.

On my way back up the hill in the rue des Juifs I wanted to see how the big crane was doing. But there she was, gone. And never called me Mother. Instead the floating pontoon is over there with the giant crane.

And I couldn’t even see what they were doing with that one either. It’s not my lucky day, is it?

As to where the big mobile crane has gone, that question soon resolved itself too.

And it also answered the question as to why Chausiais and Joly France have moved. With the ferries to the Channel islands being suspended now until the 11th may at the earliest, it looks as if they have seized the opportunity to carry on with the work that they were doing before all of this erupted.

With no ferries to worry about, they can presumably crack on.

And so I cracked on too, back home and started on the final work for the two radio projects that I had on the go. And by the time I knocked off for lunch, I had finished writing the text, it had all been dictated, uploaded to the computer and one of the projects had actually been completed.

After lunch, it didn’t take long to finish off the second, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. There are just 3 or four live recordings to deal with now, and then I’ll be at my target of four months ahead.

First job after finishing was to catch up on a pile of e-mails that needed sending out, and second job was to sort all of the albums that have been digitalised to date and file them away.

That latter job was one that took far longer than it ought because, having already crashed out for 10 minutes earlier, I went out like a light for a good half hour while I was putting away the albums.

And I do mean “out like a light”. It was as bad as I have been for quite a while and the type that would have had me crawling into bed had it happened this time last year.

There was still some time left to do a couple of little things before I knocked off at … 17:00 … for my hour on the guitars.

But at 18:00 I had other things to do.

The apple crumble is down to the last helping and there was some crumble mix left over, so I used it and the remaining cooking apples to make a small crumble.

But first, the home-made ginger and orange drink was finished off this morning so I needed to make some more. The lemons were looking somewhat sorry for themselves so I ended up with a home-made orange and ginger cordial today.

And here’s all of the finished product it all of its glory. There’s tons of stuff that I’ve been making just recently and once I have the time I’ll be trying more stuff.

While the apple crumble was cooking, I stuck a couple of potatoes in the oven with it and after a while a slice of frozen pie went in there too. With mixed veg and gravy, that was tea followed by the last of Sunday’s apple crumble with soya coconut dessert

Outside for my evening walk later on.

The sky wasn’t as good as it has been just recently though. No clear skies this evening. It was rather overcast and it was unlikely that we would have a good sunset. But this fishing boat sailing off into the setting sun was quite interesting

The Ile de Chausey is out there somewhere but it’s lost in the haze tonight.

Having dumped the rubbish in the bin, I set off on my run to the top of the hill.

And that was the worst that I have ever felt for quite a while too and I wished that I could do something else. But that kind of attitude bever helped anyone and I need to stop being so defeatist.

At least I had another really good view of the fishing boat pushing on out towards the Channel Islands or wherever.

There were no fishing boats that I could see in the Baie de Mont St Michel, but there were several out in the English Channel tonight.

From my vantage point up on the cliff I could see at least three, and here’s one of them just here. She looks as if she’s been down near Beéhal-Plage for some reason although I can’t imagine what it might be.

As for the others, it wasn’t easy to tell what they might (or might not) have been up to

A year or so ago regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the erection of a monument at the Pointe du Roc in honour of Maurice Marland and the other member sof the resistance who carried on the struggle against the Germans during the Occupation.

Four flag poles were erected, but with no flags and there was much speculation about which flags were to be flown here.

But today, we know the answer to that. Somewhere in the course of the day they have been out there to hoist a few – the French,the USA, the UK and, surprisingly, the German flag.

But then, I suppose, the German people were as much the victims of a wicked ideology as anyone else. And I can’t help thinking, as I witness the rise of Fascism in the UK and the USA and several other states in Europe just as in the 1930s, that “those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it”.

The sunset wasn’t as spectaculr tonight as it has been during a couple of evenings just recently.

Nevertheless there was a girl who had breached the security barriers in order to go down to the viewpoint at the bottom to admire the view. I wonder if she thought that what she had seen was worth the risk of the €135 fine is one of the Police Municipale ageents had appeared out of the blue.

There were certainly not so many people out and about this evening, but of those whow ere there, one of them was a guy with whom I’d exchanged pleasantries the other evening.

There’s been a great deal of talk here and there from certain people all over France complaining that the small local operators have been refused permission to fish whereas the larger multinationals are out there regardless.

The regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen enough evidence to suggest that this is clearly not the case here. We’ve seen plenty of fishing boats from here out at sea and here are a few that are at the fish processing plant unloading their catch.

So I’ve no idea what is the source of these complaints

While I was here recovering my breath from one of the legs of my run, I had a good look across at the ferry terminal to see if there was any evidence of the work that the large mobile crane had been undertaking.

Not a sausage, as it happens. I didn’t notice anything in the way of new work. But I did notice that the crane is parked up here, presumably for the night, which must mean that whatever they were doing, they hadn’t finished it.

Presumably then they’ll be back to have another go tomorrow, so I’ll have to check tomorrow and hope that it will be more evident.

That just leaves the support pillars for the floating pontoons.

There has been a great deal of work going on there during the course of the day with all kinds of equipment being used and so I was quite looking forward to observing the progress that they have made.

But as bad luck would have it, there was little if no evidence of anything that might have required the use of the cranes. All that I could see that was different today wat that another one of the support pillars for the new floating pontoons has acquired its rain hat.

And they wouldn’t surely have needed a big mobile crane for that.

My run continued onwards and I went down to the rue du Nord to check on the sunset. The girl who had been there yesterday was there again, but with a friend (she must have heard about me). And there were now heavy clouds obscuring the sun so it wasn’t worth hanging around. I ran on home.

So now it’s late and I’m having a bad day today. Not much sleep, and what I did have was at the wrong time of day. I don’t seem to be recovering quickly enough from my athletic endeavours either and despite the reassurances of the doctors I might be holding my own but I’m not feeling myself.

Looking back on my notes from the High Arctic last year when I was three months without my medication and how I was feeling (which is why I make these notes), I can see it all happening again.

No hospital appointment until July too – another two or three months to go. Heaven alone knows what I’ll be like by then.

Wednesday 22nd April 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… this evening’s beautiful sunset, as the sun slowly sinks into the sea somewhere off the shore of the Ile de Chausey, let me tall you about my day, such as it was.

And for a change, it started off rally well too. I was actually out of bed and struggling into my clothes when the third alarm went off, and that’s not something that happens every day, especially these days.

And so I wandered off for my medication, or whatever is left of my medication until tomorrow.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

And not very far, by the look of it.

There was something going on about a zoo during the night. There was a group of us, a Scottish rock group and I can’t remember which one it was. We were going hunting and someone brought a rifle along, but was soon persuaded to change it for a camera. We all had to wear face masks so I put this face mask on a little girl, a weird thing that needed all kind of strange tightening up, then told her to go to put hers on her brother and then come back to put mine on. Her brother was only a year or two older and he didn’t understand about face masks and they were having a bit of a struggle to get his face mask on.

Breakfast was next of course, and that was followed by a shower.

And those few hundred grammes that I had lost the other day – well, they are back. It seems that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as Castle Anthrax’s blood laboratory testing service … “you said that the other day” – ed.

And having had a good shower and clean up, then I cleaned and tidied the bathroom and you can actually see the surface in there now. That’s progress.

Having organised the bathroom I started on the kitchen and the dining area.

The kitchen looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned since Adam was a lad so it was high time that it was done. I usually always do that just before I go to Leuven, but I haven’t been there since January, have I?

And then the dining area. That needed a good going-over too.

So basically the place looks so much better now that it did yesterday.

The nurse (a new one) came at about 10:10 and I’m glad t was this one because even though he wasn’t particularly garrulous, he found a vein and insterted his needle quite painlessly. I’m always grateful for that.

He was in and out and gone within about 10 minutes, which meant that I could crack on with what I’d been intending to do.

We started off with the digital file splitting. Two albums of “Greatest Hits” and, to my surprise, both of them were completed today with just the odd little problem here and there but nothing serious.

That was followed by dictating the notes that I had written yesterday for the two radio projects on which I had been working.

And shame is it to say that I actually fell asleep while I was doing it. That was embarrassing, particularly as it was for about 20 minutes or so.

I can’t last the pace, can I?

But anyway, once they were dictated, I uploaded them to the computer

After lunch, I made a start on editing them, having a little chat with Rachel in New Brunswick along the way.

And even though I didn’t feel much like it and wished that I had something else to do instead of this, by the time that I came to knocking off at 18:00 I had made some quite remarkable progress.

So much so that I wish that I had had a day like this much earlier in the week when I really needed to do it.

The dictated notes have been edited as necessary
they have been converted to *.mp3 files
they have been split into the appropriate segments to match the music that will precede and follow them
they have all been merged together in the appropriate places
the remaining time has been calculated
the final, concluding tracks have been identified
these have been enhanced and edited
I’ve made a start on writing out the notes to conclude the programmes

Yes, I wish that I had more days like that.

An hour was spent on the guitar, just running over “Telegraph Road” again and once I worked out that not only is there a wrong chord, the chord pattern puts the breaks in the wrong place, then the identifying pattern was easy to spot

It’s a lot of hard work on the bass though, and I don’t think that I shall have it cracked any time soon.

For tea tonight, in my nice clean kitchen and dining area, I decided on a burger and bap for tea, with a baked potato.

Now that I know how much mustard to use (this “old-style” mustard is different to the more modern stuff) it comes out really well and tastes extremely delicious.

We’re on the verge of a crisis though. Tomorrow will see me use the last of the apple crumble. At the moment it’s tasting better and better as the spices in the apples have time to mix through

And then I had to go off for my evening runs.

The sun was still quite high in the sky right now, although I reckoned that by the time I had gone once around my little lap it will have gone down. So I put a spurt on and headed for the hills

And that was quite agonising too. For a couple of days I thought that I had cracked this little course of mine but that might have been rather optimistic. This evening I felt every inch of the way.

Eventually I found my way round to the chantier navale where I could stop to see that was going on.

And there’s been a change in there today. For the last week or so there have been four boats in there up on blocks but today there were only three.

The one that was on its own down the quayside seems to have disappeared – back into the water probably. They are clearly cracking on with things down there in the chantier navale regardless of any social distancing.

If you have a look at image, you’ll see that it’s been cropped from the previous photo. The girl in this image can be seen in the previous one right up at the top beyond the boat hoist and near the bright yellow plastic boat in the rack.

What’s interesting in this photo is that while I was taking the one of the chantier navale I could hear someone talking quite clearly, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Being of a curious bent, I had a good look around but couldn’t see anyone so I was puzzled. But then as the voice slowly became louder, I could see the girl approaching, and she was talking on her telephone.

She must have been a good 400 yards or so away from me yet because of the detention à domicile there was no noise of vehicles or other people and thus the sound of her voice was carrying for a much greater distance than you might expect.

The windows in the apartment had been open today and I had heard the pile-driver going off.

So when I stopped for breath on my run home, I went to see what they had been doing.

At first glance I couldn’t see any difference but on a closer look I think that one or two of the support pillars on the rue du Port side are deeper in the water.

They must have been having a hammering today.

While I was admiring the inner port, my attention was distracted by some goings-on in the corner over there.

Horses and hordes of seagulls circling around over there. It suggests that a fishing boat has just come in and is in the process of unloading. The birds will be on the lookout for a free meal as the process continues.

As for me though, I couldn’t hang around as I had things to do.

By now, the sun would be on its way out so I went for a butchers in the rue du Nord.

There was a girl there too, one of about ten people in total whom I had seen this evening, admiring the scenery too. I attempted to strike up a conversation with her as a gesture of solidarity but she wasn’t having it.

And so instead I carried on admiring the slowly-sinking sun. It really was beautiful.

After about 15 minutes the sun finally disappeared over the horizon and so in the nest tradition of the “News Of The Screws”, I “made my excuses and left”.

No-one was around to notice so I ran all the way back to the apartment so as to make up my five runs.

About 30 seconds after I returned, the ‘phone rang. It was Rosemary and she wanted a really good chat so we were there on the ‘phone puttign the world to rights for a good hour and a half.

I sisn’t want an early night anyway.

But now everything is all done and way later than I intended, I’m ready for bed.

Tomorrow I have the doctor’s appointment at 10:00 and then I’m off to the shops. There’s quite a bit of stuff that I need. And so I hope that LIDL isn’t going to have a heart attack if I have the need to take a photo or two.

That is – if I’m awake in time because I was hoping to be in bed much earlier than this.

Tuesday21st April 2020 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… day when I haven’t really been able to make a start.

And there have been far too many of these just recently – although the point has been made that I’m now three months without any medical treatment and I remember how I was on the last couple of days of my transatlantic voyage in the High Arctic when I was just running on adrenaline – they body, the mind and the spirit having given up a good while before then.

Yes, scanning back through my journal, I see that I still haven’t put on line the notes of the last three or four days of that voyage. The things that were going on on that voyage about which I had … well, not complained, but … errr … mentioned forcefully to the organisers were expressed in my notes in a fashion that won’t bear repeating in any family entertainment.

It’s not my habit to go back and edit what I write either. And there is a very good reason for that. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m slowly dying and on my way downhill it’s rather like a sawblade with peaks and troughs, and it’s important that I am able to look back on what I write about how I feel so that I can measure my decline – to compare whether I’m in a temporary trough or a permanent downhill slope with previous occurrences.

And that goes for my state of mind as well as my state of health too.

But anyway, I digress. And not for the first time either.

Just for a change, this morning I beat the third alarm. Not by much, it has to be said, but beat it all the same. And then once the medication was dealt with, there was the dictaphone.

It had been a hot, sweaty night (i have to keep a note of my night sweats, apparently – it’s a symptom of this illness) and I was on a train I think, one of these American overnight trains and we were discussing serving food. We thought about sausages and bread, lots of things, but we decided that if there was too much of one kind of thing people would just help themselves to that, so maybe we should just have the sausages or just the bread and have an attendant on board to serve it all. The conversation went round there for a while. A little bit earlier I’d been to Chester and had a coach with me. I had to get and park it up. I’d parked service buses up but a coach is a different proposition and had to drag it all the way through the town centre, stopping off for some chips, something like that. I wasn’t sure actually where to park it and I was hoping that I’d meet a policeman on the way who would tell me where to stick it, if you aprdon the expression. This was when I met these people who were talking about these sandwiches and how we used to do it previously when we were on a train
I don’t remember much about this next one but we were on the beach in Granville and we were going through some kind of famous album, no Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell”, something like that. There were a couple of acoustic numbers on it, and the reason why was that the musician wanted the record company to sit up and take note of his music so he thought that he’d do an acoustic number or two. This was going on, this discussion about this album and something to do with blood while we were rooting around in beach rock pools for something but I can’t remember what it was now.
There was something going on about musicians changing their nationality to Italian so a lot of people did so. Liz had got to Australia somehow but because of the quarantine she had to go back home with her children. She simply registered the children with Alitalia and they were flown home at the cost of the Italian government.
Somewhere in all of this there was also something about hanging some kind of vertical pocket-type of storage things inside a fridge but I’ve no idea what that was about now.

With all of that going on, it really was a surprise that I’d beaten the alarm, that’s for sure.

After breakfast I had a go at the digitalising of two “various artists” albums. That was a very long, very slow process that required a great deal of searching.

They were big albums too, more than 40 tracks in all and much of it involving a great deal of detective work. And we’re back at the “false attribution” thing as well in a few cases. For example, one track attributed to “Eddie Graham” just didn’t correspond with anything that he did in his solo career towards the end and eventually I tracked it down as an old “Eire Apparent” track. There were a few like that.

The thing that surprised me the most was that there was only one track that I couldn’t find. The album with most tracks on it, a double-album with 23 tracks on it, I found all of those and that was astonishing.

It took longer than I intended too, because I … errr … had a rest for half an hour during the morning. But even so, I managed to edit well over 40 photos from July 2019, including my famous “leaping whale” image for which I won a mention.

After lunch I had a rather desultory go at writing out the rest of the notes to the radio projects that I have on the go. That took longer than I was expecting too, even though I spent some of that time chatting to Liz. I’d barely finished by 18:00 – knocking-off time.

But I had to ring up the doctor’s. I need an appointment for a check-up and to order some mdication as I’m running out. That’s now fixed and the appointment is for 10:00 on Thursday.

My hour on the guitar was spent having another go at “Telegraph Road” and it’s not as straightforward as you might think. And on the bass it’s even more complicated, except that at the end I managed to identify a pattern. And I think that it took me so long because one of the chords might be wrong.

Tomorrow I’ll have another go at it. Another track that I want to have a play with is Fleetwood Mac’s “Behind The Mask”. In the late 70s with Jim Farrar and that lot in Manchester we played a lot of Fleetwood Mac but it was all stuff of the eponymous album and off Rumours and I want to do something different.

Tea was a wicked stuffed pepper with rice followed by apple crumble and soya coconut stuff.

And then it was off for my walks and my runs.

When I set my foot out of the building I’d seen this really beautiful red sunset in the distance so I struggled on up the hill to my point of rest at the end of the hedge. And then when I’d gathered my strength and recovered my breath I ran down to the clifftop to have a good look at it.

The sun hadn’t gone completely down and wouldn’t do so for another 15 minutes I reckoned, but I didn’t really want to spend the time waiting for it.

There was other fish that needed frying too, or other cats that need whipping, as they say around here.

Out in the distance way off shore I’d noticed a speck of movement so I was intrigued to see what it might be – whether it’s either maybe Thora or Normandy Trader heading into port.

But when I returned home and had a closer look, I was rather disappointed. Well, not really, because a boat is a boat is a boat. What I’d actually been seeing was one of the big trawler-type of fishing boats out to sea.

So taking my leave of the crowds out here tonight (I reckoned that all in all I’d seen about 20 people in total tonight) I headed off to the other side of the headland to see what I could see.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite recently we’ve seen fishing boats deep in the Baie de Mont St Michel. And while there were none out there last night, there was one working out there this evening.

All on her own she was too, but working she was all the same.

With nothing else to see round here tonight, I pushed on for my run along the clifftop.

The chantier navale still had the same four boats in there but there was a change across on the other side of the harbour by the ferry terminal. Xhausiais is no over there all on her tod, with no sign of Joly France who has been keeping her company for the last while.

So where has Joly France gone to? She won’t be over at the Ile de Chausey at this time of night.

That puzzle was quickly solved.

Running along the clifftop I’d seen a strange profile or two in the inner harbour and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. But it turns out as it happens to be Joly France and her sister tied up alongside the quay at the rue du Port – not their usual mooring point.

And work hasn’t restarted on the surfacing of the new car park yet. Still a lump of sad-looking asphalt when they could have done so much with it.

Mind you, they have been working on the new pontoons in the inner harbour today even though I didn’t hear the piledriver (and I had the bedroom window open too).

Not only is the thrid pillar in place correctly at the correct height, it has its little white cap on, the cap that keeps out the rain, so whatever they have been doing to it is clearly finished.

It remains to be seen when they will start attaching the floating pontoons to it. That will be progress.

And on that note, I ran on home.

And here’s a thing! Yesterday I was wishing that my new memory sticks would hurry up and arrive. When I looked in my post box on my way back in, there was a packet …

It’s come from China of course so it’s gone into quarantine in a sealed plastic bag where it will stay for a couple of weeks, and then I can open it and deal with it as appropriate.

Tomorrow morning I need to do some tidying as there’s a blood test man coming round tomorrow. The apartment could do with a good clean and tidy.

So a good night’s sleep, I hope, and then I’ll be fighting fit for tomorrow. I don’t think.

Saturday 20th April 2020 – TODAY WAS THE FIRST …

… day for quite sone considerable time (and I’m talking weeks here, I’m sure) that we’ve had ay appreciable amount of rain.

You can see the view that they are having from the coastguard station – just a mass of heavy, very wet cloud hugging the surface of the sea and no-one can really see anything at all. All that I can say is that it’s a good job that they are equipped with a radar

As for me, I’m not quite sure what I’m equipped with, but whatever it is, it seems to be preventing me from leaving my bed when the alarms go off.

That’s right, another one missed this morning too. Not by much, it has to be said, about 10 minutes in fact, but a miss is as good as a mile.

After my medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been and to see if anyone had manifested themselves to come with me too.

I started off last night in hospital, in a waiting room. I was on my own at first but then someone else came and a couple more people came. In the end there were about 8 or 9 of us. One of the couples was a young couple and it was the husband who was being involved in the medical procedure. And as he was sorting himself out someone else put his head round the door. I thought that it was a video at first but it was a real person. He started to deliver a eulogy about these two people – this couple. It was really strange, almost like he was sending them off to their deaths rather than to have medical appointments. There were a couple of people who were strange as well. One guy who came and then left after 15 minutes but came back in the middle of this discussion, shaking his car keys about, which I thought was really interesting
Later on, I was in work and went to sit at my desk. I hadn’t sat at my desk for ages. The guy sitting at the desk opposite me, an Asian guy had his feet all across my desk and didn’t move them either when I sat down. We were chatting and Frankie Howerd came up in the conversation and he asked me about him so I told him who he was. We were looking at some new buildings that were being built opposite. One of them certainly wasn’t perpendicular judging by all of the others so we were making some remarks about that. Then the story drifted around to me and an apartment block where I was living, a new-ish one, very low, four storeys something modern in an L shape with a garden in front. People were coming to see me and were talking about my apartment. I had a garage in the basement and Caliburn wouldn’t go in there so I was going to put one of my Cortinas, the red Cortina estate XCL, in. I realised that I needed some help to get it started and the kind of guy who would come along and give me a hand – I had a certain person in mind here and I don’t know why – someone with whom I was no longer on friendly terms and no-one else would really know how to help me the best to get this vehicle moved.

After breakfast, it was a long, weary drag to sort out the music for a couple of “various artists” collections. One album ended up being one short, which was astonishing because there was really some obscure stuff on there and I was expecting much more than that to be missing.

But the second one, after a great deal of work, actually worked out and no-one was more astonished than me. Some of the tracks on it were wrongly attributed too, and that always causes a huge problem.

As an example, one track attributed to Leslie Harvey (much better known as Les Harvey and the brother of Alex Harvey of the Sensational band of that name and who died through being electrocuted live on stage in the middle of a concert) isn’t by him at all.

Well, he might be playing the guitar on it, but the singer is definitely Maggie Bell (she of the “Taggart” theme song). So if Les Harvey really is playing the guitar, that can only be an early “Stone The Crows” track from before Jimmy McCulloch’s time.

And it was all like that. A track attributed to “Eric Clapton and Duane Allman” is actually a “Derek and the Dominoes” track from the “Layla” recording sessions when Duane Allman looked in from next door to see what was going on. And there were many others that were far more obscure than that.

No wonder that it took so long to sort out, and no wonder that I only edited a handful of photos from July 2019 while I was doing it.

Having got to where I wanted to be (albeit rather loosely) I turned my attention to the radio projects, with a break for lunch of course.

And by the time that I had knocked off, I’d chosen all of the music for two of them (except the last tracks of course), edited them, combined them in pairs as I usually do and even started on writing the text.

In another departure from previous practice, I’ve been preparing a searchable text file of tracks that I’ve used, with the project number to which they relate. I found to my horror the other day that I’d used the same track twice within a couple of weeks.

With a memory like mine, I need to do so much more than I’m doing. And talking of memory, I wish too that the memory sticks that I ordered would hurry up and arrive so I can merge a pile of new stuff into the various runs and maybe even start off a new run or two.

This evening on the guitar I took up a challenge.

The Dire Straits song “Telegraph Road” – one of the most emotional songs ever ever recorded and on a par with Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” – came up on the playlist just as I was pulling out the guitar.

And so I sat down and spent some time working out the chords to it. At first I just couldn’t do the chord changes even though I’d managed to work out most of them.

But after a while, the light goes on in the head like it occasionally does, and I changed the key to Gmajor and it all fell into place.

Of course, the lead guitar solo is quite a different thing entirely and I don’t think that I’ll ever manage to work that out, but still …

There was some left-over falafel in the fridge that had been in there longer that was good for it so I finished that off with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce, followed by apple crumble and soya coconut stuff.

Then off on my run all round the headland. Not that I was feeling like it (I’ve had a little chute in health this afternoon -I recognise the signs now) and I would gladly not have gone out, but that’s not going to help me one little bit if I let myself go, especially with all of this going on.

But the rain was pleasant. The first for ages as I said earlier.

And here’s a thing – have you ever noticed how fresh everywhere looks in the early morning after a rainstorm during the night? Reduced traffic on the roads at night means less pollution and what is there in the bigger particles, the rain can wash it out.

So with little traffic on the roads this last month or so, what will the first rainstorm for several weeks do to the atmosphere? I’m looking forward to seeing what it will look like outside first thing in the morning.

Having recovered my breath I carried on running along the clifftop on the south side of the headland.

Still our four boats in the chantier navale. And still the same four too. I thought that I’d better check.

But one thing that I didn’t see tonight was any fishing boats out working. I suppose that there must have been some out though, because the harbour wasn’t full of idle boats by any means.

The tide was quite a way out though too, so I wouldn’t have expected tos ee an loitering around the harbour entrance either.

While I’d been working this afternoon, I’d heard the piledriver going off so I reckoned that they had been working down in the harbour.

When I paused for breath on my way home, I went for a look to see what they had been up to, and sure enough, there’s a third pontoon support that’s been pounded into the harbour bottom.

This is starting to look serious now, isn’t it? It won’t be long before they are in a position to finish off and I wonder what it will look like.

Granville, the newer of the two Channel Island ferries, is still there. Services are suspended now until 11th May at the earliest and we shall see after that.

The old cold store, from when the port was a thriving “Newfoundlander” deep-sea fishing port, is still there looking quite sad.

Mme la Maire wants to sweep it away and install a casino and leisure facilities there, but that will be the death of the town. The commercial activities in the port keep the town active all the year round.

if they are swept away and leisure activities replace them, then it’ll be like most other seaside towns – crammed to bursting point for two months of the year and dead as a doornail for the remaining 10 and that isn’t why I came here.

So I’m off to bed, and I’ll attack the radio stuff tomorrow, given half a chance.

That is, if my file-digitalising goes according to plan. But that’s too much to expect.

Sunday 19th April 2020 – I’VE HAD A …

… cookery day today.

From left to right we have a bottle containing peach syrup and the liquid from a pile of cooking aples with coconut cinnamon and nutmeg. That will be the breakfast drink for the next few days.

The two – or, rather, one and a half – jars are apple and peach purée, with desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nutmeg. After the success of my apple purée with a tin of apricots a few weeks ago, I reckoned that I’d try it with a cheap tin of peaches to see how that works out.

At the front is another apple crumble. Not a great success, the crumble topping unfortunately, but that’s a matter of aesthetics really – personal taste more than anything else. I must put more oats in it.

There’s also a tub of muesli about somewhere. I made a load of that too.

No, one thing that needs to be understood. When I say “today” – that is being … errr … somewhat economical with the truth. It’s probably more accurate to say “this afternoon”.

And when i tell you that breakfast was at 13:30, you’ll understand why.

No alarm today of course, so I can stay in bed as long as I feel like it (staying in bed, that is). So awakening at … errr … 11:30 after a night that wasn’t all that late at all is rather comforting, even if it does mean that I’ve missed half of the day.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was with a group of people on the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour last night and a whole pile of gunmetal grey cabinets and I’d bought the lot. I had them in a storage hold there and people were wondering what i was going to be doing with them but I didn’t say anything. I had one of my mkIII Cortinas, a saloon, and I had it up on some ramps at the back – jacks, axle stands, things like that and I’d made a rear number plate – no, someone brought a number plate to me and asked me how it worked. So I told them how to fit it, where it goes, where the number plate light went and how the wires connected up, how it was fitted on with tivets, this kind of thing, and this girl said something like “I’m glad that I came and asked you because of all the other people I could have asked”. So I started to fix this number plate to the back of this mk III Cortina. Other people came by and started looking and could see it going on. We were talking about them. Someone asked “what was I going to do with all of these cabinets once I left the ship?” I told them about this big warehouse, 280 ft², not a lot of course (did I mean metres?) and I used to be a taxi proprietor and I had 5 Cortinas in there. I carried on fitting this number plate. I fitted it in a different place than usual and it actually looked quite good although the number plate light was off-centre. Some people came by and these Americans were chatting about rear number plates and the legal requirements, all of this kind of thing.

There was much more to it than that but you won’t want to know about it, seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now.

After breaKfast, or lunch, or whatever, I made a start on a couple of compilation albums. And i was perfectly correct yesterday when I said that I probably wouldn’t find all of the tracks for them. I did what I could but they have gone onto one side for me to deal with in due course.

And then the cooking and the muesli-making. Now I’m set up for another couple of weeks, although at some point I’ll need to make some more orange and ginger drink

After the crumble had finished cooking I made my pizza. Now, of course, the oven is stinking hot and the pizza cooked to perfection. I’ve come to the conclusion that even when the thermostat trips out, that doesn’t mean that the oven is warm enough. It needs much more time than that to reach the proper kind of warmth.

And then out for my walk – or, rather, my runs. Much, much later than usual

Here’s the rue du Roc again. I ran all the way up to there from beyond the last lamp-post that you see in the photo, right down at the bottom. My apartment building is the one to the left where you can see the three lights.

That’s really quite a steep climb and I’m impressed that I can get as high up the hill as I do.

Having recovered my breath, I run down from here to the clifftop for a good look out to sea to see what is going on.

With me being late, it’s going quite dark and all of the lights are on. Brehal-Plage is looking quite nice in the evening light and you can even see the lights on the wind turbines away in the distance.

From here I walk on up to the lighthouse, across the lawn and the car park and then down by the side of one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall for the view across the baie de Mont St Michel to Brittany

Nothing much doing there either so I carried on with my run along the top of the clifftop.

No change in the chantier navale so I had a look to see what was happening in the tidal habour. Chausiais and Joly France were still tied up to the ferry terminal, but there wasn’t a lot of anything else happening around there.

And so I carried on with my runs back to the apartment.

With having set out late, it’s later than usual so I’m not going to hang around. I’ll be off to bed in a minute.

Back to work tomorrow and another two radio shows and then I’ll have to turn my attention to some live concerts. I need to organise a few of those.

Wednesday 5th March 2020 – YOU’RE PROBABLY SITTING …

… there wondering why on earth I’m posting a dreadful photo like this in my journal tonight – and giving it pride of place as well.

The fact is that I’m totally surprised by this too.

This evening I went out with just the NIKON 1 J5 to see what damage I could do with it in the dark.

Adn dark it was too – about one-third moon and you could hardly see anything at all out there. Mind you the howling gale was telling us a story all of its own with the sound of the waves pounding down into the surf.

So, I tried to focus. Nothing whatever enough light for it to find a focal point so I set it to “automatic exposure”, focused on a street light an equivalent distance away, swivelled round in the direction that I wanted to face, and pressed the shutter more in hope than expectation.

And frankly I wasn’t expecting anything at all, so no-one was more surprised than me to produce an image as bright as this one.

The automatic settings were f1.74, ISO6400 at 3 seconds exposure, and it’s produced an image as bright as this. That’s impressive.

Of course, I’m going to need a tripod if ever I do it again, and then I’ll have the issue of focusing on a dummy point and then swivelling the camera around.

But I could use the exposure compensation mechanism to darken the image somewhat and speed up the exposure time. But it isn’t half interesting nevertheless.

While you admire the storm that has been raging all day and the waves that it’s been producing, let me tell you something about my day, because it’s been another disappointment.

Once more, I failed to beat the alarms and it was 06:30 when I finally pulled myself together and left the bed.

After the medication, I had a look on the dictaphone to see where I’d been. As well as the notes from yesterday afternoon, which I’ll add in in early course, there were a couple of files from during the night that needed attention.

There was something going on in the street like a gardening club meeting. A couple of people were turning up and going again. I was there with a young girl who might have been Percy Penguin, I dunno but she didn’t hang around long. I was waiting for something and there was another guy there. A girl came up and she got out of a car and started to kick this medicine ball around. I ended up playing football with her and this medicine ball. She was kicking it up the hill towards me and of course the ball was rolling back down the hill again. I was running after it to kick it back to her but I couldn’t get a kick on it at all because it was rolling back down the hill quicker than I could catch up with it. This went on for a while and then gradually people started to turn up. There was a young girl there who was with another man. apparently she’d been someone’s servant or maid before she’d settled down with this guy. They were handing out these old clothes that had been really tatty but someone had sewn up so they weren’t as tatty as they were before. They were passing these around to whoever they belonged to but I always seemed to be in the way, standing in the wrong place when someone was passing round an item of clothing

After breakfast I had a look at some more digital sound files.

Just for a change they were quite straightforward and, more to the point, quite long. One of them ended up with no fewer than 17 tracks, several of which I had no idea existed.

Such it was that I had to break off near the end and go for my shower..

Once I’d had a good clean-up, I braved the hurricane and went out to do the shopping.

Not that I managed to go very far though before I came to a grinding halt. One of the issues about living in a medieval walled city with really narrow streets is that heavy vehicles like this cement mixer can’t go in.

You have to invent a work-around, or Système D as they say in France, like a little fork-lift truck type of thing and a cement hopper.

And you’ll notice the plastic sheet on the floor to prevent cement or concrete sticking to the road surface.

Yesterday, we noticed the pile of gravel that had appeared in the port near the conveyors.

This morning, the big digger was out there and he seemed to be moving more gravel across from the bins to the centre of the port apron. The pile is certainly growing.

This can surely mean that we are at long last about to have a gravel boat coming in some time in the near future – the first one that I will have seen in 9 months.

Here’s hoping that i’m not going to be disappointed.

But here’s a surprise. The big floating pontoon is in a different position.

Does this mean that they will be installing a new walkway pontoon there as well? That’s going to restrict the movement of the boats like Marité that congregate down there in that corner.

For a change I went to the new Bio shop, La Vie Claire, near the Stade Louis Dior in the avenue des Matignon. Josée had bought me a book on making drinks from a product called Kefir so I went there to see if they had any.

They had both lots, the fruit Kefir for making soft drinks and also a pseudo-dairy Kefir for making yoghurt from vegetable milk like soya milk or almond milk. I bought one of each and I’ll be having a play with them in early course.

At LIDL I didn’t spent all that much, except that I did buy a pair of wellingtons. I don’t have a pair and there have been a couple of occasions when I wished that I had.

Not only that, in a week or so I’ll be scampering about in a pile of rock pools so a pair of wellingtons will come in handy.

On the way back I was interrupted by a noise coming from above.

Someone has had his chopper out again and I was wondering if it is the same red and yellow and one that we see wandering around. But it’s a different one that I haven’t noticed previously.

By the way, if you are wondering about the images, the fact is that Brain of Britain forgot to change the lens over this morning and on the little NIKON 1 J5 there’s still the f1.8 50mm lens that I’ve been using at night. It doesn’t “do” distance of course.

Having picked up my dejeunette at La Mie Caline, I headed for home. But we’d had a moment’s amusement in there. Some young woman in front of me was complaining that her colleagues had left her alone in her office for the day. Boththe guy behind the counter and I said at the same moment that we’d go round and give her a hand, to which she laughed.

Ohh yes, I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why.

Back here, I had a major disappointment to deal with. I have a project in mind, an important one, and I have set my heart on doing it. I’ve already set steps in motion in this respect but the disappointing news is that due to this stupid virus thing going around, it’s been put on hold and may be cancelled.

That will be devastating news for me.

After lunch (some more of that delicious soup) I started off another batch of purée and then made a start on finishing off the notes that I’d begun to write yesterday.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk of course.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned yesterday about the path that they spent a couple of weeks laying and then dug up to replace with a different path. Today I had another closer look at the new patch and you can see that they’ll be having to dig this one up and replacing it very soon.

As you can see, it’s cracking already, due to insufficient foundations, I reckon. I don’t suppose that, given the record of this Council, that they expected it to be down this long before there was a change of plan.

But the winds were thoroughly and totally wicked. I was being blown about all over the place and even had to chase after my hat on one occasion.

The fishing boat out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel was making really heavy weather of trying to get into port and I’m not at all surprised.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve been buffeted about so much in a wind like this. At times it was impossible to advance and I really was being blown backwards as I tried to advance.

And I’m sure that you have been wondering, just as I have been, how the big floating pontoon has been moving across the harbour.

This afternoon I was lucky enough to catch it in motion. And it’s being pushed, so it seems, by that boat with the outboard motor.

It’s certainly one of the strangest sights that I’ve ever seen – and, believe me, I’ve seen quite a few strange sights in my lifetime. There’s not as much friction in water as there is on land, but it still must take a lot of effort to move the pontoon.

Back at the apartment I organised the purée.

8 small apples and four small pears, peeled, cored and diced into small cubes. Put into a large pan with some desiccated coconut and cinnamon, with a very small amount of water and lemon juice. All stirred up and stirred well in.

It had been brought to the boil and left to simmer on a very low heat. All in all it had been on there for an hour or so.

The liquid was drained off and put in a glass jar to drink at breakfast, diluted as necessary. The solids were put into the whizzer and whizzed around until they made a purée.

Two large glass jars were steamed in the microwave (a little water put in them and they were heated for a minute) and the tops boiled in water. The purée was then ladled into them, the lids put on and they were left to cool.

Once they have cooled and created a vacuum they can go in the fridge. I’ll start on the first jar tomorrow and see how it is. But the sampling was delicious.

At long last I could dictate the notes that I’d written – but first I had to fight off a wave of sleep, not very successfully I’m afraid. But at least it’s all dictated and I’ve even started to edit it and clean it up.

For tea tonight there was a pile of mushrooms to be finished off that hadn’t found their way into the soup the other day. And so I cut a potato into squares and cooked it with spiced in the microwave while I organised some onion, garlic and the mushrooms with half a stock cube and more spices in the frying pan.

It ended up all being mixed together and stuck in the microwave on a low heat while I cooked some rice and veg. And wasn’t it all delicious, especially when chased down by apple crumble and soya coconut dessert stuff

Out for my walk tonight, and I’ve already shown you the astonishing photo of the waves.

The wind was wicked and at my favourite running spot it was totally impossible to move. I ended up having to run on another stretch that was well sheltered.

That took me to the cliffs overlooking the Place Marechal Foch and the Plat Gousset where I decided to have a little fun with the settings with the camera.

It wasn’t easy to work out what I was supposed to be doing, but I did notice that I hadn’t set the exposure compensation correctly.

Back here I had to edit out some red and blue colour and darken the image three stops, but even so, they haven’t come out too badly. Of course, now that the tide’s not in, they’ve left the lights on along the promenade. They couldn’t do that when it’s needed, when the tide is in and the waves are crashing down along the prom.

Anyway, I carried on with my walk and managed my second run too.

So now it’s bedtime. I’m having (I hope) an uninterrupted day tomorrow – except that the blasted bank has phoned me and I have to go to pick up my document after lunch

One thing that I want to do is to finish off this radio project. I should have done it by Wednesday night but I’m just falling behind.

I must organise myself better.

Wednesday 4th March 2020 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

The grass is riz, and all of that kind of thing.

Although I’ve no idea where “da boidies iz”, at least I can tell you all where the daffodils are. Here in the Square Maurice Marland they have sprung up over the last couple of days on the lawn here.

It’s usually a sure sign that the worst of winter has passed us by. But we haven’t had a winter this year to speak of, so I’m not taking anything for granted as far as this bizarre weather goes

Another thing that I’m not taking for granted these days is my ability to raise myself from my bed with the alarm. It was another disappointing start to the day. Not as disappointing as the previous day, but 06:25 is still unacceptable in my eyes.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone and I could see straight away why I was so tired. I had travelled miles during the night.

We had been on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again last night and there were loads of competitions and all of this kind of thing. There was talk that some of us were going to go for a walk. What this meant was having to make a written demand and our vote would be counted depending on what we’d written. We’d have to write out a reason why, something along those lines. It turned out that it should have been called at 14:00 this vote thing but instead it was well into the evening, about 20:00 and we stall hadn’t finished writing out our thing. It was going to be called very soon so we had to crack on and get done with it. I was telling all these stories about how in the past a group of people had gone ashore but didn’t have their equipment with them so they had to go back to the boat to get it and come back again. There was all this talk about how “a huge crowd of people had disappeared abruptly as if they had been eaten by a polar bear” because they hadn’t told anyone where they were going. They were on shore, all this kind of thing. I had Castor with me during this evening. We were talking about all kinds of things.
At one stage we were talking about putting down some kind of red carpet or something for a group to walk down but the point was that no-one had ever done that in the recent past except for Abba for some reason or other. It was quite common to do this 30, 40, 50 years ago in the days of Led Zeppelin to highlight someone in this way but it’s something that’s not done at all now
This procession thing was being recorded on *.mp3 and everyone had to have their *.mp3 things ready. Again, some people hadn’t done theirs yet but some had. In some cases the volume was far too loud and distorted everything. In another case it was too soon and there was too much of it. In other cases the ship that they were on would diverge out of the carnival for some reason or other. I wasn’t even given an opportunity to make a start on the one that needed doing for us and so we were at n°19 in the queue out of 20 and it looked as if we were going to be stuck there for ages while they sorted themselves out and did a proper thing. But then of course that’s not what the carnival is all about. It’s very ad-hoc and improvist and people ought to be learning from that.
I was with another friend later on, someone else who has featured quite recently in my travels and we were walking up the Boulevard Leopold III towards NATO and that way towards the airport. We were discussing projects that I had on the go. One of them was about cartoons – I had to write some kind of article about cartoons. It came out that we were talking about Belgium and how you got to like the place or didn’t. It wasn’t a case of liking, it was a case of “different” and you either appreciated the differences or you didn’t. The subject of cartoons came up in the discussion. he said something about reading cartoons to other people so I added that I was looking for a pile of cartoon books to write for my project. He didn’t actually have any. All his stuff was old stuff so I said that was just what I want. he said “I know. Come with me”. he climbed up off the motorway exit ramp that we were on onto a road above it. Of course I had to climb up there with him. Funnily enough I remember climbing up and I wasn’t out of breath for a moment. he said on this road was a shop. I knew that there was a cartoon BD shop on here where I could get things from but I didn’t really want to pay for them. I was only going to use them for this project and hand them back. He wanted to take me there to have a look so I thought that I might as well go.

Like I said, no wonder I was thoroughly exhausted after all of that.

After breakfast (a late breakfast, for obvious reasons) I sat down with the sound files and split several more. Once more I came across one that was all over the place with stuff on there that was arranged any old how and it was quite an effort to tie it all up properly.

Another one had once been cut into tracks and rejoined, but whoever had cut the tracks had clearly had some kind of visual impairment for it had been cut in the wrong places and when it had been rejoined, there were milliseconds of silence. So I had to edit out the silences and then re-cut it.

One of those two – and I can’t remember which one – was also damaged and I had to repair the damage to several tracks too. All in all, for something that should have been straightforward, it took absolutely ages.

Still time to finish off Radio project 028. And that took less time than expected because while the last track is usually always a killer to find, the first one that came to my mind not only was almost exactly the right length (I had to add in 2 extra seconds of commentary) but fitted the context perfectly.

That was the cue to start to think about lunch.

For the past couple of days I’ve had a thing about leek and potato soup (I’m not sure why but I’m certainly not pregnant) and o Monday at LIDL they had leeks on special offer.

So I heated up the wok and sliced a couple of onions. Just as I was about to add them, the telephone rang, like it always does at that moment. Rosemary was on the line, wanting a chat, so I told her that I’d call back in 15 minutes.

And then I returned to the soup.

In went the onions, followed by a pile of garlic and all of the leeks, sliced up into rings, and then the mushrooms that were left over from the weekend, along with some rosemary, sage and thyme.

While they were all frying, I peeled my potatoes and diced them. They went into a saucepan with some water and I emptied the stuff out of the wok, and left it so simmer.

Rosemary and I then had a good natter for a while which meant that I was horribly late for just about everything yet again.

With the soup mix now simmering away on the stove I headed off towards town going the long way round, right around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been encountering a fishing boat or two on something of a regular basis. And today was no exception.

Something was moving in and out of the waves out there in the English Channel so I took a photo with the intention of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) back in the apartment. And sure enough, we have another fishing boat.

But that wasn’t all of the excitement either.

There was something else out there moving about and so I took a speculative photo of that too. This time we have Joly France and a pile of passengers out there doing a run out to the Ile de Chausey.

And I was thinking to myself that I hoped that they knew where it was, because we were having a sea fog again and you couldn’t see all that much out there.

Round the headland and down the hill on the old road into town.

The harbour gates were open so i couldn’t go that way, so I walked down the rue du Port instead. I’d heard the pile-driver going off during the morning so I was wondering what was happening. But it seems that they have installed a third pillar out there now

This new pontoon is going to be something very special and as I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … it’s not looking good for the commercial traffic in the port.

Walking this way (and if anyone mentions “talcum powder” they will be disqualified) brought me past where they are working on the modernisation of the car parking facilities.

And they are definitely making progress here, because today we have some parking arrestors installed along the edge. They’ll come in handy to stop grockles reversing their cars into the harbour and on top of trawlers.

Mind you, a good fork-lift truck can help overcome obstacles like these, as we saw the other weekend over by the fish-processing plant.

At la Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed for home.

However my attention was diverted by activity going on over at the third pillar. The workmen are now back at work after lunch and they are carrying on with the installation.

What they seem to be doing is using water pressure as a means of penetrating the bottom of the harbour and every now and again a pile of silt would be forced out under pressure.

But it made me think – how much time and money would have been saved by doing this when the harbour was drained a couple of years ago. A total lack of joined-up thinking.

We had the same issue when time and money was spent installing a path to a noticeboard at the Pointe du Roc a couple of years ago, only for it to be dug up again a couple of months later for the path to the new war memorial.

Back here the soup was rzady, well-cooked, so it went into the whizzer and was whizzed right up.

It’s rather thick and the mushrooms have given it a distinctive colour, but that doesn’t distract whatsoever from the taste, because with my dejeunette it was delicious.

And, even better, there’s enough for a couple more days too. I shall be quite looking for that.

And there’s no need to worry about this coronavirus thing. My soup will kill off anything. In fact, it’s already been named “the cure for which there is no known disease”.

After lunch I had a couple of phone calls to make and then I attacked Radio project 030. No 029 – that’s a live concert and I have to think about that one

My afternoon’s work was interrupted almost immediately by it being time for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And there seems to be dirty work afoot in the rue Notre Dame somewhere, because the road up the hill is closed to traffic.

That means that the vehicle have to go down the rue St Jean in both directions, and that will be exciting because it’s quite narrow in places and even coming one way can sometimes be difficult.

It’s bound to lead to some confusion.

As for me, I walked around the walls and even managed a couple of runs. One of them was only half a run, due to the fact that there were too many people around, but the other one was a complete run.

Remember me saying just now that I was worried about the impact of the harbour reorganisations on the commercial freight traffic here, such sas it is?

Those piles of gravel over there caught my eye this afternoon. I’m pretty certain that they weren’t there the last time that I was down on the harbour and if so, that can mean only one thing as far as I am aware.

And that is that at long last, we might – just might – be having one of the gravel boats coming into port fairly soon. And about time too. The last one that i saw was before I went off on my Arctic jaunt.

And here’s a very blurred photo (unfortunately) showing someone digging up the road in the rue St Jean.

When I reached him, I asked him what was the issue and he replied “nothing”. He clearly had no interest in discussing the matter so I didn’t waste my time trying to obtain further information.

Instead, I came on back home.

My intention was to press on with Project 030 but shame as it is to say it, I crashed out good and proper. And I do mean “good and proper” because it was deep enough to go off on a voyage and I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow when I’ve transcribed the notes.

Nevertheless, I did manage to pull myself together long enough to choose the music for project 030 and even make some kind of start on the text.

That took me to tea-time and having enjoyed Liz’s apple crumble so much, I decided that I would make one too.

120 grammes of flour and 60 grammes of vegan margarine all rubbed in together really well so that it was something like a very stiff paste. And then 120 grammes of oats were rubbed well into that so that it was all nicely smeared together.

Three cooking apples were then peeled, cored and cut into small chunks and put into an oven dish. They were covered in brown sugar with desiccated coconut, cinnamon and nutmeg, soaked lightly in lemon juice and all stirred up together and then pressed down.

The oven had been warming up during this time so I covered the apple stuff with the flour and oat mixture and put it in the oven

In the meantime I made myself a pizza and that went into the oven too.

And here’s my apple crumble. Doesn’t it look wonderful? And it tastes as good as it looks too, especially with some of that Alpro coconut dessert stuff.

The good news about this is that there’s plenty left for the next few days too.

And there’s no doubt about it – I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten so well as I have been doing for the last few months since I’ve been on this healthy food and drink thing after coming back from Canada

And with my exercise and running, I’m doing as well as I can and that’s important. God food and plenty of exercise will keep me going for a while yet, I reckon.

Later this evening I went out for my walk as usual.

As an experiment, I took both working cameras with me – the Nikon 1 J5 and the old Nikon D3000. The aim was to take two photos of the same object with the same settings on each camera to see which one produced the best results in low-light conditions when fitted with the low-light lenses that I have.

The top one is taken with the Nikon 1

And this one is taken with the Nikon D3000.

As you can see, there’s a marginal improvement with the J5 over the D3000 but that’s probably due to the fact that despite being a smaller camera, the resolution is so much better.

But there’s not all that much in it between the two.

However, it was a different story around the headland by the chantier navale.

Even with stopping down the J5 4 stops to darken the image it’s still managed to produce an overexposed and blurred image.I should have stopped down much further than this to speed up the image.

But as for the Nikon D3000, that wasn’t able to stop down anywhere near enough to even attempt a photo. Only one entrant in this competition, never mind one winner.

It was pretty much the same story here too.

The D3000 struggled and couldn’t produce a worthwhile image whereas the Nikon I J5 produced an acceptable image in the dark, with Chausiais and Joly France being quite prominent over by the ferry terminal. With a tripod or my monopod even, this would have made a really good image.

But one thing is certain, and that is that when the big NIKON D500 is repaired, I’ll be making much more and much better use of the low-light lens than I have been doing so far.

There was time for a run too, which made me feel better and then I came back to write up my notes.

It’s late now, later than I was hoping, but I’ll do the best that I can. I have a lot to do and I need to organise myself better.

Early nights ae much more important so I need to think about how I intend to manage it.

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 – THERE ARE MANY THINGS …

… in this life that I don’t understand.

And one of the most bizarre things that I don’t understand is why the SNCF (the French national railway network) has suddenly decided that it can no longer book me through to Brussels using a (French) TGV train, but an independent ticketing agency can do so, at a price that is cheaper than that which I normally pay – and even more so when you consider that I don’t receive my Senior Citizens’ discount or my Fidelity Bonus.

Yes, I tried again this morning to book my trip with the SNCF for the 18th but it didn’t work out at all, just as yesterday. I had intended, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to go up to the railway station and book it there, but I reckoned that I’d try the booking agency that I sometimes use.

And sure enough, here we are.

This morning was something of a disaster – quite in keeping with modern times. I missed the alarms and ended up in bed until 07:30. This is starting to become extremely depressing as far as I am concerned.

What is even worse is that round about 17:00 I crashed out again. Yes, right good and proper too. Dead to the world in a deep sleep for about 20 minutes and I remember thinking just how bad that is. I’m not doing at all as well as I would like in this respect.

But anyway, back to this morning.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. Anyway, last night we were out recording the Carnival procession and there were lots of things happening there. We were having to make some edited highlights. One bit that sticks in my mind out of many many others was where something came along to join the procession out of a car park so we filmed the approach to the car park which was clear, then filmed this object adjoining to car park and superimposed the two to make it look as if the object was emerging from the car park. That was what we filmed and people weren’t very happy about how we did that but we really couldn’t see any other way of doing what we were trying to do.
Later on during the night I was back with the football, just as I was a couple of nights ago. This was pretty much relegation form for Crewe Alexandra who hadn’t won a game for weeks and were struggling. They had been gripped by this lack of confidence and loss of points and gone downhill. They weren’t playing too well and weren’t keeping possession and other teams were rapidly getting good results against them. Someone left Crewe Alexandra and became the manager of Rochdale, someone called Hogg, Graeme Hogg, I dunno. We were all musing – what of Crewe for a forward because while Crewe were bad, now they had even less idea and out of the transfer window you couldn’t bring anyone in at the moment. It was just generally bad news for lower-league football with all of this going on and blocked this and blocked that and players wanting to be somewhere else and didn’t want to have to work and so on.

And I’ve absolutely no idea where all of this football stuff just recently has come from. Something’s going on somewhere and I wish I knew what it was.

After breakfast I had a crack at splitting up a few more digital sound files and that seemed to go pretty smoothly although there were several distractions of one sort or another – such as a few mails to write, rail tickets to book, that kind of thing.

That took me up to about midday – time to go and fetch my dejeunette from La Mie Caline.

Armed with the NIKON D3000 for a change, I set off to see what I can see. And straight away I realised that I had forgotten how to work it. Still, I managed to pick out an image of a fishing boat out in the English Channel

And straight away, I noticed a difference in the quality of the image compared with that of the big NIKON D500. I hope that it gets well soon.

For my walk, I went the long way around, all the way round the headland and down into town along the rue du Port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me mentioning yesterday the piling that was going on in the harbour with the piledriver ramming another pillar into the sea bed inside the harbour.

That was one of the things that I wanted to see and sure enough, here they are, having had a really good go at it over the last day or so.

What’s worrying me is that now that I know what they are, I recall having seen four or five of this objects over on the far side of the port. If they are going to install all of those, it’s going to restrict the movement around the port quite considerably for the larger boats.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also have seen with me a pile of scaffolding being erected on the quayside by a crane.

This was then lowered into the harbour itself and anchored to the quayside.

So today, we can see a couple of workmen on there having a good play around with something or other. I’ve no idea what but I suspect that they are drilling the quayside just there in order to mount another one of these pontoon supports.

This is another thing that I’ll need to check in the future.

But not today though, because the harbour gates were open and so I couldn’t cross over the top.

Instead, I wandered around to the other side of the fish processing plant to watch the new fishing boat, Rocavi II come into port.

What interested me the most was the catch. The plastic boxes in the stern were full of shellfish of some kind or other and it looked to be a very impressive catch.

Mind you, they wouldn’t have spent the money on a new boat had they not been confident about the profits that they would bring in.

Having been frustrated in my attempts to cross to the other side of the port, I walked instead along the rue du Port and into town that way.

That took me past where they are refurbishing the old car park here, and they seem to be making some kind of rapid progress.

What they are doing is laying some kind of concrete channel which can’t be for drainage looking at how irregular it is. It must be for some other purpose and I suppose that the secret will unfold as time goes on.

Having picked up my bread I set off back for home but on the way back fell in with one of my colleagues from the radio who had also been a victim of that debâcle the other Sunday.

She told me her story, which paralleled mine pretty much but which ended up in a completely different and much more unpleasant way and I can understand why she was so upset about the whole affair.

Still, our chat went on for ages and was very interesting. I’d already had a few plans of my own for the future and she was quite keen on leaping aboard.

After a rather late lunch I made a start on the notes of the radio project on which I’m working.

There was the usual interruption while I went for my afternoon walk around the headland.

Although the wind has died down considerably from how it has been just recently over the last couple of days, there is still plenty of force remaining in the sea.

Even though the tide was now well out, the waves were crashing into the sea wall and sending a pile of spray everywhere. Just imagine what this must be like at high tide.

I had the NIKON D3000 with me again, and as you can see, the quality is nothing like as good as the quality of the big NIKON D500.

That is of course hardly surprising, seeing as it only cost me a quarter of the price but it’s the best that I have right now. And it’s still able to pull in a pic of the waves, even though I can’t manage to produce the same speed without compromising the ISO settings.

Still, I managed with this camera for about 5 years so a couple of weeks won’t make very much difference one way or another.

While I was out there walking along the clifftop, I was distracted by a load of noise coming from across the harbour.

Right away on the far side was a skip lorry with a pile of skips. And the digger that seems to spend a lot of time over there was messing about with something or other but I couldn’t quite see what it was.

And so accordingly I resolved to loiter in the vicinity for a while in the hope that something might develop, while I admired the lifting cab on the digger. I’d not noticed that before.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long for something to happen over there.

Now, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we went over there a couple of weeks ago when we saw a pile of cast iron pillars that they had ripped out of the harbour.

The digger seems to be fitted with a grabber and what it’s doing is picking up the pillars and dropping them into a skip on the back of the lorry, presumably to take away for melting down and recasting.

So now we know.

From up here on the clifftop there’s a good view down into the old car park that they are refurbishing.

With the zoom lens I can take a good pic of it from up here and have a better idea of what they are doing, although I do have to admit that i’m still none-the-wiser.

On that note I came home, where I had a phone call. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on 14th February (one of the many reasons why I keep this blog is so that I can keep a note of what I do and when i do it) I went into the Credit Agricole to have a form signed, and the issues that arose out of that simple request.

The form still hasn’t been returned so I sent them a mail this morning to express my displeasure. They rang me back later this afternoon to tell me that they had no trace of my form

As I suspected, signing a form and putting a stamp on it is far too difficult for them. Remember that I went there on 14th June last year and it took three employees to deal with that simple request.

Anyway, they’ve gone off to have a think about the issue and, one hopes, contact me sometime in the not-too-distant future to tell me that they have somehow managed to lose the form completely.

It’s hardly surprising that after all of that, I had a good old crash-out as deeply as I did. So deeply in fact that I was well away with the fairies for quite some time. I had a dream about a Mark X Jag like the green one that I used to have, which was in some lock-up garages at the back of Catherine Street although it wasn’t really Catherine Street. I’d bought the vehicle from a guy who had had it in a garage there. I was trying to get in touch with him to find if I could take over the garage but no-one knew. In the end I spoke to a woman whose house backed onto the garage who knew him. I was asking her the questions and she said “oh he brought it here in a caravan-type of thing, this was where he kept it” and so on. When I said about keeping on the garage she ummed and ahhed and didn’t really know the answer

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with potatoes and veg, followed by the last of the apple crumble. I know that I should have been baking but the freezer is full to the brim and there’s no room for anything at all in there until I empty some stuff out.

And even so, that’s going to be problematic because I’m running low on peas and I’ll have to buy a packet of those. So where i’m going to put them is anyone’s guess.

Out on my walk this evening I took the NIKON D3000 with men but fitted with the low-light 50mm f1.8 lens.

As a test pic, I took a photo of the Place d’Armes right outside here to see how it would turn out. And having been used to working with ISO as low down as ISO6400 without the slightest hiccup, ISO 3200 on the old Nikon is a real battle.

The lens works well enough in the poor street lighting put the image is far too grainy for my liking. One of these days I’ll try a decent graphics editor and see whether or not I can digitally improve these images.

And the camera doesn’t have anything like the control that the big NIKON D500 has.

Try as I might, I couldn’t achieve a decent well-balanced image of the lights out at Donville-les-Bains and that was rather disappointing.

Instead, I went for my two runs and managed them comparatively comfortably. On the second one, I even made it right to the top of the ramp and it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do that.

But in between the two runs I had a pause at the top of the cliff overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

With a reasonable amount of light I could wind back the ISO to a more reasonable level and the photo didn’t come out too badly at all.

To such an extent that I’m wondering why I haven’t made much more use of the 50mm lens on the big Nikon during the nights when I’ve been out on a stroll. I shall have to look into that.

On that note, I’m off to bed. I’m disappointed in my performance over the last couple of days and I have to do better. I can start by trying to catch up with my beauty sleep. I need as much of that as I can get.

Sunday 1st March 2020 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… day without a single photograph. And, eve, worse, the first day for a month that I’ve done less than my 100% daily effort.

And one of the main reasons for that was that there wasn’t much of a day today to have a go at.

What with one thing and another, I ended up not going to bed until 03:30 this morning. I had things to do, I was on something of a roll and there was good music on my playlist. No alarm on a Sunday either.

And so consequently when I awoke at 07:50, and was even out of bed at one stage, there was no chance of that ever continuing. A much more reasonable time after a late night like that was …errr … 11:50.

Consequently, breakfast was … errr … somewhat late and then I had a look at the dictaphone. And I rather wished that I hadn’t.

Because what a nightmare that was! I was in West London and I’d fallen in with a family a bit like one that I knew once in Scotland, pretty undisciplined and wild with loads of kids. When we got to their house there were dogs overrunning the house – 20 or 30 dogs. Absolutely terrible. You coudn’t do anything for dogs barking and jumping up at you, all this kind of thing. In the middle Keith Emerson came in for a piano lesson as the guy who was running the house was teaching him to play the piano. That just made the whole thing wilder. I don’t think that i’ve ever been in a house so dirty and disgusting, especially when I’ve been in a dream, something like that. An old school friend was there. There was a TV going in the background and the woman came down and told Liz off about turning on the TV, quite bossy about it and switched off the TV. And on and on went this dream
A little later last night I was walking with one of my nieces through London. She was having a row with her mother about doing something about estate agents. There were a lot of properties that needed some kind of descriptive sheet drawn up. She was saying that some kind of things were not needed but her mother was saying that she did and there was this talk about it. The girl came out with this “well I don’t care what Northern people have to say. It’s not how it’s done”. We were walking over this huge railway arch overbridge type of place. We could see railway lines that kind of thing below us heading towards London docks. We were walking through the streets and somehow she and I became separated, I was on my own. Someone touched me on the shoulder, a young guy. He said “you know all about this agency thing don’t you?” I said yes so he said “do you know what it is that the mother wants?” “yes, it’s like ‘this apartment is in a sunny situation, one bedroom, fitted kitchen’ that kind of thing of descriptive”. So he handed me a couple of forms and said “could you write them out for these places?” I noticed that there were three or four other people near me who were doing the same thing so I had to write out a descriptive for these flats. The first one was at the address where my aunt lived, a flat in her building. I said “God, how strange” but no-one seemed to pick up on that so I said it again and again but no-one seemed to pick up on it so I made a start. Someone else was writing something and saying “I wonder if she’s going to get much work done on her place?” I replied that I knew the apartment because my Aunt lives in the building there. They are allowed to work on the interior but not on the exterior. A guy said “yes, that’s right. That’s how I had my place – it was like that as well”.
One of the people in the previous dream came out with the old Kenneth Williams “I’m Alan Watermain and I’m bursting with indignation at having to do this”
I was in Granville again later on and it was the Carnival parade and everyone had to interview the owners of the floats. I’d interviewed a few and one or two other people but someone was having no luck at all. In the end he just stopped broadcasting so he had to fill in all of the events. One of the questions that we asked was “what brought you to Canada?” and they recited a bit of their history and that sort of thing. Anyway this drifted on into the night. Next minute I was up early and started to ring people again. They were looking for me on the radio – they had a TV monitor that they used to zoom into the crowds. Eventually they picked me up and used various hand gestures as I was having to take things easy myself otherwise I’ll be creating these people with all their health issues. They asked me what I was doing, so I told them that I was still hunting for people to talk to the radio.
I fell asleep again while I was dictating a dream, this one about the circus procession thing. I probably mentioned about how the French were no good at building up the tension – they were good at reporting on the actual events but didn’t have very much idea about setting the scene or building up the tension, anything like that.

So I don’t have a clue about any of that.

There was still time for me to attack one of the digital files to split that into its components, and that’s one that will have to be done because the tape seems to have been damaged – there’s a frequent blip that appears at regular intervals right through it as if the tape has been pierced at one point.

Caliburn and I hit the streets and headed for Brehal-Plage. One of the guys from the radio lives there and we had some things to talk about – making plans and all of that. Just because things aren’t going our way right now, that’s no reason to down our tools. I have plenty of ideas and if the loud-mouth in the “team” (a phrase which I use very carefully) doesn’t like our ideas then we quite simply won’t seek his approval and by-pass this selection “committee” upon which he sits. We’ll just plough our own lonely furrow.

From there, I went to Roncey. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last Sunday it was my birthday and I had been invited for a birthday tea to Liz and Terry’s. However, I had to skip it because of this debâcle in which I was involved and so I was invited today instead.

We had a really good chat and I discussed one of my projects, which will (hopefully) involve Liz and STRAWBERRY MOOSE – but that’s not going to happen any time soon unfortunately, due to various things getting in the way.

Tea was delicious. We had a dahl – a lentil curry with garlic naam bread followed by apple crumble and custard. Even better, there was plenty left for a doggy bag to bring home.

And best of all, Liz produced a chocolate and orange cake as a special birthday treat and I shall be trying that as soon as I can.

On the way home, the heavens opened and Caliburn was drenched. And if that wasn’t enough, I went over a speed bump and the passenger-side mirror glass fell out of its surround and broke.

So bed-time now, and tomorrow I shall be back at work. I have my travel arrangements to make and a few other bits and pieces to do too, as well as organising the music for the next series of music programmes.

It’s all go here, isn’t it? But at least there is cake.

Friday 11th October 2019 – REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… when I wrote about the evil (because there is no other word to describe it) humour in which I found myself?

Today I was rather hoping that I might have been over it, put it all behind me and moved on. But looking back over some of the stuff that I had written in an internet debate this morning, that’s clearly not the case because much of what I wrote, even though it reflected my true feelings, can best be described as “incendiary”.

It’s no surprise either because there was that much turmoil going on in my head that even at 01:30 the thought of going to bed hadn’t even occurred to me. I spent most of the night wide-awake.

There was some sleep of some kind though, because there are one or two items on the dictaphone. And when I get round to listening to them, it should be extremely interesting to say the least.

The alarms went off at the usual time but I didn’t. 07:15 again for me and this is getting monotonous. The school run too this morning and for a change I had Hannah’s Golf diesel.

So that’s now everything around here that I have driven at one time or another, and my favourite is still Rachel’s Golf estate, although the VWs are far too low for me and difficult to get out of.

Rushed off our feet again today. The place is closed for the weekend and on Monday so everyone wanted their supplies and work done today. I ended up shunting cars around, hauling bags of feed about and going to the bank.

And I’m right about tiredness too. Despite my dreadful night I kept on going all day with only a brief pause, not like yesterday when I was stark out. I was expecting to be much more exhausted today.

Excitement up on the railway line at the back of the depot. The old station was formerly a tractor-pulling venue but it’s up for sale. It seems that the fixtures and fittings have been sold and there were people up there dismantling the grandstand in order to move it to Grand Falls.

This evening there was just Darren and me. He had an omelette and I found some leftover vegan meatloaf in the fridge, followed by apple crumble.

later, I was reviewing some postings from my Arctic voyage. A few (well, one particular) memory came flooding back to me and so I decided to listen to some music to distract me and to soothe my fevered brow. It wasn’t a particularly good choice though. I played Colosseum Live, which will forever be associated in my brain with late, dark, cold nights on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour in the High Arctic, and that is exactly what I’m trying to put out of my mind.

Yes, events in the High Arctic have scarred me somewhat and I can’t chase them out of my mind. It’s all very well listening to Joachim du Bellay and that I should be “Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage”, I’m more inclined right now to the words of the Duke of Marlborough who, on his way to fight at (thinks) Malplaquet, said “God knows I go with a heavy heart, for I have no hope of doing anything considerable”. Or even John Major’s legendary “When your back’s against the wall it’s time to turn round and fight”.

On that note, I’ll go to bed, I reckon. I’ve had a hard couple of days now that demons whom I thought that I had laid have now come back to haunt me. I have to remember, I suppose, that today I really should have been in hospital having a blood transfusion – having already missed three. Bit I’m missing this one too.

Who knows what state I’ll be in when I finally return home?

Perhaps I need some more music
All of the sudden she disappears
just yesterday she was here
somebody tell me if I am sleeping
someone should be with me here
I wanna be the last thing you hear when you’re falling asleep….

Sunday 6th October 2019 – IT’S BEEN …

… another day that has been somewhat … errr … less-lively than the others.

Sunday is a Day of Rest as we all know, and resting until about 08:30 flat-out with hardly an interruption during the night is as restful as it gets.

I did manage to leave the bed though round about 09:15 for a trip down the corridor and on returning I found that the place in my nice warm bed had been taken by Cujo the Killer Cat, so I had company for a while.

The Taylor Breakfast Brunch was of the usual high standard, although it was rather later than usual because Strider and I had to run to the shops for some milk as we had run out.

I was summoned to the telephone too, and that took about 20 minutes to deal with.

After breakfast we chilled for a while and then I ran Darren back to the tyre depot where he was going to spend the afternoon working on the one-ton truck. He needs to have that running because we are going to take off the dump body from the old one-ton Ford that we brought down here the other week to fit on the new one so that we can haul grain sacks around with it.

Back here, I emptied out Strider and tidied him up some more. I gave a pile of stuff to Zoe and there’s some more for Darren too.

The pace though had rather overwhelmed me and back in my little room I had a doze for an hour or two – despite my lie-in this morning. But I livened myself up with a shower and a change of clothes. I look almost human now!

Rachel made a lovely tea, a kind of hamburger mash with baked potatoes followed by apple crumble. And I loitered around to chat to her and Zoe for ages.

But now I’m off to bed. Worn out too and I don’t understand it because I’ve had a quiet relaxing day. I always seem to be more tired when I’ve not done anything.

Monday 1st April 2019 – TONIGHT’S TEA …

… was something special.

Not because it was delicious, which it was as it happens, but that’s not the point. The fact that the main ingredients were prepared with my own fair hands.

We had a slice of the vegan pasty that I made the other day, with baked potatoes veg and gravy, followed by a slice of my home-made apple crumble with custard.

And I could go back and eat that all again. it was wonderful, even though I say it myself.

Last night, I was in bed early. And I slept the Sleep of the dead all the way through until the alarm, with a little awakening in the small hours.

Plenty of time to go on a voyage or two. And one or two rather surprising people, including one rather surprising debutante about whom I haven’t spent a moment’s thought since about 1979.

We were doing something involving sausages in a fast-food restaurant last night, trying to work out some sort of recipe. mash, beans and sausage for £1:00 was the aim, with each additional sausage £0:20. On our way back there was a big group of us, and the group was getting steadily bigger. It included Zero, she who used to accompany me quite regularly on my nocturnal voyages, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and her father. As usual, she was at the back and I was at the front so I didn’t get to talk to her. I was with either Jackie or Alison, I can’t remember now. We came to this flight of steps and ran down it. But this was a very interesting experience because I actually took off and flew, hovering, soaring and flying down these steps. It was the most astonishing, liberating experience. I’d found these air currents and they were lifting me up with very little effort from myself and yet no-one really seemed to notice. That was what upset me more than anything else. Eventually I landed and walked with the others around the right-hand corner at the foot of the stairs. There was this polar bear there with a dog to keep it company. It growled at everyone who walked past. Bit it seemed to be more interested in me as if I was going to be its lunch and started to walk towards me. I turned round, made myself big and shouted “no” at it in a very firm voice. It stopped, so I started to walk away so it started to walk towards me, so I stopped, turned round etc etc. After about three or four goes at this, the bear finally stopped so I walked on back to my friends who had been at the front and we carried on walking.

A little later on I was doing a job that somehow involved doing things with chocolate and being a receptionist in an insurance company. I’d only been there a week and I met a young girl very similar to that Paulette who worked at Fine Fare in Winsford. We very quickly developed a relationship and began to live together. It was a very interesting, ephemeral relationship because she was a weird kind of girl just like she was, and yet she took a fancy to me. As you might expect, this flattered my ego very well. Our living together was all very cosy. I used to do little odd jobs for her around the house like I did for Cecile. One morning she got up early and I stayed in bed. I was trying to find the light switch because she’d installed a new light by the bed. She came to show me how to do it and we ended up on the bed for a while. She told me about a problem with the washing machine that needed fixing so I reckoned that I would go on and do that. I was wondering whether I should take this girl down to the Auvergne and let her meet my friends and show her where I was living but there was stuff all over the place and it wasn’t a very good advert. I’m not sure how it would all go down with her. I ended up at a garage that was selling cars at very cheap prices. There was a mini for sale at £250:00 and something else (might have been a Hillman Imp) for sale at £495 and a Triumph 1300. But there was a Morris 1000 that needed a lot of work doing to it – the roof had been cut off for a start – and a lot of the body was missing. But what caught my eye was that it was left-hand drive. That immediately appealed to me but some young girl got to it first and started to drive it. I told her that it was LHD to which she replied that it wasn’t a problem. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t been to work at my receptionist job for a week. Whatever was I thinking about? had I told them that I would be away? And if so, for how long? Was I supposed to be on leave? had I vacated my job? It all became extremely confusing.

It’s hardly surprising that after all of that I turned over and went back to sleep again. It wasn’t until … errr … much later that I awoke.

After the usual morning processes (including muesli for breakfast instead of porridge) I sat down and started to work.

First job was to bring up-to-date the blog and to add the photos for the last couple of days. And that wasn’t as quick a job as it ought to have been.

But while I was on a roll I spent the rest of the morning adding photos to some of the older blog entries. Now I’m back as far as 9th August 2018. So only about another 9 years to go. Will I have enough time left to do it, I wonder.

Lunch was spent out on the wall. No lizards still, just my book, my butties and my fruit.

No photos either. There was quite a thick sea mist and the sun, strong as it was, couldn’t burn it all away.

Back here, I had some good news. A letter that I had sent off 12 days ago had prompted a reply. And while my letter might have been “speculative” to some degree, the reply was, whilst not actually resolving the issues, was at least giving ground for optimism.

That led to a telephone call, and that was even more enlightening. Who knows? Something might even happen about this. And won’t that be interesting?

This led to me dealing with another outstanding matter, and so I had a couple of chats with a couple of people on the internet. This led to the submission of another couple of forms.

And the events of yesterday might not have been so false I was suspecting. I’ve had to send a confirmatory e-mail to check it, but it might be kosher after all.

ON that note, I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

The mist had cleared somewhat so photography conditions were so much better. I was able to take a really good photograph of one of our fishing boats making its way into harbour.

With the tide having turned, the fishing boats could now come into harbour.

This wasn’t the first of the fishing boats to come into harbour.

Round on the quay by the fish-processing plant there were about a dozen other fishing boats either lined up by the plant, leaving it, or else arriving.

These seem to be busy times down there right now. Everyone doing what they can prior to the inevitable conflict that will ensue with the British fishermen after Brexit.

Meanwhile, at the chantier navale, the yard is almost totally empty.

All that remains right now is the long-term trawler-rebuilding project, and the larger boat that is being resprayed.

There was someone on his skyjack down there adding another coat of paint to the job. It’s going to be a really good job when it’s finished and I’m looking forward to seeing it.

After all of that I came back here and spent the rest of the afternoon slogging away with the dictaphone notes. There were a couple from the last few days and then a week’s work from the past.

That’s not going as quickly as I would like either because some of them are quite length. And those that I’m going to do so are even longer.

This evening after tea I went for a walk, in the light, around the walls.

First stop was to see how they are getting on with the house renovations on the rue du Nord.

The one on the corner, they have now jacked up the floor of the first floor with a whole army of acrows.

Furthermore, they seem to have elongated the windows to the first floor. They might even be putting a balcony out there, and that would be very nice to see when it’s done too.

At the other end of the rue du Nord, there doesn’t seem to be too much progress taking place on the house there.

The other day I mentioned that the guy building it seems to be only working there when he has nothing else to do.

One of these days it will be finished, but I’m not holding my breath about that.

But look how quickly the light has gone.

This photo of the Plat Gousset was taken just a mere 10 minutes after the previous one of the house rebuilding. All of the street lights are on already.

There are still a few people wandering about though. I suppose that the lighter evenings will keep them out for a while longer.

So now, although it’s not as early as I wanted, I’m off to bed. All things considered, I’ve had a productive two days and I’m looking for plenty more like it.

fishing boat doing a u-turn granville manche normandy france

fishing boat entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

house renovation rue du nord granville manche normandy france

Thursday 28th March 2019 – IT WAS A …

… very busy day in the harbour today.

When I walked down to the town this morning, there in the harbour was Normandy Trader tied up to her berth.

She wasn’t in there last night, so she must have sneaked in on the early morning tide without my noticing her. and she looks pretty well loaded up too, so they must have been quick.

And the reason why they were so quick became evident when I returned from LIDL.

Normandy Trader had cleared off into the sunset and in her place we had Thora tied up there in her place.

And she had only just arrived, that’s for sure, because there were a couple of civilian-types busily scrambling up the ladder onto the quayside. And one of them was a lady of the female sex too.

Last night I wasn’t as early in bed as I was expecting and despite that, I was wide-awake yet again at 03:45.

It took ages for me to go back to sleep, but when I did, I certainly did. Although I heard the alarms go off, it wasn’t until about 07:45 that I actually came into the land of the living.

Plenty of time therefore to go off on a little voyage or two. last night I was driving a bus from Chester to Crewe. One of the people on board this bus was George Scane – and what on earth is he doing in my nocturnal rambles? I was dropping off people at places all around Crewe – dropping them off in all kinds of strange directions and strange places in some kind of strange order. Going past the end of McCorquodale’s Printers in Catherine Street in Crewe and everyone was coming out of work – hordes of them. I was surprised that it was 12:00 Saturday lunchtime knocking-off time already, for I had a doctor’s appointment at 12:00 and I had a few other things to pick up from there too. We had to hurry. I was talking to this guy about women, saying that the only women I seem to find these days are women in their 90s and there was no interest in sex. He replied that I should make the most of it while I can and while it’s still offered, allthis kind of thing. He said that he was 103 – or else it was someone else he know who was 103 but he was quite old as well. This was all quite strange. Eventually we reached the doctor’s and I had to go in to ask about what I needed.
Apart from that, I had a very difficult voyage involving my father, and I’ll spare you all the details as you are probably eating your tea right now.
And I was also involved in some football match – Wales were playing Spain and I was out there on the field. Right from the very first touch of the ball at the kick-off one of the Spanish players had to leave the field. We thought that he had broken his ankle and the bench made themselves ready with a bucket of cold water, but in fact it was his boot that had broken. This ended with our team playing the Italians. They had just three people on the field – two men and a blonde-haired boy of about three. And somehow we didn’t have the will or the courage to press home our game decisively like we should have done.

As a result of all of that I was rather late organising myself and I didn’t do anything at all. After breakfast I had a shower, put a load of clothes in the washing machine, and then headed out for LIDL.

The other day I mentioned that they were working on the city walls just around the corner from here.

They had a mini-digger with a breaker attached and it was breaking up all of the rock at the foot of the walls. Why, I’m not quite sure but if it was that well-fixed that they needed a breaker, there seemed no point in moving it.

But he was having a load of fun doing it.

At LIDL I didn’t buy anything at all special today. There was tons of stuff and had I been back on the farm I would have had loads of stuff. But not here though.

On the way back home, I was round by the port again.

It was a beautifully warm, sunny morning – really nice to be out. And I wasn’t the only one enjoying being out. A couple of trawlers were just setting out for the fishing grounds

It made actually a nice photograph

With the Normandy trader having left the harbour I went back up to the apartment and sorted out the big Nikon D5000 and the telephoto lens to see what I could see.

There was some movement out on the horizon, hidden in the mist so I took a speculative photo of it to see what it might be.

It’s actually a couple of trawlers though.

Some more movement a little closer to the shore had me taking a photo to see what it might be.

But this time I was in luck. It is indeed Normandy Trader, heading off out into the English Channel in the direction of Jersey.

It didn’t take her too long to come in, turn round and go out again. I reckon that I must have missed dozens of visits by the ships.

That wasn’t all either.

There were a few more ships out there doing something or other. One of them was La Grande Ancre and judging by the buoys out there around her, she looks as if she might have some kind of fishing net out there.

I’m not quite sure what she’ll be catching just there, but I’ve seen a couple of boats round about that spot. Perhaps it’s some sunken treasure.

Gribouille and his mum were out there too so we had a bit of a chat.

Back here, I made a start on the photos for the last few days. But I wasn’t there for long because it was pretty soon lunchtime.

After lunch I finished off the photos and now the last couple of days have their photos appended.

And then it was walk-time around the headland.

Thora has already gone back out, and that was really quick. And in the chantier navale we have a coat of heavy primer now added to the large boat that they have been preparing this last few days.

It should look really good when it’s finished.

A little further on we have a group of school children around the edge of the old, abandoned dry dock.

It’s round about the time that they have the classes découvertes where groups of children come to town and stay in the Youth Hostel, and then go round looking at the fishing industry – or, rather, what’s left of it after the collapse of the cod industry in 1992.

You can see the remains of the deep-sea fishing industry all over the place around here

And although Thora has now sailed away, we have yet another visitor in the harbour.

Not exactly a visitor but more of a permanent resident, because it’s Victor Hugo, the older of the two boats that do the Channel Islands ferry to Jersey.

Ironically, they bought a new boat to replace her, but she’s nothing like as reliable as Victor Hugo.

Back here, I spent some time with the dictaphone notes, and then attacked tea.

Main course was really easy.

There’s some of the leek and tofu pie left over from the other day so I fetched a slice out of the freezer. I bunged that in the oven along with a couple of potatoes.

Real potatoes baked in the oven, with pie, veg and gravy.

But why I had the oven on is because I’ve been baking again.

This week’s effort is an apple crumble and although it’s not turned out as well as I hoped, it’s still delicious

Apple, grated coconut, raisins, brown sugar, lemon juice, nutmeg and cinnamon. Topped with a mixture of flour, oats and vegan margarine.

On my evening walk there was no-one around so I wasn’t out for long.

Back here I had a good chat with Alison, then Sue and almost immediately after, another chat to Rosemary. I seem to be in demand right now.

So as a result, it’s later than I wanted it to be. But it’s always good to talk to friends.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: apple crumble

Wednesday 20th May 2020 – HOW MANY

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Thursday 23rd April 2020 – THE GOOD NEWS IS …

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