Tag Archives: apple pie

Thursday 7th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… this evening’s beautiful sunset, let me tell you about my day today.

Just for a change, I went to bed last night at a not-unreasonable hour and I was just about on the point of throwing off my bed covers when the alarm went off.

So, a narrow defeat this morning, which was a shame. It’s high time I got myself onto a winning roll with all of this getting-up lark. I can’t afford to spend my time lying in bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

There had been some kind of radio meeting during the night. There was a new woman there and we’d been discussing a few things. There was a brochure that we had prepared, like a magazine. It was in French with an English translation. I was looking through this translation and I noticed that this new woman was standing there not too far away and she was trying her best to speak in English. I’m not quite sure why. And then the meeting came round about we were going to abandon our Saturdays. One project that the chief decided on was that we were each going to bring in a piece of fruit once a week and we’d talk about this piece of fruit. He went through the catalogue and when it got to Saturday, he said “of course Saturday we won’t be here so we can’t do Saturday”. Then he came out with a list of reasons why we couldn’t do it with coffee – because some people like it with sugar and some don’t and so on. And it all became confusing.

After breakfast I had a go ata couple of pages of the website and upgraded them.

That all led to a shower and a general clean-up. And for all of my efforts this week, i’ve lost another 100 grammes. At this rate it’ll be years before I’ll disappear completely.

But in other news, I’ve cut my hair today. And it needed it too. I’ll probably find that I’ve lost half a ton of weight now that that lot has gone.

Thursday today and so that means shopping. I grabbed my bag and headed to the hills.

One thing though, and that was that I was interested to see what was going on today with all of the shenanigans down in the harbour over the last few days.

And so this morning we could admire the big yellow crane that was now back again, and it seemed to be doing some stuff with the new pontoons over there.

So that looks like progress.

Down here on this side of the harbour by the rue du Port we saw them last week manoeuvring one of the walkways into position.

This week we can see that it’s been installed properly now. I can’t wait for the detention à domicile to end so that I can go for a walk down there and see how it is. I want to find out how the bottom is fastened to the pontoon because the pontoon won’t be at a constant height.

But just look at that car park on the right. How disappointing is that? There was so much that they could have done to it to make it so beautiful and all that we’ve ended up with is a slab of tarmac with painted white lines.

So, filled with disappointment I pushed on through the crowds (and I DO mean crowds) up the hill out of town.

First stop was at the laboratory for my test results and to pay the bill. There’s a one-way system in force there so we had to go in through the back door (and out of the front).

And in astonishing news, it’s been months since I had any treatment and my blood count has gone UP! 9.7 is quite ridiculous if you ask me. I’ve no idea what’s going on there.

On the way up the hill to LIDL I went past a house renovation that appears to have started, here in the Avenue Marechal LeClerc.

In fact one of the things that I noticed was that in a lot of the shops that are currently closed there are all kinds of repainting and redecorating going on. It looks as if everyone is getting ready for reopening, and using the downtime profitably.

At LIDL I spent a little more money than usual but there was a reason for that. I need a new plugboard with more sockets, and there was a seven-way switchable one on offer for €5:99. So that joined the happy throng.

On the way back I called at la Mie Caline for a dejeunette and then headed home. And the shopping was really heavy, what with everything in it. Like two bags of flour for a start.

But my eye caught a change over at the chantier navale. There have been four boats in there just recently but today it looked as if there was now a fifth.

And even more interesting – the boat on the left in the line of four is not the same boat that’s been there for the last couple of weeks. That’s gone and another has taken its place so it seems.

Back here I had a coffee and then made a start on the images for July 2019. For a couple of hours I had a good back at those and another 40-odd have bit the dust.

Right not I’m on the upper deck of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour watching the tight manoeuvres as we attempt to make our way into the port of Vestmannaeyjar on the island of Heimaey.

There was a break for lunch of course, and I happened to glance out of the window where I saw this.

It’s been years since we have featured an old car, so this old Citroen Acadiane is a welcome visitor to our pages.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its many guises years and years ago will recall that I had one of these that I bought at an auction, but it was “lost” when the lock-up garages where it was kept were swept away when the site was cleared for houses.

After lunch I launched an attack on the updating of the web pages. And here I made an exciting discovery.

At one stage a while ago I was looking for the working files for my 2014 trip to Canada that I could never find and which I assumed had been lost when the old laptop gave up the ghost in Germany.

But I’d obviously at one stage done some kind of directory compare between the files on the computer and files on my web server, presumably found them on both and knowing that they weren’t ready for publishing, deleted them – but from the computer and not from the web server.

They’ve now been moved over to the correct location, so obviously some more good has come out of this project.

But what with that and an early finish this afternoon I didn’t manage to do as much as I would have liked, but I can’t win a coconut every time.

So after my hour on the guitars, my early finish had given me half an hour spare so I put it to good use.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve run out of pudding and so I decided to make a small apple pie.for the rest of the week or so.

However, rather than use a pastry roll, I’d seen a simple recipe for making simple pastry – basically any given welght of flour and half that weight of butter (or in my case, vegan margarine) all kneaded together until it looks and feels good, and then a couple of tablespoons of water added and kneaded in until the texture feels good.

Take out your silicon baking sheet, dust it with flour, stick your pastry on there, flatten it out and then roll it with your rolling pin, keeping it dusted with flour so it doesn’t stick to the rolling pin as you roll it.

Grease your little baking pan (I used a 15cm one) and cut your pastry to fit it. 150 grammes of flour was enough to make the top and the bottom and there was some left over.

Peel, core and slice a couple of baking apples and add the slices to the pie with some cinnamon, nutmeg, desiccated coconut, brown sugar and lemon juice.

Then add the top, milk the edges and press them down with a fork to seal them. Brush the top with milk and dust with brown sugar, then put a couple of slits into the top to let out the steam, and then bung into the oven.

With what’s left over (pastry and apple) make an apple turnover.

And here’s the finished product. It looks absolutely delicious. And the apple turnover certainly was because I had it for pudding with some of that almond soya stuff after my burger-on-a-bap and baked potato.

And I’ll have another go at this pastry lark because it really was quit straightforward and simple. In fact, I’m wondering what I can attempt next.

After the washing up (of which there was more than enough) it was time to go off on my evening runs.

There were quite a few people out there tonight, presumably fed up of the lockdown (which seems to be working – only 600 new cases today). And we had plenty of fishing boats to admire too – like these out and about in the stretch of the English Channel between the Ile de Chausey and Bréhal-Plage.

They seem to be working all kinds of new areas these days, and a lot closer to home too.

So much so that it didn’t surprise me to see these buoys just a few miles offshore.

At first I thought that it might be a seal or a porpoise or something so it was rather a speculative shot that I took. But back home where I could crop it out and blow it up (the cropped image, not the object) I could see that they were these temporary marker buoys that we see floating about every now and again.

Despite all the time that I’ve lived here I’ve never been able to find out exactly what they are but having seen them on fishing boats, my best guess is that they are markers for fishing traps, like lobster pots and the like.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday (and for a couple of other days just recently too) we’ve walked round the headland to discover a fishing boat setting out of the harbour.

There was another one today heading off out today too. There were a few boats out fishing off the Brittany coast near Cancale across the bay and it looked as if this one was on its way to join them.

Looking more closely though, it seems to be surrounded by seabirds so I wonder if it is in fact fishing with its nets out just there.

But here’s another thing.

My evening run took me along the path on top of the cliff past the chantier navale and I could see that there was yet another change of occupants.

We’d seen this morning that we’d increased to five occupants – two of which were new because one of the older inhabitants had gone from the chocks. But tonight we’re down to four again, with one of the new ones having now been put back into the water.

It can’t have been much that she needed

The next leg of my run takes me all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round into the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne and once I reach my marker (the second pedestrian crossing) I can pause for breath.

So I walked back down the road to the walls overlooking the harbour to se what was happening. Chausiais is now back in her habitual mooring spot at the ferry terminal and Marité although you can’t see her, is still moored at the far side of the harbour (and I forgot to look this morning to see why she had been moved).

Apart from that, there was nothing very evident to indicate what work they had been doing around there.

So I ran off round to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord just in time to catch the sunset, as you have already seen.

There were a few people out there again tonight, including these people who were fishing with rod and line from the steps that go down to the beach (or would do at low tide, of course)

They seemed to be having a great deal of fun, whether they were actually catching anything or not, so I left them to it and ran on home.

Half of my notes are finished now, but so am I too. I’m off to bed and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. It’s a Bank Holiday (VE Day) in Europe tomorrow but in defiance of usual practice I’m setting an alarm so that I can finish my notes early tomorrow.

If I can.

Friday 17th April 2020 – WE DIDN’T HAVE …

… a beautiful sunset tonight.

Instead, we had the distant, ominous rumblings of a major thunderstorm of the type that we are most used to having on a hot summer evening, but some really intense, heavy grey clouds.

It was impossible to even see the Ile de Chausey this evening beacuse of the rainstorm that, judging by the direction of the wind, was heading my way. And so i didn’t hang about too long tonight just in case I got the lot of it.

Mind you, I did hang about rather longer than I intended this morning. I heard all of the alarms go off but instead I told myself that I deserved an extra half-hour in bed. I’m not sure why, but anyway, I did.

The dictaphone was interesting this morning. I’d had an attack of conscience and released 11 hostages that were being held prisoner. There was one in particular who caused me a great amount of grief and when it was filmed they said that they would continue with the story of this particular relief next week. Bit it was all something like a Hobbitesque-Lord Of The Rings-type of situation with mysterious people in it and I know that this one – a lot had gone on prior to this and this guy was something of a late entrant into this scenario.

And if you can make any sense out of that, you’re perfectly welcome to it.

After breakfast I had a go at some more digital file-hunting. And I’m really getting down to the dregs now because I’m right in the middle of more obscure stuff which I can’t find anywhere at all.

There’s so much that I’m going to have to digitalise myself, and the music industry will owe be a big favour when I’m finished because I’ll upload them onto the databases. All kinds of obscure stuff.

And it took an age too. Hunting stuff down, trying to make it load up (which wasn’t easy), waiting ages for some really painful uploads. In the end it took me up to lunchtime to do it all.

And the sad part about it all was that there were only two or three tracks out of all of this that are suitable for playing on the radio.

But at least I managed to deal with a pile of photos from July 2019 in Iceland. I’m now back on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour heading out of Akureyri on our way to our next stop.

After lunch I unpacked the hard drive that had come in the post the other day. I’ve now uploaded all of the files from the laptop that I use as a DVD player in the dining room and I’m currently uploading the files from the laptop with the broken screen.

While all of this has been going on, I’ve tidied up all of the post that hasn’t been filed away for a while and, having stumbled across a power block and extension cord that I’d forgotten, I changed things around in the apartment so that all of the amps and guitars are now in the bedroom. That means that I can play properly and hear myself properly while I have stuff going on on the computer.

This actually meant SHOCK! HORROR! I had the vacuum cleaner out on the bedroom. And it needed it too.

After the hour on the guitars, working out a couple of Lindisfarne numbers, I went for tea.

It was another Anything Curry seeing as there were some mushrooms left over that I had forgotten to use yesterday. A potato and a pile of spinach with all of that, and some rice and veg and there we go.

Apple pie and banana sorbet for pudding. Delicious.

And then off for my evening’s exercise.

A rather dramatic run up the hill as I struggled for most of the way. but it was worth it because the storm was raging away in the distance. The Brittany coast round by St Malo was taking a real bashing and you won’t see very many storms like this in this part of the world.

And I saw just four other people this evening, with just one guy admiring the storm in the distance with his field glasses. So we exchanged pleasantries for a minute or so – at an appropriate social distance of course.

Having recovered my breath, I ran on back home again.

When I stopped for breath halfway along, I went to look to see what, if anything, had been going on down at the harbour with the new supports for the pontoon.

although it was lighter this evening, I couldn’t really tell if there had been any change in the work. I hadn’t heard any suspicious noise today.

And so I have it up as a bad job and ran on home

Having had a good run tonight, I was glad that I was back early because there was football on the internet.

Yes, someone had found a video of the final match at farrar Road on 27 December 2011 before Bangor City moved to their new stadium and so we had a watch party to see them beat Prestatyn Town.

But I don’t think that anyone realised the vast improvement in standards of play, of pitches, of grounds and of facilities until you watch a match like this. It really was antediluvian.

So an early-ish night tonight, sort-of. Shopping tomorrow, fighting my way through the queues of course and then a relaxing weekend. There’s nothing on the agenda so i’m hoping for a decent weekend for once.

We shall see.

Thursday 16th April 2020 – I COULDN’T KEEP IT UP …

… this morning, which id something of a shame.

Having done so well this last couple of days, I couldn’t beat the third alarm today. I missed it by about 10 minutes.

Mind you, I didn’t have the early night that I was hoping for last night. I was listening to music again and so enjoying myself, I split up a Louis de Funes soundtrack to extract some more soundbites for my radio shows.

Definitely my favourite French comedian, Louis de Funes, and he deserves to be my co-star on the radio.

So where did I get to during the night, After the medication I could go along and find out.

I was going some kind of post-dated ad for the end of the month – the old men wanted it for some project or other. I’d get them to sign in and anyone who sends me any connections will have a reward because of it. But I was with Nerina for some part of the time.
Later on, a group of us was going skiing. We were all sitting around waiting for the bus to come and pick us up. I had all of the stuff to hand out to everyone for them to take their possessions. But some of the stuff, some of the people couldn’t carry. My brother was lucky – he just had a suitcase there and a guitar. I said “there’s no guy ropes or anything with this”. he said “yes that’s fine, not a problem. It turned out that all the stuff like that was in my suitcase and I’d got tons and tons of stuff like this. Mine was just really really heavy. There was someone who might have been Nerina but I’ve no idea who it was who didn’t have very much either, and someone else who might have been one of my sisters who didn’t have plenty. We were all there with all of these things and there was tons of it all told. I was wondering how on earth we would manage to get all of this onto a bus or a train, however we were going. Each person was responsible for his own but that’s not going to be right with all of the stuff we have. It’s just escalating all of the time out of hand like this
Later still I was just about to go off on a trip with Stuart Graham, the Honda motorcycling racing specialist and tuning guy who lived near Nantwich but just as I was getting ready to go off the alarm rang and put an end to that.

There was much more than this going on too but as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you all the gory details.

After breakfast it was digitalising the cassette collection time. Another four albums have bitten the dust this morning but, once again, they are four albums that I won’t beusing in the radio projects, for a variety of reasons.

And it made me realise that there are a pile of albums that I no longer have and I don’t understand that at all. And bearing in mind what they are, I have an idea where they might be. But I’ll never have them back now. Ahhh well!

But the splitting was reasonably comfortable and reasonably rapid, but somehow I’ve ended up with two *.mkv files, which is what I’ve been trying to avoid.

A shower and general clean-up was next. And I weighed myself too. And after all of this running and so forth I’ve … errr … GAINED 800 grammes. It looks as if my scales are as reliable as the blood machine in Castle Anthrax.

A shooping trip to LIDL was called for next.

And I was right about something else too. Starting on Tuesday earlier this week I’d been hearing strange noises coming from the port and I’d been thinking to myself that it sounds as if they have restarted work on the pontoons.

And that certainly seems to be the case. The big crane on the floating pontoon has one of the large supporting pillars in its evil clutches over there.

And when I came back from the shops later on, they were hard at work on the pontoon.

You can see the piledriver up there, supported from the big crane, pounding away at the pontoon support and driving it firmly into the bed of the harbour.

And just think how much easier it would have been to have done this work two years or so ago when the harbour was drained and they were reinstalling the new harbour gates. What an effort they would have avoided had they done it then.

But in the meantime, my attention was distracted by the excitement going on down at the bottom end of the harbour.

You can see Marité there of course, but you’ll also see a pile of large bags of building material. That would seem to indicate that either Thora or Normandy Trader is on her way to port.

We haven’t seen either of them for a few days, but that’s not to say that they haven’t been here. With us in detention à domicile like this and only being allowed out briefly, and with the rapid turnover that the ships seem to be enjoying these days, it’s not impossible that I’ve missed them.

Onwards towards LIDL and in the rue Couraye I came across something interesting.

There have been reports from all over the world about the disinfecting of the streets that receive heavy use. Here in Granville most of the banks and important local shops are situated in the rue Couraye and here they are out spraying the street.

It’s quite possible that the speech by the President the other day has galvanised them into action.

There’s also a story that the town council has ordered 20,000 masks from a local clothing manufacturer to distribute to the population. This ending of the detention à domicile on 11th May might actually be a possibility.

At LIDL tomatoes were in very short supply and those that they had were expensive. In fact I spent a lot of money there, but much of this was on new cooking supplies. They had some new tart cases and stuff like that today.

On the way back, I discovered that La Mie Caline had reopened, so I bought a dejeunette. Things really are slowly returning to normal, bit by bit.

There was an article in the local paper this morning that the amount of fish products landed here during the month of march had fallen by 30% or so.

That’s certainly some kind of clear evidence that fishing is continuing despite the crisis, albeit in reduced numbers. And as I walked up the hill in the rue des Juifs there was a delightful nautical danse macabre in the harbour.

One fishing boat was on its way in and another was on its way out, and they were having a nice little waltz around each other.

After lunch I started on the remains of the two radio projects that I hadn’t finished. I’d chosen the final tracks and edited them last night so it was just a case of writing the text, dictating it, editing it, merging it into place with the final track and then editing it all down to one hour for each project.

That took me up to about 16:15 to do them both, and I could have done it quicker too except that I … errr … relaxed for a while.

And then, until 18:00 I had some “me time”. I deserve some. And one of the things that I did was to order a new computer hi-fi system.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the one here has its problems and seeing as I spend so much time these days listening to and editing music and so on here, I ought to have some decent stuff.

And so I ended up in discussion with a musical equipment wholesaler and we’ve worked out a package. There won’t be much change out of €300 for what I’ve ordered, but I’ve had this hi-fi here for at least 18 years and it’s due for a change.

After the hour or so on the guitars, I made tea. Now that I had bought an aubergine I made myself an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit – and forgot to use the mushrooms that were left. I had some of that for tea and there are four helpings left for the freezer. I need to build up the supplies again.

The apple pie was delicious too, with the last of the coconut soya cream. But there’s that lovely banana sorbet for the next couple of days to take my mind off things.

Later on I went out for my evening activity.

There was a really beautiful red sky in the distance and by the time that i’d run up to the top of the hill (and that had me in agony) it was lookign even better, with the sun just peeking through the sky over the Ile de Chausey

It looked absolutely wonderful with the cloud just there like that, in exactly the right place.

And so I carried on with my perambulations while I recovered my breath.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have recently been discussing fishing activity deep in the Baie de Mont St Michel. There’s another fishing boat out there this evening – not the one to the left of the photo which seems to be heading into port, but the one to the right.

That one is farther out, deeper into the bay and has its workign lights switched on, so it would seem to be actively working out there.

But by the time that I’d gone round to the other side of the Pointe du Roc, the sun had sunk below the horizon.

And here I’m presented with one of the most extraordinary sights that I’ve ever seen, and I’m glad that I had the big NIKON D500 with me to photograph it. The way that the sun is reflecting on the cloud above it behind the Ile de Chausey is just like the light of a theatrical backdrop and I’ve never ever seen this effect in real life.

It was totally spell-binding.

And I wasn’t the only one out here tonight enjoying the sunset either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned on previous occasions that we are seeing more and more people flouting the regulations about staying in and so on. We had a fair crowd out in the streets today, and here’s someone who has passed the security barrier to go down to the little cove there to watch the sunset.

Still, I suppose that the sight was well worth it.

With my usual two stops for a breather, I ran all the way home from here.

But in one of the breaks I had a little diversion to look at what they had been doing in the harbour today. And they have indeed stuck another pontoon support pillar into the ground.

Not all the way down, so presumably they’ll be back to finish it tomorrow and to install the rest. Obviously the local council isn’t worried too much about this virus.

So I’m off to bed, later than I intended. Tomorrow, with no radio stuff to deal with for the first time since I don’t know when, I can make a start of a few of the arrears that have been building up.

And aren’t I looking forward to that?

Wednesday 15th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

… a naughty boy today.

Yes, i’ve been out of the apartment twice!

Mind you, I don’t think that the first one counts, because I took out a pile of rubbish to the bins. But having said that, if I had left the rubbish alone for another day or so, it would have walked there on its own.

There has been a big pile of cardboard building up behind the door too so while I was on my way down I took that too. The dechetterie isn’t going to be open for the foreseeable future so I may as well start to move that into the disposable bins. I’ll take the rest of it down tomorrow when I go to the shops.

Yes – go to the shops. No baps for burgers (as I discovered this evening), no cucumber, no apples, no pears, none of the eucalyptus sweets that I like. I shall have to organise myself much better than this

But at least I managed to haul myself out of bed before the third alarm. And that’s certainly a little progress compared to just recently.

Once the medication was dealt with I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night and, more interestingly or importantly, whether anyone we know had accompanied me.

This virus thing was still going on again last night but we were all allowed out keeping our social distances, this kind of thing. Tonight they announced that there would be a collection for the Health Services and everyone should be on the street. Of course the Government announced that there would be a fine of £30:00 for everyone caught out on the street so we don’t know where to go from there. In the end we were all out there and a guy from the local tax Office turned up with a folder. I went up to ask “were you collecting money for Live Aid then?” He gave me some kind of dirty look and said “no, some of us still have work to do” and went off to interview someone about their tax affairs.

So that was pretty exciting, wasn’t it?

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … anyone might think that I have a preoccupation with this virus.

But that’s far from the truth. When I take a close look at things, it’s not really affected me all that much, even though I’ve been told that I’m one of the most at risk. I can’t go out for my bread of course, but taco rolls are proving to be a very acceptable substitute.

And I can’t fit in my 100% of daily fitness routine, but instead I’ve started running again in the time that is allowed me and I’m pushing on with that.

There’s plenty of work here too so I’m not bored at all, and in the time that I would normally spend going for my afternoon walk I’m playing the 6-string guitar. And I do have to say that I can see quite an improvement there too. I was struggling to play barchords and couldn’t perform rapid chord changes when I started, but tonight, having a play around with Neil Young’s “Down By The River” I was changing over from Cmaj7 to Bm to D to Cmaj7 without even thinking about it.

But anyway, I digress.

After breakfast I attacked the digital files and, for a change, all four of them went off with very little problem at all – just one or two tracks that “stuck” when I was trying to deal with them. The unfortunate thing is though that they are four albums that won’t really figure in me radio programmes, for one reason or another, so it wasn’t really very efficient.

However, it didn’t require a great deal of effort so I was able to have a whack at the photos from July 2019 while it was a-doing. I’m now up to 0604, which might sound a lot, but I’m still stuck in Akureyri, and I reckon that I’ll be here for a while.

There were a couple of breaks in between all of this. One was for lunch of course and the other one was … errr … for a little pause, something that filled me full of regret.

However, despite all of that, the two radio projects that needed finished off are finished off, up and running, and the other two are all complete and assembled except for the final tracks, which can be finished off tomorrow.

Mind you it took me until 18:15, but I didn’t mind if it meant completing the job. That’s another good thing done and dusted. And I still managed my hour on the guitars, what the heck!

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg followed by a slice of apple pie with coconut soya dessert. And it just tastes better and better.

After tea I headed out for my evening run. And for some reason or another it was a real struggle, the toughest so far, to make it all the way up the hill to the corner of the hedge.

But it was well worth it of course, as it always is, because there was another beautiful sunset. I had another play around with the camera settings and finally produced the photo that I wanted.

And I do have to say that it’s come out really well too.

However, there were a fair few people out there enjoying the sunset, more than I have been used to seeing. I think that more people are becoming fed up of this detention à domicile which is a shame because figures are going back up again. It’ll never be over at this rate.

While I was out there admiring the sunset, my attention was drawn to something moving around way out in the English Channel.

Out of curiosity I took a photo of it, with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) when I returned home to see what it might be.

And I was right about part of it. It is indeed a fishing boat out there. And its working light is on too. But what I want to know is what is the object in front of it. It’s much too far away for me to have a decent chance of seeing it clearly, but it’s certainly something interesting.

Once I’d finished speculating, I set off again on my voyage.

Around the corner and looking over the Baie de Mont St Michel towards St Pair sur Mer, I could see a couple of orange lights in the distance. That was the cue for another speculative shot to enlarge at home to see what it might be.

And it looks to me as if it’s the sun, very low in the sky, reflecting off some things on the roof of that house. But as for what, I really have no idea at all.

All five runs again tonight, despite the crowds of people around. Every evening now, there seems to be more and more people out and about.

Now, if I’m really lucky, I might have an early night. That might come in useful, just for a change. I have shopping to do tomorrow of course and I want to finish off these radio projects too, and they won’t be finished on their own.

Monday 13th April 2020 – IT WAS HARD …

… this evening going for my runs.

It’s a lot colder than it has been of late and a pair of gloves and a hat would have made a great deal of positive difference to my comfort this evening.

But really what was to blame for it all was the howling gale. A couple of my runs, including the longest one, was right into the teeth of the gale and while I managed to accomplish them all, including the little additional extra metres that I’ve been doing. But I certainly knew all about it by the time that I returned home and I don’t want to have to do it again in a hurry.

A Bank Holiday today, of course. Easter Monday. And so I celebrated by having a lie-in. And in a change from just recently, it was actually only about 07:45 when I awoke.

Even more interestingly, it was 08:15 when I left my bed too. Not the best lie-ins that I’ve had, but some of them just recently have been somewhat excessive, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Nothing on the dictaphone either, as I found when I went to check it after the medication. So it must have been a decent night’s sleep too.

After breakfast (and my last hot cross bun) I made a start on the digital sound files. I’m on the cassettes now of course and by the time that I’d finished, I’d dealt with another 4 albums.

Three of them went quite quickly and I didn’t have time to deal with many of the Iceland photos. But of course there’s always one that is a struggle and it took me an age to sort it out, to find the files that I needed, to get them to download and then to convert them to *.mp3.

But having done that, I could start (better late than never) on the next two radio projects.

Despite having a stop for lunch, by the time I came to knocking off at 18:00, I’d chosen all of the music for both projects, joined them up into pairs as I would usually do, and even made a start on writing the text. I don’t know where this sudden energy has come from.

For my hour on the guitars, I’ve made a start on writing another song. I’ve been a bit quiet on that front since November. I was warming up, just running through a few chords, and a certain chord pattern caught my attention. I had a little work on it and while I was doing so, a lyric pattern that fitted it came into my head too.

So half an hour on the 6-string and half an hour on the bass working around it to see where I finished. There will be a lot more to it of course, and then I have to work out the drumming to it now that I have my electronic drum kit.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by some of the apple pie that I baked yesterday, with soya coconut whatsit. And it was all really delicious too.

That was the cue for me to go outside for my evening’s exercise.

It was still quite light while I was out there and the sun was a good 20 minutes or so from setting. But there was a fishing boat out there, presumably having left the port and heading off to the fishing grounds somewhere out by the Channel Islands.

Here’s a nice photo of her, disappearing off into the sunset. And into the haze too.

Yes, nothing like as clear as it was yesterday which is a shame.

But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night there were the three (or four) lights of fishing boats down in the Baie de Mont St Michel where I wouldn’t really expect to see them. But there they are again tonight.

In the light and with the NIKON D500 and the 70-300mm LENS I could see them clearly. There are seagulls around them too so they are certainly out there working.

There were another few fishing boats out there too, but I suspect that these two are hovering around the harbour entrance maybe waiting for the tide.

Mind you, their working lights are on too and they are also surrounded by seagulls. So even if they aren’t actually working right now, they must have full loads and they are sorting the cargo.

Struggling against the headwind as I did, I finally made it back to my apartment, totally wasted. And Rosemarie rang me up so we had a lengthy chat about nothing in particular. But then that’s what friends are all about.

And that’s why I’m late doing this – not that I’m objecting of course.

So tomorrow, back at a full day’s work, alarms and everything. And who knows? I might even make progress. Stranger things have happened.

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall a short while ago that we saw a fishing boat heading out deep into the Baie de Mont St Michel, and I expressed my surprise, because I didn’t recalls eeing a fishing boat that deep in there before.

But if yuo look at those white lights just there, you’ll understand that what we are seeing is actually three fishing boats down in thz bay somewhere off the Pointe de Carolles. They are stationary with their working lights on, and that would indicated to me that they are working.

There was a fourth one too, out way off to the left close inshore, but couldn’t fit the photo to include it.

So there you go. It seems that they are starting to look around for more places to fish, and I wonder if that is something to do with Brexit.

What isn’t surprising of course is the fact that I didn’t see the light of day until about 10:30 this morning.

Not that I’m complaining today either, because it’s a Sunday and also a bank holiday so in effect i’m allowed two lie-ins.

It was just as well because just as I was thinking of going to bed last night an interesting track came round on the playlist so I had a bash at it with the 6-string guitar.

And not just any old how either. I plugged in the VOX AMPLUG, turned it full up and put on the headphones.

It was just like being in a studio or on a stage, and I was so carried away that I ran through a pile of the repertoire until getting on for 03:00

And do you know what? I don’t regret it for a minute.

This morning after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was in Gainsborough Road last night and the place was an absolute tip with stuff everywhere, tons of stuff all over the place. There was an insurance guy who was trying to sell me some insurance policy so he could come round to the house and I could tell him to clear off. Then I got to thinking about the state the place was in but before I could do anything about it the front doorbell went – a strange doorbell like a couple of dogs barking. I went downstairs and there was this guy. Of course the two cats and a dog in my house went immediately rushing out. He made a remark about a mentally-handicapped person, having a couple turning around. He indicated a couple of people to me – one was a young girl with long albino blonde hair. He pointed to her.
A little later I was driving a lorry, a big artic with a trailer with an old van and a pile of wood on it. I was doing all right – even in a narrow road I pulled right over to let a Polish bus come the other way. Suddenly the road petered out and I ended up in the wrong section of the road. I’d been right about which was the main road but I’d taken the wrong turning at a really confusing junction because I wasn’t sure. I had to reverse around in some yard. I did it basically without looking at first and just missed a parked car by about a quarter of an inch. The guy in the house came out and was quite cheerful about it. He told me what I’d done. I said “well I’ll turn it round but the difficulty is that I can’t see what I’m doing”. He put a light on but it wasn’t what I wanted because of course you have loads of blind spots on artics. He said “do you want me to do it?”. I said “no, I’m going to do it” I don’t know why, because I wasn’t at all confident and it was really tigh but what I wanted was someone to watch me. But he wandered off. While I was sitting there examining this I noticed that the van had come loose on the trailer. I thought that this was probably just the awkward positioning that it’s in and it will straighten out when I have the trailer straight again. That didn’t look right to me. This girl came out for a conversation so I thought I’d get her to watch, but I’d still rather have the guy watching.

There was more to it than this too but you’re probably having your tea or something like that right now, so I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

After breakfast, which was well after midday, I made a start on the digitalised file splitting.

As I suspected, I seem to have run aground. I’ve started to come up against albums that for one reason or another I can’t do right now – mainly though because the digital sound files just aren’t available.

They will need a good sorting out to see what’s what and for me myself to digitalise them as necessary. But that’s for another time. In the meantime I made a start on the cassettes.

What with one thing and another it was a long, weary early afternoon trying to sort all of this out and I didn’t have much opportunity to edit many photos from July last year. We’re just pulling into port at Akureyri and photo 0542. That’s probably about a quarter of the way around my July voyages.

Finally I was able to deal with the two outstanding radio projects. They are both now complete as far as I can go right now, and the final two tracks have been timed and chosen. I just need to write and then dictate the text, edit it and merge it all together.

But I think that I’ll do what I did last week and that is to choose the music for the next two radio projects, and then write and record all of the text in one go.

And I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I had a really lovely note from someone about our outside broadcast for the GRANDE MAREE VIRTUELLE, and for those of you who understand French, you can download the Podcast at the link that I posted.

Having had a good play about on the 6-string guitar late last night and here and there today, I just had half an hour on the bass tonight.

One thing that I’ve noticed thought is that with having played a lot just recently on the 5-string fretless bass, I found today that the Ibanez acoustic 4-string just isn’t up to what I want it to do.

In my old age, I’m becoming spoilt. That’s for sure.

With it being a Sunday,as well as vegan pizza night, it’s also pudding for the week-making night.

having had rice pudding last week and having used a couple of the apple pie slices from the freezer during the week, I decided on a big apple pie and an apple turnover. What I don’t eat this week can go into the freezer to build up the stock again.

The pizza was delicious, and half of the apple turnover was equally nice. I shall have to make this again sometime.

It was really late tonight when I went out for my evening perambulations.

Once more, I ran all the way up to the end of the hedge and could have carried on, incorporating run n°2 down to the clifftop but I stopped to catch my breath.

Down at the cliff top, this fishing boat was going past on its way towards port. The fishing boats are still working out of Granville (as we saw in the first photograph earlier) whether they are working anywhere else or not.

They are even allowed to sell their fish directly off the quayside here, as I mentioned a while ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But it really was a beautiful night and I regretted bringing the NIKON D3000 with me instead of the NIKON D500.

The sky was really clear and you could see for miles. The street lights of St Malo right across the Baie de Mont St Michel were reflecting beautifully from the sky and the extra versatility of the bigger camera would have done it much more justice.

What was sad about this was that I was the only person here enjoying it. There wasn’t another soul around at all.

And it was hard to say if there was even anyone manning the radar in the Coastguard station either.

There was certainly no shadow or anything moving around in there, so I continued on my merry, mazy way.

The same four boats in the chantier navale so I left them in peace, and carried on home. The usual 5 runs in total and although I’m totally wasted and sweating by the time that I return, I notice that I’m pushing on the distance, a couple of metres here, a couple of metres there

That’s quite important to me because I need to keep on top of my health as much as I can.

But it’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow, so no alarm and a lie-in. I hope that no-one comes along to spoil it.

Saturday 11th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN PANIC-BUYING …

… today.

Yes, at LeClerc, the pizza base rolls are back in stock. So seeing as I need to replenish the stocks having exhausted my spare one last weekend, I bought two rolls.

So shame on me!

And shame on me too for my morning. It’s no surprise that having not gone to bed until something silly like 01:45 this morning that I missed the alarms. But I had been hoping for something different than 07:55. That was rather an embarrassment.

After the medication I looked at the dictaphone – or rather, listened to it. And last night, Castor came to join me on an excursion. It’s been a couple of weeks since she’s come along, so hello again to you!

Once breakfast (including a hot cross bun of course) was out of the way, there wasn’t time for very much else.

A shower, and set the washing machine in action because I’m running low on clothes, and then I headed off into town and the shops.

and there are far more people out on the streets than there were a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the detention à domicile is getting on everyone’s nerves.

This is the queue going all the way around the Leclerc Hypermarket. And if you think that this is long, this is when I was leaving. When I arrived, it was reaching right down to the end there and a little further on.

It’s never been as long as that as far as I have seen. But in the absence of the panic-buying that we have seen in other countries, I suppose that people are running out of supplies.

But, anyway, this is the reason for all of the queues.

There must be the same kind of measures being applied here that we were seeing a few weeks ago in Belgium, with shops being obliged to restrict admittance, presumably depending upon the size in square metres of the sales area.

Not that it’s particularly effective of course, because it still doesn’t stop people congregating in confined spaces in one corner of the shop.

This is quite an interesting sign too.

Apart from the couple of tips and hints, people are being limited to one shopping trolley person. That’s still a lot of food and so on for someone. It made my paltry load look quite pathetic.

But I was astonished at the price of tomatoes. They have doubled in price this last week or two and that’s a sign of the times.

Another sign of the times is that while the range of flour on offer has reduced dramatically (no pizza flour, for example), leClerc is now selling flour in generic 5kg sacks.

They are clearly confident that these will sell, so this must mean a big rise in the number of people who might be contemplating making their own bread. In fact I know a few people who have resurrected their old breadmakers.

But I do have to say that – 5kg bags of flour. I’ve seen these in places like rural Canada but I never ever in my life expected to see them on sale in an urban environment like this.

But there was one thing that I did stock up. And it isn’t really panic-buying either because I would have done this regardless of the circumstances.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a couple of months ago that they had some frozen beanburgers on offer – a pack of 4 for €3:99 and they were quite nice too. Today, they were reduced to 40% off, and so I bought two packs.

Not that I need them because I have plenty of burgers, but at that price and now that there’s some room in my freezer I couldn’t turn them down.

Back here, one task that I’d been saying for a week or so that I would do is to clean out the freezer. I did a drawer yesterday so I did the other two just now. It’s a lot tidier in there now and things are much better arranged.

And I found a slice of apple pie from … errr … June 2018 so I left that out to defrost for pudding tonight.

Once I’d organised all that, I made myself a coffee and had a start on digitalising some more albums, with a pause for lunch of course at about 13:30.

Three albums went quickly – so quickly that I only had time for half a dozen or so photos. But the fourth album wouldn’t download at all for some reason and I tried two or three locations too.

It’s a pretty rare album too so in the end I abandoned that particular one and chose another. But I’m building up a pile of rare albums that will need me to digitalise them all on my own.

Once that was done I set about the four radio projects that I had on the go. All of the text files are now edited and the first two are now complete, mixed, edited down to 1:00:00 and ready to go.

What was disappointing though was that I could have done much more again, except that I crashed out on the chair for half an hour or so (no surprise there after last night).

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars, much of which was spent having a play with Lindisfarne’s “City Song” as well as “Carey”, “Military Madness” and “Suffragette City”.

Looking at my playlist, it’s all heading off into a certain direction, which is no surprise. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, you know.

A few weeks ago, I’d sorted out the fridge, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. All of the vacuum-packed burgers were arranged in date order and i’d caught up with the expiry dates there.

And so as a special treat I had pasta and vegetables with a lentil-and-curry burger with an expiry date of 20th April. Ohh the luxury!

Followed by the apple pie and some of that coconut soya dessert stuff.

having done the washing up, I went outside and headed off for my evening runs.

Much to my surprise, I made it all the way up to the top again – the second time in successive evenings. i’m clearly improving and I just hope that I can keep it up.

And it was work the run because I witnessed a really beautiful low sun tonight over the Ile de Chausey and so i took a photo of it for future reference.

I ran on down to the clifftop and took another photo, this time having a play around with the camera’s light settings.

And I managed to come up with this really good shot. It can, I suppose, go a stop or two darker but this is how it came out of the camera with no post work. I’m quite impressed with this.

having done that, I pushed on around the headland. And I was right about there being more and more people out there on the streets. Probably a dozen or so altogether enjoying the evening sun, the most that I have ever seen since the emergency began.

And one person who was out there again tonight was my mystery girl from the other day. We said “hello” to each other but we couldn’t say any more than that because she was running one way and I was running the other way.

I wish that I knew who she was.

My run took me past the fish processing plant and there was another fishing boat there being unloaded and its catch being stowed onto the trailer that was being pulled by that tractor.

So having had my five runs tonight, I ended up back in the apartment to write up my notes.

It’s a bank Holiday again tomorrow, and a Sunday to boot, so it’s another lie-in. But I really must put my back into dealing with these outstanding radio projects.

There are two more to do next week of course and I don’t need to be falling behind like this when there isn’t any real pressure on me.

This lethargy is something of a problem though – in fact, it’s the major problem. I know that it’s a symptom of this illness and the medication that I’m taking to try to stabilise it, but it’s still not any comfort to me.

It has been explained to me on several occasions that I’m never going to be any better and more than just a couple of people have expressed their surprise that I’ve been going on for as long as I have at the speed at which I’ve been going. Most people with this illness have long-since given up the ghost.

It’s not going to get the better of me quite yet and i’ll still be in here slugging it out.

But it would be nice to see some return from my efforts.

Saturday 4th April 2020 – ANOTHER DAY …

… when I’ve been nothing like as productive as I ought to be.

And that’s a shame because it all started so well too. I comfortably beat the third alarm to my feet and after the medication I attacked the dictaphone.

Once again, the excesses of the couple of nights just recently seem to have been curbed. But while the quality seems to have been cut down, it’s done nothing the stem the emotion.

Last night I was in hospital and that I was going to have an operation. It was an appendicitis operation but it was on my throat of all places. Af course these were strange times with all kinds of different people having all kinds of different things wrong with them because of this virus and I couldn’t get into the hospital at all, but in the end they let me in. I’d been on board a ship which may or may not have been The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour going round the Far North of Scotland and they had given me some gas anaesthetic. They clamped it over my nose and mouth and started to feed me the anaesthetic and I wasn’t going under. I was just sitting there looking at them, that kind of thing. They got a teddy bear out and started to play with this teddy bear to try to distract me but that didn’t work. In the end they simply turned up the gas until the gas was full on. Eventually I managed to pass out. Even though I was unconscious I could hear them moving all the knives, equipment and everything around. I was absolutely dreading what was going to happen next and this was another occasion where I actually awoke myself in order to avoid it.

There have been one or two like that just recently where the situation has been such that I’ve been obliged to awaken myself to avoid it. I’ve often said … “on many occasions” – ed … that the whole idea of hospîtals and surgery and all of that kind of thing is something that I can’t stomach.

What I’ve been going through this last four years or so, with hospitals, operations, tubes and pipes and all that kind of thing is my worst nightmare and there are medical actions that have been proposed to me that I’ve turned down flat because I couldn’t even stand the thought of them, not the action.

It’s the law in France that any surgical intervention, no matter what, has to be explained in precise detail to the victim and his or her consent obtained. When they wanted to do stuff to me I flatly refused to hear what they wanted to tell me and there was something of a stand-off.

In the end they had to prepare a document to the effect that I would give my consent to the operation but I didn’t want to hear anything about it. They weren’t sure just how that would stand up in Court if it came to that, but that’s all that they were getting from me.

After breakfast I made a start on the digitalising of my album collection. No major issues today except that one of them took a good while to deal with. And Rosemary rang me up in the middle of it all for a good chat.

As a result of all of this, I was late going for my shower and even later going out to the shops. No queue when I arrived (there was when I left) and I was able to buy most things that I needed.

No small tins of kidney beans and still no pizza bases. No pizza flour either, so I bought some ordinary flour and I’m going to have a go, once I’ve used the last base in my stock this weekend, to make a pizza base. I have yeast, salt and oil and I can’t think what else I might need.

But years ago, I used to buy flat round bread in Belgium, slice it horizontally rather than vertically, and use that as a pizza base. There’s always a way, and I seem to remember that the bread base worked quite well.

There was ice cream that needed to be bought but I baulked at the price that LeClerc wanted for the Alpro stuff. However, they had a tub left of that delicious banana sorbet.

Back here, Laurent had returned to me his comments on our project so after a little bit here and there I could send it off for consideration. We then ended up in a discussion about the audio diary that we are keeping.

In between all of this, I was speaking to someone on the internet. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the hi-fi that’s connected to the computer is in the process of giving up the ghost. 18 or so years, 6 of which were being stored in a damp shed, hasn’t done it any favours.

I’m not going to waste my money on any cheap stuff, seeing as how much time I spend here and the kind of work that I do, so I’ve been talking to a specialist place in Germany about what I need to have some really decent desktop quality.

Eventually I was able to turn my attention to my own radio projects, but not as much as I could because I ended up … errr … relaxing for a while. And a proper, deep relax it was too and that was quite depressing.

As a result I ended up not even finishing one, never mind both of them. So although it’s against my principles, I’ll have to work tomorrow – my day off.

After the session on the guitar, I made myself some tea. Saturday night so it’s usually a meal out of a tin, but the way things are, I’m not doing anything with my tins right now.

But I have plenty of vegan burgers which are quick to cook and anyway, I believe that some vegan burger mix is heading my way in the post sometime. So pasta, veg and tomato sauce with a vegan burger it was too.

The last of the apple pie and the last of the Alpro soya ice cream. Tomorrow, it’s the day that I cook a dessert and I haven’t had rice pudding for a good while, so I reckon that we’ll have a rice pudding for the next few days.

That was the cue for me to go off for my evening walk.

It was still light out there, but the sun was quite low in the sky. I ended up with this beautiful image across the day of the sun shining directly into the windows of this building on the hilltop across the bay at the back of town.

It would have been a beautiful sunset tonight, but we had a good one last night and I don’t want to clutter things up with too much of the same photograph.

It’s hard enough as it is for me to find things of interest in the time that I’m allowed out. I mean – we haven’t had a “pathetic parking” photo for weeks.

But returning to the sunset, there were all kinds of people out there enjoying it. Almost every secluded nook and cranny had a couple of people in it, keeping out of the way of their neighbours and, I imagine, out of the way of any surveillance.

What a state in which we are living. We are told that it is for our own good, which is probably correct right now, but it’s also correct to say that it’s usually been a war or a violent revolution that has been required to take back control from a fascist once he’s laid his hands on it.

The easiest way to control a population is to frighten it. It was a principle of the Nazis expounded by Goering. At the moment, the people don’t need any more frightening in order to let themselves be controlled, but it’s going to be interesting to see what steps the Governments will be taking in the future to control the population in this measure.

How many more virus scares will we have once this one is out of the way?

Talking of scaring people, anyone who had the wind put up them by the Hitchcock film THE BIRDS won’t have enjoyed what’s been happening in the old walled town just now.

Whatever is going on I really don’t know, but the seagulls are becoming a lot less nervous of people and are clamouring around so much more. In fact there was quite a flock of them this evening circling around above the old town this evening.

Whoever was out there walking this evening, I hope that he was wearing a hat. These gulls have an accuracy that would put Bomber Command to shame

And keeping up with the routine, I managed all four runs tonight and, much to my surpise, they weren’t difficult. In fact, I overran the first by about 30 metres and had it not been uphill I could have carried on..

And I’m glad that I’m doing it because of that 800 grammes that I had gained, I’d lost 400 since Thursday.

And that reminds me of the time That Nerina told me that during a certain two-week period she had lost 2kgs.
“Keep it up, darling” I urged. “At this rate, by Christmas you’ll be gone completely”.

On that point, I’ll clear off. It’s Sunday and I can have a lie-in. But I’ll have to work, I suppose. These things don’t get done themselves, do they?

Thursday 2nd April 2020 – I’VE JUST HAD …

… a very friendly, very interesting and very lengthy conversation with a very nice young girl. She stopped me for a chat while I was out for my evening runs tonight.

We were there for about 10 minutes or so chatting away about all kinds of things.

And do you know what?

I don’t have the first clue who she is.

Something else that I don’t have the first clue about is why I bothered to waste my time by going for an early night. Just for a change, I beat the third alarm out of bed and after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

I’d started out by doing my best to obey the quarantine but I had to keep on nipping out of my apartment to the room in the attic for something or other. That meant going out into the street and in my the next door and up the stairs. This happened not once, not twice but three or four times and I was sure that someone would cotton on to what was happening. Sure enough, one time I did it, I heard another door bang in the room and heard someone going up the inside stairs, so I stood behind the door and waited. When whoever it was came in, I shouted “BOOH!”and scared them. It was a girl with whom I once worked and she’s someone I haven’t thought about for years. I had a laugh and a joke with her about the situation but I bet that she was being very curious about who was where, for reasons that I suspected were not entirely altruistic. The I was talking to someone else about this and they said “whatever happens, it’s not going to be right for ages and ages yet before the world is back to normal. All kinds of things have been cut off and we can basically forget all about”.
Later on, someone at work was selected for some kind of medical test so he started to prepare himself, saying “yes, I’ll call you when I get there and let you know how things are going on”. My boss recoiled in horror “no, no. Just give us a ring – it will be fine”. he was obviously extremely suspicious about this and I had the feeling that he would have been quite happy if this employee had picked up some kind of infection from one of these medical trials
Moi, je lui proposé que lui, il lui garde et envoyer un audio de son voyage et de contacter avec quelque chose d’intéressant mais il l’a réussi. Le patron lui a accordé raise parce que … Now why am I dictating this in French? I know that I sometimes dream in French (and in Flemish too before now) but this is the first ever time that I’ve dictated my notes in French … so they decided that the risks just weren’t worth the experience of broadcasting like that.
The next voyage was similar to the one just now about the being summoned and going for a walk and sending an audio report and that was rejected too as the story was pretty much the same
Later on we were discussing trains, HS2 and all of this and I’m still convinced that it’s just a white elephant and it’s not going to do anything particular. We had the usual arguments so I wrote a song about travelling from Amsterdam Schiphol airport to Brussels on the TGV. It came to the attention of Alquin and they weren’t sure – should I join Alquin or would they create a band for me and find me a couple of musicians or something like that. In the meantime I’d been collecting some stuff – I’m not quite sure what it was. Quarantine had ended and everyone was out on the streets. There was a big cinema complex and I was walking through it with stuff in my hat. And the thing that I remember was a really really familiar voice said “just leave it up here against the wall, Eric”. I looked round and it was a guitarist who I knew. I can’t think whether it was that Mike Averill or Sherman Downey – someone like that. He said it quite clearly in his voice that I could hear it in my sleep “just leave it here, Eric” and it was the surprise of the realism of the voice and how I heard it that awoke me
I was in a office last night working and the place was in a total tip as you might expect. There was a girl sitting next to me at my desk. She was going through all my papers and there was a load of stuff I didn’t want her to see because it was quite personal. I asked her what she was doing and she replied that she was looking for a file or a letter. I asked which one and she told me that it was in connection with an accident that I had had with a Woolworths van or lorry 18 months ago. She was going some kind of survey on it. She said “I thought that would be in the International file”. I said “no, for if it involved two people of the same nation it would be in the national, not the international one” so I had to go and fetch the file. There were papers everywhere in a big bundle and I thought that i would come back to sort these out. Then I got to thinking that I’m not going to be able to cope with all of this. I’ve probably had enough. I decided more-or-less on the spot that I was going to retire. It was only 2 days to the end of the month so I thought that at the end of the month I would retire and that would be that.

So after all of that, it’s pretty pointless going to bed early, isn’t it?

But as an aside, looking at where I’ve been during the last couple of nights, anyone would think that I had something of a preoccupation with this virus that’s going round. But that’s not the case at all.

It’s true to say that I’m being more careful than I otherwise would be, but I’m not taking this situation as intently or as keenly as some others, that’s for sure. Being engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the illness that I have, this virus thing is just another complication to add to an already-complicated tangle of affairs.

After breakfast I had a go at a couple of albums – tracking down the digital sound files and sorting them out.

And then, after a shower (the first for a few days) I headed out to town.

On my way out of the medieval walled city I stopped to have a look over the wall to see what was going on, as I had heard the crane in operation.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw Normandy Trader here in port the other day. And here she is, unloading another pile of what looks like shellfish and taking on board a load of timber as a return load to the Channel islands.

It was another quick turn-round too. When I went out in the evening, she was long-gone. She clearly doesn’t want to hang around with these current health issues going on.

My route into town took me down the Rampe du Monte A Regret

Over the past few months I’ve been seeing workmen there ripping out the vegetation that’s been growing in the cracks between the stones, but today I noticed that they’ve been repointing the joints.

This will look quite nice when it’s all done, but I wish that they would spend more of their time dealing with the bits of wall that are actually falling down.

We’ve seen plenty of those just recently.

As I was going past the laboratory, I called in to see where they had got to with my blood test results. They’d completed the examinations and had posted the results, but of course the post is somewhat sporadic these days.

They gave me a copy so I could review it at my leisure. My blood count is at 9.3, which is quite a surprise to most people because when I last had treatment – two months ago, it was 8.8.

We’ve seen in the past that the results from the hospital and the results from the laboratory differ considerably, and nothing seems to have changed right now. I know that the blood count can fluctuate, but surely not by this much.

There weren’t too many people in LIDL this morning so we didn’t have to queue outside. They didn’t seem to be short of very much at all (except pizza bases – I wonder why there’s a run on those right now) so I did what I needed, as well as buying a metre rule with spirit level and a few other accessories. A baguette too, seeing as my favourite boulanger is still closed.

Back here there was time to deal witha couple more albums before lunch, and also 20 or so photos from July 2019. Dynjandi and the Arnarfjördu were the places for which I was trying to remember the names yesterday.

After lunch I finished off the notes for the two radio projects on which i’m working, dictated them, and started on the editing.

To my chagrin I could have made much more progress than I did, but

I was in discussion for some of the time with Laurent about our Grande Marée Virtuelle – I have some lines to learn
I … errr … went off with the fairies for a good half-hour. And a proper one too – hardly surprising after my last couple of nights but disappointing all the same.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and then I stopped for tea. A slice of that tofu and lentil pie from February with jacket potates, veg and gravy.

While it was cooking in the oven, I sorted out all of the carrots that I had bought on Saturday, washed scrubbed, diced and then blanched them

By this time my tea was ready. And it was followed by a slice of apple pie with vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce. Thoroughly delicious.

Out on my walk this evening, I missed the sunset.

The sky was a beautiful red though, so I suppose that it’s better than nothing. And while I was admiring it was when I was accosted by the aforementioned young lady.

Bad news when I had my shower this morning. I seemed to have gained 800 grams since the weekend and that’s no good at all. As a consequence I put in no fewer than four runs tonight. I have to get things under control

Another thing that I need to do is to have a good sleep. It won’t be as long as last night’s, unfortunately, but it will still do me good.

But I wonder where I’ll finish up tonight?

Tuesday 31st March 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that the other day I mentioned that people have been posting saying that small fishing boats are prevented from going out to sea, whereas the larger ones are being given free rein.

At the time, I mentioned that that wasn’t the case here. And here is a case in point. One of the little fishing boats that goes out for the shellfish is coming in tonight with a full load.

And I watched it go up to the cranes by the fish processing plant to unload. So there’s no doubt in my mind that they are working here.

And while we’re on the subject of working, my plan for an early night last night wasn’t working at all unfortunately. Some good music came up on the playlist, as you might expect, and while that was playing itself out to a conclusion an interesting debate started up in one of the social networking groups that I follow, on a subject upon which I have a lot to say.

What should have been about 23:00 or so ended up being 00:45 and that kind of thing is no good at all.

This morning I missed the third alarm – but only by a handful of seconds but missed it nevertheless.

There was the usual morning procedure – first the medication and then the dictaphone. And no wonder that I had a hard time leaving the bed. I must have travelled miles during the night.

There was something going on during the night about a girl in Nantwich in one of the houses up by the Grammar School. She had put a note on Facebook that she was on her own in her house with a couple of friends and and so a party from Sartilly of all places, a group of kids hired a minibus and turned up at the house and created mayhem. As it happens, I was actually by the house and saw all of this happen so I was telling a few people all about it, describing the events.
A little later on my mother was involved in something or other although I can’t remember now what that was either. It was something to do with going to pick her up from a place in Catherine Street where she was working. I had to get all ready, get in my car, drive across to there. As I got there everyone was leaving and they were locking up the place. She saw me “you haven’t come to pick me up, have you?”. I said “wasn’t that what you wanted when you sent me that mail?” to which everyone burst out laughing. We had to climb up these steps to get out of this building which was in the basement. I got her umbrella and it was getting in the way, hitting everyone and so on. That’s all that I remember.
Then we were having people around and then news about this virus outbreak came up and everyone was told to go home. There were these people sitting in an album cover (?!?!?) waiting for a person to move their album but of course they were there so they were having to be isolated on the spot where they were, never mind having to go home and be isolated in comfort.
Somewhat later I was walking somewhere with these two people, official-looking type people. I can’t remember what was going on here, they wanted me to do something and I wasn’t going to do it and I told them that they couldn’t make me do it anyway. But one of them picked up a great big rock and started hitting me with this great big rock, not that it made the slightest bit of difference at all because he was a big guy but he didn’t have any force at all behind it – just swinging this rock at me and hitting me with it. It wasn’t hurting me at all – I just carried on walking and all the time this guy was swinging this rock at me and hitting me with it. In the end I became fed up and called the police. They saw me phone and cleared off. A woman and her child had been watching all of this so I buttonholed them and said that they would need to tell the Police what they had seen, but they were most reluctant to become involved.

Yes, I covered some ground last night.

After breakfast it was the turn of the digitalising, and another four albums have bitten the dust, including one about which I had completely forgotten and yet would ordinarily be another on my list of top 20 albums.

The pile is slowly reducing.

While I was doing it, I was dealing with the photos from July last year in Iceland but not very effectively because there were plenty of distractions with one thing and another. I ended up, not paying attention, downloading a few *.mkv files and I came to regret that.

What with one thing and another (and once you make a start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are) it was about midday when I was ready to make a move.

No bread in the house (well, there is some, but it’s in the freezer) so it was a good excuse to go for my daily exercise.

Not that I got very far because out at sea there was something rather large moving about. So I took a photo of it to blow up (the photo, not the object) when I returned to the apartment.

And it’s merely a couple of fishing boats of some description, and one of them has just hit a really wild wave and sent spray flying everywhere. It was windy, but not that windy, I thought.

Just as I said earlier, there doesn’t seem to be a restriction on the smaller boats going out to sea here.

That’s the fish-processing plant over there and there are several boats lined up, some using the cranes to winch it up to the plant above, and others unloading straight into their vehicles on the lower level.

So I’ve no idea at all where this story has come from.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw Thora here in port doing a turn-round to Jersey.

Today, it’s the turn of the other Jersey freighter, Normandy Trader, to come into port and turn round. A quick turn-round too, by the way, because when I was out later on, she had been and gone and disappeared

But what won’t be disappearing is the Channel Island ferry Granville, here in port, and her partner Victor Hugo, wherever she might be. The story is that the ferries have now been grounded until the end of April.

That was bad news for a couple in a Jersey-registered mobile home who came into town, presumably looking for a way out.

having picked up my baguette, just for a change I climbed back all the way up the steps – all 148 of them – for the Escalier du Moulin A Vent.

In the distance I’d seen something moving and I wondered what it might be. We’ve seen plenty of little fishing boats out and about doing their bit, and I was wondering about the large ones. And that’s certainly one of the large ones heading to port.

There was no-one around so I had a run along the north side of the walls. And to my surprise I ran on – and on – and on. Not sure how far but it was much further than what I normally do.

After lunch, I made a start on finding the tracks for the Project 36. I want to have two done this week, the music chosen and then I can do the writing and the dictation all in one go.

And it was a productive day as far as it went because I’d almost finished when Laurent came back with his ideas about our project. That meant that I had to drop everything and do some important work on that, including, would you believe, some seagull sound effects.

When I’d done that, I had to send it back to Laurent with a proposed batting order

At 18:00 I knocked off and had an hour on the guitars. I’d come across a couple more tracks on my travels that I was interested in having a go at, and I’m glad that I did because one of them, I’d been playing from memory but in a totally incorrect fashion.

Tea was a burger on a bun with potatoes and veg, followed by apple pie and coconut soya dessert stuff. And it was delicious as usual.

Earlier in the day, I’d seen a couple of people leap over the fence into the athletics ground of the College Malraux behind the Gymnase Jean Galfione.

It seemed to me to be a good idea – it’s nice and flat and a good running surface and it might do me good to have a go around it. However there were a couple of people around overlooking the place so it probably wasn’t a good idea right now.

But anyway, I’d run down here and it’s further than I would usually run, so that would probably do for now.

It was still fairly light this evening when I was outside.

A lovely evening, and it was a shame that I couldn’t enjoy more of it. But there were more fishing boats out there heading to harbour, and I was impressed that the NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens could pick them up at that distance.

The photo came out rather well, considering, and I enjoyed the effect that it produced. I’ve had better, but I’ve also had a lot worse.

Round on the other side of the headland there were a couple of things of interest to see.

Still out two trawlers up on blocks in the Chantier navale, but more important is the fact that Joly France and Chausiais have changed position.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been wondering about how the people on the Ile de Chausey are managing right now. With the two ships having changed position, I wonder if this means that Chausiais has taken a load of supplies out to the island. It’s what she’s here for, apparently, although it’s a lot of money invested in what is never going to be a lucrative trade on its own.

Having finished the photos, I ran back to the apartment. I started my run about 30 yards earlier than usual, but even so, still overran at the end and made a few steps up the hill. I’m definitely improving, although how long that will last I really have no idea.

There’s been a little change round in here now too. Having had difficulties with my sound system, I’ve managed – sort of – to have two speakers (of different sets) working after a fashion so there is something like stereo sound in here.

But it’s going to have to be replaced. A small pre-amp that plugs into the headphone speaker and then two decent speakers. For what I do, I need it.

So it’s bedtime now. Later than I wanted, but much earlier than last night. A good sleep will do me good and then I’m ready for a hard day tomorrow.

I don’t think.

Monday 30th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… why but I’ve had a much better day today that I’ve had for a while.

It didn’t start off very well though. I missed the alarms and was about 10 minutes late leaving my bed, and that was disappointing.

And after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. That was disappointing too. We were having some kind of football training session last night but I don’t remember very very much about them whatsoever.

Something of a wasted effort.

And so I started on the file splitting. It might have been straightforward, evan though a couple of tracks didn’t work out and I had to hunt around for some other versions which might (or might not) be the correct ones seeing as the times don’t really correspond so well.

But for some reason that only they will know, it took AAAAAGGGGEEEEESSSSS to download them and I would have been really fed up, except that while I was doing it I attacked the July 2019 photos.

And it was just as well because I managed about 50 of them, and I’m now just about skirting the tip of north-west Iceland with a hell of a long way to go still. I’m glad that I started the numbering by using four digits for I feel that I’m going to need them all.

There was a pause for breakfast of course, and once the digitalising was finished for today, I had my audio diary to do.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned this before. We are living in times the like of which the world hasn’t seen since the Black Death epidemic of the 1340s and in 100 or 200 years people (if there are any still alive) will be looking at this period with the same kind of intensity that we look at the Black Death.

In the Black Death, everyone had his or her own little stories and while one or two are remembered, from authors of the day or from anecdotes that were passed around, but the ordinary common people were in the main unable to read and write, and their stories were lost for ever.

For that reason, we at the radio have decided to keep an audio diary and we’ll be preparing various radio programmes as we go along to broadcast our stories.

One or two other people from various places have agreed to participate, and if you would like to take part in this project, send me a brief note using the contact button, bottom-right.

With still some time left, I started on Project 035 but broke off for lunch after a short while.

After lunch, I finished off the choice of music, except for the last track of course (which regular readers of this rubbish will recall is always the very last thing to do) and then turned my attention to more exciting things.

Laurent and I had been talking on and off during the day about our Grande Marée programme, and he came up with a couple of really good ideas. That meant that I had to go off on another path to hunt down various items and he sent me something that will be absolutely brilliant with a little editing.

In the end I managed to do something of a test run and he’ll get back to me tomorrow with what he thinks.

By now it was 18:00 and I broke off for a play on the guitar. I had a good go too although I’m beginning to realise that half an hour on the 6-string and half an hour on the bass just isn’t enough. Not sure how I’m going to fit in any more time though.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with rice followed by a slice of my delicious apple pie. It really is nice too and I’m very pleased with that one.

Tonight’s walk was something of an improvised choice seeing as there aren’t all that many places to go. I managed two runs and each one I pushed on an extra 20-25 metres. “Not a lot” I hear you say, but the fact is that the last extra bits were uphill, and up quite a steep hill too, so I’m impressed with that.

Where I ended up was on the grass by the car park in the boulevard Vaufleury. I’d been reading reports from somewhere that smaller boats weren’t being allowed out to fish, but there’s one down there that’s unloading at the fish-processing plant even as we speak.

So I don’t know where this news has come from

But there’s excitement at the chantier navale tonight.

Over the past few weeks, regular readers of this rubbish will recall looking at the progress being made on the overhaul of Charles Marie in the chantier navale. But she’s not there now. The ground’s all flat. She must have gone back into the water.

But it’s still busy in there. We’ve acquired another trawler so there are now two of them in there receiving attention.

Keeping their social distance, I hope.

Anyway, now it’s bedtime. To my amazement, and probably to yours too, I haven’t crashed out at all today. In fact, I’ve been feeling quite lively.

No idea what I did but I wish I could remember because I need to do it again. And more often too!

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

… were wondering whether today was any better than yesterday, the answer is “I don’t know. I missed half of it”.

And that’s no exaggeration either. It might only … “only, he said” – ed … have been 11:00 when I awoke, but it was 12:05 when I finally heaved myself out of bed this mor … errr … afternoon.

So that was basically the day ruined.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said … “on many occasions” – ed … that everyone should have one day each week when they can do nothing and not be ashamed of the fact, but as far as I’m concerned that was yesterday. I was hoping to be much more focused today.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And I’d certainly been much more focused during the night, that’s for sure.

Last night I had started off with Laurence and Roxanne when Nerina put in an appearance and wasn’t very happy to see me. It was an evening when I was on my own. The next morning along came Laurence and Roxanne and they had come to see me too. Nerina had turned up by accident by the way. As it happened there was some kind of swimming regatta so we got Roxanne to take part in this. It was like a swimming obstacle race. Of course she leapt in the water and went right round this obstacle race but something happened on the very last section and she had to be lifted out and whatever happened was put right and she had to jump back in. But they wouldn’t let her do the underwater somersault but we were urging her on to go back and do it. In the end she turned round and swam back but they wouldn’t let her do it so she swam away. Laurence went to fetch her. As we were walking back to our little spec of seats and Nerina walked past us with a scowl on her face and said “we met yesterday” and just walked off. Laurence came back and Roxanne was crying, really disappointed and we put her on a shelf. In the end she got off this shelf and went to stand up where we were sitting. These two girls who were using this shelf were having a bit of, well, not a moan but going on about how Roxanne had got their shelf wet but Roxanne said “I was sitting on the one above where there were just things” and not where they were sitting.
Some time later I was doing one of these extraordinary exploration things that come on the TV every now and again about phenomena. There had been a helicopter crash in a small village and it had been one of these normal things but suddenly a white stain had appeared on the parapet of a bridge and people wanted to know what it was. They were all so suspicious about it being the sign of the Gods or something. We went to track it down, a woman and I, and I had a look round and I could see that there was some kind of watercourse where rain water had been flowing out of a field discreety onto the road. This had changed its course since the accident. You could see that there was some discolouring in the earth of this little watarcourse that had made the earth go a lot whiter than the earth of the soil. Se we suspected that the crash had changed this watercourse slightly and it was just a natural phenomenon that the water was now flowing through where it never flowed before and was percolating up some kind of hidden fissure in the bridge. Then we were prowling around a churchyard. Someone else in Cheshire had observed a fire in the sky that went on for weeks in the direction of the Gobi Desert and the Sahara Desert about 150 years before any explorer had actually been there. We were walking around this churchyard and there was someone’s visitor book there and a page had blown off it that was a report about “St Anne’s Day” or a diary page for St Anne’s Day. It had blown onto the floor so I picked it up and put it back on the lectern and put a kind of embossed stone on top to hold it on. The woman with me said something like “we haven’t come here to change things around, have we?” all this kind of thing. I said “no, I’m just putting things back where they had blown from”. She was going on about changing things round and taking things away. Of course we weren’t doing that at all.

Breakfast at 13:15 is a much more reasonable way to go about things on a Sunday, and then I attacked the music.

Another four albums split up and filed without two many problems – just one album where a couple of tracks wouldn’t work and I had to hunt them down elsewhere which took some time.

While they were doing, I was catching up by working on the photos for July 2019. I’m now in Rif setting out on my walk to the Svodufoss waterfall and I remember that walk very well. The waterfall looked as if it was just a couple of fields away and it was too, but no-one said that there was a big river in the way so we had to walk in large figure “Z” shape to reach it. My fitbit at the end of the day showed 12.4 kms and I felt every step of the way.

Another thing that I did was to join up all of the speech files for the Grande Marée broadcast and intersperse the joins with beach ambience soundfiles. As for the speech, I’ve asked Laurent if he will do an introduction and a conclusion and he’ll get back to me. When he replies, I’ll see what he has to say and I’ll do a brief text for the other intervals.

Then of course, there was the hour on the guitar. Mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I had something of a bake-in.

With needing the oven for the pizza I’ve been baking desserts in there every Sunday evening and tonight, having remembered the cooking apples yesterday, I made an apple pie.

And with the left-over pastry and left-over apple, I rolled out the pastry and squared it off, added the apple and desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar, and made an apple turnover.

The pizza was delicious of course, and so was the apple turnover with the soya coconut. I shall be attacking the pie as from tomorrow evening and I have high hopes.

With being distracted by the time and all that, it was very late when I went outside for my exercise.

And my first run was a dismal failure. There was a gale blowing out there that was the equal of some of the best that we have had and trying to walk around in many places was impossible. If you wonder why this image was so blurred, the fact is that I was being blown around in a Force 10 gale at the moment that I pressed the shutter.

Liz had told me earlier that the wind was coming from Greenland and that I ought to complain to Heidinnguaq. Well, I dunno about where it was coming from but I know exactly where it was going and it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

Finding a spot that was out of the wind I managed a run in the end.

And that led me down a new alley that I hadn’t walked before. The rue des Degres. So at least all of this stuff is broadening my horizons.

Back here, I wrote up my journal as I listened to some music. It didn’t take me long because of course there wasn’t much to write.

It’s still late though so I’m heading to bed. It’s a busy week next week because I have two rock music projects to do, an audio diary to write and then to finish off this Grande Marée thing when Laurent lets me have his notes.

No matter what I do, the work still keeps on piling up, doesn’t it?

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

… seagull!

“So what’s exciting about a seagull?” I hear you ask. After all, there must be thousands of them loitering around here one way or another.

The answer is that it’s not necessarily the bird, but have a close look underneath it and you’ll see something dropping from it.

No, it’s not that, although it may well be, given the number of gulls around here. The bird has a shellfish and it’s flying over the concrete apron by the fish processing plant and the stone boat ramp, and it’s dropping the shellfish onto the hard surface in order to break the shell and eat the contents.

It’s had a few goes at it already and I imagine that it’ll keep on doing it until the shell breaks. But it’s just amazing to me how quickly the local wildlife adapts to the man-made environment. It’s much more convenient than dropping the shellfish on the rocks.

Just for a change these days, I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning. Not by much, but beat it I did and that was good news. Especially as it was gone 00:30 when I went to bed and so I’d had less than 6 hours sleep.

Following the medication and my nice new orange and ginger cordial, it was time to attack the dictaphone. There was a group of us doing something and it involved being out on a boat. The boat came to grief in some way or other – I can’t remember how – but the guy in charge said that it was due to our own fault, that we hadn’t taken any safety precautions like sending out a boat first to check on the crossing and check on the bit that we were having to cross over before we all leapt on board and sailed off. There would have been more to this as well but I actually had a shocking attack of cramp in my leg and awoke with a hell of a start.

After breakfast I attacked the digital sound-file splitting. Three of them went fine, according to plan, but the fourth – well …

It’s a very rare album so I doubt that I’ll get to find to what the master copy that I have relates. It doesn’t match anything at all that I have found so far. I’ve untangled it as best as I can and I’ll have to see about the rest.

But for some unknown reason, that knocked me right out of my stride and I just couldn’t get going at all today. As far as anything else goes, it’s been a very wasted day today and I’m rather disappointed with myself.

Mind you, I suppose that I have every reason to be disappointed. I’ve had some very disheartening news.

Not that I have said very much to very many people but I actually managed to find a freighter that would take me across the Atlantic from Ijmuiden in the Netherlands to Burns Harbor, one of the outports of Chicago, all the way down the St Lawrence and right through the Great Lakes, at the end of July.

It’s a trip that the ship does every month, so I had booked a passage on it as a way of getting to North America this autumn, and as it happens, on the return journey it refuels in Montreal so I’d made arrangements to be picked up in Montreal at the end of October to sail back to Europe.

But the long and the short of it is that I had a mail today telling me that the journey is cancelled. No surprise there – just a desperate disappointment. I was so looking forward to this.

On that sad note, I went outside for my morning walk to pick up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline.

There were a few people out there enjoying the pleasant, if windy morning. And there was also quite a considerable amount of shipping out there today. It wasn’t easy to identify them from up here so I took a speculative photo.

When I get back home I can blow up the image and have a look to see who’s out there.

At first glance, I had thought that one of the boats out there resembled La Grande Ancre.

But that’s not the case. It must be a fishing boat with a similar sikhouette. And how do I know that? Well, because right at that moment La Grande Ancre came sailing … “dieseling” – ed … around the headland on her way out to sea.

Right on cue, I reckon. She couldn’t have timed it any better.

But I do like this photo. Despite the distance at which it was taken, it’s come out rather well and I’m pleased with that.

They weren’t the only boats out there either.

Close on the heels of La Grande Ancre came this really nice yacht enjoying the windy weather and having a good run out in the sun.

And how I envied him. My own little nautical jaunt having been cancelled, I need to find some other way to take to the water this year, and I’ve no idea how I’m going to do that.

But then, there’s always a plan somewhere

And talking of the answer, here’s the answer – or, at least, part of the answer – to the question of which boats were out there in mid-Channel just now.

Out of the doom and gloom and mist and fog and haze comes Chausiais, heading into port. It looks very much as if she’s been out on the earlu morning tide to take a delivery to the Ile de Chausey and is now on her way home before the tide goes too far out.

It’s not very often that we are lucky enough to see her out at sea. She doesn’t seem to go out very much but I imagine that all of thzt will change pretty soon

The tide is out at the moment and the harbour gates are shut. That means that I can take the short cut across the path on top of the gates.

Over the last few days we’ve seen La Granvillaise up on blocks in the chantier navale but she was released the other day. She’s now here in the harbour, moored up in the space next to Spirit of Conrad in the space where Charles-Marie would be, were she not up on blocks in the chantier navale.

This harbour is going to become very congested in due course, with all of the pontoons that they are installing.

And talking of the installation of the pontoons, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday they started installing the second row of pontoon support pillars in the harbour.

This batch is going to be on the south side of the floating harbour, so one of the things that I wanted to do was to see how they are getting on with it.

The answer is that they don’t seem to have made all that much progress over the course of the morning. There’s still just the one pillar in position and there doesn’t seem to be anyone about doing anythign with anything else.

And with there being no-one about, I took the opportunity to have a peek in their compound to see how many more pillars there are to install. I mean – I imagine that all of those here are here to be used.

And what we have left are three large pillars, a smaller one that looks like it’s off the floating pontoon and is calibrated in some way, presumably for depth, and an offcut of about 10 or 12 feet.

What they are going to be doing with the offcut is a mystery that has drawn my attention for now. But basically, it looks as if we are going to be having one row of five pillars and another row of four, although in truth I’ve long-since given up trying to calculate the logic behind what these people are doing.

They were expecting me in La Mie Caline so I didn’t hang around long, and there was nothing to detain me on my climb back home.

After lunch, I had another attack at the sound files that we had recorded during our visit to the Grande Marée but my heart wasn’t in it and I found myself falling asleep – not once but twice – and in the same place in the recording both times too. I really must pull myself together.

To break up the monotony and try to find some enthusiasm and motivation from somewhere, I went for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds of people out there on the lawn by the lighthouse enjoying the view but my attention was elsewhere because the tide was quite out and the bay was pretty deserted. Hardly a drop of water anywhere.

Of course, this merits a photo. It doesn’t get like this every day. Probably half a dozen times each year the tide goes this low.

Roud by the chantier navale, I went to see what was happening down there.

Charles-Marie is still there and the guy working on it is still there on the skyjack hacking a few more lumps out of the side of her.

It looks as if it’s going to be a long job and she’ll be there for a while. But she’ll be a whole different ship when she comes out and I can’t wait for the moment when I’ll be able to have a close-up view of her – whenever that might be.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen on many occasions photos of people taking photos and, on one or two occasions, photos of people taking photos of people taking photos.

Today, on the grassy lawn on the boulevard Vaufleury, overlooked by our old friend the Corsair Pleville le Pelley, is another group of people having their photo taken by someone armed with a tripod.

It would probably be a good idea for me to make more use of mine every now and again, if only the wind would subside.

Back here, I ordered a new memory card for the big NIKON D500. As well as taking SD cards, it also takes XQD cards in a different slot.

These are expensive but are much better quality so I’ve ordered one and it should be here in a couple of days. Then I can see whether it’s the SD card aperture that’s faulty or whether it’s something more crucial.

But I was still unable to find the motivation that I needed to do this project and rather than waste the day completely I edited a pile of photos from July 2019 when I was on my way to Iceland on board the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour.

Tea was another “anything curry” with the leftovers lengthened with some lentils. It was quite delicious too. Apple pie and vegan ice cream for afters, and I remembered the chocolate sauce too.

No-one about for the evening run tonight. I managed three lengths too, having to lengthen my walk due to not having done enough on the morning walk. And I wasn’t as out of breath as I might have been either

No photos either. I was being rather optimistic with my ambitions, and they didn’t work out well enough. But you live and learn.

Anyway, bed-time. And i’m hoping for a good sleep tonight. A nice long voyage too, in pleasant company. I need cheering up and I always seem to have much more fun and excitement in my life during the night than ever I do during the day.

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

The day when we have one of the greatest tidal differences of the year.

There’s what they call the “tidal coefficient” – the difference between high tide and low tide. It varies quite considerably but once it starts getting into the 80s and 90s you know that it’s going to be a good one.

And today, the tidal coefficient was .. errr … 117. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Why this is important is because at very low tide, the public areas of the shellfish beds are accessible. Shellfish of all descriptions is something very important here and there’s a great deal of commercial exploitation with clearly defined areas that the commercial operators lease.

But beyond those areas, it’s a free-for-all and just about anyone has the right to hunt for shellfish there, with certain restrictions. Of course, these areas are usually under water so they aren’t accessible. But on the days when there is a great tidal coefficient, the public can reach there quite easily.

And so they do – in droves as you can see.

They were not alone, because a couple of intrepid reporters from the local internet radio station were out there as well, interviewing the people and finding out what was going on.

And we (because, dear reader, I was one of them) picked up loads of hints, learned a few good recipes, and met a couple of guys who were having a picnic on the rocks, with fresh oysters.

And it’s not true, what they say about oysters. They aren’t aphrodisiacs at all. I had a dozen on my wedding night and only nine of them worked.

Talking of working, I haven’t really done much in the way of working today. I had a really busy night, as I discovered when I looked at the dictaphone after my medication.

There was something happening about school last night with a lot of people. I was there with a former classmate and one or two other people. We were in trenches, bogged down and were being fired at. A voice from the other side saying “everyone who is still alive, stand up and let’s see you”. Of course I had no intention whatever of standing up and being seen for I knew exactly what would happen, so we didn’t. They were still shouting, all this kind of thing, from over there. I had some peaches or pineapple chunks or something and was eating them. I spilled some syrup all over the place while I was doing this so I had to scout around for something. I came across a towel from one of the girls – it might have been another one of my former classmates so I said to my friend something like “she will have to come and share yours tonight” meaning to share his bed. But yes, well … as a kind of joke. He said “but most of the girls are going home tonight because there’s something going on at home and there will be very few people left here tonight”. Of course I was staying and I thought that that would give me an opportunity to get my hands on Percy Penguin and get her to spend the night with me
A little later it was back to a dream that I’d had earlier, something to do with the Germans again. I was being shadowed into this underground station. I could see that there were two of them, a man and a woman rather like Colonel Gruber and his female associate in ‘Allo ‘Allo. They were surveying me so I ended up tearing down to the platform, making sure that they were on there and step onto the train as it pulled in, then stepping off the train just as the doors were about to close so that they were stuck on it and it disappeared off into the tunnel. I had to think whether there was anyone else that I had noticed who might have been with them. But there wasn’t so I thought that I would head back outside again. At that moment another German came down with a squad of soldiers and started to say something, which inevitably was about the people on the train. “Get the people off the train”. He was told that the train had departed, which was quite evident but he was not having any of this. I was thinking to myself “well, I’d got rid of those two people but I really need to get away before they come back and find me”. But anyway … So I was somewhere and there was a girl in here with me as well but I didn’t really know exactly where, anyway. There was something to do with bass guitar in this part – Graham Simpson of Roxy Music with his EB3 like mine. He was one of the musicians who was involved with this somewhere. but I’m not quite sure where
And later still I finally got my hands on TOTGA. There were special offers on the ferries to Europe so I rang her up to tell her about it but she’d booked a ferry to Ireland and she was telling me all about Ireland. I asked if she was going from Stranraer to Larne and she said “yes” that very evening, so I thought that she would have to get a move on because it’s a 5-hour drive to Stranraer. I was walking on an island somewhere. I can’t remember who was with me but we were following the two ships – a passenger ferry was leaving and there was a freighter that was leaving behind it. I was telling TOTGA this but I was getting all the names of ships mixed up all the time and she was having to correct me, even though she didn’t know the place and didn’t know the ships, anything like that. It was really quite funny. But anyway she was going to ireland and not coming to France

It’s hardly surprising that i was too worn out to do too much today, after all that.

After breakfast I sat down to deal with some of the splitting of the soundfiles that I’d downloaded. And that wasn’t straightforward because not one of them was correct.

Two of them had extra tracks that weren’t marked on the track lists so I had to hunt down which ones they were. For a third one, the timing just didn’t correspond at all with what I knew, and it turned out that I’d somehow managed to acquire a special studio original master before it had been edited down. That might be an exciting curio but it was a pain to work with.

As for the fourth, in the end I gave up trying to deal with it and managed to track down a different copy that, I hope, might be more accurate.

Once I’d done that, I spent an hour or so doing some tidying up. I know that Neitzsche famously said “out of chaos comes order” but Neitzsche never visited my apartment. But anyway, it now looks as if someone lives here.

That was the cue to nip into town and La Mie Caline for my dejeunette for lunch, stopping to chat to a neighbour on the way – the same neighbour whom I had met yesterday.

And it looks as if my assumption of two rows of four pillars isn’t correct. There they were this morning installing a fifth pillar in the same row as the preceding four.

So this is going to have to be another thing for me to observe over the next few days or so to see what they are actually going to be doing.

But whatever they were doing with the scaffolding down on Marité’s berth, they must have done it.

They seem to have folded up their tents and disappeared quietly into the night, or some such, because the scaffolding has now disappeared and Marité is now back where she ought to be.

As for me, I pushed on down to La Mie Caline, picked up my bread and came home to my apartment.

After lunch, I still had half an hour so I cracked on with my radio project and almost managed to finish it.

But my oppo came bang on time and, gathering up my material, we set off for the rocks. And I made an important discovery too. I have a headphone-splitter, which means that I can plug two headphones into one headphone socket.

And it also works with microphones too so we could use two microphones with the Zoom H1 and that’s really what I call progress.

We spent about an hour and a half down there talking to people and I ended up with about 30 minutes of speech, which will need to be edited down. Laurent is going to interview the Police to have a statement about what is and what isn’t permitted during the peche à pied and once we have that, I’ll prepare another radio programme.

On the way back, we stuck our noses into the chantier navale because we had heard some sounds coming from there that didn’t seem to be very healthy to us.

It turns out that in the chantier navale they are down to just three boats, and if they carry on much longer like this on Charles-Marie they’ll be down to two because there’s a guy there going berserk with a crowbar and ripping off huge chunks of wood.

There’s this feeling going through my mind that this is going to be very interesting.

After all of this excitement we went for a coffee and watched the pile-driver pounding away at the fifth column in the harbour.

Laurent then went home and I came back here to finish off my radio project. That’s now done, 1 hour exactly and even though I say it myself, it’s going to be a pretty good one. At least I hope so.

For tea tonight, I fancied something a little different so I found a slice of pie in the freezer. That went into the oven with some potatoes and I cooked some veg (I forgot the leek) and gravy.

The gravy is new stuff that I found in NOZ. It’s ok when you add herbs to it, but it doesn’t thicken. I had to make a quick cornflour paste for that. And the result was quite acceptable.

Pudding was yet more pie – of the apple variety, with the last of the coconut dessert stuff and some of that vegan ice cream – and I forgot the chocolate sauce.

But as I have said before … “many times” – ed … I really am eating well these days.

That was the cue to go for my evening walk. No-one around so I managed both my runs, although I have been managing them better just recently.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the past year or so we’ve been watching them do some work on an old house in the Place Cambernon. For the last while it’s been without a front.

But today, I notice that it has acquired one. And this is good news. Things are progressing around here on the accommodation front. And not before time too, as I found out when I moved here and so did my neighbour, so she said.

So hours later than intended, i’m off to bed. I must stop listening to all this music. It’s doing me no good whatsoever and just keeping me awake at night.

Tuesday 10th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT!

It WAS a good idea to go out early this morning to have a look at the gravel boat that had arrived during the night to make sure that it was indeed Neptune that had honoured us with her presence.

As you can see, here she is all fully loaded and deep in the wtaer and all of the hatches are battened down. It’s round about 16:00 and she’s not even been in the harbour 24 hours.

This could well be one of the quickest turn-rounds that we have seen.

At something like 10:40 this morning when I was out and about to see what was going on, she was nothing at all like in the previous photo.

Loading hadn’t been on the go for long, as you can see. They’ve started loading from the stern and working down towards the bow, she’s well-down at the stern and the bow is quite high out of the water.

That’s a clear indication that they haven’t been going long and they have about 2200 tonnes of gravel to put in her.

This morning, to my surprise, i was awake at about 05:20. But not for long, though. I was soon back to sleep.

Even more surprisingly, I managed to beat the third alarm yet again. That shows a kind of courage and determination that I thought that I’d lost.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And there was plenty to go at on there. I’d been a busy boy during the night.

At some point during the night I’d awoken to find myself telling a story about some kind of radio programme that I’d been doing that involved travelling on a ship. I was recounting this story and when I reached the end I suddenly found that the day was wrong. It wasn’t in fact going out on the day that I thought it was. The ship was going out some other day so I ended up having to retrace my steps and come back again. It was all extremely weird because it was all so lifelike while I was recounting this story.
Later on I was in some town in between Cologne and Frankfurt and had to go to meet either Jackie or Alison – I can’t remember who. The idea was that I would catch the TGV – there would be one quite regularly between the two, or was it Vienna? Might have been Vienna even I dunno. There would be some kind of TGV regularly between them. I had to start making enquiries but I found that the town where I was staying, there was no TGV. It didn’t stop. I had to go all the way back to Cologne or Stuttgart or somewhere to get onto the train. I thought “this can’t be right”. There must be some kind of local train between here and wherever the other person was. So I started to make enquiries. I found a little station where I could conceivably get a train back to Stuttgart and then get the TGV down there. So I started t think about doing this. Then I suddenly looked at my watch and it was 13:54 and I had to be down there for 17:00. I’d let all this time lapse so I thought that the only way that I was going to get down there is to drive down there. But then I had the problem of leaving my car ad that’s going to be extremely awkward. I was in a library while all this was going on and of course there were some books on display that I wanted to sit and read. In the meantime all kinds of things were going through my head about what would happen if I left my vehicle unattended wherever I was supposed to be and would it be painless about the parking, all that kind of thing. In the end I was totally overwhelmed by all this kind of thing
And at another stage of the proceedings I’d been with another friend of mine again, one who featured a short while ago. We’d been wandering around all the clubs. There was a snooker club place that we went to, a sports club and we went in there again and there was a TV. We thought about watching the football so he was flicking through the channels on the TV trying to find the football but we couldn’t seem to find it. There was some guy, a young guy, sitting there trying to watch something as well but he wasn’t finding anything so we ended up talking to him. He was a down-and-out kind of person. Again it was a case of time running out and we needed to be somewhere else.

There was more to it than that, but as you are probably eating your tea or something right now, I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

After breakfast I attacked the digital sound-file splitting. Two of them were straightforward – quite easy in fact. The third was more complicated as it contained more than it should have done. That involved tracking down through about 20 studio reference files until I found the reference to the version that I had.

But as for the fourth, it was a very obscure album to start with, from 1966 from a record company that has long-since disappeared featuring a couple of artists who have disowned their work from this period.

Reference to the album itself helped me unravel some of it but the rest was … well … not easy. I’ve managed to find a discography of the work of the artists and looking in the tracks for the phrases that represent the titles (it’s a good job that it wasn’t an instrumental) I reckon that I’ve managed to do it justice.

There’s still no clue as to what this master tape relates to, but I’ve now ended up with a very rare, and very special version of Julie Driscoll singing “This Wheel’s On Fire” long before Bob Dylan actually recorded it himself. That must be something.

This was the cue for me to go out and see what was going on down in the harbour.

The weather was, once again, completely miserable outside. It wasn’t actually raining but it wasn’t far off and there was haze out everywhere. The harbour gates can’t have long closed because the fleets of fishing boats were out ther eheading to their stations.

At least, I think they were fishing boats. I couldn’t see a thing in this claggy mist.

A little closer towards the shore the view was slightly better. Not much, but at least I could see what I was supposed to be looking at.

That’s actually a yacht, heading out in the wind towards the Ile de Chausey in the wind, and good luck to him too. I must admit that it did make me feel rather envious seeing him out there.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m on a fitness thing right now. I’ve upped my daily walks from two to three, I’m doing two lengths of running, and my morning stroll into town for my dejeunette for lunch is the longest way possible

That means walking right down to the lighthouse and instead of cutting across the lawn, going down the steps and right round the headland where I came to grief last summer.

And as I tuened the corner right at the bottom, I was treated to the sight of three more yachts coming round in squadron formation.

It’s not very often that you see yachts out there in the middle of the week when it isn’t a school holiday, so I’ve no idea what is happening. There must be something special going on to attract them like this.

and there’s more excitement round by the chantier navale

We saw the number of boats under repair dwindle down to none at the end of last week, and then yesterday we had a couple in there. But today, joining La Granvillaise and a fishing boat is another fishing boat and the yacht Charles-Marie.

So it’s All Systems Go down there right now, and that’s good news for the port. A thriving and successful chantier navale will encourage boat owners to keep their boats here and assure the success of the port.

With the tide being now on its way out, the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the top to the other side of the harbour to see what was happening with Neptune.

But first, that row of pontoons that I mentioned yesterday that looked as if it might be new. Unfortunately it isn’t. They must have been cleaning them, that’s all because it’s still the same old pontoons – just looking nicer.

So I went to see what was happening down at the other end of the harbour.

For some unknown reason, they aren’t actually using the conveyors to load up the ship.

There’s a digger bringing the stuff out of the gravel bins and dumping it in a heap at the foot of one of the big cranes, and the crane is picking it up with a grab and dropping it into the hold of Neptune.

I”m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before but there’s a quarry near Avranches that produces a very high-grade fine stone that is eminently suitable for mixing with asphalt.

There are two asphalt plants in the south of the UK, one near Shoreham and the other near Whitstable and they buy their stone from the quarry here at Avranches, and the gravel boats ferry it across.

And that, of course is a country that thinks that it’s all-powerful and can rule the world, yet it can’t even produce any gravel of its own from the rocks that exist on its own shores. It’s when you think about things like this that you realise just how much of a joke this Brexit really is.

As for Neptune herself, she was built in 1992 in Rosslau on the Elbe in Germany and, rarely these days, flies the British flag. And, surprisingly, she has ice-breaking capabilities.

While I was down here I went to see if there was anythign going on with that scaffolding that they had installed at Marité’s berth.

There were two men working on it and from what I could see, which wasn’t very much I have to admit, it looked as if they might just be repointing the wall.

So on that note, I went to La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette and then wandered back slowly to my apartment.

First thing that I did back here was a little bit of tidying up to try to make the place a little more respectable, and then to sort out another pile of albums that need digitalising.

That was the cue then to finish off finding the rest of the music for Project 031 and organise all of that. That took me nicely up to lunchtime.

After lunch I started to write out the notes for the radio project, but had an interruption to go for my usual afternoon walk.

No pathetic parking to report – just one of the lowest tides of the year (the real lowest one is tomorrow).

We’ve seen plenty of photos of the marker light for the harbour entrance being submerged up beyond the top of the highest red band, but we very rarely get to see it completely out of the water and surrounded by sand and rocks as it is today.

It’s the time for the peche à pied too. Low water is below the level that is reserved for the commercial exploiters so the general public can go out to the unallocated parts below the traditional low water mark and help themselves.

And there are plenty of people out there too having a go, and there will be even more tomorrow with it being school half-day.

One of my neighbours was out there too so we had a little chat.

On the way back, I had something of a shock.

A gaggle of schoolkids and a couple of teachers went past me on a classe découverte and one of them was the absolute spitting image – and I really do mean that – of someone who has figured in our adventures, in one form or another, on numerous occasions.

It made me look twice to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating about this. It really was quite unsettling.

Back here I finished off my notes and then dictated them. But I didn’t finish editing them because I … errrr … closed my eyes for a little while. That’s the kind of thing that’s depressing me considerably.

Tea tonight was the leftover stuffing from yesterday mixed with a can of kidney beans and rolled into a couple of taco rolls, with rice and vegetables. Plenty of stuffing left over, so that’s a job for Friday night I recon and my “leftover curry”.

Pudding was apple pie and that coconut soya dessert stuff. And even though I say it myself, my apple pie is delicious and I’ll make some more like that. But I’ll remember to put the nutmeg and cinnamon in it too.

And then I went out for my evening walk, with my little NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens for company.

There was sole wid and low cloud, but apart from that, there was an impressive view and I could see for miles. That encouraged me to have a play around with the camera and the lens to see what it could do.

It was set on shutter priority at varying shutter speeds and I took several photos of the view across to Brehal-Plage from different points with diferent settings.

What with one thing and another, I wasn’t expecting it to do very much and a couple of examples were filed under CS as you might expect.

But given the limitations of what I’m doing and the equipment that I’m using, the results of those that survived the cull are not unacceptable. A blind man would be pleased to see them.

In between all of this, I managed to fit in a couple of runs down my normal track. The first along the north side of the walls and the second across the place Maurice Marland

And to my surprise, I managed to run on for a fair distance too, well past my usual finishing post. even part-way up the ramp on run number two.

But at the top of the ramp I had a look across to the port to see if I could see neptune. But no. In probably one of the quickest turn-round times ever, the harbour gates are open and she’s been and gone already. She’s not there now, the ground’s all flat. And she’s on her way to Whitstable.

It really WAS a good job that I went to see her this morning and didn’t leave it until later.

While you admire the best photo of the bunch, taken at 1/20 second at f1.74 on ISO3200, I was feeling so enthusiastic (which is not like me at all) that I continued my walk a little and actually managed a third run down another one of my running tracks.

Yes, I’m keeping the pressure on and I’m determined to improve my basic health even if I can’t do much about my illness. Running 800-900 metres might be no big deal for some, but for someone my age who is slowly dying of a debilitating illness, it’s pretty good.

Back here, I’ve been writing up my notes and listening to music. But now I’m off to bed. I have important things to do tomorrow so I need to be on form.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: apple pie

Thursday 7th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Friday 17th April 2020 – WE DIDN’T HAVE …

Thursday 16th April 2020 – I COULDN’T KEEP IT UP …

Wednesday 15th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

Monday 13th April 2020 – IT WAS HARD …

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Saturday 11th April 2020 – I’VE BEEN PANIC-BUYING …

Saturday 4th April 2020 – ANOTHER DAY …

Thursday 2nd April 2020 – I’VE JUST HAD …

Tuesday 31st March 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Monday 30th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

Tuesday 10th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT!

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