Tag Archives: channel islands

Sunday 7th June 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY TODAY …

.. and so I have followed the example set by my namesake the mathematician, and done
three fifths if five-eights of … errr … nothing.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I believe that everyone should have one day a week where they do nothing at all without feeling guilty about it, and that for me is a Sunday.

Mind you, there was an extra reason today because I considered that I had done more than enough during the night.

I was with someone called Bob last night and we ere wandering around doing something with regard to a zoo. It involved drinks and the subject came up about a certain type of animal and I can’t remember which one it was. It led to some discussion about drinks – whether we could only have had half a pint or a pint. Because we had a pie we both had hung on to our pints really tightly so that no-one could take them away
A bit later I was supposed to be going off somewhere and this involved going with one of my sister’s daughters. She hadn’t come in and I was concerned that I had to go into work but I had to get this organised but the girl wasn’t there. So I went round to see my sister and my mother and “ohh she went out on a ramble last night and she went to so-and-so’s and spent the night”. I said “what time is she expected to come in?” but they didn’t know. No-one knew what time she was coming in and I was getting a bit agitated about this. I went back a little later on and all my family was around there. Nevertheless I got hold of this girl, my sister, and asked her again. She gave me far more precise details “she went off with X and then they went here and there and then somewhere else”. But there was still no word of when they were coming so I said to my sister’s other child “make sure that I’m told straight away as soon as she appears” and they promised that they would. But I was still pretty wound up about having to wait and miss out on a day’s work and a day’s money, all this kind of thing.

There was a group of us and we had gone off onto Ellesmere Island last night and trudging on northwards through the freezing weather. Trying to peel an orange was horrible. We stopped for the night and someone had brought with them a prefabricated wooden chalet to sleep in and I thought that by the time that they have gone very far with this, they’ll regret it. They put it up and I was invited to shelter in it. There were deer all around and female cows and we were noted the fact that there were no males. We ended up waiting for the bus. I was with Rosemary by this time and we had to check the bus to make sure that it was going to the right place – the Savannah College. Rosemary and I got on it with all of our equipment. It pulled into Hull and this was where we had to get out as we had to changed buses here to go to the hospital. I got off but Rosemary was taking an awful lot of time getting off. You could hear the struggle she was having with this equipment. I shouted up to her to see what she was doing and that was when I awoke – bang on 06:00.

But no danger of my getting up at that point. I went back to sleep again and ended up with a former friend of mine and we were cycling through Chester but for some unknown reason he put on a really fast spurt. I had to go like hell to catch hime up otherwise I would have shown him where I lived when I first came to Chester, because we were right by that area. He didn’t realise that I had lived in Chester when I told him, and I told him about my little room in Lightfoot Street as well. They we cycled off and came to this little building site and it turned out that the reason why he was having to go there was because his father was having a week off work and with a shortage of labour he was having to help out. At the same time he was fielding phone calls from Shearings about driving coaches and saying that he wasn’t available that weekend. Somewhere in the proceedings was a story about a cup with Inuit patterns on it but I don’t remember much about that but I do remember that when we reached the work compound in there were a load of old Standard forward-control vans like the Standard Atlas only different. He was saying to one of the guys there that if ever they get rid of it to let me know

My apologies too to Percy Penguin, who doesn’t appear these days in these pages anything like as often as she deserves.

She used to accuse me of snoring when we were asleep together – not that I ever did much sleeping when we were together as there were plenty of other things to be doing, but that’s another long story.

I used to deny it strenuously but having once more fallen back into unconsciousness in mid-dictation and left the dictaphone running, all I can say is … well … errr … quite.

But when I did take up the dictaphone again, I said that I don’t know if that registered so I’ll dictate it again about putting my house on the market – the house in Shavington where I was living at the time although it was how the Yoxalls had it organised with the garage, all that kind of thing. As I was passing an estate agent’s he had some houses in the area so I put it on sale with him. But I put it in a few newspapers as well including an American one. My father had seen it in an American one and was going around telling everyone that I was moving to the USA. Of course he was quite upset about that, i’ve no idea why. The discussion came round to a neighbour of my niece who had advertised his Mercedes coupé in the newspaper. I explained that he had had a lot of use out of it when he had first bought it but over the last few years he had been working away and had never used it except the odd weekend when he was home. She said “well that’s a waste then, isn’t it?” I said ‘that’s probably why he’s selling it”. I told her the story about how I had bumped into it (not literally of course) when I was down in the USA one time and he was down there on his holidays too

So it looks to me that not only did I dream it but I must have dreamt that I dictated it – and that’s when all of this becomes interesting.

09:30 when I finally saw the light of day, a reasonable time for a Sunday morning, I reckon.

There was no breakfast this morning, but instead I mixed some dough to make bread. As well as a sachet of “old” yeast, I used half a sachet of new yeast to see what kind of difference.

And having decided that if I’m going to be hungry at lunchtime I’ll have breakfast, I simply mixed it (and even though I say it myself, it was a perfect mix) and left it alone.

While I was at it, I rolled out the (now unfrozen) pizza dough, greased a pizza tray, put the dough thereupon, and left that too.

Back here I made a start on finding the documents to complete my Tax Return but I gave up after a while. It’s a Sunday and I didn’t feel like working.

In the end, I didn’t really do anything at all except just lounge about.

After lunch I went and checked on my bread dough. It had stood for about two and a half hours and had certainly risen – but by 100% I couldn’t really say. Anyway, I folded it over again, shaped it and dropped it into the greased dish that I use as a bread mould, covered it with the damp cloth again and left it.

Being Sunday, it’s my day to go for a long afternoon walk if the weather is nice.

And if the weather is even nicer, to go for my weekly ice cream too.

And there was no doubt that the weather was nice today. There was some wind but the view was one of the clearest that I have seen for quite some considerable time.

And the crowds – which we have already seen, were certainly out there making the most of it.

As we saw in the previous photo, the view across to Jersey, 54 kilometres away, was ideal.

There’s some kind of lighthouse or beacon that stands prominently off the entrance to the harbour at St Helier and as you can see in this cropped and enlarged image, that came out clearly in this photo.

There’s even a seagull, heaven alone knows how many miles out to sea, that features clearly in the photo too, in the top right.

Pivoting round slightly to our right we have the Ile de Chausey.

Not really an island but an archipelago, where there are 365 islands at low ide and 52 at high tide – or is it the other way round? I can never remember.

But today, it was standing out there beautifully and even the colours had come out somewhat through the sea haze, just for a change.

Out of interest, I cropped out a section from the centre of the previous image to see if I could see anything special.

And “not very much” is the reply. The main island, or “Grand Ile” is the only one that is inhabited these days. We can make out plenty of the houses on there and, of course, the lighthouse to the left of centre.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we went there once and TOOK DOZENS OF PHOTOS. One day I’ll get round to writing out the notes for the place.

Further on along on my walk I noticed an interesting phenomenon right across the Baie de Mont St Michel on the Brittany coast.

There’s a beach over there, the Plage de Port Mer, in between Cancale and the Pointe du Grouin, and the sunlight today was catching it at the absolutely perfect angle.

It was illuminated as if someone had pointed a floodlight onto it and the bright orangey pink colour could be seen for miles. Remember that that is probably 20 or so miles away.

Further on around the coast and out at the mouth to the harbour at St Malo, there was something that looked as if it was moving on the horizon.

Not being sure what it was, because there’s quite a lot of stuff that moves in and out of the harbour over there, I took a photo to crop and enlarge when I returned to the apartment.

And it seems to be a yacht with a very dark blue or even black sail. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen one of those around the Baie de Mont St Michel a few times just recently.

While I was at it, I noticed that the Brittany coast all the way down to the Cap Fréhel was pretty clear today too.

That’s not something that happens every day either, so I took a photo to manipulate when I returned to the apartment.

If you look closely you can see the Cape – slightly to the right of centre in this photo. As I said the other day when we talked about it, it’s about 70 or so kilometres away from here, so the cameera is doing well to pick it out.

But my intention was drawn to something that I noticed on the photo when I enlarged it for a closer look. Hence I croppd a section out to enlarge and examine in greater detail.

It’s really difficult to see anything in any detail. But on the Cap Fréhel is a lighthouse and a fort with a tower, and when they are viewed from this particular point, they might give the cross-reference that e can see on the extreme right of the image.

It’s also true that Marité, our three-masted schooner left port this morning for Lorient and she would be somewhere in that direction right now, although that doesn’t look like the kind of silhouette she might make.

So that’s another mystery to unravel.

Musing on the aforementioned I wandered on down the steps, round the path at the headland and sown the old track into the port.

On the way around the Point, the view into the Baie de Mont St Michel was absolutely splendid today. The tide was far out so there were people down there performing the peche à pied for the shellfish (which they must share with their friends – after all, you mustn’t be selfish with your shellfish). and our beacon was sitting ther eilluminating its rock at the entrance to the harbour.

The beach in front of Jullouville and Kairon-Plage was looking magnificent too today.

Down in the harbour there’s another piece of heavy machinery here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw a couple of diggers and a hydraulic breaker parked here a couple of weeks ago, and I never did find out what they had come to do.

And so I don’t suppose that I’ll have any luck finding out about this digger either. It’s a mystery to me why they come here when they don’t seem to be doing very much

My perambulations took me round the back of the fish-processing plant. As the tide was well out, the harbour gates were closed so I could cross over on the path on top.

One of my neighbours had mentioned that Marite had gone off on her travels, and so her berth was empty today. I’m not sure how long she’ll be away but she’s not due to dock in Lorient until 9th of June.

But you can see on the extreme right of the photo a few more Birdmen of Alcatraz hovering about on the thermals as they try to advance along the cliff-edge

There’s something new on the docks today – at least – I don’t recall having seen it before today.

There’s a series of portacabins stacked here to make some kind of office complex, witn an old shipping container at the side which is presumably to be used as a storage facility.

There were loads of posters plastered on the front giving various warnings about the Virus and so on, but I don’t think that it has any connection with the medical profession.

It could of course be something to do with the digger across the harbour, but whether that’s the case remains to be seen.

On eof this things that I wanted to do was to see how they had got on with installing the new pontoons at the ferry terminal.

They now seem to have them down both sides of the terminal, which is quite useful, I suppose, for when both of the Joly France boats come in together and when Chausiais is moored here too.

There’s a length that seems to be missing on the nearest row of pontoons, and none of this looks particularly level to me – not that I suppose that it matters because passengers probably wont be boarding when the tide it out.

When the tide is in, the pontoons will of course be floating.

Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen the concrete block that appeared on the quayside here when we last came by.

Now, there’s a ramp up to the top, complete with handrails, and there’s a really impressive-looking ramp that goes down to the pontoons. But no artisanal wooden steps as we saw over where the fishing boats are moored.

It goes without saying that this has all cost a fortune (much of it needlessly – see many of my earlier postings) and so it will come as no surprise that there has been an “adjustment” of the tariffs for passengers.

The net ticket price remains the same, we are told, but the taxes and port taxes have increased. Someone has to pay for the expenditure.

Chausias that prevent us from seeing what cargo it is that she takes out to the Ile de Chausey.

There’s a drop-down ramp at the front and also a small crane, which I imagine would be for the ease of taking large bulky objects out to the island. I don’t recall seeing any unloading facilities out there on the island.

Parked up behind Chausiais is one of the Joly France boats that provide the passenger ferry services out to the Ile de Chausey.

This one is Joly France I which, I suspect, is the newer of the two. It’s difficult to tell them apart from the front but from the side the newer one has deeper windows and a smaller upper deck, and from the rear the newer one has a cut-out in the stern

But the pontoons look impressive from here, especially with the handrails to stop eager tourists pushing each other into the water in their rush to board the ferries.

It’s a tidal harbour here, and the inner one is a “wet” harbour due to a pair of lock gates that close as the tide goes out, leaving water trapped behind to keep the boats afloat.

Some of the water has to be drained out however to allow the level to sink slightly so that the water pressure equalises and there’s a constant level between the inner harbour and the outer tide for when they can reopen the gates, which is 105 minutes before the high tide.

It’s also said (and how true this is I don’t know) that there’s a stream that runs into the inner harbour from inland.

So the surplus water need to have a drain out somehow and over there we can see the drainage channel for the water to run out.

To the left we can see one of the boat ramps underneath the fish processing plant and on the extreme right we can see part of the security fencing.

International passenger ferries dock here, coming from Jersey and they don’t want people to nip over the other side into the country without going through passport control and immigration checks

Having exhausted myself over here this afternoon I had a leisurely walk in the sunshine through the port de plaisance and into town, stopping off for one of my vegan ice-creams and a chat to the café owner.

He told me that business was not picking up as he had hoped, but it’s true to say that the last week or so has not seen very good tourist weather.

From here I had a slow walk back up the hill enjoying my ice-cream. And back at the apartment I checked on the bread dough to see how it was doing.

It had gone up like a lift – exactly how people said that it should. And so i switched on the oven, waited until it was hot, and then stuck the bread in it.

This time I remembered to reduce the heat after 10 minutes or so, and set the timer for 90 minutes. That’s longer than recommended but my oven is pretty much hit-and-miss and I’m sure that the thermostat isn’t correct anyway.

After an hour or so I went and prepared my pizza for tea and when the oven clicked off, I took the bread out and stuck it on a wire rack to cool, then bunged the pizza in.

The pizza was excellent, using my own dough of course, and as you can see, the loaf of bread actually looked like a loaf of bread today. It’s certainly the best that it has been to date.

The proof of the pudding though is in the eating and I’ll tell you al tomorrow about how it tastes.

No pudding tonight – it was a struggle to finish the pizza – so I went for my run.

And I’m not sure about what was going on, but while I’m not going to say that it was easy tonight, there certainly wasn’t the suffering of the last few occasions. It seems as if the illness that I had was brewing for a while.

The itinerant was still there, I noticed, as I ran down to the cliff top, but there was nothing else happening down that end so I walked round to the other side of the headland.

And it’s true to say that the excellent visibility that we had had this afternoon was continuing. The buildings across the Baie de Mont St Michel on the Brittany coast were all quite clear this evening with something clearly visible on the range of hills in the background slightly to the right of centre, about 20-25 miles away.

And the evening sun had caught a few things over on the coast at Terrelaboulet and we were having some more heliograph reflections from them

With the sky being so clear tonight, the view down at the head of the baie de Mont St Michel was also probably the best that we have ever seen.

The white hotels down at Mont St Michel are standing out really clearly tonight. All of the buildings down at Carolles-Plage were looking quite nice too, and we could even see waves breaking on the rocks down at the Pointe de Carolles

It won’t be like this for long, I reckon, so make the most of it while we can.

From here I ran on all the way down across the top of the cliffs past the chantier navale where there is still no change in occupant.

Over at the ferry terminal both of the Joly France boats are now moored there and we can compare them to see the differences. The smaller upper deck cabin and deeper windows on Joly France I – to the right – can be clearly seen

There’s another row of yellow marker buoys over there, like those that we saw the other day at the Plat Gousset. The Plage de Hérel – the beach that we saw a few weeks ago – is over there so I’m more convinced now that they must be the limits beyond which one is not supposed to go swimming.

Having recovered my breath I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury to the bottom and my resting place at the second zebra crossing – well, actually about 5 metres further on seeing as I was in good form.

As I had gone past the harbour I had noticed some activity down there so I went for a look to see what was going on. Aztec Lady is now back home from her little sojourn in Scandinavia where, I believe, she was detained in quarantine in the Lofoten islands on her way back from Svalbard.

That must have been a very exciting voyage, I reckon. I’m sorry that I missed it

There was also something going on much closer to home too.

One of the fishermen had one of the electric cranes working and they were lowering one of the dredging plates down into the back of a fishing boat.

These plough up the sea bed and release the shellfish out of the mud, which are then scooped un in a kind of metal dredging basket that we have seen on a few occasions before which allow the silt and the smaller examples to pass through the slots and back out to sea.

There were a few people round at the viewpoint at the rue du Nord as I discovered when I ran around there.

Still a good while before sunset but the sun sinking slowly into the clouds really was a nice effect so along with a few other people I stayed and watched it for a while, and then ran back to the apartment.

Tonight there’s a lot to do and I probably won’t finish off all of my notes but that’s the first task for tomorrow.

Then there’s the Welsh homework to do – we’re almost half-way through this course – followed by the two other courses that i’m doing, and then two radio projects this week.

Sometime too I must push on with the photos from the Transatlantic adventure from last year, and then there are the website-updating projects to continue.

And I’m supposed to be retired and taking it easy too.

Friday 5th June 2020 – I HAD A …

… better day today (not that it could have been much worse of course).

So while you admire the photos of Joly France fighting her way out of harbour into the howling gale and the seagull that photobombed me while I was doing it, I’ll tell you all about it.

First of all, it goes without saying that when I crashed out yesterday evening, I switched off the alarms with the intention of sleeping until I awoke.

And that was until all of about 00:30

The first task when I awoke was to deal with the notes and the photos from yesterday.

That took me up until about 03:00 because there was other stuff to deal with too, like the notes of a voyage or two that I’d travelled. And then I went back to bed.

While I was in bed I was off on a couple of mega-voyages, and I dunno why I always seem to have the most interesting trips when I’m not feeling too well.

And some of the stuff I can’t recount because I bet that you are having your tea right now and you certainly wouldn’t thank me for spoiling it for you.

We were at the radio last night working and I was asking about something or other to be done. They said that they had this new reporter in, which annoyed me rather. We were talking about a live concert that he had done of some singer, which I had dismissed as being nothing. But it turned out that it had had over a million listeners to the podcast and even I was impressed with that. It gave the whole place a new impetus. Everyone seemed to be much more excited and much more energetic. They had started working with a couple of new programs and we had been given some accounts so that we could use these new programs even if we didn’t know what they were all about. I started to think to myself “why the hell did I want to leave when I’m having such a good time with it now?” Even though we were swamped with work it was all going really well. I’d had this habit of getting stuff that I didn’t want to deal with, just putting it away and not even thinking about it. It was the pressure of that that had been getting to me. But I was actually working on a file and a couple of old pieces of post from January fell out. I looked at them and thought “why the hell did I file these anyway? What needs to be done is just so simple” so I sat down and made a start on dealing with these pieces which was only going to take me 5 minutes anyway.

There was also the question of the MoT servicing book – a big book, narrow and quite long and we wrote in all the details of the cars, what was being done on them and so on. I’d just finished one batch and I wondered if there was another book so I had to go outside to find the guy who was responsible. He told me “there’s plenty of room in there – you just aren’t looking properly”. I had a good look through and found that there was another batch of stuff in there, another batch of forms that I’d managed to miss

I must have awoken to dictate the notes of the above, and when I went back to sleep I went straight back into the dream in more or less the same place, walking to Nantwich past the Cedars and down Millstone (actually Birchin) Lane and ended up back at the place again. It seemed that I’d gone off last night and left all the drawers empty and all the spares open and I couldn’t find half the stuff. I realised that I had left them out lying everywhere. By this time we were very busy with people coming in and someone else was demonstrating a technique that he had used. He’d been looking for something in some other stores and they were going through a pile of this stuff and he’d actually found a modern-day use for a pile of stuff like on one occasion he’d made a stand for the vacuum cleaner using bits that were lying around and he showed us how he’d done it but he couldn’t undo it though because no-one had the correct screwdriver. It was strange just stepping back into that dream where I’d left off
One thing though was that I was smoking at some particular time and I don’t know why I’d started smoking. I’d burnt myself with a cigarette that I was holding so I went to stub it out thinking that this is a crazy thing to be doing anyway.
Later still We were on board a ship and there had been some kind of incident going on between a woman and a man and the man being given a big bill for his services. As a result the girl who ran the accounting office was not very pleased about it and she came to talk to me about it. Just after she finished there was a knock on my door and it was from one of my cabin friends from a nearby cabin wanting to know if I was ready to come down for breakfast. I had to search for my keys as usual then we set off out. He said what about the third guy who usually came with us that i didn’t particularly like. But there was a ribbon pinned to his door which said “lie in”. Obviously he was wanting a lie-in so we went downstairs. We were on about the 8th floor and the breakfast was on the 2nd or something. We got down to the 6th and there was a small breakfast being set out there and the woman seemed to think that we were from the party that was having the breakfast there. She told us to help ourselves. One of the girls with us went over and grabbed a glass of orange juice. I thought “I could always drink orange juice” so I went over to grab one but it turned out to be apple juice and there was only a mouthful in the beaker and there wasn’t any more in any of the jugs.

After all of that, what surprised me was the fact that with not having gone to bed until 03:00 and done all of that, I was wide awake again at 07:30. That was rather astonishing.

Mind you, that isn’t to say that I was out of bed by then. 08:30 was a much more realistic time to be out of bed.

It took a good while to type out all of my notes, as you can imagine. And I wasn’t feeling in the best of form either so it took even longer than it might have done.

No breakfast either – I still wasn’t feeling like eating anything.

For lunch though, I did try some food. While I had been searching around in the freezer the other day I had come across a pot of carrot and coconut soup. Today I defrosted that, warmed it up and ate it with the last of my home-made bread.

And to my surprise, it stayed down too.

What I’ve been doing for most of the day has been to finish off the radio project that i started. I’d dictated the text a couple of days ago but hadn’t edited it so that was the first job.

When that was finished, and the speech for my invited guest was included, I then had to edit into sections, find the pairs of tracks that I had coupled together, join everything up by using the sections of text to make a bridge between the different pairs.

That left some time over, so knock 30 seconds off that for the outro speech and then find a track of the right length that sounds like an outro track.

That track needs to be remixed to match the volume level of the rest of the programme, the speech needs to be written, recorded and edited, and then everything joined together.

It overran the hour by 5 seconds so I had to edit out 5 seconds from somewhere and then it could be saved.

There was a break of course, while I went out for my afternoon walk. Just because I’m feeling ill doesn’t mean that things have to stop.

It was a horrible day out there today. It had been raining quite heavily by the looks of things and there was a howling gale blowing too. This poor little fishing boat pulling its dinghy behind it was really struggling to fight its way back through the waves into port.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … my hat goes off to all of them out there in weather like this

My walk took me down to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

Nothing happening on the beach s you might expect. The wind had driven almost everyone back inside. And there was some kind of miserable grey sky down the coast that was causing a peculiar kind of light down at Donville-les-Bains.

And it hasn’t escaped my notice that they have put out all of the beach cabins down at Donville-les-Bains. They are really getting ready for summer down there.

My attention had been drawn in the previous photo to a series of yellow buoys strectched out across the end of the beach so i went for a closer look.

No clear evidence what they are there for though. The only thing that I can think of is that they are a mark to indicate to people the limit beyond which they are not allowed to swim.

Mind you, I think that it will take more than that to stop anyone swimming further out. Barbed wire and machine guns would probably be more effective.

My walk carried me on around the walls to the viewpoint that overlooks the Place Marechal Foch.

The roofing job down there has been going on for a while so I had another look to see where they were. And they seem to have finished what they were doing and the scaffolding has come down.

But there are still a few piles of slates and it looks as if the scaffolding is going up around the back of the building. So there’s more roofing to come, I reckon.

My walk continued around the walls and into the Square Maurice Marland.

There was a young family there leaning on the walls admiring my favourite mummy seagull and I was talking about the babies when mummy suddenly stood up and went for a walk.

We could then see quite clearly that she seems to have one chick and there’s one egg there that has yet to hatch. So whether it will or not, that remains to be seen.

However my particular mummy seems to be a little behind with her offspring.

On the next roof we had a mummy perched there watching her babies already stagger around taking their first steps.

She had two babies, but one of them had disappeared behind the chimney breast before I could prepare the camera. But the other one put on a little dance for me before flopping down exhausted on the nest, with a very proud mummy looking on.

Having watched the seagulls for long enough I wandered off an continued my little walk along the walls.

Down in the harbour I’d noticed a little funnel sticking up from the loading bay in the bocks and it didn’t look like Chausiais so I went to see who it was. And sure enough, Thora has braved the storms and gales to come into port.

And she didn’t hang about long either. Another quick turnround for when I went out later, she had gone off back to Jersey.

A little earlier we’d seen a little fishing boat fighing its way through the waves as it pulled its dinghy in towards the port.

By the time that I had completed my circuit I was treated to some kind of exhibition of I’m not really sure what it was. I reckon that that’s the boat down there the front one, that we saw struggling through the storm and it seems to have two dinghies behind it.

But as to what the other boat is doing down there with it, I really don’t know.

Back here at the apartment I carried on with my work. It took until 20:00 to complete it, with no pause for the guitars and no food either. I wasn’t hungry and in any case I wanted to finish this exercise before the weekend and I’m glad that I did.

My evening walk and runs was something of a disaster this evening.

One look at this photo will tell you why. There was a howling headwind blowing all the way down the Rue du Roc and it was difficult enough to walk, never mind run up there. And down on the clifftop I could see that Jersey, the ile de Chausey and the Brittany coast were taking a right pasting.

The storm was heading my way, and pretty quickly too. I didn’t think that this was the moment to be hanging about.

Finally, I managed to break out into a run, the one along the top of the cliffs past the chantier navale.

And there’s been a change of occupant in there yet again. This time, one of the long-term resident trawler-type of fishing boats has gone back into the water, and its place taken by a little pleasure cruiser.

That’s a nice piece of kit, that boat, and I could see myself cruising around in a white cap in one of those. But I haven’t a clue where I could rustle up the dosh for it.

It reminds me of the guy in Crewe who sent his wife to Boots Corner in Crewe to earn some money for a new car. At the end of the first night she came back with £50 and 50p
“Who gave you the 50p?”he asked
“Why, all of them” she replied.
Yes, Crewe was a right dismal place to live and I’ve no idea how I stuck it for all that time.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury was interesting as a dog decided to try to have a little bit of fun.

After he limped off with a pain in his rear left leg, I turned on the owner and told him precisely what I thought of him. In good old colloquial French too, and left him in no two minds of what I thought. I didn’t spend 12 years working with a bunch of French-speaking drivers for nothing.

Having stopped for breath at my usual stop, I walked down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what was happening.

Nothing very much except that the new pontoon is being put to very good use by the fishing boats that are congregating all around it.

From there I ran on back to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

There was nothing happening out at sea this evening, apart from the storm, and as the tide was right in there were no picnickers. So I ran back home instead.

Later than I hoped, I’m off to bed. I’ll set an alarm, hope I’ll beat it, and then go to the shops. Not that I need much because I haven’t eaten anything for a few days.

At least, with keeping a note of how I feel, I know that I seem to be on the upward slope again and in a few days I’ll be back to normal – as if I ever was normal.

Last time this happened, in the USA in July, I lost 10kgs in weight. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could lose another 10kgs?

Thursday 4th June 2020 – THAT WAS PROBABLY …

… the worst day that I have had today for a couple of years.

It didn’t get off to a very good start either. I eard the three alarms go off but I was in no real mood to make a hurried exit from the bed seeing as I was going out for the day.

07:35 was rather later than intended, but nevertheless …

During the night I’d been on my travels too. I was in some kind of Institution and the virus was taking a grip. I was interested in learning how to do different stuff from different people like bread making, that kind of thing. And this continued on and on and you don’t really want to read the rest of it because you probably are eating your meal right now.

For a change I had some breakfast and then a shower, and headed off to LIDL for the mid-week shopping.

Despite being in Caliburn, there wasn’t any heavy stuff that needed buying or anything really exciting in the special offers either. Mind you, there was quite a queue to go into the shop – just 20 people at a time being allowed in.

Having done the necessary I drove off to Laurent’s place at Bréhal Plage and we went off together for a drive.

Not as many photos as I would have liked to have taken. But that’s because, quite simply, when someone else is doing the driving you’re pretty-much dependent upon them and their time more than anything else.

Our first stop was at Flamanville right up the coast near Cherbourg.

But before I say anything about it, I was distracted … “as usual” – ed … by something offshore. It’s been an absolute age since we’ve had a “ship of the day” on these pages and so the presence of a large one sailing by about 10 miles or so offshore immediately caught my eye.

Of course at this kind of distance it was impossible to see its name, but its silhouette bears a great reemeblance to that of Commodore Clipper, the shuttle ferry that runs between the Channel islands anf the Uk mainland and ideed she did leave St Peter Port in Guernsey about 20 minutes before I took this photo.

As for where Guernsey might be, the answer to that is that it’s right there. The island of Sark is there too, but that’s lost in the background of the larger island.

Where we are is at the head of a peninsula right up near the top of the Cotentin Peninsula, very close to the port of Dielette and it’s from here in the summer that there’s a ferry service over to the Channel islands.

Not right now, of course, because everything is postponed while we all recover from the virus.

It’s usually Granville that provides the summer service over there, because judging by the look of the port at Dielette, Victor Hugo is too large to go a-manoeuvring around in there.

The ferries run a shuttle service from here to the various Channel Islands. That’s Jersey over there, a mere 40 or so kilometres away, much closer of course than it is to the port of Granville.

So it looks as if Dielette is the place for me to come in the summer to go on a nautical excursion if I can’t hitch a lift on Normandy Trader or Thora

The weather was pretty grey and miserable today, which was a shame. Not the ideal day for photography.

Nevertheless, down there on the horizon in a faint grey wisp is the coast of Brittany, which according to my calculations is a very improbable 90 kms away. But there’s no other land anywhere else out there in that vicinity so I can’t even begin to think what else it might be.

It could, I suppose be wishful thinking, the same kind of thinking that led the sailors of Christopher Columbus to believe on a couple of occasions that they had seen land before they finally espied San Salvador, but it looks pretty realistic to me

There was a floating buoy just offshore, but I reckon that I know the reason for this.

Where we are (although you can’t see it) is at the side of the big nuclear reactor at Flamanville. This is France’s equivalent of New Brunswick’s Lepreau Reactor, in that no matter how much money they throw at it and how many technicians then send in to wotk at it, they still can’t make it fire up correctly.

To be fair, the original two reactors from the 1980s seem to work fine and at one stage they were producing as much as 4% of the total amount of France’s electricity without any major problem. A third reactor was commissioned in 2007, with an on-line date of 2012 and a cost of €3.3 billion.

However one catastrophe after another has pushed the start date further and futther back, with a latest date being 2022 and with costs now rising to €12.4 billion. And none of that is certain to be the final position either.

It makes people wonder at just what stage will these people finally throw in the towel and stop throwing good money in after bad money.

We drove from there all the way along the coast on the “Route des Caps” as far as it was possible to go by car – to the harbour at Goury La Hague at the Cap de la Hague.

This is another place that I will add onto my list of places to come another time when I have visitors because even in the most miserable weather it was really nice. This little harbour here would look beautiful when the tide is in and all the boats ar bobbing about on the waves.

But I couldn’t help thinking that that is a massive wall to protect such a small harbour.

Regardless of the despressing weather, this woman here seemed to be njoying herself.

She had her notebook out and was busy painting a scene of the local landscape while her dog sat patiently close by.

This is a beautiful building just here on the quayside and Laurent asked me if I could guess its purpose. After a few moments thought I had to donner ma langue au chat as they say around here

Apparently it’s the local lifeboat station.

And what is interesting about it is that it’s a roundhouse. There are two slipways, one behind the harbour wall and the other one straight down into the sea.

The lifeboat is on a turntable on the inside and depending on what the weather is doing and where the tide is, the turntable is moved round so that the lifeboat is launched down the most appropriate slipway

And it’s hardly surprising that you need a lifeboat in a location like this.

This is the view down the slipway that goes directly into the sea. There are enough rocks just offshore to put the wind up anyone. And talking of wind there was plenty of that today too.

The green and red posts in the water tothe left are, I reckon, to mark the entrance to the little harbour there. “Green” has five letters so that means “right” – you keep that to your right as you are coming in. “Red” is the same colour as “port”, which has the same number of letters as “left”, so you keep that to your left.

Had the weather been better, the view from here would probably have been better as well.

Nevertheless we could see a long way down the coast all the way past “La Roche” down to the Falaise – or cliff – de Jobourg. And looking at that cliff answered a question of mine – namely, why would there have been the signs of the école d’escalade – the School of Climbing – that I had noticed as we had driven throught the town of Jobourg to reach here.

Well, now we know, of course. One look at that rock face right down there tells us everything.

That’s the Cap de La Roche and behind it to the left is another industrial complex of eerie significance.

It’s the site of France’s answer to Sellafield, and where all of the country’s nuclear waste – altogether more than half of the World’s capacity – is stored ready for whenever they discover a method of disposing of it.

Laurent had always wondered why they had chosen that particular site, and of course I was able to tell him. The prevailing winds in this area come up the English Channel from the south-west, and there is no French land whatever anywhere in the direction to which they will be blowing.

Any leak of radioactive material whatsoever will be blown out to sea by the prevailing winds and make landfall somewhere over the south-east coast of the UK.

There are some more rocks out there in that direction too, with that beautiful marker light perched on top of them to warn shipping.

The island behind it is the island of Alderney, the most northerly of the Channel Islands. These of course are British possessions which remained in English hands after the English were expelled from Normandy in 1204 for the simple reason is that the French King at the time didn’t have a fleet handy at the time to go along and invade them.

By the time that subsequent French Kings had arranged a Navy, the opportunity had been passed by and the islands had been reinforced ready to repel any invader.

The French Kings might have been forestalled, but others were not. In one of the most shameful incidents of World War II the British Government surrendered the Islands and their population to the Germans in 1940 without even firing a bullet in their defence.

Furthermore, even though the fighting had long-since passed them by, the British did not go along and claim them back from the Germans until after the end of the war. Hundreds of British citizens had died in the Concentration Camp on Guernsey or had been deported to places like TITTMONING, WHICH WE HAVE VISITED, Buchenwald or even Auschwitz, and the starvation of the citizens during the winter of 1944-1945 when the island was blockaded by the British caused hundreds of deaths.

Anyone who talks about hos “The British Won The War” needs to be reminded that without the help of the Americans they didn’t even dare to fight the Germans on their own soil until any danger of the German fighting back had been removed.

This here is a symbolic photograph.

It’s basically the final point of French territory around here – the lighthouse at the end of the Cap de la Hague. And a lighthouse is needed here too because of all the rocks that we have seen littering the area that will catch many a mariner totally unawares.

And shipwrecks just here are legion too – even big ships like the 10,000 tonne Button-Gwinnett that ran aground on the rocks on 19th December 1947 as well as any number of smaller vessels and pleasure boats that round the headland straight into a contrary current.

As well as shipwrecks on the shore, there have been innumerable accidents just off the coast too with collisions in the narrow navigable seaway.

This cross commemorates the crew of the French submarine Vendemiaire. She was built in 1910 when sumarines were in their infancy and submarine tactics were relatively unknown and untried.

On the 8th of June 1912 the three submarines of the Cherbourg flotilla were sent out to practise an interception on a few ships of the French navy that were steaming up the Channel. For some unknown reason the ships failed to co-ordinate their manoeuvre and the warship Saint Louis struck Vendemiaire amidships, sending her straight to the bottom taking all of hercrew with her.

Her wreckags was discovered in 2016 about 70 or so metres down, off the north-east coast of Alderney and the gash in her side was clearly visible, exposing her interior.

This photo was one that I took for my friend Louise.

She has a “thing” about useless gates, and while this isn’t a uselass gate it’s one of the next best things – a useless stile. I’m not sure at all why this would be there.

By now I was feeling really ill and the drive back to laurent’s was extremely uncomfortable for me. When we reached his house, I simply said my goodbye and drove home

Back here, I crashed out on the chair, and was gone for several hours. When I awoke, I was feeling even worse so I did something that I haven’t done for a couple of years and which I vowed that I would never do again, and that was to go and crash out on the bed.

And off I went on a long, confusing voyage. I was on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again. I was friendly with a couple who had come on board ship – a young couple. They had been on all of the yoages and were making a season of it but what had happened was that after the first couple of voyages they’d moved to the other side of the ship. When I encountered them later on they had had to move back. I asked them why and they told me “well the steward on the first side of the ship they were on was not very friendly so they wanted a nicer steward so they had moved across but they had no idea why it was they they had had to move back. We were chatting and by this time I was in Montreal and there I was wandering around in this shop like a big restaurant place. They had all these foods and sweets laid out where you could help yourself. I was wandering around trying to find something there to eat but there was nothing to eat for me. I was having a look at the sweets as well but there were no mint sweets of any kind that I could eat. I felt really bad about that. Then I was off again wandering around Montreal looking at an apartment. When I saw the rent, which was about 24,000 per year I thought that maybe I wouldn’t do that. But it was a nice lovely place down by the river. I was wandering around through the town and there was this abandoned car. The rear end was missing off it and the front end had been smashed and the engine was missing – a red one. I was wondering about the logistics of how I was going to stay – whether I could get a car, whether I could get a drivers’ licence, how much it would cost to get a driver’s licence on the Black Market, all kinds of stupid things like that
There was one instance where something was involved with firearms. I had a firearm which was not like me. Someone else had one and an issue came about that. I showed my firearm and this guy asked me all kids of weird and wonderful questions about it so I took the bullet and showed him the bullets. I quickly grabbed his and pulled his bullets out of his gun. They were a different type so I said something like “you have no room to talk about bullets” but this guy then turned to start talking about hunting which was not what I was trying to do at all.

Someone called me at sometime – I’ve no idea who because I didn’t answer. I was dead to the world and that was that.

No danger of me ever moving again.

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 – EVERYBODY SAY “AHHH”

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been keeping a close eye on the socks of fleagulls that nest on the roofs of the houses in the Rue des Juifs during the Spring.

And so; while keeping an eye on one particular nest today, I noticed something rather different, so I took a photo of it with the aim of blowing it up when I returned to the apartment

And don’t we have one very proud Mummy Seagull here? At least one and maybe two eggs have hatched and there’s a chick or two sheltering under her wings in the nest on the roof.

Well done, mummy, and congratulations. I shall be following their progress over the next few weeks.

While you admire the photos of the hang gliders who have been buzzing around the town today like a bunch of Nazgul, let me tell you about my thoroughly miserable day

Just for a change, I was up before the third alarm this morning. But that was as good as it got. Although I had my medication I didn’t feel like any breakfast and in fact I’ve not eaten anything today except some fruit

Yes, I’ve been thinking over the last few days that I was sickening for something and it looks as if I’ve got it.

That’s one of the reasons why I keep my notes – so that I can track my health as it fluctuates up and down. And it’s particularly important right now, seeing as I’ve now been probably 18 weeks without my essential four-weekly treatment.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back in March I predicted a decline in health. But that wasn’t really a prediction. Based on previous experience – it was a foregone conclusion.

So with no breakfast I decided that, at least while I was still compos mentis that I would attack my two courses, the Accountancy and the Music course.

And I ended up completely finishing a week of each course too.

As for the Accountancy course, this week’s work was spent on basic numeracy. And I do mean “basic” – in fact I’ve no idea what they must be teaching in school these days if a course like this has to instruct its followers in the kind of basic numeracy that we had to do

The music course was exciting. And now at the end of the week I can play the blues on the piano with 5/10th scale chords and in theory, 7/10th scale chords. The theory being because I can’t stretch my hands far enough.

It really makes me wonder how we managed to play the piano when we were mere kids, having to stretch like that.

No lunch of course, but I did have something to do that involved the fridge. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the door pockets are broken on the fridge. The last surviving on was wedged in somehow, but that fell off when I opened the door.

And so, having nothing better to do, I bit the bullet, sorted out the electric drill and screwed all three shelves in. Whether they hold for any length of time I really wouldn’t know, but it has to be better at the moment.

This led to another problem.

The very top shelf is a very tight fit up against the freezer compartment door and with no shelf having been there for 18 months, the ice inside had grown and pushed the compartment door out. And having replaced the shelf, the fridge door wouldn’t now close.

That meant having to defrost the fridge and pull out about half a ton of ice.

But at least the door closes now and there’s room in the freezer compartment to actually put things now. And that’s progress of some kind.

While all of this was going on, I went for my afternoon walk.

We’ve been having some really glorious weather just recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but not today.

As you can see, the weather has changed and we are now back in all of the fog and mist that I thought that we’d left behind a few weeks ago

It was still quite warm outside though, and so I suppose that out of the wind it would really have been quite nice.

At least, that’s what all of the people down there must be thinking. And good look to them too – sooner them than me. You wouldn’t stand any chance of me getting into the sea down there at any time today.

Mind you, the way things are, you wouldn’t be getting me into the sea at any time these days, even at 40°C in the air.

For part of my afternoon walk I’d had the company of a neighbour, but she had cleared off and I carried on on my own.

At the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch I had a look down to see how they were doing with the roof of the building there. And the answer was that although progress seems to have been quite rapid, they appear to have had a technical hitch.

Someone was on the roof there hacksawing away at the galvanised sheeting that they have been using to cover the dormer windows. It looks as if they might have misjudged some measurement or other.

Having stood and watched them for a while, I moved on around onto the Square Maurice Marland to see what was going on there and to check on my seagull.

It also gave me an opportunity to see what was going on out in the Baie de Mont St Michel. It looks as if the sailing school is now in full swing, with all of the little yachts out there having a lap or two around the marker buoys that they put out there.

It’s probably what they call a “slalom for sailors”, I reckon. And wouldn’t it have been a good idea for me to have enrolled onto a course like that? I must make further enquiries.

This photograph here has made me laugh, and it shouldn’t really, because it’s very sad.

It’s not the workman carrying the metal pole down the ramp that has caught my eye but something else there. They’ve spent I really don’t know how many millions of Euros completely refitting the port out with new ramps and pontoons, and it’s taken about a fortnight for social shaping by the citizens to take place to amend it.

All that money, and someone has felt obliged to build a set of steps out of a few old pallets.

All of the restaurants, bars and cafés have been closed in France since the start of the pandemic, but since Tuesday in the “Green Zone” which is where we are living, they can re-open under certain circumstances.

The Place Cambernon Is usually blocked off for July and August to allow the café La Rafale and the restaurant to spread their tables about, but it seems that they have decided to extend the period of closure from now until the end of September.

And La Rafale is taking full advantage of it – and so are the customers too. That’s good news to see the commerce re-igniting.

My perambulations took me on an extended route today because I’d seen some kind of work going on in the distance.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there was a major amount of work done on the medieval walls all through last year, and I made some kind of derogatory remarks about some of the work that was done.

It’s nice to see that the local council has been following my journal because the work seems to involve cleaning up the mess that passed for pointing on the stairwell here.

They’ve only been at it for a couple of days and already there’s a vast improvement.

On the subject of vast improvements, I wish that there had been a vast improvement with me.

Back home again I started to write out the notes for the radio project on which I was working. I even finished them too in a most amazing blitz of work.

Next stop was to dictate them – and I even managed that too. However, when I went to edit them I found out that someone driving around here in a motor bike had made such a racket that the microphone had picked it up.

Closing all of the windows I went to dictate it again.

However I didn’t get far, because I crashed out for about 15 minutes or so and woke up feeling like death. Eventually I managed to finish dictating it but as I went to upload it to the computer I went off again.

45 minutes this time, and I missed my session on the guitars. And if I had felt bad before, I was feeling even worse now. It’s a really long time – and I do mean long – since I’ve felt as bad as I did just then.

Nevertheless I was up, so I was staying up. And i wasn’t intending to miss out on my run, despite no food and no health.

There was the usual struggle up the hill – which isn’t getting any better regardless of whatever circumstances. But at least my problems aren’t as bad as some of other people. There’s been an itinerant person wandering around the Pointe du Roc and he seems to have settled down under the hedge for the night.

It beats me why he’s settled there, because there’s plenty of covered spaces where he could settle if he so choose. But I do have to say, that having slept so often in Caliburn, Strider and various hire cars by the side of the sea over the years, there is something hypnotic about sleeping in the open air with the sound of the sea in my head.

having recovered my breath I ran on down to the top of the cliff to see what was going on.

Nothing much here right now, but away in the distance Jersey and the Channel islands were taking quite a pasting. That’s something of an incredible storm that’s raging out there right now.

There’s quite a high wind blowing here right now, but luckily it’s not coming in this direction but going off out to sea, so it’s not likely to affect us. However, the winds are quite contrary and who knows what’s in store for us overnight.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw a couple of old cars, one of which was a green Morgan, driving around here.

On the car park by the Coastguard Station this evening was this green Morgan. I’m not sure if it’s the same car but anyway, it’s still interesting so with the owner’s permission I photographed it.

He told me that it is an original Morgan, not a reproduction, but it’s one of the modern series and made in 1985. That’s a shame, because I was hoping that it might have been one of the older ones. It’s still nice though.

Despite the wind, there’s still work to be done.

As I wandered around the headland I noticed a couple of fishing boats heading out across the Baie de Mont St Michel. It looks as if they are heading out towards the Brittany coast to see what they can find to catch over there.

It looks as if the head of the Baie de Mont St Michel has been abandoned by the fishing boats right now. But that may well be because of the school of dolphins that is said to be loitering around up there and which have been seen by one or two people – but not by me.

My run took me down along the top of the cliff and past the top of the chantier navale.

We have another occupant in there today, but I’m not sure whether or not it actually counts. There are the two big fishing boats that have been there for ages, but also a small yacht on blocks next to it.

Whatever it is, it was nice to see it so I took a photo and then carried on with my run all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

While I had stopped for breath, I walked down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see what was going on.

Chausiais was down there, moored up in the loading position underneath the crane. Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen her heading out to the Ile de Chausey the other day, so it’s strange that she’s looking as if she’s loading up ready to go out again so soon.

Nothing else seemed to be happening so I turned round and ran off to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord, pushing on by about 50 metres that particular segment of my run.

There was nothing going on there either. The sun was hidden in swathes of clouds and so there were no picnickers out there this evening. So I ran on home.

Having written my notes I’m off to bed, for an early night for once. I’m off for a day out tomorrow so I need to be on form. I’ll try some breakfast tomorrow morning and see if I can keep it down, and I have to go shopping too on my way out as supplies are getting low – not that it particularly matters right now.

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 – I’VE NOT BEEN …

… feeling myself today.

“And quite right too” I hear you say.

But never mind that for a moment, I’m definitely sickening for something and I know that for definite because I’m off my food. Which, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is not something that happens every day.

The day didn’t really get off to a very good start today , as seems to be usual these days, I missed the third alarm. Only b a couple of minutes, but nevertheless …

The notes on the dictaphone from my night’s voyage were interesting too. There were two new people who had started work on the radio – a girl and an older guy. I’d had a listen to a piece of music on the girl’s site and I wasn’t very impressed with it but everyone’s taste is personal. Anyway I was in the queue to ge tmyself organised when these two came over the hill. They were talking and the guy was saying something about “there’s only one song on your web site and it’s the same one that i’ve got”. She was saying things like “well I’m very new” but she’s only just started, all this kind of thing. I said “I’m quite happy to help anyone with any kind of help that they need” but they just drifted past as if I hadn’t said a word. They ended up in the queue in front of me to have their work dealt with and they were going on about this being new and all of this kind of thing. Then it was my turn so I gave me name and asked if there were any special instructions for me. he was looking down the list to see whether there was anything. I was going to say that if anyone like these two people needed a hand to get themselves started I would be quite happy to do it but instead I ended up dictating the notes of the journey.

But looking back, how long is it … ” that’s a rather personal question” – ed … since I’ve had some pleasant company with me on a nocturnal voyage? It must be an age – or, at least, it feels like it.

After breakfast I made a start on updating the journal entry for Sunday – the one that I had left hanging in the air. And by the time I knocked off for the evening I’d actually finished it.

However, there was a whole variety of interruptions today – tidying up being not the least of them. If I go video-conferencing, I need to have the place looking quite nice.

Terry came round too. he had an appointment in town and so came for the hat that Liz had left here the other day. And, furthermore, and even more importantly, he brought me a fresh supply of home-made cake from Liz.

So that’s one crisis solved.

At 11:00 I had my Welsh lesson on the internet. That meant doing quite a bit of preparation too, which was not easy because I don’t have the course book. In the end the tutor sent me a *.pdf version which was very nice of her

A few important things had come up during the lesson that needed attention so I had to organise those, and that meant once more a very late lunch.

It was another really gorgeous afternoon and so I decided once more to take my sandwiches outside and sit on my wall overlooking the harbour.

Not that I managed to go very far at first. In fact I came to a shuddering halt at the front door of the building. Regular readers of this rubbish will know about the underground refuse system here in the town and we’ve seen one or two lorries emptying them

But we’ve never seen a lorry this close with this much detail. Just look at how big these subterranean containers are.

Down at the wall, I was there all on ly own today. Everyone is either back at school or back at work and I was late as well.

But there was an awful lot going on in the harbour today. I’m not sure at all what was happening here but we had one of the smaller fishing boats tied up at the fish processing plant and there were a couple of people in a zodiac-type of boat inspecting it.

Mind you, in that depth of water they didn’t need a zodiac to go out there. They could quite easily have walked.

Mind you it didn’t stay there long.

Into the port came another one of the shell-fishing boats, a rather larger version. Our zodiac was clearly in the way so it set off and piddled off out of there

What that was all about, I really didn’t know because I couldn’t see at all what was going on.

It was pretty busy in the inner harbour too, and there was a queue of boats waiting at the crane for unloading.

In pole position for loading and unloading is our old friend Chausiais, looking as if she’s making ready to set off with a cargo for the Ile de Chausey. And behind her awaiting her turn – or maybe having already had hers and waiting for the harbour gates to open, is Normandy Trader

She must have sneaked in on the morning tide when I wasn’t looking.

Something else caught me rather by surprise too.

There I was, sitting there quietly eating my butties when suddenly a horn went off around the corner, that almost made me drop my book.

Of course, the tides are almost half an hour later every day, so it’s round about now that Joly France would be coming back from the morning ferry out to the Ile de Chausey.

And you can tell that the tide has only just started coming in.

The smaller boats with a shallow draught can pass over the sandbar at the entrance quite easily but boats like Joly France have much more trouble and have to go all the way over to the eastern side of the harbour entrance.

The water that drains out of the inner harbour has scoured a deeper channel on that side and that gives the larger boats more depth to play with.

Even so, when we went out there A WHILE AGO we grounded out on the way back in.

But Joly France didn’t hang around long. She dropped off one load of passengers, picked up another and headed back out to sea.

And as I watched her disappear, one of the medium-sized fishing boats came around the corner heading for port, presumably with a full load of shellfish ready to be unloaded at the fish processing plant.

She was travelling at a fair rate of knots too. At first I thought that she was a large speedboat of some description, making waves like that.

But better late than never – I came back inside and carried on with the work that I had to do. Choosing the music for a radio project was on the agenda this afternoon.

And I didn’t really have all that long to spend working because, with being rather late, it was time soon enough to go back out for my afternoon walk.

By now I reckoned that the harbour gates were well and truly opened because I have never ever seen so much nautical traffic just offshore as I have today

There were boats heading in all directions, and not just to and from the port either. This speedboat in the foreground was putting quite a spurt on heading along the coast towards Bréhal-Plage.

And those ships and boats in the previous photo – I thought that I recognised one of them.

And I was right too. It’s Chausiais. The harbour gates are definitely open now, because she’s been able to leave the port and head off on her little trip to the Ile de Chausey.

One of these days I’d love to be able to see what she’s carrying but her holds are closed in and with covered hatches so it’s not that easy at all. But I suppose that it takes all sorts of cargo out there.

Of course, if the harbour gates are open to let one boat out, they will be open to let everyone else out too.

And sure enough, out of the port right behind Chausias comes Normandy Trader off on her way back to the Channel Islands with another load of freight.

She’s an open freighter of course – a former car ferry by the looks of things, so it’s easy to see what she carries. But of course you can’t see anything at this distance.

As a small car ferry, she’s not really equipped to deal with the seas in the same way that a ship with a pointed bow would be.

And, for that matter, neither is Chausiais.

There’s quite a wind blowing out there and I had to take off my cap as I was walking around the headland. And the ships, with their less-than-conventional design were making rather heavy weather of the journey out to sea.

There was some beautiful spray flying around as Normandy Trader smashed her way through the waves. This photo has come out rather well, I reckon.

So that’s enough ships for the moment.

In the beautiful sunny sunshine I carried on with my afternoon walk around the headland and it was my turn to surprise some people. It looked as if they were practising Tai Chi, although I don’t think that you need yoga mats for that.

Anyway they must have seen me coming because as soon as I pointed the camera they folded up their mats and they too piddled off into the sunset as well.

It wasn’t my day, was it?

And what was quite amusing about this afternoon was that we seem to have had a tactical substitution of freighters in the harbour.

Chausiais and Normandy Trader may well have sailed out of the port on the afternoon tide, but the tide has also brought in with it another one of our old friends, Thora, also from the Channel islands.

And how I would have loved to have been at the harbour and watched her come in. There would have been an extremely interesting nautical danse macabre as all three boats were jostling for position in there.

The high winds have brought out a whole load of people and nautical craft as we have seen.

And you can tell just how windy it is out there, simply by looking at the sail on that yacht as it comes round the headland.

Look how much it’s billowing out. I bet that it’s pulling the boat along at a ferocious rate despite the load that it’s carrying. I can count at least 10 people on board and that’s quite a load for a boat like that.

But I bet that it’s exciting on there.

With all of the fishing boats out there, it’s no surprise that they are expecting a bumper load of fish and shellfish coming into the port today.

As a result there are three large artics, a smaller 17-tonne lorry and several other smaller refrigerated vehicles waiting at the fish-processing plant this afternoon

And the fork-lift truck – that has quite a load on it that’s goign to be deposited into the artic trailer over there. That’s a never-ending chain of product that will be stuck in there and the other vehicles.

There’s a really high turnover of product down there these days

And talking of high turnover of product, I used the last of my apple purée this morning. Time to make some more.

Six apples, one and a half pears, some desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg all put on the boil and then left to simmer. And when it was ready, the liquid was drained off and bottled, the solids were put in the whizzer and whizzed into a purée.

Then a handful of raisins was added, and all of that was bottled too. Of course the bottles were sterilised by giving them a minute in the microwave with some warm water in there to spread the heat.

But it wasn’t all as easy as that. Our Welsh group has set up a communication group on the internet. A couple of us set it up and were testing it – to such an extent that I completely forgot about the fruit on the stove and instead of 45 minutes simmering, it had just about two hours.

That’s not a good idea.

By this time I wasn’t feeling too good, and I don’t know why. I hadn’t been able to concentrate all day and I’ve done none of my Accountancy or Music studies because of it.

And not only that, I’ve lost my appetite, and that’s the sign of a major relapse heading my way – no surprise seeing how many months (over 4 months in fact) since I’ve had my four-weekly cancer treatment.

So no tea tonight, but I was determined to carry on with my running despite everything. So off I went, with all of my aches and pains and grouches.

Despite the wind, it was a beautiful evening and the colours were splendid. The big marker light on the rock just outside the harbour entrance, the sea, and the resort of Kairon-Plage in the background all came out really well

Surprisingly, after all of the excitement today, there wasn’t a boat to be seen anywhere at all in the baie de Mont St Michel. I wonder where they all went.

As fr me, i went off on my run all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury where one of my colleagues from the radio drove past and waved to me.

My run ended up at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord and I had a look over the wall to see how we were doing for picnickers tonight. And do you know what? After all of the excitement here over the last week or two there wasn’t even a one.

But not to worry. Because as I was musing over the situation, down the steps came a few young people carrying blankets and bags, and they began to settle themselves down in the evening sun.

And evening sun there was plenty of tonight.

We’ve had some good ones just recently but tonight was one of the best. But I didn’t hang around too long. I just stayed for a minute or two and then ran on back home.

Tonight I made a determmined effort to finish my notes even though I didn’t feel like it. And now I’m off to bed, rather later than I had hoped.

Here’s hoping that I feel a little better tomorrow because otherwise we’ll be heading for a tragedy again.

Friday 29th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of today’s calamity – and before you ask, NO, I haven’t been baking today – I can tell you about my day today.

It was another unsuccessful day in the “getting up before the third alarm” stakes and I’m as sick of doing it as you lot probably are of me telling you about it.

But then, it wasn’t actually an early night last night (although I have had much later nights than this and still been up before 06:20) so it’s my own fault right enough.

And according to my dictaphone, I’d been on my travels too.

There was a group of kids playing cricket in the street. There was on particular couple, a boy and a girl, they boy hit the ball and the young girl ran up the hill after it, got it and threw the ball back. It went over beyond the batsman and I caught it. I decided “right, I’ll bowl the ball back to her past the boy”. But the first one I got I dropped it short and it landed right in front of my feet and bounced up so I caught it. The next time my arm went over my head as I went to bowl and was caught up in some wires, telegraph wires or something like that. While this was going on there was some kind of news item going on about the cricket and about a big cricket score but I can’t remember what now.

That wasn’t all either.

Although there was nothing else on the dictaphone, I had an image going round in my mind of a situation where at some point during the night I was with a girl and i wish that I could remember who she was. We were in a relationship but she was having all kinds of personal problems which were causing her to want to put an end to our relationship, but I was equally determined not to let it end and I was having quite a discussion with her in my car – a British right-hand-drive car too.

so I don’t know about that one.

With not getting up until … errr … 07:35, which is no good at all, everything was running dreadfully late.

Breakfast wasn’t until about 09:00 which meant that I didn’t start work until about 09:35.

And at first glance, it doesn’t look as if I’ve done very much. I’ve amended one page off one website to bring it up to modern standards.

That took longer than it might have done because it needed a considerable amount of rewriting. Another one that was written in 2008 and which hasn’t been edited at all since.

And in connection with rewriting a page a day off the other site, I’m about three quarters of the way through doing that.

That’s a page from 2001 and which has had a little desultory editing over the years since then. However, it’s long been overtaken by all kinds of events of all natures and a total rewrite is long overdue.

Furthermore, it’s now grown to such a size that it’s practically unmanageable. I’m trying to keep my pages down to no more than 30kb (that’s about 18kb of text) but this one is already at 49kb and growing rapidly.

It’s going to have to be split, and that means resurrecting a project that I started in 2007 and stopped some time round about 2010 – a list of web pages and cross-references to other pages.

That’s because if I do split the page, some of the cross-references are going to be wrong.

There were a whole variety of interruptions too during the day.

Lunch was one of them, of course, and I do have to say that even though my bread looks strange, it was absolutely perfect – felt like bread, tasted like bread, everything. Even the correct number of airholes.

The truth though will be whether I can do a second one like it, or whether this one was just a flash in the pan.

Round about 14:30 I went to fetch something from the living room.

And that was when I noticed, with a quick glance out of the window, that things aren’t what they were were supposed to be.

“What’s afoot?” I asked myself.
“About 30 centimetres” – ed

It seemed to me to be a good idea to go and make further enquiries

It was an absolutely, stunningly beautiful afternoon and I’m glad that I nipped out for a quick walk around.

And I can safely say without any fear of contradiction that I have never in my life seen the sea as clear and as transparent as this. It’s the kind of colour that you always associate with the Mediterranean, and reminds me of the week that I spent WITH TRIXI ON A GREEK ISLAND called Agistri.

We’ve seen a few photos just recently of the Baie de Mont St Michel and how the sand looked a lot more evident than it has been at low tide, but this is something altogether different.

There weren’t all that many people around this afternoon which is hardly surprising, given the acrid nature of the smoke.

But these people out here on jetskis were enjoying themselves. There were three of them altogether – the third one put in an appearance just after I had clicked the shutter. They looked as if they had come from the beach at Bréhal-Plage, that neck of the woods, but it wasn’t clear where exactly they were going to.

But as long as they were enjoying it, that was all that counts. They had the right kind of weather and I bet that the sea bed looked really good where they were.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago we saw a digger digging out years of accumulated sand out of the old tidal swimming pool.

And this is the result just here. You can see that it’s holding water – and holding it quite well too. And although there was no-one actually in it, there were several people loitering with intent around it.

As for the column of smoke, it was becoming thicker and thicker and we were being treated to several loud bangs too. “Oxygen cylinders” was my immediate thought.

But it wasn’t possible to see what was causing the smoke or where it was coming from. Too many houses in the way. But the sound of sirens from fire engines dashing to the scene told me that it was something major.

Despite having had my little walk around to check on the inferno, I still went out for my afternoon walk.

The tide was still well in and the fire was clearly still raging because the plume of smoke was thicker and there were fewer people around. Down on the rocks, though, it wasn’t too bad and this person here was quite unperturbed by all of the commotion going on around him

It did make me wonder whether he was fishing for herring. If so, and the wind veered round a few points to this direction, he’d finish with a lovely batch of kippers.

He wasn’t the only one out here getting his rod out.

My hat goes off to those two intrepid fishermen over there because there is no easy way of getting to that position. They must have scrambled over quite a few rocks and I hope that they will be able to scramble back.

And that reminds me. Yesterday’s emergency – nothing in the newspapers apart from a rescue of a couple of canoeists down near Carolles-Plage. I wonder if it was nothing but a training exercise.

But as for their canoeists -I wonder if they had been rescued because they lit a fire in their canoe. You have to know that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

There wasn’t as much maritime traffic today aswe have seen over the last few days and I’ve no idea why.

The fishing boats I can understand. They don’t want to end up with a hold full of kippers either. And it can’t have been much fun on that zodiac either, or the one being pulled along behind, if they’ve been round the corner in the smoke and fumes.

But we’ve not seen the yellow zodiac for a few days. It looks as if it’s departed as quickly and dramatically as it came here.

This was interesting though.

The little baby cabin cruiser thing drifting around out there just offshore. And drifting too, because if you look very carefully, you’ll see that the propellor of the outboard motor as out of the water and one of the crew looks as if he’s calling on his mobile phone.

Normandy Trader was supposed to be coming over today too, with a pile of stuff that should have gone to St Malo. But I didn’t see her.

Subsequent information told me that she had actually been in, made a dramatically rapid turn-round and gone back out again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that one of the things that I enjoy doing is taking photos of people taking photos.

There have been a couple of occasions were photographers have brought models up here to pose for the camera and we’ve managed to snap them. And there was another one her today – a heavily-tattooed woman taking a few photos of a young woman.

They were clearly having a good time, although I hoped that the young woman had a good sense of balance. That’s a 100-foot drop to her left.

So back here to make a few enquiries and it turns out that it’s “la Sphère”, the recycling centre in Donville les Bains, that’s gone up like Joan of Arc. And the explosions that we heard were a couple of gas cyliners and several tons of vehicle batteries.

More news follows.

The music course lost me completely in week 2. We were working on major scales, minor scales, Ionian, Doric and Seventh scales. Basically, every note might played in a particular key except a flattened 2 and a flattened 6 which, apparently, are never played at all.

And it’s a tribute to the course that while I might not be technically able to keep up with the proceedings, at least I know what a flattened 2 and a flattened 6 is, which is something that I didn’t know before.

And when I translate it all onto the bass guitar as I did with my hour on the guitar between 18:00 and 19:00, with triads and minor 7ths or major 7ths, it all makes perfect sense. So for things like that, the course is fulfilling its purpose.

Tea was one of the bean burgers on a bap with a baked potato, followed by a slice of apple pie and the last of the soya coconut dessert. My pie really is excellent and I did well with that

Back out for my evening runs tonight. There was a headwind but I pushed on regardless and made it all the way up to my breathing stop at the end of the hedge, and then down to the clifftop.

Around the corner in the Baie de Mont St Michel there was a huge line of these marker buoys going round almost in a circle. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single fishing boat anywhere that I could see

There were probably no more than half a dozen people out here too. The smoke was probably keeping them all away from this end of town

There wasn’t all that much pleasure traffic out there either.

This beautiful yacht caught my eye though. Just sitting there not doing all that much, out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel underneath the headland where the Chateau de la Crete is.

That’s what I call peaceful and relaxing and it made me quite envious. And I wonder if the person over there near the shore has anything to do with the yacht.

My run took me all the way down the Boulevar Vaufleury and round the corner to my marker. And then i walked back to the harbour to see what was going on.

And the answer to that was “nothing”. There was nothing at all moving about. Victor Hugo and Granville, the two Channel island ferries, are still tied up over there. The local restauranteurs have been telling me that they are allowed to reopen on June 2nd, and so i was wondering if that means that the ferries to the Channel islands will resume on that date.

There was something to say that they had given all of their stocks of snacks and drinks to the local food bank.

Because of my extra little walk this afternoon, my fitbit was showing 89% of my day’s activities.

Keen to push on to the 100% I ran round and up to the Eglise de Notre Dame de Cap Lihou and did a lap around the church. There’s a square around the back of the church with this cross in it and I wondered if that square was where the medieval market took place.

Crosses in the market place were quite common. They were the local assembly point and where the news was read out and announcements made.

So back round to the other side of the church.

And I hadn’t noticed this statue before. And you can see that it’s made of some material other than Chausey granite because there’s hardly a trace of erosion on the stone blocks, yet acid rain has really done for this statue.

When I was doing some research into an article that I was writing about CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE, it was interesting to compare the different rates of erosion of the hieroglyphics on the different needles, due to the different levels of acid rain.

So I ran on down to the Rue du Nord and the viewpoint there.

Nothing at all happening out at sea, although my picnickers were there again having a good time – and who can blame tham?

Nothing for me to hang about for so I ran on back to the apartment where I had to close all of the windows because the wind had indeed turned and the acrid smoke was now blowing right into my living room.

So now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow and there’s a football match on the internet tomorrow after noon which I don’t want to miss

Mind you, if I don’t organise myself properly any time soon, I’ll probably still ba asleep at kick-off.

Monday 25th May 2020 – A FEW MORE …

… things to add to the pile of things that haven’t been done today. I’m not having a good start to the week.

It all went wrong right at the very beginning when the third alarm found me somewhere in Wyoming, and a very dry, dusty Wyoming at that too. I’d been in my old Opel Senator and had an accident in which it was written off and I’d had to wait around for a taxi. Eventually the one that the insurance company sent fo me tuned up – an old blue Volvo 244. On the way back (and the name Irmo – which Rhys might know – was mentioned) I mentioned how I’d be happy to settle in a place like this and I asked what taxi-driving was like around here. The driver told me with alarm “ohh don’t go settling around here” but didn’t elaborate. He told me that he might have a buyer for my car so we were talking about buying old cars and dismantling them like I used to from the abandoned car auctions in Brussels but at that point the alarm went off.

After the medication (I was up and about by 06:30) I had a listen to the dictaphone. And there was something very enigmatic on there from round about 02:30. “Yes sometime during the night I dreamt that I was actually writing up my blog. Yes, it’s getting to me, isn’t it?” was what I heard when I played it back. But what it was all about I really didn’t have a clue.

Between breakfast and lunch there was a variety of things to do. First off was to send off the radio project for the forthcoming weekend. And seeing as it’s the end of the month we’re having a live concert again.

Then it was time to choose the music for the next radio project.

It’s a friend’s birthday so I had to prepare a special birthday card for her. That was quite important.

My Welsh homework needed doing too, and that involved some research and more than a little tidying up of my notes. And the questions had come in *.docx format which Open Office doesn’t read correctly – so I had to reformat that by copying the text and paginating it which took an age.

Then back to the radio project and by the time that I knocked off for lunch the tracks had been joined in pairs, I’d chosen a speech for my guest and I’d started to write the notes.

After lunch there was cookery to be done.

This morning I’d used the last of the purée so I made some more. It hadn’t kept as well as previously so I’ve decided to make smaller amounts more regularly. Today’s effort was apple and pear, and I remembered the cinnamon and nutmeg.

With the juice that was left over, I added some syrup to make a cordial, and we’ll see how that goes.

As well as that, there was the remaining kilo of carrots to be peeled, diced, blanched and frozen. They are in the freezer right now too.

There was a break while I went out for my afternoon walk in the glorious sun.

There were a few people staring down at the foot of the cliff so I went along to see what there was going on. I’m not sure what it was that they were seeing, but I saw this beautiful little yacht go scudding by right under my nose.

One of my neighbours was there too – Gribouille’s mum – with her arm in plaster. She’d had a fall in the market on Saturday and broken her wrist.

She started to tell me all about it but no thanks – I don’t want to know things like that.

The next couple of photos look as if the quality is quite dismal too.

In several respects that’s true, but it was necessary to enhance them to bring our exactly what it was that I wanted to see. These are two fishing boats – in this photo and the next one, but it is what is in the background that is more interesting.

In all the time that I’ve been living here I don’t think that we have ever had such perfect weather out that way

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, on a good day we can see the island of Jersey from here even though it’s at least 54 kilometres away.

Today, not only could we see the island quite clearly but we could even see the buildings and the radio masts on the island. I’ve seen them before, but only with the zoom lens at full-extent and with some severe cropping and enhancing. But today, it didn’t take much to bring them out.

In places you could even see them with the naked eye, and that was impressive.

Having chatted to another neighbour who was in the vicinity I went off for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds of people out there today – picnicking on the lawn, walking around the headland and even down on the beach. Some corners of the beach are not easy to get to but the seafood pickings must be really good. Here was someone having a go at the peche à pied by the looks of things

It would be really interesting to find out how much he actually was able to catch and, more importantly, how he was going to prepare it for eating.

Talking of good seafood pickings, regular readers of this rubbish will recall a few days ago that we saw a whole sock of fleagulls perched on the rocks, looking as if they were Waiting for Godot.

At the time I speculated that they were waiting for the tide to recede from the mudflats so that they could get stuck in to supper. The tide is out right now and here they are, having a feast.

There must have been several hundred here and it shows the capacity of the shellfish to regenerate themselves every day to be be able to produce enough food to satisfy this lot.

A little earlier I mentioned the beautiful weather.

Over towards the Brittany coast the weather was rather misty and hazy but down at the end of the baie de Mont St Michel we could see quite clearly.

The large white buildings are all of the hotels and the like that service Mont St Michel. Having seen the prices that they charge for even the most basic services down there, I shudder to think how much they would want for a night in a hotel down there.

Over to the left we have the Pointe de Carolles with the Cabanon Vauban – the customs lookout post – perched on the edge.

And notice how far out the tide is? You can clearly see the orange sand down at the head of the bay.

There was the usual pause to admire the scenery down below the cliff on the south side of the Pointe du Roc.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we always keep an eye on the chantier navale to see what goes on there. Just ecently we’ve seen them whittle themselves down from five to four to three to two. But today, they have gone back up to four with the arrival of two more.

Only small ones, but then I suppose that everything helps. Someone was sanding down one of them. I couldn’t see which one it was but I could certainly hear the sound.

Up on blocks in the chantier navale is not the only way that boats receive attention around here.

Careening is a regular feature when there’s a high tidal range, although I’ve yet to see that applied in any seriousness. Being strapped tightly to a knuckle on the harbour wall so that the boat grounds out safely when the tide goes out is on the other hand something that we’ve seen on a regular basis and there’s another one over there receiving similar treatment.

There was quite a crowd up on the wall by it too, so something exciting must have happened to it.

Over the last few days regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the giant crane that appeared on the docks at the end of last week.

Whatever it’s come here to do, it’s doing it right now. Its width with its safety feet is such that it’s blocked off half of the road and there afe traffic light sontrolling the traffic.

It’s not possible at all to see what it’s doing from here. One of these days I’ll have to go for a walk down there and take a closer look. It has to be something worthwhile to have attracted machinery like that.

There was the usual hour on the guitars, somewhat later than usual, and then tea. Tonight was a stuffed pepper and the last of the apple crumble. I’ll have to make another pudding tomorrow and I have a cunning plan for that.

There was the usual run out tonight – an agonising crawl up the hill in the teeth of a gale. But I recovered my breath, ran down to the clifftop and then walked round the corner.

The other day, regular readers of this rubbish saw the marker light for the harbour entrance standing well clear of the water on its rock. By my estimation it’s still half an hour or so before high tide, and if you compare the two photos you’ll see how high the tide comes in.

And look how clear the air is this evening. You can see for miles down there.

As I ran on down on top of the cliff I noticed hordes of people standing on top of the harbour wall.

For quite a while I stood and watched them, thinking that they might be going to jump in. We’ve seen them do that before. But as long as I looked, no-one moved and I came to the conclusion that they were fishermen or something.

There were a couple of parties of girls as well loitering around where I was standing, presumably likewise waiting for things over there to happen.

As I stood there watching them, something came a put-putting around the headland.

At first I wasn’t sure what it was, but I suppose that it’s another one of these very small fishing boats. It’s a working boat, judging by the radio aerial.

And those things in the foreground. I wasn’t sure whether they were marker buoys or seagulls. And having had a closer look I have to say that i’m still none-the-wiser.

And that reminds me of a story I heard about a barrister, FE Smith, giving a lengthy explanation of something to a crowded courtroom.
“I’ve listened to you for half an hour” said the judge “and I’m still none-the-wiser”
“Maybe not, My Lord” replied Smith. “But you’re certainly better-informed”.

My run took me all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and as there was a lot going on at the fish processing plant I went to see.

This equipment that they were using was quite interesting and it took me a minute or two to work out what it was. And I came to the conclusion that it’s a kind of vacuum-cleaner that was being used to suck the shellfish out of the hold of the trawler and into the fish processing plant.

And if that’s what it is (and that was what it sounded like) it’s a pretty ingenious device.

My run tok me round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

Nothing exciting going on there and still a while before sunset so I took a quick photo and ran on home to write up my notes..

Tomorrow is a busy day. I have my Welsh class so I need to prepare, I have my book-keeping class that has now started, I have my music course.

Then there are the photos from Sunday to deal with, the current radio project and another live concert for the end of next month too.

That’s before I even think about the ongoing projects like the websites and the July 2019 photos, and then all of the other stuff that’s built up from projects before that were never finished.

It’s a mystery to me how I’m ever going to find the time to do it all.

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a parking issue on these pages?

At one time there was one almost every other day but there hasn’t been one for quite some time so I reckon that it’s about time that I put that right.

Another thing that gets my goat, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the issue of caravanettes. Apart from reversing into road signs and knocking them over and clearing off without saying anything, they think that the rest of the rules and regulations of the road don’t apply to them either.

So here we’re killing two birds with one stone. “No Parking for Caravanettes” is clearly written on this sign but the driver clearly believes that it doesn’t apply to him.

And there are two reasons why they are banned from parking in the street, apart from the obvious sanitary ones.

This is a historical medieval area with all kinds of apartments crammed into the old stone buildings. I’m lucky in that my building has private parking. Almost all of the others don’t and the streets are so narrow that it’s almost impossible to park within the walls. The locals who live here need all of the parking that they can get
It’s a bus route with the big 12-metre coaches that service the College here coming round that corner and it’s really tight. They need all of the space that they can get and wide vehicles like this overhanging the parking spaces especially right on the corner is giving the drivers an added complication.

But none of the foregoing seems to bother our visitor here as long as he has somewhere to come and spread his virus around.

The local council provides a parking space (a mere 200 metres down the road) for caravanettes and there are plenty of other places, like acres of abandoned docks, for example, where they can park as they please without inconveniencing anyone.

Signed “Grouchy of Granville”.

As for me, I didn’t go to the shops as I said that I would yesterday. But I’ll explain all about that in due course. Firstly, it will be an enormous surprise to regular readers of this rubbish (as indeed it was to me!) who will recall the issues that I’ve been having just recently, to learn that by the time that the third alarm went off I was actually up and about.

During the night I’d been up and about too. I was taking two girls to a night club in Manchester. The night club was in the North and I knew where it was vaguely situated but I didn’t realise that I was coming from Brussels. So I picked up these two girls and put them in the car, a Morris Minor I think, and set out and drove. We got to join the inner ring road in Brussels and they wanted to know why I was going that way. “doesn’t this road end in a field or something?”. I said “no” but then I thought that maybe the way they wanted me to go was the right way so I said “OK we can go that way”. But then I saw a sign for Bolton saying straight on. I thought that Bolton was near Manchester so we could go that way. But then I started racking my brains about how to get across to Manchester, to the north side to this Night Club. I really couldn’t think how to do it. At one point I was trying to drive on the wrong side of the road, I don’t know why and cars were coming that way towards me. But it would have been the right side of the road in the UK but the wrong side of the road whee I was apparently.

After breakfast I sat down and looked at a couple of the website pages that I’d planned to be dealing with. And this is how I spent my day – absorbed in this – and by the time that I’d finished I’d totally rewritten several pages and modified several others too in order to conform to the new specifications. It had been a really good day, just for a change.

There was even time to edit a pile of photos from July 2019 too – catching up somewhat with those.

During the day there had been a whole pile of interruptions too.

Firstly there was a shower and a general clean-up. Not just of me either but of the apartment. That needed to be spick and span, because I was having visitors.

Sure enough, the travelling nurse came round and took a blood sample. We had a really good chat too and he was surprised about the relaxation of the health regulations here too, and is of the opinion that the rates will be going up again as people are misled into thinking that this is all over and drop their guard.

In the meantime I’d had a look around the apartment to see what I needed from the shops and apart from bananas, there was nothing that I really needed. And as for the lack of bananas, I have a few oranges that needed eating so it wasn’t as if I was desperate. Instead I made an Executive Decision (that is, a decision that if it goes wrong, the person who made it is executed) to push on with my work.

My lunchtime bread was really nice. There’s room for improvement of course but it was much better than previous attempts and I shall have to work harder at it. But I’m on the right track, I reckon.

There was the afternoon walk of course, out there in the sun and the wind (because the wind is now back again).

We had the people back out on the beach again now that yesterday’s sea fog has lifted. Not as many as I was expecting to see, with everyone going out to faire le pont between the Bank Holiday and the weekend.

This kind of social distancing is pretty much acceptable of course. But having seen the crowds on the beaches in the UK and the USA, then they are going to have some really serious problems in a week or two’s time.

Regular readers of this rubbish might recall whether or not I’ve mentioned this object before but I can’t remember – although it’s extremely likely.

And you can see exactly how it works in this photo because the tide is quite right. It’s a medieval fish trap and the idea is that at high tide the water overflows the stone walls and as the tide recedes, the water drains out through the joints leaving the fish stuck behind.

The medieval citizens just walk out and pick up the trapped fish, and there’s your lunch. Not mine, of course.

While all of this was going on, I was disturbed once more by a rather dark shadow passing over me, rather like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings that so frightened the Nine Walkers.

No prizes though for guessing what it is. With this nice sunny afternoon and te high winds that we are having, the Birdmen of Alcatraz are out in force.

This one here was being buzzed by a seagull. They don’t take lightly to intruders and, if the rumours are true, they made pretty short work of the surveillance drones used by the police to patrol the beaches during the detention à domicile

A girl and I (keeping our social distance of course) spent a while looking at them waiting for the collision that we felt was going to be inevitable. Not much of a social distance between them even in the air.

It’s amusing (to people like me, anyway) that they take off over there from a field right next door to the local cemetery. If the take-off goes all wrong (which it has done in the past) they don’t have to carry the failures too far.

But then, that’s why they build walls around cemeteries of course. Because people are dying to go in there.

I’ll get my coat.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that yesterday we saw a pile of abandoned personal possessions on the wall of the ramp leading down to the Square Maurice Marland.

Even more surprisingly, they are still there today. Not exactly where they had been left, but someone had come along and filed them under “CS”.

Just imagine that in the UK. They wouldn’t have remained around for 30 seconds had someone put them down somewhere. It just goes to show how different people have different moral values in different parts of the world.

By the time that I’d knocked off I’d been hard at it and had a really good day for once. My hour on the guitars was profitable and I enjoyed it so much more because I’ve adopted a new tactic as far as the bass guitar goes and I’m going to work hard at this.

Tea was an “anything curry” made of leftovers and a small tin of lentils, with the last of the rice, the making of which resulted in me throwing the turmeric all over the floor. The apple crumble for dessert wad delicious and I’ll make some more of that.

Time for my evening run, I reckon, so off I set.

The usual struggle up the hill (I just can’t seem to push on any more than I’m doing even after all of the practice that I’ve been having). Eventually I arrived at the cliff top just in time to see this yacht go sailing past me towing a little dinghy behind it.

It was well on its way out of the harbour and I had no idea where it might be going. But it made me quite envious to watch it sail out – to such an extent that I put a couple of plans into operation when I returned home.

That wasn’t all of the maritime activity either.

There’s no point whatever in gratuitously posting pictures of trawlers but this one was quite interesting. As I rounded the corner at the tip of the Pointe du Roc this speedboat flashed by me with a driver who clearly had his pedal to the metal.

You can see how lively the sea was with all of the wind that blowing about, and it looked quite impressive as he carved his way through the waves with all of that sea spray splashing around.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is different phenomena of strange effects and patterns in the sea.

As I did my run along the clifftop on the south side of the Pointe du Roc I noticed another one so when I stopped for my pause for breath I stopped to take a photo of it.

Whatever it is and whatever is causing it I really couldn’t say. It looks like foam or something similar but whether it’s from someone who has been emptying their washing machine into a grid or whather it’s a natural phenomenon I really couldn’t say.

But the evenness of the distribution was fascinating. Despite the rough sea right now it was in a perfectly straight line with a right-angled bend further out.

While I was stopped getting my breath and photographing the sea phenomena, I had a good look down at the chantier navale .

There has been more movement of the occupants down there over the last 24 hours. We are now down to just two boats. The big black and green one that was up on blocks right at the bottom seems to have gone back out to sea.

So on that note I cleared off and ran all the way down the Boulevard vaufleury and my breathing point around the corner at the second pedestrian crossing.

While I was on my way down the boulevard I noticed something in the inner harbour that made me go back to look.

Sure enough, the black and green trawler that was up on blocks in the chantier navale for weeks is now moored underneath the crane in the inner harbour. I’ve no idea why but if Normandy Trader comes into harbour we’ll have a problem.

It goes without saying that when I went out earlier today, Thora was long-gone back to the Channel Islands.

There was nothing doing at the viewpoint in the rue du Nord. The clouds had come down and the sun was well-hidden, so I ran back home.

As I started to type up my notes, Rosemary rang and we ended up chatting until long after 00:30. I have an early start in the morning so I didn’t bother finishing them off. I went straight to bed and I’ll catch up tomorrow.

Tuesday 19th May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a decent old car on these pages? After all, it’s not like the Auvergne where old cars are two-a-penny round here is it?

The answer is “probably about as long as I managed to beat the third alarm to feet to my feet” which is another sore point around here, especially this morning.

And so, in order to whet your appetite for a decent old car, here’s a “Traction Avant” – one of the Citroen front-wheel drives made over a 20-or -so period between the mid 30s and the mid 50s and which featured as gangstermobiles in almost every French film of that period – driving along the Rue du Roc this evening.

Horsepower was calculated in different ways in different countries so in the UK this would be known as a Light or Heavy 15 depending on whether it was a “4” or a “6” cylinder model, whereas in France it’s either a 7L or an 11L. And, of course, “Traction Avant”, or “front wheel drive”.

It’s one of the very last models too, which you can tell by the boot lid (the earlier ones had the sloping boot lid with the impression of the steering wheel in it) and the rear bumper (which is straight, not curved).

And if you want to know how come I know all about these vehicles, there’s one of them SITTING AT THE BACK OF MY BARN in the Auvergne.

It was supposed to be a retirement project when I’d finished my house but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, what we need now is a miracle.

While we’re on the subject of miracles … “well, one of us is” – ed … I think that I’m going to need one to get me back into getting out of bed at a decent time in the morning before the alarm.

Whatever it is that i’m doing right now, it’s not working. It was about 07:20 when my feet touched the ground and that, dear reader, is simply not good enough.

After the meds I had a look – or rather, a listen – to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

Last night I was visiting some kind of zoo and we went to see the chimpanzees although another name was used for them I can’t remember who I was with. The animals were being kept in really squalid conditions in a place the size of a lock-up garage. There were about 10 chimps in there and a few of them, mothers and babies, were in a mass huddle. I asked if they were de-fleaing each other but the person there told me that each animal de-flead itself. I was interested to know what happened to the young female chimps when they reached maturity because if they stayed there they would be inbred which wouldn’t be good for the stock, so did they exchange animals with other zoos to mix the gene pool around? But by this time we were walking away and I couldn’t find anyone to ask.

After breakfast I finished off yesterday’s notes, having crashed out last night in the middle of writing them, tidied up little and then brushed up on my Welsh. The course got under way at 11:00 and finished at 13:00 and the teacher is going at a cracking pace, not leaving us very much time to draw breath. This course goes on for 10 weeks and if I’m still here at the end of it I’m going to be out of breath!

There will have to be a bread-baking session tomorrow morning because at lunch I used up almost the last of my home-baked bread. I’ve already run out of cordial so that, I reckon will be my morning taken care of.

After lunch I started on finishing off the radio project. And by the time that I was ready to knock off, it was finished. Not without much effort either because for some reason that I don’t understand, I’d miscalculated the length of the last track.

And so I had to do the last part again and with a different song and – badger me – I miscalculated again. I’ve no idea what was happening to me today, I really haven’t.

At least I didn’t crash out, which is, I suppose something. But there was an interruption while I went for my afternoon walk.

And as I walked out of the door I walked straight into something going on. A few people (there were masses of folk outside) including a couple of my neighbours were gazing at something going on offshore so I went to join them.

The local lifeboat, which regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing on a few occasions, was doing some kind of what looked like a rescue at sea.

Whether it was a trial run, a practice or an actual rescue we really couldn’t say, but it was quite exciting to watch it as the events unfolded and did what it was supposed to do.

But it’s hardly surprising that there’s some kind of “incident” out at sea just now.

There are the sailing schools here of course, one in Granville and it looks like one in Bréhal-Plage. We saw the other day some yachts that might have come from there and there are a few out there today with a couple of rows of buoys that, presumably, the yachtsmen have to sail around.

And that speedboat that we saw yesterday with the rod-and-line fishermen in it – there’s a similar boat out there today in the same place with similar people doing a similar thing.

But if I told you how many water craft there are out there today, you wouldn’t believe me.

So here’s a photo that I took of the view out from the top of the cliff towards the Ile de Chausey and you can see for yourself how many there are just in this shot.

There’s the lifeboat of course, the yacht far out in the distance toward the island, a couple of fishing boats and a speedboat. It’s hardly any surprise that there’s been some kind of “incident” out there this afternoon

It’s not just on land and sea that there are crowds of people either

As I was concentrating on what was going on out at sea I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. It was actually a shadow and when I looked up to see what was causing it, I noticed that it was one of the birdmen of Alcatraz floating on over my head.

It always amuses me that their point of take-off is right next to the cemetery in Donville les Bains. If they have any serious problem they don’t have too far to do.

My walk took me around the headland and onto the south side of the headland.

And if anything, it was just as busy there. There was any number of photographs that I could have taken to illustrate the point but I contented myself with this one because it was rather symbolic of the dirty working diesel-powered fishing boat and the clean sleek lines of the wind-powered craft propelled (at least nominally) by the wind.

There are a lot of symbolics in my photos of course. Some people say that they are just “sym” but other people say something else.

We haven’t finished with the water craft either today.

It was odds-on that with all of this water craft about, there was bound to be some kind of commercial traffic too. We haven’t seem our two little freighters from the Channel islands for a week or so but this afternoon, here in port we have Normandy Trader

These days the turn-round is very quick and so it was today because when I went out for my run later on in the evening, she had loaded up and gone.

Regular readers of this rubbish will remember the other day that we saw four refrigerated lorries parked up at the fish-processing plant.

Today it looks as if we’ve gone one better and have a nap hand of lorries here – 5 of them in fact. And you can see all of the fishing boats tied up at the quayside. Coupled with the number of boats out at sea, it’s hardly a surprise that they need 5 lorries to take away the catch.

As for me I came home to finish off my radio work and have my hour on the guitar. I mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I added some kidney beans into the left-over stuffing and had taco rolls with pasta and vegetables.

Thatw as followed up by another slice of my nice redfruit pie with soya coconut dessert stuff.

This evening, somewhat earlier than of late, I went out for my evening run.

We saw the Traction Avant that crossed my path earlier and I’m sure that you don’t want to see any more of the trawlers and fishing boats that were fishing away offshore. Instead, as I walked around the corner of the headland there was this bright yellow zodiac.

It wasn’t easy to see what they were doing either, so I took a photograph of it with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the zodiac of course) back in the apartment for a closer look

But I was destined to be confounded because the moment I clicked the shutter he put his machine into gear, put the pedal to the metal and piddled off out of it.

So whatever it was that they had been doing just there, they had clearly finished and there wouldn’t be all that much point in looking.

Consequently I carried on with my run down past the chantier navale (no change there) and the port Normandy Trader has piddled off too, as I mentioned and with the usual pause for breath, headed off for the viewpoint at the rue du Nord.

Too early for the sunset so I admired the view for a minute or so.

Once more, a noise from down below attracted my attention and sure enough, the young people who have been there for the last few days are down there again having another picnic.

It doesn’t look too much like “social distancing” to me but that’s their problem, not mine. As long as they realise the consequences then that’s fine by me.

Not wishing to wait for another half hour for the sunset I ran on home to write up my notes and listen to some good music.

So tomorrow morning will be a cookery morning, I reckon. Bread and perhap a small apple crumble because there are only two slices of my pie left. I’ll have to make some cordial too – lemon and ginger this week, I reckon.

Here’s hoping that I’m on form.

Thursday 14th May 2020 – THAT WAS A …

… better day today!

For a start, I actually made it out of bed before the third alarm. And after yesterday’s disaster, that was really some kind of progress.

And I was off on a voyage as well during the night. Not quite as graphic as the previous night’s, which is a good thing, I suppose. There were three of us wandering around central London last night, me and two girls. I know these two girls and I just can’t think who they are. It was the time of a vampire attack on the city and we’d been doing something, fighting off these vampires and a fourth member of our party, an elderly gentleman dressed in Victorian suit and top hat was helping but he was taken ill on one occasion. So I went over to see him although it wasn’t me – but it was me in the dream if you know what I mean – and I undid his shirt. I found that he had a bandage wrapped round his chest so I had to undo the bandage. He snarled and snapped at me and I realised that he was a vampire. Someone had pushed a stake through his heart at one time. I grabbed these two girls and I stuck a cross in his way or his hand or something and we ran off. Somehow we became separated and I ended up with one of these girls and she ended up going home. I escorted her home and we came back out. We were on this street, something like rue St Catherine Est (near the CHUM) in Montreal. Down at the bottom of a hill was a church and that was where I’d arranged to meat this other girl. We were late so I said to this girl who was with me “stay here” and I ran on down to see the other. There she was outside this building and she was curling up, settling down on the floor going to sleep to wait for us on the pavement. I grabbed hold of her “God, don’t do that!”. She asked “where’s the other girl?”. “I’ve left her on a street cornerto come and fetch you. Now we have to go and fetch her back”. We were loaded up with valuables (…like the camera…) but we couldn’t find anywhere to put them. There were all these boxes where you could leave stuff but there was no key. We had to scratch around for a key or a lock or something – we didn’t have one. Time was getting on and in the end I thought “God just put the stuff in there. If someone pinches it, too bad”. The door didn’t close, the camera strap was dangling out right by a fire, everything like that. We ran back up the hill and as we ran back up we were really afraid of what we would see – whether the vampire had hold of this girl again. Should I have left a cross in her hand or wrapped garlic around her neck or something? I started to have all of these weird ideas about what was going to happen and what I should have done.

After breakfast I assembled the radio project as far as I could and checked the timing. Knock off 30 seconds from what was left out of the hour, and that was the length of track for which I was looking.

A shower was next, and a shave and general clean-up. And of that 300 grammes of weight that I had lost at the last weigh-in, I’d put 400 grammes back.

It’s Thursday today, and so that means shopping of course. But once again, I didn’t go very far before I stopped.

One of the penalties of living in a medieval walled city is that quite often the old gates are too low for lorries and the like and regular readers of this rubbish will have seen plenty of examples of trans-shipment

There’s more work taking place within the walls, I imagine, and they can’t pass the lorry and the trailer here through the gateway. They are going to have to unload all of this, I imagine, and take it through as best as they can.

We’ve seen all of the ferries – the two for the Channel Islands and the two for the Ile de Chausey, parked up during the confinement.

But today it looks as if things have eased off. Joly France, one of the passenger ferries that goes out to the Ile de Chausey, was just heading off out of the harbour and by the looks of things, she has a good complement of passengers.

Here’s hoping that none of them are infected because the virus would spread like wildfire out on the island.

First stop was the Post Office to post of Rosemary’s Christmas present. I know that it’s May but she was away from home until the day of the lockdown and as she came home, the Post Office closed.

We had to queue outside and were allowed in three by three.

At the Bank, where I went to pay in a cheque and to change a standing order, it was even worse. Facemasks compulsory (luckily I had taken with me the one that I was given by a neighbour the other week), oOnly one person in at a time and so the queue was down the street.

The counter clerk was very scrupulous about cleaning off the perspex window and all of that, and then handled all of my paperwork and bank card, which made the scrupulous cleaning of the perspex screen rather superfluous.

At LIDL I spent more than intended, but a large part of that was spent on a folding rucksack. It’s a reasonable size but folds up into a large pocket and it’s just the job for when I go on excursions.

The apple pie is on its last slice too but they had on special offer some frozen red fruits – €1:79 for a 750 gramme bag. So I bought a bag and I’ll make a pie with that tomorrow.

On the way back I bought a dejeunette from La Mie Caline for lunch, but was once more interrupted walking up the Rue des Juifs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen them floating the new pontoons across the harbour by pushing them with a motor boat, but this one is actually being pushed out of the inner harbour.

We’ve also seen the mounting brackets that they installed at the ferry terminal. It looks as if, now that Joly France has gone off on her travels, that they are going to install the new pontoons.

Back here I wrote the text for the final track, uploaded it to the computer, edited it and assembled the final track. I was over time by 5 seconds but a quick edit of some speech soon dealt with that.

After lunch, while I listened to my handiwork, I had a look at the template issue for one of my websites – the issue that I mentioned the other day.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that I resolved the issue in less than 10 seconds. In fact, I’d been thinking about this problem here and there and I had a very good idea of what I had done. And I was right.

It will also be no surprise to anyone that I also had a little doze for a few minutes here and there.

Once I’d recovered my composure I set about installing the new hi-fi. And I rather think that I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat.

It was necessary to drill a couple of holes in the furniture and then perform a complicated rewiring job which meant practically dismantling the computer and a few other things too.

It led to something of a tidy-up too (and putting away a pile of papers) and then I connected everything up. And as I said, I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat because this system is somewhat overwhelming.

But the quality is phenomenal nevertheless and I’m as impressed with this as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Somewhat later that anticipated, I went out for my afternoon walk.

On the way out with the hi-fi box I bumped into a woman from the Mairie who was handing out the free washable face masks that the commune had ordered for their inhabitants. I asked her for an innuendo so she gave me one.

“Corona virus?” I enquired.
“No” she replied. “The school next door starts back up next week. We don’t want you frightening the kids”.

The hurricane was still blowing and it was a struggle to walk around the walls. But I wasn’t struggling half as much as some people. The trawler out there in the English Channel near the Ile de Chausey was really making heavy weather of the journey home.

You can tell by the whitecaps on the tops of the waves that far out (that’s probably about 10 kilometres out) just how wild the wind is right now.

And the trawler wasn’t the only one out there in the wind.

Never mind the story about the beaches being closed and so on, we have a windsurfer out there enjoying the storm. And I suppose that he parachuted in from the air too.

But there must be a good handful of people out there on that beach between Donville les Bains and Bréhal Plage and I have no idea why they are there and what they are doing.

There was still half an hour left to enjoy the music before the hour on the guitar, which was spent mainly playing around with two Dire Straits tracks – “Sultans of Swing” and “Tunnel of Love”. Despite all of the time that I’ve spent working out “Telegraph Road”, i reckon that right now it’s beyond what I’m really capable of doing.

Tea was a nice stuffed pepper followed by the last of that delicious apple pie that I made, so tomorrow is going to be a baking day, I reckon.

Back outside in the teeth of the gale and my run up the hill which was agonising tonight.

And at the caravanette park in the rue du Roc we have yet more grockles who haven’t quite grasped what all of this virus thing is about. I’ve seen the local police on their patrols and I reckon that they ought to be doing something about this.

But anyway having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop to see what I could see out to sea.

And the answer to that was “nothing at all”.

Around the corner to the south side of the headland and I noticed something glistening on the beach over across the bay at St Pair Sur Mer.

Being of a curious bent … “errr … quite” – ed … I took a photo of it to crop and blow up back here. And what I can see is that it seems to be the sun’s reflection on the window there reflecting into a tidal pool on the beach.

It’s quite amazing what you can pick up with a good zoom lens.

Earlier on today we noticed that they were pushing a floating pontoon out of the harbour.

At the time I speculated that they might be finally going to fit them to the mounting brackets that they fitted to the harbour wall over at the ferry terminal.

And sure enough, there they are in position. But I’m intrigued to see what is going to happen when the tide goes out because it dries out over there. And what happens to the pontoons then will be interesting.

Despite the howling gale I struggled on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury and I was pretty done in when I finally reached my marker.

Back down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what they had been up to down there. And it looks as if some of the floating pontoons down there (we’d seen three rows yesterday) have gone.

The missing ones are probably those that they installed at the ferry terminal.

My next run took me round to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord but there was nothing going on over there so I turned round and ran back home as best as I could in the wind.

So now I’ve finished this, I’m ready for bed. This was a better day today and I felt a bit more like myself. Here’s hoping for an even better day tomorrow.

Saturday 9th May 2020 – IT WASN’T …

… a very good start to the day today either.

The alarms went off as usual and I heard them, but by the time that I arose from the dead it was 06:45. I’d missed the third alarm again!

And another thing that I need to do is to apologise for having doubted the word of Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves. She complained once about my snoring in my sleep and having on a couple of occasions heard the dictaphone still working when I’ve been asleep, and not heard a thing, I had the temerity to doubt her word.

However, we had another occasion during the night where I went back to sleep in the middle of dictating something and … errr … well … quite.

Sorry, Percy Penguin.

Interestingly though, when I came back into the land of the undead, I resumed the dictating at exactly the same point as where I fell asleep.

There have been many occasions where I’ve awoken during the night and gone back to sleep and stepped right back into a dream at the point where I left it, but this is, as far as I’m aware, the first time that I’ve ever done the reverse.

It was another hot and sweaty night and I don’t know where we are but Crosby Stills and Nash are here and they played a concert and then disappeared offstage. I went to have a look at the equipment, all of these boxes. There was a box of accessories for each musician but there was also (…fell asleep right here in the middle …) some boxes on the stage with the names of the people. Each musician had his box and the supplementary musicians had theirs but their names were a bit vague. There was one that said something like Dino with a question mark stating that he was a native American who died in 1975 and nobody – they didn’t even know his name and didn’t even know where he came from but he played guitar with Crosby Stills and Nash and he had died away and they had practically forgotten about him – not forgotten about him of course because obviously he had his box but they didn’t find out anything about him while he was playing there, not even his real name.

After breakfast I had a look at a couple of files on the web server that shouldn’t be there at all and upgraded one that should and then went and had a shower.

And a shave. And a weigh-in and I’ve lost a couple of hundred grammes since last time. Still not enough though – it’s a slow process.

In town today it was difficult to tell that we are still in lockdown here until Monday. It was just like any other Saturday in normal times with the vehicles and the crowds and the local Council have recognised this, I reckon, because the traffic lights are now working properly instead of flashing amber like they have been.

There was a queue to enter LeClerc and even so, the place was packed with people, just like any normal Saturday. My own shopping bill wasn’t all that much and could well have been even less, except that the coffee that I bought on a super-special offer for 6 packs the other week was back on an even more special offer – 6 packs for €11:74.

At that price I had to buy a packet because it really is quite nice, that coffee.

Back here, I had a busy afternoon.

First thing was to go through the web server and identify the files that shouldn’t be there – of which there were plenty. They were brought home to the hard drive here and deleted from the server.

Then I had a look through the hard drive to identify
i) files that aren’t meant to be on the web server anyway
11) files that aren’t ready to be uploaded
give them all a meaningless suffix simply to identify them so that they aren’t uploaded again in error

And then updated the ones that needed updating, and then loaded them back to the web server.

They are all done now, but many of them will have to be done again because there was a slight change to the format halfway through.

But I think that what I’m going to do now that this project is temporarily finished, along with the digitalising of the record collection that has ground to a halt near the end, is to pick on one web page per day and rewrite it with suitable editing.

However, I’m not forgetting the second web page. I shall have to attend to that in due course and update that. However, there are only about 200 or so of those, half the amount that I’ve just done.

There was still half an hour left before knocking-off time so I attacked a few more photos from July 2019. I’m now inside the harbour at Vestmannaeyjar, on the island of Heimaey just off the coast of Iceland but I’m still not moored.

Just for a change, the hour on the guitar was much more enthusiastic. I’m not sure what happened there but anyway, I enjoyed it immensely.

For tea, I had one of the best stuffed peppers that I’ve ever made, followed by a slice of that apple pie from the other day. And that was excellent too. If I’m not careful, I’ll really be pushing the boat out – although evidently not as far as the quayside in Vestmannaeyjar.

After the washing up I went out for my evening runs. But I didn’t get far before I was brought to a dead halt.

A short while ago I wrote about people not respecting this detention à domicile, and I don’t know what to say about this. There are at least two cars like this Mercedes S500 Maybach here, and what is interesting is that they both appear to have number plates from Luxembourg on them.

So how did they get here? And what are they doing? Don’t they realise that there’s a lockdown here?

Apart from that Jersey-registered caravenette that was here just asfter the ferries stopped sailing – presumably having missed the last ferry, these are the first foreign-registered vehicles I’ve seen in the town.

Talking of ferries to the Channel Islands … “well, one of us is” – ed … look who’s back.

When I was out last night in the dark I thought that I recognised the change in silhouette in the harbour but it was too dark to see what it was. But sure enough, Victor Hugo is back from her winter sojourn in Cherbourg.

No idea why, though. We’ve been told that the ferries to the Channel islands won’t be starting up any time soon so there doesn’t really seem to be too much point in her coming down here right now.

We’d had rain earlier so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a sunset with all of the clouds about.

It wasn’t anything like as good as some of the ones that we’d been having just recently but that can’t be helped. You can’t win a coconut every time.

And as for my run up the hill, yesterday must have been an exception because it was a struggle once more up the hill. I’ll try it again with no food late in the night and see if it’s that which makes the difference.

On my way past the chantier navale this morning I’d had a quick look at the boats there and came to the conclusion that the one that appeared late last night was not the one that had been there before.

This evening I took my time to have a closer look and indeed it isn’t. It’s a slightly different shade of blue and it has a name – Joker – which the other one didn’t have.

But it’s good to see the chantier navale looking so busy. That’s a bonus for the town.

Having inspected the chantier navale I ran on down the Boulevard vaufleury all the way down to my resting point and then walked back to look at the harbour and Victor Hugo

And having done that I ran on round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord overlooking the Ile de Chausey to see the sunset.

And quite unexpectedly I was in luck. It wasn’t an impressive one but just as I arrived the sun peeked through a gap in the clouds and i was able to photograph it.

a day or two ago, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had seen some people fishing from the steps that go down to the beach.

They were there again today casting into the water, but I couldn’t see whether they had caught anything. So I ran on back home.

On the doorstep I met one of my neighbours so we had a good chat for half an hour and then I came in to write my notes.

Now that they are finished I’m going to go off to bed. No alarm (it’s Sunday) and a Day of Rest – the first one for quite a while too so I intend to make the most of it

Thursday 23rd April 2020 – THE GOOD NEWS IS …

… that I’m holding my own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excitement is a long way from being over too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or do you think that that is splitting hairs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside for my evening walk later on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That just leaves the support pillars for the floating pontoons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday 20th April 2020 – TODAY WAS THE FIRST …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This evening on the guitar I took up a challenge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Friday 20th March 2020 – I MADE IT …

… out and about this morning.

And I’m not the only one out and about either. Sneaking into the harbour unawares under cover of darkness presumably has come Granville, the more modern ferry that runs the route between here and the Channel Islands.

She was in Cherbourg the last time that I heard anything about her and I imagined that she would be staying there while all of this commotion was going on.

As for me, there wasn’t any commotion at all during the night. I had a shower and then went to bed somewhat earlier than just recently. And there I stayed until the alarms went off.

And for a change, i even beat the third alarm to my feet. That’s rather a rare occurrence these days.

After what remained of the medication, I looked at the dictaphone. I don’t remember very much about last night except that there were a lot of us. We’d decided individually of course that we’d go for a walk on our own but we all ended up at the same time on the beach. We were having to walk up and down the beach on our own but with big crowds of people.

Breakfast was next and then I had a look at some audio file-splitting. One file was very long and complicated and at first I had no idea how to do it conveniently. However, after a little pause for thought, the light went on and I started from the end and worked forwards instead of the other way round.

And it worked a treat too.

By now it was time for me to go into town to see the doctor.

Not one for this confinement lark, I went the long way round into town, past the lighthouse and the coastguard station on te Pointe du Roc.

And you can see the kind of weather that we were having too. It’s been nice and sunny for the last couple of days but today the weather has broken and we’re in a deep pervading mist that is really uncomfortable.

But the work must go on for some people. We can’t all be under detention à domicile otherwise we’d starve to death.

The fishermen are out working, even in the fog. And you will notice that in the vicinity of his boat there are a couple of what look like floats or buoys.

It’s been a mystery to me what these floats and buoys are for because I’ve never seen how they mysteriously turn up in the water. I suppose that this will be the nearest that I’ll ever become to finding out.

Carrying on around the headland I end up on the path that passes close to the chantier navale

There were a few people around there with face masks but I reckon that’s more to do with the dust that’s being created from the overhauling of Charles Marie. It’ll take more than fear of a virus to keep them from working on that boat, although I imagine that they will be forgetting all about the summer season.

But the fishing boat that was alongside her seems to have gone back into the water, presumably with her repair work finished.

With the tide being out, the harbour gates were closed and I could walk across the path on top to the other side.

But going past the fish processing plant, I noticed these objects here. Something rather more than buoys, they look like channel markers to me

And that’s going to be rather interesting because I wonder what channel they will be marking. But being here by the fish processing plant rather than on the other side of the harbour by the port office would seem to suggest that they are of more importance to the fishermen.

At the doctor’s, he had a couple of students with him. I forgot myself and he was horrified when I went to shake his hand. The two young students were wearing face masks, as was he, but I noticed that one of them had her mask only over her mouth and not over her nose.

That’s something that I’ve noticed with a few people. And I would have thought that covering the nose was just as important as covering the mouth, to be frank.

So what did the doctor say when I told him my miserable tale of woe?

He can prescribe most of my pills and potions. There’s one that he can’t prescribe but that’s not important
He can prescribe a four-weekly blood test – to be taken at home. And he’ll oversee the results.
If my blood level drops below the critical limit (8.0) he can arrange for me to have a transfusion.
He CAN’T prescribe any of the transfusions that I have. For a start, they aren’t registered or authorised in France.
If I catch an infection – of any kind – I’m well and truly on my own and there’s not a thing that he or anyone else can do about it.

I do have to admit that I would rather have been taken into care in Belgium where at least there would have been access to someone or something that might have been of some help, but there’s no point in worrying about that now.

The thing that surprises me more than anything about all of this is that whenever I want to miss a hospital appointment they give me all kinds of dire warnings about what might happen to me. But they don’t have a problem with cancelling them for four months (it’ll be six months at least by the time that this is all over) when it suits them.

The chemist came up with everything and even made a suggestion about the missing medication. They were all wearing masks and gloves in there, but they didn’t have any to sell to the public as one very disgruntled person in the queue in front of me found out.

Back here I made myself a coffee and then did another pile of file splitting. And I’ve hit a problem with this. One or two of the files are in *.mkv format and there’s something in the recent upgrade to Windows that automatically opens the files onto “standby” so, of course, you can’t delete them. And the more you have in your working directory, the slower the whole “Windows Explorer” procedure goes until the computer hangs up.

Judging by the panic in various chat rooms and forums right now, there are quite a few people affected by this. Here’s hoping that there will be an upgrade sometime soon.

There was a pause for lunch in the middle of all this. The second baguette from Belgium is rather harder than it might be but 20 seconds in the microwave sorted that out.

Later on, when the file-splitting was finished for the day, I started again with the photos for July and my trip to Iceland. I dealt with quite a few but I’m still no further forward because there were such a lot from my walk around Reykjavik.

What didn’t help was that I had a really good … errr … pause during the middle of it all.

This evening I knocked off early – at 18:00 – and had half an hour on the 6-string and then half an hour on the bass. I need to progress with this as much as I can, although my trip to Germany will presumably not be happening this year.

For tea tonight, I came across a bag of vegetable and mushroom curry from October 2018. There was slightly more than one portion in there so I lengthened it with fried potato, spinach, peanuts and brussels sprouts and there’s now enough for two nights. I’ll have the second portion tomorrow.

There’s the last of the rice pudding to use tomorrow too, so it looks as if Sunday is going to be a baking day. I bought a new 16cm pie dish in Belgium so I’ll give that a try-out, I reckon.

No stopping my evening walk either. Round the walls as usual and I managed my two runs – the first into the teeth of a gale and that was difficult, but as for the second I could have even made it up the second ramp had someone wit his dog not come round the corner just at the wrong time.

So now I’m having an early night tonight. Shopping tomorrow and that will be exciting as I’m expecting the hordes to be out and the shops stripped bare of food supplies.

My usual choices of meals – lentils, kidney beans, chick peas etc – are not usually the type that most people go for so I’m luckier than most in this respect but it will be difficult, I imagine, finding fresh fruit and veg . But we shall see what we shall see.

So now I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: channel islands

Sunday 7th June 2020 – IT’S SUNDAY TODAY …

Friday 5th June 2020 – I HAD A …

Thursday 4th June 2020 – THAT WAS PROBABLY …

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 – EVERYBODY SAY “AHHH”

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 – I’VE NOT BEEN …

Friday 29th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Monday 25th May 2020 – A FEW MORE …

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Tuesday 19th May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Thursday 14th May 2020 – THAT WAS A …

Saturday 9th May 2020 – IT WASN’T …

Thursday 23rd April 2020 – THE GOOD NEWS IS …

Saturday 20th April 2020 – TODAY WAS THE FIRST …

Tuesday 31st March 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Friday 20th March 2020 – I MADE IT …

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