Tag Archives: english channel

Wednesday 28th October 2020 – IN WHAT MAY COME …

… as a surprise to most of the regular readers of this rubbish who might recall the difficulties that I might be having these days? I actually beat the third alarm yet again!

Well sort-of. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with both feet on the floor when it went off. Not exactly what I would call “lively” – you mustn’t go round expecting too much from me these days – but it was good enough to count.

So while you admire a few more photos of the tremendous waves that we have been having, smashing down on the promenade over by the Plat Gousset and making all of the kids squeal as they are drenched by a downpour as the spray falls to earth, I’ll tell you all about it.

Last night, I didn’t actually find anything additional to do after I’d finished my notes – except to make a start on downloading the data files from the old travelling laptop onto an external drive for safety.

And it can do most of that itself. It doesn’t really need all that much of my help to do that. Mind you, I was surprised to see it fire up without a hitch although it took its usual while to fire up, but that’s only to be expected.

Once I had started it off, I snuggled myself down the bedclothes to get warm in the hope that I could have another interesting night after last night’s lack of excitement. Like I have said … “on many occasions” – ed … my voyages during the night are much more interesting and exciting that what I get up to during the day these days, and I miss it when I don’t go anywhere.

But I wasn’t disappointed last night. There were voyages a-plenty.

Last night I started off baking bread and there was something about getting it all ready before the Army came which was in effect me getting it ready before I went off back to sleep again

Later on there was something about we were somewhere or other. I was with Marianne and there was a dog. This big bulldog appeared and it took a big lump out of this dog’s side. The dog yelped and wandered off but didn’t go far, and the bulldog came round and grabbed hold of him again and took another bite out as if he was intending to eat him. This gradually evolved as more and more animals were becoming involved, all up to no good, and then they started to chase after the humans. There was a guy there an I was with Marianne and another young girl as well.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this was something about car windows – the glass inside the windows but where that fitted in I really don’t know

We were next on the top of the hill looking out across the water. There was a fight going on in the harbour and my country was being overwhelmed quite easily. I remember thinking that I’m lucky that I’m no footballer, that type of thing, because I would hate to participate in the kind of game that I’d been talking about earlier this evening

This building that we started off in tonight, a round building that looked very much like the buildings involved in London’s domestic water supply or something designed by that architect Bazalgette (and I’m surprised that I could remember his name in the middle of a dream) or something who did all of those public works in the London area round about that time

Then I awoke and it was back to chasing these people around again back in the original harbour. For once I was in the pack of the hunters rather than the hunted but I fell asleep before I could see where this actually went towards.

There was far more than that too but some of it didn’t seem to be recorded and I’ve no idea why. Is my technique slipping or am I dictating to an empty hand again like I have done a few times just recently?

And then there is other more gruesome stuff that you wouldn’t thank me for repeating, especially if you are having your lunch or something right now. I’m back on the disturbing dreams again, so it seems.

After getting myself organised, I spent much or the morning working on one of the arrears AND THAT IS NOW FINALLY FINISHED although I’ve no idea why it took me so long to do it. Having a little … errr … relax in the middle of the morning didn’t help matters too much. Clearly beating the third alarm was not the advantage that it might seem.

And then the fun began. With all of the data files now copied onto an external disk, I could set about doing a reinstall of the operating system and files onto the old laptop. When I tried that on the Lenovo the other day it took well over a day to do it. On the little Acer it took 4 hours and as a result required my almost constant attention.

Much to my surprise, once everything had been done and installed and registered, it fired up a darn sight quicker than it ever did in all the years that I have owned it. I’ve now uploaded a few programs to it and I’m going to leave it running for a couple of days to see how stable it is before I decide whether to start reusing it.

Surprisingly, that took me most of the early afternoon.

Having decided on a break from work, I decided to take myself outside for my afternoon walk.

And I do have to say that I didn’t envy the roofers up there on the roof of the College Malraux. There was what the French call a ciel de plomb – a sky of lead – out there right now, there’s quite a strong wind and it’s threatening rain at any moment.

Yet there they are up there fixing that roof and I wouldn’t like to be up there with them in this kind of weather.

And if there is one group of people for whom I have even greater sympathy than roofers, it’s deep-sea fishermen.

My route today took me round to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord and in the distance out in the English Channel near the Ile de Chausey I could make out a couple of trawlers heading out to sea for the day’s catch. My hat goes off to them in this weather, as I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed.

There were crowds of people about this afternoon so I couldn’t break into a run down the footpath. Instead I had a leisurely stroll that way to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset to watch the waves smashing down again on the promenade, photos of which you have already seen.

And it’s full house in the harbour this afternoon.

Last night I must have been mistaken … “What? You? Perish the thought!” – ed … when I mentioned that Thora had left port yesterday afternoon – either that or else she’s been and done an allez-retour in a remarkably quick time to be back in port right now, because here she is.

But all of the wood that was on the quayside when we had a look yesterday is still there so it’s quite possible that she hasn’t gone anywhere and is waiting for part of her load.

But she’s not alone out there today.

Of course Marité is moored there astern of her in her usual corner. Her tourist season, such as it was, is probably over. And there ahead of her is Normandy Trader, the other Jersey Freighter. She’s made a run in to port today and has had to moor somewhere else, which is rather confusing.

All we need now is Godzilla, or maybe the Loch Ness Monster. But ideally for me, I’d like to see one of the gravel boats come into port. And then we really would have a full house, wouldn’t we?

On the way back to my apartment I went to have a look at the roofing job on the house in the Rue St Jean to see how they were getting on.

And to my surprise, they seem to have finished, packed up and gone home. Nevertheless, they seem to have done a nice jon on it. It looks quite good from here. But I notice that a seagull is on its way to have a look, and probably to christen it too.

As for me, I didn’t want to hang around too long. I have plenty to do back at the apartment so I came home to carry on with my work.

There was my Welsh to revise, and I made a good start on that, but left off to have my hour on the guitars, which wasn’t helped by me having lost my notes on one of the tracks that I’ve been playing.

Tea was a burger on a bap – the last bap in the freezer. Must buy some more tomorrow. And then I came back in here to listen to the news from Our Glorious Leader that we’re all back in detention à domicile with effect from Friday. So where this leaves me with my trip to Castle Anthrax next week I really don’t know.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening run, Rosemary rang for a chat and by the time we had finished two hours (yes, two hours) later, it was far too late for me to go out.

So instead, I’ll go to bed. Tomorrow is shopping day of course and I’ll need to get some suplies in because I’ve no idea now what’s going to happen next with this virus and our confinement.

Whoever said that we are “living in interesting times” has got it perfectly right, especially after I’ve just gone to all this trouble to fire up the old laptop again.

Thursday 22 October 2020 – I WAS FEELING LIKE …

… the Man From Westphalia this morning. In fact, it really was a failure.

When the third alarm went off I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed. I was rather like the two merchant seamen swimming in the sea with an overturned lifeboat.
“Did you manage to drag yourselves up on the boat?” asked a rescuer
“Honestly” replied one of them. “We never even had the time to do our hair”

It was 08:20 when I finally left the bed and that’s way beyond depressing.

It wasn’t as if I’d gone far during the night either. I’d been in the office to work and we’d been in the basement. To climb back out was hundreds of steps and I was exhausted by the time that I got to the top. There were crowds of people milling past me so when I went down again and coming back, I came back up the wider part of the stairs so all these crowds of people came swarming up the narrow part, which was quite strange. They all started to go home. Someone had an Austin A90 Atlantic with a very large boot on the back and I’d never seen that before, much bigger than a standard type. I got to the counter and asked if they had some papers for me. I knew that they had because I’d dropped them off there when I arrived. They asked “what name?” so I told them and they gave them back to me with a smile. I said “I’m going to take a shower before I go”. They asked were and I replied “in my room”. Someone had noticed on my paper the name of my car. They asked “do you have a Vanden Plas?” (which ACTUALLY, I DO). I went to show them on the paper. But there was somewhere something about a situation in the shower where I’m going to take a shower at someone’s house at one point and there was a rubbish bin full to the brim of all kinds of rubbish, mostly lightweight, these polystyrene balls, bits of plastic, whatever. I’d switched on the fan in the bathroom and all these papers and this polystyrene balls had blown absolutely everywhere and made a complete and utter horrible mess of untidiness inside this bathroom. I thought “it’s going to take me ages to clean this up, and it’s in someone else’s house as well”.

Writing out all of that didn’t leave me too much time to do anything else. I had a quick shower and then hit the streets.

Off to the shops now, albeit rather later than usual.

This morning though, i managed to catch the roofers on the roof at the College Malraux. They seem to be hard at it today as well, ripping the slates off the building. And their cherry-picker will make light work of hauling up the material to the roof.

It’s a bit tough on the young kids. No apprentices and labouring jobs these days where the youth of today can watch and learn how it’s done.

having got that out of the way I continued on with my walk to the shops.

It looks as if I’d just that very minute missed the opening of the harbour gates. There was an endless stream of fishing boats, both large and small, engaged in a stampede out to sea . There were probably about 20 all told, I reckon.

The fishing season must now be in full swing again, I reckon, with all of this activity going on. It will be interesting to see the quayside at the Fish Processing Plant at high tide tonight.

It wasn’t just the fishing boats that were undergoing some activity this morning. Marité was having her fair share of attention too.

There were a couple of guys in a sky jack or a cherry picker or something of that ilk checking and repairing one of her sails this morning.

You can see the heaps of gravel piling up in the background too. It’s not going to be long, I reckon, before a gravel boat comes in to pick it all up. It’s been 6 months since we saw the last one so it’s about time.

Everyone was in facemasks in the town what with these new regulations and it looked quite bizarre. But obviously necessary with 40,000 new infections today.

At LIDL there was nothing exciting. Just the usual stuff. I wasn’t out there long. Heavily loaded (not as heavy as last week though) I headed back for town and home.

As I walked back up the Rue des Juifs I noticed an interesting spectacle.

It was something that puzzled me at first – two trawlers lashed together and sailing out og harbour. But just after there where I photographed them they did a hard left turn and the right-hand one came up against a pontoon. There, it was lashed to a support and the other trawler cut itself free.

Maybe it might have been an engine problem on the right-hand one that it couldn’t move under its own steam … “diesel” – ed … or something like that, I suppose

Back at the apartment I made myself a hot chocolate and then attacked the laptop. It has finished its reloading and all of the data files had now been copied back. What remained now was to add my suite of programs, something that took the rest of the morning.

More of my really delicious bread for lunch, and then this afternoon I started on the photos again. And this was extremely complicated because there were several photos that I took that, because of this failure of the DashCam to pick up my voice, I didn’t know where the photos were taken.

In the end I had to resort to watching the dashcam recordings to pick up any hints and with German road signs being so miserable, that wasn’t early and I ended up at one stage plotting my route by virtue of wayside advertisements.

However, I’ve now arrived at the Luxembourg border so from here on in, it should (hopefully) be pretty plain sailing for the remaining 46. Yes, I only managed to do 9 this afternoon, so complicated was it all.

After I’d done some of the photos it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

First stop was to see just how they were getting on with the roofing job in the Rue St Jean. And, by the looks of things, there has been plenty of progress. Most of the laths are now on and they have almost covered one of the pitches of the roof with tiles. It’ll be fun watching them do the edging on the left.

And there was an ambulance in the area early this afternoon too. It made me wonder if someone had fallen off that flying scaffolding.

My walk continued on down and round the corner to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

Actually, I was rather hoping to see a gravel boat so I had a good scan out to sea. But there was nothing doing. Only this zodiac racing past across the bay, with no indication of where it had come from and to where it was going.

However it was all loaded up with fishing gear so I imagine that they were going to have another go at the sea bass. And who knows? Some day someone might even manage to catch one too.

There was plenty of activity going on down on the beach and that caught my attention for a while.

Over the least couple of days we’ve had the beach artists down there doing there stuff but today it looks as if they have abandoned the place to the Civil Engineers. There are a couple of young guys building something substantial – a dyke with protective walls and sand castles. Good for them

The adults seem to be be preoccupied with something going on out to sea, but I couldn’t see what it was from up here.

My walk continued on along the Rue du Nord, mixing in with the hordes of people who were milling about.

You probably saw in the photo of the roofing that it was a beautiful, cloudless afternoon. Nice as it may have been, it wasn’t that nice. You wouldn’t get me into that water down there right now.

So instead I continued with my walk. No opportunity to break into a run unfortunately. There were far too many people about for that and I don’t want to show myself off.

When it reached 18:00 I called a halt and had my hour on the guitar. but I’ll need to find some enthusiasm from somewhere because I have lost it all right now and that’s not like me. Or maybe it is these days. I dunno. I can’t seem to summon up any enthusiasm for anything right now.

Tea was taco rolls with the left-over stuffing from the other night, followed by my delicious apple pie with chocolate sauce.

And then I went for my evening walk.

During one of my many pauses I’d read up on how to use the delayed timer, and it was a beautiful, clear night with no wind, so I took the tripod for a walk.

Many of the photos didn’t come out and were summarily deleted, and had I had the f1.8 50mm lens on the camera instead of the BIG NIKON ZOOM LENS I might have been able to salvage more. I have a lot to learn about photography in the pitch black

The tripod isn’t up to all that much either. Even on a level flat piece of concrete there’s still plenty of shaking in the joints. I didn’t have a weight with me to hold it down.

That’s pretty apparent in this photo of the street lights of Jersey. A 5-second exposure shows it up well enough. But had I had my night lens on I could have taken the same shot with just a one-second exposure and it would have been better.

And believe me – there were plenty more much worse than this that bit the dust.

But you’ll remember from earlier today when I photographed the stream of fishing boats heading out to sea on the tide, and I mentioned that i’d like to be there when they would all be coming back.

And sure enough, I was too. while I was setting up my tripod at the end of the headland to take some photos of the reflection of the moon in the sea, two of the blighters went chugging past me on their way back home.

They are the lights of Kairon Plage and Jullouville in the background by the way.

But this was what I was trying to photograph.

Over there in the background we have the Brittany coast round by Cancale. There’s the moon too, and some stars and planets, and the reflection of the moonlight in the sea. And there’s the traditional dilemma too – street lights just about right but the moon was far too bright.

Closing the aperture might reduce the light of the moon down to a proper proportion, but then you can’t see the stars or the street lights, and the reflection of the moon in the sea isn’t anything like impressive.

We’ve seen quite often the reflection of the street lights of St Malo bouncing around off the clouds in the distance.

One of the things that I wanted to do this evening was to take a better photograph of that, particularly as the clouds are now starting to close in. This was done with a 10-second delay, just long enough for a fishing boat to come into the shot, and a three-second exposure time, just long enough for the boat to become a nice blurred streak.

But at least the stars and the street lights aren’t blurred. I must have been out of the wind here, I suppose, and that prevented the tripod from being shaken about.

This one was taken looking further up the Bay to the Brittany coast round by St Benoit des Ondes.

And taking this photograph was not without its difficulties either. There were a couple of other people walking about around here this evening and they had the habit of walking in front of the camera just after I’d pressed the shutter and while the time delay was running

Someone else though saw what was happening and he stopped. We ended up having a good chat about the area. He was from the Paris region and was on holiday here. It was his first visit and he was enjoying it so far.

having stood here for a good half-hour taking loads of useless photos I ran on (because I was still running despite the equipment) round the headland to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

By now, the clouds had thickened up and the moon was being obscured. Nevertheless I tried for a 2-second exposure here and that seemed to come out reasonably well. At least the trawler that drifted into the image wasn’t quite as blurred as the previous one was.

And strangely enough, there were even more stars visible in this photo despite the shorter exposure time

Not being sure of how the previous photo would come out, because the tripod was far from level and the photo was askew (I straightened it in post-production) I rejigged the tripod and took another one.

This one has come out quite nicely too although there’s plenty of room for improvement.

What didn’t come out nicely though was the photo of the chantier navale. Only one boat in there tonight – the yacht that we have seen. The other two have cleared off.

For the record, I took several shots of the yacht in there but for some reason, not one of them came out as it should have done.

So instead I turned my attention to the Fish Processing Plant. We’d seen all of the fishing boats heading out to sea this morning and earlier this evening we’d seen them all come sailing back. It was now like a rugby scrimmage out there as all of the boats jostled for position at the quayside to unload.

All of the lights in the Fish Processing plant are ablaze, there’s plenty of movement with the fork-lift trucks and there’s a refrigerated lorry ready to take away the catch.

That photo was taken at 1/3rd of a second so I went to take the same one at a faster speed.

This one was taken at 1/5th second and it’s not come out anything like as well as the previous one. So I gave up and ran on home.

All in all, I’m pretty disappointed with all of this. Had I had the correct lens on the camera I might have done so much better, quite simply because of the shorter exposure times that would have compensated for a rather wobbly tripod.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have to check that and do some adjustment, I reckon. My technique might not be very good but it’s not going to be helped by relying on faulty equipment.

So now I’m off to bed. I can’t do with another night like last night. I have to put more of an effort into things. But only another week before I’m off to Leuven so there’s tons to do and I can’t hang around brooding.

Interestingly, my horoscope for this week reads “I’m missing my true love. I need to do everything that I can to meet up with her, see her, or simply show her the proof of all my love”.

Anyone remember Tuesday’s notes?

Tuesday 20th October 2020 – AFTER ALL …

… of the exertions over the last few days I failed miserably this morning.

Never mind the third alarm – it was 07:20 when I left the bed – more than an hour of the day wasted.

And when I listened to the dictaphone I recoiled somewhat too. All of these notes to transcribe. I was running the taxis and there was Doreen, Nerina and mme running the taxis on Saturday night. A job came in to go somewhere way up north and I Do mean way up north. In the end they decided that I should go, and go on a motorbike and that some other driver should come in. I went on my motorbike all the way up to the far north of Scotland to drop off this package and came all the way back. By now it was starting to get light next morning. I’d arranged to pick up Percy Penguin up after work so I guessed that she would still be asleep in her shop. I tried to ring her but my mobile phone wouldn’t work so I just went on round there anyway and she let me in. By now she had transformed into an old black woman who was going to come home with me to the taxi office. She had a couple of big bags of shopping and it ended up with me having to carry them. I was pretty much weighed down. When I got home Doreen was still there. She said that she was glad that she sent me on the motorbike because they’d been really busy throughout the night and had a really good night working non-stop. I had a quick glance through the sheets and saw that there was some ROF work there. I thought “did we have a contract with ROF these days? We used to”. She said “oh no, that’s some tuition that Nerina and I have been doing. We’ve been teaching some people from there”. Later on I was walking home through the streets of Brussels. There was a motorbike shop. It was pretty late at night/early in the morning type of going home but this place was open so I went in. I had a little sit on a Honda 50, a play-around and it transformed itself into a big motorbike. We ended up a group of us talking about motorbikes. Someone prepared some kind of soup and someone drank it. But someone warned “no, no, don’t drink that soup” but she drank it and transformed into soe kind of evil persona. We had to be very careful about what we’d do. But then a couple there said to another woman “come on, we have to go down to the Isle of Thanet to do something”. So they took her away. When she came back she was about 12 feet tall and her upper part was like a metal rod with a metallic design like a hollow shield for a head and also quite evil. It turned out that almost every one of these people had been transformed into some kind of evil thing through a drink or through a soup. So I started throwing the soup on the floor and drinks on the floor to break the bottles so they wouldn’t have to drink it but these people were laughing saying “Oh God it’s far too late now. You’re all going to be absorbed”. It led to a bit of a chase around this place. There was something too about a cake in an oven. I was eating a cake, the type of fruit loaf bread that I make. Meantime I was putting something else in the oven. People were wondering about that and having a laugh but someone else said “Eric? Ohh yes he really does bake and his baking is really quite good” which shut a few people up. But this battle thing with these weird people carried on until in the end there was only me and I couldn’t find anyone else who was sane. It was going to be a really stressful kind of situation. It’s no wonder that I awoke in a feverish sweat yet again.

But there was much more to it but I can’t remember any more now. And after all of that it’s probably just as well.

It left little time for any revision of my Welsh and as a result the lesson was something of a disaster. And I wasn’t the only one either. We were given part of a sample test paper for our exam and we all made a right mess of it. Mind you, we went 1 hour 50 minutes before we stopped for a break and my head had long-since turned to jelly by then.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise. There’s something – and someone – on my mind today. And it brings back memories of three late night evenings in, of all places, on the deck of a ship in the High Arctic where I changed the habits of a lifetime.

As Kris Kristofferson once wrote, “I’ll give all my tomorrows for a single yesterday”. And I will too!

But enough of my being all maudlin now of all moments. I won’t get anywhere dwelling on the past like this.

At lunch I finished off the last of the bread and the last of the hummus so it looks as it it’s going to be another food-making day too tomorrow morning. One thing that has also finished a long while ago is the ginger and lemon drink. That’ll have to be something else on the list too.

This afternoon I’ve had an exciting task.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I bought a new computer in something of a hurry in North Dakota last August when the little travelling Acer gave up the ghost. It was a sale item from Walmart heavily reduced but it came with Walmart’s splash screen and everything else on it that annoyed me but which I didn’t have the time right them to fix.

As I went along, I patched it here and there but it still wasn’t satisfactory so being fed up and having nothing better to do I did a “system restore” to “factory settings” and that involved deleting everything off the hard drive and starting again to reinstall everything.

And when I say “reinstall”, I say that advisedly because after about 6 hours of work it’s done about 88% of the operating system, never mind anything else.

In the middle of all of this, while the computer was festering away, I went out for my afternoon walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago in the Place du parvis Notre Dame we saw them set up a series of scaffolding in order to repair a roof on a house there. Today, they are attacking the side of the house that’s in the Rue St Jean.

And they aren’t using any scaffolding either apparently down the side of the house. All of the material seems to be being lifted up by the big machine there and that’s going to cause a few problems if something big comes down there.

Wednesday and Thursday we’ve been promised storm-force winds here (as seems to be usual these days). I don’t fancy being up there on a roof when they are lashing about. And I don’t fancy walking underneath where the guys are working either when there’s a wind blowing all of their stuff away.

There were crowds of people wandering around today taking in the air and I ended up chatting to one of my neighbours at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

After he had gone I had a look down onto the beach to see what was going on. The peche à pied is still in full swing as far as the tourists go. There were several more out there in amongst the rocks scavenging for what they could find.

As well as that, we had people milling around, walking their dogs, playing sports or even just taking in the air. After all, although the weather was cold and windy, it wasn’t unpleasant.

The crowd had thinned out by the time that I reached the Square Maurice Marland so I had a good run across to the other side to rack up a bonus run.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday the harbour was empty – of water and of boats. Today though we have the water back, and also the boats. Marité has returned and is moored in her little corner again.

So I carried on along the walls and as there was no-one in the street I ran on home again. I may as well clock up some extra metres on my way around when I can.

Back here I carried on with the laptop and then had a break when Rosemary rang me up. While I was in the Auvergne in July I had set “certain steps” in motion and, much to my surprise, they had actually come to fruition . That means some more outlay and I have to do it because it involves several other people.

Tea tonight was veggie balls with steamed veg and vegan cheese sauce – thoroughly delicious. And the other half of my apple turnover was even better. It’s the best one that I have ever made and I’m really impressed with that.

My walk this evening was something of a surprise.

Well, not my walk, but my run. I was feeling much more like it tonight, much looser, and I ran on past my mark on my first leg with some comparative ease. Down to the clifftop and there was a trawler way out to sea with its bright lights blazing. Too good an opportunity to miss even though it won’t come out well.

It’s probably 5 miles out to sea as well so all in ill it’s not bad at all seeing as it was the f1.8 50mm lens. I’ll settle for that.

No-one around at all, except for a couple of kids on the car park so I could do my third leg in peace.

At the viewpoint over the harbour where I stop to recover my breath, I could see all of the activity going on at the Fish Processing Plant. The fishing boats are starting to come back into harbour and there were already two of them down there unloading, with a couple more on the way.

One had carried on into the harbour but I missed her. Presumably she’s going to unload at the other side. But never mind. This one has come out OK so I’m not disappointed.

If I turn my head to the right I can also see into the Chantier Navale.

And here we have a change of occupant yet again. The new little boat that arrived a couple of days ago has now gone but we have been joined instead by a large yacht that bears a striking similarity at this angle to Spirit of Conrad, the boat on which we went down the coast a few months ago.

Of course in this light, it’s not possible to say with any certainty. I’ll have to wait until it’s light and have another look.

And so I ran on the rest of the way home, doing it in two legs as usual but even did an additional lap of honour round the building to push up the total even more.

Now that my notes are written and I’m off to bed. But before I do, just a quick “hi” to someone who made a dramatic reappearance this morning. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can organise myself, whenever that might be.

Monday 19th October 2020 – LOOKING BACK …

… over my posts from a few weeks ago (which is one of the reasons why I write this rubbish that you read) I noticed that I was taking four – and on one occasion 5 – days to prepare just one radio programme.

This morning I sat down at about 07:15 to make a start on one and despite a break to speak to someone on the telephone and another break for lunch, it was all done and dusted and ready by just after 14:10. And that has to be something of an all-time record.

It’s a really good programme too with a couple of interesting and one extremely rare piece of music that will be bound to excite the interest of my listeners. Both of them will enjoy it very much.

What helped the matter very much is that the third alarm and I had another draw this morning. Just as I’d thrown off the covers and I was about to sit up, the alarm went off.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was with three others and we’d arranged to go to the football but we didn’t for some unknown reason. When I was on my way home, all of Gresty Road was cordoned off because there was a big match. I quickly went home to dump my things and then ended up back in the ticket office for a ticket for me and a programme. I couldn’t remember how much the match was so he said “as a special favour for you we’ll do it for £20:00” which sounded pretty cheap for me but I could never be sure if that wasn’t the admission price normally. I fought my way back out through the crowds to take my position. He’d asked me where I wanted to sit and I said “in the stands nearest Gresty Road” so I thought that that was where he’d given me. As for my 3 friends whom I was supposed to be meeting I gave up any idea at all about seeing them again

It reminded me very much of the time that the Police caught three boys climbing over the fence at Gresty Road. They made the boys climb back and watch the second half.

Then I cracked on with my radio programme. I had a ‘phone call at about 11:00 from some people in the Isle of Man and then I had to send off to the engineer this week’s programme. A break for lunch, when I used the last of my home-made hummus (I must make some more tomorrow) and then I finished. A new record time to.

But it helps that I have a new system of working that’s much more efficient and choosing the tracks now only takes me a couple of minutes instead of the hours that it used to take. My record collection is divided into 7 groups now that it’s mostly digitalised, and there’s a playlist for each group. If I’m doing, say, Group D next week, I’ll be listening to Playlist D this week and making a list of the interesting and appropriate tracks, their length and (if appropriate) the week in which the track was previously played.

It only takes a couple of laps around the groups and there’s probably a list of 200 or more tracks in each group now indexed to play. I just take 50 minutes’ worth of each group each week, write out the text, dictate and edit it down, merge it all together, add on 35 seconds for a final speech, and then choose a track of the appropriate length to make up the hour.

When I’d finished, I had another task to perform. That is, to make the arrangements for the trip to Castle Anthrax. Some of us are going out on the Sunday so I’m going out on Saturday and coming back on the following Friday.

Having completed the day’s work extremely early, I went out for my afternoon walk, suitably masked for the occasion.

This afternoon I went, for a change, around the walls of the old town, so at the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord I had a good look out over the beach. And I was surprised, not only to see a fishing boat out there off the coast by Donville les Bains, but to see it so close to the shore.

The thought went immediately to my mind that maybe it’s run aground and waiting for the tide to float it off, but that’s unlikely. I’m sure they know what they are doing.

However, I’m not too sure that these people do.

It’s half-term now for French schools and so the brats are out and enjoying themselves. And quite right too. This group of people were engaged in making very pretty patterns in the sand – some kind of temporary artwork. Still, it keeps them out of mischief.

For my part, I was keeping out of mischief too. Far too many people for me to break out into a run so I had a quiet walk along the path.

No-one about on the Square Maurice Marland so I took the opportunity to go for an extra run across to the other side.

And here, a quite interesting spectacle met my eyes. Thet had drained the inner harbour – which might explain why Granville and Victor Hugo, the two Channel Island ferries, cleared off to Cherbourg the other day.

Having made “certain enquiries”, it turns out that they have done this today so that they can examine the pontoons that they installed over the winter and also check on the seals of the gates that they installed about two years ago at the port entrance.

My eyes however alighted on these objects and I wondered what they might be.

My first thought was that a group of seals or some such had entered the port when the gates had been open and were refusing to leave. And so I waited around to see if there was any movement – but there was not so I ruled out the possibility that it might be a living creature.

Closer examination revealed that they might be sacks of something or other – perhaps dropped off a fishing boat or one of the little freighters. Doubtless there will be some remark in the Press tomorrow to clarify the issue.

Back here I made a start on a couple of other tasks but Rosemary rang me up and we had a very long chat. That took me right up to teatime. A stuffed pepper with rice followed by half of the apple turnover. And even though I say it myself, my apple turnover was totally delicious. I’m really pleased with that

Later on I went out for my evening walk and runs. Mind you, I didn’t want to. The wind was blowing a howling gale the brought me to a dead halt on a couple of occasions.

Despite the wicked wind, it wasn’t going to stop the fishing fleet from going out to sea. There were a couple of trawlers battling through the waves on their out to sea to join a few of them already out there.

There were several other photos that I wanted to take too but I found to my dismay that I had forgotten to swap the lenses and put the f1.8 50mm lens – the one that I use for night-time photography – onto the NIKON D500 so nothing would work out in the dark tonight.

Instead I continued on my runs as best I could in the conditions and came on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh course so I need to be up early and do my revision. And then for the rest of the week I can finish off the photos from August 2020 and maybe even start work on some more arrears. There are plenty to go at of course.

And meantime you can have a look at THE INCIDENT ON SATURDAY that led to the sending-off. One additional defender (Priestley Farquarson, and we know how quick he is) covering, the ball 10 yards in front of the attacker, Lewis Brass the goalkeeper off his line quickly to clear the ball. Imminent goalscoring opportunity my Aunt Fanny.

The ref should be ashamed of himself.

Thursday 15th October 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… when I asked yesterday “surely this can’t continue” or whatever it was that I said.

Consequently this morning, I missed the third alarm. Not by many minutes, but a miss is as good as a mile, I suppose.

Mind you, I’d been on my travels again somewhat. I’d been looking around, searching for different things about the house and came across an automatic firearm – a big heavy thing, silver one. I was messing around with that and then took it off to show a friend. He and I had a play around doing all kinds of different things. Then we were out in the town with it and there was a lot of trouble about theft and violence, groups, all this kind of thing. We thought that we would be bound to be searched and if they found this firearm we’ve had it even though we aren’t actually doing anything with it. The nearest official building to where we were was the Nigerian embassy so we took the gun there and handed it in. Back home a few days later I was about to go into the living room when I heard my father ask “does anyone know what’s happened to my gun? It’s gone”. One of my brothers and sisters piped up to say “Eric and his friend had it”. He rang up my friend and he told him what had happened but cutting out the flamboyant bits. I was concerned about this because I was going to get into a load of trouble by taking it but my father seemed to be rather nonchalant about this. I walked off into the room something like a hospital waiting room and as I was walking in a woman was walking out. “Ohh I have your food here” she said. “I wondered when you were coming back. I’ll bring it in”. I was loaded up with loads of other stuff that I was dropping on my way in and had to try about three doors before I found which one was the correct one. I went in and sat down and waited for the next part of this story to happen.

Which of course, it didn’t.

Having sorted out the dictaphone I had a good shower and clean-up. And a weigh-in too. And I’ve lost that extra weight that I put on in Leuven, having now accelerated my fitness programme a little. If I keep up this regime and continue to lose weight at this rate, by the time my next birthday comes round I’ll have gone completely.

And now it’s time to head for the shops.

For a change I didn’t but anything extra, but I was still loaded up like a packhorse. And when the 2kg bag of apples burst, I ended up having to stick them in the shoulder bag too and that wasn’t part of the plan. It was quite a stagger back home, loaded up as I was.

And to make matters worse, the battery in the NIKON 1 J5 decided to go flat even though there were plenty of interesting things to photograph. And I only charged up the battery the other day too. I hope that that’s not going to start playing up.

Back here I made a drink and sat down – and then crashed out, which is no surprise. I recovered in time to perform a major upgrade of the computer before lunch, something that surprised me too.

After lunch, with more of my delicious bread, I had a task to perform that I’ve been putting off for several months. There were a plie of *.mkv files on my computer that simply wouldn’t allow themselves to be deleted. I spent some time experimenting with the file properties of one of them and in the end I managed to delete it.

There were about 20 altogether and I had to adjust their properties one by one too, but at least they have all gone now, which is good news.

Next task was the photos of July 2010 in Switzerland and Austria. And here I came up against another problem. Instead of using a dictaphone, I was speaking loudly so that the dashcam in Caliburn would pick up the details. But it didn’t do it well enough so that can be classed as a failure.

But this is how you learn, isn’t it?

In the end I had to look for road signs, names of buildings, town signs, that kind of thing on the dashcam recordings to work out where I was and to follow my route on an internet mapping service to work out where I was.

That took an age, as you can imagine, but now all of the photos for that month have been edited, processed and correctly identified. Another job completed.

There just remains the photos for August which should be interesting, because all of those road signs are in either Czech, Slovak or Hungarian and that is going to lead to difficulties when I see a building name.

Having made some good progress I could go outside for my afternoon walk, almost bowling over four people whom I hadn’t seen before entering the building. Elderly people, so I reckon that someone has let out their apartment for holidaymakers.

Across the car park, the scaffolding seems now to be complete as far as they intend to go. They’ve even put their advertisements on it to let us know who they are. And as for the container, it’s not a container at all but a very large skip. Benne pour bois – “skip for wood”. So that’s where they will be disposing of all of their old laths.

And their compund has blown down again. They aren’t having much luck with that. I mean – it’s not as if it’s windy right now outside.

In fact, the weather is quite changeable today.

And no photo can sum that up better than this one of the coast higher up the Cetentin Peninsula. If you look at the view round by Montmartin sur Mer towards the left, you can see the sun shining down on the houses, making them appear so nice and bright.

But yet just a couple of miles away, there’s a huge rainstorm throwing it down just there and everywhere is dark and gloomy.

Yesterday I mentioned that it looks as if the fishing season has started in earnest, and I’m very probably right.

We’re still a good half-hour before the time that the harbour gates open, so all of the big trawler-type vessels are heading for home, presumably with quite a good catch. Here are three of them heading for home and they all seem to be surrounded by socks of fleagulls

We also have a yacht out there over towards the Ile de Chausey. He’s picked a nice day to go out for a sail because it looked quite nice over there.

While I was scanning the horizon for more trawlers, I came across this object out at sea just off the coast of Jersey near the port of St Helier.

It certainly wasn’t one of our two freighters or a trawler – the superstructure is all wrong. And so I took a photo of it with the aim, when I’m at home, of cropping it and blowing it up (the image, not the object of course) to see if I can identify it.

Not that it was easy, but an examination of plots of ships in the area reveals that there’s a French research ship, the Antea, out there in that vicinity. And an examination of her photo reveals a superstructure quite like the superstructure of this ship here. So it may well be her

As I walked on along the lawn at the Pointe du Roc I came across all of the brats. It looks as if the orienteering classes are back up and running … “very good!” – ed … again after a pause last week.

My route continued on past the Coastguard Post to the end of the headland, and looking down onto the rocks I could see that the fishermen are back again. And as usual, in the time that I was watching them, no-one actually caught anything.

We also had a kayaker out there, and I bet that he was quite cold out there this afternoon because you aren’t supposed to light a fire in your canoe. Everyone knows that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last year or so there have been plenty of rebuilding projects going on all over the port area.

And it looks as if they aren’t finished yet. There’s another crew over by the Ferry Terminal. They have a digger, a shipping container or skip and an assortment of all kinds of other stuff. it will be interesting to see what they are doing.

Joly France, one of the ferries that go out to the Ile de Chausey, is paying no attention whatever to the machinations. It’s the older of the two ferries – you can tell because there’s no step in the stern, the windows are smaller and the superstructure on the top deck is larger.

We’ve seen – or, at least, talked about – plenty of people, and we’ve seen a great deal of maritime activity too.

So let’s not go forgetting the air today. And so, our friend, the yellow autogyro who we first encountered AT THE CABANON VAUBAN in August 2018 just before I set off for the North Pole, decided to put in an appearance today.

And that reminds me – I’ve not been on a plane this year, and the only time that I set foot on the sea was our trip on the Spirit of Conrad. I don’t even think that I managed to get onto a ferry this year at all.

Mind you, it’s not good for my blood pressure to see a ferry. Every time I see one, it makes me cross.

Having finished the photos I crashed out yet again for a little while, and then had my hour on the guitar. And I’m still not enjoying it, which is a shame. But I’ll stick at it of course.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, now that I have some, followed by one of those desserts that I made yesterday.

Later on tonight I went out for my evening runs. And in pursuit of even more fitness I managed to fit in 5 runs tonight. I have to control my weight now I’m back on the intravenous drips.

But it really was a beautiful night tonight – one of those nights when you can see for miles and it made me wish that i’s taken the tripod. Although these next two photos don’t add up to much, the fact that I’ve taken them at all is significant.

Here we have the street lights of St Helier in Jersey reflecting off the clouds. And also, quite clear in the photograph, are the lights that are on the radio tower or whatever it is on the hills at the back of town.

And when you consider that this is a hand-held shot taken with a f1.8 50mm lens of objects that are 58 kilometres away in the pitch-dark, it’s quite something. But what would it have been like with a tripod?

And pretty much the same thing might be said of this photo too.

While I was casting my eyes around trying to see what was going on out at sea, my eyes alighted yet again on something else. Three lights out at sea, presumably from working ships. My plotter seems to think that the one over to the left might be Antea, whom we encountered earlier, whereas the two brighter ones to the right might be fishing vessels.

There are in fact two in the area according to the plotter – Philcathane may well be the bright light to the left of the two, and the second one might be L’Alize III

While I was there, I wasn’t just admiring the view out to sea. There were plenty of other things to see.

In the foreground of this photo is the area where the walls are crumbling away along the Rue du Nord. You can see the barrier that they have put up to stop people walking too close to the edge. It was this barrier that was swept away in Storm Alex and ended up littering the Rue du Nord.

Over in the background is the car park at the Place d’Armes, that used to be the old parade ground when all of the buildings there were Army barracks. And illuminated there is the College Malraux with its coat of scaffolding and its big banner advertisement.

If you see what looks like a diamond-shaped light, that’s the building where I live.

A couple of nights ago I mentioned that with all of the building material stacked up on the quayside, it looked as if we might be expêcting one of the Jersey freighters to arrive.

And sure enough, anchored at the quayside next to Marité underneath the loading crane is our old friend Normandy Trader. She’s obviously come into port on the afternoon tide on one of her regular runs across from St Helier.

Talking of runs, I’ve managed to do 5 tonight. Nothing particularly energetic but being back on the intravenous drip means that my weight is going to balloon up again and that’s the last thing that I want. I have to keep it down.

But not right now. It’s late and I’m off to bed. I need a good rest.

Monday 12th October 2020 – PHEW!

Looking back through the reams of rubbish that I regularly write, I recall on a couple of occasions spending almost an entire week not so long ago preparing one radio programme.

Since I last wrote up my notes yesterday, in a space of just 16 hours, of which 7.5 hours was spent either sleeping, eating or doing other things, I have prepared not one but two. It just goes to show that I can do it when I really try.

But as Margaret Thatcher once said, “anyone can do a good day’s work when they really want to. But the secret is to do a good day’s work when you don’t want to” and I’m a long way from that.

It all started after I’d finished writing my notes last night. Having had a decent night’s sleep last night and a crash-out in the afternoon I wasn’t in any way really tired and ready for bed. During the day I’d been listening to a concert that I intended to edit down for my monthly “live” concert and I’d an idea which tracks I wanted to use so it was a case of splitting the concert and selecting the tracks, and then transferring them to a holding directory.

That didn’t really take all that long, which was a surprise because it’s the kind of thing that sometimes can take forever. And much to my surprise, and probably yours too, I ended up with 58:24 of music without any messing about. That’s the kind of thing that never ever happens and I can spend hours and hours editing live concert tracks and still have a substantial shortfall.

It then needed to be joined seamlessly and that’s usually a long, complicated process which sometimes can take hours because you don’t only have to make the beat and the rhythm fit in, you also have to control the sound balance so that it sounds like a smooth, flowing concert. But for another reason that I don’t understand it snapped together almost perfectly. There was only one join that was in any way complicated.

At that point I’d ended up with 58:21 of music which meant that there was just 1:39 of introduction – a big change from the usual 3:30 or something when I’m scratching round for things to say and how I wish that I could mix more concerts like this one.

On that note I went to bed. It had taken quite a while to do all of that and I was tired.

Much to my surprise, and probably yours too, I beat the third alarm to my feet. How did that happen after my late night?

Sensing that this might be my day, first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone. I was doing some work over the weekend or an evening or something and I had to be ready for work later that morning. I didn’t have time really to take it round to the person I was going to see so I was wondering if Zero, who used to accompany me regularly on my nocturnal rambles but hasn’t put in an appearance for a while, so hello to you again at last – would do it for me or if she had to see it I can’t remember but for some reason I had to make her see it. I was thinking that maybe I could post it somewhere and send her a mail for her to link to have a look at it. But there was much more to it than this that I can’t now remember, and some more that I can but as you are probably eating your meal right now, I’ll spare you any discomfort.

Next task was to attack the notes for the live concert. Having done some research I sat down and dashed off an introduction. And by the time I’d finished it, uploaded it to the computer and edited it down, I ended up with 1:46 of notes. 7 seconds over which makes a change from either being 30 seconds over or a minute short, but as there is a lengthy applause lead-in to the concert, I simply overdubbed it and ended up with my hour programme just like that.

It wasn’t yet 08:30 so I decided while I was at it, I’d make a start on the programme for the following week, a standard one with 11 tracks, a speech from my special guest and an introduction to each track. And by the time that I was ready to go for my afternoon walk at 15:40, it was all done and dusted and complete, despite the usual break for lunch. I don’t think that I’ve ever done any standard programme that quick.

After all of that I was ready for my break.

But once I went outside, I didn’t get very far. regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they had a cherry picker up at the College Malraux the other day after Storm Alex, with some people apparently checking the roof and the guttering. Today, they are erecting some scaffolding outside against the walls of the College.

There’s a little compound there so I went to have a closer look at it. There was a huge pile of laths there, and a section that was empty but labelled ardoises – “slates”. So it looks as if the College is going to be having a new roof in the very near future.

And so I wandered off to the sea wall to have a look at what might be going on there.

The tide is well in now so there’s no beach to speak of for anyone to be on, but over in the English Channel by Breville-sur-Mer there’s a yacht that looks as if it’s anchored. “Probably fishing” I mused to myself. That’s the usual reason for boats to be anchored out there.

But it shows you how the weather has calmed down now. A week or ten days ago at the height of Storm Alex there were no boats out at all and even a hardy fishing skipper would be thinking twice about it. But you can see in the background that it’s raining over there. Less windy it might be, but the weather is still depressing.

There were a few people out there this afternoon – the weather wasn’t that nice – but there was nothing else going on out at sea that I could see except a yacht way over by the Ile de Chausey.

But there’s been a change at the Monument to the French Resistance here at the Pointe du Roc. It seems that it’s not just the leaves that come off the trees at autumn, the flags in the flagpoles do as well.

And if you look very closely at the photograph, you’ll notice that we have only three flagpoles there today. The fourth one seems to be missing. So I’ve no idea what’s going on there. It’s something on which I’ll have to keep an eye as I go on my rounds here and there.

There was no change in inhabitant in the chantier navale today so I pushed on along the path.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that pathetic parking is something that takes up a lot of pages in these notes, and as I went past the Rue Saint Pierre that leads up to the College there were the usual suspects parked with wheels on the kerb blocking the path for the pushchairs and wheelchairs.

Thinking that you are probably fed up of seeing it, I resolved not to take a photo today, but here’s a photo that I couldn’t help but take.

Parking is prohibited here in the layby in the Boulevard Vaufleury from 08:00 today for the next few days so that they can trim the trees, but this hasn’t deterred this motorist and a couple of others from parking here.

And by the look of things the seagulls didn’t think very much of this “no waiting” sign either

Having taken my photo I turned for home. I’ve plenty of work to do and can’t afford to spend the time hanging around aimlessly.

While I was sorting through the photos I had a listen to the two programmes that I’d done today. And I’m quite pleased with them. They’ve come out well.

There was the usual hour on the guitar but for some reason I couldn’t get into it and I don’t know why. I’m not quite sure what’s going on right now but this isn’t like me at all.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with potatoes and veg followed by more blackberry pie and soya coconut dessert.

This evening I almost didnt go out for my walk and runs. The rain was teeming down.

Nevertheless I did, and here’s the photo to prove it- a photo of the Place Marechal Foch in the rain and the only reason I took it was to prove that I’d been out. My footpath under the walls was totally waterlogged so it wasn’t possible to have my evening run down there. However I did manage to improvise something and at least made the distance.

Apart from me, there were just two other people out tonight in the distance, walking dogs, and that was your lot. I didn’t stay out there too long either in this weather. I came home quite quickly.

Having finished the notes, I’m off to bed. I deserve an early night after this. Just my Welsh revision tomorrow and then my Welsh course, and all my programmed work will have been completed by Tuesday lunchtime. Hopefully I can then push on and catch up with some arrears. I’ve done a pile of photos from July 2020 and I’m now deep in Switzerland.

There’s just about 20 more to do and then I can turn my attention to those for August 2020. There’s about 120 of those but they will take some finding

Tuesday 29th September 2020 – I’VE BEEN REALLY …

… busy today, for a change.

And it started off quite early too when I was up and about long before the third alarm wet off. Mind you, I’m not quite sure how because when I listened to the dictaphone, I was amazed.

While you admire the photos of the tide coming in onto the Plat Gousset I’d been off on my holidays somewhere around the north-west of England but my holidays were over and it was now time to go back to work. Instead of going back to work I set off for the Welsh coast. People started to talk “well, the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR is coming in there, isn’t she? It looks like you’re going off on another voyage with her”. Although I hadn’t booked anything, that was indeed my plan to get down there, speak to the people and see where they would end up taking me – hopefully get a flight out from there to the High Arctic. But the closer I got to the coast I began to realise that the question of payment – it’s not cheap and most of my money is in my English bank account and I can’t remember the number or the contact details and I don’t have the little machine with me, so how was I going to pay for all of this? But I was still looking forward to going. I was within a couple of days of my retirement. I was planning on retiring soon in which case the question of getting any extra time off didn’t really matter very much. This latter part is a dream that i’ve had so many times – being at work and being retirement age and for one reason or other I could just get fed up, turn round and walk away.

Some time later I was at work and the question of some kind of qualification came up. We all trooped round to my sister’s house. It was overrun with kittens, totally untidy. everywhere you tried to sit you had a kitten on you, something like that. In the end we hardly dare do anything. We had to take a photo of a particular page in a booklet with this woman’s identity – she had a ring with a special seal on it. We needed this ring in view on top of the image and we could use that as proof that we’d done this course and had this qualification although we hadn’t. When it came to my turn to take the photo I couldn’t get my camera to work. Everyone was becoming quite impatient. In the end someone took the form and took this woman off so they could photograph it for themselves.
At another point we were in the army, a big group of us. We were slowly on the advance through this town. There wasn’t very much pressure – it seems that we’d had quite a clean sweep of this. We were pushing on through and came round a bend. A couple of groups in front of us had disappeared round this bend. We came round this bend and as we did so a couple of soldiers came over a railway bridge or something. Their uniforms didn’t look like ours. Suddenly the commander said “God, these are Russians!”. They saw us as we saw them. They opened fire and we ran, we lost a couple of men. In the end we got back to the little square where there were barricades erected. We got in behind the barricades. I sent two soldiers off down a side street because it was possible that we could be outflanked down this street. I sent these soldiers off with a machine gun and told them to dig themselves in and if anyone came just send them a stream of machine gun fire. They seemed very reluctant to go and I had to shout at them to get them to move. They still didn’t move with any kind of enthusiasm. I ran back to find that our compound had been under attack but we had pushed them back. They’d gone and they hadn’t come back as yet. The commandant was giving orders about this and that. We were talking about being supplied by sea in which case this little post that I’d set up needed some kind fof reinforcement for that was between us and the sea. We started to discuss all of this and I awoke in a fever.

We were all in this compound (this was later, by the way) and there were people milling around downstairs in this kind of open-plan office type of place on a floor below. It turns out that they were selling tickets for something – it might have been a Connah’s Quay football match. I was going to ask if the people at the desk wanted a cup of tea for I was going to make a pot. I had to wait my turn in the queue before I could get to see them as there was a big queueing arrangement. When I got there there were 5 of them working there but I’d only seen 2. They all said “yes we want tea” and how many sugars they wanted. I thought “I don’t have much chance of remembering all of that”. But I asked them again to make sure. There was too much water in my kettle so I tipped some out. That brought some kind of strange look from some of them but I went off to make this pot of tea. There was some kind of headlines on the radio about it but there was a huge discussion about the outpost. they were suggesting that this outpost be pushed further south and they were poring over maps for it. Out technical in command said that we already had one. It was called Preston Central and explained about the Preston railway station, how it had been relocated in the past to allow a junction for a few lines and how it had been reinforced, how lots of industry and so on had started to congregate around it. he seemed to think that this was vitally important for this industry and laid claim to the fact that Preston Central should be our outpost

From there I was somewhere around Knutsford/Manchester Airport with my brother of all people. We’d been to some kind of exhibition or village fete or something like that. We were all in this huge hall. Who should we bump into but Nerina. The 3 of us ended up having quite a lengthy chat and it all came to be quite a friendly situation. We all then had to go and get some breakfast next morning so we went down to this place where all these people were congregating, hordes of them, but somehow we lost Nerina. She must have gone to get some breakfast. We’d seen a stall with all fruit buns and things like that on it but there was a proper breakfast place. In the end I said that I’d stay where we are. He can go off and get breakfast and I’ll wait here and we’ll all meet up here again. Off he went and I was on my own, and waited for hours! We’d been given some complimentary glasses of tea and we’d had a few sips out of them. They were on the table but I got up to stretch my legs. When I came back my tea had gone – someone had cleared it away. I said something pointed about this and a guy at the table next to me was one of the organisers. He didn’t really take much notice so I had a good moan about this, saying “it’s a good job that it’s free or I’d make a fuss about this”. Eventually, after a very long wait, my brother came back with a plate with about half a dozen potato crisps on it. I asked “what’s happening now?”. he replied “they’d run out and I wasn’t going to wait any more. I had to wait long enough as it was”. I asked “have you seen Nerina?” “No!”. I started to mention this stall with all this bread on it but he didn’t seem to be particularly interested. I said “we can get some chips on the way home”. He said” what? Round by the airport?”. I replied “we’re going Knutsford, Holmes Chapel Sandbach, Crewe way home, aren’t we?” so we set off. I found that I had Nerina’s phone number on my phone so I phoned but there was no answer. I left it for a minute and phoned again – still no answer. In the end there was no other solution but we had to go home and hope that she would make it home OK without any problems. We set off, the two of us, on foot. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now. We ended up in some kind of square and there were loads of people milling around. Someone we knew there said something like “let’s have a coffee”. There was a huge urn of tea or something and he went to get the ladle out but we couldn’t find a clean mug – no clean mugs anywhere. Someone said “God, yes. The mugs gave out ages ago”. I thought “I’m not having much luck today!”

It’s surprising that I managed to awake as early as I did. In fact, the more that I think of it, I must have caught myself as I was on my way back home.

Even more so, last night I didn’t go to bed as early as I expected. I wasn’t tired so in order to profit from my lack of fatigue I pushed on and finished off the radio programme before going to bed, so that at least there was something out of the way.

First thing after I’d finished transcribing the dictaphone notes (which took longer that you might think) was to revise my Welsh and then have a quick tidy around ready for my lesson. That’s the problem with these Zoom meetings – when you’re on the screen everyone else can see all about you.

After lunch I decanted the latest batch of Kefir. That’s all that I’m doing for now – simply because I don’t have any more figs. When I’d decanted it I whizzed up a couple of oranges, extracted the juice and then ran everything through a series of sieves and filters.

That’s now having its second fermentation, and the first batch made with the strawberry juice is now in the fridge ready for use.

All of that took me up to the afternoon. Time to go out for my walk.

There was plenty of wind, although not as much as there has been, and it was quite cold too. There were a few things going on out at sea too. Here we have a yacht battling hard against the wind, with a speedboat roaring past showing just how efficient modern technology can be at times.

It’s not the same as sail, that’s for sure, but you don’t run much risk of being becalmed, except if you run out of fuel. At least, with a steam engine, you could burn bits of the boat.

Further along the path, I was pretty much alone. Just the odd person here and there out on the path.

Out on the sea, there were a few more boats dotted around in the English Channel between the Ile de Chausey and the Pointe du Roc. We have one of the trawler-type fishing boats on its way back into the port with today’s catch.

As well as that, there’s a speedboat coming back over from the Ile de Chausey.

There were probably a few others out there too but the low cloud and mist prevented me seeing right out to the horizon.

There were no brats out there this afternoon – looks as if the orienteering classes have now finished. I was enjoying watching them, remembering my own childhood experiences in orienteering.

But round the other side of the headland, I had a good look at what was going on in the chantier navale. From the heady days of as many as eight of the boats in there up on ramps, we’ve now come down to just two.

A couple more seem to have gone back into the water today, including the one that had been on the blocks by the portable lift.

And we have another visitor in port today, someone whose arrival I have been expecting for a couple of days.

Having come in on the high tide today, Normandy Trader is now moored up at the quayside underneath the unloading crane. There is nothing actually going on there right now so it looks as if she’s been unloaded and loaded back up already.

All of this points to a rapid getaway on the evening tide. One thing that I’ve noticed is that these days, with no passenger ferries operating, the two little freighters have plenty of work and they don’t hang around for long.

We can’t go for too long without a photo here or there about the bad parking that goes on round about the College Malraux – the local high school.

Here in the Boulevard Vaufleury we have someone parked up on the pavement right by the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of the road that leads to the college.

The Boulevard Vaufleury is a service-bus route and coming in the other direction is the fleet of school buses that pick up the kids to take them home.

Furthermore, there is a public car park across the road, not even 20 yards further on from where the car is parked.

As well as the kefir, I’d made some bread dough that had been proofing. I shaped them into small buns and left them to proof again while I did some more photos of the Spirit of Conrad.

When they were ready I bunged them into the oven and left them to cook while I cleaned up the mess that I’d made.

When I took them out, I noticed that they had been overcooked. 25 minutes seems to be far too long for them and I shall have to refine my technique for my next batch, whenever that might be.

After the hour on the guitar, I went for tea. A burger with pasta and vegetables with tomato sauce, followed by the strawberry turnover that I had made.

Then it was time to go out and about for my evening walk.

The wind had dropped and the sun had long-since set, but from the viewpoint overlooking the Rue du Nord I could see a beautiful sky right over the Ile de Chausey and it looked absolutely magnificent.

We could see the light of the lighthouse shining quite brightly, and also several lights of boats that are anchored off the island. Whether they are there for the night or whether they are fishing boats out there at work, it’s impossible to tell

From the viewpoint I ran on down the path underneath the city walls. One or two other people were around there so for a part of my travels I wasn’t alone.

The lights of Donville-les-Bains were glittering very brightly and their reflection in the sea looked quite wonderful. And from there I walked on around the corner to the viewpoint over the Place Marechal Foch to have a look at how the tide was doing.

No-one else about now so I ran on down across the Square Maurice Marland. I can get all the way down there and all the way up the first ramp at the end.

Mind you I have to stop and catch my breath at the end, and from there, there’s a nice view over the harbour.

There’s a trawler-type of fishing boat anchored over there on one of the pontoons that the commercial yachts use, and I’ve no idea why it would be tied up over there. It has all of its work-lights on too and that is bizarre too.

And I was right about Normandy Trader too. As you can see, the loading berth is empty. The harbour gates haven’t been open long but nevertheless she has made a smart getaway.

Yesterday, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Minette, the old dark tortoiseshell cat, for quite a while.

And so it goes without saying that tonight, here she is sitting on the steps outside her front door. She let me stroke her for a few minutes and then she wandered off.

And me? I wandered off too – ran the final length back home to clock up the metres and the percentages on my fitbit.

Back here, I had a surprise with the kefir. The instructions say that on the second fermentation, the bottles need to be opened regularly to let out the excess gas that’s been created.

Accordingly, I opened the bottle of strawberry kefir, and the fountain that was produced would have put Vesuvius to shame and would have launched the Space Station.

Perhaps I ought to open the bottles more regularly that once every day, or maybe it’s because the first fermentation isn’t complete

Whatever it was, I ended up having to wash down the kitchen and I’ll have to change my clothes in the morning.

Monday 21st September 2020 – I DUNNO …

… what happened today but this was one of the best days that I’ve has for some considerable time. And that has surprised me as much as it’s probably surprised you.

It started off with me being out of bed before the third alarm went off and it’s been a while since that has happened.

Plenty of time though to go off on a few travels. I was with a group of policewomen last night and they were doing a house-to-house visit down this road enquiring about bicycles for some reason, asking if the bicycles present belonged to the people there. They worked their way down this road and came to the final house, a fine stone 3-storey house built of granite blocks, a bit run-down, unkempt and so on. She said “right, this is the house here”. She went up and knocked on the door and spoke to someone – another guy – about it. he was in fact Derek Nimmo. I went for a wander round to look at the side of this house while she was talking. When I came back, my partner had transformed into Marianne, she and someone else arguing with this Derek Nimmo type and he was being extremely difficult. It turned out that there had been some kind of collision between Marianne and him in a car. She’d gone to have a form signed, one of these constats. He was of extremely bad grace, doing all kinds of lecturing, all of that. They wrote out this form but in the end he just picked it up and tore it up and gave it back to her, then hit her. That got me extremely angry. I stormed over there and even though he was a good foot taller than me I gave him an absolute lecture “no-one ever hits a woman in my presence”, all of this kind of thing. If he wanted to hit someone he could start by hitting me. I awoke quite feverish again.
Later in the night I found myself busy dictating again to my hand and not my dictaphone. This is becoming rather too much of a habit as well. But it seems that last night there were concerns that German commercial and public television was not being prosecuted over its failure to examine footage of demonstrations that it had filmed in 2009 involving I think Martin Luther King which could have resulted in criminal prosecutions being brought against people who were mishandling the demonstrators. This in turn led to all kinds of demonstrations. There were people everywhere chanting and so on and the forces of law and order moved in. For some reason I was with them and we were gradually pushing these demonstrators back. We had them crowded up on some kind of top row of steps but no-one seemed to be doing anything to move them any further so I gave them a big push. 4 or 5 people at rhe far end fell off the steps down to the next level. That was basically when the demonstrators abandoned the protest and we could move freely up. I went to have a look at the other end of these steps. It was quite a drop over the end, about 10 or 12 feet, but 1 or 2 people were thinking that this is the best way to get away from the police so they dropped over the edge at the back. I thought “how was I going to get away from here?”. My only solution was to drop over the edge at the back as well so I had a look. It seemed to be very high to me. I didn’t really want to jump over that. I thought that I could dangle down from my hands from the top and let go, slide down but that still looked an overwhelming drop for me. It was steeper in some places than others. Perhaps I could find a lower place I’d be more comfortable doing it.

Once I’d transcribed all of that I had another back at the arrears and after a good session on that, I’ve whittled it down to just 13 remaining. With a bit of luck (not that I have too much of that these days) I’ll finish it on Friday or something like that.

That took more time than it ought to have done, and the rest of the day has been spent working on the next radio programme, not having overlooked to post this week’s off.

By the time that I knocked off for my guitar sessions, I’d chosen all the music except the last one, combined them in pairs as usual, written the text, dictated it, started to edit it and even prepared the speech for my invited guest.

The afternoon walk was a bit depressing today. Gribouille the big ginger cat was there for his afternoon stroke and one of my neighbours was out there, so we had a good chat together.

But that was basically all that was interesting. There was nothing much happening out in the English Channel today – or, at least – if there was, I couldn’t see it.

That’s because even though we had that thunder and lightning storm last night, today was shrouded in fog and we couldn’t see very much at all out to sea.

It reminded me of that British newspaper headline in the 1920s – “fog in the Channel – Continent cut off!” which just about sums up the insularity of the xenophobic Brits.

nevertheless, the fog didn’t prevent everyone from doing their own thing this afternoon.

My walk took me around the headland and there by the seafarers’ memorial there were a couple of zodiacs down there in the Baie de Mont St Michel with a group of fishermen in each one.

You can see just how foggy it is. Le Loup, the marker light for the entrance to the harbour is just about visible but you can’t see very much at all beyond there.

And so I continued on around the path but there was nothing at all of interest to see so I wandered on home.

After the guitars, I had tea. A stuffed pepper tonight followed by apple crumble – at least, the part of the apple crumble that I didn’t drop on the floor.

There was a little wave of fatigue (the first of the day but not actually a crashing-out) but I fought it off by going for my evening walk.

And outside on my travels I didn’t see a soul. It was just like one of these North American ghost towns and I was expecting any minute to see a tumbleweed blowing through the Porte St Jean and off down the street.

But it looked so photogenic tonight that I had to take a photo of it yet again. Only this time there are no traffic lights or road signs to obscure the view.

Down along the Rue du Nord I walked, in splendid isolation, and then ran on down the footpath.

No-one around in the Square Maurice Marland either so I could run all the way down there too.

But my eye was caught by a very slender new moon up in the sky tonight so I had a little fun trying to photograph it. But I was intrigued by the green light to the left of the moon. I couldn’t see it with the naked eye.

But in a couple of the other photos that I took, it wasn’t there either. The only thing that I can think of was that although I couldn’t hear anything, a low-flying aeroplane travelling from left to right was going past at that moment and I was lucky enough to press the button just as the plane’s flashing navigation light was illuminated.

So how do we know that the plane was going from left to right and not right to left? The answer is that there are five letters in green, and five letters in right.

Port is red, and there are four letters in “port”, just as there are in “left”. So if the aeroplane was travelling from right to left, we would see the red light.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are constantly seeing all kinds of building repairs, roadworks and the like going on in the old medieval walled city quite regularly.

It looks as if we are in for another batch of work starting quite soon. Some time during the day this large piece of mobile plant has appeared and is parked up in the Parvis Notre Dame.

It’s going to be interesting to see where they will be working and what they will be doing. It’s a good job that I don’t have to drive through the old town on my way around.

But while I was there looking at the machinery I had a look behind me.

Not that there was anything of any interest going on there but the Rue Notre Dame but the view made a very good photo this evening.

From here I walked on around the walls and then ran on home. Three runs again today and I’m hoping that I can keep this going. It’s not as athletic as I was in the Spring and early Summer before I was ill but if I can keep this up I’ll be happy.

Welsh class tomorrow so I need to be on good form. An early night will do me a world of good.

Tuesday 15th September 2020 – DESPITE NOT …

… doing everything that I wanted to do, I’ve still had an extremely busy and active day today. I’ve never stopped and, even more surprisingly, I didn’t crash out either. That’s not really a surprise – it’s a shock!

So while you admire some photos of this evening’s beautiful sunset, let me mention that while once more I missed the third alarm, it was only by a matter of seconds and I was immediately up and sitting on the edge of the bed.

Mind you, it did take me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and summon up the strength to move, but that’s par for the course these days.

During the night I was in my old office in Prince Albert Street. I’d had a shave and a wash but the hairs that I had shaved off my face weren’t flushing down the drain of the sink. There was a young guy sitting there by the side of the sink waiting for me to finish but I was just taking longer and longer and longer because of these hairs. In the end I told him that I was ready to get up but I can’t leave it like this because of the hairs. He said “let me have a look” and he tried to move it as well. He said “what you need is a new sink because the capacity on this isn’t enough. We need to go along and get another sink” which I thought was silly because they just don’t issue sinks like this but off we went, clambering over a few items into the main office and out again over another pile of stores. We were asked what we were looking for and we explained about the new sink. Someone said “you’ll be really lucky finding a new sink like this. You want to try a new plug hole”.

A few more of the arrears from the dictaphone disappeared too which is good news as I slowly catch up.

After that, I tidied up in the kitchen and the dining area. We have our Welsh lesson this morning and that’s on line. I don’t really want people to see the chaos in which I live these days.

And having put all of that behind me I sat down and did some more revision of the previous course. I’ve forgotten almost everything that I learnt in the Spring.

At least, that’s what I thought because I found that once the lesson started I could actually remember some of the things that I had learned. More than I thought, more than was necessary for our opening session and more than some of my fellow-students.

Interestingly, we have a student from Romania living in Connah’s Quay who is learning Welsh. That’s certainly something quite extraordinary.

Instead of two hours, these lessons are 2.5 hours so we didn’t finish until 13:30. That meant a rather late lunch.

Having used the last of the bread, this afternoon I baked some bread. Some ordinary bread, into which I added a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds, and also a smaller loaf with a banana, some sultanas and a pile of ground almonds added to it, brushed with soya milk and sprinkled with brown sugar.

While all of that was rising in the corner, I attacked the carrots that I had bought the other day. They were peeled and diced, blanched in boiling water with some bay leaves and then drained and left to dry.

While they were drying, I peeled and diced a lump of ginger into some tiny fragments and then boiled them in some water.

While they were boiling, I peeled the lemons that I had, put them in a whizzer and whizzed them gently to separate the juice. That went onto a glass and then the remainder was thoroughly whizzed round into a pulp and then added to the ginger and water that was boiling. This was then set to simmer.

While the lemon and ginger was simmering away, I went out for my afternoon walk.

It was a beautiful afternoon again, hot and sunny with very little wind. And plenty of people out there too enjoying it. The fishermen were out there as well.

At least, I reckon that they are fishermen because I can’t think of what else they might be doing in those boats down there so close inshore by the diving platform at the Pointe du Roc.

There were quite a few other boats out there too. Not very many yachts today, with it not being weekend, but quite a few others.

Here’s one of our old friends again. She’s La Grande Ancre and she seems to spend much of her time engaged in fishing activity and the rest of the time transporting items out to the Ile de Chausey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw her go out a year or two back with a tractor on her deck and she’s had many other things to transport as well, although she doesn’t seem to do as much in that line since Chausiais arrived.

But here’s something interesting down there on the rocks.

One thing that I have noticed about the coastline here is that driftwood of any sort is very rare. We haven’t seen anything interesting, despite all the storms that we have. But this down here is the first substantial item that I’ve seen in all the time that I’ve been here.

The kids were out here again playing around on the grass. And I now know what they are doing, because I had a close look. They are having sessions in Orienteering – being given various sets of co-ordinates and running from point-to-point armed with a map and a compass.

Strangely enough, that’s the one thing that I know something about because in 1971 I came 15th in the North West England Schools’ Championship.

And no – there were not only 15 entrants.

But anyway, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the proceedings over the next few weeks to see how they are doing

On that note I wandered off around the headland to the other side of the promontory.

And there’s some excitement today in the Chantier Navale. Over the last week or two there have been as many as seven boats in there and that’s been the most that I have ever seen – up until today, that is.

As I went past this afternoon, I noticed that they had just pulled another fishing boat out of the water with the mobile crane. That’s eight boats in there today and I’ve never ever seen that many at any one time.

So we’ve seen crowds on the land and crowds in the sea. I’m sure that you are all wondering what is going on in the air.

The answer is that despite the apparent lack of wind this afternoon the Bird-Men of Alcatraz were flying around somehow. At one particular moment I counted three of them in the air all at once and I’m not sure how they are keeping aloft.

As an aside, I’ve not had any news about the bird-man who came to grief 10 days ago on the rocks by the tidal pool. I wonder how he’s getting on.

One of the things that features quite regularly on these pages is the question of pathetic parking. The Rue St Pierre by the entrance to the College Malraux at school chucking-out time is notorious in this respect.

But not today.

Obviously the local constabulary is a keen reader of my pages because today we have one of Macron’s Finest on duty keeping an eye on things, including, one assumes, the wild parking.

If everyone can park properly in the free car park round the corner when there’s a copper on duty, why can’t they do it all the time?

Only one thing remained to be done before I could clear off home.

We have a visitor in the harbour this afternoon. One of the Jersey freighters, Normandy Trader, has come into port on the morning tide.

She’s been in a couple of times since we last saw her but the ship is very busy with plenty of work so there have been some really rapid turn-rounds just recently. She’s been in like Flynn and out again on the same tide which means that I’ve not been lucky enough to be present to snatch a photograph.

We’ve not seen Thora, the other Jersey freighter, for a while either. Things must be hotting up with the run-in to Brexit.

Back in the apartment I put the oven on to heat up and when it was warm enough, I bunged the bread inside.

Taking the ginger and lemon mix off the heat, I put it in the whizzer, added two tablespoons of honey and the lemon juice that I had decanted earlier and then whizzed it all around into a nice pulpy syrup. Then put it into a bottle with some turmeric.

When the bread was cooked I tipped the loaves out onto a wire rack to cool down.

And here are the finished product. The bread is cooling down on the rack, the carrots are now freezing nicely in the freezer and the bottle of lemon and ginger cordial is in the fridge.

And the cordial is delicious too. I tried a sample of it just now.

Tea was a burger on a bap with baked potatoes (I did them in the oven while I was baking the bread) followed by apple crumble and soya coconut dessert.

That was the cue to nip out for my evening walk and runs. We’ve seen the beautiful sunset this evening, and I reckoned that while I was out there I would take a photograph of the Rue du Nord and the Place d’Armes.

You can’t see very much of my own building, but in the background to the right is the College Malraux, the local High School.

And, of course, you can see some of the decaying medieval wall that is fenced off to stop people putting themselves at risk by walking close to it.

It’s one of four parts of the wall that are fenced off right now and there seems to be no effort being made to fix them, which is a shame. The whole place is falling to bits.

From the rue du Nord I ran on along the footpath, walked a while to catch my breath and then ran on along the Square Maurice Marland.

While there was nothing particular going on as far as terrestrial objects go, there were huge flocks of birds taking off, flying around in a couple of circles and then landing again – only to take off again and repeating the process ad infinitum.

It’s difficult to make assumptions of course but it seems to me that they are practising their formation flying en masse with all of the young newly-born fledgelings ready for their flight south in a couple of weeks time.

There were hundreds and hundreds circling around, so I stopped and watched them for a while and then ran on home.

But with it being quite light this evening you are probably wondering why I’m out and about so early. The truth is that there’s football on the internet kicking off at 20:45 – Newtown v Caernarfon Town in the JD Cymru (Welsh Premier) League and I wanted to be home in time for the kick-off.

It wasn’t a very exciting match and, to be quite frank, these two teams are not going to be up there challenging for the honours at the end of the season.

The fire has gone out in Caernarfon and their central defence was somewhat conspicuous by its absence. Newtown were probably slightly the better side but their attack was rather wayward and they failed to take full advantage.

However Caernarfon ended up winning 3-2, which surprised me considerably, but it was down to one moment of magic from Paulo Mendes, another from Noah Edwards (aided by some miserable Newtown defending out by the corner flag) and some excellent work from Mike Hayes, who Bala will end up regretting releasing.

It’s now long after 03:00 and I’m still not tired so I’m carrying on working and I’ll switch off the alarms for the morning. I’d written half of the speech for my radio programme this afternoon so I can finish that off and then get on with the internet web lesson that I missed.

Saturday 12th September 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a photograph of an old car on these pages?

It’s not very long, of course, but nevertheless it’s still nice to see them when they are out and about. And, interestingly, the last few old cars that we have featured on these pages have been Jaguars and today, we came across another one.

This one is the cream of the crop, to be sure. It’s one of the classic XK-series of Jaguars and if my memory serves me correctly, it is an XK-140.

If I could have my choice of cars to come home with me, this one would be pretty close to the top of the list.

When I was a kid, I always dreamed about owning one of these but today it would cost a King’s ransom. This one was parked up on the car park of the LeClerc supermarket when I went to do my shopping this morning.

And, much to my surprise, despite the fact that the supermarket was crowded, there was just me and one other person admiring it. That’s a real shame because it’s worth much more than that.

What else was a real shame was that I missed the third alarm. 07:40 when I finally crawled out of bed.

So while you admire the activity that was taking place in the area this afternoon, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

And it really was a busy night too. No wonder that I couldn’t haul myself out of bed at 06:00. I probably wasn’t even here.

To start off the events we were on board ship last night and playing a real pantomime of pirates, that kind of thing. I was the hero and someone else was my sidekick pirate who was Irish and speaking in an Irish accent and had to go round camping up all of this thing about priates and Irish in it. We decided to do the scene again but this time with me as the Irish pirate thing but there was no time to learn the lines so I just went away and ad-libbed. At the crucial moment I forgot my accent which caused everyone to laugh and was embarrassing to me as I couldn’t recapture the comic accent after that. When this finished they talked about how this would have been presented in the Middle Ages. Someone actually produced a Middle-Ages speech guide from the 15th Century, round about then which basically used speech bubbles and so on. It was a very complicated way of doing it and of course you wouldn’t expect to follow the play by reading the speech bubbles as it was just so complicated. but I was being interrogated in this by someone or other almost as if it was real. I’m sure that there was much more to it than this as well but I’m blowed if I can remember it.

Later on there was something about a series of magic wands last night but I can’t remember much about that either. There was however one called a Disravu and predicted the future itself, found in the USA in a shipwreck and was supposed to be extremely elderly, something to do with St Paul. Marianne was with me last night and we were getting ready to go out. She said she was going to take her only two jackets with her and save her third for tonight when we went out. I thought that that was presumptuous of her. She went off and the postman appeared. He was obviously sticking stuff in the letter boxes down the end of the lane. As he turned round a black CA Bedford taxi pulled out of the side verge and nearly forced him off the road. There were a couple of other people looking at the horses as well. I went out but I remembered that I didn’t have a mail box so I looked around to see where he might have lodged the letters. It occurred to me that maybe there wasn’t any post for me – whether it was for someone else, a neighbour in the area. The two young kids who were with me and Marianne came down the drive in a sort of fancy dress, chanting and singing. I pretended to be scared. Then Marianne put in an appearance.

Later still I found myself again last night dictating a dream without the dictaphone in my hand, thinking that I had it in my hand and wrestling with it to switch it on, all that kind of thing to get it to record. But of course it wasn’t in my hand so I couldn’t. It’s not the first time that this has happened either.

But when i finally did get round to switching it on to record I’d forgotten what it was that I was going to talk about. It was something to do with a furniture removal and I can’t remember if it was Hans but we had to go into the East of Europe, sitting outside this row of houses trying to work out which one we had to visit. We were in somewhere like Albania and all the car registration numbers were weird. We were watching them and I was making a particular note of them. We saw these people pull up with a trailer loaded up with stuff on it. We watched them for a couple of minutes getting it into the driveway and starting to unload it. In the end we said “right, that must be them”. We got up and walked down to them. Hans got there first and shook hands. When I got there 30 seconds later Hans had gone. There was just a big cow that came round trying to push everyone around. Of course I don’t like big animals so I was rather uncomfortable about this idea.

And we haven’t finished yet either.

Even later on we were all rehearsing for a music competition like we did for the last night on the boat in September last year. At first I thought that I was being excluded by this group of people but then they started to include me and STRAWBERRY MOOSE and sit down and discuss the plans. There was one girl, an Indian girl who they were trying to rope in who wasn’t really sitting down with us. She was wandering off somewhere and we had to go and fetch her back but no-one could remember her name. I’d written her name or someone else had written it down for me on a piece of yellow paper but I couldn’t find it. I could remember the cleaners picking it up. This got me into a panic about “what the hell am going to do about this girl’s name?”. I was searching my room all over for this piece of paper and then we started to sit and go through this list of songs that we were going to play. Luckily I was the only one with a guitar so it looked as if I was going to be the one who would be playing all the music.

Is it any wonder that I couldn’t crawl out of bed with all of that.

Following a shower and a machine-load of washing, I went out to the shops. Nothing much at all on offer in NOZ and nothing much from LeClerc either. Grapes at €0:99 per kilo was a must-have of course, and a pile of other fruit too seeing as it was cheap.

But if it hadn’t been for the Jaguar it would have been a pretty miserable morning.

Back here I hung up the washing and cracked on with a few more dictaphone entries from the backlog from when i was in Central Europe. One of these days I might actually be up to date, but that’s going to be several weeks away yet.

There was the afternoon walk as usual today but I had a change of plan. I went around the city walls instead.

We’ve already seen plenty of activity out there this afternoon but there was even more that merited a special mention, like that rather large wind-powered ship on the horizon right out there in the centre of the photograph.

It certainly looked impressive and I wondered which ship it might be.

One ship that it won’t be is Marité.

She’s still in port tied up at her berth with a couple of people loitering around. It’s actually quite a surprise to see her here because we’re still officially in the tourist season and I would have expected her to have had a full schedule for this time of the year.

No point in going down to ask them because their stock reply will be “it’s all on our web site” and then they’ll go back to chatting amongst themselves and ignore the paying passengers.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

There wasn’t just a question of crowds of people on land and boats in the sea either.

The air was pretty full of aircraft of all different types this afternoon whizzing around above the town and the sea. Just like this microlight in fact. We’ve seen this a couple of times and I really am going to have to talk my way into a little trip around.

The autogyro that we’ve seen quite often wasn’t out there today as far as I could see. It was about the only local aircraft that we didn’t see up there today.

There wasn’t the possibility for me to go for my run across the Square Maurice Marland. I didn’t want to embarrass the crowds.

That meant that there was plenty of time to see what was going on, and whatever there was on the north side of the headland in the English Channel there was just as much on the south side, including La Granvillaise having a sail around the bay by Le Loup

You can always tell her when she’s side-on. She has her serial number, G90 (you can tell how old she is) on the sail.

Back home and just as I closed the door, Rosemary rang me so we had a good chat for about an hour.

The football season in Wales has now restarted and there was a live game on the internet. As US Granville were playing away today, I had the football on in here.

Connah’s Quay who won the Championship last year were at home against Bala Town and that was the broadcasted match. And, surprisingly, Connah’s Quay were distinctly second-best and when Bala took the lead, through something of a rather flukey goal, no-one was in the least surprised.

They failed to take advantage of their dominance and a rather shaky Nomads keeper, and they paid the penalty with what was almost the last kick of the game when Nomads winger Sameron Dool scored probably the most unlikely goal you’ll be ever likely to see. You can see it AT ABOUT 2:30:30

later on, I went for a walk outside.

it was too late for me to go out with the tripod which was a shame because the sky was really clear tonight. You might not think too much of this photo but you can see on the far right of the image the flash of light from the lighthouse at Cap Frehel 70 kms away.

There were all of the street lights from down the Brittany coast too, as far as St Cast le Guildo where we stayed for a night on Spirit of Conrad

My walk continued around the headland and along to the viewpoint over the chantier navale.

There was no change in the occupancy but it did occur to me that I haven’t taken a proper night-time photo of the place just recently so I put that right.

And having done that I carried on home. Complete with 3 runs of 900 paces in total to fit in with my attempts to recover some of this fitness that I had back in May.

It’s now gone 02:00 and I can’t sleep at all which is a surprise seeing as I haven’t crashed out today yet. Luckily tomorrow is Sunday and a lie-in so that I can recover.

Then Monday, back to work again.

Wednesday 9th September 2020 – THE BIRD …

… of prey that we have seen every now and again flying around above the rabbit colony has been back again today.

This afternoon while I was out on my rounds I came across it yet again. Unfortunately it wasn’t in such a good position to photograph as it was last time, but I did my best.

And that’s something else too. I’ve spoken previously … “and at great length too” – ed … about the fact that I’ve never seen any fisherman actually catch anything but, thinking about it, I haven’t seen the birds of prey catch anything yet either.

For my own part, I didn’t catch anything today either. The early bird might catch the worm but I wasn’t early at all this morning. Even though I was in bed at some kind of reasonable-ish time, I still couldn’t summon up the strength to be out of bed when the alarm went off.

Unfortunately, it was round about 08:45 when I finally crawled out of bed and I didn’t feel much like it then either.

Having finally managed to listen to the events of last night on the dictaphone it appears that I can’t remember very much about the nocturnal events. It seems that I was somewhere in Central Europe and it involved a cavalry army mounted on horseback that was pretty comfortably defeated by some insurrectionists of which I was one and had to retreat. All of its artillery was exposed to the TV cameras and so on during this retreat and it had to be very careful not to fall into the hands of the partisans who were roaming about

Despite it being something or a miserable day in which I was hard-pressed to summon up any enthusiasm, I finally did finish the radio programme on which I’ve been working. And much to my own surprise, it was short by a mere 0.912 of a second by the time that I had finished.

However a few additional small bits of generated silence in appropriate places soon took care of that and it was soon back up to the one-hour limit

There was of course the usual interruption while I went off on my afternoon walk.

And it seems that I wasn’t the only one heading off on an outing this afternoon. Joly France was heading off into the English Channel. It’s the old one – you can tell that by the fact that there is no step in her stern, and she’s on her way out to the Ile de Chausey with a load of passengers.

It beats me why they would want to go out there so late in the day because they wouldn’t have too much time to stay on the island.

There was plenty of action in the air too.

Never mind the bird of prey that we have seen already. There was also a small light aeroplane too but I didn’t take too much notice of that as my attention had been attracted by the powered hang-glider flying overhead.

There are all kinds of aerial activity going on around here and I suppose that I ought to be paying more attention to it.

But for the moment I carried on with my walk. Apart from the fact that someone seems to have shuffled the boats in the chantier navale, there was nothing else very much going on at all and I came on home.

After finishing the radio programme I made a start on tidying up the bedroom and sorting things out. It’s a lot better now and I can actually move around in here. There’s still plenty to do but little by little I’ll get there.

Sitting down to carry on with my Welsh revision, I had the misfortune to fall asleep and I was out for about 90 minutes on the chair. And when I awoke I was in yet another dazed and confused state that lasted for a good half hour. I ended up missing most of my guitar practice yet again.

Tea tonight was a curry that I found in the freezer, with rice and vegetables, followed by apple pie and soya dessert. Very delicious.

For my evening walk outside, there was no-one out there at all

The Porte St Jean looked very beautiful tonight, all illuminated by various floodlight, and with the streetlights of the Place d’Armes in the background it made a very spectacular photograph.

With it being too dark to see if there was anything going on out at sea, I walked on along the rue du Nord and then ran all the way along the footpath underneath the walls to my usual resting place.

Having recovered my breath I carried on with my walk and then ran across the Square Maurice Marland.

No excitement or tension in the rue Cambernon this evening so I carried on around the walls past the car from Connecticut which seems to be definitively abandoned.

From up on the top, the Place d’Armes was looking splendid in the streetlights so I took a photo of that and then ran on home.

Now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. It’s shopping day tomorrow so I need to be on form. Not that there’s much chance of that because I’m really not feeling as fit as maybe I ought to be.

It’s been over a month since I returned from my voyage and I had been hoping that I would have been much better than this by now.

Tuesday 8th September 2020 – THIS EVENING …

… I have seen something that has caused me a great deal of disquiet.

There was an ambulance and police car in the rue Cambernon here and about half a dozen people, ambulancemen and police, were struggling with a hysterical adolescent girl to put her into the ambulance.

There was no clue as to what had caused the incident, but her hysteria was way beyond the norm and quite suggestive of some kind of stupefiant-ignited issue although of course from the distance at which I was observing the affair and the fact that it was in the dark, there was nothing other than the audible indication to promote this idea.

But whatever it was, my hat goes off to the police and ambulancemen. It was a very stressful event, quite a battle to put her inside and strap her in, and they showed far more patience and discipline than I ever would have done.

It goes without saying that it’s not the kind of incident that one photographs, but it’s still bad news when the affairs of the banlieux of Paris come to, quite literally, our own doorstep.

As for me, much to my and everyone else’s surprise, I was out of bed before the third alarm went off. At least – I was sitting on the edge of the bed trying to summon up the courage to take some kind of drastic action, like moving.

Once I’d gathered my wits, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

I was on a galleon last night, one of these Spanish galleon things with crowds of people on it, a big tourist attraction. I was there with a certaib lady of my acquaintance. Something happened, me being careless I think, and she ended up with a sea-full of face – or, more likely, a face full of sea. I said that I was sorry but she started to whine on and on and on in this silly voice that she had, mimicking what I was saying so on that point I’d had enough so I just turned round and walked away. She changed her tune afterwards, apologised and asked me to come back but I’d really had enough so I just walked off. There was someone climbing up a ladder into the rigging of this ship. He was carrying a tray with about 10 different drinks on it. I thought that that was adventurous. I wouldn’t even do that with two. I was wandering around this ship, trying to find my way around and try my best to totally ignore her while she was still having one of these tantrum display things. There were some people sitting down – I was wondering whether to go to sit with them but I thought “no. I really want to be somewhere quite a way from this end of the ship somewhere on my own”.
Somewhat later we were having a look at some photos last night about all of the abandoned properties around Crewe and Nantwich, places like the old Co-op brewery and so on, a lot of them with photos of abandoned cars on them. There were several in Nantwich, three of them being churches close together in Hospital Street and their congregations transferred to the main parish church there. These churches, one of which was called St Werburgh’s, were all very eerie but very magnificent, Victorian Gothic-type but in terrible states of disrepair and decay. Even though I don’t remember them as a kid (because they weren’t there) we were having a good prowl around these places last night in this dream. It was really quite interesting. On one occasion we ended up being at a church service. They came along and asked for a collection. The girl I was with said she didn’t have anything and I just had a few copper coins that I gave them. later, we were on a railway station watching the trains come in. We moved away but a train had pulled in so I prepared my camera to take a photo. As it pulled out another one, a magnificent really big powerful locomotive pulled out of this station hauling an express train so I went to take a photo of them with the NIKON 1 J5 as it pulled out of the station but it wouldn’t work at first. I had to press the shutter a couple of times for it to work. While I was doing this there was some woman standing nearby. She was excited because she could see the main railway station from here. I thought that she meant the one at Manchester which was quite some way away and you can’t see with the naked eye, but bathed in fog anyway. But she said “no, it’s Denton station! Look over there! So I looked over there but I couldn’t see it at all with my naked eye.

Having dealt with all of that, I finally got round to having a look at Sunday’s effort. And after a good deal of listening, of thought and of transcription I managed to sort something out and you can READ IT HERE.

Surprisingly, even though I had the strongest impression that Pollux was one of the people with me, there was no mention whatever of her name at all, so I’ve no idea where this impression comes from. Mind you, there are several minutes missing here and there, either because

I didn’t dictate it (there seems to be a hole in the middle of the story somehow).
I didn’t transcribe it because I couldn’t decipher it (there was some of that too)
I didn’t type it out because there was a significant part of the voyage that would put you off your tea. And there seems to have been quite a bit of that just recently. I’ve been having some really disturbed – and disturbing – nights just recently.

As I was finishing everything, which had taken me long enough, someone with whom I wanted a chat appeared on the internet. We ended up having a lengthy chat and that was, basically, the morning finished.

After lunch I set about the radio programme. All of the tracks have been paired and combined and the text is written. Not dictated though because I ran out of time.

There had been a few interruptions during the afternoon.

First of all, there was the afternoon walk in the beautiful pleasant if not slightly windy afternoon.

There wasn’t all that much activity out there at sea this afternoon. Whatever that big ship was yesterday, that’s cleared off and there was only a speeedboat roaring past out at sea.

They are clearly going far too fast for fishing and I can’t think of any other good reason why they would be out there this afternoon. It’s not as if there’s anywhere to go in that direction.

In theory I suppose that they might be heading towards shore because there is something exciting going on over there on the beach by the looks of things.

We saw the other day that the bouchot harvesters were out there on the mussels beds at Donville-les-Bains. Over there on the beach bear Breville-sur-Mer they seem to be gathering again.

They are quite possibly waiting for the tide to go out so that they can access the mussels beds over there too. I doubt that the cabin cruiser there has any involvement in the activity.

They are probably local fishermen, because there have been quite a few of those out there over the last week or 10 days. There are plenty of mooring buoys and pot markers out there right now.

And plenty of other fishermen too. While I was walking along the path on the north side of the promontory a boat came around the headland. They are clearly intent on fishing as they have rods and fishing nets clearly on display.

It beats me why, because I have yet to see anyone out there ever catch anything.

My route arounf the headland took me past the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

And there was plenty of activity in there once again. The usual seven boats of course – nothing has changed that much. But the fishing boat from which they had been stripping the paint the other day, that’s now in the process of being resprayed.

Give it a week or two and we may well find that boat back in the water. And one or two others because there was a considerable amount of work being carried on on the other boats too.

Back here, another interruption was to deal with the question of Strider’s insurance. That expires in a few days and needs to be paid, even though I won’t probably have the pleasure of going over to Canada to drive him this year.

So this involved several e-mails, a ‘phone call to Canada, a complicated series of transactions with the bank and then a discussion on the internet with Rachel.

That took much longer than I expected and meant that my third interruption, my session on the guitar, was somewhat curtailed.

Tea was my burger on a bap with potatoes and vegetables, followed by a slice of my delicious apple pie and soya dessert.

When I went out for my evening walk it wasn’t quite dark outside.

In the distance out in the English Channel there was a yacht looking as if it was heading towards port. Of course it was far too far out for me to be able to identify it.

There were also plenty of other lights out to sea on the horizon. It wasn’t possible to say anything whatever about those.

Instead, I carried on and ran all the way along the footpath underneath the medieval walls. And, having recvered my breath again I ran across the Square Maurice Marland

During my walk across the Place Cambernon I observed the incident that I related earlier and by the time that I moved on, it was now quite dark.

We’ve seen a couple of fishing boats here and there just recently – not as many as we saw three or four months ago. However there was one coming into port and performing a U-turn to tie up alongside the fish processing plant, presumably to unload its catch.

From there I walked down to the road and then ran all the way home to write up my notes.

And having done that, I’m now ready for bed. A nice early night, finish off the radio programme (which might take all day) and then do some tidying up

There is still plenty of work to be done and I’m not really catching up with very much at all. That needs to be changed, and rapidly too.

Monday 7th September 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… do anything like I intended to do today. And while you admire the photos of this evening’s night sky, I’ll tell you all about it.

It all actually started off quite well though. Despite not going to bed until long after 01:00, I still up and about before the third alarm went off. And I bet that that surprised you as much as it surprised me.

Mind you, it would be wrong to suggest that I was leaping about raring to go. I was sitting on the bed with my feet on the ground but that was about all that can be said for it.

Having slowly come round to consciousness, I had my medication and then sat down to do the paperwork.

However I was interrupted by a ‘phone call. A few months ago, a newspaper reporter took my ‘phone number and said that he would ‘phone me some time.

Not having heard anything from him for a while I’d forgotten all about it. But he rang me up this morning to see if he could come round for a chat. That meant a really good tidying-up session, vacuuming the apartment and washing the floors.

All my plans for the day thus went right out of the window.

When he came round, we had a really good chat about the radio, about music and about all kinds of subjects. I was glad that I’d had something to eat before he came because he was here until about 15:30.

With a few urgent things to do it was rather later than usual when I went out for my afternoon walk.

The afternoon was magnificent. It was quite warm with some pleasant wind. The sky was quite clear and you could see for miles. Right out on the horizon presumably on its way to the Channel islands was a ship.

It made me wonder if it was a ferry of some description but back here when i cropped and enlarged it, I couldn’t make out what kind of ship it might be. It’s quite possibly some kind of military vessel.

There was an even better view right up the coast towards Cherbourg.

By my calculations, which may or may not be correct, that in the background on the horizon is the range of hills at the back of the Cap de Carteret and all the way up to Bricquebec.

It’s been three and a half years since I moved here and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the coast as clear as this during all of this time.

My afternoon walk went all around the headland and back down the other side.

However at the end of the headland I climbed up on one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall to see what the view was like from up there. And sure enough, Cap Fréhel and the lighthouse were pretty prominent right out on the horizon.

What we could also see too was the coastline all the way up there, including the bay where St-Cast-le-Guildo, the port where we overnighted one night on our sail up the coast on Spirit of Conrad, is situated.

And I’ve only seen that once before, I think.

The bird-men of Alcatraz were out there yet again enjoying the good weather.

When the journalist and I were having our chat, I asked about the hang-glider who was injured on Saturday. He told me that he was still in intensive care with damage to his spinal column and it’s not clear what his future prospects are.

But all of that didn’t stop the current crop of hang-glider pilots from performing all kinds of aerobatics and so on right on the edge of the cliffs and right in front of the pedestrians strolling around the headland.

We were treated to another aerobatic display too while we were out on our walk.

This time though, it was a display of nature. That bird of prey that’s been loitering around the rabbit colony in the cliffs was back again hovering over the cliff edge. It remained stationary, beating its wings, for long enough for me to take a really good photograph of it.

There was nothing else going on during my travels so I came back home to have a closer look at some of the photographs that i’d taken, to see what I could see.

Back here, before I looked at the photos, I had bread to bake seeing as I’ve run out.

For some reason or other, the larger loaf of bread didn’t rise up as well as it has done in the past. It’s certainly better than the first two or three that I made, but not as good as the last couple.

As for the banana bread, that looks pretty good and I’m hoping that it tastes as good as it looks. I went to town with the sultanas and that’s given it some added oommph. As well as that, I brushed the surface with milk and sprinkled brown sugar on top.

While the oven was baking the bread, I stuck a potato and some frozen pie in there. What with some vegetables and gravy, followed by my apple turnover and coconut soya dessert, it made a really delicious tea.

Tomorrow I fancy a burger on a bap, I reckon.

On my walk around tonight, I had the f1.8 50mm lens on the camera – hence the brighter images.

You’ve already seen the sky over the English Channel, but there wasn’t anything else of any importance so I took another photo of the Square Maurice Marland and the illuminated trees.

Altogether I did my three runs, and I almost walked on a young couple having a quiet moment in a darkened corner of the city walls.

So later than usual, I’m off to bed now. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll be on form to crack on with work. I crashed out today for an hour or so before tea, but I’ve also chosen the music for the next radio programme so at least I have done something.

But I need to push on with my work otherwise i won’t ever get anywhere.

Thursday 3rd September 2020 – YOU CAN TELL …

… that the nights are getting longer right now. Summer seems to have left us a long way right now and we are in a slow downward spiral towards winter.

Out on mt stroll tonight, around the city walls tonight, it was quite dark by the time I’d gone around and the street lights across the Baie de Mont St Michel on the Brittany coast were shining quite brightly.

It won’t be long now until i’m out with the tripod, I reckon. It will be the cue to be taking more photos of the night so I’ll have to learn how to use THE NIKON D500 with the delay action shutter.

This morning, much to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I was out of bed before the third alarm went off. Sitting on the edge of the bed in a dazed condition trying to gather my wits together in order to stand up and do something constructive.

I’d been on my travels too. I was out with Nerina again last night. We were looking at a couple of houses that she’d seen on the internet that she was interested in buying. They were round about the £76,000 £78,000 mark in Crewe and were semi-detached but of the smaller type. There was one that was particularly nice and she was looking at it. We found to our surprise that it had three bedrooms which was already something. There was a load of stuff included in the sale, including four kiddies’ bikes and a couple of kiddies’ scooters. She was wondering about those – going to make sure that they were written in the sale. I said “basically if they are there you make sure that they are written in”. She asked “what do you think I’m going to do with a kiddie’s bike?”. There was a pregnant pause as I was trying to work out whether or not I ought to tell her that I knew that she’d had a child or something like that. We had a good look at this house and it looked to be really good value for what it was, one of these 1920s types of small semi-detached houses the type that you would see around Bedford Street, that area, with a drive and a garage. There was a van parked there, like a Ford Escort van only a little bigger parked outside the garage door.
Had I not awoken with a severe attack of cramp at this particular moment, I wonder where this would have gone.
Somewhat later I was teaching some Russian girls gymnastics in the water. It was an established class but it had been allowed to go to rack and ruin, people forgetting to bring their gym clothes with them, forgetting this, forgetting that. I decided that we would have a tidying up of discipline so as soon as the girls came in I made them perform their handstands for me in the water in their uniform, and if they didn’t have their uniform with them they were to go home and fetch it. If they didn’t have a uniform they weren’t to come back until they had one. There were a few other things as well that I wanted cutting out as well. it provoked quite a few sullen disputes but I was insistent on doing this. And I was well on my way to doing it when the first alarm went off.

Once again there was much more to it all than this but as you are probably eating your meal right now, I’ll spare you the miserable details.

After my shower I went out to go to the shops.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the other day that we saw part of the Rue Des Juifs fenced off, and I said that I’d go down and see what was going on.

And as luck would have it, there was a notice on the fencing. Basically, there is an archaeological survey going on right now involving the building and grounds in which the museum is situated.

They seem to think that it dates back to the founding of Granville and the building of the fortifications by the English during the Hundred Years War.

Myy walk up to LIDL was pretty uneventful but I spent quite a lot of money in there, even though there wasn’t anything particular extra that I bought, except for a set of compasses thet I need for measuring precise distances.

And not only that, some of the stuff that I wanted wasn’t available either, so it’s on the list for Saturday and LeClerc.

On the way back, my load was rather heavy and it was a struggle up the hill, that’s for sure.

And as I stopped for breath at the viewpoint overlooking the harbour, La Grande Ancre set sail out of her berth and out of the harbour.

So having recovered my breath I carried on back here. I was too tired to unpack the shopping though. I sat down on my chair and that was that until 13:30. About 2 hours, I reckon that i was right out of it altogether, and it felt like it too.

After lunch there was some more paperwork to do and then I went out for my afternoon walk.

There were plenty of people out there today but as far as photography went, there was nothing particular going on at all.

What there was though was some kind of yacht out there just off the coast of the Ile de Chausey. That looked interesting to I took a photo of it for future reference.

My walk carried on around the headland rather aimlessly and then I came back here.

At my desk I cropped and enlarged the photo that I had just taken. It looks as if it has the same kind of sails and rigging as a boat like la Granvillaise or her sister across the bay, but there is another yacht with a similar rig that sails around here occasionally and it might be her.

After my slice of banana bread, I had a go at the photos from my trip around Europe. I didn’t do too many of those because much of the time was spent doing some research into some of the items that I had photographed.

At 18:00 I knocked off and had an hour on the guitars. And I do like my new acoustic guitar.

Tea tonight was taco rolls with the leftover stuffing, with rice and vegetables followed by rice pudding

For my evening walk today, I went for my trip around the walls.

Looking over towards the Ile de Chausey, I could see a light shining just offshore, not too far away from where that strange yacht was moored this afternoon.

Of course I can’t say that it’s the same boat, but whoever it is seems to be bedded down for the night over there.

A strange cat came up to me tonight for a stroke, and then I set off on my run along the footpath.

This took me to the viewpoint from where there’s a good view over towards Jersey and the Channel Islands.

The view was really good tonight and we can see the light of some kind of boat – probably a fishing boat – working just offshore. What else we can see is a series of red lights just to the right of the white light.

You probably can’t see it in this photo but in an enlarged photo you can see that it’s actually the warning lights on the big radio mast that we have seen in photos of Jersey taken during the day.

Before I went home I did another couple of runs. One across the Square Maurice Marland and the other one down the hill back home. The three runs in total work out at about 850 paces, which equates to about 500 metres.

So now I’m going to have an early night, as much as I can. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow so I’m hoping that I can have a good sleep and then a good day doing a pile of work.

It’s about time too. I’m just falling farther and farther behind.

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… little fit of zeal and energy, it goes without saying that today was something of a contre-coup. I felt every ache and pain when I awoke, and I couldn’t get out of bed until 08:10.

Plenty of time to go off on a nocturnal ramble or two, and how!

I had a girlfriend last night and we had gone skiing or mountaineering together. There were four of us in total . It was quite clear that the two of us were together but we hadn’t known each other long. She was just explaining how difficult relationships were because she wasn’t the kind of person to just accept any kind of relationship. She explained how difficult it was to make her laugh and all that kind of thing, how she liked to have someone who was attentive towards her. I thought “that sounds like me actually” but for some unknown reason I couldn’t actually get her to laugh or whatever. We escorted each other on this trip and I got her down the mountain safely. We ended up somewhere just coming into the town and we were told that some old guy whom we knew was at the bar but he’d had the wrong beer so he was rather differently drunk than usual and it wasn’t a pretty sight. We thought that we’d better go over there and see what was going on. We ended up over there to see this old guy but by that time he’d gone. The barmaid asked us if we wanted a drink. I really fancied a drink but she said no she didn’t so I thought that I won’t have one. I won’t drink on my own. There was another girl there and for some reason I wanted to be a little show-offy with the girl I was with but she wasn’t the kind who would be particularly emotional, which was one of the things she had said to me. She said “the barmaid is obviously thinking that we are going to be having a drink so maybe we ought to move away” so reluctantly I agreed to move away with this girl.
Somewhat later on, I went on a voyage concerning two of my mother’s aunts. They had been engaged to work as matrons in some exclusive boarding school place. The small boys in the Preparatory school had been taken away from their fathers and so they weren’t bonding with them and the girls were just left there by there parents. The aunts were very unhappy about the entire situation and they wanted to leave to go into some kind of religious establishment that was there but they decided that they couldn’t leave these children at this very vulnerable time. It was all very sad and all very depressing.
There was another thing too about an island off the coast of Australia or New Zealand, although it looked like Northern peri-Arctic to me, right at the far north. It was all very isolated and there was only a boat every so often that went to the island. It was very isolated. Someone whom I knew was a driving test examiner who came over to give everyone a driving test. It was Nerina, and she was very busy doing all of this. I eventually caught up with her and she pointed out that some had passed and some had failed and she was rather disparaging towards the people who had failed. We were talking about death and she said that when she died she wanted a certain photo to be placed in her memory. It was a photo of her with another boy – someone whom she knew in University. Of course that upset me rather a lot because I expected to be the one on the photo with her when she went but apparently not. There was all kinds of talk. I had had a Reliant three-wheeler van which had long-since gone but I still had the papers for it. I was thinking that with this not being taxed I could get into a lot of trouble with this even though the van was no longer extant. There was some talk as well about getting Ryanair to provide a flight service to the airport, how they were going to arrange it. At one time they were talking on the island about a storm that was heading their way. It had already devastated the south of New Zealand and how were they going to cope up here when the storm finally hit? This was a strange thing as well.
Later still there were two red double-deck buses that appeared on the front of a restaurant or car park of a pub where Terry and I were sitting. One of then was an AEC which might have been a Regal V but it wasn’t – did I mean a Regent V? and the other one was more like an RT although i’m sure that I meant Routemaster from London. Terry wondered what on earth they were doing here so I said that I could soon find out by taking a photo and posting it on the Abandoned Buses group and I’ll have a reply in 5 minutes. But as I went to take a photo, in the time that it took for me to get my phone out and my camera on the phone ready, these buses had disappeared again. I said something to a woman who seemed to be with them but she just blubbered some kind of nonsense and walked away. Terry and I walked to the end of the car park to see if we could see where these buses had gone but we couldn’t see a thing.

It took ages to transcribe the dictaphone notes, as you might expect with all of this, and then I attacked the radio programme. That’s now completed and ready to go.

After lunch I sat down and dealt with a load of correspondence that had built up. I also tried to order a SSD hard-drive for my little Acer laptop but the effects of Brexit are biting already, for the company concerned now no longer delivers to the mainland.

So I made another start on the photos from early August but instead I crashed out completely for a couple of hours. On awakening, I felt absolutely awful again, just like I have done for this last while (apart from yesterday of course)

It was thus rather late when I went out for my afternoon walk and once again I went around the headland.

And I’m glad that I did too, because there was this lovely scene unfolding before my eyes, down on the beach. A young couple strolling casually hand-in-hand down there lost for all the world in their own amorous attachment.

It was all very nice and romantic and made me feel quite envious, as it happens.

That wasn’t all the people out there either. There were hordes of people strolling along on the paths around the clifftop.

The sea was quite busy too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall from yesterday that there were quite a few people out there having a good fishing session. They were still out there today, like these in the zodiac down here.

There was also someone out there having a paddle around in a kayak. I could see his paddles but I couldn’t see if he had a rod with him.

And of course, you mustn’t light a fire in your boat. As you all already know, you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

And if the crowds on the beach, crowds on the paths and crowds in the sea aren’t enough to be going on with, we had crowds in the air too.

As I was walking around, I counted no fewer than four light aeroplanes flying over me. This one here came the closest and so presented the best photographic shot. I’ve no idea what type of aeroplane it is, and the serial number that I could see didn’t come up with anything.

The other aeroplanes were too far away for me to take a clear photograph which was a shame. All that I needed to see was the autogyro fluttering past overhead and the day would have been complete.

It was quite a nice day outside today. It was quite sunny and there was very little wind for a change.

The view was quite clear today too. We’d seen the Brittany coast yesterday, so today we had a good look down towards the bottom of the Baie de Mont St Michel. We can’t see the Mont and the abbey but we can see the white buildings down at the foot of the bay that are the hotels on the shore.

What is extremely interesting is whatever might be there just to the right of centre. It seems to be a very small, low cloud having a rainstorm but I’m sure that it isn’t.

My walk continued on round to the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale.

There’s been a change in occupancy in there too today. Over the last few days there have been seven boats in there but today we’re down to just six. One of the little chalutiers is missing – presumably having gone back into the water.

It’ll be interesting to see over the next few days whether we’ll be having a new arrival to make up the numbers, or whether it’ll be like 10 green bottles and they’ll be disappearing one by one as everyone slowly goes back to work.

Back here I continued with the photos for a while, and then went back to having an hour on the guitars before tea. And I do like my new acoustic guitar.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and tomato sauce, followed by rice pudding. Quite a delicious tea, I have to say.

Running rather late tonight, it was going dark when I went outside for my evening stroll.

The sun had gone right down of course, but there was still a beautiful red glow through the clouds in the sky over by the Ile de Chausey in the English Channel.

Surprisingly, I was the only person out there admiring it. There were no more than half a dozen people out there this evening and they were all walking dogs and the like, taking no notice of the beautiful evening.

From the viewpoint in the rue du Nord I walked along along the walls to the footpath.

And once on the footpath and there was no-one about, I broke into a run and ran down the footpath again, regardless of how I was feeling. The tide was well in this evening and we can see the diving platform practically submerged by the water.

We’ve seen plenty of photos of the diving platform totally out of the water when the tide is well out. This gives you some idea of how far the tide comes in and how high it is. One of the highest tides in Europe, so they say.

having spent a few minutes watching the sea, I walked on round to the Square Maurice Marland.

No-one about at all so I broke into another run and went all the way across the square and up the first ramp at the end. And as I ran along the square, suddenly the lights came on and lit up all of the trees.

It lit up everything just as if it was on the stage in a theatre.

After that I headed off home, running the final 100 metres back to the apartment. I’ve written up all of my notes now and I’m off to bed in a minute.

Tomorrow is shopping day and it’s a long walk to LIDL so I need to be on form, regardless of how I’m feeling, as there’s a few things that I need to buy.

And maybe I’ll have a series of voyages just as exciting as I’ve had for the last couple of nights.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: english channel

Wednesday 28th October 2020 – IN WHAT MAY COME …

Thursday 22 October 2020 – I WAS FEELING LIKE …

Tuesday 20th October 2020 – AFTER ALL …

Monday 19th October 2020 – LOOKING BACK …

Thursday 15th October 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Monday 12th October 2020 – PHEW!

Tuesday 29th September 2020 – I’VE BEEN REALLY …

Monday 21st September 2020 – I DUNNO …

Tuesday 15th September 2020 – DESPITE NOT …

Saturday 12th September 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Wednesday 9th September 2020 – THE BIRD …

Tuesday 8th September 2020 – THIS EVENING …

Monday 7th September 2020 – I DIDN’T …

Thursday 3rd September 2020 – YOU CAN TELL …

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

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