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Friday 11th September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what has happened this week. I really don’t.

With all of this pressure that I seem to have put myself under with doing these radio programmes, it seems that I overlooked to actually send the one in for this weekend.

Luckily they had something in the pipeline, but it’s really pointless me doing all of this work if I’m not going to send it in. It’s pretty much a waste of time.

And not only that, it seems that I’ve also overlooked to do my second week of internet course.

What with one thing or another, it’s been a pretty miserable week and I’m going to have to be doing better than this.

At least I managed to be out of bed before the third alarm. Sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the world to stop spinning round so that I could get off.

During the night I’d been in hospital and there had been some kind of operation. I was eventually allowed up. Someone from the hospital phoned me up to see how I was. They were interested to know if I was capable of doing my own shopping and they asked me about my plans. I said “the nearest LeClerc is 20-odd kilometres away so are you happy that i’m going to be cycling 40 kilometres just to go to the shops?” but they didn’t reply very much. It was a very non-commital answer that I had from them. The woman said that she lived in a small town where the nearest supermarket was only a minute or two away by car so she could do all her things like that. That didn’t help my matter very much. As I was walking around I came across a pub. It was a Sunday morning not quite before lunchtime. The pub was on a second level higher up. There were a few people whom I knew in there. I thought “should I go and have a drink?” but then though “that’s a stupid thing to be doing, going drinking”. So I carried on walking and came to the second one and there were even more people whom I knew in there. One of them was a boy whom I knew in school and with whom I shared a flat for a short while later. There was a group of about 4 boys and they were playing a few songs. On bass was another boy who was in my class – someone with whom I had very little contact whatever so how come I suddenly remembered him? I was extremely jealous because they were playing a couple of numbers that we used to play. I thought that they were going to steal a march from our bow and get themselves established in this pub.

While I was at it, I transcribed a few more days’ worth of dictaphone notes from the pile of arrears. There are still 47 entries remaining that cover a three-week period of my voyage to Central Europe.

Apart from that it’s been another slow day with something of a lack of motivation and an excess of fatigue. I’ve finished all of the arrears of photos from June and I’ve now started on those from July.

Only three days from my trip down the Brittany coast in Spirit of Conrad remaining, and then I can start on the photos from Central Europe. I’ve already done some of those but there is still a huge pile to do.

And then there are the photos from my two trips to the Arctic.

At least I managed to remember to book my trains and accommodation for my trip to Castle Anthrax. That’s one thing. Here’s hoping that I remember to print out everything and that my appointment isn’t cancelled.

We had the usual interruptions this afternoon too.

The afternoon walk was one of them of course. There were crowds of people out there today walking around in the beautiful weather. Crowds of people on the sea too. Plenty of small boats out there such as this speedboat that was roaring past.

Nothing in the way of large boats though. No Joly France no fishing boats and no Channel Island freighters. It seems to be quite quiet out there in that respect these days.

There was plenty of activity in the air too.

Our autogyro was flying around but rather too far out of range to take a decent photograph. This aeroplane here was flying quite high but with the NIKON D500 and the BIG NIKON ZOOM LENS I could take a good photo of it, and even tell you what it is.

According to the official register, it’s a Robin DR400 180 light aeroplane.

Incidentally, you are quite lucky to actually see it. On 22nd May 2019 it suffered an engine failure and crash-landed in a field near Eurodisney. Luckily no-one was hurt and damage was said to be only minor.

It could have been much, much worse.

It was no less busy around the southern side of the headland in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

This beautiful yacht was on its way around and into the port de plaisance this afternoon. Just one of several small boats out over there this afternoon.

But apart from that, there wasn’t very much else going on. It was actually quite quiet as far as excitement went. I slowly wandered on home.

Much of the remainder of the afternoon was spent revising my Welsh ready for the start of my course next week. but shame as it is to admit it, I fell asleep on the chair again. To such an extend that I missed half an hour of my guitar practice.

Tea tonight was taco rolls with the remainder of the stuffing from yesterday’s pepper, lengthened with a small tin of kidney beans.

But while I was preparing it, I noticed plenty of movement outside at the Public Rooms. The lifeboatmen, sauveteurs de mer, were congregating outside the building.

As an aside, later on in the evening the band stuck up and there was a lot of music and noise coming from the building.
I enquired as to what was going on there.
“We’re holding a Lifeboatman’s Ball” came the reply.
“Well for God’s sake let go of it” I urged. “He’s making far too much noise!”

Later on I went for my evening walk around the walls.

The lights of Jersey were twinkling quite brightly in the distance and I took a couple of photos of them with the camera. Unfortunately, with them being hand-held and in the dark, they didn’t come out very well and I discarded them.

From there I ran on along the path and then across the Square Maurice Marland.

The roadworks in the Rue Notre Dame were finished and the barriers and traffic lights dismantled. I walked past them and carried on around the walls.

But what caught my eye tonight was how nice the port area and the town looked in the streetlights, with the water tower on the skyline in the background just to the right of centre.

The big wheel was looking particularly nice so I reckoned that I had better photograph it tonight. This is going to be the last weekend that it’s here this year

But I’m not quite sure what was going on here.

There were two people with a rather large briefcase and a couple or portable radios hidden away in a corner up on the walls. i’ve no idea what they were doing and they certainly weren’t too keen to enter into conversation.

Having observed them for a couple of minutes I ran on home. My three runs of about 600 or so metres in total once more. There’s only Saturday that I’ve missed in this respect but then again I’ve been well over 120% of my day’s activity ever saturday that I’ve missed.

it’s Saturday tomorrow and US Granville are playing away. I have shopping to do of course and I’m hoping that I remember everything. I’m having a really bad time right now and I don’t know what i’m going to do about it.

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 19th August 2020 – TODAY …

… I actually made it outside the building. And if that isn’t progress I don’t know what is.

And that’s not all

Another thing that will take everyone completely by surprise is that when the alarm went off at 06:00 this morning I was already up and about sitting at the computer doing some work.

And not only that – I’d been on a few little rambles during the night too.

Crewe Alex were playing someone in the FA Cup at a stadium in Wistaston Road and we were going to the match. We were out by Audlem at 18:00 so we drove, the 4 of us, my father, my brother and someone else, 1 of his friends, in my car. We got to Shavington then I cut through the back into Wistaston and down to Wistaston Road that area going that way. We found a place to park but as I went to park the car I broke the key. The fob bit stayed on the key ring but the blade came out of the fob and stuck in the door. I had to lock the car with that. My father was in a Mercedes so I checked his doors as well and someone had left all his doors open so I locked them as well. Then we got into someone else’s car to drive to the ground. I thought for a minute that if we are in someone else’s car, maybe my father’s car, who on earth was it whose car I had locked? It turned out that we were in a FIAT, another person’s car. We drove down to where the park was then along Wistaston Road that way, trying to find a place to park. Then I had a sudden revelation that while I had the key fob I couldn’t find the key blade. Where the hell had I put that? Without that, how was I going to get home? I started to panic and go through my pockets to find this key blade and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I awoke in one of these cold, miserable sweats again.

About an hour later we were stealing a couple of trains to go and do some excursions that we had done one night per week for I don’t know how long. We got to where the carriages were stabled. One row of carriages already had a locomotive attached but the one that I was going to take didn’t so I had to go and hunt down an engine afetr I had the carriages cleaned and it wasn’t in the normal place. I had to hunt down a few sidings until I came across 4 of them but the sidings looked a bit damaged and it wouldn’t be possible to get the locomotives out. The points then had to be set in the right place so I had to walk back and on walking back I came across more that I’d walked past and not noticed, these locomotives that were parked up as spares. The other two people manning the other train they were there as well, arguing about the uniform that they were going to wear. I thought that this is ridiculous because there were other things a darn sight more important than worrying about than the uniforms they were going to wear but they were insisting on organising some kind of uniform even if it mean cutting a jacket out with plywood which was what they were doing. I was trying to work out how I was going to get my locomotive to my row of carriages because of course all of the points were being controlled from the signal box and I couldn’t get to change them over at all so this was going to become rather complicated for getting my train ready for going on this illicit excursion.

Unsurprisingly, I ended up back in bed shortly afterwards after all of this activity and it was round about 08:00 when I finally crawled out of bed.

However, I did manage to stay out of bed for the rest of the day and not even crash out for a minute. Add to that the fact that I’ve managed two meals today – muesli at lunch and then mashed potato and vegan burger for tea – and you can see that I’m slowly on the road to recovery.

This afternoon I went outside and brought some stuff in from Caliburn. The NIKON 1 was one of the things that I rescued. The new acoustic guitar was another.

And I managed to climb back up the steps with the stuff too, although I had to sit down straight away and rest. I’ve not recovered that much.

All of the photos that I took on my voyage – whether on the NIKON 1, the NIKON D500 or the mobile phone are now uploaded to the computer and I’ve actually made a start on editing them.

Only a start though. I think that I’ve done three of them.

As well as that, I’ve had a good play with the new guitar. And I like it more and more. The neck is reasonably narrow which means that I’m struggling somewhat to find the correct position for the strings but it makes playing bar chords so much easier.

So if I feel better tomorrow I might try to go for a little walk and see if I can manage some kind of distance. But one thing is certain – it’ll be a while before I’m back running again at this rate.

Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

Before sewing up the hole in your pocket, make sure that you’ve left nothing down inside the lining, because once it’s in, it’s in for good.

Yes, pride always comes before a fall, doesn’t it? Well, actually, that’s a misquote from Proverbs 16:18 which states “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”. But even that’s correct as well.

But never mind that. here’s an exciting photograph.

It’s not every day by any means that the local wildlife co-operates with the photographer. In fact, wildlife, children and females are notorious for never doing what you want them to do when you want them to do it. Like my friend who once proudly told me “one word from me, and my wife does exactly as she likes!”

But here, we have a seagull doing a very passing resemblance of a dive bomber pulling out of a dive having dropped a bomb on something onshore.

And you’ve no idea just how long I had to wait to take this photo.

And that’s not the only piece of wildlife that appeared in my photos today.

This seagull bottom left appeared by accident, making a really good photobomb as I tried to take a photo of Joly France pulling out of the harbour and heading off with passengers this afternoon for the Ile de Chausey.

A good 10 minutes I was waiting there too for there to be a calamity with Joly France having to negotiate a flotilla of yachts just outside the harbour.

But she made a clean getaway without colliding with a yacht or sinking a speedboat, much to my dismay.

However, there is some good news about clean getaways, and that is that even though today is a Sunday and a lie-in with no alarm, I made a clean getaway from my bed by 08:10 this morning.

So don’t ask me what happened there because I’ve no idea. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been days when I can’t even manage that when I’m supposed to be getting up early.

During the night I’d been on my travels, right enough.

I’m not too sure about what was happening for the first part of the night but it certainly involved a cricket match on the beach and the limit of the field was like a hexagon and there were people standind at each angle of the hexagon to field the ball.
Later on there had been a new EU ruling for the removal of trees. We’d planted a double row of cypress leylandii down the edge of a field next to a main road so the decision was taken to pull up one of the rows. I had to be there with a tractor and my father was there with someone else – a girl. She was in charge of this operation so I had been given instructions as to where I was to drive this tractor and go down and pull these trees. There was also at about every foot or something like that, chicken in rosemary with potatoes in rosemary fried in oil and she wss taking away the meals as well, except for one every so many when she was just taking out the hot potatoes. I was intrigued by what was going on so I asked her about this. She replied “ohh yes we’ll be making many friends with this job.” The whole point and purpose of this job totally bemused me and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. Anyway it wasn’t my father, it was a friend of mine who was there with this girl and that reminded me of something that had happened a little earlier. He was due to come round to visit me the previous day at 10:30. I’d been doing something, I can’t remember what, but it involved tidying up this hotel. I was with another guy and we were tidying this up. He suddenly said “do you have any beds in this hotel?” I asked “why, are you tired?” and it turned out that he was. he’d been on work since 04:00 and he wanted to go off and have a sleep somewhere. She – the owner of the hotel – found him a bed and I carried on. I noticed a stain on my jumper and had to go and wash this stain out. I had to find two or three different bathrooms before I could find it. So I was there taking off my jumper, washing out this stain. I was hearing all of this noise in this hotel and I’d been interested in staying here because it was near to where I used to go quite often but when I heard all the noise coming from the guests in there I thought that I’m glad that I didn’t. The we were walking through the streets of Manchester, the back streets round near where that hotel was where I used to go to when I had the coaches and I suddenly realised that my friend was to have come round at 10:30. but actually I had been at home at 10:30. Then I realised that we had actually finished that hotel job and we had been home, and it was 10:40 when we had set out again.So yes, we had been there at 10:30 and he hadn’t turned up. When he turned up with this girl about these trees and removing these potatoes and meals he didn’t say anything about us not being there the previous day so I imagined that for some unknown reason he just hadn’t come.

But don’t ask me what I’ve done today because I don’t really remember doing anything. I had a really lazy day, to which I’m entitled every now and again of course.

But it was such a beautiful day today that I had to go out, of course.

And it goes without saying that I wasn’t the only one out there enjoying the sun at lunchtime. El Moggo was up there sitting on his thrid floor windowsill taking in the rays, looking as if he owned the place, which he probably did.

It looks as if he had seen something down below, so here’s hoping that he didn’t decide to pounce.

With it being such a beautiful day I took my butties to go and sit on the wall above the harbour and see what was going on down there.

And just as I arrived, so did one of the Joly France boats coming back from the Ile de Chausey. It’s the older one with the smaller window and doesn’t have the step in the stern, as you probably noticed in one of the photos above as it was pulling out.

And have I noticed the crane in the bows before? I’m sure that i might haven but I don’t recall it being extended like that while she’s been sailing.

Much to my surprise she didn’t pull up at the ferry terminal as she would normally do, but at the harbour wall.

In all the time that I’ve lived here I’ve never seen the ferries moor there. And it’s interesting that she’s there next to Chausiais who hasn’t moved from that impromptu berth fora few days now.

That makes me wonder if they are still working on something over at the ferry terminal that is stopping the boats mooring there. But anyway, she did pull over tothe ferry terminal to load up and then she cleared off.

And that was far from being all of the excitement for today.

With living in civilisation as I do these days, old cars are few and far between. It’s not every day that you see them, but when you do, they certainly are interesting, like this car, which I believe might be a Morgan.

Not the old Morgan three-wheeler with the JAP V-twin engine in front, for one of which I would give all that I own and more besides quite happily, but something much more modern.

Always assuming that it is a Morgan of course, because these days there are so many kit cars around that are clones of something famous. So you can never be sure.

It went off down the road, closely followed by this machine.

Once more, this could be anything, although the prancing animal on top of the radiator suggests “Jaguar”. In which case it might be one of the old “Swallow Sidecars” SS jaguars from the 1930s, although the front wings don’t look very Jaguar to me at all.

So I shall have to make further enquiries about this one too and report back.

But this is much more like the kind of scenery that I should be expecting.

He came roaring into the harbour as if the Hounds of Hell were clutching at his coat tails – avec le feu dans ses fesses as they say around here.

The people who had been picnicking next to me and now playing beach skittles on the grass were quite alarmed by it all.

After my butties I went back to my apartment and had a look (just a look!) at the next web page to be edited.

There was an unknown lorry on there that needed identifying so I posted it in a newsgroup that I follow that concerns itself wit abandoned lorries. And that I think was the sum total of my work today

The beautiful weather at lunchtime had made me feel like another ice cream so seeign as it really was a beautiful day, I decided to walk into town – the long way round – to go and pick one up.

And if you thought that the sea was busy earlier, then you should see it now. We’re quite used to long lines of vehicles towing trailers with boats thereupon queueing up down the street awaiting their turn to discharge their cargoes into the sea

The whole town become littered with cars and trailers parked up just about everywhere while their owners take to the waters.

Yachts are fine because they are beautiful and graceful – and silent.

That’s more than can be said for the speedboats and the other powered marine craft that are in the water and go round shattering the peace. And it can’t be much fun to be in a small yacht and hit the wake of a fast-moving boat like that.

But at least there’s no kayak out there right now. There have been one or two incidents just recently of kayaks being swamped for one reason or another, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

And it isn’t just on the roads or in the se or on the beaches and the lawns that we have the crowds of people.

It’s becoming pretty densely populated in the air too around here. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the flocks of the Birdmen of Alcatraz hovering above us like Nazgul, but there are one or two people who are fitting motors to their contraptions and roaring past overhead.

There’s no peace for the wicked, is there?

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen this machine on a few previous occasions too.

We first encountered it A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO during our visit to the Cabanon Vauban and we’ve seen it sporadically since then flying around and about. It’s certainly an interesting machine.

And reading what I’ve just been typing, anyone would think that I’m turning into a right grumpy old do-and-so in my old age.

But that’s far from being the truth. I’m the first to realise that all of these people coming here like this are actually bringing money into the town and the reason why we have so many facilities here is because we have so many visitors spending their money in the town.

We should all be grateful for that.

Not much chance of any peace and quiet anyway with the crowds on the beach.

This is one of the more inaccessible parts of the beach here. There’s a very long series of steep winding steps that come down the cliff to just there and you can see that the hordes have even swarmed onto here. And finding the gap in the wall that leads to the steps isn’t the easiest thing to do either

I shudder to think of what it must be like round at the Plat Gousset this afternoon

These persons here have found an ideal way to get themselves far from the madding crowd.

Nothing like an aqualung or snorkel and a pair of flippers and a spot of deep-sea diving for some peace and quiet.

But what’s interesting about this is what they are supposed to be doing. That area just there is uncovered during low tide and there’s nothing of any particular interest at that spot.

It’s not as if there’s a shipwreck or buried treasure or anything like that might attract the attention of a frogman – or frogperson as I suppose we have to call them these days and even if there had been, it could be accessed at low tide without even getting your feet wet.

At least there aren’t four skin divers down there

And so I continued on my way around the headland and down the old track into the port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been noticing just how clear the water in the sea has been just recently. I’ve seen much worse than this in the past in the harbour as well.

It’s a very rare event indeed to be able to see the bottom of the harbour when the tide is this far in. Nevertheless, it’s still not clean enough to entice me in.

The new pontoons that they have installed are proving to be quite popular.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw all of the seagulls enjoying them, and today with very few of the fishing boats being out, they are clustered around too.

But right on the extremem left of the photo the pontoons come to an abrupt stop. I wonder if they are going to continue along to the harbour wall.

Another mystery was solved here today as well.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw what looked like a vacuum cleaner nozzle down into the hold of one of the fishing boats and I speculated that it might be for sucking up the shellfish.

However, that’s not the case at all. I went to have a closer look and it is in fact an ice chute – for pumping ice into the hold of the boats presumably to keep the shellfish fresh

Picking up my ice cream (which was one of the reasons why I came down here in the first place) I went for a wander around on the other side of the harbour.

But while there were plenty of people milling around over there, there wasn’t anything that particularly caught my attention so I headed back for home.

It wasn’t easy though. The fine weather had brought everyone out and the streets were crowded with no thought whatever about social distancing. I really do hope that we don’t have a second wave of the pandemic because with people thronging around like this, it’ll spread liKe wild fire.

Back home, I was going to attempt something exciting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on Thursday I’d bought a pack of frozen strawberries. During the course of the day I’d had them out of the freezer to defrost.

Now that i was back, I made some pastry – and I do have to say that it came out perfectly because I could roll the ball around in my hands without any of the pastry sticking to my fingers.

With the rolling pin I flattened it out, put it in a pie dish, trimmed it off and stuck it in a hot oven. And with the excess pastry I made an apple turnover.

Meantime, being very brave, I burnt my bridges and made the Sunday pizza on the last of the shop-bought pastry rolls. It’s goign to be my own dough from now on.

When the pie base was cooked, that and the turnover came out and the pizza went in.

With the strawberries, I filled the pie and then prepared some agar-agar to pour over it so that it would set like a vegan gelatine, and stuck it in the fridge to set.

After I’d eaten my pizza, I looked at the strawberry tart and unfortunately, the agar-agar hadn’t set. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but this was not one of my triumphs. However, when I’ve finished the apple pie, I’ll attack that and see how it tastes.

On that note I went out for my evening run. Another struggle up the hill and down to the cifftop. It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier these days.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one little peccadillo that I have is to stick my nose into other people’s photo shoots. Not photo-bombing them bu to take photos of people taking photos.

And up on the lawn at the Pointe du Roc, which seems to be a very popular place for photo shoots these days, there was another one going on. So i couldn’t resist the temptation to join in with my own three ha’porth.

But you can tell what the weather was like this evening simply by looking at the crowds of people here.

There were parties of picnickers all over the place and more coming along to swell the numbers even as we speak. Not very good or the social distancing but who can blame them in weather like this?

Around the corner by the coastguard point I even bumped into one of my neighbours taking the air and we had a good chat for quite a while – and that was mainly for an opportunity to soak up the sun as well

From there I ran on all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and with my usual two resting places, ended up at the viewpoint at the rue du Nord.

But on one of my rests I happened to notice that the moon had already risen. And it really did look beautiful in the evening sky tonight.

Considering that I didn’t have the tripod with me – or even the monopod, the photo has come out really well. But I suppose that I ought to be making more of an effort to go out with the tripod one of these days and take some decent photos.

And I’ll have to work on the time-delay functions too. I’ve not used it yet on the NIKON D500

At the viewpoint at the rue du nord I stopped to catch my breath and then to have a good look around.

And as seems to be usual these days, we have the crowds on the beach enjoying the evening sunshine, and having a picnic too in the pleasant weather. They’ve certainly chosen a nice evening for it.

But one thing that I have noticed about the evening picnickers is that it always seems to be a different crowd in that spot. I don’t think that i’ve ever noticed the same group of people there consecutively. I think that if I had a group of people with whom I enjoyed picnicking, then in weather like this I’d be down there every night.

And the setting sun this evening was splendid. I recall a gasp of admiration from a couple of people who had followed me down to the viewpoint when they noticed it.

Still half an hour or so before it sets, and unfortunately I don’t have the time to spare to wait. I don’t know where all of my time goes these days.

Instead, I ran on back to my apartment to write up my notes.

While I was writing up the day’s activities, a piece of music came onto the playlist.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my computer is awash with music – a couple of thousand albums almost all digitalised these days after our ptoject of the winter – and there is music going on in this apartment from the moment I awaken until the moment that I go to sleep.

Some music though I have to be very careful about playing, and for various reasons too. Some songs I can’t hear at all, even if I happen to like them, and others I can only listen to when i’m in the right kind of mood.

A couple of songs in that latter group always seem to appear on the playlist when I’m in the wrong kind of mood to hear them and sure enough tonight, while I was “hiding in a room in my mind” as Kate Bush used to say, onto the playlist came THIS SONG.

Magnificent song though it is, it’s the kind of song that I have a great difficulty hearing, much as I want to. I’ll always end up playing it two or three times one after the other even though I know exactly what’s going to happen.

And on that note (well, we are talking music here), with my notes not even half-finished, I went to bed. I’ll finish these tomorrow.

Friday 8th May 2020 – WHAT THE …

… heck happened here?

Running late yet again, and there was a football match planned on the internet tonight kick-off at 20:30 – a historic match from a few years ago in the Welsh Premier League between Bangor City and Rhyl – so I decided to forego tea, worry about that later, and watch the match in peace.

While I was waiting for it to come on, I busied myself with other things until I noticed the time – 21:35!

So what happened to the match?

A brief visit to the page of the broadcaster, and all mention of the match has been wiped off.

In fact, really, the match tonight should have been Port Talbot Town v Bala and the Bangor match last Friday, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it was that match that was broadcast last Fridat night.

There might almost have been another disappointment this morning too but I was saved on a technicality. The three alarms went off as usual but it was about 06:45 when I left the bed.

That might usually have counted as a failure, except that it’s a Bank Holiday here (Victory in Europe Day) and by rights there shouldn’t be an alarm at all.

But in a state of exhaustion I went to bed early-ish last night before I’d finished my notes so in compensation I left the alarm to ring this morning.

There was so much to write that it was 09:20 or thereabouts when I went for breakfast – that’s the penalty of not being focused – and so it turned out to be just like any other Bank Holiday afterwards where I didn’t do very much.

And there was nothing on the dictaphone from the night either.

There were some photos edited from July 2019 but not as many as I would have liked as I had to go back and change quite a few due to having become confused with the numbering. So I’m still on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour trying to get into the harbour at Vestmannaeyjar on the island of Heimaey just off the coast of Iceland.

Round about 12:30 I was thinking about lunch when the telephone rang. It was Rosemary who wanted a little chat. And when she finished, it was 14:21. We had a lot to say to each other.

By the time that I’d eaten lunch it was about 15:15 and that was effectively the day gone. I continued the task of sifting through the web server looking for files that shouldn’t be there, and I moved another few off that I had been looking for for ages.

All in all, it wasn’t a very profitable day and I could have done much better.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and then just as I was thinking about tea, someone with whom I had wanted to speak came on line so I was caught up in another chat.

Hence the running late.

With no football to watch I pushed myself on outside for my evening run.

And just about caught the tail end of the sunset. It really was beautiful out there too, Everything. The sun, the wind, the calm, the quiet. One of the nicest evenings so far.

To my surprise too, the run all the way up the hill was the easiest that I’ve had to date. I’m wondering if that might be due to the fact that I had no tea tonight. I shall have to experiment

I ran all the way down the south side of the headland and then all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury, well past my usual stopping place, and then walked back to look at the harbour.

There was nothing much going on as far as shipping went and it was too far to see if they had been working there today. However there were several people at the fish processing plant and they were making quite a noise.

Chausiais was there too, still moored in her usual place over by the ferry terminal ready, I suppose, for a voyage to the Ile de Chausey.

Having had a good couple of weeks of no movement whatever at the chantier navale they seem to be working at a frenetic pace just now.

We had five boats yesterday morning and then back down to four yesterday evening, but this evening we seem to be back up to five boats again.

But the boat on the extreme left of the row of four – if that’s not the one that was there in that spot for so long and had disappeared by yesterday, then it’s one very much like it.

Having digested the scenery here, I carried on with my runs around to the rue du Nord.

While I’d been running around the headland I’d seen the Rescue Boat shoot out of the harbour as if it meant business and I wasn’t quick enough to photograph it. But now we have an aeroplane take off from the airfield at Donville which you can see in the upper left of the photo above the illuminated fishing boat.

That may well be the air-sea rescue ‘plane taking off to follow the boat, so it looks as if we have a naval emergency somewhere.

But it was a beautiful night by the time tha I got down to the viewpoint on the rue du Nord.

It was practically going dark and I couldn’t see much, except the fact that it was looking really nice over to Brehal-Plage and Donville les Bains

That prompted me to take a photo of it. I had the big NIKON D500 fitted with the f1.8 50mm lens so at least it was the correct equipment for the job and the photo came out well enough considering.

But this photo came out even better.

That’s the rue St Jean passing out under the medieval town walls and on into the Place d’Armes and out into the rue du Roc.

As for me, I ran off to my apartment and that was that.

Now it’s bed time and I’m glad because I’m tired. It’s been a rather pointless day today but tomorrow there’s shopping to do and I need to be on form.

There will be queues everywhere, I imagine, so I need to be at my best.

Some hope!

Wednesday 6th May 2020 – THE LEAST …

… said about this morning, the better.

It was quite a late night last night as a pile of good music came onto the playlist just as I was thinking of going to bed, so that was that. I stayed up to listen to it.

And even though I heard the three alarms, ask me if I cared. 08:15 when I finally exerted myself and that’s no good to anyone at all.

To make things worse, there was nothing on the dictaphone either. That’s always a disappointment because I have said on many occasions … “indeed” – ed … as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that I have more excitement on my little nocturnal voyage than I ever do in real life, and meet far more interesting people

In fact, apart from a brief bonjour to two women walking their dogs together while I was out, I haven’t spoken to anyone else today.

After a very late breakfast I had a knotty problem to resolve. For some unknown reason, none of my mice (or mouses, I dunno) want to work on my big computer, except one that isn’t up to much.

As to why that might be, I’ve no idea. They work fine on other machines and the USB ports work fine with other appliances so it beats me.

After a good rummage around the apartment I eventually found an ancient radio mouse and, to my surprise, that seems to work for the moment.

The rest of the morning was therefore spent editing photos from July 2019. There wasn’t much time to do many and right now I’m on a sandbank in South-East Iceland admiring a bunch of harbour seals.

That loaf of bread that I made seems to improve with age because it was totally delicious – even better than yesterday.

But I was thinking about that at lunchtime. There’s too much of it and it’s going to mean that there will be some left by the weekend. So what i’m going to do is to make a smaller amount (maybe 400 grammes of flour instead of 500 grammes, always assuming that I can find some tomorrow) and make two small loaves.

Smaller loaves will also mean that it will bake quicker too and that’s always a good plan.

After lunch I took out the 10x4GB memory sticks from their quarantine and set about reorganising the music. It took two of them and there was still about 3.5GB left on the computer, mostly of incomplete files that need looking at. But they’ll receive “the treatment” in early course once my hi-fi arrives, whenever that might be.

For the rest of the afternoon I carried on updating the web pages and there’s another 16 or so now done. I’ve no idea how many are left to do but I have to go back and do the earlier ones again – the first batch that I did – as I missed something off.

As for my hour on the guitars, I’m not sure what happened but I couldn’t find the enthusiasm. It was a very long, weary but not very productive time.

It’s probably a sign that that the spirit must be quite weak these days and that usually means that I’m due a bout of ill-health any day now.

And that’s not surprising because it’s now three and a half months since I’ve had my four-weekly cancer treatment and I remember how I was feeling when I was in the High Arctic. The last couple of days out there, I was running on pure adrenaline and I well remember the counter-reaction that I had while I was waiting for the aeroplane in Kugluktuk and my two days in that hotel in Calgary.

Tea was falafel and steamed vegetables in a cheese sauce followed by the last of the rice pudding. I might bake a small apple pie for pudding for the rest of the week, and if there is plenty of flour in LIDL I might have a go at making my own pastry to see where that takes me.

The other day I mentioned that they had been planning last week to repaint the white lines in the car park at the back here.

So off I went on my evening run tonight and sure enough, the painters have been past. They’ve done the car park, right enough, but they’ve also repainted the yellow lines here in the rue du Roc for the area where buses and coaches are allowed to park.

Judging by the signs that have now appeared on the other side of the road, it looks very much as if they are going to be back to paint those lines there sometime in the near future.

Having recovered my breath, I ran on down to the clifftop to see what was happening out there in the English Channel.

For a change just recently, there weren’t so many clouds in the sky so we had this beautiful sunset out there over the Ile de Chausey.

There were a few people out there enjoying the evening, including a couple with a dog. And they were disturbed by the arrival of these two women with their mutts who wanted to play.

No social distancing for pooches of course but there are for owners and they were amm rather tangled up for a while.

What I did was to ignore them and concentrate on what was going on out to sea. There were the usual trawlers and other fishing boats out there and this one here was on its way out to join them.

This evening I could see about five in total, working away a little farther out to sea this evening.

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF!
But I’m all right nooooooooooooooooow!

Yes, it’s full moon again and with there being no clouds to speak of in the sky I had a really good view of it tonight.

Again, it’s a hand-held shot so it’s not as steady as it might be with a tripod.

And that reminds me – I need to set up one of the function buttons on the NIKON D500 to work a “delayed action” shot sequence

This photo was interesting because it shows that Chausiais has moved over to the harbour wall by the harbour offices.

And in the foreground is another trawler-type of fishing vessel, the Cap Pilar. I’ve no idea why she might be here or what she’s doing, because she’s actually a boat from St Malo.

So pondering over that, and also the fact that there’s still no change of occupant in the chantier navale I carried on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Halfway down along my run I noticed that Cap Pilar had “cast off forr’ard, Mr Phillips” and was turning round.

So having reached my marker (the second pedestrian crossing up the hill) I walked back to see what was happening. So off she goes out into the evening sunset.

As an aside, when I returned home, I checked on my AIS detector beacon to see where she might be going. And to my amusement her destination was signalled as où je veux – “where I like”.

It’s all very amusing, that kind of remark, but it’s not very much help if she fails to arrive anywhere. No-one can report her missing if they don’t know where she’s supposed to be.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the first lot of new pontoons put out and fastened to the support pillars that they have installed.

Parked up here down in the rue du port is an articulated lorry with a couple of new pontoons on it. So they are pushing along with this plan to finish the port as soon as possible.

And we saw the road-painting earlier. It looks as if they have been down here too because there are white lines painted on the new car park.

And that’s a disappointment, that car park. They could have done so much more than a squalid slab of tarmac with just a little imagination.

But we can see why Chausiais has moved, and why the pontoons are on the back of the lorry just here.

First of all, Marité is now moored where Chausiais had been, so that means that there’s something going on down in her corner. I’ll have to check that tomorrow when I go out shopping.

But you can see that the line of pontoons has extended now, but they are still a couple short. So they’ll be taking those off the back of the lorry tomorrow, I imagine, and installing them.

Nothing doing at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord tonight. I’d missed the sunset and the crowds were dispersing. And so I ran home.

The notes are finished now so I’m off to bed. It’s not as early as I would have liked but I’m hoping for a decent sleep (such as it is) and an early start tomorrow. I must crack on.

Friday 1st May 2020 – A STRANGE THING …

… happened to me during the night.

There was a group of us living in a house in Crewe and I had to get up and go to work to start a new job. But I was lying in bed and it suddenly occurred to me to get up and get dressed because the bus would be going in a few minutes time. I had to get dressed, and my fitbit came off somehow in all of this. I couldn’t find the tie that I had put aside. I was hunting high and low for this tie. In the end I went to the cupboard, opened it and chose another one. There were about 200 ties in there and everyone was looking at these ties and I said “yes I need to get rid of a few clothes, don’t I?” Someone said “oh yes. I haven plenty of stuff”. I actualy awoke at this point and found myself sitting upright on the point of getting out of bed to go to work.

There have been some really realistic voyages during the night here and there over the years, but this was certainly one of the best.

It had been one of those nights last night where I’d been running really late and I ended up going to bed instead of finishing off my notes.

And so in a break with usual tradition I set an alarm call for a Bank Holiday (it’s Labour Day here so everyone celebrates it by … errr … not doing any labouring) and in a break with even more usual traditions I actually beat the third alarm to my feet.

And this time it was for real too. I felt like that guy about whom Tommy Cooper used to talk –
“I knew a guy who dreamt that he was awake. And when he woke up, he was!”
But it wasn’t half a weird thing that in the middle of the night.

So after the medication I attacked the notes to finish them off. And that took much longer than I was expecting too. I’d resolved not to go for breakfast until they were finished and by the time that I was ready my stomach was thinking that my throat had been cut.

After breakfast it was the turn of the dictaphone to receive attention. I’ve already mentioned something of it but a little later I had someone staying with me overnight. It was another one of these panics to get up in the morning. I cooked a breakfast, toasted cheese, stuff like that and I was getting everything ready while whoever it was (and I’ve really no idea who it was either) was getting ready to leave. I made breakfast in my tiny room which was just like the cabin of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour which was so small that I had to sit outside – there was only room for one at the table. However as a gesture of solidarity we both ended up sitting outside in the corridor. But my place quite clearly aroused some appreciation. “Yes, I wouldn’t mind retiring to a place like this at all either” so i was explaining the benefits of these homes and how there were people round but they only came if you needed them and apart from that they only came once a week to clean your room, emergency bell pulls, all this sort of thing. And there was general agreement on this.

There was something else on there too but you’re all probably eating your tea right now so I’ll spare you the gory details. But it concerned another voyage on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, which certainly seems to be receiving an awful lot of my notional custom right now. It’s a good job that I don’t have to pay for these trips for real.

Having done that, I attacked the digitalising of my record collection – the last two albums as well. Whatever is left will have to be done by hand by me. One of those two albums almost ended up in that pile too, seeing that the only copy of one of the tracks was an *.mkv, which is something that I’m trying to keep off my computer, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

However, the light went on in my head, like it does on the odd occasion here and there, and I came up with a very ingenious solution to the problem. And to my surprise it actually worked!

So bearing in mind that one or two albums were shelved because all that I could find was *.mkv stuff, I might go back again and have another run through and see what I can do.

It’s a long process but probably quicker than digitalising them manually.

All of that took me up to lunchtime, would you believe, and there was time to do 30 or so photos. I’m now sitting in a zodiac in a lagoon at the foot of the Vatnajokull Glacier in South-East Iceland.

The hummus that I made yesterday was really nice and worth the effort that I put into it. And so was the apple and pear purée for breakfast by the way.

This afternoon has been somewhat … errr … leisurely. I’ve tidied up a little of the hard drive in here (only a little) and dealt with some outstanding correspondence. I’m not sure if I mentioned it but someone wrote to me about my University thesis for my “Historical Technology” module of my degree.

When it was finished I PUT IT ON LINE (I think that all research should be put on line for future scholars) and someone well-known in that area has written to me to give me some further information and to express his admiration (really!) for what I had written, which was certainly very nice of him.

As well as that, there’s some more radio stuff simmering away in the background, including something that might involve HIS NIBS, and so that required a little thought.

There was the hour or so on the guitars too during which I almost fell asleep, and then tea, which was a stuffed pepper followed by the final slice (not really the final slice because half of it went into the freezer) of the delicious blackberry pie.

And here’s something surprising (or maybe in isn’t). I’d sat down after the washing-up to digest my meal before I went out running and suddenly the football came on the internet. I’d completely forgotten that it was Friday.

A historical match – Port Talbot Town against Bala Town in a Welsh Premier League European playoff from 2013.

And how the standard of football in the Welsh Premier League has improved since then too. This was a “top 5” game yet you would never have thought so.

It ended 1-0 for Bala which was about right. Port Talbot were denied what looked from my viewpoint like two stonewall penalties, but Bala were denied on several occasions by some heroic stuff from my namesake in the Port Talbot goal and had already had a goal ruled out for a foul that was much more innocuous than the one committed on Cortez Belle in the 87th minute at the other end for which the referee waved “play on”.

But it was a very poignant match in one respect. The Spuds couldn’t maintain the momentum following this defeat and slowly slid down the table.

And then down the pyramid. Now they are in the third tier and the glory days of European football in the season 2010-11 when they went to Finland in the Europa League are nothing but a distant memory.

But here’s another thing. Bane of Britain has struck again!

Because of the football I was late – like 22:30 – going out for my runs. It was dark so I decided to swap over the lenses – put the f1.8 50mm lens onto the big NIKON D500 and the 70-300mm LENS onto the old NIKON D3000 and take the big Nikon with me.

So Bane of Britain swapped the lenses over well enough – but then took the wrong camera, as he discovered when he went to take a photo.

So no photos tonight, but at least I managed all of my runs which was good news.

It’s late now, so it’s bedtime. And shopping tomorrow – not that I need all that much but never mind. I wonder of the supermarket will be packed.

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

… seagull!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They weren’t the only boats out there either.

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

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

But then, there’s always a plan somewhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I’m not holding my breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… whose idea it is to ring that cacophony of church bells at 11:00 on a Sunday morning but it’s almost as if they don’t want you to have a decent lie-in on a Sunday morning when they go around awakening the dead like that.

It certainly put paid to my morning reverie and I was obliged to leave the comfort and warmth of my beautiful bed.

It wasn’t the first time that I had had to leave the bed either. Round about … errr … 04:00 or something like that, I had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse. I thought that I had passed beyond that, but apparently not.

So I went off and had my medication.

While you admire the high winds that we were having and the storm that was raging somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, let me tell you about my morning.

First thing that I did of course was to check on the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been on a little voyage. I was with someone last night who resembled a girl with whom I had worked for a while although it wasn’t her I’m sure, someone like that. We were discussing languages. Something weird had come up and we had a reply to do which we had done in French or Flemish or something. This led to some kind of discussion about languages and what do we do, how did we behave, all this kind of thing. I made the point sometime during this discussion that what we did is that we’d have the radio on if we were at home and just listen to a French programme or a Flemish programme. It didn’t really make any difference to the two of us what we were listening to. Any of the languages were usually pretty good for us.

After that, I carried on with the project that I’m undertaking – of digitalising my collection of LPs.

On thing that I’ve been able to do is to find about 120 digitalised sound files of albums that I own, and I downloaded them all. I’ve then had to split them into individual tracks.

It isn’t easy because many of them are studio master tapes where the tracks are recorded in “recorded order” of course which is quite often very different than the order in which they are published on CDs and LPs

Another issue is that some of the tapes include tracks that were never ever published – rejected for one reason or another – and which I don’t have a clue what they are.

And sure enough, one of the sound files on which I was working was one of the latter.

Eventually, after a great deal of effort, I tracked it down. It seems that I have somehow managed to lay my hands on a rare Swedish-only version of a master-tape with one additional track that was only available in a couple of countries and a second additional track that was only available in Sweden.

That should be quite a curio when it comes to playing it on the radio programmes.

13:30. That’s a very civilised time to have breakfast, I reckon. And the last of the home-made apple juice from when I made the apple and pear purée. It’s certainly quite interesting when I am responsible for the making (within certain limits of course) of almost every product that I eat for breakfast.

After breakfast I didn’t really do all that much. After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to a break one day a week when I don’t do much.

Nevertheless, round about 15:30 or thereabouts I decided that I would have lunch. I wasn’t all that hungry, and there was an end of a baguette from yesterday hanging around in the kitchen.

Luckily, I had remembered to fetch some hummus out of the freezer yesterday. Roasted pepper hummus too, made with my own fair hands.

So I had a hummus, tomato, cucumber and lettuce butty for lunch, followed by the usual apple, pear and banana for afters.

And that reminded me (although I’ve no idea why it would) that the lemon and ginger syrup that I make for my medication is running low. Sometime later this week I’ll have to make some more. I’ve plenty of ginger but I bought some juice oranges so I’ll go for orange syrup this time.

Whatever happens, I mustn’t forget my afternoon walk. I’m only on 3% wandering around the apartment.

Mind you, sticking my head out of the door, I wasn’t too impressed about the idea of going out.

By the looks of things, there was a huge storm brewing away across the baie de Mont St Michel over there on the Brittany coast. And knowing my usual luck, I would probably end up finding myself right in the middle of it before I’d gone too far.

But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. I set off out.

And I wasn’t alone either. Despite the wind there were crowds of people milling around enjoying the weather and I was determined to join them.

My route took me right around the headland and down the steps at the end. And the farther on my travels I advanced, the more I didn’t like the look of the weather. It was just looking worse and worse

Mind you, my luck was in, for once.

The storm was advancing quite quickly but as I rounded the headland at the Pointe du Roc I could see that it was going to miss me by a good few miles.

It had found shore down by the Pointe du Carolles and places like Carolles-Plage and Jullouville were taking something of a pounding. I’m glad that it wasn’t here, because it did look particularly nasty over there.

My perambulations brought me further around the headland and here I was greeted with a sight that made the walk all worthwhile.

As I have said before … “many times” – ed … there’s nothing between that harbour wall and the eastern seaboard of the USA and here we have the highest tides in Europe.

Consequently the power that can build up in the water whenever there is a major storm anywhere in the North Atlantic is really impressive and the sea walls here catch the lot of it full force.

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen some really impressive seas come roaring in just here.

And today is no exception to that. I stoop and watched it all for a good 10 minites even though I had other things to do, just because it was so impressive.

Strangely enough, there were several people passing by here, but no-one else seemed to be interested in staying to watch the free show.

So instead, I had a wander down to the port. The harbour gates were closed as, believe it or not, the tide is well out (although you might not think so) so I could cross over to the other side of the harbour.

One thing that has been interesting me is the story of the new pontoons that they have been installing in the harbour. We’ve seen the pontoons on the north side of the harbour alongside the rue du Port but I wanted to look at the new ones on this side

That is, assuming that I can get close enough to them, because they are crowded out with fishing boats right now. There can’t be too many out at sea today.

Another thing that we’ve been looking at as we have been on our way around is the scaffolding that is bolted to the side of the harbour wall here.

Being a Sunday and with no-one around, I took the opportunity to have a closer look, trying not to fall into the harbour while I was doing it.

And the result is that I’m still not too sure of its purpose and the OSB boards here fixed to the wall don’t seem to be able to throw any light upon the subject.

All that I can think of, as a wild guess, is that it’s a set of steps for the crew of the floating pontoon to descend to their little boat.

We’ve also seen them installing steel pillars in the harbour in order to extend the row of pontoons out perpendicularly from the harbour walls.

Three have already been installed in the harbour and I was sure that there were others although I couldn’t remember how many. Consequently I went to have a good look aroud and eventually came across them.

And I was correct. I had seen them and here they are – five of them by my reckoning. That seems to indicate two lines of four each and that’s not going to be good news for the commercial boats that come here and need the open space to manoeuvre.

And that’s going to be interesting even sooner than we imagined, because Neptune, one of the gravel boats, has just left Shoreham Harbour – “next stop Granville”. I was right about the heaps of gravel.

As you probably saw in the previous photograph, the storm has passed, the clouds are now all gone and the sun is now out.

That made me decide to push on and have a marathon walk all the way along the Quai Hérel all the way down to the new block of flats (and how I would love to live here!) and the Pointe du Roche Gauthier.

That’s as far as you can do around here. The path comes to a sudden stop and you have to retrace your steps 100 metres or so until you come to a flight of steps that go back up to the road.

So, retracing my steps, I can show you the big modern building over there on the left.

That’s the CRNG, the Centre Regional de Nautisme de Granville, and it’s also where the Youth Hostel and the Salle Hérel are.

The Salle Hérel was quite interesting today – or should have been – because they were having a “Free Market” where everyone takes the stuff that they no longer want so that others may help themselves.

However I was too late because anything that might have been of interest had probably long-since gone.

My walk brought me up past the Tax Office and it was round about here that I had an exciting encounter.

It’s not so much the car, but what the owner was using as a bulkhead to stop whatever was in the back sliding forward into the passenger seat.

It’s an old freight pallet cut down to size and trimmed to be an exact fit. I was well-impressed by this and wished that I had thought of it in the past when I had the Passat.

My walk took me onwards down little alleys that I had only glimpsed in the past.

My aim was to do down past the station and down into the Park de Val es Fleurs to see what was going on around there but in the distance I noticed a flight of steps that I hadn’t seen before.

That made up my mind to go and follow my star wherever it was going to lead me and see what was at the other end – stopping for a glance backwards at the railway engineering depot in the background where the trains are stored and repaired.

My little climb brought me out into a little housing estate where a small path led to the main Avenue de la Liberation.

This path in turn led me past a nice modern block of flats in the chemin de Choisel. And nice though the flats might have seemed, it wasn’t my cup of tea because someone was playing some music full-blast with the windows in one of the apartments.

Where I live, I have solid stone walls 1.2 metres thick so I can play music as loud as I like without disturbing the neighbours. That wouldn’t work here at all.

Out on the avenue de la Liberation and here’s a thing.

Ever since I’ve been in Granville, and probably for many years prior to that, there were some old, abandoned houses that were fenced off from the road.

It’s been a good while since I’ve been past here on foot and to my surprise something seems to be happening to them right now. We have a crane, a new roof and all other kinds of exciting things.

That will be a nice place to live when it’s all finished.

While I was here, I could have carried on down the road into town, gone down another footpath and the steps to the Park de Val es Fleurs, or else through the gardens of the Musée Christian Dior and down the steps to the Plat Gousset.

Obviously the latter will bring me closer to the sea and with me being a Pisces, being close to water is one of my aims, so I made my way down the side of the tennis club.

Last time I was out here, I saw a big cruise ship out to sea, so I had a look to see if I was going to be lucky again.

Not quite. No shipping out there today but we did have one of these mysterious buoys bobbing around in the sea down there. I still haven’t worked out what they are four but my suspicion is that they are something to do with fishing gear – nets or lobster pots, that kind of thing I reckon.

There were crowds of people out there today and a long, continuous line of people coming up the steps.

The steps are quite narrow and there isn’t much room to pass anyone so I had to wait for a while while they came up. That gave me an opportunity to take a photo of the nice archway down there that leads to the final flight of steps down to the promenade.

And the sea was looking pretty rough down there too. This could be very interesting.

And i wasn’t wrong either.

It’s now 17:40 which means that there’s still an hour or so to high tide, and the sea is totally wicked out there, smacking into the sea wall here with an incredible force and sending spray everywhere.

It’s lucky that the promenade s quite wide otherwise I could easily end up marooned down here and that wouldn’t be very pleasant, having to climb all the way back up the steps again..

And I wasn’t alone here either.

This was a show that you would have to pay a fortune to watch in some places, but we were having it for free. There were probably a couple of hundred people down here this afternoon making the most of the entertainment and we were all having more than our money’s worth.

So impressive was it that I stayed down here for half an hour taking photos when one of the very big waves came in

We’ve had quite a few storms down here so far this year, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and we’ve seen plenty of areas that have been fenced off due to the damage that the wild seas have caused.

There’s some more over there and apparently this needs to be fixed before the Grand Marée, the very high tide, comes in on Wednesday. They’ve engaged some workmen to do the job and they have erected some scaffolding to work from, but I don’t fancy their chances out there today.

It’s a good job that it’s a Sunday – a Day Of Rest – today when they can have a day off.

While you admire a few more photos of the storm on the Plat Gousset, I climbed back up all of the steps and walked home via the square Maurice Marland.

There was still about 40 minutes or so before teatime, so I busied myself with another pile of photos from July 2019 and my trip to Iceland. I really need to press on with that before i’m much older.

The trouble is, though, that with having no internet out there, I wasn’t able to do any research into the photos. Consequently every one that I am editing, I need to research to find out where it is and what’s in the image.

Sunday is vegan pizza night of course, but it’s also pudding time seeing as I have the oven on already.

It’s usually rice pudding or some such, but last week we had a delicious apple crumble. Apple pie has been on the menu too in the past and that was what I intended to try today, using the new pie dish that I bought.

These pastry rolls are the business. The cheap ones from LeClerc are vegan of course so I always have a stock of those on hand. And I’d picked up some backing apples too on Sunday.

So, grease the pie dish and unroll one of the pastry rolls and put that in, gently pressing down so that it’s in at the seam at the bottom.

Thinly slice a couple of the apples and lie the slices in on top of the pastry, making as many layers as you can fit in, so that the pastry is completely covered.

On every layer, a think coating of desiccated coconut, brown sugar and lemon juice (and some cinnamon and nutmeg, which I completely forgot, for some reason or other that I can’t explain).

Unroll another pastry roll, cut out a top for the pie, with an overhang of about 2 cms.

Wet with some mile the part of the pastry that is on the lip of the pie dish, then put the top on and press it down really hard with a fork to the pastry underneath on the lip. Then trim off the excess pastry.

Put a few slits in the top of the pie to let out the steam, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar. Then bung in the oven.

With the excess pastry, coast it on both sides – and your rolling pin – with flour to stop it sticking, and roll it out with your rolling pin. It won’t be square, so keep on trimming it off and adding the trimmings into appropriate places so that it’s as square as you can make it

Grease a flat oven tray and gently with a couple of spatulas, pick up your flat pastry and put on the tray. Add the leftover apple slices into the centre, with desiccated coconut, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg (which I remembered this time) then fold over all of the pastry and press it together to seal it.

Prick it with a fork to let the steam out, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar, and bung that in the oven too.

And here’s the end result. It all looks pretty impressive and I bet it tastes even better even without the spices in the pie. I won’t be trying it this evening though because there’s still some apple crumble left.

Instead, the turnover was cut into 2 and put in the freezer, and the pie went in the fridge ready to start on tomorrow.

Rather like the time that I made a meat and potato pie when I was younger. I left the eyes in the potatoes so that it would see me through the week.

I’ll get my coat.

One thing that I mustn’t forget is my evening walk. I’m already up to 95% so i don’t intend to go far.

The NIKON 1 J5 and f1.8 18.5mm lens came with me so that I could have a little play around. I reset the ISO to “MAX 3200” rather than “MAX 6400” as the graining is too much, and stopped down a couple of stops to see what I could produce with that.

And f1.74 at 1/50 second and ISO3200 gave me this image. And for a hand-held shot, it’s quite reasonable. Joly France looks quite nice out there at the ferry terminal.

There have been much worse shots than this.

I’m wondering what else I can produce with this camera if I show some patience. Some good might come out of the enforced deprivation of the big NIKON D500

While you admire the rest of the photos of the storm there is something else that I mustn’t forget – and that is to go running.

And it’s a good job that I did those two-and-a-half runs yesterday because I only managed one and a half today. Not because of lack of willingness or lack of fitness, but because my first run down the rue du Roc was right into the teeth of a howling gale.

When I hit the slope of the hill about half-way or so along my course, it stopped me dead in my tracks and that was that. Luckily the return run along to boulevard Vaufleury was with the wind so that was a lot easier and I managed an extra 20 metres or so.

So now I’m back home and in the warmth.

There are tons of photos to edit and lots to write, so i doubt that I’ll be able to finish it tonight. But I’ll do what I can before I go to sleep and whatever remains to be done, I can finish it all off tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining of course. This was a good day out and a really good walk around – more than enough to tire myself out. If I do fall asleep while writing out my notes, it will be for a very good …

ZZZZZZZ

Wednesday 4th March 2020 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the cue to start to think about lunch.

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

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

And then I returned to the soup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that wasn’t all of the excitement either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s bound to lead to some confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, I came on back home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The top one is taken with the Nikon 1

And this one is taken with the Nikon D3000.

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

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

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

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

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

It was pretty much the same story here too.

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 – THERE ARE MANY THINGS …

… in this life that I don’t understand.

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

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

And sure enough, here we are.

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

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

But anyway, back to this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now we know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 2nd March 2020 – CATASTROPHE AFTER CATASTROPHE!

I am having a desperately bad day today.

Nothing is working, nothing is going to plan and everything that I touch seems to be breaking. I’m now at the stage where I’m too scared to go to the bathroom!

And it all started off so well too! I’d had a good sleep for what it was worth and even managed to beat the alarms out of bed.

A nice breakfast, nothing on the dictaphone to copy out, and a good crack on at the splitting of the digital files.

But that was as good as it got. The rest of the day descended into chaos.

First task was to book my accommodation in Leuven for the period 18th – 23rd March. And, surprisingly, all of the cheap accommodation had been sold out already. I’m having to go up-market into a higher class of accommodation – at an additional price of course.

The rail trip was next. And, surprisingly, there were no trains available at all on that day, or the day before. I used the SNCF chatline and whoever was on there confirmed that the trains were running, and that I should call the helpline.

At that point I went for a shower and then headed off into town.

First stop was the railway station. But I didn’t get as far as i would have liked because I was bewildered by the lack of funfair.

It’s not there now – the ground’s all flat. They’ve folded up their tents like Bedouins and crept off silently into the night by the looks of things. I’m sure that they were here for longer than this in previous years.

At the station, the person at the counter told me that the trains were indeed running and there’s no reason whatever to think otherwise. She told me to book on the ‘phone if the internet still isn’t working.

And if I’m stil unsuccessful, to come back and see her.

Outside in the avenue Marechal Leclerc they were tidying up now that the fete foraine has gone.

The guys with the pressure-washers were out again washing the confetti into the drains for it to be discharged into the sea, which is a pretty thankless task, i suppose. It’s a good job that it’s made of paper.

At LIDL I bought a few things – some button batteries which always come in useful of course, and some new vinegar and olive oil dispensers.

The reason why I bought those was because they looked as if they were spray-on containers but when I unwrapped them at home, I found that they weren’t. And that disappointed me greatly.

But they did have leeks in – a bundle at €0:99 and I was thinking only the other day that I really fancied some leek and potato soup. So I bought a bundle and I’ll make some of that too.

On the way back, I had a look at the building work going on at the impasse de la Corderie.

They don’t seem to be making much progress so it’s difficult to see what it is that they are going. What I’ll have to do next time that I’m over there is to go to have a closer look and see what’s going on.

Had I not been running quite late and had a lot to do, I would have gone over then and there. But I had to press on regardless

Instead, today I went on down into town and La Mie Caline to pick up my dejeunette.

On the way though, I stopped to see what was going on with the big funfair because if the small one had gone, it was quite likely that the big one would follow it quite quickly.

And I was right about that too because they have broken camp and are in the process of clearing off too. But at least it gives me an opportunity to admire the balcony and French windows of that showman’s caravan just there.

As I’d been walking through the town I’d heard a pile of banging coming from down in the port so I was wondering what was going on there.

By the looks of things, they are installing a second one of those big grey pillars that we’ve been seeing. There’s a piledriver attached to the big crane and it’s that which has been making the noise as it drops down and drives the pillar into the silt.

And this is starting to cause me more than a little concern. Are they going to ba having some of these pontoons going out perpendicularly into the harbour basin?

And if so, how are the big gravel boats going to be able to turn round if the width of the harbour is thus restricted? I don’t like the way that this is shaping up one little bit.

Back here, I telephoned the rail booking point. They confirmed that the trains were running normally, They could book me tickets on the phone, no problem, so I gave them all of the details.

And then we had the “ohh dear!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve no idea. The system will let me take you as far as Lille but no further. And on teh way back, it won’t let me book you from Brussels to Paris”.
“Why not”?
“I’ve no idea. It looks as if the TGV isn’t accepting our bookinss”

Well, that’s a badger and no mistake. But at least it’s solved the problem of my morning walk tomorrow. It looks as if it will be a walk up tp the railway station and see if I can book it from there.

Next stop was to order a new glass for the mirror on Caliburn. And having specified a “right-hand” one, when I had the “confirmation of order” in my mailbox, it quite clearly states “left-hand”.

So what the heck happened there? I had to send them an e-mail and hope that they read it before they post the glass.

Next was a phone call from the people at the radio trying to make me reconsider my decision to withdraw from Group activities. Despite their pleading, I stood firm. Not necessarily because I want to withdraw, but simply that if I change my mind, then that won’t change theirs and things need to change – and change drastically – at their end of we are to progress as a team and do things correctly.

With all of this going on, it was lunchtime by now so I made my butties. And then I started work on the radio project that I have to do.

There was an interruption for my walk, and this was where the calamity of calamities hit me. For some reason or other, the BIG NIKON has stopped working!

It’s refusing to read the memory card that’s in it.

So back here, I tried almost every single memory card in the apartment (and there are more than enough of them around here!) and no luck whatsoever. This really IS a calamity!

With something of a bitter taste in my mouth, I carried on with the radio project and, clearly being unable to think straight, I’ve made something of a dog’s breakfast of it and some of it has to be done again.

Tea was some of the leftovers from yesterday – the lentil curry with rice and veg, followed by apple crumble and some of that Alpro soya dessert stuff.

For my evening walk I fired up the old Nikon D3000 but didn’t get very far with that. As for my runs though, I managed to go quite far with them and imrpved my distances more than somewhat.

It just goes to show what having a good diet can do for you.

And not crashing out today either. That’s good news too.

But in view of my dreadful day today i’m going to have an early night and a good sleep – write off today as a total loss and start again afresh tomorrow.

It’s the least that I can do.

Thursday 13th February 2020 – LIDL IN GRANVILLE …

… is slowly dragging itself into the 21st Century at long last.

Over the past year or so its BIO range has slowly been expanding and there have occasionally been things there that I can eat, but today, the freezer has been restocked and there are now not only vegetarian frozen foods but even a (very small) vegan selection.

And that’s god news for me and even though i’m struggling for space in my freezer, I bought a box, on the grounds that if no-one buys it, they won’t stock it.

Yes, I made it to LIDL this morning although I’m not quite sure how because I was feeling really dreadful. Last night I slept right the way through the alarms and it was 07:35 when I hauled myself out of bed eventually.

And to say that I wasn’t feeling at all like it is an understatement. Looking back on what I wrote last night before I went to bed, then nothing whatever had changed.

It was preying on my mind too during my sleep (such as it was) by the look of things. After the medication I struggled back to the desk to check the dictaphone. It had taken me ages to go off to sleep but I went back on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and there was a party type of thing that we were having and a group of people – the organisers – got up and did a song that involved banjos and guitars and a bass. It was really good – they were all disguised as Mexicans. I dashed in with my camera to take a photo but I couldn’t remember how to set the settings on it to get the photo that I wanted because they were standing right by an open window where the sun was streaming in so I wanted to play around with the settings but I couldn’t remember how to do it and it was the subsequent panic attack that awoke me, about 30 seconds after I’d gone to sleep.

After breakfast I had a quick shower and then headed out to LIDL even though I didn’t feel much like it.

And the first thing that I noticed was that the wind was back after its day off yesterday. And back in spades too. The port gates can’t have been opened long so the tide still has about 90 minutes before it’s full but even so it was still looking very impressive.

The waves were hurling themselves with all of their might against the sea wall and some were going over the top.

The wind wasn’t the only thing that was back either.

For the first time in well over a week, Normandy Trader had turned up in harbour. The blockade of Channel Island ships has ended of course with Guernsey’s capitulation (in four days!) and Normandy Trader, which brings in the shellfish from the Jersey Fisherman’s Co-operative, can now come into port.

But for how long remains to be seen.

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been following the antics of the workmen down in the port and the gradual assembly of the big pontoon.

A large crane turned up yesterday too, and now it seems that it has been taken out onto the pontoon.

But for what, I have no idea. I can’t think what they would need something like that for in a harbour like this – unless it’s to act as a counterbalance for the crane on the quayside as it lowers the new walkways into the water.

Even so, that’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

But then again, ther emight be something in this argument.

There’s now another mobile crane turned up in the rue du Port where they have been fitting the mounting brackets for the pontoon walkway on that side, so it looks as if they are almost ready to start there too.

This is all going to be extremely interesting over the next few weeks or so and I hope that I’ll be here to see it.

After something of a struggle I made it to LIDL where I forgot the mushrooms, but it was an expensive shop there today and for a good reason too. The largest saucepan that I have here is a 20cm one with a capacity of 2.5 litres and for what i’m doing now with making soups and drinks and also freezing carrots, it’s just not big enough.

On Monday I noticed that they had nig saucepans in on offer but I couldn’t bring one home. Today though, I was prepared with a large carry-bag and a 24cm 5.5 litre saucepan is now sitting in my kitchen.

That’s even big enough to sterilise all of my jars too.

Having picked up my dejeunette at la Mie Caline I headed for home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the other day the workman on the roof of that house that they are slowly renovating in the rue des Juifs. They are obviously going quicker than I was reckoning because now they are doing the floors and the concrete pump is here punping the concrete in.

It’s a good job that the local buses here aren’t double-deckers, isn’t it?

Despite the winds having started up again, it seems that the marine activity is still going on.

We’ve seen Normandy Trader braving the winds to come into port but now it’s the turn of La Grande Ancre to head off for a life on the open waves out there on the open sea.

And good luck to her too. She’s going to need it, a small thing like her out there in waves like that. As I’ve said before … “on many occasions” – ed … my hat comes off to all of those going out there

On the way back I bumped into my neighbour and we had a lengthy chat, buffetted by the wind as we were standing there.

Back here I had a coffee and then started work. And I can safely say that today I didn’t do a single thing that had anything whatever to do with the radio. And I think that this must be the first day since well before Christmas too.

First thing was, due to my late start this morning, to split up a few digital tracks into their component parts. And I’ve given up relying on the official data for cutting the tracks because they are just so hopelessly wrong.

That took me up to lunch time and my butties.

This afternoon I attacked the mountain of paperwork that had accumulated over the past few months. Some of it was quite urgent too so it wasn’t just a case of simply filing it away, I had a few letters and e-mails to write for stuff that I should really have attended to a while ago.

There was a pile of photocopying too that needed doing. All in all, I was still at this by the time that I knocked off for tea and there’s more to do.

But here’s a surprise. I’ve found a document that tells me that I have an employment assurance policy maturing at the end of February that is going to pay me a pension. The only pensions that I know of are my morks pension, my UK and my Belgian State pension (not that these are anything to write home about) and some old pension from when I was in the UK years ago.

So what is this all about? I’ll have to ring up tomorrow to enquire about it because I don’t have a clue. It can’t be anything substantial otherwise I would remember it. But was I in a works pension scheme when I spent that 12 months working for that crazy American company in Brussels?

There were several interruptions to my afternoon walk.

First and foremost was my afternoon walk. And that was interrupted too by me noticing a couple of guys out in the sea windsurfing. They must be out of their minds in this weather with this wind and these heavy seas and as I prepared the camera, one of them capsized into the sea.

This left the other one to engage with me.

And if I thought that the wind was bad around here, I hadn’t yet gone round the headland.

and there it really was wicked. Not as bad as it was earlier in the week but still enough to disrupt almost everything that I was trying to do. The waves were rolling into the Baie de Mont St Michel with quite a considerable force and I reckon that this evening when the tide is in it’s going to be quite dramatic.

So I wish that they would fix up some lights somewhere to make it easy for photography.

No change at all in the Chantier navale so I pushed on to see what they were up to at the ferry terminal.

The big tractor and trailer (there are in fact two of them) was heading back out there for another load of stone, with it being low tide. And wedged up in the corner was a concrete-breaker and a large digger.

The breaker breaks it off, the digger picks it up and puts it into the trailer and the tractor drives away the loaded trailer.

The photo this morning of Normandy Trader hadn’t come out too well as I had had the sun in the lens at the time.

But now, mid-afternoon, I have the sun behind me so i can take a much better photo of it too, and with the big NIKON D500 instead of the little NIKON 1. The Nikon 1 is a useful little camera and I take it with me when I go for long walks or go shopping because it’s very lightweight and fits nicely in my pocket

But it’s not up to big panoramic distance shots unfortunately. It’s very good at what it does, but it doesn’t do much.

For the same reason as the previous photo, I re-took a photo of the pontoon and the big crane.

No idea at al what they are doing but as I said earlier it’s going to be interesting in the next couple of weeks as the story unfolds.

Back here and a coffee and then I tried to carry on work but I crashed out again. And that was a shame because my head had cleared and I was starting to feel a little better

But once I was back awake I carried on and now I have a huge blood blister on my finger where I caught it in the hole puncher.

Tea was a kind-of curry of everything left over – namely the rest of the stuffing with more onion and garlic and, to lengthen it, a good handful of salted peanuts. It was delicious with a tomato sauce, veg and pasta.

And the last of the rice pudding that followed it was equally delicious.

All alone again on my evening walk, and I managed my two runs, even putting an extra 10 metres on them which was quite surprising.

But now it’s bed-time, later than I had hoped but it can’t be helped. Tomorrow I’m going to finish off the paperwork and then start on the photos from my Arctic adventures.

That will be exciting.

Sunday 9th February 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the effects of Storm Ciara as the waves come crashing down onto the harbour wall here this afternoon, a good couple of hours before High Tide too, let me tell you a little about my day today.

With it being a Sunday of course, there was no alarm call. And I wasn’t in any great rush to go to bed last night either (not that it was late by any recent standard) but I was still hoping to have a pretty decent sleep.

But, unfortunately, it wasn’t really meant to be, was it?

One glance at the dictaphone was enough to tell me that.

There were files on there that had been dictated at 04:25; 04:48 and 05:27 and all of that points to a very disturbed sleep. And while I finally awoke at about 09:30, it was still another 20 minutes before I could haul myself out of bed.

After the medication I attacked the digital file-splitting project. And I was right when I thought to myself that this seems to bear no relation to what I knew of the album, because it isn’t the album that it’s supposed to be.

Heaven alone knows what it is because it features three tracks that I don’t recognise at all and I wouldn’t even bet that it was the singer who it was supposed to be either.

And even worse, I can’t find any mention of the lyrics anywhere on the internet, which is even more strange.

After breakfast I set about looking at the notes on the dictaphone. And I wish that I hadn’t because they are all somewhat confusing to say the least.

To begin with, I’d received a huge packet of envelopes through the post and one of them -I can’t remember what it was about – but it was really complicated stuff giving me all kinds of information that I didn’t really need and inviting me to do things and be things, so on. The next day I got another letter from a different source saying “be a travel agent” this was and it was a quote for a life assurance, like £36,000 and a bit of insurance for this and a bit of insurance for that and how I would have to make payment for this. Of course I had no intention of making any payment for life assurance as my life is on its way out so I was sitting there trying to work out a way how I could decline this offer and not take it up because it seemed for some unknown reason to be pretty binding and I don’t know why. It had something to do with a voyage I was making with Liz and Terry and we had to go to a club in somewhere like Wrenbury. We left Crewe – we were in Nantwich Road and for some reason I took them down Wistaston Road and out past the park and down the Middlewich Road into Nantwich. They were wondering why I’d gone that way and I said that there’s far less traffic this way and they didn’t understand because it was longer. I said “trust me” and they replied that they had trusted me the last time about this and you’ve brought us this way again. I said “yes but we got there and we got there fine didn’t we?” so I didn’t see a problem. We were going to a party or something and it was in a pub. I asked “is there something like a separate room or a quiet room or something ebcause I don’t really feel like mixing wiht a lot of people and making a lot of noise” They said “yes, you’ll enjoy it and it’s one of the reasons why we go there because there are other things to be doing as well”

A little later, there was a concert or something due to take place about the blues or somewhere like that and I know that I had to go there and I was trying to think of a way out of it. There was something about us being on board ship as well and there was a girl here with a very long plaited pigtail-ponytail thing and that’s all I remember about this.

Later still, I’d received an invitation to go and take part in some research on this animal scientific centre out near Wrenbury (… why Wrenbury all of a sudden? …). I wasn’t very sure about this. Everyone was saying what a really good opportunity this is because it’s one of the market leaders in this kind of field. But being vegan I was pretty much opposed to it yet everyone was saying what a great opportunity this might be for me.

And finally, we were on a bus, me George and someone else, it might have been Darren dunno. We were heading towards the French coast and – a tram, not a bus – and the tram was rattly and crowded and people were gradually getting off as we got lighter. I was having a chat to this George character about nothing in particular. At one moment we came round a bend and there was a beautiful view of the port and the ships in it at Ouistreham, all of this. I went to get my camera but by the time that I got myself organised the vuew had gone. Just the canals and the barges on them like Chausiais. I didn’t get a photo of those. As we came round a corner where there was an abandoned railway station with hoardings outside all covered in fly-posting. I thought “Ahhh I know where I am now”. We got off the tram and whoever was the third person came up behind us on a bicycle. They were having a conversation and they asked “what did I think?”. I hadn’t heard the conversation so I said “I don’t know – I haven’t heard it” so they started talking again about Valentines Cards. How many Valentine’s cards do you buy? I replied “as many as you need”. They replied “you just buy one don’t you, for people you like?” I said “and what about the people you love?” They replied that you don’t need a Valentine’s card for them because they know it already. I replied “you should never take people for granted, especially women” but they disagreed with me. In the meantime I was trying to do something with the lends of my camera. I’d put some glue on it to hold something on but it had come off and I was trying to get all of this pink glue off my camera where I had this lens attached

As you can see, that took up the greater part of the morning and a little chat with Liz on the internet took care of the rest.

Luckily I had made myself a pot of coffee so I was able to keep on topping myself up throughout the morning as I was going on.

And I needed it too because despite the lengthy sleep, I was creaking away and ready to drop off at the drop of a hat.

Somewhat later than I was expecting or hoping, I went for my walk into town for my bread.

And never mind “walk”. It was more like “crawl” in this wicked wind that was blowing. Nevertheless I made it down to the chantier navale to see what was going on.

And there’s another boat in there now, next to the mobile sling. One of the trawler-type of fishing boats that operate from out of the port here. So things are looking up.

But to give you some idea of how strong the wind was, there wasn’t a single boat out that I could see. They were all moored up in port.

And look at the waves that are chopping around them too. They ave to be at least one foot-waves, and you have to remember that the tide is out and the harbour gates are too.

So those waves are building up in just the wind and in a run of a couple of hundred metres.

Imagine what it must be like out in the open sea.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they have been digging a trench on the quayside for the past week or two.

Despite the fact that it’s a Sunday and there would be no-one around, I went for a look to see what was going on. And that was a waste of time because I couldn’t see much. Whatever they have been doing is finished and the trench is now filled in.

Still, if there’s someone around during the week I can also ask him

One thing on which I have been musing is the situation re Chausiais.

As far as I could tell, there didn’t seem the capacity to take a lot of stuff aboard so I was intrigued to see how she was arranged. I had vowed next time that I was passing to take a closer look.

And I can now see what the score is and how she is arranged. If you look closely you’ll see that the roof is divided into sections and they slide back one underneath the other to make a big open space for goods.

So while you admire a few more storm photos, I picked up my bread from La Mie Caline, came back here and had my lunch. The last of the smoked cheese so I fetched some home-made hummus out of the freezer.

Having eaten, I went back into my office to finish off the notes for the radio project on which I’m working. And unfortunately I couldn’t keep going for long.

In fact I crashed out a couple of times and that really annoyed me because I seem to be getting worse and worse from that point of view

Mind you, a couple of coffees brought me round and I did manage to remain awake long enough to finish them.

There seems to be quite a few too, more than the usual so I hope that they will edit down to a more manageable size. These days I seem to be letting myself be carried away by my verbosity and that’s not good.

Still, I suppose that it’s better than not saying enough. At least it gives my listeners a little break to go to the bathroom.

Despite the winds, I headed off for my walk – around the city walls this afternoon.

And surprisingly, there were a lot of people out there this afternoon despite the weather. A few people down on the beach, including one rather intrepid soul carrying his surfboard.

With there being lots of people about, I didn’t manage to fit in any runs either which was disappointing. I’ll never improve at this rate.

With the urge to push on and do 100% every day as often as possible, I extended my walk out along the headlands.

There were crowds of people standing on the cliffs watching the waves from Storm Ciara smashing their way into the harbour wall so I went and joined them.

And with the trusty NIKON D500 I could take plenty of photos to record the occasion, because it was definitely one of those days

All in all, I stayed out there admiring the waves and then came back to my apartment.

First thing that I did was to dictate the notes onto the new ZOOM H1 and then copy them over to the computer for editing.

Ten minutes to the second, there are, but that lot needs quite some editing. And by the time that I’d knocked off for tea, I’d reviewed about 60% and got it down to 07:20, which is good going.

Even if it were to stay as it was, a final track of about 3:00 would fit in nicely, but I can reduce the amount of discussion by another minute or so at least.

On that note I knocked off for tea. I prepared a rice pudding and put it in the oven while I made the pizza, and then took the rice pudding out when I put the pizza in.

Ohhh! For two shelves in my oven. I really must look into this and see what I can do about inventing something to work as a second shelf.

The pizza was really delicious and so was the rice pudding. And then I braved the elements for the evening walk around the headland.

And brave it was too because the wind was thoroughly wicked. It was a struggle to open the front door, never mind to go outside in it. And once I did make it outside, every step was a struggle.

There were times when I was in a mind to turn back but I pressed on regardless to see what I could do in the weather. It wasn’t easy.

On the south side of the headland it was relatively sheltered so I went for my run.

And that was what I called “agony”. Only pride kept me going, I reckon, and I had to sit on the wall for five minutes afterwards to catch my breath as I couldn’t move.

So now I’m back here, finishing off my notes and regardless of the fact that there are still things that need doing, I’m going to bed.

I really am on my last legs and it’s a long walk tomorrow. You can admire the rest of the photos while I curl up in bed.

waves storm ciara port de granville harbour manche normandy france eric hall

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: nikon d500

Friday 11th September 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Thursday 3rd September 2020 – YOU CAN TELL …

Wednesday 19th August 2020 – TODAY …

Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

Friday 8th May 2020 – WHAT THE …

Wednesday 6th May 2020 – THE LEAST …

Friday 1st May 2020 – A STRANGE THING …

Sunday 12th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Wednesday 4th March 2020 – SPRING IS SPRUNG!

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 – THERE ARE MANY THINGS …

Monday 2nd March 2020 – CATASTROPHE AFTER CATASTROPHE!

Thursday 13th February 2020 – LIDL IN GRANVILLE …

Sunday 9th February 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

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