Tag Archives: rainstorm

Thursday 2nd December 2021 – I’M NOT SURE …

… what happened today. It didn’t feel as if I’d done very much but when I look back on it, I don’t have too much cause for vomplaint.

Mind you, it started off as rotten as it could be because the alarm didn’t go off and I awoke bolt-upright at 07:54. Apparently I hadn’t plugged the phone in correctly at night and the battery had gone flat. I can do without days like that.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages the next step was to check the dictaphone for messages. There were a few entries on there that were transcribed. The earlier days have been added to the relevant entries, and then I turned my attention to today’s.

Last night I was on board a small boat heading towards Greenland and this was going to start to become very interesting for the people who were around here with me but I awoke instead.

Later on I was working at the radio. We were going to record a discussion but for some unknown reason I could not get the sound correctly on my recorder. I’d been trying for half an hour and everyone was really fed up of waiting. Just towards the end of the time it began to be more promising so I thought that I’d go for a trip down the corridor while they were waiting for me. They were playing some music while they were waiting. I had my little Acer laptop and the back was off it. And if you want to know the rest of what happened here, you’ll have to wait until you’ve finished your meal.

Later still I was with Nerina last night. I’ve forgotten a lot of this but we ended up being in Germany. We didn’t really have much time but we found ourselves somewhere round by the border where East Germany used to be. We crossed over the border, not that there was a border to cross these days and picked up a road that was signposted “Dresden”. We followed that for a while. Nerina asked “how are we going to find our way back?”. I replied “we’ll drive down here for a bit and then look on the map for villages near the border, turn down to a village near the border and then go back that way”. We drove that way for a while and then came to a whole row of black and yellow posts and a deserted strip of countryside. That looked immediately like the border to us and we followed it for some time. In the meantime, we encountered a convoy of old British cars, Morris 1000s and the like. There was no border where we were but the posts that held the fencing and barbed wire were still there as a kind-of symbolic gesture. Nerina was driving. We went round a bend and came to a ford so I told her to take it easy. She did, and she got through. She reminded me of a time where she’d driven through a ford but had stopped, got out ang got her feet wet as she stepped into the water. I said “you’d done the difficult bit, hadn’t you, but you fell down on the easy part”.

There was something somewhere where I’d had a new starter fitted on the car. I’d ended up in a garage somewhere while I was waiting to load up the car with my stuff but I could walk around underneath the car and could see that a couple of bolts on the starter were loose. I thought that I’d go and find a spanner. I had my tool kit with me but could find an open-ended 15mm spanner but these looked like 16mm bolts to me and I couldn’t find a decent 16mm spanner. I thought “this is typical. Here I am in an ideal situation to put this right. I couldn’t wish for anywhere better. I can walk around and work on the car in perfect comfort but yet here I am and I can’t find the flaming tool that I need”. All this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Incidentally, when I say that I “awoke”, I don’t actually mean that. I’m still asleep when I’m dictating these notes, as you could tell if you were to listen to them, but I snap out of the deep unconscious into something that is not so deep that enables me to control the dictaphone, that kind of thing. I don’t know how else to explain it.

Once I’d finished that I went downstairs to put the first coat of paint onto Caliburn’s wheels. It was pouring down and howling a gale so I had to do it inside the back of the van and the smell was overpowering.

While I was out there I bumped into a neighbour and we had a lengthy chat about nothing in particular.

Back in the apartment I grabbed a coffee and then I busied myself again. I had a few entries to update from while I was at Leuven the other day. They are now all on line and up-to-date.

After lunch I had to order the bits that I need for Caliburn – a new rear light unit, a door mirror glass and a windscreen wiper. And that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either because my on-line payment system kept on kicking me out. It worked fine on the computer but not on the telephone.

Next stop was to go and put the second coat on the wheels. The rain had stopped by now but there was still the wind so I asphyxiated myself in the back of the van again.

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

First port of call was down at the end of the car park to have a look at the beach to see what was happening there. Today we have a small part of a beach, but there didn’t seem to be anyone on it this afternoon.

But you can see how nice the weather has become by looking at the contrast between the part of the photo that is in the shade and the other part that isn’t. Unfortunately though you can’t see the effect that the wind is having.

You can do in this photo though.

While I was down there looking at the beach I was also looking out at sea to see what was happening and I noticed that we had two trawlers heading our way, on their way home after a day’s fishing.

And they are making heavy weather of it too which is no surprise. You can see the whitecaps on the waves even that far out to sea so you can imagine that there is plenty of force in the wind this afternoon.

This afternoon I was the only person out there. I could walk in comparative pece along the path without being disturbed. Some of the kids were out there orienteering but they were well off in the distance.

Around the headland I walked and then down the path to where I could overlook the harbour.

And there’s plenty of activity with the portable boat lift this afternoon. For a start they seem to have painted it. It’s no longer a rusty white but a nice light-primer grey.

They’ve also painted the wheels too. They were a rusty dark black before but now they are a nice white. If I’d have known that they were painting the wheels I would have taken Caliburn’s down there and let them get on with job on my behalf.

Meanwhile, over at the ferry terminal activity seems to have come to a dead stop.

We saw Chausiaise and, behind her, the older of the two Joly France ferries over there a few days ago and by the looks of things they haven’t moved an inch since then.

But then again, there doesn’t seem to be any custom about. I can’t see anyone at all on the sea wall over there. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the place looking so deserted. You can tell that it’s winter time already and it’s going to be like this until Carnaval.

That is, if there is going to be a Carnaval this year. i’ve just seen today’s infection figures.

Having said that activity at the ferry terminal seems to have come to a dead stop, that’s hardly the case at the fish processing plant.

There are quite a few fishing boats over there unloading and as we saw earlier when we set out for our walk, they are still coming in. So despite the lousy weather over the last few days, the work still goes on out at sea.

Having finished my walk I went back home and made a coffee and my work then went on too. I’m off to Leuven in two weeks’ time so I needed to make all my arrangements.

It seems that my cheap 07:13 train has died a death. That’s good news in a sense because I’m not scrambling around so early trying to catch a train to Brussels. The train at 06:33 is plenty early enough.

Tea tonight was a couple of those small burgers in breadcrumbs with baked potatoes and veg. They are delicious of course but now I’m running rather low. I foresee a trip to Noz in the near future, although where I’m going to put them is anyone’s guess because the freezer is full.

Having finished my work, I’m off to bed. I have Caliburn’s new tyres to pick up tomorrow and the Law of Averages states that they’ll decide that the worst tyres are the ones that are on wheels that I haven’t as yet painted.

That’s how things usually work around here of course.

Wednesday 1st December 2021 – ONCE AGAIN I HAVEN’T …

… done anything like as much today as I had wanted to.

There have been a variety of reasons for this – not the least being that I had yet another dreadful night, wide-awake at 05:20 and lying there waiting for the alarm to ring at 07:30. I tell you – I’m thoroughly sick of all of this.

As you might expect, it took a good few minutes for me to summon up the energy to leave my bed this morning and then I was pretty much wasted for the rest of the day.

After the medication I had a shower to clean myself up and bang on time Laurent came round for me. We went off to meet Thierry and then the three of us went off to meet Father Christmas and his blasted elves.

As I thought, the interview turned out to fall rather flat. I could understand the logic (whether I agreed with it or not) of submitting the questions in advance, I totally disagreed with the idea of “suggested replies”.

Children have a really fertile imagination and they need to be encouraged to develop it. And sometimes they can come up with some fascinating responses. But having them blindly reading off a script is a pretty dismal activity and it destroys the spontaneity of it all.

Having them all sitting around a table was another bad idea too because it’s always the more powerful ones who are heard. I would have interviewed them one by one where the kids could have responded without any peer pressure and chosen the pick of the answers.

In other words, this affair was micro-managed to an overwhelming degree and Laurent and I were quite disappointed about how it turned out. What had given us the idea for this was that two years ago wandering around the streets one night we had come across Father Christmas and subjected him to an off-the cuff interview. That was a resounding success.

While I was there I took a few photos of Father Christmas and his elves but I can’t publish them of course.

Back here Laurent came in for a coffee and we had a good chat about a few things, and made a few plans for the future.

After he left I went outside to wipe the rust-proofing liquid off the wheels and dry them, but painting them was out of the question. There was a howling gale again and it was sleeting.

Lunch was late again and afterwards I had the morning’s photos to edit and send off. They’ll choose one to illustrate our programme when it’s ready to broadcast.

Once I’d finished that it was time for me to go off for my physiotherapy session.

The wind was if anything rather worse than it had been earlier and it was rather difficult to walk.

And I wasn’t the only one having difficulty moving around either. There was a trawler out at sea battling with the storm to come into port and behind her, Thora was being thrown about by the elements.

When I took this photo she was actually being blown sideways by the wind and was coming into port rather like a crab.

Down at the wall at the Rampe du Monte à Regret the pointing of the wall was proceeding apace.

Mind you, I’m not sure what was happening there earlier. On our way back from Father Christmas there was an ambulance and a police car parked up at the side.

The personnel of the vehicles seemed to be quite interested in what was going on down below but as I wasn’t driving and as we had other things to do, I couldn’t go over and have a look.

If it’s anything interesting or important, it’ll be in the local paper in the morning.

Halfway up the hill towards the physiotherapist’s, I had to stop. Not because I was out of breath but because we suddenly had another torrential downpour. I had to nip into a doorway and put on my rain jacket.

It reminded me of how Superman and all of these other superheroes used to dash into telephone boxes and emerge seconds later with their underpants on outside their trousers. Where do they go to change now with the rise of mobile ‘phones and the demise of telephone boxes?

And then of course, there was my brother. He was often seen with his underpants on outside his trousers, but that was less to do with any superhero status and more to do with the fact that he didn’t have both paddles in the water.

No tilting platform today. There was the usual 5 minutes on the cross trainer and then a load of kinetic exercises that somehow took their toll of me.

She had me once more walking along this narrow beam and throwing a ball about. She was impressed with my reflexes co-ordination but as I have said before, my previous life as a goalkeeper and wicket-keeper had a lot to do with that.

On the way home I came via the Place General de Gaulle.

On the way up to the physiotherapist’s I’d seen a few council workmen on up on ladders working on the trees and I was interested to see what they had been doing with them.

By the time that I returned, the workmen had gone but I noticed that some of the trees were now festooned with decorations. And if you ask me my opinion, it’s all a load of balls.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of years ago Strawberry Moose reckoned that the Christmas decorations in the Rue Paul Poirier WERE ALL BALLS too.

THis year though, there’s been a change, and not before time either. This year we have the street lined with artificial “Christmas Trees”.

Now what was I saying a few days ago about them recycling the same old decorations year after year and wishing that they would make a change?

Clearly, a great many people are very interested in the contents of my pages and pay them a great deal of attention.

A short while ago we saw Thora having a bit of a struggle to make it into port.

Well she finally arrived, as you can see in this photo, moored up at the loading bay in front of Marité, with Belle France and the newer Joly France ferry – the one with the smaller upper-deck superstructure, moored alongside her.

The little trawler in the background is an interesting boat. She’s called La Bavolette II – at least, for the moment. And I mean that too because in the past she’s been known by several different names.

She was built in 1982 out of wood and displaces 40 tonnes

This trawler is much more interesting though.

Not Philcathane, of course – not that she isn’t interesting in herself but she hasn’t had the adventures that the other one in the photo has had.

You can tell by her registration number – beginning with “J” – that she’s a Boat from Jersey and how long is it since we’ve seen a boat from the Channel Islands here in port with all of the shenanigans that are going on right now?

There’s a great deal of talk about illegal fishing right now and this trawler – she’s called L’Ecume II by the way, can tell you an awful lot about that because on two occasions about which I know, her crew has been in the dock and emerged with their pockets far lighter than they were when they went in.

And not only that, 18 months ago she found herself stuck on a sandbank because her helmsman had fallen asleep at the wheel.

In other words, she’s quite a well-known boat, for one reason or another.

However I wasn’t going to hang around and admire her for too long.

As you can see, out in the Baie de Mont St Michel there was quite a storm brewing up and the gale-force wind was blowing it my way.

As a result, I wasn’t going to hang around. I was going to head for home and a hot mug of coffee, and make plans about what I was going to do for the rest of the week. I actually have a day at home without any interruptions at all – but just you watch all that change.

Before I went in I went to have a look at the beach

And that was rather a waste of time because there wasn’t any beach to look at today. The tide was right in now and the water was at the foot of the cliffs. All I had for my pains was a good battering by the wind.

Back here I had my coffee and sat down to try to do some work.

Checking my messages there was a mail from my Welsh course telling me what ingredients I need for the Christmas Cake I’ll be baking on-line on Friday evening. Treacle isn’t available here so I ended up asking Liz for advice on a replacement and chatting to her for quite a while.

For some reason, tea was quite an effort tonight. I’m experiencing brain-fade – not quite as bad as the nonsense I was churning up last night – but I couldn’t think of what to have for tea. I’d really run aground.

In the end I settled for a burger and pasta. That was the best that I could do.

Right now, although I haven’t crashed out today, I’m thoroughly exhausted so I’m off to bed where I hope that I’ll sleep until I awaken.

But not much hope of that, I’m afraid. All of this is really depressing me.

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 – I HAVE HAD …

… a proposal of marriage today.

And the worst thing about it is that I’m not sure exactly how serious it was.

On the way back from the physiotherapist I met one of my neighbours heading down the hill. We had a chat about the current situation in the town, one thing led to another and she asked me “do you have your French nationality yet?”?
“No I don’t” I replied. “Just my Carte de Séjour. Nationality is a long, complicated process”.
“We’ll have to marry and then it will take much less time” she continued.

And so in the best traditions of the (News of the Screws), I “made my excuses and left”.

But the regular readers of this rubbish needn’t worry. Since I’ve been ill and I’ve had all of these bits cut out of me, I’m no use to anyone. Not even to myself.

It’s all very well discussing people like Percy Penguin, TOTGA, Miss Stoke on Trent, Castor and all of the others but they’ll all be perfectly safe with me these days.

Particularly after the night that I had last night. I was in bed really early – not long after 22:00 when I went to bed, planning on having a really good sleep all the way through to 07:30 but it wasn’t to be.

And so I’ve decided that in the future I’ll mention my good nights rather than my bad ones. It’ll save more time.

So staggering out of bed I went for my medication and then came back in here to check my mails and messages.

Plenty of mails too about my radio project and I stirred the pot by sending out a pile more. That led to the odd ‘phone call or two and so most of my day evaporated before my very eyes.

While I was dealing with the radio stuff, I uploaded the recording from last night on our visit. Two microphones means two mono tracks, with one “major” sound channel and one “minor” sound track. I’ve run them together and created a stereo track which doesn’t really give the effect that I wanted but I’m a novice with this machine and I have a lot to learn as yet.

Some time during the course of the day I had a look at the photos from Saturday night. I’ve edited 27 so far and I’m surprised at how good one or two of them are.

During the night I travelled miles. I started off having to make declarations of imports to the Customs and Excise people at Newcastle upon Tyne. My first ones weren’t very good – not very-well completed but by the time that I came round to the second ones and subsequently I had it all down to a T and was busy , doing it quite well and I was quite pleased with that.

Later, I was in Chester and I can’t remember what I was doing there now. I had this really ancient 1920s motorbike with me. We’d gone to the station to meet someone and it turned out to be an old woman. I was there with a friend of mine who was on an old motorbike too. When we met this old woman we then had to go out of Chester. I lost my way all round the station complex. I couldn’t remember where everything was because Chester had been so modernised. In the end we made our way to Northgate Street more by luck than judgement. This old woman was lagging behind because we were setting quite a pace. In the end she was talking about going for a cup of tea so we found this olde-worlde café place and went in there. I left my motorbike outside but he took his in. There were probably 7 or 8 other old motorbikes from that era in there as well. Now we had acquired 2 children, a girl about 6 and a little boy. I went and sat down where my friend and this woman went to order the coffee or whatever.

Later still I was working in an office and I’d been up to the canteen at about 10:45 to ask for a coffee. The woman said that she would make one and bring it down. By the time that it was 15:15 it hadn’t come so I went back up to find out what was happening. When I went in there I asked and she replied that she wasn’t going to make one for me. There were several other people there, one or two who were also drinking coffee so I asked why she wasn’t going to make one for me when she’d obviously made one for other people. One or two of the people tried to get me to leave but I wasn’t leaving under any circumstances and it all developed into something rather unpleasant. She still refused to make me a coffee even though everyone else who had asked had been given one

It was such a beautiful afternoon when I set out for the physiotherapist so I headed over to see what was happening in the bay.

And for a change this afternoon, there was quite a lot. The Iles de Chausey looked really nice in this strange sunlight and we could see plenty of fishing boats out there looking as if they were heading for home.

On the horizon though was something big and white. One of the ferries going from St Malo to Portsmouth, I expect. I made a mental note to check it when I returned but I forgot.

There was quite a bit of activity looking the other way too.

Down in the bottom of the Baie de Granville between Donville les Bains and Bréhal Plage there were quite a few boats out and about this afternoon – some yachts and a cabin cruiser, as well as a few others that didn’t make it into the photo.

But not that I was going to hang around to count them. I have things to do and other fish to be frying.

One of the things that I mentioned that I would do was to go and see what was happening in the old town with all of the rebuilding that seems to be taking place.

Regular readers of this rubbis will recall that we have noticed a big hole in the medieval city walls near to where they are working in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux so I wanted to check up on that.

And the hole isn’t there any more – or, at least, if part of it still is, it won’t be there much longer.

The stone masons have now reached the hole and they are busy patching it up, with a handy shield up above their head to prevent anything dropped over the wall from hitting them.

And there is actually a big danger of things being dropped down on their heads from up above.

Another worker has been raking out the loose mortar between the stones, so presumably that’s going to be the next bit that will be repointed once they have finished below.

And you can see why the men down below have erected a roof when you see where the guy up above has left his electric drill. That will make quite a dent in someone’s skull if it’s dropped 20 feet.

When we were here last time, they had dismantled part of the wall in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

Now it looks as if they have begun to reassemble it and with the fresh pointing it looks quite nice. When they refit the large stones on top, it will be a really good job.

But what will be the next job to tackle? There’s the one further along towards the viewpoint at the Plat Gousset that has been fenced off for as long as I’ve been living here at least, then then there’s the bit in the car park by my building.

But the smart money is on the Square Potel and the signs are up there already.

Another thing that we saw a couple of weeks ago was all the hieroglyphycs that had appeared on the road surface in the Rue St Michel.

They had been working in the Rue Cambernon close by, but now they have finished. They have gone on up the Rue St Michel and by the looks of things they are quite well advanced there.

But this road surface is dreadful. In the medieval city everywhere else is cobbled stone – except here. They can’t complain about people not keeping to the “epoch” in their own private renovations if they aren’t going to do the same with the official ones.

Meanwhile, down in the harbour, I see that we have a visitor.

Thora, one of the two little Jersey freighter, is in port today and by the looks of things she has quite a huge load on board. You can tell that by how deep she’s sitting in the water.

It looks as if there are some vehicles on the deck too, but I’ll go for a look on the way back. I want to have a chat with the skipper anyway.

Once more, I made it all the way up to the hill to the physiotherapist without stopping for breath.

There was however one stop, and that was almost near the top as well. You can tell that we are in November and the tourist season is over, because now they are putting up the Christmas decorations.

And this year, I hope that they are going to use their imagination and do something different than they have done over the past couple of years. They have been very samey, except that there seem to be fewer and fewer things to erect.

The physiotherapist had me doing kinetic exercises for my half-hour session and it does seem to be doing me some good. I can tell that by the fact that I seem to be moving about a little easier than I did when I first started. Not by very much, but it does take time.

On the way home, I went to see how the major roadwork project is doing down in the Parc Du Val Ès Fleurs.

They are making some kind of progress where the old railway line used to be. It’s all graded and they have fitted the drainage system and the electric conduit.

It looks as if it’s All Systems Go there, but I doubt if it will be finished for when I need to go to Leuven in a couple of weeks time. I might have to wait a little longer for that but it will be a much easier way to walk once it’s finished.

Remember the hardstanding that we have seen in the Parc Du Val Ès Fleurs in the past?

There are a couple of workmen down there doing something with it all today. I shall have to go for a closer look.

But there are still plenty of the concrete reinforcement matting sheets down there – if anything, more than there were last time. It looks as if we are going to be in for a serious amount of concreting which will be a shame. This much concrete must be bad for the environment.

So down at the bottom of the steps I could have a closer look at their doings.

In the absence of any indication I asked them what was the purpose of they were doing. “It’s for the sport” replied one of them.

And so it looks as if I might not need the physiotherapist at all once they have finished what they are doing. I can come and do my exercises down here. But they will need much more equipment than just this, that’s for sure, if they want the town to improve its fitness.

There wasn’t much else that I could see happening on the trackbed of the abandoned railwy so I cleared off down the road towards the quagmire that is the Square des Docteurs Lanos.

And quagmire is certainly the word. It’s raining on and off at the moment and over there is just a morass or sea of mud. Nothing much has changed there over the last 10 days or so, except that we now have some concrete drain boxes dropped over there.

And do you notice in the bottom corner the concrete strip that they have placed across the road? It looks as if we are going to be having a sea of concrete all the way up to the end of the abandoned railway line at this rate, hence all of the reinforcement matting.

That’s certainly what it’s looking like in the Rue du Boscq.

The concrete strip that we saw them pouring the other day has now expanded widthways to three times its size, for what purpose I really don’t know.

Ohh! For a long line of trees that should have been planted every 30 feet along there to bring some shade and greenery to people walking about in the summer.

On the other side of the road they have left the half-a-dozen trees that were growing there previously, and that looks as if it’s going to be our lot for now.

But the excitement here isn’t quite over yet.

There’s a road-roller that has been stuck on the concrete and can’t drop off the end so they summoned up one of the diggers on the site.

He picked it up without too much effort and dropped it back onto the roadway where the driver drove it away. and then the digger picked up what looked like a generator and then cleared off down to the far end of the roadworks.

And as if in sympathy, I cleared off down the far end of the roadworks too.

The kiddies’ roundabout that we saw them installing the other day is still here. It’s planned to be here until 7th November but it may be on its way sooner than that.

Apparently it’s larger than it’s supposed to be, according to the plans that were submitted to the local council, and it’s forcing people to step into the roadway. The council is none-too-happy about it and there’s some kind of proceedings going on right now about the issue.

On our way out to the physiotherapist, we saw Thora moored at the loading bay and I mentioned that I’d go over for a chat.

However as I arrived, she was just casting off ready to go. And I was right about the vehicles that she was carrying. 2 vans with Dutch number plates heading off towards the Channel Islands along with about 40 large sacks of stone.

Obviously it’s too late to speak to her skipper to I shouted a message to him as he peered through his window. Whether he heard me or not is another thing completely.

The reason for the rapid departure of Thora is that the loading bay is wanted by someone else.

As she disappears off into the sunset, right in behind comes Normandy Trader. I didn’t think that they would be able to fit all of the freight on the quayside into Thora.

It was sheer luck that I’d arrived at this moment because I wanted to speak to Normandy Trader‘s skipper too. But he had a considerable amount of work on the go, quite obviously, so I didn’t want to get in his way. I’ll catch him another time.

But doesn’t Normandy Trader look nice in her new livery?

Her captain was telling me that he was fed up of everything being blue and so while she was out of the water the other week he’s had a lot of her painted red.

They started to unload her almost immediately so I stood and watched from a good viewpoint. And the unloading didn’t take long because, as you might expect with all of this going on, the Jersey Fishermen’s Co-operative isn’t sending any shellfish over to Granville right now.

A little earlier I mentioned that it was raining on and off as I walked home.

As you can see, out there in the baie de Mont St Michel and on the Brittany coast they were having it much worse than I hwas having it right now. That looks like one impressive rainstorm that is cascading down over there.

The wind wasn’t blowing it in my direction but I didn’t want to hang around. Nevertheless it was round about here that I had my proposal of marriage.

A little further on I bumped into another neighbour out for a run so we had a little chat and then I carried on along my way.

Before going inside, I went to look at what was happening down on the beach. And the fact is that there wasn’t any beach for anything to be happening on right now. The tide is well in.

A few minutes earlier while I was walking home Rosemary telephoned me. So back here I made myself a coffee and phoned her back for another one of our long chats.

Hence I am, us usual these days, running hours later than planned.

later on, I was out again. I seem to be in great demand today as well because I was invited to a soirée in the building. It’s not like me to be popular, is it? I took myself off upstairs but I only stayed for an hour or so. I just don’t have the time (or the inclination) to be nice and friendly for such a long time.

Back down here I had pasta and a burger for tea, and now I’ve written up my notes I’m going to bed.

While I was out I took over 20 photos. But you won’t get to see them until later because with running late, I haven’t processed them and in any case, I’m whacked.

Somehow (and I don’t know how) I’m managing not to fall asleep during the day as I did in the summer but at the end of the day I’m wasted, particularly when I’ve had a bad night. A good night will do me the world of good, although I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll have one.

Friday 29th October 2021 – THAT WAS PROBABLY …

… the worst night of them all so far last night. And four files on the dictaphone tells you what kind of restless night it was.

There was a pile of dirty washing-up that needed doing. Some had already been done so my brother and I cracked on and finished it all. After we’d had something to eat there was washing up to be done and I didn’t bother to wash up but he insisted that we wash up. I refused. I only wash up once per day and that was before going to bed. This argument rolled on so I went outside. I frightened one of the seamen sitting on the steps of our ship who was looking at another ship close by. I asked him what was going on and he said “nothing in particular” and wandered off. There were 3 or 4 ships in the immediate vicinity, one a ship owned by Disney that didn’t have any superstructure like a barge. The people on it were speaking Russian so I spoke to them in Russian – “hello, how are you? My name is Eric” in Russian and they were overwhelmed that someone was speaking Russian to them and they actually came over on board our ship to talk to me. And it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken any Russian. I learnt some basic Russian from a local woman in Nantwich before I started taking coaches behind the Iron Curtain and I’ve probably forgotten most of it now.

3 of us, a guy a girl and I had to check out a disturbance on a common somewhere. There was no-one around but interviewing the locals it appeared that foreigners gathered there later on in the evening. The guy with me who was in charge told the girl to stay there on her own and make a report which I thought was strange. I expected one of the others of us to stay as well and pretend to be a courting couple. A single girl on her own would be rather prominent out there. Anyway, that was what we agreed to do and the 2 or us went away. We ended up being stuck in this huge queue of pedestrians at a roundabout. It seemed that it was Derby County’s birthday and there was some kind of celebration. We ended up in this charity shop and they had some Derby County ski suits that were really nice. I was tempted to buy one but I didn’t like the idea of carrying something with “Derby County” on it so I didn’t. We had a good look around but couldn’t see anything else. We went out and decided to go for a meal. I reminded him about this woman and said “when we go to pick her up we’d better take her a cup of coffee”. He replied “yes. hang on here while I go and fetch one”. I said “it won’t be much use now. She’ll need it at 8 o’clock when we finish. She’ll be freezing”. He said “yes” and came out with some other stuff that I can’t remember now.

Later on Liz had bought some furniture for her new house, a bed. The people in IKEA were showing up how it went together to demonstrate what it looked like. She quite liked it and said that she’d take it but it turned out that there was a 6-month delay for delivery. I said “stick it in Caliburn and we’ll take it round in Caliburn”. She said that there was no-one there to assemble it, Terry had gone to work. I replied “I’ll assemble it”. She said “you have other things to do, haven’t you?”. I replied “I can spare an hour or two to do this bed”. They couldn’t find the right nails or screws ro go with this package. I pointed out various piles of screws and nails on the floor by the bed and this was starting to become really complicated. it turned out that she had gone in to buy a bed for one of her grandchildren because the two of them were sharing a bed and it was most uncomfortable for them. She wanted to get them separate beds and saw this while she was there.

Finally, I’d made myself some muesli and was looking for a container to put it in now that I’d come back from being away. I had plenty of flower pots but couldn’t find them all. Eventually I found a large one so I took a bucket of water and washed it out and had it looking fairly clean. Then I don’t know why I did this but I tipped the bucket of water into the flower pot. Of course the water went everywhere, all over the table, all over the carpet so I had to pour the water back into the bucket quickly. My brother said that we ought to find a mop. As we were going through into the back room to fetch a mop the police were in there. They’d been looking for someone for ages who had disappeared and were wondering where he’d got to. It turned out that he was in the next room. He’d killed himself. They were puzzled because the electrode that he had used to earth himself when he gave himself an electric shock wasn’t actually attached to anything metal, just to a wooden chair leg so that wouldn’t in theory have killed him so they began to wonder about his wife’s involvement with this.

But seriously, how come my brother has been playing such a large part in my voyages for the last few days or so? What’s been bringing him into the equation?

As a consequence of all of this it was a weary crawl out from under the covers this morning when the alarm went off. Mind you, I don’t suppose that it helped very much

After the medication and checking my mails I made a start on continuing with the blog entries but I didn’t get very far.

Not long after I’d started I had a message – do I have any Greenlandic music?

Of course, I have a couple of rock albums from Greenlandic rock groups who sing in Inuktitut but that wasn’t what was required. Did I have any Greenlandic music that would do as the background for a radio programme?

“Not to hand at this very moment” was the obvious answer but I do have two Greenlandic friends, one of Danish extraction and the other a young Inuit girl who are musicians so most of the morning was spent talking to them.

Nive told me that I could help myself to anything of hers (of which there is quite a lot) that I could find in the public media and Heidinnguaq, the young girl whom I met in Uummannaq sent me a couple of songs that she wrote which she plays guitar and sings.

And so what was left of the morning was spent chasing down the various files, editing them and remixing them suitably for the radio shows.

While I was on a roll, as the saying goes, I contacted the son of the guy (now unfortunately no longer with us) who wrote “Grasshopper” – the song that I mentioned yesterday – to see whether his father ever left his notes about his song construction. We had quite a chat for a while but to no avail – there were no notes left behind.

And so, there’s no time like the present and I contacted my musical friend who lives in Germany and sent him the link to the song. He’s going to score it for me. I’ve worked out the melody on the bass guitar but many of the chords bear absolutely no resemblance to the root notes, so they must all be derivatives and that’s way beyong my capabilities.

To take me up to lunch, the nurse came round and injected me with my third vaccination for Covid. Now I’m completely up-to-date with my injections and I have a very sore right arm.

After lunch I had a ‘phone call from the guy who co-ordinates the radio. What am I doing on the 12th November?

Apparently there’s a big meeting taking place to formally open the “Greenland Week” here but the girl who has chosen to make up a radio programme of the event can’t make it. Seeing as I know Uummannaq and the people there so well, could I replace her?

Well, of course I will actually, but really I can’t find the time to do my own stuff, never mind anyone else’s.

After all of that I went out for my afternoon walk.

Quite a few people down on the beach this afternoon, although nobody brave enough to tackle the water.

And that’s not really a surprise because the weather has now turned and there’s a strong with blowing in its usual direction from the North-West. So the fact that it’s reasonably warm for the time of year counts for nothing really in this.

As usual while I’m out looking down on the beach, I have one eye roving about offshore to see what I can catch.

And what caught my eye was this storm raging away out in the bay. Somewhere out there is the island of Jersey but you can’t hope to see it because of the intense rainstorm that is falling down right now.

It’s not any surprise that you can’t see any boats out there in that direction. having seen that huge storm approaching, they have presumably run for cover and I for one don’t blame them.

A little further along the coast I came to where I could see over the Ile de Chausey.

In actual fact, where I couldn’t see over the Ile de Chausey very much because there was a massive rainstorm over there too.

This one was far more ominous because the wind was blowing it in my direction and I began to regret that I had come out without a jacket because I had a feeling that in a couple of minutes time I would be right underneath all of that.

as I walked further on along the path, I did eventually come across some maritime activity.

It looks to me as if it’s a couple of zodiacs in which these people are standing, and the marker buoy behind them is not one that would relate to a lobster pot or anything like that.

The conclusion that I drew from this is that they are frogmen – or maybe I should be saying “frogpersons” these days – going for a practice over the side. We’ve seen quite a few of them in the past just offshore.

As I walked down across the carpark to the end of the headland the storm arrived and I got the lot, just as I predicted.

And as it happens, I wasn’t the only one who was having a great deal of difficulty with the weather. There was a yacht out here in the bay battling had to overcome the elements and making rather … errr … heavy weather of it.

The rainstorm was absolutely wicked so I had no intention whatever of hanging around in it seeing how things would develop.

By now, the wind had increased considerably in speed and velocity and I was expecting to see the results of it on the sea wall.

I’d seen a large wave crash into the wall and sent spray high into the air so I prepared for another.

However it’s usually every seventh wave that is the most powerful but by the time that I’d seen the second or third I was drenched to the skin and the camera was soaking wet so I took a photo of whatever I could get and cleared off.

It reminded me of the time that Kenneth Williams appeared in Bamber Gascoigne’s farce “Share My Lettuce”. He came on stage and described how he disguised himself as a tree in order to study more closely the birds that might nest in it. And he finished his description with “and then I unfurl an umbrella and hold it up over my head”
The narrator said “but the birds will see through your disguise, won’t they, and stay away?”
“Maybe they will” replied Kenneth Williams “but I’m not getting wet for a load of bleeding birds!”.

Had the weather been any better I would almost certainly have gone for a closer look at this.

There’s a large lorry with something heavy on the trailer, and a very large mobile crane either lifting it off or putting it back on. It’s a shame that right now it’s raining so heavily that I can’t see anything at all. Not even after enhancing the image.

Back at home I made myself a coffee and then dashed through the photographs. I needed a quick, early tea because there’s football on this evening. I ended up with baked potatoes, baked beans and a vegan burger.

You have to feel sorry for Aberystwyth Town though. Second from bottom in the JD Cymru League but against the team that was second in the table, Y Fflint, nothing seemed to go right.

When they remembered to keep the ball on the ground instead of long, aimless punts upfield, they played some really nice, attractive football that kept them going forward despite all of the pressure that they were under.

They did however ahve to misfortune to find Y Flint’s goalkeeper Jon Rushton in excellent form and he made half a dozen top-drawer saves to keep his team out of danger.

Y Fflint scored twice through one of my favourite players, Jack Kenny, who would be a top-class player if he would just learn to control his temper, booked yet again for yet another off-the-ball incident when there was really no need except his own misplaced pride.

Aberystwyth did score a goal – a marvellous goal worthy of any “goal of the month” competition when Rushton punched a ball out upfield and Louis Bradford lobbed it back into goal right over everyone else’s head. have a look at about ABOUT 1:41:25 ONWARDS OF THIS VIDEO

Not long after the football finished and I was writing up my notes, I fell asleep at my desk. I hauled myself off to bed instead, reckoning that I’ll finish my notes tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Wednesday 20th October 2021 – I WAS LUCKY …

… this afternoon, finally managing to take the photo that I’d been trying to take for the last I don’t know how long.

As I was walking back up the hill in the Rue des Juifs towards home after my physiotherapy appointment, the gates to the inner harbour opened quite dramatically.

That was the cue for all of the fishing boats that were lined up outside in the outer harbour to surge forward and fight their way in to be first to tie up at the fish processing plant.

As you can see, there are dozens of them that go out from here almost every day.

And what goes out has to come back, of course, unless it’s called Bugaled Breizh, but that’s another, much sadder story for another time and place.

We can recognise a couple of the trawlers in this photo. On the extreme right looking as if she’s trying to leave is Cap Pilar and at the back of the queue is Coelacanthe, one of the biggest fishing boats in the port.

And one of these days I’m going to have to go through my notes and make an illustrated database of the boats in here so that I can identify them more easily.

And it wasn’t just Cap Pilar that looked as if she was leaving port.

Chausiaise had been tied up in the loading bay underneath the crane and as I watched, the crew cast off the ropes and reversed away from the quayside.

She’s not going to be heading out for a while because there was quite a queue of traffic waiting to come in, as we have already seen. And it’s not really a good time of day to be going anywhere because by the time that she reaches the Ile de Chausey it’ll be almost dark and the tide will be turning.

Talking of turning … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was doing a lot of that in bed last night. It wasn’t particularly early when I went to bed but nevertheless by 03:20 I was wide awake and from then until 07:30 there was only a few minutes sleep here and there.

When the alarm finally did go off, it was all that I could do to raise myself from the dead.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I knuckled down to attend to the work on the list that I had created yesterday. And to my surprise (and to yours as well, no doubt) I breezed my way through it, and a few other things that I had forgotten to add onto the list as well.

That was what I call a productive day, and it’s high time that I had one of those.

There was the usual pause for breakfast and for lunch, and after lunch I had a shower before carrying on with the work.

Listening to the dictaphone some time later, there was plenty of stuff to transcribe. I must have had an exciting night. I was working for the radio and trying to find people to interview for this radio programme. I was in an old Plaxton Elite coach parked up somewhere in the Wirral. All these people were getting on and off it as we were near one of these burger van things. People asked me what I was doing so I explained that I was looking for people who had experience of Brexit good and bad and wanted to talk about it. They asked in which direction I was going so I said “north”, so quite a few stayed on. I was going north and came to a road junction. Someone said that if you go left here there’s a centre down there where there will be plenty of people and I’ll be bound to find someone there. I went to the left and came across a low bridge. There was nowhere for me to turn round, the road was so narrow and so built up on either side that I couldn’t get a swing round to turn the coach round at all under any circumstances.

Later on I’d forgotten to fill the water container for the house at Virlet. It was late at night and dark and I had to set out and do it. Nerina wasn’t very happy. When I went out I remembered that I hadn’t fought my way into the room where the water tap is. She was annoyed about that. In the end I fought my way round to the top of the barn and went in. The fridge in there was working really hard and making a lot of noise. I went downstairs and out, and found that I could in fact get into the water room. I’d left the light on in there from the last time I’d been there. I went in and there was a bat that was flying around, diving into my hair and everything. There were thousands of little flies. I fetched the water container out of there and managed to struggle my way outside. The bat came out with me and flew off. So did all these insects.

When it was time to leave the apartment for my physiotherapy I went down to look at the beach.

Peering over the wall I could see that there was quite a bit of beach this afternoon – after all, it is my more usual time of going out compared to yesterday.

This time though there wasn’t anyone on it at all and that’s no surprise because it was blowing a howling gale and it was trying its best to rain. Not the right kind of day to be out at all unless one had to.

Further on down the hill on my way into town I could see that there was a boat moored up in the loading bay underneath the crane.

As I drew closer (but it wasn’t a good likeness of closer because I’m useless at drawing) I could see that it was Thora, one of the little Jersey freighters, who was in there. She must have come in on the morning tide

Another thing that took me by surprise was that I made it all the way up the hill to the physiotherapist without stopping for breath. That’s something that I haven’t done for months and I was so impressed with that.

Today she had me doing movements and exercises and they seemed to be better for me than the tilting platform. I was certainly aching more than I did before and, getting ahead of myself here, I was up the 25 steps to my apartment much easier than I have been of late.

But on the way home, I could see the first casualty of the mobile phone wars that are going on throughout the world right now.

That shop over there used to be, until the weekend, the SFR shop and I’m not surprised that that has bitten the dust. Regular readers of this rubbish going back 7 or 8 years or so ago will remember the dispute that I had with them.

By now it was raining fairly heavily so I didn’t want to hang around too long. I came back a different way home yet again but there was nothing of any interest to see or to photograph.

Well, that’s not actually true.

Quite by accident as I was crossing over the Avenue de la Liberation, I saw a tractor heading my way and I recognised it immediately so I prepared the NIKON D500.

Sure enough, it’s the tracor and trailer that unload the Bouchots de Chausey and we saw them yesterday hard at it. Had I been able to run, I would have followed it to find out where it is going, but I’m long past that kind of thing these days.

A little earlier I showed you a couple of photos of the fishing boats coming back into harbour.

After they had all passed by, one of the Joly France ferries reversed out of her berth at the ferry terminal and followed the fishing boats into the inner harbour.

What I liked about this photo was that I also captured two blue and white fishing boats racing neck and neck towards the harbour. I had to wait a couple of minutes to have all three boats in exactly the right position but it was worth it.

Another photo that you saw earlier was the one with Cap Pilar waiting for the traffic to subside as if she intended to go out to sea.

Sure enough, once there was a gap in the traffic, off she went and was immediately engulfed in the storm that was now raging out at sea. She disappeared into several waves that swept over her bows and my hat goes off to everyone who puts to sea in this kind of weather.

Back here I had a much needed coffee and that warmed me up somewhat. And there wasn’t time to do very much because it was quite late when I returned.

There were some mushrooms that were on the verge of looking quite dubious so I made a potato and mushroom curry with them and wasn’t that delicious.

And just as I put down my fork, Rosemary rang me – perfect time again – and we had another one of our endless, rambling conversations, hence I’m running quite late.

But now, later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed and after my dreadful night last night I hope that this one is better. I’m interviewing tomorrow so I need to be on form.

Monday 18th October 2021 – I ALMOST SET …

… a new record for my radio programme today. Bang on 10:50 and I was just about to save the final copy of the broadcast that I’d prepared when all the power went off in the building.

It took about 15 minutes for the power to come back on and then I had to add back in the very final segment of the programme. After all of that it was 11:15 when I finally finished, and that was something of a disappointment.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

It was yet another night where I was tossing and turning about for much of it, and that defeats the whole point of going to bed early.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I fell out of bed after something of a struggle and crawled into the kitchen for my medication.

Back in here I checked my mails and messages and then set down to attack the radio programme. And I made good progress, even though I had a break for a coffee and later for breakfast.

When I had finally finished I leapt into Caliburn and shot off to Lidl. There’s no food in the house – at least, not fruit and salad for lunch – so I needed to stock up.

And as I was in Caliburn I stocked up with a few other bits and pieces too, including a fresh cauliflower. I fancy some real cauliflower cheese for tea one of these nights, and I can freeze the leftover cauliflower.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night’s voyages too. I’d been helping my father put some hydraulic oil into someone’s crane. They had a tanker lorry with hydraulic fluid in the tank and the lorry had to be manoeuvred into position and the jib passed over to the filling hole on the crane. I had to help him do that and make sure that the oil didn’t overflow because they couldn’t get the tanker into position where the driver could do both things. Then it was time for me to go but I was covered in oil so I had a wash. I asked this girl how I was. She replied “your face is awful” so I washed that. Then she said that I needed to wash my hair so I washed it under the tap. All this time I was thinking that the bus timetables have changed. Someone gave me a bus timetable but the times weren’t for the bus stop in the immediate vicinity so I wasn’t sure how I would manage to catch the bus. I don’t know what happened next but later on I was walking through a forest trying to get to the station to catch the train. I noticed that there were 4 trains in the first half of the hour and none in the second. I had a feeling that I was going to miss everything. Going back to the bus by the way, at that time of night there was only 1 every hour and I didn’t have a clue what would happen if I missed the last one. We were walking through the forest. Someone met a woman and said “what’s happening about our pay rise?”. She said “I’m going through to make the dairies based on what’s been discussed so far”. The guy said “that means we are all going to receive 10%, does it?”. She burst out laughing and didn’t say anything.

After lunch I went for a shower (and had the first heat of the winter while I was doing it), set the washing machine off on a cycle (a clever washing machine, mine) and then headed off for town in the rain.

Down in the town I noticed that there was something going on.

In the Place Général De Gaulle there was a lorry there being unloaded and it looks as if they are erecting another children’s roundabout. Maybe they are plannign already for the Toussaint school holiday at the end of the month.

The walk up the hill to the physiotherapist was a lot easier than it has been of late. I only had to stop once for breath and I reckon that I might have pushed on further than I did before I ground to a halt.

Today I had a new physiotherapist and she put me through a severe examination. She’s worked out that there is a lot less force in my right knee than in my left knee and judging by the fact that the muscles in each leg were aching in different places after performing the same exercise, there’s a muscle or tendon issue as well.

At least that gives her an idea of how she is to deal with the issue.

By the time that I left the physiotherapist, it was raining quite heavily. Luckily I had my raincoat with me.

There’s a tree that has been cut down in the Place Semard and when I had a close look at the stump, it had grown some magnificent fungi.

And you know how to tell the difference between an edible fungus and an inedible one?

The answer is quite simple. Before you go to bed, take one and eat it. If you wake up next morning, then it’s perfectly safe.

Down the hill in the rain, I came to where they are working on what used to be the railway line.

There’s a digger here digging a trench and tipping the excavated soil into the bed of the lorry. A little further down we can see some pipes so it looks as if they will be laying some drainage in the ditch.

You can’t see from here but a little further down they have cemented the right-hand side of the track and on part of it they have put some kerbstones in. It won’t be long before they will have finished this part of the track.

Down the steps I went into the Parc Du Val Ès Fleurs.

At the bottom, we have in the past seen a weird collection of road signs but if you peer through the raindrops you’ll see that what we have here today is the base of a concrete hardstanding.

It beats me, whet they are going to be erecting here. The park is some kind of local showplace and I wouldn’t have thought that they would have permitted the erection of just any old building. It must be something important.

From here I carried on down the road towards the square opposite the Ecole des Docteurs Lanos.

This is in quite a mess at the moment and looks even worse than it did last time that we were here. They don’t seem to have made very much progress with this part of the work.

If anything the piles of sand and gravel have grown considerably and there’s now a pile of pipework. I suppose that they will be putting a spurt on in due course when they have finished whatever it is that they are doing elsewhere with this task.

Talking of which, looking behind me, there’s a lot been going on in the Rue du Boscq.

On the north side of the road – the right-hand side – they have installed the kerbstones now. You can see the drop in the kerb just behind the little yellow compacter and that would seem to indicate how high they are going to be building up the road surface.

All of the stakes on the other side seem to indicate where they will be installing the kerb on that side of the road. You can see the piles of kerbstones stacked up on pallets at the side.

Down at the other end they’ve already installed some of the kerbing, and there was some interesting carpentry going on.

At first glance it wasn’t easy to see what they were doing but a closer inspection revealed that it’s some kind of shuttering. That usually implies that a pile of concrete is going to be poured there. And I hope not because that will be ppretty awful.

By now the rain was coming down quite heavily so I headed off back home. I didn’t want to stay out too long in this weather.

And it wasn’t just me heading for home either.

As I peered through the mist I could see that all of the trawlers were on their way home after a day out at sea. They were coming home rather early too because the tide wasn’t all that far in and I imagine that it would be a while before the gates into the inner harbour would open.

But that’s not something that I was going to wait around to see because by now I was soaking wet and I had other fish to fry.

When I reached the top of the hill I didn’t go straight home.

By now it was the time when I usually go out for my afternoon walk so I wandered off to see what was happening on the beach.

About the same amount of beach as there was yesterday but considerably fewer people as you might expect in weather like this.

And if you want to see what the weather was really doing, have a look on the extreme right-hand edge of the photo. You can see all of the water cascading out of the drain and down onto the beach to roll down into the sea.

One final thing to do was to look out to sea and to see what was happening there.

Of course, in this weather, you can’t see all that much. There was a yacht out there battling against the weather trying to find its way towards harbour.

Back here I had a nice hot coffee, took the washing out of the machine and then listened to the radio programme that I am sending off to be broadcast.

And it’s a good job that I did listen to it because the final segment had been missed off. I’ve no idea why. And so that was the task for this afternoon – to repair this programme and send it off.

Tea was a stuffed pepper and now I’m going off to bed. I have my Welsh lesson in the morning and need to be on form. I’m hoping that I’d have a good night’s sleep.

Sunday 3rd October 2021 – I TRIED SOMETHING …

… different today, and by the looks of things, it might have actually worked too.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my fruit bread has been something of a hit-and-miss but today for some reason that I have yet to understand, I ended up with a dough that was one of the best that I’ve ever made.

Consequently, in an attempt to try something rather different, I cut the dough into 8, rolled them into some rather flat discs, and put them on some baking paper on the oven tray.

When they had risen sufficiently I baked them in the oven. And although I haven’t tried them yet, they look and feel really good.

However, I did try the pizza that I baked after the buns, and that really was excellent.

So was my sleep last night. 10:35 when I awoke, and about 11:05 when I finally left the bed. I can do with a few more days like that.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too. I dreamt last night that Lidl had gone bankrupt so I walked from my apartment all the way out there without any problems at all, I should say, and had a look round. They were even giving free coffee to people who were looking around. There was plenty of stuff on sale. I don’t believe that I bought anything. I was following this man and his daughter down the stairs thinking to myself that seeing as I’m going off to somewhere else on Wednesday I’ll go in the van and have a look around the big Lidl that is there to see what bargains they have. There were some headlines in the paper that I was looking at – “1 foot 3 inch baby born again”. There were all these people hanging around the door and we couldn’t leave so I said “do you mind letting the ones born first out of the building so that the others about to be born can come along quicker?”.

With Sunday being a day of rest, I haven’t done a great deal. After a coffee I paired off the music for the next radio programme and that took me nicely up to lunchtime.

After lunch I relaxed for a while with a coffee and then made the dough for my fruit bread. While I was at it I did a little tidying up in the cupboard under the sink. Just a little – I didn’t go mad.

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

First port of call was the wall at the end of the car park to see what was going on.

It wasn’t raining and we actually had some blue sky, and although it was very windy this afternoon, the weather was still good enough to tempt a few people out onto the beach.

But not into the water by the looks of things. It wasn’t that nice. And with the waves coming in like that, then it’s to be expected. No-one wants to be dashed to pieces on the rocks down there by a rather large wave or two.

It might have been a reasonable day over here in Granville, but that’s not to say that it was the same everywhere.

Look at that storm over there. Jersey is somewhere underneath that and by the looks of things it taking something of a severe pounding. I’m glad that I’m not out there in that.

Actually, the raincloud stretched all the way from the north-east corner of the Ile de Chausey and then right across to Jersey and beyond into the English Channel. And every now and again as I walked around my circuit, we had a spattering of rain as an extra-strong gust of wind brought some over.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a workmen’s compound had been set up in the car park outside here, and I’d promised to go and look at it.

Actually, it’s not all that much of a compound at all. Just some equipment that has been parked here, secured against theft by some red and white plastic tape.

Having a look round, I could see a notice that suggested that it belonged to a company that specialised in “difficult access”. And so I wonder if they are going to be setting up camp with a view to starting repairs on the part of the wall that is crumbling away just here.

If they are, then it’s not before time.

There were a few people around on the path as I made my way around the headland, but there wasn’t any activity out to sea. I reckon that most people had seen the storm and gone back home for a cuppa.

There was the sparrowhawk out there hovering around again but as soon as I pointed my camera at him, he cleared off, as you would expect.

And you can tell that the sun is now going much lower in the sky.

For the first time since the summer we were having the reflections of the sun in that water. This isn’t the best that we have ever had of course, but it’s the first of the winter so it deserves to be recorded.

It’s a shame that there was no-one else but me enjoying it. There was no-one else about, not even on the bench down by the cabanon vauban. And there wasn’t even a boat out there either to profit from the afternoon.

Mind you, there was a couple of yachts out there around the other side of the headland in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

You only need to look at the sea out there to see exactly what the wind was doing this afternoon. The whitecaps over there look quite wicked when you are battling the elements with a tiny yacht.

It’s actually not very often that we see the wind coming round from that angle. Le Loup is positively swamped in waves.

When I posted a photo a short while ago of the bay, the headland was acting as a really good wind-shadow to the bay with the usual nor’westers but this wind is now blowing from the west today.

With all of this wind surging around in the bay I was expecting to see something rather dramatic on the harbour wall.

However, it was only my hopes that were being dashed. Instead of a bang, it was much more of a whimper. The waves breaking on the wall were quite insignificant, and I had to wait for a couple of minutes even to have something like that.

Meanwhile, in the chantier naval there was nothing of any interest there. No new boats at all, only the dredger sitting there waiting for things to happen.

Had I been feeling better, I’d have gone down for a look. I planned to go there yesterday on my way back from the shops but the rainstorm put paid to that idea.

Anyway, further around the path, it looks as if I’ve acquired another pet subject to go with pathetic parking, the Birdmen of Alcatraz and the beach at the Rue du Nord.

Not a boat moored at the ferry terminal right now, everyone gone off for the afternoon, and they’ve left the crane arm fully extended, with all of the weight of the arm pressing down on the hydraulic seal.

But that’s their affair, not mine. I came back home for a coffee and for a relax, and left them to it.

After the coffee I kneaded and rolled out the pizza dough that I’d taken out of the freezer earlier, and put it onto the pizza tray ready to assemble.

Then I had the delightful job of peeling, dicing and blanching a kilo of carrots. On Saturday I was jost going to buy a couple and then a couple more in midweek, but why buy loose carrots at €2:19 per kilo when a one-kilo pack of carrots costs €0:79?

The buns went into the oven while I was assembling the pizza and that went in afterwards. Really delicious.

With an early start tomorrow I’m off to bed now. I’m radioing tomorrow of course and then I have an appointment with the physiotherapist. We’ve had a change of day for my appointments.

Saturday 2nd October 2021 – YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING …

… why there aren’t any photos today. Well, read on.

Last night I didn’t finish my journal entry because I almost fell asleep on my chair and in any case it was almost bed time so I posted what I’d done and went to bed.

It was another depressing night, tossing and turning and not really going into a deep sleep at all, although there must have been some at some point because there was stuff on the dictaphone.

Once again, I awoke in a deep sweat – it seems to be happening almost every night now and why I note them is because it’s one of the things that they always ask me at hospital.

After the medication I came in here to organise a few things. With these new sleeping hours there isn’t time to do much before I have to go out to the shops.

Windy, grey and damp this morning but that’s enough about me. So was the weather.

At Noz they didn’t have a lot although there was some kind of book sale so I bought a couple more to add to my library.

LeClerc was an expensive shop because I bought more coffee. I always go for the instant coffee in the silver paper containers rather than glass jars to save on waste and (of course) they are lighter for me to carry upstairs – that’s the kind of state that I’m in these days.

They never seem to have any when I need some and last week I had to buy a different variety that I don’t like all that much. But this week they had my preferred brand so I added a packet to the weekly shop to keep in store.

As I mentioned earlier, the weather was windy, damp and overcast. When I went out of LeClerc it was teeming down with a torrential downpour of rain, the kind of downpour that we haven’t had for ages. From the end of the covered parking to where I park Caliburn is about 30 metres but I was soaked and so were the paper bags with my fruit and veg in them.

By the time I reached home it was pouring down even more, and that’s exactly how it stayed until at least it went dark. And if anyone thinks that I’m going out in that, they are mistaken.

Back here I put away the frozen food and then made a coffee. And while I was drinking it, I turned my attention to the dictaphone. I downloaded the files onto the computer but then I remembered that I had no hummus for lunch.

Luckily I had everything that I needed

At some point during the night Barbararling – and it’s probably been 10 years since she last featured in a nocturnal ramble so what’s made her reappear? – was there in her role as mother of Zero but I don’t remember much of that at all, which is a shame. Wouldn’t I have liked to have known how this would have ended?

Somewhat later I’d gone to look at the new building to where I was moving. I was in the laundry on the 1st floor and to get down onto the ground floor I somehow missed the stairs and slid down a kind of post thing and ended up in the foyer. The foyer was full of plants that were not in very good condition but were giving off tons of fruit. All the people there were discussing the plants and fruit and what needed to be done. I happened to say something and someone asked “are you moving in?”. I replied “yes, on the 12th”. I’d gone and had a quote for a kitchen and some kitchen fitters and I was checking out the apartment but I couldn’t get in, something like that. So these people started to talk and they knew the person who was moving and thought “thank God she’s going”. Everyone said that they had seen her packing and driving off with some stuff. They tried to find the advert for me in a magazine for the property that was on sale but we couldn’t find it. Then the German army turned up and started to interrogate everyone quite roughly.

Finally, I was in New Brunswick last night as well. There were some people whom I knew who had a laboratory and making dangerous drugs. They sent some off in a car to someone and they rang him up to tell them that they were on their way. Someone said something about the last time the shipment was intercepted by the police and this guy went totally berserk and completely wrecked the apartment building where he was living.

After lunch I sat down and carried on with the journal entry from yesterday, but only in a half-hearted way because I’ve been shuffling the music around.

There are 6 groups of artists, grouped at random, each with about 50 artists, and I alternate from one group to the next so that I’m not playing the same group all the time. But over the last year or so it seems to have settled down into a rut so I wanted to shake things up a little.

No walk of course but I made a coffee all the same and carried on with my work.

While I was looking through my messages I came across a video of the highlights of Y Barri v Y Drenewydd from this afternoon, a match in which Y Drenewydd won 0-3.

And I’ll ask the same question that I asked a few weeks ago – “whatever is Lifumpa Mwandwe doing playing in the Welsh pyramid?”. He’s a country mile above everyone else whom I’ve ever seen.

Tea tonight was baked potato, veg and a couple of those small breaded soya burgers that I bought ages ago and froze. That’s the last of those which is a shame because I liked them.

Now that I’ve finished my notes I really feel that I ought to stick my head out of the window to see if the weather has eased off and if so, go for a walk, but I’m not up to that.

Instead, I’m going to have a little relax before going to bed. Make the most of my evening and have a nice lie-in tomorrow. And then bake my fruit bread because I’ve run out.

Monday 27th September 2021 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve seen the chantier naval looking like this?

Over the last I don’t know how many weeks, we’ve seen as many as 7 boats in there at one time, but it gradually reduced down to 4, and then 3, and then 2, and then1

And when I walked past the place this afternoon, the final boat, L’Omerta, has left the yard too.

“Gone! And never called me ‘mother'”!

The next question is “who is now going to come into the yard next?”. And, more importantly, “when?”. It’s very important for the port to have a busy chantier naval because it encourages people to base their boats here, and that’s good for the town.

As for last night though here, it was a pretty miserable night, the early 06:00 start notwithstanding.

You can tell by the waves out there at sea that there has been quite a storm somewhere.

In fact, it was actually right overhead in the early morning and the howling gale and accompanying rainstorm awoke me on a couple of occasions while I was trying to sleep.

It’s hardly surprising therefore that I was feeling pretty uncomfortable when the alarm went off this morning.

After the medication and checking my messages I sat down to deal with this week’s radio programme. And to my surprise, and probably yours too, it was finished by 11:00 and that’s a new record as far as I can tell.

Mind you, after I’d listened to it, I had to turn round and do some of it again. I tried an experiement that sounded good while I was doing it but while I was listening to it I realised that it wasn’t as good as I thought. The idea was right but the execution wasn’t.

Then I had a listen to the programme that will be broadcast this weekend and realised that I had to redo part of that as well.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m trying – for a couple of reasons – to get well ahead of where I am supposed to be, but that causes its own problems as I realised today.

When George Kooymans retired from Golden Earring in April (he was in hospital in Leuven in May with him) the hunt was on to find which group became the group with the longest continual complement of members.

Of course, down in Texas there was always ZZ Top who have been together for 51 years and so I wrote about that and dictated it into the programme that will be broadcast this weekend.

Of course, having dictated that a few months ago, didn’t Dusty Hill then go and die on me and Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard recrute a new bassist?

Consequently I had to rewrite, dictate and edit a new speech, making it exactly the same length as the part that I was cutting out. And inserting text into the middle of a programme isn’t easy because not only do you have to watch the length, there’s the sound balance that you need to match.

As well as that, I’ve had quite a lot to do about another project on which I’m working for the radio and that has taken up a lot of my time this afternoon. And as a result I didn’t have the time to listen to whatever might be on the dictaphone.

There was the usual walk around the headland too. We’ve seen the beach earlier when we were looking at the waves just offshore. Just the odd person down there this afternoon, which is no surprise given the weather that we were having.

During the walk along the headland down to the lighthouse I was pretty much on my own. And there was nothing whatever going on out at sea. Not even a single boat that I could see. Mind you, the waves out there were enough to put anyone off.

No-one was around at the bench by the cabanon vauban this afternoon either, and no boats out there either in the bay.

But as I looked at Le Loup, the light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, I could see that the effect of wind-shadow provided by the headland, aabout which I have talked previously … “on many occasions” – ed.

You can see the whitecaps on the waves over there going in towards the beach down at Kairon-Plage but closer to Le Loup the sea is much calmer, due to the wind-shadow.

There were some people over there on the beach and I wonder what they were making of all of this weather today. It’s been quite a change from just recently.

Having taken in what was going on – or wasn’t going on, to be precise – in the chantier naval, I went to look at the fish processing plant.

When we were looking down there over the last few days, the place was covered with marquees and hordes of people for the Fête des Coquilles St Jacques but almost all of that has gone now and they are busy clearing away the rest.

Now we’re back to the refrigerated lorries over there queueing up at the Fish Processing Plant as normal service is resumed and there’s shellfish to be removed to the markets in Paris. All of the excitement seems to be over.

That may well be the case at the Fish Processing Plant but there’s plenty of excitement going on at the quayside.

Yesterday we noticed a pile of equipment that had been dumped on the quayside over at the back of where the Channel Island ferries tie up – you can see the bows of Victor Hugo and Granville over there.

There’s another lorry over there today with some more equipment on the back so it looks as if there’s going to be a big pile of stuff over there by the time that they finish, so it’s going to be some kind of serious work that will be taking place.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, there’s even more excitement at the lading bay.

There’s a large articulated lorry over there having its trailer unloaded by the crane and there’s now an enormous pile of freight there.

Chausiaise is in attendance but that load won’t be going onto her – it’s far too much for her to carry and anyway there isn’t any unloading facilities over on the island and I doubt that her crane will be enough to lift it off.

It looks as if it’s waiting for one of the Jersey freighters but even so it’s going to be a struggle to load it all on. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Back here I carried on with my work and actually crashed out for 15 minutes – the first time since I’ve been working these “revised hours”.

Tea tonight wa s a stuffed pepper with rice but for some reason it didn’t cook as well as it usually does. I don’t know what I did wrong.

But now I’m off to bed. I’m hoping to have a nice long sleep (although I noticed that the wind has sprung up again) because I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow and I want to be on form.

There’s also my doctor’s appointment tomorrow – the Day of Judgement so I’ll have to remember to take my x-rays. I wonder what he’s going to tell me this time.

By the way, I did eventually transcribe the dictaphone note, but as you are probably eating your meal right now I’ll save you the gory details.

Sunday 15th August 2021 – THE OTHER DAY …

… when discussing all of the boats that were out there on the water, I believe that I mentioned how I would love to be out there when the harbour gates are near closing, in order to witness the stampede as the boats all headed back for port.

And sure enough, this afternoon I had my wish, and a lot sooner than I was expecting as well. The tide is advancing quite rapidly and even though this is my usual time to be out, you can see the mad dash for home already.

Belle France is well up there in second place to that cabin cruiser in front, but on the outside there’s a speedboat coming incredibly quickly, making quite a wave as he does so.

Round on the pther side of the headland, things are much more advanced.

There are at least five and maybe even more small boats in the photo just here, all dashing for the port de plaisance while they still are able to do so.

Nobody would want to be stranded out in the bay during the night, especially if they have work to go to in the morning.

Not too many people out on the sea wall watching them though. I would have expected this to have been one of the best free entertainments going.

Last night I did without any kind of entertainment – free or otherwise – after the football. At the final whistle I staggered off to bed and that was that.

At 06:19 I was awake but if anyone thinks that I’ll be leaving my bed at that time of day on a Sunday they are mistaken. Even 09:10 is a bit optimistic. 10:40 is much more like it.

Ordinarily I would have said that that was a good sleep but there is tons of stuff on the dictaphone so I must have been quite disturbed (as if I’m not disturbed enough as it it).

I started off at the home of a couple of friends last night, doing a load of moving for them or something like that. I’d gone to her office room to talk to her but she was busy on the phone so I went into his office room kind of thing and he wasn’t there. I thought that I would wait for him to come back and I started listening to music and I thought “He has loads of LPs so I’m sure that he has loads of live cast-offs that would do for a live concert”. There was a box of strawberries and cream by the side of his computer and I was busy eating my way through those and scrolling through his Facebook screen. Suddenly I saw a message that he had sent me about Welsh Premier League football and I could see my reply under there. I thought that I’d better not be confused in this subject comes up again because I’ll be replying as someone else instead of me and reading my own replies. When they did come down they looked so young and it was very hard for me to believe that it was them. I couldn’t believe it. They were talking about everything, about how we don’t need to go out for a meal tonight but we can go for breakfast tomorrow somewhere. I said that my partner (and I couldn’t think of her name) was having to teach this afternoon but I’d been watching “Alfie” and this started off with some guys going to rob the home of a policewoman or something but the robbery had all gone wrong and several policemen in there and there had ended up being a gunfight and all these guys had gone to prison and been sent down for an enormous length of time. The Michael Caine character had to flee the country with his girlfriend and she was telling him all this bad news about everything else that was connected with this but still going wrong. He was pretty powerless where he was to actually do anything about it

This flat (and I wish that I knew which flat is was that I was discussing) is ideal for the kind of thing for a weekend retreat where you can come away from Paris on Friday and be here Friday night, and not have to go back until Sunday night and spend every weekend down by the sea.

A little later I was on my way to a football match and I arrived in Chester and was running late so I had to take a taxi. I went to the local rank but there were only little electric telephone box-type cars so I said to a guy standing near it “is that yours?”. Another guy immediately leapt out of a vehicle and asked “taxi?”. I replied “yes but just give me a minute to make a phone call. Is there a phone handy?”. I had a discount card that I needed to ring up to book. he showed me over to a phone but said “there’s still 12 minutes left on the meter. Where do you want to go? I said “Deva Road” so he replied “come on. We’ll get there before this runs out”. He ushered me into a red Rover V8 and drove me there. We had a bit of a laugh in the snow about how uneconomical his car was, everything. He said that it wasn’t that bad. As I got up the steps to the football ground, I did a bit of shopping and started to walk back. I didn’t go to the game at all if there had been one.

A group of travellers turned up in Palestine, amongst them a three year old boy that was donated by some parent in some emergency but when they got to Palestine they didn’t have a clue as to what they were going to do so they built some kind of meeting centre or something like that to show at least that they weren’t going to waste any time.

Somewhere as well there was a story of two 9-year-old girls who used to go around all these rock festivals and blues festivals filming the events. Their mother would form them into some kind or promotional video. I was there somewhere with a girl and I introduced her to people like John Hite and someone who wrote a lot of songs, Creedence Clearwater Revival (do I mean Bob Hite of Canned Heat?). I said “there you are, you have to meet John Hite and a few others and that’s something to tell your friends, isn’t it?”. She replied “most of my friends wouldn’t even know who people like that are”.

Later I woke up in a panic thinking that it was 16:00 and I had a flight back to Europe in an hour and I had so much to do. I grabbed all of my things and shot off to the airport and then spent quite a lot of time trying to find a place to sit down and sort myself out and pack everything. A couple of people came to join me and we were talking about the lack of seats in this place. The discussion drifted on to airports in North Carolina and the rudimentary facilities there, some experience that I could share with these two people as well.

As well as all of this, someone had asked me to do some tiling for him. I’m not very good at tiling but I went along to have a look. At my place I’d tiled on top of a piece of lino so I found a piece of lino and cut to size and cleaned up but instead of using soap I’d used fat and it made a right mess of everywhere so I had to take it out. There was fat all over the floor so I prepared to mop it up. Then he came in. He hadn’t really twigged on what was going on but he was inspecting it as much as he could and how I knew what was going to be done to the right size so that I’d cut off a piece of lino as a template. He went to look at it. I told him that it was wet so he said “we’d better open it out to dry” so he opened it out on his balcony. He asked me “your insurance liability is up to date, isn’t it?” Unfortunately I didn’t have any and I was beginning to regret having said that I would do this job for him the way that he was going on like this.

After the medication I came back in here to check my mail and then I went off to have a look at the view now that the tide is on its way out.

And that’s the view that greeted me looking out across the Baie de Granville and the English Channel this morning.

After the really wonderful few days that we have had, summer is now apparently over and we are back in winter again.

It’s pretty pointless trying to look for car ferries and sailing ships in that lot just there. It was raining too, the first time for about a week, and that didn’t help matters at all. We could have had Godzilla and the Loch Ness Monster out there this morning and I wouldn’t have seen them.

The view down the coast was, if anything, even worse.

We can just about make out the white beach huts on the promenade at the Plat Gousset but our view doesn’t go very much beyond there right now. The Rue du Nord is swathed in raincloud too.

Hopefully the view will be better on the other side of the headland in the lee of the wind. The rain might not have reached there yet.

And while we might not have any rain, the view isn’t all that much better, which is a shame.

However Aztec Lady is back in town. She’s the blue boat over there that goes on a few exciting voyages every so often, although the current travel regulations have curtailed much of the more interesting sailings.

To her left, bow-end on to the camera is Spirit of Conrad, the boat on which we went down the Brittany coast last year. The last time that I’d heard of her, she was over at the Ile de Chausey but I met her skipper yesterday so I assumed that she had come home.

Another boat that was on her way home this morning in all of the bad weather is the trawler Suzanga.

She’s the new boat in town, having only recently arrived from the shipbuilders in Turkey, and she’s already out there earning her keep.

That’s several new trawlers that have joined the local fleet since I’ve been living here. It shows that contrary to all expectations, the local ship owners are rather optimistic about the future of the fishing industry here, and that’s always quite a good sign.

Positive thinking seems to be in rather short supply these days among some people.

Despite the miserable weather, there’s plenty of activity in port this morning which is nice to see.

There were several zodiacs loitering aroind in the neighbourhood, almost as if there was a cruise ship like THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR anchored somewhere offshore.

But the girl who was driving this one came in, went up to the harbour wall, said something to a few people and then turned round and sailed back out again. So what was that all about then?

Meanwhile I could see the heads of some other people down there and they looked as if they were sitting in a zodiac, but I couldn’t really see because the house roofs were in the way.

It took about 20 minutes for them to decide what they were going to do and I had to wait around all that time because there wasn’t anything else going on that I could see that would occupy my mind.

Eventually they threw a rope to someone on the quayside and they moved away, so that I could see what was going on.

They set off in the tracks of the one that had left earlier.

And I know that my expedition friends would be having heart failure seeing a moving zodiac with people standing up in it as it travels, even if they are hanging on to something.

The way that they pitch and roll and sway in the sea means that they aren’t as stable as they might be with a high centre of gravity when people are standing up. Everyone should be sitting down and luggage goes at their feet to keep the centre of gravity lower still.

By now I was becoming rather wet (as if I wasn’t wet enough before I started) so I headed for home and a nice hot coffee, and then start work on yesterday’s journal entry.

At some point or other during the day I was interrupted by noise from out at the back.

The streets around the old town are closed today as it’s the book fair, and there was a breakdown lorry trying to gain access . The driver had gone off to seek assistance but in the meantime, another car had come past him and then inexplicably stopped, rather selfishly, to let out his passengers while he goes to park the car.

Never mind that the road is narrow enough so that no-one else behind him could go past. That’s clearly unimportant as long as he’s OK.

The selfishness of some people never ceases to amaze me.

Writing my notes was a long and arduous task today, and took much longer than I expected. I even had a rather quick lunch to try to make more time but as you probably realise, something like that seldom seems to work.

This afternoon I went out to have a look at the beach to see what was happening down there.

No afternoon walk seems to be complete without that these days.

The tide has come in quite quickly but there are still plenty of brave souls down there trying out the beach, sitting around and sunbathing.

There didn’t seem to be anyone actually in the water this afternoon but that’s not to say that there weren’t any.

There were other people in the water though, but in a different fashion entirely.

Like this kayaker for instance. He must have paddled his canoe quite a long way to end up here, and now he’s going to have to turn round and paddle himself all the way back, and pretty quickly too if he wants to find a slipway or launching pad still in the water.

And is that a fishing rod that he has poking up behind him? It can’t be all that comfortable fishing in a kayak. And where would be put his catch?

Something else that was out here like piffy on a rock was this strange creature.

It’s actually a Great Cormorant and he’s a long way from home. His breeding colony is probably the one across the bay on one of the small islands facing Cancale. Several of those islands – the uninhabited ones – are know to be breeding grounds.

They were much more widespread than that at one time but predators like foxes and rats have seen off several colonies. In fact there’s a plan for the Ile de Chausey for a mass eradication of non-indigenous predators.

And when you compare this photo of the one that I took down the coast earlier today, you’ll see a great difference.

Of course, the rain cloud has now passed on to better things and the weather is so much nicer. In addition to that, the Bird-Men of Alcatraz have awoken and they have come here with their Nazgul to have an afternoon’s adventuring.

One of them has just taken off from the field by the cemetery and at the moment he’s fighting to gain control of his Nazgul, after which he’ll be heading this way.

There didn’t seem to be all that much going on farther out at sea this afternoon but I did scan the horizon.

At one point I picked up something large and dark out by the Ile de Chausey and although I couldn’t imagine it being anything else other than the sail of a yacht I took a photo to check when I returned home.

Sure enough, it is a yacht although it’s too far out to see if it’s anyone we know. Black Mamba isn’t in port right now but she’s apparently in Cherbourg right now so I doubt that it might be her.

Here is someone else who we might have seen over the last few days out there in the English Channel.

Unfortunately the weather is nothing like as clear as it was yesterday morning for us to give a positive identification but thinking that it might again be the training ship Belem, I made a note of her position.

Sure enough, when I returned, I could check on the historical radar plot and Belem was indeed at that spot round about that time of the afternoon.

There was nothing else going on out there of any importance (apart from the mad stampede that you saw earlier) so I pushed on around the headland.

As I crossed over the road, one of the errant Nazgul went swooping by over the top of the old bunker so I stopped to take a photograph of it.

And then I ended up in a mad stampede of my own down the hill chasing after my camera’s lens cap that I had unfortunately dropped.

Luckily I managed to avoid being run down by a car coming up the hill towards me. We both would have had a surprise.

At this point I was overflown yet again, this time by a mechanical device and I wondered why it had taken them so long to find me.

This is one that we recognise, having seen her many times just recently. She’s the Granville Aero Club’s Robin DR 400-140B F-GBAI going out on an afternoon flight.

She was first picked up on radar at 16:01 (my photo is (adjusted) 16:14) and she did a few laps around the Ile de Chausey and then up and down the coast before disappearing off the radar again near the airfield at 17:50

There was no change in occupant at the chantier naval today so I turned my attention elsewhere.

The ferry that we saw coming over from the Ile de Chausey, I wasn’t sure who she was. But I can tell you who she wasn’t because the older one of the two Joly France boats is sitting there at the quayside already with a load of people on the path just above her as if they have just gone ashore.

And here on the other side is the little freighter Chausiaise. So it can’t be any one of those two. But we’ll find out in a couple of minutes.

And it didn’t even take that long before we were to find out.

Around the bend, alongside the sea wall and into the harbour came the brand-new Belle France, crammed to the gunwhales with people from the Ile de Chausey.

There were quite a few people on the sea wall by now admiring her as she appeared, and quite rightly too because not only is she a beautiful machine, she’s a sign of faith and optimism that there’s plenty of life left in the port.

And with the uncertain future surrounding the Channel Island ferries and the gravel boats, then this is good news.

One thing that I have to do before I finish.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my pages are littered with inter alia photos of people taking photos. Today we had a large family group with a photographer who was taking pictures of them, with tripod and all.

This was far too good an opportunity to miss and I had to add a discreet shot of the event to my little collection.

Back here at the apartment I finally finished my notes from yesterday and then I joined up the tracks for the radio programme for tomorrow.

When that was done I attacked my pizza which was delicious. I haven’t made anything else though because I’m off on Tuesday to Leuven.

And now seeing as I’m exhausted, I’m off for an early night ready to start work tomorrow. Radio first of course, and I also have the injection man coming as well. I wonder if that will kickstart me into life for my trip to Leuven.

Thursday 5th August 2021 – HAVING BEEN FEELING …

… a little better over the last couple of days, I’m afraid that the inevitable happened today. I ended up having the worst morning that I’ve had for a considerable period of time. While I should have been out at Lidl doing my shopping, I was curled up in the foetal position on my chair in the office, and that’s no good for anyone.

But be that as it may, I consoled myself with the thought that I was probably feeling a little better than any landlubber who might have found himself on the deck of Normandy Trader as she set out from the port this afternoon.

Right into the teeth of a raging nor’wester that hit her full bow-on the moment that she left the shelter of the harbour wall. And with having a blunt end at the bow, I bet that she would have felt every wave that came smashing into her.

This was not the weather for the faint-hearted to be out at sea this afternoon.

And if you are wondering what has brought this on, well here’s your answer.

As you can see, we were hit this afternoon by one of these rolling storms that soaked absolutely everything that was in its path, including me

It was relatively moderate, if windy weather when I set out for my walk but the wind soon whipped it onto the shore and we suddenly got the lot. Where there were once several dozen people idly strolling along the path, the next minute it was panic-stricken flight and the path cleared in a matter of seconds.

If I had had any sense I would have cleared off with them as well, but I had things that needed my attention.

Normandy Trader left the harbour while I was on that side of the headland and I wanted to see if I could catch a glimpse of her out at sea and see how she was doing, battling against the storm.

However, you couldn’t see a thing out there in all of this. Eventually I was able to make out some kind of trace of a wake so I took a photo with the aim of digitally enhancing it when I returned to the apartment. And this is the best that I can do.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. While you admire another photo of Normandy Trader fighting her way out of the harbour, I was busy fighting my way out of bed.

After the medication I came back in here for a listen to the dictaphone to see where i’d been during the night.

There were all kinds of things going on last night like I’d started to make a radio programme. It was all about little bits of music or speech in French and it was all over the place. It took some tidying up and someone’s speech overran by miles, all kinds of things. I can’t really remember all that much about it now except having to combine all these speeches together to make my programme.

A little later on we were talking about postal charges and how I had to spend a lot of money getting a jacket back from Canada once but only £5:99 to get a camera back. There were some jokes about “what was my jacket doing in the meantime? Who was wearing it?” And all that sort of thing – had she stripped it off and was no longer interested. The question came round to postage and Airfix kits where it was all just die-cast plastic – you’d cast a few off, put them into envelopes and post them away, and why was postage “always to be advised” when you were buying something on line. It turned round to me singing on board the ship. I’d just started to sing a song when the alarm went off.

Until breakfast time I occupied myself in doing some more tidying up of the new computer drives. Then after breakfast I had some things that needed my attention but that was when I hit the wall and so I remined curled up on my chair for a couple of hours.

For two pins I would have climbed into bed and gone to sleep properly but that’s defeatism. If I were to do that I’d be in bed for the rest of my life and that wouldn’t be very long. I have to stay up and slug it out.

When I finally recovered my wits, such as they are these days, I did some tidying up in here and threw away a pile of stuff.

After lunch I set about trying to print out a label for the return of my NIKON 1 J5 and its faulty lens but it seems that the printer has failed definitively.

At the moment it’s printing just blue ink and not very much of that, despite all four cartridges being full of ink. I’ll buy some genuine ink cartridges at the weekend and see if it will work with those, and if not, it will be a new printer. I never have much luck with printers

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

First stop of course is the beach. Well, not actually on the beach, but to look down upon it to see what was happening.

And with the tide being well in, there wasn’t all that much beach for things to be happening upon. But there were still a few hardy souls sticking it out down there.

There were even one or two people in the water, and had they realised what was heading their way, they probably would have been well-advised to stay in it because it was bound to be drier than what they were about to receive.

And I would have loved to have been there to have witnessed the panic-stricken flight up the steps to the Rue du Nord when the going got tough.

And if you are wondering what I meant by “what was heading their way” then take a look at this.

As usual, I had one eye on the beach and one eye out at sea, and I caught a glimpse of this yacht being battered by the storm as the giant dark cloud was catching it up.

The waves and the whitecaps should be enough of a clue about the weather. And it’s no surprise that I ended up being as soaked as I was. One glance at this made me think that I had better get a move on otherwise I would be regretting it.

So I didn’t hang around. Down the path, across the car park and round the corner like a ferret up a trouser leg

We’ve seen a few photos of Normandy Trader already on her way out of the harbour, and here’s another one.

She’s still not cleared Le Loup – the marker light at the mouth of the harbour, so she’s no more than a couple of hundred yards out at sea and still theoretically in the shelter of the headland, although you wouldn’t have thought so judging by the waves and the spray that are beating over her bow

You can imagine what that is going to be like when she’s 30 kilometres out in the bay.

But while all of this is going on with Normandy Trader we must not allow ourselves to be distracted from anything else that might be going on down there.

And we’re having a change of occupancy down in the chantier naval. The trawler Charlevy is still there but at long last, the yacht Rebelle is going back into the water.

A good few weeks after the crew that was repairing her told me that it would be “shortly”, which I suppose it is, geologically-speaking. I wonder who is going to be coming into the chantier naval to take her place.

At this point my reverie was interrupted by a loud blast from a siren nearby.

It’s actually one of the Joly France boats, the older one of the two, reversing out of the ferry terminal on her way to the Ile de Chausey.

Plenty of people standing around watching (the rain hadn’t hit over there yet) but there didn’t seem to be too many people on board, and that was probably just as well because, although she has a pointed bow of course, she still has a pile of waves that are going to hit her as she heads out to sea.

And while we’re at it, let’s have a look at Chausiaise.

She’s still where she was yesterday, moored up against the wall by the harbour gates, and still with her freight hatches open. So she can’t have been on the point of unloading or loading up yesterday as I thought.

And I hope that she has some decent bilge pumps to pump out the water. Leaving the hatches open in a rainstorm that is going to arrive any minute is not a good idea.

But diverting my attention back to the chantier naval once more, I notice that there’s another change that I have missed.

The yacht Rebelle is on her way out of the place of course, but if we look closely, we see that the little inshore shell-fisher that was in between the two trawlers seems to have preceded her into the water today.

And in a storm like this that’s boiling up nicely, it will be a good test of workmanship in the chantier naval to send them right out of the repairer’s into the open sea. We’ll soo n see how good the work was.

So having done that I scurried off in the teeth of the gale and right into the storm head-on in order to catch a final glimpse of Normandy Trader as she disappeared off into the sunset.

And as she went off out of sight, around the headland came Joly France.

This photo needed to be digitally enhanced too in order to pick her out of the raincloud which was by now drenching everyone and everything. And you can see that she’s making really heavy weather of the crossing, and she’s only about a mile out.

This is not ordinarily the weather for her to be going out, but there must be a good crowd of day trippers on the island who would otherwise be stranded there, and there’s almos nothing in the way of shelter on the island

But no matter what the circumstances, I bet that they aren’t looking forward all that much to the return journey.

By the time that I returned home I was dripping wet, and I mean that too. A hot coffee went down really well while I dried out.

The rest of the evening was spent dealing with photos from Greenland 2019 (I have to justify my day somehow), playing guitar and then making tea. The last of the aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit from a few months ago so I had better make some more next week

Now I’m off to bed. It’s been a harrowing day for me and a good sleep might do me some good. At least it can’t be any worse than today.

Tuesday 27th July 2021 – THERE’S A TIME …

… and a place for relaxing, as everyone must surely agree.

But wherever and whenever it is, it isn’t at 17:15 on a Tuesday afternoon on the grass verge on a car park when you have a whole beach not 200 yards away down some steps where you can recline to your heart’s content.

However, I’m rather disappointed that these were two guys. Had it been a guy and a gal I would have come out with some kind of witty remark like “just look at that young couple on the verge …” but you can’t win a coconut every time, which is a shame.

Another time when it isn’t is at 07:30 on your chair in your office when you’ve made a special effort to leave your stinking pit at 06:00. I was hoping to have a good day to crack on with a pile of work seeing as there were no distractions, but 90 minutes flat out in the early morning is no way to start the day, particularly with the amount of time that it takes me to recover.

All in all, today was something of a failure and I’ll have to do better tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I did find time to look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was with 2 girls again and then these2 girls split up and left me with one of them but it wasn’t really the one that I wanted as you might expect but nevertheless I put a brave face on it. We went to Gregory’s nightclub in Nantwich and went on a few attractions, things like the Sliding Settee and all that, the invisible barman, whatever. There was a game-thing where you sat on it and it shot you off across this board, took a right-handed turn and shot off somewhere else and so on. I was really worried about my camera banging everywhere but I managed to make it across all the way without causing any damage. I said to this girl that after than I needed a drink and we’d go for coffee but I think she wanted a tea so we fixed on the bar where the disappearing barman was. By this time, I had a dog, an old Irish dog something like Jessie that we used to have and that was with me so the 4 of us (… who was the 4th? …) went upstairs wearing captain hats or something like that. Somewhere in this Liz (which Liz? There are several who appear in my nocturnal rambles) turned up as well and she was saying that if only she had a decent bicycle she’d get rid of her bike and buy a …I fell asleep here ….. Did I say that Liz appeared somewhere in this saying that if she lived somewhere instead of where we were living she’d have a decent bike because it’s very hard for her and her sons and everyone not to be able to drive so I told her about electric bikes and asked whether electric bikes might get her up the hills around here.

Strangely enough, or maybe not, depending on how you look at things, while I was flat out on the chair I’d been on a ramble or two or three as well, but these were a confused hotch-potch of nonsense. I was with my brother in Crewe and we’ were on our way home from something. We called into a Penny Arcade place There was a young girl in there and another man. My brother and I separately and without knowing what the other was doing whispered some kind of warning into this man’s ear. Eventually the man left so we followed him and when we caught up with him he was busily committing a serious offence. We took hold of him and had him on the floor and the police came and took all of us. The man was taken away and the three of us were left to wait. After an age someone came and asked if we were the drunken brawl people too which we said no so he left. We waited again for ages end eventually decided to look in the rooms to see if we could see the guy who had seen us just now and find out what was going on. But we kept on interrupting people in the middle of meetings, stuff like that, and there was no-one there to help our enquiry
Later on there was something with Zero too and something else with another young girl who ended up living in the total chaos that was my house. I invited some of the kids including this girl back to my bedroom but it was in such a state that I went to clean it. Lifting stuff off the bed I was finding all sorts, half-eaten bananas, piles of dust, a plumbing kit, a box with some leaky bottles, pile of polystyrene balls and the sheets were so dirty and stained it was unbelievable. When I had everything on the floor I went to fetch the vacuum cleaner but from downstairs someone shouted “food” so I went down. The girl was eating some hot chick peas and there were three other bowls of similar food, two of them boiling away. None were for me though. I usually make my own lunch. But I wanted to talk to this girl. At some point I’d seen her walking in the street. I had been on a racing bicycle and going quite fast when I passed her, and again on the way back
At some point Percy Penguin put in an appearance too.

There was lots more to it than this but seeing as you are probably eating your meal right now I’ll spare you the gory details. But there we were complaining the other day about the lack of regulars in our most recent nocturnal voyages and lo! And behold! A couple more turn up unexpectedly during a most impromptu repose.

You can’t beat it.

So once I recovered I made a coffee and then filled a little more (but not much) of the shelf unit in the kitchen.

Back in here I started to work on my photos from my adventures on board Spirit of Conrad but I needed to find a piece of paper. This led to stripping out the bookcase in here, sorting out a pile of stuff, binning loads of it, putting some for filing and generally making the bookcase much more accessible.

And just in case you are wondering, I didn’t find the piece of paper for which I was looking.

After lunch I had a session on the acoustic guitar (I’m changing my hours around a little), answered the phone from my hospital in Leuven, sent them a message and took out some of the rubbish. Yes, the highlight of the day, that was!

Just as I was about to go out for my afternoon walk we had the most tremendous downpour and I wasn’t going anywhere in that. I hung around and waited for it to pass and so it ended up with being a rather late walk.

Of course, it goes without saying that I’m going to go and have a look at the beach.

Plenty of beach again of course, but not so many people down there. At least those who were down there were having plenty of fun.

And I was surprised not to see many more. It’s only the beaches on the south side of the headland that are closed to the public. Here on the north they are open so I was expecting to see half of Paris down there.

But anyway, ignoring the people lying about on the verge, I cleared off along the path.

Joining the madding crowds of people massing on the path around the headland.

Even one or two of them wearing masks today too. Just one or two. I think that there must be more than just me concerned by the rapid rise in the number of infections just now

There was something else quite surprising too, and that is that there was nothing – absolutely nothing – going on out at sea today. Not even anyone fishing from a rowing boat. Where has everyone gone?

At last I actually find some kind of sea craft out at sea.

As soon as I saw it I was off down the path and across the car park like a ferret up a trouser leg to see what it might be. But at this range, it wasn’t easy to pick it out wit the naked eye.

Back hone though, it didn’t take much of an effort to see that it was a trawler out there just off the Phare de la Pierre-de-Herpin and the Pointe de Grouin.

Usually at this point I would say something about exploring different fishing grounds, but being the only water craft out there – never mind the only fishing boat – then anything could be happening.

Instead, I wandered off along the path on top of the cliffs to look at what was going on down in the port.

The chantier naval is always a good place to start. The yacht Rebelle and the trawler Charlevy are there of course, as are the other two trawlers whose names I don’t know.

But we can see that the one that we saw in primer yesterday now has its first top coat on the wind deflector. It won’t be long before they paint her name on it and then hopefully we can find out who she is before she goes back into the water.

And find out about the fourth one too while we are at it.

Before I go back home, and before I comment on the fact that I haven’t been overflown by anything today, which is a surprise in itself, I must comment that at least a couple of the smaller fishing boats must be out at sea.

The tractor and trailer that collects the shellfish from a couple of the boats is parked in position at the ready so it must be waiting for one of its clients to come in with some supplies.

It was at this point that I had a phone call from Rosemary so I dashed home quickly to call her back. However I was detained on the steps by a neighbour so by the time that I’d grabbed my coffee it was later than I thought.

As is usual, Rosemary and I chatted for ages putting the world to rights, to such an extent that I missed my bass guitar practice completely which is a shame. I’ll have to move that too.

Tea was taco rolls (that didn’t fall apart like the stuffed pepper) and the last of the jam roly poly. Tomorrow I suppose I’ll have to resuscitate some apple pie from out of the fridge.

Now I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh chat tomorrow evening so I need to be on form for that. So here’s hoping for a better day.

Saturday 24th July 2021 – JUST TO PROVE …

…. that I can do it when I really try, this is sunrise this morning.

It says 05:44 on the image date-stamp but because my cameras and recording equipment are always set to local standard time, it was in fact 06:44.

And by this time I’d had my medication, checked the dictaphone (to find that there was nothing at all on it – what a shame. I thought that Castor and Pollux might have come back to carry on from where we left off last night) and I was making a mug of coffee.

Such is the dedication, but unfortunately it didn’t last, as you will find out if you read on.

With nothing to transcribe on the dictaphone, I used the time by attacking the photos from August 2019 when we were in zodiacs cruising around Disko Bay in the Davis Strait.

A little later I went for a shower and then set the washing machine off on a cycle (a very clever washing machine, mine). And at the astonishingly early hour of 08:15 I hit the streets and went to the shops

3 Shops I visited, all in all. Lidl, Noz and LeClerc. Not an emty shelf in sight and you couldn’t move round the aisles for the piles of fresh fruit and vegetable. As well as the usual apples, pears and bananas, I bought peaches, grapes and a melon. Ill be pigging out this week

In fact, LIDl’s shopping bill came to something like €46:00 and it’s not very often at all that I spend that much there without something tangible to show for it.

At Noz, the building that they are constructing on the waste land at the back is coming on apace, but I’m more interested in what was in the shop.

And at long last I found four matching seat cushions for my dining chairs. And a folder for all of my Welsh Summer School stuff. And some frozen falafel and as well as that some frozen vegan minced “beef”.

That was a good find because I need to make a curry, being pretty low down on stuff like that in the freezer and I was wondering what to use. That will make a nice change.

It was an important shop in LeClerc too. I told you that I was running out of stuff in here not having been shopping for a couple of weeks. But now I have a full freezer, a full fridge, a full vegetable rack and full shelves.

Having done all of the shopping I rushed back home and dragging only half the shopping up here (you’ve no idea how heavy everything was), putting the freezer stuff away, sorting out the washing and hanging it on the airing cupboard, I was ready for my new Saturday morning Welsh chat session, armed with hot chocolate and fruit bread.

Brain of Britain has struck once again.

After that, I can’t remember what I did. But one thing that I do know is that it wasn’t very much.

There was a pause for lunch, as you might expect, and then I came back in here. Next thing that I remember was that it was something like 16:15. I’ve had another one of those cataleptic crashing-out that has been the bane of my existence for the last 6 months.

Mind you, I don’t think that going to bed well after midnight contributed much to my good health.

So with no buses outside ruining the pavement and the grass, I wandered over across the car park to have a look down on the beach to see what was going on this afternoon.

And what surprised me more than anything was that there were so many people down on the beach this afternoon.

It may not look like it in this image but right now it was teeming down with rain. I hadn’t noticed at first, but I soon did once I put my sooty foot out of the front door of the building and I hadn’t gone 20 yards before I went back for my raincoat .

So all of those people strolling up and down the beach trying to work out what to do on summer Saturday afternoon that is probably one of the wettest that I have every know, well, they are braver people than I am.

As usual, while one of my eyes was roaming around the beach, the other one was busy roaming around out to sea to see what I could see.

And while regular readers of this rubbish will recall being regaled with endless photos of whole fleets of boats out there at sea during the week and would have been expecting to see maybe ten times that on a Saturday afternoon in midsummer, then you are in for a shock.

In the expanse of the water in the Baie de Granville between here and the Ile de Chausey, I couldn’t even see one boat. And that’s probably the most surprising thing of all today.

So on that note, I cleared off along the path around the headland, dropping my camera lens cap on the way.

There was however something going on out at sea. I’d seen something vaguely white down the coast near St Malo.

Back home, I cropped the image, enhanced it and enlarged it, and I found that there were two yachts just emerging out of a rainstorm down the Brittany coast. I can’t think that they must have been enjoying the weather out there very much.

And neither was I. I didn’t want to be hanging around too much in all of this so I cleared off rather smartish-like.

Across the car park and down to the headland, nothing going on down there. Not even a fisherman today which was a surprise. So I wandered off along the path on the other side of the headland to see what was going on there.

And it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow anyone any good, as we all know.

As well as the driving rain, we were having winds of April-and-May proportions which were presumably keeping most people indoors, but not this father and his two sons.

They were making the most of whatever the weather could throw at them by flying a kite. They weren’t particularly good at it, I have to say, but full marks to them for trying it. Most of the other people around here at the car park in the Boulevard Vaufleury had taken shelter in their vehicles.

But I’m not quite sure what had happened to this Volkswagen with a broken rear window.

It’s the kind of thing that I’ve seen happen before, when someone has put a rather large object on the parcel shelf and then slammed the tailgate without thinking.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall watching a young girl open a car door, causing the glass to come into contact with the mirror of the car next to her. The mirror made short work of her window.

On the other hand, there could have been something more sinister going on here with this broken window, but anything that I might say and any suggestion that I might make would be pure speculation.

In case you are wondering where all of the boats are that ought to be out at sea right now making the most of a Saturday in mid-summer, then now you know the answer.

They are all here, moored up in the inner harbour and left to go aground with the changing tide. The owners are, I imagine, either at home curled up y the wire with a good book, or else in one of the many bars in the town waiting for the weather to turn.

But it was something of a forlorn hope. There was 10/10th cloud everywhere with no sign of anything clearing. In fact at rained all afternoon, all evening and by the looks of things, it’ll be raining all night too.

There doesn’t look as if there is going to be any let-up in this weather until the wind turns round.

You can see what I mean by looking at this photo here.

This is the Rue du Port on a Saturday afternoon at a couple of minutes to 5:00pm in late July, and you’ll see that some of the cars have their headlights illuminated. That tells you everything that you need to know about the weather.

And that was my lot today. I wasn’t going to hang around in this sort of weather. I headed for home.

And having had a nice cold Strawberry Smoothie yesterday afternoon, today it was a nice, hot strong coffee. It was taters outside.

Shock! Horror! I did some tidying up, and then I came for tea. One of those bread-crumbed soya things of which I bought a pile a while ago and stored in the freezer. That was followed by jam roly-poly.

Bedtime now, although I’m not tired, having had a really long sleep this afternoon. But I’ll do my best.

It’s a lie-in tomorrow but there’s plenty of work to do, like bake some more bread, for example. For some reason the loaf that I made the other day was a dismal failure. I blame the useless yeast myself, but it could really be down to anything.

Tomorrow I’ll give it another go.

Wednesday 7th July 2021 – I’M FED UP …

… of this perishing weather.

This afternoon I didn’t have the chance to go out for my afternoon walk because it was raining like it had never rained before.

Even in all my wet-weather gear I wasn’t going to set foot outside the building in all of this. Torrential rain had nothing whatever on what was coming down when I wanted to go for my walk.

The irony of it all was that there was a Welsh conversation on-line tonight and I was bent on joining it. And while we were chatting, the sun came out and there was some blue sky too. But the moment the chat finished, down came the rain, right on cue, and that was that.

Last night was another rather late night because something came up on the Old-Time Radio – an Agatha Christie play concerning Hercule Poirot – so I stayed up and listened to it. If it meant for a bad night and following morning, that’s rather a shame but for me I ought to be having some pleasure out of life somewhere.

As a result it was rather a struggle for me to raise myself from the bed when the first alarm went off, and some time after I’d taken my medication and come back in here I’d crashed out, sitting on my chair. And for about an hour and a half too. I must have been tired.

When I’d recovered I made myself a coffee and then had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d bought some item of clothing and it was going to be for me only and it was very special. I was living at Coleridge Way at Nerina’s. Somehow this thing was picked up in her washing and washed along with everything else and hung out on the airing trolley things. I was wondering how on earth I was going to get it back. I had to wait for a moment when everyone was out of the house. I waited for a period of over a couple of days until everyone had gone and I went downstairs and into the living room where all of these clothes were on airers. There had been a bed made up on the sofa. I crept over there to see and it was an empty bed. I thought that with the bed being on the sofa there was something strange going to happen and so I slowly made my way round to where this article was. Then I heard voices in the house so I waited thinking that the way to distract these people whose voice this was would be to leap out and startle them, and that way to forget what it was that was going on. That was what I did, and it turned out that it was my youngest sister and someone else, another female of our family. They’d both been involved in a car accident so I immediately went to console them both and tell them “it doesn’t matter – it’s only metal” and so on. Another guy was there. he was trying his best to console them as well. All the time this article that I wanted was still up on the clothes airers and I was in a very great danger of actually losing it again to someone else who wasn’t going to be careful about what they packed up and what they put away.

Tater on there was another long and rambling dream that went on and one and on. What I can remember was that some girl was having to have lessons. My brother had been giving her lessons but was unable to do so so I was now having to do it. We were living on the Wistaston Green estate and I had to find out where to go. They said that on Saturdays she lived at home but on Sundays she stayed at someone else’s house. On the Saturday it was somewhere on the Wistaston Green estate but no-one actually knew where. We knew where to go and where to park the car ans one of my sisters thought that she knew which house it was but every time I asked for the number it was “oh you just go there and park your car” and so on. The Sunday was a little clearer because I remember taking the phone call when she was changing it to her relative’s house. I could vaguely remember something about that. But there was tons to this and it just went on and on and I can’t rememner any of it.

While I was asleep on the chair though I was working in an office in Stoke on Trent. They had come along and cleared all of the files in the store room and sent them off to a central repository, which I thought was the strangest decision that I’d ever heard. Every time someone rang up or wrote in a letter you had to write to the central repository to get back the file before you could deal with their query. I’d had something to do with one particular case which I’d been working quite regularly but the file wasn’t there so in the end I went into the basement, couldn’t find this file there so a guy whom I used to know and I went off to the central repository which was in Stoke on Trent. He said that he knew his way around so off he went. I ended up just sitting there for a couple of hours and I was totally fed yp so I decided to go back home again. Back to the van was past a compound with all of these big Bentley 3-litres in it. Then there was a place wirh 4 or 5 Isetta bubble cars all mangled, it was that kind of place. Just as I was getting into Caliburn to go back, he appeared. He said that he couldn’t find the file but he’d found one of his big old buckets that he’d had before and went to empty it over the edge of this drop so that he could take it back but he almost ended up going over the drop with all of the rubbish that was in this bucket thing before he could stop himself.

It must have been a really deep sleep on the chair if I’d wandered off like that.

So having organised myself and grabbed my breakfast much of the morning up until lunchtime was spent dealing with the photos of Greenland in August 2019. I’m not about to go for a wander in a zodiac to look at the icebergs in the Davis Strait and Disco Bay just off Ilulissat. And this, I remember, is the day that I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me.

But one thing about editing these photos – it makes me want to go North again.

My work this morning was interrupted by a couple of things. Firstly, I crashed out yet again for half an hour or so, and secondly, I had a visit from the postie. The first of the deliveries from my mega-Amazon order. And so immediately after lunch I went into unpacking-mode.

A pair of batteries for each of the NIKON D500 and NIKON 1 J5 cameras. And I bet that I still end up down the street with flat batteries too at some point or another.

But interestingly, the new generation of chargers work off 5-volt USB connectors rather than the mains current. So that means less gadgets to haul around with me

The new Dashcam came too, and that took ages to work out how to initialise it, and the new multi-caddy that I’ll be using for back-up storage. The memory is here too, as is the new USB 3.0 multi-connector but that’s all a job for next weekend after I come back from Leuven when hopefully, the two new hard drives for the computer will be here.

By now it was time to go for a walk but the lousy weather put the brakes on that, as I told you earlier.

Going back upstairs I stuck the camera out of the rear window overlooking the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs to take a photo of the weather out there as well. I wasn’t going to end up being soaked just for the sake of a couple of photos.

Instead, I came back here and did some more work on my trip down the coast on board Spirit of Conrad last year. This is a pretty slow process because there’s about 400 photos and I don’t really know what to write about most of them – although that has never stopped me in the past of course.

There was a Welsh chat on Zoom this evening so I wanted to join, but the tutor had sent me the wrong link so it took a while for me to be connected. But a couple of things that I noticed, namely

this particular tutor is a lot more disorganised than the two that we have had so far
this was a mixture of people from several groups and the people from our group were much more confident than the people from the other groups

Tea tonight was chips with burger and baked beans followed by chocolate sponge and coconut soya stuff. I’ll be back to making chocolate sauce for the next few days now.

But not right now because I’m off to bed. It’s shopping tomorrow of course, if I don’t fall asleep, and there might even be more toys from Amazon. Won’t that be nice?

Tuesday 6th July 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day today, and for many, many reasons too.

You can see in this photo exactly what was going on today and one of the reasons why today was so horrible.

You can see the zodiac in front rearing up on a very tall wave, and the waves were so deep that it looked as if the people in the rear yacht were actually sitting in the water rather than in a boat.

Add to that the fact that the rain was teeming down and you’ll understand one of the reasons why today was so horrible. I know that I’ve talked about going for sailing lessons over there but I do have to say that I’m glad that what with one thing or another I never followed it up if I were going to be out there in all of this.

Another reason, and probably the most important, is that it’s been a dreadful day for me too.

Having had a late night or two just recently I made a sepcial effort to be in bed quite early last night, and yet it didn’t seem to do much good and if anything it made me even morse.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I was up quite quickly and after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was in Germany somewhere working in an office and I wanted to take out legal proceedings against someone but I wasn’t sure how to do it. There was no-one around to ask so I thought that I’d go to the Law Courts which were only a short walk away so I set off and ended up in a cemetery. There were several people who had been executed by the Germans and some war casualties, and a sign about so many German soldiers known to have been buried in this site long before the days of the Napoleonic Wars etc. I had a good walk around here because I was a foreigner who didn’t come into any of this kind of thing but it was interesting all the same. There was a café there and they were selling ice cream strawberry sundaes and they looked absolutely delicious. I joined the queue for one. Even when I ended up being the only person in this shop they weren’t serving me, they were serving other people who were sitting at the table. I wondered what I had to do to make myself be served.because I really fancied one of these sundaes. They looked absolutely magnificent. It was a really magnificent graveyard this with all kinds of wonderful headstones and all this, so typically Victorian Gothic Magnificent.

There was something else later on about WWII with the US Army about to cross the Rhine and they had fleets of red Routemaster and RT London buses that they were going to drive aross the Rhine full of US soldiers. One or two of them had already been hit by shells and knocked out of the line that was going to cross the Rhine and 1 or 2 in the Rhine that were disabled but they were simply going to drive these buses across the Rhine

And wouldn’t it have been nice to have had one of my regular companions coming with me. In fact these days, my companions are becoming less and less regular and that’s what I find quite disappointing.

With a hot mug of coffee in my hands I sat down and started on some work but the next thing that I knew, it was 09:48 and I’d missed most of the morning. There was just enough time to brush up my Welsh ready for our chat session, during which I had the great misfortune to fall asleep, and fall asleep properly too.

After lunch I set about the photos of August 2019 and I was able to deal with quite a few before I fell asleep yet again. Three times on the same day is some kind of unenviable record and I’ve no idea where this is likely to lead me. But it’s not going to lead me very far.

Nevertheless I was awake by the time that I wanted to go for a walk. I made it as far as just outside the door and then had to come back for my raincoat. Even the, I wasn’t as prepared as I would have liked to be.

First port of call was the beach at the rue du nord to see what was going on, so I wandered off across the car park to see over the wall.

There wasn’t all that much beach to be on and in any case this kind of weather would be enough to put anyone off. There were three guys down there, one of whom was in the water. They were all wearing wetsuits and I suppose that that was the right kind of attire for this weather.

As for the scaffolding that I mentioned yesterday, that seems to have gone. I’ll have to go along to there tomorrow and have a closer look to see what had been going on.

With nothing else going on, I wandered off along the path on top of the cliffs.

There were a few people out there, with umbrellas and the like to protect them from the rain. By the looks of things and the registration numbers of the cars on the car park it looks as if they are mostly tourists.

I suppose that seeing as they have come here on holiday, they feel obliged to be out and about in it. And the headland round by the lighthouse and the semaphore is probably the place to be if they are going to be anywhere.

But on the subject of tourists, at least the dreadful weather that we are having might well keep the numbers, and hence the Covid infections, down.

As I was admiring the tourists out there braving the weather, a yacht suddenly appeared from around the headland.

“Rather them than me” I thought, because as I said earlier, I don’t think much of the weather that we are having. I’m fine on the sea in all kinds of weather, but I don’t fancy being soaked to the skin by the rain while I’m doing it.

So I left them all to it and carried on along the path along the clifftop towards the lighthouse. There wasn’t anything else going on out to sea either in the direction of the Ile de Chausey or the Channel Islands. It was all quite disappointing, but not surprising.

As I rounded the corner to take the path down to the car park I noticed one of the Joly France boats looking as if it has just left port.

There will be tourists who have booked a cottage on the Ile de Chausey for the holidays and regardless of the weather, they will be wanting to go out there and take possession. Consequently the ferries will still be running regardless of the weather – up to certain limits of course and we aren’t quite yet at that stage.

Yesterday we saw one of the ferries doing a lap around the Baie de Mont St Michel and this one today is the same boat – the one with the “portrait” windows. And now she’s off to the Ile de Chausey, although there aren’t too many people on board in this weather.

As well as the ferries, the company that runs the service out to the Ile de Chausey also owns a kind-of barge or small freighter.

When the ferries are full it’s difficult to transport all of the luggage and as well as that there is also a need to supply food and other items to the people out there. That’s when the barge – Chausiaise comes into use, ferryng the freight out to the islands.

It doesn’t look as if there is much going on right now as she is moored at the ferry terminal. When there is a pile of freight to take out, she goes into the inner harbour underneath the crane and they load her up from there, fighting for her place with the two Channel Island freighters Thora and Normandy Trader.

Nothing going on any special or different in the chantier naval but as I started to leave, a trawler started to leave too and headed out to sea.

No matter what the weather is doing, people still have to eat and so the boats have to be out there in this kind of weather to bring in the catch. And my hat comes off to those who go out to sea for the fish, even if I don’t eat it myself.

Outside the apartment I bumped into another one of my neighbours. We had a little chat and then I came in for my hot coffee and to carry on with the photos, and also to sort out all of the external hard drives and try to rationalise the collection.

We had the usual time on the bass guitar and then I went for tea. Veggie balls and pasta with tomato sauce, followed by chocolate sponge and coconut soya whatsit.

So now I’m off to bed. Here’s hoping that I have a better day tomorrow, and a nice trek out during the night with some good companions. I’ve been a bit stuck for good company just recently.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: rainstorm

Thursday 2nd December 2021 – I’M NOT SURE …

Wednesday 1st December 2021 – ONCE AGAIN I HAVEN’T …

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 – I HAVE HAD …

Wednesday 20th October 2021 – I WAS LUCKY …

Monday 18th October 2021 – I ALMOST SET …

Sunday 3rd October 2021 – I TRIED SOMETHING …

Saturday 2nd October 2021 – YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING …

Monday 27th September 2021 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Sunday 15th August 2021 – THE OTHER DAY …

Thursday 5th August 2021 – HAVING BEEN FEELING …

Tuesday 27th July 2021 – THERE’S A TIME …

Saturday 24th July 2021 – JUST TO PROVE …

Wednesday 7th July 2021 – I’M FED UP …

Tuesday 6th July 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …