Tag Archives: crash out

Thursday 28th July 2022 – THIS WAS ANOTHER …

… candidate for one of the worst days that I’ve had for quite a while.

Most of it has been spent asleep on my chair in the bedroom and that is extremely depressing.

So while you admire a few photos of the aerial activity that was taking place this afternoon while I was out and about on my travels I’ll tell you all about it, not that you want to hear it.

Anyway, last night I went to bed rather later than I intended, although not as late as it might have been.

But it was quite a lively night yet again and I was travelling about for quite a distance.

There was something happening last night. Someone had copy/pasted his signature into a document but the copy/paste had included a lot of inappropriate stuff. This had caused all kinds of problems for him with him copy/pasting instead of cropping what he had copy/pasted

And I was asking my self if I had I dictated about one daughter of my niece being upset about something? I dunno … “no you hadn’t” – ed. I was trying to talk to her and she went off to sit somewhere on a bench so I went over there to sit not too close to her to give her some room but not too far away. She said something but I can’t remember what it was, an ambiguous comment that could have meant “move up closer” or “move further away” and I couldn’t work out which was the meaning of this comment that she had said to me. I was at a loss to understand it.

A little later I was in a Welsh class. We’d come back after the holidays. We were a full class and I was sitting next to the boy next to whom I usually sit. We talked about what we’d done. The guy behind us talked about what he had done too so I rang up one or two other people who were in the class and was talking to them about their holidays. The teacher started to walk down the aisle handing out papers so I cut off the conversations. Some boy sitting in the aisle next to me started to play some Santana and put his music player on my desk. He asked “how do you fancy a bit of Santana?”. Much as I would have a bit of Santana any time, that wasn’t the time or place so I told him “not now” but he wouldn’t listen. He kept turning this Santana music. He was clearly irritating the prof, it was irritating me and irritating most of the other people around us too. We didn’t want that at that particular moment.

We’d been on the office outing somewhere. We’d been to a town somewhere in Europe. We’d arrived and we were all on board the bus. It was raining quite heavily so they decided that they would abandon the walking tour. Some woman was there with a young daughter and I was quite interested in the daughter. Everyone was asking what they were going to do etc so I said to this woman “when they drop us off we can go for a coffee” as an excuse to talk to the daughter. That seemed to be like a very good idea. She seemed to like that idea. We had to fetch our things and meet back on the bus in a couple of minutes. I wandered off back to my room to get my things together and walk back to where I thought that we’d pick up the bus but it wasn’t there. I was wondering what on earth had happened to it so I had a wander around. I overheard these 2 people talking, talking about the group. One of them had been on “Eric’s group and I’m sure that we’d had more goes than we were supposed to”. That rang a bell with me about something that we’d done. I walked round the corner and it was 2 people from our party. I asked them if they knew where we were meeting the bus. They thought that it was here but I thought that it was somewhere else. I thought that it might be a good idea to go down to this other place to have a look as it wasn’t far away but they didn’t seem to be interested in leaving so I thought that maybe I’d go on my own and leave them there because if they were there they would hold the bus for me if it were to come for me and I wasn’t there and give me chance to return to catch it.

A little later Percy Penguin made a brief appearance in a German class that I was teaching. I was trying to have my students say the diphthong “HK” correctly. She was there in this class having a practice and not getting it right.

Once more it was a struggle to leave the bed before the second alarm went off but I managed it nevertheless (only just) and then I came in here to transcribe my dictaphone notes.

Round about 10:00 I fell asleep and apart from a few moments of wakefulness here and there, that was that until about 15:30. Somehow I’d managed to fit in my breakfast and my lunchtime fruit but I’m not sure how.

Before going out for my afternoon walk I had a shower to clean myself up. I weighmed myself too and the weight that I’d been slowly losing over the last couple of weeks has gone back on. That has probably depressed me more than falling asleep.

Anyway, after the shower I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

And dodging the Nazguls that were flying by overhead I went over to the wall at the end of the headland to look down on the beach to see what was happening.

There ween’t all that many people down there this afternoon but of those who were there, there were quite a few of them in the water.

Further on down the coast a little way there were plenty of people in the water down there, but access to the beach down there at the Plat Gousset is so much easier.

As well as the aeroplanes and so on, there were one or two boats out at sea this afternoon.

There was one of the shell-fishing boats on its way back to port from out at the Ile de Chausey. It’s far too far away for me to identify it from here but her colours and the dinghy that she is towing reminds me very much of Les Bouchots de Chausey.

With the wind that was blowing there was quite a bit of dust about this afternoon. This drought is starting to become serious. It’ s making the place look like 1930s Oklahoma right now and it’s not going to improve until we have some rain.

Although when that might be I have no idea.

Down at the end of the headland I crossed the car park and went down to see what was happening on the rocks.

We had a couple of fishermen out there with rod and line this afternoon. They seemed to be enjoyng themselves except, of course, that they weren’t actually catching anything.

Not that I expected that they would.

No-one sitting on the bench down by the cabanon vauban either. They seem to be having a day off today. So I wandered off around the corner and down the path on the other side of the headland.

Down at the port we have a change in occupancy in the chantier naval.

La Confiance II is still in there, and there was someone doing some arc-welding on it as I went past this afternoon. And she’s now been joined by one of the little shell-fishing boats.

Unfortunately I can’t see her registration number so I’m not able to tell you who she might be.

No-one over at the ferry terminal either. They must all be out at work today as well. There was even La Cancalaise, the sister ship to La Granvillaise, out at the Ile de Chausey with a party from Cancale.

We didn’t have any ships at the Fish Processing Plant playing “Musical Ships” but we did have some fishing boats over there unloading.

Two of them are regulars of ours and we have seen them many times. At the front of the queue is CH922344 who is of course Le Roc A La Mauve III who we saw in the chantier naval for quite a while earlier in the year, and behind her is CH640361 who is Nais.

The third one is a mystery though. Her registration number begins with “M” and that’s the registration code for Milford Haven in Wales, so I’m not likely to find her in my database of French fishing vessels. Nevertheless it’s quite a puzzle as to what she’s doing coming all the way here.

Just now I mentioned that there was no-one at the ferry terminal.

As I walked back to the apartment, around the corner behind me came Chausiaise. She’s rather early and I don’t think that there’s enough water for her to moor at the ferry terminal quite yet.

Back here I had a coffee and then spent a while having a play on the acoustic guitar. I’m enjoying myself much more on the acoustic than I have done for a while and I can actually play an F chord that sounds like an F chord.

In fact, I’m tending much more to play songs in the original key regardless of the chords rather than playing them in keys in which the chords are easier to play. Gone are the days were I’m stuck in A C D E and G and their derivatives.

Tea was steamed veg with veggie balls with vegan cheese sauce and it really was delicious.

So bedtime now. if I’m lucky I’ll be in bed early and have a good night’s sleep. Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow. I can’t go on like this.

Wednesday 27th July 2022 – THERE WASN’T ANYONE …

… playing “Musical Ships” this afternoon at the Fish Processing Plant.

In case you are wondering where L’Omerta was this afternoon while I was out on my afternoon walk, she was out in the bay doing a spot of fishing, surrounded by a flotilla of yachts from one of the sailing schools being ushered along by a zodiac.

There were a couple of the smaller port lighters moored up at the quayside there but it’s not usually possible to identify them and in any case they are only there for a matter of minutes.

Something else that was oout there this afternoon was a large sailing ship out in the English Channel way beyond the Ile de Chausey.

At this kind of distance it’s impossible to identify her but having a crafty peek at the radar screen when I returned home I could see that Le Renard, the 30-metre sailing ship from St Malo, was out there in that position at that time.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, once more I ended up going to bed rather later than I intended, once again because something interesting came up on the on-line radio playlist.

Not as late by any means as the other night of course. We have to have some kind of limits somewhere.

During the night I travelled some considerable distance, but I actually started off at home. We were all there, all doing various things with electrics and electronics. Someone came to the door and asked for a quote so thinking that it might be for something like that I went to the door to ask them. It turned out that they wanted a quote for moving a load of carrots to Germany. For that I needed further information so I had to invite them in and clear a little space by my desk. Instead they went to sit on my sofa. That was difficult for me so I went to sit on a sofa over there. There were a couple of them and a very young girl and were talking about all kinds of strange and different things. One of our little girls was taking to them about something like that as well but not really about these carrots. I was trying to get them to come to the point so that I could deal with them but they were still busy talking about a pile of irrelevances. They asked if our milk was pasteurised. I replied that it was heat-treated. We talked about rockets to the moon. One of my sisters said that she was born on a rocket going to the moon so I corrected her and said that it was on a rocket coming back from the moon etc but no-one actually reached the point of talking about this lorry-load of carrots that needed moving.

And then this was where I’d had a bird bath or something delivered to me unexpectedly. Someone came to the door to me about it. They wanted to talk straight away but when I tried to talk there was some kind of major eruption from them about everything. It turned out that they were learning the language and wanted to practise it or something like that but they realised that this had been dropped in the wrong place and wanted it moved and wanted to do it themselves or organise it themselves. I didn’t have very much to say while this thing was swinging about. They finally managed to put it somewhere else.

Checking if my laptop didn’t work as well as I’d like. What I’d done was to switch it on and let it update itself. Then I’d been called away so I’d left it but it had been picked up by the Security people who had transported it to the central unit. I was watching it and the central unit was only programmed to show roads and a lot of the route that my laptop had taken was on internal pathways. It wasn’t shown on those. Basically the tracking thing for internal purposes was no use at all. Eventually I had the call through that my laptop had been found and I had to go to pick it up. That was at the centre so we went up there. Their building wasn’t a building at all but in the open air sheathed in tin while they were rebuilding the medieval city walls around them rather like they are doing in Leuven. It was pretty much a building site, I fell into a trench and people thought that it was funny there. In the end I managed to rescue my laptop that was still uploading and carry on with what i’d been doing.

So we were all back in this big hotel. I had my laptop. We were chatting. It was Christmas Eve. There was a huge group of us in the lobby and people were talking about what they were going to do. Someone said that he was goig to wait a few years, carry on working and then do all the things that he wanted to do with his £2 million. I said that his £2 million isn’t going to be worth that much in a few years time, which caused everyone to laugh. Then I decided that I’d go to bed so I took my laptop with me and went to my car. I went to plug the laptop in. One of the plugs I could plug in fine but the two RCA plugs I just couldn’t plug in at all. There was like a subsidiary plug on the RCA plugs that plugged into another part and I couldn’t make them line up no matter how I tried. They wouldn’t go in at all into the charging box

Somewhere in a dream with some girl or other we’d had to go along and file some important papers. To do that we had to access a room where there was no access. In theory I could always jump up there, catch it with my fingernails and haul myself up. The two of us went. The idea was that I’d take the torch and paperwork and jump up there, she would pass everything to me then I’d haul her up. There were some other people there too. They had something made out of a weird collection of plastic bottles full of water that they were trying to use as steps to get themselves up like a circus artist’s trapeze thing. I went round to my usual spot but didn’t even bother to try to jump because I knew that I couldn’t reach it. I thought “what kind of state am I in these days that I can’t even do something like this that I could have done so easily a couple of months earlier?” I really am in a bad state right now and I wish that I wasn’t. Usually my dreams are my only form of escapism but it seems that it’s even catching up with me there and that’s a horrible state of affairs.

It’s hardly a surprise that I had a real struggle to leave the bed this morning. I did manage to beat the second alarm but there wasn’t that much in it.

After the medication I had a really exciting time taking the metal, glass and plastic rubbish out to the bin. Such are the highlights of my life these days when I have that to look forward to.

As well as having a really good session on all of the guitars that went on for hours I’ve been downloading stuff again. I’ve found another OLD-TIME RADIO SITE that I hadn’t know about before. That had tons of Francis Durbridge’s “Paul Temple” radio programmes on it so I’ve been downloading them.

Some tidying up too, packing for my trip next week to Leuven and doing a little DiY around here too – stuff that I should have been doing a long time ago. I was so busy that I was surprised that I managed to find the time to crash out for half an hour after my lunchtime fruit.

And there was time to go out for my afternoon walk as well.

And as usual my first port of call was down at the end of the car park to have a look over the wall to see what was happening down on the beach.

A few more people down there this afternoon although no-one was brave enough to take the waters. “I was misinformed” as Rick Blaine might have said.

It was quite warm this afternoon, although not that warm. Not like it was the other day.

It was quite windy this afternoon too.

That ws evident by the number of Nazguls that were out and about. There were several of them hovering around having just taken off from the field by the cemetery and a few minutes later one of them went by overhead, casting a cold shadow on those of us below.

This one is another two seater and it looks as if the passenger is a rather young person. I wonder what the age limit is for going as a passenger on board a Nazgul … “it’s 6 years old” – ed.

The Nazguls weren’t the only things out there enjoying the wind either.

There was this rather beautiful yacht out there in the bay this afternoon having a sail around. And as I watched, her sail bellied out in the wind and she performed a rather dramatic U-turn and headed back the way that she had come.

At a rather slower pace, I followed her down towards the headland. I can’t travel as quickly as a yacht in full sail in a gale, unfortunately. Especially when I have other pedestrians to contend with.

Round about here, I noticed an aeroplane out there in the bay on its way back towards the airfield.

Too far out for me to read its registration number I took a photo of it in the hope that I could enlarge and enhance it when I returned home but when I did so, that didn’t reveal much either.

However, the records of the airfield show that F-GSBV, a Robin DR400 180 that we have seen on several occasions in the past, took off at 15:19 and flew down the coast to Avranches. It then flew out into the bay, did a lap around the Ile de Chausey and came bak to the airfield where it came in to land at 15:56.

My photo was taken at 15:48 (adjusted) so that seems to correspond.

The views out to sea today were really quite good.

You probably noticed that when you saw the earlier photo of the sailing ship out in the English Channel. It’s even more apparent with the view of the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel 70 kilometres away down the Brittany coast.

What is interesting about this photo is firstly that it wasn’t even taken from the usual spot on top of the bunker but from a place much more banal, and secondly I could see it with the naked eye without the aid of the camera lens.

From there I walked across the desert that at one time used to be a lawn and was almost squidged on the car park by two cars reversing out of parking spaces.

Nevertheless I adroitly avoided them and wandered down to the end of the headland where I noticed that we had a fisherman down there on the rocks.

According to the local newspaper this morning the ban on fishing at certain spots has been lifted and our fisherman here does have something in which he might drop his catch.

Always assuming that he does manage to catch something. That would be exciting if we were to see someone else pull something out of the water.

But whatever was happening, there was quite a crowd down there watching it.

These two people were sitting on the bench but they must have seen me coming because as soon as they saw me they stood up and made ready to leave. And who could blame them?

Not me anyway. I headed off down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port to see what was happening there, passing L’Omerta and her entourage as I did so.

La Confiance II is still in the chantier naval and still on her own. I’m hoping that she will have some more company soon.

In the inner harbour yesterday we saw Normandy Trader loading up with freight and setting sail for Jersey.

Today we have Thora in port too loading up with freight. The harbour gates are closed right now but once they are opened I imagine that she will be disappearing into the sunset.

My coffee was waiting so I disappeared into my apartment and then transcribed the dictaphone notes which you read a little earlier.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry that was just as delicious as last week’s. I’m not quite sure what it is that I’m doing differently that is responsible for the improvement but I wish that I knew so that I could keep on doing it.

While I was writing up my notes Rosemary rang me up and we had another long chat, and as a result I’m going to be quite late going to bed yet again. Isn’t it always the case? But then again talking to friends is an extremely permissible reason for being late and I don’t do it often enough.

Tomorrow is another day without a lot to do so I need to organise myself even better and catch up with some arrears. There are plenty of those.

Sunday 24th July 2022 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured an old car on these pages?

This afternoon when I went out for my walk there was this rather nice Lancia Fulvia Sport 1600cc parked outside by the new bicycle rack.

If I’ve identified this correctly this is one of the “Zagato” models designed by Ercole Spada and built in the early 1970s.

Beautiful cars but if I were spending the kind of money that I’d need to spend to buy one of these, I would have gone for the “Spider” with the roll-down soft top.

But anyway, be that as it may, while you admire a few photos of the local kids throwing themselves off the diving platform at the Plat Gousset, I’ll tell you about my miserable day.

And it’s hardly surprising that it went so bady considering how badly it started. It all went wrong last night when after having crashed out for hours last night, I couldn’t sleep.

At one point I thought that there wasn’t much point in going to bed because it was so late. But round about 03:30 I finally bit the bullet and fell into bed.

And surprisingly I didn’t stay awake all that long once I was in bed.

No alarm in the morning of course, with it being a Sunday.

And I was awake a few times here and there during the morning with it was about 11:15 when I finally took the plunge and left the bed.

After the medication I came back in here to have a play about with the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing tomorrow and combining the tracks into pairs.

The choice of the music for this week isn’t as exciting as it has been over the last few months and combining them in pairs wasn’t easy as they didn’t gel together at all.

But anyway, I did what I could and it doesn’t sound too bad.

That was the cue to go for lunch. Porridge, toast and strong coffee to try to make me feel better. But unfortunately it didn’t work out because after lunch while I was in the bedroom I drifted off to sleep again. How disappointing is that?

When I awoke I had a play about on the guitar for a while, playing through a few of the songs on my playlist. I have to keep uo on the music otherwise I’ll just slide back into oblivion as I did last winter when I was in a very bad place and stopped practising.

Mind you, I don’t think that I’m in a much better place at all these days seeing how the last couple of days have panned out.

At some point or other during the day I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I’d been in digs with some woman in some small town in Scotland. I’d been telling this woman that I was planning on settling in the area so she was trying to give me loads of stuff. I said that that was far too early yet because I don’t know what I had and where I was going etc. I was trying to find the bus timetable. In the end I did and there was one bus in the day and one bus in the evening to Inverness. I was interested in the evening bus to Inverness on Sunday evening so a local bus driver took me to find out about it. We spoke to some kind of strange Mennonite or Amish family who told me the correct answer. As I was leaving some other woman and her child told me the answer as well. The bus was at 22:55 which meant that it didn’t arrive in Inverness until the small hours of the morning which meant that I was going to have to keep my room here in this town. I couldn’t give it up and take a room in Inverness because everything would be closed when I arrived. I was sitting down there working out the differences, if I stayed for a week for example where I was it would cost me more than £1:00 in difference compared to staying as an ordinary bugler boy with the Salvation Army or something. I was performing all these calculations in my head as well to have it all organised here but it wasn’t organised the way that I wanted.

As it happens, I’ve actually been in a similar place to this in the Highlands of Scotland in the past during one of my nocturnal rambles.

And as usual I went out for my afternoon walk.

Today I chose to go around the medieval city walls so the view that I had of the people on the beach is quite different from how it usually is.

Not much beach right now but that didn’t seem to matter because most people who were down there this afternoon had made it into the water.

That’s no surprise because today was another candidate for one of the hottest days of the year.

And there were tons of stuff happening out zt sea today.

The first thing that I noticed as I walked around the corner was that Marité had finally made it out into the bay to take the locals for a ride – in more senses than one.

She was originally a fishing boat that went out to the Grand Banks of Labrador with a load of dories that were used for fishing for cod. She is apparently the last of the wooden-built Newfoundlanders that set sail from the ports of Western France.

There were plenty of of other boats out there too.

It took me a minute to work out who this one might be because I’ve never before seen her with all of her sail unfurled and set. But she is in fact La Granvillaise.

Once she turned to run with the wind I could see the familiar “G90” on her sails.

The Ile de Chausey in the background is looking magnificent too today.

It wasn’t just the Ile de Chausey that was looking nice today.

The view out to Jersey this afternoon was magnificent and you could see everything on the island with the naked eye even though it’s 58kms away from where I was standing. I’ve not enhanced this photo at all.

There are even a couple of speedboats right out there in the bay just off the Channel Islands and the camera has picked them up really well today.

We could do with a few more days like this.

Retuning to our moutons as they say around here, the new Belle France is having another run-out this afternoon.

She’s taking a boat-load of tourists for a quick lap around the bay while the tide is in the correct position.

As for why all of these boats are out and about this afternoon, this morning has been what they call the Grand Pardon, the religious procession when they bless all of the boats and the seafarers.

Last year we were there taking a few photos but today I was in bed while all of this was going on.

There are still more interesting boats out there in the English Channel behind the Ile de Chausey. I haven’t finished yet.

This one isn’t one of our local boats and it’s too far away for me to be able to identify it correctly.

However, a glance at the radar when I returned home showed me that somewhere over there at the time that I took the photo was a 33-metre sailing boat called Le Renard that resembled that boat.

She left St Malo at 13:52 and returned to port at 17:59 so the timing would seem to be correct anyway

Before I left the area I had a look at the repointing of the medieval city walls to see what was happening down there.

Not that I can see everything everything from here, but by the looks of things they seem to be on the point of finishing. So where will they be going next?

Having shown a few tourists where the steps down to the beach were situated, I walked off across the Place du Marché aux Chevaux and through the arch to walk along the path underneath the city walls.

Having taken a pile of photos of the kids leaping off the diving platform, I carried on to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

There were crowds of people down there this afternoon. Imagine being sandwiched somewhere in that lot while confronting the issues presented by some of the highest tides in Europe.

It’s not really the place to be if you aren’t of a sociable turn of mind so it wouldn’t be doing me any good at all. I’m not even tempted by an ice-cream these days, due to a “certain photograph” that was published by someone looking down on a delivery vehicle.

Instead I wandered off around into the Square Maurice Marland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few weeks we have been keeping an eye out on three young seagull chicks. They weren’t there this afternoon but what we did have was a mother seagull teaching her chick to fly.

If her chick had already made it this far, then it’s doing pretty well and won’t need a great deal more teaching. But it was crying for its mother in that weird little chirping noise that baby seagulls make although its mother wasn’t taking much notice and was busy chirping away to herself.

She was probably trying to warn us that there were something else going past us in the air.

This aeroplane is F-GTJC and that tells me that she’s a Cessna 172S. My photo was taken at 16:36 (adjusted) but she wasn’t picked up on radar until 16:51. She was obviously keeping a low profile.

She was near Avranches when she was first observed, and from there she flew westwards along the coast for a while until turning round and flying back diagonally across the bay towards Granville when she disappeared off the radar again at 17:17, presumably going in to land.

And while all of this was going on, there was a hooting from the ferry terminal.

All of the boats there hoot away when they start to reverse out of their berth, just in case they might collide with something coming into port. But today I was lucky to see Belle France, who had presumably been into the ferry terminal to drop off the passengers who had been around the bay with her just now, reverse out.

She then pulled forward to pull into the inner harbour but was obliged to give way to a trawler that was on its way out to the fishing grounds this afternoon.

There were plenty of trawlers out at sea this afternoon, fishing in and out of the paths of the pleasure boats.

One of them was La Bavolette II. She was in the bay not too far offshore having a good fish around.

Back here I had a cold drink with ice and then went through to catalogue today’s photos. and to try to find the name of that sailing boat that we had seen out off the coast in the English Channel near St Malo.

And then I had to think about tea tonight. As usual, Sunday night is pizza night and I’d taken a lump of dough out of the freezer earlier this afternoon.

When I came back from my afternoon walk I gave it a good kneading and then rolled it out and put it on my pizza tray to proof.

When it was ready and had risen quite nicely I assembled the pizza and had it ready to bake.

After it had cooked I sat down to eat it for tea and it really was delicious. After the one last week that didn’t turn out too well, this one was back where it ought to be.

Slightly overcooked but there’s not a lot that I can do about that right now until I can have some help to bring up those kitchen units. Those people who were going to help me never turned up, so no surprise there.

Off to bed early now. I have an early start in the morning and a radio programme to prepare, and I would like it to be finished before it’s too hot to work.

Saturday 23rd July 2022 – HAVING COMPLAINED YESTERDAY …

… that we hadn’t seen Belle France out and about anywhere for a while, quess who we ran into this afternoon?

Sure enough, there I was out and about on my afternoon walk and as i was crossing the lawn at the end of the headland, from around behind a bunker she came.

It didn’t look as if there was anyone on board so presumably she’s on her way out to the island to bring back a boat-load of tourists.

It just goes to prove once more that I have the Kiss of Death when it comes to things like this. Every time that I make some kind of profound comment I am confounded.

Just like yesterday when I was waxing lyrical about the subject of kites and I was wondering to what exciting place I would be heading and with whom I would be heading there. And instead I ended up going almost nowhere and with no-one either. There was just something vague last night about a few drinks in these tetra-packs and taking a car in for a service etc. I can’t remember anything at all about anything except that and I’ve no idea at all what was going on.

When the alarm went off I struggled to my feet – really struggled – and then after my medication I headed off to LeClerc. I was there so early that the place wasn’t open yet and I had to queue with a pile of other folk for a while before they would let us in.

Once inside I did my usual shopping and bought a few extra things as well. For instance, they had some alcohol-free beer on special offer so I bought a six-pack to add to the supplies in here.

It was only just after 10:00 when I returned so I had a nice early breakfast, and then everything fell apart. I had the worst day that I’ve had for quite a while – several years in fact.

You can tell by the times of the photos that I ended up not going out for my afternoon walk until about 17:00 (adjusted). That’s because from about 10:45 until about 16:45 I was flat out on the chair in my bedroom. Out like a light with no prosepect whatever of awakening.

Anyway, I eventually summoned up the strength to go out for my afternoon walk.

And as usual the first place to go was to the car park at the end of the headland to see what was happening down on the beach.

The weather had improved dramatically since yesterday and even since this morning when it was still quite cool.

By now it was quite warm and that had brought out the crowds, even if there wasn’t all that much beach right now for all these crowds to be on.

And I do mean “crowds” because there were loads of people out there on the beach today.

Some of them had even taken to the waters which was quite brave of them because I don’t think that the weather was that warm today. Not warm enough for swimming anyway.

In the previous photo we’d seen al kinds of water craft in the water just offshore.

A little further out we had a couple of men on paddle boards looking as if they were going for a good run along the coast this afternoon. Not that I know anything about paddle boards though. It’s not my idea of entertainment.

And that was really all that there was going on down at this end of the beach. There weren’t any Nazguls out and about this afternoon or anything else of any interest.

I left them all to it and wandered off down the path on top of the cliffs towards the end of the headland.

There might not have been very much happening down by the car park, but it was all action further on down the path towards the end of the path.

The sea was absolutely heaving with boats and there was hardly any room to swing a cat in between them.

This is just one photo of half a dozen that I could have taken that would have shown the same situation. It seems that everyone who is anyone has taken to the water his afternoon and it must have been total chaos at the slipway trying to put all of these boats into the water in the limited time that’s available when the tide is high enough.

And taking them out of the water is going to be even more exciting.

It wasn’t just pleasure craft that had caught my eye this afternoon either.

There was something large moving around out in the English Channel behind the Ile de Chausey so I took a photo with the aim of enlarging it and enhancing it when I returned home.

Back here when I examined the image more closely I found that her silhouette bore a close resemblance to the freight ferries that run between Portsmouth, the Channel Islands and St Malo.

And when I checked the fleet radar, I found that at the time that I’d taken the photo, the freight ferry Commodore Goodwill was out there in the English Channel. She left St Helier at 13:30 and arrived at St Malo at 18:50.

And seeing as we were mentioning yesterday an obscure 1960s one-hit wonder, today it’s the turn of another one – Pete Townshend’s chauffeur John “Speedy” Keen and SOMETHING IN THE AIR.

It’s one of our old friends, F_GBAI, a Robin DR400-140B from the aero club, flying out into the bay de Granville.

My photo is timed at 17:09 (adjusted) and she was picked up on the radar at 16:10. She flew around the bay, then back inland, then down the coast and back where she disappeared off the radar again right by the airfield at 17:23.

She wasn’t the only thing in the air either today.

This is something that I don’t recall seeing before. We’ve seen the yellow autogyro flying around here quite often but this is the first time that we’ve seen a red one. She looks quite new and clean too.

So pondering on this mystery I wandered off along the path towards the end of the headland to see what was happening there.

Surprisingly there was nothing at all. No-one fishing off the rocks and no-one on the bench by the cabanon vauban either. And so I wandered off towards the port.

Meanwhile, out in the bay here, we have La Granvillaise coming for a sail past, towing her little dinghy behind her.

The other day I believe that I mentioned something about hos we haven’t seen so many of the charter boats out there so far this year so it’s odds-on that we were going to see one of them out and about this weekend, wasn’t it?

No change in the chantier navale or in the inner harbour so I came on home for my chocolate drink. and to try to do some work seeing as I’d had a miserable day so far.

Tea was the left-over breaded quorn fillet from last weekend, with potato and veg. Really delicious. I’ll have to go back to Lidly to see if they have any more of those.

The one problem with having slept so much today is that I can’t sleep now. It’s quite late, or, rather, early next morning, and I’m still not tired. It’s totally messed me up, this sleep that I’ve had today and I’m going to regret this very much. But it’s a sign of the times I reckon.

It makes me wonder how tomorrow will work out with all of this going on – or not going on, as the case may be.

Friday 22nd July 2022 – THAT WAS HORRIBLE!

It really does look as if I’ve slipped right back into where I was a couple of months ago. This morning I crashed right out in front of the computer, a proper, deep crash-out of the kind that I was having a couple of months ago. I was away with the fairies for a couple of hours and as a result I was late for my Welsh class.

That’s probably the most depressing thing that’s happened to me just recently.

So while you admire a couple of photos of a group of people flying a couple of kites around on the lawn at the Pointe du Roc I’ll tell you about my day today.

Actually, last night I ended up going to be rather later than I had hoped. Not as late as I have done on some occasions and certainly not late enough to to have caused all of the problems this morning.

Nevertheless, leaving the bed this morning was something of a struggle and I had to get a move on in order to beat the second alarm.

After the meds I came in here to start on transcribing the dictaphone notes but I didn’t even make a start before I wandered away into the ether.

Eventually I made it to the Welsh lesson.

Now that we’ve all worked out a few things on our own like screen sharing of *.pdfs and the like we managed to organise ourselves so much better and the lessons went quite well.

It really was a shame that the course came to an end because the group of people on the course were amongst the nicest whom I’ve met for quite a while. Consequently we’ve created a group on Social Media where we can keep in touch.

And I really hope that we do.

After I’d had my fruit for lunch I had a listen to what was on the dictaphone. I had actually managed to go for a wander around during the night, even if I hadn’t gone far. I had been at school last night. There was a lot happening last night but I can’t remember much about it but I do remember towards the end doing bakery and I had all of the children making cream cakes etc using all kinds of tools etc that we had lying around. It became after a while a gardening expedition as well. I taught them how to lay out a garden and grow vegetables. I gave them all seeds etc. We were going through the gardens digging up their potatoes. They had potatoes, these kids, steam the back way with all these potatoes around etc and the next group would go up and go through their gardens borrowing extra tools and showing off the fine band of potatoes that they’s managed to grow and put them in a basket. It was all very satisfying and rewarding watching these kids working like this.

As well as this thing about cream cakes there was some kind of hide-and-seek or some kind of game that involved a delivery of the products and you could only accept delivery when it’s your turn. You had to wait standing by the tree if it wasn’t your turn but I don’t know how it finished from there. It was all certainly complicated.

But this is what is something of a surprise to me. I’ve had nights where it seems that I’ve been off on a non-stop series of rambles from the time that I’ve gone to bed until the time that I’ve awoken and I’ve carried on during the day with no problem at all.

Yet here I am, not having gone very far at all last night and I’m totally wasted. It makes no sense to me.

Anyway, that’s another problem. I went off for my afternoon walk around the headland, much later than usual.

as usual, I went over to the wall at the end of the headland to see who was down on the beach.

There weren’t all that many people down there today and no-one at all in the water and that’s no surprise because the weather has changed dramatically. It’s cool, overcast and there is quite a wind that has sprung up from somewhere.

It’s not really the weather for the pèche à pied either but there is someone down there with a fishing net so they must be quite optimistic.

There were no fishing boats out there in the bay this afternoon so with nothing to detain me I headed off past the kite-fliers and down to the end of the headland.

At the end of the headland I ran into a yacht that was going out into the bay.

She’s called Captain Corsaire which, apparently, is the name of a clothing company from St Malo.

Not that I know very much about the registration numbers of yachts, but I’m wondering if the “GBR” that’s written on her sails implies that she’s registered in the UK

She’s struggling to make headway against the wind at the moment and it must be making things quite exciting for the members of the crew who are on board. They must be shipping quite a bit of water in this wind.

There were a couple of other yachts out there too, and a few people down there by the cabanon vauban watching them all.

This family had been walking along the lower path and had gone down to the end of the headland for a closer look at all of the maritime activity.

There weren’t any fishermen out there today either, neither with the rod and line nor at the pèche à pied.

They are leaving the local fish alone and having a day off so I decided to leave the headland alone and go off on the path down the other side of the headland to see what was happening down in the port this afternoon.

No changes in the chantier naval today.

La Confiance II is still over there up on her blocks but no-one else has come in to join her. We could do with a bit more business in there right now. It’s the kind of things that keeps the wheels of industry turning.

Meanwhile, over at the ferry terminal, one of the Joly France boats is moored up. We can tell by her windows being in “portrait” format that she’s the newer one of the two.

As to where the older one of the two is, stick around and you’ll find out in very early course.

Over at the Fish Processing Plant, L’Omerta is still moored up there.

It doesn’t look as if she has moved for a few days now. But at least she has another companion today. I can read her registration number, CH714339, and that tells me that according to my fishing database she’s a fishing boat called L’Iris de Suse.

Her colours are really eye-catching and it’s not easy to confuse her with any other fishing boat.

There are no refrigerated lorries up at the Fish Processing Plant right now so it doesn’t look as if they are expecting many fishing boats to come in on this tide.

There wasn’t anything going on up above at the Fish Processing Plant but there was plenty going on below.

There were a couple of cars driving down the ramp underneath, each one towing a trailer on which was a zodiac. Down at the end they performed a U-turn and then reversed up to the slope that drops down into the water.

By the looks of things they were going to drop off the zodiacs into the water, upsetting a flock of seagulls as they were doing so. But why they would be doing that right now, I wouldn’t know.

The way the tide is though, they won’t be in the water for all that long, unless they plan on staying out until the tide comes back in later on tonight.

Just now I mentioned something about the older Joly France ferry.

While I was walking around the headland just now I noticed something large making waves out by the Ile de Chausey and I imagined that it was one of the ferries on its way back to port.

Sure enough as I headed for home, around the headland came the older Joly France boat complete with a big load of passengers, coming back from the island this afternoon.

No trace of the very new Belle France though. We haven’t seen her for some time so I wonder where she’s got to.

On the way home I stopped for a look at the loading bay down at the bottom of the inner harbour.

Even though a pile of stuff was loaded up onto Chausiaise for delivery to St Helier the other day, yet more stuff has arrived. I don’t know whether the Jersey freighters come in at the weekend so it looks as if we’ll be having a visit quite early next week.

Back here I had a few things to do and then I went for tea. Sausage, beans and chips thanks to my air fryer and how glad am I that I bought one of those? The chips and sausage were cooked to perfection, much better than any other way that I’ve tried to cook them.

Yes, that was €28:00 very well spent.

So having started off talking about kites, then seeing as I’m not able to “fly a yellow paper sun in your sky when the wind is high, when the wind is high”, I’m going shopping tomorrow and “all of these and seven wonders more will I find” if I’m lucky.

But right now I’m off to bed with the hope that I’ll find an interesting companion for tonight’s travels so that “In letters of gold on a snow white kite I will write “I love you” and send it soaring high above you for all to read” tomorrow.

Yes, the Shulman brothers were churning out DECENT STUFF long before they formed “Gentle Giant”.

Tuesday 19th July 2022 – THAT WAS HORRIBLE

There can’t have been too many nights like last night.

When I finally went to bed I had every door and window open in the apartment and a fan on the chest of drawers going off blowing cold air onto my body – no cover over me of course.

The racket was indescribable and totally impossible to sleep but when I closed the doors and windows and switched off the fan the heat was indescribable and totally impossible to sleep. In the end I decided that if I wasn’t going to sleep, at least it’s a better plan not to sleep when it’s hot and noisy rather than not to sleep in the boiling hot, stifling and stuffy oppressive heat.

When the gale sprung up at about 02:00 I wished that there had been a third alternative too. Not even hanging a heavy weight to the end of the curtain would stop it flapping about.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 and I’d had such an awful night, and with a Welsh lesson to come, I decided that a lie-in would do me some good and there I stayed until 09!15

Having organised myself I went for Day One (well, Day Two really) of my Welsh Summer School. This tutor doesn’t seem to be as organised as the others whom I’ve had in the past. She’s one of these people who doesn’t believe in breaks. Instead she crashed on regardless and finished early.

However I can’t complain because
1) it was very nice of her to squeeze me into her course
2) the course is free

What I’ll have to do tomorrow is make a flask of coffee and have some biscuits standing by.

By the time I’d had my midday fruit (at some time considerably later than midday) I went out for my afternoon walk.

As usual, I wandered off across the car park to the wall at the end so that I could look down onto the beach.

There wasn’t a great deal of beach today. The tide cycle here is about 25 hours or so so every day when I go out the tide is about half an hour later and with the speed that the tide comes in and out here that can make a considerable difference.

There weren’t too many people down there this afternoon either. The weather was not quite as warm as yesterday and, strange as it might seem, at midday or thereabouts we’d had a little shower of rain for a couple of minutes.

While I was here I was looking out to sea as well.

And as I watched, one of the Joly France boats came out of the mist (because it was quite misty this afternoon) from the Ile de Chausey and was heading back towards the port.

The small upper-deck superstructure and the windows in “Portrait” format suggests that this is the newer one of the two.

And she has quite a crowd on board too. It looks as if they have had quite a busy time out on the island today. There are water supply issues on the island and I bet that this weather has been taxing their facilities.

And that wasn’t all the excitement either.

As I watched, a light aeroplane went flying by out in the bay from the south. And as I watched it performed a U-turn and headed back southwards.

When I enlarged the photo back home, I could see that she’s a German-registered plane, D-EQDK. She’s a Breezer B600 and we have in fact seen her before, on the 13th August last year.

According to the flight radar she took off from Avranches 16:04, headed north towards Granville, turned back southwards and then disappeared off the radar near Dinard at 16:27. My photo was taken at 16:13 (adjusted).

She wasn’t the only aeroplane in the sky either.

A few minutes later another one went flying by in the bay. This one is one of our usual suspects, F-GBAI, a Robin DR 400-140b that belongs to the Granville Aero Club.

She’s been out and about a couple of times today but at the time that I saw her, according to her flight plan, she was still on the ground at the airfield and certainly wasn’t picked up on the radar.

Maybe someone has the time set wrong somewhere.

Jamais deux sans trois – “never two without a third” as they say around here.

Sure enough 10 minutes later, out of the mist came the familiar rattle of another one of our old friends.

This is the yellow autogyro that we see quite regularly, taking passengers for a spin up and down the bay to see Mont St Michel and whatever else there is of interest in the area.

All we need now is the Loch Ness Monster and Godzilla and we will have had everything.

There were plenty of people wandering around on the path today kicking up the dust so I didn’t hang around.

Narrowly avoiding being squidged on the car park I went down to the end of the headland. No-one fishing off the rocks today but there were a couple of people sitting on the bench by the cabanon vauban.

And they had plenty to see as well, like the Joly France ferry going past and the aerial display too.

Quite a few people down there on the lower path as well. The slightly cooler weather this afternoon has brought out the crowds.

Some more changes in the chantier naval today.

La Confiance II and Monaco du Nord II are still in there but over there on the left they’ve now been joined by one of the shell-fishing boats. Her number isn’t on the database that I have but I reckon that she may well be Les Bouchots de Chausey.

Whoever she is, there are several workmen already swarming all over her so it doesn’t look as if they are going to be hanging around.

Mind you, I’ve said a few things like that before and lived to regret it, haven’t I?

Over at the ferry terminal there’s some congestion.

We have Chausiaise, the little grey, white and orange freighter, and also the two Joly France boats. The one that just arrived is the one at the back of the queue.

By the looks of things Belle France, the newest ferry, isn’t there. She’s not in the inner harbour either so I reckon that she’s probably still out there at the island.

Not much happening in the way of pleasure craft today though. That yacht that went sailing past in the background was the only one that I saw.

Mind you, had I been out there 10 minutes earlier I might have seen a zodiac out there in the bay.

But as I went past just now, the zodiac was at the ramp underneath the Fish Processing Plant and there was a van and trailer there. By the looks of things they were loading up the zodiac onto the trailer ready to take it away.

L’Omerta was still there too, but she was on her own. Everyone else who was tied up there yesterday has now cleared off.

Having taken my photos, I cleared off too. I have plenty of things to be doing this afternoon and not much time to be doing them either.

Things seem to be heating up in this ferry dispute too.

In the inner harbour Victor Hugo has now been joined by the newer Granville. They are both tied up there now and that seems to be that for the moment.

It would really be nice if this dispute could be resolved and we could get back into the business of running a ferry service. Right now we seem to be going one step forward and two steps back.

Incidentally, Granville, although the newer of the two ferries, is a second-hand boat. She was built new as the Bornholm Express in 2006 and sailed between Simrishamn in Sweden and the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea and was last seen on that service in 2014.

One of the problems of living in a medieval walled city is that the streets and gates aren’t designed for modern traffic.

The Porte St Jean into the old town is quite small and many larger vehicles can’t enter. They have to park up outside the walls and arrange some kind of trans-shipment of their cargoes.

Just like this van delivering wine, in fact. I suppose that his cargo is destined for one of the restaurants in there.

Back here I had a glass of cold coconut drink and then sat down to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I must have gone to sleep at some point during the night.

There was some kind of tennis match taking place. I don’t really remember who it was or what it was about or anything but I think that one of the participants was quite young. There was something about an advertising campaign where you could have stencils to stencil over your vehicle. The company would give you money for doing that kind of thing so that they would have the publicity from the moving vehicle as well as anywhere else.

And then we had to go to stay in a dormitory for some reason, a load of us. It wasn’t separated by sex at all for young people. I found a bed right by the alleyway, the walkway in this dormitory in the hope that a young girl whom I knew would sleep in one of the other beds around me. She was with a group of people so hopefully she might go on the other row and be down this end. I had to go to the bathroom. It was again a communal bathroom and wasn’t restricted by sex so there were all kinds of people coming and going, including one rather insistent girl while I was using the facilities. That was rather uncomfortable. Then I had to hurry back to make sure that I had my bed and that no-one else had it and hoped that this girl would have the bed that was across the walkway from mine.

There was something about a bookstore. all the books were in a total mess and it needed some arranging. I was there doing some work. a young girl kept on coming in to look at the books. She would also come in to chat to me and we became quite friendly. It turned out that she was leaving school and didn’t know what to do. I asked her why she didn’t want to work in a bookshop with us. We always had vacancies and she would enjoy it. Of course I had a two motives. One was to be nice to her and the second was to get to know her much better but that’s beside the point isn’t it?

Just recently I seem to have spent a lot of time thinking about young ladies. I must be becoming broody or something.

I forgot to mention that one of the offices in this dream had a sheep’s skull nailed to the door as a kind of talisman. Someone else who came to see me once and there was a dispute in the corridor which was upsetting. I explained that but it made no difference about people having disputes as long as they weren’t with each other.

Someone with whom I used to work in Chester was teaching at the school where I was working. He came up to me in a class and we were talking. “Do you know what I would really like? I would like to go on holiday to the Isle of Thanet and for you to come with me” which I thought was really nice. We had a really good chat about the Isle of Thanet and me going on about things that we did when we were kids and things that my mother used to tell us that she did etc. This talk went on for quite some time about all kinds of things.

My mother lived in Birchington as a child until she and her sister were evacuated to Frome in Somerset when Manston Airfield down the road came under attack. She had plenty of stories to tell us and in fact we used to go down there every summer in the late 50s and early 60s while she still had her connections there to see things for ourselves.

The guy from Chester wanted to know when I’d be free but what he didn’t know and I didn’t tell him was that I was retiring at the end of the school year so I would be free all the time. There was no case of needing a diary or anything to write stuff down but I didn’t want it generally known quite yet that I was retiring so I didn’t say anything to him while he was discussing everything.

And that’s a recurring theme too these days

However I couldn’t keep going and at about 18:30 I crashed out. Only for about 20 minutes and that’s no surprise after the night, but I wish that I could have kept going.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and then I came in here to write my notes.

Rosemary rang me up for one of our marathon chats and that prevented me from going outside to find out why the Air-Sea Rescue helicopter was hovering around. By the time that I could go outside, it had gone.

So bedtime now. Let’s see how we get on tomorrow with this Summer School. It’s not like the usual ones that i’ve had before but it’s free and at least it keeps me interested and helps me remember what I might otherwise forget.

That has to be some kind of positive anyway.

Saturday 16th July 2022 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off this morning, I was elsewhere at that moment busily making a sandwich for an Irish girl whom I knew at one time years ago.

It’s strange, the things that go on when I’m on a nocturnal ramble.

Perhaps I should have organised a lie-in today to continue where the alarm cut me off. And I wish that I had too, because I’ve had quite a difficult morning.

It’s not as if I’d had a late night either. It was after my usual time but not so late as would worry me aver-much. But sleeping in nice, clean bedding was really nice. I really must organise myself so much better.

Not surprisingly it wasn’t easy to leave the bed this morning. However I managed to beat the second alarm by a comfortable margin.

Quite early on this morning I nipped out to LeClerc. I was one of the first there too. The cap park was quite empty and I pretty much had the place to myself at first, although that didn’t last long.

For a change I remembered a few things that I’d forgotten, including the new mop. The only thing that I didn’t remember was the mint syrup, which is running low. There was something else that I’d forgotten too but I can’t now remember what it was.

It was only 10:15 when I came back here, which is about the earliest that I’ve been back, so I made myself a coffee and came in here to drink it. And that was when I crashed out. Totally and completely too, for a good couple of hours. Just like a few weeks ago and you know how depressing that was.

Once I’d recovered and warmed up my cold coffee, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There’s a young girl in this first story. I know who she is but I can’t think of her name. There was a lot in this dream but I’ve forgotten most of it. I had a cat and I was away and someone was supposed to come in to look after it. In fact it was one of the guys from the radio himself who turned up to feed it. My trip ended early and I was back home when he came. I knew about this, at least, it was something like that. Later on in the afternoon when I was round at his house I was preparing everything to go. We were doing something on the car and I went back into the house to see if there was anything that I’d forgotten or that I’d need. His daughter was there in this dream – it was this girl. We said hello. He came in and I asked him about something but he couldn’t think of it. I was inclined to go into the pantry and fetch it myself but no. What happened after this was that he and the girl started to talk. She said that she should have gone round today to feed my cat but he did it instead of her and she wasn’t very happy. Tomorrow was Saturday so I said to her “you can come round tomorrow morning if you like”. She replied “I can’t make tomorrow morning. Would tomorrow afternoon be OK?”. I thought that if I’m going to have visitors of nice young ladies I said “yes, that’ll be fine”. I’ll do my stuff some other time. He wanted to come round to do something as well so I was trying to arrange it that their appointments would be different so that I’d have this girl on her own and she’d come round without him being there so that we could have a nice friendly chat and I could maybe find out a little more about her.

Later I was with someone going around Shavington. We went past the houses at the Sugarloaf. I pointed out that one of them was owned by a family who had been there for a very long time but before that there was someone who was the founder of Chester Zoo who lived there. She didn’t believe it at fist but she went away and did some research and found that it was true. There used to be a zoo in Shavington etc a long time ago which moved off to start Chester Zoo.
And if you think that this is somewhat far-fetched, then READ THIS

Later still, there was something going on in work that made drinks and food to eat but then they left to go cold so someone thought to put them in the oven so in 10 minutes they would all be nice and warm again. There was some issue with a girl here. They found out how she was and sent Security to search her. She thought that these people were trying to arrange a date with her on one of these Social Networks so she was busy trying to arrange a date back while they were coming to look for her. This led to all kinds of confusions as to what was happening at this place that evening when they were trying to rid themselves of these 2 girls and instead had a match-making service operating

Then there was a place with all kinds of problems going on about whether pies were food or whether hair was part of you or an accessory, a few other bits and pieces. I can’t remember any dream that it was in but there was all of this going on. In the end some sea captain of a pleasure cruiser decided that he was going to deport a woman who was continually in the way and made suggestions that were wrong.

Finally, my Irish friend and I had been down at Rosemary’s and we had spent a week there and were about to go our separate ways. My friend had to go to the airport and I had to drive home. I was feeling less and less like the drive. Rosemary said that I could stay over for a few days if I wanted to so I thought that I was going to exercise the option. My friend and I of us went for a walk first of all around the town as her flight wasn’t until the afternoon. We spent a lot of time sitting on a bench just chatting about things in general. Then of course she said that if we’ve got to go, we’ve got to go so that made us get up and wander off along the street. I had to check the times of her flights and make sure that she was on time at the airport. I wasn’t sure if we were to go on the Metro or in the van etc but I was making a sandwich for her when the alarm went off.

She was a lovely girl and we did go out together a few times – even on a skiing holiday together and I would really have liked to have known her better but she had far more sense than to to take our friendship any further than she did.

There was a break for lunch today, seeing that I hadn’t had any breakfast today, and then I washed, peeled diced and blanched a kilo of carrots that I’d bought this morning. Once they had drained properly they went into the freezer for the next couple of weeks.

Later on I went out for my usual afternoon walk around the headland.

As usual I started off by going across the car park to look down over the wall onto the beach to see what was happening down there.

And with it being a really hot day today, and a weekend to boot, I was expecting to see quite a few people down there this afternoon but this really took me by surprise.

There were hordes of people down there this afternoon and plenty of them had taken to the water. I must admit that I was quite tempted too. I really was hot today and by the looks of things the next few days will be even hotter.

No-one out there kite-surfing today. The wind that we were having yesterday has dropped considerably now.

No-one hang-gliding either. I did have a good look around to see if there was anyone about on the field by the cemetery preparing for blast-off.

No-one out at sea either today but there was plenty going on out on the beach at Donville les Bains. As well as the crowds in the water over there, we had the sea-food harvesters working away this afternoon while the tide was well out.

You can see the stakes there on the beach. These ae submerged at high tide and the strings that connect them are where the bouchots grow. This was a serendipitous discovery many years ago, the fact that mussels would grow on strings and they are quite a delicacy because unlike sand-grown mussels, they aren’t “gritty”.

It’s quite high-maintenance however, hence the fact that they are considerably more expensive.

So while there was nothing going on out at sea, there was plenty happening in the air, the lack of Nazguls notwithstanding.

While I was looking down at the beach I was overflown by several flying machines. The first one to go by overhead was the little yellow hang-glider.

She had been for a flight down to Mont St Michel by the looks of things and was now on her way back to the airfield.

There are two people on board – the pilot and his passenger. And don’t worry – I haven’t forgotten that I intend one of these days to go over to the airfield and blag a ride on one of these for a lap around the bay with the camera.

That wasn’t the only airborne machine either.

While I was walking down the path through the crowds that were thronging this afternoon the little yellow autogyro came flying past, having performed a similar trip to the yellow powered hang-glider that flew by overhead a couple of minutes earlier.

As it happens, that’s actually the machine on which I would like to go for a trip. I shall have to make further enquiries.

That was that for the moment so I headed on down to the lighthouse.

Crowds again around here so I imagine that this is how it’s going to be every weekend until the kids go back to school.

To find some peace and quiet I went down to the end of the headland and saw this guy here. At first I had no idea what he was doing but it turned out, when I could have a closer look, to be fishing.

But he’s the first fisherman whom we’ve seen who has been up to his knees in it. All the other just stand upon a rock.

And just offshore is another marker buoy that is presumably indicating the site of a lobster pot that one of the fishermen has dropped off.

Down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port.

And absolutely nothing whatever any different from what we saw yesterday. La Confiance II and Monaco du Nord II are still in the chantier naval and L’Omerta was still over by the Fish Processing Plant. Marité was still absent too.

That was that really. I headed off back home for a coffee and a really good session on the guitar. On the acoustic guitar I’m much happier now playing the more complex chords and mastering the more complicated chord changes.

My playing on the acoustic seems to have improved rather a lot just recently.

Tea tonight was potato, vegetables and a breaded quorn fillet. To my surprise, Lidl had some in stock yesterday. Just one packet which I bought and had they had any more I would have bought them too.

Tomorrow is Sunday and a lie-in. And I need it too. I think that I’m slipping back into the situation in which I found myself a month ago when I was crashing out for hours without any notice.

And with my right knee looking as if I’ve done for it permanently right now, I’m in something of a mess.

Wednesday 13th July 2022 – AND THE WINNER …

… of yesterday’s sweepstake is “whoever suggested Nerina”.

She came to accompany on my voyages around and about last night – or, at least, part of them. It was pouring down with rain and we were on our way to our cabin. She was telling me that she thought that it was all wrong, what we were doing with the solar panels and wind turbines. We should have had a job where we could have worked and just spent the weekend and our spare time doing up the house and everything so that we could at least have had some money behind us. I said that there’s little point in arguing now because we were so well advanced. Things were going along anyway. It was pouring down with rain and we had 2 people with us. We were walking down this asphalt path towards our cabin. The path ended and it meant walking across a field. It was extremely muddy in places. These other 2 people found the muddy bits but Nerina and I were lucky. It was pitch-black the sky, daylight but it was so dark and raining that Nerina wanted to know what the batteries were doing. I could see through the window that there was just a faint glimmer of an orange light so I said that there was some charge in there. She thought that the fact that we could see everything through the window meant that it wasn’t really burglar-proof and we should have done more to try to hide everything from the public view when they were gazing in through the window.

There was much more than just that last night as well. One of my father’s friends had been sent to prison for something or other for a couple of months. He was now out and living near Worleston. One of my family but I can’t remember who – one of my sisters – needed a wheel bearing changing on her car so I suggested that this guy would do it. I tried to give her directions to Worleston but it wasn’t easy for some reason and I couldn’t understand why. It was a pretty straightforward place to go to from where we lived but she couldn’t understand the directions and mine were probably much more complicated than they would be in real life. In the end I thought that I’d drive over to see him so I went. He was there with his wife in his house. We had a little chat. He asked me how I was doing, whether I was off to University now that school had finished etc. It was very hard for me to talk to him because I didn’t want to ask him many questions about how he’d been and what he’d been doing because I didn’t imagine that he would want to talk to me about his 3 months in prison so it was an extremely stilted conversation, very difficult.

There was something similar about an Infant’s School that had been created in an old monastery or similar, that kind of building, but I can’t remember anything at all about that or who was there.

While I was round at that guy’s house, which had now turned itself into some kind of luxury apartment, there were all these girls coming over asking if we could do something to their cars. It was very nice, seeing all these pretty girls but as time went on we came to the conclusion that there was something going on about which we didn’t know anything that was bringing all these girls here. We were sure that it wouldn’t be car repairs

Finally I’d bought a new expensive guitar and I’d gone to the bank to see whether I had the right to reclaim the VAT on it. There was quite a queue, a couple of women in front of me doing all kinds of different things. Then some guy turned up and pushed in front to start to argue with the woman behind the counter about something. I didn’t speak German well enough to tell him to clear off but I was really annoyed by this and I made sure that he knew it. Eventually it was my turn and the clerk was away for ages. She came back with a huge sheaf of papers and pointed out all kinds of things that I’d bought in the past. She explained to me that I’d reached my limit for duty-free purchases and I wasn’t able to claim the tax back on this guitar which was extremely disappointing.

When the alarm went off this morning I was out of bed quite quickly and after the medication checked my mails and messages as usual.

First task this morning was to make some more fruit buns, otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to eat for breakfast.

300 grammes of flour, a pile of ground brazil nuts into a kind of coarse flour (and if it’s “coarse” you want, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”), some desiccated coconut, sultanas and raisins, banana chips, dried tropical fruits, some salt and some yeast all mixed up with 125ml of water and a ripe banana.

The mixture was well-kneaded, rolled, shaped and then left to proof for 45 minutes. Then it was all brushed with milk and sprinkled with brown sugar and baked for 35 minutes.

And when it was all baked, it looked delicious. And tasted delicious too. I think that I’ve mastered this process for now. One of them makes a lovely breakfast with some hot strong coffee.

After breakfast I had a few things to do.

Firstly I had to check all of my hospital appointments for 4th August and then make all of the necessary reservations on the train.

What I have done is to make an executive decision (that is, a decision that if it’s not the correct decision the person who made it is executed) that I’m not coming and going via Lille. It costs me more but the trek across town from Lille Flandres to Lille Europe is quite uphill and I don’t fancy that very much at the moment.

There have been changes too at the place where I stay. The smaller, cheaper rooms are now only available on long-tern let so I’ve had to pay for a more expensive room. Still cheaper than anywhere else in Leuven though.

One good thing about it is that I finally managed to make my Belgian credit card work and that will save me quite a bit of anguish in the future.

Rosemary rang me as well for one of our usual chats that go on for hours. Surprisingly, we managed to steer clear of politics. There is no doubt that having to deal with the issues that arise from caring for a family of Ukrainian refugees is a whole new way of life and a full-time occupation.

She also told me that little Miss Ukrainian is a little better, which is good news, and that one of the local boys who lives nearby asked her to come with him while he took his dog for a walk. Yes, I can remember when I was barely a teenager too and I think that it’s sweet.

Having had a good session on the guitar this afternoon I went out for my afternoon walk.

As usual I went across the car park, having said “hello” to a neighbour, to the wall at the end of the car park to look down onto the beach to see what was happening there.

There’s rather more beach there today but surprisingly, nothing like as many people. That’s a surprise because it was probably the warmest day of the year today and I was expected to see hordes of people taking full advantage.

Only a handful of people in the water too. I don’t know where everyone has gone to this afternoon. There is nothing else happening around the town today.

While I was watching the people on the beach I suddenly felt the cold hand of doom on my shoulder.

Never mind the odd one or two that were passing by overhead, there was a whole squadron of them assembling down by the field next to the cemetery.

By the looks of things it was the entire force of Nine Riders together with several reserves. Give them 10 minutes and they’ll all be heading my way so I cleared off down the path so that they wouldn’t sweep down on me.

Where is Legolas when you need him?

No prozes for guessing who this shell-fishing boat is. After all, we’ve seen her often enough.

Right out there in the Baie de Granville over towards the Ile de Chausey is our old friend L’Omerta. For a change she isn’t playing a new game of “Musical Ships” today but is out there at sea working.

When I saw her out in the distance I couldn’t identify her at that kind of distance but back here when I enhanced and enlarged the photo I could distinguish her silhouette quite clearly with her winch assembly on the stern.

There weren’t all that many people wandering around on the path this afternoon so I had it pretty much to myself this afternoon.

But on the grass by one of the old bunkers from the Atlantic Wall defences of the Second World War was a young family having a great deal of fun flying a kite.

That reminds me of a time when I was with Laurence and Roxanne at the seaside on the “Costa Stella” in Belgium when Roxanne and I managed to put a kite quite high in the air. Roxanne was delighted until it crashed down into someone’s picnic.

The two of us had loads of fun together in the three years that she was my “daughter”.

The kite and the Nazguls weren’t the only things flying around in the air this afternoon.

While I was admiring the kite a light aeroplane went flying by overhead. She is F-GYKL, a Robin DR400-160 and one that we haven’t seen here before.

She took off from Cherbourg at 15:09 and disappeared off the radar near Avranches at 15:35. She was next picked up near Granville at 16.21 (I saw her overhead at 16:12) and went back to Cherbourg, so it’s probably someone else clocking up the flying time on a nice warm day.

Now here’s a thing.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve complained … “surely not!” – ed … on several occasions that I’ve yet to see Victor Hugo going out to sea on a ferry trip to St Helier.

But here she is today, out in the bay with her bow pointing in the direction of the Channel Islands.

However if you look closely at the photo you’ll see that there is no wake. In fact she didn’t move for all the tima that she was in my field of vision. So there’s definitely something not quite right.

It’s always possible of course that she’s waiting for the tide to come in at Granville so that she can dock at the ferry terminal but she’s facing the wrong way for that.

With nothing happening at the end of the headland I wandered off around the headland to the port.

On the way I had a look out towards the Baie de Mont St Michel to see what was happening there. No sailing school out there this afternoon but there were several of the smaller shell-fishing boats waiting for the tide so that they could come into port.

This perhaps give some kind of credence to the idea that Victor Hugo is waiting for the tide to come in even if it might be facing the wrong way.

Someone has however made it into port at some time just recently.

That is, unless we are having a new competitor in our game of “Musical Ships”. Moored over there and settled down in the silt is La Grande Ancre.

We’ve seen her quite often loaded up with crates of shellfish and we can see that there are piles of crates on the quayside up above her.

We’ve also seen her doing other things too. I recall on one occasion seeing her coming over from the Ile de Chausey carrying an old wreck of a tractor and probably a few other things as well

There’s also a new arrival in the chantier naval today too.

Philcathane who was in there when we came back from Germany left some time after Monday afternoon so the yard was empty but today we can see that Monaco du Nord II has been brought in.

And “Monaco du Nord”? That’s the nickname that is given to Granville, and not without reason either. Firstly we have the kind of weather that allows certain kinds of palm trees and the like to flourish here.

Secondly, the Monegasque royal family has people from Granville in its family tree. In 1715 Jacques François Léonor de Goyon de Matignon who lived in the old town here and whose house we have seen on the corner of the Place Cambernon on several occasions married Louise Hippolyte Grimaldi.

Having seen all that there was to see out in the harbour I headed for home and my banana drink.

On the way back I was overflown yet again. This time it was the little yellow autogyro, complete with passenger, going by overhead on its way back to the airfield.

Back here I mixed myself a banana drink with plenty of ice and came in to drink it. Instead though, I crashed out for an hour. It looks as if I’m slowly going back to where I started off a few weeks ago.

When I awoke I had another session with the guitar. I’m trying to find some more stuff to play with the bass but I seem instead to be finding more acoustic tracks. In fact another 5 have been added to that playlist today and if I’m not careful I’ll end up with 200 songs in it.

What this might seem to indicate is that my acoustic guitar playing is improving. God help us!

Tea tonight was a burger on a bun and for a change I had a salad with my potato. Plenty of salad stuff around here seeing as I’m not eating lunch these days and I have to use it up somehow.

Later on I had a nice long chat with Liz. It seems to be my day for speaking to friends. Can’t have too many of those. We talked about all kinds of things, including my little voyages during the night. She hoped that I would find some nice and interesting companions to accompany me on my travels tonight.

another night with Zero would certainly be nice and interesting but that’s probably expecting too much. It’s pretty much like pot luck these days and I’m very lucky indeed if it works out as I would like.

Tuesday 12th July 2022 – GUESS WHO …

… came to see me during the night?

So while you all admire a few water scenes, there I was at work sitting behind my desk sitting next to some woman I don’t know and who should walk in to come and buy some cheese but Zero. She didn’t see me as she came in but she went over to the cheese counter and they cut her some cheese. When she turned to go she saw me and so I waved. She came over and chatted. The girl sitting next to me also knew Zero and said “don’t forget, when you come in you can talk to me any time”. The woman who was a supervisor beckoned her over and said “young lady, do me a favour. When you come in again don’t talk to (the girl who was with me)”. I whispered to her “you can always talk to me anytime you like when you come in”. She smiled, I patted her and she went skipping off. This woman asked me “who is that child?” (because don’t forget that I’ve known Zero ever since she was born). I replied “that’s probably the nicest child in the universe” (and she was, too). They asked me who she was so I told them. Of course they knew the parents of this girl so they all thought that it was marvellous how she’d grown up as she had, so bright and cheerful and energetic.

Then I was back in Stoke on Trent later but Zero wasn’t there. What had happened was that a member of her family had been killed so we’d been scrolling through someone’s phone trying to find hers and her father’s chat pages so that we could post some kind of message of condolence on them. As we kept on looking we just couldn’t find which were the correct pages on this person’s phone. There were thousands of different chats. It was very hard to see whose was what. Eventually we found a photo of both of them with their heads covered in towels but we didn’t even think that that belonged to one of them so we scrolled through this phone for ages trying to find what we were looking for

We were back in this dream again on our way to this funeral. We ended up round at someone’s house trying to find their contact details on Social media or their phone number etc so that we could send them messages of condolence. I couldn’t find them on my phone but I knew that I had them somewhere from years ago – probably on the old phone that lies in the van and a few other things. It was becoming late, already 18:30. When we arrived at this guy’s house she asked me who someone was so I explained that there were 4 people currently wandering around, 2 friends of mine who I named but I can’t remember and Zero and her father. I had to work out how to get in touch with them but I couldn’t do it – I needed some help from these 2 people with me or maybe even the 2 people who were going to turn up but time was drawing on and I was going nowhere. In the end to my surprise the guy who was with this woman where I was was actually Zero’s father. I was completely confused then about what was going to happen where, when and how. If that’s the case, where has Zero gone and with whom has she gone?

Finally I was with her father and we were talking about these people who were going to arrive. He said that he’d better push on and tidy everywhere before they arrive. It was 09:15 and I was still in bed so I thought about getting up. I asked him if I could send Zero a “Happy Birthday” message. He handed me his phone so I started to send a message on it. Then I thought that perhaps if I copied the number onto my phone I could send it from my phone and she would know who it was. Then I was trying to take some car registration numbers because they had something to do with how I could contact her although I don’t know how but I couldn’t get close enough to read the numbers. I was either too far away to see them or else I’d overshot. This was becoming extremely confusing. I was turning something simple into something of nightmarish complications.

Later on I was in Caliburn driving quite recklessly through rural France until I came to a stop because there was something going on. I ended up talking to a group of teenagers. There was some guy being harassed by someone or other. he quickly reached over his wall and handed me a cardboard box. He said “here, take this”. I took it and there was a trailer in it and a few other bits and pieces etc, and a couple of phones, one of which was a UK phone and it had a charger. There was no plug on the end of the charger. I was thinking “at last this is how I can contact Zero but I have somehow to make this phone charge”. I asked these kids if anyone had a charger. They replied “no”. They were interested to know why I was in France and what I was doing but they gradually drifted away. Someone told me a cheat how you can charge up your phone without a charger but it looked extremely dangerous to me. I wasn’t going to try it. I thought “once again the solution is here in my hand but I just can’t make it work”.

And isn’t that a regular occurrence? And not just in dreams either.

And here’s a dream without Zero in it although it started off that way. I was again with her father who was running me back to Crewe. I was telling him about the guy whom I used to know in Moathouse Drive who had just given me 3 cars, 2xMkIIIs and a MkIV Cortina. I had to go and pick them up at some time in the near future. I ended up back at my garage and walked in where I had a couple of cars. I found that there were half a dozen cars in there some of which weren’t mine. There was a woman so I asked her what she was doing with her car in my garage. She said that someone had given her permission. I said “I’m the occupier of this garage and I haven’t given any permission”. This escalated and there was a crowd of people who came in who didn’t care at all the fact that I was renting this garage. They had their cars there and other possessions and weren’t intending to leave. They made sure that I knew that I was pretty powerless to make them too.

So stepping back yet again into several dreams one after the other, that’s quite a strange situation too. usually stepping back involves just stepping back once, but how many times ws this?

But why is my subconscious telling me to get in touch with Zero? In the past my subconscious has told me many things that have subsequently turned out to be true, to such an extent that I rely on my subconscious intuition rather more than most people. And it was certainly quite insistent last night.

Especially when after she skipped out of the first dream I awoke bolt-upright and it took me quite a while to go back to sleep. Awakening fully as I did, I’ve always found that in the past it’s been impossible to step back into a dream but I managed it last night, and in spades too.

No surprise then that I was thoroughly exhausted when the alarm went off this morning but nevertheless I staggered out of bed for my medication quite smartly.

And then I transcribed the dictaphone notes, and that took much longer than it ought to have done.

We had a Welsh conversation class this morning too and so as you might expect when I switched on the laptop that I use to connect to Zoom, it decided to perform a full upgrade.

When it had finally finished upgrading I connected to my course but nothing was happening at all. Eventually, further investigation revealed that the internet server at Coleg Cambria had crashed so they had no internet connection. “Your course will be re-arranged”.

That left me with some free time to deal with the photos from June when I was in Germany. I’m now inside the camp at Dachau heading up to the crematorium.

Once again, I didn’t have lunch – that is, except for some fruit. I’ve just been making do with fruit at lunchtime right now. I’ll weigh myself on Saturday to see if I’ve kept this weight off.

This afternoon I fell asleep for an hour or so which is no surprise given the exciting events of the night. Not exactly stark out but it was near enough.

By now it was time for me to go out for my afternoon walk around the headland so grabbing the NIKON D500 I set out.

As usual my first stop was at the wall at the end of the car park where I can look down onto the beach to see what was going on there.

And once more, we had the crowds out in force enjoying the beautiful weather, even if there wasn’t all that much beach to be on right now.

Of course, they weren’t all on the beach either. Quite a few of them have taken to the water. I suppose that after a week or so of heatwave the water must be nice and warm. But I’m not going to be the one who goes to try it. I’ll take their word for it.

While I was taking a few photos that you saw earlier of the local shipping, I was being overflown.

It’s not one of our regulars either. This one is a helicopter belonging to the Armée de Terre, the French Army. I’ve no idea what it is except that it’s one of the “Puma” family. It closely resembles a H225M “Caracal” except that the fairing over the wheels doesn’t look right.

The French Army has 18 Caracals although none of them are based anywhere near here.

It’s strange though to see an Army helicopter flying around here. We have the Air-Sea Rescue one of course and the occasional Navy, Fishery Patrol or Customs helicopter. So I dunno.

So with nothing else happening anywhere at the headland I wandered off down the path towards the port.

And there has been a change in occupancy at the chantier naval. Philcathane who was up on blocks by the portable boat lift has now gone back into the water.

No-one has yet come in to replace her though. But I’m keen to see who else we might have next in there. We could do with a few strangers in there like Wavecat Express who was in there for a wile a month or so ago.

Whatever happened to her? I was hoping that she would bring something new to the port.

However there is plenty of stuff happening over at the Fish Processing Plant this afternoon.

We have L’Omerta over there this afternoon, and behind her from left to right we have Calean, Le Styx and Peccavi. And plenty of vehicles around there on the lower level taking away the catch that they are unloading.

Once more, we had quite a few other boats either coming into the harbour or else leaving the Fish Processing Plant for the inner harbour but I was in a rush so I didn’t wait around.

However I did wonder who will be there playing “Musical Ships” tomorrow. It’s all pretty exciting.

Down at the far end, Marité is back.

She’s finished her trip around to the southern Brittany coast and has come back home. With a bit of luck I’ll see her out in the bay some time soon. If she’s based here in Granville she ought to spend more time closer to home unless she’s off on a real expedition.

Lots of activity going on down at the loading bay. There’s a lorry there and the crane is busy moving a huge pile of building material around. That can only mean that one of the little Jersey freighters will be coming here soon.

And while we’re on the subject of the Jersey freighters … “well, one of us is” – ed … I wonder what was the result of the trials when the freighter Southern Liner came in here to try out the port for size

When I came back home I went into the kitchen to fetch some ice for my banana drink I noticed that the ice box in the fridge was full of ice and so I empted as much out as I could and set the fridge to “defrost”.

That should keep me out of mischief for a while so I had a play with the acoustic guitar and then, as promised, I had the bass out and had a play for an hour or so.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice, and then I carried on defrosting the fridge for a while. That’s all finished now so I came in here to write up my notes.

So who’s coming out with me tonight? It would be nice if it would be one of my favourite companions but I don’t suppose that I should be greedy and expect anyone special after last night’s excitement.

So it’ll either be no-one at all or else one of my family. Perhaps I ought to organise a sweepstake.

Saturday 18th June 2022 – I WAS THINKING …

… “which is always dangerous” – ed … of hitting the road this weekend.

But a temperature of 32°C in an old van without air-conditioning heading off into the wild blue yonder is more than any man can stand and so I eschewed the idea for now.

In order to underline the situation, I’ll post a couple of photos that I took of the crowds of people swimming in the sea today

You can tell how warm it was just by looking at these photos.

It was quite warm during the night too and I was tossing and turning for much of it. It was really difficult to go off to sleep.

By about 06:45 I’d effectively given up and I was sitting there waiting for the alarm to go off when with about 5 minutes to go I drifted off to sleep again and when the alarm went off I awoke with a start.

Nevertheless I was out of bed as it rang and went off for my medication.

When I’d checked my mails and messages afterwards the first thing that I did was to check the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d had the insurance through for the van. I remembered distinctly putting the certificate and policy in the container up on the roof rack while I was sorting everything out but it wasn’t there when I went to look for it. I turned the van inside out but still couldn’t find anything. By now we were 6 months into the insurance. I said that I would have to have a duplicate but my brother didn’t think that they would send me one after 6 months if I turned round and said that it was missing. I was just going to say that I’d misplaced it but he didn’t think that that was a good enough excuse for having a duplicate. We had one of our interminable discussions about it. In the end he decided that he would search through Caliburn to see if he couldn’t find the papers. at that point I left him to it. No point in both of us doing the same thing and getting annoyed with both of us doing it

We’re now in a Welsh lesson. A few of us given Welsh lessons on top of this double decker bus. One by one we must have been plucked off and disappeared because further along the programme nothing was heard but Welsh on this bus. The people weemed to be unaware that there was a party of English persons I fell asleep here

Finally it was the World Series of baseball and one of the coaches would be happy having amateur referees in it. That was a crazy thing to do because these World Series games go on for every. In any case his tactics were all wrong and the other teams were exploiting his tactics. The one team that had made it to the final had some depressing tactics of their own, like timewasting and making each play count minutes although they did manage to bottle up the defence of the others and make them run down one corridor. This violent hugging had cost the coach a $25 fine at the last game and was likely to be repeated if he continued.

At some point as well I was with Louise. She had had a long wheelbase Landrover that she had fitted a short cab. She’d sold the long wheelbase cab to someone in the area but he’d died before he could collect it so his executor was trying to haul away the cab. She was a kind of mouse who wouldn’t engage with him because she said that it was this other guy’s, even though he’d died. She had it all laid out in bits where it should go, here and there, everything. She showed me round quite proudly. Her uncle was there as well. He was talking to me about this and that. We were out there and all of a sudden it started to rain a torrential rainstorm. He said that he had to nip over and buy some fish but if I got in his car and sheltered from the rain he would come back when he had his fish and drive me home

The bit about Caliburn’s insurance was interesting. It expires at the end of the month and I had the new paperwork the other day. I’d forgotten all about it completely and dreaming about it reminded me, so I nipped out to put it in Caliburn before I forget it completely.

What I started to do next was to download a load of music. Not sound files but “proper” music because if I do manage to go off on my travels I’ll be taking the Gibson EB3 and the acoustic with me and having a little ja session all of my own.

at some point I had to break off because I needed some bread for lunch. I’m not taking half a loaf out of the freezer.

So on my way into town I stopped at the viewpoint overlooking the fish processing plant to see who was there this morning.

And we had quite a crowd down there today. From front to back we have La Grande Ancre, Les Bouchots de Chausey, L’Omerta, Le Roc A La Mauve III and a small boat that as far as I know doesn’t have a name.

Plenty of vehicles down on the lower level too, unloading the boats and taking away the catch. It’s always quite a profitable affair and sometimes I’ve seen the tractor and trailer groaning under the weight of shellfish taken off Les Bouchots de Chausey

There was plenty of activity outside the harbour in the bay too.

This yacht that was sailing past the entrance to the harbour was gorgeous and I quite liked the sails on the smaller one that was following along behind her.

And that wasn’t everything out there either. There were more than enough boats of all types, shapes and sizes sailing around there today ad I could have spent all afternoon there photographing them.

But instead I pushed on down the hill towards the town centre and the supermarket for my baguette.

Now here’s quite a surprise.

Here we are on a Saturday in summer and there are crowds of people round about, as we have seen already in our photos of the beach, yet for some unknown reason the crew of Marité has decided not to put to sea today.

It’s the kid fo day when I would have expected them to have rounded up hordes of passengers and gone off for a lap around the bay.

As for me, I went off for a lap around to Carrefour where I bought a baguette and a can of cold drink for the climb back up the hill to home.

On the way back home I wandered back through town past the Place General de Gaulle.

With it being a Saturday morning it’s market day and the open-air market is in full swing. Mind you, there isn’t really anything there that is of interest to me.

The walk up the hill in the heat was agonising as I expected and I enjoyed the stop that I made halfway up when I drank the can of cold drink. That made me feel better.

Back here I made a sandwich for lunch and then carried on with the downloading of the music. I ended up having a play around with Wishbone Ash’s THE BALLAD OF THE BEACON. It’s much easier than you would think.

In the middle of all that, rather regrettably I dozed off for 10 minutes or so. And I was doing so well too.

As it happens I was rather late going for my afternoon walk today.

Having already looked down onto the beac I wandered off along the path towards the end of the headland, having a look out to sea to see what was happening. Out there in the bay this afternoon was a zodiac with a few people in it.

At first I thought that they might have been fishermen but before I could have a good look at them they started up the engine and cleared off around the headland out of sight.

As for me, I cleared off around the headland too, but at a rather more sedate pace

There wasn’t anyone on the bench at the cabanon vauban this afternoon so I carried on down the path on the other side of the headland towards the port.

Over at the ferry terminal across the harbour we had Belle France, the newest of the ferries that go over to the Ile de Chausey. The other two aren’t in port anywhere so I imagine that they are out there at the Ile de Chausey already waiting for the tide.

Still no Victor Hugo either. According to the maritime radar she spent the night at St Helier and left early this evening, presumably to come back here. I’ll get to see her yet!

Earlier this morning I mentioned that Maritéwas still in port despite it being a summer Saturday today

And she was still there this afternoon too. By the looks of things she hasn’t been out at all today. I know that it’s none of my business but if I were in charge of Marité she’d be out all weekend during the summer, as much as possible.

Most of the fishing boats are also in the harbour too. They don’t go out at weekend either. Even L’Omerta was moored up at the fish processing plant, settling down into the silt. All on her own as well.

Just now I mentioned Victor Hugo being out at St Helier.

Also out at St Helier, according to the maritime radar, is Southern Liner, the freighter that was in port yesterday.

And I can tell you much more about her today. The company that owns her has started a freight service between St Malo and the Channel Islands just recently and as they had a couple of days free they sent the ship over here to see how she would get on in and around the harbour here.

Apparently the plan is that they want to see if there is sufficient demand for another freight service between Granville and the Channel Islands, using small containers rather than loose freight that the other little freighters carry.

This is something that is going to be interesting

Back here I crashed out again for rather longer than I was hoping – so much so that my coffee was stone cold. But I did some more music downloading. There’s still plenty to go at.

Tea was a breaded quorn burger with baked potato and veg, and then I had my notes to write, interrupted by another marathon phone call from Rosemary, hence I’m way later than I intended.

We’ve had a storm and a rainstorm too so that might cool everything down. I hope so because I’ve been in shirtsleeves with z fan going all day and I’m still struggling for breath in this heat.

Thursday 16th June 2022 – GONE!

And never called me “Mother”!

Yes, when I went for a wander out on my way to the physiotherapist’s this afternoon, I noticed that Victor Hugo, the Channel Island ferry, is no longer in port.

In actual fact, I saw a photo of her in the harbour of St Helier to where she set off this morning with a ferry-load of passengers, and I was unlucky enough to have missed her

But it just goes to show that she is actually out there working, despite what her prolonged sojourns in the harbour here might suggest.

While we’re on the subject of prolonged sojourns … “well, one of us us” – ed … I could have done with a prolonged sojourn today because while today was an improvement on what was going on last week, it wasn’t as good as the last day or so. It’s a case of one step forward, two steps back unfortunately.

The night was what would be called a very mobile night with a lot going on and I must have travelled miles. And at one point I fell asleep in mid-dictate and there’s a sound file of one hour and 41 minutes, most of which is of me snoring.

And my heart-felt apologies to Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves) who used to complain that I snored in bed and I always denied it. Well, the evidence is there for everyone to hear.

By 06:45 I was wide awake again and leaving the bed at 07:30 was fairly easy for a change. After the medication and checking my e-mails I sat down and transcribed the dictaphone notes.

All of them.

I started off last night in the Canadian High Arctic working as a radio presenter for some outpost out there in the High Arctic but that’s all that I remember. I can’t remember any details at all about what was happening while I was out there doing it

I was back in this dream about this little girl again. They were doing up her house ready to exhibit it as a museum. They had loads of photos that they were exhibiting, they were doing quizzes about her life etc. I can’t think of her name but it was in the USA cotton belt in the 1920s and 30s, a small child. She was very well-known and very wealthy, from that kind of background, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. We were going through some paperwork and finding when we got these kids helping us to sort it out. Everyone wanted to be her and be like her even though the period was very depressing and they were living in some very depressing circumstances. All of their family stuff we were finding in this house we were going to exhibit as a museum to her and probably to Disney too. It was taking up a lot of our time and progressing quite slowly. We even found stuff of when she had to capture her cat so that they could take her cat with them on holiday. There were newspaper articles about the cat from Minnesota that was visiting everywhere right now that were going in this girl’s dream, highlights and that sort of thing.

We were back on an island where there was some kind of celebrity living here so we decided that we’d tidy up the island and make it look nice, collect all the rubbish in then go through and find out what she wanted to keep then we could either throw away the rest or sell it. Selling it would bring in some money to the commune because it isn’t really making very much at all. Lots of important things are being missed off due to lack of money. This conversation went on for quite some considerable time with this discussion about all of this tidying up of the island somewhere in the northern hemisphere in the artic before someone pointed out that it is in fact a German citizen, she’ll be real fell asleep here

And when I awoke again I don’t know if I mentioned this actress who lived on this island who was the Queen Bee etc, rules didn’t apply to her. She had a kind-of Jeep and one day she was going somewhere and she cut the corner of the traffic at a road junction and something coming the other way hit her. Although she wasn’t particularly damaged it caused a lot of damage to her car and to the other car and blocked the road for quite some time. Everyone was going around saying how it served her right that it should happen to her, that she received something that she deserved at last and it might teach her to behave with a little more humility even though she’s someone rich and famous

Later on I was in Crewe. I’d been away somewhere and had come back. I had to go into work next morning so I set my alarm. Before I went to bed I’d spoken to Percy Penguin on the phone. For some unknown reason my alarm hadn’t gone off and it was past 09:00 when I awoke and I had to be in work by 10:00 at the latest. I had to run around to wash and change then nip to the grocer’s for some food as I didn’t have any. It was 10:30 before I was ready. I had to walk to work and it was cold and snowing and a long weary trudge through the streets of Crewe, some streets that I didn’t recognise. I couldn’t remember where the office was and I kept on taking wrong turnings. I thought “how on earth am I going to face everyone that I’m turning up for work at this time of day when the working day starts so much earlier than this?”. I was annoyed with Percy Penguin for not having rung me to remind me. I was annoyed with quite a few people who knew that I was back. They could have placed a towel or something under the door and made sure that I was ready for work that next morning. Instead no-one had done that and I was hours late wandering around the streets in a panic.

Then we were all in a car. We’d gone off somewhere and were driving around these streets, a big group of us. The idea was that we had gone to look for some pea soup. We reached a place where we stopped and a few people alighted. Gradually more and more people alighted just leaving me and a girl. We were having a really good chat about something or other and it was quite entertaining. It’s not like me at all to have such a good chat with someone. In fact I ended up being more interested chatting with this girl than in the pea soup. She told me all about pea soup, telling me that the most exciting thing about pea soup was how they got it in. Everyone came back into the car and moved it onto the pavement to park it out of everyone’s way then they all alighted to wander off to find some stuff. This girl and I were still in there chatting. I thought to myself that I’d never had a chat quite like this with a girl before, let alone an interesting chat. It was quite obvious that she was really interested in chatting with me. That’s something I’m not used to at all, people chatting to me in this kind of extremely friendly fashion. I thought that I might be onto something here.

That bit about working on the radio in the Canadian High Arctic was interesting though. A week or so ago CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) was advertising a vacancy for a radio presenter in their outstation at Rankin Inlet in Nunavut in the Canadian High Arctic.

As you might expect I applied for the job and when I checked my e-mails this morning I had a mail from them saying that as the work is in Inuktitut (which I can’t speak very well and which the advert didn’t mention) I couldn’t be considered.

But they have plenty of other vacancies in the High Arctic where English and French are spoken and would I like to send them my CV? I’ll get to the High Arctic yet!

The rest of the day has been spent revising my Welsh, with a couple of moments of falling asleep. Once for about 15 minutes in the morning and also about 25 minutes in the afternoon.

Mind you, I wasn’t able to concentrate very much. I might not be falling asleep as much as I was last week but I’m still pretty much wiped out.

Before lunch I had a good shower and then after lunch I carried on with the revision until it was time for me to go out.

And as usual, the first place where I went was to the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne to make sure that the NIKON 1 J5 was still working.

And the port was quite deserted today. The tide was well out as I was going past and by the looks of things it had taken all of the boats with it.

There was no-one playing Musical Ships today. No Gerlean and no L’Omerta either. They must both be out there somewhere in the bay working today.

But there are plenty of vans and lorries at the Fish Processing Plant today. It looks as if they are expecting a busy day today.

No-one over at the ferry terminal either. They must all be having a busy day running out to the Ile de Chausey today

On the way down the hill I noticed that there was some activity going on at the burnt-out houses.

By the looks of things they are emptying the houses of furniture and possessions and the like, tipping the stuff into the skip. They may well be starting pretty soon on rebuilding the houses.

And that’s not going to be the work of five minutes either.

Down in the town I stopped at the Post Office to post a letter and then carried on to the physiotherapist. It was more difficult than the walk on Monday and I had to stop a few times for breath.

The exercises were a little easier though although I’m totally dismayed about my loss of balance. Just a few years ago I was running up and down along beams on the roof and along the floor of my house. I can’t even stand on one leg these days.

After 10 minutes on the exercise bike (that wasn’t easy in this heat) to finish off she threw me out and I staggered down the hill into town.

The climb back up the hill towards home was much more difficult than it was the last time that I did it too. I seem to be having a relapse.

Before I went back in I walked over to the wall to have a look down onto the beach to see what was happening.

Plenty of beach and plenty of people on it too. Not that I’m surprised because it really was a gorgeous day today.

Back here I made myself a smoothie and tried to concentrate on my Welsh revision but it really was hard to do so, tired as I was. and I drifted away for my second bout of sleep s well at one point.

No tea tonight. There was the last of the revision sessions, three hours from 19:00 to 22:00. I grabbed a packet of crackers and during the pause I had a bowl of porridge.

But at least I seem to have got the hang of these discussion points and was able to have a few good conversations about some of them. These gap-filling questions are another thing entirely and if I’m going to fall down anywhere, that will be where it is.

Having written my notes I’m off to bed. Revision in the morning and my exam is at 15:00. And then the next part of the adventure depends on how I feel.

Whatever I do, I must remember to set an alarm for my exam. I don’t want to miss it after all of this effort.

Wednesday 15th June 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… slight improvement today. and that was even though I had something of a very late night last night as well.

So while you admire a few photos of various aerial activity like for example F-GSBV, a Robin DR400 180, flying by overhead, I’ll tell you all about it.

This morning I was actually awake at 06:15 which considering that I didn’t go to bed until 00:15 this morning, that’s quite good going.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I struggled to my feet and after the medication and checking my mails and messages I made a start on organising my revision papers for my Welsh exam on Friday. In the confusion and fast pace of the revision lesson yesterday evening everything had become mixed up.

So while you admire F-GHPJ, a Robin DR400-140B that had just taken off from the airfield on her way to Chavenay Villepreux, I was fighting off wave after wave of sleep.

Not too successfully in the end unfortunately. I drifted off for 15 minutes round about midday. And even though it was a crash-out, the fact that it was only 15 minutes is a big improvement on how things were this time last week.

When I recovered, I made a start on reading through all of the notes that I had made about the subjects that we are expected to know. There are 28 subjects, and we will be given 5 by the examiner and expected to talk for a minute on those five and answer several questions.

And then we have to pick one of those five and ask the examiner questions for a minute on each.

Finally, and where I’m expecting it all to go pear-shaped, we are given several adverts with important sections blanked out and we have to ask the examiner questions so that we can fill in the gaps.

Where the difficulty lies with this is that the “5 W-words”, who, when, where, what, why (and how) take different verbs depending on whether it’s a noun or a verb or a proper noun that follows them and what tense it is, and that’s already confusing.

So while you admire the sparrowhawk that was flying around above the cliffs, I was having lunch.

And then I went back to carry on with my revision. And I managed to finish off going right through it again before I succumbed to another wave of sleep.

Once again, it was only about 15 minutes again and once I pulled myself together I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was in the army. There was something going on. There had been an attack ordered and for some unknown reason I was given something different to do. It annoyed a lot of people that I wasn’t joining in with the attack, some people far more than others, and it even reached the stage where some of our own soldiers were throwing hand grenades at me and I was having either to move out of the way or throw them back. It was all a very unhealthy situation that no-one could understand why things were working out the way that they were and I wasn’t going on this attack etc. And there was this particular group of people fording this passage in couples and throwing hand grenades at me at every conceivable opportunity. In the end it reached the stage where I had to abandon my post because it was far too dangerous for me to be out there with all these hand grenades coming at me from all directions.

Later on I’d been in a factory dismantling one or two pieces of equipment. There had been some people hanging around who were doing some work there as well Who were as usual getting in my way. There was a digger that needed dismantling so I went back to do that today. There were hordes of people, probably 50, around there watching someone move some parts around on the car park. They were all wearing scarves with blue and cream (I think), the colours of some company or other that was also doing some work there. I had to go to find the foreman to tell him that I was going to start work dismantling this digger that was nearby. Luckily they weren’t in my way at the moment but they might be if they came any closer. I’d seen him once at the very beginning. As I was fighting my way through these throngs I suddenly realised that I couldn’t see him at all. I was wondering where he’d gone. I didn’t want to start dismantling this digger without making him understand exactly what it was that I was doing and how I wanted some space around me where I could work without being confined and pushed around

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

First stop was the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down onto the beach to see what was happening down there.

It was a nice sunny day and there was plenty of beach for people to be on, so it was no surprise to see a lot of people down there this afternoon. There was even the dog down there that may well have been the dog that we saw there yesterday

There weren’t any painters up here on the path this afternoon so I wandered off down the path on top of the cliffs towards the end of the headland

We’ve seen the sparrowhawk that was busily engaged in hunting along the top of the cliffs so I was looking out at sea to see what was going on.

There were a couple of things moving around right out in the bay over by the Ile de Chausey so I took a photo of one of them with the aim of enhancing it when I returned home to see what it might be.

What was going through my mind was that I was hoping that I’d see one of the Ile de Chausey ferries or maybe even Victor Hugo on her way out to Jersey but in actual fact it was a speedboat or cabin cruiser having a run out to the islands.

It doesn’t seem that I’m having any luck at all with the ferries.

No’one loitering around by the car park this afternoon, which was just as well because there was rather a strange phenomenon.

Way across down towards the foot of the bay on the Brittany side, the sun was shining off a window or something like that and reflecting back, and I could see it quite clearly even if it was about 20 miles away.

Years ago I read an ancient book from the 19th Century called ON THE BORDER WITH CROOK, the story of General Crook’s campaign against the Native Americans written by his Aide de Camp.

It’s one of the books that travels with me when I go to the “Wild West” and what’s interesting about it is that Bourke describes at great length the use of mirrors as heliographs for sending messages between advancing columns of infantry and cavalry and how in the right conditions the flashes of reflection could carry for as much as 50 miles.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been up on the dry, arid plains of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico and I can easily believe it. And even in the kind of weather conditions that we have here, a flash of light transmitted through serendipitous means will carry over 20 miles.

There wasn’t anyone down on the bench by the cabanon vauban looking at the reflected light so I wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland.

There were crowds of people out there this afternoon having a go at the pèche à pied. The tide is well out and the areas where the public can fish for shellfish are now out of the water allowing the harvest to begin

At first I thought that they were carrying fishing rods but they are in fact raker, gratters, nets and all that kind of thing that the serious pecheur à pied will carry with him to prize the shellfish off the rocks.

From there I wandered off down the path towards the port.

We’ve had another change of occupant in the chantier naval since we were last here.

Wavecat Express is still here and so is the catamaran. But the expensive cabin cruiser and Pescadore have gone back into the water.

In their place we have acquired another trawler. This one is L’Alize III, a trawler that we have seen before on several occasions.

Still, it’s all good as long as there is a healthy turnover of boats down there. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … a healthy, thriving boat repair yard is good news as it encourages owners to moor their boats here.

Before I went back home I had a look in the inner harbour.

Hauts de France seems to have gone definitively but Victor Hugo is still in there. But Marité is back again from her nautical perambulations of the last couple of days, tied up down at the bottom of the harbour having a rest.

Back here I had a coffee and carried on with my Welsh revision until teatime.

There was some stuffing left over from Monday so I had a taco roll with rice and vegetables and it was even nicer having been left for a couple of days.

Right now though I’m off to bed. I’m going to keep on with this having a good night’s sleep and hoping that I can keep this little improvement in my health going.

If it is something that is going to continue, it won’t be before time.

Tuesday 14th June 2022 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… slight improvement in my health, I was quite surprised that it seemed to continue today.

There were only a couple of short moments of crashing out today, just 10 or 15 minutes here and there, nothing like the couple of hours that we’ve been having just recently. And that’s despite a mammoth 5.5 hours of Welsh lessons. I surely can’t keep this up.

In actual fact I was awake – wide awake too – at 06:50 when I awoke and I couldn’t go back to sleep again either. But that’s not to say that leaving the bed at the sound of the alarm at 07:30 was particularly easy. However I managed it just the same.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I drifted off for the first of my two trips into the unknown and when I awoke and finally came to my senses (such as they are these days) I spend a pleasant hour or two preparing for my Welsh lesson today.

The lesson passed quite well, even though there weren’t all that many of us again. This revision that I’m doing seems to be paying off although nothing much of it seems to stick.

After lunch I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There were a couple of hotels in Crewe and there was a vet’s somewhere in the town centre. He was advertising rooms to let like a hotel. He wasn’t paying any taxes or anything on his rooms so everyone else considered that it was unfair competition. They were collecting evidence against him and someone came in and said that he would cram as many people as he could into his rooms when there’s an event on and on one occasion he had seven people sleeping in there. One of these small hotel proprietors said that they would never do that in their hotel. Someone reminded him that he’d done it once but he said “yes but there’s no room for anyone to go in once they had two beds in”. They wondered when someone was actually going to come along to inspect anything and find out what exactly was going to be happening about all of this.

There was much more to it than this but as you are probably eating your meal right now you really don’t want to know about it, trust me

As usual there was the afternoon trip around the headland.

First stop was of course the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down onto the beach to see what was happening down there.

To my surprise, there weren’t all that many people down there at all today. In fact there were probably more dogs than people.

It was actually quite a nice, warm day today without very much wind, just the kind of weather to bring people out in their droves and there was plenty of beach to be on too but for some reason people had decided to stay in.

Meanwhile up here on the path on top there were a few more people than normal.

My attention had been caught by this couple of guys doing some painting. I know that photos of people taking photos of people taking photos is a regular feature of these pages, but photos of people painting pictures is a new departures.

What I thought was rather strange was the fact that they were wearing some traditional artists’ smocks and the phrase l’habit ne fait pas le moine – “the habit doesn’t make the monk” or “just because you have the clothes doesn’t mean that you can do the job” came immediately to my mind.

It takes more than a smock, a palette, an easel, a canvas and a couple of brushes to make a painter, as many of the “exhibits” on sale at the Artists’ Fair on Sunday will testify.

So while I was brooding on the infinite, I was overflown by a light aeroplane.

It’s not one that we’ve seen before, as it happens. She’s F-BRAG and that tells me that she’s a MBB Bo 208C built by Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm in Germany and had at one time some connection with the Waggon Und Mashinenbau company.

She hasn’t filed a flight plan and wasn’t picked up on radar either and isn’t recorded as having been at the airfield here but she’s actually based at Dinan near St Malo so it’s possible that she’s taken off from there and been for a flight around the bay before going home again.

Apart from the painters there weren’t all that many other people on the path up here this afternoon.

There wasn’t anyone down on the bench by the cabanon vauban either this afternoon which was a shame because they would have had something to watch.

Nothing in the way of pleasure craft but there was a trawler out there over towards the Brittany coast with its equipment out. We’ve been seeing fishing boats in all kinds of strange places since all of the shenanigans out on the Baie de Granville.

So I left the trawler to it and carried on around the path on the other side of the headland.

And there’s no real change in the occupants of the chantier naval

We still have Pescadore in there along with the strange Wavecat Express and the catamaran and the cabin cruiser that have been there for a while.

But what I was hoping to see was the yacht that we noticed yesterday. While we were on our way to the physiotherapist we saw that the portable boat lift had hauled a yacht out of the water but by the looks of things it wasn’t out of the water for long.

On the way back towards home I stopped for a look at what was happening in the inner harbour.

Victor Hugo is still there. I din’t think she’s ever going to put to sea at this rate, but the ship that is here to install the new buoys, Hauts De France, has gone! And never called me “mother”! I was rather hoping that I’d get to see her in action too.

Most of the fishing boats are out at sea too. No peace for the wicked.

Back here I made myself a smoothie and then crashed out for a short while after the exertions of the afternoon walking around the headland.

Later on I did some more revision of my Welsh and then went for my three-hour Welsh revision session. And that meant that I haven’t had any tea tonight – just a bag of crisps. Now that my notes are finished I’m off to bed. I intend to make the most of my 8 hours sleep and hope that I can keep the momentum going for tomorrow. I’m not quite used to this at all.

Monday 13th June 2022 – NOW HERE’S A THING!

While you admire a couple of photos of various sea-going craft, including what looks like Marité out there in the bay, I’ll tell you about my rather surprising day.

In fact, I seemed to be rather better today. The walk up to the physiotherapist and back again wasn’t quite as bad as it has been of late, and I only crashed out for about 15 minutes today, and that’s rather surprising considering the way that things have been.

Especially when I was up and out of bed this morning at 06:00 ready to work on my radio programme.

Once again today I wasn’t particularly rushed to complete it and it was about 11:30 when I finally finished it. And that was despite stopping for a coffee and also for breakfast sometime later

Although it’s not one of the better programmes from a music point of view, it’s a good one from a technical point of view with some of the nicest joins that I’ve made for a while.

What slowed me down somewhat as well was that for part of the time I was having a chat with Alison on the internet. She had a few exciting pieces of news to impart.

When I’d finished preparing the radio programme i had a listen to one that I’d made several weeks ago that will be broadcast this coming weekend, to make sure that it’s all correct

And while I was listening to it, I was tidying up and sorting out a few files on the computer freeing up a little more space.

There was time for me to have a shower before going to lunnch, to make sure that I was nice and clean and presentable ready to go to the physiotherapist’s.

After lunch I had a listen to the programme that I’d prepared this morning while I was still doing some housekeeping on the computer, and then it was time for me to go out for my appointment.

As usual, the first thing that I needed to do was to go to make sure that the NIKON 1 J5 was working properly.

That means going to the corner of the Boulevard Vaufleury and the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne and the viewpoint overlooking the outer harbour to see what was happening there and take a photograph of it.

As it happens, there was nothing to see today. The tide is quite far out and there is no-one playing “Musical Ships” this afternoon.

But the tractor and trailer are down there on the lower level waiting for the boats to come in later on this afternoon. They will take away the boxes of shellfish although to where I don’t know. I’m not quick enough on my pins these days to break into a run to follow it.

Meanwhile I’d heard a racket coming from over in the chantier naval.

It looks as if the portable boat lift has just a yacht out of the harbour earlier today and is presumably waiting for the tide to come in so that they can lower it back in.

And apart from that, there’s no other change in the occupants of the chantier naval. We still have Pescadore and Wavecat Express in there today along with the cabin cruiser and the catamaran that have been in there for a while now.

So with nothing else going on I wandered off down the hill towards the town.

A little further on I came to the viewpoint overlooking the inner harbour where I stopped to see what was happening there.

Marité, the large sailing boat, wasn’t there. We saw her in an earlier photo out there in the Baie de Granville, but there was a pile of freight waiting on the quayside.

That means that we will be going to be having a visit from one of the little Jersey freighters some time soon.

And it might even be Normandy Trader because I saw a photo this morning to suggest that her overhaul is complete and she’s gone back into the water ready to carry on where she left off.

There weren’t too many people in the town today – there never are on a Monday as many places are closed.

But what there was was a cherry picker in one of the side streets with a guy in the nacelle doing some maintenance work on one of the buildings.

He had the street coned off to traffic and as I watched, a motorist reversed out of a parking place, flattened a couple of the cones and then drove away. It’s not just pathetic parking that’s an issue around here.

And gritting my teeth, I prepared myself for the long, weary climb up the hill towards the physiotherapist’s.

And here’s something that I’ve not seen before in France.

We’ve seen plenty of them in Belgium though, haven’t we? A furniture lift being used to help someone move from one of the apartments in the Rue Couraye.

One thing that I have noticed is that many of the stairs in the buildings here are steep and narrow and I must admit that I wouldn’t feel safe, even if I was feeling fit and healthy, carrying heavy loads down the kind of stairs that you find in some of the buildings here.

At the physiotherapist’s she had me doing a few exercises and then 10 minutes on the exercise bike. And things seemed to be a little easier today.

When the session was finished I staggered out into the daylight and down the hill towards the town centre, and then back up to the other side of the hill towards my building.

By now all of the boats are coming into the port one by one to unload their catch.

We can identify several of them – Gerlean, Rocalamauve, L’Omerta, La Grande Ancre and Le Styx are the ones that we can recognise at a glance.

Round about here I bumped into one of my neighbours. She’s the nurse and home help who lives on the floor above and, biting the bullet, I told her that I’m intending to engage her services when I come back from my travels.

Cleaning my apartment is now quite beyond my capabilities and if I don’t do something about it soon, it’ll be too late and I’ll end up living in some kind of squalid circumstances and I need to avoid that at all costs.

Now here’s something else worthy of note.

Just now I mentioned a motorist squidging a couple of cones down in the Rue Paul Poirier. But up here outside my apartment we have something even more interesting.

You can see quite clearly the “no entry” sign by the gate. This street here is a one-way street but this motorist doesn’t seem to care less about any of that. He’s pushing on regardless.

There’s definitely something wrong with a lot of people when they don’t care less about the rules of the road.

It’s not just cars coming the other way but there are loads of pedestrians around here who are used to cars only coming one way with the flow of traffic and won’t be looking out for vehicles coming in the opposite direction.

Before I went in I went across the car park to have a look down on the beach to see what was happening there.

There weren’t all that many people down there this afternoon. Only a couple of people. There wasn’t anyone else taking advantage of such a nice day which was a surprise.

On the way back here there was another neighbour loitering around so I had a chat with her as well. She’s not doing very well at the moment either. It seems to be quite an epidemic of illness in the building.

Back here I made a strawberry smoothie and came in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

I was working behind the bar in this night club. Someone came in asking for a packet of cigarettes. They gave me the little square card with the barcode on and I had to go to the machine. It was hung from the ceiling so I had to climb up onto a couple of tables and 1 or 2 other things and then I’d be lucky if I could reach it. At one of the tables was a girl called Alison whom I knew from school whose surname ought to have been “Raleigh”. She was there with a guy so I was talking to her. The guy was looking at me rather strangely so I said that we knew each other from school and didn’t say too much. She made a few remarks about one or two people whom we knew and she knew in particular. Then I had to reach for this cigarette machine but I couldn’t reach it. It was one of those things that you were only ever going to have one go at reaching because if you overbalance you’ll fall. If you fell you’d need to grab hold of the cigarette machine to stop you falling into a void. I was there tottering away on the edge of this table thinking that I’m never going to reach this machine and get this pack of cigarettes. I had absolutely no confidence that I was ever going to do so. It seemed a strange place for this machine anyway. Everyone was urging me on to go and get this packet of cigarettes but I just couldn’t see how I was going to do it without it all ending in tears. It was all extremely confusing and extremely bad for the morale this kind of dream where I couldn’t even think about getting this pack of cigarettes. All I could think about was stopping myself from falling into the void.

Then there were a few of us walking through this shipyard when all of a sudden we were pounced upon by a group of people. They started to attack and torture us, asking us questions about the ships that we’d seen being built. Wr hadn’t taken very much notice so we weren’t able to say very much. They started to become even more aggressive and the attackes became even more painful as they tried to make us tell them things but we couldn’t really tell them anything because we hadn’t noticed anything while we were walking through the shipyard

I had a cheque for £347 that I had to take to the bank. I handed it over the counter to the cashier but she credited it straight away into my bank account without asking me what I wanted to do with it. A little later in the day I’d run out of money. I realised that I’d only wanted to pay £200 into the account and I wanted the rest as cash so I had to go back to the bank and argue about that they had done with this cheque. Eventually I managed to find the woman whom I’d seen earlier (at least I thought that it was her) and discuss the situation with her before she would then return some of the money that was paid into my account from this cheque

It was while I was finishing it off that I fell asleep but surprisingly it was only for a few minutes.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with rice and veg and now that I’ve typed my notes I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to be on form.

And who knows? I might have a better day tomorrow too but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, does it?

Sunday 12th June 2022 – I CAN’T EVEN HAVE …

… have a Day of Rest on my Day of Rest, can I?

Sunday is a day when I’m supposed to be having a decent lie-in to catch up with whatever I’ve missed during the week and to tell the truth I would probably still be in bed right now except that I had a rather urgent need to go for a ride on the porcelain horse round about 09:20.

And that killed my lie-in stone-dead, regrettably.

So while you admire a few photos of the various forms of aerial activity that took place around the town this afternoon, I’ll tell you about my rather depressing day today.

After I’d had my medication this morning I came back here and made a start on work.

What I had to do was to pair off the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing on Monday. Not that I’ll be doing very much tomorrow, I reckon. If the last few days is anything to go by, I’ll be lucky if I’ll be able to haul myself out of bed at any kind of reasonable time tomorrow.

And then, regrettably, I fell asleep again and that was that. I was still stark out when Ingrid telephoned me and you’ve no idea how difficult it is to hold a conversation with anyone when all you want to do is to sleep.

As a result of the foregoing I had a rather late lunch again.

After lunch I had a kilo of carrots to peel and blanch ready to freeze and then I had a listen to what had happened during the night on the dictaphone.

I’d been out somewhere and my elder sister had come with me. She was dressed in a pair of thigh-high black leather boots, black trousers and a black jacket. We went to wherever it was and came back. She started to undress in the middle of the room which I thought was a strange thing to do. She told me “you’ve seen all this before” which of course I probably had but not from my sister. It wasn’t the kind of stuff that I was particularly wanting to see. She just peeled herself out of her clothes like peeling a banana. I thought that this was a strange thing to do.

And then we were talking about Jeeps and things. Someone was asked to describe a Jeep. They said that it was like a Land Rover where all the bodywork had been bent backwards and warped because they’ve just been driving through a housing estate somewhere that was being built and had hit a raised manhole. The Land Rover had stuck on it but of course the momentum had caused all the bodywork to twist and warp on it. It had made a real mess of everything.

There was also a teacher bringing a party of schoolchildren over on a catamaran. As he was bringing them in close to port he was going round reminding them not to ask anyone any stupid questions when they docked. I can’t remember how this developed.

and finally there was a story about how a village in Russia had been hit by Bubonic Plague. People had heard all kinds of mysteries going on about this place. They had been issuing jigsaws to people to piece together to try to work out what was the answer. Someone finally completed one and left it in the street completed and cleared off quickly. The village was closed and no-one was allowed in or out and everyone was dying, even the medical staff. The leader of the medical staff there was dead and had the place at the top of the roll of honour of those who had died

There was time for half an hour on the acoustic guitar too before I was ready for going out for my afternoon walk. I don’t want to forget what I’ve spent all this time learning. And while I was at it, I worked out a simple chord structure to CITY OF LIGHTS by RUNRIG.

Strangely enough, I seem to recall a while ago someone saying that he wasn’t going to learn any more new songs but just go with what he’d got at that point. I wonder who that was.

But since that date 26 songs have somehow been added to it, all of which I play at some point or other and of which 15 are on the playlist

But anyway that was the cue for me to go off for my walk around the city walls this afternoon.

First stop is, as usual, a look down onto the beach to see what was happening there today. And with it being a really nice afternoon (I ended up in shirt sleeves at some point) there were quite a few people down there today.

Even a few taking to the water too. In fact this had me trying to think of when I was last swimming in the sea and apart from when I fell in when I was up in the High Arctic in 2018, it was when I was in Greece in 2013

Hans and I were actually talking about Greece a while ago and I happened to mention “the last time I was in Athens was with your sister!” That’s the kind of remark that kills a conversation stone-dead, especially when it’s the truth.

And while I’m here I thought that I’d have a good look at the repairs to the medieval city wall.

They have been doing some more dismantling. Quite a lot more has been demolished compared to the last time that we were here. It looks as if they are making a thorough job of it all, and quite right too.

Much as I would have liked to, I didn’t go down the steps to look at what was happening at the outside of the wall. And for obvious reasons too. Going down the steps is one thing. Coming back up is something else completely, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Instead I wandered off through the arch and along the path outside the walls towards the Plat Gousset.

Offshore in the bay, as well as all of the boats that we have already seen, there were a few more of these buoys with flags on top.

We’ve had this discussion on several occasions, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and I reckon that they indicate where the local fishermen have dropped their lobster pots so they know where to go to pick them up again.

And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I wonder how they manage to train a lobster to actually go on one.

It wasn’t just lobster pots, yachts, cabin cruisers and La Grande Ancre who were out there in the bay either.

The number of hang gliders in the air will give you some kind of indication of how windy it was this afternoon, and there was a kite surfer out there making the most of it too.

We saw a couple of them in the bay on the other side of the headland a couple of days ago but we haven’t see one on this side of the headland for a while. It’s a sure sign that “Sumer is a–cumen in. Lhude sing cucu”, hey?

There were quite a few people wandering around on the path this afternoon so I had to fight my way through the masses down to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

And they still haven’t fitted the diving platform onto the concrete pillar down there. Summer is going to be here and gone before they get round to doing it at this rate

Plenty of people in the water here though, but then access from the promenade to the beach is much easier than scrambling down the steps in the Rue du Nord.

Despite the renovations to the tidal swimming pool, it’s still not holding water between high tides. I thought that was rather the point of it

You can see what I mean by the access to the beach from the promenade.

There are a couple of ramps and a set of steps that are by no means as challenging as those at the Rue du Nord. And that’s why there are crowds of people down there sitting in the sand.

They are out of the wind too thanks to the headland.

The red machine that we saw down there working with a pile of dislodged rocks is still there too. That’s going to be quite an interesting job of work. I wonder what the purpose of it all is. I suppose that I shall find out in due course.

Having finished my inspection of the Plat Gousset I wandered off down the Square Maurice Marland to see how the seagulls were doing.

The two chicks that I have been observing were huddled up in some shade this afternoon and I couldn’t take a good photograph so in the end I had to settle with another bunch of chicks, with a very proud mummy standing guard over them

Plenty of sea-going activity in the bay this afternoon but there wasn’t anything exciting going on in the inner harbour this afternoon that we haven’t seen before so I left them to it and wandered off towards home and my strawberry smoothie.

In the old town this afternoon it’s the Artists’ Fair.

There are plenty of artists in the old town with all kinds of galleries and today was when they were having a sale of unsold work. And frankly I could see why it was unsold because it was either far too overpriced or the quality wasn’t up to all that much.

This modern art, surrealism and impressionism with huge swirls of colours, seems to be all the rage but it’s not something that I like at all. I prefer art to be like a photograph, a faithful representation of a view, with skill and talent.

Something that actually looks like what it’s supposed to be, painted by someone who knows how to paint. But these days I’d be embarrassed to put most of what I see on my wall. I know what I want for my apartment, and I know how much I’m going to pay for it too.

Back here, I crashed out yet again for an hour or so and then I did a pile of Welsh revision, going through some of the stuff that I’d written over the last two weeks.

In between all of this, I had some bread to make. I used the last of the loaf on Friday so I made another pile of dough which I left on one side to proof for a while.

After lunch I’d taken out a lump of pizza dough from the freezer and that had been defrosting. By now that was ready so I kneaded it and rolled it out, putting it on the pizza tray so that that could proof too.

While the bread was baking I assembled my pizza and when the bread was baked I put it in the oven to bake as well.

The bread looks absolutely perfect and the pizza didn’t look too bad either. It tasted quite delicious too and I’ll tell you about the bread tomorrow after I’ve sampled it for lunch.

And talking about tomorrow I took out the next batch of fruit buns from the freezer ready to defrost, and put the carrots in there to freeze for the next couple of weeks.

When I finished tea I washed up a pile of stuff in the kitchen and came in here to write up my notes.

Now I’m off to bed. I have an early start in the morning to prepare a radio programme and I’m not looking forward at all to doing it. I’m really not feeling much like anything at all right now.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: crash out

Thursday 28th July 2022 – THIS WAS ANOTHER …

Wednesday 27th July 2022 – THERE WASN’T ANYONE …

Sunday 24th July 2022 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Saturday 23rd July 2022 – HAVING COMPLAINED YESTERDAY …

Friday 22nd July 2022 – THAT WAS HORRIBLE!

Tuesday 19th July 2022 – THAT WAS HORRIBLE

Saturday 16th July 2022 – WHEN THE ALARM …

Wednesday 13th July 2022 – AND THE WINNER …

Tuesday 12th July 2022 – GUESS WHO …

Saturday 18th June 2022 – I WAS THINKING …

Thursday 16th June 2022 – GONE!

Wednesday 15th June 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

Tuesday 14th June 2022 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

Monday 13th June 2022 – NOW HERE’S A THING!

Sunday 12th June 2022 – I CAN’T EVEN HAVE …

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