Tag Archives: apple pie

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about those piles of gravel that had been appearing over the last couple of days on the quayside down in the harbour.

This blurred and illisible photo (I still have a lot to learn about the NIKON 1 J5) shows a ship that I have every reason to believe is Neptune moored at the loading bay by the conveyors where they ship the gravel on board.

At long last we’ve had a gravel boat in the harbour and I shall go out tomorrow (and try to be early) just to confirm that it is indeed she. It would be just my luck for her to have a rapid turn-round and for me to miss her.

But here’s something else quite interesting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking is a regular topic in these pages, particularly in the boulevard Vaufleury which is on a service bus route, is just 50 metres from the High School and is an access road for the fleet of school buses that come in the opposite direction to the service buses.

Where Madame (it is indeed a Madame) is parked is
1) the wrong way round
2) half on the pavement
3) blocking the buses
4) at school chucking-out time
5) just about 20 FEET from a huge free car park
so finally, at long, long last, the local police are doing something about it and they are making her move her vehicle.

That is pretty much encouraging news.

What else is encouraging news is that I was awake before the first alarm went off, and I was out of bed before the final alarm. Crashing out half-way through last night’s entry and so giving up and going to bed was good news in that case.

After the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone. Apparently I was in this labyrinth of a theatre complex last night all the way through this underground reception hall place with doors going off leading into theatre auditoriums and all kinds of things. There were all kinds of announcements about the place, many of them were out of date, 2011 I noticed. There were all kinds of things happening here. But I was just wandering through listening to the radio. They were talking about “hypocrites of the year” I suppose – some guy who was telling us all about how keen he was for this and how good he was going to be for that but while he was doing that he had increased all your library charges. Someone else was going on about how brilliant a cricketer he might have been, all this kind of thing, but he made one fatal mistake and that was heroin. I was drifting through this auditorium that had a couple of very faded leather chairs and the leather was worn out in certain places. Something to do with catching a London Underground train somewhere. There was a thing too about caring for your vans if you were on a limited income, like a hippy, and a warning that the supply of LDV vans even in scrapyards was drying up now – the van that was chosen for an example was a silver LDV M-reg.
A little later I was outside with someone who was supposed to be Liz’s husband but he was more like the father of a couple of friends of mine. He had Liz’s daughter with him. She’d been on a student exchange and she had a student back with them. He was saying “you’ll have to come round for a game of pinocle or something one of these days. We’ll have an evening of five people”. He indicated roughly a place in eastern Manchester, Hyde or that area Stalybridge where he was living but he didn’t go into any further details about that. I was wondering who this “five” was because I knew that he was on his own, the daughter had her friend and there was me, so who was the 5th? I couldn’t think.

After breakfast I had a look at the digital sound files. I managed to unsort three of them too. One of them however needs much more attention because for some unknown reason there’s a load of “additional music” which seems to be a mixture of selections of various tracks, so I’d like to know what was going on there.

It isn’t the first one like that that I had found either.

By now it was time to go for my shower and to clean myself up somewhat, and then head up into town.

Not that I actually got very far before I was interrupted.

Remember yesterday when I photographed all of the pontoon-supporting pillars on the quayside and I mused that they might be assembling them in two rows of four?

Here’s the big floating pontoon travelling across the harbour with one of the pillars within its clutches almost at the place where one would expect to see it if we were going to have a fourth pillar in that row.

And the scaffolding too. We talked about that as well.

My attention was drawn from a distance that the masts of Marité were not where they would usually be. And that was strange because she doesn’t usually roam around the harbour but stays put in her habitual little corner.

But she’s definitely moved, and the reason for that is that they’ve put the scaffolding, complete with OSB wallboards, in her usual berth and there are a couple of guys down there doing something.

So at least I know that the scaffolding is actually a working platform for some kind of task.

From here I headed down into the town centre and up the rue Couraye towards LIDL.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago we watched them fit some kind of protective shuttering around the front of the boulangerie here and start to smash out the old window.

The protective shuttering has now gone and, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the new shop front is in glorious display. That’s quite a nice job that they’ve done there. It looks quite good.

Now for the first time ever in my whole life, I’ve seen every till open at the same time in a LIDL. And that will give you some kind of indication of just how busy it was in there today.

No cucumbers, which is a problem, and nothing else of any real interest as far as I was concerned. All in all, a little disappointing. 3-kilo bags of apples was about the closest that I was to a bargain. And they won’t last long now that I’m making my purées myself.

On the way back I headed to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but i was held up outside the shop as Birnam Wood went past on its way to Dunsinane.

There was actually a tractor and trailer parked around the corner with several large plants stacked thereupon, and presumably this machine was busy distributing them around the town.

It’s certainly a different approach to beautifying the town. I’ve said often enough … “indeed” – ed … that there isn’t enough greenery in this town and we ought to have some more.

Having picked up my dejeunette I headed back home again.

Only half-way up the rue des Juifs before I was distracted yet again. Not that I would know much about these things but they look pretty much like new pontoon supports and new pontoons over there on the west wall of the harbour.

What with one thing and another, I can see that I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow having a look at all of these things. But at least the harbour gates will be closed again by 09:30 or thereabouts so it doesn’t have to be an “early” early.

And in other news, there’s activity in the chantier navale today too.

It’s been quite busy in there up until very recently, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the boats have been going back into the water one by one until just now we had none whatever left.

But that’s all changed now. There are two boats in there now, one of which is a large yacht that might actually be La Granvillaise. I’ll go for a stroll over there this afternoon to check on that.

Back at my apartment I made myself a coffee and then split up a fourth music file. Pretty straightforward except that there were three extra tracks on it that aren’t on the LP that I have, so I had to track down which version of the master tape I had obtained so that I could identify the tracks.

There was still time before lunch to send off my project for this weekend and to start a new one to add to the stock.

After lunch, I carried on with the radio project but didn’t get too far before I was overwhelmed with a wave of fatigue. I didn’t quite crash out but for about 15-20 minutes I was teetering on the edge and didn’t actually do any work or anything while I was sitting there

By now it was raining outside when I went for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was due to come into port, that I knew, so when I saw an object the same colour as Neptune far out to sea in the English Channel I took a photo with the intention of enlarging it back in the apartment.

Which I did, and it wasn’t Neptue at all but one of the fishing boats heading back to the port. Neptune must still ne well out of range, which wouldn’t be a surprise because there’s a while yet before the harbour gates will open and she won’t want to sit around outside waiting.

She might not want to, but everyone else is.

The tide is well out and the little creek that leads up to the side of the fish-processing plant is only just starting to fill with water. It’ll be another half an hour or so before she’ll be deep enough to accept the fishing boats but they are all starting to congregate just outside.

There were at least 10 of them out there – maybe more but I had run out of fingers by this point and I wasn’t going to start taking off my shoes and socks. Mind you, had I had my hands in my pockets, I might have been able to count up to 11.

While I was walking round across the lawn by the War memorial, I noticed this.

We haven’t had an earthquake or a landslide or anything. That house is actually built like that. It’s what they call a trompe l’oeil – “something that cheats the eye” and it’s the window thats aligned strangely to follow the contours of the roofs rather than being in the hotizontal/vertical plane.

What’s bewildering me right now though is why I never noticed that before. It’s not like me to miss out on something this.

Anyway, enough of this. I continued on my way around the headland to go to see what was going on in the chantier navale.

And I was right here too. It’s my lucky day, isn’t it? The “G90” painted on the side of the yacht tells us that it is indeed La Granvillaise down there on blocks.

Crowds of people milling round her too so there’s clearly something important going on with her. At least, I imagine that the people are there for her. It’s unlikely that a fishing boat would receive that much attention unless she had caught the Loch Ness Monster.

Yesterday, you’ll recall that we saw a couple of kayaks out there in the baie de Mont St Michel.

And so when I saw something else quite small out there in that general direction, I reckoned that it might be another one so I took another photograph of it to examine back in the comfort and safety of my apartment.

But it wasn’t a kayak at all but one of the small flat-bottomed boats that they use for transporting the boxes of seafood to the quayside from boats that have for one reason or another not been able to moor at the fish-processing plant.

And earlier this morning we saw the large flaoting pontoon carrying one of the pillars across the harbour.

A short while later the noise of the pile-driver started up and it’s been going on for most of the day. And so I had expected them to have made substantial progress, and I was quite right about that.

It’s been pounded quite well and quite deeply into the bed of the harbour and I imagine that they’ll be connecting up some pontoons to it in early course.

It’s certainly interesting.

And while I was musing on this, I witnessed the “police interaction” that I mentioned earlier.

Back here I did a little more to the radio project but ended up having an hour or so playing with the bass guitar and the 6-string electric/acoustic. It’s been a good while since I had a decent play about and I must work harder on this and make more of an effort.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper with rice, followed by some apple pie and coconut soya stuff. And despite the absence of spices, it was really nice. I’ll have to make a few more like that one of these days.

But I’m really going to have to buy a bigger fridge and a bigger freezer.

For my evening walk I went to see what was going on with the winds.

The tide is well out now but the wind is still causing the waves to smash against the wall down on the Plat Gousset. I bet that they didn’t do much repair work on that wall today.

My two runs weren’t a problem, except that my first run had to be on a different course due to waterlogging. And then I went to have a look at Neptune.

Now i’m back here and ready for bed. I’ll finish (I hope) the radio project tomorrow and then I can deal with another outstanding matter.

However did I find the time to go to work?

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

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

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

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

So I went off and had my medication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind you, my luck was in, for once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And i wasn’t wrong either.

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

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

And I wasn’t alone here either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll get my coat.

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

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

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

There have been much worse shots than this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZZZZZZZ

Thursday 20th February 2020 – NOW HERE’S A THING!

When the first alarm went off this morning at 06:00 I was actually sitting at my computer working.

And yes! I had been to bed – not a case of staying up all night, as has happened on several occasions, eben though it was something of a rather late – in fact very late night (a huge pile of my favourite tracks came onto my playlist while I was thinking of going to bed so I stayed up and listened to them).

It all happened this morning quite by accident too. I awoke at about 05:20 to find myself dictating into the dictaphone that wasn’t switched on. The reason – a flat battery.

None around by the bed (I forgot to look in the camera bag) so I had to leave the bed to find one. In the radio bag there was only one so I had to search the apartment to find some more.

By the time that I found them, I was wide awake so there wasn’t much point in going to bed. I may as well start work. And I wish I knew where that battery disappeared to. It was one of my new ones too.

So I had my medication and was checking the dictaphone when the alarms went off.

I was back in Hankelow Hall again There was a huge crowd of us having a party or something and Clare Channing was there and I can’t remember who else and her husband. They had the electric on for some reason or other and were having a party. I was upstairs trying to do something and had to go to the bathroom so I went in and it was overwhelmed with cobwebs and things but there were still things hanging everywhere and so on. But there was toilet paper which was great. I switched on the light but the light wouldn’t work. I tried putting the bulb in various positions to see if that was something wrong but no. But I thought it was still light so I could go anyway. But I was called down at that point. A lot of people had gone and there were just a few around. Someone brought a big plate of sandwiches and gestured towards them “there’s some here that you can eat”, some kind of paste or something on really dark brown bread like German. I said I hope that I’m going to get more than this for my tea because there was really only two triangles and I can eat a lot more than that when I’m going. But no this seemed to be my entire teatime and I felt a sense of dismay at that.
I was In Hankelow Hall last night and there was a lot of us there doing something downstairs. I went upstairs to use the bathroom and it was all covered in dust and there were decorations everywhere all over the wall and everything, cobwebs, but I went in al the same. I found some toilet paper which was just as well but I couldn’t get the light switch to work which was odd. It wouldn’t come on. I messed around with the cable for a bit trying to get that into a better position but that didn’t work either. I realised that I was going to be more embarrassed by getting further, deeper into this than I intended to. And someone shouted out, it was a cry of “Maths” so I had to go downstairs and eat my maths. We were in a building like St Joseph’s so I went downstairs and changed my money and got some maths, changed some more money and got some motorbike company and had my evening meal. Although I was sitting at a table with a few people I had my thoughts practically about me and I stayed like that until the alarm went off at 07:15 when I was the first out of the door and got a boat ready to sail off to see the animals to see how they had survived the winter.
I’m not sure if the second part of the above is the same as the first part and dictated a second time in a different fashion, or whether it really is a different voyage that, by simple coincidence, is related to the first one.
A little later I was doing something but I can’t remember quite what that involved a couple of old cars and I had to swap these old cars around. I ended up in a black Citroen traction avant. I had to drive it up the road and down a slip road onto the motorway and off again somewhere. I got up to the set of traffic lights where you turn left for the motorway and turned onto the sliproad. Round about there, there was a boy and a girl weaving about in the road on pushbikes talking to each other and I clipped the heel of the boy on the bike. Of course that was all I needed! he insisted on filling in an accident form, all this kind of thing. Of course this traction hadn’t moved for years and there was no paperwork with it. he was quite insistent about this so I had a root around in the vehicle, found some kind of paper about something and he seemed to be quite satisfied with this, saying that the controle technique was OK and so on. In the meantime I was talking to this girl about the car. She said “if this was 30 years older it would be a real veteran”. I said “I know. It came out of a barn down on the French border somewhere (… I was in Belgium …) and we were having a friendly chat about this car and he was getting a bit up in the air about all kinds of things which he was right to do but anyway …

After breakfast I sat down and split up a few digital music files into their component tracks. And while it might have been more straightforward that on previous occasions, it was not without its complications.

One of the albums ended up with 19 minutes of extra music and of those, I only recognised one. I ad to search all the way through a pile of catalogues until I could find which version of the album it was and, more importantly, the timings because not every catalogue entry has the timings.

And then I had to listen to samples of the extended tracks to make sure that it really was what I was expecting to hear and that it was all in the correct order – because I’ve been caught out with out-of-order recordings before, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

“But why are the recordings out of order?” I hear you ask

The answer is that with studio master tapes, they are recorded, quite simply, in the order that they are recorded. However, unless it’s a concept album or something where the running order is crucial, the producer will then try to sort out the tracks so that there’s as near as possible an equal length of recording on each side of an LP or a cassette. And quite often, that’s nothing like the order in which they were recorded on the studio master tapes.

That was the cue for me to head into town and LIDL so I had a quick shower and put the washing machine on the go before leaving the apartment.

There was nothing whatever of any relevance on the way down into town so I didn’t loiter around. But my route took me onto the Place General de Gaulle where they have assembled the stage, to see what else was happening.

And there was certainly plenty of excitement there this morning.

There was a bunch of guys manhandling a trailer around on the square, so thinking that they might be trying to steal it, I went to see if they needed a hand.

Actually there were delivering it, not taking it away. And I’ve no idea what it might be except that it makes reference to ma vie dans la Manche – “my life in the Manche” (the département here).

And so my thought is that it might well be some kind of sales pitch, tourism or advertisement thing ready to try to seduce the crowds at Carnaval.

Instead of going up the rue Couraye I went along the Cours Jonville to see how they were getting on with the chapiteaux, the marquees that we saw yesterday.

And by the looks of things they might well be almost finished over there now. And that’s a really impressive task that they’ve undertaken to do it so quickly.

Mind you, they’ve r^probably had plenty of practice doing it. I imagine that the marquees are hired in and that the fitters and installers come from the hirers and do this every week.

But this is a new thing and I’d forgotten all about this, even though I stood on it last year to have a good view.

There’s a Princess of Carnaval and on Sunday she’ll be standing on this stage to address her loyal supporters.

And I’m amazed at just how quickly they’ve set up this stage too. There wasn’t even a hint of this here yesterday lunchtime when I came for my bread so it looks as if they must have dashed through the installation yesterday afternoon.

Up past the cinema and onto the rue Couraye that way up towards LIDL.

At the roundabout at the Place Pierre Semard by the railway station, I came to another halt. On Monday as I came by there were just a couple of lorries here but today the fête foraine, the funfair is practically all installed ready for the opening on Friday evening.

These people don’t ‘arf crack on with this kind of work when they have a timetable to which they have to adhere

When I first moved here there was a car spares shop and rally centre in the avenue du Marechal Leclerc but it closed down not long after I arrived.

A few months ago the windows were pained over on the inside as if something was going on there but there were o visible signs of anything at all. Today though, they’ve ripped out the shop window.

And so with this work going on, it looks as if there’s going to be a new occupier in there. I wonder who it might be and, more importantly, what they might be selling.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few weeks we’ve been examining LIDL here for vegan and vegetarian products on sale as their range slowly expands.

What we’re featuring today is another discovery that has taken me by surprise, namely a range of gluten-free products. This is a major Leap into the Unknown by a shop like LIDL but it’s a sign of the times, I suppose.

But it’s not all good news though. It’s a good job that I bought those vegan burgers when I did because there are none in the freezer today. Whether it’s a temporary rupture of stock or something more permanent remains to be seen.

And LIDL felt the benefit of my largesse rather more than usual today. They were selling bathroom stuff in there and one of the things that they had was a magnifying tabletop mirror, something that I don’t have and which I can certainly put to good use.

being rather later than usual today I didn’t loiter around too much but headed for home.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall a while ago that we saw them erecting a crane outside a house in the Impasse de la Corderie, but not a great deal happened subsequently. Today though, there’s some shuttering gone in and a pile of breeze blocks have been delivered.

Clearly things are going to start happening there sometime soon. I wonder what that will be.

Over the last few days we’ve seen them erecting the fairground attractions on the Parking Hérel.

That’s all the heavy stuff going in there but there’s a smaller car park next to it in the rue Saint-Sauveur and they are setting up a few attractions there today.

So that looks as if it’s going to be Kiddies’ Corner for all of the tiny tots to have their round of fun. As you can see, in one fashion or another the Carnaval and the fête foraine are taking over the town.

At la Mie Caline I picked up my bread and headed back up the hill towards home.

And my progress was erected in dramatic fashion by the sight down on the parking area that they’ve been renovating where they ripped out the old railway lines.

We have a compactor down there now flattening down the surface. So I imagine that they are going to be putting the top layer on there any day now.

That’s going to be exciting to see what they are doing – I hope.

Back here at the apartment I reflected on the fact that I hadn’t made any observation whatever about the climbs up the hills today. That alone tells me tjat I must be feeling somewhat better than of late.

And so I made a coffee and returned to the digital sound files.

As well as the ones that I’d previously downloaded, I actually managed to track down a couple more and they were summarily dealt with too.

The next task was to make myself a decent badge with my name on it for the weekend. We have badges for the radio but with our given names scrawled on the back in felt-tipped marker pen. I wanted something much more official so I scanned my badge, inserted text with my name in bold font, and then printed out two copies on stiff paper and glued them back-to-back

And it’s moments like this that I wished that I had my laminator here.

This was another job that took an hour to do. 5 minutes to scan the badge, 5 minutes to insert the ext and 5 minutes to print it out and stick it together, and blasted 45 perishing minutes to find that flaming thing that I sodding well had in dratted hands 10 damned minutes earlier.

By now it was lunchtime so I made my butties.

This afternoon I had plenty to do.

Not the least of which was to contact the company who made the desktop mike stand that I ordered and which came the other day. The mike mounting is about 2.5cms and yet the diameter of the microphone is actually 4.5cms.

It looks as if the wrong mounting bracket was put in the box so I had to photograph the set-up to send off to the suppliers.

Of course I don’t have my coloured ruler – that’s in the pocket of my jacket that’s hanging up in a hotel bedroom in Calgary – so I had to invent one.

Coloured rulers – where each inch or centimetre is coloured differently are really useful because when you are photographing objects like this you can lay the ruler alongside it then take your photo, and the presence of the coloured ruler in the shot shows at a glance the effective size of the object.

Tidying up was next. I’ve found that the plastic containers in which I’ve been buying my carrots fit nicely in the small drawer of my desk – suspended from the top of the sides leaving a space underneath.

And so I tidied the drawer out and found a few things about which I had completely forgotten

Final task for today was to start the photos from the summer. All of June is now finished and I’ve now started on July.

But so much for my shipboard idea about placeholders. By the time that I’d reached just number 7 I’d already overtaken the placeholder numbers.

And the fault in the images on the portable computers doesn’t seem to be the photos but the screens, as I suspected. On this screen, which is quite expensive and good quality, as well as being more modern technology, they look so much better.

A couple of interruptions though. The afternoon walk was one of them but I didn’t go far as we were having a torrential downpour and hurricane-force winds. I did about half a lap in an ad-hoc direction that kept me out of the wind, and then came back.

The second interruption was … errr … a little relax. And no susprise given my night. The only surprise was that it was only for about 10 minutes and wasn’t all that deep.

Tea was all of the leftovers with spicy tomato sauce and pasta with vegetables, followed by apple pie and raspberry sorbet with chocolate sauce and it was magnificent.

And then the evening walk. The weather had subsided but it was still quite damp outside.

Nevertheless that didn’t stop me going for my evening runs. And for two days on the run … “groan!!” – ed … I ran on for a good few metres on my first run and on my second run ended up halfway up the ramp instead of flaking out at the foot.

Yes, I’m definitely feeling better.

And for two days on the run, Minette was there on her windowsill waiting for her stroke. It’s very relaxing, stroking a cat. Good for easing the stress.

The pizza van was there again, parked bang outside Le Contremarche, the new posh restaurant in the Place Cambernon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I pointed out the other week that she had a new van. And now it seems to have been painted. Business must be good.

So now I’m home, finished my notes and ready for bed. And with new batteries in the dictaphone I’m hoping for a decent night’s sleep.

Whether or not I have one is another matter.

And no water craft today either. What is happening to me?

Wednesday 19th February 2020 – THESE FAIRGROUND WORKERS …

… aren’t half cracking on with it, I’ll tell you that.

At lunchtime I went down to La Mie Caline to buy my dejeunette and after picking it up I went round to the car park at the Cours Jonville to see just how they are going on with the chapiteau that they started to erect on Monday morning.

Yesterday we saw that they had had a really good go at one of them but today they have leapt ahead in spades and they now have a second one up and it’s almost finished.

When they’ve done that I’ll have to get them to go round to my farm, won’t I?

As for me, I’m not very impressed with myself. I somehow managed to miss the second alarm and while I was contemplating my navel in bed, the third alarm went off. I actually had my feet on the floor half a second later but just couldn’t puck up the courage and went back to bed.

By the time that I was finally on my feet, that was half an hour of the day missed and gone.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

There was this family – a husband and wife and a couple of kids – girls about 11 and 9. They had been on their travels and I’d forgotten a lot of what had gone on but they ended up being back in Mexico. They were at some kind of place and they had an old Mexican woman with them who had befriended them. There was some music being played. While they were rejoicing about their escape or whatever it was that had got them to Mexico these two guys slowly sidled in from the dark. The kids were cheering and the husband was laughing but the two women, this wife and the elderly Mexican realised that these two guys were here and it was quite clear to them that these two guys meant some kind of mischief. They tried to get the person who was playing these records to stop playing them so they could all go off to bed but this person hadn’t really grasped the seriousness of it and carried on. Meantime these two guys were becoming a bit more intrusive and talking about all kinds of things and reading some of the comments that I had on piece of paper about the music that I was doing. One was making air guitar gestures that kind of thing and I thought to myself that this is going to start to turn really ugly in a minute.
Somewhat later, I was at the death of John Cipollina the musician. He didn’t die of lung disease at all but was killed in a motorcycle accident in South Street, Crewe, opposite the Up The Junction club. He’d been playing with man and I’d been recording it for a concert for my live shows and I was preparing it. There was an awfully long speech about the introduction and all of this kind of thing. We were all called outside and there was a car mounted on the pavement where the undertakers used to be and Cipollina and his motorcycle were there. They’d been hit by this car. They were asking “how is he” but his eyes were closed and all this kind of thing “don’t anyone go near him”. Someone said “we had to go near him. We had to disentangle the wheels of his motor cycle, all this kind of thing. We were there; we didn’t know what to do. We phoned an ambulance but the ambulance took ages to come along. We then all went off into the village hall where they had the autopsy and examination and someone was talking about suicide at one time – he’d rammed the car directly, I suppose. Then we had to go down to the High School, Sandbach High School and break the news to my daughter whoever she was because she was rather fond of John Cipollina.

Like I said, the things that go on during the night are far more exciting than whatever happens to me during the day. Someone once asked me if I were troubled by dreams during the night. I replied “well, no. I actually quite enjoy them”.

After breakfast (and my apple, pear, coconut and cinnamon purée and drink are delicious by the way) I attacked the radio projects. And by the time that I was ready to knock off to go and fetch my bread I’d finished project 26 completely and also done the “live concert” for the last week in March.

The way things stand now, I’m already dealing with the prjects for may but I’m short of a live concert for the end of April. I have a few things lined up that I could use but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, anyone who has anything that they would like me to broadcast on their behalf is more than welcome to submit it.

With my new determination to push on past the 100% level on my fitbit every day, I decided on a very extended walk down into town to fetch my bread.

So off to duplicate my afternoon route around the headland and I’m glad that I did because there was something moving about in the thick mist out to sea in the general direction of where the Ile de Chausey might be.

Armed with the big Nikon and the mega-zoom lens I took a photo of it to crop and blow up back at the apartment in case it was anything interesting.

However, it was only Joly France off on one of her runs out there.

When I reached the lighthouse, instead of going off across the lawn my the War memorial as I usually do, the lack of any major wind today meant that I could go down the steps and right around the headland without any major discomfort.

It’s actually an exciting way to go, not just because of the physically-challenging nature of the walk for someone like me but also for the fact that there’s quite a lot of the old Atlantic Wall, like this gun emplacement, to see.

We normally wouldn’t get to see this when we are on the more usual route.

There’s another part of the Atlantic Wall that we don’t usually see either.

This is a slit trench that’s reinforced with concrete and I can’t make out whether it’s supposed to be a shelter (given the roof) or an observation post given that the direction of the trench aligns with the Channel Islands.

Whatever it is, it must have been a very lonely, cold and isolated vigil, being posted to a tour of duty in here.

Just now I mentioned something about “the lack of any major wind today”.

That may well be the case but you would never have thought so by looking at the waves here. The tide is still a couple of hours out yet the waves are storming in from out at sea and smashing their way into the sea wall here.

It’s going to be pretty exciting down there at high tide if they keep on going on like this, that’s for sure.

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

Out in the English Channel is this speedboat – at least, I think that it’s a speedboat – and it’s disappearing into one of the heavy waves that’s rolling in.

That’s going to be something of a wild ride into the harbour in a little vessel like that in waves like these. Whoever is on board will know all about the weather by the time that they arrive in port.

It was round about this time yesterday that I walked into town for my bread. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my arrival coincided with all of the fishing boats coming in to harbour.

The tide is about half an hour later every day so the gates won’t be opened for a bit, and this looks like the first of the fishing boats heading in for home. It’s quite a way out in the English Channel (hence the blurred photo) but it will take that extra half-hour to arrive here.

No particular need for me to rush for the harbour gates today then.

Just as well because … ohh look over there!

Yes, we have a visitor today. It seems that Normandy Trader has sneaked in on the morning tide and tied up at the unloading bay underneath the crane.

So seeing as I have plenty of time today, having finished my essential work for the week, I’ll go over there and have a talk to them. I have things to discuss.

So I make my way down onto the docks, across the harbour ates by the pathway on top, and across to the other side of the port.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall yesterday that we watched them float one of the new pontoons across the harbour to the far side.

And sure enough, there are some of the new pontoons, properly anchored (I hope) to the mounting brackets that they have been installing over the last few days.

But how are they going to get down to the pontoons? They’ll need some steps of some description.

Everyone was at lunch and the harbour was totally deserted right now.

That gave me a good opportunity to go and have a look at the big floating pontoon that they are using to transport the crane about the harbour to see what else is on there.

There’s a compressor and a generator on there as well as a couple of storage containers, and also some other machinery that I was not able to identify with any certainty.

Still, it’s enough to be going on with.

Once again, despite my best intentions, there was no-one about on Normandy Trader. I shouted and button-holed a passer-by from another ship, but no luck.

This is something that I’m going to have to deal with by correspondence or by phone.

At la Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette, went to check on the chapiteau as above, and then headed for home.

And the workmen are back at work by now too. Clearly too tired to walk around the harbour, they have decided to sail across in some kind of outboard motor-propelled craft of some description.

Whatever is the world coming to? As for me, I believe that I did mention that the last day or so I’ve been feeling a little better. So much so that I actually RAN for 50 metres or so UP THE HILL o the way back.

How about that?

After lunch I updated THE RADIO PLAYLIST with the tracks that were played over the weekend. That’ ssomething that’s pretty important and I always seem to manage to let it fall into arrears.

After that, I realised that I hadn’t yet chopped up any digital soundfiles into the individual tracks. So that was the next task and I would have done that much quicker and been much farther ahead had I not confused myself by “copying” when I should have been “cutting”, pasting the same track three times and wondering why everything was out of sync.

What with all of that, I found myself rather late going out for my afternoon walk around the headland – the shorter route this time.

And it seems that I wasn’t the only one who was “late” either. The harbour gates have been open for a good few hours and they won’t be so far off closing. But here’s a fishing boat heading into harbour nevertheless.

There’s always someone who has to be last, no matter when they come in. Nothing wrong in that as long as he makes it in before the gates close. We’ve already seen one fishing boat stranded at the fish processing plant, caught by the receding tide.

It’s school holidays here in Granville right now. Most kids are at home or with grandparents but there are some poor kids who have to go on what is called classe découvert or “discovery class”.

It’s said to be a way of making children explore their environment, to see things in a different fashion than they would otherwise do and to learn about them in a different way.

But in fact, it’s more about putting the kids somewhere out of mischief because either there is no-one to look after them or the parents want a break themselves.

Mind you, knowing some parents as I do, perhaps a classe découvert is a good way for the kids to get some peace and quiet away from their parents, so don’t knock it.

Going past the top of the cliff I stuck my head over the top to see what was going on in the chantier navale

And we seem to have a change in there this afternoon too. There’s only one fishing boat in there now. The other one seems to have cleared off back into the water.

So I wonder who’s going to be next to arrive in the chantier navale. It would be nice to have something exciting in there for a change or perhaps from them to build a boat.

That would be interesting.

No chance of getting to speak to Normandy Trader now this afternoon, because she isn’t there.

She must have sneaked out as soon as the harbour gates opened earlier this afternoon. And into the harbour has come Thora instead. I want to speak to her skipper too but if I can’t catch hold of them I’ll contact them in writing to maybe arrange an appojntment.

And there’s someone else I would like to talk to about this matter before I forget. I shall have to sit down one day and draw up some plans.

Back here I … err … had a little doze for a short while and then carried on with some other stuff that had been building up while I’d been stuck in this “work” mode just recently.

There’s plenty of that lying around and I shall be doing it bit by bit. But there are several things that need doing fairly quickly, so now that I’m free of any serious commitment until Saturday, I can tackle them tomorrow.

But I also have a party to attend on Friday night, here in the building. I don’t really have the time but it would be unsociable not to at least go for half an hour. I know that “sociable” isn’t like me at all but these are mu co-residents and I have to be polite.

Tea tonight was some of the lentil and tofu pie from the other day with potatoes, veg and gravy, followed by apple pie (also from the other day) with the last of the Alpro Soya Cream and chocolate sauce.

And it was absolutely delicious. I really am eating so well these days and I’m enjoying every minute of it.

Later on I went out for my evening walk.

It was beautiful outside with a relatively clear sky and you could see for miles. The lights of Brehal-Plage were really bright tonight and came out so well.

If you look closely, you’ll see a small red light in the background. In the absence of any other candidate, I reckon that that’s the warning light for the wind turbine at the back of Gavray, about 20-25 kms from here. That’s how clear the night was

So now that I’ve written up my notes I can go to bed, and have more exciting dreams, I hope. And maybe if I’m lucky, actually leave the bed when i’m supposed to.

Shopping tomorrow, the dictaphone and the sound-file chopping, and then the rest of the day is my own. Plenty to do, though, and it won’t be done on its own that’s for sure. I have to get a wiggle on.

Sunday 16th February 2020 – DESPITE IT BEING A …

… day of rest today, I have been a very busy boy.

And here is the evidence. Frm left to right we have a lentil-and-tofu pie, an apple pie and, to use up the rest of the pastry and apple, an apple turnover.

The other day I mentioned that there were only a couple of slices of pie left in the fridge. Well, there was some tofu that needed using up and I bought a couple of pastry rolls yesterday.

Lentils are never in short supply here and so there we were.

A couple of hundred grammes of lentils went into the slow cooker with some parsley, sage and rosemary, and then some water. And they were left to boil up.

Once they had boiled, I drained them off, rinsed them and put them back in clean water with some tofu, more herbs as above and a couple of stock cubes. And left them for a couple of hours.

And talking of a couple of hours, it was more than a couple of hours of sleep that I had last night. In bed at a relatively realistic time, I slept right through until about 07:50.

But there was no chance of my leaving the bed at that time of the morning. The howling gale and rainstorm that I could clearly hear going on outside made me crawl back down under the bedclothes. 10.30 is a much more reasonable time to arise on a Sunday.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone. Apparently I was at a rock concert last night in Nantwich and there was a group playing and I was watching the group. I was with someone but I can’t remember who now and a woman came over. I knew this woman but I can’t remember who she was. She was big and tall and in a wide-brimmed black hat with a small crown, black cloak type of overcoat. She looked like a Bishop. She shouted at me but I didn’t recognise her at first but then I did and got talking with her. I noticed that one of the musicians was someone who had been a chauffeur with me, and he was with a saxophone. I thought “ohh, how strange”. We had a talk and a joke about cars, that kind of thing. I was meeting someone else but it was quite early so I went back to my apartment and got a burger and started to fry it. But being hit overwhelmingly by an overwhelming way of sleep I went to get into bed. I took off all of my clothes to get into bed and just then the doorbell rang. I staggered out of bed past a half-cooked meal, half asleep and asked who it was. “Oh, it’s Mikhael” the bass guitarist from the Hillbilly group. That was the guy I was waiting for. So I thought “‘I’d better let him get in and get dressed, stop eating and trying to cook this food, all of that kind of thing”.
After that I was in a museum somewhere and there was a discussion about a play taking place where two actors were throwing balls at each other – Roman actors. They were on version 2 of a CD or DVD and I had to check first of all to check that I had DVD version 2, which I had. So we checked and it was the Romans in bed that were throwing, these two guys were throwing these hard balls at each other until one was hit on the head and killed. We were discussing why the other guy hadn’t killed the first one and we thought “maybe he had been lying on his arm so long so his arm was weak and so he had to use his bad arm. This led to a discussion about military tactics at Flodden -Culloden rather where British soldiers were instructed to attack the man on their right whenever he raised his claymore to attack the British soldier standing on his right and never mind about the guy in front of you because your mate on the left would be taking care of him. Whenever they raised their right arm, their soft under-belly was exposed and that was where you would bayonet them. That went back to the crusaders and armour, how you would kill a knight is underneath the right armpit. Someone said “should we all go and get a glass of water out of the tap and resume this discussion somewhere more comfortable rather than around a few library desks.
A little bit earlier I was having to do something that was extremely urgent and I’d got off the Metro and there on the Metro was someone, the guy who played someone in Hawaii 50 and I can’t remember his name – a very famous actor. I quickly got back onto the Metro to get off a bit further down and was hoping that there was no-one at the station waiting for me. It was a long and convoluted route to get to where the safety deposit box was because obviously the previous Metro Station would have been better for that. I had to come off and walk across a crowded street which took ages and walking up this hill in the countryside. As I was doing it, some woman’s dog came along and started growling at me so I kicked it away. She complained. The dog came back and bit me so I gave it a really good heavy kick and she complained about that. I said “you should have your dog on a lead”. She said that lLeads are compulsory here which I thought strange. I had to walk up this hill and I reckon that it was a climb of about 500 feet and it was hot, in the summer and we were quickly out of the urban area into the rural area. I was feeling really uncomfortable at this walk and this climb. I have this the wrong way round haven’t I? It was first the man then the story about being on the tram and the dog biting me then finally the third part.
Later still I was on the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again with a group of people, a family with very young kids and we were doing the usual family type of thing that you do with young kids, playing games and things. And then I went for a walk. We’d only been on this ship half a day or so but I’d been on it before so I knew my way round so I was wandering around quite happily. I walked past all these people on the deck sitting there in the lounge. I walked out and upstairs, outside and round and ended up being on the top of a double decker bus, an old green Crosville one. I worked out that on the top deck there was only room for about 20 people that you would expect on a double-decker bus or maybe more I dunno. Anyway I walked back down and these people were looking at le with amazement thinking “where’s he been?”. A stewardess called Kerry who I knew so I said to her, calling her by her first name and they all thought “wow he’s learning quick about the ship” and then we approached Crewe Bus Station which was a dock and I said to her “gosh, he’s coming in quick! Is he on a mileage bonus or something?” “Ohh God yes he is!” and he hit the quayside, bounced up on top of the quay. I said “that’s our holiday finished, isn’t it now?” But he kept the power on and the sip sailed round in like a U-turn, back to the edge of the quayside and dropped over and into the water again. I thought “God, I’d never ever thought of doing that” but there we were, back in the water again.

By the time that I’d finished typing that lot out I’d had breakfast, had a quick bit of butty and it wasn’t all that far off teatime. After all, it’s Sunday and I was in no hurry.

One thing though – because of the weather I hadn’t set one single foot outside the apartment but round about 16:00 the rain briefly stopped.

Seizing the chance I grabbed my coat and went outside for a walk. The weather was still grey and totally miserable as you can tell from this photo of the lighthouse and the coastguard station at the Pointe du Roc.

But the most important thing was that the wind had dropped considerably and that was good news. it had really been wicked.

And while the wind might have dropped there was still plenty of power in the sea.

That’s quite evident in this photo. The tide is well out right now and yet there’s enough force in the waves to bring them right up to the sea wall with something of a splash.

If it keeps it up, it’s going to be really impressive out there this evening at high tide I reckon. Not that I’ll be there to see it though.

Heading into town for a long walk by the very old road – or path more like – here’s something that I don’t remember encountering before.

It was the fencing and the “keep out” notices that drew my attention to it so I went to look. It seems that the cliffs are eroding just here and undermining part of the wartime German concrete.

There’s tons of that around here in the Atlantic Wall and we have seen plenty of it in the past, but this looks like one piece that we won’t be seeing for much longer.

But while I was there my attention was further caught, this time by the sound of running water.

There are a couple of springs up on the top and these days they disappear into some kind of guttering system. I’ve never worked out where they go to from there but now I think that I know.

This culvert here that discharges into the sea looks very much like the outlet for all of this.

With the tide being quite far out right now the gates to the harbour were closed so I could walk over the pathway at the top to the other side of the harbour.

Yesterday I mentioned the fete foraine here in Granville. The machinery and amusements are to arrive today and start to set up tomorrow. It looks now as if most of them have turned up already.

Here they are anyway, parked up at the car park at the end of the quayside near to the ferry terminal and here they’ll stay fr a couple of weeks.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been following the fortunes of the two concrete breakers, the digger and the two tractors and trailers that are removing rocks from the ferry terminal.

The havy stuff parks over by the fish processing plant but here on the quayside are the tractors and trailers and all of the stuff that they have brought with them.

And this can only mean that we won’t be expecting a gravel boat for a while because all of this is parked where the gravel would be dumped for loading.

Last night we saw the arrival of the first lot of caravans for the fete foraine and they were parking up at the Place Godal.

Today there are a lot more of them as well as a couple of lorries that might well be something to do with the fairground attractions.

and just in case you hadn’t already noticed, it was now back to raining again. But the wind was still keeping down so I pressed on with my walk. After all, I can’t get much wetter than I am.

My little voyage took me along the sea front and down to the Parking Hérel.

Starting tomorrow this will be where the fete foraine will be erected. And it’s a complete work of art the things that they do to get it going.

Tomorrow I’ll be coming back from my radio meeting this way and I’ll be able to see how they are doing. And hopefully take a few photos of the erections that they put up. And it doesn’t take them long to do it.

For a variety of reasons there aren’t too many old houses of the traditional Normandy-Style here in Granville.

And this is one that I haven’t seen before, in a little alleyway off the rue Commandant Yvon. A real Normandy wooden-framed house. And not falling down either like the one in the rue Ernest LeFranc.

By now I was ready to return home but still wishing to push up the percentages on the fitbit I continued around the town for a while getting wetter and wetter and eventually made it back home for coffee and cake.

For tea I made myself the usual pizza, forgetting the sliced garlic, and then made my pies.

Before I’d gone out I’d checked the slow cooker. The mix was too liquidy so a couple of spoonfuls of oats had taken care of that and it was lookign quite good.

So pastry in the pie dish, add in the filling, moisten the edge of the pastry, put a top on, press down the top with a fork so that it seals, trim off the excess pastry, paint with soya milk and prick with a fork.

Roll out all of the excess pastry so that it’s flat again, cut out a circle to put in a pie dish, slice a few cooking apples very thinly and pack the pie dish with them, some lemon juice and brown sugar and forget the cinnamon and nutmeg but remember the desiccated coconut.

Roll out the remaining pastry, cut out enough for a lid, repeat the process as for the previous pie except to sprinkle on the top some brown sugar.

With the pastry that you’ve trimmed off, roll it out again and keep on trimming and adding back as you roll it to keep it square, fill it with the leftover apple brown sugar and coconut, fold it over and then bung the lot in the oven to cook while I’m eating my pizza.

And while I was eating my pizza I was wondering why I hadn’t fried any onions and garlic for the pie mix.

The pies weren’t ready so for pudding I had a banana with some of the Alpro almond-flavoured dessert stuff that I’d bought for the apple pie.

No-one about at all on my evening walk so I had a good couple of runs. My usual track on the north side of the walls was waterlogged so I improvised. And I even did a third run – or, rather, half a run – later on because having seen that I was now on 93% of my daily target, I extended my walk.

Now my notes are finished, my day of rest is over and it’s back to work tomorrow. A good night’s sleep is required and then i’ll be fighting fit for tomorrow.

I don’t think.

Friday 7th February 2020 – I HAD VISITORS …

… today, and that’s always good news because it obliges me to do something about the state of my apartment and get on and do some cleaning and tidying up.

And also to unblock the sink. I seem to have been a little too lax with the carrot peelings from yesterday. And that involved dismantling the cupboard, which meant getting everything out.

And while everything was out I could clean it.

You can see how one thing leads to another and once you get started you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

Last night wasn’t as early as I would have liked, and as a result I found it hard to leave the bed. In fact I missed the third alarm completely and ended up leaving the bed at 07:10 and that’s no good at all.

After the medication I had a look on the dictaphone. And sure enough I’d been on my travels during the night. I remember very little about this except that there was a group of us going away from somewhere presumably being chased by someone’s mother and we were down Pillory Street in Nantwich. later on we were again in a group and there was some wise intelligent old man there, a teacher or something and the girl with me, he was talking to her and he said that he was going to draw her a jigsaw now and of course we were all puzzled about what he meant. He drew a jigsaw piece and he wrote a word in it. I can’t remember the word now but when you turned it upside down it created another word that made perfect sense as well. It was a long word – about 15 letters or so and it actually resolved a word no matter which way up you had the piece but obviously it was a different word with a different meaning.

Once breakfast was over I started to cut up another sound file but that was agonising. Nothing whatever corresponded to the track descriptions that I had, and although I knew the album I didn’t know the name of the tracks and that didn’t help. After having done about half of it, I reckoned that I’d better crack on and do the tidying up.

Just as the place was looking more respectable, Liz and Terry came round. I could finally give Liz her birthday present, and then we went for a walk and a coffee at La Rafale.

After they had left, I could go for my walk into town for my bread.

The tide was out so I could go across the harbour gates and on the other side, I found that Charles-Marie and Spirit of Conrad had been moved. They are right in front of where I’m standing and in their place are a couple of pontoons with scaffolding.

So what’s the why of that? We seem to be living in interesting times in the harbour.

Ignoring Chausiais for the moment I went to look at the work that they had been doing on the docks.

It’s not at all clear as to what they are intending to do here, and there was no-one around to ask either. So my curiosity still isn’t satisfied and I’ll have to come back when there are people around.

That is, if ever I can manage to find my way down here early enough. I’m not doing so well right now.

We noticed yesterday that Thora had come into port, and we saw her in the earlier photo above.

My route took me past the ship to see if there was anyone around but no such luck. That’s something else to do another time.

But they ought to start thinking about a coat of paint or two. She looked so nice and fresh when she first came in here almost two years ago and she needs to get back her good looks.

La Mie Caline was next for my dejeunette. But there were none on the shelves. But no matter. They found me one directly out of the oven and that’s one of the benefits of being a regular customer.

Back here I finished off the splitting of that digital music track. After all of that, it seems that the digital recording contains the same track twice and that’s why everything is right out of sync.

After lunch I sat down to write the notes for the next project but crashed out completely for half an hour.

Once I managed to get my head together I did some of the work and then went out for my afternoon walk.

The tide was coming in so the fishing boats were heading our way to unload their catch. There were dozens of them just offshore heading into harbour this afternoon, presumably coming back from Guernsey now that the Guernsey authorities have capitulated.

Yes, it’s all very well catching as much fish as you can, but it’s no good if you can’t sell them, as the stupid Brexiters will find out soon enough.

“Heading into harbour” I said, didn’t I?

Well, the early birds were already there and this will give you an idea of just how many active fishing boats there are that operate out of here. Add that lot to the dozen or so that were heading our way and you’ll see that it’s a quite busy fishing port.

Just imagine what it must have been like in its heyday when the fleets of Newfoundland and Grand Banks trawlers were in here

While you admire the rest of the fishing boats out to sea, I came back to the apartment.

To warm myself up (because it was cold and windy outside) I made myself a coffee and came to sit down on my comfy chair. And here, I fell asleep again. A proper deep sleep for half an hour or so, really away with the fairies.

This is something that is depressing me very much.

Nevertheless, I did manage to press on and not only finished the notes but actually dictated them too.

That means that tomorrow when I come back from the shops I can crack on with this one and get it done. And then, maybe on Sunday, do the third.

Tea tonight was a slice of lentil and bean pie that I found in the freezer followed by an apple turnover out of the freezer, with raspberry sorbet.

One thing that I can say is that I’m eating really well.

We mustn’t forget the evening walk. Cold and windy and I had forgotten my hat but I pressed on all the same.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the walls round by the place du Marché aux Chevaus are now closed off to the public due to the instability of the walls, but unless I’m very much mistaken, they might be starting work here ver soon.

At least, they have dumped a load of scaffolding off at the site, and I’m sure that this wasn’t here earlier today when I was out.

So having admired the scaffolding for a while I carried on with my walk and two runs. The second run was agony but I have to push on and keep going while I can.

Minette was there on her windowsill so we had a chat for a while and I gave her a stroke, and then I came back.

Just in time for the football. Caernarfon Town v Bala Town in the Cymru Welsh Premier League.

In a howling gale, it was always going to be a lottery and skill would count for nothing. The play was about equal but Bala won 2-1 and also missed a penalty. They were much more clinical in front of goal.

But one thing amazed me. I don’t know what was going on in the referee’s top pocket but he must have had a pop-up toaster in there.

Anyone looking at the stats and seeing that there were 7 or 8 yellow cards must have thought that this was a dirty match. But in fact, in my opinion only one of the tackles warranted a yellow card and the rest were for faults about as minor as you could get.

I shudder tho think what would happen if he were ever to referee a match between Stoke City and Uruguay.

So it’s now rather late and I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow, and I bet that I’ll forget half of the stuff that I need. Better have a god night’s sleep.

Wednesday 29th January 2020 – THIS TOWN AND I …

… have a lot in common. We’re both falling apart at the seams.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that part of the public car park outside is cordoned off as a rather large crack has appeared in the wall. And on my walk around the walls this afternoon I noticed that a part more, in the Place du Marche Aux Chevaux is likewise cordoned off.

I had a quick browse and ACCORDING TO THE LOCAL RAG the wall there has developed a crack that, for the moment, renders it unsafe to the public.

Doubtless someone will come along and look into it pretty soon.

And that reminds me about the story of the ugly crack that appeared on the wall of Trump’s office in the White House. However, workmen came along and painted over it before Trump could find someone to read it to him.

As for falling apart, I certainly am. The alarms went off as usual but I ‘eck as like haul myself out of bed. 06:45 when I finally struggled out and put my feet on the floor and that’s no good whatsoever.

Not only that, I couldn’t seem to get started and it was long after breakfast before I was up to attacking the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night . I had a woman with me and I can’t remember who she was but she was the kind of woman whom I would have been extremely flattered to have been with. I knew who she was – a blonde. We went out to see my father about something. I had to do quite a lot of work and I can’t really remember now what the work was to be done but we finished and I asked father if he had one or two other things that needed doing. he said “no”. he was having to nip out straight away to see someone for 18:00 and it was 17:40 now. We had another thing to do which was to go to see someone in Stockport and we were in Stoke on Trent at the time. I remember opening the door for this girl in Caliburn thinking to myself “well she can get in and come with me and wouldn’t I feel proud to have her coming with me to Stockport”. I was trying to work out my route – should I go up round the M6 and across or should I go sraight up the A34 and A6 or wherever like that. It was while I was waiting for this girl to come back to the car and people were doing things on their mobile phones, making appointments and that was when I unfortunately awoke.

There was a lot more too but seeing as you are probably eating your evening meal at the moment you won’t be wanting to read it.

Having finally dealt with that, I started on the music project that I have on the go. It meant listening to the notes that I’d dictated and looking at the sound waves, cutting out any breathing, any clicks and bangs and any pauses. And, of course, any faults. I’m at the stage now where I just dictate one sound file from start to finish and if I make a mistake I simply re-dictate it and tag the section that needs cutting out.

That way, I can reduce a sound file from well over 10 minutes down to just a little over 6 minutes.

Mind you, it takes a while to do it, but it’s relatively straightforward with a good sound-editing program and a decent (at last) fast desktop computer.

That took me up to a rather late lunch and that meant heading down into town and La Mie Caline for mydejeunette.

And there’s a surprise in store for me here too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I moved here in April 2017 part of the pavement alongside the city walls in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne was blocked off. And round about a year ago, the workmen moved in to start to repair the walls.

Today, there is a dramatic change in the situation.

A few weeks ago they took away part of the protective fencing and vehicles began to park there in the bit that was now open.

But today, all of the fencing has been taken down. Furthermore, all of the material has been tidied up and they look as if they are ready to move away.

The young guy to whom I spoke the other day told me that “it won’t be long” before they have gone and it’s looking as if he was right.

There was activity in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers too today.

That road was closed off a few days ago, although I couldn’t see why. It’s closed off today but at least I can see why. There’s a huge crane here and he was just lowering his jib as I walked past.

Apparently they are rebuilding a public stairway down between the houses and he’s been lowering down some equipment and material. Apparently they don’t do that by hand any more as we did in the old days.

The harbour gates were closed again so i could walk across to the other side of the harbour on the path across the top of the gates.

They were there working on Spirit of Conrad so I stopped for a chat. Some of the hull has been replaced and the plan now for the rest of the year is “to complete the repairs”.

No mention of a sailing plan which is annoying, but we’ll work it out I suppose.

By now the Post Office was open so I posted off my parcel, then picked up my bread and headed for home.

After lunch I started to join up all the different sections of the radio project and in the end I overran by twp and a half minutes. I had to do some hefty editing of the text that I had dictated before it would come down to one hour.

One hour is what they want and one hour is what they get. Not 59 minutes and 59 seconds or 60 minutes and one second, but 60 minutes exactly.

That took me up until about 18:00, with a break for my afternoon walk.

The rue du Nord is a private street with an automatic control for the residents, but more often than not the rising posts that protect the entrance aren’t working.

That’s been the case just recently but today there are some workmen with a laptop investigating the situation.

Having observed the collapsing wall, I pushed on and did my run along the north side of the walls seeing as there was no-one about. I have to push on at every available opportunity.

But I came to a stop at the end of my track as something out to sea by the Plat Gousset caught my eye.

Despite photographing it and blowing it up (the photo, not the object) back in my apartment later, I’ve no idea what it is. If it’s floating debris, it looks as if it’s been in the water for a considerable amount of time.

Anyway, I pushed on. But I wasn’t able to do my run along the square Maurice Marland because there were people about. My running is ungainly to the point of embarrassment and I’ve no intention of showing myself up.

Every now and then we take a look at the buildings that are undergoing renovation, and there have been quite a few of those up here in the old town just recently.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago they were delivering a pile of plasterboard to a house in the rue St Jean. The workmen are there today going at it full-tilt.

That’s yet another project going on up here and I can’t wait to see just how it all will unfold in the fullness of time

After I finished the radio project I cut up a few more digital music files into their component tracks and that’s looking a lot more respectable now.

All in all I’ve done about 20. That just leaves about … errr … 150 to do.

For tea tonight, I fancied a slice of vegan pie with veg and gravy so I took one out of the freezer. While I was there I found the left-over slice of apple pie from just before I went away and both of those went in the oven to heat up while I made some gravy.

They were absolutely delicious, but there’s only enough lemon sorbet now for half a portion tomorrow. Good job that it’s a shopping day and I can buy some more.

Later on, I went for my evening walk. I’d been around the walls this afternoon so it was around the headland this evening.

The sky was really clear and you could see for miles. There was plenty of activity out to sea and had there not been such a wind I would have gone back for the tripod and taken a few photographs.

Instead I had to make do with the trawlers in the port.

There were four or five of them unloading at the fish-processing plant but I imagine that those out to sea would be joining them pretty soon.

With no-one about I managed to do another run down the street – that’s important to do as much as I can to keep up my fitness levels and keep my weight down.

Being so close to my 100% target I went for an extended walk tonight and managed to push it up to 101% by the time that I came in. I’ll be intrigued to see this month’s figures on the fitbit.

And while I was on my travels we came across yet another example of bad parking.

In fact, it’s exactly the same bad parking as we had a few days ago. Someone in his Range Rover thinks that it’s amusing to park his vehicle across the entrance to the fire lane at the back of our building because he’s too lazy to walk another 20 yeards to the car park

Whatever goes through the minds of these people I really don’t know.

So while I’ve been writing up my notes I’ve been checking through the photos to make sure that they are all uploaded to the computer. The next immediate project is to start to go through those for my voyages to the High Arctic and for that I need to start mastering a decent graphics program.

Someone sent me a link to a high-powered program that was free and I’ll be trying that. If it won’t do what I want, I’ll have to bite the bullet and start paying some money.

But there’s another two radio projects that need finishing. That’s the job for tomorrow morning.

But before I go, let me just mention that on my Social Networking page the other day I mentioned that the results were not what I was hoping. And today, two people from the radio, who must have seen the entry, contacted me, one by telephone and the other by e-mail, to ask how I was.

That was rather nice of them.

Tuesday 28th January 2020 – IF YOU WANT …

… to know what the weather was like today, this photo here will tell you everything that you need to know.

Miserable, horrible, grey and overcast with huge and violent rainstorms and incredibly high winds stirring everything up. In fact, a typical day on the western Normandy coast for just recently.

And when is it going to end? It looks as if this weather is here for the duration and isn’t going to let up very easily.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I could hear the howling weather quite clearly and ashamed as I am to admit it, it drove me back underneath the covers where I stayed until just after 07:00. This wasn’t the kind of weather that would make anyone want to raise themselves from the dead, least of all me.

After the medication I had a look to see where I’d been during the night. I had been at a house with a group of people and we needed some things from a shopping parade down the street. There had been a really heavy snowfall and it was difficult to move around so I said that I would go. I had to go on foot because Caliburn was at the menders and I could pick him up and bring him back on the way back so that was what I decided to do. As I was leaving, one of the girls in this house shouted out “don’t forget it’s time to go and get your food and organise this and Eric’s going to get this and that”. I don’t know why she did that. Anyway I was off. I went to get a coupe of shopping bags. It was a really steep slope down the hill to this shopping parade and with the snow it was quite icy and slippy. There was a group of people coming up the hill. One of them was a girl dressed a kind of white smock kind of arrangement and she had a couple of other kids with her running up there. All of a sudden they slipped, came down the hill and collided with me. They knocked me over onto the ice, and there was me, this girl and a boy sliding down this hill and where the road went round a bend we went straight on over the edge and crashed into a snow bank. The girl was laughing about this and the boy said to her “you’re disgusting”. She said “yes, I know that I’m disgusting”. It all went rather downhill from there.

Those rubber spatulas proved their weight in gold today. Ordinarily I would have said that I had run out of apple purée for breakfast but with the rubber spatula I managed to scrape enough out of the jar for a small portion for breakfast.

After breakfast, I attacked the travel notes. In a change to previous voyages, I’m not taking all of my files with me on the laptop. I’m making a “travel noes” file where I can record everything, and then bring it back home and edit the entries into the various data files. It’s much less confusing that way.

But it seems that I’ve made a bit of an error with the radio projects. I’ve forgotten to leave a space for the live concert at the end of February. As a result, everything that I did that was labelled “Project 16” has now to be labelled “Project 19” to preserve the integrity of Projects 17 and 18 and the series of material from which I draw is now out of order and needs to be changed.

While I’d been in Leuven I’d found something that a friend of mine had asked me to see if I could find. I’d been successful so i’d wrapped it and I took it with me to post on my way to pick up my butties.

But as usual, I was side-tracked by the sound of a pneumatic drill coming from the other side of the harbour and seeing as the gates were closed, I could go over the footpath on the top to see what was happening.

And it’s not a pneumatic drill at all but a hydraulic concrete breaker on the jib of one of the diggers that have been dredging the harbour just now.

What they seem to be doing is chiselling out the rocks at the foot of the sea wall at the ferry terminal.

This will explain the pile of piles that regular readers of this rubbish will have seen with me the other day – removed so as to give access for the concrete breaker.

But does this mean that, with the dredging of the harbour to make it deeper and removing the rocks at the side to make it wider, are we going to be expecting the arrival of a new ferry boat that is larger than those that we have at present?

We are living in interesting times indeed.

This fishing boat, the Rocavi II is quite interesting.

There has been an article in the local newspaper about the Rocavi II just recently. It’s a brand-new fishing boat that has only recently been launched and on Saturday it was blessed by one of the local priests.

What with living in France, I suppose that breaking a bottle of champagne over the bows is pretty ordinary stuff and nothing whatever special at all.

A little further along the port, it looks as if Thora has been here while I’ve been away.

Much of her work involves taking building supplies out to Jersey and she doesn’t seem to have a regular load off the island. Instead, her owners collect scrap metal and as there are no scrapping facilities on the island they bring it here for processing. Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen quite a few loads of scrap on the quayside.

This lot of scrap metal looks as if it has been part of some structure that has been destroyed by fire.

With all of these distractions I missed the post. So I went to la Mie Caline and picked up my dejeunette and headed for home.

After lunch I made my own apple purée. Four apples peeled, cored and diced, a pear ditto and some cinnamon put into a saucepan with some water and boiled for about 45 minutes.

And it’s not a success. I’ve used far too much water – or else the fruit was too juicy – and it’s more like an apple drink than an apple purée. But I’ll use it over the next few days just to dispose of it and then I’ll make some more – with much less water this time.

But pears, bananas, rhubarb, apricots, all kinds of fruit can go into it and I’m hopeful of making some good stuff with this. I need to push on and do a lot more about being self-sufficient.

And then I started to write the notes for the first of the radio projects. But I wasn’t at it long because it was walk-time. What hadn’t helped was that for about 10 minutes or so I had … errr … had a little relax.

While I was out there earlier we had had a moment of sun. But not now. A howling gale and the rain that we had seen over the Brittany coast had caught me.

For that reason I didn’t hang around very long. Chausias was over there at the ferry terminal in a NAABSA (Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground) condition so presumably they are expecting her to be doing something in the near future.

The two passenger ferries were moored up in the inner harbour where they usually stay.

But no Channel Island ferries. Both Granville and Victor Hugo are currently moored up in Cherbourg and I have no idea why.

Spirit of Conrad has made good her escape from the Chantier navale so I was keen to see who had taken her place.

The answer is that there isn’t anything special in there right now. We have two of the inshore fishing boats that haul in the shellfish and one of the trawler-type of fishing boats that is over there where Spirit of Conrad used to be.

So at least there’s plenty of work for the shipyard to be doing and that should keep them out of mischief for a while.

Back here I finished off the writing and then dictated the notes. They are going to need some hefty editing too as I seem to have been somewhat extravagant.

Anyway, I had made a start by the time that I went to make tea. Vegan burger on a bap with baked potatoes and vegetables, followed by fruit salad and sorbet. And there’s still that left-over slice of apple pie in the freezer from before I went to Leuven. But that’s an oven job so it will probably be to go with the pizza on Sunday.

Howling gales and torrential rain tonight, and I was out in it. To make it worse, I had to go for a longer walk than usual as I was in touching distance of my 100% target so I may as well push on over.

The storm was raging and although the tide wasn’t all the way in, the waves were still crashing down on the Plat Gousset and soaking everything. It’s disappointing that they haven’t left the lights on along the promenade so that we can see the waves better.

And despite the miserable weather I managed to fit in my two runs this evening. My two little tracks were quite well sheltered.

But Iw as feeling the strain, I’ll tell you. It seems that the spell of good health I had in December is about as good as it is ever goign to be.

So having finished my notes, I’ll wait until “Yes In Concert” finishes ad then I’ll go to bed. The problem is that I have far too much good music here to which to listen to waste my time by going to bed and sleep.

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 – BRAIN OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

Went down to ma Mie Caline for my dejeunette this morning, didn’t I? Normandy Trader had sneaked in on the early morning tide and there were a few other things that I needed to observe so I made sure that I had the big Nikon D500 with me.

It was when I was reviewing a photo that I had taken that I discovered that I had forgotten to put the memory card back in it last night.

And badger me if I went out this afternoon still having forgotten to put it in. But at least there, I cold go back for it which was more than I could do when I was down on the docks.

Last night, just for a change, I was in bed before midnight. Only just, by a couple of seconds or so but nevertheless …

And I slept right through until the alarm went off without moving, and not going anywhere, either virtually or for real The alarms went off as usual and while I didn’t beat the start of the third alarm, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor when it stopped. So I suppose that I kind-of beat it.

The early part of the morning was spent cutting up digital music tracks as usual. That’s another pile organised but there are still plenty – dozens if not hundreds – to go at over the next while.

Another thing was that while I was looking for a track that had somehow been missed, a few things by Louis de Funes popped up. Anyone who has listened to my “A La Pointe Du Rock” programmes on OUR LITTLE RADIO STATION will know that Louis de Funès is my regular studio guest and having as many examples of his speech as possible is always useful so I downloaded a pile more of that.

With the Zoom I’m entitled to a free download of Cubase and also Wavelab. Not that I intend to use them – I’m quite happy for now with Audacity – but I can see possibilities so I downloaded Cubase.

That was the cue to go for my bread, take my camera and forget the memory card.

There was no indication of anything that would indicate what work was going on in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers so I pushed on down to the docks where there was no water vessel beached today.

Across the top of the harbour gates and over to the other side of the harbour where I fell in with someone wrestling with a huge, really long wire rope that was about 10mm in diameter. He was opening it up with a file head and threading a nylon rope through it. “Something for the fishermen” he told me, after I’d asked him about four times.

Normandy Trader was bearing more of a resemblance to the Marie Celeste. Fully loaded up but not a soul about anywhere. One day I’ll get to meet the skipper and his crew I suppose.

Back home I attacked the radio project and that took me all the way up to about 18:00 to finish off. There was all of the text to finish writing, and then it needed to be recorded, spliced into its individual sections and then merged in with all of the music files. It’s just like a little military operation.

Some of it needed to be redone because it overran by about 10 minutes. Hefty editing was called for, including the dropping off of a song that I was hoping to play but then that’s what editing is all about.

There were the usual interruptions of course. Lunch was one of them and my afternoon walk was another.

Normandy Trader was already leaving port and heading off into the wild blue yonder so I went to take a photo of her. That’s when I remembered the memory card.

But a dash back to the apartment and load it up again. Then back outside just in time to see her disappear into the afternoon fog that’s been swathing us for a couple of days now despite the wind.

And the yacht that’s out there with her – that might well be Aztec Lady. There’s certainly a resemblance.

And there wasn’t just Normandy Trader out there either.

Here’s Chausiais heading back into harbour having clearly been somewhere. And not too far either so it’s quite possible that she’s been doing a delivery to the Ile de Chausey.

If I remember correctly, this is the first time that I’ve seen her out in the open sea (although I have seen her sailing around the harbour) so I’m glad that I went back for the memory card.

This afternoon’s walk took me, for a change, around the city walls, just by way of being different.

Out there in the bay just off the holiday camp there were a couple of windsurfers enjoying the sunshine and the wind out at Donville les Bains near the Hermitage holiday camp. Like I said, there was a lot of maritime traffic today.

As for me, I had my run along the north side of the walls, and again along the Square Maurice Marland, although not all the way for the latter because there were some people loitering around.

But nevertheless I actually made it to the top of the first ramp so that’s something.

Desperate to reach the 100% figure, I carried on further than I otherwise would have done, basically to see what was the purpose of the bollards in the Boulevard Vaufleury last night.

Talking of bollards, how about pollards? They are pollarding the trees along the boulevard. Something that they do every spring before the growth starts so as to make the place look pretty.

The machine upon which they are standing is extremely interesting and I could find a hundred uses for something like that.

Back round to the rue du Roc to clock up the miles and here’s an interesting notice that I saw.

“No parking from 08:00 on 23rd January while they connect up the fibre-optic cables”. This can only be good news. They’ve been playing about with the installation almost since the day that I arrived here, so it’s about time that they finished it off.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be connected soon!

back at the apartment I … errr … closed my eyes for a few minutes before finishing off the programme. And then I did nothign whatsoever until teatime.

Tea tonight was an everything curry with all of the leftovers going in the pot. And as there wasn’t quite enough, I lengthened it with a handful of peanuts.

Apple pie and sorbet for afters and the remaining piece of pie went in the freezer for when I come back.

The evening walk was around the headland. Freezing cold it was and I didn’t hang around. I just went out and came back. No photos, although I did get yet another run into the programme, but fell short of my target point.

Not that I’m worried too much, because it was the third run of the day.

So in a minute I’ll be having an early night. I’m off on my travels tomorrow so I need to be on form.

Monday 20th January 2020 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… they are getting ready for Carnaval right now.

The one big event of the year here in Granville is the annual Carnaval. We’ve seen THIS TAKE PLACE BEFORE in previous years and this year it’s the period 21-26 February.

And so on my way out up town I noticed that while they were taking down the Christmas lights, they were also putting up the bunting and the location points for this year’s Carnaval in the rue Paul Poirier and the rue Couraye.

This year is passing by quicker than anyone thinks.

Last night, I had a frantic search around for my telephone before going to bed. I couldn’t find it at all and I needed it for the alarm. Eventually, after phoning myself up, I managed to locate it and I could go to bed in peace of mind.

Not that I needed it though. I was wide awake at 05:30 for some reason that I haven’t quite understood, and up and medicating when the alarm went off.

With just a brief pause for breakfast, I bashed on with my editing of the interview that I had had with US Granville’s Chief Coach and I finished it just about. 8:30 of question and answer there was, and it’s not too bad.

There was also time to look at the dictaphone and I had indeed been off on a voyage here and there. There was an OUSA meeting taking place in the USA so off I went. I was in this town looking at all of the food shops and saying to myself “God how I love being in the USA with all of this food on offer here, all of these bakeries and all of these things even though I can’t eat any of it”. The a girl came out – a young girl with glasses and she had a limp, something like that as if she had had polio and I recognised her. She was a student at the Open University … “no she wasn’t” – ed. We ended up having quite a chat and she was saying how she wished she could go to this Conference and so on and for some unknown reason I couldn’t get out of my head the phrase “give me your e-mail address and I’ll add you onto my mailing list”. I could have sent her loads of stuff and could have developed some kind of relationship with her, I suppose.
A little later on there was a group of us in a house and amongst these people was, of all people, someone who has made a dramatic appearance in my life just now … “it didn’t take her long to come a-voyaging with you, did it?” – ed … my brother and a few other people. It was my house in Gainsborough Road and the back part of the back garden was overgrown in weeds and we ended up having a game of cricket. I was the first to go into bat for my team which was my family and the aforementioned person was going along to bowl for her side. I took guard at the entrance to my house and she decided to bowl up the hill Clifton Avenue. She bowled an over that went nowhere near my bat so I couldn’t hit it and score any runs. She went off to get someone else to take over and I was thinking that I hadn’t even asked my family if they wanted to play yet. They would probably tell me to clear off. Anyway that’s how that ended.

Once I’d done that I had a shower and then headed off for my radio meeting, saying “hello” to the builder guy with the cement conveyor as I passed.

It seems that having done the radio programme for MY VERSAILLES TRIP totally alone and unaided from start to finish, I’ve trampled upon an ego here and there because not a single person said anything about it at all – despite the fact that it’s the second most-listened-to podcast that we’ve ever broadcast.

But they can’t be too dismissive because they told me that my interview with Johan Gallon will be broadcast TOMORROW (TUESDAY) AT 17:00 CET (that’s 16:00 UK time, 11:00 Toronto time).

Having worked my feet into the door now, I’ve suggested one or two more things that have been accepted, and there are a couple more that I have simmering away on the back burner.

Bhere was a huge dispute at the meeting about someone’s plan. The idea is to present the “Top 10 of the decade” films, music, TV programme, books etc. The plan is to ask the Literary correspondent, Music correspondent etc to suggest their choices.

A dissenter or two however suggested that everyone on the committee put forward their Top 10 and we have a poll.

No-one was interested in my opinion so I went for a ride on the porcelain horse while they fought it out. But in my humble … “quite!” – ed … opinion they are all wrong. People don’t listen to the radio to hear other people, they listen to hear themselves.

Had it been me organising this, I would have announced that I would be at a Saturday market on one weekend (say the 1st in the month) – then a Brocante the next 1st weekend of the month, a football match at another. anywhere where there is a crowd of people, and then interviewed members of the public to ask them.

Now that’s good radio. You never know what responses you are going to receive and some of them will be absolute gems as my Versailles programme proved. But no-one listens to an idiot, do they?

On the way back I stopped off at LIDL for the shopping where I forgot the bananas and something else that I can’t now remember what it was.

And picking up my dejeunette at la Mie Caline, I came home. Not straight home though because I was sidetracked.

This vehicle is telling us that it’s a Saviem, and on the front wing is a badge telling us that it’s a Saviem SM6. Now as far as I’m aware (and I may be wrong) Saviem was absorbed by Renault and the marque was dropped some time round about the late 80s, and this vehicle is clearly later than that.

Furthermore, the SM6 was a medium-range lorry of about 7.5 tonnes and this certainly isn’t. And so I’ve no idea at all about this.

Having spent so long at this meeting, it was lunchtime already so I grabbed my butties while the grabbing was good.

After lunch, it was time to turn my attention to the radio projects. I’d offered a “live concert spot” to someone but he never came back to me so I resurrected a concert that I’d broadcast in the past.

That took much longer than intended too because you’ve no idea how difficult it is to write 3:07 of text when you only have the sketchiest of information. But at least it’s a foot in the door because I wrote to tell the agents of the artist that the concert was being broadcast and I invited them to send me some more stuff from some more of their artists for broadcast if they like.

Next month’s concert, if this guy still hasn’t got back to me, will involve some German input and I have a cunning plan.

Another reason for the delay was that I was using the new ZOOM H1 dictaphone that I bought. It took an age to configure it and an even greater age to find a memory card that would work in it (one out of five) and an even greater greater age to get it to work, but when I finally did, the quality is miles better than anything that has gone before.

As a result, I’m really impressed with this – almost as impressed as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk. The high winds are back again and so there weren’t all that many people out there.

There was plenty of activity out there on the ocean waves though. The tide is quite high but nevertheless there were still several trawlers heading towards the harbour.

This one here for example, just sailing … “dieseling” – ed … in past the Ile de Chausey.

There was another whitish blob right out there in the distance somewhere in the direction of the Channel islands.

Thinking that it might be Thora or Normandy Trader on its way into the harbour, I took a photo of it with the intention of blowing it up, because, despite modern anti-terrorist legislation, I can still do things like that.

But it’s actually another trawler heading into the harbour to unload its catch.

And that’s not all either.

There’s another one that’s even closer to home0 It’s rounded the Pointe du Roc and it’s now in the Baie de Mont St Michel on its way into port. Right now it’s just passing by the marker light that indicates the entrance to the port.

Yes, it’s all go out there this afternoon with these trawlers coming home.

But there’s clearly been some excitement today somewhere because we have rather an unusual visitor in port.

This is one of the Customs launches and I don’t recall having seen one in here today. And there’s no traffic of any kind in port today – especially not over there by where he is moored – that might warrant the kind of attention that he would bring

So I dunno what’s going on with him, and I wasn’t about to go down there and ask him. I came back home instead.

Once I’d finished the radio programme I made tea. There was one of those vegan galette things left over so I had that with rice and veg and a thick onion gravy.

For my evening walk it was freezing outside and I was alone. So I managed my two runs again. But seriously, I didn’t see a single soul out there tonight.

Rosemary rang up when I returned home and we had a really long chat that went on for almost 2 hours – hence I’m running very late and things that I planned to do won’t be done yet again.

So a very late night tonight. I’m taking one pace forward, and ending up two paces behind.

And the apple pie was delicious.

Sunday 19th January 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned yesterday that after my posting of the other night a menu dramatically appeared in the window of the new restaurant yesterday.

It was not illuminated so you couldn’t read it in the dark (which rather defeats the purpose of posting it) but anyway, I went along this afternoon to have a look at it and see what was on offer.

And I was right about two things. I can’t afford anything on the menu, and even if I could, there is nothing on the menu that I can eat.

So back to the fritkot then.

It was finally back to bed last night at about 02:30 so there was no chance whatever of my showing a leg at 07:30 when I awoke.

None whatsoever.

Instead I turned over and went back to sleep and there I stayed for about three hours or so until about 10:30. That’s more like it!

Plenty of time to go on a voyage then. There was a lot going on during the night but I don’t remember very much of it at all except one bit where there was a woman with long blonde hair in a pony tail who was talking to me about songs. She was asking me to guess her history which of course I didn’t. It turned out that she was a backing musician to Judy Collins back in the early 70s and can be heard on one of the tracks playing the banjo which I thought was extremely interesting all the same.

After the medication I had a very important task to perform which took up quite a lot of the morning. A ship that once passed by during the night one weekend in another life a world or so ago has dramatically sailed into port during the night.

The world is small, it’s becoming smaller all the time and all of the chickens will come home to roost before it’s over. Still, it’s all part of life’s rich pageant I suppose

But as a result I didn’t really get started on my project until long after midday and by the time that I knocked off at 19:00 I’d only done the first pass through and re-recorded the questions that I asked during the Press Conference.

They need to be edited back in, which I’ll do when I’ve finished this, and then it needs a second run-through to cut out the irrelevances which I suppose will be tomorrow’s task before I go to the meeting.

It wasn’t until about 14:30 that I got out for my bread.

It was a glorious afternoon in the sun and there were loads of yachts and other boats out there taking full advantage of the fine weather, which is no surprise.

And Joly France was out there too, moored up at the ferry terminal. She must have a crossing to do this weekend then, and I bet that that has held up the dredgers today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having been with me when we saw them setting out the “no waiting” signs in the Boulevard des Terreneuvieurs the other day to advise of travaux

It looks as if things will be moving on fairly rapidly. Today, the road is closed off and a diversion is posted.

Out of curiosity I did go for a walk down that way to see if I could see anything of any significance, but there was no evidence of anything out of the ordinary.

As a result, I can’t wait until Tuesday!

There was a brocante in the Place General de Gaulle this afternoon so after picking up my dejeunette from la Mie Caline I went for a look.

Nothing particular caught my eye except a very overprived Epiphone acoustic guitar, but I did buy for e3:00 a book about the fall of the Maginot Line in 1940. I’m running out of exciting reading matter here.

One the way back I bumped into one of my neighbours going out for a walk so we had a lengthy chat and then I came back for lunch. It was now 15:00

After lunch I pushed on with work until about 17:30 when I went for a very late afternoon walk

There were quite a few people out there enjoying the late afternoon sunset and who can blame them? Despite the howling gale that has now sprung up again it really was beautiful.

But I didn’t have time to loiter. I have plenty of work to do and I don’t have the time to hang around.

Despite all of that, I did hang around when I saw this.

It’s a Citroen C5 but apart from that I’m not sure whether it’s an ambulance or whether it’s a hearse but whatever it is, much as I’m not a fan of modern Citroëns I’d take this home in a heartbeat.

Old age must definitely be creeping up on me if I’m admiring modern Citroëns, that’s all I can say. Unless it’s dementia.

Tea tonight was one of the best pizzas that I’ve ever eaten, followed by the last of the banana sorbet (and what an excellent buy that was!).

But while the oven was on I used one of the smaller quiche dishes that I had bought yesterday to make a four-helping apple pie.

In the fridge is some pear sorbet that I bought a good while ago and that needs eating, and I reckon that over the next few nights that will go nicely with the apple pie.

It really does look good.

This evening I was all alone on my walk so I fitted in two runs – one along the north side of the wall and the other on the usual parcours on the Square Maurice Marland. I must keep pushing on.

But now I’ve finished my notes, it’s back to work. No-one would ever believe that I’m retired when I’m under this kind of pressure and deadlines.

Sunday 12th May 2019 – I REMEMBER …

… saying yesterday that I was hoping for a good night’s sleep for a change;

And so I’m more-than-satisfied with 10:25. That will suit me nicely, thank you.

Plenty of time for going off on a little voyage during the night. Something happened last night that a group of us was out looking for a lorry. We eventually came across it – an old late-1930s British Army 2-tonne lorry that was hidden up an alleyway. We quickly unloaded it and I took it off to hide it. Someone asked me where I’d put it and I replied that I’d put it in my workshop next to my Cortinas. This person wondered how I’d managed it because that was full of all kinds of stuff, but I explained that I’d tidied it up and moved things around (however unlikely that might seem). I was round then at some woman’s house getting my things ready and it had taken me a while and I was running late. I was sorry that I hadn’t had time to go to see a girl who lived in the neighbourhood and on whom I was keen and I didn’t have time. The woman suggested that I ring her and merely say “hello” and I could see how the land lies. She might even slip round for a moment.
But somewhere in all of this a girl had asked me if I fancied a new car. I replied that a Jaguar would suit me nicely so she explained that all I needed to do was to go to a flower shop and place an order for a certain type of flower. There was an extremely long and complicated script to the way in which I had to ask and she endeavoured to coach me, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. In the end I told her that we would both go in together and instead of teaching me the script she could simply say it to the shop owner and save the trouble.

As a result of all of this, any plans that I might (or might not) have had all went gang agley.

What was even worse was that the nearest football match was about 30 kms away and while I might have travelled that far to see a game when I lived in the Auvergne, things are somewhat different now that I live here;

But I’ve not been idle. Not by any means. I’ve spent all of the day working on the photos for the trip to Canada in 2015 and they are now completely up-to-date.

So that’s another project finished and I’m pleased about that.

The next plan is to look at the pages for 2016, and then for 2017. I’m pretty certain that for the earlier years all of them have been done.

Once they are done, I’m going to work on some kind of opus magnus about Montreal – something similar to what I did about Quebec.

However, that’s a long way off, I reckon.

There were the usual interruptions. Lunch, of course, and later on I had my afternoon walk.

There was quite a lot of action on the sea this afternoon.

There were all kinds of naval craft out there, including several yachts such as this one here.

And do you notice the marker buoys in the water just ahead of it? It makes me wonder whether all of these marker buoys that we see occasionally in the water aren’t something do do with the yachting school – marking out a route or a limit maybe.

As well as the yachts out there, we had speedboats and cabin cruisers too, such as these here offshore from St Martin de Bréhal in this photo, which I cropped out of a long-distance shot and enlarged.

I’m not sure what the two boats nearest the camera are doing, but if you look closely you can see a horde of seagulls flapping around in between them. So there’s clearly something interesting going on there.

But look at the colours of the sea today. It was beautiful this afternoon.

And all of the people were enjoying themselves too.

There were hordes of people down there on the Place Maréchal Foch and heading off to enjoy the sunshine along the Plat Gousset.

Not too many on the beach today though. It might have been a nice day but the wind wasn’t making it so warm as it might have been. We might have to wait a few weeks for that, if it’s going to happen at all, for this year is turning out to be something of a disappointment.

I said though, didn’t I, that there were crowds of people out there today.

On my travels over the last couple of days I’d seen strange signs appearing all over town advertising “routes” and I’d been wondering what was going on. But my curiosity was satisfied this afternoon when I saw hordes of people wandering around in organised groups following the signs.

The days when I could tag along behind and follow them are long gone. I don’t move about as quickly as I used to do, and I’ve had it when it comes to stairs of course

So that’s the land and sea from this afternoon dealt with. We haven’t said anothing about the air yet.

And that was quite busy today too. We didn’t see our autogyro today but there was this little microlight flying around above us, presumably from the airstrip over beyond Donville-les-Bains.

But taking this photo involved something of an athletic feat because this is one occasion where the monopod gets in the way. Taking photos at anything more than about 20° means that I have to bend down underneath the camera. At about 60° I end up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The evening though was probably the most magnificent that I have experienced since I’ve been living here.

The wind had dropped and the haze had gone, which meant that I could see for miles. I was seeing things with the naked eye that I struggled to see with the telephoto lens. It was a perfect evening for photography, as this long-distance shot of Jersey will confirm.

As I have said before … “and you will say again” – ed … it’s very hard to imagine that this shot is of objects that are at least 54 kilometres (31 miles) away. And it’s picked up the buoy in mid-channel really well.

But 54 kilometres are nothing at all compared to what I was seeing and what the camera was picking up this evening.

A rather speculative shot in the distance following a compass heading has picked out the hills at the back of the Brittany coast out between St Brieuc and Paimpol, and they are at least 80 kilometres away.

I spent quite a considerable time out there and too plenty of photos. They are appended to this blog entry and I’ve made a couple of notes of where they might be.

It really was beautiful and it’s a shame that there were so few people out there enjoying it.

On my way back to the apartment, my attention was distracted yet again.

I’ve no idea what drew my attention to it, but at the foot of a tree in the boulevard Vaufleury I saw this broken egg. It’s clearly not a hens-egg shell discarded by a tourist because it’s a completely different shape and size.

A couple of people have mentioned to me that they had seen chicks about this year earlier than usual, and it looks as if they might be right.

Where there are broken egg-shells, there would have to be a nest in the immediate vicinity.

And the tree at the base of which the egg was found would seem to be a good place to look. Sure enough, carefully entangled into the branches of this tree is a very discreet nest.

It’s so well camouflaged that it was impossible to take any sort of photograph of it. And so I’ve no idea whose it is or even how many people might be in it.

And I see that I’ve forgotten to mention tea. Vegan pizza of course followed by apple pie and coconut sorbet. Delicious. The sad thing is that tomorrow will see the last slice of pie.

And shame as it is to say it, I was away with the fairies for 20 minutes too, despite my good sleep. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

So now it’s bedtime. Not as early as I would have wanted, but early enough.

Ready for a bit more hard work next week.

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close up brittany coast cap frehel france

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“st pair sur mer baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

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Saturday 11th May 2019 – WE HAD MORE …

… football this evening.

The second of the two Europa qualifying semi-finals, between Caernarfon Town and Cardiff Metro.

The match was certainly not without incident as the bundary wall behind the goal collapsed when Caernarfon scored a goal and about 50 fans, mostly young kids, spilled over onto the field. Luckily no-one was injured or hurt, but it held the game up 8 minutes.

We had another surprise result. Cardiff Metro won 3-2 away from home to a team that finished 3 places above them. But that was the correct result. Caernarfon’s players aren’t particularly skilful but have a tremendous team spirit and the huge crowds act as an extremely potent 12th man.

But the Met are a very skilful side, if horrendously inconsistent, but tonight once they got going they played well.

So they are away at Bala Town for the play-off final next weekend. Should be exciting.

Talking of exciting, the night-time was exciting too. We were at the football last night and it was the Welsh play-offs. Of the first game, it was the unexpected team that won, rather like last night – znd tonight too. And we were getting ready for the second. There was this huge monstrous type of guy there watching the game and I can’t remember very much about what he was doing right now, but we ended up back on Ocean Endeavour and off sightseeing. We came into a harbour that was very narrow and restricted, and there was some kind of red bar across the harbour to stop boats in the river being brought out by the tide and current. I had to go in and out of here on a zodiac and every time I went past this red bar I had to be verified. It was the same man verifying me all the time. he had to walk up to me, I had to anchor the boat, he’d check the boat over and we’d walk back in together. When I was going out we had to do the procedure in reverse. He would be wandering off checking all these boats and I wouldn’t be sure where he was going. I’d look around and he’d disappeared up some alley of boats. It reached the stage where the locals gathered to see this pantomime, me and this guy walking up this river every now and again. I could always tell when he disappeared because I would get hoots of laughter and derision as I was carrying on marching, so I’d have to stop and wait for him. He’d go off, check a boat and come back and follow me. It was all a big pantomime
Later on I’d been given a new job as a doctor. Actually we passed all the exams so I turned up at the place where my room was to be given to me. There was some kind of discussion about the rooms because we’d all had pre-printed visiting cards showing our room numbers but people had changed into different rooms. We had to move everyone around and sort that out. In the end I got my room, or rather the corner of a communal room of four people, all furnished in heavy oak like a private library. We had to go off somewhere and I could choose my company car. I chose an old Jag XJ-S convertible with a 56 plate. I took some people with me and the car ended up in a terrible state with rubbish everywhere. I had to vacuum it but I needed to be careful because I’d pulled some things out of my pocket earlier and all bits of important things like micro-SD cards were everywhere. I mustn’t hoover them up. We discussed getting back into the car later but the people in front of us had already gone. We wre in Telford at the time so someone asked if I knew the way back to Stoke on Trent. “Are we going past the such and such nightclub where we could have a good time or drive straight back?” I said that I wouldn’t be in work the next day. They asked why. I replied that I had an interview for a job. People were amazed that I was going to turn this one down but I said “not really. I had five interviews for jons and this one I was offered but I wan tto go to all the other interviews just to see what goes on and how things sit and practise my interviewing techniques”

After all of that, I was rather late leaving my bed, but not too late that I would be worried.

We had the usual medication and breakfast, followed by a shower and I forgot to do the washing, and then I went off shopping.

Today? I spent very little. I didn’t need much and what I did need wasn’t in stock. lIDL had nothing special, NOZ just had a couple of little bits and pieces (and more coconut sorbet) and LeClerc had just the usual, minus my vegan burgers.

Back here I unpacked and put everything away, and then dealt with a few things relating to the blog for yesterday.

After lunch (which was taken indoors and was a lovely fruit bread from LIDL) I attacked the photos for September 2015. These are now done back to Saturday 19th September, which means that there are a mere 18 to go. I’m hoping to finish that off and even October’s before I go to Leuven next weekend.

There was the usual afternoon walk of course, seeing as there’s no football tonight.

And I wasn’t the only one out and about either. The sea was humming with people out there enjoying themselves, including a dozen or so people having a run around the bay on a zodiac.

Makes me wish that I was out there with them. And who knows? one of these days I might be.

That wasn’t all either.

WIth the new telephoto lens I can take some good distance photos without having to change lenses.

Right out there across the bay near Montmartin Sur Mer there seemed to be a sailing school out there today. Dozens of yachts are down there sailing around offshore

And hang-gliders too.

Here’s one taking off from the place that they always use – at the back of the Christian Dior Museum by the cemetery.

And I think that that is an appropriate place for them to begin their adventures. If they make a false manoeuvre on taking off, they don’t have too far to go.

But at least I was enjoying the weather out there.

Whoever this person is here, she clearly isn’t. And I can’t blame her either because I wouldn’t have liked to have been sitting on the beach.

The wind was far too strong for that and I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

Out of the wind, though, the situation was better.

There were crowds of people walking along there on the promenade and even a few people sunning themselves on the beach. Clearly the wind wasn’t as strong down there.

And there was a cherry picker down there too. I’ll have to go and have a look down there to see what is happening.

There was a lot of action on the sea today;

We’ve already seen quite a bit of it but as I wandered further on round on my route, I observed one of the ferries from the Ile de Chausey coming in to dock at the Marine Terminal.

Hordes of people on board today. And they must all have had a good time out at sea today.

Plenty of entertainment on land too.

At the Square Maurice marland there was a woman sitting on a bench playing the accordion. I asked her if she would mind me photographing her, and she smiled and carried on playing.

This is one of the most bucolic events that I have witnessed since I’ve been here in Granville.

At least, it was until I went around the corner into the rue Notre Dame.

A group of young men were playing some sort of wierd game, so I went over to ask them about it.

The game is called palet and it’s played in several different regional variations. They were playing the Palet Breton.

This is a similar game to boules or petanque in that there’s a pion or target that is thrown onto the board, and each person stands 5 metres away from the board to throw in turn their discs onto the palet. And the closest to the pion wins.

In Palet Breton the discs are made of lead and about 50mm diameter. Other regions use different metals and/or different sizes.

And in the background two girls were playing open-air darts.

Tea tonight was out of a tin, but it was delicious nevertheless, especially with more apple pie and coconut sorbet.

There was time for a quick walk and a chat with a neighbour.

The crowds were still out and about on the sea. This rather beautiful yacht was sailing around in the Baie de Mont St Michel. And I must admit to admiring thr colour scheme.

And then back to the apartment, the sofa and the internet for the football.

So now it’s a long lie-in tomorrow – at least I hope so. I’ve had a couple of little crashes today so I reckon a good sleep will do me the world of good.

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Friday 10th May 2019 – I’VE HAD A …

… better day today, much to my own surprise. Much better than the weather anyway, and that’s saying the least.

Last night wasn’t as early as I was hoping, and I needed to go for a stroll down the corridor in the middle of the night, and it’s been quite a long time since that’s happened.

And on top of all that, I didn’t manage to beat the third alarm. Not by much, it has to be said.

But there was still plenty of time to go off ona little voyage during the night. We had to go to the seaside, four or five of us. One guy with us was an old Italian. I remember him being something like the Italian football team manager and I couldn’t think of his name or put a finger on his career. I asked him how he had been doing since he left Italy – a vague question – and he replied “surely you knew. I won the league with (he mentioned a few clubs) and won promotion with Torquay United” – It all sounded amazing to me. And someone came along with this huge, enormous shopping trolley. I remembered having lent it to someone and was hoping to have it back, but he replied “no, we’re going to take it on to someone” but I ended up carrying it or pushing it. We got on a train and went down to Brighton and ended up in an apartment that was to let. One of us was thinking of taking it but I can’t remember who now. The girl asked about it and another guy said that it was up for let. But someone is going to take it but it needs work doing to it. The tap is leaking or something. IS there anything about it? So we had a rummage round and found a big manila envelope. We pulled it out and went to open it to read what it says. At that moment a young guy with us, very like him in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced started to cook and was serving up pancakes with fruit or veg, giving one to this girl.
That wasn’t all of it either, but there were parts of this voyage that wouldn’t make good reading if you are eating your tea.

After breakfast I settled down to do some work, and I’ve been hard at it for most of the day.

I started off by finishing off last night’s entry and adding the photos. And that wasn’t as quick as it might have been too.

That was followed up by merging the photos and the dictaphone notes for August 2015 in Canada. And then, I went through the blog entries for that month and added in all of the text from then.

That took ages but it has produced quite a copious file, and it won’t take much to edit and expand it into a proper series of web pages.

Like I said, I do one job and the closer it gets to finishing, the more work it seems to spawn.

To finish off the day I started to do the same for September 2015, and I’ve done three days of that. This is going to be quite a lengthy work, so it’ll take me longer than a couple of days to finish it off.

During all of this, I stopped for lunch of course, indoors once more.

And of course there was the afternoon walk. In the rain of course, so there wasn’t anyone out and about.

There weren’t all that many fishing boats out there this afternoon, as far as it was possible to see through the driving rain.

La Grande Ancre was out there however, and she had just performed a U-turn outthere ofshore. She won’t be towing a net behind her with a tight turn like that, I wouldn’t have thought.

There wasn’t anyone about working on the Resistance Monument either. And by the looks of things, it doesn’t look as if anyone has been out there at all today

And that’s hardly surprising given the amount of rain that was teeming down right now.

I’m intrigued though to know why they have dug a big hole on the centre of the emplacement down there. It doesn’t look as if it has any purpose to serve, and it hasn’t been shuttered off.

As it happens, I wasn’t quite correct when I said that there was no-one about at all.

Yesterday we had someone with his chopper out and today we have someone with his rod out. Down on the edge of the rocks off the Cap Lihou is someone fishing.

I’m not sure that he ever caught anything, but it does remind me of the story about why sex has a lot in common. In both cases you take out your rod and you never know what you are going to catch.

Despite the rain, I walked on round the headland to where I could overlook the chantier navale.

Yet another change-round in there. Grand Beau Temps has now departed, which is hardly any surprise in this kind of weather.

But she’s not been replaced. The berth in which she was installed is now empty. But I don’t imagine that it will remain empty for long.

Tea was a burger with vegetables followed by apple pie and coconut sorbet – delicious.

The evening walk, I almost abandoned it due to the rain. But I pressed on none-the-less.

And here’s something interesting that seems to be happening in the rue Notre Dame.

I’ve absolutely no idea what an “enquete policiere grandeur nature” is, and even less of an idea why they need to ban parking in the street in order to carry it out.

I suppose that I’ll have to present myself sur place on 18th May in order to find out.

Fighting my way back through the rain, I made it back here just in time for the football.

Clubs in the Welsh Premier League are entitled to 4 places in European competition. The Champions play in the Champions League , and the Cup Winners (or runners up in the League, if the Cup winners are the Champions) and then the next-highest club in the league. So that’s TNS, Connah’s Quay Nomads and Barry Town.

The four next-lowest teams have a series of play-off matches to decide who has the remaining place, and tonight Newtown (5th) were playing Bala Town(5th).

In one of the most exciting matches that I’ve seen for a while, Bala won 2-1. And the difference between the teams was firstly Keighan Jones’s foot, and secondly Henry Jones.

Henry Jones, one of the most skilful players ever to have played in the WPL, has been off-form for a while but tonight he recovered all of his skill and more besides, and put in a match-winning performance.

And when Newtown broke through the Bala defence, and found themselves on a one-on-one situation with Keighan Jones in the Bala goal, his outstretched right foot saved them on both occasions. He’s only the second-choice goalkeeper too, but that was a superb performance tonight.

So tater later than intended, I’m off to bed.

Shopping tomorrow so I need to be fit.

Monday 6th May 2019 – AND IN OTHER …

… news, I have made great advances today.

The number of files left to deal with on the backlog of dictaphone notes is down to a mere 94. And every one of those relates to my voyage around Canada in autumn 2015 and thus are very likely to have already been copied onto text.

Even more surprisingly, I’ve actually managed to trace the notes, so tomorrow’s plan is to listen to the dictaphone notes while I’m reading the text and make sure that it’s all there.

And then that will be at least one of my long-term plans all done and dusted and out of the way.

Now the one problem with having a really early night (like 21:45, for example), a really good sleep with just one or two slight interruptions, ignoring the alarms and sleeping through until 06:45, the fact is that when I finally did crawl out of my stinking pit, I felt … errr … even worse.

Plenty of time to go on a travel too during the night. I was in some town or other not too far from where I live, and came across an Auchan supermarket. I thought that I’d go in there to see if they had any of their weigh’n’save stuff. So off I trotted and it suddenly became an internal market hall. I wandered around it but then everyone was being ushered to one side. I asked a girl what was going on, she replied that the President of the Republic was coming. I asked why, and she said that he was going to have treatment at the local hospital and this was where they were dropping him off. So why didn’t they drop him off at the hospital? She replied that he wanted to be seen as very populaire dropped off amongst the people and he could walk up there. He and his entourage would walk up there, about half an hour or so to get there. That might be OK for him but what about everyone else? I could see in the distance a big Mercedes van about to pull up and I imagined that that was him in there.

There was plenty of other stuff going on too during the night, but as you are probably eating your evening meal right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

So with a late start, it was a late breakfast and so on, and then I cracked on with the dictaphone notes. And that’s how I’ve spent most of the day.

We had several interruptions though. lunch, of course, and my afternoon walk.

There were plenty of trawlers out there again off the coast. This one was out there in the channel between the Ile de Chausey and the Pointe du Roc.

There were a few other ones further out too, closer to the Ile de Chausey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days ago we witnessed a few people marking out the grass and telling me that they plan to erect a memorial here.

Sure enough, today they have brought in the diggers and earth-moving equipment and they have made a start on digging up the grass.

They’ve already laid some gravel on what they have dug out, and there’s a compactor there busily firming it up.

But this is something that I really don’t understand.

Regular readers of this rubbish willrecall a while back that they had dug up part of the grass and eventually, after much delay, they installed a noticeboard and a path leading thereto.

But only a few months after spending all of that time and money doing all of that, they have gone along and dug it all up again for this work.

It’s not what I would call “joined-up thinking”.

It was a beautiful afternoon for photography and the view from the lifeboat memorial was particularly impressive.

The tide is quite far out this afternoon and the harbour marker light is clearly visible on its rock. We can see the red bands around it that give some kind of indication of the condition of the tides.

I’m wondering whether there is some kind of correlation between the markings and the opening of the harbour gates. I shall have to check this.

Remember yesterday when I saw something out there on the horizon over on the Brittany coast?

With it being such a beautiful afternoon I took the photo again to see whether there was any difference between the two, which might indicate whether there was a moving object on there.

The view was particularly clear and we can see the Brittany coast all the way down past St Malo. There’s the island of cézembre at the mouth of the harbour at St Malo and the tower is, I reckon, a lighthouse on one of the outlying islands.

But we can also see in the background the Brittany coast all the way along to Cap Fréhal (about 60 kms away) and maybe even beyond as far as Paimpol.

We went along on the cliffs above the chantier navale to se what was going on down there today;

one of the trawlers has gone back into the water and in its place is a large sailing yacht. It looks vaguely familiar to me but I can’t recall its name right now.

It’ll give me something to do on Wednesday to go down there and have a look at it to see who she is.

Another interruption was a visit from the courier too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my Canadian bank card ran out last month and I need the new one before I can get to my branch, so I called them up the other day.

And I certainly didn’t expect it to be delivered so quickly, and by courier too. So hats off to the Scotia Bank.

And remember the bank card that I left behind in the cash machine in Leuven? The replacement turned up today too from the BNP Paribas.

Tea was baked potatoes and potato curry from November, followed by a slice of my apple pie and the last of the soya cream. The base of the pie is slightly under-cooked, which means that either the temperature was too high or else the pie was too high in the oven.

I was planning to go on my evening walk afterwards, but a football match came on the internet. The final of the Welsh FA Youth Cup between Aberystwyth Town under-19s and Cefn Druids under-19s.

This was a really exciting match, won 2-1 quite rightly by Aberystwyth, but what was even more interesting was that there were half a dozen players out there who could walk into almost any Welsh Premier League side and not be out of place.

Both keepers were excellent as were both left-backs. But star of the show has to be Aberystwyth’s centre-half Lee Jenkins. He’s only 17 but captains the Wales under-18s and has been a regular in the Aberystwyth Town first team for over a year.

He’s a player who is destined for bigger things, I’m sure.

So now, rather later than planned, I’m off to bed.

But I’ve had a good day so I don’t really mind.

trawler english channel jersey granville manche normandy france

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: apple pie

Monday 9th March 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

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Thursday 20th February 2020 – NOW HERE’S A THING!

Wednesday 19th February 2020 – THESE FAIRGROUND WORKERS …

Sunday 16th February 2020 – DESPITE IT BEING A …

Friday 7th February 2020 – I HAD VISITORS …

Wednesday 29th January 2020 – THIS TOWN AND I …

Tuesday 28th January 2020 – IF YOU WANT …

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Sunday 19th January 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Sunday 12th May 2019 – I REMEMBER …

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