Tag Archives: la mie caline

Friday 10th January 2020 – HE WHO LAUGHS LAST …

… usually lasts longest and loudest too. And that’s certainly the case with me and my rail ticket.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my adventures at the railway station at Granville yesterday and how they wouldn’t exchange the return ticket because the return train was running – regardless of the fact that as the outward train was cancelled, I couldn’t get out to catch the one back.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “hooray” – ed … I had an e-mail informing me that the return train has now been cancelled. So, off to the station tomorrow to have another go at sorting them out.

But talking of sorting out, I still haven’t sorted out this sleep thing. I heard the first two alarms go off and while I was trying to find the energy and courage to get out of bed, the third one rang too, so I missed that.

But anyway, that was the signal to leave the bed. I went and had my medication.

With a brief pause for breakfast I carried on with the radio project about the football. And by 09:45 it was all done and dusted. And even if I say it myself, it was pretty good and I’m pleased with it. It’s all been sent off now and it’s in the hands of the Admin who will decide whether or not to broadcast it.

And now to turn to important things. After their victory against FC Versailles 78, Granville have drawn none other than Olympique Marseille in the French Cup.

The Stade Louis Dior is deemed to be unsuitable so the match is to be played at Caen. And even so, I’m expecting a healthy demand for tickets. Terry wants to come too so I did some searching about on the internet, found the website of the stadium and Lo! And Behold! There are two tickets for the football now sitting on my desk.

No intention of missing this.

That was the cue for me to go off into town to La Mie Caline for my bread.

On the way down there I passed by the Chantier navale to look and see what was happening. Spirit of Conrad is still there of course – I think that she’s moved in for the duration – but there’s a new addition today. The trawler at the back.

She must have slipped in on the morning tide, I reckon.

We’ve mentioned just recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the ships that are disappearing one by one from the port.

Granville went a few days ago, followed by Victor Hugo. Today though, it’s the turn of Chausiais to put in a disappearing act. Joly France is over there at the ferry terminal but she isn’t.

So I wonder where all of these ships are going. It’s a mystery to me.

But here’s a thing.

Walking along the rue du Port after my little inspection of the Chantier navale my perambulations were interrupted by this car going past. a Citroen traction avant of course and a later model one at that. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one of those on the road.

They are usually all black but I’ve seen the odd grey one and a white one, but I don’t recall seeing a blue one before. The one in my barn is black, by the way.

Pushing on (or pushing off, as the case may be) I eschewed the passage over the harbour gates and instead wandered on down to see what was going on at the old abandoned railway network.

We’d seen them yesterday digging up around the railway lines so I had promised myself a closer look. And sure enough, not only are they digging up around the lines, they seem to be pulling them up too.

It looks like the … errrr … end of the line for the railway network in the port

And so it is too.

There was a workman wandering around the site so I buttonholed him and enquired about the project. It seems that they are going to be working on the car park and making it more attractive to visitors. This means that the rails have to go and they won’t be coming back.

Time for me to have to go too. I went off for my bread.

Back at the apartment I started to address the mountain of correspondence that had built up during my work-in. Pile of stuff needed answering and that is going to be today’s task, I reckon.

Mind you it might take longer than today, that’s for sure. Especially as I had another crash-out. This one a really good one too, just like the old days. Not a brief eye-closing affair but a proper deep disappearance into the void, curled up on my chair with no intention whatever of moving.

After lunch, there were the carrots. I’d bought 2 kilos the other day and they were lying about on the worktop so I attacked them too. They are all now peeled, diced, parboiled, drained, dried and and the freezer on the way to being frozen.

And how I wish that I had a bigger freezer because there is now absolutely no room for anything more and I need a bag of peas tomorrow.

Out on my rounds this afternoon, there wasn’t a great deal of anything at all happening.

A few people out there taking the air of course, and the usual fishing boats heading towards the harbour. La Grande Ancre was out there looking as if she’s heading back from Chausey.

She had a tractor on her decks a few days ago and was loading the other day or two at the crane. So maybe she’s been doing deliveries.

Back at the apartment again I could finally get on with the correspondence and sent out about 6 long e-mails to wish people a Merry Christmas (I was that far behind!). Still tons to do and it will have to be done another time as I’m in a rush.

While I was putting away the stuff in the freezer I found a slice of vegan leek and tofu pie from 3rd February 2019. So in the oven went that and a couple of potatoes while I boiled up some veg and gravy on the stove.

And what a delicious tea that all made.

One thing that I would like to do is to make a couple more pies but there isn’t the room in the freezer to store them which is a pity.

Off on my walk around the walls tonight.

The waves were quite impressive but it was too dark to see them properly so I went off for my run. I made 6 paces up the ramp before I ground to a halt – I’m not doing very well with this, am I?

No-one about at all so I carried on alone and passed this little street – the Venelle St Michel. I hadn’t really seen it before but it’s a good example of the streets here in the Old Town.

Three or four main streets, a couple of squares and the rest are all little alleys like these

By the time that I returned, it was the football. TNS v Newtown, and I don’t ever think that I have seen such a one-sided match as this ever before.

Newton were lucky, very lucky indeed to get NIL abut how on earth TNS only managed to score 2 goals with all of the dominance and possession that they had, we’ll never know.

Newton’s “attack” consisted of desperate long aimless punts upfield to no-one in particular and their two forwards hardly had a touch of the ball. They were substituted after about 70 minutes which was totally unfair in my opinion. It doesn’t matter how good you might be, you can’t play football if no-one gives you the ball.

And the man of the match? The commentators chose Ryan Brobbel but for me, it was Adrian Cieslewicz all night long. He had an astounding game down the right flank tonight.

On that note I’m off to bed. I’m so tired it’s unbelievable. I wanted to finish this before I went to bed but I’m afraid that there’s no chance of …

ZZZZZZ

Thursday 9th January 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that a good few months ago I spoke about some kind of plan or other involving the abandoned railway network that ran through the port at one time.

This morning on my travels up town to LIDL I happened to look over the wall down to the harbour, and here they are, digging out the infill from where they had covered it up in the past.

It goes without saying that I’m really intrigued with what’s going on down there and on my way for my dejeunette tomorrow I shall be making further enquiries.

With lots of activity going on in the harbour down there right now, you could be forgiven for thinking that that was that.

But not at all. In fact one thing that was conspicuous in one sense was that Victor Hugo was conspicuous by its absence. That means that both of the Channel Islands ferries are out somewhere because Granville, the newer one, is also absent and has been for a day or two now.

It must be all go at the Channel Islands right now

But it wasn’t all go here this morning. The night was reasonably early and I did hear all of the three alarms, but I couldn’t somehow find the intention to leave the stinking pit. It was gone 08:00 when I finally saw daylight this morning and that’s no good at all.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone and I’m not sure exactly what I was doing in some kind of poor mountain village in poverty-stricken USA but it was doing some thing like a radio programme or whatever, I suppose. I had this young girl with me – she might even have been my daughter. The story goes that she was found kissing one of the boys in this village. They rounded up this girl and me and started to change our clothes and gave us nice clothes to wear. It suddenly struck me that this is marriage, isn’t it? This girl is going to be married off to this boy presumably but she was nowhere near old enough for this kind of thing. She was admiring the clothes that she was wearing and started to hum “here comes the bride” and suddenly had this appalling look of horror on her face as she too realised what was going to happen and started to snatch the clothes off her. These people were trying to grab hold of her to keep the clothes on and that was when I awoke.

After breakfast I was straight into the shower and as I seem to be struggling for clothes right now, I stuck a pile of dirty ones into the washing machine and let them have a run round.

And then the excitement began.

Wit my train being cancelled this morning I mentioned that I was changing my travelling arrangements. So off to the railway station in the pouring rain.

Hardly had I presented myself at the ticket window when the girl there beckoned someone else forward and let them have their say before me. Needless to say, there were words said about that.

She then couldn’t piece together my itinerary so I had to help her put the tickets in order (which had been in order until she had started messing around with them)

So eventually I was able to ask –
Our Hero – “as my train has been cancelled today, I’d like to change my travel and go again in two weeks time”
Girl at Window – “what date is that?”
OH – “two weeks from today”
GAW – “what date is that?”
OH – “whatever date two weeks from today is. The 23rd is it?”
GAW – “I don’t know”
OH doing some rough calculation – yes, 23rd
GAW – “the same trip?”
OH – “Didn’t I say that?”
GAW – “I don’t know”
so eventually after much prompting and grumbling she did it.
OH – “now what about the return?”
GAW – “what date?”
OH – “Just what I said earlier – the same trip but in two weeks time”.
GAW – “What date is that?”
OH – “whatever date is two weeks from the date on the ticket”
GAW – “but you haven’t told me what date”
OH by now rapidly losing his patience and his temper was surely bound to follow – “two weeks from the date on that ticket”
GAW – “but what’s the date?”
OH doing some more rough calculations – the 26th
GAW – “that will be €15:00”
OH – “what do you mean €15:00? I’m having to rearrange all of my trip because the outward train isn’t running. You’ve cancelled it”
GAW – “but the return train is running”
OH – “so how am I supposed to get the return train if I can’t travel out to get it?”
GAW – “I dunno”

The net result of all of this is that they will need to repaint the interior of the station booking office where the paint has blistered under the heat of my incendiary comments. I’ve not changed my return trip as yet but I shall be doing so in very early course once I’ve spoken to the SNCF head office.

LIDL next. And nothing of any excitement there, although I did forget to buy the peppers and mushrooms. I dunno what’s the matter with me right now.

Calling at La Mie Caline for my dejeunette, I then headed off for home.

Most of the day has been spent doing this football thing and by the time that I knocked off it was almost finished. There are 7, or possibly 8 main threads now with all of the isolated soundbites incorporated in to one of the threads as appropriate.

The linking texts have been dictated too but all of that needs editing and some background dubbed onto it, and then I can link it all together and dictate a closure to add in.

It’s about an hour’s work, I reckon, but knowing me, it will probably take most of the morning.

And then I have that stupid, pointless translation to do. It hasn’t escaped my attention that with the project owner not having had the time to edit it, I’m going to have to translate everything. I reckon that I keep about 15-20% of whatever I record on an interview and discard 80-85%, so this tells me that 80-85% of my work is going to end up filed under CS.

And that’s a thought that depresses me greatly as you can imagine. As Sheriff Buford T Justice put it so well in Smokey and the Bandit “we don’t have time for that crap!” I don’t know what people think I am … “and I don’t think that you want to either” – ed.

There were the usual interruptions today. Lunch was one of them of course and that hummus that I made the other day is tasting better and better as the herbs and garlic spread through it.

We had the afternoon walk of course, around the headland.

The sun was out and it was quite bright now. The rain had stopped. But there was a fierce wind blowing around and whipping up quite a wave down there. Some of the waves were crashing over the sea wall with an impressive force.

Not the kind of day to be out there at all.

Nevertheless, there were quite a few people doing their best. There was a line of about a dozen fishing boats heading into port.

If you have any doubt about what the phrase “making heavy weather of it” means, just one look at this boat will explain it to you better than anything I can say.

She was up and down and in and out of the waves all the way around the headland.

You probably noticed that I mentioned the line of fishing boats out there heading into port.

This is where they are heading and they’ll have to ride out at anchor because there isn’t any room at the inn. Apart from our old friend La Grande Ancre, I count another 8 of them just there.

The pink one that we saw heading this way is going to take the last empty berth and the rest of them out there will have to wait.

Not for long though.

The unloading takes place pretty quickly, as you can see. There’s quite a load on that boat there and they are using the cranes to stack it onto the trailer that is pulled by the tractor.

Where it goes after that I don’t know, but one of these days I’ll track it down.

Back to the apartment now to carry on working.

And the day that I might be able to work even faster might not be far away. That’s the company that’s installing the fibre-optic cable and they are doing something out in the street just outside the Place d’Armes.

Here’s hoping that it’s the cable being connected up.

Tea tonight was a burger – or, at least, it should have been a burger. But in the packet that i bought “on spec” from NOZ were some galette- thinks, like small thick crepes made with vegan components. Quite different from what I was expecting but tasty all the same and I’ll look out for more of these.

For the evening walk I was on my own at first.

Cold and windy but the sky was reasonably clear. Donville-les-Bains was looking quite nice in the dark but I didn’t stay around long to admire it. I went off and had my run.

However I have never ever felt less like it than I did. The strong headwind didn’t help but even so I was all for giving up after the first 100 yards. I kept on going though, and just about made it to the ramp.

There were crowds of people outside La Rafale, the bar in the Place Cambernon, and the pizza van that wa sparked there was doing a roaring trade.

My attention was distracted by a woman taking a rather small cat for a walk. She explained to me tearfully that it had been diagnosed with this cat disease that goes around. It’s survived a couple of attacks but it now had it again and its days are numbered.

And so i commiserated with her and gave her cat a stroke, poor thing.

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. It’s later than I hoped but for some reason I can’t concentrate on anything today.

But at least I didn’t crash out. That’s always something to be grateful for, I suppose.

Wednesday 8th January 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… once more yesterday.

This time it was about those shellfish containers or whatever they were in the port last night and I said that this may well indicate a visit from Normandy Trader in the very near future.

So here we are, bang on cue yet again. The aforementioned has indeed arrived in Granville and is tied up over there by the old cold store from when this port used to be a thriving deep-sea fisheries place.

Something else that I may well have been right about, although I probably didn’t express very much about it, is that i’m not now going to Leuven tomorrow. This afternoon I had a message from the SNCF saying that my train from Granville wasn’t going.

As it happens, I’d had an earlier telephone call from the hospital asking if I could postpone my visit as they would be overloaded with chemotherapy patients. Consequently I didn’t even bother to look for alternative transport. I changed the date of my appointment to two weeks hence (as for why, you’ll find out soon enough) and rebooked my accommodation. I’ll go to the station tomorrow on my way to LIDL and change my tickets.

Last night was another relatively early night (well, early for just recently anyway) but even so, it was about 07:00 when I finally crawled out of my stinking pit.

After the medication I had a bash at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night, and hello! again to Pollux. It’s been a while since you’ve been around. Here she was all on her own. I was doing some kind of Shakespearean drama and she was appearing in it. It was the scene where she was dragged away right near the end. Wr were discussing this and it turned out that she had been on the beach that time that we were having the Rock Festival thing and she’s tried some of my orange-flavoured water. We were getting her to talk about it and then she started to talk about other things, skateboarding, roller skating and so on. All the kids these days went onto the old railway land round by where the old BR Parcels depot was in Crewe, all round there. I explained to her that that was dangerous. It’s BR Parcels and they can be quite nasty. I was thinking that she might have been playing on the old railway land at the back of the Permanent Way Club, but it was definitely there. She was agreeing with me “yes, it was a terrible thing doing all of that” and she was telling me about the time what they did and she had a boyfriend that took her down there for the very first time. Only a couple of days ago this boyfriend had taken her down there. He was showing her a few things and she said she didn’t – she was saying that she was having the frissons about it and how she wished she was somewhere else

What is interesting about this is not so much the journey itself but the fact that I was dictating it using a French word. I know that I’ve dreamt in Fench before but I don’t recall ever using that language in the dictation.

After breakfast, surviving a power cut that delayed my start for a while, I set to work on the football trip that I did on Saturday last.

It’s very slow going, but it’s rather like a snowball in that it starts ff slowly and gets bigger quite quickly. What I’ve had to do is to go through all of the interviews, chop them into little segments and then stick them together – in the sense that you ask 20 people 20 questions, you need to extract all of the answers to Question 1 and stick them together, and then Question 2 etc. You get the picture.

It’s different to the one we did about the Bain des Manchots because there we were working to a timeline and we wanted it to run at a fast pace.

That’s taken me all day, with a couple of pauses here and there. Phone calls not being the least of them.

There was the usual morning trip down to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but once again I was side-tracked.

In the past I’ve talked about careening as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. That’s the process of using the tide to deliberately lay a ship on its side so that you can repair the hill or the bottom.

That’s quite a well-know procedure of course, but this is something else completely although I doubt if it’s as effective.

By the looks of things they are inspecting the rudder or propellor and fixing that is not a job that I would like to undertake in a situation like that.

With the tide being out, I could walk over the path at the top of the gates, but there was no-one about on Normandy Trader to talk to.

You are probably wondering why Normandy Trader wasn’t moored at her usual place. The answer is that La Grande Ancre is in the place underneath the crane. To be fair though, it looked as if Normandy Trader was fully-loaded, and was simply waiting for the gates to open.

And I must admit to admiring the matching colour scheme of the lorry attending to La Grande Ancre.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and then went for a look to see what was going on at the place Générale de Gaulle.

Our famous ski slope didn’t last all that long. They are busy dismantling it and that was a shame.

And the story going around the town is that two of the beavers or whatever they were on there have “gone missing”. They’ve probably gone off with the penguin that went missing from there a couple of years ago.

Lunch was an interruption of course, and so was bottling my home-made orange and ginger drink and setting another one off on the way.

There was the afternoon walk too, and that was interesting because the fog had now closed right in.

And I was right yet again about Normandy Trader. She was indeed ready to depart from the harbour because here she is, setting out into the English Channel.

And as I have said before … “and you’ll say again #34; – ed … my hat goes off to the sailors who spend most of their life confronting all kinds of difficulties that we landlubbers wouldn’t even consider.

But as one goes out, another one come in.

Here’s one of the trawler-type of fishing boats coming into port, and the presence of seagulls flying around in the vicinity suggests to me that it has a good catch on board.

With there being no-one around in the square Maurice Marland I took the opportunity to have an afternoon run.

And my health is definitely in a downward spiral right now because I knew all about this one.

Back here I had another little … errr … relax, something that is annoying me intensely these days after I went for several weeks feeling almost normal

Tea was some more falafel with veg and vegan cheese sauce followed by Christmas cake of course, and then my walk outside.

The fog has lifted slightly but I was still the only person out there. I managed a run too although I felt most unlike it. But regardless of how I feel, I have to push on forwards.

Tonight’s notes are now finished but as Runrig have now come up on the playlist I’ll be awake for another 43 minutes or so.

Perhaps I ought to do some more week.

Tuesday 7th January 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… last night when I doubted that I would be able to stay awake long enough to finish my notes for the day.

About half-way through I felt myself going off and although I managed something of a recovery, it wasn’t for very long and 5 minutes later I was in bed under the cover and away with the fairies with the notes unfinished.

At least – I think that I was away with the fairies because when I checked the dictaphone this morning it was bearing a rather strong resemblance to my bank account, or to the cupboard of Old Mother Hubbard.

One thing about crashing out early was that I was awake early too – 05:35 in fact. But I still managed to have to fight to beat the third alarm call out of bed.

After the medication, I made a start on today’s project. And that is to do another radio programme for my weekly rock show. I’m actually working now on the first programme after Brexit and while I’m not allowed under the terms of my contract to “engage in polemic”, nevertheless I have a cunning plan.

As Pete Seeger once famously said, “songs are weapons” and I haven’t given up the fight.

There was a break for breakfast of course, and having worked all the way through the morning afterwards, it was 13:20 when I went into town for my dejeunette.

Down at the fish-processing plant I was treated to some excitement. The first fishing boat in was unloading and it look as if they had a big pile of crabs.

It wasn’t appropriate to go for a closer look because they were working quickly, so I had to content myself from here.

The harbour gates were closed so I went that way round over the path on top.

Here’s a photo of Victor Hugo and what’s interesting is not what’s there in the photo but what’s not there. Yes, Granville seems to have gone out for another trip somewhere.

And I shouldn’t be surprised if Victor Hugo will be joining her at some point because her bridge was busy. There were three our four officers having a discussion on board her

While you admire the photo of Thora here, I’ll tell you about my encounter with a guy from the Port Authority.

He’d come out of the Port Authority office and was clearly looking very official, so as he strolled around the harbour I fell in with him.

Having asked the right questions, I can tell you that the gates open 105 minutes before High Tide and close 105 minutes afterwards.

And furthermore, he told me that there has been no gravel boat in port for over two months and he has no idea when the next one will be arriving

Thora was there and all loaded up. Those big builders’ bags had been all loaded on board.

One thing I’ve been meaning to do is to chat to the skipper but once more the ship was deserted and no-one was about. So that was that.

Instead, I went and picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and came back home for lunch.

The afternoon walk was taken in the cold and the wind (although not as windy as it has been).

Once more, there was a light out in the Baie de Mont St Michel over by Cancale on the Brittany coast, and I’ve seen enough of these now to be able to make an educated guess that it’s a trawler-type of fishing boat.

And here you are. I cropped the image and enlarged it when i returned home and sure enough, I was right about that too.

And that wasn’t all of the excitement either.

There was another yacht today out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel. Not as extravagant as the one out there yesterday with the bright red sail but still nice enough.

But what wasn’t there though was Thora. She must have cleared off quite rapidly as soon as the harbour gates were open.

Back here, I had another little … errr … relax – something that is annoying me because I was doing so well just now – and then pressed on with my project.

There was another brief pause because our “outside broadcast” from the Bain des Manchots – the Swim of the Giant Penguins – at Donville les Bains was being broadcast. And for those of you who missed it, you can HEAR THE PODCAST at your convenience, provided that you take your phone there with you.

It was 19:20 when I finally finished my radio programme – it had taken me far longer than I expected seeing as I’d made really good progress this morning.

What with being late I had another helping of the curry – lengthening it with some frozen spinach and one of the remaining endives.

Alone again on my evening walk, and my run was agony. I was ready to give up long before I hit the ramp although I pushed on nevertheless.

That good spell of health that I’ve had this last couple of months is coming to an end unfortunately . All the signs are there.

Although Thora is no longer with us, there’s more activity down at that end of the port.

They look like the shellfish cages and so that can only mean one thing, and that is that Normandy Trader must be on her way into port. Those are part of the load that she fetches and carries for this Jersey Co-operative thing.

So I headed home, all alone in the wind and light rain that had now sprung up.

So having done the radio programme that needed doing, tomorrow I’m going to freeze the carrots that I bought, deal with the orange and ginger drink and then start on the programme of the football supporters. I want that finished by the time that I come back from Leuven on Sunday.

That is – if I ever get there, because I’ve just heard that my train from Lille to Brussels is cancelled.

Monday 6th January 2020 – ONE OF THESE DAYS …

… I really will have myself an early night.

Last night was some time around 02:00 when I finally went to bed. I stayed up to finish off this radio programme in a case of “ship or bust” so that it would be ready for our meeting, and that was that.

No peace for the wicked. I cracked on and on and on, and now it’s finished. It could be better, I suppose, had I taken more time, but there is a vacant broadcasting space tomorrow at 17:00 CET and it was there for the taking.

And when I finally went off to bed, I found that I couldn’t sleep and ended up having a dreadful night. And although I heard the two earlier alarms, I was still debating whether to get out of bed when the third one went off.

Something of a failure there.

After the medication, I attacked the dictaphone notes from the night. And yes we had been on our way home yet again from the High Arctic. However, instead of an aeroplane, we were all standing around waiting for a pile of buses. Our particular bus was a single decker and there were a lot of people waiting for it so they sent for another bus which turned out to be a double-decker. We were being strictly controlled about entering – only being allowed 20 at once or something like that so the driver could check our tickets (… doesn’t this sound familiar? …) but then the double-decker appeared so everyone wandered off there and there didn’t seem to be any control on that. There was one girl most upset about not being allowed on the single-decker coach with the driver there. She was pleading with him trying to make her some room so that she could travel with him rather than the double-decker.

After breakfast I did some more work on my own radio project, and then went for my shower. My weight is going up again and I don’t like this one bit. I have noticed that my raging thirst has dried up, that I’m not as sprightly as I was a couple of weeks ago and that I’m more tired than before (I crashed out again for 15 minutes today).

Maybe all of this is related.

Anyway, I hit the streets and headed off for our weekly meeting at the Centre Agora. We weren’t all that many today. Three of our usual suspects were missing. And that reminds me – one of those missing had a parcel waiting for him at Carrefour that he couldn’t collect, so he had e-mailed me a copy of his identity card and I went to pick it up.

At the radio meeting I’ve long-since come to the conclusion that the only way that I’m ever going to get anything done is simply to do it and present it as a fait accompli, so I’ll be working on my notes from the trip to Versailles next.

While we’re on the subject, the affair of this musician rumbles on and on. The guy who thinks he runs the place has had the notes for over two weeks and done nothing at all with them. Today he gave them to me and asked me if I could translate them into French so that he could dictate them as an overdub.

Talk about making work for yourself and everyone else. If it’s beyond his capabilities, why did he take it on in the first place? Mind you, regular readers of this rubbish will recall me saying something about how possessive these people are of their ideas.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall exactly how I suggested that it should be done in the first place. And had it been done like this, the programme would have been completed, broadcast and filed away a long time before this

It’s hardly any surprise that nothing seems to get done when they work like this. I’ve always considered myself in the past to be totally disorganised, but I’m rapidly changing my opinion.

They way it’s going, I can see it ending up as a rambling, hopeless monologue. At least with Laurent, he was quite amenable to my ideas and quite malleable and we made a decent outside- broadcast radio programme “on the fly” in a matter of 8 hours and it’ll be on the air on Tuesday.

On the way home I called in at LIDL and I spent a larger-than-usual sum of money. Mind you, one of the purchases was a pile of new undies to go with the new socks that I bought 10 days or so ago. My undergarments are starting to look quite threadbare and it’s high time that I thought about some new stuff. The older stuff can go in the pile to go to Canada.

There was some more of that delicious sorbet there too. Strawberry this time too so I bagged a tub. I seem to be overflowing with sorbets just now but it’s a case of getting them while the getting is good.

Carrots too. I’ve run right out so I need more. There were 2kg-bags on offer again so tomorrow I’ll have a mega-carrot-preparing session ready for the freezer.

On the way back home, at the corner of the rue Herel and the rue St Paul I encountered the recycled rubbish-emptier.

In haste, I managed to grab a quick photo of him, but while I might have been too slow to actually photograph the rubbish being emptied, I was too quick to press the shutter and the image didn’t have time to settle down so it’s come out blurred.

But then that’s life.

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

For the rest of the day I’ve been working on my radio project and that’s taken longer than it ought to have done too. One of the reasons was that I had to redesign the web page for the playlist. And to make it more interesting, I’m just going to do one for the whole of the year 2020 – if I manage to keep on going for that long.

As usual, there were several interruptions during the day. Lunch was one of them of course (and my new hummus is delicious) and … errr … having a little relax was another.

Going out for a walk was a third interruption too.

And I didn’t get far before I was waylaid as usual. Yes, I’m still on this “pathetic parking” lark, aren’t I? And here’s another example for the record.

It’s usually brand-new Mercedes and BMWs that do this kind of thing, but how about a little Peugeot that is almost 11 years old at least?

Some people have no shame.

Once again, I noticed some movement way out in the English Channel so in order to identify it, I took a speculative shot with the aim of blowing it up (the image, not the object) back in the apartment.

And it’s not a gravel boat. It really does look as if they have stopped coming. Instead it’s one of the trawler-type of fishing boats that operate from out of the port.

Loads of gulls around it, so it looks as if she has a full hold today which is good news.

Talking of fishing boats … “well, one of us is” – ed … I had a look in at the chantier navale this afternoon

Spirit of Conrad is still there – she looks as if she has taken root down there – and so is the small shellfish boat. But there’s also another fishing boat in there now and people are working on her like 13 to the dozen.

And I’m not at all sure what is coming out of the air vent. Steam or water, but it could really be anything.

Over at the ferry terminal there has been some movement of the shipping too.

Chausiais and Joly France have been parked up over there for quite a few days now, but they seem to have changed places. That quite possibly means that there’s going to be some movement very soon, although I’m not quite sure what.

And I stil haven’t worked out what it is that Chausiais will be doing.

Movement too in the inner wet harbour.

We haven’t seen a gravel bot for an age now, but the smaller freighters are coming in quite regularly still. Thora has now turned up in the harbour and although you can’t see them in this photo, there are a large pile of these builders’ bags, the kind of stuff they put sand and gravel in, lined up on the dockside.

But Thora is starting to look a little run-down now compared to how she was when she first arrived. She could do with a coat of paint.

Back at the apartment there was yet another interruption. The lemon and ginger drink that I made a couple of weeks ago is now on its last legs. And with a pile of juice-oranges (or, rather, clementines) lying around here, I set a clementine-and-ginger drink off to start. We’ll see what that turns out like.

Once the radio project had been completed and I’d had a little relax, I made tea. I’m away from Thursday morning for a few days so it was another “leftover curry”. It was absolutely delicious and, even better, there’s enough for another two days

On my evening walk, I wa all alone again. The run wasn’t a success either as I struggled to even make the foot of the ramp and in the end just managed four paces up it.

But now I’m back and totally exhausted. I have a feeling that tonight I’ll be asleep long before I finish writing this …

ZZZZZZZZZZZ

Sunday 5th January 2020 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

… exploits and editing all of the photos etc it was … errr … 03:30 when I noticed the time and decided that I’d better go to bed.

And I’m glad that I did as well because apparently I wasn’t in it all that long. It’s been a while since I’ve been off on such a voyage or two or three or four.

We started off with one of these cold, clammy wake-up-panicky things. I’d not been asleep long and in my sleep I’d been making a list of things that I had to do over the Christmas period, one of which was to go up the North Wales coast to see someone near Rhyl. Suddenly I had a horrible flash – God, I’d promised the mother of someone I used to know that I’d take her to the Nick to see her son who had been remanded in custody over the Christmas period. I went to find my mother and asked “has Mrs X rung you up?”. She had a look through a few papers and said “no”. “God!” I said “I’d better give her a ring and see what she wants doing about this”. But how do you broach the question of “ohh do you want a lift to the nick to see your son in a cell?. I’m going to have to think carefully about how I’m going to approach this. That was when I awoke in one of these cold clammy moments because all of this sounded so real to me. It was certainly a realistic voyage
I’d gone back to sleep and I wasn’t asleep for very long because I awoke again. I’d been in my house which might have been Davenport Avenue although it was my house at the time. My father stuck his head up from downstairs and said that it was high time that I tidied up my house, that kind of thing. Previously Nerina’s mother had been doing it and when we had had our bit of a dispute Nerina’s mother stopped coming and the place was getting rather untidy. I was busy trying to do something and I had a whole load of things going on and was so confused that I just shouted “if you don’t like the way my house is then you f**k off somewhere else”. He became really annoyed by that so I told it to him again. He went away and tripped over something and fell through the banister – broke it off but he didn’t fall so he picked the banister up and threw it downstairs and said “that’s the first thing that can go out of this house”. I didn’t care because I was trying to sort out some clothes out to go to work. I couldn’t find any and I hadn’t any znd those on the clothes rail were sodden and damp and wet, and there was a howling gale blowing which flattened the clothes rail once. I was really annoyed and angry about this and said “if you don’t like my house the way it is then you f**k off out!” and that was when I awoke again with another one of these brusque sharp awakenings.
A short while later, I awoke to find the dictaphone in my hand all ready with a file open ready to dictate. So I’ve no idea what I was trying to say, but I didn’t manage to say anything at all. What a shame.
Later on though, I had an address for my father, which was 172 “Something” Road, Alpraham. I can’t remember the girl with whom I was, which was an extreme disappointment but off we set to find it. We couldn’t find it in Alpraham at all so in the end we turned round towards Tarporley (we had this all wrong because Alpraham is the “other” side of Tarporley, the Nantwich side and i was looking on the far side) but there was Alpraham and we came back and eventually found the place after much searching. It was two brick and white low-rise blocks of flats on either side of the road, connected by a kind of bridge of flats over the top of the street. His name was on the wall, on a blackboard, room n°20. So we parked up to get our things organised. She had some decent clothes and some stuff in a bag and I had some stuff in a box. We decided that we would take up some of the stuff and leave the rest of the stuff in the car,but it was a convertible so we went to look for a cloakroom or something. One of the members of staff sitting at a table in the common area said that there was absolutely no cloakroom here whatsoever. We thought that we had better take our stuff up with us and that’s what we were doing – organising our stuff to take u to my father’s room when I awoke.
Somewhere along the line though Rowan Atkinson had turned up. He made some kind of extremely offensive remark about the disabled and I was appalled. I thought to myself that I wished that he could be in the place of one of these people and go through what they were going through and see what kind of reaction he would have at his comments
Then we all had to queue to get back on our aeroplane in the High Arctic to wherever it was that we were going. People were taking off their winter boots and throwing them in a huge pile underneath the steps to the aeroplane and the Filipino crew guy was there saying “you want to keep those in case you come again” and they were saying “we don’t need to come again”. They were taking photos of him as a souvenir and climbing up the ramp onto the steps. I remember saying to one of the guys getting on “Ohh I don’t want to go home again!” and that was when I awoke yet again, and I think that I awoke definitively that time.

Well, actually it wasn’t. I must have gone back to sleep yet again because it was 11:00 when I awoke. I reckoned that I had better get out of bed at that point and look as if I mean business.

After the medication, I attacked the dictaphone notes to see where I’d been during the night, and that took longer than it should have done too.

And then it was breakfast.

Despite the late morning, I still had to think about lunch so I went off to la Mie Caline in search of my dejeunette.

And I wasn’t the only one out there either. Away out there in the baie de Mont St Michel over towards the Brittany coast was this beautiful yacht with a gorgeous red sail flapping away in the breeze.

It actually made me quite envious and i wished that I could be out there with him.

And that’s not all either.

Coming round the Pointe de Roc is this cabin cruiser or speedboat or whatever. That’s an impressive-looking piece of kit and the owner can’t be short of a bob or two.

He’s travelling at some speed too and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder whose it is, and where he’s come from.

The harbour gates were open so I had to come into town by the rue du Port.

La Grande Ancre is there ties up to the quayside, and she has acquired some more freight by the looks of things. There’s a small tractor on her deck, so maybe she has another delivery to do – maybe to the Ile de Chausey.

Having admired the various water craft, I carried on down into town and picked up my bread. And then the long walk back to here again.

The rest of the day has been spend doing the radio programme for the Bain des Manchots. It’s almost finished too – just the final 90 seconds to edit so that’s probably an hour or so’s work.

But to date, I’ve crammed about 35 minutes’ worth of speech into just over 8 minutes and it actually makes some very good listening. Hardly anything is repeated and everyone had something interesting to say (well, that’s how it ended up after I’d finished chopping everything up).

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

Back outside, I had a good look around.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we were having a series of some really unusual light effects, but they have nothing on the light effect that we could see over there on the Brittany coast over Cancale today.

It’s probably the best bit of floodlighting that I have ever seen, and all done by nature too.

Round the corner, I could see that Spirit of Conrad still there up on her blocks in the chantier navale.

But there are two more sets of blocks out there today. I’m not sure that they were there last time I looked, so it might well mean that we’ll be having some more visitors in there in early course.

Watch this space!

Tea was a vegan pizza – one of the best that i’ve ever made – and then the evening walk all alone in the freezing cold. I did my run too – but again only half-way up the ramp.

The day’s journal is finished to now I’m going to finish off the radio programme before I go to bed. I want it done and out of the way and the soon er I start, the sooner I finish.

Friday 3rd January 2020 – I AM NOT LOOKING …

… forward to tomorrow. Not at all. I’ve just found out that our buses are leaving at 07:30, not 08:00, and we are expected to be at the football ground by 07:00.

It looks as if an early night is on the cards, and an alarm at about 05:30 too.

And I’ll have to do better tomorrow morning than I did this morning. Despite hearing all of the alarms, it was still 06:35 when I finally crawled out of bed after a night that was later than I was hoping.

Still, there was time to go off on a couple of travels during the night. One of them featured the welcome return of Zero – someone who has accompanied me on many a voyage but has been conspicuous by her absence for quite some time. But seeing as you are probably eating your tea right now or something like that, I’ll spare you the gory details. But later on, I was at the football and it was something to do with the managers of one particular football club where we were. They had all been fired for some reason or other but I’m not quite sure why now.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes from the night and after breakfast I began to write up the notes for the Project that I had done yesterday.

Not that I got very far though because bang on cue at 10:00 Laurent came round.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last Sunday we went to Donville les Bains to watch the bathers take to the water and we interviewed a few of them. Laurent had listened to the recording and today was the plan to start to edit it.

One problem with a lot of this live stuff is that the interviewees often ramble off on monotonous monologues, and the secret of good radio technique is to let them, because quite often you uncover some unexpected pearls of comment that you would otherwise have missed.

And then, you edit it to cut out the useless bits that you don’t need.

The complicated bit is to listen very carefully to what you have left, and you’ll find that quite often the interviewees have answered questions that you haven’t actually asked. What you need to do then is to recreate exactly the same atmosphere and ambience in the comfort and safety of your own surroundings and then ask (and record) the questions.

That’s what Laurent and I were doing all morning – reviewing the recording and recording an extra … gulp … 24 questions.

After Laurent had finished asking my dictaphone the questions, he went home and I walked down into town for my dejeunette at La Mie Caline. A very late lunch today.

And today was my lucky day. I went round the back of the harbour to see if the gates were closed, but they were open so I couldn’t go across.

But regular readers of this rubbish will remember a few weeks ago when I arrived at the gates and they were closed, but just as I went to put my foot on the footpath the alarm went off, the barrier went down and the gates opened.

Today though, we had exactly the opposite. Just as I was about to turn round and go back, the gates swung closed.

Absolutely perfect timing to the second that was.

Not that I was loitering about (it was raining by now) but I had a look to see who was about in the harbour.

This is a boat called L’Omerta, which is Italian for the mafia code of silence. We saw a boat called Omerta in the chantier navale for quite a while a few weeks or so ago, but I wouldn’t like to speculate that it was the same one as this.

At la Mie Caline I picked up two dejeunettes. With an early start tomorrow I need to make some butties before leaving, otherwise I’ll starve to death.

Making my butties, I discovered that I’d almost run out of hummus. That big batch I made ages ago is almost gone.

Not wishing to be without hummus I made another big batch, one lot of which went in the fridge and the rest in the freezer.

And here’s my recipe.
For any given weight, you need
50% of chick peas
25% of tahini (sesame seed paste)
sea salt and pepper to taste
garlic
olive oil
chick pea juice.
You should find that you have about 95% of your given weight
Stick that lot into a whizzer and whizz it round until it gives a really nice creamy mixture the consistency of cement. It might take a few minutes.
Now you add your extras to bring it up to the given weight. I used olives today, sliced thinly. I’ve roasted some finely diced tomatoes or red peppers in the past.
Add these into the mix and then whizz them around GENTLY. You don’t want to whizz them around so much that they are pulverised – you just want to whizz them around enough to disperse them through the mix.

Today I ended up with about 850 grams – so that was 4×250 ml ice cream tubs that I had collected from my old housemates in Leuven. Three in the freezer and one in the fridge.

While I was at it, I made another batch of muesli and filled up the coffee container.

All of that took me up to my afternoon walk and so I trotted off out.

And here was an astonishing sight. Unless I’m very much mistaken, this plant has its first spring buds already.

They talk about global warming and climate change, and the proof is out there if you look for it. It’s really early this year. We’ve not even had a proper winter as yet.

The rain had died down and it had brought the crowds out again.

But although the wind might have abated somewhat, we’re having a really heavy rolling sea coming in from the Atlantic.

As you can see in this photo, the tide is still quite a way out but there is enough power in the sea to send it slamming into the sea wall with some incredible force

For a few minutes I stood and watched it, and then I headed for home. There was plenty of work to be done.

This afternoon’s task was to begin to edit out of the rubbish from the interview and to cut and splice into it our supplementary questions.

By the time I’d finished for the day, I’d edited down 12 minutes into a very snappy 2:30 and it’s come out rather well.

What was disappointing though was that I could have done much more.
1) I … errr … had a little relax for about 15 minutes
2) the sound balance was all wrong (I must teach people to talk to the microphone and not to the people) and it needed to be adjusted.
3) You could clearly hear all of the differences in tone and sharpness in the different segments of the interview and so I had to manufacture a “work-around” and that took time.
I ended up working in 6-track (questions, answers and background, each one in stereo) which is pretty phenomenal for the set-up that I have and it’s worked rather well.

The rest of the weekend I’ll have to work at the remaining … GULP … 18 minutes (although I know full well that about 6 minutes of that is ambience recording)

Tea was falafel in cheese sauce with steamed vegetables, and then the evening walk – and run, and I made it halfway up the ramp. I was on 98% of my daily activity too so I did another lap around the block to finish off.

Now I’ve finished my blog, I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep if I’m to be anything like it tomorrow.

Thursday 2nd January 2020 – LAST NIGHT …

… was not as early as I hoped it would be.

By the time I’d finished out stripping the applause from that live concert and filing it away, it was long after midnight.

There were still a couple of other things to do too and by the time I made it to bed, it was … errr … 02:40 or thereabouts.

My fitbit tells me that I had 4.20 hours of sleep last night, of which just 3.26 was restful sleep. It’s no real surprise then that although I heard the alarms go off, it was more like 07:00, not 06:00 when I finally struggled out of bed.

After the medication and before breakfast, I attacked the dictaphone notes from last night. Always time to go off on a little ramble.

There are some people whose company I positively welcome to accompany me on my little voyages, and regular readers of this rubbish won’t be unaware of who these people might be.

There are others about whom I have well, I suppose, ambivalent sentiments. I can take them or leave them.

But there’s a third group in respect of whom I would cross over to the other side and turn my back rather than to go anywhere voluntarily with them, even if they were proposing going towards Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter. And it was one of those who I encountered last night.

He was there last night and for a change he was being quite friendly, which was quite a surprise considering how things were before I left the UK and on one legendary subsequent encounter. He was going through all of his diary notes from years and years and years ago, all like little blue paper sheets put in folders. We were talking about a Crewe Alex match and the name of a player came up. I can’t remember who he was playing for when we discussed it but he neded up playing for Bury and we did say his name but I can’t remember it. He got his sheets out and said “yes, I went to see that match. The Alex played them on such and such a date and there was a crowd of 3,000-odd there (… in those days 2,000 would have been a really good gate …) only 35 different from the crowd today (… they are now getting over 4,000 …)” he said. “Things haven’t changed much, have they?”. I talked about the prices, all that sort of thing, that it costs a lot more to go in than it did in those days. Then there was something about going to see a house that we were thinking of buying, in a cul-de-sac somewhere like Franklin Avenue. The house had been empty for years and we really didn’t want people to know that we had bought it but we had to go. He had arranged an appointment with an expert to be there, so we had to be there at about 10:00 which meant that Nerina would be late for work that day. We had to wait around for him to come to pick us up. I was doing stuff in one room of the barn and she was doing stuff on her Wolseley in another back in Virlet. It was the first time that we had been back in Virlet for quite some time. There was a strong wind blowing so I went to see what the wind turbine was doing because there was a little ventilator thing on the desk in the room where I was working and that was going round like the clappers with the current. I went outside to have a look and the wind turbine was actually broken. A couple of the blades were shattered in pieces and the through-rod thing had dismantled and it was looking really really sad. I remember thinking that I should have spent the money on more solar instead. I didn’t want to say anything to Nerina to point out about the wond turbine having failed but anyway I was surprised to see her working on her car so I just said some kind of non-commital thing and didn’t say very much.

After breakfast I made a start on Project 009 but I didn’t get far before I broke off for a shower and a general clean-up.

After all, it is Thursday and that is shopping day at LIDL.

So off I set but I didn’t get very far before I was waylaid. Out there in the bay there was something moving about, and I only had the Nikon 1 with the standard zoom lens. But I took a photo of it to see what it might be, with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the object of course) back at home.

And here you are. It’s one of the small fishing boats that goes out for the shellfish, heading off into the English Channel.

Talking of fishing boats, there was more action in the inner harbour.

The harbour gates had now opened and so the larger fishing boats were slowly stirring themselves into life. This one here, with a crew of two on the deck and presumably a third at the wheel, was now heading off out to sea.

In the background we have Granville, the newer of the two Channel Island ferry boats. behind it, pretty much obscured, is Victor Hugo, the older one and quite probably the more reliable of the two.

The walk up to LIDL was a little more painful than it has been recently and I’m not sure why. But I reached there without a great deal of effort and did a little shop.

For a change, there was nothing in the weekly sale that interested me so it was a relatively light shop. More than usual because I’m not going to be here on Saturday for my weekly shopping so I need to make sure that I have enough food on hand until I can visit the shops again.

Back here, I unpacked the shopping and put it away and then resumed my work on the project.

There was a break for lunch (I’d remembered to pick up my dejeunette) and then back to the grind. And by the time that I’d finished, it was time for my afternoon walk.

It wasn’t really cold out there, and it wasn’t as windy as it has been either.

Consequently there were hordes of people milling around outside making the most of what is really unseasonable weather. These were just a few of the people out there today.

No dogs in this shot, which is surprising because there were quite a few round about and at one point we were treated to a little scrap between a couple of them. It certainly livened up the proceedings.

Way out across the bay I’d noticed something unusual on the beach way past Donville les Bains so I took a photo of it to blow up back home.

My initial impression was that it might have been some oyster beds or something similar, but a closer examination of the photo reveals that it’s a large heap of rocks being used as a reinforcement or storm-breaker in front of the little holiday camp out there near the airfield.

With the winds and the storms that we’ve been having, I reckon that they are going to need it too.

Talking of storms and the like, you can’t see it clearly on this photo unfortunately but there was quite a storm brewing out over there off the Brittany coast.

There was a patch of sea about 2kms square that was receiving a right pasting from a torrential downpour. I took a photo of it with the hope of being able to digitally enhance it back in the apartment but it didn’t work out.

You’ll just have to take my word for it if you can’t see it.

Something else that has appeared at the Pointe du Roc just recently is this stele that resembles the headstone of a grave.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the past year they’ve gradually been trasforming the Pointe du Roc into a pilgimage site for the French Resistance and they’ve erected all kinds of monuments and flagpoles and the like.

This seems to have sprung up overnight too – I don’t recall having seen it before. It’s another memorial to the Resistants and I don’t know why they feel the need for another one without explaining why it differs from the big one just around the corner.

There seems to be signs of movement at the chantier navale too.

Spirit of Conrad is still there and there are a couple of people, one of whom may well be my neighbour, working on it. The smaller fishing boat is also still there.

Conspicuous by its absence though is the larger trawler-type of fishing boat. It looks as if that may have gone back into the water on the early morning tide.

And in the background Joly France and Chausiais are still over at the ferry terminal. They don’t seem to have moved for a good few days.

Back here, I had a little think. There’s a life-changing event taking place in Europe in four weeks time and it’s something that I ought to be commemorating, even if I’m not allowed under the terms of my contract to discuss it.

But Pete Seeger once famously said “Songs Are Weapons” and I have plenty of weapons, and even a launch pad to fire them off. Consequently I spent some time searching for suitable weapons and after about an hour or so I’d ended up with more than enough.

If I put my mind to it, I can come up with something quite formidable and that will be impressive.

For tea tonight I had the other half of the curry from the other night and then went for my walk.

There were a few people, mostly young kids, loitering around but I still managed my run. However I ended up just 10 feet from the top of the ramp before I ran out of steam.

So back here to write up my notes, and then off to bed.

But the good news relates once again to the fitbit. In December I walked 264.95 kms – almost 9 kms per day, and ran for 1 hour 48 minutes – about 3.5 minutes per day. There were only 9 days when I didn’t make the magical 100% and there was one day where I made 179%.

That’s not bad for an Old-Age Pensioner and I’ll go with that any day of the week. But I’m not going to rest on my laurels. I’m going to push on (or push off as the case may be) and see if I can do even better than that.

It’s never too late to try to achieve a satisfactory level of fitness and I do have to say that it seems to be working because I’m feeling better now than I have done over the last few years.

Onwards and upwards, hey?

Tuesday 31st December 2019 – UNLESS I AM …

… very much mistaken, there’s been a change in the situation over at the chantier navale during the course of the morning.

On my way down into town to pick up my dejeunette this morning, I thought that something looked quite different in the distance. And so I took a speculative photo across the rooftops with the aim of blowing it up back in the apartment to check.

And sure enough. It looks as if Spirit of Conrad has grown a mast. It could well be that in a short space of time she might be going back into the water.

Which is more than you can say about me. Despite my best intentions, by the time that I had finished listening to a couple of really decent albums my plans for an early night had vanished into the ether. It was just after midnight when I crawled off into bed.

Still there was enough time to go on a ramble, but I don’t remember very much at all about it which is a shame, because I bet that it was interesting, especially as it actually concerned Castor’s parents. I don’t know now if I ever knew what had happened but they just decided to pack up and emigrate from the UK and go to Australia. So Mrs Castor left her employment and they sent a letter off to the Tax Office asking for a permanent refund on the grounds that she wouldn’t be taking up any further employment in the UK as they were leaving to go to Australia in the morning.

So whatever that might have been about, then your guess is as good as mine.

When the alarm went off I wasn’t all that keen. It was round about 06:30 when I finally raised my head and put my feet on the floor. Something of a disappointment but there you are.

After the medication I cut up a digital album into its component track and then transcribed the dictaphone notes to see where I had been.

After that, I’ve been a very busy boy and I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that the time has gone really slowly today even though I seem to have done tons of work.

Much of the morning was spent on dealing with something that have been wanting to do for ages – to sort out my hard drive. And without thinking, I seem to have the files all muddled up and moved the wrong ones. Now I’m having to go back and unpick the directories and start again. That was rather a waste of a morning.

But I have something else going on with regard to the radio station – a completely different project than normal, and that involved sending off a few enquiries.

Down into town for the bread as I mentioned earlier, and then back up here for lunch. I was running quite late.

After lunch I attacked the radio programme that I’d run aground on. And with a really good session it’s almost finished – except for the final track to close the broadcast.

That’s always the most difficult one because it has to be a certain length – namely 30 seconds shorter than the gap that it needs to fill. And once I’ve chosen it, it has to sound like a final track and not like a start track. There needs to be a long intro and/or outro so that if the 30-second speech overruns, I can overdub it onto the start or trim off the ending.

So it’s not easy but I’ll do that tomorrow.

There were a couple of interruptions to my afternoon though.

Firstly, there was of course my afternoon walk among the throngs of people outside enjoying the weather. Nice and sunny, but cool and very windy (although not as windy as it has been).

My route went by the chantier navale to check on Spirit of Conrad and sure enough, the mast is installed and my neighbour was on deck working away cleaning her up.

The fishing boat is still there, but do you remember that I said that they had laid out another row of blocks so I was wondering if they were expecting another boat in?

Sure enough, there’s one of the very small shellfish boats there now next to the fishing boat. So business down there must be picking up again which is always good news.

And Joly France and Chausiais

The second interruption was … errr … closing my eyes for 10 minutes or so. Three days on the run – this isn’t any good. I don’t want to relapse into my old habits again.

Tea was a leftovers curry – mushrooms, a leek, some potatoes, a small tin of lentil etc. Delicious indeed. Followed by Christmas cake.

On my evening walk I was all alone again. Cold and windy, so I didn’t hang around any. I did my run and made it halfway up the ramp, which isn’t good enough either.

Back here I had a bowl of that banana sorbet to celebrate the forthcoming New Year, and then wrote up my blog.

Later on I’ll be going out for a walk around the town to see what is happening at Midnight, and I’ll let you know tomorrow.

So in the meantime, I wish you all a pleasant evening and a Happy New Year. I hope that in the forthcoming year you will receive everything that you wished on everyone else in 2019.

Monday 30th December 2019 – I BET …

… that when you first saw the photo of this car in this parking place, you thought to yourself “he’s off on this pathetic parking lark yet again!”

But not a bit of it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my perambulations around Paris two weeks or so ago and I featured one of the new electric vehicle charging points that are springing up like mushrooms all over the developed world (except of course in the UK, for obvious reasons).

Well, here’s another one. Or two, to be precise, right outside the railway station in Granville. As I said a couple of weeks ago, the world is racing ahead.

And quite right too. The EU is to phase out the production of the internal combustion engine by 2040. The biggest obstacle to electric vehicles is the lack of charging points, but this is changing quite rapidly.

Other things that I wish would change quite rapidly are my sleeping habits. What with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised how many other things there are) it was about 01:45 when I eventually went to bed last night. 4:33 of sleep last night, of which 3:42 were classed as “restful”.

This is getting beyond a joke.

Even so, there was still plenty of time for me to go off a-voyaging. I had to get up early next morning and there was a bit of an issue. There were two girls at my house. One of them was part of my family but I can’t remember who she was and the other one was her friend who was staying with us. Round about 11:00 they got up and about 11:15 or 11:45 something like that they went out. That was the last we’d seen of them. We knew that they were going to a dance. There we were, sitting there, a big group of us, drumming our fingers on the table wondering where they hall they had got to. I thought that this is no good – I need the car. I have to get up in the morning and everything like that. Round about 02:30 they suddenly appeared back again. They’d been on a dance, off to a night club all this kind of thing and we were all making disparaging remarks about “WHAT time was it you went out this morning?” All of that kind of thing. These girls weren’t giving a straight answer because they were a bit embarrassed something like that about it. But the situation concerned one of my Cortinas. I’d been driving around in it and the MoT had expired a while ago. I remember thinking to myself that I ought to have this vehicle on two number plates so I can get two different MoTs which would overlap so that if one expired I’d just put the plates on it for the other MoT and run that for another few months and so on. I can’t remember what on earth that was all about but that was when I awoke for the first time – round about 04:00.
But later on there was something going on to do with the radio. Some young boy had been at the radio who was doing his stuff with very primitive equipment (something like I’m doing at the moment I suppose) and tired of being pushed to the bottom of the pile because of that he went out and bought some decent stuff which improved his quality and improved his output and annoyed all of his colleagues because he’d now got some superior kind of stuff.

It was something of a struggle for me to leave my stinking pit this morning, which should not be a surprise after the night that I had, but I did make it up before the 3rd alarm.

Having taken the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes and then went for breakfast once the medication had worked.

After breakfast I checked my communications and found that Alison had replied to me with her plans for the weekend when I’ll be at Castle Anthrax. And so I could go ahead with making my travel arrangements.

Thursday 9th January
09:00 – Granville to Paris Montparnasse, arriving 12:05 – and in the main arrivals hall too if my reading is correct.
13:15 – Paris Gare du Nord – Lille Flanders arriving 14:18
14:41 – Lille Europe – Bruxelles-Midi arriving 15:17
and then a local train to Leuven
Sunday 12th January
08:43 – Bruxelles-Midi – Paris Gare du Nord arriving 10:05
10:57 – Paris St Lazare – Caen arriving 12:58
14:10 – Caen – Granville arriving 15:44.

Of course, all of this is somewhat … errr … facultative. It’s all very dependent upon the availability of transport in the middle of a General Strike and I can see myself as having as many exciting adventures as did the Knights of King Arthur as they went to visit Castle Anthrax.

With booking my accommodation too, and my local train between Brussels and Leuven, it was quite late when I went for my shower.

And SHOCK! HORROR! – I’ve gained 2kgs since my last shower. That can’t possibly be right and seems to indicate that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood count readings from Castle Anthrax.

Off I went into town and up to the railway station (and the electric vehicle charging point) to pick up my tickets. And there was quite a pantomime about getting them from the machine.

That’s why I always like to pick them up before I travel. There’s no-one in the ticket office at the time my train leaves so if the machine has a seizure on the morning of my travel then I really am cooked.

At LIDL I spent more money than I was expecting.

One thing that I said that I would do is to take more care of my living arrangements, and forgetting to change my bedding for weeks isn’t helping things. Today though at LIDL they had some flannelette sheets on offer so I bought a couple. A dark blue one to go with one bedding set and a light blue one to go with the other.

They weren’t very expensive for what they are and the quality isn’t brilliant but alternating them around more regularly means that they will last somewhat.

On the way back home I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then headed for home.

At the recycling centre across the road from my building the lorry had come to empty one of the containers.

Not being in any particular rush, I watched it for a while as it emptied the plastics bin. And then watched for a couple more minutes while the crew of the lorry went scampering around trying to catch the pieces of plastic that where Blowing In The Wind.

The moral of this story is – don’t empty the lightweight plastics containers in a gale-force wind.

Back at the apartment I had a few things to do that took me up to lunch, and once lunch was out of the way I had a little project to attend to.

My “recording sessions” take place at the moment using an external microphone with the dictaphone, and then plugging the dictaphone into the computer to download the files and then to enhance them etc with my sound editing program.

But there’s no reason whatever why I can’t plug the mike into the computer and then record directly and edit “on the fly”, which will save me a couple of steps in the process.

And so I had the computer out of its cubby hole and plugged the mike in, and then had a play.

The result was awful. The sound level was abysmal, even on max input, and there was a persistent hissing on the recording. It needed so much “enhancing” to remove the hissing that it sounded as if i was speaking with my head in a bucket.

And so it’s back to the dictaphone while I think of Plan B. I hadn’t really realised just what good quality I was getting from the dictaphone with an external mike.

But all was not lost. It gave me an opportunity to reroute a few cables that needed rerouting, even if I did plug the HDMI cable into the incorrect socket and spent 10 minutes wandering why I wasn’t receiving a signal at the screen.

That was the signal for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And what a beautiful afternoon it was. We had glorious sunshine even if it was quite low down in the sky. There were plenty of people out, even walking along the beach today seeing as the tide was out.

And the wind had dropped dramatically from how it was earlier too. And that was very welcome news.

It wasn’t just around on the grassy field on the north side of the headland and on the beach that the crowds were massing.

Although they are the most popular places to be, they aren’t the only places. There were the hordes of people on the southern side by the big car park on the boulevard Vaufleury too.

They seemed to be admiring the harbour and the view across the Baie de Mont St Michel towards the Pointe de Carolles, as well as soaking up the best of the late afternoon sun.

With the tide being right out, there wasn’t much action down in the outer tidal harbour. But there were a few things of interest though.

The other day we talked about NAABSA harbours – the “Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground” situation where ships are allowed to settle on the silt in tiday harbours where there isn’t enough water to keep them afloat.

Over there at the ferry terminal, Joly France is there, and as there is no water underneath her, she’s in a NAABSA state and it doesn’t seem to concern her owners at all.

She wasn’t the only one either.

In front of her, likewise in a NAABSA state, is Chausiais, the new freighter that the owners of the Ile de Chausey have bought, presumably to provide a freight service over to the island, even if I can’t see what would be going over that couldn’t be carried in the hold of one of the ferries.

Still, we shall see in due course, won’t we? I sense a Cunning Plan.

That was my cue to come home where, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out, leaving my coffee undrunk.

And if ever there was a moment where I really did feel like hauling myself off to bed to crash out definitively, then that was it. But I fought off the feeling, even if I did feel like death.

As a result, my plan to attack the dialogue for my next radio project fell flat without very much progress having been made. I need to finish that one off as well as do another one by the end of the week, although I’m not sure quite when I’ll fit it all in.

But whatever happens, I mustn’t fall behind otherwise I’ll never get back in front again.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with the stuffing left over from late last week. And I don’t know why, but it was the best one that I’ve ever made.

If anyone is interested in my stuffing mix, it’s as follows –
Start by boiling up some quinoa or bulghour with a little water and some really spicy chili powder, and leave it to simmer.
Meanwhile, dice up some onion, garlic (have to have garlic of course!), a tomato, mushrooms, olives and whatever else you might have lying around that is suitable, a handful or two of salted peanuts, and then some herbs. I use oregano, basil and tarragon, as well as ground black pepper.
Then, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a couple more of tomato sauce (not ketchup, of course!)
Mix it all up together and then add the bulghour or quinoa, which should by now be ready, and mix that well in too. You need your stuffing to be very moist, but not runny.
Cut round the stalk of the pepper and scoop out the core, the seeds and the pith. Then stuff it with your stuffing mix.
Into the microwave at medium-full (that’s 640 watts on mine) for 7 minutes 30 seconds while the rice and veg are cooking.
The when the rice is cooked and you’re rinsing it out with boiling water, give the pepper 90 seconds on max (that’s 800 watts on mine)

If you try it, let me know how it turns out, and let me know if you have any suggestions to make it differently. There’s a “contact me” link down at the bottom right corner of the screen.

After that I went out for my evening walk in the freezing cold, because the temperature has dropped dramatically. I was the only one out there, which was no surprise.

But while I was out there, I checked and sure enough, Granville really is back in the harbour, tied up alongside Victor Hugo.

It looks like her a-roaming is over for a few days.

And so was mine. For tonight anyway, I headed for home. I managed to fit in my run, although I was dead by the time that I reached the ramp and only made four or five paces up it.

It’s really disappointing that I can’t seem to push on and run for longer. I remember when I went back running in the mid-90s, when after a few weeks I suddenly found my second wind and could run for miles. I can’t seem to break this barrier these days.

Mind you, I’m not sure what I’m expecting at my age. It’s not every OAP who goes out running late at night every night, especially one who is supposed to be on his death bed. I should be grateful for what I can do.

This evening I didn’t see Minette the old black cat but I saw her mum who was on the doorstep chatting to a couple of people. So I had a little chat, wished them the compliments of the season and came home.

Now I’ve written up my journal, I’m off to bed. 6.5 hours of sleep if I’m lucky. That’s a luxury these days so I need to make the most of it.

But not quite yet. I’ve been listening to No Smoke Without Fire by Wishbone Ash. It’s an album that I’ve owned for probably 30 years but I haven’t heard it for probably 29 years. And while it won’t ever be anything like as good as the first couple of albums, I’m astonished that I haven’t played it more often because some of it is really excellent.

And as that finished, onto the playlist came Fur by Jane Wiedlin. Not an album that you would normally associate with me but Janet Marsden played it to me late one night and there are a couple of tracks on it that are totally unexpected in their brilliance. They bring back a couple of memories of one particular night in Crewe, and how things could have been different had I been in a better place in my head back then.

Sunday 29th December 2019 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether it was a good idea or not for me to set an alarm this morning. Because I might have needed it, and then again I might not.

Hoping around on my toes at 04:00 trying to ease out a bad attack of cramp (how come these attacks have started up again just recently), awake again at 07:00, and finally and definitely, about 2 minutes before the alarm at 08:30.

No medication this morning. I don’t have time to wait for it to work. Instead I had breakfast and then made a start on the dictaphone notes from during the night.

I was with a group of people last night – we were on board a ship (yet again). I’d gone out once already during the night to see what was happening and there wasn’t very much so I had to go out of my cabin again so I decided that what I would do was to go and have a look outside again to see what the weather was doing while I was on the point of doing this other job. There was a guy standing by the door outside – I thought he was smoking a cigarette or something so I went out to say hello and he said “have you thought about that thing that we can be doing, because if you aren’t going to do it straight away I can get down to start work on my car”. I had the impression that I was supposed to be helping him work on a motorcycle but I don’t remember much about it and of course there isn’t all that much we can do on board a ship in that respect. Anyway I thought “well, yes, I’m willing to help out anyone any time” and I awoke at that point
At another time during the night there was something going on about people having a party. They’d booked a table at a night club, a table for 8 but the table was at the back. They enquired why and were told “some of these big tables have a habit of being a bit rowdy and pushing their way to the front and it disrupts the other people so we like to keep them where they are”. But this guy whose party it was was organising something and the other people were to come and a lot of them were saying that she couldn’t stay very late and he was qute disappointed about this. He said “as long as you come for the first drink that’w what’s really important. Come and have the first drink with me”. Then he said he had to go and there was some issue too about the date. It was the 1st of January and the date ticket that was sat in the date holder think on the table or in the notebook was too long and protruded out of the holder so it needed to be trimmed. But he hadn’t thought about doing that so I asked him where he wanted it on the table. He said that it was upstairs so he’d better go upstairs and get it. And that was when I awoke.
And somewhere along the line there was something about fitting a pinch bolt in the gearbox drive of a vehicle that I owned so I’d gone down to the garage in Centreville to do that. Darren and I dunno maybe Jody were there. They got a pinch bolt out and got the tools and everything then they both climbed under the vehicle and I thought that I was going to do that but they climbed under there anyway. I had to move so that they could get under. They put the pinch bolt in but it was slightly too long and they could get it in with a real bit of difficulty but there was about an inch too much that wasn’t needed on the pinch bolt. So they looked at each other and said “well should we cut this inch off then?” And that’s all that I remember of that bit.
There had been another thing too but when I awoke I had the most awful cramp – so much so that I had to stand up to ease the leg. And by the time that the cramp had gone, so had any memory of the dream

After that I checked over my equipment and then Laurent appeared at the door so we shot off to Donville les Bains.

Today is the Bain des Manchots, the “bathing of the Giant Penguins”.

Every village for miles around loses its fou for the day and they all assembles on the beach ready to take the plunge.

Our task today was to come to the Bain des Manchots in order to interview some of the bathers and the organisers.

There were plenty of manchots around on the beach too and we interviewed a couple of them to find out why they had come all this way for a swim when they could have stayed at home and gone for a swim back there.

As well as manchots there were dozens of Father Christmases out there too, all taking a break from delivering the presents and recharging their batteries ready for the start of the new year.

And it wouldn’t take much of an effort for them either if they are used to the weather at the North Pole. Although the air temperature is a mere 4°C, someone has measured the water temperature and it’s between 9°C and 10°C.

And that’s positively tropical.

And for mainly that reason, the organisers reckoned that they had a record number of entries.

Certificates were awarded to those who “took the plunge” and they reckoned that as far as they could tell, they issued 300 or so certificates.

That’s a far cry from when they started 10 or so years ago and just 20 people made it into the water.

The secret of going into the water in this weather is really quite simple.

For people who are in any way timid or unsure of themselves, the key is to be at the front, first in line. Once the whistle blows, there’s no turning back and the force of the crowd behind you pushes you into the water.

Being last in, you see all of the others wincing as they enter the water, and that can dampen anyone’s ardour.

People didn’t stay in for long – 15 minutes was, I reckon, the longest.

We interviewed a few of them, including a girl aged about 6 who we reckon was the youngest participant, when they came out.

No-one was really suffering although one or two people were looking really uncomfortable. Each to his own though. Some people are more susceptible to the cold than others.

Laurent brought me home and he came up here for a coffee and a chat for a while. It’s a good job that I’d cleaned up and tidied up everywhere over the last couple of days

After he had left, it was lunchtime so I walked back into town for my dejeunette.

Down on the rue du Port near to the fish processing plant, my eyes were drawn to this beautiful piece of street art. Someone had clearly taken some time to compose this oeuvre here on the pavement.

It’s far more representative of art than many of the works exhibited in many galleries these days.

The tide was out so the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the pathway on top, over to the other side of the harbour.

Victor Hugo is there this afternoon, as are Aztec Lady and Charles Marie.

But there’s no sign of Granville, the more modern of the two Channel Island ferries. I’m pretty certain that she was here last night, so it looks as if she’s had another early morning run out to St Helier.

I picked up my dejeunette from la Mie Caline and then went for a look around the town.

The Christmas market, such as it is, is still going on in the place Générale de Gaulle and will be for another day or two.

Mind you, it’s not what I would call a Christmas market. I’m more used to the ones in Germany where it’s freezing cold and there are hundreds of stalls and thousands of people.

Here today, there were about half a dozen stalls and more stalls than people.

It doesn’t seem to be possible these days to go for a day without my making some kind of remark about some of the pathetic parking that we see around the town.

Here’s today’s example. A huge space in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne, big enough to park a bus in, and yet the driver (and I use the word loosely) has somehow managed to end up with two wheels on the pavement.

That’s bad enough in itself but what is worse is that he’s simply left the vehicle there and made no attempt whatever to park it correctly.

Back in the apartment I had a very late lunch and then something of a vegetation (after all, it IS Sunday) before going out for my afternoon walk.

Crowds of people around but not much else going on.

However there was some guy wandering around with a couple of girls aged about 10 and 12 and he was posing them in all kinds of artistic settings on the clifftop and then taking photographs of them.

I enjoy taking photos of people taking photos, but this one hasn’t worked so well as I ended up with the low evening sun right in the camera lens and I didn’t have the time to change the camera settings.

Back here I had a listen to our dictaphone recordings of the morning’s adventures and then sent them off to Laurent. He’s going to listen to them and tel me where and what to cut out, and dictate some more “questions” that I can insert in, to break up some of the “monologues” that we recorded where our interviewees were carried away with themselves.

Tea was a vegan pizza as usual, and it was delicious, as was the Christmas cake that followed it down.

While I was eating it, I was watching a Saint episode on the DVD player. Loads of famous people had bit parts in these series before they became famous and it’s always interesting to see who I can pick out.

One voice stood out a mile and I recognised it as soon a I first heard it. I had to wait unti the end to confirm it, and I was right. None other than Lois Maxwell, who later went on to fame and fortune as Miss Moneypenny in the “James Bond” films.

After tea I went for my walk around the walls.

No-one around so I could have my run around my little track and I made it up to the top of the first ramp tonight. While I was pausing for breath I could see some fishing boats unloading at the fish processing plant.

As I came back to the apartment I noticed that I was on 93% of my daily activity.

And so i continued my walk and went to see what was out at sea. Sure enough, the lights were telling me that another long line of fishing boats were on their way back to the fish processing plant.

A quick rough head-count told me that there were about 7 of them at least. There may well have been more.

Although these photos might seem blurred you need to remember that it’s pitch black out here so I’m on a very slow speed, the camera is hand-held in the wind, and the boat is about 5 miles offshore.

In the circumstances I’m not too disappointed.

Back here it’s late, I’ve just finished my journal and now it’s time for bed. I won’t have much sleep tonight but I’m looking forward to what I might have. It’s been a long day today.

And a Sunday too!

bain des manchot or penguin or some such donville les bains granville manche normandy france

Friday 27th December 2019 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I went to use the jam in the fridge only to find that it was … errr … past its best.

Seeing as the shops were open today and I’d missed my Thursday walk up to LIDL, that I’d walk up there this morning and buy some more. And while I’m at it, pick up a few more bits and pieces that I need.

And so I picked up a few more bits and pieces from LIDL and came home again. And it wasn’t until I’d almost finished putting away the few more bits and pieces that I suddenly realised “dammit! Forgot the jam!”. And that was really the whole purpose of going out!

Mind you, I blame my bad night for all of this. I don’t know why but there I was working away at something or other and I suddenly noticed the time – 03:15. Heaven alone knows what I was doing at that time of night but never mind. I eventually made it off to bed but I wouldn’t like to guess what time it was.

As you can imagine, the alarms at 06:00 etc were not greeted with very much enthusiasm. Nevertheless with a superhuman effort it was as early as 06:40 when my feet eventually touched the ground.

While I was waiting for the medication to work I had a look at the dictaphone. And sure enough, even with only a couple of hours sleep, there had been enough time to go for a wander during the night. I had been in a Weigh-and-Save of all places and looking around for stuff and I hadn’t a clue what I wanted and I couldn’t find half of it, all this kind of thing, and this went on for a good few minutes. Suddenly I noticed that this queue, the enormous queue at the checkouts had disappeared and there was no-one there. I dived into the checkouts as if I was ready to go. I’d been looking for flour but couldn’t find any but there they were – they had a few bags behind the counter so I asked “is this the flour?”. They said yes. “And this is what you use for baking, that kind of thing?” “Ohh yes, that’s it”. So I started to get that and I was thinking that if I got that I could keep on nipping back into the shop and getting some other stuff but then a queue of people started to build up behind me after that so I thought “this isn’t going to work now, is it?”

After breakfast, one project to which I hadn’t been attending just recently was set back in motion again. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d been searching around for digital copies of old albums that I’d owned and that I’d downloaded a huge number.

They have to be split into individual tracks of course and I had made a start on that a few weeks ago. But today, I started again.

By the time that I had to go for a shower I’d done one and there was another one in the pipeline.

Having cleaned myself up somewhat, I set off for town.

And down at the foot of the Escalier des Noires Vaches I stopped for a while to observe the fishing boat Les Bouchots de Chausey moored up by the fish processing plant with a few guys doing some loading work around it.

And it was as well that I had stopped, because right at that moment the telephone rang.

It was Rosemary on the telephone. She needed some advice about Paypal and how it works.

So while I was chatting to her, I was admiring the work that was going on with Les Bouchots de Chausey. It looks as if she’s about to set out to sea because they are loading all of the plastic boxed onto her – the boxes in which they stack the catch.

With the tide being part-way out, the harbour gates were closed again so I could walk over the footway at the top and over the other side of the harbour.

Nothing much going on there today and no new visitors. And judging by the small size of the gravel heaps, we aren’t going to be expecting a gravel boat any time soon

And then there was the performance at LIDL.

Today I dodn’t spend much money either – nothing out of the unusual even though they had had the weekly “specials” delivery. It’s not very often that there isn’t anything in the Lidl Specials to excite me. The big issue is usually whether I can afford it and, these days, whether I can carry it away

Regular readers of this rubbish must be quite fed up these days of me going on about pathetic parking.

It’s something that really gets on my wick and there seems to be a lot of it about right now, such as this example here in the rue St Paul.

There’s a parking place right by where I’m standing, as you can see, but madam has driven 10 metres past it and parked on the pavement right across a pedestrian crossing while she has a chat with the postie on a bike who is blocking off the rest of the street.

On that note I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then continued on my way home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the seafood stall that I mentioned the other day – the only one that seems to sell the fish straight off the boat.

It’s here again today, set up at its usual spec on the corner of the port. It seems to have a couple of customers too.

And you can see what the weather was doing too. A cold, clammy fog with no sun and trying its best to rain – that thin wet rain that you don’t notice but which soaks you right through to the skin and makes you feel really miserable.

Back here, I finished off the splitting of the other digital music file, and then reworked my advert for the radio rock show that I’m producing and presenting. After I made the first one and sent it off, they then changed the time of the repeat. I’m on the radio on Fridays at 21:00 Central European Time (20:00 UK time, 15:00 Toronto time) and repeated on Saturdays at the same time.

That took me nicely up to lunchtime where I had a nice little relax with a book and a sandwich.

After lunch I unwrapped the final piece of my Christmas present to myself.

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do was to play the drums and while I was browsing around on the internet I came across a cheap electronic drum kit.

Cheap – and complete too. The only thing that it doesn’t have is a USB cable to connect it up to a computer but I can source one of those from somewhere, I reckon.

So that’s now all connected up and wired in as far as I can, and I’m going to have a bash at the drums. I had a few trial goes and believe me, it actually sounds like a drum kit through the headphones that come with it.

Despite the horrible weather, I went out for my afternoon walk.

And I wasn’t the only one out there walking either. As well as the crowds on the headland, there were a couple of people walking around on the beach clearly making the most of the holiday season.

There were a few other people tempted to go down there and join them, but I declined. By the time I managed to reach the bottom the tide would be right in and I’d have to turn round and come straight back up again.

It must be that time again, because once more we had the queue of fishing boats in the English Channel and the Baie de Mont St michel waiting to come in to the port and unload.

The tide must be on the way in, hence the reason why I declined the walk down to the beach.

While I was admiring this boat here, I did a quick count of the number of boats that I could see. Even with the fog and mist out there, I could see half a dozen. I’ve no idea how many more there might be lurking about in the fog.

And yet another example of bad parking.

Here in the boulevard Vaufleury, this is a service bus route right near to a school with piles of school kids and school buses knocking about.

Yet this person is parked with two wheels on the pavement, blocking off the pavement for wheelchairs and pushchairs etc, and blocking the road for the service buses and school buses.
Even worse, there’s a huge free public car park not even 30 metres away from where the car is parked, but that’s evidently far too far for this sad excuse of a car driver to walk, isn’t it?

Back here I did some more tidying up so the place looks a little more lived-in and like home, and then I stopped for tea. I’d bought a pepper so I treated myself to a stuffed pepper. I do like them

The evening walk was a wet one so I didn’t hang around for photography. I managed my run too, much to the amusement of a couple of young kids lurking around in the bushes in a dark corner. I have to admit that my running style is rather eccentric, but at my age, it’s like Samuel Johnson’s description of women preachers – “It is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

Back here I listened to my radio show for tonight and it worked quite well. I’m not impressed with my delivery though and I’m going to have to work on that.

But it’s been a very long day and I’m ready for bed. Shopping tomorrow and then tidying up. I’m expecting visitors on Sunday.

Tuesday 24th December 2019 – CHRISTMAS JUST ISN’T CHRISTMAS …

… without any mince pies.

And so when you don’t have any and can’t obtain any, the only answer is to make a few yourself. And here are some I made earlier.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my oven is somewhat “hit and miss” – in fact, it’s far more “miss” than “hit” so they haven’t turned out like they might do from the shop.

But they are still delicious and I should know because I had the oven-bottom for pudding tonight with the rest of the blackcurrant sorbet left over from the other day.

But if you think that that was something of an impromptu or ad-hoc arrangement, you should have seen what was going on in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne at lunchtime.

A handful of guys had set up a picnic table on the pavement and they were having some kind of casual picnic lunch at the side of the road.

They were clearly having loads of fun so I wished them “bon appetit” and left them to get on with it.

Talking of having loads of fun, I wasn’t this morning. I had a totally streaming head cold and ached in places I didn’t even know I had places.

The three alarms went off but I was in no mood to get up so I turned over and closed my eyes. Shame as it is to say it, it was 08:30 when I next saw the light of day.

After the medication and breakfast I transcribed the dictaphone notes to see where I’d been during the night. And last night it was Christmas and there were groups of people wandering around the town. I was playing music, either a Creedence Clearwater Revival or Canned Heat song, ideal for people to walk to or march to and they were walking around the town to that kind of music. Some young woman and her baby and I can’t remember what happened to her but I know that one or two people didn’t like my choice of music until I explained to them exactly why I had chosen the songs that I had. Granville’s Christmas lights were involved in this as well like the little LEDs in a blanket overhead they were involved in it too.
A little later on I was in Montreal discussing car rentals and someone was saying that the only way to make car rentals work was to hire a decent car and hire an old banger as well. I was trying to work that one out. First of all I didn’t have a clue how you could hire an old banger anyway. I thought that I would have to look into this. I went wandering off, and I was looking for some kind of meeting place because I was supposed to be meeting someone. A group of people from Somalia who had taken over one of these water rafting concerns, doing all kinds of things like delivering lorry loads and so on. But they had gone bankrupt and the local press was giving them a bit of a hard time. I’d arranged for someone to accompany me, a bassist (why I would want a bassist to accompany me I really don’t know) so I ended up in this big room and all these Oriental people turned up. They were mostly taking groups around but in the end I finally found one who was expecting to be with someone all on his own. I thought that that was me. I buttonholed this guy and he said he’d done this kind of thing before with individual people. Just then a couple of other people turned up – obviously the people in charge – a young Oriental guy and girl dressed in black outer clothes and white shirts or blouses, so I went to check with them but I couldn’t really get a direct answer from them – they were busy trying to organise other things, not really taking too much notice of what I was trying to say. The girl who was there was talking “yes it will be absolutely great as long as you show me a good time”. I thought “what the hell is happening here?”
Next task – the final one in the latest backlog of things, was to deal with the blog entry for the Saturday when I went on the bus for the away cup match.

As you can see, that’s now all done and dusted too, and there are just the “normal” arrears now to tackle. First job is going to HAVE TO BE tacking the photos from the summer when I was away for four months on various ships etc.

What I’ll have to do is to look into this image-editing program that everyone talks about and see what benefits that can bring to me.

By now it was after midday so I had to go into town for my dejeunette and my special Christmas fig and raisin bread.

The tide was right out so the harbour gates were closed. That meant that I could walk over the pathway and down the far side of the harbour.

The weather was so beautiful and the city walls and the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou were looking splendid in the sunshine.

And in the centre of the photograph you can see where they have been repairing the city walls just recently.

In this beautiful weather even Marité was looking really nice.

What I’ll have to do is to overcome my scruples and make enquiries about going for a sail on her in the summer. It’s just that the people who are responsible for her are so disinterested in helping the public and have no idea about “customer service”.

Every question you ask, it’s always “it’s on the internet” and they go back to talking amongst themselves.

Now here’s a thing.

If ever you wanted a pick-up in France it was always “Peugeot”. But Peugeot stopped making pickups after the 505 finished production.

In North Africa we did see a modern Peugeot pick-up but they aren’t sold in France, so that’s why I was really surprised to see this “Renault Alaskan”. Not the name that you associate at all with pickups.

I was going to say that I’ve never seen one of these before, but a close inspection is enough to convince me that I have, and plenty of them too. Next time you’re at your local Nissan agent …

You are all probably very fed up of me using these pages to go about bad parking.

But if you are, that’s rather too bad because here’s some more. If you look closely at the registration number of the vehicle just here, and then just have a look at the registration number of the reserved parking place at this apartment building, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

It beggars belief, doesn’t it?

At la Mie Caline I picked up my bread and then headed back to the apartment. The diners had cleared off so I came back in.

After lunch I made a start on Project 008 for the radio and assembled all of the music except for the closing track which I always leave until last when I can see how much time there is left.

And Rosemary rang up too and we had a nice long chat for well over an hour about nothing in particular.

That was the cue for me to go out for my afternoon walk.

When I was out in the dark last night I’d noticed that there was something new erected by the war memorial to the Resistance fighters, and I wondered what it was.

But it’s not one thing at all, but four things. Four flagpoles in fact, and the next question is “what flags will they be flying from there?”

There had been something new in the Chantier Navale so I went to see what was going on there.

Spirit of Conrad is still in there up on her blocks but she now has a new neighbour. One of these short stubby trawlers that sail out of here.

But there was someone working on Spirit of Conrad this afternoon. Does this mean that she might be nearing completion and ready to take to the waves?

While I was musing on that subject I was roused by my reverie by a siren going off in the outer harbour.

It looks as if Joly France – one of the ferries that does the trip out to the Ile de Chausey and back – has been out for a sail during the day.

She must have unloaded all of her passengers and is now heading into the inner harbour and her berth.

And I was right.

Here she is, tied up at her berth just behind Granville and Victor Hugo on the far side of the harbour, right by where I went for my walk earlier in the day.

On that note, I headed back to the apartment.

Back here the first thing that I did was some tidying up. The old broken office chair and a few more cardboard boxes have gone into the back of Caliburn ready for the dechetterie at the weekend.

Afterwards I finished the music for Project 008 and then attacked the mince pies. There was enough pastry on the roll for four mince pies and enough left over to make a sort-of oven bottom thing to fill with mince filling.

The mince filling came from out of a jar so I must remember to order some more for when Liz and Terry come back from the UK.

Tea was a burger in a bap with baked potatoes and vegetables followed by my oven-bottom, and then my evening walk.

No-one about and nothing to photograph so I didn’t stay out long. I did my run and just about made it to the ramp before I gave up. Yes, clearly not well.

But that’s not going to stop me from going for a walk at 23:45 to see what’s happening in town this evening at midnight. Probably nothing, but it’s still worth going for a look, especially as it’s a bank holiday of course, so no alarm.

I’ll let you know what happens.

joly france port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Monday 23rd December 2019 – THESE FLU INJECTIONS …

… really work, you know.

My flu injection was only given to me about two weeks ago, and I’ve caught it already. How about that?

Yes, I awoke this morning full of aches and pains and feeling pretty exhausted. So mush co that it took me until about 06:45 to haul myself out of my bed.

After the medication and while I was waiting for it to work, I had a look to see what was on the dictaphone.

Last night I was out with a pile of people and I was doing some images for the website and doing all the tags. It wasn’t until I’d almost finished that I realised that I had the tags to all the wrong images, (something like I did the previous evening before going to bed) so I had to sit down and change them all. I managed to find a bulk utility that would change them all with just a few strokes of the key and when I’d done that the images leapt from the page and really took on much more relevance. I remember saying to whoever I was with that it’s amazing the power that you can get out of just a couple of words.

After breakfast I made a start on Strawberry Moose‘s Christmas card to his friends.

Over the past 18 months he’s made several new friends and he wanted them to feature on it too, so what could I do but oblige?

That took me longer than expected – although it didn’t really because I was far too optimistic that what I was able to do, I could do simply and without too much effort. But I ought to know better by now.

Anyway, it’s all done and dusted and it prints out nicely on the new photo paper. Someone whom I know doesn’t have the internet so I sent his by post.

That’s right – I went to the Post Office on my way out and posted the Christmas Card.

But first, seeing as the harbour gates were closed, I went for a walk around the port to see what was going on.

We have seen a lot of Aztec Lady just recently in the Chantier Navale. But here she is in the inner harbour now moored up behind Charles Marie and ahead of Victor Hugo and Granville; the two Jersey ferries.

My walk took me by Aztec Lady and I was hoping to see if there was anyone around, but I was out of luck. One day I’ll catch someone.

So after the Post Office I went off to LIDL and bought a few things, including a drinks dispenser, because I’m about to start to make my own drinks and see how they turn out.

On the way back I picked up my dejeunette from la Mie Caline and then came back to the apartment.

First job that I did was to peel the carrots that were here. They were starting to look rather sad. But once they were peeled I diced them and put them in boiling water just long enough to blanch them with some bay leaves.

Now having drained all day, it’s in the freezer freezing off.

Second task was to peel the three lemons that I had bought a week or two ago. Then to chop them up and put them into a pan.

The fresh ginger, peeled and diced into tiny cubes, was added and enough water to cover them and about an inch more was added. This was boiled gently for about an hour or so while I had my butties.

After I took it off the heat I added a couple of tablespoons of honey and gave it a taste. Far too much ginger. Still, you live and learn.

That’s going to stand for 24 hours or so, be strained to remove the lemon and ginger that hasn’t dissolved, and then more water added to take it up to about 3.5 litres. And then it’s for the drink dispenser that I bought.

Tomorrow the cooking continues. I’m going to try to make mince pies. You can’t have Christmas without them.

Having done that I came back in here to make a decent start on Sunday’s blog.

But as the flu bug took more and more of a hold I felt less and less like it and at one stage was seriously contemplating going back to bed. And it’s been a good while since that has happened.

But I fought off the impulse and went out for a walk around the city walls.

And I’m glad that I did too because the tide was well on its way in and even though the wind has dropped a little on land, there’s still plenty of force in the sea.

The waves were smashing down on the Plat Gousset with the most astonishing force.

And despite how impressive it all looked from up here, it still wasn’t disturbing the mariners too much.

There was a line of about four or five trawlers slowly battling their way into port and as I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed … my hat goes off to them all.

It’s not the kind of weather that would encourage me to go to sea in a small boat, that’s for sure.

Continuing on my walk, I broke into a run at one point but there were too many people around to really make it count.

Instead, I headed for home and caùe across another example of pathetic parking here in the rue Notre Dame.

Madam in the red Citroen has just pulled up and … I suppose … parked. But you can see that the pavement is really narrow where she’s parking, so she parks across all of it.

Not a thought for any pedestrian with mobility difficulties or a wheelchair or kiddies’ buggy user. It really gets on my wick, as regular readers of this rubbish will realise.

Remember that I told you the other day that they were renovating the old municipal offices in the place Cambernon?

Today, I noticed that the signwriters had been by so I went to see if there was any kind of clue as to what might be going on.

Sure enough, it looks as if we are going to have another restaurant here, called the Contremarche. And I do hope that it has vegan options because I’m fed up of not eating out here in the town.

And it’s going to upset the pizza van that parks just there, isn’t it?

Final thing this afternoon was to identify the source of this incredible racket that was going on over my head.

That’s right. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve met the local autogyro in the past on a couple of occasions. And here she is again, just passing over head.

And for a change I was lucky. I just managed to grab a shot of her before she passed out of sight over the church roof.

That was everything for my walk. I came back here and carried on with Sunday’s blog even though I didn’t feel like it. But anyway it’s on line now.

For tea I finished off the stuffed pepper stuffing in some taco rolls with spicy rice, followed by the last of the rice pudding.

And then I went out to brave the rainstorm for my evening walk around the headland, in two jackets and my new tactile gloves which really work.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to look at the Chanter Navale to see what’s happening there. Spirit of Conrad is still in there as you can see, and she’s been joined by a small fishing boat.

What I’ll have to do is to wait until daylight and then go for a proper look around to see what she’s up to.

By now the rain was belting down so I set off at a run for home. And shame as it is to admit it, I only made half of my little track before I had to give up.

Hardly a surprise with this flu thing going around my head

Now I’ve finished the journal for tonight, I’m off to bed. An early night will do me the world of good and I hope that I can shake off this flu.

It seems that I’m destined to catch it round about now and I’m getting rather fed up about it.

But then, this is what this illness is all about. I’ve no immune system so I’m catching just about every disease or bug that’s going around.

trawler english channel ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

storm high winds waves splashing on plat gousset granville manche normandy france

trawler entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Sunday 22nd December 2019 – REMEMBER A WHILE AGO …

… when we had been discussing those strange objects on the quayside, and that I’d made enquiries and they were in fact shellfish-dredgers?

Here I am today, down in the town by the harbour and here they are actually loading up some of the aforementioned onto one of the fishing boats here.

Clearly these items are still in day-to-day use, and that’s always good to know of course.

While we’re on the subject of shellfish and fishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … most of the stuff is either transported away in lorries for the mass market or else it’s sold locally in shops or local restaurants.

In Oostende we’ve seen the fish market where the trawlers unload and their catch is sold direct to the public, but there’s very little of that in Granville, which is a real surprise.

In fact, I think that I’ve only ever seen this stall set up at the end of the port to deal directly with the public.

In all the time that I’ve lived here, I can’t ever recall ever having seen anyone else doing this direct from a fishing boat. I mean, the produce is so fresh that a good vet could bring it round.

But talking of today, I had quite a surprise this morning. It’s Sunday and lie-in, with no alarm. But bird-brain of Britain had set an alarm for last Sunday in order to be up and about to catch his train, but had forgotten to unset it.

As a result, at 06:00 on a Sunday, on my Day of Rest …

But no chance whatever of that. I made sure that the rest of the alarms were switched off and went back down under the covers and there I stayed until … err … 10:00.

That’s much more like it for a Sunday.

Plenty of time to go off on a travel then. I was with Cecile last night – at least, I think it was Cecile – and we had been somewhere and I had to go to a hospital – I think we were in Stoke on Trent. It was something to do with a house in Stoke on Trent and it was where Carriatt was living with his father. He took us back to his little house – in Kidsgrove – with his little car and there was an older car parked in the drive and it was only used once a fortnight and sometimes it wouldn’t start. but back in his little house, a nice little semi-detached house and he told us about it. He’s had it three or four years and paid about £5500 for it. They were thinking of selling it and I was thinking that it was a nice kind of house and it would just do me. Pretty small and two people was probably stretching it a little bit but on my own that would really do me. I had to go on to the hospital and Cecile had to go as well. I got there and got myself registered in and I explained that Cecile had to be registered in – at least, I think it was Cecile. We both had to go for x-rays so they took a preliminary photo of her and gave it a reference number then we had to go out across the yard and register ourselves in for this X-ray thing. The woman said to Cecile “as you’re new here you had better come back and tell me the reference number of the object…” or whatever the word was “… for your x-ray”. She looked bewildered but I said “that’s OK, I know what’s happening here. Come with me”. She was a bit confused but I took her out. They were going to give reference numbers to people and that related to whatever photo they had of you on the file. If they had 3 or 4 they would choose 1 so that it could be linked into the right file. But Cecile had only had 1 taken here, this introductory photo, so that was obviously the number that was going to be allocated to her. So I knew what was happening. We had to go across the yard to the other bit of the hospital to register for this x-ray thing. I gave my details and explained “this is Cecile, she’s new and from the Netherlands (…don’t ask me why …) so the clerk explained the procedure to Cecile and she was slowly understanding it. We were hoping that we would get an appointment in 2 or 3 hours to give us time to go and do some sightseeing. Cecile then asked “do you have any aspirin”. This woman looked bewildered. “What’s aspirin?” So Cecile came out with the Latin name “aspartamine” (or whatever it was) so the woman said that Cecile needed to go to see them in the Pharmacy “over there somewhere”. Cecile became anxious, going to a third place and although we’d been registered in and she had taken away all our paperwork we hadn’t been given a time for our x-ray. I thought that this is going to start getting really confusing in a minute. It was just then that I awoke with a really bad attack of cramp.

But if Carriatt is now appearing in my nocturnal rambles I’m going to go off rambling somewhere else.

After the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes while I was waiting for the medication to work, and then had breakfast. That took me up until about 11:10 and I had a feeling that I was not going to have a very good day.

Well over 100 photos from the Archipel last night and they all needed editing and so I set to work. When I noticed the time (14:00) I’d done about half so I thought that I’d better nip out for my dejeunette for lunch.

But one of the reasons why I was late was that I’d been helping Hans, designing a piece of code for him to display podcasts on his web page.

Anyway, off I set on my travels, right out of the door where I was met by a blast of wind that almost blew me back into the building.

You can see just how rough the weather was out there too. That’s the local coastguard rescue boat, I reckon, and there it is disappearing into a giant wave.

Not a day for anyone to be out at sea, I reckon.

Having picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline for lunch, and ordered a special “fig and raisin” loaf for the festive period (“don’t forget to pick it up on Tuesday, Eric”), I went to see what was happening in the town.

On a publicity leaflet somewhere I’d seen that there was to be a Brocante professionelle today in the rue Couraye.

Now I’m all in favour of brocantes as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but I’m horrified by the prices that people around here want for objects that are not all that far removed from a load of old junk.

And when it’s a Brocante professionelle rather than a Brocante particulier, it’s going to be even more horrific so I didn’t even cross the road for a look.

Here in the place General de Gaulle there’s someone selling carpets and the like, and what that has to do with a Brocante, whether professionelle or particulier I really couldn’t say.

So on that note I headed back to my apartment for a very late lunch.

Back here it was almost 17:00 when I finished the photos, and then I sent them on to the radio HQ for them to pick one or two to illustrate the podcast of last night’s broadcast.

And when I have time, I’ll create a web page for you to see them and post the link here.

Better late than never, I decided to go out for my afternoon walk.

The wind was thoroughly wicked again tonight so I didn’t want to hang around long. I went around the city walls as it was out of the shelter of the wind and I could see what the storm was doing.

The tide wasn’t right in yet so we weren’t having the full effect of the buffeting but it was wild enough out there nevertheless.

By now it was becoming quite dark.

The lights of the rue Paul Poirier were looking quite good in the gloom from up here and they are always worth a photograph or two.

The streets were quite busy too with the shops being open in the run-up to Christmas and there was quite a traffic jam in the rue Lecampion as people headed for home.

By now it was starting to rain so I took the opportunity to run down my little track, much to the surprise and/or amusement of the couple who were heading my way.

Just by way of a change I made it al the way up to the end of the ramp and then I went into the place Cambernon to see what was happening and to look at the lights (and collect a raindrop on the lens of the camera).

Back here I made a start on the blog for Saturday but shame as it is to admit it, I fell asleep for 10 minutes. That’s not like me these days, is it?

Tea was a pizza which was delicious, and then out for my walk.

There was such a howling gale that I didn’t even attempt the Point du Roc. Instead I went round the walls again.

This time I hung about even less than before and amused another couple of people with my second run of the day. I have to push on.

Now, having finished the journal for tonight and dealt with an enquiry in English from Canada about the radio station, I’m off to bed.

An early night, and I’ve earned it. I’ll do Saturday’s blog tomorrow

I hope.

storms high winds plat gousset granville manche normandy france

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: la mie caline

Friday 10th January 2020 – HE WHO LAUGHS LAST …

Thursday 9th January 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Wednesday 8th January 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Tuesday 7th January 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Monday 6th January 2020 – ONE OF THESE DAYS …

Sunday 5th January 2020 – AFTER LAST NIGHT’S …

Friday 3rd January 2020 – I AM NOT LOOKING …

Thursday 2nd January 2020 – LAST NIGHT …

Tuesday 31st December 2019 – UNLESS I AM …

Monday 30th December 2019 – I BET …

Sunday 29th December 2019 – I’M NOT SURE …

Friday 27th December 2019 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

Tuesday 24th December 2019 – CHRISTMAS JUST ISN’T CHRISTMAS …

Monday 23rd December 2019 – THESE FLU INJECTIONS …

Sunday 22nd December 2019 – REMEMBER A WHILE AGO …

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