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Friday 26th June 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I was up before the third alarm went off this morning.

Not by much, it has to be said, but before is before and it’s all good.

Mind you I don’t know why because outside was a really miserable day. I didn’t know if it was raining because I couldn’t see. Wr had a huge sea mist rolling in and it was freezing cold – a far cry from the last few days.

After the medication it was the dictaphone. I had an appointment at the hospital last night and I went to go to the reception. I walked into the office and had to get a ticket to queue up. But the woman called me over as I waslked in. I shouted “in a minute” and went to get my ticket anyway, but I don’t know why. When I got to the desk and said that I had an appointment she asked “who with?”. I said that I didn’t know – it was on the card. She looked on the card and all it had was “Doctor C”. She said “what you’ll have to do is to ring up Doctor Carpentier and se if it’s him. If it’s not him, here are all the other doctors whose names begin with C. You’ll have to ring round all of them until you find the one who is supposed to be seeing you.

Today, with nothing really outstanding that needed doing, I exerted myself by sorting out the washing that had been hanging up on the clothes airer for the last 10 days or so.

Nice and dry of course, and because of the washing softener it actually smelled nice too. Far better than it did the last time that I washed it and forgot about it in the washing machine for a couple of days.

After that, I had some things of my awn to attend to and then I settled down to carry on with a few of the projects that I started a while ago.

Firstly, this involves completely rewriting one of my websites. And that’s not as easy as it might sound either because it seems to have been amended in several stages in the past and some of the early stuff seems to have stuck in a previous format and missed the subsequent amendments.

What I’ve had to do is to prepare a template for each version, work out which version of the site each page is and then amend it accordingly.

So far I did about 4 or 5 pages this morning once I’d sorted out the templates. But it’s not just that – I’m finding lots of stuff that shouldn’t be there as well as a few files that i’d lost here and there along the way.

This afternoon I carried on with editing a web page from another site. What I wrote 20 years ago is not the same as I would have written today, and it’s not easy either to change a style of writing but keeping the same emotion that I had when I first wrote it.

As well as that, it’s been about 12 years since I’ve done any serious third-party web design work so I’m quite rusty in that respect but looking at my site with different eyes, I’ve solved almost instinctively a couple of problems that stumped me whan I was in full flight. I’m not sure how I managed that at all.

As well as that, I had a good go at the photos from July 2019 in Iceland and now I’m back in Heimaey on the way out to Greenland.

Another thing that i’ve done is to make a few tentative enquiries about going off on my travels sometime whenever. I have a couple of plans but they are not for right away or even in the near future. Nevertheless there is no time like the present to get things under way.

At the usual time this afternoon I went out for my walk.

Although, once again, I couldn’t see why. In fact i couldn’t see very much at all this afternoon because that sea mist was still hanging around out there.

it was cold too, as I said earlier. I had a sweater on, which is pretty much unthinkable for the latter days of June. Even Gribouille the big ginger cat wasn’t coming out in this weather. He stayed stuck on his windowsill indoors.

With nothing much to see I trudged on around my little circuit, mixing with the people who were out there. There were actually quite a few – more than I was expecting.

With not being able to see very much in the fog, there wasn’t an awful lot to photograph. But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen a few photos of the seafarers’ memorial just recently in the bright sunlight, so I thought that I would reproduce the view in the fog.

If you look carefully you can juts about make out the coast on the other side of the bay near St Pair sur Mer and Jullouville

With nothing else going on I walked on down along the top of the cliff and then round towards home.

Not an awful lot going on in the harbour either. No Jersey freighter today, but La Grande Ancre is there in port tied up. She has no intention of going out in this, that’s for sure.

From there I headed off back home to carry on working. There was plenty to do. And I might have accomplished so much more had I not gone off with the fairies again for half an hour or so.

When I came round, I was feeling pretty miserable. I reckon that I’m sickening for something else right now and I don’t like that idea very much at all.

But I plodded on with my work and then had the usual hour on the guitar.

Tea tonight was exciting. There was a pepper left over so I sliced it up. A potato was diced and put in the microwave with a little water and some spices (turmeric, coriander and cumin) for a couple of minutes.

While that was doing I sliced up a couple of onions and fried them with spices and also some fennel and fenugreek. A pile of garlic went in next, and then the pepper.

The potatoes followed, with a tin of exotic vegetables that I had picked up from NOZ a while back. And then a handful of spinach.

More spices to taste, and then the pièce de résistance – not a French virgin but a little carton of soya cream (regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they had some on special offer at LeClerc a couple of weeks ago).

So there we are – an Instant Korma, and vegan to boot. With some rice and mixed veg it was delicious and, even better, there are four more helpings for the freezer.

Apple pie and ice cream for pudding with chocolate sauce.

My run was going to be late tonight because I wanted to hear the start of my radio programme. But badger me if the baskets have forgotten YET AGAIN to broadcast it.

Having been missed off the list of “presents” at the meeting last week, I am not very impressed at all by this. If they don’t want my programmes they should have the courage to tell me so that I don’t waste my time.

Eventually I made it outside for my evening run.

And I ran straight into the sunset again. Unfortunately, although the weather is 100 times better than it was earlier and you could actually see things, there was too much cloud about for it to be as spectacular as the last couple of nights.

Anyway, I made it all the way down to the clifftop past the itinerant, even though I didn’t feel much like it tonight.

Not a great deal of activity out there tonight.

There was a small yacht way out in the distance over by the Ile de Chausey but there were also some fishermen in their boat just off the cliffs fishing for something or other.

One of these days I’ll have to accost a fisherman and find out what the catch is in the waters off here. The waters aren’t all that deep so it’s not going to be anything super-exotic.

It was another evening with no-one picnicking in the old gun emplacement so I carried on walking across the lawn.

There were a few people about as well, getting in my way, but round by the Pointe du Roc all of the action seemed to be down at the viewpoint by the old watchman’s cabin.

W’ve seen quite a few groups of people congregating down there just recently and there was another bunch of people hanging out in the evening sun down there. It’s a lovely spot to hang out.

There was no fisherman down there this evening though. The rocks around there were looking pretty bare.

It seemed to me as if they had all given up for the duration but, having a look around, I found one of them standing on a rock elsewhere in the vicinity casting his line into the void.

With nothing else exciting going on, I carried on with my run. Past the chantier navale where there were still the five fishing boats.

At the end of the path i stopped for a breather, and from there i had a look around to see if there was anything exciting.

The two Joly France boats were down there near the ferry terminal but what caught my eye was the older boat of the two. She was moored in rather a dangerous position right by the harbour gate and I was sure that she shouldn’t be staying there.

But closer inspection revealed that her crane was extended and as I ran on down the road, she lifted something out of the forr’ard hold, dumped it on the quayside, and then cleared off elsewhere.

All the way down the Boulevard vaufleury I ran, round into the medieval city and round through the alleys to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord – a little easier tonight, I reckon.

There were a few people down on the beach this evening. Not picnicking but simply soaking up the sun. Not as many people as we have seen in the recent past.

But I was admiring a couple of people down there. They were drying themselves with towels and sorting out some clothes, so it looked to me as if they had actually been in the water for a swim.

Braver men than I am, Gungha Din.

As I said earlier, the sunset tonight wasn’t all that spectacular.

Back at the apartment I showed it to Liz and she described it as a storm in a sunset sandwich, which I thought was very lyrical of her.

For a change it’s a little earlier than usual so I’ll probably go for an early night. I’m expecting a couple of visitors tomorrow so I might even do a little tidying up early tomorrow morning if I feel up to it.

Shopping tomorrow of course, but I don’t need much at all. But I want to go to the second-hand shop because I have a project in mind.

More of this anon

Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We should all be grateful for that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least there aren’t four skin divers down there

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another mystery was solved here today as well.

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

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

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

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

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

Back home, I was going to attempt something exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a parking issue on these pages?

At one time there was one almost every other day but there hasn’t been one for quite some time so I reckon that it’s about time that I put that right.

Another thing that gets my goat, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the issue of caravanettes. Apart from reversing into road signs and knocking them over and clearing off without saying anything, they think that the rest of the rules and regulations of the road don’t apply to them either.

So here we’re killing two birds with one stone. “No Parking for Caravanettes” is clearly written on this sign but the driver clearly believes that it doesn’t apply to him.

And there are two reasons why they are banned from parking in the street, apart from the obvious sanitary ones.

This is a historical medieval area with all kinds of apartments crammed into the old stone buildings. I’m lucky in that my building has private parking. Almost all of the others don’t and the streets are so narrow that it’s almost impossible to park within the walls. The locals who live here need all of the parking that they can get
It’s a bus route with the big 12-metre coaches that service the College here coming round that corner and it’s really tight. They need all of the space that they can get and wide vehicles like this overhanging the parking spaces especially right on the corner is giving the drivers an added complication.

But none of the foregoing seems to bother our visitor here as long as he has somewhere to come and spread his virus around.

The local council provides a parking space (a mere 200 metres down the road) for caravanettes and there are plenty of other places, like acres of abandoned docks, for example, where they can park as they please without inconveniencing anyone.

Signed “Grouchy of Granville”.

As for me, I didn’t go to the shops as I said that I would yesterday. But I’ll explain all about that in due course. Firstly, it will be an enormous surprise to regular readers of this rubbish (as indeed it was to me!) who will recall the issues that I’ve been having just recently, to learn that by the time that the third alarm went off I was actually up and about.

During the night I’d been up and about too. I was taking two girls to a night club in Manchester. The night club was in the North and I knew where it was vaguely situated but I didn’t realise that I was coming from Brussels. So I picked up these two girls and put them in the car, a Morris Minor I think, and set out and drove. We got to join the inner ring road in Brussels and they wanted to know why I was going that way. “doesn’t this road end in a field or something?”. I said “no” but then I thought that maybe the way they wanted me to go was the right way so I said “OK we can go that way”. But then I saw a sign for Bolton saying straight on. I thought that Bolton was near Manchester so we could go that way. But then I started racking my brains about how to get across to Manchester, to the north side to this Night Club. I really couldn’t think how to do it. At one point I was trying to drive on the wrong side of the road, I don’t know why and cars were coming that way towards me. But it would have been the right side of the road in the UK but the wrong side of the road whee I was apparently.

After breakfast I sat down and looked at a couple of the website pages that I’d planned to be dealing with. And this is how I spent my day – absorbed in this – and by the time that I’d finished I’d totally rewritten several pages and modified several others too in order to conform to the new specifications. It had been a really good day, just for a change.

There was even time to edit a pile of photos from July 2019 too – catching up somewhat with those.

During the day there had been a whole pile of interruptions too.

Firstly there was a shower and a general clean-up. Not just of me either but of the apartment. That needed to be spick and span, because I was having visitors.

Sure enough, the travelling nurse came round and took a blood sample. We had a really good chat too and he was surprised about the relaxation of the health regulations here too, and is of the opinion that the rates will be going up again as people are misled into thinking that this is all over and drop their guard.

In the meantime I’d had a look around the apartment to see what I needed from the shops and apart from bananas, there was nothing that I really needed. And as for the lack of bananas, I have a few oranges that needed eating so it wasn’t as if I was desperate. Instead I made an Executive Decision (that is, a decision that if it goes wrong, the person who made it is executed) to push on with my work.

My lunchtime bread was really nice. There’s room for improvement of course but it was much better than previous attempts and I shall have to work harder at it. But I’m on the right track, I reckon.

There was the afternoon walk of course, out there in the sun and the wind (because the wind is now back again).

We had the people back out on the beach again now that yesterday’s sea fog has lifted. Not as many as I was expecting to see, with everyone going out to faire le pont between the Bank Holiday and the weekend.

This kind of social distancing is pretty much acceptable of course. But having seen the crowds on the beaches in the UK and the USA, then they are going to have some really serious problems in a week or two’s time.

Regular readers of this rubbish might recall whether or not I’ve mentioned this object before but I can’t remember – although it’s extremely likely.

And you can see exactly how it works in this photo because the tide is quite right. It’s a medieval fish trap and the idea is that at high tide the water overflows the stone walls and as the tide recedes, the water drains out through the joints leaving the fish stuck behind.

The medieval citizens just walk out and pick up the trapped fish, and there’s your lunch. Not mine, of course.

While all of this was going on, I was disturbed once more by a rather dark shadow passing over me, rather like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings that so frightened the Nine Walkers.

No prizes though for guessing what it is. With this nice sunny afternoon and te high winds that we are having, the Birdmen of Alcatraz are out in force.

This one here was being buzzed by a seagull. They don’t take lightly to intruders and, if the rumours are true, they made pretty short work of the surveillance drones used by the police to patrol the beaches during the detention à domicile

A girl and I (keeping our social distance of course) spent a while looking at them waiting for the collision that we felt was going to be inevitable. Not much of a social distance between them even in the air.

It’s amusing (to people like me, anyway) that they take off over there from a field right next door to the local cemetery. If the take-off goes all wrong (which it has done in the past) they don’t have to carry the failures too far.

But then, that’s why they build walls around cemeteries of course. Because people are dying to go in there.

I’ll get my coat.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that yesterday we saw a pile of abandoned personal possessions on the wall of the ramp leading down to the Square Maurice Marland.

Even more surprisingly, they are still there today. Not exactly where they had been left, but someone had come along and filed them under “CS”.

Just imagine that in the UK. They wouldn’t have remained around for 30 seconds had someone put them down somewhere. It just goes to show how different people have different moral values in different parts of the world.

By the time that I’d knocked off I’d been hard at it and had a really good day for once. My hour on the guitars was profitable and I enjoyed it so much more because I’ve adopted a new tactic as far as the bass guitar goes and I’m going to work hard at this.

Tea was an “anything curry” made of leftovers and a small tin of lentils, with the last of the rice, the making of which resulted in me throwing the turmeric all over the floor. The apple crumble for dessert wad delicious and I’ll make some more of that.

Time for my evening run, I reckon, so off I set.

The usual struggle up the hill (I just can’t seem to push on any more than I’m doing even after all of the practice that I’ve been having). Eventually I arrived at the cliff top just in time to see this yacht go sailing past me towing a little dinghy behind it.

It was well on its way out of the harbour and I had no idea where it might be going. But it made me quite envious to watch it sail out – to such an extent that I put a couple of plans into operation when I returned home.

That wasn’t all of the maritime activity either.

There’s no point whatever in gratuitously posting pictures of trawlers but this one was quite interesting. As I rounded the corner at the tip of the Pointe du Roc this speedboat flashed by me with a driver who clearly had his pedal to the metal.

You can see how lively the sea was with all of the wind that blowing about, and it looked quite impressive as he carved his way through the waves with all of that sea spray splashing around.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is different phenomena of strange effects and patterns in the sea.

As I did my run along the clifftop on the south side of the Pointe du Roc I noticed another one so when I stopped for my pause for breath I stopped to take a photo of it.

Whatever it is and whatever is causing it I really couldn’t say. It looks like foam or something similar but whether it’s from someone who has been emptying their washing machine into a grid or whather it’s a natural phenomenon I really couldn’t say.

But the evenness of the distribution was fascinating. Despite the rough sea right now it was in a perfectly straight line with a right-angled bend further out.

While I was stopped getting my breath and photographing the sea phenomena, I had a good look down at the chantier navale .

There has been more movement of the occupants down there over the last 24 hours. We are now down to just two boats. The big black and green one that was up on blocks right at the bottom seems to have gone back out to sea.

So on that note I cleared off and ran all the way down the Boulevard vaufleury and my breathing point around the corner at the second pedestrian crossing.

While I was on my way down the boulevard I noticed something in the inner harbour that made me go back to look.

Sure enough, the black and green trawler that was up on blocks in the chantier navale for weeks is now moored underneath the crane in the inner harbour. I’ve no idea why but if Normandy Trader comes into harbour we’ll have a problem.

It goes without saying that when I went out earlier today, Thora was long-gone back to the Channel Islands.

There was nothing doing at the viewpoint in the rue du Nord. The clouds had come down and the sun was well-hidden, so I ran back home.

As I started to type up my notes, Rosemary rang and we ended up chatting until long after 00:30. I have an early start in the morning so I didn’t bother finishing them off. I went straight to bed and I’ll catch up tomorrow.

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

… time since I really don’t know when, I haven’t put my sooty foot outside the door today.

And that’s no surprise because right now we’re in the middle of a howling gale the like of which I have rarely seen, with torrential rain lashing down everywhere.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been out in all kids of weather but I ain’t going out in this one.

With it being Sunday, I had a nice lie-in without being disturbed and it was a very reasonable 09:45 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I had been anywhere during the night. And I wasn’t disappointed. I was actually told off last night! I’d gone to watch the football at Granville and Granville were winning so we were all chanting. We were making a lot of noise and it sounded really good but the manager came over to speak to us and to thank us for coming but said that it’s going to be a bit peculiar for everyone at the football club that all that they can hear are applause and cheers and people shouting in English. He said that that was giving the wrong impression of the club. “We’re not an expat club, we’re a French club” and gave us a bit of a lecture, although I don’t know what he expected us to do about it.
Anyway a little later I was off with a girl – I can’t remember who it was now which is a shame because I always like to know who I’m with – and we were walking in the countryside. We saw a road sign and I’d seen a road sign going to the same place, something like Pound Hill, somewhere else so i wondered if these two roads connected with each other. “So let’s go and find out”. This road or track petered out after about 50 yards and went through a field. In this field was a cow and I wasn’t sure if it was a cow or a bull so I was a bit wary. The animal didn’t really do all that much attacking – it just nuzzled a bit. Then a dog appeared and was quite wild – a medium-sized dog he jumped and grabbed hold of my jacket by the back of the neck and pulled my jacket. In the end I had to get this dog and drag it off my back, put it on the floor and stamp on it a few times until it calmed down. It was a strange thing.

With there being something of a late breakfast and with it being a Sunday anyway, I haven’t done too much today.

Some of the morning was spent sorting through the music to prepare in advance some kind of playlist. That’s a project that I started half-heartedly while I was digitalising the record collection and I’ve been expanding it as I go along. Today I started adding into the playlists the tracks that have already been played, but that’s not an urgent task.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned that I would be reviewing a past web page every day and rewriting it. Today I’ve done the first page but there wasn’t an awful lot that needed doing.

The other web site needed a revision in the same way that the first one has had. It took me an age to design the template and then the home page that I was going to use (it was superseded by events in 2010 that have in turn been superseded) was so out of date that I had to rewrite all of the text.

But having done that, I now want to redo the template into another, more logical fashion, so I’ll have to start again. But the thing about all of this is that it takes hours to set it up correctly but then once it’s correct it take minutes to deal with it.

There was even time left to spend an hour or so working on the photos of July 2019 and right now I’m standing on the edge of a lava field on the island of Heimaey.

There was the hour on the guitar of course and I was quite enjoying what I was doing this evening – not the least of which reason being that I reckon that I have got the hang of this 6-string guitar business, although I’ve a long way to go yet before I’m going to be any good, if I ever am.

Sunday night here is pizza night of course.

Just one more ball of dough left from the batch that I made a couple of weeks ago and I’d left it out of the freezer to thaw overnight so that it was ready to use.

So I flattened it out onto the baking roll, dusted it with flour and then rolled it out.

As I mentioned last week there wasn’t really enough pastry mix so it ended up being quite thin and wouldn’t lift off safely from the baking roll, so I simply picked up the baking roll and flopped it over onto the pizza tray.

All of the usual topping of course and then into the oven. And there’s nothing wrong with this whatsoever.

For pudding there was of course a slice of that delicious apple pie that I made, with the almond soya dessert stuff. And that was just as good

While I was waiting for the pizza to cook I went to check something on the internet and found, much to my surprise, that the missing football match that I had mentioned yesterday (Bangor City v TNS, not Rhyl as I had thought) had just started and I had missed the first 100 seconds.

So while I had my pizza I watched the football.

It was the championship decider for the season 2010-11. TNS were in front by one point but Bangor had home advantage. And they duly made it count in the 68th minute. But both teams had a couple of chances to have added to the score during the 90 minutes.

Heady days, of course, which Bangor City will never see again of course, having been sold a few years later to a bunch of crooks (and I use the term in full confidence in view of the nature of the criminal convictions, which include inter alia Defrauding the Exchequer, of the new owners) who promptly added the club to the long line of sports clubs that they have trashed during their ownership.

So no walk or run this evening, but it’s still late. I’m off to bed ready to start work. I’m interested to see how much time this “sorting of my music” will save me when I come to start the next radio project tomorrow.

Saturday 9th May 2020 – IT WASN’T …

… a very good start to the day today either.

The alarms went off as usual and I heard them, but by the time that I arose from the dead it was 06:45. I’d missed the third alarm again!

And another thing that I need to do is to apologise for having doubted the word of Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves. She complained once about my snoring in my sleep and having on a couple of occasions heard the dictaphone still working when I’ve been asleep, and not heard a thing, I had the temerity to doubt her word.

However, we had another occasion during the night where I went back to sleep in the middle of dictating something and … errr … well … quite.

Sorry, Percy Penguin.

Interestingly though, when I came back into the land of the undead, I resumed the dictating at exactly the same point as where I fell asleep.

There have been many occasions where I’ve awoken during the night and gone back to sleep and stepped right back into a dream at the point where I left it, but this is, as far as I’m aware, the first time that I’ve ever done the reverse.

It was another hot and sweaty night and I don’t know where we are but Crosby Stills and Nash are here and they played a concert and then disappeared offstage. I went to have a look at the equipment, all of these boxes. There was a box of accessories for each musician but there was also (…fell asleep right here in the middle …) some boxes on the stage with the names of the people. Each musician had his box and the supplementary musicians had theirs but their names were a bit vague. There was one that said something like Dino with a question mark stating that he was a native American who died in 1975 and nobody – they didn’t even know his name and didn’t even know where he came from but he played guitar with Crosby Stills and Nash and he had died away and they had practically forgotten about him – not forgotten about him of course because obviously he had his box but they didn’t find out anything about him while he was playing there, not even his real name.

After breakfast I had a look at a couple of files on the web server that shouldn’t be there at all and upgraded one that should and then went and had a shower.

And a shave. And a weigh-in and I’ve lost a couple of hundred grammes since last time. Still not enough though – it’s a slow process.

In town today it was difficult to tell that we are still in lockdown here until Monday. It was just like any other Saturday in normal times with the vehicles and the crowds and the local Council have recognised this, I reckon, because the traffic lights are now working properly instead of flashing amber like they have been.

There was a queue to enter LeClerc and even so, the place was packed with people, just like any normal Saturday. My own shopping bill wasn’t all that much and could well have been even less, except that the coffee that I bought on a super-special offer for 6 packs the other week was back on an even more special offer – 6 packs for €11:74.

At that price I had to buy a packet because it really is quite nice, that coffee.

Back here, I had a busy afternoon.

First thing was to go through the web server and identify the files that shouldn’t be there – of which there were plenty. They were brought home to the hard drive here and deleted from the server.

Then I had a look through the hard drive to identify
i) files that aren’t meant to be on the web server anyway
11) files that aren’t ready to be uploaded
give them all a meaningless suffix simply to identify them so that they aren’t uploaded again in error

And then updated the ones that needed updating, and then loaded them back to the web server.

They are all done now, but many of them will have to be done again because there was a slight change to the format halfway through.

But I think that what I’m going to do now that this project is temporarily finished, along with the digitalising of the record collection that has ground to a halt near the end, is to pick on one web page per day and rewrite it with suitable editing.

However, I’m not forgetting the second web page. I shall have to attend to that in due course and update that. However, there are only about 200 or so of those, half the amount that I’ve just done.

There was still half an hour left before knocking-off time so I attacked a few more photos from July 2019. I’m now inside the harbour at Vestmannaeyjar, on the island of Heimaey just off the coast of Iceland but I’m still not moored.

Just for a change, the hour on the guitar was much more enthusiastic. I’m not sure what happened there but anyway, I enjoyed it immensely.

For tea, I had one of the best stuffed peppers that I’ve ever made, followed by a slice of that apple pie from the other day. And that was excellent too. If I’m not careful, I’ll really be pushing the boat out – although evidently not as far as the quayside in Vestmannaeyjar.

After the washing up I went out for my evening runs. But I didn’t get far before I was brought to a dead halt.

A short while ago I wrote about people not respecting this detention à domicile, and I don’t know what to say about this. There are at least two cars like this Mercedes S500 Maybach here, and what is interesting is that they both appear to have number plates from Luxembourg on them.

So how did they get here? And what are they doing? Don’t they realise that there’s a lockdown here?

Apart from that Jersey-registered caravenette that was here just asfter the ferries stopped sailing – presumably having missed the last ferry, these are the first foreign-registered vehicles I’ve seen in the town.

Talking of ferries to the Channel Islands … “well, one of us is” – ed … look who’s back.

When I was out last night in the dark I thought that I recognised the change in silhouette in the harbour but it was too dark to see what it was. But sure enough, Victor Hugo is back from her winter sojourn in Cherbourg.

No idea why, though. We’ve been told that the ferries to the Channel islands won’t be starting up any time soon so there doesn’t really seem to be too much point in her coming down here right now.

We’d had rain earlier so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a sunset with all of the clouds about.

It wasn’t anything like as good as some of the ones that we’d been having just recently but that can’t be helped. You can’t win a coconut every time.

And as for my run up the hill, yesterday must have been an exception because it was a struggle once more up the hill. I’ll try it again with no food late in the night and see if it’s that which makes the difference.

On my way past the chantier navale this morning I’d had a quick look at the boats there and came to the conclusion that the one that appeared late last night was not the one that had been there before.

This evening I took my time to have a closer look and indeed it isn’t. It’s a slightly different shade of blue and it has a name – Joker – which the other one didn’t have.

But it’s good to see the chantier navale looking so busy. That’s a bonus for the town.

Having inspected the chantier navale I ran on down the Boulevard vaufleury all the way down to my resting point and then walked back to look at the harbour and Victor Hugo

And having done that I ran on round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord overlooking the Ile de Chausey to see the sunset.

And quite unexpectedly I was in luck. It wasn’t an impressive one but just as I arrived the sun peeked through a gap in the clouds and i was able to photograph it.

a day or two ago, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had seen some people fishing from the steps that go down to the beach.

They were there again today casting into the water, but I couldn’t see whether they had caught anything. So I ran on back home.

On the doorstep I met one of my neighbours so we had a good chat for half an hour and then I came in to write my notes.

Now that they are finished I’m going to go off to bed. No alarm (it’s Sunday) and a Day of Rest – the first one for quite a while too so I intend to make the most of it

Tuesday 5th May 2020 – I THOUGHT SO!

For some reason or other, I had it in my mind during the night that we were having a rainstorm.

It’s one of those things that I’m not quite sure why and when day dawend, although it was a miserable morning it certainly wasn’t raining. But on my run around the walls in the evening I pass by a spot that always floods when there’s heavy rain. It’s been dry for a few weeks yet this evening we have a puddle on the path.

And so there you are. Yet you would never have said anything because once the day got under way it was quite pleasant.

And for a change, I had quite a pleasant night too. In bed relatively early and I actually managed to beat the third alarm, which is always a good sign of progress.

After the medication I went and had a listen to the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been on my travels again.

First of all, Castor put in an appearance again. Or did she? Because on the dictaphone I definitely use the name on several occasions but even in my sleep I made a note that it wasn’t her. So do I count her as Castor or as an unknown?

No idea myself. It’s the kind of thing that’s really confusing me.

But anyway we were at a party that I was helping supervise. But when it was getting towards the end she said “could you go and fetch me some paper because I need some paper”. I said “there’s some here in the printer” so I went to get some out of the printer but there wasn’t any. I had to go downstairs for it. She came downstairs with me and she started to talk about this game. She’s got to do this – this game has to be done right now – it can’t wait any later as it all has to be finished by midnight and we were getting very close to the time. So we got a piece of paper out. There was a third person down there but we ignored that person. It was a case of asking the questions alternately and doing the actions but the 1st question had been cut out. She was a bit mad at that because some other people taking part in the game had cut it out to spite her and she was not at all impressed.
At some other point during the night I was making sandwiches. I had four people with me doing different things and I had to make sandwiches. I had to buy a pile of strange stuff and the kind of pastry stuff that I had to use as a base had all gone off and gone manky so I ended up having to get some bread and making some sandwiches, but I was just getting completely and utterly confused. It took me ages to do something so straightforward as I was so confused about this. When it came to packing everything up ready to take down to the people I couldn’t find any plastic bags to put them in. It was now 13:30 and I guessed they would be wondering what on earth had happened to lunch. I saw a post on Facebook – one of my people had bought lunch and donated money to LIDL for his lunch and I thought to myself it’s going to be an awful row when I get these sandwiches downstairs. But I had a bit of food everywhere that I couldn’t get organised as to what went on where, anything like that. It was all really confusing and it was taking place on the playing field at Nantwich Grammar School as well.
There was more to it all than this but as you are probably eating your evening meal right now I’ll spare you the details. But the interesting thing was that there was some kind of mix of circumstance – the usual confusion and indecision was there of course, but also for once (and which doesn’t happen very often) something was going right for me until, once again, someone comes along in the night and spikes it. That happens far too often – in real life as well as on a nocturnal voyage. The whole story of my life is that people can’t bear to see me being happy and do whatever they can to spike it.

But anyway, I digress … “again” – ed.

After breakfast (which was late due to the amount of stuff I had to type) I carried on with the radio project and that was done well before lunchtime.

Next task was to sort out the music. All of the irrelevant music (from the radio point of view) was moved into a separate directory so that they are excluded from selection for the radio programme.

The reason for this is that with the 6 directories that I have (AA-FF) next week it’s the turn of music from directory CC to be selected for the radio so I have all of that (50-odd artists with however many albums) going round on a continuous random loop for the next week and I’ll be making a note of likely possibilities.

There’s so much music these days in my collection that it’s easy to lose track of what I have and some really good stuff will slip though my fingers if it doesn’t spring to mind.

So moving the irrelevant stuff out of the way means that I don’t waste my time with it popping up on the playlist.

Another task that I have set myself concerns the updating of the web pages.

That’s a task that I started ages ago and which fell by the wayside as I started back to work on the radio. But now that I have the radio work under control (for the moment) I can return to the programme.

When I started MY WEBSITE it was in 1997 as part of a project for my technology degree. It was completely hand-coded from scratch and pretty basic but over the years it slowly evolved.

The last major upgrade that it had was back in 2007 and I’ve learnt a lot since then. The menus were all handcoded *.css, individually for each page and when the number of pages passed 50, I realised that this would present a problem if ever I had to update anything on the menus.

So while I was laid up in Canada recovering from my exertions in the High Arctic, I taught myself some basic javascript, designed a few javascript menus and some iframe procedure and set about changing the menus over from individual *.css stuff to one common set of menus that can be inserted as a javascript script.

Today, after lunch, I carried on with the project and amended 20-odd pages. I’ll do some more tomorrow too. As an aside, I was impressed with my bread. It’s a much better attempt than the last one.

That still left an hour or so , thus I attacked the photos from July 2019. I managed about 20 of them, spending more time wrestling with a recalcitrant mouse than anything else.

And despite that, I’m still in an inflatable rubber boat in a lagoon amongst the icebergs at the foot of the Vatnajokull Glacier in eastern iceland

After an hour on the guitars, I went to make tea. I had an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit with vegetables, all out of the freezer, with pasta. And having taken stuff out of the freezer, there’s still not enough room for the half of the pie that’s waiting in the fridge for a space.

As I mentioned earlier, it was another pleasant evening.

The wind had died down somewhat and there was a beautiful sky and sunset out there tonight. I went to take a photo of it and then ran off up the road to my marker at the end of the hedge.

Having gathered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop past an extremely concerned pedestrian who gave me a weird look. I suppose that I really am a sight, running around the place at my age.

Walking around on the bumpy bit past the demolished bunker of the Atlantic Wall, I startled a woman having a relax in the bushes watching the sunset. Yes, I would give everything that I owned, and more besides, to be able to sing.

Out in the Baie de Mont St Michel it was really busy tonight.

A brief perusal of the bay showed no fewer than four (and maybe more) fishing boats out there over towards the Brittany coast, and this one on its way out there to join0 them.

And that will come as a surprise to someone who posted this morning another one of these “news stories” about how the small fisherman is banned from fishing while the big industrial concerns are free to come and go as they like.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen enough evidence to know that that is total nonsense.

Carefully avoiding the big puddle I carried on with my run along the tp of the walls.

No change in the chantier navale today, but there is something bizarre going on in the ferry terminal. It seems that a fishing boat – one of the trawler-types – has decided to tie up there.

And I’ve no idea why that might happen either. I didn’t think that they were supposed to be over there, and for all kinds of reasons too. The pontoon to which it is tied is for foot passengers for the ferries.

Off on my long run down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round the corner to my marker, and then I walked back to see what was happening in the port.

There’s been quite a lot going on today by the looks of things. We actually have some of the new floating pontoons in place attached to the pillars that they have spent weeks piledriving into the ground.

And across on the other side, they’ve fitted a few new anchorage mounts on the wall. I’ve no idea what they will be anchoring to them, but we’ll probably find out over the course of the next few days.

But it’s all exciting stuff.

From a standing start I ran off up the hill and round the corner to the viewpoint in the rue du Port.

No-one else was there but me but that’s no surprise because the low cloud on the horizon prevented me witnessing the sun sinking below the horizon.

Instead I had to content myself to watching in pass through a gap in the clouds.

My final run was back to the apartment where one of my neighbours was disinfecting the stairs. They are a friendly, sociable bunch of people here, not like anywhere else where i’ve lived, that’s for sure.

It’s late now. There was some good stuff on the playlist. So not much of a sleep tonight but we’ll see how the day unfolds. It’s a bank Holiday on friday so at least I can catch up with my beauty sleep then.

Wednesday 29th April 2020 – I MISSED …

… a few things that I intended to do today.

Perhaps the most important was the first run of the evening, but there’s a good reason for that and if you’ll look at this image just here you’ll understand.

Not only do we have the rainstorm, we have a howling gale blowing outside, right down the road towards me where I do my first run. And it was difficult enough to walk, never mind run up the hill in this

The second thing that I missed was the third alarm. I definitely heard the first two but I must have gone back to sleep again because when the third alarm went off I was still deep down under the covers.

But I wasn’t too far behind myself which was good news.

After the medication it was the dictaphone. For some unknown reason last night I was in my cabin last night on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour playing acoustic guitar to a Creedence Clearwater song but I can’t remember which one. But when I looked I could see that the doorway was blocked and I realised that someone had put outside the doorway a sack with everything – all my food and everything in it that I needed for the next few days while this virus went round. And that’s all that I can remember of it anyway.
But here’s a thing. Yesterday I was writing something for the radio and the subject of a certain former girlfriend turned up, so I included in my article a little anecdote about her.
So who should turn up in my night-time meanderings but the aforementioned. I’d been somewhere and I’d bumped into her although I hadn’t, because she walked right past me as if I wasn’t there. I hadn’t given the matter a great deal of thought but a couple of days later I was sitting in Woolworth’s in Crewe and she was walking through Woolworths and went out of the door that was about 10 feet away from where I was standing. I waved as she went past but again she totally and utterly ignored me. I went to write her an e-mail to ask if I’d done anything to upset her or whatever. In the end I thought “sod it” and I telephoned her. She answered and she was down the street somewhere in Crewe and we ended up having a chat. It was a friendly-enough chat but you could feel that there was something there and I couldn’t understand what it was. This gradually evolved into one of the daughters of my niece and she said something to her mother on the telephone about she won’t be home for supper so could Eric bring it round in his van? Seeing as I was going to a place that evening that was near there. She had never asked me but seeing as it was near the place where I was going it didn’t really bother me that she was proposing me to do something without even asking me first.

After breakfast I made a start on the file digitalisation. For one album there was only one track that I found, which was a surprise because it’s a quite well-known album.

However I found another two to do and it didn’t take long. They were quite quick in digitalising and there were only one or two that “stuck”. But so quick were they that I only had time to do 20-odd photos from July 2019.

But now I’m just pulling up at the Vatnajokull Glacier in Iceland.

One of the photos was a very good one of Rosemary so I posted it to her. As a result she rang me up for a chat and we were on the phone for ages.

All of the time that I’d saved evaporated just like that, but isn’t that just life? Still, taking time out to talk to friends is very important and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Most of the day after that was spent mainly in finishing off the radio project. I finished editing the speech, chopped it into segments, assembled everything together, worked out the time remaining, knocked off 30 seconds for the final speech and then found a final track to fill in the remaining time.

And much to my surprise, it all went together like clockwork and fitted to within a second or two, and I soon fixed that. I could have fixed it earlier too but I was … errr … away with the fairies for half an hour or so, which was quite disappointing.

There was cooking to do too – well, cooking of sorts. I didn’t do the hummus as there was enough for lunch so I’ll do that tomorrow and it’ll be nice and fresh for lunch. It’ll be roast pepper in one batch and sun-dried tomato and olives in the other

But there were the 2kgs of carrots that I had bought on Saturday.

They are all peeled, diced, blanched and in the freezer. I don’t know what it is about shop-bought frozen carrots but they taste ptetty miserable. Mine, or any other home-frozen ones always seem to taste better.

While I was putting stuff away (yes, putting stuff away!) I came across a 2gb memory stick that I had somehow managed to overlook. I copied a pile of music from the recently-digitalised recordings onto that to play on the hi-fi in the living room, and then merged the sound files into the general fun of music.

Once the new memory sticks come out of quarantine there will be some more being moved out of the temporary diirectory so while I was at it, I made a start on a new collection, labelled FF, with the “new” artists who weren’t in any previous collection.

That’s 6 collections with different groups and musicians in each, which means basically that there’s now 7 or 8 weeks (including the monthly live concert) before we complete the circle so a group is only featured at the most once every 7 or 8 weeks.

For my hour on the guitar I tried a new track. I did the bass first followed by the six-string and that seemed to be a better way round. Before I put them away I can have a run through a couple of numbers that I know well and that lifts my spirits.

Tea was lentil and tofu pie with vegetables and gravy followed by the blackberry pie with almond soya. Really delicious stuff, it was too.

And then “once more unto the breach, dear friends!”

Just me out there tonight, not another soul about. So I struggled up the hill at a walk and then ran down to the clifftop to see the sea. Not as wild as I was hoping, unfortunately, but the tide is a long way from high – not until almost midnight – so it should be good by then.

And 10.3 metres high too. A long way from the highest of course, but good enough to put the wind up the sailors.

Yes, if this is what the storm is like now with the tide three hours out, imagine what it’s going to be like later.

It’s a shame that it’s going to be dark at high tide because I won’t be able to see it.

So instead I carried on with my run. There was no change in the situation at the chantier navale. Still the same four boats, including the new black and green one, so I didn’t trouble anyone with a photo.

This was worth a photo though. In the dark and way out in the distance out to sea so it’s come out rather blurred but that can’t be helped.

It’s one of the little fishing boats right out there in the baie de Mont St Michel struggling against the waves as it slowly tries to make its way towards harbour.

And I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed … my hat goes off to those out there in weather like this trying to earn a living in boats like that. It’s not easy by any means.

This is interesting too.

On the quayside over there by the crane is a pile of builders’ material – wood and these bags that have sand or gravel or stuff like that in them. That can only mean one thing and that is that we are about to have a visit from either Thora or Normandy Trader.

It’s quite likely that I won’t know about it either. What with current developments, their turn-round in the harbour is quite rapid, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and with me only being allowed out for an hour every day, I’ll almost inevitably miss their visit.

Something else that I’ll be missing from now on will be the floating pontoon.

It’s not there now – the ground’s all flat – in the water but dismantled into its sections and hoisted out on the quayside over there ready for removal.

The big crane isn’t there either. Gone! And never called me mother! Whatever they will be doing now isn’t going to require too much lifting by the looks of things and all of the supporting pillars are now in.

Or are that? What did they do with that offcut that was around there?

But I’ll find that out another day because right now I’m off to bed. It’s not early but it’s not late either, but I have to go shopping tomorrow. Supplies are getting low. So I need to be on my best behaviour and on good form.

Monday 27th April 2020 – FOR ONLY THE SECOND …

… time (if my memory serves me well, as Julie Driscoll once sang) since this detention à domicile began, we’ve had proper rain today

And I should know because I was out in it this evening, attired in yellow rain jacket and black cap to keep the water off me.

And although there were only two or three other people walking about out there, there was plenty of other movement too. It doesn’t look like very much but deep in the rainstorm out to sea is one of our fishing boats and it’s looking as if it’s heading into harbour.

So they are still out there working.

But talking of movement, there wasn’t much movement in here this morning. I ended up last night doing some things on the computer and it was past 02:00 when I ended up going to bed.

Consequently, even though I heard the three alarms go off I paid no attention to them whatever and it was after 08:00 when I finally arose from the dead.

No-one I knew had come with me on my travels last night which was a disappointment. But I’d been out. There was a row of terraced houses somewhere like Edleston Road in Crewe round about where the old Christian Science church was, a row of terraced houses set well back from the road. They had been derelict for years and there was some scandal about money this sort of thing and I couldn’t quite understand what it was. Tere the protesters protesting about the waste of money being spent on renovating them, whether fraud had been committed in renovating them, something like that or whether the council was goign to charge an awful lot of money to let them out but they were in a dreadful condition. This whole group of protesters had got together and got hold of the front of the building through the window frames and were shaking the building about. In the end they pulled the whole front off it. This demonstration was being policed by the Navy of all people and of course the Navy charged in and arrested dozens and dozens of these protesters and dragged them off. All of the others went streaming home carrying their banners. The banners were all written in German so I couldn’t really understand what they were saying.

A late breakfast and then I attacked the digitalising of my record collection.

Another two albums bit the dust – 40 or so tracks in all and that was a marathon. Some of the tracks were extremely difficult to find and, much to my dismay, one of my more reliable sources had some of the old stuff for which I was looking, but in *.mkv format, which is black-listed on my computer.

Eventually though I managed to track down everything, and in the amount of time that it took I was able to edit over 50 photos from July 2019. I’m now at the Skálanes nature reserve, still in Iceland and STILL on the 11th July. Will the 12th never come?

The bread was something of a disappointment. One of the main problems was that the tray in the oven was too low so while the top is slightly overcooked, the bottom was almost burnt and had it stayed in there much longer, I would have needed an axe to cut through it.

But it was edible and tasted quite nice too, so i’m certainly not discouraged. It’s all part of a learning process and what I have learnt is

put the shelf two rungs higher up
turn the oven down a little so that the cooking is more even

A couple more efforts and I might get there yet.

This afternoon I sat down and chose the music for the next radio project. That was all done (except for the last track of course) and the tracks were joined together in pairs as usual.

And then the hour on the guitars. And I do have to say that I can’t think that I have ever felt less like it. Whatever is the matter with me just now?

Tea was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the fridge with pasta and vegetables. And that reminds me that tomorrow I have to freeze all of the carrots that I bought on Saturday. I should have done that at the weekend but one thing leads to another and once you start you’ve no idea how many other things there are.

Pudding was the apple turnover and because they had no soya coconut whatsit, I had to buy the almond stuff.

After the washing up I stuck my nose out of the building, saw the rain and then went back for my rain gear.

Despite the weather I ran all the way up to the top of the hill and then down to the clifftop. We’ve already seen one fishing boat just now, but he wasn’t alone. There were several more out there, like this one here.

And that one has certainly been working and is coming home to unload its catch. You can tell that by the flock of seagulls that is flying around it. There’s at least 30 birds, and maybe more.

having recovered my breath and walked for a little way I could run on along the clifftop on the other side of the headland.

And it’s certainly busy in port tonight. There are a couple of fishing boats coming in, to be sure, but there are also others going out, like this one.

That report that I read about French fishermen being prevented from fishing – I’ve no idea about where that came from because it’s manifestly untrue, as we have been seeing

And as if to underline the point, there’s a full complementof fishing vessels unloading at the fish processing plant.

Fishing vessels of all sizes too, small, medium and large. And with a few others on their way in, the fish processing plant seems to be just as busy as it was before the crisis.

And quite rightly so too, because people still have to eat. Not me though – you won’t catch me eating shellfish. And not just because I’m a vegan too. I couldn’t stand the things even when I did eat meat.

But hang on a minute! There’s a change going on here in the port right now.

That big crane there on the slipway is the big bluey-green crane that’s been living on top of the floating pontoon for the last few months while they have been busy putting in the new supporting pillars for the floating pontoons.

Does this mean that they have finished all of that now? The next few weeks should be interesting over there.

Nothing new in the chantier navale just now, still the same three boats, so when I had gathered my breath I ran on down on run n°4, the longest one of the batch.

Having run past and up the hill, I went for a walk back fown to see how things where in the harbour. There was no visible change down there that I could see, although the big stationary crane is certainly on dry land and no longer on the floating pontoon.

So how are they going to lower the new floating pontoon walkways into the water then? That’s an interesting question.

But in the meantime we can turn our attention to the floating pontoon.

Ther eit is, completely dismantled. Nothing on it now and I imagine that the mobile crane is there to lift it out of the water. That will be the next step I suppose.

We’ll doubtless find out tomorrow.

So I continued with my little extra run from a standing start right up the hill.

Round to the rue du Nord. Just one or two people out there but I was more interested in the machine that I’d seen in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

My stroll took me down there to inspect the beast. It’s a JCB pallet lifter but as for what it’s going I really have no idea because there was nothing evident.

And so I ran back home to the apartment.

No matter what happens, I’m going to bed as soon as I’ve done this. I don’t want another morning like this morning. There’s so much to do and not much time left to do it.

One of these days, things will catch up with me. But not any time soon, I hope.

Sunday 26th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned that I was going to have a baking day today.

And so I did too – and here’s the result.

There’s

a loaf of bread (thanks to Catherine for the recipe)
a vegan pizza made with my own dough (and credit to whoever gave me the recipe – I forget now
a blackberry pie (pastry out of a roll
an apple turnover (to use up the remains of the two rolls of pastry)

In fact I made enough pizza dough for three pizza and as I’m told that it will freeze well, it’s in the freezer and I’ll find out next week if it really does.

The bread didn’t really work out. It certainly rose, although nothing like as much as I hoped that it would, and I’m going to need a pneumatic drill to get through the crust.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we’ll see tomorrow at lunchtime how it went. I shan’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t work out – it’s my first ever go and you can’t win a coconut every time.

However, the pizza did, and I was impressed by that.

What else I was impressed with was that I was actually up and about at a more reasonable 10:15 this morning rather than the near-midday of just recently. Much as I like – and enjoy very much – a good lie-in, there’s no need to take it to extremes.

Unless, of course, there was someone else, young and nubile of the female, lying in with me, and then that would be a completely different matter entirely.

Ohh yes – I can still chase after the women at my age. I just can’t remember why.

And that reminds me of when i was chatting to Rosemary the other day saying that I haven’t seen that mystery girl since we crossed each other’s path while out running a couple of weeks ago.

Rosemary asked my why I didn’t turn round and run after her. My response was that if I had managed to catch her, I wouldn’t have been in any fit state to do anything about it.

After the meds I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night and who had been there with me. So hello to you again, Castor.

I was back playing guitar again, playing bass for someone. We hadn’t rehearsed or anything. Castor was involved in this. But it wasn’t really Castor but some other group of girls a bit like those two in that Agatha Christie Poirot play about the cruise ship in the Eastern Mediterranean. But when we came to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour we were almost the last to leave and I walked up to the top – I must have been somewhere and seen a lot of people – but I walked up on the top deck ready to come off and there were kids “where’s so-and-so?” their friend or father or someone. “He’s waiting for you. You’ve been downstairs since 08:30”. They said “he’s gone down for a sleep”. I said “no, he’s waiting for you ready to go” so they all piled into grandfather’s car ready to leave. They invited a few of us round to their house afterwards so we were allowed to go. They had even invited me which was a surprise so I set off there as well with a couple of other people. There was much more to it than this but I really can’t remember it now and in any case, you’re probably eating your tea now or something.
Some time later I’d been packing up ready to leave The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour last night. I had a load of tinned food stuff and was getting a carrier bag ready to carry it out. I thought that this would be much easier in plastic bottles than metal tins isn’t it to move it. And then some of the product, I can’t remember what, dated back to 1970 from Chile and the time when Allende was making a secret treaty between the Chileans, the Russians and the Americans and no-one ever talked about the sell-out by Allende at all.
Later still I was at a quiz show on the television and the call went out for all of the studio to be evacuated so everyone ran out except for me. We’d been examining bottles of fizzy water and one of the bottles swelled up dramatically and was about to burst. I just put it on the floor and put a wooden box on the top and stood on the wooden box. When it burst it burst inside the box and shook me around a bit but there was no damage done to anywhere. People came back in and I told them what had happened.

Yes, that was a pretty comprehensive voyage or two or three during the night.

With the time that it took to deal with all of the foregoing it was a late breakfast. More like an early lunch if the truth is known. And afterwards I attacked the digitalised file project. Two more albums went the Way of the West today. A couple of complications but in the end I managed to sort things out.

There wasn’t a great deal of time though for editing photos. Only 25 or so but many of them today were cropped out of larger images and I imagine that only about half were actual original images.

As an aside for this, I’m currently on image 0860. A similar image from my first run through on a one-for-one basis was image 0723 so it shows just how many croppings there have been.

Incidentally, that’s for the 11th July. One-third or so of the way through the month.

There was a break for a snack at about 14:30 and then I had my culinary session. Like I say, the bread could be better but for a first try I don’t think that it’s too bad. I shall have to work on it and maybe have better luck with the next loaf, because I’m intending to keep on trying if I can.

Tea was, of course, the pizza (delicious) followed by the last of the apple crumble. Tomorrow’s pudding will be the apple turnover and then after that I’ll start on the pie.

There’s absolutely no doubt about it – I’m eating so much better these days than ever I have been (except for those three months when Liz and Terry took me in).

After the washing-up (three loads of it of course this evening) I went off for my evening runs.

No-one about at all on my travels and that’s hardly a surprise as it wasn’t the kind of day that you would be expecting to see people. It was a cool evening but cloudy and overcast with a heavy sea mist.

It wasn’t the day for photography at all so there are very few photos of this evening’s activities.

Having recovered my breath from my runs up the hill and then down to the cliffs, I had my third run along the clifftop on the south side of the headland overlooking the town.

Nothing much happening down there at all. The place was as dead as a do-do. I could see right across the port, past the hotel and out up the street alongside the beach. All that I could see was just one person walking along the quayside.

Who knows? maybe people have realised that the solution to this problem is in their own hands. The number of new cases of this virus is falling dramatically and we might even be on target for Liberation on 11th may if this keeps up.

But there was someone else out there whom I missed but slamming his van door like that, it drew my attention to him.

He was unloading equipment from that fishing boat just there, putting it in his van and driving away.

At the viewpoint at the rue du Port there was a small group of people hoping to see the sunset. No-one whom I recognised, and not keeping their “social distance” either.

But there was no chance of them seeing the sunset. The heavy cloud and mist obscured everything.

There was however a piece of machinery parked higher up the rue du Nord in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

It crept into a photo while I was photographing something else and I didn’t take much notice of it until I returned home.

No idea what it is so I’ll have to go tomorrow for a proper nosey and make further enquiries about it.

But not now. I have a couple of thing to do and then i’m off to bed. I can’t wait to try my loaf tomorrow and see how it went. I’m not too optimistic but we shall see.

Thursday 9th April 2020 – TODAY WAS A …

… better day than some that I’ve had just recently. Mind you, that’s not to say that it was a good day. Just better.

It didn’t have the makings of a good day though. I’ve no idea what happened to the evening at all or where it went, but when I looked at the clock thinking that I ought to be going to bed soon, I noticed that the time was 00:40.

Obviously, leaving the bed at 06:00 or thereabouts was going to be rather difficult. But once again I slept through the alarms and it was 06:50 when I finally arose from the Dead.

After the medication, I looked at the dictaphone as usual. I had a new little girlfriend last night and she was ever so sweet. She was younger than me and I was a teenager. It was basically all about that and trying to make progress with a relationship. She lived a long way away from where I was staying so I had to travel quite a distance. I eventually found her house. I had seen something in the papers about a film in the cinema in a nearby town and I wasn’t sure if she wanted to go there but this way my plan. It was my plan for every week too – once a week take her to the cinema and just see how things developed. It all seemed really nice and lovely and warm and calm and relaxed and sweet and it was a dreadful shame that I had to spoil it all by waking up.

It wasn’t quite on a par with the “Worleston” dream that I had a few years ago and that I won’t forget in a hurry, but it was in that kind of ballpark area.

The digital file-splitting was straightforward this morning, although there were a couple of interruptions. Breakfast was one, and a phone call was another and I can’t remember now with whom it was that I was chatting.

The file-converting took up a good deal of time, and I was able to edit about 40 or so photos from Iceland in July 2019 while all of this was going on. I’m now up to photo 482 – just coming up to dock at Siglufjördur. And that’s day 8 of 31 and there’s a long way to go yet.

One task that I had been meaning to do for a while is to review the freezer and see what’s in there. The answer to that conundrum, having emptied out one of the shelves and given it a really good clean, is “not a lot”. The stocks have been going down nicely and the curry that I made yesterday is the only bulk-type of food in there now. It must therefore be time to make another aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit.

After lunch (more taco rolls of course) I carried on with the radio projects. And by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 I’d finished all of the text, dictated it and saved it to the computer. I could have done much more too except that I had a major crash-out at some point in the proceedings.

And that shouldn’t have been any surprise to anyone after last night’s late night.

And it means that I’ll have to carry on for longer than I intended, which means that this next project of mine will be delayed. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in my apartment are two desktop computers, 5 laptops, about a dozen different external hard drives, a pile of memory sticks and an even bigger pile of memory cards.

What I’ve done is to buy a big 4TB external drive, and absolutely EVERYTHING from every data storage device in the house will be transferred onto it. I’ll then go through and weed it down so that there’s just one major back-up copy with everything and then retire a whole load of obsolete stuff.

Having different loads of data scattered all about the place is proving to be a distraction that I can well do without so I want to tackle that task as soon as possible.

After the customary hour on the guitars, spent mainly working out Al Stewart’s “Valentina Way” and Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”, I went for tea.

Spoilt for choice, I didn’t know what to make so I ended up with pasta and vegetables with tomato sauce and the left-over stuffing with a couple of handfuls of peanuts thrown in for good measure.

Once I’d had the rice pudding and done the washing-up, I went for my evening runs.

Moving a lot easier today, I covered a bit more ground than usual which is always nice. I was at the end of the headland in no time and out there in the Baie De Mont St Michel, nicely framed between the bits of Atlantic Wall, was something moving out to sea

That bit of the wall is interesting though. When the war was over, they tried to move one of the bunkers. The put enough dynamite inside to shatter every single window withn a radius of 50 kilometres, yet moved two lumps of concrete about 20 feet.

They gave up after that.

Further on round the other side, I was able to take a much better photo of it.

It’s actually one of these trawler-type of fishing boats, and what that’s doing down there I really don’t know because we don’t normally see them fishing so far down the Baie de Mont St Michel.

But what it probably means that with there being such a high tide right now, there’s much more to go at that hasn’t been got at any time in the past.

Further on round the headland I was able to see over the wall down into the chantier navale to see what was happening there tonight.

There’s been a continual shange of occupant down there just recently and last night, there were four ships in there. But they’ve obviously been doing some sort of work there today, because one of the ships has disappeared and they are now down to three again.

It’s just like a game of “Ten Green Bottles” in the chantier navale.

So carrying on with my run down to the other end of the wall, there was a lovely view across the outer harbour tonight.

And there’s been some excitement in there tonight, and quite a lot of it too.

The first thing that you will notice is that Chausiais and Joly France have changed position. In fact I had noticed that yesterday but I had forgotten to mention it.

What this presumably means is that Joly France has gone out on a mission – presumably to the Ile de Chausey. Let’s hope so anyway.

But even more interesting is what is actually leaving the harbour.

There’s a fishing boat on its way out, but that’s not really much of a surprise, but there’s also a Customs launch going out behind it.

“Going ou” implies of course that it has “come in”, right enough, but why would it want to come in here anyway? There’s no-one in the harbour who doesn’t belong there and no-one apart from the fishing boats has been anywhere just recently.

So that’s an interesting one. And on that note I came back to the apartment. Another 5 runs, and I’m working up a sweat now. That’s a good sign.

It’s extremely late now – and that’s because when I came in, Rosemary rang me up and we had a chat for an absolute age. But it doesn’t matter because toMorrow is Good Friday. And in accordance with usual practice there’s no alarm.

In theory I can sleep as late as I like. But you just watch someone come along and spoil it.

Sunday 5th April 2020 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

… wasted day today. And it’s my own fault too.

It all started to go wrong last night. As I was preparing to go to bed, some decent music came on the playlist. One thing leads to another, and once you have started, you’ve simply no idea how many other things there are.

It was one good piece of music after another, all kinds of nostalgia came flooding back (this is what happens when you start to listen to music that you haven’t heard for 40 years and more) and in no time at all I was in the depths of a depression.

So much so that, believe it or not, it was 04:00 when I finally went to bed. And I still wasn’t able to sleep.

At some point, I must have dozed off, because I awoke at 11:00. That was a good start to the day – having missed half of it. And even worse, it was 11:45 when I finally hauled myself out of bed.

Nothing on the dictaphone, which is hard to believe after the exertions of just recently, so after the medication I attacked the digital sound files.

That’s another four albums out of the way, reasonably straightforwardly. Only a couple of tracks that weren’t readily available and which took some tracking down. And while I was at it, I disposed of some more photos from July 2019. I’m not up to 19070400 or thereabouts, which means that there’s only about another 1200 from that month to deal with.

And then there are August’s (of which there are so much more) and September’s and October’s too.

That meant that breakfast was at the rather democratic time of … errr … 13:45, which is a late time even for lunch. And the apple purée is running low and I don’t have enough apples to make any more. I sense that a supplementary trip to the shops is on the cards some time soon.

After breakfast – or lunch, or whatever you might like to call it – I buckled down to the 2 radio projects on which I have been working.

They are both done now except for the speech for the last tracks which needs to be recorded, edited and merged into position. And they could so easily have been finished had I not … errr … closed my eyes for a while.

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

It’s just some more stuff to do tomorrow, isn’t it?

There was the hour or so on the guitars and I spent much of the time working out the rhythm and bass parts to U2’s “In God’s Country” and David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”.

Tea was another vegan pizza with the last pizza base, followed by one of the best rice puddings that I’ve ever made.

My daily exercise was after tea of course.

It was going dark now because I was so late, but I took a photo of one of my running spots in the rue du Roc. I start way back there beyond the farthest street light, and you can see the rise that always brings me to a halt.

The usual spot where I run out of steam is just by where the hedge begins but just recently I’ve been pushing on to the point at which I took the photo.

“Nothing much to shout about” I hear you say, but it is at my age and in my state of health. And it’s just one of four running tracks that i’m using

Feeling in something of a good form, I ran across the lawn to the top of the cliffs where the lighthouse looked really good, silhouetted as it was against the darkening evening sky.

That was well worth a photo too, and it’s come out rather well.

And so it should, because I’m back in business again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had had an issue with the big NIKON D500 CAMERA. It wasn’t reading any memory card.

However, there is a second slot for XQD memory cards, an obsolete but much better form of memory storage.

So even though it’s much more expensive than SD format, I ordered a card to see whether the fault lay in the camera or simply in the SD card slot.

As you can see from the quality of the photos, like this one of the Pointe de Carolles, the XQD memory card seems to be functioning perfectly well.

The fault must therefore be in the SD card slot and I don’t know what to do about that. It’s probably going to be an expensive repair and unnecessary too as long as I can obtain XQD cards.

But one thing that I won’t be doing if I can help it is to take out the cards to upload the photos to the computer.

It’s only a passing thought of course, but I wonder if the regular removal of the card is what has caused the card slot to fail.

So once the card is in, it stays in and I’ll upload it using a cable, like I’ve been doing for the last few weeks with the NIKON 1 J5 and the old NIKON D3000

With the new card, I took a photo of the port with Chausiais and Joly France moored up over at the ferry terminal, and then carried on.

A poor woman had the shock of her life as I came round a corner at something rather less than a canter – but not as much of a shock as I had.

But anyway, 5 runs tonight and a good bit of distance too. This is starting to be a bit more like it.

But for how long? It’s well over an hour since I came back in and i’m still out of breath. But I must push on. Keeping fit, losing weight and watching my health is how I’m going to keep on going, not to mention an improvement in my diet.

But hard work tomorrow. There’s still plenty to do and less time to do it of course.

And the weather has changed. In the space of two days we’ve gone from being far too cold to having the heat switched off and the windows opened.

Has Spring finally arrived?

Sunday 22nd march 2020 – AND JUST HOW …

… did I celebrate the first Sunday morning of my enforced confinement?

No idea at all. I slept right through it.

Well, almost. It was about 10:45 when I awoke and just after 11:00 when I finally arose. And seeing as I was in bed fairly early last night – like before midnight – that was a rather impressive lie-in.

So after the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone notes. I was in my van last night, a Transit the same as Caliburn but the bulkhead was one row further back so there was space behind the driver’s seat and passenger seat. While I was sitting in my van suddenly the back door opened and my brother and someone else came into the van and started to try to make themselves comfortable so I threw them out and told them to clear off. So they went out but didn’t shut the back door properly so I shouted at him to come and close the back door. he replied “no, that’s how it was before. I’m not closing that properly so I got so enraged so I put Caliburn – the van – into reverse and drove backwards, scattering all these pedestrians who were in the way until I caught up with him. As for the “what happened next”, well, I found myself back where I was on the final days of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour at the end of August and beginning of September in the same circumstances that alarmed me so much and which prevented me writing up my notes for those final three or four days. Things are clearly getting to me again.
But later on I was somewhere in South London at a railway station waiting for a train. There was a girl on this patform with me. She was a nice girl and we were waiting for a train. A train pulled in at the station, an old 1950s first-generation (… it was much older than that and like an early Southern Region Commuter Electric from the late 1930s …) multiple-unit thing painted red and cream. It pulled in on the platform across from where we were standing and we had to go down – a dark dingy corridor and set of steps to go down, not like anything modern. As we were going down this girl said to me “can you see where you are going?” I said yes and she said “oh” (scintillating dialogue, isn’t it?). As we got down to the level below there was another platform and she just wandered off onto this platform so this left me all on my own. I ended up walking out through the ticket barrier – you had to hold your ticket up to this reader thing. I did but I wasn’t sure if it had read it but the gate opened anyway so I walked out. As I walked out I was thinking that as I’m spending all this time in London why don’t I get a bike? A pushbike. It would be a lot cheaper than travelling on the train. Then I thought to myself “I wouldn’t get to meet all these nice girls will I, if I’m on a bike”. There was also something going on about being in a boat. The only thing that I remember about that is that we had a pile of stuffed penguins and two fell overboard so we had to do a U-turn to go back and pick them up, but I don’t remember anything else about that.

Breakfast at 12:15 is definitely the right way to go and then I came back to look at some file-splitting. I managed to track down another digital sound file which I could then split up at my leisure, but as for the three other albums that I chose today, I had to do that track by track by track.

But I managed to solve a little mystery as to why I could never find one album anywhere at all. The album that I have was picked up in a secondhand shop somewhere in Europe all those years ago and I’ve never been able to trace its provenance.

But searching more deeply into this and comparing track listings on a music-business site to which I have access, I discovered that the album that I bought was a German limited edition budget release of an album much more well-known.

So that resolved that issue and I was able to proceed.

Having dealt with these issues, I turned my attention to the photos from July for what was left of the afternoon (which wasn’t much).

By the time that I had finished I had finally managed to leave Reykjavik and it’s the next morning as I’m watching the sun rise over Snæfellsjökull in North-West Iceland. And I remember it well and just how pleasant it was too.

There was the customary hour on the guitar, all of which was spent on the bass. As it happened, “Old Admirals” by Al Stewart and “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan came round on the playlist so I spent half of that time working out a bass line to each one.

But like anything else, I can always think of something better a little later on.

This evening I had a little bake-in.

The half-baguette that was left over from Belgium was beyond stale so I made myself some garlic butter and treated myself to some garlic bread, seeing as I hadn’t had any lunch today.

But with it being Sunday evening and pizza night, I reckoned that I ought to make a dessert as well. I had rice pudding last week and I had no cooking apples left, but I did have a jar of jam that I had bought in Belgium and another one that was opened here.

That was the cur to make a jam tart but it ended up as being a jam pie – strawberry jam with desiccated coconut.

And the pastry that was left was rolled out flat and was used to make a jam and coconut turnover. No sense in wasting anything.

And I now know that the new 16cm pie dish that I bought needs just one roll of pastry to make a pie, and there will be a little pastry left over.

The pizza was delicious as usual and the jam turnover went down a treat with some of the coconut dessert stuff.

Despite the quarantine regulations, I went out for my evening run or two. I have to keep up my health and going out in the evening I’m not likely to encounter anyone else.

My first run was quite good except for the path which was rather waterlogged. It looked as if there had been some rain during the day that was responsible for all of that.

My path brought me round to the lookout over the town round about where the escalier du moulin a vent – the Windmill Staircase – comes down onto the little flat piece of land at the landward end of the rocky outcrop.

Just there is a concrete bunker or two, part of the Atlantic Wall from World War II and the inner row of ramparts from the medieval town.

It’s really quite amusing in a way to see two relics of two different times and two completely different types of warfare so close to each other like this. And in the end, neither of them did the job that they were supposed to, being as they were, completely by-passed by events elsewhere.

The view across to the Eglise St Paul was very impressive tonight so I took a photo but I still have to work hard on my night-time technique to make any improvement.

So I turned my attention to my second run and made it all the way up to the second ramp and a good half-dozen paces up that slope. That’s something that I couldn’t have done a few weeks ago.

What’s important to me is that I can tell how my health is holding up by how far I can run and how I feel afterwards. And in the absence of any medical follow-up from the hospital, I have to self-check and this is the best way that I know how.

Hence my evening walks and runs.

Despite my long lie-in today, I’m feeling quite tired so I’m off to bed. And wondering what tomorrow is going to bring. Here in Granville we seem to have been lucky right now but of course that can change at any moment.

Friday 20th March 2020 – I MADE IT …

… out and about this morning.

And I’m not the only one out and about either. Sneaking into the harbour unawares under cover of darkness presumably has come Granville, the more modern ferry that runs the route between here and the Channel Islands.

She was in Cherbourg the last time that I heard anything about her and I imagined that she would be staying there while all of this commotion was going on.

As for me, there wasn’t any commotion at all during the night. I had a shower and then went to bed somewhat earlier than just recently. And there I stayed until the alarms went off.

And for a change, i even beat the third alarm to my feet. That’s rather a rare occurrence these days.

After what remained of the medication, I looked at the dictaphone. I don’t remember very much about last night except that there were a lot of us. We’d decided individually of course that we’d go for a walk on our own but we all ended up at the same time on the beach. We were having to walk up and down the beach on our own but with big crowds of people.

Breakfast was next and then I had a look at some audio file-splitting. One file was very long and complicated and at first I had no idea how to do it conveniently. However, after a little pause for thought, the light went on and I started from the end and worked forwards instead of the other way round.

And it worked a treat too.

By now it was time for me to go into town to see the doctor.

Not one for this confinement lark, I went the long way round into town, past the lighthouse and the coastguard station on te Pointe du Roc.

And you can see the kind of weather that we were having too. It’s been nice and sunny for the last couple of days but today the weather has broken and we’re in a deep pervading mist that is really uncomfortable.

But the work must go on for some people. We can’t all be under detention à domicile otherwise we’d starve to death.

The fishermen are out working, even in the fog. And you will notice that in the vicinity of his boat there are a couple of what look like floats or buoys.

It’s been a mystery to me what these floats and buoys are for because I’ve never seen how they mysteriously turn up in the water. I suppose that this will be the nearest that I’ll ever become to finding out.

Carrying on around the headland I end up on the path that passes close to the chantier navale

There were a few people around there with face masks but I reckon that’s more to do with the dust that’s being created from the overhauling of Charles Marie. It’ll take more than fear of a virus to keep them from working on that boat, although I imagine that they will be forgetting all about the summer season.

But the fishing boat that was alongside her seems to have gone back into the water, presumably with her repair work finished.

With the tide being out, the harbour gates were closed and I could walk across the path on top to the other side.

But going past the fish processing plant, I noticed these objects here. Something rather more than buoys, they look like channel markers to me

And that’s going to be rather interesting because I wonder what channel they will be marking. But being here by the fish processing plant rather than on the other side of the harbour by the port office would seem to suggest that they are of more importance to the fishermen.

At the doctor’s, he had a couple of students with him. I forgot myself and he was horrified when I went to shake his hand. The two young students were wearing face masks, as was he, but I noticed that one of them had her mask only over her mouth and not over her nose.

That’s something that I’ve noticed with a few people. And I would have thought that covering the nose was just as important as covering the mouth, to be frank.

So what did the doctor say when I told him my miserable tale of woe?

He can prescribe most of my pills and potions. There’s one that he can’t prescribe but that’s not important
He can prescribe a four-weekly blood test – to be taken at home. And he’ll oversee the results.
If my blood level drops below the critical limit (8.0) he can arrange for me to have a transfusion.
He CAN’T prescribe any of the transfusions that I have. For a start, they aren’t registered or authorised in France.
If I catch an infection – of any kind – I’m well and truly on my own and there’s not a thing that he or anyone else can do about it.

I do have to admit that I would rather have been taken into care in Belgium where at least there would have been access to someone or something that might have been of some help, but there’s no point in worrying about that now.

The thing that surprises me more than anything about all of this is that whenever I want to miss a hospital appointment they give me all kinds of dire warnings about what might happen to me. But they don’t have a problem with cancelling them for four months (it’ll be six months at least by the time that this is all over) when it suits them.

The chemist came up with everything and even made a suggestion about the missing medication. They were all wearing masks and gloves in there, but they didn’t have any to sell to the public as one very disgruntled person in the queue in front of me found out.

Back here I made myself a coffee and then did another pile of file splitting. And I’ve hit a problem with this. One or two of the files are in *.mkv format and there’s something in the recent upgrade to Windows that automatically opens the files onto “standby” so, of course, you can’t delete them. And the more you have in your working directory, the slower the whole “Windows Explorer” procedure goes until the computer hangs up.

Judging by the panic in various chat rooms and forums right now, there are quite a few people affected by this. Here’s hoping that there will be an upgrade sometime soon.

There was a pause for lunch in the middle of all this. The second baguette from Belgium is rather harder than it might be but 20 seconds in the microwave sorted that out.

Later on, when the file-splitting was finished for the day, I started again with the photos for July and my trip to Iceland. I dealt with quite a few but I’m still no further forward because there were such a lot from my walk around Reykjavik.

What didn’t help was that I had a really good … errr … pause during the middle of it all.

This evening I knocked off early – at 18:00 – and had half an hour on the 6-string and then half an hour on the bass. I need to progress with this as much as I can, although my trip to Germany will presumably not be happening this year.

For tea tonight, I came across a bag of vegetable and mushroom curry from October 2018. There was slightly more than one portion in there so I lengthened it with fried potato, spinach, peanuts and brussels sprouts and there’s now enough for two nights. I’ll have the second portion tomorrow.

There’s the last of the rice pudding to use tomorrow too, so it looks as if Sunday is going to be a baking day. I bought a new 16cm pie dish in Belgium so I’ll give that a try-out, I reckon.

No stopping my evening walk either. Round the walls as usual and I managed my two runs – the first into the teeth of a gale and that was difficult, but as for the second I could have even made it up the second ramp had someone wit his dog not come round the corner just at the wrong time.

So now I’m having an early night tonight. Shopping tomorrow and that will be exciting as I’m expecting the hordes to be out and the shops stripped bare of food supplies.

My usual choices of meals – lentils, kidney beans, chick peas etc – are not usually the type that most people go for so I’m luckier than most in this respect but it will be difficult, I imagine, finding fresh fruit and veg . But we shall see what we shall see.

So now I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there was certainly plenty of excitement there this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By now it was lunchtime so I made my butties.

This afternoon I had plenty to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I’m definitely feeling better.

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

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

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

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

Whether or not I have one is another matter.

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

Friday 14th February 2020 – IT’S ST VALENTINE’S DAY …

… and someone loves me evidently.

No-one tangible unfortunately, but someone “up there” … “down there, more like” – ed … must do, because I’ve had some good fortune. And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Those of you who read my notes from yesterday will remember that I’d received this strange letter from some insurance company in Belgium. I rang them up this morning to enquire about it because it was puzzling me.

It turns out that, not that I remember, but when I worked for that strange American company in Belgium I’d been part of their occupational pension scheme which involves a “lump sum” payment on retirement.

As I officially retired, as far as Belgium is concerned, last year on reaching 65, I claimed my Belgian retirement pension to which I’m entitled having worked for this company and also my spell at General Electric.

This was awarded to me and as a result my identity number in the Belgian national records system has been reactivated and the Insurance company has thus been able to track me down and write to me telling me to claim it.

Usually I like to slip sideways off national registers because being on them brings the wrong kind of attention from the Authorities, but for once, as I said, it’s good news

Other good news – well, almost good news – is that I’m feeling a lot more like myself today. I must have had one of these 24-hour bug things, that’s all that I can think of, and of course I have no immune system to fight it off.

And I almost beat the third alarm today too. I had my head off the pillow and I was just about to sit up straight when it went off. Still never mind. Close enough!

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. And another night of rambling away to myself. I started off with something to do with the dictaphone last night but as soon as I picked up the dictaphone whatever memory I had in my mind had gone completely and I’d completely forgotten what it was all about. But I did remember a bit of it. I was walking past an outdoor swimming pool. It was pouring down with rain and there was a big fat boy swimming in there. He climbe dout and got his clothes on and started to get dressed. He went inside the office and there was something happening inside the office with a couple of people and he was one of them but this is where my memory runs out. This certainly involved something to do with dancing and i was trying to work out a dance step with someone or other, a girl but I’ve no idea now.
Later last night I was emptying out Marianne’s apartment getting a pile of stuff in her living room and throwing away some of it, putting some of it in boxes and bags and getting it ready to be taken down to Caliburn. I was working quite well and was quite impressed wuth myself but when I had a look at the bedroom and kitchen there was still tons to do there and I started to get a bit despairing. But I thought well, it’s no good me standing here looking at it is it? I may as well press on regardless and get on with it, which was what I did. I was looking out of this window at Caliburn parked in the street, all that kind of thing.

So whatever all that was about, I really have no idea.

After breakfast I set about cutting up a few albums and this was an agonising task. The first one just wouldn’t cut as it was supposed to and after much binding in the marsh I realised that it was actually titled wrongly and not the track it was supposed to be.

The second one wouldn’t cut properly either but after a while (and I do mean a while) I realised that it was a studio acetate rather than a recording master and so the track order is quite different than the published and printed album.

The third one was one of the very few that had survived the Universal Studios fire so it was actually very high quality although it was “in bits” and needed reassembling.

But just a reminder – I’m only tracking down digital tracks for albums that I already own on vinyl or on tape.

Having resolved the issue of this pension thing, I had to go to the bank to have my payment details confirmed and stamped.

But on the way I was … errr … detained. We saw the trawler
Coelacanthe doing some kind of weird nautical danse macabre in the harbour the other day, but here she is again manoeuvring herself around.

Obviously the fishing is back on the agenda right now that Storm Ciara has passed.

Meanwhile, at the Bank, in the headlong plummet into the abyss of being The Worst Bank In The World, the Credit Agricole Normandie once again rises to the top, or maybe I should say “sinks to the bottom” to snatch the lead from the Royal Bank of Scotland once more.

“Ohh we can’t do that here” said the second cashier to whom I had spoken. “Our Head Office has to do that”.
“All I want is for you to confirm my bank account details and to apply your stamp”
“No, our Head Office has to do that”.

Totally pathetic, that is. Whatever happened to the excellent service and first-class customer consideration that I had at Pionsat? There was none of this nonsense.

On the way back to the apartment I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then went to see what was happening in the harbour.

And the gates were open now, so Coelacanthe was heading off out so sea. And at the same time there were fishing boats coming in so we had a kind of traffic jam at the port entrance as they jostled for position.

But as for me, I came back here to carry on work. There was plenty to do

This afternoon I started to attack the outstanding photos. And there are more than I thought because there were those few weeks when I had my broken hand and couldn’t type or do anything.

Not only that, there were piles missing so I had to fire up the failed laptop and see if they were still left on there, and also to fire up the travel laptop to see what was on there.

They’ve all been copied over, although I’m still not convinced that they are all here as they are supposed to be. And it took an age to do so.

By the time that I’d knocked off for tea I’d finished all of the photos for June. And I think that I was unnecessarily depressed about the quality – at least of the early ones – because they didn’t need much post-work at all. Well, not as much as I was expecting anyway.

But of course that’s without making any reference to the ones that were taken under the Arctic light which is a great deal different than any light that I’m used to.

My afternoon was interrupted, as you might expect, by my afternoon walk. And, for a change and I’ve no idea why, there were hordes of people out there. A nice day, yes, but not that nice.

And I’d hardly set foot out of my apartment before I was shocked out of my usual reverie by the sirens of an emergency ambulance roaring past me.

So, as you might expect, I wandered off down the footpath at the top of the cliffs in order to catch up with it to find out what was going on that needed an ambulance.

But when I finally caught up with it I was none-the-wiser. And not even better-informed either.

The ambulance was parked at the side of the road sure enough and there was an ambulance man talking to a family group on the grass verge. But as for why, I really have no idea.

And whatever was going on there didn’t look like anything particularly urgent to me, so I left them to it.

By now, the tide was well on its way out. Not quite right out yet though.

And so I was totally surprised to see the digger and the concrete-breaker already making their way out across the water to the ferry terminal. What was really quite amusing was that, as I watched, the digger bogged down a couple of times and he used his jib and bucket as a lever to pull himself out.

On eof the best free afternoon’s entertainments that I had had.

But the sight of the digger bogging down, even with its caterpillar tracks, had presumably convinced the tractor driver that the time wasn’t right for him to set out.

He was waiting patiently at the foot of the concrete ramp for the tide to subside some more and for the ground to dry out a little before he sets off.

And I can’t say that I blamed him. After all, he doesn’t have a bucket and jib to pull himself out if he becomes bogged down.

But they had the order of proceeding all wrong anyway.

The tractor should have been the fourth, not the third machine to move. Because he’s not ready to set out quite yet he’s stopping the other concrete breaker from going across.

The other two by this time had actually made it across and had started work while they were still sitting there.

Desperate to bring the day’s total up to 100%, I went on another extended walk to clock up the miles.

My route back brought me along the rue St Jean towards home, and there at the dressmaker’s there was some excitement going on. Someone was all dressed up like something out of the 19th Century and there was someone else taking a photo of her using a tablet.

With nothing better to do, I stayed and watched them for a minute to see what they were up to but after the photo they just hung around chatting so I cleared off home.

And it looks as if I have a new neighbour too.

Whoever they are, they must be acclimatising their family pet to his new surroundings as they had a cat tethered to a lead that was tied in through their window on the ground floor.

A very friendly cat too, and we had a good ten minutes of chat and socialisation. I hope that he’ll be there again.

Back here, I carried on working despite having a little snooze here and there. But nothing like as complete as they have been just recently.

Tea was next and, having tidied the freezer once more, I came across a potato and lentil curry of 2018. That was totally delicious with rice and vegetables.

No more rice pudding so I had a banana and raspberry sorbet. And even though it was the cheap LIDL sorbet it was still delicious.

But one thing that I noticed was that there are only a couple of slices of pie left. Sunday’s task will therefore be to make another pie. If I can fit in two pies at once I might even make an apple pie.

The evening walk was, as usual, all alone around the walls. That meant that I could fit in my two runs in relative comfort, regardless of the howling gale.

Being almost at 100% I extended my walk and went on the cliff by the fish processing plant where, from my lunchtime spec when the weather is good, I could see the fishing boats coming home now that the tide was coming back in.

Fishing is back on the agenda now that Storm Ciara has passed.

Back here, there was the football. Bala Town v TNS in the Welsh Premier League

TNS have swept all before them over the past 10 seasons although Connah’s Quay are catching them up. And with TNS losing at Newtown the other day the gap has narrowed.

Bala are, somewhat surprisingly considering that they have two of the best players in the league in their team, somewhat off the pace.

The match though, went according to expectations. TNS had about 80% of the possession and had Bala pegged back in their area for most of the match. But we were treated to something much more than a defensive masterclass – more like a desperate rearguard “thin red line” defence as bala did everything they possibly could.

Henry Jones and Chris Venables were surprisingly subdued today and so they offered little in attack. The big winger Lassana Mendes though had an excellent game and why he didn’t win the man of the match award I really don’t know.

Surprisingly, despite having nothing much up front, Bala took a surprise lead when a corner into the TNS penalty area was headed into his own net by Aeron Edwards. But TNS pulled one back with a penalty late in the game – a case of “blaa to hand” rather than “hand to ball” but a penalty none-the-less.

But no matter how much they threw at the Bala defence they couldn’t break through for a winner.

Meanwhile over on Deeside, Connah’s Quay put four past Caernarfon to go top of the table. Interesting times indeed.

But asI write up the notes I have a feeling that I’m not going to reach the end before I crash out at my desk so i’d better ….

ZZZZZZZZZ

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: photo

Friday 26th June 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Sunday 31st May 2020 – HANDY HINT N° 12345

Friday 22nd May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

Saturday 9th May 2020 – IT WASN’T …

Tuesday 5th May 2020 – I THOUGHT SO!

Wednesday 29th April 2020 – I MISSED …

Monday 27th April 2020 – FOR ONLY THE SECOND …

Sunday 26th April 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Thursday 9th April 2020 – TODAY WAS A …

Sunday 5th April 2020 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

Sunday 22nd march 2020 – AND JUST HOW …

Friday 20th March 2020 – I MADE IT …

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

Friday 14th February 2020 – IT’S ST VALENTINE’S DAY …

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