Tag Archives: bouquet granvillais

Monday 1st February 2021 – THERE’S ONE GOOD …

… thing about being in bed by 21:40. And that is that I can, if I play my cards right, be wide awake, standing up and looking for my clothes at 06:00 when the first alarm goes off.

Yes, never mind beating the third alarm, I actually managed to beat the first one today and that’s something of a red-letter day, isn’t it?

So there I was, wide awake, fighting fit and ready to go and by the time the third alarm went off I had had my medication and was sitting at the computer working.

By the time lunchtime came round, I had completed an entire radio programme from scratch – up and running, a whole hour of it. And I’d had my break for breakfast (the last of my Christmas cake) and drink of hot chocolate too. That was quite impressive too.

This afternoon I sat down and carried on with the siege of Chateau Chalus but later on in the afternoon I had the misfortune to crash out for half an hour and that was disappointed. I might have finished it otherwise.

That was probably due to the fact that I went out this afternoon for my usual walk around the headland.

There were a few other people around out there too, walking around, but the surprise was actually down on the beach. There were about 20 people down there playing some kind of sport and even though I watched them for a good few minutes, I couldn’t work out what it was they were actually doing.

There were a few other people around down there too but they were just doing normal things like walking around at the water’s edge.

And when I say that I was surprised to see them, that was for two reasons too.

Not just because it was strange to see so many people, but also due to the fact that there were some incredible rolling banks of fog moving in off the sea and it was at times quite difficult to see very far.

Despite all of the wind that we have had just recently, there was hardly a breath of it today so while it might have been rolling in off the sea, it was just banking up at the head of the bay and becoming thicker and thicker down there. That’s not the kind of day to be out at sea.

Le Loup, the marker light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, was barely visible and you couldn’t see very much beyond there along the coast.

But one thing that you will notice is that it really is a sea mist or fog and not driving rain. And it’s not very thick either. You can see the blue sky overhead above the mist here at the edge of the fog.

At the end of the headland, I looked out to sea to see what was happening but as you might expect, I couldn’t see anything going on there at all. But most of that was down to the fog. I couldn’t even see the Brittany coast so I gave it up as a bad job and carried on with my walk along the headland.

There’s another change of occupier at the chantier navale.

We still have a total of four boats, but one of the fishing boats that was there seems to have gone back into the water and instead, we seem to have acquired Aztec Lady, one of the tourist charter boats. It makes me wonder what’s the matter with her, but seeing where she’s been positioned, it can’t be anything that’s likely to detain her for long.

Talking of being detained for long, I cleared off home for my hot afternoon coffee but when I went to drink it, it was freezing cold. That’s what happens when you crash out for half an hour.

The hour on the guitar passed really well and I quite enjoyed it, and then I went for tea. Taco rolls with the remains of the stuffing but, most unlike me, half of it went in the bin. For some reason, I wasn’t at all hungry tonight.

You are all probably wondering where I got to (and, more importantly, who came with me) during the night. But just as I was about to start to transcribe my dictaphone notes, Rosemary rang up for a chat – a chat that went on for just over one hour and forty minutes.

It took me a couple of days before I could find the time to transcribe them, but I was playing bass with The Doors or The Grateful Dead or someone last night. We were on our way to a gig, the first that they had done for 25 years. I’d bought some new equipment. While we had stopped for a coffee and an afternoon break I started to wire up the PA but noticed that the microphones had on/off switches that had to be held down. I thought “this is wrong. We have the wrong equipment here. What are we going to do about this because you can’t hold down a mike switch in the middle of a concert when you have both hands on a guitar”. I carried on wiring them up anyway. A couple of boys appeared and spoke to Jerry Garcia or whoever it was. He had them play a little song, all very countrified rock, arpeggio chord-playing guitar, that sort of thing. The guy playing a really weird guitar with the tuning pegs in the body of the guitar and nothing on the neck, which was a very small neck anyway. I went back over to the pile of equipment and sat there suddenly scratching my head. Someone else came along and said “what are you doing?”. I replied “I don’t know. I just walked over here for something and I can’t remember what it was that I came back for”. He asked “was it your guitar strap?”. I said “no but I need to check that anyway so while I’m here I’ll do that”.

Later on I was with a couple and I’m not sure who they were. They may well have been one of my sisters and her husband. Also with me was Zero, who at one time was a very, very regular companion of mine on my voyages who hasn’t been around much of late, so a big “hello” to you in Stoke on Trent. The 4 of us had been to British Salt having my Cortina fixed. It had been a question of having it serviced of course and one of the bolts on the bottom pulley which was held on by two bolts needed replacing. Rather than buy one, they turned one on the lathe. There were all kinds of things going on there with old lorry cabs, an old Dodge lorry cab lying around. Someone had been sent home from work not once but twice. The garage there was absolutely spotless and I’d never seen it looking like that in al my life. They went in to get the paperwork ready. I went in with them but was told that I couldn’t stay. I had to go back into the waiting room. Then they all came out and the four of us walked down the drive. The woman was very slow and her partner was very fast and I was there with Zero. When we went round a bend the guy was suddenly no longer in front of us so we had to wait until the woman caught us up to find out where he had gone. There was something going on in Northwich and it was a lovely afternoon so Zero and I were wondering whether we were going to walk to Northwich or whether we were to go on the bus. We didn’t mind walking and we were sure that the guy would want to walk but she said that her mother (who was this woman) wouldn’t want to as she wasn’t very good at walking. So we waited, and the guy turned up. He’d been reading a notice and that’s why we missed him, a notice about a football competition. Then off we set on foot. We still hadn’t decided whether we would go on the bus or walk but there were loads of things to carry. One of them was a pack of margarine and I ended up with traces of margarine all down the front of my jumper. As we set off the woman said to Zero “you’d better come and sit next to us 2 adults so that you can have a better view” and I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.

But interestingly, as seems to be a regular feature in my nocturnal voyages, the moment that I find a pleasant and interesting character to come along with me, someone from my family always pops up to intervene. That really was the story of my life when I lived back in Crewe all those years ago.

Having written my notes now I’m off to bed. Welsh lesson tomorrow so I have to be on form for that, and then I have the rest of the week to do plenty of things that have been building up. Far too many of them just now and there seems to be more and more.

Thursday 28th January 2021 – HAD I PUT …

… my mind to it, I could have beaten the third alarm quite comfortably today. But when I heard the torrential rain cascading down onto the skylight in the roof, I decided that having a lie-in was probably a much better idea.

Even so, I was still up and about before 07:00 too. No point in hanging around in bed – and that’s not like me at all these days, is it?

And it was a good job that I was up early too. Alison had to take a friend to hospital early this morning but found out that she couldn’t stay with her. So she messaged me to see if I fancied a coffee.

Despite the rain, we met up at the car park at the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein. There wasn’t much choice about where to go for our coffee. But as it was a good idea for me to go and check on the times of trains for tomorrow morning, we headed to the station and had a take-away coffee sitting on one of the benches there while I noted down the train times.

We had a good wander around the town in the rain and then Alison drove me back home where I … errr … had a little rest for a while. In view of the miserable weather there were no photos.

After lunch I had things to do.

While I was at the hospital yesterday I transcribed a ton of notes that had accumulated on the dictaphone from earlier in the week. And so the first task was to amend the entries for MONDAY, TUESDAY and YESTERDAY. And when you read the notes of everywhere where I’ve been, you’ll be just as surprised as I am that I even had time to sleep.

Then of course there were the notes from last night. I’d been out with my family and met up again with a girl who, back in the olden days almost 50 years ago, had been a girlfriend of mine when we were at school. I was trying to persuade her to come home over Christmas and she finally agreed to come back to my house and there was all talk about where she was going to sleep. I had to remind everyone that I was the one who had the bed. The discussion still went on and no-one was getting the message that if she came back, it was me who was going to be interested. One of my younger siblings asked if she had a Father Christmas. She said “no” so they replied “we have a chocolate Father Christmas you can have” and one or two other things. I definitely intended to get her into bed last night but I was a little disappointed that my brother kept on trying to argue his own point of view rather than mine.

The rest of the afternoon was spent choosing the music for the next few radio programmes. I almost finished choosing the music for three programmes but I ran aground on the last one because I need a plug-in for the music-editing program that I have on the laptop but I can’t remember which one it is.

While I was doing all of this, I had a message from the Covid-testing service. Apparently I’m negative, which is what I suspected anyway but I had to go through the process.

For tea I finished off most of the food that was here – there isn’t going to be all that much to take home for a change. And hopefully, if I do have my appointments on Thursday from now on, there will be even less.

Tonight I’m going to have an early night. I need to be up early for my journey back home. It’s going to be a long and tortuous journey home tomorrow, with all kinds of complications.

Monday 18th January 2021 – BACK AT …

… work today and for a change, I had a really good morning.

Admittedly I missed the 3rd alarm but it was only by about 10 minutes or so, do I don’t mind all that much. But after having the medication I sat down and made a start on the radio programme for this week.

And to my surprise, I was able to stick at it without a pause all the way through (except for a pause for my hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread) to a rather late lunch at about 13:20 but having said that, in actual fact I finished the radio programme right the way through to completion.

And my home-made bread, the one that I made yesterday, is really good. It’s not risen as much as I would like, but nevertheless it’s nice, soft and tasty.

After lunch, while I was listening to the programme that I’d made, I made the arrangements for my next trip to Leuven next week.

And this is going to be pretty awful – the line from Granville to Paris is under repair and so I have to catch a train at, would you believe, 05:55. and I am not looking forward to this, especially as there’s a curfew until 06:00. Luckily, medical trips are exempted from the curfew but it still renders me liable to be controlled.

The way back home isn’t any easier either. Although I can have something like a lie-in, I have to go from Paris to Rennes and then catch a bus back to Granville from there. So instead of being home at 14:30, it’s a return at about 17:40.

That took me up to my afternoon – rather, my only walk of the day.

There were one or two other people out there but even so the weather was pretty depressing. Cold and overcast but the view was quite clear. Right out there in the English Channel was a trawler, the pink one that we’ve seen before in the harbour. There were actually a few out there, but they do seem to be fishing close to the French shore.

It’s going to be interesting over the next few weeks to see how the French fishermen will react to the Government of Jersey trying to keep out the French fishermen from their waters in contravention of the Treaty of the Bay of Granville.

With the rain that we have had just recently the path along the headland was quite flooded so I had to pick my way around the puddles.

Eventually I ended up at the end of the headland looking out across the Baie de Mont St Michel towards the Brittany coast. With the clear view today the coast was comparatively clear and the Ile de Rimians has come out really well.

The sun was reflecting off the sea too creating quite a nice effect, but with the advancing daylight, there is no longer the same kind of sunset that we were having two or three weeks ago

From there I carried on along the path on top of the cliffs on the southern side of the headland.

At the viewpoint overlooking the harbour I could see down into the Chantier Navale, and there’s a new tenant in there up on blocks. It’s the pleasure boat Courrier des Iles. Although she’s of comparatively modern construction, she’s been built to an older style and usually undertakes guided tours around the islands off the coast here.

Back here I had a look at the dictaphone to see where I had been during the night.

I’d been in my office in the EU. It was dark and I had the lights out but the computer was on in the background. I was half-asleep lying on my seat. Suddenly I looked up and there were dozens and dozens of people outside wearing Trump hats all loitering around by my window. About 10 minutes later my room was suddenly invaded by thousands of people who began to occupy it. I asked what was going on here and they replied “this is the Trump Convention. We’re all meeting here. There are thousands of us”. I had no intention whatever of staying so I gathered up a few of my possessions. Money had fallen out of my pocket so someone handed it over to me. I asked them what time they were leaving and they said that they were going to Port Glasgow dead drunk at 04:00 so I indicated a few things and said that I’ll be back for these some time this evening and gathered up my things making ready to leave.

whatever is that person now doing, featuring in my nocturnal rambles? That’s something that I don’t understand.

Unfortunately I dozed off for an hour of so which was a terrible shame, but at least I was awake enough to have my hour on the guitar.

Tea was a madras curry out of the freezer followed by the last slice of jam pie from last week. Tomorrow I can start on the jam roly-poly and see how that tastes.

Rosemary rang up later on to have a chat and we were on the phone for another 103 minutes. This is turning into quite a story. But now I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. I have my Welsh to prepare and then in the afternoon I have to visit the doctor.

And so for all of this, I have to be on form so I’m not going to hang about.

Monday 11th January 2021 – JUST TO PROVE …

… that I can do it when I really try, I beat the 3rd alarm to my feet this morning. And I bet that you weren’t expecting that, were you? I know that I wasn’t.

After breakfast I made a start on the radio programme and with having to start it from scratch, it took me until about 14:30 to finish.

It would have taken a lot less time but I rather seriously overran. What I normally do is to choose 10 tracks for a total length of 50 minutes, some text to introduce the tracks which I edit down, and then a final track to finish to make up an hour’s worth of programme.

Unfortunately I was rather carried away with what I did today because I ended up with 51:40 in my 10 tracks, and then 11.46 of text which when edited down made 7:30, did not leave enough time for a decent final track. Consequently I had to go through and edit the text right down again to make some space for a final track.

There was the usual pause for my mid-morning hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread, and a pause for lunch as well with my home-made bread.

Spending the afternoon not doing all that much at all, I did however stop what I wasn’t doing in order to go out for my afternoon walk.

And we were having the kind of weather where I would have been much happier being out with a white stick and a guide dog. This wasn’t a rolling fog but in fact a thin mist of very light rain.

As it was out there in the English Channel and I couldn’t see the Ile de Chausey at all, I was tempted to think about the people out there on the island looking over to us over here and coming out with the old hoary chestnut “fog in the Channel! Continent cut off!” – a throwback to the days when to be born British was to win the lottery of life and wasn’t tha a long time ago.

Anyway I continued along the footpath at the top of the cliff, dodging my way past the mud patches that have mysteriously appeared over the last couple of days.

As I reached the footpath and the car park, out of the doom and gloom came a fishing boat, chugging its way back into port.

It was extremely windy out there this afternoon and the sea was quite rough so it can’t have been very pleasant out there this afternoon, and these small boats take quite a battering out there in this kind of weather.

There were quite a few people out there this afternoon walking around despite the weather, and it wasn’t just people out there enjoying the weather either.

Every now and again we see a bird of prey hovering over the cliffs here at the Point du Roc looking for little rodents and baby rabbits in the grass. And he’s here again doing his stuff on the clifftop.

He spends a lot of time hovering around over the cliffs here and, just like the local fishermen out here sometimes on the rocks, I have yet to see him actually catch anything. But if the cliffs here were barren he wouldn’t be coming back here at all.

The port this afternoon seems to be packed with fishing boats today. And there’s a reason for that too.

With the Treaty of the Bay of Granville being revoked by the British, the Channel Islands should be issuing permits under the Brexit withdrawal agreement for fishing boats from here, but by the middle of last week they had yet to do so. The French Minister for Fisheries came here at the end of last week and told the fishermen that if the Channel Islands hadn’t issued the permits by Sunday, they could head out there on Monday accordingly with the blessing of the French Government.

And so I imagine, they must have set out for the Jersey fishing grounds this morning.

One of the fishing boats that we saw in the previous photo was the shellfish boat Joker that we have seen on several occasions.

As I watched, she left the quayside by the fish processing plant and chugged off across the harbour in the general direction of the chantier navale. As she came into the shadow of the portable boat lift, she did a U-turn and I was treated to a delightful little nautical danse macabre as she pirouetted around.

Actually, I was expecting her to reverse into the lifting bay, and that was what I was expecting the guy on the end of the bay to be organising.

But as I watched, she pulled forward again and came to a stop. For about 10 minutes or so I waited there expecting things to develop but she didn’t move at all.

While I was there, a couple of trawlers came out of the gloom around the headland and headed into port. And as well as that, one of the school buses passed by on the road at the foot of the cliff so it was quite a busy afternoon all in all.

But after waiting for 10 minutes in the rain and Joker hadn’t moved at all during that time, I turned and headed for home.

But that wasn’t the only action taking place in the harbour today.

The fact that the trawlers were heading back into port suggests that the harbour gates were about to open. And sure enough, not only did they open as I watched, Chausiais appeared out of the fog and passed through the harbour gates into the inner port where she moored up at the loading bay underneath the crane.

Having seen her safely home, I wandered off back to my home for a nice hot mug of coffee. With all of this rain and wind, I needed it.

There was the usual hour on the guitar and after that I set off for my evening walk and run.

It was still raining when I went out but I put a brave face on it and headed off outside.

This wasn’t the weather for hanging around so I didn’t stop to take too many photos. I made my way all round my usual route, either running or walking, and ended up overlooking the harbour. We’d seen the gates open earlier today but I was lucky enough to be out here to see them close tonight.

It’s not every day that I manage to see them both on the same day. So, rather content with my self, I ran off home again.

Tea was pasta and burger with vegan pesto sauce, and followed by jam turnover and soya coconut. That turnover was delicious and I hope that the pie is just as good.

Having done all of this, I’m off to bed. I have my Welsh lessons tomorrow (I hope) so I need to be on the top of my form. And that’s not very easy these days, is it?

Wednesday 6th January 2021 – I WON’T EVER SEE …

… my friendly neighbourhood ginger cat again.

Regular readers of this rubbish may recall that I mentioned a while ago that his mum, one of my neighbours, had been offered an apartment in sheltered accommodation due to her age and infirmity. This afternoon as I put my head outside the door of the building I saw a removal van outside the door to her block.

And when I went out later this evening, her apartment was totally empty and cleared out. There she was – she and her cat – gone, and never called me mother (next week, East Lynne).

As for me I was totally gone last night too. When I finally made it into bed, late as usual just recently, I was out like a light and didn’t move a muscle until the alarm went off. And while I didn’t actually beat the third alarm, I wasn’t many minutes behind it.

After the medication I had a few things to do and then I had to ring up the doctor’s and make an appointment. And you can tell that this isn’t the UK.
“Is it urgent?”
“no, not particularly”
“Is 9:30 tomorrow OK?”

Haven’t dealt with that I sat down to start to dictate the notes that I’d written but then almost immediately I was interrupted by a telephone call. Would I like to go for a coffee with the manager of the radio station?

So I managed to dictate all of the notes and then go and have a shower before I headed off across the car park to the Municipal offices at the back. Coffee was served and then we had a lengthy chat about Brexit and Scottish and Welsh independence.

Very little to do with the radio, and it seemed to me that I was being interrogated for something, although I don’t know what it might be. We shall see what transpires of this in due course, if anything.

There was no bass guitar practice tonight. Even though I seem to be a little better today, it’s not that much better and it took me an age to do what it would normally take a couple of hours to do. When it came to 18:00 and knocking-off time, I wasn’t far away from finishing so I pushed on and by 18:35 both of the outstanding radio programmes were now completed up and running.

Of course we had had a couple of interruptions. Lunch was taken of course and unfortunately the bread supplies are quite low. I need to look into this.

There was the afternoon walk and today this was a walk with a difference.

If I’m baking bread tomorrow morning, I may as well make a sourdough fruit loaf so having fed the sourdough and watched it rise like a lift, I headed off into town. I have no jellied fruit and I need to buy some. The Super U in the town is the place for that.

Outside it was cold and cloudy but with the sun poking through the clouds here and there.

But just for a change, instead of the sun lighting up the sea or the Brittany cliffs or whatever, today the sun was streaming down onto the water tower up near the Shopping Centre. It was all particularly impressive.

The Super U came up trumps with the jellied fruit but my new bank card wouldn’t work. having tried a couple of times I paid in cash and went round to the Bank to try it there. Once again, it didn’t work so I went to chat to a cashier.

It seems that Brain of Britain has struck again. Somehow I must have taken the old card out of my wallet, signed the new card and then put the old card back in the wallet.

With nothing else much going on in the town I headed back for home.

By now, with the sun having moved around on its cycle and with the clouds having been blown around by the wind the sun was now shining in a different direction. It was rather later than usual so we were having a gorgeous orange glow in the sky which was reflecting off the water in the bay.

This is without doubt one of the best sunsets that we’ve seen so far, even though the photo was being photobombed by a seagull flying through the shot and I stayed out there for a while to watch it – the sunset that is, not the seagull.

While I was out there I had a look down to see what was going on at the chantier navale

There was nothing special going on there this afternoon. The yacht is still there on its blocks and there are a couple of cars parked around it. It’s not clear though whether they have anything to do with the yacht or its owners. There certainly doesn’t seem to have been much progress on the yacht, whatever they might be doing, over the past few months.

The trawler is still there too, parked up on blocks at the back near the portable boat lift. There’s a van parked right by it so it might well be that there has been some kind of work being undertaken.

But that’s been there for a while too.

Rather than go straight home I went to have a look out to sea from the North side of the headland to see if there was anything exciting going on.

Nothing much at all though this afternoon. No boats out to sea or anything else. There were a few people out walking on the beach, presumably looking for shellfish or something similar lying around on the beach. I’m not sure what they have found.

For a couple of minutes I watched them and then came on back into the apartment for a hot coffee and a slice of Christmas cake. Having digested that I cracked on with the radio work that I had been doing until I finished it.

And I might have finished it earlier too had I not crashed out a couple of times.

After the practice with the 6-string guitar, I headed off out for my evening walk.

Seeing as I hadn’t been round the headland this afternoon I went that way this evening in the dark. The gymnasium of the College Malraux was all lit up and so there must have been something going in there. It’s actually called the Gymnase Jean Galfione.

And in case you are wondering who Jean Galfione was when he was at home, if he ever was, he is probably France’s most successful pole vaulter and won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympic Games as well as winning several other championship events.

It’s a shame that this photo hasn’t worked out as I wanted, but it was taken in quite a hurry.

You can’t actually see clearly in this photo but there’s a woman there with a large dog, and also a laptop computer. And what she’s doing working on a laptop with a dog outside in the middle of winter I really do not know.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few months ago we also saw a couple of other people working on a laptop outside in the cold on the city walls. So I’ve no idea what that is all about.

From there, I ran home – my first run for a week or 10 days. I really wasn’t up to it and I was in agony when I finished but I can’t let this thing pass me by.

Tea was pasta with veg and some veggie balls followed by defrosted apple crumble; And then I made my sourdough loaf – or, at least, the first mix of it so that it can do what it might do overnight. It’s crammed full of goodies like

a pile of whizzed up brazil nuts
several dessert spoons of desiccated coconut
ditto sunflower seeds
a couple of handfuls of raisins
ditto jellied fruits

and I can’t wait to see how it comes out.

And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m going to make some dough for my main loaf and let that rise overnight too. It both loaves have their second kneading first thing tomorrow morning, they’ll be ready to bake as soon a I come back from the shops and I can have fresh bread for lunch.

Tuesday 5th January 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… miserable day today.

At least I managed to hear all of the alarms this morning and I may not have beaten the third alarm, I didn’t go back to sleep at all and I managed to rouse yself round about 07:00 so as far as that goes, it’s some kind of progress better than yesterday.

After the medication I came back and had a listen to the dictaphone. And to my surprise I found that I had actually been somewhere during the night.

As it happens, I don’t remember very much about my voyage but we were doing something like besieging a castle. The castle was outside Granville somewhere. One thing that I noticed was that there was a dip in the ground by this castle with a kind of embankment running through it. It suddenly occurred to me after all these years that this could have been where the tacot ran through. I’d never succeeded in tracing the route of the tacot but that looked the right kind of place for the tacot to have been.
Some other time we were all in an office discussing a certain company or other. The company had had rather a rocky reputation. Someone produced on their mobile phone a logo that this company used. I had a look at it and thought “that’s the company that administers my works pension”. I mentioned that to the room and I was quite surprised by that because I always thought of them as being a reliable company but apparently they aren’t and that made me worry about my pension.

Having dealt with that I had a good work through my Welsh homework, revised some more stuff and then reviewed the forthcoming lesson. With a quick tidy up, I made myself some hot chocolate and grabbed a mince pie (the sourdough fruit loaf was … errr … spoiled) and switched on the portable computer, only to find that the tutor wasn’t available today and the course has been cancelled. That was pretty annoying but it can’t be helped.

So having drunk my chocolate and eaten my mince pie I sat down to do the second part of the radio programme. And by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 I’d finished typing (but not dictating) the notes. Again, it was something of a hard struggle today to find any kind of incentive or motivation.

There was a variety of reasons as to why it took me so long. First of all, there was lunch of course. Another helping of my gorgeous vegetable soup with home-made bread – a lunch made with my own fair hands. And there’s enough soup for another helping too so that ended up in the freezer for another day along with the rest of the butternut squash soup.

We had the afternoon walk too as usual.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall my musing about the scaffolding up at the College Malraux. They had erected it on just half of the College and I was wondering whether they were just going to do half of the roof. But here they are, dismantling the scaffolding at the far end and re-erecting it down the other half of the wall.

They have also relocated the compound too.

So it looks as if we are going to have the whole of the roof repaired. And judging by the amount of tie that it’s taken to do the part that they have done, they are going to be here for a while.

There weren’t too many people out there this afternoon either which was no surprise give the cold, windy weather.

The path around the clifftop and across to the headland was pretty deserted so I walked over there to see what was going on. No ships or boats around at all but the evening sunset was shining really beautifully through the clouds onto the water.

We’ve seen a few of these sunsets just recently but the one this afternoon was up there with the best of them. Unfortunately the cliffs at the back were obscured in the low cloud so the distant view wasn’t as good though.

Taking my leave of the view, I walked off along the path on the south side of the headland.

The sun was shining brightly down on St Pair sur Mer and it was looking like a stage set all bathed in floodlights. I carried on walking along the path, admiring the new door that they fitted on the public conveniences yesterday. Nice big and armour-plated but they have made a basic error in its design and installation, and the workmen will be back in early course.

And still no change of occupant in the chantier navale either. The yacht on the blocks and the trawler by the mobile boat lift.

Down there in the port, we have a visitor in there today.

Brexit doesn’t seem to have interrupted the little coastal freighters from Jersey coming into the port here. Down there in the loading bay underneath the crane we have Thora there. She’s probably come in on the morning tide.

Having taken a photo, I wandered off back home for a mug of hot coffee and a slice of my Christmas cake and to carry on with my work. But then we had another problem to delay me, in that having rather unsuccessfully fought off falling asleep, then I crashed out not once, not twice but three times during the rest of the afternoon and it’s making me feel terrible.

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars and then I wandered off out for my evening walk. And walk too because I’m still feeling pretty terrible.

Along the footpath I walked, as far as the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset where I took a photo to prove that I had been out, and then carried on walking back home again for tea.

Tonight I had baked potatoes, burger in a bap and vegetables followed by the last of the Christmas pudding with custard. These have been delicious meals just recently and we’ll have to see what we can do to keep the delicious meals going.

Having dealt with the food and the washing up, I had another task to perform.

The last bottle of kefir is now in the fridge ready to use and so I had to make some more from the stuff that had been brewing. There were only three kiwis because the fourth had been left rather too long, so I added a pear to it to see how that would develop.

And now I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll be feeling a little beter and that I can get on and do some work and finish off what I’ve been trying to do for the first two days of this week. I really need to get going as I have so much work to do and not a great time to do it.

Monday 4th January 2021 – THAT WAS A …

… horrible day today again.

It is a fact that the day after I come home from Leuven, exhausted by the travel and by the effects of the medication, I find it difficult to do anything the next day while I recover my strength. And when I’ve had no sleep the night before and I’ve been carrying heavy shopping around as well, it simply amplifies the effect.

When I’ve slept through the alarms in the past, at least I’ve heard them somewhere in the distance but I’ve taken no notice. This morning though, I didn’t hear a thing. Nothing in the night disturbed me. There wasn’t even anything on the dictaphone so it must have been one of the deepest sleeps that I’ve ever had.

Mind you, I didn’t go to bed until 02:30. Despite the heavy couple of days that I’d had, I wasn’t tired at all for some reason and I don’t understand that. And so it’s no surprise that I didn’t awaken until about 09:30, and didn’t leave the bed until about 10:20.

After the medication then, with nothing to transcribe from the dictaphone. I could make a start on the radio programmes. But while in the past I’ve been able to dash off a programme in a couple of hours, by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 to play the guitar I had just about finished writing, neve rmind dictating and editing, the notes for just one programme.

Fighting off sleep (unsuccessfully a couple of times), and not having the same energy that I’ve had just recently, it’s clear that I can’t keep going like I could previously. I hope that I can pick up in due course.

Lunch was some of my delicious vegetable soup, even nicer than it was yesterday, and later on this afternoon I went out for my afternoon walk.

The temperature had dropped to about 3°C and it was damp and miserable out there. There were a few people nevertheless walking on the beach out by the Plat Gousset this afternoon, something that surprised me.

There was quite a mist out there too and it wasn’t possible to see any distance particularly. So haven’t taken a photograph of the beach I headed off along the path on top of the cliff

Across the lawn and across the car park I went until I reached the end of the headland looking out over the bay.

As I mentioned just now, it was pretty cold this afternoon and so I was surprised to see a couple of people sitting on the bench by the old sentry cabin right out on the end. They can’t have been enjoying the view in this weather.

With nothing else going on out there that I could see, I walked off along the path to see what was going on at the chantier navale. And the answer to that was “nothing”. The trawler and the yacht were still there, in exactly the same position that they where before they left.

Not too far away from the viewpoint overlooking the harbour is a set of public conveniences. There’s a roll-up lightweight door that rolls down when they are closed but before I went away, that had been damaged.

Today there were a couple of workmen there. They’d taken away the roll-up door, or what was left of it, and they were fitting a heavy-duty metal sliding door instead. I watched them for a while and then headed home for a nice hot coffee and a slice of Christmas cake.

What with chatting to Liz and dozing off a few times I didn’t do much work, and I knocked off for a very enjoyable session on the guitars.

Later on I went out for my evening walk. Walk, not run. I wasn’t feeling up to running around tonight. I must be feeling under the weather.

It was now 2°C outside and trying its best to rain. Not the best weather to be out there at all. The view along the coast had improved slightly and down the coast to Donville the street lights stood out clearly. The image though, taken with the NIKON 1 J5 didn’t come out as clearly as I liked though. I shall have to have the big NIKON D500 repaired pretty quickly.

As you can tell, I’m down on the footpath underneath the walls tonight. Despite the weather today, it must have been dry while I was away because the path was no longer flooded.

Further along the coast, the lights on the promenade at St Martin de Bréhal were quite bright this evening. The view was nothing like as clear as this earlier today

From here I carried on walking along the footpath and eventually ended up at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. There wasn’t anything else going on around there either so I pushed on across the Place Maurice Marland – again at a walk.

The rain was starting to fall a little heavier now so I wasn’t going to hang around. I might not be able to run today but I can walk pretty quickly.

Now that the scaffolding has gone from the house on the corner I could walk down the alleyway and into the Rue Notre Dame.

No black cat to greet me tonight, and no Christmas lights in the Place Cambernon either. I’d noticed from my viewpoint earlier that all of the Christmas lights in the town had been switched off so I suspected that that would be the case here.

The lights are still there though. They haven’t actually got around taking them down yet. And so it wouldn’t have heurt to leave them illuminated to add a touch of gaiety to the place in these difficult times.

While I’d been walking around the path earlier I’d seen all of the fishing boats out at sea heading home to unload.

By the time that I’d walked around my circuit, the first ones had started coming into port. The tide can’t be far off coming right in.

Back home I made tea. Rice with veg and a vindaloo out of the freezer followed by Christmas pudding and custard. That was a really nice tea.

While i’d been out Rosemary had rung so I called her back and we discussed this and that. for a whole hour and 38 minutes. This is why I’m just dashing off my notes – because it’s late and I’m tired. Tomorrow it’s the Welsh lesson and then hopefully I can push on with this work. And I haven’t forgotten that I didn’t do my Welsh homework today. That was disappointing.

Must do better.

Wednesday 30th December 2020 – I HAVEN’T BEEN …

… very far today.

And that’s because for most of the day we’ve been in the grip of a torrential downpour. It was going at it hammer and tongs when I awoke so to be honest I turned over and went back to sleep where I stayed until about 09:30.

It was still raining when I awoke so I had a drink and then listened to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There had been a party going on in the attic of my house in Virlet and for some unknown reason all of the lights went out. It wasn’t dark, but I was there at the cables trying to touch different cables with a connector to see if the lights would come on, trying to work out the position in which these two cables ought to be in, in order to make the lights wotk. It seemed pretty straightforward but you’ve no idea how complicated it was last night when all of this was going on. Occasionally I was getting the lights to be illuminated but they didn’t look bright enough, suggesting a bad earth or something like that or whether they had the terminals the wrong way round (which of course wouldn’t work LEDs). I was making such a hard job of making this job correct and I have to say that the wiring that I was messing around was a total mess to start with. It didn’t resemble anything like a set of wiring ought to do, except the wiring that I did right at the very beginning.

Later on there was a conflict in a family-run business and the old guy who ran it had been shunted out and the two brothers were fighting over it. It came to dividing up the assets and 1 of the brothers suggested that because of the way of life of the other, he wasn’t entitled to as much money. This discussion went on for ages and in the end they agreed to settle it by an exchange of assets – a painting and something else would be exchanged for a painting and something else of greater value and that way it would be quits. The 2nd brother went to talk to his father about it and in the end, secretly one night before this exchange was due to take place they agreed a change of assets themselves which left n°2 son better off and withdrawing all his claims, leaving his father who was in a much better place to fight the claims against his other son. As they were saying goodbye to each other it was a case of “for God’s sake don’t go home. You want to hit the road straight away to make sure that the other son doesn’t come round to your house by accident and catch you with this because you’ve had a much better deal and he would be extremely dismayed by this”. And then the father too hit the road with his ill-gotten gains but started to be dogged all the way by his illegitimate children turning up from when he was younger claiming their share, unpaid bills suddenly appearing that the company hadn’t satisfied and so on which would lead to a seizure of assets. It seems that the n°2 brother wasn’t as stupid as he looked and had gone and shopped his father for all of this in the hope that if all of the assets were liquidated he would receive more because of his family share of it.

This led to another walking adventure, of which there have been more than a few just recently. I was walking with another couple of guys walking away from somewhere which might have been this situation and having a really pleasant and pleasurable long walk through the south-west England countryside trying to get away from civilisation for a while. On one occasion we ended up lying underneath a car talking about bread pudding, whether you butter the slices of bread or not (ohhh! The excitement!)

Finally, I was being held prisoner for some reason and a big burly guy something like Bernard Bresslaw had been instructed to “deal with” me. When he took me outside I explained that we’d had our differences but they had always been fair fights and we took what was coming in good grace, but this was a pretty unfair way of doing it and did he think it right? etc. he started to see my point of view and agree but just then his boss came in, clearly exhausted and exasperated after a hard day somewhere and barked out a few orders, and I could see then at that moment that I was wasting my time.

As you might imagine, it took me quite a while to transcribe all of that. And what surprised me was that I’d been so far. I’d had a really bad night it it had taken me hours to go to sleep.

By the time that I’d finished, the rain had stopped so I cleared off quickly into town.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been looking at this property for quite a while.

It’s part of the complex where I have my accommodation, a part that has not yet been developed. It’s been a rubbish dump for quite a while until they started to tidy it all up a while ago.

And I know the story behind it now because I asked the complex manager when I saw him. It seems that they had started to develop it into apartments for the hotel but planning permission was refused, and they have been fighting about it for the last 10 years. The manager isn’t all that optimistic about its future.

As for the tidying up, they apparently had a notice served on them by the local council.

There’s yet more excitement going on just around the corner in the Tiensestraat.

There’s a vague idea going on around in my head that last time that I was here they were doing something to one of the properties there but it seems that whatever it was that was here, they have simply erased it from the map. This is going to be something to keep an eye on over the next while.

From here I headed off into town to see what was going on. And the answer to that is “nothing”. It was a bit much to expect that the Christmas market was going to be working this year.

There was nothing whatever happening in FNAC either. If that was their New Year sale, it’s a bit thin. And I imagine that the New Year sales for most places will be the same.

In the Bondgenotenlaan they have been working on this property for a few years now.

It’s where WIBRA used to be and after they left it was totally stripped out down to the four walls. And it’s another thing that’s taking a while to come to a conclusion. They are a long way from finishing it.

Talking of WIBRA, I stuck my head in there and also in Zeeman but there was nothing to tempt me. Not even a nice new
woolly hat that I would like. I ended up in Delhaize for just a couple of things and then came back here.

After lunch I sat down and did some work on the radio programmes. I now have two programmes with the music chosen, remixed and paired. And I’m hoping to do a couple more on Friday.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do my Welsh homework as I … errr … had a little relaxation.

No tea either – I wasn’t al all hungry, so I wrote up my notes for the day, such as they were. No evening walk either as it’s still pouring down with rain and didn’t leave off until after curfew as you might expect.

So a rather late night, and tomorrow I have the hospital when I can see what they are going to do to me. And see how I’ve been keeping for the last couple of months since my last appointment in October.

And I shudder to think.

Saturday 26th December 2020 – I’M HAVING …

… a few technical issues right now. If the computer causing me a few upsets isn’t enough, it’s now the turn of the NIKON D500 to start to give me grief.

Since the computer blew a fuse the other day, uploading photos from the camera to the computer has been a long, laborious process. The USB sockets on the front must be USB 2.0, not 3.0 because it takes an age and quite often it’s stalled and I have to upload them 1 by 1.

The other day in fact it wouldn’t upload any at all and so I had to open them from the camera with the computer and then save them to the Hard Drive. This evening, I went up upload today’s and yesterday’s and nothing happened at all. Wondering if I were to use the XQD card reader I plugged that in, put the card in and waited …. and nothing happened at all.

And so I put the card back in the camera and “please format this card”. So I plugged the card reader and card into the USB 3.0 port on another computer, and sure enough “device not recognised”. So I put the card back into the camera and plugged that into the machine and although it identifies the camera, it can’t read the card.

So that’s that then. It looks as if I’ll be having to make do with the little NIKON 1 J5 for a while until I can organise the solution to this problem.

I’m not having a very good time, am I?

Especially not as I didn’t get up until about 10:45 this morning. But considering that I was still awake and working at 03:30 this morning that’s not too bad.

After the meds I finally sorted out the dictaphone. There were lots happening through the night but I could only remember a bit of it. They were dealing with some important issue at a Government Office and they had asked someone to bring in a huge pile of paperwork relating to his unexplained wealth. It was an enormous stack of stuff that he had brought in. The husband of one of my sisters was sorting the post and some of it he was actually filing away and I didn’t want him to do that as he was having to present it all to the person who was looking at the file and wanted to make sure that it was all there. I left and was walking down this terraced street in London, a really nice modernised terrace and this guy was living there in one of these terraced houses and they were on their way to move house. So I went to have a look round at their old premises. Just across the road were more houses of this type and 2 guys were walking down there. They decided that they would go into this house to deliver a package. When these boys saw what was inside, one of them let out a really camp expression. I walked on round the corner and almost fell down this enormous hole at least 40 feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen workmen trying to clear some slurry away because there was a huge water leak down there. They were presumably trying to get at it to block it. But all the local kids had somehow managed to jump in and were sitting on the edge of this water waiting to get their bath for a swim. As I was taking a photo another young boy in a swimming costume pushed past me ready to jump in and it was very much a busy kind of place. But there was much more to it than this and I can’t remember a thing now.

A bit later they (who did? Have I missed something here?) dressed a girl up as a mermaid and she came out with these bright red vivid clothes and that took everyone by surprise

Later on that night my sister and I went off and came to a restaurant. She ordered her meal but I had to wait though while they organised a few tables, things like, that, washing the floors. It occurred to me that I could have ordered mine and waited for it so I went to order it. I asked what was on the vegetarian menu. The girl said that they had vegetarian food but no menu, and she told me what there was. There was one dish that I didn’t recognise at all. I asked what it was and she said that “it’s only been on the market since yesterday. I’ve no idea what it is either”. I said “yes, OK I’ll try that”. She decided to serve that for me and put it all ready on a plate. I went back to the table. Before I’d gone away we’d sat to talk to someone who lived in Shavington and when I came back there was someone else there, one of the boys of a family who had several of them. I said “God, has everyone else who has been to Shavington come here?”. My sister was chatting away to this boy then off he went and my meal still hadn’t turned up at this time, hardly a surprise as I’s only been away from the counter 30 seconds.

Apart from that, I’ve not done a great deal today either. Mostly just messing around here and there. But I did do two weeks’ worth of Welsh homework to make up for yesterday. And I did have lunch too – my usual Christmas lunch a day too late of toast and vegan butter and vegan mushroom pate.

Two trips outside today too, my afternoon walk with the massive crowds and my evening run when I was practically all alone. And this evening I seemed to be running a lot easier than I have been for quite a while. The weather wasn’t at all bad either – not what you might think for the middle of winter.

Tea was exactly the same as yesterday, listening again to my Christmas rock concert. I hope that those of you who heard it enjoyed it as much as I did.

Despite being tired, I’m not ready for bed yet. I’ll hang around for a bit, add yesterday’s dictaphone notes to the blog, that kind of thing. A day of rest tomorrow but I have packing to do ready for Leuven on Monday.

Friday 25th December 2020 – I HOPE THAT YOU …

…. all had a really wonderful Christmas and that Santa was very kind to you, and brought you everything that you deserved.

As for me, he brought me a Day of Rest. And I really do mean that because I really have done absolutely nothing at all today. I haven’t edited the photos today for a start. In fact until I made tea at about 20:00 tonight all I’d had to eat was a clementine and a boiled sweet.

Mind you, with not leaving my stinking pit until about 10:20, what do you expect? I had a really good lie-in.

Despite all of that though, I did go out for an afternoon stroll around the headland in the crowds, and for the photos, as I said you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for all of those.

Back here, I had a slice of my Christmas cake (I forgot to mention that just now) with my coffee. It’s an old-fashioned spiced ginger cake with nuts, and I iced and marzipanned it. It’s a bit sickly and sweet but the lemon icing works extremely well and for a first go, it’s not bad at all.

Eventually though I did manage to listen to the dictaphone. This was another James Bond film and I’d been sent to catch someone. I’d gone to this magnificent 5-star hotel, an enormous place, and I came down for breakfast. I’d had a really bad night with virtually no sleep and a long day before that with nothing to eat. So I came down and eventually found a table sitting enxt to a guy. I asked “do you have any objection if I sit here?”. He said “not legally, no” so I could see that he was something of an amusing character and I thought that that would cheer me up. I noticed that it was a buffet breakfast so I went over to the buffet and started with 2 glasses of orange juice which I downed straight away and filled uo. I went to get some coffee and then to sort out some bread. The 1st thing that I noticed here hot cross buns and I have a thing about them so I immediately grabbed 2 to stick on my plate thinking to tell Liz “you’ll never guess what I had for breakfast this morning”. It was in the middle of this queue to get my breakfast together that I awoke.

Tea tonight was seitan slices with veg and roast potatoes – really nice, it was too, followed by Christmas pudding and custard. And while I was eating it, I was listening to my Christmas concert on the radio. There are plenty of imperfections in it, but if you didn’t know about them, you wouldn’t notice and it all went down really well. If you missed it today And that reminds me – if you missed it, you can hear it on Saturday 26th December at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK time, 15:00 Montreal/Toronto time at HERE. And if you miss it then, it’s downloadable on a podcast – look for “A La Pointe du Roc 59”.

That’s about it, really. I’m not doing anything else. I’ll come back and add in the dictaphone notes and the photos when I feel like it, but I think that I deserve a rest, especially as I’m off on my travels on the 28th.

As I said earlier, I hope that you all had a wonderful day and I wish you all the best for the season. Have a nice day tomorrow too.

Thursday 24th December 2020 – WOW!

Even though I say it myself, I’m quite impressed with this photo that I took this afternoon.

It’s not necessarily the quality of it because I still have a great deal of issues with that, but it’s the dramatic and stark effect of the colours here. Just as I lined up a shot of Cancale silhouetted on its clifftop across the Bay, the light gave me everything I wanted just at the correct moment and it’s come out exactly as I would have wished, with no post-processing at all.

It’s one of those very rare photographs where everything that you are trying to do suddenly does it itself with you having to try.

Another thing that I did without really having to try was to haul myself out of bed before the third alarm. And I bet that that took you as much by surprise as it took me too. Mind you, I was only sitting on the edge of the bed is a dazed and weary state, not exactly running around like a headless chicken.

After the medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was in the USA last night and Trump was giving a concert. He had someone playing banjo or mandolin or something and he was playing bass and singing, doing some kind of rap about how good he was, and everyone in the crowd was greeting him with stony silence. He was becoming all worked up on the stage and everyone was treating him with stony silence. When everyone left I had a look at the bass guitar. It was just a cheap $29 thing so I said to someone of the road crew “at least you might have got him a real guitar to play with”. They replied “he does have a real one but he was afraid he’d be all emotional”. Trump heard this conversation and came over, and started to have a bit of a go at me about it. I said “I’ll tell you what my life means to me. Come with me”. He couldn’t get the hang of what was going on but “come with me, come outside”. So we went outside and there was Caliburn. I opened the door to the back of Caliburn and there on the floor was a mattress and a sleeping bag and a few bits and pieces. I was living rough. And there at the side of the sleeping bag was the Gibson EB3. “That’s what my bass means to me” I said. “It’s all that I have here”.

The next thing was about the wife of my friend on the Wirral. She was telling me that she had been taken into a bedroom by an Indian guy to which I said “lucky her” and they spent 4 hours together so I said “even more lucky her” discussing some kind of new sales venture for some kind of product that she might have been interested in. There was much more to it than this but in the time it took me to grab hold of the dictaphone I forgot it.

The next hour or so was spent dealing with the arrears of work. I’ve been stuck in Chateau Gaillard for the last 2 weeks and I can’t seem to drag myself out of there. I seem to be bogged in there quite deeply at the moment.

That took me up to shower time and weigh time, and I’ve gained 1kilo in weight in this last week. But examining my body closely (and isn’t that a gruesome task?) I noticed that my feet and ankles are swollen. So it looks as if the water retention is back again and that will explain this weight issue.

Off I set to the shops for the groceries to see me through the Christmas period.

It’s the tradition in France for people to have oysters as a Christmas treat (which probably explains why so many babies are born here at the end of September) and there in the Rue Lecampion where there’s the fishmonger’s, with the butcher just down the road, it just looks like Poland as I remember it in the 1970s, or the UK after 6 months of Brexit.

But I was joking about the oysters and babies just now. Don’t you believe everything that you hear about oysters. I had 12 of them on my wedding night and only 9 of them worked.

It’s unlikely that I’m going to get down into town to see the Christmas lights this year. I’m not well and I know it, and I’m not going to tax my system too much.

But it didn’t prevent me from having a good mooch around for a look at the decorations in the Place Charles de Gaulle. And I was right about one thing, in that they aren’t very inspiring this year. It seems to be merely the same stuff that has been here for the last ever so many years, just arranged differently.

But anyway I pushed on to the Railway Station for my tickets for next week. The clerk in the office was on her own so I asked her about the trains next week. At the moment, they are still running as advertised. Whether it stays like that, we shall see.

One thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that pathetic parking takes up a lot of room on these pages.

Not so much recently – not (I hasten to add) because the situation has improved but because there is just so much of it that it’s become boring and even i’m fed up of it. But I couldn’t let a thing like this go by.

Right outside the railway station is the bus station. all of the long-distance buses (of which there are plenty) as well as the two service buses for the town come here and there are 4 bays. But this driver has decided that he’s allowed to park in one of them and the bus that goes in there can park elsewhere.

Of course, it’s a BMW and like Audi drivers, they consider that the rules of the road and of common courtesy don’t apply to them.

On the way up the hill I stuck my head in the newsagent’s. I’d heard that US Granville had made some club facemasks and the newsagent was selling them. These are tough times and we have to do what we can to help things along right now, and so I bought one to wear when I’m in Belgium.

At La Vie Claire they had Seitan slices so I bought two ridiculously expensive packs and then went round to LIDL for the shopping. I bought most of what I needed but shock! horror! no Brussels sprouts. How do you have Christmas without Brussels sprouts?

Luckily I still have some frozen ones for the meals on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but it’s going to be touch and go after that.

On my way back into town again I went past the Place Generale De Gaulle again.

There’s quite a lot going on in there now that wasn’t happening earlier. They seem to be setting up some kind of Christmas market in the Square, although that doesn’t look much like Christmas goodies to me.

But at least the kiddies’ roundabout was working and entertaining some clients. And that’s good news because Christmas is all about children anyway and they ought to be making the most of it while they are still young enough.

There’s a fresh seafood stall on the harbour every Friday morning selling the stuff that his boat has landed that morning. But with Friday being Christmas Day it looks as if he’s having his stall a day earlier to cash in on the Christmas trade.

And quite right too. Even though I don’t eat animal products, it’s up to others what they do and there is nothing at all quite like fresh food of any description.

So having caught my breath, for I was carrying some quite heavy shopping, I carried on back home where I had a slice of my fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate.

And then, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out good and proper on my chair. It was late-ish when I returned from the shops but even so, it was 13:30 when I awoke, feeling like total death yet again. This is what I meant earlier when I said that I wasn’t too good right now. It’s just not possible at the moment for me to live a normal life like this and it’s dismaying me very much.

So at lunch, I’d run out of bread so I set about making some more. Not the sourdough this time but a real loaf. I want to see how my technique is doing and to see if the fault about my sourdough not rising is because of me or the sourdough.

And so I bashed out a quick 500-gramme dough mix with yeast and several handfuls of sunflower seeds and left it on one side to see what it would do.

By now it was walkies time so I set out into the wild blue yonder.

And wild was hardly the word either. The wind has shifted around and we now have a nor’easter instead of a sou’wester as we had yesterday. So if you thought that the Bay of Granville was turbulent yesterday, you ought to have seen it this afternoon. There hasn’t been anything quite like this for a considerable period of time and I bet that the boys in Thora and Normandy Trader are glad that they are tucked up safe and sound in the harbour in St Helier.

It was enough to make me want to join them but the journey across to Jersey would be extremely uncomfortable right now.

There were hordes of people out there this afternoon, everyone having a pre-Christmas walk I reckon and making the most of the lack of rain (for the moment at least).

And if you are able to peer underneath the clouds, it was the kind of afternoon where the visibility was so impressive and you could see a very long great distance down the coast. Cap Frehel and its lighthouse were just about visible with the naked eye over to the right on this photo.

We’ve had some good shots of Cap Frehel in the past, better than this one of course, but it’s not every day that it’s visible with the naked eye

Just a little earlier I taked about the lack of rain – “at the moment” – and I said that for a reason.

While I was scanning along the Brittany coast with the camera, I noticed a strange phenomenon out there in certain places so I photographed it for a closer look to see what it might be. And back here in the comfort and warmth of my apartment I determined that it was actually a rainstorm out there.

Of course, as I said earlier, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for us to be bothered about it right now, but the wind is a highly volatile and uncertain beast and can change direction at any given moment.

Having taken my photographs I walked off across the lawn and the car park (almost being squidged by a motorist reversing out of a parking place) down to the end of the headland.

Once more, there are no boats out there in the bay but we do have this beautiful sunset, an excellent example of which you have already seen. And here’s another really good view of Cancale across the Baie de Mont St Michel, lit up as if it was on a stage and they had switched on the spotlights.

Far too many people about for me to break into a run this afternoon so I walked off down the path instead.

We saw just now how churned up the sea was around the north side of the headland with this raging nor’easter.

Nothing could have been a greater contrast than the sea down on the southern side of the headland by the port. Whereas yesterday we had a raging storm with waves crashing over the sea wall, today the sea seems to be almost becalmed.

Actually, it isn’t but that was how it was looking this afternoon especially after yesterday.

But that was enough for me anyway, I had a peek in at the chantier navale to see that there was no change whatever there, and then carried on home for a hot coffee and a mince pie. And delicious, if a bit sweet and sickly.

And the bread had risen like a lift. I’d never had it go up quite like this before. It was so impressive. I gave it a good squeezing to let the gases out and then shaped it and put it in its bread mould, covering it with a damp tea-towel.

And now I have a little Christmas present for you all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my friend Liz and I produced a series of programmes for several local radio stations in the Auvergne under the “Radio Anglais” banner back in those days.

While I was looking around for something I came across one of the Christmas Specials that we did, so I’ve uploaded it to the internet FOR YOU ALL TO LISTEN TO OVER CHRISTMAS with much love and best wishes from me.

Don’t take too long in listening to it because I need the space on my server so I’ll be taking it down again after a week or so. So you’ll probably be better off downloading it onto your own machine. Or, if you make your next Amazon purchase via the links on the right and I receive a small commission on the deal, I can buy more space.

While I was at guitar practice I had the oven warming up and I slipped the loaf of bread in there at a suitable moment along with a potato and, later on, a slice of frozen home-made pie.

After the guitar, it was time for evening walkies. And with the wind now blowing in the opposite direction from yesterday, it was the outward journey that caused me more problems than just a few.

In fact, I had to abort the trip along the Rue du Nord and seek shelter within the narrow streets of the old town by dodging down an alley way. We’ve seen plenty of photos of the Rue St Jean in our time but we haven’t seen one from this viewpoint. The Place Cambernon is just down there at the bottom and the Porte St Jean which we have photographed on several occasions is right down there at the end out of the picture.

And if you look up at the top you can see the spire of the Eglise Notre Dame du Cap Lihou all illuminated.

But I’m not going that way. I’m going in this direction down towards the Place de l’Isthme.

We took a photo of the street from the Place de L’Isthme a few weeks ago and so I reckoned that I should take one back up to the place where I was at the time, just for the record. And then I set off for a run along there all the way to the end of the street.

As I emerged into the open square at the end I was hit by a huge blast of wind that brought me to a dead stop, and I’m not surprised because it was wild.

That was enough to make me not want to hang around any longer out of doors – especially now that it had started to rain as well, And so I went down ste steps to the Place Maurice Marland and ran on home.

But up on the walls the night was looking so beautiful despite the rain, so I took a photo of the harbour, the Baie de Mont St Michel and all of the lights out there twinkling away on the Brittany coast. It was all looking quite magical tonight and I’ve no idea why.

But that’s enough of my waxing lyrical for the moment. It’s time I was at home tucking into the tea.

While my veg was cooking (endives, broccoli, leeks and carrots) I had a look at the bread to see how it was doing.

It had risen quite a lot while it was sitting for its second proofing, but in the oven it’s not done too much more. But as I took it out of its mould, part of it had stuck so I sampled it. And it was perfect, it really was. The best that I’ve made to date. There’s nothing wrong with my technique at all.

With the veg water I made a delicious gravy, and the whole lot was finished off with apple crumble with some soya dessert stuff. That was what I called a good tea.

So now it’s Christmas Day and I’ve written up my notes. I’m off to bed. A Merry Christmas to you all and I hope that Santa brings you lots of nice things, including, more important than presents, lots of love and good health. We’re living in hard times right now but at least we are living, and the joys of the internet mean that we can stay even closer all the same.

There’s our radio show to listen to and tomorrow night at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK Time, 15:00 Montreal and Toronto time etc, there’s my Christmas broadcast on LE BOUQUET GRANVILLAIS. It’s a special live rock concert that I’ve spent some time preparing and I hope that you’ll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed preparing it.

Best wishes from me.

Tuesday 22nd December 2020 – IF ANYONE THINKS …

… that I’m feeling cocky, firstly I’m not in China and secondly it’s a disgusting habit anyway.

And thirdly, to put a complete dampener on everything, it was 09:40 when I finally arose from the dead, thanking my starts that I didn’t have a Welsh lesson today otherwise I would have been seriously incommoded. Yes, that’ll teach me to crow about how well I’m doing.

But I can’t understand it. I was in bed long before midnight and I should have leapt out of bed with alacrity, even if alacrity wasn’t anywhere near me at the time.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise, there was some stuff on there from yesterday that I must have forgotten to transcribe. So first off I attended to that and put it all on line.

After that I turned my attention to the voyages of last night. And it is hardly any surprise that I was so exhausted after the distance that I must have travelled during the night

There was one of these tribal dance things going on in Europe. I can’t remember too much now but I’d had a lot of difficulty going off to sleep what with one thing or another and I remember saying “just wait until i do my tribal dance before I go off to sleep and I’ll be fine”. Of course there were so many different foreign words in the English language at that time but they were all to do with this tribal dance stemming from all kinds of different countries where every country had one to celebrate or commemorate going to sleep, something like that

Later on there was something happening about a bunch of girls who were travelling around in medieval times and fighting their way through to success or whatever. On one occasion they were being led to storm this citadel. When they got up the steps to what I suppose you might call a landing where there were windows that looked out of this building they were all there ready with their spears and arrows ready to repel whatever it was that was coming along behind them

Some time later I was back in this big Czech castle again and we were attending an auction of paintings. There was a painter I had my eye on – he had a painting exhibited at this auction that was coming up for sale and I really fancied it. I’d drawn out a couple of hundred Euros for it. The auctioneer was selling at a hell of a speed and I was running after him trying to keep up while he was auctioning everything. He eventually reached the painting that I wanted and the bidding he started at €900 and it went up and up and up. I thought that I was totally wasting my time here. No matter how much I liked these pictures I’m never going to be able to afford them. A few people were making disparaging comments about how the lights are going out in the Czech Republic now that all of the treasures are being sold off. It was a real gothic montrosity kind of night and I awoke in a cold sweat.

After that I’d been to see someone in mid-Wales – it might have been Nina or someone like that and to come back I’d got on the train. The line was old and in bad condition and unfit but the price of the ticket was peanuts. I saw that they were having an offer every Sunday that you could go on the Mid Wales line for almost nothing. So the next Sunday I went down to see Esi in Cardiff. We met and she took me back to the University. She was amazed that I’d come and even more amazed that I’d brought my Welsh stuff with me. She went through my bag and laughed at some of the food that I’d brought and wondered what I was doing with it. Then she started to engage is some Welsh dialogue with me and said later on that we’ll go through a student-teacher exchange and we can ask each other questions all that kind of thing based on the text and I could send my answers to her before Wednesday. It was Sunday afternoon now. All in all it sounded pretty good.

While I was in Cardiff Louise and I went for our driving tests. We both took them simultaneously and ended up back at the Driving Test Centre. She returned a little before me. I sat in the car and waited. I didn’t realise that you had to enter the building and queue. By the time that I realised this and went in the queue was enormous. It took hours and hours to get to the front, people pushing past me and fighting their way to the front. I was really unsure about what I was supposed to be doing but everyone else seemed to know. Eventually I reached the window and someone took my details and typed it into the computer. he told me about a roundabout. They had changed a roundabout and they hadn’t marked the street yet and I’d driven straight through it. I ought to know that it’s a roundabout. But I explained that I didn’t know the town at all. he said that I had all the temperament required so he gave me a kind-of green sticky thing like a shamrock. I asked him what I was supposed to do with it but I didn’t get an answer.

The alarm went off instead and I turned over and went back to sleep. But I didn’t get back in touch with where I had been.

Writing all of that out took up most of what was left of the morning and then I had another job to do. I’d been playing the three concerts that I’d done yesterday and there was a join in one of them that I didn’t like at all. And so before lunch I had a closer look

And in fact, I could see on closer examination that there were three or four that weren’t very good. This is one that I joined together but never used when we were working with Radio Anglais and while I suppose that I was really pleased with it back then it shows just how much I’ve learnt since then. Anyway, I did the broadcast again – at least, I overdubbed a couple of joins and rejoined the other couple, and it’s much better.

So this is basically telling me that the ones that I have on the back burner for later (there’s three more from that period, I reckon) are no good and need to be done again. But strangely enough, editing them together is the bit that I like the most.

This meant a rather late lunch (yet again) and I’d missed my morning break too.

After lunch there wasn’t much time to do very much so based on the theory that “it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do something – anything” I spent an hour or so editing more photos of the trip in 2019 to Greenland. And there are some pretty good ones in there too and I’m impressed with a few of them.

There is the usual afternoon walk of course and despite the weather I set off on my route.

For the past I don’t know how many weeks there have been seagulls, either adults or juveniles, sitting on one of the window ledges and on more than one occasion seen them tapping on the window with their beaks. And today, with this juvenile here, I could see exactly why.

It seems that the owners have put on the inside of their window a model of a bird and it might possibly be that that has something to do with why the seagulls seem to like to visit that window ledge.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the other building there was a window ledge that the seagulls liked to frequent. The owner cured them of the habit – by buying a cat.

So I pushed on along the path, dodging the puddles because once again it was a grey, miserable and depressing day.

Across the lawn, across the car park and down to the headland to see what was going on out in the Bay. And if there was anything going on in the Bay I wouldn’t have seen it anyway. That, dear reader, is not fog or a low cloud but a good and proper rainstorm.

It was raining where I was standing of course, but out there it was pelters and with the wind blowing my way, I reckoned that it wouldn’t be long before I got the lot. This was not the time to be hanging around admiring the view.

And so I pushed off along the path on top of the cliffs, a path that in places was well under water and I had to scramble up the bank in a couple of places.

We’ve had rain, cloud, and all hat kind of miserable weather but one thing that we weren’t having very much of was wind. But there must have been plenty of it blowing around somewhere out in the Atlantic because we were having some really heavy rollers coming into the Bay and colliding with the sea wall right now.

Eventually I managed to struggle on as far as the viewpoint overlooking the port, and in the chantier navale I could see that the trawler that had moved to a position by the portable boat lift was still there. Obviously, my thinking yesterday that it would soon be back in the water was somewhat optimistic.

But one thing that I wasn’t over-optimistic about is the state of the fishing industry.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the last few nights we’ve seen the fishing boats in their hordes out in the cruel sea of the bay of Granville having a swansong. I made sure that I had a good look around the port this afternoon and there is not one single fishing boat of any kind at all in the harbour.

There’s only Marité and Joly France and the commercial sailing boats in there now. As I said yesterday, anything at all connected with the town’s fishing fleet that will float is currently out at sea catching what it can.

The market is even more vibrant right now with the British being excluded from the Continent, their catch rotting away in the back of a lorry on a deserted and abandoned airfield somewhere in Kent, something about which I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Back here I had a coffee, had a long chat with Liz on the internet, did some more Welsh revision and then attended to a few tasks before having an enjoyable hour or so on the guitars. But if only I could ease some of the pressure by finishing off a few of the arrears I’d enjoy myself so much more.

On the way out for my evening runs I bumped into a neighbour and we put the world to rights, and then I headed off into the wind and rain for my run.

The fishing fleet was too far out to photograph tonight and in any case there was too much cloud and rain about so I ran on and took a photo of the Rue du Nord and the Place d’Armes. And I’ve taken many better photographs of here too during my time.

With all of this rain I reckoned that there would be far too much water about down on the footpath underneath the walls
so I pushed on along the road at a run and then went down the steps to the bottom.

One of the things with which I’ve been experimenting is, with the delayed timer switch, taking few photos of the same object using different settings to see if there’s much of a difference in the output.

From down on the path underneath the walls, on a dry bit, I set up the camera on yet another handy stone to take a few photos of the Plat Gousset to see how they would come out. This one here came out quite well, I suppose and I was reasonably satisfied with that.

And so I fiddled around with a few settings and set the camera up again to take a few more photos.

This next one came out … errr … differently as you can see, slightly darker but the resolution and sharpness are slightly better.

The others that I took weren’t up to all that much and were thus filed under “CS”. But one day sometime soon when the wind dies down I’ll be out there with a tripod and the 70-300mm LENS and see what damage I can do with that.

From there I had a good run home ready to make tea. It was stuffed pepper last night so with the left-over stuffing it was taco rolls tonight. And delicious they were too, followed by apple crumble yet again. I’m getting to be quite good at that.

Having written out my notes, it’s now time for bed. And I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow. I can’t keep on losing hours like this. I won’t every accomplish anything at this rate.

Monday 21st December 2020 – MY SOURDOUGH FRUIT LOAF …

… today is excellent.

The dough rouse by about 30% which although isn’t a lot, is more than it had managed to rise before today. And although it was heavy and soggy, it was extremely tasty when I had a slice for my morning break and I shall make much more of this.

And in case you are wondering, I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning, which surprised me more than anyone else. First thing that I did was to put the oven on to warm up while I took my medication, and once the oven was warm enough I put in the sourdough mix that I had shaped and put into its mould last night.

While it was cooking I made a start on the outstanding radio programmes – two and possibly three live concerts if I can manage the third.

After an hour though I stopped to go and organise the sourdough loaf. Out of the oven and tipped out onto its wire grill to cool off.

It was a rather late lunch today, but at least I’d done all three of the radio concerts. Now I’m right up to date until the end of April next year and that’s really good going. And I’d stopped for 20 minutes for my hot chocolate and delicious fruit bread too.

When I remembered, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

It was a Chronicles of Narnia thing where a group of kids had wandered off somewhere and ended up at the restaurant near the end of the highway. All the lost souls were gathering around there. They came back home again and when they returned home they found that their home was deserted. Music was still playing through the hi-fi but there was no-one around at all. They couldn’t understand what on earth was going on. They were making all sorts of enquiries and setting all kinds of tests like touching objects remotely to make sure that they weren’t booby-trapped or anything like that. The idea that they should ring someone up and speak to them never really entered their minds. They didn’t do that. They had all this lengthy discussion about what was happening, what was going wrong and so on but none of this was making any sense whatsoever about how their whole environment seemed to be totally deserted. Maybe 30 years later they had made contact with more people, I don’t know how and they were living the kind of life that survivors of a nuclear holocaust would lead but there was nothing in between there, that was the thing about them coming back from wherever they had been and finding the place all deserted to 30 years later living in this survivor situation.

During lockdown a couple of us had been playing cards or something. This had finished and the result had been published but not the exact details of the score in the same way that one of the football teams had had its scores mentioned in the press but some had been missed off. Someone had then said something that made us suspect that he knew about the scores so we asked him about it and how come he found out all the scores and the manners of scoring but just as he was about to reply the alarm went off.

After lunch I had a few things to do and then I went out for my afternoon walk.

And despite the miserable weather today, cloudy and overcast and windy, there were still plenty of people about

There were several people down there today on the beach too, and I’m not really sure exactly what they were doing down there. It looks as if it’s a paper bag that they are carrying so it’s not likely to be anyone doing the peche à pied down there today. And in any case there wouldn’t be anything to catch or to harvest round by where they are standing.

There was nothing else going on down at that end of the beach so I walked off across the car park and along the path.

As I was walking along the path I was looking out to sea in order to see if there was anything going on out to sea.

Once again, there was something moving out to sea round by the north-eastern end of the Ile de Chausey. It was too far out to see for me to be able to identify it with my naked eye so I took a photo so that I could crop it and blow it up (the photo, not the object of course) to identify it back at home.

And once again, it is neither Thora nor Normandy Trader coming into port but it is yet another trawler.

Incidentally, there is to be a sailing of Normandy Trader this week. There’s a pile of freight piling up in French ports that can’t go to the UK in view of the new restrictions, and some of that freight is destined to the Channel Islands. So it’s being diverted to here and we are expecting a couple of lorries to turn up sometime over the next few days with goods for the Channel Islands

But what a state to get into in the UK, and it’s not even Brexit yet.

I plodded off on my merry way along the path and then across the lawn and the car park to the end of the headland to see what was happening there.

Nothing very much at all, so I carried on around the headland on the path on top of the cliffs to have a look at what was happening down in the chantier navale. And we’re having another change of occupant down there today. The trawler that came in here the other day now looks as if its ready to go back into the water.

That was a very quick turnround, I have to say. It didn’t take them long to sort out whatever it was that needed sorting out.

There had been rain throughout the whole morning and the paths around here were flooded so I had to pick my way gingerly along the paths.

Down at the end of the path there’s a viewpoint overlooking the port and while there wasn’t much in the way of traffic anchored in there, one of our regulars is tied up there underneath the loading crane. It’s the big trawler le Coelacanthe and judging by the presence of the van in the background, it looks as if they are loading her up for a long trip out.

And look how quickly it’s gone dark. It’s the shortest day of the year of course and darkness has crept up on me rather quicker than I anticipated.

Further along the path I can look deeper into the harbour and there, moored to the quayside, is le Coelacanthe‘s sister le Tiberiade.

There’s no-one around her right now but I imagine that she’ll be loaded up – if that’s the case – in her own turn in early course.

But it’s very interesting to reflect on how things used to be in the port before the Cod moratorium in 1992 when the deep-sea trawlers would go out from here on a sailing that would take them several weeks. There must have been scenes like that with le Coelacanthe several times a day with different boats.

And so I headed off home for a mug of hot coffee and to do my Welsh homework. I have to keep that up as much as I can.

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars, and then I went off for my evening runs. I took several photos out there with the delayed-action shutter but of all the ones that I took, not a single one came out as I would have liked. They ended up being filed away under “CS”.

Tea tonight was stuffed pepper and rice with fresh vegetables, followed by the first instalment of the apple crumble (the remains of last week’s rice pudding ended up in the bin), which was as delicious as the sourdough fruit bread.

Having dealt with the notes for today, I’m off to bed. I’ve already fallen asleep twice typing them out. No welsh course tomorrow of course so I can have a good day (I hope) on some arrears. But a good day means a good start, and that means a good sleep. So I’m not going to hang about.

Sunday 20th December 2020 – SHRIMP BOATS …

… are coming, there’s dancing tonight

Tonight while I was out on my run, I counted the number of fishing boats out at sea that were heading back to home, and made it at 18 as far as I could see, and there where probably even more others the that I couldn’t see too.

With Christmas rapidly approaching and with Brexit threatening to cut off access to the fishing grounds out there with the repealing of the Treaty of the Bay of Granville, anything that floats has probably gone out to sea to make the most of whatever they can catch between now and the end of the year.

As for me, I made the most of whatever sleep came my way last night. Despite not going to bed until 02:30 this morning, I slept all the way through until about 11:20, which isn’t too bad considering.

And plenty of time for me to go off on a voyage or two here and there. We were on board a ship last night steaming into a harbour – a really big harbour without many ships in there. We were imagining what it would have been like 100 years ago. We had to tie up and manoeuvre around in the port and that meant following the quayside edge very closely for quite a distance. I was thinking that 100 years ago with it full of ships we would never have done this. The cleats that you use for tying up the ship were missing – hadn’t been refitted after a paint job so we tipped out a box of them and found 3 but couldn’t find the screws then to screw them together. The screws that we had chosen out of here weren’t big enough. We didn’t have the right screws for some reason. Rosemary was there and she had to do something. I had the impression that it was to spread some jam on some bread or something but I can’t remember what it was she had to do. Then the ship pulled into port. By this time we were on the quayside and the ship pulled in and they threw out the ropes and tied her up. Down came the gang plank and we had to go back on board to get our things ready to move on. I helped on board those whom I was with.

Some time later I was on Crewe Bus Station with my mother and STRAWBERRY MOOSE waiting for a bus to Shavington. It was starting to become late and I thought to myself “I wonder where the thing has got to. It should have pulled in by now”. Mother was chatting away to people as she usually did. She talked to a bus conductor who told her that it had pulled in at the Zoom platform down there, platforms 4 5 and 6 which was where the buses usually went to. So what were we doing up at the top end of the bus station I don’t know. My mother needed some convincing and in the end she suddenly said “yes it must be” so off we ran. I had to fetch my rucksack which was extremely heavy and pick up Strawberry Moose. There was another girl there who was going to school for her first day. She was saying that it’s not going to be much fun if she turns up late for school or not even get in at all on her very first day. We ran on down to where the voice was, and I heard a voice shout “no, no, no” but I ignored it. I was just about to mount on the bus when I saw my mother up on top making “no” gestures so I had a look at the bus that I was just about to get on that he had indicated which was the K43 that goes to Nantwich via Willaston, not Shavington so I thought “what’s goign to happen now?” I had to get off again. A couple of minutes later she came back down. Then this really ancient kind of tram that was actually now a bus pulled into the bus station at Platform 1. We all went down to see it – it was “P” registered which was of course a nonsense because the thing was about 100 years old. We had a good look around it and found that it was an old Liverpool Corporation tram that Crosville had acquired and were going to use it as a bus. It turned out to be ours and we were actually going to have a ride on it as well. Someone took out his camera to photograph it so we all took out ours and stood back in a ring to take a photograph of it but for some reason my camera wasn’t working again and I just couldn’t get a pic of it. This was annoying of course because everyone else was wanting to walk down to have a closer look at it and I was asking them to wait until I had a photo which they were all willing to do but it was just taking me ages to try to take a photo. The camera just wouldn’t seem to take it

And I’m impressed that I can remember so much about the organisation of Crewe Bus Station in a dream after all these years. And it’s also strange that Crewe Bus Station always seems to put in an appearance round about this time of the year.

Later on during the night I was in Whitchurch – 2 of us had set off from Crewe or Nantwich and the guy I was with wasn’t ready so I said that I’d set off and he could catch me up. The usual way that we’d go to Shrewsbury would be via Audlem and Market Drayton but for some reason I went through Whitchurch that way. When I got into Whitchurch this guy still hadn’t caught me up and there was a huge flood in the centre of the town. By now I was on foot, and there was a Mark II Ford Zephyr taxi up to its doors in the water making really heavy weather of trying to get through. I thought that he shouldn’t have got through at all in this. A rough old thing as well with no interior trim or anything, a real ancient elderly machine. When we got past I took out my camera to take some photos but it wouldn’t work again. I ought to take loads of photos of these floods but I couldn’t get the camera to work. Then I noticed that trains were passing very slowly underneath the railway bridge so I went to see what was happening there. There was a load of workmen digging away at a pile of sand. It looked as if the bridge had collapsed onto the railway underneath in parts. I was there trying to take a photo of that but still the camera wouldn’t work. A guy came up and asked what I was doing. I explained that I was taking some photos for a blog. he replied “you’d better bring some bottles down for us. Me and my mates, we’d like some bottles” I said “I’ll talk to the readers – see what they have to say about it. They won’t even pay me for my travelling expenses”. In the end we were allowed down and I was having a look for the charge utile loading plate on the bridge. You could see where the bridge had collapsed under there – a proper Victorian construction. Again I went to take some photos but again the camera wouldn’t work. All that time I was trying to take these photos these kids kept on running around in front of me and the camera and I kept on telling them to keep away so they would keep away for a minute or two and run back again with all of this going on – the floods and the Zephyr up to its doors and the collapsed bridge and the trains inching their way past and the flaming camera wouldn’t work!

It’s not the first time that the NIKON 1 has let me down in a dream either. It seems to be becoming a regular feature in a nocturnal ramble these days, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But while I’m on the subject, seeing as it came up in the middle of a nocturnal voyage, if you’ve enjoyed or profited from these notes, please make your next Amazon purchases by using the links aside. It costs you no extra but I receive a small commission that helps defray my web-hosting expenses

All of that took me right up until about 13:30 so I went for a hot chocolate and the last slice of my delicious fruit cake. And that gave me an idea.

One of the things that I’d noticed was after having fed the sourdough mother the other day, I noticed that for the very first time, it had risen spectacularly and the jar was full of gas.

Now one of the problems with my sourdough bread is that it doesn’t rise enough and it’s all rather damp and heavy like a cake. And so I prepared a sourdough dough mix and added all of my fruit and nut mix to it, including a couple of ripe bananas, and left it on one side.

If it doesn’t rise very much and ends up like a cake, as it seems to be doing right now, it won’t make any difference and it’ll still taste just as good with all of the fruit in it and I won’t be inconvenienced. And it’ll be a good opportunity to practice.

Having done that, I fed the sourdough again and put that on one side too.

When I’d been in LIDL last I’d bought a traditional ginger spice cake with nuts (completely vegan of course) because I have no Christmas cake this year with Liz being away. On Saturday I’d bought some marzipan so this afternoon I sprinkled my rolling pad with icing sugar and then rolled out a lump of marzipan until it was very thin.

While a couple of spoonfuls of strawberry jam were slowly melting in a saucepan over a very low heat, then using the cake as a template, I cut five slices of marzipan out of the bit that I’d rolled, for the top, the two sides and the two ends.

With the jam now nice and liquid and runny, I painted the 5 faces of the cake with a nice thick layer of the warm jammy liquid and then pressed the marzipan to it so it was now all covered (except for the base). That’s now going to cool and set for 72 hours and then I’m going to try to ice it.

By now it was time for me to go off on my afternoon walk around the headland to see what was happening.

And there were quite a few people out there today having a wander around on the last weekend before Christmas, and even a couple of intrepid wetsuit-clad paddle-boarders having a go at practising their art. It looks as if one of them didn’t quite make it out to sea, but I imagine that he’ll remount and have another go at joining his friend at some point.

There’s a seagull out there that isn’t all that pleased about what has been going on and is expressing its displeasure at one of the paddle-boarders. And we know all about their accuracy

While I was out there having a good look around, I noticed some movement right out at the north-eastern extremity of the Ile de Chausey.

It was very difficult to see what was happening with the naked eye so I took a long distance photograph to crop and enlarge when I returned home so that I might be able to see what it might be.

What was going through my mind was that it might be either Thora or Normandy Trader coming into port on an additional run, but in actual fact, it’s one of the larger of the trawlers from the port out there doing a little bit of fishing or whatever in that little corner.

From there I wandered off along the path towards the lighthouse, but there wasn’t very much going on that way. And so I wandered off across the lawn and then the car park and round to the end of the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen quite a few good sunsets over here just recently. With us reaching the shortest day of the year I was hoping that we would have a good view of the sun at its perigee and today I was not going to be disappointed at all. It’s not as good as one or two that we have seen, but it’s certainly better than most.

No ships or anything like hat out at sea so I wandered off again on my walk.

But then I didn’t really advance very far before I stopped again.

We’ve seen plenty of fishing boat out at sea today, but it’s not just at sea that there’s a pile of fishing going on. Even though we are not at the period of the Grand Marée there are even so a few people down there taking part in the peche à pied this afternoon.

They were throwing a few things into a bucket, so I watched for a few minutes and then wandered off myself down the path. We still had our two boats in the chantier navale, the yacht and the fishing boat that arrived yesterday, and nothing else.

While I was out there looking down on the chantier navale, my train of thought was interrupted by my being overflown.

We’ve had plenty of people on land, and plenty of people out at sea, so there is no reason at all why we shouldn’t have plenty of people in the air. Today, it’s the turn of a Piper PA-28-181 Archer III, registration number F-GHYZ.

As far as I can tell, it’s a machine owned by the Rennes Air Club and according to its flight plan, it’s on its way to Rennes St Jacques Airport.

And so I wandered on home and made myself a nice hot mug of coffee to keep me going.

It was time for me to think about a puddling for next week. With plenty of cooking apples on hand, I made myself a small apple crumble. And with some crumble left over, I made a second, smaller one.

Earlier on in the day I’d taken out a dollop of dough from the freezer. By now it was defrosted so I kneaded it properly, mixed it around and then rolled it out and put it into the pizza tray, folding the overhanging edges back inside.

With an hour or so to spare I came back in here and had a play around with a few things that needed doing and did my Welsh homework for the day again.

When the pizza base had risen, I put on the oven and brought it to temperature and bunged in the apple crumbles. While the crumbles were doing, I prepared my pizza and when the apple crumble were cooked, I took them out and then put the pizza in.

While the pizza was cooking, I went out for my evening walk and runs. All the way down to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

Earlier on, we saw the photo of all of the fishing boats out there this evening. Plenty more than were shown on the photograph as I mentioned, but there was something else that caught my eye.

This particular light here is something quite out of the ordinary and I’ve no idea at all as to what it might be. It’s not likely to be a fishing work light this close to the rocks at the Pointe du Roc. But nevertheless, there were still a couple of other lights in the background from other fishing boats making their way into the harbour.

While I was standing at the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord, I did my impression of Lord Darnhall’s wife at the sermon in the church on the first holiday of the year, and cast my eye about.

And here’s a thing that caught my eye too. I’ve no idea what this might be but there was some kind of light going on and off on the beach down below at the foot of the steps. There didn’t seem to be anyone standing around down there with it and after a few minutes, the light failed to come on again and that was that.

From there, I pushed on along the Rue du Nord, breaking into a run as much as I could. And then I disappeared down the path underneath the walls, avoiding the puddles.

Halfway along the footpath I stopped at my usual place to catch my breath, and there I looked out to sea.

It was reasonably clear on the horizon and so I had a try at taking another delayed-exposure photograph or two (or three or four with all kinds of different settings) of the general area in which lies St Helier. Most of them ended up filed under “CS” but one of them was worth another look, although I’ve taken many better photos than these.

You can’t actually see the street lights of the town down here but the red light on the radio mast at the back of the town is clearly visible on the photo, even if it wasn’t visible with the naked eye.

From there, I walked on down to the end of the path – forgetting to break into a run which was rather disappointing.

Across the Square Maurice Marland I ran, right away to the far side. From there, before I walked up to the top of the walls, I looked back across the square back towards where this leg of the run began and I have to say that I’ve not really appreciated the view from this viewpoint and so I decided to take a photograph from here looking backwards.

Down in the Rue Notre Dame I met Minette‘s mum so we had a chat for a while and then I ran on home.

By now, my pizza was properly cooked so I sat down and ate it, having photographed it first with my apple crumble.

No pudding tonight again of course – the pizza was quite filling and I didn’t need anything else to eat. And then I came back in here to write up my notes for the day.

Tomorrow I have my radio programme to do. I want to finish off the live concert for the month of February and then do a live concert for the month of March. If there’s time again, there’s the month of April to do and then we’ll be right bang up to date.

While I’m in Leuven, if I can do 2, or even 3 radio programme’s worth of music and then deal with the speech when I return, I’ll be well away with where I would like to be. 20 weeks ahead is ideal because if I have plans to do anything over the summer, although I don’t quite know what or whether we’ll even be able to do anything anyway, there will be a breathing space for me to have a little break.

And I can’t say that I don’t need one.

Tuesday 15th December 2020 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… go at this long-distance night-time photography lark tonight

So winding the ISO down to a very reasonable daylight figure and slowing the speed down to an absurd 4 seconds, I managed to produce this shot. And you can tell how long the aperture was open because while the background is perfectly sharp, the fishing boats in the near distance (they are probably 10 miles out to sea in this shot) are comparatively blurred due to the distance that they have travelled while the aperture was open.

And as well as a nice, light background to the shot, we have plenty of stars in the sky because it was a delightfully clear, cloudless evening.

It’s a shame about the smear on the lens which rather detracts from the photo, but again considering the equipment that I have and the fact that the camera was actually perched on a flat rock to take this photo, I’m really impressed with it. Almost as impressed as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

What else that was impressive was the fact that yet again I managed to beat fairly comfortably the third alarm this morning. I seem to be making a habit of this right now, and quite right too.

And after the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was around on a huge liner last night but I can’t remember very much about a lot of it now. It’s gone right out of my head. At one point I had someone with me, a young girl and and I was going to take her to show her around the ship. She wasn’t sure whether she would go and she was dithering at the top of this spiral staircase thing that led down to the executive cabins. The purser came by and looked at her and said “if you want to go, go!” That gave her the courage and she came down with me. I showed her around the Executive Suites, everything like that. Then we found ourselves in the steerage where people were all crammed in like sardines. We were walking through there and I was saying to her that for us who were 3rd class passengers when we came on a cruise we just had one of these bunks that was together whereas they had 9 crammed in them somehow. They had no privacy, no curtains or anything yet we did. It turned out that she and her friend had been sleeping on a mattress somewhere. She sleeping in her friend’s room on a mattress, should I say. Yes, she knew about that, she knew where that was kept round the other side. We walked all around this ship and I was fighting the most enormous temptation to put my arm around her. It was really a strange kind of situation. I had the impression that this was Castor or someone like that but I couldn’t really see who it was. The face was very blurred all the way through this voyage, as if it was being done deliberately which is interesting. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now, something that has filled me with extreme disappointment, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Later on there had been a dispute about some postings made on a Social Networking conference and someone had complained. It turned out that people were posting in one particular Group and the guy there was referring them to another one. Of course they were way off-topic and people were suggesting that they should be banned but they should have been banned in the other Group where they were and this was the argument between the two sets of Moderators about this. This escalated into something about families, I’m not too sure now. I was working at work, not doing anything at all and my arrears were building up (this is quite a recurring dream, isn’t it?) but I was leaving on the following Thursday, the day before Good Friday so it didn’t really make any difference to me anyway. I was thinking that I’d be back home and then I was thinking that there would be 2 generations of retired people living in our house. That was unusual these days when I retire on Thursday. A discussion took place about various different generations living together. It turned out that in one house there were 5 generations where a girl of 18 who should have been celebrating her marriage ended up in hospital having a baby so there were now 5 generations living in the house where she was living. This dispute about the internet rumbled on. In the end 2 burly Australian farmers were sort-of involved in it. They ended up having to get a car started which they finally managed to do, so where next? They’d hard some kind of description about something happening. 1 of them said “I know, there’s a place not too far away from here where they have sea lions, all this kind of thing, just by where you turn onto the main highway”. Everything he said had the right kind of description about it so 1 of them grabbed the steering wheel of this car they had just fixed and off we all drove in this car.

Having sorted that out, I had some stuff to attend to and then I cracked on and organised myself for my Welsh class

And it wasn’t just revision from last week and preparation for this week that was important, I had to make the place look pretty too – that was part of the activity.

If you look in the photo just here there are now some red, white and blue Christmas lights. I found those while I was tidying up so I strung them up over where I sit, at the dining room table. That’s only a temporary thing – they will be in the other window tomorrow.

Strawberry Moose came to the lesson too, complete with Father Christmas hat. He certainly helps to liven up the proceedings and brings a smile to everyone’s face.

As for the lesson itself, armed with a hot chocolate drink and a slice of my fruit bread, it passed quite well and we seem to be more confident. We were given the same set of questions to answer that we were given in September and the answers were much more rapid and profound.

Interestingly, just as we knocked off for a break, the ‘phone rang. Caliburn’s new battery has arrived, about two days before the suppliers told me that it would even be in stock, never mind delivered. So Caliburn will be having his new battery fitted tomorrow.

But the timing of the phone call was spectacularly precise.

After lunch I set to and made some sourdough dough – 500 grammes of flour and a pile of sunflower seeds together with salt, water and some of my sourdough started. In the attempt to make something decent, I spent absolutely ages folding it in to make it nice and smooth, but having had a look at it just now, it’s not increased all that much in size. I’m feeling that sourdough is not the way for me to go, especially as my fruit bread with yeast worked so well on Sunday.

There were carrots that needed peeling, dicing and blanching too, so I organised them while I was at it. They went into the freezer later.

By now it was time to go out for my afternoon walk (we don’t finish our Welsh lesson until late).

Quite a few people out there walking today, celebrating the semi-end of our detention à domicile. Also crowds in the air too. There were several light aircraft flying by overhead, including this one, F-BUKK. She’s a Wassmer W54 Atlantic, fitted with a Lycoming O-360-A1LD engine.

She’s actually quite an elderly machine, apparently built in 1973. And that might be quite right too because the company closed down in 1977. So it’s a surprise to see her still out and about.

Plenty going on out at sea today too.

Or, at least, there might have been earlier in the day because everyone seems to be coming home now. The tide isn’t yet in but it looks as if we are going to have a queue of boats waiting to get to the fish processing plant.

Not that I was intending to hang around too long. I had plenty of things to do and wanted to return home as soon as I could. I was rather disappointed in that there wasn’t any other kind of interesting movement out there to attract my attention. The correct thing to do was to go and make myself a coffee and move on.

There was some post waiting for me when I returned. The good news is that my Old-Age Pension has finally come through, so Spend! Spend! Spend! The bad news is that the Taxe d’Habitation people have finally caught up with me and there are residence taxes to pay.

So it comes in with one hand and goes out with the other. That’s quite typical, isn’t it?

So having listened to a few radio programmes, I sent three of them off to the technicians. They’ll be on holiday soon and if I don’t have them in stock down there, nothing will be broadcast. And my Christmas Day broadcast is something special.

Another thing to do is to send a bank transfer of cash to my niece for Christmas. She and her family are really kind to me and do such a lot to help me out. And as I haven’t been to Canada this year to repay them, the least I can do is to express my gratitude in another way.

There was the usual guitar practice of course, and then a change to the advertised programme.

We are now in curfew from 20:00 until 06:00 which means an end to my late-night perambulations unfortunately. That made me wonder how I was going to fit it in, because I can’t do without my runs, so I’ve decided for the foreseeable future at least, to go for my run as soon as I finish guitar practice and have my meal afterwards. I’m not sure how this will affect my digestion or my sleeping.

We shall see.

We’ve seen the photos of the Channel Islands tonight anyway, so I carried on with all of my runs, along the Rue du Nord, down the steps and along the path, then through the Square Maurice Marland onto the walls.

There was plenty of activity in the port this evening. You saw in the photo of St Helier that there were plenty of fishing boats out in the English Channel tonight. They were starting to come into port as I reached the viewpoint over by the Eglise Notre Dame.

The Fish Processing Plant is working of course – you can see the lights shining from the open doors into the water, and there’s a refrigerated lorry there parked in the loading bay.

There had been some other bright lights shining in the harbour that I had missed.

There was a trawler parked on this side of the quay so I wondered if it might have been her, but then in the background there are all kinds of lights shining at the Ferry terminal, and while it’s unlikely that one of the Joly France boats would be coming back at this hour, maybe the little freighter Chausiais has had a little run out.

Nothing gave me a clue, so I walked round the corner, photographed my Christmas lights and then ran on home.

Tea was a burger with pasta and veg and the last of the delicious vegan pesto. No pudding because the football was about to start.

With a vital basement clash of Flint Town v Cefn Druids, a match that neither side could afford to lose or draw if they don’t want to be cast adrift at the bottom of the table, the broadcasters chose to broadcast Penybont V Cardiff Metropolitan, a meaningless mid-table match.

And meaningless it was too. I fell asleep towards the end of the first half for 5 minutes, and by the time the final whistle sounded I had long-since gone off to do other things. Penybont scored quite early in the match but they were restricted to maybe just 2 or 3 other shots on goal, and I don’t recall Ashley Morris in their goal having a serious save to make. The Met were clueless up front and never looked like doing anything at all.

We’ve seen some exciting matches in the JD Cymru Welsh Premier League in the past but this wasn’t one of them. A miserable, depressing match without a single moment of excitement. A poor advert for Welsh football, when so much was at stake up on Deeside.

But now anyway, I’m going to give my sourdough dough a good going over and put it in its mould to work away overnight, and then I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I’ll be fitting Caliburn’s battery and making a renewed start on some arrears. I’m making no progress at al with those really and I need to sort it all out.

EPIC HALL

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