Tag Archives: bouquet granvillais

Monday 8th June 2020 – IT DOESN’T SEEM …

… to matter these days how busy I am, or how busy I’m not, I can never seem to finish anything like I intend to.

Missing the third alarm doesn’t seem to make much difference either – when it went off this morning I was having a guided tour of an apartment that was for sale and it took me a couple of minutes to rouse myself from my slumbers.

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

To start off, I was doing a quiz in the USA somewhere about some Miami gangster who had gone north for the good of his health and had taken over the running of operations in New York and New Jersey, that area. The newspaper clipping was about 20 facts associated with him and giving his membership of secret societies and his donations of public works which were immense and his treatment of arresting people who weren’t wearing trousers or still in a nappy or something like that as well I dunno. Yes I was here with these 20 questions. There were some words as well – to guess the meaning of these words like gangster English – yes when i awoke just now I was busy doing the work as well.
And having complained the other day about none of my regular companions featuring these days in my travels, Percy Penguin and I had had an argument last night and she wasn’t speaking to me. I’d retired but I’d been working for them and he had slowly started to pay me back the money that ha owed me, her father, and I’d been doing work for him as well. But even after we’d had an argument I was still working there. Instead of me going to the farm on Thursday night to get paid he came down to see me. he had someone else in the car – I can’t remember who now and he paid me the money. My parents were watching out of a window while this was going on – it was at Little Heath at Audlem. I knew from Caroline that they were going out this evening so I said to him “what time are you going out?” He didn’t know and was prevaricating a bit about this so I asked him again and he didn’t really give a clear answer so I said “tell Percy Penguin that I’ll ring her tonight” thinking that I’ll ring her round about 17:00 after she gets out of college and before they have tea. It was all very iffy.

But well done to Percy Penguin for making an appearance, although she actually didn’t even make an appearance herself. She was just there in spirit

No breakfast again this morning. Instead, I went to finish off the notes from yesterday. And I hadn’t realised that there were so many because it took hours to do. I really excelled myself yesterday, so it seemed.

Once I’d finished that, whenever it was, I had a go at the Welsh homework. That took longer than anticipated too due to unforeseen format challenges. I fixed it in the end but for some reason the *TAB* key ended up working backwards.

The rest of the day has been spent on working on another radio project and forgetting almost everything else that I had to do, I finally finished it at something like 19:15. That was an effort and a half.

There were however a few interruptions.

Lunch was one of them, and the loaf of bread that I made was just like a loaf of bread should be. The crust was rather armour-plated and I’m not sure about what to do about that but the bread inside was delicious

There was a ‘phone call from the people at the radio too, wondering how I was doing. We ended up having quite a chat and I ended up missing the time when I usually go for my walk.

Eventually though I made it outside where I could see what was going on.

We were in the grip of a gale-force wind again so there was almost no-one down on the beach. And that was a surprise because they would have had all of this beach to play with

The tide is about as far out as it might go right now and the yellow buoys that mark the end of the swimming zone (if that is indeed what they are ) are looking quite silly having settled down on the sand.

There might be almost no-one on the beach but there is plenty going on out to sea today.

There are a couple of the trawler-type of fishing boats out there right now in the English Channel heading towards each other looking as if they are going to have a chat. Seeing as they are surrounded by seagulls, it looks as if they may well have their fishing gear out.

There are a couple of other boats out there on the horizon but they are too far away for me to be able to say what they are.

It’s not just over there that it’s busy either.

Over by the Ile de Chausey there’s a lot going on too right now. A couple more of the trawler-type boats are out there too but I can’t see whether or not they are working or merely passing through on their way elsewhere.

Mind you, they must have been out for quite a while as the harbour gates will have been closed for several hours and it only takes about 15 or 20 minutes to reach that spot.

My walk took me around the headland and down along the clifftop on the south side of the headland.

A rhythmic tapping told me that someone was doing some work somewhere, so I set out to track it down. And it seems to me that we have another roofing job being undertaken in the vicinity.

These guys down there on that house roof in the rue du Port look as if they are going at that job hammer and tongs. It wasn’t like that yesterday, that I’m pretty certain, but I’m not sure about the wisdom of taking outs some of the roofing structure so that they can climb through it

Here’s something else that i didn’t notice yesterday.

It looks as if they have fitted some lifesaving equipment on the pontoons this morning. I’m sure that I would have remembered seeing that red lifebelt housing and the light down there on the pontoons.

But anyway, I came back here, had a slice of cake and carried on with my work.

No tea either tonight – a packet of bombay mix that needed eating will keep me going until the morning, I reckon.

Surprisingly, or maybe it isn’t, I was sitting here doing not very much when I … errr … closed my eyes. I’m not sure why but it was, I suppose, better than falling asleep in mid-afternoon.

Nevertheless I almost missed my evening run so I had to leg it outside quickly.

The run up the hill was a little better than it has been of late so I was pretty pleased for once, despite the offensive comments hurled by a young girl out of a car window. But there’s still a long way to go before I’m satisfied.

having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop past the itinerant who is still there.

There was nothing going on out in the English Channel so I carried on around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall yesterday the sunlight flashing off the objects over across the Baie de Mont St Michel round by Terreboulet.

There was the same effect this evening too, and if anything it was even better.

We also had several fishing boats out there this evening. Some of them were clearly working but one or two were heading back to port, presumably to unload.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that I have a thing about people taking photographs.

Down by the old sentry cabin right at the end of the Pointe du Roc we had a woman taking aim with a telephone camera, presumably at the guy who was standing perched on the rock right down at the end.

It’s not entirely certain how he’s managed to make his way down there, but I reckon that it’s going to be interesting to watch him as he tries to scramble back up again.

My run continued around the corner and along the clifftop on the south side of the headland.

However before I set off I took a photo of the harbour wall down there. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen people standing on that harbour wall before and while they aren’t jumping in, the only other thing that I can think that they are doing is fishing.

And the evenig sun has caught St Pair Sur Mer beautifully this evening.

While I stopped further down to catch my breath I noticed Le Loup – “the Wolf”. That’s the name that’s written on the marker light just outside the harbour entrance.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is the marker light standing well clear of the water, perched upon its rock at low tide. This evening, we’re not too far off high tide and if you compare the photo WITH THIS ONE you can see just how high the tide rises – and there’s still time at either end yet.

It’s said that here at Granville we have some of the highest tides in Europe and I can readily believe that.

From there I ran all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and even pushed on 20 metres or so beyond my marker, which pleased me somewhat.

While I was recovering my breath I wandered down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what was happening. A little earlier we had seen a couple of fishing boats heading into harbour to unload. Here’s one of them with its catch being winched up on one of the little cranes.

You will have noticed the socks of fleagulls in attendance in case the loas happens to slip.

From there I ran on up the hill and round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord to have a look at the sunset.

The tide was in of course but that didn’t stop the picnickers. I exchanged pleasantries with a couple of women carrying bowls of food and glasses of wine who were going to sit on one of the benches in the communal garden to have their evenign meal.

And who can blame them?

As for me, I ran on home where I bumped (literally) into a neighbour.

So an early night tonight. Tomorrow I have my Welsh class and there’s a lot of preparation to do. There’s another radio project that needs doing too, a couple more courses to attend to, and then a pile of arrears to catch up with.

It’s all go round here, isn’t it?

Friday 5th June 2020 – I HAD A …

… better day today (not that it could have been much worse of course).

So while you admire the photos of Joly France fighting her way out of harbour into the howling gale and the seagull that photobombed me while I was doing it, I’ll tell you all about it.

First of all, it goes without saying that when I crashed out yesterday evening, I switched off the alarms with the intention of sleeping until I awoke.

And that was until all of about 00:30

The first task when I awoke was to deal with the notes and the photos from yesterday.

That took me up until about 03:00 because there was other stuff to deal with too, like the notes of a voyage or two that I’d travelled. And then I went back to bed.

While I was in bed I was off on a couple of mega-voyages, and I dunno why I always seem to have the most interesting trips when I’m not feeling too well.

And some of the stuff I can’t recount because I bet that you are having your tea right now and you certainly wouldn’t thank me for spoiling it for you.

We were at the radio last night working and I was asking about something or other to be done. They said that they had this new reporter in, which annoyed me rather. We were talking about a live concert that he had done of some singer, which I had dismissed as being nothing. But it turned out that it had had over a million listeners to the podcast and even I was impressed with that. It gave the whole place a new impetus. Everyone seemed to be much more excited and much more energetic. They had started working with a couple of new programs and we had been given some accounts so that we could use these new programs even if we didn’t know what they were all about. I started to think to myself “why the hell did I want to leave when I’m having such a good time with it now?” Even though we were swamped with work it was all going really well. I’d had this habit of getting stuff that I didn’t want to deal with, just putting it away and not even thinking about it. It was the pressure of that that had been getting to me. But I was actually working on a file and a couple of old pieces of post from January fell out. I looked at them and thought “why the hell did I file these anyway? What needs to be done is just so simple” so I sat down and made a start on dealing with these pieces which was only going to take me 5 minutes anyway.

There was also the question of the MoT servicing book – a big book, narrow and quite long and we wrote in all the details of the cars, what was being done on them and so on. I’d just finished one batch and I wondered if there was another book so I had to go outside to find the guy who was responsible. He told me “there’s plenty of room in there – you just aren’t looking properly”. I had a good look through and found that there was another batch of stuff in there, another batch of forms that I’d managed to miss

I must have awoken to dictate the notes of the above, and when I went back to sleep I went straight back into the dream in more or less the same place, walking to Nantwich past the Cedars and down Millstone (actually Birchin) Lane and ended up back at the place again. It seemed that I’d gone off last night and left all the drawers empty and all the spares open and I couldn’t find half the stuff. I realised that I had left them out lying everywhere. By this time we were very busy with people coming in and someone else was demonstrating a technique that he had used. He’d been looking for something in some other stores and they were going through a pile of this stuff and he’d actually found a modern-day use for a pile of stuff like on one occasion he’d made a stand for the vacuum cleaner using bits that were lying around and he showed us how he’d done it but he couldn’t undo it though because no-one had the correct screwdriver. It was strange just stepping back into that dream where I’d left off
One thing though was that I was smoking at some particular time and I don’t know why I’d started smoking. I’d burnt myself with a cigarette that I was holding so I went to stub it out thinking that this is a crazy thing to be doing anyway.
Later still We were on board a ship and there had been some kind of incident going on between a woman and a man and the man being given a big bill for his services. As a result the girl who ran the accounting office was not very pleased about it and she came to talk to me about it. Just after she finished there was a knock on my door and it was from one of my cabin friends from a nearby cabin wanting to know if I was ready to come down for breakfast. I had to search for my keys as usual then we set off out. He said what about the third guy who usually came with us that i didn’t particularly like. But there was a ribbon pinned to his door which said “lie in”. Obviously he was wanting a lie-in so we went downstairs. We were on about the 8th floor and the breakfast was on the 2nd or something. We got down to the 6th and there was a small breakfast being set out there and the woman seemed to think that we were from the party that was having the breakfast there. She told us to help ourselves. One of the girls with us went over and grabbed a glass of orange juice. I thought “I could always drink orange juice” so I went over to grab one but it turned out to be apple juice and there was only a mouthful in the beaker and there wasn’t any more in any of the jugs.

After all of that, what surprised me was the fact that with not having gone to bed until 03:00 and done all of that, I was wide awake again at 07:30. That was rather astonishing.

Mind you, that isn’t to say that I was out of bed by then. 08:30 was a much more realistic time to be out of bed.

It took a good while to type out all of my notes, as you can imagine. And I wasn’t feeling in the best of form either so it took even longer than it might have done.

No breakfast either – I still wasn’t feeling like eating anything.

For lunch though, I did try some food. While I had been searching around in the freezer the other day I had come across a pot of carrot and coconut soup. Today I defrosted that, warmed it up and ate it with the last of my home-made bread.

And to my surprise, it stayed down too.

What I’ve been doing for most of the day has been to finish off the radio project that i started. I’d dictated the text a couple of days ago but hadn’t edited it so that was the first job.

When that was finished, and the speech for my invited guest was included, I then had to edit into sections, find the pairs of tracks that I had coupled together, join everything up by using the sections of text to make a bridge between the different pairs.

That left some time over, so knock 30 seconds off that for the outro speech and then find a track of the right length that sounds like an outro track.

That track needs to be remixed to match the volume level of the rest of the programme, the speech needs to be written, recorded and edited, and then everything joined together.

It overran the hour by 5 seconds so I had to edit out 5 seconds from somewhere and then it could be saved.

There was a break of course, while I went out for my afternoon walk. Just because I’m feeling ill doesn’t mean that things have to stop.

It was a horrible day out there today. It had been raining quite heavily by the looks of things and there was a howling gale blowing too. This poor little fishing boat pulling its dinghy behind it was really struggling to fight its way back through the waves into port.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … my hat goes off to all of them out there in weather like this

My walk took me down to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

Nothing happening on the beach s you might expect. The wind had driven almost everyone back inside. And there was some kind of miserable grey sky down the coast that was causing a peculiar kind of light down at Donville-les-Bains.

And it hasn’t escaped my notice that they have put out all of the beach cabins down at Donville-les-Bains. They are really getting ready for summer down there.

My attention had been drawn in the previous photo to a series of yellow buoys strectched out across the end of the beach so i went for a closer look.

No clear evidence what they are there for though. The only thing that I can think of is that they are a mark to indicate to people the limit beyond which they are not allowed to swim.

Mind you, I think that it will take more than that to stop anyone swimming further out. Barbed wire and machine guns would probably be more effective.

My walk carried me on around the walls to the viewpoint that overlooks the Place Marechal Foch.

The roofing job down there has been going on for a while so I had another look to see where they were. And they seem to have finished what they were doing and the scaffolding has come down.

But there are still a few piles of slates and it looks as if the scaffolding is going up around the back of the building. So there’s more roofing to come, I reckon.

My walk continued around the walls and into the Square Maurice Marland.

There was a young family there leaning on the walls admiring my favourite mummy seagull and I was talking about the babies when mummy suddenly stood up and went for a walk.

We could then see quite clearly that she seems to have one chick and there’s one egg there that has yet to hatch. So whether it will or not, that remains to be seen.

However my particular mummy seems to be a little behind with her offspring.

On the next roof we had a mummy perched there watching her babies already stagger around taking their first steps.

She had two babies, but one of them had disappeared behind the chimney breast before I could prepare the camera. But the other one put on a little dance for me before flopping down exhausted on the nest, with a very proud mummy looking on.

Having watched the seagulls for long enough I wandered off an continued my little walk along the walls.

Down in the harbour I’d noticed a little funnel sticking up from the loading bay in the bocks and it didn’t look like Chausiais so I went to see who it was. And sure enough, Thora has braved the storms and gales to come into port.

And she didn’t hang about long either. Another quick turnround for when I went out later, she had gone off back to Jersey.

A little earlier we’d seen a little fishing boat fighing its way through the waves as it pulled its dinghy in towards the port.

By the time that I had completed my circuit I was treated to some kind of exhibition of I’m not really sure what it was. I reckon that that’s the boat down there the front one, that we saw struggling through the storm and it seems to have two dinghies behind it.

But as to what the other boat is doing down there with it, I really don’t know.

Back here at the apartment I carried on with my work. It took until 20:00 to complete it, with no pause for the guitars and no food either. I wasn’t hungry and in any case I wanted to finish this exercise before the weekend and I’m glad that I did.

My evening walk and runs was something of a disaster this evening.

One look at this photo will tell you why. There was a howling headwind blowing all the way down the Rue du Roc and it was difficult enough to walk, never mind run up there. And down on the clifftop I could see that Jersey, the ile de Chausey and the Brittany coast were taking a right pasting.

The storm was heading my way, and pretty quickly too. I didn’t think that this was the moment to be hanging about.

Finally, I managed to break out into a run, the one along the top of the cliffs past the chantier navale.

And there’s been a change of occupant in there yet again. This time, one of the long-term resident trawler-type of fishing boats has gone back into the water, and its place taken by a little pleasure cruiser.

That’s a nice piece of kit, that boat, and I could see myself cruising around in a white cap in one of those. But I haven’t a clue where I could rustle up the dosh for it.

It reminds me of the guy in Crewe who sent his wife to Boots Corner in Crewe to earn some money for a new car. At the end of the first night she came back with £50 and 50p
“Who gave you the 50p?”he asked
“Why, all of them” she replied.
Yes, Crewe was a right dismal place to live and I’ve no idea how I stuck it for all that time.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury was interesting as a dog decided to try to have a little bit of fun.

After he limped off with a pain in his rear left leg, I turned on the owner and told him precisely what I thought of him. In good old colloquial French too, and left him in no two minds of what I thought. I didn’t spend 12 years working with a bunch of French-speaking drivers for nothing.

Having stopped for breath at my usual stop, I walked down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what was happening.

Nothing very much except that the new pontoon is being put to very good use by the fishing boats that are congregating all around it.

From there I ran on back to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

There was nothing happening out at sea this evening, apart from the storm, and as the tide was right in there were no picnickers. So I ran back home instead.

Later than I hoped, I’m off to bed. I’ll set an alarm, hope I’ll beat it, and then go to the shops. Not that I need much because I haven’t eaten anything for a few days.

At least, with keeping a note of how I feel, I know that I seem to be on the upward slope again and in a few days I’ll be back to normal – as if I ever was normal.

Last time this happened, in the USA in July, I lost 10kgs in weight. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could lose another 10kgs?

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 – EVERYBODY SAY “AHHH”

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been keeping a close eye on the socks of fleagulls that nest on the roofs of the houses in the Rue des Juifs during the Spring.

And so; while keeping an eye on one particular nest today, I noticed something rather different, so I took a photo of it with the aim of blowing it up when I returned to the apartment

And don’t we have one very proud Mummy Seagull here? At least one and maybe two eggs have hatched and there’s a chick or two sheltering under her wings in the nest on the roof.

Well done, mummy, and congratulations. I shall be following their progress over the next few weeks.

While you admire the photos of the hang gliders who have been buzzing around the town today like a bunch of Nazgul, let me tell you about my thoroughly miserable day

Just for a change, I was up before the third alarm this morning. But that was as good as it got. Although I had my medication I didn’t feel like any breakfast and in fact I’ve not eaten anything today except some fruit

Yes, I’ve been thinking over the last few days that I was sickening for something and it looks as if I’ve got it.

That’s one of the reasons why I keep my notes – so that I can track my health as it fluctuates up and down. And it’s particularly important right now, seeing as I’ve now been probably 18 weeks without my essential four-weekly treatment.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back in March I predicted a decline in health. But that wasn’t really a prediction. Based on previous experience – it was a foregone conclusion.

So with no breakfast I decided that, at least while I was still compos mentis that I would attack my two courses, the Accountancy and the Music course.

And I ended up completely finishing a week of each course too.

As for the Accountancy course, this week’s work was spent on basic numeracy. And I do mean “basic” – in fact I’ve no idea what they must be teaching in school these days if a course like this has to instruct its followers in the kind of basic numeracy that we had to do

The music course was exciting. And now at the end of the week I can play the blues on the piano with 5/10th scale chords and in theory, 7/10th scale chords. The theory being because I can’t stretch my hands far enough.

It really makes me wonder how we managed to play the piano when we were mere kids, having to stretch like that.

No lunch of course, but I did have something to do that involved the fridge. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the door pockets are broken on the fridge. The last surviving on was wedged in somehow, but that fell off when I opened the door.

And so, having nothing better to do, I bit the bullet, sorted out the electric drill and screwed all three shelves in. Whether they hold for any length of time I really wouldn’t know, but it has to be better at the moment.

This led to another problem.

The very top shelf is a very tight fit up against the freezer compartment door and with no shelf having been there for 18 months, the ice inside had grown and pushed the compartment door out. And having replaced the shelf, the fridge door wouldn’t now close.

That meant having to defrost the fridge and pull out about half a ton of ice.

But at least the door closes now and there’s room in the freezer compartment to actually put things now. And that’s progress of some kind.

While all of this was going on, I went for my afternoon walk.

We’ve been having some really glorious weather just recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but not today.

As you can see, the weather has changed and we are now back in all of the fog and mist that I thought that we’d left behind a few weeks ago

It was still quite warm outside though, and so I suppose that out of the wind it would really have been quite nice.

At least, that’s what all of the people down there must be thinking. And good look to them too – sooner them than me. You wouldn’t stand any chance of me getting into the sea down there at any time today.

Mind you, the way things are, you wouldn’t be getting me into the sea at any time these days, even at 40°C in the air.

For part of my afternoon walk I’d had the company of a neighbour, but she had cleared off and I carried on on my own.

At the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch I had a look down to see how they were doing with the roof of the building there. And the answer was that although progress seems to have been quite rapid, they appear to have had a technical hitch.

Someone was on the roof there hacksawing away at the galvanised sheeting that they have been using to cover the dormer windows. It looks as if they might have misjudged some measurement or other.

Having stood and watched them for a while, I moved on around onto the Square Maurice Marland to see what was going on there and to check on my seagull.

It also gave me an opportunity to see what was going on out in the Baie de Mont St Michel. It looks as if the sailing school is now in full swing, with all of the little yachts out there having a lap or two around the marker buoys that they put out there.

It’s probably what they call a “slalom for sailors”, I reckon. And wouldn’t it have been a good idea for me to have enrolled onto a course like that? I must make further enquiries.

This photograph here has made me laugh, and it shouldn’t really, because it’s very sad.

It’s not the workman carrying the metal pole down the ramp that has caught my eye but something else there. They’ve spent I really don’t know how many millions of Euros completely refitting the port out with new ramps and pontoons, and it’s taken about a fortnight for social shaping by the citizens to take place to amend it.

All that money, and someone has felt obliged to build a set of steps out of a few old pallets.

All of the restaurants, bars and cafés have been closed in France since the start of the pandemic, but since Tuesday in the “Green Zone” which is where we are living, they can re-open under certain circumstances.

The Place Cambernon Is usually blocked off for July and August to allow the café La Rafale and the restaurant to spread their tables about, but it seems that they have decided to extend the period of closure from now until the end of September.

And La Rafale is taking full advantage of it – and so are the customers too. That’s good news to see the commerce re-igniting.

My perambulations took me on an extended route today because I’d seen some kind of work going on in the distance.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there was a major amount of work done on the medieval walls all through last year, and I made some kind of derogatory remarks about some of the work that was done.

It’s nice to see that the local council has been following my journal because the work seems to involve cleaning up the mess that passed for pointing on the stairwell here.

They’ve only been at it for a couple of days and already there’s a vast improvement.

On the subject of vast improvements, I wish that there had been a vast improvement with me.

Back home again I started to write out the notes for the radio project on which I was working. I even finished them too in a most amazing blitz of work.

Next stop was to dictate them – and I even managed that too. However, when I went to edit them I found out that someone driving around here in a motor bike had made such a racket that the microphone had picked it up.

Closing all of the windows I went to dictate it again.

However I didn’t get far, because I crashed out for about 15 minutes or so and woke up feeling like death. Eventually I managed to finish dictating it but as I went to upload it to the computer I went off again.

45 minutes this time, and I missed my session on the guitars. And if I had felt bad before, I was feeling even worse now. It’s a really long time – and I do mean long – since I’ve felt as bad as I did just then.

Nevertheless I was up, so I was staying up. And i wasn’t intending to miss out on my run, despite no food and no health.

There was the usual struggle up the hill – which isn’t getting any better regardless of whatever circumstances. But at least my problems aren’t as bad as some of other people. There’s been an itinerant person wandering around the Pointe du Roc and he seems to have settled down under the hedge for the night.

It beats me why he’s settled there, because there’s plenty of covered spaces where he could settle if he so choose. But I do have to say, that having slept so often in Caliburn, Strider and various hire cars by the side of the sea over the years, there is something hypnotic about sleeping in the open air with the sound of the sea in my head.

having recovered my breath I ran on down to the top of the cliff to see what was going on.

Nothing much here right now, but away in the distance Jersey and the Channel islands were taking quite a pasting. That’s something of an incredible storm that’s raging out there right now.

There’s quite a high wind blowing here right now, but luckily it’s not coming in this direction but going off out to sea, so it’s not likely to affect us. However, the winds are quite contrary and who knows what’s in store for us overnight.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw a couple of old cars, one of which was a green Morgan, driving around here.

On the car park by the Coastguard Station this evening was this green Morgan. I’m not sure if it’s the same car but anyway, it’s still interesting so with the owner’s permission I photographed it.

He told me that it is an original Morgan, not a reproduction, but it’s one of the modern series and made in 1985. That’s a shame, because I was hoping that it might have been one of the older ones. It’s still nice though.

Despite the wind, there’s still work to be done.

As I wandered around the headland I noticed a couple of fishing boats heading out across the Baie de Mont St Michel. It looks as if they are heading out towards the Brittany coast to see what they can find to catch over there.

It looks as if the head of the Baie de Mont St Michel has been abandoned by the fishing boats right now. But that may well be because of the school of dolphins that is said to be loitering around up there and which have been seen by one or two people – but not by me.

My run took me down along the top of the cliff and past the top of the chantier navale.

We have another occupant in there today, but I’m not sure whether or not it actually counts. There are the two big fishing boats that have been there for ages, but also a small yacht on blocks next to it.

Whatever it is, it was nice to see it so I took a photo and then carried on with my run all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

While I had stopped for breath, I walked down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see what was going on.

Chausiais was down there, moored up in the loading position underneath the crane. Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen her heading out to the Ile de Chausey the other day, so it’s strange that she’s looking as if she’s loading up ready to go out again so soon.

Nothing else seemed to be happening so I turned round and ran off to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord, pushing on by about 50 metres that particular segment of my run.

There was nothing going on there either. The sun was hidden in swathes of clouds and so there were no picnickers out there this evening. So I ran on home.

Having written my notes I’m off to bed, for an early night for once. I’m off for a day out tomorrow so I need to be on form. I’ll try some breakfast tomorrow morning and see if I can keep it down, and I have to go shopping too on my way out as supplies are getting low – not that it particularly matters right now.

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 – I’VE NOT BEEN …

… feeling myself today.

“And quite right too” I hear you say.

But never mind that for a moment, I’m definitely sickening for something and I know that for definite because I’m off my food. Which, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is not something that happens every day.

The day didn’t really get off to a very good start today , as seems to be usual these days, I missed the third alarm. Only b a couple of minutes, but nevertheless …

The notes on the dictaphone from my night’s voyage were interesting too. There were two new people who had started work on the radio – a girl and an older guy. I’d had a listen to a piece of music on the girl’s site and I wasn’t very impressed with it but everyone’s taste is personal. Anyway I was in the queue to ge tmyself organised when these two came over the hill. They were talking and the guy was saying something about “there’s only one song on your web site and it’s the same one that i’ve got”. She was saying things like “well I’m very new” but she’s only just started, all this kind of thing. I said “I’m quite happy to help anyone with any kind of help that they need” but they just drifted past as if I hadn’t said a word. They ended up in the queue in front of me to have their work dealt with and they were going on about this being new and all of this kind of thing. Then it was my turn so I gave me name and asked if there were any special instructions for me. he was looking down the list to see whether there was anything. I was going to say that if anyone like these two people needed a hand to get themselves started I would be quite happy to do it but instead I ended up dictating the notes of the journey.

But looking back, how long is it … ” that’s a rather personal question” – ed … since I’ve had some pleasant company with me on a nocturnal voyage? It must be an age – or, at least, it feels like it.

After breakfast I made a start on updating the journal entry for Sunday – the one that I had left hanging in the air. And by the time I knocked off for the evening I’d actually finished it.

However, there was a whole variety of interruptions today – tidying up being not the least of them. If I go video-conferencing, I need to have the place looking quite nice.

Terry came round too. he had an appointment in town and so came for the hat that Liz had left here the other day. And, furthermore, and even more importantly, he brought me a fresh supply of home-made cake from Liz.

So that’s one crisis solved.

At 11:00 I had my Welsh lesson on the internet. That meant doing quite a bit of preparation too, which was not easy because I don’t have the course book. In the end the tutor sent me a *.pdf version which was very nice of her

A few important things had come up during the lesson that needed attention so I had to organise those, and that meant once more a very late lunch.

It was another really gorgeous afternoon and so I decided once more to take my sandwiches outside and sit on my wall overlooking the harbour.

Not that I managed to go very far at first. In fact I came to a shuddering halt at the front door of the building. Regular readers of this rubbish will know about the underground refuse system here in the town and we’ve seen one or two lorries emptying them

But we’ve never seen a lorry this close with this much detail. Just look at how big these subterranean containers are.

Down at the wall, I was there all on ly own today. Everyone is either back at school or back at work and I was late as well.

But there was an awful lot going on in the harbour today. I’m not sure at all what was happening here but we had one of the smaller fishing boats tied up at the fish processing plant and there were a couple of people in a zodiac-type of boat inspecting it.

Mind you, in that depth of water they didn’t need a zodiac to go out there. They could quite easily have walked.

Mind you it didn’t stay there long.

Into the port came another one of the shell-fishing boats, a rather larger version. Our zodiac was clearly in the way so it set off and piddled off out of there

What that was all about, I really didn’t know because I couldn’t see at all what was going on.

It was pretty busy in the inner harbour too, and there was a queue of boats waiting at the crane for unloading.

In pole position for loading and unloading is our old friend Chausiais, looking as if she’s making ready to set off with a cargo for the Ile de Chausey. And behind her awaiting her turn – or maybe having already had hers and waiting for the harbour gates to open, is Normandy Trader

She must have sneaked in on the morning tide when I wasn’t looking.

Something else caught me rather by surprise too.

There I was, sitting there quietly eating my butties when suddenly a horn went off around the corner, that almost made me drop my book.

Of course, the tides are almost half an hour later every day, so it’s round about now that Joly France would be coming back from the morning ferry out to the Ile de Chausey.

And you can tell that the tide has only just started coming in.

The smaller boats with a shallow draught can pass over the sandbar at the entrance quite easily but boats like Joly France have much more trouble and have to go all the way over to the eastern side of the harbour entrance.

The water that drains out of the inner harbour has scoured a deeper channel on that side and that gives the larger boats more depth to play with.

Even so, when we went out there A WHILE AGO we grounded out on the way back in.

But Joly France didn’t hang around long. She dropped off one load of passengers, picked up another and headed back out to sea.

And as I watched her disappear, one of the medium-sized fishing boats came around the corner heading for port, presumably with a full load of shellfish ready to be unloaded at the fish processing plant.

She was travelling at a fair rate of knots too. At first I thought that she was a large speedboat of some description, making waves like that.

But better late than never – I came back inside and carried on with the work that I had to do. Choosing the music for a radio project was on the agenda this afternoon.

And I didn’t really have all that long to spend working because, with being rather late, it was time soon enough to go back out for my afternoon walk.

By now I reckoned that the harbour gates were well and truly opened because I have never ever seen so much nautical traffic just offshore as I have today

There were boats heading in all directions, and not just to and from the port either. This speedboat in the foreground was putting quite a spurt on heading along the coast towards Bréhal-Plage.

And those ships and boats in the previous photo – I thought that I recognised one of them.

And I was right too. It’s Chausiais. The harbour gates are definitely open now, because she’s been able to leave the port and head off on her little trip to the Ile de Chausey.

One of these days I’d love to be able to see what she’s carrying but her holds are closed in and with covered hatches so it’s not that easy at all. But I suppose that it takes all sorts of cargo out there.

Of course, if the harbour gates are open to let one boat out, they will be open to let everyone else out too.

And sure enough, out of the port right behind Chausias comes Normandy Trader off on her way back to the Channel Islands with another load of freight.

She’s an open freighter of course – a former car ferry by the looks of things, so it’s easy to see what she carries. But of course you can’t see anything at this distance.

As a small car ferry, she’s not really equipped to deal with the seas in the same way that a ship with a pointed bow would be.

And, for that matter, neither is Chausiais.

There’s quite a wind blowing out there and I had to take off my cap as I was walking around the headland. And the ships, with their less-than-conventional design were making rather heavy weather of the journey out to sea.

There was some beautiful spray flying around as Normandy Trader smashed her way through the waves. This photo has come out rather well, I reckon.

So that’s enough ships for the moment.

In the beautiful sunny sunshine I carried on with my afternoon walk around the headland and it was my turn to surprise some people. It looked as if they were practising Tai Chi, although I don’t think that you need yoga mats for that.

Anyway they must have seen me coming because as soon as I pointed the camera they folded up their mats and they too piddled off into the sunset as well.

It wasn’t my day, was it?

And what was quite amusing about this afternoon was that we seem to have had a tactical substitution of freighters in the harbour.

Chausiais and Normandy Trader may well have sailed out of the port on the afternoon tide, but the tide has also brought in with it another one of our old friends, Thora, also from the Channel islands.

And how I would have loved to have been at the harbour and watched her come in. There would have been an extremely interesting nautical danse macabre as all three boats were jostling for position in there.

The high winds have brought out a whole load of people and nautical craft as we have seen.

And you can tell just how windy it is out there, simply by looking at the sail on that yacht as it comes round the headland.

Look how much it’s billowing out. I bet that it’s pulling the boat along at a ferocious rate despite the load that it’s carrying. I can count at least 10 people on board and that’s quite a load for a boat like that.

But I bet that it’s exciting on there.

With all of the fishing boats out there, it’s no surprise that they are expecting a bumper load of fish and shellfish coming into the port today.

As a result there are three large artics, a smaller 17-tonne lorry and several other smaller refrigerated vehicles waiting at the fish-processing plant this afternoon

And the fork-lift truck – that has quite a load on it that’s goign to be deposited into the artic trailer over there. That’s a never-ending chain of product that will be stuck in there and the other vehicles.

There’s a really high turnover of product down there these days

And talking of high turnover of product, I used the last of my apple purée this morning. Time to make some more.

Six apples, one and a half pears, some desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg all put on the boil and then left to simmer. And when it was ready, the liquid was drained off and bottled, the solids were put in the whizzer and whizzed into a purée.

Then a handful of raisins was added, and all of that was bottled too. Of course the bottles were sterilised by giving them a minute in the microwave with some warm water in there to spread the heat.

But it wasn’t all as easy as that. Our Welsh group has set up a communication group on the internet. A couple of us set it up and were testing it – to such an extent that I completely forgot about the fruit on the stove and instead of 45 minutes simmering, it had just about two hours.

That’s not a good idea.

By this time I wasn’t feeling too good, and I don’t know why. I hadn’t been able to concentrate all day and I’ve done none of my Accountancy or Music studies because of it.

And not only that, I’ve lost my appetite, and that’s the sign of a major relapse heading my way – no surprise seeing how many months (over 4 months in fact) since I’ve had my four-weekly cancer treatment.

So no tea tonight, but I was determined to carry on with my running despite everything. So off I went, with all of my aches and pains and grouches.

Despite the wind, it was a beautiful evening and the colours were splendid. The big marker light on the rock just outside the harbour entrance, the sea, and the resort of Kairon-Plage in the background all came out really well

Surprisingly, after all of the excitement today, there wasn’t a boat to be seen anywhere at all in the baie de Mont St Michel. I wonder where they all went.

As fr me, i went off on my run all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury where one of my colleagues from the radio drove past and waved to me.

My run ended up at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord and I had a look over the wall to see how we were doing for picnickers tonight. And do you know what? After all of the excitement here over the last week or two there wasn’t even a one.

But not to worry. Because as I was musing over the situation, down the steps came a few young people carrying blankets and bags, and they began to settle themselves down in the evening sun.

And evening sun there was plenty of tonight.

We’ve had some good ones just recently but tonight was one of the best. But I didn’t hang around too long. I just stayed for a minute or two and then ran on back home.

Tonight I made a determmined effort to finish my notes even though I didn’t feel like it. And now I’m off to bed, rather later than I had hoped.

Here’s hoping that I feel a little better tomorrow because otherwise we’ll be heading for a tragedy again.

Monday 1st June 2020 – WHAT STARTED OFF …

… as a really good day disintegrated pretty quickly into the usual chaotic mess and there’s now yet more stuff piled up in the queue of arrears to be dealt with.

So while you admire the photos of the young boys taking a giant step for mankind into the English Channel off the ramp at the Plat Gousset, I shall enlarge.

And I might even tell you about it too.

In fact, there was a hint if it all starting to go wrong last night when at about 23:15, halfway through writing up my notes, I was suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue.

That was the cue for me to call it a night and stagger off to bed. It wasn’t a worry because it’s happened before … “and it will happen again” – ed … and I’ll catch up with it soon enough.

However, in what will come as a totaly surprise to just about everyone, I reckon, including me, I awoke with the first alarm and didn’t go back to sleep as I normally do.

As a matter of fact, when the third alarm went off I was in the kitchen mixing my morning cordial with which to take my medication.

And that’s not something that happens every day either, especially just recently.

Nothing on the dictaphone either – I don’t seem to have gone anywhere during the night so it must have been a really solid sleep.

That meant that I could have a good half-hour or so on adding to my notes from yesterday before the medication worked and I could go to breakfast.

After breakfast I had tidying up to do because I was having visitors. It’s one good thing about having them, in that it does prompt me to clean up the place.

Sure enough, at 10:00, Laurent came round and we had a really good chat about all kinds of things and made a plan for a day out on Thursday. He knows of a few places that might interest me, like France’s answer to New Brunswick’s LePreau nuclear reactor, which is having a similar amount of success.

And if we take some potatoes with us, we can have fission chips for lunch.

After Laurent left there was a radio project to prepare.

Luckily I’d already done half a dozen live concerts in the past for another project when Liz and I ran “Radio Anglais” so I pinched one of those, wrote an introduction, dictated and edited it and merged it in to make an hour-long concert for this radio station.

Just like that!

That meant a very late lunch, unfortunately. And I was good and ready for it too by now.

It was a really beautiful afternoon, right enough, so I went outside and sat on my wall with my butties and my book. With the air being so clear these days we could wee right across to Cancale over there on the Brittany coast.

That’s about 18 miles away as the crow flies, yet you would never ever think so by looking at the photo.

The tide was coming in quite rapidly as I sat there. I could actually see it rising before my very eyes.

As a result one lot of fishing boats was heading out of the harbour to go to work while an earlier wave of boats was on its way back in to unload the morning’s catch.

There was the usual pile of pleasure boats too. Perhaps I ought to mention that it’s a Bank Holiday today and many people are off work.

Back here I made a start on the second week of my Accountancy course – but not for very long because it was time to go for my afternoon walk.

With it being such a beautiful day, there were the usual crowds out there.

This cabin cruiser was sitting in the sea quite a long way out and if I possessed a boat I would be out there too in this kind of weather.

There’s another one of those marker buoys there too, over there to the right of the boat. It’s hard to see because it’s black, and that’s not the best colour to have in the sea because it’s pretty difficult to see.

What’s wrong with yellow or orange?

It goes without saying that in this weather and a Bank Holiday too there are the usual crowds on the beach.

That means that in order to escape the madding crowds, people have to go further and further into the crooks and nannies in order to find some peace and quiet. And it doesn’t get much more isolated than the spot that they have chosen.

As an aside … “here we go!” – ed … I once told a friend that I had gone into the country to get a little piece and quiet.
“Don’t you mean ‘peace’?” he asked.
“No” I replied. “I mean ‘piece’, and I got one too, but she just wouldn’t keep quiet”

Standing on the clifftop overlooking the sea I fell in with a neighbour of mine who was busy admiring the scenery

We spent quite a long time admiring the scenery and putting the world to rights, like you do. And our discussion was interrupted by the arrival of Captain Matthew Webb. Not exactly “swimming along the old canal”
“That carried the bricks to Lawley” though.

He was probably “paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination” but somehow missed his turning along the route.

We mantioned earlier something about the crowds on the beach and the necessity to find a quiet corner.

But there aren’t any crowds on the beach right now, and for the simple reason is that there isn’t much of a beach for them to be crowding on.

The tide is still well in and in a few minutes even that little bit of beach will be awash with water. Not that it’s stopping all of those people from taking to the waters. It was the right kind of day for it.

Round at the lookout over the Place Marechal Foch I went to see how they were progressing with the re-roofing.

And the answer is “not as quickly as I was expecting”. They have done about two thirds of it and they have put some fancy galvanised covering over the dormer windows. But there is still plenty to do.

However it’s looking like a very neat job and it will be somethign to admire when it’s finished, sure enough.

This was interesting too. I wasn’t sure what was going on with this particular yacht but, sensing that there was a catastrophe in the making, I stood there with bated breath and the camera at the ready.

But I was to be confounded yet again because the crew on board the yacht managed to straighten out the boat after making their very tight turn and sailed off into the sunset.

Or, at least, they would have done had this event taken place a couple of hours later.

But I was impressed with how they managed to get their boat upright again.

There was plenty of other maritime activity out there this afternoon too.

There were the usual yachts of course, several of which we have seen already, but this boat that was slowly chugging past looked to be very interesting. I wasn’t sure whether it was a yacht with its mast down or a streamlined cabin cruiser, but it was making comfortable progress even if it was towing its dinghy behind it.

As for me, I had to make comfortable progress and came back to make myself a coffee.

There was also my Accountancy course to attack, but shame as it is to say it, I crashed out on the chair. Not just for five or ten minutes either but a really deep 45 minutes the like of which I used to have when this illness first took hold and which I thought that I had shaken off.

That’s a tragedy because I have so much to do and I’m just getting farther and farther behind.

When it came round to 18:00 I was still somewhere else in my head but I managed to get myself together and spend the usual hour on the guitars.

Tea was a stuffed pepper and rice, followed by apple pie and soya coconut cream.

And then it was time to go out for my evening runs.

With not feeling too goo, every step was agony but I made it all the way round on my normal route. But at the clifftop I had to stop and take a photo of the spectacular view.

And just why it’s spectacular is that over there is, I reckon, Cap Fréhel on the Brittany coast and that’s just a little over 70 kms away. It’s not every day that you can see that far down the coast from up here, and I had to perch up on top of one of the old Atlantic Wall bunkers to make the shot work.

Round by the ferry terminal was my next port of call.

Both of the Joly France boats are moored up at the ferry terminal this evening. I did hear that there had been excursions over to the Ile de Chausey today.

But Chausiais has at long last moved from her ad-hoc temporary mooring against the harbour wall. And not before time either, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve seen how quickly the tide rises and falls here and where she was, she risked being dashed against the wall, and that wouldn’t have done her much good.

So I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury, ignoring a ribald remark that was directed in my direction, and when I’d recovered my breath at my resting place, I went down to overlook the harbour to see what was going on.

As usual, nothing very much, but at least we know where Chausiais has got to. She’s back on her mooring spot in the inner harbour where she’s out of the way of other traffic and the rising tide.

So having recovered my breath I ran on back all the way up the hill to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord to see what was happening there.

And the answer to that is “not very much”.

But my picnickers are still out there having fun. And I’m sure that they must be multiplying because there are more and more of them.

Having made sure that there was nothing else happing I ran on home to write out my notes.

Having done that, I’m off to bed. I have more visitors tomorrow morning and there’s my Welsh class. And then one of these days I really do need to do somethign about all of these arrears.

This backlog is just getting out of hand. Its ridiculous.

Wednesday 27th May 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you’re wondering what the weather has been like today, this photograph will tell you everything that you need to know.

As you can see, crowds on the beach, crowds in the water, everyone having fun. We’ve had what is easily the hottest day of the year. The thermometer that I have outside went up well into the 20s and at one stage peaked at 24°C.

That is pretty good going for a seaside resort in May with the winds that we have around here.

And they were still at it later on when I went for my evening walk and runs.

Admittedly I was a little earlier than usual, but nevertheless there would be no reason to suppose that there would be fewer people there 15 minutes later.

And you can’t see everyone either. There were crowds picnicking on the lawn behind the bunker of the Atlantic Wall and even several little groups sitting down on the grass behind me.

And even later on, they were still out there in droves.

As it was getting dark, the tide still had a long way yet to come in and there were people taking full advantage of that fact by having their picnic on the beach.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen groups of people picnicking down there for a couple of nights last week. I wonder if it’s the same group or whether these people are different.

It wasn’t just on dry land that there were crowds of people either.

There was the usual motley collection of fishing boats out working, but also a relentless stream of pleasure craft out there in the English Channel and the Baie de Mont St Michel. There’s a couple of yachts in this photo and a speedboat too.

And that’s just one photo of any dozen that I could have taken that would have featured multiple marine craft.

As for me, the day started off thoroughly miserably today.

In fact, it’s probably fairer to say that it ended miserably last night, although that’s not really true. I was planning on going to bed early but some decent music came onto the playlist and while I was listening to it, someone in North America with whom I wanted to chat appeared on the internet.

And by the time I finished talking, it was … errr … 02:30.

Not the slightest danger of m being up before the third alarm today. That goes without saying. The only surprise was that I actually made it up by 08:30.

First job after the medication was to set the yeast to work. 400ml of lukewarm water, a dessert spoon of sugar and a packet of yeast, and then leave it to ferment.

After breakfast I set about making the bread. Although THE LADY AT HARRINGTON HARBOUR who showed me how to make bread had a tendency to fight with her dough, the general opinion around here is that I’m being too rough with it.

It doesn’t need to be put near warmth to make it rise afterwards, apparently. Just leave it a couple of hours under a damp cover.

So I decided to follow these new counsels, and that’s what I did. Treated it gently and then left it.

While it was leaving, I came in here and finished off the radio project. That took longer too because my final speech overran by a country mile the 45 seconds that I allow for it and it wasn’t really possible to edit out the extra.

Instead, I had to hunt elsewhere for bits and pieces that I could cut out to reduce it to the 1:00:00 dead that it’s supposed to be.

By this time the dough had been standing for well over two hours so I went to see how it was going.

People were telling me that it should have doubled in size, but that was rather debatable. Nevertheless, I carried out the next stage of the proceedings which was to grease my bread mould, shape the bread dough and drop it in without mixing it any more.

Then cover it with a damp cloth and it should rise again to double the amount.

While it was rising, I made an apple pie with the last of the pastry rolls out of the fridge. Just one pizza roll to go now, which I’ll use on Sunday.

Having trimmed off the excess I made an apple turnover with that.

During this last bit the oven had been on and warming up, so I bunged the pie and the turnover in. The bread had risen … errr … somewhat, but I bunged it in the oven as well. Otherwise I’d be waiting there now. I reckon my yeast must be going off or something.

In the heat of the oven, the bread went up like a lift as I watched it. But only on one side despite it being in the centre of the oven. And why it does that defeats me completely.

For lunch I finished off the bread that was left and then made myself an orange and ginger cordial seeing as I’d run out of the lemon stuff.

By this time the pie and the turnover were cooked, and the bread looked as if it was done as well.

It’s still not shaped right, with only rising on one side, and I’ve no idea why it does that. One of life’s little mysteries, i suppose.

This afternoon I made a start on my accountancy course and managed to complete about three quarters of this week’s work before it was time to go for my walk.

As I said earlier, the weather was really beautiful today and everyone seemed to be enjoying it.

They seemed to be keeping their social distance too, which is always good news. We’re still on probation with this relaxation of the rules.

So far today there have been just 191 new cases and 66 deaths and that is looking rather optimistic. But people need to keep their heads and their social distance to avoid a second wave of the illness which, if history is anythign to go by, is usually far more virulent than the first.

And as Terry Venables once famously said, “If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again”.

So in the glorious summer weather, in just my shirt sleeves (and trousers, of course) I walked on around the walls.

At the lookout over the Place Marechal Foch I had a look out and down over at the building on which they’ve been replacing the roofing, to see how far they have reached.

It’s a big job of course and I wa expecting it to be keeping them out of mischief for quite a while. But they are cracking on like nobody’s business over there and another week might actually see them finished at this rate.

On the way back towards home I passed by the Place Cambernon. And here I was distracted somewhat.

We’ve seen this vehicle before – the other day in fact in the Rue du Roc. And also a couple of months ago, but that’s another story. Today though the owner was with it so I went over for a chat. He had bought it from an auction in this condition, and it’s maintained by a garage in Sartilly that has a couple more.

It’s a 1954 model, and a Citroen 11L by the way, not a 7L. You can tell that by the thickness of the C pillars. The 7L like mine has pillars that aren’t so thick.

Being low down and front wheel drive, it sticks to the road like glue and flat out, it’ll do 110kph. However the noise at anything above 90kph is unbearable. “It’s like an aeroplane” he says. There’s no soundproofing and there’s no heat insulation either so with the engine being up near the bulkhead (the gearbox is in front in these) the engine heat is unbearable.

No seat belts either. He told me that the Law is that if the vehicle is unmodified and as it was as it came out of the factory, then factory specifications is fine. So if the belts aren’t fitted when new, it doesn’t need them as long as he doesn’t modernise the car in other ways.

We’ve seen a couple of zodiacs flying around as well just recently.

There was another one out there today too. Not the yellow one that we’ve seen a couple of times, or the other one that’s been around a couple of times, but a third one, I reckon.

Judging by all of the equipment that they have on board it, it looks very much as if they are setting off on a fishing expedition somewhere off the coast by Bréhal-Plage.

With it being such a nice afternoon I went for an extended walk and that took me around to the viewpoint over the harbour.

The big cranes weren’t doing very much, but there was a small water craft scuttling across the harbour with a few workmen in it. It looks as if they are heading for the new pontoon that they’ve been installing.

Somehow I’m not convinced by the use of the boat. I can’t see why they couldn’t walk around the harbour. It would probably do them good.

Back here I had a look at the music course that I’ve started.

It’s evident that I’m not going to finish it either because despite it only being advertised at the weekend, it’s already in week 3 of 6. And the standard is way beyond where I am musically, and that’s not counting the fact that it’s on the piano and i’ve not played the piano since I was 12.

But in the hour or so that I was looking at it, I learnt an enormous amount already, including why “7” chords, such as A7 or E7 are so called. And the way the tutor was talking, I was expected to know that.

There was still the hour on the guitars and then tea. A slice of pie with baked potato and veg and gravy, followed by my apple turnover.

Outside in the evening heat I ran off up the hill and it was awful. I felt every step of the way. However am I going to manage when it’s really hot?

Past the crowds sunbathing and picnicking in the evening, and across the lawn out into the Baie de Mont St Michel I saw this fishing boat come into port. And you can tell that it had a full load of fish in the hold because of the trail of seagulls following it into port.

And I wonder what is the bird that photo-bombed my picture.

Interestingly though, as soon as the fishing boat turned into the harbour, the seagulls cleared off. I wonder why, and where they went.

But there was still plenty of other maritime traffic to be going on with.

A little earlier I mentioned the yachts that we had seen out in the English Channel. As I was wondering about the fishing boat, the yachts caught me up and I would admire them. The one in the distance looked as if it was going to slalom around the buoys offshore, but the nearer one caught my eye with it towing its dinghy behind it.

It’s certainly the life, isn’t it? Being out there on a boat like that. If I weren’t so ill I’d be out there on my own boat like that. But then, if I weren’t so ill I’d be still in the Auvergne and not here, so it doesn’t make any difference.

I ran down across the top of the cliffs on the southern side and stopped for my pause for breath in the usual place.

And it looks now as if the cranes have gone. Finished what they are doing, I suppose, folded their tents and crept off silently into the night.

The traffic lights are still there though, although in a different place. And I can’t see why because of the bend in the road. Still, it’s shopping day tomorrow so I can go for an investigation on my way out.

My resting place on this leg of my run overlooks that chantier navale so I could see what they were up to in there.

The two larger fishing boats that have been there for a while are still here, but the two smaller ones that came to join them a couple of days ago have now gone back into the water.

So on that point I walked up to the road and ran all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury to my next pause for breath.

With the cranes gone, I went to look at the pontoons to see where they were up to.

It’s not what I would call finished, but they evidently think so. All of the bits and pieces that we saw on there the other day, they have been removed too.

But it’s impressive to see just how quickly the local wildlife moves in and takes over. Just look at all of the seagulls congregating on the pontoons!

So on that note I ran on down to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord. There was nothing doing there (except our picnickers) so I ran on home again.

What’s surprising me is that despite the shorter day, I managed to accomplish so much. Not like me at all. There is still a mountain of arrears to do but at leat I haven’t fallen behind any more.

Tuesday 26th May 2020 – WE’RE BACK TO NORMAL …

… again, aren’t we?

For eight glorious weeks the planet has been in lockdown, the earth has breathed again and all was right in the world. But the gates are opened for about a week or so and already the humans are back to their disgusting habits.

It’s as if this last eight weeks has taught them nothing at all and it’s totally shameful.

For eight weeks there’s hardly been a paper out of place and the whole area has looked so nice. And now this!

I despair.

As for me, I managed to beat the third alarm to my feet, which is always good news. it was “only just” – but that’s enough for me right now.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. At first there was a army unit. There had been a unit of a sergeant and a few other people. They were getting rather tired of the war and had been doing things rather independently. One evening they’d come back to us in their tractor. They had a load of their supplies and they were just arranging them in a pretty formation, using them as wickets. There was some talk of distributing them among the poor. While this was going on there happened to be a general inspection and all the generals were there with this old tractor chugging past and they wondered what on earth he was doing. He was setting out all of these things. We expected there to be some kind of argument or discussion but the general went over to look at it and started to make suggestions about the best way to deploy his field to defend against it. It looked very much as if instead of having a huge argument about this old sergeant we were just going to have a peaceful game of cricket. A few people inside were telling all of their stories and there was one guy who was moaning away that he’d only qualified for 8 weeks and he’d spent 4 of those weeks in the army. We asked him what he was and he had qualified as a doctor so he said but he had come in as a private. Then people started clamouring for me to tell them my story
Somewhat later during the night we were doing something out on an island somewhere. One of the boats that was doing the connection between the mainland and the island was this yacht run by this woman. She was a bit domineering and bossy, and it wasn’t very pleasant having to work anywhere where she was in control. Anyway, at the end of the period we all left. A year or so later I came back to do something and found that the woman and the boat were still here. For some unknown reason I had a different opinion of her by then – maybe she wasn’t as bad as she was made out to be and we were probably as much to blame about things. I was interested to get to see her and talk to her and that took a lot of doing.

After breakfast I tidied up in the living room and the kitchen to get the place looking tidy (that’s the one thing about video-conferencing – I have to make the place look nice), reviewed last week’s Welsh notes, and then swatted up on the notes for this lesson.

And you’ve no idea how quickly time goes when you’re trying to concentrate like this. I had to dash the last page or two, and then I couldn’t find the invitation to the chat.

But eventually I was sorted out and we had our two-hour lesson. And we’re getting quite good at it. However we’re going at a cracking pace so heaven alone knows what it will be like when our 10-week course finishes. Fluent but totally exhausted, I reckon.

For lunch I attacked my loaf and now there’s just an end that’s left. So tomorrow morning I’m going to have to make another loaf. This will be version 4 and I wonder if this will be any improvement on the previous three. We’ve seen improvement week on week so here’s hoping.

This afternoon I attacked the radio project and by the time I came to knock off I’d written the text, dictated it and edited it. Tomorrow morning after my baking, I’ll join everything up.

There was the usual break mid-afternoon to go for a walk around the headland. And in the sun and the wind too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on many occasions we’ve seen marker flags and buoys bobbing up and down in the sea just off the coast. There’s another one out there today in the English Channel.

One of these days I’ll work out what they are for. I reckon that it’s something to do with fishing equipment, but I would have expected them to be painted in a bright colour that’s easily seen rather than black that no-one can see so easily.

When I was in Wyoming last July following the traces of the battles between the US armed farces and the native Americans, I was intrigued to read a report to say that in the clear conditions of the Plains of Wyoming the flash of a heliograph signal could be seen 50 miles away.

Once or twice I saw some decent reflections out there, but this one here today over on the Brittany coast was even more interesting. That’s about 20-25 miles away, which may well be only half the distance, but it’s from a window I reckon, not from a pre-focused mirror.

And regular readers of this rubbish who have followed this stuff for years will recall that when we were at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on the Outer banks of North Carolina and one or two other lighthouses out there, we had a very interesting discussion about pre-focused Fresnel lenses.

So with the right equipment, imagine the distance that the flash of a heliograph would travel across here. From hill to hill of course, otherwise you’ll be confounded by the curvature of the earth.

It wasn’t just the flashes from the Brittany coast that were looking impressive today either.

In all the time that i’ve lived here I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the Ile De Chausey looking so clear at this distance. It’s 20-odd kms away over there.

And the yacht in the long distance has come out surprisingly clear too. That was quite impressive too.

My walk carried me on around the headland and back down the south side of the headland.

No change in the chantier navale – still the same four boats in there – but there seems to be an incredible amount of activity down in the rue du Port with the two giant cranes at full stretch across the harbour.

It’s not easy to see what they are trying to do, so I’ll have to creep up quietly a little closer to see if I can have a better view.

This is better. I can see what they are doing from here.

And it’s as I suspected. They are putting in the finishing touches to the floating pontoon that they have built out from the rue du Port. I was wondering when they were going to finish that.

But it really is depressing. This is costing them a fortune all of this equipment. But a couple of years ago they had the harbour drained for a couple of weeks. They could have done all of this then at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time with working on what was effectively dry land.

Back here I carried on with my radio project and then had a play on the guitar as usual.

But I missed out on my session on the bass, and for a very good reason too. I’d been playing the chords to U2’s “One Tree Hill” and was interested in trying to fathom out the fiddly bits in it. And after a few minutes, it hit me as to what they were.

And it’s simple – the lower four notes of the G chord and the upper 4 notes of the C chord and the D chord. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But you try playing it at the speed that they play it when you’ve never done it before.

So I spent all of my hour trying to master t and at the end of my hour there is just one interchange that I cannot get tight no matter how hard I try.

But then when I started to teach myself the 6-strin guitar back in late August I couldn’t play bar chords and that was a great disappointment too. So I’ll just keep on persevering.

Tea was an old “anything curry” out of the freezer with rice and veg.

There should have been a dessert made today but if I’m baking bread tomorrow the oven will be on so I’ll make an apple pie as well. I’ll be brave and use the last of the pastry rolls in the fridge. So for dessert I had a go at making a rice pudding in the microwave. However that was a disappointment and I shan’t be doing that again

The high winds had calmed down this evening so it was very pleasant outside.

The first run up the hill was the same old struggle as usual and it isn’t getting any better with time. I remember when I started back running when I went to live in Belgium. After a couple of weeks I could run miles and miles with no problem. But then again that was when I was healthy and it was 25 years ago of course.

My run took me across the lawn down to the clifftop and then I walked across the lawn to the other side through the crowds.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that just recently we’ve been seeing whole fleets of fishing boats down in the Baie de Mont St Michel far deeper than we have seen them before.

And again today, there was probably seven or eight of them down there working.

At the fish processing plant there were four large refrigerated lorries so they must be anticipating a large catch today. And I’m just wondering how long they are going to keep on exploiting the harvest out there.

It’s not just from boats in the Baie de Mont St Michel that they are fishing.

In the beautiful evening sunshine we had someone perched on a rock with a rod and line. The other day we saw the seagulls on there waiting for the tide to go out, and here’s someone taking full advantage of the tide being in.

For my part, I took advantage of the fact that what wind there was was now blowing from behind me so I took to my heels down along the clifftop

And I was right about the anticipation of a really good catch today, by the look of things.

The fishing boats were queueing up to unload at the quay. We had one boat reversing away and another one pulling into its place and we ended up with a fascinating nautical danse macabre as they maoeuvred around each other.

So, with no shipwrecks and nobody drowndin’, I headed off for the next part of my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

But here was something totally magnificent heaving into view while I was stopped for a pause for breath.

It’s probably the most magnificent yacht that I have seen for quite a while. I’ve no idea where it came from because I hadn’t seen it out at sea earlier. It took me quite by surprise.

There was nothing much going on at the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord so I didn’t hang about, and ran on home instead to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I’m going to be busy because there is so much that needs catching up and I really don’t know how I’m going to find the time to do it all.

Monday 25th May 2020 – A FEW MORE …

… things to add to the pile of things that haven’t been done today. I’m not having a good start to the week.

It all went wrong right at the very beginning when the third alarm found me somewhere in Wyoming, and a very dry, dusty Wyoming at that too. I’d been in my old Opel Senator and had an accident in which it was written off and I’d had to wait around for a taxi. Eventually the one that the insurance company sent fo me tuned up – an old blue Volvo 244. On the way back (and the name Irmo – which Rhys might know – was mentioned) I mentioned how I’d be happy to settle in a place like this and I asked what taxi-driving was like around here. The driver told me with alarm “ohh don’t go settling around here” but didn’t elaborate. He told me that he might have a buyer for my car so we were talking about buying old cars and dismantling them like I used to from the abandoned car auctions in Brussels but at that point the alarm went off.

After the medication (I was up and about by 06:30) I had a listen to the dictaphone. And there was something very enigmatic on there from round about 02:30. “Yes sometime during the night I dreamt that I was actually writing up my blog. Yes, it’s getting to me, isn’t it?” was what I heard when I played it back. But what it was all about I really didn’t have a clue.

Between breakfast and lunch there was a variety of things to do. First off was to send off the radio project for the forthcoming weekend. And seeing as it’s the end of the month we’re having a live concert again.

Then it was time to choose the music for the next radio project.

It’s a friend’s birthday so I had to prepare a special birthday card for her. That was quite important.

My Welsh homework needed doing too, and that involved some research and more than a little tidying up of my notes. And the questions had come in *.docx format which Open Office doesn’t read correctly – so I had to reformat that by copying the text and paginating it which took an age.

Then back to the radio project and by the time that I knocked off for lunch the tracks had been joined in pairs, I’d chosen a speech for my guest and I’d started to write the notes.

After lunch there was cookery to be done.

This morning I’d used the last of the purée so I made some more. It hadn’t kept as well as previously so I’ve decided to make smaller amounts more regularly. Today’s effort was apple and pear, and I remembered the cinnamon and nutmeg.

With the juice that was left over, I added some syrup to make a cordial, and we’ll see how that goes.

As well as that, there was the remaining kilo of carrots to be peeled, diced, blanched and frozen. They are in the freezer right now too.

There was a break while I went out for my afternoon walk in the glorious sun.

There were a few people staring down at the foot of the cliff so I went along to see what there was going on. I’m not sure what it was that they were seeing, but I saw this beautiful little yacht go scudding by right under my nose.

One of my neighbours was there too – Gribouille’s mum – with her arm in plaster. She’d had a fall in the market on Saturday and broken her wrist.

She started to tell me all about it but no thanks – I don’t want to know things like that.

The next couple of photos look as if the quality is quite dismal too.

In several respects that’s true, but it was necessary to enhance them to bring our exactly what it was that I wanted to see. These are two fishing boats – in this photo and the next one, but it is what is in the background that is more interesting.

In all the time that I’ve been living here I don’t think that we have ever had such perfect weather out that way

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, on a good day we can see the island of Jersey from here even though it’s at least 54 kilometres away.

Today, not only could we see the island quite clearly but we could even see the buildings and the radio masts on the island. I’ve seen them before, but only with the zoom lens at full-extent and with some severe cropping and enhancing. But today, it didn’t take much to bring them out.

In places you could even see them with the naked eye, and that was impressive.

Having chatted to another neighbour who was in the vicinity I went off for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds of people out there today – picnicking on the lawn, walking around the headland and even down on the beach. Some corners of the beach are not easy to get to but the seafood pickings must be really good. Here was someone having a go at the peche à pied by the looks of things

It would be really interesting to find out how much he actually was able to catch and, more importantly, how he was going to prepare it for eating.

Talking of good seafood pickings, regular readers of this rubbish will recall a few days ago that we saw a whole sock of fleagulls perched on the rocks, looking as if they were Waiting for Godot.

At the time I speculated that they were waiting for the tide to recede from the mudflats so that they could get stuck in to supper. The tide is out right now and here they are, having a feast.

There must have been several hundred here and it shows the capacity of the shellfish to regenerate themselves every day to be be able to produce enough food to satisfy this lot.

A little earlier I mentioned the beautiful weather.

Over towards the Brittany coast the weather was rather misty and hazy but down at the end of the baie de Mont St Michel we could see quite clearly.

The large white buildings are all of the hotels and the like that service Mont St Michel. Having seen the prices that they charge for even the most basic services down there, I shudder to think how much they would want for a night in a hotel down there.

Over to the left we have the Pointe de Carolles with the Cabanon Vauban – the customs lookout post – perched on the edge.

And notice how far out the tide is? You can clearly see the orange sand down at the head of the bay.

There was the usual pause to admire the scenery down below the cliff on the south side of the Pointe du Roc.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we always keep an eye on the chantier navale to see what goes on there. Just ecently we’ve seen them whittle themselves down from five to four to three to two. But today, they have gone back up to four with the arrival of two more.

Only small ones, but then I suppose that everything helps. Someone was sanding down one of them. I couldn’t see which one it was but I could certainly hear the sound.

Up on blocks in the chantier navale is not the only way that boats receive attention around here.

Careening is a regular feature when there’s a high tidal range, although I’ve yet to see that applied in any seriousness. Being strapped tightly to a knuckle on the harbour wall so that the boat grounds out safely when the tide goes out is on the other hand something that we’ve seen on a regular basis and there’s another one over there receiving similar treatment.

There was quite a crowd up on the wall by it too, so something exciting must have happened to it.

Over the last few days regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing the giant crane that appeared on the docks at the end of last week.

Whatever it’s come here to do, it’s doing it right now. Its width with its safety feet is such that it’s blocked off half of the road and there afe traffic light sontrolling the traffic.

It’s not possible at all to see what it’s doing from here. One of these days I’ll have to go for a walk down there and take a closer look. It has to be something worthwhile to have attracted machinery like that.

There was the usual hour on the guitars, somewhat later than usual, and then tea. Tonight was a stuffed pepper and the last of the apple crumble. I’ll have to make another pudding tomorrow and I have a cunning plan for that.

There was the usual run out tonight – an agonising crawl up the hill in the teeth of a gale. But I recovered my breath, ran down to the clifftop and then walked round the corner.

The other day, regular readers of this rubbish saw the marker light for the harbour entrance standing well clear of the water on its rock. By my estimation it’s still half an hour or so before high tide, and if you compare the two photos you’ll see how high the tide comes in.

And look how clear the air is this evening. You can see for miles down there.

As I ran on down on top of the cliff I noticed hordes of people standing on top of the harbour wall.

For quite a while I stood and watched them, thinking that they might be going to jump in. We’ve seen them do that before. But as long as I looked, no-one moved and I came to the conclusion that they were fishermen or something.

There were a couple of parties of girls as well loitering around where I was standing, presumably likewise waiting for things over there to happen.

As I stood there watching them, something came a put-putting around the headland.

At first I wasn’t sure what it was, but I suppose that it’s another one of these very small fishing boats. It’s a working boat, judging by the radio aerial.

And those things in the foreground. I wasn’t sure whether they were marker buoys or seagulls. And having had a closer look I have to say that i’m still none-the-wiser.

And that reminds me of a story I heard about a barrister, FE Smith, giving a lengthy explanation of something to a crowded courtroom.
“I’ve listened to you for half an hour” said the judge “and I’m still none-the-wiser”
“Maybe not, My Lord” replied Smith. “But you’re certainly better-informed”.

My run took me all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and as there was a lot going on at the fish processing plant I went to see.

This equipment that they were using was quite interesting and it took me a minute or two to work out what it was. And I came to the conclusion that it’s a kind of vacuum-cleaner that was being used to suck the shellfish out of the hold of the trawler and into the fish processing plant.

And if that’s what it is (and that was what it sounded like) it’s a pretty ingenious device.

My run tok me round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

Nothing exciting going on there and still a while before sunset so I took a quick photo and ran on home to write up my notes..

Tomorrow is a busy day. I have my Welsh class so I need to prepare, I have my book-keeping class that has now started, I have my music course.

Then there are the photos from Sunday to deal with, the current radio project and another live concert for the end of next month too.

That’s before I even think about the ongoing projects like the websites and the July 2019 photos, and then all of the other stuff that’s built up from projects before that were never finished.

It’s a mystery to me how I’m ever going to find the time to do it all.

Tuesday 19th May 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve featured a decent old car on these pages? After all, it’s not like the Auvergne where old cars are two-a-penny round here is it?

The answer is “probably about as long as I managed to beat the third alarm to feet to my feet” which is another sore point around here, especially this morning.

And so, in order to whet your appetite for a decent old car, here’s a “Traction Avant” – one of the Citroen front-wheel drives made over a 20-or -so period between the mid 30s and the mid 50s and which featured as gangstermobiles in almost every French film of that period – driving along the Rue du Roc this evening.

Horsepower was calculated in different ways in different countries so in the UK this would be known as a Light or Heavy 15 depending on whether it was a “4” or a “6” cylinder model, whereas in France it’s either a 7L or an 11L. And, of course, “Traction Avant”, or “front wheel drive”.

It’s one of the very last models too, which you can tell by the boot lid (the earlier ones had the sloping boot lid with the impression of the steering wheel in it) and the rear bumper (which is straight, not curved).

And if you want to know how come I know all about these vehicles, there’s one of them SITTING AT THE BACK OF MY BARN in the Auvergne.

It was supposed to be a retirement project when I’d finished my house but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, what we need now is a miracle.

While we’re on the subject of miracles … “well, one of us is” – ed … I think that I’m going to need one to get me back into getting out of bed at a decent time in the morning before the alarm.

Whatever it is that i’m doing right now, it’s not working. It was about 07:20 when my feet touched the ground and that, dear reader, is simply not good enough.

After the meds I had a look – or rather, a listen – to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

Last night I was visiting some kind of zoo and we went to see the chimpanzees although another name was used for them I can’t remember who I was with. The animals were being kept in really squalid conditions in a place the size of a lock-up garage. There were about 10 chimps in there and a few of them, mothers and babies, were in a mass huddle. I asked if they were de-fleaing each other but the person there told me that each animal de-flead itself. I was interested to know what happened to the young female chimps when they reached maturity because if they stayed there they would be inbred which wouldn’t be good for the stock, so did they exchange animals with other zoos to mix the gene pool around? But by this time we were walking away and I couldn’t find anyone to ask.

After breakfast I finished off yesterday’s notes, having crashed out last night in the middle of writing them, tidied up little and then brushed up on my Welsh. The course got under way at 11:00 and finished at 13:00 and the teacher is going at a cracking pace, not leaving us very much time to draw breath. This course goes on for 10 weeks and if I’m still here at the end of it I’m going to be out of breath!

There will have to be a bread-baking session tomorrow morning because at lunch I used up almost the last of my home-baked bread. I’ve already run out of cordial so that, I reckon will be my morning taken care of.

After lunch I started on finishing off the radio project. And by the time that I was ready to knock off, it was finished. Not without much effort either because for some reason that I don’t understand, I’d miscalculated the length of the last track.

And so I had to do the last part again and with a different song and – badger me – I miscalculated again. I’ve no idea what was happening to me today, I really haven’t.

At least I didn’t crash out, which is, I suppose something. But there was an interruption while I went for my afternoon walk.

And as I walked out of the door I walked straight into something going on. A few people (there were masses of folk outside) including a couple of my neighbours were gazing at something going on offshore so I went to join them.

The local lifeboat, which regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing on a few occasions, was doing some kind of what looked like a rescue at sea.

Whether it was a trial run, a practice or an actual rescue we really couldn’t say, but it was quite exciting to watch it as the events unfolded and did what it was supposed to do.

But it’s hardly surprising that there’s some kind of “incident” out at sea just now.

There are the sailing schools here of course, one in Granville and it looks like one in Bréhal-Plage. We saw the other day some yachts that might have come from there and there are a few out there today with a couple of rows of buoys that, presumably, the yachtsmen have to sail around.

And that speedboat that we saw yesterday with the rod-and-line fishermen in it – there’s a similar boat out there today in the same place with similar people doing a similar thing.

But if I told you how many water craft there are out there today, you wouldn’t believe me.

So here’s a photo that I took of the view out from the top of the cliff towards the Ile de Chausey and you can see for yourself how many there are just in this shot.

There’s the lifeboat of course, the yacht far out in the distance toward the island, a couple of fishing boats and a speedboat. It’s hardly any surprise that there’s been some kind of “incident” out there this afternoon

It’s not just on land and sea that there are crowds of people either

As I was concentrating on what was going on out at sea I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. It was actually a shadow and when I looked up to see what was causing it, I noticed that it was one of the birdmen of Alcatraz floating on over my head.

It always amuses me that their point of take-off is right next to the cemetery in Donville les Bains. If they have any serious problem they don’t have too far to do.

My walk took me around the headland and onto the south side of the headland.

And if anything, it was just as busy there. There was any number of photographs that I could have taken to illustrate the point but I contented myself with this one because it was rather symbolic of the dirty working diesel-powered fishing boat and the clean sleek lines of the wind-powered craft propelled (at least nominally) by the wind.

There are a lot of symbolics in my photos of course. Some people say that they are just “sym” but other people say something else.

We haven’t finished with the water craft either today.

It was odds-on that with all of this water craft about, there was bound to be some kind of commercial traffic too. We haven’t seem our two little freighters from the Channel islands for a week or so but this afternoon, here in port we have Normandy Trader

These days the turn-round is very quick and so it was today because when I went out for my run later on in the evening, she had loaded up and gone.

Regular readers of this rubbish will remember the other day that we saw four refrigerated lorries parked up at the fish-processing plant.

Today it looks as if we’ve gone one better and have a nap hand of lorries here – 5 of them in fact. And you can see all of the fishing boats tied up at the quayside. Coupled with the number of boats out at sea, it’s hardly a surprise that they need 5 lorries to take away the catch.

As for me I came home to finish off my radio work and have my hour on the guitar. I mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I added some kidney beans into the left-over stuffing and had taco rolls with pasta and vegetables.

Thatw as followed up by another slice of my nice redfruit pie with soya coconut dessert stuff.

This evening, somewhat earlier than of late, I went out for my evening run.

We saw the Traction Avant that crossed my path earlier and I’m sure that you don’t want to see any more of the trawlers and fishing boats that were fishing away offshore. Instead, as I walked around the corner of the headland there was this bright yellow zodiac.

It wasn’t easy to see what they were doing either, so I took a photograph of it with the aim of blowing it up (the photo, not the zodiac of course) back in the apartment for a closer look

But I was destined to be confounded because the moment I clicked the shutter he put his machine into gear, put the pedal to the metal and piddled off out of it.

So whatever it was that they had been doing just there, they had clearly finished and there wouldn’t be all that much point in looking.

Consequently I carried on with my run down past the chantier navale (no change there) and the port Normandy Trader has piddled off too, as I mentioned and with the usual pause for breath, headed off for the viewpoint at the rue du Nord.

Too early for the sunset so I admired the view for a minute or so.

Once more, a noise from down below attracted my attention and sure enough, the young people who have been there for the last few days are down there again having another picnic.

It doesn’t look too much like “social distancing” to me but that’s their problem, not mine. As long as they realise the consequences then that’s fine by me.

Not wishing to wait for another half hour for the sunset I ran on home to write up my notes and listen to some good music.

So tomorrow morning will be a cookery morning, I reckon. Bread and perhap a small apple crumble because there are only two slices of my pie left. I’ll have to make some cordial too – lemon and ginger this week, I reckon.

Here’s hoping that I’m on form.

Thursday 14th May 2020 – THAT WAS A …

… better day today!

For a start, I actually made it out of bed before the third alarm. And after yesterday’s disaster, that was really some kind of progress.

And I was off on a voyage as well during the night. Not quite as graphic as the previous night’s, which is a good thing, I suppose. There were three of us wandering around central London last night, me and two girls. I know these two girls and I just can’t think who they are. It was the time of a vampire attack on the city and we’d been doing something, fighting off these vampires and a fourth member of our party, an elderly gentleman dressed in Victorian suit and top hat was helping but he was taken ill on one occasion. So I went over to see him although it wasn’t me – but it was me in the dream if you know what I mean – and I undid his shirt. I found that he had a bandage wrapped round his chest so I had to undo the bandage. He snarled and snapped at me and I realised that he was a vampire. Someone had pushed a stake through his heart at one time. I grabbed these two girls and I stuck a cross in his way or his hand or something and we ran off. Somehow we became separated and I ended up with one of these girls and she ended up going home. I escorted her home and we came back out. We were on this street, something like rue St Catherine Est (near the CHUM) in Montreal. Down at the bottom of a hill was a church and that was where I’d arranged to meat this other girl. We were late so I said to this girl who was with me “stay here” and I ran on down to see the other. There she was outside this building and she was curling up, settling down on the floor going to sleep to wait for us on the pavement. I grabbed hold of her “God, don’t do that!”. She asked “where’s the other girl?”. “I’ve left her on a street cornerto come and fetch you. Now we have to go and fetch her back”. We were loaded up with valuables (…like the camera…) but we couldn’t find anywhere to put them. There were all these boxes where you could leave stuff but there was no key. We had to scratch around for a key or a lock or something – we didn’t have one. Time was getting on and in the end I thought “God just put the stuff in there. If someone pinches it, too bad”. The door didn’t close, the camera strap was dangling out right by a fire, everything like that. We ran back up the hill and as we ran back up we were really afraid of what we would see – whether the vampire had hold of this girl again. Should I have left a cross in her hand or wrapped garlic around her neck or something? I started to have all of these weird ideas about what was going to happen and what I should have done.

After breakfast I assembled the radio project as far as I could and checked the timing. Knock off 30 seconds from what was left out of the hour, and that was the length of track for which I was looking.

A shower was next, and a shave and general clean-up. And of that 300 grammes of weight that I had lost at the last weigh-in, I’d put 400 grammes back.

It’s Thursday today, and so that means shopping of course. But once again, I didn’t go very far before I stopped.

One of the penalties of living in a medieval walled city is that quite often the old gates are too low for lorries and the like and regular readers of this rubbish will have seen plenty of examples of trans-shipment

There’s more work taking place within the walls, I imagine, and they can’t pass the lorry and the trailer here through the gateway. They are going to have to unload all of this, I imagine, and take it through as best as they can.

We’ve seen all of the ferries – the two for the Channel Islands and the two for the Ile de Chausey, parked up during the confinement.

But today it looks as if things have eased off. Joly France, one of the passenger ferries that goes out to the Ile de Chausey, was just heading off out of the harbour and by the looks of things, she has a good complement of passengers.

Here’s hoping that none of them are infected because the virus would spread like wildfire out on the island.

First stop was the Post Office to post of Rosemary’s Christmas present. I know that it’s May but she was away from home until the day of the lockdown and as she came home, the Post Office closed.

We had to queue outside and were allowed in three by three.

At the Bank, where I went to pay in a cheque and to change a standing order, it was even worse. Facemasks compulsory (luckily I had taken with me the one that I was given by a neighbour the other week), oOnly one person in at a time and so the queue was down the street.

The counter clerk was very scrupulous about cleaning off the perspex window and all of that, and then handled all of my paperwork and bank card, which made the scrupulous cleaning of the perspex screen rather superfluous.

At LIDL I spent more than intended, but a large part of that was spent on a folding rucksack. It’s a reasonable size but folds up into a large pocket and it’s just the job for when I go on excursions.

The apple pie is on its last slice too but they had on special offer some frozen red fruits – €1:79 for a 750 gramme bag. So I bought a bag and I’ll make a pie with that tomorrow.

On the way back I bought a dejeunette from La Mie Caline for lunch, but was once more interrupted walking up the Rue des Juifs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen them floating the new pontoons across the harbour by pushing them with a motor boat, but this one is actually being pushed out of the inner harbour.

We’ve also seen the mounting brackets that they installed at the ferry terminal. It looks as if, now that Joly France has gone off on her travels, that they are going to install the new pontoons.

Back here I wrote the text for the final track, uploaded it to the computer, edited it and assembled the final track. I was over time by 5 seconds but a quick edit of some speech soon dealt with that.

After lunch, while I listened to my handiwork, I had a look at the template issue for one of my websites – the issue that I mentioned the other day.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that I resolved the issue in less than 10 seconds. In fact, I’d been thinking about this problem here and there and I had a very good idea of what I had done. And I was right.

It will also be no surprise to anyone that I also had a little doze for a few minutes here and there.

Once I’d recovered my composure I set about installing the new hi-fi. And I rather think that I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat.

It was necessary to drill a couple of holes in the furniture and then perform a complicated rewiring job which meant practically dismantling the computer and a few other things too.

It led to something of a tidy-up too (and putting away a pile of papers) and then I connected everything up. And as I said, I’ve over-egged the pudding somewhat because this system is somewhat overwhelming.

But the quality is phenomenal nevertheless and I’m as impressed with this as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Somewhat later that anticipated, I went out for my afternoon walk.

On the way out with the hi-fi box I bumped into a woman from the Mairie who was handing out the free washable face masks that the commune had ordered for their inhabitants. I asked her for an innuendo so she gave me one.

“Corona virus?” I enquired.
“No” she replied. “The school next door starts back up next week. We don’t want you frightening the kids”.

The hurricane was still blowing and it was a struggle to walk around the walls. But I wasn’t struggling half as much as some people. The trawler out there in the English Channel near the Ile de Chausey was really making heavy weather of the journey home.

You can tell by the whitecaps on the tops of the waves that far out (that’s probably about 10 kilometres out) just how wild the wind is right now.

And the trawler wasn’t the only one out there in the wind.

Never mind the story about the beaches being closed and so on, we have a windsurfer out there enjoying the storm. And I suppose that he parachuted in from the air too.

But there must be a good handful of people out there on that beach between Donville les Bains and Bréhal Plage and I have no idea why they are there and what they are doing.

There was still half an hour left to enjoy the music before the hour on the guitar, which was spent mainly playing around with two Dire Straits tracks – “Sultans of Swing” and “Tunnel of Love”. Despite all of the time that I’ve spent working out “Telegraph Road”, i reckon that right now it’s beyond what I’m really capable of doing.

Tea was a nice stuffed pepper followed by the last of that delicious apple pie that I made, so tomorrow is going to be a baking day, I reckon.

Back outside in the teeth of the gale and my run up the hill which was agonising tonight.

And at the caravanette park in the rue du Roc we have yet more grockles who haven’t quite grasped what all of this virus thing is about. I’ve seen the local police on their patrols and I reckon that they ought to be doing something about this.

But anyway having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop to see what I could see out to sea.

And the answer to that was “nothing at all”.

Around the corner to the south side of the headland and I noticed something glistening on the beach over across the bay at St Pair Sur Mer.

Being of a curious bent … “errr … quite” – ed … I took a photo of it to crop and blow up back here. And what I can see is that it seems to be the sun’s reflection on the window there reflecting into a tidal pool on the beach.

It’s quite amazing what you can pick up with a good zoom lens.

Earlier on today we noticed that they were pushing a floating pontoon out of the harbour.

At the time I speculated that they might be finally going to fit them to the mounting brackets that they fitted to the harbour wall over at the ferry terminal.

And sure enough, there they are in position. But I’m intrigued to see what is going to happen when the tide goes out because it dries out over there. And what happens to the pontoons then will be interesting.

Despite the howling gale I struggled on with my run down the Boulevard Vaufleury and I was pretty done in when I finally reached my marker.

Back down to the viewpoint over the harbour to see what they had been up to down there. And it looks as if some of the floating pontoons down there (we’d seen three rows yesterday) have gone.

The missing ones are probably those that they installed at the ferry terminal.

My next run took me round to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord but there was nothing going on over there so I turned round and ran back home as best as I could in the wind.

So now I’ve finished this, I’m ready for bed. This was a better day today and I felt a bit more like myself. Here’s hoping for an even better day tomorrow.

Wednesday 13th May 2020 – THE LEAST SAID …

… about this morning the better.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was saying the other day that I’d had certain symptoms that were suggestive of a health setback sometime soon

Well, I didn’t have long to wait. This morning when the alarms went off I awoke feeling like death. I hadn’t felt as bad as that for quite some considerable time.

And to such an extent too that it was long after 10:30 when I found the energy to haul myself out of bed and it took another couple of hours before I was anywhere in touch with anything else.

And you can tell what kind of night it had been too because I’d been on the kind of travel during the night that you wouldn’t want to hear, seeing as you are probably eating your tea or something right now. Even more interestingly, I was accompanied on my voyage by someone really astonishing who is making her debut on these pages. Whatever she was doing making an appearance during the night I really don’t know.

With being in no fit condition to start work again until mid-afternoon I missed a good chance to catch up on stuff. But it can’t be helped, I suppose. Ill-health is something for which no-one can plan.

As a result all that I’ve managed to do is to write out the notes, dictate them and edit them. And it’s an achievement to get that far with how I was feeling.

There was a quick break for a sandwich (and that loaf of bread that I made yesterday is excellent) and also for my afternoon stroll, now that it’s permitted.

My perambulations took me around the medieval city walls today and I wasn’t half surprised when I looked down over the outer wall. There were hordes of seagulls down there sitting on the rocks and I’ve no idea why.

The first thought that I had was that they were fishing for shellfish amongst the rocks but they were all sitting there doing nothing at all.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we have been watching the excavations at the old abandoned tidal swimming pool over the last few days.

There was no-one around right now so they may well have finished, but the pool seems to be holding water for the first time since I’ve no idea exactly when, for I’ve never seen it with water like this with the tide so far out.

And if you have a look just below the steps you’ll see the drain with the water emptying out. It’s hard to believe that they are going to call it finished, but the proof of the pudding will be in seeing the amount of use that it will have once the beaches are open.

Talking of seagulls … “well, one of us is” – ed … they seem to have taken to their nests. There’s a seagull on a nest on almost every roof in town.

It must be that time of year when the eggs aren’t too far off hatching although how many will or will not remains to be seen because there has been some kind of campaign to sterilise the eggs.

What this actually involves, I really don’t know but it sounds interesting.

So back here, I carried on with work and then had a play on the guitars for an hour. I was obviously feeling a little better.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with rice and vegetables, followed by apple pie and coconut soya dessert stuff.

Out for my evening run tonight and … you wouldn’t believe it.

What do some people not understand about

essential travel only
a 100 kilometre limit
not going out of your home département

You clearly can’t tell some people anything. Is it any wonder that the virus is spreading so rapidly and so far as it is?

My run was difficult tonight as the howling gale is back again. I struggled up the hill and after I’d caught my breath, ran down to the clifftop.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen the fishing boats out exploring all kinds of different areas that I don’t recall them fishing. Here’s a boat that’s been in the bay off the coast at Bréhal-Plage.

There are no seagulls hovering around her so it’s not easy to say if she has caught much.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is that they put some flags up at the new Resistance war memorial that they installed last year.

With all of the high winds that we’ve ben having, one of the flags is disintegrating rapidly and it looks as if it’s about to be blown away in the next gust of wind.

No prizes for guessing that it’s the British flag that’s about to be torn to shreds. That’s obviously some kind of symbolic gesture from Mother Nature.

And this is impressive over at the fish processing plant.

That’s three refrigerated lorries and possibly a fourth one behind waiting to load up over there. Obviously there have been some really good catches just recently to entice all of those vehicles here.

Business certainly seems to be booming in the port and I have to say that the detention à domicile doesn’t seem to have had too much effect on business.

My pause for breath was on the lookout point over the chantier navale.

Sill the same four boats that have been there for a week or wo – we don’t have a fifth one yet to replace the one that left recently.

But going back to the question of fishing boats, you can see two of them queueing up outside the harbour. No room at the inn, or even at the wharf just now so they can’t come in to unload. They have to wait for another one to go out.

What with the howling gale blowing right into my face I eschewed my long run down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Once out of the wind though, I picked up the pace and ran down to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord where I witnessed a TORA TORA TORA spectacle – the sun streaming through gaps in the clouds.

Eben more interestingly, I was the only one there witnessing it. Dunno where the crowds are who gathered there when they weren’t allowed to. It’s the kind of thing that defies logic.

And so I ran on home.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow will be a better day. I have to go shopping, I have to make more cordial and I’m way behind with the stuff that I need to do. I can’t let ill-health get in the way.

Tuesday 12th May 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

… had one of those days when you’ve been trying to do something straightforward and simple and it just doesn’t work?

Right now I’m having one of those. I’m making a new template for one of my websites – a task that I’ve done on countless occasions – and for some unknown reason it just won’t work out.

For three hours now I’ve been at it, and I’ve spent a similar amout of time on this template too, but I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve even gone right back to basics and started from the beginning but that’s not working either.

What has happened, I reckon, is that I’ve made a spelling mistake with one of the *.div boxes, or forgotten a quotation mark or something, but I’m badgered if I can see where.

After all this time I’ve abandoned the quest for the evening because my eyes have turned to mush and I can’t see straight.

The day started off so well too. I actually beat the third alarm to my feet, which is something to celebrate these days. And I’d been off on my travels, as I discovered when I listened to the dictaphone later after the medication.

Last night I was coming back from Shavington into Crewe and down by Gresty Brook was a row of lock-up garages. Something had happened and there was a black Lamborghini-type of sports car with all of its front end stoved in and some of these garages were open and there were motorbikes everywhere. It looked as if this Lamborghini had lost control and smashed into these garages. As I walked past I could see that there had been some work doing but there was more to do. Anyway, all of the traffic coming out of Crewe had stopped so I was able to negotiate my way through. Then it came to updating my website so I moved some information around and wrote in a bit about this accident to fit in with a few of the images. Roxanne came to talk to me about something and we ended up talking about hot air balloons that she had seen as a very small child and where they fitted in to the story of Montgolfière, these balloons
We were all on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, a huge mob of us. I was interested in a woman or girl or somebody. I was doing what I could to become friendly with her. At the same time there was another guy trying to do something to be friendly with another girl and everyone kept on butting in on him like they usually do with me. So one one occasion someone said something about this girl – that Stephen from Brooklyn, so I explained to him that the other guy had first dibs and he was quite put out by that. One evening we were having a meal and it was a huge refectory kind of place, not like the dining room. I grabbed my evening meal and went to sit down and I couldn’t see this girl whom I wanted to sit next to. I thought “she can’t be here yet” so I chose a place a bit away from everyone else but there was no cutlery or anything for anyone else so i started to assemble some cutlery to make a place for her. Just then I was overwhelmed by half a dozen people who appeared at once and all sat down at this table all around me and left no space for this girl. One of them was this Stephen and he explained to me that ‘I was having a nice friendly chat with so-and-so and this girl and thank you for putting me right to the situation”, things like that, and i was thinking “God I wish that someone would put these people right about my situation”,
A hot, sweaty, sticky night again, which I have to note, and I ended up somewhere in all of this in a big 1960s American estate car, a beige one, right-hand drive. For some unknown reason whenever I left a standing start I had to push it to make the car roll forward and then leap in. It was really heavy too but one in started to roll it was fine. I remember having to do this at a certain traffic light where opposite, the road narrowed and made it an interesting procedure. So I bought a different, smaller and lighter American estate car and at the same junction I had to do the same thing and that was for some reason even heavier to push.

After breakfast I had a good go at cleaning up the kitchen and dining area. And then configure a laptop so that it would work “Zoom” – this on-line meeting thing. It had to be done on the laptop because there’s no microphone or webcam on this big machine here.

Promptly at 11:00 we had our first lesson. There was the initial teething trouble with the programme as you might expect as no-one (not even the tutor) knew how to do it, but we were soon organised and the two hours passed quite quickly.

One of the attendees had her daughter of about 6 with her, and she had brought a dolly with her. So it goes without saying that at some point Strawberry Moose joined in the Welsh lesson.

Apparently the Welsh Government body that is sponsoring these courses expected about 100 attendees and made the appropriate provision. However there are a total of 1039 people who enrolled. It seems that the events of the last four years are swinging the pendulum over towards the side of Nationalism.

It did not escape my notice that one of the choices for “reasons for studying this course” was “to establish my national identity” or something very similar.

That took me right up to lunch where I finished off the last of the bread that I had made 10 days ago. I’m surprised that it had lasted so well.

This afternoon, as I said yesterday, has been a cookery afternoon. And you cans ee the finished products here.

We have a loaf of bread, one and a half jars of apple and apricot purée for breakfast, and some apple and apricot cordial. And once again, I forgot the cinnamon and nutmeg.

The loaf was made with 400 grammes of flour.

We started off with 250 ml of water had a teaspoon of sugar and a sachet of yeast added to it. It was all stirred together and put in the microwave until it was lukewarm.

Meanwhile, 400 grammes of flour had a dessert spoon of salt added to it, and it was all mixed togather.
The lukewarm water was slowly added, every so often stopping to give the mixture a really good mix. make sure that your hands are well-floured so that the bread mix doesn’t stick to them so badly.

Eventually, you’ll end up with something rather like plasticene, nice and elastic. Then, you have to really knead it with your hands to make sure that the water and yeast are really well circulated throughout the mix. This can take 10 minutes or so and it’s quite an art.

Then put a towel over the bowl and put the bowl in a warm place for 45 minutes or so, to give the yeast a good start.

Meanwhile, peel, slice, core and dice 10 apples and but them in a saucepan with just a dash of water and plenty of lemon juice, stirring them well round as you add them to make sure that the lemon juice and water soaks the outside to stop them browning.

Then bring them to the boil and once it’s boiling, turn the heat right down to simmer gently until the apples are really soft (this could take 45 minutes even), giving it all a really good stir around every ten minutes or so.

Once the apples are simmering away, go back to the bread. It should already have started to rise now. So turn your oven on and while it is warming up, you need to knead the bread again for a while to make sure that the nitrogen being released by the yeast it distributed evenly through the bread.

Then put the mix in your bread mould and put in a hot oven 230°C for 10 minutes and then 210°C until it’s done.

When the apples are cooked, open a cheap tin of time-expired apricots from NOZ, drain off the syrup into a sterilised jar and add the fruit to the apples.

After about 5 minutes when the fruit is all thoroughly heated through, strain off all of the liquid into the jar with the syrup and whizz the fruit up in your whizzer.

Sterilise a couple of large jars (I put a small amount of water in them and run them for a minute in the microwave on medium-high and use boiling water on the caps) and put the purée in the jars and seal the lids.

Then check the bread by poking a large skewer into it. When it’s ready, it should sound good and the skewer should be clean when it comes out

Rather later than usual, I went out for my afternoon walk with the madding crowds – although nothing like as many people as I was expecting.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw them yesterday digging out the sand from the old tidal swimming pool. They’re not there now … “the ground’s all flat” – ed … but whether it’s because they have finished or simply knocked off for the day I really couldn’t say.

What i’ll have to do is to go that way tomorrow too but somewhat earlier so that I can see how they are doing.

I carried on walking around the walls, past more people than I have seen for quite a while, until I came to the Square Maurice Marland.

Between the chimneys I noticed some movement in the harbour so I took a speculative photo to see what it might be.

It’s beautifully focused on the chimneys, which means that it’s out of focus deeper in the image, but I could see that it’s one of our floating pontoons for the new walkway being pushed across the harbour by a motor boat.

A little further on there was a better view of what it was doing. It looks quite impressive too.

But we can see that whatever was keeping Marité out of her berth seems to have been resolved because she’s now back in her little corner.

The two Channel Islands ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, are moored up over there, and today there’s just one Joly France boat, the ferries that go over to the Ile de Chausey, moored up. The other must be out on a run.

Back here I had another bash at this web site problem and then had my usual hour on the guitars.

Tea was steamed veg in vegan cheese sauce with falafel, followed by some of my apple pie and soya coconut dessert stuff.

There were a few people out there this evening but that didn’t prevent me from going running.

It was yet another struggle up the hill in the wind but I made it all the way up there. There was nothign much going on offshore tonight so I wandered around the corner to watch the fishing boats unloading at the fish processing plant.

It was really busy there tonight. There was a queue of boats there waiting for a berth to unload their catch.

But there seems to be plenty of activity down in the chantier navale

We’ve had five boats in there for the last couple of days but today it seems that one of them has gone back into the water. I wonder if we are going to be having another visitor any day soon.

Despite the strong headwind I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury and was almost bursting by the time that I reached my marker.

having seen them pushing the pontoons over this afternoon I went down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour to see if I could see what they had been doing.

It’s not evident at all but I think that they might be adding a third layer to the bit that’s perpendicular to the harbour wall. That’s all that I can think of that might be different.

My next run took me up to the viewpoint at the rue do Nord but there was nothing at all happening out there so I ran on back home.

Bed now, not as early as I had hoped. But there’s a lot to be done tomorrow. I want to finish off this radio project, sort out this perishing web template and do the chores like photos and rewriting other web pages

And I need to find time for another play around as my new hi-fi has finally arrived today. I’m looking forward to that.

Monday 11th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of this evening’s beautiful sunset, let me tell you a little about my rather less-than-successful day.

It actually started off exactly as I predicted. Pretty much beautiful weather throughout the detention à domicile and when it was lifted somewhat, at midnight, we were in the middle of a howling gale and torrential rainstorm.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having followed my adventures for any great length of time, MANY SIMILAR OCCURRENCES in the past and should, if they had had any sense, have cleaned up at the bookie’s, having bet their mortgage on this happening.

When I awoke … errr … somewhat later than planned, the rain had stopped. But the howling gale was still howling away outside. And it kept it up all day too.

After the medication I went to have a listen to the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been off on my travels again. I was talking to one of the girls at work and trying to build some kind of relationship with her. It wasn’t until we were talking about going to a football match so she dressed in a blue denim jacket and blue jeans that I realised exactly who she was – someone who I once trained at a job that I had briefly in the 1980s and that was a name from the past.

As it happened, I did quite like her, but she was already married so that was that. ironically, a few weeks after I’d left and moved on to pastures new, she and her husband separated.

A little later on (during the night, not during the 1980s) I was off again.

I’d come down to breakfast in a posh hotel where I’d been staying. There were already quite a few people down there even though it was early and I wasn’t the first. We all had a good chat and had some kind of breakfast and the place slowly filled up. I decided that I wanted to take a coffee to my room which was one of the options offered by the hotel so I hunted down the reffer – a girl walled Maria, a Slavonic type of blonde girl and she’s someone I know but I can’t think who – it wasn’t the pretty Polish girl who I knew in Stoke on Trent – so I asked her about the coffee . Sh said “yes, where’s your chit?”. She had to sign it and I asked if I had to sign it as well. She said no, her signature was good. So off she went. Then I awoke and I was lying here for about two minutes wondering what had happened to my coffee and when was I going to get it before I realised that it had been in a dream and no it wasn’t.

It really was that realistic, and there have been a few like that just recently, as regular readers will recall.

As an aside, someone else whom I know, a girl with whom I was at school, is also taking part in this project.

She contacted me first thing in the morning.
“You appeared in my dream last night, Eric”.
“Did I?” I enquired
“No” she said. “I fought you off”.

I’ll get my coat.

After breakfast, I made a start on the next radio project.

And organising myself like I have done, it was certainly a lot easier to choose the music. In fact, I was rather spoiled for choice and that’s a very good sign.

By the time that I knocked off for lunch I’d

chosen all of the tracks (except the last one)
combined them into pairs
chosen a speech for my guest
written part of the text for the broadcast

It’s not finished though, and it won’t be finished tomorrow either.

Tomorrow morning I have the first part of my Welsh course (it’s amazing, isn’t it – I’ve signed on for three on-line courses to pass the time during the detention à domicile and they all wait to start until it’s over) and in the afternoon I’m baking. The bread is almost running out and I need more apple purée too.

This afternoon I started off my doing some coursework for my Welsh lesson. My grandmother is Welsh and all of the little words she used to say to us when she dandled us on her knee were, as I subsequently learnt, terms of endearment in Welsh. I can still remember her saying a word that sounded like “cooch” when she used to hug us, and that of course is the Welsh word “cwch”.

When she died, my grandfather threw away her family’s Welsh bible with all of the family tree in it (it stopped in 1912) and I went to rescue it.

A coach driver with whom I worked was a native Welsh-speaker and he taught me quite a lot of basic Welsh and I worked my way slowly through the Bible, comparing it with an English one, but I’m determined to learn Welsh properly.

Where we lived as tiny kids, in that part of Wales known as “Part of Flint” until we moved to Cheshire, it was very angiicised. No-one there spoke Welsh and there was even a movement at one time to attach the area to Shropshire during the Local Government reorganisations of the early 1970s.

But you only had to look at my father, small, dark-haired, to know that he was a Celt, not a Saxon or a Norse.

Da iawn

That was the cue for, at last, going out for an afternoon walk.

The footpath down aunderneath the walls below the rue du Nord was open and there were quite a few people there admiring the wicked wind that was whipping up the waves into a foam of frenzy just offshore.

On the lower right-hand side of the photo you’ll see the stone walls of the medieval fish trap.

Water would overflow that during high tide and bring in a pile of fish. As the tide receded the water would seep out through the gaps in the rocks but the fish would be trapped.

People would just go down at low tide and pick up the fish.

Talking of tidal traps, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that here at the Plat Gousset there is a tidal swimming pool, but over the years it’s fallen into neglect and disrepair.

But it’s clear that they are anticipating that firstly, the beaches will reopen sometime soon and secondly, we are going to have an influx of visitors this summer.

They have a digger down there digging out years of accumulated sand and silt. And then, I suppose, they’ll repair the leaks in the walls and it’ll be back in business again.

A few days ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we noticed that Marité had moved to a new mooring and I said that I’d see if I could find out why.

My walk continued across the Square Maurice Marland where there’s a point that overlooks the harbour. But there was no evidence of anything at all to suggest that she has had to move.

The two Joly France boats are down there and look as if they have encroached upon Marité’s mooring, but that can’t be the reason why she’s moved.

Back here I amended today’s web page, fixed the one for the other web site and then attacked some photos from July 2019. I’m now at the Storhordi Nature Reserve on the island of Heimaey off the coast of Iceland.

Halfway through I was interrupted by a phone call. It seems that in these times the Jehovah’s Witnesses are conducting their Ministry by telephone.

We had a very pleasant half-hour’s worth of chat during which I tied him up in a big theological knot.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and I was feeling more enthusiastic again about it, and then I broke off for tea.

There was some stuffing left over from Saturday so I tipped in a small tin of kidney beans and tomato sauce, and had taco rolls and rive for tea.

More pie for pudding with that Alpro almond soya dessert and it was just as delicious as before.

The evening rune were something of a nightmare with the wicked, howling gale blowing about.

The run up the hill was a real struggle and I felt every inch of the way. There were quite a few people out there, not as many as I was expecting, and they were watching the activity out at sea.

This fishing boat was certainly providing a lot of entertainment.

She’s been fishing out in the baie de Mont St Michel and she evidently has a full hold on board.

You can tell that by looking at the gulls surrounding her. There must be well over a hundred out there following her in and I hope that the crew are all wearing protactive headgear.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury, the longest one, was aborted tonight. The gale was such that it was a struggle to even walk down there, never mind run.

But as soon as I went out of the wind I could run again and I ran round to the viewpoint on the rue du Nord.

That’s where all of my sunset photos were taken this evening, as it sank behind the clouds just above the horizon.

After watching it go down, I turned round and ran on back here.

Bedtime now and I’m not sorry. Our detention à domicile has ended and in some ways I’m rather disappointed. I was doing so well in organising myself and catching up with the arrears.

Let’s see how the future unfolds.

Sunday 10th May 2020 – FOR THE FIRST …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday night here is pizza night of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So while I had my pizza I watched the football.

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

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

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

Tuesday 5th May 2020 – I THOUGHT SO!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But anyway, I digress … “again” – ed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I mentioned earlier, it was another pleasant evening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s all exciting stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

EPIC HALL

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