Tag Archives: spirit of conrad

Wednesday 29th January 2020 – THIS TOWN AND I …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, there is a dramatic change in the situation.

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

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

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

There was activity in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers too today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was rather nice of them.

Tuesday 28th January 2020 – IF YOU WANT …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are living in interesting times indeed.

This fishing boat, the Rocavi II is quite interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 27th January 2020 – IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

… to get out of bed at 05:30 but I managed it – only just.

And by the time the third alarm went off at 05:45 I was already on my way down the road having rinsed my empty bottles, packed my rucksack and put the key to my room in the key disposal box.

When the first of the normal series of alarms went off at 06:00 I was sitting in a train at the station in Leuven.

It’s an elderly AM80 electric multiple-unit. Covered in graffiti and not very clean at all. But the fact is that it’s here, it’s leaving at 06:04 and it’s travelling non-stop into Brussels.

That’s good enough for me.

At the Gare du Midi I went into the Carrefour, bought myself some raisin bread for breakfast and then went to sit down to wait until my train is called.

With half an hour to go before departure, I took the initiative and went myself to look for the train on the off-chance that it might be ready.

And sure enough, here it is sitting on the platform ready to go. It’s one of the “Reseau 38000” PBA (Paris Bruxelles Amsterdam) trainsets built for the start of thatservice in 1996.

To my surprise the door was open and I was able to go in and find my seat – a good 25 minutes to go before departure.

A ticket inspector came by and I thought that he was going to heave me out but he simply checked my ticket and that was that.

As for the journey itself, I have no idea at all about it because I slept for most of the route. This early start caught me up good and proper.

We arrived about 10 minutes late but that didn’t inconvenience me at all. The Metro was quite rapid even though it was crowded and I had to stand all the way, and I arrived at Montparnasse a good hour before my train was due to leave.

With the new timetable, it now arrives and departs from a platform in the main station complex rather than the Vaugirard annexe. In some ways that’s a good thing because it saves me a 10-minute walk, but in other ways it’s not so good.

That’s because Montparnasse is a huge, windswept desolate, cold station whereas the Vaugirard annexe had a nice draught-free glass waiting room where it’s reasonably comfortable to sit.

But hunting around, like you do … “like YOU do” – ed … I found an ideal hidey-hole where I could even see an electronic departure board.

With 15 minutes to go, my train still hadn’t been posted so i went to look for it. And I found it sitting at one of the platforms. Meantime, the PA announcer was telling us that “the departure details are currently unavailable” – which was the craziest thing that I’ve ever heard seeing as at the time she was making the announcement I was actually looking at it.

Eventually we were called to the train – exactly where I said it was – and we could board it.

For part of the way, as far as L’Aigle, I had a very charming young female companion but after she left, I dozed off and there I stayed, fast asleep again, almost until we reached Granville.

Bang on time into the station we were, although it took me a few minutes to get my things together. And then I headed off into the rain.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of weeks ago a notice had appeared in the car park of the Parc de Val es Fleurs to the effect that a chapiteau – a marquee – was to be erected there.

Just for a change I came back home that way to see if there was anything exciting happening. And sure enough, we did have our chapiteau in all of its glory, surrounded by a load of caravans.

It’s a circus, apparently, and even as I watched a huge pile of schoolkids filed their way into the chapiteau. They were obviously going to be treated to a matinée performance all to themselves.

Now here’s a thing!

For the last I don’t know how many weeks we’ve seen Spirit of Conrad up on blocks in the chantier navale. But no longer, by the looks of things.

Here she is, in the inner harbour with Joly France on one side of her and Charles-Marie on the other side. But no Aztec Lady. It must have been her that we saw heading out into the English Channel in the wake of Normandy Trader the other day.

Barry Hay once famously told us “one thing that I gotta tell you man – that it’s good to be back home!” and he’s absolutely right. A year or two ago, for the first time ever in my life I felt the pangs of homesickness after I’d been away from here for a couple of months.

This place really is my home and I was glad to be back here, even if it was absolutely freezing cold with no heating having been on. And to my delight a parcel for which I had been waiting since the end of November has finally arrived, at long last.

Nevertheless I sat down in my nce comfy chair and did nothing until tea time. I’m entitled to a relax after my efforts of today.

For tea, in the absence of any special willpower just now, I grabbed a frozen curry out of the freezer – the left-over leftovers from a few weeks ago. With rice and veg, including sprouts and spinach, it was delicious. And followed down by fruit salad and lemon sorbet.

The rain held off tonight for about 5 minutes after I set out for my evening walk – and then I caught the lot. All of it!

The tide was well-in and there were several trawlers out there heading in to harbour with their catches so I took a pick of one.

The lights of St Malo were looking quite good tonight too but the wind was far too strong for me to take a steady shot with the camera. The tripod wouldn’t have fared any better either – the wind would have had that over in a matter of seconds.

But round by the chantier navale I could take a photo of the inmates there.

No Spirit of Conrad of course – just a couple of fishing boats and another one right at the back. But the photo is no good because of the wind and rain. I wasn’t going to stay out long.

Getting back into the rhythm, I managed my little run just to keep up with my progress. Whatever else I do, I have to concentrate on getting fit no matter how much it hurts me. I do actually feel much better with having less weight to carry around these days.

So having written up my notes for the day, I’m going off to bed. Tomorrow I’ll be getting back into the routine. There are two and a half radio programmes that need finishing and that’s the priority task for this week.

So I need to be on form.

Tuesday 21st October 2020 – I’M FED UP …

… of being buzzed by just about every man and his dog who owns any kind of flying machine in this vicinity. It’s getting on my wick.

If it’s not the guy who had his chopper out the other week, it’s now someone in a low-flying aeroplane who has come for a look around outside my apartment.

This plane is actually F-BRTM, which is the 152nd Jodel DR-253B in the series apparently. But whether or not Jodel actually built it is open to question. The company stopped manufacturing almost 60 years ago and now just sells to home-builders licences for construction of its aeroplanes.

But as for flying, I certainly didn’t get off to a flying start. With my really late night last night – after 02:00 in the end – I couldn’t leave the stinking pit at all. 06:45 when I finally pulled myself together and arose from the dead.

After the medication I checked the dictaphone and here I drew a blank. I hadn’t been anywhere during the night, which was a shame. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … what I do and where I go during the night is much more exciting than what I do and where I go during the day.

After breakfast I began to catch up on a few outstanding tasks. First off, I cut up quite a few digital sound tracks that I had downloaded in the past into their individual component tracks

That took me up until almost lunchtime so I went to have a look in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers to see what this work thing is all about.

And I do have to say that I really didn’t see anything that looked relevant. In fact the only thing that really caught my eye was the tree shredder here, parked up for lunch, with loads of bits of small trees around it.

It would be quite surprising if they had closed the road and banned all parking simply for this.

Who knows?

This method of beaching ships and boats in some kind of ad-hoc informal dry dock situation is becoming something of a habit.

The other day we had the trawler type of fishing boat lashed to the harbour wall but today we have a small motor boat and outboard motor beached on the boat-loading ramp.

And I do have to say that I like how they have done this – dropped it onto the wall so that the outboard motor overhangs the steep drop and doesn’t ground out.

The heavy equipment that they have been using for the dredging over by the ferry terminal seems to have moved so I went to look for it.

And here’s one of the huge dumper lorries, being loaded onto a low-loader ready to be moved. There was a driver chaining it down so I asked him if the work was now completed. He replied that he didn’t think so but the equipment was required elsewhere.

And so we might be seeing it back some time in the near future.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day they were doing some kind of building work over by the ferry terminal with a concrete breaker and I’d said that I’d go for a look some time.

Today, with the tide being out, the harbour gates would be closed so I could cross to the other side by the path on top and go for a look.

And surprisingly there was nothing evident. But there were all of these columns that look as if they have been some kind of ferry pier at some time in the past.

So I shall have to make further enquiries.

The place to go for that, I reckon, was the compound that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing a few days ago too.

And I was in luck – at least, I thought that I was – because there were two guys just coming out of it. I went over to one of them but just as I walked up to him he got into his van and drove off.

Not to be outdone I turned round to grab hold of the other one but he must have seen me coming and disappeared off in a fork-lift truck.

Ahh well – I’ll have to come down here again too, won’t I? It’s not my day.

So instead, I went to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette and came back home for lunch, to find workmen painting the windows in the communal part of the building.

On the way up the hill there was a workman in what’s left of the compound that they had when they were working on the wall.
“Nearly finished?” I asked.
“Yes, nearly” he replied.

After lunch I started on another radio project – a rock music programme. And I’m glad that I chopped up all of that digital music this morning because I’ve been selecting bits out of there.

At one point I must have fallen asleep because I sat bolt-upright and it was 15:50. Time for my afternoon walk.

Outside it was bitterly cold to the point of being uncomfortable so I didn’t want to hang around. Having been buzzed by someone’s aeroplane, I did stop to take a photo of these two fishing boats crossing each other in mid-channel.

And I don’t know what happened to the photograph here but for some reason it didn’t want to work properly.

Continuing my walk around the headland in the piercing wind … “what wind?” – ed … PIERCING … “ohhh!” – ed … I was distracted yet again by the sound of a rather large engine.

Consequently I scampered around the bend and had a look over the wall to see what I could see, and there was yet more activity in the Chantier navale today.

Spirit of Conrad is there of course and so are a couple of fishing boats that have been there for a while too. But there is someone else coming to join them.

We saw the mobile sling working the other day when it was lowering the blue and yellow trawler-type vessel back into the water.

But today it’s pulling another fishing boat out. And as I watched, it moved across the yard with the fishing boat suspended beneath it and dropped the boat off on a set of chocks next to Spirit of Conrad.

And here, I imagine, she’ll be staying for a while. So I’ll keep my eye on her as I go for my daily wander.

But here’s a thing.

We saw the little blue boat with the outboard motor earlier, beached on the boat-loading ramp. But here she is now back in the water moored to the fish-processing plant, and she seems to have acquired a friend.

And if anyone were to ask me I would say that the latter is in the colours that I would expect to see on a Police boat.

So what with the Customs yesterday and the Police today, tomorrow we might be having Godzilla.

Back here I pushed on with the music and that’s all chosen, and I’m halfway through writing the notes. But I have a feeling that it might have to change because somehow I seem to have over-run by some considerable amount.

That’s something for me to look into tomorrow.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with pasta for a change, followed by more apple pie. And it really was a nice tea too.

having frozen to death this afternnon, I put on a fleece underneath my jacket and at least I felt a little warmer tonight outside.

Those lights that regular readers of this rubbish will recall me mentioning ages ago were on tonight and they stayed lit long enough for me to photograph them.

They seem to be in the position where I would expect Donville’s football pitch to be, but I don’t recall it having floodlights at all so who knows?

Despite the cold, I managed to do both my runs tonight because there was no-one around to laugh. My style of running these days is rather awkward to say the least but considering my illnesses and my age I’m surprised that I can do it at all.

With being nearly at the 100% mark I stretched my walk to pass the limit.

And here in the Boulevard Vaufleury in another miserable photograph (what on earth is happening to my technique?) we can see that the bollards are back.

So what are they going to be up to tomorrow? I can’t wait to find out.

The barrier into the car park is now fixed so I brought Caliburn back from the public car park and he’s now in his usual little place.

Now that I’m back I’ve written my journal and I’m off to bed – unless something exciting comes up on the playlist meantime.

Friday 17th January 2020 – I BET THAT YOU ARE …

… all wondering where I’ve been with the posting of today’s activities, aren’t you?

The fact is that I didn’t get home tonight at all. In fact, it wasn’t until about 16:40 on Saturday that I put my sooty foot through the front door of my apartment.

And with not having had lunch either, I ended up running considerably later than planned. But then, that’s what plans are all about, aren’t they?

But anyway, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

It was another morning of missed alarms. Another 07:00 start and I really need to get a grip and get myself organised otherwise I’m just going to fade away.

But then after the medication I attacked the dictaphone in order to see where I had been during the night.

Strange as it may seem, I was back in my house back in Gainsborough Road and it was an absolute tip (I know that I live in total chaos but it has nothing on how my house was, last night, I’ll tell you). There was stuff everywhere all over the place and there was the football on – it was the World Cup or something like that – the European Nations match and I was trying to watch it on TV but there was just so much disorder going on around me that I couldn’t. I went into the kitchen to get something and the place was in such a state clothes and bits everywhere and someone shouted something like “come on, your tea’s ready”. It turns out that my brother and a younger boy had been given their tea and it was probably about midnight or whatever. I went into the room and it was the back room and there was one of my sisters sitting on a chair. I hadn’t seen her for ages and she was talking to someone, another one of my sisters. I went up to her and said something like “what are you going to do tomorrow morning, if you get up early?” She said “I’m going to come and wake you up”.
It was some time shortly after that that we found a young boy hanging upside down by his feet in a four-poster bed. We pulled back the curtains of this four-poster bed and there he was hanging upside-down by his ankles. What was quite bizarre was that after going back to sleep after dictating the first part of it, I stepped right back into it where I’d left off. And it’s not the first time by any means that I’ve done that either.

There was lots more to this voyage too but as you are probably eating your meal or something I’ll spare you the unpleasantness.

Once breakfast was out of the way I attacked the radio project that needed finishing. And that took a lot longer than I expected too, basically because the 10-minute audio file that I had dictated turned out to be only 04:20 by the time that I had edited it and so I had to find a completely different song to end the show than the one that I had planned.

Anyway, I eventually managed to complete it and that was mu cue to go off and buy my dejeunette from La Mie Caline

Having seen a white speck out in the English Channel I went to photograph it, only to find that I’d forgotten to put the memory card in the camera so I had to go back upstairs for it.

Downstairs again, I could photograph it and then in the comfort and safety of my own little office I could blow it up (the photo, not the object of course).

The result is inconclusive but probably a trawler-type of fishing boat I reckon. And you can see the Jersey coast in the background behind it. That gives you some idea of how far out the boat was.

Off then on my jaunt into town, but I didn’t get very far.

It’s all change in the inner harbour today. Chausiais and Joly France II have moved position. They’ve crossed over to the other side of the harbour and are now moored up in fromt of their sister over by the old cold store.

That’s a surprise for me. The only thing that I can think of is that they don’t want any debris from the car park renovation to drop onto the deck. And it also indicates that Granville and Victor Hugo are not going to be back home anytime soon

Yesterday, the regular readers of this rubbish and I saw them setting out a pile of “No Parking” signs in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers.

Today I went that way to see if I could pick up any clues about what might be happening down there.

Having had a look, I’m not really a great deal wiser. Apparently we are going to be having travaux – some kind of works – taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. That should be interesting to I shall have to go for my walk that way for a butcher’s.

There was excitement too down at the Chantier navale too right now.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had four boats in there this last couple of days. But in about ten minutes time we shall only be having three of them.

Spirit of Conrad is still there and so are two of the fishing boats but the third one, the blue and yellow one, is just about to leave the scene.

Here she is, in the mobile sling, being lowered down into the water. And in a couple of minutes she’ll be sailing … “dieseling” – ed … off into the wild blue yonder.

So with another empty space in the place, does this mean that we are going to be having a new visitor?

But it also means that the tide is quite a way in, which also means that the harbour gates will be closed which also means that the path across the top will not be accessible and I’ll have to go along the rue du Port.

And as I went along the rue du Port I could see strange goings-on on the boat-launching ramp down into the tidal harbour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen the dredging operations out by the ferry terminal and we had a look at the machinery the other day.

But today they are giving one of the huge dumper-lorries a good hose down with a pressure-washer, presumably to remove all of the silt that has accumulated thereupon while they have been working.

Off I went to la Mie Caline to pick up my bread, and then I headed back home.

What I spend the afternoon (with a break for lunch of course) was to deal with the Johan Gallon (the coach of US Granville)’s speech.

It’s been completed now, with all of my questions edited in, and I’ve been going through to edit out the joins, the silences and the stumbles. When that’s completed I’ll be going through and making another pass to remove the irrelevances and I’m hoping that I’ll have it done for Monday morning – at least, that’s the plan.

At 16:00 I called it a day, grabbed a few things together and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills.

First stop was at the dechetterie. The European Cardboard Box Mountain has now been consigned to a skip along with the old broken office chair and I can now get into the back of Caliburn if ever I need to.

Second stop was at Liz and Terry’s at Roncey.

We had a good chat and I gave them their Christmas present, after which we had tea. Burger and chips with salad followed by ginger cake.

Terry and I then headed off in Calburn down the motorway towards Caen and the Stade Michel D’Ornano. It’s the last 16 of the Coupe de France and Granville have pulled a plum out of the bag for this match.

They are “at home” against Olympique de Marseille but the match can’t be played at the Stade Louis Dior as was the Bordeaux match two years ago. There, there is a capacity of just 3,000 and it’s very uncomfortable at that size too.

But the Stade D’Ornano at Caen is free and has 20,200 places. Even so, it was sold out in about 4.5 hours but I managed to obtain 2 tickets.

We were doing really well until we hit the outskirts of Caen when a road accident slowed our progress. An hour it took to advance 6 kilometres.

Then we hit the traffic heading to the stadium, became tangled up in the mesh of red lights, and then I lost count of the number of roundabouts that we passed in the frantic search for a parking place.

Spotting an ad-hoc parking place, we quickly stuffed Caliburn into it and ran down the road towards the next roundabout. Not seeing the stadium, we asked a passer-by who sent us back where we had started. Brain of Britain had miscounted, and parked Caliburn at the roundabout right by the stadium.

As a result we missed the first 30 seconds of the game.

Having been frisked at the stadium we were allowed in, but finding a seat was impossible. We ended up standing, with about 100 others on the stairs, with a couple of people who had made themselves comfortable sitting on the top step complaining about the “new arrivals blocking their view”.

But at a time like this and in a crowd like this, it’s “every man for himself”. Sardines had nothing on us.

The first half of the match was a surprise to most people.

It was pretty clear that Olympique de Marseille were the better team but it was also clear that US Granville weren’t going to lie down and roll over. They were pegged back for much of the half, that’s for sure, but they were breaking away quite regularly and going forward down the wings, with William Sea throwing his weight around up front.

The Granvillais goalkeeper was the busier of the two but it wasn’t by any means a one-way street.

At half-time we were treated to a display of drumming as the drummers marched around the touchline having a right old bang. There were also two teams of kids having a penalty shoot-out.

What was even worse was that I was dying to use the bathroom and desperate for a coffee but I had no intention of moving away from my good spec on the stairs having fought my way into it.

So we stayed put and waited for the second half to begin.

The second half carried on where the first left off , with Olympique de Marseille attacking, US Granville absorbing the pressure, and then hitting them on the break.

And then the match turned rather sour.

maseille had worked out early on that the danger men for Granville were little Lamrabette with his merry, mazy runs with the ball through crowds of players, and also big William Sea who was showing that despite his injury he still had what it takes to mix it on level terms with the Olympique Marseille central defenders.

As a result, they were flattening the two of them with regular monotony, but being very careful firstly not to do it quite enough to earn a caution and secondly to take it in turns so as no individual would be cautioned for persistent infringement.

It was saddening to watch a display like this from a team like Olympique Marseille against a bunch of amateurs and if that’s the idea of how Villas-Boas wants his team to play then he should be ashamed of himself.

Anyway, it had the desired effect because with round about 15 minutes to go, William Sea was finally fed up of being grabbed from behind every time he had the ball. He lashed out behind him with his elbow and unfortunately caught a Marseille player full in the face.

Having had a yellow card earlier in the game, that was that for Sea and he was off down the tunnel for an early bath and Granville were down to 10 men.

What was sickening about this was that the player who had been fouled them followed Sea to the touchline and taunted him about being sent off. A couple of Granville staff had to grab hold of Sea before he put the Marseille player over the stadium wall and out into the street.

And that, I’m afraid, was that.

At the Press Conference I’d mentioned that the danger time in every game where the professionals meet the amateurs is the final 15 minutes when the lack of fitness shows through and the amateurs run out of steam. And even more so when you are only 10 against 11.

And so it proved. 2 minutes later, Olympique de Marseille went ahead. They added a second 10 minutes later and then deep into stoppage time, a typical US Granvillais “lack of concentration” about which I have moaned on more occasions than many in the past gifted them a third.

Although before the game the general feeling was that had Granville come home with a 3-0 defeat they would have done really well but after the match that we had seen, a 3-0 defeat was a travesty.

And the tactics of a team riding high in the French Premier League against a bunch of students, supermarket shelf-fillers, taxi drivers, teachers and the like have left a bitter taste in the mouths of many, including mine.
.

The drive home was no better than the drive out. We had to fight our way through the maze of traffic lights which took an age and then another accident on the way back had us queueing again for yet another lengthy period.

As a result it was 01:00 when we finally reached Terry’s, and he offered me a bed for the night. By that time and after all that, I was totally done in anyway so I took up his offer and here I am and there I stayed.

Wednesday 15th January 2020 – IT’S REALLY NICE …

… when someone’s project that you have been following for quite a while finally comes to fruition.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been following the renovation of the big old building in the Place Cambernon for a couple of years now on and off, but now here it is, the Restaurant La Contremarche, in all its glory. Open to the public this evening

And it’s a right place too. There’s a piano, and waiters in aprons, all that kind of thing. Definitely not for the likes of you and me.

And there’s another reason why I won’t be going there either. And that’s because, although I did look, I couldn’t see a menu on display outside.

There are two reasons why that fact would disappoint me too –

It’s not possible to see whether there’s anything that I could eat. And with my rather restricted diet, that kind of thing is very important. In fact it will put a lot of people off going.
With not knowing what’s available, I can’t see the prices. It’s like the old saying about Rolls Royces, which is quite apposite seeing as I lived for several years in the town where Rolls Royces were made – in that “if you have to ask the price, then you can’t afford it”. Rather than being embarrassed about the price, I wouldn’t go in at all.

So Fritkot for me.

But more importantly, where are they going to put the pizza van now? I don’t think that the owners of the restaurant will want it outside their front door.

We’ll find out tomorrow.

But never mind tomorrow, let’s talk about today. It was a night that was rather later than intended last night, and as a result I didn’t quite manage to beat the third alarm. Only a couple of minutes in it but still disappointing.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I can’t remember now who I was with but we were in a hotel waiting to be called for our aeroplanes. We had been told that they were going in 5-minute intervals or 10 minute intervals. The last plane had been called at something like 12:00 and it was now long after 13:00 and we still hadn’t been called. We’d all packed and had everything ready and were just sitting around waiting, getting more and more annoyed and stressed out about this. In the end I was actually staying on for an extra week so it didn’t really concern me that much but the two people I was with, they were going back. IN the end I picked up the hotel phone and tried to dial out to try to find out what was going on. These two people told me the number but as I was dialling I had this light voice saying “doing my best, doing me best”, a female voice, obviously an automatic machine. As I was doing this a noise started up in the hotel corridor as if everyone was moving out. I had my old shoes on, the ones with the broken laces and whoever I was with came up and said “here, look at this” and he tied my laces in a realy peculiar way that ended in a dead-knot. “How’s that?” I said “if you can remember how to undo it, it’s fine”. My laces were a nice lime green and with black trainers that didn’t look right at all.

After breakfast, I’d still had no news of what I was supposed to be doing with the audio files from the Press Conference at the Stade Louis Dior yesterday. It’s all very well sending me to this meeting, but I have to know what I’m supposed to be doing.

Deciding that any action is better than none at all, I went through the one with Johan Gallon, the trainer of US Granville, all 25 minutes of it, and made copious notes.

It worked out that there was an opportunity to ask about 25 questions to be inserted into the interview, so I set about and recorded them.

There was a brief interruption in the middle of all that to go and fetch my bread. The wind had stopped but we were now having a rainstorm.

It’s half-day at schools in France on a Wednesday.

They close at midday and sure enough there are hordes of people milling around. And load of cars like these here.

Bit I watched the one across the road pull up. I’m standing right by an approved parking place which is vacant, there’s a huge public car park 50 metres further up the Boulevard Vaufleury but the selfish driver chooses to block the pavement by parking with two wheels upon it, and blocking the access down the road for the service buses and school buses that come down here.

And if that’s no enough to be going on with, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that the driver is parked on a bus stop. You can’t see the yellow hatching on the road but you can see the “bus stop” sign right in front of the car.

My walk took me onwards towards the Chantier navale

Our old friend Spirit of Conrad is still in there of course and so are the two fishing boats that have been there for a while. But they are now joined by a third one, to the right of Spirit of Conrad.

It looks as if there’s a lot going on in the Chantier navale right now and that’s always good news. The port needs to be kept busy with as much work as possible.

The tide was well in today so the gates were open and I couldn’t walk across.

It also meant that the earth-moving equipment doing the dredging at the ferry terminal weren’t out working, They were parked down at the rue du Port so I could go and inspect them,

Two large diggers and two huge earth-moving lorries. And whaen I was “huge eath-moving lorries” I do mean huge. I could have hours of endless fun with one of those.

Having bought my dejeunette at la Mie Caline, I headed for home, chatting to a neighbour on the way.

It wasn’t quite lunchtime so I had a listen to what I had dictated. It needed some background white noise, a little echo and some background noise so I spent a while adding some of that.

By now it was lunchtime so I knocked off for half an hour or so.

After lunch I set to copying and pasting the audio files and my questions and I’d done half of it when the telephone rang. I finally know now what I have to do with it all, and it means that my morning is wasted.

As I’ve said before, the lack of professionalism is really annoying me.

Instead, I carried on with this blasted, flaming translation. By the time that I knocked off for tea I’d reached 46 minutes – that’s about 83%. With a bit of luck I can finish that tomorrow before I go to the shops.

The afternoon walk – in the bright sunshine now, was interesting. I only managed half of my run along the square Maurice Marland but I wasn’t disappointed because with no-one about at all, I’d done the run along the north side of the walls.

But I don’t understand why I hadn’t taken any photos at all.

Tea was a stuffed pepper followed by rice pudding. And it was delicious as usual. Mind you, I forgot to put the peanuts in the stuffing.

Outside, the wind had dropped but the ground was sodden as if we’d had a sudden rainstorm.

The views though were really excellent tonight. I could see dozens of fishing boats right out in the English Channel and there was one of them heading in to port seeing as the tide was in.

The sea was comparatively calm too, so there can’t have been much intensity in the storm that passed us by over the last couple of days. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have on occasion seen waves still come roaring in days after a violent storm.

“A really clear night” I thought to myself.

Out there in the English Channel you can see a couple of the trawlers – or, rather, the lights of a couple of trawlers out there fishing off the coast of Jersey.

But even more importantly, you can see the large red lights on the extreme left of the image. I’m not sure what they are but my best guess would be that they would be warning lights for something like a radio antenna or a radar mast over on the Jersey mainland.

Picking this up with my equipment in the darkest night is quite something.

That wasn’t all either.

The lights of St Malo were nice and bright and clear tonight. With no tripod to take long-delay exposures, I had to do my best with a hand-held shot.

It’s hard to think that 18 months ago I might have been lucky to produce this image but it’s rather small beer compared to what I’ve been able to produce with the new camera and the tripod.

We mentioned a little earlier the parking issues in the Boulevard Vaufleury.

In the future though it’s going to become far more difficult. They’ve blocked off half of the car-parking spaces with a row of cones and I’ve no idea why.

Perhaps I’ll find out tomorrow when I go for my walk. But stopping to photograph them interrupted my evening run (yes, I’ve done a lot of running today). And stand by for some more “pathetic parking” photos of cars whose kids are far too lazy to walk 50 metres.

The fishing boat that I had seen earlier was now at the fish processing plant and was busy unloading.

If you look very carefully you’ll see the fork lift truck that is taking away the boxes of whatever the boat had brought in.

As for me, I carried on with my walk. I was on 90% of my day’s activities so I pushed on for a while. That’s how come I found myself in the Place Cambernon.

But a good walk around brought me up to 100% eventually so I could come home.

Listening to my recordings just recently, I’m well aware of the fact that my equipment for the radio isn’t producing the quality that I would like. In fact, I’m really surprised that it’s doing as well as it does.

But anyway there’s a Special Offer on at the moment on recording equipment and there’s a professional piece of equipment that does exactly what I want on sale at just €88:00. So that, and a microphone desktop stand and (at last) a water filter are on their way here.

There are a few bits and pieces missing for the camera following my aquatic adventures and they are on the way here too, as well as some sticky labels for the new laptop to convert it to a French keyboard.

Money is being spent like water right now but I’m having to do it if I want to move on.

There’s a new electric kettle to be looked for too. The one that I have has just blown every fuse in the house.

Friday 10th January 2020 – HE WHO LAUGHS LAST …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No intention of missing this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here’s a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

And so it is too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what a delicious tea that all made.

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

Off on my walk around the walls tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZZZZZZ

Monday 6th January 2020 – ONE OF THESE DAYS …

… I really will have myself an early night.

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

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

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

Something of a failure there.

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

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

Maybe all of this is related.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then that’s life.

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

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

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

Going out for a walk was a third interruption too.

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

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

Some people have no shame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement too in the inner wet harbour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZZZZZZZZZZZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then it was breakfast.

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

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

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

And that’s not all either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back outside, I had a good look around.

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

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

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

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

Watch this space!

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

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

Thursday 2nd January 2020 – LAST NIGHT …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onwards and upwards, hey?

Wednesday 1st January 2020 – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

May I take this opportunity to wish all of my readers (both of you!) a very happy New Year. I hope that you will receive everything this year that you wished on everyone else during the course of the last year.

It goes without saying, of course, that whatever you wished on Brexiters, the Conservative party, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, the Republicans and Canadian Tories are exempt from this. If the World comes to an end in 2020, we’ll all know who to blame.

And for that reason, this song is going to be my anthem for the current year. I have often said … “and you will say more often” – ed … that if violence is the answer, then it must have been a very stupid question. And the question on the Referendum paper in 2016 is about as stupid as they come.

And the fact that 17.4 million people were stupid enough to vote for it, and 14 million people were stupid enough just now to vote for the Tories shows you that people still haven’t got the message.

The only way for you to tell them the message in a fashion in which they will understand it is –
1) to tell them about it slowly
2) on their thick skulls
3) in Morse code
4) with a pickaxe handle.

Yes, “if you want your rights you’re going to have to fight” and “we’ll walk hand in hand to the promised land” “if we bring down the Government now”.

On the subject of walking, as I mentioned last night, I went out for a walk at about 23:30 to see what was going on in town. Not hand in hand though. I was on my own and had a camera to carry.

The harbour gates were open so I had to walk along the rue du Port and that way into town and just as the clock struck midnight, I found myself at the end of the rue St Saveur.

Having a think about it, I don’t recall if I took a photo of the street with its Christmas lights so I took a photo of it just now to complete the picture.

Mind you, I’m not sure why I bothered, because they aren’t really all that much to write home about, are they?

From there, my perambulations took me along the street into the place Générale de Gaulle.

This is much more like it. They seem to have pousseé‘d the bateau dehors a bit more here as we have seen before. The ski slope is certainly different, although I’m still not sure why they would want one.

But apart from that, it’s still pretty much the same as previous years and I do with that they would try to do something different next year.

As for the rue Lecampion, I’m not quite sure what to say.

What certainly didn’t help was that they put out the overhead lights just as I was preparing to photograph the street, so we were just left with the lights up the sides of the shops.

The overhead lights going out was the cue for me to go home. And by the time I returned here I reckoned that I hadn’t even encountered a dozen people wandering around.

There were a few noisy parties going on – even one in this building, and so I was grateful for 1.2 metres of solid Chausey granite walls between me and the rest of the world.

Not feeling in the least bit tired, I did some personal stuff on the computer. And no-one was more surprised than me to notice that the time was now 03:30. Where had the time gone?

Bedtime by now, I reckon, even if I didn’t feel like sleep. I have to make an effort.

And sleep I must have had. No alarm and so I awoke at 07:00. Not the slightest chance of me showing a leg at that time of morning.

And neither was there any chance at 09:00. This is after all a Bank Holiday, no alarm, I’m entitled to a rest, and I’ve had a late night too.

What is much more like it is … errr … 12:15. That’s a REAL lie-in.

As for any voyage that I might have had, well, what’s this bit about hunting furs last night? I don’t remember very much at all but apparently someone living in France who could catch 60 squirrels and skin them had the same style of life as someone normal, which of course I found hard to believe and the people to whom I was telling this story they found it hard to believe too but apparently that’s how it went and that’s really all that I remember about last night.

Breakfasting at 13:00 is much more like it too and so seeing as I had my fig roll and (finally) some strawberry jam. Yes, jam today. And I hope that it will last so that there will be jam tomorrow too. Perhaps I ought to think about making a jam tart.

So once the breakfast was over, there was work to be done. And as I promised myself, I attacked Project 008 for the radio.

That’s now finished and, even though I say it myself, I think that it’s the best to date. It’s not just that my technique is improving, but that instead of speaking “off the cuff” as I would normally like to do, I’ve started to write scripts.

That means that I’m not umming and ahhing as much (which means that there is less stuff to cut out) and I’m not pausing the dictaphone as often while I look for material, so it sounds much more seamless.

Once I’d finished it and played it through to make sure that it was as I wanted it with no mistakes, I went out for my afternoon walk.

With having not been out for any bread this morning (I’d missed lunch of course) I took the long way out right around the new bit of path that they had excavated after the rockfall and where I had met my Waterloo in May.

Crowds of people out and about, even if the weather was pretty miserable and you couldn’t see a thing.

Once I was out, I was going to stay out, and well out too.

My trip took me past the chantier navale where I could see what was going on. Pecheur de Lys was back on dry land after her little sojourn through the summer in the water. She’s looking rather sad though and could do with a coat of paint.

Spirit of Conrad was there too, as were the other two fishing boats. But there was no-one out there working on them. “Knocked off for the holidays” I reckoned.

The tide was out so the harbour gates were closed, which meant that I could take the path over the top and across to the other side.

Where the fish processing plant is, there is a huge concrete apron and the seabirds here have learnt quite quickly to take advantage of it.

This gull is just one of many that will scavenge a mollusc out of the silt and fly over here to drop it on the concrete to break it open, and then dive down for a feast. It really was quite impressive.

The wildlife kingdom is amazingly versatile and can adapt to most kinds of environment – if only humans would let them.

With nothing exciting going on in the inner harbour, I went for a walk over to the port de plaisance, the yacht harbour, to see what was going on there.

Not an awful lot, but there were a few boats that we have seen on several occasions, such as the lifeboat over there on the far side.

That has plenty of use of course and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw it disappear into an enormous wave during the storm that we had the other day.

Here’s another one that we have seen a few times in the past.

She’s Lys Noir, and when we’ve seen her moored up in the harbour, it’s usually been in the wet harbour at the back of where I’m standing, where boats like Thora, Normandy Trader and the gravel boats tie up.

So why she should be here, I don’t know. If she’s advertising cruises, she won’t have many people passing by to read the notices where she is.

This is a boat that we’ve seen even more often than Lys Noir.

She’s La Granvillaise and immediately recognisable by the “G90” on her bows. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that she too spent some time in the chantier navale a while ago being given a good going-over.

But with all of these boats, there isn’t presumably much happening right now so they are laid up for the winter.

Nevertheless, with all of the tourists here right now, wandering aimlessly around the harbour, I’d have had them plastered with adverts for the summer season trips that they do, and put them where people could actually see tham.

My perambulations took me right along the seafront, such as it is here, through the new modern apartment complex at the end, and back into town via the rue St Gaud and the rue St Saveur.

But round the back of the Mairie in the rue du Commandant Yvon, whoever he was when he was at home, if he ever was, is another set of electric vehicle charging points.

Europe needs to get its act together with the phasing out of new internal-combustion engines cars by 2040, and it’s good to see that here in France they are organising themselves.

And so I decided that I’ll keep a closer eye out to see what I could find, and I didn’t have to go far to find some more.

Not even 50 metres, I reckoned. Here are two more on the public car park around the corner off the Cours Jonville. So with the two that I saw at the railway station earlier this week, that makes 6 that I’ve found in Granville without looking too far.

And that’s not counting the half-dozen or so that are installed at the LeClerc supermarket on the edge of town.

Across the road from the car park I noticed this old Porsche Carrera.

Nice and interesting the car might be, but it wasn’t the car that caught my eye but its registration number. It has the “F” for France on the number plate of course, but the registration is hors serie – out of the usual run of numbers, whether pre-2009 or post-2009.

It could mean absolutely anything of course, so I shall have to make further enquiries about it. I did look at the insurance sticker in the window and that was displaying a “WW” series number, indicating Trade Plates.

Back home, I didn’t do a great deal. After all, it is a Bank Holiday.

later on, I made tea though.

Same as Christmas night as well. Seitan slices roasted in olive oil with onions, garlic, gravy and herbs, with roast potatoes in olive oil and mint. Vegetables included an endive, peas and carrots, green beans, a leek and some sprouts.

Followed by Christmas cake for pudding, you really cannot even begin to imagine just how delicious it all was.

Plenty of sprouts and endives left to finish off, ad a leek too, but I intend to make a leek and potato soup with that sometime soon.

This evening I was all alone on my little walk around. Not a soul out there. I managed my run too, and made it to the top of the first ramp.

So I’m off to bed now. It’s not early, because I’ve been busy. I found a “live” concert from the BBC with only a small audience, and as I have a project on the back burner that needs a small audience, I was stripping out the applause to use.

But here’s a thing – the applause is evidently over-dubbed, without question. And as they didn’t have enough material for the spot, they’ve extended the applauses by adding three or four together.

None of that is the issue though. What is the issue is that they seem to have done it all on a two-track recorder in stereo and without the overdubbing facility that multi-tracking can give you, they have simply joined the tracks together – and you can see all the joins. Tiny little milli-seconds of silence.

What I’ve had to do is to edit the applauses after I’ve stripped them out, so that the joins have gone and it all looks pretty seamless.

Given the facilities they have there, it’s not very good at all, especially when even a home-based four-track set-up like the cheap affair that I have can produce a seamless show.

Maybe I’m in the wrong job.

Tuesday 31st December 2019 – UNLESS I AM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were a couple of interruptions to my afternoon though.

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

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

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

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

And Joly France and Chausiais

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday 28th December 2019 – HOW ABOUT …

… this as a fine way to start off the morning?

There we were, Caliburn and I, sitting in the car park just above the chantier navale down the road here, watching the sun rise above the horizon over St Pair sur Mer and the Baie de Mont St Michel.

That’s not a sight that I’m likely to see very often – the sunrise. We have seen it before on a few occasions but very very rarely when we are back home.

But just in case you are wondering, which I’m sure you are, this wasn’t at some ridiculous hour like 04:00, this was the situation at just before 09:00 this morning. It’s the middle of winter as you know.

Last night, I was in bed realtively early compared to how its been just recently. And although it was a struggle, I did actually make it up out of bed before the third alarm at 06:20. Only just, but nevertheless …

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes, as I had in fact been on my travels during the night as I discovered. I didn’t remember much about them except at one point I was on a bus as a passenger. I’d been taking an express bus strip from somewhere or other and I’d got to be picked up and I wasn’t sure whether my luggage had been put in the boot or not, my green rucksack and a brown jacket. I went round the back to look and there was a guy there, and I was talking to him but suddenly the bus took off and we ended up the two of us sitting in the luggage boot having a chat about this and that, going around Crewe. I remember thinking that we can’t go all the way to Caen sitting here like this – we’re going to have to get out at one point, but anway that was that.
Earlier, there was a situation where I had a girlfriend and I was doing something and some guy, one of these arrogant pushy types, was talking to my girlfriend. He turned round and said “anyway, you’re with me now” to which this girl replied “no, no no I’m not. I’m with Eric (or whatever my name was at the time)”. He wasn’t used to being turned down like this and became quite annoyed by it.

Once breakfast was out of the way I split another digital album into its component tracks and that’s all looking good. Then I hit the streets.

As well as the gorgeous sunrise this morning, there was also activity at the ferry terminal.

Granville, the modern Channel Islands ferry that came from Sweden a few years ago, is at the ferry terminal and she looks as if she’s loading up ready for a trip out to Jersey this morning.

Thinking hard, I’m not at all sure that I’ve actually seen one of the Channel Islands ferries actually depart from the terminal. I’ll have to give this a miss too as I’m in a hurry.

Having visited LIDL on foot on Friday and not been tempted by anything on offer, I made my way straight to LeClerc.

It’s the tradition in France at New Year to eat oysters and to drink champagne. And sure enough, one of the local oyster-sellers has set up his stall just outside the supermarket today in order to catch the crowds.

And by the way – it’s not true that oysters are an aphrodisiac. I had 12 on my wedding night and only 10 of them worked.

In Leclerc I bought my ticket for the next football match – in Versailles! US Granville are away in the cup next weekend and once more, there are buses provided. If you pay for your seat on the bus (which I did – €10:00) the club will give you a free ticket to enter the ground.

Sounds very fair to me!

And even though I didn’t spend much money in LeClerc today, I was there for much longer than I wanted to be. For some reason which only they will know, a charge of about €3:60 was added to my bill “for Carte Noire coffee” – and I hadn’t bought any.

The girl at the cash desk couldn’t deal with it so I ended up having to go back to Reception where eventually, and not with just a little umming and ahhing either, I had my money back.

But I’ll watch my bill in future.

Another thing that I will watch will be the ice-cream freezer. Today, I found a tub of banana sorbet, 100% vegan. That’s my New Year treat and if it’s any good, which I hope it will be, I’ll be getting some more.

From LeClerc I went on to NOZ. And spent more money in there than I intended to too.

But the main reason for that was that they had a box of 7 high-quality “brand name” socks on offer at just €7:99. I get through cheap socks at an astonishing rate and yet some decent ones that I bought in 2013 are only just now wearing through and need to be replaced.

They also had twin-packs of proper woollen Arctic over-socks there too, so I bought one of those. If ever I go North again, which I hope to do, keeping my extremities warm is important.

And in that respect, rummaging around in the €0:99 bin I found another woolly hat.

Back here I put everything away and then for a little while I started the tidying up. Not for long though because I had to sit down after a while. So I had a coffee and vegetated.

Later this afternoon I went for my little walk around the headland.

There were crowds of people out there today because although it was grey and overcast, it wasn’t all that cold and the wind had dropped considerably too0

But it took me a while to get going. I was “detained” by Gribouille who came for a stroke and I ended up chatting to his mum for quite a while. I hadn’t seen her for ages.

There wasn’t anything else whatever of note going on so I did my circuit around the headland and came back home.

For all of the afternoon I’ve been alternating between cleaning and resting (and crashing out for 10 minutes too, unfortunately). I might be having visitors tomorrow so the place needs to look respectable.

At least the toilet and the bathroom are cleaned and the floors washed. The rest of the place has been vacuumed out and some attempt at tidying has been made.

Another thing that I did was to finish off the making of the rest of the lemon and ginger drink and it’s not too bad at all. 6 litres in all, I made.

The leftover pulp, now not too strong, is in the fridge and I added a little of it to tonight’s tea – a curry from October 2018 that I found in the freezer. It gave it a certain je ne sais quoi.

And while I was in LeClerc I bought some more ginger. I’ll let that ripen for a few days and then I’ll have a bash at doing something with some oranges. That should be interesting.

On my evening walk tonight, there wasn’t a soul about whatsoever. No idea why because it was a lovely evening.

Having been around the headland this afternoon, I took my walk around the walls tonight but there wasn’t anything of interest to photograph either.

With no-one about in the Square Maurice Marland, I could have my run without disturbing anyone or embarrassing myself, and I made it all the way across and half-way up the ramp. I don’t suppose that I should be too disappointed with that.

Having seen Gribouille this afternoon, it was the turn of Minette this evening. She was sitting on her windowsill watching the world go by, and she let me give her a stroke for a few minutes

By the time I reached the apartment I noticed that I had done 83% of my day’s activities. And so with it being such a pleasant evening, I pushed on to continue my walk up towards the Pointe du Roc

Round in the harbour, there wasn’t anything worth seeing. Granville was back and moored up, so I walked on to the chantier navale to see how Spirit of Conrad and the fishing boat were doing.

Both are still there and on their own too, but I did notice that a new set of blocks had been laid out. Are we perhaps expecting another visitor some time soon?

While I was musing on the foregoing, my reverie was interrupted by the sound of a long-stroke diesel engine coming around the headland.

Not sure what it might be, I waited for a while until it came into view and sure enough, it’s another fishing vessel heading back into the harbour.

When I had started my walk a little earlier I’d noticed that there were half a dozen or so out there in the distance. They must be on their way home

While the fishing boat continued its progress towards the port, I continued mine, around the headland and then down the rue du Roc towards home.

And as I crossed the threshold into the apartment the fitbit passed over to 100% of my daily activity and that’s always good news.

And for some reason, that’s 8.4kms today. The daily activity target is slowly increasing. The machine is obviously noticing that my fitness level is improving.

There will be SHOCK! HORROR! an alarm call tomorrow. I’m off out to do another outside broadcast – but recorded this time.

Laurent and I have decided that we’ll do a few of these whenever there’s some kind of special activity going on, and tomorrow there’s the annual “polar dip” so we’re going round to interview the participants.

Not that you’ll catch me going in. I’ve done three of them already – up to my knees at Etah, 650 miles from the North Pole, up to my knees in Cambridge Bay in the North-West Passage around the top of Canada and up to my chest in a river in northern Labrador and that’s enough for me.

In any case I have a catheter in my chest as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and that prevents me from immersing myself.
“What would you do if you didn’t have the catheter in?” Castor asked me several weeks ago
“Ohhh – I’d think of another good excuse” I replied.

On that note, I’m off to bed. Goodnight

Wednesday 25th December 2019 – MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all my readers!

usually in the past I’ve inserted some kind of reference to Crewe Bus Station in here but I stopped doing that a while back because everyone was becoming bored with the same old thing.

But these days, seeing as I have many new readers, especially from the other side of the Atlantic who wouldn’t understand the significance, I reckon I should tell it again.

The most significant place where I saw this written was on the wall of the public convenience in Crewe Bus Station, and I noticed it while I was admiring the … err … unusual artwork on the walls.

In fact it was studying the unusual artwork that helped me gain a good pass in my General Certificate in Education. It went into far more detail and was much more useful than anything I had ever learnt in Biology class at school.

It was also at the Public Conveniences in Crewe Bus Station where I dashed in one evening after a heavy night on the Boddington’s at the Lion and Swan.
“Phew!” I exclaimed. “Just made it!”.
The guy standing next to me had a quick glance and said “Blimey! Can you make me one like it?”

Yes, the old ones are the best, aren’t they?

Anyway, I hope that you had a very good Christmas and that Santa brought you everything that you deserve.

So where was I and what was I doing at midnight then?

The answer is “admiring the sluice out of the inner wet harbour in the port”. Yes, I did say that I was going for a prowl around the town at midnight to see what was happening there.

The tide was well out and as the harbour gates were closed, I walked over the footway on top to the other side of the harbour.

From the footway there was a good view of the boats in the harbour and many of our old friends are there tonight.

From left to right we have Granville and Victor Hugo, the two ferries that run the service to the Channel islands from here, then Aztec Lady in the centre, who we saw for weeks up on blocks in the Chantier Navale just recently.

Nearest the camera in the right foreground, wrapped up in her winter attire, is Charles-Marie.

There is the odd fishing boat or two thrown in for good measure.

My wanderings took me down alongside the harbour.

Across the other side of the water the rue du Port and the old Medieval walled city were looking quite nice.

It’s the kind of view that would make a really good picture postcard view if I could just get the colour balance right.

15 minutes I’d been out before I met my first human.

Walking along the rue Lecampion was I, taking a photo of the street lights, when someone came round the corner towards me. He rattled the handles of a couple of bars in the street (to no avail) and then disappeared up an alleyway and that was that.

As for me, I carried on along the way home and haf-way up the rue des Juifs I encountered my second and third people. As you can see, France is nothing like the UK on Christmas Eve.

Back here, I had an alcohol-free beer out of the stock and then changed the strings on the Ibanez acoustic bass. Happy Christmas to the bass – it could do with some new strings and it sounds so much better now.

On that … err … note I went to bed.

No alarm in the morning, so waking up at 04:00 was not part of the plan. Neither was waking up at 07:00. Or 09:30. 10:45 is a much more realistic time to haul myself out of bed on Christmas Day.

And despite the length of time that I was in the arms of Morpheus, I can only remember some guy standing in s stream having a water-fight with an elephant, and the elephant playfully knocking him over into the water with his trunk a few times. And then the guy walking off down along the stream.

At breakfast we had a crisis. I had my fig roll as an extra, but the jam – well, I hadn’t checked it for ages and it’s one of those jams that doesn’t have anything in it to preserve it once it’s opened.

So it went in the bin and I had to have my fig roll dry.

Once breakfast was over, I turned my attention to more exciting things.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m changing things around in my life just now. I’ve stopped buying fizzy drinks in bottles and I’ve started to make my own soft drinks.

A couple of days ago I started to prepare a lemon and ginger drink and here it is, in the drinks dispenser that I bought the other day from LIDL.

Three lemons and a small ginger root peeled and sliced up really small, and then boiled up in water that just covers them and then an inch over.

After 10 minutes, set to simmer for an hour or so, and the moment it comes off the boil, a couple of tablespoons of honey added.

Left to chill for a coupe of days and then sieve to remove the lumps, add to the drinks dispenser and fill up with water.

Meanwhile, go through the process again with the lemon and ginger that was sieved out. That’ll be ready in a couple of days and after that I’ll try something else.

But it’s very refreshing – and very gingery too! Maybe somewhat less ginger next time.

For the rest of the day I didn’t do very much at all. Just chilled out and chatted to a few people on the internet. It was nice to catch up with friends.

No lunch either. A couple of slices of the fig and raisin bread and a nibble on stuff here and there.

And while I was mooching around, I came across one of our old Christmas Specials from the days when I used to run Radio Anglais.

Liz and I used to have a great laugh doing these and it’s a shame that my health can’t keep up with things now. I could dash off a programme like that in a couple of hours back in those days, but not now!

Somewhat later than usual, I went for my afternoon perambulation around the headland.

And while I was standing on the cliff overlooking the sea admiring the naval craft going by, I fell in with Xavier, one of the people from my new employers and we had a chat for a little while.

And then I pushed on – or pushed off, as the case may be.

The speedboat wasn’t the only thing out there this afternoon enjoying the weather.

Whilst there wasn’t much going on in the way of commercial traffic today, there was a fair bit of pleasure traffic. A couple of yachts, one of which was this one, were sailing around in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

They obligingly posed for me, which was nice of them.

Here’s something that I haven’t noticed before. Well, I have, but I’ve not paid it any attention until today.

At first glance it loks like a rock face, and not just a pretty rock face either. On closer inspection, it looks as if it’s the mouth of a tunnel that’s been bricked up.

And that’s got me all curious. I wonder what it was and where it went. I shall have to look into it.

I’d gone the long way round, in case you hadn’t realised, down the new bit of path and along the old road.

This route brings me out by the Chantier Navale where I could see Spirit of Conrad still stuck up on her ramps, with a fishing boat for company.

One thing that I was hoping to do was to have an update on the former and a description of the work to be carried out on the latter but as you might expect, there was no-one about.

My route took me right into town and then round a couple of back streets before making for home. And depressing as it is to recount, there was absolutely nothing going on at all in town. A few people about, but wandering aimlessly around, like me.

Back here, I carried on doing very little until tea time. And then I attacked the food.

First thing was to cut up some potatoes into cubes, coat them with olive oil and put them in the oven to roast.

Then a seitan slice with gravy put likewise in the oven.

Some veg, including leeks (I like to have a leek with my Christmas meal), and endive and some Brussels sprouts (not Lincolnshire sprouts of course, the sad, pathetic fools), and what is Christmas without Brussels sprouts, cooked properly?

And here you are, one Christmas dinner. Cooked to perfection.

And take my word for it. The meal really was delightful. I enjoyed it very much, as you might expect and I’ll be going back for more.

As for pudding, well of course it should have been Christmas pudding but I was running terribly late.

And in any case, I had something else planned. My Christmas present from Liz and Terry is, as always, a vegan Christmas cake. And so for pudding tonight I had a slice of that.

And that was just as good as it usually is.

It was cold and windy tonight on my somewhat late walk. And no-one around either. I didn’t see a soul.

No photos – it was too cold to go hunting for anything special to photograph – but I did manage my run, even if it was only just.

And with the fitbit showing 93%, I went and did another lap around to reach the 100% marker. At least it’s pushing me onwards, this fitbit.

It’s now 02:55 – no surprise seeing as I had a very long lie-in this morning. I’ve been doing nothing since I came back, and I’ve only just finished writing up my journal.

So now it’s bed time. I wonder what time I’ll wake up tomorrow.

And I hope that you had a good day today.

night old town port de granville harbour manche normandy france

yacht baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

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

… without any mince pies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this beautiful weather even Marité was looking really nice.

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

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

Now here’s a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

It beggars belief, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was right.

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

On that note, I headed back to the apartment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll let you know what happens.

joly france port de granville harbour manche normandy france

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: spirit of conrad

Wednesday 29th January 2020 – THIS TOWN AND I …

Tuesday 28th January 2020 – IF YOU WANT …

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Tuesday 21st October 2020 – I’M FED UP …

Friday 17th January 2020 – I BET THAT YOU ARE …

Wednesday 15th January 2020 – IT’S REALLY NICE …

Friday 10th January 2020 – HE WHO LAUGHS LAST …

Monday 6th January 2020 – ONE OF THESE DAYS …

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Tuesday 31st December 2019 – UNLESS I AM …

Saturday 28th December 2019 – HOW ABOUT …

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