Tag Archives: trawler

Monday 5th July 2021 – WELL I’LL BE …

… and I will be too.

It’s another one of these “if you don’t try it, it won’t work so try it and see what happens – you have nothing to lose” moments.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but many others will not, that I don’t have health insurance from the French Government. When I took early retirement from my job in Belgium I kept my private health insurance and as it’s more comprehensive than offered by the French Government (because it’s Belgian) ther’s no need for any other cover.

To prove that you have French health insurance, a person has a Carte Vitale – a green and yellow chipped photo ID card. For the people of pension age, it confers other benefits too but I’ve never been too bothered by any of those.

However the Government’s Covid passport scheme, and hence the European passport scheme, depends on having a Carte Vitale and so back at the beginning of the year, more in hope than expectation, I applied for one.

For months I didn’t hear a thing but about 6 weeks ago I had a message asking me to send off a photo and a copy of some photo ID which I did. And in the post this morning, sure enough, came a Carte Vitale. So now all that I have to do is to work out what I can do with it.

Another thing that has taken up most of the latter part of the afternoon was to answer a phone call about a subject that has been simmering away in the background for 6 months or so. There’s a possibility of going North again, and a lot farther north (depending of course on the ice conditions) than we did IN SEPTEMBER 2018.

One of the things on which it depends (and there are several) is how far the news of certain events of two years ago, and about which I haven’t yet written but will write one of these days when I can think of a way to express them, have spread.

And also, how far the Covid epidemic has spread too. This particular journey starts and finishes within Canada and so will not be affected by the closure of Canada’s borders but if I can’t get into Canada to reach the starting point, then I shall … errr … be in difficulties.

But as it isn’t going to happen for at least a year and maybe even longer than that, then the future remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, returning to our moutons, as they say around here, despite another crazy, late night, I was up at 06:00 as the alarm went off.

After the medication, I sat down to deal with the next radio programme in the cycle. And today it took me rather longer than usual and it wasn’t until midday that I had finished.

There was a reason for this, and not just a halt for coffee and breakfast either. But when I’d listened to the programme that I was to send off today, I found a glaring mistake in it. So as well as the programme that I was doing, I had to write out some more text for the other one to rectify the mistake, record that too, and then do some rather hasty doctoring in order to make that one work as well.

There was the dictaphone too, to find out where I’d been during the night. We were back with the old Cortinas last night scattered all over the place and I was doing some work, The paraffin heater was becoming rather low on fuel and I was wondering whether to go and fill it up. But my friend and his wife, I noticed hat they were preparing to go out in the evening and when I looked, they were wearing masks and I thought “they are off to do another bank robbery”. I decided that I would go and fill up the oil heater which meant that I had to go across the car park. There on the car park were crowds of people milling around using the paraffin machines. I thought “I hope that there’s no-one using mine”. Eventually I had to fight my way into the end of the queue. Mine was OK which I thought was lucky but there were loads of people hanging around it, especially kids and I had difficulty trying to put my container over the nozzle of the filler. I said a few times to a kid “be careful, don’t step back” but like kids they would step back anyway and got oil all over themselves. There were a few moanings and rumblings, that kind of thing. Eventually a guy said that he would do it for me. He did it but kept finding an obstruction so he went to siphon it and ended up with a mouth full of dirty engine oil. At this point I thought that I’d give up and go and buy some fuel from the petrol station but then I wasn’t sure what fuel I was using in my oil heater. I thought that if it’s not paraffin and I go and buy some fresh paraffin and put it in, then of course it’s going to start to pop because the regulator is only going to be set for whatever fuel I have in it, not paraffin. Having worked in the motor trade as often as I did with insurance companies I cantell you what happens when an oil stove pops and there’s a jet of flame that shoots out from it and sO many fires starting. This isn4t really the best way forward to go at all.
So after this car had done its aerobatics and gone out of the way (and what was that part about?) I could prepare to fuel up but I was offered a posting to the Caernarfonshire Fuel Authorities for my time getting the most out of this fuel station was over because it was the old Alan Pond garage in Crewe and it was time that I looked for somewhere a bit nearer wherever it was that I might be living

The rest of the day has been spent working on the photos from August 2019 and now we are heading up to the end of the Nassuttooq, or Nagssugtoq, or Nordre Stromfjord in Greenland preparing to go ashore for a walk around amongst the artefacts.

Talking of going for a walk, it was time soon enough for me to go for my walk around the headland.

First port of call was to go to check on what is going on down on the beach this afternoon and so I walked off across the car park for a look over the wall down to the beach.

This afternoon, there was no-one down on the beach. And that’s no surprise, and there were two reasons for that. Firstly, with the tide being well in, there wasn’t all that much beach to be on this afternoon. and the second reason was that it was raining yet again – no surprise here – and not only was there no-one on the beach, there was no-one about on the path up above either.

But one thing that did catch my eye in this photo was in the upper right-hand corner where the other day that had set up some scaffolding underneath the city walls. There seems now to be some kind of covering over the scaffolding now, so I’ll have to go along to check on that later this week.

While I was looking with one eye at events going on (or not going on as the case may be) down on the beach the other eye was roving around out to sea to see what was going on in that direction.

The weather was pretty rough this afternoon and so was the sea, and it was quite a struggle for the fishing boats making their way back into the harbour before the tide turns. This one here was battling its way through the waves on its way back to the Fish Processing Plant.

My journey along the path was something of a struggle too in the miserable weather. I really can’t believe that it’s July when we are having weather like this.

The view out to sea might have been pretty depressing and miserable but along the Brittany coast it was actually quite clear.

Off the coat near St Malo one of the beaches was quite clearly visible, as were two very small yachts just offshore and another larger yacht that was sailing by offshore out there. There was a fishing boat out there too having a go at harvesting the sea at the entrance to the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Nothing else was going on out there so I carried on down the path and across the car park down to the end of the headland to see what was happening down there.

The sea was actually quite rough out there this afternoon with spray flying around just about everywhere where the waves were breaking on the rocks.

It’s the kind of weather where the best policy would be to keep away from the edge but it’s not the kind of weather that’s going to deter a keen fisherman from trying his luck even if his bait is going to be swished around by the waves.

Even in the best of weather they don’t seem to catch anything so I didn’t fancy his chances in this weather. Mind you, he was the only one out here trying his luck. Anyone else interested in fishing must have decided to stay indoors and I wish that I had stayed indoors too.

From the end of the headland I walked off around the headland on the other side of the headland and came across another group of people who might have wished that they had stayed indoors too.

It’s not the weather to go off sightseeing out at sea but one of the Joly France boats – the newer one – that provides the ferry service out to the Ile de Chausey looks as if she’s taken a load of tourists out on a trip around the Baie de Mont St Michel.

In this weather you’d certainly need your sea legs to go off on a voyage around the bay in a small boat like that. It was pretty rough on land as well and it was something of a stagger along the clifftop for me in the wind and rain.

With no change of occupancy in the chantier naval today, and with you having seen yesterday in close-up the new boats that were in there, I didn’t bother to take a photograph of anything going on in there.

Instead I concentrated on what was happening in the outer port at the Fish Processing Plant as the fishing boats come in to unload. And here’s an unusual sight. That looks as if it might be L’Omerta over there leaving the quayside.

What’s unusual about it is that instead of staying tied up at the quayside she’s gone off to moor herself in the inner harbour for a change. She’s spent the last couple of weeks moored up there and left to go aground when the tide goes out.

a href=”https://www.erichall.eu/images/2107/21070044.html”> fishing boat yacht kairon plage baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall But as some boats leave the quayside by the Fish Processing Plant, other boats come along to take their place.

A short while ago we saw a fishing boat out at sea heading in towards port. By now, it’s taken me so long to walk around my circuit that she’s caught me up and she’s now about to enter port where she can unload too.

Behind her is a yacht that I thought at first was heading in towards the harbour but when I cropped and enlarged the photo I noticed that she was actually heading out to sea. She’s not the Spirit of Conrad and I can’t think who else she might be, and I pondered on that as I headed home.

As I walked past the viewpoint overlooking the inner harbour I noticed that there was another pile of merchandise lined up on the quayside underneath the loading crane where the Jersey freighters tie up.

The swimming pool on the quayside seems to indicate that it’s Normandy Trader who’ll be coming in to take the stuff away. She has the contract with the manufacturer to transport his pools to the Channel Islands whenever it’s necessary.

But the shrink-wrapped boat that’s at the other side of the crane is a puzzle. That’s been there for a while now and showing no signs of moving. But the red tent that we saw at the end of last week has gone now. Whatever its purpose was is now clearly over.

Back here I had my ‘phone call from Canada that went on for quite a considerable time and which meant that unfortunately my guitar practice time was curtailed.

But I had a lovely tea – pie with veg and gravy followed by chocolate sponge and coconut soya whatsit. But right now I’m off to bed now that my journal is finished. We have a Welsh conversation group meeting tomorrow so I need to catch up with my revision in the morning.

Saturday 3rd July 2021 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… afternoon I’ve had.

After my lunch I came in here with my coffee to do some work, and the next thing that I remember it was 16:55 and my coffee was cold by the side of my desk.

The confusing thing about this is that I don’t remember falling asleep. It was another one of those occasions where I seems to have switched myself off into a stupor or a cataleptic spasm or something, without any memory of being tired or anything.

What’s bothering me about this is the issue of driving. If I switch off while I’m driving without realising that I’m falling asleep, this could lead to a catastrophe that cold have unpleasant consequences.

But talking of driving, Caliburn and I were out this morning going to the shops as usual on a Saturday morning.

When the alarm went off at 06:00, I was up and about quite quickly even though I’d had a late night. After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. There was something involving a huge serpent that had been slithering around somewhere and had been causing people to be trapped in their buildings and houses and so on. I had the idea at a certain moment that I was going to trap it and take it to the Government and let it terrorise the Government for a change. So I had everything arranged in my mind about what I would do but actually when I went to do it the serpent wasn’t there. The thing had disappeared. That was a big disappointment so I had to abandon my plans. The moment that I abandoned my plans the serpent came back and started to terrorise everyone else again.

After a shower, a shave and a general clean-up we set off for the shops.

Last week at the back of the NOZ car park they had started building a new shop unit.

Although I had the camera with me then, I forgot to photograph it but I remembered to do so this morning. I wonder what they are going to be selling from that shop. I suppose that I’ll have to wait for a few months before I discover that. It’s not going to be a big shop that’s for sure.

At NOZ there wasn’t anything very much of any excitement – just some more vegan soup and a couple more small things and then I went off down the road to LeClerc for the rest of the shopping.

LeClerc had alcohol-free beer on special offer so I stocked up with some bottles. They had some more of those small vegan burgers so I bought another pack. I need to encourage them to stock more vegan products. Oven chips were on offer too so I bought a pack of those as well, although I’m not sure why I did that.

On the way back home we had one of these two-minute torrential downpours that soaked about everyone and everything in its path as it moved down the coast. But I was lucky to be able to make my way back home because there had been an accident or something right outside the entrance to the car park and there was total chaos.

And if that wasn’t enough, all the tourists have arrived now and the roads were jammed with people trying to find a parking space. I was glad to return home, where I had a chat with a neighbour who had arrived at the same time as me.

Armed with my toast and hot chocolate, I came in here and had a few things that I needed to organise for the next month or so and that took me up to a rather late lunch

After lunch I wanted to book my trip to Leuven and my hotel but the less said about the afternoon the better. i’m so dismayed and fed up about it all.

And so it was rather late when I went out for my walk and to see what was going on down on the beach this afternoon.

But never mind the beach for a moment. Look at these two people. That had been previously on the beach of course but now they were having a load of fun splashing and swimming around in the water. Perhaps I ought to try that. It would certainly wake me up a little

But then on the other hand I remember when Castor and Pollux asked me if I was going to take part in the Arctic Dip when we were on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in the North West Passage.
“I can’t” I replied. “I have this catheter in and I can’t go into salt water with t”.
Castor asked me later “would you have gone in the water if you didn’t have the catheter?”
“No” I thought to myself. “I’d have found another excuse.

And that reminds me – whatever happened to Castor and Pollux? They haven’t been on a nocturnal voyage with me for ages. But then, there are many people who are conspicuous by their absence these days. Even my life during my sleeping hours is becoming very mundane these days.

Where did all the excitement go?

It’s probably all going on out at sea right now judging by all of tha boats that are sailing around in the Bay of Granville this afternoon.

The weather might be warm but it’s still misty and the visibility isn’t all that much good with the mist that’s hovering around out at sea. We have quite a few yachts sailing around, but everyone seems to be heading back to the harbour right now. It’s close to high tide and if they miss this high tide, the next one will be in the early morning tomorrow so they’ll have to spend the night out at sea.

But that’s not a problem that’s going to affect me right now. I headed off down the path on top of the cliffs, trying to avoid the madding crowds. But I’ve no idea what prompted a group of young people decide to have a game of boules in the middle of the path so everyone had to walk in the grass around them or risk a broken ankle.

As I was walking long the top of the cliffs I was overflown by a light aeroplane to I took a photo of it to see who it might be.

And it’s our old friend F-GIKI who we have seen on many occasions in the past. She’s a small Robin DR 400-120 that belongs to the Granville Aero Club and is used for flight training or refresher courses for pilots who need to keep up their licences.

She had taken off at 17:06, which looks about right to me, and according to her radar plot, went for a flight along the coast towards Avranches, did a lap around the block and came back home, where she landed at 18:11.

Once F-GIKI had flow off on her little adventure I was overflown yet agaon almost immediately.

This time it’s F-GDKM who has taken to the air. She’s a Robin DR 400-140B, powered by a Lyvoming 160HP engine and she’s a new aeroplane to us. It’s not one that I’ve noticed before. She’s owned by the Manche Aero Club and is available to hire for instruction at €131 per hour for a solo flight and €151 per hour for dual instruction.

She actually took off from the airport at 16:42, her second flight of the day, and did pretty much the same circuit as F-GIKI, returning at 17:31.

And while I was looking at the flight radar, there was something else that caught my eye. At 14:08 a plane had landed at the airport here, N65MJ which is a British registration and had set off from Turweston Airfield near Brackley in the UK at 11:48.

Si what’s a ‘plane from the UK doing landing at an airport where there is no international clearance in the middle of a pandemic when the UK is on France’s red list? I smell something fishy, and I’m not talking about the content’s of Baldrick’s apple crumble either.

While all of this was going on, there was plenty more activity going on out at sea.

More and more boats started to appear out of the gloom and mist and one of them was one of the Joly France boats that provide the ferry service to the Ile de Chausey. They will be quite busy right now with all of the tourists that we have around here and she certainly looks crowded.

There were a couple of yachts and other light craft out there too, but what caught my eye was what was going on out on the horizon. Just left of centres is a large mast that might belog to one of the larger yachts that plies for hire in the harbour.

However out towards the left edge of the photo there are some pretty big masts and I wonder if it’s Marité on her way home from wherever she’s been for the last few days. It’s certainly big enough.

And I’ve identified the white trawler that’s in the chantier navale at the moment.

As I went past this morning I was able to read a couple of letters of her name, and that was enough to tell me that she’s L’Alize 3, the trawler that we saw in the inner harbour last week. She’s up there on blocks next to Philcathane with the yacht Rebelle over to the right.

As for the black and white trawler, I still can’t remember her name and there was far too much traffic about today for me to stop and look. I’ll go that way for a look around tomorrow afternoon if I’m not asleep but I’m sure that she’s related to le Pearl. Her owners have a distinctive car and that car was parked underneath this trawler this morning.

By now many of the boats that had been out at sea were coming into port, including Joly France

From this angle we can tell that she’s the newer one of the two because her windows are rectangular in “portrait” format rather than the “landscape” format of the older boats.

Now that Joly France is back home, I can go back home too. And I can’t say that I wasn’t sorry. It had been a tough afternoon.

Back home I put the coffee from lunchtime into the microwave to heat it up and then I came in here to push on with some work. I have plenty of work to do from Friday that I haven’t done yet and it won’t ever be done at this rate.

But whatever I did, it took me up tp teatime. A couple of the burgers from today with baked potatoes and veg followed by chocolate sponge and chocolate sauce.

Now that I’ve finished my journal I’m off to make some bread mix. I need new bread for Monday so I can cook it while the oven heats up for the pizza. That sounds like a good plan.

Thursday 1st July 2021 – HAPPY SUMMER…

… so welcome to the sunshine and the glorious weather. Can it get any better than this?

Yes, what a way to start of the summer. A cold clammy fog enveloping absolutely everything, just like a November day. And it was cold too. I had to go and search for a jumper to keep me warm. I’m not cut out for this kind of weather.

Anyway, that was the weather that greeted me as dawn broke this morning. I couldn’t believe it. And I have to go out shopping later. One look at that and I made myself a piping hot mug of coffee and came back in here to get on with some work

With it being the first of the month, it’s the day when I normally back up everything. So today I decided to start on a full and complete programme.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there’s a USB stick permanently plugged into the laptop on which I back up a few times every day. Then there’s a spare hard drive in this machine on which I back up once a month.

And then there’s an external drive on which I uploaded every single file off every computer or hard drive that I have ever owned and I’ve been gradually sorting it out into some kind of order.

So today, I copied the files off the working drive onto the back-up drive in the machine and then copied them over to the external drive. And even as we speak, after about 12 hours or so, it’s still going on. It’s a long job but it had to be done and I ought to do it more often.

But there’s one good thing about it, and that is that I can remove some of the stuff off the working drive that doesn’t need to be there and make some space, now that it’s stored in at least two other locations. That’s probably going to be tomorrow’s job, always assuming that this back-up is completed by then.

At least, while it’s doing, I can get on and do other stuff, like a pile of photos from August 2019. And now I’m wandering aimlessly around Sisimut in Greenland having a good look around.

After a shower, I made myself ready to set off to the shops. Not that I was feeling like going. And I was feeling even less like coming back loaded up with shopping.

Here in the Rue Couraye is somethign that regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

This used to be some kind of oriental restaurant, as you might remember. And after it closed, a lot of money was spent on transforming it into a rather plush and expensive interior decoration shop with condultants and the like to give advice. And it opened amid a great fanfare.

But it didn’t last very long by the looks of things. As I went past this morning, it was empty, closed up and abandoned. There was a sign saying “we have moved” – but it omitted to tell us just where it actually moved to. And that tells us all that we need to know.

At LIDL I spent more money than I intended, not that I bought anything special. And they had run out of brazil nuts too which is a shame. But anyway, off I set for home, staggering under my heavy load.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the roofing job that was being undertaken on a house here in the Rue de la Houle.

Last week we saw them nailing battens around the chimney in order to hang slates therefrom. And sure enough, they’ve now been and gone and as we can see, the chimney is now all slated and looking quite nice.

But my money is on the fact that they didn’t repoint the chimney and replace the rotten bricks, and that’s going to lead to a problem in the future because a poor chimney isn’t going to last forever, especially when the wind gets going.

And we’ve seen some famous winds since I’ve been living here.

Something else that we’ve seen a lot of since we’ve been living here is redevelopment of buildings and building sites, such as this one at the corner of the Rue St Paul and the Rue Victor Hugo.

There used to be a café on this corner and we watched them knock it down and clear the site, and then fence it off. last week we saw a digger on site and it had dug a big hole. And I was wondering what was the purpose of the hole.

And now we know. They’ve installed a huge crane here and that tells me that building is about to get under way any minute now. Those cranes are expensive to hire and small builders won’t hang about when they have the rental to pay.

Although I suspect that you’ll all be reminding me that I said that in 6 months time.

Back in town again, in the Rue Paul Poirier, I encountered something that caused me some anguish.

It’s the time of the year right now when the fledglings in the seagull nests begin to flex their wings and one or two of them manage to take to the air. Here is one that has left his nest and fluttered down into the street in the Rue Paul Poirier. And now he can’t get up steam to fly back to his nest.

It isn’t easy to know what to do in these circumstances. Maybe his mother will come to look for him, and human scent on her baby might drive her away. And if you do try to catch him, would he dash off into the traffic? I decided with regret that the best course of action was to leave him and hope that a more knowledgeable person would come along.

So up the hill I trudged with my heavy load of shopping until I reached the benches half-way up where I could see down into the harbour.

And it looks as if I’ve arrived at exactly the right time because judging by the little queue of trawlers here, the harbour gates are going to be open any minute now and I could sit and enjoy the spectacle. Mind you, I don’t envy them going out to sea in this dreadful fog. It’s not that thick down there, with visibility about half mile or so, but I bet that it’s a lot worse further out at sea.

It made me wish that there was a café nearby where I could fetch a drink for myself as events would unfold. This is pretty unseasonal weather for July.

Sure enough, I only had to wait a couple of minutes before the gates opened and the red lights changed to green.

And once they did so, a whole line of trawlers suddenly burst into life from all over the inner harbour and they were off like ferrets up a trouser leg. It was quite an impressive sight to see them all go like that.

There was a whole line of trawlers waiting to come into the harbour too but it looks as if those leaving have priority. And once they had cleared the entrance, the ones outside swarmed in. I wanted to take a photo of them but once again, the lens jammed on the NIKON 1 J5. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we had that repaired about 18 months ago.

Anyway I cleared off up the hill, still wrestling with the camera lens and eventually I managed to free it off.

And thzt was just as well because out of the fog came another one of our old friends going for a run around the bay with a bunch of tourists. It’s La Granvillaise, one of the charter yachts that operates out of the port. We can tell who she is because of her unusual sail layout and also the fact that she displays quite prominently the number G90.

And I felt sorry for the tourists because they aren’t going to see very much in this weather, although with the tide being in, at least the boat can go closer to the shore so they will be able to see something of what’s going on.

While I was taking the photo of La Granvillaise there was a tremendous squawking from the roof of one of the buildings so I went off to have a look to see what was happening.

There are two seagulls down there having a tremendous tug-of-war over something or other but I couldn’t see what it was. They kept it up for quite a while too – longer than I was prepared to wait and see the outcome. I wanted to go home.

Back here I put the frozen peas in the freezer and made my self some real hot chocolate to go with my fruit bread. and having had breakfast I came in here to upload the photos onto the computer when unfortunately I dozed off.

Good and proper too. I didn’t wake up until about 13:30 and then it took me a while to find my equilibrium. Another late lunch.

This afternoon there was plenty of excitement, which led to me being kicked out of the “British in Europe” Group. The people who run it have the most unbelievable egotism and arrogance. Ever since Brexit they have leapt aboard every possible bandwagon going and every time some concession has been made, it’s been “look what we won for you” even when they weren’t involved at all.

There’s a campaign been organised to thank the various Préfectures in France for their forbearance and patience but the people who run “British in Europe” have ordered everyone (and told people to pass the message on) NOT to thank the French authorities as “it undermines our campaign”. Have you ever heard anything like it?

One of their main beefs is that the French authorities have, according to them, failed in their obligations to notify every British person of the new arrangements. However, the facts are considerably different. In France, the censuses are held every 5 years and a great many British people have failed to fill in the census forms, for various reasons. So, quite naturally, the French authorities don’t know that they are here so they can’t notify them.

Furthermore, they are complaining that the French are expelling people. The French have a right to expel people if they represent a manifest danger to the security of the State, and the people I know who have been refused residence and expelled are those who have not long been released from prison for certain unspeakable offences.

So I told the organisers what had been going on, but like any two-bit organisation, it can’t tolerate one bit of criticism and won’t hear anything that undermines the “Big I Am”.

This took me up to afternoon walkies so the first thing that I have to do is to go off to the end of the car park and look down to see what was happening on the beach.

So uutangling myself from a group of residents at the door, I set off to see who was about down there. And this afternoon there was quite a crowd down there. That’s because the weather had improved somewhat since this morning. The sun had burnt off the mist from on the land and it was quite warm.

Warm enough for people to be undressed and in swimwear although I didn’t see anyone actually take to the water while I was there. Maybe it wasn’t all that warm in there after all.

But whether it was warm or not, the sea really did look beautiful this afternoon.

It was that beautiful emerald green colour that we don’t see all that often. I reckon that it has to be a trick of the sunlight and the reflections or something like that to make it look so nice and inviting, even if it might be fairly cold this afternoon.

But I can’t hang around and admire the view. I had to push on around my little circuit and see where I can end up. And more importantly, what I encounter on my trip round the headland.

Rather like this yacht that suddenly appeared from out of the mist.

Somewhere out there in that direction is the Ile de Chausey but there is no chance of seeing it in this weather. And that is probably from where the yacht has departed. As I was walking along the path on top of the cliffs it just materialised out of the doom and gloom rather like a phantom.

Of course it’s too far away for me to identify from here so I can’t say if it’s someone whome we know. But anyway, I wandered off across the car park and along the footpath on the other side of the headland.

But here is someone that we ought to recognise. And I ought to know who it is because I’ve seen it so often in the past.

There’s been another change of occupancy in the chantier navale this afternoon because she certainly wasn’t there this morning. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the trawler le Pearl, the new trawler that arrived here last autumn. Well I’m pretty sure that this is her elder sister and I wish that I could remember her name.

But anywhere, here she is, next to Philcathane, with the other trawler whose name I have yet to discover and the yacht Rebelle to keep her company while she’s in here receiving attention.

Down in the other harbour, the tide is quite far out but once more we have a couple of fishing boats tied up ay the fish processing plant and left to go aground.

It’s L’Omerta of course and she’s been moored over there on and off for quite some time now and I’m curious to see what is going on and why she’s there so often.

In the background to the right, moored up at the ferry terminal, is Chausiais, the small freighter that runs supplies out to the Ile de Chausey. She’s probably not long come back from a trip out there and is empty at the moment. When she’s about to go off on a trip out there she’ll be in the loading bay underneath the crane in the inner harbour.

Back here I carried on with the backing up of the computer and the hard drives and that took me up to guitar practice. And I’m not making as much progress as I would have liked with the bass unfortunately. It’s not a case of lack of technique, it’s a case of lack of memory. I can’t remember what I learnt yesterday, stuff like that.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper (now that I have some mushrooms) and I’m sure that I forgot something that usually goes in it. My chocolate sponge and chocolate sauce was delicious too.

And now, as this argument from this afternoon rumbles on over a whole variety of pages on my Social Network, including someone from Britain In Europe wading into a person’s private page and telling her how to manage her own page (how outrageous are these people?) I’m of to bed, as soon as there’s a suitable pause in this backing-up.

But I fear that it’s going to be going on for quite a while yet. And so is this argument.

Tuesday 29th June 2021 – MY CHOCOLATE PUDDING …

… is absolutely delicious.

This morning after the medication I mixed a pile of bread dough and left it to fester in its own time

And after my breakfast of fruit cake, toast and hot chocolate (made with real chocolate of course) I gave the bread a second kneading, shaped it and put it in the mould that I use.

While it was festering I made the chocolate cake mix and put it in a deep baking tray lined with baking paper. When the bread mix had risen enough I put both the bread and the chocolate cake mix in the oven.

When everything was cooked I took the cake, cut it in half, layered the halves with jam and joined the two halves together in a sandwich and left it to cool.

The bread was delicious of course but my cake was just so exquisite with some of the chocolate sauce that I make. I’ll make some more of this, that’s for sure.

While all of this was going on, I was working on my photos from August 2019. For a change I made good progress and I’m now in my hotel in Toronto waiting to leave for my plane to take me to Greenland.

One of the photos that I edited was of THE CHURCH IN WINNIPEG where my grandmother was married in 1918 and another one was of THE STAGE IN THE METROPOLITAN THEATRE where she shared the top of the bill in 1922 with Lon Chaney and Jackie Coogan.

Some of the time was also spent revising my Welsh – even though we’re on holiday until September I don’t want to forget what I’ve learnt so I’m going to spend maybe half an hour a day revising. In fact I might have spent more time working on my Welsh had I not crashed out rather comprehensively.

Lunch was as a consequence rather late, although my fresh bread was delicious, and then I carried on with the photos until it was time for me to go for my afternoon walk. And no girl hanging around the doorway today either.

First port of call as usual was to go and look to see what was going on down on the beach so I took myself off across the car park to stick my head over the top of the wall

The tide was on its way out by the looks of things and so there was a reasonable amount of beach to be on. And there were a few people down there as well, and that’s not much of a surprise because the good weather has come back.

Not quite well enough for a session of sunbathing although when we were out of the wind it was quite warm and pleasant. Pleasant enough to loiter around on the rocks and wait until tonight when the tide will come back in.

There was plenty of other activity going on elsewhere on the beach.

While I was taking the photo of the people on the beach in the previous photograph I was casting my eyes around to look for anything else and they alighted on some people having fun over on the beach at the Plat Gousset.

The tidal swimming pool isn’t visible from here but the medieval fish trap is. And as well as being full of fish, it’s also full of people swimming around and being buzzed by a seagull while they were at it. They seem to get everywhere, these birds. And so do the swimmers too. They seem to be enjoying themselves in the fish trap. I hope that the fish don’t mind.

Today was one of those days where we could see for miles, which is rather a change from the last few days.

The island of Jersey was quite clearly visible today even if it is 58 kilometres away from me. But I wasn’t as interested in the island as I was in what was going on in the sea just off-shore from the island.

There were several boats sailing around just offshore and it’s very rare that you can actually see them from here. And if you look to the right of centre there’s a boat that has the same profile as the Commodore ro-ro ferries that ply between St Malo, Portsmouth and the various Channel islands although I’ve not been able to identify which one.

The weather was so clear that I could actually see the individual buildings in St Helier.

The big round white building that we can see is, I reckon, the View Bar and Supplement store at Fort Regent on the edge of the harbour. The smaller white building to the left is, I think, a building at the harbourside occupied by a firm of accountants.

As for the big tall structure at the left-hand edge of the photo, I’ve not been able to identify that. And I shan’t be able to for quite a while yet because with no way to get out to the Channel Islands right now as long as the Covid epidemic rages, I can’t get any closer.

But there’s no difficulty at all identifying this view.

With the air being so clear today, I was expecting to have a good view out across the bay to the Brittany coast. And so after having admired the Channel Islands, I set off down the path and across the car park to the far end of the headland to see what was going on.

The town of Cancale was exceptionally clear this afternoon. That’s 18 kilometres away as the crow flies but to actually drive there it’s about 60 kilometres, as I know only too well having been caught out by that when I first came here.

No fishing boats out there today which was a surprise, and so I headed off down the path.

There were crowds of people this afternoon at the viewpoint overlooking the harbour so I had to jostle for a view. But at least the path was a lot drier this afternoon than it was yesterday.

There’s been a change of occupancy in the chantier navale today. The trawler Philcathane and the yacht Rebelle are still in there but they’ve been joined by another trawler. She’s carrying the same colour scheme as L’Alize 3 although without being to read any name, I’m not able to say.

So I had to wait for the people to move away before I could take a photo. And then I could move off along the path. There wasn’t anything else going on in the outer harbour to hold my attention.

There was however plenty of activity in the inner harbour today.

Maité was in there today and she was surrounded by a pile of people who might be schoolchildren wearing something yellow that might be lifejackets.

And it looks as if we are going to be having a visit from one of the Channel Island freighters, either Thora or Normandy Trader, because there’s a pile of freight on the quayside down there, including a boat still in its shrink-wrapping for transport to its destination.

The Big Wheel wasn’t going round though while I was watching. Maybe there aren’t any customers waiting for a ride around.

But I headed off back home for my afternoon coffee. And while I was waiting for the kettle to boil I cut the vegan meat pie into slices and put them in the freezer along with the remaining apple pie that might be eaten one of these days..

And later on I crashed out yet again.

Guitar practice was quite good and then I went for tea – rice with an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit followed by my cake and chocolate sauce. And then a huge pile of washing-up.

Now I’m off to bed because I’m exhausted. I don’t know why I’m so tired today. Here’s hoping I’ll have a better day tomorrow.

Sunday 27th June 2021 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

… today that I haven’t done for absolutely ages. And that is that I’ve been out for an evening walk. And I’ve even seen the sun go down on the Ile de Chausey for the first time since I don’t know when.

Mind you, there’s a good reason for that. When I went out for my usual afternoon walk today the rain was so heavy that the noise was deafening. According to a storm warning that we received round about lunch-time, the amount of rain that was planned to fall during the afternoon would be the equivalent of three weeks’ worth of rain.

And anyone who has seen the amount of rain that we have had this last three weeks will know that a pasting was on its way.

Something else that I’ve done today that I haven’t done for ages is to awaken to the sound of the alarm on a Sunday at 06:00. And if I ever understand what made me forget myself so much to have set an alarm for this morning , I’ll let you know because it’s certainly something that I didn’t intend to do.

Furthermore it interrupted me right in the middle of an exciting voyage too. I’d gone round to a girl’s house. It was in some kind of back entry I’d been walking down there. there were big houses and some girls were coming out into the back as I walked past so I walked into their yard. They were setting up a tennis game. One of them was serving a few balls that came remarkably close to me and I was very surprised. As this game developed a guy whom I used to know turned up. He started to work on a red Cortina belonging to one of these girls – the girl who had been serving these balls at me. I could see that there was some kind of chemistry between those two. He was going things like draining the oil all over the floor of the garage and he was masking up and painting some bits as well. He was asking me questions about the Capri that I had and what I’d done. I said that I’d swapped over a load of engines. he said “I thought that you were putting the yellow engine into that one”. “No” I replied. “I’ve put the red one in for now and the yellow one is going in somewhere else and when that’s done I’m going to take out this engine and rebuild it”. He was wrestling with this girl and I was getting more and more jealous and that was when the alarm went off and what the alarm was doing going off at 06:00 on a Sunday morning I really don’t know.

It took me quite a while to go back to sleep as well but eventually I dropped off. There was someone like a French friend of mine who was going to come to visit so we were tidying up the house. I was tidying one of the rooms and rearranging the furniture and some old guy who lived there came back from work. Whoever it was in charge told us all to stop and to get on and do some things but I was still looking around for any tons of mess that needed cleaning hidden behind chairs and so on. I had to go off to work – I worked in a cafe or a hotel or something so I set off to walk. There were a couple of these motorbike/moped things going past. I thought that one of them might have been my friend arriving. Anyway I ended up at an ice-skating rink and I wanted to go in. I was going to hire my skates but then I saw that I needed a towel to dry off after the shower and a few other things too. I thought rather than just help myself and leave the money on the counter I’d wait for the woman to finish what she was doing then she could come and serve me properly. She was with one of the managers and they were filling out a diary about cleaning and so on.

It was about 10:45 when I eventually managed to haul myself out of bed and go for my medication – but not before I’d checked the stuff in the slow cooker to see how it was doing.

After the medication I mixed a pile of pizza dough and then left it to rise. I then came back in here and typed out the notes on the dictaphone, the two above from today and the one from yesterday which is now on-line, and then organised some stuff that needed organising.

Lunch was porridge and toast with coffee following which I came in here and did some music stuff. Tomorrow I’ll be preparing a radio programme and the music is already chosen. This afternoon arranged it into pairs and merged the pairs together. Tomorrow I can start by writing the text.

Another thing that I’ve done is to check the specifications of my computer because it needs upgrading and I need to make sure that I buy the correct parts for it.

With the walk being abandoned I kneaded the pizza dough, divided it into 3, put two parts in the freezer and rolled out the third, putting it on the pizza tray.

While that was doing I’d tipped the stuff out of the slow cooker into the wok where the tofu was marinading, mixed it all around, brought it to the boil, added a few spoonsful of porridge oats to thicken and glutify it, and left it to simmer.

Pastry was next. I made a nice mixing of pastry, rolled out enough to make a base in a pie dish and rolled out some more to make a lid and then switched off the filling to let it cool down.

Once it had cooled down sufficiently I stuck it in the pie bottom, added the top and sealed it, and put it in the oven to bake. With the leftover pastry and the leftover filling I made a pasty-type of thing for tea tomorrow night.

While all of that was cooking I assembled my pizza and when the pie was properly baked, I swapped it over for the pizza.

When the pizza was baked too, I could sit down and have my tea. And as for the pizza, it was delicious – one of the best that I’ve ever made too. I just wish that I had remembered to turn up the heat in the oven to “full”, and then it would have been even better.

And why no pudding tonight? That’s because I’m having to bake bread on Tuesday morning and I’ll make a pudding then. Meantime, I’ll live off the apple pie that’s in the fridge.

Finally the rain stopped and I went out for my walk.

Earlier on I mentioned that this afternoon we were in the grip of a torrential rainstorm. This had only eased off a short while ago.

And that looks like it might be the storm over there, heading off down the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula depositing the contents of the heavy raincloud onto Agon-Coutainville and into the sea just offshore.

As you can see, there’s no point in scanning the horizon for any fishing boats or anything like that this evening. Whatever is going on out there, we aren’t able to see anything because of the raincloud.

Now here’s a craft that we have seen on many occasions in the past – always assuming of course that it’s the same boat.

It’s quite possibly the same yellow zodiac that we have seen on previous occasions in the past moving in and out of the harbour and the Baie de Mont St Michel. Today, it’s anchored in the Baie de Granville and is occupied by a man who is bent on fishing in the water just offshore. He has one rod in the water and another one upright in the back of the boat.

As I watched him for a while he didn’t manage to pull anything out of the water and eventually, pulled his rod out of the water, sat down at the controls of his boat and roared off into the sunset. Another unsuccessful fishing expedition out of the many that we have seen so far.

So with him having cleared off now I can concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing this evening.

No walk around anywhere in Granville would be complete without looking down on the beach at the Rue du Nord to see what is going on down there this evening. Due to the later hour, I didn’t expect to see anyone sunning themselves down there, and the fact that the tide was right in meant that there wouldn’t be too much beach to actually be on.

From this photo you can see how people can descend to the beach here. Over there at the top of the image towards the right is the set of steps that descend from the Rue du Nord. The foot of the set up steps in deep in the water which shows you just how far in the tide actually is right now.

One thing that we have noticed over the last while is the state of the medieval city walls and how the walls at the Place du Marché aux Chevaux have been fenced off to prevent people going too close to it.

What I noticed here today was that there is some kind of wooden structure that has been assembled and fastened to the wall. And I’ve no idea as to its purpose either. It doesn’t look very substantial so it can’t be anything important.

But out of shot is some kind of trailer that looks as if it might be a workman’s cabin. That’s appeared here over the last few days and so who knows? We might even be seeing something actually happening to the city walls in the near future and won’t that be a surprise?

There was something going on round by the diving platform at the Plat Gousset and so, bravely dodging the big puddles on the path underneath the medieval walls, I wandered off that way to see what it might be.

First of all though you can see how high the tide is right now. There’s a concrete pillar out there on which is a kind of diving platform that the kids use for leaping into the water wen the weather is much more clement than it is right now. And today, the diving platform is actually submerged by the tide. Only the guard rail is above the water right now.

And as for what is actually splashing around in the water by the diving platform, it’s a swimmer who seems to be enjoying himself in the water. And sooner him than me in this weather. Mind you, it’s so wet out here that I don’t suppose that it makes much difference whether you are in or out.

And here’s something else that has attracted out attention over the last few days.

Having seen this sign I can tell you that this “Urban Trail” and the white tapes that have sprung up all over the place relate to a couple of races that took place on Friday evening in the town. 700 runners were attracted to the town to take part in 2 races, one of 13 kilometres and the other one of 8 kilometres.

Quite a few people have used the opportunity of the lockdown to start some kind of régime of fitness and many of the runners, particularly in the 8-kilometre race, were debutants at road-racing.

Now that my curiosity was satisfied I pushed on towards the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

There might not be a beach to sit on right now but there’s a sea wall. And with the comfortable seat and the calm sea, it’s an ideal place to sit and watch the sunset as these two young girls are doing.

But I’m not sure what the man is doing, apart from chatting to them of course. And he’s carrying a guitar as well so maybe he’s going to give them both a tune. The girl farthest away from the camera doesn’t seem to be to impressed by what is happening.

Nor me either, for that matter, I cleared off across to the Square Maurice Marland to see what was happening there.

First of all, I have to go to see what my seagull chicks are doing on the roofs across in the Rue des Juifs.

And they seem to be coming along quite nicely. They look quite healthy and while they weren’t actually flapping their wings, they were quite active and alert, waiting for mummy to come home with supper.

As for the Square itself, I was hoping that with signs of repair taking place here and there around the town that they might have actually done something to start work on tidying up the place and restoring the kiddies’ rides ready for summer. But there looks to be no chance of that happening right now.

Another opportunity lost.

And when they do eventually get round to restoring the place after all of this time, I hope that they do a far better job than they have done here. Because this is dreadful.

At one time the Rue St Michel used to be a really nice authentic cobbled street here in the centre of the old town but as we know, it’s been dug up a couple of times just recently while they have been replacing various pipes and cables.

But now they seem to have finished, they haven’t bothered to put back the cobbles at all. They have simply resurfaced the street with asphalt and how I hate to see that. It shows a total lack of imagination and lack of skill, particularly when we are talking about a historic place like the medieval walled city up here on the rock.

All of the old-time skills are dying out and I suppose that this is another one where there is no-one left with the skill to do the job correctly.

At the end of the alleyway there’s a view over the inner harbour and at last I can identify the fishing boat that I saw yesterday.

She isn’t in fact a new one and I’m surprised that I didn’t recognise her because she is in her way quite a famous little boats. She’s L’Alize III and she was the boat that was excluded from the fishing grounds around the Channel Islands on 18th May and which led to yet another confrontation between the Channel Islands authorities and the town of Granville.

But this was enough for me. I folded up my tent and cleared off into the shadows back towards my apartment. I’m exhausted and so I’m off to bed. An early start in the morning and I’m radioing, so I need to be fit.

Friday 25th June 2020 – AFTER EVERYTHING …

… that a certain person not a million miles away from this keyboard has said about people going out without wearing a facemask, guess who forgot his this afternoon when he went out for a stroll?

That’s definitely a case of omelette sur le visage if ever there was one. Someone whom we all know is blushing with shame right now.

There was nearly some more omelette sur le visage this morning too. When the alarm went off I leapt out of bed like a scalded cat, totally convinced in my own mind that this was the second alarm going off and that I’d failed to leave the bed for the first one.

The fact is that it was indeed the first alarm and I’ve no idea what had entered my head to convince me that it was the second.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d actually started a new school. It must have been round Northwich way because I was on my way home. I was in a new car, a company car and I had to be careful of all the speed limits coming back to Crewe around Middlewich. Then I came across a bus. It got back in Crewe at about 6 o’clock and it started out at a Grammar School in Manchester. I thought to myself that that would be really nice because getting up early in the morning is no problem to me and after all, going away to Manchester and going down through the University at Keele to the motorway there and getting to Stoke on Trent that way I could make lots of new friends who don’t really know me and anything about me and it would make a really nice change. By the time I got into Middlewich I’d taken the wrong turn and ended up in Middlewich … I fell asleep here … because I wouldn’t know to deal with any of this.

And I’ve no idea what was going on in that lot.

First thing to do was to write up the journal from yesterday. I’ve no idea why but I was just so tired and I’d fallen asleep a couple of times while I’d been writing it out. Bed was the only answer to that.

And it’s just as well because it took much longer than you might have expected to type it out. Sometimes an early night can pay dividends. I’d probably still be here typing it even now had I stayed up to do it.

The rest of the day has been spent scanning in all of my medical receipts. You’ve no idea how many there are, and I bet one or two are expired It took me right the way up to guitar practice to do it as well and that’s without making out any of the claims. There are still a few missing but I’ll have to find them again, I reckon.

We had the usual breaks of course. Breakfast with my own home-made fruit bread and real hot chocolate made with real chocolate and lunch with my own bread. And at this rate I’ll be making my own water before too long.

There was the afternoon walk too. Mustn’t forget that.

Off across the car park to the wall at the end to see what was going on down on the beach this afternoon.

Not too many people at all down there today. And that’s not a surprise because it was raining. Just some people out there at the water’s edge doing a bit of peche à pied .

For the benefit of any new reader, of which there are more than just a few these days, the beach that is between normal high-water and normal low-water is leased out to commercial seafood harvesters. Much of it isn’t exploited but even so, people are still officially not permitted to harvest anything from there. You can sit on it, make a sandcastle, bury your father, but you can’t harvest any shellfish.

But occasionally, we have very low tides when the water goes below the normal low-water line. That area is public and regular readers of this rubbish will have seen in the past the swarms of people hunting for shellfish and the like. We even made a radio programme last year about it.

Today, the tide is quite low and despite the rain, there were one or two people working the public areas of the beach.

While I was looking down on the beach, I also had half an eye out looking out to sea to see what I could see.

And the answer is today “not very much” the rain that is falling is creating one of these “wet mists” that we have every so often and there wasn’t much hope of being able to see and great distance. I could see this yacht out in the Baie de Granville and somewhere behind it are the Iles de Chausey, but there’s little hope of seeing those today.

No fishing boats out there this afternoon. The are probably too far out and lost in the mist, wherever they are. And so with nothing else going on of any note out there and no Birdmen of Alcatraz hovering by overhead, I decided to push on along the path around the headland.

Yesterday I mentioned the peculiar taping that had taken place on the path around the headland.

It’s difficult for me to remember if all of this was here yesterday as I was too engrossed in the fate of the Birdman of Alcatraz who had come to grief just behind where I’m standing right now, but it certainly looks new to me. And there was nothing in the local newspaper about anything going on here so I’m still none-the-wiser. I’m not even better informed.

It was round about here that I realised that I didn’t have my mask. Ot my cap either for that matter. It was raining fairly heavily and I was getting rather wet, as if I’m not wet enough already. So I can’t hang around here getting rained on like this. High time that I was clearing off on my way.

As I walked down the footpath and across the car park at the end of the headland I saw something moving out at sea so I went for a closer look.

Struggling towards me out of the mist was one of the smaller trawlers. I can’t tell which one she is from this distance but judging by the direction of her approach she’s been fishing in the outer part of the Baie de Mont St Michel. Another one of the boats that is trying its luck there as insurance in case this arrangement with the Channel Islands is broken next week.

She’s heading towards the harbour so I suppose that I ought to as well. I took to the path on top of the cliffs on the other side of the headland and headed off on my way, admiring as I passed by the two or three brave souls who were at the peche à pied down there on the rocks.

And in no time at all, geologically speaking, we ended up at the viewpoint overlooking the port and the chantier navale.

The yacht Rebelle is still in there. She looks as if she’ll be there for a while yet. And she has some company too. For a while there was a fishing boat, the Gwenn Ha Ruz in there with her but she had gone by the time that we arrived here yesterday.

Instead, there’s one of the trawler-type of boats up there on blocks receiving attention. She’s the Philcathane, a boat that has FEATURED A FEW TIMES in these pages in the past.

And that’s not the only thing that was receiving attention either. While I was minding my own business a couple came up to me and asked me if the Christian Dior Museum was anywhere near. And they were most put out when I explained that it was at the other end of town, a good walk away in the rain.

My good walk in the rain brought me round to the fish processing plant.

And they must be expecting a bumper catch today because as well as the assorted refrigerated vans, the tractor and trailer and so on belonging to the small traders and merchants, we have no fewer than fiver refrigerated lorries wairing to take away whatever the fishermen can bring in.

But at this rate I’ll be expecting pleurisy if I don’t get a move on and go back home. I headed off to the apartment, watching a crazy Parisian motorist getting in everyone’s way while he tried to work out where he was supposed to go, and back in the apartment made myself a mug of coffee and carried on scanning receipts.

The guitar practice was hopeless tonight but the taco rolls with yesterday’s leftover stuffing was well worth the effort, especially followed by apple pie and custard.

Now i’m off to bed. It’s shopping tomorrow and I need to be on form. I’ve not been to the supermarket for a fortnight so I’m keen to see what goes on there.

And I mustn’t forget my mask either.

Thursday 24th June 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… really tiring day today – so much so that I was stark out for a couple of hours round about midday and ended up having a very late lunch.

And that’s really no surprise because in what time was available I did quite a lot of work.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I struggled out of bed and went off to take my medication. And then back here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

I’d been to see a band play – it might have been Strife – and then a while later they were in a rehearsal room or village hall setting up for a kind of concert. They were going through a few things before they started, talking about stuff on the stage and said “we’re a bit overwhelmed with basses as well because Eric has his stuff here as well and someone else has his stuff” and so on. A little later on he took me on one side and said “did you learn the three numbers like I asked?” I replied “well to be quite honest no I didn’t”. He said “right” and fetched a pile of paperwork out. He said “someone worked out a way of teaching people how to follow music a bit like some kind of game. All you need to do is to watch your ‘phone and watch the paper”. He drew this kind of musical anotation thing with each string going down to the end of the page and then it doubled back going the other way rather like Chinese writing. He said “this is far the easiest way to learn and I’ll show you how it all works in a minute”. I was really intrigued by this method. Anyway sometime during this I’d been to the supermarket or the chip shop or something and while I was waiting around for this group to turn up I bumped into a girl and she gave me a really nice smile. I looked puzzled and she said “you don’t remember me but I was the girl in the shop yesterday. I made a special effort to remember everyone’s faces because I’m new here”. She was really extremely friendly about this kind of thing and that took me by surprise as well.

Having organised myself as well as I can these days I had an hour or so attacking the photos from August 2019. Right now I’m in Montana on the verge of making a fabulous discovery.

That was followed by a shower and – surprise surprise – a haircut. And having tidied myself sort-of-ish and set the washing machine of on a cycle (a very clever washing machine, mine) I hit the streets.

Not that I had actually managed to proceed very far before I stopped to take a photo.

Yesterday we had seen the two Jersey freighters Normandy Trader and Thora here in the port. By the time that I went out this morning they had both cleared off back to Jersey but it looks as if they (or at least, one of them) is going to be back fairly soon.

These two lorries here are the reason for that. The only reason that they would be here in the port area is if they are bringing merchandise to the quayside for the little freighter to take away back to Jersey with them.

Full of curiosity I went to see what was going on in the loading bay but I was distracted.

Marité, the old fishing vessel now used for training and sightseeing trips has been away from port for the last week or two but this morning she is back. She’s definitely the star attraction of the waterfront so a photo was in order.

Every time that I see her I’m tempted to find out how and when I can go off on her for a sail but I’m not a big fan of the people who run it. Every time that you go down to their office and ask a question they scowl at you as if “how dare you interrupt us?”, tell me that “everything is on our website” and then go back to chatting amongst themselves.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if they are Belgians. They certainly know all about Belgian customer service.

It was a long, hard climb up the hill to LIDL this morning. I remember a few times when I sailed up there like a Spanish galleon or if I was on my way to invade Poland but those days are over. After my operation I’ve aged 20 years and I felt every single, solitary step up that hill

At LIDL I didn’t buy anything special but even so the bill today came to almost €13:00. I did buy myself an energy drink because I reckoned that that would be the only way that I’d get up the hill at the other end of my journey.

On the way back, I hadn’t gone all that far before I came to a stop.

Here in the Rue de la Houle they have been reroofing a house and today they are fitting a series of laths around the chimney as if they are going to be tiling that too. In fact, if you look further along the roof, you can see a chimney that has already been tiled by the roofers.

It’s a strange way of going about things, tiling a chimney like that. All kinds of things can be going on to the chimney, the brickwork and the cementing underneath the tiles and you won’t be able to see it until the chimney collapses. And as I looked at this one, it certainly needed a bit of fixing before they go to seal it in.

One thing upon which we have been keeping an eye is the building site on the corner of the Rue St Paul and the Rue Victor Hugo, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There used to be a little cafe here but that had long-since closed. They demolished it and fenced off the site a few months ago, and then a notice appeared to the effect that planning permission had been granted for a 4-storey block of flats.

Today though, I noticed that things might be starting to get under way at long last. As well as some equipment that has been deposited on the sire, there’s a digger here and it looks as if he’s just dug a big rectangular hole in the middle of the plot.

As for why, we’ll have to wait and see. I pushed off down the hill into town where I became entangled in a schoolkids’ crocodile that had obviously just set off from the youth hostel.

As I passed through the town I noticed my first “G” registered car. The turnover is about 2 years and a couple of months for a letter, but the “F” plates started in October 2018. It shows you just what effect Covid had on the new car sales market.

Up the hill I staggered underneath my heavy load, wishing that I had a shopping trolley to take with me, and made several stops to catch my breath – one of which was the viewpoint overlooking the loading bay.

That pile of wood wasn’t there yesterday evening and it won’t have come over from Jersey because wood travels in the other direction. It made me wonder if that was what one of the lorries had brought in this morning for one of the Jersey freighters to take away.

Over the next couple of days I’ll have to be keeping my eye open on the quayside. The turn-round of the freighters in the port is so rapid these days that I miss their visits quite regularly. By seeing when the load has gone from the quayside, that will tell me when one of them has been in here.

Right behind where I’m standing is the Square Potel, which at one time had the famous unstable set of steps.

Work has been promised to start on here in 2022 but the other day we saw a digger in here and it looked as if it had just brought down the set of steps. I was wondering if that was going to herald the start of the work, a year or so ahead, but that was being rather optimistic, I reckon. The digger has gone and the site is fenced off and that looks to be it for now.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … the way that the patrimony of he town is treated is a disgrace. The whole place seems to be tumbling down around our ears and the council is showing no sense of urgency.

Heading back up the hill on my last leg(s) home I noticed something else going on.

There was a boat out there, moving quite quickly and towing a smaller boat behind it. Thinking that it might have been the patrol boat that we have seen a coupe of times just recently I took a photograph of it so that I could have a closer look when I returned home.

However when I enlarged it back at the apartment I noticed that it was simply an ordinary fishing boat heading out to sea. So why it would be towing another boat behind it I don’t know, unless it’s to go closer inshore when it arrives at wherever it’s going.

Back at the apartment I put the frozen food in the freezer, made myself some hot chocolate and cut myself a slice of fruit bread, and then came in here to carry on working.

At some point I crashed right out completely and I don’t know when, because it was another one of those occasions when I didn’t remember going off to sleep.

And this is something that worries me because if I’m going to be out driving around in Caliburn here and there, I would really like to know when I’m becoming tired and ready to sleep so that I can find a suitable place to stop and sleep it off. Just “switching off” like this is the kind of thing from which accidents are made.

Round about 14:00 I awoke again and it took me a good 10 or 15 minutes to orientate my head into the right direction. And when I finally managed to stand on my own two feet I was somewhat unsteady as I staggered around the apartment but I eventually managed to find my way into the kitchen to make a rather late lunch.

After lunch I had a task to complete. Well, to start actually. I have a huge pile of medical receipts that need scanning and then sending off to my insurance company to claim reimbursement. I made a start on some that I had to hand, and then had to break off to go for my afternoon walk.

Hardly had I managed to set foot outside my front door before the dark shadow fell upon me.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me understand what the Hobbits went through as they were being overflown my the Nazgul in LORD OF THE RINGS but of course there’s very little that is sinister in this particular occasion because we all know what’s going on here and there is no evil intent, unless one happens to crash-land on your head.

Yes, we have quite a wind (yet again) today and so the hang-gliders are out in force. There is probably half a dozen out there this afternoon.

And that’s not all of the aerial activity. Not by a long shot.

After the incident with the hang-glider I’d probably gone no more than half a dozen paces before I was overflown by something else. That’s right, someone has got his chopper out this afternoon and is flying around the headland.

It’s not the usual yellow and red air-sea rescue helicopter that we have seen on so many occasions but its grey-green colour suggests to me that it’s a military machine and I wonder why one of those has decided to come out to entertain us today.

Nevertheless it reminds me of the story in which a class of schoolchildren were asked to write a sentence including the words “chaste” and “by helicopter”. And one boy wrote “the boy chaste the girl and by helicopter”.

One thing that I always like to do is to go out and check on the beach and see how the tide is doing and whether there are any people taking advantage of it.

One thing that you’ll notice is just how much beach there is compared to YESTERDAY AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME. There’s about 50 minutes time difference between each high tide, so comparing this photo and that of yesterday give you some idea of how quickly the water comes in

But anyway, there are a few people out there enjoying themselves on the beach this afternoon, even if they are about to be overflown by the Nazgul that is hovering away in the distance.

Earlier this morning round about 07:15 or something like that I heard a lot of noise – schoolchildren cheering and all that kind of thing. But I couldn’t see anything from here.

But what I noticed this afternoon as I went on my afternoon walk around the headland is that some kind of path had been marked out by all of these tapes. It made quite a circuit and so I wondered if there had been some kind of race going on around the headland. And maybe that might explain the presence of the schoolchildren whom we saw earlier who seem to be lodging in the youth hostel.

But whatever was happening, it was all over now and there was no-one around to ask. Not even anyone coming to take away the rubbish that they have left and to remove the tapes. Maybe I’ll find something in the local paper tomorrow that might give me a clue as to what has been going on with all of this.

Now how I wish that I’d come out for my afternoon walk about 5 or 10 minutes earlier. I might have been treated to an exciting spectacle.

The blue and green object on the ground over there near the gun emplacement is the parachute or whatever they call it of one of these Nazgul It seems that one of the bird-men of Alcatraz has come to grief over there and I was quite disappointed at having missed the spectacle.

Quite a few other people didn’t by the looks of things and there are plenty of people with mobile phones and cameras over there who presumably have recorded the incident. But anyway, the pilot or whatever you might call them doesn’t seem to be injured or anything and he’s up and about on his own two feet organising himself and his parachute.

Once he’d gathered up his wits, presumably from wherever he might have dropped them, he made his preparations for getting back into the air.

And getting back into the air seemed to be quite easy. He just lifted up his parachute and the wind filled it full of air. Gently, he rose up and away from the ground, and once he had sufficient height he was able manoeuvre himself and his parachute around and head off back the way that he had come.

The crowds of people watching the spectacle clearly enjoyed it. They had all taken enough photos and even a few films about all of the activity. when they return home to wherever home is, they’ll have plenty of exciting films and photos to show the grandchildren

While all of this was going on, my eyes had been roving around and when they came back they pointed out more goings-on out at sea.

And so I took off down the path and across the car park down to the end of the headland for a closer look at what was happening. And living in a fishing port, you can expect that there is always something to do with fishing.

With issues going on involving the Channel Islands, which need to be resolved within the next seven days or so, the local fishermen are busy trying to exploit new fishing grounds that don’t fall within the scope of the Treaty of the Bay of Granville that the British Government unilaterally revoked under the pretext of Brexit

And so the Baie de Mont St Michel has become a favourite fishing ground at the moment for several local boats who are trying to see whether they can do any good here.

But the story of the Treaty of the Bay of Granville is that it was signed in 1839 between the Channel Islands and the fishermen of Brittany and Normandy to give fishermen from the three regions equal access to the bay. It was reinforced on many occasions, the latest being in 2000.

The Channel Islands are not and never have been part of the European Union and they are also free to negotiate on their on behalf in local affairs independently of the British Government so there is no reason for the British Government to intervene in the affairs of the Channel Islands.

However, the UK has claimed a 12-mile limit around the Channel Islands after Brexit and has revoked the Treaty without consulting either the Channel Islands or the local fishermen who have fished together in peace since 1839, and this is the subject of the dispute.

In the meantime while I’m talking about the Treaty of the Bay of Granville another boat comes in from down the Baie de Mont St Michel.

It’s coming in at quite a rate of knots too so I imagine that it must be late for a tea break or something like that. And as it’s surrounded by seabirds, I’m assuming that it must have quite a harvest on board. And that’s why many of these little shellfish-catchers have canopies or tilts across the cargo space – to prevent dive-bombing by the seabirds eager for a cheap and easy meal.

But I’m not going to hang about too long watching it. I’m taking to the path, despite all of the people ignoring the Prefet’s regulations on face masks, to see what’s happening in the harbour.

And today, we have another change of occupancy in the chantier navale.

At the moment we’re down to just one boat in here, the yacht Rebelle from London. The other boat that was in here, the fishing boat Gwenn Ha Ruz, or “White and Red” has now departed, presumably back into the water to carry on with whatever it is that she does.

Who will be the next arrival in the chantier navale, I wonder. as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … a thriving ship repairing business is good for the port because it encourages people to base their boats, whether working boats or pleasure boats, in the port where they can be assured of a good and reliable repair and maintenance service.

But this issue of people leaving their fishing boats to go aground when the tide is out instead of mooring them in the inner harbour is still continuing.

There’s another one moored over there this afternoon, right at the ferry terminal. So here’s hoping that none of the joly France ferries to the ile de Chausey want to go out or come in. We know that the Channel Islands ferries Granville and Victor Hugo won’t be going out any time soon.

But as for going out, I’m going back in. I’m ready for a nice piping hot coffee and then I can carry on with the work that I’m doing, sorting out the receipts for my medical expenses and getting them ready to submit to my insurance company.

And by the time I’d sorted them out, I found that there were two months missing. I remember one month where I wasn’t seen by a doctor at the hospital and so didn’t receive a prescription, but I don’t know what happened to the other month. I certainly had a prescription but there’s no mention anywhere of me going to a pharmacy to collect the medication, so I can’t have done.

By the time that it was guitar practice, I was still a long way from sorting them out, never mind scanning them. That’s a job for tomorrow. and so is guitar practice, I reckon, because I’m not making all that much progress with what I want to do. It’s a slow, laborious task.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, because I bought some this morning, followed by apple pie and coconut whatsit. But that’s the last of the coconut so I’m going to treat myself to some custard tomorrow and Saturday.

And now I’m off to bed. I’ve finally caught up with everything that I did today and I’m ready for a good sleep. Tomorrow I’mm continue sorting out my receipts. There must be €1000 here so it’s “spend spend, spend” I don’t think.

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that another recurring theme that runs through these pages with monotonous regularity is the shameful state of the medieval city walls here.

As you know, there was an initiate 2 years ago to restore part of them in the Rue des Juifs and they did a good job but while they were doing that, more and more of the city walls were being cordoned off as being unsafe for the general public.

A year or two ago they cordoned off part of the city walls in the Place du Marché Aux Chevaux and as I went past there today, they had closed off yet more of it by order of the mayor.

Much as I despise tourists … “surely not! Perish the thought!” – ed … there’s no doubt that they bring a lot of money into the town and help provide all of the activities and amenities that we have here. One of the things that they come to see is the medieval walled city, but at this rate there won’t be much of a walled city left.

The shame about this is that the Council seems to be showing not the slightest sense of urgency of dealing with this issue and the city walls are crumbling all around them. There’s history going back 600 years and they have a duty to protect it, not to let it rot away like this.

Regular readers saw the other day that in the Square Potel we saw a mini-differ that had brought down the condemned staircase that led down from the city walls and I mentioned that it was about time that something was done to make all of this area safe too.

But by the looks of things, the digger has cleared off too. The stairs are down and the ground underneath has been tidied but that looks as if it’s going to be our lot for the near future.

But it really is appalling, all of this. There was a campaign, as I have mentioned previously, when the previous mayor was in office to denounce her for the state that the place was getting into. But now there’s a new mayor, I wonder what the people who ran this campaign are saying now.

Today has been something of a depressing day, in case you haven’t already guessed from my first couple of paragraphs.

As usual, I was out of bed bang on the first alarm at 06:00 even though I didn’t feel like it, not having gone to bed until 00:30 this morning.

First task after my medication was to deal with some outstanding correspondence that has built up just recently. And as the regular readers of this rubbish have stopped writing to me, there wasn’t anything to send to them. But a couple of the mails were really quite important and we’ll see how they develop.

Then for a few hours I’ve been musicking. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been digitalising my record collection and today while searching around I came across some more stuff that relates to albums that I own so I was working on that.

Another thing that I did was to record a cassette tape onto the dictaphone to see how that would work. And that, dear reader, was a dismal failure. The sound levels are all over the place and had “clipped” so lowering the recording level after the event was no good. It all ended up filed under CS.

There are a couple of dictaphones around here so I’m going to see if I can find one with a manual recording level rather than an automatic level, and see what good that might do. I’m not beaten yet. Ohhh no!

The rest of the morning was spent dealing with the photos from August 2019 and I’m now back in Montana on my way to Winnipeg. And just as I was about to back up my work and go to lunch we had a power cut and it wiped it all out.

After lunch I started to try to restore everything and by the time that it was walkies I was a long way from finishing it.

Off I trotted into the wild blue yonder and down to the wall to look out to sea to see what was going on out there today.

Out there in the Bay of Granville there’s some activity going on. Out there today we have a fishing boat that I don’t actually think is fishing right now. It looks as if it’s heading back into harbour.

Behind it is some kind of yacht, right out near the Ile de Chausey. It’s far too far away for me to be able to read its name and head-on to the camera like she is right now, I can’t actually pick up any clues from her hull lay-out either.

While I was here, I had a look down onto the beach to see if there was anything exciting happening.

Again, there isn’t all that much beach to be on but nevertheless, there are a couple of ^people down there sitting around on a rock. And rather them than me because it’s not exactly what I would call a warm summer day. Far from it in fact.

And you are probably noticing that today’s photo of the beach is taken frol a different perspective from the usual photographs. Instead of going around the headland this afternoon, I’ve gone off for walk around what remains of the city walls that hasn’t crumbled away.

Out there near to the Plat Gousset there was something really strange going on this afternoon.

Whatever they are supposed to be, I really have no idea but they are animate objects swimming against the tide and current. They might be humans, they might be mammals or anything at all but I really can’t identify them well enough.

But here’s something interesting. It’s down this path that I used to go running back in the good old days. And as there was no-one around, I actually did break into a run. I only covered about 100 metres which is nothing like enough or anything like as much as I used to do, but it was a start and it astonished me that I could even run that much after what I’ve been through.

There’s a viewpoint along the path where I can stop and look out over the Plat Gousset to se what’s going on down there.

And despite it being a wintry day, nothing like summer at all, we actually have a lifeguard on duty there this afternoon, presumably with thermal blankets and mugs of hot soup and other artefacts and devices for treating frostbite.

There’s a guy down there who’s going off to test the water, but I imagine that he’s pretty safe. He’s not actually dressed for going swimming.

And in this photo you can see that the diving platform has been erected on top of the concrete pillar.

That guy might not have been dressed for swimming but these two people are, and don’t they know it?

There’s a couple down there in the water cavorting about and they are certainly braver men than I am, Gungha Din because not even Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter in skimpy bikinis would entice me into the water this afternoon in weather like we are having right now.

For a few minutes, I stood there and watched them fooling around and then I wandered off down the path to carry on with the rest of my walk. There were too many people about for me to break into a run. I don’t want to show myself up. I can do that without breaking into a run

When I reached the Square Maurice Marland there were still too many people around for me to start running, so I walked over to the edge of the path where I can look at the seagull chicks on the roofs of the houses in the Rue des Juifs.

And it looks as if there are plenty of things happening right now. A few of them were flapping their wings and taking their first steps towards some kind of flight, like this one here and his sibling who were really making a valiant attempt to get off the ground.

It won’t be long until this new generation of seagulls will be flying around the town. And as an aside, any visitor to Granville is advised to bring a hat. The seagulls have an accuracy that puts Bomber Command to shame.

Out of the Square Maurice Marland I found myself in the Rue Lecarpentier.

There’s some excitement going on there today as well because we have a lorry and a digger. They aren’t actually doing anything except blocking the street, because this is a cul-de-sac for vehicles and those stuck down at the bottom end were I am can’t move away until the lorry clears off.

Incidentally, there’s an interesting story told about one of the houses here. It’s actually facing into the street but it’s been turned round in effect so that the front entrance is through the garden at the back, off the Rue Notre Dame.

The story is that the owner of the house had an argument with the descendants of the person after whom the street is named, so he changed the layout of his house round so that its address was no longer “Rue Lecarpentier” but “Rue Notre Dame”.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day, the swimming pool on the quayside suggested to me that Normandy Trader would be in port pretty soon.

Well, I wasn’t wrong, was I? She seems to have come in on the morning tide and brought her friend Thora with her as well.

What with all of the changes that have been going on as a result of Brexit, and one or two as a result of Covid, we have had weeks when we haven’t even seen one of the little Channel Island freighters, never mind both of them. and so we really are lucky to see both of them in port together like this.

The boat that’s underneath the loading crane is Thora.

She was built in the Faroe islands in 1975 and was the fifth of the ferry boats ordered by the Shetland Islands Council when they began to run the ferries between the mainland of Shetland and the outlying islands.

She was one of the two ships that operated the ferry service across Yell Sound but that was a route that was only really busy in the summer so for much of the time she was either laid up or else operated as the relief vessel for the other runs.

She was laid up in 2006 when a new ship arrived to relieve her.

She first appeared here two or three years ago and looked quite smart at the time but the sea and the sinds that we have around here have given her quite a battering.

She’s used occasionally as a car ferry and regular readers of this rubbish will have seen cars lifted off her deck by the crane.

The ship to the right is the Normandy Trader She’s a converted landing craft – an ex-military machine apparently, designed for transporting tanks and that kind of thing.

And apart from the fact that she’s 27 metres long, I’ve not been able to find out very much else about her.

But you can see the swimming pool. That was what gave the game away. I know that she has the contract with a certain manufacturer for moving the swimming pools to their new clients in the Channel Islands, so when I saw one on the quayside on returning from Leuven, I guessed that the boat will be in port quite soon.

After all, they aren’t going to leave them lying around for too long.

And while I was watching the two little freighters, there was some activity going on close inshore in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw an official-looking boat passing by the entrance to the harbour towing a little boat behind her. And here she is again, or at least, one very much like her.

There’s no possibility of reading her name from here which is a shame. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen one boat very much like her, Les Epiettes when we were on the Ile de Chausey last year and they are some kind of patrol boat. Bit I’ve no idea what they are supposed to be patrolling.

They won’t be patrolling the fisheries right now because by the looks of things the boats are coming in with their catch.

There are quite a few boats down there today, and if you look at the back of the queue you’ll see the boat that we saw as we set out on our journey. I was right when I said that she seemed to be on her way into port.

You can see the layout of the wharf here. The bigger loads of seafood are lifted up my the little cranes that you can see here and are whisked away by fork-lift truck into the plant for processing.

But you’ll notice the ramp that goes down and underneath where the people are working. Several of the smaller boats are chartered by fish shops, restaurants and the like. Their vehicles can drive down there underneath and the crew of “their” boats can pass the catch to them to be taken away

Not all of the fishing boats are in by the look of things.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the activity that has been taking place in the Baie de Mont St Michel. We have another two boats out there fishing even as we speak I don’t know who they are though unfortunately.

Anyway, I’ve done enough right now so I’m heading off home for a hot coffee and to carry on with recovering some of the stuff from when the power went. I never had this problem with laptops.

By 18:00 I’d done all that I could so I had a play with the bass guitar, writing out the notes for one of the songs that I need to learn. This is going to be a very long series of sessions

Tea was a curry from the freezer followed by more apple pie, which really is good. And now I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow and there’s quite a list. I need to organise myself for that. I wonder how I’ll get on up the hill?

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 – THERE AREN’T MANY …

… many photos today. And when you see the weather that we were having, it’s hardly any surprise.

When I went out for my afternoon walk today I was in sou’wester, oilskins and gumboots and had to battle my way along the coastal path in the teeth of a howling gale. Of course I stuck my head over the wall at the end of the car park as you might expect, but as you also might expect, there wasn’t a soul down there this afternoon. The place was totally deserted.

But anyway, back to this morning. I awoke with the alarm at 06:00 and was up and about quite promptly. First thing that I did after the medication was to add all of my secret ingredients to my fruit loaf and give it all a second kneading, shaping, and put in the bread mould.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I started off on board a ship again. We’d gone up to the quayside and the captain said “you’re in for a surprise with all these changes”. Anyway we went aboard and there was some kind of meeting so we went to participate in it. There was this yellow dick running around called Donald. Someone said “right, we’re going to talk about photography. I want you to imagine that you are sticking your head outside your tent in the morning” – something like that and he stuck his head outside the tent and said “we’re going to take a photo of it”. In the meantime this duck had come to me. There was a little 3 year old girl sitting next to me. She saw this and said “ahh, Donald”. I said “no I’m Eric actually”. She started talking to this duck and I has a feeling that there would be lots more of this to come.

Later on I was reporting to a ship at the harbour side and came on board. The captain said something like “things are changing now. You’ll find things the other way round” or whatever. Then he said “the task for today is to work out how you would get from x to y”. Of course this was quite easy because I used to do this thing with taxis and underground trains pushing me around. So I planned a route from the Strand to Underwood Lane without going anywhere near Gordon. he said “that’s maybe OK but what would God say if he came along and saw it” but I supposed that I’d been doing my good story here on the scene and … I fell asleep here

Incidentally, I was surprised by the similarity between the way the two dreams started, and I wonder where I would have ended up in the second dream had I not gone back to sleep.

By the way, when I say “fell asleep” – what I mean is that my speech descends into a slur and I stop talking. And you can tell by my breathing that I’m in a deep sleep. When I dictate these details I’m usually unaware of what I’m doing – it’s an automatic reaction to grab hold of the dictaphone even if to all intents and purposes I’m asleep.

Having done that I put the fruit bread in the oven to bake and, armed with a mug of coffee I attacked the Welsh revision and also took advantage of the possibility of booking myself onto a week’s course at the end of July. There’s so much going on in July now that I’ve actually started a calendar.

When the lesson began I armed myself with my hot chocolate and a slice of fruit bread which was now ready, and attended the lesson. It passed quickly enough, and I only fell asleep once. All in all, it was quite good today. And my fruit bread was perfection. Putting the fruit in at the second mix rather than the first seemed to do the trick.

After lunch and a little clearing up I came in here to do some work but unfortunately I hadn’t gone too far before I crashed out. And it was one of those occasions where I hadn’t realised that I’d been asleep until I awoke.

And that had actually taken me up to walkies time. A look outside this morning had made me fear the worst and nothing had changed at all as the day had progressed so it was the rainwater gear.

We’ve already seen the beach and the absence of people thereupon, but that wasn’t much of an indication of what the weather was doing. This photo sums it up quite nicely.

That’s the Spirit of Conrad, the boat on which we went up and down the Brittany coast last year, coming back from the Ile de Chausey. You can see that the wind is catching it beam-on and even with such a small amount of sail, it’s careening right over under the force of the wind.

It’s the kind of weather than makes me glad that I’m on dry (well, not exactly dry in this weather) land right now. I bet that it was really wild out there this afternoon.

As I went round the corner at the end of the headland there was another boat battling hard against the headwinds.

It was quite a distance out at sea and so thinking that it might be Black Mamba I took a photo with the aim of cropping it out and blowing it up (the photo, not the boat) when I returned home so that I could have a closer look.

But it’s not Black Mamba unfortunately. It’s another unidentified yacht that’s sailing around in the bay and I’ve no idea where it has come from. There’s no chance of reading her name.

So I pushed on into the gale and headed off down the path to the viewpoint overlooking the port to see what was going on there.

Even though there’s a howling gale out there people still have to eat, and I think that too many people take the fishermen for granted.

They’ve all been out there this morning and now the tide is well in, the larger boats are coming into harbour to unload their catch at the fish processing plant. There are quite a few of them at the quayside with several more in the queue waiting for a space to moor up and unload.

And that’s an indication of what happens when boats are left at the quayside – the room for unloading is smaller and the queue is longer.

With no change in occupant at the chantier navale I headed off for home and my hot coffee to warm me up.

The rest of the afternoon was spent tidying up stuff on the computer and I was so engrossed that I forgot my guitar session. I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning.

Tea was one of those breaded burgers that I bought in Noz ages ago, with baked potato and veg, followed by apple pie. And wasn’t it all delicious? I really enjoyed that. And now I’m off to bed. I’ve had a tiring day and I need my beauty sleep.

As much of it as I can get.

Monday 21st June 2021 – I’VE BEEN EXTREMELY …

… active today, and that has surprised me as mush as it has probably surprised you.

In fact I’ve been down to the chantier navale this afternoon to have a look around the two boats that are in there.

The yacht Rebelle is still in there of course. It looks as if she is going to be having a new paint job. There’s a guy over there busy sanding down her bottom with one of these big industrial sanders and so I imagine that Rebelle is going to be in there for a good while yet.

But what is interesting about her is her port of registration. She’s registered in London so I’m curious to know what she’s actually doing here in Granville. It’s a very long way to come for a refit and a repaint.

The fishing boat that we’ve seen for the last couple of weeks is actually called Gwenn Ha Ruz

And in case you are wondering what Gwenn Ha Ruz is, it’s actually Breton for “White and Red” and presumably relates to the colour of her hull and superstructure.

And whatever you do, you must not confuse it with Gwenn Ha Du, “Black and White”. These are of course the colours of Brittany and it is also the name of one of these organisations like the Free Wales Army or the irish Republican Army who led a very active life fighting for the liberation of Brittany and doing things like blow up statues and burning down Prefectures.

Although the Organisation was dissolved after World War II, it inspired the Talbenn Dieubiñ Breizh or “Liberation Front of Brittany”, a society that gained a lot of publicity in the 1960s and early 1970s during criminal trials against its leaders and led indirectly to a revival of the Breton culture and language.

But be that as it may, let’s start at the very beginning. Once again I was up at the sound of the first alarm and after the medication I cracked on with the radio programme that I was doing.

Despite stopping for a coffee and a little later for breakfast, I had it all finished and ready to go by 11:45, and I’ll go with that any time.

While I was listening to it and to the programme that will be broadcast this weekend (another live concert) I sorted out the music on the computer. There are piles of various albums and I hadn’t a clue who half of the artists were so I did some research and edited the file names of the songs to add in the artists.

Ad there’s another “various artists” album added to the collection now. I’d bought one in Canada a couple of years ago and hadn’t digitalised it yet. But I have now!

After lunch I spent a very pleasant hour or so editing photos of my trip to Wyoming in August 2019. I’m now in Wind River Canyon on my way back to Winnipeg, where I might arrive in a couple of days given a bit of luck, God’s help and a bobby.

But right now I have to go out to the shops.

And I don’t get very far before I’m side-tracked by some activity out at sea. In fact, probably not even 100 yards.

Just gently passing by the harbour entrance is what looks like one of the French Government’s patrol boats. There is one, called Les Epiettes, that loiters around here and we saw that in July 2020 when we were on the Spirit of Conrad out at the Ile de Chausey but of course I’m not able to tell you whether it’s the same boat.

Whoever she is, she’s towing some kind of boat behind her. That’s not her lifeboat of course – it’s rather too big for that so I wonder what that is all about. It might account for her coming up to the pleasure port – to drop it off at a pontoon.

A little further on along the street I was brought to a shuddering halt again.

It looks as if I’ve arrived here just at the right moment. The harbour gates that control the mouth of the harbour are closed but judging by the gaggle of trawlers hanging around down there, the gates are about to open.

Once the gates are open the trawlers will swarm through into the inner harbour and go and unload round the back of the Fish Processing Plant.

Down the hill in the Boulevard des Terreneuviers I went and ended up at the chantier navale where I took the photos that you saw a little earlier.

From the chantier navale I headed off into town.

my little trek was interrupted by this strange sight at the inner harbour.

It looks as if one of the boats needs some work doing below the waterline because we have a diver complete with aqualung walking around on the pontoons. And so I said to him “don’t you start away, uneasy. You poor old sod, you see it’s only me”.

Down the road I went towards the town centre. At the Super U I bought a lettuce because that which I had brought home from Leuven was dead, and also some of that dried and candied fruit that I stick in my fruit bread. I’ve run out of Liz’s cake so I need to make some more fruit bread.

Over the road I went to the pharmacy where I stocked up on medication with the prescription from my GP. And it’s a good job that I didn’t collect that three months’ supply in Leuven because my GP has prescribed me three months’ worth of medication. Now I have enough to sink a ship and that’s exactly what I wanted.

While I was out there I kept on colliding with a couple who must have visited every shop in the town trying to find some “Eskimo” ice cream.

Loaded up now with more stuff than I intended to bring home, I climbed up the hill in the Rue Des Juifs on my way home.

Half-way up the hill where the viewpoint is overlooking the loading bay I had a look down there to see what was going on. The swimming pool is there so we can assume that Normandy Trader has yet to put her sooty foot in the harbour.

However there seems to be nothing else lined up on the quayside so maybe she isn’t going to be coming in for a few days yet.

While we’re on the subject, on a few occasions Thora used to come into port with a load of scrap iron – old lorries, tractors, all kinds of metal. But I’ve not seen any of that lined up on the quayside for quite a while. Perhaps the price of scrap has dropped.

Meanwhile, there’s some kind of activity going on across the road in the Square Potel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in early summer 2020 the stairway that led down to the Square from up on the wall was closed off to the public as being unsafe. A while later, the spending plan of the town stated that restoration work on the stairs and the repointing of the wall would take place in 2020.

But looking at the little low wall around the Square, that’s been renovated and repointed, and the stairs have been brought down, presumably by that digger that’s there. So they are getting going with this earlier than planned, by the looks of things.

In a couple of weeks time it will be interesting to see how the square will look as the renovations proceed.

While we’re on the subject of proceeding, I proceeded on up the hill towards home.

When I arrived at my building I carried on across the car park to look down onto the beach to see what was going on down there this afternoon.

There’s even less beach than there was yesterday but nevertheless there are some people down there on the rocks. They look as if they have been in the sea for a swim and they are braver people than me.

Back in my apartment I made myself a coffee and then went to listen to the dictaphone. There is stuff on there for the last four days which I transcribed and one of these days I’ll add in the detains to the previous three days whenever I can find a moment. I might actually have done it today but I … errr … had a little relax while I was riding the porcelain horse.

As for last night I was playing in a pop group last night, playing bass. I’d gone and bought myself a new cabinet, a 300-watt combo things. I was working out first of all how to make a cover for it out of plywood or something. Then I took it up onto the stage, took the cover off and took the plug out of my little amp and plugged it into the back of this big machine and started to play. The sound was so much better, as you might expect for the money but there was a flat spot where I played two notes but you could hear it waling down the street. Some guy had brought a …. I fell asleep here for 7.5 minutes … so where was I? Anyway, I had this bass cabinet and was playing it. Some Irish guy had this weird mouth harp thing but he was playing it but wasn’t getting any sound out of it. We were all joking about him getting more and more frustrated until suddenly he opened the top of it and found that he should be inserting a battery in there – a big PP9 battery from the 1950s.
But while I was asleep just now I was in Caliburn and I was in a seaside town looking up on a cliff. I was driving back to the town but I lost my way and ended up on a street full of semi-detached bungalows, obviously second holiday homes, all closed up and everything. Then I went back to the main road and back down the hill. There was a big chalk quarry with a couple of huge trees that had been blown down with the explosives and there were probably 1000 hunters there with guns. I had to thread my way through as I was on foot by this time. As I reached the other side I met two people – they might have been two people from work. I said to Lucien “I don’t fancy anyone’s chances here. As someone sees a squirrel there is 1000 people shooting at it. The skin is going to be no use for anything and the meat is going to be riddled with lead. But they were really lucky because they saw something moving and they were just about to shoot and it turned out to be a cat. Some little kids had to go and try to catch the cat or chase it away.

There was the hour on the guitar while I picked my way note by note through the bass lines of one of the tracks that I need to learn, and then for tea it was veggie balls with pasta and veg followed by apple turnover, which was delicious.

Now I’m going to prepare some dough for my fruit bread, and then I’m off to bed. Welsh lesson tomorrow – the last of the Academic year – so I need to be on form.

Saturday 12th June 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… good and productive morning today which was nice. And which was just as well because I had a pretty lousy afternoon.

But more of the afternoon anon. Let’s talk about the morning first.

As the alarm started to ring I leapt out of bed and wandered off for my medication. And then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone.

And there was nothing on it from the night, which was a surprise because I had all sorts of vague ideas and images going around the margins of my mind when I awoke but they had all flown away as I had tried to grab hold of them.

There was however some stuff on the dictaphone from 30th and 31st May that needed transcribing and so I dealt with that and brought their pages in the journal up-to-date.

While I’d been doing that I’d been listening to music. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, a week’s radio programmes was lost in some king of confusion and my records ended up being out of order for a week. And rearranging it meant that I had a blank week.

Without confusing things any more, I was rather stuck for what to do. But then yesterday I had an idea. I have a load of music that is waiting to be digitalised and even more than hasn’t yet been sorted. So I went through and sought out the groups who are debuting in my playlist.

The CDs that needed digitalising were then digitalised and I made up a playlist of albums where the groups and musicians were debuting in my lists.

And so today while all of this updating of the journal was going on, I was listening to music. I’d already been listening it last night and I’d selected a few tracks from it but by the time I’d finished the updating this morning I ended up with a nice collection.

And so I selected my tracks, edited them to cut out bits I didn’t want and to regulate the volume and then I combined them in pairs. So that’s the music sorted for that programme. On Monday I need to start by writing the music which is good because I have an appointment at lunchtime and I need to have the programme done by then.

When I’d finished what I’d been doing I grabbed a Louis de Funes sound file and chopped that up for more soundbites and I’m now accumulating a nice bunch of soundbites. And there are plenty more to go.

When I’d finished it, that was when it all started to go wrong, because I almost immediately crashed out. And a good and proper crashing out it was too. It was a very late lunch today because I didn’t come round until about 14:20. And then I was staggering around like a drunkard for a few minutes until I grabbed hold of my equilibrium.

The rest of the day has been spent cutting up albums (and there are still plenty to go at) and editing photos from August 2019. And I’m now actually at South Pass – at least where Highway 28 goes through it.

It didn’t look like the description that I had though and while things can change since 1845 they don’t change that much so what I did then was to go back to find a hotel and make further plans and do further research. So unless I am distracted tomorrow you might get to hear a little of my adventures.

In between all of this I went out for my afternoon walk.

First thing that I did, as you might expect, is to interest myself in what is happening down on the beach today.

And so girding up my loins I headed for the wall at the end of the car park where I can look down from my viewpoint. And as we can see, there’s plenty of beach again today because the tide is well out again today. As I go out most days at roughly the same time, it’s interesting to see how the tide evolves over a complete cycle.

And while the weather is better today than it has been, warm with hardly any wind, there weren’t as many people down there as I was expecting to see. After all, it’s the holiday season and the place is swarming with Parisians right now bringing their viruses with them.

But while I was admiring the people on the beach my attention was caught by some kind of movement away on the horizon.

It was a ship – I was pretty sure of that. It couldn’t be anything else at that spot but with the naked eye it was far too far away for me to make out exactly what kind of ship. I was intrigued to see what it might be so I took a photo with the aim of cropping it out and blowing it up (which I can still do despite modern anti-terrorist legislation).

And so there you are. It’s a large sailing ship with at least two masts. And according to my shipping radar, Marité, the old fishing schooner that lives in the port, slipped her moorings at 07:53 this morning and headed off towards Bordeaux. And I can’t say any more than that about the ship out there.

And its not just people on the beach and ships at sea that is attracting our attention right now. Try to do something serious and concentrate and your reverie is immediately interrupted by a buzzing noise overhead.

It’s not a mosquito or an insect like that, but it’s one of these microlight ULM powered hang-glider things. These kinds of things have their origins in the pou de ciel or “flying flea” microlights designed in the 1930s by the Frenchman Henri Mignet and popularised in many magazines, with plans being produced for home-builders.

Ever since then the French have had quite a reputation for building light aircraft of all shapes and sizes and regular readers will recall that we have seen quite a few different types of light aircraft flying over our heads when we’ve been out and about.

This on the other hand, is a real aeroplane and it makes a change to see one that not only was picked up on radar but is entered in the books of the airport at Granville.

She’s a Cessna F182P Skylane, a model that was introduced in October 1971 and powered by a Continental O-470 piston engine fitted with a carburettor and producing 230 HP, or 72 kW. With a range of over 1,000 miles, the models for the European market are quite often flown over from Wichita, crossing the Atlantic via Newfoundland, Baffin island, Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

This one though was noted as being at Toulouse Airport this morning at 11:59 and was picked up by the radar near Balma at 13:21. And I could follow her route from there all the way to Granville where she landed at 16:15.

But right now I haven’t finished with the air yet because there were other things going on too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have a local bird of prey that we have seen quite regularly. I’ve forgotten what breed he might be because the birdwatching lectures that I had from Nerina weren’t about this type of bird, but it hovers about the edge of the cliffs because there are many small animals, including a colony of rabbits, that have made their home there.

And to my surprise, I noticed today that it had a mate. Or, at least, there was a second one working the cliff edge farther along. It will be nice if we can have our own colony of vultures or whatever they are.

Let’s turn our attention back to the sea now because there was still plenty going on out there too.

With it being Saturday,, then of course we can expect the local fishermen to be out in their droves this afternoon trying their luck from their boats just offshore at the foot of the cliffs. But doing my best not to make any tart remarks about their success rate, I pushed off along the path.

And the path was crowded with people today too. And despite the Préfet‘s instructions about masks being compulsory until the end of the month, many people were walking around maskless or with their mask tucked under their chin.

And seeing that many of them are holidaymakers from Paris, that will tell you all that you need to know about why the disease is so rampant in those places. And here they are, bringing their disease to us.

So I pushed my way along the path all the way around the headland until I reached the viewpoint that overlooks the harbour from where I could see what was going on in the port.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have talked … “at great length” – ed … about trawlers left in the outer harbour to go aground when the tide goes out.

So here’s another one of them – one of the bigger ones too, tied up in a NAABSA (not always afloat but safely aground) position to the harbour wall underneath the red marker light for the harbour entrance.

There’s definitely something fishy about this, and I’m not talking about the contents of Baldrick’s apple crumble either.

But to put your minds at rest L’Omerta and its friend, which is called Gerlean, are still tied up at the fish processing plant and are sitting on the mud.

But it beats me why they are there because it can’t be very popular with the other little fishing boats. With those tow moored there, there’s less space for the others to tie up to unload and so they’ll have to queue for longer.

But anyway, that’s not my problem. There’s a hot coffee and some ginger cake waiting for me back at home so I headed that way, and ended up having quite a lengthy chat with one of my neighbours on the stairs. That’s not like me at all, is it?

Tea tonight was interesting. There was some stuffing left over so I lengthened it with stuff that needed using in the fridge, added some tomato sauce and had it with some pasta. And as an ad-hoc meal it was surprisingly good.

But now I’ve finished and I can hardly keep my eyes open, and so I’m off to bed. A nice Sunday lie-in tomorrow and won’t that do me the world of good?

Thursday 10th June 2021 – IT SEEMS THAT …

… the phrase “The Office Bike” has a completely different meaning here in France than it does in the UK.

There was an estate agent in the building dealing with an apartment that’s for sale in the building (it’s way overpriced so don’t worry) and sticking visiting cards in everyone’s letter box. And instead of a company car, he has a company electric bicycle on which he can get about the town.

How times are changing. I suppose that it’s better than going on a private jet.

As for me, I’ve had a better day today. And it’s high time that I had one of those, isn’t it?

In bed slightly earlier than usual just recently but it was a disturbed, tossing and turning and cold sweat night. That’s a few of these sweaty nights that I’ve had just recently, and the reason why I comment on them is because they ask me about them at hospital. It’s a possible side-effect of one of my medication, but I can’t remember which one.

Tons of stuff on the dictaphone to whet my appetite.

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson had won an adventure and thewere seeing this out of the way when suddenly something even more new and terrible came along from somewhere in the Indian Ocean which had nee, inspired by Moriarty, which was when I awoke in a cold damp sweat again

There was something in this dream as well about me having an old Vauxhall, old car, a big old Ford type of thing – I can’t remember now. I’d been at work and taken very ill again. I’d ended up spending most of the morning fast asleep in a bed. In the afternoon I decided to go home. The illness was far too much for me to cope with now. There was some firewood to put on the fire and I wondered if I was actually going to leave it or whether I ought to take it. I thought that if I take it then I could use it and they won’t miss it here. I picked up and went outside. It was Clifton Avenue and my car was outside covered in snow. It had been pouring down with rain and my car was covered in snow, damp snow. I went down and got in and started the engine. Then some kind of Hillman Minx came up behind me followed by a Vauxhall Cresta. The Hillman Minx did a U-turn at the end and drove back down the hill again totally followed by this Vauxhall Cresta. Then about 3 minutes later this Hillman came back and did the same thing again only this time it went onto the pavement to do its U turn down the far side of my van – car and then back off. It came back a 3rd time with this car pursuing it and there was an awful row, these people shouting. I was wondering what was happening so I was interested in following them so I could see. So I got to turn the corner with some tight manoeuvres to get round and end up behind them without making it public what I was trying to do with the third vehicle, third parking space. I had to go into Jubilee Avenue to turn round and ended up on Wistaston Road (actually Stewart Street) at one time so I had to turn round again to get behind these cars
At a car park where the cattle market used to be and there were cars being stripped down there. They would just come and dump them and Shearings used to pick up there and we’d always find a few cars dumped. One day I went down there and there was another one dumped. Well there were 4 or 5 but this one was encroaching onto our field and I had to move it out of the way. Then I noticed that all of my tools were there. Someone had broken into my car and pinched all my tools and had been using them to work on one of the abandoned vehicles and had scattered my tools and equipment and everything all over the place everywhere and I wasn’t very well but I had to spend all this time picking them up. It really annoyed me, not just the fact that people had stolen them but they couldn’t be bothered to put them back or even in any kind of resemblance of being tidy after all the effort that I’d made to sort them out and tidy them up in the past

There had been a reorganisation of electoral boundaries in Crewe. Where I lived had been moved into another constituency area for the town but this was an area that was heavily dominated by the Conservatives and my area was a marginal seat held by the opposition. I felt that this was a way of trying to win that particular seat for the Conservatives by moving the boundary to move out some of the people who would be voting against them at the election and I was trying to write a letter of complaint to the CSEB about this but I couldn’t find the address and no-one there seemed to be able to find it either but I wanted to complain about this gerrymandering

Did I say anything about a group of us? Four of us were together and we had some kind pf hire car from somewhere. We’d all ended up staying in a room in a hotel. A couple of people had the itch and decided that they wanted to move on so I’d awoken and started to assemble a fishing rod with the idea that I was going to go out and fish for things as a way of doing something different. But gradually one by one 2 other people awoke and the 3 of us decided that we would all move away and leave that person behind. The guy assembled all of his stuff and went off to the bathroom to have a bath while the girl started to prepare a ton of make-up. I thought to myself that the idea of makeup was not what I had in mind. We were going to be footloose and fancy-free and all to do with nature, getting back to basics and going back to our roots. Putting on a ton of makeup and foundation cream and all that kind of thing had nothing to do with what I was intending

After the medication I had to sort out all of the paperwork that I’m taking to the doctor. There’s so much of that now that it’s difficult to know where to turn. After that I had a shower and in the few minutes that remained I edited some of my photos from August 2019 in Wyoming.

When it was time to go out I hit the streets.

And as you might expect, my attention was distracted the moment that I stepped out of my front door here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the scaffolding that has covered the building here since late summer last year. That’s the company that installed it, and they are here with a large pick-up and a pretty big lorry armed with a crane.

All of this can only mean one thing, and that is that they have come to collect the scaffolding. It’s taken them long enough to complete the job and as you saw in the photo a week or so ago, the job looks as if it’s finished. So with a bit of luck the scaffolding will be gone by the time that you read this. I can check when I go out this afternoon, if I remember.

that wasn’t all that was going on right outside my door either. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the skip lorry here yesterday. Well here he is again.

It’s not clear at all if he’s been bringing an empty skip or going to take away a full one. He was parked up in this position when I came out, and didn’t move for the whole time that I was outside here, so I’ve no idea what he was up to.

And as it happens, I was out there for a while too. One of my neighbours was also outside waiting for someone who was coming to pick her up. We had quite a little chat, and then she climbed into her friend’s car and I cleared off down the road towards the doctor’s for my appointment.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is the pointing work that’s being undertaken on the wall by the Rampe du Monte à Regret by one of these Job Creation Schemes.

The progress was slow as you might expect from one of these Organisations and its puplis, not that there was much supervision, but now it seems that the work has ground to a halt. Not only have all of the students departed, leaving the wall unfinished, but they have taken away all of the scaffolding too.

Wasn’t that something of a flash in the pan? Unless of course it’s to do with the summer tourist season and they will be back once the tourists have cleared off home again.

At the doctor’s, he and I had a good chat. He had a report from the hospital and he was greatly concerned about the amount of blood that they took from me during my operation. Apparently it’s no surprise that I’m tired and exhausted with all of that.

He reckons that it will be a long hard road before I’m feeling myself again, and I can’t even do that right now. They say that a man has a brain and … errr … something else, and only enough blood to work one at a time. I don’t even have that at the moment.

He gave me some information that I requested and wrote out a prescription for my medication. I know that I usually pick it up in Belgium and I still shall, but I want to be a couple of months ahead in case I go off on a ramble some time and need to build up a stock.

Interestingly, he had a stock of Lyrica in this office and he gave it to me. I forget now how many times I’ve been given this from different people now. I suppose they can’t dispose of it, except to people like me. But I suppose that it’s safe for me to take it because I had all of the side effects before I started to take it. “impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless” – I was all of that even before I was ill, never mind all of the rest.

So after having gone through all of that, the doctor threw me out and I headed off for LIDL.

Here in the Rue Couraye we have some excitement going on this morning.

The mayor has passed some kind of rule or regulation that cafés and the like can occupy one car parking space in the street outside their premises, or as near as they can get, to make some kind of outside terrace, if they don’t already have one, in order to welcome the tourists in the nice weather.

It looks as if we are having another one installed here, although I can’t see who would be occupying it as there doesn’t seem to be a café or restaurant just here. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see who moves in to occupy it once it’s finished.

At LIDL I didn’t buy all that much. mainly because I couldn’t carry it. You’ve no idea how difficult it was just to bring me up the hill. The hill at the other end of town in the Rue des Juifs is just as steep and just as long and to go up there with a load of shopping is not my idea of fun.

One thing that I did buy was a litre of drink, which I demolished quite quickly. My raging thirst has come back again, and in spades too.

After leaving LIDL I headed for home via the Rue St Paul.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several months ago we witnessed them demolish the old café on the corner of the Rue St Paul and the Rue Victor Hugo.

Very shortly afterwards, a planning notice for several apartments went up on the site, and it looks as if it’s been granted because we now have a portacabin office and another temporary building on site. Who knows? They might even be starting work sometime soon if we aren’t careful.

But the answer to the scaffolding question that I posed earlier has now been resolved, jusding by a notice that I saw stuck on the building. The mayor has banned the erection of all scaffoldings and the like for the period until September this year, in order to keep the town pretty for tourists.

So now we know.

So now that I’m ready to have my lunch, let me show you my culinary delights for today.

Not much in the way of excitement. Just a beautiful, soft loaf of bread and a rice pudding for dessert for the next few days. The rice pudding is quite nice, because I had a little sample when it was cooked. As for the bread, I think that I have that sussed now because it really was nice and tasty. I’ll go with that.

After lunch I had a few things to do –

ring up for a Covid test. But that was a waste of time because they are only open in the morning. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.
try to change an appointment in Leuven next month. This new app thing has a facility to send messages, so I did. Whether it works or not is another question.
Book my accommodation in Belgium. And he’s given me a nice discount, for which I’m always grateful. They do look after me there.
Book my rail trip to Leuven. The bit from here to Brussels was fine but on the SNCB for some reason every time that I tried to pay for my ticket, it was refused, no matter which card I used. However, on the app it worked fine first time and I don’t understand that at all.

As a result, all of that took far longer than it should have done.

The rest of the day apart from desperately fighting off waves of fatigue, I’ve been splitting LPS that I digitalised into their individual tracks. Due to an error in the admin side at the radio where the broadcast of a programme was missed, I’ve ended up with a vacant week and I don’t really know what to do with it.

Several suggestions have come to my mind, but the one that I’ve decided on is that I have piles of stuff that hasn’t yet been allocated into their parent groupings, and some of them are new artists with no previous example of their work anywhere in my broadcasts. And so I’m going to do a programme of completely new, unique and individual stuff.

You’ve already seen the photo of the bike that I took on my way out of the building, so here’s one of the beach that I took next.

With nothing on the car park right now to distract me I wandered off to look over the wall down onto the beach and blimey! Where has the water gone? The tide is well out to sea today. And to my surprise, despite the nice day, there were probably no more than half a dozen people on the beach that I could see.

But there’s an interesting phenomenon over there on the horizon, something about which I’ve talked … “AT GREAT LENGTH” – ed … elsewhere ON ANOTHER OCCASION.

Yes, the bank of cloud in the background. There’s a clear blue sky and hardly any cloud today but the prevailing winds that are coming from the west from over the sea have picked up an amount of water vapour water vapour. The air has to rise up to clear the cliffs and the hills over there on its way into the interior and this causes the air to cool down and so the water vapour condenses and forms clouds.

That’s one of the ways in which ancient mariners could tell if they were near land, by seeing the cloud formations.

Out there at sea again today is the yellow inshore fishing boat that we’ve seen on several occasions just recently.

And I’m slowly coming round to the conclusion that maybe it isn’t the same yellow boat that we saw up on blocks in the chantier navale earlier in the year. If you look very carefully, down the side of the hull you’ll see a wide black stripe edged in white. I don’t recall seeing that on the boat that was in there.

There wasn’t anyone else out there close enough for me to photograph – they were all too far away – so I left them to it and I set off along the path to do my lap around the headland with the madding crowds that were thronging around this afternoon

At some point or other, as I wended my weary way along the clifftop, I was bound to be overflown by an aeroplane this afternoon.

And it’s another one about which I know very little, if nothing at all. I can’t even see its registration number properly. It might be 50-NJ in which case it’s definitely a new one on me. But whatever it is, it’s another one of these strange series of numbers that crop up quite regularly in one manner of another.

No point in looking for a flight plan because it won’t have filed one. And it won’t have flown high enough to have been picked up on radar, so basically we can forget all about this one. I really must make an effort and go out to the airport to make further enquiries..

Le Loup, the light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, was looking very nice today.

What were even nicer was the large black dog and the girl who was looking after him. At one point there was a photo crying out to be taken but just as I was about to take it, they both moved and the moment was gone. I had to take one of Le Loup instead.

And from this photo you can tell how far the tide is out today. The rock on which the light sits is actually exposed, but when the tide is right in, it’s almost up to the lower of the two red bands. I suppose that the red bands are there so as to give any ancient mariner an idea of what the tide is doing.

And we’ve had yet another change of occupier today in the chantier navale. It’s all happening in there.

My walk along the clifftop on the other side of the headland took me to the viewpoint overlooking the port where I could see what happening.

And there’s been a tactical substitution of trawlers today. Hera, the trawler that has been there for a while has now gone back into the water and another trawler has come in to join the yacht Rebelle.

I can’t see who she is but I can see that she’s having some electric arc welding being done on the bottom of her hull, and there’s an angle grinder working around the other side so it’s all systems go down there with that boat.

With nothing else of note happening down there I headed for home, on the way to which I was overflown yet again.

This time it was a microlight or U.L.M on its way out for a lap around the bay. It’s certainly been a very busy day with so much going on.

Back at the apartment I carried on splitting LPs until it was time for guitar practice, which for some reason tonight was pretty gruesome. I’ve no idea why I’ve lost my touch and my co-ordination. I was glad when I could knock off and go for my tea tonight.

And having bought or made the necessary, I had stuffed peppers and rice for tea followed by rice pudding, which was delicious.

But I’m totally exhausted now and I’m off to bed. And I need it, and I deserve it. It’s been a hard day and I shall be glad of some rest.

Wednesday 9th June 2021 – IN NEWS THAT WILL …

… infuriate every gammon for miles around, we can now see which of the four flagpoles was taken away earlier in the week.

The interesting thing about this is that the three nations whose flags are represented there have long-since given up fighting World Wat II and for the past 70 or so years have been working together to make the world a far better place in which we all can live (except when, of course, the Septics elect a Republican president).

There’s only one nation that is still fighting World War II and that’s the Brits. Still unable to live down the humiliation of throwing away their weapons and running away from the Germans and ever since then, clinging to the coat-tails of the Americans.

This inferiority complex was never better shown than on a few islands just in sight here on the horizon. The one part of the British Isles occupied by the Germans in 1940, the liberation passed by the Channel Islands in July 1944 but because the Americans refused to let the British have the resources, the British were too afraid to confront the Germans on their own and left their own people to starve, cut off from supplies, until after the Armistice in May 1945.

The people in the Channel Islands have never forgotten this of course, although the British have, a long time ago. Humility and remorse is not something in the character of the average gammon.

What’s not in the average character of me right now is this getting-up-at-06:00 lark, although I’ve been doing it for long enough these days. Still, to my surprise, I hauled myself out of bed as the alarm sounded (well, maybe a minute or two later) and went off to sort out the medication, which takes far longer than it ought these days.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I went during the night. I was with a boy from school last night last night and somehow we had ended up being chased out of our accommodation. We had to walk and travel one stop on the train and we found another place where they were building some kind of armed camp to defend themselves against the authorities. We went to squat there. I asked him how he felt about seasick and he said that he wasn’t very good. We were in this room and I asked “what about your trip to Shearings? Are you still interested in going?”. He replied “yes” … (indistinct) … but instead he dressed and with about 12 minutes to spare I took him out and thought what was the matter with him … (I fell asleep here for a good few minutes) … I don’t know where I got to with that when I fell asleep dictating but we found some refuge in this place and then we got to the time when his pickup was ready so I asked him if he was still interested in going with Shearings, going on something that I had organised. He wanted to go with Shearings so I told him to get his things ready and I’ll see him on the bus somewhere. And the moral of this story is “never give up no matter how tempting the other alternatives are because you never know how good the profits of what you are planning are going to be” and what those last few words have to do with anything that has occurred I really have no idea.

And once more, apologies to Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear in these pages anything like as often as she deserves) for doubting her when she complained that I snored when I was asleep.

Most of the day has been spent revising my Welsh, with plenty of comfort breaks, coffee and hot chocolate breaks, lunch breaks and even a couple of work breaks when I updated a couple of the Leuven pages (but don’t ask me which they were – you’ll have to go back and find out for yourself). And I made an appointment to visit the doctor tomorrow too.

My Welsh exam took place at 16:00 and by 16:15 it was all over. Although I made a couple of basic errors, I think that overall I might have done OK.

Luckily I’d found tucked away in the revision section of the course book 50 standard questions that might go with one part and 50 keywords that would go with another part so I spent a couple of hours working over different answers to the standard questions, and then inventing questions to fit the 50 keywords.

And I’m glad that I did that because while not many of the actual questions or keywords came up in the test, question patterns were pretty much the same. That will make up for me saying ‘sgynno fo on a couple of occasions when I should have said ‘sgynny hi. And that’s an important distinction. If only I’d stuck to “mae gan Caroline …”.

Anyway, about half an hour late, I went out for my afternoon walk.

And right outside the front door we have yet more activity. And had I come out at my normal time I would have missed all of it.

The other day we saw a skip lorry drop off a skip and drive away empty. Today we’ve seen the reverse of the operation. An empty skip lorry has pulled up and he’s now reversing into position where he can lift up a skip onto the back of his lorry and drive away with it.

They were out working until quite late last night, judging by the times that the dumper came past here while I was writing up my notes. It’s not like French workmen to do overtime. There must be a penalty clause somewhere about to come into operation, hence the rush.

As is my custom, my next stop is to go and look at the beach to see what activity there is going on there right now.

Off I strolled across the car park over to the wall at the end where I can stick my head over the top to see what gives down there. And the answer is “not all that much”. There’s more beach than yesterday because the tide isn’t as far in, and it’s also a nice day considering what we have had just recently.

And so I was surprised to see only one couple down there on the beach, as far as I could see. And they are either preparing to go into the water or else they have just come out. It’s not all that clear. But it is a Wednesday afternoon and the schools are off this afternoon. So why aren’t there crowds of kids swarming about down there this afternoon?

Maybe they are all in the swimming baths at the Cité des Sports – it’s opened this afternoon for the first time since a long time ago.

And I hadn’t moved all that far away from where the people were down on the beach before there was yet more excitement this afternoon – this time, there’s Something In The Air as Thunderclap Newman would have said.

The other day I pontificated on the fact that we hadn’t seen the Bird-men of Alcatraz for quite a while, and so immediately there was one who took to the air. He must have been out there for a trial run and to report back to the other boys in the band, because this afternoon there were at least four of them out there enjoying themselves and probably a few more than that besides.

But for some reason they didn’t bother me all that much. I was able to walk faster than they could fly and so they never caught me up as I walked off along the path.

One of the things that we have been doing recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is to look at what’s going on in the Baie de Mont St Michel to see if the fishermen from Granville are exploiting it.

And so I walked past the flags, that you saw earlier, across the car park and down to the end of the headland to see if there were any trawlers out there this afternoon. And sure enough, there were quite a few of them out there today.

Right down at the bottom of the bay right up against the Brittany coast are three of them working hard. And they were just three of a dozen that I could have photographed. But they will do because they were quite close together rather than spread out across the bay.

And look how clear the Brittany coast is this afternoon. That’s somewhere near Cherrueix which is about 20 miles away as the crow flies.

From the viewpoint overlooking the port I could see quite a lot of activity going on there and in the chantier navale today, which makes a nice change.

The yacht Rebelle is still in there. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw her still in the portable boat lift yesterday. But now, they have put her up on blocks, so it would seem to be more than a five-minute job that they will be doing on her.

The trawler Hera is still in there of course, but the question to which I’m more interested in knowing the answer is “what happened to that hulk that was in there for a few days?”. To my untrained eye that looked as if it needed much more work to make her seaworthy than the time that they spent on her.

But you can tell that it’s coming up to that time of day when the tide will be well in.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a few years ago that they dug out a deep channel a couple of years ago at the quayside under the Fish Processing Plant so that it would fill very quickly when the tide started to come in.

There’s already some water in that channel and there are a few of the inshore shellfish boats with a very low draught that have been able to come in and unload. The larger boats will have to wait until there is more water.

And doesn’t that yellow one resemble the one that was out in the Baie de Granville yesterday?

Oooh! Look who’s moored up in the inner harbour underneath the loading crane?

It’s one of our old friends from the Channel Islands. This is Thora, one of the little coastal freighters that plies her trade between here and Jersey. At one time, a long time ago, she used to be a car ferry working between the island of Bressay and the “Mainland” of Shetland. That’s a comparatively sheltered water so I bet she and her crew know all about conditions in the English Channel between Jersey and here when the going gets tough.

She still occasionally doubles as a car ferry. At the time that the lockdown was at its height and the big ferries weren’t running, people being repatriated had to come over on Thora and regular readers of this rubbish saw more than one or two cars lifted out of her by the big crane.

So we’ve seen a bit of almost everything today. So what remains to be seen that we haven’t seen as yet? I know! How about an aeroplane?

Sure enough. Almost as soon as I’d said it one of the little light aircraft came flying by. I must have made a pact with the devil, I reckon.

This one is F-GORN, a machine that we have seen on many occasions. She’s a Robin DR400/120 Dauphin and she seems to have spent a lot of her time today flying around in circles not too far from the airport. Not that that should come as any surprise to anyone because she is actually owned by the Aero Club de Granville and is used either for instructing or solo flying by club members.

They say that you should always leave the best until last and so how about this one? It’s this kind of thing that made it all worthwhile going out late for my walk.

And so I’ll tell you that you have undoubtedly never ever seen one of these before, and you undoubtedly will never ever see one again, and that’s because there were only ever 502 of these made, and that was 55 or so years ago.

The first ever Italian car to have a fibreglass body and powered by FIAT’s water-cooled 767cc engine, it’s an Autobianchi Stellina and just what it’s doing here I really don’t know. These would be as rare as hen’s teeth in Italy, never mind here.

Back here I cut myself a big slice of Liz’s ginger cake as a reward for my efforts and made myself a nice hot coffee. And then I came back into my little office where I promptly fell asleep. About 2 hours I was away with the fairies and so the guitar practice, when I finally came round, was short and horrible.

Tea was a burger in a bap, and then seeing that I had no pudding I made something that I haven’t made for ages – viz. a baked apple with hot custard. And wasn’t that delicious too?

But now I’m off to make some bread dough, and then I’m goig to bed. I’ve had enough of today. it was only seeing that Autobianchi that cheered me up.

Sunday 6th June 2021 – JUST IN CASE …

… you are wondering why it’s taken so long for this post to come on line, the fact is that I’ve had rather a busy day as you can see.

All of this here is the contents of the shelf unit that is in the kitchen area. That has been totally emptied later on in the afternoon and it isn’t going to go back on the shelves until it’s all had a really good sort-out and I’ve decided what is what. There has been so much confusion and so much has been misplaced and lost at the back of the unit.

Quite frankly, I never really realised that there was so much on there. The pile of stuff goes right around to the left in front of the sofa and has filled the living room area completely.

But this is the real reason why I’ve done this.

Ever since I’ve started cooking and baking seriously I’ve been dropping bits of dough and pastry all over the floor and with it being a nice wooden floor, I don’t want to spoil it and mark it with what I drop. Back at the end of last year when I was at Brico Cash I bought some linoleum and it was living in the back of Caliburn.

Today Liz and Terry came round and they asked if they could do anything while they were there. So we stripped out the kitchen completely and laid it on the floor. And with what was left, Terry cut it to make covers for the shelves.

You have to admit that it looks really good and I’m very pleased with all of this.

But with Liz and Terry coming round to visit me today, I had done something that I rarely, if ever, do on a Sunday and that was to set an alarm. But that was something of a wasted effort because at 05:20 this morning all of the church bells in the town started to ring – presumably celebrating the D-Day landings.

Although I went back to sleep it wasn’t for long and by 08:30 I was up and about having my medication.

There was a little bit of tidying up that I could carry on doing so that by the time that they arrived the place was looking something rather respectable, which makes a change.

We had a coffee and they sampled some of my fruit bread. Liz made a few suggestions as to how it can be improved. And so my next batch of fruit bread will hopefully be better – not that it is actually bad of course, but I’m always open to suggestions. In the past many people have made all kinds of suggestions, but most of them were physically impossible.

Later on we went out for a walk in the sun.

First thing that I noticed was that out there in the distance there was something moving behind the Ile de Chausey and so I took a photograph of it for later examination.

Back at the apartment later on, I cropped and enlarged the photograph to see what it might have been. It has all of the silhouette of one of the Channel Islands ferries that sail out of St Malo and so I went and had a look at today’s departures from the port of St Malo.

My photo is timed at 11:07 which is actually 12:07 right now and at 10:30 or thereabouts Commodore Goodwill, one of the two ferries that run out of St Malo and around the Channel Islands, set out from St Malo.

But what we had really come to see was what was going on at the bunker that I’d noticed yesterday. It cost €2:00 to go in so we had to have a scavenge around for a handful of cash so that we could go in.

And this was the star attraction in the bunker this year. A complete wartime medical kit belonging to a German doctor.

It seems that a couple of years ago an old woman left her home and was placed in an old people’s home. Her house began to be emptied and when they searched her cellar they discovered this complete kit down there, where it had been since 1944. It’s been donated to the people running the bunker as an exhibit for the proposed museum that they intend to set up here.

The other room of the bunker was empty because of water infiltration through the roof. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I was given a guided tour of the bunkers so I didn’t take any more photographs of it.

On the way back to the apartment we walked along they clifftop so we could watch the sea.

And while we were admiring the view and watching the people relaxing on board the little cabin cruiser down there, a large zodiac or some other kind of rapid boat roared past them. And I bet that the people in there wouldn’t be very popular when the wake of the zodiac hits the little cabin cruiser.

We went back to the apartment and Liz made a big salad out of all of the stuff that I had in the apartment, with my home-made bread and home-made hummus and it was delicious.

Once we’d digested our meal we attacked the kitchen. Terry reckoned that it would take 30 seconds to empty the shelves but his estimate was somewhat optimistic. It took much longer than that. And then I had to go and fetch the lino up from Caliburn.

By the time that we had finished it was quite late but nevertheless I took Liz and Terry down to La Rafale to treat them to a drink. I do have to say that they had earned it.

On the way back we were overflown by one of our regular aerial pals who we haven’t seen for quite a while.

It’s the yellow autogyro that we first saw several years ago AT THE CABANON VAUBAN when I was here with Hans. I’d seen it quite regularly at one time but for the last few months there hasn’t been a sight of it, despite all of the other aircraft that we’ve seen just recently.

Liz and Terry didn’t come back to the apartment. It was time for them to go home. I went with them to their car and sent them off on their way with my grateful thanks for all of their help.

After Liz and Terry had gone off home I went across the car park to look over the wall to see what was going on down on the beach.

Today there were crowds of people down there lounging around on the rocks. By the looks of things there were even a few people who had been in the water.

That’s hardly any surprise for when I awoke this morning and looked at the thermometer, the temperature outside was already 23°C. If that’s not enough to being out the crowds today then I really don’t know what is.

But there were crowds of people around everywhere today, not just on the beach either. The hordes were swarming around the car park and the paths as well.

And not just on dery land or out at sea either. The air was pretty busy too as we have already seen with the yellow autogyro.

And here, overflying me as I was watching to goings-on down on the beach is another one of the aeroplanes that fly around here. Its registration number is 35MA and she is definitely one that we’ve seen before, and on several occasions too.

It’s a shame that I don’t have access to the database where this number is referenced, and so unfortunately I can’t tell you vert much about it. One of these days I’ll have to go out to the airport to have a good look around and see if I can find more about this aeroplane and the other one, 55-OJ for which I can’t find any information either.

Now over the last few days I’ve been lamenting the fact that we haven’t been seeing any Birdmen of Alcatraz for quite a while.

And so not content with seeing crowds of people on the beach and low-flying aeroplanes, I’m overflown by one of the birdmen who take off from the field by the cemetery so that they don’t have far to go if they make a mistake.

But I left the birdman alone and went inside to see how things were looking. And it’s going to be a long job to sort out all of this mess. And as I was contemplating it, Rosemary rang me and we had a really good chat for half an hour before, emulating the old news reporters from the old News of the Screws I “made my excuses and left”.

According to the guys who had talked to us at the bunker, there was to be a fly-past of an American bomber between 18:30 and 18:45 this evening and I was determined not to miss it so I arranged to clear off outside to watch.

The first thing that I had noticed was a yacht sailing right out there in the Baie de Granville so I wandered over to have a better look and to take a photograph.

It’s not one of the big charter boats that we see sailing around here every so often, unfortunately. It’s quite a small yacht, presumably out of the pleasure harbour or even brought here on a trailer from elsewhere.

There are three or four people sitting down there so it’s probably a small family or a group of close friends out for a breath of wind on a pleasant afternoon. But I wasn’t going to hang around and watch them for I had things to do down at the end of the headland.

Another thing that I noticed out there in the Baie de Granville.

There was a strange little boat out here that I hadn’t seen before. There were four guys on board and while one of them was at the controls of the boat two of the others were busy fishing while the fourth guy was busy watching the proceeding. I wonder if he had any more luck that me in seeing one of the fishermen pull a fish out of the water.

But I left them to it and wandered off down to the end of the headland to find a good position to watch the American bomber fly past.

It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of an aeroplane approaching so I prepared the camera.

But it didn’t sound like a four-engined Pratt and Whitley to me, and as it came over the headland behind me, I saw that I was right. It’s F-BVMC, which is a Robin Apex DR-400/140 B that had just taken off from the airport here. She was on her way back to somewhere in the Paris area from where she had set off earlier.

And I can tell you that because I had a look at the radar when I eventually returned home. She disappeared off the radar somewhere to the south of Paris so I imagine that she must have come down to land somewhere in the vicinity. And how I wish that these aircraft would file flight plans.

Still no sign of the aeroplane but I was quite comfortable sitting on my nice, big and comfortable rock so I could have a good look around.

Underneath me a canoeist was paddling past in the water down there, heading towards the harbour at the end of the day. He had a good pair of oars with him down there, and we know all about that. When I mentioned to STRAWBERRY MOOSE when I was on board a boat that I needed a pair of oars, he completely misunderstood the situation and brought a couple of ladies, heavily made-up and wearing fishnet tights.

But I had to admire him being out there and shirtless in his canoe at this time of the evening. The evening was coming on and the weather was starting to cool down.

But suddenly, things started to liven up down there in the water. The harbour gates must have just opened because a load of traffic suddenly started to swarm out into the bay.

This was developing into an exciting scenario, because the smallest boat that we’d just seen with the four men in it was heading back to port. And a speedboat was speeding around out there too heading into port. The trawler had to do something of a dodging manoeuvre that brought him rather closer to the little boat than I thought was prudent.

For a while I watched them and their activities, but there was no collision and no “shipwreck and nobody drownding – in fact nothing to laugh at at all” which was rather disappointing.

This trawler was followed out of port by another trawler, the Thais Leo

And what caught my interest about this trawler was its registration number, which begins with SB. That indicates that it’s a boat that’s registered at the port of Saint Brieuc down the Brittany coast and so I was wondering what on earth it was doing here.

But by now it was about 19:15 and still no aeroplane so I went back up to the bunker to check the time of the aeroplane. But they had all packed up and gone home so I decided to do the same. I must have missed the aeroplane somehow.

Not long after I returned home there was a knock on my door. One of my neighbours who owns a red car who has parked next to Caliburn once or twice told me that she’d inspected her car closely and found no trace of any damage on it. We had a little chat and then she left.

Once she’d gone, I rang Rosemary back and we had a good chat that went on for about three hours, by which time it was far too late for me to think about food and even to think about writing my notes. I was totally exhausted after my long day so I went to bed and I’ll write up my notes in the morning.

Thursday 3rd June 2021 – SOMETHING THAT HAS …

… figured quite often in these pages has been the subject of fishing. And seeing as I live in one of Normandy’s most important fishing ports, that’s hardly a surprise.

But I’m not just talking about commercial fishing, I’m also talking about fishing with rod and line, whether it’s from the rocks down below the Pointe du Roc or from an open boat anchored just offshore.

And so today we have a pile of fishing boats anchored offshore with people on board casting their lines into the sea. More in hope than expectation, I have to say because as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we have yet to see anyone actually pull a fish from the water using rod and line, despite over four years of trying.

One of these days we’ll be lucky, and we will see someone pull something from the sea that isn’t an old boot or a bicycle wheel, but I’m not holding my breath.

You’ve all probably been holding your breath wondering how I coped with the alarm going off again at 06:00 after all of my vicissitudes yesterday.

The answer is that I leapt from my bed with alacrity at the sound of the first alarm, and then went for my medication. And as I explained earlier, that’s no light task because these days there’s so much of it.

And then, after the medication, I made some bread dough. Just because I’m ill doesn’t mean that I don’t have to eat. One lot of normal dough for the bread for my butties and another lot for my fruit bread with everything in it. Including yeast, unfortunately, because I think that my sourdough has died due to my rather long stay in Leuven.

Today’s task was to finish off the three radio programmes that I was half-way through. That meant

editing the third lot of recorded speech
cutting it into fragments representing each pair of tracks
joining up the pairs of tracks with the speech to make a radio programme of sorts
working out how much time is left to make up an hour
knocking off 45 seconds for some speech to introduce the track
choosing an appropriate track that fits the length
adjusting the sound balance and volume

When that’s done the next steps were

writing 45 or so seconds of text to introduce the final track of each of the three programmes (one line of text on my text editor is equal to about 17 seconds of speech)
recording same
editing same
adding each bit of text onto the end of the last bit of text already on each programme
adding the final tracks
editing it all down to fit the hour time slot.
Saving each one

As you can see, I had my work cut out, but I actually finished it all by lunchtime.

And that includes taking a lot of time out to organise the baking.

By about 10:00 the bread dough had had enough time to rise up so I gave them their second kneading , shaped them and put them in their moulds. And while I was at it I made some apple crumble for the rest of the week’s puddings. And how I wish that I had a bigger oven because I had to mess about with a collection of various containers in order to make everything fit in.

Round about 11:00 I switched on the oven and when it was stinking hot I put in the food.

And here are the finished objects, all nicely cooked and ready to be eaten.

At lunchtime I tried a few slices of the ordinary bread. And it was lovely, soft and delicious with the last of the spicy hummus from Leuven. And that reminds me – the last of the spicy hummus. That means that my task for tomorrow morning will be to make another big load of hummus. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. I might even make another load of ginger beer too.

This afternoon I came in here to make a start on transcribing the dictaphone notes – something that I’ve let go for the last couple of weeks. But as you might expect, no matter how perky and chipper I was feeling this morning (which really surprised me) I promptly crashed out. And I didn’t awaken until 15:50.

Whatever happened to these 10-minute power naps that I used to take?

And so eventually I staggered outside, just in time to see some activity in this little builder’s compound just outside my front door.

The other day we saw them taking digger-loads of stone and gravel out of one of the containers that was dumped here, and it seems that now they have finished with it because the skip hire lorry came round to load up the skip and take it away to wherever skips go to when they are no longer required.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wonder if the activity that we have seen around the Rue St Michel in the old walled city is finally drawing to a close. After all, they’ve been at it long enough.

One of the things that I usually do these days is to keep an eye on the beach to see what is happening there.

So off I trotted down to the end of the car park to look over the wall. And while there wasn’t all that much beach to be on at the Rue du Nord due to the tide coming right in right now, some people had managed to find a cosy and comfy little spec down there.

The weather wasn’t actually the right kind of weather for me to be down there sunning myself. The hot windless weather that we had the other day seems to be a thing of the past. It was quite cool out there and there was quite a wind today.

Wouldn’t it be nice if summer were to come back?

Just now I talked about men out there fishing from their open boats anchored just offshore.

Here’s a prime example – a solitary man in a little cabin cruiser thing casting his line into the water in the hope of catching something interesting, and presumably edible, from the sea.

Where he’s fishing is just off one of the rocks at the foot of the cliff here on the North side of the headland, so I hope that he has a good anchor or mooring post because he’s in danger of being blown by the wind and driven by the tides right onto that rock just there. And that will give him a rather nasty awakening.

One of the things that I read about in the local paper this morning was that someone had gone berserk with a lawnmower on the lawn up by the lighthouse. And so obviously I was eager to find out what was going on.

The local council is not mowing the lawn up here, except on the approved paths. The idea is to give something of a more natural habit to encourage wildlife like butterflies and bees and other sorts of things, an idea with which I concur wholeheartedly.

But someone has come by with a lawnmower – whether they had permission or not was not made clear – to create some kind of artistic labyrinth in the grass.

It beats me why they would want to do that because it totally defeats the purpose of the natural habitat. Animals normally running around beneath the level of the top of the grass would now be exposed as they moved from one patch to another, and we’ve already seen on several occasion the birds of prey that loiter around here.

We’ve seen enough of small boats out at sea fishing with rod and line in the hope of catching something decent for tea, so it’s high time that we turned our attention to some of the larger stuff.

This trawler was plying its trade out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel and I had noticed it in the distance. And as I came down the path and crossed the car park I noticed that by now it was heading for home, presumably with her work finished for the day.

One would think that she was carrying a good catch home with her this afternoon because she has a couple of seagulls hovering around her. The fishermen will already be busy gutting the fish and throwing the entrails overboard I suppose, and that will attract the birds. Regular readers of this rubbish witnessed this when we were in Greenland a while back

There are rules and regulations about throwing stuff overboard from ships but food products are not included in the ban, because of course that provides food for other marine species.

Now isn’t this beautiful?

Just now I talked about the local council stopping mowing the grass around the Pointe du Roc in order to encourage the local wildlife. It seems that it’s not just fauna but flora too and we now have a beautiful patch of wild flowers springing up at the side of the path around the headland.

This is the kind of thing that will encourage the birds and the bees to come and loiter around here. It certainly cheered me up. With a spring in my step, I pushed on along the path to the viewpoint overlooking the port.

Once more, there have been dramatic changes in the chantier navale since the last time that we came this way

Where there were four boats before, now there are two. The customs launch and the fishing boat have now gone back into the water. All that we are left with (for the moment at least) are the trawler Hera and that strange wooden craft that looks as if it’s seen better days.

There wasn’t much else going on anywhere around the port so I headed for home. This afternoon I fancied a nice hot coffee rather than a cold drink. It was that kind of weather and in any case, I needed waking up again.

Now was the time to attack the dictaphone. I started by seeing where I’d been to last night and, more importantly, who had come with me. In fact I had a visit from Heidingauq last night – her first so welcome to my nightmare. And she can come and visit me any time she likes. I started off living in a new house that was very similar to Winsford except that the stairs were different. I met this guy who lived in the neighbourhood and we’d been chatting and I invited him into the house for something but I can’t remember what it was. He came in with his wife and then they left. I noticed that they had left the door open so I went down to see. There was something going on outside so I went to look. It was a football match between a girls’ team from the area and another team. The girls were well-beaten, 3-9 or something like that but they had sent a note to say that they would like to play this team again. It was all a really big friendly atmosphere. They had put lights on and there was some guy doing the lights. Who should be there but Heidinguaq so we had a little chat. We started to talk about music and I suddenly had a brainwave. I dashed into the house and got my acoustic bass and my acoustic guitar. I came out and gave the guitar to Heidinguaq. She said “ohh shall we do a song? We’re going to do a song for you”. Then she found out that the guitars were out of tune so she had to retune them. This was what we were doing and the guy doing the lights had to go along to put a new light bulb in, to fetch one from my house. he asked “is that your dad?”. I laughed and said “no, that’s not my dad, that’s my house. I live there. I own it”. She said “my dad had a name for people like that” but she couldn’t remember what it was. She added “my dad says whatever you do, do it well, but do it with your honour” and I was trying to find out what the hidden meaning in that was when I sat bolt upright wide awake. It was rather a feverish awakening as well.
I stepped back into this dream as well later on (something I haven’t done for a while). Later on there was a knock on the door. It was Heidinguaq. She wanted something so I gave it to her and she wandered off again. A while later she knocked on the door and I opened it. She came in this time. We chatted and in the end she was helping me do the dishes which I thought was very nice of her. She asked about frogs legs. I said “never mind that. I’ll get a bottle of champagne. I produced this bottle of champagne out of my stock.

And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I do have a bottle of champagne in stock ready for if ever she, or TOTGA, or Castor does come round to my house.

Having dealt with today, I turned my attention to the backlog. And before guitar practice there was time to bring up to date THE FIRST OF THE ENTRIES FROM MY TRIP TO LEUVEN.

The guitar practice didn’t go how it was supposed to because I seem to have lost the knack and I can’t sing any more. I would have thought that with these stitches still in I would have had no problem reaching the high notes but apparently it’s not the case. And my co-ordination has gone too. I despair.

Tea was taco rolls with the leftover stuffing from the other day, followed by a delicious home-made apple crumble with delicious home-made custard. Whatever else that might not be going right, at least I’m eating well. Good food too.

But now it’s bed time, later than I was hoping but it can’t be helped. But fancy one of my Inuit friends from the far north of Greenland putting in an appearance. Things really are looking up. Maybe this is the sign of something good about to happen. We can always live in hope.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: trawler

Monday 5th July 2021 – WELL I’LL BE …

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Tuesday 29th June 2021 – MY CHOCOLATE PUDDING …

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