Tag Archives: bouquet granvillais

Wednesday 1st January 2020 – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

later on, I made tea though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I’m in the wrong job.

Tuesday 31st December 2019 – UNLESS I AM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were a couple of interruptions to my afternoon though.

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

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

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

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

And Joly France and Chausiais

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 30th December 2019 – I BET …

… that when you first saw the photo of this car in this parking place, you thought to yourself “he’s off on this pathetic parking lark yet again!”

But not a bit of it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my perambulations around Paris two weeks or so ago and I featured one of the new electric vehicle charging points that are springing up like mushrooms all over the developed world (except of course in the UK, for obvious reasons).

Well, here’s another one. Or two, to be precise, right outside the railway station in Granville. As I said a couple of weeks ago, the world is racing ahead.

And quite right too. The EU is to phase out the production of the internal combustion engine by 2040. The biggest obstacle to electric vehicles is the lack of charging points, but this is changing quite rapidly.

Other things that I wish would change quite rapidly are my sleeping habits. What with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised how many other things there are) it was about 01:45 when I eventually went to bed last night. 4:33 of sleep last night, of which 3:42 were classed as “restful”.

This is getting beyond a joke.

Even so, there was still plenty of time for me to go off a-voyaging. I had to get up early next morning and there was a bit of an issue. There were two girls at my house. One of them was part of my family but I can’t remember who she was and the other one was her friend who was staying with us. Round about 11:00 they got up and about 11:15 or 11:45 something like that they went out. That was the last we’d seen of them. We knew that they were going to a dance. There we were, sitting there, a big group of us, drumming our fingers on the table wondering where they hall they had got to. I thought that this is no good – I need the car. I have to get up in the morning and everything like that. Round about 02:30 they suddenly appeared back again. They’d been on a dance, off to a night club all this kind of thing and we were all making disparaging remarks about “WHAT time was it you went out this morning?” All of that kind of thing. These girls weren’t giving a straight answer because they were a bit embarrassed something like that about it. But the situation concerned one of my Cortinas. I’d been driving around in it and the MoT had expired a while ago. I remember thinking to myself that I ought to have this vehicle on two number plates so I can get two different MoTs which would overlap so that if one expired I’d just put the plates on it for the other MoT and run that for another few months and so on. I can’t remember what on earth that was all about but that was when I awoke for the first time – round about 04:00.
But later on there was something going on to do with the radio. Some young boy had been at the radio who was doing his stuff with very primitive equipment (something like I’m doing at the moment I suppose) and tired of being pushed to the bottom of the pile because of that he went out and bought some decent stuff which improved his quality and improved his output and annoyed all of his colleagues because he’d now got some superior kind of stuff.

It was something of a struggle for me to leave my stinking pit this morning, which should not be a surprise after the night that I had, but I did make it up before the 3rd alarm.

Having taken the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes and then went for breakfast once the medication had worked.

After breakfast I checked my communications and found that Alison had replied to me with her plans for the weekend when I’ll be at Castle Anthrax. And so I could go ahead with making my travel arrangements.

Thursday 9th January
09:00 – Granville to Paris Montparnasse, arriving 12:05 – and in the main arrivals hall too if my reading is correct.
13:15 – Paris Gare du Nord – Lille Flanders arriving 14:18
14:41 – Lille Europe – Bruxelles-Midi arriving 15:17
and then a local train to Leuven
Sunday 12th January
08:43 – Bruxelles-Midi – Paris Gare du Nord arriving 10:05
10:57 – Paris St Lazare – Caen arriving 12:58
14:10 – Caen – Granville arriving 15:44.

Of course, all of this is somewhat … errr … facultative. It’s all very dependent upon the availability of transport in the middle of a General Strike and I can see myself as having as many exciting adventures as did the Knights of King Arthur as they went to visit Castle Anthrax.

With booking my accommodation too, and my local train between Brussels and Leuven, it was quite late when I went for my shower.

And SHOCK! HORROR! – I’ve gained 2kgs since my last shower. That can’t possibly be right and seems to indicate that my bathroom scales are about as reliable as the blood count readings from Castle Anthrax.

Off I went into town and up to the railway station (and the electric vehicle charging point) to pick up my tickets. And there was quite a pantomime about getting them from the machine.

That’s why I always like to pick them up before I travel. There’s no-one in the ticket office at the time my train leaves so if the machine has a seizure on the morning of my travel then I really am cooked.

At LIDL I spent more money than I was expecting.

One thing that I said that I would do is to take more care of my living arrangements, and forgetting to change my bedding for weeks isn’t helping things. Today though at LIDL they had some flannelette sheets on offer so I bought a couple. A dark blue one to go with one bedding set and a light blue one to go with the other.

They weren’t very expensive for what they are and the quality isn’t brilliant but alternating them around more regularly means that they will last somewhat.

On the way back home I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then headed for home.

At the recycling centre across the road from my building the lorry had come to empty one of the containers.

Not being in any particular rush, I watched it for a while as it emptied the plastics bin. And then watched for a couple more minutes while the crew of the lorry went scampering around trying to catch the pieces of plastic that where Blowing In The Wind.

The moral of this story is – don’t empty the lightweight plastics containers in a gale-force wind.

Back at the apartment I had a few things to do that took me up to lunch, and once lunch was out of the way I had a little project to attend to.

My “recording sessions” take place at the moment using an external microphone with the dictaphone, and then plugging the dictaphone into the computer to download the files and then to enhance them etc with my sound editing program.

But there’s no reason whatever why I can’t plug the mike into the computer and then record directly and edit “on the fly”, which will save me a couple of steps in the process.

And so I had the computer out of its cubby hole and plugged the mike in, and then had a play.

The result was awful. The sound level was abysmal, even on max input, and there was a persistent hissing on the recording. It needed so much “enhancing” to remove the hissing that it sounded as if i was speaking with my head in a bucket.

And so it’s back to the dictaphone while I think of Plan B. I hadn’t really realised just what good quality I was getting from the dictaphone with an external mike.

But all was not lost. It gave me an opportunity to reroute a few cables that needed rerouting, even if I did plug the HDMI cable into the incorrect socket and spent 10 minutes wandering why I wasn’t receiving a signal at the screen.

That was the signal for me to go for my afternoon walk.

And what a beautiful afternoon it was. We had glorious sunshine even if it was quite low down in the sky. There were plenty of people out, even walking along the beach today seeing as the tide was out.

And the wind had dropped dramatically from how it was earlier too. And that was very welcome news.

It wasn’t just around on the grassy field on the north side of the headland and on the beach that the crowds were massing.

Although they are the most popular places to be, they aren’t the only places. There were the hordes of people on the southern side by the big car park on the boulevard Vaufleury too.

They seemed to be admiring the harbour and the view across the Baie de Mont St Michel towards the Pointe de Carolles, as well as soaking up the best of the late afternoon sun.

With the tide being right out, there wasn’t much action down in the outer tidal harbour. But there were a few things of interest though.

The other day we talked about NAABSA harbours – the “Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground” situation where ships are allowed to settle on the silt in tiday harbours where there isn’t enough water to keep them afloat.

Over there at the ferry terminal, Joly France is there, and as there is no water underneath her, she’s in a NAABSA state and it doesn’t seem to concern her owners at all.

She wasn’t the only one either.

In front of her, likewise in a NAABSA state, is Chausiais, the new freighter that the owners of the Ile de Chausey have bought, presumably to provide a freight service over to the island, even if I can’t see what would be going over that couldn’t be carried in the hold of one of the ferries.

Still, we shall see in due course, won’t we? I sense a Cunning Plan.

That was my cue to come home where, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out, leaving my coffee undrunk.

And if ever there was a moment where I really did feel like hauling myself off to bed to crash out definitively, then that was it. But I fought off the feeling, even if I did feel like death.

As a result, my plan to attack the dialogue for my next radio project fell flat without very much progress having been made. I need to finish that one off as well as do another one by the end of the week, although I’m not sure quite when I’ll fit it all in.

But whatever happens, I mustn’t fall behind otherwise I’ll never get back in front again.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with the stuffing left over from late last week. And I don’t know why, but it was the best one that I’ve ever made.

If anyone is interested in my stuffing mix, it’s as follows –
Start by boiling up some quinoa or bulghour with a little water and some really spicy chili powder, and leave it to simmer.
Meanwhile, dice up some onion, garlic (have to have garlic of course!), a tomato, mushrooms, olives and whatever else you might have lying around that is suitable, a handful or two of salted peanuts, and then some herbs. I use oregano, basil and tarragon, as well as ground black pepper.
Then, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a couple more of tomato sauce (not ketchup, of course!)
Mix it all up together and then add the bulghour or quinoa, which should by now be ready, and mix that well in too. You need your stuffing to be very moist, but not runny.
Cut round the stalk of the pepper and scoop out the core, the seeds and the pith. Then stuff it with your stuffing mix.
Into the microwave at medium-full (that’s 640 watts on mine) for 7 minutes 30 seconds while the rice and veg are cooking.
The when the rice is cooked and you’re rinsing it out with boiling water, give the pepper 90 seconds on max (that’s 800 watts on mine)

If you try it, let me know how it turns out, and let me know if you have any suggestions to make it differently. There’s a “contact me” link down at the bottom right corner of the screen.

After that I went out for my evening walk in the freezing cold, because the temperature has dropped dramatically. I was the only one out there, which was no surprise.

But while I was out there, I checked and sure enough, Granville really is back in the harbour, tied up alongside Victor Hugo.

It looks like her a-roaming is over for a few days.

And so was mine. For tonight anyway, I headed for home. I managed to fit in my run, although I was dead by the time that I reached the ramp and only made four or five paces up it.

It’s really disappointing that I can’t seem to push on and run for longer. I remember when I went back running in the mid-90s, when after a few weeks I suddenly found my second wind and could run for miles. I can’t seem to break this barrier these days.

Mind you, I’m not sure what I’m expecting at my age. It’s not every OAP who goes out running late at night every night, especially one who is supposed to be on his death bed. I should be grateful for what I can do.

This evening I didn’t see Minette the old black cat but I saw her mum who was on the doorstep chatting to a couple of people. So I had a little chat, wished them the compliments of the season and came home.

Now I’ve written up my journal, I’m off to bed. 6.5 hours of sleep if I’m lucky. That’s a luxury these days so I need to make the most of it.

But not quite yet. I’ve been listening to No Smoke Without Fire by Wishbone Ash. It’s an album that I’ve owned for probably 30 years but I haven’t heard it for probably 29 years. And while it won’t ever be anything like as good as the first couple of albums, I’m astonished that I haven’t played it more often because some of it is really excellent.

And as that finished, onto the playlist came Fur by Jane Wiedlin. Not an album that you would normally associate with me but Janet Marsden played it to me late one night and there are a couple of tracks on it that are totally unexpected in their brilliance. They bring back a couple of memories of one particular night in Crewe, and how things could have been different had I been in a better place in my head back then.

Sunday 29th December 2019 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether it was a good idea or not for me to set an alarm this morning. Because I might have needed it, and then again I might not.

Hoping around on my toes at 04:00 trying to ease out a bad attack of cramp (how come these attacks have started up again just recently), awake again at 07:00, and finally and definitely, about 2 minutes before the alarm at 08:30.

No medication this morning. I don’t have time to wait for it to work. Instead I had breakfast and then made a start on the dictaphone notes from during the night.

I was with a group of people last night – we were on board a ship (yet again). I’d gone out once already during the night to see what was happening and there wasn’t very much so I had to go out of my cabin again so I decided that what I would do was to go and have a look outside again to see what the weather was doing while I was on the point of doing this other job. There was a guy standing by the door outside – I thought he was smoking a cigarette or something so I went out to say hello and he said “have you thought about that thing that we can be doing, because if you aren’t going to do it straight away I can get down to start work on my car”. I had the impression that I was supposed to be helping him work on a motorcycle but I don’t remember much about it and of course there isn’t all that much we can do on board a ship in that respect. Anyway I thought “well, yes, I’m willing to help out anyone any time” and I awoke at that point
At another time during the night there was something going on about people having a party. They’d booked a table at a night club, a table for 8 but the table was at the back. They enquired why and were told “some of these big tables have a habit of being a bit rowdy and pushing their way to the front and it disrupts the other people so we like to keep them where they are”. But this guy whose party it was was organising something and the other people were to come and a lot of them were saying that she couldn’t stay very late and he was qute disappointed about this. He said “as long as you come for the first drink that’w what’s really important. Come and have the first drink with me”. Then he said he had to go and there was some issue too about the date. It was the 1st of January and the date ticket that was sat in the date holder think on the table or in the notebook was too long and protruded out of the holder so it needed to be trimmed. But he hadn’t thought about doing that so I asked him where he wanted it on the table. He said that it was upstairs so he’d better go upstairs and get it. And that was when I awoke.
And somewhere along the line there was something about fitting a pinch bolt in the gearbox drive of a vehicle that I owned so I’d gone down to the garage in Centreville to do that. Darren and I dunno maybe Jody were there. They got a pinch bolt out and got the tools and everything then they both climbed under the vehicle and I thought that I was going to do that but they climbed under there anyway. I had to move so that they could get under. They put the pinch bolt in but it was slightly too long and they could get it in with a real bit of difficulty but there was about an inch too much that wasn’t needed on the pinch bolt. So they looked at each other and said “well should we cut this inch off then?” And that’s all that I remember of that bit.
There had been another thing too but when I awoke I had the most awful cramp – so much so that I had to stand up to ease the leg. And by the time that the cramp had gone, so had any memory of the dream

After that I checked over my equipment and then Laurent appeared at the door so we shot off to Donville les Bains.

Today is the Bain des Manchots, the “bathing of the Giant Penguins”.

Every village for miles around loses its fou for the day and they all assembles on the beach ready to take the plunge.

Our task today was to come to the Bain des Manchots in order to interview some of the bathers and the organisers.

There were plenty of manchots around on the beach too and we interviewed a couple of them to find out why they had come all this way for a swim when they could have stayed at home and gone for a swim back there.

As well as manchots there were dozens of Father Christmases out there too, all taking a break from delivering the presents and recharging their batteries ready for the start of the new year.

And it wouldn’t take much of an effort for them either if they are used to the weather at the North Pole. Although the air temperature is a mere 4°C, someone has measured the water temperature and it’s between 9°C and 10°C.

And that’s positively tropical.

And for mainly that reason, the organisers reckoned that they had a record number of entries.

Certificates were awarded to those who “took the plunge” and they reckoned that as far as they could tell, they issued 300 or so certificates.

That’s a far cry from when they started 10 or so years ago and just 20 people made it into the water.

The secret of going into the water in this weather is really quite simple.

For people who are in any way timid or unsure of themselves, the key is to be at the front, first in line. Once the whistle blows, there’s no turning back and the force of the crowd behind you pushes you into the water.

Being last in, you see all of the others wincing as they enter the water, and that can dampen anyone’s ardour.

People didn’t stay in for long – 15 minutes was, I reckon, the longest.

We interviewed a few of them, including a girl aged about 6 who we reckon was the youngest participant, when they came out.

No-one was really suffering although one or two people were looking really uncomfortable. Each to his own though. Some people are more susceptible to the cold than others.

Laurent brought me home and he came up here for a coffee and a chat for a while. It’s a good job that I’d cleaned up and tidied up everywhere over the last couple of days

After he had left, it was lunchtime so I walked back into town for my dejeunette.

Down on the rue du Port near to the fish processing plant, my eyes were drawn to this beautiful piece of street art. Someone had clearly taken some time to compose this oeuvre here on the pavement.

It’s far more representative of art than many of the works exhibited in many galleries these days.

The tide was out so the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the pathway on top, over to the other side of the harbour.

Victor Hugo is there this afternoon, as are Aztec Lady and Charles Marie.

But there’s no sign of Granville, the more modern of the two Channel Island ferries. I’m pretty certain that she was here last night, so it looks as if she’s had another early morning run out to St Helier.

I picked up my dejeunette from la Mie Caline and then went for a look around the town.

The Christmas market, such as it is, is still going on in the place Générale de Gaulle and will be for another day or two.

Mind you, it’s not what I would call a Christmas market. I’m more used to the ones in Germany where it’s freezing cold and there are hundreds of stalls and thousands of people.

Here today, there were about half a dozen stalls and more stalls than people.

It doesn’t seem to be possible these days to go for a day without my making some kind of remark about some of the pathetic parking that we see around the town.

Here’s today’s example. A huge space in the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne, big enough to park a bus in, and yet the driver (and I use the word loosely) has somehow managed to end up with two wheels on the pavement.

That’s bad enough in itself but what is worse is that he’s simply left the vehicle there and made no attempt whatever to park it correctly.

Back in the apartment I had a very late lunch and then something of a vegetation (after all, it IS Sunday) before going out for my afternoon walk.

Crowds of people around but not much else going on.

However there was some guy wandering around with a couple of girls aged about 10 and 12 and he was posing them in all kinds of artistic settings on the clifftop and then taking photographs of them.

I enjoy taking photos of people taking photos, but this one hasn’t worked so well as I ended up with the low evening sun right in the camera lens and I didn’t have the time to change the camera settings.

Back here I had a listen to our dictaphone recordings of the morning’s adventures and then sent them off to Laurent. He’s going to listen to them and tel me where and what to cut out, and dictate some more “questions” that I can insert in, to break up some of the “monologues” that we recorded where our interviewees were carried away with themselves.

Tea was a vegan pizza as usual, and it was delicious, as was the Christmas cake that followed it down.

While I was eating it, I was watching a Saint episode on the DVD player. Loads of famous people had bit parts in these series before they became famous and it’s always interesting to see who I can pick out.

One voice stood out a mile and I recognised it as soon a I first heard it. I had to wait unti the end to confirm it, and I was right. None other than Lois Maxwell, who later went on to fame and fortune as Miss Moneypenny in the “James Bond” films.

After tea I went for my walk around the walls.

No-one around so I could have my run around my little track and I made it up to the top of the first ramp tonight. While I was pausing for breath I could see some fishing boats unloading at the fish processing plant.

As I came back to the apartment I noticed that I was on 93% of my daily activity.

And so i continued my walk and went to see what was out at sea. Sure enough, the lights were telling me that another long line of fishing boats were on their way back to the fish processing plant.

A quick rough head-count told me that there were about 7 of them at least. There may well have been more.

Although these photos might seem blurred you need to remember that it’s pitch black out here so I’m on a very slow speed, the camera is hand-held in the wind, and the boat is about 5 miles offshore.

In the circumstances I’m not too disappointed.

Back here it’s late, I’ve just finished my journal and now it’s time for bed. I won’t have much sleep tonight but I’m looking forward to what I might have. It’s been a long day today.

And a Sunday too!

bain des manchot or penguin or some such donville les bains granville manche normandy france

Friday 27th December 2019 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I went to use the jam in the fridge only to find that it was … errr … past its best.

Seeing as the shops were open today and I’d missed my Thursday walk up to LIDL, that I’d walk up there this morning and buy some more. And while I’m at it, pick up a few more bits and pieces that I need.

And so I picked up a few more bits and pieces from LIDL and came home again. And it wasn’t until I’d almost finished putting away the few more bits and pieces that I suddenly realised “dammit! Forgot the jam!”. And that was really the whole purpose of going out!

Mind you, I blame my bad night for all of this. I don’t know why but there I was working away at something or other and I suddenly noticed the time – 03:15. Heaven alone knows what I was doing at that time of night but never mind. I eventually made it off to bed but I wouldn’t like to guess what time it was.

As you can imagine, the alarms at 06:00 etc were not greeted with very much enthusiasm. Nevertheless with a superhuman effort it was as early as 06:40 when my feet eventually touched the ground.

While I was waiting for the medication to work I had a look at the dictaphone. And sure enough, even with only a couple of hours sleep, there had been enough time to go for a wander during the night. I had been in a Weigh-and-Save of all places and looking around for stuff and I hadn’t a clue what I wanted and I couldn’t find half of it, all this kind of thing, and this went on for a good few minutes. Suddenly I noticed that this queue, the enormous queue at the checkouts had disappeared and there was no-one there. I dived into the checkouts as if I was ready to go. I’d been looking for flour but couldn’t find any but there they were – they had a few bags behind the counter so I asked “is this the flour?”. They said yes. “And this is what you use for baking, that kind of thing?” “Ohh yes, that’s it”. So I started to get that and I was thinking that if I got that I could keep on nipping back into the shop and getting some other stuff but then a queue of people started to build up behind me after that so I thought “this isn’t going to work now, is it?”

After breakfast, one project to which I hadn’t been attending just recently was set back in motion again. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d been searching around for digital copies of old albums that I’d owned and that I’d downloaded a huge number.

They have to be split into individual tracks of course and I had made a start on that a few weeks ago. But today, I started again.

By the time that I had to go for a shower I’d done one and there was another one in the pipeline.

Having cleaned myself up somewhat, I set off for town.

And down at the foot of the Escalier des Noires Vaches I stopped for a while to observe the fishing boat Les Bouchots de Chausey moored up by the fish processing plant with a few guys doing some loading work around it.

And it was as well that I had stopped, because right at that moment the telephone rang.

It was Rosemary on the telephone. She needed some advice about Paypal and how it works.

So while I was chatting to her, I was admiring the work that was going on with Les Bouchots de Chausey. It looks as if she’s about to set out to sea because they are loading all of the plastic boxed onto her – the boxes in which they stack the catch.

With the tide being part-way out, the harbour gates were closed again so I could walk over the footway at the top and over the other side of the harbour.

Nothing much going on there today and no new visitors. And judging by the small size of the gravel heaps, we aren’t going to be expecting a gravel boat any time soon

And then there was the performance at LIDL.

Today I dodn’t spend much money either – nothing out of the unusual even though they had had the weekly “specials” delivery. It’s not very often that there isn’t anything in the Lidl Specials to excite me. The big issue is usually whether I can afford it and, these days, whether I can carry it away

Regular readers of this rubbish must be quite fed up these days of me going on about pathetic parking.

It’s something that really gets on my wick and there seems to be a lot of it about right now, such as this example here in the rue St Paul.

There’s a parking place right by where I’m standing, as you can see, but madam has driven 10 metres past it and parked on the pavement right across a pedestrian crossing while she has a chat with the postie on a bike who is blocking off the rest of the street.

On that note I picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline and then continued on my way home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the seafood stall that I mentioned the other day – the only one that seems to sell the fish straight off the boat.

It’s here again today, set up at its usual spec on the corner of the port. It seems to have a couple of customers too.

And you can see what the weather was doing too. A cold, clammy fog with no sun and trying its best to rain – that thin wet rain that you don’t notice but which soaks you right through to the skin and makes you feel really miserable.

Back here, I finished off the splitting of the other digital music file, and then reworked my advert for the radio rock show that I’m producing and presenting. After I made the first one and sent it off, they then changed the time of the repeat. I’m on the radio on Fridays at 21:00 Central European Time (20:00 UK time, 15:00 Toronto time) and repeated on Saturdays at the same time.

That took me nicely up to lunchtime where I had a nice little relax with a book and a sandwich.

After lunch I unwrapped the final piece of my Christmas present to myself.

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do was to play the drums and while I was browsing around on the internet I came across a cheap electronic drum kit.

Cheap – and complete too. The only thing that it doesn’t have is a USB cable to connect it up to a computer but I can source one of those from somewhere, I reckon.

So that’s now all connected up and wired in as far as I can, and I’m going to have a bash at the drums. I had a few trial goes and believe me, it actually sounds like a drum kit through the headphones that come with it.

Despite the horrible weather, I went out for my afternoon walk.

And I wasn’t the only one out there walking either. As well as the crowds on the headland, there were a couple of people walking around on the beach clearly making the most of the holiday season.

There were a few other people tempted to go down there and join them, but I declined. By the time I managed to reach the bottom the tide would be right in and I’d have to turn round and come straight back up again.

It must be that time again, because once more we had the queue of fishing boats in the English Channel and the Baie de Mont St michel waiting to come in to the port and unload.

The tide must be on the way in, hence the reason why I declined the walk down to the beach.

While I was admiring this boat here, I did a quick count of the number of boats that I could see. Even with the fog and mist out there, I could see half a dozen. I’ve no idea how many more there might be lurking about in the fog.

And yet another example of bad parking.

Here in the boulevard Vaufleury, this is a service bus route right near to a school with piles of school kids and school buses knocking about.

Yet this person is parked with two wheels on the pavement, blocking off the pavement for wheelchairs and pushchairs etc, and blocking the road for the service buses and school buses.
Even worse, there’s a huge free public car park not even 30 metres away from where the car is parked, but that’s evidently far too far for this sad excuse of a car driver to walk, isn’t it?

Back here I did some more tidying up so the place looks a little more lived-in and like home, and then I stopped for tea. I’d bought a pepper so I treated myself to a stuffed pepper. I do like them

The evening walk was a wet one so I didn’t hang around for photography. I managed my run too, much to the amusement of a couple of young kids lurking around in the bushes in a dark corner. I have to admit that my running style is rather eccentric, but at my age, it’s like Samuel Johnson’s description of women preachers – “It is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

Back here I listened to my radio show for tonight and it worked quite well. I’m not impressed with my delivery though and I’m going to have to work on that.

But it’s been a very long day and I’m ready for bed. Shopping tomorrow and then tidying up. I’m expecting visitors on Sunday.

Wednesday 25th December 2019 – MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all my readers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My wanderings took me down alongside the harbour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On that … err … note I went to bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was just as good as it usually is.

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

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

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

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

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

And I hope that you had a good day today.

night old town port de granville harbour manche normandy france

yacht baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

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

… without any mince pies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this beautiful weather even Marité was looking really nice.

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

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

Now here’s a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

It beggars belief, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was right.

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

On that note, I headed back to the apartment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll let you know what happens.

joly france port de granville harbour manche normandy france

Sunday 22nd December 2019 – REMEMBER A WHILE AGO …

… when we had been discussing those strange objects on the quayside, and that I’d made enquiries and they were in fact shellfish-dredgers?

Here I am today, down in the town by the harbour and here they are actually loading up some of the aforementioned onto one of the fishing boats here.

Clearly these items are still in day-to-day use, and that’s always good to know of course.

While we’re on the subject of shellfish and fishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … most of the stuff is either transported away in lorries for the mass market or else it’s sold locally in shops or local restaurants.

In Oostende we’ve seen the fish market where the trawlers unload and their catch is sold direct to the public, but there’s very little of that in Granville, which is a real surprise.

In fact, I think that I’ve only ever seen this stall set up at the end of the port to deal directly with the public.

In all the time that I’ve lived here, I can’t ever recall ever having seen anyone else doing this direct from a fishing boat. I mean, the produce is so fresh that a good vet could bring it round.

But talking of today, I had quite a surprise this morning. It’s Sunday and lie-in, with no alarm. But bird-brain of Britain had set an alarm for last Sunday in order to be up and about to catch his train, but had forgotten to unset it.

As a result, at 06:00 on a Sunday, on my Day of Rest …

But no chance whatever of that. I made sure that the rest of the alarms were switched off and went back down under the covers and there I stayed until … err … 10:00.

That’s much more like it for a Sunday.

Plenty of time to go off on a travel then. I was with Cecile last night – at least, I think it was Cecile – and we had been somewhere and I had to go to a hospital – I think we were in Stoke on Trent. It was something to do with a house in Stoke on Trent and it was where Carriatt was living with his father. He took us back to his little house – in Kidsgrove – with his little car and there was an older car parked in the drive and it was only used once a fortnight and sometimes it wouldn’t start. but back in his little house, a nice little semi-detached house and he told us about it. He’s had it three or four years and paid about £5500 for it. They were thinking of selling it and I was thinking that it was a nice kind of house and it would just do me. Pretty small and two people was probably stretching it a little bit but on my own that would really do me. I had to go on to the hospital and Cecile had to go as well. I got there and got myself registered in and I explained that Cecile had to be registered in – at least, I think it was Cecile. We both had to go for x-rays so they took a preliminary photo of her and gave it a reference number then we had to go out across the yard and register ourselves in for this X-ray thing. The woman said to Cecile “as you’re new here you had better come back and tell me the reference number of the object…” or whatever the word was “… for your x-ray”. She looked bewildered but I said “that’s OK, I know what’s happening here. Come with me”. She was a bit confused but I took her out. They were going to give reference numbers to people and that related to whatever photo they had of you on the file. If they had 3 or 4 they would choose 1 so that it could be linked into the right file. But Cecile had only had 1 taken here, this introductory photo, so that was obviously the number that was going to be allocated to her. So I knew what was happening. We had to go across the yard to the other bit of the hospital to register for this x-ray thing. I gave my details and explained “this is Cecile, she’s new and from the Netherlands (…don’t ask me why …) so the clerk explained the procedure to Cecile and she was slowly understanding it. We were hoping that we would get an appointment in 2 or 3 hours to give us time to go and do some sightseeing. Cecile then asked “do you have any aspirin”. This woman looked bewildered. “What’s aspirin?” So Cecile came out with the Latin name “aspartamine” (or whatever it was) so the woman said that Cecile needed to go to see them in the Pharmacy “over there somewhere”. Cecile became anxious, going to a third place and although we’d been registered in and she had taken away all our paperwork we hadn’t been given a time for our x-ray. I thought that this is going to start getting really confusing in a minute. It was just then that I awoke with a really bad attack of cramp.

But if Carriatt is now appearing in my nocturnal rambles I’m going to go off rambling somewhere else.

After the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes while I was waiting for the medication to work, and then had breakfast. That took me up until about 11:10 and I had a feeling that I was not going to have a very good day.

Well over 100 photos from the Archipel last night and they all needed editing and so I set to work. When I noticed the time (14:00) I’d done about half so I thought that I’d better nip out for my dejeunette for lunch.

But one of the reasons why I was late was that I’d been helping Hans, designing a piece of code for him to display podcasts on his web page.

Anyway, off I set on my travels, right out of the door where I was met by a blast of wind that almost blew me back into the building.

You can see just how rough the weather was out there too. That’s the local coastguard rescue boat, I reckon, and there it is disappearing into a giant wave.

Not a day for anyone to be out at sea, I reckon.

Having picked up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline for lunch, and ordered a special “fig and raisin” loaf for the festive period (“don’t forget to pick it up on Tuesday, Eric”), I went to see what was happening in the town.

On a publicity leaflet somewhere I’d seen that there was to be a Brocante professionelle today in the rue Couraye.

Now I’m all in favour of brocantes as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but I’m horrified by the prices that people around here want for objects that are not all that far removed from a load of old junk.

And when it’s a Brocante professionelle rather than a Brocante particulier, it’s going to be even more horrific so I didn’t even cross the road for a look.

Here in the place General de Gaulle there’s someone selling carpets and the like, and what that has to do with a Brocante, whether professionelle or particulier I really couldn’t say.

So on that note I headed back to my apartment for a very late lunch.

Back here it was almost 17:00 when I finished the photos, and then I sent them on to the radio HQ for them to pick one or two to illustrate the podcast of last night’s broadcast.

And when I have time, I’ll create a web page for you to see them and post the link here.

Better late than never, I decided to go out for my afternoon walk.

The wind was thoroughly wicked again tonight so I didn’t want to hang around long. I went around the city walls as it was out of the shelter of the wind and I could see what the storm was doing.

The tide wasn’t right in yet so we weren’t having the full effect of the buffeting but it was wild enough out there nevertheless.

By now it was becoming quite dark.

The lights of the rue Paul Poirier were looking quite good in the gloom from up here and they are always worth a photograph or two.

The streets were quite busy too with the shops being open in the run-up to Christmas and there was quite a traffic jam in the rue Lecampion as people headed for home.

By now it was starting to rain so I took the opportunity to run down my little track, much to the surprise and/or amusement of the couple who were heading my way.

Just by way of a change I made it al the way up to the end of the ramp and then I went into the place Cambernon to see what was happening and to look at the lights (and collect a raindrop on the lens of the camera).

Back here I made a start on the blog for Saturday but shame as it is to admit it, I fell asleep for 10 minutes. That’s not like me these days, is it?

Tea was a pizza which was delicious, and then out for my walk.

There was such a howling gale that I didn’t even attempt the Point du Roc. Instead I went round the walls again.

This time I hung about even less than before and amused another couple of people with my second run of the day. I have to push on.

Now, having finished the journal for tonight and dealt with an enquiry in English from Canada about the radio station, I’m off to bed.

An early night, and I’ve earned it. I’ll do Saturday’s blog tomorrow

I hope.

storms high winds plat gousset granville manche normandy france

Saturday 21st December 2019 – JUST LIKE OLD TIMES!

Yes, eating my evening meal at … errr … 00:15. Brings back many happy (and not-so-happy) memories of times gone by, that does.

And I bet that you’ve been hovering on the edge of your seat wondering why this has been the case ever since you saw the original posting on Saturday night. Well, I can now tell you.

Although I ought to set the stage (if you pardon the expression) first.

Despite having a really late night last night I still had to make an effort to be up early as it was going to be a busy day.I somehow missed the second alarm yet again and the next thing that I remember it was 06:24. And it still took a few more minutes before I could haul myself up out of bed.

With the usual routine of medication and then breakfast once the medication works, I took an early trip to the shops. Just LeClerc where I was waiting at the door with about 50 other people for 10 minutes until opening time.

With being one of the first in, I was one of the first out too. Not that I bought a great deal of stuff but it still came to €33. Endives and leeks included, and Caliburn smelt lovely inside.

After LeClerc I went up the road. A shop that closed down about a year ago has been taken over by a company called Action. It’s rather like Noz but a lot more organised and a lot more stuff that is useful. I came away with some stuff such as a headphone splitter, a jack plug adapter, some photo printing paper and a 4-way USB connector for Strider.

Next door was a shop called Bureau Vallée that sells office supplies. They had some cheap USB memory sticks that had a capacity of 2GB. A lot of my old electrical equipment such as the hi-fi and Caliburn’s stereo is old-generation stuff with a maximum reading capacity of 999 files, so a 2GB memory stick is ideal for those. And I’ve almost run out.

Back at the apartment I put the frozen food in the freezer (having made some room of course because it’s still pretty full in there) and then went back out.

As regular readers of this rubbish will probably have gathered, I’ve gone back to work.

Back into the media in fact, working for a local radio station called le Bouquet Granvillais. I’m photographer, English-French (and vice versa, and if there’s any vice going about, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”) translator, and check out the programme “A La Pointe Du Rock” and see if you recognise the voice.

It’s a new radio station, started in June this year, and tonight we are doing our first live outside broadcast. At the moment, the guys are stringing up the banner above our sound console while the others are plugging everything in.

In order to move about freely inside the venue we are to be issued with badges, so I had to go down to collect mine, although I was rather thinking of Walter Huston and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”, although it will come as a surprise to many to know that they didn’t actually say that in the film

And while I was at the Archipel, I stuck my head in through the door to see what was going on because I’d heard the music.

Nothing to get excited about quite yet, but it gives me an idea of what will be going on there this evening.

Now in the possession of a badge for entry into the Archipel tonight, I set off home. And stumbled immdiately across some more pathetic parking – the bane of these pages as regular raders of this rubbish will recall. And this time it’s a pearler too!

Remember the other day when we had that motorist parked half-on the pavement and another one a day or two earlier with the motorist stuck any old how across the street – and on a service bus route too?

Well this guy here hasn’t chosen just to park at random half on the pavement and half in the road to block a service bus route, he’s actually parked on the bus stop itself. And you can clearly see the markings on the road right where he’s parked.

Maybe he should have strapped his guide dog to the roof. That would have told him that he isn’t allowed to park there. But it really annoys me, the lack of courtesy and consideration that some of these motorists have for others. As long as he and his passengers don’t have to walk anywhere more then 20 feet, the rest of the world can go hang itself.

A little higher up the hill in the rue des Juifs I came to another halt.

The weather is actually pretty windy and miserable today, but that’s not stopped the timetable for the ferries from running as normal. Here’s Joly France battling the elements as she sets out from her berth at the maritime terminal on her way to do her run to the Ile de Chausey.

She’s not exactly overloaded with passengers today as you can see, but she does have a timetable to keep to and that will oblige her to sail.

Back here, I put away some of the shopping (but not all of it by any means) and then made myself some lunch. That was followed by a session sorting my equipment out. I’m officially the photographer and outside-broadcast techie so as well as the usual equipment that I need like the Nikon D500 and so on, there’s also the telephone, the dictaphone, the microphone and some headphones.

It’s pretty basic, my outside broadcasting unit, but the thing is that it’s not complicated to operate and it works. Keep it Simple!

Our first port of call was at the place Cambernon.

Father Christmas was due to arrive here at 16:30, although it was more like 16:45 when his sledge pulled into the square – pulled by a Kubota tractor.
“Where are the reindeer? we asked”
“I’ve given them the night off” said Père Noël. “They are going to be really busy on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning so I don’t want to be working them too hard right now.”

So now you know.

So at the place Cambernon, we had first of all the arrival of the Fanfare, or local jazz band. Every town or village in France has its own fanfare and we’ve encountered a few of them in the past.

Santa also had a full complement of elves too. They quickly clambered aboard the sleigh and took their places, to the accompaniment of music from the fanfare and once everyone was ready, the sleigh set off for Santa’s grotto in the town, with the crowds of people following on behind.

Having done a quick estmation, I made it something like 150 or so people of all ages up here

The route down to Santa’s grotto took us down the rue des Juifs, and the wrong way too.

But it wasn’t a problem because the farces of law and order at the bottom of the hill were blocking off the traffic to give us an opportunity to come down the hill en masse.

That’s what I like about France. It’s all delightfully informal. None of this Health and Safety and road closure notices and the like. People just make up the rules as they go along.

Down the rue Paul Poirier we went; again against the flow of traffic in the one-way street. But once again the local coppers did the business and held up the traffic to allow us to pass.

The cortège turned into the place Générale de Gaulle – once again against the flow of traffic, and then headed over to the famous ski slope where he and his elves alighted.

Laurent and I had been given a voucher for a hot alcoholic drink at the little hut here, so Laurent went off for his while I wandered around.

The fanfare found themselves a good spec on the edge of the ski slope and entertained us for a while.

As for me, I found Father Christmas sitting around with a bunch of kids being photographed by their parents sitting on his knee, so at a suitable pause in the proceedings Laurent and I grabbed hold of him and interviewed him for our radio show, and took the opportunity to interview a little girl called Océane who was waiting her turn to sit on his knee.

I’m really glad that I had the dictaphone and microphone with me.

Having made sure that the recording had worked fine, I took it over to the Archipel. One or two of the artistes tonight don’t want their shows recording so we have some time to fill in. We’ll be doing some artistes’ interviews with the more obliging ones, broadcasting some music too, but an interview with Father Christmas will go down quite well too.

By now though, proceedingsw ere well on their way and things were hotting up.

At a suitable pause in the recording due to the instransigence of a couple of artistes, we began to interview the rest of the performers. Elizabeth and Xavier took on this reponsibility and I was invited to take photos of them for the radio’s own website.

We may as well try to look as professional as we can and a pile of good photos always helps in this respect.

And talking of good photos, photography is an absolute pleasure when you have subjects who co-operate fully and completely with their photographer.

Unfortunately I can’t remember her name – in fact I don’t even know if I knew it – but hopefully someone can help me out in this respect. See the “Contact Me” box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen.

But whoever you are, take a bow.

We had an interval at half-time and I tok the opportunity to see what was going on.

Earlier in the day I’d witnessed a sound check between a couple of musicians, a bassist and a pianist, and they had played a performance before the start of the concert while everyone was taking their seats, and again at the half-time interval.

Although their music wasn’t quite my style, I enjoyed listening to it and they were really quite good at what they did.

All in all, we were there recording until the final whistle at 23:00 and then of course it took an age to tidy up and pack everything away. I ended up being back at the apartment just before midnight having gone the long way round to make sure that I arrived at my 100% and then made myself a plate of pasta and vegetables tossed in garlic, olive oil, tarragon and vegan cheese.

Yes, eating my evening meal at 00:15 – brings back many happy memories of a previous life.

But now I’m off to bed. And a good lie-in, I hope, because I’m whacked. See you in the morning.

Thursday 19th December 2019 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… no-one and nothing came along to disrupt my work today so I was able to have a fair crack of the whip, news which should please sadists and masochists everywhere.

Mind you, had something come along to disrupt me today I don’t know how I would have fitted it in. I didn’t get off to the best of starts.

With having had a very late night last night, I didn’t respond very well to the first two of the three alarms that go off here in the morning. The third one prompted me to sit upright with shock at still being in bed, but nevertheless it was a good 10 minutes before I was able to haul myself out.

Even though it was a short night, there was plenty of time to go a-voyaging. We were recording again for the radio last night, a series of programes of a programme, something like that and we all had to set out and go somewhere and do something. I ended up walking all the way through the countryside and I kept on finding abandoned canal courses, falling in them and so on. I came all the way across these places and ended up back in Diffusion to find that the diffusion of documents was being moved from the building where it was to another building close by, something like if Shavington Infants were moving to the old Junior School, something along those lines. It was moving on the Monday but the Friday prior was going to be my last day as Monday I was going to move to another department. I asked why they were moving and they said that the official reason was that there was something to do with security – Diffusion had become famous for something or other and they wanted some privacy, but no-one knows what the real reason is. Of course “security” was nonsense and we all knew this and it seemed a totally illogical decision because or course all the paperwork had to br brought from the old office to the new one, sorted around and all taken back again which was going to take a lot longer and a lot more staff. We started talking and I expressed my dismay and they ask why? About leaving? About moving? I replied “not really but the new building is nearer my home and of course they waited until I changed department before they moved so I don’t get the benefit of having a shorter distance to go to work” something like that. They started to talk about the routes we had taken to get there. I said that I had found this old abandoned canal race and fell in it. They asked if I had plenty of photos then and I replied “Ohh God yes, hundreds of photos”. We were talking about showing them when the alarm went off and awoke me.

After the medication I transcribed the dictaphone notes and then went off for breakfast.

With that out of the way, I came back and started on Project 007. And it’s a good job that I’ve been systematically backing up as I go along because Audacity, the program that I used, crashed twice in the middle of what I was doing and had I not backed up, I would have had to start again.

But now that one is completed, 60 minutes to the second, and I do have to say that it sounds pretty good to me. But you lot will have to wait until 10th January to hear it.

In the middle of everything I downed tools and went off to do my shopping in LIDL.

And here’s a classic example of why living within the walls of a medieval walled city is not always a good idea. Having everything delivered, like a lorry-load of furniture or a lorry-load of cement, creates quite a logistical challenge.

They aren’t always easy to solve either.

What they were having to do is to have a fleet of some kind of machines fitted with hoppers, and discharge the cement into the hoppers for onward transport into wherever they might be going.

And I don’t know if you have noticed, that underneath the cement chute there’s a large plastic sheet – presumably to stop the overflow of cement fouling the roadway.

So round the corner and right into the teeth of the gale, one of the strongest winds that we’ve had to date.

At LIDL I didn’t want very much. I don’t these days, going there three times each week, but I do it for the exercise more than anything else as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

On the way back I went via the big Eglise St Paul to see what was going on.

Last time that I was here they had just finished erecting a crane in the Impasse de la Corderie so I was keen to see what was going on today.

It looks as if they are having a load of breeze blocks delivered and they are about to be craned into position, so someone is having a house extension of some kind.

having picked up my dejeunette I headed on back up the rue des Juifs towards home, nearly stepping on someone’s dalmatian.

But I had a little stop when I got to the place that overlooks the harbour, because there was a weird danse macabre going on in the tidal harbour.

Yes, it looks as if, for once, I’ve caught Chausiais on the move.

She carried on with her little dance for a good 10 minutes as I watched, and then took herself off into the corner where the pier is for the ferries that go over to the Ile de Chausey.

It’s intriguing me because what freight that has had to go over to the island in the past has gone over quite comfortably on the ferries.

So why a freighter? My opinion is that the owner has a cunning plan, and it might have something to do with the fact that Brexit isn’t all that far away.

But we shall see.

Earlier on, we saw workmen with the concrete mixer up by the Porte de St Jean.

But here we have another load of workmen with a mini-digger and a pile of these one-ton reusable sacks. It finally does look as if they are cleaning up here ready to close down the chantier

That will be a job well-done.

Now that Chausiais has finished her dance and is moored up at her post, the rest of the boats here can move around.

Here is one of the little fishing boats heading out to sea. And just look at the waves, almost swamping the poor thing. And that’s only a hundred yards outside the harbour in the shelter of the sea wall.

Imagine what it’s going to be like out in the open sea. It gives you an idea of how the rough weather is right now.

Back here, I carried on with my project and that took me until well past lunchtime, but I didn’t want to stop until it was completed. And as I said earlier, it sounds pretty good to me.

After lunch I pushed on with the arrears. There were 50 photos of Leuven’s Christmas lights – clearly far too many to go on a blog page.

And so I sat down and quickly wrote a web page that features all of them, and you can see them at your leisure.

At that point I rather regrettably dozed off, and sat blot upright 10 minutes later at 15:50. late for my walk again.

Nevertheless I took myself out into the wicked wind to see what was going on.

Out at sea in the English Channel there was something moving around. I couldn’t see what it was so I took a random photo, hoping to be able to blow it up (the photo, not the object) back home to see what it might be.

It’s probably one of these small fishing boats that ply their trade out of the harbour, or else it’s Chausiais and she’s farther out at sea that I think she is.

Round the headland where the wind was even more fierce, I passed by the Chantier Navale and had a look to see what was going on.

Spirit of Conrad is still there up on her blocks, and the trawler that they winched out of the water yesterday is now up on blocks too and there are a couple of people working on her.

It doesn’t look as if she is going to be in there long either, I reckon, so we might be having another change of resident in early course.

Earlier this morning I mentioned that they were clearing up the site where they had been repairing the city walls.

Right now they are making rapid progress and they have a small lorry there, with the digger dumping loads of rubbish into the back.

And I don’t know what happened to the photo there, because it’s not one of my best. Not by a long way either.

After a coffee, I changed a light bulb (I’ve no idea why these IKEA LED lights aren’t lasting as long as I was expecting) and then cracked on amending Sunday’s blog.

Not all of the photos of the Traversee de Paris are in there because, as I explained yesterday, there were far too many, and I told you where to go if you want to see them.

Half-way through, I broke off because it was tea time. Stuffed pepper, it was, and it was delicious. Followed by rice pudding too that made it even better.

And then my evening walk.

And I cans afely say without fear of contradiction that I have never seen as many fishing boats out there in the English Channel as I did tonight.

In fact I counted a dozen in easy view, and there may even have been more if the white lights on the horizon weren’t St Helier.

It puzzles me because I’m sure that i’ve never seen as many right out there in earlier years.

But talking of easy views, there was a lovely easy view down one of the little alleys that leads into the Place Cambernon.

The Christmas lights give it quite a lovely effect, especially when they are constrained by the walls of the alleyway.

So having admired the lights I went on with my walk and had a little run over my usual little stretch of level ground. And I made it right to the top of the first ramp too although it really did take it out of me.

So now I’m home, Sunday’s blog is finished and so is this one. And I’m off to bed.

There’s a meeting tomorrow evening so I’m hoping to have a good day cracking on with things and getting myself up to date.

Some hope there!

Wednesday 18th December 2019 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about this meeting this evening.

To avoid offending your delicate sensibilities I shan’t say too much about it, except that I was picked up here at 18:45 and I was dropped back off at about 23:15. And they are already talking about a “part II too”.

There is however a silver lining to this. Chatting to the guy’s partner, it turns out that they have a pile of live music that the guy’s group recorded over various occasions and she’s going to send it to me. I sense another live concert in the making.

Last night, I remember that I was feeling quite tired quite early. I managed to fight off the sleep long enough to finish dictating the notes of the day but there was one thing that I needed to do before going to sleep.

And that was to go into the living room and light up the Christmas tree.

It was still up since last year – I hadn’t taken it down, for the simple reason that I hadn’t taken advantage of it. My medical appointment was on New Year’s Eve last year and I had no way of getting home afterwards so I stayed on in Leuven or a few days including Christmas Day.

For that reason, I decided to illuminate it early this year and take full advantage of it

And that reminds me. I had a look over my notes for the Christmas period to see how things were. Here I am today rejoicing that my blood count has crawled up to 9.2 from as low as 8.4 back at the end of June. And yet this time last year I was dismayed that it had dropped from 9.9 to 9.8.

How times have changed.

This morning I heard the first alarm and probably the second too, but instead of getting up I must have gone back to sleep because the third alarm awoke me. Drat and double-drat!

No nocturnal voyage either. I must have been dead to the world.

After the medication I sat down and cracked on with the photos. Now, the keywords are all done and saved to file. All 146, and by lunchtime too.

And that includes a couple of interruptions – firstly for breakfast and secondly to go into town for my dejeunette

There was some excitement too in the street around the corner.

Don’t ask me what was going on because I was about a minute too late to see it, but there was a cherry-picker there with its nacelle being retracted, and some people leaning out of the window of the nice house built into the walls.

It must have been something to do with them, I reckon, but I don’t know what.

There was some action down at the chantier navale too.

We’d seen the other day Aztec Lady being carried off my the mobile cradle and lowered into the water but as one boat goes another one arrives to take its place, like this fishing boat here.

There’s also a small yacht that has appeared in there too since I last had a good look. I’ll keep my eye on that one.

When I came back from town, I still had half an hour or so before lunch so I rewrote Monday’s blog and included the photographs of Monday and the dictaphone notes into it.

After lunch, I decided to carry on with the blog entries, but it set me wondering what to do about the …gulp … 22 photos from my walk around Paris on Sunday.

The answer was simple – “write a web page”. And so I set about doing it.

It wasn’t easy because I’d forgotten that Javascript doesn’t pass internet boundaries. I had to rewrite all of the Javascript files that I wrote back in October to make sure that all of the root directories are included in the file links.

So that’s now done and it’s now on line. Let me know if you spot any broken links – there’s a “contact me” box at the bottom right corner of your screen.

While I was out this morning, the postie had been by and left me a letter. Apparently I’d forgotten to pay a bill for my refuse collection so I decided to use my afternoon walk to go down to the estate agent and rectify the situation.

Not five minutes was I out of the building before I was buzzed by another low-flying light aeroplane.

It’s one of those lightweight things that I believe you can fly on some kind of basic restricted licence, although whether you can fly one so close to residential properties I really don’t know.

And I couldn’t see the registration either so I’ve no idea exactly what it is.

We’ve seen quite a few fishing boats just recently in the English Channel off the coast of Brehal-Plage. And there was another one out there today.

This one looks as if he has his net out too, so they are clearly giving it a go out there.

We’ve seen plenty of buoys out there too and we still haven’t worked out what they do and why they are there. If you look closely at the bottom right corner of the photo, you’ll see another one out there floating away to itself.

At the estate Agent’s I paid the bill and that was that. But something else too. With the events that are going on on the other side of the Channel right now, it won’t be too long before people start wondering whether I have the right to be in the country – the Estate Agents first of all as they have a statutory duty to check the bona fides of every resident.

A few months ago, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I managed to blag for myself a “residence permanent” identity card from the French Government. So while I was there I whipped it out and told them to photocopy it and put the copy in my file.

As I said the other day, the French love official documents and rubber stamps and all that kind of thing. Now that I have an official document – my identity card – I’m going to make sure that they all know about it.

Back at the apartment, having fought my way past my neighbours having a good chinwag at the door, there was another urgent task to perform. That was to dictate the notes for Project 007. There was enough time to do that and then take a shower before going off to this meeting at Brehal-Plage.

And now that that’s done and I’ve grabbed a bite to eat, I’m off to bed. It’s quite late and I have an early start tomorrow too. I hope that I can sleep well.

Tuesday 17th December 2019 – 10:30 am

Remember yesterday when I said that I had a day with no interruptions booked, and that I bet some basket comes along and spoils it.

Well, 10:30am. That’s when I had my first phone call, about a job that needed doing more-or-less immediately and with someone hanging on the phone while I made a start I could,’t put it off until a time more convenient to me.

That was followed at various times during the day of about half a dozen e-mails all of which needed some kind of immediate attention. At one point I was so engrossed that I almost missed the Post Office.

But let’s just say that after all of that, I didn’t manage to accomplish anything really of what I had set out to do, and that includes continuing the updating of the web pages, a task that I had missed off the list yesterday.

Last night wasn’t as early as I would have liked. I’d started a task – editing the photos – and I was intent on at least doing some of it. Again, not as many as I would have liked but at least a few of the enormous backlog.

For a change, I beat the third alarm quite comfortably and after the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes – with a little pause for breakfast.

It seems that I’d been on something of a travel last night too. I was recording programmes again for the radio (and when I say “again”, you’ll find eventually that I’d been dreaming about this a couple of times just recently). There was one that should be done every month and we were having to record four or five of them. We were doing them from different venues and there was some guy who was extremely interested in it and was hanging around watching and listening and making notes of what was going on. And there was another one that should have been done every month and that was a cricket broadcast and for some unknown reason they had done three broadcasts consecutively one after the other in the USA, about cricket matches in the USA and broadcast to the USA. Whether they were trying to get the USA to take up cricket, something like that I really don’t know. The chat with this guy who wanted to know what was going on was extremely interesting and I wish that I could remember more of what I was doing during the night.

Once the dictaphone notes were finished I began the photos. I thought that there were probably 100 or so. I never expected them to be as many as 146.

And with the continued spate of interruptions throughout the day it took me up to about 16:00 just to edit them. I haven’t written up the tabs yet

Despite everything that was going on today, I did manage to get out and about for my three walks today.

But wait a minute – what’s this? Here’s Spirit of Conrad right enough, and I know that Omerta has gone, and went a few days ago too, but where’s Aztec Lady?

She was here yesterday but she’s not there now. The ground’s all flat etc etc.

Actually, I do know what happened to Aztec Lady because I saw her go when I went out for my dejeunette at lunchtime.

Here she is, in the portable sling being carried down off her perch to the dry dock which, presumably with the tide being in, is now a wet dock.

And you’ll notice the steps there on the left. They are the stairs of the Escalier des Noires Vaches, my route down to the rue du Port that I take on my morning perambulation.

And here she is again.

Having been put back into the water after (presumably) the repairs have been completed, she’s off to find her berth again in the wet harbour, presumably somewhere over there between Victor Hugo and Charles Marie.

What I’ll have to do now is to go and hunt down her web site and see what trips are planned for the forthcoming season. I want to get back out to sea.

Maybe I should turn my attention elsewhere in that case.

Under cover of darkness it seems that Normandy Trader has sneaked into harbour. She’s now tied up in the usual place underneath the lifting crane which they use for unloading her and Thora.

Anyway, I was late. I was doing something – one of these urgent jobs – on the computer when I suddenly noticed the time. 11:40 – and there was a parcel to pick up from the Post Office and they close at 12:00.

Having picked up my parcel just in time, and picked up my dejeunette for lunch, I went down to the harbour to talk to the guys on Normandy Trader. I’d seen just now that they were about.

But badger me! Just as I got round to the quayside it was a case of “cast off for’rard, Sub Lieutenant Phillips” and they let go of the lines and set out for sea.

They must have heard me coming. That’s all I can say.

It’s really not my day, is it?

Lugging my heavy parcel I headed off back up the hill in the rue des Juifs and stood at the top, watching Normandy Trader heading off out of the harbour into the open sea with the Pointe de Carolles in the background.

Still, there will always be another day, I suppose. I went back to the apartment and carried on with the photos.

At about 15:50 I downed tools and took myself outside for my walk around the headland.

The wind had died down but there was some kind of weird sunlight effect yet again. The Ile de Chausey seemed to be bathed in some kind of bizarre blue light and everything seemed to be so clear. You could even see the colours of the houses quite clearly.

I’ve never seen it look like this before so I took a photo of it for the record.

While I was musing about the island, I was buzzed by a light aeroplane passing by overhead.

Because of the angle at which it’s flying, I couldn’t make out its registration number so I can’t tell you what it is. Anything that I might likely say would be pure guesswork and your guess is as good as mine.

And so I walked on, past the chantier navale and took the photo of Spirit of Conrad that I showed you earlier.

From up on the top of the cliffs I could see blue flashing lights in the distance so I took a long-distance photo to see what was going on.

It’s the day of the General Strike today and everyone seems to be demonstrating in the streets.

And that’s what gets on my wick. This strike is supposed to be against the Government yet the strikers are out there not interfering with the Government but interfering with the ordinary citizens.

Why should the ordinary citizens suffer because of all of this? It’s nothing to do with them at all.

Something else on my list of jobs to do was to start another project in order to keep myself well in advance. And so Project 007 is now under way. The music has been selected and tomorrow I’ll dictate the notes.

And then on Thursday I can make up the file. Three days per project – if I can keep that up it will be fine I reckon.

That took me up to tea time and I made the pizza that I had promised myself. It took ages too because I made a rice pudding too and that seemed to absorb all of the heat because although that was cooked to perfection, the pizza wasn’t. I’m really going to have to get a decent oven, I reckon.

Walk time afterwards and I was totally alone in the cold and darkness.

Except for the fishing boats. A whole line of them were in the English Channel on their way into port to unload their catch.

So having watched them for a while I carried on with my walk and did my run quite comfortably, although I was whacked at the end of it.

So tonight I really am going to have an early night. I’ve been ready for this for a while and I think that I ought to make an effort to catch up with my beauty sleep.

God knows I need it!

Wednesday 11th December 2019 – I WAS RIGHT!

This afternoon while I was out and about I noticed a movement out to sea, right out on the horizon near Jersey.

Not being too sure what it was – it might even have been a rock for all I knew – I took a photo of it with the big Nikon lens at full stretch, with the idea of blowing it up (the photo, not the object) back in the apartment.

Nevertheless I had a sneak preview on the camera’s monitor and although I couldn’t see clearly, it looked as if it had the outline or silhouette of Thora setting out to come here.

And sure enough, when I went for my evening walk tonight, I noticed that there anchored in the inner harbour tonight at her usual mooring place next to Marité and underneath the crane is Thora.

Crept in on the afternoon tide while my attention was elsewhere of course. There must be quite a lot goign on right now because she’s made quite a few trips over here just recently in rapid succession. It’s good for trade, that’s for sure.

As for me, I was right about having a late night. Long after any time that I wanted to be up and about, but can’t be helped. There’s a lot to do.

Eventually though I crawled off into the stinking pit. Straight into the Arms of Morpheus and also, simultaneously, off on a voyage or three.

One more I had this group of young escapees with me (have I had them with me before?) and there was one in particular being lodged at my house. Someone connected with a political party – the Labour Party – thought that this was inappropriate and the Party started to run this kind of campaign to get the situation changed (…now doesn’t this all sound remarkably familiar?…). Their tactics including running some kind of spurious article or poll or something in the local newspaper, including a photo, about some girl or other. This girl wasn’t any younger than the girl who was staying with me and was probably older too, but even so, that situation didn’t go down very well with me, particularly after I had read all of the articles about it. They were all completely irrelevant and so far from the truth even though they weren’t actually supposed to be about the particular girl but some other spurious character, but there was very little truth in any of it.
Yes, this all rings a big bell about a certain incident in the past, doesn’t it? They say that old sins cast long shadows!
However, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, I ended up a little later back on board a ship last night. It might have been The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, I dunno, I didn’t recognise it and even in the dream I didn’t recognise it. This voyage was all about dreams again and how my dreams were getting all mixed up about people and things and so on, in parallel to how mixed up these things seem to be being in life right at the very moment. For once even though the tracks were muddled up and I didn’t know which track went where, all that kind of thing I seemed to have some kind of better arrangement about sorting out these tracks. And what would I give in real life to have a method like that?
Later on I was playing football for Crystal Palace last night, don’t ask me why. There were high balls being pumped into the penalty area and I had to bring them down under control. Qite bizarrely, I was doing much better with the difficult ones rather than the English were doing with the easy ones, just like being a multi-million pound footballer or something, and isn’t that pretty much how I’ve been talking about Lee Trundle just recently after his one-man show for Rhydaman the other night?
And that’s not all either. There was also something going on about one of these extreme right-wing Fascists, something about the roundabout up near LeClerc and I’m not quite sure what. He was down by the Post Office in the Cours Jonville and a British policeman as it happened came over to talk to him about his book saying that if he was going to publish it he needed to submit it to magistrates first to be reviewed. 20 magistrates would look at it rather like they did with Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness to decide whether or not it was obscene or fit for publication. Apparently he’d been witnessed kicking some kind of Pakistani or immigrant, something like that but the immigrant had refused to press charges so the police were powerless, but they were intending to stop him somehow.
Ironically, when I was dreaming this, I remember thinking that I was actually awake so it wasn’t a dream so I had no need to dictate it. But then the alarm went off and awoke me, so I must have been asleep at the time.

Yet again I beat the third alarm quite comfortably and that led of course to an early medication and an early breakfast.

With all of that out of the way I sat down and with an air of determination I bashed out all of the 4-odd minutes of text for the live project that I’m preparing. I overran somewhat but it all fitted in so well that I had to do some editing of the music. And believe it or not, it sounds so much better now.

Talking of things sounding better, I listened a couple of times to the teaser that I had prepared yesterday. I decided that it needed some amendment so I re-did that too. That’s much better now but I’m convinced that I can make it even better still. But that’s a job for again.

All of that took me right up to almost lunchtime, would you believe, so I went for a nice long walk around the harbour, the long way round seeing as the gate was closed so the walkway was open, and went to pick up my dejeunette.

With the gates being closed and the tide being right out, the sluice hate is open. This discharges water slowly out of the inner harbour into the sea. Not enough to drain it of course, but to lower the level so that the harbour gates can be opened a good deal before high tide when the water level will of course rise again.

And with each tide being of a different height, some kind of regulation of the water level is necessary.

And have you noticed the tidal depth gauge by the way?

The way back was via the rue des Juifs as usual.

That gave me an opportunity to have a good look at the Christmas decorations that they have set up in the street. And … well … it’s not exactly going to set the town alight, is it? They could have done so much better than this, I reckon.

On the way back up the street I bumped into one of the guys who was at that strange meeting Monday evening. We had a little chat and then I came back here to eat my butties.

Feeling in a productive mood, I sat down after lunch and attacked another one of the projects I need to do. And now that it’s 23:30, I’ve just finished it and I’m having a listen to it.

All that remains is to send it off and then I’ll be right up to date for the New Year, and then I can get on and do stuff properly and make an attempt to catch up on this ever-increasing backlog.

As well as all of this, I had a little five minutes away on the new comfy chair. It’s doing the business, this is.

But I managed to pull myself together long enough to go out for my afternoon walk.

And if you think that I’m having trouble with the weather and the gale-force winds, then how about these two guys? They’ve decided to go out surfing at the Plat Gousset. And all I can say is “good luck to them” because you wouldn’t get me out there in any water less than 37°C. Not even if Castor and Pollux were in there ready to catch me.

But one advantage of the miserable weather was that there was no-one around so I could have an extra run without being observed.

The surfers weren’t the only ones out there taking to the waters.

We had one of the trawlers from the port out there too. Well, in fact there were probably a dozen of them at least but there was this one right outside the harbour on its way in. In view of the rough weather that it was having to face, I reckoned that it deserved to have its photo taken.

And on that note, I headed back into the apartment to carry on work.

But not quite straight away because there was something else that needed doing.

There’s the old Municipal building in the Place Cambernon that has been empty or thereabouts for as long as I’e known it, although just recently iy’s been covered in scaffolding, covered over and there have been workmen in there.

But today it seems that its cover has gone and we can actually see some of the work that they have been doing to the building. And it’s looking quite good. I can’t wait to see what they are going to do with it when it’s finished.

Later on this evening I went out for my evening walk – and another run too as there was no-one around. I have to keep up the pressure.

As well as Thora I was also looking to see what else I could see of the Christmas decorations. There’s a certain point where you can see right up the rue Couraye to the railway station and I reckoned that if the Christmas lights are going to be good from anywhere, they’ll be good from that place.

Seeing the lights and seeing Thora meant that I had to take a slightly different, longer route. And when I finished, I found that I was on 95% of my daily effort. And so I did another lap around the block to reach the 100%.

Quite right too, because I had a big tea tonight. A pile of steamed veg with falafel and cheese sauce. Totally delicious it was too, especially when followed down by some of Liz’s apple cake with sorbet.

So another very late night, and I do need to be up early. The indications are that my morning train to Paris might be going (well, it’s not shown as cancelled) and my train from Paris to Lille is running too. But from Lille to Brussels it isn’t. So the plan is that I cancelled the bus trip and I’m relying on the trains to get me to Lille at least (if I can’t negotiate a trip direct to Brussels).

If I can only get as far as Lille there may be some public transport to get me across the border to Mouscron or Harelbeke in Belgium, and then a local train to Brussels. But if I’m confounded here at Granville, I’m going to go in Caliburn. My appointment isn’t until 13:30 on Friday so there’s plenty of time to do it in two stages

So I’m off to bed. I need to be ready for my adventures tomorrow.

surfers plat gousset granville manche normandy france

Tuesday 10th December 2019 – I HAVE OFTEN SAID …

… “and you’ll say more often too” – ed … that it is really nice to speak to people, especially friends. And that friends always come first before almost everything.

So despite the amount of work that I have to do and how much of it is piling up and how I decided that I would crack on and have a really good whack at some of the outstanding backlog, then spending … errr … 2 hours 16 minutes and 34 seconds instead talking to Rosemary on the telephone was nevertheless quite enjoyable, even if it isn’t getting the baby bathed.

Not that I’m complaining. Far from it in fact … “perish the thought” – ed … but I seem to be going one pace forward and ending up two paces backwards right now.

Last night was another late-ish night as I was working on project 005 and trying to sort out the mess that I’d made of the vocals. But seeing as I was getting nowhere, in the end I finally gave up and went to bed.

Not much time in bed last night – probably not more than four hours in the end, but still time to go on a voyage of some description. I was out and about being placed into a group of people for some reason or other. They were going through the names of the groups and there was one group with a name like Anvil Brown and the Red Shoes, something like that. I knew that there was a girl in charge of this group and running it so I immedately opted to go into this particular one. I went over to see her to present myself and it was at that point that I awoke.
Back asleep, a little late I was doing some photography with a group of young girls. I was wanting to do it my way instead of the way that some interfering busybody was trying to have me do it and which was totally wrong in my opinion, but I awoke pretty smartly there too so I’ll never know how that one ended either.
But strangely, these are two other circumstances in which I can see parallels with actual events, and it’s rather worrying.

Not so worrying that it’s disturbing my sleeping and waking patterns though. I managed to struggle out of bed before the third alarm and deal with the medication issues followed by breakfast, and then I attacked the vocals for my project.

In the end I gave it up as a hopeless task and re-dictated them. And with a little judicious “cut and paste” I was able to make some kind of progress. It took ages though before it finished and I do have to say that I learnt quite a lot while I was doing it.

There was an interruption though from a text message. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had a message yesterday evening telling me that my train for Thursday had been cancelled due to industrial action. And so I booked a seat on the bus last night. And so today I had a message to say that my train has now been restored, as you might expect.

There was just about enough time for me to have a shower and clean up before heading to town. And HOORAY!!!! I’ve reached my target weight – a weight that I never thought that I would ever see again. But I’m not going to stop. I’ll keep on pushing my fitness regime. 12 kilos in 5 months means that in about 33 months I’ll be gone completely.

At the Grand Café I met this musician guy who showed me his songs. Luckily there are no glaring errors like in Alquin’s Mountain Queen where Dirk Franssen invites a girl to his house to “see the Morning Glory”, although I did reckon that he should change “the Poles are melting” to “the Ice is melting” in one of his songs. After all, Poland has a tough enough time as it is.

For my trouble I was given a coffee and a CD of this guy’s band, and from there I walked up to the railway station to chat to the clerk about the trains.

I had to wait half an hour for her to come back from lunch, so that gave me plenty of time to have a nosy around the station to see what was going on. And the short answer was “nothing”. There wasn’t a soul about and the train that does the route Caen – Granville – Rennes, a Bombardier B82500, was parked up and abandoned.

Something similar to the Marie Celeste, I reckoned.

Granville is also home to several of the GEC Alstom Regiolis trains too – the ones that perform the service between Granville and paris and on which I travel.

But they were all down there parked up in the sidings and slearly had no intention whatever of moving today either. This strike looks pretty much complete.

Eventually the girl in the ticket booth came back. And when she did, she knew even less than I did. “We won’t know until tomorrow” she said.
“What time?” asked our hero.
“After 17:00” she said. So that’s a lot of help then, isn’t it?

La Mie Caline for the dejeunette was next, and then the doctor’s. It pays to be on the good side of your doctor because when I asked him about a prescription for a ‘flu jab, “ohh, I’ve got some stuff here” and gave it to me on the spot.

On my way down into town I’d noticed that Normandy Trader was in the harbour again.

I was pushed for time (as usual) just then but now I don’t have anything particular organised for the rest of the day so I went to pay a courtesy call.

But I didn’t have very much success at all. I shouted and shouted but there was no answer and so seeing as it’s inappropriate to go on board without an invitation, I wandered off and I’ll go back down there again in early course.

Although the weather was failrly miserable, I decided to come the long way home all the way round the Pointe du Roc.

That route would take me past the chantier navale that we had seen in the dark last night and I could see how things were doing in there. As we can see, Aztec Lady is there in the foreground and in the background behind it we have Spirit of Conrad.

Both of them are still there receiving attention although there doesn’t seem to be anyone about down there just now.

From higher up the hill we can see just how rough the seas are this afternoon.

There’s quite a heavy sea out there right now and La Grande Ancre – for I’m sure that it is she – has a battle on her hands as she fights her way across the baie de Mont St Michel towards the harbour.

And you can see how the weather has closed in across the bay at St Pair sur Mer

For a change just recently, I managed to make it home without falling over. I wonder where it all went wrong yesterday.

The first part of the afternoon after lunch was spent working on this teaser for this project of mine. That’s all done and dusted now and you can hear it here.

That led up to my afternoon walk time in the rain and the wicked wind. This storm that we’re having is blasting just about everything that gets in its way.

The tide is still quite a way out but even so you can see the mess that it’s making of the sea wall down here. Imagine what it must be like at high tide when the waves are at the peak of their force.

I wouldn’t want to be standing right there at that particular moment, that’s for sure.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my photos are being constantly photo-bombed by the flocks of the feathered and flying creatures that live around here.

While I was admiring the scenery, another one came flying by right in the area where I didn’t want it to be so in order to humour the bird I took a photo of it with nothing else in the image at all.

Now perhaps it will go away and leave me alone to get on and do other things

Although the tide wasn’t right in, there was still enough of it in for the fishing boats to be able to tie up at the quay by the fish processing plant to unload their catch. It was quite useful to dredge out a little channel there so that the boats would have more time.

The cranses up on top are working full-tilt winching up the catch to the processing plant and to the large commercial vehicles that will take the catch off to market somewhere.

But underneath where the private and small-scale operators unload their catch, they are quite busy too. In fact, it’s a very busy port with a lot of fishing activity going on.

Mind you, it must have been a magnificent sight down there 50 years ago with all of the deep-sea trawlers that went out to the Grand Banks, and the working railway line down to the port and the trains that took the catch away.

Apart from that there wasn’t a lot going on, although I did have to give directions to a passing motorist and then I came back here.

One of the things that I’m doing is to work on a live project for 27th December, so I made a start. And despite it being in theory quite straightforward, it wasn’t ‘arf complicated because the raw material that I had to work with was full of holes. You’ve no idea the lengths to which I had to go to in order to make some reasonable patches, but in the end it sounds something like a live project – all 56 minutes and 4 seconds of it, so I need just under 4 minutes of talking. That will be a challenge.

Tea was the leftovers from Sunday evening, with a few oven chips to lengthen it out. Totally delicious it was too

When I went out for my walk later in the evening, I noticed that there had been a change in the wind outside this evening. It had gone from being ridiculous to violent.

At times it was a real struggle to make any headway, so I didn’t hang about outside for too long. Just long enough to take a couple of photos including this one of Donville-les-Bains in the dark with that big floodlight thing shining away in the background.

But despite the wind I did my lap around as usual, even managing the full length of my run, and into a headwind too. Even I was impressed with that.

Rosemary rang me as soon as I returned home and now having updated my notes, I’m off to bed. All that I had planned to do this evening, well, it’ll have to be done some other time.

Story of my life, I suppose.

storm waves on rocks granville manche normandy france

fog at sea english channel fishing boat granville manche normandy france

storm high winds waves sea wall port de granville harbour manche normandy france

normandy trader port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boats unloading port de granville harbour manche normandy france

donville les bains night granville manche normandy france

christmas lights place cambernon granville manche normandy france

Monday 9th December 2019 – I HAVE NEVER EVER MET …

… so many people so gifted with the art of expanding so little thought into so many words.

It’s true that I have said this before, but here I am saying it again under different circumstances. Like at another one of these volunteer meeting things.

Following my exploits at that meeting with the kids from Greenland the other day, I was invited to take part in this twinning committee because “my mother tongue is English and I speak French pretty well”

And so there in the upstairs room in the Grand Café they were going on about “we could do … (X, Y and Z) … but the stuff is in English so if only we had someone to translate it into French” – and there I was sitting right next to and right opposite the two people having this discussion who both had totally forgotten that I had translated from the English to the French at that meeting the other week. “There’s someone here who could translate it for us” said another person, and pointed to … another (French) woman sitting at the corner of the table.

And in order to introduce myself to the others, I had to make a little speech of introduction to the rest of the gathering, so I began with “there are six people in Greenland who I know really well …” and named them. And a few minutes later someone said to me “surely you know … (Mr X) and (Mrs Y) and (Master Z) and (his pet gibbon)” who were not among the people whose names I had mentioned.

Obviously, people not taking the slightest bit of interest or notice of what I have been doing or saying.

The conversation carried on about not very much for two hours, except for who could speak the longest and say the least. I was effectively shunted off into obscurity, musing to myself that these are the kind of meetings that should be held standing up, outside, in the pouring rain. And then all of the work would be accomplished in probably a tenth of the time, and much more effectively too.

But it’s my own fault. I paid the €15:00 membership fee as soon as I arrived. Had I held out until the end before waving the folding stuff about, I imagine that they might have made more of an effort to engage with me until they had managed to chisel the cabbage out of my sweaty little mitt.

This morning though was just as bad. Apparently I had to go with someone to interview someone in English. I thought that we were doing that a couple of weeks ago but it was merely a telephone call. Today it looked like the real thing but when we arrived, it was simply a case of going for a meal with this British guy with the purpose of arranging a date for the interview.

It’s all complete, total and utter chaos and what made it worse was that when we were outside this restaurant the British guy and I were having a chat and the French guy who was trying to set up this interview said afterwards to me “if only we had the gear hear to record that. It was exactly what I wanted!”

Had I not needed him to drive me home from Avranches, I would have beaten him to death on the spot.

That’s not the worst of it either. The way to do this interview is to prepare a list of questions. I ask them of this English guy and we record the answers. We then superimpose a French person asking the questions into the recording and then I do a translation into French with a nice British accent and it’s overdubbed so you can hear the British guy talking in the background but hear the French (with accent) over the top.

It’s such a simple thing to do and I can do it all in half an hour here at my desk but the guy who thinks that he’s running the show (as distinct from the guy who is supposed to be running it) feels that he needs to be there and to do it in a way that is about 10 times more complicated and gives nothing like the same effect.

As I’ve said before … “and you’ll inevitably say again!” – ed … the lack of professionalism is really annoying me. And these are hours of my life that I won’t ever get back and I don’t have all that many to spare.

The proof of all of this was that I was up until quite late last night working, trying to catch up with the arrears of work (some hope).

And just as I was about to go to bed the gale got up, we were hit by a tempest and as I opened the bedroom door there was an enormous flash of lightning – just by way of a spontaneous greeting to me.

Despite the late night I was off on my travels last night, with Batty Bat (and it’s been YEARS since she’s accompanied me on a nocturnal voyage) and TOTGA. I’ll spare you all of the gory details because you’re probably eating a meal right now and I don’t want to turn your stomachs. But what was surprising about this particular journey is that encompassed several events that have or had a parallel with events that have or had taken place in real life and one event in particular that has been going through my conscious mind for the last week or so. It was quite surprising when I heard it on the dictaphone.

With a Herculean effort I was out of bed before the third alarm and after breakfast I attacked the outstanding project that needed to be done by today.

And ohh me miseram … “well, puer amat mensam!” – ed … I miscalculated the timing and ran 5 minutes short of my hour. A frantic search found a piece of music exactly the correct length, and then I needed a vocal explanation to go with it. Which I recorded incorrectly.

Too late now for my shower, I shot off for my meeting at the Centre Agora.

One thing about being late for my meeting is that had I been on time five minutes earlier I would have missed this glorious light. I’ve spoken … “at great lengths” – ed … on several previous occasions, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, about the peculiar lighting effects that we can sometimes have around here and we’ve seen a few examples, but there has been nothing quite like this one.

This is one of the best that I have ever seen.

At the Centre Agora I made another suggestion but this one suffered the same fate as the other suggestions that I have made – viz kicked into the long grass. And then this abortive drive to Avranches with people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

Back here again I cracked on and finished the project that needed finishing and then I attacked the following one that I had already prepared. The music was ready and just needed the sound so I dictated that and began to edit it when i discovered that I had forgotten a track.

Down into town for this other meeting and on the way back I had a text message – “your train on Thursday is cancelled due to a strike”. So much for that!

On the way back home after the meeting I went the long way round in order to clock up the kilometres and also to see what was going on in the Chantier Navale.

We stall have our three boats in there – Spirit of Conrad, Omerta and Aztec Lady but never mind them for a moment. Just admire the photograph.

It’s quite true that I’ve taken many photos that have come out far better than this one, but the fact is that this one was taken with the little Nikon 1 and if it could take photos like this all the time I wouldn’t be so reluctant to rely on it.

Whenever I go out on foot for any distance I take that one with me because it fits nicely in the pocket, but its night-time photos have usually been something of a disappointment.

With my train being cancelled, the first task when I reached home was to see what Flixbus had to offer me.

Nothing at all from Avranches, but there is a bus going from Caen at … errr … 08:00 that morning. So it looks as if Caliburn and I will be having an early start. The station car park at Caen is quite expensive but I’ll be badgered if I’m going to leave him in the street for four days.

But something happened to me today. Walking up the hill towards my meeting at the Centre Agora this morning, I suddenly came over all queer. And then tonight, I had another fall. Luckily onto a raised grass surface so I did myself no damage. But what’s happening here?

Tea was the rest of the leftover curry with rice and veg followed by the last of the pineapple with sorbet. Now I’m carrying on working as I listen to a “Traffic Live” concert. A brilliant band, Traffic, especially live.

Tomorrow I have a couple of things to do in town as well as cashing in my rail tickets, but I want to finish this project on which I’m working as well as doing another one at least before I go.

There’s tidying up to do too, so I’m hoping to be on form. But I doubt if I’ll have an early night. Far too much to do!

EPIC HALL

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