Tag Archives: fishing

Thursday 16th July 2020 – TODAY WAS …

… not much better than the last couple of days. In fact in some respects it was worse because I missed the third alarm yet again.

So while you admire the photos of tonigh’s sunset, I’ll tell you that I only missed the alarm by 5 or so minutes, but a miss is as good as a mile, as we all know. What didn’t help was that all through the night I was awoken by some wicked attacks of cramp that really had me in pain. I could have done without those, right enough.

After the medication I checked the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

Yes I’m not too sure about very much of last night’s dream at all except that I was in Belgium and I’d been out somewhere. I’d ended up on the frontier with France right on the point of a headland by the sea. There was a river that divided the two countries and you could see everything that was happening in France and I took a few photos. Then I went back to tell everyone where I’s been but people weren’t all that concerned or interested in what I was doing.

A little later on I was playing football, playing central defence. I’d gone into a kind of forward attacking role to play the ball but I’d made a bit of a mess of it and the ball had got behind me with three attackers so I was running back after it but I just blew up – ran out of steam completely and could hardly move while I was chasing the ball and chasing these players
After another attack of cramp I went back to sleep and found myself on the playing field at the back of where we used to live in Shavington. There was the upper football pitch and the lower football pitch and I was on the upper one. everyone else was on the lower one and no-one was coming along to play with me so in the end I went down to join the others. But there were many more than 11-a-side there so I reckoned that one team ought to wear chasubles (I’m dreaming in French again) so that we would know who is on which team.

Having disposed of all of that I turned my attention to the photos from July 2019. Another 50 or so bit the dust today which is good news, although I haven’t advanced very far. Right now we are in a fleet of zodiacs zooming around Kangerluluk Fjord on the east coast of Greenland. At this rate I’m never going to get to the North-West Passage, never mind New Brunswick.

It was shopping today too so I had a shower and a weigh-in. And my weight is still under my first target weight which is good news, I suppose.

And nice and clean, I changed the bedding and did a machine-load of washing. It’s all clean and nice-smelling right now which is good. I like the conditioner that I bought the other week.

So off into town I set, having a quick chat with a neighbour as I left.

But I didn’t get very far. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there’s a film being made here just now. The seem to have transformed the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs into some kind of Government office and it was all floodlit this morning.

They must be filming something right at this moment, I reckon. And for that reason we are not allowed to approach the site.

My route into town continued. And as I looked over the wall here I could see that down in the harbour “Old Faithful” is nack.

Chausiais must have moved pretty smartly this morning from the mooring underneath the crane because Normandy Traders, one of the little freighters from Jersey, is now in port.

The gates havent long been open so I imagine she sneaked in on the morning tide to drop off a load of shellfish from the Jersey Seafood Co-operative and pick up a load of material.

On I pushed to the Rampe du Monte Regret where I pictured a bizarre kind of house removal.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in Brussels we had portable lifts for all of this, but here apparently not. They were hauling up the stuff by hand with a couple of ropes.

That must have been hard work but it’s not a new experience for me. When I was younger I did all kinds of furniture removals like this, but that was in the days before Health and Safety regulations were in force.

Making my way into town, I called at the Post Office and sent off my letter – the one that I had written yesterday. Then I walked on to LIDL.

It beats me really why I went because I didn’t want to buy very much at all – and for a good reason too as regular readers of this rubbish will find out in a couple of days.

In the end, the grand total of €6:12 or something like that was what I spent.

On the way back down the Rue de la House I encountered this trange phenomenon – some people spraying the streets. That intrigued me greatly so I went to make further enquiries.

On the side of their little vehicle was a little sticker “weedkiller with boiling water”. So that’s what they are doing them. Pouring boiling water on the weeds.

How effective is that? I asked myself. It’s better for the environment than Agent Orange, that’s for sure. But does it really work that well?

On the way back I called at the vegetable shop and bought two (yes, two) carrots. For tea tonight and tomorrow. I won’t be needing any more for a while after that.

And so I headed on home up the Rue des Juifs.

Normandy Trader was still there being worked on. They were loading her up quite rapidly so it looks as if they are pushing to have her out of the harbour and on her way as soon as the gates open this afternoon

Back here I carried on with the photos for a while and then I had something else to do. There are a couple of cunning plans running round my head right now, one or two of which I have put in motion already.

One of the people approached actually replied (and another one did later this evening too) so I decided to push my luck and see if fortune would carry me onwards. That meant replying to the mail with a certain amount of jen ne sais quoi and seeing where we go with this.

But it’s not for right now, although it makes sense to push along while it’s fresh in people’s minds.

After lunch I started on my two courses. Firstly the song-writing course. And by the time that I knocked off I’d done the first week.
It didn’t teach me anything new but that’s not a problem. There is plenty of time and I have great hopes for this.

After I’d finished I went for my afternoon walk around the walls.

The tourist season is well under way as we can imagine right now. Joly France is keeping quite busy, taking day-trippers on a couple of laps around the bay as she waits for the tides to turn so she can go back to the Ile de Chausey and pick up those whom she dumped on there earlier.

They do a lot of work in the tourist season, do the two Joly France boats. This is the older one, with the smaller windows, the larger upper deck and without the step in the stern.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish that I’d been out here 10 minutes earlier.

There is a huge load of small boats moored just off the headland as if there is a shoal of sea-bass in the vicinity. It seems to me that anyone who can hold a rod in his hand is out there trying his luck at catching supper.

I learnt the following day that it was in fact a shoal of mackerel that had appeared off the headland

And what confusion it must have caused to everyone when Joly France came round the corner at a rapid rate of knots. Scattered them like ninepins, I reckon.

Carrying on my walk around the walls, I came to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

The tide is rushing in right at this moment and the massed crowds of grockles have now retreated up to the sea wall to keep their feet out of the sea.

The tide isn’t a particularly high tide today – a coefficient in the 40s – so they might be lucky and stay dry. But it would be interesting to see the outcome of all of this if the tide does comme in higher than they are expecting.

And not just on land or in the sea was it busy.

It goes without saying that there was plenty going on in the air this afternoon too. The Birdmen of Alcatraz are out there in force swooping around like a bunch of vultures.

The seagull here is taking a great deal of exception to this particular birdman. It spent a good 10 minutes or so buzzing him, presumably to get him to clear off. Unfortunately I didn’t have tile to stay and see how it ended but my money was on the seagull.

And not just boats out on the sea either. There were plenty of swimmers there too.

The diving platform was crowded with people too and others in the sea swimming out that way to take part in the sports. This young boy here showed us quuite an acrobatic somersault into the water.

He received a good 4.9 for artistic impression from the bystanders but he lost a few points on the technical merit. His entry into the water could have been better.

But at least he entered the water quite rapidly. This young boy here was not quite so keen.

The onlookers on the cliff were urging him on, chanting “sautez, sautez” but he didn’t budge. A couple of the people on the platform were also counting him down to enter the water too.

Eventually the young boy in the previous photo pushed his way to the front and leapt in. This seemed to galvanise the other one here into action and he leapt in immediately afterwards, to a loud cheer and round of applause from the onlookers.

Round I went to the Square Maurice Marland I went to check on my baby seagull but he seems to have definitively gone now.

Something else that has gone is Normandy Trader. She must have cleared off the moment that the harbour gates opened because there at the loading bay in her place in Thora, the other Jersey freighter.

You might recall seeing in an earlier photo some shrink-wrapped boats on the back of a lorry at the side of the quay. They are now being loaded into Thora ready to go to the Channel Islands.

And Marité is back in port too after her adventures just recently.

Having spent a few minutes looking at the loading, I carried on with my walk.

And there are changes in the Place Cambernon too today. It looks as if a little market of sorts has sprung up in the square. Only a couple of stalls but it’s a start, I suppose. We could do with more like this in the neighbourhood

There is the pizza van of course. That’s here on Thursdays too so it looks like that’s the day for everyone to come to the old town just here. I wonder if the market will expand over time. I hope so.

On the way back I was walking along the elevated section of the walls when I noticed that the filming at the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs had finished.

They were packing up the equipment so I took a photo to show you what was going on.

Back here I started the other course – “building an interactive website”. And unfortunately and depressingly, i crashed out yet again. Another good hour or so on the chair, well away with the fairies.

As a result I didn’t do half as much as I liked, so I’ll have to push on tomorrow as it’s going to be rather a busy day for me

There was the hour on the guitars, followed by tea. A lentil and potato curry out of the freezer followed by apple crumble.

Afterwards I went out for my run. And I don’t know why because my heart isn’t in it right now.

It’s knowing that I had a collapse in health a couple of weeks ago on the Spirit of Conrad that’s done it. I can feel the difference right now and it isn’t very nice.

But anyway I made it a good way up the hill before I shuddered to a halt, and then walked the remaining 100 metres to the corner. From there I ran on down past the itinerant to the clifftop.

There were a few people around but nothing at all happening so I walked across the lawn to the other side and then ran on down the next leg of my run.

From that rest point I could see that there was something going on at the ferry terminal. Joly France is there of course but the lifeboat is tied up next to it.

It beats me why it would be there. The only thing that I can think of is that it’s been out on a job and missed the tide for going back into the port de plaisance where it lives.

The next stage to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord I have to do in two legs these days. The strain is definitely getting to me these days, that’s for sure.

At the viewpoint I watched the sun go down, and you have already seen the photos of that. But once more there were the crowds on the beach enjoying the good weather (it was a really nice evening).

Having seen the sun go down, I ran on back to the apartment to write up my notes. And now they are done I’m going to put away last week’s washing that I took off the clothes airer and then go to bed.

It will be a long day tomorrow so I want to be on form for it. I hope that I don’t have another attack of the cramps like last night.

Sunday 12th July 2020 – MY BREAD …

… seems to have gone somewhat berserk today.

This isn’t cooked. This is it on its second rise in the windowsill. It’s totally overflowing the bread mould and about to expand onto the windowsill.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my previous attempts at bread-making. I’ve never ever had bread perform quite like this. But then again it’s new flour and new yeast, and that must make a difference.

So while you admire this evening’s sunset, let me tell you that the bread rose a darn sight better than I did this morning. Although for a Sunday, 10:00 is quite an acceptable time for me to be up and about.

There’s some stuff on the dictaphone too so I must have been somewhere during the night. Unfortunately what with one thing and another I forgot to transcribe the notes today.

You’ll have to check back tomorrow to see where I’ve been. I for one can”t wait to find out!

No time like the present! First thing that I did was to mix the bread dough. 600 grammes of flour and a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds seeing as they were reasonably handy. A couple of teaspoons of salt in there too, all mixed together.

Meanwhile I’d heated 400ml of water to about 30 degrees or so, added a little sugar to activate the yeast, and then a sachet of yeast.

That went onto one side until there was a really good froth on top of the water to show that the yeast was working, and then tipped into the flour and thoroughly mixed together.

The thing about bread dough is that you know when it’s exactly right. It makes a lovely elasticky ball that no longer sticks to anything and takes all of the floury mess off your hands.

It’s something of a “trial and error” procedure so you need a bit of flour and a bit of water stabding by in case your mixture is either too wet or too dry.

When it’s done, you stick it on one side under a cloth for a couple of hours and let it do its stuff.

And while it was doing its stuff I was busy editing some more photos from my trip on the Spirit of Conrad. There are about 400 of those and if I’ve done a quarter I’ll be lucky.

For lunch I had breakfast – muesli with soya milk and some grape juice.

Following that, I made some pizza dough – basically the same recipe as the bread dough except that I add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. 500 grammes of that is enough for three pizza bases.

That went on one side while I greased my bread mould and put the bread dough into it. That went onto the side next to the pizza dough.

Sunday is the day when I go for my very long afternoon walk and end up in town for my treat of the week – my vegan banana sorbet.

But with it being such a delicious hot day and all of the bright sunlight that goes with it, it had brought out the people in droves.

And no question of Social Distancing either. Crowds congregating as they wish. Anyone would think that this virus had passed and wasn’t coming back. But several hundred infections and several deaths every day ought to give someone a clue about what is happening.

At least, out at sea, social distancing of a sort can be maintained.

And how many boats did you count out there in this photo? I haven’t counted them but there must be several dozen all jostling about in the English Channel in between the mainland and the Ile de Chausey.

We have yachts, speedboats, zodiacs, everything. You name it and it’s out there somewhere having a splash around at sea. And if I had the chance, I would be joining them.

But it was a really beautiful day for photography.

The sky was hot, the air was clear and there wasn’t a trace of sea mist anywhere. It had all been burnt off. And so the view out to the Ile de Chausey was spectacular.

It’s not every day that you cans ee the colours of the buildings on the island as clearly as this. The lighthouse is there on its peak just to the left of centre, and the semaphore station is the square building on the ridge to the right.

And it wasn’t just the Ile de Chausey that stood out really well in the afternoon sun.

The island of Jersey was looking quite spectacular too today. We can actually see the houses at St Helier too – and that’s at a distance of about 58 kilometres away.

Unfortunately we can’t see if either Thora or Normandy Trader are on their way to pick up that load of timber that’s still on the quayside here awaiting collection

And down the coast the weather is just as good too.

We saw yesterday the outline of the lighthouse away down the coast on Cap Fréhel but today we can even see the the Cape itself away on the extreme right of the image here.

As for the thing that’s farther over to th right, I’m still undecided as to what that might be. It could be a yacht or it could be one of the lighthouses off the coast of St Malo but I really have no idea.

Anyway, leaving that to one side for the moment I carried on with my walk along the top and then down the stairs to the viewpoint right at the end of the Pointe du Roc.

And here’s something that I don’t recall seeing before – or maybe I do, I dunno. A nice flat piece of concrete in the steps leading down, with a little design in it and dated 1943.

Probably a souvenir from when they were building the Atlantic Wall and there must be a story behind this if only I knew what it was. I wonder who inscribed it here.

As it happened, I’d gone down there for a special purpose.

While I was descending the steps I noticed a huge swarm of seagulls on the rocks and riding the waves and I hadn’t a clue why. My first thought was that they might have been fishing but I didn’t notice any bird catch anything – rather like my local fishermen.

It wasn’t as if they were sleeping either. There was plenty of activity going on down there, so it beats me.

But talking of fishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … one of the rocks out there had a fisherman or two perched thereupon.

Jusding by the writing on the back of the tee-shirt – BELGIUM – they are probably grockles come to disturb the peace of the local inhabitants.

For a good few minutes I stood and watched them too but, true to form, they didn’t pull anything out of the water. As I have said … “on many, many occasions” – ed … I’ve yet to actually see any fishermen actually catch anything there

My walk continued along the old road that eventually comes out by the chantier navale.

And dodging the swarming masses I finally made it down there to see what was going on. We still have six boats in there. I know that you can only see five but the sixth is in front of the two on the extreme left and you can’t see it.

There were massive crowds too on the quayside around here. Holiday season is in full swing and it was definitely a case of “dodge the covid-carrier” around here today.

The gates across the harbour entrance were closed so it was possible for me to walk across the top to the other side.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we saw a rack of portacabins over here for some reason or other – I never did find out why. But they have gone now so whatever they were doing is finished.

Having dealt with that I walked through the port and then around the town in a glorious figure of 8, ending up at the ice cream parlour for my Sunday ice cream

But not before I was buzzed once more by yet another low-flying object. A microlight, or ULM as they call them around here, was flying by overhead disturbing the peace.

So having picked up my ice-cream I headed off once more down the Rue Lecampion and down the Rue du Port

The new car park down there is depressing me completely. A solid mass of tarmac without one blade of grass or any other greenery What a shame.

And that thought brought me along to one of the fishing boats here. Do you notice the buoys and the flags at the stern? Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve often wondered about those, but now I know.

The flags are an indication that a casier such as a lobster pot, is at the other end on the sea bed. And the round buoys can either serve that purpose too or otherwise they might be mooring buoys

A couple of our more well-know trawlers are in the harbour today.

Coelacanthe and Tiberiade probably belong to the same company, seeing as they carry the same livery, but they are in fact different types of boat.

Coelacanthe seems to be a bigger boat, with more solid superstructure at the side rails and with a different array on the cabin roof.

One of these days I’ll have to blag myself a ride out to sea in one of them.

Rosemary called me while I was out so I arranged to phone her when I returned home.

Back here, by now we’ve already seen what has become of the bread in the bread mould, and the pizza dough has expanded dramatically too.

In the meantime I phoned Rosemary back and we had a chat. And I worked out a cunning plan, more of which anon

So while the oven was heating up I prepared an apple crumble. The bread went into the oven when it was hot, followed by the crumble. But there was plenty of crumble mix left over so with another apple, I made a small apple crumble too. There will be enough for ages, I reckon, like that.

Once the bread and the crumble was under way I split the pizza dough into 3. One I rolled out and shaped to fit in the pizza tray and the other two were rolled in olive oil, wrapped in greaseproof paper and put in a plastic bag in the freezer for another time.

Having left the pizza on its tray for half an hour, I then went and prepared it ready for the oven.

When I took out the bread and the crumble, I put the pizza in and let it cook for half an hour. And this is the result.

The pizza base had risen to perfection – it really had – and the toppings of course were the usual delicious items. I have to say that this was the best pizza that I have ever cooked – and I’ve cooked plenty of them, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

As for the bread and the apple crumble, then the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

And the eating didn’t take place tonight because I was rather full after my pizza and i’m trying to cut down on what I eat. So I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

One thing though – with all of this cooking there was a whole pile of tidying up and washing up to do. Not my favourite occupation at all.

later on, I went out for my evening run, dropping off the bin bag in the bin as I went.

With a little effort I managed to extend my run up the hill another 50 metres again, and then having walked up to the corner, i ran down to the clifftop.

Nothing much going on there so I walked across the lawn to the other side. On the viewpoint was a couple watching the evening sunset. And quite right too because, as you have already seen, it really was beautiful again tonight.

The next stage of my run took me along the clifftop but there was nothing going on there very much.

We did however have another case of the different colours in the water.

And while I was on the train the other day i was reading the account of the journey of Vilhjalmur Stefansson to the Arctic coast of Canada between 1908 and 1912

Of the Mackenzie River he wrote “The huge volume of fresh water in the spring (the river usually opens between the fifth and twenty-fifth of May) not only melts away the sea ice, but also by its current drives away any that happens to be floating about, so that none but the strongest ones from seaward can fill the immediate vicinity of the delta with ice. The volume of fresh water is so large, tluit the whaling ships in passing outside of Mackenzie Bay take water for cooking and drinking purposes that has not a taint of brackishness
even where land is not in sight from the masthead”.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury and having recovered my breath, I ran on round to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

We’ve already seen the sunset out to sea and while there were no picnickers this evening, there were still a few people on the beach.

Crowds up here watching the sunset too so I didn’t hang around for long after the sun had gone down. I ran on home to write up my notes.

And having done that, much later than I intended, I’m now off to bed. It’s been a long day and I deserve a good rest.

Thursday 9th July 2020 – ANYONE CARE TO …

… guess who this is heading our way this evening?

While I was out on my evening walk I noticed it way out to sea and so I took a photo of it with the aim of enlarging it when I returned home to make sure that I was correct.

And just in case you haven’t already gathered, I’m now back home in my cosy little apartment in Granville after my journey back home on the train from Leuven

However, as it happens, I didn’t need to wait until I returned home to find out, because as I was running back home after my trip to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord, into the harbour she came.

Sure enough, it’s our old friend Normandy Trader coming in from Jersey.

And while her loading bay isn’t particularly full this evening, there are quite a few passengers – maybe as many as a dozen – standing on the deck just in front of the wheelhouse.

It seems that she’s as busy doing these repatriations as her friend Thora

As for me, I was doing my own repatriation this morning, heading for home after my stay in Belgium.

The alarm went off this morning at 05:30 and within minutes I was up and about. I made my sandwiches, packed my bags and so on and was well on my way having dropped the key off at the office.

By 06:00 I was halfway down the road towards the railway station and that’s always a good sign.

When I was here last they were digging up the surface of the Martelarenplein to make some kind of underground parking and I was intrigued to see how they were doing with it

But as it happens, it’s all well fenced off and it looks in any case as if they are now at the stage where they are starting to resurface it. It seems that I have missed all of the excitement.

It was about 06:05 when I walked onto the station platform.

There’s a stopping train that goes out at 06:17 but an Intercity non-stop goes at 06:24 so I decided to wait for that. So while I was waiting I admired the freight trains that were passing through the station – dozens of them.

This locomotive is quite interesting. It’s one of the Bombardier Traxx F140 locomotives, although I can’t tell from here which model.

They are owned by a company called Railpool and that’s an interesting company. It was created by two German banks and owns all kinds of rail equipment including 42 modern electric locomotives that it leases to rail operators all over Europe whenever they have a shortfall of equipment.

This locomotive is much more regular though.

It’s one of the SNCB’s Class 13 electric locomotives of the late 1990s with a maximum speed of 200kph. But they weren’t without their teething troubles due in the main to electrical interference from their equipment that disrupted the signals.

The class 18s, of which we have seen an awful lot, have come in and taken their place on the headline routes, pushing them back onto secondary duties. But they are proving to be remarkably resilient.

5 minutes earlier than planned, my train came in.

It was one of the AM96 multiple unit sets that do the express working to Blankenberge and are quite interesting because when two are coupled together and the bellows seal them in, the cabs pivot out of the way so that you can walk through from one unit to the other.

We arrived in Brussels without any issue and much to my dismay the seats in the waiting area were all taped off. And I had about 45 minutes or so to wait for my train and I didn’t fancy standing for all that time.

Luckily this train came in early too and I had to run almost the whole length of the train to find my seat.

But as I mentioned on the way out to Leuven on Monday, I’m appalled by the casual manner of some people in the way that they are wearing their face masks.

Seeing someone with their nose uncovered is quite par for the course, but this guy here on the train from Brussels to Paris went the whole way, 300-odd kms, with his face mask around his chin and nowhere near his nose and mouth.

His friend sitting next to him didn’t have his face mask on either when i went for a ride on the porcelain horse. I really don’t know what these people don’t understand about a pandemic.

We arrive in Paris Gare du Nord bang on time which is always good news, and I found a different way to the Metro.

Down in the bowels of the station at the line 4 platform I didn’t have long to wait before the train came in. And then I was whisked off through the catacombs down to Gare Montparnasse.

They’ve been working on that for a couple of years and it’s nearing completion. As a result I had to think for a minute about how to find my way to the train shed.

One good thing though is that we no longer have to go all the way down to the platforms at Vaugirard. Our train can fit into the main hall.

An hour to wait before my train but luckily I found a vacant seat so at least I was in some comfort

We were called to our train about 20 minutes before it was due to leave, and that must be something of a record

Having stamped my ticket in the machine I scrambled aboard and found that, once again, I had a travelling companion. As I have said before, I don’t understand this social distancing thing in the station if we are all having to sit cheek by jowl in the train.

At L’Aigle there was an “incident” with a passenger and the police were called. I’m not sure what that was about but it didn’t take long and we were soon on our way. So much so that we actually arrived in Granville 5 minutes early which was quite impressive.

My route home was interrupted by a visit to the Post Office. A recorded delivery letter had come for me while I was away on my boat and I hadn’t had to pick it up.

So while I was passing through I called in for it. And outside the old tourist information office there was a cherry picker with a couple of guys on it working on the clock that’s there.

It’s been stuck at about 01:50 for as long as I can remember so it looks as if they are finally going to to do something about it.

And not before … errr … time either.

As Barry Hay once famously said, “one thing I gotta tell you, man – it’s good to be back home!” and he’s perfectly right too. I’ve lived in a great many places in my life and here in Granville is the only place for which I’ve ever felt any kind of emotion that might be described as “homesickness”.

Usually the kind of “homesickness” that I’ve felt is the kind of sickness that you have when you are sick of a place, but not here.

The travelling takes quite a lot out of me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, so I didn’t do much. I sat and vegetated for a while.

At one point I was tempted to go and lie down on the sofa and watch a film. In fact I actually got as far as switching on the DVD player before I overcame the impulse.

Tea was actually the same as last night, which is hardly surprising because I used the stuff that I brought back from Leuven – pasta, veg and the second falafel burger – but this time with spicy tomato sauce.

The last slice of apple pie that was in the fridge too with some of the soya coconut dessert.

None of the foregoing prevented me from going out for my evening walk and runs.

What actually did put a stop to it was the gale-force wind that had sprung up in the latter part of the afternoon. You can tell what was going on out there by looking at this speedboat that was moored offshore with guys in there fishing.

The swell of the waves was such that it was hiding the boat at times. That can’t be comfortable for anyone out there casting his hook and line into the sea, and I wouldn’t like to be the neighbour of any fisherman there right now.

Out of the wind I managed to run along the top of the cliffs on the south side of the headland.

This takes me along the path overlooking the chantier navale where I can have a good look down to see what’s happening there. And once more we have a full house of 6 boats in there receiving attention.

As I have said before … “on many occasions” – ed … it’s good news for the town that they can keep so busy down there. It encourages people to bring their boats here

Even though I was out of the wind on this side of the headland, others were not quite so lucky.

This little fishing boat out in the Baie de Mont St Michel is having quite a battle with the elements as it struggles to make it back into harbour.

It’s not really the weather to be out there in a small boat like that I reckon. I’m glad that people have so much faith in their equipment.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury was OK but as I rounded the corner I was hit by the full force of the gale and that brought me to a dead stop.

It was so powerful that I had to walk on round the next corner before I could continue my run to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord. Unfortunately the sunset tonight wasn’t all that much to write home about although we did have a nice TORA TORA TORA moment.

No picnickers down on the beach tonight, which was no surprise in this wind. I for one wouldn’t be down there.

From the viewpoint I set out to run back to the apartment but as I passed by the end of the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne I could see our visitor had arrived.

The little fishing boat was coming into port, but she was following in the wake of Normandy Trader who had now made it into port.

You can see the crowds of people huddled on the deck just there. That must have been a really uncomfortable crossing standing on the deck all the way across the English Channel from St Helier in a wind like this.

Normandy Trader fought her way into the harbour and went off to moor at the quayside underneath the large crane that would unload her.

As for me, I ran off back to my apartment to write up my notes.

First of all though, there was the dictaphone to see if I had been anywhere during the night.

We had been at school last night and we ended up in little groups of about 10 of us doing something on Geography, talking about Iceland, places like that. One girl I particularly wanted to be with she ended up being in another group of 10 which quite disappointed me. I was with someone else in a pair in our group of 10. On going through the names I saw that one particular was in our group and I thought “why didn’t I get myself into a pair with her? Good Lord! I must be really slipping these days! I thought that there would be plenty of time to do that but then I realised that it was right at the end of the school year. For some reason the school year had gone really quickly and there wasn’t much time left. I was leaving anyway at the end of the year and all these opportunities I’d missed yet again.
Later on I was going back home from my holidays and we were having a look at my photos. Someone was saying somethign about the state and condition of places that I had been to. I said that I’d been to a lot worse than this and I had to search through my computer to see if I had any older photos. I came across the photos of 2002 when i was in the USA so we started to look through those. there were some really nice ones there but there were some really dreadful places that I’d seen. “Someone else said “yeh. I used to go on the Fred Trueman Estate or something in Crewe back in the 70s and God! That was a bit dire as well” and we ended up having a chat about all of that

Unfortunately I didn’t finish all of my notes. I ended up falling asleep, which is no surprise. So I’ll have to finish them off in the morning.

And it will be late too because I’m not setting an alarm. I’m always exhausted when I come back so I’ll be having a lie-in.

Saturday 4th July 2020 – THERE WAS NO …

… possibility that I was ever going to beat the alarms this morning.

In fact, I didn’t even try. Not after going to be quite late last night. I was lucky to be up by 07:30.

After the medication I went for a shower but it seems that Bane of Britain has struck again. Guess who forgot to switch the hot water back on again last night?

Instead I worked my way through the hundreds of e-mails and messages that had built up over the week. Or, at least, some of them, because I went off to the shops.

Espace Auto was a waste of time. They are now on Summer hours which means that they are closed on Saturdays. I shall have to go some other time to pick up the estimate for the repairs to Caliburn’s bodywork.

Noz was likewise a waste of time. Sometimes the shop is excellent with tons of really good stuff, but at other times there’s nothing of interest.

Today was one of the latter. I ended up with another pack of those breaded soya steaks (there were only four left), a tub of vegan chocolate and hazelnut ice-cream and a book about Serbia in World War I. It’s actually quite interesting to see these history books that recount history in quite a different way to to the way that it’s told to kids in the UK. There’s a completely different perspective and point of view.

LeClerc wasn’t all that much better. I don’t need much because I’m off again on Monday morning for three or four days but even so I managed to forget the apples.

The guy and his wife in front of me in the queue bought enough beer and spirits to keep them going for a year but the cashier and I commiserated with each other that whatever they were doing, we hadn’t been invited.

Dodging the raindrops I drove back here stuck behind a flaming grockle in a perishing mobile home stopping every blasted minute to admire a sodding seagull. I can’t see why they don’t just post their money to us and stay at home.

The rest of the day was spent in going through the outstanding mail and then uploading the missing blog entries. They aren’t complete because I’ve not yet transcribed the dictaphone entries or edited the … gulp … 400 or so photos that I took while I was on my travels.

While we’re on the subject of photos … “well, one of us is” – ed … I went out for my afternoon walk as usual.

The weather wasn’t very nice at all. It was cool and damp, trying its best to rain a little.

That didn’t stop the picnickers on the beach though. They were all down there making the most of the first day of the Grandes Vacances that will continue for the next 8 weeks until the end of August.

It’ll take more than just a bit of bad weather to stop a kid with a bucket and spade scrambling over a rock on a beach

It wasn’t just kids with buckets and spades or adults with picnic hampers either today.

The fishermen were out there in their numbers, up to their knees in the surf casting their lines into the sea.

Having made enquiries with the crew of the Spirit of Conrad, I now know that they are actually fishing for sea bass, or bar. I’m not sure whether they are any of DOCTOR EVIL’S EVIL-NATURED SEA BASS because as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I have yet to see anyone actually catch anything and five days on board a boat in the middle of a fleet of fishing boats didn’t change that situation either.

It was round about here in the Place du Marché aux Chevaus that I was almost knocked over by an old barsteward in a car reversing out of a parking place without looking. We had what can only be described as “a frank exchange of views” but what impressed me more than anything was that he used the adjective “Belgian” in connection with the way that i was speaking.

It’s hard to believe that after 13 years living in France I still speak French with a noticeable Belgian accent, rather than the British accent which is what most people might expect.

My walk today carried on around the walls and I ended up at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been roofing works going on here for the last couple of months and I was intrigued to see how they had progressed.

They seem to have finished the roof but the scaffolding – or, at least, some of it, is still there. We shall see over the course of the next week or so if that part that remains is finally removed or whether they will be doing something else.

From there I carried on around the walls and ended up in the Square Maurice Marland.

When we arrived in port yesterday, we could see that the Big Wheel had been erected in the Place Godal. It comes every year for July and August but people were wondering if it would come this year due to the fact that last year apparently it was quite poorly patronised.

But here it is and if you look closely at it you’ll see that there are actually people on board right now, as well as the customary seagull giving it an official fly-past.

Talking of seagulls, while I was here I had a look to see how my baby seagull on the roof in the rue des Juifs was doing.

Some of the babies here are flapping their wings and trying to fly but my one here is a week or two behind and hasn’t quite reached that stage. But he or she seems to be healthy enough and is certainly looking fairly active.

Next week I’ll pass by for another look and see how it’s getting on. We’re reaching the stage where we’ll soon be seeing a few of them taking to the air.

Back at the apartment I carried on with work and then had just 40 minutes on the guitar tonight – the 6-string. One thing that I realised while I was on board the ship is that I’m not going to have my music with me all the time and so I’ll be far better off practising half a dozen songs really well until I can reach the stage where I can play them without the music and sing them without the lyrics.

Tea tonight was one of the breaded soya fillets with potato and vegetables, followed by a slice of apple pie from the other week. I’d frozen the slices that were left when I went away and so this morning I pulled out two for the weekend.

And that reminds me – don’t forget to take the pizza dough out of the freezer in the morning.

Later on, I was just about to go out for my walk when the phone rang. Rosemary called me and we had another one of ur very lengthy chats about not too much in particular.

By the time we had finished it was gone 23:00 and raining quite heavily so it was no time to go for my evening run. I stayed in and finished my notes instead.

So tomorrow I must organise myself. There’s my Welsh course to review seeing as I missed last week’s lesson and homework to be done of course. Travel tickets need to be printed too and to pack my things.

Another thing is that I’ve started a new course today. Seeing as how I enjoyed the blues piano course (even if I can’t play the piano at all and was more interested in the theory) there was a free one on song-writing.

Not just lyrics either (although I’m sure that they can give me a few tips) but on chord arrangement and structure too, and that’s the interesting part. I’m intrigued to see what it will do.

But that’s for tomorrow. Tonight is bed time with, I hope, a lie-in tomorrow. I deserve one after this week’s efforts.

Sunday 28th June 2020 – AFTER YESTERDAY …

… evening’s adventures with my colleagues at the radio I was in no mood to go to bed early. Consequently it was about 02:30 when I finally hit the sack.

No alarm of course, with it being Sunday, so no-one was more surprised than me to be wide awake at 09:30, and to be up and about by 10:00.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone. And I didn’t seem to have been anywhere at all during the night.

However, there was a file on there. And when I looked at the datestamp it showed 12:30 yesterday. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that round about then I was away with the fairies so it must have concerned a voyage that I had made during that period.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded it TO YESTERDAY’S PAGE and you can read all about it there.

Today I had a lot to do and, for a change, despite it being Sunday i’ve been bust. First task was to cut my hair and make myself look slightly more respectable.

Second task was to deal with my Welsh homework. That meant actually studying because, shame as it is to say it, I couldn’t remember a thing about last week’s lesson and I had to do it all again.

Apart from that, I’ve been updating the files on the portable computer. That’s something that I haven’t done since January and there was tons of stuff that needed doing.

So much so in fact that the 128GB memory stick that I use as a back-up didn’t have enough room on it to deal with it all in one go.

While I was getting my things ready, I needed to collect some stuff out of Caliburn.

When I went through the door and glanced out to sea, I saw that Marité was quite happily sailing around the bay. I ran back upstairs, picked up the camera, ran back down and took a photo of her.

It seems that the repairs the other week in Lorient were successful, she now has her passenger licence and she’s back plying for hire around the coast with piles of day trippers

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I don’t see eye to eye with the people who run it – hence I haven’t been out with her. Every question you ask, the answer always is “it’s on our web site” and they go back to laughing and joking amongst themselves.

That’s no way to run a business.

For lunch, I had breakfast. Some muesli and apple juice. I would have had apple puree too but not that lot. I hadn’t opened it for a week and I wish that I hadn’t today either.

later on in the afternoon it’s my custom to go for a long walk down into town for my Sunday ice cream and to see what’s going on.

But here’s a thing. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that every now and then we’ve been seeing different colours in the water, in strange patterns.

Today the difference was even more marked – probably the most dramatic that we have seen since we’ve been making observations. And looking at it closely, I think that I’ve a plausible suggestion for what is causing it.

All of those boats flocking around there gave me a further clue.

But it was the colour that gave away the game because we’ve seen this before. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we saw the harbour gates open when the tide was coming in a few weeks ago, we saw a wave of just this colour coming into the harbour with the tide.

We classed that as silt being brought in from out of the harbour on the incoming tide. What’s happening now is the reverse. The tide has turned and the stream that flows out of the harbour is now pushing the silt back out and it’s been picked up by the current.

Crowds of people out there again walking along on the footbath at the top of the cliffs.

That was my route – at least, part of it – because when I reached the end by the lighthouse, instead of going across the lawn I went down the steps and round the headland to see all the marine traffic that was down there. These two beautiful yachts were very impressive examples.

It was a shame about the speedboat though. Cutting through there and that kind of speed and disturbing everything. i’ve no idea why he couldn’t have given them a wide berth.

This little yacht was quite a dinky thing.

She came sneaking in towards port from somewhere out across the Baie de Mont St Michel. And I did rather like her sails too. That’s not a traditional yacht rigging of course. I shall have to look in my Book of the Sea to see what rigging it is.

Down the old pathway I went, right past the chantier navale but there was no change in there. Still the five boats that we have seen before.

The tide was on its way out so by now the harbour gates were closed, so i could take that pathway over the top to the other side.

Down in the harbour something was moving about. It was my neighbour Pierre’s yacht Spirit of Conrad. He’s been working on it today, fuelling and watering it up today because he’s off on a voyage tomorrow morning.

We had a little chat across the harbour about this and that, and then I wandered off while he went over to his mooring.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they have been installing new pontoons all over the port just recently.

There are some here at the ferry terminal that they installed a while ago, but the photo that I took of the head of the ramp showed some kind of ramshackle affair of hand railing.

But it seems that they have now rectified that. This looks so much more solid and so much better. It’s actually quite professional now.

But I couldn’t see what it was thay they were doing with the two cranes the other day.

from there I walked on down to the end of the sea wall.

The harbour entrance is just here and I’m standing under the green starboard (right) light. Across the mouth is the red port (left) light and beyond there is Le Loup – the marker light that is positioned on top of the rocks just outside the harbour mouth.

And when you see where that light – and the rock of course – is, you’ll understand why it’s necessary. It’s quite a tight turn out of the harbour to pass safely by it, so exact positioning is essential.

We’ve seen how big the gravel boats are, for example.

My next port … “well done!” – ed … of call was the port de plaisance – the pleasure harbour.

This big catamaran had just come into port and people were leaving her, dragging their suitcases behind them. She’s the Addictive from the Scilly isles, by the looks of things. I loved the solar panels at the stern. Brought back many happy memories.

Next stop was the ice cream stall for my vegan ice cream. They know me in there now and as soon as I appear they dash for my coconut sorbet

Eagerly clutching my ice cream, I walked through the masses thronging in the streets.

And if I thought that the streets were packed, you should have seen the Plat Gousset. There was hardly any room to move on there with all of the folk taking the air. Look near the top on the right hand edge of the photo

The beach wasn’t left out of the equation either. Hordes of folk there too sunning themselves on towels on the sand. All kinds of fun and games going on there.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have been quite critical of some of the manoeuvres of the mayor that I consider to have been thoughtless and a waste of money.

But credit where credit is due and I applaud the decision to spend some money on rehabilitating the old tidal swimming pool. With more people holidaying at home, it’s certainly come into its own and there were loads of people in there this afternoon taking full advantage of it.

A good time was certainly being had by all today.

And it wasn’t just on land or in the water today that there were crowds either.

The Birdmen of Alcatraz were out there in force, swooping around like Nazgul over the crowds on the beaches. It’s quite bizarre when all of a sudden a big silent shadow slides across you as walk around in the sunshine. I can understand why the hobbits were so frightened.

But as I have said before … “on many occasions” – ed … the fact that they take off from the field next to the cemetery is very significant. If they have a bad take-off or landing, they don’t have far to go until their next resting place

On the way back I climbed all the way up the steps to the top, to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

having forgotten to see how the roofing job was doing when I came past yesterday, I had a look today.

It’s still not finished, which is a surprise. But by the looks of things they don’t have far to go. But then I’ve said that before.

Back here, I carried on with my work until 18:00 and guitar practice. Again with the acoustic guitar – I must become accustomed to playing it, even though I know that it’s pretty poor quality stuff.

Tea tonight was pizza – another home-made effort. Cooked to perfection and extremely delicious too. My pastry seems to be doing fine.

No dessert though. My appetite has gone completely, hasn’t it? They warned me about that at the hospital. It’s one of the first signs of decline and I would say “bang on schedule” too.

Later than usual, I went for my evening run.

In the twilight gloom past the itinerant, down to the clifftop, and then walk around to the lawn. Nothing much happening out at sea but there was quite a wind that was blowing tonight, snapping at the flags at the War Memorial with some force.

There were some people unpacking a drone here too, but this wasn’t the weather to be doing any of that. And, as we know from the experience that the police had when they tried a few drones around here, the seagulls will make pretty short work of it.

It’s becoming quite dark on the south side of the headland as the sun sinks down into the sea on the other side.

The restaurants are now open of course, and the one just there in the rue du Port is all illuminated. It’s a long time since we’ve seen anything so welcoming, even if there is nothing there that I can eat.

Up to the Boulevard Vaufleury I went, and ran all the way down to the end and round the corner. I’m no longer stopping at my usual breathing point but carrying straight on.

Down underneath the Porte Dt Jean, down the rue St Jean almost to the Place Cambernon and then through an alleyway to the rue du Nord and back up to the viewpoint on the corner.

There were quite a few people there tonight and we exchanged pleasantries while we watched the sun sink slowly behind the clouds.

When Liz saw this photo later she described it as “like a battleship on the horizon” and who can argue with that? That was quite a description.

The crowds weren’t just on the wall at the viewpoint either.

While it’s true to say that there was no-one down on the beach picnicking that I could see (after all, it was quite late) there were still some people out there, standing on the rocks fishing out into the water.

We can’t do without our fishermen, can we? The peche à pied is certainly popular around here. Something of a local sport.

For 15 minutes or so I stayed to watch the sunset and then I ran on home.

For a change, I was rather pleased with myself. Although it’s a struggle to go up the hill, my running this evening was easier than it has been just recently and my recovery time is becoming less and less.

But that’s all for tonight. There’s a lot going on tomorrow so I need to be on form as much as I can.

See you all tomorrow – maybe.

Friday 26th June 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I was up before the third alarm went off this morning.

Not by much, it has to be said, but before is before and it’s all good.

Mind you I don’t know why because outside was a really miserable day. I didn’t know if it was raining because I couldn’t see. Wr had a huge sea mist rolling in and it was freezing cold – a far cry from the last few days.

After the medication it was the dictaphone. I had an appointment at the hospital last night and I went to go to the reception. I walked into the office and had to get a ticket to queue up. But the woman called me over as I waslked in. I shouted “in a minute” and went to get my ticket anyway, but I don’t know why. When I got to the desk and said that I had an appointment she asked “who with?”. I said that I didn’t know – it was on the card. She looked on the card and all it had was “Doctor C”. She said “what you’ll have to do is to ring up Doctor Carpentier and se if it’s him. If it’s not him, here are all the other doctors whose names begin with C. You’ll have to ring round all of them until you find the one who is supposed to be seeing you.

Today, with nothing really outstanding that needed doing, I exerted myself by sorting out the washing that had been hanging up on the clothes airer for the last 10 days or so.

Nice and dry of course, and because of the washing softener it actually smelled nice too. Far better than it did the last time that I washed it and forgot about it in the washing machine for a couple of days.

After that, I had some things of my awn to attend to and then I settled down to carry on with a few of the projects that I started a while ago.

Firstly, this involves completely rewriting one of my websites. And that’s not as easy as it might sound either because it seems to have been amended in several stages in the past and some of the early stuff seems to have stuck in a previous format and missed the subsequent amendments.

What I’ve had to do is to prepare a template for each version, work out which version of the site each page is and then amend it accordingly.

So far I did about 4 or 5 pages this morning once I’d sorted out the templates. But it’s not just that – I’m finding lots of stuff that shouldn’t be there as well as a few files that i’d lost here and there along the way.

This afternoon I carried on with editing a web page from another site. What I wrote 20 years ago is not the same as I would have written today, and it’s not easy either to change a style of writing but keeping the same emotion that I had when I first wrote it.

As well as that, it’s been about 12 years since I’ve done any serious third-party web design work so I’m quite rusty in that respect but looking at my site with different eyes, I’ve solved almost instinctively a couple of problems that stumped me whan I was in full flight. I’m not sure how I managed that at all.

As well as that, I had a good go at the photos from July 2019 in Iceland and now I’m back in Heimaey on the way out to Greenland.

Another thing that i’ve done is to make a few tentative enquiries about going off on my travels sometime whenever. I have a couple of plans but they are not for right away or even in the near future. Nevertheless there is no time like the present to get things under way.

At the usual time this afternoon I went out for my walk.

Although, once again, I couldn’t see why. In fact i couldn’t see very much at all this afternoon because that sea mist was still hanging around out there.

it was cold too, as I said earlier. I had a sweater on, which is pretty much unthinkable for the latter days of June. Even Gribouille the big ginger cat wasn’t coming out in this weather. He stayed stuck on his windowsill indoors.

With nothing much to see I trudged on around my little circuit, mixing with the people who were out there. There were actually quite a few – more than I was expecting.

With not being able to see very much in the fog, there wasn’t an awful lot to photograph. But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen a few photos of the seafarers’ memorial just recently in the bright sunlight, so I thought that I would reproduce the view in the fog.

If you look carefully you can juts about make out the coast on the other side of the bay near St Pair sur Mer and Jullouville

With nothing else going on I walked on down along the top of the cliff and then round towards home.

Not an awful lot going on in the harbour either. No Jersey freighter today, but La Grande Ancre is there in port tied up. She has no intention of going out in this, that’s for sure.

From there I headed off back home to carry on working. There was plenty to do. And I might have accomplished so much more had I not gone off with the fairies again for half an hour or so.

When I came round, I was feeling pretty miserable. I reckon that I’m sickening for something else right now and I don’t like that idea very much at all.

But I plodded on with my work and then had the usual hour on the guitar.

Tea tonight was exciting. There was a pepper left over so I sliced it up. A potato was diced and put in the microwave with a little water and some spices (turmeric, coriander and cumin) for a couple of minutes.

While that was doing I sliced up a couple of onions and fried them with spices and also some fennel and fenugreek. A pile of garlic went in next, and then the pepper.

The potatoes followed, with a tin of exotic vegetables that I had picked up from NOZ a while back. And then a handful of spinach.

More spices to taste, and then the pièce de résistance – not a French virgin but a little carton of soya cream (regular readers of this rubbish will recall that they had some on special offer at LeClerc a couple of weeks ago).

So there we are – an Instant Korma, and vegan to boot. With some rice and mixed veg it was delicious and, even better, there are four more helpings for the freezer.

Apple pie and ice cream for pudding with chocolate sauce.

My run was going to be late tonight because I wanted to hear the start of my radio programme. But badger me if the baskets have forgotten YET AGAIN to broadcast it.

Having been missed off the list of “presents” at the meeting last week, I am not very impressed at all by this. If they don’t want my programmes they should have the courage to tell me so that I don’t waste my time.

Eventually I made it outside for my evening run.

And I ran straight into the sunset again. Unfortunately, although the weather is 100 times better than it was earlier and you could actually see things, there was too much cloud about for it to be as spectacular as the last couple of nights.

Anyway, I made it all the way down to the clifftop past the itinerant, even though I didn’t feel much like it tonight.

Not a great deal of activity out there tonight.

There was a small yacht way out in the distance over by the Ile de Chausey but there were also some fishermen in their boat just off the cliffs fishing for something or other.

One of these days I’ll have to accost a fisherman and find out what the catch is in the waters off here. The waters aren’t all that deep so it’s not going to be anything super-exotic.

It was another evening with no-one picnicking in the old gun emplacement so I carried on walking across the lawn.

There were a few people about as well, getting in my way, but round by the Pointe du Roc all of the action seemed to be down at the viewpoint by the old watchman’s cabin.

W’ve seen quite a few groups of people congregating down there just recently and there was another bunch of people hanging out in the evening sun down there. It’s a lovely spot to hang out.

There was no fisherman down there this evening though. The rocks around there were looking pretty bare.

It seemed to me as if they had all given up for the duration but, having a look around, I found one of them standing on a rock elsewhere in the vicinity casting his line into the void.

With nothing else exciting going on, I carried on with my run. Past the chantier navale where there were still the five fishing boats.

At the end of the path i stopped for a breather, and from there i had a look around to see if there was anything exciting.

The two Joly France boats were down there near the ferry terminal but what caught my eye was the older boat of the two. She was moored in rather a dangerous position right by the harbour gate and I was sure that she shouldn’t be staying there.

But closer inspection revealed that her crane was extended and as I ran on down the road, she lifted something out of the forr’ard hold, dumped it on the quayside, and then cleared off elsewhere.

All the way down the Boulevard vaufleury I ran, round into the medieval city and round through the alleys to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord – a little easier tonight, I reckon.

There were a few people down on the beach this evening. Not picnicking but simply soaking up the sun. Not as many people as we have seen in the recent past.

But I was admiring a couple of people down there. They were drying themselves with towels and sorting out some clothes, so it looked to me as if they had actually been in the water for a swim.

Braver men than I am, Gungha Din.

As I said earlier, the sunset tonight wasn’t all that spectacular.

Back at the apartment I showed it to Liz and she described it as a storm in a sunset sandwich, which I thought was very lyrical of her.

For a change it’s a little earlier than usual so I’ll probably go for an early night. I’m expecting a couple of visitors tomorrow so I might even do a little tidying up early tomorrow morning if I feel up to it.

Shopping tomorrow of course, but I don’t need much at all. But I want to go to the second-hand shop because I have a project in mind.

More of this anon

Thursday 25th June 2020 – I CAN’T SEE …

… just what use this particular product would be to anyone.

believe me, I hunted high and low but I have yet to encounter a shop that sells electric vegetables. There certainly weren’t any in LIDL where I saw this appliance.

What I did see in LIDL though was someone pick up almost every melon in the shop (with his bare hands) and hold it close to his face to sniff it to see if it was ripe.

Note to self – don’t buy melons from LIDL. I really don’t see what is so hard to understand about behaviour in the middle of a pandemic.

Something else that I don’t understand is why I found it so hard to leave my bed this morning. Another day where I missed all three alarms and that is more depressing that anything to do with this pandemic, that’s for sure.

After the medication though, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

last night we were all on a yacht (I’m getting carried away with this idea, aren’t I?) and the question of some kind of news came up. We were talking about the weather, storms, all this kind of thing. At fist I couldn’t understand it but later I began to get to grips with the message and started to understand it. The project really wasn’t very bright. They asked me if I would go on the TV and speak to them, say something about it in Welsh but I declined the offer as I really didn’t know enough off the top of my head to be able to hold a conversation in it yet. The British all left and it just left this boat bobbing around and I was on my own for a while. Then more and more people started to come back and it wasn’t the same tranquil little scene that it should have been. I was annoyed about that as well.
And what that was all about I don’t have the faintest idea.
A little later on I was looking around at houses, in Sandbach, a house on the corner of that street that leads into Park Lane, an old terraced house. A friend of mine had been to see it so there was some thing about “this house is Private Property” and for any inspection please telephone “so and so” – Keep Out – all that kind of thing. It was from the Estate Agent who was showing me around. he told me about the house on the corner of Carter Street. I said “yes, a friend of mine had seen it”. he said “it’s good value isn’t it?” I said “it’s good value if you have the money to spend to do it up, I suppose”. He started to he a bit derogatory about my friend, saying “you could soon come up with the money if you wanted to”. I said “he hasn’t had his inheritance yet”. he replied “what kind of guy is it who sits around waiting for an inheritance? he should be out there making his own way”. I pointed out that he was making his own way if he was renting an apartment pro-tem and had his yacht, all this kind of thing. But this conversation just went on in a very deprecating tone towards this guy and I didn’t like that at all.

Later on I had a shower and a general clean-up. And a weigh-in too. And my weight is going back up – in fact i’m almost back up to my old target weight, having stayed below it for two weeks. I must do something about that.

Like go for a walk up the hill to LIDL in the early morning heat.

And here I am – right again. My assumptions from yesterday were correct. When i saw that lorry and the fork-lift truck preparing to unload it, I suspected that one of the Jersey freighters would be in port very shortly.

And here in the harbour this morning, having presumably crept in on the early morning tide, is Normandy Trader bringing in more stuff from the Channel islands and ready to take more stuff back

But something in that photo caught my eye so I went for a closer look.

And there up in the rigging of Marité there’s someone messing about with a mast. Had this been the UK then the Health and Safety inspectorate would have a field day with this.

And the guys with the fishing nets are still having an enormous amount of fun trying to untangle it over there. They still don’t seem to have sorted them selves out.

First stop was at the Railway Station. I’ve ordered and paid for my tickets but I need to collect them from the machine. I need to do that because there have been times when the machine has been out of order and the Booking Office doesn’t open until after the train has departed.

So if I can’t obtain the tickets from the machine then I am well and truly stuck.

Next stop was LIDL. I’ve mentioned some of the excitement there, but what was more exciting was that peaches are on special offer, and they had grapes in at a reasonable price.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m a big grape fan and I can demolish a kilo of grapes at one sitting with no problem at all.

There’s plenty of home maintenance going on all over town right now.

But ehre’s some adventurous stuff that’s worthy of a photo. It looks as if the guttering or the fascia board has come adrift from the fron of that building in the Rue de la Fontaine Bedeau.

Seeing as it’s Thursday I went on to la Mie Caline for my dejeunette and a chat with the guys in there, and then headed off for home

On the way up the hill in the Rue des Juifs, something caught my eye.

We’ve had another change of occupant in the chantier navale today. Or maybe I should say “changes” because there are two extra fishing boats in there now that must have been lifted up this morning.

So it’s all go in there then.

By this time I was roasting so when I arrived home I made a smoothie. There was a peach left over from last week, quite ripe, so I put it with some soya milk and ice into the whizzer and whizzed it all round.

That was something that I called extremely tasty, although maybe an extra peach might have given it more flavour.

This afternoon I started on the final week of my music course and that is now finished despite several interruptions. In theory I should be able to play 32-bar sequences in 5 scales using 2-5-1 progressions to change scale but of course the practical application of this course left me behind a long time ago. I can’t play the piano to save my life.

One of the interruptions was to go for my usual afternoon walk amongst the crowds in the glorious sunshine.

Strangely though, there was nothing whatever happening out at sea today, although there was plenty of activity in the chantier navale. We saw that there were four boats in there at lunchtime. This afternoon they seem to have multiplied.

There’s now five of them over there up on blocks for work to be carried out. This is really good news as far as I’m concerned. Nothing wrong with all of this activity at all.

Round on this side of the headland there was some activity in the water.

We had a few men in a boat yet again all equipped with all kinds of tackle looking as if they meant to do some serious harm to the piscatorial population.

Whether or not they will do of course remains to be seen. I’ve yet to see any one of the huge number of rod-and-line fishermen actually pull anything out of the water. Not even an old boot.

While I was out there admiring the fishermen I was interrupted yet again by some more air traffic.

A light aeroplane, presumably from the airfield at Donville-les-Bains overflew me. This time I managed to take a good photo of its registration – 26-AEW – but that tells me nothing because it’s not on the national database.

Apparently there’s some kind of local register for small light aircraft and the 26 in its number relates to the fact that it’s registered in Départemente 26, which is the Drôme, down in South-East France.

My walk carried me on around the path where there’s a good view of the fish processing plant.

And it looks as if someone has forgotten their fishing boat. Stenaca is here tied up to the wharf at the plant but the tide has gone out around it and she’s now grounded out.

We’ll have to wait for the tide to come back in before she can sail off into the evening sunset. But while she’s there they could be giving her hull a really good scrub.

Back round in the Place d’Armes there’s more activity going on with the pipelaying in the Rue Lecarpentier.

We now have the digger here moving big slabs of rock into the back of the pick_up. I wonder if this means that the work is almost finished and they are now tidying up.

But anyway, I came on in to carry on with my music course. I wanted to finish it.

And I did too, although I could have finished it much earlier had we not had the other usual interruption of me crashing out on the chair for a while. It’s the kind of thing that is filling me full of dismay that I can’t keep going for a whole day.

In the time that was left before guitar practice I had another play around with the web pages that I have been editing. That’s a job that i’m looking forward to restarting tomorrow in earnest.

After the guitar it was teatime. I’d forgotten that I’d bought some endives at the weekend so I made myself some steamed veg with some of those frozen vegetable balls, all covered in a cheese sauce.

So filling was it that I didn’t have any pie for afters either.

My run this evening was much, much later than usual. And for a very good reason.

It had slowly begun to cloud over during the evening but round about 20:00 there was the most astonishing clap of thunder that blew the window right open, knocking the fan onto the floor.

That was followed by a torrential downpour of epic proportions with flashes of lightning and claps of thunder that I hadn’t heard for ages. No chance of my going out in any of that.

By about 21:30 the rain had stopped, the wind had died down and the ground was starting to dry out.

That was the signal for me to go out for my evening runs just in case the weather worsened again. And I’m glad that I did because I was treated to a really gorgeous sinking sun tonight

So anyway, off I shot and ran all the way up the hill and down to the clifftop past a rather sodden itinerant who still won’t seek shelter out of the rain.

There were a few people there admiring the sunset but my attention was drawn elsewhere.

From behind me I’d heard the familiar thud if a couple of old diesels and sure enough, Normandy Trader was heading off out to sea past Le Loup – the light at the harbour entrance that marks the sunken rocks.

The way in which she was bathed in the late evening sun was so impressive and that was something that is always worth a photograph.

It surprised me that none of the others there were interested in it.

As she sailed past me, I stood on the headland and watcher her go.

And then I set off for my run down to the viewpoint over the cliffs. apart from the fishing boats in the chantier navale, which hadn’t multiplied yet again during the late afternoon, there wasn’t an awful lot else going on.

having recovered my breath I walked over to the Boulevard Vaufleury and ran off all the way down to the bottom and then through the medieval town and back up to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord.

For some reason or other, it was a much more difficult run that it has been of late, and i was glad when I reached the viewpoint.

My arrival coincided with that of Normandy Trader rounding the headland. She was well on her way out to sea now for an arrival in Jersey in the small hours.

The background of this image, a beautiful pale pinky orange colour and the Ile de Chausey fading away in the distance looked quite impressive too and I was getting all nostalgic about it yet again.

When I arrived, there was no-one down on the beach having a picnic, nor anyone perched on the rocky shelf either.

But during the course of the next fifteen minutes a couple of people ended up down there and the crowd slowly swelled are more and more people came down to watch the sunset.

By the time that I was ready to leave there was quite a crowd down there enjoying the view, and with every good reason too.

The rainstorm that we had had had left plenty of clouds hanging around in the sky and the sun was playing peek-a-boo with everyone here tonight.

The spectacle was pretty amazing so I stayed to watch it for about 15 minutes and then I came on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I’m going to make a start on the current projects that have been in abeyance since I started my series of courses. The Welsh course still has three weeks to run but the others are all now finished.

Mind you, I have plenty of ideas of things that I need to do which i shall have to put in motion for when I’m free of all commitments, whenever that might be.

But that’s not for this evening. It’s already quite late and I’m going to have another bad day tomorrow if I don’t get a move on and go to bed soon.

So what I’ll do is to leave you with all of the photos from later this evening with Normandy Trader disappearing into the sunset while I go and catch up with my beauty sleep.

See you all tomorrow.

beautiful sunset ile de chausey english channel granville manche normandy france eric hall

normandy trader beautiful sunset ile de chausey english channel granville manche normandy france eric hall

Wednesday 24th June 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

… out and about on my travels this morning.

So while you admire the photos of the baby seagull, which now seems to be very fit and healthy, I can give you the account of my day.

And just for a change, it got off to a very good start, for I was actually up and out of bed before the third alarm – something that doesn’t happen too often these day. Maybe it was the early night that helped there – if you can call 23:45 an early night.

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

Last night there was a group of us working on a new history textbook for schools and this involved rewriting quite a bit of stuff that was already in it including a load of songs and so on. So we noticed that these songs to fit into the new way of things and it was quite difficult for everyone to get into the habit of hearing them in the new way and I remember my brother being particularly surprised at some of the changes made to the songs in order to make the songs fit the times more than anything else
There was something else going on during the night and I’ve forgotten a lot of it but I’d been caught doing something and been punished in some way by having to do something, carry out a few tasks and at the end of that time I was given £30:00 in 2x£15:00 vouchers to spend. Whoever I was with – it might have been Nerina – was really upset about that and demanded to talk to me about it. The guy who was watching me, I held up the two vouchers and waved them about to attract his attention and said that I was going into the building. Nerina came with me and I had to find a quiet room to have a discussion. There were about 6 rooms in this building and there wasn’t really one that was suitable – the walls were flimsy and there were people in adjacent rooms. In the end we found a room where the photocopier was and we were about to go into there. And that was when the alarm went off.

And even though it was Nerina who was with me for part of the evening I do have to say that regardless of any of our issues, I would much rather have her company on my nocturnal rambles than many of the others who have been putting in an appearance just recently.

I’m still not eating breakfast so having done a little work, Caliburn and I headed for the hills – Gavray, in fact.

When I arrived in the town I took a wrong turning and I’m glad that I did because I found something that I would otherwise have missed – an old disaffected railway station.

There was a “Light Railway Act” in France similar to that in the UK of 1896, and for a period of about 50 years the whole of France became honeycombed with what they called the tacot or “rattletrap” – a narrow-gauge voie metrique railway network.

It’s the kind of system that was highlighted in the Alec Guinness FATHER BROWN series of films in the 1950s of the books by GK Chesterton

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen plenty of examples of this on our travels, especially in the Auvergne where I used to live and also here in Normandy along the coast.

There was also a voie metrique that went across-country from Granville to Conde-sur-Vire, opened in 1910 and closed in 1936 (and we’ve seen lines closed much quicker than that too). That line passed through Gavray and there would almost certainly have been a railway station here.

That has always been one of the things that I’ve been aiming to do – to track it down – and having taken a wrong turning in Gavray when I was looking for something else, I find myself falling right on it, quite by chance.

So while you admire the photos of the kayaker and othe rpeople in various water craft out there fishing today, I was busy tracking down the garage that I had come to visit.

Eventually I tracked it down and the guy had a good look at Caliburn. He reckons that it’s perfectly possible to do something with Caliburn. There’s no rot except in one wheel arch – the rest of it is simply rubbing down, rust-proofing, zinc priming and about a ton of underseal.

He’s not going to end up as he did out of the factory 13 years ago, and it’s not cheap either. But with my lifespan that’s left there’s no point in buying a new vehicle just for three or four years.

Caliburn and I may as well go out together.

So I headed on back to Granville and I’ll wait for the estimate to arrive. But I’ve decided that i’m going to have it done anyway.

When I reached the outskirts of Granville I took the by-pass and joined the traffic queue heading south towards St Pair sur Mer.

Brico Cash was where I was heading, to see what they had on offer today as I haven’t been there for a while.

And the answer is “not an awful lot”. There wasn’t anything that caught my eye particularly although I picked up some French plugs. A couple of the appliances that I brought from The Auvergne when I was there just now still have British plugs on them.

Traffic queues back here as well. I was stuck behind a grockle in a motor home admiring the blasted seagulls instead of advancing in an orderly fashion.

Back here there was still plenty of time before lunch so I had another look at the web pages that I’ve been amending.

That one is now completed and I’ve made a start on the next. I’ve now crossed over the border into Great Satan and I’m on my way to Bar Harbor in Maine.

By now it was lunchtime.

It was beautiful and warm and bright and sunny so I made my sandwiches (home-made bread, home-made hummus and salad) and went and sat outside on the wall again.

Even though the tide was well out and there were no ships or boats in the harbour, there was still quite a bit of activity going on down there today, despite it being the lunch hour.

There was a mobile crane down there and as I watched, it was joined by another one – the big mobile crane that comes here every so often.

The big crane extended its jib and they were both performing some kind of activity out there. I couldn’t see what it was, so I shall have to go out that way on my Sunday walk to see what has changed.

It can’t be anything too complicated because all the way through the manoeuvre … “PERSONoeuvre” – ed … one of the Joly France boats – the newer one – was moored right there and with the tide being out, it wasn’t moving anywhere else.

Back at the apartment I tackled the last week of my Accountancy course. I’ve finished it, not very successfully I have to say because I can’t remember all that much about what I just learnt.

That’s one of the penalties of old age. Two things happen to you then.
The first is that you forget absolutely everything that you are supposed to remember.
And as for the second thing – well, I’ve forgotten what that was.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk.

Today, in the gorgeous hot sunlight I went for a walk around the walls of the medieval town. From there I could look down on the beach at the Plat Gousset and watch all of the crowds enjoying themselves.

It’s Wednesday afternoon and the brats aren’t in school so the beach was busier than normal, and that’s not a surprise. Given half a chance, I’d be down there myself.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we saw the local council clearing out the old tidal swimming pool with a lorry and a digger – clearing out years of accumulated silt.

They’ve done a really good job by the look of it. It’s actually retaining some water and it’s attracted quite a crowd of people, splashing around in there.

And the people in the flourescent jackets – I’m convinced that they are the lifeguards, although how they are expected to swim while wearing those is anyone’s guess.

My walk went on along the walls and around to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

There’s been a roofing job going on on one of the roofs of one of the buildings down there for as long as I can remember, and they still don’t seem to have finished it.

Not long to go by the looks of things, but I recall having said that before. They were doing really well at one point but seem to have gone off the boil just recently.

From there I passed through the Place Maurice Marland to check on my seagull chick, and then walked on to the viewpoint over the harbour.

There’s some activity down there right now. A lorry has turned up and there’s a fork-lift truck that looks as if it might be thinking about unloading the lorry. Does this mean that either Thora or Normandy Trader are going to be paying us a visit some time soon?

And we have another group of fishermen over there wrestling with a rather large fishing net

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is the works van that appeared on the city walls near where they did all of that repointing.

The pointing on part of it in the Parvis Notre Dame was pretty poor so i speculated that the work might be something to do with that, and it seems that I was perfectly right. There are two men down there cleaning it all up

You can see how much excess cement that one of the guys has scraped off the wall – it’s all lying on the ground behind the car.

Back here I carried on with the course and, shame as it is to say it, crashed out a couple of times too. This is really getting on my nerves.

But I finished the course in the end and there was time to edit a few more photos. Tomorrow I’m going to start the final part of my music course. I want that out of the way too.

After the guitar I made tea. There was some left-over stuffing so I added some kidney beans and tomato sauce and made taco rolls

Somewhat later than usual, iw ent out for my evening run. It was far too warm to go out at the usual time.

All the way up the hill and down to the cliff without stopping, saying hello to the itinerant sheltering under the tree. Out to the sea there was plenty of activity and we have already seen some of the boats. We haven’t seen this yacht though, sailing back from the Ile de chausey into port, towing its dinghy behind it.

It’s making me all broody again and I’m going to have to do something about all of this before too long.

Just for a change there was no family group picnicking in the old gun emplacement.

There were however plenty of people down on the viewpoint by the old watchman’s cabin and they were having a good time by the looks of things

Quite a few fishermen too, down there on the rocks casting their lines out into the water. It seems to be becoming quite a regular thing these days.

My run continued on along the path on top of the clifftop on the south side of the headland

No kids jumping off the sea wall tonight, but instead we seem to have had some activity down at the chantier navale. One of the fishing boats that has been there for quite some considerable time seems to have gone back into the water.

There were a few other people down there taking photos of themselves in the evening sunshine. All in all, it was quite busy.

And not just there either.

Way across the port on the sea wall that protects the port de plaisance – the yacht harbour – there were crowds of people milling around tonight. They were certainly making the most of it.

As for me, I cleared off and ran all the way round down the Boulevard Vaufleury and the rest of my vastly elongated route round to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord.

The tide is right in right now so the chances of finding any picnickers on the beach was extremely remote.

However that little shelf that we noticed a few days ago – that seems to be the place to be these days as there are a couple more people making use of it.

And I’m still trying to work out the optical illusion surrounding the guy on the left. It looks thoroughly weird to me.

The people down there were enjoying another magnificent evening.

There were quite a few people up here enjoying it too, and quite rightly so for although it wasn’t as good as last night’s, it was still something special.

having watched it for a while I headed on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow, it’s shopping day. There’s not much that I need but it’s stuff that I can’t do without so I shall have to go.

And then i’ll make a start on the last week of my music course. I want to get that out of the way before the weekend. It’ll give me a chance to do some other work that’s been sitting on the back burner for the last month or so.

High time I got a move on.

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall yesterday that I mentioned something about the possibility of going out on a boat, but the owner never came back to me about it.

So while you admire the photos of the kids leaping off the sea wall into the sea this evening, let me tell you that it goes without saying that having vented my spleen (well, I would have done had I had one) yesterday, who should knock on my door today?

Right in the middle of my Welsh lesson too, which meant that I missed some of it. But then that’s always going to be par for the course too, isn’t it?

The upshot of all of this means that I have a little trip out organised for next week. And you’ve no idea just how much I’m looking forward to it either. I must get out to sea – and some time soon too.

Another thing that I have been looking forward to for quite a while is beating the third alarm call out of bed.

And this morning, much to my surprise, I actually managed it. No-one was more surprised than me.

Another thing that I have been eagerly anticipating, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is some convivial company accompanying me on my travels during the night. I had a good whinge about that yesterday too as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

But everything comes to he who waits . When I listened to the dictaphone after the medication this morning, who should I discover accompanying me during the night but TOTGA? I was wondering when one of my regulars would put in an appearance on a nocturnal ramble. Last night it was something to do with a holiday and I don’t remember very much. I’d been on holiday and I’d met her quite by accident. We ended up talking and walking off somewhere. I actually held her hand and she didn’t really discourage it – she just let herself be taken along. We carried on chatting and the question came round to “I’m having to go on Tuesday and that will be that I suppose”. She replied “I hope that we can make some time together – there will be some time together for us to meet one evening before you go” which of course cheered me up no end.

It’s nice to have some good news like that. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall – late nights in the North-West Passage notwithstanding.

After organising the dictaphone notes I went and did the tidying up. Even vacuumed the place a little too. I brought up some stuff from Caliburn that has been in there for a couple of years and cleaned that too before rearranging it.

Next task was to prepare for my lesson and make sure that I knew everything. The lesson was going quite well until I was disturbed at the door. But as it was good news, I didn’t mind all that much.

Lunch was taken on the wall overlooking the harbour in the beautiful warm weather.

And for a change I wasn’t alone either. There was a girl down at the other end of the wall eating a salad out of a bowl, and we had Normandy Trader, having presumably sneaked in on the morning tide, down there too.

While I was eating my butties I watched them unload her (the ship, not the girl of course). And I also watched a couple of fishermen (on the extreme right of the image) laying out a fishing net on the quayside in order to entangle it.

Back here I made a start on week 5 of my music course. And by the time that I knocked off at 18:00 I’d finished it too.

At least, I’d reached the end. It’s wrong to say that I’ve completed it because it’s way, way over my head. I’m supposed to be able to improvise using 5/10ths, 7/10ths, 7/13ths, 6/9ths, do inversions and play V-I, II-V-I and II-V-VI-I chord progressions.

And while I have to say that it’s way beyond my capabilities, what has surprised me more than anything is that now I actually know what they mean.

What else has surprised me was that I finished the week’s course despite the interruptions that I had during the day.

Of course there was the afternoon walk as usual, in the beautiful afternoon sun.

And I reckon that this is the first time for ages that I’ve seen them working on the shellfish beds over by Donville les Bains.

There’s a type of mussel called a bouchot that has a liking for string or rope, as someone discovered by accident a good few years ago. And so they have those kind of attachments out there to help the things grow in massive numbers then when the tide is really low they drive out there with a tractor and pluck them off the ropes.

Yesterday, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I went round the Pointe du Roc and took a photo from behind the Seafarers’ Monument out across the bay.

So just for no particular reason, seeing as I was there, I’d take a photo of it again today so that you can compare the two.

In fact, you can compare it with THIS PHOTO as well. In the one here to the side, the tide isn’t yet all the way out and in the one in the link, the tide isn’t all the way in either.

But you can still have a really good idea of the height of the tides nevertheless. Probably the highest in Europe, as I have said before … “on many occasions” – ed.

Loads of people about on land and sea.

And also in the air. While I was taking the photo of Le Loup – the light in the previous photo, I was buzzed by a microlight aircraft or ULM that presumably had taken off from the airport at Donville les Bains.

At first I thought that it was my autogyro, the yellow one that we see quite regularly, but not with those wings. In those flimsy craft with their engines it must be just like back in the Golden Days of aviation between about 1907 and 1914 and I don’t think that it’s for me

It’s all change in the chantier navale too.

We seem to have acquired a third fishing boat right now. There were a few people working on it sanding it down so it looks as if it’s going to be receiving a new coat of paint some time soon.

That’s something for me to observe over the course of the next few days, isn’t it? It’s always interesting to know what they are going to be doing with it.

Back here I carried on with the course but once more, depressingly, I was overwhelmed with fatigue and crashed out a couple of times. In the end I stuck my head under the cold tap and carried on work.

When it was finished there was still 45 minutes of my working day left before the guitar practice so I had another play at a web page that i’ve been amending for the last week or so. It’s almost finished, but then it needs to be split up into two because it’s rather unwieldy

For a change, the guitar practice went well, which is good news, and then I turned my attention to tea. One of the vegan beanburgers that I bought from LeClerc a few weeks ago, on a bun with baked potato and veg, followed by the last off the apple crumble.

Tomorrow I can start on the apple pie that I made. And for a change, it seems to be cooked properly, base and all.

This evening it was another beautiful evening outside.

And for a change I had another good run too – all the way up the hill round the corner and down to the clifftop where I could see what was happening out to sea, like this yacht heading in one direction and a cabin cruiser thing heading in the other.

And out there in the distance, I suspect, is Normandy Trader. With the tide being well in now I imagined that she wouldn’t hang around long (and I was right too – she had indeed left port).

The picnicking spot in the old gun emplacement seems to be quite popular these days.

There was another family in there putting it to good use with their coolboxes and picnic hampers.

And who can blame them? it really was a wonderful evening to be out there soaking up the sun. I had even surprised the itinerant (who is still there) who has now moved to shelter under the tree and who was applying sun-tan oil to his limbs as I ran on past.

And of course, there would be crowds of people out to sea too.

With the tide being well in the local fishermen don’t have far to go out to make their catch, assuming that they catch anything, for I remain to be convinced. I’m not quite sure what his boat is either. A low profile like that suggests a kayak, but not with his feet on top of it.

That too is not the kind of thing that I would like to be out in if ever it comes to a swell on the water.

There were people absolutely everywhere tonight.

We’ve seen the crowds on the lawn, we’ve seen the big bunch of kids jumping into the water off the harbour wall, and there’s also a crowd down there at the viewpoint by the watchman’s cabin enjoying themselves in the sun.

And of course it goes without saying that we have the obligatory fisherman perched on his rock with his rod in his hand.

My run continued down along the clifftop where I could watch the kids leaping into the water, and then I carried on all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

These days of course I don’t stop for breath but carry on all the way down the rue St Jean almost to the Place Cambernon, cut through the alley and then back up the rue du Nord to the viewpoint on the corner.

No picnickers tonight again, seeing as the tide was in, but that rocky shelf that we saw yesterday seems to be very popular right now.

We have another, different group perched on there tonight making the most of the beautiful weather.

And they had every reason to be out there enjoying it tonight too because this was one of the better sunsets.

If you look very closely you’ll notice that the sun has its orange halo tonight. There’s a lot of discussion about what these halos represent but current thought seems to indicate that there would be very thin cirrus clouds up there laden with ice crystals.

The sun would be shining into the ice and this would create a prism effect .

But whatever it is, it’s certainly beautiful

Just as I was about to run for home I noticed the fishing boat in the distance out in the English Channel over by the Ile de Chausey. Wondering what it was doing, I took a photo of it to crop and enlarge back at the apartment

So I ran on back home to do the necessary, and if you look very carefully at the rear of the boat, you’ll see that the crew have their tackle out and are clearly going hard at it.

As for me, I edited the photos and then wrote up my journal.

An early night is called for tonight. Tomorrow I’m going out for a drive with Caliburn.

He became a teenager a few weeks ago as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, so he’s going to have a makeover. Tomorrow someone in a bodyshop is going to have a look at him and we’ll have a discussion about how to keep him going for the next 13 years.

He’ll probably outlive me at this rate.

Monday 22nd June 2020 – THIS MORNING …

… was another morning to really forget about as far as the “getting up” stakes went.

And it beats me as to why, really, because whilst it wasn’t exactly an early night, I crashed out and went to bed before I’d finished the night’s tasks. Finish the journal and do the back-up.

And the back-up is becoming quite complicated these days.

There’s been an upgrade to the operating system that I use – a major upgrade – and some of the functions are missing.

In the past there was a “search” function where you could specify “today” or “yesterday” or “this month” or “this year”. I have a 128GB memory stick in one of the USB ports and I would would simply “search” for “today” on the computer’s hard drives (there are four in here) and it would come up with all of the files that I’ve created or modified today, then I would just drag copies onto the memory stick.

But that function seems to have gone and what i’m having to do in the meantime until I find a work-around is to go into each of the hard drives on the computer, list all of the files and drag over copies of those that were last saved today.

And that takes about 10 times as long.

So when I eventually did heave myself out of bed and have my medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone. Yesterday’s voyage was transcribed and I amended the journal entry to include it.

But as for the one from last night, I was for ever writing that one out.

Last night I was in Canada – at least, I assumed that it was in Canada. I was in my car off taking photographs and there was someone in a car. But we started – I had to go to the tax office and I had to fill in a load of forms. One of them was the Vanden Plas that I’d got and how I’d come by it, how I was given it, all that kind of thing. And I was being interviewed by these two people – first one and then the other. They were asking me loads of questions about all this kind of thing. The first one came back with a pile of forms. “Here’s a pile of forms and you’ll have to follow the instructions that you will be receiving scrupulously” I had a quick glance though these forms and I couldn’t see what there was in there of any particular importance. I thought “I’ll find out in due course”. To go out it was liek a kind of maze of one room inside another, all with wallpaper painted over them and a rotted chipboard door in one wall that had swollen up. As I was going out a woman was going out with a girl who had her hair in pink pigtails. She went and I got in my car and drove off. Just then I encountered another car that had been bogged down in the gravel and they were trying to push it to get it out. The rear left tyre was totally flat on it, all the tyres were worn, the paintwork was peeling, it was an absolute mess this car.Anyway they pushed it out got into it and drove away. I thought “God imagine a car like that on the road in the Uk these days. My tyre was flat now so I took out the spare and put the wheel on the same nuts as the one that was still on there that was flat so I had two wheels on that particular corner. Just then a girl came past and we started chatting. A little earlier I’d been looking at a map and there was a promontory a way out from here miles down some narrow roads which had a shop there called something like “when the lorry stops, the community stops” or something like that. I imagine that it was a lorry that would take all the supplies out there. She was actually talking about what was I doing here, looking at my car and saying how a train doesn’t do this and a train doesn’t do that and a train doesn’t need inflatable tyres and so on. We started walking off down this road round this lake. I had a dog with me, a black and white sheepdog called Shep. She said “we’ll go on, there are some places to photograph and then we can go back to my place”. I thought “what’s happening here?” So we wandered off with the dog and by this time we had another guy with us – the three of us. The dog decided to disappear so I shouted after him to come back and he knew which way we were going. She stopped at this old derelict house and she said that it was something to do with – she came out with a quote from a book which the other guy immediately recognised as one of these American authors of the 19th Century and saying “is that the house where one of his characters lived?” He named the character and I can’t remember it now. We were talking about this and the blasted dog still hadn’t come back. I thought that I’d better go and look for this dog but I thought “if I do that this guy is going to get his feet under the table with this girl isn’t he? But the dog is much more important, isn’t it?”

Yes, I’m back to having anxiety attacks in my dreams again, although seriously, I don’t think that I ever stopped them over the last few years.

Ohhhh! To have a couple of pleasant voyages like I used to have with convivial companions. It’s been ages since TOTGA, Castor and one or two others have come along to accompany me.

It took me much longer to deal with the dictaphone notes than it ought to have done, and there was the Welsh homework to attend to. All of that took me up to lunchtime which was taken on the wall overlooking the harbour.

All alone, with no lizards, no passers-by and nothing going on down in the harbour. But even so, there has to be something to be said for home-made hummus spread out on home-made bread.

This afternoon I had a radio project to deal with – a live concert to bring myself into synch with everything else. I ended up with 57:09 of music and so I dictated piles of introduction – only to find that I was 15 seconds short – something that seemed most unlikely to me but there we were.

Consequently I dictated some more – only to find that I was still 5 seconds short. But some spurious applause fed into the soundtrack soon dealt with that issue and it’s come out quite well.

There were the usual breaks during the day of course.

For a start, there was the afternoon walk outside. rather windy but apart from that it was absolutely beautiful weather. The tide was well out although there weren’t too many people down there enjoying the sunshine which was quite a surprise to me.

Not that I intended to go down there. I was off for my walk around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve spent a lot of time looking at fishermen just recently.

We have the peche à pied of course – the people who scavenge amongst the rocks for the shellfish, and those with rod and line percehed on the rocks. There’s also plenty of movement out at sea too – with the speedboat roaring past the guy paddling his own canoe.

Fishing rods bristling everywhere of course. They all mean business, but in their own fashion.

It’s not only humans who are out there fishing.

The local wildlife spends a lot of its time fishing too. We’ve seen whole socks of fleagulls loitering on the rocks waiting for the tide to go out so that they too can go scavenging in the rock pools.

This bunch here seems to he having some kind of feeding frenzy down there in that tidal rock pool. And no fighting means that there must be plenty of food to go round.

And that’s just as well. You mustn’t be selfish with your shellfish

On the way round to where the seagulls wee hanging out, I went past the memorial to the seafarers.

There has been a lifeboat station here for a considerable length of time and a couple of crews have lost their lives over the years while out on a rescue.

The memorial stands just here overlooking le Loup – the light that marks the submerged rock at the entrance to the harbour – the Baie de Mont St Michel and the coastal towns of St Pair sur Mer, Kairon-Plage and Jullouville.

There wasn’t a great deal else happening out there so I came on home to carry on with my radio project. But, once more, in something that is becoming only too regular an occurrence these days, I ended up in the arms of Morpheus for 20 minutes or so. And I’m thoroughly fed up of all of this.

There was the usual hour or so on the guitars during which I found that I had forgotten most of what I had learnt.

Although on the 6-string I’ve found that I’ve been changing from Bm to F without even thinking about it and without even looking. 6 months ago I couldn’t even play them and I was changing key whenever a bar chord cropped up in my playing.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper followed by apple crumble and soya dessert. And I really had to force myself to eat it because my appetite has well and truly gone now.

So later on I went out for my run, and I never felt less like it than I do right now.

All the way up to the top of the hill, around the corner and down to the clifftop without stopping, to see what was going on there. We saw a zodiac out there earlier with a pile of men going fishing, but I’m not sure if that’s the same one.

The tide is right in so that they don’t have to go too far out from the cliffs this evening.

It was a really beautiful evening and there were quite a few people out there enjoying the beautiful sunset.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw a pile of people picnicking in one of the old gun emplacements, and tonight there’s a different crowd in occupation

It seems to me that that’s the place to be if you are having a family picnic and there’s no doubt that the view from there out across the English Channel to the Ile de Chausey and down the Brittany coast is certainly spectacular.

My walk continued across the lawn and the car park and down onto the path at the extremity of the headland.

And as I arrived there, this beautiful little yacht went sailing past. It really did make me feel quite jealous and how I wished that I could be out there right now.

In fact I spoke to someone whom I know about going out sme time on a yacht but he never ever got back to me about it so I imagine that that particular plan is kicked in the head.

At this rate I can see me ending up buying a boat and had I been in better health I probably would. But then again, had I been in better health I wouldn’t be here, would I?

It’s surprising that during the course of the day we’ve seen almost everything out there fishing – except for anyone perched on the rocks.

We almost have to wait until the end of the evenign before we finally encounter someone. He’s climbed down the old collapsing stairs (they are fenced off these days) to where there’s a small tidal beach.

The tide is right in now of course, so he’s taking the usual step of perching himself on a rock and casting his line into the water from there.

Whether he’s actually catching anything is another question entirely.

From there I ran on down to the viewpoint on top of the cliffs and as there was nothing happening there either I ran on all the way down through the medieval town and round on the rue du Nord to the viewpoint.

There’s no beach here to picnic on when the tide is in, so I wasn’t expecting any picnickers. But that didn’t worry these people here. They simply perched themselves on a handy ledge on the rocks and soaked up the sun.

That’s a place that i’m going to remember for future reference. It seems to have everything.

And they were in luck because there was plenty of sun to soak up.

It was another night of beautiful sunset so I stayed there fora while to enjoy it and then ran on home to write up the notes.

Earlier on I’d said that I didn’t feel at all like going out. But somehow the runs seemed to be a little easier than they have been over the last couple of days.

It’s clearly a state of mind that affecting me right now and I think that i’m sinking into deep depression. And that’s all that I need right now.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last summer when I was on my Transatlantic and Arctic escapade for several months without my four-weekly cancer treatment, I ended up deep in the depths of a depression.

On one or two occasions I expressed myself in a manner that made me unwelcome in one or two places and there are still three or four days at the end of August and the beginning of September where I haven’t published my notes because of what I wrote at the time and the manner in which I wrote it.

Back in February when my cancer treatment was dramatically stopped “for the duration” I remember writing something like “God knows what state I’m going to be in by the time they call me back” so it’s no surprise.

It’s just as well that there isn’t anyone around who gets on my nerves otherwise we might have another couple of “those” moments.

But anyway, you don’t want me to burden you with my troubles. You have enough of your own to be dealing with. I’ll go to bed instead before this Steve Harley concert that I’m listening to drags me deeper into the pit.

Who’s going to come along and disturb my sleep tonight?

Sunday 21st June 2020 – HAPPY SOLSTICE!

Yes, that six months from winter went pretty quickly, didn’t it? It’s all downhill now until the end of the year

So while you admire one of the Birdmen of Alcatraz entertaining the crowds with his daredevil stunts, let me tell you something of my day today.

And it all started off on the wrong foot as usual, when I found myself wide-awake at 07:40.

And if anyone thinks that I’m going to be heaving myself out of my stinking pit at that time of a morning on a Sunday, especially as I didn’t go to bed until 01:30, then they have another think coming.

09:30 is a much more reasonable time for me to see the light of day on a Sunday.

It’s a day of rest of course and I allow myself one day a week when I can do nothing at all if I so choose and not feel guilty about it.

First task after the medication was one that I had forgotten to do. The dashcam is almost full and the files need downloading onto the computer.

It had to be done quickly because otherwise I’d be tempted to drive off somewhere and forget to take it with me.

26.7GB of files on there, and they all need converting to *.mp4 one of these days whenever I find a moment. There’s masses of them all told.

But while I was doing that, I forgot to do something else – and that was to check the dictaphone.

Well, rather, I did check it, saw that there was a voice file on there (so I must have been somewhere during the night) but said to myself that when I unplug the dashcam I can plug it in.

And then I forgot.

However I did subsequently remember.

There were a couple of little girls who were having some kind of wrestling fight. There had been three of them, one a little older than the other two. This worked its way round to me being in Belgium and having to come home. I had to do it with a whole series of buses and I had plotted out this route and then forgotten it. All I knew was that I had to be at the Gare du Midi at 09:00. It was 08:45 and I had to get back to the hotel, get all of my stuff, check on this route, arrange – make sure that I got on this bus, book a hotel, all this kind of thing. So I was running back to the hotel but the hotel seemed to get further and further away.Eventually I got there, got my stuff together but there wasn’t enough time to look for a hotel. I realised that I was going to be stranded in the middle of the country somewhere in a small town and if there wasn’t a room at that hotel I was going to be stuck for the night. So I ran out of the hotel and ended up in the company of a friend and she was looking at old derelict houses that another friend had told us about. I was trying to push on to this bus station and she was still looking at these houses. In the end I was looking at cars to see if there were any cars that I could buy just to go there. They were old wrecked lorries the kind that even the Africans wouldn’t touch. We ended up looking at this really depressing single-storey building in a really rough area. She went inside and I thought “God at last I can push on”. She came out and I thought that she had finished but ohh no “can you pass me this tape measure?”. God, I thought all my chances of getting this bus have just totally evaporated now.

Next task was to look for the paper from the controle technique where the guy pointed out a few things about Caliburn that needed attention

That ended up being a massive paper-filing job … “at long last” – ed … and general tidy-up, but there was no trace of it. So I grabbed the new door mirror glass for Caliburn that finally came a few weeks ago, the dashcam and the insurance certificate for the coming year to take down to Caliburn because I was going to search in there for the papers.

However, I stuck my nose out of the door and changed my mind. There was a torrential downpour going on out there.

Back up here I carried on with the tidying up. This time the medication in the bathroom needed arranging to see what I have in stock and what I need from Leuven.

That reminded me – I needed to book my travel to Leuven and my accommodation while I am there. So that was the next task.

Mind you, I don’t know why I might need accommodation. I noted that my appointment is for 16:00 and not at the Outpatients department either but at the main entrance. For a 5-hour process that’s not going to be possible in a department that closes at 17:30.

Do they mean to keep me in, I wonder?

By now the rain had stopped so I went to pick up the stuff to take to Caliburn and there, on the windowsill right underneath where I’d put the stuff was the note from the controle technique.

Anyway, all of that is now in Caliburn and he has his new mirror glass. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

There was no hummus for my lunchtime sandwiches (I’d done all of that this morning!) so I went to make some more.

By the time that i’d finished, I had two batches. One with olives and cumin and the other with dried tomato and herbs. Both with plenty of garlic, pepper and sea salt of course.

As for the olive and cumin, I dunno about that but the dried tomato and herbs is wicked, it really is. No danger of any werewolves and vampires coming around anywhere near me tonight.

With it being Sunday, that’s the day for me to go for my walk down into town for my vegan ice cream.

There were hordes of people out there today. We’ve seen the Birdmen of Alcatraz swarming around like Nazguls after a Hobbit, but there were a darn sight more than 9 walkers out there on the paths.

And on the narrow path around the headland we were jammed shoulder to shoulder in places. I don’t think that social distancing was much in evidence today.

These people over there are certainly respecting their social distancing though.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen countless fishermen perched on rocks at the water’s edge casting their lines into the sea and with the tide being right out just now, they have gone right out with it.

And as I have said before – I have yet to see anyone ever catch anything.

With the tide being out the harbour gates were closed so I could walk across the path over the top to the other side.

What was interesting me was the pontoons at the ferry terminal. With the tide being out, I wanted to see how they were holding up. And the answer to that question is “not very well”.

Either the silt is building up quickly around them, or else the pontoons are slowly sinking into the mud. My money is on the latter and I wonder how long it will be before they have to send a few diggers in to dig the pontoons out again

Not much else was happening at all around the harbour so I went into town to pick up my ice cream. The guy in the shop recognises me now and that’s bad news.

On into town and life here is definitely back to normal, as the monthly brocante is in full swing.

They aren’t anything like the brocantes that we used to have in the Auvergne which is a shame.

Over there it would be private people clearing out stuff that they no longer wanted or needed. Here, it’s professionals trying to make a living and so the stuff is basically banal rubbish sold at 10 times what it’s worth and probably 100 times what they paid for it in a deceased person’s house clearance.

Just out of interest I had a wander round to see what there was.

A book on the History of Normandy looked interesting, but not €8:00 worth of interesting by any means. And a nice looking work bench with built-in vice and clamp caught my eye, as did the price of €250:00. Free woodwork thrown in – or burrowed in more likely.

So at that point I abandoned my stroll around and headed for home.

The weather might have been quite nice, warm and sunny but there was quite a rolling sea out there this afternoon.

The yacht was quite obviously enjoying the windy weather but the fishing boat was making quite heavy weather of it all. Towing a dinghy behind it can’t have helped much either.

All of this windy weather is making me very nostalgic for the sea and a maritime voyage so somewhere – anywhere in fact. I need to stretch my sea legs at some point pretty soon.

Back here I had a bake-in.

First task was to make a pile of pizza dough. Just like bread dough but wit a little oil in the base. 400 grammes of flour is enough for three bases, and having mixed it and got it really nice, i left it on one side.

Next stop was some pastry. 250 grammes of flour and 125 grammes of vegan margarine makes a decent-side pie. Knead it all together for about 10 minutes until it’s thoroughly mixed through, and then add a couple of spoons of water and mix that until it reaches the right texture.

Take 2/3rds of it, roll it out and put it in a greased pie dish.
Peel, core and slice a couple of large apples and fill in the pie base.
Desiccated coconut, sultanas, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg go nicely in there too.
Trim off the excess pastry, and damp the edges of the pie with some milk.
Add the trimmed-off pastry back to the 1/3 of pastry, roll it out and stick it over the top, pushing the edges down with a fork onto the dampened edges of the pastry base to seal it in and then trim off the excess.
Brush the top with milk, dust with brown sugar, pierce a few holes to let out the steam, and bung into a hot oven.

With the excess pastry that you trimmed off, roll it out into a square, add some of the apple and the other interesting bits, dampen the edges with milk, fold it over and squeeze together, brush with milk, dust with sugar, pierce some steam holes and stick that in as well.

By now the pizza dough will have risen so divide into three.
Lightly dust two of them in oil, wrap in greaseproof paper, put in a plastic bag and stick in the freezer.

With the third one, roll it out to size and stick it in a greased pizza tray. brush with tomato sauce, add your toppings and herbs, then cover with your grated cheese.
Then stick your pizza in with the pie and the turnover.

“And here is one I made earlier” – not out of a toilet roll holder and sticky-backed plastic as we used to do with Peter Pervert, John Dope and Valerie Simpleton.

Well, actually, this is the finished product. Today’s culinary offering. The pizza was delicious but I don’t know about the pie because I wasn’t that hungry so I didn’t try any of it.

My run tonight was painful – really painful – but I pushed on al the same and did it all.

But we have a new visitor on the car park by the lighthouse. Not exactly new – in fact he’s been there for two evenings now.

It’s an old rescue van from the fire service and you can still see where the vinyl writing used to be on it. But now it seems to have been converted into a mobile home of some description.

But I couldn’t help but admire his optimism when I read this notice.

He’s looking for a female companion to accompany him on his travels “in search of the sun” and he plans to be gone a long time.

Judging by the dampness in the plastic and the faded writing, the sign has been up for a long time too so he’s not been having much luck in that respect.

And I can’t say that I’m surprised either.

My walk continued on around the headland to the other side.

There was a strong wind that was blowing and we were having a really rough sea this evening. This fishing boat, which at first I thought was our old favourite Coelacanthe but is in fact her sister la Tiberiade was really making heavy weather of it.

She’s only just out of harbour too – hasn’t even passed le Loup – the light and marker for the big rock that is out there and the entrance light for the harbour itself

From there I ran on all the way down to my first resting place.

And there I was entertained by an interesting spectacle on the roof of one of the buildings in the Boulevard de Terreneuviers. A group of seagulls were having a fight over something, although I don’t know what.

It was a nasty fight too. They chased one away but he kept on circling and coming back for more. This battle went on for quite some time abd the seagull didn’t seem to have any attention of giving up easily.

From there I ran on all the way down on my elongated run right to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

No picnickers again, but that was hardly a surprise because there was only a couple of feet of beach here right now. The tide is well and truly in. there was a fisherman here on the rocks, so I hope that for his sake the tide was on its way out.

If on the other hand it’s on its way in, he’ll find himself stranded if he’s not very careful

The sunset tonight was a little much – a little too bright to be able to reproduce a good effect.

This is the best of several photos that I took and it’s still not what I would like to see, which is a shame.

So after a couple of minutes and no sign of improvement I ran on home to write up my notes.

Back to work tomorrow and there’s plenty to do. A live concert for a start, followed by my Welsh homework.

We’ll see how far we get with all of that but right now I’m off to bed.

Saturday 20th June 2020 – LET’S NOT TALK …

… about this morning as it was nothing at all to celebrate.

Instead, while you admire the photos of the sunset this evening, let me tell you something about the rest of the day.

After the medication (when I finally did leave my stinking pit) I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. It’s always the most important part of the day when I check the dictaphone and find out that I’d been on my travels.

I was back in school last night and it was the annual prizegiving. On eof the prizes being awarded was for the most attractive male pupil. I actually made it to second place … “yes, as if …” – ed … which I thought was absolutely bizarre … “and quite right too” – ed. The winner was a friend of mine from my schooldays, and that would have been omething that would have surprised everyone except him. He was a little taken aback and when they presented him with the award he asked “is there a speech that I have to read?” I shouted out “no, you have to read your own”. So he gave a very tear-laden speech, just a short one thanking everyone. The the MC said “it’s lunchtime now so we’re going to do something down in the canteen but you can all go for a wander round until it’s ready”. I stormed out of the room there, I’m not sure why, to wait for the guy I was with – my doctor friend again. And we saw this winner again standing in the corner of one of the rooms on his own with a few people hanging around in that room as well and we wondered what was happening now with him

After a shower I headed off to the shops. And to my surprise I bought next-to-nothing at NOZ – some vegan ice cream, a couple of little bits and pieces and a nice comfy seat cushion for my office chair.

At LeClerc again I spent almost nothing at all. And to my regret they had run out of those frozen falafels that I had bought last week. I should have bought a few more packets last week.

However I did buy some of the veggie balls that they had, and also some more of that bread flour seeing as I seemed to have had some good results with that last lot.

Back here I put most of the stuff away and then I … errr … had a little relax. As if I haven’t done enough of that already today.

Lunch was taken on the wall overlooking the harbour again but whether it was the weekend or whatever, there wasn’t a soul moving about anywhere. I can’t think of such a less interesting time out there.

Mind you it was nice in the sun. I didn’t mind that much.

This afternoon I spent a lot of time going through some stuff on the hard drive of the computer. One or two … “dozen” – ed … directories seem to have got themselves into something of a tangle just now and needed a good clean-out

Hidden deep in there was a small utility program that I had downloaded and then completely overlooked. It’s quite a useful little utility too and I put it to some use while I was at it. No time like the present.

Not only that, while doing some research into the issue I came across the solution to a problem that has Been vexing me since Christmas.

So even if it looks as if I haven’t done much, I’ve accomplished an awful lot.

Out for my walk this afternoon and I had several errands to run.

Not that I got very far though because I was distracted by something out to sea. I took a photo of it with the big 70-300mm LENS with the aim of enlarging it when I returned home.

And much to my disappointment it wasn’t the Loch Ness Monster at all. It seems to be a group of people, maybe surfers with their surfboards having a Union meeting out to sea and I’ve no idea whatever what they may have been discussing.

One of the many things that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing has been the fishermen perched on rocks on the edge of the water rather like little garden gnomes on their tuffets.

There were yet more out there today – and for a change, I reckon from the body shape that this one is more likely a female of the variety. That’s certainly something new.

A friend of mine once took his wife fishing. “never again!” he replied. “She did EVERYTHING wrong to show me up in front of the others. talked too loudly, used the wrong hook, fixed the wrong bait, cast the line incorrectly, caught the biggest fish …”

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we saw them a good few weeks ago now digging out the accumulated sand from the old tidal swimming pool.

It’s now well up and running as you can see from this photo. There are a few people there or thereabouts.

And do you notice the guys in the yellow flourescent jackets? I was told the other day that the beach and the pool are to be patrolled by lifeguards this summer in view of the larger-than-expected crowds.

My suggestion is that the two guys down there in those jackets are the lifeguards.

One of the things that I forgot to do was to check on the roofing to see how it was doing.

Instead, I pushed on through to the Place Maurice Marland to check on my baby seagull to see how it was doing.

And there it is, on the roof, looking fit and healthy although still a week or two behind the others around here. And no sign of mummy. She probably thinks that baby is big enough to be left alone while she goes off foraging around for food.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the medieval city walls are falling to bits.

They spend a whole year almost repairing a huge section in the rue des Juifs but in the meantime there are three more sections of wall (and one on the Plat Gousset) that have had to be closed to passers-by due to the danger of falling rocks.

And here’s another one today. I noticed in the newspaper a few days ago that the stairs down to the Square Potel have been closed of “due to a serious degradation”.

It’s high time that, instead of wasting millions in the port on a job that could have been done at half the cost and twice the speed when the port was drained a couple of years ago, they started to do some serious work and maintenance on the cultural heritage of the town.

None of this is going to last for ever, and tourists – and inhabitants – won’t want to come if all there is is a heap of stones

Another thing that I have been meaning to do is to go and check up on the work that we saw on the steps in the rue LeCarpentier.

They had a digger there of course and it had been doing plenty of work. They’ve cleared away the ground from around a meter so it’s obviously some kind of mains services that are being overhauled.

As it happened, at the foot of the steps I bumped into my friend who works at the mairie. She told me that it’s a gas pipe being replaced.

While I had her attention I mentioned to her the subject of the itinerant. There’s a welfare service in town that deals with the disadvantages and there is emergency accommodation available. She’s going to get on the case and see what she can do.

If he wants to stay out there in all weathers, that’s his choice and I’m the last person to stand in his way. But someone who knows what they are doing should be keeping an eye on him all the same.

Now how long is it since we’ve had an old car in these pages? And I don’t just mean something from the 1960s or 70s either but something really old.

Walking back to the apartment I came across this parked on the side of the road by the Porte St Jean so of course I went over to have a closer look and take a couple of photos.

According to the radiator grille it’s a Citroen B12. And according to the woman who was sitting in the back, it’s from 1924

Something isn’t right there then.

The B12 wasn’t unveiled to the public until the October 1925 Paris Motor Show, when it replaced the B10 and the B2

It seems that the car had broken down, so the lady told me. The driver had gone off to look for spare parts so I didn’t really learn an awful lot. I hung around for a while but he didn’t show up so I headed for home.

After the guitar, tea tonight was baked potato and veg with one of the brzaded soya fillets (there were a few more in Noz today) followed by Apple Crumble and soya coconut dessert.

Just for a change I didn’t buy any of that today. In Noz they had some vegan oat-based ice cream and I’m going to try that when the coconut stuff runs out.

One thing that I like about Noz is that they do have the unexpected in there and it’s a great way to vary my diet. As I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed …I’m eating so much better these days.

Off I went on my run later on – all the way up the hill and down to the clifftop without stopping (in total agony too).

It was a lovely evening although there were not too many people around out there which was a surprise. There was one family just there having a big picnic in one of the old gun emplacements and a few other people loitering around just to make up the numbers.

The itinerant was there too of course, perched under his hedge. I reckon that he’ll be here for the summer, and more besides, probably.

There wasn’t much going on in the water this evening.

One or two fishermen on their rocks but no-one about in a fishing boat. Just this speedboat roaring over from the Ile de Chausey on his way back to town.

So with nothing doing there, I ran down to my viewpoint past the chantier navale, where there was no change in occupancy, down to the port which was all quiet.

With nothing happening I ran all the wat down the Boulevard Vaufleury, gown the Rue St Jean, through the alley and back up to the Rue du Nord and the viewpoint.

You’ve seen the photos of the sunset at the beginning of this posting, but you haven’t seen the beach. No picnickers down there – just a couple soaking up the summer sun and some kids having some fun.

With nothing else going on, I ran on home to write up my notes.

Sunday tomorrow, and I lie in. But I need to find the papers for Caliburn’s controle technique which are around somewhere and also book my next voyage to Leuven

That 6 months has come round fast, hasn’t it?

Friday 19th June 2020 – GUESS WHO …

… is back in town today?

And if you guessed Marité you get one point. Guessing Thora brings you another point. And if you guessed them both, you earn three gold stars, five merit marks and a night at the opera with your favourite film star

We’ve had what can only be described as a “busy” day in port today.

And if you had added Normandy Trader to your list, you would have won the entire internet.

She came into port on the morning tide by the looks of things because I noticed her in the harbour when I went out for lunch. Her turn-round wasn’t as quick as just recently as she didn’t leave until the afternoon tide by which time, as she was leaving, Thora was on her way in and they waved at each other as they passed.

Like I said, it’s been a busy day in port today. All we need now is a gravel boat and the Loch Ness Monster and we’ll hit the jackpot

So while you admire the photos of Marité manoeuvring … “PERSONoeuvring” – ed … her way into harbour this afternoon in the rainstorm, let me tell you about my day today.

Last night, as regular readers of this rubbish might have noticed, I crashed out well and truly long before I finished writing my notes. No sense in fighting to stay awake. i called it an early night.

But as what usually happens in cases like this, it didn’t do me any good at all because in news that will shock just about everyone, I was up and about long before even the first alarm went off.

When did that happen last?

So in the absence of any beauty sleep (and I need all that I can get of course) I had my medication and then had a listen to the dictaphone.

Unfortunately what went on during the night is not the kind of thing that I would like to recount so close to mealtime so I’m afraid that you’ll all have to do without it today. I accept no responsibility for your appetite.

However, a very warm welcome to Jem who made his debut appearance last night in my nocturnal meanderings. The list of visitors is growing and growing. We might even have a gravel boat and the Loch Ness Monster tonight.

Once I’d dealt with that, I mixed some dough.

Fresh proper bread flour now that I can get and with fresh yeast. I was impressed with the yeast that bubbled up just like it was supposed to and which I had never seen before. That was impressive.

The mix came out really well too – just as it should be. There’s a certain moment when the mix is just right where it starts to take the sticky dough off your hands and feels like a rubber or elastic ball.

That’s what you should be aiming for, and today’s was really good. So I left it and went to carry on with the notes from yesterday.

It took me about two hours to finish everything, what with one or two interruptions along the way.

One of them was from a school along the Lower North Shore of Québec. They wanted to use a couple of my photos OF ST PAUL’S RIVER on the “Forgotten Coast”.

Unfortunately she didn’t tell me which ones so they took some finding. And when I sent them to her, the mail was too big for her mailbox so I had to do a “wetransfer”.

By the time that the notes were finished, I went to look at the dough to see how it was doing.

And much to surprise it had risen – well over double the size that it was supposed to. So I quickly shaped it and put it in dish that I used to bake my bread, having greased it first.

Onto the side under a damp cloth where it stayed for half an hour or so. I went back into “the office” and made a start on this week’s music course. Have to try to catch up.

Half an hour later, I went back to look at the bread dough underneath the cloth to see how it was doing.

And to my surprise it had gone up like a lift and the cloth had lifted up right off the dish, so much had the bread risen.

This was obviously going to be a really good loaf, I reckoned. I put the oven on and when it was stinking hot, I stuck the bread in. 10 minutes on 230°C and 60 minutes on 210°C (I’ve decided not too cook it for so long this time) and we’ll see what happens.

And here’s the finished product.

Just look at this! It’s the first real loaf that I’ve ever made. It looked like bread, sounded like bread, felt like bread, sliced like bread and tasted like bread. I was so impressed.

So that’s the secret then. Decent flour, decent yeast, a decent mix, and not to cook it so long. I’ll have to see what the next one will turn out like, to make sure that it’s not “beginner’s luck”.

Another thing that I’m going to have a go at is fruit bread, like sultanas, dried fruit, walnut, fig, bananas and so on. Something for an afternoon snack.

For lunch I made my sandwiches with some of that lovely bread, and then went outside to sit on my wall in the sun.

This was when I noticed that Normandy Trader had come into the harbour earlier in the morning. They weren’t working on her, which probably means that she’s fully loaded ready to go as soon as the gates open.

But what’s she doing with a forest on board? I thought that Birnam Wood went to Dunsinane, not to Jersey.

By the time that I was ready to go for my afternoon walk, I’d finished my week’s music course. And now I can (in theory at least, because I’m useless on the piano) improvise the blues in diminished scales using the “motivic elements”.

And I’m actually noticing an improvement in my bass playing on the guitar – and not before time too, I reckon.

There was a telephone call this afternoon too. Ingrid rang me up for a chat and that was really nice. It’s been a while since we spoke.

She had lots of news to tell me and we chatted for ages catching up with our news. Despite her ongoing health issues she’s kept out of danger which was very nice to hear

When I went out for my afternoon walk the weather was still quite nice.

There were quite a few people about out there too enjoying the weather. And it was another one of those days where the views out to distance were really good.

We’ve seen Cap Fréhel away down the Brittany coast a few times just recently but today was certainly one of the better days in my memory. I reckon that the cape is about 70 kms from where I’m standing.

The above photo came out so well that you could actually see the fort and the lighthouse with the naked eye.

Or, at least, what I assume to be the fort and the lighthouse. Because they were so clear, I cropped the image and enlarged it to see if i could have a clearer indication of what those objects are on the horizon.

And I’m afraid to say that after all of that, I’m still none-the-wiser. I’m not even any better-informed either. The only solution I reckon is for me to go off for a wander with Caliburn one of these days.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an adventure.

The view out to the Ile de Chausey was quite interesting too.

To enhance the image I tried a little artistic effect but it didn’t seem to come out as I wanted it to. Still, it makes a change from a boring flat image.

From there, I threaded my way through the masses and walked on up to the lighthouse to see what was happening there.

The answer to that question was, as usual “not very much”. No aeroplanes, no bird-men of Alcatraz or anything.

What we did have though was a bunch of fishermen. We’ve seen dozens of these just recently, all taking advantage of the suspension of the detention à domicile to fit three months’ fishing into three weeks, even if it means, like these guys, doing it offshore in a zodiac.

But something that surprises me, and that is that in all the time that I’ve seen fishermen out here, and the numbers of fishermen that i’ve seen, I have never yet seen anyone actually catch anything.

And that goes for the fishermen on the rocks too.

We’ve seen dozens of those who have somehow scrambled down (never mind how they expect to scramble up again) the cliffs to the rocks at the water’s edge with their equipment. But today it was somewhat exaggerated. Every rock seemed to have its fisherman perched upon it casting his line into the water.

Te=he tide is on its way in too, and it comes in quite quickly. If they aren’t careful they will end up by being cut off from the shore.

No change in the chantier navale today. Still the same couple of boats, so I didn’t hang around there.

Instead I took a photo of a couple wrestling with a zodiac that they had dragged down with a van. It must be getting close to the time when the water will be deep enough to launch a boat from one of the ramps.

Back at the apartment, having finished the week’s work, I could make a start on the arrears.

A few (just a few) more photos from July 2019 edited, and I attacked one of the pages for the website that I’m in the process of rewriting. I need to push on with those.

But at 17:00 I broke it off and went outside.

By now it was teeming down with rain but I’d heard on the bush telegraph that Marité had been seen coming around the headland

First, though, we had Thora coming in.

She made her way down to her usual little corner underneath the crane where she can be unloaded. But how many times is it this week that she’s come into port?

Once she’d installed herself, Marité came in, as we have seen.

Apparently she needed some work doing which required her to be lifted out of the water. The boat lifts that we have seen here in the port de plaisance and the chantier navale have a lifting capacity of just 100 tonnes and as she weighs more than that, she had to go to Lorient where there was a bigger one that could lift her.

On my way back to the apartment I went to the other side of the headland to see if there was any sign of Normandy Trader

She was too far out at sea to take a decent photo, disappearing as she did into a rain squall.

How the weather had deteriorated in just the last two hours.

Back here there was the hour on the guitars and i’m feeling much more comfortable with them now, as I should be after all of the practice that I’ve been having just recently.

Tea was a burger with pasta and veg, followed by some more delicious apple crumble

It was then time for me to Go for my evening stroll.

It had stopped raining by now but still very wet underfoot. Nevertheless I set off up the hill on my run and instead of pausing for breath as I would normally do, turned the corner and ran down to the clifftop, bidding a cheery greeting to the itinerant as I passed.

And once again, we have fishermen just off the shore. A different group too than earlier, but by the looks of things, still having thr same amount of luck.

So with those people not accomplishing anything, I carried on with my walk around the headland once more.

Nothing much doing along there either so I ran on along the clifftop down to where I usually pause for breath.

Plenty of activity at the fish processing plant tonight. There was a lot of traffic out at sea fishing this afternoon and we saw some of it while we were out on our walk.

Tonight there are four articulated lorries with refrigerated trailers at the Fish processing plant tonight ready to take everything away tonight so that it will be in the seafood shops in the big cities tomorrow morning.

From there I ran on all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round the corner at the end. And then I pushed on all the way down the rue St Jean, down the alley and back round to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord.

No picnickers on the beach tonight but we did have a pile of kids scrambling around on the rocks down there tonight.

They don’t look as if they are fishing – at least, the couple nearest the camera, and I’m at a loss to understand what there is about this fascination with the rocks just recently

There was far too much cloud for a really decent sunset this evening which is a shame. We can’t win a coconut every time.

One photo came out really well though. It showed up the heavy cloud really well and made a strange reflection in the sea.

From there I ran on back to the apartment to write up my notes.

Tomorrow is Saturday and shopping. I don’t really need all that much, seeing as I haven’t been eating all that much just recently.

But I’ll go just for form’s sake. You never know what I might find at Noz.

Monday 15th June 2020 – I WAS HARD …

… at it all day today for a change) and by the time I knocked off at 18:15 I’d completed a whole radio project.

It was one of my live concerts which regular readers of this rubbish might think are usually easier than the usual ones – and usually they are. But not this one. Not at all.

Someone had very kindly send me a pile of music (which reminds me – if you are in a group and want your music featured on my shows, get in touch!) for a live concert, which was very nice of them and I never decry the effort, but it was all unusable.

It was a case of scouring the internet to see what I could find, re-manipulating and remixing the rest and then editing it and merging it all together. It’s ended up a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but there wasn’t all that much I could about it.

So in the end I wrote the intro, dictated it, uploaded it to the computer, edited it, and then merged it into the other part, and then had to edit everything to make it fit the on-hour time slot.

And if you think that’s a lot of work, it’s not all that I had to do either. And it didn’t help much that I missed the third alarm as well. Only by a few minutes but missed it all the same.

After the meds I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I had been during the night. I was actually working with someone for whom I don’t really care all that much in real life. We had a tyre depot or we had taken one over. It wasn’t particularly very busy but we were just doing odd jobs and things just to tide us over while we established ourselves. We’d taken it over from some other people, one of their depots and we noticed that we were getting into Novermber but we hadn’t had any calls to change tyres for winter or anything like that and I would have expected that to have been happening round about now. So I was wondering whether they were keeping all of the good jobs back from us and doing them themselves. I was talking to another friend on line and he was asking about how things were. I explained that I hadn’t had time to devote anything to any project that I particularly wanted to do because earning a living was the priority and as no-one wanted to employ me I’ve been having to create a business for myself and I was telling him about this tyre depot.

There were a few things that needed doing and then for the rest of the morning I dealt with my Welsh homework. And I found that I had forgotten most of what I had learnt last week so I had to revise it again.

There was the break for lunch of course, and also the brak for my afternoon walk.

It was trying its best to rain when I went out there this afternoon, so i didn’t like to hang around too much.

But regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen piles of weird buoys and maritime markers bobbing up and down in the water around the coast. There’s another one here just now, with a couple of boats – a zodiac and a speedboat loitering around it.

It’s difficult to see what they are doing – whether they are fishing with rod and line or whether they are doing something with the buoy.

No prizes what this guy is doing here.

With not very much (and even fewer people) around on the lawn I wandered off around the headland to see if there was anything happening there. Again, not an awful lot except this guy fishing from the rocks.

It’s quite a scramble to reach that particular point and I bet that it’s even more difficult scrambling back up the hill, especially with a full catch.

And I’m not convinced about his choice of attire either, and I have a feeling that he’ll be regretting it before much longer.

Just look over there at the Brittany coast. That’s a couple of wicked rainstorms and they are heading right this way. I’m not too bothered because I’ll be home in five minutes. It’ll take him at least that to put away his gear and scramble up the rocks.

There are plenty of boats out there too and they’ll know all about it when the rainstorm hits them in mid-ocean or whatever

That’s not the best of it either.

My walk took me further around the headland to the south side and this was the sight that greeted me there. A huge rain cloud has blown in from the bay and enveloped the Pointe de Carolles in its wet and clammy grasp.

It’s slowly heading up the coast and as I watched it advance, it slowly spread its shround all over Jullouville.

“This isn’t the time to be hanging about” I reckoned, and headed back for my apartment

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the weekend we saw the “no parking” notices on the part of the car park that is on the public part of the Place d’Armes.

Being intrigued to see what was happening there I went round for a good look. It’s not easy to see what they will be doing but we have a builder’s mobile office parked here now.

Not only that, there’s a generator just parked there waiting for just anyone to come along, pick it up and drive away. Imagine that in the UK!

On my way back I saw Gribouille sitting on his windowsill so I went to give him a stroke, only to find Nicole there struggling with her drawers, with her hand still in a plaster.

Gallant me, I went to give her a hand. I glued them back together for her and slid them back into the unit.

Back outside it was now teeming down. The rain had caught me up so I came inside quickly.

After my hour on the guitars I ended up with a stuffed pepper for tea. And the amount of fresh food that I’ve had to throw away due to not eating is appalling. I hate throwing food away.

Later on I went for my evening walk and run around the headland.

First stop though was to see what was going on where the builders’ office was. And we seem to have acquired a pile of tarmac and sand from somewhere. They must be digging up somewhere, but I’ve no idea where.

Having examined that, I ran off up the road – a little bit (just a little bit) easier than it was been. And having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop.

My itinerant was there again. I reckon that he’s here for the duration.

He wasn’t the only one here either – although he might well have been seeing as how quiet the whole area was. There was just one other couple here – a young couple sitting in the sun quietly watching it sink down into the sea

It’s a really nice way to spend a summer evening.

And talking about nice ways to spend summer evenings, I’ve had an e-mail completely out of the blue from someone who played a large part in my life 45 years ago and who I’ve seen on a few occasions since, but not for about 10 years.

So what’s happening here?

No prizes for guessing what’s happening here.

A couple of fishing boats out there, almost stationary. So I imagine that they have their fishing equipment out and are dredging up the sea bed for the shellfish. I’m determined to get out there one day and see how they do it.

Despite it being overcast, there was another excellent view all the way down the Brittany coast towards Cap Fréhel. Not as good as the last time but still impressive enough.

As I walked across the lawn by the Resistance memorial, the sun suddenly came dramatically out of the clouds and lit up the Chateau de la Crête.

Ordinarily I would wait until I’m down on the other side of the headland where there’s an unrestricted view, but the weather is being rather capricious just now and you can’t rely on there still being the same effect in five minutes time.

But at least you get to see one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. They don’t feature very often in my photos for one reason or another.

Nothing else of any importance happened at all. My run all the way in its several stages) down to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord was pretty uneventful.

There on the beach though I could see that a group of picnickers weas just installing itself down among the rocks. I didn’t think that it was warm enough for that, but they clearly do.

But when you ae young you are pretty much immune to that kind of thing. Yes, since I had that e-mail earlier, I’ve gone all nostalgic and broody.

Instead of musing on the past, I straightened myself up and admired the sunset.

It’s another one of these wonderful mid-evening lights again and I really like the effect that it gives.

But I couldn’t stay for long. I had a chat with a couple of people admiring the apartment that’s for sale, especially when the woman stood on one of the bollards in the street to have a better view and it sank into the ground under her weight.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh class so I need to revise and prepare for it.

That means an early night, in the hope that I can be out of bed early.

Some hope, hey?

Thursday 11th June 2020 -I WAS TREATED …

… to a delightful little nautical danse macabre this morning down in the port.

Normandy Trader had come in on the morning tide – in fact she was waiting outside the harbour for the gates to open earlier – and was tied up at the unloading point while the workers on the crane were busy unloading her.

And into the harbour, full steam ahead, came Thora. She almost came to a dead stop when she saw Normandy Trader moored just there. Being too far over to moor up at the side, she had to go into a delightful 360° outside turn in order to get herself into position to moor in a temporary unloading place.

Mind you, while we’re on the subject of a berth being occupied, mine was occupied for rather longer than intended this morning.

Never mind the third alarm – it was 06:30 when I finally crawled out of bed again.

No breakfast once more so I came back here to listen to the dictaphone. We were on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour again and we reached the Far North of Iceland although it was much more bleak and much more cold and much more icy than the Far North of Iceland – it could easily have been the far North of Greenland. There was some kind of settlement there which was pretty much abandoned – there weren’t many people living there. There was one building made of wood and the whole front had been washed away by a high tide in a storm. We typed something into a search engine about this place and it came up with a couple of shots of the boat that we were using to ferry ourselves back and to to the ship and also the World War II 4-engined bomber that had crashed somewhere in the vicinity. Of course I was really keen to go ahead and find out where this plane was but that was when I awoke, with a massive attack of cramp that knocked me right for 6.

So how did this end? I’ve no idea because after I’d eased the cramp off and went back to sleep I missed the restart and that was that.

Looking back on things, I’ve spent so much time during the night on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour that I shudder to think what the bill would be if ever Adventure Canada find out and decide to send me a bill for my stays.

Next job was to finish off the Tax Return and type a letter to the Tax people to explain my particular circumstances. A shower, and a weigh-in, and then off to LIDL

Not that I got very far.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the roadworks that we saw yesterday in the rue Notre Dame. All of the traffic is having to travel down the rue St Jean and as we have seen on many occasions, it’s pretty narrow.

As a consequence they have installed temporary traffic lights now at the Porte St Jean. I shall have to go for a wander and see how far they stretch down the street.

Off I continued on my travels, but I didn’t get very far.

Around the headland came our friend Normandy Trader. As she approached the port entrance I prepared myself ready to take a photo of her entering port, but she came to a shuddering halt just outside the harbour.

Of course, what has happened is that the tide isn’t quite in far enough and the gates are closed. She’ll have to wait until they open but for some reason she’s decided to wait outside.

At last I could push on down the road and down the Rampe du Monte Regret.

And there seem to have been a few changes there too. Everyone is preparing for the summer and as there’s no Nuit des Soudeurs this year, it looks as if they are installing a kiddies’ open air play area of some description with a little casual café.

People won’t be travelling on holiday this year of course so we’ve seen all kinds of preparations being undertaken to make sure that people enjoy their holidays at home.

And on that subject, I’ve no idea what’s going on here.

These look pretty much to me like the beach cabins that we’ve seen them installing on the Plat Gousset just now, but I’m wondering what on earth they are doing unloading in the middle of the town centre here in the Place General de Gaulle.

All will be revealed in due course, I imagine. I see that the route of my Sunday perambulation is already panning itself out without me having to sit and think about it.

Up at LIDL I spent a lot of money but without anything substantial to show for it. A pile of bin liners was one thing, but the principal expenditure was on olive oil. I always cook with olive oil and I’m getting rather low, and today they had two-litre bottles at a ludicrous price. So one of them found its way into my shopping bag.

On the way back I went to the Tax Office to deliver my letter. It’s closed one day a week and regular readers of this rubbish will recall, having followed my exploits around the world often enough, which day of the week it’s going to be.

So I slipped it into the letterbox and headed back towards home.

Thursday is the day for a little treat. Calling at La Mie Caline, I picked up my dejeunette for lunch. I know that I bake my own bread these days but it’s still nice to have something different.

Pushing on I went via the Rue Paul Poirier to see if I could see the roofing works in thr Place Marechal Foch from a different angle.

And from here, there’s a completely different perspective on what they are doing up there. It’s quite a big roof, that much is evident, and it must have been something of an effort to put the scaffolding up in the gap between the two wings.

But on the fork-lift trucks they have a hod of slates so they are clearly pressing on with the job and it won’t be long before they will finish it.

Up the hill in the rue des Juifs, I could see Normandy Trader at her berth.

They are cracking on with the unloading and with Thora awaiting her turn they aren’t going to be long in turning her round ready to leave port.

So I pushed on back home to sort out the shopping. There wasn’t any more excitement on the way back which was a shame.

Having gathered up my strength I went to have a look at Week 3 of my Accountancy course. There are actually 38 modules in this week’s session which makes this “four hours of study per week” look a bit ridiculous.

But by the time that 15:30 came round, I’d done 21 of them, and that was despite a stop for lunch.

At 15:30 though, just as I was planning to leave for my afternoon walk, Rosemary called me up. We ended up having a lengthy chat – to such an extent that it was after 17:00 when I was ready to go for my afternoon perambulation.

And just for a change, it was pouring down outside. and I can’t say that we didn’t need it. All of the grass here is scorched dark brown and needs a really good soaking.

Dressed in my raincoat I was fine and I could watch in comfort yet another nautical danse macabre as a fishing boat sailed into the bay just here, performed an exquisite U-turn and sailed back out again.

If you look at the photo, you can see its wake quite clearly. But the point of it quite clearly beats me.

The weather might be bad for some people but others are taking full advantage of it right now.

Here’s someone down there dressed in the right gear and fishing off the rocks. I’m not quite sure what he might catch down there, apart from pleurisy, but it did remind me of the old guy who once told me that having sex these days was very much like fishing.
“Why is that?” I asked
“Well” he replied, “these days you get your rod out and you never know what you are going to catch”

On that note I strolled off around the headland and down along the path on the other side of the promontory.

That route takes me above the chantier navale where I can look down and see what’s going on down there. And today we have another occupant. A large fishing boat has come in to join the others.

And only just come in too by the looks of things. The crew are still down there with her giving her a good hose down. Not that she’ll need much in this weather.

A rhythmic tapping from further down the Boulevard Vaufleury told me that the roofing work down below in the rue du Port was still going on.

Not that I would want to be working on a roof in weather like this, but the answer to that is that with no roof on the building in a rainstorm you are going to get wet anyway so it doesn’t make much difference.

Talking of getting wet, standing here watching the workers on the roof was having that effect on me so I came on back home. There was my hour on the guitars to occupy my time.

After the session on the guitar I would normally go for tea but I wasn’t feeling hungry at all so I caught up with a few little bits and pieces, only to develop a raging hunger round about 20:30.

What’s going on here?

Anyway it was far too late to worry about food now with so much to do – like going for a run.

A few biscuits filled a little hole and then I set off into the rain again. Up the hill a little easier than it has been just now, which reminded me that my climb up the hill to LIDL had passed without the slightest hint of drama.

Having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop past the itinerant who was sheltering under a plastic sheet. And that’s what I don’t understand. All of the World War II bunkers of the Atlantic Wall and the couple of stone buildings from the 18th Century fortress in which he could be sheltering, all of which are out of the rain and all a mere cockstride from here, and he’s sheltering under a plastic sheet under a hedge.

There was nothing much happening out to sea so I carried on walking around the headland to the other side of the promontory.

It must be getting close to gate-opening time, I reckon, because the fishing boats were starting to head for the port. 105 minutes before High Tide, so I’ve been told, that the gates open and it’s not so very far off that right now.

But no seagulls hanging around the boats tonight. Probably the rainstorm is proving to be too much for them too and they’ve gone off to seek shelter elsewhere.

The next stage of my run takes me down past the chantier navale and down to the end of the path where I always stop for breath.

And I was right about the harbour gates being on the point of opening because just look at all of the fishing boats here. And that’s not by any means all of them either. There were another three or four out of shot behind the harbour wall, not to mention those still out at sea.

But the gate didn’t open while I was there so I carried on with my run.

All the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury, around the corner and up to the second pedestrian crossing. But once more I ended up a good 20 oe so metres beyond it.

Back down at the harbour I had a look at to see what was going, accompanied by someone else who was taking a few photos of the place. What caught my eye were the couple of little boats that were moored against the new pontoons in the shadow of the larger boats.

But what I was trying to understand was why they would want a ladder at the end of the pontoon going down into the water. That’s another mystery to me.

The fifth stage of my run takes me now all the way to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord where we usually see the sunset. But not this evening of course. Not in this weather.

No picnickers out there either tonight which is no surprise either, but we did have some more fishermen doing their stuff. One of them was a young boy whom I watched scrambling over the rocks until he foud a good position to cast his line.

Once he’s put his hook in the water I ran on back home to write up my notes.

So later than I anticipated I’m off to bed now. No idea who I’ll be meeting during the night but I hope that it’s someone interesting and exciting. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Tomorrow I’m going to finally get to grips with my music course and spend the day learning blues piano. It’s free so I may as well make the most of it.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: fishing

Thursday 16th July 2020 – TODAY WAS …

Sunday 12th July 2020 – MY BREAD …

Thursday 9th July 2020 – ANYONE CARE TO …

Saturday 4th July 2020 – THERE WAS NO …

Sunday 28th June 2020 – AFTER YESTERDAY …

Friday 26th June 2020 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Thursday 25th June 2020 – I CAN’T SEE …

Wednesday 24th June 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

Monday 22nd June 2020 – THIS MORNING …

Sunday 21st June 2020 – HAPPY SOLSTICE!

Saturday 20th June 2020 – LET’S NOT TALK …

Friday 19th June 2020 – GUESS WHO …

Monday 15th June 2020 – I WAS HARD …

Thursday 11th June 2020 -I WAS TREATED …

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