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Monday 15th March 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… much better day today.

Due without doubt to crawling wearily into bed at about 22:45 and sleeping right through until the alarm went off.

There was plenty of time for me to go off on a nocturnal voyage or two. I was out somewhere during the night. I went to see a house. I walked in there and walked out in disgust because it was pretty expensive. They wanted €16 per week until 2008. I thought that that was a lot but as someone pointed out, at least it’s a roof over my head even if it’s only temporary. Just then my personal manager guy who looks after me came past and we walked off together and were talking about things. It might have been a friend of mine from way back. We got into school and I’d had a can of drink on the way and this guy had paid for it. I said that I would give him the money back when we got to school so we got there and bumped into a girl who was in my year at class of all people. She’d had a bottle of drink and there had been a strange clip on the bottle that she had to hand back. I’d seen someone walking off with a clip of that sort but it didn’t really click for a minute what it was. After her drink she had a hunt around for this clip but couldn’t find it. She went to ask the girl at the till if she had seen it. They talked about this and she said something about “what have you done with your little friend?”. She looked up and saw me and went all red and blushed. This girl said something so I replied “it’s OK. I’ve had worse than that”. Then she came out with something about the school over the last couple of years has been really good because there’s been no-one foreign in it. No Irish and no foreigners. I replied that foreigners are more exciting and interesting so we had a talk about that.

Later we were on the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR trying to go through the North West Passage but there had been an incident and we had lost our mast so we were proceeding with diesel engines. There was a port nearby but we didn’t know which one it was so we’d head there anyway. One of the guys with us broadcast a silly message about how well we were doing and so on. We came into this town along the road on the ship and it didn’t look right at all because it looked far too green, somewhere like the north of Scotland. We pulled in and I thought “this is a big town. It has a Co-op and loads of shops so this isn’t somewhere in the North-West Passage at all. The street signs were in English with Chinese writing as well and all of the accents were northern Scotland. We parked where we thought the port was and there was a ramp going up into like a pub. He wandered off, the guy who was with me and I wandered around for a bit. he went off looking in the shops and he started to complain about the rugby pitch that he had seen. I looked out of the window and we were quite high up. There was a big valley down below us with gas holders in it. I thought “well, this is nothing like a port at all”. I walked up this ramp but it turned out that it was into a pub. I thought “we’ll never be able to get our boat up to here. There were no boats or anything and I thought “where the heck have we arrived now?”.

After the medication I made a start on the radio programme for this week and having chosen the music and paired it while I was in Leuven, I’d finished and had it running to listen to by 11:15.

It’s a good jo that I had because while I was listening to it and trying to organise myself Rosemary rang and we had one of our lengthy chats. As a result I was quite late in going for my lunch.

After lunch I had something important to do – to make further enquiries about what I need to do to upgrade the big computer as I would like it to be. I’ll run the one that I repaired for 72 hours non-stop while I’m in Leuven next week and if it runs fine, I can use that while I have the big office machine in pieces.

The weather was fairly cold and threatening rain when I went out for my afternoon walk so I dressed accordingly when I went out for my afternoon walk.

Not as accordingly as this guy down here on the beach out by the Rue du Nord. I just had on my winter jacket and cap. This guy seems to be in his oilskins and waders, and he probably has his sou’wester in his pocket in case it comes on to rain, which it might well do at some point, judging by the sky.

Mind you, he was the only person down on the beach who was dressed to such an extent. There were three or four other people down on the beach at different locations but they were dressed more … errr … casually. I’ve no idea what they were all doing down there and I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.

There was plenty of activity in the air today too. While I was walking along the footpath I was overflown by a light aircraft.

Despite the poor quality of the photograph due to the distance that it was out at sea I could see her registration number. She’s F-GSBV, a Robin DR400/180 of unknown date. She’d taken off from Granville Airport at 15:53 and flew a figure-of_eight around the coast and landed back at the airport after just 11 minutes, her second flight of the day.

There wasn’t anyone else out there this afternoon so I had the path all to myself. I pushed along in the wind as far as the lawn near the lighthouse.

From here, there’s a good view back to the College Malraux where I could see what was going on with the roofing that they were doing.

They don’t seem to have advanced very far over this last couple of weeks. They’d had that corner of the roof stripped off when I came back from Leuven two and a half weeks ago. They need to be working quicker than that if they want to finish it sometime soon.

Nothing else was happening here, except for the Council grass-cutters, so I walked on across the car park to the end of the headland. There wasn’t anything happening in the bay and the Brittany coast was rather obscured by clouds so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a week or two ago we saw some workmen unloading a pile of builders’ bags onto the quayside over by the ferry terminal.

Those bags disappeared quite quickly and I never did find out what happened to to them, but today we have some more workmen over there. They seem to be doing something over on the far side of the wall and one of these days when I have a moment, whenever that might be, I’ll have to go over there and have a look for myself.

Down at the chantier navale there was no change in occupancy. The four large yachts and the trawler were still in there up on blocks and thy look as if they will be there for a while yet. And there’s not much room in there for anything else if the need arises.

One thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall noticing is that these days we seem to be having rather a plethora of NAABSA (not always afloat but safely aground) fishing boats over by the Fish Processing Plant.

It used to be very rare to see one – they’d all be taken inside to the wet harbour and moored there. But just recently we’ve seen a few abandoned over there to the mercy of the tide and I’m not sure why either.

Back here, I had my afternoon coffee and then tackled the photos from Greenland. Another 20 bit the dust in the time available. We’re still at the foot of the Sermitsiaq Glacier that runs off the into the Maniitsoq Ice Cap Evighedsfjorden or Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord but all told, there is just 300 or so to be dealt with for the month of July 2019.

The guitar practice went OK and I finally managed to track down the chord arrangement for Al Stewart’s MODERN TIMES, something that I’ve been trying to find for quite a while, with one of the best guitar solos of all time right at the end.

With having a late lunch I didn’t fancy much for tea – just a baked potato with beans.

Now that my notes are written, it’s off to bed as I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow. Surprisingly, I haven’t crashed out today and that’s a surprise. That sleep must have done me some good.

Another one just like that would do me even better.

Saturday 13th March 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the photos of today’s storm out at sea I’ll tell all you about my miserable day today.

And miserable it was as well too. It took me ages to go off to sleep, no matter how tired I was when I finally crawled into bed. at one stage I didn’t think that I would drop off at all.

And when I awoke this morning I had a pain in my left shoulder – one of the better-known side-effects of this vaccination. It’s not all that uncomfortable actually, and in any case, by all accounts it’s far better than what you have to go through if you actually catch the virus.

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

I was transferring a load of stuff from one hard drive to another (rather reminiscent of what I was doing yesterday) but some of the files wouldn’t move. That was extremely disappointing. I tried a few little tricks but they still wouldn’t move. As I was passing through the data cable that ran between one and the other there were all these kids who were on holiday. There were 3 groups of kids, blond-haired boys and girls who were all different ages, probably 8 or 9 and I dunno 2 groups slightly older and different ages. I kept on confusing them because of the time difference that it was taking me to do this. I decided that I would be chatty so I spoke to the youngest group and said “hi”. This girl gave me a puzzled look and said something that I didn’t catch so I said “hi again”. She repeated what she had just said. I gave her a smile and a wave and walked on through the data cable to the other drive, sitting there wondering what it was that she said. Had she said that she didn’t speak English and I pretended not to hear it or didn’t notice that that was what she said.

Later on I was at a music festival, a huge thing and there were enormous crowds there. But it was all family stuff. We were wandering around the camp site and there was no social distancing whatever and there were arguments over pitches and who was going to camp where and whatever.

Just as that voyage was starting to get under way, the alarm went off and I awoke. And I was up and out of bed before the second one went off.

Before I went to have my shower I made a start on tidying up the back-up drive. As I expected, it’s slow progress from here on in and it’s going to be a long time before it’s done. Mind you, I did liberate another 40GB of free space sorting out the duplicates.

After my shower I went off to the shops. And I wasn’t out all that long and didn’t spend much money either. And what I did spend, a lot of it went on an industrial-size bottle of clothes-washing liquid from NOZ.

Back here I carried on with the sorting out of the duplicate files but at some point I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 14:00. I’ve no idea how long I was out of it but it made me run a lot later than I intended.

After lunch I worked on the Greenland photos. I only did a few yesterday so I had a lot to do today to catch up. Right now we’re in the Kangerlussuatsiaq Fjord in Greenland going to look at the Sermitsiaq Glacier that drains off the Maniitsoq Ice Cap.

This was the last complete day on board the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. Tomorrow afternoon we alight at Kangerlussuak and take the aeroplane to Toronto where I push onwards deeper into North America.

At 15:45 I was ready to go out for my afternoon walk but we were in the middle of a torrential downpour and hailstorm. I wasn’t going to go out for a walk in any of that.

Round about an hour later the rain eased off a little so I nipped out.

It was only a brief amelioration in the weather too. As you can see, there’s a raging storm going on out over the Ile de Chausey and I hadn’t gone all that far before it caught me in the open. It was completely wild out there right now and I was soaked to the skin.

There had been one or two other people out there but by the time I reached the lawn and the car park, I was pretty much all on my own out there and that was hardly any surprise at all given the conditions.

Nothing going on out at sea today, either in the English Channel or the Baie de Mont St Michel so I pushed on along the path to see what was happening at the port.

And we have another change of occupant in the chantier navale today. Well, yesterday, actually, as I noticed it when I arrived back from Valognes last night but of course it was too dark to photograph.

Today, we have one of the bigger trawlers, Charlevy in there undergoing work. I’ve no idea what’s the matter with her and there was no-one around there to ask either. In fact there was no-one working on any of the boats down there today and I’m not surprised about that either. I wouldn’t be out there working in the kind of weather that we were having this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, the ferry terminal was overflowing with boats – both of the Joly France ferries and Chausiais were moored over there. But they have all left the quayside today as you can see.

One of the Joly France boats, the older one, has disappeared completely but the other one and Chausiais are now moored up in the inner harbour next to the two Channel island ferry boats.

By now, I was a total drowned rat so I hurried on back to the apartment. A hot coffee and a slice of Liz’s cake from yesterday went down really nicely, and I had a quick bash at the notes from Central Europe last year until the football came on.

Haverfordwest County, one of the newly-promoted teams this season were facing perennial champions TNS

TNS are currently in second position in the table having over the last couple of weeks lost their ruthless streak. The owners of the club have, on the other hand, retained their ruthless streak and sacked the management team early in the week in an effort to climb back to the top.

TNS, although they showed plenty of skill, looked to be very lethargic today but Haverfordwest, although clearly not as skilful, were very well marshalled. TNS had the lion’s share of possession and Haverfordwest were content to let them run around and shepherd them into blind alleys.

To everyone’s surprise, Haverfordwest took the lead, from a breakaway upfield after 17 minutes, but when TNS equalised from a corner early in the second half we could see a familiar script being replayed.

Later in the match Haverfordwest tired and we were all expecting a couple more TNS goals, but instead one of the Haverfordwest attackers took them completely by surprise and combined well with one of his colleagues who scored a beautiful goal to restore Haverfordwest’s surprise lead.

And as the match played out to a conclusion, it was Haverfordwest who were still going forward and won probably the most surprising victory of the season so far.

For tea I just had some pasta and vegetables and then came in here to write my notes. Now that they are done I’m going to prepare some sourdough and then I’m off to bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow and I can’t say that I don’t need it. A good sleep will do me good.

Sunday 7th March 2021 – AFTER I’D FINISHED …

… finished writing up my notes last night I went off and made my kefir. There were a pile of kiwis that were on the verge of going off so I used four of those. Whizzed up in the whizzer and then pressed through the filter system and the brewed kefir mixed in.

While it was seeping through I set another batch of kefir on the way and then the stuff that I’d mixed, I filtered through the filter stack into the bottles and left it to brew.

When I’d finished I came back in here but I wasn’t in the least bit tired so I sat down and did some work. I finished ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE and then I went on and bashed out 30 or so photos from Greenland 2019 and I’m now sailing down Tunulliarfik Fjord.

It was about 01:45 when I finally went to bed so it was something of a disappointment to be awake at 07:50 when I awoke. But there’s no chance whatever of me being up and about on a Sunday at that ridiculous time so I turned over and went back to bed.

10:15 is much more like it on a Sunday.

First task after the medication was to deal with the sink. I went to do all of the washing-up from last night but the water simply didn’t drain out at all.

In the end I dismantled all of the pipework under the sink and found a nice piece of cable to ram down the pipe that I couldn’t dismantle. Judging by how far the cable went down the pipework it was well into the communal lengths before it found the obstruction.

It took quite a while of furkling about with the cable before the obstruction suddenly moved. And then I had to reassemble everything. It wasn’t exactly how I intended to start my Sunday but at least I could crack on.

After all of that I couldn’t concentrate on the blog entry that I’d started and didn’t seem to make any progress so I had another go at the photos. That’s a huge pile of those that I did today and I’m now in a zodiac in Arsuk Fjord heading for a close encounter with a musk-ox.

Despite it being a Sunday, I remembered to go out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

The sky was absolutely beautiful once more with not a cloud in the sky today. But there were plenty of other things in the air instead. None of the bird-men because there wasn’t enough wind but we did have one or two people up in the air in their powered hang-gliders or whatever they are called.

Several light aircraft were flying past overhead too, but they were too far away for me to photograph with any kind of clarity.

On the other hand, something else went flying by quite clearly enough for me to photograph this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have some kind of bird of prey flying around the edges of the cliffs. There’s a colony of rabbits somewhere in the cliffs and I imagine that it targets the very young of the colony together with whatever else it can find in the way of small mammals.

As for the details of its species, I have to say that I have no idea. Despite all of the lectures on birdwatching that I’ve had in the past from Nerina, they weren’t about this kind of bird.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, we were talking about the gorgeous weather today.

Nice though it might have been, it wasn’t all that warm at all and so I was surprised, if not astonished, to see a couple of women emerging from the sea like a couple of 21st-Century sirens. I would have expected the water to have been cold enough to freeze the barnacles off a brass dinghy right now.

When we were in the Arctic we had people throwing themselves into the sea even as the surface was freezing over but they were Canadians and it’s the kind of thing that you might expect from them but it’s not the thing that I would normally expect French people to do for pleasure.

There were quite a few people out there this afternoon, not as many as there were yesterday for sure, and with nothing going on out at sea I walked round to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

There was no change in occupancy in the chantier navale today, the same four boats that have been there since Thursday are still there on their own today, but also, surprisingly, the two boats that were grounded over by the Fish Processing Plant yesterday are still there today.

Every now and again we see the odd boat left there overnight or in between tides but to see them there for this long is quite unusual. It prevents others coming in to unload from reaching the wharf and they can’t be too happy about that.

It’s not as if there isn’t any room in the inner harbour for them to tie up. There is plenty of space in there since they installed the new pontoons.

As I mentioned earlier, there wasn’t a great deal of wind this afternoon, but there must be some kind of strong wind blowing from somewhere as you can see from this photograph.

The sea was quite calm this afternoon without any high waves, as you can tell by the wake of the cabin cruiser going past but there was a really powerful current rolling in. It’s about every seventh wave that is the strongest and this seventh waves was smashing in and sending spray right up to the top of the sea wall.

There were several people standing around here at the viewpoint watching the spectacle. I’m not quite sure why because there were no shipwrecks, nobody drownding, in fact nothing to laugh at at all.

Another indication of how calm the sea really was today was the behaviour of the yacht out there in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

All of that looks perfectly calm out there and the boat looks perfectly stable regardless of all of the waves beating up against the harbour wall. It seems to be such a really nice day to be out and about on the water.

In the background, the road that leads into Saint-Pair sur Mer is all bathed in sunlight and the chateau d’eau looks particularly prominent today. There’s also some building work going on in St Pair sur Mer too, judging by the crane on the extreme right of the image. I’ll have to go and have a look at that one of these days too.

Back here I made another attempt at rewriting the notes of one of my pages from Central Europe and this time, I made some progress. But I broke off to have a chat with TOTGA and then I had to go to attend to the cooking for the following week.

The pizza dough I had taken out of the freezer this morning and now that it had defrosted I kneaded it again, rolled it and put it on the tray to proof again.

There was a roll of flaky pastry left over in the fridge since Christmas so I used it this afternoon and made myself an apple pie with it. And while the pie was baking I assembled the pizza and that went into the oven when the pie was finished.

And here we have the finished products from today’s baking session, along with the kefir from last night. That’s already fermenting so it seems to be a very good batch today. I hope that it tastes as good as it performs.

The pizza was delicious but as for the apple pie, I’ll tell you another time – there was no room for any this evening as the pizza was, as usual, quite filling.

Having done a little tidying up, I’m now off to bed as it’s Monday tomorrow and I’m radioing again. I remember saying at the beginning of the week that I was quite optimistic about the week that was to come and I seem to have accomplished a fair amount for a change. I wonder how this week will turn out.

Thursday 4th February 2021 – HAVING WAXED SO LYRICALLY …

… at great length about the epicurean delicacies for my meals yesterday, today’s evening meal was a much more plebeian beans and chips with a burger on the side.

For some unknown reason, I had a fancy for baked beans for tea – maybe my subconscious is telling me that I should have a bubble-bath tomorrow – and in the absence of anything else to go with it, I settled on chips, in order to dispose of some really old potatoes, and a burger out of the stock in the fridge.

Making chips here is not too easy because I don’t have – and I don’t want – a deep-fat fryer but my niece Rachel who is a Tupperware senior manager let me have an incredible heavy-duty thing that fries in a microwave. It’s something that I haven’t used much because actually it’s too big to rotate in my microwave oven, but I worked out that if I take out the turntable and put a ramekin dish in there upside-down to cover over the pivot (I’m nothing if not inventive), I can put the Tupperware thing in on top of the ramekin dish and it just about fits in.

It doesn’t rotate but you can’t have everything and while the results are not spectacular, it does what it’s supposed to do.

Talking of things doing what they are supposed to do, I didn’t exactly beat the third alarm clock to my feet today. Mind you, it was a close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington said after the Battle of Waterloo, because by the time that the alarm stopped ringing, I was actually on my feet.

Only just, it has to be said, and it took the room a good few minutes to stop spinning round so that I could join in, but there I was.

After the medication I did a few bits and pieces and then had a shower ready to hit the streets.

All over town there have been all kinds of things springing up about Carnaval, the event that occurs here OVER THE MARDI GRAS WEEKEND.

No Carnaval this year, for obvious reasons, but there are still a few displays all over the town featuring what might have been on the carnival floats had they been permitted to parade, and we saw THE COW AND PENGUINS when we returned from Leuven the other day.

What is on this sign is a timeline that records the successful application for Carnaval to be registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site. After all of the preparatory work, a formal application was made in January 2014 and approval was given in November 2016.

It’s one of the claims to fame of the town and one of the reasons why I chose this place to come and spend my final years after I was released from hospital in 2017. There’s almost always something interesting and exciting going on here

Further on down the road I noticed that all of the trawlers were lined up at the harbour gates.

It’s the moment for the harbour gates to open (and indeed, they did open as I was watching) and all of the fishing boats in the harbour streamed out line astern into the open sea. Fishing seems to be back on the agenda for the moment, although for how long I don’t know with the Silly Brits threatening to revoke the agreement if they don’t get what they want, like the bunch of spoilt little brats they are.

But I mustn’t let myself become bogged down in politics, must I? I promised that I wouldn’t do that.

And we have a visitor in the harbour this morning too. Normandy Trader sneaked in on the evening tide and here she is, loading up in order to leave the harbour on the tide.

And I know now why she goes over to St Malo at times on her voyages over here. It’s to do with the shellfish that she brings from the Jersey Seafood Co-operative. They have to be unloaded at a port where there is a Health Inspector to give them a health check, and there isn’t one here at the moment.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there’s talk of having a full Customs Post here in Granville for the port and the airport, but as yet, it doesn’t seem to be in place.

At the Post Office I sent off my application for the Securité Sociale and we’ll see how that evolves. I have been more hopeful about other things, but if you don’t apply, you don’t get, do you?

LIDL wasn’t anything to write home about. There wasn’t anything at all of any interest on special offer today so I just bought a few things there and headed back home again.

They had been busy while I’d been away.

A trench has been dug right across the road at the corner of the Rue Lecampion and the Rue Paul Poirier and as I watched, and the traffic waited, a digger picked up a huge sheet of metal to use as a bridge for the traffic to cross.

Down at the far end of the Rue Paul Poirier I fell in with the friendly neighbourhood itinerant and we had a nice long chat for about 15 minutes about nothing much at all, and then I hurried on home in case my frozen peas were to thaw out

Clutching a slice of my delicious sourdough fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate I came in here and sat down, and made a start on transcribing the remaining dictaphone notes. And there was so much to transcribe that it took me right up until afternoon walkies.

Yesterday’s notes ARE NOW ONLINE, all of them. And by that I DO mean “all”, because there were miles and miles of them. I must have had a really bad night.

Then I could turn my attention to today’s notes. A few prisoners had escaped from a prison and they were being pursued across this building site. 1 had been caught but the other 2 had got away, not without a great deal of difficulty. 1 of them, who reminded me of Kenneth Williams, was almost crushed by a railway locomotive as he ran across the shunting track. The locomotive pinned him up against another one and damaged his hip but he still struggled on. 2 of them ran down the east end of London and ended up in an old derelict market hall type of place that was now a café. The healthy 1 was well ahead and ran into this place. The other 1 running behind him was immediately stuck in some kind of ante-room where there were loads of kids hanging around sitting there drinking coffee. It turned out to be some kind of teenagers’ quiet coffee bar where they could go and watch TV and sit, run by the Church. They showed soap operas there on the TV and this was where the 2 men were going to lay low for a day or 2 where they could get coffee and sleep for a while until they worked out their next move.

Later on I was on a walking tour of Eastern Europe with someone and an old Morris MO went past. I went to grab hold of my camera but I suddenly realised that I didn’t have it with me. I thought “where had I left that?”. I had to wrack my brains all the way back to the start of the day at the hotel and I couldn’t remember having it with me at all during any part of the day. Had I left it at the hotel? Had I put it down when we stopped for a breather and not picked it up? Or had I lost it the day before? I didn’t really know so I had to retrace all of my steps. Obviously the other guy wasn’t all that interested in coming back with me. He preferred to sit and wait which I suppose was the correct kind of thing so off I set. I walked through this small town where a boy was kicking a ball up into the air and then getting underneath to head it as it came down. I carried on walking back to the hotel that was miles away, trying to look on the way back to see if my camera was anywhere

And I bet that you are just as intrigued as I am to know why I seem to be having all of these camera issues during my nocturnal voyages just lately. Who is trying to tell me what?

There was a break of course for lunch – more of my delicious leek and potato soup with home-made bread (there were still some epicurean delights during the day) and then when I’d finished my dictaphone notes I went out for my walk.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have been following the progress of the roofing job that’s being undertaken at the College Malraux across the car park from here.

The scaffolding has been slowly advancing ahead of the work, as they take it from a finished part behind them and erect it in front at a place that has yet to receive attention. Today, they have dismantled some more from the side and are now erecting it at the end of the building here.

As we suspected right at the very beginning, this is going to be a very long job and they will be here for a while yet.

The paths had dried out considerably and there wasn’t much water left to block my path. But there wasn’t anything much to see anywhere. All the fishing boats were way out of sight and Normandy Trader had long-since left port.

But earlier on in the day I’d seen a photo of the Cale de Radoub – the old dry dock here in the harbour.

Completed in 1888 it was used as a dry dock to repair the old wooden fishing boats that went out to the Grand Banks to bring in the cod and the photo that I saw was actually of a boat being repaired in there, but it’s been out of use since 1978 and has fallen into decay.

It was declared a Historic Monument on 28th March 2008 and every now and again there’s talk of recommissioning it, but the cost of restoring it to full working order has frightened off the town council.

Back here I had a phone call to make. I had a letter from the hospital arranging my next series of appointments … for Wednesdays, despite what the doctor told me. So I had to ring them back and change them all over again to a Thursday.

When I had returned I’d made myself a coffee but by the time I came to drink it, it was cold. Not simply due to the fact that I’d been on the telephone, but also due to the fact that I’d crashed out yet again.

For the rest of the afternoon, such as it was, I made progress on my little report about Oradour sur Glane.

There was guitar practice of course which for some reason I didn’t enjoy, and then tea which I have already mentioned.

Bedtime now, and a full day at home with (hopefully) no interruptions and I can press on.

Ever the optimist, aren’t I?

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 – I REALLY AM …

… eating quite well these days. I really am.

This afternoon I have had one of the nicest lunches that I have ever had.

For a start, I fried two rather large onions in a very large saucepan. To that, I added several cloves of garlic and an assortment of herbs. When they were browning nicely I added the four leeks that I had bought and which I had peeled and sliced, and stirred them in, along with a variety of herbs and ground black pepper.

Four small potatoes followed them into the pan, washed and cubed. They were stirred into the mix too.

Once everything was all mixed in, I added a couple of stock cubes, just enough water to cover the contents, and then a box of soya cooking cream. When it was all in the pot, I stirred it well in and left it to simmer for 45 minutes.

Once it was all well-cooked, it was all whizzed up and I ended with probably the finest vegan cream of leek and potato soup that I have ever eaten. I was really pleased with this.

And that wasn’t all of it either, not by a long way. I have made this morning the most perfect loaf that I have ever made after all of these attempts and with my leek and potato soup it was absolutely delicious.

It goes without saying that I was pleased about all of this because my day didn’t start off like that.

Never mind the first alarm, or the third alarm for that matter, it was 08:30 when I finally found the strength to leave the bed and that filled me full of dismay because it made me run so late for everything that I had to do during the day.

First task was to give the sourdough dough a second kneading, and then I shaped it and put it in the smaller of the two silicone moulds and left it for its second proofing.

Second task was to make a 500-gramme wholemeal loaf using traditional years. And I do have to say that for some unknown reason for which I really have no answer, the dough turned out to be absolutely perfect – exactly as it ought to have been – nice and rubbery and elastic and smooth.

It was then left for an hour or so to proof in a mixing bowl and I came in here to make a start on transcribing the dictaphone notes that have been building up over the last few days.

After a break for my hot chocolate and cake for breakfast I gave the dough its second kneading, shaped it and put it into the larger silicone mould and while it was proofing again, carried on with the dictaphone notes.

When the bread went into the oven I made my soup so that it was all ready for eating. It was a rather later lunch than usual but it was well-worth waiting for because everything was exactly as it would have been – especially as I finally seem to have managed to have made a loaf that came out exactly as it should have done after all these attempts.

Once lunch was over, I attacked the form for my registration with the Securité Sociale. Filling in the form was reasonably straightforward but finding the accompanying documents took rather more time than it ought to have done. And when the scanner function on the printer didn’t work and I had to photocopy some of them instead, that took longer still.

By the time that I’d completed everything I was ready for my afternoon walk.

It was quite cloudy outside and windy too and things hadn’t dried up that much. But I pushed on around my little circuit.

There was nothing whatever happening out there this afternoon. The only thing of any interest whatever was the fact that Chausiais and Joly France were moored up in the mud over by the ferry terminal and don’t look anything like moving within the foreseeable future.

And the only reason that I took the photos, I suppose, was for the sake of having taken a photo while I was out.

Back here, just as I sat down with my coffee, the telephone rang. Ingrid phoned me and we had another one of these very long chats that took me right up to guitar-playing time.

Tea was pie and veg with gravy followed by apple pie. Like I said right at the very beginning, I am really eating rather well these days. I have never in my life had such good food as I’ve been having since I’ve been living here.

The net result of all of this is that the blog entries for SUNDAY, MONDAY and TUESDAY have been amended to include the dictaphone notes, if you have the patience to read them because during those three nights I travelled miles, as well as taking a couple of old and welcome regulars with me.

Last night though I was with one of the Welsh rock bands and the story gradually evolved as we were trying to work our way between several concerts last night – I hadn’t actually got up on stage but I’d been jamming away in the background while they were there and one of the Man offshoots picked me up and we went off to perform a few gigs. There was a photo that they had passed around of Strawberry Moose playing the drums at some resort in North West England. They’d made some kind of remarks about the Vikings who had come along to conquer that country and were busy beating it up with rock and roll songs because Strawberry Moose still had on his helmet from our voyage with Adventure Canada on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. One of the couples had a daughter who was about 4. She was a very precocious kid and was actually playing and singing on one of the numbers on stage. Surprisingly she wasn’t doing a bad job at all and everyone seemed to be enjoying it. When we got off the stage at the end she stayed on the stage to do something and her mother had to go and fetch her back. Everyone was making a joke about her being 4 and doing all of this, and I thought that that was most unfair because what she was doing was nothing to laugh at at all. It was quite serious stuff and quite good and enjoyable. I thought that she was getting the rough end of this.

A little later on our coach pulled in to Audlem although it was nothing like Audlem. As we climbed up the hill which doesn’t exist of course we had to stop to let some people out. I asked about the toilets and they replied that they were in the Market Hall. They showed me where it was and I ran off. It was miles, absolutely miles, and on the way back running past this guy I came to a set of stairs and there was an archway over the top every 4th or 5th stair or something. rather than running through the archway I ended up on top of it running from one top of an arch to another down these stairs. I eventually reached the bottom and went outside, and the coach was there. One of the guys who had a toilet cistern said “it’s ok, there’s no hurry. This toilet cistern is no use to me – I’ve just found out that it’s made in Spain, not the UK. We’re just making 1 or 2 phone calls about how to deal with a certain thing” and the coach doesn’t seem much like moving at the moment so I just loitered around outside. This was a hot sweaty dream again.

Later still, we were coming into Shavington via Dodd’s Bank, Nerina and me. I asked if it was OK if we go to a pub – I mentioned the name of a pub – it was one in Crewe somewhere to go and see Jon Dean because he had my bank credit card and one or two other things that I needed for my journey. I could see as she answered back that she wasn’t very happy. As we got into Shavington there was someone (I couldn’t decipher who) who could see the 2 of us together and he smiled a bit because he probably heard that our relationship was just a little rocky but we were still together I suppose which cheered him up.

Somewhat later Jackie and Alison were round at my house revising. I’d been out the previous day to go to Manchester to fetch some car parts and had to go again today because some were missing. I went round to the wholesaler’s first to check and he said it wasn’t there and i’d have to go myself to Manchester to fetch it. I think that I’ve dictated (which I apparently haven’t, so I wonder what it is that I’ve missed out) a lot of this about going with Percy Penguin and having to go and pick her up from her home where she was living. There were loads of other people living in this home as well which which was overrun with cats. I had to find her – she was busy doing something and I couldn’t work my way back downstairs again. A woman told me where to go and I had to climb down a load of pipework which was very awkward as there were no stairs. She was at the bottom and was pleased to see me so I had to get ready to go. I wanted to go to the toilet but a cat kept on getting in the way. And then I realised that I wasn’t going to the toilet in the right place so I found that. Percy Penguin took so long messing around that it was now about 11:30 znd we’d never get to Manchester before the place closed for lunch. I wanted to be back for lunch as I was going to take Jackie and Alison somewhere. We got in the car ready to go and she was talking about driving lessons and how she’d taken a few but Covid had closed it down and when they reopened they had forgotten all about her. I wanted to put “Traffic” on the car radio but for some unknown reason their live album wasn’t on my playlist and I had to select some tracks which was pretty awkward while I was trying to drive. It turned out that they were tracks from some kind of play or something. There was an advert of some kind or other and the music of “Traffic” was used as the background so while I had that on there was some other music coming from somewhere and I couldn’t hear it properly. That was starting to annoy me and all in all I was becoming quite annoyed about everything that was going on.

And so the obvious question is “where am I going to be travelling tonight”.

Thursday 28th January 2021 – HAD I PUT …

… my mind to it, I could have beaten the third alarm quite comfortably today. But when I heard the torrential rain cascading down onto the skylight in the roof, I decided that having a lie-in was probably a much better idea.

Even so, I was still up and about before 07:00 too. No point in hanging around in bed – and that’s not like me at all these days, is it?

And it was a good job that I was up early too. Alison had to take a friend to hospital early this morning but found out that she couldn’t stay with her. So she messaged me to see if I fancied a coffee.

Despite the rain, we met up at the car park at the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein. There wasn’t much choice about where to go for our coffee. But as it was a good idea for me to go and check on the times of trains for tomorrow morning, we headed to the station and had a take-away coffee sitting on one of the benches there while I noted down the train times.

We had a good wander around the town in the rain and then Alison drove me back home where I … errr … had a little rest for a while. In view of the miserable weather there were no photos.

After lunch I had things to do.

While I was at the hospital yesterday I transcribed a ton of notes that had accumulated on the dictaphone from earlier in the week. And so the first task was to amend the entries for MONDAY, TUESDAY and YESTERDAY. And when you read the notes of everywhere where I’ve been, you’ll be just as surprised as I am that I even had time to sleep.

Then of course there were the notes from last night. I’d been out with my family and met up again with a girl who, back in the olden days almost 50 years ago, had been a girlfriend of mine when we were at school. I was trying to persuade her to come home over Christmas and she finally agreed to come back to my house and there was all talk about where she was going to sleep. I had to remind everyone that I was the one who had the bed. The discussion still went on and no-one was getting the message that if she came back, it was me who was going to be interested. One of my younger siblings asked if she had a Father Christmas. She said “no” so they replied “we have a chocolate Father Christmas you can have” and one or two other things. I definitely intended to get her into bed last night but I was a little disappointed that my brother kept on trying to argue his own point of view rather than mine.

The rest of the afternoon was spent choosing the music for the next few radio programmes. I almost finished choosing the music for three programmes but I ran aground on the last one because I need a plug-in for the music-editing program that I have on the laptop but I can’t remember which one it is.

While I was doing all of this, I had a message from the Covid-testing service. Apparently I’m negative, which is what I suspected anyway but I had to go through the process.

For tea I finished off most of the food that was here – there isn’t going to be all that much to take home for a change. And hopefully, if I do have my appointments on Thursday from now on, there will be even less.

Tonight I’m going to have an early night. I need to be up early for my journey back home. It’s going to be a long and tortuous journey home tomorrow, with all kinds of complications.

Tuesday 26th January 2021 – HAVING CROWED …

… yesterday about how well I did in getting up at 04:22 before any of the alarms went off, it goes without saying that this morning I slept through all three of the alarm calls and didn’t awaken until about 08:30.

So while you admire a couple of photos of the Diestsestraat in the early evening dark, I went off and had my medication.

First task today after the medication was to prepare for my Welsh class. And I forgot what I was going (or supposed to be doing), did the wrong homework and generally didn’t do very well at all.

With no fruit bread or anything like that, I had to make do with toast and jam. But with no toaster, that was likely to be a challenging proposition but I’m nothing if I’m not inventive, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

In this apartment it has the old-type resistance heater elements on the hob – the ancient type of solid element.

So simply switching on the larger one and putting the bread on top, and turning it over at the appropriate moment I ended up with a very reasonable approximation of toast. And so armed with toast and jam and coffee I could attend my lesson.

Why the lesson was under way I had a ‘phone call from Belgium’s Corona Virus Centre. But when I called them back at half-time, they couldn’t find any information as to why they called me. So I’ve no idea what they was all about.

While you are looking at an image of the Mechelsestraat, I went off for lunch. Yesterday at the Carrefour I’d bought some bread and some stuff to go on it, and of course it was followed by some fruit.

After lunch, I didn’t do very much at all for a couple of hours. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the trip up to here (and the one back again) takes a lot out of me and I need a pause to recover my strength.

But as it started to go dark outside round about 17:00 I went out for my evening walk around the town to see what was going on.

The University Library always looks nice in the dark when it’s all illuminated so of course I would go out that way past the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein – although I do have to admit that I took this photo on the way home when it was even darker than it was on the way out.

Down the Tiensestraat I went, round past the University Library and into the FNAC to see if they had anything going on in the Sales. There were plenty of reductions of course but there was nothing in there that interested me.

While I was out I went into the shops down the Diestsestraat, the photographs which you have already seen, and then down past the Mechelsestraat ditto.

We’d seen the Mathieu de Layensplein the last time I was here, but I’d taken a photo of it from a completely different angle so I reckoned that I’d take a photo from this point of view.

One of the things that I was doing – I had to admit – was to have a look in the windows of the Travel Agents to see if there were any special offers going on – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d found myself AN IMPROMPTU TRIP TO NORTH AFRICA a couple of years ago by doing just that – but they are all closed for the Duration.

Not that I was planning on going anywhere though even if they had been open. I think that this year is going to be cancelled too as far as voyages go. With today’s casualty list figures, anyone with a British passport is going to be treated like a pariah from now on, I reckon.

And on the way back I went through the Grote Markt to have a look at the Stadhuis – the Town Hall.

Although it’s quite beautiful light up like this, it’s not a patch on how it has been in the past when it was lit up with all different colours of lights. But as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … Austerity seems to have been the order of the day with Christmas decorations this year.

Passing through the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein to see the Library, I headed home to warm myself up. It was freezing cold outside.

Tea was a lovely spicy burger in breadcrumbs with pasta and veg followed by peach laves and strawberry soya dessert.

At some point I managed to find the time to listen to the pile of stuff that was on the dictaphone.

I was in my hotel somewhere when all of a sudden someone burst in, like Robert Vaughan of The Man From Uncle. He said come on, so-and-so (and mentioned a Christian name) we need to sort this out” or something like that. I replied “I’m not (so-and-so)”. He looked at me strangely, basically “don’t be silly” so I showed him some photo ID that I had. Then I went to show him my passport but somehow my passport had become damp in my neck thing that I wear and it came out in about 3 or 4 different parts. But he could see it and look at it and he said something like “trust it to be a Canadian” or “trust it to be one of you Canadians”. Then he picked up the telephone as if to dial someone The phone rang and all of a sudden I looked up and he wasn’t there – he’d gone But the receiver was hanging off a hook and there was a conversation going on, but I couldn’t understand all that much of it. Suddenly the door opened again and 3 people walked in. They were having a look around my room as if it had just been decorated. One of them was a woman whom I knew from the trip around the High Arctic in 2018. They were having a look at my room and in particular the huge mural of the desert that was on one wall which actually looked so life-like. She lay down on the bed, looked at me and said “do you know – one night when we were in a hotel somewhere I was in one room and when there was nothing particular going on in that room I went into the other room and do you know what i saw?”. She looked at me as if she was expecting me to answer but I couldn’t think of what it was she was talking about because I didn’t recall that I was doing anything that I shouldn’t have been doing in one of these rooms in this hotel that we were in, but she was looking at me with that look on her face as if she was expecting some kind of admission or some kind of answer

There were two girls aged about 7 and 9. They had been out somewhere so I’d made tea, a kind-of macaroni cheese thing with meatballs. When they came back I gave them their tea and made a bit of a play about it with the younger one. For dessert I went to fetch some of my special cake but found that it was all gone. In the box instead was some chocolate cake belonging to one of the little girls, a different one so I asked her if the two other girls could have some cake. She told me which ones to get but I couldn’t get them out. She asked me to pass her the box which I did and she worked the correct combination but a pile of little figurine things fell out so she said “you can have those and take them” which was OK but it wasn’t the cakes so I was wondering what I was going to do about the cake that I had promised this girl that she could have and where was I going to get that from.

I was living in France in a village where there was a lot of demolition going on. It was a village around which I’d walked years ago but since I’d been there I’d only visited a bit of it and hadn’t visited the rest so I was surprised when I went to visit the rest and so much of it had been knocked down I was doing some work for the Government that involved rounding up a group of people and a couple of others and we all piled into this big 9-seater huge car type of 1950s American saloon, a red one with a cream top. I made sure all of these people got in and then I had to get into the front. There were already 3 people sitting at the front so I told them to squidge up so I could get in. They grumbled but the fourth person in here was nothing to do with me. We set off and I drove back with these prisoners. When we nearly reached our destination I had to get out check round underneath the car and everything like that. I had a piece of emery cloth and was busy rubbing down the sills and so on to see what it was like and chatting to another one of the guys who was doing something. He was telling me about some new Hurricane cars that had been brought out and was apparently blowing everyone off the streets including him in whatever car he had – yes, he had the same one as this but had talen out the old V8 motor and put in a 9-litre BMW engine in it and this Hurricane had blown him off. I got back into the car but by this time I was the only one sitting in the front and I’d made my report that this was a good solid car and runs quietly but would benefit from a really good rub down of the bodywork and a respray

Some time later I was around with a group of people and there was an old woman who had a collection of vehicles that we had been admiring. We all went back to her house and she had this beautiful old 1930s car parked in her kitchen. I was having a good look around at this. It turned out that she was running some kind of private museum. I asked her if she had had this car valued. She replied that it had been valued in May at $30,000. I said “God it’s worth much more than this”. This woman was a teacher and had a class at a local High School. I was talking to one of the girls who studied there. They’d all done some homework, 6 pages, that was being handed out and this girl had only 5 pages back. I asked her about it and she replied that she had only done 5 but “I hadn’t done them anyway. One of the boys had done them for me”. She added “it was a weak class and I had 30%, that’s what I usually get and the class is pretty weak anyway so it doesn’t make much difference”. There were some boys there fooling around and they were in quite a bit of trouble with different things. This woman was having some kind of party and loads of people had been invited. I overheard these to boys talking about this addiction to painkillers was really hurting them and they were going to have to get some more from somewhere. They thought “this woman is a nurse too so we could raid her medicine cabinet”. I waited to try to get this woman on her own but she was too busy showing the scars of her operation to everyone so in the end I managed to get her to one side and said “by the way let me give you a piece of advice. Keep an eye on your medicine cabinet”. She asked “what do you mean?” and said it out loud so everyone turned round and looked. I said it again quietly and everyone in the crowd basically said “oh no, not them!”. She sailed off inside her house and we could hear a lot of noise and she was yelling at these two boys. She had obviously caught them trying to burgle her medicine cabinet. She sent them home from this party and made them write out an essay for homework as to why this was really a bad thing.

But now I’m off for an early night. I can really have a lie-in tomorrow as my appointment isn’t until 13:30. But I might not even be having that if I don’t have a negative report from the Covid test that I took on Monday.

It would be nice if they would hurry up and let me know.

Sunday 24th january 2021 – I’M NOT DOING …

… very well with this idea of getting up early, am I?

Obviously it’s Sunday so we don’t really expect all that much but nevertheless 11:30 is rather exaggerated and it doesn’t bode very well for my 04:30 start. At this rate I can see myself not bothering to go to bed and sleeping on the train on the way to Paris.

And it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve done that either as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

So after the medication, the first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

To my surprise, there was something on there FROM YESTERDAY so I transcribed that and added it into the entry, and then turned my attention to last night’s voyage.

And this was confusing because I was watching this action exactly as I would have done had I been watching a film – in fact it was a film although I’ve no idea as to the circumstances under which I was watching it – whether in a cinema, on TV or something like that. But it was certainly a film that, in my dream, I’d seen before.

It was something like a scene from The Great Escape or La Grande Vadrouille last night with 2 men and a woman escaping from the Germans. They ended up hiding in a forest and next morning they set out again. I remembered this film in my dreams – a film that inspired me about the Auvergne (although how I ended up in the Auvergne is nothing to do with any film at all) because the forest where they had been hiding was just like what I thought the forest in the Auvergne would be. It’s all very confusing. So they set off. The woman and a man set off together and another man walked on his own. he must have found a lift because he disappeared off the scene. The man and a woman went on walking and an old grey Albion lorry went past, one from the late 60s with an early Mandator TG4 cab actually and nothing to do with World War II, a left-hand drive one as well. Eventually they were picked up by some old woman who led them into town. They walked past a café and there sitting in the window was their friend who bore a very strong resemblance to Michel de Berg (and what’s he doing putting in an appearance here?). He left the café and followed them into the town centre. They went into a place and a fight broke out, I’m not quite sure why. The old woman was immediately suspicious of the two people whom she had brought in but anyway she went downstairs and the two people, the man and the girl whom he’d taken with her, they were already downstairs with the 3rd guy and were sitting at some tiny table tucked into the corner somewhere right by the toilet. When the girl came out of the toilet there was a whole rush of people trying to go in. The 3 people sat down and tried to order something. They had ordered a coffee but they were trying to order something to eat as well.
But somewhere along the line I remember myself with other people and I had two jars, one half-full of instant coffee and the other half-full of brown sugar. To save on the jars I suggested mixing the two together and I said that surely no-one will mind as they all take sugar in their coffee. And then I realised that I myself don’t take sugar.

There was a break in the middle of all this for a bowl of nice hot porridge, and then I didn’t do very much at all except attend to some outstanding paperwork.

There was the usual afternoon walk of course so out I went. And I rather wish that I hadn’t.

A long while ago I’d read a report on the Tay Bridge Disaster which said that the gusts of wind were so strong that men had to walk along the bridge on their hands and kneed to avoid being blown over, something that I didn’t take seriously at the time.

But having been out in the wind that was blowing this afternoon I can well believe it. I was being lifted off my feet and pushed along in any direction other than that in which I wanted to travel, so strong was the wind. I had never experienced anything like it.

That’s the reason why there were no photos from the northern side of the headland. It was just totally unsafe with a cliff edge nearby in a gale like this.

Instead you had to wait until I went around the south side of the headland before I could unleash the NIKON 1 J5.

You might not think that this is nothing about which to become excited but actually we are in the lee of the strongest blasts of the gale. And while the sea is only “moderately wild” it’s still impressive enough but doesn’t do justice to the actual conditions that we were experiencing.

If the wind were to shift round a few degrees and the tide were to come in any more, then we would be having some really interesting scenery down there on the harbour wall.

You’ll have more of an idea of what we were up against in this image here.

You can just about make out Carolles and Jullouville in the distance through the heavy clouds and the rainstorm (did I mention that it was pouring down with rain too?) but you can’t see very much further beyond there. And, of course, the farther out you go, the rougher the sea becomes as it’s out of the shelter of the headland.

It was one more haggard, drowned rat that made its way back to the apartment and the mug of hot coffee was extremely welcome. And while I was drinking it, I prepared my pizza base for tonight’s tea.

While the pizza was cooking I tidied up, backed up the computer and packed my bags. I’ve probably forgotten loads of things but that’s just too bad.

The pizza was delicious of course and then I had a shower and changed my clothes. I’m going to bed tonight fully-clothed in the hope that I can just fall out of bed and hit the road tomorrow morning. I am not looking forward to this one little bit.

Saturday 26th December 2020 – I’M HAVING …

… a few technical issues right now. If the computer causing me a few upsets isn’t enough, it’s now the turn of the NIKON D500 to start to give me grief.

Since the computer blew a fuse the other day, uploading photos from the camera to the computer has been a long, laborious process. The USB sockets on the front must be USB 2.0, not 3.0 because it takes an age and quite often it’s stalled and I have to upload them 1 by 1.

The other day in fact it wouldn’t upload any at all and so I had to open them from the camera with the computer and then save them to the Hard Drive. This evening, I went up upload today’s and yesterday’s and nothing happened at all. Wondering if I were to use the XQD card reader I plugged that in, put the card in and waited …. and nothing happened at all.

And so I put the card back in the camera and “please format this card”. So I plugged the card reader and card into the USB 3.0 port on another computer, and sure enough “device not recognised”. So I put the card back into the camera and plugged that into the machine and although it identifies the camera, it can’t read the card.

So that’s that then. It looks as if I’ll be having to make do with the little NIKON 1 J5 for a while until I can organise the solution to this problem.

I’m not having a very good time, am I?

Especially not as I didn’t get up until about 10:45 this morning. But considering that I was still awake and working at 03:30 this morning that’s not too bad.

After the meds I finally sorted out the dictaphone. There were lots happening through the night but I could only remember a bit of it. They were dealing with some important issue at a Government Office and they had asked someone to bring in a huge pile of paperwork relating to his unexplained wealth. It was an enormous stack of stuff that he had brought in. The husband of one of my sisters was sorting the post and some of it he was actually filing away and I didn’t want him to do that as he was having to present it all to the person who was looking at the file and wanted to make sure that it was all there. I left and was walking down this terraced street in London, a really nice modernised terrace and this guy was living there in one of these terraced houses and they were on their way to move house. So I went to have a look round at their old premises. Just across the road were more houses of this type and 2 guys were walking down there. They decided that they would go into this house to deliver a package. When these boys saw what was inside, one of them let out a really camp expression. I walked on round the corner and almost fell down this enormous hole at least 40 feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen workmen trying to clear some slurry away because there was a huge water leak down there. They were presumably trying to get at it to block it. But all the local kids had somehow managed to jump in and were sitting on the edge of this water waiting to get their bath for a swim. As I was taking a photo another young boy in a swimming costume pushed past me ready to jump in and it was very much a busy kind of place. But there was much more to it than this and I can’t remember a thing now.

A bit later they (who did? Have I missed something here?) dressed a girl up as a mermaid and she came out with these bright red vivid clothes and that took everyone by surprise

Later on that night my sister and I went off and came to a restaurant. She ordered her meal but I had to wait though while they organised a few tables, things like, that, washing the floors. It occurred to me that I could have ordered mine and waited for it so I went to order it. I asked what was on the vegetarian menu. The girl said that they had vegetarian food but no menu, and she told me what there was. There was one dish that I didn’t recognise at all. I asked what it was and she said that “it’s only been on the market since yesterday. I’ve no idea what it is either”. I said “yes, OK I’ll try that”. She decided to serve that for me and put it all ready on a plate. I went back to the table. Before I’d gone away we’d sat to talk to someone who lived in Shavington and when I came back there was someone else there, one of the boys of a family who had several of them. I said “God, has everyone else who has been to Shavington come here?”. My sister was chatting away to this boy then off he went and my meal still hadn’t turned up at this time, hardly a surprise as I’s only been away from the counter 30 seconds.

Apart from that, I’ve not done a great deal today either. Mostly just messing around here and there. But I did do two weeks’ worth of Welsh homework to make up for yesterday. And I did have lunch too – my usual Christmas lunch a day too late of toast and vegan butter and vegan mushroom pate.

Two trips outside today too, my afternoon walk with the massive crowds and my evening run when I was practically all alone. And this evening I seemed to be running a lot easier than I have been for quite a while. The weather wasn’t at all bad either – not what you might think for the middle of winter.

Tea was exactly the same as yesterday, listening again to my Christmas rock concert. I hope that those of you who heard it enjoyed it as much as I did.

Despite being tired, I’m not ready for bed yet. I’ll hang around for a bit, add yesterday’s dictaphone notes to the blog, that kind of thing. A day of rest tomorrow but I have packing to do ready for Leuven on Monday.

Tuesday 8th December 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

… seen the lighthouse at the Cap Fréhel looking as clear as it did this afternoon?

It’s about 70 or so kms away, as you are probably fed up of hearing right now, but there must be something about the atmospheric conditions and the height of the lighthouse above sea level to make it stand out so well. We’ve seen it on several occasions, that’s for sure, but I can’t think that it’s ever stood out so clearly as it did today.

One of these days I’ll sort out the photos that I took when we sailed right down the coast on the Spirit of Conrad and you can compare the view of the lighthouse from close up with one of these photos taken from the Pointe du Roc.

Something else of note that is worth mentioning today because it doesn’t happen all that often just now is that I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning. And by a good couple of minutes too

That’s twice in two days that I’ve beaten the alarm. Anyone would think that I’ve wet the bed or something.

Last night before going to bed I’d given the sourdough bread mix its second kneading and put it in the mould that I used, and left it on one side overnight. And so this morning as soon as I got up, the first thing that I did, even before the medication, was to switch on the oven at full heat.

And then, when I’d taken the medication and the oven was now nice and hot, I took a large baking tray, put about half an inch of water in it, dropped the bread mould with the dough inside into the water, covered it with another matching baking tray so that the steam off the water would aerate the bread, and stuck it in the oven.

After about 25 minutes, I took off the lid and then left it cooking for about another 40/45 minutes or so on a slightly lower temperature.

While it was baking away to itself, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

Yesterday’s notes I transcribed and added them to the entry, and then I turned my attention to last night. There was a house move to do and we had a flatbed lorry. It involved putting all these personal possessions off this lorry, or were we putting them on because one minute we were putting them on and another minute we were taking them off. It started off with about 10 of us but the number gradually whittled down every week and between us there was a different number of people until in the end there was just 3. We had quite a crowd watching us, sitting on chairs watching us load or unload this lorry. In the end it turned out that we didn’t have a captain. He had left so one of the guys in charged asked me if I wanted to be captain but I ummed and ahhed. Another guy volunteered so there was just 2 of us running back and to, passing these boxes to the guy who was stacking them. I was thinking all the time that an open-sided lorry is not the kind of vehicle to go around with when you are doing a job like this, stacking boxes on top of it. It’s bound to end in tragedy when you go round a corner. There was one part where we were messing around with 7″ singles. They wouldn’t all stay in the boxes. Someone suggested putting them in with the LPs although I couldn’t see how that made any difference. It meant in the end that they were going to be out of alphabetical order and he’d never be able to trace them again if he had them all mixed up like that wil the LPs
Later there was a supermarket in the basement of a big building. An ad-hoc supermarket in the corner of an empty floor with Covid regulations and only a few people were allowed to go there at times. I was down there doing my shopping. I had a trolley with a few items in it and I had to go back and find my car, a yellow MkIV Cortina. I was convinced that i’d parked it outside in the car park so instead of going up and following the directions back, I went outside but I couldn’t see my car on the car park at all although i was convinced that I’d left it there. It must have been on the internal car park in the building so I had to get back into the building somehow with my trolley load of goods and try to remember which flood I’d put my car on or whereabouts, because I didn’t have a clue where it was now.

That wasn’t all either. But seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

Now it was time to turn my attention to the Welsh course. I wrote up my notes from last week and went through them to make sure that I understood them (which isn’t very evident)and then turned my attention to prepare for this week’s lessons.

One thing that I do remember from my grandmother was the imperative, which is only natural of course with my grandmother. Dewch i mewn for “come in”, Edrych for “look”, byddwch yn dda for “be good” and of course paid! – “don’t” and so on so it didn’t take too much preparation today, which suited me fine.

At the end of its time I took it from the oven and here’s the finished product. It’s something of a disappointment to say the least as it doesn’t seem to have risen at all.

Mind you, when I tried it for lunch, it was light and very aerated all the same, so I’ve no idea what is happening here. Had it been this size but dense and heavy I would have written it off as a failure. But I don’t know what to make of this.

It’s certainly the lightest bread that I’ve ever made, even when I’ve been using yeast.

After lunch I made a start on more of the arrears, but not for long. By now, it was time for me to go out on my afternoon walk around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night we saw piles of fishing boats out in the English Channel on their way back into harbour after their day’s work. And here are some more of them today heading back out to the fishing grounds.

But I’m not too sure how long this will go on. Apparently the Jersy fishermen are getting up a petition to revoke the 1836 Treaty of the Bay of Granville that divides the fishing areas up between the Channel Islands and France, and kick the French boats out.

There’s a meeting in a day or two’s time during which the French fishermen and the Regional Council will discuss the matter. The fishermen have already pointed out that 70% of the Channel islands catch is landed here in Granville and that all of the electricity supplied to the Channel Islands comes from the nuclear reactor up the coast here in Normandy that we visited A FEW MONTHS AGO.

We are living in interesting times.

Maybe you might have noticed just how nice the weather was, looking out to sea in the previous photograph.

That’s not the case down there along the Brittany coast. Over by St Malo and Dinard it looks as if they are on the receiving end of a very localised rainstorm that’s giving them all a really good soaking. I’m glad that I’m not over there in the middle of all that.

But it’s really quite astonishing when you consider that just down the coast the sky is as clear as a bell, as we saw with the view of the lighthouse at Cap Frehel. And I thought that the weather conditions in the Auvergne were bizarre.

While we are here, there’s something else that I want to photograph – something that I noticed yesterday but there were too many people around.

The local council has had a man out cutting the grass in his tractor. He’s had his blade set too low because he’s managed to churn up a huge stone right in the middle f the path here. never mind the damage that he’s probably done to his blade, which surely he must have heard, that’s a hazard just waiting for one of our nocturnal ramblers to trip over in the dark.

He shouldn’t have left the rock and the hole like that in the middle of the footpath.

Anyway, I pushed on around the headland and with nothing going on out at sea I made my way along the clifftop.

The wind has died down considerably from how it has been and the sea looks as if it’s quite calm. But there must he a heavy rolling sea out there in the Atlantic somewhere because the waves are coming in with quite some force

Remember that the tide is still a long way out. This would be quite impressive at high tide.

But there was no change of occupant in the chantier navale and nothing much else going on, so I headed off for home and a hot coffee.

One task that I needed to do was to remove some photos from the camera. The memory card is full, I don’t have another and the price of the type of card that I use is prohibitive. That involved coupling up an external drive and you’ve no idea how long it takes to remove 2500 files off the camera onto the laptop via a USB 3.0 cable, the software and hardware in the computer, and a USB2.0 cable to an external drive.

It might have taken less time too had I not unfortunately drifted off with the fairies at some point.

After the hour on the guitar I made tea. A burger with vegetables and pasta with some more of that vegan Pesto sauce which is really good and I must buy some more. And the apple pie that I made in the middle of last week is excellent.

After tea I was straight out and off down the road for my evening run.

And we saw just how nice the sky was this afternoon right down the Brittany coast. it was just as clear along the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula too and the warning lights on the wind turbines at the back of Coutances were clearly visible. You can see two of them towards the left-hand edge of this photograph.

The street lights of the small towns along the sea front were quite visible too. Hauteville sur Mer on the left and St martin de brehal on the right. And in the background, the lights of the main road that runs up eventually to Cherbourg.

If the view up both of the coasts is going to be good, then it ought to be good out in the English Channel too.

This photo might be somewhat blurred but it’s hand-held, and it shows the lights of St Helier in Jersey in the Channel islands 58 kilometres away. And so for that reason it’s not bad at all. The red light on the radio mast at the back of town is clearly visible.

From the viewpoint I ran on all the way down the street, combining two of the legs of my run into one. For some reason I was running quite well tonight. it might have been the head of broccoli that I had for tea, steamed in a pan with the pasta.

When I finally stopped for breath I retraced my steps for 100 metres because I’d noticed that the view across to Donville les Bains was looking quite interesting too tonight.

The promenade was looking really nice with the street lights reflecting off the water tonight, but then the headland by the cemetery from where the birdmen take to the air cuts out a good part of the view. And then we have all of the houses on the cliffs round by where the Musée Christian Dior might be found.

And then of course I had to run all the way back to the Place de l’Isthme. Yes, I stayed “up above” tonight seeing as at some point there must have been a rainstorm here too as everything was soaking wet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve shown a couple of photos of the trench that seems to bisect the fortifications up here at the Place de l’Isthme.

It’s not possible to see from one end of the trench to another because there’s something like a walled-over passage that runs through the trench to the part that’s isolated. And while I was nosying around up here I found what I think might be the entrance to the passage.

There’s a date carved on the lintel over the top too – 1843. I don’t know whether that’s the date of the original construction or not.

Down below, I ran on through the Square Maurice Marland with enough energy to go half-way up the steep ramp at the end.

From there I went round to the Rue St Jean to see if there was any better indication of what was going on here. And it seems that they have made a start digging up the pavement. I’ll have to come here in the daytime and see if I can find out why.

From here I ran on home and made it back to the apartment just in time for kick-off. There was football on the internet tonight, hence my early run out.

Over the weekend we saw an ineffective and anonymous Caernarfon team totally rolled over by Penybont. Tonight they were to take on bottom club Cefn Druids in Cefn Mawr in the suburbs of Wrexham.

With several changes in the team tonight, they looked a totally different outfit and seemed to have recovered their spirit. They went 2-0 up and were unlucky not to have had one or two more. This was a much more professional and competent approach, at least for the first 75 minutes.

They had Josh Tibbetts back in goal and he was extremely busy because Cefn Druids were much better than the score and their league position suggested. They pulled a goal back late in the game and the last 15 minutes saw them camped on the edge of the Caernarfon penalty area.

In all honestly, Tibbetts kept Caernarfon in the game, although the Druids could have been embarrassed a couple of times in the closing stages when Caernarfon had a couple of rapid counter-attacks upfield.

But if the Druids are bottom of the table, then all that I can say is that the standard of the JD Cymru League has improved dramatically over the last 5 or 6 years. The Druids would have rolled over clubs like Afan Lido and Llanelli of that period. And then we turn the clock back 15 years with clubs like Rhayadr and Welshpool, to name just two of a dozen that I could mention.

So off to bed. Tomorrow I have a day at home and tons of stuff to do that I’ve forgotten. One day I might even get ahead of whatever I’m trying to do.

Thursday 12th November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… beat the third alarm this morning either – no surprise there, is there?

Probably something to do with my very long day yesterday and the fact that after I’d finished my notes I was editing some photos from the High Arctic and chatting to a young lady friend of mine – she of the corona virus – until the small hours, giving her my moral support – although whether anything that I can do which involves young ladies can be classed as “moral” is a matter for conjecture.

07:30 it was when I raised my ugly head, and when I listened to what was on the dictaphone I wished that I hadn’t gone to sleep. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that occasionally I don’t publish some stuff that I do during my voyages because, believe me, I can have some pretty gruesome dreams at times, but last night was gruesome for a very different reason.

I was working for a Government department last night and was in Montreal – I’d been seconded to work in the office in Montreal. I was staying at a friend’s, someone who had actually found the position for me. I’d gone over there and she had a beautiful flat, a really nice one about 5 stops away on the Metro from where the tax office was. There were lots of people staying there too including my various nieces. It was a pretty crowded apartment with all these people staying in it. So I arrived there and stayed the night and next morning I had to get ready. I was getting ready but there was all kinds of strange stuff going on outside – a huge stampede of cattle in the streets leaping into the river and swimming across to get to the other side on the island, the side where we were. So we walked out to see what was going on. It was due to a food shortage and they were all going off to another Province to be slaughtered. I went back in and had to get dressed. I put some clothes on and then thought “where are the rest of my clothes?” My friend said that she’s tidied away my suitcase and it was stuck right away in a corner under a huge pile of stuff and I couldn’t get at it. I didn’t have a tie but a guy who was there said “your brother has left a few ties here. You’ll have to fill in a form to pay him and you can have this green tie”. So I bought this green tie and there was a long white scarf with it as well that was dragging on the floor. I rolled it up and put it somewhere. “Do you want that?” I replied “it’ll probably come in use for the winter”. I noticed that everyone else was dressed and said “ohh look we’re all in green this morning”. Zero was there and she burst out laughing and said “yes”. Off I set and turned up at the building which was a crummy kind of building in a run-down area. There were crowds of people willing around outside. A guy came over and there were about 4 of us. He gave us a bit of an introduction chat and said that we have to report through door 13B. At 10:00 prompt the doors opened to this office and it was like a huge stampede as thousands of people swarmed in, obviously trying to get a good ticket so they could be in there first. We were swept in in the rush but couldn’t find this doorway. We had a look and there were loads of doors but none was the door that we wanted. In the end one guy I was with, a very tall, very thin guy found like a slit in the wall. He said “go through here and see”. He slipped through this slit and said something like “this is it”. “How the hell am I supposed to get through there?” I asked. He might get through there but I certainly couldn’t. I didn’t think that anyone of any particular size would either. Where our other two people had gone I really didn’t know. I was now pondering about how I was going to get through this slit. If I started I would be wedged in with so many people around me that I wouldn’t be able to extricate myself. That was when I awoke in a sweat.

A little later there had been another instance of me trying to catch a bus. I was scrambling around at a roundabout with cobbles and it had been raining. All these people on motorbikes kept on colliding with each other and falling off. But this was before this particular bit. The only bus coming in was this red bus that wasn’t a local bus at all. I got on and said “take me to a metro station”. he replied “there isn’t one where we are going. I suppose we could drop you off somewhere where you could get another connection”

So later on we were back again in my friend’s apartment a while later. I’d stepped back into this dream where I’d stepped out. This time things were better-arranged and when I got up this morning I could find my clothes and get dressed. I realised that I had the wrong clothes on so I went to look for my clothes. I found dozens of dirty clothes and thought that I was going to have to do some washing now. I’d only been there a day. I got dressed and there was some good music going on. I said to my friend “you have some really good music here and good books”. She said “I’ll tell my son about that”. Presumably he had chosen them all. I started to put the food out but suddenly realised that I was putting out things like vegetables and gravy. That must have been stuff for the evening meal, not breakfast. In the end we all went out and got on the bus. There were 3 of us, me, Nerina and another guy. She sat next to this other guy and started to talk to him in this really friendly involved conversation about going to football matches and discussing her ex-boyfriends, whatever. All the time I was thinking “she ought to be sitting next to me discussing this kind of thing and I was getting extremely jealous. We pulled up at a roundabout and we all got off the bus. Nerina asked “you know which bus you’re getting on, don’t you?”. “No” I replied. She explained to me about the roundabout and said “as long as you get on a bus there and it goes any distance you’ll be fine”

But in connection with the bit about the motorbikes falling over I was telling my brother about my journey and told him a cock and bull story about how I took a taxi because I’d missed all the buses but the taxi could only take me so far and he threw me out at a roundabout where I could get a bus.

Things were certainly happening last night, and I’m reminded of the doctor in THE CANNONBALL RUN who said “I’d really like to probe his case”.

Having written out the dictaphone notes, I had a shower and a weigh-in. And I’ve now gone back over my higher target weight which is a shame. But one of the side effects that I have is “weight gain” and it seems pretty pointless me battling to keep the weight off if they give me all of this that puts it straight back on.

Having had my shower, I set out for the shops, having forgotten to switch on the washing machine.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw Normandy Trader in port the other day, and then she disappeared again. But she’s back now doing another freight lift to and from the Channel Islands. Apparently she is really busy right now and there is “some talk” – although how serious it is, I don’t know – of buying a bigger ship.

There’s also the delivery of a new pleasure boat – the shrink-wrapped thing on the trailer behind the red and yellow lorry. It looks as if things are hotting up in the harbour.

Considering that there’s a lockdown on, there are more people about than I would have imagined.

But certain shopkeepers are taking full advantage of the pause well enough. There’s a café there in the Rue Paul Poirier and it looks as if, while it’s closed under the lockdown procedures, that they are ripping out the old front and fitting a new one.

That’s good news if you ask me. It’s nice to see the town slowly being redeveloped as time and funds permit. All we need now are a few more commercial freighters in the port and we’ll be well away. It’s all very well talking about increasing the pleasure boat traffic but what’s the good of the town being packed to the gunwhales 2 months of the year and dead as a dodo for the remaining 10?

One of the reasons why I came here was because of how lively it is throughout the year.

At LIDL I didn’t buy all that I needed, for the simple reason that I couldn’t carry it. I had to buy an extra carrier bag while I was there for what I had already selected.

Pride of place though went to a set of stainless steel mesh sieves. The one that I use for straining my kefir etc is really too big and cumbersome to wield about.

On the way home, I took a little detour.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that quite recently I’ve talked rather a lot about the Eglise St Paul. One of the things that I have mentioned is the sad state of the building and how bits are dropping off it rather too rapidly for comfort.

It seems to me that I did mention that there was a ban on walking around or parking near to it, so here’s a photo of the perimeter of the church all roped off and a warning sign “falling rocks” just to illustrate the point that I was making.

It’s a real shame that the building is crumbling away like this.

The real reason why I’d come up here is because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’d seen the War Memorial here from across the valley a while ago and I’d mentioned that one of these days we’d come to see it.

And sure enough, here we are. There’s no time like the present. And rather disappointingly, there is no mention of any casualties on the Memorial, just a note “To Our Glorious Dead”. I was hoping to see a list of names of local soldiers who had lost their lives.

But interestingly, it mentions “our matelots”. And that set me thinking because I don’t recall any naval engagement during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the war to which this monument relates. I can see that I shall have to go off and do some more research.

So after struggling up the hill laden with shopping, I made myself some hot chocolate and a slice of my fruit bread I went to talk to my friend who was now back on line. And we had a lengthy chat that took me up to lunchtime and more of my delicious bread.

This afternoon, I remembered to switch on the washing machine and even with the racket that that was making, waltzing around in the bathroom I managed to fall asleep for half an hour or so. I realise now why I usually set it to go when I’m out at the shops.

Next task was to peel a kilo of carrots – I’d bought two kilos at the shops today because I was right out. So peeled and diced, I blanched them ready for freezing. And while the water was coming to the boil, I fed the sourdough. There’s now 400 grammes of that happily fermenting away (and I do mean fermenting too – it’s bubbling really well) and as I need just 200 grammes of starter for a 500 gramme sourdough loaf, I reckon that my next loaf will be a sourdough one, and see what damage I can do with that.

Somehow I also managed to find the time for amending the two missing journal entries, THURSDAY’S and FRIDAY’S to incorporate the missing bits. I was going to look for the details of that aeroplane that crashed near Leuven in 1944 and I will do that one day, for sure, but there was something else that I needed to do.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have another friend stricken with Covid too, and I wanted to ask her how she was. And a quick 10-minute ‘phone call turned into a phone call of 1.5 hours.

People reading this will be thinking that maybe I begrudge the time that I spend talking on the ‘phone and on the computer because I’m always on about it, but it’s very far from the truth It interferes with my plans of course, but that’s what plans are for and I think very highly of my friends. I don’t have many friends but those I do have are the best friends in the world that anyone could have and I’ll speak to them any time of the day no matter where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.

Except of course, to certain people to whom I’ve confided my innermost secrets only to find that they have become a subject of discussion in a certain Land Rover news group. No friendship can withstand that, but I digress.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, what with one thing and another (and once you get started you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are) it was after 17:00 when I finally set out for my afternoon walk and by now the light has gone. So much for trying to keep a constant time in order to compare lighting situations.

As I stepped out of the apartment building I noticed a movement out to sea so I went to investigate.

And it looks as if we are having yet another trawler heading for home today too. Whatever else is happening, there’s still fishing to be done and they are out there hard at it.

But anyway, I pushed on with my walk around the headland to see what else was going on.

And the answer to that was “nothing at all”. I had to walk all the way round to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour before I noticed the next object of interest.

Normandy Trader has left port. That was a very brief visit – the turnround times are getting shorter and shorter. But in her place is Thora, the other little Channel Island freighter. She’s come in to do a quick sea lift from and to the Channel Islands.

These two seem to be hard at it without a moment’s rest and so it won’t surprise me if they do end up with a larger boat each before much longer.

Unless, that is, everyone is stocking up prior to Brexit (not that it will have too much of an effect on the Channel Islands) and it will all go very quiet afterwards.

As I was watching Thora the trawler that I had seen out at sea was coming round the headland towards port.

And at that moment, another one was heading out to sea. So in anticipation of a mid-channel collision, I stayed and watched them for a while. However, there were no shipwrecks and nobody drowndin’, in fact nothing to laugh at at all. So I headed for home as the sun started to sink down towards the horizon.

My hour on the guitar was something of a disappointment because I went to play the Steve Harley song “Riding the Waves”. I’d worked out the chords to the chorus but I couldn’t find my piece of paper with the notes on. And when I finally did find the paper, it sounded all wrong again.

The reason why I like the song, apart from the fact that it reminds me of someone who I’ll talk about at some time in the future, there’s a rapid series of chord changes involving the “F” chord and I need to improve that.

And before anyone says that there’s no “F” chord in it, I play it in a different key to suit my voice. My singing isn’t that good.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper. While I was tidying up the food to put everything away, I came across one that was left over from the other week and it still appeared to be in good shape. So followed down by the last of the pineapple rings, it was delicious. Tomorrow I’ll have to take some frozen apple pie out of the freezer.

Later on, I went out for my evening walk and runs around the walls.

There was no-one around tonight so I broke into a run almost as soon as I left the building and ran all the way through the Porte St Jean to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord. But I went back to take a photo of the gate nevertheless because it looked so nice, all illuminated now that they fixed the lights the other week.

Nothing at all going on out at sea – or, if there was, I couldn’t see it – so I ran on down the Rue du Nord to the steep incline that always beats me.

Having recovered my breath, I ran down the footpath underneath the walls, being lured ever onwards by the lights of the promenade at Donville-les-Bains.

With no-one about yet again, I stopped to take a photograph of the night scenery out that way, and then having recovered my breath, ran on down the footpath to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

There was no-one about down there or on the Plat Gousset either, and no-one in the Square Marechal Foch either for that matter, so I could run all the way across there to the other side. Tonight I was really enjoying myself. It was a beautiful night – not too windy, fairly cold and rather crisp.

Further on along the walls by the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou, I looked down to the Rue LeCampion and unless my eyes deceive me, they’ve put up the Christmas lights in the street.

That’s flaming early, I reckon. They must be planning something special right now. I don’t recall the lights being up this early before. Maybe it’s to take advantage of the fewer people wandering around in the streets during lockdown. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s something to do with that.

Back here, I carried on writing up my notes. There were plenty to go at tonight. I’m hoping for an early start tomorrow because I’ve plenty to do. Carrots to dice and blanch of course, and then I ned to start to organise myself about my trip around Europe earlier this year.

It’s not going to get done by me simply thinking about it.

Thursday 29th October 2020 – PHEW!

After everything that I’ve had to do, I’m thoroughly exhausted. And it isn’t going to be better any time soon.

So while you admire more photos of yet more waves crashing onto the Plat Gousset this afternoon, to the evident delight of the little kids down there, I’ll tell you all about it.

And it all started off so well too. Much to my own surprise, and to yours too, no doubt, I beat the third alarm to my feet yet again. How many days on the run is that now?

First task this morning was to listen to the dictaphone. And once again, there was nothing on it. I must have had a really restful night again.

So that gave me some time to have another look at ANOTHER ONE OF THE ARREARS from my trip around Central Europe in the summer.

There was actually time for me to start a second, but I left that half-finished knowing full well that there would be time to finish it off later today … “ha ha ha” – ed … I went off to have a shower instead.

It was on my way down the street that I discovered that the battery had gone flat once again in the NIKON 1 J5. It looks as if the battery on it is heading for the hills which is a shame.

So while you look at yet more photos of waves, I went to the local Nick.

Here the copper on duty was very polite and friendly, but he didn’t know what was going on either so he wasn’t much help. Despite the ban effective from Friday night on foreign travel, there’s a right to travel to seek medical attention and I didn’t know if the medical attention outweighed the ban.

And neither did he.

While I was going past the Post Office I dropped a letter in there. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had a “parcel” delivered the other day.

While the sender told me that there was no charge, I couldn’t leave it like this. He may not want any money for what he sent me (more of which anon) but I can still buy him and his mates a drink. Every job of work deserves its rewards.

From there I headed up to the railway station, today going by the Boulevard Louis Dior so we could see the other end of the alleyway that we saw the other day. This was when I discovered that the camera battery was flat.

They were queueing out of the door at the railway station. The quarantine has changed everyone’s plans of course and they are all trying desperately to change their tickets.

The transaction that I needed, when I finally reached the head of the queue after half an hour, seemed to take all day and there ended up being an enormous queue waiting by the time that I finished.

It’s always this way with me – even the most simple transaction goes all wrong when I’m pushed for time, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. I apologised profusely to everyone waiting behind me. It was the least that I could do.

LIDL was heaving today. Everyone was stocking up with essentials prior to the lockdown. I didn’t want much so I think that I spent more time queueing than I did looking at the shelves.

Back here, I had work to do. A whole pile of packing, a couple of phone calls to make, a few internet purchases to arrange and a pile of paperwork to be printed out. All of that took me up to a rather late lunch.

After lunch I started to load up the data files to the little Acer travelling laptop. I’m going to work with it for a week and see how it goes, in the hope that it will behave itself. It’s been running for over 48 hours non-stop and seems to be quite stable at the moment. I hope that it keeps on going, and there’s only one way to find out.

In the middle of all of this I crashed out – right out good and proper too, for about 45 minutes. A really deep, intense sleep. When I awoke I felt like death

Having recovered my composure somewhat, but only vaguely, I set off for my afternoon walk under yet more leaden skies.

Surprise, surprise, there weren’t too many people about in this weather. Even the roofers on the College Malraux roof had become fed up and gone home. Probably no more than a handful of people, including two little kids running down the steps from the Rue du Nord onto the beach.

Such beach as there was, because the tide was well in by now and they weren’t going to be going far.

But despite the wicked weather, the work must still go on.

From my viewpoint in the Rue du Nord I cast my eyes out to sea and there in the distance I could make out a couple of objects heading in. When I returned home I cropped the photo and enlarged it, and I could see that it was a trawler-type of fishing vessel – a smaller one – heading back into port.

In the absence of any other information, I’m assuming that she has a good catch, as might the one coming on behind that I didn’t photograph. But the usual cortège of seagulls was absent.

You saw the photos of the waves just now, so having watched the entertainment I walked on through the Square Maurice Marland where there was a little 4-year-old having a whale of a time on the roundabout as her dad spun her around.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a week or two ago we witnessed the spectacle of a trawler being “helped” across the harbour by one of its friends to a berth where it could be tied up.

Today, I was interested … ” to say the least” – ed … to see that our friendly neighbourhood lifeboat, Notre Dame de cap Lihou was over there attending to her. I was wondering what might be going on that might require her services.

But as I watched, they tied the two boats together and drifted away from the pontoon

When she was out into the open, I could read her name on the side of her superstructure.

She’s none other than Cap Lihou – the trawler that’s been parked up on blocks in the chantier navale for the last I don’t know how long and who only went back into the water a short time ago.

It looks to me as if she might have a severe mechanical problem, and hence is unable to move under her own steam … “or diesel” – ed … and that’s what she needs help.

And that reminds me. Where does a ship go to when it’s feeling unwell?
Of course – it goes to the doc(k)s

While I was watching her I speculated where she might be going. Of course “out to sea to be scuttled in deep water” was after all hardly likely.

Of course, there’s no real prize for guessing correctly. There can’t be many places that a sick ship (and try saying that with someone else’s teeth in) can go to round here. She’s off to the chantier navalewhere presumably she’ll be winched up onto some blocks.

When I go out for my evening constitutional – if I do get out with all of this work going on – I’ll check on where she is and on what’s happening to her.

While I was watching Cap Lihou limping along out of the inner harbour, there was plenty of other activity going on too.

When I first looked, the two Joly France boats were tied up at the ferry terminal. But as the pantomime in the inner harbour unfolded, I was joined by the newer of the two Ile de Chausey ferries – the one with the smaller upper deck superstructure and deeper windows.

Also in the photo behind her are two of our regulars, Aztec Lady and La Grande Ancre. They don’t seem to have very much going on with all of this virus lockdown going on.

And that’s not everything either. Despite all of the quarantine and lockdown, people still have to eat and we’ve seen a trawler out there earlier coming home with its catch.

And as I watched Cap Lihou and her manoeuvres … “PERSONoeuvres” – ed … into the inner harbour behind Joly France came another trawler. And, surprisingly, the seagulls floating on the water were taking not the slightest bit of notice.

Mind you, I must admit that I did admire the nonchalant attitude of some of the members of the crew as she swung round to tie up at the fish processing plant. They don’t look as if they are in any hurry.

Back in the apartment I carried on hastily trying to assemble things, and then broke off for my guitar practice. And I found to my dismay that I’d forgotten the bass line to “Moonage Daydream” that I’d worked so hard on in the past.

Tea was taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing followed by the last of the delicious apple pie. And then I went out for my evening runs. This was when I discovered that the battery in the NIKON D500 was flat too.

It’s really not my day, is it?

And Cap Lihou wasn’t in the chantier navale either. And it was too dark to see where she was. I just did all of my runs and came home. 135% on the fitbit. I’ll go with that.

So what will tomorrow bring me? Who knows? It’s certainly going to be interesting to find out. I don’t think that anything is going to be easy for a while and I’ve taken considerable precautions. Whether they are effective or not is anyone’s guess. But you’ll find out tomorrow assuming that the little Acer has managed to keep up.

And I never did finish amending that blog posting.

Wednesday 28th October 2020 – IN WHAT MAY COME …

… as a surprise to most of the regular readers of this rubbish who might recall the difficulties that I might be having these days? I actually beat the third alarm yet again!

Well sort-of. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with both feet on the floor when it went off. Not exactly what I would call “lively” – you mustn’t go round expecting too much from me these days – but it was good enough to count.

So while you admire a few more photos of the tremendous waves that we have been having, smashing down on the promenade over by the Plat Gousset and making all of the kids squeal as they are drenched by a downpour as the spray falls to earth, I’ll tell you all about it.

Last night, I didn’t actually find anything additional to do after I’d finished my notes – except to make a start on downloading the data files from the old travelling laptop onto an external drive for safety.

And it can do most of that itself. It doesn’t really need all that much of my help to do that. Mind you, I was surprised to see it fire up without a hitch although it took its usual while to fire up, but that’s only to be expected.

Once I had started it off, I snuggled myself down the bedclothes to get warm in the hope that I could have another interesting night after last night’s lack of excitement. Like I have said … “on many occasions” – ed … my voyages during the night are much more interesting and exciting that what I get up to during the day these days, and I miss it when I don’t go anywhere.

But I wasn’t disappointed last night. There were voyages a-plenty.

Last night I started off baking bread and there was something about getting it all ready before the Army came which was in effect me getting it ready before I went off back to sleep again

Later on there was something about we were somewhere or other. I was with Marianne and there was a dog. This big bulldog appeared and it took a big lump out of this dog’s side. The dog yelped and wandered off but didn’t go far, and the bulldog came round and grabbed hold of him again and took another bite out as if he was intending to eat him. This gradually evolved as more and more animals were becoming involved, all up to no good, and then they started to chase after the humans. There was a guy there an I was with Marianne and another young girl as well.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this was something about car windows – the glass inside the windows but where that fitted in I really don’t know

We were next on the top of the hill looking out across the water. There was a fight going on in the harbour and my country was being overwhelmed quite easily. I remember thinking that I’m lucky that I’m no footballer, that type of thing, because I would hate to participate in the kind of game that I’d been talking about earlier this evening

This building that we started off in tonight, a round building that looked very much like the buildings involved in London’s domestic water supply or something designed by that architect Bazalgette (and I’m surprised that I could remember his name in the middle of a dream) or something who did all of those public works in the London area round about that time

Then I awoke and it was back to chasing these people around again back in the original harbour. For once I was in the pack of the hunters rather than the hunted but I fell asleep before I could see where this actually went towards.

There was far more than that too but some of it didn’t seem to be recorded and I’ve no idea why. Is my technique slipping or am I dictating to an empty hand again like I have done a few times just recently?

And then there is other more gruesome stuff that you wouldn’t thank me for repeating, especially if you are having your lunch or something right now. I’m back on the disturbing dreams again, so it seems.

After getting myself organised, I spent much or the morning working on one of the arrears AND THAT IS NOW FINALLY FINISHED although I’ve no idea why it took me so long to do it. Having a little … errr … relax in the middle of the morning didn’t help matters too much. Clearly beating the third alarm was not the advantage that it might seem.

And then the fun began. With all of the data files now copied onto an external disk, I could set about doing a reinstall of the operating system and files onto the old laptop. When I tried that on the Lenovo the other day it took well over a day to do it. On the little Acer it took 4 hours and as a result required my almost constant attention.

Much to my surprise, once everything had been done and installed and registered, it fired up a darn sight quicker than it ever did in all the years that I have owned it. I’ve now uploaded a few programs to it and I’m going to leave it running for a couple of days to see how stable it is before I decide whether to start reusing it.

Surprisingly, that took me most of the early afternoon.

Having decided on a break from work, I decided to take myself outside for my afternoon walk.

And I do have to say that I didn’t envy the roofers up there on the roof of the College Malraux. There was what the French call a ciel de plomb – a sky of lead – out there right now, there’s quite a strong wind and it’s threatening rain at any moment.

Yet there they are up there fixing that roof and I wouldn’t like to be up there with them in this kind of weather.

And if there is one group of people for whom I have even greater sympathy than roofers, it’s deep-sea fishermen.

My route today took me round to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord and in the distance out in the English Channel near the Ile de Chausey I could make out a couple of trawlers heading out to sea for the day’s catch. My hat goes off to them in this weather, as I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed.

There were crowds of people about this afternoon so I couldn’t break into a run down the footpath. Instead I had a leisurely stroll that way to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset to watch the waves smashing down again on the promenade, photos of which you have already seen.

And it’s full house in the harbour this afternoon.

Last night I must have been mistaken … “What? You? Perish the thought!” – ed … when I mentioned that Thora had left port yesterday afternoon – either that or else she’s been and done an allez-retour in a remarkably quick time to be back in port right now, because here she is.

But all of the wood that was on the quayside when we had a look yesterday is still there so it’s quite possible that she hasn’t gone anywhere and is waiting for part of her load.

But she’s not alone out there today.

Of course Marité is moored there astern of her in her usual corner. Her tourist season, such as it was, is probably over. And there ahead of her is Normandy Trader, the other Jersey Freighter. She’s made a run in to port today and has had to moor somewhere else, which is rather confusing.

All we need now is Godzilla, or maybe the Loch Ness Monster. But ideally for me, I’d like to see one of the gravel boats come into port. And then we really would have a full house, wouldn’t we?

On the way back to my apartment I went to have a look at the roofing job on the house in the Rue St Jean to see how they were getting on.

And to my surprise, they seem to have finished, packed up and gone home. Nevertheless, they seem to have done a nice jon on it. It looks quite good from here. But I notice that a seagull is on its way to have a look, and probably to christen it too.

As for me, I didn’t want to hang around too long. I have plenty to do back at the apartment so I came home to carry on with my work.

There was my Welsh to revise, and I made a good start on that, but left off to have my hour on the guitars, which wasn’t helped by me having lost my notes on one of the tracks that I’ve been playing.

Tea was a burger on a bap – the last bap in the freezer. Must buy some more tomorrow. And then I came back in here to listen to the news from Our Glorious Leader that we’re all back in detention à domicile with effect from Friday. So where this leaves me with my trip to Castle Anthrax next week I really don’t know.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening run, Rosemary rang for a chat and by the time we had finished two hours (yes, two hours) later, it was far too late for me to go out.

So instead, I’ll go to bed. Tomorrow is shopping day of course and I’ll need to get some suplies in because I’ve no idea now what’s going to happen next with this virus and our confinement.

Whoever said that we are “living in interesting times” has got it perfectly right, especially after I’ve just gone to all this trouble to fire up the old laptop again.

Tuesday 27th October 2020 – CALIBURN HAS …

… gone off today for his makeover. He’s a teenager now of course, and I promised him a makeover for his bodywork as a treat, as the Controle Technique tester made a couple of remarks about it last time.

It’s not cheap – not at all – but buying a new vehicle is even less cheap. The garage where he goes every year says that he has plenty of life in him, the bodywork repairs will be guaranteed for five years, and I’ll be lucky, very lucky indeed if I get another five years out of my body with this illness. So there’s no point in doing anything else except getting him fixed.

So while you admire the waves from the latest storm smashing their way into the sea wall over at the Plat Gousset, let me tell you about my day today.

Rather – last night too because after I’d finished writing up my notes, and not feeling in the least bit tired I amended ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS to include the photos of the day and the voyages that I’d been on during the night.

And consequently, despite the lateness of the hour when I went to bed, no-one was more surprised than me (except you of course) to find that I was up and about – well, “sort-of-about” – when the third alarm went off. I shall have to do this more often.

Nothing on the dictaphone either, which was just as surprising. I must have had a really peaceful sleep last night for a change.

And so with no notes to write up, I had a go AT YET ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS. Well, sort-of, because there weren’t any photos taken that day and I didn’t go anywhere during the night either. So that ended up being something of a non-event.

Before I could take Caliburn off anywhere, I had to find the details of my rail journey at the weekend. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I always like to have my rail tickets in my hand long before the day of my journey.

That’s because on a couple of occasions the printing machine at the station is out of order and as the ticket office doesn’t open until after my train has left, I’d look rather silly if I left it until the morning of travel to pick up my tickets and found that the machine wasn’t working.

So having collected the necessary, Caliburn and I set out through yet another driving rainstorm to find our way to the garage where he’ll be staying for the next two weeks.

When the boss came in I handed him the keys and gave him a couple of extra instructions. he needs his annual service of course, he needs his brakes looking at, and there’s the controle technique due on the 5th November – and there will be fireworks if he doesn’t pass.

Mind you, it’s only an emissions check so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem about that – I hope. He runs well enough, which is why I’m keeping him.

On the way back home in the rain I walked down the main Route de Villedieu in the rain, but I stopped when I saw this.

It’s mushroom season now of course and you’ll find plenty of mushrooms in plenty of places, but growing in a flower bed at the side of the road is not one of the more likely places to find one, especially one as big as this.

And do you know how to tell if they are edible?

It’s really quite simple. Take a sample and eat it just before you go to bed. If you wake up next morning, then you know that it’s safe.

Just for a change, after leaving the railway station with my tickets I walked down the “other” side of the Rue Couraye.

And it’s amazing the things that you see that you haven’t noticed before. Granville is honeycombed with little alleyways and surreptitious flights of steps and here’s one that I haven’t ever noticed before.

It leads down across the old railway line and over to the Boulevard Louis Dior, the road that leads to the Parc du Val es Fleurs where we went a good while ago to see all of the animals and where they had that marquee once.

Just across the road from here, the workmen are being pretty busy.

There was a Home Decorating shop there – one with a ghastly aluminium 1960s-style of shop front that they had installed at some point and ruined the aspect of the building. It was sold a couple of months ago and since then it’s been sheathed in wood.

But now they seem to have taken that down and they are busy with the angle grinder cutting into the brickwork and concrete on the pavement. I don’t know what they will be installing there but I’m pretty sure that it will be an improvement on what was there before.

Back here I made some hot chocolate, cut myself off a slice of my banana bread – and then fell asleep in the chair. hardly surprising, I reckon, after all of this walking that I had done.

When I awoke there was enough time to make a good start on YET ANOTHER ONE OF THE BLOG ENTRIES that needed updating now that I’ve finished the photo editing and the dictaphone transcribing.

Plenty of photos and voyages in that one so it took me all the rest of the day, which isn’t surprising in itself considering everything else that I had to do.

For example, after lunch my kefir needed attention. It’s been brewing for long enough.

Four nice, ripe kiwis were peeled and put into the whizzer with a few handfuls of grapes and whizzed around until I had a nice mushy liquidy pulp. This was strained through my filter stack into the big jug and the kefir out of the pot followed through the stack, leaving an inch or so at the bottom of the pot.

Everything in the jug was then strained back through the filter stack into a few bottles that I had washed and cleaned.

Then I set another batch of kefir on the way – 40 grammes of sugar, three slices of lemon, a fig cut in half and then the pot filled to within a couple of inches at the top with filtered water.

Later on, with the rain having stopped for a brief moment I decided to go out for my afternoon walk.

Crowds of people out there taking advantage of the moment of sunshine that we were having, even though it didn’t look too nice further down the coast towards Donville les Bains. I reckoned (and I was right too) that we would be having another good helping of rain any moment now.

And so no time to hang around. I pushed on around the footpath under the walls dodging the puddles that hadn’t diminished one iota from the last time that I was out.

You’ve seen the photos of the storm that we were having. The rain might have stopped (for the moment) but the wind had got up and was raging away to itself. For a few minutes I watched them crashing down on the Plat Gousset and then headed off across the Square Maurice Marland.

At a walk, I hasten to add. Too many people about for me to break into a run.

Now here’s a nice surprise awaiting me in port this afternoon.

How long is it since we’ve seen Thora, the smaller of the two Jersey freighters, here in the harbour? I was thinking about her quite recently and here she is. There’s a huge pile of building material, wood and the like, all kids of stuff, on the quayside so it looks as if she is going to be taking all of that back with her.

But I wasn’t going to hang around at all. There was the storm brewing up yet again and I wanted to be home as soon as possible.

Back here I finished off the blog entry that I mentioned just now, and then had my hour on the guitar. And tonight I just went over a couple of old numbers that I could sing to, just to make me feel better. I wish that I could snap out of this depression that I’ve been in since August last year when a whole lifetime’s ambition was within my grasp and it just melted away through my fingers at the side of a windswept airport runway in the Frozen North.

Am I becoming all maudlin and broody again?

Tea was a stuffed pepper which, strangely, was one of the best and tastiest that I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed that very much. And my slice of apple pie was even nicer. I’m even surprising myself with my cooking.

With the rain having now died down I went out for my evening walk and runs.

A run up the Rue du Roc and then another one down to the clifftop, and this was the sight that met my eyes. At first I thought that it might have been the reflection of the moon or something in a rock pool but no matter how I changed my position the light remained in the same position.

It’s not a beach down there – it’s where all the rocks are. And there are plenty of rock pools so it may be that there’s someone having a go at night fishing. And he’ll probably catch just as much in the dark as he might do during the day.

My walk continued on to the end of the headland to look out across the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of days ago I tried to take a shot of the moon reflecting on the bay, but the wind was too strong to have a good attempt. Tonight was a little better, but still too windy to use the flat-topped post that I found, so I had to make do with wedging the camera up against the side of the bunker.

And that one hasn’t come out very much better than the previous one either, which is a shame. I must do better

From here I ran on down the path at the top of the cliffs as best as I could. Not because I was tired but because I had to dodge the huge puddles that were everywhere.

Sometimes late at night, we’ve encountered the Joly France boats coming in from a late-night trip back from the Ile de Chausey, but we won’t be seeing them out at sea tonight. Both of them are moored up over there at the ferry terminal.

Not much sign of life there either. They’ve all packed up and gone home a good long while ago, I reckon.

Have we had a night-time photo of the port offices yet? It’s no use asking me as I can’t remember.

The offices are right by the gates to the inner harbour and anyone going into there has to make contact with the Port Officer first. But the gates are closed (you can tell by the red light) and so is the office.

The green light is there to tell pedestrians that it’s permissible to cross over to the far side by taking the little pathway across the top of the gates, a route that we have taken quite often.

On my way home I had a quick look down at the harbour. Thora has now left – that was a quick turnround yet again – and there was nothing else going on. I completed all of my runs, somewhat easier than of late. I must be easing up again, which can only be good news.

It makes me wonder where I’ll be by the summer. I’m not pushing myself to extremes like I did last Spring but I can feel that I’m starting to become ready to push myself on.

But right now, I’m going to push on (or push off, more like) into bed. A whole day at home (barring accidents), and as there was no Welsh course this week I intend to spend some time tomorrow revising what I’ve already forgotten – which is probably about all of it.

Another plan of action that I have is, seeing how well the reformatting of the laptop went the other day, to have a go with the little travelling Acer too and see if I can’t tempt that back into proper life. I managed to rig it so it worked well enough to extract the data from it but a disk format and clean installation might possibly do some good.

It was the slowest laptop that I ever had but it was also the lightest and travelled with me everywhere despite everything. It will be nice to make it go again. I’m not too optimistic but if I don’t try, it definitely won’t work.

And in other news, I had a “parcel” today in the post. More of this anon

Sunday 25th October 2020 – I KNOW THAT …

… it’s Sunday and Sunday is a Day of Rest, a lie-in and all of that, but nevertheless, 11:20 is just a little exaggerated, even if it was about 02:30 when I went to bed this morning.

Another thing that I learnt today is that my fitbit doesn’t automatically reset the time when the clocks change. So in actual fact, it was 10:20, not 11:20. That makes me feel better. Clocks only an hour back not like the UK where they are busily setting their clocks back 200 years to the days when the rich and privileged sent starving kids up chimneys and condemned the poor to workhouses.

Mind you, I needed that extra hour in bed because of the distance that I must have travelled last night.

I started out in Shavington last night. It was snowing and wintertime. We were all hanging around outside, doing all kinds of different things and it gradually became dark at night. I went around the street at night looking in people’s gardens because they would put out things that they wanted other people to have. I was collecting a nice little collection of Christmas decorations. Every night I would go out and look but tonight I was at someone’s house I knocked my box over and all the decorations went everywhere. It was embarrassing trying to pick them all up again because you would think that people would be thinking that I was stealing everything. Then I went for a slide, like you used to do as a kid, on your feet. I remember sliding all the way down Vine Tree Avenue into Chestnut Avenue and I got to where the new-build houses were. I couldn’t remember whether they had any Christmas stuff or whether it was just the old ones, so I went over there to have a look. I was doing something in an attic and I can’t remember exactly what it was that I was doing. Something to do with my clothes or something, I’m not too sure, all a very sad, solitary thing

Later I was at the doctor’s. There was a queue in front of me and we were gradually advancing one by one to get in. It was an Asian doctor and most of his clients were Asian. Who should walk in behind me but an Indian woman whom I knew in Stoke on Trent. After some people had gone in she said “go on in Eric, it’s your turn”. I said “no, there’s someone just gone in”. She replied “no, there can’t have been”. “Yes there is” I countered so she had a look and she was right and this doctor was doing some kind of strange tests and setting everything right.

Some time later there were all these people milling around in the bus station thinking where it was they were wanting to go to. I was going to somewhere along the North African coast and people keep on presenting me to their cousins who were travelling with me or travelling in the reverse direction. There was a queue at the reception desk, and I was busy trying to find the bay for my bus because it wasn’t very clear. If you were travelling by car the bay was actually somewhere else outside, but I couldn’t see from the map. I was hoping for a clue when there were all these people who had got to the front of the queue and were being told by the receptionist that they could discuss the matter amongst themselves but preferably do it away from where the ticket machines were and the queue for the reception was because they were blocking the road for everyone else.

Later still I’d been out for my usual early morning walk and as I crossed over the railway bridge where one of the branch lines came into Crewe an electric goods train went underneath. I had a look at my watch – it was something like 06:15 and I thought “I’m usually somewhere else at this time, not here. I have to be out and on my way to the station by 06:30 and I’m well over a mile away from home. How am I going to manage this?”. I cut short my route and went home through a side street. The first thing that I came to was a wolf- a sheep that was all alone. It came over towards me so I shoo’d it off. It went over to where a pack of dogs was so the dogs chased it off down the street. I continued walking and came to a T junction. I didn’t remember a T junction here so I didn’t know which way to take. There was a hill where I could climb to the top to look over but it was on private property. When I went over the fence onto this land to try to climb this hill I was suddenly surrounded by several people who demanded to know exactly what it was that I was doing. I gave them an explanation but they wouldn’t believe a word of it.

I’ve not finished yet. Not by a long way.

I was manning a look-out post on a high ridge overlooking a valley. I had a tent there and that was basically my camp. I was out on this ridge with a large-bore shotgun. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for – just generally watching the movements. First of all a couple of young people came up. They put their tent up not too far from mine and then changed into their hunting gear complete with feathers on their hats and wandered off with their guns further off down the ridge. Then a couple of couples, elderly couples turned up and started walking aorund, taking a great deal of interest in my van, like an old Ford Thames 400E with a high-top roof. Filthy inside – it had been used as a butcher’s van and it was all lined with dirty fat inside. I had a few words with them. There was a girl about 9 or so who was expressing an interest in it. She said something to me that was extremely informal so I asked “did your father teach you to say things like that to people whom you don’t know?” She replied “my father’s here. You can ask him”, something like that. I ended up having a chat with this guy. He took me down to his farm and then wandered off. I was still there, on guard in his farmyard now, and noticed a really ancient moped so I went over to have a look at it. The handlebars were broken and the rear wheel was missing. This girl came out again and I said “is this yours?” “No” she replied. “It’s dad’s”. He came over and took me into this room, barn or storeroom or something. He had all kinds of machinery all over, huge stuff and he was showing me one or two things. I hadn’t a clue what they were but he showed me the crankshaft of an engine which was really long but really lightweight. I thought “I wonder what it is that this is from”. We had a chat about it. he had a few other bits and pieces together and showed me roughly how it worked. Further on down into this barn was all of his electrical equipment – desk meters and so on. He had one that turned out to be some kind of 2-way radio, a 2-way hi-fi radio so he could actually talk on it as well. As he was showing it, he said “ahh! Table-tennis!” and started to tune it in so people could have a game of table tennis on this machine.

And finally I ended up walking across a car park, the one at St Nicolas. There was a van there parked in the roadway in the car park and the driver was eating his sandwich. But there were plenty of places for him to park, even one right by where he was stopped. I had this great big dig with me for some unknown reason and it came across 2 girls having a wrestling match, so he shot off to join in, which didn’t go down very well and everyone said something about it. Then this girl from the previous voyage put in an appearance. Stepping back into a previous dream yet again!

And when I said “finally”, I’m not sure that I really mean it. I’m certain that there was much more to all of this and furthermore, the files on the dictaphone are numbered consecutively and there are two missing. I’m not sure how it happens because it doesn’t have an “over-write facility” (well, yes it does but I’ve disabled it) and I’ve also disabled the “delete” facility – the only way that I can delete files is through a computer interface.

So what’s going on here, then? It beats me.

This morning there wasn’t much time left after I had typed out all of that. I went and had a hot chocolate and some of my fruit bread.

And having had some food, I then prepared another fruit loaf. Two small bananas, a dozen or so brazil nuts finely whizzed up in the whizzer, several handfuls of raisins and, for a change, a couple of tablespoons of desiccated coconut added into the flour and salt mix. Then, the yeast and water (more water than usual – I’m told that my mix is too dry) mixed in and kneaded well into a lovely dough ball.

While that was proofing, I took some pizza dough out of the fridge and kneaded that ready for tonight.

With the important stuff out of the way, I turned my attention to the day’s work. I know that it’s Sunday and I don’t usually do any work today but I’ve been so lazy just recently that I thought that I’d better do something.

Accordingly, I started on the updating of the journal to include the stuff that I didn’t do when I was ill or when I was away. The first one, for 23rd August when I was recovering, is now completed and you can SEE THE FINISHED VERSION HERE. I’ll be working on backwards from here and finally you’ll get to read about some of these weird and wonderful nocturnal voyages that I went on and told you all about.

All through the morning (such of it as I saw) we were alternating between sunshine and torrential downpours. And it became worse and worse after lunch.

Eventually the rain eased off. It had all gone quiet and I could hear voices of people outside. It must be the moment to go for a walk I reckon. I took to the walls.

There was no-one sitting down on the beach this afternoon and I’m not at all surprised by that. But nevertheless there were still plenty of people taking, presumably, their last stroll on the beach.

And when I say that, I don’t mean it terminally. Although of course, with almost 50,000 new infections disclosed yesterday, it may well come to that for so many people. I really don’t understand what is so difficult about the restrictions that are taking place.

Meanwhile, I walked (not ran – there were far too many people about for that) around to the Square Maurice Marland.

And here you can see exactly what the weather is doing today. Huge and horrendous squalls of rain being blown by the wind across the Baie de Mont St Michel. I’m glad that I’m not out there in all of that, that’s for sure.

In fact, I’m not going to hang around at all. I’m going to head for home as soon as I can to avoid being caught up in this because as sure as night follows day, this lot will be dropping on my head in about 20 minutes.

And it doesn’t look as if I’m the only one with doubts about the weather either.

As I watched, out from the harbour came the port’s lifeboat, the Notre Dame de Cap Lihou. it headed off to sea, cutting its way through the waves that were crashing down on her bow. If it’s an emergency call, it’s no surprise in this weather because the storms really were raging again.

Unfortunately though, I couldn’t see where she went. She certainly didn’t head out into the English Channel as far as I could see, and she didn’t go across the Bay to the Brittany coast either. All told, she wasn’t out for long. When I checked her fleet log an hour later, se was already back at her berth.

One thing that’s for sure – she wasn’t going to rescue the passengers of Joly France, the ferry that goes out to the Ile de Chausey.

The bad weather today hasn’t stopped her sailing. As Notre Dame de Cap Lihou went one way, Joly France came the other way, back to port with a load of passengers.

And it must really have been a shame for them. All that way out to the island, it’s not cheap either, and to have had the dreadful weather that’s bothered us for much of the day, and then had to come home in a storm that created a really rough crossing for them.

And rough crossing it must have been too.

The wind wasn’t as strong as the last couple of days when I spent more time running after my hat than I did walking around my little circuits, but it was still strong enough to send the waves crashing over the sea wall, even though the tide was quite far out as you saw in the photo of the beach just now.

All of this has got me thinking. And I know that that could be quite dangerous. looking back over the last few months, we seem to have spent most of our time being battered by storms. I know that I’ve only lived here 3.5 years and that’s no time at all but I don’t remember it being as windy as this for as long as this.

Looking for the lifeboat, I went for a walk over to the other side of the headland to see if I could see where she went.

No such luck, but what I did see cheered me up immensely. Through a large gap in the clouds the sun was treaming down onto the Brittany Coast round by St Cast le Guildo where we went with Spirit of Conrad and the Lighthouse at Cap Fréhel, on the extreme right of the photo, is quite clearly visible.

No lifeboat so I came home, noticing that one of my neighbours had left the headlights burning on her car on the car park, so I gave her a buzz to tell her as I came in.

When I came back, I checked on my bread. It hadn’t risen as much as I would have liked – far from it in fact. But never mind. It’s had three hours to have sorted itself out so I gave it another good kneading, and then shaped it and put it in the mould that I use and covered it for its second proofine.

For the pizza dough, I gave it a good kneading and then rolled it out . When I had it how I wanted it, I put it on a greased pizza tray and left it to proof.

In the office I sorted out the photos that I had just taken and wrote up my notes, and then bunged the fruit bread in the oven. It hadn’t risen very much but once in the hot oven it went up like a lift. While that was cooking I prepared the pizza and when the bread was cooked, I took the bread out and put the pizza in.

Half an hour later I was tucking into one of the best pizzas that I have ever made. Everything about it was just so right.

And I’ll tell you about the fruit loaf tomorrow.

Tonight’s run was rather depressing, if not something of a failure.

There was a biting, howling gale coming hurling itself down the Rue du Roc that brought me to a standstill as soon as I started on the uphill bit. With the sky being do clear I was hoping for a good photo of the moonlight reflecting off the bay by resting the camera on that handy stone that I found last night but no chance of that. It was impossible.

From the shelter of the Atlantic Wall bunker there, the result just wasn’t the same. But you can’t win a coconut every time.

Nothing at all happening out to sea so I harried on along the path to the viewpoint.

Nothing in the harbour either. The tide is too far out for the fishing boats to come in, assuming that there are any out there tonight in this wicked storm. And so tonight I took a photo of nothing – except perhaps the lights of the restaurant in the Rue du Port.

From here I ran on home again, bunging in a little deviation to make up some of the ground that I’d lost. After all, it it’s deviation that you want, then, in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”.

So tomorrow I have work to do. Two radio shows have to be prepared. But at least I have a head start for I’ve sent off this week’s – and next weeks – already, ahead of time. Next week’s of course because I won’t be here and it’s almost impossible to work when I’m away.

Consequently I need to be on form. None of these 10:20 or even 07:20 – starts. Not that I’m optimistic but I’ll see what I can do.

EPIC HALL

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