… yesterday that it looks as if the big yachts are going to be in the chantier navale for a while yet, one of them has now gone back into the water and we already have a replacement.
It seems that I’m not much good at this prediction lark and I ought to pack it in. It’s not the first time that I’ve had to abandon my fortune-telling. The first time, I had to give it up because although I had a crystal ball, there was no future in it. The second time, I had to abandon my studies due to unforeseen circumstances.
So yesterday we should have been saying “goodbye” to La Granvillaise and instead, this afternoon we are saying “hello” to the trawler Hermes I who has now come to join in the (af)fray. There she is sitting on her plinth in between Charles Marie and Lys Noir
And had you been around here round about 06:00 this morning you would have been saying “hello” to me too because once again I arose from the dead just after the first alarm went off. And that’s after my night last night wasn’t as early as it might have been either. I had another play on the guitar before I went to bed.
Having made yet another major effort to rise from the dead, I went for my medication and then afterwards I listened to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.
Last night I was with Birmingham Corporation and some woman was giving a talk on something or other to tourists using slide displays and so on. Down in the basement was someone with some old films who was busy showing them. When the woman finished her presentation someone else came in to take over his turn. It was a doctor and she recognised him. They started to chat about old times because they had known each other. But somewhere out on an outside broadcast was another guy who was related by marriage to this woman – I don’t know if he was her husband or something. I was half-expecting him to put in an appearance while this woman and doctor were being so friendly because that really would have stirred up the pot as far as their relationship went. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember it now.
From then on I had something of a rather busy morning. Between then and 09:00 I had tidied up the apartment, taken out all of the plastic, glass metal and paper that had built up over the last few weeks (and you have no idea just how much there was) and dealt with the 20 photos from Greenland 2019 that I was planning to edit today.
There are now less than 300 to edit for the month of July, and many of those relate to my voyage around North America in the Kia Soul.
Round about 09:00 I made myself a coffee and then sat down to revise my Welsh for this week’s lesson. And somewhere in all of that time I managed to fall asleep as well. And that’s hardly a surprise given the hectic morning that I’d had so far.
Nevertheless, by the time that our lesson started at 11:00 I was at the computer with my hot chocolate and slice of sourdough fruit bread to see me through until lunchtime.
The lesson passed quickly enough although I wasn’t as well prepared for it as I might have been. I made a couple of rather embarrassing elementary howlers. We over-ran yet again and that meant that I was even more late for my lunch than I might otherwise have been.
This afternoon I’ve been brewing. There was a batch of kefir to make and I’d bought a kilo of juice-oranges the other week that were now nice and ripe. Tons of juice in those and they’d made a good batch.
At Leclerc last weekend in the “reduced for quick sale” section there had been a litre of fresh orange juice too and I’d bought that. I’d seen a recipe for ginger beer that is made with orange juice and I wanted to see how that would come out.
And while I was at it, I made a couple of litres of ordinary ginger beer too.
In between all of this I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.
Not that I could see very much out there today because the rolling sea fog that has been around and about on and off over the last few days was very much on today and it had rolled right in.
If there was anyone down on the beach today I simply wouldn’t know. And the same would go for anything out at sea as well.
With no-one else about today I was pretty much on my own as I walked down the path. There was nothing of any interest at all except for a bunch of schoolkids being taken for a walk by a teacher. That’s all that there was to relieve the monotony of the blanket of mist that had shrouded absolutely everything.
From the car park by the lighthouse I had a look out across the Jullouville to see how the view was today in the fog.
Le Loup was visible, and so was the rock upon which it stands. The fog doesn’t seem to be as thick out on this side of the headland and of course the tide is quite far out right now. But the fog is such that we can’t see anything much beyond that.
Out in the bay across to the Brittany coast the view was just as miserable so I carried on around the footpath and headed on along the path towards the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale and the port.
Yesterday we saw a hive of activity over at the ferry port with the lorry and its crane doing some kind of work.
Today it seems to be quite a bit quieter. The lorry has gone and there isn’t a soul out there working. They still have their blue container that they seem to be using as a store and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen that before on several occasions around and about in the port in the past where they have been working.
So leaving the ferry port and Joly France down there on their own for the moment, I had a look over at the chantier navale to see what was happening there. And we’ve seen the results of that already.
Back in the apartment I carried on with my brewing activities and I now have quite a good collection of drinks brewing away.
On the far left, we have a large and small bottle of orange ginger beer. At the back from left to right we have the ginger mother solution and then the kefir mother solution.
The three other bottles with orange liquid are the three orange kefir bottles and the remaining two at the front are the ginger beer.
You can see the two bottles with the orange caps. They are the cheaper ones that I bought from NOZ. I’ve had a further tweaking around with them and the seals still aren’t satisfactory. When I can find a couple more bottles of better quality like the lemonade ones that I found in LIDL, these two will be retired to less-pressurised duty.
The hour on the guitar passed well enough and they I had a hurried tea with a curry from out of the freezer because there was football on the internet.
Bala Town, third in the League, were at home to Connah’s Quay Nomads, currently leading the league. This had the potential to be the best match of the season because on their day (which unfortunately isn’t often enough) Bala can be the best team in the League.
And Bala duly obliged, straight from the kick-off before I’d even sat down to watch it. Up at the other end the Nomads equalised after just 5 minutes. Ramsey punched out a long throw-in, the ball hit Michael Wilde on the back of the head and the rebound bounced of George Horan’s head into the Bala net and I don’t think that anyone knew anything about that.
Bala unfortunately were very quiet for the rest of the match and Will Evans was practically anonymous, snuffed right out of the game by the Nomads defence. The Nomads relied on their long ball game to the head of Michael Wilde and the two wingers running on, and their persistence and fitness paid off towards the end when they scored two late goals.
The three points tonight enabled the Nomads to stay at the top of the table but their rather lightweight attack, something from which they have suffered for the last few years, is going to cost them dearly yet again as the season draws on.
Now I’m off to bed and I’m hoping to have a good day’s work tomorrow, including booking my travel for next week, something that I overlooked to do today.
