Tag Archives: Amber

Friday 18th April 2025 – I HAVE HAD …

… a visitor today

My tenant has finally decided to present herself to me this afternoon.
"What do you want to do about the kitchen in the apartment?" she asked.
"If you look behind you" I said "you’ll see some kitchen units in boxes. I ordered them, paid for them and had them delivered a long time ago. It’s rather late in the day to tell me about yours"

She then began a long complicated spiel about the difficulties she was having with the apartment for which she has signed.

However, I cut her rather short. "That’s not my problem" I interjected. Then I proceeded to tell her what my problem was. I explained my medical issues, in rather forthright terms and how she was contributing to them. I told her that I had proposed an exchange of apartment but she had refused.
"But I can’t walk upstairs. I have this bad back"
"Madam" I replied. "In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve just walked up 25 stairs this very minute to speak to me. Your medical problems are obviously nothing like as bad as mine and I have to do that at least three times per week on crutches"

We carried on with that kind of chat for a couple of minutes and then I interjected once more, saying "I have nothing more to add to the matter. If you have anything further to say, you must say it to the letting agent" and I escorted her to the door.

Now she can walk the 25 stairs back down again.

She’s obviously not received the letter that I sent to the letting agent this morning because I have now decided on a course of action.

Gotthold Lessing once famously said "better counsel comes overnight" and that’s certainly true, especially when you have had a lot of night in which to think.

Having dashed through everything last night, I was finally in bed by not many minutes after 23:00, which made a very pleasant change. Looking forward to a good night’s sleep, I curled up under the bedclothes and made myself comfortable

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I had been up for an hour and a half. So much for my idea of a good night’s sleep. Of course, it’s dialysis night but it’s usually Saturday night / Sunday morning when I have sleeping issues. So it must be my guilty conscience preying on me.

But when you are awake at 05:05 and don’t leave the bed until 05:28 you have plenty of time, all nice and peaceful, to think of a plan.

My plan was firstly to go into the bathroom and have a good scrub up. And then into the kitchen and have my medication.

Back in here, armed with a mug of instant coffee, I sat down and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I came home from school and found my mother doing her usual things, talking, and then our father came in. He was talking about a couple of things that he was intending to do in the future. One of them was “we have to pack because we are moving”. This took everyone by surprise. He said “we’re moving to London – I have a job down there. I already have the house and it’s all ready for us to move”. “Oh God!”. My mother and I were completely taken by surprise because he’d never said anything to anyone. We hadn’t put our house up for sale and there were still lots of little tasks that needed doing. The first thought that went through my mother’s mind was “I bet he hasn’t bought a house. He’s probably rented a room somewhere for us and the next stop will be two rooms and a bathroom then some kind of council house”. My mother was very dispirited. So was I. I said “I don’t want to go”. She replied “that’s not like you. You’re always wanting to move on”. I replied “yes but I want to move on to my place on my terms, not go down to south-west London”. My mother replied “you aren’t obliged to go, are you?”. I replied “no, but I’ll have to find a job, all that kind of thing, leave school”. My mother was worried about all kinds of tasks that needed finishing off, like the garage floor, all of that, but it never seemed to change anything and we were just extremely unhappy and dispirited by it all.

That is in fact just like my family. They never ever planned anything for the future. It was always a question of carpe diem quam minimum credula postero as Horace would have said and “make it up as you go along”.
.
Another intriguing thought is “why did I say “South-West London” “? I actually lived in Wandsworth once for a couple of months, that’s true. I was so fed up listening to someone’s sad tale of “never finding work” and having an excuse for every suggestion that I made, that I took action.

What I did was to place an advert in one of these local papers in South-West London – mainly because it was the only area of London that I didn’t know very well – and within 48 hours I had a room lined up. I caught the train down and found my room, dumped my stuff and went for a walk.

Around the corner was a pizza restaurant advertising for casual kitchen staff and delivery drivers (evenings) and a few doors down was an Employment Agency with an advert in the window looking for bus drivers to drive schoolkids around mornings and evenings. So within 20 minutes of arriving at my digs I was effectively in full-time employment.

It really was that easy.

When my mother said that not wanting to go was not like me at all, she was perfectly correct. I was always the adventurous one. If I had had my way, our family would have immigrated to Australia under the “ten-pound Poms” scheme in the 1960s.

After I’d finished, I sat down and wrote out my letter to the letting agents, the one about which I talked earlier. I set out all of my medical issues and all the action that I had taken to date vis-à-vis my tenant.

And here’s the crunch. The lease will definitely finish on the due date. And if she wants to stay on afterwards, she can do so – but on hotel terms and conditions and at hotel rates too. I finished with “these terms are non-negotiable. It’s ‘take it or leave it’ and I want to hear no more of the matter. The discussion is finished”.

The way she came upstairs and went back down after having rejected my home exchange offer eighteen months ago “on health grounds” has only made me more determined.

The nurse came round to sort me out and I asked me if he knew anyone in the Mafia. He seems to know everyone else who might be disreputable. It might come down to asking “Luigi and a couple of the boys” to help me do a home removal, and we’re not talking about my apartment either.

Once he’d gone I could make breakfast and read more of MY BOOK. We’re still in Kenilworth Castle having a good wander around looking at the architecture. And nothing has happened that is controversial as yet.

But seeing as we have been talking about breakfast… "well, one of us has" – ed … my hot cross buns were absolutely exquisite. Just as they ought to be, in fact. This is a real success.

Back in here, there was more discussion. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I should have had a ‘phone call from the UK last week. However, due to a family emergency it never happened.

Today though, we had a very lengthy exchange of messages, discussing the finalisation of phase one of my project and the projected start of phase two. We’ve had an estimate of sorts for the work and we discussed other work that we could also include. All we need to do now is to save up some money

Next task was to finalise my LeClerc order and send it off. They had almost everything too, and acceptable substitutes for what was missing.

We haven’t finished yet either. My niece and a couple of my little great-nieces (or great little nieces) contacted me for a chat and we had a lovely time together. Amber has just finished her exams and is quite confident that she’ll graduate in May. It’s streamed live and so she’ll send me a link.

Her High School graduation was streamed live too and I enjoyed watching it. It’s really hard to believe that in December 2003 she was such a tiny baby and I was bouncing her up and down on my knee in a car in a howling snowstorm in the Appalachians of Maritime Canada.

My first disgusting drink break, late that it was, was interrupted by the arrival of my cleaner who set about her afternoon’s task

After she left I could make a start on my Saturday At Woodstock, but not for long because my LeClerc order arrived and I had stuff to put away. With the LeClerc order came the tenant, about whom I spoke earlier, so I had her to deal with too.

Finally, I had everything put away (well, almost) and so I sat down to restart my Saturday At Woodstock.

And no sooner had I started then Rosemary rang. Just a short ‘phone call today – one hour and thirty-eight minutes. I forgot to mention earlier that I’d been speaking via text messages to Rosemary throughout the day, helping her to fix her computer at a distance.

It’s hardly a mystery that she’s having so many problems. I finally managed to receive her “SysInfo”. Her OSbuild is 5371 and mine is … errr … 5737, 360 rebuilds later, and mine’s not new. And her operating system is dated Seventh August … errr … 2020.

What I suggested to Rosemary is that she comes to help me move (if I ever do) and brings her laptop with her. I’ll fit one of my spare 250GB SSD units in it and give it a clean install from new.

What with one thing and another (and once you start, you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was a very late tea of salad, air-fried chips and some of those vegan nuggets, followed by chocolate cake and soya dessert. All really nice, that’s for sure.

So horribly late, I’m going to bed. It’s dialysis day tomorrow. But what a day that was today. I’m glad that it was a Day of Rest. What would it have been like had I been busy? Just about everything happened today and that makes a change from the usual.

But seeing as we have been talking about Italian restaurants … "well, one of us has" – ed … a new Italian restaurant opened in Crewe and I went for a job as a delivery driver.
Nerina thought that I was crazy going for that job and that I’d never have it
However I did succeed in my application and when I saw her in the street later I gave her a wave as I drove pasta.

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Tuesday 25th February 2025 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I …

… call a wasted day today. I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done exactly three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing.

Some of it has been my own fault, as you might indeed expect, but some of it hasn’t. I really need to motivate myself better if I am ever going to accomplish anything.

The most obvious excuse to use is that I was thoroughly, completely and utterly exhausted. The other day, returning from dialysis, I was in bed at 21:30 and last night it was 22:20. and I was lucky that I made it that far because I really wasn’t in the mood.

Once in bed though, going to sleep was another matter. “At least, being in a horizontal position is resting and relaxing” I kidded myself.

Eventually though I dozed off into oblivion and had yet another turbulent night. For a change though, following a dialysis session, I was actually asleep when the alarm went off at 07:00

At that moment I was with a friend of mine and we were trying to go into her office. There was a security reception desk and the girl on there was known to be rather strict so it was necessary to fill in an application form, and when you went for an eye test, the optical test, it would come up with several people similar and you had to guess which one you were. The aim was that I would find someone similar to me and say that I’d lost my card. She would give me a new card and I would go in. This however wasn’t working and there was nothing very similar to me at all so my friend had to think of another excuse. The girl at the reception desk took an absolute age to deal with all of this before she finally handed me a duplicate card. My friend said “this is just typical of this girl. She knows that this is a fraudulent application because we have thousands, and she’s just taking her time about it as she always does”. We went in a walked down a corridor, then we had to climb down into a courtyard and up the other side. Climbing down was fine but climbing up was almost impossible for me so I had to think of another way of doing it. At that moment a man came down and sat in the corner to begin to smoke a cigarette. I thought that the easiest way was to strike up a conversation. This place looked rather Asian so I talked about having a Japanese garden in here. My friend came back to look for me. He asked her “how long have you worked here?”. She replied “oh, years. I came here in August” and said which year it was. He asked “how do you find it?”. She replied “I made a mistake because I came here in a jumper and I regretted it”. She wandered off and he said to me “she’s a tough girl, isn’t she?”. I said “someone who had had the problems that she had had and survived, anyone would be tough”. He was looking at me and could see that I was disabled and said “oh please sit down”. I replied “I can’t because if I sit down I can’t stand up”. Then he began to panic saying “oh please sit down, sit down, sit down”. I wondered what was going on. This place where we were was like a volcanic crater although it was a garden with pavilion-type Japanese buildings in it, all ringed by a really jagged range of mountains in a huge circular form that looked just as if it was inside a volcano but with a garden inside instead of a crater.

That’s an interesting idea for Security, isn’t it? Being able to choose who you were. After all, NAMES ARE FOR TOMBSTONES, BABY. And I had a friend for a while in Brussels who had been a diplomat in Japan, but it wasn’t she. But if I’m going to be disabled and handicapped in my dream, then it rather defeats the point of them, doesn’t it? Not much point in escapism if you can’t escape.

Into the bathroom for a good wash and then into the kitchen for medication; Finally back in here to listen to the dictaphone because there was much more than just the above. I’d been working on a radio programme and I couldn’t ever make it right. It never seemed to go anywhere as how it was supposed to do. It was continually failing the quality control check. After several weeks of editing I finally had it something like and was ready to send it off. The recording engineer and some of the producers were however rather fed up of having this come up on their desks every week so they were determined to stop it but I sent it off anyway but they still came back and refused it. What should have been a deadline for the 28th of April was now running into May. They basically said that they wouldn’t edit it again and it was finished. I replied “well for failing it this last two or three times on tiny issues, it shows a serious lack of goodwill particularly when I have worked as hard as I have done over the past day or two to put the issue right. If there was nothing substantially wrong with the last one you should have accepted it” but they were still very unwilling to move on this particular issue and I could see this programme running on and on and on.

There have been radio programmes that have taken an age to do because the editing has been so complicated. There was the one a few weeks ago that took several weeks, and the worst part of it was that it overran so I had to edit it, and one of the bits that went was the bit where I’d had all of the difficulty

There was a girl from school directing a film last night. She was running through the scenes. I had a look at the scenes and towards the end of the film there were thousands of scenes every second, so many scenes to go through and they lasted a blinking of an eye. I was appearing as an extra in it and so was a friend of mine. We’d been to makeup and we’d been dressed up and put our costumes on. As the film was being filmed it was passed through some kind of computer animation so people became like cartoon characters as they were going through the motions for real. When I looked at my image and the vision of the girl who was with me, the images were horrible, the faces were all distorted and nothing seemed to be correct at all. We were standing on the set waiting to be directed. The girl from school came along, took one look at us, took one look at the screen effects and told us to leave the stage. We thought “that was a waste of an entire day. What a shame. Our chance for fame and fortune”.

This is another girl about whom I haven’t spent a day thinking since I left school. So why she would put in an appearance right now I really don’t know.

Later on I was with another girl. We’d stopped somewhere to look at something that we’d seen earlier. All of a sudden I had a horrible realisation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d arrived at this place, or the name of the place or what I was doing here anyway. I left the girl with the car and walked a little way up the road to see if I could see anything. On the left-hand side of the road was a funeral director’s place with gravestones in it but it was all closed, dusty, and hadn’t been open for years by the looks of it. I decided to turn round and walk back to the car and drive until we find a village and see the name. What I could also do later was to look through the dashcam videos and see if I could identify the route. As I was walking back a lorry that was coming up behind me stopped at the side of the road behind me. The driver alighted and stood by the side of his cab. A lorry that was coming towards me, he stopped too and he alighted from his cab. He was carrying a small puppy and he stood by the cab. I was effectively blocked in between these two lorries, and my car and my friend were beyond them. As these two guys stood there I had this horrible menacing feeling that something pretty awful was about to happen.

So who are all these girls who keep on appearing? I wish I knew. Some nice, charming, pleasant company would be just what the doctor ordered and to actually have them present and allow them to slip away so easily like this is something of a shame. And I know that regular readers of this rubbish will recall saying on many occasions that I never “know where I was” but in this dream it was for real. As for those two guys in the lorries, I know THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM .

isabelle the nurse breezed in this morning, late as usual due to having to do all of the blood tests that her oppo doesn’t want to do. She had a few cheery words of greeting and then rushed back out. She’s been working on her float for Carnaval and making the costumes and she’s promised me plenty of photos after the parades this forthcoming weekend.

Then it was breakfast time and MY BOOK time.

Today we are discussing miscellaneous earthworks again and despite his dismissal of much that has been assumed or inferred on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he seems to conclude that everything uncertain is “probably” something astronomical or astrological, or both. However, he is yet to post one single piece of evidence to suggest what it is that is supposed to be indicated or observed, and the position of the stars and planets in the sky hasn’t changed that much in the last 5,000 years. The earth rotates through something like 1° every 7000 years.

His “pottery works” on the shores of the Thames estuary in Essex was excavated in the 1930s and identified as an Iron Age or Roman salt evaporation site, and not only did I manage to find the report of the excavation, I found a treatise on the operation thereof and now I would be quite confident in running my own sea salt production facility if the need ever arises. It would have been the kind of thing that, had I found it 20 years ago, I would have gone to try it to see if it would work.

Back in here I had all of the replies to deal with, and you’ve no idea just how many there were. Do I owe you all money or something? Once again, a great big thank-you for your continued support.

No Welsh today, so I decided to deal with the “Taste of Woodstock” radio programme. First task is to see what “songs played at Woodstock” I have in my live music collection As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I can’t use material actually performed at Woodstock unfortunately.

The answer to that is “not as much as I need” so I edited what I had and then set out to hunt down more music but I was waylaid. One of my neighbours, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanted to come to pay me a visit. She’d left me a birthday present yesterday, which was nice of her.

She came along and we had a very nice chat for a while and discussed several issues, one of which was, surprisingly, one of the topics that I’d discussed with Rosemary the other day. It seems to be something that’s on the minds of a lot of people right now.

Next was my little great niece (or is she my great little niece) who arrived back home in Canada last night from Ecuador. She showed me all of her photos and videos of her trip and I told her how impressed I was with her. And I am too. These opportunities for travel only come along once in a lifetime and you should seize the moment. Sitting there with her feet straddling the equator beats the one that I took of Alison straddling the driehoek – the three-cornered border between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and also beats the one of Rosemary, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me straddling the Arctic Circle.

Had His Nibs and I been able to reach the North Pole in 2018 I might have trumped it but, regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we stopped 700 miles short. My niece has 50 years ahead of her to do that, and good luck to her.

And while we’re on the subject of Rosemary … "well, one of us is" – ed … she rang me again today for a short chat. And it was short too – only fifty-three minutes. She needs the birth certificates of her parents and didn’t know how to go about finding them. Consequently I had a very happy time delving deep into the bowels of the Public Records Office in Kew and to my delight, I came up trumps too. When I was in Wandsworth working in that Italian restaurant I spent a lot of time in the PRO

The radio programme for this coming weekend needed chaeking too. That’s now done and sent off, but there was no time left to carry on with any more work. I was late as it was. But making a taco roll with rice and veg followed by date bread and soya dessert doesn’t take long.

So now I’m off to bed ready for shower day tomorrow. And I hope that I have a more productive day than today was. I can do without too many days like that. However, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to talk to a friend when the opportunity arises. There are more things in life than working.

But while we’re on the subject of working … "well, one of us is" – ed … One of my friends had sent me a message for my birthday, saying "I hope you managed to lay your hands on something tasty for your birthday"
And so I replied saying "unfortunately not. The nurses at dialysis kept well out of my reach."

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Friday 21st February 2025 – WHAT A NIGHT …

… that was!

Not that I saw all that much of it because I was in bed at 21:30. I threw in the towel and hit the hay, without even finishing off the things that I usually do before going to bed. Once my notes were done, that was that.

And to be honest, I was surprised that I even finished those because I was really in no mood to do anything whatsoever.

To give you some idea of how tired I was, there was a pool of blood on the pillow where my puncture must have leaked after I’d had a shower. I simply swapped pillows, threw the soiled one on the floor and left it

Once in bed though, I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes it’s possible to be too tired to sleep and that was certainly the case last night. But once I’d gone off nothing whatever moved me until about 04:15. By the looks of things I’d had six hours of uninterrupted sleep and it’s been a very long time since I can say that.

Surprisingly, I actually managed to go back to sleep too at some point but not for long, and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

We went through the usual routine of bathroom, kitchen and back here for a listen to what was on the dictaphone from the night. I was working on a radio programme last night about Lindisfarne. It was an hour long and I was collecting all the songs, all of the anecdotes etc. I didn’t actually have very much to say but I was trying to think of a way of ending it. Of course Simon Cowe has died in Canada and one or two of them have retired from regular performances. And it was Alan Hull who died too but Rod Clements is still going with Lindisfarne with (…fell asleep here …) and I was just trying to think of a way to end it.

And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that it’s impressive that I knew – in a dream – the real fate of three of the musicians of the “original” Lindisfarne. As for guitarist Simon Cowe, I was at the Harvest jazz and Blues Festival in New Brunswick one year when I met someone who actually knew Simon Cowe in his new job as a wine importer. he was still alive then so it must have been 2014.

Later on I fell asleep again and I was working for “Private Eye”, the review magazine, writing a column about changes in police attitudes and the expenses that were incurred by the police officers, and how they were reimbursed etc but I wasn’t asleep for long.

In the past I did write a few articles for “Private Eye” but we had a falling-out when they began to support the B Liar’s war in the Middle East. I thought that as a satirical magazine mocking the Establishment, they should have taken up an “anti” viewpoint, like most of us.

The nurse was early again today, and he didn’t hang around. In and out in five minutes, which suits me fine. I could carry on by making breakfast and reading MY BOOK.

Today, we’re discussing moated houses and as I don’t know enough about the subject I shan’t pass any comment, other than to say that I now know a lot more than I did before I started to read the chapter.

Today, I’ve had another busy day with radio stuff. Firstly, I had several holes in my forthcoming schedule of programmes so for three of them, in the absence of any better proposition, I used three of the programmes that I’d stocked from a while back that had never been broadcast previously.

Secondly, there’s another live concert in the offing so I had to identify the tracks, the running order and work out the timings so that I could edit the entire concert down to a manageable size and then write the notes. So that’s all complete for tomorrow night to dictate.

Finally, we’re soon going to be upon the anniversary of Woodstock and while broadcasting anything from the concert itself is streng verboten I had to track down the artists, find their setlists and see whether I actually had anything that was played elsewhere that the relevant group or musician played at Woodstock so at least I can broadcast a “flavour of Woodstock” programme.

You’ve no idea just how complicated all of this is becoming. It seems to have developed a life all of its own.

There were plenty of interruptions too. The cleaner came by to do her stuff so we sorted out the bloodstained pillow and changed the bedding while we were at it.

Next, I had a lovely chat with one of my old girlfriends from school. We still keep in touch and she’d left a message on my ‘phone while I was in dialysis so I called her back for a chat. It was lovely to speak to her

Finally I’ve had two chats with Canada. My niece was one of them, and her eldest daughter was the other. Her youngest daughter, the one who came to see me last Summer, is currently in Ecuador. They don’t half move around.

In yet another change, I was feeling more like food tonight, so chips, salad and some of these vegan nuggets. Not particularly exciting but I haven’t eaten this much for over a week. I must be feeling better but then, we have dialysis tomorrow.

So while we’re on the subject of tomorrow … "well, one of us is" – ed … I have my Welsh homework to finish, a couple of bills to pay and then that’s me done until Tuesday. It’s not like me to be getting ahead of myself like this..

But seeing as we have been discussing Canada … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone in Canada asked an American "can you name the two important differences between a Canadian and an American?"
"No I can’t" replied the American
"Well" replied the Canadian "not only do we have a sense of humour, we know how to spell ‘humour’".

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Tuesday 24th December … TO ALL THOSE PEOPLE …

… living in Panama, HIS NIBS and I wish you a Merry Isthmus

strawberry moose polar bear cambridge bay high arctic research area canada 2024And so does Nanuk, a very friendly Polar Bear whom we met in the High Arctic Research Area in Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island in the Arctic Ocean where those of us on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR called for supplies.

Nanuk, or, I suppose, more correctly Nanu’q is Inuktitut for “polar bear”. Some words that I learned from the Inuit in the High Arctic seem to have stuck.

However, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here. It’ll be Christmas Day by the time that most of you read this so I hope that you have all been good and that Santa has brought you some nice presents. I know what he has brought me, and it’s the same that my namesake the mathematician will receive.

One thing that he will bring will be a nice lie-in. I’ve told the nurse to clear off, the alarm is switched off and that will be that. That’s the best present that anyone could want.

Not like this morning though. When the alarm went off I was already up and about.

It wasn’t as if I’d gone to bed early either. It was approaching midnight by the time I crawled into my stinking pit and once more, I was out like a light and felt nothing at all. Totally painless.

However, something awoke me at about 06:40 this morning, and it was another quite dramatic awakening. I’ve no idea what it was that went off but whatever it was supposed to do, it certainly did it.

Seeing that I stood a good chance of beating the alarm, I fell out of bed and had a most undignified crawl to the bathroom where I sorted myself out, and switched off the alarm when it went off.

In the kitchen I made sure that everything was put away and then took my medication for the morning

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night. At one point I was having a really long, involved and complicated dream that was so interesting. I reached for the dictaphone and the dream evaporated immediately from my mind. I couldn’t recall a single thing about this dream at all

That must have been a real disaster, forgetting an exciting dream like that. But it’s like one of those projector slides that just slides down over the memory and blots it out completely.

Later on, Nerina and I had gone to the USA. We’d been driving around the Midwest just on a case of opportunism, looking at one or two things that were there, but otherwise just following our noses. We eventually turned up in this town in Wisconsin. There was a village fair advertised but which had taken place on 3rd June. We went to have a look at a couple of the notices that were on this site. After a while we worked out that we were actually on the training ground. There must be another site somewhere else where the events took place so we decided to walk across the road and have a look. There, we met some guy who was walking down the road. We said “hello” and ended up having a chat with him about the town. He wanted to know all about us and what we were doing there, a typical friendly American. He decided that he would show us around. The first thing that he took us to was what looked like a large rectangular area with grassed-over earth walls around it. He said that that was where a film had been filmed – one of these Space fantasies in the 1950s about people from Earth going to live on another planet. It had all been filmed there. Then next door to this was a huge office block that must have covered a dozen acres in a kind of Y-shape. It wasn’t very tall, about twelve storeys. This apparently was the offices for this fair. I thought that this was going to be an astonishing place. He took us round to the offices. When we walked around the corner there was this huge arena in the shelter of two of the arms of this Y-shaped building, a massive place. This was apparently where the events took place. We thought that for a little, small town fair this is an astonishing situation. He gave us a talk on it. We turned up at one of the corners of this building. There was a bar in there. he said that he was going in so Nerina said that we ought to buy him a coffee so what would he like to drink and what would he like. We’d had one of the most astonishing guided tours that I’ve ever had in my life.

This is another dream in which there’s a lot of mileage. Firstly, of course, Nerina appears in it. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t mind at all her turning up. I invited her into my life all those years ago so she has every right to be there, and in any case, I wouldn’t have invited her if I hadn’t liked her and nothing that has happened since has changed a thing. They say that you can choose your friends but not your relatives, and that’s certainly true. She would be chosen ahead of a lot of other people much more closely related to me.

Then of course there’s the village, or small-town fair. That’s an institution in many rural areas of the USA and we used to always go to the one in Clinton, in Maine. They had tractor-pulling competitions there so my niece’s husband and two of his daughters used to compete with their monster truck. This fair, like all the others, was epic and there’s nothing like it anywhere else. Watching the kids take part in the piglet-wrestling competition is bewildering if nothing else.

And then there are Americans. Americans in groups are devastating but one American on his or her own in the rural regions is probably one of the most friendly people on the planet, as long as you don’t discuss politics. You’ll remember Isaac Weld saying something along the lines that Americans have a deep sense of curiosity and will ask the most intimate questions to enquire about you and your purpose of visiting their neck of the woods. That’s certainly true. They have a natural sense of inquisitiveness, more than any other people

But then there’s the huge stadium in the tiny town. That rings a bell with me because every now and again my website statistics are swamped by visits that come from the small town of Prineville in Oregon, with the browser being recorded as “other”. Prineville is a town of just 10,000 inhabitants and sometimes it seems that every one of those people visits my sites every day, judging by the number of hits.

However, the mystery is easily explained. In Prineville is the location of two massive data centres, one for a major telephone and computer supplier and the other for a huge social media company. So all these hits are actually coming from all over the World but accessed by the medium of the various private data network connections and the various “own brand” browsers.

There was a load of mileage in that dream.

The nurse came early today and didn’t hang around. I reminded him not to come on Christmas Day as I’ll be in bed. I’m sure that I can manage for one day without him being here sorting out my legs.

After he left I made breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

And in it, T Rice Holmes answers one of his own questions, and the answer is exactly as I expected it to be. He seems now to have forgotten his question about why the continued use of Palaeolithic tools even though Neolithic tools are in use on the continent. However, he does admit that "pastoral tribes do not turn to agriculture until their numbers have increased to such a degree that they have no prospect of being able to live by hunting".

Later, he says "but as their numbers multiplied and it became more and more difficult to find sufficient food, the struggle for life must have led to intertribal war, and men’s minds must have been exercised to improve their weapons"

So, as I said, if the old stuff works, keep on using it but, as I also said yesterday, "It’s only when something like a greater pressure from an increasing population comes along that new technology is considered"

He’s still stuck in the stereotypical myths of savage prehistoric man, which can hardly be the case bearing in mind the organisation that must have taken place to build the barrows, stone circles, hill forts and the like. He comments "matriarchy, it would seem, was the root of family life : descent was reckoned through the mother, for the father was often unknown.", and that on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

Today, I have done almost nothing at all. I have had a nice relaxing day. All that I have done in the way of work is to track down a couple of concerts that I knew were somewhere about, identify them and date them.

My friendly cleaner came round today instead of tomorrow to give the place a clean-up. And that included me, because I had my weekly shower. And didn’t I feel better for it? I can’t wait to be downstairs, have a walk-in shower installed and then hava shower every day.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg, that didn’t drop onto the floor tonight. It was followed by ginger cake and soya dessert. Tomorrow it will be my Christmas dinner. I shan’t be doing much tomorrow, or celebrating. But I shall be eating well.

So I’m not off to bed yet, but I’ll finish my notes and take my time. A lie-in in the morning.

But while we’re on the subject of the town fair at Clinton in Maine … "well, one of us is" – ed … in one programme that we were given when we were there, it talked about the results of the previous year’s competition.
And there we saw the classic entry "Mrs Jones won the ‘throwing the rolling pin’ competition"
and a few lines further down – "Mr Jones won the 100 yards sprint."
I bet he did!

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Saturday 7th December 2024 – IT’S NOT THE …

… bells on her toes that matter. It’s the ring on her finger that counts.

It only seems like yesterday when I was bouncing a bonny, tiny baby on my knee as her mother wrestled with the controls of a GMC “Jimmy” through masses after masses of snowdrifts in the foothills of the Appalachians in Canada

amber taylor st fx ring saint francis xavier university antigonish nova scotia canada 2024That was in late December 2003, and here’s that bonny, tiny baby now, 21 years later on, proudly displaying her ring.

"One ring to rule them all
One ring to find them
One ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them"
it is not but it’s just as hard to find. The wearing of this ring signifies that the wearer has completed a degree course at Canada’s most prestigious (in my opinion) University, Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia

Our family isn’t all a load of tat as you may think, judging by what I have a tendency to write. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my maternal grandmother was one of Canada’s leading singers in the period 1915-1924. Even though her father (my great grandfather) re-enlisted in the Canadian Army after retirement, one of her distant cousins was SENTENCED TO DEATH IN WORLD WAR I as a conscientious objector (I have in my possession some of the letters that he wrote in prison).

And going even farther back, that distant side of the family is related in some way to Edward Kenealy, the barrister who defended the Tichborne claimant so vigorously that he was struck off.

It’s obviously that side of the family where all the brains are, because my great little niece (or is it my little great niece?) is now the second member of our family to qualify for her St.F-X ring.

So well done, Ammie. I’m proud of you!

Not so proud though of the time that I went to bed last night – or, rather, this morning. I’d finished quite early what I had to do last night but as usual, finishing work is one thing. Going to bed is quite something else. I hung around for quite some time trying to summon up the courage to pull myself out of my chair.

Once more though, once in bed it took an age to go to sleep but once I did, I was gone for good and the howling gale outside didn’t disturb me at all, which is surprising.

When the alarm went off it took quite a while for me to stagger to my feet and head to the bathroom, rounding up a pile of clothes on the way because, having changed the bedding yesterday, it’s washing day today.

After I’d had a good wash, I had a shave and then loaded up the washing machine. And believe it or not, there’s still a pile of stuff that wouldn’t fit in. This is becoming ridiculous.

Next port of call was the kitchen for a drink, and while I was at it, to take my medicine. And I was so distracted that I took the medication that I’m not supposed to take on Dialysis Day. Still, you can’t take it out once it’s gone in.

Back in here I listened to the dictaphone to find out what I’d been up to during the night. There was something strange going on at school. There was a group of us, boys and girls of all ages, who used to hang around together. I suspected that one of the girls was becoming rather too friendly with me – that is, rather more friendly than “just being friends”. I decided that I might encourage it a little and see where it goes but we were interrupted by the bell to go back to lessons. A little later on a few of us met again, including this particular girl. I happened to mention obliquely something along the lines of “girls who seem to find older boys at school more attractive” and “there seems to be one at least who might be tilting her cap towards me”. This girl replied “yes. I’ve noticed that, Eric” and she mentioned two girls, one of whom was a daughter of a friend of mine, and a second one. But the daughter of a friend of mine was even talking about obtaining a marriage certificate. I found that really hard to believe because I hadn’t really noticed anything. This discussion went on, more complicated, until it was time to go back to the lessons so I said to these girls and boys, and in particular to the one whom I mentioned earlier “I’ll see you all at lunch then”. She replied “don’t forget to go to talk to these two girls. One of them is in her Physics class”. I had a bottle of beer with me that I’d opened so I walked up to the Physics class. They were all crowded around a bunsen burner talking about something so I took a piece of kitchen roll, rolled it up tightly and used it as a stopper in this bottle. I smiled at this particular girl and that was when this dream ended.

Imagine that! There I was with the bird on my plate, just about to get my fork stuck in it, and “poof!”. It comes to a shuddering halt. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there is something going on in my subconscious that is preventing me from Getting The Girl. It seems to happen every time (with just one or two exceptions). So what does my subconscious know about my relationship with girls that it doesn’t want me to proceed any further than this point?

It’s interesting too that this is always the kind of thing that occurs when I’m an adolescent in my dreams. It’s true that my adolescence was not a happy one, for a variety of reasons, and a loyal and reliable girlfriend of the type who would have helped me weather the various storms would have been a very great comfort to me. But my subconscious is not letting me go down that route at all, and in any case, teenage girls like that are very rare birds indeed.

Then there was some kind of confrontation between a Jewish school and the local community. When it came to the end of term the kids had to be taken away by buses to another centre. They had all tried to arrange times with their parents but it was impossible. For a start, the E40 was always blocked on school chucking-out days so people would arrive home quand ils s’amusent – when they could. I was driving one of the buses with someone else and we had a police escort. We reached the school and handed the ticket to the teacher who was on the door. She directed us to the school theatre where a group of pupils were singing some kind of pseudo-religious song from the stage. It really was wonderful. After they finished I turned to my colleague and said “we aren’t allowed to applaud in a church, are we?”. He asked “you thought it was that good, did you?”. I replied “yes”. He said “quite frankly I have never ever heard it done better”

This second dream relates to a concert I’d been watching before going to bed. It was a concert from 2016 commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and was taking place in Exeter Cathedral. One of the tributes was from a well-known folk group who performed a musical tribute, a poem by my favourite poet A E Housman with music composed by George Butterworth who was killed at the Somme. And when they finished, everyone in the congregation applauded. And I remember thinking last night as I was watching that applause in a Cathedral shows some pretty bad taste

And the confrontation with the Jewish school presumably relates to something that I’d read, also yesterday evening, about a couple of obscure Jewish sects burning copies of the New Testament.

Isabelle the Nurse came early this morning and didn’t hang about. Not that I can blame her because this storm in increasing in velocity and it’s going to be much worse than this. But I’m glad that she wasn’t here for long, because it means that I can start making breakfast early.

And armed with breakfast, I can go to carry on reading ISAAC WELD’S BOOK.

Today, his book contains the longest footnote that I have ever read in a book. It spans four complete pages, and is a really good rant about the peevish relationship that the USA is trying to cultivate with Canada in an attempt to absorb it. He very presciently observes that "there is more reason to imagine that the Floridas, and the Spanish possessions to the east of the Mississippi, will be united therewith" than there is of Canada uniting with the USA, for the "people of Upper Canada are refugees, who were driven from the States by the persecution of the Republican party and though the thirteen years which have passed over have nearly extinguished every spark of resentment against the Americans in the breasts of the people of England, yet this is by no means the case in Upper Canada. It is there common to hear, even from the children of the refugees, the most gross invectives poured out against the people of the States and the people of the frontier states, in their turn, are as violent against the refugees and their posterity and, indeed, whilst Canada forms a part of the British empire, I am inclined, from what I have seen and heard in travelling through the country, to think that this spirit will not die away."

As well as that, I have had a fascinating lecture on how to build a blockhouse, if ever the need should arise.

After breakfast I sorted out the washing and hung up that which needed to hang. In my present state of health where I’m totally unsteady on my feet, that was a rather complicated issue but I managed in the end. Mind you, in this weather it will take an age to dry.

My faithful cleaner fitted my anaesthetic patches for me and then I had to wait around for the taxi. When he arrived I was hustled out into the gale-force wind and staggered as best as I could to the car. The waves on the water were magnificent in this weather, I noticed as we passed by. What wouldn’t I have given to have gone for a walk?

We picked up our second passenger and then headed for Avranches. Strangely, away from the coast, the wind was much less.

In the clinic there were very few of us today. Maybe the wind was keeping the others at home. Julie the Cook fitted my connections today. The first was absolutely painless. I felt nothing at all. But the next one was different and hurt throughout the session.

Once more, I drifted off for a few minutes at the start and once I’d recovered I revised my Welsh and then read some more of Hakluyt. He’s repeating the legend of “King Arthur” and his presumed voyages to subdue the Norsemen, basically copied from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. That’s quite a shame, but he had no other sources to use and didn’t have the archaeological knowledge or access to papers in the Danish Royal Library that we have today.

No-one bothered me at all today and I was out quite early. I had a chatty driver bringing me home and she brought me through the town to see the Christmas lights, which was nice of her.

Coming home was one thing – coming to the building was something else. My cleaner was there waiting, and even with two women hanging on to me, I was almost blown over twice. I’ve never known a storm like this one.

To add insult to injury, the handrail fell off the wall so I had enormous difficulty coming upstairs.

Tea tonight was a baked potato with breaded quorn fillet and vegan salad followed by ginger cake and soya dessert. So now I’ll dictate my radio notes and then go to bed for a nice lie-in.

Yesterday though, we left Isaac Weld hunting on the shore of Lake Erie. This morning the wind had changed direction so the captain called him up on his mobile ‘phone
"Where are you now, Isaac?" asked the Captain. "What are you doing?"
"I’m hunting bear on the shores of Lake Erie" said Isaac
"Well, put your clothes back on and come back to the ship. The wind has changed direction and we are ready to sail"

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Sunday 24th November 2024 – RIGHT NOW I’M IN …

… absolute agony yet again, having been standing on my feet for several hours.

It’s the lack of muscles in my knees that is causing the pain. If I want to stand up without my crutches, such as if I want to use my hands, I have to wedge my legs so that the knee-bones lock in a certain way and after a while it hurts like hell

Still the most important job of the week is done, even if several less-important ones have not so been.

Take the radio notes for example. Last night after I finished writing my notes I had the dictating of the radio notes to do – two lots of them. I was also having a chat on-line with my niece from Canada.

Her middle daughter, my great little niece (or is it “little great niece”?) was married a year ago and now lives in Michigan in the USA and her youngest daughter, another my great little niece (or is it “little great niece”?) is at “St. F-X” – St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, the best University in Canada.

We’re planning a group meeting soon, a video chat on one of the on-line platforms seeing as we haven’t all seen each other for an age.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was invited to the wedding in Michigan last November so I tried a “dummy run” to Belgium last September to see how I would cope with the journey on my crutches with just a backpack, but failed miserably so I didn’t manage to go to the USA.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment I finished off the dictation, finished off the chat and crawled into bed much later than I would have liked.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and wandered off for a quick wash and brush up. It’s Sunday, I’ve had an hour’s lie in and the nurse will be here soon so I need to hurry.

But back in the bedroom I have a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night. The wind awoke me at 03:00 (not that I knew anything about it) but at that point I’d been off on an expedition with the native Americans. We’d paddled down the coast as far as we could to Florida and then walked back, describing a few of the tribes that we’d met and a few of their characteristics. Several of them were noted as lazy and several others had different epithets. In the end we said that it’s a far better representation of ourselves amongst the native Americans, we want to build a stronger fort to protect our settlement. He goes on to say that although there’s not a lot of land in each settlement they’ve crammed in many men, sometimes more men than the land is worth and they really need more soldiers going to serve as colonists so that they can have some kind of native element to protect the settlements against the French or the French can protect their own settlements against anyone, even the British who were currently their allies at the moment.

This reminds me of the book that I’m reading right now. Our author travels by water all the way down the St Lawrence River and then comes back on land.

But the conflict between the English and the French, with various native American tribes on different sides (or not as the case may be) went on all along the Hudson River valley and out into Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee for the best part of a hundred years, on and off. It was a fierce, vicious war at times and was well-documented in stories such as Fenimore Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE VISITED MANY OF THE BATTLEFIELD SITES in the Hudson valley in 2013 when we had that slow drive back to Montreal that took several weeks

We made it to Ticonderoga, Fort William Henry and all of the other places that Fenimore Cooper made famous in his “Leatherstocking Tales” of the Seven Years War in North America.

I’m not sure where I was but there was a choice of two cars. We had to choose one of three cars, An Austin Maxi, an Austin Princess HL and a Marina. I remember thinking that that’s the whole total of the British car output of the United Kingdom represented in that lot. We had a really good look round at them but couldn’t see anything or any reason to break any kind of monopoly position with Ford because there were quite a few issues with the British cars, even coming just straight off the production line and we couldn’t really at the time negotiating and repairing all of the bits that they needed to give us a car that we wanted

In the past I’ve had various cars and vans and I have to say that I’ve always returned to having Fords. I’m not sure what I’ll be having next. It’ll have to be whatever is available at the moment that has hand controls fitted.

The nurse turned up and was in chat mode today. She asked for my Carte Vitale – my health card – because she’ll be off on Tuesday and won’t be back until after the start of the next month so she has to make up her accounts.

After she left, I made breakfast and carried on reading my book. And I learned something new today.

Over the years, I have always wondered why the “District of Columbia” where the city of “Washington DC” is situated, is not included in the territory of any of the States. And thanks to Isaac Weld who was there at the time of its creation, now I know.

Congress used to meet in Philadelphia but at the end of the Revolutionary War it was besieged by discontented soldiers whose pay was in arrears. And the Pennsylvania State Government, in sympathy with the soldiers, refused to summon up the State’s forces of law and order quell the riot.

Consequently it was decided that there should be a territory created to house the Congress, where Congress itself could act as the local Government, issue by-laws, control the law enforcement officers and so on, and not be dependent upon any State authority.

In HIS BOOK he talks at great length about why that particular site was chosen. He is certainly very informative, if not garrulous.

Back in here, much later than usual thanks to the late arrival of the nurse, I had football to watch.

For some reason I couldn’t find a video of Stranraer’s game against Spartans. I later found out that the match had been postponed.

As for te Welsh football, there was one game missing – Hwlffordd v Y Bala, and it took an age to find that one.

The radio notes that I’d dictated were quite complicated. So far, I’ve only managed to finish editing one and I’m halfway through the other. I’m a long way from being where I wanted to be, with two radio programmes fully completed.

That’s because after the hot chocolate I set about dealing with the freezer.

It took much longer than you might imagine to unpack the two new drawers. Whoever packed them certainly deserves a medal because they would never be likely to break in that box, with all the padding that was around them.

Then I had to switch off the freezer, unplug it and take out all the drawers. Luckily, I’d put ice packs in there and they, being frozen solid, would help keep the contents cold.

Then I could attack the freezer with the hair dryer that I’d liberated the other week.

That took much longer too. I was surprised at just how much ice there was in there. And what didn’t help was that having put a towel at the front to catch the water that melts, the water actually drains out of the back.

For the time that it took, I was on my feet for several hours and hence the issue with my knees. But it was worth it because the freezer is now totally defrosted, the new drawers are in and filled, and you’d be surprised at how much room there is in there now.

At lunchtime I’d taken out some pizza dough from the freezer and that had been defrosting. When I finished with the freezer I rolled out the dough and later, assembled the pizza.

With no small tomatoes I had to use large ones sliced thinly. Nevertheless it took much longer to bake. However it was delicious all the same. Now I’m going to have a quick tidy-up of the packaging and then go to bed. It’s dialysis tomorrow.

But talking about the Last of the Mohicans … "well, one of us is" – ed … reminds me of Hawkeye and Chingachgook on their way to Fort Ticonderoga
After separating for a few days Hawkeye comes across Chingackgook with his ear to the ground.
"What is it, Chingachgook?" asks Hawkeye
"Stagecoach. French stagecoach" says Chingachgook. "Eight horses, two drivers, twelve passengers, five women, seven men. One driver, he have wart on side of face. Other driver, he have patch over left eye. "
"That’s astonishing" said Hawkeye. "You can tell all that by just lying there with your ear to the ground?"
"Oh no" replied Chingachgook. "Me standing here having little pause, and damn stagecoach ran me down"

0

Wednesday 8th May 2024 – IT’S GOING TO BE …

… another late night tonight, if last night wasn’t late enough.

My great little niece (or is it “my little great niece) sat around the dining room table for hours this evening discussing all kinds of things. It’s good to know that it’s not just her sister and I who see things in the same way.

But then that’s what going to University is all about – making you see different things from a real-world perspective rather than a small-minded rural perspective that’s stuck inside a time-warp. For example, those of us who sharpened our claws in some of some of the more confrontational conferences on our University’s debating forum certainly met several new ideas.

The two of us were having a good chat last night too and it wasn’t until quite late that she left. As a result it was about 01:00 when I finally crawled into bed and I’ve a feeling that it’s going to be pretty much the same today.

Once in bed though, I slept the Sleep of the Dead and didn’t show a leg until the alarm went off at 07:00 when I fell out of bed to switch it off.

Having done that I crawled off into the bathroom to prepare myself for the day, and then went for my half-litre of flavoured water and pills.

Once they were out of the way I arranged the dining room for the nurse. When she came round she was able to change the plaster on my wound and fit my puttees. We had the usual apocalyptical warning about what I can and cannot do, to which I took absolutely no notice whatsoever. No-one’s going to chain me up – at least, not without the changing hands of a considerable amount of folding stuff.

After she left I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night. There was some kind of strange war being fought last night between two groups of people. They were fighting each other quite heavily but there were umpires and judges, everything like that who supervised it. After one game, the fight broke out again. Everyone was fighting, I was busy fighting someone or other and I came across the fact that 30 or 40 of their members had actually come as prisoners on a barge and all of a sudden were now fighting. I thought that that was cheating so I made the point but no-one else took it seriously and began to laugh. I didn’t know at all what to do in this situation

And that’s the kind of chaos with which I’m usually associated. Apart from that, I don’t understand the significance

There was also something about a football team changing its goalkeeper at half-time without notifying anyone but I’ve no idea where that fitted in. I suspect that it might be to do with one of the football matches that I watched at the weekend. Having followed one particular team throughout the season I noticed that they had a goalkeeper of a different ethnic origin between the sticks for the first time at the weekend and that confused everyone, including me.

There was a live football match on the Internet afterwards – the USA women’s team against an Asian side – so for a change I settled down to watch it. Yet, not surprisingly, I fell asleep after 25 minutes. And a real, proper deep sleep too.

As a result I was late for breakfast – A couple of slices of hot, buttered toast with fresh bread and that made me want to eat it again

There were two mugs of hot, strong black coffee too and it’s a total lie about coffee keeping you awake because it didn’t work for me. In fact when my visitor texted me to say she’ll be here shortly I was flat-out away with the fairies.

However I awoke in time and when she arrived we began our little discussion, which went on for a couple of hours. She’d researched the area and the area where I used to live and was able to have a really good conversation.

One thing about her is that she’s definitely her father’s daughter. Strong, determined, self-reliant and confident, and "This new learning" that SO AMAZED KING ARTHUR and which seems to have gripped most of her generation hasn’t reached her yet which is very good news.

After a while she left to go to visit the Dior museum and I came in here to carry on working, selecting the music for the next radio programme.

Not that I got very far. Rosemary rang me and we had a very lengthy chat, putting the World to rights as we usually do, not that the World ever listens to us

We’re both convinced though that there’s a major breakdown in social order in the UK these days and, funnily enough, my little great niece who is wandering around the country on her own for the first time and seeing things from a totally different perspective, happened to mention that very same thing in out discussions.

After Rosemary’s phone call I did a little more work but my visitor returned. We carried on our discussion and I also made a chick pea curry with rice and veg. The soya yoghurt gave the curry a creamy taste and it all went down very well

Our chat continued for ages but after a while with her falling almost asleep on the table she set off back to our hotel and I did the washing up.

She’s on an early train in the morning so won’t have time to come here to say goodbye which is a great pity. I’ve enjoyed seeing her and having her come to visit me. I still can’t get over how quickly she’s grown since she was a tiny dot in my arms 20 years ago in 2003 when I was there in Canada that winter.

So tomorrow I’ll carry on with what I’ve been doing and hope to make some progress. Tomorrow is another day of course but as Kris Kristofferson sang, I’D GIVE ALL MY TOMORROWS FOR A SINGLE YESTERDAY

Yes, especially the days (and nights) when Castor, Zero and TOTGA would come to see me. I can’t remember now who I was with when, the next day someone asked me "who was that lady I seen you with last night?"
"I saw!" I replied. "It’s ‘I saw’!"
"Well OK. Have it your way" he answered. "Who was that eyesore I seen you with last night?"

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Tuesday 7th May 2024 – I’VE HAD A LOVELY …

… evening with a visitor who has come all this way to see me.

The youngest daughter of my niece from Canada stuck her head in to say “hello” this evening as she passed by on her peripatetic perambulations.

One thing that I’ve always tried to instil into youngsters is the importance of doing something different, as every student’s CV is identical these days, with the same courses, the same pastimes, the same interests and so on.

Foreign travel is one of the ways to go and some universities offer foreign exchange student programmes. After Liz (“that” Liz, not “this” Liz) died I made sure that her daughter was accepted onto a foreign exchange programme in 2010 and I actually took her to her University in Ontario from London.

St Francis-Xavier University in Antigonish has one too and my niece’s middle daughter ended up in Madrid but the youngest one was accepted onto an exchange in Edinburgh and she’s been there since Christmas.

She’s off to visit Mont St Michel and the Christian Dior museum tomorrow so she thought that she’d catch an earlier ‘plane and come to see me

Even though it’s only – quite literally – a flying visit, there was a lot of preparation to do and as a result I was in bed quite late last night

It was another peaceful night where I completely lost track of time, and no-one was more surprised than me when the alarm went off. Anyway I hauled myself out of bed and headed for the bathroom, and then into the dining area for the medication.

Having done that I arranged the dining area for the nurse but for some reason she was late coming today and I had to hang around for a while. None of this “not quite dressed” lark of Sunday when he came early.

After she’d finally arrived, changed my dressing, fitted my puttees and cleared off I could come in here and revise for my Welsh lesson. And then armed with my coffee and flapjack I joined in the lesson.

The lesson was like the curate’s egg – good and bad in parts. I was quite happy with some of the stuff that I did but disappointed with other parts. I put it all down to my failing memory but I forgot to mention that.

At the end of the lesson the first thing that I did was to make the dough for a loaf. I wasn’t sure whether my great little niece (or is she my little great niece?) would want to take advantage of my comfortable sofa and if so, we’d need something for breakfast

Then I came in here while the dough was proofing so that I could transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been arrested for something that I’d said but managed to talk my way out of it. Then I was arrested a second time that happened to be during a period when I was having a dance with another girl. She thought that me being arrested was funny. I had a key in my hand but lost it. It fell down and became mixed up in the bed. The soldiers who arrested me wanted the key and access to one of the store cupboards and were surprised that I was playing difficult, although I wasn’t – it was simply because they didn’t believe that I’d dropped things. Anyway they wanted to carry me off to the castle where presumably I’d be tortured, although they didn’t say what or why it was that I was going. I was simply arrested and bullied out of any kind of sympathetic position.

Then I was with a former work colleague. Again, it was a similar kind of situation. There was some kind of rack of calculations in the formula on it that these people wanted but I had. I wasn’t going to hand it over so someone came down to interrogate me and maybe arrest me but they didn’t cart me off. They had a full search of everywhere and then they left. Id been standing in a very peculiar position, sort-of propped up with a support behind me. My ex-colleague made some kind of remark such as “had I ever been an italic cursor?” or something so we laughed. I explained that there were all kinds of photos of me and maybe we ought to have a look. I noticed when we were talking that he actually had that paper in his hand. I wondered why he’d never admitted having it and never shown it to whoever it was who was interrogating me.

That’s not how things usually work, is it? Normally people will take every conceivable step to drop me into the soup at every possible moment.

Later on I stepped back into that dream, and in it the girl had taken away the bottle … "which bottle?" – ed … to wash it. She then brought it back, saw me being man-handled, threw away the bottle and hid the formula

And that’s most unlike people I know too.

By now the dough had risen and so after a second working-over I put it into the oven to bake while I made my hot chocolate.

The bread baked deliciously. It rose up like a lift and it is quite soft and fluffy. We’ll call this one a success.

While I was waiting for my visitor I finished off the radio notes for the programme that I started the other day and then began to select the music for the next one.

And then having fought her way through the underground system in Paris she turned up.

It’s hard to believe that when I held her in my arms back in that winter of 2003 when I was in Canada she was such a tiny little new-born thing. She’ll be 21 soon and it’s hard to believe that the time has gone by so fast.

She’s not stopping though. She didn’t know how ill I was and didn’t want to put any strain on any facilities that I might be having, which was very nice and thoughtful

We had lots to talk about – after all I haven’t seen her since I drifted by her house after my return from the High Arctic in 2019 – and it was nice to catch up with the latest news from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia

She’s quite confident that she’ll pass her current year and will go back to St F-X for her final year and receive “the Ring”. Alumni of St Francis Xavier receive a special ring to wear and it’s apparently the equivalent of a Canadian Freemasonry handshake.

Of course, over the last 20-odd years there have been loads of jokes about people going “My preccccccc – ious” whenever the subject of the St F-X ring has been mentioned and that’s not really any surprise.

It was quite late when she left but nevertheless I made my taco roll with rice and veg for tea and it was just as nice for being late.

So now I’m going off to bed and make some investigations about that huge bloodstain that appeared on my pillow overnight. It looks as if someone has butchered a pig on there, there’s so much blood.

But it’s nice to see a member of my family here where I live. One of my nieces from Crewe came over in 1994 and then two of my three little great-nieces from Canada have been to see me. And would you believe – that’s the only contact that I’ve had with any member of my family since I left to live on the mainland of Europe

They were much more loyal than that when we all lived together. One of my sisters once told me "some boy at my school told me that you weren’t fit to live with pigs"
"Ohhh really?" I asked. "What did you say?"
"Oh I stood up for you" she replied. "I said that you were"

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Monday 6th May 2024 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… I might be having another visitor.

Most of the morning has been spent working out routes across half of north-west Europe to see if there’s anything that fits in with someone else’s peripatetic voyages around Europe and who knows? Maybe it’ll all work out.

What I can’t understand is why I suddenly seem to have become the flavour of the month. I’ve already had more visits this year than I’ve had in all the rest of the time that I’ve been here, and there are several more already organised to come

And then here I am with someone else who might want to try to visit.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. I m not usually the sociable type so I don’t visit many people myself, and even fewer since I’ve been disabled, so I’m quite happy usually with my own company – after all, with dissociative identity disorder you are never alone – but nevertheless it’s nice to see real people now and again. Real friends are just as important as your imaginary ones.

So last night, with a great effort, I was only 5 minutes late going to bed. And as usual these days I fell asleep quite quickly, a long time before my little scenario about which I talked last night finished.

And it was another deep intense sleep again. I remember nothing at all of anything that might have been going on. When the alarm went off there was something going on about girls in a school; but it evaporated from my mind as soon as I stood up, which was a shame.

Having switched off the alarm I staggered into the bathroom and then into the dining area for my medication. I then arranged the room how the nurse likes it and prepared for his visit but somehow I had a couple of very severe pains at the top of my hips at the front of my body. It hurt like hell when I walked or lifted my legs.

Despite all of that, and in spite of all of the pain, the nurse changed the dressing on my foot and put on my puttees. He thinks that I won’t need to bother soon because the wound has healed really well. He thinks that soon I can go back to wearing these elasticated socks.

After he cleared off I checked my messages and discovered one asking for travel advice so I’ve been working on that all morning. Crossing Paris by public transport in order to catch a train to come here is quite simple and straightforward, but not for someone who has never seen a train and doesn’t know how a Metro works. You have to explain everything in great detail and make sure that you don’t take things for granted and miss out a step “because everyone knows that”.

After my lunchtime fruit I had a listen to the dictaphonz to find out where I’d been during the night. There was an Avro Lancaster that flew to some remote valley in Austria and landed on a deserted airstrip. It had come from the UK and was full of wounded and full of all kinds of other stuff that the Resistance might need. The wounded were lying around in chairs and in the bomb bay. After every hour they had to change position with someone who was less comfortable than they were and so it went on. They landed on this deserted airfield and unloaded the goods that the Resistance wanted, they unloaded the goods that they’d brought with them, they unloaded the wounded and then collected up a lot of stuff that had been put there for them to take away. They taxied to the end of the runway, turned round and took off from it again. There was some rugby equipment that they’d been told that they could take and all kinds of electronic stuff and electrical stuff. They were leaving things like instructions behind on how to do certain things etc. It was really interesting to see what their plans were but I’ve no idea why they took a lane full of wounded with them to leave behind in Occupied Austria.

There were many occasions where British aircraft, usually Lysanders, would put down in Axis-occupied territory to unload supplies for the Resistance and pick up or drop off passengers, and it’s certainly true that on a couple of occasions larger aircraft did make use of abandoned airfields in Occupied Europe to make a quick landing and take-off on behalf of MI6. However, this idea of dropping off wounded personnel is certainly a novel one.

And then I was in a library checking for a former schoolfriend’s thesis that he’d prepared on leaving school. It had been filed away and referenced but there was no trace of it anywhere in the library no matter how hard we looked. I’d had to make some kind of summary report at one time so I mentioned this and I happened to mention that it would be nice if I had some extra staff. But then it turned into something of an argument with the head of this project saying about my demand for extra staff. I replied that I hadn’t really demanded extra staff – I’d just made a note on the report. That led to a bit of an argument which was a shame because I liked the guy usually. No matter how hard we looked and no matter where we searched there was no trace of this project anywhere. We’d even gone through all the pages of these books that were on display to make sure that it hadn’t been misfiled but there was absolutely no trace of it at all.

That reminds me of my fruitless search in the library of the University of Laval in Québec for one of the theses of the archaeologist Thomas Edward Lee.

The author James Enterline quotes from Lee’s theses which concerned the excavation of what might have been a Norse building in Ungava Bay in the north of Labrador in Canada. He gives the complete references of Lee’s works.

Armed with the details I set off accordingly to the University to track them down in order to refer to them and check Enterline’s information.

Both the theses are registered at the University Library – I know because I saw them on the index – but the librarian and I could only find the second one and not the first one, no matter how hard we looked.

However a very interesting fact was that Lee was a very controversial and confrontational person, not at all your typical academic. His forthright, sometimes intimidating style of writing clearly ruffled a few feathers and his application for a grant for a third year of excavations was refused.

As far as I’m aware, no-one has continued his work and the excavations have lain incomplete for 60 years.

Another disappointment was that having spent a couple of years writing my Magnum Opus on Eustache Lanouillier’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montréal and Québec in the 17th Century, the actual plans for it are also at the University of Laval and I didn’t find that out until later.

The rest of the afternoon has been spent pairing off the music that I chose yesterday and then writing the notes for about half of it. I’ve not really been in any rush to complete it.

The cleaner came round with some soya milk that she found in the local supermarket which was nice. And then LeClerc rang up. They’d seen my complaint about my missing soya milk. Would I like a refund?

And so I explained that I’d rather have the milk, that I’m handicapped and can’t buy it any other way except through them. So sure enough, a delivery driver turned up with 6 cartons of milk later in the day

Tea tonight was a delicious stuffed pepper and there’s stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow night and probably for a leftover curry too. My diet might be monotonous but my meals really are delicious

So that’s all I’m doing for tonight. I’ll be in bed soon ready to rise again nice and fresh for my Welsh lesson, I don’t think

As someone once asked me "what happened to all of your ‘get up and go’?"
The answer to that is simple. I told them "It’s all got up and gone a long time ago."

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Monday 15th January 2024 – YOU’VE NO IDEA …

… or maybe you have, I dunno, about how much my weekend’s excitement took out of me. Much of my day has been absolutely horrible.

Considering that there was no alarm this morning, leaving the bed at about 07:30 this morning was quite an achievement but I managed it all the same.

And I wished that I hadn’t because I didn’t last long.

Liz and I had a little chat for a while and I could feel myself slipping away once or twice but then I was gone. And gone for good too. It was like those situations that I was having when I first moved to Leuven in 2016 when I’d have these spells where I was totally unable to function.

There were several phone calls that I largely ignored and at one stage my cleaner came down to see me. She took one look at me and said "tu as la tête vraiment dans les vases" – “you’re just not here, are you?”

And I wasn’t either.

At about 14:00 I answered one phone call. It was this guy with the equipment for my apartment. “Can I come by in half an hour with the things?”

Seeing he was here, he was here, so I thought that I’d better try to do something. Margaret Thatcher once said something like "anyone can do a good job when they feel like it, but it’s doing a good job when you don’t feel like it, that’s the key to success" and really and honestly, I didn’t feel like it.

Nevertheless, by the time that he did come round (at 15:45 in fact) the place was looking better and I’d even contacted the Centre de Re-education for my timetable this week and booked the taxis.

Once he and his floozy had gone, having damaged my bath (and I’ve no idea what the landlord will say about that), I downloaded the dictaphone notes. I’d come back home from Europe. I was in a yellow LDV. I was back there and I had my old lagoon blue MkI Cortina and one or two other vehicles. We were having a huge row about something else as we usually did. My brother took out an indelible pencil and scored a huge brown cross on the back of my LDV. I asked him to remove it but he refused so I told him that I’d phone the police if he didn’t. He replied “go ahead” so I did. A policeman turned up, inspected everything, and told my brother that he’d be charged with committing criminal damage, which didn’t go down very well with the rest of the family because to date he didn’t have a criminal record. The policeman noticed my blue Cortina and that it hadn’t been taxed for over a year. He looked at his records and found that there was an entry there that it had been seized by the police. When he showed me the log book, that was what was written in there I wondered how that was possible because I actually had the vehicle in my possession so it certainly can’t have been physically seized by them. Then I began to think that I’d better do something about finding a place to hide it. If it’s been noted as seized by the police and now they know where it is, they might come along physically and seize it. That would cause me a great deal of problems. I thought that I’d better start work and do something about this particularly as now having antagonised the whole family they are all likely to seek their revenge in some way and this would be an easy way of doing it.

And if you think that that’s unlikely, you should have seen the letter that my brother wrote to the Cheshire Constabulary in 1993. I bet he hasn’t set foot in a church since. I’ve not heard any stories of any thunderbolts flashing round South Cheshire subsequently.

Really, some people are totally shameless when they think that they won’t be found out. But I’m disappointed that my subconscious is letting me down after the other night. I really had high hopes of that.

Anyway, have I told you about the “friend” that I had, someone who I thought that was the best friend that anyone could ever had and with whom I’d shared the most personal and intimate secrets of my life at one time?

Only to find that he was there on a “Yahoo” Land Rover Group repeating all of my stories and he and his mates were having a good laugh at my expense?

He turned out to be “not a companion upon whom a discerning man would rely for the purposes of hunting the tiger” as FE Smith (Lord Birkenhead) said of one of his clients

One thing that you can say is that “I sure know how to pick ’em”.

Later on I was well into a dream about a rock singer who wrote a song about being naked and searching through a rubbish bin but I cant remember what it’s called now … "neither can I" – ed … but I remember inviting one of my neighbours to come along and take part in some kind of performance while we were going shopping at 10:00 on Saturday morning but I wasn’t even sure about how we were actually going to manage to go shopping on Saturday at 10:00 but that was another question entirely.

Then I sat down to deal with the correspondence. And there was tons of it that has emanated from my last 2 stays in hospital

And have you any idea how difficult it is to concentrate on anything when you have people keeping on contacting you for photos of your knees? And I’m sure you think that I’m joking too.

Actually there’s a community nurse attached to the hospital whose job it is to contact me every week to see how I’m doing with all of this new medication.

She wanted to see photos of my knees after my fall so that she can forward them to the doctor but in the meantime, with my dramatic rise in blood pressure (it was 19.5/11.9 and Percy Penguin was nowhere about) she’s re-prescribed one of the medicaments that they stopped last week.

This kind of thing is never-ending.

Eventually I managed to sort out the most urgent stuff and that will be going about its business once I contact my trusty cleaner, whose presence really is making things so much easier around here.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, quite nice with plenty of stuffing left over for the next few days, and then I’ve been chatting to the family in Canada on the internet. My youngest great-niece is on a student exchange in Edinburgh right now so we’re trying to figure out a way of her coming over to see me, which will be lovely.

She was on a school exchange in Montréal a few years ago and strangely, I’ve seen more of her partner, Dorothée, than I’ve seen of her over the last few years.

But that’s enough for tonight. I’m dead to the world, hurt in places that I didn’t even know that I had places and regrettably, I’ve slipped into the deep pit again, and for no apparent reason too. I really don’t know what’s going on with me right now.

A short while ago I was listening to one of the Paul Rhys “The Saint” programmes, “The Saint Closes The Case”, where one of his allies says "It doesn’t matter. I’ve heard the sound of the trumpet"

But as Frodo, one of Tolkien’s characters in LORD OF THE RINGS put it, "End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it"

Unfortunately, I can’t see anything at the moment. For some reason, I can’t get the other night out of my head.

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Sunday 31st December 2023 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what happened last night but when I plugged the dictaphone into the computer to download the night’s voyages, I found that there were none.

For the first time in just over a year I must have had a completely deep uninterrupted sleep and I suppose that that’s something to celebrate. But on the other hand, I know that this sounds strange but I was disappointed.

It’s not that I mean that I didn’t get to see Zero, Castor or TOTGA, but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I seem to have these days is what goes on at night while I’m asleep.

Having lived a life full of excitement, to be practically “confined to quarters” is so depressing. I’ve been blown up in a Freedom Fighter explosion, I’ve had an extremely inflammatory confrontation with a Russian security patrol in Minsk in the Soviet Union, I’ve been arrested by a military patrol in Belfast, I’ve been shot at in Stoke on Trent, I’ve had someone kill herself right in front of my eyes, and here I am stuck in a first-floor apartment on my own because I no longer have the strength to go downstairs. So what goes on at night is so important to me.

Still, never mind. It can’t be helped

Although I didn’t leave the bed until about 11:30 this morning, I didn’t go to bed until late and it probably wasn’t far from dawn when I finally hit the hay

But there’s a good reason for that, and a big “thank you” to the organisers of the Shrewsbury Folk Festival who deserve more than just a mention on these pages.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I talked the other day about my radio shows and how I’d like to broadcast concerts on the anniversary of their taking place.

And after a brief exchange of e-mails, the organisers of the Festival have made available a whole pile of video recordings of groups who have appeared there.

Last night just as I was thinking of going to bed I was sent Steeleye Span 2018 which of course I had to check over the recording to make sure that it is complete and correct.

Today I’ve been sent a Fairport Convention, Lindisfarne and a couple of Show of Hands performances, and they reckon that there might be more stuff in their archives. So once again, a great big thank you to the organisers of the Festival.

Apart from downloading and checking over the concerts ready for conversion to *.mp3 and editing, I’ve been a very busy boy today even though it’s a Sunday.

First task was to edit the notes that I dictated and to assemble all the programme components. I ended up, when the final track had been selected and the notes written and dictated, with an overrun of 3.5 seconds but I can soon edit that down. There’s always stuff in my notes that I can edit out without losing the sense or the rhythm.

And then there was the baking. I needed pizza dough, a small loaf and a bread pudding so I set to work and they are all complete. 2 parts of the pizza dough are in the freezer and the third part made a lovely vegan pizza. But it took ages to make and I ended up with a very late tea.

In the middle of it all Rosemary rang me for a chat. And because I was pressed for time, it was only a short call. 1 hour 8 minutes and 16 seconds to be exact. Not one of our marathon chats where we spend hours talking about nothing.

Meanwhile, in other news, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I am a great-uncle to three young ladies in Canada.

The eldest one is settled down in her little house in Woodstock with a partner, a dog and a job working at her father’s corn mill

The middle one won a place at Canada’s most prestigious University, St Francis-Xavier in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. I visited her a few times and she came to see me when I was living in Leuven when she was on a student exchange in Madrid. She was the one who was married in November in Michigan.

The youngest one has also won a place at St Francis-Xavier University. It’s really hard to believe that I was holding her tightly when she was so small and tiny, only two months old that winter in Canada. How quickly time has flown.

But anyway, she’s won a place on the foreign exchange programme of the University and for the next 6 months she’ll be in the UK and “Uncle Eric, can I come to visit you?”.

“Of course you can! Don’t be silly! Come when you like! Stay as long as you want!”.

It’ll be lovely if she comes. I don’t see my Canadian family anything like as often as I would like to do.

So I’ve had my pizza, written my notes, and that’s all I’m going to do. I’ll have a hot drink and a quiet evening and then go to bed.

Many people will be celebrating tonight but I don’t have all that much reason to be out there with them, even if I could.

There used to be a drink called “Phyllosan” that “fortifies the over-forties”. What is there that I can take that will “sixtify the over-sixties?”.

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Thursday 20th October 2022 – JUST IN CASE …

… you’re wondering what is going on, I’ve caught the ‘flu. And this is the ‘flu to end all ‘flus. I’ve never felt as bad as this.

Normal service will be resumed when I’m feeling better.

For a while I was actually not too bad and even managed to run down to Fredericton in Strider to deliver some feed from the mill and to do a little shopping ready for going home, but things just went slowly worse throughout the day.

But in the meantime, I’ve been going off on quite a few voyages. I was moving into my house in Winsford. I was talking to someone on the internet. They were also planning on moving in to a new house so we were just basically chatting about that. My father and his second wife were around. Suddenly a vehicle identical to the one to which I was just talking pulled up in the drive of the house and all these people got out. They began to move suitcases etc about. I could see that they were to people to whom I’d just been talking. It looked as if they were going to be my neighbours just across the road. We began to chat a little then we moved out of their way to give them room to manoeuvre their suitcases.

And later we were going somewhere. I can’t remember who was with me now. We were in Caliburn. We came to a set of road works controlled by traffic lights. We were let through when they changed to green but had to wait a moment while a tarmacking machine went past. Then we had to set out to climb this steep hill to a road junction. They had really freshly tarred it so trying to find a grip on it was pretty much impossible. There was a great danger that we would slide everywhere. By now, instead of being in Caliburn I was on a bike. That made things a hundred times worse. There were people coming from all kinds of directions. I didn’t want to have to swerve around too much in case I’d fall over with there not being any grip on this road as yet with the hot tar.

My friend from near Ellesmere was going to come over so I had to make all kinds of arrangements with her. I had to speak to a pub landlord about making sure that she was welcomed etc so I had to fill in a questionnaire. I was in this pub with someone else while the pub landlord was reviewing the questionnaire. It was also the birthday of one of the daughters of my niece so I found an envelope and had to write a little message to her but I kept on confusing the names and was writing this message to my friend but of course it was to my niece’s daughter to whom I wanted to leave it. On the way out of the pub I had to pick up the questionnaire that I’d filled in. I saw that he’d given me 11 out of 11. He said in some rudimentary and basic French that my friend would be welcomed over there when she passed through so I picked up the paperwork and began to walk out.

At another moment I was with my friend from South Carolina. We’d been in a chemist’s shop and asked if he had a box. A chemist’s shop in a shopping precinct. he thought that he’d thrown out all of his boxes but in the end he found a box that he gave to us for which we were grateful. Then we were wandering around this shopping mall. Next morning we had to leave quite quickly. I was chatting to a Welsh tutor about some kind of problem that had arisen that had had him talking to his students for hours during the night. We were wondering how many other tutors had been disturbed by this and their families upset at ridiculous hours. My friend stopped to have a cup of tea. I didn’t think that we had time but he did anyway. He took the tea and someone asked me if they’d made it properly. I said “as long as the water is poured when it’s absolutely boiling that’s absolutely great”.

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Friday 28th January 2022 – I FOUND OUT …

inside bunker pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022… something about the gun whose mount they uncovered when they cleaned out the abandoned bunker the other day.

Thanks to a friendly neighbourhood press release, the gun that was mounted on the mounting that you can see in the foreground just behind the wire grill was a naval-type 105mm gun.

That will probably mean that it’s the SKC/32 rather than a derivative of the 88mm flakartillerie gun, and was the secondary armament on several of the larger German ships and also the primary artillery on many of the earlier generations of World-War II U-boats (but not, surprisingly, the Class VII which still used the 75mm gun).

chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022What I didn’t find out though was the name of the boat that was in the chantier naval at the side of Gerlean.

That’s because when I looked this afternoon, there she was! Gone! And never called me “mother”!.

Surprisingly, Gerlean had gone too. She’s been in there for quite a while but it looks as if she’s gone back into the water.

And what wouldn’t I have given to have gone back to bed this morning? I know that 07:30 isn’t as early as I used to get up in the good old days when I was feeling better, but it’s still far too flaming early for me these days.

After the medication I came back in here and sat on the chair. And while it would be wrong to say that I fell asleep again, I may well have done for all the work that I was doing.

A strong mug of coffee and a fruit bun at breakfast time did something to revive me and so I tackled the dictaphone notes. I was playing football last night with a couple of teams of girls. There was some confusion going on about the score because one team had had to play either with a woman short or out of position etc. No allowance had been made for that and they thought that that was rather unfair. On my way home I said goodbye. One of the girls who looked like my niece’s youngest daughter – it might have been her – had a tiny long-necked dragon-type of insect thing that she was training. She was training it by either giving it or withholding food. We all thought that it was pretty amazing but thinking on it was the kind of thing that you can do if you are using food as a tuition method. I said goodbye to them all and went outside. I was sleeping in a hedge like in Vine Tree Avenue in Shavington but it was freezing and I thought that I’m not looking forward to sleeping outside tonight in this.

Later on there was something about vehicles in the rush hour, someone driving some kind of I dunno maybe a stolen car but the authorities were already there and there were two vehicles of theirs being in plain clothes that were following this vehicle with these outlaws in it to try to find out what they were doing and where they were going and what their plan was.

And yet in the Magistrates’ Court (whatever this is all about I really don’t know) there was someone being dragged around by his collar lying on his back along the floor. I’ve no idea why and I’ve no idea what it relates to

There was also something about a car and caravan, one of these big North American caravan things. There was traffic stopped or slowing down to let a pedestrian walk across the road. This car and trailer didn’t see it until very late and swerved off the road having to drive in through all of the trees and smashed up while this pedestrian was slowly making its way across to the other side of the road

Finally, Nerina and I were working on VBH, one of my old yellow Cortinas. She was getting together all of the bits and pieces and I was busy adding them on etc. She was becoming very frustrated saying “you’ve no idea how long it’s taking me to get all of this stuff together”. I replied “yes, I can imagine, but it’s not taking me any less time to do all of the work. While we were doing that we were talking about the invasion of Normandy, how there were still one or two hold-out towns of Germans on the coast. We were discussing how quickly it would take them to close the gap. We didn’t think that it would take them long – a bus would do that trip in 3 or 4 minutes. We were talking about that. Just then a couple appeared in a white Ford Transit, people whom we knew who worked on the radio. They stopped and said “hello” and said that they were going off somewhere but they would come back to give us a hand. Off they went. Nerina brought me a dish of pea soup and I spilt most of it down me, on the carpet, on the rug and made quite a mess. I said “not to worry. I’ll change my clothes and put everything in the wash, including the rug etc. Then this couple came back. It hadn’t taken them long. They stopped a little further down the road, got out and went to talk to a couple of other people whome they must have known who were about 100 yards away from us, found some chairs and sat down and made themselves comfortable. We thought “they aren’t going to be coming along helping us, are they?”. Nerina said something like “it’s not surprising that his nickname is “the King” is it?”. I went off to find some clean clothes but in my bedroom all of my furniture had been moved around. I asked my brother what was going on. He wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I finally found my chest of drawers and went to take a clean tee-shirt. he said “you have bed bugs in there” so I opened it and had a sniff and thought “no, there are no bed bugs in here. What’s he talking about?”. We had this really ferocious argument about him changing everything around in the room without talking to me about it.

And I do wish that my family would clear of and leave me alone when I’m in the middle of a nocturnal ramble. It really is quite depressing when they keep on butting in. I don’t mind Nerina – after all, I chose her to come into my life for better or for worse and after a few of the women whom I subsequently encountered, I came to the conclusion that she wasn’t the person that I imagined her to be – but the others I can do without.

For lunch I finished off the half-loaf that I had out. The other half still in the freezer can wait until Monday before I take it out. It went in almost as soon as it was cooked so I hope that it will be nice and fresh.

After lunch I attacked the files for the radio project. One lot went fine with no issues but the second on, that it quite long and the third one, they are presenting me with quite a problem. There was a lot of background noise and I forgot to record some ambience so I had to invent some, and that wasn’t easy.

And then, there’s a difference in tone between what we recorded on the day and what we recorded here in my apartment. There’s much more resonance in the original one because it was recorded in a public hall with different acoustics so I’ve spent most of the afternoon experimenting with echo settings and changing the tone.

That’s a long, hard job and it’s going to take me a while to have it how I want it, if I can manage it at all. If not, I’ll have to “invent” something else.

beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022Meanwhile, I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

First port of call was at the wall at the end of the car park overlooking the beach to see what was going on down there this afternoon.

Not that there was very much beach for anyone to be on, because the tide is quite well in.There’s still some room for some people to go for a walk if they so choose, but there was no-one down there.

It wasn’t a bad day, actually. There was very little wind compared to what we usually have and it was fairly warm for the time of year too. Not the kind of weather to keep me indoors anyway.

strange lighting effects baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022We were however having some strange lighting effects out at sea.

Somewhere over there is the Brittany coast, although you would never guess if I hadn’t told you. There’s some sun shining through a gap in the clouds higer up, but we have some kind of sea mist just offshore and fairly low down.

You can even see some kind of demarcation line in the bay which the mist reaches, and it all looks particularly weird.

What the horizontal lines represent between the mist and the sunlight represent is something else that I can’t understand either. I wish that I’d paid more attention to Miss Coxon’s Meteorology lessons 50-odd years ago.

The guy from the council has finished his work with the concrete pad for the new flagpole so I pushed on to check the bunker before continuing my walk around the headland.

le roc a la mauve 3 chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022Gerlean and the other boat next to her may well have cleared off, but the third boat is there so I concentrated on trying to identify her.

Her registration number is pretty much out of sight and I can’t decipher it, and we have her name written in some of this stupid illegible font on the wind deflector above the cabin.

Doing the best that I can, I think that she’s called Le Roc A La Mauve III, and that’s not impossible because according to the Companies Register there’s a company based down the road in Donville les Bains called “Le Roc A La Mauve” and which is described as “sea farmers”.

gerlean chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022and as for where Gerlean is, look no further.

It sounded to me as if there was a lot of noise coming from the chantier naval and what was happening was that the portable boat lift was busy lowering Gerlean back into the water.

And once in there, she cleared off across the harbour and out to sea. Probably for sea trials, I reckon, after her repairs. It’s not very likely that she’ll make straight for the fishing grounds after having been dropped back into the water after all of this time.

joly france ferry terminal port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022Meanwhile, at the ferry terminal, we have one of the Joly France boats moored up.

It’s the older one, by the looks of things, without the step in the stern. They do still run out to the Ile de Chausey in winter but nothing like as regularly as in the summer.

And hang onto your hats, because we might be seeing some other boats over there. My understanding is that the Channel Island ferries have been sold to a new owner and service is due to restart in late April.

Mind you, we’ve all heard that before. Let’s hope that for this time, it really is true.

la grande ancre mobile crane port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo January 2022On the way back home for my coffee I had a look in the inner harbour to see what was going on.

The big mobile crane has now been folded up and the machinery that came on the lorry that it unloaded has also gone. Apparently one of the Jersey freighter, either Normandy Trader or Normandy Warrior, came in earlier today to pick it up and take it away.

Back here I had my coffee and then carried on with this sound file editing which is going to take me quite a while and then nipped into the kitchen for a quick tea. More veg and baked potatoes with an ancient breaded soya fillet that I found, simply to make more space so that I could file away the rest of the carrots.

And thzn football. Y Bala v Y Drenewydd. Much more skilful than earlier in the week and Bala won by the only goal. But it was something of a midfield battle and the strikers didn’t have much of a look-in. And of course Drenewydd’s defeat gave TNS an opportunity to go even farther ahead.

They are well out on top, Cefn Druids are well adrift in the basement, but the other 10 places are really up for grabs with no-one stamping their authority on the League.

But now it’s bed-time. And I wonder who’ll be coming walkies with me during the night. After the delightful company that I had a few days ago, Castor, TOTGA and Zero, I shudder to think who’ll be out there waiting for me to appear tonight.

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Monday 9th August 2021 – THERE HAS BEEN …

trawler charlevy chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall… yet more excitement in the chantier naval today.

When I walked past there this afternoon I discovered that the yacht Rebelle has once more gone back into the water today. But for how long, who knows? We might be seeing it back again quite soon if past history is anything to go by.

Also missing today is the trawler Monaco du Nord II. Her repaint and renovation job seems to be finished.

All that remains today is the trawler Charlevy and the two others whose names I have yet to discover.

joly france ferry terminal port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallMeanwhile, over at the ferry terminal is one of the Joly France boats – the older one without the step in the stern and with the windows in landscape format.

It may well be that she’ll be going out to the Ile de Chausey when the tide comes back in, even if the tide doesn’t come back in until later this evening, unless she’s there in preparation for an early start tomorrow.

Despite the weather not being exactly summer-like, there are still holidaymakers who need to be ferried out to the island and back. And it’s really sad that the weather isn’t what they would have been wanting after all of the events of the last 18 months.

And the sleep that I had last night wasn’t quite what I was wanting. Despite my early night and feeling as tired as I was, I couldn’t get off to sleep for ages and when I finally did, it was one of those sleeps that was rather intermittent.

And one thing that I noticed that I had to leave my bed in the middle of the night, something that I’ve now done for a few times just recently after going without for a couple of years.

There’s a pile of stuff on the dictaphone too. It was 21st birthday party of one of my niece’s daughters and a late 16th birthday party for another. They had waited until Covid was over and were having this celebration. There were some kids next door who were having a party and the parties somehow intermingled. At some point there was a fire and the fire brigade were called. The police came and arrested me and took me off. Some woman policewoman started to question me about the party – what was I doing allowing this and that to happen? I replied “hang on – what’s this got to do with me? I’ve only just turned up from Europe. I have no idea of what was happening at this do. I wasn’t in charge of it or anything like that. Why isn’t my sister here? Why isn’t her husband here? If anyone was in charge of it, they were more than anyone else because they live there and they were their kids”. After this went on for a couple of minutes I said “I’ll tell you exactly whose party it was. It was my niece’s daughter’s party. She’s 21, she’s an adult. Why isn’t she here?”. The policewoman looked at me, thought for a minute and said “get out of here”.

I was having camera issues and things weren’t going very well. Suddenly a box turned up and I opened it. It was 3 cameras, one of which I’d ordered but the other 2 were 2 that I’d looked at and decided that I didn’t want. It seemed that Amazon had sent me the 3. Liz then asked “is that the one that I got you?”. It turned out that Liz had bought me one as well and someone else had bought me one. I thought “that’s really nice of my friends, isn’t it?”. They were all going out and I was having to stay behind. They were getting ready to go but there were all kinds of things – it was like being in an office. Instead of closing at 17:00 it was open until all times of hours. There were people coming and going, all that kind of thing. A friend of mine (and I’ve no idea who she was) with 2 daughters, she’d gone of to take her kids to ballet class but she didn’t have time to come back. She came back with the older daughter who was about 8. We’d had a chat and a hug. We were just about to go off and get the other car when the other girl appeared from her ballet class and asked “where are the others going?”. I replied “they are going away home and leaving you behind”. “No they aren’t” she retorted “No” I said “they are going to get the car and bring it round here so you can go”.

There was more than this too but as you are probably eating your meal right now I’ll spare you the gory details.

What had occupied my time this morning was the radio programme that needed to be prepared. Yesterday I’d paired the music so I had to do the rest this morning.

And much to my surprise it was all done and dusted by 11:20, which is a new record, and I could even have finished earlier than that had I not forgotten to deduct the 35 seconds of speech from the time left over at the end of the programme.

As a result the final track was 35 seconds too long and I had to spend some time editing out a pile of speech to make the final track fit.

There was the usual break for breakfast, and my fruit loaf, the one that I made yesterday, is delicious.

When the radio programme was finished and while I was listening to it to make sure that it’s OK, I wrote up the notes from yesterday and posted them on line

After lunch I sat down to work on the journal entry from 31st JULY from when I went out socialising, and the excitement that I had on the way home. Unfortunately I … err … closed my eyes for a while, even though I had a full mug of hot coffee by my side.

Cold coffee doesn’t really taste the same.

Coming round from my reverie took longer than usual and it led to rather a late afternoon walk.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallDown to the wall at the end of the car park to look at what was happening down on the beach.

And today, not only were there people sunbathing, there were a few actually in the water enjoying themselves, although I can’t see how anyone could possibly be enjoying themselves in any kind of water at a temperature less than 37°C.

Mind you, today there was hardly a breath of wind and it was fairly warm. I’d even gone out without a jacket or pullover, for the first time since I can’t remember when.

man fishing place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallOne thing that we haven’t seen for quite a while has been any fishermen.

Today, there was one of them standing on the rocks down at the end of the beach at the Place d’Armes. Of course, as you might expect, he never actually caught anything while I was watching, but then that’s par for the course.

And for a change, there wasn’t anyone in a boat fishing just offshore. Usually you don’t have the one without the other but we haven’t seen any seaborne fishermen with rod and line for quite a while.

fishing boats ile de chausey baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallOn the other hand, there is plenty of evidence of seaborne commercial fisherman.

My roving eye out at sea had picked up some kind of activity going on round by where we spent the night in the Spirit of Conrad last year. It looks as if it’s one of the inshore shell-fishing boats.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there are some shellfish beds out there and I suppose that the boat is engaged in harvesting the fruits of the sea.

There are some bouchot beds out there too and I suppose that the quality of the harvest from there would be beautiful seeing as there’s almost no human interaction over there.

condor voyager boat english channel ile de chausey Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallBut there was something else going on even further out behind the Ile de Chausey in the English Channel, something that looked rather like a large boat.

Although I couldn’t see it clearly, I took a photo of it with the aim of blowing it up (the image, not the object) and enhancing it to see if I can find a clue as to her identity.

Having done that and enhanced the image sufficiently, I noticed that her silhouette resembles one of the Condor high-speed ferries that works the round trip between Poole, the Channel Islands and St Malo.

This photo was taken at 16:33 (remember, the camera is set to standard, not Summer time) and I noticed from the radar that at 16:53 the high-speed ferry Condor Voyager pulled into the harbour at St Malo

yacht fishing boat rainstorm brittany Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallOver the fast few days we’ve seen storm and rain clouds gathering across the bay along the Brittany coast.

Today, there’s yet another rainstorm descending onto the sea just offshore over there. There ware a couple of boats, one a yacht and the other one that looks as if it might be a small fishing boat, that look as if they are about to be engulfed.

There are several small beaches over there that are quite popular with holidaymakers and they must be having something of a torrid time with the weather over the last few days.

chausiaise ferry terminal port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallAround the path on top of the cliffs to the viewpoint overlooking the port where I could look down onto the chantier naval and the ferry terminal.

Earlier on in this journal I posted a photo of Joly France settled down in the silt over by the ferry terminal, and here in front of here is Chausiaise, the freight barge who has moved from her mooring in the inner harbour where we saw her yesterday.

That would seem to indicate that she too is either about to go or has just been out on a run with freight over to the Ile de Chausey. The service is still continuing despite the depressing summer so far.

boat building material port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallYesterday, we saw a shrink-wrapped boat on the quayside waiting for transport out to the Channel Islands.

The boat has now been joined by a pile of building material so we can assume that there will be a freighter coming into the harbour imminently.

And if we look to the side, we’ll see that Marité has gone off for a sail today. We’ve not seen her out there at sea but I can tell you that she left port this morning at 08:06 and apparently she came back on the evening tide.

police interviewing motorcyclist car park boulevard vaufleury Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThat isn’t everything either.

There’s an issue, just as there is everywhere, of kids on motorbikes running around with little respect to the rule of law (and just in case anyone wonders, I was a young tearaway on a motorbike too in my youth) but here in the car park at the Boulevard Vaufleury, a couple of the local police force are giving one of the motorcyclists the third degree.

They are checking his papers, under the scrutiny of that woman over there who seems to be expressing a keen interest in whatever is going on.

apple crumble place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallBack at the apartment I finished off the outstanding journal entry and then went off to prepare a dessert for this week.

The choice fell on an apple crumble, and this is one of the best that I have ever made. You can see that I’ve already taken a helping out of it. That went down really well after my vegan pie and vegetables for tea.

But now that everything is done, i’m off to bed. Another early night and I hope that I have a better one that I did last night. I’ve been feeling a little better today and I hope that it keeps up. Tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson and I need to be on form.

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Wednesday 30th June 2021 – THE BIRD-MEN …

hang gliders plat gousset Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall… of Alcatraz were out in force this afternoon while I was out for my walk.

Instead of going round the headland I went on the path around the medieval city walls to see how they were getting on with some of the repairs that they have been doing to various things in the old town, but instead I ended up being buzzed by a squadron of Nazgul

They take off and land at the field next door to the cemetery which I always think is good planning because they won’t have far to go if they have an unfortunate accident, and then follow the clifftop along almost to the lighthouse and then fly back to where they started.

hang glider plat gousset Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThat is, always assuming that they can gain enough height to do so.

Some of the bird-men find it easier to do than others. This guy is struggling to find the air currents that will pull him up. Instead, he’s struggling along well below my eye level and well below the top of the cliff and not doing too well about it either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw one of the birdmen come to grief the other day at the lighthouse and he’s not the first either. Someone else was seriously injured last year, and I never did find out whether he recovered from his accident.

But our intrepid birdman did in fact find a current of air in the end and lifted himself off into the ether over my head.

And I must have found a good current of air to lift me out of bed this morning because I leapt out of bed with an extraordinary burst of energy as soon as the alarm went off. And considering how exhausted I was last night, that must have been pretty close to a miracle.

After the medication I came back in here and finished off last night’s journal entry. There wasn’t much to do but I did it anyway. And following that I carried on with the photos from August 2019. and right now I’m on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR pulling into the harbour at Sisimut, Greenland.

Yes, I really managed to crack on this morning and deal with a nice bundle of them. I even managed to find a photo that I took of THE AURORA BOREALIS in Kangerlussuak Fjord

There was a pause for a coffee break and later for breakfast, and then I had another task to carry out. My little niece Amber graduated from High School in Canada last week and she had sent me a video of THE GRADUATION PARADE AND VALDICTORY SPEECHES.

Being as busy as I am I’d not had an opportunity to see it and so with my hot chocolate and fruit bread, and then with the acoustic guitar I watched the video. And I had to laugh as well. You can tell that it’s New Brunswick. They held the parade in the Tractor-Pulling Stadium

That all took me right up to lunchtime when I had some more of my very nice fresh bread.

After lunch I went to revise my Welsh but once more, ended up crashing out on the chair for half an hour or so. I didn’t realise that Welsh had this effect on me. It’s all becoming quite embarrassing. But anyway that took me up to walkies time and I would have gone out earlier had we not had another power cut. And this time it wasn’t any fuse in my apartment and it came back on after a couple of minutes without any help from me.

trans-shipping rubble porte st jean Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallNo schoolgirl loitering outside the door this afternoon again so I could push off into the wild blue yonder. But only a little way because there was something going on right at the back of my apartment at the Porte St Jean.

One of the problems of living within the confines of a medieval walled city is that large lorries and delivery vehicles can’t make their way in so there has to be some form of trans-shipment. In this case, this little pickup is bringing builders’ rubble from within the walls and it’s being scooped up into the back of the larger lorry for disposal.

And while I was passing I had a look at the rubble that they were taking away. And there were several granite setts in there that had presumably at one time been part of the road surface. Throwing those away is really sad if you ask me.

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hallnext stop of course was to go and look down on the beach and see what was going on down there this afternoon.

And you’re probably noticed that we have a different perspective for the view today. That’s because we are going for our walk around the city walls rather than the headland so instead of being in the car park I’m at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord.

This afternoon there are plenty of people down on the beach enjoying the nice weather. And even a young kid running out of the sea as if she’s just been in for a quick splash round. And if I’d been in the sea I’d be running out pretty quickly too and no mistake.

scaffolding wooden structure workmen's hut place du marché aux chevaux Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallOne thing that has been the subject of much comment and discussion in these pages just recently has been the state of the medieval city walls.

Some more were closed off a week or so back here in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux and then a couple of days ago a kind-of workmen’s hut appeared, along with a strange wooden structure that was fastened to the walls.

This afternoon I found a spec on the other side so I could have a look at the outside of the walls to see if I could see to what this wooden structure relates. But it’s not evident at all. But at least you can see the trailer that looks as if it might be a workmen’s hut.

Something else that we can see from this viewpoint is some scaffolding. I haven’t seen that down there before, but I wouldn’t like to insist that it’s only just arrived. I just don’t remember seeing it before.

But I wonder if all of this really does mean that we might actually be seeing some work being done on the walls in the near future in the Place du Marché aux Chevaux.

lifeguards tidal swimming pool beach plat gousset Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallA flash of flourescent yellow caught my eye down at the Plat Gousset so seeing as the path underneath the wall was reasonably dry this afternoon, I went that way to have a look.

Being buzzed by a variety of Nazgul on my way along the path I eventually arrived at the viewpoint overlooking the beach, and I could see that I was right. The holiday season is now in full swing and we have a couple of lifeguards on duty in their flourescent yellow jackets.

There is one standing at the water’s edge keeping an eye on the bathers in the sea (and take my word for it – there were a few of those this afternoon) and the other one is supervising events taking place in the tidal swimming pool that still has its water in it. And there were a couple of people in there too.

people on beach plat gousset Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallBut out of the wind I bet that it was really nice and cosy if you could catch a few rays of the sun.

Round by the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset we could see the people on the beach. Not exactly the height of summer (which is due to start this weekend of course) but still plenty of reason to be on the beach, especially as it’s half-dayat the schools and the brats have the afternoon off on a Wednesday, as we can tell from this photo.

And the other day I showed you a photo of a couple of girls sitting on the wall overlooking the beach, and I surmised that it must be quite a comfortable spec. And that’s what it must be because there were more girls sitting on the wall this afternoon.

f-gsbv ROBIN DR 400-180 baie de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallWhile I was walking around the path underneath the walls I was overflown yet again, only this time not by one of the Bird-men of Alcatraz but by an aeroplane.

Even though it’s quite far out in the Baie de Granville I can actually identify it from here. She’s F-GSBY, one of the aeroplanes that we see on a regular basis. She’s a Robin DR400-180 and is owned by the Granville Aero-Club where she’s used for either advanced flying training or for hire.

According to my radar she took off at 16:55, flew down to do a lap around Mont St Michel and then flew back to the airport where she landed at 17:21. And as my photo is times at 16:15 (it’s set to real time, not summertime) that looks as if it’s correct.

And I haven’t forgotten that I must make suitable enquiries at the airport about the navigation school

seagull chicks rue des juifs Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallWhile we’re on the subject of flying … “well, one of us is” – ed … there are other flying objects that need our attention.

So with that in mind I pushed on round to the Square Maurice Marland to have a look out onto the roofs of the houses in the Rue des Juifs to see how our baby seagull chicks are doing.

And they look as if they are doing quite well too. There are three of them on that roof over there and they have grown quite a lot this last couple of weeks. One of them was flapping his wings quite vigorously and so I don’t think that it’ll be too long before he’s ready to take to the air.

But the Square is still a mess and it’s quite annoying. Sumer is here and some of the kiddies’ entertainments have been taken away and the rest are fenced off and overgrown. This is not the way to run a holiday resort.

boat on quayside port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallYesterday we saw a huge pile of merchandise stacked up on the quayside ready to be taken away by one of the Jersey freighters.

Word on the streets is that Normandy Trader came in for a quick “in and out” early this morning on her way back from St Malo and it looks as if she’s cleared almost all of the load. The boat wrapped in shrink-wrap is still there so either Normandy Trader was full or else that’s a load for Thora.

What’s intriguing me though is the appearance of the garden shed over there. If it is a product for export, I’d expect it to be flat-packed to save on loading space. But it could be for a small office for either one of the boats or else for a customs or police presence (but why wouldn’t they be in the police station across the road?). We shall have to see.

resurfacing venelle st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAt te start of the afternoon we saw the trans-shipment going on with the rubbish and a few of the granite setts.

What they seem to be doing now is trying to resurface the Venelle St Michel with granite setts in certain places and judging by the excavations, in other places too. It’s probably from here that the rubbish and the granite setts were discarded and I don’t understand at all the idea of disposing of those.

But I’m still dismayed by the surface of the Rue St Michel and its stone-chips. They could, and should, have done so much better than that.

There were some people in the back garden of a house here having a party, with a tabby-cat sitting on the wall. It let me stroke it, which surprised the people in the garden. But I left them to it and came on home for a coffee and to do some work on my boat trip on the Spirit of Conrad last year.

The practice on the bass went well and then I went for tea – burger on a bap followed by chocolate sponge and chocolate sauce.

Now, tired as I am, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’m shopping and I want to carry on with my Spirit of Conrad stuff as well as do some more photos from Greenland. High time that they were all done and dusted.

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