I now know what the shipping containers and the crane down in the harbour are all about. And unfortunately it’s nothing to do with a nes ship coming to the port.

I’ve always said that if you want to know the answer to the question you need to ask the question, so while I was out and about on my travels I went down to where everything was assembled and buttonholed a workman.

The harbour here is tidal as you know, but there’s the deep-water bit where the larger visitors tie up and that has a pair of tidal gates across it so that the water stays in the basin so the ships will stay afloat.

And it seems that we are going to hae new lock gates. All of the pieces are here, and the containers are simply tool stores and offices and the like.

So with the new gates we might be having some new visitors. Who knows?

I had another miserable night last night. I ended up watching a film – Austin Powers as it happens – and as you know any film normally sends me to sleep after 5 minutes. But not last night. I could have watched the film two and three times over had I so desired and I still would have been awake.

But I must have gone to sleep at some point, because I remember waking up. Still dark, long before the alarm. And by the time the alarm sounded, I was up, medicated and well on the way to breakfast.

It didn’t look very hopeful outside with yet more driving rain, but round about 09:45 the rain stopped and we had a very watery sun. “If I don’t go now I never will” I mused, and so off I set.

One of the places on my travels was the laboratory. There was an extra charge that I had to pay because they had to examine part of it again. Apparently I’m missing something in my body (and it’s not a brain).

And then to LIDL where I bought a baguette, some pears and some biros.

Now here’s a thing.

I need a black pen to fill in a computer input form, and there in one of the bins at LIDL were several packs of pens, some coloured blue and others coloured black. So I bought a pack of black ones, like you would – only to find that they have blue ink inside. How weird is that? I’ll go back tomorrow and buy some blue ones and see what colour ink they have.

On the way back, I called at the port as above, and then staggered (because it really was a struggle) back up the hill for a coffee.

This afternoon I made a start on the correspondence. And that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either because the last time that I updated my letterhead was in 2011 and a lot has happened since then. I had to redesign it completely from scratch.

Then I needed a pile of attachments so first of all I had to scan in a few documents. And then spend the next half hour looking for them in the laptop. But then I could write my letters (I managed three today) and print them, as well as all of the attachments.

And not only that, I could print off a few things. It’s a good job that when I received my French driving licence back in 2009 I scanned it into the laptop, because now I have a reasonable facsimile to use with my “declaration of loss” if I’m help up in a police spot-check. It’s good to finally have a working printer

It’s always a good plan to scan your official identity documents for cases such as this.

It was then walkies time and as the rain was still holding off – just about – I went out for my afternoon walk around the Pointe du Roc again.

But look at that storm out there! Drifting along – and quite rapidly too – in the general direction of St Pair sur Mer. And as I watched, they got the lot too. It really was something quite impressive to see and I’m glad that it went over there and not over here.

Mind you, it did start to rain shortly after that, but nothing like what they had over there.

And down in the tidal basin the digger was out there again digging away. So I stopped to watch him for a while.

And to my surprise, there’s nowhere provided for him to dump the silt that he’s excavating. He’s just swivelling his jib around and dumping it elsewhere.

And so he can’t be dredging the basin then. It’s almost as if he’s looking for a body or something like that. I shall have to go for a walk down there sometime and see if I can find out what he’s up to.

Soup for lunch again, and tea, because I didn’t know what I fancied to eat, was baked potatoes and a tin of ratatouille. And that’s significant because that was the last tin of ratatouille from the European tinned food mountain.

Still plenty of other tins of other stuff from back then, but it’s all looking optimistic that ine day sometime soon I might clear it all out.

The walk this evening was punctuated my a couple of showers, and also by a couple of cats – I took a different route up on the walls to avoid the muddy footpath. So according to my fitbit I’ve done 113% of my daily effort today which is quite impressive.

In a short while I’ll be off to bed, and I’ve clearly earned it. I just hope that I can make the most of it.