… this afternoon here in Granville.

And how I regret that they weren’t loaded with paratroopers because how I would have loved to have said that they just “dropped in for a chat”!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that where I used to live in the Auvergne I was right underneath the flight path for the French Air Force’s training flights and we had all kinds of aircraft flying by overhead. We even had the Stealth Bombers fly overhead when they were bombing Belgrade, as some of the older readers of this rubbish in one of its many previous existences might recall, including that famous night when I counted 12 flying out out but only 11 flying back.

But since I’ve been living here, the sighting of a French military aeroplane has been a very rare event.

And the French Military aeroplanes weren’t the only visitors today either.

When I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland I noticed down there in the harbour our old friend Normandy Trader. She’s come in to take away another load for transport back to the Channel Islands.

Stop me if you’ve heard this already but you might remember the other week that I told you that she’s been putting into St Malo to unload sometimes and then coming light over here to pick up her load to go back. I was intrigued by this, as you might remember, so I made “certain enquiries”.

It turns out that it’s to do with the shellfish that she brings in from the Jersey Fishermen’s Co-operative or whatever it’s called. Since Brexit, that can’t be landed just anywhere – it needs to be landed at a place where there’s a Health Inspector who can issue the correct certificates.

Be that as it may, I didn’t land just anywhere today. Or at any time either. I actually managed to beat the third alarm once again – that’s every day this week and isn’t it a long time since that has happened?

There was nothing on the dictaphone which was a shame because I do vaguely remember being out and about somewhere during the night, although I have no idea now where that might have been.

And so after the medication I had some time to spend to edit some more photos from July 2019 in order to ease myself into work. I’ve done about 100 this week – 20 a day which isn’t enough unfortunately. There’s still about 700 to do for July 2019 and then I have about 2800 to do for August, not to mention September and October.

This is going to be a long, looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong job.

Having woken myself up, I then dealt with the radio programme for which I had been asked to give some help. That involved searching through all of my music, choosing half a dozen or so tracks and then writing a report as to why those tracks are appropriate for this radio programme that someone is making.

After lunch, and more of my nice fresh bread, I found myself …. errr … drifting away, but I managed to stop myself before I’d gone too far. After I’d pulled myself together (which is more difficult than you might imagine because I’ve been falling apart at the seams for ages) I attacked my Oradour notes.

But for some reason that I don’t understand, I don’t seem to have made much headway. It’s possibly due to the fact that I managed to tease my way into a newspaper archive that had tons of information about more recent developments there, including a spat between Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande that seems to have slipped in under the radar. I spent an age wading my way through that lot.

There was the usual afternoon walk out in the beautiful sunny weather, even if it was absolutely freezing cold.

There were crowds of people out there today, down on the beach enjoying themselves. And I didn’t realise it at the time but the person in blue centre-right in the image is the woman who lives in the apartment above mine.

On the way back into the building after my stroll, we collided in the entrance hall of the building. She’d been out “to take the air” with a friend of hers and had engaged, without a great deal of success, in the Peche à pied. It’s not really the right kind of tide for that at the moment.

Earlier on at the start of these notes I talked about the French military aircraft.

The first photo I had “shot from the hip” as they had taken me by surprise, flying low over the College Malraux. There was much more time to take a photo as they flew along the coast. For a moment I thought that they were going to put down at the airport here but instead they lumbered slowly on inland.

The general consensus of opinion is that they would be heading for Cherbourg, but I would have expected them to have continued along the coast and gone that way rather than heading off inland.

With the aircraft now well out of the way, I could turn my attention to the noise coming from the beach.

Despite the lack of school transport even today (how would these people manage in the Auvergne) there are still plenty of school children about and this afternoon there was a pile of brats down there on the beach, paying no attention whatever to the teacher who was bellowing instructions to them.

The paths are much more clear of snow so I could carry on along the path in relative ease and go out across to the end of the headland and see what was going on. But with the tide well out, there were no trawlers cruising idly around just offshore right now.

There was something right out at sea just heading out of the harbour at the Ile de Chausey and I wondered what it was. The NIKON 1 J5 doesn’t have the range of the big NIKON D500

But when I made it round to the viewpoint overlooking the inner harbour, I could see Joly France over there at the ferry terminal in its NAABSA (Not Always Afloat But Safely Aground) position, but there was no sign of the little freighter Chausiais. That may well be who it was who was heading for home.

It was about time that I was heading for home too and my hot coffee as I was quite cold by now. Two pairs of trousers is a good move but everything else is frozen in all of this.

After I finished work I had an hour on the guitars that wasn’t really all that impressive and then I went for tea. I ended up with past and veg with bulghour in a vegan cheese sauce. And there was nothing wrong with that. The last of the rice pudding has gone so I’m going to have to defrost some apple pie for tomorrow night’s pudding.

So off to bed now, nice and early. Shopping tomorrow and I have to book my journey to Leuven too. It’s surprising just how quickly the time comes round these days. I can’t keep up with it.