… slight improvement in my health, I was quite surprised that it seemed to continue today.
There were only a couple of short moments of crashing out today, just 10 or 15 minutes here and there, nothing like the couple of hours that we’ve been having just recently. And that’s despite a mammoth 5.5 hours of Welsh lessons. I surely can’t keep this up.
In actual fact I was awake – wide awake too – at 06:50 when I awoke and I couldn’t go back to sleep again either. But that’s not to say that leaving the bed at the sound of the alarm at 07:30 was particularly easy. However I managed it just the same.
After the medication and checking my mails and messages I drifted off for the first of my two trips into the unknown and when I awoke and finally came to my senses (such as they are these days) I spend a pleasant hour or two preparing for my Welsh lesson today.
The lesson passed quite well, even though there weren’t all that many of us again. This revision that I’m doing seems to be paying off although nothing much of it seems to stick.
After lunch I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There were a couple of hotels in Crewe and there was a vet’s somewhere in the town centre. He was advertising rooms to let like a hotel. He wasn’t paying any taxes or anything on his rooms so everyone else considered that it was unfair competition. They were collecting evidence against him and someone came in and said that he would cram as many people as he could into his rooms when there’s an event on and on one occasion he had seven people sleeping in there. One of these small hotel proprietors said that they would never do that in their hotel. Someone reminded him that he’d done it once but he said “yes but there’s no room for anyone to go in once they had two beds in”. They wondered when someone was actually going to come along to inspect anything and find out what exactly was going to be happening about all of this.
There was much more to it than this but as you are probably eating your meal right now you really don’t want to know about it, trust me
As usual there was the afternoon trip around the headland.
First stop was of course the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down onto the beach to see what was happening down there.
To my surprise, there weren’t all that many people down there at all today. In fact there were probably more dogs than people.
It was actually quite a nice, warm day today without very much wind, just the kind of weather to bring people out in their droves and there was plenty of beach to be on too but for some reason people had decided to stay in.
Meanwhile up here on the path on top there were a few more people than normal.
My attention had been caught by this couple of guys doing some painting. I know that photos of people taking photos of people taking photos is a regular feature of these pages, but photos of people painting pictures is a new departures.
What I thought was rather strange was the fact that they were wearing some traditional artists’ smocks and the phrase l’habit ne fait pas le moine – “the habit doesn’t make the monk” or “just because you have the clothes doesn’t mean that you can do the job” came immediately to my mind.
It takes more than a smock, a palette, an easel, a canvas and a couple of brushes to make a painter, as many of the “exhibits” on sale at the Artists’ Fair on Sunday will testify.
So while I was brooding on the infinite, I was overflown by a light aeroplane.
It’s not one that we’ve seen before, as it happens. She’s F-BRAG and that tells me that she’s a MBB Bo 208C built by Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm in Germany and had at one time some connection with the Waggon Und Mashinenbau company.
She hasn’t filed a flight plan and wasn’t picked up on radar either and isn’t recorded as having been at the airfield here but she’s actually based at Dinan near St Malo so it’s possible that she’s taken off from there and been for a flight around the bay before going home again.
Apart from the painters there weren’t all that many other people on the path up here this afternoon.
There wasn’t anyone down on the bench by the cabanon vauban either this afternoon which was a shame because they would have had something to watch.
Nothing in the way of pleasure craft but there was a trawler out there over towards the Brittany coast with its equipment out. We’ve been seeing fishing boats in all kinds of strange places since all of the shenanigans out on the Baie de Granville.
So I left the trawler to it and carried on around the path on the other side of the headland.
And there’s no real change in the occupants of the chantier naval
We still have Pescadore in there along with the strange Wavecat Express and the catamaran and the cabin cruiser that have been there for a while.
But what I was hoping to see was the yacht that we noticed yesterday. While we were on our way to the physiotherapist we saw that the portable boat lift had hauled a yacht out of the water but by the looks of things it wasn’t out of the water for long.
On the way back towards home I stopped for a look at what was happening in the inner harbour.
Victor Hugo is still there. I din’t think she’s ever going to put to sea at this rate, but the ship that is here to install the new buoys, Hauts De France, has gone! And never called me “mother”! I was rather hoping that I’d get to see her in action too.
Most of the fishing boats are out at sea too. No peace for the wicked.
Back here I made myself a smoothie and then crashed out for a short while after the exertions of the afternoon walking around the headland.
Later on I did some more revision of my Welsh and then went for my three-hour Welsh revision session. And that meant that I haven’t had any tea tonight – just a bag of crisps. Now that my notes are finished I’m off to bed. I intend to make the most of my 8 hours sleep and hope that I can keep the momentum going for tomorrow. I’m not quite used to this at all.
