As the legendary TS McPhee once sang –
“I’ve done everything that I’ve ever set out to do”.

That is to say, what I had planned to do today, I did. Two radio programmes, all finished done and dusted, and all by 14:30 too. And I would have finished half an hour earlier had I not under-run the main one by 4 seconds and had to track down some filler.

Mind you, I cheated. After I’d finished yesterday’s notes, I wasn’t tired in the least and so I sat down to choose the music for today. And not only did I do that, I mixed the sound to equalise all of them, combined them in pairs and even added the intro to the first pair.

It’s amazing what you can do when you are motivated and aren’t tired. But where did this motivation come from? That’s what I want to know. It’s not like me just recently.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, despite the late-ish finish I actually beat the third alarm to my feet and I haven’t done that for a while either.

There was still time for me to have been off on my travels. We were in a hostel last night discussing some kind of bilateral union. The first thing that we noticed was that someone had rigged up some kind of cable for a microphone but had used about 5 miles of cable. Instead of going directly, they had gone and followed every kind of nook and cranny possible and used far too much wire. Then the question of “bilateral” came up. “What if one party doesn’t want to agree?”. “Well, we have a unilateral one”. They asked “how do you make that out?”. I replied “that involves the army of course”. I’m not quite sure where we went or what we discussed after this but we were certainly discussing for quite some time but I seem to have forgotten it all. But part of it involved something to do with salaries. They were one of the subjects discussed. It turned out that people believed that someone was paying someone else’s salary so that they could come into work, purely for “nefarious” reasons.

And I’m sure that there was much more to it than this but there was nothing else on the dictaphone and I can’t remember anything else.

By about 12:15 I’d finished the first radio programme. All 11 tracks, all of the text dictated and merged and all tied together to make an hour-long programme.

Then I started on the live concert. That involved the 7 tracks that I had, finding out that one of them was wrong so looking around for the correct version, combining all of the tracks and editing out the joins, and looking for an extra 30 seconds of speech that I knew existed but wasn’t on what I had, so I had to search for that and find it too and then add it in.

By the time I knocked off (and I had had my lunch break too) I’d written some of the text. Not all of it because this is something extremely private and the information isn’t in the public domain. It’s having to be sent to me by the people concerned and it will be here when it gets here.

But one thing is certain – and that is that when it finally is broadcast, it’ll be something really special. Something of which part has only ever been broadcast once and the other part has never been broadcast at all. I’ll be making radio history with this.

For the rest of the day I didn’t do very much. I considered that I’d worked hard enough. I did a few housekeeping bits and pieces while I waited for the horrendous rainstorm raging outside to calm down.

When the right moment arrived, I buttoned up my raincoat and headed out for my afternoon walk.

And straight away I noticed that the roofers were up there at work again fixing the slates on the building in the Rue St Jean. Their machine was out there lifting the material up to the top, blocking the road to the Mercedes taxi behind it.

Other vehicles had passed through at the side of the machine without too much difficulty and without sounding their horns, and eventually the Mercedes did too. It makes a change for a Mercedes to be the victim of some selfish motorist – not that this is selfish at all of course.

The rainstorm that I had seen in the distance now caught me good and proper as I was wandering down the Rue du Nord.

By the time I’d gone down onto the footpath where I run, we were having a hailstorm. You can see the size of the raindrops and hailstones in this photos and within minutes the bits of me were soaked right through to the skin – and I really do mean that.

No chance of running down there. You’ve seen the size of the puddles. And you’ll see the temporary fencing down at the end of the path to fence off yet another part of the walls that are slowly falling down. This leg of the run goes on about 50 metres or so past the end of the temporary fence.

picking my way gingerly around the puddles I made my way down the path, but came to a stop at a certain point along the path.

There was all this water bubbling up from the ground just here. I imagine that there must be some kind of drain from the street up above that goes down here, and the force and volume of the water has overwhelmed the outlet down at this level.

That’s not something that I’ve noticed before, usually because I don’t very often come this way in the daylight and certainly not in weather quite like this.

The rainstorm had passed by the time that I reached the viewpoint looking over the Plat Gousset and the Place Marechal Foch.

People had now started to come out of hiding and were wandering up and down the promenade. Further along the coast towards Donville les Bains you can still the rain beating down on the beach along there and it was very likely that we’ll be getting another helping of rain pretty soon.

The tide is well in too. No room for anyone to sit on the beach – not that you would find any willing takers in weather like this either.

The other evening I posted a photo of the concrete Eglise St Paul on the end of the hill across the valley where the town is situated.

To get to the church by road, it’s a long, tortuous, circular route but if you are on foot, there’s a staircase from one of the little roads that leads off the Rue Couraye. I’ve never counted the number of steps, but there’s far more than enough for my liking wit my state of health.

The statue there at the head of the steps is a monument to the soldiers of France and interestingly, dates from 1904, before the carnage of 1914-18. Quite rarely, it’s a memorial to the dead of the Franco-Prussian War and hasn’t been overwritten with the names of the Dead from 1914-18 and 1940-45.

One of these days when I’ve been shopping at LIDL I’ll come back that way and have a closer look at it

So like a drowned rat, I ran across the Square Maurice Marland seeing as there was no-one else about, and made my way home, just about beating the next downpour that was following the previous one.

My session on the guitar was also much better. A few more Jimi Hendrix ones followed by a couple of Jethro Tull numbers on the bass and to my surprise I could sing along to all of them even while I was playing. As for the 6-string, I spent much of the time working out the chords to Tull’s “Wind Up” and then playing a couple of other sing-along numbers.

Tea tonight was one of the end-of-range burgers that I had bought 10 days ago. And decided that I didn’t like them all that much. Mind you, my apple pie for pudding was delicious yet again. And I forgot to mention – the fruit bread that I made yesterday is magnificent.

Later on this evening the rain had died down so I ventured outside for my evening walk.

But it was too good to be true, and certainly didn’t last. I hadn’t gone five yards before the rain came drenching down and I was soaked to the skin. However I pushed on to do at least something tonight. Here’s the Boulevard Vaufleury down which I usually run (except for tonight of course) and you can see just how heavily the rain was coming down.

Even though I have to keep up my fitness as much as I can, there are limits. I wasn’t going to stay out in all of this.

The moonlight was shining brightly over the Baie de Mont St Michel tonight despite the rain fall so I went to take a photo of it.

Unfortunately it didn’t turn out as well as I was hoping. I couldn’t get myself into a good position, I was being buffeted about by the wind and drenched by the rain. No chance of getting myself set up properly in all of this.

However, not to have a completely wasted day today, I ran all the way home from here back to the apartment and the dry, shaking myself to disperse all of the rain before I dragged it all inside with me

So having finished all of that, I’m going to have a quiet early night. Tomorrow I have to be out early, taking Caliburn for his makeover. And on the way back I have to pick up my travel tickets for Saturday from the railway station.

It’s all go here these days, isn’t it?