… never to laugh or take the micky out of foreign translations into English (after all, my writing in French and Flemish isn’t all that much to write home about) but there are some occasions that just leap to the eye.
Here in Noz this morning, I was presented with the opportunity to buy some “dehydrated black fungus”.
The literal translation is of course “dehydrated black mushrooms” and I might ordinarily have been tempted – a handful of those sprinkled on my Sunday pizza would have soon absolrbed any excess liquid, but I couldn’t get past the “black fungus” bit.
So in the end I passed up the opportunity
Having gone to bed reasonably early last night, it was still a struggle to leave the bed at 06:00 when the alarm went off.
After breakfast I had a little session listening to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I was staying with someone who was a cross between my Aunt Mary and Rosemary, in a room that was underneath one of the rooms in the attic where there were peopel staying. I wasn’t particularly clean because I’d been working all the time. I didn’t have many clothes with me and it wasn’t possible to wash them so I was rather struggling. We had a big house and there was a huge garden with it, completely overgrown and an absolute mess and we’d started work on tidying that up. Some guy had come along to help us and move the heavy stuff. We’d sorted out all of the washing, all the clothes and stuff in the barn and there was a pile of stuff. By the time that he was ready to leave the place looked brilliant. he said that there was a load of washing and clothes still in the barn but he’d had to take the washing line down. If someone wanted to refix it, he’d come along later and put the clothes back up. I said that I’d do that, although I didn’t feel much like it with my health because I didn’t want him rummaging through those clothes. There was a huge bank at the back of the house and we were manoeuvring stuff up there, putting it into skips and everything. There was an issue with horse hair for some reason. This woman asked me if I’d stayed in that room before. I replied “yes, I was in that same room last year”. She said “ahh well, a horse hair has got out and this was something of a tragedy to her that this horse hair had escaped from this room.
While I was at it, I did a few of the arrears too and just as I was on the point of finishing, there was a power cut and I had to start again, right from the very beginning, having forgotten to save my post as I worked.
And do you know – I’ve been using this text editor – NOTE-TAB – for over 20 years and it wasn’t until just after the power cut that I realised that there’s an autosave facility buried deep in the bowels of this program. It’s now set to “save every 2 minutes”.
But then this is how I’ve learnt most of the details about the programs that I use – thinking about “surely this particular function would be quite useful in this program” and searching my way through the program’s functions until I find it.
Off to the shops I set, and the first port of call was Noz of course. I eschewed the dehydrated black fungus but instead bought a couple of “orange and strawberry” drinks with which to take my medicine.
As well as that, having thought long and hard about what webcam to buy for the big computer (for more than two years in fact) they had some cheap ones at €3:50 so I’ll have a bit of a play with that and see what happens.
At LeClerc they had grapes at, would you believe, €1:49 per kilo so I bought a huge pile of those. The autumn is the time of year that I love, because we have grapes in abundance followed by clementines and satsumas, all the way up to the New Year.
A rather unusual purchase was a tin of WD40. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been having problems with Caliburn’s door latch mechanism and having dismantled it a few weeks ago I could see the problem.
So on the car park of LeClerc it’s all had a really good oiling and it will be having a few more before I reassemble the door panelling.
Now here’s something that you very rarely, if ever, see here in France.
By the side of the road in a parking area outside a row of houses is a damaged car, parked up on blocks with its wheels missing. And judging by the amount of rust on the front discs, it’s been like that for quite a while too.
Usually, the council is pretty quick on identifying abandoned vehicles and tagging the wheels to check whether the vehicles are in use (we’ve seen a couple of these) and then if there’s no evidence of movement they take them away.
They don’t need to tag this one to see that it’s not in use.
Back here I put my frozen peas in the freezer, made myself a coffee, sat down to drink it and the next thing that I knew, it was almost 14:00. And it’s been a good couple of weeks since I’ve crashed out se deeply, so definitively and so long as this.
While I was away, I was off on my travels. I was working for Gill Leese again, just as I had been one night a couple of weeks ago, presumably before I had been unceremoniously fired. A few drivers had taken a couple of coaches and gone somewhere. While I was there one of the drivers suddenly asked me “could you ‘phone Gill now?”. I went to fetch my ‘phone but I couldn’t remember the password. When I did, I was entering it in all wrong and it was all totally crazy. It took me ages to actually get into it. I ‘phoned her and she said that there had been a customer who had come in and wanted to take a coach-load of people on a lion hunt somewhere out in Leicestershire way that evening. Would I do it?”. I thought that this was an extremely strange pantomime way of asking me to go about doing something. I said that I would do it but I was still puzzled as to why it had taken her all of this effort instead of someone just asking me outright at some other time during the day.
It took me quite a while to gather my wits (which is a surprise, seeing how few I have left these days) and so I ended up with a very late lunch, yet again.
This afternoon I had a few things to do, including catching up with completing yesterday’s entry (which is still unfinished) but there wasn’t much of an afternoon left before it was time for me to head out to the football.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago I mused about the situation that would surely arise when the gates of the port would be due to arise and there would be a mass stampede back to the harbour.
It seems that my afternoon trip out today has coincided with the closure of the gates of the port this afternoon because that’s precisely what I was witnessing as I walked on down the hill
However, there is one boat that seems to be heading off in the opposite direction. He’s quite possibly off for a trip around and either come back on the morning tide or to go off and find another harbour elsewhere.
The sunout in the west was creating a haze on the water and out of the haze, boats were coming from all directions.
It wasn’t just yachts and cabin cruisers either. There were a few kayakers too, paddling like fury to reach the shore. They’ll want to be home before the evening goes cold because,being so close to the water, it’s very cold in there and you can’t have your kayak and heat it.
There are a couple of boats with multiple oars too. I once knew someone who fell out of one of those. And everyone said that he was out of his schull.
Outside the entrance to the tidal harbour, there was what almost amounted to a traffic jam.
We have yachts, zodiacs, speedboats and kayakers all jostling for position and fighting for their way into harbour.
So I left them all to it – I didn’t have too much time to waste – and headed off down the hill down the Rue des Juifs on my way down to the centre of the town in the sun on my way to the football.
You can tell that the summer season has come to an end. All of the attractions that were here for the summer are disappearing one by one.
The kiddies’ roundabout that was here in the Place Charles de Gaulle throughout the summer has been dismantled and taken away. I wouldn’t have thought that a Saturday would have been a good day to remove it with the market and all of the families with children wandering around the shops.
The walk up the hill towards the football ground was tough again, although it seems that it’s a little easier than it has been just recently. Perhaps the physiotherapy is doing its job.
At the Stade Louis Dior US Granville were plaving Sologne Olympique Romorantinais.
The two teams are quite low down the table having had a poor start to the season and it didn’t go any better for Granville as they lost 1-2.
In fact Granville played quite well but they just couldn’t find the final shot on goal no matter how much of the attack that they had.
And when they did have a decent attempt on goal, a beatiful cross that split the defence, it was the attacker at the far post who ended up in the net and the ball whistled past the post. The goal that they did score was a clearance out of defence that the Granville midfield fired straight back.
Romorantan just had two shots on goal and scored tham both, which shows you just how cruel a game of football could be.
What was quite amusing was that after Granville missed their sitter at the far post, Romorantin went upfield and scored their second, and it was immediately from the kickoff that Granville scored their goal. That was a phrenetic two minutes.
Apart from the seagulls around here, there are quite a few colonies of songbirds in the town and one of them nestles in the row of trees behind the football ground.
As we were watching the game, the colony came home to roost in the trees, circling around above our heads as they came in to land.
It was like watching a scene from Daphne du Maurier’s THE BIRDS and Jessica Tandy ran from the flock, clutching her skirt between her legs and Alfred Hitchcock explaining to Kenneth Williams “a bird in the hand is worth two in the …”
Being stood up for a couple of hours was more exahusting than I could imagine and I’m seriosly considering taking a seat in the grandstand in future, which shows you how ill I’m feeling these days, and so even the long walk down the hill was exhausting.
The sun was going down as I staggered back up the Rue des Juifs and I was glad to get to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour where I could stop and sit on a seat and catch my breath.
The harbour gates were closed by now and everyone who was coming in home is home and tied up.
From left to right, we have Chausiaise, Marité nearest the camera, Galeon Andalucia behind her, still in port, and then Granville and Victor Hugo, the two Channel Island ferries.
A couple of weeks ago we witnessed them starting to repair one of the brick walls that form the capping of the retaining wall that separates the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne from the Boulevard des Terreneuviers.
The top row of capping had diappeared a while back and they had stuck some bricks on top of it. But now they have infilled and pointed the brickwork and they have done quite a decent job of it too.
The walk up to the top of the hill from here went rather easier than I was expecting and not as much of a struggle as I was fearing. To my surprise, I found that I even had some force in my right knee too.
While I was here, a good few hours later than usual, I went to look at the beach to see what was happening.
Surprisingly there were a few people down there too, despite the lateness of the hour and the fact that it was growing dark. Trying to squeeze every last moment of what is left of the summer.
And I’m convinced that when Rosemary came to visit me a couple of years ago she hid a spy camera in this apartment.
She rang me up last weekend just as the final whistle blew on the football that I was watching on the internet, and tonight it was just as I walked through the door after the football up the road.
We had a lengthy chat as usual and as a result I’ve had no tea and I’ve done nothing at all to finish off my day.
It makes me wonder just WHEN I’m ever going to get myself up-to-date.
