Tag Archives: carry on cruising

Sunday 19th November 2023 – IF I EVER FIND …

… out who it was who rang my doorbell this morning at 09:30, “harsh words” will be said. I was just on the point of tidying the kitchen and putting things away when someone rang the front door bell and awoke me. Who does a thing like that at 09:30 on a Sunday morning? I just stuck my head under the bedclothes and presumably they went away. However I couldn’t go to sleep again after that. It really annoyed me

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m happy (well, I’m not, actually, but that’s by the way) to raise myself from the dead at any time you like but Sunday is a Day Of Rest when there’s never an alarm and I’m quite content to lie in bed for as long as it takes until I’m ready to show a leg. And anyone who gets in my way and interrupts me will know all about it.

But that’s not the worst of it.

As it happens I did manage to go back to sleep at some point but at 10:15 the doorbell went again.

This time I staggered across the apartment as Nature intended ready to give someone a piece of my mind but there was no-one on the other end of the parlophone.

There was no point in going back to bed after that so I had my medication and, exceptionally, I made myself a mug of strong instant coffee

It took a while, as it usually does these days, to come round into the Land of the Living and then I sat down to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I’d been producing a play. Admittedly it wasn’t very good but it was part of street entertainment. The idea was that there would be 4 different versions of this play taking place simultaneously and the actors would begin to walk from the far end of each street until they arrived simultaneously in the centre of the Square in the town centre. Of course, doing something on that kind of scale in a small town there won’t be any kind of experienced actors so if you did find any experienced actors you’d ration them out between the different performances to make sure that one of the streets didn’t have more quality than the others. It was all quite hit-and-miss, the kind of thing that was destined to fail but you would give it a go. The actors set off and slowly advanced into the town centre down their respective streets to meet up in the middle. There was one woman who was really outraged because she considered that her street had a couple of second-rate actors playing important roles whereas the neighbouring street had a couple of professional, experienced actors playing the same roles. She was incensed. What annoyed me more than anything was that from where she was standing to watch it she could actually see two performances, the one with the average actors and that with the better actors in the leading role so she really had no grounds to complain. Nevertheless she was extremely angry and vituperative about it.

That reminds me of something that happened 10 years ago when I was in Munich. I was at some kind of party with some theatrical types and busy chatting to a young Italian girl who was with a travelling theatre company. She was telling me that she was going to produce her first ever play – either Hamlet or “The Scottish Play”, I can’t remember now.
She asked me "how would you produce the play?"
"Do you know the play well?"
"Yes I do" she responded.
"Have you read it?" I asked
"Yes I have" she answered
"When you read it, do you visualise in your mind and your imagination what is going on, or do you simply look at the words?"
"I can imagine and visualise it" she answered.
"Well, that’s how you produce it – so that it turns out exactly how you imagine it to be. It’s all your own work – no-one else’s so do it how YOU see it and not how anyone else wants you to see it, otherwise there’s no point in you being the producer"

And half an hour later "how would you produce the play?"

Later on during the night I was talking to the lorry driver with whom I was talking in a dream a couple of nights ago. He was telling me that every Sunday he had to go to the fuel depot at Y Fflint to load up his lorry ready for the week’s work. But because it was a Bank Holiday just about everywhere was filling up so there was an enormous queue. He wasn’t attended to until late at night which meant that he had no drivers’ hours left to go home. He slept at the side of the road in his cab then spent the next week delivering, running later and later because with the effects of Covid it took much more time to unload and prepare anything. Instead of being home for Friday he ended up coming off the road and going straight to the tanker depot to refuel for the next week’s work without even seeing his home and having to sleep in his cab for the night again. He went at the height of Covid for several weeks without even seeing his own home and family.

Finally I was staying with some people in Arizona, in a big house on the edge of town. There was just the boy of the house and me there – the family was away. No-one had said anything about food and by now I was starving. I’d brought some bread rolls with me in the car so I said that I’d make a sandwich. Did he want anything? He replied no so I went off and fetched whatever I had, which wasn’t very much. later on in the afternoon as it began to go dark I went for a walk. I could tell by plaques on various places around the town that it had been created in 1918 as a watering point along the railway. Someone had built a church but it was all ripped out and modernised in 1933. There were several stories. One of the strangest things was that at the side of the Town Hall was what might have been a memorial of a 1950s convertible that had been involved in a really heavy front-end smash. There were 3 children standing by the car so I wondered if they had been killed in the accident and the memorial was to them. The most interesting thing was when I went down a side street I ended up in some kind of gallery that was all ornate carved wood like something out of a Gothic cathedral. There were people milling around and one or two people were talking to me. I was standing by a waste paper bin blocking it. Some woman asked me to move so we had a little chat. I pointed out to her a ghastly luminous human head floating down the gallery. As I went round the corner I came across a cat show with about 20 or 30 cats in baskets. I went over to stroke them and some woman made a remark to someone else about “that’s the guy who’s staying with such-and-such a family at the moment”

After lunch I made the pizza for the next batch of pizza and I do have to say that the dough came out the best that I have made for some considerable time.

While it was busy proofing I began the bread and butter pudding.

The recipe included eggs so I had a go with Liz’s patent baking-soda-and-vinegar replacement. And the result was something like Lance Percival experienced in CARRY ON CRUISING

Nevertheless it went into the oven well enough and baked quite nicely. I decided in the end to bake it in a low, wide dish in the conventional oven so that it will cook more evenly

As yet I haven’t tasted it but if it’s anything as nice as the uncooked mixture tasted before I baked it, it’ll be phenomenal.

And having ordered some dry figs in the week from LeClerc, I found three unopened packets in my baking box. I really must make a proper and thorough inventory of exactly what I have in here.

In between everything I edited the radio notes that I’d dictated last night and I completed the programme. I’ll be ready to start the next one tomorrow.

There was a visitor too. One of my neighbours came round to talk to me about cars with hand controls.

The pizza was absolutely delicious again, and now that I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed once I’ve had a drink of honey, blackcurrant and lemon

So who will put in an appearance tonight? At some point during the night I had a vague recollection that Nerina was there or thereabouts. I’ve no objection to her coming to visit me during the night because, after all, I did invite her to share my life for better or for worse.

However I do wish that everyone else in my family would clear off and leave me alone. I put as much distance between them and me in the real world as I possibly can and so I take a great deal of objection to them pursuing me around in the ether during the night.

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Monday 12th February 2018 – IT’S SNOWING!!!!

snowing place d'armes granville manche normandy franceWe had bright sunlight quite early on and I’d turned the light off early today. But round about 10:30 it went pitch-black outside.

And so out of curiosity I went for a peep out of the window and sure enough, we were having a fall of snow.

No-one was more surprised than me to see it, that’s for sure. I love the snow as you know, and I was bitterly disappointed to think that I might have missed out.

snow fall place d'armes granville manche normandy franceMind you, when I say “snowing” – that’s something of an exaggeration. Especially when regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen photos of the Auvergne where I lived and where we could have half a metre of snow at the drop of a hat.

This was just a bare covering of snow, and unfortunately it didn’t last long. The weather quickly brightened up and within 20 minutes it had all melted away.

But it’s snow nevertheless, and here are the photos to prove it.

I’d had another good night’s sleep and been travelling again. I can only remember a small part of it, and that involved a cruise liner with a scene something reminiscent of Carry On Cruising. There was also a pile of loose change to be considered too, and the pieces of money were large and mis-shapen, nothing like what you would expect coins to look like these days.

Medication and breakfast, and once it all worked I settled down and attacked the European Photo Mountain. I’m at the stage where I can slowly start to add things back into the stuff on the external hard drive. It’s certainly a lot tidier – and a lot emptier – than it was when I resurrected it.

But there’s still tonnes of stuff missing and I do wonder where it’s all gone to. There must be another external hard drive somewhere, but I’m badgered if I know where it might be.

With a minor interruption to look at the snow, I carried on with it until lunchtime, and soup again.

Back at work and I had a phone call to make. It’s another one of these cases where you send a letter to someone telling them of your change of address, so they send the next document to your old address. I’m fed up of all of this.

And then there was a letter to write. That involved a lot of work and research, but that’s done now. And then there was a pile of stuff to print off. My Health Insurance want a declaration that I’m still alive (I’m not even sure of that and I’m sure that you aren’t either) and there are some documents from the Health Insurance to hand in to them. All of that needed to be printed off in order to take with me on Wednesday.

And then I tidied up and filed away a load of paperwork that had been lying around.

normandy trader port de granville harbour manche normandy franceIt was a beautiful, bright, warm sunny afternoon so I went for my afternoon walk around the headland again.

And I was in luck – just in time to see Normandy Trader cast off forr’ead and cast off aft, and set sail … "diesel" – ed … out of her little mooring.

Yes, the tide is right in, so there’s no point in my going down to look at this new gate arrangement thing to see what they have done.

normandy trader port de granville harbour manche normandy franceSo with a touch of “left hand down a bit”, Normandy Trader negotiated the exit to the tidal harbour and headed off out to the open seas.

I thought that we might have had a maritime disaster on her hands as just as she was leaving, two fishing boats appeared coming in.

But keeping starboard to starboard instead of the more usual port to port, there were no shipwrecks, nobody drownding and nothing to laugh at at all.

Back here I had a cold drink for a change – it was so warm (for the time of year) and then my exertions caught up with me.

Half an hour later, I had a session on the bass guitar – this time picking out the bass line to “Ride a White Swan” by T Rex. As the skunk said when the wind changed, “it all comes back to me now”.

Tea was more tortillas (I want to finish off the packet before I leave) with another load of my home-made stuffing mix, which really is good, even though I say it myself.

The wind had got up again when I went out for my night-time walk. It seems like the easly Spring has come and gone.

So I’ll have an early night, I reckon. Plenty to do tomorrow and there’s the Mardi Gras parade for the carnaval tomorrow afternoon.

Not to be missed, so I’m told.

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Saturday 12th March 2016 – BLIMEY! WHAT A NIGHT!

I don’t know what it was that they put in all of those injections that they gave me yesterday, but saying that I had a disturbed night last night was something of an understatement. In fact, when the alarm went off, I found that all of the bed clothes were all over the floor. And in trying to get out of bed, I fell right on my nether regions. Clearly, something was going on.

And despite being crashed out in bed long before 20:15, I didn’t need to make a trip down the corridor despite having such a fitful night. Instead, I was off on some of the most astonishing voyages that I have had to date. I’m sure that all of these injections and medicaments that I’m taking are responsible for the greater part of what is going on in my head during the night.

We started off back in Crewe, in West Street yet again but at the town end by the Jet garage. Someone had sent me a panoramic photo of the area and you could see just how bad the area was, with abandoned houses and demolition sites all around, particularly in the area between West Street and Richard Moon Street. It goes to show just what a horrible place Crewe is – something ironically that I had been discussing with Terry and Liz during the evening. I was down at that end of town because I’d had a message from Cecile that contained a file but my telephone wouldn’t open it, so I went down there because she had a flat down there where she lived with her mother. So walking down the street, I came across Cecile and I went in to see them and we had a good chat, not about anything in particular. Cecile had been given some money by her mother, some of which was Belgian money including a 20-franc piece which she had put on one side to make an emergency phone call if necessary if she needed help, which just goes to show how far behind the times Cecile’s mother was because you couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee with that in Belgium these days. But it turned out that Cecile’s mum hadn’t given just a couple of hundred Belgian francs in notes to Cecile, but also a couple of hundred Euros in notes too. I had a brief glance and it looked to me as if there were at least 500 Euros in there. Cecile’s mum had a huge stuffed gorilla which she was cuddling. I made the remark that I should have brought Strawberry Moose around for her to cuddle because he was missing her. Or maybe, they should both come round to my house to see him because Strawberry Moose is missing Cecile’s mother. Cecile’s mother interjected to say “well, give him a big kiss from me” and that sort of thing. At that point, I left the apartment to continue my travels.
These took me to the far north of Alaska or Canada with someone who started out to be Rachel (but it wasn’t her) and we were off driving somewhere and ended up in this town. Where we parked was on some kind of concrete quayside by a river that was running through an open culvert and which was a non-fishing river, and another car pulled up alongside up. In this car was a family consisting of a man and presumably his wife, with a daughter in her early teens and an older son. This “Rachel” girl and I had gone there to do a few shady deals which involved a couple of people belonging to the local ethnic group and these people had now spiked our guns, so we needed to be much more discreet. These native people needed to leave us and travel into the centre of the town, and so chose to travel by canoe down this river, their canoe being was fitted with an outrigger. It was important that this family didn’t see the canoe with its occupants, but the boy saw them. He started to say something about them not having the right to be in there, seeing as how it’s a non-fishing river, but the father tried to reassure him, saying that maybe they were just voyagers, but the boy thought that this was strange. He made the point that dawn was only just breaking and so if they had set out from a neighbouring village, they would have had to have set out in the pitch-darkness and that would have been impossible down the river in the canoe. This led to something of an argument. I ended up going for a walk with the mother of this party and we went for a good stroll around. she told me about the issues that she was having with her son – he was 18 and at college but was bone-idle. We were trying to access the internet but we couldn’t make a connection – all we had was a long length of telephone cable instead of an ethernet connection. Plugging in the telephone cable, we couldn’t make a connection. This was annoying the boy who complained that he needed to access the internet, but I asked him how he expected to access the internet without the correct cable. Despite that, he still carried on complaining. This woman was saying that he really was a spoilt child. At this moment, the girl appeared. There was a little bit of sun and so she went out to sit in it in a short-sleeved tee-shirt and jeans. We had a laugh, and said that we expected her to be in a bikini in a minute or two. The woman and I then set off to walk back to the car, through a crowd of people that were milling around on the pavement. One of them was one of my niece’s daughters. She wasn’t expecting me to be there so as I walked past, I gave her a cheeky wave, causing her to burst out laughing. She started to call me “dad” and say things like “how’s my son?” We had quite a laugh about that. But this woman was still going on about her son. I had half a mind to say that this is what happens when you spoil your son far too much and don’t impose any controls on him. Kids should be taught to fight for what they want, not to be given everything regardless. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
By now, I was back at Montreal airport, employed as a taxi driver, although I was living in Rope Lane in Shavington. We had been having huge discussions about how quickly we should be moving passengers on from there, how to recognise quickly the ones who are looking for a taxi and so on. We needed one full-time driver from 06:00 to 18:00 and another from 18:00 until 06:00, with others coming on for 12-hour shifts at 07:00, 07:30 and every half hour until about 10:00, and then part-timers taking over for short shifts until the very early hours when the airport quietened down. People who are on their own or clearly looking lost, we need to approach them and at least find out their names and find out if they are waiting for anyone, and at least rule them out of our work. It would help to identify our potential customers so much quicker. The daughter of my niece was still with us and this is one thing that we had notice about her – she was waiting for a fare and there were a couple of people loitering around, so we asked her who they were (“I don’t know”) and what they wanted (“I don’t know”). It was these kinds of situations that we needed to avoid. And so the next morning, it was time for work. I was in the airport waiting for a fare and a big man came up, wearing a kind-of cowboy hat rather like the fat bad-tempered man on Carry On Cruising. He wanted to go to the brewery in Montreal so we walked round to where I had parked my car, but it wasn’t there! We tried another two or three places of where I might possible have parked it and it wasn’t there either. I had to go back to the house to find the other driver and get him to take this fare. All of this had made a total nonsense of my ideas about being quickly away from the airport. Now I had to go to look for my car. The other driver had parked his car in the marketplace but I was sure that I had looked in there for mine, but nevertheless I had to go back there and look. All of these fine plans that I had had about improving our business, and I couldn’t even find my own car.
I then went off to a railway station somewhere – a private railway station on one of these council-funded lines. We were waiting for a train and there was chronic under-funding as you might expect with anything involving British Rail and Local Government. The Flying Scotsman was there, not only pulling freight trains but then going off to do some shunting in the absence of any British Rail shunter or any more-suitable locomotive in the yard.

The alarm broke the spell of all of this and I ended up downstairs via the bedroom floor.

I spent most of the morning typing up the notes of last night’s voyages – all … gulp … 1572 words of it. And then after lunch I carried on with merging in the blog notes to the voyage around North America in September 2015. I say “North America” because I’m now in the USA, Burlington, Vermont, to be precise, where I was in early September.

And apart from that, I’ve not done anything at all. Just taken it easy.

And thinking about life and all of that as I reflect on the news that someone so gifted and talented in his life as Keith Emerson was should find something so wrong in his life that he should choose to end it by a gunshot to the head. If that’s not enough to make anyone ban the sale of firearms, I don’t know what is.

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