… Marité isn’t going to be back in port very soon.
As you can see in this photo, her place down at the bottom corner of the harbour has been taken by one of the Joly France boats that normally runs the ferry service over to the Ile de Chausey. She’s the newer one of the two as well. You can tell the difference from this angle by the windows. They are deep and thin rather than the square-ish ones of the other boat.
So I’ve no idea when we might see Marité back in town. She’s still in Lorient undergoing her annual service and I’ve no idea how long that’s going to take. We’ve seen boats in the chantier navale for a lot longer than we would expect.
Last night I was much shorter in bed than I was expecting. But that was due to not going to bed until late. When the alarm went off at 06:00 I leapt out of bed and went for my medication. And to my surprise, I’ve not crashed out at all today despite less than 6 hours sleep. Perhaps its the late rising yesterday that is responsible for that.
After the medication I came in and had a go at the next live concert. I’d decided on which concert that I was going to do but to my dismay some of the sound files have become corrupted and I had to re-record them onto the laptop.
And I learnt something today too. The CD on which they had been recorded was damaged due to all kinds of staining and wouldn’t clean off. However, I have some glass cleaner that is designed for these new electric hobs and I tried some of that. And to my surprise it worked perfectly and I’ll remember that for next time.
So now that the sound files were uploaded to the computer I could proceed. And with a lot of hacking about and editing and copy-and-pasting, and a little over-dubbing here and there, I now have a quite presentable live concert. 5 minutes 08 seconds of speech written, recorded and edited down to 2 minutes and 49 seconds completed the one-hour slot.
It took rather longer than I was expecting, due to the re-recoding issues. I was hoping to have a second one done today too but that will have to be for another time
After lunch I had a listen to the programme that will be transmitted this coming weekend and then I sent it off. Following which I had a listen to my completed live concert to make sure that it’s ok. But there’s still a couple of little bits of editing to do and that will be for tomorrow.
That toom up nicely for my afternoon walk around the headland.
When I went outside I didn’t get very far. Just a couple of inches in fact before I took my first photo.
The other day, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I mentioned that there must be road works going on somewhere in the old town as they had set up some kind of builders’ compound on the corner of the car park across the road from here.
Today it looks as if they have had a delivery of gravel because there was a fleet of dumpers coming up the road having their hoppers filled with gravel from the digger. That presumably means that they are not far from finishing what they were doing if they are back-filling it already. I really ought to go down into the old town and try to find out what is going on.
Next stop of course is the end of the car park and to look over the wall to see what is happening down on the beach.
And the answer to that was “not a lot”. First of all, there wasn’t all that much beach to be on in order to have a happening, and secondly, there wasn’t anyone that I could see actually down there to which it might be happening.
And that was a surprise because it was the nicest day of the year so far. Not only was it warm, there was very little wind and it’s a very long time since I’ve been able to say that. I would have expected to have seen the crowds out there in their thousands today.
While I was out there looking at the beach I was overflown by another light aeroplane on her way to the airport at Donville les Bains.
And she’s another aircraft whom we have seen on several previous occasions – at least three in fact. She’s F-GBAI, one of the Robin DR400 140B four-seater aircraft that is actually owned by the Granville Aero Club. She’s powered by a 160-horsepower engine and has a range of 500 miles without refuelling.
Being equipped for night flying, she’s used by the Aero Club for advanced training and for local flights. And that reminds me that I need to make further enquiries about her too one of these days as well as enquiries about the sailing club in the town.
This was something strange that I bumped into, and I have no idea what was going on here.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one of the (many) things that feature in these pages on a regular basis is me taking photographs of people taking photographs. Here, there’s some kind of set-up involving a three-piece suite, other furniture and a few cameras on tripods. I particularly liked the potted plants.
There was nothing in the local papers about there being a film set here and there was no- security around ushering people away so it can’t be anything formal. But whatever they were doing, they were obviously enjoying themselves doing it.
At the end of the headland I finally caught up with a few people out and about enjoying themselves.
Apart from the people at the film set, I hadn’t seen anyone coming towards me on the lawn, the path or the car park but at the end of the headland there were several people walking around the lower path, taking the long way round. This small family had stopped at the bench by the old watchman’s cabin, presumably to catch their breath.
The adults, that is. The kids still looked as if they had bags of energy. Kids can run around for hours and then collapse spectacularly.
No fishermen out there either. None on the rocks or, as far as I could see, in the bay. There was one boat way down the far end but that was far too far away for me to identify it.
From there I walked on down the path along the top of the headland. No change in occupancy in the chantier navale today, and nothing else going on in the harbour.
But there was something happening down at the Fish processing Plant. As I looked, a whole horde of people came streaming out of the Fish Processing Plant.
“What on earth is happening there?” I asked myself. There was no indication of anything. But I do know that the fishermen are having regular meetings talking about escalating their dispute with the British Government and maybe it was something to do with that this afternoon. Who knows?
None the wiser, and not eve better-informed, I came on back to the apartment for my hot mug of coffee, of which I forgot to drink half.
During the night I can’t remember who I was with now but I was in Stoke on Trent, Hanley, walking up towards Etruria station. Someone was coming down the road after me who I’d left but I had gone on a little detour to have a look at something so it looked as if I was actually walking back up Etruria Road to find my street, as if I was heading back up to Hanley. That was bound to be confusing to the person coming behind me in this car. I wandered off down a side street and sat down. I had a wind turbine with me and I put it on the table while I was sitting there in the rain. There were 3 girls, like I suppose 6,8 and 9 something like that who were running around in this garden. They were looking at my wind turbine and looking at me, chatting among themselves then went back inside the house. There was then some kind of commotion so I went in. 2 girls were sitting in a corner quietly and the oldest girl was unconscious. There was a heap of people with this girl, men and women then these people started to move around a little and a guy started to interrogate 2 of them. It turned out that he was probably a bigger crook than they were. They were telling him about the kind of vehicle that the hero was driving and they had to catch him, so the guy was telling them all his plans for catching them. He’d let the guy chase him and when he came up behind him he’d flip his car round and flip the other car off the road. He made a deliberate mistake in writing the address so one of the fellows summoned him over to have a look and he got there in the middle of these 2 people to look at what this guy was writing and suddenly gave them an enormous rabbit punch in the kidneys with a knuckle duster and flatted them both out, said “goodbye suckers” and walked out.
And that’s only about half of it too. Seeing as it’s tea time right now I’ll spare you (and myself) all of the gory details.
Tea tonight was veggie balls and steamed veg with vegan cheese sauce, followed by jam roly-poly and sorbet. I’ve over-cooked the jam roly-poly unfortunately, not as bad as it was the first time, but half an hour, I reckon, will be plenty long enough next time. Nevertheless, it’s a good attempt at a pudding.
Anyway tonight, I’m not hanging around. I’ve had a day where I haven’t crashed out at all and that’s the first time for ages. I want to keep on going and anyway there is my Welsh class tomorrow.
