Tag Archives: cefn druids

Tuesday 31st August 2021 – THIS WAS ANOTHER …

… day that is best forgotten, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not been good at all.

When the alarm went off I managed to crawl from my bed and take my medicine, and then I had things to do.

The first thing that I needed to do was to bake some bread as I have now run out.

500 grammes of wholemeal cereal flour and a couple of handful of sunflower seeds produces a really nice loaf and using the technique that Liz showed me the other day when she came round, it produces a nice textured dough.

Once it was all kneaded together I left it to proof for a while and came back in here to check my mails and messages.

Meanwhile, according to the dictaphone, There had been a kind of “ping” when I was in bed during the night. Nerina panicked a bit and said something. I looked round and all the electricity was out. It looked as if we’d blown a fuse so I got up, went downstairs and reset the fuse. I came back upstairs and it was already 06:25 so there was no point going back to bed at that time. I decided that I may as well get up.
There was also something somewhere that I was down Middlewich Road somewhere where the Rising Sun used to be. I was with someone and it was a story about a motor bike. Someone had passed their driving test on a motorbike but they had left ot somewhere so we had to go and pick it up. It might have been Liz Ayers who was with me. We found the motorbike and I asked whoever it was with me if she wanted to ride it. She said “yes” so I got on the back, she got on the front and we rode off towards Willaston on it. When we arrived there this person had turned into a little girl wearing a kind-of party dress or bridesmaid’s dress or something. We were walking hand-in-hand down Crewe Road. We came to the turn-off down to Willaston but it was nothing like what the turning was like, but it was all blocked off. They were saying “you have to go down 2nd Avenue and I had no idea where 2nd Avenue was. I was going to go down Coppice Road. There was an interesting alley on our right so I took this girl down there to explore it but we found that it was just taking us back to where we’d been so we turned round and went back. In the meantime there were several other little girls who were all dressed in a similar kind of clothing, bridesmaid or 1st communion or something like that.

After I’d given the bread a second kneading and put it in the mould I came back to look through my Welsh coursework for today but just then Rosemary rang me up for a chat about a problem that she had, which I had to cut short (after about half an hour!) because it was time to go to class.

While I was making my coffee and sorting out my fruit-bread I switched on the oven and then when it was warm I put the bread in.

Just four of us at the Welsh lesson today – well, it is the summer break – and the time passed quite quickly.

Somewhere near the end of the lesson the oven switched itself off so once the lesson had finished I went to rescue the bread.

And it looks quite good too. I’m quite pleased with this, especially when I tried a couple of slices for lunch. One of my better loaves of bread, this is.

After my lunch I came back in here to start work but instead I drifted off once again into the Land of Nod and I’m going to have to stop doing this. It’s not doing me any good at all and I have far too much work to be doing right now.

But anyway, I digress … “again” – ed.

For my afternoon walk, once again I strolled across the car park to go and have a look over the wall and down onto the beach.

The tide is now even further in and there is even less beach to be on, but that clearly hasn’t bothered some of the people down there because, much to my surprise, there were some people actually in the water.

Not actually swimming, but being up to their shoulders in the water counts as much as anything else does. And for that they deserve a medal because the weather has certainly turned today and it seems that autumn is only just around the corner.

It’s the usual procedure while I’m here to have a look out to sea to see what I could see but I couldn’t even see a seagull this afternoon. There wasn’t a single thing happening out at sea so I set off along the path on the top of the cliffs taking care not to fall over again.

Out in the distance at sea there was a rainstorm brewing and the Ile de Chausey was pretty much obscured by clouds, as the old song goes.

But there was something moving right out there, just about to disappear itno the rainstorm. Something rather large so I photographed it for further examination when I returned home.

As it happens, I wasn’t much further forward after I’d enlarged and enhanced the photo. My best guess is that it’s one of the Joly France ferries going out there to bring home the day trippers and holidaymakers who are still out there. But which one, I really don’t know..

From what I could see, there is no step in the stern so it may well be the older Joly France boat.

Pushing on across the car park I went down to the end of the headland to see what was happening down there.

There may well have been no fishermen out at sea this afternoon but there were several people fishing from the rocks today. These two guys were fishing together so I stood and watched them for a while as they sorted themselves out.

Not of course that they actually caught anything while I was watching, and even had they done so, they didn’t seem to have a net to haul in their catch, or a bucket in which to keep it.

They weren’t the only people down there right at the end of the headland either.

Sitting on the bench at the end of the headland was this couple having a little relax.

And the old stone building behind them is one about which we have talked on many occasions. It’s one of the sentry boxes to give shelter to the Customs men while they were keeping an eye on traffic in the bay.

Back in the 18th and 19th Century the Channel Islands were a smuggler’s paradise and boats would regularly run the gauntlet in order to bring contraband into France. Hence the Customs men had these little cabins dotted all around the bay here, and handy semaphores that they used to send messages.

While I was looking around at the headland, I noticed this pile of flotsam and jetsam on the beach.

It would be very doubtful if the sacks and their contents had been washed up by the tide – I don’t think that even the power of the tides around here would be strong enough to move them about, but it’s very likely that the couple of buoys have come in with the tide.

As for the two buoys, the white one would seem to be a lobster pot marker or similar, whereas the yellow one is the same colour as the buoys that are used to mark out the patrolled areas of the beaches.

Meanwhile, I trudged on along the path round to the viewpoint from where I could see over the port.

And at least I ca tell you who it wasn’t who we saw out at sea just now. Over there, parked up at the ferry terminal is Belle France, the very newest of the ferries. Behind her is another one of the Joly France but unfortunately I can’t see which one she is.

While I was there I had a look at the chantier naval to see what was happening there but there was no change in any of the occupants today so I left them alone and carried on with my walk around the path.

There’s someone else who it was’t as well. Chausiaise, the little Chausey freighter, is down there moored to the quayside.

Behind her is the Galeon Andalucia and I’m not sure what’s happening with her because everyone, including the owners whom I contacted, told me that she should have sailed by now.

By now, my coffee was calling me so I headed back for home and a nice hot drink. And to draw up a couple of floor plans with a computer design programme for a project that I have in mind right now.

Another thing that I did was to try to write up some of the arrears from the other day but regrettably I fell asleep yet again and I can do without all of this.

As a result I was late for tea. Taco rolls yet again with the leftover stuffing from yesterday lengthened with a small tin of kidney beans. And while it was all a-doing I sorted out the freezer and tidied it up a little to make a little bit more space.

Once tea was over, I came back into the office just in time to catch the start of Y Drenewydd v Cefn Druids.

Y Drenewydd is a comfortable mid-table side but the Druids are quite frankly wretched. They were miles off the pace last season and during the summser a few of their better players departed for pastures new leaving their new manager to assemble rather hastily a scratch side of cast-offs and hopefuls.

They were swept aside in their opening couple of games this season and this match was no exception. At half-time the score was already 3-0 and Y Drenewydd could have had half a dozen more too.

At the start of the second half Naill McGuiness made a couple of substitutions and his team had a far better shape and even managed a shot on target. However, later in the game Chris Hughes took off a defender and a midfielder (something he should have done much earlier) and put on two extra attackers who simply overwhelmed the defence.

The 5-0 victory in the end was a lucky defeat for the Druids. They could have conceded a dozen and not had any cause to complain.

But here’s a question – what is Lifumpa Mwandwe doing playing in the Welsh Premier League? He was the best player on the field by a country mile and way above the class of everyone else on the field.

But right now, I’m off to bed. I’ve had another bad day today and I don’t need any more.

Saturday 19th December 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you were wondering (which I’m sure you aren’t) I missed the 3rd alarm this morning too.

Nothing like as dramatically as yesterday, it has to be said. Only by about 20 minutes as it happened but still, a miss is as good as a mile as they say. And after something of a rather late night, I’m not really all that surprised.

So after the medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been. And it’s no surprise that I was late getting up with everything going on that went on during the night.

I’m not quite sure what I was doing during part of the night but I had a cat. I was cooking a bone and the bone had obviously been there for a very long time because it had all dried out and the meat was dry and the skin made a kind of sub-cutaneous fat crackling that all broke away from the bone. It was like eating a packet of crisps. I was Eating this and the recipe had been sent to me by my friend in Galashiels so I asked her if her meat had turned out like this, whether it was simply a cheap cut, something like that, but I never really got an answer. That was when I awoke.

Later on there was a bunch of us in a school yard. We’d been on a trip by coach or a cruise or something like that and it was the final day. We had a big debriefing session and a little snack but that was before the evening meal which was the last on that we’d be taking together. I wanted to say goodbye to these girls with whom I’d been friendly. They might have been Castor and Pollux or they might not, I dunno. I knew which table they usually sat at so as soon as the meeting was open I made a beeline for that table and I was the first basically there. I sat down and other people came to join me. But at the evening meal there was only about a quarter of the people there, just 4 tables and the rest of the people, including the two people whom I was hoping to see, hadn’t come down. I imagined that the snack that they’d had in the afternoon was enough for them. That was extremely disappointing to me as you could imagine. Anyway I started to pass the cups and plates around – they were actually underneath the table on a shelf thing that pulled out so I was passing them around. I started out by pouring out tea and I asked if anyone else wanted one. Someone did, and I got into such a confusion about his mug that in the end he took the mug off me and held it while I poured it. The conversation descended into telling bawdy jokes and everyone was having a really good laugh. The annoying thing was that I couldn’t think of a joke to tell and that’s not like me. I couldn’t think of a single 1 and everyone else was telling these jokes and we were laughing, having a really good time about this but I felt terrible because I couldn’t think of a single joke and feeling even worse because these 2 girls hadn’t shown up. This put a real damper on my trip in the end.

Having had a shower, I put the washing machine en route (I’m having clean sheets tonight) and then headed out to the shops. Caliburn started straight away with his nice, new battery so there was no problem there.

NOZ came up with a couple of CDs and not really much of anything else important. On the other hand I spent a lot of money in LeClerc on all kinds of exciting things, mostly food-related. I didn’t buy much in the way of fresh vegetables for Christmas – I’m leaving that until Thursday when I’ll also be hoping, if I’m lucky, to find some Seitan slices.

But on the way back from the shops we had some excitement.

In the Rue Paul Legibon in the Quartier St Nicolas we had a police van and a fire engine in attendance at a house. And as I watched (firstly from stuck in a queue behind the fire engine and then in the church car park across the road) two firemen shinned up a ladder onto the terrace and proceeded to break into the house.

So whatever was going on there must have been quite important, if not serious, and doubtless we’ll be hearing more about this in due course.

Back here I put the frozen food (there wasn’t all that much) into the freezer, hung up the washing and then made myself a hot chocolate. And with a slice of my delicious fruit bread I attacked some arrears.

That took me up to lunchtime, and then after lunch I started to put some of the purchases away. Not all of them of course, I’m not feeling that much better. And when I felt up to it, I had a few things to do here that needed doing.

That took me up to walkies-time so I set off out of the apartment.

And almost straight away, as soon as I had set foot out of the door I was buzzed by a light aircraft that had obviously been hovering around, waiting for me to come outside.

It’s none other than our old friend F-BUKK, the rather elderly Lycoming-engined Wassmer W54 that seems to have moved into the vicinity these days. And strangely enough, she’s not on the list of arrivals and departures for Granville Airport today although she was briefly picked up on their radar at 15:57 (roughly when I saw her) and disappeared as quickly as she appeared.

And I can’t find her anywhere else.

But it’s a surprise really that there was anything very much going on outside today.

The howling, bitter wind that has plagued us these last few days, or weeks, or months, is still here. It’s churning up the sea quite considerably as you can tell from this photograph. All across the bay this afternoon we cansee the whitecaps that have been whipped up by the wicked wind.

It might be difficult to work out where it’s coming from, but I can tell you with extreme confidence exactly where it’s going. And I’m glad at times like this that I’m not a Scotsman.

For that reason I’m not going to hang about and I wandered off across the lawn and car park to the end of the headland.

Nothing much happening around there today either so I wandered off down the path on the other side of the cliffs.

And here in the chantier navale at long last, we have a new arrival. We seem to have acquired one of the little trawlers that has come in here to have some work done on her. I’ve seen her about the port here and there in the past and she does have a local (Cherbourg) registration so she’s one of ours.

Is this the start of another rush of work, or are we just going to be having work in dribs and drabs until people start preparing for next summer. After all being alone on a small boat is probably about the safest place you can be in a pandemic, and we’re certain to be having a few more waves of this virus.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks or so ago we saw a phenomenon in the harbour that seemed to represent the outline of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.

As I wandered along the clifftop, lonely as a cloud etc etc, I noticed that we had the same phenomenon again today. And just as before, we had a sock of fleagulls reposing upon it. It’s not quite as accurately drawn as the time before but you can still make out the eastern and northern parts of the country, with the County of Kent just disappearing underneath the harbour wall.

That’s something else about which I would like to find out more. There’s a story that there’s a previous harbour wall somewhere prior to the building of the present one and this may be where the foundations are, the shallow depth of silt on top causing the water to dry out quicker.

Back here I grabbed a coffee and organised one or two things quickly because there was more football on the internet today. A bottom-of-the-table match between Y Fflint and Aberystwyth. I was impressed with Flint when I first saw them but they slid down the table at an alarming rate after that really heavy defeat and have recently changed their manager to no-nonsense Neil Gibson who a few years ago kicked Prestatyn Town three divisions up the pyramid in a very short space of time.

On the other hand, Aberystwyth are a good side with some good players but for some reason have simply failed to fire up and are in desperate danger of being sucked down into a relegation scrap. A win for both sides was vital today.

And the match went pretty much as expected. Aberystwyth throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Flint who had to sit back and hope to absorb it, and hit Aberystwyth on the break.

And I do have to say that Flint’s defence was magnificent today. They fought like lions with what at times was desperate defending and were unlucky with a break after 35 minutes when a header was pushed over the bar by Connor Roberts in the Aber goal.

But Roberts could do nothing in the 40th minute when one of the most beautiful, inch-perfect long balls out of defence that you have ever seen fell to Mark Cadwallader who shrugged off a desperate challenge TO TOE-POKE THE BALL PAST ROBERTS.

In the second half Aberystwyth had even more of the game and were pounding the Flint goal at will but were undone late in the game by not one but two breakaways for probably the most surprising victory that I’ve seen for a while and a result that just goes to underline Aberystwyth’s season to date.

They were unlucky to lose at all, and certainly not by a score of 3-0. Now both clubs are stuck right in a pack of four at the bottom with Y Drenewydd and Cefn Druids and this can all go in any direction.

But it’s easy to see why our two teams tonight are deep in the mire. Too many wayward passes, not marking close enough and, in Aber’s case especially, not having the killer instinct when they need it.

Now it was time for me to go out for my evening walk and runs. And the first two legs of my evening adventures brought me to the gate where I would disappear down to the footpath underneath the walls

Looking back behind me from this particular spot the view back down the Rue du Nord to the Place d’Armes over to the right was really impressive this evening. And the beam of the lighthouse down at the Pointe du Roc was making a nice hazy fog of light, as you can see over on the right behind the College Malraux.

Having taken the photo I disappeared down the path and along underneath the walls.

With no rain for at least 24 hours, which is strange just recently, that path under the walls wasn’t all that wet so my runs down there were reasonably comfortable tonight.

But where I stopped, halfway around to catch my breath, the view over the Plat Gousset was looking quite nice and special so I decided to have a little fun. I’d take three or four photos of the same view on different settings and see how they worked out.

The photo up above was one of them, and the one below is another of them. All of the rest were filed under “CS”.

This particular one has had a little post-work done on it but the first one is just as it came out of the camera and all in all, they aren’t too bad really.

The discarded ones were over-exposed. You’ve no idea (well, some of you have, of course) how difficult it is to set the camera for the right amount of light for artificial light when the surroundings are in pitch-black.

From there I did the next leg of my run down to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. And, as usual thse days, there was nothing whatever going on down there, interesting or not so I turned and headed for home.

And tonight the crescent moon was back.

A little higher in the sky tonight so I could see it before I crossed the Square Maurice Marland, and I spent a couple of minutes trying to take a good photo of it.

From there I ran on down to the walls, walked along the walls and then ran on home for tea. I can’t get used to this “early” lark.

Tea tonight was pasta and nice fresh (and I do mean fresh because broccoli was the special offer today and I had bought sprouts on Thursday) steamed vegetables with vegan pesto (I’d bought some of that too) and an old falafel burger followed by rice pudding.

Rosemary had called me while I was out so I phoned her back and we were chatting for a couple of hours, which is why I’m still writing my notes long after 02:00. But now I’ve finished, I’m off to bed.

But I’ll leave you tonight with a special treat. For those of you who worry about me, I put it all down to the kind of company that I keep. This is ONE OF MY FRIENDS FROM OTTAWA in Canada. I hope that you enjoy it.

Tuesday 8th December 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

… seen the lighthouse at the Cap Fréhel looking as clear as it did this afternoon?

It’s about 70 or so kms away, as you are probably fed up of hearing right now, but there must be something about the atmospheric conditions and the height of the lighthouse above sea level to make it stand out so well. We’ve seen it on several occasions, that’s for sure, but I can’t think that it’s ever stood out so clearly as it did today.

One of these days I’ll sort out the photos that I took when we sailed right down the coast on the Spirit of Conrad and you can compare the view of the lighthouse from close up with one of these photos taken from the Pointe du Roc.

Something else of note that is worth mentioning today because it doesn’t happen all that often just now is that I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning. And by a good couple of minutes too

That’s twice in two days that I’ve beaten the alarm. Anyone would think that I’ve wet the bed or something.

Last night before going to bed I’d given the sourdough bread mix its second kneading and put it in the mould that I used, and left it on one side overnight. And so this morning as soon as I got up, the first thing that I did, even before the medication, was to switch on the oven at full heat.

And then, when I’d taken the medication and the oven was now nice and hot, I took a large baking tray, put about half an inch of water in it, dropped the bread mould with the dough inside into the water, covered it with another matching baking tray so that the steam off the water would aerate the bread, and stuck it in the oven.

After about 25 minutes, I took off the lid and then left it cooking for about another 40/45 minutes or so on a slightly lower temperature.

While it was baking away to itself, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

Yesterday’s notes I transcribed and added them to the entry, and then I turned my attention to last night. There was a house move to do and we had a flatbed lorry. It involved putting all these personal possessions off this lorry, or were we putting them on because one minute we were putting them on and another minute we were taking them off. It started off with about 10 of us but the number gradually whittled down every week and between us there was a different number of people until in the end there was just 3. We had quite a crowd watching us, sitting on chairs watching us load or unload this lorry. In the end it turned out that we didn’t have a captain. He had left so one of the guys in charged asked me if I wanted to be captain but I ummed and ahhed. Another guy volunteered so there was just 2 of us running back and to, passing these boxes to the guy who was stacking them. I was thinking all the time that an open-sided lorry is not the kind of vehicle to go around with when you are doing a job like this, stacking boxes on top of it. It’s bound to end in tragedy when you go round a corner. There was one part where we were messing around with 7″ singles. They wouldn’t all stay in the boxes. Someone suggested putting them in with the LPs although I couldn’t see how that made any difference. It meant in the end that they were going to be out of alphabetical order and he’d never be able to trace them again if he had them all mixed up like that wil the LPs
Later there was a supermarket in the basement of a big building. An ad-hoc supermarket in the corner of an empty floor with Covid regulations and only a few people were allowed to go there at times. I was down there doing my shopping. I had a trolley with a few items in it and I had to go back and find my car, a yellow MkIV Cortina. I was convinced that i’d parked it outside in the car park so instead of going up and following the directions back, I went outside but I couldn’t see my car on the car park at all although i was convinced that I’d left it there. It must have been on the internal car park in the building so I had to get back into the building somehow with my trolley load of goods and try to remember which flood I’d put my car on or whereabouts, because I didn’t have a clue where it was now.

That wasn’t all either. But seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

Now it was time to turn my attention to the Welsh course. I wrote up my notes from last week and went through them to make sure that I understood them (which isn’t very evident)and then turned my attention to prepare for this week’s lessons.

One thing that I do remember from my grandmother was the imperative, which is only natural of course with my grandmother. Dewch i mewn for “come in”, Edrych for “look”, byddwch yn dda for “be good” and of course paid! – “don’t” and so on so it didn’t take too much preparation today, which suited me fine.

At the end of its time I took it from the oven and here’s the finished product. It’s something of a disappointment to say the least as it doesn’t seem to have risen at all.

Mind you, when I tried it for lunch, it was light and very aerated all the same, so I’ve no idea what is happening here. Had it been this size but dense and heavy I would have written it off as a failure. But I don’t know what to make of this.

It’s certainly the lightest bread that I’ve ever made, even when I’ve been using yeast.

After lunch I made a start on more of the arrears, but not for long. By now, it was time for me to go out on my afternoon walk around the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night we saw piles of fishing boats out in the English Channel on their way back into harbour after their day’s work. And here are some more of them today heading back out to the fishing grounds.

But I’m not too sure how long this will go on. Apparently the Jersy fishermen are getting up a petition to revoke the 1836 Treaty of the Bay of Granville that divides the fishing areas up between the Channel Islands and France, and kick the French boats out.

There’s a meeting in a day or two’s time during which the French fishermen and the Regional Council will discuss the matter. The fishermen have already pointed out that 70% of the Channel islands catch is landed here in Granville and that all of the electricity supplied to the Channel Islands comes from the nuclear reactor up the coast here in Normandy that we visited A FEW MONTHS AGO.

We are living in interesting times.

Maybe you might have noticed just how nice the weather was, looking out to sea in the previous photograph.

That’s not the case down there along the Brittany coast. Over by St Malo and Dinard it looks as if they are on the receiving end of a very localised rainstorm that’s giving them all a really good soaking. I’m glad that I’m not over there in the middle of all that.

But it’s really quite astonishing when you consider that just down the coast the sky is as clear as a bell, as we saw with the view of the lighthouse at Cap Frehel. And I thought that the weather conditions in the Auvergne were bizarre.

While we are here, there’s something else that I want to photograph – something that I noticed yesterday but there were too many people around.

The local council has had a man out cutting the grass in his tractor. He’s had his blade set too low because he’s managed to churn up a huge stone right in the middle f the path here. never mind the damage that he’s probably done to his blade, which surely he must have heard, that’s a hazard just waiting for one of our nocturnal ramblers to trip over in the dark.

He shouldn’t have left the rock and the hole like that in the middle of the footpath.

Anyway, I pushed on around the headland and with nothing going on out at sea I made my way along the clifftop.

The wind has died down considerably from how it has been and the sea looks as if it’s quite calm. But there must he a heavy rolling sea out there in the Atlantic somewhere because the waves are coming in with quite some force

Remember that the tide is still a long way out. This would be quite impressive at high tide.

But there was no change of occupant in the chantier navale and nothing much else going on, so I headed off for home and a hot coffee.

One task that I needed to do was to remove some photos from the camera. The memory card is full, I don’t have another and the price of the type of card that I use is prohibitive. That involved coupling up an external drive and you’ve no idea how long it takes to remove 2500 files off the camera onto the laptop via a USB 3.0 cable, the software and hardware in the computer, and a USB2.0 cable to an external drive.

It might have taken less time too had I not unfortunately drifted off with the fairies at some point.

After the hour on the guitar I made tea. A burger with vegetables and pasta with some more of that vegan Pesto sauce which is really good and I must buy some more. And the apple pie that I made in the middle of last week is excellent.

After tea I was straight out and off down the road for my evening run.

And we saw just how nice the sky was this afternoon right down the Brittany coast. it was just as clear along the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula too and the warning lights on the wind turbines at the back of Coutances were clearly visible. You can see two of them towards the left-hand edge of this photograph.

The street lights of the small towns along the sea front were quite visible too. Hauteville sur Mer on the left and St martin de brehal on the right. And in the background, the lights of the main road that runs up eventually to Cherbourg.

If the view up both of the coasts is going to be good, then it ought to be good out in the English Channel too.

This photo might be somewhat blurred but it’s hand-held, and it shows the lights of St Helier in Jersey in the Channel islands 58 kilometres away. And so for that reason it’s not bad at all. The red light on the radio mast at the back of town is clearly visible.

From the viewpoint I ran on all the way down the street, combining two of the legs of my run into one. For some reason I was running quite well tonight. it might have been the head of broccoli that I had for tea, steamed in a pan with the pasta.

When I finally stopped for breath I retraced my steps for 100 metres because I’d noticed that the view across to Donville les Bains was looking quite interesting too tonight.

The promenade was looking really nice with the street lights reflecting off the water tonight, but then the headland by the cemetery from where the birdmen take to the air cuts out a good part of the view. And then we have all of the houses on the cliffs round by where the Musée Christian Dior might be found.

And then of course I had to run all the way back to the Place de l’Isthme. Yes, I stayed “up above” tonight seeing as at some point there must have been a rainstorm here too as everything was soaking wet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve shown a couple of photos of the trench that seems to bisect the fortifications up here at the Place de l’Isthme.

It’s not possible to see from one end of the trench to another because there’s something like a walled-over passage that runs through the trench to the part that’s isolated. And while I was nosying around up here I found what I think might be the entrance to the passage.

There’s a date carved on the lintel over the top too – 1843. I don’t know whether that’s the date of the original construction or not.

Down below, I ran on through the Square Maurice Marland with enough energy to go half-way up the steep ramp at the end.

From there I went round to the Rue St Jean to see if there was any better indication of what was going on here. And it seems that they have made a start digging up the pavement. I’ll have to come here in the daytime and see if I can find out why.

From here I ran on home and made it back to the apartment just in time for kick-off. There was football on the internet tonight, hence my early run out.

Over the weekend we saw an ineffective and anonymous Caernarfon team totally rolled over by Penybont. Tonight they were to take on bottom club Cefn Druids in Cefn Mawr in the suburbs of Wrexham.

With several changes in the team tonight, they looked a totally different outfit and seemed to have recovered their spirit. They went 2-0 up and were unlucky not to have had one or two more. This was a much more professional and competent approach, at least for the first 75 minutes.

They had Josh Tibbetts back in goal and he was extremely busy because Cefn Druids were much better than the score and their league position suggested. They pulled a goal back late in the game and the last 15 minutes saw them camped on the edge of the Caernarfon penalty area.

In all honestly, Tibbetts kept Caernarfon in the game, although the Druids could have been embarrassed a couple of times in the closing stages when Caernarfon had a couple of rapid counter-attacks upfield.

But if the Druids are bottom of the table, then all that I can say is that the standard of the JD Cymru League has improved dramatically over the last 5 or 6 years. The Druids would have rolled over clubs like Afan Lido and Llanelli of that period. And then we turn the clock back 15 years with clubs like Rhayadr and Welshpool, to name just two of a dozen that I could mention.

So off to bed. Tomorrow I have a day at home and tons of stuff to do that I’ve forgotten. One day I might even get ahead of whatever I’m trying to do.

Friday 28th February 2020 – I MISSED …

… the alarms this morning.

Yes, round about 07:30 when I finally heaved myself out of my stinking pit this morning. I’ve no idea why because last night wasn’t exactly a late night.. after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone as usual. I’d been on a few travels too during the night, but not enough to wear me out.

I’d been in Audlem and it had been some kind of New Years Eve or something like that. There were hordes of people out in the street all dressed in fancy clothes. I’d been wandering around looking at them and admiring their outfits, all that kind of thing. Then I headed down to where the Buttermarket was. There were even more people coming out from down Shropshire Street, all in a sort of nightwear type of thing as if they had been to some kind of pyjama party. They were all streaming up to a pub that of course doesn’t exist somewhere on Stafford Street. This pub was a black and white Tudor building with all kinds of statues on the edges of the roof like in Austria. There were all these bunk beds outside and this was the middle of winter and all these bunk beds for kids outside. These kids were all dressed in nightwear and I couldn’t understand what it was that they were doing. This was really late for kids to be out and so on.
Before that we had been in a procession, a procession of all kinds. We were dressed as seafaring pirates, a Marsupilami thing. We were quite happily parading and making up the story as we went along. We saw some being questioned about who was in a huge queue and who wasn’t and we realised that this was going to be the fate of death for us because we wouldn’t be allowed to continue. We chatted amongst ourselves who it was and ended up talking to this very young girl about 6 or 7 and ask her all these questions but by now we weren’t having the microphone passed down to us and being put on the air.

And there was more to all of this lot too.

After breakfast I had a look at some more sound files and, sure enough, just as expected, a couple of them were all over the place and took an age to sort out; Somewhere in the middle of all of this I took my Carnaval costume back to its owner. We had quite a chat and she had a lot to say for herself about her work so I made a note for the future.

After having finished the sound files I went down into town for my bread. The long way round too seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere special tody.

But down on the harbour, the hydraulic concrete-breaker that’s been breaking up the rocks over at the ferry port is back so that it looks as if they will be restarting there some time very soon.

Not today though. Chausiais and Joly France were over there moored in a NAABSA position on the bottom. It looks as if they have things to do this weekend.

While I was here I went to look at the new pontoons that they’ve been installing.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I mentioned the cranes on the quayside and that I didn’t think that they will reach over the pontoons.

Today, there were a couple of fishermen there so I asked the question. And the answer is “no, they don’t reach”.
“So what are you going to do then?” asked Our Hero
“Bof” replied one of the fishermen with a beautiful Gallic shrug.

A beautiful word, “Bof” – a must-have word in anyone’s vocabulary. It means basically “I don’t know” but with a much greater air of abandonment.

The tide was out so I could walk across the harbour gates to the other side.

Thora had gone, as I had expected, so I could admire the new pontoons here too. They are cracking on with all of this and I don’t think that it will be long before they have finished.

But as I have said before, I hope that they will leave some space for the commercial boats like the gravel boats that come in here, even if they haven’t been in for a while.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed for home.

Still plenty of time before lunch so I made a start on scanning in all of the receipts that needed scanning. And I was surprised that there were so many. I seem to have run aground somewhere in my plan for rolling scanning. even worse, I can’t find the receipts for medication that i bought at the end of June prior to going off on my sea voyage. It was an expensive do too so I hope that I didn’t discard the receipts along with all of the rest of the paperwork that I threw away on my travels.

After lunch, I had something very important to do. I’d used up the last of the hummus so I had to make some more. And although it took a while, it was thoroughly wicked when it was finished.

Basically, for any given weight you need 50% of chick peas and 25% sesame seed paste. These are the important figures to remember.
The remaining 25% of the given weight is made up of all kinds of things – olive oil and chick pea juice for a start. Then I use sea salt, ground black pepper, garlic (tons of that) and then your “flavouring ingredient”.

Everything except your flavouring ingredient goes into the whizzer and it’s whizzed round until it’s a nice creamy paste. Then, add your “flavouring ingredient”. I made two batches, one with the roasted peppers that I had prepared last night and the second with some sliced olives. You add that to the mix in the whizzer and whizz it just enough to disperse it rhrough the mix but not enough to break it up completely.

After that, I could crack on then and fill in these forms. And that wasn’t the work of five minutes either, with so many to do. I hadn’t really realised just how many receipts had piled up over that period when I broke my hand.

There was the usual pause for my afternoon walk. Around the walls this afternoon, but no run because there were far too many people around.

Despite the wind, there were quite a few people down on the beach at the Plat Gousset too. I’ve no idea what they were doing but they were clearly having a good time doing it.

So I came back to carry on work, but it wasn’t quite the success for which I was hoping. There was a little … errr … repose during the afternoon that slowed me down too.

By the time that I had finished the medical expenses it was 18:30 and so I did something that I haven’t done for quite some time, namely I had a play on the bass. It shows you just how much work I’ve had to do that the guitars have been on the back burner all this time. The track “Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic came round on my playlist so I spent half an hour working out the bass line.

There has been some excitement too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my disenchantment with certain events over the weekend. The controller has called a meeting for Monday to discuss them but EVERY ONE of the volunteers is refusing to go and there has been a frantic exchange of e-mails.

There are stories of one or two others who are as disenchanted as I am, but I had no idea that the feeling was so general. Not, of course, that I am surprised.

Tea was an “anything curry” of leftover food in the fridge, including a couple of falafel balls that had been in there maybe longer than they ought to have been.

The evening walk around the headland was disappointing. I only managed one run and that was a struggle too as I had a headwind against me. Reaching my mark, never mind extending it, was something of a battle.

Later, I had the football to watch so I started to write my notes on the little old Acer laptop that I have recently raised from the dead just to prove that it still works.

It was Welsh Cup quarter-final and we should have had two second-division teams, Prestatyn Town and Flint Town United. But their match was called off so the cameras made a dash across North Wales to show us Caernarfon Town v Cefn Druids instead.

Caernarfon scored after just a minute – a wicked deflection from a corner that shouldn’t have been awarded in the first place. And then they had Alex Ramsey to thank for a series of excellent saves to keep them in the game for the next hour.

The match hinged on a moment of madness on the hour-mark.

Arsan, one of the Druids defenders, was fouled and the referee blew his whistle to award the free kick. Arsan, in his folly, kicked out at the Caernarfon player for which he was rightly booked. Probably not 30 seconds later, he had the ball and as he ran past a Caernarfon player, fell to his knees. No clearer case of simulation you will ever see, and he picked up another yellow card and was thus expelled from the game.

In my time I’ve seen some stupid players do some stupid things, but nothing quite as stupid as this.

Within the next 5 minutes Caernarfon had scored two more goals, and went on to score a bizarre fourth right at the end when an outstretched Caernarfon boot touched the ball awkwardly causing it to loop up over everyone and drop down behind a defender into the net.

So I’m off to bed now. For the first time in a while I’m off shopping and I hope that they have more of that Alpro soya ice cream. I started on that for tea tonight and it was delicious.

Wednesday 12th February 2020 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day it was today.

And I’m not talking about the weather either because considering we’re approaching mid-February, it was a nice day from that point of view. The wind had dropped considerably, it was a bright day and there were even people walking on the beach.

What I’m talking about is from a health point of view.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the end of November and for most of December I was feeling better than I have been doing for quite a number of years.

But then in the new year I could feel a decline in my health and I’ve been going steadily downhill.

Today I reached rock-bottom. Most of the day was spent flat-out in my chair and had this been a few months ago, I would have taken to my bed without a second thought.

But having had this good spell, I’m not going to let this defeat me and I fought it out. Not very successfully but there we go. And at one time I was really feeling totally and thoroughly dreadful.

But then, that’s what this illness is all about. They say that I’ll start to feel the effects after about five years, and it’s been almost four and a half since it was diagnosed – and that’s no telling how long I’d been carrying this illness before it was diagnosed

What I’ll have to do is to resign myself to it and just take things as they come, and reflect on the fact that I’ve been far worse than this.

and to make things worse, last night I did something that I haven’t done for years, and that is to go for a trip down to corridor. Back in the past it was at least once every night but for several years it’s not happened at all. Sign on the times, I reckon.

And to add insult to injury, I failed to beat any of the alarms and it was almost 07:00 when I arose, and that’s no good either. All in all, it’s pretty depressing.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone. We started off with a crowd of us in a room and I was drinking coffee and everyone else was drinking beer. There was a guy there from the – the – and he asked me if I’d had the Audi. “Which one?” “The one that was on your front the other day”. “Ohh that’s been and gone, that has. It just passed through my hands, that kind of vehicle”
A litttle later on we had an unexpected visitor. A footballer by the name of Jamie Reed has just signed for Cefn Druids in the Welsh Premier League and has been making something of a good impression. Anyway, don’t ask me why but last night on my travels he was trying to do something phenomenal with a boat out of Normandy but I can’t remember what now but it had become quite popular but on one occasion there was a balloon in a shop with him and someone else holding onto it. This mobile thing was turning around so they were suspended in the air turning around this object or being turned by it, one or the other (… like a ceiling fan…). Plastic models of them, inflatable plastic models (…not the real Jamie Reed …)
Then I was in a music shop and there was a little old lady there. She had a play on a guitar but played with one of the machine heads so the thing went flat. She put the guitar somewhere not quite right but when the guy came back in, the shop assistant, he saw that the guitar had been moved and said “is anybody here?”. This little old lady spoke up. He checked the guitar and it was out of tune so he plugged it into a machine to tune it up. In the meantime I had a bass and I was busy trying to tune that but it wouldn’t tune for some reason or another. I had the tuning gauge that I had set to percentages instead of an analogue meter and of course that’s much more difficult to tune when it’s like that. Then a parcel arrived, a huge, heavy parcel. I wondered what it could be. Then I realised that I’d gone in for a kind of lifesaving course so I could be a monitor in Canada in the Arctic and this was the first part of that and it was my certificate to say that I’d passed together with a huge wooden framed glass panelled door as a prize. Of course I could use that on my house between the kitchen and the hallway in Winsford, which of course never had a doorway between the kitchen and the doorway, but there you go.

That’s not all of it either but seeing as you are probably eating your lunch right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

That apple and pear puree that I made – the verdict is that it was absolutely perfect and I really do mean that. You couldn’t distinguish it from any shop-bought stuff.

And then I attacked the splitting of the digital tracks. Again not straightforward because nothing actually corresponded to the published track lists. After much of an effort I came to the conclusion that the published lists are wrong, which is a surprise but there you go.

And also, if that’s not enough, some people have a strange idea of what constitutes a track break and I’ve often had to rebuild tracks before I could split them again.

Apart from that, I’m not quite sure what else I did during the morning. I know that I finished off the notes for the current radio project and I brought THE SET LIST WEB PAGE up to date so that people can see what was played when.

The rest of the time was probably spent fighting off a pile of sleep

From somewhere somehow I managed to summon up something to get me to go into town, even though I really didn’t feel like it at all.

Down into the port and across the top of the harbour gates seeing as they were closed, in order to see what they were up to. No sign of any wind turbine, as you might expect, but a very large floating pontoon with workmen and machinery thereupon.

And so the plot thickens here.

But I have an idea as to what might be going on because I’ve only just noticed that there’s something missing from the port.

In the space where Spirit of Conrad and Charles-Marie were moored up until very recently, there used to be a pontoon. And I should know because I walked on it once

But it’s not there now and I couldn’t possibly say when it went either. But anyway, I’ve only just noticed.

And it makes me wonder what this machine might be doing here.

It’s a proper heavy-duty crane and is carrying a makers plate saying that it’s rated at 60 tonnes. Of course with an outstretched arm it won’t lift anything like that, but nevertheless they wouldn’t have brought something like this down here when they can have a mobile crane like the one that’s here already.

So we are definitely going to be having some strange things going on.

But this might account for a lot of what is happening.

Out of curiosity and the fact that there was no-one around to stop me, I went for a closer look. Nice new rubber and aluminium heavy pontoons I reckon, presumably to replace the ones that they have ripped out and to go where they are installing the new supports.

But whether this brings any more marine traffic into the port remains to be seen. I haven’t seen a gravel boat since before I went on my High Arctic exploits

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and as the weather was nice I went for a little walk.

Round by the Cours Jonville they were erecting a marquee. At first I thought it might have been something to do with Carnaval but the smell of cellulose soon changed my mind.

It looks as if they are spraying the bus shelter there, to tidy it up.

My walk took me along to the rue Roger Maris to see why the street was closed on Monday but whatever it was, they must have done it as the traffic is flowing freely down the hill.

And so I turned my attention to heading back to my apartment.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in the past we’ve seen a few old wells dotted here and there about the town, particularly up near the Centre Agora.

But here’s one that I must have missed. I certainly haven’t seen this one before. It’s something that I shall have to look into sometime, if I could take off the roof.

And that reminds me of somethign out of Frankie Howerd and Up Pompeii
Senna the Soothsayer – “three times have I looked into the bottomless pit”
Frankie Howerd – “well, well, well”.

carrying on along the rue General Patton I came past the rear entrance to the Market Hall.

Although I’ve been out of that door a few times I’d never stopped to give it a good look. And I was impressed with it too – the Art Deco scultures of marine life such as shellfish.

It could do with a bit of a clean, a tidy-up and a repaint. It’s looking rather shabby around the edges, but then so am I and I’m not getting any younger either.

By the time that I returned it was long after lunchtime so I quickly made myself some butties and then attacked the work.

Fighting off wave after wave of fatigue, sometimes not successfully at all, I managed to dictate the notes, edit them, crop them and assemble a complete project, right down to the final track.

And for a change, I was short rather than overrun. Only by 7 seconds so I scanned through a collection of sound files that I’d made, cut out something from a previous project and inserted it in an appropriate place. There’s a lot to be said for building up your own sound library. I even added a cough to it too today.

A littl trimming here and there and off we go.

apart from the sleep issues, I went for my afternoon walk too.

The rue du Nord was advertised as closed so I was intrigued to see why. That scaffolding that we saw the other day in the place du Marché aux Chevaux which I thought might have been for repairing the collapsing wall is in fact for repairing a house wall.

And with the street being so narrow, no cars can pass with the scaffolding erected. That will upset quite a few people I imagine.

Despite the waterlogged ground I managed to fit in my run along the north side of the walls because there was no-one around up here at all.

And when I made it round to the cliff overlooking the Plat Gousset I could see why. We’ve already seen the crowds on the beach and there were yet more people out there walking along the promenade enjoying the really nice weather.

And I can’t say that I blame them either. Given half a chance I would be down there too.

Better down there than up there with that guy.

There’s been a major house renovation project in the rue des Juifs that’s been proceeding along at snail’s pace – in fact they don’t seem to have advanced much since this time last year. But today, someone is up there fitting a new metal roof to it.

It makes me wonder what the seagulls have to say about it. They have been making nests on the roofs over there and I imagine it won’t be long until they are back.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to fit in my run along the square Maurice Marland because there were too many people about and I don’t want to show myself up.

But my ear picked up a noise of stones on the quayside so I went for a look to see what it might be. I thought that it might have been the gravel lorries starting to come back but in fact it was a tractor with a big trailer tipping rocks onto the quayside.

And that was interesting too. Tons of stuff going on around the place today.

keeping my eyes peeled, I followed the tractor and trailer as they left the quayside to see where they went.

And I was in luck again. Regular readers of this rubbish will have seen the concrete breaker down at the foot of the ferry terminal at low tide breaking off the rocks that are jutting out.

And there is the tractor and trailer, presumably on their way to pick up the rocks and drop them off somewhere where they can be collected. They can’t go and dump those off around the corner like they do with the silt.

Back here and in between the waves of fatigue I pressed on, determined to finish the radio project. And even though it meant a late tea, it was all done and dusted and ready for the road.

Tea was steamed veg with falafel in vegan cheese sauce followed by rice pudding. And absolutely delicious it all was too. My cooking is definitely improving.

Out for my evening walk and I was the only one out there too so I managed another run. I have to keep on pushing on with this.

But with the foul weather having subsided it looks as if the fishermen are back at work. Here’s one of the trawler-type of boats unloading at the fish-processing plant, so it looks as if it’s back to business as usual.

So now all of my notes are written and I’ve listened to the radio programme to make sure that it’s okay, I can go to bed.

Here’s hoping that it’s a good night’s sleep and that I’ll be fighting fit in the morning. But I don’t think so at all. I think that i’m stuck with this.

Friday 13th December 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that my blood count has gone up yet again. It’s now at 9.2 which is pretty astonishing as far as I am concerned. And I made a point to ask exactly what treatment they are giving me for my illness and the answer is “nothing”. The tablets that I take are to counter various side effects and the medication is to boost up my immune system.

But as for the illness, absolutely nothing.

Mind you, it’s pretty disconcerting to see that your doctor needs medical treatment herself. She had problems with her foot. But nevertheless, she can come and soothe my fevered brow any time she likes. This is a University hospital and all of the staff at this level are young University students. There has to be some benefit of my illness and I intend to make the most of it.

But as for bad news, then there’s plenty of that.

Firstly, my train out of Paris has been cancelled on Sunday due to the strike. It’s not the end of the world though because there are other solutions, amongst which “hiring a car” should never be ruled out. But there are options other than that to consider first.

Even so, hiring a car might sound expensive to some, but when you think about the price of a hotel in Paris, it’s not an outrageous proposition at all.

And that’s not all. You’ve all heard about the results of the Uk General Election where 14 million people voted for the Fascists and only 6.5 million voted to revoke the exit from the EU.

That in itself isn’t so important. But what IS important is that I now lose

Some of my UK pension rights
my health insurance rights
my employment rights
my rights of free movement and residence in the EU

And when one of my (ex) friends in the UK posted something bewailing her lot and I replied telling her to make the most of what she’ll be getting because I’ll be getting much worse than that, she called me all kinds of names (honestly!) and accused me of all kinds of things for not sympathising with her, even though she didn’t spend a single moment thinking about my lot.

But that’s the true spirit of the British people. Mean, narrow-minded, selfish, self-centred. I’m better off without these people dragging me down. And isn’t that just why I abandoned everyone in the UK in the first place? It can’t be a coincidence that they all end up like that. They all show their true colours eventually.

It’s definitely Friday 13th today!

Last night I wanted an early night so I tried the usual standby – switch on the laptop to watch a film. And sure enough, it works every time. Within 10 minutes I was away.

And right away too. There are a few files on the dictaphone that weren’t there when I went to bed, so it should be interesting to see those when I make it back home.

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 etc but seeing as my appointment at Castle Anthrax wasn’t until this afternoon I was in no rush to rouse myself. A little lie-in did me good and it was 07:30 when I finally showed a leg.

This morning was spent firstly dealing with last night’s little perambulations.

I vaguely remember something about ships and fuel tankers having to reposition themselves and so on. Some captain had to reposition his ship but he hadn’t brought his money with him so it was rather pointless. i’d ended up at my electronic studio and I was trying to work on something. I managed to produce a really really good electronic music track and while I was at it I produced some vocals and overdubbed them over a piece of music that someone else had written and they were really really good. A few people came round to my house to do something with the computer so I had these tracks playing in the background and they looked really impressed. Although after a few minutes they asked “are we going to get on with some work or are we going to listen to this all day?” and I thought that maybe I had played a little too much and that was a shame because I was so impressed with what I’d done.
Sometime later we were back with the songs again and someone was going to bring some music over and we were going to do all of the singing. It meant getting out of this crowded tram. Someone was fighting their way to the door but the doors closed and there was a cry of “jam the door”. Someone stuck their foot in it so that it wouldn’t close, and it rebounded open. This person had to fight their way out through the crowds and out of the door. We ended up talking about fishing again and the situation of the British having sold all their permits and are now getting upset because the permits that they sold are now making money and the ones that they still have aren’t, and as usual.

Then we had the issue of dealing with the egocentric and selfish Brits in the UK but I did tear myself away to go to the Delhaize for shopping. Pasta, burgers and frozen veg will be on the menu or the next few days.

Back here, I had a shower and a clothes wash, made my butties and then headed for the hospital, calling at the Delhaize in town on the way because I had forgotten the vegan cheese and vegan mayonnaise.

Pouring down with rain now but I pushed on regardless.

My route today took me, as usual, down the Brusselsestraat and past St Pieter’s Hospital. An early and significant casualty of the linguistic war, this huge modern hospital was constructed to serve the French community, apparently (so I was told) who, once it was built, created a new town called Louvain-le-Neuve and moved all of their infrastructure out there instead.

The memory that I will always retain of this place as they make a serious start on demolishing it is that there were still the makers’ labels on the double-glazed windows on some of the floors because the rooms on those floors had never even been occupied.

By the time that I reached the hospital I was looking something like a drowned rat. 13:30 was my appointment but I was treated at 13:45 and then I was sat in a chair for a while as the medication was pumped into me.

Rosemary rang and we had a good chat while it was all going on, and eventually I was thrown out. A call at the pharmacy for medication and then down into town.

Last time that we were here they were excavating a giant hole in the middle of the car park on the Jacobsplein, and I was interested to see how they were getting on and, more importantly, what they were going to be doign with it.

So here I am, and all that I can say is that in the last 4 weeks or so there hasn’t been very much change in the situation. The hole is still there and there doesn’t seem to be anythign to indicate why they have actually gone and dug it out.

It’s probably one of those things where time wil ltell and I should come back in four weeks time where I shall be equally confounded.

A visit to the Origin’O Health Food shop was also on the cards The Delhaize doesn’t sell all the vegan product that I need.

Before I went in though, I took the opportunity to take a photo of the Christmas lights in the Vismarkt. You can do quite a lot with modern LED lighting and this looked particularly good to me.

That was the cue to go into the shop and see what was on offer. They had some of that nice smoked vegan cheese that I had before so I bought some more of that, as well as some more grated cheese for the pizzas and the cheese sauces.

Though the rainstorm had died down by now, it was still wet and miserable going back to my little room.

For that reason, and also for the fact that I had the little Nikon 1 with me and not the big D500 with me, I didn’t hang around too long looking at Leuven’s Christmas lights, beautiful as they might be like these ones in the Bondgenotenlaan.

What I’ll have to do is that if it’s not raining tomorrow evening, I’ll bring the big Nikon out for a walk and go on a prowl around the city to see what I can see.

By the time that I arrived back at my room it wasn’t far off tea time so I made myself some food. And it wasn’t too bad either. It’ll keep the wolf from the door for a while.

There was football on the internet later. While Connah’s Quay Nomads were being turned over by Cefn Druids, we were being treated to Barry Town v TNS.

And it was easy to see why TNS have been Champions of the Welsh Premier League for the last couple of hundred years. Barry Town had been leading the league at one point this season but TNS dealt with them in summary fashion, winning 4-1 away from home without even breaking sweat.

First to the ball on almost every occasion they never looked in trouble at all and had Ratcliffe in the Barry goal not played a blinder, TNS could easily have doubled their tally.

As far as I’m concerned, they may as well give the title to TNS right now because no-one is ever going to stop them. They could even afford the luxury of leaving Greg Draper their leading scorer on the bench until about the 80th minute.

On that note, I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough for now. Nothing planned for tomorrow except to recover from today so if the weather has improved I’ll just go for a long walk.

See you tomorrow.

Incidentally, I did take some photos of the Christmas lights of the city. Too many to put on this page so if you want to see them you need to go to this page

Friday 4th October 2019 – TODAY WAS A …

… little more optimistic and hopeful than yesterday. Helped quite considerably by the fact that someone who had annoyed us intensely yesterday and who was the cause of everything going wrong kept well away from the premises and we could all concentrate on what we do best.

For my own part, I had a much better sleep last night. Awake once or twice during the night to dictate stuff onto the dictaphone, not that I remember too much about anything. But what I do recall is that judging by recent conversations that I’ve been having with myself during the night, it seems that I’ve managed to lay a couple of demons that have been haunting me for a while.

And having read that final phrase back to myself, I realise that I could have expressed that much better too and in a different way, otherwise my readers in Kugluktuk, Celbridge and Cahors will have completely the wrong idea of what I’m trying to say and that might lead to complications.

This morning the two kids managed to have a lift to school with the neighbour’s boy (he remembered to turn up today) and Rachel was in a hurry, so I had a leisurely start to the day.

A hot breakfast followed by a little relax and then I edited and uploaded another blog entry from my voyage on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. This concerned my visit to Hvalsey, one of the three important places in Greenland that I had really wanted to visit.

Up at the tyre depot I found everyone submerged in work. It’s the middle of the potato harvest but the torrential rain overnight had made digging impossible. Consequently every farmer and farm labourer in the whole of New Brunswick had sorted out all of the jobs that they had put off doing and dashed down to have them done right now.

Added to that, one of the printers, the one that we use most often, ran out of ink. And as the Accountancy program and the inventory are old Dos-shell based programs, the print manager wouldn’t change over the default printer in these programs to the reserve printer. I had to go through and change every single page by hand, and when the new ink arrives next week, I shall have to go back and change them all back again.

Mind you, it could be worse. They could have been GEM (Graphics Environment manager)-based programs and I haven’t worked in GEM since 1998.

And that reminds me – I have a computer that runs on GEM somewhere around.

After we finished work I went to the Irvings to fuel up Strider. Just on a quarter of a tank left and he’s done 479 kms. That’s a dramatic improvement on what has gone before, and I hope that when his new chip arrives, it’ll improve even more.

With everyone being out this evening I finished off the pasta from the other night and then watched the football. Cefn Druids v Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League. Bala were the better team in the first half and the Druids were somewhat aimless, but the score of 0-3 to Bala, and having two other goals disallowed for offside, was rather flattering. But a couple of substitutions for the Druids at half-time brought a much more stable team out for the second half and they actually played with a shape and with a purpose. But no more goals were scored, even though the match was quite entertaining.

That left me with a short time of not much going on, so I added another page to my voyage. I’m now at Brattahlid, home of Eric the Red and a second one of the three places that I desperately wanted to visit.

But unfortunately we didn’t make the third. Gardar, home of the Norse Catholic cathedral, was not accessible to us on this trip. I shall have to go back, but not tonight because I’m off to bed.

Monday 6th May 2019 – AND IN OTHER …

… news, I have made great advances today.

The number of files left to deal with on the backlog of dictaphone notes is down to a mere 94. And every one of those relates to my voyage around Canada in autumn 2015 and thus are very likely to have already been copied onto text.

Even more surprisingly, I’ve actually managed to trace the notes, so tomorrow’s plan is to listen to the dictaphone notes while I’m reading the text and make sure that it’s all there.

And then that will be at least one of my long-term plans all done and dusted and out of the way.

Now the one problem with having a really early night (like 21:45, for example), a really good sleep with just one or two slight interruptions, ignoring the alarms and sleeping through until 06:45, the fact is that when I finally did crawl out of my stinking pit, I felt … errr … even worse.

Plenty of time to go on a travel too during the night. I was in some town or other not too far from where I live, and came across an Auchan supermarket. I thought that I’d go in there to see if they had any of their weigh’n’save stuff. So off I trotted and it suddenly became an internal market hall. I wandered around it but then everyone was being ushered to one side. I asked a girl what was going on, she replied that the President of the Republic was coming. I asked why, and she said that he was going to have treatment at the local hospital and this was where they were dropping him off. So why didn’t they drop him off at the hospital? She replied that he wanted to be seen as very populaire dropped off amongst the people and he could walk up there. He and his entourage would walk up there, about half an hour or so to get there. That might be OK for him but what about everyone else? I could see in the distance a big Mercedes van about to pull up and I imagined that that was him in there.

There was plenty of other stuff going on too during the night, but as you are probably eating your evening meal right now, I’ll spare you the gory details.

So with a late start, it was a late breakfast and so on, and then I cracked on with the dictaphone notes. And that’s how I’ve spent most of the day.

We had several interruptions though. lunch, of course, and my afternoon walk.

There were plenty of trawlers out there again off the coast. This one was out there in the channel between the Ile de Chausey and the Pointe du Roc.

There were a few other ones further out too, closer to the Ile de Chausey.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days ago we witnessed a few people marking out the grass and telling me that they plan to erect a memorial here.

Sure enough, today they have brought in the diggers and earth-moving equipment and they have made a start on digging up the grass.

They’ve already laid some gravel on what they have dug out, and there’s a compactor there busily firming it up.

But this is something that I really don’t understand.

Regular readers of this rubbish willrecall a while back that they had dug up part of the grass and eventually, after much delay, they installed a noticeboard and a path leading thereto.

But only a few months after spending all of that time and money doing all of that, they have gone along and dug it all up again for this work.

It’s not what I would call “joined-up thinking”.

It was a beautiful afternoon for photography and the view from the lifeboat memorial was particularly impressive.

The tide is quite far out this afternoon and the harbour marker light is clearly visible on its rock. We can see the red bands around it that give some kind of indication of the condition of the tides.

I’m wondering whether there is some kind of correlation between the markings and the opening of the harbour gates. I shall have to check this.

Remember yesterday when I saw something out there on the horizon over on the Brittany coast?

With it being such a beautiful afternoon I took the photo again to see whether there was any difference between the two, which might indicate whether there was a moving object on there.

The view was particularly clear and we can see the Brittany coast all the way down past St Malo. There’s the island of cézembre at the mouth of the harbour at St Malo and the tower is, I reckon, a lighthouse on one of the outlying islands.

But we can also see in the background the Brittany coast all the way along to Cap Fréhal (about 60 kms away) and maybe even beyond as far as Paimpol.

We went along on the cliffs above the chantier navale to se what was going on down there today;

one of the trawlers has gone back into the water and in its place is a large sailing yacht. It looks vaguely familiar to me but I can’t recall its name right now.

It’ll give me something to do on Wednesday to go down there and have a look at it to see who she is.

Another interruption was a visit from the courier too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my Canadian bank card ran out last month and I need the new one before I can get to my branch, so I called them up the other day.

And I certainly didn’t expect it to be delivered so quickly, and by courier too. So hats off to the Scotia Bank.

And remember the bank card that I left behind in the cash machine in Leuven? The replacement turned up today too from the BNP Paribas.

Tea was baked potatoes and potato curry from November, followed by a slice of my apple pie and the last of the soya cream. The base of the pie is slightly under-cooked, which means that either the temperature was too high or else the pie was too high in the oven.

I was planning to go on my evening walk afterwards, but a football match came on the internet. The final of the Welsh FA Youth Cup between Aberystwyth Town under-19s and Cefn Druids under-19s.

This was a really exciting match, won 2-1 quite rightly by Aberystwyth, but what was even more interesting was that there were half a dozen players out there who could walk into almost any Welsh Premier League side and not be out of place.

Both keepers were excellent as were both left-backs. But star of the show has to be Aberystwyth’s centre-half Lee Jenkins. He’s only 17 but captains the Wales under-18s and has been a regular in the Aberystwyth Town first team for over a year.

He’s a player who is destined for bigger things, I’m sure.

So now, rather later than planned, I’m off to bed.

But I’ve had a good day so I don’t really mind.

trawler english channel jersey granville manche normandy france

Friday 26th October 2018 – IT WAS HARD …

… this morning to get out of bed and I ended up with something of an unexpected lie-in.

And so it was something of a rather late breakfast this morning, what with one thing and another.

This led to a nice walk up town to collect my railway tickets. And it was a good job that I was somewhat later than planned because the ticket machine wasn’t working and I had to go to the booking office. It’s a good job that I hadn’t waited until Sunday to do this.

Round the corner and down the road to join the Madding Crowd at the Hotel des Impôts. And afer a rather long wait in the queue I was handed a form by a Civil Servant who smiled and wished me luck. I was rather taken aback by that.

On the way back I remembered the lettuce and I bought myself a baguette too so as to have a nice lunch. And for that, I went out onto the wall but I was only there for five minutes. It was bright and sunny, but there was a cold, biting wind and that drove me back to my apartment.

The day has been spent in editing the photos from yesterday, but also attacking a huge project that I started the other day on the other laptop. That’s taken me most of the day, and I’ve made a load of rapid progress there. I’m pleased with that.

I also spent some time on the Arctic pages too, but not as much as I would like.

The walk this afternoon around the walls was freezing. The wind has increased in volume and it was quite uncomfortable.

But at least the skies were clear and there was a really good view out to see and Jersey was quite clear.

And so I attacked the island with the new 70-300mm zoom/telephoto lens to see what I can see.

I blew up (because I can do this despite modern anti-terrorism legislation) the photo and cropped out and enlarged a few selections from the images

Very blurred and very shaky of course, but considering that we are looking at something 55 kms away and there’s a strong wind blowing, it’s not really come out too badly.

To do much better than this I’ll have to invest a lot more money than I can afford into my equipment.

But never mind the view out to sea. The view out along the coast past Donville-les-Bains all the way down to Agon-Coutainville was beautiful too.

This was taken using the 18-105mm lens with a focal length of 25mm so it’s something of a wide-angle shot.

It’s brought out the scenery and the colours, and you can tell the strength of the wind from the whitecaps on the waves breaking on the beach.

A short while ago I posted a photo of some men on a cherry-picker drilling away into the wall of a house on the rue du Nord.

It’s far too windy for them to be working up there today so I could see what they were doing.

It looks as if they are going to replace the lintel over the window there, although I can’t think why.

Here’s something that I have never noticed before.

On the corner of the rue Paul Poirier and the rue Etoupefour is a building with “Residence des Granvillaises” cast thereupon. It’s not very easy to see this from street-level

Apparently it’s some kind of holiday accommodation, but it’s probably well out of my price range and out of the range of most people who might want to visit me.

Tea tonight was the rest of the crèpes with salad. Just as delicious as it was before.

And there was no walk this evening either for we had football. Llandudno v Cefn Druids in the Welsh Premier League.

Two clubs scrapping it out in the basement and the first half was pretty dismal. It livened up after the inteval and the last half-hour was quite good. The Druids were the better-organised team but Llandudno looked the more dangerous going forward.

But with both sides being totally incapable of hitting the nether regions of a ruminant animal with a stringed musical instrument, a 0-0 draw was no surprise.

There are four clubs slowly coming adrift at the foot of the table – Llanelli, Carmarthen, Cefn Druids and Llandudno and it’s clear to see why these two are down there at the bottom. There is no-one pulling the strings and there is no-one providing the service to the forwards. Rittenberg for the Druids looked quite dangerous when someone gave him the ball – which wasn’t all that often.

So no walk – the howling wind and now the rainstorm is enough to keep me in the house tonight. I’ll have an early night instead.

Saturday 1st September 2018 – IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

… to haul myself out of the stinking pit. But then, what do you expect at 04:00 in the morning? at least I beat the morning chorus of the air-conditioning and the fridge compressor.

But having made my butties and packed my bags last night, a quick wash and a few other things and I was ready for the road.

I hadn’t gone more than 100 yards when I was totally drenched in one of these sudden storms for which Montreal is famous. But it went just as quickly as it came so it wasn’t too much of a problem.

And it’s a good job that I was early at the bus stop. The advertised time of departure is 04:54 but at 04:54 we were already half-way down the Boulevard Rene-Levèsque, doubtless to the annoyance of a few people, I should imagine.

The airport was the usual Dorval chaos. As Alvin Tofler predicted 40 years ago in his classic book “The Third Wave”, it’s all self-check-in stuff now. The passengers don’t have a clue half the time as to what they might be doing, and it’s all very well for the staff to tirer la tronchewhen the labels are stuck on the suitcases incorrectly or something like that, but what do they expect?

While “security” might ordinarily have been somewhat painless, I was still marked out for more personal attention – probably because they found the tube of Aloe Vera, for which I had paid a small fortune yesterday, in my backpack. They even closely examined the peak of my cap.

As I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … I’d much rather take my chances with the freedom fighters than the airport “security” personnel.

They had a call for hand luggage to go into the hold, and just for a change I sent mine down, having removed the laptop and the book. I remember that I was rather overwhelmed with stuff on the journey over, and it’s only a couple of hours on the plane (said he, having forgotten about the two-hour time difference).

Today’s aeroplane is an Airbus A320-200, and it’s been a while since I’ve had a flight in one of those.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see its serial number so I can’t tell you anything about it.

But what I can tell you is that, much to my surprise, there wasn’t a meal offered on the flight – and it was over 4.5 hours too. That was bizarre.

Plenty of coffee though, so I fuelled up on a couple of occasions. And being stuck in the middle of a row (no aisle seats available yet again) I had to disturb this rather nice Oriental girl sitting next to me.

But as for the hotel itself, I’ve never ever seen anything like it. It even puts the one in Tunisia to shame.

The staff are overwhelmingly polite to the point of being obsequious and I found that very disagreeable.

But there’s absolutely everything that you could want here, even down to an electric iron and a shoe polishing kit.

I’m right at the top, on the 8th floor to be precise.

And on the side that has a beautiful view right over the terminal building and the runway too. I could sit and watch the planes come in to land all day, but I have plenty of thigs to do;

Like reorganise my luggage.

But first things first.

With there being no food on the aeroplane I need to organise some lunch, and one of the advantages of having a good internet connection is that these days one can call up a map of the area to see what’s about.

And just about one kilometre away across the car park is a Subway sandwich bar.

These days they offer falafel so I braved the biting wind and went over there for a falafel and salad butty. And it was hard work trying to persuade the rather elderly “sandwich artiste” to make me what I wanted instead of what she wanted to sell me.

But when I finally received it, it was very nice. And with it being this week’s special offer too, it was very realistically-priced.

The walk back through the car park was very interesting indeed, and for a whole variety of reasons too.

Do you remember all those years ago when we first started to come regularly to Canada and we saw these electric plugs dangling out of the engine compartments?

We decided that they were engine block heaters and, sure enough, here on the car park at Edmonton Airport are the sockets in which to plug them in winter.

No what about this car?

This is one that I’ve never seen before, and yet it looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

It’s actually a third-generation Nissan Quest, made between 2004 and 2009 and in my opinion it bears more than just a passing resemblance to the Dodge Grand Caravans that we used to have in the good old days before Strider, doesn’t it?

And here’s something else that we Europeans won’t ever have seen.

It’s a Genesis, and in case you are wondering what that might be, it’s really a Hyundai but quite a luxury one.

With the Hyundai name being usually associated with more plebeian vehicles, it was felt that offering a luxury car under that name was not such a good idea – hence the branding exercise.

I went for a walk around the terminal building.

I was intrigued by the fact that, for the domestic flights at any rate, the baggage carousels decanted themselves right into the middle of the Arrivals terminal.

That’s not such a good security idea in my opinion – anyone could grab your suitcase and walk off with it without any check whatsoever.

Another good advantage of having a decent internet connection is that you can watch the football. In the Welsh Premier League today, the televised match was Cefn Druid v Llandudno and I managed to catch the second half.

Llandudno had most of the play but weren’t as well-organised as the Druids, and the 2-1 scoreline in favour of the latter was about right.

But judging by the style and quality of the play, it’s clear to see why these two clubs are at the wrong end of the table.

I had a shower and a wash of the clothes that I had been wearing, and then I had to go to a meeting to discuss our future.

There were 170 of us in this little room all told, including The Vanilla Queen – a nice young girl whom I had noticed on the aeroplane coming up here. The presenter of this meeting gave us all some very bad news.

Not the news that I was hoping to hear, I have to say, but it can’t be helped. No-one can legislate for the weather at all and you get what you are given and like it.

As a result, all of our plans have now changed and I am really disappointed. And what didn’t help was missing my aim and biting a huge chunk out of my lower lip. It’s swollen up like nobody’s business right now.

But there’s always a bright side to everything. I had a long chat with she named The Vanilla Queen. She’s a hairdresser, so it seems, and lives on Baffin Island. And she’ll be on my aeroplane with me (and about 50 other people) at … gulp … 06:00 tomorrow morning.

And so yet another early start. I’m going to bed.:!!

Sunday 20th May 2018 – WHAT A NICE SURPRISE!

Yes, I had a video call from Alison this evening. Only the second that I think that I’ve ever had. So as well as a very long chat, she also had a conducted tour of the apartment.

Mind you, it would have been more interesting had I tidied up the place first because it hasn’t been tidied since before I went to Belgium. I really must try to organise myself better.

But it’s not likely to happen today. It’s Sunday and so on Sunday we don’t do any work at all – just sit around and vegetate. There’s not even an alarm to awaken us, so being awake and up and about at 08:20 is rather disappointing.

But tha hadn’t stopped me from being off on my travels during the night. I was wandering around the ring road in Leuven looking for a bus to take me to my hospital appointment in Brussels (exactly!) but I was carrying a big orange fuel container (in fact, one that I have back on the farm) full of petrol – about 20 litres of it in fact – and it was flaming heavy. And so then I thought to myself “what don’t I take it to the place where I have left my red Cortina estate XCL 465 X (actually, the parking spot that I have for Caliburn), fuel her up with it, and then run for the bus? An hour and a half is plenty of time”. And so I decided to do that. But even in the middle of a nocturnal ramble I was able to assure myself that I was going to look pretty foolish when I arrived there because the Cortina was elsewhere – as in the Auvergne. So what would I be doing with 20 litres of petrol for it in Leuven?
A little later I was having coffee with an Arab at some kind of harbourside café. We were watching hordes of people swarm aboard a ferry boat of some description and he was telling me that he had to board it shortly. I told him that I thought that he should be on it already because it was looking very full to me and he might not find a place. He replied that admission to the ferry was by ticket only, he already had his and that it had been stamped as valid and accepted for the voyage. So whatever happened, he could just walk down onto the boat and take his place. It all sounded rather nebulous to me.

And in keeping with my new mode of eating, I didn’t have breakfast this morning. I’m only going to eat when I’m hungry, not when the clock strikes. So I had a brunch – at 12:21 to be precise.

This afternoon was the most important game in the Welsh Premier League’s calendar. The European play-off final. The less-successful teams in the league have been competing in a knock-out tournament with the winner taking the final place in European competition with its guaranteed minimum prize of £220,000 and which could rise to as much as £3,000,000 depending upon success in the Europa League.

Cefn Druids from Cefn Mawr in the outskirts of Wrexham lined up against Cardiff Metro – 5th v 6th in the League. And the match was rather less than exciting unfortunately. But that’s hardly surprising considering what was at stake. It was decided by just one goal from the Druids during a scramble in the goalmouth.

But it could have been a totally different story had the Mets attacker sidefooted the ball into the net right on half-time instead of blazing over an open goal from 5 yards out. Hang his head in shame – that must be one of the most expensive misses in history.

We’ve had the usual walks, the usual vegan pizza and the chat with Alison.

And now we’re going to have an early night. It’s Monday tomorrow so I suppose that I’d better show some willing and start to tidy up the place a little.

Saturday 12th May 2018 – IT’S A WELL-KNOWN PHENOMENON …

… that when you lose something that you desperately need, you can’t find it anywhere even though you know almost exactly where it ought to be.

And it’s an even more well-known phenomenon that while you are looking for the aforementioned, you find something that you lost a while ago and were totally unable to find and you had since given up all hope of ever finding it again. And – you usually find it in a place where you are certain that you have already looked – and on several occasions too.

So for this reason I unreservedly and unequivocally withdraw all of the intemperate remarks that I made at the time and have made since then a propos the mobile phone which disappeared from my possession just before Christmas.

The next question of course is – “what will I have lost and be looking for when I find the spring retaining clip off Caliburn’s window winder?”

Now here’s something rather strange. I was sitting here last night feeling somewhat (but not all that much) tired but I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to do all that much. So in the end I gave it all up as a bad job and went off to bed in default. That’s not at all like me, is it?

And it didn’t take me long (like a matter of a couple of minutes) to go off to sleep too.

The first part of the night was quite restless though and I was tossing and turning somewhat. But eventually I settled down and was well away with the fairies.

We had another one of those nights where I was wandering around aimlessly, my clothes in my hands, from one big public building to another trying to find where the public showers were.
But later I was with a couple of people, one of whom was a young girl of about 10 or 11, on bicycles waiting at a roundabout for the traffic to clear. It was early one morning and still dark and the girl had no lights on. Suddenly she darted off between the traffic and took the wrong road. I had to chase after her, which wasn’t easy seeing as I couldn’t see her, but caught her up eventually on the Coleridge Way estate in Crewe. She’s come to a dead end and couldn’t work out where to go next. I knew where we were although I couldn’t understand how we had arrived there, and to return to our route we had to go down a footpath that would lead us back to the road. But there were these anti-bicycle gates on the footpath so I had to lift her bike over them, and in doing so I scratched the paintwork. You could see through the deep pink down to the original purple colour. She was most upset about that.

It was another struggle to leave the bed this morning. I’m clearly suffering the after-effects of my journey the other day. But having made a nice new muesli mix yesterday I could enjoy a nice fresh breakfast – even if I did forget the orange juice.

A shower and a shave and a general clean-up and then I hit the streets. My trip out took me to LIDL, NOZ and LeClerc where I bought nothing special but nevertheless spent a lot of money because the stocks here are right down.

But I couldn’t help thinking to myself that they must have some strange men doing their shopping at NOZ. Here on the “men’s” shopping rack we have a nice selection of dresses and an even better selection of handbags.

It takes all sorts, I suppose. I wonder if Lee Pottymouth does his shopping here. But then, I didn’t see any fairy boots on offer.

I also visited the Controle Technique station to book Caliburn’s next appointment and also the garage where he goes to be serviced, but they are taking advantage of this week of two Bank Holidays by being closed until Monday.

With the controle technique being due, I reckoned that it might be a good idea to find out why the driver’s door on Caliburn no longer opens from the outside. It was a good morning – not too hot, dry, no wind, so I could work in comfort.

And it didn’t take too long to discover the problem. There’s a rod that operates the door latch and it’s adjustable with a nut on the end. Only there was no nut on the end. It’s fallen off. So I rummaged around, found a nut of the correct size, and reassembled it. It’s not quite adjusted correctly, but it works and that’s good news.

Then, the reassembly bit. The window winder is held on by a spring clip, not a screw, and it’s flaming awkward to fit. The first time that it sprung off I actually caught it as it flew across Caliburn’s cab – much to my own surprise – but the second time it disappeared off in the general direction of under the driver’s seat.

So I bent down to look for it – and the rest is history.

The phone was under there looking as if it had been placed there. It’s impossible for it to have fallen out of my pocket into the position where I found it. And in any case, I’m certain that I’ve looked there before. So I dunno. It’s mystifying me.

The weather was nice enough to work on Caliburn but not nice enough to eat my sandwiches outside. And then, much to my dismay, I was gone with the wind for a good hour or more. Clearly not up with it, am I?

Nevertheless I went for my walk this afternoon and then settled down to watch the football. Cardiff Metro v Barry Town in the Europa League playoffs. Barry unbeaten in the last 10 matches and the Met having been on a woeful run of form although they came good in the last two matches.

And everyone in a packed ground at Cyncoed and those watching on the internet were treated to a thriller for the first 25 minutes. Barry had most of the possession but Cardiff Met played some good, neat football. And then the Met took the lead with a goal out of nowhere. And then a second ditto. A third followed shortly thereafter – an own goal from a defender who headed a free kick into his own net. And that was that.

The second half was pretty much the same although the killer instinct had gone from Cardiff Met. They scored a fourth but Barry pulled one back to make the score a little more respectable. Cardiff Met were the better team to be sure, but not three goals better. If they play like they did in the first half against Cefn Druids next week and win, they’ll tear up Europe next season.

I had my little walk this evening after a tinned tea, and now I’m vegetating. No alarm tomorrow as it’s Sunday so I’m going to sleep until I awake. I reckon that I need it.

Friday 27th April 2018 – GOD, IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

… to get out of bed. I ached in every joint and every muscle.

I’d had a bad night too – couldn’t manage any sort of decent, continuous sleep.

Not that any of this stopped me going on the kind of mega-ramble that I haven’t been on in quite some considerable time though.

We started off with a whole bunch of us in some seaside area or resort and where I was staying was out of the town centre so I had to walk in every day down this same old road to get into town. But it was coming up to our time to leave so we were assembled waiting outside a building for something to happen. After a while I decided that I would go in the building. In there was a load of people whom I knew – probably most of them in fact – and we all ended up having a big chat. Someone began to talk about the time that he had been for a drive with Nerina and the exhaust had become detached from the manifold on the black Cortina and how she had driven over it. I told a few moe stories about car problems that we had had. I happened to glance out of the window to see everyone else starting to come in and they all looked really wet. I asked if it had been raining, and the people replied that it had been snowing too. After a while Anne and Mike (although it wasn’t Mike) decided that they would have to leave regardless of the weather. They went outside but just then two young girls came past on bikes and shouted to Anne “we’ve done it – we’ve done it”. It turns out that Anne and Mike were some kind of medical consultants or the like and had to go to change someone’s bandages, but these two kids had done it instead, and successfully too. I asked what this was all about, so someone explained it to me. And then another two kids appeared. They announced that they had done something else to someone else who needed medicl attention. This ws all very exciting, listening to the accomplishments of these kids. They wandered off so I followed them around the corner. There was this big fat muscular old man there wearing a fez. I went back into the building and ended up in a dark corner doing something, but there was some kind of commotion, and I heard a gruff voice say “right then, we’ll go to his room”. There was the man, dragging roughly a boy from my childhood heading obviously to my room. It was clear that a large amount of force had been used on this boy so I asked him if he was ok. The boy replied “no, not after what he’s just done to me”. That made me pick up the phone to start dialling 999. this man came round to my side of the desk to see what I was doing. I told him that I was phoning the police. He replied “no you aren’t” and went to snatch the phone from me. My response was to pick up one of these dagger-like envelope openers and plunge it straight into his stomach. That’ll settle his hash.
A little later I was changing jobs within an office and all of my old work was going to be taken over by someone else and I would be having new work. I was very very unhappy about this because there were lots of things that I ought to have done yet hadn’t done, and I didn’t want my shortcomings to be exposed to anyone else. In view of this, and seeing that I was beyind retirement age I decided that I would simply retire and walk away. I wandered over to a nearby school to see if any of the school buses needed a new driver, seeing as it was chucking-out time. I had realised that I would be terribly lonely in my retirement as I liked people and was always pleased to see them (!!!). As these kids came streaming out, a young blonde-haired girl came over and greeted me as if we were really old friends. For my part, I had no idea who she was. I couldn’t remember her at all. Nevertheless I told her that I was retiring and that leaving was going to make me fed up. She said that that wasn’t a problem as she baked quite regularly and she promised to contact me each time she baked something and I could come along and buy some cakes off her. We can exchange the money right outside the accountants’ office where I work and that will make him really agitated, seeing me receive money. So I wandered off and ended up in the company of two boys. I ws looking for stones because what I had been doing was building up a breeze-block wall on an earthen bank. But the bank kept on collapsing and as I tried to hammer the breeze block into the cement on the top of this bank it was either making the bank crumble away more or else shaling the breeze block. I needed the stones to make a stabilising layer. My search took me down this cut-off part of road where I encountered these two boys. One of them had a very long pointed stick and he was killing everything that he encountered – deformed stillborn animals, seals caught up in fishing nets – by stabbing them with this pole. I was outraged by this. Halfway down this cut-off we came across a really strong and powerful half-man, half beast thing. He said that if we want to pass, we would have to fight him for it. I immediately volunteered this boy who had been killing everything. I said that he seemed to be in the right kind of humour for the task. But of course, like most bullies, he immediately chickened out. We turned round and retraced our steps much to my disappointment with this boy chickening out of this fight. But that was only to be expected, I suppose. I wasn’t going to get my stones, was I?

With all of that going on, no wonder I was exhausted.

After breakfast and the usual morning routine I sat down and attacked the two missing days. So now Tuesday’s entry and Wednesday’s entry are both on line.

And when you consider that the total amount of words came to just a little short of 5,000, you’ll understand why it took me until 19:50 this evening to finish it off.

It might however have taken less time had I not … errr … had a little relax after my afternoon walk. A good hour or so I was gone. It’s all catching up with me, this jet-setting lifestyle. I’ll be non compos mentis for a while at this rate.

Tea tonight, seeing as I don’t have a great deal of variety in the house just now, was stuffed peppers. I remembered to buy some at LIDL yesterday. And then we had football. Cefn Druids comfortably beat Connah’s Quay Nomads in the Welsh Premier League, live on the internet.

Afterwards, I went for a walk in the dark around the headland, and now I’m off to bed. An early night is called for as there is a lot to do tomorrow, as well as a football match in the evening.

I need to be on top form.

Sunday 25th March 2018 – EVEN THOUGH IT’S SUNDAY …

… I was wide-awake at 06:45. And that’s 05:45 in real money too because the clocks went forward today.

That is – if you live in the real world. For those people who voted for Brexit the clocks went back 100 years – but that’s another story of course.

And I was feeling a little better this morning – mind you, it was a 10-hour sleep that I had just had so it ought to have done me some good.

But not so good that it was a steady walk to the bathroom. I think that I clutched at just about everything on my way there, and on the way back too.

Despite all of that though, Id had a very interesting night’s journey. On eof my friends from school put in an appearance to discuss his latest claim to fame and we ended up outside in a yard full of old timber and so on, doing some kind of open-air camp fire stuff. But over away in a corner was a girl from our year at school, a girl who I don’t think I exchanged even half a dozen words with during the whole 7 years that we were there. How come she had suddenly put in an appearance? I felt that I ought to go over and say something to her seeing as I was the host, I supposed, of what was happening, but I couldn’t think of any kind of introduction after all these years.

The morning, was, as you might have expected, very “quiet”. In fact I didn’t do anything at all. But round about 14:00 I felt that I ought to try some food so I made some soup and had that with some bread. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

There was football on the internet this afternoon – TNS v probably the worst Cefn Druids football team that I have ever seen. 5-1, the score ended up, with New Zealand international striker Greg Draper scoring 4 and he should have had 14. Perhaps it might have been a different result had Cefn Druids’ playmaker Alec Mudimu not been away with Zimbabwe on international duty against Zambia, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer as we all know.

That’s about it really. I’m going to have another good sleep and if I feel better I’ll have some breakfast and a shower tomorrow. I certainly need it after this weekend.

Thursday 8th February 2018 – AND IN NEWS …

… that will surprise absolutely no-one – certainly not the regular readers of this rubbish – having been deposed from the top of the pile by our historical favourites the Royal Bank of Scotland having risen briefly from the dead, the Credit Agricole of Granville go back in front in the race to reach the bottom of the barrel.

Having had a telephone call yesterday from my “service agent” asking me to confirm that everything was in order, at 23:00 last night I had a message from my mobile phone and internet supplier to tell me that th monthly standing order has been missed.

It was previously being paid by the Credit Agricole in Pionsat and the account that I wanted to be closed. And I imagined that it was also being paid from my Granville account, because I remember distinctly taking all of the paperwork there back in the early summer.

And futhermore I had sent the details to the Bank on the 5th of January and again a week or 10 days ago.

So now I’m wondering about my Electricity account and my annual insurance payments.

Just for a change I had the Sleep of the Dead last night. And I went on an exciting voyage too, although every memory of it disappeared the moment that I awoke.

After the medication and breakfast, I had a shower, a shave and a change of clothes. Need to make myself look pretty because it’s shopping oday of course. And the weather was, just for a change, beautiful. Cold but very little wind and -SHOCK! HORROR! – some strange golden thing in the sky.

First port of call was the offices of my phone supplier. I explained the situation about my payments and they gave me a telephone number to call. I could have done the change of bank details then and there, but Brain of Britain hadn’t brought his details with him.

Next stop was the railway station, and that took some finding seeing as how a fairground seems to have grown up around it.

Of course, everyone is preparing for Carnaval, and it looks like it might be exciting. I shall have to go for a good walk around tomorrow evening to see what gives.

At the station I picked up my rail tickets for next week, and I noticed that the times have changed. There are engineering works on the line so the train is departing half an hour earlier, at 08:34. That’s going to upset my plans a little, isn’t it?

Up the hill to LIDL – the usual struggle – and in there I didn’t buy anything exciting at all. I’ve run out of carrots and seeing as they don’t sell t hem individually, I had to buy a kilo. That means before I leave here, I shall have to make some carrot soup and freeze it.

On the way back I popped into the harbour to see what was going on. The tide was in, and so was our old friend the Normandy Trader.

Not in the usual berth for the freighters – I wonder why that is. Probably due to the lock gates and the depth of water in the basin I reckon.

But with the tide being in, there wasn’t much point in going to photograph what they were doing. I’ll have to go again.

Lunch was the remains of the vegetable soup and then I attacked the European Photograph Mountain. Having been out today, I’m exempt from a tidying-up session.

As well as that, I’ve been tackling a little bit on the database, playing the guitar and ringing up the number that they gave me in the phone supplier’s. That at least is up-to-date, no thanks to the Credit Agricole. I really don’t know why I pay them for the service that I’m receiving. They should be paying me.

Having bought some peppers at LIDL, tea tonight was a pepper stuffed with the last of the stuffing that I made the other night. And how delicious that was too.

As yet I’ve not been for a walk. There’s footy on the TV – Bala against Cefn Druids in the Welsh Premier League. And I’m glad that I’m not in Bala – the weather over there is worse than we’ve had.

But I’m on 96% of my daily fitness total so I’ll go for a brief walk around later after full-time. A shame to stop so short of my target.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: cefn druids

Tuesday 31st August 2021 – THIS WAS ANOTHER …

Saturday 19th December 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

Tuesday 8th December 2020 – HAVE YOU EVER …

Friday 28th February 2020 – I MISSED …

Wednesday 12th February 2020 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

Friday 13th December 2019 – THE GOOD NEWS …

Friday 4th October 2019 – TODAY WAS A …

Monday 6th May 2019 – AND IN OTHER …

Friday 26th October 2018 – IT WAS HARD …

Saturday 1st September 2018 – IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

Sunday 20th May 2018 – WHAT A NICE SURPRISE!

Saturday 12th May 2018 – IT’S A WELL-KNOWN PHENOMENON …

Friday 27th April 2018 – GOD, IT WAS HARD THIS MORNING …

Sunday 25th March 2018 – EVEN THOUGH IT’S SUNDAY …

Thursday 8th February 2018 – AND IN NEWS …

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