Tag Archives: census

Sunday 2nd May 2021 – 08:45 …

… is far too early to leave my bed on a Sunday when I’m supposed to be having a lie-in. Especially when I didn’t go to bed until 03:30 (that’ll teach me to crash out so comprehensively during the day).

11:35 is much more like it and I felt so much better for it too.

After the medication I made a pile of bread dough. 500 grammes worth of wholemeal flour with a couple of big handfuls of sunflower seeds for a loaf for next week and then 200 grammes of bleached flour because I’m going to have a jam roly-poly for pudding next week.

That took me up to a rather late lunch or breakfast or whatever you might call it and then I carried on with having a look through this free census. At that point Rosemary called me so we had another one of our mega-chats.

Interestingly, she’s been trying to trace her family tree but had run aground. With all of the files open I had a go to see what I could find and managed to trace her family back on both sides to the end of the 18th Century without a great deal of difficulty. It makes my family look exotic.

When she hung up I came in here and gave the bread a second kneading, then kneaded the roly poly dough, rolled it out, spread it with jam, rolled it up, cut it into 2 and put it on a baking tray to rise again.

Finally, I kneaded the pizza dough that I had taken from the freezer, rolled it out and put it on the pizza tray, folded the overhanging edges back in, and left that to rise too.

That took me up to my rather late afternoon walk

people on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAs usual I wandered over to the wall on the end of the car park to have a look down to see what was going on down there.

There was plenty of beach to be going on with today but there weren’t all that many folk down there on it this afternoon. And that was a surprise because it was quite a summery day today, nice and warm, and the wind had dropped a little more. I’d have expected a few more people out there this afternoon.

But there were plenty of people on the footpath on top of the cliffs. It was rather like the M6 on a Friday afternoon. And so I pushed on regardless through the crowds at whatever risk to my health and regardless of whether they were wearing a mask.

aeroplane 49ABE pointe du roc Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallWhile I was walking along the path I was overflown by another light aeroplane on its way to the airport at Donville les Bains.

Its serial number painted on the underside of the wings is 49ABE and that’s a number that is out-of-series for any main registration list so I can’t tell you anything at all about it. It’s not even shown as landing at the airport either so that’s that as far as I can see.

Plenty of cars on the car park today as you might expect, with people having come from just about everywhere for a walk around our cliffs this afternoon. I avoided them as best as I could and went down to the end of the headland to look out to sea but there wasn’t anything in the way of fishing boats working there this afternoon.

charles marie baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThere was however something exciting going on in the bay though that doesn’t involve any fishing boat.

That looks like Charles Marie out there going for a sail around the bay. Or, more likely, a diesel around the bay as her sails are still furled. It’s a nice little day for a run around outside.

But one boat that we are unlikely to see again around here is Lys Noir. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that she was in the chantier navale for quite a while for an overhaul, and having gone back into the sea, she’s now been sold and in the future will be plying her trade out of another port.

It’s my turn to go and ply my trade out of another port, to wit my kitchen where I forgot to make my coffee as I had other things to do.

I switched on the oven and bunged the bread and the roly poly in there to bake, having brushed the roly poly with milk and dusted it with sugar first.

While it was was baking I assembled my pizza, having been obliged to use mushrooms out of a tin seeing as I didn’t buy any yesterday. And when the Bread and roly poly were baked, I put the pizza in to cook.

home made bread jam roly poly vegan pizza place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallAnd here are the finished products. The pizza was delicious given its shortcomings, and I’ll tell you about the bread and the roly poly tomorrow night. I had no room for pudding this evening.

So now having written up my notes I’m going to bed. With my late start and my time out to chat to Rosemary I didn’t do half of what I was wanting to do today but it can’t be helped. So if you want to read about where I went during the night you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that. I’ve not had time to transcribe them yet.

Tomorrow I’m radioing and I have a couple of live concerts to manufacture tomorrow. Those are starting to fall behind so I have to catch up. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for those but I’ll probably think of something.

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Monday 16th January 2017 – WHAT A BEAUTIFUL …

… tea that was!

First of all, I sliced up a large carrot and potato and put them on to boil. And while they were doing, I sliced up an onion and some garlic and fried them in vegan margarine with some cumin and turmeric.

Once they were fried to perfection, I added a tin of mushrooms and a small tin of macedoine vegetables, and then tipped in the potato and carrot. Once they were simmering away, I cooked a pan of rice in turmeric.

There’s enough curry for four days, so three helpings went in the fridge and I had the fourth with the rice. And just for a change, I had it on a plate instead of eating out of my saucepan. Completely delicious. And there’s more to come over the next three days, when the spices have had more of an opportunity to percolate into the food.

A job well done, my curry!

I slept right through until the alarm went off, with only one distraction and no nocturnal rambling either. Alone again at breakfast and I might well be alone in the building too, because I’ve not heard a thing from anyone else for a good few hours.

That gave me plenty of opportunity to crack on with some other stuff today. I did some stuff on the 3D program that I use, using the design function and I actually managed to create something. Or, rather, modify an existing prop. It wasn’t difficult but it’s a step forward all the same.

As well as that, I’ve been doing some more research with my Labrador project and the Finnish espeditions. Interestingly, they make reference to a Priest, the Reverend Paul Hettasch, who was a Moravian priest from Germany who ran one of the Moravian missions on the coast, at Makkovik. The author of the report, Vaino Tanner, talks at length about all of the weather reports that Hettasch was keeping – how precise, complete and thorough they were. And a further search about Hettasch on the internet revealed that according to the Canadian Police, Hettasch was a Nazi sympathiser who sent all of his weather notes back to Germany and these formed the basis of the weather predictions that aided the German bombers of the Luftwaffe in their attacks over the UK in the early days of World War II.

It’s amazing what you can uncover these days in all of these research projects.

But while I was looking over the Labrador censuses during the inter-war period I came across some interesting notes taken by the census-recorder at Davis Inlet while he was asking about the Innu settlement at Voisey’s Bay in 1935. His notes were extremely brief, with just the most basic details recorded, and he explained that the “… information was furnished by a Davis Inlet Indian and it was impossible to get further details. Their life is a nomadic one and it would be futile to go look for them.”

But it was difficult this afternoon. I kept on dozing off here and there, and when I was awake, it was difficult to concentrate. I need to do what I can to recover my fighting spirit and get back to work properly.

I can’t go on like this!

And you may well have noticed – I’ve not set a single foot outside the building today.

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Saturday 24th January 2015 – I HAD A NICE …

… morning out today.

I was up early this morning despite havig had a late night and having been on my travels again. I was driving up to Southern Scotland with Rosemary and had taken the road via Derby (the old A6) which had led to some kind of deviation around the Matlock area. We ended up at Carlisle in a motel but the room that we had been given also doubled as a rest room for the staff and I was continually being disturbed by staff members coming in for a smoke and so on. In the meantime there were a couple of boys with fishing nets and jam jars and wearing helmets, diving into pools of the most disgusting and dirty water, looking for what, I don’t have any idea.

By 09:00 I was at Cécile’s to show a couple of people around Cécile’s house and on the way back I called at the Intermarché and ended up having lengthy chats with various people, including Marianne.

I went round to the Mairie afterwards. It’s census time again and I’ve been away from the house for just one day, and guess which day it was that they called? I now have to declare myself at the Mairie but of courseit was closed this morning so I resolved to go back this afternoon.

No chance of that, though. We had the heaviest snow of the winter this afternoon and everywhere is a white-out. I’ll have to go there another time.

I spent this afternoon working on the text for the radio programme and that’s almost finished. An hour tomorrow and it will be done.

Apart from having a lengthy chat with Cecile this evening, that’s my lot today. It’s not been the weather for doing much else.

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Tuesday 2nd February 2010 – I’ve had another one of these days …

… where I haven’t done very much. Life seems to be conspiring against me right now.

I was awake long before the alarm went off – in fact I had to crawl out of bed to go for a Gipsy’s but it was far too cold to stay up so I went back to bed until the alarm went off. At least, that was the plan but for some reason or another it was 10:04 when I came to my senses (such as they are).

I didn’t have time to have my breakfast either for while the kettle was boiling the phone rang. It was the Mairie ringing up – could the woman doing the census come round and take my details? So she and her minder came round (they’ve clearly heard all about me) and took down my particulars. It was a good job I had put clean ones on. But the French census is a lark – they just want to know your age, place of birth, profession, education standard and your employment as well as something about the conditions in which you live. Vastly different from the UK where they want to know more about you than you know about yourself.

After that, someone from the Conversation Group rang up with a chagrin d’amour. I suppose that I should be pleased that people feel comfortable in confiding their problems to me. It’s a pleasant change from being totally ingored – the usual state of affairs.

I managed an hour or two on the wall but it was then time to go off to Montaigut to look at these two houses. One is supposed to be livable in a certain fashion but the other one is merely four walls and a roof. We had a good poke around and as you might expect the “livable” one didn’t live up to expectations – damp penetration being one of the major problems. And from the corner of the roof that was supposed to have been fixed. But we had a good chat afterwards and some serious discussions took place, with the result that for better or for worse we placed an offer on the properties – suitably balanced to cover the cost of re-redoing the roof (I made sure that the estate agent was aware of the defect) and putting right the damage. The way we see it, the more time we spend discussing the situation the longer it’s going to take us to make a start. And all the time with inflation at 3% and bank interest at just 0.5% the longer you wait the more the real value of your savings melts away before your eyes. The quicker we can find something suitable and start to invest our labour into it the better.

After that, it was 17:00 when I came home and I didn’t feel like starting work again just for an hour – which was just as well as Claude came round for a chat and he was here for over an hour. I’m going to have to put in a good day tomorrow.

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Friday 15th January 2010 – Liz rang me up this morning for a chat.

intermarche pionst puy de dome franceThe new Intermarche at Pionsat opened its doors on Wednesday and yesterday Liz went there for a look round. She was ever so excited – they had some kind of prize draw there, and she had won a flight in a helicopter!

Anyway, I reckoned that seeing as how I had to go into Pionsat yesterday anyway, I’d go and have a nosey around in there. First thing I did was have a go at the prize draw but of course my usual luck held out and I won b*gg*r all.

Never mind, I went for a wander around and I was quite impressed. They are clearly “mindful” of the large “Alternative” community that exists round here. Tons of pulses, dried herbs, infusions, all that kind of thing (and at a price too, though, it has to be said) and a really good “bio” selection. They are also just as clearly “mindful” of the large British community living round here. Heinz Baked Beans and Typhoo tea bags were just two of the dozens of traditional British products on sale. They even had Hartley’s Jelly, something that I have never ever seen anywhere this side of the Channel.

And of course that reminds me. I worked in Brussels for several years and one day one of my Belgian colleagues came up to me. “What do you call that dessert that you Brits eat and it goes ‘brrrrrrrr’ when a lorry drives past?“

Another exciting thing about the Intermarche was some publicity from the local taxi company offfering some kind of limited stage carriage service from the local area into Pionsat and from Pionsat to Clermont Ferrand and Montlucon. They even advertised a shopping service – you phone up the shop and place your order, they go round and pick it up and bring it to you, for €5:00. It’s not quite “Tesco at Home” but it’s still some kind of gesture to the 21st Century.

And seeing that advert prompted me to do something that I vowed that I would never ever do even if I was dying of hunger and the bailiffs were hammering at the door, having spent 25 years of my life doing it. I went round to the taxi company’s office and, mindful of the fact that they were advertising a whole host of new services, I suggested to them that they might feel the need to engage extra drivers and if so I was available on an occasional basis. So I now have to fill in a CV and a letter of motivation and we’ll see what happens.

I must be off my head.

But the most exciting thing occurred as I was wandering around the Intermarche. The woman from Luxembourg who lives up the road a way from here and uses my e-mail address when she needs to order anything – she was in there and she came over to me saying “here – have this!” And it was A RIDE IN A HELICOPTER. She had won it and she had absolutely no intention of doing anything that involved taking more than one foot off the ground. All in favour of terra firma – the more firma, the less terra. I was ever so impressed, and ever so grateful.

And I’m still in great demand here. Apart from Liz on the phone I had one of these cold calling canvassers. By the time we finished our call I had the latter cursing and swearing at me down the telephone. Serve them right – I hate them. And not only that I had a visit from the mayor’s office. Firstly about the census and would I like to participate by filling in a form. And secondly it was a fact-finding mission as there appears to be some confusion about the land that I want to buy from the commune. One of the councillors wanted to see precisely what it was that I was wanting.

With all of that, I haven’t done much here. I have an “outside wall” in the stairwell where I wasn’t able to put any insulation to stop the heat leaving the attic. I found some thick corrugated cardboard boxes and flattened them out to use. If homeless people can live in them then they must be some good at insulating and it does seem to work. It’s quite cosy in here even without the heating on.

But I did fit the vertical that I cut yesterday. I also trimmed it to take the horizontal battens that will support the plasterboards. And I’ve made a start on the next one. While I was looking for a suitable chevron I came across some stuff such as guitar leads that I’d been looking for for a while.

All in all, on balance I’ve had a really good day today.

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