… of this rubbish will recall the storm cloud that was gathering out in the bay yesterday afternoon.

Today, we had practically the same, except that the clud was a little further to the north, hovering around over Pointe de Grouin.

The wind was just the same, blowing around from south-east to north-west contrary to the usual direction, and I was thinking just as yesterday that the wind doesn’t need to veer around very much for that lot to be blown back over here and drop well and truly on us.

And just like yesterday, that was exactly what happened. About half an hour later the wind changed direction and shortly afterwards we were swamped with another torrential downpour.

It certainly makes a change, for according to official records that were published this morning, we went a total of 47 days without the slightest drop of rain this summer just gone and if that’s not a record, I don’t know what is.

And while we’re on the subject of records … “well, one of us is” – ed … we didn’t quite have a new record of sound-files dictated during the night while I was away on my travels, but it was still pretty good going.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. While you admire a few photos of the maritime activity today (of which there was plenty, for a change) I’ll start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

And last night was a “highly active” night with plenty of tossing and turning. And dictating too as you’ll find out in due course.

So much so that when the alarm went off this morning I was pretty wasted and it was another long, dispirited attempt to try to drag myself out of bed before the second alarm went off.

After the medication I came back in here and spent a good half-hour or so trying to summon up the energy to actually push on and do something.

But once checking the mails and messages was out of the way, I could make a start. And I’ve finally finished all of the photos from my Jersey trip.

And it didn’t ‘arf take quite a while too. There has to be a quicker way of batch-processing what I’m doing with the photos and one of these days I’ll sit down and write out some scripts to automate the process if I can.

But the trouble is that when you are up to your neck in alligators it’s very hard to remember that what you are trying to do is to just drain the swamp.

Anyway, they are all on line now so that’s that done.

At the moment what I’m doing is posting the text from the blog entry for that day into the correct position and then I’ll have to write more notes for some of the other photos.

There were 94 in all that made the final cut which isn’t bad, so there will only be a small percentage of those that will figure in the journal entry. I’ll make up a photo page for the rest when I have a moment, whenever that might be.

Apart from all of that, I’ve been extremely business today and that’s not like me, is it?

One thing that’s been annoying me is the hunt that I’m on for the piece for that car that was imported into Europe from Canada and spare bodywork panels aren’t available in Europe.

Not being able to interest my relatives in the affair and it’s not the kind of thing that you can ask friends to do, I finally after many vicissitudes tracked down the original supplier a few weeks ago and I contacted them.

There was an acknowledgement and then nothing else, even after a reminder so this afternoon I tracked down their social media page and left a few messages.

Eventually, someone responded to me and told me that they “would get back to” me. I have a feeling that this saga is going to run and run until we all die of boredom.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m thoroughly fed up of trying to do business. I send off countless e-mails for all kinds of things and rarely receive a reply, never mind reach a satisfactory conclusion.

That’s not necessarily the case all the time. A couple of my friends are involved in Arctic Exploration as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and I religiously follow up their links to see what opportunities there might be for me to go North again.

And someone has actually replied and ‘phoned me back this afternoon. And that’s a first, isn’t it?

Mind you, this won’t go all that far either, I reckon. I can sense it.

But doesn’t everywhere look nice and bright and let so much more light in when you clean the windows? First time since … errr … I’ve been here that I’ve washed the outside of the windows. And they were dirty too!

It’s not a particularly good job because scrambling over the furniture is a bit beyond me at the moment but it’s stall a vast improvement. That cheap telescopic window cleaning tool that I bought from Noz ages ago is certainly the business.

You’re probably surprised that I found the time to go out for my afternoon walk.

a href=”https://www.erichall.eu/images/2209/22090044.html”>And as usual I wandered off across the car park to look at what was happening down on the beach. And wasn’t this a surprise that there were actually some people down there today?

It doesn’t look as if they are sunbathers though. Probably just holidaymakers from the caravanette park down the road from where I live out for a run around before the storm hits.

With the wind blowing from the opposite direction today it would be quite sheltered down there. Not sheltered enough though to encourage people into the water. It looks as if that’s finished for the season now until the end of the year when everyone dresses up as penguins and goes for the winter dip.

Having taken a few photos of boats and the like out at sea I staggered off down to the viewpoint overlooking the park

Not that I got very far though. As I passed through the arch in the opposite wall of the car park ready to go down the street, around the corner came the familiar sight of Thora on her way into port.

Thinking about it actually, she came into port last Wednesday too as we were strapped into our seats waiting for Victor Hugo to reverse out of her berth. It must be every Wednesday that she comes into port, so I’ll have to keep an eye open for that.

Incidentally, Normandy Trader comes into port every Thursday at least.

By the time that I made it down to the viewpoint, Thora was well inside the harbour heading towards the gates into the inner harbour.

She doesn’t look as if she has much of a load on there at all today. By that, I’m making reference to what is known as the “Plimsoll Line”.

The Plimsoll Line is the round circle with the line through it and it’s effectively the loading gauge of the ship. You can in theory load up the ship until that line is level with the water.

There are different lines painted on the ship for each ocean and season during which the ship sails. You want to see the Plimsoll Line for “Winter North Atlantic”. It’s a lot lower down than, say, “Tropical Freshwater” where you can stick far more freight on a boat and have it much lower in the water.

Now this is a photo that I’ve been wanting to take for years.

It’s a decent (in composition, if maybe not in technique) photograph showing sisters Le Tiberiade and Le Coelacanthe together. And why I wanted this photo is to compare them so that I can tell them apart when I see them on their own.

When they are here like this we can see that Le Coelacanthe is slightly bigger, it has wings at the side of the wheelhouse to stop the spray going inside, thz masthead is much more substantial but she only has three windows at the side of the wheelhouse rather than four.

It might be a good idea for me to run one of those photo competitions and let the regular readers of this rubbish recall the differences and award a prize to the person who comes up with the most.

And did you hear about the man who invented the crowbar?
He was awarded first prize.

I’ll get my coat.

While I was busy watching Thora making her way across the inner harbour to tie up underneath the crane, suddenly Shtandart slipped her moorings and set off.

Crowds of people on board too. So unless she’s kidnapped a pile of hostages, repatriating a bunch of unwelcome Russians or taking back some recruits for the Russian Army, it looks as if she’s going out for a lap around the bay.

But it’s rather late for that now, unless she’s planning to stay out for the night.

It’s something that I can’t say for definite because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, because I’ve said it before, she has her AIS transmitter switched off so I can’t pick her up on my radar and tell you where she is for definite.

So while you watch Shtandart make her way out of harbour (under her diesel engine, not – regrettably – under canvas) I headed for home and my glass of ginger beer.

And also to attack the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. This was another one of which I’d forgotten half as soon as I grabbed the dictaphone. There was a robbery taking place on Jersey. The people who committed it were on the same boat as we were on the way home. I can’t remember any more about it except that at one point there was a couple of young lads dressed in some kind of hip clothing going past. A TV company was interviewing people about it. I said something like “each generation has its own identity, its own clothes etc. We’ve all been there and we’ve all done that when we were that age too. So what?”.

Some time later there was this family heading towards the ferry to go to Jersey. They were struggling along carrying this stuff. This was when these new colour codes had been invited. We didn’t really know what they were out on the island so we didn’t realise that the boy pushing the pram with a lot of clothing and suitcases in it was really disabled so he was met with hoots of derision. He dropped the pram onto the ground, he fell onto the ground abd everyone was still laughing at him because they hadn’t seen or understood the significance of the flag that he was flying. The landlord in charge of a pub there in Jersey was telling me that these people were so unreliable that they even had a couple of lock-up garages repossessed that they were using to do these different things.

It had been the play-off final in Wales. The 2 clubs had travelled down to Cardiff along with all of their supporters. I’d arranged a lot of transport for a lot of different groups but there was some kind of issue. Going back was extremely difficult and no-one reached home until the small hours of the following morning at least. One coach didn’t arrive until Sunday lunchtime. Someone had been suggesting to me that a coach from Caernarfon was even later still. I went round to see it and the driver was still there. I asked him if he’d had a good trip. He shrugged his shoulders. I asked what time he’d returned. He replied “07:00 on Sunday” which given everything else that had happened I didn’t think was too bad. I asked him about that.

There was a boat out in Cardigan Bay doing something. At one moment the passengers thought that they were all going back into harbour but someone else on board from the crew announced that he had a couple more verses to do yet of his song. Everyone groaned while he started to sing. There were even a few people who wished that the ship would sink so that they could escape from all of this.

We were in a hotel. We’d gone to some kind of meeting or other. The boss said that we’d all meet for breakfast. Some time or other early on he came round and awoke us all, told us to fetch our breakfast and come to his room. I thought he said Room 32 but in fact he said Room 22. It took me a while to gather my wits and prepare myself. I picked up my breakfast, went to Room 32, found that it wasn’t there, went to Room 22, opened the door and went it. The room was crowded. Instead of just being the half-dozen or so of us there were probably 25 people in there including some young kids. There was just 1 seat vacant but there was someone’s meal in front of that. I asked if I should go to fetch a chair but no-one took any notice. They didn’t say anything. I was just about to shout at the top of my voice to awaken everyone and attract their attention when the church clock here began to ring and I awoke.

Back asleep again and I was with a group of hippies or people like that. We’d gone off camping for the weekend. I’d gone in Caliburn but there were all kinds of people there in tents etc. Someone had rigged up some kind of LED warning system. I’d made an adapter for it with a set of Christmas lights and strung a set of Christmas Lights and connected them to a low-frequency sound detector. Sure enough, I managed to make mine work which impressed everyone. They all came round to see it. They went over to my van but I had someone with me. They came back with my big pressure cooker. They said that someone’s sister (and they produced this young girl) was going to set up a recording device to record the arrival of the moles because this light chain pulse emitter would go off and emit a noise. She then said that she didn’t want to do it ina pressure cooker so I tried to find out exactly how she wanted to do it. A pressure cooker and an automatic voice recorder with a pressure cooker to act as an echo chamber and the voice recorder set to “automatic” to switch on when there was a noise would be ideal I would have thought, given the limited stuff that we had available. But she wanted to do it another way and I wanted to find out which

So no-one whom we know came with us last night. A good thing in certain circumstances with certain people, but not so good in other circumstances with other people

Tea was a left-over curry and I was rather ambitions with that and there is some left over that I will have to find a way of using. Delicious as it was, I can’t really have a curry made of left-overs from a left-over curry. One idea would be to make a left-over pasty and bake it on the oven. That would certainly be interesting, to say the least.

So having cleaned the outside of the windows, whatever next? Maybe I ought to think about cleaning the insides.

Actually, I might take my life into my own hands and steam-clean the bathroom next.

God help us!