Tag Archives: database

Monday 4th February 2019 – HAVING GONE …

… to bed reasonably early last night, I slept right through until the alarm went off this morning, with just a little interruption here and there. Nothing serious.

And on the subject of “nothing serious”, I was off on my travels last night too. And it concerned my old black cat Tuppence. She had an accident to one of her front paws and pulled her claws right out. All rather gruesome.

I didn’t loiter long in bed, and so we had an early-ish start today.

But not for long.

Round about 09:15 I was overwhelmed with fatigue. Not a desperate tiredness but I just couldn’t concentrate. And so I went to bed for an hour. No point in fighting the fatigue because I wouldn’t get anything done anyway.

I did close my eyes for about 10 minutes or so, but that was about it. And by 10:20 I was back up and fighting fit. Well, sort-of anyway.

This morning I was attacking the photos again. I’d taken quite a pile yesterday and they all needed editing and generally sorting-out. And it took me longer than I expected. No idea why.

There was an interruption too. Rosemary rang me up for a chat and we were on the phone for over an hour putting the world to rights. It meant a rather late lunch but never mind. There’s nothing wrong whatever in spending time chatting to friends.

After lunch, the next project was to resurrect the database that I started to make a couple of years ago. But a good search around the computer and I can’t find it anywhere. It mustn’t have survived the transfer over.

And so I started off another one. But for some reason or other I couldn’t make it work as I wanted. I seem to remember having exactly the same issue with the previous one and it took me ages to solve it. And I can’t remember how I did it now. This is going to take me much longer than I thought.

fishing boat storm ile de chausey granville manche normandy franceThe wind had dropped by the time that I went for my walk. Just blowing at gale-force.

There were a couple of little trawlers out there heading for port, and it was quite amusing fun watching them smashing their way through the waves on their way home.

Many people really don’t appreciate the efforts and the dangers that fishermen go through;

lorry unloading gravel port de granville harbour manche normandy franceBut no sign of Neptune in the harbour though. She’s still offshore somewhere and her latest ETA is 00:00. I won’t be there to see her put in to port at that time of night.

But in the meantime, they are still bringing loads of gravel down from the quarry and dropping it off on the quayside ready for Neptune to take away

Tea was sausages in cheese sauce. Just as delicious as it always is. And followed by the rest of the rice pudding.

casino place marechal foch granville manche normandy franceThere was no-one else about for the evening walk. I was completely on my own. Mind you, the wind had dropped still more and it was now just “strong”.

The Casino at the Place Marechal Foch presented a very interesting photography subject this evening, down there all bathed in blue light. I don’t recall having seen it looking like this before.

So I’ll try to have another early night and a decent sleep tonight. I have things to do tomorrow.

But at least my birth certificate turned up today. It’s destroyed one of my pet theories about my origins, but presented me with several other mysteries.

We shall have to see.

fishing boat storm ile de chausey granville manche normandy france
fishing boat storm ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

fishing boats baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
fishing boats baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

fishing boats port de granville harbour manche normandy france
fishing boats port de granville harbour manche normandy france

fishing boats port de granville harbour manche normandy france
fishing boats port de granville harbour manche normandy france

vertical axis wind turbine plat gousset granville manche normandy france
vertical axis wind turbine plat gousset granville manche normandy france

0

Saturday 10th February 2018 – IT’S CARNAVAL!!!

And I’ve been out for most of the day.

I have dozens of photos and a good few videos but they aren’t edited yet, so you’ll have to come back over the course of the next few days to catch up with what I was up to.

But during the night I was off on my travels again and found myself, as some people were saying, in Coventry. People in a bar where I was were pointing out the cathedral down in the square at the bottom of the hill, but this was nothing at all like Coventry – the hill was unimaginably steep and it immediately suggested “Oldham” to me – I’m not sure why because in reality it was nothing whatever like Oldham either. Far too “posh”. But as for me, I continued on my way and found a rambling brick complex of buildings, now having the air of being totally deserted and boarded up. I went over for a closer look and found that the decaying noticeboard outside showed evidence of having once had writing in Welsh written upon it. Apparently it was a former school (although what a Welsh-speaking school was doing in Oldham wasn’t clear) and as it happens, there was nothing “former” about it because there were two classes still taking place, despite how derelict and abandoned the place looked. It turned out that one of the classes didn’t have a teacher and seeing as it was the Welsh-speaking class, I volunteered (not like me at all is is, volunteering and teaching?). It all seemed to be going okay until one of the fathers came to see me. He was concerned that his daughter was not doing as well as he thought she should, and that it was all my fault (not hers of course) and wanted me to inflate her marks. “And if I didn’t …”. For the next test she didn’t do so well either so he came back, insisting that I up her marks to 81%. That I refused to do so he whipped out a gun, waved it around under my nose and told me that I would. I gave a weary sigh. I told him that I was old and tired and couldn’t care less, and if he wanted to shoot me then to go ahead because I really was beyond the point of arguing with anyone.

All of this awoke me bolt-upright at 05:21, but no chance of leaving the stinking pit at that time. I curled back under the bedclothes until the alarm went off at the much-more-reasonable time of 06:40.

After breakfast I had an hour or so on the database but for some unknown reason it locked up and that was that. I’m not doing very well with this at all.

But all of a sudden, the memory stick in the hi-fi came to an end. That was the cue for some major amendments.

For the last few weeks the hi-fi has been perched precariously on the bookcase behind me, with wires and cable causing all kinds of problems. So today I moved the old computer hi-fi gear off the shelves where I keep the records and installed it there.

To make that work I had to drill four holes in the back of the unit, and feed all of the cables through for the mains power, the aerial lead and the two speakers – and lengthened the speaker wires with the cable that I bought last week.

Feeding the mains cable through the back meant cutting off the moulded plug – but I’d bought a replacement so that wasn’t an issue.

With the extra lengths of cable I now have the stereo speakers far enough apart to have real stereo sound and that is definitely progress. I’m very happy with my set-up now.

And remember the memory sticks that I bought yesterday? I made up another one (there’s four just now) and made a note of the albums that are on each memory stick so that I don’t double them up.

After lunch I went down to the carnaval to see the childrens’ procession. And I’ll tell you much more about that in due course when I’ve organised all of the photos that I took. I will say that I was impressed.

However, I did feel out of place in civvies. Exactly the opposite to the time when I was in Jerusalem and due to a misunderstanding, I was the only one at the Wailing Wall who was carrying a harpoon.

There was someone there carrying a girl sitting on his shoulders.
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked him
“I’m a snail” he replied
“And what about the girl on your shoulders?”
“She’s Michelle”.

And there was a character there dressed all in brown with little green bits stuck to him
“What about you?” I asked
“I’m a character from ‘Star Trek'”
“Which one?”
“Captain’s log”.

It quietened down later in the afternoon but by now the rain was coming down heavier (it goes without saying of course that it was raining all day) so rather than hang around, I came home for a coffee.

Later on I braved the cold and rain to go up to the Stade Louis Dior for the football. US Granville were playing the reserves of Lorient – a professional team.

And they looked it too – much fitter, quicker, sharper. And I particularly liked the way that they sped about the field to close down the Granville players whenever they had the ball. It’s long been my complaint, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that teams give their opponents far too much time and space on the ball.

But Lorient spent most of the match trying to pass the ball into the net. They had probably 65% of the possession but were comparatively ineffective up front. They just weren’t direct enough and hardly made a single killer pass. And when they did beat the keeper, a Granville defender was behind him to clear off the line.

Their big blond n°9 was quite ineffective and didn’t contribute much at all, but one thing that he did do was to continually harass the defence and the keeper whenever they were playing the ball around at the back. And he harried them on several occasions into hasty, wayward clearances and a couple of occasions into losing possession in dangerous places, situations that would have undone Granville with a more attack-minded team.

Granville were quite subdued today – the efforts of playing three matches in 7 days is probably too much, and so a 0-0 draw was about right. But it was a good match for all of that.

ON the way back I went round the funfair to see what was happening and take some photos, so that’s another pile to organise.

But again I didn’t hang about. I was frozen to the marrow and soaked to the skin. How I’m going to regret this.

A tin of ratatouille with pasta was fine for tea and now I’m off to bed. It’s Sunday – a lie in, and with 148% of my daily activity accomplished, I need it too.

I’ll be dead to the world in a minute, and I hope that I can have a really good, long sleep.

0

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.

carnaval fairground place de la gare granville manche normandy franceNext 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.

normandy trader port de granville harbour manche normandy franceOn 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.

0

Wednesday 7th February 2018 – I MISSED …

… the first alarm this morning.

Well, I actually didn’t. I vaguely remember it going off, and I vaguely remember reaching out and turning it off. And then that was that until the second alarm went off. Dead to the world. And it was a struggle to haul myself out of bed – I’ll tell you that.

A,d I’d been on my travels again during the night. I Was with some girl or woman – and I can’t remember who now – watching some old cat try to come to terms with three kittens who were doing their usual kitten antics like falling into the bowl of milk. Watching the bewilderment on the face of this old cat made us both remark at the same moment that it was like he had completely forgotten that a few years ago he was a kitten too.

After the usual performance this morning, I cracked on with this huge pile of photos that I’ve discovered. And anther enormous pile has headed the way of being stored on the External Hard Drive in the Sky. Duplicates, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, we’ve got the lot.

On my laptop I’ve a duplicate file finder program and I set it to work in one of the directories, but it took one look at what I was expecting it to do and promptly crashed. And I can’t say that I blamed it.

But I was so engrossed in what I was doing that it was gone 13:30 when I stopped for lunch. And another packet of that “5 assorted vegetables passed through a sieve” soup, with small pasta and bulghour. Add some bread and fruit as well, and there you are.

This afternoon, with not having gone out, I attacked another corner of the living room – the part between the sofa and the window. That’s all vacuumed, cleaned and tidied and things put away.

The good news is that when I moved the sofa back to vacuum underneath where it had been I found the miniature 64GB memory stick. I’d totally forgotten about that. But that prompted me to do a back-up of the laptop. You never know.

And I’ve started to pack for Leuven next week. It’s never too early for that of course.

We had the usual walk around the headland, in the bitter biting wind, followed by a coffee, a … errr … relax, and then an attack on the database, as well as a play on the bass guitar.

For tea we had oven chips, beans and some falafel that I had bought at the weekend. And it’s nothing like as good as you might find in a Leuven fritkot.

Out into the wind for the evening walk, and then back here. And that’s that for today. I’ve done quite enough. Shopping tomorrow of course, and I need to stock up a little because the town will be in chaos this weekend with the carnaval.

So I’d better have an early night, hadn’t I?

0

Tuesday 6th February 2018 – YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP!

I had the Royal Bank of Scotland on the ‘phone this morning. Complaints department ringing me back about my call yesterday.

They gave me a brief and unconvincing explanation about why they had sent out the letter to my old address but I didn’t pursue it any further – they were well and truly on the back foot. They did however confirm that my new address had been noted.

So having dealt with that, I asked about my bank cards. In my letter advising them of my change of address I had told them of my … errr … missing bank cards and requested duplicates. So I wanted to know when I might receive them.

There was a brief silence – and then a cough. “It seems like no-one has dealt with the second part of your letter” was the embarrassed reply. So he had to deal with that, and then pass me through to the Bank’s credit card centre to talk to them.

“Please enter your credit card number” said the automatic reply.

And so I did.

“I’m sorry. We don’t recognise that as a valid card number” replied the machine. And that’s hardly a surprise because when I noticed that the card was missing, I rang up to cancel it.

And so we went round and round in circles until some human intervened.

You really couldn’t make up any of this nonsense.

Although I didn’t have a very long sleep last night, it was quite deep. And I was off on my travels too, not into an igloo with Sylvia or with TOTGA either, but I ended up running around after some neurotic 40-something woman. Very tense and edgy – and also armed with a pistol. And the people whom whe was intended to confront were likewise armed, but much more experienced and much more at ease with it, so I had to try to persuade this woman to calm down and at least disarm herself, otherwise this could all end in tears.

One look at the weather convinced me that I wasn’t going anywhere this morning, despite my plans. Howling gale, freezing cold and torrential rain. I didn’t even have my shower, but sat on the sofa sorting through that disk full of photos and merging another pile. That was my morning’s work.

Despite not liking the soup, I finished it off at lunchtime and then – surprise surprise – I did some more housework. I’ve cleaned the hallway and what will be the dining area. That’s all tidied, vacuumed, washed and cleaned. And Brigitte, one of my neighbours, caught me washing the floor. That will go down well, I reckon.

And then I braved the elements for my walk. I declined the opportunity to go round the headland in view of the howling gale. It was tough enough going around the city walls.

Back here with a coffee, a little .. errr … repose, and then I attacked the issue of my train and accommodation next week in Leuven. Fortunately I can receive messages on this new phone now so I could pick up the bank’s confirmation code.

And then the database. I’m still no further forward in the long run with this.

Tea was more tortillas and spicy rice, and then a walk. And bumped once more into Brigitte. Apparently there was a meeting this evening of the local residents and I missed it.

But back around the walls and now I’m home again in the warm and my nice partly-clean apartment. If the weather eases tomorrow I have things to do in town. But there’s no chance whatever if it continues like this.

0

Monday 5th February 2018 – MY HUMBLE AND SINCERE APOLOGIES …

… to the Crédit Agricole for having described them … "on numerous occasions" – ed … as being the worst bank in the world.

As part of my mega-letter-writing activities the other day I sent a letter to the Royal Bank of Scotland telling them of my new address. I received a reply today –
“We’ve changed your address. Thanks for your request to update your address; we’ve now changed this for your personal account. …. then there’s nothing for you to do”.

And they sent it to my old address!

I don’t know why it is but I seem to be surrounded by a staggering level of incompetence – much of which is not, surprise surprise, of my making. I’ll be the first to admit that my financial affairs are not straightforward, but this is astonishing. In the days before blogs were invented, I had endless troubles with the Generale de Banque in Belgium, but I sorted them out “good and proper” and since they’ve been taken over by Fortis Bank, they have been good to me. But I can’t be doing with the rest of the motley crew. What on earth is going on?

And I was asking myself this this morning when the alarm awoke me. I’d been driving a komatik – complete with huskies – around the frozen wastes of Northern Labrador during the night and ended with me being shacked up – or, more probably, iglooed up – with a girl called Sylvia whom I know from another parallel existence. Not my ideal choice of companion to share my sleeping bag for the 6 months of night in a dark and crowded igloo but then again in the frozen wastes of Northern Labrador you have to make the best of whatever entertainment is available, as many a Métis‘s father will tell you.

After the usual start to the day I had a task to perform. In my mission to inform the Rest of the World about the Welsh Premier League I challenge every news source that I see that concentrates on Welsh rugby at the expense of football.

I had a good attack on a news source on Friday and they challenged me to send in my own information about the Welsh Premier League. And so this morning I sat down and wrote off a report covering all six of the weekend’s matches.

It goes without saying that they haven’t published it. I didn’t expect that they would, but one has to go through the motions.

After that, I once more attacked the database, determined not to let my frustrations overwhelm me. And it was a hard task too, I’ll tell you. Eventually I ran aground in Verdun when I was taken ill, and with reams of photos and no notes, and the blog wasn’t written up for that period, I’m stuck up a gum tree. I can’t even find the map that I had with the notes on it.

As for the hi-fi, I’ve found another unexpected hitch. For some reason it doesn’t like tracks longer than 24:59. And so all of my hour-long live concerts are being cut off in less than midstream – after all of the effort that I went to in order to prepare them. One unhappy bunny here.

Lunch was onion soup with pasta and bulghour and for some reason it tasted awful and I’ve no idea why. I’ve noticed that my taste buds seem to have changed since my illness and some foods – and even coffee – doesn’t taste like it did.

This afternoon I took everyone, including you lot and including myself, completely by surprise. Having cleaned and tidied the bathroom the other day, you may remember that I resolved that, when I had no plans to go off anywhere special, I would do a little bit of cleaning. And so today, I attacked the kitchen.

It’s been cleaned from top to bottom, a home found for almost everything that was loitering about, and it’s been vacuumed and the floor washed.

And it does look different.

Having talked to Steven and Rosemary for a while on the computer I went out for my afternoon walk. And for once, it wasn’t raining. But it’s cold out there. Down to 0.5°C last night – a far cry from the -16°C and -19°C of the Auvergne but still the coldest night yet. And it even snowed chez Liz and Terry. And more low temperatures are on the cards for tonight.

Tea was another splendid tortilla and spicy rice with an excellent filling. I’m getting good at these. And then my evening walk.

Bed-time in a minute, presumably to go back into my igloo. With a different companion tonight, I hope. Where is TOTGA when you need her?

0

Sunday 4th February 2018 – 07:30 …

… is no time to leave the bed on a Sunday

09:15 is however much more like it, so I’m glad that I turned over and went back to sleep when I awoke earlier.

It also gave me a chance to go back on my travels too. I’d started off living in a room in some woman’s house – some woman whom I know in real life but I can’t think now of who she is. And we were joined by a young girl who had fled her own home and was looking for refuge. This girl was, like most teenagers, not very reliable. She needed an early start every morning so this woman arranged to wake up quite early ready to have her breakfast ready. One particular morning I needed to see this girl so I made a special effort to be up and about early. However when I arrived downstairs in the kitchen, the woman there showed me a note to the effect that the girl was saying that she wasn’t in the house and furthermore, she wouldn’t be back. We both felt rather disappointed that she hadn’t said anything about leaving, especially after the effort that it required to be up and about early.
A little later I was out on my horse on the Plains of North America and came across this sad, tired homestead. In there on her own was some woman in a red dress. For some reason she attracted my attention despite being a very scrawny unkempt woman (but then, on the frontier of North America in those days there wasn’t exactly a very good choice of woman). However at that moment her husband came back, and I had to pretend to be the local doctor giving the woman a medical examination in order to avoid any misunderstanding.
Later still, there was some television comedy series thing being broadcast. Not that it was of any interest to me but the people with whom I was associated found it very interesting and amusing. The series was then transferred to the theatre where it was merged with some other comedy series. My friends were keen to see it so in the end I succumbed and off we went. But I had a look at the poster outside the theatre where the cast was listed, and it seemed that the stars of the two series weren’t in fact going to be appearing in the play. So that was rather a waste of time.

With it being Sunday, I took it easy this morning. Plodding along with my database of photos. And it really is doing my head in without any doubt at all. Even the simplest task is either beyond the capacity of the program or else it’s beyond my capacity to make it work.

Who could ever have imagined that it would have taken an hour to add in an extra column and make the column fit into the order in which I want it to appear – and that’s in addition to all of the problems that I encountered yesterday?

As I’ve probably said before – back in the early 1990s we had a lightweight Office program called “Works for Windows” and that was our introduction to integrated office suites – and we could make the parts of that program do anything that we wanted – in a matter of seconds – never mind all of this nonsense that I seem to be encountering.

The lunchtime soup was delicious with the added herbs and spices that I added yesterday. It warmed me up nicely. And then I hit the streets.

comcom granville terre et mer manche normandy franceOn my way to the Sports Centre I passed by the building that is the headquarters of the Granville Terre et Mer” Comcom – the Community of Communes.

With many of the French communes being quite small – there’s even one with just one inhabitant – several might group together in a “Comcom” to organise a common water supply or a common refuse collection service or engage a public gardener to be shared between them – all of that kind of thing.

And this beautiful building is the headquarters for the “Comcom” that covers the smaller communes around here.

cite des sports football us granville fc st lo manche normandy franceIt was a beautiful sunny afternoon at the Sports Centre, and it would really have been a nice afternoon to be out, except for the bitter, howling wind.

It was really agony to stand here this afternoon, and it didn’t help by the building being closed and so there was no coffee on offer.

I can’t understand the lack of buvette here. It seems to be open whenever I bring a flask, and closed whenever I don’t, as if it knows that I am coming.

cite des sports football us granville fc st lo manche normandy franceUS Granville’s second XI were in action again this afternoon, against FC ST Lo Manche, the league leaders in blue.

The team that is second in the table obliged US Granville by losing, in the only other match to be played in the whole of Normandy, last night. So if can avoid losing today, they will go into second place.

The wind made this match a complete lottery and neither side seemed to be able to play with it and it was rather a scrappy match.

But US Granville did take the lead after half an hour when a cross into the area was headed out indecisively by a defender, right to a US Granville midfielder on the edge of the area. He had all the time in the world to pick his spot and fire into the bottom corner.

At the start of the second half, we had the only time that one of the teams attempted to use the wind to its advantage, and that, I suspect, was more by accident that design.

A high corner taken into the wind that caused a panic-stricken scamble on the St Lo goal-line, and eventually the ball was forced home by a US Granville attacker.

So Granville ran out 2-0 winners, the first team to beat FC St Lo Manche this season and are now in second place in the table. But I still think that their attack is far too lightweight for this level of football.

st pair sur mer granville manche normandy franceJust for a change, I came home a different way, walking down to the coast road.

There’s a good view across to St Pair sur Mer from just here so I stopped to take a photograph, almost being run down by a local policeman in the process.

And then I walked back along the coast road into Granville. I’d never been this way on foot before and it made a nice change to see some different scenery.

7It’s carnaval here next weekend, and all of the fairground lorries are coming into town. There were quite a few streaming past the Sports Centre while I was watching the match.

showman's goods lorry three trailers granville manche normandy franceI was convinced that I saw an artic go past pulling no fewer than THREE trailers, and I was right because I tracked it down in the car park opposite the port.

Generally speaking, a “showman’s goods” licence allows a vehicle to pull a trailer containing his act, another containing his living accommodation and maybe yet another pulling the power unit such as a generator. Nowadays with most sites having mains electricity you don’t ever see the generator, and I suspect that this driver may well have been interpreting the rules in an unduly generous fashion.

Unless, of course, the rules for “showman’s goods” in France are different from in the UK, which is always a possibility. But anyway, it certainly puts my North American roadtrains into perspective.

fairground lorries caravans port de granville harbour manche normandy franceThey are apparently also setting up a fairground on the harbour and as I climbed up the hill towards home I could see all of the lorries and caravans set out on the end of the harbour.

I’ve yet to experience a really good mainland European “Carnaval” and I’m told that the Granville carnaval is one of the best that you can find.

And so I’m quite looking forward to being here when it all happens. Especially when the day after it ends, I have to head for Belgium.

Tea was, of course, vegan pizza. And I didn’t go far for my walk as the wind was astonishing. But no matter – what with the rest of my exertions I’ve done 111% of my daily activities today.

I reckon that I deserve a good sleep.

0

Saturday 3rd February 2018 – WELL, THAT WASN’T …

… very much of a walk this evening. And I didn’t go out at all this afternoon either.

Mind you, I can’t say that I blame myself at all. The respite that we had from the rain yesterday didn’t last and it’s pouring down outside. All football cancelled tonight, which is hardly a surprise. This has to be the wettest winter that I have ever encountered.

I ended up being late to bed last night, but I still found time to go on a perambulation during the night.

I was working … "he means “employed”" – ed … in a Government office such as the VAT office somewhere and it was announced that we were moving out to another town. The secretary of the local Workingmen’s Club had been sending us notes about entertainment that I had been using in the Staff bulletins so I decided to go to thank him and return all of his notes. I had them all copied into a mauve-coloured binder that I intended to return to him. In the club he was on the stage so I climbed up there to thank him and return his notes but at the very last minute remembered that there were all kinds of other notes from other people in there and it wouldn’t do any good whatever for them to fall into the wrong hands and enter the public domain.

Once more, it was a struggle to leave my bed and you’ve no idea how much I’m looking forward to my Sunday lie-in tomorrow.

After the usul start to the day I had a shower and a general clean-up in my nice, clean bathroom, and then headed for the shops.

In the usual shops, LeClerc and LIDL, I just bought the usual stuff with nothing exciting at all. And I bought the hi-fi cable and connectors at Mr Bricolage.

But I discovered a new shop that has just opened – an office supplies shop called Bureau Vallée. And here I struck quite lucky.

Remember me saying that I wanted some 2GB memory sticks? Well as it happened, they had three on sale at a reasonable price too, so they have disappeared into my shopping bag. They had a decent 4-hole perforator at a reasonable price for which I have been searching for years and a few other bits and pieces too for good measure.

I shall be going back there too, because while their mainstream stuff is rather pricey, their budget products are really good value, which makes a change these days.

But I had to laugh at NOZ. That’s the kind of place that’s almost impossible to describe. It sells surplus, fire-damaged and bankruptcy clearance stocks, time-limited food goods a,d all of that kind of thing. They try their best to keep it tidy but it inevitably turns into something like a jumble sale within half an hour of opening.

Now my new smartphone is a cheap Chinese import that I reckon might have been for a mainstream manufacturer but now outdated. I’ve had it a week but with there being no case for it, the screen is already scratched more than I would like.

And there in NOZ was a huge heap of all different kinds of mobile phone shells, all mixed up and (for the most part) taken out of the boxes so that people could try them.

I spent a good 15 minutes rummaging around and in the end found one that is an exact fit for my phone, with even the switch buttons being uncovered, but the camera hole is slightly out of position (I can drill that out). Not in the box of course but after a good five minutes rummaging around I found an empty box and packaging, and put it in that to take to the checkout.

The fact that the price tag on the box said €2:99 – the cheapest that I could see – had nothing whatever to do with my choice of box.

Just for a change, I decided to spice up my lunchtime soup a little. It’s tomato and vermicelli for the next couple of days, so besides the usual pasta and bulghour, I added some basil, oregano and chili powder. And different it was too.

With no football and no possibility of going for a walk this afternoon I sorted out the music onto the 2gb data sticks. I now have three and I could do with a pile more. I shall have to go back to Bureau Vallée next weekend and hope that they have some more.

But as well as that, I sorted out a box of paperwork that I had collected ages ago from hanging around in Caliburn. That’s been weeded, sorted, filed and some of it binned. And I didn’t say that I found in NOZ some container that will do fine as a waste paper collector.

Having organised that, I set out to master this database that I want to build for my photos.

And if there is a worse database program in the world I have yet to find it.

In the old days, you could program them so that the numbers would automatically increment, fields would “fill down”, “fill up” or “fill series” like with spreadsheets, and columns could be programmed to auto-adjust for width of data. But if this can do all of that, I have yet to discover how to make it work.

I was hoping to have this running in a couple of hours but I have this uncomfortable feeling that unless I can find out how to make it do what I want, I’m going to be here for ever.

Like with most computer programming, there has to be a way to do things like this because they are the kind of requirement that everyone needs.

But I wish that I knew how to do it.

0

Friday 5th June 2015 – CALIBURN IS BACK

I told you the other day that I had had a phone call to say that Caliburn was ready. And so today, Liz came to pick me up and we cleared off down to St Gervais to rescue him.

I had set the alarm for 07:30 as usual but I was wide awake, up and about at 07:00 without any prompting. I had an early breakfast, I remembered to put the money out for the boulangère and I was good and ready well before 09:00 when Liz was due. I walked down to the end of the lane to meet her.

The bill for Caliburn came to €370, most of which was for a new caliper. And I will say that I have never had brakes as good as this, not even when Caliburn was brand new. This was money well spent, and it makes a total mockery of the €2500 estimate that I had from Barrat Ford of Montlucon.

Liz and I went for a coffee afterwards, where we bumped into someone whom I knew from Sauret football club. We had a lengthy chat about football, as you might expected, but one thing that I did notice was that there were 10 or so people in the bar there and they were all totally pickled – at 10:15 in the morning. It was all quite amusing, not at all aggressive as you might find in the UK, and sitting out on the terrace in the glorious sunshine watching the world go by, you couldn’t be anywhere else except in France. It’s a feeling that you can’t explain to anyone who has never spent any length of time here.

I went round to Rosemary’s afterwards to see how she was getting on. Instead of going by the main road, I went by the old road round the back of St Gervais down the Gorge de la Sioule to Chateauneuf les Bains and then along the road through the gorge to the Pont de Menat. That’s one of the most beautiful roads in the whole of France, I reckon.

We had a good chat and Rosemary even made lunch which was very nice of her. I went off later to do my shopping and was back here by the end of the afternoon.

I’ve spent the evening making a database of all of the music that I’ve played on the rock programmes. This had been getting out of hand so with the new laptop I’ve downloaded an SQL program and I’ve been busy trying to remember everything that I learned when I did my Diploma in Computing at University. You’ve no idea how much I’ve forgotten – or maybe you have. After all, I’m not getting any younger.

As well as that, I’ve been extracting soundbytes from the old time radio programmes that I’ve been downloading. I need to build up my library to use in the rock programme for my “studio guests”

I’ve had the fan on all evening too. The temperature up here reached 33°C this afternoon and outside, it was 36°C at one time. This means that it’s either going to snow tomorrow or else we are going to have a terrific thunderstorm.

0