How about that for a nice time to wake up? Never mind get out of bed.

That’s what I call a Bank Holiday, isn’t it? You can’t beat that. But then that’s what Bank Holidays are for, isn’t it?

And I’d been on my travels too. Working (sell, sort-of) in a Chocolate factory and we were all objecting to the amounts and the calculations of bonuses that were on offer there.

So with a somewhat late awakening, it was an even later breakfast. And seeing as it wasn’t that far off lunchtime I defrosted some of the bread that was in the freezer (good plan to buy that) and had bread and jam too. That way, I could skip lunch.

And then, I did precisely … errr … nothing whatever. And quite right too. It’s Bank Holiday.

Although, having said that, I did catch Ingrid and we had a lengthy chat on the ‘phone. It’s nice to hear her dulcet tones again.

And as promised, seeing as it was a nice day, I went for a long walk down to the harbour.

And here in all their glory are the new harbour gates. To be honest, they don’t look all that different from the ones that were there before but at least they are new, I suppose, and that makes a difference.

And they didn’t seem to be leaking, which I suppose is the point of them

But much to my surprise, I noticed that we have another tidal basin here.

I’ve seen this impressive-looking dock on numerous occasions but I’d never had a good poke around it until today. And you can see that there are actually some gates here too.

I’m surprised that they don’t resurrect this part of the docks too and have some ships mooring in here every now and again.

But that wasn’t all the excitement either.

There’s a boat lift here for pulling boats out of the water and putting them up on the top so that the shipwrights can work on them and I’ve been dying to see it in action.

And here it is, actually working. Not actually lifting a boat but they were using the crane part of it to lift out the diesel engines from this boat here, as you can see.

It was still exciting though.

While all of this was going on, the tide had turned, and you have no idea how quickly the basin fills up here.

And we had a whole procession of boats – seven or eight that I could see – flooding in with the tide and heading to the fish docks (which you may remember, they had that digger digging out several weeks ago) presumably with this afternoon’s catch

They certainly put their backs into it around here

ON the way back, I headed into town and came that way round.

And on the docks I noticed that they were erecting a kind of compound on one of the car parks. And so I made enquiries of a very vocal workman.

It’s all to do with the fibre-optic cabling. They’ll be digging up this road in very early course to lay the cable trunking, and this is going to be their depot and store.

So it really does look as if it’s All Systems Go round here now.

When I finally returned here I made myself a coffee and some of the beautiful biscuits that I had bought the other day to celebrate the fact that I had come all the way up the hill to here with a spring in my step and without stopping once for breath. That’s definitely progress.

And, shame as it is to say it, I forgot my session on the bass guitar, as I realised later. I’ll have to have half an hour on it this weekend.

Tea was a frozen curry – lentil mushroom and sweetcorn – and that was quite delicious too. As I have said … "on many occasions" – ed … it was a good move to buy this freezer.

And on my travels tonight, we have the “London Bus” phenomenon. Where you don’t see one for ages and then a load of them come along at once.

That seems to be the case with decent sunsets doesn’t it? Because we had another one tonight. This one was even better than last night’s, although nothing will ever beat those that we saw on Long Island Sound back in October.

And my mate wasn’t there for his evening stroke tonight either. That’s a shame. Stroking a cat is very good for the stress.

But before I go, I’ll leave you with this photo and ask you if it reminds you of anything.

To me, this can only be a low-flying Heinkel HE111 returning from a bombing raid on Portsmouth in late summer 1940. Have a look at some of the images on this page and see if you don’t agree with me.

It seems that nature is catching up – and I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.