… did I celebrate the first Sunday morning of my enforced confinement?
No idea at all. I slept right through it.
Well, almost. It was about 10:45 when I awoke and just after 11:00 when I finally arose. And seeing as I was in bed fairly early last night – like before midnight – that was a rather impressive lie-in.
So after the medication, I had a look at the dictaphone notes. I was in my van last night, a Transit the same as Caliburn but the bulkhead was one row further back so there was space behind the driver’s seat and passenger seat. While I was sitting in my van suddenly the back door opened and my brother and someone else came into the van and started to try to make themselves comfortable so I threw them out and told them to clear off. So they went out but didn’t shut the back door properly so I shouted at him to come and close the back door. he replied “no, that’s how it was before. I’m not closing that properly so I got so enraged so I put Caliburn – the van – into reverse and drove backwards, scattering all these pedestrians who were in the way until I caught up with him. As for the “what happened next”, well, I found myself back where I was on the final days of The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour at the end of August and beginning of September in the same circumstances that alarmed me so much and which prevented me writing up my notes for those final three or four days. Things are clearly getting to me again.
But later on I was somewhere in South London at a railway station waiting for a train. There was a girl on this patform with me. She was a nice girl and we were waiting for a train. A train pulled in at the station, an old 1950s first-generation (… it was much older than that and like an early Southern Region Commuter Electric from the late 1930s …) multiple-unit thing painted red and cream. It pulled in on the platform across from where we were standing and we had to go down – a dark dingy corridor and set of steps to go down, not like anything modern. As we were going down this girl said to me “can you see where you are going?” I said yes and she said “oh” (scintillating dialogue, isn’t it?). As we got down to the level below there was another platform and she just wandered off onto this platform so this left me all on my own. I ended up walking out through the ticket barrier – you had to hold your ticket up to this reader thing. I did but I wasn’t sure if it had read it but the gate opened anyway so I walked out. As I walked out I was thinking that as I’m spending all this time in London why don’t I get a bike? A pushbike. It would be a lot cheaper than travelling on the train. Then I thought to myself “I wouldn’t get to meet all these nice girls will I, if I’m on a bike”. There was also something going on about being in a boat. The only thing that I remember about that is that we had a pile of stuffed penguins and two fell overboard so we had to do a U-turn to go back and pick them up, but I don’t remember anything else about that.
Breakfast at 12:15 is definitely the right way to go and then I came back to look at some file-splitting. I managed to track down another digital sound file which I could then split up at my leisure, but as for the three other albums that I chose today, I had to do that track by track by track.
But I managed to solve a little mystery as to why I could never find one album anywhere at all. The album that I have was picked up in a secondhand shop somewhere in Europe all those years ago and I’ve never been able to trace its provenance.
But searching more deeply into this and comparing track listings on a music-business site to which I have access, I discovered that the album that I bought was a German limited edition budget release of an album much more well-known.
So that resolved that issue and I was able to proceed.
Having dealt with these issues, I turned my attention to the photos from July for what was left of the afternoon (which wasn’t much).
By the time that I had finished I had finally managed to leave Reykjavik and it’s the next morning as I’m watching the sun rise over Snæfellsjökull in North-West Iceland. And I remember it well and just how pleasant it was too.
There was the customary hour on the guitar, all of which was spent on the bass. As it happened, “Old Admirals” by Al Stewart and “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan came round on the playlist so I spent half of that time working out a bass line to each one.
But like anything else, I can always think of something better a little later on.
This evening I had a little bake-in.
The half-baguette that was left over from Belgium was beyond stale so I made myself some garlic butter and treated myself to some garlic bread, seeing as I hadn’t had any lunch today.
But with it being Sunday evening and pizza night, I reckoned that I ought to make a dessert as well. I had rice pudding last week and I had no cooking apples left, but I did have a jar of jam that I had bought in Belgium and another one that was opened here.
That was the cur to make a jam tart but it ended up as being a jam pie – strawberry jam with desiccated coconut.
And the pastry that was left was rolled out flat and was used to make a jam and coconut turnover. No sense in wasting anything.
And I now know that the new 16cm pie dish that I bought needs just one roll of pastry to make a pie, and there will be a little pastry left over.
The pizza was delicious as usual and the jam turnover went down a treat with some of the coconut dessert stuff.
Despite the quarantine regulations, I went out for my evening run or two. I have to keep up my health and going out in the evening I’m not likely to encounter anyone else.
My first run was quite good except for the path which was rather waterlogged. It looked as if there had been some rain during the day that was responsible for all of that.
My path brought me round to the lookout over the town round about where the escalier du moulin a vent – the Windmill Staircase – comes down onto the little flat piece of land at the landward end of the rocky outcrop.
Just there is a concrete bunker or two, part of the Atlantic Wall from World War II and the inner row of ramparts from the medieval town.
It’s really quite amusing in a way to see two relics of two different times and two completely different types of warfare so close to each other like this. And in the end, neither of them did the job that they were supposed to, being as they were, completely by-passed by events elsewhere.
The view across to the Eglise St Paul was very impressive tonight so I took a photo but I still have to work hard on my night-time technique to make any improvement.
So I turned my attention to my second run and made it all the way up to the second ramp and a good half-dozen paces up that slope. That’s something that I couldn’t have done a few weeks ago.
What’s important to me is that I can tell how my health is holding up by how far I can run and how I feel afterwards. And in the absence of any medical follow-up from the hospital, I have to self-check and this is the best way that I know how.
Hence my evening walks and runs.
Despite my long lie-in today, I’m feeling quite tired so I’m off to bed. And wondering what tomorrow is going to bring. Here in Granville we seem to have been lucky right now but of course that can change at any moment.
-“Have you thought of an ending?”
