… has had his chopper out today, so it seems.
We’re used to seeing a helicopter flying around here but it’s usually the Eurocopter one that the Air-Sea Rescue uses. In fact we saw that one out and about the other night. But today it’s a new one that I don’t recall having seen before.
It looks as if it’s a private helicopter, not one belonging to a Government department or organisation. And it makes a change from the autogyro that we usually see flying around here in the afternoon.
And if it had been flying around here when the third alarm went off, I would have missed it because, once again, I failed to make it out of bed at the appropriate time and that has filled me with dismay.
And it’s not as if I had a late night either – well, not as late as some have been.
And I didn’t really go all that far during the night either. I’m not sure what was happening here but it was in lockdown and no-one was allowed out. There was one group or orchestra practising in a shipping container that was floating on the sea. But the container suddenly nose-dived and anyone in it was taken below the water. There were a lot of people appealing to the Ministry to allow people back out onto the beaches to avoid another tragedy
And later on, after many struggles Wales finally had its own navy although no-one ever called it out for very much. It wasn’t safe to go out in the ruler’s boat too far because of all kinds of different complications but we certainly had a navy by now.
It’s certainly interesting, the things that I get up to during the night.
All of the morning has been spent dealing with the photos from August 2020. And that took an age as well because the system that I tried, of dictating my notes out loud so that the recorder on the Dashcam would pick it up, was also a dismal failure.
In the end, I had to follow on the Dashcam the route that I took, look for road signs that I could decipher (which was not easy with the bright sunlight shining into the windscreen) and then timing the difference between two photos.
That’s complicated enough when it has to be done in German, but when you are dealing with notices, adverts and signs written in Czech, Slovak and Hungarian, it’s another thing entirely. It took me all the morning to do about 30, and there’s still plenty more to go at.
After lunch, I had to go out. Caliburn is now a teenager, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and for his birthday he’s having a makeover as I promised him. So basically I had to drive to Gavray where we repeated the process that we has done several months ago, and now he’s booked in for a week from 27th October.
There’s plenty of life left in him, that’s for sure, but his bodywork is looking his age and the MoT examiner made a few comments about it. It’s going to cost me an arm and a leg, and I really do mean that, but buying a new vehicle will cost me 10 times that. And if I get a second-hand vehicle, who knows what I’ll end up with?
And the repair will come with a 5-year guarantee, which is about all the life that I have left in me if I’m lucky, according to the doctor’s. They gave me a lifespan of between 5 and 10 years, and we’ve entered that period now.
Having returned from my rather pointless drive from Gavray, I went for my afternoon walk.
And at least I had very good weather for it. The weather was really beautiful this afternoon. A little cold and windy but really sunny outside. There were quite a few people down ther eon the beach making the most of the mid-October sunshine.
However, on the way out of town, I’d seen people carrying buckets and rakes and all kinds of things off onto the beach, so I wonder if it’s another Grand Marée when they’ll be swarming onto the beach for the shellfish in the public area.
There was other activity going on out to sea too.
The white boat that we saw away in the distance in the English Channel is still there, only now a bit closer to the Ile de Chausey. A look on the live plotter of the Fleet Monitor that I have (regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I host in my apartment the AIS receiver and antenna for the port) tells me that the research ship Antea is still out there.
That leads me to the conclusion that she is in fact none other than the aforementioned. The next question of course is “what is she researching?”
There were quite a few people out there on foot today wandering around in the good weather.
And the brats were out there again today, with their orienteering project. I’m not quite sure what it is that they are actually supposed to be doing because when I was walking past, one of the monitors was sending them off in pairs to stand by the control points.
It seems to me that one of these days I shall have to grab hold of a brat and interrogate it to find out what they are up to out here.
So off past the lawn to the Point of the headland to see what’s going on there.
Here are a couple of them – a trawler-type on the left and an inshore shellfish fisher (and try saying that with someone else’s teeth in) heading back to port.
There was another one of these strange lighting effects today too.
There wasn’t a rainstorm today but there was plenty of cloud obscuring the sun in places. And every now and again the sun would pop out to say hello and there would be this extraordinary floodlighting effect, just like over there in the fields at the back of Kairon-Plage
Le Loup, the marker light on the rocks at the entrance to the harbour is nevertheless all in the shade and the guy fishing on the rocks in the bottom-left is nothing but a shadow.
While I was looking at the live plotter of the Fleet Monitor, I noticed that there had been a change in the boats in the harbour.
Victor Hugo, the older one of the two Jersey Ferries, the one that’s blue, is no longer shown as being present in the harbour. So while I was out I went for a look and sure enough, there’s only Granville, the newer one of the two present.
As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the ferries to the Channel Islands have stopped for the time being as the Channel Islands have closed their borders, and both of them were moored here. So why, at about 06:20 this morning did Victor Hugo suddenly pull up sticks and head off – to Cherbourg as it happens?
And of course Normandy Trader has cleared off too. Out on the early morning tide on her run back to St Helier.
There was the hour on the guitar with the same lack of enthusiasm, and then tea. I added a small tin of kidney beans to the remainder of the stuffing from yesterday and had taco rolls. That was followed by the third of those desserts, and there’s one left for tomorrow.
later on I went out for my evening walk and runs. 5 more runs, to be precise. I’m stepping up my fitness activity as much as I can.
And it’s just as well, because I was all alone tonight and I had the old walled city to myself. There was nothing much going on worth photographing so I settled for a photo of the Eglise St Paul – on eof the world’s first modern concrete buildings.
However in 1999, not even 100 years old, it was found to be in a deplorable condition and was closed. Bits of concrete drop off without notice so parking at the side of it is forbidden. A project of renovation has been considered, but at a cost of €7,000,000 which is considered to be beyond the budget of any interested party.
Now, here’s a thing.
A short while ago, I mentioned that Victor Hugo had left port early this morning and that Granville was there all on her todd. But after I’d finished my run across the Square Maurice Marland and looked down onto the port, I noticed that she had disappeared too.
At 16:53 to be precise according to my live tracker, not long after I came in. Or, in other words, as soon as the harbour gates opened. And she’s also in Cherbourg now apparently, so the crew who took her sister out there earlier must have come back by train and gone straight back out again.
It looks as if the ferries have now finished for the season if they’ve gone into winter quarters already. It was a pretty lean year for them, then.
series of films in the 1950s of the books by GK Chesterton
