Tag Archives: ginger beer

Tuesday 1st June 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

… really horrible day today, which will come as no surprise to anyone at all.

It’s always the same – the day after I return from Leuven I always have a day like this, which is why I always try to come home on a Saturday – so that I can take advantage of a Sunday and stay in bed. When I have to get up early in the morning it’s bound to back fire.

And so it did today. With my Welsh lesson this morning I had to haul myself out of bed at 06:00 as usual, and I managed that without any problems. After the medication, of which there is more than enough these days, I came in and sorted out a few bits and pieces that needed to be done.

Finally I could sit down and start to revise my Welsh. And I got as far as the first few pages of my notebook and that was that. Flat out on the chair, and until 09:40 as well. I must have been out for a couple of hours.

First thing after coming round was to have a shower. Nice clean clothes and properly refreshed after all of that, I could sit down and study – as much as I could in the time allowed because there wasn’t much time left.

Soon enough – far too soon in my opinions – I knocked off and went to make myself some hot chocolate – real hot chocolate made with real chocolate as usual, and armed with this and a slice of that cake that I bought from LIDL at Christmas, I went for my lesson.

It was a strange lesson. We have our exam next Wednesday – mine is at 16:00 – and so while it was officially a week off for school half-term, we had a special lesson which was in effect to work our way through 2 past question papers and then we each had a mock examination. Mine went rather flat as I forgot two tenses and also didn’t understand one word that our tutor used.

It’s an oral examination done on Zoom with four parts to the paper and we need 50% in each section to pass. And despite my faltering here and there, our tutor told us that we would all have passed quite easily.

For lunch I finished off yesterday’s sandwiches and then went off to the shops. With having been away for so long, whatever fruit was left had gone off and there wasn’t much of anything at all left.

At LIDL I spent a lot of money, mainly on all different kinds of fruit, and then at LeClerc it was another expensive do, mainly due to having to buy some more coffee. Not that I’m running low on supplies but whenever I do, I never have any handy and I never seem to be able to find the type that I like.

Back here I put away the frozen food and then went out for my afternoon walk. Mustn’t forget that.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday we saw the builders’ compound across the road that had sprung up like a mushroom while I’d been away.

This afternoon when I went outside they were actually working there. There was a digger working there taking a pile of earth and sand out of the store of earth that they had in a container and tipping it into the load bed of the dumper, presumably to disappear off into the bowels of the medieval city to fill in whatever hole they have dug.

There is quite a lot of rubble and earth and sand in that container there so it must have been quite a hole or trench that they have dug. I might go for a walk out that way tomorrow to see what they have been up to.

it was the habit before I went off to Leuven for me to go over to the end of the car park and look over the wall down onto the beach by the Rue du Nord to see what is going on down there.

As you might expect, there were several people down on the beach. Not as many as I was expecting because the temperature was 24°C this afternoon, really warm, and hardly a breath of wind. How the weather has changed since I went off to Leuven.

With weather like this, I would have expected to have seen crowds of people down there this afternoon.

Also in the distance you can see the row of yellow buoys. They mark the edge of the patrolled beach of the Plat Gousset. It looks as if they have reassembled all of the necessary summer season items like the diving platform and all of that, ready for the arrival of the grockles.

Another thing of which we have seen plenty of in the past is all of the fishermen who hang around either on the rocks or in boats just off the cliffs out at sea.

Today, we have a pile of fishermen out there in boats. I had noticed that there were two guys in that zodiac just there. They were stationary and were casting their lines into the sea from their boat. And as I watched them, the other guys turned up in the speedboat from across the bay near Donville les Bains.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the two guys in the speedboat had made themselves quite unpopular by their sudden arrival. I’m sure that the wake of their boat would have driven away any fish that might be there.

As regular readers of this rubbish might recall, we haven’t ever seen a fisherman catch a fish when they have been on their own, never mind when someone has come along to disrupt their silence.

While I’d been looking down onto the beach just now, I had noticed out of the corner of my eye some kind of movement in white out near the Ile de Chausey.

Using the zoom lens at its fullest extent I was able to take a photograph of it, and later on when I was back at the apartment I was able to enlarge it and crop it out so I could see better which boat it was.

Of course, it goes without saying that what I had seen was a boat, and it was none other than one of the Joly France boats on its way back to port with a load of tourists having spent the day out there on the island, accompanied by a speedboat.

Another thing that we were looking at prior to my departure to Leuven was the fact that the local fishing boats were now much more active in the Baie de Mont St Michel than they ever have done in the past.

And sure enough, there were a couple of trawlers out there in the bay today fishing away off over towards the Brittany coast. I’d seen them when I was on the lawn and so I walked across the lawn and the car park down to the end of the headland in order that I could photograph them.

It seems to me that despite the agreement with the Jersey authorities the fishing boats are busy exploring new fishing grounds as some kind of insurance

By now, the white thing that I had seen moving about has come closer to the headland so that I can see better what it is. There was really no need for me to have taken the earlier photograph in fact.

Here she is, coming closer to the headland, just as she is passed by a trawler on its way out to the fishing grounds. Whatever the circumstances, they are still going out to the Baie de Granville for fishing purposes. At least those people in the large boats actually manage to catch things, which is more than can be said for the men with rod and line.

From here, I continued on my way along the footpath. Having been so ill, I was really struggling along the path. It was really hard to believe that 12 months ago I could run around here without any problems.

My walk – or, more likely, my stagger – along the top of the cliffs took me to my viewpoint over the harbour where I could look down on the chantier navale and see what was going on down there.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I left here, the ship repair yard was empty. It had been full for quite some time but gradually all of the boats had ended up back in the water. And so it was nice to see it quite busy again when I came back from my little trip.

There’s a trawler, Hera in there, and next to it is a Customs launch. Does this mean that we are finally going to have our own Customs post here at long last?

Next to that is quite a large inshore fishing boat. You can see all of the buoys on board that we see floating around in the water occasionally, which seem to mark the position of lobster pots, and you can see the crane that presumably lifts the pots out of the water

But what piqued my interest most of all was the wooden craft closest to me. That looks like something old and disreputable from the 16th Century and I’ll be keeping a keen eye on her to see what is going to happen.

By now, Joly France had arrived in port and was heading off to her berth at the ferry terminal.

In the past they enter port really close to the green marker light but today she had come in closer to the other side of the harbour entrance. That’s presumably because they’ve moved the silt bank that was over there, an activity that we watched with great interest a couple of months ago, so the water isn’t quite as shallow as it used to be.

And we can see that she’s the older of the two Joly France boats. We can tell that because of the windows down her side. They are rectangular in “landscape” mode, whereas in the newer boat, they are rectangular in “portrait” mode.

And doesn’t she have a crowd of people on board this afternoon? It must have been busy over there on the island today in this lovely weather.

Yet another thing that had caught my attention, and that of the regular readers of this rubbish, who will recall that I have spent a great amount of time talking about the boats that are left tied up to the jetty underneath the fish processing plant and left there to settle in the silt when the tide goes out.

One that I’ve seen quite regularly is L’Omerta. She’s been tied up there a few times and left to go aground, instead of being taken into the inner harbour where she can remain afloat.

And I’ve still not figured out the significance of her name. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … Omerta is the name given to the oath of silence taken by members of the Mafia.

Back here I made myself a nice cold drink – a strawberry smoothie – and then came in here to carry on with my work but, shame as it is to admit it, I fell asleep again and was stark out until 18:45. And I wasn’t in any fit state to do anything for a while. I’d missed my guitar practice and I was annoyed about that.

Tea was a stuffed pepper (I’d bought some of those while I was out) followed by chocolate sponge and coconut dessert stuff. There’s only enough chocolate sponge now for tomorrow so I’ll have to invent a dessert for the rest of the week. I did buy some cooking apples so I might even go for a crumble and make some custard now that I know that it works.

To my surprise the ginger hadn’t died so I fed it with more. I wasn’t so sure about the sourdough. It didn’t look at all healthy but I emptied it out, fed it, cleaned out its bottle and refilled it. We’ll see how it goes over the next couple of days as to whether it’s still alive.

As for me, I don’t feel as if I’m still alive. I’ve made an executive decision – which means that if it is the wrong decision, the person making it is executed – and that there will be no alarm tomorrow. I’m owed a Day of Rest after my exhausting travels and I’ll take it tomorrow.

Hopefully that will set me back on my feet but I doubt it. I think that I’m too far gone for that.

Monday 17th May 2021 – MY SOURDOUGH …

… seems to be enjoying itself right now.

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I’d fed the sourdough and the ginger beer mix. And sure enough this morning when I went into the kitchen I discovered that it had fermented so well that it had erupted and overflowed the bottle in which I keep it.

That’s what I call a good sourdough mix.

What else was good about the day was that I managed to leave my bed at the first alarm which, seeing that I didn’t go to bed until 00:30. And for a change I had a peaceful night

After the medication I armed myself with a mug of coffee and sat down to deal with a few radio shows. I needed three concerts in order to bring myself up-to-date and in a fit of marvellous concentration I managed to do all three.

The second one was an absolute swine to do and I really had to struggle with that. And then I needed over 4 minutes of speech in order to fill out the hours’ worth of programmes and that was a struggle to keep it interesting for that length of time.

The third one was much more straightforward and luckily it only needed 34 seconds of speech. That’s not really enough but there was no other way of doing it without cropping out some of what I consider to be crucial tracks. After all, it’s my programme and I get to choose the tracks that I like.

This all took me up to a very late lunch but that didn’t matter because I was determined to complete all three before I knocked off. And of course there had been the pause for hot chocolate (made properly with real chocolate of course) and sourdough fruit bread for breakfast.

After lunch I came in here to do some work but I do have to say at at some point I crashed out. And it was another one of those crashings-out where I didn’t realise that I had done so until I awoke. I’ve been having a few of those just lately and it’s disconcerting.

As a result I ended up going for a late walk this afternoon. And that wasn’t a bad thing because earlier it had been raining quite heavily, but now it had stopped.

“Gone back to fetch some more” I mused.

We were also having another session of very high winds as you can tell by looking at the whitecaps in this photo.

As usual I went over to the wall at the end of the car park to stick my head over to see what was happening on the beach. And being rather late today, the tide was leaving us with rather less beach than it would otherwise have done had I been out at my normal time.

But despite the miserable weather it was otherwise quite sunny and I suppose that if you could find a spot out of the wind in which to settle it would have been a very nice day. But I was too busy hanging onto my hat in the howling gale to notice.

Instead I headed off down the path along the top of the cliffs towards the end of the headland.

With all of the issues just recently, the local fishing boats seem to be spending more time closer to home rather than farther out in the English Channel.

We have a couple of trawlers out there just off the headland and slightly to the north. One is clearly visible and there’s a second behind it obscured by the haze and mist and what looks like an approaching rain cloud. I hope that I’m back at home when it finally hits land.

There were a couple of trawlers out in the Baie de Mont St Michel as I discovered when I went round to the end of the headland but they were even more obscured in the weather than the ones here so I didn’t photograph them. Instead I pushed off along the path on the other side of the headland and along to the port.

At the viewpoint overlooking the chantier navale I noticed that the place hadn’t remained empty for long.

Today there’s one of the smaller fishing boats that’s come up onto the blocks here presumably to have some work undertaken while the fishing season for certain types of shellfish has paused. And if we’re lucky we might even see a few more of them up here being overhauled.

And in the background over at the ferry terminal, Chausiais is moored up, resting on her bottom as the tide is going out quite rapidly. There doesn’t seem to be anything going on out at the Ile de Chausey this afternoon that would require her attention.

And not mine either. I carried on home before the rain came upon me.

There’s a change of occupancy amongts the larger yachts too.

Aztec Lady whom we last heard of at St Cast le Guildo has returned and she’s moored up alongside Anakena and to the right of Vlack Mamba and Charles-Marie. But the big yacht that has been there for ages next to Spirit of Conrad has now left port.

At least though now by the process of elimination I’m able to identify her. She’s called Capo di Fora, registered in Belgium the same as Spirit of Conrad and Anakena. And if you want to know where she is, she’s swapped station with Aztec Lady and is now in the bay just off St Cast le Guildo.

It’s a small world, isn’t it?

Back here, rather late, I had some fun working out the bass line to another one of the songs on this playlist and then I went for tea. Burger on a bap tonight with baked potatoes, followed by chocolate sponge with that soya coconut dessert stuff. I’m really feeding myself quite well.

So now I’m off to bed. Welsh lesson in the morning and the exam date is approaching. High time that I did some revision and got on with some work as well. I really do have to knuckle down.

Sunday 18th April 2021 – SEEING AS IT’S …

… been a good few days since I’ve had a really good whinge about tourists and holidaymakers, I just thought that I’d let you all have a reminder than I’m still alive and kicking.

Someone once asked me why I was so bad-tempered in my old age and I replied that half of the population over the age of 65 were nothing but bad-tempered old men.
“Why can’t you be like the other half?” they asked.
“Because they are bad-tempered old women!” I retorted.

So returning to our moutons as they say around here, here’s another bunch of boulers out here having a bit of a play just outside my building.

No sign of any social distancing, and not a single facemask anywhere to be seen. And that explains the 29,344 infections today despite us having been in quarantine for as long as I can remember.

Last night I was hoping to be in bed for as long as I can remember too, but it wasn’t to be. It took me an age to go off to sleep and when I did, I awoke three or four times during the night, two or three times with a bad attack of cramp.

And when I awoke at about 08:30 it was impossible for me to go back to sleep. Even so, it wasn’t until about 10:15 when I finally left my bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And it was something of a disappointment. I started off back home as a kid in Vine Tree Avenue and there was something exciting and adventurous going on but I can’t remember what it was. As soon as I awoke it all disappeared immediately out of my head and I was totally disappointed by that

Later on there was a rock group with a record out rather like THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK and the musicians where two who I didn’t get, one whose name I missed and someone called Keith Carvell. Those two continued the group avec (!!) a couple of other people into Fleetwood Mac with a couple of other people and recorded a song which was playing in my dreams which I can’t remember now. These 4 people were this Fleetwood Mac-type group and 2 of them left leaving the other 2 behind to carry it on and the 2 who left went on to other things outside the music industry.

There was a third thing too that somehow wasn’t recorded, but when I awoke I had this feeling going around in my head about a young girl whose mother had died and her father was suspected of killing her, and as a result she had been left alone to bring up her younger brother. What’s even more strange is that I can actually see her now exactly as I did when I awoke. She looked about 12, a little on the thin side with a small round face with long straight dark brown hair and small round John Lennon glasses. In fact the absolute image of a girl whom I met once in London one summer who by coincidence had the same family name as my own.

First thing that I did after the medication and the dictaphone was to make so dough for another loaf. There’s not much of last week’s loaf left and that’s going to be my lunch so I want another loaf for the next couple of days and for my sandwiches for the road on Wednesday.

And while I was at it I fed the sourdough and the ginger beer mother solution.

The rest of the day has been spent editing the photos from August 2019 in a very leisurely fashion, although most of the time has been spent trying to track down the site of a photo that I took in Upper Wyoming. Of course, when I dictated “a dirt road”, I didn’t realise until today that I had a choice of four dirt roads in the immediate vicinity – and not one of them seems to resemble the photo that I took.

It would ordinarily be easy to identify it by looking at the dashcam images but they are on the memory stick that’s in the pocket of my jacket which, the last time that I saw it, was hanging up on a hook in a hotel room in Calgary in September 2019.

But anyway, I’ve left the site of the battles of the Powder River in 1865 and now I’m following the site of the retreat of General Connor towards Fort Reno. But tomorrow there is going to be a deviation as I shall be coming into the territory of the Johnson County Wars of 1891-92.

There was a break for my usual afternoon walk around the headland.

As usual, I want across the car park to have a look over the wall down onto the beach to see what was happening.

There wasn’t a great deal of beach to be on but nevertheless the crowds somehow managed it this afternoon. In just this snip of a photo there are about a dozen people featuring on it. The whole beach was like that.

Up here on the cliff there was a wicked wind whirling about and it was quite cold but out of the wind and in the sun it was really quite nice and warm. But there weren’t all that many places out of the wind and in the sun up here.

And the wind didn’t have the effect of keeping down the crowds. It was extremely busy up here and there were endless streams of people moving along the path, masks or no masks.

Even down on the coastal path at the foot of the cliffs there were crowds of people.

At the end of the path by the lighthouse I’d wandered off across the lawn and the car park and down to the end of the headland. There was nothing going on out at sea in the bay today. It seems that the frenzy of activity that had taken place in there last week has now ground to a halt. Maybe they have all knocked off the fishing for the weekend.

And that will explain all of the people walking – or in some cases sitting – around the paths this weekend. Had this been during the week, they would all have been out in their trawlers reaping the harvest of the sea.

It’ll also explain the seabirds riding the wavs down there too. With no boats out there fishing today, they have no-one on which to go and prey.

From there I went off along the path on top of the cliffs to the other side of the headland.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day we saw a couple of the fishing boats tied up at the Fish Processing Plant and left to the mercy of the tides.

They are still there today and so that presumably means that they have been left there for all of the weekend. It beats me why they haven’t gone into the inner harbour to be tied up at one of the new pontoons that were installed at great expense two years ago.

The cynic inside me suggests that the great expense of installing the new pontoons has led to a great increase in the mooring fees.

At the chantier navale there was no change in occupancy so I didn’t take a photo of it today.

As I walked past the inner harbour I had a glance down – and look who’s back in there!

The yacht Black Mamba burst dramatically onto the scene a while ago, made quite a spectacle of herself and then disappeared just as dramatically. Rather like the Russian ballet, where the dancers some Russian on, go Russian around madly and then go Russian off again near the end.

But anyway here she is again, having crept into the harbour quite recently. I wonder if we will be seeing her strutting her stuff around in the bay over the forthcoming weeks.

Behind her is the yacht Charles Marie who we saw up in the chantier navale for quite a while just recently having her bottom scraped and a general overhaul.

Here’s something that caught my eye this afternoon, and it’s something that we’ve seen before, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

There’s a pile of stones and moss that have fallen onto the pavement and the edge of the road. And if we look up on the wall of the block of flats here, you’ll notice a shaling of the stonework. To think that at one time I was contemplating buying an apartment in that building. I’m rather glad that I didn’t, with all of that going on.

Back here I kneaded the bread a second time, put it in the mould and then covered it up with a damp tea towel again, leaving it to proof again for another hour or so while I made myself a nice coffee.

After an hour or so I switched on the oven and when it was warm, bunged the bread in. And having kneaded the lump of dough that I’d taken out of the freezer this morning I rolled it out and put it in the pizza tray.

When that had proofed I assembled the pizza and when the bread was cooked, the pizza went into the oven to cook.

And here are the finished products. A vegan pizza and a nice loaf of wholemeal bread with sunflower seeds. The pizza was as usual delicious and I’ll tell you all about the bread tomorrow.

Now I’ve Written my notes I’m off to bed. Nice and early too for a change and I’m quite looking forward to it too. I’m radioing tomorrow of course and then I have a load of scanning and printing to do ready for my trip to Leuven on Wednesday.

It’s surprising just how quickly these four weeks come round. It hardly seems like I’m back home before I have to turn round and go back again.

At least it breaks the monotony of it all, although if I didn’t have this illness life wouldn’t be so monotonous, would it?

Sunday 11th April 2021 – I DON’T THINK …

… that I’ve ever seen so many people out and about on the footpath as I did this afternoon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that for the past week the whole place has been like a ghost town as far as the general public wandering around here has gone. Today though, you couldn’t move around on the path without tripping over crowds of them out there enjoying themselves.

It must be that they are like mayflies or something – with the warm weather bringing them out in swarms. Except that the weather wasn’t all that warm. It’s probably all the holiday-makers and second home-owners bored to tears after a week going round and round in circles inside their own little holiday homes.

In my own little holiday home I had a rather late night last night, still being awake at 01:30, and so awakening at 09:05 was far too early to rise for my liking. 11:30 was much more like the right kind of time to leave my bed.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I had been during the night. First off was a story about Britain and the Eastern Mediterranean, the Dardanelles where the outbreak of war had caught them unprepared. In the end 2 battleships had held up the British reputation and had managed to fight their way through, had beaten off encirclement and were ready to fight another day, something similar to the story of Goeben and Breslau. They’d come up with this really dramatic poem that talks about irons as in flat irons, that kind of thing but what I can’t understand is where that relates to the girl, the heroine of the story who I was in full tilt after during the earlier part of this dream that I can’t remember now, and I wish that I did.

Later on I was doing something with a friend during the night. It involved some kind of music. We were talking about the piano. I was saying that it was a bit in tune, near enough. There’s no point in doing anything to it. We carried on with what I was doing. he said “round about 17:30 could you just play something so that my mother could hear it?”. I thought to myself “me play the piano?”. Then I remembered my jazz blues course and how I’d learnt to play 12 bar blues on the piano in the key of C. That should be quite simple and I thought that I could just improvise something in the key of C like I did in my 12-bar blues course. I made a start round about 17:30, well 17:33 in fact. But I just couldn’t get to grips with the piano and the noise coming out was awful because I couldn’t seem to find any timing or rhythm. All I was trying to do was something simple and I had to do it so that his mother could hear me and the piano being played.

Just for a change I missed lunch because I was already running quite late. After I’d finished the dictaphone notes I went to look at the sourdough bread mix. It hadn’t risen all that much at all, which was really disappointing, but I gave it a second kneading, shaped it and put it in its mould.

Next thing was to make up another break mix, using the yeast this time. This was for a more traditional loaf with cereal bread and of course several handfuls of sunflower seeds. Once it was all mixed together, I left it to fester a while. And then I fed the sourdough and also the ginger mother solution.

Outside this afternoon, down on the beach there were crowds of people too.

Well, maybe not crowds but still more than the odd one or two people who we’ve seen for the last few days or so. But you can tell by the clothes that they are wearing that we aren’t actually in the height of summer right now.

It might have been something of a bright day as far as the sunlight goes, but there was a bitter piercing wind – the kind of wind that blows through your clothes and through your skin and eats its way into your bones and for mid-April, this is not the kind of weather that we ought to be having. We deserve better than this.

Further out down the beach at Donville les Bains, there were crowds of people out there too.

Most important of all of the people down there are the guys who look after the bouchots, the mussels that grow on strings. You can see their beds over there on the left the stakes that have been driven into the sand, and the guys with the tractor and trailer are the guys who harvest them.

Regular readers of this rubbish might have heard me mention it before … “just once or twice” – ed … that the growing of mussels on strings was serendipity – they were trying to do something else when they planted the stakes and strings. However mussels attached themselves to the strings and grew there.

Of course, with not being in the sand, they didn’t taste gritty and so became very popular. This then became something that the local fishermen began to exploit.

Now how about this for a view this afternoon?

For the last I-don’t-know-how-long, if we’ve ever been lucky enough to have caught a glimpse of Jersey across the English Channel, and that’s not been very often at all, it’s been some kind of hazy, misty grey mass of granite with nothing at all of any feature that we could distinguish.

But it’s nothing like that today. With some careful enhancement of part of my image, I could bring out not only the individual houses and buildings, but also some of their colours too, and we haven’t seen any of that for a considerable length of time.

From the same image I cropped another section and blew that up too, which I can do despite modern anti-terrorist legislation.

In this section I’ve been able to bring out some kind of concrete ramp down to sea-level and also what might possibly be identified as some kind of tower block, something that I have never noticed before. The radio mast that we’ve seen on a few occasions is over there to the left of whatever the large building might be.

One of these days I’m going to have to hitch a ride across there on either Thora or Normandy Trader and see for myself what all of these objects are so that I can identify them the next time that I see them.

That’s exactly what I did when I went down the Britany coast on Spirit of Conrad for those 5 days.

That helped me identify quite a few different objects that we see every now and again down that way, like the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel. That was so clear today that we could see it with the naked eye, even thought it’s about 70 kilometres away as the crow flies. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen it this clearly.

But I digress … “and not for the first time either” – ed. From my viewpoint overlooking Jersey, almost 60 kilometres away, I carried on along the path, fighting my way through the crowds of people as I pushed along towards the end of the headland.

As I walked along the path, I noticed the people on top of one of the bunkers – the one of which I had a guided tour two years ago just before I broke my hand and dislocated my knee.

It looks as if they are cleaning all of the dirt, mud and weeds from off the top of it – maybe having a spring-cleaning to make it ready for the celebrations on the 8th of May. That’s a Bank Holiday here, and that means of course that I can have an extra lie-in.

But not for the moment, I pushed on down to the end of the headland to see what was going on out to sea. But there was nothing whatever of any interest for me to see.

Nothing whatever of any interest anywhere else either. No change in the chantier navale nor in the port either. As a result I wandered off back to my apartment as I had things to do.

The bread dough that I had made earlier had hardly risen which was bizarre, but nevertheless I kneaded it again and then shaped it and pit it in the bread mould that I used, and left it to fester for a wile.

In the meantime I’d taken out a lump of pizza dough from the freezer and when it was defrosted I kneaded it, rolled it and put it in the pizza tray that I had greased, rolling the edges back in.

While all of that was busy doing what it does, I came in and did some of the photos from August 2019. I’m now on the battlefield of the Little Big Horn, where I’m going to be for quite some time, I reckon. That was a long day and there were plenty of things to see while I was there.

When the bread had proofed for a while (but not risen much) it went into the oven that I’d heated for a few minutes. And in there it went up like a lift.

While it was a-doing, I assembled my pizza for tonight. For some reason, it was rather short on toppings but it actually came out quite nice nevertheless, as you can see in this photo.

No pudding today because there’s plenty of my jam roly poly left. I’ll finish that off this coming week and maybe make a rice pudding for a couple of days towards the weekend. That’ll give me some opportunity to heat up some pie and do some baked potatoes, which will be nice for a change.

Now that I’ve had my tea and written my notes I’m off to bed. I’m radioing tomorrow and I really must find some time to revise my Welsh ready for Tuesday. I also have 2 kilos of carrots to prepare and freeze so I’m going to be quite busy tomorrow.

Thursday 11th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

… miserable and depressing day again. And while you admire the force of the waves smashing down on the sea wall in the storm this afternoon I’ll tell you all about it.

It actually started off quite well and once again I was out of bed just after the first alarm went off despite the rather later night than I intended.

After the medication I had a listen to where I’d been during the night. One of my younger sisters – I can’t remember which one – had had an accident and was paralysed from the waist down. She was having to get all new stuff from school so I had to take her to the shop where the school uniforms were. While we were searching for the rooms we came across the right room for the blue and white pinafore skirts and grey tunics, that kind of thing. We started to make a list of things that she needed for next year. Then she got out of her wheelchair and very unsteadily went towards looking at the pens and papers, that kind of thing. I thought that she ought to go back in her chair because she wasn’t fit enough to be walking around. I had one or two words with her about going back to sit in her wheelchair again.

Later on, there was something strange happening in a big office. It was necessary to follow some people and record their movements. I’d been on the lookout for suitable people to do this. I’d been driving around the hospital in a tractor and trailer and came across a young boy and his mother – his mother had been visiting the boy. I thought of going to ask them if they could do this but I had the tractor stuck. It meant a lot of reversing around. I ended up back in the public area in the library and TOTGA was in. She’d already done this a few times for me so I waited until she turned up and I asked her if she would do it again. I asked if she had all of the paperwork. She replied that she had left it all at home. I said “never mind. We’ll have to start again from scratch”.

Later on Caroline put in an appearance too. This is the first time for quite a while that she’s put in an appearance in a nocturnal ramble.

There was much more to it than all of this too, but firstly I’ve forgotten most of it and what I didn’t forget, it’s not the kind of thing that you would be interested in hearing, especially if you are having your tea right now.

First task after I’d finished my dictaphone notes was to attack the day’s quantity of photographs. Another 20 went the way of the west today and I’m now wandering around Nuuk in Greenland looking at the sculptures.

There’s only another 360 to review for July and then there are … gulp … 2500 or so for August and then a pile for September and October too. Then 2019 will be up to date.

When all of that is done, then I have to update all of the blog entries for that period, and I still haven’t worked out how I’m going to write about the three missing days in September when I was having … errr … certain issues.

Once I’d organised myself properly I wandered of and had a shower to make myself look pretty. That is of course a job that takes a darn sight longer than it ought to do as you can imagine.

The last thing that I really felt like doing was to go to the shops this morning. I really wasn’t feeling like it. But I hauled myself out and set off in the gale.

There was a trawler out there in the harbour, just pulling away from the Fish Processing Plant. At first, I thought that it was going to be heading back out to sea but instead it headed off across the harbour and went to tie up over there.

She’ll be in good company over there too. Tied up over there where she has been for quite a while just recently is La Grande Ancre. It’s not like her to be moored up for very long without moving.

There were some guys up there on the top of the quayside and by the looks of things they were unloading that red van. I wonder if they are going to be loading up one of the fishing boats ready to go out on a voyage.

Thursday is usually the day that we see Normandy Trader in the port. At the moment though the harbour gates are closed and she isn’t in there as yet.

But there’s a lot of activity going on down there right now with the unloading of a lorry and a pile of timber. I suppose that this means that she’ll be in here at the earliest possible opportunity.

From there I pushed on to LIDL for the shopping. I didn’t really need all that much but I bought what I thought that I needed. They had some more of these mis-shapen carrots at €1:59 for 2kg (1kg of normal carrots cost €1:29) so I bought a pack. I’m getting rather low on carrots right now.

On the way back I was caught in a rather dramatic shower and was soaked to the skin. But luckily the rain didn’t last for too long and the sun came out quite quickly afterwards.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and sourdough fruit bread, and then I came in here and … errr … fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was out but by the time I’d gathered my wits together after I awoke, it was 14:25. I made it about 2.5 hours that I was out, all told.

After lunch, I came back in here and shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep again and was late going out for my afternoon walk.

Taking the correct camera with me today, I wandered off outside.

The storm that had been blowing up this morning was now raging outside. You can see from the whitecaps on the waves that we were having our money’s worth this afternoon. With the tide being well in, there wasn’t much beach to be on but even so, there wasn’t anyone at all down there picking their way around the rocks. It wasn’t the kind of weather to be down there.

For a change just recently, the view along the coast and inland was fairly clear today and you could see a good way into the distance although it was hazy yet again out at sea.

With the tide being well in, all of the fishing boats were on their way home.

Coming in from the English Channel braving the wild water was one of the smaller shellfish boats. That’s not the kind of boat in which I would like to be out there in all of this.

There were just two or three people walking around the headland today so there was no issue about social distancing. Apart from the boats that we have seen, there wasn’t anything happening out there at sea.

My route took me over the lawn and through the car park to the end of the headland but there was nothing exciting happening there either so I headed off along the path on top of the cliffs.

The storm was totally wild out here, as you have seen from the photos that I posted earlier. The waves were crashing away over the sea wall and the poor people out there were being soaked.

Over at the ferry terminal this afternoon there seems to be quite a lot of activity.

Both of the Joly France boats are over there right now, presumably making use of the ferry terminal, and that means that Chausiais has had to move out. She’s been obliged to moor up against the outer wall of the inner harbour.

Down at the chantier navale there was a hive of activity with people wandering around working on the boats that were down there. Still the same four boats though. We haven’t had any change in occupancy for a week now.

When I went out to the shops this morning there were five refrigerated lorries parked at the Fish processing Plant.

That means that despite the heavy storm and high winds, they are expecting a good catch coming into port. And sure enough, there were plenty of fishing boats down there this afternoon unloading at the wharf.

As well as the crowds on top hauling the stuff off to the Fish Processing Plant, there are several vehicles on the lower level belonging to private enterprises such as local seafood shops taking away the shellfish from the boats that they charter.

Back here, I had my coffee and the last of my coffee cake, and then I peeled, diced and blanched half of the carrots that I had bought this morning. As well as that, I fed the sourdough and the ginger mother-solution.

The guitar practice went OK and then I had tea – taco rolls with the remainder of the stuffing from the other day. The apple pie was delicious too.

During the day here and there while I’ve been doing other things, I’ve been doing some more of the file duplicates. I’m now up to 1.05TB of free space. From here now, it’ll be a very slow crawl file by file.

But I won’t be doing any more tonight. I’ve had a bad day and I’m exhausted. I’m off to bed early because tomorrow I have a lot to do. I have to go to Valognes near Cherbourg to have my first vaccination and on the way home I have to stop off and repair a computer. Such are the exciting things that I get to do.

Friday 5th March 2021 – I’VE HAD ONE …

… of those days where I seem to have been in great demand.

All of the afternoon has been spent talking to different people either on the telephone – first Terry, then Ingrid, then Rosemary and then Liz, one after the other from not long after lunch until all the way through to teatime and I even missed my guitar practice.

It all makes up for the night that I had last night where about 5 minutes after going to bed I had one of the worst attacks of cramp that I have ever had. I was out of bed four or five times trying to ease everything off, something that wasn’t easy for at one stage I had cramp in all four of my limbs at once.

Most of the night was spent not in sleep but in agony, although I must have gone off to sleep at one stage because I remember going on a voyage. We’d been to Dublin for a day out and we were on our way back on the train, a multiple-unit and there was a chance to get out and go to walk around a little village for an hour and then get back on the following train. Our train pulled into this station and we alighted, and I’m not sure what happened and I was ordering the configuration of it, but instead of ending up with 4 carriages I ended up with 45 so I went to delete some. I ended up back with 4 carriages but I’d lost the power car. We had to wait anyway for the next train to come and when that pulled up I explained to the driver what I’d done. He quite simply put his card into the slot and tapped out a couple of things and we ended up back with a power car so we could move off.

Despite everything I was up again quite smartly after the first alarm and after the medication I kneaded the two loads of dough that I had prepared before going to bed last night – one of the sourdough with fruit and the second with the wholemeal bread.

Most of the morning was spent going through the hard drive to remove another pile of duplicated files from the back-up drive. Another 19GB of rubbish bit the dust this morning. Of course, the further you go into this, the slower it becomes, but I’ll get there.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I broke off to put the bread in the oven and then again round about 10:30 when the oven had switched itself off

The wholemeal bread was cooked to perfection but the sourdough was another failure – a soggy mass of whatever without a trace of having risen at all. My sourdough doesn’t seem to be working at all.

But nevertheless, as a nice moist fruitcake it was something of a success from that point of view and with my hot chocolate it tasted quite nice and made a very good breakfast. But I really need to improve my sourdough technique if I’m to get anywhere with it.

Later on in the morning I crashed out for about an hour on the office chair. Not much of a surprise after the night that I’d had but it was still very annoying and I wasn’t very happy. Especially as it took much longer than usual to come round.

After lunch I fed the sourdough and the ginger beer mother solution and then I had my stream of phone conversations.

But one thing leads to another and these calls didn’t stop me working. While I’d been tidying up the other day I’d found a headset that must have come with a mobile telephone. While I was talking to Ingrid and Rosemary I plugged the headset into the telephone which meant that my hands were free and during the conversations I edited almost 60 photos and I wish that I’d thought about this before.

Now we’re on board a zodiac on our way back to THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR after having visited Brattahlid.

In between everything I went for my afternoon walk around the headland.

But first I went over to the sea wall to see what was going on. Later than usual but even so the tide was quite far in and there weren’t all that many people down there walking around. And that was something of a surprise because for once just recently there was very little wind and there was plenty of sun.

The view along the coast past Donville and into the area was extremely clear today but there was plenty of haze out at sea. The Ile de Chausey was clear enough today, but I couldn’t see as far as the island of Jersey.

There weren’t all that many people walking around today either so I had the path pretty much to myself today.

As I walked round onto the lawn near the lighthouse I had a reall good view of Le Loup, the light that’s on top of the rocks just outside the harbour entrance.

You can see the usual high tide mark on the light – the line just below the lower of the two red rings. Of course at the Grande Marée the tide is higher than that.

In the background across the bay the town of Kairon-Plage is standing out quite nicely in the sunshine. And on the right-hand side of the photo just below the skyline is that mystery tower that we saw in a photo the other day and which one of these days I’ll take myself off out to see exactly what it is.

Yesterday, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the workman painting the lettering on the seafarers’ memorial at the Pointe du Roc

While I was out there this afternoon I went to have a look to see what kind of job he’s done. And it’s not turned out quite too badly at all and we can actually read what’s written on the memorial now without straining ourselves.

From there I walked along the path down to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour. There weren’t any more changed of inhabitant in the chantier navale. Still the four boats that were there yesterday and no others. No sign of spirit of Conrad as yet.

There’s a change of boat at the Fish Processing Plant.

The big trawler that was moored there in a NAABSA position has now gone back out to sea but there’s one of the smaller shellfish boats now settled down in the silt.

And they seem to be expecting a bumper load of shellfish and aquatic life today. As I watched, one refrigerated lorry pulled away and another one was manoeuvring around ready to reverse into position. A third lorry as already there in the course of being loaded up.

Back here I had my coffee and cake and then carried on with my series of phone calls.

When I finished I went to tea. With plenty of potatoes around here I made some chips in the microwave along with some beans and a burger, followed by more jam tart.

Now I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed. Despite my long sleep at lunchtime I’m exhausted and can’t wait to go to sleep. I’m surprised that i’ve kept going this long.

But shopping tomorrow, more football and then a day of rest on Sunday. And I think that after this week, i’ve earned it too.

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 – I’VE BEEN BACKING …

… up my computer all afternoon – and a major back-up too, seeing as I haven’t done a proper back-up since August.

It’s not as bad as it sounds because I have a travel laptop that comes to Belgium with me, so that’s only at the most, 3.5 weeks behind. And then there’s a 128GB memory stick in a USB port and every night before I go to bed I copy all of the day’s data files onto it.

What I did do at one stage though was that at the end of the month I’d take a mirror of the data drive in this machine (it has 3 hard drives in it) and store it on an external hard drive. But I’ve not done that for a while, so I set about doing it this afternoon.

It’s also given me an opportunity to merge in some of the stuff off some of the more ancient back-up drives that I’ve had lying around here since as far back as 1999. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a year or so ago I went through all of them and uploaded them to one of the drives in this computer and little by little, I’ve been merging them all in.

That’s a job that’s destined to go on for ever too, but a fair-sized proportion was dealt with today.

We had another day of actually being up before the third alarm, and if I had actually put my mind to it, I could have beaten the first one. But with my Welsh lesson looming, I thought it important to at least have some semblance of a repose.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night. A few of us had been out walking last night and we came to a canal. It was the middle of winter and we were walking along the canal. Everything was frozen and it was really cold, and we were taking a few photos but I went just over a bridge and there we had the most glorious effect of the sun in the clouds and everywhere you could see, there was proper pack ice out in the sea. This was really the most incredible winter scene. I had never seen pack-ice like this. I ran back and fetched the others. There was a girl about 5 or 6 so I put her on my shoulders and we ran back. One was a woman from my Welsh course. We reached a place where we could see it but the sun had gone so the scene wasn’t half as gorgeous as it could have been. We climbed up the towpath on this bridge and had a look. We couldn’t see the really good view that I had seen 2 minutes earlier. Walking back, you could see some of it and I took a photo. It was just so disappointing because it had been so beautiful. I was disappointed for this little girl who I was going to show it too as well. The other 2 people with us, my course-mate and another girl, they were saying that the couldn’t see the photos on their camera after they had taken them because that was a function reserved for men, not for women. They had to upload them to their computer in order to see the finished effect. I said “pass your camera to me and I’ll try to do that for you to enable it to be seen by them.

It took me a while to summon up the energy to start my Welsh preparation. Not even a strong, hot coffee could get me to start up and so I was very unprepared for the lesson and it didn’t go all that well. But there’s an exam in June to test us on the work that we will have done by Easter and I’ve enrolled in it all the same.

And the laptop that I fixed over the weekend worked perfectly with a Zoom program for a whole 150 minutes.

This afternoon after lunch I started on the back-up of the computer and that’s absorbed most of my efforts today.

There was a break for my afternoon walk though.

Today has been a really beautiful day today. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The tide was pretty far in and there wasn’t all that much room left on the beach. But there was still enough room for some people to have a picnic and a little play around among the rocks.

With the schools being on half-term this week, there were quite a few kids running around, all told. The car park just outside the apartment was swarming with them this afternoon. It was like playing rugby trying to dodge and weave between them on my way out

The sea was quite rough too this afternoon, as you can see in this photo. There was quite a gale blowing yet again, as if we haven’t had enough wind right now.

With the tide being well in right now there were plenty of trawlers and other fishing boats either in or near to the harbour. I was lucky enough to see this trawler sailing in towards the port. No hordes of seagulls swarming around the hold but I bet that she has quite a good load on board this afternoon.

She’s not a boat that I recognise and I can’t read her name but she has a CH (Cherbourg) registration so she’s a local boat.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a beautiful afternoon, a bright blue sky with not a cloud in the sky.

And there was a nice moon too this afternoon so I took a photograph. I’d much rather photograph the moon in the dark but of course these days we aren’t allowed out after 18:00 and it looks as if that’s a state of play that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future. No matter what they do here, there’s no sign of the Virus abating.

With the sky being as clear as it was today, I wasn’t expecting anything at all of a light show in the Baie de Mont St Michel this afternoon, so I wasn’t disappointed. No ships or any other activity out there eitier so I carried on around the headland.

And there’s a change of occupancy in the chantier navale.

We’ve seen the same four occupants in there for several weeks now but as I walked along the path at the top of the headland I could see a new arrival. Nothing particularly exciting like a large trawler or one of the charter boats that hang aronnd the harbour but a small pleasure yacht having a little work done upon it.

And despite the hive of activity going on around the big yacht yesterday, it’s still there and there doesn’t seem to be much change in its condition. There were a couple of people working on there this afternoon though so you never know.

There’s also another new arrival down there today – in the port.

Normandy Trader has been in once or twice recently but I’ve missed her, but this afternoon I was lucky enough to catch Thora who has come in from the Channel Islands. There’s still plenty of work for the two little freighters even if some of their freight has to be dropped off at St Malo due to the new Customs regulations.

Back here I had a hot coffee and carried on with the back-up and then had my hour on the guitar. I’ve been trying to work out the chords to Al Stewart’s “Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres”, a song that reminds me of a night that I spent not too long ago and about which, one of these days, I actually might write something when I can think of how to express it.

Tea was the rest of last night’s stuffing inserted into taco rolls followed by an apple turnover. And while it was cooking I fed the sourdough and the ginger.

But now I’ve stopped the back-up and I’m off to bed. I’m off to Leuven in the morning and I don’t feel at all like it.
.

Saturday 20th February 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the waves that are crashing down on the sea wall at the port this afternoon in the gale that was blowing outside this afternoon, I was trying desperately to struggle out of bed.

The two alarms had gone off and I’d even heard the one that I’d set to remind me that the third one is about to go off and give me a three-minute warning to rise.

However I felt myself drifting away and I just about managed to pull myself up out of bed in time to beat it. I didn’t want to miss out on another complete week of beating the third alarm call. It’s not every week these days that I can do it and two complete weeks on the run was is a memorable achievement these days, not to be discarded lightly.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

There wasn’t anything on there but I have a completely vivid memory of watching through a window as two white dolphins were leaping up and down in the water, calling my brother to look but he didn’t have the least interest in coming to see the spectacle.

Now that my magnum opus is done for now, the next task is to continue with the subsequent entries and make sure that they are up to date. And I even managed to do NEXT DAY’S ENTRY.

After a shower, I headed off to the shops to stock up with stuff for the next few days and have a few bits and pieces left over for when I come back from Leuven.

Noz didn’t have very much worthwhile except for a new Sports Bag. I’d been looking for one to take with me to Leuven so I don’t have to struggle with a shopping back to bring back the supplies. Black and yellow too!

At LeClerc, no confrontations or anything like that on the car park this week, and inside there wasn’t anything exciting or interesting or useful on sale this weekend. All in all it was rather boring. There was however 20 cents off soya milk so I bought as much as I could carry away because the sell-by date is a year hence and I can certainly use it.

Such are the highlights of my life these days, hey?

One thing that I had done was to go to the techy bit of the shop to see if they had a travel keyboard that might work with the laptop that I repaired. It was a forlorn hope anyway.

Back here I had a mug of hot chocolate and a slice of my sourdough fruit bread and carried on with my work. However at some point I crashed out – crashed out good and proper too and it was another one of those “feeling really awful” ones from which I seem to take an age to come round.

As a result, lunch was rather late today.

One task that needed doing is to feed the mixtures here – the sourdough and the ginger bug. They both seem to be doing quite well and the ginger beer that I made earlier in the week, after a very slow start, is now fermenting nicely. I’ve been venting the pressure on the ginger beer and the kefir every half-day and at last, this afternoon the beer almost presented me with a gusher.

One more feed of those on Wednesday morning before I head off for Leuven and that will see them right for when I come back.

It was a beautiful afternoon today even with the gale-force winds that were blowing and it had brought out the crowds in force.

I went out dressed for the Arctic temperatures only to find that it was a balmy 14°C – or maybe that should be “barmy” given the fact that we are in the middle of winter. But the crowds down on the beach were enjoying themselves. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many people down there at this time of year.

It’s not as if they had a great deal of beach to go at either because the tide hasn’t gone all that far out right now. But there are still quite a few people having a go at the peche à pied, scrabbling around on the rocks.

Having satisfied my curiosity down on the beach I headed off along the footpath on top of the cliffs.

Considering that this is mid-February and there was a howling gale blowing, I couldn’t believe the crowds of people who were out and about. Everyone was jostling everyone else on the footpaths just like on an August Bank Holiday Weekend. The path down by the Gymnase Jean galfione was packed.

Despite how bright and sunny it looked this afternoon, there was quite a haze about. It wasn’t possible to see out as far as Jersey and it was just as bad down the Brittany coast this afternoon. Warm as it might be this afternoon, it wasn’t warm enough to burn away the haze.

Across the lawn and the crowded car park I went down to the headland. Nothing much happening there at the moment so I turned away to walk on down the path.

But just as I moved away I felt the sun come out from out behind a cloud so I turned round. And there was the sun streaming down right into the middle of the bay with another one of these TORA TORA TORA moments.

Having photographed that I pushed on past the waves roaring into the sea wall with quite a force considering how shallow the water is there right now, and had a look over into the chantier navale

There were a couple of guys clambering all over the yacht that’s been in there since time immemorial . And just as I went to take a photo of them, they dodged back down into the cabin.

“Obviously very shy” I mused to myself. It wasn’t my day today.

There were fewer people around here on this side of the headland so, taking my time, I went to see what was going on in the port.

Not many fishing boats out at sea by the looks of things this afternoon. There are plenty of them tied up at their berths. Granville and Victor Hugo, the Channel Island ferries, are there too as you might expect. Apart from a brief flurry of activity in June, they haven’t sailed on a paid voyage for almost a year.

The future is looking quite bleak for the Channel Island ferries right now, and the Joly France ferries to the Ile de Chausey aren’t doing all that much better. I know that I haven’t been out as regularly as I have been in the past, but it’s been a good while since I’ve seen one of those out and about with passengers.

Back here I had a hot coffee and then carried on with the work that I’d been doing and there are now several days’ worth of updates that I’ve completed. I knocked off at about 18:30 to telephone Ingrid for a chat and then went for tea.

Baked potatoes, veg and one of those breaded soya fillets of which I’d bought a large supply from Noz ages ago. And the last of the apple crumble. For the couple of days that I’m here next week, I’ll defrost some slices of apple pie from the freezer.

Having written my notes, I’m not going to be up for very long. That repairing a disk failed – overnight it reached 30% before the repair crashed. But the drive is still recognised so there’s hope for it. There’s a diagnostic tool that I can try to see if I can access the files but it’s very complicated so I need to be at my best to work it to make sure that I don’t make an error.

Wednesday 10th February 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… this morning about the snow.

Actually it’s not as much of a triumph as it sounds. It was a pretty safe guess that it would still be here this morning, judging by the way that it was coming down last night so as soon as it was light I stuck my head and the camera out of the window to take a photograph or two of the beautiful Alpine scenery, such as it is around here on the Normandy coast.

Well, when I say that I stuck my head out of the window etc, that is rather somewhat poetic licence because I did no such thing. I’d checked the temperature earlier this morning when I had my medicine and at that moment it was minus 2°C.

And if anyone thinks that I’m going to be sticking my head out of a window at minus 2°C they are mistaken. In fact that’s the coldest that I can remember it being since I’ve been here.

It’s a far cry from back in the Auvergne when I’d be out working on a roof or in a garden in two feet of snow and minus 18°C but I’m a lot older now than I was back then. But whatever we have here, it has everyone worried as I expected. They’ve cancelled all school transport for today. How would they have managed in the Auvergne?

But did you like the bit about “I’d checked the temperature earlier this morning”? Yes, I managed to beat the third alarm yet again, and that’s a surprise because I ended up working quite late last night – getting on for 01:00 when I went to bed.

This morning I took it rather easy. The only task of note being to rearrange once more the running order on the database for the radio programmes. It seems that the radio engineer is just as confused as I am about where we are in the running order and so we some confusion and on Monday I had sent him a programme that had already been broadcast.

There was the dictaphone to listen to too. I was around Winsford last night and I’m not sure why but I was walking around carrying a paraffin heater with me that was lit. I can’t remember very much at all about this but I was walking through the Shopping Centre there and the guy in the Fast Food Stall was putting up a sign “Closed – back in 15 minutes”. I looked at him and it was the guy who used to work in the bank there. I remember him saying how unhappy he was so we had told him that if he was unhappy he ought to leave. I was on my way to see a girlfriend – no idea who – who lived in Winsford. I hadn’t seen her for years and I was worried that it was rather late. I had a look on my watch and it was still 18:30 so I thought that there was plenty of time yet. I can’t understand though why it was so early. I hadn’t seen this girl for years yet I was so wrong about a lot of the other times that it might only have been a couple of days. And I can’t remember any more than that.

However, this “meeting up with former girlfriends after so many years as if it’s only a couple of days ago” was a recurring theme from a few years back, as regular readers will recall. Back then I was planning on ringing up former girlfriends for dates thinking that they might be free, even if I hadn’t seen them for over 30 years

Just as it was coming up to hot chocolate and sourdough fruit-bread time, Rosemary rang me up for a chat. We put the world to rights and by the time that we finished there wasn’t any point in going for breakfast as it was almost lunchtime.

Not much bread laft now so if I forget to bake on tomorrow morning, it’s going to be soup from the freezer again with the bit of bread that’s left.

But once I’d eaten my lunch I made another batch of kefir. Now that I have plenty of empty bottles I can make them earlier than I have been doing and give the contents more time to settle.

Today’s ingredients were orangs and kiwi again, with a mandarine thrown in for good measure. I’m not sure how this batch will turn out but I have high hopes. And having set that under way in the flip-top bottles for its second fermentation, I made another batch that can sit and ferment for the next 6 days or so.

And while I was at it, I had a look at my ginger bug – the ginger beer starter. That’s fermenting nicely in its little corner by the radiator and has started to bubble. That means that fermentation has begun and we are now on our way. It needs five days or so of feeding before it’s ready to use.

Basically, it’s rather like sourdough – you just help yourself to some of it to make a second fermentation in a flip-top bottle with more water and ginger, and and a little water back to your starter again so that the volume of the starter remains constant.

Of course, every other day you feed it with ginger and sugar to keep it going.

For the rest of the day I’ve been working on my Oradour sur Glane notes. Right now, the murderers have been convicted (those who were brought to trial, that is) but the fun is just about to begin.

Off I went on my afternoon walk in the freezing cold weather.

There was still a fair amount of snow about covering the car park. The bright sunlight had melted some of it but not all by any means.

In fact, we’d had a thaw and then a freeze by the looks of things because there were signs that water had run out of the snow and down the slope towards the grid but then frozen again leaving a nice trail of black ice.

And if you like, you can ask me how I know about this.

Now that the fishermen are back out at sea again, we’ve been seeing the trawlers on their way home again from the fishing grounds.

There was another one out there today heading back into port. One whose name I have unfortunately forgotten but she’s the older sister of the new trawler Le Pearl who arrived in port just before Christmas. She’s surrounded by seabirds too, all hoping for a little treat, so she must have a very good catch in her hold.

There were one or two other trawlers way out there too in the distance, heading back for port. It seems that the fishing is now back in full swing after the little pause while the island of Jersey attempted in vain to hold the French fishermen to ransom.

The sun was pretty low down in the sky today but where the light could actually reach, it was really beautiful

In this photo we’re looking back down along the northern side of the headland past the Rue du Nord and the beach at the Plat Gousset towards Donville les Bains.

But nice as the weather might look, it really was freezing out there and I was glad that I’d come prepared. I usually wear these shell trousers because they wash and dry easily. But they are rather thin and the wind goes right through them.

However, I did bring with me a pair that are one size bigger than I would normally wear. And I simply slipped these on over the ones that I was already wearing and that was great. Mind you, my ears froze again.

Nothing much doing anywhere else so I made my way around the headland to look at the activity in the port.

And we aren’t alone there again today. We have a visitor, because Thora is in port right now having come in from the Channel Islands with another load. So she’s keeping busy which is good news.

But that was me just about done. I headed off back home for my afternoon coffee and to carry on with my work. But unfortunately I was out like a light yet again for about half an hour or so, which I don’t suppose is any surprise given the circumstances of last night.

The hour on the guitar passed OK, I suppose. And on the acoustic guitar I was working out the Allan Clark number “Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress” – I’ve no idea why that entered my head this afternoon. And that’s not an easy number to sing because there’s a key change in there somewhere and I end up one scale higher than I ought to be at one point and I can’t think why.

Mind you, it’s the same with “Behind the Mask” that I was playing yesterday. And strangely enough, it’s the same note each time, an “A”.

Tea was taco rolls with the rest of the stuffing from Monday, followed by rice pudding. And having written my notes, I’m not messing about. I’m off to bed for I’m exhausted and a good sleep will do me the world of good, I reckon. And I hope that the photos work properly tonight, Sean. Thanks for the note.

Pleasant dreams, everyone.

Sunday 7th February 2021 – COLD, GREY, MISERABLE, DEPRESSING AND WINDY.

But that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about the day instead.

With it being Sunday I had a nice little lie-in today.

It was rather a late night last night because I ended up playing the guitar right through into the small hours, for want of anything better to do. So being awake just before 10:00 and not leaving the bed until about 10:30 isn’t of any importance.

Surprisingly, after all the sleep that I had, I didn’t go all that far on my travels during the night. I only remember bits of this but I was with Terry and Liz and we were talking about my Welsh course. I’d somehow led them to believe that I was taking classes physically rather than virtually and taking place in North Wales, Bangor. Terry said that he had to go there so I replied that if it was a Monday I could take him there in the afternoon. He said that it wasn’t. We started to chat about Bangor and he asked where I stayed when I was up there. I replied out by THE MENAI BRIDGE which of course I didn’t stay there at all. I can’t really remember the rest of this.

But anyway it must have been a deep relaxing sleep if that’s all that I did.

As far as work goes, I really didn’t do all that much at all. After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to a day of rest here and there.

One thing that I did do however was to make a start on the ginger bug – the base that you use for brewing your own ginger beer. That’s now up and running and we’ll see how that develops over the next week or so, ready to make into ginger beer. Having over the last couple of weeks accumulated a few more flip-top pressurised bottles, I can do that now.

And while I was at it, I fed the sourdough

Of course there was the afternoon walk – no afternoon is complete without that.

Mind you, I would much rather have stayed indoors this afternoon because it was horrible out there. Only the guy windsurfing offshore at Donville les Bains would be taking any pleasure from the howling gale that was going on out there this afternoon.

With no-one about at all, I even tried to run along the footpath under the walls but gave it up after half a dozen steps because the wind brought me to a shuddering halt as I tried to make progress.

In view of the howling gale I had decided to take the low road under the walls rather than the high road around the headland.

And you can tell what the weather was like because there are so few people out and about compared to yesterday, and those who were had dressed themselves sufficiently to enable them to cope with the Arctic conditions. Even my ears were freezing as the wind somehow found its way to whistle through the woolly hat that I was wearing to keep my woolly head warm.

It was one of those days where I had no intention whatever of staying outside for a second longer than I had to. I was keen to come on home for my hot coffee.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve had a few occasions over the depths of darkest winter where we’ve been having some spectacular sunsets on the bay out there by the Brittany coast.

Whilst the day has lengthened to such an extent now, we aren’t having the same effects which is a pity. But there were a couple of holes in the thick, heavy clouds this afternoon and we ended up with another TORA TORA TORA moment this afternoon as rays of sun were shining down onto the sea.

There was someone else out there armed with a camera wandering around looking for objects to photograph but I can’t believe that he missed this view.

While I’d been out on my travels yesterday I’d seen a mural that someone had painted on a gate down in the Rue Carpentier, but there were so many people around it that it was impossible to photograph it.

Today I’d forgotten all about it – until a casual glance down the Rue des Degres brought me face-to-face with it again. There was no-one about here so I could photograph it at my ease, and I’m glad that I waited until today because photographing it like this from the far end of the side street has brought it out quite well.

But I’m curious to know what it’s all about. It’s rather reminiscent of the album cover of COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING but I’d be surprised if anyone recognised that album out here.

Around the walls I walked, to see what was happening. And from up here there’s a good view down onto the chantier navale.

There’s no change in the occupants – the two fishing boats, the yacht that has been there for ever and Aztec Lady which has been there for much longer than I was expecting, but I took a photo of it all because it’s not often that we see it from this perspective.

Seeing as I was dressed for the winter, I took the opportunity to take out the rubbish – the general garbage and the recyclable metal and glass. Such is the highlight of the day, hey?

Having taken out a lump of pizza dough from the freezer at lunchtime, it was now ready to prepare. I rolled it out and put it in the pan to proof again while I came back in here to edit some more photos from Greenland.

Once it had proofed, I switched on the oven and bunged in the rice pudding to cook while I prepared the pizza.

And when the pudding was ready, in went the pizza. Meanwhile, I parcelled up the remaining slices of apple pie, labelled them and put them in the freezer for when the rice pudding runs out.

The pizza was delicious but I can’t comment on the rice pudding because there wasn’t any room left inside me for dessert. So that will have to wait until tomorrow.

So now I’m off to bed for an early night. I need to have a good start tomorrow as I have nothing prepared for the radio so I’ll be doing a programme from scratch.

I’ve not crashed out at all today so despite the late start I’m tired and if I prolong it, it’s going to be another dismally late start tomorrow and I can’t afford that.

Tuesday 20th December 2016 – I MADE SURE …

… that I dropped off early to sleep last night.

What I did was to do something that I hadn’t done for quite a while, and that was that I got into bed and started to watch a film on the laptop. Sure enough, after only about 10 minutes or so, I was off.

But if I ever lay my hands on whoever it was who left the building at 02:40 this morning, slamming the door behind them, they they will know about it. Because I didn’t go back to sleep afterwards.

And it was just as well because the girl in the room next door was up and about at 06:00 and she wasn’t exactly quiet either. But then you can’t pick your housemates, can you?

Anyway, I was in at breakfast at 07:00 and out by 07:30 and back down here at work.

Meanwhile, I forgot to tell you about a couple of things that happened to me at the hospital yesterday.

For the benefit of those who don’t speak French, the sign on the back of the Fiat van says “Please don’t park within 3 metres …” of the rear doors, to allow the rear doors to open to admit a wheelchair.

And so the car behind is parked within 1 metre of it – right outside the entrance to a hospital.

I went up to the driver and asked him if a sign has to be written in both official languages (French and Flemish) to be legal, but as you might expect, my comment went clear over his head.

As Alfred Hitchcock once said to Kenneth Williams “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”, and reminds me of the spoof Open University course on “Understanding Irony”, which actually received several applicants.

But it’s a sad reflection of the selfish attitude of many Belgians, isn’t it?

But the second thing was even more unnerving.

I walked up to the reception desk and the woman looked at me and said “ahh, Mr Hall …” Yes, I’m even being recognised by the clerical staff in the hospital now. This is uncomfortable, isn’t it?

Another thing that I have forgotten to do is to post the photo of the stuff that I bought on Sunday at the English shop.

Working clockwise around, we have Linda McCartney vegan pies, a vegan Christmas pudding, Bisto vegan gravy browning, a bottle of ginger beer, a bottle of dandelion and burdock, a bag of Bombay mix, some custard powder and, pride of place, two boxes of vegan mince pies.

Now I’m all set up for Christmas.

Later this morning I went down to Caliburn to sort out some stuff to bring up here and then went down to the Carrefour. I came back with a baguette and some tomatoes, some seitan slices (for Christmas dinner), some potatoes, some carrots and some leeks as well as a couple of pots of fresh spices.

That was because, for tea, I had boiled potatoes with fresh mint, carrots with fresh rosemary, leeks and Linda McCartney vegan pie covered in thick Bisto gravy. It made such a change from my usual fare and it was absolutely delicious. It all worked out fine too, much better than my pizza did. I shall be doing more of this, as well as looking at the possibility of baked potatoes in the microwave here.

High time that I was organised.

This afternoon I crashed out for a while and also did some work on my web pages.

Another thing that I did was to walk into the (unlocked) bathroom just as my nubile next-door neighbour was wrapping herself in a towel after her shower. Serves her right for not closing the door!

So now we’ll have another go at an early night. And I’ll hope for better luck too.

Sunday 21st August 2016 – GUESS WHO …

… forgot to switch off the alarm this morning?

And so, despite it being Sunday and despite having managed to sleep through the 07:00 cacophony, there was no possibility of Bane of Britain going back to sleep. Instead, I ended up having another early breakfast.

And in other news, I seem to have come down with yet another heavy cold. And in news that will delight everyone who reads this rubbish, I’ve also lost my voice. And seeing how, starting on Monday, I have about 100 phone calls to make, that is what I call perfect timing. But then again, this is going to be a permanent feature of my life from now on so the sooner I adapt to it the better.

Last night was slightly better. I was only up three times, which makes quite a change from the other night when I seemed to spend more time out of bed than in it. And we had flooded kitchen issues to deal with this morning. Someone had left open the Velux roof light, and we were having a torrential rainstorm. That’s not going to look too nice on the floor when it dries. But by the time I went down the road for my baguette the rain was starting to die down.

With it being Sunday, I had a leisurely start to things, having a second mug of coffee and vegetating around in the room for a while. It was long after 10:00 when I went off to the launderette for the internet. Liz was on line so we had a really good chat for a while and I also caught up with a few things that I had let slide just recently.

My butty for lunch was excellent – there’s no doubt that the bread in the boulangerie round the corner is the best that I have found so far. It’s a shame that it’s also the most expensive too. and this all led to a quiet, relaxing afternoon doing not very much except to listening to radio programmes that I have downloaded from ARCHIVE.ORG and having a mess around with my 3D program, while listening to a new neighbour moving in. I hope that he (or she) is quieter once he (or she) has settled in.

Braving the torrential rainstorm I went back to the launderette for an hour or so to see what was going on in the world (the answer is “not very much at all”) and then came back here to put into action a new procedure. Before going out to buy my Sunday eveing pizza (now that I have some more vegan cheese) I prepared some garlic bread. I’d bought a couple of these half-cooked baguettes and I mixed up some gaarlic butter, using the soya margarine that I had bought the other week, slit the baguette in about 10 places, filled the slits with the garlic butter, and then stuck it in the little oven that I had been warming up.

While the bread was cooking, I went to pick up my pizza and when I returned, the bread was cooked to perfection. And you have no idea just how delicious it was too, washed down with a can of ginger beer that will also, hopefully, become part of my Sunday evening ritual while I’m living here, now that I’ve found a place here in Leuven where I can buy it.

Now I’m going to have an early night to prepare for tomorrow. I have so much to do and not very much time to do it. I shall have to put my skates on.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: ginger beer

Tuesday 1st June 2021 – I’VE HAD A …

Monday 17th May 2021 – MY SOURDOUGH …

Sunday 18th April 2021 – SEEING AS IT’S …

Sunday 11th April 2021 – I DON’T THINK …

Thursday 11th March 2021 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Friday 5th March 2021 – I’VE HAD ONE …

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 – I’VE BEEN BACKING …

Saturday 20th February 2021 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

Wednesday 10th February 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

Sunday 7th February 2021 – COLD, GREY, MISERABLE, DEPRESSING AND WINDY.

Tuesday 20th December 2016 – I MADE SURE …

Sunday 21st August 2016 – GUESS WHO …

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