Tag Archives: golden earring

Friday 26th May 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was delicious.

Down at the supermarket in town this morning they had some fresh broccoli on special offer so I bought a chunk, trimmed off the florets, blanched them and then stuck them in the freezer for a later date, now that I have room.

There was a nice, thick, chunky stalk left over so I made a soup. I fried an onion and garlic in olive oil with some cumin and coriander, diced a couple of small potatoes and diced the stalk, added it to the mixture to fry and when it was all soft, added some of the water in which I’d blanched the broccoli.

After about 20 minutes’ worth of simmering, I whizzed it with the whizzer and ate it with some crusty bread.

And I’ll do that again!

But here I am, waxing lyrical about going to the shops and buying some broccoli as if it’s the highlight of my life. One of those memory things popped up on my social network, reminding me that 11 years ago today I was out on an icebreaker as we smashed our way through the pack-ice on our way back to Natashquan after taking relief supplies out to THAT ISOLATED ISLAND off the “forgotten coast” of Québec.

The moral of this story is “whenever an opportunity comes your way, grab it with both hands and go right to the end. You’ll never know if you’ll have another chance, and you never know what the future has in store for you”.

While we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the first track to come round on the playlist this morning, after what I had said yesterday, was THE VANILLA QUEEN.

It’s been a long time since that “fascinating lady” has been to “haunt me in my dreams” after “the bright, nocturnal Vanilla Queen” and I stood together on the bow of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR watching the midnight sun in the Davis Strait. I was never the same again.

And while we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the lovely Dyan Birch, whose voice is up there with Kate Bush, Julianne Regan and Annie Haslam, put in an appearance shortly afterwards.

She was well-know of course for her stint in Kokomo but before that she sang in an obscure Liverpool group called Arrival and their first album was one of the very first albums that I ever bought all those years ago.

The song that featured on the playlist was HEY THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE and I picked that as one of the ones to be broadcast in one of my radio programmes in due course.

It’s the song that came into my head up in the High Arctic as I watched “someone” walk from out on this desolate windswept and icebound airstrip to her aeroplane without waving or looking back and I thought to myself “hey, that’s no way to say goodbye!” but a few years later when I was saying goodbye to someone else on another airport, I suddenly realised the reason why some goodbyes have to be said in that way.

Samuel Gurney Cresswell, the artist and Arctic explorer, was once asked to explain Robert McClure’s loss of nerve after their dreadful experience in the moving pack-ice not too far from the first airport that I first mentioned. He replied that a voyage to the High Arctic “ought to make anyone a wiser and better man”.

However it didn’t work for me. One day I’ll write up the story of those three missing days.

But that’s enough maudlin nostalgia for the moment. We all know that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Let’s turn our attention instead to this morning, and the fact that one more I was up and about (in principle because I was far from awake) before the alarm went off.

But a shower slowly brought me round and I put the washing on the go. Oh! The excitement! It’s almost as riveting as the day that I had when the highlight was taking out the rubbish.

There was plenty of time before I had to go anywhere so I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. This was another one of these work dreams again, and I’m having plenty of those. I was working in an office but I wasn’t very productive and I wasn’t doing very much at all. Mostly wasting time. The Germans invaded the country and occupied the town where our office was situated. They ordered most people to leave. Those people gathered their things together and started to set off. At that moment I came back into the building having missed everything that was going on, saw them going, and said something like “goodbye, my colleagues. I don’t know how many of us will meet again after this thing has happened. Wishing everyone the best”. I’d heard some stories that some farmers had been far too friendly with the invaders and denounced a couple of people already. So we sat and started on what was going to be a very long ordeal.

But invaders again? We had them the other night, didn’t we?

Then there was something else on these lines. Someone ended up sending something or other to the office where we were working, as a kind-of sign of discontent but I can’t remember anything about it.

I also spent much of the night in company with a young girl and I wish that I knew who she was. We were talking about the area up at the back of Barrow, places like that. I mentioned a fishing port that was formerly very busy. When the fishing died out they came and moved some of the railway lines that connect the port network to the main line but left a diesel shunter behind that was now stranded on the dock and can’t be moved. We were chatting about all kinds of interesting things. Right at the end there was some kind of problem about her having to pay her rent on her little apartment so I suggested that she comes to live in mine. This was another one of those really nice, warm comfortable dreams that I wished would go on for ever and I don’t have too many of those.

But seriously, who would want a relationship with me?

It was a slow stagger down to the doctor’s and I didn’t have long to wait to see him. But as I thought the other day, he confirmed that with this series of injections, there’s nowhere else to go. He wrote out everything that I needed, wrote out the prescriptions, and that was that.

And that got me thinking.

It’s not the first time that I’ve mentioned it but a few years ago I was standing ON THE CREST OF SOUTH PASS, the gap that the “trails west” emigrants used when crossing the Continental Divide where to the east the waters drain into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, and to the west they drain into the Pacific.

It’s the most peaceful place on earth and I want to go back. I’m getting itchy feet again.

At the Carrefour round the corner I bought the broccoli, some mushrooms, some potatoes and a couple more of the small peppers. Now I know that I can freeze them, i might as well put a stock in the freezer now that there’s room.

Have you any idea how much a month’s supply of Aranesp costs? You really don’t want to know. And because it’s not on the list of GP-prescribed medication I have to pay for it up front and claim it back from my health insurance. That will hurt for a while.

So loaded up with a ton of medication (I’m singlehandedly keeping the French pharmaceutical industry afloat and they won’t ‘arf miss me when nature takes its toll) and having to go back tomorrow for some more, I crawled back up the hill onto my rock where I made my soup, had lunch and then … errr … relaxed. This stagger back takes its toll of me.

This afternoon I finished off choosing the music for the next batch of radio programmes but I’ve run aground at the moment. There’s a French musician called Miquette Giraudy who collaborated with Steve Hillside-Village and she wrote and played on several tracks. But you try to find them. None of my usual sources came up with the goods. The best example of her work that I can find so far is the album on which she collaborated with Hillage after he left “Gong”.

Both Alison and Liz were on line later so I ended up chatting to both of them. Alison was telling me more detail relating to our chat yesterday and Liz was showing me photos of her little week away in the Marches.

Tea was chips (now that I have some potatoes) done in the air fryer, with salad and some of the veggie balls. So you might say that part of my meal was a load of balls this evening. But then again, you might not.

Shopping tomorrow, not that I need very much at all but I have to go through the motions. I’ll go to LeClerc of course to see what they have to say for themselves, and I’lll also go for a prowl around at Noz. There’s usually a few surprises there and it’s nice to buy something different. It helps to shake up the diet.

And then after lunch a walk into town to pick up the Aranesp, which means that in the afternoon I’ll be crashing out. Terrible, isn’t it?

Thursday 25th May 2023 – I’VE BEEN HAVING …

… a day of nostalgia today (as if I haven’t had a few of those just recently).

They say that music is something that is capable of moving you to another place. That’s certainly true. Anywhere that puts on a “Smiths” song anywhere near where I am and I’ll certainly move to another place.

But that’s not what they really mean, of course.

Today while I’ve been choosing music for my radio programmes I stumbled upon a Golden Earring album. Everyone knows “Radar Love” of course but in the Netherlands they are much better-known than that.

Back in the Summer of 1993 I was lucky enough to stumble upon them quite by accident on the beach at Scheveningen playing an acoustic concert when I was out for a ride on the old CX500 that I had, and it was one of the most enjoyable evenings that I’ve had, even though dawn was breaking by the time I arrived back in Brussels.

Then a few years later when Roxanne went off on a sleepover one night, Laurence and I went to Oostende in my old Merc to see them at the Kuursaal.

And of course, regular readers of this rubbish will recall the significance of “The Vanilla Queen”.

If that’s not enough to be going on with, Tom Petty came round on the playlist.

Back 20-odd years ago I was in Montreal in a heavy snowstorm and had to drive to Bar Harbor in Maine, all the way through the Appalachians.

As usual, I’d brought a pile of cassettes with me but this was the first car that I’d ever hired that had a CD player. So down the road from my motel out at Jarry was a second-hand shop where they had INTO THE GREAT WIDEOPEN, DAMN THE TORPEDOES and a few others.

So steaming all the way through the mountains and the snow, taking a ferry across the Bay of Fundy and going via Halifax to the accompaniment of various Tom Petty albums on continuous play in this Chevrolet Cavalier.

Those were they days of course, and we shan’t see their like again The way things are, it’s an achievement if I can manage to get out of bed.

But get out of bed I did this morning, and before the alarm went off too.

And we had a calamity last night, as I found out once I was up and about.

For my little project about doing my own “Hawkfest” on the radio, I’d collected about 6 hours’ worth of music from obscure space-rock bands. With having a friend whose son was sound engineer for The Pink Fairies, it’s amazing the stuff that turns up.

Anyway, it was all in an obscure recording format so it needed to be converted to *.mp3. It’s not like trying to convert a standard audio or video converter. The “estimated time” was something like 57 hours so the computer was on through the night the other night but last night Bane of Britain forgot and switched off the computer with just 9 hours to go

So no use crying over spilt milk. I went and had my medication instead.

As well as choosing a pile of music and writing out some notes, I’ve been looking at cameras. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we no longer have the NIKON D500 due to certain controversial circumstances, the NIKON D5000 has never been the same since I DROPPED IT in the ferry terminal in Québec waiting to cross the St. Lawrence, the NIKON D3000 is showing its age and I’ve never been a big fan of the mirrorless NIKON 1 J5.

Anyway Nikon has launched a new camera this week and my friends tell me that very soon they will start to clear out all of the previous models. I’ve been chatting with my friend in Vancouver who works for Nikon and he reckons a NoS NIKON Z6ii is the way to go. At least it has an eyepiece viewer that the Nikon 1 doesn’t have and which I miss.

And the advantage of that is that with an adapter that is easily available, I can use all of the old AF-S lenses.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too referring to my nocturnal perambulations. I was with one of my friends last night but I can’t remember who he was. He was feeling rather thirsty but instead of actually buying a can of drink he set about actually taking the back off the drinks machine in the hall and taking the drinks out of the back. Of course while he was doing that the headmistress and one or two teachers came along. They were discussing what was happening with the drinks machine, that things were missing etc, and wondering how it was being done. And there we were right behind it dismantling it. I expected there to be an investigation and we’d be discovered straight away but the more they kept on talking about it, the more we dismantled the machine. In the end he went to grab a can but he missed. It fell down into the chute round the front. No-one of all the people round at the front actually noticed. he quickly put his hand round and took the can of drink, opened it and poured it into another can so that it looked as if it hadn’t come out of our machine and slowly started to reassemble it. By this time there were people going past etc and no-one for even a minute noticed what it was that we were doing and that we were behind the machine and that the machine had been pulled out from the wall a couple of feet.

Nothing about my family last night, and nothing about cats either. But something happened during the day concerning cats. There was a link that popped up on my social network about an elderly cat that is going to be put to sleep because no-one would adopt it and in a fit of weakness I contacted the shelter.

Foolishly, I made the mistake of saying that I was glad that it was an older cat because I didn’t want a circus around here at 03:00. And that led to a really bizarre rant from whoever it was to whom I’m speaking, a rant about
“and what would you do if it awoke you at 03:00? What would happen then?”
My reply was “I didn’t say anything about being awoken. I mentioned “a circus””
“I don’t know what a circus is!” went the person, in one of these indignant, belligerent tones.
“Well, I’ve made my offer. It’s up to you now”
“What offer?”

It’s really too much hard work to try to help people out, isn’t it? I have a nice comfortable home that would suit an elderly cat for a couple of years but I don’t have time to engage in a debate or to put up with people’s attitude. If they want to pick a fight they can pick it with someone else.

Tea tonight was pasta, veg and some of those mini vegan bread-crumbed things that I bought from Noz a couple of months ago. They are actually quite nice and it made a nice meal. But the freezer is emptying quite nicely now and if I’m not careful I’ll have to start to restock it.

Alison and I had a chat on the internet later, now that she’s back from her perambulations in the real world. She has some exciting news to impart but more of that anon.

Tomorrow I’m off to the doc’s to tell him the news about my injections and to have a few prescriptions prepared. When I come back I’ll have to make plans. I’ll be eating the last of my ginger biscuits and I’ll have to bake some more. I could remake a type that I’ve made in the past (like those delicious chocolate ones) or try something completely new, in which case I’ll have to check to see what I have and what I need.

While I’m at it, I might have a go at making a vegan pie. I’ve not made one for ages and the last time that I tried, I had forgotten the knack about how to make pastry. At one time I had it going really well but since I stopped eating pudding I haven’t made anything like as many.

There’s no pizza dough left either so I’ll have to make some more. And if it turns out as well as the last batch, I shall be one very happy bunny indeed.

And it’s about time that there was some happiness in my life. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Friday 9th December 2022 – “THERE’S ONE THING …

… that I got to tell you man, and that it’s Good To Be Back Home”.

So said Barry Hay on the beach at Scheveningen in the Netherlands back in 1993 when I was there on my old CX500 and I can’t disagree.

But I owe a great big thanks to two of my neighbours who drove to the railway station here at Granville at 19:00 to meet me off the train because, believe me, I was finished, totally finished when it pulled into the station

And I was right about my affairs at the hotel. I really was given the run-around and at 07:00 when I was on the point of leaving and wanted to pick them up, I was told that they weren’t there as far as they could see and I could stand there all day and wait for them if I liked and it would change nothing at all.

So that’s the NIKON D500, the 70-300mm LENS and all of my photos from Canada along with all of my portable electronic equipment gone the Way of the West.

Ahh well!

It’s not surprising that i was in a bad mood about this because I’d had a bad night, as I always do when I’m having to go somewhere early. Not that it stopped me going off on my travels and although I don’t remember much about my travels, I do recall that had I not awoken suddenly, I would have had a visit from one of my favourite young ladies.

So maybe that’s why I awoke suddenly. My whole outlook on life has changed just recently.

Having finished my rather acrimonious but otherwise pointless discission with the hotel staff (I seem to be arguing with everyone right now) I set off in the ice and freezing cold that made my already unsteady gait even more so.

But not for the railway station at Bruxelles-Midi. Instead, I clambered gingerly down the stairs into the metro station at the Boulevard Lemonnier. Crossing the road to get there was fraught, and no mistake.

Even more fraught was crossing the tram rails to the opposite platform and I was convinced that at one point rather than travel by tram I would be out on my ass but in an incredible feat of gymnastics I just about managed to keep my feet.

The platforms at the Gare du Nord were a mess and I must have staggered for miles trying to find my way up to ground level, having to be helped up a few steps by a few people. But when I did I had to go round and round in ever-decreasing circles in order to find my way out of the station.

Yes, “out of the station” because I’m not going by train.

Eventually I found my way outside in the freezing fog and having completely lost my bearings, I wandered around (such as I can) until I stumbled quite by accident on that for which I was looking.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back several years ago when there was a rail strike I ended up HAVING TO GO BY BUS. I remembered that it called at Caen and then went on via several stops to Bruxelles-Nord – without going via Paris.

It was going via Paris that was frightening me. Can you imagine the fight in the Metro and the long walk down to the station at Montparnasse? Not on your nellie!

But trains now go from Caen to Granville and there were, to my surprise, two that corresponded with the arrival of this bus. So sitting comfortably (not that it’s comfortable on these buses but you get the point) all the way to Caen without moving has to be a good deal.

It’s not surprise to anyone that I had to be lifted onto the bus, and then I was sat in a seat by the door. And to make sure that I didn’t move, I didn’t eat or drink anything all the way to Caen. What doesn’t go in can’t come out.

It was a long, boring drive all the way to Caen but every time I started to become fed up, I began to think of the fight through the metro in Paris and that restored me to my senses.

We were late arriving at Caen which means that I missed the 16:11 but there was plenty of time for the 17:16. And that wasjust as well because it’s a long walk from the bus stop to the station. Once I’d bought a ticket from the machine I bought myself a coffee (first drink of the day) and made a tomato butty while I waited for the train.

And what a stagger it was to the lift, through the subterranean tunnel and back up the lift on another platform. I was really gone by this time and I just fell into the nearest seat on the train. My journey had been well-documented on social media and you have no idea the size of the sigh of relief that I breathed when Marie and Anna asked if I would like to be picked up.

The station at Granville was iced up and I was even more unsteady that I had been in the morning and I took hours to leave the station. Marie and Anna were heartbroken to see me because, believe me, I am not the same person who left here in September. That trip to Canada was one trip too many and one trip too far.

When we arrived back here there was a little ad-hoc reception committee that met me but I was really in no mood to see anyone. Marie helped me into my room here at Ice Station Zebra and that was that.

When I’m finally tired enough to sleep, whenever that might be, I’ll go to bed. And there will be no alarm until Monday. Not that I care either. It’s been weeks, if not months, since I’ve slept with no alarm and I deserve some time off

And when I’m ready, I’ll rebuild my life with what’s left of my health and what’s left of my possessions and start again until the end. I just can’t fo it any more.

A big thank you to everyone who has been so kind to me on my travels around and who has helped me in my difficulties. So many of you that have helped restore my faith in humanity. I love you all, more than I can say.

Monday 27th September 2021 – HOW LONG IS IT …

chantier naval port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021… since we’ve seen the chantier naval looking like this?

Over the last I don’t know how many weeks, we’ve seen as many as 7 boats in there at one time, but it gradually reduced down to 4, and then 3, and then 2, and then1

And when I walked past the place this afternoon, the final boat, L’Omerta, has left the yard too.

“Gone! And never called me ‘mother'”!

The next question is “who is now going to come into the yard next?”. And, more importantly, “when?”. It’s very important for the port to have a busy chantier naval because it encourages people to base their boats here, and that’s good for the town.

As for last night though here, it was a pretty miserable night, the early 06:00 start notwithstanding.

waves man on beach rue du nord Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021You can tell by the waves out there at sea that there has been quite a storm somewhere.

In fact, it was actually right overhead in the early morning and the howling gale and accompanying rainstorm awoke me on a couple of occasions while I was trying to sleep.

It’s hardly surprising therefore that I was feeling pretty uncomfortable when the alarm went off this morning.

After the medication and checking my messages I sat down to deal with this week’s radio programme. And to my surprise, and probably yours too, it was finished by 11:00 and that’s a new record as far as I can tell.

Mind you, after I’d listened to it, I had to turn round and do some of it again. I tried an experiement that sounded good while I was doing it but while I was listening to it I realised that it wasn’t as good as I thought. The idea was right but the execution wasn’t.

Then I had a listen to the programme that will be broadcast this weekend and realised that I had to redo part of that as well.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m trying – for a couple of reasons – to get well ahead of where I am supposed to be, but that causes its own problems as I realised today.

When George Kooymans retired from Golden Earring in April (he was in hospital in Leuven in May with him) the hunt was on to find which group became the group with the longest continual complement of members.

Of course, down in Texas there was always ZZ Top who have been together for 51 years and so I wrote about that and dictated it into the programme that will be broadcast this weekend.

Of course, having dictated that a few months ago, didn’t Dusty Hill then go and die on me and Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard recrute a new bassist?

Consequently I had to rewrite, dictate and edit a new speech, making it exactly the same length as the part that I was cutting out. And inserting text into the middle of a programme isn’t easy because not only do you have to watch the length, there’s the sound balance that you need to match.

As well as that, I’ve had quite a lot to do about another project on which I’m working for the radio and that has taken up a lot of my time this afternoon. And as a result I didn’t have the time to listen to whatever might be on the dictaphone.

There was the usual walk around the headland too. We’ve seen the beach earlier when we were looking at the waves just offshore. Just the odd person down there this afternoon, which is no surprise given the weather that we were having.

During the walk along the headland down to the lighthouse I was pretty much on my own. And there was nothing whatever going on out at sea. Not even a single boat that I could see. Mind you, the waves out there were enough to put anyone off.

le loup baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021No-one was around at the bench by the cabanon vauban this afternoon either, and no boats out there either in the bay.

But as I looked at Le Loup, the light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, I could see that the effect of wind-shadow provided by the headland, aabout which I have talked previously … “on many occasions” – ed.

You can see the whitecaps on the waves over there going in towards the beach down at Kairon-Plage but closer to Le Loup the sea is much calmer, due to the wind-shadow.

There were some people over there on the beach and I wonder what they were making of all of this weather today. It’s been quite a change from just recently.

refrigerated lorries fish processing plant port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021Having taken in what was going on – or wasn’t going on, to be precise – in the chantier naval, I went to look at the fish processing plant.

When we were looking down there over the last few days, the place was covered with marquees and hordes of people for the Fête des Coquilles St Jacques but almost all of that has gone now and they are busy clearing away the rest.

Now we’re back to the refrigerated lorries over there queueing up at the Fish Processing Plant as normal service is resumed and there’s shellfish to be removed to the markets in Paris. All of the excitement seems to be over.

equipment on quayside port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021That may well be the case at the Fish Processing Plant but there’s plenty of excitement going on at the quayside.

Yesterday we noticed a pile of equipment that had been dumped on the quayside over at the back of where the Channel Island ferries tie up – you can see the bows of Victor Hugo and Granville over there.

There’s another lorry over there today with some more equipment on the back so it looks as if there’s going to be a big pile of stuff over there by the time that they finish, so it’s going to be some kind of serious work that will be taking place.

crane unloading freight on quayside port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo September 2021And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, there’s even more excitement at the lading bay.

There’s a large articulated lorry over there having its trailer unloaded by the crane and there’s now an enormous pile of freight there.

Chausiaise is in attendance but that load won’t be going onto her – it’s far too much for her to carry and anyway there isn’t any unloading facilities over on the island and I doubt that her crane will be enough to lift it off.

It looks as if it’s waiting for one of the Jersey freighters but even so it’s going to be a struggle to load it all on. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Back here I carried on with my work and actually crashed out for 15 minutes – the first time since I’ve been working these “revised hours”.

Tea tonight wa s a stuffed pepper with rice but for some reason it didn’t cook as well as it usually does. I don’t know what I did wrong.

But now I’m off to bed. I’m hoping to have a nice long sleep (although I noticed that the wind has sprung up again) because I have my Welsh lesson tomorrow and I want to be on form.

There’s also my doctor’s appointment tomorrow – the Day of Judgement so I’ll have to remember to take my x-rays. I wonder what he’s going to tell me this time.

By the way, I did eventually transcribe the dictaphone note, but as you are probably eating your meal right now I’ll save you the gory details.

Wednesday 12th September 2018 – WHAT A …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… horrible night!

About 00:45 when I finally settled down to sleep. And something awoke me at 03:30 – no idea what it was – and that was how I stayed, drifting in and out until the alarm went off at 06:00.

A beautiful morning with some lovely streaks of light. Several icebergs and a couple of islands away astern too. Have we reached Greenland already?

As a true measure of my popularity I took breakfast alone this morning. It seems that I’m the rattlesnake in the Lucky Dip again. I wonder who I’ve upset today. And more importantly, how?

At least I managed to have a chat with Jerry Kobalenko about Labrador. Apparently I can find out much more information by looking in his book, “obtainable in the gift shop”. I suppose that my explorations are pretty much small beer compared to the routes that he has travelled.

My morning caught up with me though, and pretty quickly too. By about 08:45 I was flat out on the bed and there I stayed until about 09:45. Dead to the world. The only trouble with this though is that I feel worse now then I did before I crashed out.

At least there was a nice view of Greenland through the fog and that might cheer me up a little. An iceberg went sailing past at one point, hard up against the Greenland coast and so I went out to take a photo or two.

There was a lecture on “the Vikings” – not “the Norse” – and Latonia started completely on the wrong foot, telling everyone that Lindisfarne was on the north-west coast of England.

Another discussion that we had was on the failed Adolphus Greely expedition of the 1880s. And what annoyed me about this was that we were just 30 miles or so from where they came to grief and there was no proposal whatever to take us there.

With all of the disturbances and failures that we have had with our voyage, I would have thought that they would have done what they could in order to make our journey more exciting and instead of this messing about in Lancaster Sound, we could have come up here instead.

I’m dismayed about all of this.

At lunch I sat with Natalie and Deanna and we chatted about last night’s entertainment. And good that it was too – the chat as well as the entertainment. I threw in a few tales from Carry On Matron too while I was at it.

By now we had arrived off the coast of Etah in Greenland. This is the last place on our list – the farthest north at 78°18′, 1300kms (750 miles) from the North Pole and I was half-expecting to be turned away from there too.

But we clambered aboard the zodiacs and off we went up the fjord. It’s long, narrow and also shallow so the ship couldn’t go too far up there. Instead we were treated to a 45-minute zodiac trip. And it’s just as well that we did because we went past three herds of musk-oxen.

We stopped to take photos of them. The best estimate is that there were about 20 of them in total.

Etah was the farthest-north permanent settlement in this part of the Arctic. The first Europeans to visit here were John Ross and William Parry in 1818 and in whose shoes we have been travelling.

Ross called them his “Arctic Highlanders” and attempted to signify his peaceful intentions towards them by holding aloft a drawing of an olive branch. Which considering that there were no trees in this part of Greenland, never mind an olive tree, was a rather strange thing to do.

After several minutes of bewilderment on both sides, the holding aloft of a basket of presents did the trick.

Etah really was right on the limit of what was possible in the way of permanent settlement and even in the late 19th Century the inhabitants were just clinging on in there, declining rapidly in numbers. Two separate expeditions of Isaac Hayes, in 1854 and 1861, noted the rapid decline in numbers of people living there, comparing the latter with the former.

There are the remains and mounds of a considerable number of huts here, and one that I inspected still had the furniture and the cast-iron stove in there. These were apparently from a failed attempt to resettle the area in comparatively modern times.

I found a considerable number of pottery shards scattered about and in the absence of a measure, I recorded the length using the camera zoom lens.

Another thing that we saw were bones. from the odd bone even down to several skeletons – mainly of musk-oxen but of other stuff too. More caribou horns than you could shake a stick at.

Once the beach area had been cleared, we could walk down to the glacier.

It’s called the Brother John Glacier, named by the celebrated and famous (or infamous) American explorer Elisha Kent Kane – he of the Margaret Fox and spirit-rapping fame – in honour of his brother

It looks quite close but it was actually not far short of three kilometres. And on the way down there on the path flanked by the polar bear guards we encountered an Arctic Hare watching us from the rocks.

Strawberry Moose had a really good time there. I took a few photos of him, and several other people insisted on photographing him. It does his ego a great deal of good to be the star in other people’s photographs.

Including aerial photography. There was someone filming the glacier with a drone and His Nibs features on some of the film.

I did some serious photography myself. There’s a couple on board who are making some kind of profile of themselves for some kind of modelling assignment, and I used their cameras to take a few pics of them

On the way back I went the long way around. A lap of the lake and it wasn’t as easy as it seems. Not only was it all “up and down” there were several piles of loose scree everywhere and I had to negotiate them clutching a moose. It wasn’t easy.

Another thing that I had to negotiate was a woman lying prone on the path. Apparently she was smelling the Arctic plants, so I was told.

And then we had the stepping stones over the river. That was exciting clutching His Nibs.

All in all, the walk back around the lake from the glacier was interesting and exhilarating. And probably the first time ever that Golden Earring has been played at Etah.

One thing that I did do – you might think is bizarre – is to take off my boots and socks and go for a paddle in the Arctic Ocean. Well, although I intended to, I went in quicker and deeper than I intended due to a wet slippery rock upon which I was standing.

Absolutely taters it was – far colder than in that river in Labrador this year. I must be out of my mind.

Hot tea was served and I was so busy talking that I almost missed my zodiac back to the ship. And they waited so long for me that it had grounded and it took a while and several people to refloat it.

But that wasn’t as bad as one of the other drivers. He had struck a submerged rock in his zodiac and broken his propellor.

There was a storm brewing in the distance and it was touch and go as to whether we would make it to the ship before we were caught in it. Of course, we were soundly beaten and arrived back at the ship freezing, soaking wet and covered in snow.

In my room I had a shower and a clothes-wash, and then after the resumé meeting I went for tea. With my American friends again. She’s a former gymnast and did in fact judge the gymnastics at the Olympic Games;

Tonight there was a Disco – a Viking-themed one and although I didn’t do all that much, I had spent some time getting His Nibs prepared for the show and he won a prize, which cheered me up greatly.

I had several chats, several dances and the like but, as expected, His Nibs had more success with the ladies than I ever do.

They are still dancing and Disco-ing in there. I’m writing up my notes and ready to go to bed. I’ll go for my midnight walk to check the compass and the twilight, even though we are now ahead one hour seeing as we are officially in Greenland.

There’s a pile of the younger ones in the hot tub where, apparently, they have been for some considerable time, enjoying the water and also the Arctic twilight which is magnificent tonight

Tonight’s binnacle heading is 144°, which is slightly south of south-east. So that’s it then.

We didn’t make 80°N or any of the farthest-north outposts of Arctic exploration, or even Annoatok (the farthest-northerly seasonal settlement which is only 20 miles further north than here and where Frederick Cook set out on his alleged attempt at the North Pole), but having hit John Ross’s farthest north we are on our way home. And I’m so disappointed that we have accomplished so little of what I wanted to do.

I set my foot on Ellesmere island and also at Etah, but the rest has been a big anti-climax.

You can’t win a coconut every time but just once every now and again would do fine for me.

I’m off to bed.

Sunday 2nd September 2018 – HAVING GONE WEST …

… yesterday, I was hoping that we would be emulating Richard Barnes today and, getting rather tired of Southern Comfort we would “Go North”.

early morning plane landing edmonton airport canadaAnd it must be my really bad conscience telling me something, or else the tension has totally swept me away, Or else it was the early night. But I was wide-awake at 02:25 this morning, looking at the aircraft coming into land at the airport.

By 04:00 I was out of bed working, having given up the idea of sleep a long time previously. I really need to do something about this otherwise I’m going to have a catastrophe.

After all of the alarms had rung, I went and had a good shower. And gathered up all my things.

Luckily, at the check-out I managed to locate a coffee machine so I was able to fuel up. Maybe I’ll feel a little more like it when it starts to work. Who knows?

At the baggage check-in at the airport I noticed that I’m definitely losing my touch. My suitcase weighed a mere 16.6 kgs and that included Strawberry Moose. It’s not like me at all. I could have taken a couple of extra children in my baggage allowance.

Security was another total farce. We had probably the surliest member of the Canadian Government Service that I have ever encountered (and I’ve encountered a few, believe me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall).

And then my boots rang the alarm bells at the barrier so I was told (not asked, told) to take them off. And so I made an acerbic remark about the fact that I’d rather take my chances with the freedom fighters than the Security Services, which led to my being “selected for special screening”.

The guy then couldn’t make the explosives detector work so I sat down on his table to rest, to which he took a great deal of exception. My response was that I wasn’t going to hang around like this while he messed around with all of his useless equipment, and we had something of a stand-off as I dug my heels in.

In the end, I was waved through, but not before they confiscated my bottle of water. For some reason or another they took exception to my book too and we had a little argument about that as well.

I really don’t know what’s the matter with these people. It’s almost as if they go around looking for a fight. So the best that I can do is to make their day and oblige them.

While I was sitting down, I started to make a list of the things that I don’t remember packing. I can see it being another one of THOSE voyages. And I must remember to find a large bin-liner in which to wrap His Nibs, otherwise he’ll be rather wet.

bae 146 avro rj85 rj100 canada september septembre 2018Our aeroplane is one of the old British Aerospace BAe146 voriants, either an Avro RJ85 or an RJ100, and the only way to tell them apart withour a tape measure is to have one standing alongside another.

You can tell from the registration number too, but I can’t see it on my photo. It’s a charter flight operated by a company based in Yellowknife and there weren’t all that many people on it, which makes me think that it might be an RR100.

I ended up sharing a row of seats with an elderly British lady who has lived in Canada for 75 years, and a rather garrulous British guy who had clearly had more than just a whiff of the barmaid’s apron.

A meal was supplied on the flight and I was rather dubious about whether it was really as vegan as it was supposed to be.

After a nice relaxing flight we came in to land at Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories for a refuelling stop.

That’s a decision that seemed to me at the time to be a rather strange decision, knowing the likely range of a BAe 146. And the cynic inside me was not assuaged by the news that we received here.

It seems that, once more, we had been confounded by the weather. Instead of blowing stuff away from us, is blowing stuff towards us and blocking our passage, which can be very painful if you have forgotten to bring your ointment.

The bad weather conditions mean that we can’t go on yet again, and we are now stranded here in Yellowknife for a while. Looking at the positives, because I need to adopt a more positive outlook, at least, I can say that at 62°27N this is the farthest north point that I have ever reached, beating Finland 1981 by a good 100 or so miles.

But will we make it any farther north?

That positive outlook didn’t last very long, did it?

While things are being organised, I went for a walk outside the airport.

Straight away, I stumbled across a paid of really old Douglas DC3 “Dakotas” parked up at the end of the runway. I knew that there were some that had been abandoned here but I didn’t think that I would be lucky enough to find them.

douglas dakota dc3 c-gpnr buffalo air yellowknife canada september septembre 2018This one here is registration number C-GPNR and it was apparently built in 1942, construction number 13333 and ex-USAAF serial 42-93423.

It’s a DC3-S1C3G variant, which seems to indicate to me that it’s fitted with two 895-kW Pratt and Whitney R-1830-S1C3G Twin Wasp radials rated at at 1200hp, so it’s much more powerful than the versions fitted with Wright Cyclone engines.

But it doesn’t look as if it will be going very far in the near future as from what I can see, its last airworthiness certificate that I could find expired on 23rd May 1996

douglas dakota dc3 cf-cue buffalo air yellowknife canada september septembre 2018This one is a Douglas C47 version – the Skytrain – of the DC3 Dakota.

Her registration number is C-FCUE, built in 1942 as construction number 12983 and fitted with two Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 Twin Wasp radial engines. It’s claimed to be the first aeroplane to have landed in Yellowknife and can count among its celebrated passengers the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

It’s also been suggested and one very vocal local yokel told me that one of these two aircraft was involved in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944

But it’s a shame to see them here slowly disappearing into the landscape like this. Someone ought to do something about saving them.

There’s another aeroplane here too, away in the distance. This one is on display on a plinth. Yet another obliging local told me that this was the first aeroplane to have landed on the North Pole and so I went to see that too.

arctic fox bristol mk31 freighter north pole yellowknife airport canada september septembre 2018And, lo and behold, it’s Arctic Fox, registration CF-TFX.

She’s a Bristol Mk31 freighter and you will have to look long and hard to find another one of these aeroplanes anywhere in the world because there can’t be more than a dozen remaining.

She was built in 1953 to a wartime design as a freighter as you can tell from the clamshell front doors for transporting machinery and vehcles.

arctic fox bristol mk31 freighter north pole yellowknife airport canada september septembre 2018She was bought by Wardair in 1958 and used for the transportation of freight around the North-West Territories.

But her claim to fame is much more important and personal than that, because she was the first ever wheeled aeroplane to land at the North Pole, a feat that she accomplished on 5th May 1967 under the control of a pilot called Don Braun.

It was purchased from Wardair in 1968 and installed here as a monument on 22nd June 1968

I went back to the airport afterwards to see what was going on, and eventually we were picked up by a shuttle bus and driven to our hotel. We’re staying in the Days Inn in the centre of the new town, up on the hill.

And much to my surprise, I don’t seem to be alone.

The Vanilla Queen, whom I mentioned yesterday and who is named for all those of you who know your Dutch rock music from the early 1970s – is the Québecoise who was on my plane from Montreal to Edmonton yesterday. She was then in the hotel last night, again on the ‘plane this morning, now on my shuttle bus and she’s staying in my hotel.

We had a lengthy chat and what she told me caused me to give her all of my adulation. She comes from Montreal, south of the river, and had the urge to go to live in the Arctic. So one day, she just upped sticks and moved to Iqaluit, the principal town on Baffin Island, beyond the Arctic Circle.

And how I admire people like that who have that kind of courage.

She’s a hair stylist (NOT a hairdresser) by profession, so I joked that she would have loads of fun trying to do something with what remains of the hair that I still have.

For lunch I wandered off into town and came across a Subway. That’ll do me nicely.

demolition of old wooden building yellowknife north west territories canada september septembre 2018But not before I’d witnessed the total demolition of an old wooden building here.

Half of the town was out watching it, and I thought that it was the highlight of the year, but it turns out that it was a silent protest as almost everyone in the community was up in arms about the whole affair.

Mind you, someone whom I met later said that in her opinion it was a derelict wreck and about time that it went.

On the way back I noticed a sign saying that the town had been built on the oldest rocks yet known in the world,, so I recounted to one of the officials on our voyage the story of the rocks being 4,000,004 years and three months old.

But as Alfred Hitchcock and Kenneth Williams once so famously remarked “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.

great slave lake yellowknife north west territory canada september septembre 2018A little later, there was a guided tour of the town organised so I leapt on board. And so did The Vanilla Queen, and we had quite another chat.

I was expecting to see the sewage farm, the rubbish dump and the brand-new bicycle rack but instead we ended up on the rock at the Bush Pilots’ Memorial where there’s a magnificent view over Yellowknife Bay on the Great Slave Lake.

It was well-worth the climb because You could see for miles from up here over some really beautiful views.

modern town yellowknife north west territories canada september septembre 2018Yellowknife is actually two towns in one.

The original settlement that was founded in the 1930s is down by the lake but when the North West Territories were incorporated in 1967 and the region’s administrative offices were located here, these buildings were constructed up on the hill away from the water.

A modern town, complete with all facilities, to house the staff who came here with the Government grew up around the buildings. Today, about 20,000 people live here.

hotchy yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018We walked back down the hill towards town in the company of another couple of people who had spent some time in the town and who knew their way around.

There were several exciting things to see on the way down, including this little photo prop at the side of the road.

It’s the kind of thing that is always worth a good photo opportunity

ad hoc sculptures yellowknife north west territories canada september septembre 2018On our way again, we hadn’t gone all that far when we were sidetracked by some of the most extraordinary people you would ever wish to meet.

Down at the edge of the lake we ended up at the old original settlement of the town. Here we met a guy who makes sculptures by collecting all kinds of abandoned objects and balancing them on top of each other.

Having lived here for a considerable number of years, he told us a whole host of interesting and exciting stories about life down here.

houseboats great slave lake yellowknife north west territories canada september septembre 2018He also pointed out a route along the lake shore where we could see many interesting things, such as house boats that float on large iron pontoons.

Rents in the town are quite expensive, but the lake is actually outside the city boundary so people can live here on a houseboat without paying rent or any local authority charges.

This can on occasion lead to quite a considerable amount of controversy. There are of course no services available to those who live in the houseboats and so they take advantage of those available in the town – without usually paying for them of course.

jolliffe island houseboats great slave lake yellowknife great slave lake canada september septembre 2018Many of the local residents and indeed the town council are none-too-happy about this situation and on quite a few occasions the farces of law and order have been involved.

Access to the houseboats is of course by boat during the summer but in the winter the lake freezes over and access is on foot.

And the ice on the lake is so solid that residents can even bring their vehicles right up to the front door.

ragged ass road yellowknife north west territories canada september septembre 2018One of the most famous roads in the town is called Ragged Ass Road.

When the access to the waterfront properties was by water, what is now known as Ragged Ass Road was the rear limit of the properties and at was against this line that all of the outside toilets of the residents were situated.

However there are some people who reckon that this story is at best apocryphal.

Another famous street in the town is Lois Lane. In case you haven’t guessed, one of the houses in the street was for a number of years the home of the actress Margaret (Margot) Kidder.

While we were down in Ragged Ass Road we met a woman who told us that she was a computer programmer and that she had developed the computer program that Sue was using on her tablet.

international harvester r150 yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018In the garden of a house right by where we were talking, there were a couple of abandoned lorries.

I thought that this one was exciting. It’s an International Harvester R150 that was gradually being overwhelmed by Arctic Willow.

This is quite a rare vehicle because as far as I could discover, they were only made from 1953 to 1955. The whole range totalled about 250,000 of which well over half related to just one model, the R110.

air compressor tools and drills yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018That wasn’t all that was exciting around here either.

This is an old mining area and as well as the old Ingersoll Rand air compressor that was lying around, there were loads of old air tools and machinery lying around too.

Someone had taken full advantage of all of these to create a very interesting art-deco sculpture that spanned several gardens in the street.

gold miners cabin yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018I mentioned that the original site of the town was down here on the waterfront.

It consisted of loads of of old ad-hoc wooden cabins assembled by the miners who came here in the late 1930s in search of the gold that had been discovered in the area in 1934.

There are still a few of the original cabins remaining and this was pointed out to us as being one of them.

Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018By now our little group of people had whittled itself down to just two of us and so we wandered off to the museum of local life, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.

This was certainly quite an interesting place and there were lots to see. We certainly learnt a great deal about local life amongst the indigenous people.

I was very keen on the Polar Bears while The Vanilla Queen fell in love with a stuffed Muskox.

parliament building council offices yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre is situated in a very beautiful location on the edge of the city in a small park, in the same area where the Parliament of the Northwest Territories is situated.

We still had plenty of time after the museum closed and so we were able to admire the Government Offices in all their glory in the evening sunshine.

This isn’t the kind of traditional view that you would associate with life on the tundra so close to the Arctic Circle.

Our evening meal at the hotel across the road had been put back by half an hour and so we had plenty of time left on our hands. But there was a beautiful lake at the back of that hotel which looked very inviting so we went for a walk.

And I must have been very distracted because I don’t seem to have taken any photos of it. I’m sure that that can’t be right.

inuit throat singing yellowknife northwest territories canada september septembre 2018We had a nice buffet tea, with plenty of choice even for me which makes a nice change.

And after tea, we were entertained by some Inuit throat musicians giving a fine demonstration of their art. It was certainly different.

But the procedure was interrupted by an announcement from the admin of our trip that with a change in the direction of the wind we are going to try to go on tomorrow. But to where, we really don’t have much of an idea

So off we traipsed to our hotel and bed. Alarm calls at 04:00 and on the bus at 05:00

And where will we be stranded tomorrow?

Tuesday 14th August 2018 – AFTER ALL …

… of my vicissitudes just recently, I am now back home. And quite right too. Despite liking as much as I do going off on my travels, it is, as Barry Hay once famously said, “good to be back home”.

Last night was a very bad night. I was so wound up and tense that I couldn’t go off to sleep and I certainly remember it being 04:40 and I was still wide awake.

But I must have gone to sleep at some moment because the alarm awoke me at 06:20.

Liz and Terry must have been tired too because it took a while for everyone else to begin stirring, but eventually we were all downstairs having breakfast and a cosy chat with plenty of coffee.

Terry unloaded his van and I loaded up Caliburn with the things that were coming with me, and I set off for home.

On the way back, I had a couple of stops to make. Firstly, there was some shopping to do at LeClerc. Not much, but it needs to be done.

Secondly, there was an address in the town that I had to visit.

solex moped granville manche normandy franceMany years ago I helped a Swedish friend (I can’t remember her name now but her daughter was called Pernilla) move house to a place near Limoges. And in the undergrowth were the remains of a 1960s Solex moped.

I liberated it and brought it back to the farm but I never did anything much with it. And recently I met a man in Granville who restores them.

I have no plans whatever to do anything with it and it’s no use to me, so seeing as he can do some good with it, he may as well have it. It’s good to make friends and contacts.

Back here I had a good chat with Brigitte on the car park, and then came upstairs to make my butties. And then to sit on the wall with my butties. No lizards though because someone else was sitting in my usual space and I had to go elsewhere.

Back here, my exertions of the last few days caught up with me and I ended up crashing out for a couple of hours. And on the bed too. Flat out was hardly the word and I missed my afternoon walk.

Tea tonight was a pizza seeing as I had plenty of stuff lying around that needs eating. And I managed my walk this evening too, although it’s now getting dark quite early. It was dark when I went out at 21:00.

So now I’m still pretty tired so I’ll be having an early night. Tomorrow I’ll start unloading Caliburn and arranging things in here.

Wednesday 25th April 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

… whose silly idea this was but a flight at 06:15 in the morning should have given me a clue.

And so it was with a really heavy heart that I hauled myself out of my stinking pit at … errr … 02:00 following the cacophony of alarms and people knocking at the door.

But still I’d had plenty of time to go off on a journey during the night.

I was living in a village with a group of North Africans and the old lady of the village who had been wandering around came to see me in the house where I was living and then wandered away. In this village were two cows and they were both having some kind of psychological issues so I had to go to see an animal psychiatrist to make an appointment for one of them. So we had a little chat about this cow and then I decided that I would go home. But this cow decided that it would follow me and I don’t get on very well with large animals as regular readers of this rubbish will recall so I was rather put out by this. I had to dash home, reach the safety of the inside, lock the door and then park up a revolving door so that entry would be impossible but I could still get in and out of the house – something that was very complicated. And I had to do it pretty quickly too as I didn’t want to have a confrontation with this cow. But as I was trying to arrange the revolving door all of the villagers turned up. They had heard somehow that the old lady had been here and they wanted to come in to talk to her. But of course she wasn’t here, and I was wondering how I could tell them without arousing their anger or suspicions because I could see that although they looked reasonably good-natured, the wrong kind of word in the wrong kind of place could really upset them and we could have an “incident” here. It was all starting to become rather worrying.

The bus was due to leave at 02:41 so I had reckoned on it being here round about 03:15, so no-one was more surprised than me to find it outside the hotel when I hit the foyer at 02:15. Any chance of picking up some food at the all-night bar at the side of the pool promptly evaporated.

We were crammed like sardines into the bus – not a spare seat anywhere – and it took a mere 40 minutes to reach the airport on the way back. We must have come to the hotel via the scenic route.

Just by way of a change, I was one of the first to check in and was thus rewarded with an aisle seat. And passing security was something else. Bells and buzzers going off like nobody’s business but no-one seemed to care at all. That’s what I call a “progressive” attitude.

Take-off was timed for 06:15 but by that time we were probably already 500 feet off the ground. The plane was up there with us too and I for one am not at all used to this idea of people being early – especially in countries that are much more laid-back and in which time is of lesser importance than elsewhere.

We were in another elderly Airbus A320 that had Spanish signs plastered all over it, presumably from a previous employment, and which could have done with a really good clean, especially in the bathroom, of which only two out of three were working.

I had another seat up at the front against the aisle which was just as well because these Nouvelair jets are all rather like sardine tins and we are crammed in tightly. But then, as I have said before, it’s not as if we are going across the Atlantic on it, and the lack of comfort is adequately reflected in the lack of price.

We were served a breakfast – of an omelette and there was once more no vegan option despite my having requested one. But that’s not new, is it? What is new though is that I had missed my opportunity to stock up on stuff from the all-night restaurant.

At Brussels Airport I was first off the aeroplane, and by a long way too. And first at the baggage carousel too. Even more surprisingly I was down in the bowels of the station just as a train to the city was about to leave, so I hopped aboard.

But it was all to no avail because it pulled into Bruxelles-Midi at 11:15, just two minutes after the TGV that I usually catch had pulled out. And there was a wait of an hour and a half for the next one. I must say that I hadn’t expected to be on the 11:13 at all, but it was such a disappointment to be so near and yet so far.

At least it gave me enough time to go to the supermarket for a baguette for lunch and to pick up some of the nice raisin buns that they have. Remember that I had had no breakfast and I’d already been on the go for … errr … nine hours.

TGV gare du nord paris franceThe TGV was pretty full and I seemed to have been given a seat next to the person who had all of the luggage. And he was most upset about having to move it, and even more upset when I told him where to stick it.

Not too many people these days seem to know how to use the luggage racks in the train.

You’re probably wondering what the yellow box is in the foreground of this photo.

There are several of them scattered about all over the SNCF railway stations in France. They are called composteurs and you stick your ticket in there to composter it before you board the train.

What the machine does is to insert a time and date stamp on your ticket so that you can’t claim a refund on it as “unused” at a later date. And it’s an offence to travel on the SNCF with an uncomposted ticket.

There’s always an announcement as the train is pulling out of the station to the effect that “if you have forgotten to composter your ticket, please see the conductor immediately”. He’ll growl at you and stamp it by hand, but he’ll do much more than growl at you if he catches you before you catch him.

I didn’t get much of a sleep on board the train, and that was a disappointment. I’ll probably catch up with it later but at a most inconvenient time, I suppose.

Travelling through Paris was pretty straightforward. Line 5 to the Gare de l’Est and then Line 4 down to Montparnasse. But it’s a nightmare trying to get to the ticket office in the station there but it’s even worse just now because they are carrying out renovations there and building a commercial centre.

And the queue for tickets! It took ages to work our way down it to the front – and to find that the next train is the 16:43. There was an earlier way to get to Granville, going on the TGV to Rennes and then on the train to Caen but leaving at some tiny wayside station and catching the bus. But that’s like going in a big letter “Z” and costs a fortune, not to mention all of the effort.

So I went down to the platform for my train and made my butties instead, fighting off the pigeons.

SNCF gare de granville railway station manche normandy franceThe train that we should have caught is the “return” from Argentan but that was running 50 minutes late so they prepared an idle multiple-unit standing in a vacant platform. Even so, we were still 20 minutes late leaving. And as it was a 6-car unit instead of a 12-car unit we were crammed in there like sardines too.

As the train emptied out I finally managed to doze off. But not for long though – only about 10 minutes I reckon.

I can see that I shall be paying for all of my efforts in due course

We arrived back at Granville bang on time – the driver must have done well to catch up the missing 20 minutes along the way. But it was a long, sad, weary way back home dragging my suitcase behind me up the hill and with the pain in my legs.

It’s good to be back home, as Barry Hay once famously sang, but I would much rather be in Tunisia. It took me a couple of hours to sort myself out and then I made some tea out of a tin.

But what an effort? What a surprise? Who would have ever thought that I would have made it to the desert?

They say that the best things come as a complete surprise and this is certainly true.

I’m now off to bed. With no alarm call either. Just watch me wke up at 05:00 tomorrow morning.

Saturday 18th March 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… was something of a restless night for me. For a start, I wasn’t hungry and so I didn’t have anything to eat. And then I couldn’t go to sleep for ages either. By 06:00 I was wide awake and working on the laptop.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go on my travels during the night. I’d been to some kind of city where the railway lines had been moved out of the centre to the edge of the place, and the interior where the rails and the stations had formerly been was now all overgrown and being used by the locals as a kind of park. There were some arches over where the railway lines had been – brick arches of the kind that might have been built by the Romans and in very poor repair. I kept trying to take a few photos of them but people kept on getting in the way and it was just so difficult to have a clear shot.

Anyway, I had breakfast, in company with plenty of other people and a pile of dogs – it seems as if there was some kind of Canine Convention going on here just now. And then, as usual, I had things to do on the laptop.

Having survived the initial attempt to turf me out of my room, I decided not to push my luck and by 10:00 I was on my way. First stop was the LeClerc supermarket for bread and a few other bits and pieces to set me up for the next few days. I had a chat with Ingrid on the telephone too and we arranged to meet up on Monday for a chat and so on.

And then – I’ve put this off for so long but I can’t keep on doing it. I headed for home. It’s been a long time since I’ve been down these roads. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been something of a disciple of Wilfred Grenfell, who sais that “when two paths are open, always take the more venturesome”. But I have to go home sometime.

When I finally arrived, I could see that it was clear that the gales and tempests that have battered the centre of France have given here a pretty good battering too. But there’s no real damage or anything and, to be honest, it was good to be back. The good news is that the rodent-proofing that I carried out here in December seems to have worked and there’s no obvious signs of any damage. It was 16.1°C in here too so that was good – saved me having to light a fire.

But the bad news is that the storm has done something to the internet connection and that is down. It looks as if I’ll be taking Ingrid to Montlucon on Monday to swap my Livebox over for a new one. Anyway, I had a nice sit-down and relax for the afternoon, and kicked my mug of coffee all over the floor breaking off the handle of the mug, as well as washing the floor..

One of my plans for tonight was to go down to Pionsat to watch the football. But to my astonishment, not only is Pionsat running just one team this season (instead of the two last season and even three a couple of seasons ago), the team has declared a general forfeit and abandoned all of its matches. I don’t know what to make of this. It’s all rather astonishing as far as I’m concerned.

So anyway, I made myself something quick out of a tin to eat and then settled down on the sofa tonight, trying to sleep amid the sound of the animals scratching away in the roof.

As Golden Earring once famously sang, “You know it’s good to be back home” but I have been realising day by day while I’ve been away that with my declining health (because I can see it declining every day) my long-term future lies away from here.

Wednesday 9th December 2015 – I’VE BEEN OUT …

… on my travels today – the first time since I came back from hospital last Friday.

In fact, I was out on my travels during the night too. I was working in an aeroplane hangar and one of the jobs that I had to do was to fit a new wheel and tyre on the undercarriage of ar aeroplane. In fact, the wheel bore a very great resemblance to the wheel and tyre that I fitted the other week on my wheelbarrow. And each time I fitted it, the air pressure went down and the tyre went flat. Eventually I had a good listen and I could hear the air escaping from a puncture in the inner tube. But like a good Civil Servant that I was, I’d been told to put this particular wheel and tyre on the aeroplane, and so I did. Fixing the puncture was obviously too much like hard work.
But from there we moved on a little and I was part of an undercover police force that was investigating the theft of a very dangerous chemical from this hangar. It was one that dissolved almost everything with which it came in contact (so how did they find a container in which to keep it?) and was on the Top Secret list. And as we were searching this hangar for clues, there was a man, badly eaten away by the acid and with bits of his body like his left thigh missing and with yellow skin, trying desperately to hide from our view underneath a 50-gallon oil drum that was lying on its side. But having failed in our search, we did however know that something had been posted to someone, put in a letter box somewhere. We were all crushed inside an old Ford Y van, a red Post Office van, and we were looking at all of the letters that had been collected from various letter boxes. All of a sudden, one particular letter caught my eye so I opened it. It was addressed to a cycle maker, and seemed to be some kind of coding in a five-letter group on an old blue order form. We sent a woman with the order form to give to the cycle maker to see what happened, which she did. And a couple of days later, she was called back and gived a brand new specially-made kids’ cycle painted green and white and she looked totally ridiculous on itn being a rather large woman. But we were no further forward and so we retired to plot our next move.

And this is when the alarm went off and I had to struggle to find the phone which, in the meantime, was waking everyone in the house. And I was thinking what another good sleep I’d just had.

After breakfast and the visit of the nurse to give me my injection, I had a shower and packed my bag and then Terry and I set off for Montlucon, stopping on the way at Pionsat for fuel and my order from the pharmacy.

At Montlucon we went to the hospital for my 11:00 appointment, which turned out to be about midday before I was seen.

The good news is that I don’t have leukaemia. The bad news is that I have a form of lymphoma. There are several types of this illness, some of which are quite aggressive and others not so. It seems that I have one of the lesser kinds. There is a whole range of reasons why this might have occurred, and one of these reasons is due to something to do with an aggressive protein, and my blood count shows that there is a protein that has gone off the scale in the blood count. It’s not the “usual suspect” in this respect, but nevertheless it merits further enquiries and so I’m due for further tests.

But as an aside, two points raise their ugly head. If it is a protein issue, there are not the facilities to treat it at Montlucon and so I will have to go elsewhere. It looks as if I’ll be on my travels again in the New Year. And in the second case, I seem to be full of ganglions. Not that they are dangerous apparently, but their presence has certainly been noted and in all kinds of places too.

On the way back we stopped for a late lunch and then went to Neris-les-Bains in search of chocolates for Liz because it’s her birthday today. After that, I went back home, for the first time for almost three weeks.

We’ve had plenty of sun, plenty of wind and plenty of excess solar energy, 694 amp-hours in just 19 days and that’s impressive for a period approaching the winter solstice. I also had a good rummage around and found a spare door lock, and I fitted that onto the front door so that it can be opened from the outside. This might come in handy if people other than me need access to the house.

I hung around here for a while too because, although it was cold, it was nice to be on my own for a while and relax in the relative comfort and security of my own surroundings. As Barry Hay once famously said on the beach at Scheveningen about 25 years ago “I tell you what man, it’s good to be back home”.

I started up Caliburn, threw some spare clothes, soya milk and vitamin B12 drink into the back and set off for Liz and Terry’s. First time Caliburn has had a run out for a while of course. And I mustn’t forget Strawberry Moose who has been invited to spend Christmas away from home.

As I drove back here, I remembered thinking “wouldn’t it be nice if the next round of tests were to reveal that I don’t need these twice-daily injections and the district nurse didn’t have to come round so often” and then I thought “blimmin’ ‘eck – it’s 19:00 and if I don’t put my foot down I’ll miss the nurse!” I had completely forgotten.

But I was back first and here I am at Liz and Terry’s. All ready for Round 2, and trying to work out a cunning plan about going home. I managed to take a huge load of wood upstairs to my attic without stopping, and that was certainly better than before I went to hospital, so things are looking up. I’ll see what my next couple of blood tests tell me and then I’ll make a decision.

Sunday 17th May 2015 – WELL, WASN’T THAT EXPENSIVE?

There I was, deep in the arms of Morpheusin the small hours in my little rest area at the side of a Swiss Autoroute when there was a banging on the door and a cry of “Kontrole!”

Yes, the Swiss police are not noted for their sense of humour but then they do have a job to do, I suppose, and I duly presented my papers.

While they were being checked, I had a lengthy chat with one of the other officers about this and that, and then it came down to the crunch “where’s your vignette?”

If you use a Swiss autoroute you have to buy a special sticker to give you the necessary entitlement, and in all my years of travelling I’ve never ever bothered with it. But sooner or later I was bound to be picked up, and sleeping in a rest area on the autoroute made it an odds-on certainty.

No complaints from me about it, although it stopped me going back to sleep again. And while I was lying there in half a daze, it occurred to me that I’d carried on a conversation for about 15 minutes in German without even pausing for breath. Things are looking up!

overnight stop rest area autoroute switzerland may 2015Next morning in the bright sunshine, a took a photo of the rest area just to prove that I had been here, and then I made myself a coffee. Nothing else though, because I realised that I had forgotten to buy anything for breakfast

I was definitely having a bad morning.

The irony of all of this is that just about 15 minutes later, The Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav directed me off the autoroute and into the Jura mountains for a leisurely drive home, most of which was completely uneventful except for at the boulangerie where some woman moaned like hell because I had the nerve to complain that she had blocked me in on the car park. Silly four-legged animal well-known for giving a high-quality dairy drink!

My road back took me via Macon and that gave me an idea. I telephoned my friend Jean-Marc who lives up in the hills at the back of the town to see if he was in for visitors, and to give him an opportunity to flee the country before I arrived.

We first met when we were both 16 – Crewe was twinned with Macon and we exchanged families during one summer. I went to live there and he went to live in Crewe. And we met up again last year under the most bizarre circumstances, as long-term readers of this rubbish will well-recall.

We had a long chat and discussed old times for quite a while, and drank a couple of cups of coffee, for which I was very grateful.

And then I had a completely uneventful drive back home, arriving at about 20:05.

And as Barry Hay once famously said during a live Golden Earring concert on Scheveningen Beach back in 199(3?) – “let me tell you one thing, man, it’s always good to be back home!”

Friday 2nd January 2015 – I WAS IN CREWE …

… last night, back at Gainsborough Road. The four members of Golden Earring were in bed, which was a mattress on the floor in a smallish room rather like back at La Batisse, and they were giving a concert to about four people while they were in bed. It was all rather weird.

What was even more weird was that someone was writing up a schedule of the “concert” and I noticed that, even deep in the arms of Morpheus as I was, that I could tell that the address that they had written was incorrect.

For some reason that I don’t quite understand, Golden Earring feature quite often in my nocturnal ramblings.

I was awake at 07:00 this morning but there was no possibility of hauling myself out of my stinking pit. I stayed there until about 10:00 instead and then had breakfast. I watched More Than Murder, the second part of this Mike Hammer spectacular. Its French title is “Il pleut des Cadavres” – which crudely translated by Yours Truly means “It’s Raining Corpses” and that sums up the film quite well.

These films are about 90 minutes long and more people die in them than died in the 90 minutes that it took to sink the Bismark. I don’t suppose that the films are too bad but they are full of plot holes and non-sequiturs and the action moves on at such a speed that there’s no time for a substantial plot to build up. They are clearly aimed at the truncated attention span of the American MTV generation.

It does make me wonder that if the Director hadn’t had the time constraint of 90 minutes and all that had to be crammed into it, what would these films have turned out like? Marlon Brando, when he directed One Eyed Jacks ended up with a “Director’s Cut” of about 9 hours or something like that, and the savage editing clearly showed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Director’s Cut of More Than Murder would double that with plenty to spare.

The Boulangere was late today but the time wasn’t wasted. When I built the woodshed Iused a pile of old pallets and there was tons of wood left over – the feet of the pallets and the like. So I separated all of the feet from the planks – some of them were quite substantial – and brought them up here. They didn’t half get the fire going.

And apart from that, nothing else happened today.

Now apart from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, I don’t usually talk about football very much on here. But I follow the antics of Bangor City Football Club. This is the largest and best-supported club in Wales, and I started to follow them when I used to go to Bangor to see a girlfriend who was at Uni there. They are having a dismal season this year, languishing at the foot of the Welsh Premier League and running around like a bunch of headless chickens directed by a manager who seems to have lost the plot completely in my opinion and a spineless Board of Directors who, it seems to me, have totally abandoned their responisbilities.

Had they won today, they would have risen off the bottom of the table because the team above them lost, but instead, they gave another clueless and inept performance and lost 3-0. It’s already looking like an odds-on relegation certainty, and this is a fine end to the biggest club in Wales.

It’s high time that the Board of Directors accepted its responsibilities, dismissed the manager, released some of the underperforming players and brought in a manager and some players who know how to fight..

What’s going on at Bangor City is a total shambles and the Board of Directors must accept total responsibility for the disaster that is staring them in the face before it’s too late.

Friday 10th October 2014 – I MUST HAVE BEEN TIRED LAST NIGHT.

10:45 when I heaved myself out of the stinking pit, and had the ‘phone not rung downstairs at that time, I would probably still be there now. Terry said that he had never known anyone sleep that long, which just goes to show that he’s clearly not kept himself up-to-date with these pages, and that he’s never gone two days with just a fitful doze or two in between. But then again, my lifestyle has always been somewhat extreme compared to the norm, I suppose. Not many people would put up for a minute with what I do just for pleasure.

After breakfast, we had a long chat about things around here and when Liz came back we had lunch. Then, on their way to see Rob and Julie, they dropped me off here.

Caliburn started with just a glance at the ignition key – good old Caliburn – but we are having some issues here right now. I have (once again) left the fridge plugged in permanently while I was away, instead of in the overcharge circuit, and so with the bad weather for the last three or four days that they have had here, the batteries are right down. And with the forecast weather for the next few days, there won’t be much chance of topping things up for a while so I’ll be on short rations again. I really must remember to sort out the fridge properly each time that I go away. I did exactly the same thing last year, you might remember.

The battery in the laptop went flat after a couple of hours’ work and so I was wondering how to charge it up. By then of course, it was late afternoon and in the pouring rain I wasn’t going to be doing much else so the idea came to my mind to go to St Eloy to do my shopping. It would fill in the time this evening, save me a journey tomorrow, give Caliburn an airing and also charge up the laptop. Problem solved. Wasn’t I glad that I had bought that 12-volt charging lead a few months ago?

At LIDL I met Amondine from the Anglo-French group. She was there with her children doing her shopping and we had quite a chat. All in all, at the shops, I spent €21 for a week’s supply of food. That’s much more like old times.

Back here, the internet is down, so I discovered. Dunno what has happened here. I just did a few other bits and pieces and went for an early night. I’ll resolve this issue tomorrow.

Or maybe some other time.

I dunno.

But as Barry Hay once famously said at a concert at Scheveningen Beach, “I’ll tell you one thing, man. It’s good to be back home”.

Saturday 26th October 2013 – I REMEMBER …

… back to 2004 when I was ill and thinking that I ought to develop a new interest, that the subject of footy first came up. Brussels is ideally situated for being a Northern European footy fan and I do remember thinking that as Belgium and France are rather boring in that respect, I ought to cast my net a little further afield.

Dutch football fans are well-known for their passion and ardour and as the town of Breda is easy to get to from here on public transport (change trains at Antwerpen), then NAC came onto the radar. However, times changed, and things changed, and I changed, and that was that. Nevertheless, it was always something that turned around in the back of my mind.

Dutch football has some very interestingly-named teams such as Willem III, Heracles and Top Oss, but pride of place has to go to the enigmatically-named Go Ahead Eagles. Any team with a name like that deserves to be supported. And so imagine my surprise this morning when, over a cup of coffee, I glanced at the footy fixtures and found that the Eagles were playing away this evening – at NAC Breda!

So early this afternoon after lunch I leapt into Caliburn and shot off up the motorway as far as Weerde (I really ought to live in a town with a name like that – second only to the town of Silly of course) when I realised that I didn’t have my passport (I seem to be making a habit of this).

Back on my way to Antwerpen I encountered a Carrefour at Mechelen so I was even able to do a pile of shopping, and after that, with Golden Earring playing on Caliburn’s music centre in honour of my Going Dutch, I eventually arrived at the ground.

stadion rat verlegh NAC Breda netherlands eredivisieNice and modern, which many purists (including Yours Truly) will think is a pity, but with plenty of space around it and plenty of parking too which makes a pleasant change.

Buying a ticket for an Eredivisie match is not easy. You need to have a Dutch FA clubcard to but a ticket for the match. if you don’t have one, which of course I don’t, you need to produce a national identity card, which I don’t have either, or else produce a passport, which I did have, so it was a good job that I remembered to go back and fetch it. But just €15 (that’s £12) for a ticket is an absolute bargain to watch a 1st-tier match in a keenly-fought domestic league.

Next stop was to buy some food. I left Caliburn (who has never been to the Netherlands before, by the way, so there’s a first) at the Stadion Rat Verlegh (a delightful name) and went on foot to the centre, and I’m glad that I did because I stumbled once more upon something quite exciting that I would otherwise have missed.

fokker 100 scrapyard breda netherlandsThis is a Fokker 100 of the late 1980s or early 1990s and what it is doing here as an advert for a scrapyard I really have no idea. This isn’t the first one that we have seen either, for those of you with very long memories will recall the Andover that sat on top of a scrapyard at Ettiley Heath, at the back of Sandbach, for a while. But anyway, here it is and here it sits, and here it will probably stay until the price of scrap aluminium rises again.

It did rather remind me of that delightful story about the old World War I pilot reliving one of his battles during a live television interview.
“There I was, at 8,000 feet, all on my own, and suddenly these five German Fokkers appeared out of a cloud, right in front of me”
“I should mention, for the benefit of our younger viewers” said the interviewer “that a Fokker is a type of German aeroplane”
“Thats right!” ejaculated our hero. “These Fokkers were Albatroses”

historic building medieval centre breda netherlandsSo I eventually made it into town, following my nose which was quite interested in the smell of chips that it was detecting.

This brought me to a little square just on the edge of the old medieval centre and here was a beautiful historic building. I’ve absolutely no idea what it might be although it looks like an ersatz town hall or school building of the late 19th Century when the Dutch ran out of inspiration. However, I could be completely wrong about this and nothing would surprise me.

Here I was distracted as two pizza delivery motorcyclists burst out of an alleyway and headed off in different directions. That gave me a clue and so I headed into the alleyway and found myself at the back of a takeaway pizza lace. My takeaway Vegetarian with my own vegan cheese (I always come prepared) was one of the best I’ve ever eaten.

public urinal Breda NetherlandsOn the way back to the stadium in the dark, wishing that I had come here much earlier to properly explore the town, I encountered this object, right outside the football ground as you,might expect one such object to be. Whatever its proper name might be, I was told that the locals refer to it as the p155 house, and for very good reason too as you can see.

In fact I made very good use of it. I must stop drinking all of this flavoured water while I’m driving. It’s doing me no good at all, I tell you that. I’m not sure how I would have coped had I not found this artefact. It’s certainly a novel way to spend 1.2 centimes.

Mind you, it’s a bit disconcerting having to resort to something like this in front of a crowd of about 17,000 people trying to get into the Stadion Rat Verlegh. I mean, I didn’t want to give them all an inferiority complex.

stadion rat verlegh nac breda go ahead eagles deventer netherlands eredivisie 26 october 2013But that’s enough of me talking rubbish. Let’s concentrate on the football.

Tyhe quality was rather … errr … less than I was expecting for an Eredivisie match. NAC were, well, about average I suppose but Go Ahead Eagles were thoroughly awful and how they were in one place higher than the home side before the kick-off I really do not know. They had a central defence pairing of Lord Lucan and Martin Bormann and for the second quarter of the game they were quite simply torn to shreds. Its no exaggeration to say that 4-0 at half-time, all the goals coming in that 20-odd minute spell, was something of an understatement.

stadion rat verlegh nac breda go ahead eagles deventer netherlands eredivisie 26 october 2013It will also come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the second half was a totally different game. Naive followers of the sport would expect the second half to begin with the Eagles having their heads buried in their boots and a bouyant bunch of Breda boyos bouncing out to run up a cricket score (mind you, 4-0 IS a cricket score when England are batting).

But no, Breda had gone right off the boil and were content to play exhibition football for a while, passing the ball around amongst themselves instead of going for the jugular.

This of course gave the Eagles some kind of respite and a couple of times they snatched the ball away and went racing off down the ptch to give the Breda defence some VERY ANXIOUS moments indeed. I remember thinking that if the Eagles scored twice (which they could so easily have done), there would have been an almighty panic in the Breda side and anything could happen.

stadion rat verlegh nac breda go ahead eagles deventer netherlands eredivisie 26 october 2013However the Breda defence stood firm and with just two or three minutes to go, they managed to pot a fifth goal to calm what was clearly becoming a jittery Breda performance. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a side winning 4-0 look so nervous.

But I really don’t know why teams like this do this kind of thing. 4-0 up and looking good, and then going on the defensive for 45 minutes. They should have carried on with the allout attack, been 6-0 up after the hour, and then gone on to bury this team, instead of giving them a few easy chances to get back into the game. Really bad planning, this, and I would have kicked the players all around the stadium. A tight mid-table finish means that goal difference is all important when it comes to doling out the prize money at the end of the season and whenever you are given the opportunity, which doesn’t arrive very often for clubs like this, you should be going for the throat;

And on that note, I went home. Another one of my … errr … goals in life accomplished.

Wednesday 25th April 2012 – YOU ARE PROBABLY …

jumbo jet KLM boeing 747 PH-BFK City of Karachi… wondering why there’s a picture of an old beat-up KLM jumbo jet on my blog this evening. The answer is, rather prosaically, that that’s how I arrived in Montreal.

Yes, it’s a change from the Air France aeroplane upon which I had planned to arrive, but thereby hangs a tail and if your luck is in, then it’s in, that’s all I can say.

I arrived in good time at the airport to be greeted with the news that the aeroplane is sold out (not a problem for me, of course) but that the one planned to do the flight has broken down and won’t be going.

The only one available to replace it has 40 seats fewer, so they need 40 volunteers prepared to go to Montreal by alternative means.
“We’ll give €300 to anyone who will travel by other means” announced the hostess and, believe me, I was the first in the queue and there were casualties.
“I would go via Hell itself, even Old Trafford, as long as I get to Montreal tonight” I proudly announced.
“There’s no need to go to those lengths. If you are quick there’s a flight departing for Amsterdam in 25 minutes and a ‘plane for Montreal that gets in about 40 minutes later than the one that you are booked on”.

Now I can be quick when there’s €300 involved, I mean, I’d bash up my own granny for a fiver. I hung around just long enough to get the mazooma and then I was off like a ferret up a trouser leg.

And there I was

And here I am.

I shan’t go into the boring details about the airport security because you’ve heard me say it all before. And if you really are interested, you can read all about it here.

But to ease the pain I kept on whispering to myself “three hundred euros – three hundred euros”. After all, it works out at about €500 per hour and I’ve never had a job that paid that well, not even selling my body on Boots Corner in Crewe.

At least, it would have been €500 per hour but the ‘plane was late taking off so I’ve no idea how much it ended up being. Still, never mind. Who’s complaining?

And on the flight there were several things of note

  1. I was sat next to a young girl who was half-Dutch and half-Tanzanian and I had the most enjoyable flight companion that I’ve ever had. In fact I was quite disappointed when she hopped into a taxi at the airport, having refused the lift that I offered her
  2. they actually found a vegan meal for me. I was worried about that – being on a restricted diet and having left my booking behind of course. And it was conjured up just as I was thinking that it was lucky that I brought a gingerbread loaf with me
  3. One of the films on offer on the flight was Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit. That’s another one of those films that I can watch time after time after time.
  4. Surfing through the radio stations available on the aeroplane I came across “Arrow Classic Rock”. That was a station that I could pick up live in Brussels when I lived there at Expo and it didn’t ‘arf bring back the good old days. Golden Earring all the way across the Atlantic – what more can anyone want?
  5. even more surprisingly, I was chatted up by … errr … one of the air stewards, who spent a great deal of time chatting to me as well and even gave me a pen with his compliments. However, at the end of the flight, in the best traditions of a News of the World reporter, I “made my excuses and left”. B*gg*r that for a game of soldiers

dodge grand caravan dorval pierre trudeau airport montreal canadaAnd after last year’s experiences with hire cars and all of that – well, they knew that I was coming this year didn’t they?

I’ve got my Dodge Grand Caravan – exactly as I ordered and exactly as I expected.

And it’s black – so it won’t show the dirt. And it has 17587 kilometres on the clock.

comfort inn laval montreal quebec canadaI usually stay at the “Howard Johnson” motel out at St Léonard at the side of Highway 40, but now that the renovations are complete, the prices are way out of my budget.

The cheapest motel that was available that was easily accessible and with private off-street parking was a Comfort Inn. It’s in Laval though, some miles away from the airport.

Nevertheless, I had a really good deal here, although the walk-in price is something else completely.

strawberry moose comfort inn laval montreal quebec canadaSo now that I’m installed in my comfortable room, and His Nibs is tucked up in bed, I’ve nipped out for food.

And I don’t have to go very far because there’s a restaurant next door. It doesn’t take them long to rustle up a pizza for me to eat (yes, I remembered my cheese).

The downside of this is that I didn’t get to go for a stroll around the neighbourhood as I usually do.

But then again, I think that I’ve done enough strolling today – I don’t know how many kilometres it was that I had to run in order to catch all of these blasted planes.