Tag Archives: grand marée

Tuesday 30th March 2021 – HAVING HAD A …

… really bad night last night, caused n the main by only having 5.5 hours of sleep, I’ve had a rather bad day today.

So bad in fact that most of the afternoon had been spent sleeping on the chair in the office. In fact there were times when I could quite easily have crawled back into bed and gone to sleep. and it probably would have been more productive had I have done so too.

But I can’t complain altogether because despite everything, today has been reasonably productive even if I didn’t spend the morning revising my Welsh (school is out for Easter by the way) as I had intended.

In news that will come as totally earth-shattering to most people, I’ve finally finished the photos for July 2019. And furthermore, I’ve burnt a DVD with those on it that I hadn’t burnt previously. This will be sent to Rosemary who, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, accompanied me from Aberdeen to Kangerlussuak.

As well as that I’ve finished another page of my voyage around Central Europe and THAT’S NOW ON LINE.

There’s just one more page to do but unfortunately that’s the page where I ran aground months ago. So don’t expect that to resurface any time soon.

In the middle of all of this I had to break off this morning to go into town. I’ve run out of fruit so I need some to keep me going until Thursday.

Off I set down the street towards town and I was arrested by the sight of the lifeboat going out and about for a run around.

They probably haven’t been out for a rescue but it does go out quite often for training exercises and the like and that’s probably what it’s been doing this morning.

There was plenty of other activity going on there at the Fish Processing Plant. Amongst the boats unloading there is our old friend la Grande Ancre who has probably been out collecting shellfish.

And there are plenty of vans parked around there too, presumably to take away the catch from the fishing boats. Whilst the Fish Processing Plant handles a lot of the catch, some of the boats belong to private enterprises such as wet fish shops or restaurants and they have their own vans to take away their shellfish.

Having watched them for a while I skipped off down the street towards town.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the pointing that’s been going on on the wall on the Rampe du Monte à Regret next to the Rue des Juifs.

Having stalled for a few weeks, this project to have apprentices training on the wall seems to have led to something of a spurt and they have advanced quite considerably. Maybe they might even finish it some time soon and start on something else.

Down the steps I went and landed in the Place Pleville and then strode out to the Super U. With the bag that I had in my sac banane I carried away a couple of apples, a couple of pears and a couple of bananas.

It was a shame that the battery in the camera went flat at this point as I would have taken a few more photos while I was out.

Next stop was the Nautical Centre on the seafront. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago I mentioned something about going on a sailing course and that’s the place to be. They were another one of these places where they know nothing but tell you “look on our website”. But at least they have courses and that’s always a start.

Next door to the CRNG is the Salle Hérel. That’s where the new vaccination centre is so I stuck my head inside to talk to someone. There was someone there so I started to tell my story but he cut me short. “I’m just the technician” he said. “If it’s a medical enquiry you need to come back tomorrow when the centre opens”.

So that’s something else that I need to do on Thursday morning on my way back from the shops. If I can have my second vaccination here instead of going all the way to Valognes, so much the better.

Back at the flat I carried on with work until lunchtime.

After lunch I came back in here to carry on work but I didn’t do a thing. I was curled up on the chair in here for most of the time.

When I awoke I was rather late for my afternoon walk so I grabbed the NIKON D500 and headed off out.

When I reached the wall on the end of the car park I looked down onto the beach to see what was going on down there.

It goes without saying that I had to admire those people down there on the beach. Not just those paddling around up to their knees but the people who were even deeper in looking as if they were about to launch themselves off swimming in the water. They are braver men than I am, Gungha Din.

Mind you, one can hardly blame them. The sun was out, there wasn’t much wind at all and according to my thermometer at my apartment it was 22°C. Not the kind of weather in which I would want to be seen in the sea but I could understand others wanting to have a go.

It wasn’t just on the beach that there were people around.

Right out at sea by one of the lights on a rock off the Ile de Chausey is one of the trawlers heading off into the English Channel to make its catch. As we saw this morning, they are very busy at the Fish Processing Plant wit all of the boats coming in with their catches.

Having looked around at what was going on I headed off towards the end of the headland, weaving my way through the throngs of people who were out there enjoying the weather this afternoon.

Across the lawn and the car park I went, to see what was happening out at sea. But there was nothing whatever happening out there so I continued on my way along the path on the other side if the headland.

You can tell that we are at the time of the Grande Marée. Just look at all of those cars parked on the harbour wall right now.

That is presumably where many of the people will be waiting for the “all clear” to go out onto the beach to scavenge for shellfish.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall because I’ve mentioned it before … “on many occasions” – ed … the foreshore is let out to commercial enterprises but at the very low tides of the Grande Marée the shore is uncovered beyond the commercially-let areas and the public has access to those areas.

They can scratch away to their hearts’ content subject to the rules and regulations about quantity and size

Also scratching away to their hearts’ content down in the harbour are the two diggers that are laying the new mooring chains. They seem to be having a whale of a time.

But it beats my why they are doing this now. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a year or two ago they had whole performance down there working on the mooring chains, digging them out of the silt and refurbishing them. So I wonder why they didn’t do this work then rather than making everyone come back now to do it again.

It seems to be typical of the authorities around here that they don’t have a complete programme of work. They drained the inner port a few years ago to replace the harbour gates, and then came back 6 months later to install the new pontoons. They could have done it at half the cost and in half of the time had they done it when the harbour was empty.

Then there was the notice board giving details of the Pointe du Roc. They dug up the grass and installed a path to there. And then 6 months later they installed the monument to the Resistance and dug up the path that they had laid to the noticeboard and replaced it with a path to the Resistance Monument.

They don’t seem to have the aptitude to be able to think things right through

There’s yet more activity at the chantier navale today.

While Hermes I, Lys Noir and Aztec Lady are still on their stocks down there, Spirit of Conrad now seems to have cleared off back into the water after her little sojourn in the chantier navale, all fully repaired and ready for the coming season, if we are actually going to have a tourist season this year.

Hermes I looks quite nice today, all masked off with brown paper. if the weather holds I could see that she’s going to be sprayed with a new coat of paint in certain places. She’ll be as good as new, if not better, by the time she goes back into the water.

And having seen that, and having noticed that there was nothing else going on anywhere else, I cleared off back to my apartment. I have plenty of things that I need to be doing this afternoon.

One of the things that I needed to do was to make another batch of kefir.

Plenty of juice oranges around here so I whizzed up 4 of them to extract the juice which I sieved, and then added the brewing kefir that I had made last time. I’d left an inch or so of the mother solution to use as a starter and then added the sugar lemon and fig and then filled it up with another couple of pints of water.

By now the kefir in the big jug had mixed in quite nicely with the orange juice so I stirred it all around and poured it through my filter stack into the bottles.

So here’s the finished product, all nice and orange. That will keep for a few days until I’m ready to use it.

And you’ll notice that I’m using the two bottles in which I had bought the lemonade the other week. We can see how they get on under the pressure of the fermentation. And if they hold out well enough, I’ll know what to buy the next time that they have a special offer.

As I was settling down afterwards to carry on work, Rosemary rang me up. And we had another one of our marathon chats – a mere 2 hours and 24 minutes. I’m amazed that I have so much to talk about.

That meant that I missed my guitar practice and a few other things besides. But at least with the ‘phone and the headset etc, I could wander around and do other stuff while I was talking.

Tea tonight was some vegan nuggets that I had bought in Leuven and hadn’t eaten. They were a couple of months past their sell-by date so I’ll be having the rest tomorrow. They were actually quite delicious with veg and potatoes and the apple crumble that followed it all down was just as delicious. I am eating well these days.

Having written my notes, I’m now ready for bed. I’m exhausted and ready for a really good sleep and it’s high time that I had one as well.

Monday 1st March 2021 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

It’s Saint David’s Day today so Happy St David’s Day to everyone from Wales who is a regular reader of this rubbish, Rhys.

When she came to visit me yesterday, Liz brought me some daffodils that she had plucked from her garden. They weren’t open but I’d left them in a glass of water overnight and this morning I was greeted with this gorgeous sight.

In fact, I have quite a lot of Welsh blood in me – more than you realise – because it’s only because of Welsh bedroom practices that I’m here. Like most people back in the 1950s, my father was a great believer in the use of Welsh letters.

And if you don’t know what a Welsh letter is, it’s a French letter with a leek in it and you need to say that out loud in order to understand it.

This morning, to my own surprise as well as to yours, I actually beat the second alarm, never mind the third alarm, to my feet. Mind you, I was in bed before 23:00 for the first time for ages so I suppose that that might have had something to do with it.

First thing that I did was to vent the gases out of the kefir that I made yesterday.

You can see the bottles on the right here with the new batch that I’m brewing in the large jar at the back. And if you look very closely you can see what I mean about the stoppers on those two cheap bottles that I bought. I’ve replaced the washers with some that are more substantial and while they are certainly working much better than the cheap plastic washers that were on them, the stoppers still aren’t fitting correctly.

On the left is the remaining bottle of ginger beer. That’s definitely a success and I’ll be making more of that. I’ve seen a reference to orange ginger beer and I have some orange juice loitering around that I shall try.

After the medication I attacked the next radio programme and having done some of the work while I was in Leuven I’d completed the work aby about 11:40, only to find that I’d done the wrong programme. But it’s not a big worry because I’m several weeks ahead of myself so I can do the one that I missed next Monday.

For the rest of the morning I did some work on the photos from Greenland. Not very many of those because having now arrived in Qaqortoq in Greenland I needed to find a map of the town in order to identify some of the places that I had visited as I walked around the town.

But even if I do just 20 per day, it’s still going to be decent progress.

One thing that I ought to mention as well is that having edited some of the photos on the little travelling Acer and then on the laptop that I’d bought in North Dakota, the results were pretty dismal because of the poor quality of the screens and the graphics cards and I had to start again with them on this big machine.

But the ones that I’d done while I was in Leuven on the machine that I had repaired were just as they are supposed to be and look quite good on this machine.

All of this is making me think again for the moment about repairing one of the small laptops. This one that I fixed seems to be doing the business and with the CD drive that’s in it, I think that the extra 0.6 kilogramme won’t be such of an issue when I compare the advantages of the machine.

After lunch I had a form to fill in about my Welsh exam, the next radio programme to send off to the tech team and then to carry out some research into the big desktop computer.

The big machine is running with a 256GB solid State Drive as a C drive, a 1TB drive as a data drive and a 4TB drive as a back-up drive. Space is starting to run out on the C drive and the data drive so I’m planning to replace the 256GB SSD with a 1TB SSD, take out the data drive, convert the back-up drive to be the data drive and then add the largest possible drive as a back-up drive.

Or even add more drives in if I possibly can if there are more SATA slots on the hard drive.

It’s also running 8GB of RAM and I’m thinking of upgrading that to 16GB or even 32GB.

All of this means that I have to contact the manufacturers for some further information.

There was also the dictaphone to deal with.

I was up in Canada last night. Darren, one of his daughters and I were in an Artic heading down to somewhere in Maine with a tanker on the back. I was saying how good it was to be back in Canada after all this time. Darren was telling me what he needed me to do. he had a plate off a vehicle and was going to put it on another and I had to block something with this other vehicle so that he could do something with the lorry without having other vehicles inconveniencing him and getting in his way. I didn’t quite understand it but it would all become very clear in due course. We pulled up at a transport café and went in. While we were queueing up in there for something someone pulled up with a Mk I Cortina with British plates on it. I thought that this was really surprising. I had a look at the vehicle and it had some publicity on the side. I went to take a photo with the NIKON J1 but it wouldn’t photograph. We’re back to this thing about photos again and they aren’t working with the J1 (not another occasion with the failed camera!). I was trying for ages. When I looked again it had gone and another vehicle was there with French plates on it, a kind of flatbed mini lorry or something. A couple of minutes later this Cortina was back but with a different number on it now. Someone was playing around because the number ended with “40 G” and someone had written something to do with a lady’s anatomy after the G. Again I tried to photograph it but again the camera wouldn’t work. Those two wandered off out there and I was still trying to make this camera work. One of the guys at the till said something like “they’ve rung up and you have to go”. I made myself a quick coffee but the kettle wouldn’t boil. In the meantime I put milk in the wrong mug so after a couple of minutes and nothing was happening I just tipped it all away and ran off to go back to the lorry to join them again.

Later on I was working in an office and I was being sent on a mission to Germany somewhere. I’d been allocated a room on my own more by accident than design but then we found out that one of the people coming was a woman and they were wondering how best to accommodate her. I suggested that she could have my room and I’d share with someone else. I wasn’t really happy about sharing but there was nothing much you could do in a situation like this. For some unknown reason I couldn’t get them to hear what I was saying. They said “yes that’s the first thing we thought of” but started off on some other rambling explanation that I didn’t understand at all. it seemed such an obvious thing to do so I couldn’t understand why they were going through such a performance and rigmarole and ritual to try to think of another way round this solution. Then I returned home and told my partner whoever i was with that I was off on a mission to Germany. She asked “where in Germany?”. I replied “I don’t really know”. “What do you mean?” she asked. I replied “they are just sending me to Germany, that’s the important thing, that I’m going on a mission and it’ll all work out”. She was surprised that I wasn’t really interested in knowing which town it was that I was going to.

Today was another gorgeous, summer day with a bright blue sky and not a single cloud up there to obscure the view.

The kids are still out on half-term holiday by the looks of things as there were plenty of people around. The beach was swarming with people out and about this afternoon and I can’t say that I blamed them.

While I was out there, I bumped into one of my neighbours and we had quite a little chat about this and that. She told me about the new tenants on the ground floor and one or two other things besides.

However I couldn’t stay out there chatting all day, I had to carry on with my walk.

When I reached the end of the headland by the lighthouse I discovered why there were so many people out there on the beach today.

The tide is miles out today so of course it must be the Grand Marée, the highest, and hence also the lowest, tides of the year when the water drops below the level of foreshore that are let out to commercial exploitation. And so everyone swarms onto the sands and the rocks for the peche à pied, scavenging about in the sand and the rocks for whatever they can find there that’s edible.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we did a radio report on the Grand Marée last year that went down really well.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the situation in the chantier navale.

Yesterday we saw it down from street level but today I’m up on the cliffs on top where I can look down into the yard. We can see Aztec Lady over there on the right-hand side where it’s been for several weeks now without very much happening to it, and over on the left is Lys Noir up on the blocks where it’s been for a while too.

But that’s all there is today. The fishing boat that has been there for several weeks has gone and while I was in Belgium the yacht that has been there for months on end also left the yard.

But where it’s gone to, I really have no idea.

There’s plenty of excitement going on down in the outer tidal harbour today.

While I’d been walking round the top of the cliffs I’d noticed all of the tracks of heavy machinery out there in the silt and I wondered what was going on down there today. But here, there are several heavy diggers down there together with several workmen in attendance and a tractor with a large trailer attached thereto.

There was nothing about that would give any indication of what they were doing, but if anything were to be done in the tidal harbour, the time of the lowest tide of the year would be the right time to be doing it.

There was other work going on in the vicinity this afternoon too.

At the weekend I’d seen “no waiting” signs up on the car parking spaces in the Boulevard Vaufleury and so I suspected that something would be going on there this week. It seems that we’re having a pile of topiary on the trees right now.

It’s quite possible that they are leaving it rather too late though. We’ve already noticed that the birds are starting to build their nests and I can easily imagine that they’ve trimmed out the odd nest or two from the outer branches of a few of these trees.

Back here I made myself a hot coffee and unwrapped the birthday present that Liz had brought me yesterday.

A gorgeous vegan coffee cake made with her own fair hands and so I cut myself a slice to see what it was like. And here’s another one that receives 10 out of 10. It’s absolutely delicious.

The rest of the afternoon, such as it was, was spent working on the arrears of my voyage around Central Europe. But shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep. And how! I was out like a light for a good hour or so and I’d even managed to go off on a ramble while I was out.

I was doing some work at home when Nerina suddenly announced “We’ve forgotten Lil (one of the staff at the Oddfellows Club whom we used to take around in our taxis)”. I said I’d go straight away but she said there’s no real rush. Finish what you are doing. So when I’d finished what I was doing I leapt into a car and set off. I turned up at the pub, the Ash Bank, in Minshull New Road on the Badger Avenue roundabout but it was actually a mirror image of the pub on the other side of the road. When I arrived it was in total darkness and the last two people were getting into a car which then drove off. I looked at the time and it was 00:12 – I was almost 45 minutes late. I followed the car up Minshull New Road where it turned right into West Street. I was quite annoyed that we’d lost a passenger. Had I checked the time I would have dropped everything and gone out straight away. Nerina should have had more of a sense of urgency and I should have paid more attention to the time.

When I awoke, I was totally unsteady on my feet for a good while. I even missed my guitar practice.

Tea tonight was the rest of the pizza with a baked potato, followed by the apple turnover that I’d baked yesterday. And it was all quite delicious. And now I’m off to bed. Welsh class in the morning so I need to be on form.

I wasn’t really feeling much like it last week and I’m hoping to be in a better mood and more enthusiastic about it tomorrow.

Saturday 17th October 2020 – WE CALLED IT …

… a draw this morning. I’d just thrown off the bedclothes and was on the point of sitting upright ready to crawl out of bed when the third alarm went off. Just one second earlier would have been a glorious victory.

And seeing that I was in bed by 22:30 last night I ought to have done better too.

And during the night I’d been on my travels as well. I was with Nerina and we were in Gainsborough Road. I don’t remember too much about this but we’d been doing a lot of sorting out. I’d been to see a lock-up garage somewhere near Manchester which would be ideal for me to use as a store to store a lot of stuff that was lying around that I didn’t need but didn’t want to dispose of. Then we were back at the house and I don’t remember a great deal but I seem to remember that I’d bought a house in Winsford – it might have been Plantagenet Close – years ago and I was wondering what on earth I was still doing with it. I couldn’t find the keys so I wondered if the estate agent still had them, or if Nerina had them – I’d given them to her to look after, or her mother, something like that. In the end I went to ask her but each time I started to ask, she interrupted me and said something else. We ended up in the Post Office in Crewe. I was going to go to Winsford the next afternoon but it was a Saturday afternoon and the Post Office wouldn’t be open. The aim was to ask someone in the Post Office about delivering letters – where do they go to, who had a key? All of that kind of thing. I got myself into a queue by a counter but there was no-one there at the time, just a customer but no member of staff so I was idly loitering around. One member of staff came and started to deal with it. When she had dealth with this person, a young guy and his father walked up in front of me straight to the counter. Nerina said “those two guys have pushed in front of you. I said “yes, they haven haven’t they?”. The younger of the two turned round and made a smart remark to me – in Dutch. I turned round to Nerina and said “yes, Ne’erlandssprekers” so this guy made another comment and strolled away. Then I got to the window and the cashier, and that was that..

But it seems that dreaming about a new house elsewhere that I own is becoming another recurring feature of my nocturnal rambles. So what’s going on here?

For an hour or so this morning I tracked down some more photos of my trip around Central Europe at the beginning of August. And one or two of those took some tracking too. German road signs are not the clearest, especially when viewed on my low-resolution dash-cam through a bug-infested windscreen but in the end I managed to do some good with them and they are all properly labelled.

One or two in Munich were likewise difficult but reference to Hans, my friend there, soon resolved that issue.

After a shower and a clean-up (and a weigh -in, and I’ve lost another couple of hundred grammes) I went off to the shops. NOZ came up with one or two things, but nothing to get excited about, and it was the same at LeClerc.

No figs though, but luckily the Fruit and Veg shop, la Halle Gourmande, had a few. The lady there told me that they are seasonal, so I’m going to have to think of a substitute for my kefir.

Back here, I put some of the stuff away and then sat down to continue the photos but ended up falling asleep on the chair after my exertions. A whole hour or so I was out, and that’s good for neither man nor beast, especially when it means a very late lunch.

After lunch I attended to the kefir that had been fermenting away for the last few days.

Four juice-oranges were whizzed up, strained and filtered and put in a large jug. Then most of the kefir liquid was strained and filtered (always leave an inch or two in the bottom of your jar to cover the grains that you are making) into the orange juice.

The whole lot was then mixed together and then poured through a filter into a few stoppered glass bottles, and I hope that this batch is going to be as good as my lime-flavoured kefir from last time, which was excellent.

Finally, I set another lot of kefir en route for later in the week.

By now it was time to go for my afternoon walk

The other day I mentioned the Peche à Pied – the local pastime of scavenging amongst the rocks and the beach during the very low tides when the public areas below the commercial concessions are exposed

It seems that I may well have been right when I mentioned that it looked as if we are having another very low tide – a Grand Marée – this weekend because, sure enough, the crowds were out on the beach with their buckets and rakes, and whatever else they bring with them.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the Peche à Pied at the Grand Marée in April was forbidden due to the virus, so two of us from THE RADIO broadcast a “virtual Grand Marée instead.

and there weren’t just crowds of people on the beach either.

There were the veritable hordes swarming around in the sunshine too, but also plenty going on in the air. As I watched, I saw a couple of light aeroplanes take off from the airport at Donville-les-Bains. One of them obligingly headed my way but before I could take a decent photo of it head-on, it veered off out to sea.

While we’re on the subject of the airport at Donville les Bains … “well, one of us is” – ed … there’s some talk about allowing international flights to land there again, mainly from the Channel Islands. This will mean that a permanent Police and Customs presence will be required.

All of this can only be a good thing.

Back here, a few more photos, and that leaves just 75 to do. But at the rate that I’m doing them, they are going to take forever to finish off.

Then it was time for the football. An early evening kick-off on the Internet for Barry Town v Connah’s Quay Nomads.

It was a game that finished 0-0 which is hardly a surprise because Connah’s Quay are still missing four of their star players – Danny Holmes, George Horan, and their two star attackers Jamie Insall and Mike Wilde. Chris Curran who normally plays on the wing, had a really good game up front for them but he was never likely to score.

Barry Town had a solid central defence for a change after their debacle the other week, but they too were missing their star attacker Kayne McLaggon and they still haven’t recovered from losing Momodou Touray at the end of last season so they were never really likely to trouble Connah’s Quay’s makeshift defence without Horan and Holmes.

The match though turned on a decision made after just two minutes. A Barry Town attacker burst through the defence and broke clear, only to be fouled by a Nomads defender. Certainly a foul, no doubt about that, but a red card for “denying a player a goalscoring opportunity”? The ball was only just beyond the centre-circle in the Nomads area, about 50 yards from goal with another two defenders bearing down on him and with the ball about 10 yards in front of him that the keeper might even have reached first? To call that a “goalscoring opportunity” is rather stretching things a bit in my opinion. I didn’t agree with that at all.

In fact the referee seemed to have a pop-up toaster in his top pocket because it seemed to me that there was always a yellow card popping up. I think that I counted 8 all told, many of which I wouldn’t have given myself. And the red card given to Barry’s David Cotterill, the former Welsh International, in the dying seconds of injury time for “kicking an opponent” was likewise somewhat exaggerated.

So Connah’s Quay played for 88 minutes with just 10 men and you wouldn’t have noticed because Barry never really had a serious shot on goal. A powerful header right into the arms of keeper Lewis Brass is all that I could think of.

Tea was out of a tin at half-time, and after the final whistle it was time for my evening walk

For a change I went around the headland tonight and over some of the runs that I used to do.

The first leg was along the Rue du Roc for some of the way – not as far as I used to go, and then a second leg across the lawn down the side of the hedge to the clifftop where the lighthouse was busy sending out its beam.

Something that not many people know is that each lighthouse has its own individual sequence of lights, to distinguish it from another lighthouse somewhere in the vicinity. Here at Granville it’s four short pulses of light followed by a long pause.

There’s a rotating shield inside the light with bits cut out for the light to shine through which is responsible for that.

There were a few people out there tonight so I wasn’t as alone as I might otherwise have been.

There was even someone inside the Coastguard Station because there was a light on outside and when he saw me about to take a photo he switched it off just to confuse the issue and I had to take the photo again.

At least everyone had cleared off by now so I could run my third leg, along the clifftop. And that wasn’t as good as it might have been because the car park has now become the centre of assembly for all of the adolescents in the town with their motorbikes and music.

But who am I to complain? At their age I was doing just the same. And probably getting into more mischief too while I was at it.

On my way back from the shops this morning I went past the chantier navale and I could see that it really is Les Epiettes in there.

There was also a new arrival, to make the total now three in there, so while I was catching my breath in the viewpoint at the top of the cliffs I could take a photo of it for the record.

And from there I ran on home – two extra legs of my fitness regime runs to make up five.

Back at the apartment I encountered one of my neighbours coming back home so we had a lengthy chat about putting the world to rights. And then I came up here to write my notes.

Having done that, I’m off to bed. Sunday tomorrow and a lie-in, but I also have pizza bases to make as well as some kind of dessert. It’s been a while since I’ve made an apple pie so I might have a go at that – either that or a crumble.

It might be a case of waiting until tomorrow to see how I feel.

Wednesday 8th April 2020 – I DONT KNOW …

… what kind of day it has been today, because up until this evening I haven’t set foot out of the door to the building.

But if it was anything like the night sky suggests that it was, it must have been truly wonderful. There’s a beautiful red tinge to the sky over there on the horizon very much reminiscent of the old phrase “Red Sky At Night, St Malo is on fire”.

And being somewhat considerably later than usual for my evening walk, I was lucky to actually see it

Something else that I was lucky to see was the morning. It was another one of those mornings where I missed the alarm. And I’m not sure why either because although it wasn’t an early night last night, it wasn’t anything like as late as some have been just recently.

After the meds I looked at the dictaphone notes. I was with someone from the radio station and another guy with a very thin face and we were discussing the radio. It was in a cafe somewhere at the bottom end of the Chaussée de Wavre near the Boulevard du Souverain in Brussels but there was no coffee being served because of this scare going on. We were talking about all kind sof things and there was a quartier where there was some events taking place and there was no-one covering it. I said that I would go for a wander around and at least I would make a few contacts there because I was moving to this area in due course. So we had a talk about that, contacts, getting people to sign in and get people to be watchers for us to tell us what’s going on, all this kind of thing. At this moment my tea was ready so I asked everone else what they would like to eat as I’d cooked myself a meal. The two women said “a Boskoop” (an apple). I thought “do I have enough?” so I asked “is that all that you wanted?”. Then I heard a shout from outside and it was a former schoolfriend of mine who was my son, would you believe. I thought that I wouldn’t introduce him as my son to these women because I wasn’t sure that they realised that I was old enough to have a son his age. I had to get out my sieve, a plastic conical one. It had been in dirty water for about a week and was all stained and all horrible. That was when I awoke, wondering about my nice cooked meal and was it appropriate to eat it when these people were just going to have an apple each, always assuming that I actually had one for them.
A little later, we were discussing groups. There were three of us – me, a guitarist and someone else jamming. Only for about 30 seconds and someone had recorded it on video. They were starting to make copies of it and pass them all around which I thought was crazy – just one of these 30-second-type jams that you have every now and again. Some guy was there saying “yes we’re going to do our best to help you and do our best to get you somewhere”. I thought that that was just absolutely crazy. They started to pass these CDs and DVDs around. They were taking all of my white CD sleeves. I thought “hang on a minute this isn’t on” because my CDs are colour-coded – red for this, white for that, black for that, blue for that and they would disturb my system and that wasn’t really on. Then I thought that having a DVD of me actually playing would be interesting. At one moment he was talking about a tricycle, a Honda 750 that had been turned into a tricycle called a Queen Bee or a Queen Mary or something. The rear single-wheel bit was extremely complicated and he’d never seen one properly but he had found one in a scrapyard and was trying to negotiate to buy it to put it on his bike but the scrapyard wanted to sell the whole unit, not just the bits. He asked me if I’d ever seen one close up and I said “no, and to be honest, I’ve never seen one from a distance either”

After breakfast I made a start on the digital file splitting. You can tell that we are getting down to the bottom of the pile right now because these last few are proving to be difficult.

Long-gone are the days when you would pick up an album to find that it would be Tangerine Dream and consist of one track that was 51:20 in length or something like that. Instead I’m coming across albums of 15 tracks of 2:00 each, something like that.

There are plenty of tracks that are not so easy to find either so I’m having to hunt around more than maybe I ought. And in error I rather regrettably downloaded an *.mkv file, with all of the problems that that entails.

As a result of all of this, I was somewhat late finishing everything this morning.

But by my reckoning, there are maybe another 20 albums at most that I can do things with in the immediate future. The live albums and the obscure compilation albums will be done another time and the untraceable ones that I shall digitalise myself, that’s for even later.

The next thing that I intend to do is to start on the cassettes. Dozens of those from my “Winsford” days and I’m surprised that after almost 40 years I still have them.

A few of those are quite obscure too and I will need to digitalise those. I had made a start on that in … errr … 2004 but that was a project that ran aground quite quickly. I’m hoping for more perseverence this time.

After lunch, with taco rolls again of course, I had to make some orange and ginger cordial.

Not as much ginger as I would have liked because, for some unaccountable reason, I only had an old piece of manky stuff. I’m convinced that I had two or three pieces, but I’ve no idea whatever became of them.

And even worse, I’ve run out of Manuka Honey. Not having had the chance to go to a health food shop when I was in Leuven last time I couldn’t pick any up.

What I’ll have to do is to go to the Health Food shops here – if they are open – and see what they might have.

Eventually I could attack the text for the radio shows and once again I’ve come up short. There was a break to listen to our “Grande Marée Virtuelle” of course, and the hour on the guitars, but I wasn’t even in much of a mood for that either.

It makes me wonder if it’s something to do with the full moon, this lethargy.

For tea tonight, I made that potato and lentil curry that I had been promising myself. And this new diet thingy means that instead of there being enough for 5 helpings, there was actually enough for 7.

The other 6, which I didn’t eat tonight of course, are now freezing nicely in the freezer ready for another time.

After the rice pudding, I went out for my evening’s exercise, rather later than usual.

And surprise! Surprise! I wasn’t the only one out there tonight. I mentioned the other day that the fishing boats here are still going out and there was one just there heading off into the wild blue yonder.

And there was an article in the newspaper this morning that direct sales to the public from the quayside may commence, but only under certain quite strict conditions.

It’s better than nothing, I suppose.

Another thing about which I am not sure is going on is down in the chantier navale

It looks as if the fishing boats are breeding or something like that becase we had a third yesterday and today we have a fourth one. And it’s not keeping its social distance either, but is rather cuddled up to the one on its right.

So I left it to its own devices and carried on. I’ve managed my five runs this evening but I ended up feeling like something that the cat has dragged in through the cat flap

Back here I had a little chat with Liz. She likes to make sure that i’m still OK, which is very nice of her.

So having finished my journal for tonight, I’m off to bed. Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Monday 6th April 2020 – OHHH NOT ANOTHER …

… bad day today!

And I was so careful too about going to bed at a reasonable time too.

But as for sleep, I was awake for most of the night with a really bad attack of cramp that persisted for hours. At one stage I was hopping around the bedroom trying to find some way of easing it off.

It goes without saying that I missed the alarms this morning. 07:40 when I awoke. And nothing on the dictaphone either. It can’t have been much of a night.

After the meds then I made a start on chopping up digital audio files. One or two of those were straightforward but the others certainly weren’t and took quite a bit of effort.

There were a few interruptions too. Breakfast was one of them of course, and then we had an impromptu telephone conference call for the radio, about our Grande Marée Virtuelle

And if you want to know what that is all about, you need to listen to THE RADIO at 17:00 European Time, 16:00 UK Time and 11:00 Toronto time on Wednesday this week.

Anyway, it took an age, all told, to finish off this batch of files. And all the time, the pile is diminishing. And even more interestingly, this pile isn’t as big as it might look because there are several albums there that I won’t be recording. In fact I’m not quite sure how come I have them – there are albums here that I never ever remember buying and some that I wouldn’t ever have bought at all.

With no time to go for bread, I used a couple more taco rolls with salad, and this seems to be working quite well. So much so that if things worsen here and the lockdown continues, I might thing of this as a long-term temporary solution.

This afternoon, I decided on a new tack. Rather than mess about with different lots of dictation all over the place, I chose the music for another couple of radio broadcasts.

One of the is all joined up and edited and I’ll do the other tomorrow morning, and then write out all of the text, for those two as well as the missing bits for the previous two. I’ll do all of the dictation then at one go.

That took me all the way up to guitar-practising time and having been listening to “Carry On” by Crosby Stills and Nash, I had a play around with that. And it’s easy to play it simply, but a darned sight more difficult to play it properly.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with more rice pudding for dessert. And it really is one of the best that I’ve made and I wish I knew what it was that I’ve done differently.

Just for a change I was late going out for my evening walk. But I had a good run in a couple of stages all the way up to the end of the Pointe du Roc.

The sun had long-since disappeared but there was a glorious reddish tinge in the sky over on the horizon somewhere in the general direction of the Brittany coast.

It was far too good to miss out on a photograph of course, although the guy in the Coastguard station gave me a weird look.

And the flock of birds that fle across the camera as I was taking the photo was interesting too

Last night I’d taken a photo of the Pointe de Carolles in the dusk, so tonight I reckoned that I would move the camera around a little.

So tonight we have the new road that goes into town with, to the left of the harboure entrance light, the town of Jullouville and then to the left of that, the town of St Pair Sur Mer with, if we believe what we are told, all of the Parisians who have fled the city to the coast and have brought the virus with them.

And from here I had another run along the top of the wall overlooking the harbour and the chantier navale

And we have more excitement in there tonight.

We’ve seen for the last week or so the two large trawler-type fishing vessels that have been up on blocks down there. It seems that today, they have acquired a new neighbour. We’re seeing a third one in there now to keep them company.

Social distancing, of course, as you can see.

Two more lengths of run (making 5 in total) saw me back at the apartment and writing up my notes for the day. I’ll go to bed in a minute

Thursday 2nd April 2020 – I’VE JUST HAD …

… a very friendly, very interesting and very lengthy conversation with a very nice young girl. She stopped me for a chat while I was out for my evening runs tonight.

We were there for about 10 minutes or so chatting away about all kinds of things.

And do you know what?

I don’t have the first clue who she is.

Something else that I don’t have the first clue about is why I bothered to waste my time by going for an early night. Just for a change, I beat the third alarm out of bed and after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

I’d started out by doing my best to obey the quarantine but I had to keep on nipping out of my apartment to the room in the attic for something or other. That meant going out into the street and in my the next door and up the stairs. This happened not once, not twice but three or four times and I was sure that someone would cotton on to what was happening. Sure enough, one time I did it, I heard another door bang in the room and heard someone going up the inside stairs, so I stood behind the door and waited. When whoever it was came in, I shouted “BOOH!”and scared them. It was a girl with whom I once worked and she’s someone I haven’t thought about for years. I had a laugh and a joke with her about the situation but I bet that she was being very curious about who was where, for reasons that I suspected were not entirely altruistic. The I was talking to someone else about this and they said “whatever happens, it’s not going to be right for ages and ages yet before the world is back to normal. All kinds of things have been cut off and we can basically forget all about”.
Later on, someone at work was selected for some kind of medical test so he started to prepare himself, saying “yes, I’ll call you when I get there and let you know how things are going on”. My boss recoiled in horror “no, no. Just give us a ring – it will be fine”. he was obviously extremely suspicious about this and I had the feeling that he would have been quite happy if this employee had picked up some kind of infection from one of these medical trials
Moi, je lui proposé que lui, il lui garde et envoyer un audio de son voyage et de contacter avec quelque chose d’intéressant mais il l’a réussi. Le patron lui a accordé raise parce que … Now why am I dictating this in French? I know that I sometimes dream in French (and in Flemish too before now) but this is the first ever time that I’ve dictated my notes in French … so they decided that the risks just weren’t worth the experience of broadcasting like that.
The next voyage was similar to the one just now about the being summoned and going for a walk and sending an audio report and that was rejected too as the story was pretty much the same
Later on we were discussing trains, HS2 and all of this and I’m still convinced that it’s just a white elephant and it’s not going to do anything particular. We had the usual arguments so I wrote a song about travelling from Amsterdam Schiphol airport to Brussels on the TGV. It came to the attention of Alquin and they weren’t sure – should I join Alquin or would they create a band for me and find me a couple of musicians or something like that. In the meantime I’d been collecting some stuff – I’m not quite sure what it was. Quarantine had ended and everyone was out on the streets. There was a big cinema complex and I was walking through it with stuff in my hat. And the thing that I remember was a really really familiar voice said “just leave it up here against the wall, Eric”. I looked round and it was a guitarist who I knew. I can’t think whether it was that Mike Averill or Sherman Downey – someone like that. He said it quite clearly in his voice that I could hear it in my sleep “just leave it here, Eric” and it was the surprise of the realism of the voice and how I heard it that awoke me
I was in a office last night working and the place was in a total tip as you might expect. There was a girl sitting next to me at my desk. She was going through all my papers and there was a load of stuff I didn’t want her to see because it was quite personal. I asked her what she was doing and she replied that she was looking for a file or a letter. I asked which one and she told me that it was in connection with an accident that I had had with a Woolworths van or lorry 18 months ago. She was going some kind of survey on it. She said “I thought that would be in the International file”. I said “no, for if it involved two people of the same nation it would be in the national, not the international one” so I had to go and fetch the file. There were papers everywhere in a big bundle and I thought that i would come back to sort these out. Then I got to thinking that I’m not going to be able to cope with all of this. I’ve probably had enough. I decided more-or-less on the spot that I was going to retire. It was only 2 days to the end of the month so I thought that at the end of the month I would retire and that would be that.

So after all of that, it’s pretty pointless going to bed early, isn’t it?

But as an aside, looking at where I’ve been during the last couple of nights, anyone would think that I had something of a preoccupation with this virus that’s going round. But that’s not the case at all.

It’s true to say that I’m being more careful than I otherwise would be, but I’m not taking this situation as intently or as keenly as some others, that’s for sure. Being engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the illness that I have, this virus thing is just another complication to add to an already-complicated tangle of affairs.

After breakfast I had a go at a couple of albums – tracking down the digital sound files and sorting them out.

And then, after a shower (the first for a few days) I headed out to town.

On my way out of the medieval walled city I stopped to have a look over the wall to see what was going on, as I had heard the crane in operation.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw Normandy Trader here in port the other day. And here she is, unloading another pile of what looks like shellfish and taking on board a load of timber as a return load to the Channel islands.

It was another quick turn-round too. When I went out in the evening, she was long-gone. She clearly doesn’t want to hang around with these current health issues going on.

My route into town took me down the Rampe du Monte A Regret

Over the past few months I’ve been seeing workmen there ripping out the vegetation that’s been growing in the cracks between the stones, but today I noticed that they’ve been repointing the joints.

This will look quite nice when it’s all done, but I wish that they would spend more of their time dealing with the bits of wall that are actually falling down.

We’ve seen plenty of those just recently.

As I was going past the laboratory, I called in to see where they had got to with my blood test results. They’d completed the examinations and had posted the results, but of course the post is somewhat sporadic these days.

They gave me a copy so I could review it at my leisure. My blood count is at 9.3, which is quite a surprise to most people because when I last had treatment – two months ago, it was 8.8.

We’ve seen in the past that the results from the hospital and the results from the laboratory differ considerably, and nothing seems to have changed right now. I know that the blood count can fluctuate, but surely not by this much.

There weren’t too many people in LIDL this morning so we didn’t have to queue outside. They didn’t seem to be short of very much at all (except pizza bases – I wonder why there’s a run on those right now) so I did what I needed, as well as buying a metre rule with spirit level and a few other accessories. A baguette too, seeing as my favourite boulanger is still closed.

Back here there was time to deal witha couple more albums before lunch, and also 20 or so photos from July 2019. Dynjandi and the Arnarfjördu were the places for which I was trying to remember the names yesterday.

After lunch I finished off the notes for the two radio projects on which i’m working, dictated them, and started on the editing.

To my chagrin I could have made much more progress than I did, but

I was in discussion for some of the time with Laurent about our Grande Marée Virtuelle – I have some lines to learn
I … errr … went off with the fairies for a good half-hour. And a proper one too – hardly surprising after my last couple of nights but disappointing all the same.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and then I stopped for tea. A slice of that tofu and lentil pie from February with jacket potates, veg and gravy.

While it was cooking in the oven, I sorted out all of the carrots that I had bought on Saturday, washed scrubbed, diced and then blanched them

By this time my tea was ready. And it was followed by a slice of apple pie with vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce. Thoroughly delicious.

Out on my walk this evening, I missed the sunset.

The sky was a beautiful red though, so I suppose that it’s better than nothing. And while I was admiring it was when I was accosted by the aforementioned young lady.

Bad news when I had my shower this morning. I seemed to have gained 800 grams since the weekend and that’s no good at all. As a consequence I put in no fewer than four runs tonight. I have to get things under control

Another thing that I need to do is to have a good sleep. It won’t be as long as last night’s, unfortunately, but it will still do me good.

But I wonder where I’ll finish up tonight?

Monday 30th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… why but I’ve had a much better day today that I’ve had for a while.

It didn’t start off very well though. I missed the alarms and was about 10 minutes late leaving my bed, and that was disappointing.

And after the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. That was disappointing too. We were having some kind of football training session last night but I don’t remember very very much about them whatsoever.

Something of a wasted effort.

And so I started on the file splitting. It might have been straightforward, evan though a couple of tracks didn’t work out and I had to hunt around for some other versions which might (or might not) be the correct ones seeing as the times don’t really correspond so well.

But for some reason that only they will know, it took AAAAAGGGGEEEEESSSSS to download them and I would have been really fed up, except that while I was doing it I attacked the July 2019 photos.

And it was just as well because I managed about 50 of them, and I’m now just about skirting the tip of north-west Iceland with a hell of a long way to go still. I’m glad that I started the numbering by using four digits for I feel that I’m going to need them all.

There was a pause for breakfast of course, and once the digitalising was finished for today, I had my audio diary to do.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve mentioned this before. We are living in times the like of which the world hasn’t seen since the Black Death epidemic of the 1340s and in 100 or 200 years people (if there are any still alive) will be looking at this period with the same kind of intensity that we look at the Black Death.

In the Black Death, everyone had his or her own little stories and while one or two are remembered, from authors of the day or from anecdotes that were passed around, but the ordinary common people were in the main unable to read and write, and their stories were lost for ever.

For that reason, we at the radio have decided to keep an audio diary and we’ll be preparing various radio programmes as we go along to broadcast our stories.

One or two other people from various places have agreed to participate, and if you would like to take part in this project, send me a brief note using the contact button, bottom-right.

With still some time left, I started on Project 035 but broke off for lunch after a short while.

After lunch, I finished off the choice of music, except for the last track of course (which regular readers of this rubbish will recall is always the very last thing to do) and then turned my attention to more exciting things.

Laurent and I had been talking on and off during the day about our Grande Marée programme, and he came up with a couple of really good ideas. That meant that I had to go off on another path to hunt down various items and he sent me something that will be absolutely brilliant with a little editing.

In the end I managed to do something of a test run and he’ll get back to me tomorrow with what he thinks.

By now it was 18:00 and I broke off for a play on the guitar. I had a good go too although I’m beginning to realise that half an hour on the 6-string and half an hour on the bass just isn’t enough. Not sure how I’m going to fit in any more time though.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with rice followed by a slice of my delicious apple pie. It really is nice too and I’m very pleased with that one.

Tonight’s walk was something of an improvised choice seeing as there aren’t all that many places to go. I managed two runs and each one I pushed on an extra 20-25 metres. “Not a lot” I hear you say, but the fact is that the last extra bits were uphill, and up quite a steep hill too, so I’m impressed with that.

Where I ended up was on the grass by the car park in the boulevard Vaufleury. I’d been reading reports from somewhere that smaller boats weren’t being allowed out to fish, but there’s one down there that’s unloading at the fish-processing plant even as we speak.

So I don’t know where this news has come from

But there’s excitement at the chantier navale tonight.

Over the past few weeks, regular readers of this rubbish will recall looking at the progress being made on the overhaul of Charles Marie in the chantier navale. But she’s not there now. The ground’s all flat. She must have gone back into the water.

But it’s still busy in there. We’ve acquired another trawler so there are now two of them in there receiving attention.

Keeping their social distance, I hope.

Anyway, now it’s bedtime. To my amazement, and probably to yours too, I haven’t crashed out at all today. In fact, I’ve been feeling quite lively.

No idea what I did but I wish I could remember because I need to do it again. And more often too!

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

… were wondering whether today was any better than yesterday, the answer is “I don’t know. I missed half of it”.

And that’s no exaggeration either. It might only … “only, he said” – ed … have been 11:00 when I awoke, but it was 12:05 when I finally heaved myself out of bed this mor … errr … afternoon.

So that was basically the day ruined.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have said … “on many occasions” – ed … that everyone should have one day each week when they can do nothing and not be ashamed of the fact, but as far as I’m concerned that was yesterday. I was hoping to be much more focused today.

After the medication I had a look at the dictaphone. And I’d certainly been much more focused during the night, that’s for sure.

Last night I had started off with Laurence and Roxanne when Nerina put in an appearance and wasn’t very happy to see me. It was an evening when I was on my own. The next morning along came Laurence and Roxanne and they had come to see me too. Nerina had turned up by accident by the way. As it happened there was some kind of swimming regatta so we got Roxanne to take part in this. It was like a swimming obstacle race. Of course she leapt in the water and went right round this obstacle race but something happened on the very last section and she had to be lifted out and whatever happened was put right and she had to jump back in. But they wouldn’t let her do the underwater somersault but we were urging her on to go back and do it. In the end she turned round and swam back but they wouldn’t let her do it so she swam away. Laurence went to fetch her. As we were walking back to our little spec of seats and Nerina walked past us with a scowl on her face and said “we met yesterday” and just walked off. Laurence came back and Roxanne was crying, really disappointed and we put her on a shelf. In the end she got off this shelf and went to stand up where we were sitting. These two girls who were using this shelf were having a bit of, well, not a moan but going on about how Roxanne had got their shelf wet but Roxanne said “I was sitting on the one above where there were just things” and not where they were sitting.
Some time later I was doing one of these extraordinary exploration things that come on the TV every now and again about phenomena. There had been a helicopter crash in a small village and it had been one of these normal things but suddenly a white stain had appeared on the parapet of a bridge and people wanted to know what it was. They were all so suspicious about it being the sign of the Gods or something. We went to track it down, a woman and I, and I had a look round and I could see that there was some kind of watercourse where rain water had been flowing out of a field discreety onto the road. This had changed its course since the accident. You could see that there was some discolouring in the earth of this little watarcourse that had made the earth go a lot whiter than the earth of the soil. Se we suspected that the crash had changed this watercourse slightly and it was just a natural phenomenon that the water was now flowing through where it never flowed before and was percolating up some kind of hidden fissure in the bridge. Then we were prowling around a churchyard. Someone else in Cheshire had observed a fire in the sky that went on for weeks in the direction of the Gobi Desert and the Sahara Desert about 150 years before any explorer had actually been there. We were walking around this churchyard and there was someone’s visitor book there and a page had blown off it that was a report about “St Anne’s Day” or a diary page for St Anne’s Day. It had blown onto the floor so I picked it up and put it back on the lectern and put a kind of embossed stone on top to hold it on. The woman with me said something like “we haven’t come here to change things around, have we?” all this kind of thing. I said “no, I’m just putting things back where they had blown from”. She was going on about changing things round and taking things away. Of course we weren’t doing that at all.

Breakfast at 13:15 is a much more reasonable way to go about things on a Sunday, and then I attacked the music.

Another four albums split up and filed without two many problems – just one album where a couple of tracks wouldn’t work and I had to hunt them down elsewhere which took some time.

While they were doing, I was catching up by working on the photos for July 2019. I’m now in Rif setting out on my walk to the Svodufoss waterfall and I remember that walk very well. The waterfall looked as if it was just a couple of fields away and it was too, but no-one said that there was a big river in the way so we had to walk in large figure “Z” shape to reach it. My fitbit at the end of the day showed 12.4 kms and I felt every step of the way.

Another thing that I did was to join up all of the speech files for the Grande Marée broadcast and intersperse the joins with beach ambience soundfiles. As for the speech, I’ve asked Laurent if he will do an introduction and a conclusion and he’ll get back to me. When he replies, I’ll see what he has to say and I’ll do a brief text for the other intervals.

Then of course, there was the hour on the guitar. Mustn’t forget that.

For tea tonight I had something of a bake-in.

With needing the oven for the pizza I’ve been baking desserts in there every Sunday evening and tonight, having remembered the cooking apples yesterday, I made an apple pie.

And with the left-over pastry and left-over apple, I rolled out the pastry and squared it off, added the apple and desiccated coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar, and made an apple turnover.

The pizza was delicious of course, and so was the apple turnover with the soya coconut. I shall be attacking the pie as from tomorrow evening and I have high hopes.

With being distracted by the time and all that, it was very late when I went outside for my exercise.

And my first run was a dismal failure. There was a gale blowing out there that was the equal of some of the best that we have had and trying to walk around in many places was impossible. If you wonder why this image was so blurred, the fact is that I was being blown around in a Force 10 gale at the moment that I pressed the shutter.

Liz had told me earlier that the wind was coming from Greenland and that I ought to complain to Heidinnguaq. Well, I dunno about where it was coming from but I know exactly where it was going and it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

Finding a spot that was out of the wind I managed a run in the end.

And that led me down a new alley that I hadn’t walked before. The rue des Degres. So at least all of this stuff is broadening my horizons.

Back here, I wrote up my journal as I listened to some music. It didn’t take me long because of course there wasn’t much to write.

It’s still late though so I’m heading to bed. It’s a busy week next week because I have two rock music projects to do, an audio diary to write and then to finish off this Grande Marée thing when Laurent lets me have his notes.

No matter what I do, the work still keeps on piling up, doesn’t it?

Saturday 28th March 2020 – WHAT A WASTE …

… of a day this has been.

For some reason or other, I just haven’t been able to get going at all and I don’t know why. Possibly with all of this doom and despondency, I dunno, but I feel rather like the Lady of Shalott (although where I’m going to find the Lady of Shalott at this time of night is anyone’s guess) and “the curse has come upon me”. And if I can’t find the means to snap out of it sometime soon, the curse really will be here and it will be more than the mirror that will crack from side to side.

The day started so well too.

As luck would have it, I did have my early night last night and, even more luckily, I was up before the third alarm too. Well before it in fact.

And that is something of a surprise because when I looked at the dictaphone after my medication and saw the distance that I had travelled during the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time.

Talking about a blast from the past I was studying history last night and in the same class as me was a girl who I haven’t seen for almost 50 years and about whom I haven’t given a passing thought even when I knew her. So what she’s doing coming with me on a nocturnal ramble I really don’t know at all. That’s the kind of thing that can only happen in circumstances like this. But I digress. She was struggling with her lessons so I was going to make a suggestion that the two of us study together and that was I could get to know her rather better (and why I would really want to do that I don’t have any idea either). But something had happened and she had upset a couple of people, a couple of young black guys and they called her out. Feeling that this could turn rather nasty, I followed. I didn’t want her to be in any kind of danger. As for how all of this worked out, I really don’t know because it reached a point where it was so stressful and distressing that I actually forced myself to wake up (I did too, and that’s probably what is the most astonishing thing about the whole affair) rather than sit and witness it. It was so disturbing and I really didn’t know why.
And a bit later on it involved something similar with Steven Stills of all people making an appearance but I awoke again before that too got out of hand
I was with a former friend of mine last night and someone else, and this other person – we were in an old mini. We’d gone into Stoke on Trent and my friend had gone to fetch an Indian meal. We were waiting, we other two, in the mini. The guy with me said “I have to go to the loo – the bathroom” so we set off. My friend was still in the takeaway so I made a gesture to him “5 minutes”. We drove and first of all we came to a petrol station but we couldn’t find anywhere in there. Then there was the abandoned railway station. But that was locked up and we couldn’t even work out which was the station building where the toilet might be. Then I found a hedge that looked suitable that he could go behind but it turned out that there was a housing estate behind it. We were now on somewhere like Chell Heath and all the ground had been disturbed. These were called “arths”, where the frozen ground beneath had melted and bubbled up and pushed up the soil. We were talking about these and all the time this guy was being extremely flippant about all kinds of things and wasn’t taking the slightest bit of notice about wanting to go to the bathroom again even though that’s why we had pulled away and why we had left my friend in this restaurant and that was about an hour ago now and I wasn’t very pleased about that.
Somewhat later again I was at a Crewe Alex football match watching the game. I saw both goalkeepers make some pretty good saves. Strangely enough it was Garratt in goal for Crewe and the stadium was as it was before it was modernised back in the 90s. Someone was talking about this fitness coach – they’d signed a fitness coach from Melbourne and asking if it was a good idea. I made some comment about his age. Crewe had this player playing, n°25 or 26, I dunno. His name was Ralston. I didn’t recognise him at all so I was keen to know how come he had ended up at the club because he wasn’t one of the players whom I would normally see there.
Later yet again, I was with a couple of girls and we were planning on moving somewhere so we were packing. Something about an object that they had – I’m not quite sure what they had to do with this object but it involved that the only way that they could do this was to unpack it from their bag and put it in a separate bag ready to take with them. And that was when the alarm went off, at that moment.

That was some night, that’s for sure.

After breakfast I made a start on hunting down digital sound files. And after I’d done one, I broke off for a shower, a change of clothes and a clean-up.

At LeClerc there weren’t too many cars on the car park but there was a queue around the side of the building. They were just letting 50 people in to start with, then then one in as one came out.

It took me 10 minutes to get in and I wasn’t there for long. There were a few things missing – out of stock – but nothing of any great importance. Just a few different varieties of tinned stuff. Nothing at all like the UK where they say that it looks as if a flock of locusts have descended on the place.

The only thing that inconvenienced me was the lack of pizza rolls – good job I always have one at home. There were none of the cheap pastry rolls either but the next one up is vegan too. And they had some beautiful-looking blackcurrant jam which, I reckon, will make a beautiful blackcurrant pie like my jam pie last week, so I bought a jar.

This week I spent a little more than I usually do and while I haven’t been panic-buying at all, I’ve been making sure that I’m one week ahead of where I normally would be.

Back here I finished off the digital files – another 4 albums have bitten the dust today, and then I edited that sound file for the Grande Marée that I had missed. What was 03:42 of rambling conversation is now 02:40 of hard-hitting action.

After lunch I carried out another task that I’d been putting off – redesigning one of the home pages for one of my browsers. I don’t use “favourites” at all on web browsers – I wrote several web pages with all of my favourite sites on one or more them as clickable links and use each one as a home page for each browser that I use, depending upon the purpose for which I use the browser. One web page was well out-of-date and needed revising.

But it was round about here that I ran aground and ended up doing nothing at all for the rest of the day and that’s a disappointment and no mistake, with so much that needs to be done.

Nevertheless I found some energy to play the guitar for an hour and to make tea. Pasta and veg in tomato sauce with a burger, followed by the last of the jam pie with vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce. I’m sorry to see the last of that pie because it was delicious.

The evening walk was a shambles tonight.

There’s nowhere for me to go really and the high winds disrupted my running. At one point a huge gust of wind stopped me dead in my tracks. When I stopped to catch my breath I was by the Richard Anacréon Museum of Modern Art so I took a photo of it.

And then I came home to sit and vegetate again and do nothing except to listen to some excellent music.

But I really do need to snap out of this lethargy soon and push on. I don’t have the time to waste doing nothing and I wish that I knew what the answer was.

What I’ll have to do is to write off today as a failure and start again tomorrow.

Friday 27th March 2020 – AND IF YOU THINK …

… that yesterday was a bad day, you should have seen today.

We started off this morning where we finished last night – in total chaos. It wasn’t as early a night as I was hoping because just as I was about to go to bed, onto the playlist came Al Stewart and his song “Modern Times” from THE ALBUM OF THE SAME NAME.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Al Stewart was pretty much dismissed in the same terms that were reserved for Chris De Burgh several years – “the work of a queasy adolescent scratching his pimples” or some such quote.

And while his early output was considered by many to be mushy, maudlin, sentimental and egoistic, it was something that many of us, brought up in similar circumstances, cast adrift as teenagers in squalid and sordid bedsits, could readily identify.

His later work evolved as he himself evolved, but there was still this underlying nostalgia deep in there somewhere and in the song “Modern Times” he brought out every memory that I ever had of the painful pangs of growing up, coupled with, right at the end, two minutes or so of one of the most magnificent, underrated guitar solos that I have heard for quite some considerable time.

So on that note, rather later than usual having listened to it three or four times and shared it with some of my friends, I went off to bed feeling about as depressed as I could be.

When the alarms went off in the morning, I quite simply missed it. All three calls. it was 07:50 when I finally arose from the dead, feeling completely disappointed about the whole affair. I don’t know what’s getting to me right now.

After the medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone. And no wonder I was so tired. You would be had you gone off on the voyages that I had.

I’m not too sure about much of this first part because in the panic that I had when I couldn’t find my dictaphone and had to wake up and get out of bed to look for it, I forgot all of it. But it was to do with me being in a kitchen, a caravan-type of kitchen although it might not have been in a caravan and I had to get some things out of the cupboard that’s above the sink. So I opened it up but couldn’t find anything at all that I knew was in there. It suddenly occurred to me that what was happening was that for some unknown reason the stuff there in the cupboard was the wrong way round, as if you were trying to get in from the back rather than from the front. That’s why I couldn’t find anything that I knew was i there because it would now be at the back instead of at the front. There were things like little test tubes full of a kind of oily liquid of all different kinds of stuff in there and I was trying to work out what these were that I was pulling out – lots of different stuff like that!

Later on during the night I dreamt that I was arrested for a debt but because it was a debt that related to something weird to do with some kind of Act of 1742 I was arrested and sent to a debtors’ prison, the kind of place we had that still exists today. We were all herded into one great big cell, men women, children. We were all basically put in there and the key was locked upon us. Meals were cooked but there was no organisation or anything. We grabbed a seat where you could and lay down where you could, all of this kind of thing. The Salvation Army would come amongst the prisoners to talk to them, that kind of thing. Surprisingly, I counted quite a lot of solidarity between the prisoners, something that you wouldn’t really expect in those conditions. Certainly an interesting place to be. There was a book passed round with a list of all the prisoners in it. It had me in it, and showed my address and an extract of the roll of my premises and it said “car scrapping and recovery” and something else there that was all quite interesting too.

Finally I was on an aeroplane to Chicago but it was Canada and I’ve no idea why Chicago might be in Canada. It was only the previous day that I had made up my mind that I was going – I had a couple of weeks between hospital appointments so I thought that I would go. I got onto this plane and it was pretty crowded. I was sitting next to a young boy, a college student, something like that, and I had to explain to him that the UK was fighting a war and while there was a surfeit of Canadian students until 2021, that was going to disappear so I said that any Canadian student of which there is a surfeit to get them over to the Mother Country – tell them that the UK is fighting a war and needs their bodies. We were discussing things on board the ‘plane and talking about headphones. he asked “what happens when the staff plug in a headphone for you and you don’t use it – does that count?” I explained that you get a basic radio service that’s free, included in the price of the ticket and you only pay if you go for an enhanced service. There was a problem with my seat – it wouldn’t stay upright and kept on reclining backwards. I thought “God I hope that they don’t make me move prior to take-off because there didn’t seem to be anywhere to move to and I was settled where I was in a nice aisle seat.

Thinking about it later on, it was the whole kind of emotional environment last night going to bed where, had this been another time, I would have expected Castor or Zero to have put in an appearance. But as far as I’m aware, neither of them showed up, which was probably a good thing.

After a rather late breakfast I had a crack at the digital sound files. It wasn’t as good as it might have been because for one album, there was absolutely no trace whatsoever of anything relating to it.

Not that it surprises me because I must have the only copy in existence, so I’ll have to make a digital copy myself along with the others that I’m collecting for which there is no trace.

Two more, all that I could find are *.mkv files. And while I can convert them to *.mp3 just as easily as I can convert almost anything else, it’s disposing of them afterwards. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve identified a fault that makes them almost impossible to remove without a great deal of effort and if you have too many on your computer, they all try to open automatically at once and it slows your machine right down.

As a result I’m trying to hold off downloading *.mkv files until either Yours Truly or Microsoft can find a fix.

Having eventually finished the albums I went out to see if I could find my bread.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I mentioned the Ile de Chausey, the folk who live there and the lack of facilities that they have, and I wondered how they would cope.

So when I saw a couple of boats heading out that way in the mist I took a rather speculative shot to see whether it might be either Joly France or Chausiais doing out with supplies.

But it actually appears to be two fishing boats going out that way, presumably for the purpose of fishing. So I’ve no idea what is going to happen over there if they can’t receive any help.

What’s even worse from my point of view is that all of the paths around the clifftops are closed off so I couldn’t take my usual long route around the Pointe du Roc.

Instead I had to walk around the edge of the park in the boulevard Vaufleury. There’s a good view down into the chantier navale and from there I could see that Charles Marie has found a friend.

The fishing boat Cap Lihou has come to join her, but keeping her social distance as she can see. There was someone there with a pressure washer hosing off her barnacles.

That reminds me of the time that I was talking to a ship about barnacles. I was saying that I didn’t like them very much.
The ship replied “neither did I at first, but after a while I found that they grew on me”.

The port and the harbour are out of bounds too with this new legislation so I walked on down the rue du Port.

There was one of the smaller fishing boats moored there, and there in the stern was a lobster pot (however do they train baby lobsters to go on one of those?) and, would you believe, some buoys with red flags like we’ve seen floating in the sea every now and again.

So that might well the answer.

As I expected, La Mie Caline was all closed up again with no sign of life. Luckily I had done my research yesterday as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and the boulangerie at the foot of the hill was open, so I picked up a baguette from there.

On the way back, I took a short diversion.

As I mentioned above, all of the walks around the clifftops are now out of bounds and that includes my running track across the Square Maurice Marland, as I discovered last night.

And so i went that way to have a look at the notice and to take a photograph of the situation so as to record it for posterity. We are living in unusual times and it’s important that we document as much as possible of what is going on so that history will have something to remember.

Somewhere on the internet in some social group or other I was reading that in some places the smaller fishing boats have been prevented from going out to sea.

We saw a couple from here earlier heading out towards the Ile de Chausey, and here’s another one heading into the English Channel towards Bréhal-Plage.

We’ve seen buoys out there where the boat is – in fact, there was one the other day – but I haven’t seen who is out there placing them in the water. But if you look closely at this photo, you’ll see some kind of disturbance in the water between the boat and the photograph.

After lunch, I turned my attention to the purée because I had used the last of that this morning.

Firstly, I peeled, cored and diced 9 eating apples (I prefer them to cooking apples as they need no extra sweetening) and put them as I diced them into a large saucepan that has a small amount of water, lemon juice, nutmeg and cinnamon in there. there was also a large amount of desiccated coconut, for a reason that I will explain.

As I added the diced apple each time I had finished one, I stirred it round in the liquid so that it would remain white and not start to go brown. The desiccated coconut adhering to the bits of apple showed me that they had been treated.

Then I peeled, cored and diced three pears (and I would have added more had I had them) and added them to the mixture, stirring them round as above.

The saucepan then went on the heat and was brought to boil. Then I left it to simmer for an hour.

In the meantime, I made a start on the radio programme about the Grande Marée. There was an interview of almost 8 minutes that needed editing and that took me quite a while to deal with it too – but now it’s down to about 4:30 of quite interesting stuff.

Halfway through the proceedings I broke off to look at the fruit to see how it was doing.

It looked pretty good to me so I washed and cleaned the two jars and put them in the microwave with a small amount of water so as to heat and sterilise them.

The fruit was drained off and the liquid put in a bottle that was put in the fridge for juice in the morning. The actual fruit was put in the whizzer and given a really good whizz round to turn it into a nice purée.

Once it was whizzed up, I put it into the sterilised jars and put on the lids, that I had carefully cleaned. So that’s the apple and pear purée for the next 10 days or so, I reckon. And it’s pretty good stuff, I promise you.

Once it had cooled down, I put it in the fridge. And I carried on with my radio programme. And as I was beginning to assemble it, I found another one of the interviews that I hadn’t actually edited, so i had to turn my hand to that as well.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time. It was 18:00 and time for my hour with the guitars. I won’t get any better if I don’t practise, even if I won’t get any better if I do, but that’s hardly the point.

At 19:00 I broke off and made tea. There was the rest of the stuffing left over so I added the rest of the mushrooms, some more onion and some spinach and tomato sauce, and boiled up some pasta and vegetables.

Pudding was, of course, jam pie and vegan ice cream with chocolate sauce. Totally delicious. And it’s a shame that there’s just one more slice left, because for an ad-hoc improvised arrangement, this was a real success.

And so simple too. There will be many more of these in the future, that’s for sure. With all different kinds of jam. Blackcurrant might be nice.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last night I went out to photograph the new moon with a camera that had a flat battery.

No such mistake tonight because I had it on charge overnight. So we can see the beautiful moon tonight, with a planet shining quite brightly close by.

Not being an astronomer, I’ve no idea what planet it might be but I understand that Venus is quite visible at the moment. I wouldn’t like to speculate, particularly after the last time when I said to a passer-by “I can see Uranus from here” and the dirty look that he gave me in response.

With all of my regular runnign spots and all of the clifftop paths closed off, I had a rather irregular walk tonight, although I still managed to fit in two runs of some description to the equation.

There was another nice view across the harbour and the town, so I took another evening photograph of the tranquil scene. We’ll be seeing many more shots like this as this lock-down takes hold.

And if it’s anything like any other plague or epidemic in history, it will flare up again for a couple of years until they can either find a vaccine, everyone becomes immune or everyone is wiped out.

So now I’ve finished my notes and I’m off to bed, as long as nothing in the way of nostalgic music appears on the playlist.

Saturday tomorrow, and shopping day. So we’ll see what that brings us. I’m expecting thigs to be much more busy than last week with people having been cooped up and thus short of supplies. I can see me eventually changing my time of visit to a less popular time as this affair carries on.

Thursday 26th March 2020 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… a very bad day today. And for a variety of reasons too

Having had a brief flurry of activity earlier in the week, I found my favourite boulangerie closed today and had to walk almost as far as the Proclaimers to find another one
I spent most of the afternoon crashed out on the chair and I’ve no idea why
It was a beautiful evening for photography with a beautiful clear sky and a thin sliver of crescent moon, so when I lined up the camera to take the first of what I hoped was many photographs, the battery went flat on me
My evening routine is now completely disrupted as the terrain on which I perform my evening runs has now been placed out of bounds

And probably many more reasons that I can’t think of right now but I bet that I will as soon as I press “PUBLISH”.

The day started off so well too. I was awake for the first two alarms and out of bed dressing myself when the third one went off. Not something that happens every day.

The last of the ginger and orange this morning for my medication, so I need to deal with that a little later.

And then the dictaphone. In the first part of our adventure last night Castor went missing. It was somewhere round about Ottawa in October. There was a message posted about everyone search their gardens and yards, all this kind of thing. Of course everyone did that and there was still no trace of her so they announced that they were going to search people’s cabin trunks. I remember saying that that’s one way to encourage people to get rid of their travelling trunks. So we (whoever “we” were) unpacked ours, checked it and repacked everything and closed it up again, got it ready. There was still no trace of her and she had disappeared on the 10th and the panic started on the 12th so it then got to the stage of asking people to check her movements before then and to look for human remains in their gardens, all of this kind of gruesome stuff upon which I won’t elaborate.
A little later there was a group of us all going somewhere and we should be setting out because we were – it was getting late. But someone was there listening to some music – Yes as it happened – and we were all urging this person to get a move on. He was saying “yes, I want to listen to the music. We have plenty of time yet”. I said “you might have but I haven’t, I have a lot to do and I need to be getting myself organised”. I had an electric welding kit and aluminium welding rods in the back of my car that I was going to do something with but I can’t remember what, and I needed to have a shower as well and there we were, trying to urge this person to get going but he was just taking his time, taking his time, taking his time.

After breakfast (and the last of the muesli too) I made a start on the digital sound files. Again, no complete file so I had to hunt down probably about 50 individual tracks.

But not to worry – over the next few days there will be some really good stuff coming up and I’m quite looking forward to that. All kinds of classic albums that I haven’t listened to for years.

Once they were out of the way I had a few things of my own to attend to, and then I went out to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette.

As usual, during the lockdown I took advantage of my permit in order to go the long way around, all the way around the headland of the Pointe du Roc.

Over at the ferry terminal were Chausiais and Joly France, the older one (the newer one has a step cut in the stern) and that got me thinking, which is a rare event these days, I know.

There are no facilities on the Ile de Chausey apart from a bar-hotel and a small grocery point, as far as I am aware. So I’m wondering just how they are managing at the moment – whether the ferries are still running and, more importantly, what happens if the virus hits the island when there are no medical facilities for them there

It’s probably something about which they aren’t going to think until it actually happens.

The tide was out so the harbour gates were closed so I could take the path over the top to the other side.

It’s no surprise that work on the pontoons has ceased for the duration, and the pillars that remain to be installed are still lying here waiting for something to happen.

But the off-cut is intriguing me. I’ve no idea what they intend to do with that but it wouldn’t be here if it isn’t going to be serving a useful purpose.

Being confounded at La Mie Caline, I went to the boulangerie up the road. But that one is closed on Thursday. I ended up at the one in the rue Couraye where we have seen them install the new shop front.

No dejeunettes of course so I bought a baguette instead. And I was inpressed with their security precautions – a strip of clingfilm posed vertically along the top of the counter to act as a germ barrier. And the people working there were wearing gloves and masks.

And there I was – I’d decided not to go to LIDL this morning because I didn’t really need anything important, and I ended up on a marathon hike just the same.

On the way back I took something of a roundabout route and found myself in the rue Ernest Lefrant looking at this little alleyway that I hadn’t ever noticed before.

That’s one thing that can be said about all of this – that i’m going places that are off my usual beaten track and seeing things that I never would usually see.

And in case anyone is wondering why I was taking something of a roundabout route in the present circumstances, it was to spy out the boulangerie that is nearest to my home to check that it’s still open during the crisis and to see what are its opening hours.

Having bought my bread from there in the past, I seem to recall that its baguettes were quite acceptable and if La Mie Caline is closed for the duration I’ll be going here.

After lunch I sliced up a lump of ginger into very small pieces and put them into a little water to boil. While they were simmering away quite nicely with some cumin and coriander, I made another batch of muesli so that there’s some fresh stuff for tomorrow.

When the ginger was boiling nicely I took a pile of oranges. One or two weren’t looking so goo so of those, I cut off what I didn’t want to use.

Then I peeled all of the oranges, removed as much of the pith as I could, and then put the oranges in the whizzer. I gave them a gentle whizz around, just enough to separate the juice, which I strained off and put into a glass bottle which I had sterilised in the microwave with a little water which I had then emptied out. The orange juice then went into the fridge.

The pulp was put back into the whizzer and whizzed around until it was as fine as I could reasonably make it and it was then added to the ginger and water.

With plenty of other things to do, I came back in here and started on the radio programme for the Grande Marée and edited a couple of the recordings that we had taken.

After about 60 minutes I went to see how my stuff in the saucepan was going. All quite properly done to a turn, so I took it off the heat and added a couple of tablespoons of Manuka Honey, stirring it well in.

It all went into the whizzer again for a really good whizz around for a good few minutes to really break up everything, and then when it had cooled (I did the washing-up meantime) I added it to the orange juice and put it into the fridge. There’s my cordial for the next week or so.

Back here though, I couldn’t keep going. I crashed out I don’t know how many times and it really was a struggle. I did however manage to pull myself together and do some of the stuff though, but I was really disappointed with my lack of effort.

Rosemary rang me too, and I had a chat with Liz on the internet and as a result I missed 15 minutes of my guitar practice. But there were a couple of songs that I had digitalised just recently with which I wanted to have a play around, so I spent most of my time with those on both the bass and the six-string guitar.

For tea I added a small tin of kidney beans (good idea, those small tins) to the left-over stuffing and made myself taco rolls with rice and veg. Totally delicious. There’s some of that left too for tomorrow when I’ll be having an “everything curry” made with all of the leftovers.

Pudding was more jam pie with vegan ice cream and chocolate sauce and it really was a meal fit for a king. I’m eating so well these days and a lot of it is home-made.

And that got me thinking too – that if bread is going to be hard to obtain, then taco rolls and a supply thereof might be useful.

As for my evening outing, I mentioned it just now. I did manage to do two runs but not as I was hoping or where I was hoping, but we all have to make sacrifices too these days.

And no photos either. That’s depressing too.

But regardless of everything else, I’m so tired that I’m going to have an early night. Despite my reasonable sleep I’ve had a really bad day and I don’t want too many more like this. I have so much to do and so little time to do it.

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

… seagull!

“So what’s exciting about a seagull?” I hear you ask. After all, there must be thousands of them loitering around here one way or another.

The answer is that it’s not necessarily the bird, but have a close look underneath it and you’ll see something dropping from it.

No, it’s not that, although it may well be, given the number of gulls around here. The bird has a shellfish and it’s flying over the concrete apron by the fish processing plant and the stone boat ramp, and it’s dropping the shellfish onto the hard surface in order to break the shell and eat the contents.

It’s had a few goes at it already and I imagine that it’ll keep on doing it until the shell breaks. But it’s just amazing to me how quickly the local wildlife adapts to the man-made environment. It’s much more convenient than dropping the shellfish on the rocks.

Just for a change these days, I beat the third alarm to my feet this morning. Not by much, but beat it I did and that was good news. Especially as it was gone 00:30 when I went to bed and so I’d had less than 6 hours sleep.

Following the medication and my nice new orange and ginger cordial, it was time to attack the dictaphone. There was a group of us doing something and it involved being out on a boat. The boat came to grief in some way or other – I can’t remember how – but the guy in charge said that it was due to our own fault, that we hadn’t taken any safety precautions like sending out a boat first to check on the crossing and check on the bit that we were having to cross over before we all leapt on board and sailed off. There would have been more to this as well but I actually had a shocking attack of cramp in my leg and awoke with a hell of a start.

After breakfast I attacked the digital sound-file splitting. Three of them went fine, according to plan, but the fourth – well …

It’s a very rare album so I doubt that I’ll get to find to what the master copy that I have relates. It doesn’t match anything at all that I have found so far. I’ve untangled it as best as I can and I’ll have to see about the rest.

But for some unknown reason, that knocked me right out of my stride and I just couldn’t get going at all today. As far as anything else goes, it’s been a very wasted day today and I’m rather disappointed with myself.

Mind you, I suppose that I have every reason to be disappointed. I’ve had some very disheartening news.

Not that I have said very much to very many people but I actually managed to find a freighter that would take me across the Atlantic from Ijmuiden in the Netherlands to Burns Harbor, one of the outports of Chicago, all the way down the St Lawrence and right through the Great Lakes, at the end of July.

It’s a trip that the ship does every month, so I had booked a passage on it as a way of getting to North America this autumn, and as it happens, on the return journey it refuels in Montreal so I’d made arrangements to be picked up in Montreal at the end of October to sail back to Europe.

But the long and the short of it is that I had a mail today telling me that the journey is cancelled. No surprise there – just a desperate disappointment. I was so looking forward to this.

On that sad note, I went outside for my morning walk to pick up my dejeunette from La Mie Caline.

There were a few people out there enjoying the pleasant, if windy morning. And there was also quite a considerable amount of shipping out there today. It wasn’t easy to identify them from up here so I took a speculative photo.

When I get back home I can blow up the image and have a look to see who’s out there.

At first glance, I had thought that one of the boats out there resembled La Grande Ancre.

But that’s not the case. It must be a fishing boat with a similar sikhouette. And how do I know that? Well, because right at that moment La Grande Ancre came sailing … “dieseling” – ed … around the headland on her way out to sea.

Right on cue, I reckon. She couldn’t have timed it any better.

But I do like this photo. Despite the distance at which it was taken, it’s come out rather well and I’m pleased with that.

They weren’t the only boats out there either.

Close on the heels of La Grande Ancre came this really nice yacht enjoying the windy weather and having a good run out in the sun.

And how I envied him. My own little nautical jaunt having been cancelled, I need to find some other way to take to the water this year, and I’ve no idea how I’m going to do that.

But then, there’s always a plan somewhere

And talking of the answer, here’s the answer – or, at least, part of the answer – to the question of which boats were out there in mid-Channel just now.

Out of the doom and gloom and mist and fog and haze comes Chausiais, heading into port. It looks very much as if she’s been out on the earlu morning tide to take a delivery to the Ile de Chausey and is now on her way home before the tide goes too far out.

It’s not very often that we are lucky enough to see her out at sea. She doesn’t seem to go out very much but I imagine that all of thzt will change pretty soon

The tide is out at the moment and the harbour gates are shut. That means that I can take the short cut across the path on top of the gates.

Over the last few days we’ve seen La Granvillaise up on blocks in the chantier navale but she was released the other day. She’s now here in the harbour, moored up in the space next to Spirit of Conrad in the space where Charles-Marie would be, were she not up on blocks in the chantier navale.

This harbour is going to become very congested in due course, with all of the pontoons that they are installing.

And talking of the installation of the pontoons, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday they started installing the second row of pontoon support pillars in the harbour.

This batch is going to be on the south side of the floating harbour, so one of the things that I wanted to do was to see how they are getting on with it.

The answer is that they don’t seem to have made all that much progress over the course of the morning. There’s still just the one pillar in position and there doesn’t seem to be anyone about doing anythign with anything else.

And with there being no-one about, I took the opportunity to have a peek in their compound to see how many more pillars there are to install. I mean – I imagine that all of those here are here to be used.

And what we have left are three large pillars, a smaller one that looks like it’s off the floating pontoon and is calibrated in some way, presumably for depth, and an offcut of about 10 or 12 feet.

What they are going to be doing with the offcut is a mystery that has drawn my attention for now. But basically, it looks as if we are going to be having one row of five pillars and another row of four, although in truth I’ve long-since given up trying to calculate the logic behind what these people are doing.

They were expecting me in La Mie Caline so I didn’t hang around long, and there was nothing to detain me on my climb back home.

After lunch, I had another attack at the sound files that we had recorded during our visit to the Grande Marée but my heart wasn’t in it and I found myself falling asleep – not once but twice – and in the same place in the recording both times too. I really must pull myself together.

To break up the monotony and try to find some enthusiasm and motivation from somewhere, I went for my afternoon walk.

There were crowds of people out there on the lawn by the lighthouse enjoying the view but my attention was elsewhere because the tide was quite out and the bay was pretty deserted. Hardly a drop of water anywhere.

Of course, this merits a photo. It doesn’t get like this every day. Probably half a dozen times each year the tide goes this low.

Roud by the chantier navale, I went to see what was happening down there.

Charles-Marie is still there and the guy working on it is still there on the skyjack hacking a few more lumps out of the side of her.

It looks as if it’s going to be a long job and she’ll be there for a while. But she’ll be a whole different ship when she comes out and I can’t wait for the moment when I’ll be able to have a close-up view of her – whenever that might be.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen on many occasions photos of people taking photos and, on one or two occasions, photos of people taking photos of people taking photos.

Today, on the grassy lawn on the boulevard Vaufleury, overlooked by our old friend the Corsair Pleville le Pelley, is another group of people having their photo taken by someone armed with a tripod.

It would probably be a good idea for me to make more use of mine every now and again, if only the wind would subside.

Back here, I ordered a new memory card for the big NIKON D500. As well as taking SD cards, it also takes XQD cards in a different slot.

These are expensive but are much better quality so I’ve ordered one and it should be here in a couple of days. Then I can see whether it’s the SD card aperture that’s faulty or whether it’s something more crucial.

But I was still unable to find the motivation that I needed to do this project and rather than waste the day completely I edited a pile of photos from July 2019 when I was on my way to Iceland on board the The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour.

Tea was another “anything curry” with the leftovers lengthened with some lentils. It was quite delicious too. Apple pie and vegan ice cream for afters, and I remembered the chocolate sauce too.

No-one about for the evening run tonight. I managed three lengths too, having to lengthen my walk due to not having done enough on the morning walk. And I wasn’t as out of breath as I might have been either

No photos either. I was being rather optimistic with my ambitions, and they didn’t work out well enough. But you live and learn.

Anyway, bed-time. And i’m hoping for a good sleep tonight. A nice long voyage too, in pleasant company. I need cheering up and I always seem to have much more fun and excitement in my life during the night than ever I do during the day.

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

… right about the pontoons. So almost right in fact that I’m going to give myself 9 out of 10.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I counted the pillars on the quayside and decided that they were going to install two rows of four, and then they went yesterday and put a fifth one in the row on the north side of the harbour that confounded all of my expectations?

Anyway, to cut a long story short … “thank goodness” – ed … they might have installed five n one row, but today they are indeed starting on a second row, just as I reckoned that they would.

But that’s going to be bad news as far as I can see for the shipping in here, where they are installing that second row.

Here’s Tiberiade, a sister ship to Coelacanthe, and I watched her for a good five minutes struggling to negotiate her way around the pillars in order to find a berth to which to tie up.

And that’s just a fishing boat. We have both of the Joly France boats, Chausiais, and then the two Channel Island ferries, Granville and Victor Hugo, that tie up more-or-less where they will be fitting that pontoon. I’m not sure how that’s going to work for them

And while you admire the photos of the storm that we had tonight, let me tell you about my totally miserable day. A day when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

And we started off my oversleeping. Not by five minutes or ten minutes but a good hour and a half. Staying up and listening to decent music might be a good plan from that point of view, but 01:30 is being rather optimistic when I want to be up by 06:15

That got me off on the wrong foot and things disintegrated from there on.

The medication was no problem, and then I came back and looked at the dictaphone.

And no wonder that I was exhausted this morning. I’d been miles during the night.

There was a whole group of us discussing some guy’s application for something or other. It was an unusual application – it turned out that he had an eagle on a ring not too far away and he wanted something to control this eagle but no-one would take him seriously about this. Everyone was saying that if he had an eagle living there it would be fantastic. But no-one could quite get to grips with the seriousness of the thing because eagles can even carry off people. This all came about I think when someone was getting married, I’m not quite sure, and there was a fear of this eagle but this sighting was dismissed and they never saw it again. People were saying “ohh well, there you are, it must have been a false report, this kind of thing, but this whole thing was based on the fact that an eagle had reappeared and been seen at a different place entirely so maybe it hadn’t actually gone away but had just basically moved nest into somewhere else.

Later on, three kids were staying at our old house in Vine Tree Avenue. We were there and there was a hell of a lot going on in this dream. One of my things to do was to go round and check on the flies. For some unknown reason, the flies were of interest. I’d read a book on flies and the life-cycle of the flies, the family of the fly, all this kind of thing and it was interesting to see how much the families of the flies around our house actually bore to it. So I used to do my rounds and check on things while everyone else was out and I still kept on doing my rounds. And on one of my rounds I walked into my parents bedroom and there was one of my sisters. “So what are you doing here?” I asked her “I’m looking for a quiet place to study and write some letters and people wouldn’t leave me alone so I came in here”. I said “the easiest thing to do to be left alone is to not make any noise and people won’t remember about you. You should really be in here and shut the door and that would be better still” and I gave her some more advice like that as well. But it was something about the life cycle of the fly and the family of the fly that interested me.

I was in the area of Shavington last night, (…Rope Hall Lane…). I was on a motorcycle and I was following someone in a car. This motorcycle thing went past us, grey but with an orange-painted tank on it. As I went round a bend the guy in the car was busy turning the car round to come back the other way towards me. I asked him what was up. Apparently the motor cycle had hit him and driven off. A crowd of people came round, someone on a police motor bike but it wasn’t a policeman. The guy with me was telling a story about how he had hit him and said a few impolite things and driven away. I suddenly realised that I knew this guy, and I bet that I knew his name as well as he sounded like the kind of person whom I’d met. I mentioned it to him, that he’s a regular on this road and we can find him again at some other time.
But then I was in Shavington (… Rope Lane by the Vine …) with someone else, someone from Canada but not Josée I think. We were talking about my childhood as we drove through Shavington so I took her down Vine Tree Avenue and showed her the house where we lived as kids. Of course it’s much different now than it was in those days. We were having a chat about it when some woman came up and asked me if I knew the area. I said that I had lived here. She replied that she had lived here since the 50s and she knew this street – pointing to Edwards Avenue – by some other name. I said that if she had been here in the 50s she must have known me then so we had a chat. I don’t think that we actually got to mentioning my name, who I was, but we were talking on about Edwards Avenue and Vine Tree Avenue and I was pointing out some garages (… which don’t exist …) that still bore some kind of resemblance to how our houses looked at the time

As I said, no wonder that I was exhausted.

After breakfast, there wasn’t much time before I had to go to the shops, so I looked at the digital soundfile that I’d downloaded yesterday. And one brief listen to that, and that one followed the previous version into the bin as well. The first couple of minutes of the opening track are missing, and that’s no good to anyone.

What I’ll have to do is to download yet another version if I can find one.

Before I went out I grabbed a quick shower and then headed uptown, stopping to watch Tiberiade perform her nautical danse macabre around the harbour.

At LIDL there was nothing of any particular interest, although I did watch in mild amusement as someone came into the shop in plastic gloves and a face mask to do his shopping. I think that some people need to get a sense of proportion. More people died in the 2003 heatwave, and more people will die of influenza in a normal winter. The trouble is that because those things are so normal, the Press never mentions them so people don’t realise.

Talking of journalists, I have a journalist friend in the USA who is currently having a hysterical panic about this virus. So I asked her how the tally of deaths and illness from the virus compares with the amount of firearm-related deaths and injuries in the USA.

She didn’t reply, but kept on having her hysterics.

Yes, never mind this virus. There are people walking the streets in the USA with enough firepower to wipe out a small-sized district at the drop of a hat, yet that causes these silly Americans no concern whatsoever. But then again, I suppose that the USA is such a violent bloodthirsty country that they are accustomed to the idea of violence.

And that’s a dreadful state of mind to be in.

Several weeks ago, I posted a photo of what I considered to be the first buds of the year. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at the time I expressed my scepticism.

But there’s no doubting whatsoever about these. here in the rue de la Houle there are definitely buds here on this creeping plant that’s growing up the wall.

Yes, we can definitely now say that Spring is on its way quite definitively. That put a little spring into my step, although I wish that I knew what happened to winter.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we’ve been keeping an eye on the new building that’s going on on the corner of the rue Charles Guillebot and the impasse de la Corderie.

Being in an energetic mood today, I went to have a closer look at it today. It is indeed a new house. But the people who are building it don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to finish it.

It’s one thing that I’ve noticed here with the local builders. They don’t seem to be in any rush whatever to actually complete anything and we’ve seen projects like this go on for ever.

Just by way of a change, seeing as I’d never come this way, I went down into town via the rue Charles Guillebot.

That takes me down the north side of the eglise St Paul, a side of the church that we haven’t seen before. I’ve probably mentioned this church in the past. It was one of the earliest concrete structures built in modern times (the Romans were well-advanced with the use of concrete) but like most things, was never maintained.

As a result, there are bits dropping off it and there are notices all over the place telling the public to keep well clear.

At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and headed back home.

But once more, I stopped half-wau up the rue des Juifs to admire the view. We saw them earlier knocking the support pillar into the floor, but that was a photo that I had taken later this afternoon.

What we are seeing in this photo is the floating pontoon setting out from its mooring with that support pillar in its evil clutches and being shunted into position by the little boat.

It’s actually quite an exciting procedure watching then manoeuvring about the harbour with all of their equipment. All of this free entertainment that we are having.

Back at the apartment, I had a little surprise. I bumped into one of the more energetic owners here, and he invited me to come with him on a little guided tour.

Underneath this building are several big man-made caverns which had been bricked off and a year or so ago they had found the entrance and smashed their way through the wall to the inside.

There were apparently the water tanks for the old city in the days before there was the mains water supply. All of the rainfall from the roofs of the houses and from the street was channelled into here.

And it’s certainly an impressive sight to see. Apparently, it was full of all kinds of things before they started to clean it out. The plan was to divide it up into private cellars for the owners of the apartments, but it’s hit a major snag.

And he showed me what was the snag.

One of the underground caverns was well-blocked off and took some smashing down. And when they finally broke their way in, they could see exactly why it was so well sealed.

If the story that I was told is correct, and I would gladly learn otherwise, the building was divided into rooms by all kids of ad-hoc partitions that had accumulated over the centuries. When it was converted into apartments, the old partition walls had to be smashed down and taken away.

Included in the contract for the work was a large sum for “hire of containers and transport away of the waste” and this was duly paid. However it seems that the waste was never transported away at all but thrown down the lift shafts into one of the caverns and the cavern was then sealed off so that no-one would see it.

Of course, this is just one person’s view of the matter and there is very likely another, but one inescapable fact is that m’learned friends have been called in by the building’s management committee.

We shall see how all of this develops over the next few months. But nevertheless, it was exciting being down here and seeing all of this that I had never seen before.

After lunch I boiled up some ginger and then started to make my orange and ginger syrup.

I peeled 5 large juice oranges, gave then a quick whizz in the whizzer and poured off the juice, which I put into a bottle that I had sterilised. That went into the fridge.

The left-over pulp was whizzed down finely and then, after the ginger had simmered for an hour or so, I added the left-over pulp, brought it to the boil again and then left it to simmer.

While that was happening, I made a start on the sound files that we had recorded at the Grande Marée yesterday.

There were a few people out there this afternoon but I didn’t loiter very much.

My route took me round to the chantier navale where I could see that La Granvillaise and one of the fishing boats have gone back into the water. But Charles-Marie is still in there, minus a good few of her planks. This is going to be a long job

There was another classe decouverte out there today too, but no-one whom I recognised so I headed for home. I’m still shaking my head about that unexpected encounter yesterday.

Back here, I had a look to see how my orange and ginger was doing.

Nicely simmering away so I took it off the heat, added a couple of tablespoons of manuka honey (that’s how I make it into syrup), poured it all into the whizzer and gave it all a really good and lengthy whizz around.

The syrupy mass was then poured into the orange juice that I had put in the fridge earlier and it was all shaken up to mix it in. It all went into the fridge where over the course of the next week or so I’ll be using it up as my morning drink.

Back at my desk, I carried on with the sound file but I didn’t get very far as I drifted away with the fairies. And I also had my half-hour on the bass.

Tea was a burger on a bun with potatoes and veg. And I forgot the veg until the very last minute and had to rush them. The apple pie and ice cream for pudding was delicious too. I really am living well these days.

There was quite a wind blowing outside this evening.

Not one of the strongest winds that we have had and not really enough to knock me out of my stride either. And so i was astonished to see how the waves were roaring in to the Plat Gousset.

It is the period of the fullest moon and the highest tides, but even so, I hadn’t expected to see waves like this coming into the Plat Gousset with such incredible force. I stood there for quite a while to watch the show.

Windy it might have been, but not enough to frustrate my two evening runs. I managed to fit them in without too many problems and managed to push the distances on again. For my second run, I even made it up to the top of the ramp and I haven’t done that for a while.

But there was a lot of activity in the port and at the fish-processing plant. With it being nearly high tide, the gates are open so the big fishing boats can come in and unload.

For my part, I went and had a little play with the NIKON 1 J5 and the f1.8 18.5mm lens

The photo above was taken with the shutter speed at 1/20 at f1.74 with ISO 900

This photo here was taken completely manual with speed of 1/125 at f1.74 and ISO 2800.

They have both come out rather well and I’m quite pleased with them. Still plenty of room for improvement but I’ll just keep on working away at it until I improve.

So back here I’ve written up all of my notes and now, a lot later than I hoped, I’m going to bed. I hope that I have better luck trying to drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning, but who knows? It’s really driving me to despair

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

The day when we have one of the greatest tidal differences of the year.

There’s what they call the “tidal coefficient” – the difference between high tide and low tide. It varies quite considerably but once it starts getting into the 80s and 90s you know that it’s going to be a good one.

And today, the tidal coefficient was .. errr … 117. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Why this is important is because at very low tide, the public areas of the shellfish beds are accessible. Shellfish of all descriptions is something very important here and there’s a great deal of commercial exploitation with clearly defined areas that the commercial operators lease.

But beyond those areas, it’s a free-for-all and just about anyone has the right to hunt for shellfish there, with certain restrictions. Of course, these areas are usually under water so they aren’t accessible. But on the days when there is a great tidal coefficient, the public can reach there quite easily.

And so they do – in droves as you can see.

They were not alone, because a couple of intrepid reporters from the local internet radio station were out there as well, interviewing the people and finding out what was going on.

And we (because, dear reader, I was one of them) picked up loads of hints, learned a few good recipes, and met a couple of guys who were having a picnic on the rocks, with fresh oysters.

And it’s not true, what they say about oysters. They aren’t aphrodisiacs at all. I had a dozen on my wedding night and only nine of them worked.

Talking of working, I haven’t really done much in the way of working today. I had a really busy night, as I discovered when I looked at the dictaphone after my medication.

There was something happening about school last night with a lot of people. I was there with a former classmate and one or two other people. We were in trenches, bogged down and were being fired at. A voice from the other side saying “everyone who is still alive, stand up and let’s see you”. Of course I had no intention whatever of standing up and being seen for I knew exactly what would happen, so we didn’t. They were still shouting, all this kind of thing, from over there. I had some peaches or pineapple chunks or something and was eating them. I spilled some syrup all over the place while I was doing this so I had to scout around for something. I came across a towel from one of the girls – it might have been another one of my former classmates so I said to my friend something like “she will have to come and share yours tonight” meaning to share his bed. But yes, well … as a kind of joke. He said “but most of the girls are going home tonight because there’s something going on at home and there will be very few people left here tonight”. Of course I was staying and I thought that that would give me an opportunity to get my hands on Percy Penguin and get her to spend the night with me
A little later it was back to a dream that I’d had earlier, something to do with the Germans again. I was being shadowed into this underground station. I could see that there were two of them, a man and a woman rather like Colonel Gruber and his female associate in ‘Allo ‘Allo. They were surveying me so I ended up tearing down to the platform, making sure that they were on there and step onto the train as it pulled in, then stepping off the train just as the doors were about to close so that they were stuck on it and it disappeared off into the tunnel. I had to think whether there was anyone else that I had noticed who might have been with them. But there wasn’t so I thought that I would head back outside again. At that moment another German came down with a squad of soldiers and started to say something, which inevitably was about the people on the train. “Get the people off the train”. He was told that the train had departed, which was quite evident but he was not having any of this. I was thinking to myself “well, I’d got rid of those two people but I really need to get away before they come back and find me”. But anyway … So I was somewhere and there was a girl in here with me as well but I didn’t really know exactly where, anyway. There was something to do with bass guitar in this part – Graham Simpson of Roxy Music with his EB3 like mine. He was one of the musicians who was involved with this somewhere. but I’m not quite sure where
And later still I finally got my hands on TOTGA. There were special offers on the ferries to Europe so I rang her up to tell her about it but she’d booked a ferry to Ireland and she was telling me all about Ireland. I asked if she was going from Stranraer to Larne and she said “yes” that very evening, so I thought that she would have to get a move on because it’s a 5-hour drive to Stranraer. I was walking on an island somewhere. I can’t remember who was with me but we were following the two ships – a passenger ferry was leaving and there was a freighter that was leaving behind it. I was telling TOTGA this but I was getting all the names of ships mixed up all the time and she was having to correct me, even though she didn’t know the place and didn’t know the ships, anything like that. It was really quite funny. But anyway she was going to ireland and not coming to France

It’s hardly surprising that i was too worn out to do too much today, after all that.

After breakfast I sat down to deal with some of the splitting of the soundfiles that I’d downloaded. And that wasn’t straightforward because not one of them was correct.

Two of them had extra tracks that weren’t marked on the track lists so I had to hunt down which ones they were. For a third one, the timing just didn’t correspond at all with what I knew, and it turned out that I’d somehow managed to acquire a special studio original master before it had been edited down. That might be an exciting curio but it was a pain to work with.

As for the fourth, in the end I gave up trying to deal with it and managed to track down a different copy that, I hope, might be more accurate.

Once I’d done that, I spent an hour or so doing some tidying up. I know that Neitzsche famously said “out of chaos comes order” but Neitzsche never visited my apartment. But anyway, it now looks as if someone lives here.

That was the cue to nip into town and La Mie Caline for my dejeunette for lunch, stopping to chat to a neighbour on the way – the same neighbour whom I had met yesterday.

And it looks as if my assumption of two rows of four pillars isn’t correct. There they were this morning installing a fifth pillar in the same row as the preceding four.

So this is going to have to be another thing for me to observe over the next few days or so to see what they are actually going to be doing.

But whatever they were doing with the scaffolding down on Marité’s berth, they must have done it.

They seem to have folded up their tents and disappeared quietly into the night, or some such, because the scaffolding has now disappeared and Marité is now back where she ought to be.

As for me, I pushed on down to La Mie Caline, picked up my bread and came home to my apartment.

After lunch, I still had half an hour so I cracked on with my radio project and almost managed to finish it.

But my oppo came bang on time and, gathering up my material, we set off for the rocks. And I made an important discovery too. I have a headphone-splitter, which means that I can plug two headphones into one headphone socket.

And it also works with microphones too so we could use two microphones with the Zoom H1 and that’s really what I call progress.

We spent about an hour and a half down there talking to people and I ended up with about 30 minutes of speech, which will need to be edited down. Laurent is going to interview the Police to have a statement about what is and what isn’t permitted during the peche à pied and once we have that, I’ll prepare another radio programme.

On the way back, we stuck our noses into the chantier navale because we had heard some sounds coming from there that didn’t seem to be very healthy to us.

It turns out that in the chantier navale they are down to just three boats, and if they carry on much longer like this on Charles-Marie they’ll be down to two because there’s a guy there going berserk with a crowbar and ripping off huge chunks of wood.

There’s this feeling going through my mind that this is going to be very interesting.

After all of this excitement we went for a coffee and watched the pile-driver pounding away at the fifth column in the harbour.

Laurent then went home and I came back here to finish off my radio project. That’s now done, 1 hour exactly and even though I say it myself, it’s going to be a pretty good one. At least I hope so.

For tea tonight, I fancied something a little different so I found a slice of pie in the freezer. That went into the oven with some potatoes and I cooked some veg (I forgot the leek) and gravy.

The gravy is new stuff that I found in NOZ. It’s ok when you add herbs to it, but it doesn’t thicken. I had to make a quick cornflour paste for that. And the result was quite acceptable.

Pudding was yet more pie – of the apple variety, with the last of the coconut dessert stuff and some of that vegan ice cream – and I forgot the chocolate sauce.

But as I have said before … “many times” – ed … I really am eating well these days.

That was the cue to go for my evening walk. No-one around so I managed both my runs, although I have been managing them better just recently.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the past year or so we’ve been watching them do some work on an old house in the Place Cambernon. For the last while it’s been without a front.

But today, I notice that it has acquired one. And this is good news. Things are progressing around here on the accommodation front. And not before time too, as I found out when I moved here and so did my neighbour, so she said.

So hours later than intended, i’m off to bed. I must stop listening to all this music. It’s doing me no good whatsoever and just keeping me awake at night.

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

… whose idea it is to ring that cacophony of church bells at 11:00 on a Sunday morning but it’s almost as if they don’t want you to have a decent lie-in on a Sunday morning when they go around awakening the dead like that.

It certainly put paid to my morning reverie and I was obliged to leave the comfort and warmth of my beautiful bed.

It wasn’t the first time that I had had to leave the bed either. Round about … errr … 04:00 or something like that, I had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse. I thought that I had passed beyond that, but apparently not.

So I went off and had my medication.

While you admire the high winds that we were having and the storm that was raging somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, let me tell you about my morning.

First thing that I did of course was to check on the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been on a little voyage. I was with someone last night who resembled a girl with whom I had worked for a while although it wasn’t her I’m sure, someone like that. We were discussing languages. Something weird had come up and we had a reply to do which we had done in French or Flemish or something. This led to some kind of discussion about languages and what do we do, how did we behave, all this kind of thing. I made the point sometime during this discussion that what we did is that we’d have the radio on if we were at home and just listen to a French programme or a Flemish programme. It didn’t really make any difference to the two of us what we were listening to. Any of the languages were usually pretty good for us.

After that, I carried on with the project that I’m undertaking – of digitalising my collection of LPs.

On thing that I’ve been able to do is to find about 120 digitalised sound files of albums that I own, and I downloaded them all. I’ve then had to split them into individual tracks.

It isn’t easy because many of them are studio master tapes where the tracks are recorded in “recorded order” of course which is quite often very different than the order in which they are published on CDs and LPs

Another issue is that some of the tapes include tracks that were never ever published – rejected for one reason or another – and which I don’t have a clue what they are.

And sure enough, one of the sound files on which I was working was one of the latter.

Eventually, after a great deal of effort, I tracked it down. It seems that I have somehow managed to lay my hands on a rare Swedish-only version of a master-tape with one additional track that was only available in a couple of countries and a second additional track that was only available in Sweden.

That should be quite a curio when it comes to playing it on the radio programmes.

13:30. That’s a very civilised time to have breakfast, I reckon. And the last of the home-made apple juice from when I made the apple and pear purée. It’s certainly quite interesting when I am responsible for the making (within certain limits of course) of almost every product that I eat for breakfast.

After breakfast I didn’t really do all that much. After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to a break one day a week when I don’t do much.

Nevertheless, round about 15:30 or thereabouts I decided that I would have lunch. I wasn’t all that hungry, and there was an end of a baguette from yesterday hanging around in the kitchen.

Luckily, I had remembered to fetch some hummus out of the freezer yesterday. Roasted pepper hummus too, made with my own fair hands.

So I had a hummus, tomato, cucumber and lettuce butty for lunch, followed by the usual apple, pear and banana for afters.

And that reminded me (although I’ve no idea why it would) that the lemon and ginger syrup that I make for my medication is running low. Sometime later this week I’ll have to make some more. I’ve plenty of ginger but I bought some juice oranges so I’ll go for orange syrup this time.

Whatever happens, I mustn’t forget my afternoon walk. I’m only on 3% wandering around the apartment.

Mind you, sticking my head out of the door, I wasn’t too impressed about the idea of going out.

By the looks of things, there was a huge storm brewing away across the baie de Mont St Michel over there on the Brittany coast. And knowing my usual luck, I would probably end up finding myself right in the middle of it before I’d gone too far.

But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. I set off out.

And I wasn’t alone either. Despite the wind there were crowds of people milling around enjoying the weather and I was determined to join them.

My route took me right around the headland and down the steps at the end. And the farther on my travels I advanced, the more I didn’t like the look of the weather. It was just looking worse and worse

Mind you, my luck was in, for once.

The storm was advancing quite quickly but as I rounded the headland at the Pointe du Roc I could see that it was going to miss me by a good few miles.

It had found shore down by the Pointe du Carolles and places like Carolles-Plage and Jullouville were taking something of a pounding. I’m glad that it wasn’t here, because it did look particularly nasty over there.

My perambulations brought me further around the headland and here I was greeted with a sight that made the walk all worthwhile.

As I have said before … “many times” – ed … there’s nothing between that harbour wall and the eastern seaboard of the USA and here we have the highest tides in Europe.

Consequently the power that can build up in the water whenever there is a major storm anywhere in the North Atlantic is really impressive and the sea walls here catch the lot of it full force.

regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen some really impressive seas come roaring in just here.

And today is no exception to that. I stoop and watched it all for a good 10 minites even though I had other things to do, just because it was so impressive.

Strangely enough, there were several people passing by here, but no-one else seemed to be interested in staying to watch the free show.

So instead, I had a wander down to the port. The harbour gates were closed as, believe it or not, the tide is well out (although you might not think so) so I could cross over to the other side of the harbour.

One thing that has been interesting me is the story of the new pontoons that they have been installing in the harbour. We’ve seen the pontoons on the north side of the harbour alongside the rue du Port but I wanted to look at the new ones on this side

That is, assuming that I can get close enough to them, because they are crowded out with fishing boats right now. There can’t be too many out at sea today.

Another thing that we’ve been looking at as we have been on our way around is the scaffolding that is bolted to the side of the harbour wall here.

Being a Sunday and with no-one around, I took the opportunity to have a closer look, trying not to fall into the harbour while I was doing it.

And the result is that I’m still not too sure of its purpose and the OSB boards here fixed to the wall don’t seem to be able to throw any light upon the subject.

All that I can think of, as a wild guess, is that it’s a set of steps for the crew of the floating pontoon to descend to their little boat.

We’ve also seen them installing steel pillars in the harbour in order to extend the row of pontoons out perpendicularly from the harbour walls.

Three have already been installed in the harbour and I was sure that there were others although I couldn’t remember how many. Consequently I went to have a good look aroud and eventually came across them.

And I was correct. I had seen them and here they are – five of them by my reckoning. That seems to indicate two lines of four each and that’s not going to be good news for the commercial boats that come here and need the open space to manoeuvre.

And that’s going to be interesting even sooner than we imagined, because Neptune, one of the gravel boats, has just left Shoreham Harbour – “next stop Granville”. I was right about the heaps of gravel.

As you probably saw in the previous photograph, the storm has passed, the clouds are now all gone and the sun is now out.

That made me decide to push on and have a marathon walk all the way along the Quai Hérel all the way down to the new block of flats (and how I would love to live here!) and the Pointe du Roche Gauthier.

That’s as far as you can do around here. The path comes to a sudden stop and you have to retrace your steps 100 metres or so until you come to a flight of steps that go back up to the road.

So, retracing my steps, I can show you the big modern building over there on the left.

That’s the CRNG, the Centre Regional de Nautisme de Granville, and it’s also where the Youth Hostel and the Salle Hérel are.

The Salle Hérel was quite interesting today – or should have been – because they were having a “Free Market” where everyone takes the stuff that they no longer want so that others may help themselves.

However I was too late because anything that might have been of interest had probably long-since gone.

My walk brought me up past the Tax Office and it was round about here that I had an exciting encounter.

It’s not so much the car, but what the owner was using as a bulkhead to stop whatever was in the back sliding forward into the passenger seat.

It’s an old freight pallet cut down to size and trimmed to be an exact fit. I was well-impressed by this and wished that I had thought of it in the past when I had the Passat.

My walk took me onwards down little alleys that I had only glimpsed in the past.

My aim was to do down past the station and down into the Park de Val es Fleurs to see what was going on around there but in the distance I noticed a flight of steps that I hadn’t seen before.

That made up my mind to go and follow my star wherever it was going to lead me and see what was at the other end – stopping for a glance backwards at the railway engineering depot in the background where the trains are stored and repaired.

My little climb brought me out into a little housing estate where a small path led to the main Avenue de la Liberation.

This path in turn led me past a nice modern block of flats in the chemin de Choisel. And nice though the flats might have seemed, it wasn’t my cup of tea because someone was playing some music full-blast with the windows in one of the apartments.

Where I live, I have solid stone walls 1.2 metres thick so I can play music as loud as I like without disturbing the neighbours. That wouldn’t work here at all.

Out on the avenue de la Liberation and here’s a thing.

Ever since I’ve been in Granville, and probably for many years prior to that, there were some old, abandoned houses that were fenced off from the road.

It’s been a good while since I’ve been past here on foot and to my surprise something seems to be happening to them right now. We have a crane, a new roof and all other kinds of exciting things.

That will be a nice place to live when it’s all finished.

While I was here, I could have carried on down the road into town, gone down another footpath and the steps to the Park de Val es Fleurs, or else through the gardens of the Musée Christian Dior and down the steps to the Plat Gousset.

Obviously the latter will bring me closer to the sea and with me being a Pisces, being close to water is one of my aims, so I made my way down the side of the tennis club.

Last time I was out here, I saw a big cruise ship out to sea, so I had a look to see if I was going to be lucky again.

Not quite. No shipping out there today but we did have one of these mysterious buoys bobbing around in the sea down there. I still haven’t worked out what they are four but my suspicion is that they are something to do with fishing gear – nets or lobster pots, that kind of thing I reckon.

There were crowds of people out there today and a long, continuous line of people coming up the steps.

The steps are quite narrow and there isn’t much room to pass anyone so I had to wait for a while while they came up. That gave me an opportunity to take a photo of the nice archway down there that leads to the final flight of steps down to the promenade.

And the sea was looking pretty rough down there too. This could be very interesting.

And i wasn’t wrong either.

It’s now 17:40 which means that there’s still an hour or so to high tide, and the sea is totally wicked out there, smacking into the sea wall here with an incredible force and sending spray everywhere.

It’s lucky that the promenade s quite wide otherwise I could easily end up marooned down here and that wouldn’t be very pleasant, having to climb all the way back up the steps again..

And I wasn’t alone here either.

This was a show that you would have to pay a fortune to watch in some places, but we were having it for free. There were probably a couple of hundred people down here this afternoon making the most of the entertainment and we were all having more than our money’s worth.

So impressive was it that I stayed down here for half an hour taking photos when one of the very big waves came in

We’ve had quite a few storms down here so far this year, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and we’ve seen plenty of areas that have been fenced off due to the damage that the wild seas have caused.

There’s some more over there and apparently this needs to be fixed before the Grand Marée, the very high tide, comes in on Wednesday. They’ve engaged some workmen to do the job and they have erected some scaffolding to work from, but I don’t fancy their chances out there today.

It’s a good job that it’s a Sunday – a Day Of Rest – today when they can have a day off.

While you admire a few more photos of the storm on the Plat Gousset, I climbed back up all of the steps and walked home via the square Maurice Marland.

There was still about 40 minutes or so before teatime, so I busied myself with another pile of photos from July 2019 and my trip to Iceland. I really need to press on with that before i’m much older.

The trouble is, though, that with having no internet out there, I wasn’t able to do any research into the photos. Consequently every one that I am editing, I need to research to find out where it is and what’s in the image.

Sunday is vegan pizza night of course, but it’s also pudding time seeing as I have the oven on already.

It’s usually rice pudding or some such, but last week we had a delicious apple crumble. Apple pie has been on the menu too in the past and that was what I intended to try today, using the new pie dish that I bought.

These pastry rolls are the business. The cheap ones from LeClerc are vegan of course so I always have a stock of those on hand. And I’d picked up some backing apples too on Sunday.

So, grease the pie dish and unroll one of the pastry rolls and put that in, gently pressing down so that it’s in at the seam at the bottom.

Thinly slice a couple of the apples and lie the slices in on top of the pastry, making as many layers as you can fit in, so that the pastry is completely covered.

On every layer, a think coating of desiccated coconut, brown sugar and lemon juice (and some cinnamon and nutmeg, which I completely forgot, for some reason or other that I can’t explain).

Unroll another pastry roll, cut out a top for the pie, with an overhang of about 2 cms.

Wet with some mile the part of the pastry that is on the lip of the pie dish, then put the top on and press it down really hard with a fork to the pastry underneath on the lip. Then trim off the excess pastry.

Put a few slits in the top of the pie to let out the steam, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar. Then bung in the oven.

With the excess pastry, coast it on both sides – and your rolling pin – with flour to stop it sticking, and roll it out with your rolling pin. It won’t be square, so keep on trimming it off and adding the trimmings into appropriate places so that it’s as square as you can make it

Grease a flat oven tray and gently with a couple of spatulas, pick up your flat pastry and put on the tray. Add the leftover apple slices into the centre, with desiccated coconut, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg (which I remembered this time) then fold over all of the pastry and press it together to seal it.

Prick it with a fork to let the steam out, brush with milk and sprinkle with brown sugar, and bung that in the oven too.

And here’s the end result. It all looks pretty impressive and I bet it tastes even better even without the spices in the pie. I won’t be trying it this evening though because there’s still some apple crumble left.

Instead, the turnover was cut into 2 and put in the freezer, and the pie went in the fridge ready to start on tomorrow.

Rather like the time that I made a meat and potato pie when I was younger. I left the eyes in the potatoes so that it would see me through the week.

I’ll get my coat.

One thing that I mustn’t forget is my evening walk. I’m already up to 95% so i don’t intend to go far.

The NIKON 1 J5 and f1.8 18.5mm lens came with me so that I could have a little play around. I reset the ISO to “MAX 3200” rather than “MAX 6400” as the graining is too much, and stopped down a couple of stops to see what I could produce with that.

And f1.74 at 1/50 second and ISO3200 gave me this image. And for a hand-held shot, it’s quite reasonable. Joly France looks quite nice out there at the ferry terminal.

There have been much worse shots than this.

I’m wondering what else I can produce with this camera if I show some patience. Some good might come out of the enforced deprivation of the big NIKON D500

While you admire the rest of the photos of the storm there is something else that I mustn’t forget – and that is to go running.

And it’s a good job that I did those two-and-a-half runs yesterday because I only managed one and a half today. Not because of lack of willingness or lack of fitness, but because my first run down the rue du Roc was right into the teeth of a howling gale.

When I hit the slope of the hill about half-way or so along my course, it stopped me dead in my tracks and that was that. Luckily the return run along to boulevard Vaufleury was with the wind so that was a lot easier and I managed an extra 20 metres or so.

So now I’m back home and in the warmth.

There are tons of photos to edit and lots to write, so i doubt that I’ll be able to finish it tonight. But I’ll do what I can before I go to sleep and whatever remains to be done, I can finish it all off tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining of course. This was a good day out and a really good walk around – more than enough to tire myself out. If I do fall asleep while writing out my notes, it will be for a very good …

ZZZZZZZ

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: grand marée

Tuesday 30th March 2021 – HAVING HAD A …

Monday 1st March 2021 – DYDD GWYL DEWI HAPUS.

Saturday 17th October 2020 – WE CALLED IT …

Wednesday 8th April 2020 – I DONT KNOW …

Monday 6th April 2020 – OHHH NOT ANOTHER …

Thursday 2nd April 2020 – I’VE JUST HAD …

Monday 30th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

Sunday 29th March 2020 – AND IF YOU …

Saturday 28th March 2020 – WHAT A WASTE …

Friday 27th March 2020 – AND IF YOU THINK …

Thursday 26th March 2020 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

Friday 13th March 2020 – LOOK AT THIS …

Thursday 12th March 2020 – I WAS ALMOST …

Wednesday 11th March 2020 – IT’S THE GRAND MAREE TODAY!

Sunday 8th March 2020 – I DON’T KNOW …

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