Tag Archives: great escape

Sunday 24th january 2021 – I’M NOT DOING …

… very well with this idea of getting up early, am I?

Obviously it’s Sunday so we don’t really expect all that much but nevertheless 11:30 is rather exaggerated and it doesn’t bode very well for my 04:30 start. At this rate I can see myself not bothering to go to bed and sleeping on the train on the way to Paris.

And it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve done that either as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

So after the medication, the first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.

To my surprise, there was something on there FROM YESTERDAY so I transcribed that and added it into the entry, and then turned my attention to last night’s voyage.

And this was confusing because I was watching this action exactly as I would have done had I been watching a film – in fact it was a film although I’ve no idea as to the circumstances under which I was watching it – whether in a cinema, on TV or something like that. But it was certainly a film that, in my dream, I’d seen before.

It was something like a scene from The Great Escape or La Grande Vadrouille last night with 2 men and a woman escaping from the Germans. They ended up hiding in a forest and next morning they set out again. I remembered this film in my dreams – a film that inspired me about the Auvergne (although how I ended up in the Auvergne is nothing to do with any film at all) because the forest where they had been hiding was just like what I thought the forest in the Auvergne would be. It’s all very confusing. So they set off. The woman and a man set off together and another man walked on his own. he must have found a lift because he disappeared off the scene. The man and a woman went on walking and an old grey Albion lorry went past, one from the late 60s with an early Mandator TG4 cab actually and nothing to do with World War II, a left-hand drive one as well. Eventually they were picked up by some old woman who led them into town. They walked past a café and there sitting in the window was their friend who bore a very strong resemblance to Michel de Berg (and what’s he doing putting in an appearance here?). He left the café and followed them into the town centre. They went into a place and a fight broke out, I’m not quite sure why. The old woman was immediately suspicious of the two people whom she had brought in but anyway she went downstairs and the two people, the man and the girl whom he’d taken with her, they were already downstairs with the 3rd guy and were sitting at some tiny table tucked into the corner somewhere right by the toilet. When the girl came out of the toilet there was a whole rush of people trying to go in. The 3 people sat down and tried to order something. They had ordered a coffee but they were trying to order something to eat as well.
But somewhere along the line I remember myself with other people and I had two jars, one half-full of instant coffee and the other half-full of brown sugar. To save on the jars I suggested mixing the two together and I said that surely no-one will mind as they all take sugar in their coffee. And then I realised that I myself don’t take sugar.

There was a break in the middle of all this for a bowl of nice hot porridge, and then I didn’t do very much at all except attend to some outstanding paperwork.

There was the usual afternoon walk of course so out I went. And I rather wish that I hadn’t.

A long while ago I’d read a report on the Tay Bridge Disaster which said that the gusts of wind were so strong that men had to walk along the bridge on their hands and kneed to avoid being blown over, something that I didn’t take seriously at the time.

But having been out in the wind that was blowing this afternoon I can well believe it. I was being lifted off my feet and pushed along in any direction other than that in which I wanted to travel, so strong was the wind. I had never experienced anything like it.

That’s the reason why there were no photos from the northern side of the headland. It was just totally unsafe with a cliff edge nearby in a gale like this.

storm sea wall port de Granville harbour Manche Normandy France Eric HallInstead you had to wait until I went around the south side of the headland before I could unleash the NIKON 1 J5.

You might not think that this is nothing about which to become excited but actually we are in the lee of the strongest blasts of the gale. And while the sea is only “moderately wild” it’s still impressive enough but doesn’t do justice to the actual conditions that we were experiencing.

If the wind were to shift round a few degrees and the tide were to come in any more, then we would be having some really interesting scenery down there on the harbour wall.

storm le loup baie de mont st michel Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallYou’ll have more of an idea of what we were up against in this image here.

You can just about make out Carolles and Jullouville in the distance through the heavy clouds and the rainstorm (did I mention that it was pouring down with rain too?) but you can’t see very much further beyond there. And, of course, the farther out you go, the rougher the sea becomes as it’s out of the shelter of the headland.

It was one more haggard, drowned rat that made its way back to the apartment and the mug of hot coffee was extremely welcome. And while I was drinking it, I prepared my pizza base for tonight’s tea.

While the pizza was cooking I tidied up, backed up the computer and packed my bags. I’ve probably forgotten loads of things but that’s just too bad.

The pizza was delicious of course and then I had a shower and changed my clothes. I’m going to bed tonight fully-clothed in the hope that I can just fall out of bed and hit the road tomorrow morning. I am not looking forward to this one little bit.

Saturday 15th August 2015 – NIGHTMARE AT DORVAL

We had another “sleep of the dead” last night – this change of air must be doing me good. So after a shower I went off to see if my room rate included breakfast, but of course it didn’t. Whatever was I thinking of? Breakfast is another 11:00CHF. It’s a good job that I picked up those bread rolls last night.

view from bedroom window ibis budget hotel glattburg zurich airport switzerland On my way back to my room though, I couldn’t help but admire the view from the window right outside my door. I thought that I could hear aeroplanes close by.

So in a minute, I’m off back to the airport even though there is hours before my flight. I might find a power socket somewhere that I can plug into – there are none here of course.

The tram came pretty quickly (so quickly that I forgot to photograph it) and the journey was quite simple. And while I was travelling to the airport, I came to a conclusion. My really bad experience last night was caused by nothing more than my lack of preparation – and the hotel can take most of the blame for this (just for a change).

Had it been clear in the hotel’s publicity that there was no shuttle to the hotel (but trams 10 and 12, and bus 510 pass in front of the hotel and a 24-hour bus pass can be obtained … etc), that breakfast was 11CHF extra, and that a Swiss adapter was needed for the electricity, then I would have been prepared, and my stay there would have been quite acceptable, instead of the totally chaotic mess.

But to give you one idea of the hotel, the coffee machine in the hotel sold at 3:00CHF. The same machine installed by the same company selling coffee to a captive audience at the airport was selling at 2:50CHF.

Negotiating the maze that is the airport is by no means easy, and we had another pig-ignorant security guard who doesn’t understand the word "please". All these people who were kicked around and bullied at school when they were kids have really been able to wreak their revenge on society with the massive expansion of what is laughingly called "security". The place was totally packed with people too

duty free shop at security check in zurich airport switzerland But on thing will tell you all that you need to know about the mentality of the Swiss – the "security" screening decants you straight into a huge duty-free shop.

And the number of people wandering around the airport carrying "duty-free" carrier bags shows that this shameless selling technique really works. It would probably work even better at the other side of the security check-in too, especially if it were to sell tranquilisers to calm the nerves (and pickaxe handles to deal with the security staff).

swissair airbus 330 300 zurich airport switzerlandI’m here watching them load up my plane. It’s an Airbus A330-300. And what’s more, I’ve even found a plug that will charge up my laptop.

In fact it didn’t take too much finding – rows and rows of empty seats all over the airport but just one row every now and again with hordes of people congregated around it

Boarding the plane was straightforward and, much to my surprise, the plane seemed to be almost new. Luxury wasn’t the word and the flight over to Montreal, although the longest that I’ve been on to date, was very comfortable. My meals were excellent too. The entertainment was not really my choice – I was even offered the chance to see The Great Escape
– however it wasn’t Christmas so I didn’t bother. Instead, I had Shaun the Sheep, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
.

One downside of the flight, nothing to do with the company of course, is that my neighbour’s idea of personal hygene was even less than my own.

With a window seat, the views outside were superb. With the airport being busy, I’ve never seen a queue like this of aeroplanes lined up in the queue waiting to take off. It was like the M25 at rush hour with all of them here.

The plane in front of us was something quite big and we had a wonderful view from right behind of it taking off. It’s probably the most impressive sight that I’ve ever seen, and there wasn’t much room between the tail of the plane and the ground. You can understand why so many tail strikes are recorded.

Having flown over a great big pile of tundra, we hit the St Lawrence River right at Sept Iles, and I recognised it immediately from the air.

alouette aluminium smelter sept iles quebec canadaThe bay itself was easy to identify, with its seven island and a pile of big ships anchored there, but what gave the place away was the huge Alouette aluminium smelting works and the port facilities that I’d seen in 2012 on my trip up the coast.

I’d wanted to see them from inside, but failing that, a view from the air is good enough.

lafarge quarry highway 132 montreal quebec canadaAnother thing that I have mentioned in the past are the huge LaFarge quarries on the outskirts of the city. They are not very easy to photograph from outside, as I had discovered once when I had driven past them, due to all kinds of fencing, lack of parking and so on.

However, here we were this afternoon, flying right over the top and here I was, sitting by a window seat. This was far too good an opportunity to miss, wasn’t it?

unacceptable passenger delay pierre trudeau airport montreal quebec canada 15 august 2015But don’t get me started on the ariport and Immigration, will you? Every day, during the mid-afternoon, about 20 long-haul jets arrive at Pierre Trudeau Airport, Montreal. If they are all full, that’s about 6,000 passengers (plus however many come in from other destinations).

The Canadian Government’s response is to have just FOUR (and for a short while, just THREE) immigration officers on duty.

My ‘plane was about 8th in, and I had a wait of 2.5 hours. I feel really sorry for the people who came in near the end and who were stacked up on the balcony because the immigration hall was full. Nowhere to sit, no water to drink, not possible to visit the bathroom. I could go on and on … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed.

Luckily I had some good music to keep me company, and that always calms me down. But finding, once through Immigration, that all of our suitcases had been taken off the carousels and dumped on the floor (and no-one knew where they were), and discovering that I’d left my cap on the ‘plane too, and I was off again, wasn’t I?.

Luckily the hotel bus was already there so I had to take my leave of my delightful companion with whom I’d been spending a little time just recently since I encountered her in the queue and we drove the half-mile to my hotel down at the end of the runway.

Having checked in, next task was to hit the city, and there’s a bus stop right outside the hotel. The bus 202 took me from here down to the Metro at DuCollege, and the metro took me to Snowdon where I made a stunning discovery – an Indian restaurant. From Calcutta, they are, but it was the nicest Indian meal that I had had outside Stoke on Trent. Beautiful, it was.

Bad news, though, is that my little ice-cream place on the Cote-des Neiges has closed down. A tragedy! So I had to make do with some mandarins from the outdoor office.

halifax nova scotia school buses parked up cote de liesse montreal quebec canadaGetting back from the town is not quite so easy – I have to go miles to find an overpass across the Cote-de-Liesse, but I came across some nefarious, nocturnal dealings here. There’s a whole pile of school buses, all from Nova Scotia and all on temporary licence plates, parked down the road. The drivers are, apparently, staying in my motel.

It seems that they are all time-expired (you can only use school buses for a limited number of years) and are being traded in for new ones, to be driven back to Halifax.

And back here, 22:00 (04:00 in real time), I just crashed out. And that was that.

PS- my phone number seems to be working, much to my surprise. It’s the same three figures as the last 4 years, but then 740-6186. If you don’t have the first three numbers, send me a message.

Friday 1st January 2010 – I’m blogging early this evening.

Yes, I won’t be up much longer as I’m going to have an early night – I’m shattered. Last night’s major revelling kept me awake until all of 00:45 before I crashed out, and I had a leisurely morning in bed until about 10:00. So I’ve no idea why it is that it’s just after 22:00 and I’m ready for bed.

It’s not as if I’ve done very much either. I’ve managed a stroll across to the barn to check on things over there but that involved dodging a deluge of snowy rain that’s been falling all day. Apart from that I’ve been up here doing not very much at all.

Christmas is of course not complete without watching “The Great Escape” on television. And for me, New Year always involves watching old westerns on DVD. You may recall that I bought a copy of John Wayne’s Fort Apache the other day but it wasn’t that I was watching. In Brussels at the Media Market in April I bought a boxed set of vintage westerns from the 1940s and 50s – 9 old hand-coloured “forgotten classics” and so I’ve been watching Vengeance Valley, Abilene Town and The Bells of San Angelo this afternoon.

The Bells of San Angelo is a “Roy Rogers and Trigger” western featuring a whole pile of singing cowboys. It’s as cheesy as anything you can imagine and I’m not sure whether, looking at it from today’s perspective, you could distinguish it from anything that Mel Brooks might put out. I’m not sure who might have ever considered it as being anything like a “serious” western but we are talking of the days before the idea of a parody had ever been set into anyone’s minds and when people were still scratching their heads trying to figure out what Hellzapoppin’ was all about.

On the other hand, Vengeance Valley is a much more interesting film. The plot revolves around an unmarried mother giving birth to a child out of wedlock and how much of a risque topic was this for that period? Especially as the film treats her with sympathy and reviles the doctor who refuses to treat her until he “has a request from the father”. But it’s quite interesting from my point of view as the film opens with a narrative about the loneliness of being high up in the mountains with nothing but the eerie wind whistling through the pines. Now have a read of this page that I wrote in 2002.

The prize for the most significant film however nust be given to Abilene Town. It’s an early Randolph Scott film and features a conflict between homesteaders and the cattle-barons. it introduces the concept of the “good” and “bad” sides of the main street – an idea that was developed in Kirk Douglas’ Gunfight At The Ok Corral. What is even more interesting is that there is a scene inside a music hall with a dancer and chorus line and as soon as you see it you will immediately say Blazing Saddles. Not only that, the film ends with a confrontation between the pacific citizens and rowdy cattle hands, just as in the aforementioned. And when towards the end of Blazing Saddles Cleavon Little invokes the name of Randolph Scott, it all becomes clear and you know precisely on which film Brooks based much of Blazing Saddles.

Not only that, in another one of those moments that can only be described as coincidence, I mentioned the music hall scene, that was absolutely horrendous, and a perusal of the full cast list reveals that the choreography (if that is what it was) was by Sammy Lee. No wonder he only lasted a handful of games as manager of Bolton Wanderers if that was the best that he could do.

And there are three items of news that have caught my eye today. Firstly, relating to the mysterious affair of the underwear bomber, we have an announcement from the UK Government. Now who reading this blog is surprised? Of course you will be saying that the British Government had no connection at all with the supposed detonation or not of this weapon (although if course anything is possible in this modern age) but you can see that they cannot pass up an opportunity to remove some more civil liberties from their citizens. What do you do if you need a gipsy’s towards the end of your flight? Of course the Brits will take it lying down as always – no-one in the UK has any backbone any more. It reminds me of the OUSA Executive Committee meeting when they learnt that I had been elected to a position within their august body, and a shiver ran round the whole meeting looking for a spine to run up.

But you’ll note that the UK Government targets Yemen in its prognostications. Those ideas are developed further elsewhere. So having targeted Iraq and having a good go at Iran they are now having a go at a third state in the area. No wonder the whole of Islam feels under threat from the west. All they really need to do is to have a good go at Syria, which will no doubt be forthcoming in early course, and they will have ringed and surrounded the chief culprit in the whole of the Al-Qaida network – namely Saudi Arabia. Of the 19 hijackers of September 11th, 15 were Saudis. They were trained by a Saudi, led by a Saudi and financed by a Saudi (who just happens to be a big pal of the Bushbaby’s daddy) and so the western world invaded …. errr …. Afghanistan. Of course with the west getting half of its oil from Saudi Arabia it was never likely to tackle Al Qaida and Bin Laden on their home territory in case Bin Laden’s dad, the fourth-richest man in Saudi Arabia, cuts off the western supply of oil. And as more and more of Iraqi oil is sold to the likes of China and Angola, then the west’s dependency on the spiritual home of Al Qaida for its oil is not likely to end any time soon.

Thirdly, it appears that the UK National Health Service is about to collapse underneath the weight of the drunks and binge drinkers in the country. So sozzled has British society become that the Brits are totally shameless about it. Someone on a certain Social Networking site not so long ago posted with pride that she didn’t remember anything after 11 o clock on one particular and woke up next day at 1:30 in the afternoon still in her clothes and shoes, so she must have had a good time, and she can’t wait to go out and get wrecked again. In fact so sozzled is the UK right at this moment that the answer is staring them in the face and they are too p155ed to see it. All you do, to solve the crisis is to put an extra 50p tax on the price of an individual drink, or £4:00 on the price of a bottle, and give all the extra tax raised to the NHS.

Problem solved.

Mnd you, knowing the NHS as I do, what they will do with the money is to engage thousands of extra consultants to advise on how to spend the money, and when they send in their bills the total will be about exactly the amount received, so nothing at all will reach the front line and the NHS will be back where it started.

No surprise there.