Tag Archives: half blood prince

Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

… for tea tonight was actually quite good.

There’s room for improvement of course but bearing in mind that this is the first one that I’ve made since I was living in Reyers more than 25 years ago, it was by no means disappointing.

There wasn’t enough filling, but that’s a minor problem. There’s enough food left nevertheless to make two more meals so it’s just as well that it worked.

What I did was to put some lentils in the slow cooker and slowly bring them to the boil. Then they were rinsed and put back in with clean water and some basil, oregano and tarragon. Mind you, I almost forgot to rinse them and had to leave my comfortable bed to do that.

Later on this afternoon I added some bulghour and later still, because there was still plenty of water, I added some porridge oats to soak it up and stiffen the mix.

At teatime I fried an onion and garlic with more of the herbs, added my mix from the slow cooker and some tomato concentrate, then layered alternate layers of pasta sheet and my cooked mix, topped it off with a thick cheese sauce and baked it in the oven, and away we went.

During the night I went away too. So much so that for a change just recently I wasn’t up before the alarm. It awoke me with a start when it went off but I didn’t hang around at all in bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone notes. And I really Had been away. Back at Hogwarts at one point too during the night with HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE seeing the kids at their dance. Ron had split up from Lavender Brown. There was another girl there who was sulking for some reason or other. Ron went to ask her to dance but she replied “they aren’t playing our tune”. All her friends told him to leave her alone. Just then the music started to play it so a couple of people went to dance her and missed. She moved away. I don’t know what happened to Ron and this girl then but Hermione was there dancing with someone whom I didn’t know when the dance floor collapsed. They carried on dancing and it looked as if they would dance into the ladies’ lavatory. Someone just coming out of the door said to hermione “do you want some paper as well?”. It all was very strange.

Back in Harry Potter again later and there was something about spying on someone’s house. It was very difficult to do. There was a fallen tree with its branches and we had to hide ourselves in the fallen tree’s branches to do it. We piled into a car and set out to drive. There was a lot of traffic and I was weaving in and out of it and almost had a collision with someone. They went in front of me and put their brakes on to slow down so I did too. We had a slow drive with all the traffic on the road. We came to Barbridge where there was a fallen tree in the middle of the road. I said to the others “lock your doors and hang on because this is a trap” thinking that someone had cut down the tree for it to fall across the road to stop us and ambush us when we left the vehicle to see what was happening.

Later still I’d seen an AC Cobra for sale in the local newspaper so Laurence and I went round to see it with Roxanne. It was somewhere off nantwich Road in Crewe so we eventually managed to find the house. We walked straight into the house without knocking. We found the car in a downstairs room covered by a blanket. First of all my taxi detector wouldn’t work. Then I realised that an AC Cobra wouldn’t have been a taxi anyway. Found the guy and his wife sitting in a room next door, not in the least perturbed by the fact that we were in their house. We went back into the room and began to look around at this vehicle. He told me that he wanted £30,000 for it, which I thought was cheap. But that turned out to be the deposit to take it for a test drive – it was really £250,000. There was no way that I could afford that. I pretended that I was interested and got down to look underneath it. It was quite badly rotten around the edges. I thought to myself “he’s asking for a lot of money for something in this kind of condition. Even if I were to buy it, I didn’t have the mobility to crawl around underneath it with welding tackle etc these days. There’s no way that I could consider this vehicle” but I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d had a good look around to find out what else was wrong.

I was back in this dream again later on and we were leaving. Down at the bus station was a bus going to Mold. We were saying our goodbyes but the driver prepared to close the doors. This woman and I ran to the door and scrambled aboard. We had a look for the guy who was with us but he wasn’t on board. By now the bus had set off. I thought “never mind. We’re on here and Roxanne is on here”. I asked for two and a half to Mold. he smiled and said “I’m not going to Mold”. “Well, take us to wherever you’re going”. He gave me two and a half tickets which came to 11/-. The first thing that I did was seeing as I had some money ready I said that I’d give him the shilling but it was a £10 note. Then I had a 10/- note for him. He looked at me and asked “is that correct?”. I suddenly realised that I’d done, took the £10 note back and gave him 1/-. I went to sit down and to worry about contacting the other guy later. There were 2 boys on the bus who made some kind fo remark about me handing over a £10 note and how did I spot it from that distance? I replied “when you reach a certain age you don’t look at the money, you can smell the difference between the notes.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent on Day Two of my 2017 trip to North America and the page is practically finished. However, we did hit an obstruction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one thing always leads to another, and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

The subject of Marguerite de Bourgeoys cropped up on that web page.

She was a big friend of Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal and she was on one of the very first emigrant voyages to Nouvelle France where she occupied herself with spiritual works and the welfare of the filles du roi, the young girls from orphanages who were sent out to become brides for the soldiers who remained there to settle after having been discharged from the army.

They both came from Troyes which was on my shuttle route between Virlet and Brussels so on the very last time that I drove the route, instead of doing it overnight as I usually did, I took a whole week and visited every place of interest that I could find along the way.

One of the places that I visited was the family home of the Chomedeys and I found all of my photos. But seeing as Troyes is such a beautiful old town I took dozens of photos of many old house and I couldn’t remember which one was his.

No trace of the notes that I made, which was a surprise – especially as they were written up from the following day all the way back to Virlet.

In the end, I had to dive back into the bowels of the back-up disk and find the dictaphone recordings from the journey and re-transcribe the notes for the relevant day and mate them to the photos.

That’s another project that I’ll have to do one of these days. The road between the Belgian border at Rocroi and down to Nevers is one of the most beautiful and historic in all of France. I had a plan that when I was stuck for something to do (whenever that might be) I’d pick a long road like that, explore it thoroughly and write a book about it.

The TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY was done in 2010, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and I’m doing Version 2.0 even as we speak.

After that, I wrote a pile of stuff about Lanouiller and de Bécancour’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montreal and the city of Québec and all the way down the “Forgotten Coast” as far as it’s possible to go.

The road between Rocroi and Nevers was to be the third of the trilogy but ill-health and feeling sorry for myself somehow conspired to get in the way of all of my plans.

Someone else for whom I was feeling sorry for was the physiotherapist. He came by at 17:00 to tell me that he’s busy and will be back at 19:30. That was a major inconvenience, disrupting my evening like that and I made sure that he knew.

Rosemary phoned me at lunchtime and we had another one of our marathon chats that go on for ever. She’s being swept up by the turn of events and it’s not easy for “a stranger in a strange land” to deal with some of the things that go on. It’s not something that bothers me too much because I couldn’t care less, but Rosemary is much more sensible and focused than I ever am.

After she hung up, I went for a shower to clean myself up ready for His Nibs to come round and put me through my paces

As I mentioned earlier, tea was delicious. And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have to nip into town which will do me good. And then I have to carry on with Canada 2017 and sort out the mess that will be Trans-Labrador Highway Version 2.0

So once I finish that I’ll have to do Rocroi-Nevers next, then carry on with the Arctic stuff, go back and carry on with the Emigrant Trails stuff, organise the Grand Banks trips and probably 1000 other things too.

Never mind anything else – I’m far too busy to die right now.

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Monday 29th May 2023 – I’M GOING TO HAVE …

… to stop watching all of these HARRY POTTER films.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, while I’m eating my tea I’ll be watching a film on the DVD, gradually working my way around my collection of DVDs. Right now, the film that’s on the machine is HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

And so during the night I had to go to a wizards’ conference to learn something or other on a course. Wondering how I was going to go there, someone turned up and said that they’d take me. They had an umbrella that was like a helicopter blade. I hung onto them, they hung onto the helicopter blade and off we went. We flew past the house of someone whom I knew. I always suspected that they were rather strange and there were 5 people hovering over their house on broomsticks. I waved. Suddenly we came down to earth. The guy said “I’m going out of my area now so you have to get off and walk”. I asked “how go I come back?”. He replied “you come back to this spot and I’ll pick you up”. “So how do I come back here?”. he replied “you could always call a taxi”. I said goodbye to this guy and set off to walk. When I arrived at this place they were burying a cat that had been hit by a car. I thought that the collar might have special magic powers so I was wondering if I could have it. But they were obviously intent upon burying the cat wearing the collar so it was probably inappropriate to ask. They carried on with their plan to deal with the cat while I prepared myself for this weekend course.

It’s actually a film that I remember very well, having been to see it with Marianne when it was doing the rounds of the cinemas. And I remember thinking, when Dumbledore took out his wand to clean and rebuild Professor Slughorn’s house, that I would give all that I own and more besides to have a wand that would do that

A couple of weeks ago, it was the 10th anniversary of her voyage to meet her maker. It’s bizarre how quickly time flies. It seems like only yesterday but a lot has happened since then.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, and in particular, about today.

It all started off with me once more raising myself from the dead before the alarm went off. And once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I made a start on the radio stuff that I’d dictated on Saturday night.

There wasn’t any rush today so it took a while, but in the end I finished up with two more programmes completed. There are only notes for two more, and then I can begin work on the next batch. But I’ll have to take it easy because I’m now 9 months in advance of broadcasting. I know that I want to be well ahead, because you never know when the bell might toll for me, but this is becoming rather excessive.

Being that far ahead isn’t really a good idea. I remember back in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I wrote and recorded a programme about Chris Squire, only for him to shuffle off this mortal coil the morning the programme was due to be broadcast. I don’t think that there’s been a radio programme rewritten as quickly as that one was.

Anyway, eventually I managed to finish the programme, despite the interruption from the nurse who came to give me my injection this morning.

One thing that I was going to do was to take out the rubbish to the bins but we have another hurricane blowing around outside. That’s the problem with living in what is one of the windiest places in Europe.

Mind you, it used to have its compensations. In this kind of weather I’d be out on the headland with the camera taking photos of the sea roaring over the sea wall into the harbour but these days I can’t even open the door of the building.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I’ve already mentioned one of them but there were still several others. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard the physiotherapist shout to me. I don’t know what happened there but there have been a few times here and there over the years that I’ve had this phenomenon of people calling my name when I’ve been asleep and it’s awoken me with a start. I’ve never worked out why.

But strange things happen when you are asleep. I knew someone who dreamt that he was awake, and when he awoke, he was!

Later on I had to take my overtime sheet to the supervisor to have it signed so that I could submit it for payment. She began to ask me all kinds of strange questions about my hours etc that really weren’t anything to do with overtime. Then she asked me about lunches. How did I cope with lunch?. I replied “every so often I’d go to buy some meal tickets and hand over a meal ticket when I picked up my lunch”. She said something like “your brother will buy a spaghetti with his lunch money. Why don’t you do that?”. I couldn’t understand what was the issue or why she was making such a fuss out of something like this. All I wanted was my overtime sheet signed and none of this had anything to do with that.

At another moment I made a start writing a humorous book about an estate agent as well during the night but I didn’t get very far with that unfortunately. And when I awoke I couldn’t remember any of what it was that I’d written in my sleep.

With what time has been left, I’ve been sorting through the notes for 2017. It’s going to be a very long and laborious effort because Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I travelled about 12,000 miles during those 5 weeks.

Right now I’m in Pictou in Nova Scotia on my way to see my niece’s daughter who was at University in Antigonish at St F-X.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And we had something of a calamity in that the pepper was too tall to fit in the air fryer. That’s something that I need to watch for the future. Frozen peppers wotk well enough in the air fryer but the microwave makes them sodden and the oven would take years for them to bake from frozen.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the disaster that it might have been, and there’s still plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll for tea tomorrow.

There’s no Welsh lesson tomorrow as Coleg Cambria is having a week off. I might do some revision for a change and then continue with my 2017 notes. I’ll be pushing on up the Cape Breton coast towards Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland.

And then I’ll be pushing off.

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Friday 21st February 2014 – I WAS WATCHING …

… Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince last night. And so consequently all through the night I was running around at Hogwarts.

Yes, three bad nights of sleep in succession – no surprise that I crashed out for a couple of hours when I returned home late this afternoon.

But as for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, that’s a perplexing film. It’s full of holes, more like a succession of scenes with no interlacing connection rather than being a continuous film.

Scenes start off at random in the middle of action, so you don’t know how the actors arrived at the situations and emotions that they are expressing.

I realise that you can’t cram 700 pages of novel into just 151 minutes of film, otherwise you’ll end up with something like One Eyed Jacks, where the original director’s cut ran to well over 5 hours, but nevertheless there was tons of stuff that was irrelevant that could have been left out, just as there was tons of stuff that was relevant that should have been included.

But two things came to mind during this film –

  1. If Professor Dumbledore were to put on the market the magic wand that he used to tidy up Professor Slughorn’s house, he would … errrr … clean up. I would give all that I had, and more, to own something like that where a simple flick of the wrist would finish the repairs here and have the place all spick and span.
  2. Ginny Weasley is ordinary, banal, boring even. Whyever didn’t Rowling develop a romance between Harry Potter and Luna? She has much more character and personality than poor Ginny and would have been an ideal foil for Harry to bounce his ideas around. She’s definitely my favourite character in the films and, ironically, when there was one of these apps on a social networking site to “answer 30 questions to find out which Rowling character you are”, I came up with Luna. No – I’m convinced – Rowling got it all wrong. The ideal partner for Harry Potter should have been Luna.

So once I had woken up and crawled rather unwillingly out of my stinking pit, I crawled even more unwillingly off to Marcillat-en-Combraille to record the rock programme for Radio Tartasse, and when Liz arrived we recorded the English-language information programmes.

From there, we went on to Liz and Terry’s fir an early lunch (and that car was still in the ditch after all this time) and then on to Gerzat and Radio Arverne for the other lot of programmes.

By this time I was about flaked out and so I didn’t even stop at Liz and Terry’s for a coffee on the way back. I managed a stop at the Intermarché to do my weekens shopping (save me going anywhere tomorrow) and that was about that.

But I need to find a proper sleep rhythm from somewhere.

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