… gesture.

One of my neighbours knocked on my door earlier.
“I haven’t seen you about for a good few days. I was wondering if you were Ok. Do you need anything?”

That’s what I call Solidarity. It’s what the world has been missing for the last 50 years. Let’s hope that if we learn anything from this world-wide dêbacle, it’ll be that Solidarity is a very important concept and that there’s always a place for it.

Not like – was it Ron Atkinson? – who said “there’s always a place for the Press. They just haven’t dug it yet”.

Even more surprisingly, I arose from my stinking pit as the first alarm went off at 06:00. I bet that you weren’t expecting that – I know that I wasn’t!

But the secret to that was that I had forgotten to put the ‘phone under my pillow and it was on the chair, making enough noise to awaken the dead. Rather like Peel’s “View Hulloo” I suppose.

Actually, I was already awake. I had awoken bang on the spot of 05:58 and I know that for a fact because I looked at the time on my fitbit.

So what all of that was about this morning, I really have no idea.

After the meds it was the dictaphone. I was with my father at a house and Claude had thrown away an old cooker but the cooking panel was better than the one in my house so I took the cooking panel out of the cooker and put it in the kitchen. It worked for a couple of days and then packed up, so we repaired it and it worked for another couple of days and then it packed up again, right in the middle of doing something, making a cup of tea I think. Of course it was a Saturday afternoon, wasn’t it? No chance of getting to the shops to replace it. And Bank Holiday Monday, so we were stuck. I had to get the old one out to put back in to last until the shops reopened. We were talking about it and I was thinking “yes, God, Claude never gave anything good away so that explains that. At the same time I had to take it out and dump it in my garden along with all of the other rubbish that was in there. It was really looking bad, my place and my father said that I ought to take some stuff down to the tip. I said that I would do as soon as the van’s empty but it’s full right now. He said “why don’t you take my van? Take some stuff in my van?”. I was surprised that he would let me because he was never really one for letting people take his vehicles. He started to remember the time that I’d borrowed his van in 1974 and I had a parking ticket, all that kind of thing. I was thinking “God, that’s 40-odd years ago and he’s still remembering that and still talking about it”.

After breakfast I started on the file digitalising again. And what a miserable session that was this morning. It took me ages to find four albums for which I could find everything that I needed. There were several where there were only two tracks, or three tracks or, in one case, nothing at all available and that was depressing.

Some of the stuff is pretty rare, I know, but I was expecting to do better than this. Like I’ve said before … “many, many times ” – ed … that fire at Universal Studios must have been devastating. I’m going to have my work cut out to deal with all of this stuff that I can’t find anywhere else, and I’ll certainly be doing the music industry a great favour when I’ve digitalised it all.

Despite the good start to the day that I had had, all of this nonsense took me almost up to lunchtime. What was even worse was that because of all of the issues I didn’t manage to do too many photos. I’m still inspecting the old Norse village at Gàsir just up the road from Akureyri. I’ll never be finished at this rate.

Nevertheless I cracked on and by the time I knocked off this evening (a somewhat later 18:15) I’d finished writing all of the notes for all of the radio projects as far as I could. That will be dictated tomorrow and I can crack on with editing it – I hope.

Tea was a falafel with steamed veg in a cheese sauce and it’s difficult to make a vegan cheese sauce when you’ve run out of the correct type of vegan cheese that you need.

No pudding tonight – simply because I made too much veg and I have to be careful what I eat.

When I’d finished the washing-up I went out for my evening run.

And with all of the vegetables that I had eaten, it was quite a struggle to run all the way up to the top of the hill and I was exhausted. Mind you, it was well worth it because there was a really beautiful evening sun.

There were quite a few people out there enjoying it. And no surprise either because it was slightly warmer tonight than it was yesterday evening.

The sun was going down quite nicely over the Ile de Chausey so I took another photo of it.

To try something different, I had a play around with the camera settings but it still didn’t give me the image that I wanted, which was a shame. It’s a bit of a disappointment really.

So on that note I exchanged pleasantries with another sun-watcher (from an appropriate social distance of course) and carried on with my run around the corner and along the cliff top.

Still the same four boats in the chantier navale so I had a look over at the ferry terminal.

Not that the ferry terminal will be doing much, but one of the Joly France boats – the older one, I think – and Chausiais are moored up there. Apparently, in answer to a question that I had posed a few days ago, there’s a freight service twice a week over to the Ile de Chausey.

No-one has said anything about passengers though, so I don’t know how they are moving about, if they are moving about at all, that is.

So I pushed on with my running. And while it was agonising tonight, I managed to complete all of my five runs.

One thing that I have noticed though, is that while I’m not pushing on the distances very much, my recovery time between each run (because I have to pause for breath) is reducing little by little.

And even when I don’t feel up to running, I find that I can still push on regardless and as long as it’s on the flat or downhill I can do it.

Just for a change, I thought that tonight I hadn’t seen a fishing boat out there and that they weren’t being allowed out.

However I did notice something moving right out to sea near the horizon so I took a speculative photo in order to blow it up (the photo, not the object) when I return home.

Sure enough, it’s one of the big fishing boats right out in the English Channel. So they are still going.

Anyway with a bit of luck I might be in bed before midnight. I’ve had a long day today and I haven’t even crashed out. That must be something of a record.

I wonder if I can keep it up.