… of this rubbish will recall some rather spectacular lie-ins just recently when there has been no alarm call in the morning and with not going to bed until about 02:30 this morning one could be forgiven for believing that we would have another one today.
However I think that a new record has been set today because I seem to have taken it to some rather extreme lengths. I don’t know what else you would call 13:55 for an awakening. All I can say is that I must have been really tired. It’s a good job that it was a Bank Holiday.
There’s no alarm tomorrow either because it’s a Sunday. I hate to think of what time it will be when I awaken.
Of course, with it being such a late start I’ve done absolutely nothing today. By the time that I’d had my medication and let it work, it was time for my afternoon walk.
As usual I wandered off to the end of the car park to look over the wall down onto the beach but instead today I was distracted by events out at sea.
Just offshore cruising along quite comfortably and slowly was Joly France. The holiday season must be well under way by now and with it being a Bank Holiday there are crowds of people about. The ferry company is thus making the most of it all by taking some of them for a lap around the bay to see the sights, whatever sights there might be.
We can tell from this angle that it’s the newer one of the two Joly France boats. The give-away is the shape of the window. On this one the windows are rectangular and deep whereas on the other one the windows are more square.
Having observed the activity out at sea, I turned my attention to the beach down below.
There are crowds of people down there this afternoon as you can see, even if, with the tide, there isn’t too much beach to be on. And I’m not surprised today because it was quite possibly the warmest day of the year so far. There was something of a wind as well but for a change it was a warm wind, rather like the Föhn Wind that you experience sometimes in the northern rain shadow of the Alps.
There’s something else that you can see in this photo that’s interesting, and that’s at the bottom-right of the photo. It’s a stone outlet pipe that drains the water from the car park and cascades it down onto the beach below. It’s pushed so far out so that the water from the drain will fall down clear of the stonework and wash the mortar out of the joints.
There was something moving that caught my eye out there in the English Channel between the Ile de Chausey and the mainland.
It was quite a long way out so there was plenty of time for me to walk to the little butte at the back of the lighthouse where there’s the best view of the Channel. Dodging the crowds on the path, because everyone in Normandy seemed to be out there today, I wandered off along to there to take a photo.
Bach here I could blow up the photograph, despite modern anti-terrorist legislation, and I could see that it’s the other Joly France boat on its way back from the Ile de Chausey. They have been quite busy today what with this and that.
Although the wind wasn’t all that strong today there was still quite a heavy rolling sea. I could see the waves breaking with some force onto the sea wall so I was keen to make my way round there to see what was going on.
First though I went across the car park down to the end of the headland to see what there was going on out there. And apart from the crowds of people around here and the people down on the lower path there wasn’t very much happening at all.
There was no-one fishing with rod and line off the rocks and there weren’t any fishing boats exploiting the resources of the bay today either so I wandered off along the path on the top of the cliff towards the harbour to see what was happening there.
Halfway along the path there’s a good viewpoint where you can see the waves breaking on the harbour walls.
The force of the sea isn’t as powerful as we have seen sometimes but nevertheless it was impressive watching these large, heavy waves come rolling in from the Atlantic. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … there is nothing between that sea wall and the North American coast several thousands of kilometres away so any storm out there will be picked up by the waves and brought to this very point.
But it was also quite interesting to see that the people on top of the harbour wall were taking absolutely no notice whatever of the waves breaking on the sea wall behind them
They were obviously much more interested in what was going on in the harbour so I wandered off down the path to the viewpoint over the harbour to see for myself.
The first thing that I noticed was that the diving boat was there. So there’s something going on right now. Then there are the couple of people on the lower quay underneath the fish processing plant doing something with what looks like a jetski.
At the back of the jetski is a pile of disturbed water and a load of bubbles, just as if a diver has gone down over there and that had caught my interest. I waited there for a few minutes hoping that if someone had gone down over there, they would come back up. But no luck with that so I don’t know.
While I was waiting for the diver (if indeed there was one) to come back to the surface I had a look at the chantier navale to see what was happening in there right now.
And we’ve had a change of occupancy once more in there today. At long last, after all this time up on the blocks in there, Aztec Lady has now gone back into the water. Her repairs, whatever they were, have now finished. There’s just the little fishing boat in there right now but I imagine that that will change over the next few days.
The diver didn’t resurface so that made me wonder whether I was right about that, but after a couple of minutes waiting I went on home for a mug of coffee ready for tonight’s football which was about to start.
With TNS having won earlier this afternoon, it was vital that Connahs Quay Nomads won this evening in order to maintain their lead at the top of the table. I was delighted that Andy Morrison had picked an attacking formation because at times the Nomads have been quite impressive going forward.
Caernarfon aren’t all that strong on skill but there is a really good team spirit there that keeps them in a mid-table place but unfortunately they were no match for the Nomads. They went a goal down quite early on and although they held out after that they didn’t ever really threaten the Nomads goal.
The situation changed dramatically after about an hour. Jamie Insall was through the defence with the ball with only Lewis Brass in the Cofis goal to beat. Brass came off his line to try to win the ball but missed by about half an inch and brought down Insall.
It was clear to me that Brass was going for the ball and it was 25 yards out, well-wide of the goal but nevertheless the referee brought out the red card. And all that I can say is that if that was a red card offence then many other referees are being far too lenient.
With Caernarfon down to 10 men and with a substitute keeper in goal, Andy Morrison’s answer was to take off a defender and bring on another attacking player and the Nomads simply overwhelmed the Cofis and scored 3 more goals.
They were easily the better side but 4-0 was rather flattering. But the championship now goes all the way down to the wire. It’s all on the final match of the season.
Eventually I managed to catch up with the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than enough, from today. I don’t know if I’ve dictated this but I was out on a hike with my rucksack, a nice, rural rolling countryside. I came into a village and there was another girl or woman there with a rucksack obviously hiking. She was pouring over a map looking for somewhere. One of the locals was trying to help her so I asked if she needed any help. She told me that she was looking for a certain place where she hoped to find a place to stay for the night. Where I was headed was a Youth Hostel so I told her about that and invited her to come with me to this place but she decided not to and carry on and try to find the place where she was going to be staying. This was another one of these dreams where there was this mountain pass that we’ve been on on several occasions either skiing or walking, the very tall narrow pass, very steep. I was thinking that it’s quite a climb up there and down the other side and if the Youth Hostel there doesn’t have any room I’m going to have to come all the way back and I didn’t really fancy that at this time of the afternoon. But it was this pass again that was quite interesting.
I was with a woman and we had a big pile of kids. We were in Caliburn going somewhere and we picked up this big fat woman, gave her a lift. Suddenly she turned round to be extremely nasty and started to overwhelm everything, giving orders, this kind of thing. My response to that would have been to hit the woman with a trolley jack handle and all of us clear off but the woman with me said “why don’t we wait until we’ve crossed the border and then we can do that and dump her”. The we’d set off to go and fetch food or something. Coming back we found that this woman was 100 yards or so away from the woman, me and the van so I got in the vans and shouted for the kids to run behind the van as they were only youngsters and can run really fast and the big fat woman couldn’t run at all. I went about half a mile down the road and pulled up there waiting for the kids to come along and join us.
Somewhere during the night I was in an aeroplane, 2 of us in a Spitfire 2-seater. We had a radar set and we were supposed to be looking for mines. We were chasing 1 particular contact which turned out to be in the flat hills of South America. We landed our plane and went to look where the radar had indicated and it turned out to be a puddle with a few fish in it. The person I was with expressed surprise that the radar was so accurate that it had managed to pick out fish in a puddle and not mines in an ocean. I noticed that this puddle was at the side of a lump of concrete and as I explored it trying to work out what it was the person with me said that it was probably some kind of hard-standing for the farmer to park his tractor when he was here. I was looking at how it dominated a mountain pass and thought that if you had a tank on this concrete its gun would be firing straight up the road so anyone coming over the mountain pass, this tank could pick them off one by one. The rise of the hill on the other side would prevent anyone coming up the pass from firing back until they came over the top of the pass when of course they would be in full view of this tank. The guy with me didn’t think very much of my suggestion but I was convinced that that was what it was. This was what the radar had picked up, not the fish in the puddle at the side.
What linked these two dreams together – it was the aeroplane dream first – was for some reason we had a wheel off the aeroplane and some guy came over to have a look at us. He said “ohh a Spitfire” and talking, had somehow climbed into the cockpit 2nd seat while I was changing the wheel. We must have had a puncture or something. He started to play around with a few things. I asked “what are you doing?”. He replied “I’m undoing the handbrake” and the aeroplane which had now transformed itself into Caliburn or a van or something started to roll back ever so slowly, but slow enough that I could still get the wheel onto the studs and start to turn the wheel nuts on. As it rolled back I knew that it wasn’t going to go far because there was a tree behind us. Sure enough the van rolled into this tree and there it came to a stop so I could finish putting on the wheel nuts on it. It was somewhere round here where this guy turned into this big fat woman and we turned into this van with these kids and I had this woman with me
So having done all of this I’m off to make the first mix of my sourdough fruit bread and then I’m off to bed. I’ve not been up and about for long and I’ve not done anything at all. But there are occasionally days like this. We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.
