Tag Archives: natalie

Friday 15th December 2023 – YOU HAVE PROBABLY …

… already guessed what has happened today.

At roughly about 11:40 when I was comfortably settled deep down in the Arms of Morpheus, the telephone rang.

"This is the hospital here in Paris. We’re doing our planning for next week. Can you come on Monday instead of Tuesday? You’ll still be staying for several days."
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we started off with Tuesday, and then it was already changed from Tuesday to Monday a few days ago, and then changed back again to Tuesday at a later date.
"I shall have to see what the taxi company has to say about it. I’ve messed them around enough with all of these cancellations and it is rather short notice"

And so I phoned the taxi company to chat to them about the situation. We had an “interesting and illuminating” discussion which eventually led to them agreeing to take me on Monday instead. The appointment isn’t until 13:15 which means leaving at 09:00 instead of 04:30 and hitting the rush-hour head on, so that might have helped to persuade them. And the lie-in will be useful for me too.

Having had the agreement from the taxi company I phoned back to the hospital and confirmed the situation. So that is that.

When the cleaner came round, we had a discussion about the situation, as we do.

With my usual air of optimism I added "well, it’s 16:00. Still plenty of time for a further change of plan"
"Not at this time of the afternoon. Everyone will be ready to go home" she replied.

And I must admit that I really did admire her confidence. Five minutes later the telephone rang.

This time it was the taxi company. "Would you possibly consider doubling up and sharing a taxi with someone else going to Paris on Monday, leaving at 07:00?"

So much for my lie-in then. But considering how they’ve been messed about by all of these changes to the programme, I have to show some bonne volonté I suppose. My cleaner hopes that it will be a belle blonde travelling with me, but my money is on a retired Bulgarian female weightlifter

They probably won’t say anything to the Social Security about the car-sharing and charge for two trips, but in that position I’d probably do the same too.

But anyway, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, I had a good play around on the guitar before going to bed, something that led me down another road to somewhere deep in the past.
"She moved her hips
And swayed in my direction
I thought we could make it yet
And beat the isolation
But in that gentle dark
We tore ourselves apart
Through fire and rain
Through wilderness and pain
Through the losses, through the gains
On love’s roller coaster train
I call your name"

So hauling myself out of the pit wherein lives the Black Dog, I hauled myself off to bed where I had another turbulent night. And although there was quite a lot going on, I didn’t have any special visitors.

When the alarm went off this morning I already had the bedroom light on and was just about to swing my feet out of bed, so effectively I fell short of an early start by a matter of a handful of seconds. Still, a miss is as good as a mile.

After the meds I came back in here to print off a justificatif de domicile – a certificate issued by the Electricity Board as proof of your occupation of your premises, and then transcribed the mountain of dictaphone notes. It seemed to have been “quantity” last night, not “quality”.

I started off busily organising my bread, dividing it into portion-sized helpings for the future when I awoke this morning. The ambulance had already come for me and there was something going on there too about organising a wholesale supply of food and daily helpings for different people but I wasn’t actually involved in what was going on down there. They’d just come to pick me up and at that moment I awoke.

And then I was doing my English homework at home. I had a list of words and had to find their equivalent in the second column of this list and then insert them in the correct place in the test that I was reading. It was about an American guy from the Mid-West who was finishing work and coming home. Some of the language in this text was extremely dubious so I wouldn’t read it out loud because we had a young girl staying with us. Then my father came home from work. He asked what I was doing so I explained. The girl explained a little too. My father then began to say things like “do they have an equivalent in there for ‘stripper’?” – words like that. As a matter of fact they did but I didn’t want to read them out because of the young girl. My father didn’t seem to care at all. We began to make tea. On the table, there were all kinds of stuff on this table that you wouldn’t believe. There I was with these hot dishes and there was nowhere to put them. I went to move some things out to the side but someone grabbed hold of it and began to use it. Someone else asked me if I wanted a slice of apple pie. That had been put on the floor because it was the only place to put it. This was in my opinion a completely unacceptable way that everything was just scattered about everywhere

Continuing on that dream later on, there was some of my mother’s cooking there and that was something of a mess. No matter how much I actually like hummus I decided that when my mother presented a bowl for the evening meal, I’d rather give it a miss.

My mother’s cooking was legendary, but for all the wrong reasons. When I used to go round to a friend’s house in Nantwich after school his German mother always served me up with piles of food. When I was in Munich with him last year, we talked about it and I asked him why.
"Don’t you remember?" he asked. "I stayed for tea once at your house. Only once."

To be honest, it wasn’t until I met Nerina that I began to eat well

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed it was a Monday morning and I was slowly preparing to go to work. Suddenly I looked at the time. It was 08:20. I had to rush around and find everything really as quickly as possible. I hadn’t even had a wash and probably smelt to high heaven but had to do the best that I possibly could. All the time there were the usual interruptions, people in my way, not being able to find anything. There was a discussion going on about why Manchester United hadn’t done as well as everyone had expected over the last couple of seasons so I had my three ha’pence-worth as I was going around. But I was really fighting a hopeless task and was nothing at all like ready when I realised that the bus had gone and that I’d be late for work. In a fit of exasperation etc I stormed into the kitchen, dropped my things onto the floor and said “this is it! I’ve missed the bus again! I’m not going to miss this bus again whatever happens”.

Believe it or not, I actually laughed in the middle of the dream when I dictated that. I’ve heard those promises before.

A short while later I had exactly the same dream again about preparing for work or for school. Exactly the same thought about never being late went through my head again with exactly the same response from my subconscious during the dream. I ended up storming off out of the room, bad-tempered. I spent some time doing some Welsh revision while I was waiting for the alarm to ring

While I was in Munich I’d gone to see something or other on the outskirts. When I was driving back I came to a roundabout where there was some evidence of bomb damage still – burnt-out buildings etc. I stopped and took the camera but I couldn’t find a good spec to photograph it, where I could fit everything in without the sun interrupting me. At one stage I was trying to cross the road when 3 BMC 1100s appeared one after the other and performed some kind of pirouette around me as I tried to reach the other side of the road

Finally I came across some people who had a Bristol Lodekka double-decker bus, a green one, in their barn in the centre of France. The destination blind on it read ROUTE 929 – LEEDS to OPORTO. They told me some of the story of the bus but not everything. We’d recently come to settle down there. Before leaving someone had given me a box of things with fish in it. I made a little pool for these fish but instead it turned out that they were some giant cormorant birds. They looked quite ridiculous sitting on my little pond. They, at least, one of them, could actually talk and I had some very interesting conversations with the cormorant about laying eggs and hatching, etc. But it was the bus in the neighbour’s barn that intrigued me. I’d love to know what it was doing and how it had ended up there when it should have been somewhere in Oporto

When the bus (the local one, not the 929 from Leeds to Porto) came, I clambered aboard, declining a lift from a neighbour because I have to push myself onwards on the bus whenever I can, and we set off for St Nicolas and on the way, the driver forgot to stop at the Ecole d’Hotellerie to let off the High School baking class

At St Nicolas the first stop was at the Post Office where, armed with my justificatif de domicile, I jumped through various complicated hoops in order to open a bank account.

So shortly I’ll have a bank card and actually be able to draw some cash at some point. As I have mentioned before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s not another cash point in the town accessible to me because I can’t climb back onto the bus afterwards.

It took so long that I didn’t have time for my coffee at the Carrefour but at least I have tomatoes and mushrooms and a few other things. I met the guy with whom I’d had a long chat the other day.
"A British guy who likes our bread and our coffee " he said. "That’s a rare sight"
"If I’d only wanted tea at four o’clock" I replied "I’d have stayed over there".

At the bus stop I had a long chat with a local guy also waiting for the bus, and then with a woman on the bus on her way to the doctor’s.

People are starting to notice me. I’m not sure that that’s a good sign.

Back here I had another chat with a neighbour and then climbed up the stairs to my apartment where I made my coffee and cheese on toast

Despite phone calls, the attentions of the cleaner and the occasional drift away into nothingness I finihsed off the radio notes that I’d started yesterday, and they are now ready for dictation, which I’ll do tomorrow night as usual.

Rosemary rang up too and we had another one of our lengthy chats that seem to go on for ever when we talk about almost nothing.

However, I have made an executive decision, and for the benefit of new readers, of which there are more than a few just recently, an executive decision is a decision that you make which, if it goes wrong, the person making it is executed.

And that is that I’ve decided what to have for Christmas dinner.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about making a vegan pie because I haven’t made one for ages. But this one is going to be different – I’ve ordered some puff pastry rolls.

Making pastry like that from scratch is difficult. You have to roll it out thin, coat is with oil, fold it over, roll it again, coat with oil, fold again ad infinitum. I can imagine exactly how mine would turn out.

However the LeClerc poverty-spec pastry rolls are vegan so that’s what I’ll use.

  • Put a cup of lentils in the slow cooker, cover with water and slowly bring to the boil.
  • When they begin to boil, drain them out and rinse them thoroughly, then put them back on the lowest heat with more water, plenty of herbs and spices and leave them overnight on the lowest heat
  • Next morning, cut up your tofu into small squares and fry with onion, garlic, mushrooms, whatever else you like and plenty of herbs and spices.
  • When they are nice and golden brown, tip in your lentils and stir it round, and then add a few spoons of oats to absorb the liquid and make a glutinous mass
  • Empty it into your pie case, add the top, brush with soya milk and bake until golden brown

As usual, any other suggestions and ideas are welcomed.

Tea tonight was salad, chips and some of those nugget things, something that went down really well.

So having finished my notes, I’ll carry on with the guitar for a while. I’ll have another go at trying to sing MOONAGE DAYDREAM while playing the bass.

At least I’m not the only one how finds it difficult. Grahame wrote that he doesn’t find it easy either. Maybe we ought to hold a “Ziggy Stardust” masterclass at some point.

But if anyone else wants to write and say “hello” or exchange ideas, there’s a link on the bottom right of the page. But if you use Gmail, I can’t reply to you.

In Google’s quest to take over the internet the company wants webmasters to embed its code into all minor domains and until I know why and what it does, I’m not putting it in mine. Consequently Google is blocking me from writing to anyone with a Gmail address.

Tomorrow I have no plans, but as usual, something will probably pop up to distract me. And then on Sunday, I’m baking bread and biscuits and a few other things besides, I reckon.

That means that I’d better remember to order some more vegan butter. I’m going through it at an alarming rate.

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Thursday 28th September 2023 – AS BARRY HAY …

… once famously said – "there’s one thing that I gotta tell you, and that it’s good to be back home".

And no-one was more relieved than me when I collapsed into my chair here with my mug of hot chocolate at 18:15 this evening.

It had been a very long day. I’d had a bad night and was actually up and about by 06:40.

After breakfast I had a shower to prepare myself for my departure at 11:00, packed everything away and made myself ready.

While I was waiting, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was in a railway station. There were two guys there with two ancient locomotives, a diesel shunter and a small diesel main line unit who had volunteered to come and help me at the stations When they arrived they parked up their locomotives, stepped out and walked down to meet me. They were immediately intercepted by some kind of Security who were unhappy for some reason and made them climb into their machines and drive away. At that point the SNCF service came along and offered to help me. I let them help me, and they asked some kind of questions , one of which was something like “what was I going to do for food at midday?”. I replied “I’d had a couple of people who had come to help me and they had probably brought something for me but you chased them away before they could even manage to talk to me so I don’t know now”. That rather upset them but I thought that it was correct to be true and honest with them.

After that I can’t remember who I was with now but the person was either male or female, I don’t know, had been engaged to make a cake for someone. The woman involved had come to see her to order a simple cake. They were there discussing styles and ideals etc. In the end the two of us and the woman and her friend, an elderly woman, rather plump, went for a walk and discussed it. We passed a lorry with a lorry-load of turf that was going to re-turf someone’s garden. I remember that I’d seen them when I was there last week ripping up the old turf so it must be the day for them. Our walk continued. The woman then said that she was going to have to try to find someone to make a quick cake for her because she had someone coming tomorrow. I said “what about an oil-based cake?”. She didn’t understand so I explained that it’s simply flour and sugar, oil and flavouring all mixed together. You pour it into a mould and then cook it. What I do with mine is to take it out, cut it in half, coat both halves with jam, stick it together and ice it. It’s really quite simple. Her friend, the old woman, looked at me and said “tell me, Eric, are you married?”. I replied “no I’m not actually” and her eyes lit up. I thought “I’m going to have a couple of problems here”. We ended up at a railway station and I’m not quite sure why or what we were going to do now that we’ve arrived.

And I’m impressed that I could remember a cookery recipe during a dream.

Finally I was with Nerina again. We’d been to see some friends in England. We were on our way back to the ferry. The girl whom we’d visited took us on a nice scenic route through the countryside then along the sea front all the way towards Dover and the ferry terminal. We were having a nice, interesting chat. At one moment Nerina tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to something huge in the bay. She asked “is that the American carrier?” because I’d heard a story that an American aircraft carrier was in the English Channel. I looked and sure enough, it was. I went to find my camera but I didn’t have it. I’d left it at my friend’s. I went to find my little Nokia phone but I couldn’t find that either. I realised that I hadn’t had that since I’d set the alarm the night before. I told her and she gave a great big sigh and said that we’d have to go home but you’ll miss your ferry. She was going on about inefficient people etc. I said “it’s not the first time that it’s happened to me. She dismissed it with some kind of shrug of the shoulders. Later on we were leaving Dover in the Jetfoil. It was moored in some kind of underground dock so when we boarded we couldn’t see very much. We boarded and they must have opened the gates at some time because suddenly the ship began to rock quite violently. It was reversed out to the Channel and shot off at a ridiculous speed across to arrive from: Dover in an hour’s time. It was really quite uncomfortable, the Jetfoil.

Just as I was about to depart I was pounced upon by a group of students who wanted to examine me, and then a series of blood pressure tests and so on, followed by a wait for the documents that I need. It was 12:45 when we finally left, with my neighbour having had to hang on for all that time.

There was no time to go for lunch but I’d grabbed a few bits off the lunch trolley so It wasn’t so bad. My neighbour helped me to my seat and then the train set off.

At Granville there were no taxis free so I took the bus into town and staggered down to the port for the bus to my place. But one of my neighbours came past in her car and gave me a lift, which was really nice.

She helped me up the stairs by carrying my backpack, and then I made myself a hot chocolate and came in here where I crashed out.

Later on I had a bizarre tea. For some strange reason I’d fancied ratatouille so I put a large potato in the oven, found a vegan burger and I actually did have a tin of ratatouille in the kitchen.

So now that everything is done, and the notes for the last few days are now on line, I’m going to bed to sleep for a week and not awaken.

But I bet that you’re dying to know about what has happened at the hospital.

They’ve found no major trace of the cancer in my nervous system, but there’s a slight swelling in several glands that might be a result of an infection. They are proposing a second series of transfusions which apparently may be dona at home, and then a return to the hospital in a month to see what’s happening.

At least, even if they can’t find the solution, they are quite prepared to keep on trying, and that’s always good news. We’ll have to see now how things unfold. But look out Paris! Here I’ll be coming again.

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Tuesday 26th March 2019 – I WAS WONDERING …

… why I was planning on having pasta for a change with my stuffed pepper. And so while I was preparing the pepper I decided on rice instead.

It wasn’t until I sat down to the pudding that I realised why. Rice as a main course followed by rice pudding was not really a good idea.

Last night, I was in bed by 22:00. And it was a rather restless night too, with me waking up on several occasions. I’d been on a few travels as well, some of which were quite interesting.

There was a whole pile of us and we’d been walking or something like that and we’d ended up in a really big shop. Eventually I found myself at the front of the queue and I ordered a pound of minced beef (and I’ve no idea why I would order that). The conversation then moved around to a discussion of Belgian trains. Someone shouted something at me and I couldn’t hear them properly and understand what they were saying, but it came out that they wanted to know the price of a train fare from somewhere. I replied that I could remember a certain station where we used to get on at one time – a station right out in the sticks and it cost us €18:00 to go to there. The most that I had ever paid to go anywhere on Belgian Railways was €22:00. This conversation then ended up as a length discussion about Belgian trains
Everyone has the right in post-Brexit Britain to be on the right-hand side of the road in queues and this is just one occasion where people were suddenly being confronted with all of everything that they had bought or collected and it needed to be sorted out and cars needed to be moved over to the other side of the road to be parked. It was all extremely complicated, and all for nothing. I remembered being in the south of Germany and falling over the back of a settee on the border and ending up in Austria on the other side of the settee – the seat bit (and what that voyage was all about, I have no idea at all).
A little later I was in the High Arctic again with Natalie and I was trying to get on board the ship, but I was totally unprepared. I had a couple of lockers and a bed inside a wooden hut. I was trying to pack my rucksack with things that I needed to take on board ship. With natalie being there I couldn’t get at the secret box of supplies because I didn’t want her to see it. Everyone was hurrying about and I was getting p155ed off and Natalie went off, so I started to stuff more things into my rucksack. She then came back and told me that someone had said not to forget about the ghetto blaster so I had to hunt that down and stuff that into the rucksack too. It was all quite chaotic and I was panicking. Everyone was assembling ready to go on board the ship and I was nowhere near being ready.
Finally I was out again somewhere sitting on a table talking to someone who had been on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour (but he hadn’t of course). He was an Inuit (although he wasn’t). We were talkig about the High Arctic and he was telling me that Nunavut had now become chair of the Arctic Council and how pleased he was about it all. We were talking about all kinds of things so I asked him if he was planning to go back on the Adventure Canada runs this year. he said that he wasn’t, so I then tried to get in touch with the Company to try to get myself on board the ship this year, but he didn’t seem to pick up on what I was saying, and I was really disappointed at that. I was trying to make him interested in what I was doing but he was more interested in telling me that they now had street lights out there in Nunavut so it was much safer to move around at night – you could see if there were any polar bears around. We ended up wandering off and I was talking about all of this to him but it wasn’t him at all but two other people. I said something about the fact that the people in there – indicating the building from where I had just come – weren’t al that interested, so that had them scratching their heads wondering what I was talking about. I came across a phone box by the Square in Crewe in the ice so I was trying to ring them but it was the wrong time of day, no-one was answering their phones. In the meantime I was planning to do some kind of radio programme on one of these internet radio stations where I could have a couple of people talking in Inuktitut while I played rock music.

Just for a change I left the bed quite early this morning and I was all set for a good day’s work.

I started off with a shower and a general clean-up. And a haircut too. It didn’t need it, but I want to keep it under much better control than I have been doing.

Following that, there were the dictaphone notes and I’m back now into mid-August. But there are plenty for the period from early Spring to then, including a whole voyage around central Europe, so this is going to be a rather long job. 358 files to be transcribed in fact, so it’s not the work of five minutes.

The next thing to do was to bring the blog up-to-date – at least, in recent times. I did all of the photos back until when I set out to Leuven.

All of that took me up to lunchtime.

This afternoon I started on the searchable photo database for September 2018 when I was in the High Arctic. Another hundred or so photos were indexed, but this took far longer than I intended because not only has it involved some research, I also had another closer look at some of them.

Basically, the editing that I did on board ship isn’t very satisfactory and now that I have a much better computer and a better graphics program, I can do far better than I did on board the Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and I’m planning to go back and do them all again.

Furthermore, with the better screen and higher resolution, I’ve been picking out bits of the photographs with interesting items that I missed. So I’ve been cropping those out and blowing them up – which I can do these days despite modern anti-terrorism legislation.

So there are a few more photos to merge back into the run of things now, and by the time that I finish there will probably be a few more too.

hang gliders place d'armes granville manche normandy franceMy walk around the headland this afternoon was a reasonably solitary one.

But not as solitary as it might have been because we were being observed from above.

It’s that kind pf the year when all of the hang-gliders come out. And there they are soaring up over the old barracks building. On eof these days I might have one dropping in for tea.

ships chantier navale granville manche normandy france But there have been changes in the chantier navale.

The big yacht, that might have been Spirit of Conrad has gone, as have a few of the other ones too, including Charles-Marie.

They’ve obviously finished what they were doing to them, but not to worry – it’ll be full again soon, I imagine.

old cars bedford cf caravanette granville manche normandy franceBut one of our old favourites has come back.

The ancient Bedford CF caravanette that appears here every now and again on a regular basis is back in its little hidey-hole.

One of these days I’ll go down there for a chat to the owner.

And I’ve solved the question about the strange annex to the house down there in the rue du Port. It seems that the plans include installation of a lift. So the space above will be for the machinery.

Tea was as I mentioned. And it was extremely delicious. And there’s enough stuffing left over for another one too.

The wind had risen for the evening walk. I was pretty much alone there too and I didn’t hang around all that long either.

So I’ve had my cocoa for supper and now I’m off to bed. I had an enormous wave of fatigue later in the afternoon and ended up curled up asleep on the chair for 20 minutes.

I really need to have a decent sleep one of these days, and I do hope that it’ll be soon.

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Saturday 15th September 2018 – LAST NIGHT’S SLEEP …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… was probably the best one yet. In bed at 23:15 and flat out until the alarms went off at 06:00. High time that I had a decent sleep like that.

And I was away on my travels too – off once more to the High Arctic with a couple of the Inuit people on board the ship – and on several occasions too. But I have no idea where I ended up and what I did while I was there. It’s all evaporated completely out of my mind.

It was something of a stagger into breakfast this morning, and I shared my table with a couple of people from Singapore, now living in British Columbia. And I also had a good chat with the maitre d’hotel, to find out that we both shared the same opinion about something or other.

Back in my room I started to prepare Strawberry Moose and myself for our trip ashore to Uummannaq. This is a small town of about 1500 or so inhabitants, and His Nibs is looking forward to it as there is to be some kind of presentation involving the kids of the local orphanage.

If ever there was a day where I felt less likely than moving, I’ve no idea when it was. I crashed out on the bed and for two pins I would have stayed there all day. But I forced myself to move and made my way to the zodiac with Strawberry Moose.

I’m glad that I made the effort because it was all totally beautiful. The ride out there and back as well as the time on shore.

I found myself in Mike’s photography group and he gave us quite a few little tips (many of which I knew already), and then we went off to photograph certain settings that he suggested. And I probably took over 200 photographs in all.

Some of them were quite miserable but others came out fine. And patience was definitely a virtue in several cases. In one particularly noteworthy occasion, I waited for a husky to position himself perfectly, and he was immediately joined by his wife and offspring and it all worked out perfectly.

We all trooped off to the entertainment where a group of girls from the Orphanage entertained us (most of the boys were helping out at the fishing station). The place was crowded, the light was difficult and it took me a while to set up the camera how I wanted it, given the conditions. Usually I like to be in a venue beforehand to size out the light.

Condensation on the telephoto lens didn’t help much either.

And that was worthwhile too because I fell in love with one of the girls. She had the most beautiful smile that I have ever seen in the whole of my life. I would have taken her home with me in a heartbeat.

She could sing and play the guitar, and had written a few songs. And while I was listening to her and watching her smile, I remembered Vaino Tanner’s quote about Inuit girls from his 1944 book “Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador” concerning his expeditions on 1937 and 1939,

  1. the Inuit girls are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
  2. they are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
  3. they have an extremely sensual nature

I always wondered how Vaino Tanner discovered that last little fact, and I was interested in doing a little scientific field research into the subject myself.

I had to wait for a good half an hour for her to get into the correct position, for her colleagues to get into the correct position and to give me one of her beautiful smiles but I FINALLY took the photo that I wanted.

And it worked so spectacularly that it is definitely THE photograph and I have set it as my desktop image on the travel laptop.

When the performance was over I went to chat to the girls, and I took Strawberry Moose for a good hug. And how he enjoyed it too, being passed around from girl to girl, allowing himself to be photographed.

I even managed a little chat with The Girl With The Smile. And I told her that I thought her smile so beautiful. No point in thinking complimentary thoughts if you aren’t prepared to spread them about. Being nice and polite is what makes the world go round.

We were so long there chatting that we almost missed the last zodiac (not that that would have bothered me over-much) and I had to scrounge around for a lifebelt.

Talking of being nice to people, I’d taken a photo of someone yesterday – a woman peering through her camera at some birds away in the distance and it had come out rather well. I tracked her down and showed her the photo, and let her have a copy.

Lunch was a barbecue on deck and the cynic in me immediately suggested that there had been a fire in the dining room this morning. I managed to find some salad. and to my delight, the roast potatoes on the ship are cooked in oil, not butter or lard. So I had a plateful of those too.

In the afternoon we went across the fjord to Qilakitsoq. This is another Thule village dating back to round about AD1475 +/- 50 with its sod houses.

There are a few graves too, but the crucial discovery was made here in 1972. A couple of Greenlanders clambering on the cliffs above the village looking for ptarmigan thought they saw skin and clothing through a crevice in the rocks.

Our Greenlanders called for assistance and the rocks were investigated to reveal 8 bodies, contemporary with the village, buried inside. And the conditions were so ideal that they had become mummified.

Archaeologists have studied the bodies and can say that there are 8 people, two childen aged 6 months and 4 years, and several adults aged from 20 to about 45. The bodies are so well-preserved that it was even possible to determine that they had been eating.

We clambered up onto the cliffs (it was something of a hike and scramble so I left His Nibs behind on the ship) to look at the site. It’s been excavated and cleared now, but it was formerly underneath an overhanging rock protected by an erratic boulder.

I managed the climb and the descent, and waited until I reached the easy, flat bit before I slipped over onto my derriere. Nothing was hurt, except my pride of course. But then that’s been hurt before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … so it’s quite used to it.

It was polar dip time for those who wished to take part. But not me. I went to my room for a shower and a wash of some clothes, returning to the deck just in time to see the intrepid plungers take to the hot pool to warm up after their efforts.

Of course, I would have been first into the polar dip had I not had this catheter in my chest … "of course" – ed …, but at least I take my hat off to those who did it.

For a short while at least I could stay up and about but it didn’t take long before ill-health took over. I ended up fairly sharply back in my room flat on my back and there I stayed for an hour.

I don’t remember too much about my sleep but I certainly remember a swb land-rover, light grey with a cream truck cap, pulling up at the side of the ship (which was quite remarkable seeing as we are all floating on water);

There was the usual briefing and as usual I missed the first 10 minutes while I gathered my wits (which, seeing how many I have, takes far, far longer than it ought to these days)

We were advised that lunch could be taken ashore the next day by anyone who felt the urge. People would have to forage for themselves in the town, where there were several restaurants. Once more, the cynic in me suggested to several members of the team that the kitchen has now run out of supplies, burnt out in the dining room fire of course.

But even during the briefing I was distracted. Heather wanted my contact details and then just at a crucial moment there was a glint of sunlight on a rock away in the distance so I dashed off to take a photo.

Not only that, the mystery about the flag (if you can remember from,a couple of days ago) is solved. It’s apparently the flag of the Bahamas, where the ship is registered, although it doesn’t look familiar to me.

Tea was taken once more at The Naughty Table. Natalie the Yoga Instructor came to join us and she fitted in perfectly. She and I had a long chat about nothing much in particular.

After tea, we played “Arctic Bluff” – a kind-of “Call My Bluff” with an Arctic flavour. And our team was rubbish. Not even Strawberry Moose could help us out here.

So now I’m in my new little perch from the other day, right up in the Gods, writing my blog and checking my photos. Not sure how many of the latter that I have but 200 would be a good guess and that’s something of a record for a day’s photography.

I’d better get a move-on.

But not for long though. Round about 23:30 I reckoned that it was hopeless to continue so I headed off back to my room. But on the way I was interrupted by sounds of merriment coming from the lounge. The hot-tub dippers were drying off.

I had a lengthy chat with Sherman Downey the musician about music and records and all of that kind of stuff, and another with Olimpia about potatoes from Peru, the conclusion which I drew from that conversation was that maybe Olimpia ought to put some more water in the next one.

That was the cue to head off to bed. I’d somehow managed to find enough to keep going for a whole extra hour.

Does me good to be awake and to mingle.

0

Wednesday 12th September 2018 – WHAT A …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… horrible night!

About 00:45 when I finally settled down to sleep. And something awoke me at 03:30 – no idea what it was – and that was how I stayed, drifting in and out until the alarm went off at 06:00.

A beautiful morning with some lovely streaks of light. Several icebergs and a couple of islands away astern too. Have we reached Greenland already?

As a true measure of my popularity I took breakfast alone this morning. It seems that I’m the rattlesnake in the Lucky Dip again. I wonder who I’ve upset today. And more importantly, how?

At least I managed to have a chat with Jerry Kobalenko about Labrador. Apparently I can find out much more information by looking in his book, “obtainable in the gift shop”. I suppose that my explorations are pretty much small beer compared to the routes that he has travelled.

My morning caught up with me though, and pretty quickly too. By about 08:45 I was flat out on the bed and there I stayed until about 09:45. Dead to the world. The only trouble with this though is that I feel worse now then I did before I crashed out.

At least there was a nice view of Greenland through the fog and that might cheer me up a little. An iceberg went sailing past at one point, hard up against the Greenland coast and so I went out to take a photo or two.

There was a lecture on “the Vikings” – not “the Norse” – and Latonia started completely on the wrong foot, telling everyone that Lindisfarne was on the north-west coast of England.

Another discussion that we had was on the failed Adolphus Greely expedition of the 1880s. And what annoyed me about this was that we were just 30 miles or so from where they came to grief and there was no proposal whatever to take us there.

With all of the disturbances and failures that we have had with our voyage, I would have thought that they would have done what they could in order to make our journey more exciting and instead of this messing about in Lancaster Sound, we could have come up here instead.

I’m dismayed about all of this.

At lunch I sat with Natalie and Deanna and we chatted about last night’s entertainment. And good that it was too – the chat as well as the entertainment. I threw in a few tales from Carry On Matron too while I was at it.

By now we had arrived off the coast of Etah in Greenland. This is the last place on our list – the farthest north at 78°18′, 1300kms (750 miles) from the North Pole and I was half-expecting to be turned away from there too.

But we clambered aboard the zodiacs and off we went up the fjord. It’s long, narrow and also shallow so the ship couldn’t go too far up there. Instead we were treated to a 45-minute zodiac trip. And it’s just as well that we did because we went past three herds of musk-oxen.

We stopped to take photos of them. The best estimate is that there were about 20 of them in total.

Etah was the farthest-north permanent settlement in this part of the Arctic. The first Europeans to visit here were John Ross and William Parry in 1818 and in whose shoes we have been travelling.

Ross called them his “Arctic Highlanders” and attempted to signify his peaceful intentions towards them by holding aloft a drawing of an olive branch. Which considering that there were no trees in this part of Greenland, never mind an olive tree, was a rather strange thing to do.

After several minutes of bewilderment on both sides, the holding aloft of a basket of presents did the trick.

Etah really was right on the limit of what was possible in the way of permanent settlement and even in the late 19th Century the inhabitants were just clinging on in there, declining rapidly in numbers. Two separate expeditions of Isaac Hayes, in 1854 and 1861, noted the rapid decline in numbers of people living there, comparing the latter with the former.

There are the remains and mounds of a considerable number of huts here, and one that I inspected still had the furniture and the cast-iron stove in there. These were apparently from a failed attempt to resettle the area in comparatively modern times.

I found a considerable number of pottery shards scattered about and in the absence of a measure, I recorded the length using the camera zoom lens.

Another thing that we saw were bones. from the odd bone even down to several skeletons – mainly of musk-oxen but of other stuff too. More caribou horns than you could shake a stick at.

Once the beach area had been cleared, we could walk down to the glacier.

It’s called the Brother John Glacier, named by the celebrated and famous (or infamous) American explorer Elisha Kent Kane – he of the Margaret Fox and spirit-rapping fame – in honour of his brother

It looks quite close but it was actually not far short of three kilometres. And on the way down there on the path flanked by the polar bear guards we encountered an Arctic Hare watching us from the rocks.

Strawberry Moose had a really good time there. I took a few photos of him, and several other people insisted on photographing him. It does his ego a great deal of good to be the star in other people’s photographs.

Including aerial photography. There was someone filming the glacier with a drone and His Nibs features on some of the film.

I did some serious photography myself. There’s a couple on board who are making some kind of profile of themselves for some kind of modelling assignment, and I used their cameras to take a few pics of them

On the way back I went the long way around. A lap of the lake and it wasn’t as easy as it seems. Not only was it all “up and down” there were several piles of loose scree everywhere and I had to negotiate them clutching a moose. It wasn’t easy.

Another thing that I had to negotiate was a woman lying prone on the path. Apparently she was smelling the Arctic plants, so I was told.

And then we had the stepping stones over the river. That was exciting clutching His Nibs.

All in all, the walk back around the lake from the glacier was interesting and exhilarating. And probably the first time ever that Golden Earring has been played at Etah.

One thing that I did do – you might think is bizarre – is to take off my boots and socks and go for a paddle in the Arctic Ocean. Well, although I intended to, I went in quicker and deeper than I intended due to a wet slippery rock upon which I was standing.

Absolutely taters it was – far colder than in that river in Labrador this year. I must be out of my mind.

Hot tea was served and I was so busy talking that I almost missed my zodiac back to the ship. And they waited so long for me that it had grounded and it took a while and several people to refloat it.

But that wasn’t as bad as one of the other drivers. He had struck a submerged rock in his zodiac and broken his propellor.

There was a storm brewing in the distance and it was touch and go as to whether we would make it to the ship before we were caught in it. Of course, we were soundly beaten and arrived back at the ship freezing, soaking wet and covered in snow.

In my room I had a shower and a clothes-wash, and then after the resumé meeting I went for tea. With my American friends again. She’s a former gymnast and did in fact judge the gymnastics at the Olympic Games;

Tonight there was a Disco – a Viking-themed one and although I didn’t do all that much, I had spent some time getting His Nibs prepared for the show and he won a prize, which cheered me up greatly.

I had several chats, several dances and the like but, as expected, His Nibs had more success with the ladies than I ever do.

They are still dancing and Disco-ing in there. I’m writing up my notes and ready to go to bed. I’ll go for my midnight walk to check the compass and the twilight, even though we are now ahead one hour seeing as we are officially in Greenland.

There’s a pile of the younger ones in the hot tub where, apparently, they have been for some considerable time, enjoying the water and also the Arctic twilight which is magnificent tonight

Tonight’s binnacle heading is 144°, which is slightly south of south-east. So that’s it then.

We didn’t make 80°N or any of the farthest-north outposts of Arctic exploration, or even Annoatok (the farthest-northerly seasonal settlement which is only 20 miles further north than here and where Frederick Cook set out on his alleged attempt at the North Pole), but having hit John Ross’s farthest north we are on our way home. And I’m so disappointed that we have accomplished so little of what I wanted to do.

I set my foot on Ellesmere island and also at Etah, but the rest has been a big anti-climax.

You can’t win a coconut every time but just once every now and again would do fine for me.

I’m off to bed.

0

Tuesday 11th September 2018 – SOMEWHAT OPTIMISTICALLY, UNFORTUNATELY

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

That’s the verdict after last night’s sleep – if sleep is the correct word. It was about 00:30 when I went to bed and the first thing that I needed to do was to confront the demons because they were at it again last night. In fact it took ages for them to calm down and go to sleep.

Once I went off, it was just until about 04:30 or something. The ship was slowly changing position and the captain was using engine power to maintain station. As a result, the engine noise was constantly increasing and decreasing.

That film had affected me too in some degree because I was off on my travels with a couple of my fellow-voyagers would you believe, scrambling through deck rails and onto the shore.

Despite being awake early, it was somewhat later than normal that I arose from the dead and with an early start this morning (breakfast at 07:00 instead of 07:30) there wasn’t much time to do as much as I wanted.

Breakfast was taken in the company of Chris the expedition photographer and Natalie the yoga girl. She freely admitted that it wasn’t my company but the company of Strawberry Moose that she was seeking, which rather spoiled my morning somewhat … "as if …" – ed.

Just as we were about to dress for our landing, it was announced that it had been postponed until later. Firstly there was too much ice, and secondly, there was a polar bear guarding the entrance to the beach. We needed to wait until he moved.

So we waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually it was announced that the bear had managed to make a kill out on the ice and there it was staying until it had eaten it.

Not only that, by now the tide had turned and the ice that was lodged on the beach was floating and being tossed about in the wind and waves. It’s not the kind of weather for going off to the shore in a zodiac so our landing at Grise Fiord was yet another event cancelled.

I tried my best to encourage some kind of intrepid voyage to shore but they weren’t having any of it. And once more, Lieutenant Skead’s words about Collinson came right into the forefront of my mind – “An ordinary yachtsman might have taken his craft east, and his wife and daughters to boot. I’m afraid to think of what we shall do if we meet with difficulty“.

It’s quite true that safety should be a very important requirement but this is an expedition, not a cruise. And we’re in the High Arctic, not the Gulf of Mexico. If people are uncomfortable with the conditions then they shouldn’t be here. They should go back to Hicksville and let the rest of us get out on an adventure.

Abandoning yet another good rant for the moment, we did end up going on a zodiac cruise around the ice floes. No shipwrecks and nobody drownding, in fact nothing to laugh at at all.

I took a pile of photos, although nothing like what I was hoping for. There were a few spectacular ice formations but nothing that really floated my boat. All in all I was rather disappointed.

What disappointed me even more was that having decided to leave Strawberry Moose in the cabin, everyone was asking me where he was. As I said the other day, he’s much more popular than I am.

Not half as disappointed as I might have been though, because we collided with several ice-floes and that vould have been extremely exciting had one had sharp edges.

Back on board again, and I hope that we don’t go out anywhere else today because while I was showering I washed all of my expedition gear seeing as it was still early morning. It might take a while to dry so if we do travel out this afternoon i’ll freeze,

If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed then Mohammed must go to the mountain. The Inuit people from Grise Fiord whom we were going to see over there came over here (in zodiacs, not kayaks) to entertain us. And it was all rather too touristy for me.

One of the original settlers here gave us all a talk on the origins of the settlement, and it was just as depressing as every other story that I’ve heard about the relocations.

I buttonholed him after the event. A 22-litre can of petrol costs about $25 – a subsidised price. I’m not quite sure why fuel up here would be subsidised when they have just cut the budget for the fuel boat in Black Tickle.

(looking back at this later on, I can see that for some reason or another I’d descended into a really wicked, bad mood. The first time for quite a while, isn’t it?)

Lunch was taken in the company of Latonia and a guy called Peter. I’m afraid that I rather upset him because when we were discussing the failure of this expedition and he said that we could always come back next year, I replied that I couldn’t come back.
“Why?” he asked. “Are you dying?”
And I’m afraid that I rather shocked him with my answer. But this is what happens when you are feeling irritable and in a bad mood.

I reminded Latonia once more that I wanted to talk to her about Labrador, and she promised once more to make some time for me.

We said goodbye to our visitors after lunch and also said goodbye to Grise Fiord. The most northerly permanently-inhabited settlement in Canada. Then I retreated to my room for some peace and quiet. And so peaceful and quiet was it that it wasn’t until 70 minutes later that I awoke.

And did I feel any different after my little rest?

I certainly did. I felt much worse.

We seem to be flying a new flag at the rear of the ship. I can’t be sure of course, but I don’t remember this one at all. I shall have to make enquiries of the crew at an appropriate moment.

There was a presentation on the Predators of the Northwest Passage and I caught the end of it, and this was followed by a little photography session. We were sailing past what looked to me to be like the farthest northern end of Devon Island and a couple of beautiful glaciers presented themselves.

That was enough for me though. I had nothing much to do really so I sat in the lounge and did it. This Peter guy with whom I had lunch came to sit with me and we had a really good chat and a natter about nothing much in particular.

Just to liven up the voyage, they had a singles party where the aim was for all of the people travelling alone to meet up. About a week or so too late in my opinion – this is the kind of thing that should be done on or about the first full day of the voyage. By now, it’s more than likely that you will have met someone, if that is one of the aims of your voyage.

At the evening de-briefing session we had the usual gnashing and wailing from the Septics on board about how badly-treated they were on this day a few years ago. And I walked out in disgust. The Septics still don’t understand how much the rest of the world hates them and their arrogant, egocentric narcissic ways. Not a word about Iran Air Flight 655 that the US military shot down in Iranian airspace on 3 July 1988 – the event that started off all of this.

This led us on nicely to the evening meal. I shared a table with a woman whom I had met a few days ago at the special table to which I had been invited and we chatted about loads of things, such as maple syrup. It was all go.

To wind up the day there was a sing-along concert in the lounge with Sherman Downey. We started off with about 50 people but by the end of the evening there was a stalwart half-dozen or so. But amongst the entertainment, Strawberry Moose took the floor and entertained the crowds.

It’s late now but I’m still here, sitting down and writing my notes and listening to Colosseum Live again.

And who knows? I might even have an early night too. But not before my midnight walk.

There’s a faint glimmer of twilight on the horizon but not enough to activate the camera. And we’re heading on a direction of 69° – that’s in a vague east-north-east direction.

It looks as if 80°N is not going to be reached.

0

Saturday 8th September 2018 – IT REALLY DOES COME TO SOMETHING …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… when a person living in an isolated Arctic community on a remote Island in the Far North tells you, without any prompting at all, that the British are totally out of their minds about Brexit.

But never mind that for a moment. I’m wondering what would have happened had I not had a severe attack of cramp round about 05:30 or so – the first that I’ve had for a few days. Whether I would have slept on until 06:00

However I did stay in bed until the alarm went off. No polar bears to entice us out this morning. And after the medication I went for a walk. Not without an element of some panic because I appear to have lost my woolly hat – the one that goes on my woolly head.

Not that that’s too much to worry about because I’ve lost count of the amount of things that I’ve lost already and then subsequently recovered in my room. Nevertheless it won’t be long before something goes missing completely. You can bank on that.

I took my evening walk to the bridge last night. Imagine me – in short sleeves at midnight in the High Arctic in September. Binnacle pointing to 180° – in other words, due south.

But no midnight sun last night. And that’s hardly surprising because for the morning we are swathed in fog again. This weather is really getting me down but then again what did I expect up here in the High Arctic? Some explorers have been stranded for four or five years by the capricious ice and, as we know, hundreds have failed to return.

If it were a cake-walk to come here, it wouldn’t be half the adventure that it is now, would it?

I had breakfast this morning with a couple of members of staff – Christopher the geologist and young Michael the ship’s “go’fer”. He’s excited because Pond Inlet is his home village and the captain has invited his family on board for lunch.

As for our plans today, I’ve no idea what they might be. This morning, anyway.

This afternoon we’re visiting an Inuit community – the one at Pond Inlet and that seems to be a waste of time in my opinion because not only is it not a traditional Inuit community but more of a modern resettlement town, but we arrived there on a plane the other day so we’ve been here. And there are still plenty of other places to visit.

The cynic inside me is once more wide-awake and telling me that maybe someone on board the ship has an aunt who runs the local gift shop or something like that.

But on the other hand, for the last week or so Chris Farlowe has been singing to me “Don’t Start Chasing Happiness – Let It Take You By Surprise. Don’t Go Casting Shadows …”. I suppose that I ought to be adopting a more positive outlook, even if I don’t feel much like it right now.

One positive outlook is the fact that we have seen yet another candidate for Ship Of The Day. It’s useful having an AIS beacon reader on board, so I was able to discover that she is the MV Golden Brilliant.

She’s a bulk carrier of 41500 tonnes, built in 2013 and registered in Hong Kong. She left Gijon in Spain on 26th August and is en route for Rotterdam, and taking a major deviation to a stop called “Camni” in the fleet database – clearly some port that doesn’t have an AIS logger.

Its AIS track puts it up here anyway, so it’s the correct ship, and someone in the crew tells me that there’s a mine out here – the Mary River Iron Ore Mine.

This would seem to place Camni at Milne Port Inlet, 71°53’N 80°55’W, so that seems to fit the bill.

Although I didn’t take too much interest in many of the proceedings today, there was a brief class giving some kind of outline of the Inuit language, so I wandered in for a lesson. It’s really quite simple and some kind of, I suppose, shorthand symbols for the syllables, of which there are probably in the region of 60 – 20 consonants each with three vowel sounds, ee, ah and ooh. And every word is made up of one or more symbols, with various accents to emphasise or detract the sound.

That took us nicely up to our arrival in Pond Inlet. We had a discussion about the town and were given a slide show of the town with the various buildings that might be important.

Pond Inlet is situated at 72’42” north. It loses the sun in mid-November, and you have to wait until February until it comes back.

It was named by John Ross in 1818 for John Pond, the Astronomer Royal of the period.

And good-oh! It’s the village brocante this afternoon. How exciting! Mind you, the cynic inside me won’t be at all surprised if this has been arranged because one of the locals has heard that a cruise ship is coming in with a pile of gullible tourists and the rest of the villagers have a load of rubbish that’s awaiting disposal.

What was this about adopting a more-positive outlook?

The most important, certainly for Strawberry Moose, is the fact that Pond Inlet is the home of the most Northerly Tim Horton’s in the whole world.

If that’s not a good destination for him to make a public appearance then I don’t know what is.

Lunch was taken with the couple who seem to be quite interested in me, the fools. It was nice of them to ask me over to sit with them. I don’t understand my popularity these days.

But only with certain people. I am definitely persona non grata elsewhere, something that is entirely my own fault. It’s a desperate shame, but it’s no use crying over spilt milk.

We all piled aboard the zodiacs and headed out to the town. There was some kind of ad-hoc immigration control in place on the beach but of course none of that prevented His Nibs from gaining a foothold ashore.

An Inuit lady called Joanna was there to give us a guided tour of the town, not that there was an awful lot to see.

The first thing that caught my eye was all of the shipping containers all over the place. In that respect it’s very much like South-Western Newfoundland where the bodies off the old Newfoundland Railway wagons were auctioned off and now litter the countryside just about everywhere.

True garden-shed engineering.

And I had quite a laugh at the bus stop too. As if you really need a bus around a community of about 1600 people. Especially when there are so many cars all around the place. That was also something that astonished me.

It is however the time that Arctic cotton is in flower and that’s a useful commodity out here. It’s really a bunch of flowery seeds rather similar to how a dandelion works, and they are used here to make wicks for qulliqs – the soapstone oil lamps – and similar things.

The Catholic Church was quite interesting, if not tragic. It’s apparently the northernmost Catholic church in the world and a comparatively recent construction too. It will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this rubbish who will recall the almost-inevitable fate of most buildings out here in Canada.

What is the tragic part is that when it went up, it took with it the Catholic priest, Father Guy-Mary Rousselière who was probably the greatest of all of the anthropological and archaeological amateurs in this region, along with almost every single item of his work. All that remains was whatever he had managed to publish during his lifetime.

We were shown a sled that was built up on another larger one and which was built up on a third even larger. It was even covered in. The idea is that in the winter the father of the family would tow it behind his skidoo and if he kept on going at full tilt he could leap over small crevasses in the ice and the sled with all of the kids inside wouldn’t ground out.

There’s an RCMP post here too and it has at one time held as many as 21 detainees at one time. This must be a record for a small town like this.

Another asset of the community, now long-closed and replaced, is the Hudson’s Bay outlet. It’s now being used for mechanical repairs and is guarded by a couple of large dogs who have clearly seen better days.

All of the stuff littered around in the wooden crates is the stuff that has come up in the recent sea-lift.

The biggest employer in the town is the Canadian Government and they have some offices here. These ones here are the offices of the Canadian National Parks Service for the Sirmilk region, which is where we are right now.

There are several traditional habits that are still carried on here. The mothers still carry their babies with them in the hoods of their parkhas and it was quite amusing to see the tourists surrounding one of the aforementioned in an attempt to persuade her to allow them to photograph mummy and offspring.

I’m not sure where the quad fitted in with the traditional habits though.

One of the attractions of the town is the half-built sod house that is used to explain to visitors how the original inhabitants of the area lived. Today, they use 4×2 wood to build the frame for the sealskin roof, but in the past they used whalebone.

Lying around were some bones from a bow-head whale, the type of bones that would have been used in the olden days before wood became available.

They were brewing up too and making bannock. The latter isn’t for me, seeing as they use lard in the peparation, and a new kettle of water hadn’t boiled yet. But I was discussing Labrador Tea with Joanna and she, ferreting around in the box, came up with a teabag of Labrador Tea. And I shall be trying that tomorrow.

Of course, Strawberry Moose had to have a photo opportunity at the sod house, didn’t he?

There’s an Anglican Church in the community too and Joanna was regaling us with tales of the religious wars that used to go on here as each church tried to pinch the other church’s congregation.

One of the guys with her told us a story about how the boats have “evolved” over the years. Up until almost maybe 50 or 60 years ago, the Inuit umiak, made by a company in Trois-Rivières, would be quite common. But people slowly moved over to more modern “European” boats made of industrial materials.

And now the race was on as everyone tried to out-do his neighbour with e bigger, better, more powerful boat.

But the problem was that the smaller and lighter the boat, the easier it is to haul it out of the water in the freeze when the Inuit were on their travels. But with the bigger, heavier boats, they can’t and they are losing countless modern, heavy and expensive boats being crushed in the ice.

There’s quite a big school here in the settlement, and it flies the Nunavut flag. There’s a red inukshuk on it that divides the flag into two – one half white and the other half yellow. I was unable to discover if the colours have any significance.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall me complaining about the price of goods in Labrador but it has nothing on the price of goods here.

When you start to see a pack of toilet rolls, €2:49 in your average LIDL, on sale here at $36:99 you’ll understand the difficulty of supplying a remote community out here in the Arctic with just one sea-lift per year and the rest of the time flying it in by air from Ottawa or wherever. And this is just one example of countless similar prices.

But some other people don’t have the same issues. Pond Inlet is home to the world’s most northerly Tim Horton’s, and I unveiled His Nibs in here for a photo session. In no time at all we were surrounded by other locals who wished for a photo opportunity with himself. And I can’t say that I blame them.

What was depressing about all of this was the ship’s kitchen staff all congregating in a corner eating a bought pizza. What does that tell you about the cooking on-board?

I was told that there’s a scenic viewpoint here too and so I wandered that way to see. The North Pole is a mere 1932 kms from here and this may well be the closest that I shall ever be to it, unless things change dramatically.

It might also be the closest that His Nibs gets to it too, so he needs to have yet another photo opportunity too.

My reverie up here was broken by the sound of an aeroplane. Another Air Tindi plane has come in to land and presumably unload whatever it is that it’s bringing.

From here I went for a walk around the town (I decided to miss out on the brocante) and had a few chats with the very friendly locals. The number of times that someone stopped me to offer me a lift was incredible.

And it was here that I met my very vocal local yokel. He was renovating the old ice-hockey arena and had indeed been responsible for building the new one.

We discussed all kinds of things here and there, including the effects of a temperature of -50°C on engine and hydraulic oil and the monstrous folly of Brexit. I did also express my dismay that a cruise ship on a regular route around the High Arctic was manned … "PERSONNED" – ed … by Filipinos and Indonesians and the like, and not Inuit.

His opinion, which I simply relate without making any comment at all, was that the Inuit wouldn’t do the work, and he cited several examples from his own experience.

I carried on with my walk, found the health centre and the school (again) and ended up at the new arena so I nipped inside for a look. In the Community Centre there was an exhibition of Arctic sports so I stopped for a while to watch, but I was roasting in there so I went out for a walk.

At the Library and Information Centre a little girl fell in love with Strawberry Moose so her mother agreed that she could be photographed with him – provided that she could join in the fun too.

And why not?

A few other locals took photos of him too, and someone produced the Centre’s own mascot, a seal, who also wanted to join in the fun.

By now it was time to return to the ship so down we went, passed through Immigration which was now Emigration and sped back to the ship, having to do a U-turn as two of the passengers had forgotten their lifebelts.

I had a shower and washed some clothes, and then waited for the call for tomorrow’s briefing. But in the meantime crashed out and so I missed the first 10 minutes, of presumably all of the important stuff.

Tea was a riot though. The waiters were horribly confused and I’m still not totally convinced that I received what I ordered. And my table companions for today were extremely garrulous, which was very pleasant.

Later tonight, there was an impromptu concert. There’s a folk singer-musician, Sherman Downey, on board and one night he’d overheard another passenger playing the piano. A girl could also sing reasonably well so they had been rehearsing informally and decided to give a concert. I’d been asked but obviously with no bass on board it was rather difficult.

The surprise of the night was that we found another girl vocalist – Natalie who does the yoga. And while it was rather hit-and-miss, she had all of the emotion and it looked and sounded quite good. One photo that I took of her came out really well and really captured the emotion of the moment.

And if that wasn’t enough, we discovered a mouth-organ player in the crowd so by the end of the night we were all rocking away, and quite right too.

We have an elderly blind lady on board, and she had asked for a special request. So when they played it, I went over to her and invited her to dance. We did a kind of jazzed-up waltz which fitted the music, which is just as well because it’s the only dance that I know.

At one point we must have hit the open sea in the Davis Straight because we were swaying around quite considerably. It certainly added a certain something to the dancing.

My midnight ramble was once more taken in a tee-shirt (much to the astonishment of Tiffany wrapped up on the deck as if in a cocoon) and we are heading out at 4° on the binnacle. That’s definitely north, so if all goes according to plan we might be pushing on.

I hope so, because these continual delays are really getting on my nerves.

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Friday 7th September 2018 – AND THERE I WAS …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… lying on my palliasse wondering whether I ought to heave myself out of my stinking pit.

I’d had a really bad night. For some reason I was very sensitive to the engine noise. It was constantly changing pitch and consequently constantly keeping me awake all through the night and I can’t recall if I ever managed to drop off to sleep.

And as the 06:00 alarm suddenly started to sound, a voice shouted down the loudspeaker system “Polar Bears at 3 o’clock”.

In my half-awakened state I thought to myself that he’s a good few hours late with this announcement, but then it clicked and I grabbed the camera, dashed out of my room, bumped into a lady, she screamed so I dashed back into my room and put on my clothes and then dashed back onto the starboard beam.

At first I thought that it was two polar bears on the ice floe but as events unfolded, I noticed that there were three. A mother and two cubs.

Mum was in position by a seal hole awaiting breakfast, and the two cubs were in their snow-bank den waiting for mum to come back with the grub.

She was totally unperturbed by the passing of the vessel even though it would keep away the seals, but the thing about living in the Arctic is patience. Never mind the “Ohh God, give me patience. And hurry!” – I once heard a delightful story about a group of Inuit who went to the Arctic meadows on Ungava for some hay, found that the grass hadn’t grown enough, so they pitched their tents there and waited.

And this was exactly what mummy was doing, perched by the seal hole. Not pitching her tent waiting for the hay to grow of course, but you know what I mean.

The photos are unfortunately rubbish but then it’s with the Nikon 1’s light-hungry zoom lens in the half-light from a moving ship when I’m not even half-awake. What did you expect? David Bailey?

After taking a score or so of photos, I went back to my room for my medication and other stuff.

And while I was sorting out my laptop, it reminded me of last night’s later events. The bearing on the binnacle was 121°, so we are going in the opposite direction. 0° is North, 90° is East, and so we are heading more-or-less south-east right now, back down Lancaster Sound.

Breakfast was in company of a couple of travellers who seem to have taken a shine to me, and I’ve no idea why because I’m not usually the kind of person whom others like, and we had a really good chat about this and that.

Not about the other though. That’s a rather sore point right now the way that things are. I think that Strawberry Moose is having more luck than me in that respect.

Later I was up on the bridge admiring the pack ice away in the distance to the south, and looking at the beautiful scenery of this corner of Devon Island. I’ve no idea where we are going next, and I’m not convinced that the crew and the captain know either.

Mind you I did manage to speak to a member of the crew about the ship that I keep on seeing. Apparently there’s another ship – the Fram – that’s loitering around the ice edge waiting for a gap to miraculously appear;

We’ve seen several icebergs go drifting past, some of them extremely impressive but none more so than this one with a hole in the middle, like a floating polo mint.It’s apparently called a keyhole iceberg. The hole is caused by some kind of subterranean river in the glacier

And while I was photographing that iceberg I noticed out of the corner of my eye a ship away in the distance. This time, it was no problem in the light to photograph it at distance and to crop it down to see what it was.

It’s indeed a Canadian icebreaker of the kind that would be on stand-by duty around here to watch out for icebergs and also for ships that might risk running headlong into the pack-ice. There are several ships in the channel and also several communities that have not yet received their winter provisions, so with the seas icing up so quickly already, they will be in for a tough time if the icebreakers can’t open up a channel.

We had a couple of discussion session, several of which didn’t interest me very much so I didn’t take part in them, and the one on the story of Franklin’s expeditions and the Erebus and Terror stories, but I didn’t really learn all that much that I didn’t already know.

I did however manage to buttonhole the camera guy and we discussed the camera, the images and my technique.

He had a good look at everything and had a few things to say about it.

Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with my technique except that with it being a lightweight camera, I’m pressing too hard on the switch and making the camera shake at the crucial moment.

Secondly, the images come out the same on his laptop so it’s not a fault of my laptop,

As for the quality of the images, that’s as good it can be. So the fault lies in the camera itself. Not that it’s a bad camera, but simply that it’s not designed to do what I want to do with it and I’m pushing it to the limit of its technical capabilities and even beyond.

It was then lunchtime so I nipped off and had a salad. And to be quite honest I spent more time talking than eating. The yoga assistant is a big fan of 70s rock music so I’ve invited her to come and listen to some of the stuff that I have on my laptop.

It sure beats etchings, doesn’t it?

On a totally different tack, does anyone still remember our trip to Red Bay in Labrador
 and the Bernier?

There’s a girl on board ship – one of the staff – called Bernier so I asked her what she knew about the ship. Nothing whatever, she told me, but she did know that there was a very famous Canadian sea captain called Bernier and one of the pages on the Canadian passport depicts him.

Another member of staff told me that Bernier (the captain, not the ship) worked in the High Arctic and it was he who actually claimed Bylot Island – which we will be passing – for Canada in 1906 and he had his crew carve something emblematic on a cliff face.

I’m writing this now because everyone else is outside looking at a bird colony. But as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the only birds in which I have any interest won’t be found clinging to a rock in the High Arctic.

And this is a fine time for the battery in the camera to start to go flat, and we’re off out in an hour or so. I’ve had to bung it on charge and of course, it’s now that we’re starting to sail through the ice. Good job that I have the phone handy, although what the quality might be like is anyone’s guess.

But it actually worked out, because the sea was so rough at this point that the water in the heated pool was going everywhere except where it was supposed to go, and I was able to take a few videos of it.

The phone didn’t last too long though. There was a huge iceberg away in the distance – more like a large sheet of float actually – and the phone camera will never do justice to that, so I’ve had to go down and fetch the Nikon.

They are still trying to do their best to entertain us seeing as everything that is planned is falling apart. And so we had afternoon tea while we played a kind of game where we had to find out bits and pieces about each other. I sort-of took part in it in a half-hearted way because I’m not really in to being sociable as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

There’s a National Park at Tay Bay on Bylot Island which is on our route and it’s been decided that we will go for an evening ramble around there.

We needed a briefing from Parks Canada (done vitually) before we could go and, much to my surprise, we were first to leave the boat. I had to get a wiggle on to get changed into my winter gear, and then there was an almighty panic as I couldn’t find my badge.

Nevertheless I did manage to find it and we struggled ashore onto our beach where the perimeter of our walk was guarded by Polar Bear watchers.

Strawberry Moose enjoyed his ride in a zodiac and he made many new friends. Plenty of photo opportunities for him too.

Introducing new species onto an island here is definitely not allowed and there are no moose here. But I shall be wondering what scientists will be thinking when in 1000 years time they are analysing polar bears with antlers or moose in white coats with claws and teeth.

And for me. I had a good walk around to kill the time, which the cynic inside me tells me is the reason for this stop. There were some exciting views of all kinds of things – nothing that I found really interesting though.

There’s a tent ring on the shore but that’s believed to be contemporary and not historical.

As an aside, anything over 50 years old is classed as historical and so that includes a great many of the passengers on board the ship. Me especially. I’m feeling like 150 years old right now with the weight of the world resting on my shoulders.

And there were several icebergs of some beauty. I even saw the sun, such as it was, disappear down behind the mountains and that was fairly spectacular too.

But I do have to say that, much as I enjoyed the pleasant walk, I’ve come here to do much more than this and it’s leaving me somewhat disappointed.

One thing though really stuck in my mind. There’s a young Inuit boy – probably aged about 20 but then again what would I know – on board the ship and I’ve had many a chat with him. He comes from the area and he was pointing out some of the glaciers to me. he was saying that even in his short life the glaciers have receded dramatically and how he was fearing for his grandchildren.

He told me a story about how, even today, he will come over for a large lump of glacier to take home to melt down as water. This ice fell as rain thousands of years ago when there was no pollution in the air and so is as fresh and pure as anything that you might find. It makes the tea taste magnificent, so he said.

It was a wet ride back to the ship, with His Nibs safely inside his plastic bag. And then there was an enormous queue at the boot-washing station as someone apparently decided to do a week’s washing.

A hot shower and a wash of the undies was called for, and then I came down to tea. In a change to my usual habits, I have decided to mingle with different people at mealtimes and chat about different themes seeing as I seem to be stuck in a big rut right now.

And a good chat I had too. We talked about exchanges as students, Switzerland, the Northern Lights and primitive aircraft. All in all, quite an agreeable time and I shall have to do more of this.

It’s quite late now. We didn’t return to the ship from the shore until late and tea was thus even later. I’ll loiter around for a while and then wander off. I doubt that I’ll be around until midnight or later this evening. I need to bring at least some kind of semblance of order into my life.

One thing that has tired me out though is that I had a very emotional, disagreeable and stressful task to do, one which needs to be done and done quickly too before things take a turn in escalating out of hand.

Rather like MacBeth and his “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.

This afternoon the opportunity presented itself so I bit the bullet and did it. The sooner I do it, the sooner it’s over.

It didn’t work out how I hoped that it would, but that would have really been clutching at straws. And in any case, it’s all my own fault for not listening to myself and all of my best counsels in the first place. Proverbs 19:21 is what I should have kept in my mind, isn’t it?

It’s not the first time that I’ve ended up in a mess like this. Far from it. Anyone would think that I would be used to it, but not at all. I fall into the trap on every occasion and it never turns out well. I always start off with the best of intentions, it all somehow goes wrong, I always end up saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment and it never ever comes out as I intend it to. In fact, usually exactly the opposite.

I am reminded of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon and “In the heat of the action men are apt to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away” and it happens to me all too often.

I really shouldn’t be let out without a keeper. But then, who would want to be responsible for keeping me?

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