Tag Archives: newspaper article

Monday 7th September 2020 – I DIDN’T …

sunset english channel ile de chausey granville manche normandy france eric hall… do anything like I intended to do today. And while you admire the photos of this evening’s night sky, I’ll tell you all about it.

It all actually started off quite well though. Despite not going to bed until long after 01:00, I still up and about before the third alarm went off. And I bet that that surprised you as much as it surprised me.

Mind you, it would be wrong to suggest that I was leaping about raring to go. I was sitting on the bed with my feet on the ground but that was about all that can be said for it.

sunset english channel ile de chausey granville manche normandy france eric hallHaving slowly come round to consciousness, I had my medication and then sat down to do the paperwork.

However I was interrupted by a ‘phone call. A few months ago, a newspaper reporter took my ‘phone number and said that he would ‘phone me some time.

Not having heard anything from him for a while I’d forgotten all about it. But he rang me up this morning to see if he could come round for a chat. That meant a really good tidying-up session, vacuuming the apartment and washing the floors.

All my plans for the day thus went right out of the window.

When he came round, we had a really good chat about the radio, about music and about all kinds of subjects. I was glad that I’d had something to eat before he came because he was here until about 15:30.

ship english channel granville manche normandy france eric hallWith a few urgent things to do it was rather later than usual when I went out for my afternoon walk.

The afternoon was magnificent. It was quite warm with some pleasant wind. The sky was quite clear and you could see for miles. Right out on the horizon presumably on its way to the Channel islands was a ship.

It made me wonder if it was a ferry of some description but back here when i cropped and enlarged it, I couldn’t make out what kind of ship it might be. It’s quite possibly some kind of military vessel.

cap de carteret granville manche normandy france eric hallThere was an even better view right up the coast towards Cherbourg.

By my calculations, which may or may not be correct, that in the background on the horizon is the range of hills at the back of the Cap de Carteret and all the way up to Bricquebec.

It’s been three and a half years since I moved here and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the coast as clear as this during all of this time.

cap frehel brittany coast granville manche normandy france eric hallMy afternoon walk went all around the headland and back down the other side.

However at the end of the headland I climbed up on one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall to see what the view was like from up there. And sure enough, Cap Fréhel and the lighthouse were pretty prominent right out on the horizon.

What we could also see too was the coastline all the way up there, including the bay where St-Cast-le-Guildo, the port where we overnighted one night on our sail up the coast on Spirit of Conrad, is situated.

And I’ve only seen that once before, I think.

hang gliders pointe du roc granville manche normandy france eric hallThe bird-men of Alcatraz were out there yet again enjoying the good weather.

When the journalist and I were having our chat, I asked about the hang-glider who was injured on Saturday. He told me that he was still in intensive care with damage to his spinal column and it’s not clear what his future prospects are.

But all of that didn’t stop the current crop of hang-glider pilots from performing all kinds of aerobatics and so on right on the edge of the cliffs and right in front of the pedestrians strolling around the headland.

bird of prey pointe du roc granville manche normandy france eric hallWe were treated to another aerobatic display too while we were out on our walk.

This time though, it was a display of nature. That bird of prey that’s been loitering around the rabbit colony in the cliffs was back again hovering over the cliff edge. It remained stationary, beating its wings, for long enough for me to take a really good photograph of it.

There was nothing else going on during my travels so I came back home to have a closer look at some of the photographs that i’d taken, to see what I could see.

home made bread banana bread granville manche normandy france eric hallBack here, before I looked at the photos, I had bread to bake seeing as I’ve run out.

For some reason or other, the larger loaf of bread didn’t rise up as well as it has done in the past. It’s certainly better than the first two or three that I made, but not as good as the last couple.

As for the banana bread, that looks pretty good and I’m hoping that it tastes as good as it looks. I went to town with the sultanas and that’s given it some added oommph. As well as that, I brushed the surface with milk and sprinkled brown sugar on top.

While the oven was baking the bread, I stuck a potato and some frozen pie in there. What with some vegetables and gravy, followed by my apple turnover and coconut soya dessert, it made a really delicious tea.

Tomorrow I fancy a burger on a bap, I reckon.

street light illuminated trees square Maurice Marland granville manche normandy france eric hallOn my walk around tonight, I had the f1.8 50mm lens on the camera – hence the brighter images.

You’ve already seen the sky over the English Channel, but there wasn’t anything else of any importance so I took another photo of the Square Maurice Marland and the illuminated trees.

Altogether I did my three runs, and I almost walked on a young couple having a quiet moment in a darkened corner of the city walls.

So later than usual, I’m off to bed now. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll be on form to crack on with work. I crashed out today for an hour or so before tea, but I’ve also chosen the music for the next radio programme so at least I have done something.

But I need to push on with my work otherwise i won’t ever get anywhere.

Saturday 10th August 2013 – WELL, YOU MISSED…

… all of the excitement today, anyway.

You may remember that I told you yesterday that Barry Town had beaten the FAW hands down in the court case concerning the football club’s expulsion from the league.

Anyway, to day in one of the Welsh newspapers was a letter from a member of the FAW commenting on the case, and I have to say that in all my life I have never ever seen such an inflammatory, insulting, offensive letter.

Its contents, full of vindictiveness and hatred, certainly would have brought it into the realm of a “Contempt of Court” charge.

It provoked a whole hornets nest of comment from all kinds of people and I myself spent some considerable time drafting a letter of complaint.

And then what? Yes, the newspaper concerned withdrew the letter with a comment that the author denied ever having written it and does not subscribe to the views that are represented within it.

Frankly though, I cannot believe that a respectable on-line newspaper would have published a letter of such a type without making further enquiry.

If the editor didn’t, then he only has himself to blame for whatever might follow for, as night surely follows day, this matter is not going to rest here, given the amount of dust that has been spread around.

It wasn’t without its moments of humour either. I sent my mail to the editor of the newspaper concerned. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (my deputy)”
So I resent the mail to his deputy. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (the editor)”.

You couldn’t make up a thing like that.

tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazisAt lunchtime I went off to do the shopping. I went to the Carrefour at Evere today and made a little diversion on the way.

If you remember from last Sunday, I took you all to the cemetery at Ixelles to see some of the war graves. I mentioned the Tir National, the old army firing range at Schaarbeek quite close to where I used to live when I had the little apartment in the Boulevard Reyers.

I told you all that the Tir National was used as the execution point for those found guilty of War Crimes by the Germans.

edith cavell memorial tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by germans world war 1Many of the victims have been buried there, and although I did tell you that Edith Cavell was there, that’s no longer true.

She was disinterred shortly after the end of World War 1 and taken to be reinterred at Westminster Abbey and ended up being buried at Norwich Cathedral on 19th May 1919 as Annie so kindly informed me.

However, her name is there on this World War I monument along with that of the people who died with her, and plenty of others from World War 1. A mere thirty-odd, you might think.

One is more than enough but 30-odd does pale into significance when compared to the several hundred others from World War 2

robert roberts jones grave  tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazis world war 2Amongst these hundreds and hundreds of graves from World War II is this one of a certain Robert Roberts-Jones.

With a name like that you might be forgiven for thinking that he is a Welshman, but he is in fact a 3rd-generation Belgian and was a lawyer before he was shot in 1943.

Brussels was honeycombed with spy networks (for example, the Soviet “Red Orchestra” had its headquarters a brisk walk from where I’m currently sitting) and escape routes, called “rat lines”, which were used to dispatch escaping and evading Allied forces personnel and others into neutral territory for trans-shipment back to their units.

The most famous was arguably Andrée (Dédée) de Jongh’s “Comet Line”. This was however infiltrated and collapsed in 1943 and Roberts-Jones, one of the members of Comet, was arrested, tortured and executed.

He has a street named after him, at the back of the Russian embassy here and I often wondered, while I was driving down the street to pick up visas and the like, what the street referred to.

unknown graves tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazis world war 2More poignant though are the “unknowns” here. Probably a hundred or so graves are marked as “unknowns”.

No-one will ever know who they are and what they did – they will be amongst the victims of what the Germans called Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog”, the name given to the method by which people were quietly abstracted from their environment and “disappeared” for ever, presumably after suffering all kinds of horrors ant the hands of their torturers.