… images will tell yu a little story.
Basically they are rubbish but it’s not the quality that counts but the circumstances surrounding them. Take this photo for instance – this is not a handful of trawlers out in the English Channel but lights which I think might be the port at St Helier on the mainland of Jersey, 58 kms away.
And that’s pretty phenomenal.
And take this one here.
These over here are the street lights in St Malo, right across the Baie de Mont St Michel from here in Brittany. Not as far away as Jersey and the Channel Islands of course, but by my reckoning that’s about 35 or 40 kilometres away.
And that’s something that’s even more phenomenal too.
But we’ll leave the best until last.
All of those lights down there, that by my reckoning is St Cast le Guildo and Cap Fréhel and all of that is about 60 kms and more away from here.
No sea haze of course to obstruct the view like there is out to sea and that’s why the photo is clearer than the first. But all of that is pretty impressive.
Hand-held in quite a wind that was blowing – too windy for the tripod unfortunately and I’m a bit wary of that since the tripod blew down off a roof on one occasion with a camera still attached.
But all of this goes to show you what a beautiful, clear evening it was.
It was a lovely morning too and I should know, because for once I actually saw it. Feeling like death of course but I still managed to drag myself out of bed before the first alarm, for the first time since I can’t remember when.
After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes. I’d been out in Eastern England somewhere, a town called Jura near Cambridge or somewhere like that with a huge lake, that was where I was and I remember this huge map hanging on the wall of that part of Eastern England and I used to study it and work out where towns were, all that kind of thing. One day some lady started to talk. She came to Jura and she tried to take my cup of coffee away thinking that i’d finished with it but I insisted on hanging on to it which got off to a bad start but she was going on to her firneds about how her son in law or grandson in law plays football for a Scottish team and how they were drawn against a big team in the Scottish Cup and how they were only part-timers, all this kind of thing. But she was getting everything wrong and I was thinking that i’d have to correct her somehow but of course that’s not the kind of person that you can correct at the top of your voice and anyway you couldn’t get in any words in edgeways with what she was saying
After breakfast I set about splitting up a few more digital recordings. That’s another one of these projects that I have to continue. It’s quite important because I’ll be pulling a load of stuff out of there for the radio projects.
Later on I carried on with the notes for the radio project on which I am working and by the time that I had to go out, I’d just about finished writing them.
The walk up to the Centre Agora was quite pleasant and I arrived bang on time for a coffee before our meeting.
There’s going to be a jobseekers’ meeting here in Granville on 6th March and we are planning to do another live broadcast. 80-odd employers are going to be present and if previous years are anything to go by, there will be over 1,000 jobseekers coming to meet them armed with CVs and the like.
We will be interviewing the jobseekers and the employees and hosting a kind-of round table discussion, to go out live on the air.
However, that day there’s a lot happening and we are rather short-handed so I’ve been roped in as an interviewer.
The purpose of our meeting this afternoon was to meet the person who is organising the event on behalf of the town council and to agree a strategy. Unfortunately it was another one of those meetings where if someone sets aside 2 hours, everyone there will make sure that it lasts two hours too.
As I have said before … “and on many occasins too” – ed … these kinds of meetings should be held standing up, outside, in the pouring rain. Just as much would be decided, and in five minutes or less too.
It reminds me of a story that I heard about the election of a Pope in the Middle Ages. The cardinals were taking forever about it so the local duke ordered his men to remove the roof from the building where they were meeting.
They reached a decision in minutes once it started to rain.
From there I had a slow walk home, retracing my steps to try to find the glove that I had lost – one of my tactile gloves too – only to find that it had fallen out of my pocket in the apartment.
Not very good, am I?
Anyway, for a couple of hours I recorded the notes that I had written and even managed to start to edit them before I stopped for tea.
Earlier on during the day I’d been through the freezer again and I’d found a pack of frozen mushrooms. Now if there is one thing worse than commercially-frozen carrots, it’s commercially-frozen mushrooms. They are awful.
So what I did was to get one of these half-cooked baguettes and slice id and insert garlic butter into the slices. Then clean a couple of potatoes, and finally take out of the fridge the left-over pastry from the other day and the left-over cooking apple, and make an apple turnover.
All of that went into the oven.
Meanwhile, I fried a couple of onions and added some garlic, and when they were thoroughly fried, added the defrosted mushrooms which I had drained (and you have no idea just how much water there is in frozen mushrooms) along with some herbs.
When the mushrooms were thoroughly cooked, the whole lot went into the whizzer and made a thick mushroom soup which I ate with the potatoes and garlic bread that I had made.
Pudding was the apple turnover with sorbet, and delicious it all was too. And there’s enough mushroom soup and another bread thing for tea tomorrow night too.
We’ve seen some of the photos from tonight’s walk, but there are a couple of others that I took too.
The tide is in and this is the cue for the trawlers to start coming home to port. There were already a few of them at the fish-processing plant unloading their cargo and there were several more on the way into the harbour from out at sea.
It’s a really busy place here, even if we don’t have the gravel boats in any more which is a shame.
And that reminded me – I hadn’t looked at the Chantier navale for quite some time, so I went over there.
There isn’t anything very much exciting going on in there right now. Just a couple of small fishing boats, no yacht of any size and no deep-sea trawler-type of vessel.
Still, there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there? We mustn’t abandon hope quite yet.
So here I am and it’s almost 02:00 and I can’t sleep. If you read this, spare a thought for me and my friends. Thanks to 17.4 million xenophobes and racists We are now stateless people with no more rights than your average Somali or Syrian refugee and our continued residence here depends upon the goodwill of various Governments that have no interest whatever in us while across the Channel in The Land That Time Forgot, the Silly Brits are using their foreign residents as bargaining chips.
As the conversation went in Lord of the Rings
“Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.”
We could be on the verge of the greatest mass forced migration of citizens since the Eastern Germans during the period 1945-1948 if the UK doesn’t come to its senses pretty quickly.
