Tag Archives: paul ross

Sunday 11th January 2026 – I HAVE HAD …

… a miserable day today. Partly for reasons that I’ll mention in due course, and partly for reasons that I won’t mention. Either way, once more, it’s quite obvious that I’m ill again.

With this new computer, everything happened so much faster, as I briefly mentioned last night. Instead of grinding out the time until after midnight, everything was finished by 23:10 and I was soon in bed under the covers.

And there I lay, with something of a disturbed sleep. I’m not sure exactly how many times I awoke, but it was more than just a few. Even so, I was fast asleep when Isabelle breezed in on the latest storm. And it was a storm too – not quite on a par with that a couple of days ago, but even so …

She hardly awoke me, which was good. She peeled back the quilt, did her stuff and then left, while I went back to sleep.

It was 09:35 when I finally left the bed, and after a quick wash, I went into the kitchen for breakfast.

First task was the croissants. And I remembered to fold them the correct way today. They didn’t come out too badly, I suppose, for an amateur process. I had two with my porridge and coffee and left the other four for subsequent Sundays.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was in hospital, and I heard about the plan to restrict the password to exclude certain patients who were presumably no longer of any medical value. It’s a password that the nurse uses when she comes on Sundays for that really long word with whatever it is that is supposed to awaken me. They couldn’t work out which word to use instead of it. There were several that they also used on Sunday morning so there wasn’t really one that was memorable or instantly used in the way that 999 was so they weren’t able to access it.

This is an intriguing dream. I can see some kind of logic in it, but I’ve no idea where it came from or where it was going.

There was a girl from school whom I was seeing. I’d just started work and we were still drifting around together. After lunch, on my way back to the office, I’d get whoever it was who was with me to drop me off at her house so that I could say “hello” and have a little chat, then I’d dash on down the street to try to make up the lost time. This went on for several weeks. But one day, I was running a little late and when I turned up at her house, her mother was there but she wasn’t. She was in one of the bedrooms, standing on a ladder doing something in the attic and saw me arrive. So she came downstairs and said that she’d gone into town with someone. It wasn’t her father or something like that but I can’t remember who. She was on a red bicycle and the other person was on a bicycle of some odd colour. At that point, her father arrived. He gave me a really heavy pair of gauntlets and wheeled out a form of three-wheeled tricycle, with a seat at the back on which to sit and pedal and a seat in between the two front wheels facing forwards for a passenger. He urged me to climb in but for some reason, I took some time and he made a sarcastic comment, and then he pedalled off with me, trying to find where this girl had gone, his daughter.

This is another intriguing dream. Who is the girl? The girl whom I was dating after leaving school while whe was carrying on was one of the girls who came to see me a few weeks ago. She was three years younger than me. However, I’m certain that it wasn’t her, even if she did fit into one or two of the characteristics of this dream.

As for the rickshaw, a friend of mine in Munich has – or had – a 1920s rickshaw that he used for running around the town, and I’ve been driven around a local town in it.

Did I dictate that dream about the girl whom I used to go to see at lunchtimes? I’m sure that I did, … "yes, you did" – ed …but later on in that dream we were all sorting out a few kinds of things and my stepbrother Paul had had a bang in the back of his car so we’d been ordering bits and pieces for it as well as ordering other things. And sure enough, little by little, the packages came. I was half-expecting to have a package from this girl who had disappeared because I didn’t know if I’d said that I’d gone up there once afterwards and the house was empty and they had all gone. I never heard from her after that. So these parcels kept on arriving and my mother was rather frustrated because she was having to run around. One day she came in with an enormous parcel tucked under her arm. We said “oh, that’s the rear valance”. but when we unwrapped it, it wasn’t just the rear valance but the whole rear panel. It was painted the correct colour for the car and the number plate was already installed. It even had “Jaguar Ford” written on the back in some kind of stylish graphics instead of just the plain, ordinary “Ford” Of course, we all made some kind of remark about that to my step-brother, about the posh car that he was going to have There was a rear bumper too, and he looked at it and said “no-one’s going to bend this if they drive into it” Then he started to make arrangements with someone whom we knew to cut out the old, damaged bodywork. And then up the back gardens from down the street came some young woman. She looked at us all and said “lounging around again, are you?” She saw me with a mug of coffee in my hands and said “and time for tea for you”. So we all had a little social chat for ten minutes.

The colour of the car is actually the colour of my father’s MkV Cortina, which is languishing down the field on my farm waiting for me to pull out the engine and gearbox, although this will never happen now, of course. The back panel has another significant meaning, and it breaks my heart to think of how stupid I must have been one evening in 1983, when I acted decisively without thinking things through, and made the totally wrong decision that ended up costing me far, far more than I saved. If I could turn the clock back in time, it would have been to that moment.

As for my stepbrother, he was a lovely guy and would do anything for you. However, he fell in with the wrong crowd, was taken to the cleaner’s and died of a brain aneurysm, the same as his father.

I didn’t dictate that dream about that girl leaving. I’d gone up to her house to see her but she’d gone, the house was all closed etc. so I had to set off for home. What I had was one of these butcher’s bikes, the tricycle thing with the seat at the back and in between the two wheels was a large box where the butcher would put the meat in for deliveries, etc., one of the earliest versions of the bakfiets. I had to go home, and I was trying to think of how to go home without encountering any hills because it was difficult to manoeuvre up and down and I came up with a way back via Warmingham without going up any hills. So I set off, and I’d been going a couple of hundred yards when I thought “this is crazy because I’ll be going about seven or eight miles round and my house is only about a mile and a half from here, if that, so why don’t I just go home and struggle with the one hill that’s in between it?”. So that was what I decided to do. When I was back home, I didn’t remember how I’d actually arrived. I couldn’t remember the route or anything and I didn’t recall being out of breath. But this was when these parcels began to arrive, and I was there, hopeful that something would happen with a parcel for me. But there was something somewhere about after I’d been to that girl’s house and gone to the end of the street, there was a huge slope down to the left. You’d have to go down this cutting, down this slope to reach the railway station, which was one of these provincial things with just two platforms. If you were to cross the line to the other platform, that was actually down on top of an embankment because the slope was that steep and the embankment was quite high too. At the bottom, there was a road and I walked down this road somewhere somehow, and there were lots of people walking up it. There were the substantial ruins of a castle, one of these medieval, fourteenth-century Edwardian castles, and they were almost intact. You’d see all the carvings in the brickwork to make it look like a piece of beauty as well as a fortress, and lots of people were making comments about it and so was I. It looked wonderful, but I carried on walking and I’m not sure where all of this fitted in.

It’s disturbing me deeply, this story about the girl who keeps on appearing in my dreams and then disappearing. I’d love to know who she is. The butcher’s bike is quite an interesting object to appear in this dream, that’s for sure. I worked out that I was somewhere round by Hungerford Road in Crewe, so I could have come down and up Macon way which is much less steep than either Mill Street or Edleston Road. And then, even less steep, I could have gone the other way down to Crewe Green roundabout and then along Crewe Green Road.

The medieval castle and the footpath alongside it relate to the city walls at Leuven, although they are alongside a river, not alongside a railway station in a Welsh valley, the name of which totally escapes me at the moment.

This took me up to a disgusting drink break, following which I dismantled an external drive box to rescue the hard drive which has now handed in its hat and which I’ll have to rescue one of these days, and carried on with the updating of this computer.

There was football too – Forfar v Stranraer. And while the Loons had the lion’s share of the play in the first half, Stranraer wiped the floor with them in the second and were 2-1 up and cruising, only to be undone by a sucker-punch deep into injury time.

After that, there were the bread and pizza to make. And for a change, instead of sunflower seeds, I ground up a large handful of Brazil nuts and used them.

While I was at it, I baked the vegan pie and that looks lovely too. I’ll slice it into eight in the week and put seven slices in the freezer ready for another time.

The bread looks wonderful and the pizza was nice too, although I only ate half of it again.

Right now though, I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow afternoon and then Paris on Tuesday. We seem to be back where we were a couple of months ago.

But seeing as we have been talking about medieval castles … "well, one of us has" – ed … a couple of tourists were being shown around Caernarfon Castle not so long ago..
"This castle is unique in history" said the guide. "In the seven hundred years that it’s been here, there have been no repairs and no restoration project carried out on the building."
"That’s an amazing coincidence" said one of the tourists. "It must have the same landlord that we do."

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Friday 4th July 2025 – I DON’T KNOW …

… where to begin today’s account. Bo I begin it when I awoke at 01:01 this morning? Or do I begin it when I awoke for definite at … errr … 07:59?

Well, anyway, after last night’s disaster when I fell asleep, fully clothed, into bed and didn’t move a muscle, I awoke at 01:01 exactly, according to the time on my ‘phone.

Despite trying everything that I could, by about 01:40 I gave up the struggle and heaved myself out of my stinking pit, never having felt less like doing anything in my whole life.

Once I was (sort-of) on my feet, I staggered over to the chair and when the World finally stopped spinning round, I began to plan my day.

The first thing to do was the statistics and then the backing-up. I can’t ever forget them. Next thing was to write up the notes for Thursday, and they are now on-line, with apologies to anyone who was disappointed when they came here looking for them.

There was nothing on the dictaphone from the night at that particular point, so I spent a while trying to concentrate on doing some stuff but in the end, round about 04:30, I gave it up as a bad job and went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off at 06:30, I’m afraid that I simply switched it off, set the alarm to 07:59 and then went straight back to sleep.

Once again, it was a very weary me that fell out of bed a couple of minutes after the alarm had sounded. I couldn’t hang about, because Isabelle the Nurse was on her way so I had to struggle into the bathroom as best as I could.

When Hurricane Isabelle blew in, she found me trying to take my medication. She couldn’t hang about long, for various reasons, but she took away “War and Peace” – the summary of my visit to Paris last week that had arrived in the post yesterday – for a read when she’s at home tonight.

And that reminds me – when it comes back, I need to scan it and send it to my health insurers because it’s quite comprehensive.

Incidentally, I note from the report that they confirm that I was given Retuximab and “some other product” twice back in early 2016 but they withdrew “some other product” because of the dreadful and insupportable side effects. However, here I am nine years on, much older, much more ill, much more unfit, and they are giving me the same “some other product” again.

So what’s happening here? Haven’t they realised what happened, or is this some desperate last throw of the dice? I think we should be told.

After Isabelle left, clutching my papers in her little mitt, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Today we are talking about medieval money, and there’s a beautiful paragraph or two about the history of the various coins of the realm of that period. It all ends with the delightfully modest statement "This much for mint and coinage, by occasion of this Tower (under correction of others more skilful)".

Why can’t modern authors be so modest? … "Why indeed?" – ed …

Back in here, it took a while to come round to my senses, and then I finished off paring and seguing the music for the radio programme that I’d been preparing.

My cleaner stuck her sooty foot in the door at some point to do her stuff for the day and after she left, I read through my Woodstock notes for the Friday, performed a few corrections, added this in, took that out, and that will be dictated at the next opportunity. Then I’ll do Saturday’s, and then Sunday’s.

At some point Rosemary rang me up for a chat. Just a short one today – one hour and twenty-three minutes. She’s offered to come all the way up from the Auvergne to help me if ever I need it and can’t find any more help else where. It’s a lovely offer, but it’s totally impractical for her.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t have many friends … "and fewer and fewer these days" – ed … but those whom I have are the best in the World and no-one could wish for better.

At another point, I transcribed the dictaphone notes, and I was surprised that there were so many. I was down at Virlet. I noticed that there was smoke and a small electrical fire coming from one of the electrical anchoring points on the roof of one of the lean-to sheds. I was looking at it for a couple of minutes wondering “how on earth could this have happened?”. I filed up a bucket with some really dirty water and threw it onto the roof. It seemed to dampen it down somewhat so I threw another one or two on top too. I noticed that there was still a light burning in the upstairs part of the lean-to so I had to climb up an ad-hoc kind of ladder in the pitch black with a couple of the local kids wandering around, to stick my head in to see whether that had caught fire too. When I looked inside, I found that I’d left a light burning from all those years ago, so that was probably the reason for that. I climbed down and was back inside my garage where these two kids and their father wee wandering around. I was chatting to these two kids. Just to make sure, I took another big bucket of filthy water, told them to keep out of the way and went to throw it up onto the roof a final time but then I couldn’t see where the fire had been and from where the smoke was coming. There were a few bits and pieces of smoke but these were fumes from different kinds of things. They weren’t a fire-type of smoke. I looked on the roof but couldn’t see any sign of anything so I was sitting there pondering what to do with this bucket of water.

Whatever happens now at Virlet is long out of my hands and I need to forget all about it because I can’t ever go back there in my state of health and I’m not expecting any miracle from this treatment that will enable me to be mobile again. In fact, I’ve been wondering if this treatment isn’t simply a case of postponing the inevitable. Then it will be u to my heritees … "God help them!" – ed … to sort it all out.

Later on, I was on a train going somewhere – a German or French type of railway carriage. I noticed that it was measured. There were the little marks every so often, every 50 cms or something so we could see immediately where we were sitting because of the length numbers written on the ticket rather than the seat number. I can’t remember what happened after that.

So we’re back on the train again, are we? This seems to be something of a regular occurrence. Fans of these German psychoanalysts will doubtless say that it’s a subconscious wish to be away from my present mode of life, and who can argue with that?

And finally I was back on the taxis again. We had a fare to pick up at some medical centre at about 08:30. Nerina was with me and so was my step-brother. We went round to pick up these two people and dropped Nerina off at some place on the way – it might have been her mother’s – and then dropped off these two people in Sandbach but they just ran off. There was no point going chasing after them so we set out to come home. There were by now three of us – my brother-in-law was there. We were walking around a seaside town looking for a police station, looking at the yachts and everything. We’d had the freezer opened to sort everything out. We wandered around this seaside town but couldn’t find anything, and ended up throwing a ball at each other until someone broke his glasses when the ball hit him in the face. We climbed into the car and came home. The stuff from the freezer was still out on the shelf. I thought that I’d better put that away before everything melts. While I was doing it, there were loads of stuff in the fridge, sandwiches from several weeks ago etc. I was busy trying to sort out all of these. It seemed that the tidier I tried to make the fridge, the worse it became. Then I suddenly realised that there was a football match that I wanted to go to see, the final match of the season where TNS were playing at somewhere like Pontypridd. I was really hoping that I would have a chance to see it. Instead, I don’t know what happened. I was far too busy trying to sort out this fridge, I was driving a taxi too, I had the stuff to put back in the freezer. I reckoned that it was going to be one of those days when I’m going to end up doing nothing even though I had far too much of other things to do.

The motto of the long-departed and long-lamented “News of the Screws” was “all human life is here”, and this dream is certainly a microcosm of all of my life. I don’t think that it needs too much explanation or examination because you can see the parallels for yourself.

Tea tonight was a dish of left-overs. There had been some mushrooms festering in the fridge for a week and I’d been eyeing them keenly for a few days. There was also half an onion and half a tomato, so, with a little garlic … "he means ‘a lot’" – ed …, I chopped them all up and fried them in vegan butter.

And when they were nicely cooked, I tipped them out of the pan all over a couple of slices of thick toast. However they tasted nicer in my imagination than in my mouth. That’s not a criticism of the food by the way. Everything that I have tasted since chemotherapy has tasted as if it’s been laced with a shed-load of salt. I’m not enjoying my food at all right now, and that’s a sign that I am really ill.

But before I go off to bed, that medical report sounds like the old Kenneth Williams-Sid James exchange in one of the medical “Carry-ons”.
Dr Williams "give him a colostomy, an x-ray, a thoracotomy, a bioscope a … "
Patient James "what was all that?"
Dr Williams "and while you’re at it, wash his ears out."

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Wednesday 7th July 2021 – I’M FED UP …

… of this perishing weather.

rainstorm place d'armes Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallThis afternoon I didn’t have the chance to go out for my afternoon walk because it was raining like it had never rained before.

Even in all my wet-weather gear I wasn’t going to set foot outside the building in all of this. Torrential rain had nothing whatever on what was coming down when I wanted to go for my walk.

The irony of it all was that there was a Welsh conversation on-line tonight and I was bent on joining it. And while we were chatting, the sun came out and there was some blue sky too. But the moment the chat finished, down came the rain, right on cue, and that was that.

Last night was another rather late night because something came up on the Old-Time Radio – an Agatha Christie play concerning Hercule Poirot – so I stayed up and listened to it. If it meant for a bad night and following morning, that’s rather a shame but for me I ought to be having some pleasure out of life somewhere.

As a result it was rather a struggle for me to raise myself from the bed when the first alarm went off, and some time after I’d taken my medication and come back in here I’d crashed out, sitting on my chair. And for about an hour and a half too. I must have been tired.

When I’d recovered I made myself a coffee and then had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d bought some item of clothing and it was going to be for me only and it was very special. I was living at Coleridge Way at Nerina’s. Somehow this thing was picked up in her washing and washed along with everything else and hung out on the airing trolley things. I was wondering how on earth I was going to get it back. I had to wait for a moment when everyone was out of the house. I waited for a period of over a couple of days until everyone had gone and I went downstairs and into the living room where all of these clothes were on airers. There had been a bed made up on the sofa. I crept over there to see and it was an empty bed. I thought that with the bed being on the sofa there was something strange going to happen and so I slowly made my way round to where this article was. Then I heard voices in the house so I waited thinking that the way to distract these people whose voice this was would be to leap out and startle them, and that way to forget what it was that was going on. That was what I did, and it turned out that it was my youngest sister and someone else, another female of our family. They’d both been involved in a car accident so I immediately went to console them both and tell them “it doesn’t matter – it’s only metal” and so on. Another guy was there. he was trying his best to console them as well. All the time this article that I wanted was still up on the clothes airers and I was in a very great danger of actually losing it again to someone else who wasn’t going to be careful about what they packed up and what they put away.

Tater on there was another long and rambling dream that went on and one and on. What I can remember was that some girl was having to have lessons. My brother had been giving her lessons but was unable to do so so I was now having to do it. We were living on the Wistaston Green estate and I had to find out where to go. They said that on Saturdays she lived at home but on Sundays she stayed at someone else’s house. On the Saturday it was somewhere on the Wistaston Green estate but no-one actually knew where. We knew where to go and where to park the car ans one of my sisters thought that she knew which house it was but every time I asked for the number it was “oh you just go there and park your car” and so on. The Sunday was a little clearer because I remember taking the phone call when she was changing it to her relative’s house. I could vaguely remember something about that. But there was tons to this and it just went on and on and I can’t rememner any of it.

While I was asleep on the chair though I was working in an office in Stoke on Trent. They had come along and cleared all of the files in the store room and sent them off to a central repository, which I thought was the strangest decision that I’d ever heard. Every time someone rang up or wrote in a letter you had to write to the central repository to get back the file before you could deal with their query. I’d had something to do with one particular case which I’d been working quite regularly but the file wasn’t there so in the end I went into the basement, couldn’t find this file there so a guy whom I used to know and I went off to the central repository which was in Stoke on Trent. He said that he knew his way around so off he went. I ended up just sitting there for a couple of hours and I was totally fed yp so I decided to go back home again. Back to the van was past a compound with all of these big Bentley 3-litres in it. Then there was a place wirh 4 or 5 Isetta bubble cars all mangled, it was that kind of place. Just as I was getting into Caliburn to go back, he appeared. He said that he couldn’t find the file but he’d found one of his big old buckets that he’d had before and went to empty it over the edge of this drop so that he could take it back but he almost ended up going over the drop with all of the rubbish that was in this bucket thing before he could stop himself.

It must have been a really deep sleep on the chair if I’d wandered off like that.

So having organised myself and grabbed my breakfast much of the morning up until lunchtime was spent dealing with the photos of Greenland in August 2019. I’m not about to go for a wander in a zodiac to look at the icebergs in the Davis Strait and Disco Bay just off Ilulissat. And this, I remember, is the day that I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me.

But one thing about editing these photos – it makes me want to go North again.

My work this morning was interrupted by a couple of things. Firstly, I crashed out yet again for half an hour or so, and secondly, I had a visit from the postie. The first of the deliveries from my mega-Amazon order. And so immediately after lunch I went into unpacking-mode.

A pair of batteries for each of the NIKON D500 and NIKON 1 J5 cameras. And I bet that I still end up down the street with flat batteries too at some point or another.

But interestingly, the new generation of chargers work off 5-volt USB connectors rather than the mains current. So that means less gadgets to haul around with me

The new Dashcam came too, and that took ages to work out how to initialise it, and the new multi-caddy that I’ll be using for back-up storage. The memory is here too, as is the new USB 3.0 multi-connector but that’s all a job for next weekend after I come back from Leuven when hopefully, the two new hard drives for the computer will be here.

rainstorm rue du roc foyer des jeunes travailleurs Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallBy now it was time to go for a walk but the lousy weather put the brakes on that, as I told you earlier.

Going back upstairs I stuck the camera out of the rear window overlooking the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs to take a photo of the weather out there as well. I wasn’t going to end up being soaked just for the sake of a couple of photos.

Instead, I came back here and did some more work on my trip down the coast on board Spirit of Conrad last year. This is a pretty slow process because there’s about 400 photos and I don’t really know what to write about most of them – although that has never stopped me in the past of course.

There was a Welsh chat on Zoom this evening so I wanted to join, but the tutor had sent me the wrong link so it took a while for me to be connected. But a couple of things that I noticed, namely

  1. this particular tutor is a lot more disorganised than the two that we have had so far
  2. this was a mixture of people from several groups and the people from our group were much more confident than the people from the other groups

Tea tonight was chips with burger and baked beans followed by chocolate sponge and coconut soya stuff. I’ll be back to making chocolate sauce for the next few days now.

But not right now because I’m off to bed. It’s shopping tomorrow of course, if I don’t fall asleep, and there might even be more toys from Amazon. Won’t that be nice?

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Saturday 24th April 2021 – THERE ARE MANY …

… things in this life that I don’t understand. And the older that I become, the more I realise that the less and less I actually do understand.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago I was going through a phase of not being able to haul myself out of bed at any price regardless of however many alarms that I set and how loud and for how long I set them.

On Thursday I switched off the alarms so that I could have a lie-in and then on Thursday night before going to bed, I switched them back on.

The chattering birds outside my window, helped by the rattling fridge downstairs, awoke me at about 05:20. And not being able to go back to sleep, I lay awake waiting for the 06:00 alarm.

When I checked the time again, it was actually 06:10 and the alarms hadn’t gone off. It seems that last night I’d set them for 08:00 in error. And had I not been awake and instead slept right through to when the alarms would have actually gone off, I’d have missed my train home.

So what would have been the odds on that in similar circumstances a couple of weeks ago?

And this is what I just don’t understand – that I can actually do it when I have to so why can’t I do it when I don’t have to?

But anyway, there I was, up and about on time so I tidied everything up, made my sandwiches, packed up and headed off for the railway station.

martelarenplein leuven belgium Eric HallHere’s something that is extremely interesting.

Something else that regular readers of this rubbish will recall that not long after I came to live in Leuven in 2016 they closed off the Martelarenplein outside the railway station in order to completely refurbish it. And since then, it’s been all fenced off and the fences covered with tarpaulins so it’s impossible to see through it.

This morning though, some of the tarpaulin covering has been taken away and it’s now actually possible to see what they have been doing for all of this time.

And to be quite honest, it really doesn’t look all that different than it did before, although I do have to say that judging by how the place appears right now, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Another project around the town that has gone on far longer than it ought to have done.

So on the station, I didn’t have to wait too long for my train to come in.

automotrice am96 multiple unit 543 gare de leuven railway station belgium Eric HallThe train that I’m catching this morning is the 08:19 to the Belgian coast, calling at the Airport, and then the city centre before it clears off coastwards.

Just for a change, it’s not one of the depressing and dirty AM80 units but a much more modern AM96, the type with the rubber bellows and the swivelling drivers’ cabs. Bang on time it was when it pulled in and it pulled out on time too.

When we arrived in Brussels I still had 90 minutes to wait before my train came in so I went and sat in the main concourse for a while.

Once I’d worked out where my train would be arriving (there’s only a choice of 2 platforms for the Thalys and the train to Amsterdam pulled into one of them) I went up there to wait.

A few minutes later I was joined by a young lady. “This platform is quite big and lonely and there aren’t many people about” she said. “Would you mind if I waited near you? I’d feel safer”? She clearly didn’t know me very well.

Thalys PBKA 4331 gare de brussels midi railway station belgium Eric HallSoon enough, a train pulled into the station at my platform.

It’s one of the PBKA (Paris – Brussels – Cologne – Amsterdam) units, number 4331, a nice clean and shiny one just out of the carriage wash. But it only had 8 carriages, numbered 1-8 which didn’t really suit me because I had a seat in carriage number 18.

My lady-friend had a seat in carriage 8 so she cleared off to board the train and take her seat. I had a few enquiries to make, such as to go and find an arrivals board to find out what trains were due to arrive in the very near future. That should tell me everything that I need to know.

TGV Réseau 38000 tri-volt 4536 coupling up to Thalys PBKA 4331 gare de brussels midi railway station belgium Eric HallAnd I was quite right too. 5 minutes before my train was due to depart, a TGV was coming into the station from Amsterdam. And sure enough it pulled up at this platform and I had the pleasure of watching them couple up two trainsets together.

This one is one of the PBA (Paris – Brussels – Amsterdam) Reseau 38000 tri-volt trainsets, number 4536, and once it was all coupled up I could take my seat in carriage 18. It was really busy too which is no surprise seeing as it’s the only train to Paris this morning and I’m not sure whether there will be one in the afternoon either.

We set out bang on time and arrived bang on time in Paris too, and there the passengers had to run the gauntlet of a police barrage, checking papers.

Although I don’t have a valid Covid test result, I’ve been out of the country for less than 72 hours and have a Carte de Séjour to prove my address and residence status, so I didn’t have a problem. A really good plan, that, to apply for my Carte de Séjour when I did.

And I’ll tell you something else as well, and that is that the gendarmette who questioned me at the station can detain me for further questioning any time she likes. Actually, I should be being paid by the police force, judging by the number of times that I’ve had to help them with their enquiries.

The metro was quite rapid and when I arrived at Montparnasse I even managed to find a seat, which was just as well because I had a wait of about 90 minutes for my train. I could eat my butties in comfort.

82694 Bombardier B82500 84559 GEC Alstom Regiolis gare de Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallIt was a 6-carriage train (the one on the right, not the Bombardier B82500 on the left) to Granville and it was packed.

Even worse, there were no reserved seats. But I was one of the lucky ones in that I didn’t have a neighbour so I could fall asleep and drop my laptop on the floor in comfort.

We were held up somewhere in the countryside by electrical current issues but we made up the missing minutes as we hurtled down the line towards the coast.

And when we arrived, actually a couple of minutes early, we’d somehow managed to throw out most of the passengers and there weren’t all that many of us left.

When I’d left Leuven this morning it was pretty cold but here in Granville we were having a heatwave and I had to strip off to walk home, down the steps and through the park.

citroen ami electric car parc de val es fleurs Granville Manche Normandy France Eric HallIn the past we’ve seen some pretty awful and horrible-looking cars but this is one that really takes the biscuit.

It’s a Citroen Ami all-electric car and I do have to say that it’s one of the most hideous that I’ve ever seen.

The climb up the Rue des Juifs was rather painful in the heat and seeing as I’m not feeling myself right now, I had to stop for a breather half-way up the hill and that’s not like me at all. And I can’t blame the shopping that I was carrying because I’ve come up the hill with much more than this.

Having put the cold stuff away I came in here to watch this evening’s football.

And this was the match of the season – TNS, top of the table, against Connah’s Quay Nomads in second place. The Nomads do have some quality but they aren’t consistent enough to do it every week, whereas TNS are like a well-oiled machine and tick over quite smoothly.

Ordinarily we might be expecting a tight game but Nomads have been known to crumble at the most inappropriate times so I don’t think that too many neutral supporters would have had their money on the Nomads.

But while you always find the odd player here and there who has a bad game, it’s very rare to find half a dozen who are having a poor performance all at the same time. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the TNS centre-half pairing of Blaine Hudson and Ryan Astles were having a nightmare match.

Despite having 60% of the ball TNS never really did much with it and Connah’s Quay simply swept them aside. Michael Wilde, a player released by TNS a few seasons ago, scored a hat-trick and Jamie Insall scored a fourth while Astles and Hudson stood around watching them.

In the end TNS had 5 strikers on the field and while they did manage to score one early in the game, they never ever looked likely to trouble the Nomads back line and when they were awarded a penalty towards the end of the game, Oliver Byrne in the Nomads goal saved it quite comfortably.

It’s been about 20 years since I’ve been watching the Welsh Premier League and I have never ever seen TNS play so badly as they did today, although a lot of the credit should go to the Nomads back 4 and Callum Morris just in front of them who stopped almost everything that TNS tried to do.

One thing that I forgot to do until later was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. I’d started out with a former friend of mine and we were in Nantwich, Crewe Road end, going to visit some people. There were two girls there talking away and the guy was some kind of electronics guy and his house was a total tip worse than mine and there was stuff everywhere – all bits and pieces for making radios and so on. These 2 girls were young teenage girls busy talking away and at a certain moment I said to one of them “what language are you speaking? Is it Welsh”? They replied “no, it’s Slovensko”. So I asked “Slovene”? and they replied “no” so I asked “Slovak”? and they said “no” so we agreed that they were talking Czech. I was intrigued to know what they were doing while they were looking at all these bits and pieces. At the end of the road I looked out and there was an old guy on a walkframe, delivering the newspapers. It looked as if he had a paper round. I thought “it’s one way of keeping busy when you are old”. I went off into my shed, rooting around for something. There were all these old people standing around, not saying or doing anything, just standing there and it was making me feel uncomfortable. I of these 2 girls came in and she asked me for something. I couldn’t remember what it was she asked me but she saw it while I was searching through stuff so I let her have one. The other one came in and asked “where’s mine”? So I had to find one for her as well. I told her to make sure that she used it otherwise I’d be wanting it back.

Later on I was in Winsford with my father and a few other people, and Denise was there (as if that was ever likely to happen). One of my sisters was talking to Denise about operations, telling her about how she should have had a breast cancer operation a long time ago. Paul Ross rang up but my father was on the other phone so he couldn’t speak to him. Paul Ross came round and said that yesterday evening Dave Clark had died. We worked out that since Christmas we’d had 4 deaths in the immediate close circle and it was enough to make you wonder who was going to be next. Everyone looked at me but I said “as far as I’m concerned, it’s the creaky gate that hangs the longest, isn’t it”?

Anyway, now I’m off to make some sourdough mix and then I’m going to bed. No alarm in the morning and quite right too as I deserve a lie-in after my efforts today.

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Wednesday 30th January 2019 – IT’S SNOWING!!!!

snow place d'armes granville manche normandy franceAlthough you’ve seen this heading before this winter, you’ve seen it in relation to Canada, the Auvergne and Belgium. But this afternoon, it’s been snowing here!

And I’m not talking about a light dusting for five minutes either. Round about 13:00 the heavens opened up and we had a right pasting for a couple of hours and it looked quite impressive.

I thought that it was going to stick too but it stopped, the weather warmed up a couple of degrees and all of the snow disappeared.

st helier jersey granville manche normandy franceThat’s a shame too. because tonight, there’s a clear sky, millions of stars and you could see for miles.

This photo, albeit rather blurred because it was hand-held on a very slow exposure in a wind, is of St Helier in Jersey.

The lights are, would you believe, about 60 kms – that’s 35 miles – away. And you won’t have this kind of light and this kind of photo in many weather conditions.

night montmartin breville granville manche normandy franceThis photo is a little closer to home.

That’s Montmartin-sur-Mer, Breville-sur-Mer and Bréhal-Plage. Montmartin, on the extreme left, is about 25 kms away.

So, in other words, it is probably going to be really cold tonight and had the snow hung around, it would have been a good base to really start the winter.

Despite my depressing posting of yesterday, I’ve had a better day today. A good sleep of at least 5 hours. There was a vague wave of tiredness round about 17:00 but I managed to fight it off.

And a little ramble or two too during the night. There were four of us, me, my father, the son of the woman whom he married in the 1970s and someone else. And the car was his red Mark III Cortina. We’d all been out for a drive somewhere and ended up in a small town somewhere. We were all hungry so decided to go for food. My father and his friend wanted to go somewhere special but I was just interested in something simple so Paul and I went to a chip shop for a portion of chips. The chip shop owner was a bad-tempered, miserable kind of guy, the chips were over-cooked and the portions were disgracefully small. We took them outside to eat them, and noticed that there were two young girls, one of them an Asian girl, chatting to my father and his friend in the car, and then they climbed in. So Paul and I made a few ribald comments about what was going to be going on. Shortly afterwards Paul and I were with a couple of people and the subject of these girls came up. I made some kind of suggestion about their professional activities, but the other people told my that my opinion was far from being the case and that they were really nice and friendly girls really and certainly not the kind of girls that I was suggesting.
Although I was awake at about 05:30, there was still enough time to go back to sleep before the alarm. And off on another voyage too. Ad I was with either Alison or Jackie – I can’t remember now just who it was. And she was clambering about up the side of a slope and on top of a hill and I was taking photographs. But when I looked at them, they hadn’t come out ptoperly but more like rather jerky poor-quality *.gif moving images. I was disappointed by that because it meant that either the camera was playing up or the computer was playing up. But either way, I was worried that I had lost all of the images.

After breakfast I had a very relaxing morning doing a mega-back-up of the new computer seeing as I hadn’t done one since I’d bought it. That took some time, what with one thing or another.

Another thing that I did was to sort out some more music for the bass guitar. And to print it out too. I need to organise myself so much better than I do.

Lunch was rather later than usual, and I spent the time watching the snowfall. Like I said, a shame that it all petered out.

This afternoon I did some more 3D stuff. I’ve had to go back and rework some objects that I created a while ago because I came across something the other day that made quite a useful add-on.

st helier jersey granville manche normandy franceThere were a few people out a-walking this afternoon. It was damp outside but not really cold and not really windy.

A good day for photography because there some strange effects on the sea as the storm was moving out across the bay.

St Helier and the rest of Jersey were fairly clear, even if they were swathed in storm.

ferry ile de chausey traversier granville manche normandy franceThere had been a ferry service out to the Ile de Chausey too. Or, at least, there was a ferry coming back from the island.

I would have been out there much more often on the ferry had the prices been more reasonable. But €27:50 for a round trip is a bit more than I’m willing to pay for a sail around the bay.

rock ship granville manche normandy franceThis photo was quite interesting too.

There’s a huge rock at the entrance to the bay at St Malo but there seemed to be something else out there too.

Cropping, enhancing and blowing up the photo (because I can do that despite modern anti-terrorist legislation) brought out something to the left of the rock that might possibly (although it’s difficult to tell) be a ship – possibly one of the Brittany Ferries fleet – sailing into St Malo.

Tea was a curry – a pepper, mushroom and coconut cream curry from November 2017. just as delicious as it was the day that I made it.

Later on, as I said, the storm has gone when I went around the walls, but it’s cold out there and I reckon that it’s going to become even colder tonight.

So I’ll be huddled up under the bedclothes gathering up my strength for my trip to the shops tomorrow. I’ll need to warm myself up.

ferry ile de chausey traversier granville manche normandy france
ferry ile de chausey traversier granville manche normandy france

st helier jersey granville manche normandy france
st helier jersey granville manche normandy france

st helier jersey granville manche normandy france
st helier jersey granville manche normandy france

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Saturday 1st August 2015 – NO WONDER …

… I had a struggle to leave my bed. And no wonder that I didn’t feel like anything at all until I’d had a nice hot coffee. In fact, I’d been to somewhere round Stockport during the night, and on a pushbike too. I had Paul Ross with me on his bike too and we had gone there with the aim of doing some taxi-ing with our bikes (don’t ask me how). Anyway someone came over and wanted to go up onto the moors and so I told Paul to take him – I didn’t fancy the mountains. But Paul was being difficult. He said that he had to be home soon and this was going out of his way. I explained that it was “sort-of” on his way (which it wasn’t of course” and he’d only be 10 minutes late, but he was still unwilling. Then onto the stage came another friend of mine from Uni. He’s a friend of mine in a social network and for the last year he’s been tetchy and argumentative, and tonight in Stockport (he lives no where near there) he was being his tetchy and argumentative self.

But whatever were these two doing in my nocturnal ramblings?

So today I’ve done nothing at all of significance except to talk to Liz, Hannah and a guy from Bangor, Maine on the computer. And I may have some exciting news to report on Monday night – who knows?

And apart from that, I’ve written three enormous pages of my blog from 2011 about my journey around southern New Brunswick. If you start here and go forwards, you’ll find them and you can follow my adventures from there.

All comments welcomed.

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