Tag Archives: place maurice marland

Sunday 14th August 2022 – WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT!

It actually rained today. And I missed most of it.

When I (eventually) awoke this morning (yes it was morning) the bright blue sky that we had had for the last I don’t know how long had changed into a woolly grey mass of cloud and the temperature was probably 10°C cooler too. Not that you’d know it in here because being a stone building with walls 1.20m thick it managed to avoid the extremes of temperature that we have outside.

Mind you, it wasn’t far off midnight. That’s because come 03:00 this morning I was still up and about. I’ve no idea what time I eventually went to bed but I was glad that I wasn’t going out at 08:30 this morning.

In actual fact I was awake at 10:20 but there wasn’t all that much likelihood of me showing a leg at that time. It was much more like 11:00 when I finally staggered into the daylight and went for my medication, feeling quite grateful that I’d prepared the music for the radio yesterday instead of trying to do it today.

Back in here, in a mad fit of enthusiasm and I’ve no idea where that came from, I listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was a house somewhere down Minshull New Road or somewhere like that, a council house. I don’t know what I was doing in it but it was filthy, dirty, dusty, overfull of furniture etc. The only way out was to climb through a window, one of the smaller fanlight windows at the top. I’d been doing that for a while here and there. One day a girl in there got hold of me, told me her name and told me that she lived in this house and that she was fed up of people coming in and going out again through the window. I made a facetious remark about going out of the door which didn’t go down very well. I said “never mind. I’ll write you an apology. It’s no problem to me” so we agreed that I would write her an apology and she would accept it. We had a chat and she was saying how she hated this house and how she was hoping to move etc, quite a long discussion. In the end I decided that I had to go. Of course the only way out was through the window. I went to open the window which for some unknown reason wasn’t easy today. While I was at it two dogs, a big one and a small one came up and started gnawing at my leg. Then some old man came in and asked what I was doing. I explained to him and explained that I’d seen the girl. He didn’t seem to be all that pleased and was making up all kinds of reasons for it to be extremely difficult for me to climb out of that window. I was determined that I was going anyway. We were talking about travelling around the world. I said that I’d met some interesting people. He asked if I’d been to Moscow so I replied “yes”. He asked if I’d ever been to New York so I replied “yes”. He said that the World Trade Centre has only been down a few years so I replied that I’d been to New York a lot longer than those had been down. We had quite an acrimonious discussion, polite but bad-tempered. All the time I was trying to go out through this window so that I could leave but everything seemed to be conspiring against me to stop me going and to keep me in this flaming filthy, dusty, dirty house.

Later on I was at work. I’d been promoted and was working with the inspectors. We received certain information about different things and I suggested ways of dealing with it that were unorthodox but were bound to bring in results and weren’t illegal. Everyone looked at me strangely and as we didn’t have the staff we put it on the back burner for the moment. In the afternoon we were invited to a beach party so we went down there. A lot of the people were playing beach volleyball but I was peering through some papers that I’d brought with me sitting in the sun. I thought “when I’ve finished these papers I can go and join in the volleyball”. But everyone suddenly packed up and started to move. Someone asked where they were going and the response was “guess”. It turned out that they were all heading to the local night club because even though it wasn’t night time it was probably open by now. I had no intention whatever of going there but one has to be sociable. Just then some woman from the office came by with a huge folder and said “guess what I have in here”. I know that I was trying to lay my hands on a folder for work so I said the name. She said “no. It’s a list of all second-homes and country cottages in the UK”. I suggested that these be compared with the owners. If necessary we could make enquiries about them and tie them up to their owners and see what comes of it. Someone was there, a Prophet of Doom, saying that it would never work, that’s totally illegal” which of course it was nonsense. I was trying to argue my particular corner. For some reason these people seemed to be totally devoid of any imagination and were totally unlikely to make anything work with the kind of imagination that they had.

That’s one thing that I’ve noticed since I left the UK in 1992. These days British people seem to fall at the first fence when they are trying to do something. When a problem arises or a technical hitch develops or something goes wrong or a machine breaks or a plan needs developing, the first setback is enough to make them throw in the towel.

We were always taught to use our imagination, to think, and work out a workaround and I used to have loads of fun doing that. But I seem to be one of a very small breed of people today. It reminds me of the saying “99% of the population has problems, but the rest of us have solutions”.

After lunch I came back in here but strangely, I can’t remember now what I did. I know that I didn’t fall asleep, that is a surprise in itself these days. I managed to keep on going until it was time to go walkies but just as I was about to step out of the door Ingrid rang.

We ended up having a marathon session on the telephone too seeing as it’s been a while since we last spoke, and the result of all of this was that I was considerably late going for my afternoon walk.

As usual the first thing that I did was to go over to the wall at the end of the car park to look down on the beach.

There were hordes of people down there this afternoon but they weren’t there for the sunbathing.

That was because
1) there was no sun
2) It’s the time for the pèche à pied and they were all mainly down there at the water’s edge having a scratch around to see what they could pull up

And with the tide being quite well out, it was all systems go further down the coast.

At Donville les Bains there’s a bouchot farm and you can see all of the stakes planted in the sand. Someone made an accidental discovery that if you leave ropes and things in the water the shellfish will actually grow on them in preference to the sand.

And that’s quite a delicacy too because the shellfish aren’t full of sandy grit and taste so much better.

Why that works so well here, apart from the fact that we have so much shellfish, is that with the high tides, the ropes and stakes can be well-submerged for growing the shellfish but at low tide they are out of the water and can be harvested and the equipment maintained quite easily.

But here’s an example of an earlier generation of fish traps.

This is the kind of thing that would have been common in medieval times. They would build a wall of loose-fitting stones across a bay or estuary so that at high tide, water and the fish therein would over flow behind the wall. And as the tide went out, the water would exfiltrate through the gaps in the stones leaving the fish behind.

And then all of your medieval fishwives would wade in and catch the fish with their bare hands ready for supper.

It’s the kind of thing that would still work today if it were properly maintained.

There’s a sort-of modern version of it here.

That’s the tidal swimming pool at the Plat Gousset and the principle is the same. And today it seems to have caught quite a few fish of the two-legged variety in its trap.

The person in the fluorescent yellow jacket is the lifeguard. There is a handful of them scattered around at various places on the beach keeping an eye on the activities and making sure that no-one is swept away.

Not that they are likely to be swept away in the tidal swimming pool but you never know your luck, I suppose.

From there I wandered off to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset.

Whenever we’ve seen that just recently it’s been heaving with people on the beach taking the sun but not today. There aren’t too many people down there in this weather. They are all wandering around the Place Marechal Foch.

But what caught my eye in this photo was the long queue of traffic coming down the hill into town. I can’t remember ever having seen a traffic jam quite like that in all the time that I’ve been living here

The reason for that might be something not unconnected with what’s going on in this photo.

These days it seems that you can’t go anywhere without attracting the attention of the local farces of Law and Order. And a couple of Granville’s finest seem to be rather more than interested in what this biker is up to with his machine.

In actual fact there were four policemen altogether and maybe they were performing a spot check of vehicles entering the town.

Nevertheless it’s good to see them going for the same old stereotyped victims. Nothing much changes, despite the passage of time.

another reason might be that the town centre is all closed off to through traffic today.

No vehicles are allowed in there right now and so they are having to go around the outside. That means that gordes of pedestrians can roam around the streets in perfect safety to their hearts’ content.

Rather bad luck if you live in the town centre and need your car, but never mind.

When I lived in Brussels we had a car-free day one Sunday every year. All of the public transport was free and there were all kinds of entertainments in the street.

Where I lived was on a hill on the edge of the city centre and you could see the dramatic improvement in air quality down below by the end of the day.

My route from here took me through the Place Maurice Marland.

My seagull chick wasn’t there today so maybe it had gone off for a fly around with its mum. I hope that it wasn’t the one that I saw dead by the side of the street on Friday.

There was plenty of activity in the harbour this afternoon. It doesn’t look as if anyone had gone out working. Over there on the back wall we had Le Coelacanthe and little sister le Tiberiade. You can tell them apart in this photo as the gormer has the wings to its bridge.

In the foreground from left to right we have the new Suzanga, the blue Massabielle and on the right, the little white Nais.with red and yellow stripes.

Plenty of others too that didn’t make it into the photograph which was a shame.

Over there in the bay where the gravel boats used to tie up is the trawler Philcathane

The other two boats that are there, I didn’t expect to see them here today. Marité for example, the wooden sailing ship. With it being a Sunday in the middle of the tourist season I would have thought that she would have gone out and about into the bay with a crowd of passengers to earn a few bob while the going was good.

As for Chausiaise, a friend of mine in St Helier sent me a photo this morning of her over there in jersey. The freight situation is definitely hotting up here if she’s being pressed into service.

Victor Hugo, the Channel Islands ferry isn’t here though. She spent yesterday and today running around the Channel Islands but she’s back in port by the time that I’m writing this.

From here I headed for home through the old town.

It’s book fair today and everyone had set out their stall to sell their surplus books. But by the time that I arrived here it was quite late and most people had packed up and had gone home.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall me talking about the Monegasque Royal Family and their connections here when one of the Grimaldis married a local girl. The browny-grey granite house on the street corner on the left is where she lived.

Carrying on homewards I had a look over the wall and out into the bay.

A little earlier I mentioned the pèche à pied. Over there you can still see a few people out there but they are now heading for safety as the tide is coming in. And it comes in here quite rapidly too so they don’t want to be caught hanging about.

It was raining ever so slightly as I reached home and that’s a good thing as this are has been declared in a State of Emergency because of the drought. But we’ll need much more rain than this to do any good. Probably about a week’s torrential downpour.

And now I remember what it was that I did after lunch.

Last weekend I used up the last of the pizza dough so I had to make some more. That was how I spent the early afternoon and it had been proofing while I was otherwise occupied.

When I came back from my walk two lumps went into the freezer and I rolled out the third one and put it on the tray for its second proofing.

Later on this evening I assembled my pizza and put it in the oven to cook. And it was delicious too.

But here’s something that I rarely do. In fact, I can’t think when I last did it.

Usually I know exactly what my appetite will be and I make my food accordingly. My pizza is always a standard, regular size.

But tonight, about a third of it went into the bin. I quite simply couldn’t finish it and that’s something that has rarely, if ever happened to me before. It’s not like me at all to be off my food and not even want to save it for breakfast.

What’s happening here?

Anyway that’s for another day as I’m off to bed right now. Radioing early in the morning so I need to be at my best. But not much chance of that.

Sunday 13th June 2021 – SUNDAY IS …

… pizza day as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and so for the first time for several weeks, having been stranded in Leuven a couple of weeks ago and then having had visitors last weekend, I’ve been having pizza withdrawal symptoms.

And so I made myself a nice pizza today, and put on it a bit of everything that I had. And it was delicious too. A really good way to end a weekend in my opinion.

But no dessert tonight though. The pizza was quite filling and there was no more room left. And that’s just as well, for I didn’t fancy the rice pudding that was left anyway. That’s destined for the bin and for the remaining 2 nights that I’m here before I go off to Leuven I’ll drag some apple pie out of the freezer. There’s a ton of that in there.

This morning, the lie-in wasn’t as long as I would have liked. Or maybe it was because I’ve complained about some of these mega-lie-ins in the past. Being up and about by 09:25 is probably realistic.

Mind you there are some who disagree. I remember once when I was staying with a friend that I always liked a lie-in on Sunday. She replied “you can stay in bed until 09:00 if you like”. I remembered that I thought that round about 09:01 some sharp words would be spoken.

After the mountain of medication I came in here and had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. We started off with something going on last night about Liz’s chocolate cake and something or other involving music but I can’t remember what it was. It was another one of those things that when I awoke it disappeared completely from m mind, not that there’s much to hold it in these days.

At another time I was in a pub in Crewe – it might have been the Cheese Hall – talking to the barmaid, someone I knew. It might have been some girl with whom I worked at one time even. A guy (someone who was once a friend of mine and with whom she’d once gone out) came in and said to her “don’t think I’m prying or anything but have you seen anything of do-and-so?” and he mentioned a guy’s name. It turned out to be a guy who I got on well with fairly reasonably. She asked why and he replied “I didn’t want to say anything but he and I became champions of the George’s pools team on Monday night so of course we were all giving him our congratulations and there were the usual “how many people entered? Just two?” that kind of thing. We got talking and he was working on boats. He said how he would love to be working on cruises one day. That gave me an idea and I immediately, well, not signed him up but got him to be interested in a project that I was doing involving cruises and I was thinking of hiring the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. I can’t remember where I’d go with it but I’d get all of my friends as stewards and stewardesses and we’d go off and have a really good time like we did at the time of the institution.

I was at my sister’s in Canada. I’ve no idea what I was doing there. She was talking about changing jobs or she had a new job, something like that. As I was tidying things up, on the settee I came across a folder that was talking about her new job. I forgot myself and started to read it. I’s read about 2 pages before I realised that everyone else was in the room so I shut it and moved it. There was a black cat actually sitting in the fire and it was smoking so I had to move it away otherwise it would catch fire. My sister said something about le being on the settee so I had this pair of pliers in my hand so I showed her this pair of pliers that I said I’d pinched my hand with. I was thinking while I was there about getting a MIG-welding set so that I could start to weld up all of the vehicles that I had to repair. Then we were back again hunting for the vehicles that I’d dumped all round Crewe somewhere and wondering where they were and whether I should go and collect a few back.

That bit about having Ford Cortinas dumped all over Crewe was at one time a recurring dream but it’s one that I’ve not had for a little while.

The first mission for today, if I chose to accept it, was to defrost the fridge. The pizza dough is in the freezer compartment and that has all iced up and I can’t even open the little door, never mind get anything out. So I took most things out, put a towel at the bottom, switched it off and let nature do its bit.

Second task was one that I had been putting off for quite a while. as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been digitalising my record collection for the last 18 months or so. There are a good few cassettes that need recording digitally and I’ve yet to find a successful means to do it.

One thing that I tried was to couple up an old tape deck and run a line out into the Zoom H1 but that didn’t work all that well.

This morning I resurrected an old amp, connected all of that up (which involved no little amount of manipulation and even some tidying up). The net result of that was a set of pierced eardrums from the headphones that I was using.

So having ruled that out, I’m now back to the only other remaining idea that I have, of using one of the old laptops with a lead from the hifi in the other room.

I wish that I’d remembered to bring the old cassette player back from the Auvergne last year. I had such success with that years ago.

Giving the stack of ice in the fridge a prod every now and then, I next split up a few more LPs that I’d recorded a long time ago. Just a few more to go now and that task will be finished. Then there will only be the cassettes to deal with.

That took me up to lunch. And as usual these days I had porridge and a couple of slices of toast, followed by coffee.

Having spent the morning shuffling the music around and dealing with the fridge (all done with and finished now) this afternoon I’ve been attacking photos from August 2019.

And by the time I knocked off, I was actually standing with my feet in between some real waggon ruts from the 1840s and 50s right in the middle of South Pass – the “real” bit of South Pass where I was actually supposed to be.

From here, it’s all downhill to Winnipeg and then to Toronto where my Voyage of Destiny begins.

Right now, though, I’m going on my Voyage of Destiny outside the building.

Of course, we have to go out and have a look at how things are doing on the beach this afternoon.

And sure enough, there were crowds of people down there too because today was the hottest day of the year so far and there was hardly any wind to speak of, which will come as a big surprise to most of you. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, this has been the windiest year that I can ever remember.

And in case you are wondering about the change in perspective of the photo today, I’m not at my usual spec down at he end of the car park. I’ve gone the other way round and I’m in the Rue du Nord heading off around the walls.

Now here’s a thing that will take many people by surprise.

Where those kids and other folk are swimming is actually in the old medieval fish trap. And that shows you that it’s still reasonably effective at what it does compared to more modern techniques because the concrete tidal swimming pool has drained itself of all of its water. Modern isn’t always best.

All that we can hope for is that some old medieval fishwife with a home-made trident doesn’t actually spear a small boy instead of a fish by mistake, or else another small boy doesn’t have his toe bitten by a crab that is bent on making good its escape before a fishwife can grab it.

My route continued around the walls until I came to the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset, where I could see what was going on down there.

That spec down there really is protected from the wind and so if the crowds were going to be anywhere today, that was where they would be. And I’m not wrong as we? We have some kind of informal football match going on on an impromptu pitch down by the diving platform (which has now been reinstated for the summer) and a few other private kick-abouts among the dozens of people sunning themselves.

But I have no time to stand and watch them. I’m pushing off around the corner and across the Square Maurice Marland to see what’s happening there.

The first thing that I do is to have a look to see how the various families of seagulls and their chicks are going.

This little family was quite interesting and I spent quite an amount of time watching them. One seagull chick was being quite well-behaved but the other one was having quite a dispute or something with its mother and I wasn’t sure why. But when I saw them, the mother and chick were taking it in turns to chase each other around the roof here in the Rue Des Juifs.

The baby chick was giving its mother some nasty pecks in what I can only describe as some kind of teenage seagull angst. And I really ought to have stayed around to see how the situation developed.

Down at the other end of the Place Maurice Marland were a few more seagull chicks. And here, there seemed to be no parent in sight. It’s not like a seagull parent to fly off and leave the chicks unattended so this is rather an unusual situation.

What, however, seems to be a usual situation is the state of the place. There was some kind of campaigner campaigning about the previous mayor and how she had let the place become run-down.

But I wonder what our anonymous blogger has to say about the new mayor who not only has let the place deteriorate even more, but many of te kiddies’ amusements are blocked off and many of those that aren’t have been removed.

And at summer time too when the tourists are here.

Into the Rue Notre Dame I went, but I didn’t get very far before I was brought to a standstill by the crowds.

On my way into the old city I noticed that there were diversions everywhere and there were signs telling us that “an event” was taking place. And so there was too. It’s another one of these craft fair things where people sell the the most overpriced in-bad-taste articles at the kind of prices that would make even a Bond Street salesman blush.

For quie a while now I’ve been trying to find a nice seascape original to hang in my living room, but not at the kind of prices that they are asking here, even if I were to find anything half-decent, which is most unlikely.

The Place Cambernon and Rue Cambernon were lined with stalls too, but I wasn’t going to push my way down there with all of those people thronging around carrying God-alone-knows-what kind of virus with them.

And that was what appalled me, quite frankly. The Préfet of the département has decreed that face masks are compulsory until 30th June but you only have to look at this photo and the previous one to see that half of the people aren’t wearing them and of the other half, half of those aren’t wearing them properly.

Where are the authorities who are supposed to be enforcing this measure? I headed for home rapidly and my nice cold strawberry smoothie with ginger cake. And I’ve timed this hospital trip quite nicely because I’m right down on cake.

What else can I persuade the hospital to chop off so that Liz will feel sorry for me and bake another cake?

Anyway, having had tea and written my notes, I’m off to bed. I have the radio stuff to do tomorrow, followed by a visit to have a Covid test. It’s non-stop, isn’t it?

Wednesday 2nd June 2021 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… bad day today and I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.

As I mentioned last night, I was going to have a good lie-in this morning. However 07:15 is not what I call a good lie in at all. And leaving my bed at 07:30 because I couldn’t go back to sleep was extremely disappointing.

These days it takes me ages to sort out the medication. There’s just so much of it right now. I mentioned earlier that if I move too fast I’ll rattle. But moving fast is not something about which I’ll have to worry these days.

Anyway, once the medication was done, I came in here and started work. I dictated all three sets of notes. Not very well – a couple of them were a right mess. But by the time that it was lunchtime I’d edited one of them, chopped it about and assembled it all together. I’d even worked out the length of the final track and selected one that would do the job.

There’s no bread in the house so I had a couple of wraps with my salad in. They were nice. But while I’m on the subject of bread, I think that the sourdough has died while I was away. The flour and water is separating out. No chance of making a sourdough fruit loaf right now. But tomorrow I might make a loaf and make some fruit bread with yeast.

After lunch I came back in here to carry on with the other 2 radio programmes but, as you might expect, I crashed out completely. I was well away with the fairies too and didn’t come back round again until about 15:45. As a result I was quite late in going out for my afternoon walk.

Outside I went to have a look out to sea to see what was going on. And I wasn’t disappointed, as there was a trawler coming home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that fishing has been a very topical point of discussion this last few months with the problems that have arisen with the British Government unilaterally revoking the Treat of the Bay of Granville of 1843.

But some kind of agreement has been reached because the local boats are still going out there. Here is one on its way back from the fishing grounds out there. It’s too far out for me to see if it has the usual crowd of seagulls hovering around it. That is usually a sign that there has been a good catch.

One thig that I usually do when I go out is to look down onto the beach at the Rue du Nord to see what’s happening down there.

And I had a really good look down there but I couldn’t see a soul this afternoon. And that’s not a surprise because the weather today has changed dramatically. The wind that has been conspicuous by its absence since I came back from Leuven has now come back as well, the sky was overcast and cloudy, and the temperature has dropped about 6 degrees from yesterday.

In the circumstances it’s hardly a surprise that there was no-one about this afternoon down on the beach. I wouldn’t really want to be down there in this weather either.

This is a view that I can’t remember featuring in any previous posting, so I’m including it in here.

You probably noticed that we had a different viewpoint of the beach today. That’s because, as I mentioned yesterday, I’m going the other way today – around the path underneath the city walls. In the Rue du Nord there’s an old gateway that leads to the footpath down there and this is where I used to go a-running.

It was probably an old sally-port where the defenders can make a counter-attack against anyone besieging the walls. There’s no actual gate there now though.

You can see what would happen to any attackers trying to batter down the door. Because the door is at right-angles to the walls, anyone trying to batter down the door would be right underneath the wall where the defenders could drop objects and boiling oil and that kind of thing on them.

A little further along is the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset where we can look down on the beach and see how the preparations for the summer season are advancing

In the foreground, we can see that the crown has been put back on top of the pillar to make the diving platform where the kids can jump off or dive off. In the middle distance, the tidal swimming pool is looking really good too. They cleared that out last year, and earlier this year they carried out some more work on it.

In the background on the promenade of the Plat Gousset are the changing cabins. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw them arriving on the back of a Council lorry the other day while we were on our way to the railway station.

A little further on is a better viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset where we can have a better view down there.

There were a few people down there on the beach, huddled up against the sea wall out of the wind. They don’t actually look very comfortable down there. There are even a few people drying themselves off with towels as if they have just come out of the sea after a swim. And they are certainly braver than I am. There is no chance of me going in the water in this kind of weather.

You’ll also notice someone in a wheelchair on the Plat Gousset. There’s a big white building on the seafront just down there that at one time was a hotel but is now a Rehabilitation Centre for people to go who have had a serious illness and injury.

Awwwwww. Now look at this!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last year we spent a very pleasant early summer watching seagull eggs hatch and the chicks growing up and learning to fly. So after I’d been to look down at the Plat Gousset I came across the Square Maurice Marland to go and have a look on the roofs in the Rue des Juifs to see what we have this year.

And sure enough, here’s a mummy seagull perched upon her nest down there on that roof, and she has at least two little baby chicks in her care. They look so cute, don’t they, with their lovely camouflage colouring.

While I was here I had a look at the other roofs in the area to see what was going on on there, and I could see plenty of activity.

Here’s another very proud seagull mummy, and she has a couple of little chicks in her care. In fact I lost count of how many seagull babies I could see all over the roofs of the Rue des Juifs.

But I had other things to do rather than study baby seagulls. I’d come this way round today on an errand and I’d not had much luck yet. So dodging the people around here who weren’t wearing their masks as they are legally obliged to until the 9th of June, I carried on along the Square and then out into the street.

There’s a viewpoint just a little farther on where we can look down onto the port to see what was going on down there, so I headed off that way for a peek.

And we can see here that one of our old friends is down there in the port. Normandy Trader, one of the little freighters that runs the shuttle between here and Granville, is moored up in the loading bay and we can see the big crane loading the empty crates into the ship.

Those crates usually contain the shellfish from the Jersey Seafarers Co-operative but I didn’t think that she was bringing any shellfish over from Jersey due to the issues about which I spoke a little earlier. Unless of course they are empty crates that have been hanging around here since before the troubles started.

From that viewpoint there is a view all along the Rue du Port and down into the Place Pleville le Pelley.

The other day I mentioned the bar ephemere Chez Maguie. It’s stored in a shipping container that is delivered here at the end of May and set up here ready for the tourist season. Despite the unfortunate weather today, there were still plenty of people down there having a drink. And good luck to them too.

From there I threaded my way through the alleyways into the Rue Notre Dame. No sign of Minette, the old long-haired black cat who hangs around here on occasion and lets me stroke her, or any other cat either. Since Gribouille the big ginger cat moved away, there is definitely a shortage of cats in my life.

What I was actually looking for by coming this way was where they were carrying out all of the roadworks for which they have set up the builders’ compound across the road from me.

And no prizes for guessing where it might be. I’m not sure how long they have been working on the Rue St Michel but they seem to be still far from finishing it. Part of the road is still fenced off and dug up.

But the huge pile of gravel there , which is what they must have been shifting in the dumper the other day, seems to indicate that they might be starting to fill the hole in some time soon. But then, judging by all the painted marks that were on the road surface before they dug it up, someone else will come along and take it all out again.

There’s a short cut down to the walls. It’s called the Allee de Saint Michel and goes across the bottom of the Rue St Michel.

That was the way that I was planning to go but I ruled that out of the equation. As you can see, they’ve made even more of a mess of that alley than they have of the Rue Cambernon and the Rue St Michel.

But with nothing else going on out there I headed off around the walls and back to the apartment for a nice hot coffee. No cold drink this afternoon.

By the time that I knocked off work I’d finished the second week of radio programmes as far as I could. All ten tracks and the speech all coupled up together and the final 11th track chosen. It’s just a shame that I fell asleep today and couldn’t manage to do the third.

The guitar practice went okay although I’ve discovered that I’ve lost my voice and some of my co-ordination. I suppose being away for 2 weeks has had something to do with that. I’ll have to work out a way to take a guitar with me.

For tea, I had a burger on a bap with baked potatoes and veg, followed by the last of the chocolate cake. I shall have to do some baking tomorrow, I reckon.

But now I’m off to bed. It’s late and I’m going to have an alarm call in the morning. It seems that having a lie-in makes no difference at all, except to make the day even shorter than it already is.

Thursday 24th December 2020 – WOW!

Even though I say it myself, I’m quite impressed with this photo that I took this afternoon.

It’s not necessarily the quality of it because I still have a great deal of issues with that, but it’s the dramatic and stark effect of the colours here. Just as I lined up a shot of Cancale silhouetted on its clifftop across the Bay, the light gave me everything I wanted just at the correct moment and it’s come out exactly as I would have wished, with no post-processing at all.

It’s one of those very rare photographs where everything that you are trying to do suddenly does it itself with you having to try.

Another thing that I did without really having to try was to haul myself out of bed before the third alarm. And I bet that that took you as much by surprise as it took me too. Mind you, I was only sitting on the edge of the bed is a dazed and weary state, not exactly running around like a headless chicken.

After the medication, I had a listen to the dictaphone. I was in the USA last night and Trump was giving a concert. He had someone playing banjo or mandolin or something and he was playing bass and singing, doing some kind of rap about how good he was, and everyone in the crowd was greeting him with stony silence. He was becoming all worked up on the stage and everyone was treating him with stony silence. When everyone left I had a look at the bass guitar. It was just a cheap $29 thing so I said to someone of the road crew “at least you might have got him a real guitar to play with”. They replied “he does have a real one but he was afraid he’d be all emotional”. Trump heard this conversation and came over, and started to have a bit of a go at me about it. I said “I’ll tell you what my life means to me. Come with me”. He couldn’t get the hang of what was going on but “come with me, come outside”. So we went outside and there was Caliburn. I opened the door to the back of Caliburn and there on the floor was a mattress and a sleeping bag and a few bits and pieces. I was living rough. And there at the side of the sleeping bag was the Gibson EB3. “That’s what my bass means to me” I said. “It’s all that I have here”.

The next thing was about the wife of my friend on the Wirral. She was telling me that she had been taken into a bedroom by an Indian guy to which I said “lucky her” and they spent 4 hours together so I said “even more lucky her” discussing some kind of new sales venture for some kind of product that she might have been interested in. There was much more to it than this but in the time it took me to grab hold of the dictaphone I forgot it.

The next hour or so was spent dealing with the arrears of work. I’ve been stuck in Chateau Gaillard for the last 2 weeks and I can’t seem to drag myself out of there. I seem to be bogged in there quite deeply at the moment.

That took me up to shower time and weigh time, and I’ve gained 1kilo in weight in this last week. But examining my body closely (and isn’t that a gruesome task?) I noticed that my feet and ankles are swollen. So it looks as if the water retention is back again and that will explain this weight issue.

Off I set to the shops for the groceries to see me through the Christmas period.

It’s the tradition in France for people to have oysters as a Christmas treat (which probably explains why so many babies are born here at the end of September) and there in the Rue Lecampion where there’s the fishmonger’s, with the butcher just down the road, it just looks like Poland as I remember it in the 1970s, or the UK after 6 months of Brexit.

But I was joking about the oysters and babies just now. Don’t you believe everything that you hear about oysters. I had 12 of them on my wedding night and only 9 of them worked.

It’s unlikely that I’m going to get down into town to see the Christmas lights this year. I’m not well and I know it, and I’m not going to tax my system too much.

But it didn’t prevent me from having a good mooch around for a look at the decorations in the Place Charles de Gaulle. And I was right about one thing, in that they aren’t very inspiring this year. It seems to be merely the same stuff that has been here for the last ever so many years, just arranged differently.

But anyway I pushed on to the Railway Station for my tickets for next week. The clerk in the office was on her own so I asked her about the trains next week. At the moment, they are still running as advertised. Whether it stays like that, we shall see.

One thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that pathetic parking takes up a lot of room on these pages.

Not so much recently – not (I hasten to add) because the situation has improved but because there is just so much of it that it’s become boring and even i’m fed up of it. But I couldn’t let a thing like this go by.

Right outside the railway station is the bus station. all of the long-distance buses (of which there are plenty) as well as the two service buses for the town come here and there are 4 bays. But this driver has decided that he’s allowed to park in one of them and the bus that goes in there can park elsewhere.

Of course, it’s a BMW and like Audi drivers, they consider that the rules of the road and of common courtesy don’t apply to them.

On the way up the hill I stuck my head in the newsagent’s. I’d heard that US Granville had made some club facemasks and the newsagent was selling them. These are tough times and we have to do what we can to help things along right now, and so I bought one to wear when I’m in Belgium.

At La Vie Claire they had Seitan slices so I bought two ridiculously expensive packs and then went round to LIDL for the shopping. I bought most of what I needed but shock! horror! no Brussels sprouts. How do you have Christmas without Brussels sprouts?

Luckily I still have some frozen ones for the meals on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but it’s going to be touch and go after that.

On my way back into town again I went past the Place Generale De Gaulle again.

There’s quite a lot going on in there now that wasn’t happening earlier. They seem to be setting up some kind of Christmas market in the Square, although that doesn’t look much like Christmas goodies to me.

But at least the kiddies’ roundabout was working and entertaining some clients. And that’s good news because Christmas is all about children anyway and they ought to be making the most of it while they are still young enough.

There’s a fresh seafood stall on the harbour every Friday morning selling the stuff that his boat has landed that morning. But with Friday being Christmas Day it looks as if he’s having his stall a day earlier to cash in on the Christmas trade.

And quite right too. Even though I don’t eat animal products, it’s up to others what they do and there is nothing at all quite like fresh food of any description.

So having caught my breath, for I was carrying some quite heavy shopping, I carried on back home where I had a slice of my fruit bread and a mug of hot chocolate.

And then, shame as it is to say it, I crashed out good and proper on my chair. It was late-ish when I returned from the shops but even so, it was 13:30 when I awoke, feeling like total death yet again. This is what I meant earlier when I said that I wasn’t too good right now. It’s just not possible at the moment for me to live a normal life like this and it’s dismaying me very much.

So at lunch, I’d run out of bread so I set about making some more. Not the sourdough this time but a real loaf. I want to see how my technique is doing and to see if the fault about my sourdough not rising is because of me or the sourdough.

And so I bashed out a quick 500-gramme dough mix with yeast and several handfuls of sunflower seeds and left it on one side to see what it would do.

By now it was walkies time so I set out into the wild blue yonder.

And wild was hardly the word either. The wind has shifted around and we now have a nor’easter instead of a sou’wester as we had yesterday. So if you thought that the Bay of Granville was turbulent yesterday, you ought to have seen it this afternoon. There hasn’t been anything quite like this for a considerable period of time and I bet that the boys in Thora and Normandy Trader are glad that they are tucked up safe and sound in the harbour in St Helier.

It was enough to make me want to join them but the journey across to Jersey would be extremely uncomfortable right now.

There were hordes of people out there this afternoon, everyone having a pre-Christmas walk I reckon and making the most of the lack of rain (for the moment at least).

And if you are able to peer underneath the clouds, it was the kind of afternoon where the visibility was so impressive and you could see a very long great distance down the coast. Cap Frehel and its lighthouse were just about visible with the naked eye over to the right on this photo.

We’ve had some good shots of Cap Frehel in the past, better than this one of course, but it’s not every day that it’s visible with the naked eye

Just a little earlier I taked about the lack of rain – “at the moment” – and I said that for a reason.

While I was scanning along the Brittany coast with the camera, I noticed a strange phenomenon out there in certain places so I photographed it for a closer look to see what it might be. And back here in the comfort and warmth of my apartment I determined that it was actually a rainstorm out there.

Of course, as I said earlier, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for us to be bothered about it right now, but the wind is a highly volatile and uncertain beast and can change direction at any given moment.

Having taken my photographs I walked off across the lawn and the car park (almost being squidged by a motorist reversing out of a parking place) down to the end of the headland.

Once more, there are no boats out there in the bay but we do have this beautiful sunset, an excellent example of which you have already seen. And here’s another really good view of Cancale across the Baie de Mont St Michel, lit up as if it was on a stage and they had switched on the spotlights.

Far too many people about for me to break into a run this afternoon so I walked off down the path instead.

We saw just now how churned up the sea was around the north side of the headland with this raging nor’easter.

Nothing could have been a greater contrast than the sea down on the southern side of the headland by the port. Whereas yesterday we had a raging storm with waves crashing over the sea wall, today the sea seems to be almost becalmed.

Actually, it isn’t but that was how it was looking this afternoon especially after yesterday.

But that was enough for me anyway, I had a peek in at the chantier navale to see that there was no change whatever there, and then carried on home for a hot coffee and a mince pie. And delicious, if a bit sweet and sickly.

And the bread had risen like a lift. I’d never had it go up quite like this before. It was so impressive. I gave it a good squeezing to let the gases out and then shaped it and put it in its bread mould, covering it with a damp tea-towel.

And now I have a little Christmas present for you all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that my friend Liz and I produced a series of programmes for several local radio stations in the Auvergne under the “Radio Anglais” banner back in those days.

While I was looking around for something I came across one of the Christmas Specials that we did, so I’ve uploaded it to the internet FOR YOU ALL TO LISTEN TO OVER CHRISTMAS with much love and best wishes from me.

Don’t take too long in listening to it because I need the space on my server so I’ll be taking it down again after a week or so. So you’ll probably be better off downloading it onto your own machine. Or, if you make your next Amazon purchase via the links on the right and I receive a small commission on the deal, I can buy more space.

While I was at guitar practice I had the oven warming up and I slipped the loaf of bread in there at a suitable moment along with a potato and, later on, a slice of frozen home-made pie.

After the guitar, it was time for evening walkies. And with the wind now blowing in the opposite direction from yesterday, it was the outward journey that caused me more problems than just a few.

In fact, I had to abort the trip along the Rue du Nord and seek shelter within the narrow streets of the old town by dodging down an alley way. We’ve seen plenty of photos of the Rue St Jean in our time but we haven’t seen one from this viewpoint. The Place Cambernon is just down there at the bottom and the Porte St Jean which we have photographed on several occasions is right down there at the end out of the picture.

And if you look up at the top you can see the spire of the Eglise Notre Dame du Cap Lihou all illuminated.

But I’m not going that way. I’m going in this direction down towards the Place de l’Isthme.

We took a photo of the street from the Place de L’Isthme a few weeks ago and so I reckoned that I should take one back up to the place where I was at the time, just for the record. And then I set off for a run along there all the way to the end of the street.

As I emerged into the open square at the end I was hit by a huge blast of wind that brought me to a dead stop, and I’m not surprised because it was wild.

That was enough to make me not want to hang around any longer out of doors – especially now that it had started to rain as well, And so I went down ste steps to the Place Maurice Marland and ran on home.

But up on the walls the night was looking so beautiful despite the rain, so I took a photo of the harbour, the Baie de Mont St Michel and all of the lights out there twinkling away on the Brittany coast. It was all looking quite magical tonight and I’ve no idea why.

But that’s enough of my waxing lyrical for the moment. It’s time I was at home tucking into the tea.

While my veg was cooking (endives, broccoli, leeks and carrots) I had a look at the bread to see how it was doing.

It had risen quite a lot while it was sitting for its second proofing, but in the oven it’s not done too much more. But as I took it out of its mould, part of it had stuck so I sampled it. And it was perfect, it really was. The best that I’ve made to date. There’s nothing wrong with my technique at all.

With the veg water I made a delicious gravy, and the whole lot was finished off with apple crumble with some soya dessert stuff. That was what I called a good tea.

So now it’s Christmas Day and I’ve written up my notes. I’m off to bed. A Merry Christmas to you all and I hope that Santa brings you lots of nice things, including, more important than presents, lots of love and good health. We’re living in hard times right now but at least we are living, and the joys of the internet mean that we can stay even closer all the same.

There’s our radio show to listen to and tomorrow night at 21:00 CET, 20:00 UK Time, 15:00 Montreal and Toronto time etc, there’s my Christmas broadcast on LE BOUQUET GRANVILLAIS. It’s a special live rock concert that I’ve spent some time preparing and I hope that you’ll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed preparing it.

Best wishes from me.

Sunday 22nd November 2020 – I KNOW THAT …

… Sunday is a Day of Rest, but I do have to say that 12:30 is taking this to absurd lengths. So much so that I’m giving serious thought to setting an alarm for 10:00 on a Sunday morning just to remind myself that I have plenty of other things that need doing during the day too.

I could easily understand it if I hadn’t gone to bed until 05:00 or 06:00 (which has sometimes been the case) but going to bed at 23:30 is early by my standards. All I can say is that I must have been tired.

Plenty of time for me t go on a variety of travels, and so it comes as something of a surprise to learn that last night I didn’t go all that far. I’d been in France with Terry and we had to come back to the UK. Terry had his motorbike so we decided that we would go back on his motorbike. I remember that for some reason I was sitting on the front seat but he was sitting on the rear but he was driving. We made sure that we had absolutely everything and we set off. In no time at all we ended up back in Crewe and I don’t remember anything about the journey back except for tiny bits here yet we must have gone on the ferry, we must have stopped for fuel, all this kind of thing and surely did I fall asleep on the motorbike? He replied “yes, it took up 5 hours to come back”. I thought that that was absolutely astonishing. Anyway I ended up at home and had a few letters to post. I thought “I can do that tomorrow” so I went to the Bridge Inn at Audlem to see Alan Findlay. He wasn’t there so I thought that I’d take Liz Ayers with me there because there’s a woman in the bar who was her spitting image and it would be interesting to see their reactions if they were to see each other. But she didn’t come and this woman was looking more like Liz all the time. Then I met another couple of women who looked like her as well. I thought “God, if only Liz had been here this ould have been great”. I eventually tracked Alan Findlay down at his house and did what I had to do. That was when Liz had committed suicide and that was totally astonishing and the thought came over that she had had such a good time in France that to go back to the UK was bound to be an issue particularly with the health problem that she had.

But all of this is certainly weird. Liz Ayers popping up during the night and also Alan Findlay, a name from the past about 45 years ago and about whom I haven’t really thought all that much (if anything) ever since then.

So having wasted half a day there wasn’t really all that much to say about today. By the time that I’d sat down by the computer it was 13:00 and by the time that the paperwork was done it was about 14:00. That didn’t leave me much time because at 15:00 I had a Zoom meeting.

One of my friends, Jem Stuart, is an established poet and it was the launch of his latest book of poetry “No Limericks Left Overnight In This vehicle” today and he was having a “Zoom” party to celebrate. His sister has been a friend of mine for about 50 years ever since she was dating a friend of mine at school and so I’ve been following his career with some interest since we made contact again about 5 years ago. There were about 20 of us there and we had a good chat while he read some of his poems and told us a little story about them.

That took me up to walkies time. Rather later than usual, but never mind.

There were several people out there walking around, and a group of them were pointing at something out on the rocks. At first I thought that it was a cormorant or a heron perched upon a rock but in actual fact, having enlarged the photo on returning home, I could see that it was someone quietly contemplating the state of the nation.

Not that I have too much time to do anything like that of course. If I’m not sleeping I’m working and I don’t really have the time to sit and relax. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many days in the year. And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t have many of them left. I want to get up-to-date before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

And so accordingly I continued on my way along the path on top of the cliffs.

It was so late when I went out that the sun was on the verge of setting. A far cry from the days when I’d be out at 21:30 and 22:00 and the sun was still visible in the sky. The sun was so low in the sky that it had plunged the reverse side of the lighthouse into pitch-black.

There’s a project simmering away in the back of my head right now and I need a photo like this to illustrate a point that I will be making. So no time like the present.

Round at the end of the Pointe du Roc on the headland overlooking the Baie de Mont St Michel and the town of Cancale over on the Brittany coast, the view was even better.

What was really nice was seeing the church at Cancale (on the horizon on the left of the image) and the Ile des Landes (on the right) silhouetted right in the full light of the sun as it was shining through the hole in the clouds over there.

In actual fact, the whole effect was quite pleasing, in a different way from the other day when the sun was higher in the sky.

From there I tried a little run along the path on the clifftop on the other side but encountered only too soon a group of other people so I slowed down to a sedate walk and came on home.

Back here, it was time for baking and I do have to say that it was not a success. In fact, probably my first culinary disaster. The pie base worked well enough, and so did the apple turnover with the rest of the pastry. But the Chocolate brownie mix that I tried went totally wrong. it said “bake for a maximum 30 minutes” but I’d only made about 3/4 of the mixture and as the oven is rather unreliable I put the time at 35 minutes and 15°C over. Even so, when I pulled out the cake mould to check it at the end, I poured half of the liquid all over the floor.

Even 70 minutes didn’t bake it thoroughly so I dunno. I know that my oven isn’t up to much but I would have expected it to have been better than this. I’ll have to write it off to experience.

It goes without saying that, once more, there wasn’t time to make a sourdough loaf. I might start that tomorrow after I finish my radio recording if there is time.

Tea was a vegan pizza of course. I attacked that with gusto and it was good enough, and so I checked the pie base into which I had added the fresh raspberries and agar-agar before tea. And that hadn’t set either. In the end I resorted to some very thick custard to complete the task.

All in all, not a very good cookery day today. Instead I went out for a run, far later than usual as I was running really late, what with one thing or another.

What was good about this was that there was no-one else around so I could run to my heart’s content, at least, as far as my health will let me. And my fourth leg brought me as usual to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch. We’ve seen a few photos from here just recently, but I don’t think that we’ve seen the back of the square.

On the immediate left is what I think might have been an old hotel but is now a Convalescent home (in which, apparently are several Covid patients brought from elsewhere) and to the right is the Rue Jules Michelet, probably the steepest street in France I reckon.

Just imagine what it must have been like trying to take a horse and cart up there 150 years ago. Today, traffic goes up the serpentine Avenue de la Liberation to the right and cover three times the distance to arrive at the same spot.

My route home includes a trip through the Square Maurice Marland.

By the memorial to Maurice Marland, which regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing on numerous occasions, there’s a solitary tree which has some lights set in the ground around it. Today those lights were actually illuminated and the effect was so eerie that I stopped to take a photo of it.

No-one about calling their dogs tonight so after I finished my walk around the walls I ran on home, rather late.

So despite it being still a little early and that I had a late start to the day, I’m off to bed. Back to work tomorrow and I really must press on instead of idling about like I seem to be doing these days.

There’s a radio show to do of course, and I need tocheck on another one that is due to be broadcast because I think that I need to make some changes to it.

And bread to bake too, and maybe something else if my chocolate cake has turned out to be a total failure.

It’s all go around here, isn’t it? When was the last time that I sat down to read a book or watch a film? I really can’t remember, it was so long ago.

Wednesday 24th June 2020 – I’VE BEEN …

… out and about on my travels this morning.

So while you admire the photos of the baby seagull, which now seems to be very fit and healthy, I can give you the account of my day.

And just for a change, it got off to a very good start, for I was actually up and out of bed before the third alarm – something that doesn’t happen too often these day. Maybe it was the early night that helped there – if you can call 23:45 an early night.

After the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

Last night there was a group of us working on a new history textbook for schools and this involved rewriting quite a bit of stuff that was already in it including a load of songs and so on. So we noticed that these songs to fit into the new way of things and it was quite difficult for everyone to get into the habit of hearing them in the new way and I remember my brother being particularly surprised at some of the changes made to the songs in order to make the songs fit the times more than anything else
There was something else going on during the night and I’ve forgotten a lot of it but I’d been caught doing something and been punished in some way by having to do something, carry out a few tasks and at the end of that time I was given £30:00 in 2x£15:00 vouchers to spend. Whoever I was with – it might have been Nerina – was really upset about that and demanded to talk to me about it. The guy who was watching me, I held up the two vouchers and waved them about to attract his attention and said that I was going into the building. Nerina came with me and I had to find a quiet room to have a discussion. There were about 6 rooms in this building and there wasn’t really one that was suitable – the walls were flimsy and there were people in adjacent rooms. In the end we found a room where the photocopier was and we were about to go into there. And that was when the alarm went off.

And even though it was Nerina who was with me for part of the evening I do have to say that regardless of any of our issues, I would much rather have her company on my nocturnal rambles than many of the others who have been putting in an appearance just recently.

I’m still not eating breakfast so having done a little work, Caliburn and I headed for the hills – Gavray, in fact.

When I arrived in the town I took a wrong turning and I’m glad that I did because I found something that I would otherwise have missed – an old disaffected railway station.

There was a “Light Railway Act” in France similar to that in the UK of 1896, and for a period of about 50 years the whole of France became honeycombed with what they called the tacot or “rattletrap” – a narrow-gauge voie metrique railway network.

It’s the kind of system that was highlighted in the Alec Guinness FATHER BROWN series of films in the 1950s of the books by GK Chesterton

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen plenty of examples of this on our travels, especially in the Auvergne where I used to live and also here in Normandy along the coast.

There was also a voie metrique that went across-country from Granville to Conde-sur-Vire, opened in 1910 and closed in 1936 (and we’ve seen lines closed much quicker than that too). That line passed through Gavray and there would almost certainly have been a railway station here.

That has always been one of the things that I’ve been aiming to do – to track it down – and having taken a wrong turning in Gavray when I was looking for something else, I find myself falling right on it, quite by chance.

So while you admire the photos of the kayaker and othe rpeople in various water craft out there fishing today, I was busy tracking down the garage that I had come to visit.

Eventually I tracked it down and the guy had a good look at Caliburn. He reckons that it’s perfectly possible to do something with Caliburn. There’s no rot except in one wheel arch – the rest of it is simply rubbing down, rust-proofing, zinc priming and about a ton of underseal.

He’s not going to end up as he did out of the factory 13 years ago, and it’s not cheap either. But with my lifespan that’s left there’s no point in buying a new vehicle just for three or four years.

Caliburn and I may as well go out together.

So I headed on back to Granville and I’ll wait for the estimate to arrive. But I’ve decided that i’m going to have it done anyway.

When I reached the outskirts of Granville I took the by-pass and joined the traffic queue heading south towards St Pair sur Mer.

Brico Cash was where I was heading, to see what they had on offer today as I haven’t been there for a while.

And the answer is “not an awful lot”. There wasn’t anything that caught my eye particularly although I picked up some French plugs. A couple of the appliances that I brought from The Auvergne when I was there just now still have British plugs on them.

Traffic queues back here as well. I was stuck behind a grockle in a motor home admiring the blasted seagulls instead of advancing in an orderly fashion.

Back here there was still plenty of time before lunch so I had another look at the web pages that I’ve been amending.

That one is now completed and I’ve made a start on the next. I’ve now crossed over the border into Great Satan and I’m on my way to Bar Harbor in Maine.

By now it was lunchtime.

It was beautiful and warm and bright and sunny so I made my sandwiches (home-made bread, home-made hummus and salad) and went and sat outside on the wall again.

Even though the tide was well out and there were no ships or boats in the harbour, there was still quite a bit of activity going on down there today, despite it being the lunch hour.

There was a mobile crane down there and as I watched, it was joined by another one – the big mobile crane that comes here every so often.

The big crane extended its jib and they were both performing some kind of activity out there. I couldn’t see what it was, so I shall have to go out that way on my Sunday walk to see what has changed.

It can’t be anything too complicated because all the way through the manoeuvre … “PERSONoeuvre” – ed … one of the Joly France boats – the newer one – was moored right there and with the tide being out, it wasn’t moving anywhere else.

Back at the apartment I tackled the last week of my Accountancy course. I’ve finished it, not very successfully I have to say because I can’t remember all that much about what I just learnt.

That’s one of the penalties of old age. Two things happen to you then.
The first is that you forget absolutely everything that you are supposed to remember.
And as for the second thing – well, I’ve forgotten what that was.

There was the usual break for my afternoon walk.

Today, in the gorgeous hot sunlight I went for a walk around the walls of the medieval town. From there I could look down on the beach at the Plat Gousset and watch all of the crowds enjoying themselves.

It’s Wednesday afternoon and the brats aren’t in school so the beach was busier than normal, and that’s not a surprise. Given half a chance, I’d be down there myself.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we saw the local council clearing out the old tidal swimming pool with a lorry and a digger – clearing out years of accumulated silt.

They’ve done a really good job by the look of it. It’s actually retaining some water and it’s attracted quite a crowd of people, splashing around in there.

And the people in the flourescent jackets – I’m convinced that they are the lifeguards, although how they are expected to swim while wearing those is anyone’s guess.

My walk went on along the walls and around to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

There’s been a roofing job going on on one of the roofs of one of the buildings down there for as long as I can remember, and they still don’t seem to have finished it.

Not long to go by the looks of things, but I recall having said that before. They were doing really well at one point but seem to have gone off the boil just recently.

From there I passed through the Place Maurice Marland to check on my seagull chick, and then walked on to the viewpoint over the harbour.

There’s some activity down there right now. A lorry has turned up and there’s a fork-lift truck that looks as if it might be thinking about unloading the lorry. Does this mean that either Thora or Normandy Trader are going to be paying us a visit some time soon?

And we have another group of fishermen over there wrestling with a rather large fishing net

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing is the works van that appeared on the city walls near where they did all of that repointing.

The pointing on part of it in the Parvis Notre Dame was pretty poor so i speculated that the work might be something to do with that, and it seems that I was perfectly right. There are two men down there cleaning it all up

You can see how much excess cement that one of the guys has scraped off the wall – it’s all lying on the ground behind the car.

Back here I carried on with the course and, shame as it is to say it, crashed out a couple of times too. This is really getting on my nerves.

But I finished the course in the end and there was time to edit a few more photos. Tomorrow I’m going to start the final part of my music course. I want that out of the way too.

After the guitar I made tea. There was some left-over stuffing so I added some kidney beans and tomato sauce and made taco rolls

Somewhat later than usual, iw ent out for my evening run. It was far too warm to go out at the usual time.

All the way up the hill and down to the cliff without stopping, saying hello to the itinerant sheltering under the tree. Out to the sea there was plenty of activity and we have already seen some of the boats. We haven’t seen this yacht though, sailing back from the Ile de chausey into port, towing its dinghy behind it.

It’s making me all broody again and I’m going to have to do something about all of this before too long.

Just for a change there was no family group picnicking in the old gun emplacement.

There were however plenty of people down on the viewpoint by the old watchman’s cabin and they were having a good time by the looks of things

Quite a few fishermen too, down there on the rocks casting their lines out into the water. It seems to be becoming quite a regular thing these days.

My run continued on along the path on top of the clifftop on the south side of the headland

No kids jumping off the sea wall tonight, but instead we seem to have had some activity down at the chantier navale. One of the fishing boats that has been there for quite some considerable time seems to have gone back into the water.

There were a few other people down there taking photos of themselves in the evening sunshine. All in all, it was quite busy.

And not just there either.

Way across the port on the sea wall that protects the port de plaisance – the yacht harbour – there were crowds of people milling around tonight. They were certainly making the most of it.

As for me, I cleared off and ran all the way round down the Boulevard Vaufleury and the rest of my vastly elongated route round to the viewpoint in the rue du Nord.

The tide is right in right now so the chances of finding any picnickers on the beach was extremely remote.

However that little shelf that we noticed a few days ago – that seems to be the place to be these days as there are a couple more people making use of it.

And I’m still trying to work out the optical illusion surrounding the guy on the left. It looks thoroughly weird to me.

The people down there were enjoying another magnificent evening.

There were quite a few people up here enjoying it too, and quite rightly so for although it wasn’t as good as last night’s, it was still something special.

having watched it for a while I headed on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow, it’s shopping day. There’s not much that I need but it’s stuff that I can’t do without so I shall have to go.

And then i’ll make a start on the last week of my music course. I want to get that out of the way before the weekend. It’ll give me a chance to do some other work that’s been sitting on the back burner for the last month or so.

High time I got a move on.

Saturday 20th June 2020 – LET’S NOT TALK …

… about this morning as it was nothing at all to celebrate.

Instead, while you admire the photos of the sunset this evening, let me tell you something about the rest of the day.

After the medication (when I finally did leave my stinking pit) I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. It’s always the most important part of the day when I check the dictaphone and find out that I’d been on my travels.

I was back in school last night and it was the annual prizegiving. On eof the prizes being awarded was for the most attractive male pupil. I actually made it to second place … “yes, as if …” – ed … which I thought was absolutely bizarre … “and quite right too” – ed. The winner was a friend of mine from my schooldays, and that would have been omething that would have surprised everyone except him. He was a little taken aback and when they presented him with the award he asked “is there a speech that I have to read?” I shouted out “no, you have to read your own”. So he gave a very tear-laden speech, just a short one thanking everyone. The the MC said “it’s lunchtime now so we’re going to do something down in the canteen but you can all go for a wander round until it’s ready”. I stormed out of the room there, I’m not sure why, to wait for the guy I was with – my doctor friend again. And we saw this winner again standing in the corner of one of the rooms on his own with a few people hanging around in that room as well and we wondered what was happening now with him

After a shower I headed off to the shops. And to my surprise I bought next-to-nothing at NOZ – some vegan ice cream, a couple of little bits and pieces and a nice comfy seat cushion for my office chair.

At LeClerc again I spent almost nothing at all. And to my regret they had run out of those frozen falafels that I had bought last week. I should have bought a few more packets last week.

However I did buy some of the veggie balls that they had, and also some more of that bread flour seeing as I seemed to have had some good results with that last lot.

Back here I put most of the stuff away and then I … errr … had a little relax. As if I haven’t done enough of that already today.

Lunch was taken on the wall overlooking the harbour again but whether it was the weekend or whatever, there wasn’t a soul moving about anywhere. I can’t think of such a less interesting time out there.

Mind you it was nice in the sun. I didn’t mind that much.

This afternoon I spent a lot of time going through some stuff on the hard drive of the computer. One or two … “dozen” – ed … directories seem to have got themselves into something of a tangle just now and needed a good clean-out

Hidden deep in there was a small utility program that I had downloaded and then completely overlooked. It’s quite a useful little utility too and I put it to some use while I was at it. No time like the present.

Not only that, while doing some research into the issue I came across the solution to a problem that has Been vexing me since Christmas.

So even if it looks as if I haven’t done much, I’ve accomplished an awful lot.

Out for my walk this afternoon and I had several errands to run.

Not that I got very far though because I was distracted by something out to sea. I took a photo of it with the big 70-300mm LENS with the aim of enlarging it when I returned home.

And much to my disappointment it wasn’t the Loch Ness Monster at all. It seems to be a group of people, maybe surfers with their surfboards having a Union meeting out to sea and I’ve no idea whatever what they may have been discussing.

One of the many things that regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing has been the fishermen perched on rocks on the edge of the water rather like little garden gnomes on their tuffets.

There were yet more out there today – and for a change, I reckon from the body shape that this one is more likely a female of the variety. That’s certainly something new.

A friend of mine once took his wife fishing. “never again!” he replied. “She did EVERYTHING wrong to show me up in front of the others. talked too loudly, used the wrong hook, fixed the wrong bait, cast the line incorrectly, caught the biggest fish …”

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that we saw them a good few weeks ago now digging out the accumulated sand from the old tidal swimming pool.

It’s now well up and running as you can see from this photo. There are a few people there or thereabouts.

And do you notice the guys in the yellow flourescent jackets? I was told the other day that the beach and the pool are to be patrolled by lifeguards this summer in view of the larger-than-expected crowds.

My suggestion is that the two guys down there in those jackets are the lifeguards.

One of the things that I forgot to do was to check on the roofing to see how it was doing.

Instead, I pushed on through to the Place Maurice Marland to check on my baby seagull to see how it was doing.

And there it is, on the roof, looking fit and healthy although still a week or two behind the others around here. And no sign of mummy. She probably thinks that baby is big enough to be left alone while she goes off foraging around for food.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the medieval city walls are falling to bits.

They spend a whole year almost repairing a huge section in the rue des Juifs but in the meantime there are three more sections of wall (and one on the Plat Gousset) that have had to be closed to passers-by due to the danger of falling rocks.

And here’s another one today. I noticed in the newspaper a few days ago that the stairs down to the Square Potel have been closed of “due to a serious degradation”.

It’s high time that, instead of wasting millions in the port on a job that could have been done at half the cost and twice the speed when the port was drained a couple of years ago, they started to do some serious work and maintenance on the cultural heritage of the town.

None of this is going to last for ever, and tourists – and inhabitants – won’t want to come if all there is is a heap of stones

Another thing that I have been meaning to do is to go and check up on the work that we saw on the steps in the rue LeCarpentier.

They had a digger there of course and it had been doing plenty of work. They’ve cleared away the ground from around a meter so it’s obviously some kind of mains services that are being overhauled.

As it happened, at the foot of the steps I bumped into my friend who works at the mairie. She told me that it’s a gas pipe being replaced.

While I had her attention I mentioned to her the subject of the itinerant. There’s a welfare service in town that deals with the disadvantages and there is emergency accommodation available. She’s going to get on the case and see what she can do.

If he wants to stay out there in all weathers, that’s his choice and I’m the last person to stand in his way. But someone who knows what they are doing should be keeping an eye on him all the same.

Now how long is it since we’ve had an old car in these pages? And I don’t just mean something from the 1960s or 70s either but something really old.

Walking back to the apartment I came across this parked on the side of the road by the Porte St Jean so of course I went over to have a closer look and take a couple of photos.

According to the radiator grille it’s a Citroen B12. And according to the woman who was sitting in the back, it’s from 1924

Something isn’t right there then.

The B12 wasn’t unveiled to the public until the October 1925 Paris Motor Show, when it replaced the B10 and the B2

It seems that the car had broken down, so the lady told me. The driver had gone off to look for spare parts so I didn’t really learn an awful lot. I hung around for a while but he didn’t show up so I headed for home.

After the guitar, tea tonight was baked potato and veg with one of the brzaded soya fillets (there were a few more in Noz today) followed by Apple Crumble and soya coconut dessert.

Just for a change I didn’t buy any of that today. In Noz they had some vegan oat-based ice cream and I’m going to try that when the coconut stuff runs out.

One thing that I like about Noz is that they do have the unexpected in there and it’s a great way to vary my diet. As I have said before … “on many, many occasions” – ed …I’m eating so much better these days.

Off I went on my run later on – all the way up the hill and down to the clifftop without stopping (in total agony too).

It was a lovely evening although there were not too many people around out there which was a surprise. There was one family just there having a big picnic in one of the old gun emplacements and a few other people loitering around just to make up the numbers.

The itinerant was there too of course, perched under his hedge. I reckon that he’ll be here for the summer, and more besides, probably.

There wasn’t much going on in the water this evening.

One or two fishermen on their rocks but no-one about in a fishing boat. Just this speedboat roaring over from the Ile de Chausey on his way back to town.

So with nothing doing there, I ran down to my viewpoint past the chantier navale, where there was no change in occupancy, down to the port which was all quiet.

With nothing happening I ran all the wat down the Boulevard Vaufleury, gown the Rue St Jean, through the alley and back up to the Rue du Nord and the viewpoint.

You’ve seen the photos of the sunset at the beginning of this posting, but you haven’t seen the beach. No picnickers down there – just a couple soaking up the summer sun and some kids having some fun.

With nothing else going on, I ran on home to write up my notes.

Sunday tomorrow, and I lie in. But I need to find the papers for Caliburn’s controle technique which are around somewhere and also book my next voyage to Leuven

That 6 months has come round fast, hasn’t it?

Wednesday 17th June 2020 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday evening when, having observed the lorry parked up near the unloading bay where the Jersey freighters tie up, that we would be expecting either Thora or Normandy Trader to be making an appearance sometime soon

So will I was out on my post-prandial perambulation this afternoon, I was not in the least surprised to see, on looking down over the walls of the medieval city, that Thora has come to join us this afternoon.

Sneaked in on the midday tide she has, I reckon. And I wasn’t there to wave her in because at lunchtime we were having the most appalling rainstorm.

She’s fully-laden too.

Normally she would carry scrap in from the island to bring here and then go back with whatever her charge would be. But that tractor there – a John Deere if’m right – looks from this distance at least to be far too good to be providing employment for the cutter’s torch.

But there’s all kinds of stuff on there and had I had the time, I would have hung around for a while to see what else was going to be coming off her.

So while you admire the little baby seagulls and their proud mothers that I saw on my walk this afternoon, let me tell you about my miserable day.

Now whether it was because I’d had that mega-crash-out yesterday late afternoon or whether it was the energy drink that I had had upon awakening – the first caffeine that I have had of any description for over two weeks I really don’t know.

But at 04:30 this morning I was still wide awake and working. And that was completely depressing for me.

There wasn’t any alternative except to switch off the alarms and let my body do its own thing. Pointless trying to be up at 06:00

Anyway, it was about 09:30 when I saw the light of day and it could have been much worse than that.

After the meds I sat down to look at the two radio projects that I had on the go. I finished off writing the text for the one that I had half-started, recorded it, edited the recording and then merged it into the broadcast at the relevant place.

Having made sure that that one worked correctly I turned my attention to the one that I did on Monday and which had this rather awkward silence in the middle.

As I expected, I’d stuck in something closer to the front and it had pushed the missing applause track 12.4 seconds further along, missing the gap that it was supposed to fill.

So while you admire the photos of Joly France – the old one – coming into port, I was cutting out 12.4 seconds of silence from that particular track (I’d been working in 6-track, not four-track as I thought) and it all went together as it should.

But there were a few imperfections that I had noticed and so I spent half an hour tidying it up. There’s still one imperfection that I can’t remove so that will unfortunately have to stay. But the rest is pretty good – apart from the poor quality but there’s nothing much that I can do about that.

For lunch I did something that I haven’t done for a considerable period. I’ve run out of home-made bread but there was some in the freezer so I took out a lump from there and let it defrost so that I could make my sandwiches.

In all honesty I have to admit that it’s far better than anything that I have done to date. But that’s not really the point. If I don’t keep on practising I won’t ever improve.

This afternoon after lunch I sat down to look at my accountancy course. In order to recap I reckoned that I would go back to the start of week 3 seeing as I had the time and whack my way through it.

And as always happens, as I was getting stuck into it, the telephone rang. Rosemary called up for a chat. We talked about pretty much nothing for a whole 1 hour and 45 minutes which meant that not only had I missed my habitual walking slot but that rather than advancing with my course I’d ended up further back than when I started.

At least the heavy rain that we had been having had stopped by now, which was always something, I suppose.

So without a raincoat I went and braved the late afternoon air and spent some time watching the activities of the nautical craft that were out there in the English Channel between here and the Ile de Chausey.

We had a fishing boat heading for home in a hurry, a speedboat, a yacht and a couple of open boats. And that was just in this photo too.

There was plenty of other stuff out there too.

Out to see off the shore at Bréhal-Plage was this cabin cruiser. It was parked up there and I’ve no idea why. The crew members were probably having a fishing break – after all, it was getting on for tea time.

There were more of these mysterious buoys out there too today. Either something to do with the sailing school or else they are some fishery stuff.

I walked on along the footpath in between the two rows of walls round to the corner that overlooks the beach at the Plat Gousset.

We’ve seen plenty of nautical craft in the water just now, but we also have some human company too. This guy here seems to be enjoying himself having a good splash about in the water.

And the yellow buoys that I assumed had broken loose from their moorings – it looks as if they are tethered to the beach where they are, judging by how they are floating just there.

So I pushed on … “pushed off” – ed … along the path to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there has been a roofing operation going on there for the last couple of weeks. And it’s still going on too. They haven’t finished it yet.

Mind you, with all of the rain that we’ve been having, it can’t have been very nice to have been up there. But if they don’t get a move on it’ll be just as wet inside as it will be on the outside.

While I was there I could see the crowds out on the Plat Gousset too.

Not on the beach because the tide is well in and there is no beach to be on. So everyone is strolling around waiting for the tide to go out.

Nothing down there particularly interested me so I turned round and walked through the Place Maurice Marland to home, admiring the baby seagulls, the unloading of Thora and the arrival of Joly France while I was at it.

Back here it was time to start the guitar. And then tea. The left-over stuffing with kidney beans to make taco rolls with rice and veg, followed by my delicious apple crumble with coconut soya dessert.

On my evening run I pushed on all the way up the hill and without stopping for breath turned the corner and ran on down to the clifftop.

At least, that was the intention, but the itinerant stopped me for a chat. He says that he’s a painter and fed up of the detention à domicile that we have had, he came out here to reconnect with nature and seek inspiration.

It didn’t look much like that to me, but then who am I to judge? he certainly seems to be well-spoken.

Down at the clifftop – having pushed on an extra 50 metres to counteract the pause, I could see some more of the strange patterns in the sea. It’s a phenomenon that regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen on regular occasions and I really haven’t been able to find an explanation for it.

All I can think of is that it’s the little stream that feeds into the sea just round the corner that is of course fresh water rather than saline, and the water hasn’t dispersed yet.

But I doubt if that is the real explanation.

It’s not very often that we have some really spectacular clouds around here, but today was certanly an exception.

Having taken the previous photo I walked across the lawn to the other side of the headland and there I was treated to this magnificent specimen over the Brittany coast.

From here I ran on down the path to my first breathing point. No change in the chantier navale and Thora had departed for the Channel islands again. The crane had gone too. I recovered my breath and then headed off down the Boulevard Vaufleury.

Once more I pushed on all the way right down the rue St Jean, through the alley to the rue du Nord and then back up to the viewpoint there.

No-one picnicking on the beach which was a surprise because the sunset was another terrific one. But for some unknown reason the photo didn’t work as well as it has done just recently.

So I ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have shopping to do in the morning, and in the evenig I have this perishing meeting that I really don’t feel much like attending.

But there’s all of this course work too, and that won’t be done by itself. One pace forward but two paces back.

Saturday 13th June 2020 – I SPENT A …

… fortune today in the shops.

And for a couple of good reasons too, so while you admire today’s photos of the baby seagulls, let me tell you about it.

The spending spree started in NOZ, as you might expect. But what you won’t expect is the fact that food (and drink) played only a minor part the expenditure. Some of the alcohol-free beer that I like and the last of the breaded soya fillets, together with a tiny tub of vegan ice cream.

Some of the rest went on a platform on wheels.

The way things are at the moment I’m not as young as I was and heavy lifting is a problem. I have a collection of wheeled platforms and indeed at one time I made my own, but everything is, of course back in the Auvergne and it’s not much use there.

However the crowing glory was a huge pile of history books. Occasionally NOZ has a book sale and I’ve bought a few from there (I’m currently reading a book that I bought there a while back on the history of Normandy in the Middle Ages) but today was a whole pile of interesting stuff .

Right now one of my bookshelves is groaning under the weight of 7 big new volumes of French and European history, all written from a French perspective.

That lot will keep me out of mischief for a while.

Round at LeClerc it was also an expensive day

But, once more, there was a very good reason for that. There’s a well-known UK frozen food manufacturer that has a large range of vegetarian products, one or two of which are vegan

It now seems that LeClerc has started to stock them and they had their products on an opening special offer of 34% off.

It’s rare to find high-quality vegan food at a reasonable price but right now there’s some room in the freezer so now there’s a pile of deep-frozen falafel and deep frozen vege-balls in there.

It wasn’t an offer that I could pass up.

Talking of passing up on thisgs, I managed to pass myself up into the kitchen before the third alarm went off this morning – something that doesn’t happen very often these days..

And no-one was more surprised than me.

So after I had my medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone

What a nightmare that I had last night too! I had a house on Osbourne Grove in Shavington. It had either caught alight or someone had planted a bomb in it and everything was due to happen at midnight. I was runing back there – it was nearly 3 minutes to. I got inside the house, I had to rip electrical appliances off the wall, thrown them out of the window, pick up my belongings, pick up Strawberry Moose. I could feel the time really really advancing . I was doing this faster and faster. Then I lost the way a bit and ended up in a telephone box thing – interview booth

Somewhat later on I was driving taxis last night and we were in Earle Street in Crewe where there was a taxi rank. I dunno whether there was something going on but one of the drivers whom I knew came over to me and in a kind of forceful way said “just you go and get me a packet of crisps – a packet of chips and wait for me on tha corner and give them to me when I come past. he was obviously going to do something to upset the other drivers but anyway I set off towards the chip shop round into Market Terrace. Walking down there I met Roxanne. We started talking and she was telling me about how when she was young she’d drawn a picture of her mother and made a remark about it. I said that I disagreed, so she told me about a drawing she had made of me. We had a chat about that, and she added “I had a really good imagination as a child”. Anyway I came round and I got to the fish and chip shop by this time and I was just about to walk in when the alarm went off.

It always does just as things are becoming interesting.

There was more to last night’s voyages too, but as you are all probably having your lunch or something I’l spare you the gory details.

Having dealt with the dictaphone notes I went and had a shower and a weigh-in. And while one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and it’s too early to start crowing, for a whole week now I’ve been below my target weight.

Whether I can keep it up is another thing. We’ll have to see about that but it’s encouraging.

That means that in 11 months since I had my major health scare in the USA I’ve lost 13kgs. Not a pleasant way to lose the weight but the ends justify the means.

It reminds me of the story about my wife, who proudly announced “this last two weeks I’ve lost 5kgs”
“Keep it up, dearest” I urged (I used to call her “dearest” because she was the most expensive thing I’ve ever had) “in another 26 weeks you’ll be gone completely”.

Off to the shops which I’ve already mentioned, swamped in the crowds and the traffic. The port was heaving today with the sailing school having a busy morning. Cars parked everywhere.

Back here I actually managed to unpack everything and even put some of it away without having to go and sit down. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do that.

For lunch I had some of the baguette that I buy every Saturday and then came back in here to do some work.

And I really don’t know what happened after that. There was some work that needed doing which I started but the next thing that I remember was that it was 15:28. I must have been out like a light for 90 minutes or so and I don’t understand that at all.

Mind you, I awoke just in time for the kick-off of today’s football match – the Welsh Cup Final between Bangor City and Port Talbot Town from 2010.

Bangor City were expected to win this match at a canter and at 2-0 up after 15 minutes, it looked all over. But the Spuds stiffened up and began slowly to come into the game.

Bangor spurned a couple of good chances as the match progressed and when the Spuds pulled a goal back out of nothing after an hour, it was game on.

Astonishingly, in a frenetic end to the match, the Spuds scored an equaliser with just two minutes to go, only for Bangor to go back into the lead in injury time, to lift the Cup for the third year in succession.

But what a difference a decade makes. Bangor City were acquired by a couple of crooks (which I can safely say, having in my possession a list of their criminal convictions) whose financial manoeuvres saw the club lose its professional licence and expelled from the Premier League, and the Spuds who now play in the third tier of Welsh football

This was the time – about 90 minutes later than usual, for me to go for my afternoon walk.

From the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord I could see that down on the rocks and on the beach just there that the people were gathering in their masses.

When I came out of LeClerc earlier there was a torrential downpour going on and it had been pretty miserable. But now the sun had some out and brought with it the Saturday afternoon crowds

It wasn’t just on the beaches either.

The water was pretty busy too. We had a pile of plank surfers or whatever you call that sport out there two round by the buoys that seem to be marking the end of the swimming zone for the beach at Plat Gousset.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen them out there before. What the attraction is in that sport I really don’t know. But as long as they enjoy it, it keeps them out of mischief.

You probably noticed from the previous photos how beautiful the weather was looking right now. A real contrast from a few hours ago.

Over across the bay towards Bréhal Plage the colours really were magnificent and while the view into the distance wasn’t as clear as that which we saw the other day whe we saw the wind farm at the back of Coutances, it was certainly a nice sharp view over there.

It’s a shame that I can’t have a sharp view like this when the coast in the distance is clear.

But you can see what I mean about the crowds out here this afternoon.

That’s the way that I go when I’m walking around the wall – underneath the arch and onto the path behind the outer curtain walls. That was my first running track too when I started running back in the winter, but as you can see, there’s no hope of running down there today.

You’ll notice the puddles on the path too. There was that much rain that the water hasn’t drained off. You’ll also notice that the grass is still quite brown despite the rain of the last couple of days.

Surprisingly, the beach wasn’t all that busy. I was expecting to see many more people than that down there.

No-one swimming around in the water either this afternoon either, which was another surprise. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen swimmers in that water in all kinds of temperatures.

No-one in the tidal swimming pool which is a shame after all of the effort that they went to when they cleared it out a month ago. It’s still holding water.

So where were all of the people then who should have been on the beach?

This is where most of them seem to be. I’m not sure what the attraction is of the rocks and the stone ramp when there’s some nice sand to sit on.

But do you notice the boy on the left-hand edge of the photo? He’s having a space-hopper ride on one of the yellow buoys that’s broken away from its mooring point.

You can see its chain behind it lying in the sand.

My route now took me round through the crowds in the Place Maurice Marland where I could check on my seagulls, and then towards home.

But here in the rue Notre Dame I noticed that the roadworks that they taped off yesterday have not been respected. Someone has driven through the tapes (not this car) and broken them – and now a whole stream of vehicles is passing along the road.

No wonder they have to keep on redoing them if people will drive on the cobbles before the concrete has set.

On the way back to the apartment this view made me lauch.

Here’s Gribouille, the big ginger cat, sitting quite comfortably on his wndowsill admiring the view, taking absolutely no notice whatsoever of the seagull that’s on the windowledge just above his head.

What kind of cat is this? But then again when I was married we had four cats but there was once a mouse in the kitchen that they completely ignored.

Back here it was guitar time already so I had an hour or so on those, followed by tea again. One of my breaded soya fillets with a baked potato and vegetables. I do quite like them but they aren’t on sale in France officially.

However NOZ sells anything and everything that comes its way. I stocked up when I could and it’ll be a shame when the supplies run out.

Out for my run afterwards but I had to abort the first part of the first run.

There was a major gale blowing – a proper sou’wester. And the tall buildings on either side of the rue du Roc were funneling it straight into my face. It was hard enough to walk, and impossible to run in it.

Once I’d gone beyond the buildings on the north side I could break into a run but it was still agony.

The itinerant was still there, calmly reading a newspaper as I ran past him down to the clifftop.

And I could see what was going on from the top of the cliff. The strong winds that we had had had blown the storm out to sea and the eastern side of Jersey was now taking a right pasting, presumably from the same storm that we had had earlier.

Whoever might be out there in a boat right now is probably not enjoying that one little bit, I’m sure of that. It’s hardly a surprise that there’s no fishing boat in view.

However, one thing that can be said is that I’ve never seen Jersey looking so clear and visible so late in the evening.

With the big70-300mm LENS at full stretch I took a photo, and it’s amazing just how clear it is. We can see the tower at the entrance to the harbour which I reckon is St Helier, and on the right we can even see what looks like a church spire.

That’s not bad for 58 kilometres or so, I reckon.

From there I walked off across the lawn and round to the viewpoint near the coastguard station.

Down by the Sailors’ memorial I looked down onto the rocks and noticed a cuple of guys lounging around here. Nominally fishing, as you can tell by the rods, but the lines aren’t in the water and hey don’t seem to be too interested right now.

And I don’t know why they are there because it can’t be pleasant down there in that wind.

And they weren’t the only ones out there either.

This couple were here sitting on a bench by the old guard cabin, taking the full brunt of this sou’wester that was roaring up the bay.

Anyway, it’s none of my business, so I walked round, crossed over the road and ran on down to my first resting place, despite the crosswind.

The next stage of my route takes me all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round the corner at the end

While I was catching my breath I walked back to the harbour to see what was going on there. Nothing much, but our heavy equipment is still there. I’ll go for a closer look tomorrow if it’s still there.

From there I ran on round to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord, but there wasn’t anything at all of any interest happening there either so I came on home again.

Sunday tomorrow, and a lie-in too. I suppose that i’d better do some work too, seeing as I have done almost nothing today. But I’m going to make myself an apple crumble for tea, I reckon. We’ve not had one of those for ages.

Wednesday 15th May 2019 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

… strikes yet again!

There I was, out on my evening walk, and the autogyro that hangs around out here flew by slowly overhead. So Yours Truly went to take a photograph of it, only to find that he had forgotten to put the memory card back in after extracting the afternnon’s photos.

So last night wasn’t as early as all that, and it was something of a mobile night too.

I started off by going round to a friend’s house. He had been doing something wrong and was on the point of having a nervous breakdown, and his wife and daughter were quite broken up by it too. The doctor had prescrbed them all a very strong sedative so I had a look at it. I saw the name and knew that it wasn’t appropriate for their situation at all so I told them all not to take it and have a word with the doctor. But the husband took his and it poisoned him. As a policeman I asked for his desk lid to be sent to me. It took quite a while to have this sent to me so that I could examine it. I must have forgotten it though because several years later when I was tidying up my office I actually came across it in a corner. I thought that it was far too late to do anything about this case now so I may as well stick it back in the corner and forget all about it.
After that, some woman was in a restaurant last night and sitting there she had a parcel on the table. All of a sudden someone came over to her, threatened her with a gun and asked for the parcel. She refused to hand it over and a third person sitting at an adjacent table grabbed hold of the parcel, threw it across the room, the waiter caught it and he and the third person disappeared immediately. he problem resolved by me appearing, a bit like the Saint sorting everything out and dealing with this other person, had him arrested etc. Then this woman had a threatening letter – either return this article or face death. But she didn’t have this article – what could she do? We were wandering around the school in Nantwich by the way. I said that we are going to have to find it. What do we know about all of this?. We discussed the facts as they happened and came to the conclusion that this third party was nothing to do with the robbers at all – the people who were after this. There must be some other reason why they had suddenly become involved. It seemed to be a very well worked out plan too. There was something going on that none of us knew anything about. She made a remark about “these people, they can’t really spell”. I asked her why and she replied that they had spelt “dagger” as “daga”. That suddenly rang a bell with me – wasn’t that some kind of sculptor or painter or something? Are they talking about the same thing? Are they really interested in what’s in this parcel? Or is there a fourth puzzle now going on?
From there, it was a question of some kind of ballet due to take place but it was one of those things that kept on being postponed a bit like East Lynn – always next week. Someone came to see me about it and said that he had been given the opportunity to finance the ballet. What did I think? I thought that the first thing to do is to see it, find out about it and why it’s being postponed. A question of finance is one thing but a question of competence is quite another. He asked “how do I know what’s good or what’s not?” I replied that you have some professional advice, take some people. I know someone in the area – TOTGA – who could help. I explained that her daughter had danced with the Royal Ballet when she was 10. I was sitting in my car and he got in, and said “take me to …” (some address) that was only 50 yards away. So I reversed the car, without looking or even trying, between two vehicles ready to turn round, thinking that it’s only 30 yards away now if I were to go backwards. But I went forwards and ended up down a long dead-end where there was this gorgeous 1960 Massey Ferguson chromed tractor. We looked and said “God this is wonderful”. We were on foot after this and that was when the conversation had taken place about the ballet, half in the car and half on foot. TOTGA was in the bit on foot. We walked past some shops – one had been Nichole’s Dance Wear but was empty and the sign badly painted over. The other one was a Sports Shop with all of these little kids trying out these weird swimming costumes and doing some kind of running group action for photography. We were talking about this ballet of course. He wandered off and there had been this queue somewhere. I asked him how handy he was – dood with his hands. If he were no good with his hands he would have to get someone in to make all these dresses and this would cost him a fortune because they aren’t cheap. That was something that he needed to bear in mind.
Later on, someone had made an incredible mchine. It was 6 solar panels fastened in a circular formation so that they would pick up the sun 24 hours per day and the machine was in the middle of this circle. We’d seen the diagrams and the notes which had taken up a couple of pages of A4. I thought that whoever patented that would be making a fortune and he’s going to need all of these drawings because these are going to form part of his patent application.

Strangely enough (although it actually isn’t) I can pick little threads out of all of the foregoing that compare with a few little things that were either going on over the last couple of days or going on right now.

Even more interestingly, while we are on the subject if the subconscious, after I left school I ran away from home and moved to Chester where I met a few lads my own age.

One of them had a sister who always followed us around and it wasn’t until I said something curt to her and she burst into tears was it explained that she was interested in me. But by that time my interest lay elsewhere.

And I’ve no idea why, but she suddenly appeared in my mind today, after not having given her a moment’s thought for 45 years. It’s rather strange.

I missed the third alarm but it was still fairly early when I crawled out of bed. And with a reasonably early start I’ve accomplished a lot today.

The notes for Canada 2016 are all collated with the photographs, and I’ve made a good start on Canada 2017. But I’m convinced that I’ve done this lot before too.

As well as that, I don’t know what I did to the CD recording program that I use but today, it managed to detect the album names and track listing. Have I fixed it? Or has something else happened?.

We had lunch of course, taken indoors, and then our afternoon walk in the windy sun, or the sunny wind.

And once again, the seas around here were absolutely heaving with sea craft. More than I’ve ever seen before. All of these yachts here, off the headland at the Pointe du Roc.

It did make me wonder what was going on with them all, especially the one centre-right nearest the rocks.

And it wasn’t just out at sea where there were the crowds.

With the schools being off for half a day each Wednesday, people have plenty of mid-week spare time and today in the really nice weather it was time for the beach.

The kids were particularly enjoying themselves down there. making sandcastles by the looks of things.

But this is something that I would call “courageous”.

These days I’m much more nesh than ever I used to be, but even when I was fully-fit you’d be very lucky to see me in the water. But this guy seems to be doing fine.

He’s actually quite a way out from the shore just there.

But as we all know, once you are actually in, you’re in and it’s not too bad. But getting out of the water can be purgatory.

And I seem to have solved the mystery of the cherry-picker down on the Plat Gousset

There were a couple of guys on there inspecting the windows of the Rest and Rehabilitation Home down there. And there were a couple of vans fitted out with the kind of equipment that is used for carrying glass and windows.

So it looks as if new windows might be on order down there in the near future.

My route carried on around the walls past the Place Maurice Marland overlooking the harbour.

The gates must have not long opened, because there was a continuous stream of fishing boats coming in. Here we have three of them coming into the harbour in line-astern.

Like I’ve said earlier, I don’t recall seeing so many fishing boats getting out and about from here.

Back here, having given Minette a little stroke on the way round, I carried on working until tea time.

With some stuffing left over, I added some other bits and pieces of leftovers and a small tin of flageolet beans and made a curry.

There’s some left over for tomorrow too, which will save me a good deal of time.

Later on I had my incident with the memory card. I came back in for it and carried on with my walk around the Pointe du Roc.

Just half a dozen or so out there enjoying the beautiful sunny evening, including quite a handful of people who were fishing with rod and line once more off the Cap Lihou.

And although I stood and watched them for a while, I didn’t notice them actually catching anything. In fact I’ve yet to see anyone pull anything out of the water at Granville with rod and line

But as I said, the weather really was beautiful this evening.

Although it was rather more mistier than yesterday so the view was not quite as clear, at a certain moment tha haze over the Brittany coast lifted for just a brief moment and I was able to snap this photo of the coast and the lighthouse somewhere round by Cancale.

Tomorrow I’ll have to go to seek a reference point to see if I can find the locale
.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that every now and again some mysterious buoys appear in the sea just off the coast.

And so it was this evening. There was a whole row of orange buoys anchored for some reason just off the coast here in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

No idea what they are doing and what they represent, but at least they are clear of the lane taken by trawlers coming and going into the harbour, otherwise we might have an unfortunate incident.

There’s a change of occupant in the chantier navale too this evening.

Our 10 green bottles are now reduced to three – the dredger St Gilles Croix de Vie from the Vendée, the trawler that has been undergoing major rebuilding for as long as I can remember, and the passenger cabin cruiser.

The yacht that’s been there for a while has now cleared off and we have two bays vacant. I don’t imagine that it will be empty for long.

There’s a change of occupant in the wet harbour too this evening.

Our old friend Thora must have come in on the afternoon tide without me noticing her. Another load from the Channel Islands I reckon, with a load to pick up from here and take back.

But she’s not quite parked in her usual place this evening. There must be a good reason for that and I wonder what it might be.

But I was rather confused by something in the harbour.

There was a type of boat in the harbour that I didn’t recognise at all, so I took a photo of it thinking that I could enlarge it and have a closer look back in the apartment.

And the mystery was soon cleared up. It’s not one boat at all but two completely different boats tied up side-by-side and that was what was confusing me.

Now I’m going to try for an early night again. I need a decent sleep again, and I have shopping tomorrow of course.

trawler granville manche normandy france eric hall

speedboat pleasure boat granville manche normandy france eric hall

yacht buoy granville manche normandy france eric hall

sea plat gousset granville manche normandy france eric hall

crowds on beach promenade plat gousset granville manche normandy france eric hall

sailing school baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france eric hall

fishing boats entering port de granville harbour manche normandy france eric hall

.

trawler granville manche normandy france eric hall

speedboat port de granville harbour manche normandy france eric hall

Saturday 9th March 2019 – NEPTUNE IS BACK!

On my way out to the shops this morning, I noticed that Neptune had come in on the tide earlier this morning.

I stopped at the side of the road to take a photo of her. She’s busy pumping out the bilges – probably come over here in a ballast of water to keep her on an even keel in the stormy seas that we have been having just recently.

So she won’t be loading quite yet.

Last night was another decent night’s sleep. I was awake just before the alarm went off but I was in no hurry to leave the bed.

But last night was a rather interesting night. I was in a house where there were two separate gangs of organised criminals, and the aim was to keep these two groups separate so that they did not cross each other’s path. At a certain moment, we had to leave to go somewhere so I had to pack. And fo some reason I was packing all kinds of clothes that I had already worn and needed washing – with the argument that I could wash them in the hotel sink (although how I was going to iron the shirts was something else completely). I needed to pack the laptop and a few other things, but I only had a very short space of time to do it.
Later, I was somewhere round about the junction of Gresty Road and South Street talking to a couple that might have been the French mother and son whom I had met on the Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour. I asked the mother if she had lived round here long, to which she replied in the affirmative. And so I enquired about a house at the back of the Royal Hotel in Pedley Street that was used as an artist’s studio, with a great big picture window facing south (which is bizarre because windows in artists’ studios face north, so that the light is even). She said that she knew nothing about it, but nevertheless she told me a surprising amount. So off I went round there to the area where I was on Wednesday morning and the Aldi supermarket and where, on reflections, I’ve been before, and found the house. In there were a couple of photographers and a couple of models doing some kind of greenscreen photography.

After the usual morning ritual of medication and breakfast, I had a shower and then set the washing machine going. There’s a huge pile of washing built up and I’m not sure how.

And then Neptune and the shops, calling at the paper container to dump another load of shreddings. It’s full now so I’ll have to wait for a while until it’s emptied.

LIDL had nothing special, although I did pick up another set each of AA and AAA batteries. I’ll have a big change-round of batteries here in the important stuff like the dictaphone and so on.

At NOZ, we encountered yet again another example of pathetic parking.

Judging by the registration number, that car is at least 10 years old, by the way.

Even though I spent a reasonable sum of money, it was on incidental stuff – nothing of any importance, except maybe a plastic werving spoon with holes in and, at long last, a nylon hand-whisk.

I have a metal whisk, which is great for using in a glass bowl, but no good in a metal saucepan. So €0:99 was money well spent.

Caliburn is getting low on fuel so I put some more in at LeClerc – the first since October, and then I didn’t fill it. I’m not going anywhere these days.

And in the shop, I didn’t buy anything special. There’s no point seeing as I’m going on Thursday.

Back here I actually managed to unpack and put everything away, and then I hung up the washing on the clothes drier in the windowsill.

After lunch I finished the blog entries for October so that’s up-to-date now.

But I couldn’t keep going. by about 14:30 I was under the covers in bed asleep, and there I stayed until 15:45.

However, I did managed to haul myself out of bed and go off for my afternoon walk.

This took me round by the rue du Nord and here on the corner they had started the renovation of a small block of flats here.

I shall keep my eyes on this work too over time, to see what they are doing.

Further on down the rue du nord, I had another look at the building works going on there.

That’s been going on all through the winter, in some kind of desultory fashion because he doesn’t seem to be making any rapid progress.

I’ve no idea when he might be finishing the job, but I’m not holding my breath.

Despite the fact that it was cold (I have the heating on again) there were quite a few people out with me walking around the walls today.

And down there on the Plat Gousset there were even more crowds of people milling around enjoying the early March weather.

It won’t be long before the tourists are back.

We even had a few people running around up and down the beach.

It’s not really a day for being on the beach, but at least they were enjoying it, so good luck to them.

But looking at the figure at the foot of the diving platform, and seeing how far out the sea is, when we have a high tide, the water is up above the level of the platform so you can see the tidal range around here.

The fairground out at the Parking Hérel is still going on, even though Carnaval finished on Tuesday.

For an experiment, I tried a long exposure to see if I could pick up the movement effect of the fairground attraction, but it didn’t turn out as I was hoping.

I can see that I shall have to work on my technique.

Further on around the walls, I ended up in the Place Maurice Marland.

And having talked yesterday about Spring, here today we have the daffodils blooming quite impressively.

We’re definitely expecting the sun right now then, aren’t we? Spring can’t be too far away at all.

Back on the walls, I had a look down into the harbour.

We have Marité of course, and also a trawler by the name of Le Styx, and also Neptune, who seems to have stopped pumping out the ballast water.

And unless I’m very much mistaken, she seems to have acquired a new digger. The old one was white – I’m pretty certain of that. But this one is yellow.

Back here, I made a start on the images for September. Only a world-record 1730 of them so it’ll take me an age to do all of them.

And then, finally, I can restart the web pages for my trip to the High Arctic.

We had a break for the football. A top-of-the-table clash between Connah’s Quay and TNS. Connah’s Quay lost the match, and the lead in the table, by a score of 2-0.

And the difference was that Connah’s Quay played with a very ineffective attack, whereas TNS were excellent up front.

The Nomads can say goodbye to the Championship after this, and we’re back in the usual position of TNS out in front.

Tea was out of a tin – ravioli with lentils and veg followed by apple pie and soya.

And then out for my walk around the headland in the rain.

Nothing much happening, except that the funfair seemed still to be working. Nothing else apart from that so I came home and made myself a mug of cocoa to warm me up.

Now I’m off to bed, and a good lie-in tomorrow I hope.

I certainly need it.

Monday 28th January 2019 – THE ONE PROBLEM …

… with having a really good lie-in is that when you eventually go to bed, it takes a positive age to go off to sleep.

And so it was last night. It was well-gone midnight before I went to bed, and then I was tossing and turning around for quite some considerable time.

Mind you, once the alarm went off I was pretty much wide awake, although it did take some considerable time for me to leave my stinking pit.

After breakfast, I sat down and set to work.

First job was to go through a mountain of photos. The other laptop that I had been using was struggling to cope because the quality of the screen and the graphics card was not up to much and I couldn’t see properly what I was doing. And it’s a whole wide world of difference with the graphics card in this computer and the new IPS screen.

Second thing, that took all of the morning and quite a bit of the afternoon was to download a huge load of *.zip and *.rar files for the accessories for the 3D program that I use.

Luckily, I’d bookmarked most of them so I could track them down fairly quickly. Although downloading them and unpacking them took all of the time. And it’s amazing how much I had forgotten that I had.

Cheese and salad butties for lunch. I’ve finished off the hummus and there’s some cheese opened from when I was in Belgium last week. One of these days I’ll make some more, and have a mega-cook-in too because I have some puff pastry that needs using. I fancy an leek and potato pie, and I might even put some tofu in it too – except that I don’t have any.

There was a terrific wind blowing this afternoon. Not as much as yesterday morning though but impressive all the same.

We had a really impressive array of waves smashing onto the harbour wall.

The power of the sea is really astonishing and if only people would put more effort into harnessing it, the world’s energy problem would be solved without any difficulties.

It was a beautiful day for photography too.

The air was quite clear and you could see for miles down the coast. Montmartin-sur-Mer and the Sienne estuary stood out really clearly today so I took a few photos.

I cropped and enlarged a few selections and you can see them below.

Tea tonight was vegan sausages and vegetables, all covered in vegan cheese sauce. It was delicious. Especially when followed by pineapple and coconut-flavoured soya cream.

This evening’s walk around the walls was really nice.

The wind had dropped, it was warmer than it ought to be this time of the year and the sky on the horizon was quite clear. The lights of Jersey stood out quite clearly.

The way things are going, I’m going to have to buy a better camera with a more responsive ISO as well as a decent attachment for the tripod.

But even so, the Nikon D5000 can still bring out some really good photographs in the right lighting conditions.

Now that they have installed some illumination in the Place Maurice Marland it’s producing some really nice effects.

I shall have to do some more of this when I have the time.

The fibre-optic cable works are continuing.

We saw them the other day digging a hole on the corner of the rue Notre Dame and the rue de l’Auditoire. Now, they have put an inspection hatch in there, ready for the cabling.

While I was out there I nearly flattened another pedestrian, and I also met a new cat, a youngish short-haired black one that I had never seen before. And talking to the cat made me realise that I haven’t spoken to a single person today.

And in other news, there are reports coming in that British travellers arriving at Dusseldorf Airport from the UK were pushed into the “non-EU” lane.

Things are beginning to bite, and we aren’t even at B-Day yet.

agon coutainville granville manche normandy france

hauteville sur mer granville manche normandy france

st martin de brehal granville manche normandy france

storm port de granville harbour manche normandy france

trawlers fishing night granville manche normandy france

medieval city walls granville manche normandy france

trees night place maurice marland granville manche normandy france

Wednesday 9th January 2019 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

…day.

And it all started off so well too.

Despite a night that wasn’t as early as it might have been, I was still up and about relatively early. I’d even been on a nocturnal ramble but wherever I had been, I don’t remember now because it disappeared from view as soon as I awoke.

After breakfast and a little attention to a few things here and there, I attacked the European Paper Mountain. And by the time that I had finished for the day (more of which anon) almost all of the most important papers had been itemised and filed away in a special binder.

I’d even gone through and made a list of papers that are missing, and I’ve started to send out enquiries for the missing ones.

One thing that surprised me more than anything though was that after living in total chaos since 2012 (according to the papers that have already been filed), with papers just about everywhere all over my house in Les Guis, in sacks and boxes and all over the floor on three levels of home, and living in all kinds of unsatisfactory temporary accommodation until moved here in May 2017, there are so few papers missing.

In fact, I was hard at it for most of the day.

Lunch was soup again, and it was even nicer than before.

I managed to go on my couple of walks today too.

in the wind. Few people about, but then again that’s not a surprise. The wind is a bit strong. But there’s clearly something going on with the tides because there were people out there on the beach scavenging in the rock pools.

Flexing their mussels, you might say.

In fact the tide was quite far out and in the distance I could see that there was a lot going on.

I don’t know whether they are oyster beds or mussels beds just offshore at Donville-les-Bains but whatever they are, it looked as if they were taking advantage of the low tide by doing a spot of harvesting.

There were a few men with a couple of tractors and trailers working around amongst the staves.

But even though the sky was cloudy and overcast, and the wind was quite strong, it was for some reason a beautiful day for photography.

You couldn’t see all that far today but what you could see came out really well.

With the 70-300mm zoom lens I was able to pick out features on the Ile de Chausey that are usually enveloped in haze and spray. That view over there is probably 14 or 15 miles away at the far northern end of the archipelago.

That wasn’t all of the excitement either.

Anyone remember the film Tora Tora Tora? And in particular the scene where as rhe Jpapanese pilots step into their aeroplanes and the sun breaks through the clouds?

That’s exactly what happened here just as I walked around the corner to the Place Maurice Marland and looked over the Baie de Mont St Michel. It really was so impressive.

From my vantage point back on top of the walls, I could see that there was a lot of activity going on on the quayside down below.

There was a lorry pulling up down in the harbour, loaded with another 20 tonnes of gravel. It’s not the first one either because there’s already quite a pile there by the conveyor.

That can only mean one thing – that is that Neptune or one of her sisters will be putting in an appearance pretty soon to take it all away.

There’s a derelict building in the Place Cambernon. Apaprently it was formerly the library and meeting hall.

It’s been like that ever since I moved here nearly two years ago and there was some talk at the mayor’s meeting last year that something was going to happen to it.

And here we are, with scaffolding up and the builders have moved in. This should be an exciting development once things get under way and the work advances.

Back here after my walk, something else that I managed to do was to book my next trip to Leuven and my medical appointment. It’s quite exciting in that the fares are on special offer so I’ve booked my trip – 600 kms each way of which 300 each way are on a high-speed TGV – for a mere €138.

For 1200 kms! I bet that you wouldn’t ever have a fare like that in the UK.

And my room for three nights in Leuven because I’m going to stay on for an extra day and come back on Wednesday.

But the bad news is that round about 17:00 I started to wobble. I kept it up for about 10 minutes and then that was that. On the bed.

At 18:30 I briefly came round and crawled under the covers, and there I stayed until about 20:30. Totally flat out. And I would probably still be there now had I not been required to go for a ride on the porcelain horse.

Mind you, I did go off on a nocturnal ramble. And a welcome return to Zero. She used to accompany me quite regularly on my travels during the night but she’s not been around awhile so it was nice to see her, even if she was known during this journey by another name.

I’ll spare you the details though. You are probably eating your tea right now, which is more than I did because I missed my tea slot.

I did manage to arouse myself enough for my evening walk though.

And the night was another one of those nights that was crisp and clear, and probably deep and even too, with a good view for quite a considerable distance.

Across the bay, the lights of Cancale were quite clear, and you could see the reflection up there in the clouds of the streetlights of St Malo.

There was a patch of light moving across the bay from the direction of the Ile de Chausey.

I wasn’t sure at first if it might have been one of the ferries, but on closer inspection it appears to be a trawler coming into port here at Granville on the evening tide.

And for once, I was able to take a fairly clear photograph of it. It’s not come out too badly, all in all.

So back in my cosy little nook. Tomorrow is shopping so I’ll need to get my rest. But what with all of this rest and sleep, I’m not sure what state I’m going to be in if I don’t manage to go to sleep again.

ostreiculture donville les bains granville manche normandy france

ile de chausey granville manche normandy france

sun through clouds baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

night st helier jersey granville manche normandy france

Wednesday 19th December 2018 – HAVING GONE …

… to bed at some kind of reasonable time last night, I actually managed to have a reasonable sleep.

I was off on a travel too, but I’ll spare you the details. It’s another one of those that will catch you just as you are eating a meal or something and you won’t thank me for it.

There was something of a lazy daze which took me a while to overcome, but it wasn’t as late as it might have been which is always good news. Even better news is that the arrangements for my new computer have been confirmed and it might be here in a fortnight if I’m lucky.

After breakfast, I arranged some images, and then started on the High Arctic pages again. A slow ramble through a couple of pages – nothing as exciting as I have been doing in the past, but much better than recently. I’m feeling a little better, but not as much as I would like.

We’ve had lunch and then the first of our two walks. But I didn’t get too far out of the building before I came to a resounding halt.

Remember the green machine that was parked out here the other day? Here it is, fully erect and doing a really good impression of a cherry-picker, with some people on board doing some work around the flashing of the dormer window up there.

It looks quite impressive.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a while back they were drilling into the wall above the window of a house along the rue du Nord.

Whatever it was that they were doing, they seem to have finished it. And it’s not easy to see where it was that they were working.

You can’t see the join in the stonework where they were pulling stuff out and, presumably, putting stuff back in.

We had a beautiful early moon as well this afternoon.

I was out there taking a few photos of it, during which I was the victim of a really good photo-bombing.

Here we have a seagull performing a celebratory fly-past. Quite by accident on my part of course, but who knows what goes through the mind of a seagull?

We were having a very strong wind this afternoon, and out on the Plat Gousset we were reaping the full rewards of it.

The waves were piling into the sea wall and every now and again, one was getting the timing perfectly right and the spray was soaring up over the unsuspecting passers-by.

And serve them right too.

A day or two ago we saw a strange-looking crane parked up on the Square Maurice Marland.

I heard a story a while back that there would be some work being undertaken on the medieval town walls. And here they are with the crane looking as if they are actually doing something.

Loads of bags down there filled with all kinds of building material;

A stuffed pepper (one of the best that I’ve ever made) with spicy rice for tea, and my second walk in the dark. That’s the sum total of my day’s effort. I’m going to go to bed.

But before I go, although I have promised not to fill up my pages with politics, I see that the British press is full of comments about a remark that a British politician is alleged to have made about another one. And it’s caused page after page of drivel pouring out over all kinds of postings on all kinds of communication.

All I can say that with the UK descending into total chaos with talk of troops on the streets to keep order, stockpiling food and baby milk, all this kind of thing, the silly Brits are so stupid and so lacking in any kind of sense of priorities that they consider this to be the most important topic of debate just now.

They need to have their collective heads examined, the stupid people.

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4th December 2018 – FIVE SCREENS OF DEATH …

… and that’s my lot today. The desktop computer seems to have been working so much better today. Especially as all 5 of these screens of death occurred in the last half-hour as I tried to use the Duplicate File Finder program to eliminate the duplicate files.

Because there were thousands of those. You have no idea of how many hidden directories and partitions I have found. Loads of files for which I have been searching for years and many of which I have even forgotten all about.

Most of them have now made it onto the portable hard drive and when the desktop computer has cooled down tomorrow I’ll have another run through it and see what else I have missed.

But there won’t be much time tomorrow though, because I’m going out in the afternoon. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had a considerable amount of health issues over Christmas last year and I don’t want to have the same this year. And so I have made an appointment to have a ‘flu injection.

It’s free here (at least, I am reimbursed 100% for it) so as much as I hate the idea of injections, I’m going to have it. And I hope it works.

But back to the computer again.

I had it running again last night and it was doing so well that I let it go. And it was at about 02:30 when I finally decided to switch it off and go to bed.

So even though the alarm went off this morning at the usual time, I took little notice. It was more like 07:45 when I came round far enough to haul myself out of bed. And as a result it was a rather late breakfast.

Once all of the nonsense was out of the way I have spent all day with the big computer extracting the files. I’m doing it while the doing is good because I’m not sure how long it will keep going.

We had lunch of course, indoors these days, and then a little later, it was time for my afternoon walk.

Neptune was still in the harbour but Thora must have crept in on the morning tide because she was on the point of leaving the port at 16:00.

For a while I stood around watching her manoeuvre and I took several photos of her passing out.

By the time I got back home I could see Thora rounding the headland of the Pointe du Roc and heading out to sea past the Ile de Chausey

Opportunity for a good photo was looming so I loitered around for half an hour and took several photos of her disappearing into the sunset.

And given the lighting and weather conditions out there, some of them came out quite well.

On the way back, I bumped into Gribouille. He came for his stroke but could smell Minette on me from last night so he wasn’t too impressed.

The laptop was playing some of the old-time radio shows in the background while I was working.

And you have to admire Leslie Charteris. We had another episode of The Saint with my favourite Simon Templar, Paul Rhys in the title rôle.

And we had the immortal exchange of conversation
” ‘Orace, old chap. Things have been a bit dull for a while. Do you feel like a spot of action?”
“I’ll just load the revolver, sir”
You can’t beat the good old days.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger on a bap with the last of the potatoes. And talking of potatoes, when I went to open the pineapple slices for pudding, I found that I had opened the tin of new potatoes instead. It’s not my day, is it?

But that soya dessert stuff that I had bought – it went down really well with the pineapple slices when I eventually opened the correct tin.

Just me again on my evening walk tonight.

Neptune was still at her quay with her hydraulic hatches wide open.

I’m not sure of where they are up to with loading her but things must be progressing and she’ll probably be on her way tomorrow if they get a move on. I’ve never known her loiter in port for this long.

But there’s something else going on round by the place Maurice Marland just right now.

There has been talk of some kind of repairs to the city walls but tonight I tripped over some kind of crane or machine that was just dumped here without any warning.

And it’s pretty dark down here at night, you know. I could have done myself a mischief.

But the Christmas decorations around the town are advancing.

In the rue Paul Poirier, where I lived when I first came here, they have been out stringing up the fairy lights.

And it all looks quite pretty down there right now with the overhead lights in the foreground and the artificial palm trees in the background.

Round the corner in the rue Notre Dame Minette was sitting on the roof of a van. In order to come down to my level, she sat on her rear end and slid down the windscreen. I haven’t seen anything as funny as that for quite some considerable time.

With no desktop computer right now (it’s cooling down) I’m going to have an early night. After my exertions last night I reckon that I deserve it.

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