… gone off today for his makeover. He’s a teenager now of course, and I promised him a makeover for his bodywork as a treat, as the Controle Technique tester made a couple of remarks about it last time.

It’s not cheap – not at all – but buying a new vehicle is even less cheap. The garage where he goes every year says that he has plenty of life in him, the bodywork repairs will be guaranteed for five years, and I’ll be lucky, very lucky indeed if I get another five years out of my body with this illness. So there’s no point in doing anything else except getting him fixed.

So while you admire the waves from the latest storm smashing their way into the sea wall over at the Plat Gousset, let me tell you about my day today.

Rather – last night too because after I’d finished writing up my notes, and not feeling in the least bit tired I amended ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS to include the photos of the day and the voyages that I’d been on during the night.

And consequently, despite the lateness of the hour when I went to bed, no-one was more surprised than me (except you of course) to find that I was up and about – well, “sort-of-about” – when the third alarm went off. I shall have to do this more often.

Nothing on the dictaphone either, which was just as surprising. I must have had a really peaceful sleep last night for a change.

And so with no notes to write up, I had a go AT YET ANOTHER PAGE OF THE ARREARS. Well, sort-of, because there weren’t any photos taken that day and I didn’t go anywhere during the night either. So that ended up being something of a non-event.

Before I could take Caliburn off anywhere, I had to find the details of my rail journey at the weekend. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I always like to have my rail tickets in my hand long before the day of my journey.

That’s because on a couple of occasions the printing machine at the station is out of order and as the ticket office doesn’t open until after my train has left, I’d look rather silly if I left it until the morning of travel to pick up my tickets and found that the machine wasn’t working.

So having collected the necessary, Caliburn and I set out through yet another driving rainstorm to find our way to the garage where he’ll be staying for the next two weeks.

When the boss came in I handed him the keys and gave him a couple of extra instructions. he needs his annual service of course, he needs his brakes looking at, and there’s the controle technique due on the 5th November – and there will be fireworks if he doesn’t pass.

Mind you, it’s only an emissions check so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem about that – I hope. He runs well enough, which is why I’m keeping him.

On the way back home in the rain I walked down the main Route de Villedieu in the rain, but I stopped when I saw this.

It’s mushroom season now of course and you’ll find plenty of mushrooms in plenty of places, but growing in a flower bed at the side of the road is not one of the more likely places to find one, especially one as big as this.

And do you know how to tell if they are edible?

It’s really quite simple. Take a sample and eat it just before you go to bed. If you wake up next morning, then you know that it’s safe.

Just for a change, after leaving the railway station with my tickets I walked down the “other” side of the Rue Couraye.

And it’s amazing the things that you see that you haven’t noticed before. Granville is honeycombed with little alleyways and surreptitious flights of steps and here’s one that I haven’t ever noticed before.

It leads down across the old railway line and over to the Boulevard Louis Dior, the road that leads to the Parc du Val es Fleurs where we went a good while ago to see all of the animals and where they had that marquee once.

Just across the road from here, the workmen are being pretty busy.

There was a Home Decorating shop there – one with a ghastly aluminium 1960s-style of shop front that they had installed at some point and ruined the aspect of the building. It was sold a couple of months ago and since then it’s been sheathed in wood.

But now they seem to have taken that down and they are busy with the angle grinder cutting into the brickwork and concrete on the pavement. I don’t know what they will be installing there but I’m pretty sure that it will be an improvement on what was there before.

Back here I made some hot chocolate, cut myself off a slice of my banana bread – and then fell asleep in the chair. hardly surprising, I reckon, after all of this walking that I had done.

When I awoke there was enough time to make a good start on YET ANOTHER ONE OF THE BLOG ENTRIES that needed updating now that I’ve finished the photo editing and the dictaphone transcribing.

Plenty of photos and voyages in that one so it took me all the rest of the day, which isn’t surprising in itself considering everything else that I had to do.

For example, after lunch my kefir needed attention. It’s been brewing for long enough.

Four nice, ripe kiwis were peeled and put into the whizzer with a few handfuls of grapes and whizzed around until I had a nice mushy liquidy pulp. This was strained through my filter stack into the big jug and the kefir out of the pot followed through the stack, leaving an inch or so at the bottom of the pot.

Everything in the jug was then strained back through the filter stack into a few bottles that I had washed and cleaned.

Then I set another batch of kefir on the way – 40 grammes of sugar, three slices of lemon, a fig cut in half and then the pot filled to within a couple of inches at the top with filtered water.

Later on, with the rain having stopped for a brief moment I decided to go out for my afternoon walk.

Crowds of people out there taking advantage of the moment of sunshine that we were having, even though it didn’t look too nice further down the coast towards Donville les Bains. I reckoned (and I was right too) that we would be having another good helping of rain any moment now.

And so no time to hang around. I pushed on around the footpath under the walls dodging the puddles that hadn’t diminished one iota from the last time that I was out.

You’ve seen the photos of the storm that we were having. The rain might have stopped (for the moment) but the wind had got up and was raging away to itself. For a few minutes I watched them crashing down on the Plat Gousset and then headed off across the Square Maurice Marland.

At a walk, I hasten to add. Too many people about for me to break into a run.

Now here’s a nice surprise awaiting me in port this afternoon.

How long is it since we’ve seen Thora, the smaller of the two Jersey freighters, here in the harbour? I was thinking about her quite recently and here she is. There’s a huge pile of building material, wood and the like, all kids of stuff, on the quayside so it looks as if she is going to be taking all of that back with her.

But I wasn’t going to hang around at all. There was the storm brewing up yet again and I wanted to be home as soon as possible.

Back here I finished off the blog entry that I mentioned just now, and then had my hour on the guitar. And tonight I just went over a couple of old numbers that I could sing to, just to make me feel better. I wish that I could snap out of this depression that I’ve been in since August last year when a whole lifetime’s ambition was within my grasp and it just melted away through my fingers at the side of a windswept airport runway in the Frozen North.

Am I becoming all maudlin and broody again?

Tea was a stuffed pepper which, strangely, was one of the best and tastiest that I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed that very much. And my slice of apple pie was even nicer. I’m even surprising myself with my cooking.

With the rain having now died down I went out for my evening walk and runs.

A run up the Rue du Roc and then another one down to the clifftop, and this was the sight that met my eyes. At first I thought that it might have been the reflection of the moon or something in a rock pool but no matter how I changed my position the light remained in the same position.

It’s not a beach down there – it’s where all the rocks are. And there are plenty of rock pools so it may be that there’s someone having a go at night fishing. And he’ll probably catch just as much in the dark as he might do during the day.

My walk continued on to the end of the headland to look out across the Baie de Mont St Michel.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a couple of days ago I tried to take a shot of the moon reflecting on the bay, but the wind was too strong to have a good attempt. Tonight was a little better, but still too windy to use the flat-topped post that I found, so I had to make do with wedging the camera up against the side of the bunker.

And that one hasn’t come out very much better than the previous one either, which is a shame. I must do better

From here I ran on down the path at the top of the cliffs as best as I could. Not because I was tired but because I had to dodge the huge puddles that were everywhere.

Sometimes late at night, we’ve encountered the Joly France boats coming in from a late-night trip back from the Ile de Chausey, but we won’t be seeing them out at sea tonight. Both of them are moored up over there at the ferry terminal.

Not much sign of life there either. They’ve all packed up and gone home a good long while ago, I reckon.

Have we had a night-time photo of the port offices yet? It’s no use asking me as I can’t remember.

The offices are right by the gates to the inner harbour and anyone going into there has to make contact with the Port Officer first. But the gates are closed (you can tell by the red light) and so is the office.

The green light is there to tell pedestrians that it’s permissible to cross over to the far side by taking the little pathway across the top of the gates, a route that we have taken quite often.

On my way home I had a quick look down at the harbour. Thora has now left – that was a quick turnround yet again – and there was nothing else going on. I completed all of my runs, somewhat easier than of late. I must be easing up again, which can only be good news.

It makes me wonder where I’ll be by the summer. I’m not pushing myself to extremes like I did last Spring but I can feel that I’m starting to become ready to push myself on.

But right now, I’m going to push on (or push off, more like) into bed. A whole day at home (barring accidents), and as there was no Welsh course this week I intend to spend some time tomorrow revising what I’ve already forgotten – which is probably about all of it.

Another plan of action that I have is, seeing how well the reformatting of the laptop went the other day, to have a go with the little travelling Acer too and see if I can’t tempt that back into proper life. I managed to rig it so it worked well enough to extract the data from it but a disk format and clean installation might possibly do some good.

It was the slowest laptop that I ever had but it was also the lightest and travelled with me everywhere despite everything. It will be nice to make it go again. I’m not too optimistic but if I don’t try, it definitely won’t work.

And in other news, I had a “parcel” today in the post. More of this anon