Kate, Darren, Dylan and Robyn are spending a week with Liz and Terry. Today they were going to the beach at Agon-Coutainville and Liz asked me yesterday if I would like to join them.

I’d had another one of those nights where I was wide awake at 05:00. I did manage to go back to sleep again, but I was up and about as the alarm went off.

After breakfast I had a shower and then made my butties for lunch. Caliburn and I then went off to the shops, spending most of the trip through the town stuck behing a grockle doing about 20kph in a caravanette as the driver and his wife admired the seagulls.

At LIDL there had been a power failure and only half of the tills were working. A fine start for one of the busiest days of the year, especially as the place was heaving with tourists.

Having been stymied with my attempts to find some black-faced melamine, I went to Mr Bricolage and bought a couple of pine plank boards, one at 40cms and the other at 30cms width.

They are both 2m long so the narrower one I had cut in half so that there are two boards of 1m length which will make two shelves over the desk. The longer one will go across and bridge the gap between the two cupboards, one on either side of the desk.

At LeClerc I remembered the new memory card. But the difference between a 8gb card and a 16gb card was just €1:00, so I bought the larger card. I hope that it will work in the big Nikon.

But apart from that I bought nothing special at all. Not for want of trying, but the place was heaving today. It was almost impossible to move around in there. Mind you I ought to have had a clue with all of the traffic about on the roads. It was nose-to-tail from the ring road to the town centre.

It was a comparatively quick drive to Agon-Coutainville so I was there first before the others, and so that gave me a chance to have a good look around.

And I’m glad that I did because I came across one of the rarest of all mass-produced Western European cars of the late 1960s parked up on the car park.

And when I say “rarest” I really do mean that because in total there were only 14,400 of them ever built.

It’s a Simca 1200s coupé ans in my opinion it’s one of the most beautiful cars ever produced, but the chances of me ever finding one for sale would be about zero, I reckon.

Apart from being a Simca, and with all of the associated quality issues that it would have had, the steering was very … err … imprecise and the brakes had a reputation for being, well, “unmatched” to the performance of the vehicle.

With all of that and with the car being something of an icon amongst the well-heeled and reckless youth of that period, they had a tendency not to last very long.

All eight of us (because Robyn had brought Strawberry Moose with her) went off for a coffee and the little ones went to buy some cakes too.

And then we went for the highlight of the afternoon.

It’s Darren’s birthday today and so for a treat Liz had arranged a session on sand yachts for him. And Kate, Dylan and Terry went along as well.

Dylan was rather light though and his yacht wouldn’t move along so easily. But he soon got the hang of it with a little personal instruction. The others didn’t have the same problems and had a great time, enjoying it thoroughly.

Afterwards, we headed off to a quiet corner of the beach and set up our little camp for a picnic.

We chose a little sheltered spot out of the wind where we would watch the next session of sand yachting, and ate our butties in comfort.

Which was just as well because it was now about 16:00 and my stomach had been thinking that my throat had been cut.

Our neighbours were a French man, his English wife and their two daughters, aged about 11 and 7. At one point, the mother asked the youngest daughter, in English “where’s Ruby?” (presumably the elder daughter).
The younger girl replied, immediately without even a pause for thought “elle est partie chercher des crabes” in perfect French.
There’s a family and a couple of kids who have all of the right advantages and who will go far in life, that’s for sure.

After lunch I had a little bit of a snooze and later, being only half-awake, I had a very interesting conversation with Kate, thinking that she was Liz.

Kate took the kids down to the sea and they all had a good swim. The water was quite warm apparently but the sun had disappeared so they were frozen to the marrow when they came out.

So everyone had a good warm-up in woolly towels and then we all headed for home. It was 18:30 – amazing how quickly time flies when you are enjoying yourself.

I came back here, to discover that Brigitte had left the window of her car open so I had to ring her and tell her about it.

And during my evening walk I met another one of my neighbours who invited me around tomorrow evening for an aperitif.

But despite having had a good crash-out during the day, I was quite tired. So no tea and an early night.

It’s Sunday so I can have a lie in. And I need it too.