… once more yesterday.
This time it was about those shellfish containers or whatever they were in the port last night and I said that this may well indicate a visit from Normandy Trader in the very near future.
So here we are, bang on cue yet again. The aforementioned has indeed arrived in Granville and is tied up over there by the old cold store from when this port used to be a thriving deep-sea fisheries place.
Something else that I may well have been right about, although I probably didn’t express very much about it, is that i’m not now going to Leuven tomorrow. This afternoon I had a message from the SNCF saying that my train from Granville wasn’t going.
As it happens, I’d had an earlier telephone call from the hospital asking if I could postpone my visit as they would be overloaded with chemotherapy patients. Consequently I didn’t even bother to look for alternative transport. I changed the date of my appointment to two weeks hence (as for why, you’ll find out soon enough) and rebooked my accommodation. I’ll go to the station tomorrow on my way to LIDL and change my tickets.
Last night was another relatively early night (well, early for just recently anyway) but even so, it was about 07:00 when I finally crawled out of my stinking pit.
After the medication I had a bash at the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night, and hello! again to Pollux. It’s been a while since you’ve been around. Here she was all on her own. I was doing some kind of Shakespearean drama and she was appearing in it. It was the scene where she was dragged away right near the end. Wr were discussing this and it turned out that she had been on the beach that time that we were having the Rock Festival thing and she’s tried some of my orange-flavoured water. We were getting her to talk about it and then she started to talk about other things, skateboarding, roller skating and so on. All the kids these days went onto the old railway land round by where the old BR Parcels depot was in Crewe, all round there. I explained to her that that was dangerous. It’s BR Parcels and they can be quite nasty. I was thinking that she might have been playing on the old railway land at the back of the Permanent Way Club, but it was definitely there. She was agreeing with me “yes, it was a terrible thing doing all of that” and she was telling me about the time what they did and she had a boyfriend that took her down there for the very first time. Only a couple of days ago this boyfriend had taken her down there. He was showing her a few things and she said she didn’t – she was saying that she was having the frissons about it and how she wished she was somewhere else
What is interesting about this is not so much the journey itself but the fact that I was dictating it using a French word. I know that I’ve dreamt in Fench before but I don’t recall ever using that language in the dictation.
After breakfast, surviving a power cut that delayed my start for a while, I set to work on the football trip that I did on Saturday last.
It’s very slow going, but it’s rather like a snowball in that it starts ff slowly and gets bigger quite quickly. What I’ve had to do is to go through all of the interviews, chop them into little segments and then stick them together – in the sense that you ask 20 people 20 questions, you need to extract all of the answers to Question 1 and stick them together, and then Question 2 etc. You get the picture.
It’s different to the one we did about the Bain des Manchots because there we were working to a timeline and we wanted it to run at a fast pace.
That’s taken me all day, with a couple of pauses here and there. Phone calls not being the least of them.
There was the usual morning trip down to La Mie Caline for my dejeunette but once again I was side-tracked.
In the past I’ve talked about careening as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. That’s the process of using the tide to deliberately lay a ship on its side so that you can repair the hill or the bottom.
That’s quite a well-know procedure of course, but this is something else completely although I doubt if it’s as effective.
By the looks of things they are inspecting the rudder or propellor and fixing that is not a job that I would like to undertake in a situation like that.
With the tide being out, I could walk over the path at the top of the gates, but there was no-one about on Normandy Trader to talk to.
You are probably wondering why Normandy Trader wasn’t moored at her usual place. The answer is that La Grande Ancre is in the place underneath the crane. To be fair though, it looked as if Normandy Trader was fully-loaded, and was simply waiting for the gates to open.
And I must admit to admiring the matching colour scheme of the lorry attending to La Grande Ancre.
At La Mie Caline I picked up my dejeunette and then went for a look to see what was going on at the place Générale de Gaulle.
Our famous ski slope didn’t last all that long. They are busy dismantling it and that was a shame.
And the story going around the town is that two of the beavers or whatever they were on there have “gone missing”. They’ve probably gone off with the penguin that went missing from there a couple of years ago.
Lunch was an interruption of course, and so was bottling my home-made orange and ginger drink and setting another one off on the way.
There was the afternoon walk too, and that was interesting because the fog had now closed right in.
And I was right yet again about Normandy Trader. She was indeed ready to depart from the harbour because here she is, setting out into the English Channel.
And as I have said before … “and you’ll say again #34; – ed … my hat goes off to the sailors who spend most of their life confronting all kinds of difficulties that we landlubbers wouldn’t even consider.
But as one goes out, another one come in.
Here’s one of the trawler-type of fishing boats coming into port, and the presence of seagulls flying around in the vicinity suggests to me that it has a good catch on board.
With there being no-one around in the square Maurice Marland I took the opportunity to have an afternoon run.
And my health is definitely in a downward spiral right now because I knew all about this one.
Back here I had another little … errr … relax, something that is annoying me intensely these days after I went for several weeks feeling almost normal
Tea was some more falafel with veg and vegan cheese sauce followed by Christmas cake of course, and then my walk outside.
The fog has lifted slightly but I was still the only person out there. I managed a run too although I felt most unlike it. But regardless of how I feel, I have to push on forwards.
Tonight’s notes are now finished but as Runrig have now come up on the playlist I’ll be awake for another 43 minutes or so.
Perhaps I ought to do some more week.
