… crowing about another day where I haven’t crashed out at all (and how many consecutive days is this now?) just let me mention two things –
- I didn’t go to bed until 22:25 and I was up at 06:00
- There were no fewer than TWELVE entries on the dictaphone during the night. And if that isn’t a recode I don’t know what is
In fact, the longest period during which I wasn’t disturbed was one hour and 22 minutes.
So given the foregoing, I expected to be crashed out on my chair a long time before tea never mind still going strong at this time of evening.
Something else I’ve noticed is that my walking seems to be a little easier and so is my breathing. Only a little, but it’s noticeable. I know that they told me a week or two ago to stop taking one particular medication, but I was feeling quite ill a good while before I started taking it. So it can’t be that.
Nevertheless, it was a struggle to tear myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 06:00 and I really didn’t feel much like doing the radio programme today.
However, despite a couple of interruptions, for coffee and for breakfast, it was all up and running and sounding quite well by 11:10. Mind you, with two tracks less about which to write, it ought to have been finished a while before then.
However I made a total mess of dictating the speech and had to restart not once but twice. And you try saying “The Victor Brox Blues Band” when you’re half asleep
Yes, 2 tracks short today, but when you open with a track that is 21:42 long, it doesn’t leave much time for many others when you only have an hour to do.
There are plenty of short tracks that aren’t being used because with 11 tracks in about 52 minutes, it’s not that easy to fit so many in. One of these days I’ll have to start doing programmes with 13 tracks. That’ll move them on.
While I was listening to that one and the one that I’m sending off for broadcast (I’m several months ahead) I was … errrr … tidying up.
Lazy me hasn’t filed away the post since last October and there’s paperwork and letters all over the bedroom. Having made a start yesterday on tidying the desk, I went through the paperwork that was lying around, sorted it into date order, perforated it all and filed it away in a binder.
There are binders for each year with papers filed in date order, but since everything seems to be digitalised these days I’m doing two years to a binder.
After lunch I had something important to do.
On Friday I ate the last of the fruit buns and so I had to make some more. It took quite a while to make the dough with all of the extras that went into it, and then I divided it up into 10 and made buns, leaving them to proof
While the buns were busy proofing I went out for my afternoon walk.
And you can tell that the holiday season is now over. The car park was comparatively empty and down on the beach there weren’t all that many people down there at all.
It’s true to say that the weather was quite windy but that wouldn’t be enough to keep the crowds back at home if there were crowds of people and a beach to be on. It certainly kept them out of the sea anyway today.
But I’ve never seen the beach as empty as this on a sunny August day.
A little further on along the path I noticed these people scrambling over the rocks.
From up here I had no idea what they were doing, not even with a 300mm telescopic lens. They didn’t look as if they were engaged in the peche à pied because they didn’t seem to have any equipment.
My neighbour couldn’t understand what was happening either. She was slowly ambling along the path so I stopped and we had a good chat for 10 minutes
As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not the sociable type at all, but I have to be friendly with the neighbours. It makes the world go round and makes life here much easier.
Further along the path I noticed some unusual activity just offshore in the bay.
And I’m not talking about the lobster pot buoy either, but the other objects down there in the water.
It didn’t take me long to work out what they were, particularly once they broke surface, because we’ve seen them before. It seems to be where they practice their SCUBA-diving techniques although I couldn’t see a boat anywhere in the vicinity.
So would you call them SCUBA-divers or frogmen? If the latter, I suppose that we’ll have to call them “frogpersons” these days.
And SCUBA? Why, its “Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus” of course.
While I was walking along the path in comparative solitude I noticed an aeroplane out at sea.
Just in case I could identify it, I took a photo to check when I returned home, but it was far too far out at sea for me to read its registration number.
As you might expect, I checked the registers of the local airfields and there were no arrivals or departures that corresponded with the time that the aeroplane flew past
On the path there can’t have been more than a dozen people walking past. It seems that the holiday season has ended here too.
Not so many people on the car park either. It was almost as if I had the place to myself.
So I pushed on down to the end of the headland to see what was happening here. There was a young woman out by the cabanon vauban who was taking a photograph of themselves but as soon as I arrived she put her ‘phone away.
However I’m not sure why she would want to be down there this afternoon. It wasn’t as if there was anything going on out at sea. There wasn’t a single boat out in the bay that I noticed, and the weather wasn’t all that bad either.
Fromthe end of the headland I wandered off down the path on the other side of the headland.
It may well have been that there would have been an extra vehicle on the car park but whoever it was didn’t quite make it to the top of the hill. a depanneuse had been sent for and he was busy dragging a car onto the load bed.
And depanneuse is a lovely word. It’s a feminine word and means here in a France a “breakdown truck”. But if you see the word depanneur on a notice in Québec, it doesn’t mean the driver or the male version of a breakdown truck, but it’s actually Québecois for a “corner shop”.
The tide was well out this afternoon so the port was quite dry.
But once again you can tell that the summer season is over. We’ve been used to seeing all of the Ile de Chausey ferries out and about in the afternoon doing all kinds of things to keep themselves busy with the crowds of tourists looking for things to do.
But today, Belle France, the newest one of the three, was parked up at the ferry terminal waiting for the tide. There wasn’t anyone loitering around there with her so it looks as if she’s going to be there for a while.
Here was something interesting that I noticed while I was here.
Those down there are the drags for the shellfish trawlers. The are marked, usually with electric welding writing, with the name of the ship to which they belong and they are stored down there.
A lorry-load has just turned up and there’s a forklift truck dropping them off.
The grillage is made to a certain size so that when the drag is dragged along the sea bed, anything undersize slips through the grillage and back onto the sea bed.
Mind you, they still manage to pull up all kinds of interesting things, unexploded World War II munitions included. There are plenty of those about out there.
Meanwhile there is much excitement in the chantier naval this afternoon.
Cap Lihou has gone back into the water, what with her brand-new paint job. But La Soupape Trafalgar Peccavi Trafalgar and Chant De Sirenes are still in there too.
However we have a couple of new occupiers in there over at the back. We can see Hermes I quite clearly but hidden behind the portable boat lift is Charlevy.
So things are looking up in the chantier naval and that is good news for all of us.
Not so much though over in the inner harbour.
Almost all of the fixtures and fittings of the Festival of Working Sailing Ships have now gone. It didn’t take them long to remove all of that. The only thing that I can see that still remains is the artificial beach over on the right-hand side.
Something else that has also gone is Marité. And never called me “mother”! She was glued to the harbour for most of the Festival when all of the crowds were about but once the visitors departed she cast off her chains and cleared off.
She left at 09:10 and didn’t return until 20:36 having spent the day having a run-around in the bay.
Someone else who is back in port after being away for a while is Victor Hugo.
She’s been running around in the Channel Islands and came back into port yesterday evening at 20:57 and tied up next to Chausiaise. She won’t be back out now until Wednesday morning at 09:30.
Meanwhile, several of the trawlers haven’t gone out to sea this morning. We can see Arc en Ciel and Massabielle down there and there are a few more too.
But I didn’t stay around to see them. I came back home for my iced ginger beer.
And having drunk my drink, I brushed the fruit buns with vegan milk and brown sugar and put them in to bake.
And I’m not sure what happened by the bottom of the buns are slightly burnt as if they are overcooked. And I cooked them as I would usually do. So what’s happening there? With my pizza being overcooked too, I wonder if my oven has finally started to do what it is supposed to do.
While they were baking I was transcribing the dictaphone notes. And I’m not convinced that you’ll want to know about them. I was with Rosemary in Canada. We’d been for a walk in this city then she had to go off somewhere so I kept on wandering around. We met up again and ended up right out of town at this park somewhere wandering around the park. I said that I had things to do so I needed to be back in town so I’d leave her there and come back for her at 19:00. I walked back into the city centre and was sitting on a bench catching my breath when another tourist from our group came past – a South-Asian guy. He sat down and was complaining about the distance that he’d walked and how he was going to find someone with a Honda moped. I said that I had one of those back at home (and I do back in Virlet – a Honda Melody actually) which of course was no use here. he was saying that so far he’d walked 12 kilometres. I had a look at my fitbit and found that i’d only done 7 which really surprised me as I thought that I’d done three times that. We carried on talking and a 3rd member of our party, David from my building, turned up and joined in our chat. I said that I was going to go back to pick up Rosemary because I was going to cook a meal. This Indian guy’s eyes lit up. “A meal?” he asked. “I’d have to come to help you do something” but I didn’t like the idea of someone inviting themselves in for one of my meals like this.
I was getting married but at the very last moment the bride pulled out. She didn’t tell me until the very final minute. I had to go round to tell all the guests that the wedding had been cancelled. That’s all that I remember of this. There was an awful lot more to it.
Back at my wedding again and this time I’d married. I was standing on a page about to give a speech when my mother in law turned up with a bunch of flowers and began to chat me up in the middle of all of this crowd of people. I thought that regardless of anything else this was extremely inappropriate, certainly not the time and place to do something like this.
This was another one where I found myself dictating into my hand again. There was some kind of issue with the parking and one of the guys at the wedding stood up and was making a speech about the issue but I can’t remember now what he said because the dream evaporated when I was halfway through it.
This was my parents again at this wedding talking to some other people who were there including some girl who they happened to like and wanted me to marry at one point. I had to hurry up and change ready to go on my holiday. I was chatting to a girl of 12, something like that, and realised that I had to prepare to go on my honeymoon
There was a girl there notoriously flirting around, getting on everyone else’s nerves so she was arrested and found guilty of water-walking, whatever that is, I dunno.
Dick Whittington had been elected in 1066 for each year and protested in favour of more-normal relationships between London and Exeter, Bristol and Manchester.
I’d been out to somewhere near Audlem, some stately home to do something or other. It was early in the morning. When I arrived there was no-one around so I had to wait for someone but they didn’t show up so I was sitting in their library reading books. Then I had to go to work. They told me that it was 07:40 so I’d have to leave. I went down to my car but I wasn’t sure that it would start so I coupled up one of these battery packs to it. That didn’t do anything, the whole car was dead so I disconnected it. There was enough charge in the battery just to turn the engine over sufficiently for it to fire up. I drove off down the long drive. There was a small lorry heading my way something like a Mercedes 508 with a tipper back. The path was extremely narrow so trying to pass was quite difficult. I had to use a paper in front of the car to press down the weeds to find out where the edge of the road was so that I didn’t slip into the ditch at the side. On the way down the drive before that lorry a woman and her friend had been talking. I mentioned something about DVDs. They said that they had plenty ond they would lend me one for the journey back. As I set off to drive they came running out of the barn with these buckets of DVDs. So I tried to stop. There were no brakes so the vehicle rolled on about 10 metres and they had to catch me up. I had a quick glance. There was nothing there that I needed so I set off down the farm track. Turning onto the main road was on a really bad bend. I wished that I had some extra-powerful rear lights so that people coming from a distance away could actually see me coming onto the road. For some unknown reason the Polish guy who worked there hadn’t fitted any. I drove on down there and came to a road junction. There was a guy who pulled up with his car on a piece of wasteland at this road junction and then went running back to the main road waving as if he was trying to flag down a car behind. I asked him if he needed any help but he just ignored me and carried on trying to wave down whatever it was that was coming behind him.
I’d booked a hotel, an expensive hotel but it was at a bucket price at an on-line website place for e47:00. When I had the bill next morning it was for €163:00. I had a look and there were all kinds of optional things that he’d added in to this bill that I hadn’t the remotest interest in paying. There was €43:00 for the privilege of booking a room at Christmas and New Year which I didn’t want. There was £25:00 for the manual finding of the records, all kinds of this. I was flatly refusing to pay this. He told me that it was too late to take them off my credit card but I told him that I wanted it put back on my credit card because I’m not paying it. I went through the bill item by item, crossed off what I didn’t agree with until it came back down to this €47:00 that I’d been promised. He wasn’t going to move an inch and I could see that we were heading for some kind of enormous confrontation.
I was back working for Shearings again, doing a feeder out from the tour interchange to places all round the East Midlands. I set out with a coach and started to climb up through the Pennines. It was a brand new coach full of all mod cons, everything, really nice. We were doing OK. Then I had to come down a hill. While I was driving I was sewing my trousers because I had a tear in them. I was doing that but as we went down this hill I stopped sewing and concentrated. I suddenly found myself in a series of bends that I didn’t recognise at all. An ancient Ford Anglia came the other way that virtually brought me to a stop on one set of bends. When I came round these bends I came to a road sign that said “Windermere”. I thought “where am I going here? I don’t recognise any of this and I shouldn’t be anywhere near Windermere”. I pulled up at the side of the road in a lay-by. All the passengers alighted to stretch their legs. I went to fetch my SatNav. I thought that I’d plug it in and plug in the address of the first drop-off. That way I’ll have the coach take me back to where I want to go. There were all discussions about this coach and all of the luxuries that were fitted to it that we never had when we were driving the old Fords etc. Even so there was still only room for one official passenger which was bound to make life complicated when you had 2 drivers bringing their wives on a Christmas tour.
There were some people in a medival tower being taken to their rooms . Although this was a modern period these people might have been prisoners or something like that being led through the tower. One said to the other “at least it’s not bad. We know that there are people in the adjoining rooms”. One of the people in one of the adjoining rooms was a young girl. They said “goodnight” as they walked past but there was no reply from her room so they were wondering what was going on in there, it was so quiet and she didn’t seem to be about.
And there was more to that than this as well but if you’re eating your tea you really don’t want to hear about it.
Tea was a stuffed pepper as usual and it was one of the best that I’ve ever made. Plenty of stuffing left too so I’ll have a good taco roll tomorrow.
But I have no idea what was going on between 00:30 and 02:01 when I dictated no fewer than SEVEN soundfiles and stepped back into the same dream a total of four times one after the other.
It’s probably the strangest night that I’ve ever had and it’s a shame that none of my regulars were there to share it..
