Tag Archives: st cast le guildo

Thursday 3rd December 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… go to the shops today.

On looking out of the window I noticed that it was absolutely chucking it down and there was a violent wind bending all the branches of the trees. It’s not as if there’s anything particular that I need today, so I’ll wait until tomorrow and try again.

Another thing that I didn’t do today was to beat the third alarm. When it went off, I was still in bed. Mind you, I was up and about within seconds so it didn’t make a great deal of difference either.

With it being shopping day (even though it ended up not so being) I had a shower, and then while you admire a couple of photos of tonight’s storm, I’ll attack the dictaphone.

A gang of thieves had raided a large shop and had escaped with an enormous amount of money in the run-up to Christmas. They decided that they would go on and do it again thinking that there would be more money in it now and they would have learnt a lot from their previous escapade. So that was what they did. But what was lacking this time was a suitable watch-out, a suitable dedication and a certain amount of ruthlessness. They obviously thought that they knew it all before and that they knew it all but whereas the authorities had learnt quite a lot, these people hadn’t. The person who was actually the security guard was actually one of the criminals. He faked the hold-up while someone fired a shotgun blast that blew out one of the windows in a door and the guard let everyone in. They started rampaging through the store, going through the safe but there was just one guy working. The others were larkign around a bit. There was no-one in the foyer of the place keeping an eye on who was coming up and down in the lift which was still working. Of course the Police appeared pretty quickly because they were all clued up by this before the gang had even finished loading up the stuff from the 2nd safe. It was the look on the guy’s face when everyone was urging on the safecracker, when he got everything out of the 1st safe and they said “there’s another safe to go now”. You should see the look on his face because he’s the only one working. The others were just larking around when speed was the essence. if they had taken what they had out of the 1st safe and disappeared they might have made it. As it was there was a running battle all the way down this street with the police and these gangsters. They’d set the whole street on fire in trying to make away their escape in the confusion. But it hadn’t quite worked like that and they were trapped by the flames. And I awoke in a night sweat

A little later I was staying in a house with a family. A house very similar to Davenport Avenue. There was a question about this mattress. We had to put it out of the way and I had assured everyone that it would go somewhere in a cupboard so I tried to push it into a cupboard but after a while trying, it wouldn’t go so I said in the end “what would it matter if it went into the attic?” They all agreed to put it into the attic so I climbed into the attic ready for them to pass it to me. But it looked far too long to go into the attic and had to be folded in half. I wasn’t sure whether it would fit. We needed it to be in the box to keep the dust away from it and that was going to be even more difficult. It was going to turn out to be one of these Chinese puzzle things . Again I awoke in a sweat. There were a few other things we could get into the attic afterwards as well if we persevered which would make the place look a lot better anyway

There was more to it than that too but as you are probably eating your meal I’ll spare you the gory details.

Having typed all of that I spent the morning dealing with the arrears of my journey to Central Europe. There was a break for my hot chocolate and chocolate cake and I do have to say that despite how it looks, my chocolate cake is delicious. And the icing, once it had set, was perfect too.

That recipe will be used again, certainly, but with individual cake cases to better manage the dough mixture.

After lunch I had the kefir to attend to as stocks are getting low right now. The earliest batch of kiwis are now super-ripe so they were whizzed up into a pulp, the juice was extraced and the remainder squashed to extract the final drops.

The kefir that had been brewing was now passed through the filter with the kiwi pulp in so that it would rinse more liquid through into the juice in the big jug while I made up another batch of kefir

The kefir and kiwi juice in the big jug were all mixed together and then filtered through the very fine mesh filter into the bottles where it will ferment for a few days

By now, believe it or not, it was time to go out for my afternoon walk.

And so walk I did seeing as the rain had stopped for the moment. But the weather had certainly brought out the mushrooms. They were sprouting everywhere and were quite an impressive size. This one must have been about three inches in diameter.

Many people have asked me if I know whether these mushrooms are edible or not. I usually reply that I don’t know, but there is a test that works. All you do is just before you go to bed, take a small piece, cook it and eat it. If you wake up next morning then you know that it’s perfectly safe to eat.

It’s infallible

Strangely, even though the weather was heavily overcast and it was threatening rain, there was a really good view down the Brittany coast.

If you look closely at this photograph you’ll not only see the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel but also the headland behind it that it is protecting. And while seeing the lighthouse is not an everyday occurrence, seeing the land is even less so.

The gap in the land mass that you will notice just to the right of centre, that’s the bay with Saint-Cast-le-Guildo at the bottom – the little port where we stayed one night in early summer when we were out aboard wem>Spirit of Conrad.

The view in the other direction from where I was standing is pretty impressive too despite the weather.

from left to right, we have

Coudeville-sur-Mer on the extreme left
The “Route Blanche” caravan site
The large white building which I think is the grandstand for the racecourse
the airport buildings
Bréville church on the skyline
L’Oasis camp site
the start of Donville les Bains just disappearing behind the hedge

From there, I pushed off around the headland and down the path on the other side to see what was happening.

Chausiais and Joly France were over there at the ferry terminal of course. And there’s a sign of things to come in the chantier navale this afternoon. For some unknown reason they have erected a tarpaulin tent over the rear of Ceres II as if there’s some kind of important work like repainting going on underneath it (although it’s rather too cold and damp for painting right now, I would have thought).

It looks as if we might have to wait for a few days to find out. But could this be a sign that at long last she might be going on her way very soon?

And while we’re on the subject of comings and goings in the port … “well, one of us is” – ed … here’s someone who has come into port this morning and, presumably waiting for the gates to open so she can go out again.

Yes, we’ve been honoured with the presence of Normandy Trader over there being loaded up ready for departure. And moored the correct way round too, not like Thora yesterday, although it’s not so crucial which way round she moors as her accommodation is at the rear.

With that much excitement going on, I was overwhelmed so I had to come on home for a mug of nice hot coffee to warm myself up.

There was the usual hour on the guitars and then I went for tea. I fancied a vegan pie but to my surprise I’ve run out completely of main-course pies. I had one of my vindaloo curries that I made a few weeks ago instead, followed by apple pie.

So tomorrow, I can see that I’ll have a job to do – like bake a pie. I really fancied one today too so I’ll have to make one tomorrow instead, I reckon.

This evening I almost came within an ace of not going out for my runs. It was teeming down with rain and there was a howling gale blowing.

But having missed so many, I gritted my teeth (well, it was freezing) and set off.

Running was pretty difficult and I didn’t even consider the path underneath the walls. That’s waterlogged at the best of times so heaven alone knows what it would be like right now. I remained on the Rue du Nord and round to the top of the Escalier du Moulin a Vent

That’s possibly one of the highest part of the walls at this end and you can see all the way out across town. And down into the Cours Jonville and the Mairie – the Town Hall – which is now all decorated in blue Christmas lights.

There’s a hint of decoration in the trees opposite the Mairie too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw the electricians stringing up the lights in the trees down there a while ago.

My usual viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch is down there.

You’ll see the metal fence, and if you look below it you’ll see what looks like a row of small arches. I’m usually tucked in the corner on the far right of those arches when I’m taking my photos. You can see the difference in height between the two positions. It’s probably about 30 feet to right down there.

And that was where I went for my photos of the storm that you have seen, and then I ran off across the Square Maurice Marland and straight home. No detour around the walls in this weather.

So if the weather is better, it’ll be shopping tomorrow. I shan’t be going if it’s still like this though. I was soaked to the skin and frozen to the marrow. Never mind my woolly hat – it’ll be gloves tomorrow if I go out.

Sunday 25th October 2020 – I KNOW THAT …

… it’s Sunday and Sunday is a Day of Rest, a lie-in and all of that, but nevertheless, 11:20 is just a little exaggerated, even if it was about 02:30 when I went to bed this morning.

Another thing that I learnt today is that my fitbit doesn’t automatically reset the time when the clocks change. So in actual fact, it was 10:20, not 11:20. That makes me feel better. Clocks only an hour back not like the UK where they are busily setting their clocks back 200 years to the days when the rich and privileged sent starving kids up chimneys and condemned the poor to workhouses.

Mind you, I needed that extra hour in bed because of the distance that I must have travelled last night.

I started out in Shavington last night. It was snowing and wintertime. We were all hanging around outside, doing all kinds of different things and it gradually became dark at night. I went around the street at night looking in people’s gardens because they would put out things that they wanted other people to have. I was collecting a nice little collection of Christmas decorations. Every night I would go out and look but tonight I was at someone’s house I knocked my box over and all the decorations went everywhere. It was embarrassing trying to pick them all up again because you would think that people would be thinking that I was stealing everything. Then I went for a slide, like you used to do as a kid, on your feet. I remember sliding all the way down Vine Tree Avenue into Chestnut Avenue and I got to where the new-build houses were. I couldn’t remember whether they had any Christmas stuff or whether it was just the old ones, so I went over there to have a look. I was doing something in an attic and I can’t remember exactly what it was that I was doing. Something to do with my clothes or something, I’m not too sure, all a very sad, solitary thing

Later I was at the doctor’s. There was a queue in front of me and we were gradually advancing one by one to get in. It was an Asian doctor and most of his clients were Asian. Who should walk in behind me but an Indian woman whom I knew in Stoke on Trent. After some people had gone in she said “go on in Eric, it’s your turn”. I said “no, there’s someone just gone in”. She replied “no, there can’t have been”. “Yes there is” I countered so she had a look and she was right and this doctor was doing some kind of strange tests and setting everything right.

Some time later there were all these people milling around in the bus station thinking where it was they were wanting to go to. I was going to somewhere along the North African coast and people keep on presenting me to their cousins who were travelling with me or travelling in the reverse direction. There was a queue at the reception desk, and I was busy trying to find the bay for my bus because it wasn’t very clear. If you were travelling by car the bay was actually somewhere else outside, but I couldn’t see from the map. I was hoping for a clue when there were all these people who had got to the front of the queue and were being told by the receptionist that they could discuss the matter amongst themselves but preferably do it away from where the ticket machines were and the queue for the reception was because they were blocking the road for everyone else.

Later still I’d been out for my usual early morning walk and as I crossed over the railway bridge where one of the branch lines came into Crewe an electric goods train went underneath. I had a look at my watch – it was something like 06:15 and I thought “I’m usually somewhere else at this time, not here. I have to be out and on my way to the station by 06:30 and I’m well over a mile away from home. How am I going to manage this?”. I cut short my route and went home through a side street. The first thing that I came to was a wolf- a sheep that was all alone. It came over towards me so I shoo’d it off. It went over to where a pack of dogs was so the dogs chased it off down the street. I continued walking and came to a T junction. I didn’t remember a T junction here so I didn’t know which way to take. There was a hill where I could climb to the top to look over but it was on private property. When I went over the fence onto this land to try to climb this hill I was suddenly surrounded by several people who demanded to know exactly what it was that I was doing. I gave them an explanation but they wouldn’t believe a word of it.

I’ve not finished yet. Not by a long way.

I was manning a look-out post on a high ridge overlooking a valley. I had a tent there and that was basically my camp. I was out on this ridge with a large-bore shotgun. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for – just generally watching the movements. First of all a couple of young people came up. They put their tent up not too far from mine and then changed into their hunting gear complete with feathers on their hats and wandered off with their guns further off down the ridge. Then a couple of couples, elderly couples turned up and started walking aorund, taking a great deal of interest in my van, like an old Ford Thames 400E with a high-top roof. Filthy inside – it had been used as a butcher’s van and it was all lined with dirty fat inside. I had a few words with them. There was a girl about 9 or so who was expressing an interest in it. She said something to me that was extremely informal so I asked “did your father teach you to say things like that to people whom you don’t know?” She replied “my father’s here. You can ask him”, something like that. I ended up having a chat with this guy. He took me down to his farm and then wandered off. I was still there, on guard in his farmyard now, and noticed a really ancient moped so I went over to have a look at it. The handlebars were broken and the rear wheel was missing. This girl came out again and I said “is this yours?” “No” she replied. “It’s dad’s”. He came over and took me into this room, barn or storeroom or something. He had all kinds of machinery all over, huge stuff and he was showing me one or two things. I hadn’t a clue what they were but he showed me the crankshaft of an engine which was really long but really lightweight. I thought “I wonder what it is that this is from”. We had a chat about it. he had a few other bits and pieces together and showed me roughly how it worked. Further on down into this barn was all of his electrical equipment – desk meters and so on. He had one that turned out to be some kind of 2-way radio, a 2-way hi-fi radio so he could actually talk on it as well. As he was showing it, he said “ahh! Table-tennis!” and started to tune it in so people could have a game of table tennis on this machine.

And finally I ended up walking across a car park, the one at St Nicolas. There was a van there parked in the roadway in the car park and the driver was eating his sandwich. But there were plenty of places for him to park, even one right by where he was stopped. I had this great big dig with me for some unknown reason and it came across 2 girls having a wrestling match, so he shot off to join in, which didn’t go down very well and everyone said something about it. Then this girl from the previous voyage put in an appearance. Stepping back into a previous dream yet again!

And when I said “finally”, I’m not sure that I really mean it. I’m certain that there was much more to all of this and furthermore, the files on the dictaphone are numbered consecutively and there are two missing. I’m not sure how it happens because it doesn’t have an “over-write facility” (well, yes it does but I’ve disabled it) and I’ve also disabled the “delete” facility – the only way that I can delete files is through a computer interface.

So what’s going on here, then? It beats me.

This morning there wasn’t much time left after I had typed out all of that. I went and had a hot chocolate and some of my fruit bread.

And having had some food, I then prepared another fruit loaf. Two small bananas, a dozen or so brazil nuts finely whizzed up in the whizzer, several handfuls of raisins and, for a change, a couple of tablespoons of desiccated coconut added into the flour and salt mix. Then, the yeast and water (more water than usual – I’m told that my mix is too dry) mixed in and kneaded well into a lovely dough ball.

While that was proofing, I took some pizza dough out of the fridge and kneaded that ready for tonight.

With the important stuff out of the way, I turned my attention to the day’s work. I know that it’s Sunday and I don’t usually do any work today but I’ve been so lazy just recently that I thought that I’d better do something.

Accordingly, I started on the updating of the journal to include the stuff that I didn’t do when I was ill or when I was away. The first one, for 23rd August when I was recovering, is now completed and you can SEE THE FINISHED VERSION HERE. I’ll be working on backwards from here and finally you’ll get to read about some of these weird and wonderful nocturnal voyages that I went on and told you all about.

All through the morning (such of it as I saw) we were alternating between sunshine and torrential downpours. And it became worse and worse after lunch.

Eventually the rain eased off. It had all gone quiet and I could hear voices of people outside. It must be the moment to go for a walk I reckon. I took to the walls.

There was no-one sitting down on the beach this afternoon and I’m not at all surprised by that. But nevertheless there were still plenty of people taking, presumably, their last stroll on the beach.

And when I say that, I don’t mean it terminally. Although of course, with almost 50,000 new infections disclosed yesterday, it may well come to that for so many people. I really don’t understand what is so difficult about the restrictions that are taking place.

Meanwhile, I walked (not ran – there were far too many people about for that) around to the Square Maurice Marland.

And here you can see exactly what the weather is doing today. Huge and horrendous squalls of rain being blown by the wind across the Baie de Mont St Michel. I’m glad that I’m not out there in all of that, that’s for sure.

In fact, I’m not going to hang around at all. I’m going to head for home as soon as I can to avoid being caught up in this because as sure as night follows day, this lot will be dropping on my head in about 20 minutes.

And it doesn’t look as if I’m the only one with doubts about the weather either.

As I watched, out from the harbour came the port’s lifeboat, the Notre Dame de Cap Lihou. it headed off to sea, cutting its way through the waves that were crashing down on her bow. If it’s an emergency call, it’s no surprise in this weather because the storms really were raging again.

Unfortunately though, I couldn’t see where she went. She certainly didn’t head out into the English Channel as far as I could see, and she didn’t go across the Bay to the Brittany coast either. All told, she wasn’t out for long. When I checked her fleet log an hour later, se was already back at her berth.

One thing that’s for sure – she wasn’t going to rescue the passengers of Joly France, the ferry that goes out to the Ile de Chausey.

The bad weather today hasn’t stopped her sailing. As Notre Dame de Cap Lihou went one way, Joly France came the other way, back to port with a load of passengers.

And it must really have been a shame for them. All that way out to the island, it’s not cheap either, and to have had the dreadful weather that’s bothered us for much of the day, and then had to come home in a storm that created a really rough crossing for them.

And rough crossing it must have been too.

The wind wasn’t as strong as the last couple of days when I spent more time running after my hat than I did walking around my little circuits, but it was still strong enough to send the waves crashing over the sea wall, even though the tide was quite far out as you saw in the photo of the beach just now.

All of this has got me thinking. And I know that that could be quite dangerous. looking back over the last few months, we seem to have spent most of our time being battered by storms. I know that I’ve only lived here 3.5 years and that’s no time at all but I don’t remember it being as windy as this for as long as this.

Looking for the lifeboat, I went for a walk over to the other side of the headland to see if I could see where she went.

No such luck, but what I did see cheered me up immensely. Through a large gap in the clouds the sun was treaming down onto the Brittany Coast round by St Cast le Guildo where we went with Spirit of Conrad and the Lighthouse at Cap Fréhel, on the extreme right of the photo, is quite clearly visible.

No lifeboat so I came home, noticing that one of my neighbours had left the headlights burning on her car on the car park, so I gave her a buzz to tell her as I came in.

When I came back, I checked on my bread. It hadn’t risen as much as I would have liked – far from it in fact. But never mind. It’s had three hours to have sorted itself out so I gave it another good kneading, and then shaped it and put it in the mould that I use and covered it for its second proofine.

For the pizza dough, I gave it a good kneading and then rolled it out . When I had it how I wanted it, I put it on a greased pizza tray and left it to proof.

In the office I sorted out the photos that I had just taken and wrote up my notes, and then bunged the fruit bread in the oven. It hadn’t risen very much but once in the hot oven it went up like a lift. While that was cooking I prepared the pizza and when the bread was cooked, I took the bread out and put the pizza in.

Half an hour later I was tucking into one of the best pizzas that I have ever made. Everything about it was just so right.

And I’ll tell you about the fruit loaf tomorrow.

Tonight’s run was rather depressing, if not something of a failure.

There was a biting, howling gale coming hurling itself down the Rue du Roc that brought me to a standstill as soon as I started on the uphill bit. With the sky being do clear I was hoping for a good photo of the moonlight reflecting off the bay by resting the camera on that handy stone that I found last night but no chance of that. It was impossible.

From the shelter of the Atlantic Wall bunker there, the result just wasn’t the same. But you can’t win a coconut every time.

Nothing at all happening out to sea so I harried on along the path to the viewpoint.

Nothing in the harbour either. The tide is too far out for the fishing boats to come in, assuming that there are any out there tonight in this wicked storm. And so tonight I took a photo of nothing – except perhaps the lights of the restaurant in the Rue du Port.

From here I ran on home again, bunging in a little deviation to make up some of the ground that I’d lost. After all, it it’s deviation that you want, then, in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”.

So tomorrow I have work to do. Two radio shows have to be prepared. But at least I have a head start for I’ve sent off this week’s – and next weeks – already, ahead of time. Next week’s of course because I won’t be here and it’s almost impossible to work when I’m away.

Consequently I need to be on form. None of these 10:20 or even 07:20 – starts. Not that I’m optimistic but I’ll see what I can do.

Sunday 11th October 2020 – SUNDAY IS …

… Day of Rest, but you wouldn’t have thought so today. I’ve been really busy.

And not just during the day either. Having gone to bed quite early, totally exhausted for some reason or other, I went off on the kind of rambles which would put me to shame in my daylight hours.

I started off around Oldham way last night although it turned out to be around Stockport. It was again to do with taxis. Someone had had a burglar alarm fitted inside their commercial garage premises and someone was talking to me about it, a passenger. I said that my vehicles are all fitted with stuff like this as well. As we were talking about this one of the alarms went off. I went round to see and they were busy trying to deal with this alarm so I had the long extension coil out that you could plug into it from where my car was parked but it didn’t quite make it. I was able to give a little advice to these 2 guys. They were Pakistani guys running this garage, talking about having their own taxi service so we talked about planning permission, where they could park their cars for it. They had plenty of room and plenty of ideas. And then all of a sudden one of the fridges had broken down, one of the freezers so they needed to move the stuff out of there. I have them a hand to do it. It was all like Indian takeaway food, all very unhygenic, stacks of mushrooms in these cardboard crate things, all over the place, stuff dropping off everywhere. It wasn’t the kind of place where I would like to eat once I’d seen how they were storing their food.

A bit later on there was something going on somewhere else where there were two guys, really tough guys who had taken over control of someone’s life. It was again to do with some garage or other – it may even have been the same one. They had beaten this guy severely and got him doing all kinds of menial stuff for them and they were getting him to brush the curtains with a wire brush. In the end you could see that he just put the brush down. They went over to talk to him and get him to do it again – “you know what happened last time” but you could see the look in his eyes. He had snapped. These two people were going to be in a lot of trouble once he let himself go. They couldn’t see it but I could. Then they started picking on me. One of them tried to push me arpund but I got him in a backbreaker on the floor and just sat there like that. He said “let me go! Let me go!” but I just sat there on him in this backbreaker just leaving him there. In the end he got free. “I’m not really interested in fighting you” I said. “Just leave it like this”. Then he started to try to provoke me again. I was sitting there doing nothing but I could see that the only way that I was going to stop this was by doing the same again like I did last time. I awoke in a feverish sweat at this point – something that I need to note because they ask me about this at Castle Anthrax.

Somewhat later, my brother and I had been somewhere in Caliburn and he was driving (as if that was likely to happen). We’d gone through Angouleme on the way out and driven for loads and loads of miles to see something and were then on our way back. When we got to near Angouleme (wr didn’t know that it was Angouleme at first) we saw a nice view. We thought that we’d go and photograph it. But then we thought that there was no road down there. He had a look on the GPS “there was a little bit of road further along here” so we went that way. We parked up and started to walk. We got to where this view was, a deep river with a gorge running through the mountains and this enormous tunnel as if the river had been canalised at one time and the river was flowing through there. I went to take a couple of photos of it but for some unknown reason my camera wouldn’t work. Every time I pressed the switch nothing happened. it gave a FAULT error. I tried three or four times but then gave up. We came to a building where there was a meeting place, museum or something with a lot of people walking around inside it. I wanted to take a photo of the inside but we weren’t allowed in as we hadn’t paid. We had to wait outside and take a photo through the door. Every time I went to take a photo someone stood in front of me and took a photo. In the end I pushed my way to the front and told my brother “next time this door opens, nip in and close a certain door (that I indicated) because the light coming in through there is spoiling the photo.” He did that and I took a photo but again the camera didn’t work. The woman in charge saw my brother and threw him out so we couldn’t take any more photos so we had to wander back. A girl with us (and I don’t remember her being with us at the time) who was definitely someone I know – maybe Maria, my Greek friend – said “it sounds like you have a card problem” so I took out the card. “Oh look” she said. “It’s melted” and it had as well. I thought “it’s a good job that there’s a spare one in the van”. We carried on walking but then I realised that I’m not using the SD card. There was another type of card in there. In the end I worked out how to take that out, clean it and put it back. That didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. It still wouldn’t work. We were walking on, now me, someone else (a Bourvil-type of character), a 3rd person and my brother. As we walked into Angouleme we somehow separated. My brother disappeared. We were following where we thought he went and ended up on a dirt road. We thought “this isn’t the main highway, is it”? We turned round and walked back. What we had by this time was a wheelbarrow that we were pushing. But it only had one handle so it was really difficult to push so we were taking it in turns. Two of us would carry it. We carried it in all different types of styles in order to exercise all differnt kinds of muscles. It was still awkward and we weren’t making much progress. The handle was a kind of wheelbrace, a metal one. Someone was walking past and I was pushing this wheelbarrow with its one handle and it suddenly flipped up. The handle flew over as the wheelbarrow canted over and the handle hit on the head the one who was walking past. I apologised but he had a good laugh and a smile about it. There we were in the countryside miles from anywhere, totally lost with a stupid wheelbarrow and a camera that didn’t work.

After all of that, what surprised me, and what will surprise you too no doubt, is that I was up and about as early as 08:45. It’s been a long time such a thing has occurred when I’ve not been going anywhere, hasn’t it?

Mind you, it took me a good while for my head to stop spinning round and it having come to a stop, I could get on and do things.

One of the things that I hadn’t done was to write up my notes from last night. In my state of health, the kind of walks that I’m doing with this monumental climb up the rock at the end of it is exhausting me more than you can imagine and I ended up being in such a state that as soon as the football finished I went straight to bed.

And so this morning I had to write them up. That was followed by transcribing the dictaphone notes. All of that took much longer than you might think too because with it being a Sunday I wasn’t really concentrating too much. Part of the time was spent sorting out some of the shopping that I had bought on Saturday which I still hadn’t put away properly, and that meant a little reorganisation in the fridge because it’s full to capacity.

After lunch I made a start on the work. There’s no bread here so I needed to make two loaves. The first was my fruit loaf – 250 grammes of flour with a banana, a couple of handfuls of raisins, a dozen or so ground Brazil nuts (I like my whizzer) and, for some variety, a good handful of desiccated coconut.

Then there was the main loaf. 500 grams of cereal flour with a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds thrown in .

One of the criticisms of my bread has been that it’s too dry. And so I left it rather wetter than I otherwise would have done to see if it improves things any. I put them both on one side covered with a damp tea towel and left them to proof.

Then I needed to feed my sourdough. I mixed it all well in, threw away some to keep the weight down to 100 grammes that’s effectively 50 grammes of flour and 50 grammes of water) and then added 50 grammes of flour and 50 grammes of water, mixed it all in, and then put it in a new jar- a thinner, taller jar. I put an elastic band around it where the level of the sourdough is, so that I can check if it’s rising.

That’s gone into the fridge where it can slowly ferment until next week when I can add some more. It needs feeding with the same weight of flour and water as there is in the mixture. So next week, I’ll have to add 100 grammes of water and 100 grammes of flour.

If I’d left the sourdough out in the warm, I’d need to feed it every day. The warmer it is, the faster is its metabolic rate.

But as I have said before … “and you’ll say again” – ed … it’s just like having pets around the house, the sourdough and the kefir.

By now it was time for me to go out for my usual afternoon walk. Twice, in fact. The first time was to take out the glass and plastic rubbish. It’s been accumulating for a while and the bag in which it lives was overflowing.

The second time was to make the most of the cold but sunny weather on my walk around the walls. And I wasn’t the only one making the most of it either, and certainly not to the degree that some were taking it. This is what I call courageous. You wouldn’t get me in that water in these kinds of conditions for all the tea in China.

it reminds me on the time on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR when Castor and Pollux asked if I would be taking the Arctic Dip when we were in the High Arctic.
“I can’t” I replied. “I’m not allowed to go into salt water with this catheter port in my chest”.
“What would you done had you not had that catheter there?” asked someone standing close by after they had cleared off
“I’d have looked for another excuse” I replied. I’ve been up to my knees in the Davis Strait 700 miles from the North Pole and that was quite enough for me, thank you.

Having observed our lady friend for a few minutes, urging her on, I carried on along my path underneath the walls. No chance of going for a run. Far too many people around for that.

Round at the viewpoint overlooking the Plat Gousset I could see what was going on down there. Just a handful of people down there on the beach this afternoon and not one of them taking in the sun, never mind going for a swim. Clearly the hardiness of the locals is something restricted to just a few.

But the seaweed scattered all over the beach had attracted my attention. The storms just recently have been so violent, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that they seem to have torn a pile of seaweed off the seafloor and dumped it on the beach

My route then took me off around to the Square Maurice Marland. Too many people for me to break out into a run so I had a nice walk.

Out at the end I could see down to the docks, and in particular the loading bay where the Jersey freighters come in to dock. And there’s a pile of building supplies in bags down there waiting for loading so it looks as if either Thora or Normandy Trader, or maybe even both, will be coming into port some time soon.

And that reminds me. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen Thora. They have pretty quick turnrounds these days down at the port but I would have expected to have seen it at some point just recently.

And from here I headed on home to my apartment.

Back at the apartment I had a look at the bread. Despite having proofed for well over an our, it still hadn’t risen too much but nevertheless I gace them both a good kneading, shaped them and then put them in their mould.

With the bread being of less weight than in the past (it goes too stale by the end) I used a smaller mould – one of my silicone moulds. The bread was sticking too much to the porcelain one that I have been using. The fruit and nut bread went into the usual small cake mould. I came back in here and did some more work.

With about an hour and fifteen minutes to go before teatime I switched on the oven and stuck the bread in it to cook. Meantime, I rolled out the pizza dough that I’d taken out of the freezer at lunchtime, put it onto the greased pizza tray, folded over the dges and left it to proof for forty-five minutes.

When it was ready, I prepared the pizza. It was nicely timed because as soon as I’d finished it, the oven switched off with the bread. So I took out the bread, tipped out the loaves onto a wire grill to cool, switched on the oven again and bunged the pizza in.

It took about 30 minutes to cook – and cooked beautifully too. The edges had risen quite nicely and I’m impressed about how this folding of the edges has turned out.

As for the taste, it was delicious. And I didn’t have any pudding because it was quite filling.

After tea, I went out for my usual evening walk.

The sky was really clear tonight and you could see for miles. All the way out to St Helier on Jersey in the Channel Islands. And it’s not every day that I can see so clearly like this all the way out there in the dark. It’s 58 kilometres out to St Helier, as I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … so to see the street lights of the town like this is quite surprising.

And you can clearly see the red aircraft warning lights on the radio tower on the hills at the back of St Helier. And what is the bright light to the left of the image? Is it a fishing boat out there working?

After taking the photo I walked on along the path at the top of the cliffs on the north side of the headland.

Away in the distance the lights of the small towns all along the north Brittany coast were shining really brightly tonight. You could see all the way down the coast as far as St Cast le Guildo where we slept overnight on board Spirit of Conrad back in July. Right out to the right-hand side of the image is the light of the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel, about 70 kilometres away and you won’t see it much clearer than that.

Here I was nearly bowled over by a couple walking along with one of these LED headlights to see where they were going. Somehow though they didn’t see me until they had almost knocked me over

They were the only people whom I saw. No-one else was out there tonight enjoying the pleasant evening.

On the point of the headland there was a nice view across the Baie de Mont St Michel over to the promenade at Jullouville. Le Loup, the marker light on the rock at the entrance to the harbour, was looking quite nice tonight in the starlight. The reflection of the flashing light on the water came out really well.

From there I carried out my three runs tonight. One along the top of the cliffs to the viewpoint, the second along the Boulevard Vaufleury and round the corner into the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne, and the third one from the church back home. And as for the second, I extended my run by another 10 metres tonight. I’m not far from the brow of the hill now and another couple of weeks shall see me over the top and down the other side.

Back here I’ve written up my notes, and now it’s bedtime. Back to work tomorrow and I have a live concert to edit and engineer ready for broadcast. That’s not a work of five minutes.

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 – NOW HERE’S A THING .

For much of the morning, ever since I awoke, I had a song – the title track from the album ZOOROPA – going round and round in my head.

When I’d finished doing what I had to do I switched on the music here. There are somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 tracks on my computer and the playlist is set to “automatic random”. And the first track that came up on the playlist was, of course, the title track from the album ZOOROPA.

That was uncanny – if not eerie.

Doing what I had to do didn’t take all that long this morning because there wasn’t all that much to do. When I listened to the dictaphone, I discovered that it was rather like my bank account right now – nothing in it.

That means that I can’t have gone anywhere last night – something that surprised me completely, and for two reasons.

I had an early night last night
I treated myself to a lie-in this morning – to wit – I didn’t leave my stinking pit until about 08:30

You would have thought that with an early night like that I would have gone off for miles.

With nothing to download, I did take full advantage and transcribed another pile of the arrears. Now there’s just a handful left and hopefully I can deal with them tomorrow.

“Hopefully” is the correct word too because I’m going to be busy. I have to make some bread quite early on and leave it to proof while I’m out at the shops. Then, of course, I have to come back and bake it.

Something else that I did this morning was to attack a pile of the photos from my trip up the Brittany coast in Spirit of Conrad. We’re now just pulling into the harbour at St Cast le Guildo where we spent out third night on board

After lunch I set about doing some tidying up in the bedroom. Much of the time was spent sorting through a large pile of post that I’d brought back from the Auvergne.

Mixed up in there was all kinds of stuff that I’d wished that I’d found two years ago and which would have saved me a lot of effort.

But at least you can walk around the bedroom without walking on anything and you don’t have to move anything to go anywhere else. It’ll be even better tomorrow after I’ve had another go at it and put some more stuff away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other evening we saw another heavy machine parked up in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame and I mentioned that I would look out for where it’s working.

Here at the side of the church there’s another roofing job going on. They have ripped off the slates and the old laths and are currently fitting new laths.

And helping them in the task is the big machine that we saw the other evening. So now we know.

Mind you, I don’t envy the men up there on that scaffolding. It’s freezing cold this afternoon, quite a dramatic drop over the last couple of days and there’s quite a gale blowing. Definitely not the weather to be up there.

And so it’s hardly surprising that there was no-one about having an afternoon walk.

It had it all to myself – to such an extent that seeing as the footpath under the walls was in the shelter out of the wind I ran all the way down the path.

But this is what I call courage. As I said, the weather has turned and it’s just like winter outside this afternoon. But these brave souls have brought their fold-up chairs and are sitting there on the beach evidently enjoying the weather.

And so are the seagulls too by the looks of things. They are evidently waiting for exciting things to happen but I think that they might well be in for a long wait.

No-one in the Square Maurice Marland either so I had a good run all the way across there too.

But there was plenty of activity in the port this afternoon. I noticed that the big crane was in operation so i wondered if one of the Channel island freighters, Thora or Normandy Trader, was in port.

But it was nothing to do with them at all. Two of the town’s trawlers, Coelacanthe and her little sister Tiberiade were moored up in the unloading bay this afternoon and the crane was busy relieving them of their trawl nets.

Whether they are to be repaired (because we’ve seen plenty of sailors sewing up trawl nets in the harbour) or to be replaced remains to be seen.

But it looks as if Normandy Trader will be in port some time soon. I’ve heard that the company that owns her has bought a lorry to do its own transporting, and the the one that I saw in a photo looks pretty much like that one down there.

There’s still more excitement down there as well.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing throughout the summer the Big Wheel in the car park down in the Place Godal. But there it is – gone! A sure sign that the summer season is finished.

My walk around the walls continued and as there was still no-one about I ran the final few hundred metres back home.

After I came back I recorded another album with the USB turntable. But I must remember not to go banging about while I do it. I’d completely forgotten about the effect that knocking the turntable has on the LP that’s playing, and I had to re-record one of the sides to eliminate the jumping about.

Thinking about it (which I do quite often these days) it’s been 20 years or so since I’ve played an LP. I didn’t have it set up in Expo, I’m sure of that.

After the guitar, I had tea. Taco rolls and rice, using the left-over stuffing with some kidney beans in it. And the rest of my apple crumble with some vegan chocolate ice cream. While I’m baking the bread tomorrow I’ll make a rice pudding too.

I can also cook a sheep’s head, and if I leave the eyes in it, that’ll see me through the week.

Outside tonight, I didn’t hang around. If I thought that the wind was bad outside this afternoon, it was totally wicked this evening.

The people on board Joly France, the ferry that goes out to the Ile de Chausey who were returning from the island will have known all about the crossing, that’s for sure. They were being tossed around like corks.

And that reminds me of the time that I was on board a cross-Channel ferry with Percy Penguin once, bringing back a coach from France. This was 1992 and there was a hurricane in the Channel and the crossing took 19 hours as we couldn’t get into port.

One guy was leaning over the rails “feeding the fishes” quite dramatically.
“The trouble with you” I said “is that you have a weak stomach!”
“Weak stomach rubbish!” he retorted. “I’m throwing it as far as everyone else!”

Despite everything, I’ve managed three runs this evening too, so what with 6 altogether today I’m feeling quite impressed with myself.

But tomorrow should be a better day. Cooking the rice pudding, baking the bread, making some more cordial and going shopping too. I suppose that I ought to have a look at making this kefir and kombucha too, seeing as I have had the book for two years, the container for 12 months and the powder for 6 months

Saturday 12th September 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a photograph of an old car on these pages?

It’s not very long, of course, but nevertheless it’s still nice to see them when they are out and about. And, interestingly, the last few old cars that we have featured on these pages have been Jaguars and today, we came across another one.

This one is the cream of the crop, to be sure. It’s one of the classic XK-series of Jaguars and if my memory serves me correctly, it is an XK-140.

If I could have my choice of cars to come home with me, this one would be pretty close to the top of the list.

When I was a kid, I always dreamed about owning one of these but today it would cost a King’s ransom. This one was parked up on the car park of the LeClerc supermarket when I went to do my shopping this morning.

And, much to my surprise, despite the fact that the supermarket was crowded, there was just me and one other person admiring it. That’s a real shame because it’s worth much more than that.

What else was a real shame was that I missed the third alarm. 07:40 when I finally crawled out of bed.

So while you admire the activity that was taking place in the area this afternoon, I had a listen to the dictaphone.

And it really was a busy night too. No wonder that I couldn’t haul myself out of bed at 06:00. I probably wasn’t even here.

To start off the events we were on board ship last night and playing a real pantomime of pirates, that kind of thing. I was the hero and someone else was my sidekick pirate who was Irish and speaking in an Irish accent and had to go round camping up all of this thing about priates and Irish in it. We decided to do the scene again but this time with me as the Irish pirate thing but there was no time to learn the lines so I just went away and ad-libbed. At the crucial moment I forgot my accent which caused everyone to laugh and was embarrassing to me as I couldn’t recapture the comic accent after that. When this finished they talked about how this would have been presented in the Middle Ages. Someone actually produced a Middle-Ages speech guide from the 15th Century, round about then which basically used speech bubbles and so on. It was a very complicated way of doing it and of course you wouldn’t expect to follow the play by reading the speech bubbles as it was just so complicated. but I was being interrogated in this by someone or other almost as if it was real. I’m sure that there was much more to it than this as well but I’m blowed if I can remember it.

Later on there was something about a series of magic wands last night but I can’t remember much about that either. There was however one called a Disravu and predicted the future itself, found in the USA in a shipwreck and was supposed to be extremely elderly, something to do with St Paul. Marianne was with me last night and we were getting ready to go out. She said she was going to take her only two jackets with her and save her third for tonight when we went out. I thought that that was presumptuous of her. She went off and the postman appeared. He was obviously sticking stuff in the letter boxes down the end of the lane. As he turned round a black CA Bedford taxi pulled out of the side verge and nearly forced him off the road. There were a couple of other people looking at the horses as well. I went out but I remembered that I didn’t have a mail box so I looked around to see where he might have lodged the letters. It occurred to me that maybe there wasn’t any post for me – whether it was for someone else, a neighbour in the area. The two young kids who were with me and Marianne came down the drive in a sort of fancy dress, chanting and singing. I pretended to be scared. Then Marianne put in an appearance.

Later still I found myself again last night dictating a dream without the dictaphone in my hand, thinking that I had it in my hand and wrestling with it to switch it on, all that kind of thing to get it to record. But of course it wasn’t in my hand so I couldn’t. It’s not the first time that this has happened either.

But when i finally did get round to switching it on to record I’d forgotten what it was that I was going to talk about. It was something to do with a furniture removal and I can’t remember if it was Hans but we had to go into the East of Europe, sitting outside this row of houses trying to work out which one we had to visit. We were in somewhere like Albania and all the car registration numbers were weird. We were watching them and I was making a particular note of them. We saw these people pull up with a trailer loaded up with stuff on it. We watched them for a couple of minutes getting it into the driveway and starting to unload it. In the end we said “right, that must be them”. We got up and walked down to them. Hans got there first and shook hands. When I got there 30 seconds later Hans had gone. There was just a big cow that came round trying to push everyone around. Of course I don’t like big animals so I was rather uncomfortable about this idea.

And we haven’t finished yet either.

Even later on we were all rehearsing for a music competition like we did for the last night on the boat in September last year. At first I thought that I was being excluded by this group of people but then they started to include me and STRAWBERRY MOOSE and sit down and discuss the plans. There was one girl, an Indian girl who they were trying to rope in who wasn’t really sitting down with us. She was wandering off somewhere and we had to go and fetch her back but no-one could remember her name. I’d written her name or someone else had written it down for me on a piece of yellow paper but I couldn’t find it. I could remember the cleaners picking it up. This got me into a panic about “what the hell am going to do about this girl’s name?”. I was searching my room all over for this piece of paper and then we started to sit and go through this list of songs that we were going to play. Luckily I was the only one with a guitar so it looked as if I was going to be the one who would be playing all the music.

Is it any wonder that I couldn’t crawl out of bed with all of that.

Following a shower and a machine-load of washing, I went out to the shops. Nothing much at all on offer in NOZ and nothing much from LeClerc either. Grapes at €0:99 per kilo was a must-have of course, and a pile of other fruit too seeing as it was cheap.

But if it hadn’t been for the Jaguar it would have been a pretty miserable morning.

Back here I hung up the washing and cracked on with a few more dictaphone entries from the backlog from when i was in Central Europe. One of these days I might actually be up to date, but that’s going to be several weeks away yet.

There was the afternoon walk as usual today but I had a change of plan. I went around the city walls instead.

We’ve already seen plenty of activity out there this afternoon but there was even more that merited a special mention, like that rather large wind-powered ship on the horizon right out there in the centre of the photograph.

It certainly looked impressive and I wondered which ship it might be.

One ship that it won’t be is Marité.

She’s still in port tied up at her berth with a couple of people loitering around. It’s actually quite a surprise to see her here because we’re still officially in the tourist season and I would have expected her to have had a full schedule for this time of the year.

No point in going down to ask them because their stock reply will be “it’s all on our web site” and then they’ll go back to chatting amongst themselves and ignore the paying passengers.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

There wasn’t just a question of crowds of people on land and boats in the sea either.

The air was pretty full of aircraft of all different types this afternoon whizzing around above the town and the sea. Just like this microlight in fact. We’ve seen this a couple of times and I really am going to have to talk my way into a little trip around.

The autogyro that we’ve seen quite often wasn’t out there today as far as I could see. It was about the only local aircraft that we didn’t see up there today.

There wasn’t the possibility for me to go for my run across the Square Maurice Marland. I didn’t want to embarrass the crowds.

That meant that there was plenty of time to see what was going on, and whatever there was on the north side of the headland in the English Channel there was just as much on the south side, including La Granvillaise having a sail around the bay by Le Loup

You can always tell her when she’s side-on. She has her serial number, G90 (you can tell how old she is) on the sail.

Back home and just as I closed the door, Rosemary rang me so we had a good chat for about an hour.

The football season in Wales has now restarted and there was a live game on the internet. As US Granville were playing away today, I had the football on in here.

Connah’s Quay who won the Championship last year were at home against Bala Town and that was the broadcasted match. And, surprisingly, Connah’s Quay were distinctly second-best and when Bala took the lead, through something of a rather flukey goal, no-one was in the least surprised.

They failed to take advantage of their dominance and a rather shaky Nomads keeper, and they paid the penalty with what was almost the last kick of the game when Nomads winger Sameron Dool scored probably the most unlikely goal you’ll be ever likely to see. You can see it AT ABOUT 2:30:30

later on, I went for a walk outside.

it was too late for me to go out with the tripod which was a shame because the sky was really clear tonight. You might not think too much of this photo but you can see on the far right of the image the flash of light from the lighthouse at Cap Frehel 70 kms away.

There were all of the street lights from down the Brittany coast too, as far as St Cast le Guildo where we stayed for a night on Spirit of Conrad

My walk continued around the headland and along to the viewpoint over the chantier navale.

There was no change in the occupancy but it did occur to me that I haven’t taken a proper night-time photo of the place just recently so I put that right.

And having done that I carried on home. Complete with 3 runs of 900 paces in total to fit in with my attempts to recover some of this fitness that I had back in May.

It’s now gone 02:00 and I can’t sleep at all which is a surprise seeing as I haven’t crashed out today yet. Luckily tomorrow is Sunday and a lie-in so that I can recover.

Then Monday, back to work again.

Monday 7th September 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… do anything like I intended to do today. And while you admire the photos of this evening’s night sky, I’ll tell you all about it.

It all actually started off quite well though. Despite not going to bed until long after 01:00, I still up and about before the third alarm went off. And I bet that that surprised you as much as it surprised me.

Mind you, it would be wrong to suggest that I was leaping about raring to go. I was sitting on the bed with my feet on the ground but that was about all that can be said for it.

Having slowly come round to consciousness, I had my medication and then sat down to do the paperwork.

However I was interrupted by a ‘phone call. A few months ago, a newspaper reporter took my ‘phone number and said that he would ‘phone me some time.

Not having heard anything from him for a while I’d forgotten all about it. But he rang me up this morning to see if he could come round for a chat. That meant a really good tidying-up session, vacuuming the apartment and washing the floors.

All my plans for the day thus went right out of the window.

When he came round, we had a really good chat about the radio, about music and about all kinds of subjects. I was glad that I’d had something to eat before he came because he was here until about 15:30.

With a few urgent things to do it was rather later than usual when I went out for my afternoon walk.

The afternoon was magnificent. It was quite warm with some pleasant wind. The sky was quite clear and you could see for miles. Right out on the horizon presumably on its way to the Channel islands was a ship.

It made me wonder if it was a ferry of some description but back here when i cropped and enlarged it, I couldn’t make out what kind of ship it might be. It’s quite possibly some kind of military vessel.

There was an even better view right up the coast towards Cherbourg.

By my calculations, which may or may not be correct, that in the background on the horizon is the range of hills at the back of the Cap de Carteret and all the way up to Bricquebec.

It’s been three and a half years since I moved here and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the coast as clear as this during all of this time.

My afternoon walk went all around the headland and back down the other side.

However at the end of the headland I climbed up on one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall to see what the view was like from up there. And sure enough, Cap Fréhel and the lighthouse were pretty prominent right out on the horizon.

What we could also see too was the coastline all the way up there, including the bay where St-Cast-le-Guildo, the port where we overnighted one night on our sail up the coast on Spirit of Conrad, is situated.

And I’ve only seen that once before, I think.

The bird-men of Alcatraz were out there yet again enjoying the good weather.

When the journalist and I were having our chat, I asked about the hang-glider who was injured on Saturday. He told me that he was still in intensive care with damage to his spinal column and it’s not clear what his future prospects are.

But all of that didn’t stop the current crop of hang-glider pilots from performing all kinds of aerobatics and so on right on the edge of the cliffs and right in front of the pedestrians strolling around the headland.

We were treated to another aerobatic display too while we were out on our walk.

This time though, it was a display of nature. That bird of prey that’s been loitering around the rabbit colony in the cliffs was back again hovering over the cliff edge. It remained stationary, beating its wings, for long enough for me to take a really good photograph of it.

There was nothing else going on during my travels so I came back home to have a closer look at some of the photographs that i’d taken, to see what I could see.

Back here, before I looked at the photos, I had bread to bake seeing as I’ve run out.

For some reason or other, the larger loaf of bread didn’t rise up as well as it has done in the past. It’s certainly better than the first two or three that I made, but not as good as the last couple.

As for the banana bread, that looks pretty good and I’m hoping that it tastes as good as it looks. I went to town with the sultanas and that’s given it some added oommph. As well as that, I brushed the surface with milk and sprinkled brown sugar on top.

While the oven was baking the bread, I stuck a potato and some frozen pie in there. What with some vegetables and gravy, followed by my apple turnover and coconut soya dessert, it made a really delicious tea.

Tomorrow I fancy a burger on a bap, I reckon.

On my walk around tonight, I had the f1.8 50mm lens on the camera – hence the brighter images.

You’ve already seen the sky over the English Channel, but there wasn’t anything else of any importance so I took another photo of the Square Maurice Marland and the illuminated trees.

Altogether I did my three runs, and I almost walked on a young couple having a quiet moment in a darkened corner of the city walls.

So later than usual, I’m off to bed now. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll be on form to crack on with work. I crashed out today for an hour or so before tea, but I’ve also chosen the music for the next radio programme so at least I have done something.

But I need to push on with my work otherwise i won’t ever get anywhere.

Friday 10th July 2020 – I’M WHACKED!

And while you admire the photos of this evening’s sunset I’ll tell you why.

This afternoon I went out for a little walk. And by the time that I returned I’d walked 11.0 kilometres and 142% of my daily activity.

And that’s BEFORE I go out for my evening run.

This morning started off though as it ought to have done – with me having a decent lie-in until almost 08:00. And I’d earned it too after yesterday’s efforts.

After the meds I had a listen to the dictaphone. We were on board the yacht last night and the discussion turned round to Brexit. My opinion of it that it was a mass of sewage met with great approval. I said things like they made all this mess and now they have to clean it up. There was a lot of symbolism there that I don’t remember now and there was a lot more to this that I can’t remember at all.

But I awoke all drenched in sweat again – it was another one of those nights, wasn’t it? I have to make a note of these because it’s a symptom of my illness, although they didn’t ask me about that the other day.

When I’d finished today’s dictaphone entry I had a session transcribing a couple of others that were awaiting processing.

Rather too many of those, although nothing like as many as there were while I was on my transatlantic sail last year and which took a good while to transcribe.

The rest of the morning was spent dealing with the photos from my voyage on the Spirit of Conrad last week. A good few hundred of those and so far I’ve probably done about 40 of them. I’m not doing too well with those, am I?

There’s no bread in the house at the moment because I used it all up before I went to sea.

So instead I had taco rolls for lunch, filled with salad. It’s quite a useful thing to have hanging around here, a couple of packs of those. But I can see Sunday being a Day of Baking)

After lunch I set off on my mega-ramble. I need to go to pick up the estimate for Caliburn’s bodywork and the garage is shut on Saturdays. With trying to use Caliburn as little as possible, I decided to walk there. it was a lovely day for it too.

And I didn’t get too far out of the house before I was interrupted.

This morning I was awoken by an infernal racket coming from underneath my bedroom window. There’s a film being made in the old medieval town for the next couple of weeks and it looks as if the film crew has arrived with all of the equipment.

There are probably half a dozen large vans and lorries parked all around here with all kinds of stuff inside them (I did have a crafty peek).

More excitement down at the docks too this afternoon.

having lived here long enough, I’m starting to recognise the signs. There’s a lorry down there loaded up with wooden beams which are being unloaded by the fork lift truck.

It’s a sure sign, if ever there was one, that one of the Jersey freighters, Thora or Normandy Trader or maybe even both are due to pay us a visit in early course.

Normandy Trader was in last night as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but she didn’t hang around for long and was soon back at sea again. But a quick turn-round at St Helier will bring her back soon enough.

Regular readers of this rubbish will likewise recall that yesterday they had a cherry-picker with a couple of men in it working on the broken clock by the old tourist information office.

Being keen to see if they had finally repaired it after all these years I went for a quick look.

And isn’t this a disappointment? They seem to have taken the hands away from the clock rather than actually fixing the mechanism. The mechanism must be beyond repair.

But why remove the hands? At least the time was correct twice a day as it was before. Now it isn’t right at all and that’s rather a backward step.

There’s a new grocery shop opened in town in the old kids’ clothes shop.

We had a Coccinelle here before but it changed its franchise to Super U so someone has decided to open another Coccinelle franchise here.

And just look at the opening hours! This is really dragging Granville kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, isn’t it? It’s high time that a few places around here actually started to respond to the needs of the clients

It’s quite a long walk out to Espace Autos on the edge of town.

It takes me past the water tower on its little eminence on the edge of town. Quite a few times I’ve driven past here and seen the paintings on the side but I’ve never actually stopped for a closer look.

It’s certainly impressive, the way that it’s been painted. So much better than just a whitish-grey concrete eyesore despoiling the countryside. Up there it can be seen for miles so it needs to be a good advertisement for the town

At the garage they gave me the estimate for Caliburn’s bodywork. And when I recovered from the shock I set off again for home.

On the way back I called in at a couple of shops to see what was going on but there was nothing there that impressed me so I returned empty-handed.

Only as far as the Plat Gousset where I treated myself to a vegan banana sorbet. I reckoned that I had earned it.

So much that I wanted to do during the early part of the evening but instead I crashed right out. And for a good 90 minutes-worth of deep sleep.

That was a deep disappointment but I can’t say that I was surprised after all of the effort. It’s not every day that I walk that kind of distance without a break.

So a rather late tea. A curry from out of the freezer with rice and veg, followed by the last slice of apple pie and some soya coconut dessert. There’s an apple turnover for tomorrow and then on Sunday I’ll bake an apple crumble. It’s been a while since I made one of those.

The weather out there tonight was beautiful.

Plenty of wind but very bright and clear and I could see for miles. All the way down to Cap Fréhel and its famous lighthouse in fact, as you can see right over on the extreme right-hand edge of this enlarged photo here.

And I’ll show you the photo of what it looks like close-to when I finally finish editing the photos that I took when I was aboard Spirit of Conrad

Here it is again only a more distant shot.

The lighthouse is again on the extreme right and just to the left of it is the Fort la Latte. Immediately to the left of that where there is nothing on the horizon is the bay where St Cast le Guildo is.

That was where we moored up one evening during our voyage the other week. I really must crack on and deal with the photos that I took. It’s a shame that it was difficult to work on board the boat.

This is something a little closer to home that I also had an opportunity to inspect when I was aboard Spirit of Conrad

That’s the Ile des Landes and in front of it is Phare de la Pierre-de-Herpin, the Pierre de Herpin lighhouse off the Pointe de Grouin on the Brittany coast.

It marks the entrance to the Baie de Mont St Michel and was opened on 1st October 1882, a light having been requested some 30 years previously. Since 1970 its light has been electrified and these days, like most lighthouses, it’s probably automated

My run was something of a disappointment. My two longest runs were cut short. It’s amazing how just two weeks of not exercising has affected me.

But I made it round to the viewpoint at the rue du Nord all the same. And while there was no-one picnicking on the beach, there were still crowds of people hanging around down there.

But one thing that I haven’t noticed so far is an fishermen. Before I went away there was a fisherman on every rock, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. Where have they all gone?

By now I was on 191% of my day’s activity and being keen to make it 200% I carried on for another lap around.

This extra route took me past the College Malraux and here the kids have made themselves some kind of soft fruit garden. There are all kinds of soft fruits here with a sign “let’s protect them so that we can eat them – the fruit presumably.

Soft fruit? I’m all in favour of that! I’m going to restart my home food production next week now that i’m back in the saddle. It’s high time that I organised myself.

From there I continued on to the cliff edge in time to catch the sunset.

We’ve seen plenty of sunsets just recently but not with the sun actually sinking below the horizon. But here I was at the right time and the right place so I stayed to enjoy the view.

There were a few other people loitering around here too admiring the sunset and I can’t say that I blame them either. Everything was just about perfect for a change.

As the sun slowly sank below the horizon I took a few photos and then scuttled off back to my apartment. I had a few things to do.

Firstly there was to reset the language on the portable laptop that I bought in the USA. It’s in “American English” which I detest so I’d ordered some French keyboard stickers.

While I was tidying up a little yesterday I came across them again so I changed the language settings to “French” at applied the stickers in the appropriate place.

Then there is the journal to write up for today. And to be proud of course of my 202% of my daily activity. If that’s not a success i don’t know what is.

There was an interruption as “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart came onto the playlist. I had a quick strum with that and worked out the chords while I was at it.

But now it’s bedtime, just like the sun that has now sunk below the horizon. Shopping tomorrow, and there’s quite a bit of stuff that I need too. I’ve not done much for this last couple of weeks.

So I’ll set the alarm tomorrow. It’ll do me good.

Thursday 2nd July 2020 – WITH NO ALARM …

… this morning I slept right through until everyone started appearing in the dining room. 07:55 or thereabouts. nd todaym for the first time since I can’t remember when, I had three proper meals today. This sea air has given me an appetite.

But more of that anon.

First thing though was to check the dictaphone. And sure enough, I’d been miles during the night. It must have been a very restless night, that’s all I can say. And when I return home and transcribe them I’ll find out where I’ve been. And, more importantly, who came with me.

After breakfast I went ashore to use the facilities in the port, and then came back on board. We left port pretty smartly in the beautiful sunshine and once clear we ran up the sails.

And now I know why I felt so ill the other day. This afternoon I banged my head on the hatch cover (yet again!) and found that I’d left half of the skin off my head hanging onto the edge of it.

That prompted me to go and look in the mirror. And sure enough, a bright red face, swollen eyes – I caught the sun when I was steering the boat the other day and I’m pretty badly sunburnt around the face.

No wonder I was feeling so cold!

We eventually arrived at the Ile de Chausey without mishap – no patrol boats or policemenm although there was a Customs boat in port – but he paid us no attention. Lunch had been taken in mid-ocean so as soon as we arrived we took a zodiac ashore.

This time I managed to make a full circuit of the island, visiting qlmost erverywhere that I wanted to go, and then we had a drink at the hotel and came back to the ship. But not before Strawberry Moose had his photo taken with yet another admirer who fell in love with him.

Pierre, our captain, knows someone on the island so he came beck too and we had a good chat for an hour or so.

It was also the birthday of Catherine, one of our passengers, so we had a little birthday party. I played the guitar too and someone told me that I had a good voice. It just shows you how much alcohol everyone had drunk this evening.

This evening there’s a very low tide so we can’t anchor here. We’ve retreated round to the north side of the island. We’re catching the wind full on and with the running seas it’s pretty uncomfortable when we are stationary. But apparently when the tide recedes, we’ll find ourselves in a little lagoon surrounded by rocks and in the shelter so it should be very comfortable.

There will be no alarm tomorrow either so I’m hoping for a good lie-in. It’s my last night on board tonight which is a real shame. I’ve really enjoyed it.

******* PHOTOS AND MORE CONTENT WILL BE ADDED IN DUE COURSE *******

Wednesday 1st July – MUCH TO MY …

… own surprise I once more beat the third alarm to my feet. But that was more in the hope that I wouldn’t awaken my fellow passengers with the racket that it makes rather than any keenness on my part. Some stuff on the dictaphone too and I’ll tell you more anout that as time goes on. I’ve not yet listened to it so I don’t know as yet if I have had any exciting company.

Mind you, my shipmates aren’t so pleased with me. Apparently David Bowie awoke the whole ship this morning and they have politely asked me to switch off my alarm tomorrow.

We had a leisurely start today and Strawberry Moose became the first moose ever to set hoof on the Isle de Brehat. There he found himself a girlfriend – it was love at first sight.

This all involved a zodiac ride and if anyone from Adventure Canade were to see the security precautions that we took, they would blanch. But we made it ashore (and back) safely and had a good tour around the island for three hours or so.

Back on the Spirit of Conrad we had an unexpected hitch. The anchor was jammed and it needed both the crewmen to free it. However we needed to leave at that moment because of the tide so Yours Truly was trusted with the controls all on my own for about an hour or so.

Luckily I wasn’t at the controls a little later because we had “an incident”. There was a ship anchored off the coast right in our path and as we approached it, it signalled to us to “clear off”. We saw no reason to so we carried on regardless and right behind it was a police launch – the Geranium I. And they came to intercept us.

Apparenty this ship is surveying the ocean bottom and there have been some disputes with the local fishermen, so a 500-metre exclusion zone has been declared around it. All very well if you are a local and you know, but if you don’t know, you don’t know.

They were on board for almost an hour verifying all of our papers and everything before they cleared off.

The weather, that hadn’t been too good to start with, deteriorated over the course of the day. We passed Cap Frehel in a heavy cloud and by the time we moored at St Cast le Guildo) it was raining heavily. Mind you there are some good modern showers in the harbour office so I for one took full advantage.

Rosemary called me for a chat too which was nice – but that meant that it was quite late when I came back on board. However with no 06:00 alarm in the morning it doesn’t matter all that much. I’m off to bed and hopefully I’ll be having a good lie-in

******* PHOTOS AND MORE CONTENT WILL BE ADDED IN DUE COURSE *******

Friday 31st January 2020 – THE NEXT THREE …

… images will tell yu a little story.

Basically they are rubbish but it’s not the quality that counts but the circumstances surrounding them. Take this photo for instance – this is not a handful of trawlers out in the English Channel but lights which I think might be the port at St Helier on the mainland of Jersey, 58 kms away.

And that’s pretty phenomenal.

And take this one here.

These over here are the street lights in St Malo, right across the Baie de Mont St Michel from here in Brittany. Not as far away as Jersey and the Channel Islands of course, but by my reckoning that’s about 35 or 40 kilometres away.

And that’s something that’s even more phenomenal too.

But we’ll leave the best until last.

All of those lights down there, that by my reckoning is St Cast le Guildo and Cap Fréhel and all of that is about 60 kms and more away from here.

No sea haze of course to obstruct the view like there is out to sea and that’s why the photo is clearer than the first. But all of that is pretty impressive.

Hand-held in quite a wind that was blowing – too windy for the tripod unfortunately and I’m a bit wary of that since the tripod blew down off a roof on one occasion with a camera still attached.

But all of this goes to show you what a beautiful, clear evening it was.

It was a lovely morning too and I should know, because for once I actually saw it. Feeling like death of course but I still managed to drag myself out of bed before the first alarm, for the first time since I can’t remember when.

After the medication I attacked the dictaphone notes. I’d been out in Eastern England somewhere, a town called Jura near Cambridge or somewhere like that with a huge lake, that was where I was and I remember this huge map hanging on the wall of that part of Eastern England and I used to study it and work out where towns were, all that kind of thing. One day some lady started to talk. She came to Jura and she tried to take my cup of coffee away thinking that i’d finished with it but I insisted on hanging on to it which got off to a bad start but she was going on to her firneds about how her son in law or grandson in law plays football for a Scottish team and how they were drawn against a big team in the Scottish Cup and how they were only part-timers, all this kind of thing. But she was getting everything wrong and I was thinking that i’d have to correct her somehow but of course that’s not the kind of person that you can correct at the top of your voice and anyway you couldn’t get in any words in edgeways with what she was saying

After breakfast I set about splitting up a few more digital recordings. That’s another one of these projects that I have to continue. It’s quite important because I’ll be pulling a load of stuff out of there for the radio projects.

Later on I carried on with the notes for the radio project on which I am working and by the time that I had to go out, I’d just about finished writing them.

The walk up to the Centre Agora was quite pleasant and I arrived bang on time for a coffee before our meeting.

There’s going to be a jobseekers’ meeting here in Granville on 6th March and we are planning to do another live broadcast. 80-odd employers are going to be present and if previous years are anything to go by, there will be over 1,000 jobseekers coming to meet them armed with CVs and the like.

We will be interviewing the jobseekers and the employees and hosting a kind-of round table discussion, to go out live on the air.
However, that day there’s a lot happening and we are rather short-handed so I’ve been roped in as an interviewer.

The purpose of our meeting this afternoon was to meet the person who is organising the event on behalf of the town council and to agree a strategy. Unfortunately it was another one of those meetings where if someone sets aside 2 hours, everyone there will make sure that it lasts two hours too.

As I have said before … “and on many occasins too” – ed … these kinds of meetings should be held standing up, outside, in the pouring rain. Just as much would be decided, and in five minutes or less too.

It reminds me of a story that I heard about the election of a Pope in the Middle Ages. The cardinals were taking forever about it so the local duke ordered his men to remove the roof from the building where they were meeting.

They reached a decision in minutes once it started to rain.

From there I had a slow walk home, retracing my steps to try to find the glove that I had lost – one of my tactile gloves too – only to find that it had fallen out of my pocket in the apartment.

Not very good, am I?

Anyway, for a couple of hours I recorded the notes that I had written and even managed to start to edit them before I stopped for tea.

Earlier on during the day I’d been through the freezer again and I’d found a pack of frozen mushrooms. Now if there is one thing worse than commercially-frozen carrots, it’s commercially-frozen mushrooms. They are awful.

So what I did was to get one of these half-cooked baguettes and slice id and insert garlic butter into the slices. Then clean a couple of potatoes, and finally take out of the fridge the left-over pastry from the other day and the left-over cooking apple, and make an apple turnover.

All of that went into the oven.

Meanwhile, I fried a couple of onions and added some garlic, and when they were thoroughly fried, added the defrosted mushrooms which I had drained (and you have no idea just how much water there is in frozen mushrooms) along with some herbs.

When the mushrooms were thoroughly cooked, the whole lot went into the whizzer and made a thick mushroom soup which I ate with the potatoes and garlic bread that I had made.

Pudding was the apple turnover with sorbet, and delicious it all was too. And there’s enough mushroom soup and another bread thing for tea tomorrow night too.

We’ve seen some of the photos from tonight’s walk, but there are a couple of others that I took too.

The tide is in and this is the cue for the trawlers to start coming home to port. There were already a few of them at the fish-processing plant unloading their cargo and there were several more on the way into the harbour from out at sea.

It’s a really busy place here, even if we don’t have the gravel boats in any more which is a shame.

And that reminded me – I hadn’t looked at the Chantier navale for quite some time, so I went over there.

There isn’t anything very much exciting going on in there right now. Just a couple of small fishing boats, no yacht of any size and no deep-sea trawler-type of vessel.

Still, there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there? We mustn’t abandon hope quite yet.

So here I am and it’s almost 02:00 and I can’t sleep. If you read this, spare a thought for me and my friends. Thanks to 17.4 million xenophobes and racists We are now stateless people with no more rights than your average Somali or Syrian refugee and our continued residence here depends upon the goodwill of various Governments that have no interest whatever in us while across the Channel in The Land That Time Forgot, the Silly Brits are using their foreign residents as bargaining chips.

As the conversation went in Lord of the Rings -“Have you thought of an ending?”
“Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.”

We could be on the verge of the greatest mass forced migration of citizens since the Eastern Germans during the period 1945-1948 if the UK doesn’t come to its senses pretty quickly.

Sunday 12th May 2019 – I REMEMBER …

… saying yesterday that I was hoping for a good night’s sleep for a change;

And so I’m more-than-satisfied with 10:25. That will suit me nicely, thank you.

Plenty of time for going off on a little voyage during the night. Something happened last night that a group of us was out looking for a lorry. We eventually came across it – an old late-1930s British Army 2-tonne lorry that was hidden up an alleyway. We quickly unloaded it and I took it off to hide it. Someone asked me where I’d put it and I replied that I’d put it in my workshop next to my Cortinas. This person wondered how I’d managed it because that was full of all kinds of stuff, but I explained that I’d tidied it up and moved things around (however unlikely that might seem). I was round then at some woman’s house getting my things ready and it had taken me a while and I was running late. I was sorry that I hadn’t had time to go to see a girl who lived in the neighbourhood and on whom I was keen and I didn’t have time. The woman suggested that I ring her and merely say “hello” and I could see how the land lies. She might even slip round for a moment.
But somewhere in all of this a girl had asked me if I fancied a new car. I replied that a Jaguar would suit me nicely so she explained that all I needed to do was to go to a flower shop and place an order for a certain type of flower. There was an extremely long and complicated script to the way in which I had to ask and she endeavoured to coach me, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. In the end I told her that we would both go in together and instead of teaching me the script she could simply say it to the shop owner and save the trouble.

As a result of all of this, any plans that I might (or might not) have had all went gang agley.

What was even worse was that the nearest football match was about 30 kms away and while I might have travelled that far to see a game when I lived in the Auvergne, things are somewhat different now that I live here;

But I’ve not been idle. Not by any means. I’ve spent all of the day working on the photos for the trip to Canada in 2015 and they are now completely up-to-date.

So that’s another project finished and I’m pleased about that.

The next plan is to look at the pages for 2016, and then for 2017. I’m pretty certain that for the earlier years all of them have been done.

Once they are done, I’m going to work on some kind of opus magnus about Montreal – something similar to what I did about Quebec.

However, that’s a long way off, I reckon.

There were the usual interruptions. Lunch, of course, and later on I had my afternoon walk.

There was quite a lot of action on the sea this afternoon.

There were all kinds of naval craft out there, including several yachts such as this one here.

And do you notice the marker buoys in the water just ahead of it? It makes me wonder whether all of these marker buoys that we see occasionally in the water aren’t something do do with the yachting school – marking out a route or a limit maybe.

As well as the yachts out there, we had speedboats and cabin cruisers too, such as these here offshore from St Martin de Bréhal in this photo, which I cropped out of a long-distance shot and enlarged.

I’m not sure what the two boats nearest the camera are doing, but if you look closely you can see a horde of seagulls flapping around in between them. So there’s clearly something interesting going on there.

But look at the colours of the sea today. It was beautiful this afternoon.

And all of the people were enjoying themselves too.

There were hordes of people down there on the Place Maréchal Foch and heading off to enjoy the sunshine along the Plat Gousset.

Not too many on the beach today though. It might have been a nice day but the wind wasn’t making it so warm as it might have been. We might have to wait a few weeks for that, if it’s going to happen at all, for this year is turning out to be something of a disappointment.

I said though, didn’t I, that there were crowds of people out there today.

On my travels over the last couple of days I’d seen strange signs appearing all over town advertising “routes” and I’d been wondering what was going on. But my curiosity was satisfied this afternoon when I saw hordes of people wandering around in organised groups following the signs.

The days when I could tag along behind and follow them are long gone. I don’t move about as quickly as I used to do, and I’ve had it when it comes to stairs of course

So that’s the land and sea from this afternoon dealt with. We haven’t said anothing about the air yet.

And that was quite busy today too. We didn’t see our autogyro today but there was this little microlight flying around above us, presumably from the airstrip over beyond Donville-les-Bains.

But taking this photo involved something of an athletic feat because this is one occasion where the monopod gets in the way. Taking photos at anything more than about 20° means that I have to bend down underneath the camera. At about 60° I end up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The evening though was probably the most magnificent that I have experienced since I’ve been living here.

The wind had dropped and the haze had gone, which meant that I could see for miles. I was seeing things with the naked eye that I struggled to see with the telephoto lens. It was a perfect evening for photography, as this long-distance shot of Jersey will confirm.

As I have said before … “and you will say again” – ed … it’s very hard to imagine that this shot is of objects that are at least 54 kilometres (31 miles) away. And it’s picked up the buoy in mid-channel really well.

But 54 kilometres are nothing at all compared to what I was seeing and what the camera was picking up this evening.

A rather speculative shot in the distance following a compass heading has picked out the hills at the back of the Brittany coast out between St Brieuc and Paimpol, and they are at least 80 kilometres away.

I spent quite a considerable time out there and too plenty of photos. They are appended to this blog entry and I’ve made a couple of notes of where they might be.

It really was beautiful and it’s a shame that there were so few people out there enjoying it.

On my way back to the apartment, my attention was distracted yet again.

I’ve no idea what drew my attention to it, but at the foot of a tree in the boulevard Vaufleury I saw this broken egg. It’s clearly not a hens-egg shell discarded by a tourist because it’s a completely different shape and size.

A couple of people have mentioned to me that they had seen chicks about this year earlier than usual, and it looks as if they might be right.

Where there are broken egg-shells, there would have to be a nest in the immediate vicinity.

And the tree at the base of which the egg was found would seem to be a good place to look. Sure enough, carefully entangled into the branches of this tree is a very discreet nest.

It’s so well camouflaged that it was impossible to take any sort of photograph of it. And so I’ve no idea whose it is or even how many people might be in it.

And I see that I’ve forgotten to mention tea. Vegan pizza of course followed by apple pie and coconut sorbet. Delicious. The sad thing is that tomorrow will see the last slice of pie.

And shame as it is to say it, I was away with the fairies for 20 minutes too, despite my good sleep. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

So now it’s bedtime. Not as early as I would have wanted, but early enough.

Ready for a bit more hard work next week.

east jersey coast granville manche normandy france