Tag Archives: vaino tanner

Friday 19th January 2024 – GUESS WHO …

… has been in the Urgences at the hospital in Granville again this afternoon?

This morning at about 10:45 I had a ‘phone call. "Mr Hall, you need to come back to the hospital. We’ve picked up something on the X-Rays that might be important. Can you come this afternoon?"

So having arranged transport (which was a story in itself, which you’ll find out in early course) I arrived at the hospital.

They shoved me through one of these Stargate time-tunnel machines, one made by my former employer, General Electric, and then waited around for the results.

When someone finally turned up, it was "sorry, it must have been a false alarm. You can dress and go home". So off I went home, driven by a mad taxi driver (which was a story in itself, which you’ll find out in early course).

But it reminded me of the time after my bad car accident in 1986 when I was taxiing in Sandbach, and they gave me a brain scan.
"How did it go?" I asked
"No need to worry" the doctor replied. "We found nothing"
Well, quite …

But I digress … "again" – ed …

So there’s nothing wrong with my leg, they told me. They would have had a different opinion if they had been in bed with me during the night because I was awake for hours in agony. It’s not getting any better – in fact it seems to be getting worse.

And with a late night and all of these sleeping issues I felt like death when the alarm went off. And I forgot to take the ‘phone with me when I went to walk the parapet so the whole building was probably awoken by the second and third alarm.

Dressing was a struggle yet again and then, having taken the blood pressure, went for my mountain of medication.

Back in here I eventually managed to summon up the energy to transcribe the dictaphone notes, such as they were in the short time during which I was asleep. I’d somehow found myself at a dance and had ended up in the company of an Inuit girl to whom someone had introduced me. What I didn’t realise was that there was another girl whom I liked much better and who was actively trying to find me to begin to talk to me but of course when she found me with this Inuit girl she backed away. I didn’t find this out until later so I was rather annoyed with the person who presented me to this girl. Of course it was all my fault for getting together with her but anyway I was still annoyed. Eventually the girl began to chat to me so I explained to her about the confusion. She asked what had happened later on. I explained that the person responsible for the mix-up getting me together with this Inuit girl had ended up dancing on the floor with a group of people or someone or other and was quite happy where he was but they announced that they were going to divide the room into two – there would be a dance for the people from the reseau urban – the urban area and another one for the people from the pays lointan – the distant rural areas. He ended up being in a different area than where he actually wanted to be, or, at least, away from the people with whom he wanted to be. He was not happy at all so I thought that there was some kind of justice being served somewhere and that made me feel a little better

But why would I be upset about finding myself a nice Inuit girl?

Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist, went between 1937 and 1939 to Northern Labrador to live among the Inuit in order to study their lifestyle, customs and habits, and to report on the area in which they live.

In his report, “Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador” published in 1944 he tells us that the Inuit girls –

are very hard-working around the house (and then goes on to list the tasks that they enjoy performing)
are keen to marry men of European descent
have an extremely sensual nature

It intrigued me how he discovered the third part of that trilogy so, believe me, having read his report, I was off on the next trip of the THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR to the frozen North to conduct my own in-depth field research.

It was shortly after this that the ‘phone went berserk.

Throughout the morning I was negotiating my shopping list with my cleaner who was wandering around town carrying out her various errands.

The hospital at Paris rang up to find out how I was doing so I told them of all of my complaints here and there. After an extremely long and complicated telephone call, made harder by the fact that she dragged me back from being away with the fairies so I didn’t have both paddles in the water at that particular moment, she said that she’d speak to the specialist.

Next was the local hospital as I mentioned. I had to negotiate a taxi voucher from them but they could only do it for the return so they rang up my doctor to issue it. And I forget how many ‘phone calls I must have made to his secretary to confirm it

It still wasn’t ready when my cleaner, poor lass, went by to see and she broke the bad news to me when she came to bring me my shopping.

Nevertheless I phoned for a car and told them that we’d have to stop at the Medical Centre to pick it up. But when he came he said "I’ll pick it up later when I have more time". He’s not come back to me so I imagine that it must be OK.

The poor guy. Being quite busy he was in a hurry but he had to spend an age hunting down where I was supposed to go. Everywhere seemed to be closed. In the end, after what seemed to be a geological age and several phone calls, he found out that it was the Urgences, which is what I’d told his controller and I’m sure that I told him too.

One there I had to undress and wait a while before being put through the Stargate, and then wait a while for the results.

And now I know where the Grinch goes when it’s not Christmas. He works for the rival taxi company to the one that I use.

Bad-tempered and miserable, he told me that he didn’t have time to help me up the stairs so I had to telephone my long-suffering cleaner.

We hurtled through the 30kph limit of the harbour area at 75 kph and eventually screeched to a halt outside my building.

And his car – it was a “EA” plate, meaning that it was registered in March or April of 2016 and it had, would you believe, 320,000 kilometres on the clock. My next car (if there is one) will be a Peugeot 508 diesel.

My long-suffering cleaner helped me up the stairs to my apartment where I crashed into a chair and couldn’t move for 20 minutes. Then I made a hot chocolate and that was that for the day.

Tea tonight was wonderful. I had a raging fancy for a potato salad with my salad and vegan burger so

I diced some potatoes quite small and put them to boil
Half-way through I drained them to dispose of the starch, and then carried on with the boiling with fresh water and some dried chives
Meanwhile I took some vegan mayonnaise, added some garlic paste, lemon juice, vinegar and olive oil with some herbs (and there would have been some finely chopped raw onion in there too if I had remembered)
I whipped all of that up into a nice liquidy mix
Then I drained the potatoes, rinsed them to cool them down, put them back in the pan and added the sauce and mixed everything up together
When it was done I tipped it out onto the plate with the salad and burger – and ate it

And do you know what? It was absolutely out of this world delicious and I’ll make this again.

So now, much later than usual, having had a short (only 48 minutes) conversation with Rosemary, I’m off to bed hoping for a better night.

But hospital again? It’s really going beyond a joke. I’ll be moving permanently into a hospital at this rate.

And I know which one it will be. It won’t be one that we’ve encountered so far. They don’t have wards like that in general hospitals.

Saturday 5th August 2023 – IT’S REALLY WILD …

… outside. Some of the strongest winds that I have known since I have been here are howling around outside as I write these notes.

It’s been like this all day although maybe it’s a little worse now than it was. It certainly didn’t keep me awake during the night.

Plenty of other things did though, and I wish that I knew what they were, for it was another night when it seemed to take an age for me to go off to sleep, no matter how tired I was.

When the alarm went off I had to struggle out of bed. And later on it was even more of a struggle to make my way to Caliburn. I’m not very steady on my crutches at the best of times, but with my shopping trolley in a howling gale and torrential rainstorm made it even worse.

They were late opening up at Noz so I had to sit in the van for a while. And I’m glad that I went there because I was rather lucky.

While I’d been waiting, I’d been lamenting on the state of Caliburn’s wheels that are dirty, pitted and rusting. I’d painted the spare wheels a while ago and there in Noz today was some rustproofing wheel paint so I bought a couple of tins.

All I need now is for the wind to drop and the rain to stop.

There was also some jars of curry – vegan lentil Korma – so I grabbed a couple of jars of that too for use one of these days.

LeClerc didn’t come up with much but I seemed to have been in there for ages. I was quite late coming back. Especially as I was held up by a van crawling along at 20kph with a tannoy blaring out of it.

There’s a circus somewhere in town and this van was announcing it. Driven by one of the clowns, most likely.

There was quite a battle to make it back to the apartment with all of this wind.

Having sorted out the shopping I had my coffee and cheese on toast, then came back in here where, true to form just recently, I crashed out. Good and proper too.

There was quite a lot of stuff on the dictaphone from the night too, as I found out later on. I was back in hospital. They stuck an intravenous drip in my arm and connected a drip-feed to it. When they finished they disconnected the drip and strapped the catheter under a bandage of plasters and everything and sent me home to come back in a week or so. I then had to go to a check-up a day or two later. I can’t remember now where this check-up was but it was something significant. They checked me and from what they could see everything was back to normal. There were a couple more measurements and readings they wanted to take. They were underneath the bandages and strapping so they needed to take it all off. I was aware of how much all of this hurt, putting these needles in and taking them out again so I made something of a face about it. She told me that if all went well they would take it out today. I thought “what about if I have to come back here in a few days?”. She didn’t really have an answer to that. I felt just totally fed up at this point that they were thinking about all these things and no-one was actually thinking about me and the effect that the needles were having on me.

I had to join in last night with some people engaged in a tug of war with a gigantic ginger cat. Apparently it was a security cat that belonged to some kind of building and had been massively over-fed. It was having severe health problems and needed to be taken to the vet. They had so much difficulty catching it that eventually they managed to get a lead around it but they needed some help to try to pull it into a cage because it was so big.

Later on I was coming from Chester. As I approached Nantwich I was having a debate with myself about whether it would be quicker to go through the town centre or around the by-pass. Eventually I chose to go round the by-pass. It was the wrong decision because it was chucking-out time at Reaseheath College. The whole area was swarming with people, pedestrians, cyclists etc. We were held up for ages. I was bringing a coupe back to the area, 2 people sitting in the back seat. They were flirting around. I was having to keep a close watch in my mirror in all this traffic but I couldn’t see the road because of these two people. I was trying at the time to work out how best to tell them to sit still and not move about so that I could see what was going on behind me.

It was also the end of term. A bunch of kids from school were off to University. One girl in particular whom I liked, I’d been helping her with all of her paperwork, to prepare it. She was packing and I was going to take her to the University to install her there. I had my car in the car park. We were going through the final preparation getting the paperwork ready when one of her friends who was going to the same University said that we’d take her as well. She asked which car it was. I told her that it was a pale blue Ford Cortina RBY623R. I told her where it was parked. We collected the other girl’s things and went to draw out some money and to photocopy a few documents. She asked if we could stop somewhere as we were passing through France to pick up some alcohol. She was a small girl who looked younger than she was. I told her to print out an extra copy of her birth certificate and put it in her purse with her so that she wouldn’t have any problems in places like that. We then went to the printer, which was like a cash point. We had to insert a document. There was a keyboard where you had to type whatever information you wanted to insert. She inserted some documents, typed a few things and then printed them out. There was a couple of other people waiting to use the machine. They complained about how long she was taking which I thought was strange as it was the only one for the entire school. There must have been queues like this before.

As I went back to sleep I was on a bus with my passengers. I was collecting up my paperwork, tools and a box full of washers, drill bits etc, getting ready. I had prepared a map of the area. We set off in the coach on the way home, stopping by various places on the way.

Later on I finished off the radio notes ready for dictating and then went back to my Canada 2017 trip. I’ve now crossed the Churchill River and on my way north-east.

Churchill River was interesting. Trying to research it is not very easy because it wasn’t called Churchill River until 1965. When it was originally observed by Europeans, they named it “Grand River” but in 1821 it was renamed “Hamilton River” in honour of the then-Governor of Newfoundland.

So you can see what I mean.

And it’s likely to become even more complicated in due course as there is a movement afoot to petition the Government to change the name to represent its Innu heritage.

In case you’re wondering, which I’m sure you are, there are three, and maybe four, ethnic groups here in Labrador. Along the coast, north of Hamilton Inlet but formerly much further south too, are the Inuit.

In the southern part of Labrador and the interior of the north are the Innu, recognised by themselves as forming one ethnic grouo but some people, including our hero Viano Tanner, suggest that the southern people, known by the French in the past as Montagnais and the people in the interior further north , known in the past as Naskapi, are distinct and discrete groups.

And since 1982 the Métis have been recognised as a distinct and discrete ethnic group.

Something else that I’ve been doing is hunting down Court injunctions.

In 2012 Valard, the company that is building the dam at the Muskrat Falls and Nalcor, the energy corporation of the Newfoundland and Labrador Government were granted an injunction which prohibited “NunatuKavut (the local Innu) members and others from going within 50 meters of the Site which included any areas of land that Nalcor is authorized to use, or shall be authorized to use in the future”.

A Court of Appeal hearing in 2014 found that this injunction “prohibited the people of NunatuKavut from carrying out traditional activities and accessing their traditional lands” in defiance of a Treaty of Native Rights and overturned the injunction.

But the lesson we can learn from that is that not even a Treaty with native people is allowed to stand in the way of one of the Newfoundland Government’s sacred cows, if the Government thinks that it can get away with it.

Tea tonight was chips, salad and one of those kale and lentil burgers that I bought the other day. The burger wasn’t at all what I expected but it was actually quite nice and I wished that I’d bought some more of them.

Having written my notes now I’m going to dictate my notes for the radio if the wind dies down and I can hear myself think. And then I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have fruit buns to make and radio programmes to prepare, so by the looks of things I’ll be busy. Mind you, I’ll probably fall asleep instead. That seems to be how things work these days.

Thursday 6th July 2023 – MY PHYSIOTHERAPIST …

… came round late this afternoon to tell me that he’s not going to be coming back again.

He and my neighbour have apparently had a dispute and she has told him that she doesn’t want to see him again. So he’s told me that it’s not worth his while to come out here just for me. It’s quite a way out of town.

Actually, it’s not as if I’m really bothered. I’ve said before that he has a kind of manner that I don’t really appreciate all that much. Anyway, he’s given me the phone number of a colleague and told me to contact him.

But we shall see. Because right now, I’m too tired to do anything.

It’s not as if I had a bad night either. Fair enough, I was in bed later than I intended but I’ve been to bed much later than this. And had more-restless nights too.

When the alarm went off I was stark out as well and it was a real struggle to haul myself out of bed before the second alarm.

No medication for me. I had a quick wash and brush up and headed out for the laboratory. I arrived bang-on 08:30 and found myself to be the only person there.

It was necessary to wait 20 minutes though. There’s a special test that needs to be carried out that involves a heated tube so I had to wait for it to be warmed up.

But the nurse found a vein and took a sample straight away first go without any difficulty at all. They are pretty good at this laboratory.

When I came out of the cubicle I found the place heaving with people. I’d arrived just at the correct time by the looks of things.

While I was out, I nipped to LeClerc.. Caliburn is running low on diesel and whenever I go to the supermarket there’s usually an enormous queue. It’s not often that I’m out early on a weekday morning so I nipped out that way to check. To my surprise, there was a pump empty so I bunged in 50 litres. That will do me for several months, I reckon.

Back here I had my medication and then spent some time unwinding. I had another call from the nurse. She couldn’t read the stuff that I sent the other day so could I send some different stuff.

Having scanned that and sent it off, the doctor rang me. He still hadn’t received it so I told him that I’d print it out and bring it with me when I go tomorrow. So I printed it all and then the nurse phoned me back to say that he’d now received it and I needn’t bother printing it out.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone during the night. And by the sound of things, I was literally in the Wars. There was a train that we had to go somewhere to board. I think that we were probably prisoners or something. Before I boarded the train I felt the urgent need to go to the bathroom but there wasn’t anywhere to go and I wasn’t able to go standing by the side of the train. In the end I just climbed aboard anyway. I opened a hatch and somehow managed to pull myself inside ready for the train to set off. I don’t know whether we were fighting the Turks or someone like that

We were in the War last night. We left our support trench to go to the Front Line. We had to charge. We swarmed out of the door into No-Man’s Land but didn’t go very far at all. We just took shelter once we were clear. The Germans started to lob hand grenades, really like explosive charges fitted into glass jars. They always seemed to be landing where I was. I had to dodge around quite a lot in order to escape being blown up by one of them. Just at the moment when I was at my least comfortable a German General came round the corner with a couple of orderlies. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or him. He actually ordered me back to my trench instead of wanting to shoot me or anything like that. Then our Colonel came up. He went over to the German General and handed him a file. It turned out that he had given him the whole information about our defences. When I asked why the Colonel said “another part of the Front is much weaker than ours. I wanted to encourage the Germans to go to attack that and leave us all alone

Then I was away somewhere on a voyage and had a really bad attack of cramp in my left calf again. That wiped away every memory that I had of what I was doing and where I had been

Finally I’d been round to see someone. Someone else came with me. This other person was an older person who lived on his own. We were in a car somewhere in Belgium. The first person whom I’d been to see asked me which way I’d come. I told him and he was trying to tell me a better way to arrive that was quicker etc. I wasn’t really sure about this. Then the other person turned up. We got into the car to go somewhere else . I asked him about the first guy “is he always like this?”. He replied “yes, he loves to take control”. Just then the alarm clock somewhere went off. This guy said “yes that’s my alarm clock. I wasn’t sure what was going to be happening so I went to bed and set the alarm for now but as it happens I got up earlier. It’s no problem”. We began to drive to where we were supposed to be going.

Having dealt with that I did some more work on my radio notes and then went back to the Labrador coast. I was interested to read that our hero Vaino Tanner told us a story that when he was in Cartwright he heard a tale of dogs that had attacked and killed a small child, and how all of the locals denied that such a thing had happened.

Yet there I was, out in the abandoned cemetery in the abandoned village of North River across on the other side of Sandwich Bay, looking at the headstone of the grave of Ephraim Williams aged 4 years and 8 months “who was killed by dogs”.

Not only that, looking even deeper into things, I came across the story of little three year-old Willie Davis down the bay at Long Point. His cousin Tom told a reporter that “These dogs come and fastened right into him. I don’t know if Mother was looking or if she heard something. When she started pelting rocks at them, all the proper dogs went away, all but this old black one, he just stayed there and tore away at Willie. “

So small children being attacked, and sometimes killed by dogs is nothing new. In fact, during the Influenza epidemic that almost wiped out the Inuit community of Okak up the coast, it was reported that “dozens of sled dogs grew wild with hunger and began eating the corpses or attacking sick humans”

As well as all of this I’ve been trying to revise the next batch of my Welsh but today it was more a case of fighting off an overwhelming urge to go to sleep. I’m really not doing very well.

Tea was another one of these quinoa and lentil burgers with rice, veg and some thick onion gravy. For some reason, the gravy wasn’t as nice as last week which was a shame. nevertheless, I did manage to eat it all.

Tomorrow I have my appointment with the nerve specialist who is going to do his worst, and I’m not at all looking forward to that. It hurts like hell, but I suppose that it has to be done. I’d better go and have an early night for once in my life.

Wouldn’t it be awkward if I were to fall asleep in the middle of his test?

Wednesday 5th July 2023 – I MANAGED TO …

… beat the alarm clock again this morning, even though I didn’t feel anything at all quite like it. When it went off this morning at 07:00 I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing

It goes o show that nothing in this life is permanent. I remember not so long ago going through a phase of not being able to get up out of bed at any price and I remember thinking at the time that it’s just going to go worse.

But the way that things have turned out, then I suppose that there are some grounds for optimism. I just wish that I knew what they were.

However, as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … being up and out of bed is one thing. Actually being at my desk and working is something else completely.

Isabel the nurse was the first to dislodge me from my reverie this morning. She’s supposed to be giving me a blood test tomorrow but apparently this one is extremely complicated and has to be done at the laboratory.

The laboratory opens at 07:30 and I need to be there before 09:00. And she hopes that I won’t be in a rush because these are “special” tests that take about 10 days before the results are ready.

Next person to ring was the nerve specialist’s secretary. I was wondering why I’d been copied into a blank e-mail but it turned out that the e-mail should have contained the copy of the prescription that he sent to me. He wasn’t available and his secretary needed it for her records so could I send it to her?

It all sounds quite bizarre to me, but who am I to interfere?

Having sorted out the playlist for the next few days, I wrote out a few more notes for a radio programme. It’s quite strange really but my heart doesn’t seem to be in it right now.

But to be honest, my heart isn’t really into anything much right now. All my get-up-and-go seems to have got up and gone at the moment – quite a change from that dramatic burst of energy that I had a couple of weeks ago where I was ready to take on the World.

Yesterday I mentioned that I’d revised half of my first Welsh course book. Today I looked through the other half. And I’ll keep on doing that through the summer, I reckon. The only difficulty is that with my teflon brain, nothing is sticking. I’m going to have to do something dramatic about that too.

The rest of the day has been spent walking around on the Furdustrandir, the beach where the Norse voyagers landed on their epic voyage down the North American coast – or, at least, where I think that the Norse landed.

Everyone has their own preferred location as to which beach it might be, and find 100 reasons why it won’t be anywhere else, and then someone else finds 100 reasons why it’s not where anyone else says that it might be.

The early writes on the subject, like Carl Rafn, Gustav Storm and Arthur Middleton Reeves put the beach as far south as Massachusetts and quote the number of daegr – or “days” quoted in the Sagas, and the average speed of a longboat.

However, no-one is going to sail a ship in unfamiliar waters full of shoals and rocks during the hours of darkness, and they weren’t in a longboat anyway but in a cargo vessel.

William Munn wrote a book in 1914 to suggest that Newfoundland was the likeliest spot for the Norse to have settled and when confronted about the problem of “vines growing in the neighbourhood”, Munn’s suggestion that “maybe the climate was different in those days” – the first ever reference to Global Warming – was loudly ridiculed by his contemporaries.

In any case Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist, whose ancient Norse language is bound to be more reliable that many other Westerners, tells us that “vinland was originally a nomen appellativum derived from the early Nordic word vin (pronounced vinn), plural vinjar, which signifies grassland or pasture suitable for cattle.”

And as for the critics who say “grassland or pasture suitable for cattle in Labrador?”, they’ve obviously never been to Greenland and seen what passes for pasture there.

So I suppose that that will be my next project, if ever I finish this one. To write up my notes of my visits to the Norse sites in Greenland.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone again from the night. I had a couple of wax mannequins or dummies in my house that I used either for decoration or putting clothes on etc. What people didn’t realise was that they were in fact some old friends of mine, including Rosemary, who I’d somehow managed to kill and coated in wax as a way of disguising their bodies while I had a think about what I was going to do with them. They’d been around in my apartment now for a couple of years and I was beginning to wonder how long I could get away with it if none of these people had, say, featured on their social network in that time. Someone would be bound to ask me a few questions about them, where they are. One idea that went through my head was to use their mobile phones to establish some kind of connection so that their online presence would be noted but that would inevitably draw people in to where I was and that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I was in this enormous quandary about what I was going to do and how I was going to do it

My brother had his motorbike and we were planning on doing something with ours. We said that we’d meet at a certain pub after a music concert. He got onto the pub who said that we could leave our motorbikes there during the concert. We wandered slowly home to fetch the bikes. He had his and I told him to wait a few minutes. He said that his wouldn’t start so he’d have to push it. if we set off now we’d be there at the same time. Off we set. I went into the barn. It was filthy, untidy, dusty and dirty etc, a real mess. I even found 20p in the dust and an album cover from a Who album. Trying to get my motorbike down was really difficult. I had to pull myself up with my arms and elbows onto another half-floor above. I needed a great deal of strength to do that. I had to open a cupboard, the door opened upwards, take the bike out and somehow lower it down to the floor below. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this at all. I reckoned that it would be extremely difficult. Then I thought that I hadn’t run the motorbike for years so what if it doesn’t fire if the petrol has gone stale or something like that?

I had some cars that needed washing. They were all kinds but mainly ancients – stuff that you find that’s 100 years old that’s dragged out of a barn. I had them in this kind of workshop and coupled up the hose but it wasn’t long enough. It made life really awkward. Someone found an extension piece for the hose. I put that in but there wasn’t enough water pressure so it was taking just as long anyway. There were all kinds of stuff – vans from the 1920s rotten as hell. There was one vehicle that we couldn’t really identify at first. It was dark green and big like a furniture removal lorry with Yale locks on it. It looked as if it was from the 1930s. I thought that I could make out what was a Bedford plaque from much more modern times so we were sitting there trying to decide what kind of vehicle it actually was until we could get close up to it to have a look

Tea tonight was a vegan chili using the leftovers and a small tin of kidney beans. This time I used chili powder rather than tipping the tabasco sauce in and it worked well enough.

So now I’m going to bed. Exhausted yet again and I have to go out early tomorrow morning. And I don’t really feel like it, but then again I don’t really feel like very much at all right now. In fact, early though it may be, I’m ready for bed.

My cleaner did a good job of tidying up the place so at least I don’t have to worry about that. And that’s just as well. I have plenty of other things to worry about right now.

Friday 30th June 2023 – THAT WAS THREE HOURS …

… of my life that I’ll never ever get back.

It beats me (well, it doesn’t actually – it’s called “egoism”) why people come to these meetings and spend hours talking about nothing of any use whatsoever. There was even a lengthy discussion that went on and on and on about a Motion AFTER it had been defeated.

In my opinion, such as it is, all these meeting and others of a similar type should be held standing up, outside in a rainstorm. That would succeed in concentrating the minds.

My mind was sufficiently concentrated last night to have been up and about once more long before the alarm went off. But I really did wonder why because my head was spinning around for a good few hours. It really was quite uncomfortable.

After the medication I came in here to carry on working but knocked off at 10:00 to stagger outside and catch the bus into town. There was no way that I was going to walk into town.

Having stocked up on a few of the basics I came back on the bus and made myself some coffee and cheese on toast for brunch, and then I started work.

Today I’ve finished my exploration around Cartwright (at long last) and even as we speak I’m heading out in an open boat to go for a walk on what I consider to be the Furdustrandir, the “Wunderstrands” of the Norse sagas and to walk in the footsteps of Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist

His claim to fame is that during his expedition to the Labrador coast between 1937 and 1939 he made the observation, that has since gone down in history as far as I’m concerned, that

Inuit girls are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
they are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
they have an extremely sensual nature

I was intrigued to find out how he discovered all of this, particularly the third point, so as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I went to the High Arctic myself in 2018 and 2019 to conduct my own field research into the matter.

There was a pause, for much longer than I was hoping, for this perishing waste of time of a meeting that could have been accomplished in less than an hour had everyone been of a mind to do so, but some people really like to have their money’s worth.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was down on the farm at one point and decided that I was going to stay here this time. That meant moving a lot of stuff from outside the barn door and moving some stuff around inside the barn so that I could put Caliburn in, then I could sleep in Caliburn and cook outside. It was dark and raining bit I did what I could. Then I went to get into Caliburn. Then I remembered that just before I parked him up I’d changed something over but hadn’t tried to see whether he’d start or not. I got in and turned the key. He took an age to start and when he did he wouldn’t fire up or run normally. he was coughing and spluttering. By this time I actually had him into a field where I planned to turn round. I thought to myself that I’m going to have a devil of a job now trying to move him to the path seeing as he’s not running correctly and I had my things all over the place.

There was also some kind of public meeting taking place with crowds of people. I had to wire up the PA system to broadcast to the hall. We had a row of 4 speakers down each side and 4 speakers either side of a corridor down the middle. It meant running wires to them. A friend of mine was cutting the wires and I was installing them. We reached one point where we’d had to move a few things around and the two wires were about 2 metres short. I had to go back to my friend who was busy talking to some young child and sorting something out for it, and ask him for some cables 2 metres long. He cut them. I thought to myself “should I give him back the old wire or should I just keep it and take it home with me at the end when everyone has gone?”.

I was back in that hall again later, this time in rural Canada. There was a big crowd of people in there whom we’d been investigating. A WPC had disguised herself as a citizen in order to infiltrate the group to find out what the private organisation was all about. One day she didn’t turn up so we went for a closer listen to the people and found out that they were concerned about how interested we were and didn’t seem to have had a hand in removing her.

Finally, there had been some kind of issue in an Army camp where I was. The junior staff was rather insubordinate. One of them had stood up to the Colonel and said something quite offensive to him on the lines of “well, you aren’t in charge of me; I am” which outraged the Colonel. He was fuming about it. he was planning on having everything all toughened up in the camp to re-instill some more discipline. There was much more to it than this but I awoke again with a massive attack of cramp in my left leg. That playing up now is all I need.

Tea tonight was chips and salad with some of the frozen sausage rolls, cooked with the chips in the air fryer. Just one more serving of those and then I’ll have to start on something else. But if I go to Noz tomorrow, which is debatable, they might have some more frozen vegan stuff on offer.

But actually there are plenty of carrot burgers, breaded quorn fillets, sausages and falafel so it’s not as if I’m actually going to be short of anything.

And thinking on, I need to make more space in there because I haven’t had a vegan pie for an absolute age. That thick onion gravy was delicious yesterday and some more of that, with steamed veg, new potatoes and a slice of vegan pie really would be delicious. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now I’m off to bed and hoping to have a really good sleep. Not that I will, I expect, but I have to keep on trying.

Actually, that’s something at which I’m quite good. A lot of people have said in the past that I’m very trying, which was quite nice of them.

Thursday 28th November 2019 – I MISSED …

… the second alarm call YET AGAIN – and I’ve no idea why because it’s quite clearly programmed in.

And so when what I thought was the second alarm call went off and I glanced at my fitbit and saw that it was 06:20, no-one was more disappointed than me.

There I was, deep in the arms of Morpheus and I wasn’t alone either, because the Girls from Uummannaq were in there with me.

What was going through my mind was a quote from the report of Vaino Tanner, a Finnish anthropologist who had studied the Inuit in Labrador and reported, in his book “Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador” of 1944 that inuit girls …

… are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
… are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
… have an extremely sensual nature

There he was, wondering how he found out all of this, and there I was, about to put Point 3 to the test (and wondering how Tanner discovered that particular point) when, with sitting bolt upright like that, it all immediately disappeared from my mind.

So having had a disappointing medication and breakfast followed by a shower, I attacked the dictaphone notes, totally forgetting that I was supposed to be going to LIDL.

Eventually, it clicked with me, so I dressed and made a hurried exit.

Stepping out into the street, I was nearly flattened by a JCB pallet lifter that was in something of a hurry going down the street.

And when I expressed the fact that I had almost bee flattened by this thing, al of my friends expressed their regret.

They’ve been working on another house here in the old town, this time in the rue St Jean, and they’ve had a delivery of metal plasterboard struts.

Our pallet lifter was on his way to lift them into the house, blocking the entire street as he did so, much to the dismay of all of the motorists.

I, however, had a delightful five minutes watching him have all kinds of problems trying to unload the pallet, with part of the metal struts wedged under the load bar of the pick-up.

The weather was looking rather miserable today and was on the point of rain.

Over there you can see a nice storm cloud hovering over the town right where I’m heading, and with the rays of the sun shining somewhere else.

There was this feeling that it was not going to be my day today.

While the wind had dropped considerably from the previous few days, you would never have thought so by looking at the waves down there.

The tide is quite a way out still as you can see and yet we already have something crashing down on the loading ramp at the Plat Gousset.

The amount of energy there is in the sea and yet there are some people who don’t want to harvest it.

Down in the Place marechal Foch I had better luck.

The workmen were there today and they didn’t run off when I approached them like they did yesterday, so I was able to talk to them.

And I was right. It’s more fibre-optic cable trunking going in. And they don’t have a clue as to when the system will be going live. After all, it’s only been about two years now. There’s no hurry

Having said that, I hurried, right up the hill at something of a good pace all the way to LIDL. And I can tell that I’m doing better because I was talking to myself all the way up. if I can do that, I can’t be too out of breath.

At LIDL there was nothing special that I needed so I just bought a few bits of fruit and veg, some drink and some boxes of rice. I’m on my last box of that so I need supplies.

But how about this that I bumped into on the way home? You don’t see too many of these about and I haven’t seen one for ages.

It’s a Jaguar XJ-8 2+2 coupé, and the reference to the “8” in the model name relates to the fact that it’s powered not by the standard 6-cylinder or v-12 engine but by a V8 engine.

These were launched in 1997 as a kind-of replacement for the XJ-S but because of the reputation that the earlier vehicle had, they just never caught on at all and as I have said, I haven’t seen one on the road for years

Having fought my way through the town and stopping off for my dejeunette, I headed on back home again.

And peering over the wall, I noticed that our old friend Normandy Trader is back in town again. She must have sneaked in on the early morning tide.

Of course she would, wouldn’t she, when I’m running so late that I don’t have time to go down to say “hello”

That wasn’t all of the excitement in the rue des Juifs either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I encountered a young black cat in the vegetation up on the city walls. Today, it was the turn of this very young tabby and white to make my acquaintance.

We had quite a chat too for a few minutes before it went off to do some more exploring.

There was half an hour or so to go before lunch so I attacked some more dictaphone stuff. And by the time that I knocked off, I was down to just 59 outstanding entries.

Mind you, the ones that I attacked today (and will be doing for the next few days) are the ones when I was slowly reaching a crisis point and they make rather grim, if not gruesome listening.

There was all kinds of turmoil going on in my head round about this time and that much is clearly evident in what was going on during the night.

After lunch, I started to attack the web pages, to carry on with the updating. By the time I was ready to go for my afternoon walk, I had done 13 of those.

That may not sound like much compared to yesterday, but there were plenty of distractions going on while I was trying to do it and I was lucky that I did that many.

By now we were in the middle of a rainstorm but I didn’t let that deter me.

Out in the English Channel towards jersey I could make out something moving in the gloom so I tok a speculative shot to work on when I returned to the apartment so that I could see what it might be.

And it’s another bunch of fishing boats out there doing what they do best, and i this weather too!

However, I’m absolutely certain that we haven’t seen this much activity out there in preceding years. It seems to me that things are changing, and changing quite rapidly too, in the fishing industry.

Further on around the headland and, as Bob Dylan famously sung, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” around here.

The tide is right out now as you can see. if you look at the beacon there between the trees, that’s almost totally submerged when the tide is fully in.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … we have the highest tides in Europe right here on the coast.

But the rain is now closing in again quite quickly and I have a feeling that I’m about to get the lot of it.

Look at that storm brewing up over the Pointe de Carolles.

That triangular lump just there by the way is part of one of the old bunkers that formerly formed the Atlantic Wall.

After the War they tried to demolish the bunkers and so they packed the first one with explosive.

With the force of the explosion they managed to break every window in Normandy, Brittany and the Channel Islands but as far as the bunker went, they managed to move a hatful of concrete about half an inch.

They decided then to give it up as a bad job.

By now it was pelting down again so I didn’t hang around for long. I headed for home.

The Chantier Navale had its usual complement of boats so I didn’t stop to take a photo, but Normandy Trader was still at her berth by the crane so I took a quick photo of her.

And then I came back to the apartment, where I spent some time working on my “Girls of Uummannaq” web pages

There was some curry left over from the other day for tea, but not a frightful lot of it so I added a small potato and some spinach. And it was just as delicious.

For pudding, I had realised that I’d had some soya coconut cream stuff open for quite a while so I thought about that with my pineapple. But it looked rather dubious to me so it went don the drain and I had blackcurrant sorbet instead.

Out and about in the dark I thought that I was alone until I was barked at by a dog, with its owner standing in a deep shadow. It’s a good job that I wasn’t doing anything that I wasn’t suposed to be doing.

But it was dark down there tonight. They had switched off the lights on the Plat Gousset so although the waves were beating down on the sea wall, you couldn’t see them.

Nevertheless, I did my best

Not so much of a problem in the town though.

The upper floors of the buildings on the south side of the rue Lecampion for some reason mooked quite good this evening, very well illuminated by the street lights.

So much so that I couldn’t resist a photo. And I do like the shadow effect on the stone walls.

No-one about tonight so I had a good run, making half the way up the ramp at the end of my little track. One day I’ll measure it and see how far it is. It’s only about 300 metres, I reckon, if that.

Minette the old black cat was there on her windowsill so she let me give her a little stroke. It seems to be my lucky period for cats right now, although i’m not sure why. I probably smell of fish.

So tomorrow I’m having a day at home. For once I don’t have to go anywhere, but nevertheless I still have a lot of work to do.

To do some information files for my projects for a start. And once they are done, I can tell you all about it.

So there are one or two other little things that need to be done tonight and then I’m off to bed. I’m hoping that I can slide back into the arms of Morpheus and carry on my experiments from last night.

Saturday 15th September 2018 – LAST NIGHT’S SLEEP …

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

… was probably the best one yet. In bed at 23:15 and flat out until the alarms went off at 06:00. High time that I had a decent sleep like that.

And I was away on my travels too – off once more to the High Arctic with a couple of the Inuit people on board the ship – and on several occasions too. But I have no idea where I ended up and what I did while I was there. It’s all evaporated completely out of my mind.

It was something of a stagger into breakfast this morning, and I shared my table with a couple of people from Singapore, now living in British Columbia. And I also had a good chat with the maitre d’hotel, to find out that we both shared the same opinion about something or other.

Back in my room I started to prepare Strawberry Moose and myself for our trip ashore to Uummannaq. This is a small town of about 1500 or so inhabitants, and His Nibs is looking forward to it as there is to be some kind of presentation involving the kids of the local orphanage.

If ever there was a day where I felt less likely than moving, I’ve no idea when it was. I crashed out on the bed and for two pins I would have stayed there all day. But I forced myself to move and made my way to the zodiac with Strawberry Moose.

I’m glad that I made the effort because it was all totally beautiful. The ride out there and back as well as the time on shore.

I found myself in Mike’s photography group and he gave us quite a few little tips (many of which I knew already), and then we went off to photograph certain settings that he suggested. And I probably took over 200 photographs in all.

Some of them were quite miserable but others came out fine. And patience was definitely a virtue in several cases. In one particularly noteworthy occasion, I waited for a husky to position himself perfectly, and he was immediately joined by his wife and offspring and it all worked out perfectly.

We all trooped off to the entertainment where a group of girls from the Orphanage entertained us (most of the boys were helping out at the fishing station). The place was crowded, the light was difficult and it took me a while to set up the camera how I wanted it, given the conditions. Usually I like to be in a venue beforehand to size out the light.

Condensation on the telephoto lens didn’t help much either.

And that was worthwhile too because I fell in love with one of the girls. She had the most beautiful smile that I have ever seen in the whole of my life. I would have taken her home with me in a heartbeat.

She could sing and play the guitar, and had written a few songs. And while I was listening to her and watching her smile, I remembered Vaino Tanner’s quote about Inuit girls from his 1944 book “Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador” concerning his expeditions on 1937 and 1939,

the Inuit girls are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
they are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
they have an extremely sensual nature

I always wondered how Vaino Tanner discovered that last little fact, and I was interested in doing a little scientific field research into the subject myself.

I had to wait for a good half an hour for her to get into the correct position, for her colleagues to get into the correct position and to give me one of her beautiful smiles but I FINALLY took the photo that I wanted.

And it worked so spectacularly that it is definitely THE photograph and I have set it as my desktop image on the travel laptop.

When the performance was over I went to chat to the girls, and I took Strawberry Moose for a good hug. And how he enjoyed it too, being passed around from girl to girl, allowing himself to be photographed.

I even managed a little chat with The Girl With The Smile. And I told her that I thought her smile so beautiful. No point in thinking complimentary thoughts if you aren’t prepared to spread them about. Being nice and polite is what makes the world go round.

We were so long there chatting that we almost missed the last zodiac (not that that would have bothered me over-much) and I had to scrounge around for a lifebelt.

Talking of being nice to people, I’d taken a photo of someone yesterday – a woman peering through her camera at some birds away in the distance and it had come out rather well. I tracked her down and showed her the photo, and let her have a copy.

Lunch was a barbecue on deck and the cynic in me immediately suggested that there had been a fire in the dining room this morning. I managed to find some salad. and to my delight, the roast potatoes on the ship are cooked in oil, not butter or lard. So I had a plateful of those too.

In the afternoon we went across the fjord to Qilakitsoq. This is another Thule village dating back to round about AD1475 +/- 50 with its sod houses.

There are a few graves too, but the crucial discovery was made here in 1972. A couple of Greenlanders clambering on the cliffs above the village looking for ptarmigan thought they saw skin and clothing through a crevice in the rocks.

Our Greenlanders called for assistance and the rocks were investigated to reveal 8 bodies, contemporary with the village, buried inside. And the conditions were so ideal that they had become mummified.

Archaeologists have studied the bodies and can say that there are 8 people, two childen aged 6 months and 4 years, and several adults aged from 20 to about 45. The bodies are so well-preserved that it was even possible to determine that they had been eating.

We clambered up onto the cliffs (it was something of a hike and scramble so I left His Nibs behind on the ship) to look at the site. It’s been excavated and cleared now, but it was formerly underneath an overhanging rock protected by an erratic boulder.

I managed the climb and the descent, and waited until I reached the easy, flat bit before I slipped over onto my derriere. Nothing was hurt, except my pride of course. But then that’s been hurt before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … so it’s quite used to it.

It was polar dip time for those who wished to take part. But not me. I went to my room for a shower and a wash of some clothes, returning to the deck just in time to see the intrepid plungers take to the hot pool to warm up after their efforts.

Of course, I would have been first into the polar dip had I not had this catheter in my chest … "of course" – ed …, but at least I take my hat off to those who did it.

For a short while at least I could stay up and about but it didn’t take long before ill-health took over. I ended up fairly sharply back in my room flat on my back and there I stayed for an hour.

I don’t remember too much about my sleep but I certainly remember a swb land-rover, light grey with a cream truck cap, pulling up at the side of the ship (which was quite remarkable seeing as we are all floating on water);

There was the usual briefing and as usual I missed the first 10 minutes while I gathered my wits (which, seeing how many I have, takes far, far longer than it ought to these days)

We were advised that lunch could be taken ashore the next day by anyone who felt the urge. People would have to forage for themselves in the town, where there were several restaurants. Once more, the cynic in me suggested to several members of the team that the kitchen has now run out of supplies, burnt out in the dining room fire of course.

But even during the briefing I was distracted. Heather wanted my contact details and then just at a crucial moment there was a glint of sunlight on a rock away in the distance so I dashed off to take a photo.

Not only that, the mystery about the flag (if you can remember from,a couple of days ago) is solved. It’s apparently the flag of the Bahamas, where the ship is registered, although it doesn’t look familiar to me.

Tea was taken once more at The Naughty Table. Natalie the Yoga Instructor came to join us and she fitted in perfectly. She and I had a long chat about nothing much in particular.

After tea, we played “Arctic Bluff” – a kind-of “Call My Bluff” with an Arctic flavour. And our team was rubbish. Not even Strawberry Moose could help us out here.

So now I’m in my new little perch from the other day, right up in the Gods, writing my blog and checking my photos. Not sure how many of the latter that I have but 200 would be a good guess and that’s something of a record for a day’s photography.

I’d better get a move-on.

But not for long though. Round about 23:30 I reckoned that it was hopeless to continue so I headed off back to my room. But on the way I was interrupted by sounds of merriment coming from the lounge. The hot-tub dippers were drying off.

I had a lengthy chat with Sherman Downey the musician about music and records and all of that kind of stuff, and another with Olimpia about potatoes from Peru, the conclusion which I drew from that conversation was that maybe Olimpia ought to put some more water in the next one.

That was the cue to head off to bed. I’d somehow managed to find enough to keep going for a whole extra hour.

Does me good to be awake and to mingle.

Monday 11th September 2017 – WHILE I WAS SITTING …

… down drinking my coffee after breakfast, there was a tap on the door. Funny sense of humour, this guy here has.

But seriously, “come on – the wind has changed. Put your gear on!”.

So dressed in my flotation jacket and sea boots, I waddled down to the waterside and fell into the boat – which, I suppose, is better than falling out of it.

The tide was quite high up and so there wasn’t much difficulty in leaving here, even though we had an extra passenger.

A local Inuit woman had come along as a guide and to tell me a little about where we are going.

The sea wasn’t as rough as it might have been and so we could go comparatively far out to sea, and we made good time too.

Away in the distance just here is Main Tickle, which we saw yesterday from up on the top of Flagstaff Hill.

That was a summer fishing station used by people from the nearby winter settlements for fishing for cod and salmon.

However, there has been a cod moratorium since 1992 and salmon fishing is limited today.

Instead of catching barrel after barrel in an unlimited supply, people are allowed to catch just four per year and you aren’t going to make a living out of that.

Further down the coast is another summer fishing station.

This is North River and it was formerly a permanent settlement. However it was one of the places that fell victim to the controversial resettlement programme.

Most people moved to Cartwright and just come out here when time and conditions allow.

And here I am, with my feet ashore.

After much binding in the marsh and many vicissitudes, I’ve finally made it out this morning to the Porcupine Strand.

It has the nickname of “Wonderstrand” or “Wunderstrand” because, believe me, it is wonderful, but it also has another claim to fame.

If you were to read the Norse sagas about the voyages to “Vinland” you’ll read several very good descriptions about the areas to whch they sail.

The Norse make several references to the beautiful, long white sandy beaches here – the Furdustrandir – that so impressed them.

They also refer to a prominent cape to the north, and to the south they mention a great many inlets and islands.

A quick look at maps and aerial photographs will identify many sites that appear to correspond to the description that they give.

But in my opinion there’s one place that stands out above all of the others.

I have said for a long time that the 50-odd kilometre stretch of beach known as the “Porcupine Strand” fits all of the descriptions that I have seen.

It has been one of my lifetime’s ambitions to come here, and so regardless of the expense, I’ve chartered a boat, a driver, an Inuit guide and here I am.

I probably won’t ever have another chance to come out here, and I shudder to think how much it’s going to cost me, but ask me if I care.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance and I wasn’t going to miss out.

as I said earlier, there was formerly a permanent settlement out here.

And where there has been a permanent settlement there was inevitably a cemetery, and so it is with North River.

This was another place that I was keen to visit while we were out here and so my guide took me along

Many years ago, I read a discussion about the Labrador coast. A Finnish anthropologist called Vaino Tanner who carried out research on the Labrador coast in the late 1930s had claimed that a small child had been killed in a Labrador village by a pack of dogs.

His critics hotly disputed that. They were insisting that dogs just wouldn’t do this kind of thing.

And so enlarge the photograph here by clicking on it, have a read, and make up your own mind.

But as I have been saying before, the Spanish Influenza epidemic that hit the Labrador coast in November 1918 was said to have killed off 10% of the population.

Here in North River Cemetery are the graves of a considerable number of people, many members of the same families, who died in November 1918.

While there is no evidence here to confirm that they died in the epidemic, the dates of death and their family relationships are very suggestive.

This is the grave of Isaac Lemare. And if you notice carefully, his cross is different from the other contemporary crosses and heis buried outside the limits of the cemetery.

The thought that went through my head was that maybe with a name like Isaac, he was of the Jewish faith and so was not entitled to the benefits of “consecrated ground”.

My guide however did suggest a couple of other reasons why he might have been so buried and I’ve really no definite idea.

This isn’t actually in the cemetery but on the headland overlooking the sea.

You will have noticed the number of people called Davis whom we have been encountering on our travels around Cartwright.

This monument is to Charles Davis, who is said to have come over here from Wales and was the father of the “clan”.

So back on the boat and out to sea again.

And although this photograph doesn’t represent what it is that you see with your own eyes, you’ll notice clearly the beach and how bright it looks from a good way offshore.

Anyone passing by this way would immediately notice the whiteness of the sand, and this is another justification of my theory.

The Norse sagas make much about a prominent headland in the vicinity of the furdustrandir and there’s at least one reference to a keel-shape.

I’m not quite sure that you’ll find any more prominent keel-shaped headland than this anywhere along any coast.

It’s an island though, and the sagas make no reference to that.

On our way back we took a little diversion out to what at one time was one of the largest outlying settlements on the island and where my driver spent many happy summers as a kid.

And when I stood up to take a photograph my hat flew off with the wind into the sea.

However, a keen-eyed guide and a boathook came to the rescue and I was restored to my headgear.

This is _ or was – the settlement of Pack’s Harbour. Over there are said to be the bunkhouses of the “stationers”.

These were the people who came over from Newfoundland in the summer to live on the island to fish.

There would be three kinds of people out here – the “floaters” who lived on their schooners, and the “stationers” who would be dropped off for the summer by the coastal boats such as the Kyle and the Ethie

The third class of people would be the “liveyers” – the ones that lived permanently on the Labrador coast.

Some would be permanent residents throughout the year, which was a pretty grim way of doing things.

But most would live in winter quarters on the mainland where they could attend their trap lines in winter and come here to their cabine for the fishing in the summer.

That little red building over there – that was the village store.

And seeing as how there was a “Fequet” listed on the censuses here for 1935 and that he had a “servant”, it’s a fair bet to say that the store was one of those operated by the Fequets.

My driver told me numerous stories of going in there for “candy bars” when he was a kid.

And so after a really good sail around for almost three hours, we set our sails … “you mean “our outboard motors” – ed … for home.

We managed that without being sunk or marooned, and once I divested myself of my marine equipment I came in here for a coffee … and somehow don’t remember much for an hour or so.

After lunch I was out for another hour or two. But I blame that on all of the exercise, the sea air and the fact that I’d had a restless night – and I fell down the steps in the caravan going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which didn’t help much either.

TOTGA was there though- she was having a row with her boyfriend, and so was Terry. He had a pile of stuff that he wanted to givee me and was talking about having to empty his van, so when I went out of my front door (we were in Shavington by the way) it was all piled up against the wall of the front of the house – several really heavy ornately-carved pieces of furniture and I had no idea how I was going to move them or where I was going to put them.
But the worst thing of it all was that going down a hill in Caliburn, someone in a light grey large Nissan hatchback of the 1980s overtook a line of traffic and collided head-on with Caliburn. We both stopped, but he reversed, gave me a cheeky wave and drove off. I gave chase but lost him in the traffic. Caliburn wasn’t too badly damaged, but more badly-damaged than my liking.

Things didn’t get much better during the afternoon either. The propane tank ran dry and left me without heating, and then the electricity blew a fuse while I was cooking tea.

Rummaging around with a solar torch in an electrical compartment in the cold was not my idea of fun.

In the end, with everything working, I went to bed. It had been a long day.

Friday 20th January 2017 – I’VE HAD A …

… really bad day today.

It wasn’t so bad until the afternoon, when I crashed out again somewhat, but when I went, I really went.

Although I struggled up to make a coffee at about 16:30 I still wasn’t in any fit state and it took until about 19:30 for me to properly come round. It was just like the bad old days today – it really was, and I was totally dismayed. Instead of getting better, I’m just getting worse.

I had another disturbed sleep last night, although I did manage to go off on a ramble. I was back in Shavington, at Goodall’s Corner in fact, heading south to Wybunbury on foot, and there was this woman on the far side of the road heading in the same way. At a certain moment I came to a railway bridge (not that there is one along there of course) and stopped to look down at the rails. This woman crossed half-way across towards me and then changed her mind and started to cross back. It was just at this moment that a huge grey Volvo lorry – the bonnet-nose type, came hurtling around the corner and just managed to screech to a halt, with its front bumper right in the small of this woman’s back. It was half an inch away from bowling her over.

Alone again at breakfast, and then I carried on with my reading. Tanner says that the reason for the decline in the Inuit population is that many of the Inuit girls married settler males and produced Métis offspring, which make up a good proportion of the population of the “liveyers” on the Labrador coast. He further states that

the Unuit girls have an extremely sensual nature
they are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
the girls are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people, and goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home

So when’s the next flight to Makkovik? I’m packing my bags.

But here’s a thing. Makkovik is an Inuit name for one of their settlements on the North Labrador coast. And it’s on an inlet deep into the interior. Now have a look at the etymology of the stem …vik… It’s a Norse stem for “cove” or “inlet”.

Of course, there are a thousand reasons why an Inuit word should look as if it has some kind of Norse etymology (not the least of which is that the first Moravian missionary there was a Scandinavian) but it’s very tempting to tie up the idea that the Inuit have absorbed some of the early Norse culture, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not the only Inuit place along the Labrador coast and the shore of the Ungava Bay that ends in … vik either.

And so I hope that I shall be feeling much better tomorrow. What with one thing or another, I’m feeling quite depressed right now. But I’ve been here before and I know that there’s a way out and in a few days I’ll be back up again as usual.

I hope.

Wednesday 18th January 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… was something a bit more like it too.

Although it took me ages to go off to sleep (I was reading Vaino Tanner’s notes on the Finnish expedition to Labrador until something silly in the morning) I ended up soundly asleep until the Eastern European workmen awoke me at 06:30. They were actually quite quiet during the night which was very a pleasant surprise.

On my own at breakfast, I came back down here and … errr … went back under the bedclothes to keep warm (it was minus 5°C outside). The next thing that I remembered was that it was 11:10. I’d slept for 3 hours without any difficulty at all.

Braving the freezing cold I nipped out to the supermarket on the corner for my baguette and an apple – I’ve run out of fruit in here. But making my butties at lunchtime, I was joined by a Far-Eastern woman and another man whom I don’t recall having seen before.

I pressed on with my expedition notes this afternoon in between crashing out somewhat. We’ve hit the anthropological stuff now, and he talks at great length about the Inuit. He’s tentatively identified a new race of Inuit round about the 15th Century that began to push aside the Thule Inuit, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion from his notes

Although now discredited by almost everyone despite the efforts of James Enterline in his book Viking America: The Norse Crossings and Their Legacy, the obvious conclusion has quite a logical ring to it – in that with the Little Ice Age descending on Greenland in the mid-14th Century and the Norse settlers being cut off from Iceland by the dramatic deterioration in weather, the only way for the Norse to escape the weather would be to head west and live off the ocean instead of the land.

Like many Europeans since then – in fact right up until the early 20th century, the quickest way for a new settler to assimilate traditional survival skills in a hostile environment is to take a native spouse who can teach you the necessary skills. Most of the population of Labrador are descendants of mixed unions of European men and Inuit women, and had the Norse assimilated (and there is no reason to suppose that they didn’t – they aren’t likely to have sat around and starved or frozen to death), there would be a completely mixed gene pool within just a couple of generations. And with their better technology and knowledge of iron, they would quickly have overwhelmed the less-developed Thule culture.

And the timescale fits too.

Liz and I had a good chat on the laptop later and then I went for tea. I was on my own for most of the time except for a young family with a baby (so we have this to deal with tonight).

Now I’m off for a shower and a change of clothes, and then I’ll be having an early night.

Tuesday 17th January 2017 – THIS REALLY WAS …

… delicious tonight – and if the improvement overnight is anything to go by, it’s going to be magnificent by the time that I get to the last portion.

On a plate too – not out of a saucepan either. And because it looked so nice and the presentation was so good, I took a photo of it. Just imagine it with some fennel and coriander leaves sprinkled over the top.

And I wasn’t alone in the kitchen either. I have been invaded by a pile of Eastern European workmen. There are at least five of them and they were eating away in the kitchen when I went up there. They seem friendly enough inasmuch as we could understand each other, but I wonder how noisy they are going to be.

That’s quite a good point on which to ponder too, because for once, last night, I had my best sleep for ages. In bed early, crashed out quickly enough, awoke to switch off the laptop and then I remember nothing at all until the alarm clock went off.

Well, that’s not quite correct either because I’d been on a mega-ramble during the night. And a mega-ramble it was too. I was with the girl who has been described in these pages as “The One That Got Away”. We’d gone to buy a caravan from some kind of second-hand car sales place. We’d turned up as soon as the place opened, explained what we wanted, and were told to wait. And wait we did, for five hours at least until we lost patience. We then went off in search of a salesman but ended up with the female secretary again, the one whom we had seen as we arrived. She wouldn’t put us in touch with a salesman instead but came out with a variety of reasons why we couldn’t see one – all kinds of silly statements such as “if we moved he caravan what is going to happen about the bare, worn patch where the caravan is sitting?”. Despite the silliness of the questions and the ease with which we could answer the questions and solve the problem, she just came up with even more silly problems and we weren’t getting anywhere with this.

A little later I was with the father of Zero, a girl who sometimes accompanies me on my travels although she wasn’t out there tonight. We were driving somewhere in Canada at the back of Montreal.The road that we were taking was a road that I didn’t know but at a T-junction where we hit a main road, I suddenly recognised the road and where we were – we had just come a different way round. We were very low on fuel but it didn’t really matter because I knew that along this road was a big “Shell” service station where we could stop.

We haven’t finished yet either. I was back at school, and it was here that I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. It was just a case of getting on as best as I could – the same for a few other people who were having similar problems. One boy in particular was having a hard time coming to terms with his illness and I had to keep on telling him to pull himself together. But then he put in another appearance, moping around, and although I could only see him from behind I was convinced that it was him, so I snapped at him to “pull himself together”. He turned round and it wasn’t him but a good friend of mine whose wife was ill, and I immediately regretted having said what I had said. We ended up having a chat about our various problems but it wasn’t doing anyone any good.

Yes, with a night like that, I can do with another half-dozen

I was alone at breakfast, and then came back down here to carry on with my work. I’m still on the notes of that Finnish expedition and we are discussing vegetation right now. I’m up to page 424 and that’s about half-way. I can’t wait to get onto the history and anthropology bits, but whenever that might be, I really have no idea.

What is interesting though is that they haven’t actually gone into the interior – I suppose that in 1937-39 the interior of Labrador is pretty much unexplored. They are making interpretations of the interior based on other people’s published voyages and I note that the works of Mina Hubbard and Dillon Wallace are referred to quite often, as well as the notes of an explorer by the name of AP Low who went into the interior in the late 19th century in a canoe.

As an aside, it was Low’s badly-drawn maps that led Leonidas Hubbard up a creek without a paddle on his ill-fated voyage of 1903. Low only recorded one river at the end of Grand Lake when there are in fact three, the Beaver, the Susan and the Naskaupi, and Hubbard could only find one – but the wrong one.

I’ve had a play around with my 3D program too, as well as a good crash-out after lunch. So soon after lunch that I hadn’t even drunk my lunchtime coffee.

And I made it to the supermarket for my baguette today. There were also a couple of black plastic storage boxes in the rubbish, so I’ve liberated those too. I really do need to take some down to Caliburn as my room is filling up. At the last count there’s 11 of them in here.

Now here’s a thing.

Parked in the Kruisstraat this morning was an almost-new BMW saloon. And a short while after it pulled up and the owner disappeared, another car pulled up.

The driver was extremely interested in the vehicle and stopped, took out a camera, and snapped it about a dozen times from all angles, including a close-up of the rear number-plate and of the wheels.

And then he got back into his car and drove off.

Of course, I’m making no suggestion or allegation whatever. In fact, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m quite often pulling up at the side of the road to take photos of vehicles parked in the street or in people’s driveway.

But not of brand-new BMWs though, and it did look rather weird to me. But without any doubt he had a good reason for doing it.

So now, I’m going to try to have an early night again. Despite all of the new arrivals, I hope that my sleep will be as good as last night’s!

Monday 16th January 2017 – WHAT A BEAUTIFUL …

… tea that was!

First of all, I sliced up a large carrot and potato and put them on to boil. And while they were doing, I sliced up an onion and some garlic and fried them in vegan margarine with some cumin and turmeric.

Once they were fried to perfection, I added a tin of mushrooms and a small tin of macedoine vegetables, and then tipped in the potato and carrot. Once they were simmering away, I cooked a pan of rice in turmeric.

There’s enough curry for four days, so three helpings went in the fridge and I had the fourth with the rice. And just for a change, I had it on a plate instead of eating out of my saucepan. Completely delicious. And there’s more to come over the next three days, when the spices have had more of an opportunity to percolate into the food.

A job well done, my curry!

I slept right through until the alarm went off, with only one distraction and no nocturnal rambling either. Alone again at breakfast and I might well be alone in the building too, because I’ve not heard a thing from anyone else for a good few hours.

That gave me plenty of opportunity to crack on with some other stuff today. I did some stuff on the 3D program that I use, using the design function and I actually managed to create something. Or, rather, modify an existing prop. It wasn’t difficult but it’s a step forward all the same.

As well as that, I’ve been doing some more research with my Labrador project and the Finnish espeditions. Interestingly, they make reference to a Priest, the Reverend Paul Hettasch, who was a Moravian priest from Germany who ran one of the Moravian missions on the coast, at Makkovik. The author of the report, Vaino Tanner, talks at length about all of the weather reports that Hettasch was keeping – how precise, complete and thorough they were. And a further search about Hettasch on the internet revealed that according to the Canadian Police, Hettasch was a Nazi sympathiser who sent all of his weather notes back to Germany and these formed the basis of the weather predictions that aided the German bombers of the Luftwaffe in their attacks over the UK in the early days of World War II.

It’s amazing what you can uncover these days in all of these research projects.

But while I was looking over the Labrador censuses during the inter-war period I came across some interesting notes taken by the census-recorder at Davis Inlet while he was asking about the Innu settlement at Voisey’s Bay in 1935. His notes were extremely brief, with just the most basic details recorded, and he explained that the “… information was furnished by a Davis Inlet Indian and it was impossible to get further details. Their life is a nomadic one and it would be futile to go look for them.”

But it was difficult this afternoon. I kept on dozing off here and there, and when I was awake, it was difficult to concentrate. I need to do what I can to recover my fighting spirit and get back to work properly.

I can’t go on like this!

And you may well have noticed – I’ve not set a single foot outside the building today.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: vaino tanner

Friday 19th January 2024 – GUESS WHO …

Saturday 5th August 2023 – IT’S REALLY WILD …

Thursday 6th July 2023 – MY PHYSIOTHERAPIST …

Wednesday 5th July 2023 – I MANAGED TO …

Friday 30th June 2023 – THAT WAS THREE HOURS …

Thursday 28th November 2019 – I MISSED …

Saturday 15th September 2018 – LAST NIGHT’S SLEEP …

Monday 11th September 2017 – WHILE I WAS SITTING …

Friday 20th January 2017 – I’VE HAD A …

Wednesday 18th January 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

Tuesday 17th January 2017 – THIS REALLY WAS …

Monday 16th January 2017 – WHAT A BEAUTIFUL …

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