… last night crowing about how i hadn’t crashed out yesterday.

Well, pride comes before a fall as we all know, and so this afternoon, I crashed out for today, yesterday and for the whole of next week too. A good 90 minutes in total, I reckon. Well away with the fairies.

I did say, didn’t I, that I would pay for yesterday.

It wasn’t as if I’d had a late night either. Well, not by my standards anyway. Mind you, there was a firework display somewhere in teh vicinity so I didn’t go to bed until after it had finished. And I awoke under my own steam too before the alarm went off.

After the usual morning performance there, I had a shower, a change of clothes and all of that lark and then headed to the shops. And they were all packed to the gunwales too.

LIDL had nothing exciting, but there were a few things in NOZ that were noteworthy, including jars of tahini at just €1:49 which is for nothing. I use a lot of it in my hummus, so I bought 4 jars and Liz asked me (because I sent her a text) if she could have one of them. Not a problem.

At LeClerc I bit the bullet. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have carrot issues. For a reason that I can’t understand, they don’t seem to last more than thre or four days here. I don’t like frozen carrots at all but I can’t see an alternative so I bought a packet. 1kg at €0:79 – even cheaper than fresh and will last a darn sight longer too.

But I did spend some money in GIFI. Something caught my eye when I was in there the other day so I went there to see if they still had one, which they did. And tomorrow, when I’ve assembled it, I’ll show you what it is.

Back here I put everything away and then managed to configure my laptop to watch French television and settled down to watch the football, France v Australia.

But I switched off in disgust shortly after half-time. It seems now that they can stop the game so that the referee can look at the TV and the action replays and reverse his previous decisions.

That, of course, is a total nonsense. It’s bad enough, this stop-start football these days, without bringing this into the game. Soon, they’ll be stopping the game to decide on throw-ins and the like, and presumably running commercial breaks while they do it too.

It’s the death-knell for football as far as I’m concerned. Since time-immemorial part of the whole football experience for the fans includes having a good old moan at the referee. Take that away and you lose half of the excitement.

Instead, I made my butties and went to sit on the wall with my book and my lizard.

I was however distracted by something in the distance.

But with the big telephoto zoom lens that I have, I can photograph it and then crop and enlarge the image for a closer look. And it turns out to be some kind of small motor boat, like a customs launch or something.

And if you think that the photo is blurred, you need to remember that the coast over there is over 18 miles away so the boat is probably 14 miles away. It’s not oo bad in th circumstances and I would have to pay a lot of money to have anything better.

Back here I had a few things to do and then I crashed out as I mentioned earlier. But once I revived myself I went for a walk around the headland in the hordes of people who were out taking the air, stopping to give Gribouille a pick-up and stroke on the way out.

Liz was on-line later so we had a little chat and then just for a change I sat down and watched a film on the DVD. Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me. It took ages to get it to play, but fired up in a matter of seconds once I switched the remote control over from “record” to “play”.

Tea was out of a tin tonight (it’s Saturday) and then I went for my evening stroll.

First thing that I noticed was yet more objects way out offshore so this was another job for the big zoom lens.

It turns out that they weren’t ships at all but a couple of islands out to sea, and I realised that I have made this mistake once before.

Still, you can’t win a coconut every time. We did once catch a ship out there with a speculative shot, you may remember.

THis isn’t a speculative shot, by the way, even though you might think so.

Up in that tree is a large tortoiseshell cat.

The tree is growing from the ditch at the town end of the fortifications and the upper branches are leaning against the top of the wall. And this seems to be the favourite route of the aforementioned El Moggo.

She (for I imagine it’s a female) was quite adept at getting up and down there too.

And that sailing boat that we saw coming in to the harbour back three or so weeks ago, it’s coming back in this evening too.

One of these days I’ll wander down to the harbour and find out its name. I’m sure I must have known it at one time.

But I’m very disappointed that it’s not actually sailing, but dieseling into the harbour. I’d be much more impressed to see some real seamanship with it coming in under the power of the wind in its sails.

Talking about wind and sails though, Marité isn’t in the harbour today. I wonder where she has got to. The people who run that have disappointed me too, on several occasions too, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Narrowly avoiding being run down by a motorist going up a one-way street the wrong way, I stopped to take a photo of a little street party in the Place Cambernon.

It seems that the gallery which I mentioned the other week is having an “open day”, or open evening more like. But as I said at the time, the prices of the objects in there are enough to put anyone off.

Instead, I came back home and settled down.

Sunday tomorrow, and a lie-in. And I reckon that I’ve earned it. I’ve had a hard week and I’m feeling the strain. There’s a jazz concert in town this evening, but I’m just not up to going unfortunately.