{"id":13294,"date":"2020-05-18T21:41:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T21:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=13294"},"modified":"2020-05-19T08:05:50","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T08:05:50","slug":"monday-18th-may-2020-while-you-admire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=13294","title":{"rendered":"Monday 18th May 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sunset<\/a>… the photos (that didn’t work out quite as I intended) of the really fiery sunset this evening, let me tell you a little about my day.<\/p>\n

For a start, I actually managed to beat the third alarm to my feet and after the health problems of the last few days that’s really something, I suppose, because you wouldn’t have bet your money on it at all after yesterday.<\/p>\n

And after yesterday I had a look – or rather, a listen – to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night.
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>And it didn’t start off very well at all.<\/p>\n

My brother was appearing in this and my mother (what on earth are they doing interrupting my enjoyable evening meander?), so I believe. There was something happening in this and I’m not quite sure what but it meant that some tidying up had to be done and my brother was doing it. Someone was going along to give him a hand and I thought “no, don’t give him a hand. Ask him if he needs help but let him do it. People need to do things and need to have a challenge and need to tackle these things. You should show them your support but you shouldn’t go along and actually do the thing for them unless they actually need it. So ask him if he’s OK and if he needs a hand but some people need all the success that they can get because they don’t succeed as often as other people do”
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a> Later on Last night a friend of mine was dealing with people and sending in all of their documents for driving licences. He was collecting them and organising them and sending them off – the same with residence permits and so on which I thought was very brave of him seeing as he doesn’t really like dealing with authority all that much. He had loads of things – people had written to him about and I was extremely jealous. But I was going through the files anyway making sure that things were correct.
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>I was living in some houses with some old woman and there was a pile of stuff that someone had sent in and I was passing comment on a few of them like “I’m sure that this never really happened” and “this one’s a liar as well”. I’d been somewhere and when I came back in the old woman buttonholed me. The first time that I’d been out and come back she had shown me a video of a cat trying to organise a dog. The dog was asleep and had pinched all of the covers. The cat was clawing away at these covers and trying to get the cover off it and when it finally got the cover off you could see the dog was curled up but it had about 10 kittens around it all taking advantage of the warmth under the blanket so I thought that she was going to show me something like that. But it turned out that it was “that Ken from the Netherlands” who had been one of these applicants that I’d been talking about. “He’s very upset that you called him a liar”. That had me perturbed for a minute because I thought “how the hell did he know what I’d been talking about in a private discussion.
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>Once I’d done all of that and had breakfast, it was time to start work.<\/p>\n

And still not feeling myself, which is just as well, etc. etc. it took me a lot longer than it usually does (and that’s long enough as it is) to settle down to work.<\/p>\n

Today’s job was to deal with the radio project – and that meant forwarding the one for this weekend off to the programmers And then I could knuckle down to see where I’m at
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>It’s the turn of music from batch DD to be selected.<\/p>\n

This idea of having the music in batches and playing each batch of music randomly throughout the week before it becomes due for selection and noting the tracks that might appeal to my listeners … “both of them” – ed<\/em> … is working in spades.<\/p>\n

There’s tons of stuff that I have that I had forgotten just how good it was and during last week I must have noted about 100 tracks
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>Consequently picking the music was comparativel straightforward, or it would have been had I applied myself with any vigour.<\/p>\n

But eventually it was done and there’s some good stuff in there that would have been well and truly missed off had I not adopted this procedure.<\/p>\n

Working at a snail’s pace I had chosen the tracks, edited them and combined them in pairs by the time that I knocked off for lunch.
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>And having used the hummus yesterday on our taco rolls for lunch and forgotten to take another pot out of the freezer there was none ready for lunch.<\/p>\n

But ages ago I’d bought a small tin of vegan mushroom pat\u00e9 and I’d noticed that the sell-by date was 20th April this year. That gave me the opportunity to remove it from the fridge, which I’ll be doing over the next few days.<\/p>\n

If I’m not careful, I might actually end up with some space in the fridge. Who knows? It’s been rather crowded in there just recently.
<\/p>\n

\"sunset<\/a>This afternoon I wrote out the text for the programme, in something of a desultory manner and then dictated it.<\/p>\n

By the time that I came to knocking-off at 18:00 I’d made a good start on editing it, and had chosen the speech for my invited guest and merged that in where it would normally go.<\/p>\n

And had I really applied myself, I could have finished it off too but you know what it’s like right now. I can’t seem to be able to concentrate on abything, and that’s another sign of an impending health crisis.
<\/p>\n

\"motor<\/a>There was the interruption for the afternoon walk too, around the walls starting in the rue du Nord. Rather later than usual but never mind.<\/p>\n

And I’m glad that I went out when I did, otherwise I would have missed a whole host of goings-on. Like this speedboat that went roaring past me at a rapid rate of knots.<\/p>\n

And you’ll notice slightly to the rear of the boat that we have another one of these mysterious marker buoys. And if it really is for a piece of fishing equipment he doesn’t want to be going so fast so close to it.
<\/p>\n

\"fishing<\/a>And while we’re on the subject of fishing … “well, one of us is” – ed<\/em> … I counted at least a dozen fishing boats out there in the area of sea bordered by the Pointe du Roc, the north-west Cotentin coast, the Ile de Chausey and the Channel Islands.<\/p>\n

You can see a couple of them in this photo, with the outline of Jersey in the background peering through the haze.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t clear enough to make out any of the buildings on the island today though which was a shame. The weather needs to be a little warmer to burn off the haze.
<\/p>\n

\"children<\/a>It’s not just Palestinian hermits from Biblical times who spent their lives squatting on top of poles either.<\/p>\n

Here we have a kid on the beach practising his Palestinian pole-squatting, presumably, one imagines, as a way of socially isolating himself from his playmate down there.<\/p>\n

A sensible move, that one is. Whatever else these Palestinian pole-squatters might have died from, it wasn’t from the corona virus, although it does remind me of a witty rhyme that I once saw on the wall of the Gentleman’s Rest Room at Crewe Bus Station
\nIt’s no use standing on the seat<\/em>
\nThe crabs in here can jump six feet<\/em>
\nand someone else had written underneath, in a different handwriting
\nAnd if you think that that is high<\/em>
\nGo next-door – the b@$t@rd$ fly<\/em><\/p>\n

And talking of Crewe Bus Station, we were talking yesterday about the fact that the whole bus station complex and the shopping arcade around it were built as recently as 1959 when the Queen came to Crewe to open them.<\/p>\n

But this year they are all being swept away as “no longer needed”. Even when I lived there, as late as 1992, many of the shops were empty and the situation has only become worse over the last 28 years.<\/p>\n

And this is the country that thinks that it can stand on its own two feet in a fiercely competitive world.
<\/p>\n

\"fishing<\/a>Anyway, I digress. let us return to our moutons<\/em> as they say around here.<\/p>\n

That fast-flowing speedboat wasn’t the only speedboat out there. There was this other one parked up in the bay. And all of the fishing boats out there were receiving competition from the two guys in it who were fishing with rod and line.<\/p>\n

No idea what they would catch like that because shellfish are notoriously difficult to entice with a lump of bait. I was tempted to shout out to tell him but he would probably have replied with “pollack” or something like that.
<\/p>\n

\"swimmers<\/a>And if that’s not enough to be going on with, we had a few more water sports goign on too.<\/p>\n

There were a couple of swimmers out there, one of whome seemed to have something like a SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) tank on his back.<\/p>\n

Whatever they are doing out there, especially with a SCUBA tank I really don’t know because regular readers of this rubbish will have seen how far out the tide goes there at the Plat Gousset and thare are no wrecks or anything else worth exploring in swimming range that couldn’t be reached on foot at low tide
<\/p>\n

\"building<\/a>Fighting my way through the madding crowds, I came to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.<\/p>\n

A loud clattering from down there awoke me from my reverie and on looking down I could see that they are installing some scaffolding around one of the buildings – or, at least, they would be if they weren’t throwing it on the floor.<\/p>\n

So that will be something else for me to be keeping my eye on as I go for my post-prandial perambulations over the next few days or so.
<\/p>\n

While I was looking out across the sea when I went out, apart from all of the fishing boats there was something quite large looming out of the haze in the vicinity of the Ile de Chausey.<\/p>\n

\"yacht<\/a><\/p>\n

Only one place that it might be heading, and that was the harbour here at Granville and I reckoned that by the time I walked around to the other side of the walls it would be arriving at the harbour entrance.<\/p>\n

And sure enough, one of the Joly France<\/em> boats, the ferries that run between the Ile de Chausey and the mainland was just pulling up outside.<\/p>\n

There was quite a crowd of people on board too, and I’m really not sure that that’s a sensible idea, given a global pandemic, for all those people to be crammed into a boat like that and taking a disease out to a disease-free island where the medical services are “rudimentary”, to say the least.
<\/p>\n

Anyway, they must surely have more of an idea what they are doing than I have so I left them to it and came home.<\/p>\n

There was the usual hour or so on the guitar, spending much of the six-string session trying to work out John Stewart’s song “Daydream Believer”. It has some nice rapid chord changes and being able to do that instinctively will improve my playing no end.<\/p>\n

Tea tonight would have been stuffed pepper with spice rice except SHOCK! HORROR! I seem to have allowed myself to run short of rice. I don’t want to waste what is there so with no potatoes either, I ended up with pasta instead. Mind you, it didn’t ‘arf look strange with yellow pasta from the turmeric that I had put in the water.<\/p>\n

And it’s no use thinking that I cans tock up with rice on Thursday when I go to LIDL for mid-week shopping, because Thursday is a Ban Holiday and the shops will be shut.<\/p>\n

But this fruit pie that I made is delicious and I shall be doing that again, for sure. The frozen fruit worked perfectly.<\/p>\n

\"sign<\/a>On the way out of the building for my evening walk\/run I bumped into one of my neighbours on her way out so we exchanged pleasantries before I set off on my run.<\/p>\n

And while the caravanetters are allowed to use the camp site up the road, they aren’t allowed to do this. It looks as if one of them has reversed into the signage pole and broken it off. That’s enough to fill anyone with dismay.<\/p>\n

And do you like our waste disposal facilities?<\/p>\n

Three subterranean caverns, one for paper, one for glass and plastic and one for the rest. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve seen a few photos of lorries emptying them here and there around the town in the past.
<\/p>\n

\"marker<\/a>Having recovered my breath I ran on down to the clifftop to see what was happening out at sea.<\/p>\n

There was a beautiful sunset, that you have already seen, and there still the piles of fishing boats out there working away. This one, silhouetted against the setting sun, came out really well.<\/p>\n

There’s a permanent marker buoy out there over to the left and that might indicate a hidden rock or maybe even a shipwreck. I need to get my hands on a naval chart to look at all of these and see what there is.<\/p>\n

There have certainly been several shipwrecks here in the past and a USAAF Liberator bomber is out there somewhere too.
<\/p>\n

\"joly<\/a>My run carried on round the headland and along the clifftop on the south side.<\/p>\n

Still no change in the chantier navale<\/em> – the four boats that have been in there for a while – but over there at the ferry terminal are Chausiais<\/em> and the Joly France<\/em>boat that we saw this afternoon coming back from the Ile de Chausey.<\/p>\n

And I haven’t forgotten that it is my intention one of these days to see how the new pontoons over there are dealing with the matter when the tide is out and they ground out on the bottom.
<\/p>\n

\"st<\/a>If you thought that the weather was fine this afternoon, it was just as nice this evening.<\/p>\n

The Brittany coast was quite clear away over there in the distance by St Benoit des Ondes and the buildings were standing out really clearly.<\/p>\n

As an aside – that’s about 30 kilometers away, over there across the Baie de Mont St Michel.<\/p>\n

Having recovered my breath I ran on down the Boulevard Vaufleury to my marker where I made a halt for breath, and then ran on down to the viewpoint on the rue du nord.
<\/p>\n

\"kids<\/a>While I was there I stood and watched the sun sink slowly down into the sea for a while.<\/p>\n

But a noise from down below distracted me again. Those young people who were down there the other evening were back again having a party. Not exactly social distancing, that lot but, as Barclay james harvest once sang, “ohh, what it is to be young”.<\/p>\n

With the sun still five minutes from disappearing I ran on back on my final leg. But I only made half-way as I bumped – quite literally – into my neighbour again. So we walked back home together.
<\/p>\n

\"fire<\/a>We went over to the clifftop here to watch the final disappearance of the sun and I took a few more photographs.<\/p>\n

But while I was doing that, my roving eye caught a glimpse of what looked like a fire away in the distance over behind Brehal-sur-Mer. I’ve no idea what it is that is burning but it was going quite nicely.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of when I used to try to light fires. I could never get them to ignite whenever I wanted to, but when I was doing something with heat that should not involve a fire, I could summon up a raging inferno without any effort whatsoever.
<\/p>\n

So I came back in and I’m totally exhausted, and I’ve no idea why. I can’t have recovered properly from my 24-hour bug of Sunday afternoon quite yet, so I’m off to bed.<\/p>\n

I’ll have to catch up on the arrears tomorrow.<\/p>\n

0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div>
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… the photos (that didn’t work out quite as I intended) of the really fiery sunset this evening, let me tell you a little about my day. For a start, I actually managed to beat the third alarm to my feet and after the health problems of the last few days that’s really something, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4507],"tags":[3357,6339,261],"class_list":["post-13294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eric-hall-2","tag-donald","tag-joan","tag-liz-terry-messenger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13294"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13299,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13294\/revisions\/13299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}