{"id":13716,"date":"2020-10-23T21:05:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T21:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=13716"},"modified":"2020-10-24T07:49:41","modified_gmt":"2020-10-24T07:49:41","slug":"friday-23rd-october-2020-another-flaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=13716","title":{"rendered":"Friday 23rd October 2020 – ANOTHER FLAMING …"},"content":{"rendered":"

… shambles of a morning where I couldn’t find the energy to drag myself out of bed when the alarms went off.<\/p>\n

That was despite having a relatively early night too. And nothing on the dictaphone either to disturb me. Although I do seem to remember something about hitting someone with a golf club so that he couldn’t take part in a competition in which I was competing, something like Tonya Harding, I suppose.<\/p>\n

First task was then to finish off THE BLOG FROM YESTERDAY<\/a> by adding in all of the photos that I took last night. And when I say “all of them”, I mean “all of them that survived the cull” because most of them ended up in the bin.<\/p>\n

It was a very disappointing session last night.<\/p>\n

Another thing that I did, which took up the rest of the morning, was a two-week course in “How To Create Great On-Line Content” from the University of Sheffield. I studied the course, took the exam at the end and ended up with a score of 80% and a certificate. Yes, the World’s my oyster now, isn’t it? And all in a couple of hours before lunch too!<\/p>\n

This afternoon I attacked the outstanding 46 photos from August and now they are all done. Right on cue too.<\/p>\n

\"woman<\/a>Having compeleted my day’s tasks, I went off for my afternoon walk.<\/p>\n

Not as enthusiastically as this lady here, of course. She has come here to take the waters and that’s plainly evident by her actions in leaping into the sea. A braver man than I am, Gungha Din. I know that I’ve been it up to my knees 700 miles from the North Pole but I had a coat on at the time.<\/p>\n

You wouldn’t get me doing what she’s doing, not for all the tea in China. I’m sure that I don’t need to repeat the discussion that I had with Castor and Pollux on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR<\/a>.
<\/p>\n

\"light<\/a>so instead I wandered off on my afternoon walk around the medieval walls of the old city.<\/p>\n

Having seen someone in the water, several people on the beach and crowds of people around on the footpath, it only remained for me to see someone in the air and I would hit the jackpot. And sure enough, a light aeroplane from the airport at Donville-les-Bains duly obliged.<\/p>\n

You are probably wondering why I didn’t include any of the scaffolders on the roof of the College Malraux or the house in the Rue St Jean as my aerial representatives, but the fact is that they had all cleared off and gone.
<\/p>\n

\"joly<\/a>When I’d been out at the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord, I’d seen some movement out to sea near the Ile de Chausey.<\/p>\n

My money was on it being one of the Joly France<\/em> ferries coming back from the Ile de Chausey and as I came around the corner into the Square Maurice Marland, sure enough, she came around the headland and headed for the port entrance.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately there were far too many people around so I couldn’t break out into a run. What with one thing and another, I run like a dromedary with dropsy and it’s not for public consumption.
<\/p>\n

\"joly<\/a>By the time I reached the far side of the Square, Joly France<\/em> was making her tight turn into the harbour entrance.<\/p>\n

Down there on the left-hand side, there’s a current that swirls away at the silt and it’s worn a channel over there that is deeper than the rest of the harbour entrance. When the tide is quite low like it is at the moment, the boats need all the sea-room that they can get and even so, I’ve bumped along the bottom over there once or twice.<\/p>\n

But she successfully negotiated the entrance and then went over to the ferry terminal to tie up and disgorge her passengers.
<\/p>\n

\"pallet<\/a>In fact, there were quite a few strange goings on in the harbour this afternoon.<\/p>\n

A van and a trailer pulled up at the quayside and then a pallet loader came along and dropped some rectangular metallic object onto the trailer. And as well as that, there’s a huge pile of what looks like wood dumped in one of the gravel bins over there. That’s something else for me to keep an eye on in the future.<\/p>\n

But not right now. I headed for home as I had plenty of things to do this afternoon.
<\/p>\n

So, what were my plans for this afternoon?<\/p>\n

First of all, I had to feed the sourdough. And it was a mistake to tip the excess down the sink because it’s clearly working, extremely sour, and has stunk the place out to high heaven. The next step, probably the middle of next week when the current loaf is exhausted, is to try my hand at making a sourdough loaf.<\/p>\n

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that several weeks ago, in the process of digitalising all of my music, I asked the question “could I record straight off the cassette unit of the old Hi-fi into the ZOOM H1<\/a> unit that I use for outside broadcasts when I’m out on the streets WITH THE RADIO<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, now I know the answer. And the answer is “yes, I can”. I tired it and it works. But not very successfully, unfortunately. There’s no output control on the cassette unit so it’s a tinny sound and it’s also overwhelming the recording level range of the machine. My next trick will be to dig out the old amp (which, as you might expect, is at the bottom of the pile so inaccessible for the moment) and run the cassette unit through the amp with the Zoom plugged into the headphone socket on there.<\/p>\n

It’s a long and complicated process but in the end I’ll get there, I’m convinced of that.<\/p>\n

The hour on the guitars was rather more interesting tonight. On the bass playlist a couple of Jimi Hendrix tracks came round. When I played in a group back in the mid-70s with Jon Dean and Dave Hudson we performed a few Hendrix numbers so I was reliving old times. But it’s depressing me because 45 years on and I can’t play the bass lines as rapidly as I used to be able to. So instead, I concentrated on singing.<\/p>\n

That made me feel better, but I don’t think that anyone else within earshot did.<\/p>\n

The half-hour on the 6-string, I just bashed out a few Lindisfarne numbers and then had a go at Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine”. That’s not going to be the work of five minutes either.<\/p>\n

Tea tonight was a potato and veg curry out of the freezer followed by more of my delicious home-baked apple pie.<\/p>\n

\"lights<\/a>It was another beautiful clear night out there tonight. Not across to the Channel Islands but down the Brittany coast it was marvellous.<\/p>\n

But no tripod tonight. The gale-force winds that we were promised for Wednesday and Thursday that we didn’t receive have arrived this evening. Instead, you have to make do with a hand-held photo of the Brittany coast – but with the correct lens tonight.<\/p>\n

That photo was taken with me leaning up against one of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. A solid support but still plety of wind about. The tripod would never have worked here.
<\/p>\n

\"lights<\/a>But this is so much better, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

No tripod, but a handy flat-topped stone pillar being used as a route marker was pressed into service. And with the timer delay and suitable long exposure I managed to conjure up this photo. And for an ad-hoc photo of the lights of Cancale on the left and St Malo on the right reflecting from the clouds, there have been much worse than this.<\/p>\n

Happy with that, I continued along on my run along the clifftop down to my rest area at the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.
<\/p>\n

\"yacht<\/a>This was the view that I was hoping for last night that didn’t come out at all.<\/p>\n

It’s a far cry from when we had 8 boats in there a few weeks ago, isn’t it? Now we’re just down to the one and that’s not a working boat either. It’s not the Spirit of Conrad<\/em>, the one on which I went down the Brittany coast either. It has a wind turbine on the stern and that makes me pretty sure that I’ve seen her before.<\/p>\n

From here I ran on back home and, to my surprise, without even thinking about it, I ran on a good 20 metres beyond my rest stop too – and uphill. I’m slowly getting myself back to fitness. It’s been a while and there’s still a long way to go too
<\/p>\n

Having written my notes, I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow of course and I don’t need much because next weekend I’m off on my travels. I’m going early to Castle Anthrax because I have a few things to do in Leuven. That means that I have to do two radio programmes next week. Luckily one of them is a live concert and hey! Have I got something special for that?<\/p>\n

But that’s not all. Schools are out, the holidays have started, the holidaymakers have arrived, and three cases of Covid reported in the town – one of which is apparently in the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs<\/em> which, as everyone knows, is the building behind mine.<\/p>\n

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… shambles of a morning where I couldn’t find the energy to drag myself out of bed when the alarms went off. That was despite having a relatively early night too. And nothing on the dictaphone either to disturb me. Although I do seem to remember something about hitting someone with a golf club so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4507,1616,8571,10941,7876],"tags":[8797,12724,1104,13133,8725,8627,10917,12109,3426,2924,8595,212,2560,8730,5565,8581,801,389,8691,4321,10942,2925,4571,5918,401,12737,11736,13013,7891,11917,13240,11947,13941,12037,12415,10256,13988,13989,13418],"class_list":["post-13716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-granville","category-joly-france","category-place-darmes","tag-aeroplane","tag-anna-eakin","tag-blog","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-brittany","tag-cancale","tag-castle-anthrax","tag-chantier-naval","tag-city-walls","tag-dave-hudson","tag-donville-les-bains","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-foyer-des-jeunes-travailleurs","tag-france","tag-granville","tag-httpwww-amazon-co-uk","tag-httpwww-lesguis-com","tag-ile-de-chausey","tag-jimi-hendrix","tag-joly-france","tag-jon-dean","tag-led-zeppelin","tag-leuven","tag-lindisfarne","tag-lucy-horn","tag-ocean-endeavour","tag-photo-editing","tag-place-darmes","tag-plat-gousset","tag-potato-mushroom-pepper-curry","tag-rue-du-nord","tag-sourdough","tag-spirit-of-conrad","tag-square-maurice-marland","tag-st-malo","tag-tangerine","tag-tonya-harding","tag-zoom-h1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13716","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=13716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13717,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13716\/revisions\/13717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}