Category Archives: Belgium

Monday 28th December 2020 – HERE I ALL AM …

… not exactly sitting in a rainbow but pretty near enough. I’m curled up around a radiator in my little home from home in Leuven where I’ll be staying until Sunday.

And much as I like Leuven, it’s a pretty dismal state of affairs because firstly Alison is stranded in the UK by the new Covid rules and my appointment has now been pushed back until Thursday as I discovered today. So I could really have spent an extra two days at home, travelled on Wednesday and come home on Saturday thus saving a third day out.

But you live and learn.

What else you learn the longer that you live is that you can do it when you really try and so not only did I beat the third alarm, I was up and out of bed and running around while the 1st alarm was still ringing. And so plenty of time to tidy up, have a shower, take out the rubbish, back up the computer, send off a pile of radio files, make some sandwiches for lunch and cut a large slice of fruit bread to take with me for breakfast – pretty good and nourishing stuff, this fruit bread.

Tons of stuff on the dictaphone too, And what surprised me was that I was able to leave the bed so early with all of this going on. I’m surprised that I’d even made it back home.

I was having to make tea for Marianne last night and the guy she was having to sit with who was ill so I made them a kind of roast dinner as best as I could which didn’t look too bad. But I realised that on his plate I’d forgotten the gravy so I mixed up a white sauce and put it on his plate and went to add the gravy powder to mix in, but first I added chocolate powder. I thought “that will never do” so I scraped it off the plate and put another lot on. The next thing that I tried to put on was coffee powder and hat didn’t work either. It took about 3 or 4 goes for me to actually get his sauce right
Before that, I’d been out for a walk and there were a couple of people loitering around so we had a bit of an ad-hoc game of football and it was quite pleasurable. I came back into the house. Later on that evening when I was writing up my notes I couldn’t settle and I couldn’t make myself comfortable, moving from 1 chair to the next and 1 machine to the next, then trying to find some paper to write it out in longhand. In the end I settled on a shorthand notes reporter’s diary but found out that it was full. All the time my brother was asking me questions about this and that and I was trying to answer him as well, and I was trying to write out this report and I wanted to embellish it, to make it look a lot more than it is but I could never do it. I was getting so confused by the fact that I just couldn’t get comfortable and couldn’t make a start and couldn’t get anywhere with this
Art one time a girl dresses as a ballerina appeared on the scene and you could see according to the effort that she was putting into it and the way that she was walking and holding herself that it was a great big effort. I hoped that she would hold out physically and with the virus because it would be very sad if she were to succumb to it with all of this effort.
Later on I had to go and pick up Alvin from Hampton Close. I had my motorbike, my old CX and I decided that i’d go and pick him up. That went OK for a while until I got to Chester and I thought that I’d better programe the route to Hampton Close on my GPS because it’s years since I’ve been there. I spent ages fiddling around trying to make the GPS work. I had to drop off something at someone’s place and coming back I couldn’t make the GPS work. It took ages with all of this messing about to get it to go. The bracket broke off it and when I made it work I couldn’t programme it. It was all a nightmare, this journey was for some reason. Suddenly it worked and it was 18 minutes to there but I only had 15 minutes left but I thought that that’s not too much of a problem. He’s not going to be that concerned. Then I noticed on the back of the butty box the L plates had all faded off and you couldn’t read that it was an L plate. I was worrying about that for a while but suddenly realised that I didn’t need L plates on it because I had a full licence. Yes, I had to post off Ann’s present, that’s why I’d stopped and had to take it to the post office. Then Alvin came. he was there. I told him the story of my adventures which he thought was hilarious. We mounted the bike ready to move off to wherever we were going to next.

I’d gone out for a walk and I was the other side of Sandbach close to the motorway. I’d taken the wrong route which I’d taken before which was a dead end and I had to retrace all my steps. This time though I thought that I’d push on and climb up this embankment at the side of the motorway into a field and walk along the field at the edge There’s bound to be a bridge that goes over at some point I walked on and by now the motorway had transformed into a canal so I was walking along the towpath of an abandoned canal. It gradually came into a little village. I was really enjoying this walk and thought that this is going to end bu around Middlewich way. It’s a long way home but it will be really nice and i’ll stop for an ice cream. I walked through this little village. There was a shop there with its shutters half down. I thought an ice cream would be nice but i’ll push on to the next village. At this point there was some guy messing around in the road. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to go left or right so I swerved round him, making some kind of remark but banged my hip on a parked car. he didn’t say anything aboutt hat but he was going on and on about what he was doing. So I dropped in that I was working on the radio and things that I was doing that I’d inflated. Then he had to go and sort out a puncture in his car so I took him as a passenger in mine which was strange because I’d been walking up to this point. There were 3 of us in the end in this car. He was still going on about his radio and I was still going on about mine. He was saying “that’s a fine hobby to have”. I said “it’s a bit more than a hobby”. We reached Middlewich in the end and he told me where he wanted me to drop him off. he asked how much he owed me for the ride. I replied “nothing. I hope that someone would do the same for me some day if I ever need it”.

But the walk around Sandbach and Middlewich reminded me of a walk that I’d been on during a nocturnal ramble when I’d set out to walk from Chester to Nantwich via, of all places, Wrexham. Or as the skunk said when the wind changed – “it all comes back to me now”.

Having organised myself as much as I could, I headed out for the railway station.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we haven’t as yet seen the town’s Christmas light in all their glory but this morning they were illuminated. My route took me up the Rue Lecampion and we can see here exactly what they have done as far as this street goes.

In fact, it’s all rather underwhelming, isn’t it? I can recall the decorations from last year being so much better than these. It looks as if the town has been on an economy drive this year.

A few days ago in the daylight we had a trip around the back of the kiddies’ roundabout in the Place Generale de Gaulle to see what they had been doing there.

This morning, the Christmas lights were illuminated here too and we can see how they are getting on now. On the left illuminated by a pink light is supposed to be a wooden polar bear, and I suppose that a blind man would be pleased to see it. And strangely enough, a couple of Christmas trees further along weren’t lit up at all. That’s a strange decision.

The newspaper offices at the end of the street are all rather garish and somewhat tasteless but I don’t suppose that there is any particular reason for them to bother themselves too much.

Finally, I walked along the Cours Jonville.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few weeks ago we saw the electricians stringing up the light in the trees down here with a cherry picker. With the lights being on, we can see their handiwork today. It’s all nice, bright and airy, but it doesn’t exactly inspire the imagination, does it? The could have done much more than this with the facilities that they have.

But I wasn’t going to hang about and argue. By now the rain had started again so I pushed off towards the railway station. And the farther I went, the more and the harder the rain fell.

By the time that I reached the railway station I resembled something like a haggard, drowned rat. But at least my train was already in the platform so once I’d stamped my ticket I was able to clamber aboard and find my seat.

Today I was right by the rest room and right in front of the luggage rack so it was something of a convenient seat. No-one sitting next to me either so I could eat my fruit bread and fruit in comparative quiet and luxury.

To while away the journey I uploaded all of the backup files that I’d done this morning and then started to go through to identify duplicate files and remove the earlier versions

If you think that the rain that we were having was pretty rough, we weren’t having it as rough as some people were.

By the time that our train reached the region in between Vire and Argentan the heavy rain had turned to snow and thrre was a lovely white colour in the fields all around the train as we sped on to Paris. It didn’t hold my attention for very long though because I dozed off to sleep. And when I awoke again near Versailles we had long-since left it behind.

We reached Paris more or less on time and compared to how it has been just recently, it was quite busy. And we had to wait a while for a Metro which was something of a surprise.

And somewhere along the route a couple of cleaners climbed into the train with a cleaning machine the size of a small zamboni. That disrupted everyone on board.

We arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris with plenty of time to spare and I was luck enough to find a seat straight away where I could sit in comparative comfort until our train was called. These big French mainline stations are draughty, windswept affairs with very little public seating.

Today’s train is one of the usual TGV Reseau Duplex double-decker trains, old but comfortable and rattle along at a rapid rate of knots towards Lille. it was crowded too, although once again I was lucky enough to have a double seat all to myself so that I could eat my sandwiches in comfort.

And that bread that I made the other day is delicious. And furthermore, there’s half a loaf awaiting me in the freezer for when I return, along with the leftover frozen leeks, broccoli and endives.

We were a few minutes late arriving in Lille Flandres Railway Station so we had something of a scramble across town to the Lille Europe railway station for the TGV coming from the Midi that was going to take us on to Brussels.

By the time we arrived, the train was already in the station so making sure this time that it was in fact the correct train, I dashed on board to grab my seat. This time I wasn’t quite as lucky. I had a neighbour which meant that unfortunately I wasn’t able to spread myself out very much.

One thing that I forgot to do with this one was to check the times so I couldn’t tell how the journey went. But it passed off without any incident.

Arriving in Brussels I was in time for the 15:37 to Leuven and Liège. That was late pulling into the station and with a technician scrambling around in the drivers cab, it was very much later pulling out.

It’s one of the old, dirty graffiti-ridden AM80 multiple units and it’s high time that these relics of a bygone age were put out to grass somewhere but it brought us into Leuven and now that the rain had stopped I had a nice walk down to my hotel in the Dekenstraat.

For a change they’ve put me in a different room than usual, but it’s still an upgrade so I’m not complaining. And there was a little Christmas present for me too which was a lovely little touch.

Later on I went to the Carrefour and stocked up with shopping, but I forgot a few things like the vegan mayonnaise so I’ll have to go again. And I failed to notice that the tinned apricots didn’t have a ring-pull so I had to hack my way in as best as I could.

Having fallen asleep already while typing out my notes, I’m off to bed. No alarm – I’m having a lie in tomorrow. And then I have several days of Welsh homework to catch up with. There will be the dictaphone notes too, and another trip to the shops for the stuff that I forgot so it isn’t actually going to be very much of a day of rest

Friday 6th November 2020 – AND THAT WAS …

… more difficult than it ought to have been too.

And when the TGV broke down somewhere in the wilderness I really did think that I’d had my chips too.

This morning I totally ignored the alarm yet again and had a lie-in until about 07:30. More stuff on the dictaphone of course that I transcibed after I returned home.

We were in the USA last night. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This evil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

A little later I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was also something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been Man or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. Deke Leonard saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what I’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own.

After that I was taping a Man concert, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

If that’s not enough, then later I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south – Hassall Road – so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they had sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached the bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.

Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

But back in Belgium I had a nice little relax instead (and I felt that I needed it after all of that) and then a really good tidy up before setting out for my journey home.

There was already a train in the station going to Brussels but as I wasn’t able to run for it with the load that I was carrying, I let it go and waited for the next one.

This one was pulled by one of the Siemens Class 18 electric locomotives that work the line from Eupen and Welkenraedt to Oostende. We travel on these quite often.

Unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with this one because it was pulling a rake of older-generation carriages – the type with the old PVC seats, that sort of thing. It would have been really nice to have had one of the usual sets with the modern cloth upholstery.

But I’m getting greedy. At least it was on time both here and in Brussels.

There was an hour to wait, sitting on a draughty platform on Bruxelles-Midi but luckily this train, one of the PBKA units, came in early so having had our tickets checked, we could scramble aboard.

Even though there are only three trains per day between Brussels and Paris right now, this one was pretty empty. Fewer and fewer people are moving around. In fact, the railway station was like a ghost town.

There was a police patrol on the train too, and we all had our identities and movement forms checked. Luckily all of my papers were in order, and I’m glad that I went through all of that trouble 18 months ago to obtain a French identity card.

Then we had the engine failure. All of the lights and power on the train went out and we ground to a halt, down from 300kph. All hope of catching my connection – the only one to Granville today – seemed to vanish before my eyes.

20 minutes later, they managed to fire it up again and we limped into the Gare du Nord.

Leaping from the train I hared off through the station to the Metro where, luckily, there already was a train at the platform so I leapt aboard and we shot off to Paris Montparnasse, where we arrived with 25 minutes before my train was due to depart.

Just three people in the SNCF offices as well so I went in to see about organising a refund for the tickets for the trains that were cancelled And to my surprise, they cancelled the tickets for the current voyage (which was in fact more expensive) and endorsed the tickets for the cancelled train giving me authority to travel.

We were allowed on this train early too, which was very pleasant. In fact, it took me by surprise as I was in the middle of eating my butties.

Once the train set off, I curled up on my seat and slept for an hour or so. I’d already had a couple of dozes prior to this but this was a good ‘un. I didn’t feel a thing.

For some reason though, the seats didn’t seem to be as comfortable as they have been in the past. It reminds me of that really uncomfortable flight that I had back from Canada two or three years ago where I just couldn’t settle down comfortable.

Our train arrived early too, so I even had time to nip into the Coccinelle Supermarket for some bread seeing as I don’t have any here.

On the wat back I walked past the Place General de Gaulle.

You wouldn’t believe that it’s Saturday night right now. This lockdown is clearly working. I was picturing tumbleweeds and all that kind of thing coming blowing across my path as I walked by.

However I made it home without too many problems and made myself a bowl of soup out of the freezer, which I ate with the bread. And then I released the valves on the kefir and even though I took great care, I still ended up with a face full and a bath full. It wasn’t ‘arf lively after having been left alone for a week or so.

It’s good to be home anyway. I like my little apartment. I’ll have a good sleep and pleasant dreams (I hope) and then I need to go out tomorrow and buy some food. No Caliburn so that’s going to be an interesting trip.

Thursday 5th November 2020 – THIS COMPUTER UPGRADE …

… is taking its time yet again.

When I finally crawled out of bed this morning at about 08:00 it was still on 70%. I’ve no idea why it takes so long to upgrade – and why it should want to upgrade so often after I’d done a clean install.

Tons more stuff on the dictaphone which I transcribed when I returned home.

I was with a girl last night who might have been Ann, something like that. Previously i’d been out with another girl who was very similar to Ann and we hadn’t been on very good terms when we broke up. We were all in this kind of big classroom with long tables and benches doing our work. This other girl had got up to go to the bench for something or other, to fetch a drink of water or food or something. I was already up, wandering around doing something and seen this girl wandering around and thought that it was Ann so I went to wait by the door for her to come. But she didn’t come. Instead it was the other girl walking back to her seat for something and she gave me a bit of a glare as she went back to sit at her seat. I went back to see where Ann was, if it was Ann. She had a boy sitting next to her and the two of them were working on something together. I was waiting for one of them to budge up so that I could sit in the middle of them but she said something like “you aren’t going to need me after this, are you?” I asked “after what? Because after this illness I shan’t be needing anyone”. I was wondering what she was driving at.

Later on last night we were living out on the North Circular Road in London. I don’t remember who I was with now but we certainly had a Ford Cortina Estate. To reach our apartment was rather a complicated affair because there was a road bridge over a big dual carriageway road and the bridge had 3 lanes, the left hand lane of which was to turn left and the other 2 lanes turned right. Nevertheless we had to be in the left lane for turning right otherwise we couldn’t get into the parking area in front of our apartment. That always made for a few things to be extremely complicated. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

Even later still I was with an Indian politician and 1 or 2 people treated him with a bit of respect and a few others were very patronising, calling him “so and so’s shadow”, that kind of thing. I mentioned to him that I thought that it was pretty awful as far as I was concerned. It turned out that he had actually been someone quite well-known in Government circles and had had a career mapped out for him but somehow it had all gone wrong and he’d been punted back into the wilderness again. We spent a lot of time talking and I realised after a while that what I was actually doing was trying to motivate him to start up again. This led to thoughts in my head that if he does fire up again and I’m there encouraging him, what’s that going to do for my own particular career? That was pretty much an afterthought really. I didn’t think about that at the time until I was well on the way towards doing this.

First thing that I did after my morning coffee was to sort out my rail tickets for going home. There’s just one train to Granville tomorrow – at 16:13 and which is taking almost 40 minutes longer than the usual one so I imagine that it’s “all stations” instead of a “limited stop”. But I don’t have any other choice. I’m not looking forward to not getting home until about 20:30.

From Brussels to Paris there are three trains. But the one that corresponds best with my timetable is at 13:13. There’s a wait of about 1:40 in Paris while I change trains but it’s the best that I can do.

At least I don’t have to have a ridiculously early start in the morning

There was an added complication to booking my ticket. Having to perform the operation on the mobile phone, I couldn’t see the part of the screen where I have to tap in the security number that I received to authorise the transaction. It took about 6 goes before I finally managed to enter it correctly.

And it’s not cheap either – not as cheap as the ticket that I can’t use. But there really is no other choice.

It was a beautiful day today despite being cold and frosty so I went for a nice long walk.

Alison had told me where the big cemetery was so I took a walk out to there this morning. And the first thing that I noticed was this extraordinary relic of a very unwelcome pasts.

The “Belgian Congo” wasn’t Belgian until 1908. Prior to that it was the personal property of the Royal House of Belgium, and it was during this period of the Congo’s history that the inhabitants were the victims of some of the worst atrocities committed by the colonisers.

This plaque on the wall of the cemetery here commemorates the names of Belgians (obviously white ones) who died in the Congo during the period of fhe private ownership of the Kings of the Belgians.

Having seen the plaque on the wall, I went for a walk around to see what else I could see of interest.

There were several mounds like this one with wrought-iron crosses set in them – each cross bearing the name of a street in Leuven apparently, from what I could tell. These appear, from what I could tell, to be the mass graves of people who died during the various cholera epidemics on the second third of the 19th Century.

A stark reminder of what awaits the Western World if they can’t bring this current virus under control. Here is clear evidence of the waves in which infectious diseases like this sweep around the World in the days before good sanitation.

But this is what I had come here to see – or one of the things to say the least.

It’s the Commonwealth Military Cemetery for British and Commonwealth Farces personnel who lost their lives during the two World Wars.

There are a handful of graves from World War I and about a dozen or so from World War II, including what looks like a crew of a multi-engine bomber who lost their lives on 12th May 1944. When I find a reliable internet connection and a reliable computer to take advantage of it, I’ll track down the aeroplane that was involved.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE FOUND CIVILIAN GRAVES from the wars in the Cemetery at ixelles a few years ago.

Accordingly, I was expecting to find a similar layout here in the cemetery in Leuven and sure enough, I tumbled on it. The wall in the background lists the names of people who were executed by the Germans during the war and who presumably have no known grave.

It would seem that the graves in front with the white headstones are for civilians whose identity was known.

Behind it are yet more civilian graves and other wall plaques.

The plaques seem to list the names of the victims who were deported to Greater Germany and who never returned – hundreds of them. There’s also a casket there that is said to contain the ashes of one of the victims from the extermination camp at Buchenwald.

The graves that surround it are also civilian graves but it isn’t clear as to the significance of their burial in that particular location. The headstones here are not as helpful as they are in Ixelles.

Of course, there’s a war memorial here in the cemetery.

Belgium was very quickly overrun in World War II but in World War I the Belgians hung on right the way through the war and fought to the bitter end. There were several major battles between the Belgians and the Germans in the vicinity of Leuven in the first couple of weeks of August 1914 as well as around Antwerp later and then for the rest of the war in West Flanders

The casualty list was enormous for such a small country and a great many Belgian soldiers were killed, many of whom have no known grave.

One of these days when I have time again,I want to make enquiries to find out what became of the civilians who died in the Sack of Leuven but there was no-one around right now.

And so I set out to continue my walk, but not without having a little smile at this arrangement.

There are taps scattered around the cemetery and watering cans lying around for people to use. But it’s like shopping trolleys here, where you have to put your Euro into the slot in order to withdraw the can.

Do they really have people who would want to take a watering can home?

From here I walked through the Phillips complex and then down the street to the railway line, and then followed the path alongside the tracks all the way to the railway station at Heverlee.

Then I threadedmy way through the maze of streets in a north-western direction and ended up at the Sint Lambertusplein where there was this beautiful church.

It’s actually the church of Sint-Jozef and Sint Lambertus and dates from between 1878 and 1880. There have been several previous churches on or near this site, one of which was said to be a wooden chapel dating back to the 8th Century.

The coming of the railway here led to a rapid increase in population so in 1876 plans for a new church were commissioned from the architect L.A.F. van Arenberg

There was a little park at the back of the church so I walked through there and along the street, eventually finding myself at the Stadion den Dreef, the home of OH Leuven.

Just recently we’ve seen several views of the River Dilje that had previously escaped our attention.

Here around the back of the football ground is another view that we haven’t seen before and it’s a really nice rural setting on the edge of town.

I followed the path along the river for a while to see what else I could see down there but there was no bridge to cross over to the other side, so I ended up having to retrace my steps back to the football ground.

Strangely enough, it was not possible to walk all the way around the football stadium either as a couple of the walkway gates were closed.

However I pointed the camera through the fence to take a photograph of the ground again and then wandered off to Carrefour in order to buy a few bits and pieces to make sandwiches for the journey home tomorrow.

No special offers today unfortunately so I came back to my apartment, to find out tha the computer upgrade was complete and, to my surprise, it actually worked.

After lunch I updated the journal entry for yesterday and that took most of the afternoon. This computer is crawling along slowly when the internet is working, so I’ll have to finish it all again once I’m at home.
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Tea was burger and pasta followed by fruit salad and sorbet. And then the journal entry for today.

having crashed out a couple of times this afternoon, I’m off to bed right now. It’s going to be a long and stressful journey home tomorrow and I’m not looking forward to it, particularly the arrival back home at some ridiculous hour.

But there’s no choice so I shall have to grin and bear it.

At least it will be good to be back home.

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… accomplish very much of my plans today.

The plans all started to misfire last night when I listened to the radio for hours instead of going to sleep. And then I couldn’t doze off once the programme stopped.

Eventually I suppose it must have dropped off, and once I did, I went off on a little voyage.

I was in a psychological thriller again last night, on a couple of occasions too. There were five groups of us, all different colours and we were combining somewhere in some way in which to go off on a voyage but a few people were unstable and led to a few incidents. Everyone was watching closely everyone else until I became alone with someone who then exploded and hot me with a bottle, this kind of thing. Eventually he was overwhelmed and tranquilised. Then we drifted on again but it turned out that it wasn’t this person. He was someone who was suffering from the stress and I ended up alone with the other person who was manifesting allthe signs of everything, and I was hit on the head with a bottle again. This guy escaped through a window to run around the roof. They left him to it. I had to go to the top of the stairs and shout for someone and they came up. They all seemed to occcupy themselves with this guy, not me. I was in a bit of a state. In the end the guy came back in and basically admitted everything. he said “well I suppose that Igoing to be hanged now?” or something. They said “no. We’ll take you away and get you all patched up and cut a few bits out here and a few bits out there and you’ll be fine. All the tlme I was sitting on this sofa. I’d been hit over the head twice with a bottle but no-one was paying the slightest bit of attention to me and my wounds.

Although the alarm went off at 06:00 etc it was about 07:40 when I finally left the bed and after typing out the dictaphone notes, I prepared for today’s Welsh course;

That involved trying to make Zoom work on my mobile phone and for some unknown reason that wasn’t as easy as it might have been. But apart from the fact that it was difficult to see what the tutor was writing or displaying, it worked very satisfactorily on the phone. It’s a good idea that I obtained a digital copy of the course book and uploaded it to the laptop.

The course went quickly today too and I actually felt a lot more confident about it than I have done just recently.

But the bad news came during the course work. The ‘phone was pinging all the way through the lesson and when I looked at the end of the course, I found that my train from Lille to Paris and from Paris to Granville are cancelled. This is going to take some planning, I reckon, if I want to get home.

For lunch, I had finished off the last of the bread so I decided to go off and buy some more.

Seeing as it was daylight and quite a pleasant afternoon to boot, I decided to retrace my steps of last night, only this time being able to see where I’m going.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a month or so ago we say them ripping off the roof of one of the houses in the Dekenstraat and so I was interested to see how they had progressed with it.

And by the looks of things, it’s actually completed, the scaffolding has been dismantled and everyone has gone back home. And by the looks of it, they’ve done a pretty good job too.

Carrying on along the labyrinth I came to the corner of the Vlamingenstraat. As I said yesterday, I’ve not been down here during the day so I wasn’t aware of what there is to see here;

And here is one of the interesting buildings that I must have missed last night. It’s the Onze Lieve Vrouw Ter Koorts, the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sorrows. It’s another one of these places where originally there was a tree and then there was a statue in the tree, and then people came on pilgrimages to see the statue and so they started to build a chapel for the pilgrims and so on.

It was purchased by the University in 1986 and is now part of the research and archive centre of the university.

Across the road, the Sint Donatus Park was now opened so that I could go for a walk around there today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve taken a couple of photos in here before in the distant past. There are quite a few relics of the city’s glorious past in here and the medieval defences are quite prominent here;

Leuven is much more lucky than many cities in Belgium where the medieval defences have been totally swept away. Here, we still have a few walls and towers and as we saw last month round by the River Dijle, they actually are taking some kind of care of them.

It’s not just the medieval remains in the park that are worthy of attention;

There’s this stage in here, down at the southern end of the park. I would imagine, not that I have any evidence to support it, that it’s the kind of place where they would have open-air concerts in the summer. That’s the kind of thing that goes on in mist parks.

The painting od the whale is particularly interesting and in fact, the rear of the building seems to resemble the scales of a fish.

Some of the gates in the park were locked so I found my way out into the Naamsestraat by way of the grounds of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis Atrechtcollege.

This is the Centre for Agricultural History and the students here are studying the heritage and history of rural life, food and agriculture since the 1750s to the present day and have created a knowledge bank of more than 12,000 photos and documents relating to the last couple of centuries;

There’s also a large collection of artefacts but these are housed elsewhere in West Flanders which is a shame because that would have been somewhere that I would have liked to visit.

In the courtyard of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis is this really beautiful bronze globe:

It’s a replica of the globe that was used by the Flemish missionary and astronomer Ferdinand Verbeist at the Chinese court in 1763 (the original is still in Imperial Observatory in Beijing) to try to demonstrate that western science was superior to that of the Chinese, something that apparently provoked a great deal of merriment.

Apart from that, Verbiest has a claim to fame in that some suggest that a design of a self-propelled steam-powered vehicle that he drew and about which he wrote in 1672 was actually a working model and this would have been the first “automobile”.

Down the road from the College is the Sint Michielskerk.

It’s considered by some to be one of the “Seven Wonders of Leuven” and was declared a National Monument in 1940. It dates from the third quarter of the 17th Century and designed by Father Willem Hesius for the Jesuit Order, who took his inspiration from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Il Gesu in Rome.

Many people have said that it strongly resembles an altar, an effect that Hesius managed to continue on the outside as well as on the inside.

After the Austrian occupiers dissolved the Jesuit Order, the church then became a Parish Church.

Round again through towards the Groot Begijnhof I had to take a little detour from my normal route due to roadworks.

Down the Redingenstraat, another street down which I have never previously set my sooty foot, I came across yet more historical relics, to wit – another length of the old city wall.

It seems that there is a great deal of this wall still standing and one of these days I shall have to make an inventory of what there is. But whatever there is left, it’s a real shame that more effort wasn’t made to retain more of it.

Finally finding my way through into the Groot Begijnhof I could have a little wander around to pass the time,

As I said the other day, this is a place where I would really love to live. Nice and peaceful in some wonderful medieval buildings.

From here I found my way to the Carrefour where I bought my bread and some stuff for pudding. And a few more vegan articles that were reduced for special offer. There was also a 2-kg sack of bread flour “just add water” for just €1:00. Not that I’m expecting it to be much good but at that price I’ll give it a try.

Tea was burger and pasta in tomato sauce followed by peaches and sorbet. And then my notes;

Bed-time now, and then Castle Anthrax tomorrow. They haven’t cancelled my appointment yet but there is plenty of time to go. And then I have to worry about getting home. That’s a job for after my appointment is finished. No need to do anything quite yet as they too are likely to change.

Monday 2nd November 2020 – I FORGOT …

… to set the alarms for this morning. And so waking up at 07:15 took me as much by surprise as it probably took you lot.

Mind you, that might have something to do with the pounding of the rain on the skylight above my head. It was absolutely wicked.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too but there was no point in doing anything with it right now for a look on the computer told me that this upgrade was now at 55%. This was going to be a very long day. Summoning up what energy that I could, I spent the morning trying to revise my Welsh for my lesson.

That took me up to lunch and then I had a look at the laptop. I’m not sure where it was going but it wasn’t going any further. The installation had crashed. After quite a little fettling I managed to take it back via a system restore to how it was immediately after I had it running again. And then it reinstalling a lot of the programs that had dropped off.

It made me think, and not for the first time too, that it was a mistake to bring this laptop with me.

When it finally fired up I was able to deal with the dictaphone notes

Apparently I had had a home invasion last night. A gang of teenagers entered my home last night and I couldn’t get them out. I even had one of them trapped inside a rubber glove and I ws swinging the glove around above my head although I couldn’t actually throw it. When I tried to phone the Police, there was no-one there. They said that they would take my number and call me back even on an emergency line. It had taken me a long time togo off to sleep after last night and this made me wake up in a feverish sweat again. One thing that I wondered was that are feverish sweats product of the dream or is the dream the product of the feverish sweats?

This was another long dream something like Saturday Night Fever, something like that but I can’t remember much because I awoke in the middle of it and it all evaporated. It was two boys having all these streetwise arguments and discussions about all kinds of people. They had been trying to roll some kind of guy from some other organisation but he was continually managing to outwit them. Once they cornered him and got him come with them in their motorbike and sidecar somewhere but somewhere on the way he escaped, but I don’t know where he escaped. One minute he was in the motorbike and sidecar, the next minute he wasn’t so I went to put my dream on “rewind” and it rewound but it didn’t actually go back so I couldn’t find out how it was that this guy had escaped. But it was something extremely weird trying to rewind a dream – not the usual kind of thing that you try to do during the night but it shows that it’s getting to me.

Tea was a vegan pizza from the pizza place -one of the vegan pizzas that I had seen last time that I was here. Luckily the rain had eased off so it was safe to go out. And that was a good job because it had really been awful during the day.

Instead of going down the ring road, I went for a wander through the edge of the town in the maze of little streets at the back here. Down at the end of the Dekenstraat I came across yet another building site where they are erecting a few terraced houses.

This isn’t a way that I come very often so I can’t say what there was here before. It’s another one of these places that I shall have to keep an eye on as time evolves and see how the work is progressing..

Eventually I worked my way through the labyrinth and into the Vlamingenstraat, one of the streets that leads off the Tiesesteenweg.

It’s a beautiful little street up at the Tiensesteenweg end, but I don’t ever recall coming this far down. lots of typical late-19th Century terraced houses, now mostly converted into student quarters.

And on the left of this photo behind the iron railings is the Sint Donatus park, with several remnants of the old medieval city walls, including one of the original towers. I wasn’t able to go in there to have a look round though as during this pandemic it’s locked up during the night, which is a shame

Here’s something else that is all locked up at night too.

Finally in the Naamsestraat where I could walk down to the pizza place, I came across the Sint Kwinten’s Kerk. I’ve taken a photo of this before, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but never at night. And it looks so much better in the dark when it’s illuminated.

Dating from about 1450, it was built on the site of a previous chapel like most churches of that era. The Dutch historian Justus Lipsius described it in 1605 as “the nicest church in Leuven”, a distinction with which the Belgian Government seems to agree, for it was declared an Ancient Monument in 1937.

Eventually I arrived at the pizza place, purchased my pizza and took it home. And the verdict? It was delicious.

The plan was now to have an early night as I’m exhausted and I’ve no idea why It’s not as if I’ve done too much. Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson and then I’m going to try to be brave and choose some music for my next radio show. The show must go on regardless.

Instead however, an Agatha Christie play came around on the radio, one that lasted for 2:12:00 so that was the early night out of the window. But not that I’m complaining. I’m allowed to enjoy myself every now and again.

Sunday 1st November 2020 – HAVING SET …

… the alarm for 08:00 this morning, I promptly slept right through it. it was 09:00 when I finally awoke and so i had to get a move on. Alison would be here at 10:30.

First job was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

We were in some kind of really posh hotel last night, a whole group of us in the USA and to get to where we were going we had to walk through these labyriths of corridors, up abd down stairs, everything like that. Someone had left a parel in my room soI opened it. There were all letters in there, a cardigan, and they were for my friend June and as well as that there was a robot-type doll child who was also for June as well so we set off through this hotel labyrinth thig to find June to give her all of her things and this doll. This doll took off and ran off down this pathway and climbed down these stairs as if it knew exactly where it was going and there wasn’t really much that I could doas I wasn’t able really to run after it and catch it.It certainly had a most ungainly way of walking.
The I had to go and fetch Liz and Terry. They were asleep in their van and it was freezing outside so I went and woke them up. Terry came out and he was dressed like Nanook of the North, quilted jackets with newspaper round him, and a hat and balaclava helmet as if he was sleeping at the North Pole. He eventually got out of his van. The frost was really deep, it was a really cold night. I said about going in to get some food. I could see that for some reason they weren’t all that concerned.
Later on I started driving for a taxi firm in Crewe. They had apparently taken over my business and were getting themselves organised and I’d started to drive for them. They were giving me all information and I’d sorted out some leaflets. I could see my old driver’s badge that they had and the plate off the car that I had. They were going on “if anyone ever gives you any trouble you’d better give them one of these leaflets and explain that you are a driver. I said “that’s not a problem because my badge is here and I can hand that out”. So off I went to get into my car. The woman from the place and a few of her friends were outside drinking coffee and I went to get into the car that hey would let me drive for the night. But in this yard there were all kinds of old cars, a Singer Gazelle, other kinds of cars there, obviously derelict and I thought that it must have been quite an unusual taxi company in the past if these were the cars that they were driving.

By now it was time to leave so I grabbed some toast and jam and headed to the door Alison was waiting on the corner so we headed off towards Aachen. We had to go via Liège instead of taking the short cut through the Netherlands because of the virus controls. But we were soon in Aachen and parked the car;

if there’s anywhere more dead than a German city on a Sunday, it’s a German city on a Sunday when the Sunday is a Bank Holiday.

And when the Sunday Bank Holiday comes in the middle of a pandemic lock-down, things are yet more dead.

We had to tramp for miles until we came to a café that was open. This is the Cafe Extrablatt on the Markt overlooking the Rathaus, which I think is a wonderful name for the headquarters of Local Gevernment.

Here I had a big monster coffee while we sat and listened to some woman bashing out the arias of an opera while stading on the steps across the way. i was surprised that it wasn’t pelting down with all of that going on. The packed crowd of about 8 people listening to her must obviously have enjoyed it, but everyone else (not very many else, that’s for sure) kept a decent distance away.

Next stop was to find some food.

Our Great Trek took us through the Munsterplatz and past the fountain that was destroyed during the war and which was rebuilt in 1951. We wouldn’t normally come this way, except that our favourite restaurant was closed and, once more, we had to tramp for miles before we found another that was open and which offered vegan food.

Eventually we found a suitable place, whose name I have forgotten, down by the Spa. I can’t remember now what Alison had but I had a bown of falafel and salad which was certainly delicious and well worth the money

After our meal we planned to goto the Cathedral so we retraced our steps;

There are some beautiful old houses in the Cathedral close that are always well worth a good inspection and a photograph is always worthwhile. No photos of the interior of the cathedral though. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that despite the immense wealth of the Church in general they actually employ people to go round and physically prohibit people from taking photos and we have encountered them before.

If you want to photograph the interior of the Cathedral you have to buy a permit to do so and there is no chance of that.

If they are short of a few bob here and there, they can always start by selling off some of the opulent treasures that are there. “Give all that thou hast to the Poor!”. Bah! Humbug!

We then went for yet another coffee and then headed back towards the car via the Square at the back of the Rathaus

The rear of the aforementioned building is not very often photographed so I thought that I would do the honours. You’ve seen a few of my photos of the front in the past.

It dates from the first decade of the 14th Century and is on the site of a much earlier building. There’s a kind-of grid that you can peer down to see the old stonework from the building that was here in Charlemagne’s time and when I come back with the NIKON D500 instead of the NIKON 1 J5 I’ll take a photo and show you just what I mean.

And shame that it is that I am obliged to say it, when I poured heaps of scorn onto the PLANNERS OF THE EXTENSION and said that it was some kind of mess that only a British architect could make.

So, before I go off and eat some humble pie, let me show you the Charlemagne Centre – a museum dedicated to the memory of Charlemagne whose capital Aachen was.

This Square is surrounded by the cathedral on the eouth side, the Rathaus on the north side, some nice early medieval stone houses opposite on the east side and a beautiful medieval stone meeting hall next door.

And the best that the modern planners can come up with to showase all of those is this God-awful monstrosity. I despair.

But at least, despite the best that the RAF and the USAAF could throw at it, Aachen’s cathedral remains pretty much intact, not like that did at Coventry where the planner did for the bits of cathedral that the Luftwaffe couldn’t destroy.

Said to be one of the largest and one of the oldest religious edifices north of the Alps, it started off life in 793 as the chapel of Charlemagne’s court and is where he was buried in 814. His remains are still in the Cathedral although there is dispute as to where they might be.

Charlemagne had been made Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800 and from then on until 1531 almost every successive Holy Roman Emperor and German King, 31 of them to be precise (and 12 Queens) was crowned there

On that note we headed back to the car and drove home. Alison came in and had a coffee and a chat and after she had gone I switched on the laptop.

“An upgrade is taking place” it informed me. “Do not switch off”. So I didn’t and by 23:30 it was on 20% completed. So I gave it up as a bad job and went to bed.

Saturday 31st October 2020 – I DID HAVE …

… my lie-in this morning.

Until all of about 10:00 too. Mind you, seeing as I was still up and about at 03;30 it wasn’t all that much of a lie-in today. Not at all. For some unknown reason, despite my exhausting day I just couldn’t go to sleep.

Anyway, when I listened to the dictaphone this morning- or what was left of this morning – there was some stuff on there from yesterday too. So first thing that I did was to add all of that into yesterday’s entry. Then I could concentrate on where I’d been last night and, more importantly, who came with me.

There was some kind of football match going on last night, a team of grown-up men if you like and they were playing in the Cup against another team. This other team sent out its juniors to face them for some unknown reason and Zero was there playing centre-forward. There were two matches that they had to play and this team of kids won them both, with Zero scoring a couple of important goals playing centre-forward. It’s nice to see her around on my travels.

Later on I was in a van or pickup, presumably Strider and I was waiting at some traffic lights. There were three or four people behind me. I was editing Strider’s signwriting while I was waiting at the lights. I could do that with the computer and it would change all over the van. I was busy doing that and the lights changed so I pulled off. There was a big pickup and another van behind me. We advanced up to another road junction and turned right I suddenly realised why this road had so much traffic on it. It was the main road from Ottawa to Québec and I’d just turned off the main road from Montreal to the east so it’s bound to be extremely busy here. It went through a beautiful pass, a big main road going through this beauiful pass and Québec City was just at the end of it. I thought “why didn’t I come this way before because it seems to be so much quicker. The I realised that going home from Adventure Canada the coach had gone this way; He went to the other side of Ottawa to drop off Castor and Pollux and then turned round and gone back to Ottawa to drop off their grandparents. That seemed to be such a sensible way of doing things and I wondered why I had never thought of doing that before either. And all the time I was wondering what these people in these vehicles were thinking with Caliburn’s signwriting changing just like that while I was either parked at those lights or starting to drive away.

There’s something else that spun into my mind as well, to do with a river. There was a girl doing something in this river, it might have been Zero or it might have been Castor. We were all alongside his river – there was something going on on it and I can”t remember very much now. Later on they drained the river and I started looking on this river bed for something that was concerning this girl. I was chatting to a few of the organisers and they were saying something like “yes well someone found something and we saw them using it”. I wondered whether it might have been this girl who had found it without actually telling me. That was a big disappointment for me because I was hoping to find it and give it to her as a way of drawing her attention to me. But I don’t remember very much about this – it was all very confusing.

And there was far more to this series of voyages too but seeing as you are probably eating a meal right now I’ll spare you the gory details.

After hat, I went and had a shower and washed my clothes. I need to look as pretty as I can s eeing as I’m staying here until at least Friday. I say “at least” because with more and more European states closing their borders to travel it might not be as easy as I think it might be to return home.

And while we’re on the subject of lockdowns … “well, one of us is” – ed … the Tory Party’s social media site had a post pinned to the top accusing Keir Starmer of “playing party politics with people’s lives” by demanding a second lockdown. It mysteriously disappeared earlier this morning and then later this evening the Tory Party announced the same measures that the Labour Party had demanded and which they had criticised.

You really couldn’t make this up.

After lunch I sat down here for a few minutes – and promptly crashed out. A really deep and depressing and disappointing sleep that lasted for almost an hour.

Once I pulled myself together I went out for an afternoon walk around.

Not that I went very far before I came to a halt. There’s been a building site at the back here that has been abandoned for longer than I can remember and which had become a local rubbish dump.

A few months ago I noticed that it had been fenced off, and today I noticed that there was a skip there loaded up with much of the rubbish that had been abandoned. It might be that work is goign to restart there sometime soon and if do, that should be very interesting.

Maybe it’s going to be an extension of this place.

If you’re wondering about the photos by the way, the battery in the NIKON 1 J5 has gone flat on me yet again.

It’s a good job that I had my phone with me right now.

So having dealt with that, I pushed onto the Tiensesteenweg where I was nearly squidged by a kid on a scooter.

In the street there’s more stuff of interest going on. There’s a building here that’s been knocked down. The site is fenced off and there’s some heavy machinery there. That presumably means that they are going to be rebuilding something else in its place.

In fact, there were several places up and down the Tiensesteenweg where there is redevelopment taking place. Despite the virus and the retraction of the economy, it still seems to be “full speed ahead” at the moment in this respect.

Down the Tiensesteenweg I went, into the Herbert Hooverplein and then into the Ladeuzeplein towards the main shops.

Down at the bottom end of the Square there was a couple having fun with a camera and tripod. One of the things that I seem to do is to spend a lot of my time taking photos of people taking photos.

And for a change, there weren’t too many people about here today. It seems that people here might be taking this health crisis seriously which can only be good news. It won’t disappear if people don’t treat t with respect and obey the rules.

Mind you, that wasn’t the case here. The maket in the Brusselsestraat is still open and there’s even more chaos than normal.

This is what I don’t understand. With a shelf-life of just 14 days, thus virus could be halted if they simply had three weeks of draconian restrictions. Half-hearted measures are not going to be good for anything.

And on the market there was a stall selling bratwurst – ed and that got me thinking. The idea of making sausages out of unruly children might be the answer to the post-Brexit food catastrophe in the UK. Perhaps they need to think about that to go along with hedgerow foraging and apple scrumping.

There was some more shopping that I needed to so for a change I decided to go on to the Carrefour supermarket on the edge of town.

My route took me down through the Grote Beguinhof, the ancient area on the edge of the city which were formerly a kind of almshouses. Having been derelict for years they are now student accommodation for the University here and it really is a beautiful area.

It’s a pity that it didn’t become private accommodation because an apartment in here would be wonderful. I would be right at home here.

There’s a dual carriageway not too far away from here and a subway takes pedestrians and cyclists underneath.

But the River Dijle flows along right by here and it was looking really nice at this time of the year with the leaves almost all off the trees.

At the Carrefour there was plenty of vegan food, much of which was reduced so I stocked up with a few extra items for my diet. But looking at the selection, I decided that I would come here again the next time that i come to Leuven. There’s much more choice here.

On the way back I went to have a look at the Stadion den Dreef.

Yes, I’m definitely missing my live football here. OH Leuven were promoted to the Premier Division for this season but with matches being played behind closed doors, there won’t be any chance of seeing them again for a while.

But there was football on the internet so I came home;

In the Welsh Premier League we were treated to Haverfordwest County against Bala Town. Haverforwest were promoted this year and I’ve seen them a couple of times this season.

Each time that I’ve seen them they have played quite well and deserve their mid-table position. They gave leaders TNS a fright the other week and this week we were entertained to an exciting 1-1 drawn. And had they been more clinical up front, they might have had more of it.

Tea was burgers and pasta with tomato sauce followed by tinned peaches and ice cream.

Bed-time now because I’m going out for the day tomorrow so I need to be on form. Let’s hope that it’s stopped raining.

Friday 30th October 2020 – OUCH!

That was an expensive day today!

So while you admire a few more photos of the outside of the Gare du Nord in Paris before they start on any redevelopment, you’ve probably gathered that I’ve been on the move today.

What with France going into lockdown, and the word on the streets (thanks, Alison) suggesting that Belgium might be following suit imminently, I reckoned that if I don’t go to Belgium right I won’t ever go at all

Hence my frantic rush around yesterday to change all of my tickets and organise all of my paperwork ready to travel this morning while I still can.

Much to my surprise this morning, I was very very close to beating the second alarm, never mind the third alarm. That’s progress, and it goes to show that I can do it when I really try.

Pleny of stuff on the dictphone too, as I was to discover when I had a listen to it later. I must have travelled quite far during the night.

I was with Mike and Jerry and all of that lot. We were doing something in he mountains. There was a catalogue that I was thumbing through, trying to get ideas for Christmas presents and I got to this illuminated map of the far north of Canada and the entrance to the North West Passage round by Bellot Strait, that area round there. It was a crystal, cut-glass etching upright on a plinth. I thought that that was wonderful so I said to Jerry “here’s what I’m going to get for you for your Christmas”. They all came over and were all poring over this and having a good look at it, working out where they could go to get one, all this kind of thing; It was powered by an old mobile phone thing that you plugged into it bit it really was something impressive

Later on there was something else going on about a girl and boy. They were staying in my apartment. The girl was asleep in bed and all this time this boy was sitting by her, looking at her, making sure that she didn’t fall out, something like that. When she awoke it developed into a kind-of romantic scene between the 2 of them. I was rather disappointed that she’d decided on him but I thought that they would make a very nice couple anyway so I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. Somawhere along the line we were working out some kind of calculations for something or other. I remember saying that we had to add two on for something, but then thinking that there was a load of other little things, fixtures and fittings, tha kind of thing.They would all need costing into this as well. I didn’t really know how much they were going to be and this was going to confuse the issue a lot

This morning, I finished off the packing, took the rubbish out, washed the bins, did some tidying up vacuuming, and even washed the floor round by where the kitchen is, to make sure that everything is clean and tidy for when I come back.

Having fed the sourdough and put it in the fridge, I bleached all of the drain outlets and then hit the streets.

This morning proved that I had been right about something.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days ago we saw piles of roadstone gravel being delivered and I predicted that very soon we would be having one of the gravel boats in shortly to take it all away.

And sure enough, as I headed down the Rue des Juifs into town, I glanced over the wall and there moored at the quayside is Neptune, one of the three or four that come in here every now and again.

When I first came here, there was one in the port every month or two, but this is the first since March and before that it was almost exactly 12 months ago. I was beginning to despair of ever seeing one again.

For a change, I followed the road along the Boulevard Louis Dior and through the car park of the regional offices of the département, that way to the railway station.

The coffee machine was once again out of order and he train wasn’t in either which meant that we had to wait around on a windswept platform until it finally arrived. Another one of our usual GEC Alstom Regiolis multiple unit.

Just a one-unit train today instead of the usual 2-unit ones, and even so, there was still plenty of room for us to spread out. I had a seat all to myself and spent most of the journey copying files from a portable drive onto the little Acer laptop.

Bang on time in Paris. probably a little early in fact as we had to wait for 5 minutes for a slot to get into the station. Not many people in the Metro either – in fact there was only one person in the queue for Metro tickets at the Gare du Nord so I went and bought another pack of 10.

Not that I need them yet but usually there’s a queue a mile long and I’m always pushed for time when I need to buy some more, so I may as well get ahead while I can.

There was half an hour before my rain was due to depart so I went outside to take a few more photos of the exterior. As there are plans for the redevelopment of the station, I wanted to make some kind of record of how it looks.

It will be a big shame if they do any damage to the main train shed; It’s a wonderful example of 19th Century railway architecture.

By now it was time for me to go back into the station and see about my own train.

Much to my surprise, they had already started boarding. That’s not like them at all. Usually it’s 15 minutes prior to departure and not a minute before. And so I quickly took a photograph of our train – one of the TGV “Duplex” double-decker train sets.

Then on to the platform through the electronic gates that check your ticket, and how I wish that they would install them at Lille Europe, for reasons that you will soon find out.

This is a double train-set and of course, my seat is in the second unit. Right down the end of the train too in the wagon just behind he driving unit. At least it means that I don’t have to walk far at the other end of the journey.

And despite it being a double train-set, i was pretty empty too. Lockdown is clearly working in France and potentially in Belgium and very few people seem to be travelling about.

The journey was pretty uneventful and we arrive in Lille Flanders on time as well. I’m not used to this at all. And then there was the usual inconvenient walk down the road to Lille Europe to catch the train from Montpelier to Brussels.

There was only a wait of about 10 minutes before the train came in so we were soon on our way.

And herein lies the problem.

When I went to the railway station at Granville to change my ticket from Saturday to today, the booking clerk typed out the details and handed me the ticket. And like a fool, I didn’t check it.

When the ticket collector checked it, he noticed that instead of 14:45 she had typed 15:54, and so of course it wasn’t valid for the train that I was on. After quite an argument and despite using my best persuasive powers I was still stuck with a penalty fare of €70:00.

And serves me right for my awn stupidity.

Once again, there wasn’t long to wait in Brussels for my train to Leuven.

and to my dismay it was one of the ancient, elderly AM80 multiple units. These machines are on their last legs, with old vinyl seats and linoleum floors, and covered in graffiti inside and out. Not a very good advert for the Belgian railway system I imagine that they will be the next batch of machines to be replaced.

Within an hour I’d arrived at Leuven, walked down to the Dekenstraat, picked up my keys and installed myself in my room. Another upgrade this time – business must be quiet.

Later on I went to Delhaize for my shopping where amongst other things I bought a tin of baked beans. That was because the fritkot down the road was open, so tea tonight was chips and beans. Delicious.

Tomorrow I’m having a lie-in. I’ve done enough these last few days so a rest willdo me good. I hope that no-one comes along to spoil it.

Friday 9th October 2010 – I’M GLAD …

… that I took Liz’s advice to vent my kefir in the bath.

That’s because it went up like the traditional four-bob rocket when I released the caps, and actually blew the caps and wires out of their sockets. So this will be a good batch. I hope.

Yes, for all my vicissitudes, I’m now back chez moi at the seaside and apparently I’ve brought the bad weather back with me. It was quite nice this morning, so I was told, but about an hour after I came back, it had clouded over.

This morning though, in Leuven, there was a heavy, damp, humid mist of the kind of which I’m so familiar, as anyone who has ever been in Belgium in the autumn will remember. I was up and about bang on the dot of the first alarm at 05:30 – just to prove that I can do it when I really try – and after finishing the packing and making my sandwiches, I headed out for the station.

At the station I had to wait 10 minutes for my train – the 06:21 to Blankenberge from Genk.

Being a shorter train than the usual Welkenraedt – Oostende train that I catch, it pulled up short of where I was standing. I had to run a hundred yards or two down the platform to the train. It was pulled by a Type 19 electric locomotive – basically the same as a Type 18 that we had on the way out to Leuven, but fitted with an automatic coupling system.

It was pretty busy too, even right down at the front where I usually sit. That’s quite a surprise at that time of the morning.

My train to Paris-Nord was already in at the platform when I arrived – 40 minutes before departure, but we couldn’t board right now because while the passengers were there, the crew wasn’t.

This morning we’re going to Paris on one of the Thalys PBKA units – the ones specially-built for the Paris – Brussels – Cologne – Amsterdam service. They differ from the usual PBA units in that they are equipped to work on the German electric railway network.

They are getting on for 25 years old now and surprisingly, are still in quite good and comfortable condition. I’m quite happy to travel on one of these any time. But not so many other people were. Admittedly the 07:35 is the first service to Paris of the morning, and also the cheapest, but there were very few people on board today and we could spread out.

Our train hurtled off from Brussels bang on time and we made such good time that we had to sit outside Paris Gare du Nord for 10 minutes for our slot for the final half-mile.

It was rush-hour of course in Paris – 09:13 when we arrived – and while the Metro was busy, it wasn’t crowded as you might expect. As I said on the way out, it seems that the business life of Paris has changed somewhat with the Corona Virus and that might explain the lack of custom on the TGV.

At the Gare Montparnasse our train was in the station already even though it wasn’t advertised yet. It’s because it’s the only one that has “NORMANDIE” written all down the side of it. No point in trying to board because it will be all locked up, so I took a seat on a bench and read my book.

After waiting around for 35 minutes, the train to Granville was announced we were all allowed on board.

The train set is one of the GEC Alstom Regiolis units. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we travel on one of these each time we go back and forth to Paris. There are 361 of these and they started to come into service in 2013. They were so successful that they allowed a whole raft of old equipment from the 70s and 80s to be swept away, and they are all that you ever see now on much of the French railway network, including the Paris-Granville service. I’ve never done the route in anything else.

And I was lucky in my neighbour today on the way back. She can sit beside me any time she like.

The voyage was pretty uneventful so I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

I was back running the taxis again and I had a yellow Mk IV but was completely yellow, a tidy little car. There was a driver driving for me who lived next door to a Hackney driver but didn’t get on particularly with him. He was quite good at his job. When he came round to start work one morning I was in the middle of changing windscreen wipers over. I’d got them off an old car that we’d had, the wipers and arms, and I was busy switching them over to then new one, getting it ready to go out, the yellow one. This guy was going through the sheets writing out his list of jobs. There were a couple of jobs, long ones and he wondered why he hadn’t been given them. I didn’t know so I told him that it might be something to do with the fact that they didn’t think that the car would be ready by then. Then someone else from another taxi company turned up from Northampton. While I was busy changing the wipers the other driver started chatting to them asking their advice – should he put these jobs down on his sheet or not. I had all the wires – dunno why there were wires on this – tangled up and I was trying to untangle them, everything like that. The more I tried to untangle them, the more tangled they became.

Having done that, I merged a few more composite files and than quietly ate my butties.

Our arrival in Granville was a couple of minutes early. I’m not used to this. It was a pleasant if not tiring walk back home from the station, and the first thing that I did was to spray the bathroom with orange-flavoured kefir.

Most of the stuff that I bought was then unpacked (I forgot some) and then I swapped the files over from the portable computer onto the big office machine. I didn’t do as much as I wanted to do because, what with the early start, I … errr … had a little relax.

That’s possibly because I had the heating on in here. It seems that the cold has arrived.

Tea was taco rolls – there was some stuffing left over from Monday followed by a slice of Blackberry pie out of the freezer.

Later on in the evening I went out for a walk around the headland in the dark. And first thing that I noticed is that the old Opel estate that had been been abandoned on the car park for the last however many months has now been removed.

There was a strong wind, but nothing like as strong as it has been. Even so, I didn’t want to hang about. Instead I had a wander around and ended up at the Chantier Navale to see what was happening in there.

We’re down to just two boats now. Les Epiettes, the boat from the Département des Ponts et Cnaussées is still in there on the right, and the trawler on the left which is Cap Lihou is still in there. She’s been there for quite a while and probably now a permanent fixture.

My runs tonight were pretty disappointing. I only managed two and the second one of those was a little shorter than it has been of late. I need to work myself back into it again. Instead of going for my third run, I headed slowly for home. I’ve still managed 114% of my daily activity.

Having written my notes, I’m now off to bed. It’s shopping tomorrow and I need a few things to replenish the stocks. And there’s football tomorrow night too so I’ll be busy.

And what is left of my kefir is delicious.

Thursday 8th October 2020 – IF EVER I …

… get my hands on whoever it was who telephoned me this morning at 07:02, they’ll be eating soup through a straw for the next three month.

It’s always the case though – you can absolutely rely on it. Whenever I plan on having a lie-in, someone always comes along to disturb it. Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous incarnations will recall that my bank, not having contacted me for several years, once rang me up a good few years ago at 05:00 when I was fast asleep in a motel somewhere in North Carolina.

What was worse was that I’d left my phone downstairs and by the time that I was down there, whoever it was rang off.

Nevertheless, I went back to bed where I stayed until about 09:10.

While i was having a coffee, I listened to the dictaphone. I had walked for miles and miles last night but I can’t remember anything about it now hardly. Except that we were out in the countryside somewhere near Barthomley way and the group had had a huge row and I was sulking for some reason or other. Someone was talking about all of this, the past, showing us photos, all kinds of stuff. One of the photos came across what looked like some kind of farm building. There was an old coach there and drawings showing hos they wanted to extend this farm building to make a garage for the coach. It turned out that one of the guys said “oh yes can you imagine – while you lot were doing whatever it was that you were doing in the early 70s I was living in this coach. We all said “wow that’s amazing”. he said “yes my BMW was behind the hedge here”. it turned out that he was a famous rock star from the period when he was living in the Crewe area. We were talking about all the goings-on in that particular area and how there was someone who hired out wedding cars and how the place would be decorated when there was a wedding. Then he mentioned a name and it immediately rang a bell with me . He played in a rock group from Nantwich and they had an LP out. This album bombed spectacularly so I asked “do you have any idea where I can get in touch with this guy?” “Ohh, he’s still around. Why are you interested?”. I said “I want to get my hands on their LP because I want to broadcast it on the radio”. H replied “I have a copy”. I asked “I don’t suppose that I could borrow it so that I could record it and play it?”. He seemed to be quite enthusiastic at the idea and one or two other people started to become interested in it.

Strangely enough, there was a rock group from Nantwich, a group called Strife. They fitted the bill and there was a musician in this group who actually had the same name as the one last night. And even more of a coincidence, I have in fact during my daylight hours, I have been trying to track down a copy of their album – and for years to – for just that reason.

No success as yet, but I live in hope.

This morning I’ve been doing some housework on the laptop. I have several files that have been duplicated and I’ve been going through a few of them and merging them in together. Plenty to do though, and that reminds me that there is a whole raft (like 4TBs worth) of this to do on the backup drive that I created earlier this year.

In fact I was trying to do something with the trip that I had on board Spirit of Conrad but it seems that I don’t have the edited photos with me and I can’t remember the numbering sequence.

After lunch I decided to go for a nice long walk to stretch my legs

While I was out on my travels yesterday I noticed that a house down the end of the street in the neighbourhood was having its roof ripped off. I thought that I may as well go into town that way and see what was going on.

And they are certainly making a really good job of it – going flat out at it and making a completely thorough job of it. Obviously, with the house being in Dekenstraat -Blanket Street – it’s having a new blanket.

There was nothing exciting in FNAC, nor Wibra, nor Kruidvat, nor Zeeman, nor Hema. But in Sports Direct I bought another couple of pairs of the trousers that I like seeing as they were on special offer. The ones that I’ve had for three or four years are starting to look pretty thin and I damaged a pair when I was in the Auvergne the other week.

After my little trip to the shops I went for a walk out of town.

In the past, regular readers of this rubbish have seen the sad state of the part of medieval city walls at the Handbooghof right by the River Dijle, and yesterday we saw that some renovation was about to be carried out. My trip around to the Handbooghof was to see what was happening there.

They’ve stuck up a sign to give a little hint as to what is going on. Only a little though because it doesn’t contain very much interesting information.

It doesn’t really help matters either that they have shrouded the work in this corrugated iron fence.

Even with the camera held high above my head I couldn’t really see over it to find out hos they were doing. But there were some big bags of rubble lying around so it looks as if they are dismantling them.

But whether they are going to rebuilt them is another matter. It certainly seems to be pointless if they are taking away some of the bricks that were used in its building. It won’t be the same at all with modern bricks.

While we’re on the subject of bricks … “well, one of us is” – ed … I went to look at that building that I mentioned yesterday – the one that has recently been exposed by the demolition of a more modern building in front ot it.

There is no evidence (like a date-carved lintel) to give an idea of the date, and while the bricks certainly look contemporary to the appropriate historical period, they look extremely clean and the pointwork looks to be extremely tidy.

Not at all what you’d expect from a building several hundred years old so you take your choice.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that yesterday we went past that building in the Monseigneur Van Waeyenberglaan – the one that was stripped right out.

We’ve been keeping an eye on its renovation over the past while and today, purely by chance, I went past the estate agent’s office where the apartments are advertised for sale.

There seems to me to be little doubt that this is it, and if you have a close look at the asking prices you’ll see why I could never ever afford to come and live in Leuven. Some of the prices here are totally out of anyone’s reach.

One of the things that I intended to do was to go and take a few photos of the old St Rafael Hospital before anything happens to it, so after I’d been and bought my pepper I went round for a look.

The best view of the building is from down the Biezenstraat, and then it isn’t particularly good.

So dodging the school kids coming out of school I took a photo from this corner. At least it had the more modern part visible behind it, and there was a good view of the roof too. It’s green but it’s very unlikely to be copper.

The Kapucinenvoer, the street where the Sint Rafael is situated, is quite narrow and built up on both sides down its whole length so it’s not possible to step back and take a photo of all of it from face-on.

The only way that I could take another photograph is from further down the street on the opposite corner of the building, and it doesn’t look anything like as imposing from this angle.

It’s not really much better inside. I’ve had to go there on a couple of occasions and it’s really just a maze of corridors and tiny consulting rooms. At least – that’s what I saw of it. I didn’t go very far in there.

A little further along the street towards the Brusselsestraat by the Cuythoek, there’s a more modern extension.

It won’t be much of a loss to the community if that part of the building were to disappear. It seems to be nothing more than a typical early 20th Century Government building.

The only drawback would be whatever they would build in its place. We’ve seen PLENTY OF EXAMPLES in the past of modern buildings conjoined to older masterpieces, and all it seems to do is to show up the lack of skill and appreciation held by modern rchitects and builders.

On that depressing note I went around to the Brusselsestraat to see how they were getting on with the demolition of Sint Pieters Hospital.

When we were here in July, we saw a couple of large grabs at work, just like dinosaurs, nibbling away at the brickwork. But they don’t seem to be there any more. Instead, what we seem to have is someone inside the building on the top floor throwing material out of the window.

And if there’s any more pointless task than that, I really don’t know what is.

As I (and quite a crowd of other people) watched, more objcts, and then brickwork and the like, followed the first batch of stuff down to the ground.

And I really can’t see what is going on here at all. Surely, if they are demolishing the building, they’ll do it from the outside with machines like the big ones that we saw back in July. Whatever was still inside it would come down automatically with the rest of it.

It seems to be a waste of time and money to send someone up there like that. It’ll take them forever to knock down the building like that.

While I was there, I noticed that they had taken out a fence panel. That meant that I could approach that machine that I saw yesterday.

On a closer look at it, I could see that it isn’t a water atomiser as I had thought. It’s not powered by compressed air but by electricity (at least, there’s an electric cable attached to it) and the name that’s written on it – “Spray Stream” – seems to indicate that it’s nothing more than a water sprayer.

The huge fan at the back helps to disperse the water all over the rubble. But at least I was right about that – it’s to keep the dust down while they are knocking down the brickwork.

It was a good job that that fence panel was out, because while I was down there admiring the Spray Stream, my eyes alighted on something else.

The city is honeycombed by branches of the River Dijle, and we’ve seen quite a few of those in the past in all kinds of different places in the city.

But this is one that I haven’t noticed before. It’s been pretty well concealed underneath the Leistraat across the road and it isn’t shown on any maps.

There’s a medieval religious house here on the site that has been pretty much built over the river.

It’s the Sint Elizabeth Gasthuis, dating from about 1090 and was the city’s hospital from the 13th to the 17th Century. And when I worked out what it was, that rang a bell with me because I recall having read somewhere that it was the fashion to build hospitals over running water during the Medieval period.

It was something to do with hygene, if I remember correctly, and I’ll have to track down what it was that I read and remind myself.

Back here I had a few things to do, and then I had tea. Another falafel burger with the rest of the vegetables and some pasta with tomato sauce.

No possibility of going out for a walk right now because it was teeming down with rain, so I made a start on writing up my notes.

. The rain did ease up for a little moment so I nipped out to make the most of it.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen a few photos of where I stay taken during the day, but I can’t remember whether I’ve ever photographed it in the night. So here it is. My little room is down the little alleyway to the left just by where the tree is.

So having taken the photo I walked on around the block to run up the time on the fitbit to over 100%. I might have gone farther but I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my facemask with me so I’d better head back. Not for health reasons, but for fear of frightening the locals.

But now I’m off to bed. It’s a 5:30 start in the morning so I need to be on form.

Wednesday 7th October 2020 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT …

… Castle Anthrax I had my check-up. Blood count is down to a mere 8.2, just 0.2 above the critical limit. They didn’t keep me in, but they didn’t give me a blood transfusion either. They are trying a new treatment on me again, something called Octagam.

One thing that I did was to check on the side effects and symptoms. And to my surprise, I have many of the symptoms that are flagged, a couple of which have even seen me hospitalised. But I assume that they know what they are doing.

Having said that, I’m not convinced that I do. I couldn’t sleep last night and it was long after 02:30 when I finally went to bed. Quite obviously there was no chance of my leaving the bed at the sound of the alarm. I was surprised that I managed to be out of bed by 07:20.

First job was to have a shower and a clothes wash. I need to make myself pretty. And then to make some sandwiches. I’d no idea how long this session was going to last.

And then I hit the streets.

When you have been away for a while from a place that you know, it’s very interesting to see the changes that have taken place since your last visit.

ON OUR TRAVELS AROUND LEUVEN in the past we’ve seen the start of a whole system of changes to the city, starting with the demolition on the Sint Pieter’s Hospital Building where I stayed for a week or two when I first came here in 2016. They are making a considerable advance in dealing with the matter but it looks as if it’s going to take an age.

It’s a shame that A FORMER NEIGHBOUR and customer of my taxis is no longer with us. He would have had that building down in a twinkle of an eye and at much less cost too.

While I was watching some of the demolition, my interest was caught by this machine and I was wondering what it might be.

It took me a while but I think that I know now what it might be. It looks like some kind of water atomiser powered mainly by compressed air, I suppose, that’s blasting a pile of water over the heap of rubble that has been knocked down from the building. I imagine that its purpose is to keep the dust down.

You would never have had precautions like that 20 years or so ago. It seems that Health and Safety Regulations have even arrived over here.

My route continued along the Brusselsestraat to the corner of the place where I lived for 6 months, and then round the corner into the Sint Jacobsplein.

When we’d been away for a couple of months last year, we came back here to find a great big hole in the middle of the Square. It was all fenced off so we never had the opportunity to look into it, and even though it’s been at least a year since they made a start on it, they still haven’t finished.

This is turning into a really long job and I’m wondering if I’ll still be here to see the finished product. At least, I hope that they will make a better job of it than they did of that deplorable patch of asphalt in Granville.

at the side of the Sint Jacobsplein is the Biezenstraat, and when we were last here IN JULY they were busy making a start on digging it up

Since then, they seem to have made a great deal of progress. And now that I can see the big concrete pipes down there, I can tell now that it’s all to do with replacing the sewer pipes in the street. That makes me wonder if they’ve installed something like a subterranean holding tank or something underneath the Sint Jacobsplein.

And as for the Frittourist, the fritkot on the edge of the Square to the left, the roadworks can’t be doing them much good in the way of passing trade. It’s a good fritkot too, one of the best in the City.

When I turn around to look behind me the other way to face the direction of the Hospital, I’m admiring the Sint Hubertusstraat.

When we came here last time, in early July, there was a huge hole in the middle of the crossroads and we had to walk miles around in order to proceed without falling down a great big hole in the road.

But now, it seems that they’ve filled in that part of the street now and while the surface isn’t finished, and not by a long way either, we can still walk past it on our way up the hill towards the hospital.

Just after the corner there’s a big block of flats on the left that we always walk past.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a while ago all of the residents were turfed out and once they had gone, the building was completely gutted right back to the framework. They have gradually been rebuilding it and it looks as if they are on the point of packing away their tools.

You can see all of the “For Sale” signs on the windows of the apartments. Most of them that I could see are “sold” and that presumably means that the new inhabitants will be moving into their homes very soon. It’s taken them long enough.

My struggle up the hill continued, through all of the roadworks that were there last time. The trench has been filled in and they are reworking the pavements and the cycle track right now.

The actual heavy work is now taking place on the way up between the by-pass overbridge and the roundabout at the foot of the car park. And just as I arrived, they obliged me by picking up a large concrete pipe and dropping it into the hole that they have dug.

For a change, I was early and was quickly logged in. And I found the reason why there had been such a delay in my treatment. In the waiting room there are no longer 40 seats but just 10. and in the communal treatment rooms where 20 people can sit and have their treatment, there are just two seats. There are about a dozen or so confidential treatment rooms where you go for your tests on admission, and now patients are left in these rooms throughout the whole of their treatment.

So Instead of about 50 patients at a session, there are now just maybe a dozen. Hardly a surprise given what’s going on right now.

A nice nurse took care of me and I had a nice young trainee doctor. There have to be some benefits of having this illness. Even nicer, Kaatje came to see me and we has a nice chat. She’s nominally a Social Worker but in reality she’s a psychiatrist, although they don’t let on. Every terminally-ill patient has a psychiatrist allocated to them, and Kaatje can come and administer to my needs any time she likes.

While I had her attention, I mentioned the issues – or lack of them – about not having had my compulsory 4-week treatment since January this year. Not that it will do any good but it’s something that one has to do.

While I was sitting there having my perfusion, I attacked the dictaphone. Last night I was a girl, would you believe? And I was living at home. I’d been downstairs for a meal and tried to talk to people and be interesting but no-one was listening or interested in the least with what I had to say. They were always cutting my speech, that kind of thing. In the end I threw something of a tantrum and stormed upstairs to my room. There was a record player in there and a record on and playing but the needle wasn’t advancing. It was just going round and round he edge again. Sooner or later there was a knock and the door opened. It was my father coming in. I thought that he might have come in to talk to me about things. But no. He just handed me a pair of my gloves that I’d left downstairs and said “you’ve forgotten these” and turned round and went out. I was so disappointed.
Later on there was one of these American sleuths – a Philip Marlowe type. He was renowned for helping his clients in all kinds of ways, many of which were illicit, to escape detection. This came at a price of course. One day he was being interviewed by a gangland boss who he didn’t particularly like. The gangland boss said something like “I understand that you can help people out of certain kinds of difficulties. Well I need a little help – that kind of thing. This private detective taunted him a little bit then said “yes, I’ll do that, $5,000”. To which the mafia type guy, the crook erupted into a rage. He grabbed this guy by the lapels and started to shake him like a dog. Just then, two warders came in to try and sort it all out.

Round about 14:00 my treatment was over and I could leave, having picked up next month’s supply of medication.

Here’s something that I’ve not noticed before, although that isn’t to say that it wasn’t there.

In the middle of the roundabout at the bottom of this car park is this large concrete pillar. And I’ve no idea why it’s there and what it’s supposed to represent. My opinion of modern art IS VERY WELL KNOWN so I won’t waste your time in repeating it. But seriously, I can’t see any attraction whatever in a concrete cast-off like this.

It reminds me very much of one of Albert Speer’s flak towers in Berlin, or something designed by someone from the Donald Gibson School of Wanton Vandalism, as I once mentioned IN MY UNIVERSITY THESIS

While we’re on the subject of wanton vandalism … “well, one of us is” – ed … after my hospital wisit I wandered on down the hill to see what was going on on the Kapucijnenstraat.

When we had walked past there the last time that we were here, they had started on the demolition of the annexes to the Sint Rafael. It’ always very interesting to see how they are doing and it seems to me that right now the whole lot have been swept away. They are even starting to build something on the site, but I bet it won’t be anything like as attractive.

At least the magnificent Flemish-style main building is there, but I may well go for a wander around tomorrow with the camera to record it for posterity because the cynic inside me HAS VERY LITTLE FAITH in modern developers. A suspicious fire could break out at any moment.

There is however a good side to all of this demolition, even if it might not seem like it.

There are loads of old houses from the glory days of the city that have been obscured by new development. There’s a little Close off the Brusselsestraat that I haven’t yet explored but with the demolition of a newer building in the Kapucijnenstraat a couple of the houses down at the bottom end of the Close have been revealed.

When I’m out and about next, I’ll have to go to have a closer look, to see whether it is an original or whether it’s a simple modern reproduction.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is that last time I was here I made a note about the lamentable state of the city walls in certain places.

It’s quite clear that the good Burghers of the City are keen and regular readers of the rubbish that I write because they now seem to be fenced off and there is scaffolding up in certain places. So maybe they really are going on to do something about it all.

It was round about here that I found a set of keys lying in the road. As it happens, a couple of Municipal Police were walking in the immediate vicinity so I referred the matter to them. I went on to Delhaize for a bit more shopping to take home.

After Delhaize I went to Origin’O for some grated vegan cheese for my next supply of pizza and then headed for home.

In the Tiensestraat I came across my favourite sweet shop. Or at least, it was when I was allowed to eat animal products, because as far as I know, all of their products contain pork gelatine. It’s the kind of place where you put your sweets into a bag and weigh the bag to work out the price.

The first time I encountered one of these shops was when I was in Bruges getting on for 40 years ago. It’s quite a large chain of shops with branches in most of the towns. in fact, some might say that sweets in Belgium are nothing but a load of Bollekes.

Back here, I had a few things to do and that took some time to organise.

Later on, it was time to go out. Alison and I had arranged to meet in the town centre.

And now I have seen everything I reckon. In the past we’ve seen pizzamats, potatomats and, a few weeks ago, a soupomat. Plenty of other mats too. But today is the first time ever that I’ve seen a Bloemenomat – an automatic flower-vending machine – here at the florist’s on the corner of the Brabanconnestraat.

It makes me wonder whether or not it shouts “violet, get your luvverly violets” at passers-by. That remains to be seen.

Having inspected the Bloemenautomat, I headed off down the Tiensestraat into the town centre.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one of my favourite photography subjects is to take photographs of other people taking photographs. Whilst that’s not the case in this photograph, I surprised a group of photographers marching actoss the Rector de Somerplein and it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Alison was waiting for me at our usual meeting place. It was nice to meet up again because it’s been a couple of months since we’ve last seen each other.

There seems to be a new place opened, the Wasbar in the Tiensestraat, and it was advertising vegan food. We decided to go there to see what it was like. It was certainly different and overpriced, but if you don’t go, you won’t know.

After we’d eaten out meal we headed off back down into town.

At the bottom of the Tiensestraat is the magnificent St Peter’s Church – the Sint Pieterskerk. It’s least the third church on this site – the first known church being first recorded in 986. Made of wood, it was destryed by fire in 1176 and replaced by a church in the Romanesque period.

This one was in turn replaced by the present one, began round about 1425 and, surprisingly, still to be finished. Probably a British construction company was involved somewhere in the proceedings.

Here at the western end, the twin towers of the Romanesque church were to remain but in 1458 they were destroyed by fire.

There was a design proposed to replace them with some really impressive towers but firstly the foundations were not solid enough, then they ran out of money, and then there were a couple of collapses of whatever of the towers had been built. Had the plans been properly completed, it would have been the tallest building in the world at the time.

During the Sack of Leuven in 1914 the church was set alight and the roof was destroyed. And then in 1944 it suffered a direct him on its northern side from a bomb

While we’d been walking around on our way to our meal we’d noticed some lights down at the end of one of the streets. On the way back we decided to go and have a look to see what as going on.

Here in the Mathieu de Layensplein where they have the brocantes at weekends, one of the bars here has decided to bring a little gaiety into the area by stringing up some very nice lights.

The whole Square looks quite nice and interesting like this and it would have been nice to see more people try this kind of thing in their neighbourhood. With everything that’s going on right now, we could do with some brightening up.

On the way back home, someone stopped me in the Tiensestraat and asked for directions.

While I was talking, I was having a look round and having the subject of lights going round in my head, I noticed just how nice the lower end of the Tiensestraat looked with all of the lights on the buildings. It’s another subject that seems to be crying out for a photograph.

Having done all of that, I headed home and missed my short-cut, so I had to go the long way round.

And now I’ve written up my notes (and that was a labour of love) I’m off to bed. No alarm tomorrow because the medication usually takes a lot out of me and I don’t know what this new stuff will be like.

And, of course, I have a 05:30 start on Friday so I need to be at my best.

Tuesday 6th October 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that LAST YEAR IN MONTREAL I came across a pizza place that had started to sell vegan pizzas as a mainstream meal.

Here I am in Leuven tonight, and what do I find but that another, different pizza chain is now offering the same. It’s most unlikely that I’ll be able to find them in France, with France about 100 years behind in this respect and Leuven is likely to be in the forefront, having such a huge student population as it does, but it’s certainly progress.

The only downside of this is that I didn’t see the notice until after I’d bought the food for my stay here for the next few days. Had I seen it earlier, I would have changed my meal plans. This kind of thing needs encouragement.

What also needs encouragement is my early starts in the morning. Another day where I was out of bed, up and definitely about this time, long before the third alarm went off. First task was to release the gas in the Kefir, and second was to feed the sourdough. It’s like having household pets in here now and that was something from which I have been trying to escape. The idea of having ties like this of any kind is not part of the plan.

So having loaded the working files onto the portable hard drive, done the washing up, had a shower, taken out the rubbish and bleached the sinks, shower and toilet and finished the packing, I hit the streets.

Last night, the day’s photographs finished with trawlers unloading at the Fish Processing Plant.

So today we start as we mean to go on with a carbon-copy of last night’s photograph, except of course that it’s somewhat lighter right now. And there’s a trawler manoeuvring around in the harbour too. Although the harbour gates are closed, the tide is well on its way in and so I imagine that the gates are about to open and the trawler is ready to leave.

And so I headed off towards the railway station. It was windy, but nothing like as windy as it has been, and the weather was doing its best to rain. It’s a good job that I’d prepared by wearing the correct clothes.

There was still half an hour to go before departure time when I arrived at the Railway Station.

And here we have a disaster. The coffee machine is out of order. I’m not drinking very much coffee these days but I still fancied a cup this morning due to my early and somewhat energetic start. The train, a GEC Alstom Regiolis, was already in at the platform so I was able to board it, find my seat and settle myself down in comfort.

Somewhere along the route I was joined by a miserable, bad-tempered old woman who had clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed and who moaned all the way to Paris. And for the first time ever, I managed to go for most of the way without crashing out. Just 10 minutes or so. I was able to do quite a bit of work.

One of the jobs that I did was to listen to the dictaphone. I was with someone last night – it might even have been Castor I dunno. It started off with meeting somewhere – we had to meet and I had to go on back to my digs. I’d looked at a couple of digs and wasn’t really keen on them but the 3rd one was OK so I’d booked in there. Then I had to go out to meet whoever it was. It turned out that 1st of all it was yet another boy from my school days and we met in Claughton Avenue. I said that we had better go to check to make sure that my car was still there because I’d left it there a day or so ago. It was the old Ford Escort that I’d had. We walked down the whole length of the street looking for this Escort but it wasn’t there any more. I thought that either we were in the wrong street or someone has pinched it. If it’d been pinched, it’s been pinched and it’s far too late to do anything about it now. It was all about worrying about a car or worrying about a bike When we got to the end there was a bike rack with a pile of bikes and someone in charge The guy whom I was with picked up a bike and sat on it as if to cycle off Some old guy who was in charge said “put that back! It’s not yours!” My companion replied “ohh yes it is!” so we had this “no it isn’t – yes it is” bit and in the end he said “no it isn’t” and handed the bike back. The old guy said “thank you very much”. By now the situation had advanced and I was with Castor – it could have been Castor, it could have been anyone. We’d come out of a huge building complex type of thing and we had to go home to where my digs were. I said “come this way” and she replied “no, it’s this way”. She wanted us to go in exactly the opposite direction but I was insisting that it was my way and she was insisting that it was her way She’s had a bit to drink and was a bit unsteady on her feet so in the end I guided her back In the end we ended up somewhere walking home and I suddenly realised that you needed a special code to get into the building where I was staying and I didn’t have that code I thought “how am I going to manage that?” To make it worse, whoever I was with decided that she wanted to stay the night with me I thought that ordinarily this would really be my lucky night but how am I going to manage this if I can’t get into my building? I supposed that I could conceivably go and find a room for us in a hotel but it was now something like 02:00 and what hotels with rooms would be open at this time of night? We were on foot so we couldn’t go far. It all became really confusing as well as being a really feverish night again

It’s a common, recurring theme, isn’t it? Here I am, with the bird on my plate and just as I’m about to get my fork stuck in it, something always comes up to spike my guns. Story of my life, I suppose. And Castor too!

A little later I was back in a similar kind of situation and a similar kind of situation running a chocolate factory and mixing chocolate. There was some kind of dispute about the recipe and in the end she chose one. We were busy making it and we got a couple of blocks to take back to the hotel where we were staying to try them out.

Our train arrived in the Gare Montparnasse about 2 minutes late but the Metro trip was rapid and straightforward. Some people didn’t find it that easy though. There was a barrage of ticket inspectors checking everyone’s tickets and a few people fell foul of them.

When I arrived at the Gare du Nord I had half an hour before my train was due to leave so I went for a walk around outside. One thing that I do like about the Paris Metro is the beautiful art-deco work of the entrances. This one, across the road from the railway station, is a typical example.

There were not very many people at all in this photo, which is not what you expect outside the Gare du Nord. In fact, one thing that I did notice was that the Metro was much quieter than usual and the station was quite empty. This virus is certainly affecting the business habits of the inhabitants of the city.

Another thing that I noticed was that outside the Gare du Nord thee was a placard saying that planning permission had been obtained for various alterations.

The work that is planned to be carried out is quite extensive and substantial. It’s going to change the aspect of the railway station quite considerably and that’s a shame because the station is a beautiful building and a rare survival of decent 19th Century railway architecture.

Somewhere here and there I have a few photos of the exterior of the railway station but I don’t have one of this angle here. I reckon that I had better take one to add to the collection just in case they are really going to alter it in any major way and we might not ever see it again.

Back inside the station there was still 20 minutes to go before the train was to depart. I wasn’t going to loiter around outside too long because it was raining and it’s dryer inside.

There was already a train parked in our platform. It was one of the TGV duplex trains, built by Alstom and are getting on for 25 years old now. But nevertheless, they are still very comfortable and very rapid too.

We weren’t allowed on board yet so we had to wait around for another 10 minutes before we were allowed on board. During that time they were loading up the train with the foodstuffs and drink for the journey. I’m not quite sure why because it’s not as if it’s actually a long way to Lille on a TGV.

They eventually allowed us through towards the train. This train set consists of two units joined together and my seat was is in the farthest unit.

We actually left on time and hurtled off into the wild blue yonder at 300Km/H. The train was actually half-empty, which was something of a surprise. Like I said earlier, people’s habits are changing.

Our train arrived in Lille-Flandres 5 minutes late, and then there was the hike down the road to the Lille-Europe railway station. The rain had stopped by now so it was a really pleasant walk down there, although I had to get a wiggle on because they don’t allow you very much time to make the journey and there isn’t a shuttle-bus or anything to connect up the stations.

Negotiating the layabouts with their savage dogs at the entrance, I made my way into the station. Still 5 minutes to go before my train was due to arrive which was just as well because the singing was wrong in the station and I had to walk almost the full length of the platform to where I had to board.

Bang on time, our train came in. It’s the TGV that comes from Montpelier and when I lived in the Auvergne I used to catch it quite regularly from Lyon when I was flying out to North America from Paris Charles de Gaulle.

Arriving on time, leaving on time, and reaching its destination, Bruxelles-Midi, bang on time too. This isn’t the SNCF as we know it. There’s a story that goes around France about how kids spend all of their maths lessons working out train arrivals and departures, and then when they start their working life they encounter the SNCF …

Having arrived in Brussels, I didn’t have to go too far or wait too long for my train to Leuven. It was due to come in at the next platform.

This is the express from the Belgian coast to Welkenraedt on the German border. It’ one of the Siemens Type 18 Electrics, about 12 or 15 years old and designed by Chris “Failing” Grayling. Consequently they came with a great many problems and Siemens had to pay a hefty fine. Once they were eventually put right they’ve proved to be the backbone of the SNCB’s express passenger service.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall by the way that there’s a story to Welkenraedt and WE’VE BEEN THERE to find out about it.

We arrived in Leuven on time (I’m not used to this) and I was soon installed in my room here. One of the benefits of being a regular here is that when there’s room, I am given a free upgrade and as it’s quiet, I have a duplex apartment.

Down at Carrefour to do my shopping, past the pizza place, and then back to here for tea (falafel burger and pasta followed by fruit salad and vegan sorbet) and to watch the football. Connah’s Quay Nomads in a torrential rainstorm against Caernarfon Town.

In the first half, it was all one-way traffic towards the Caernarfon goal. Caernarfon only made it into the Nomads’ penalty area once so you will not be at all surprised to learn that the half-time score was Nomads 0, Cofis 1. Such is the nature of Welsh Football.

The second half was a much more even contest but the Nomads were playing with the rainstorm pushing them forward and they ran out 3-1 winners in the end , 2 goals of which were scored by the centre-half Priestly Farquarson who was pushing up behind the attackers on several occasions and relying on his pace (because he is quick) to get him back.

It was however quite quaint to see, every time the game stopped, a hand come round the front of the camera with a cloth and clean the lens of the rain that was soaking it. That brings back many memories from a less-sophisticated past.

Sunday 16th August 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you’re wondering, I’m back home.

But there’s a slight problem, as Alison will understand because we talked about it. In all honesty for the last couple of weeks I’ve not been feeling myself … “quite right too – disgusting habit” – ed … and the feeling has slowly been getting worse until today when it finally erupted.

Today therefore I was up early and I pushed on home.

Not before I had a listen to the dictaphone though.

There was some kind of police incident last night with all of these really violent criminals and we were caught in the crossfire. These criminals had 12-bore shotguns sticking them inside our vehicle and pulling the trigger, everything like that. I couldn’t see how anyone could have survived in it. It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen or been involved with. Eventually we were set free. it seemed that the police had overwhelmed these criminals which was the most surprising thing, and when we got out and checked ourselves over we found that we were totally unhurt. I couldn’t believe that for a minute. I was the last to be released from the car. I had a little chat with them. They were telling me all kinds of security precautions that I knew mainly vaguely. Then they took me off to a room. There was a bed in 1 little room, annexe type of place and there was someone in there. I asked him where all the others were. he said that they were in the next room so I went in there. One of the people was a boy whom I knew from school – what the hell is he doing? He was just finishing some tea and saying that he’s on the 16:00 bus the same as me. We started to have a little chat and I remember sayng that apparently I’m unharmed which really surprised me. We had a little chat about something or other involving this.

Later on there was something to do with nurses last night. One of them was talking to some people discussing a strike that had taken place. She said that there was only her and one or two other people and a patient from France who were still working at this particular local hospital. Somewhere in this I had a kind of plastic knife thing like a scraper that was used for cutting rope. I’d used it on a piece of rope but somehow the blade had come dislodged and I had to work out how I was going to get the blade back in because it had taken ages for it to be assembled and I wasn’t quite sure about it.

There was another thing about some kind of lorry. I thought that it was a Ford D-series artic tractor but it was in fact a very short wheelbase kind of lorry with high sides at the back for gravel, that kind of thing parked up at the side of the road. I had to park my van somewhere and work out where was the best way to take a photograph of it. I tried all kinds of places to get a good photograph but the person in this van was getting a bit fed up about it. I managed to get one photograph but it wasn’t very good. It turned out to be a Mercedes too. Then I walked to try to get a photo and ended up at a place where there were loads of people standing as if they were waiting to be picked up by people coming in cars. I had to walk back and clamber over the side of this verge to get a good photo but while I was doing it this lorry just drove away which annoyed me.

First thing to do was to go and rescue Caliburn. I wasn’t leaving him out in the street but there was a locked compound opposite (for an extra charge, of course) where he would be perfectly safe.

This gave me an opportunity to take a photograph of my extremely expensive hotel, with the sun streaming into the lens. And expensive it was too – with the receptionist going to check the contents of the fridge in the room before he would chack me out.

We also had something of an argument about a missing bottle of Schweppes until the housemaid butted in to confirm that she didn’t put one in.

The experience put me right off this hotel.

Finding my way out of town was quite an experience too, with a railway line blocking me at every turn.

However in the end I found what I was looking for. This is the Basilique Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours.

It started life as an oak tree, would you believe, in the Middle Ages. When it died they made a statue of Mary from the wood and it became a centre of pilgrimage for some unknown reason.

In 1637 a chapel was constructed to shelter the statue and then, like Topsy, “it just growed”, The current building dates from 1885-1892, and was awarded the title of “Basilica” by Pope Pius X in 1910.

Incidentally, where I am when I’m taking this photo is in France. Peruwelz is that close to the French border.

Leaving Peruwelz and entering France, there was something that I needed to do so I set course for Albert.

In the past I’d read countless books about the Battle of the Somme and I’d been interested in stories about how the top of the church spire was used as a watch tower by the British and how the Germans could clearly see its gilded top from their lines.

That was what I wanted to see for myself and due to a variety of different circumstances I didn’t have the opportunity to do that when I was here 18 months ago

So here I am, standing roughly where the Second Line of German trenches would have been prior to the British offensive of 1916 and you can indeed see the church spire quite clearly from here – and probably even clearer still when there is no early-morning mist about.

One of the locals was clearly upset by my stopping outside his house to take the photo. He came out to his front gate to have a look at me so I gave him a cheery toot and a wave as I departed.

Just down the road is the town of Albert and there’s a supermarket there. That’s where I stopped to buy food for lunch as I don’t have very much in the van.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that pathetic parking takes up a lot of space on my pages, and here’s another one that is probably more pathetic than most.

Here on the car park at the Super U in Albert, this rather sad and sorry person has chosen to take up no fewer than four car parking spaces with his Ford Ranger. It surely isn’t possible to be any more selfish than this.

On the way home, we reached a very important milestone in Caliburn’s life was reached.

Somewhere between Amiens and Neufchatel-en-Bray Caliburn’s tripmeter clocked up to 200,000 kilometres. Not bad for a boy who’s just celebrated his 13th birthday. He’s in line for a reward when we return home, whenever that might be.

As I mentioned earlier, for the last week or so I’ve not been feeling too good and I’ve gradually become worse and worse. The farther along the road I drove, the worse I became and I began to worry about reaching home.

It was my intention to call in on Liz and Terry and drop off Terry’s brushcutter but I was in no fit state to do that. I pushed on homewards thinking that the sooner I reach home the better

And just as well, for back here, it was a struggle for me to even climb up the stairs.

First thing that I did when I was up here was to call the boys on the great white telephone, after which I could peruse the finest details of what I’d eaten for the last few days.

Now I’m off to bed, with a handy bucket by my side, and normal service will be resumed as soon as the crisis passes.

Saturday 15th August 2020 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

… today that I haven’t done since 2005. And this time even more so because while back then it cost me nothing, this time it’s cost me a lot of money.

But ask me if I care.

What I’ve done is to walk away from a hotel that I had booked for tonight and went somewhere else (far more expensive).

But more of this later. Last night I had a strange sleep – waking up at about 00:45 to find that the radio was playing. And then sleeping through until about 05:45 without moving. Not a single nocturnal voyage anyqhere to be seen

Plenty of time to do a load of paperwork and then I went down to breakfast. Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling too well so I didn’t eat much which was a shame because there was tons of stuff there. It could have been an outstanding breakfast.

Unfortunately Jackie wasn’t available but Alison was free today as well as tomorrow so we agreed to meet up this afternoon.

Dodging the roadworks and the heavy showers, I set off for Leuven.

The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav brought me all the way through Luxembourg, where I fuelled up before crossing the Belgian border (fuel at €0:97/litre) and the Ardennes, passing through the town of Bastogne where I stopped to take a photo of another abandoned bus

It’s an old “bendy bus”, one of the articulated buses and judging by its number plate it comes from the town of Rotenburg in Lower Saxony but it’s now the Friterie Marsupilami, the FritKot on the Edge of Town.

There’s a fritkot on almost every corner in Belgium and this is certainly one of the more interesting ones. It’s closed though so I couldn’t find out what it was like.

It took me a good while to find Alison’s house – The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav having brought me into town in entirely the wrong direction. It was a nice afternon so we went to the English shop for a supplies such as vegan ice cream.

Later on we went for a walk. We discovered a new footpath that eventually took us past the Kasteel van Leefdaal.

Here we could admire the wildlife swimming on one of the many ponds – mostly man-made ponds – around there

Not that I would want to go swimming on a pond like that. There’s that much algae floating aound on top that you could probably walk on it – or, at least, someone lighter than me could. I must keep on with the battle to keep my weight down.

The Chateau isn’t open to the public unfortunately and it’s hidden behind a rather large wall so you can’t actually see very much of it.

Currently owned by the Counts of Liedekerke it dates from the Renaissance period and replaced a previous building. There is known to have been a building on the site since at least the 12th Century.

Armed with our vegan ice cream, we then went back to Alison’s house for a chat. We must be both getting old because we ended up crashing out in the garden in the sun, something that we found quite amusing, although in fact it was a rather sad indictment of our states of health these days.

Alison had to go out later so I set off through one of the most wicked rainstorms that I have ever encountered. All of the road round by Braine l’Alleud was flooded and the traffic lights at a road junction had failed. That led to certain complications until we all managed to sort ourselves out.

As well as having A FAVOURITE TOWN IN AUSTRIA Strawberry Moose also has a favourite town in Belgium.

It goes without saying that as we were passing within a mile or two of the place, we had to go there. His Nibs is never one to pass up on a photo opportunity whenever he gets the chance, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Having done that, we headed off down to peruwelz on the Belgian – French border and my hotel. But one look at it convinced me that this was not where I wanted to stay. Crowds of single men loitering outside, sitting on the steps or leaning against the wall. Crowds of them.

It’s the kind pf place that gave me a most uneasy, eerie feeling that I can’t explain. But always having been one to rely on my own intuition, I decided that it wasn’t the place for me so I went elsewhere.

Tea tonight was a plate of chips and a salad, and watching the people coming into the fritkot, I can see immediately why the infection rate in Belgium is so high. Despite all of the precautions that are supposed to be taken, the wearing of masks is, shall we say, rather casual.

And the roads in Belgium are appalling. They are much worse that I ever remembered them. They are just like in a third-world country and for one of the richest countries in the world, it’s an embarrassment.

Tomorrow I won’t have far to go on Belgian roads because I’m close to the frontier here. About a kilometre away, I reckon.

With any luck I’ll be over the border early tomorrow and then a leisurely drive home. It might take a couple of days to make it but I’ll be back by the middle of the week. It’s been a long time

Thursday 9th July 2020 – ANYONE CARE TO …

… guess who this is heading our way this evening?

While I was out on my evening walk I noticed it way out to sea and so I took a photo of it with the aim of enlarging it when I returned home to make sure that I was correct.

And just in case you haven’t already gathered, I’m now back home in my cosy little apartment in Granville after my journey back home on the train from Leuven

However, as it happens, I didn’t need to wait until I returned home to find out, because as I was running back home after my trip to the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord, into the harbour she came.

Sure enough, it’s our old friend Normandy Trader coming in from Jersey.

And while her loading bay isn’t particularly full this evening, there are quite a few passengers – maybe as many as a dozen – standing on the deck just in front of the wheelhouse.

It seems that she’s as busy doing these repatriations as her friend Thora

As for me, I was doing my own repatriation this morning, heading for home after my stay in Belgium.

The alarm went off this morning at 05:30 and within minutes I was up and about. I made my sandwiches, packed my bags and so on and was well on my way having dropped the key off at the office.

By 06:00 I was halfway down the road towards the railway station and that’s always a good sign.

When I was here last they were digging up the surface of the Martelarenplein to make some kind of underground parking and I was intrigued to see how they were doing with it

But as it happens, it’s all well fenced off and it looks in any case as if they are now at the stage where they are starting to resurface it. It seems that I have missed all of the excitement.

It was about 06:05 when I walked onto the station platform.

There’s a stopping train that goes out at 06:17 but an Intercity non-stop goes at 06:24 so I decided to wait for that. So while I was waiting I admired the freight trains that were passing through the station – dozens of them.

This locomotive is quite interesting. It’s one of the Bombardier Traxx F140 locomotives, although I can’t tell from here which model.

They are owned by a company called Railpool and that’s an interesting company. It was created by two German banks and owns all kinds of rail equipment including 42 modern electric locomotives that it leases to rail operators all over Europe whenever they have a shortfall of equipment.

This locomotive is much more regular though.

It’s one of the SNCB’s Class 13 electric locomotives of the late 1990s with a maximum speed of 200kph. But they weren’t without their teething troubles due in the main to electrical interference from their equipment that disrupted the signals.

The class 18s, of which we have seen an awful lot, have come in and taken their place on the headline routes, pushing them back onto secondary duties. But they are proving to be remarkably resilient.

5 minutes earlier than planned, my train came in.

It was one of the AM96 multiple unit sets that do the express working to Blankenberge and are quite interesting because when two are coupled together and the bellows seal them in, the cabs pivot out of the way so that you can walk through from one unit to the other.

We arrived in Brussels without any issue and much to my dismay the seats in the waiting area were all taped off. And I had about 45 minutes or so to wait for my train and I didn’t fancy standing for all that time.

Luckily this train came in early too and I had to run almost the whole length of the train to find my seat.

But as I mentioned on the way out to Leuven on Monday, I’m appalled by the casual manner of some people in the way that they are wearing their face masks.

Seeing someone with their nose uncovered is quite par for the course, but this guy here on the train from Brussels to Paris went the whole way, 300-odd kms, with his face mask around his chin and nowhere near his nose and mouth.

His friend sitting next to him didn’t have his face mask on either when i went for a ride on the porcelain horse. I really don’t know what these people don’t understand about a pandemic.

We arrive in Paris Gare du Nord bang on time which is always good news, and I found a different way to the Metro.

Down in the bowels of the station at the line 4 platform I didn’t have long to wait before the train came in. And then I was whisked off through the catacombs down to Gare Montparnasse.

They’ve been working on that for a couple of years and it’s nearing completion. As a result I had to think for a minute about how to find my way to the train shed.

One good thing though is that we no longer have to go all the way down to the platforms at Vaugirard. Our train can fit into the main hall.

An hour to wait before my train but luckily I found a vacant seat so at least I was in some comfort

We were called to our train about 20 minutes before it was due to leave, and that must be something of a record

Having stamped my ticket in the machine I scrambled aboard and found that, once again, I had a travelling companion. As I have said before, I don’t understand this social distancing thing in the station if we are all having to sit cheek by jowl in the train.

At L’Aigle there was an “incident” with a passenger and the police were called. I’m not sure what that was about but it didn’t take long and we were soon on our way. So much so that we actually arrived in Granville 5 minutes early which was quite impressive.

My route home was interrupted by a visit to the Post Office. A recorded delivery letter had come for me while I was away on my boat and I hadn’t had to pick it up.

So while I was passing through I called in for it. And outside the old tourist information office there was a cherry picker with a couple of guys on it working on the clock that’s there.

It’s been stuck at about 01:50 for as long as I can remember so it looks as if they are finally going to to do something about it.

And not before … errr … time either.

As Barry Hay once famously said, “one thing I gotta tell you, man – it’s good to be back home!” and he’s perfectly right too. I’ve lived in a great many places in my life and here in Granville is the only place for which I’ve ever felt any kind of emotion that might be described as “homesickness”.

Usually the kind of “homesickness” that I’ve felt is the kind of sickness that you have when you are sick of a place, but not here.

The travelling takes quite a lot out of me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, so I didn’t do much. I sat and vegetated for a while.

At one point I was tempted to go and lie down on the sofa and watch a film. In fact I actually got as far as switching on the DVD player before I overcame the impulse.

Tea was actually the same as last night, which is hardly surprising because I used the stuff that I brought back from Leuven – pasta, veg and the second falafel burger – but this time with spicy tomato sauce.

The last slice of apple pie that was in the fridge too with some of the soya coconut dessert.

None of the foregoing prevented me from going out for my evening walk and runs.

What actually did put a stop to it was the gale-force wind that had sprung up in the latter part of the afternoon. You can tell what was going on out there by looking at this speedboat that was moored offshore with guys in there fishing.

The swell of the waves was such that it was hiding the boat at times. That can’t be comfortable for anyone out there casting his hook and line into the sea, and I wouldn’t like to be the neighbour of any fisherman there right now.

Out of the wind I managed to run along the top of the cliffs on the south side of the headland.

This takes me along the path overlooking the chantier navale where I can have a good look down to see what’s happening there. And once more we have a full house of 6 boats in there receiving attention.

As I have said before … “on many occasions” – ed … it’s good news for the town that they can keep so busy down there. It encourages people to bring their boats here

Even though I was out of the wind on this side of the headland, others were not quite so lucky.

This little fishing boat out in the Baie de Mont St Michel is having quite a battle with the elements as it struggles to make it back into harbour.

It’s not really the weather to be out there in a small boat like that I reckon. I’m glad that people have so much faith in their equipment.

My run down the Boulevard Vaufleury was OK but as I rounded the corner I was hit by the full force of the gale and that brought me to a dead stop.

It was so powerful that I had to walk on round the next corner before I could continue my run to the viewpoint in the Rue du Nord. Unfortunately the sunset tonight wasn’t all that much to write home about although we did have a nice TORA TORA TORA moment.

No picnickers down on the beach tonight, which was no surprise in this wind. I for one wouldn’t be down there.

From the viewpoint I set out to run back to the apartment but as I passed by the end of the Boulevard des 2E et 202E de Ligne I could see our visitor had arrived.

The little fishing boat was coming into port, but she was following in the wake of Normandy Trader who had now made it into port.

You can see the crowds of people huddled on the deck just there. That must have been a really uncomfortable crossing standing on the deck all the way across the English Channel from St Helier in a wind like this.

Normandy Trader fought her way into the harbour and went off to moor at the quayside underneath the large crane that would unload her.

As for me, I ran off back to my apartment to write up my notes.

First of all though, there was the dictaphone to see if I had been anywhere during the night.

We had been at school last night and we ended up in little groups of about 10 of us doing something on Geography, talking about Iceland, places like that. One girl I particularly wanted to be with she ended up being in another group of 10 which quite disappointed me. I was with someone else in a pair in our group of 10. On going through the names I saw that one particular was in our group and I thought “why didn’t I get myself into a pair with her? Good Lord! I must be really slipping these days! I thought that there would be plenty of time to do that but then I realised that it was right at the end of the school year. For some reason the school year had gone really quickly and there wasn’t much time left. I was leaving anyway at the end of the year and all these opportunities I’d missed yet again.
Later on I was going back home from my holidays and we were having a look at my photos. Someone was saying somethign about the state and condition of places that I had been to. I said that I’d been to a lot worse than this and I had to search through my computer to see if I had any older photos. I came across the photos of 2002 when i was in the USA so we started to look through those. there were some really nice ones there but there were some really dreadful places that I’d seen. “Someone else said “yeh. I used to go on the Fred Trueman Estate or something in Crewe back in the 70s and God! That was a bit dire as well” and we ended up having a chat about all of that

Unfortunately I didn’t finish all of my notes. I ended up falling asleep, which is no surprise. So I’ll have to finish them off in the morning.

And it will be late too because I’m not setting an alarm. I’m always exhausted when I come back so I’ll be having a lie-in.

EPIC HALL

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