Category Archives: Belgium

Monday 27th August 2018 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that the blood count has gone up yet again.

The bad news is that it hasn’t gone up enough and the people in the hospital don’t want me to travel.

Despite the racket in the reception last night, I did manage to go off to sleep quite easily in the end and I was flat out until all of … errr … 04:38.

But even so, I was back asleep until the alarms went off at 06:20.

I had my medication and then a shower and a good clean up. But I was so bust sorting myself out that I forgot to have a coffee. And with no water or anything to drink, I had a thirst that you could photograph.

But I was out early and down to the station where, when I was buying my ticket, I heard them announce a train to Leuven. So I RAN – yes, RAN, dear reader (and you’ve no idea how pleased that made me) for the train and leapt aboard.

And it was then that I realised that I had forgotten to buy any breakfast either.

But there’s a supermarket at the back of the station at Leuven so I picked up some bread rolls and at them as I marched across the city.

I was early for my appointment so I settled down in a comfortable seat, and bang on time, the nurse came to see me and I was all plugged in and hooked up.

When the doctor came to see me, he told me that my blood count had only gone up to 9.3. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that this time last year it was at 13.0 and they were happy to let me go a-wandering off.

Not this time, though.

They want me back in 3 weeks time, so I spent the afternoon in between sleeping having a discussion with Rachel about a cunning plan.

Kaatje came to see me too. I’d had two more bills from the hospital so I handed them to her to pass on to my health insurance people.

When they threw me out, I wandered back downtown.

My route took me down to the Kapicijnenvoer for a change, and outside the Sint rafael Ziekenhuis I noticed that they had dug up the street completely.

It’s quite an impressive piece of work that they are doing.

In the town centre I stopped at a couple of places- the Carrefour, the Loving Hut and the Kruidvat for some supplies, and then I caught the train back to Brussels and my hotel.

Later on, I went out again. Alison had discovered a vegan and gluten-free restaurant called Moon at the back of the cathedral so we met there. It’s a simple buffet where you pay for the food by weight.

Delicious it was too and this will go onto our list of places to revisit, although it’s a bit amateurish in the way that it’s run. The rice ran out and “there’s no more now until tomorrow” – that kind of thing.

We went down to the Gare Centrale for a coffee and a good chat afterwards.

Later, we went outside and I put Alison onto her bus home. Once she’s ridden off into the sunset I had a bit of a loiter around outside.

With all of the photos that I’ve taken of Brussels over the years, I’ve never taken one of the Central Station. It’s not very impressive in the daytime, but at night it’s something else.

The exterior of the station at the Carrefour de l’Europe never used to be very impressive.

When I lived here it was just one main street with traffic just about everywhere, but not the traffic has been blocked off and it has been turned into a pedestrian zone.

The addition of a few pillars and arches, and a few cleverly-positioned streetlights make the place look really good.

From there I went for a little wander around in the dark, boldly going where I haven’t gone for quite some considerable time.

My perambulation took me past the Place de la Vieille Halle au Blés where the statue of the famous Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel stands sentinel.

He’s come out quite nicely in the subdued street lighting.

Now back at my hotel, and 205% of my day’s activity – 16.2kms – I’ve walked today. And it feels like it too.

I’ve made my butties for my journey tomorrow and now I’m off to bed. I have an early start in the morning.

05:20 to be precise.

carrefour de l’europe gare centrale bruxelles belgique

grande place hotel de ville rue de l’etuve bruxelles belgique

Sunday 26th August 2018 – HOMER SIMPSON …

… is alive and well, and visiting Brussels at the moment.

I saw his car parked up by the Gare du Midi this evening.

Actually, it’s probably not his, but probably the one belonging to Miss Hodge, because it’s a little-known fact that Homer Simpson was not the first to use the catchphrase. It first came to prominence in the 1940s in ITMA – “It’s That Man Again” when Miss Hodge used it all the time to express her exasperation at Tommy Handley’s antics.

For the first time for quite a while, and changing the habits of a lifestyle, I set an alarm for this morning. I’m off on my travels and I have plenty to do.

First thing was to make my butties. That’s the most important thing. I can’t starve when I’m on the road. And when the butties had been made, I could then clean down the worktops and the table.

The sink and the draining board looked pretty insalubrious too so I put everything away that I could, and then spent a good 10 minutes cleaning that.

Next task was to put out the rubbish. That had accumulated for a while and its presence had become quite evident, so that went the Way of the West too. I shall have to put the rubbish out much more often, especially in the summer.

Final task was to scrub the waste bin and then put bleach everywhere that needed disinfecting. Grabbing a packet of crackers for breakfast, I hit the streets.

I’ve made something of a miscalculation. It’s Sunday, and on Sunday there are no local buses. So I had to head off to the station on foot, dragging behing me my huge suitcase with Strawberry Moose in it.

But at least it meant that I could see a beautiful yacht come sailing … “dieseling” – ed … into the harbour.

she’s called “De Gallant”, and with a name like that I reckoned that she is probably Flemish or Dutch.

And I was right too. Originally called Jannete Margaretha, she was launched in 1916 in the middle of World War I in the neutral Netherlands.

She was originally a herring boat and later as a cargo vessel, but since 1987 she’s been a sail training vessel. Mind you, she was dieseling her way into the harbour today.

It seemed like a long, slow crawl up the hill with the suitcase and I had to stop a couple of times to catch my breath.

But in fact it was only 08:25 when I arrived. I would almost have had time to have gone to visit the brocante that was setting up in the streets outside.

The train was in so I grabbed a coffee and leapt aboard, settling myself down and having my breakfast. And being interrupted by the girl in front who wanted to borrow my phone charger.

In between reading my book and listening to the radio programmes on my laptop I had a good sleep for half an hour. And that did me some good too.

Barclay James Harvest once famously wrote I have been to a place where chaos rules. I used to think that they had been to an Open University Students Association Executive Committee Meeting but today I realised that they had in fact been alighting from a train on a Sunday lunchtime at Paris Vaugirard, because chaos it certainly was. Whole areas were roped off with hordes of people waiting to reboard the train. We had to fight our way through the queues.

They had even installed a one-way dual carriageway system on the platform down to the main station.

The metro was heaving too but I took up a place right at the front and not only was there plenty of room down there, I even managed to find a seat. But the heat was stifling, especially as I was wearing a fleece.

There seems to have been a change at the Gare du Nord too. Usually there’s a gate at the end of the platform that leads out to the main-line station but today I couldn’t find it and ended up being routed all the way through the bowels of the station.

I went outside and ate my butties, spending more time though fighting off the pigeons.

But I did notice this sign though on one of the doors outside. Crudely translated (and if there’s anything crude involved anywhere, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney “I’m your man”) into the vernacular by Yours Truly, it means “p155 off elsewhere”.

So now you know.

The TGV was crowded too. I was lucky enough to be one of the first on so the big suitcase had a place on the luggage rack. I don’t know what would have happened had I been any later because there was only room for about four on there.

And they must have been cleaning the carriage because there was an overwhelming smell of cleanliness in there. So I settled in and plugged in my laptop. It was then that my neighbour arrived so I warned him not to trip over the cable.

Twice.

So he tripped over it

Twice.

Just by way of a change, I spent most of the journey asleep. The seats were quite comfortable. And so I can’t tell you anything about the journey. But when we arrived in Brussels it was like winter here. All of the good weather had disappeared.

I’m staying in the Hotel Midi-Zuid. I’ve stayed here a few times in the past. It’s an easy 5-minute walk from the station and although the area around here is depressing, this is a modern, clean hotel where rooms represent really good value for money seeing as you are at a vital traffic hub in Europe’s capital city and I have no complaints.

Esyllt rang me up. It’s been a couple of years since we last saw each other. She’s in Brussels right now so we arranged to meet at the Gare du Midi.

We ended up having a good walk around the city in the rain, even finding an open-air techno music exposition. But even more excitingly we found an Indian Restaurant, the Feux de Bengale.

Esi isn’t a big fan of Indian food, but I am. And there were a few banal foods on offer on the menu. And so we had one of the nicest meals that I have had for quite a while. My potato and cauliflower curry was delicious.

Interestingly, when I was going to look for the conveniences, the manager sidled up to me and whispered “we have rooms for the night or for the hour”. This kind of thing used to be quite common in Brussels but I was under the impression that it had pretty much died out.

But what use would I be, even for an hour? As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed …I can still chase after the women – I just can’t remember why.

Last time any young lady asked me, when I was in bed, if I needed anything, I replied “a glass of wincarnis and a hot water bottle”.

We carried on with our walk afterwards and ended up in a bar. And one thing that we noticed was that despite there being quite a few people in there, and plenty of couples too, Esi was the only female in the place.

Eventually we arrived at Esi’s metro station so I put her on the train to the friend’s house where she was staying, and I walked back to my hotel.

Lots of changes in the city and the main road through the centre is now a pedestrian walkway. It’s much different from how it was when I first came to live here – 26 years ago now.

My hotel room is on the ground floor, and there’s quite a lot of noise coming from the reception area. I hope that I’ll be able to sleep tonight with all of this going on. But at least the room is well-appointed and I’m quite pleased with it.

I’m at the hospital tomorrow.

Tuesday 7th Auguat 2018 – JUST HAVE A LOOK …

… at the front of the train that brought us back from Paris this afternoon.

If you look carefully, you’ll notice all of the marks and dents on the front cowling around the coupling hitch. That’s right – I’ve been involved in a railway accident (well, of a sort) on the way back home.

It’s all happening to me these days, isn’t it?

Even though it was a (comparatively) early nigbt for me, I was totally flat out until the alarm went off. No noisy neighbours, no power cuts, nothing to disturb me.

We had the usual morning performance but instead of a shower I went out early to the SPAR supermarket down the road. A baguette, tomato, banana and a reel of plaster. I’ve noticed that with all of the walking that I’ve done just recently I have a blister on my little toe and I need to pad it out.

Today I have vegan cheese (from the Loving Hut yesterday) and tomato butties, with a banana for pudding. And having plastered my little toe, I can’t remember what I did with the rest of the reel of plaster. Age is certainly catching up with me.

Having packed, I checked out and walked through the burning early-morning sun to the station, where I just missed the 09:09 train.

But not to worry, the 09:19 train from Genk to Blankenberge was not far behind so I didn’t have long to wait.

It’s one of the AM96 class of multiple units, built in 1996 and although they might not look it, they are capable of 100mph, which is just as well because I didn’t want to hang about.

And even though it was packed, I managed to find a comfy seat.

It was a good plan to arrive in Brussels early as it gave me an opportunity to visit the bank that’s in the vicinity. I managed to cancel the monthly payment for the parking in Leuven, but as for activating my bank cards for use outside the EU, apparently there’s a problem. The copy of the electricity bill that I presented to the bank last time as proof of identity of my change of address has been rejected. I need to contact my own branch to see what I have to do next.

Anyway, I don’t have the time to go to Schuman so this is something that I need to do by writing when I arrive back home. Just one more task added to the heap.

The TGV pulled in a couple of minutes late. It’s one of the first-generation ones and they are now starting to age and are showing it.

Little patches of corrosion appearing around the most exposed places and just painted over. It makes you wonder what they are like where you can’t see – not the kind of thing for a nervous passenger when you are hurtling along at 300kph.

Apart from that though the voyage was quite uneventful. Except, of course, that I somehow managed to be convinced into lifting down all of the baggage of a group of Dutch women. And I reckon that it would have been so much easier for them to have bought tickets for the kids instead of stuffing them into the cases – unless it was lead off the local church roof that they were transporting.

10 minutes late arriving in Paris, but it didn’t matter one jot because the metro was strangely deserted and I arrived at my platform in a new record 35 minutes. And had I done that the other day I might just have caught my train.

The train to Granville was busy but I was in luck (for a change) – at least at the start of my journey anyway.

Not only was the seat next to me empty but I was on the north side of the train.

Not only did that mean that I was out of the sun, it meant that after all this time I finally managed to take a good shot of the Eiffel Tower.

And not only that. If you look on the horizon to the right of the image you’ll see Montmartre and the Eglise de Sacre Coeur.

You aren’t half having your money’s worth, aren’t you?

We rolled on and on through the countryside, with me rolling in and out of sleep (just by way of a change).

In the past I’ve seen something that looked very much like a solar farm just across the road from the railway station at Surdon.

And so being in the right place at the right time I was able to confirm that it is indeed a solar farm. That’s quite interesting.

And so off we set again to continue on our route.

The weather was slowly starting to deteriorate by now and by the time we arrived in the vicinity of Vire it had changed dramatically.

The skies had gone completely grey and overcast, and it looked as if we were on the point of receiving a right old pasting.

A little further on we were presented with a perfect example of an “anvil” storm cloud which you can see right in the middle of the photograph.

And when we stopped at Vire, we were met by a torrential rainstorm. There was a terrific gale blowing that was whipping up all kinds of dust, vegetation and other objects.

It really was impressive.

We carried on through the weather, but we didn’t get far.

About half-way between Vire and Villedieu-les-Poeles we ground to a halt, right across a level crossing, to the dismay of a couple of farmers and motorists who were trying to cross.

After we’d been stopped for five or ten minutes, we had an announcement. Apparently a very large branch had blown down off a tree alongside the railway line in the storm, and we had hit it.

We had to have the train inspected to make sure that there was no significant damage and that it was safe to continue.

As a result we were a good 40 minutes late arriving in Granville, and I had a brisk walk home.

The storm that we had had in Vire had clearly passed through Granville as well because the streets were littered with all kinds of debris.

But I was much more interested in this particular sight just here.

I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen the harbour gates actually in the process of opening, but I was in luck today because they were actually in operation as I walked past;

They are open for about six hours a day, I reckon. 90 minutes before High Tide, and they close 90 minutes after High Tide.

And not long after I returned, we had a torrential rainstorm. That put me off going for my evening walk – not that it mattered because I have done 109% of my daily effort.

But one thing that came out of this voyage, and that was that instead of taking my backpack and a small suitcase, I crammed everything into my new large backpack and took that.

And it worked just fine. There was an issue with the zip but I felt much better with it and I was certainly much more mobile. I shall have to do that again.

Monday 6th August 2018 – I HAD A SMASHING …

… time in the café this evening.

There was nowhere to sit so Alison and I took our drinks outside to sit on the wall. I carefully put down my glass and my bottle of water, carefully put down my rucksack, went to sit down, lost my balance and smashed my glass.

Ahh well.

Having crashed out so dramatically last night, we had the Sleep Of The Dead until about 04:50. Totally painless – didn’t feel a thing.

I beat the alarm too and was out of bed before it went off. The washing wasn’t dry (of course) so I searched for a clothes hanger – and instead, found a cooling fan in the wardrobe! I wish that I had found that last night!

Breakfast was very pleasant of course, and then I set off for the hospital. A long, hot weary trudge through the streets in the heat;

I’d gone out early because last time when I had tried to go to the Bank, it was closed in the afternoon. So I arrived a couple of minutes after 09:00, only to find that it was closed for holidays.

It’s really not my day, is it?

There was a new girl on reception at the hospital and she didn’t recognise me, so we had to go through all of the identity checks again which is a pain.

And then with them being under so much pressure, I had to wait a good 25 minutes before I was seen to. And the nurse was somewhat rough with the needle too.

All throughout the day I melted and melted. They wouldn’t open the windows so after I had had a good moan for a while they bought me a fan. And that was much more like it.

The good news is that I have lost 5kgs in weight, and my blood count has gone up to 9.1. Not as much as I had wanted – last year it was 13.0 after the session had finished, but I have one more to go of course, but it won’t reach that.

The doctor doesn’t think that things are quite so urgent, so I told him that I was thinking of taking a holiday after the August visit. His response was “see you when you get back then”, which means that I can at last think of a plan.

I’m not sure what, but Alison and I saw a trip to Cape Verde that could be interesting.

Kaatje was there too and we had a chat. She’s off to Croatia soon so I asked if there was any room in her suitcase.

Eventually I was released, and I walked down to the town in the heat and did a little shopping, as well as buying myself a sorbet.

Alison left work and came to join me, and we had a really good walk before breaking off for a burger in a new vegan rstaurant (although the owners claim that the restaurant isn’t new at all, but we had never seen it before).

We had another sorbet for pudding and then walked down to the cafe on the canalside where I had my adventure with the glass.

Now I’m back here, having had a nice shower to cool me down, and I’m off to bed. With the fan blowing all over me because it really is hot tonight.

But it doesn’t look as if it is the case now, because we’ve just had a power cut. So that’s put paid to that idea.

And even as we speak the power comes back on. So I might have a decent sleep yet.

Sunday 5th August 2018 – EVERYONE CAN MAKE …

… a mistake or have a problem.

That’s not a big issue under any circumstances.

What is important is how you manage to negotiate yourself out of them.

So when the train for Paris this afternoon set off 20 minutes late, and just got later and later and later as it travelled east, now was the time to put the SNCF to the test, because thanks to all of this, I knew that I would never catch the TGV to Brussels.

For a start, there was no conductor on the train. So I couldn’t have it stamped then and there.

There was however an announcement “anyone in danger of missing a connection should go to the information desk” which, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is right away across the far side of the station.

And so I did.

I explained to the receptionist what had happened, and he told meto go in and see the “travelling today” people.

Despite the hundreds of people in there, there were just 5 staff on duty. So we sweltered and waited. One of the staff thenclosed down his post, and a girl came to take over.

She took (because I timed it) over 11 minutes to start of the computer, adjust her chair and the screen, disinfect the desk and all kinds of things before she was ready to work.

Eventually she made a start and about half an hour later it was my turn. Of course, I drew this woman, didn’t I? She looked at my ticket and said “there’s nothing I can do”;

She told me that the Thalys is not an SNCF product but an independent company, and I should go there. So I wanted to know why the receptionist hadn’t said anything to me, to save me wasting my time.

She couldn’t answer that, but at least she stamped my ticket with an official stamp and a brief note.

The metro was, surprisingly, rapid and had I been away from Montparnasse rather smartish, I might even have caught my train.

A helpful SNCF guy directed me to the Thalys office and there, the receptionist checked my ticket and looked at her computer.
“The next train is …” the one that’s an hour after mine, leaving in 10 minutes “… and it’s fully booked”. But she gave me an authority to travel and told me to sit in the bar.

And that wasn’t all. She noticed that I looked hot and flustered (my normal state of affairs these days) and gave me a glass of water.

So SNCF didn’t do too well, but Thalys scored 10 out of 10.

Last night I’d gone straight off to sleep and apart from a brief awakening, it was totally painless until 08:00.

Alison and I had breakfast together and then we went for a walk along the beach. We couldn’t stay long because the tide was coming in, but we sat on the wall and had a good chat for ages.

On the way back to the apartment we passed through the Place Cambernon.

There seems to be something going on here later today. They’ve been setting out all kinds of tables and chairs out here and there’s some kind of fast-food stall in operation

This is the kind of thing that always happens when I’m on my travels, doesn’t it?

We came back here to make our butties for the trip, and then left for the railway station.

On the way out I forgot my camera so I had to run back for it.

And I came back out just in time to see Marité go sailing past the entrance to the port. She looks absolutely magnificent out there like that.

We arrived at the station, to find that we had the train times wrong and we were an hour early.

So we went across the road to the café for a cool drink.

I mentioned the performance on the SNCF train, but once I was on the TGV I installed myself in one of the seats in the bar.

The one that I had chosen was reserved, but there was another one free, next to a young African girl who had also travelled up on my train and missed her connection. So we had a chat all the way to Brussels.

For once my luck was in, though; I stepped off the train at Bruxelles-Midi to find that there was a Leuven train pulling in just two platforms along.

And so I was in Leuven by 21:20.

And even more luckily, the new fast-food place that has just opened outside the station does falafel. So I had them make me a falafel and chip butty for tea.

My room was ready for me, but it was absolutely piping hot. I was already hot and sweaty so I had a very cool shower and washed my clothes. They won’t take much drying in this heat.

I didn’t even bother to dry myself either. I just crawled, damp and soggy, into my bed and crashed out straight away.

Sunday 8th July 2018 – WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT …

… that by the end of the day I would have been setting my foot inside Canada?

Only in your wildest flights of fancy would you have imagined it, but nevertheless, here I am. And quite right too if you ask me.

I DID say “never say never”, didn’t I? And where there’s a will there are relatives. So Canada here I came.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?

As expected, I had a bad night with my noisy neighbours. But not so bad that I wasn’t able to go off on a nocturnal ramble.

A rather distressing one in fact. Two men were trying to extract a piece of wood from underneath a huge pile halfway up a scaffolding at IKEA of all places. The pile titled alarmingly and caused two yellow dumper-type lorries to swerve. One of them crashed into Caliburn and badly damaged him, but the lorries didn’t stop until they were round the corner. I didn’t know which one was responsible for the damage so I challenged them both. But they both denied it. A friend of mine, someone from school, was travelling as a passenger in one of them and he reckoned that it was the other so I challenged that driver but he still persisted with his denial. I tried to explain that I had seen what happened with the wood so they could hardly be blamed and the insurance would deal with it anyway, but they still refused to admit which one of them it was.

Awake before the alarm, I did some more paperwork and then tidied up ready to leave.

I had a gentle moan at the receptionist about my neighbours (it was hardly her fault, was it?) so she offered me a complementary coffee.

It pays to complain, if you do it nicely enough.

Round the corner to fuel up Caliburn, to the Carrefour Sunday supermarket for bread and some buns for breakfast, and then on the road in the blinding heat for France, eating my bread rolls and drinking my coffee as I drove.

My route took me all the way down the motorway well into France, and I came off at Denain and headed for Douai.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its very first incarnations will recall that I called Denain “The Land of the Living Dead”. All of that area, Denain, Douai, Doullens, they are all old mining and heavy industrial towns and the collapse of Western European heavy industry in the 1980s affected them terribly.

They were bad 20 years ago but now they are even worse than parts of Stoke on Trent, and that really is saying something, I’ll tell you that. Horrible, sad, decaying cities.

I found a place to stop and eat my sandwiches, and then went to book a room in either Albert or Arras. And I don’t know what is happening there right now but prices are through the roof. There’s clearly something going on.

All that I’ve managed to find in my price range is a flea-pit in Lens about 20 miles away from where I want to be. That’s not a good sign.

But anyway, I’m back on the road and heading for this afternoon’s destination. And The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav is doing her best to confuse me.

But before I actually reach there, I’m side-tracked … "yet again" – ed … by something that’s not on my list of places to visit.

I’d heard of the “Tank Cemetery” somewhere in the back of my mind, where graves were laid out in the shelter of an abandoned tank, but that was up north.

So seeing a sign for the “Tank Cemetery” around here at Guémappe, I went for a look.

It relates to inter alia an action on 23rd and 24th March as a continuation, I suppose, of the Battle of the Somme, when the village was stormed by soldiers of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, and then subsequently by a couple of Field Ambulance Units until it was overrun in the German “Spring Advance” of March 1918.

And there are 64 Cameron Highlanders buried in one mass grave here.

Anyway, I eventually reach my destination. This is Foncquevillers Military Cemetery.

Foncquevillers was a British stronghold behind the front line in early 1916 and it’s where part of the british Army assembled to plan its attack on the Somme.

What we are going to be doing over the next few days is to sketch out the plan of attack of 1st July 1916 when General Rawlinson’s disastrous handling of the the Third and Fourth Armies led to a debâcle unparalleled in British history and a disaster second only to Dunkirk.

I’m not going to write too much about it here because there is so much to say and I can go on for ever … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed … and besides, it’s going to be spread over a couple of days … "and several fields too" – ed.

So I shall just say that I had a very pleasant afternoon ambling through the sunshine.

And you’ll be surprised at just how much is left to see after 102 years. Most of the stuff has been ploughed away but you do occasionally find some gems.

But from there I headed north to Lens. All 45 kilometres of it and it’s rather a drag.

But Rupert Brooke famously talked about “a corner of a foreign field that is forever England”.

What he didn’t say is that there’s a couple of corners of foreign fields that are forever Canada and I’m standing in one right now.

I came here with Nerina 30 years or so ago, but I’ve no idea where my photos might be, and so I came by again.

And for those of you who couldn’t see the monument clearly, here’s a close-up of it in all its glory.

It’s a monument not only to the events on Vimy Ridge over Easter 1917 but also to all of the fallen Canadian soldiers who have no known grave – more than 11,000 of them.

And their names are engraved on tablets as we saw at the Menin Gate at Ieper.

You can see why possession of Vimy Ridge was something worth fighting for – if anything is worth fighting for, that is.

The view all over the plain between Douai and Lens is phenomenal, and it’s the first real occasion that the British and French had of actually overlooking the German front lines – the Germans always going for the heights.

But I’ll come back to all of that in a bit.

Right now I’m off to my hotel. I eventually find it by the railway station in Lens. I’m pretty disappointed with this one – not for the least of the reasons being the weird landlady who clearly ought topass the bottle around instead of keeping it for herself.

The room is OK and stifling hot, so I nip downstairs and bring up the fan. That’s much better.

A quick wash of the undies and I sit down to do some work but my heart isn’t in it and eventually I drift off to bed with most of the stuff undone.

I can’t keep it up these days like I used to.

Saturday 7th July 2018 – ONE OF THESE DAYS …

… I’ll have a decent night.

But it wasn’t last night, that’s for sure. With all of the excitement following Belgium’s unexpected victory over Brazil there was chaos in the streets and enough noise to awaken the dead.

And so despite everything and all of my best intentions, it was hours before I managed to go off to sleep.

It was another morning too where I was awake long before the alarm went off. When I finally glanced at the time it was 05:47 and I was hoping for something rather better than that.

There had still been time to go on my travels though. Back driving a taxi and I’d been given a list of the regular clients which I was sure that I had memorised, and so I tore it up. And immediately there was a call over the radio “go to Nantwich and pick up so-and-so”. And I couldn’t remember where he or she lived. My notes were too badly torn to be able to be pieced together so I asked on the radio, but I couldn’t understand the reply which was rather garbled.
A little later I was in Eritrea (don’t ask me why) – an Eritrea that looked like nothing that I had ever seen of it. There was a military patrol walking down a road floating up observation balloons, many of which had fallen to earth and were littering the side of the road. Suddenly the patrol withdrew, leaving me isolated right out in front, a rather nervous place to be. Eventually I found a tourist guide who was selling tickets on a steam train ride. he was negotiating with someone and they agreed on a price of $50:00. The only thing that I could see in the brochure for a steam ride was at $130:00 so I asked about it. He replied that I needed to go to the railway station and book it there. He mentioned 13:30 but I didn’t understand if that was the time of departure or the time of return, and it was all so confusing.

So crawling out of bed I had my medication (now that I have some) but I still didn’t feel like any breakfast so I had a shower instead and cracked on with my paperwork.

The cleaner wanted to come in here at 11:00 but I told her to wait for a while as I was expecting a visitor.

And sure enough, just when I reckoned that I ought to go outside, I opened my door to see Alison pulling into the car park. Bang on cue.

Our first port of call was about 30 kms down the road in Welkenraedt.

Despite only having a population on 9,000 or so, it’s probably one of the most famous small towns in Belgium and it’s one that I’ve been dying to visit ever since I first came to Oostende over 45years ago

And for one of the strangest reasons too, because it’s not your usual run-of-the-mill tourist venue.

Back in the 1970s at the railway station in Oostende there would alwas be a train waiting to meet the ferries, and they would always be going to Welkenraedt.

It aroused my curiosity so I did a little research and found that it was a small town in the north of the Ardennes that didn’t look as if it had any significance at all, so I was puzzled as to why all of these trains would want to come here.

And when you look at the station, it’s a big, modern station that has plenty of facilities and it is all out of proportion to the size of the town

A little bit of research back in those days soon cleared up the question.

Welkenraedt is the closest railway station to the border between Germany and Belgium – in Germany until 1919 and in Belgium afterwards.

And when the railways were electrified, the German voltage system was different from that in Belgium until comparatively modern times. And until the Schengen agreement, there was a frontier post at the station.

So while the passengers were having their passports controlled, the train would be changing engines and then going on to Aachen or Cologne or maybe further still.

Welkenraedt is officially a German-speaking town but when it was transferred to Belgium by the Treaty of Versailles, the SNCB, the Belgian railway company, opened a locomotive depot here and transferred in a large number of French-speaking railway workers.

They flooded the town to such an extent that you will struggle to find German spoken here today. We saw a couple of signs in German but that was about that.

We went off to find something to eat as Alison was hungry, and I forced down a helping of overcooked chips. I’m clearly feeling better after my crisis of Thursday and Friday.

But you can’t cometo this region without going down the road to Moresnet.

For several reasons really, not the first of which is this absolutely gorgeous railway viaduct.

It’s not quite on a par with the Tracel de Cap Rouge of course, that’s rather exceptional, but it’s by far the best that you are likely to find around this part of Europe.

According to the information that I have found, it was built during the period 1915-1916. The pillars are fine examples of reinforced concrete of that period.

It’s just over 1100 metres long and at its highest, it’s about 60 metres above the velley of the River Gueule

That tells us a couple of things

There may well have been something here prior to that period that was demolished at the start of World War I
It escaped demolition during the fighting of World War II

Knowing my usual luck, we would ordinarily have had to wait for about three weeks to see a train pass over the viaduct, and then we would have missed it because we had gone for a coffee.

But that’s not the case here. This is the main railway line that runs between Aachen and Antwerpen, one of Europe’s busiest ports.

We’d hardly pulled into the village before a freight train went rattling by just above our heads.

So while you admire the village of Moresnet and Alison and I have gone for a coffee with the friendly young girl who runs the village café, let me tell you a little story.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars the Treaty of the Limits in 1816 redefined the border between the Low Countries (because Belgium didn’t exist at that time) and the Kingdom of Prussia.

For various reasons, they couldn’t agree with what to do with the commune of Moresnet and so they planned to divide it between them.

Unfortunately, any logical dividing line ran right through a very important and valuable quarry and they couldn’t agree where the line should go so that each country would have half the value.

Eventually, they agreed that the quarry and a surrounding piece of land would be a neutral zone administered jointly by one official from the Low Countries (Belgium after 1830) and the Kingdom of Prussia (the German Empire after 1871).

And so you had Moresnet, Neu-Moresenet (the German bit) and Moresnet Neutre.

In 1914 Germany took all of it, so at the Treaty of Versailles Belgium was awarded all of it, so in 1940 Germany took it all back and in 1945 Belgium regained all of it.

There has been quite a lot of excitement in such a sleepy little Belgian village

But our conversation with the serving wench was quite exciting. being practically right on one of Belgium’s linguistic borders, our conversation drifted between French and German with hardly a pause.

Belgium is a fascinating country.

And if that’s not enough to be going on with, just up the road some time round about 1750 a miracle involving Mary the Mother of Jesus is said to have taken place

Pilgrims came to visit the site so a small chapel was built, followed by all of the usual facilities for the visitors, and the village of Moresnet-Chapelle developed.

A group of Franciscan Friars (and seeing as this is Belgium, they were probably chip monks) were sent from Aachen in 1875 to provide spiritual comfort to the visitors.

As a result, some substantial development took place.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve talked on several occasions about the Chemin de la Croix – 14 stages of Jesus on his way to his crucifixion, death and subsequent resurrection.

We’ve also been to see a a magnificent example of this at Cap de la Madeleine in Quebec.

In 1895 they decided that they would emulate it (the filthy beasts) right here.

In 1895 German benefactor provided some cash to purchase the land around the chapel and they set to work.

The work was completed in 1904 and today there are 14 grottoes made of puzzolane, each featuring one of the stages of the Chemin de la Croix.

The aim is to visit each one, purchase a candle to light in each (which must bring in a fortune) and say a prayer at each one, in order to be absolved of your sins.

Of course, I don’t need to, for regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous guises will recall that I was granted absolution by the Pope, having passed through all of the Holy Doors in Rome during the Period of Grace in 2000.

I choose my friends carefully as you know.

The twelfth station, the Calvaire or Calvary, featuring the crucifiction, is always a good ‘un and there’s no exception here.

In fact, it was so popular at one time that they have installed benches here and occasionally hold open-air church services here.

But clearly not masses, because the place is pretty-much deserted today.

And I shan’t bore you all by repeating the story that a Frenchman delightfully told me, that they asked for a famous sculptor from each country to send in their impressions of how the Calvary should look, and the Belgian sculptor sent in a drawing of John Wayne on his horse.

Final stop (for now, anyway) on our day out was just a couple of miles up the road.

Here we have the Driehoek – or “Three Corners” – where the countries of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany meet.

And when we had Moresnet-Neutre, it was a Vierhoek because that area had a bit of it too.

The girl in red is sitting half in the Netherlands and half in Germany, and the girl on the floor is half in the Netherlands and half in Belgium.

Not only that, the highest point in the Netherlands – the Vaalserberg – is only 100 metres or so from the border and so we had to pay that a visit too.

It’s all of 322.4 metres above sea level, or 1,058 feet for those of you still dealing in real money.

And in the background you can see an observation platform. Apart from the fact that it cost real money to go up there to the top, the number of steps that I saw was enough to put me off the idea.

So having been driven up the Vaal(serberg) our next stop was across in our third country of the day – Germany. And those silly Brits who voted to leave the EU just don’t understand the advantages of having Breakfast in Brussels, Lunch in Luxembourg, Tea in Turin, Supper in Sampdoria and Bed in Bari.

Aachen in fact was where we went, where Alison wanted to take me to a café that she had found. And even though we arrived 12 minutes before the advertised closing time of 18:00, they refused to serve us.

Consequently we nipped to Mullers for some of my white coconut chocolate, and then to the cat café that we had visited a while ago.

The cooking smelt delicious so Alison had some thick soup and I had hummus with raw vegetables and bread.

It’s not far back to Liège from Aachen, even though you pass through three countries to get there. and I was in time to see Russia defeated by Croatia. And I could tell by the way that the first Russian limped up to take his penalty, head bowed to the ground, that he was going to miss it.

Tomorrow I am on the move, and so an early night – if my neighbours let me. They are being just a little rowdy, but then you can’t win a coconut every time, can you?

-1

Friday 6th July – I’M DEFINITELY FEELING …

… poorly right now.

We’re back on the “sleeping all day and eating nothing” spell that we know so well. It was a good plan to book myself in here at the Première Class Hotel in Liège for several days.

A word about the hotel though. They are in general good hotels – well sited, cheap and convenient. But I’ve noticed once or twice now that the rooms are starting to have little defects and the maintenance isn’t being kept up.

I can see them going the way of the Formule 1 hotels if they don’t start to get on top of the little irritating defects.

But be that as it may, I slept until just before 02:00, went off again round about 03:00 and had a brief spell of awakening before going back to sleep until the alarm went off.

And I’d been on my travels too – watching a film starring Michael Caine about a whole series of vicious murders. It turned out that a male transvestite had had a very hard time in a prison and so was intent on dealing with all of the people who had sent him there. He was only exposed by accident at the very last moment when Michael Caine, deciding not to go home but to go to the delicatessan instead (this action took place in Stoke on Trent by the way), recognised the person travelling on a bus that turned at a junction right by where he was standing.
Later on during the night I was with a young girl, about 15 or so, and we’d been on a bus trip to Scotland. At the time to leave, two people hadn’t turned up so we had to wait for them. It turns out that they were Scots women and, as they freely admitted, they had had a drop too much to drink. And this made the journey back very uncomfortable.

I hadn’t paid for breakfast here, because I’ve had issues with that in these places, so my intention was to pay as I go along. But somehow I just couldn’t fancy eating anything.

Instead, I mooched around, did some work, crashed out again, that kind of thing.

Eventually I went for a walk to look for a branch of the Fortis Bank (to no avail) and did some shopping in the Cora supermarket down the road. I’ve bought myself another electric fan. It’s stifling in here and I can’t do with the heat.

And even though I’m not eating, grapes at €2:45 a kilo were too good to resist as was a litre of banana-flavoured soya milk.

Having had another lie-down, I made some sandwiches and to my surprise managed to eat them too. And then another lie-down until about 18:00.

Yes, I’m not feeling so good right now but one thing that we do know is that it will all be better in a day or two. It goes in cycles like that.

Now, it’s just a case of riding out the storm. Or sleeping it out.

Thursday 5th July – WHAT A DEPRESSING DAY!

But let’s not go getting ahead of ourselves.

Last night was weird. I crashed out as soon as my head hit the pillow, woke up again after about half an hour, and then crashed out for good until about 04:30.

And then of course, I dozed off again just a couple of minutes before the alarm went off.

Consequently it was a very tired and weary me that hauled itself out of the stinking pit, and even a shower couldn’t really bring me round. I was feeling awful and for two pins I would have gone back to bed.

But I have things to do, and so I staggered downstairs to the van.

On the car park I met Hans who was loading up his van ready to leave, so we wished each other a good trip and like the Knights Of The Round Table, we each went our separate ways.

There wasn’t all that much traffic on the motorway given the time of morning, so I made it to Leuven in good time. And it seems that my parking spec has been taken by someone else. So I parked in an empty spec and anticipated a row when I returned.

The walk from there up the hill to the hospital was a long, weary walk and I almost didn’t make it. “I’m definitely not feeling myself today” I said, and just as well too because it’s a disgusting habit.

At the hospital I was early so I had to wait around for a while. And the first lot of bad news is that my weight has gone up by 3kg. Hardly a surprise seeing as I’ve been without my tablets for 12 days.

Plugged in and switched on, I slept for most of the day. With just the occasional awakening from the medical staff. And it was during one of those awakenings that I had some even more bad news.

The protein loss has doubled to just over 2.0 and the red blood count has collapsed to 8.8. No wonder I’ve been feeling so ill today.

They are totally dismayed by that and they want to bring me forward to three-weekly visits. That is out of the question for the next visit so we agreed on Monday August 6th – which means that I’ll be travelling back to Belgium with Alison.

And the one after that will be on August 27th, which is also bad news and rules out any possibility of going to North America.

Eventually they threw me out and I headed for Caliburn. Loads of things that I wanted to do but I just wasn’t up to any of them. No-one had said anything about Caliburn being in the wrong place, so we all came back to Liège, stopping off at Bio Planet for some vegan cheese and vegan sausages.

The traffic in Liège was horrendous yet again and it took ages to reach the hotel. By now I was thoroughly and completely tired and fed up so I went straight to bed and that was that.

It’s been a very bad day.

Wednesday 4th July 2018 – THERE HAS TO BE …

… something extraordinarily civilised sitting with a coffee on a terrace in a hotel with my feet almost in the Rhine looking at a car ferry loading up and crossing over to the other side.

It’s not like me at all is it, this “being civilised” bit?

And having had a really good sleep in a really comfortable bed and a really copious breakfast, all for €53:00 per night, then you can understand why this place will be added to my list of places to revisit.

And comfortable bed it was too, although I wasn’t in it for long. I’d taken a plane back to Crewe, and landed at the airport at Radway Green. But the 320 PMT bus didn’t come to the airport and so this meant a long walk with my baggage to the Alsager road. And with having to be back three hours before the flight departure the next day with no public transport, it meant that I would only have time to put my foot in the town before I would have to turn round and come back. And anyone who knows Crewe will realise what a good idea that is, although for some reason that I can’t understand, it bothered me more than it should have done.

And while I’ve been sitting here on the terrace, I’ve been watching the railway line across the river on the eastern bank of the Rhine.

I’ve counted one train every couple of minutes or so, the majority of which are freight trains.

I can’t see the railway line on the Western bank but I can hear it, and the trains seem to be just as frequent. It’s a big contrast to the UK isn’t it?

And it’s not just trains either.

We saw dozens of barges yesterday sailing … "dieseling" – ed … up and down the Rhine too and it didn’t look as if we were going to be disappointed today either.

This one seems to be a gas tanker, and there are even tankers full of sulphuric acid that use the Rhine – one of those sank off St Goar a few years ago.

Having completed another mound of paperwork we all loaded up Caliburn and headed across the road for the ferry.

And this gave us a good opportunity to admire the hotel.

As I said, the Hotel Rhein Inn might be a little old and tired, but on the value-for_money scale, which to me is quite important, it scores an easy 10 out of 10.

I haven’t had such a good sleep and a nice breakfast as that for quite some considerable time.

Just as we were boarding the ferry across the river, a canoeist went heading across our bows.

That’s rather a dangerous sport to do here, I reckon with all of the river traffic. There aren’t just barges but cruise ships, pleasure boats, speedboats and all that kind of thing.

And so shouldn’t go lighting a fire in your canoe. After all, we have been told for many years that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

So off we set.

And the crossing was not as straightforward as you might think because we had to dodge and swerve around the barges that were heading up and down-stream.

They didn’t look as if they took any prisoners while they were on their travels. “Full steam ahead” without even a hint of “left hand down a bit” to swerve around the other traffic on the river.

Now that I’m on the eastern bank, the first stop has to be on the edge of the town of Erpel.

That over there is the western tower – the one that has been transformed into a museum by the then-mayor of Remagen and financed by the sale of the stones from the demolished central towers.

And despite the bridge being more-associated with the town of Remagen I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better-seen from Erpel.

This is the eastern tower here in Erpel.

You’ll notice the slits in the brickwork here. The bases of the towers were designed to accommodate troops of infantry who would defend the bridge, and the slits were loopholes through which rifles and machine guns could be fired.

The accommodation in there has now been transformed into a Performing Arts centre.

Here on the eastern bank, the railway line that crossed the bridge disappeared into the railway tunnel halfway up the Erpeler Ley

This tunnel, almost 400 metres long, curved around to the right and joined up with a railway that connected to the line along the eastern bank.

It was hiding in this tunnel that the German engineers pressed the plunger that detonated the explosives that failed to go off correctly.

It was discovered later that an artillery shell had severed many of the cables that connected the individual charges.

There’s a good view of the town of Remagen from along here too.

The Rhine was at one time the frontier of the Roman Empire and here the Romans built a fort, which they called Rigomanus.

A town grew up around it and although the town was fought over and destroyed many times, each time it arose again from the ashes.

The church that you can see over there may well be the church of St Apollinaris.

The story goes that a ship loaded with Holy relics sailed from Milan to Cologne in the Middle Ages, but grounded at Remagen.

They unloaded some cargo to lighten the ship, and as soon as the relics of St Apollinaris were unloaded, the ship floated away.

His relics were then interred in the old Roman chapel here which was subsequently expanded into a church.

So if you are suffering from gout, epilepsy or venereal disease, this is the place to be.

Bad Hoffen up the road is also the place to be as far as I am concerned.

Here littered around a yard at an old factory was a whole collection of old commercial vehicles, one of which was this Oshkosk

Oshlosk is a company that is a builder of specialist vehicles in Appleton, Wisonsin, USA and was founded in 1917 to make severe-duty 4×4 vehicles

As for this lorry, I don’t have a clue what it might be, although rollers on the deck indicate that it might have been for use around a steel mill or something.

As for the car on the back, we all know what one of these is because we’ve seen one before. It’s a Cadillac Fleetwood and I reckon that it’s either a Series 7 or a Series 8, which puts in in the late 50s or early 60s

There was tons of stuff here and I didn’t really have much of an idea about what they might be.

There was even a “Whirlybirds” helicopter parked up here. Someone had had his chopper out.

I’ll have to do some research when I return home and I’ll update this page with a pile more photos so that you can see just what there was in here.

Not long after this, we had a little excitement.

It was grey and heavily overcast out over Bonn and I was sure that a storm was threatening.

We didn’t actually see any rain but I suddenly came across a patch of road that was soaking wet and you could smell the rain in the air.

It didn’t last long before we were in the dry again, but it really was bizarre. I learnt later that they had had a severe storm which, although it only lasted for a couple of minutes, was so severe that several houses had flooded.

We pushed on and as we drove past Bonn (which is on the western side) I noticed the ruins of a castle perched on a rock.

Ordinarily I would have gone to make further enquiries but I missed the turning to where it was situated and there was so much traffic that I wasn’t able to turn round easily enough.

And so we carried on

We eventually found a LIDL (you can never find one when you want one, and when you don’t need one you keep on tripping over dozens) where we were nearly squidged by a German drifting across the road in his car, mobile phone in one hand.

And having bought stuff for lunch, the next issue was trying to find a place to eat it. I must have driven down dozens of little alleys heading towards the river only to be disappointed with no parking.

Instead, I ended up crossing over the Rhine, just south of Cologne, thinking to myself that I’m glad that I’m not travelling eastwards.

I didn’t like the look of any of that at all.

Instead I pulled off the motorway at a very dirty unwelcoming service area and did my best to eat my food without noticing too much all of the rubbish that was littered around.

At Aachen I left the motorway to look for fuel and as luck would have it, the only petrol stations open were on the other side of the road and crossing over in all of the traffic was practically impossible.

So I pushed on, into the Netherlands and round by the winding road that goes across the highest point in the country, and into the Belgian Ardennes.

Still without finding any fuel.

I was now in that part of the Ardennes which had seen heavy fighting in the Battle of the Ardennes – or Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans launched a surprise attack on the American forces sheltering here, hoping to break through the lines and recapture Antwerp.

The attack failed but it caused heavy casualties. An American tank Corps based in Neufchatel was badly cut up by the attacking Germans and the citizens of the town, in partnership with the American Army, erected a memorial to the soldiers who had died.

So we carried on and eventually arrived in Liège. By now the fuel question was becoming rather desperate – Caliburn had done a record 840kms on three-quarters of a tank – so I pulled off at the big commercial shopping centre.

And wasn’t that a mistake?

We were now well and truly in the rush hour and it took ages to sort ourselves out. I took a little short-cut that I knew but to my dismay the motorway entrance was closed for repair so I had to go back and fight my way through the traffic.

I eventually reached the hotel, to find that Hans had beaten me by a good couple of hours.So I went for a quick shower and, shame as it is to admit it, crashed out on the bed for 20 minutes.

We ended up at Chi-Chi’s, one of the franchised Tex-Mex restaurants. They concocted a vegan meal for me which was totally delicious. But when was the last time that you ever heard of me leaving a table with food still upon it?

And not only that – Usually we spend our meal-times discussing the women and girls in the restaurant but today we ended up discussing our medication and bowel problems and the like.

Aren’t we getting old?

Back here, I couldn’t even keep my eyes open so I came back here and crashed out for good.

it had been a long day.

Saturday 9th June 2018 – THIS IS TURNING INTO A DISASTER

And I’m not quite sure about where to start either.

I could, I suppose, make a start by telling you all about last night’s nocturnal ramble. And that was such a confused, jumbled, rambling voyage too and I’ve probably forgotten most of it.

But I do remember leading a party of other motorists to Granville but it was nothing like the Granville as we know it, and the road to there was even more different. Doing it in the semi-dark was another thing too, especially as there were no signposts. However I had been there once before and I could remember the way – at least everything looked familiar like the roundabout near the yacht harbour where we had to turn left. At a certain moment we left the main road and were driving along a farm track where there was suddenly a terrific drop. I remembered a drop, but nothing as terrific as this one but it had to be here because there was no other way that resembled this. Everyone else looked in a panic but I pressed on down the slope and it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.
At some other time during the night I ended up in Bill Badger, my old BMC half-ton van from the 1970s. I’d put it back on the road after more than 20 years and it was running fine. I’d done some work on the engine too and that had me thinking about “why don’t I find a BMC 1622 diesel engine and fit that in the vehicle?”
From there I drifted into YLO, my first Cortina mkIV and I was going round to visit some sportsman. Much to my surprise he was living in very modest circumstances, the only sign of affluence being a small sailing boat in his garden that he was restoring. There was a notice on the gate to the effect that “no matter what, the boat isn’t for sale so don’t waste my time and yours enquiring”. He explained to me that his wife had just given birth and people always though that when you were there with new family commitments that took up much of your time, your hobbies would be the first to go, and go quickly and cheap too. I sympathised, explaining that I had a Transit van and another vehicle up on ramps in my garden right now.
Somewhere in all of this my mother put in an appearance. I’m not sure why. She was being assailed by a couple of women and even though I had no time for her at all, I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for what she was suffering.

So there I was, at 05:20 sitting on the edge of the bed typing out all of this before I forgot it, despite the fact that with a long and exhausting day ahead of me, I needed all the sleep that I could get.

So an early breakfast etc, and organising myself, packing and the like. Ant at 08:30 I was at the supermarket buying a bottle of drink and a baguette.

Having made my butties I went off to hand in my keys and book the room for my next session, giving a big stroke to the cat on my way past.

It was here that today all started to go wrong, if you don’t consider awakening at 05:20 to be wrong.

My next visit here coincides with the big Werchter Rock festival in mid-Belgium, so there is no room at the inn. Not at any other inn in the region so I have been told. And I can’t change my appointment at Castle Anthrax because it fits in nicely with my other arrangements. And I can’t book a hotel in Brussels because I’m in Caliburn and there’s nowhere reasonable to leave him.

But there’s always a Plan B. It’s been years since I’ve been to Liège and I hardly know the city so I might book a hotel there and that will give me an opportunity to go for a wander around the city. I might even at last get to visit Welkenraedt – something that I’ve been trying to do for 45 years since I first saw it as a train destination at Oostende in the early 70s

Not only that, it’s easy to escape from too – avoids the necessity to struggle through the traffic on the edge of Brussels. There’s a motorway that goes from there to France via Charleroi instead.

But it’s still annoying.

At the station I didn’t have to wait too long for a train. It was another Oostende train and so it was heaving with holidaymakers. I ended up being crammed into a corner with about 20 young German kids, several crates of beer and a music centre playing “oompah” music.

That was certainly not what I wanted at that time of the morning, but at least I had a seat. So I can’t complain too much. Especially as one of the boys actually offered me a beer (which I of course declined).

At the Gare du Midi I didn’t have to wait too long for the TGV to be called and to my surprise it was already in the station so we could take our seats and settle down in comfort.

But that was to no avail because the train didn’t move. After a while we were told to dismount. We were apparently having a “technical problem”. They called for a new trainset and they coupled that up to the next TGV so we were half an hour late leaving Bruxelles-Midi.

I went in search of the train manager and made a fuss about my connection to Granville. We had a lengthy discussion and in the end she endorsed my ticket to Granville to the effect that I would miss my train due to their fault and not mine.

We pulled into Gare du Nord 35 minutes late, not 30 minutes late – and that extra 5 minutes proved to be crucial as we shall see.

There’s an RER “express” that does part of the route of Metro Line 4 missing out several stations, so I gambled on that as far as Les Halles. It was indeed much quicker but whatever time I saved was lost by having a long walk between platforms so it wasn’t any quicker really. But I have timed the journey in the past going on Line 5 and then Line 4 and I know full well that I didn’t have enough time today so it was a gamble to nothing.

At Montparnasse I rushed as quickly as I could but it’s a long way, and I reached my platform just in time to see my train departing. For the first time since 1992 I wished that I was back in the UK where the trains run when they feel like it and only pretend that there’s a timetable.

This meant a trip all the way back to the ticket office. It’s possible to travel to Granville on the TGV to Rennes and then the Caen and Cherbourg train from there, alighting at Folligny where there’s a bus that connects with the train. But that goes at 14:14 and by the time I’d walked all the way back to the ticket office and queued to see a counter clerk, that train had long-gone.

The clerk wasn’t all that helpful and I was in no mood for her light-hearted attempts at laughter. She refused to consider finding me an alternative route (far too much effort of course) and so there was no alternative but to wait three hours for the next train.

Another marathon walk back to my platform where I ate my butties and read my book. And listened to the desperate news that “the train arriving from Granville” … which will be the one that will be taking me back … “has been delayed by 40 minutes due to a signal failure”.

But to give them their due, as soon as it arrived and the passengers alighted and the crew had checked it for lost property, we were immediately waved on board. They hadn’t had time to clean it so it was something of a mess, but I didn’t want to wait around for another half an hour. 10 minutes late was quite enough.

During the whole route back I was in something of a daze. That 05:20 start had done me no favours whatsoever and the marathon dash and consequent stress had made things even worse. I wasn’t in much of a state to pay much attention to what was going on.

To make things worse, in view of everything that had happened today I was going to treat myself to a bus back home. But the last bus goes at 20:00 and we arrived back at 20:10 so that was that i had to walk.

And to make things even worse, the only bakery open in the town at that time of night had sold out of bread and buns for tomorrow.

It was a very long drag up the hill and I was stopped by a couple of tourists who needed directions.

So back here after all of that and I’m not up to much at all. I couldn’t even face making any tea. I’m going to go to bed and sleep until I awake. After all, tomorrow is another day.

Friday 8th June 2018 – I FINALLY MADE IT …

… to the railway museum at Schaerbeek today, after several years of trying.

I’ve usually never had the time, had too many other things to do or (on at least one occasion) been too tired to carry on to the station, even though it’s been three years since it opened and I lived about 20 miles away on a direct railway line for a year of that time.

Mind you, I was almost too tired to make it there today.

I don’t recall too much about last night except that it was another disturbed night. I’d fallen asleep listening to a couple of radio programmes and after I’d awoken to switch off the laptop I couldn’t go back to sleep again for ages.

And then it was another “mobile” night, with me sitting bolt upright at 06:00 as something made a noise in the room.

Nevertheless, I’d been on my travels, even though I don’t remember too much about them. It involved a swimming pool somewhere and the changing rooms, instead of being individual cubicles, were cubicles for a dozen or so people. And in our cubicle was a little girl of about 3 or 4 who took great delight in telling us – and showing us too – how she folded up her cozzy when she was ready to leave. From there I went outside to do back home and was looking for the road signs. Sure enough, there was not one, but two road signs pointing in different directions to – was is Cemaes or Caersws? Can’t remember now. That had completely confused but on waking up I could still see them. One was black-on-white and the other was white-on-green so it was obvious that one was via the motorway and the other was via the normal roads. But why I couldn’t work that out in a nocturnal ramble was a mystery to me.

We had the usual morning performance and once I’d settled down, I set off for the station and bought a day return ticket to Brussels.

And one thing that I didn’t know until this morning was that there’s a direct train from Leuven to Waterloo that goes through Bruxelles Schuman instead of one of the main stations. And seeing as I wanted to go to Schuman that would save an awful lot of messing around.

I arrived at the station at 09:50 and the train was due to depart at 09:52 which was perfect timing, even if it wasn’t planned. And I don’t recall ever having travelled on one of this type of train before.

It’s an AM (for automotrice, or railcar) 86, one of 50-odd introduced between 1986 and 1991 and the class has been progressively modernised since 2012. Very comfortable and a smooth ride, apart from the tight curve at Haren.

It didn’t take long to arrive at the Bank, and I shall remember this train for the future. It will come in handy.

Once I was there I picked up my bank card, only to find that they hadn’t sent me the code to operate it. So we aren’t all that further forward. I also managed to complete the change of address, seeing as the guy who manages the counters was engaged elsewhere. But cancelling the standing order for Caliburn’s parking wasn’t so easy. I need to do that next month.

Negotiating the new redesigned Schuman station isn’t all that easy so I was lucky that the 10:55 train was late. But it had a good toilet which was just as well, even if I did have to queue for a while to use it.

With it being late I missed my connection at Bruxelles Nord for Schaerbeek station, but with it being on the main line out to the east of the city there was another train due in 10 minutes – the service S6 from Denderleeuw.

And much to my surprise, that one, a Siemens Desiro AM 08 pulled in 4 minutes early. You can see that we are nowhere near the UK, can’t you?

This one terminated at Schaerbeek and there were only a handful of people travelling on it so I had a carriage pretty much to myself.

Schaerbeek Station is really beautiful, a credit to the architect and the builders, just like many of the public buildings in Schaerbeek which reflect just how wealthy the commune was 150 years ago.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous reincarnations from many years ago will recall the tour that we had of the magnificent Schaerbeek Town Hall.

But times have changed over the last 75 years and it’s now along with Molenbeek and St-Josse one of the poorest communes in the city.

The railway museum was comparatively expensive to visit. I remarked to the cashier that I only wanted to visit the museum, not to buy a train. And there wasn’t all that much stuff that interests me.

Mind you, any railway museum would be considered a total disappointment by anyone who had visited the Canadian railway museum near Montreal. And despite my comments I managed to stay here for a good three hours and when I’ve sorted out the photographs I’ll give you the conducted tour.

Back on the station, my train to Leuven was due to depart imminently from platform 12 so I dashed all the way down there, only to be met by a swarm of people flooding back the other way.

Had I missed it? Not at all. It was a change of platform so I had to dash all the way back again.

And you can see what I mean about the railway station here at Schaerbeek. Probably 18 platforms, of which only 4 seem to be in use and even those are overgrown with weeds and fenced off where they are crumbling. Its former glory has long-gone.

In Leuven I bought a baguette and some tomatoes and a baguette and made myself a very late lunch. Following which I crashed out for a good hour and a half.

I’d been on my last legs going around that museum. I’d even crashed out for a couple of minutes in the gentlemen’s rest room and been caught unawares, not by an automatic flush toilet but by an automatic timer that cuts out the lights.

Later I had a shower and then went to meet Alison.

We had a really good chat and a good meal at our favourite Mexican restaurant where we were serenaded by a group of street musicians.

Not exactly the Ritz and the Palm Court Orchestra, but at least it’s entertainment.

We followed our meal by a walk out to St Pieters hospital that we had visited yesterday. Alison was interested to see the plans for the forthcoming redevelopment of the site. She told me that the site had been intended for the French community but the construction of the building was followed almost immediately by the language schism. The French decamped to Louvain-la-Neuve and never took up their option on the building.

And then back up to town for a coffee.

Now I really am going to crash out. I have a long day to travel back home tomorrow.

Thursday 7th June 2018 – THE GOOD NEWS …

… is that my blood count has gone up from 9.4 to 9.8 and that my protein loss has declined from 1.42 to 1.08 (which is still however a long way from the ideal of a maximum of 0.15)

The bad news though is that the improvement isn’t rapid enough. If you remember last year, it shot up to 13.0 and they signed me off for two months. This time though, they won’t sign me off and the monthly treatments will be continuing.

This means unfortunately that there will be no trip to Canada this year so how dismayed am I? I was looking forward to a nice long break away in Labrador and some other places too, but I can rule all of that out now.

And not only that, the 2kgs weight that I lost over the last couple of months have come back. And I don’t understand that either because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m not eating anything like as much as I used to and I’m keeping up with all of the exercise that I can.

Despite everything that I said about being exhausted, that long crashing-out yesterday evening didn’t do me any good at all. My usual stand-by of watching a film on the laptop didn’t work – in fact I ended up seeing two from start to finish and it didn’t have the slightest effect.

And then I had a really bad night with several attacks of cramp, and even a trip down the corridor at 03:15 and it’s been a long, longtime since that has happened.

But it wasn’t so bad to prevent me going on a nocturnal ramble. And it was another one that might put you off your supper or something. I was up on a hill with someone looking down on atypical suburban street scene, and we were watching a man delivering parcels in one of these big brown UPS vans. He would arrive near his destination, switch off the engine and before the van shuddered to a halt he would leap out, deliver a parcel and leap back in, switching on the engine so that whatever momentum was left in the vehicle would fire it up again. I admired his style and I suggested that I ought to recruit him to drive one of my taxis. But suddenly he was called away elsewhere so he leapt out of his van, having forgotten to switch it off. The van collided with two vehicles and did them some serious harm before coming to a halt. The two drivers were, as you might expect, extremely annoyed by this and with their badly damaged cars, proceeded to ram this van and to reduce that to rubble too. A pedestrian had been knocked over in the initial collision and, thinking that he was the van driver (there was no-one else at the scene) they proceeded to beat him to a pulp. We called the attention of the van driver, now a long way from the scene, to what was going on but he either didn’t hear us or didn’t want to hear us, and was well away. I reckoned that maybe I wouldn’t want him to work for me after all.

We had the usual morning performance and then a shower and change of clothes. And outside as I was leaving the building I was once again assailed by the hotel cat who wanted to be picked up again.

I’d hardly gone 50 yards when the heavens opened and I was drenched. Luckily I had my rain jacket but I was still soaked to the skin nevertheless.

And a poor little kid about 5 years old was scootering through the streets with her mum when she encountered a metal grating where her scooter slid and she had a very heavy and uncomfortable fall. Poor little kid!

But the rain soon cleared up and the rest of the walk was quite pleasant.

But there are big changes afoot in the city.

This is the St Pieters Campus of the hospital and it’s here where I stayed when I first came to Leuven. It’s hardly used these days despite hos modern it looks, and all of the signs plastered around it seem to indicate that it’s going to be demolished and a kind of art gallery and public park are to be built on the site.

‘What a waste of a good modern building” was my immediate thought but it is something of an eyesore and the plans that they have seem to be quite exciting, especially as they intend to uncover a culverted arm of the River Dilje.

But we’ve seen all of these projects on paper before, and finding the funds to carry out the architect’s intentions isn’t as easy as drawing up the plans.

And regular readers of this rubbish will recall four weeks ago I published a photo of this spot in the Brusselsestraat in my “Only In Belgium” series of photos.

And it’s clear that my blog is being very widely read these days, especially by the local council, because they have now put up the correct road sign, showing the road narrowing on the right.

I’ll have to find something else to complain about now, won’t I?

Like parking for example.

Pathetic parking features regularly on these pages but only regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it all originated in Belgium when I was there in early 2013

So it’s only correct that I post yet another example, once more in Belgium.

I was really early at Castle Anthrax. So much so that I was all plugged in, wired up and sat in my comfortable seat a good 15 minutes before my appointment was even due. You wouldn’t have service like that in the UK under the NHS.

And I was there until about 15:30 before they threw me out. Back in four weeks.

Having picked up my medication I walked back to my little room, going via the Loving Hut (where SHOCK HORROR they have run out of vegan sausages) and Kruidvat for some gelatine-free sweets.

Coming back from town I came a different way and this sculpted relief on the side of a house here caught my eye.

Leuven was invaded by the Germans in August 1914 and in their well-publicised policy of “frightfulness” they set out to wipe out the city.

The library, that had tens of thousands of books going back 1500 years was burnt to the ground and dozens of acres of the city were destroyed.

This sculpted relief is a symbol of that period. And what is astonishing about it is that it managed to escape the attention of the Germans who came here again in May 1940 and burnt down the library again.

As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … it’s very easy for people to criticise what they consider to be a lack of resolution against the invaders, but they didn’t have to suffer what the invaded people had to suffer.

And don’t forget that the British abandoned the Channel Islands to the Nazis and didn’t dare invade the islands to reoccupy them until after the War was over.

For tea tonight I encountered the world’s only Italian restaurant that doesn’t have any pasta. Instead I had to have a pizza. Just as well I’d been for cheese at the Loving Hut.

So now another early night. I’m off for a day out tomorrow so I need to be on form.

Wednesday 6th June 2018 – I’VE BEEN REUNITED …

… with my missing wallet. And it didn’t take too much effort.

The route planner that I use proposed a route from the station to the Police Station that took 38 minutes, and from the Police Station to the “Convention” metro station a route that took 22 minutes. However, while I followed the suggested route from the Police Station to the Metro, the route that I took from the station was slightly different (as in “more straightforward and easier to follow”).

And I was on the platform of the Metro station, having been to collect my wallet, long before even the 38 minutes. And most of that time was spent going through the Security check at the entrance to the Police Station.

But I needn’t have wasted my time because there was nothing left of any value in the wallet – not that that surprised me. And it was a pleasant walk through a part of Paris that I didn’t know at all.

I’d had a decent sleep for a change, although it was once more difficult to haul myself out of bed. I had a shower, a quick whizz around the apartment, took out the rubbish, made my butties and made sure that I had everything that I needed.

It was a brisk walk of 25 minutes to the station in the cold, clammy weather, so I was there half an hour before the train was due to depart.

We only had to wait around for about 15 minutes or so before the train pulled in to the station so there was plenty of time to find our seats..

Nominally I was reading DW Prowse’s excellent History of Newfoundland but I spent most of the train journey in a doze.

On one occasion though I had to rouse myself to go for the stroll down the corridor, and the man whom I met leaving the Gentlemen’s Rest Room could have bowled me over, rather like Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles during the fight near the end of the film.

When we arrived at Paris it was still muggy and clammy but it warmed up pretty quickly while I was tramping around the streets.

The Metro was quite straightforward -Line 12 from “Convention” back to “Montparnasse-Vaugirard” and then a brief walk around the corner, not the usual marathon trek, to Line 4. With the works going on at Gare du Nord, I had to alight at Gare de l’Est and take Line 5. And I’ve never seen a Metro as crowded as this one.

But I was in plenty of time to eat my butties before boarding the TGV. It was trainset 4343 and we’ve travelled on that one before.

However this time I didn’t have much luck on it.

Having been exhausted by the walk I wanted to sleep on the train but every time I dozed off, my neighbour wanted to go to the Gentlemen’s Rest Room.

And that was dismaying. I was well out of it by the time we arrived at Brussels.

As luck would have it, we arrived a little earlier, so the earlier train to Leuven was still in the station. So I leapt aboard and we were off.

It was a struggle to make it to here, and once I’d installed myself in my little room I was out like a light for a good 90 minutes.

But it took longer than usual to install myself as, on leaving the office with my keys, I was assailed by the hotel cat again who insisted on being picked up and given a stroke.

Unpacking my stuff, I find that I’ve forgotten my coffee and my ice tray, so down at the shops i had to buy coffee and a pack of these ice cube bag things. And it makes much more sense to travel with a couple of these than a tray.

Tea was baked potatoes (I remembered those) and a tin of Fajita beans followed by a caramel soya dessert and banana.

Now, I’m totally whacked. 151% of my daily effort so even though it’s only just 21:30 I’m off to bed. It’s hospital tomorrow.

Thursday 10th May 2018 – I’M BACK HOME

Yes, with Alison being busy I haven’t hung around in Leuven this time. I came straight back on the train today.

But let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start, as Julie Andrews tells us.

As for last night’s sleep, that was one of the best yet.

With having had a hard day yesterday I was struggling to keep awake even while I was writing last night’s blog and once I’d finished and had lain down on the bed, that really was that, even though it wasn’t quite 22:00.

And for that reason, when someone knocked on my neighbour’s door at 05:00 to awaken him for work, I didn’t mind at all. For that was the first noise that I had heard all night.

First real noise, that is, because there had been plenty of others during my nocturnal voyages. We started off doing something that involved someone – an accountant from Vancouver – from where I used to work. What was interesting about this was not the voyage itself, but the fact that I awoke from it (although I didn’t) and thought that I had better write it down. And so I did – in a kind of spidery hand that when I looked at it after I had read it, I couldn’t make out a word. But of course I didn’t write it down at all. It’s quite amazing where these nocturnal voyages can take me.
A little later I was with Nerina again. She was in bed and she protested that I had hit her. I explained that there was some animal chasing a squirrel- a squirrel that was covered in fleas and maggots and the like – and the squirrel was trying to take refuge in the bed with her, and so I was preventing it from doing so. But of course you would never convince her of that.

But anyway, I was up with the alarm at 06:20 and went through the usual morning ritual, followed by a nice hot shower. Need to be fresh for my journey back home.

Having nipped out for a baguette, I made my butties for the trip and then made ready to leave. And then having to go back for the hat that I had forgotten.

While I was in the office and seeing as I know my plans (or, rather, Alison’s plans) for the next month, I booked my room. Appointment is on the Thursday so I’ll be arriving on the Wednesday, staying Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night (I’m determined to get to see the railway museum in Schaerbeek) and then back home on the Saturday.

At the station I bought my ticket for Brussels and stepped out of the ticket office to find a Brussels train already at the platform. And so I leapt aboard. And wasn’t that a mistake?

It’s a Bank Holiday in Belgium today and so many people are bridging the gap over to the weekend and having four days by the seaside on the Costa Stella. And the train that I had leapt aboard was the express to Blankenberge. So standing room only, I’m afraid.

But at least I was in Brussels with plenty of time (like two hours) to spare before my train; And the time would have dragged had I not found an abandoned Sudoku book with a couple of games still uncompleted.

Up on the platform I took my … errr … station where the noticeboard indicated that my carriage would stop, but the blasted thing shot past me without stopping and I had to run halfway down one of the longest platforms in Belgium.

It seems that instead of a 16-car unit, it was only an 8-car unit today – the bit that comes down from Amsterdam and Antwerp.

And packed too. It took ages to find my seat and then there was a regular change of companion until we finally settled on a young Dutch girl with a 7-month old baby. That kind of thing does my self-esteem a pile of good, I’ll tell you.

Across Paris with little or no effort at all, and then joining the crowds of people waiting at the Gare Montparnasse, where I ate my butties.

The train to Granville was heaving too and I had a fit of confusion, taking four attempts to find my seat, disturbing a couple of piles of people in the process.

But eventually I found the correct seat and settled down for the uneventful journey home. So uneventful in fact that I slept for much of the journey home, despite having the headphones on and listening to stuff on the laptop.

All of this travel is clearly getting to me

The walk back up here was likewise uneventful which suited me fine and it didn’t take too long to be back. And I seem to have brought a streaming headcold with me yet again.

And remind me not to travel on a Bank Holiday ever again.

EPIC HALL

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