Category Archives: Belgium

Wednesday 13th August 2016 – NOW, ABOUT LAST NIGHT …

… I was in bed by about 21:30 and it didn’t take all that long at all to drop off to sleep. And the next thing that I remember was that it was 05:35. I can’t have been for a wander during the night and I vaguely remember only the basics of some kind of nocturnal ramble going on during the night. It concerns Renown Garage where my taxi business was based during the late 1980s. They had dug up the petrol pumps and were concreting them, with this huge cement mixer. However, instead of water, they had mixed the concrete with petrol which had infiltrated into the foundations from the old petrol tanks. This had the effect (at least, it did last night) of making the concrete set quickly and super-hard, and they had far too much of it that they didn’t know what to do with it. I immediately seized on the opportunity to offer my back garden as a dumping ground for the concrete – with the aim of course of covering it over as a place to park my vehicles.

I felt quite better this morning, and even had an appetite for breakfast. And afterwards, now that I’ve bought some soap, I went for a shower and sorted out all of my clothes for washing. And this was when I realised that I only have one spare pair of undies and trousers – no socks, tee-shirt or jumper. Nevertheless, I put everything ready to wash.

I had to wait hours for the machine to free itself, seeing as the cleaner seemed to have gone berserk with the cleaning cycle, but it didn’t take long to wash. Meantime, I’d gone round to the supermarket for my baguette, tomato and banana, and as well as that, bought myself a bag of sweets and a bun because I was starving. This is definitely an improvement.

And my relentless thirst seems to have calmed down too, which is a good thing. You’ve no idea how much liquid I’ve demolished this last few days.

This afternoon I had a doze again for an hour or so and later on went out for tea. Thanks to all of the vegan cheese that I have, I went for another pizza and I polished that off quite comfortably.

Yes, definitely feeling a little better.

But you missed all of the excitement while I was out. Some young guy thought that he would be clever by cycling on the pavement around a traffic queue in the street. Instead, he cycled right into a grid in the gutter, his front wheel jammed and he went head-over-heels right over the handlebars.

Yes, I did have to laugh.

But tomorrow I’m back at the hospital. I’m having a blood test at the day centre and that will tell us whether I need another transfusion, or whether the chemotherapy is actually working.

It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on, and I hope that it’s working because I don’t want to go through too much of this under any circumstances whatever. It’s horrible.

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Tuesday 12th APRIL 2016 – I’VE BEEN OFF AGAIN …

… on yet another mega-ramble during the night. I must be sleeping a little better, which must be a sign of something, I suppose.

Last night, I started out with a girl who was supposed to be Amber, my niece’s daughter (but who bore a startling resemblance both in looks and character to my younger sister) and her friend Julianna. And we were in Canada, on our way west towards Centreville to be reunited with Amber’s grandmother. But Amber (or my sister, take your pick) was certain that her grandmother wasn’t there and that when we arrived she and her friend would have to take the ‘plane to fly on to wherever her grandmother was staying. I was surprised at this because it was the usual time for me going to Canada and she was always at home when I arrived (and why we didn’t telephone to check up was something that I don’t understand either). By now, it was late at night and we stopped for the night at a motel. We had our beds in the foyer so everyone had to go past us to enter their rooms and with me and two young girls the place soon became a real dump, with stuff everywhere for I had had to turn the luggage inside-out to find the food to make sandwiches and I’d been finding all sorts of things. But Amber (or my sister) mentioned the name of the town where her grandmother usually stayed so I looked for it on the map but couldn’t find it. But in a moment of inspiration I looked inside the front cover of the map and there was a rubber stamp from a used-car salesman from the town where she might be. I couldn’t read the writing so I asked one of the girls to look. Amber (or my sister) had a look and told me the full address, and the nearest city happened to be about 250 miles in the opposite direction right near where Hannah goes to University at Antigonish. I told Amber (or my sister) to telephone straight away to her father to see if grandmother was at this address, because now that we had it, we could have a good night’s sleep and head down there directly in the morning. And it was here that I noticed that Amber (or my sister) was having a crafty smoke of a cigarette, so did I have words to say to her about that at her age!
From here, the action moved on to Brussels and a group of Russian “nouvels arrivants” living there. Some of these Russians were fairly young but they were all quite street-wise, and everyone seemed to be concerned with some kind of storage of illicit spirits. One of the girls, called Alina (and who bore more than a passing resemblance to girl called Alina whom I once met) was more determined than the rest and was keen to secure her independence. She had once been dared to work out how to break into one of these secret warehouses and much to everyone’s surprise she had managed to do so. Now, she intended to break in for good and clear out all of the stock and, unsurprisingly, in a fit of boredom and lack of excitement in my life, I volunteered to help her. Terry and Liz offered to help as well. So she turned up, worked her way into the warehouse and we loaded up a van with all of these spirits and Terry quickly drove it off while Alina and I sorted out the finances. When I met up with Liz and Terry afterwards, they were both keen to know all about Alina and my involvement with her and how come she felt so confident as to be able to handle all of this at her age, and on reflection I had to admit to them that I knew nothing really concrete or substantial about her and I couldn’t really see how I had come to let myself be involved in all of this, knowing what the Russian Mafia could be quite capable of “arranging”.
After this, it was the turn of my middle sister to make her debut in my nocturnal ramble. There she was with another girl and both had babies in pushchairs. We were all planning to go off somewhere and the bust was at 08:13 but they were taking far too much time to prepare themselves and their charges and I was trying to urge them on. It was a good 10 minutes walk to the bus stop and I looked at my watch – it was 07:56 and I was feeling that if they don’t organise themselves right this minute, we wouldn’t be going anywhere at all.

It wasn’t 07:56 though because I checked. It was 07:23 when I awoke and, much to my surprise, I was feeling a little (but only a little) better. I actually managed to attack my breakfast with much more confidence. I had the usual repose during the morning, being evicted by the cleaner while she did the room and that gave me an opportunity to do some research into the laundry room. There’s a washing machine there that for €2:00 will do all of your clothes so I’ll be sorting that out tomorrow.

I felt a little better going down to the shops for my bread and when I could finally bring myself to eat it, I felt much better after that. So much so that I postponed my afternoon nap until 16:30 and was back up and about at 18:00.

For tea, remembering to go out early so as not to end up locked out like last night, I had pasta and tomato sauce – to take away – for a mere €5:50. Living in an area overrun with students is paying massive dividends with deals like that. And for once, I really enjoyed it and managed to eat it all without any hesitation.

So I’m off to bed in a couple of minutes. I’m glad that I’ve been feeling better today and I hope that I can maintain the improvement tomorrow – especially if I can keep eating like this.

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Monday 11th April 2016 – IF I’M TOTALLY OUT OF IT TODAY …

… then there is a very good reason for this, because I was well away with the fairies during the night.

“Away” was not the word. I must have crashed out listening to the radio because I awoke at about 01:30, in the middle of the night, to the sound of the Clitheroe Kid.

And I wasn’t alone last night either. I had companions during all of it and I started off with none other than Nerina and my brother. He had a Ford Fiasco which had a luton body on it (don’t ask me how – or why) and he was out and about on his travels when he bumped into me, somewhere on the corner of Edwards Avenue and Edwards Close in Shavington. As we were talking, a police car loomed over the horizon and he beat something of a hasty retreat away from his Fiesta. I asked him why but he didn’t give a convincing reason and in the end I cornered him over the fact that it wasn’t insured. “Don’t you remember that as soon as I got my licence I was planning to go off on that drive across Europe but in the end I had to cancel it. That was because the insurance hadn’t come through”.
So from there we made our way into the company of Nerina who wanted some stuff moving. She didn’t care about how ill I was, and I couldn’t make her understand. We ended up bringing a quad motorcycle down some narrow stairs from an attic, getting it stuck at every turn, and once it was down, off we set. We carried on arguing all the way to where we were going, to Hankelow Hall, to my house in France, and even arguing in some roadside petrol station near Audlem (which was nowhere near Audlem of course) and I’d lost patience long ago.
After a trip down the corridor I was at the seaside. Only a teenager, I was with a group of others and there was a huge storm raging sending spray everywhere and one girl of our party was out running around in it. I went out to bring her inside but I ended up being overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all too and staying out with her. As the storm subsided we went for a walk and ended up taking a short cut through someone else’s garden . I asked her if she knew the people to which she replied that she did. I had no intention of meeting them so I persuaded her to retrace our steps and we were met at the gate by a crowd of people including the fire brigade. Apparently the place had caught fire and so we were asked what we had been doing. I replied with the first thing that came into my head – that we were collecting the pools money – but that was clearly the wrong thing to say because there was some scam going around about the Football Pools and I’d put my foot right in it. Nevertheless, an elderly couple whom I knew saw me with this girl and gave me a “knowing wink”.
And later still, I’d been out with a friend and her husband to a local bar. The husband was quite the worse for wear so she asked me to escort him home. I agreed, provided that she would bring a few bottles back for me to take to my friends. However, outside the bar, husband jumped on a bicycle and despite his wife’s most earnest entreaties, he wouldn’t get off and wobbled off down the street. I grabbed hold of the nearest bike, a kind of Moulton mini-bike with a flat rear tyre and weird handlebars, and shot off after him. But I was so impressed by this bike. Even with a flat rear tyre, the gearing was such that the momentum of going down Vine Tree Avenue took me all the way back up the bank in Chestnut Avenue, and I remember thinking that I shall have to look much more closely at modern bicycles

No wonder that I’m exhausted – but I’m curious to know what Shavington doing featuring in all of this these days.

I slept almost right through to the alarm this morning but it was a slow crawl to the breakfast room. And back here, I crashed out again for an hour straight afterwards. It took me ages to come round sufficiently but the cleaner threw me out of my room at about 11:00. This gave me an opportunity to go to the office to pay for my accommodation. I’ve paid up until Thursday morning because I’ve no idea where I’ll be after then. Will I be detained in hospital or will I be released?

As an aside, the receptionist complimented me on my Flemish. I suppose it must be returning by now but I don’t feel anything like as confident – or as competent – as I think that I ought to be.

I crawled to the supermarket to buy food for lunch and then crawled back here afterwards to eat it and then have another crash-out for a couple of hours. But at 20:00 I staggered out to the fritkot – not feeling very much like it at all but I have to eat and frits are full of fat which, apparently, I must have.

I was in luck at the fritkot – it was the anniversary of the opening of the place and so a medium portion was free. How often does this kind of thing happen to me? I had a struggle to eat them but they all went down and they must have done some good because now it’s 22:00 and I’m still awake.

But not for much longer. I’m off to bed and I’ll see where I end up tomorrow.

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Sunday 10th April 2016 – AFTER MY REALLY BAD NIGHT …

… last night, the first thing that I did this morning was to dash to the washbasin by the wall (and I bet that you are so glad that I told you that, aren’t you?). And, strangely enough (or maybe not), I felt a little better after that. Mind you, that’s not difficult because I could hardly have felt any worse than I did during the night.

But having put all of that nonsense behind me, I managed to eat a breakfast and then I went off for a little walk. The Delhaize up the road was closed today (which I suspected it might be) and so I decided to head for the nearest bakery for a real stockbrood for once. And here I was in luck.

I’d forgotten all about the Belgian habit of everyone going to the banketbakkerij on a Sunday to buy koekjes – the breakfast ritual here in Belgium is for cakes and coffee and some of the cakes are magnificent. They aren’t for me of course, but they did have some sugar-coated raisin buns. Two of those with another coffee when I returned to my little room cheered me up a little.

At lunchtime, I had some vegan cheese on my butty and I’m a little disturbed because the taste seems to have changed. It hasn’t – it’s that my taste buds have changed since I’ve had chemotherapy and that’s disturbing me. It’s one of the reasons that I’m off my food right now. I don’t really fancy anything to eat and the idea of eating anything greasy makes me queasy.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m cold too, and that’s not like me. I ended up having to turn on the heating in my room to make me feel better.

I crashed out for a couple of hours this afternoon – nothing like as completely as I have done over the last couple of days though – and later on I forced myself out to organise a pizza. I must start to eat some food some time. Luckily, I have plenty of sliced vegan cheese hanging around.

Delicious as the pizza might have been, I had to force myself to eat it. And I managed it too and I felt slightly better too.

But I’ve now noticed another little problem – where I had this drain in my right arm, the area is now swelling up, just like the very first time when I was at Montlucon hospital. That, as we know, turned out to be a wandering blood clot and led to my having all of those injections twice a day for three months. I hope that it isn’t – I don’t want to go through all of that again.

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Saturday 9th April 2016 – LAST NIGHT WAS THE FIRST …

… night that I’d spent in a single room for a while so I was determined to make the most of it. But having crashed out earlier in the afternoon, I was awake by 02:00 and spent the rest of the night drifting in and out of sleep.

And drifting in and out of nocturnal rambles too. I started out by leading some kind of commando pack and it was the evening of the invasion of Europe. Our HQ, such as it was, was a landing craft anchored offshore and it was from there that all of our missions were taking place. But after a few hours, a green light came on, somewhere in the sky over the land, and that was the signal for us to move our headquarters onto the shore, to a place known as Home One. Once we had established ourselves here, we checked over our radio equipment and picked up a television broadcast which was an advert for a quiz programme and which featured a young girl who was part of our team – a very fair girl with a blond pony-tail (and, incidentally, someone with whom I’d worked for a short while in Stoke on Trent once). She had made an unbelievable gaffe in this programme and when she had realised, she went a glowing shade of red and the television commercial was showing her changing colour, which we all thought was unfair to keep on broadcasting it. And at the same moment, another one of our female commandos had been manhandled by a group of civilians and one of our male crew who was quite keen on her immediately sprung up to go and give these people some retaliation, and we had to hold him down to prevent him, because this would surely blow our cover and we were not ready for this yet.
Later on, because by now I was having endless trips down the corridor, a friend of mine put in an appearance. He’d been doing car repairs and was making something of a reasonable profit but we were warning him that very soon he would start to get out of hand with this and the authorities would pick him up if he wasn’t careful.

Breakfast looked to be something of a disappointment. We had bread and coffee, and that was really about that. I was having a little curse to myself about that, especially as it was only about an hour later, after everything had been cleared away, that I discovered where they kept the jam and the speculoos biscuits.

D’ohhhh!

But I’m far from well – there’s no doubt about that. After breakfast I wasn’t up to too much and stayed in my room. So much for all of my plans to get out and about. It’s a beautiful city, Leuven, and would have been even more beautiful too except that the Germans burnt it down in 1914 and again in 1940. The former was the saddest of the two though because Leuven had been declared an “open city”, but the Germans of World War I had a policy of “frightfulness” in 1914, committing all kinds of atrocities on the civilian populations for no good reason other than to terrorise them into submission. Burning down the University and its magnificent, unique library was just one of many atrocities committed here in 1914 by the German invaders.

I made it as far as the Carrefour, which was a long way short of the Delhaize and much smaller so it didn’t have anything like the same amount of stuff on sale, and I ended up making a mistake and buying soup vegetables instead of salad. It made no difference anyway because I couldn’t eat all of my baguette.

And when you hear that I’m off my food then you really know that I’m not well.

from about 16:00 I crashed out again and I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep ever since. It’s now 23:30 and for once I’m wide awake, but I hope that it doesn’t last. I really need to sort myself out somehow.

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Thursday 7th April 2016 – WHY DO I ALWAYS …

… seem to be given the perishing room-mate who snores? There I was at 05:30 still not able to drop off to sleep.

But I must have gone off at some time or another because I was on my travels again. I started off trying to make some sandwiches with white bread but every time I went to spread anything onto the bread, it tore the bread away from the crust and after a while that started to annoy me greatly. I decided to go out for more bread but I needed someone to do some baby-sitting for me while I was out (don’t ask me why) and just at this moment a young girl – someone who has featured once or twice in our nocturnal rambles – came along. My idea was to grab hold of her to stand in for me but she was rather uncatchable, discreetly drifting away every time I tried to ask her to help out. But in the end off I went, in an old early base-model Mark I Ford Cortina 2-door, dark blue. MY route took me up a track at the back of some houses, through the daffodils, only to find my way blocked by an old car that I hadn’t noticed, so I had to retrace my steps.
A while later, I found myself in France again and I’d been following this trailer with an old car on it – a Peugeot 203. This was taken off the trailer and pushed up an overgrown lane to where there were another two of them. I couldn’t stop there as it was on the side of a hill, quite exposed and with bad bends, so I parked up in the nearby village and set out to walk back. even though it was a Sunday, there were hordes of people about and I wanted things to be much more quiet than this but I just couldn’t escape the people. I lost my way in the village and was surrounded by curious onlookers and I couldn’t find my way to these cars. Most of the people were British and there was clearly something going on of which I didn’t like the look at all – a drugs deal or other criminal activity maybe and this was an uncomfortable place to be. And somewhere along the line, this girl appeared in it again.
And yet another while later, I was in a car with, having made a dramatic reappearance, this same young girl. We were watching these British people and they were making a film – something like one of the 1970s “Cops and Robbers” dramas on British TV. This involved a car chase – the part in which she was interested – and so was I when I saw that the car being chased was a gorgeous Daytona Yellow Ford Taunus – the model from 1973-76. It was the most beautiful car of its type that I had seen for years and I had my heart set on it but I knew in my bones exactly what was going to happen to it – and I was right too. They slammed it right into the external corner of a wall and put a huge V-shaped dent in the front of it. I was furious and leapt out of the car calling them all kinds of names and in the end, after the chase had passed by, I man-handled the Taunus onto my trailer, which just happened to be attached to the back of my car. I asked this girl what her plans were for tomorrow and she told me that she “had to go to check out a scene for the Sweeney” – one of the aforementioned “Cops and Robbers” programmes and I took it to mean that she had to go and look at a location to see if it would be suitable for filming. I thought to myself that she isn’t half having some interesting and important tasks for a girl of her age.

But it’s amazing in a way that the same person can appear in all three parts of my little voyage during the night, and that I was of the opinion that it was all interconnected in some way. It’s not the first time that I’ve stepped out of a little nocturnal ramble only to step right back into it later at more-or-less the same place.

Anyway, after this, I did finally go back off to sleep and I remember being off again, but being awoken at 07:30 so that they can take a blood sample, well before you’re back in the land of the living, means that wherever I went has gone forever.

We had the cleaner coming along quite early and she showed quite clearly that she must have studied under Hattie Jacques. It must have been the turn of our room to have “the works” because she went over it from top to bottom, to such a thorough extent that Hattie Jacques would have been quite impressed. I kept to my bed while she was at it. That seemed to be the safest course.

I had a whole stream of visitors – nurses, doctors, Professors and the like. And each one told me a different story about my stay here. But one thing became clear, and that was that my blood count isn’t so good. The transfusion that I had the other day brought the count up to just 8.1. That’s close to the critical amount of 8.0 and so they are proposing another blood transfusion to bring it up to something more like it.

First off though, was to have more chemotherapy. They’ve decided that I’m fit enough to have a second helping of that before they give me more blood and so they made the necessary arrangements. And remembering how things unfolded last time, they took it slowly. That meant that they didn’t finish it until about 18:30, by which time it was too late to do the blood transfusion and throw me out.

That disappointed me – it means that I’ll have to stay here for yet another night and go without sleep once more. It’s ruined my day completely, the effects of last night without sleep because I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep all day and I’ve not really been able to accomplish anything that I’ve set out to do. How I dream for a good night’s sleep and a proper day of some kind of effort.

Not only that, OH Leuven were at home to White Star Brussels this evening. I’ve never seen Leuven play, but the last time that I saw White Star, they had about 200 supporters and a brass band. I was looking forward to going this evening, but I’ve had to rule that out which has annoyed me greatly.

Alison came by the visit too. Her cousin had some over for a short stay so she had been to pick her up at the railway station. On their way back, they came to visit, bringing a few edible bits and pieces with them and they will go down quite nicely.

So now everyone has finished what they are doing and we are supposed to be settling down for the night. But fat chance of that with my neighbour rattling off like he is. I’m thoroughly fed up of this, I can tell you.

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Wednesday 6th April 2016 – THE BEST-LAID SCHEMES …

… of mice and men gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns once wrote. And how right he was. I reckoned that I lasted maybe for 5 minutes of my film before crashing out.

I was only awoken three times during the night – once by the usual need to take a stroll down the corridor, the second which was by one of the nurses who wanted to take my temperature, and the third time my a nurse asking me if I was okay. And had my reactions been any quicker, she would have had a pillow in the face as well. GRRRR!

But during the night I’d been looking at old cars for sale. I’d come across a garage that sold classic cars and my eye was caught by a maroon Wolseley 1300 (the same as Nerina used to have, except that hers was Black Tulip) that was for sale at €1,883. But I ended up playing in a rock band once more with Hans and also with a female on drums. We were playing at a concert up on the Chester road, slightly north of the Bluestones traffic lights near Acton (and we’ve been here before) and warming up, we played an impromptu blues number that I made up on the spot, called “I’m the accused”. Of course, the word “accused” is one of the easiest words in the English language to rhyme – there are so many other words that go with it, but it was still impressive that I could write a whole song “off the cuff” while actually performing it. And if I could write music, I’d write it down because I can still remember it even now.

And so the morning came round quick enough and I was soon tucking into breakfast. And with a sweet smile, I was even able to negotiate a second pot of coffee. I then had a shower (which made me feel so much better after yesterday) and a blood sample.

The blood sample wasn’t so easy though. They tried to take it out of the drain in my arm but for some reason that had become blocked. In the end, they had to take out the drain, fit another one in the other arm and take the sample from there.

An hour or so later they were back. “Your blood count is only 7.3, so we need to give you a transfusion today”
“So what was if before I had the transfusion on Monday?”
“6.5”
No wonder I was feeling like death in Givet last weekend.

We then had some amusement with the cleaner too. Doing her best to speak English to me (and I will never ever mock anyone’s attempts to speak a foreign language), she said “you must stay on your bed when I’m cleaning. It’s dangerous when I’m around”
“I know the feeling” I replied. “People often say that it’s dangerous when I’m around too”.

I found some time (although not very much) to start to write up the notes of my Canada 2014 voyage – I really need to get cracking with this – but it ground to a halt at about 15:00 when they came to give me more chemotherapy. This time, they took their time and it was soooooooo slowwwwwwwwwww. The blood came next and that needed to be heated to 41°C so they had a bizarre kind of coil heater machine to do it.

Foolish me should have gone to the bathroom at that moment because the blood transfusion was even slower. It crawled along and wasn’t finally over until 23:00, by which time I was bursting.

It meant that there was no chance whatever of me leaving the hospital today so I’m in for another night. And my neighbour is snoring like a pneumatic road-drill. It looks as if it’s going to be on of THOSE nights.

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Tuesday 5th April 2016 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what they put in one of those pochettes that they gave me, but I’ve never known anything like it.

They had a timer and some kind of feeder set on it. We started off at 20ml/minute (or something like that) and it gradually increased every 30 minutes or so until in the end I was having this stuff at 120ml/minute. And this is where the roof fell in.I went freezing cold, shivering like I have never shivered before, and having attack after attack of nausea. It was so bad that in the end they were obliged to switch if off for an hour while I recovered, and then start up again, with a limit of 50ml/minute.

But for that 10-minute period, I felt really and utterly dreadful.

Despite my bad night, I had a good sleep and didn’t wake up at all, not even for the bathroom. We didn’t have the same early start as we had in Montlucon either – about 07:20 if I remember correctly.

Breakfast was, as you might expect, jam butties with coffee (which was very nice) and then I was introduced to the student nurse who has been assigned to me. She’s from Denmark apparently, and the idea is that we can both learn Flemish together. That’s not quite what I had in mind, although there are some Flemish words that I learnt when I was chauffeuring in Brussels that I’m sure she doesn’t know. And she went and liberated another pot of coffee for me too, which was very nice of her.

The dietician came round too and spent half an hour with me. In quite a contrast to Montlucon, she knew what she was talking about. I have a severe protein deficiency, and need to increase my intake of fats. We spent all of the time talking about my diet for when I return home, and she’ll try to organise a few things here too.

I had a blood pressure test and pulse check too, but how they ever think that they are going to obtain a serious and meaningful reading from me when they send in four young student nurses into my room to make the measurements I’ll never know.

Lunch was a vegan chili (with soya chunks) and tomato sauce, with steamed potatoes and for what it was, it was delicious. And then we got down to business.

I told you about the first part of the treatment. That apparently is for marking the bad cells in my body. And there must have been plenty to affect me like that. And then once I’d recovered (which took a while) the system was cleansed for 20 minutes or so and then I was given the second stage of the treatment, interrupted by tea which was … errr … jam butties.

By 19:00 all of that was finished so I could prepare to receive my visitor. And sure enough, at 19:30 Alison appeared for a chat. She brought me a towel which was good of her, and some soya yoghurts and desserts, and a fruit salad (which was delicious for supper, thank you).

Now I’m going to stay awake until I fall asleep (which isn’t an Irishism at all – usually I go to bed and talk myself into sleeping) and watch a film maybe. There’s no alarm set for the morning either, for I imagine that I’ll be awoken by the hustle and bustle of the nursing staff.

But I need to increase my intake of proteins and fats.

Where’s the nearest fritkot?

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Monday 4th April 2016 – I WAS UP …

… quite early this morning and on the road almost straight away. I wanted to be at the hospital early and it’s a good job that I was because there were traffic queues and road works all over the place.

Once I’d found a good spec for Caliburn (there’s an outside car park that I needed to locate as the main car park has a 2-metre height limit), I went off on a route march to sign myself in. And that reminded me of the queue for registering a vehicle at Riom – I was ticket 259 and they were dealing with n°208.

But with 10 registration desks open (not like at Riom where there is just one) I was all done and dusted within 10 minutes and even had time to go to the café for breakfast. That worked out to be somewhat expensive for some bread and jam, but it would have been a lot cheaper had I realised that what I took to be orange juice was actually freshly-pressed mango.

I found the day hospital, and it’s nothing like Montlucon in that there were probably 100 people there. But I was pretty quickly whisked into a side ward and had a drain fitted. From there, I was shunted off into another room to wait for my blood.

But it’s not like Montlucon in another respect either. I hadn’t been in there long before someone from the Welfare Department came to see me. And never mind the interminable wrangle that we had at Montlucon (and is still going on) about payment – she was brandishing photocopies of my Insurers’ registration form and we filled it in on the spot. They are of course much more used to my situation here and are fully prepared.

We also discussed the situation about my accommodation for when I’m released. She went off and came back 20 minutes later with the news that I have been booked for two weeks into the “family guest-rooms” at the old hospital in the city centre. That’s pretty quick, I have to say. And it’s pretty good news too. All of which is compounded by the fact that the parking here at the hospital (€4:00 per day for inmates) is capped at €12 per week for long-term visitors, and they expect me to be undergoing treatment for … gulp … six months. And so this two-week “stay of execution” gives me time to think of a “Plan B”.

But treatment here wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been. They needed to do all kinds of tests and so on that hadn’t been carried out at Montlucon apparently, and by the time that they had finished everything and the blood had finally arrived, it was 15:30. For food, it was jam butties because, having caught them à la depourvu, there was nothing arranged for me, but at least there was a free coffee machine just around the corner.

By the time that my transfusions were over, it was 19:30 – far too late for chemotherapy and far too late for me to go anywhere else, and so they have found a bed here for me until Wednesday, and chemotherapy will start tomorrow morning. But I’ve missed the evening meal tonight because of all of this, and so I had … errr … jam butties for tea. However, I went down to Caliburn for my things, and profited by stuffing the suitcase full of goodies.

But damn and blast my neighbour. I’m having to share a room and of course, he snores. It’s been a long time since I’ve been still awake at 01:00. This is going to be a very long night.

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Sunday 3rd April 2016 – I DIDN’T FEEL …

… much like it this morning, that’s to be sure. I was awake at 07:20 but that is of course not the same as getting out of bed. In fact it took me a good hour to summon up the courage to leave the bed. But once I was up, I started to collect all of my affairs together and it didn’t take too long to be ready.

And I discovered why the internet had dramatically reduced in speed and strength. It seems that the repeater for the wi-fi was in my room underneath the bedside cabinet and I’d unplugged it in order to plug in my laptop. It didn’t half work better once I’d reconnected it

I picked up Caliburn and then headed for the Belgian border, stopping off o pick up a baguette on the way. And then I had a nice drive along the Meuse where I stopped at a good spec somewhere just north of Profondeville to admire the view and have a little kip. Crashed out again!

My baguette was enormous and I struggled to eat it all, and then once I’d gathered my wits (which doesn’t take long these days) I set off. And by the time I got to Phoe … errr … Namur, the sun was out and everywhere looked so nice.

I had an uneventful drive back to Alison’s, stopping for a couple of hours on the Motorway Service Area at Heverlee to crash out for a while in the glorious, warm sunshine, and then to bring up-to-date the paperwork. And to have a coffee too, which is the first coffee that I have had since Thursday, would you believe.

But with the internet at the Motorway crashing out, I lost interest after a while and headed back to Alison’s. She loved her tree, which pleased me greatly because I don’t really ever know how to thank people properly, and we ended up having a good chat.

But now I’m off to bed because I have an early start in the morning. My treatment begins at 09:30, so they say, which means that I need to be signed in at 09:00. But I want to be there much earlier than that because, firstly, the earlier we start, the earlier we finish and secondly, I’ve no idea how long this treatment is likely to take, there will be side-effects so I’m told, and I have to see the Social Services people. I need to be on top form.

So I’ll see you all tomorrow and let you know how it went.

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Friday 1st April 2016 – I’M BACK …

… on the road again today. I was awake early enough but when I switched on the laptop, there was someone on line with whom I wanted to have a chat. Consequently it was about 09:30 when I went downstairs and I hit the road straight away.

My first stop was at the town of Ramillies, the site in 1706 of one of the major, if not decisive battles of the War of the Spanish Succession. And it was here that I realised that I had forgotten my mobile phone and camera. Still, start as you mean to go on, I suppose.

Instead, I went shopping at the Delhaize at Inhout so as to stock up with food for my couple of days, and here I received a lovely smile from a young girl. I suppose that I’ll have to add it to the list of places to revisit. After all, it’s not every day that I have such a nice smile like that and I need to remember these places.

I called at a nursery on the outskirts of Namur. Alison is a very keen gardener and I want to thank her for being so kind to me, so I managed to pick up a young almond tree that will look really nice when it starts to blossom. I hope that she’ll like it.

Fuel at Namur was a mere €0:97 per litre, which is the cheapest that I’ve seen it for about 15 years. Caliburn was running quite low and so I profited by fuelling him right up, as I’m sure you would have done too at that price.

I missed the turning that I wanted at Namur and ended up on the wrong side of the Meuse – the eastern bank which is quite industrialised. It took me ages to find a crossing over onto the western bank, by which time I reckon that I had missed all of the picturesque hotels. but not to be outdone, I carried on southwards to Dinant, where the streets were undergoing a total renovation. There was nowhere to park, nowhere to move around, and walking around the town didn’t look very easy at all.

As a result, I pressed on towards the frontier, stopping for my butty somewhere where there was a lovely view across the river. Having no answer at a couple of bed-and-breakfasts, and at yet another, being told that it was full and I should refer myself to the other two in the town.And so I eventually found myself across the French border, in Givet. The first hotel that I found had transformed its rooms into apartments.The prices at the next few that I found frightened me to death and so as a last resort I found myself at the Ibis Budget on the outskirts of the town. I had no luck here either as the computerised registration system was down.

From here, I decided to cut across country to Rocroi where I knew that there were a few cheap hotels, but instead, negotiating the narrow one-way streets of Givet I found another hotel, the “Reflets Jaunes”. They were busy too and all of the cheap rooms had gone, but when I moaned about the price they allowed me a 20% discount which made it much more like my kind of place. There was secure vehicle parking too round the corner which was very handy because the streets weren’t half narrow.

Once I’d installed myself, I crashed out for an hour or so and then had a shower and washed my clothes. And I do have to say that I wasn’t disappointed with my hotel. I’ve been obliged to decline breakfast because it’s so expensive, although had I been a meat-and-dairy eater, I wouldn’t have complained for a moment because it really did look excellent, the way the receptionist described it. But the room is nice, warm and comfortable, and the towels are so fluffy that I’ve no idea how I’m going to close my suitcase when I leave here. The shower is lovely too and the internet connection is superb.

Later on in the evening, I went to see what there was to eat. There are several fritkots in the town but none of them sell falafel from what I was able to see. One was however next to a Carrefour “City” so while my chips were frying, I went next door and bought a cucumber salad to have with the chips.

After tea, I started to watch an Inspector Hornleigh film but my heart wasn’t in it and I’d gone in about 15 minutes. I’m definitely noticing how much I’m struggling now so I hope that the next few days will start to see a slight improvement in my health. It’ll be three weeks since I will have had a blood transfusion.

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Thursday 31st March 2016 – TODAY’S THE DAY …

… when I might learn something about my state of health and whether the Hospital at Leuven will do something about it.

But before I can think about that, I have other fish to fry. Hans is coming back from Zeebrugge this morning and we’ve agreed to meet up at the Motorway serviced just down the road from here for breakfast.

I was up early and off out to fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n down the autobahn about 3 miles to the service station where I waited.

And waited.

And then I had a phone call – “just pulling into the Services now – it was Tienen, wasn’t it?” as a matter of fact, it wasn’t. I was at Heverlee and so a quick thrash down the motorway brought me to Tienen and breakfast.

We had a good chat for a few hours and then I had to return to Alison’s, for she was intending to run me into the hospital, which was very nice of her and something that I appreciated a great deal.

First port of call was for a blood test. And sure enough, my blood count has gone quite down. It was 9.1 the last time I was here, but now it’s down to 7.8. That’s set a few alarm bells ringing at the hospital, make no mistake.

The doctor who saw me asked me quite a few questions and gave me a good examination, and then summoned her Professor – the kind of thing that always makes me feel better. But the news that I received deflated me rather rapidly. It seems that the Hospital here at Leuven thinks that I have a different type of lymphoma than that diagnosed by Montlucon. They didn’t understand the need for the removal of the spleen and, in agreement with the opinion of the District Nurses who have been visiting me at Liz and Terry’s, they don’t understand why I need to have these anti-coagulant injections and think that they might be doing more harm than good. The first week or so, yes. But today it’s long-beyond the bounds of necessity and I can stop immediately.

As for treatment, they propose a course of Chemotherapy. There are two types of this – a standard type that is the most common and which is recommended in 99% of cases. There is another type – about 10 times more expensive (and so it’s not reimbursed by the Belgian authorities) and 10 times more effective. And this is what they propose for me – a course of treatment that might last for as long as 6 months and they intend to start it on Monday morning. Furthermore, it has been reimbursed by my Medical Insurance in the past in other cases, and someone from the Social Services department of the hospital will be coming to see me on Monday to “help me” make the application for this treatment. Yes, not backwards at coming forwards, here at Leuven.

They aren’t sure how this is going to pan out though. I’ll be treated as an out-patient but I need to spend a few days recovering from each session. I’ve told them that I’ve nowhere to go to stay (I can’t keep on relying on other people’s generosity) so they told me that there is some guest accommodation at the hospital. The Social Services department will help me here too, to see if I qualify for a place.

And so here we are. I had my operation on 27th January and since then, nothing much has happened at Montlucon with regard to my illness. Here at Leuven, they have a decision within 9 days and propose a course of treatment starting in 4 days time.

It’s very easy to say, with hindsight, that it was the wrong decision to allow Montlucon to go ahead with the removal of the spleen, but there was a good chance that it might have worked and I was worried about any further delay. Had I known that the treatment would begin less than two weeks after my first visit, maybe I might have thought differently. And then again, Leuven has had access to all of the tests and analyses carried out by Montlucon which aided quite considerably the speed of the diagnosis. How long would I have had to have waited for all of this?

We went shopping afterwards to a Charity Shop rather on the style of a Canadian Value Village. Loads of interesting furniture, including a lovely coffee table that, when cleaned and polished, would look lovely in my little house. But all of this is a long way away.

Anyway, I’m off for the weekend. I’ll find a river somewhere and lodge myself in there for a few days to relax. I need it.

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Wednesday 30th March 2016 – OFF TO BRUSSELS.

And I’d forgotten what a horrible place Brussels was. That I can tell you for nothing.

I fought my way through the traffic and left the Motorway at Woluwe, only to find myself in a huge set of roadworks that seemed to go on for ever – way beyond the Woluwe Shopping Centre. But eventually I found myself on the car park of the Carrefour at Boisfort, right by the Demey metro station.

It goes without saying that the metro station was closed – in fact about half of them were, so I had a weary trudge all the way back in the opposite direction and beyond, to the station at Hermann-Debroux.

I arrived at the bank, which was to be my first port of call, where I needed to transfer some money from my savings to my current account. But I ruled that out when I discovered that I’d left my passport behind in Caliburn. That was no use.

But I made about 30 phone calls to the EU’s Personnel Department (I refuse to use the derogatory term of “human resources”. I’m a human being, not a unit of production, and the whole world went wrong when employers stopped treating their staff as human beings and started to treat them as just another business resource) before someone answered the phone. I explained my problem – and I’m not sure why I had to because the person to whom I was speaking couldn’t see me. So wasn’t that a waste of time? But she did say to call back at 16:00 precisely as her colleague would just be back from a meeting and I might just catch him before he leaves the office.

I bought some bread and tomatoes and had lunch in the Parc Solvay, then went on the bust and tram to Ixelles and the Health-Food shop to buy some more vegan sliced cheese. Four packs, so that’s me OK for a while. And then I went off to see Marianne and have a chat. She was probably surprised to see me, and she’ll be even more surprised shortly if I end up in there with her. But I’ll be heading in the opposite direction, that’s for sure. They are stoking the fires already.

By now, I’d pulled a muscle in my right leg and was in agony. But I pressed on and found my way back to Schuman, having been obliged to take a really circuitous route there, due to “perturbations”. passing through Maelbeek Station, which is all fenced off and covered over, the thought did occur to me that this bomber can’t have been much good, and his infrastructure even worse. Just 400 metres further on is the Arts-Loi metro station, which is the key hub of the underground network, and it doesn’t take much in the way of brains to realise that had his bomb gone off there, he could have crippled the Brussels Metro for good.

I’m on record, and from as far back as 2002 too, as saying that the only reason that there aren’t more of these attacks is that the perpetrators can’t be bothered.

And it’s no use crying about it either. The time for crying was in 2002 when millions of people took to the streets to protest at the actions of Western Europe in becoming involved in a war that had nothing to do with us. But the politicians took no notice, and here we are. And only a politician or a westerner can be so naïve as to believe that if you declare war on someone and start to attack them, those people aren’t going to turn round and fight back.

Ever since 2002, the West should have been preparing for casualties. The first actions of the UK politicians in 1939 was to order 200,000 cardboard coffins “just in case”. The naîveté of the West, its politicians and its citizens, has been unbelievable.

As Douglas Haig once famously said, “fear of heavy casualties is a good enough reason for not going to war, but it’s a pretty poor reason once you are already fighting” or something like that.

I telephoned my Personnel guy bang-on 16:00 and he answered the phone. And I could feel the disappointment in his voice as I spoke to him. But 15 minutes later, there I was and he gave me a few bits and pieces of useful information that I have filed away for future reference, including the fact that I’m entitled to claim travelling expenses for all of my appointments at Montlucon and if I can persuade them at Montlucon to wash their hands of me, which they have done already, for travelling expenses to Leuven too.

But I had the shock of my life in the coffee shop round the corner where I stopped for a rest. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the regular appearances of a young girl known by the name of Zero after an Al Stewart song, the lyrics of which were extremely relevant – a girl whom I haven’t seen for … ohhh … 8 years, I suppose. But breezing into the coffee shop was a girl who would have been the spitting image of this girl, allowing for the passage of time. Even the shade of red hair was correct to the minutest detail. The surprise was so complete that I dropped my coffee. Of course, it probably wasn’t her but nevertheless, it was an astonishing resemblance. I felt like bursting out into the Warren Zevon “there’s a red-haired girl in a red silk dress. I’m asking her to dance with me, she might say yes!”

But I dunno – it quite caught me à la depourvu, as the French say.

At the moment, the Metro is closing at 19:00 so I leapt on a bus and asked the driver to throw me out when we reach a tram route. This was at the Arsenaal and I could board a tram 25 and then the bus 71 which ended up by me being at the fritkot that does lovely falafel.

From there, another bus dropped me off at the Place Weiner from where I could take the tram 94 round to Hermann Debroux and Caliburn again.

And then back to Alison’s.

I’ve had my money’s worth today, although my leg is killing me and I’m thoroughly exhausted.

But seeing this girl has quite disturbed me. Whatever is going on these days?

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Tuesday 29th March 2016 – THERE ARE JUST SO MANY …

… job opportunities these days.

basterd suiker emte supermarket zoutelande netherlandsYes, I’ll be back in the Netherlands at some point giving them lessons in English spelling because somewhere along the line, they seem to have lost their way.

But the existence of this product explains quite a lot and answers many questions.It must have been on sale in the UK at one time or another, because I’ve overheard loads of people wandering around Tesco’s or Asda going “where’s the basterd sugar?”. And now I know why.

After my dreadful evening last night, I was first up and first into the breakfast room yet again, and I was in and out by 08:30. It didn’t take me too long to pack and arrange my affairs, and by 09:10 I was on my way.

But something very surprising happened as I was leaving. I’d handed my key to the chambermaid and as I was walking away from the hotel, the landlady came chasing after me. Not, as you might think, to accuse me of taking the towels away, but to shake my hand and wish me all the best in my forthcoming trials and tribulations. I thought that that was very poignant indeed.

Off to the supermarket and stocking up with Raak Campagne Pils and gelatine-free licorice-and-banana flavoured sweets, and then I went off for a drive along the coast.

sherman tank westkapelle netherlands museumJust down the road in the town of Westkapelle I stumbled upon a museum. This features exhibits relating to the polders and dykes around here and contains a few exhibits from the battles around here that liberated the islands in the Scheldt estuary in late 1944.

That up there on the top of the dyke is a Sherman tank of course. From the USA and the most popular of the USA light tanks in World War II

remains of shipwreck westkapelle netherlands museum“Exhibits relating to the polders and dykes”, I just said. And this area of the coast is littered with shipwrecks, which is hardly surprising when you remember just how close to the shore the main shipping lane is.

It’s bad enough in a motor-powered ship but it must have been a nightmare in a sailing ship. There’s hardly any room at all in which to manoeuvre. This pile of metalwork has been gathered from off the shore over time and is part of the exhibits.

landing craft tank LCT737 westkapelle netherlands museumThat’s not all either. This is a Landing Craft – Tank and was one of the key elements in amphibious warfare.

It’s the kind of thing that I would buy in a heartbeat if I were to live on my own island somewhere off the coast. Caliburn would fit in there quite nicely with a little modification (to the LCT) and t would be just the thing to keep us all mobile.

I would gladly have told you so much more about the exhibits but as you might expect, the museum is closed. No surprise here.

So I travelled on up the road for a while and found a lovely spec by the seashore where I could watch the ships sailing along the coast, and also have a little snooze for a couple of hours. You’ve no idea right now how much I’m feeling the exertions of my travels.

I stopped for a coffee on the way home, at a motorway service area just before the International Border, and then hit all of the traffic around Antwerp. And that’s just how it was, all the way back to Alison’s.

I didn’t hang around for long though. I have a long day ahead in Brussels and so I crawled upstairs for an early night.

There’s just about enough time for me to tell you about my travels though. Some British person had bought a piece of land in France, but it was more like on Barony Park in Nantwich, at the top end of the street where Helena and Ann used to live. He was laying down some huge amount of concrete hardstanding there in order to erect a block of flats. Someone had been working for him but had left the job half-way through and an arrangement had been made for me to go and pick up his wages. I had to be there at 17:00 but when I arrived at 17:01, everyone had already gone – in that minute that I was late. I had to find a place to park there, annoying all of the traffic whilst I was trying to squeeze into a parking place – access was really difficult. I had a good look around but I couldn’t find anyone, and ended up by talking to a man who had been interested in buying the small plot next to this large one. He had thought that with this first man ordering to much concrete, he could add whatever he wanted onto the neighbour’s order and pay pro-rata. They could lay his concrete together and he would return the labour on this person’s site. However, the first guy was not at all in favour. he told him to bring his tonne of aggregate, his tonne of sand and of cement and we’ll do it in five days. This made the second guy have second thoughts about buying this plot of land for if this was how it was going to be like in the beginning, how was it going to end up in the future when they were living next door to each other? From here, I had to go back to my bus (for I was driving a bus) and pick up Roxanne’s grand-parents on her father’s side. We had to go and pick up our mail which was delivered to the garage of a block of apartments somewhere that looked like a street I know in Evere and was put in galvanised metal buckets. There was nowhere to park, as usual, so I had to park in the street while they nipped out to pick up their buckets and pick up mine too. Of course, at this moment a great big bus pulled up behind me and of course he wasn’t very happy so I had to move. I had to drive about 50 yards down the road to where I had seen a parking place. But it was tight down there and I had knocked the mirror on the passenger side of my bus so I couldn’t see properly and had to inch my way down there and inch my way into this parking space and shunt myself in so that I was close enough to the kerb. But this bus wasn’t helping because every time I went forward, so did he, which meant that I couldn’t reverse back in, especially with no mirror on the passenger side (it was a RHD bus by the way), and I was on the point of getting out and giving him a piece of my mind.
I was with Liz and Terry somewhere around the Pinware River in Labrador. It was where they have built the new diversion but we were actually on the old road but this was all now industrialised and a big city environment with a railway line that ran up there and a yard where containers were loaded and stacked. The first thing that we noticed was a shipping container that had not detached from its trailer, so the crane had picked up the container and the trailer – and then dropped the lot! The whole right-hand side of the road had been devastated by fire and I wanted to photograph this, so I had to drive around to find a suitable place to park (I was in Strider, but a RHD Strider, by the way). There was nowhere really to park and I lost Liz and Terry while I was doing this. I’d gone higher up the hill, but on turning round and coming back, I noticed that there was a road that turned off to the right so I turned off to travel along it, but it was a one-way street and I ended up going the wrong way along it. People were flashing their lights at me and some youngish guy tried to get into my car with me and give me a lecture, something about “all of these tourists coming into our country and thinking that they know their way around when they really know absolutely nothing. They ought to be given proper qualified guides to accompany them”. My reply was that I was interested in seeing things that I was interested in, and seeing them through my own eyes, not anyone else’s. This led to quite a heated debate. He started speaking to me in a language that I didn’t recognise but, remembering where I was, I guessed that it was Innu, which he confirmed. It was all very unpleasant.
We were out walking by the river somewhere round by Farndon, that area. There was a girl, rather like Pamela Hayes or that girl whom I met on that ship out in the Gulf of St Lawrence who looked quite tall (although she was wearing high heels) and she was intending to throw herself in the river. We had a big discussion about it and I explained that this wasn’t the solution – there were people far worse off than she was, and all of this sort of thing. There were people up to their necks in water struggling to get out and so on. I introduced myself and told her that I was out looking for an apartment somewhere as I lived at home with my five siblings and my parents in a little two-bedroomed house. My mother was swimming in the river at this time (although it wasn’t my mother, it was the mother of Helen – a girlfriend from my school days). All of our family was into things to do with painting – my mother was a painter and my brother was a house painter. I was actually on my way to Halfords to buy a box of assorted tap washers to do some plumbing. I knew a girl who worked there, but she was in the department that sold tapestries. My mother then came out of the water and we all had a big chat and then went off to buy these washers; However, there was nothing really suitable – they had a multi-pack of washers there but these were just bits and pieces. At this moment, the Police turned up. There had apparently been some other kind of incident going on there and they had come in response to that, but we were all held and interviewed about what we knew.
This next bit is nothing like complete because after I woke up, I fell asleep again almost immediately and so didn’t dictate it “at the moment” as I would normally like to do. From what I remember, though, I was on a train that had left France and was heading down to the south of Europe. I’d boarded it at the departure point, Paris, and it was crammed with people like most wartime trains were. We’d boarded it right behind the engine and had to work our way backwards to find a seat. We must have travelled for miles and there was still no seat to be found. We kept bumping into the guard and he was telling us all kinds of stories about wartime travel and so on. I don’t remember too much more about it, although we did end up somewhere down by Yugoslavia and we were still standing. But on the subject of wartime, I was explaining to someone that French railways were liberated “all at once”. They were surprised by that but I pointed out that the railway staff was actually civilian in most cases and would just take orders from whoever was giving them. It made no difference whether they were French, German or whatever, whether they were giving the orders or receiving them. They would not, in by far the most cases, be considered as combatants. So once the head of the pyramid of command had been liberated, so would all of the rest of it.

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Thursday 24th March 2016 – BACK IN THE NETHERLANDS

That’s right – I’ve left my comfy little spec at Paul’s Hotel this morning and headed east – in the driving rain.

But while we’re on the subject of the hotel, the breakfast that I had this morning was excellent. The coffee was beautiful for a start, and so was the bread and jam. I even had a comfy hour or so in the lounge while I did some work on the laptop that needed doing. In other words, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay here and although it was expensive, I had my money’s worth.

I’d travelled miles while I’d been asleep. Having been awoken by attack after attack after attack of cramp (which I’m very sad to see has returned after all this time), we started off with a sporting hero – a motorcycle racer or someone. He had an agent and also a manager. He was doing some business with his manager that involved making payments and he always made those payments promptly and always in cash with no problems whatever. One day he was in a rush to go somewhere and so he ordered a sandwich so the manager arranged to buy it. It came to €6:99 so the hero searched through his pockets to try to find something so the agent put down €7:00. The manager said that he would give back the €0:01 next time they would see each other. But the motorcyclist then went out to race, but was killed. This gave rise to the legend about him that his manager gave nothing and took everything, whereas the motorcyclist gave €0:01 and also gave his life.
So valiantly fighting off another attack of cramp, I was out in Labrador City, but it wasn’t Labrador City but a kind of linear village in the High Arctic, all along some kind of track. We’d gone there to take the supplies and the girl with whom I had gone, she had gone in front in an open-topped bulldozer-type vehicle to clear the route and I was in the closed-up vehicle bring the supplies behind because the girl said that it would be warmer. When we arrived, we were besieged by people who were after their stuff. We were talking to a woman there who was telling us about Pingu the Penguin who was some kind of local hero – everyone watched him on television. It turned out that an old girlfriend of mine, Robina, was living out there and I thought that that would be nice – I’ve not seen her for forty years. I hoped that she would come for her supplies. However, she didn’t come. Loads of others did so though – people with children and they were all talking about Pingu the Penguin. There was also a soap opera broadcast twice a day – 06:00 and 18:00, all about young people falling in love and I suddenly remembered something that I had written about this subject – a fictional story. I thought that it might possibly have been a script for this programme. We all had quite a chat about that too. One of the small boys asked me where I lived and I told him about my house – Hankelow Hall, although I called it something else. How we squatted there although I was in one of the outbuildings. We moved on from the town and ended up in the graveyard. Someone had been stealing one of the bulldozers on a regular basis and flattening the graves. One grave was an expensive grave for a person who had founded the Hobey’s (whoever they might be) chain of whatever and this grave was a particular target, having been flattened a few times and graffiti drawn in the soil such as “I used to work at Hobey’s”. Everyone in the town was disturbed by this and they had been unable to catch the culprit and stop them flattening this cemetery again and again.
Having managed to avoid another attack of cramp, I was back in Virlet, but it wasn’t Virlet as I know it. There were lots of ruined, abandoned houses all together. I was there with mine and Liz was there with hers and we were talking about selling and going off somewhere else. We went to an estate agent, who turned out to be Lieneke, to try to sell our properties for us. We had had all kinds of people coming to visit and they had asked all kinds of stupid questions so I reckoned that I ought to open a “stupid questions” file. I had to contact the mayor, who was in fact Rebecca from the OU, and find out all of the answers to these stupid questions. That would save everyone so much time. We were having quite a chat about this on the telephone and Lieneke went away. It was pretty close to Easter at this point and suddenly three or four caravans turned up and parked on some land at an abandoned house. Loads and loads of hippies arrived and installed themselves there, about 100 yards from my house. Lieneke asked me what I thought about all of these hippies. I said that I had nothing against them and they were entitled to their own lifestyle and it was sometimes a good thing because they can bring new ideas and new ways of thinking into a stagnant region, but they can saturate an area. I didn’t want 100 hippies living in an area like this. There was a programme on TV and I had been wanting to see it for quite some weeks, which is not like me. The village café had a bar so I had arranged to meet Liz somewhere so we had agreed on the café and I went there way earlier to watch this programme. I was sitting on a chair with a coffee watching this when I local turned up and sat down by me. He started to discuss this programme with me, which is what I didn’t want to do, and to my surprise, this person had some really intelligent points to make about it. And it was only something boring, like a quiz game.
Once more, after another disturbance, I was back in my house, which resembled something like my old apartment at Reyers, with someone who might have been June. Someone had arrived during the night and was ill and so had been put into one of the spare bedrooms (I didn’t even have one bedroom in Reyers – it was a studio!). This person needed me to help him recover and so I took him a breakfast tray and went to see how he was. It took ages to find the door into the room – I don’t know why – and so I knocked on the window to let him know I was there, and then tried again to find the door. It took a while to do that but eventually there I was. I said to the guy that I hoped that I hadn’t disturbed him too early but he laughed and pointed out that it was now just after 16:00 – I’d slept all that time! I sat down by the man and asked him about himself, but he apologised for wasting my time – it turned out to be only a simple headache and now he was feeling much better and didn’t need my services. At this point, June said that a weekend’s rest would do him good – why didn’t he come down to her place with a group of her people and play in a scrabble tournament? He liked the idea but the stakes (they were gambling – so much per point) were quite elevated and it ruled me out. But something that he said had made my ears prick up. It was quite a disreputable project so June wasn’t at all keen and quite rightly so, but hidden away underneath a fairground carousel was one of the very first Citroen 2CVs and that was the prize. But it was all weighing heavily down on me. I was 60 and I should have retired back in February and it was now the month of May. I needed to get away so I told June that I was going to see Stevie Smith, my old boss from way back, and tell him that I was leaving in three weeks time. She thought that I was being crazy, especially seeing that I was still being paid.

Back on the road, and we’ve started off with a major tragedy too. The battery in the Nikon D5000 seems to have died a death.

It was pretty flaky yesterday, I noticed, even though it had been fully-charged. And today, it just wouldn’t work at all – keeping on telling me that it’s flat. Which it isn’t of course because 2 minutes in the charger and the “fully-charged” light comes on.

The camera itself has never been the same since I dropped it in Quebec in 2012 and so I suspect that half of the problem is not with the battery but with the camera – maybe the contacts are slightly bent out of shape. But anyway, now (or, at least, when I return home) is the moment to upgrade the camera – something that I have been threatening to do for quite a while.

world war two fortifications atlantic wall english channel coast netherlands belgium borderYou’ll have to make do with some photos taken on the camera phone, such as this one.

The area where we are is an open shoreline with miles of flat land behind it, and has easy access to the port of Antwerp. It’s therefore quite heavily-fortified to protect it from invasion from the sea or from the Netherlands border and the fortifications still remain even today, like all over this coastline.

I’d bought a baguette, which was one of the nicest that I have ever eaten, but also one of the most expensive too. And I headed off via Cadzand to Breskens to sit on the estuary to eat my butty.

ship western scheldt estuary netherlandsThis is exactly the same spot where I ate my butty yesterday, but you can see the difference in the weather.

It really is wet, grey and miserable today and the wind is fairly strong. And you still can’t see very much through the fog. I’d love to tell you more about the ship that’s sailing past but I can’t make it out.

There are probably 1000 other ships out there too, but I don’t have a chance of seeing them.

After lunch, I headed off and found the bored tunnel under the Scheldt. It cosy €5:00 to go through, which I don’t suppose is too bad seeing as it’s 6.6kms long, and Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I sang a few songs and played a game of hide and seek with the tunnel in order to cheer it up.

The weather brightened up on Walcheren and wasn’t too bad at all by the time I arrived at Zoutelande. I quickly found a hotel, the price of which for five days bed and breakfast would have bought a hotel in France. But there’s parking here for Caliburn (it’s expensive to leave it on the street), I was tired and about ready to crash out. And it is Easter weekend anyway and the town is crowded.

After an hour’s sleep I went for a walk – in the rain because it was heaving down. There doesn’t seem to be a fritkot here either but at least there are a couple of pizza places and I have some vegan cheese.

I won’t need much rocking tonight, that’s for sure.

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