People are starting to recognise me around here. It’s Saturday night and back home that’s curry night, but here, with no curry, it’s falafel and chips night. So off to the fritkot I went and started to place my order – “a durum falafel …”
“…with garlic sauce, and a large frites with garlic sauce” added the guy behind the counter. This is all becoming unnerving. I don’t like that at all.

So after a second night without sleep, I spent the morning working on the second of the three parts of the radio programmes and made some good progress, but called a halt in order to go off and do some shopping. The big Carrefour overlooking the battlefield at Mont St Jean on the outskirts of Waterloo was the destination, not the least reason being that over the road is a huge Media Markt.

But despite spending an hour or so in the Media Markt, I didn’t find anything worth spending my money on. No CDs, no DVDs. But I did have a good prowl around and a close examination of the fridges there. There’s a decent-sized fridge on the market that has an annual consumption of 90KwH – that’s about 7500 amp-hours of energy – so things are definitely looking up on the fridge front.

In the Carrefour I still can’t get used to the prices here in Belgium. The week’s shopping, normally less than €25 back home, came to about €42 and there wasn’t anything special in that lot. I really don’t understand how come I managed to live here for as long as I did. No wonder I moved to rural France when I retired.

I was also ambushed on the stairs back here. One of the women who lives in the block must have seen me arrive back at the building, and timed her arrival on the landing here just as I was putting the key in the door. She was eager to engage me in conversation but I’m not sociable at the best of times, never mind when I’m in a bad mood, so she learned nothing new.

By the way, if you would like to comment on these notes, which I sincerely hope that you do, you now need to sign in. I’ve posted about 10 entries since I created this blog and I’ve received 1266 comments, all but four of which were spam. It’s too much work to go round and keep on deleting this amount of comments.

So to log in, follow the log-in link where you will see a link for “forgotten password”. Enter your e-mail in the box provided and you’ll receive further instructions by mail. Sorry about this, but it’s too much work to allow this blog to be open-access as I would like it to be.

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