… not sitting in a rainbow but sitting in a posh living room in a duplex apartment here in Leuven.
The one thing about being a very regular customer of these apart-hotels is that if there’s a higher-grade accommodation vacant, they give me a free upgrade and I’ve struck lucky this visit.
A lovely big double bed, nice and comfortable. All I need is a nice and sweet young lady to share it with me and I’ll be well away. Ohhh yes – even at my age I can still chase after the women. I just can’t remember why!
The only down side is that I have noisy neighbours who seem to be partying. But I can’t hear a thing because I remembered to bring my really good headphones with me and with Colosseum Live
But that album has its downside, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. Although it’s one of the top five live albums ever recorded, it was the one that was going round and round on an endless loop while I was on The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour in 2018 and 2019.
Of course it immediately brings back all kinds of memories, mostly good but some quite bad and there are people like The Vanilla Queen and Castor and Pollux going through my mind as I listen to it.
Somewhere I read something along the lines of “anyone who spends any time in the High Arctic will come back a different person” and that’s certainly true.
Just for a change, this morning I was up quite smartly and it didn’t take me long to get everything ready for leaving. I’d had a shower last night before going to bed so I didn’t even need to deal with that.
Plenty of time to go a-voyaging too. The first little trip had something to do with the website and about how I’d changed round the radio programmes or something like that so that there was a whole new series of numbers starting on 1st January 2020 on the first January of the year with all kinds of different – there were two different strands of numbering now one of which was the radio concerts and one of which was something else but I can’t remember any more about it now unfortunately
Later on, there was a huge dispute between us over something or other and it led to someone coming storming round to our house going to throw a cup of cold tea over everyone. I had a cup of cold tea ready and he came storming in. I told him to sit down but he said “I’m going to throw this cold tea over you. What are you going to do?” I replied “I’m at my house. I’ll throw a cup of tea over you and you’re the one who is going to have to suffer”. He looked at me for a minute and then said “I can see that you aren’t going to flinch. You are brave enough”. I asked “so how are we going to sort this out?” He said “we need foue elastic bands like this size” and he showed us one of them. Of course I didn’t have any that size so I had to go across the road and ask one of the neighbours. We were in Vine Tree Avenue at the time during all of this.
Back in the Land Of The Living, I finished getting ready. The rubbish went out of course and then I followed it up to town.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that bad parking plays a prominent role on these pages.
Hardly a day goes by without me seeing some new depths to which the general public has sunk and here’s another prime example. We’re at the roundabout at the end of the rue Lecampion and this motorist has decided to park his car right across the entry to the new block of flats.
The motorist in the big SUV can’t get his car out of his own car park because of it, and I would have loved to have had the time to hang around and see how this story would unfold.
Instead I headed off to the station and there I was treated to the delight of the train being already at the platform.
No coffee though. Once again the coffee machine is out of order and this is really annoying. How am I expected to go on a journey like this without being armed?
The ticket-stamping machine was having issues too and it took several goes before it would accept my ticket and stamp it.
Bang on time we set off and I fell asleep. A right deep sleep too and it took the ticket collector a good minute or so to awaken me from the dead to check my ticket.
We were 15 minutes late arriving in Paris but it didn’t quite matter so much because, as predicted, out train now arrives in the main station rather than in the vaugirard annex and that saves me a considerable amount of time.
The metro was running too and was quite rapid, so I had a good half-hour to spare before my train to Lille.
That half-hour was spent in a queue at the SNCF office. I’d had an e-mail yesterday telling me that my seat had been changed and I would have to make further enquiries.
Eventually I managed to make someone deal with me quickly and, armed with a new seat number, I could take my seat on the train.
It’s one of the older “Reseau” TGV trainsets, number 226 which puts it in the first wave that were delivered between 1995 and 199.
Nice and comfortable they are, and I could sit and eat my butties and fruit in comfort, which is always nice. And have another little doze too. I’m not in any great rush to do anything.
Due to “affluence on the line” our train was 20 minutes late arriving in Lille- Flanders.
With only 15 minutes (and having to cross town to Lille-Europe) between trains, you might think that I would be panicking by now.
But not a bit of it because if there was “affluence on the line” for us, there would be “affluence on the line” for the Marseille – Brussels train that would be folllowing behind us too and that was the one that I was catching.
Sure enough, that one was half an hour late so I had plenty of time to ring up the hospital and check my appointment time. 13:30 it is tomorrow.
The trainset that came for us is a model that we have seen before on a regular basis because it’s this type that does the Paris-Brussels service, The Thalys PBA trainsets, albeit in a different livery.
My place here was quite comfortable too and I even managed to doze off for half an hour or so yet again.
In Brussels I only just missed the 15:58 – I had my hand on the door when it pulled away.
But there was another one right behind – the 16:13 to Genk. It’s one of the push me – pull you train sets and coming into the station in reverse so I didn’t get to see the identity of the locomotive pushing it.
So by 16:50 I was in Leuven after a relatively painless, straightforward voyage for once and wasn’t I a happy bunny?.
Having organised my room I went shopping at Delhaize. Tons of stuff for the next few days to keep me out of mischief and I shall have to add “herbs and spices” to the list of things that I bring with me from home. I’ll make up a sachet of oregano, basil, tarragon, garlic, chili powder etc and put it with the coffee.
So tea tonight was a vegan burger with mixed vegetables, spinach and pasta, all tossed in a tomato sauce and it was delicious. Pudding was peach halves with mango sorbet.
The party next door seems to have finished so I can go to bed. Nothing much to do tomorrow morning so I’ll have a lazy day before I head off to the hospital round about 12:30, something like that.
I wonder what they will tell me.
