… one of the worst days of my life today.

And in fact it began long before midnight when the rain began.

The rain started at about 23:30 and began to come down in sheets, bouncing off the slanted window above my head with a force that I had never heard before and that put paid to any hope that I might have had of a decent sleep.

Every time I dozed off the rain came down with increased force and awoke me again. And that’s how we carried on until the alarm went off this morning.

To my surprise there was some stuff on the dictaphone, as I discovered later. Last night I’d been out doing a school run – it was the early morning about 06:30 although I don’t know why I was doing a school run at that time. I was in a Cortina and drove back up Mill Street afterwards. On the wasteland there, there were some people with a caravan who had set themselves up, 3 guys I think they were, and were hanging out some washing on an impromptu clothes line and they had a petrol pump there but I don’t know where the tank was. Anyway I parked up on another car park there, I backed in up against the wall and stayed there for a while. Gradually people started to come down to get their cars to go off to work but one thing that they noticed was that the rear quarter light in every single car on there had been smashed as if it had been a way to get into the cars there to see what there was to steal. What was worrying me was that mine was the only car that hadn’t been smashed because I’d only just arrived so would people start to point the finger at me as the possible thief. Somewhere along the line I was on the other side of Mill Street where all of the houses were demolished ab=nd I was wandering through a couple of the condemned houses. There was one that had been burnt out and I was exploring through that one. There was nothing but charred mess. There was some stuff relating to a girl called Valerie, I think, who lived there and I wondered that had happened to her and had she survived the fire and where she was living that kind of thing.

Once I was up I had a shower – not before I’d switched on the heating in the place. It was freezing cold this morning.

When I set foot out of my room I noticed that the whole compound was flooded out.

There were leaky drainpipes everywhere and the water was gushing out from all kinds of gaps and cracks and it was flowing out the way that I was walking.

But the rain didn’t seem to be as heavy as it sounded from inside my room so I decided to walk to the hospital rather than take the bus. And wasn’t that a decision that I came to regret?

But for now I braved the weather and headed out across town. And I was the only person out there, which wasn’t any of a surprise.

Down through the town I noticed that the Delhaize supermarket has had a major refit.

And also that the roadworks at the corner of the Amerikalaan, Franz Tielemanslaan and the Brusselsestraat where they have been installing a cycle path are complete.

There are even some nice flower beds there too. But I imagine that they won’t be there for long because the water will wash them away before too long.

Some nice street furniture there too, and I wonder how long that will all be there before it’s damaged or destroyed. It looks too nice to be there for too long.

All of this is on top of a large bridge that spans the River Dilje that flows through the town at the foot of the hill.

We can see just how much rain we’ve had over the last 10 hours or so. The river has risen by several feet in that time.

And the speed of the river has increased quite rapidly too. It’s water with a velocity like this that has destroyed the town centre of Pepinster out in the mountains to the east of the country.

By now though, the river was close to destroying me too so I rushed off as much as I could towards the hospital, driven along by the rain.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here last time we saw them beginning to install what was to become some kind of velodrome.

By the time that I went past this morning the velodrome was finished and ready for use.

But it’s not likely to be having much use in this kind of weather. It’s made of wood and I imagine that in this kind of weather there won’t be a single ounce of grip on the surface of those wooden boards.

And there aren’t likelty to be all that many spectators out there in the open-air grandstand either while this downpour is going on.

I had a look at what was happening on the site of Sint Pieter’s hospital that they have demolished recently after many vicissitudes.

By now the site seems to have been cleared and all of the rubble, concrete and steel has now been taken away and left just a nice flat surface.

There’s an interesting trench that is there on the ground that looks as if they are going to be installing something there. But I hope that it will be drains that they will be installing because you can see just how waterlogged the place has become.

But with the demolition of the hospital there’s a whole new vista that has been opened up.

And I didn’t notice this bit until I was back at my place and enlarged the image. There’s a medieval tower that has no been revealed in all its glory, having been hidden for so long by the hospital building.

This tower would seem to be part of the medieval city walls that we have seen here and there dotted all around the city.

But I headed off to the hospital looking rather like a drowned rat. I have never been so wet in all my life and that’s not a call for ribald comment.

In the nephrology department I had a good moan at them about my medication and all of this fatigue and how I would be glad to cut it all out. The end result is that they gave me two more medications instead, as well as a fortnightly injection that is supposed to be the last resort.

This was available at the pharmacy in the hospital so I had to go and collect it. And now as well as four injections, I also have a nice lunch bag and a small ice block thing.

Down into town I went next.

The weather was still raging and I was chased all the way down the Monseigneur van Waeyeberghlaan by a tide of floodwater.

By the time that I arrived at the Cafe Brazil I was even wetter than I was before and while I was drinking my coffee with Alison I was leaving a huge puddle of water underneath where I was sitting, and that’s not a cause for ribald comment either.

As the rain eased off to mere “torrential” we headed into town where I bought her a chopping board for a housewarming present, and then we went for a bag of chips for lunch.

Alison very kindly ran me back to the hospital where I went for my regular haematology session. And everything seems to be stable, so I was told. So nothing explains the tiredness at the moment so they gave me the first injection of this new series.

Back into the pouring rain I went down the hill to the Kapucijnenvoer where I could see the swimming pool of the basement of the building that hey are erecting.

And it was here that the lens on the little NIKON 1 J5 locked up again in the same way that it did 18 months ago and which led to it being sent away for repair.

As for me, I repaired to Delhaize where I bought stuff for tea and then swam back here and crashed out on the sofa for an hour.

After tea I wrote up my journal and tomorrow I’ll edit the previous days’ entries to add the dreams in to the entries that I missed.

But right now I’m off to bed. I’m exhausted and I could do with a sleep. I hope that the rain holds off so that something different can keep me awake tonight.

Cramps, torrential rainstorms – it’ll be a plague of locusts tonight.