… luck this afternoon to be able to see inside that building on the Rector de Somerplein.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few months ago a building that had been used for years as an office had closed down and they began to smash out the inside.

A couple of months ago I managed a quick glance in but this afternoon while I was out and about in town I noticed that everyone had knocked off and gone home, and the tarpaulin that they had fitted across the front was blowing in the wind.

“An opportunity far too good to miss” I thought to myself. I whipped out the NIKON 1 J5 and poked it through the grille at the front.

Et voilà

At least it was better luck than I had last night trying to go to sleep. It seems to make no difference what time I go to bed, I simply can’t sleep these days and that’s beginning to get on my nerves. It must be my guilty conscience, I reckon.

However I must have gone off to sleep at some point because there were tonnes of stuff on the dictaphone from my travels during the night.

And once more, it was quite a fight to tear myself off the mattress this morning when then alarms went off. I failed miserably with the first and second alarms and although it was something of quite a struggle, I did manage to beat the third alarm – only just.

There was a Welsh lesson this morning so I had to do things with a rush as we were starting early as our tutor had a medical appointment.

And to my surprise it passed off quite well too. I don’t know what I’d done wrong but I seemed to have remembered most of what I needed this week.

The one good thing about having an early lesson was that it stopped me feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in self-pity for a change. Half the problem is that I have too much time on my hands. If I were at home I’d have plenty of distractions to keep me occupied.

After lunch I had a go at the dictaphone notes to see where I’d been during the night. I’d started out with Jerry Kobalenko, one of my Arctic explorer friends. We were out in the Atlantic and getting into some kayaks to paddle north. As the story changed and continued Jerry became a girl. I know who she is but I can’t think of her or where I met her. We were there on the high seas getting out of this boat trying to pack our things that were floating around on top of the water. We were having to put them in a couple of holdalls that would be strapped to the kayak. Of course it would make the kayak top-heavy so it was going to be interesting to see how we could make it to land like that without being swamped. I noticed that the boat on which we sailed, it could have been THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR had only one propeller blade. All the others had sheared off. There was my little wind turbine on there but it wasn’t doing all that much. I had another alternative energy machine on there but I can’t remember what that was. In the meantime our ship was reported missing. We’d been in the company of another ship for a while but then there was an ice field and we’d separated but hadn’t rejoined the other ship afterwards so we were listed as missing. People were starting to be worried about us and search for us but we were still afloat, still a way out in the Atlantic busy trying to organise these kayaks so that we could get out of the water as we were actually in the water by this time starting to pack then get into the kayaks and paddle away through these waves and the storm in top-heavy kayaks

And then there was a group of us on board ship again. Me, another woman, her boyfriend (it could well have been my friends from Nicorps). There were a few small girls. Once again one of these small girls had taken a fancy to me and was hanging around with me. During the evening they had a kind-of ship’s party out on the open deck. It was starting to become somewhat out of hand. The woman and her husband, they wouldn’t dance together. He wouldn’t dance with her. A person took him and made him eat something, some powder, and used him as a kind-of sacrificial altar where they decked him out with candles etc using some kind of magical incantation to make people dance a kind of crocodile around him. This woman worked out that what they had actually given the husband was strychnine. We all thought that it would kill him, at least make him impotent. She took a mouthful of it and we all wondered why. She said that it was to do with some way of making him immune to disease. We couldn’t work out exactly why but there were all these people dancing around. There was such a feeling of deep and utter tragedy happening. Then one of these little girls, the one who had taken a shine to me, started to dance with me too.

Later on I stepped right back into that dream of all of us on that boat, these dancing people being separated and so on. It was at that point where the women were dancing and the men were standing still before the one who had been picked out to be the sacrificial altar, somewhere around there.

We were back in Crewe. There was some kind of family event going on. We were in the High Street. By this time the railway line to Chester was a footpath and there was the old railway line that was also a footpath. We were discussing what had happened on someone’s wedding night where Malcolm had had rather too much to drink and had been fooling around round here by the steps onto the abandoned railway lines and had been arrested. It was around here where we bumped into TOTGA, a very crestfallen-looking TOTGA too. She’d been in a fight with a group of girls. It turned out that someone had suspected her of sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend. She showed me a photo of a girl and said “that’s the girl who hit me”. I asked her how she was. She said that she’d hurt her hand so I took her hand. She was very reluctant to let me but I kissed it better like you do to a kid. That made her recoil a little. The conversation went on about the particular fight that had happened completely out of the blue. She knew absolutely nothing about it. It just flared up in the street from nothing.

But this is not the time for TOTGA to be unhappy.

It goes without saying that talking about sacrificial altars and the like, there was much more to it than this. But you really don’t want to know about it, especially if you are just about to have a meal.

This seemed to be a good time for me to go out for my afternoon walk. There were a few things that I needed in town.

Down the Tiensestraat I strolled and ended up on the corner of the Herbert Hooverplein and the Tavern Universum.

Over the last few months we’ve been watching the developments here as they have been ripping out the interior and so on.

The skip over there on the left is full of rubble so it looks as if it’s going to be a while before the work is finished and the tavern reopens.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of excitement in the Square itself.

The fountain over there is now working again after the winter and there are a couple of kids having no end of fun running about and soaking themselves as the fountain erupts in a fury.

It just goes to show you the resilience of kids. It’s not exactly midsummer this afternoon and I bet that the water over there is pretty cold.

From there I headed off into town, past the building that we saw earlier in the Rector de Somerplein.

The Grote Markt is well-known for all kinds of exciting temporary displays and we’ve seen a few in our time over the 6 years since I’ve been coming here.

THis month they have a giant megaphone over there although why it’s there and what it’s advertising, I wasn’t able to identify. I shall have to have a closer look on Thursday when I’m on my way to Castle Anthrax.

But whether or not I have time is something else. My first appointment is at 09:30which means that I have to be off on my travels at 08:00 and I’m not sure how I’m going to manage that.

At the Delhaize I stocked up on vegan cheese and vegan garlic mayonnaise for home, as well as some Iced Tea and banan-flavoured soya milk. However I forgot the coffee and baked beans and so I’ll have to go again when I go to buy the vegan sausages at the Origin’o or whatever it’s called these days.

Back here I had to choose the music for the final radio programme of this next batch. And of course the first track that I chose and which will open up the programme had to be YET ANOTHER ONE that touched a nerve.
“Well maybe I’m just thinking that the rooms are all on fire
Every time that you walk in the room
Well there is magic all around you, if I do say so myself…
I have known this much longer than I’ve known you”

So having now had tea, I’m going to sit quietly and not do very much before I’m off to bed. If I’m lucky I might be able to have a good sleep but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe I ought to have someone come and tuck me in every night and read me a story, but let’s not go getting all broody again, hey?