… nice and early, long before the alarm.

“Up (one, two) Down (one, two)”. Right, and now the other sock.

Yes, have to keep myself fit and active.

An early breakfast followed by some work on the computer, and then at 09:00 precisely, off to the LeClerc. I didn’t need much but still, it’s nice to get out and about.

On the way there we had an exciting moment when a Belgian motorist, seeing me coming, simply pulled out to pass a parked lorry. We aren’t having any of that so I blocked him off and made him reverse backwards. As he finally retreated and I ended up alongside him, I wound down my window and gave him a volley of verbal abuse, in Flemish.

Not for nothing did I spend a year living in Leuven.

You may or may not know this, but there were no driving tests in Belgium until 1973. You simply applied for a driving licence and you were given it. The driver was certainly old enough not to have taken a test. There’s the old French joke about Belgian driving licences being given away in packets of crisps and that’s certainly the case here.

At the LeClerc, we had another one of those “moments”. A woman was loading a pile of bread into her trolley.
“All you need now are two loaves and a pot of tea for 5,000” said our hero gallantly
The woman replied “What?”.
As Alfred Hitchcock once famously said to Kenneth Williams “it’s a waste of time trying to tell jokes to foreigners”.

LUnchtime was on the wall on the clifftop overlooking the harbour. It was really warm and beautiful out there. So much so that back here, for the first time, I felt hot in my apartment. I had to open all of the windows to make a current of air circulate through. If the sun can heat up solid granite walls one metre thick, then it must have been warm.

But it cooled down rapidly in the evening and I had to go round and close everything a little later.

An early night now after my beans, sausage and chips. And I’ll see you all in the morning … "not if we see you first" – ed.

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