Tag Archives: leuven

Sunday 3rd January 2021 – THERE ARE NO …

… dictaphone notes tonight.

And that’s for the simple reason that not only did I not go on a nocturnal voyage, I actually didn’t go to sleep. I had what they call around here a nuit blanche.

It was just after midnight when I finally went to bed, having packed away everything, and with having to get up at 05:00 I didn’t even undress. I just lay on the bed in the hope that I would drift off to sleep.

However it wasn’t to be and when the first alarm did go off at 05:00 I was actually up and about making my sandwiches.

It didn’t take me long to leave the apartment and having deposed my key in the key box, I headed off to the station carrying my rather heavy load.

And just look at the time on the noticeboard over the top of the head of the passenger to the right of the train. This is my train coming into the station and it’s just 05:33. And it’s been a long time since I’ve been out and about at that time. Our train by the way is one of the SNCB workhorse locomotives, a Class 18 electric locomotive taking a train to Oostende.

The train didn’t hang about for very long in the station. It soon cleared off to Brussels and for the first time since I don’t know when, my ticket was checked by a guard.

In the Gare du Midi in Bruseels my train to Lille (actually, to Strasbourg but I was getting out at Lille) was already at the platform.

It’s one of the Reseau 38000 TGV trainsets on which we travel quite frequently and while there was an hour to go before it was due to depart, the doors were locked so we had to loiter around for ages in the freezing cold.

And freezing cold it was too. 2°C it was yesterday evening and I imagine that it’s colder than that right now. And just look at the time here too.

We left on time and arrived in Lille on time too because I had just 20 minutes to cross the town from Lille Europe railway station to Lille Flandres. I’ve no idea why they do this at all because there is no margin for error. And there were hordes of people flooding off my train up the road into town and the Paris train.

What would they do if the brussels train would ever be late? Would they leave everyone stranded in Lille or would they hold the Paris train? I can’t see why they can’t set the Paris train to depart from Lille Europe.

The train in Lille Flandres is one of the TGV Reseau Duplexes, the “double deckers.

We all piled into the train and bang on schedule it set off like a rocket. And for the first time so far today, my eyes started to sag and I drifted away for a minute or two (and really, only a minute or two too).

Our train made it to Paris Nord a couple of minutes early, and that’s a rare event too. And so I took a phot of it and then headed off for metro line 4, carrying my heavy load. There was plenty of food left over from my stay in Leuven and I wasn’t going to leave any of it behind.

The metro wasn’t all that busy and there were no delays or anything like that. One thing that I like, and one of the (many) reasons why I chose Granville as a place to which to retire is that the trains from Paris to Granville depart from the Gare Montparnasse which is on the direct line from Paris Gare du Nord and there’s no need to change trains in the bowels of the city.

There was about 50 minutes to wait at the Gare Montparnasse and once more we weren’t allowed to board the train to wait in the warmth. These big railway stations in Paris are open and really draughty. There’s no-where to go that’s out of the cold.

When the train set off I settled down comfortably and even dozed off for a few minutes, only to be awoken by the ticket collector. And then I couldn’t go back to sleep again, although I was in no state to do any work or anything. I did manage to eat my sandwiches though.

Keeping up what seems to be becoming a habit, we were early into Granville and our train, the one on the left, found a berth next to one of its brothers in an adjacent bay.

Struggling under the weight of my load I headed for home and arrived here bang on 14:30. I’d left one of the radiators working but even so it wasn’t all that warm in here and I had to wind up the heating. With a coffee I came and sat down on my chair but although I didn’t go to sleep, I didn’t do very much.

Later on when I recovered my strength, I went into the kitchen.

First off, I fried a couple of large onion and plenty of garlic in a saucepan (not a frying pan).

When they were brown, I tipped in all of the rest of the mixed frozen veg from Leuven and all of the frozen broccoli except for four stalks, and stirred it all in, along with a mixture of herbs and spices.

When it was all nice and browning, I tipped in the rest of the soya cream that I’d been using for my mince pies before I went away and added some water too, and left it to simmer for half an hour while I took out a pile of rubbish to the bins outside.

Having left it for a half-hour or so, I whizzed it all up with the whizzer and it made one of the most delicious cream of vegetable soups that I’ve ever tasted. I treated myself to a bowl as a snack.

For tea, I had a roast dinner with the seitan slices that were left over from Christmas with roast potatoes and a pile of Christmas vegetables that I’d frozen before I went away along with the broccoli that I’d set aside earlier. And I deserved it too. My New Year’s Eve meal was nothing much to write home about at all.

So now I’m caught up with my notes from this trip I’m off to bed. There’s an alarm tomorrow and I’m back at work. My Christmas break didn’t last long, did it?

Saturday 2nd January – I MANAGED TO …

… beat the third alarm out of bed this morning.

Mind you, I have to admit that I cheated somewhat. Not having gone to bed until late and needing to be on form, I reset the alarms to start at 08:00 instead of 06:00. I reckoned that that was a reasonable compromise, what with one thing and another.

First thing that I did was to have a listen to the dictaphone to see if I’d been anywhere during the night. In fact I’d been in Shavington but it quickly transformed itself into Crewe. There was a fire in the outskirts and it was slowly heading into town. We had things to do, we had to sit down there and I wanted to watch a football match or listen to one on the radio. We were making our way into this big building but it was clear that the flames were starting to get worse and I noticed in the end that I was the only one in there. Then someone else came round, a woman with a few things . I had a feeling that if I stopped she would stop too and that was going to be a bit silly so I explained to her about how dangerous the fire was going to be. In the end we went outside and there were a few people outside co-ordinating rescue efforts. One of the guys from the radio was in charge. We stood and watched for a couple of minutes then slowly picked up our things and moved away as we heard that the fire had now reached the outskirts of Crewe round Davenport Avenue and Nantwich Road. We moved away and I had the satisfaction in seeing that I was the last one to gather up my stuff and move away and I checked to make sure that everything was clear before we did so. It reminded me of a General and his troops retreating and how the General ought to be the last and making sure that the way was clear in order to do so just like in the Army.

In connection with the fire, later on in the night 3 objects came up for auction. There was a soldier’s compass, a soldier’s badge and a 3rd thing that I can’t remember what it was. I remember thinking that these would have come in handy if we had been in the fire and these were available. This was where the fire dream came in at this point just here and now and we found ourselves back in Shavington on the corner between Edwards Avenue and Edwards Close with this burnt and blackened paper shredded and flying around.

The next task was the Welsh homework. No matter what, I have to keep up to date with that. It didn’t take me all that long although it’s bcoming more and more complicated and took quite some research. Interestingly, we aren’t now being asked to asnwer questions, we are being asked to come up with questions to ask.

Afer a shower, I made some sandwiches and then, gathering them up, I headed off to the Railway Station.

While I was waiting for my train to Brussels I was eating my sandwiches on the platform. And hence I was taken completely by surprise when the train came in early.

Our train today is one of the strange AM96 multiple units. When one trainset is coupled to another the rubber bellows make a perfect seal, and the drivers’ cabs at the join tilt round 90° so that passengers can walk from one trainset to another.

Our train pulled into Brussels Central Station bang on time, and walking up the steps I met my friend Esi.

Esi and I studied together and University when we both lived in Brussels years ago but she went back to Wales and I went on to France after we graduated. We’ve met up a couple of times since then when our paths have crossed in Brussels but earlier last year when Brexit became a reality she moved back to Belgium to cement her European rights.

The two of us went for a walk around the park opposite the Royal Palace where we chatted about our different adventures since we last met, and then went off to the Belvue Museum in the Place du Palais to meet one of her friends and then for a walk around the museum.

The museum is a fascinating place to visit. It’s all about the history of the country of Belgium since it won its independence in 1830.

There was plenty to see in there and I could have spent a lot longer in there than our alloted time slot. But for me, the pride of the place was this gorgeous FN 4. It’s the world’s first 4-cylinder in-line motorbike – block 4s and V4s had been made previously – and was made between 1905 and 1914.

This is a later one rather than an earlier one – you can tell that by the rear brake. This is a drum brake whereas the earlier ones had rim brakes rather like a pushbike.

Interestingly, to start it up, you had to pedal it until the engine fired up. No kickstart.

One of the more interesting things to see is the view from out of one of the windows.

This view is right up the Rue Royale, past the park where we walked just now, all the way past the old Jardin Botanique and all the way down to the Église Royale Sainte-Marie de Schaerbeek, one of the most beautiful buildings in the city but now sadly delapidated and more-or-less abandoned despite the fact that it was renovated 30 years ago.

After the museum, Esi had a few things to do so the three of us walked around the city running errands. We stopped for a coffee in the Central Station and then like the Knights of the Round Table, we went our separate ways.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there are 4 expresses every hour from Brussels to Leuven. However they are all bunched pretty much together and then there’s a long gap.

There is however a semi-urban stopping train that runs across the Metropolitan area and terminates at Leuven. We’ve caught it a few times when we went to watch the football at Tubize and one of them pulled into Central Station just at the right moment. It’s one of the modern class AM08 multiple units that was just coming into service as I left the city.

When it pulled up in the station we all piled out and I headed off back home to my digs, having first stopped to take a photo of the train

Well, in actual fact, I didn’t head off hiome. I had a few things to do first.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other evening when I was wandering around the city in the dark, I took a photo of the Bondgenotenlaan from the Rector de Somerplein looking down to the railway station. Tonight, seeing as I was standing outside the railway station in the Martelarenplein, I could take a photo of the Bondgenotenlaan looking back down to where I was the other night.

Right down the far end of the street we can see the lights of the Stadhuis – the Town Hall – in the Grote Markt.

While I was here in the Martelarenplein I had a good look around the neighbourhood to see what else I could see.

Where I’m standing now is on an overbridge that crosses the ring road – the Tiensevest – that is emerging from a tunnel underground. It’s one of the main throroughfares of the city with the railway station to my left and so just the kind fo place that you would expect to be brightly illuminated to welcome visitors to the city, but once again, it’s quite depressingly banal.

All in all, I’m rather disappointed with the Christmas decorations this year, not just in leuven but in just about everywhere that I have visited.

Turning round further to my left there was a view between the buildings to the eastern end of the train shed of the station.

Behind it, there’s one of the hotels in the vicinity of the station and then a couple of office blocks. This is the area where it all happens.

Back at my little room it was teatime so I made a plate of pasta and vegetables and chick peas with tomato sauce. But just as I was sitting down to start my notes, Rosemary rang me up for a chat and we ended up being on the phone together for 1 hour and 38 minutes.

There was now some packing to do and then I have to go to bed as son as I can because I have to get up at 05:00 and you know how I feel about that these days.

As for my notes, they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Friday 1st January 2021 – I’M GLAD …

… that 2020 had finished. That was one difficult year and the first time that I haven’t been to North America for I don’t know how long.

And in case you are wondering, which I’m sure that you aren’t, I’m not convinced that 2021 is going to be much better.

At least we started off on the right foot because despite not going to bed until about 02:00 this morning, I was up and about, with no alarm, at 09:30. A few more days like that will suit me fine but I shan’t be having them.

After the medication I came back here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night.

My friend from the Saone valley and his friends came to visit me during the night. I was in Virlet – or what passes for Virlet and I was very embarrassed when they saw the kind of state in which I was living. I was trying to interest them in things like the radio telescope in the valley down below. The he asked where all of my CDs were even though they were in plain evidence all over the walls. It was a very strange meeting and wasn’t exactly how I intended it to be or thought that it would be. They stayed for a while and all cleared off again. I shook my head and couldn’t see the point of that and what was going to happen next.
But next I had to leave the house and I was in the van. Part of this area was a building site round by Joey the Swan in Crewe. One of the ways to get up where I was was to reverse back up the hill past these half-built houses and reach the main road that way, or the 2nd thing to do was to cut through one of the driveways and onto the main road through the back of one of the drives. I must have driven and reversed up and down that road 3 or 4 times trying to work out which would be the best drive to go up. There was one but for some reason I kept on overshooting it and ending up in one that was more unsuitable.

Apart from that, I had a half-hearted go at doing my Welsh homework and at least that’s now up to date. Apart from that I’ve done nothing at all. Even for lunch I just had a slice of toast.

Yesterday I remember saying that I would go out this evening to inspect the Christmas lights that I hadn’t seen yesterday when I walked though the city on my way home.

At least, later on after it had gone dark I managed to tear myself away from whatever I wasn’t doing and headed off into the freezing cold . I ended up in the Naamsestraat to see what the decorations were like, and as you can see for yourself, they are pretty depressing.

At least the lights wrapped around one of the towers of the town hall provide some kind of relief to the start environment.

From the Naamsestraat there are several little alleyways that lead on down to the Oude Markt.

The Oude Markt is, in more normal times, the centre of café life in the city, crowded with people even in the middle of winter and in the past there have been some really beautiful and impressive Christmas lights here. But while these look quite nice, they aren’t a patch on what we’ve seen in the past.

A real sign of the times right here and now is that there isn’t another soul in the image this evening apart from someone on a bicycle heading my way.

The far end of the Oude Markt is a small street called the Kortestraat, or “short street” that leads into the Grote Markt.

This is the street where almost every commercial ground-floor premises is a fast-food takeaway and I’ve had a couple of good meals in one of the fritkots here. But these days they are all closed to customers except for takeway and delivery, and one of the very few benefits of the current situation is the explosion in the number of food delivery cyclists in the city.

There’s a couple of dozen loitering here waiting to be beckoned by one of the food outlets.

Yesterday I took a photo of the Town Hall – the Stadhuis – with all of its illuminations.

In previous years there have been all kinds of other decorations, such as creches and stables and the like in the Square but this year there is nothing at all like that. There’s a Christmas tree and natural tree that is illuminated and in between them is a small creche but that’s just about your lot.

Mind you, the buses are driving around the usual Christmas route deviation instead of driving through the Square

One thing that you have probably noticed is the absence of pedestrians in the city this evening.

From the Grote Markt I walked around the back of St Pieters Church and down the hill into the Mechelsestraat and here I struck it lucky. In this photograph you can actually see five other people, four on foot and one on a bicycle.

What I don’t see though are any really exotic Christmas decorations. A few lights strung up across the street and a few draped over a shop display by a private individual and that’s it.

having inspected the Mechelsestraat I continued on my lap around the church without noticing anything special, and found myself at the bus stop in the Rector de Somerplein.

From there, there is a good view all the way down the Bondgenotenlaan to the Martyrs’ Column in the Martelarenplein and the Railway Station in the background. Every year the trees in the avenue are illuminated with lights draped in the branches and while this has never been anything startling, at least they have maintained the decorations this year.

And before I could regain the pavement I was almost squidged by a family on pushbikes weaving around in the street

Back on the pavement I walked on along the street and then cut down a side street into the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein.

Once again, the lights here in the Square are pretty disappointing. In front of us is the famous University Library, burnt to the ground along with all of its priceless possessions and collection of ancient books by the Germans in 1914 during the Sack of Leuven. And the lights here on this building aren’t anything like they have been.

Even so it looks extremely impressive, illuminated just like this.

On the way back home I walked across the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein towards the Tiensestraat.

Looking behind me, I noticed that the trees had received some kind of decoration to relieve the monotony, but again, I’ve seen much better than this in the past.

When I arrived back home I went to sit down for a couple of minutes but ended up crashing out for an hour. For some reason, this walking thing is taking a lot out of me.

Not feeling hungry I just made a sandwich for tea. There’s no need to eat if I’m not feeling particularly like it.

Now I’ve written my notes I’m off to bed. There’s an alarm tomorrow so I want to be on form. I have a date in the afternoon.

Thursday 31st December 2020 – BY THE TIME …

… that most of you read this, we will be in a New Year. 2020 will have ended and we’ll have 2021 to contend with. Many people are hoping that this New Year will be better than the last but that’s an optimism that I can’t share.

Especially for the Brits who not only have Brexit with which to contend but also a miserable figure of just under 56,000 new Covid infections and just under 1,000 deaths despite a lockdown. What’s interesting is that whereas in the USA they are taking almost no precautions whatsoever, the relative figures per 1,000 of the population are much less.

Historically, all of these previous viruses such as The Black Death, Cholera, Spanish ‘Flu have all come in several waves and there’s no reason to suppose that this is any different. So I don’t see this year as being any better than the last.

But why be so miserable? Let’s look on the bright side of life. At the hospital today they have told me that symptoms of the disease that I have are now being traced in the kidneys. So you won’t have too much longer to suffer this depressing diatribe by the sound of things. And that’s enough to cheer anyone up, isn’t it?

While you admire the snail-like (lack of) speed of the new sewer and roadworks in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan that seem to be taking for just about ever, I myself managed to crawl out of bed to beat the 3rd alarm this morning.

And that’s not something that happens every day these days, is it? And considering that I had another miserable night where I took about a week to go off to sleep, it’s pretty good going for right now.

First task of course was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And to my surprise, I’d covered the miles yet again.

I’d started the night with all of us queueing at the ferries last night with lorries. I was in an artic with a big flat trailer and I’d managed to get my lorry down into the hold so when it came to driving onto the ferry I walked on behind the lorry in front and just stood behind it so as to mark my place. There was a big discussion about the ferry – whether we were to go from Grande-Synthe or Petite-Synthe and where it was situated, all this kind of thing, but I’ve forgotten it all now

Later on during the night I had a girl with me, a young girl and I don’t know very much about her at all. The 2 of us were talking about things and she was saying how she didn’t think much of prefects or housemasters or such. She was working herself into such a state that as someone walked past who was a prefect or whatever she just hit them with this iron crowbar and literally split their skull and knocked them to the ground. I picked up the girl and dragged her away and took her to another room where I phoned the police and ambulance to come to the victim. I was really wondering what I was going to say about this and my part in getting the girl all worked up like that.

Having transcribed the dictaphone notes I went and made some sandwiches for lunch as I was to have a busy day today.

That was followed by a clothes-washing session and then a shower. I have to make sure that I’m clean, smell nice and look pretty for the nurses there.

By the time that I’d arranged all of that, I was starting to run behind and I had to put my skates on. Luckily the rain that had awoken me at some point during the night had stopped and it was comparatively dry outside.

Surprisingly the streets were totally deserted. There wasn’t even a handful of people out there on the streets.

My route went as usual down into town, through the centre and out along the Brusselsestraat heading west (or going west of course).

Over the past year or so we’ve seen them demolishing the Hospital Sint Pieters, the hospital that was apparently built for the French community in Flanders but never used due to them all decamping to Louvain-le-Neuve. The demolition has been going on for so long now with so little progress being made that it must be costing them a fortune.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … MY OLD NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR would have had that down in the twinkling of an eye, never mind over a period of more than a year.

They don’t make them like that any more

Something that’s been going on for even longer has been the digging and subsequent filling-in of the big hole in the car park in the Sint Jakobsplein.

It seems that at last they have filled in the hole and resurfaced it, not that they have made a particularly good job of it. But it’s still not available for parking by the general public as it’s all fenced off still.

It seems to me that it’s now being used as the storage area for the equipment and material for the work that’s going on in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan and the Sint Hubertusstraat.

and so it seems like this area of the car park will be unavailable for the next forever, I imagine because they don’t seem to be in any rush.

Here in the Sint Hubertusstraat, the lower part of the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan the repairs are also a long way from being completed and while that vehicle is making a valiant attempt to pass down the length of street it’s making heavy weather of the journey.

So I pushed on up through the roadworks that you saw earlier, and arrived at the hospital with 10 minutes to spare, the time for which was lost trying to work out where I was supposed to go.

And if you think that the town was empty, the hospital was even more empty too. There were very few people wandering around there and hanging around waiting for appointments.

Eventually I was seen by the student at the Kidney department following the x-rays that I had a while back. She interrogated and examined me, and then she went off to talk to the Professor who is in charge of that section.

He came back and told me the news that I mentioned earlier, which isn’t the best news that I’ve had so far. The plan is that they will write to me to give me an appointment when they have the results of the samples that she took from me.

Then I went upstairs to the Oncology department for my usual treatment. I wasn’t long there, with no visit from a doctor, so it wasn’t long before I was allowed to leave. And then I had to go back for a prescription for some of my medication. Abd by the time that I’d picked that up, the chemist’s was closed – early for New Years Eve of course.

On the way into the hospital I noticed that there was a Christmas tree outside the hospital door.

By the time that I left, it was going dark and so the tree was all illuminated. The decorations were not exactly inspiring but still I suppose I ought to take a photograph of it for the record seeing as I’m not getting about as often and as far as I would have done had things been different.

It was quite cold outside now so I wasn’t going to hang about very long. I headed off down the street back towards town and my lodgings.

My way home retraced the steps that I had taken on the way out to the hospital.

By now it was quite dark and the Christmas lights in the town were illuminated. Here in the Brusselsestraat from roughly where I took the photo of the Sint Pieters Hospital and looking to the west there was a good view of the lights, or at least, such lights as there were here this year.

Apparently it’s not just Granville that is economising on its Christmas displays this year. The lights in Leuven aren’t all that much to write home about either.

From the same spot looking eastwards back to the town centre there are more Christmas lights to see.

But once again, I’m rather disappointed by the lights that are here in the Brusselsestraat. Of course, it goes without saying that with all of the uncertainty, the loss of revenue and the increased expenditure due to the current situation, there are going to have to be economies made here and there with regard to the budget.

Nevertheless it’s a shame that they have decided to do this with the Christmas decorations It’s the kind of thing that would cheer up everyone and bring a little happiness into people’s lives in these grim times

In the background of the previous photo you saw the spires of the Stadhuis – the Town Hall in the Grote Markt lit up by strings of LED lights. And so with the aim of wanting to see them in all their glory, I went home that way.

In previous years they have been multicoloured lights that change colour at regular intervals and make a rather beautiful spectacle. But not this year, unfortunately. We have a golden yellow light and that seemed to be that for the time that I spent looking at it. Not a change of colour anywhere.

Beautiful that it is, it’s again something of a disappointment. But I’ll go out tomorrow evening after dark for another good look around and see how the rest of the town centre looks.

It’ll have to look better than the Herbert Hooverplein because this really is disappointing.

No Christmas market, which is no surprise, but they could still have done something better than this. And if you are dismayed by this, the decorations and lights in the Tiensestraat were non-existent. I came on home.

Back here I crashed out for a while and then made tea. Nothing at all exciting – just pasta and tinned veg, followed by tinned apricot and some Soya strawberry dessert stuff.

Having written my notes, I’m off to bed, ready (I don’t think) for the New Year.

To all of you, I hope that this year will be better than the last year and that we can move about once more. I wish each and every one of you everything that you wished for everyone else last year, wishes for Brexiters and Trump supporters excluded of course.

Take good care of yourselves and we’ll see each other again – hopefully not at Philippi

Wednesday 30th December 2020 – I HAVEN’T BEEN …

… very far today.

And that’s because for most of the day we’ve been in the grip of a torrential downpour. It was going at it hammer and tongs when I awoke so to be honest I turned over and went back to sleep where I stayed until about 09:30.

It was still raining when I awoke so I had a drink and then listened to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. There had been a party going on in the attic of my house in Virlet and for some unknown reason all of the lights went out. It wasn’t dark, but I was there at the cables trying to touch different cables with a connector to see if the lights would come on, trying to work out the position in which these two cables ought to be in, in order to make the lights wotk. It seemed pretty straightforward but you’ve no idea how complicated it was last night when all of this was going on. Occasionally I was getting the lights to be illuminated but they didn’t look bright enough, suggesting a bad earth or something like that or whether they had the terminals the wrong way round (which of course wouldn’t work LEDs). I was making such a hard job of making this job correct and I have to say that the wiring that I was messing around was a total mess to start with. It didn’t resemble anything like a set of wiring ought to do, except the wiring that I did right at the very beginning.

Later on there was a conflict in a family-run business and the old guy who ran it had been shunted out and the two brothers were fighting over it. It came to dividing up the assets and 1 of the brothers suggested that because of the way of life of the other, he wasn’t entitled to as much money. This discussion went on for ages and in the end they agreed to settle it by an exchange of assets – a painting and something else would be exchanged for a painting and something else of greater value and that way it would be quits. The 2nd brother went to talk to his father about it and in the end, secretly one night before this exchange was due to take place they agreed a change of assets themselves which left n°2 son better off and withdrawing all his claims, leaving his father who was in a much better place to fight the claims against his other son. As they were saying goodbye to each other it was a case of “for God’s sake don’t go home. You want to hit the road straight away to make sure that the other son doesn’t come round to your house by accident and catch you with this because you’ve had a much better deal and he would be extremely dismayed by this”. And then the father too hit the road with his ill-gotten gains but started to be dogged all the way by his illegitimate children turning up from when he was younger claiming their share, unpaid bills suddenly appearing that the company hadn’t satisfied and so on which would lead to a seizure of assets. It seems that the n°2 brother wasn’t as stupid as he looked and had gone and shopped his father for all of this in the hope that if all of the assets were liquidated he would receive more because of his family share of it.

This led to another walking adventure, of which there have been more than a few just recently. I was walking with another couple of guys walking away from somewhere which might have been this situation and having a really pleasant and pleasurable long walk through the south-west England countryside trying to get away from civilisation for a while. On one occasion we ended up lying underneath a car talking about bread pudding, whether you butter the slices of bread or not (ohhh! The excitement!)

Finally, I was being held prisoner for some reason and a big burly guy something like Bernard Bresslaw had been instructed to “deal with” me. When he took me outside I explained that we’d had our differences but they had always been fair fights and we took what was coming in good grace, but this was a pretty unfair way of doing it and did he think it right? etc. he started to see my point of view and agree but just then his boss came in, clearly exhausted and exasperated after a hard day somewhere and barked out a few orders, and I could see then at that moment that I was wasting my time.

As you might imagine, it took me quite a while to transcribe all of that. And what surprised me was that I’d been so far. I’d had a really bad night it it had taken me hours to go to sleep.

By the time that I’d finished, the rain had stopped so I cleared off quickly into town.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve been looking at this property for quite a while.

It’s part of the complex where I have my accommodation, a part that has not yet been developed. It’s been a rubbish dump for quite a while until they started to tidy it all up a while ago.

And I know the story behind it now because I asked the complex manager when I saw him. It seems that they had started to develop it into apartments for the hotel but planning permission was refused, and they have been fighting about it for the last 10 years. The manager isn’t all that optimistic about its future.

As for the tidying up, they apparently had a notice served on them by the local council.

There’s yet more excitement going on just around the corner in the Tiensestraat.

There’s a vague idea going on around in my head that last time that I was here they were doing something to one of the properties there but it seems that whatever it was that was here, they have simply erased it from the map. This is going to be something to keep an eye on over the next while.

From here I headed off into town to see what was going on. And the answer to that is “nothing”. It was a bit much to expect that the Christmas market was going to be working this year.

There was nothing whatever happening in FNAC either. If that was their New Year sale, it’s a bit thin. And I imagine that the New Year sales for most places will be the same.

In the Bondgenotenlaan they have been working on this property for a few years now.

It’s where WIBRA used to be and after they left it was totally stripped out down to the four walls. And it’s another thing that’s taking a while to come to a conclusion. They are a long way from finishing it.

Talking of WIBRA, I stuck my head in there and also in Zeeman but there was nothing to tempt me. Not even a nice new
woolly hat that I would like. I ended up in Delhaize for just a couple of things and then came back here.

After lunch I sat down and did some work on the radio programmes. I now have two programmes with the music chosen, remixed and paired. And I’m hoping to do a couple more on Friday.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do my Welsh homework as I … errr … had a little relaxation.

No tea either – I wasn’t al all hungry, so I wrote up my notes for the day, such as they were. No evening walk either as it’s still pouring down with rain and didn’t leave off until after curfew as you might expect.

So a rather late night, and tomorrow I have the hospital when I can see what they are going to do to me. And see how I’ve been keeping for the last couple of months since my last appointment in October.

And I shudder to think.

Tuesday 29th December 2020 – WHILE YOU ADMIRE …

… the images of this afternoon’s walk through the Groot Begijnhof and along the River Dijle, let me tell you about where I went during the night.

I started off with a lady friend of mine from University last night but somehow I mixed her up with a girl with hom I once worked. She was separating from a black guy. He was still living in the family home in Dantzig Street and finding the payments difficult to keep up and was saying that he would have to sell it. That surprised me because I was wondering what she was going to receive from this because it’s bad enough being the mother of a couple of kids but being kicked out of your family home and living in a little dirty flat isn’t very good for the morale or anything like that. She should be doing much better than this. I can’t remember any more about this dream but interestingly I awoke at 06:00 as I would have done had the 1st alarm gone off even though I’d switched off the alarms this morning.

And the fun was only beginning.

Later on I was with a girl who was a real blast from the past from 45 years ago. We’d been on some kind of date kind of thing. One evening round at her house I suggested going for a walk but instead one of her friends (who was in fact keen on me all those years ago) came with me instead. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea for her to come along (back in those days there were a couple of reasons why I didn’t pursue this line) so in the end I let her go back home. I was wandering around Crewe on my own looking at how disgusting and dirty the place was, thinking that I should drive around videoing it and putting it on Social Media to show everyone what kind of dump the place is. Then the principal girl suggested that we go for a drive. We got into her car and she drove, and she wasn’t a bad driver at all, quite good in this little Mini that she had. We drove off out of town and came to a road junction where we had to turn. She said that we’d turn right so I asked where we were going. She said “you’ll find out”. We were heading in the direction of the hospital and I wondered what was going on in there, whether one of her friends was there, for I was hoping to get her up a dark alley and be much more friendly than I had been to date but if we were going to the hospital to see a friend, that ruled that out, didn’t it?

There was something else that I don’t remember very much, about me being in a bathroom somewhere. There were 2 guys who were the handymen for this building and 1 in particular spent some time in the area where I was. When I went out there was just the other guy there so I said that the light was out in the bathroom that I’d just used and perhaps he ought to tell his friend when he returned to do something about it but I can’t remember where this fitted in at all.

Somewhat later I’d done a big pile of cooking and I had all of these casserole dishes full of stuff all over the place, 2 big ones. I’d been ill and been in bed so they had been sitting in the kitchen for 2 or 3 days. I’d invited Barbara Windsor back, presumably for a right old carry-on. I’d been seeing her a couple of tiles and eventually I plucked up the courage to ask her out. She came back to my place and I started to parcel up these casserole things into individual portions The portions turned out to be a lot smaller than I was thinking and she was saying that maybe I should have done it into fives instead of sixes We were listening to the radio in the background and they announced ‘Top of the Pops” and I’m not going any further along this road because it’s going to spoil a surprise that I have lined up for a few weeks’ time.

But by the time that this voyage ended, it was no longer Barbara Windsor- she had transformed herself into the girl who starred in the previous voyage and this will explain a lot to at least two people who follow these adventures more closely than they like to admit.

What with all of that, that took me up to about 09:30, which isn’t too bad for a lie-in, I suppose.

And by the time that I had finished transcribing all of these and all of the adventures from yesterday, of which there is quite a considerable amount which you will find if you go back to yesterday’s page, it wasn’t all that far off lunch.

And with having no cucumber and no salad cream or equivalent, I set off out to the shops yet again.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here last time, we saw them busy working on a house on the corner of the Dekenstraat and the Brabanconnestraat.

It goes without saying of course that I was interested in seeing how they were doing with it so I took myself off that way for a closer loon. And they seem to be fitting an outer skin on it, with these new modern bricks that are quite thin and not unattractive.

It’s a long way from being finished, which is no surprise around here when you see just how the builders work, so we’ll get to see plenty more of this work.

We’ve seen the building across there – the Pope Leo XIII Seminary founded in 1889 and installed in a building that was built between 1889 and 1896.

It’s a magnificent neo-gothic pile designed by Joris Helleputte, one of the finest examples of its type and period in the city, and so whatever was going on in the minds of the city fathers when they granted planning permission for the modern monstrosity opposite it which is the School of Engineering?

It really does destroy the whole effect of the magnificence of the former building, which unfortunately now due to the decline in the number of trainee priests, is now a hostel for devout Catholic students.

It’s enough to make anyone gasp in amazement.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish might recall is that there are still vestiges of the old medieval city walls dotted about here and there in the town.

When we were here last time I showed you a photograph of one of the old surviving towers in the Sint Donatus park, so while we’re passing through today, I reckoned that I would show you a remnant of the old city walls here in the park not too far away.

You may well have seen them before but I can’t remember. Anyway, here I am and here they are.

One thing that you will have seen before is the Kangxi-Verbiest globe, although you won’t have seen it from this viewpoint.

Ferdinand Verbiest was a Jesuit priest who in 1659 went as a missionary to China. trying to impress the Chinese with the knowledge that was current in Europe at the time, he showed them a globe. This prompted the Chinese into an outburst of laughter because at the time the Chinese were well ahead of the Europeans in this manner of thinking.

This is not the original globe. That remains behind in China. This is a copy here in Leuven.

The door to this yard opens up into the Naamsestraat and so I pushed on down the road.

Those two metal lines across the street – they indicate as far as they can the position of the Proefsstraat Gate which stood here from 1156 until 1755 and was part of the fortifications that we have just seen that encircled the city. It’s on the highest part of the street

Despite its age, it wasn’t the oldest of the gates around the city. It’s known that there were fortifications including a gate built somewhere around here in the 9th Century to protect the city from Norse raids.

And this gate here didn’t survive the defortification orders of the Austrian Empire either.

There’s a calvary built across the road from the stones of the gate, and that reminds me of the story about the time they wanted to built a calvary here in modern times and they sent out requests for a design. Due to a misunderstanding on the telephone, one architect sent in a drawing of John Wayne on his horse.

Through now into the Groot Begijnhof which is a part of leuven that I love.

This is the Huis Sint Niklaas, gifted to the city in 1983. And I’ve probably taken a photo of that before too.

In Carrefour I bought what I needed, also plenty of stuff that I didn’t realise that I needed too. In fact I spent more on this second trip than I did on the first.

And then a long stagger home, where I made my sandwiches and then promptly crashed out for a really good hour.

What awoke me was a phone call from a friend in the UK. We’ve been in desultory touch here and there but she decided to ring me to see how I was. We chatted for well over an hour about all kinds of things.

Later on, I went out to buy some chips.

You’ve seen a photo of where I stay before but it looked so nice that I couldn’t resist photographing it again. But my favourite chip shop was now closed so I had to find another one. Beans and chips and burger for tea.

Now it’s late and I’m ready for bed. No watching a film like I did last night. It’s too late for that. Especially as I have an alarm set for the morning. I did 2 lots of Welsh homework today but I still need to push on when and where I can. And Thursday is D-Day at the hospital so I need to be on form.

Wednesday 25th November 2020 – THIS IS NO …

… good at all.

Never mind the three alarms this morning. I didn’t wake up until about 10:00.

This is a really sad situation to be in. But then, it’s probably my own fault. I was distracted after finishing off my notes and didn’t go to bed until 01:30. And so I was thinking that I would be lucky to be up at 06:15. Even so, I didn’t think that it would be this late and waste half a day.

Plenty of time to go on a walkabout during the night too.

By now things were advancing with TOTGA and we were definitely a couple. She was definitely living in Gainsborough Road with me. She had brought her animals with her, a couple of cats and a couple of dogs. The cats were very stand-offish as far as I was concerned. One night she went to bed and I had a few things to do so I stayed up. I was wondering about going to bed, and I thought “no, I have a few things to do and I can make the most of it doing them while it’s quiet”. We’d done a furniture removal and we could have removed all of the stuff out of my house with this van but it didn’t quite work out like that with people not being able to keep to a timetable and likely to run off or something like that. I ended up having to take the van back without moving my stuff but I’d removed the other person’s. It was 01:00 or 02:00 and I didn’t feel particularly like going to sleep so I’d done some some more stuff. But I’d made a mistake. I went to press the button on something but ended up pressing the doorbell and thought “God, I’ve awoken everyone in the apartment building now”. I carried on doing what I was doing. For some unknown reason a heavy lorry started up and drove away. I thought “I’m glad that’s not me waking the neighbourhood even more”. Then TOTGA came down and asked “are you going to come to bed or what?”. I had a little laugh and smile to myself and off I went upstairs. She’d changed all of the bedding in the bedroom so I made a remark about it. There was no room for me in the bed because of all these dogs and cats fighting their way around. Suddenly the alarm went off. I looked and it was only 05:00 instead of 07:00. I couldn’t remember how to switch off the alarm. In the end she had to come and do it for me and it was all. That was all very well – I’d lived in this place and she’d only been here half an hour, something like that. I went to get into bed and some of her cats were all curled up with my cats and it all looked like one big happy family until I got into bed when hers started to move. I thought “that’s just typical, isn’t it? It’ll take them a while to get used to me”.

So it wasn’t all bad then during the night. Not ‘arf it wasn’t.

First thing this morning (or what was left of the morning, should I say) was to make the booking for my trip to Leuven. And that’s not going to happen now either. All of the train across the border are cancelled and there’s just the repatriation trains. The one out is on Sunday and costs €155, which costs more than I usually pay for a return ticket. The one back is on Friday but I didn’t even check that.

In theory I suppose that I could drive there in Caliburn but it’s a long way and a lot of organisation so in the end I decided not to go.

They weren’t impressed when I rang them up to tell them but the way I see it, it was fine for them to annul my 4-weekly appointments for 9 months when it suited them so there’s no reason why I can’t annul a 4-weekly appointment for 4 weeks.

Time for hot chocolate and chocolate cake and then I could press on with work. And I’ve been doing another load of stuff of the arrears for my trip to Central Europe in the summer.

There were the usual interruptions during the day. Firstly of course there was lunch. And I do like my sourdough bread. I’m pleased with how it’s turned out although the shape leaves something to be desired. I need it to be taller and not as wide. But it’s no big worry – it’s all about learning as you go along and I’m doing plenty of that.

There was also the pause this afternoon to go for my walk around the headland

It’s Wednesday of course so no brats out playing or orienteering this afternoon on the field at the back of the sports ground of the school. I can therefore take a photograph of the lawn and also of one of the bunkers of the old Atlantic Wall that are dotted about here.

That’s the one that they opened up about 18 months ago and about which there is some talk of transforming into a museum of the Atlantic Wall and, presumably, of the Resistance Fighters here.

Whether it will ever be a project that gets off the ground remains to be seen of course

With nothing else of very great importance going on I walked on around the headland and then ran all the way down the path (seeing as there was no-one about) to the viewpoint overlooking the harbour.

And it looks as if there is going to be a change of occupant in the chantier navale today. We have one of the little inshore seafood harvesting boats being winched up out of the sea by the portable boat lift.

You can see that it’s only just come up out of the sea, with all of the water that’s dripping off it. And yet there’s a van parked by it and workmen who look as if they are inspecting something on the port side. So maybe it’s been in a collision with a rock or a mermaid or something.

And that reminds me. A short while ago I asked one of the local fishermen if he knew the ideal vital statistics of a mermaid. He replied “36 – 24 – €9:99 per kilo”

And that’s not all of the excitement going on down there this afternoon either.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I mentioned the other day that there was a pile of equipment down on the quayside in the loading bay for the Channel Island freighters and so I expected one of them to be putting in an appearance some time soon.

And so it looks as if today is the day because Thora is down there this afternoon and by the looks of things she’s not long come into port. And I’m glad that I got to see her because with the rapid turnover that we’ve been having just recently I might otherwise have missed her.

And then you lot would be moaning on at me to improve my aim.

While I was there looking at Thora into port came another one of our old favourites.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the trawler Cap Lihou was up on blocks i the chantier navale for what seemed like eternity this summer. But here she is today, just having unloaded at the fish processing plant and now heading into the inner harbour.

But I headed off back home for a hot coffee and to carry on with some work. But my friend with Covid (or who had Covid, should I say) was on line so we had quite a chat again.

Anything to keep up her morale. It’s very important that she keeps a positive outlook. And in any case, I happen to like her.

My hour on the guitar was another one that was very enjoyable – playing along on the bass and singing to a few Hendrix numbers that I used to play in a group in which I played all those years ago, and then later playing lead guitar solos to “Riding The Waves” and “Whisky In The Jar”. I’m still rubbish at bar chords though.

Tea was an aubergine and kidney bean whatsit out of the freezer followed by more raspberry and custard tart. And this worked so well that it’s going to be added tot the menu for future reference.

Just as I was about to go out for my evening runs Rosemary rang up and we ended up chatting for 2 hours and more yet again. By now it was far too late to go out, what with the curfew and all of that, so I’ll have to write that off tonight. I can’t rely on the coppers turning a blind eye too often.

So I’l lgo to bed, still later than I intended. Shopping tomorrow and there’s quite a list so I need to make an early start. But late as it is, I’m not relying on a 6:15 start. I really need to do better than this.

Monday 23rd November 2020 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that one of the things that I moan on about from time to time is the question of bad parking.

In the Boulevard Vaufleury round about school chucking-out time it’s particularly bad as people would rather block off the street and prevent the school buses and the service buses passing rather than make their precious little darlings walk an extra 20 metres to the large free car par park just across the road.

And here today is the local police force giving a “Hail Columbia” on the loud hailer to two women (because they are both women) parked opposite each other, the white one with all four wheels on the road and the black one with two wheels on the pavement, combining to block the entire street and one of the two pavements to just about everyone who might be going past.

And that’s good news as far as I am concerned.

What else that is good news is the fact that when the third alarm went off this morning I was already in the kitchen sorting out my tablets. And that’s a long time since that has happened.

After having had the medication I cracked on with this week’s radio programme. And by the time I stopped for lunch it was all done, completed and ready to go. And apart from the fact that I stopped for my hot chocolate and slice of chocolate cake (which isn’t half as bad as I was expecting it to be) I would have finished it earlier had there not been a power cut round about 09:30 which meant that I lost whatever work I hadn’t saved since I’d backed it up a short while earlier.

In actual fact, it’s all worked out really well and it’s certainly one of the better ones that I’ve done. Unfortunately, I missed out the fact that I should have been doing a live concert, so I’ll have to deal with that probably later on this week.

As for my chocolate cake, the bottom is rather burnt and the rest of the outside is overcooked whereas the centre is rather heavy and slightly undercooked. That implies that the oven was too warm but the cooking time was not long enough. It’s not as much of a disaster as I was thinking and it’s hopeful for the future.

After lunch, I had a listen to the programme that I’d recorded this morning ans also to the live concert that I had prepared a few weeks ago for this weekend. And it seems that in the past I had already edited the part that I felt needed attention so I could relax.

While that was going on, I had a listen to the dictaphone. to see where I’d been during the night.

I was with a lady-friend of my acquaintance last night. We were a couple. Something had happened about a letter – there was an important letter to give to me and even though I wasn’t there she hadn’t realised about it so she said that she would take it. I ended up being back at home again on my own first and I had gone to the bathroom. I’d had a load of issue about closing the door to the bathroom but in the end I managed to do it. Just then she turned up and said “I have this important letter for you”. I was trying hard to pretend that I didn’t know that she had it. I said “ohh right”. She said “I’ll throw it over the top of the door”. I said “no, I’ll be out in a minute. You hang on to it”. So I went to sit on the toilet and she went into the kitchen. There was only a wire netting fence between the two so that you could see. She was getting out this envelope and then she got some cucumbers and cut them in half lengthways so that they were very long and thin and started scoring them to get them into some kind of cut, maybe about 10 to the inch, something like that all the way down this cucumber and then bent the skins inwards then she could trim all of the cucumber off at one go and have all of these half-slices at one go. Some other girl came along into the kitchen, picked up another half of a cucumber and started to do the same thing so I wondered what on earth was going on here now with this other girl. What’s she doing here?

Later on I was on a tram in New York last night travelling up Edleston Road in Crewe when a couple of ticket inspectors climbed aboard to check tickets. I suddenly realised that I’d forgotten to buy a ticket. I had a search around in my pockets and found a ticket that I had used a couple of days previously so when the ticket inspector came to me I handed her the ticket. She had 2 or 3 tickets in her hand at the same time so she checked them, handed the 2 back to the other 2 people and said “I’ll be back in a minute” and wandered off up the tram. Just at that moment the tram reached the top of Edleston Road and of course I was planning to go off down Nantwich Road anyway so I took the opportunity to nip out at that tram stop and walk off down Nantwich Road and tried to think about how the tram system in New York worked – I certainly hadn’t put any of my tickets through any machines or anything like that while I’d been on the trams or so on. And then thinking that maybe it’s probably not a good idea to get a tram back home but to walk. At least it would save me going out for a walk later on at night. I’d have got my exercise in simply by walking home from Nantwich Road.

There was more to it than that too, but as you are probably eating your tea right now I’ll spare you the gory details.

Round about the normal time I went out for my afternoon walk around the headland.

As you can see from the photo they have made a start on replacing the slates on the roof, and that’s not something that I would fancy doing doing in this kind of weather. It was cold and windy although, admittedly, not as windy as it has been.

One thing that I ought to mention about the roofing task is that a couple of weeks ago while I was in Leuven one of the workmen fell from the roof and was seriously injured. They actually had the helicopter air ambulance in the car park here to take the injured party to hospital.

And as I’ve already mentioned the weather just now, I went over to the sea wall to look out to sea in order to see what might be going on out to sea.

There were no boats out there at sea today which was a shame, but what had caught my eye was the beautiful cloud formation out there in the centre of the photograph just beyond and to the left of the Ile de Chausey. There have been quite a few good ones just recently, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

No brats out there today orienteering so I pushed on round to then end of the headland to see if there is anything going on round there too, but there was disappointment there too. I’ve never known it to be so quiet.

Mind you, there was something going on at the chantier navale as I was to discover when I arrived at the viewpoint overlooking the port.

While there was no change in the actual occupancy of the chantier navale but as we can see, the mobile boat lift has now moved from its usual position over the docking area to a position right by Ceres II as if it’s about to pick up the little boat and drop her into the water at the next high tide.

Having spent a few minutes watching the excitement in the Boulevard Vaufleury with the Police interaction, I came on home because there were things to do.

The sourdough was bubbling away quite nicely so I cleared all of the workplace, cleaned the worktop and started to make some sourdough dough. And it’s a real time-consuming process too – much more than I was expecting and the standing time is quite lengthy too.

While I was at it, I prepared the next batch of kefir.

5 of my batch of clementines were peeled, put in the whizzer and slightly whizzed round to extract the juice. This was filtered through into the large jug and the pulp was put back into the whizzer, whizzed for a good five minutes and filtered through again.

The kefir was then filtered through the filters and the clementine pulp into the jug and then it was stirred round to mix together. I’d left an inch or two of liquid in my big pot with the kefir starter in, and prepared a new batch with sugar, lemon slices and a dried fig and, or course, a couple of litres of water.

The clementine/orange mix was then filtered through the fine mesh filter into the bottles and that will now be left to ferment for a few days until it’s ready for use.

With having used some nice, juicy clementines, I’m intrigues to see how it’s all going to turn out. The big idea of course is to use whatever fruit is handy and in season to make your kefir.

The hour on the guitar was quite enjoyable too and I’m finding that my singing and playing the bass is improving, although I have to keep the bass lines much les complicated than I otherwise would and I can only let myself go during the solos. But at least it’s quite an improvement over where I was a few months ago. I just have to persevere.

Tea was a vegan burger with pasta and vegetables followed by a slice of my raspberry tart, which likewise hasn’t turned out too badly. The custard Filling worked particularly well.

Out on my walk tonight, I was all alone yet again so I could run as much as I wanted, which was not as much as I would like, but nevertheless …

It was a cold, clear, bright night with a good view all the way down the coast so when I stopped at the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord I took a photograph of all of the street lights on the promenade down at Saint Martin de Bréhal and further along the coast at Bréhal-Plage.

having dealt with that, I ran down to the footpath underneath the walls and then ran all the way round to the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

There was nothing going on at the Place Marechal Foch so I went over to see what was happening in the Rue Paul Poirier.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few days ago we saw that the Christmas lights had been installed down in the street and I was rather hoping that they might have been switched on by now. But that wasn’t to be the case. It seems that we’ll have to wait for that to happen, whenever that might be.

There was quite a strong headwind as I ran across the Square Maurice Marland and it was something of a struggle to fight against it. But I made it all the way to the end, despite giving the girl sitting on the wall in the dark quite a surprise.

Continuing along the medieval walls I heard a sound coming from the harbour as if there was an engine running somewhere.

It looks as if they are doing something with Victor Hugo. All of her lights are on and it seems that the engine was running too. What’s going on there is something that remains to be seen, but I do know that there are no plans to resume the ferry service to the Channel Islands in the near future.

From there I ended up at the Place du Parvis Notre Dame and from there I ran on home to write up my notes for the day.

Now that’s done, I have to knead my sourdough dough. It’s been standing for five hours instead of the recommended three but it still hasn’t doubled in size. Nevertheless I’ll give it a go and put it in its mould and leave it overnight ready for the morning when I’ll bung it in the oven.

In view of its lack of energy so far, I’m not convinced by the sourdough procedure. I’ll try three or four loaves but unless there’s something dramatic it’s an experiment with which I may not continue. At least the kefir and the cordial (this batch of orange cordial is delicious) are working.

But that’s for tomorrow. After I’ve kneaded the dough I’m going to bed. I have my Welsh letter tomorrow.

Monday 9th November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… manage to beat the third alarm this morning. But nevertheless I managed to tear myself out of my stinking pit fairly quickly so it wasn’t too much of a problem.

So while you look at some photos of the rather dramatic air-sea rescue that took place this afternoon out in the Baie de Mont St Michel I’ll tell you something about my day today.

First thing after the medication was to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night. And, more importantly, who had come with me.

And there was actually something there, so I must have been away at some point. And what I heard about my voyage took me quite by surprise because it’s quite a rare event, what happened during the hours of darkness.

Last night I dreamt that I had gone to the local Council offices to talk about getting a French nationality. The woman had sent me into a room which was where I would have to wait but my appointment would be something like 09:30. After a while I noticed that they had been calling through people who had come into the room after me and I was starting to become a little concerned about this. I went back to the reception and told them. The woman there said that there were a lot of people to see of course but she could absolutely guarantee that I would be seen before 11:30 that morning. I thought to myself “OK, I’ll have to wait” so I went back. But then I awoke in this dream and found that I was actually inside an old van with a load of other people. I had a look at my watch and it was 10:45. I thought that I have to go and make this appointment. How long have I been away and what have I been doing in the meantime? So I shook myself out, climbed out the van which was something like a CA Bedford or J4 with sliding doors. Someone else wanted to come out behind me so I had to help them out, then the curtain in the doorway was getting in the way. Then I thought “should I take a book with me or something? But them I thought that I don’t really have time. I have to get all the way back to the Council offices and hope that I haven’t been called in the meantime and that I’ll be there before 11:30.

It was really weird, this waking up in a dream and finding myself still in a dream.

Once I’d organised myself with the dictaphone I had a radio prgramme to prepare.

It’s the 69th issue of my programmes and now I’m deep into the obscure tracks, which was always the plan. Groups like Amazing Blondel, Brian Auger’s Trinity, Eyes of Blue and the Swedish musician Bo Hansson will be making their debuts when this programme is broadcast and there are plenty more of the same to follow.

And so round about 07:30 or so I sat down to make a good start.

It took me less than 90 minutes to choose the first 10 tracks, remix them, combine them in pairs and add on the introduction.

Then I had to research the groups because with so many new groups, I didn’t have much in the way of prepared notes, and then I had to write out the texts and then dictated them.

Once I’d dictated them I had to edit them, split them into segments and then link all of the pairs of songs together with the segments of text in between.

That left 4:20 so knocking 45 seconds off for a closing speech, that meant a final track of 3:35. Having chosen one of the right length and remixed it, I then had to dictate a closing speech which I unfortunately overran and ended up having to trim down the programme by 19 seconds.

Nevertheless, buy 14:20 it was all done and dusted, despite having a break for hot chocolate at 10:30 (and my fruit bread buns were perfect) and for lunch (and my hone-made bread was pretty good too).

First task when I finished was to ring up to enquire about Caliburn. And, as I expected, the time limit that I was given was … errr … somewhat optimistic. They’ll ring me up when he’s ready, but I can see that it’s not going to be any time soon.

Second task was to sort out the rest of the radio programme that I’d started. I even started to type out the notes but I’m afraid that my early start proved somewhat too much for me and I ended up asleep on the chair for a while.

Consequently my walk outside this afternoon was rather later than planned, but I went out just the same.

For a change I forgot myself and ended up going off around the headland instead of around the walls. The tide was well in and out there sitting on a rock was a colony of what looks like cormorants.

They were just sitting there not doing very much, except one of them that was flapping its wings as if it was going out of fashion. The birds posed quite nicely for a good few minutes and then I pushed off to find out what the racket was all about out to sea in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

And out there, hidden in the spray kicked up by the rotor blades of a helicopter, was our local lifeboat Notre Dame de Cap Lihou.

As I watched, the helicopter made two or three practice runs towards her and then on the next one, she hovered quite close and as I watched, she lowered a person down on a winch.

By the looks of things it may well have been nothing more than a practice exercise but it was still exciting just the same.

With nothing else going on out there this afternoon, I wandered off back home again to do a bit more work.

Later on, I had a really enjoyable hour on the guitars. One of the things that I did with the bass guitar was to work out the bass line to David Bowie’s “Heroes” and I found, to my immense satisfaction, that I could sing it at the same time.

Back 40 years ago I could sing and play the bass but it wasn’t all that easy. Despite the fact that I still haven’t manage to recapture whatever skill I might have had, I’m finding singing to be so much easier and I don’t understand that at all.

With the acoustic guitar, I selected half a dozen songs and then had a little concert. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I need to spend more time concentrating on maybe just a dozen songs and knowing them very well rather than dissipating my efforts over a hundred or so.

But one track that I’ve found that I can play and sing quite easily is Counting Crows’ “Recovering the Satellites”, although that song and “Heroes” that I mentioned just now remind me rather too much of a certain night back at the beginning of September last year and one day I might even write about it.

There wa san old burger in the fridge that needed eating so I had that for tea. And being fed up of pasta, I had a baked potato with tinned veg seeing as I have run out of carrots. And the veg was peas, peppers and sweetcorn from a tin that I had bought ages ago at NOZ. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … rummaging around in the food mountain at NOZ does provide me with a varied diet.

Both Rosemary and TOTGA wanted a chat on the internet so I was rather late going out for my evening walk and run.

And to my surprise, not only did I manage 6 runs, I ran them without any effort too and I reckon that I could have pushed on even further had I wanted.

In between a couple of the legs I stopped for a breather at the viewpoint overlooking the Place Marechal Foch.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen plenty of photos of the Place Marechal Foch during the night, but it occurs to me that you may not have seen the view looking behind me

There’s the nice little flat level ground which is disfigured by a small bunker or two of the Atlantic Wall, and then the stairs – the Escalier du Moulin a Vent that leads up to the Place de l’Isthme. And while there is indeed a “Windmill Staircase”, there’s no windmill. although there used to be and I have seen an old postcard that shows a view of it.

No-one about so I had a good run across the Square Maurice Marland.

It was all looking quite nice, the trees all illuminated by the lights and with no leaves to hide the effect.

And from there I continued around the walls and then ran on home to write up my notes.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to do some revision in the morning, and then in the afternoon I hope that I’ll be able to finish off the radio programme that I started in Leuven.

Then there are plenty of other things to be doing and who knows? One of these days I might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Just don’t hold your breath.

7th November 2020 – THIS WEEK IS …

… International Polar Bear Week apparently so I feel that I ought to join in the fun by posting a photo of a couple of mine.

In case you are wondering, this photo was taken last August in the North West Passage, in the Victoria Strait between the Royal Geographical Society islands and King William Island and is just one of the … gulp 2,500 or so exciting photos that I took while I was out there in the High Arctic and with which I shall regale you in due course.

That is, of course, my long-term project for the coming winter – to sort them all out, edit them and upload them to the internet. I’m hoping that once I clear out the arrears back to June, I can crack on with the High Arctic photos, although I’m not sure when all of that might happen.

At least, I didn’t actually fall behind even further today. Even if I slept through the three alarms and didn’t wake up until long after 10:00. It’s always like that when I return home, after all of the effort that I go through, and even more so when I didn’t return home until late.

Being in bed for as long as I was, there was plenty of time to go on several nocturnal rambles, and I must have travelled miles during the night.

I started off in the USA. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This eveil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

Later on I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been a certain Welsh rock group friends of mine or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. One of them was saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what i’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own

Subsequently I was taping a concert of the aforementioned group, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

From there I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south, Hassall Road, so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they ahd sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached th bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.
Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

There was plenty of other stuff too but I can’t remember them. I know that at one time I caught myself dictating into my hand, but I can’t remember what it was that I was saying.

One thing that was rather disappointing was that I wasn’t joined by any of the usual suspects who I like to accompany me. With all of this and the distance that I travelled, I would have expected at least one of them to be there at some point. Instead, I end up with people from whom I spent 38 years trying to escape. It’s just my luck, isn’t it?

By now it was well into the early afternoon and so I ate the half-baguette that was left from yesterday evening. No chance of going out to the shops now – it was far too late.

Not having done much throughout the day, I reckoned that I ought at least to go out for a walk this afternoon.

But no matter how little I had done and how much I thought that I ought to be doing, I wasn’t going to emulate this woman down here on the beach at the foot of the steps in the Rue du Nord. As I watched her, she marched slowly out to the water’s edge, peeling off her outer garments one by one.

And then she looked for a safe place amongst the rocks where she could leave them and her towel.

Having done that, she continued on her way out to the water’s edge, bent doan and soaked herself in seawater.

Once she was thoroughly wet through, she took the plunge and dived into the water, swimming away from the shore and out to sea.

It’s not the kind of thing that I would want to do. Even on a hot day I’m not all that interested in going into the water, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, even if in the past I have been swimming in the Mediterranean in November. But I’ve no intention of going into the water around here at any time of the year.

So instead, once my water baby, I wandered off along the Rue du Nord.

With the number of people who were around, many more than I was expecting in the middle of a lockdown, I didn’t feel like showing myself up by breaking into a run. And it’s just as well because during my gentle walk, my eyes probing out to sea picked up something yellow bobbing about on the waves in the sea off the shore of Donville les Bains.

Closer examination reveals that there are in fact two of them, in a nice line across the bay. We’ve seen all kinds of buoys out there in the past, for all kinds of different reasons, and it’s not immediately clear exactly what their purpose is.

Further along the footpath under the walls, I had a look down onto the beach round by the Plat Gousset.

And amongst the people wandering around down there were three young people in something of a state of undress. It looks as if we have had a few more water babies this afternoon, but I was too late to actually see them in the water.

But one thing that I did notice was the absence of face masks on the people down there. I know that it’s the policy on the promenade for the compulsory wearing of face masks, and I would have thought that now, seeing as we are in lockdown, that the compulsory wearing of masks would have extended further out from where it was before

With crowds of people around, I wasn’t able to go for a run across the Square Maurice Marland this afternoon. Well – not with any sense of pride, at least.

But at the top of the Square I had a look at one of the houses in the Rue LeCarpentier. Just before I left, they had erected some scaffolding up around it. But now, the scaffolding is sheeted in a protected netting and it looks as if work has begun.

Interestingly, the company doing the work advertises itself as a “restorer of the country’s patrimoine – a word for which there is no obvious translation but which means basically the intrinsic cultural values and artefacts, whether it’s song, dance, old machinery and buildings, that kind of thing.

One thing that is of course a compulsory activity is to check on what’s happening down at the chantier navale, seeing as I’ve neglected it for over a week.

The yacht that we saw in there the last time we looked is still present and it’s been joined by another boat. It’s not easy to tell from here what kind of boat it is. I shall have to sneak out later tonight for a closer look.

It goes without saying though that the huge mountain of gravel that was on the quayside has gone, and likewise has Neptune, the gravel boat that came into port as I was leaving town. She fetched up a couple of days later in Whitstable where she unloaded, and the last that I heard of her she had picked up a load of something in Dordrecht in the Netherlands and was on her way to Ridham, just down the road from Whitstable.

Back here this evening there was football. TNS were away at Bala Town in the Welsh Premier League, first away at second. It was a good, exciting match and while TNS were clearly the better team, Bala looked extremely dangerous at times and hit the woodwork twice with the keeper beaten and had Chris Venables had a decent touch on a ball in front of goal with Paul Harrison well out of position, Bala could have taken the lead.

As it was, TNS went into the lead after about 75 minutes only for Bala to equalise 5 minutes later. 1-1 was how it ended, a result which was about right altogether.

Tea was pasta with a couple of the burgers that I brought back from Leuven, followed by pineapple rings with chocolate vegan ice cream. No chance of going for an evening walk as there is apparently a curfew and it’s too late now.

Tomorrow will be really busy. I have bread to make – both “normal bread” and banana bread, as that which remained from last time didn’t survive. I have some kefir to make too, and for that I’ll probably use oranges this time.

The sourdough will need reanimating and feeding too, and then next week I’ll have a go making sourdough bread. I can’t use it this time because, having been in the fridge for a week or more, it’s still asleep.

Just like I’m going to be in a few minutes, I reckon. It takes me a couple of days to recover from my efforts in Leuven and I have plenty of work to do.

Friday 6th November 2020 – AND THAT WAS …

… more difficult than it ought to have been too.

And when the TGV broke down somewhere in the wilderness I really did think that I’d had my chips too.

This morning I totally ignored the alarm yet again and had a lie-in until about 07:30. More stuff on the dictaphone of course that I transcibed after I returned home.

We were in the USA last night. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing but it involved my father and a whole group of other people whom I knew. There had been some big kind of political debate. Some politician had made a disgraceful affair and all the other politicians were standing up for him. Someone went to get into their car but found that the locks had been changed. This evil politician had gone around changing everyone’s locks on everything. At that stage I became quite simply fed up and beat both of them into a pulp. I had to sell someone about something or other and I can’t remember what. It was to do with a car needing work or something. I got into my car which was a very new one. I managed to get in and drove away from the scene. As I came up to a set of traffic lights a police car pulled out of a side road right in front of me, blocked the road and put his stop lights on. When the traffic lights changed he went off presumably to drive round the block to come up behind me. But it was a really inconvenient place to stop. There was an abandoned fuel station just across the traffic lights so I pulled over there, of course bitterly regretting what was going to happen next – I was in no illusions. There were a couple of guys there getting petrol out of this abandoned fuel station. They said something about parking there. I said “that’s all right. I’m waiting here to be arrested”. They looked at me a bit wide-eyed so I said to 1 of them “yes the police are coming to arrest me”. He thought that he had better get a move on and do what he’s doing quickly and get out of the way. Just then I saw a group of my friends coming along. They were carrying an engine lift, tools and everything as if they were going to lift the engine out of a car somewhere after what I’d said to them. I thought “this policeman is taking his time isn’t he? I could nip off if I wanted to leave my car there.” But did I want to leave my car there? Did I want to nip off? Did I want to go? There was a cheap Honda Acty microvan things parked up and I was having a look at that.

A little later I was a kid, a teenager doing something with a house. We’d all been working on bits of it and I’d been painting the bedroom. The 1st coat hadn’t worked properly because some filling needed doing on it. I’d done most of that and painted what I’d already done. It hadn’t appeared too badly and I was reasonably pleased with it. Then the tutor came in and started to give me instructions about what he wanted me to do next but I reckoned that in view of the time factor it would be a good idea just to fill the rest of the wall where it needed filling and paint one coat over it to see where it was low. We could fill it again to make it up in the meantime and the coat of paint would be on it ready for the top coat. We had a lengthy discussion about that and in the end he agreed to let me do it as I wanted. He told me that I would have to put a curtain up somewhere over one part where the walls were uneven but I thought that that was going to be a silly idea – it would just draw people’s attention to it but he was pretty adamant so in the end we agreed that we would talk about this again. I did the calculations that by the time I had finished this room putting these coats and this filler on I would have had my A levels by then in which case no-one would be in a position to contradict me at all and I really could then do it as I liked.

There was also something where I was doing something with a pile of musicians – it might have been Man or something like that. We were just sitting around talking about drugs, all this kind of thing. Deke Leonard saying that he hadn’t shot up for a whole 15 concerts but was quite busy taking the weed – the same with a few of the others. I said that I didn’t even know whereabouts to go to get it. I wouldn’t have a clue. They said “that girl who came to your party in your building. She sold us a bag”. I thought that was a bit if a shame because I liked her. Then we ended up at someone’s house after this – it might even have been this girl’s. It was a much nicer apartment than mine, on the floor below from where I was living. We were all getting ready to go places and were sorting through a pile of things and having to tidy everything up. I was sorting through these stones, I’ve no idea why. Some were precious and some weren’t and I was getting it all wrong. There were 3 gear lever knobs from a vehicle in there. It was a really confused thing that I had to sort through. Someone came over to give me a hand. He clearly knew what he was doing. I had to resort what I’d already done because it wasn’t right. I ended up going for a walk around and having a look at her garden which was really nice. On the way back I saw everyone else coming for a walk around the garden. I thought that I might as well have waited until they decided to come rather than go out on my own.

After that I was taping a Man concert, trying to get that organised but it was again something that I was only doing half-heartedly and missing most of the joins, thinking that I would have to go back and check it over again. The question of London came up, the question of a restaurant in the basement of a hotel that we go to near the railway station but it had moved down to South London. A girl I was with suggested that we should go there and have a meal. I thought ” that’s a long way to go for a meal and come back. It’s not as if it’s at the railway station where it used to be where we could be in and out in an evening. With this we have to hike most of the way across London to get to it and it’s not going to be the same, particularly with only another two weekends to go…

If that’s not enough, then later I was walking along Crewe Road into Sandbach and as I was passing the houses at the end of Park Lane I was thinking that I had to go to the bank. But the bank wasn’t where it is but in the street that runs about half a mile to the south – Hassall Road – so I had to find my way around like a deviation. In the end I got to 3rd Avenue and I remembered that I could walk through there that way. I walked down there – there were some kids playing netball in the school plating area there and a couple of boys playing football. I went on and came to a set of steps that I had to walk down. There were two young girls there who were rolling balls down it. Obviously whose ball rolled furthest down the most stairs won. They had a rake that they were using to pull the balls back up. One of them was pulling a ball back up and the rake swung back over her head and nearly impaled me as I was waling past so I made some kind of light hearted remark about it and they laughed. Then I noticed in one of the swimming pools in the back garden of a house round there was a skeleton so I asked “is that your last victim?”. They laughed again. By this time a woman had come down. She thought that it was funny as well so we had a chat. We got to the bottom and there was a really deep puddle. She was talking about the gypsies who lived in Sandbach and how they had sometimes washed their clothes in it. When we reached the bottom she said which way she was going, and I thought that this was the other direction so I said goodbye to her. I turned left and she went a little further on and she turned left too. We bumped into each other again. I said “I thought that you were going the other way”. She said “no, this way. I have to fetch some money from the bank”, a different bank. She started to ask “where shall we go from here?” so I said “hurry up and get your money” so she dashed inside the bank.

Later on I stepped back into this dream. I was walking back to the bus. I got on the bus by the centre door and for some reason I didn’t want to sit down at the front so I chose a seat right opposite the centre door where I didn’t have to go very far. Then this woman appeared, the one with whom I’d walked just now. I was hoping that she would get on the bus and come to sit next to me but that was when I awoke.

But back in Belgium I had a nice little relax instead (and I felt that I needed it after all of that) and then a really good tidy up before setting out for my journey home.

There was already a train in the station going to Brussels but as I wasn’t able to run for it with the load that I was carrying, I let it go and waited for the next one.

This one was pulled by one of the Siemens Class 18 electric locomotives that work the line from Eupen and Welkenraedt to Oostende. We travel on these quite often.

Unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with this one because it was pulling a rake of older-generation carriages – the type with the old PVC seats, that sort of thing. It would have been really nice to have had one of the usual sets with the modern cloth upholstery.

But I’m getting greedy. At least it was on time both here and in Brussels.

There was an hour to wait, sitting on a draughty platform on Bruxelles-Midi but luckily this train, one of the PBKA units, came in early so having had our tickets checked, we could scramble aboard.

Even though there are only three trains per day between Brussels and Paris right now, this one was pretty empty. Fewer and fewer people are moving around. In fact, the railway station was like a ghost town.

There was a police patrol on the train too, and we all had our identities and movement forms checked. Luckily all of my papers were in order, and I’m glad that I went through all of that trouble 18 months ago to obtain a French identity card.

Then we had the engine failure. All of the lights and power on the train went out and we ground to a halt, down from 300kph. All hope of catching my connection – the only one to Granville today – seemed to vanish before my eyes.

20 minutes later, they managed to fire it up again and we limped into the Gare du Nord.

Leaping from the train I hared off through the station to the Metro where, luckily, there already was a train at the platform so I leapt aboard and we shot off to Paris Montparnasse, where we arrived with 25 minutes before my train was due to depart.

Just three people in the SNCF offices as well so I went in to see about organising a refund for the tickets for the trains that were cancelled And to my surprise, they cancelled the tickets for the current voyage (which was in fact more expensive) and endorsed the tickets for the cancelled train giving me authority to travel.

We were allowed on this train early too, which was very pleasant. In fact, it took me by surprise as I was in the middle of eating my butties.

Once the train set off, I curled up on my seat and slept for an hour or so. I’d already had a couple of dozes prior to this but this was a good ‘un. I didn’t feel a thing.

For some reason though, the seats didn’t seem to be as comfortable as they have been in the past. It reminds me of that really uncomfortable flight that I had back from Canada two or three years ago where I just couldn’t settle down comfortable.

Our train arrived early too, so I even had time to nip into the Coccinelle Supermarket for some bread seeing as I don’t have any here.

On the wat back I walked past the Place General de Gaulle.

You wouldn’t believe that it’s Saturday night right now. This lockdown is clearly working. I was picturing tumbleweeds and all that kind of thing coming blowing across my path as I walked by.

However I made it home without too many problems and made myself a bowl of soup out of the freezer, which I ate with the bread. And then I released the valves on the kefir and even though I took great care, I still ended up with a face full and a bath full. It wasn’t ‘arf lively after having been left alone for a week or so.

It’s good to be home anyway. I like my little apartment. I’ll have a good sleep and pleasant dreams (I hope) and then I need to go out tomorrow and buy some food. No Caliburn so that’s going to be an interesting trip.

Thursday 5th November 2020 – THIS COMPUTER UPGRADE …

… is taking its time yet again.

When I finally crawled out of bed this morning at about 08:00 it was still on 70%. I’ve no idea why it takes so long to upgrade – and why it should want to upgrade so often after I’d done a clean install.

Tons more stuff on the dictaphone which I transcribed when I returned home.

I was with a girl last night who might have been Ann, something like that. Previously i’d been out with another girl who was very similar to Ann and we hadn’t been on very good terms when we broke up. We were all in this kind of big classroom with long tables and benches doing our work. This other girl had got up to go to the bench for something or other, to fetch a drink of water or food or something. I was already up, wandering around doing something and seen this girl wandering around and thought that it was Ann so I went to wait by the door for her to come. But she didn’t come. Instead it was the other girl walking back to her seat for something and she gave me a bit of a glare as she went back to sit at her seat. I went back to see where Ann was, if it was Ann. She had a boy sitting next to her and the two of them were working on something together. I was waiting for one of them to budge up so that I could sit in the middle of them but she said something like “you aren’t going to need me after this, are you?” I asked “after what? Because after this illness I shan’t be needing anyone”. I was wondering what she was driving at.

Later on last night we were living out on the North Circular Road in London. I don’t remember who I was with now but we certainly had a Ford Cortina Estate. To reach our apartment was rather a complicated affair because there was a road bridge over a big dual carriageway road and the bridge had 3 lanes, the left hand lane of which was to turn left and the other 2 lanes turned right. Nevertheless we had to be in the left lane for turning right otherwise we couldn’t get into the parking area in front of our apartment. That always made for a few things to be extremely complicated. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

Even later still I was with an Indian politician and 1 or 2 people treated him with a bit of respect and a few others were very patronising, calling him “so and so’s shadow”, that kind of thing. I mentioned to him that I thought that it was pretty awful as far as I was concerned. It turned out that he had actually been someone quite well-known in Government circles and had had a career mapped out for him but somehow it had all gone wrong and he’d been punted back into the wilderness again. We spent a lot of time talking and I realised after a while that what I was actually doing was trying to motivate him to start up again. This led to thoughts in my head that if he does fire up again and I’m there encouraging him, what’s that going to do for my own particular career? That was pretty much an afterthought really. I didn’t think about that at the time until I was well on the way towards doing this.

First thing that I did after my morning coffee was to sort out my rail tickets for going home. There’s just one train to Granville tomorrow – at 16:13 and which is taking almost 40 minutes longer than the usual one so I imagine that it’s “all stations” instead of a “limited stop”. But I don’t have any other choice. I’m not looking forward to not getting home until about 20:30.

From Brussels to Paris there are three trains. But the one that corresponds best with my timetable is at 13:13. There’s a wait of about 1:40 in Paris while I change trains but it’s the best that I can do.

At least I don’t have to have a ridiculously early start in the morning

There was an added complication to booking my ticket. Having to perform the operation on the mobile phone, I couldn’t see the part of the screen where I have to tap in the security number that I received to authorise the transaction. It took about 6 goes before I finally managed to enter it correctly.

And it’s not cheap either – not as cheap as the ticket that I can’t use. But there really is no other choice.

It was a beautiful day today despite being cold and frosty so I went for a nice long walk.

Alison had told me where the big cemetery was so I took a walk out to there this morning. And the first thing that I noticed was this extraordinary relic of a very unwelcome pasts.

The “Belgian Congo” wasn’t Belgian until 1908. Prior to that it was the personal property of the Royal House of Belgium, and it was during this period of the Congo’s history that the inhabitants were the victims of some of the worst atrocities committed by the colonisers.

This plaque on the wall of the cemetery here commemorates the names of Belgians (obviously white ones) who died in the Congo during the period of fhe private ownership of the Kings of the Belgians.

Having seen the plaque on the wall, I went for a walk around to see what else I could see of interest.

There were several mounds like this one with wrought-iron crosses set in them – each cross bearing the name of a street in Leuven apparently, from what I could tell. These appear, from what I could tell, to be the mass graves of people who died during the various cholera epidemics on the second third of the 19th Century.

A stark reminder of what awaits the Western World if they can’t bring this current virus under control. Here is clear evidence of the waves in which infectious diseases like this sweep around the World in the days before good sanitation.

But this is what I had come here to see – or one of the things to say the least.

It’s the Commonwealth Military Cemetery for British and Commonwealth Farces personnel who lost their lives during the two World Wars.

There are a handful of graves from World War I and about a dozen or so from World War II, including what looks like a crew of a multi-engine bomber who lost their lives on 12th May 1944. When I find a reliable internet connection and a reliable computer to take advantage of it, I’ll track down the aeroplane that was involved.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE FOUND CIVILIAN GRAVES from the wars in the Cemetery at ixelles a few years ago.

Accordingly, I was expecting to find a similar layout here in the cemetery in Leuven and sure enough, I tumbled on it. The wall in the background lists the names of people who were executed by the Germans during the war and who presumably have no known grave.

It would seem that the graves in front with the white headstones are for civilians whose identity was known.

Behind it are yet more civilian graves and other wall plaques.

The plaques seem to list the names of the victims who were deported to Greater Germany and who never returned – hundreds of them. There’s also a casket there that is said to contain the ashes of one of the victims from the extermination camp at Buchenwald.

The graves that surround it are also civilian graves but it isn’t clear as to the significance of their burial in that particular location. The headstones here are not as helpful as they are in Ixelles.

Of course, there’s a war memorial here in the cemetery.

Belgium was very quickly overrun in World War II but in World War I the Belgians hung on right the way through the war and fought to the bitter end. There were several major battles between the Belgians and the Germans in the vicinity of Leuven in the first couple of weeks of August 1914 as well as around Antwerp later and then for the rest of the war in West Flanders

The casualty list was enormous for such a small country and a great many Belgian soldiers were killed, many of whom have no known grave.

One of these days when I have time again,I want to make enquiries to find out what became of the civilians who died in the Sack of Leuven but there was no-one around right now.

And so I set out to continue my walk, but not without having a little smile at this arrangement.

There are taps scattered around the cemetery and watering cans lying around for people to use. But it’s like shopping trolleys here, where you have to put your Euro into the slot in order to withdraw the can.

Do they really have people who would want to take a watering can home?

From here I walked through the Phillips complex and then down the street to the railway line, and then followed the path alongside the tracks all the way to the railway station at Heverlee.

Then I threadedmy way through the maze of streets in a north-western direction and ended up at the Sint Lambertusplein where there was this beautiful church.

It’s actually the church of Sint-Jozef and Sint Lambertus and dates from between 1878 and 1880. There have been several previous churches on or near this site, one of which was said to be a wooden chapel dating back to the 8th Century.

The coming of the railway here led to a rapid increase in population so in 1876 plans for a new church were commissioned from the architect L.A.F. van Arenberg

There was a little park at the back of the church so I walked through there and along the street, eventually finding myself at the Stadion den Dreef, the home of OH Leuven.

Just recently we’ve seen several views of the River Dilje that had previously escaped our attention.

Here around the back of the football ground is another view that we haven’t seen before and it’s a really nice rural setting on the edge of town.

I followed the path along the river for a while to see what else I could see down there but there was no bridge to cross over to the other side, so I ended up having to retrace my steps back to the football ground.

Strangely enough, it was not possible to walk all the way around the football stadium either as a couple of the walkway gates were closed.

However I pointed the camera through the fence to take a photograph of the ground again and then wandered off to Carrefour in order to buy a few bits and pieces to make sandwiches for the journey home tomorrow.

No special offers today unfortunately so I came back to my apartment, to find out tha the computer upgrade was complete and, to my surprise, it actually worked.

After lunch I updated the journal entry for yesterday and that took most of the afternoon. This computer is crawling along slowly when the internet is working, so I’ll have to finish it all again once I’m at home.
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Tea was burger and pasta followed by fruit salad and sorbet. And then the journal entry for today.

having crashed out a couple of times this afternoon, I’m off to bed right now. It’s going to be a long and stressful journey home tomorrow and I’m not looking forward to it, particularly the arrival back home at some ridiculous hour.

But there’s no choice so I shall have to grin and bear it.

At least it will be good to be back home.

Wednesday 4th November 2020 – AS SEEMS TO BE …

… usual these days, I managed to miss the third alarm again. Not by much, I have to say, but enough to disappoint me yet again.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone, which I’ll transcribe in due course, but first of all I had things to do; And by the time that I was ready to go out, I’d chosen all of the tracks for the next radio programme (well, the first ten of course) and combined them in pairs.

Due to issues about the program that I use to prepare my notes, I couldn’t go any further than than right now. By now it was time to go out.

This morning I was to meet Alison in the Kruidtuin – the Botanical Gardens – so I headed off up into town.

My route went through parts of the town where I don’t normally do, and found another bridge over the River Dijle that I hadn’t noticed before, this time in the Minderbroerstraat.

Alison and I went for a good walk around and stopped off for a take-away coffee. The town was pretty deserted and gave me the impression of one of those bad B-movie westerns where you walk round a corner to find a tumbleweed blowing across your path.

We retraced some ofmy steps from yesterday where I’d seen bits of the city that Alison hadn’t seen and then went back to her car.

She dropped me off at Castle Anthrax where I went for my Appointment with Doom. And the little student nurse that attended to me can soothe my fevered brown anytime she likes, even if the did have to have a couple of goes to couple me up to my perfusion under the supervision of an experienced nurse.

She’s only been here a week, poor thing, but she won’t improve unless she has plenty of practice, and she can practice on me again

Kaatje came to see me too and we had a long chat. What with her and this new student nurse, after all there have to be some consolations with being ill.

One of the things that Kaatje and I talked about was this virus. She’s of the same opinion as me, in that the low death rate right now compared to how it was at the beginning is the fact that with more tests being carried out these days, more people are being diagnosed with the disease even though they aren’t suffering from it.

Previously, people would only to go seek medical attention if they were really bad and for a mild attack, they would just shrug it off.

However, one thing that they are noticing now in the hospital is a dramatic rise in the number of people with breathing issues. It seems that people who were infected with the illness who didn’t seek treatment at the time have now developed further symptoms several months further on down the line.

As for me, the treatment that I had last time must have done some good because my blood count went up over the last 4 weeks to 9:0. It’s been a long time since it’s been that high.

When they threw me out I headed back down the hill for the town and home.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that over the last few months thet have been replacing the sewers in the Monseigneur van Waeyenberghlaan and they had a digger working here last time we came past.

That’s another one of those tasks that seems to have gone on for ever and it’s far from finished as you can see. But the pile of roadstone that’s been deposited here at the top of the road by the roundabout looks optimistic.

Further down the street, beyond the ring road, they seem to have made even more progress.

They are now beginning to put in the kerbs and what I imagine will be the cycle track. And it will look so much better when it’s finished with all of the nice trees growing here. It’s a shame that they can’t put more trees in other places where they have been relaying the roads.

And it doesn’t look as if they are going to be too long in dealing with this bit too – and about time too, I reckon.

Ever since at least the new year thay have been digging up the crossroads at the junction of the Sint Hubertusstraat and the Goudsbloemstraat to install some kind of lmportant storm drain connection;

And that work is still under way too and it’s far from being completed. It looks as if it’s going to be going on for ever. The work has extended all the way down the St Hubertusstraat by now, as far as the Kapucijnenvoer.

It makes me wonder just how far they are going to extend this work. They would presumably have to dig up the Kapucijnenvoer in order to make a connection for the drains at least.

One task that looks as if it’s almost finished has been the big hole that they made in the car park in the Sint Jacobsplein.

We’ve been watchng that for the last year or so and I’ve been looking forward to going for a walk over there. Over the passage of time the surface was very uneven and it needed a good levelling out.

But that’s something for another time unfortunately. They might have finished the work but it’s still fenced off. It looks as if they are using it now as a compound for the storage of the equipment and machinery and won’t be accessible until the rest of the work is finished.

my little perambulation led me on into the Brusselsestraat and down to where Sint Pieter’s hospital is, or should I say “was”.

Regular readers of this rubbish will rcall that this immense construction was intended to be part of the French-language institutions that sould have been in Leuven but in a fit of pique after the Federalisation of the country 25 or so years ago, the French institutions moved out to the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve

Sint Pieter’s Hospital remained empty even though it had only just been built. It only ever received some casual use, such as visitor accommodation where I stayed when I fist came here, and for palliative care.

But now with all of the changes that are planned for the city over the next ten years, they have been pulling down the building.

They are taking their time about it too. It’s another thing that seems to have been going on for ever.MY OLD NEIGHBOUR would have had it down in an twinkling of an eye, and that’s exactly what they need to deal with this.

Our water sprayer is working flat out too even if they don’t necessary need it right now.

From there I came straight home and switched on the laptop – only to find that it had now decided to perform yet another upgrade. Last time, it was 55 separate upgrades but today it’s a mere 76.

This upgrading – I don’t know what’s the matter with this. After all it was a clean installation less than a week ago and since then it’s been upgraded twice. I reckon that it was a mistake to bring this laptop with me, what with all of this.

Instead I went and had tea – more burgers and pasta in tomato sauce out of the fridge followed by tinned fruit salad and sorbet. Then I spent the rest of the evening making use of the internet on the mobile phone.

By the time that I went to bed, the upgrade had reached 46%. So this is going to be another long session that will drive me to distraction. I’m not even sure that it will be fnished for tomorrow.

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 – I DIDN’T …

… accomplish very much of my plans today.

The plans all started to misfire last night when I listened to the radio for hours instead of going to sleep. And then I couldn’t doze off once the programme stopped.

Eventually I suppose it must have dropped off, and once I did, I went off on a little voyage.

I was in a psychological thriller again last night, on a couple of occasions too. There were five groups of us, all different colours and we were combining somewhere in some way in which to go off on a voyage but a few people were unstable and led to a few incidents. Everyone was watching closely everyone else until I became alone with someone who then exploded and hot me with a bottle, this kind of thing. Eventually he was overwhelmed and tranquilised. Then we drifted on again but it turned out that it wasn’t this person. He was someone who was suffering from the stress and I ended up alone with the other person who was manifesting allthe signs of everything, and I was hit on the head with a bottle again. This guy escaped through a window to run around the roof. They left him to it. I had to go to the top of the stairs and shout for someone and they came up. They all seemed to occcupy themselves with this guy, not me. I was in a bit of a state. In the end the guy came back in and basically admitted everything. he said “well I suppose that Igoing to be hanged now?” or something. They said “no. We’ll take you away and get you all patched up and cut a few bits out here and a few bits out there and you’ll be fine. All the tlme I was sitting on this sofa. I’d been hit over the head twice with a bottle but no-one was paying the slightest bit of attention to me and my wounds.

Although the alarm went off at 06:00 etc it was about 07:40 when I finally left the bed and after typing out the dictaphone notes, I prepared for today’s Welsh course;

That involved trying to make Zoom work on my mobile phone and for some unknown reason that wasn’t as easy as it might have been. But apart from the fact that it was difficult to see what the tutor was writing or displaying, it worked very satisfactorily on the phone. It’s a good idea that I obtained a digital copy of the course book and uploaded it to the laptop.

The course went quickly today too and I actually felt a lot more confident about it than I have done just recently.

But the bad news came during the course work. The ‘phone was pinging all the way through the lesson and when I looked at the end of the course, I found that my train from Lille to Paris and from Paris to Granville are cancelled. This is going to take some planning, I reckon, if I want to get home.

For lunch, I had finished off the last of the bread so I decided to go off and buy some more.

Seeing as it was daylight and quite a pleasant afternoon to boot, I decided to retrace my steps of last night, only this time being able to see where I’m going.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a month or so ago we say them ripping off the roof of one of the houses in the Dekenstraat and so I was interested to see how they had progressed with it.

And by the looks of things, it’s actually completed, the scaffolding has been dismantled and everyone has gone back home. And by the looks of it, they’ve done a pretty good job too.

Carrying on along the labyrinth I came to the corner of the Vlamingenstraat. As I said yesterday, I’ve not been down here during the day so I wasn’t aware of what there is to see here;

And here is one of the interesting buildings that I must have missed last night. It’s the Onze Lieve Vrouw Ter Koorts, the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sorrows. It’s another one of these places where originally there was a tree and then there was a statue in the tree, and then people came on pilgrimages to see the statue and so they started to build a chapel for the pilgrims and so on.

It was purchased by the University in 1986 and is now part of the research and archive centre of the university.

Across the road, the Sint Donatus Park was now opened so that I could go for a walk around there today.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we’ve taken a couple of photos in here before in the distant past. There are quite a few relics of the city’s glorious past in here and the medieval defences are quite prominent here;

Leuven is much more lucky than many cities in Belgium where the medieval defences have been totally swept away. Here, we still have a few walls and towers and as we saw last month round by the River Dijle, they actually are taking some kind of care of them.

It’s not just the medieval remains in the park that are worthy of attention;

There’s this stage in here, down at the southern end of the park. I would imagine, not that I have any evidence to support it, that it’s the kind of place where they would have open-air concerts in the summer. That’s the kind of thing that goes on in mist parks.

The painting od the whale is particularly interesting and in fact, the rear of the building seems to resemble the scales of a fish.

Some of the gates in the park were locked so I found my way out into the Naamsestraat by way of the grounds of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis Atrechtcollege.

This is the Centre for Agricultural History and the students here are studying the heritage and history of rural life, food and agriculture since the 1750s to the present day and have created a knowledge bank of more than 12,000 photos and documents relating to the last couple of centuries;

There’s also a large collection of artefacts but these are housed elsewhere in West Flanders which is a shame because that would have been somewhere that I would have liked to visit.

In the courtyard of the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis is this really beautiful bronze globe:

It’s a replica of the globe that was used by the Flemish missionary and astronomer Ferdinand Verbeist at the Chinese court in 1763 (the original is still in Imperial Observatory in Beijing) to try to demonstrate that western science was superior to that of the Chinese, something that apparently provoked a great deal of merriment.

Apart from that, Verbiest has a claim to fame in that some suggest that a design of a self-propelled steam-powered vehicle that he drew and about which he wrote in 1672 was actually a working model and this would have been the first “automobile”.

Down the road from the College is the Sint Michielskerk.

It’s considered by some to be one of the “Seven Wonders of Leuven” and was declared a National Monument in 1940. It dates from the third quarter of the 17th Century and designed by Father Willem Hesius for the Jesuit Order, who took his inspiration from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Il Gesu in Rome.

Many people have said that it strongly resembles an altar, an effect that Hesius managed to continue on the outside as well as on the inside.

After the Austrian occupiers dissolved the Jesuit Order, the church then became a Parish Church.

Round again through towards the Groot Begijnhof I had to take a little detour from my normal route due to roadworks.

Down the Redingenstraat, another street down which I have never previously set my sooty foot, I came across yet more historical relics, to wit – another length of the old city wall.

It seems that there is a great deal of this wall still standing and one of these days I shall have to make an inventory of what there is. But whatever there is left, it’s a real shame that more effort wasn’t made to retain more of it.

Finally finding my way through into the Groot Begijnhof I could have a little wander around to pass the time,

As I said the other day, this is a place where I would really love to live. Nice and peaceful in some wonderful medieval buildings.

From here I found my way to the Carrefour where I bought my bread and some stuff for pudding. And a few more vegan articles that were reduced for special offer. There was also a 2-kg sack of bread flour “just add water” for just €1:00. Not that I’m expecting it to be much good but at that price I’ll give it a try.

Tea was burger and pasta in tomato sauce followed by peaches and sorbet. And then my notes;

Bed-time now, and then Castle Anthrax tomorrow. They haven’t cancelled my appointment yet but there is plenty of time to go. And then I have to worry about getting home. That’s a job for after my appointment is finished. No need to do anything quite yet as they too are likely to change.

Monday 2nd November 2020 – I FORGOT …

… to set the alarms for this morning. And so waking up at 07:15 took me as much by surprise as it probably took you lot.

Mind you, that might have something to do with the pounding of the rain on the skylight above my head. It was absolutely wicked.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too but there was no point in doing anything with it right now for a look on the computer told me that this upgrade was now at 55%. This was going to be a very long day. Summoning up what energy that I could, I spent the morning trying to revise my Welsh for my lesson.

That took me up to lunch and then I had a look at the laptop. I’m not sure where it was going but it wasn’t going any further. The installation had crashed. After quite a little fettling I managed to take it back via a system restore to how it was immediately after I had it running again. And then it reinstalling a lot of the programs that had dropped off.

It made me think, and not for the first time too, that it was a mistake to bring this laptop with me.

When it finally fired up I was able to deal with the dictaphone notes

Apparently I had had a home invasion last night. A gang of teenagers entered my home last night and I couldn’t get them out. I even had one of them trapped inside a rubber glove and I ws swinging the glove around above my head although I couldn’t actually throw it. When I tried to phone the Police, there was no-one there. They said that they would take my number and call me back even on an emergency line. It had taken me a long time togo off to sleep after last night and this made me wake up in a feverish sweat again. One thing that I wondered was that are feverish sweats product of the dream or is the dream the product of the feverish sweats?

This was another long dream something like Saturday Night Fever, something like that but I can’t remember much because I awoke in the middle of it and it all evaporated. It was two boys having all these streetwise arguments and discussions about all kinds of people. They had been trying to roll some kind of guy from some other organisation but he was continually managing to outwit them. Once they cornered him and got him come with them in their motorbike and sidecar somewhere but somewhere on the way he escaped, but I don’t know where he escaped. One minute he was in the motorbike and sidecar, the next minute he wasn’t so I went to put my dream on “rewind” and it rewound but it didn’t actually go back so I couldn’t find out how it was that this guy had escaped. But it was something extremely weird trying to rewind a dream – not the usual kind of thing that you try to do during the night but it shows that it’s getting to me.

Tea was a vegan pizza from the pizza place -one of the vegan pizzas that I had seen last time that I was here. Luckily the rain had eased off so it was safe to go out. And that was a good job because it had really been awful during the day.

Instead of going down the ring road, I went for a wander through the edge of the town in the maze of little streets at the back here. Down at the end of the Dekenstraat I came across yet another building site where they are erecting a few terraced houses.

This isn’t a way that I come very often so I can’t say what there was here before. It’s another one of these places that I shall have to keep an eye on as time evolves and see how the work is progressing..

Eventually I worked my way through the labyrinth and into the Vlamingenstraat, one of the streets that leads off the Tiesesteenweg.

It’s a beautiful little street up at the Tiensesteenweg end, but I don’t ever recall coming this far down. lots of typical late-19th Century terraced houses, now mostly converted into student quarters.

And on the left of this photo behind the iron railings is the Sint Donatus park, with several remnants of the old medieval city walls, including one of the original towers. I wasn’t able to go in there to have a look round though as during this pandemic it’s locked up during the night, which is a shame

Here’s something else that is all locked up at night too.

Finally in the Naamsestraat where I could walk down to the pizza place, I came across the Sint Kwinten’s Kerk. I’ve taken a photo of this before, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but never at night. And it looks so much better in the dark when it’s illuminated.

Dating from about 1450, it was built on the site of a previous chapel like most churches of that era. The Dutch historian Justus Lipsius described it in 1605 as “the nicest church in Leuven”, a distinction with which the Belgian Government seems to agree, for it was declared an Ancient Monument in 1937.

Eventually I arrived at the pizza place, purchased my pizza and took it home. And the verdict? It was delicious.

The plan was now to have an early night as I’m exhausted and I’ve no idea why It’s not as if I’ve done too much. Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson and then I’m going to try to be brave and choose some music for my next radio show. The show must go on regardless.

Instead however, an Agatha Christie play came around on the radio, one that lasted for 2:12:00 so that was the early night out of the window. But not that I’m complaining. I’m allowed to enjoy myself every now and again.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality