Tag Archives: leuven

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

28th January is the day that is set aside for my operation. I need to come into the hospital the day before, at 09:00, so that I can have a major blood transfusion prior to the operation. And I can guess why.

But as for the rest of the details of the operation, my card is marked ne veut pas recevoir des informations – “doesn’t want to have any further information”. Yes, what is going to happen is going to happen regardless of whatever they tell me about it, and if they start to tell me about it, I’ll just spend the next three or four weeks losing sleep worrying. Frankly, I’d prefer to be walking calmly across the car park, to be clouted from behind by a pick-axe handle and wake up to find that the job has been done.

As it is, I’ll be spending at least a week in hospital afterwards while I recover – if I do – and that’s something that ought to worry all of you a great deal because if it does all go wrong, then I’m going to come back and haunt the lot of you. Especially if you are a female reader. I wouldn’t mind putting the willies up quite a few young ladies of the female sex and I have a list already prepared.

We can start with a young lady who has featured on these pages before. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my mentioning a girl described as “the one that got away” from my evil clutches 20-odd years ago. She’s put in an appearance or two on these pages since then, and there she was again last night. I can’t remember where I was going or what I was doing for the first part of last night’s journey, but she was certainly there and her card will be amongst the first to be marked.
But after a nocturnal ramble down the corridor to the porcelain horse and back into the arms of Morpheus, I had a different partner in crime and I can’t now remember who it was. But whoever it was, we were also in the company of a couple of regulars from the Carry-On team, Sid James and Joan Sims included. We were somewhere up the north -west coast of Spain near the cape, whatever it is called, where one turns into the Bay of Biscay. The cape is a kind of headland that shelters a bay to the north-east and there was a big run-down house overlooking the bay, with a big sandy beach, rather like a cross between the setting in And Then There Were None and the old house in Carry On Regardless. Everyone was planning on going down there for a couple of days so my companion and I decided that we would seed the house with all kinds of practical jokes. This worked in spades and we certainly succeeded in putting the willies up the rest of our company.

From there, I waited for the nurse who was to take the blood sample and then I could have breakfast, followed by a nice hot shower. I must make myself all clean and tidy for the hospital after all.

At Pionsat I went to the pharmacy for the next round of prescriptions and then to the Intermarche for some bread and tomatoes, and then off to my house to inspect the property and see what else was going on. It was cold in my attic too, although not as cold as it might have been.

Back on the road I headed for Montlucon and tracked down the office where I need to go to pay for my blood tests. They’ve sent me a reminder. I didn’t stop and go in because there was nowhere in the vicinity to park and I didn’t have the time to walk any great distance. I went off to the Hospital for my interview with the surgeon and it was really busy – I found possibly the last parking place on the overflow car park.

The surgeon who will be operating on me is only a young girl (which is more an indictment of just how much I have aged than any criticism of her) and we had quite a chat, much of which was in Flemish. There has been quite a commentary on these pages about a certain hospital, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven in Flanders – a hospital that has received several good remarks in its favour, and guess where this surgeon did her training? That’s right, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven. And so it looks like I’m going to have the best of both worlds. I’m sure that if I ask her nicely, she’ll bring me a plate of fritjes.

In fact, I had quite a chat about my diet with one of the nurses there. She suggested a food hamper too.

In a desperate effort to kill two birds with one stone, I went up to the oncology department to see if they had received my blood results. Apparently not, so they rang up to enquire. Just 7.7, a decline of 0.3 in just 2 days. This is starting to become silly.

I do need to have a blood transfusion, according to them, so I explained about my 100km round trip to the hospital, explaining how it was wearing me out. But to no avail. They couldn’t do me now, sir. I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I went to the Carrefour and did some shopping instead.

We had a minor disaster on the way back. I’m using my Belgian bank account as a kind of fighting fund, but when I went to draw some cash out (there’s a branch here in Montlucon) I found to my dismay that my card expired at the end of December. That’s going to halt me full in my stride, without a doubt. I need to do something about this.

Vegan vegetable lasagne for tea (Liz’s gorgeous cooking is the one positive side of being ill, no doubt about that) and then another early night. I can’t keep it up like I used to, and having to go back to Montlucon means that I need another 07:00 start – never mind 07:45.

I shan’t be sorry when all of this is over, regardless of the outcome.

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Tuesday 22nd December 2015 – WELL, I HAD THE CALL!

Yes, at about 09:30.

“Mr Hall, we’ve had your blood test results. You need to come in this morning for a transfusion”
“I’m still waiting for the District Nurse to come, and it’s over an hour’s drive to Montlucon, you know.”
“Well you really need to be here before midday”.

And so that was that. With no District Nurse by 10:30, I was off and gone – on my way to Montlucon.

Mind you, I was off and gone long before that. Despite having once to leave my bed (for the usual reasons), I had a really good night to make up for the dreadful one that I had had the night before. And I was running the Formula One racing network too. My youngest sister was driving one of the cars and my niece in Canada was doing the voice-over television commentaries. However, we were under attack in our house (which bore a strange resemblance to Hankelow Hall, the abandoned stately home where we squatted back in the 1970s, except that there was a more modern extension built onto the back) by people who wanted to take over the running of the organisation. We were trying to defend it resolutely but looking out of the back, I noticed that a load of gear, including skis (for some reason), was being passed from the new extension into our house on the floor below through a window that should have been guarded by my elder sister. The door into our room was then battered down and into the room surged a crowd of people, TV cameras, everything, and my sister saying that we had all agreed to pass on our rights to this new company. I however made it quite clear that she was not speaking for me.
From there via several removes, I ended up back at my house in Gainsborough Road Crewe where I was living with a woman who was about 20 years older than me, and we had a daughter of about 11. The behaviour of this woman was extremely bizarre, which puzzled the girl and me a great deal.

strawberry moose violet sock sloth camping story time sauret besserve puy de dome franceSo after breakfast, we had to play Hunt The Moose again. Today, Strawberry Moose was in the sun-lounge camping. And also reading a story to his new best friend Violet the sock-sloth.

Robyn was keen to join in of course. She loves having stories read to her and no-one reads stories like Strawberry Moose. And in exchange, she drew a beautiful picture of him.

At the hospital car park, there was hardly anyone about so I had a good spec right by the entrance just 200 metres from the front door of the hospital. And they were waiting for me when I arrived, which made a nice change.

“Only one go” I said to the nurse trying to inject the drain into me. “They had four goes last time that I was here”
And so she did it in one, and a more painful injection I have never had. Total agony.

Lunch wasn’t up to much unfortunately, but you can’t expect much in the way of special diet when you turn up a l’improviste. However, I had foreseen this, having been caught out last time, and I had packed a packet of crisps, a handful of Liz’s home-made vegan biscuits and a banana. They didn’t ‘arf go down well. What was not so acceptable was the inexcusable, unpardonable sin of forgetting me when it came to bringing round the afternoon coffee. The fact that I MAY just have closed my eyelids to give my tired eyes a rest is neither here nor there. What you can be sure of is that harsh words were exchanged – and I did get my coffee.

I also got something else quite important too. The internet speed at the hospital is quite respectable for a public place, and so I profited by downloading a huge pile of radio programmes and a Mr Wong film from archive.org. That should boost up my supply of listening and watching matter if I’m going to be incarcerated elsewhere.

And talking of that, I was also speaking to my friend Alison, with whom I used to work at The Conference Board – that weird American company in Brussels. She had a very serious operation in Belgium and was full of praise over the treatment and care that she received. I’ve always said that Belgian health-care is the best in the world and that is where I would go if I were ever seriously ill, and so I asked her which hospital it was that she used.

It’s the one at Leuven, and having made enquiries, Alison told me that there is in fact a dedicated lymphoma department there. Furthermore, she rang them and it transpires that they would be glad to talk to me, and they passed their number onto her to give to me.

Why I’m doing this is that they have already told me that they don’t have the facilities to treat me in Montlucon. If I need treatment I have to go elsewhere. Clermont-Ferrand is, at the limit, acceptable because I’m still within some kind of travelling distance of possible visitors and facilities, but anywhere else is uncharted territory with no possibility of visits. Smuggling supplies into the hospital will therefore be extremely difficult and I’m not going to survive on what food a hospital can offer me.

Not only that, I’m dismayed at how much Flemish I have forgotten since I’ve left Brussels. I reckon therefore that a spell of immersion in a Flemish-speaking environment will do me the world of good.

An added advantage of Leuven is that there’s a Belgian 2nd-Division football club – OH Leuven, in the immediate vicinity and public transport in Belgium is very good. I’m sure that I can smuggle myself out of hospital occasionally on a Saturday night. If so, I can track down a fritkot too, and Alison has already promised to be my conduit for illicit food parcels.

I was thrown out of the hospital by 16:00 and I was wondering whether to go home for an hour or so but I wasn’t feeling up to much so I came back here. As a surprise, Liz and Kate have made me some vegan ice cream – strawberry and also choco-mint. It wasn’t ready for tea though but it will be fine for tomorrow. I hope that I’m still here to eat it, and not detained elsewhere.

I met up with the District Nurse too. He’s concerned about the continued use of this anti-coagulant and reckons that I ought to speak to the doctor about it tomorrow. he can understand why I needed it but it seems to him that the crisis has passed. He reckons that it’s now at the stage where it can be doing more harm than good, especially if I keep going for the total of three months for which it has been prescribed.

I’m all in favour of that. It’s costing me an arm and a leg for a start, and it will also mean that I can go back to having my Sunday morning lie-in. These continued 07:45 starts are killing me off.

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Friday 8th May 2015 – HERE …

caliburn overnight sleep stop heverlee leuven louvain belgium.. is where I spent last night – at a motorway service area at Heverlee, near Leuven. And I slept the sleep of the dead too – totally painless it was. Didn’t feel a thing.

And even better, there was a nice hot shower available too. And didn’t I enjoy that? I haven’t felt so good in ages.

Mind you, I forgot to buy a bottle of water and so my morning coffee, in a roadside rest area while they cleared away an accident down the road, and coffee made with sparkling water is certainly different, that’s for sure.

I wasted the morning not doing very much at all, and then met up with Alison for lunch. Alison and I worked together for an American company for almost a year, and we both walked out at more-or-less the same time. And for the same reasons – basically that American companies have no idea of the notion of cultivating staff loyalty, and rule their employees by fear. There’s no place in my environment, nor in Alison’s environment either, for an attitude such as that, and we can’t understand why it is that other people allow themselves to be pushed around.

marianne orban grave ixelles brussels belgiumAfterwards, I went to check up on Marianne and to have a chat. It’s hard to believe that it’s two years since she passed away, but then at this sort of age time passes quickly.

It seems that I wasn’t the only person to go to visit her either, for there were a couple of other pots of flowers that had been left on her grave. I’m glad that she hasn’t been forgotten and that she is being looked after by people locally. It’s not feasible for me to come to Brussels to tend to her as often as I like.

civilian victims of the gestapo ixelles brussels belgiumIt’s also VE day today – the end of the War in Europe, so it’s only right to go to pay a visit to the interred in another part of the cemetery here at Ixelles. There are some military graves here, but there are also some graves of civilian victims of the Gestapo.

There are many people, one or two of my acquaintances amongst them unfortunately, who criticise the French and the Belgians, and a few other people too, for what they see as a lack of resolution by the population of those countries when it came to resisting the German invaders.

But if you have a look at these gravestones, you’ll see fusillé – “shot”, or executé – executed, or decapité – decapitated. These were the risks that people were running every day for four and a half years of the Occupation, so it’s hard to be as resolute as some might like when you are risking all of this.

And, of course, it’s very easy to beat the drum when there’s an ocean between you and the invader. I’d be interested to see just how brave these critics would have been had they been over here amongst the Gestapo during the Occupation.

I braved the rush-hour traffic and set out for Germany. I’d forgotten just how busy the roads could be on a Friday afternoon and I’m glad that I’m no longer involved in any of this.
crossing the border Belgium Liege Aachen GermanyAnd here I am crossing the border into Germany not too far from Aachen at the back of Liege.

The camera on my new phone has quite a high resolution and isn’t far off what the Nikon D5000 can come up with on a good day. It’s also easy to use on the move so moving pictures are back with us again.

However, I needed to be careful. Can you make out the blue flashing lights just down the road? I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been waiting for me.

It seems that I have entered my destinations into the Satnav in the wrong order and it’s doing the route backwards. That’s clearly no good so I need to change it all. At a rest area at the side of the Autobahn I pulled up to reprogramme it, but then I thought “what they heck” and it’s here where I’m going to be bedding down, German police permitting.

And talking of the Police, I’ve managed this year to avoid having a run-in with the Belgian police this year. Either my luck was in or else they must have been all asleep.

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Thursday 7th May 2015 – WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME …

morris minivan carrefour car park brussels begium may 2015… that you saw one of these? I can’t even remember when it was that I saw one in the UK, so I never expected to find one parked in a supermarket car park in Brussels.

I can’t remember when it was that they stopped making them but I don’t recall any later than the mid 70s so this one is at least 40 years old.

But make the most of it, because it’s not going to be here for long. To be frank, it’s an absolute nail, full of rust and rot and simply painted over, rust, rot and all, as a display advert. What a waste of a good old BMC Minivan

motorway service area nijvel nivelles brussels begium may 2015Here’s where I spent the night last night, at a motorway service area at Nivelles, on the outskirts of Brussels.

I didn’t think that I had had a particularly comfortable sleep, but I must have done, for I was off on my travels during the night. Playing in goal for Pionsat’s 3rd XI as it happens. And then I was off to see my friend Kris. She was living up on the moors right near the crest, and had a huge pile of wood that needed sorting out and would I help her?

Not too far away, on the edge of a village right on the crest, was a Muslim monastery (yes!) just like a huge castle but with an enormous tower in the centre. Round and comparatively modern (like Flemisn 15th Century architecture) it was 14 storeys high but the 14th storey had fallen off. each of the remaining storeys was let out as a separate apartment.

Each time Krys and I went somewhere we saw the tower from a different viewpoint and each time I asked her what it was, and each time she told me.

I’ve sorted out the gas issue by buying what I needed from a sports outfitters here. I reckoned that it would be cheaper then paying to eat out every night, but having had to buy it in Belgium, I’m not so sure. The price was totally shocking.

I’ve solved the beichstuhl issue too. Seeing as how IKEA was right next door to the sports outfitters, I paid them a visit. I’ve bought a galvanised metal pail, and also the curtains seeing as they had the exact colour that I need. And as you might expect, it was the most expensive that they had. I always seem to have the most expensive tastes and I just wish that I had the money to back it up.

stone kitchen worktop IKEA brussels begium may 2015Talking of expensive tastes, I’ve found exactly the worktops that I want for the bathrrom and the kitchen.

A mere €295 per square metre, but it really is beautiful and I would love to have this about the house. The biggest problem is that the worktop in the bathroom needs to be 45cms and in the kitchen 50cms, and the smallest sinks in IKEA (they have to be factory-fitted) are 45cms for the bathroom and 50cms for the kitchen.

That’s clearly not going to work so I need to have a really good think about this.

woman feeding ducks and swans etangs mellaerts brussels begium may 2015For lunch I stopped off at the Etangs Mellaerts to eat my honey and nut bread, and to watch an old woman feeding the ducks and swans.

As you can see, she had quite a crowd around her – clearly the most popular form of waterfront entertainment.

And at least, I could watch it from the van. For tea tonight I went to my favourite restaurant in Ixelles for a falafel supper, and ended up having to park a hundred miles away . Parking in Brussels these days is something of a joke, that’s for sure.

I’ve also been to sort out the bank as well. I needed to activate my bank cards for my forthcoming trip to Canada. And I took advantage while I was there of sorting out a few financial arrangements. I visited the Post Bank too – I had completely forgotten about an account there and that has been frozen. I need to contact them to reactivate it.

But here’s a thing – it’s the first time that I’ve ever been to the Post Office at Schuman and been served straight away without ever having to queue. That’s a record.

So tonight I’m on the motorway service area not too far from Leuven. I hope that the showers are working because they weren’t this morning at Nivelles.

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