… yesterday about how well I did in getting up at 04:22 before any of the alarms went off, it goes without saying that this morning I slept through all three of the alarm calls and didn’t awaken until about 08:30.

So while you admire a couple of photos of the Diestsestraat in the early evening dark, I went off and had my medication.

First task today after the medication was to prepare for my Welsh class. And I forgot what I was going (or supposed to be doing), did the wrong homework and generally didn’t do very well at all.

With no fruit bread or anything like that, I had to make do with toast and jam. But with no toaster, that was likely to be a challenging proposition but I’m nothing if I’m not inventive, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall.

In this apartment it has the old-type resistance heater elements on the hob – the ancient type of solid element.

So simply switching on the larger one and putting the bread on top, and turning it over at the appropriate moment I ended up with a very reasonable approximation of toast. And so armed with toast and jam and coffee I could attend my lesson.

Why the lesson was under way I had a ‘phone call from Belgium’s Corona Virus Centre. But when I called them back at half-time, they couldn’t find any information as to why they called me. So I’ve no idea what they was all about.

While you are looking at an image of the Mechelsestraat, I went off for lunch. Yesterday at the Carrefour I’d bought some bread and some stuff to go on it, and of course it was followed by some fruit.

After lunch, I didn’t do very much at all for a couple of hours. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, the trip up to here (and the one back again) takes a lot out of me and I need a pause to recover my strength.

But as it started to go dark outside round about 17:00 I went out for my evening walk around the town to see what was going on.

The University Library always looks nice in the dark when it’s all illuminated so of course I would go out that way past the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein – although I do have to admit that I took this photo on the way home when it was even darker than it was on the way out.

Down the Tiensestraat I went, round past the University Library and into the FNAC to see if they had anything going on in the Sales. There were plenty of reductions of course but there was nothing in there that interested me.

While I was out I went into the shops down the Diestsestraat, the photographs which you have already seen, and then down past the Mechelsestraat ditto.

We’d seen the Mathieu de Layensplein the last time I was here, but I’d taken a photo of it from a completely different angle so I reckoned that I’d take a photo from this point of view.

One of the things that I was doing – I had to admit – was to have a look in the windows of the Travel Agents to see if there were any special offers going on – regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d found myself AN IMPROMPTU TRIP TO NORTH AFRICA a couple of years ago by doing just that – but they are all closed for the Duration.

Not that I was planning on going anywhere though even if they had been open. I think that this year is going to be cancelled too as far as voyages go. With today’s casualty list figures, anyone with a British passport is going to be treated like a pariah from now on, I reckon.

And on the way back I went through the Grote Markt to have a look at the Stadhuis – the Town Hall.

Although it’s quite beautiful light up like this, it’s not a patch on how it has been in the past when it was lit up with all different colours of lights. But as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … Austerity seems to have been the order of the day with Christmas decorations this year.

Passing through the Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein to see the Library, I headed home to warm myself up. It was freezing cold outside.

Tea was a lovely spicy burger in breadcrumbs with pasta and veg followed by peach laves and strawberry soya dessert.

At some point I managed to find the time to listen to the pile of stuff that was on the dictaphone.

I was in my hotel somewhere when all of a sudden someone burst in, like Robert Vaughan of The Man From Uncle. He said come on, so-and-so (and mentioned a Christian name) we need to sort this out” or something like that. I replied “I’m not (so-and-so)”. He looked at me strangely, basically “don’t be silly” so I showed him some photo ID that I had. Then I went to show him my passport but somehow my passport had become damp in my neck thing that I wear and it came out in about 3 or 4 different parts. But he could see it and look at it and he said something like “trust it to be a Canadian” or “trust it to be one of you Canadians”. Then he picked up the telephone as if to dial someone The phone rang and all of a sudden I looked up and he wasn’t there – he’d gone But the receiver was hanging off a hook and there was a conversation going on, but I couldn’t understand all that much of it. Suddenly the door opened again and 3 people walked in. They were having a look around my room as if it had just been decorated. One of them was a woman whom I knew from the trip around the High Arctic in 2018. They were having a look at my room and in particular the huge mural of the desert that was on one wall which actually looked so life-like. She lay down on the bed, looked at me and said “do you know – one night when we were in a hotel somewhere I was in one room and when there was nothing particular going on in that room I went into the other room and do you know what i saw?”. She looked at me as if she was expecting me to answer but I couldn’t think of what it was she was talking about because I didn’t recall that I was doing anything that I shouldn’t have been doing in one of these rooms in this hotel that we were in, but she was looking at me with that look on her face as if she was expecting some kind of admission or some kind of answer

There were two girls aged about 7 and 9. They had been out somewhere so I’d made tea, a kind-of macaroni cheese thing with meatballs. When they came back I gave them their tea and made a bit of a play about it with the younger one. For dessert I went to fetch some of my special cake but found that it was all gone. In the box instead was some chocolate cake belonging to one of the little girls, a different one so I asked her if the two other girls could have some cake. She told me which ones to get but I couldn’t get them out. She asked me to pass her the box which I did and she worked the correct combination but a pile of little figurine things fell out so she said “you can have those and take them” which was OK but it wasn’t the cakes so I was wondering what I was going to do about the cake that I had promised this girl that she could have and where was I going to get that from.

I was living in France in a village where there was a lot of demolition going on. It was a village around which I’d walked years ago but since I’d been there I’d only visited a bit of it and hadn’t visited the rest so I was surprised when I went to visit the rest and so much of it had been knocked down I was doing some work for the Government that involved rounding up a group of people and a couple of others and we all piled into this big 9-seater huge car type of 1950s American saloon, a red one with a cream top. I made sure all of these people got in and then I had to get into the front. There were already 3 people sitting at the front so I told them to squidge up so I could get in. They grumbled but the fourth person in here was nothing to do with me. We set off and I drove back with these prisoners. When we nearly reached our destination I had to get out check round underneath the car and everything like that. I had a piece of emery cloth and was busy rubbing down the sills and so on to see what it was like and chatting to another one of the guys who was doing something. He was telling me about some new Hurricane cars that had been brought out and was apparently blowing everyone off the streets including him in whatever car he had – yes, he had the same one as this but had talen out the old V8 motor and put in a 9-litre BMW engine in it and this Hurricane had blown him off. I got back into the car but by this time I was the only one sitting in the front and I’d made my report that this was a good solid car and runs quietly but would benefit from a really good rub down of the bodywork and a respray

Some time later I was around with a group of people and there was an old woman who had a collection of vehicles that we had been admiring. We all went back to her house and she had this beautiful old 1930s car parked in her kitchen. I was having a good look around at this. It turned out that she was running some kind of private museum. I asked her if she had had this car valued. She replied that it had been valued in May at $30,000. I said “God it’s worth much more than this”. This woman was a teacher and had a class at a local High School. I was talking to one of the girls who studied there. They’d all done some homework, 6 pages, that was being handed out and this girl had only 5 pages back. I asked her about it and she replied that she had only done 5 but “I hadn’t done them anyway. One of the boys had done them for me”. She added “it was a weak class and I had 30%, that’s what I usually get and the class is pretty weak anyway so it doesn’t make much difference”. There were some boys there fooling around and they were in quite a bit of trouble with different things. This woman was having some kind of party and loads of people had been invited. I overheard these to boys talking about this addiction to painkillers was really hurting them and they were going to have to get some more from somewhere. They thought “this woman is a nurse too so we could raid her medicine cabinet”. I waited to try to get this woman on her own but she was too busy showing the scars of her operation to everyone so in the end I managed to get her to one side and said “by the way let me give you a piece of advice. Keep an eye on your medicine cabinet”. She asked “what do you mean?” and said it out loud so everyone turned round and looked. I said it again quietly and everyone in the crowd basically said “oh no, not them!”. She sailed off inside her house and we could hear a lot of noise and she was yelling at these two boys. She had obviously caught them trying to burgle her medicine cabinet. She sent them home from this party and made them write out an essay for homework as to why this was really a bad thing.

But now I’m off for an early night. I can really have a lie-in tomorrow as my appointment isn’t until 13:30. But I might not even be having that if I don’t have a negative report from the Covid test that I took on Monday.

It would be nice if they would hurry up and let me know.

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