… job opportunities these days.

Yes, I’ll be back in the Netherlands at some point giving them lessons in English spelling because somewhere along the line, they seem to have lost their way.

But the existence of this product explains quite a lot and answers many questions.It must have been on sale in the UK at one time or another, because I’ve overheard loads of people wandering around Tesco’s or Asda going “where’s the basterd sugar?”. And now I know why.

After my dreadful evening last night, I was first up and first into the breakfast room yet again, and I was in and out by 08:30. It didn’t take me too long to pack and arrange my affairs, and by 09:10 I was on my way.

But something very surprising happened as I was leaving. I’d handed my key to the chambermaid and as I was walking away from the hotel, the landlady came chasing after me. Not, as you might think, to accuse me of taking the towels away, but to shake my hand and wish me all the best in my forthcoming trials and tribulations. I thought that that was very poignant indeed.

Off to the supermarket and stocking up with Raak Campagne Pils and gelatine-free licorice-and-banana flavoured sweets, and then I went off for a drive along the coast.

Just down the road in the town of Westkapelle I stumbled upon a museum. This features exhibits relating to the polders and dykes around here and contains a few exhibits from the battles around here that liberated the islands in the Scheldt estuary in late 1944.

That up there on the top of the dyke is a Sherman tank of course. From the USA and the most popular of the USA light tanks in World War II

“Exhibits relating to the polders and dykes”, I just said. And this area of the coast is littered with shipwrecks, which is hardly surprising when you remember just how close to the shore the main shipping lane is.

It’s bad enough in a motor-powered ship but it must have been a nightmare in a sailing ship. There’s hardly any room at all in which to manoeuvre. This pile of metalwork has been gathered from off the shore over time and is part of the exhibits.

That’s not all either. This is a Landing Craft – Tank and was one of the key elements in amphibious warfare.

It’s the kind of thing that I would buy in a heartbeat if I were to live on my own island somewhere off the coast. Caliburn would fit in there quite nicely with a little modification (to the LCT) and t would be just the thing to keep us all mobile.

I would gladly have told you so much more about the exhibits but as you might expect, the museum is closed. No surprise here.

So I travelled on up the road for a while and found a lovely spec by the seashore where I could watch the ships sailing along the coast, and also have a little snooze for a couple of hours. You’ve no idea right now how much I’m feeling the exertions of my travels.

I stopped for a coffee on the way home, at a motorway service area just before the International Border, and then hit all of the traffic around Antwerp. And that’s just how it was, all the way back to Alison’s.

I didn’t hang around for long though. I have a long day ahead in Brussels and so I crawled upstairs for an early night.

There’s just about enough time for me to tell you about my travels though. Some British person had bought a piece of land in France, but it was more like on Barony Park in Nantwich, at the top end of the street where Helena and Ann used to live. He was laying down some huge amount of concrete hardstanding there in order to erect a block of flats. Someone had been working for him but had left the job half-way through and an arrangement had been made for me to go and pick up his wages. I had to be there at 17:00 but when I arrived at 17:01, everyone had already gone – in that minute that I was late. I had to find a place to park there, annoying all of the traffic whilst I was trying to squeeze into a parking place – access was really difficult. I had a good look around but I couldn’t find anyone, and ended up by talking to a man who had been interested in buying the small plot next to this large one. He had thought that with this first man ordering to much concrete, he could add whatever he wanted onto the neighbour’s order and pay pro-rata. They could lay his concrete together and he would return the labour on this person’s site. However, the first guy was not at all in favour. he told him to bring his tonne of aggregate, his tonne of sand and of cement and we’ll do it in five days. This made the second guy have second thoughts about buying this plot of land for if this was how it was going to be like in the beginning, how was it going to end up in the future when they were living next door to each other? From here, I had to go back to my bus (for I was driving a bus) and pick up Roxanne’s grand-parents on her father’s side. We had to go and pick up our mail which was delivered to the garage of a block of apartments somewhere that looked like a street I know in Evere and was put in galvanised metal buckets. There was nowhere to park, as usual, so I had to park in the street while they nipped out to pick up their buckets and pick up mine too. Of course, at this moment a great big bus pulled up behind me and of course he wasn’t very happy so I had to move. I had to drive about 50 yards down the road to where I had seen a parking place. But it was tight down there and I had knocked the mirror on the passenger side of my bus so I couldn’t see properly and had to inch my way down there and inch my way into this parking space and shunt myself in so that I was close enough to the kerb. But this bus wasn’t helping because every time I went forward, so did he, which meant that I couldn’t reverse back in, especially with no mirror on the passenger side (it was a RHD bus by the way), and I was on the point of getting out and giving him a piece of my mind.
I was with Liz and Terry somewhere around the Pinware River in Labrador. It was where they have built the new diversion but we were actually on the old road but this was all now industrialised and a big city environment with a railway line that ran up there and a yard where containers were loaded and stacked. The first thing that we noticed was a shipping container that had not detached from its trailer, so the crane had picked up the container and the trailer – and then dropped the lot! The whole right-hand side of the road had been devastated by fire and I wanted to photograph this, so I had to drive around to find a suitable place to park (I was in Strider, but a RHD Strider, by the way). There was nowhere really to park and I lost Liz and Terry while I was doing this. I’d gone higher up the hill, but on turning round and coming back, I noticed that there was a road that turned off to the right so I turned off to travel along it, but it was a one-way street and I ended up going the wrong way along it. People were flashing their lights at me and some youngish guy tried to get into my car with me and give me a lecture, something about “all of these tourists coming into our country and thinking that they know their way around when they really know absolutely nothing. They ought to be given proper qualified guides to accompany them”. My reply was that I was interested in seeing things that I was interested in, and seeing them through my own eyes, not anyone else’s. This led to quite a heated debate. He started speaking to me in a language that I didn’t recognise but, remembering where I was, I guessed that it was Innu, which he confirmed. It was all very unpleasant.
We were out walking by the river somewhere round by Farndon, that area. There was a girl, rather like Pamela Hayes or that girl whom I met on that ship out in the Gulf of St Lawrence who looked quite tall (although she was wearing high heels) and she was intending to throw herself in the river. We had a big discussion about it and I explained that this wasn’t the solution – there were people far worse off than she was, and all of this sort of thing. There were people up to their necks in water struggling to get out and so on. I introduced myself and told her that I was out looking for an apartment somewhere as I lived at home with my five siblings and my parents in a little two-bedroomed house. My mother was swimming in the river at this time (although it wasn’t my mother, it was the mother of Helen – a girlfriend from my school days). All of our family was into things to do with painting – my mother was a painter and my brother was a house painter. I was actually on my way to Halfords to buy a box of assorted tap washers to do some plumbing. I knew a girl who worked there, but she was in the department that sold tapestries. My mother then came out of the water and we all had a big chat and then went off to buy these washers; However, there was nothing really suitable – they had a multi-pack of washers there but these were just bits and pieces. At this moment, the Police turned up. There had apparently been some other kind of incident going on there and they had come in response to that, but we were all held and interviewed about what we knew.
This next bit is nothing like complete because after I woke up, I fell asleep again almost immediately and so didn’t dictate it “at the moment” as I would normally like to do. From what I remember, though, I was on a train that had left France and was heading down to the south of Europe. I’d boarded it at the departure point, Paris, and it was crammed with people like most wartime trains were. We’d boarded it right behind the engine and had to work our way backwards to find a seat. We must have travelled for miles and there was still no seat to be found. We kept bumping into the guard and he was telling us all kinds of stories about wartime travel and so on. I don’t remember too much more about it, although we did end up somewhere down by Yugoslavia and we were still standing. But on the subject of wartime, I was explaining to someone that French railways were liberated “all at once”. They were surprised by that but I pointed out that the railway staff was actually civilian in most cases and would just take orders from whoever was giving them. It made no difference whether they were French, German or whatever, whether they were giving the orders or receiving them. They would not, in by far the most cases, be considered as combatants. So once the head of the pyramid of command had been liberated, so would all of the rest of it.

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