Tag Archives: Simonis

Saturday 21st June 2025 – I KNOW THAT …

… many of you spend the whole of your day gripping the edge of your seats in eager anticipation of the next instalment of my memoirs, and so I can imagine that those of you who made repeated visits here throughout the night to catch up with the news will have had a sense of dismay and disappointment on finding these pages performing a rather passable imitation of Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

The fact is that I have spent almost the whole of the last twenty-four hours in bed. Alone, unfortunately, but it was probably just as well and it might even have done me some good.

There wasn’t the slightest indication of this last night when I went to bed. And so much has happened subsequently that I can’t even remember what time it was. It wasn’t early, I’m pretty sure of that, but I do remember that I was tired and that I didn’t stay awake for very long once I was under the covers.

It was 06:15 when I awoke, which is probably one of the latest times yet since my sleep patterns have been so disturbed, and the first task that I undertook was to have a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been. I was at school last night, in the final year of my sixth form. We should each have been doing some kind of independent work on our own during our free study periods. However, I had been doing something, something to do with the football. At first, I considered it to be a waste of time and tried to forget it and do something much more academic but in the end I went back and carried on doing these statistics and organisation of this football league. Then I thought that it’s just as good an education as doing anything else. However, I was talking to someone about it because we were living in Belgium at the time. The question of Georges Simenon came up and I explained that this is all about the metro station at Simonis. Where the name came from for Simonis was a derivative of the Belgian family name “Simenon” implying that their family in the past and maybe even today as far as I know had some kind of connection with the place.

Simenon was of course the author of the “Maigret” novels but he is probably more famous for his somewhat entangled web of relationships with which his long-suffering series of wives had to cope. The metro station “Simonis” which is the one to which the local bus would take me when I lived in Jette is named after Eugène Simonis, a Belgian sculptor who lived in the immediate area in the 19th Century.

There were some kind of works going on at Southampton Docks last night so all of the containers and container traffic for all the ships for export and the tunnel across the estuary there had to go north to a small port somewhere higher up the estuary. They had a video surveillance of the port to keep their eyes open for anyone who didn’t understand the message that everyone had received, and they noticed that there was a lorry that had been queueing for a couple of hours at the entrance to the port. They sent him a text message asking him what he was doing there. When he replied that he was trying to wait for the ferry, they asked him whether he had received the letter or not, or the e-mail, and he’d have to push on and go north to wherever this was. There was a long line of HGVs and containers heading north up this road towards the mouth of this tunnel and the little port that was there.

This doesn’t seem to relate to anything that I recall and as far as I can tell, has no significance.

I was about to go to a doctor’s appointment somewhere in South London. It was a complicated place to find, and in the end I ended up climbing over a wall of the hospital into the hospital grounds, finding the correct building and having the appointment. Next, and shortly after that, one of the girls in the house where we were lodging had to go. She was rather a sad girl so I decided that I’d go with her to cheer her up and one or two others did, so we had a minibus instead of the usual taxi to take us. This took us to the hospital, down a hill and into the car park. There, once in the car park, we had to swing out across the road, blocking the traffic, nearly hitting a green Ford Cortina and then reversing backwards in through the gates over these concrete teeth things. The girl climbed out and I wished her luck. I was hoping that she wouldn’t ask me where I went and how I arrived there but she didn’t. She seemed to know her way. One of my friends who was in there with us made a remark about having been here too. While we were waiting for her to come back, we were talking about one of our friends from school. Someone was talking so I asked “what was his place like?”. Someone said that he had three telephone coins just outside the side door. I asked “what on earth was he doing that for?”. He replied “that was how he came in and went out of his jail, by that way” so we were discussing that for a couple of minutes.

This area of South London is one that we have visited on numerous occasions during our nocturnal voyages, and one that I can’t understand because the only area of South London in which I’ve ever lived in is Wandsworth when I was working in that Italian restaurant one winter, and it’s certainly not there.

Everyone else began stirring at about 07:00 so I went for a wash and a good scrub-up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant today, and then went in for coffee.

Isabelle the Nurse was soon along, and we had another example of her hidden side when she began to talk about why I wasn’t here the previous day. She keeps this side of her character well-hidden but just occasionally, a little glimpse of it is revealed.

By now it was about 09:00 and I could feel myself beginning to slide away. By 09:30 I couldn’t keep on going any longer and decided to go to lie down for a while. And just to make my day, the stabbing pain in my foot began again, and it’s still going on.

There I lay in bed, dead to the World, until The Hound of the Baskervilles barked to let me know that we had a visitor.

My faithful cleaner had come down to do her stuff and found me in bed. Nevertheless, she enticed me out and fitted my anaesthetic patches, then telephoned the dialysis centre to tell them that I was having another one of my crises.

She waited with me until the ambulance came, gave the driver his instructions, and we went down to the centre.

Because we’d been standing outside our building waiting, we were early arriving and although I was far too early for my appointment, they let me in and I was coupled up quite quickly.

They kept a close eye on me today, checking my blood pressure every 15 minutes, and I just slept right the way through the session – except when the doctor came to see me. And to my disappointment it wasn’t Emilie the Cute Consultant who had come to soothe my fevered brow but the doctor with whom I’d had that argument a few weeks ago.

There’s no point being early at the dialysis centre if the taxi is late coming to pick me up, and with a prescription issued by the doctor we had to go to two chemists before we managed to find all of the medication that we needed, so we were no earlier arriving home than we might usually have been.

It was a desperate stagger up the stairs and a desperate fall into bed, and that was how my day ended. And why you’ve had to wait until this morning to read this rubbish.

But seeing as we have been talking about the doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … when she came to see me, I told her "I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I looked in the mirror and I looked absolutely dreadful"
"I’ll have to examine you to find out" she said "but I can say that there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight".

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4th March 2017 – HANNAH’S FITBIT …

… tells me that we walked over 11 miles today. And I’m supposed to be ill too! You would never think so.

Last night was a bad night as far as I was concerned. It took me a while to drop off to sleep and I kept on waking up during the night, like at 03:00 and 06:00. At 07:00 the alarm went off and so I crawled into the shower for a really good soak (I didn’t have the energy to do that yesterday evening) and to wash my clothes from yesterday.

Breakfast started at 08:00 and although I was 5 minutes early, I wasn’t the first person down there. It was a good breakfast too and for a change I managed to eat something realistic.

Hannah was having a lie-in so it was getting on for 10:00 when she came a-knocking on my door, and then we headed off to the metro station at Brussels Midi.

And here we had our first set-back in that there is a cosplay convention in the town and the Metro was swamped with cosplayers. They were holding up all of the Metro trains so that they could set these people on their way.

Our second setback was once we were on our way, the Metro broke down and we had to alight. What we thus did was to cross the tracks to the other platform and go the long way around the circle to the Simonis station.

At the Simonis we took the old Bus 13 – the one that I used to take back home again. We alighted at the woods and went for a tramp therein (he got away unfortunately) but we didn’t have sight of a parrot as we did when Terry and Liz were here in 2011. Our walk took us past my old apartment at Expo and then round the corner to catch the bus 84.

At Heysel we had our third setback – in that the little shopping precinct there where there were all of the cafés, it was closed for refurbishment.

This led us nicely on to our fourth setback – Mini-Europe, which was what Hannah had really been hoping to see, was closed for refurbishment too.

But never mind – there was always the Atmomium. But with all of the people having come out today for the cafés and for Mini-Europe, there was nothing else to do except visit the Atomium. And so the queue was all the way down the street. That was our fifth setback.

And so we went down to the café at the bottom of the hill, and true to form, our sixth setback was that it was closed. We eventually found a café so that we could have a coffee.

A tram took us to the Tour Japonais and the Chinese Pagoda, and that was closed too. Setback number seven.

But never mind, we waled down into town past the Royal Greenhouses, the Royal Palace and the monument to King Leopold, past the Chapel of St Anne and the Riding Stables. We stopped at the Royal church at Laeken, to find that closed too. But it was 13:50 and it opened at 14:00 so we waited.

The caretaker turned up on time and we could see the interior of the church. It’s the first time that I’ve ever been in there too. It’s quite impressive too and I’ll be back at some point to take some photographs.

Down the hill to the tram stop and we took the 93 in the direction of the city centre. But then we had a tram breakdown (the eighth setback) and had to jump on board a bus. We jumped off the bus so that we could walk past the huge abandoned church of Schaerbeek, and then down the road to the old Botanical Garden where we stopped for a drink in the café there

There was an exhibition of photos taken by some Austrian of ruins that he had discovered of the German extermination programme of the mentally-ill children during the Holocaust. as I have said before, it’s quite simply not right that just one group of people has claimed the Holocaust as its own. All kinds of minorities were targeted by the Germans and focusing on just one group devalues the lives of all of the others.

The Metro and a bus took us out past the little apartment that I had at the Place Meiser and to the Tir National where we have been before, to see the graves of the Belgian Resistance who were executed by the Germans.

By now we were hungry so a Tram 25 took us all of the way round to Ixelles and the posh fritkot where I used to go when I lived at Marianne’s. And wasn’t it all delicious there, just as usual?

A bus 71 and then a tram 81 took us to Merode, and a walk through the Cinquantenaire took us to the Rond-Point Schuman where I showed her the European Institution buildings. But I was so disappointed that they were all in darkness. I hope that it isn’t symbolic.

We’re back here now and I’m stretched out trying to relax as I can feel my muscles tensing up. And I need to be fit for tomorrow as I have yet more walking to do.

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Sunday 23rd February 2014 – PHEW!

No wonder I’m so flaming tired all the time, if last night is anything to go by.

There I was in South-West London, renting a room in a house and to reach the area of London where the house was, there was a zig-zag climb up to a plateau rather like the way in to Marcillat from the Montlucon road only, of course, all built-up and urbanised.

I was talking to a girl who was something to do with a business, down at the business premises at the foot of the climb, talking about the house in which I was living, and she was expressing her astonishment that here in the inner suburbs of London there was a house that had three wind turbines powering all of the electricity (I do actually have three wind turbines here).

The conversation was interrupted as I needed to go to Brussels in Belgium. There, I met Anne-Marie in a café half-way up the Boulevard Léopold II near to the Simonis transport hub. She was wanting to see more of the parts of Brussels that she didn’t know, and the area of Molenbeek and Koekelberg (served by the Simonis hub) is an area that I know quite well.

But Anne-Marie. She joined the EU at about the same time that I did and was part of this little group of us that went around together. I had quite a soft spot for her and we went on a couple of skiing trips together. She would have been a good partner for me, I always reckoned, as she had a knack of bringing my feet back firmly to the floor whenever I went off on one of my regular flights of fancy. But as is usual, though, I would have been far too much hard work for someone “normal” and so nothing ever happened. Another “one that got away”, the lucky girl.

But let’s return to the issue at hand. Despite all of the contemporary stuff that was going on in the Boulevard Leopold II, it was in fact early 1914 and the eve of World War I. Some German notable, von Something zu Somewhat, was there trying to negotiate something with some Belgian politicians and my task, if I chose to accept it, was to find out who he was and what he was doing and who he was negotiating with and why. On the eve of World War I, everyone in Europe was nervous.

So once I had ascertained his name, I contacted MI6 to see if he was “known” to the British authorities. I didn’t receive a reply but it turned out that the principal reason why he was there was that he (only a young guy) had made a young girl pregnant because he needed a child in order to inherit something. But this girl was not ready to have herself “announced” to all the world. Therefore there was some machination about producing the baby, with a spurious mother, and producing the real mother at a later date.

I suggested that he should have produced a spurious baby as well and saved all of this pantomime, but this didn’t go down too well at all.

After all of that running around Northern Europe for 100 years when I should have been sleeping, I didn’t feel too bad about staying in bed until 10:10 this morning. And after breakfast I just mooched around for a while.

There should have been some footy this afternoon – I had a choice of the 1st XI at Lempdes – about a 90-minute drive away – or the 2nd XI at home against the Goatslayers, both kick-offs at 13:00. Of course, I chose the Goatslayers at home, and so of course the match was postponed, as I found out when I arrived at the ground.

But with the glorious summer weather today (180.1 amp-hours of surplus solar energy, 66°C in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load), firstly I aired all of the bedding that I use in Caliburn – it’s been in its suitcase in the barn since early November, and secondly, I had a look at Caliburn’s auxilliary electrical circuits.

The solar panel on Caliburn’s roof rack hasn’t been charging up the second battery for a while and neither has the split-charging relay that works off the main battery. It turns out that the cheap charge controller that I bought years ago in the UK has burnt itself out. Luckily, in one of these solar briefcase kits that I bought years ago and which broke when it fell off the LDV’s roof, there was a charge controller that was now sitting around doing nothing. Consequently, that’s now wired in the circuit and seems to be working.

As for the split charger, after much furkling arouns and bad temper and cursing, I found that there was a poor earth connection. Once that was all cleaned up and greased and sanded, that now works as it should.

But with having almost dismantled the auxilliary electric circuit, I decided to tidy it all up. It really was such a mess. Now it’s all shipshape and Bristol-fashion, bolted to the bulkhead as it should be, and out of the way of where I’m likely to trip over it. But I’m still not all that happy – I can do much better than this and I will do too.

But me? Working on a Sunday? Things are getting to me, aren’t they?

And this evening, no pizza. Not that I can’t make one, but that the temperature up here is 18.4°C, and that’s with no heating on either. If I light the fire I’d be melted out long before the pizza would be cooked.

This winter is thoroughly crazy.

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Saturday 16th July 2011 – HAVING SPENT THE NIGHT …

… parked up on the Motorway Service Area at Drogenbos, a good (for once) sleep led to a major shopping expedition and I have finally found a new whistling kettle – I’ve been hunting one for ages.

And then after lunch it was round to the apartment.

You might recall that back in the winter we tried everything that we could to undo the lock on the cellar to empty it. And nothing we tried would make it work. This time, I took a couple of enormous extensions and a drill and angle grinder. And of course, trying to unlock the door just one more time “for old time’s sake”, it came undone with no issues whatever!

Just like Sam Gamgee’s rope in Lord of the Rings in fact.

And so that was emptied and the racking dismantled in no time flat and all loaded up into Caliburn. I don’t know how people can function without vans, I really don’t.

And so with plenty of time to spare, another shopping trip, this time to IKEA where I discovered a few exciting items in the sale.

Having called at the Simonis Fritkot for my assiette falafel, I headed off to my motorway service area for a kip. But in fact I spent quite a while fixing a car for a British guy returning from holiday with his family and whose electrical charging circuit had broken down.

No peace for the wicked, is there?

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