Tag Archives: Syria

Thursday 2nd March 2017 – AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT …

… having had a decent, long walk or two during the day yesterday was that I was in no fit state this morning.

It took me a while to go off to sleep, and I was flat out until the alarm went off.

I’d been on my travels too during the night. Firstly, I was the adviser to a Politician who bore a most remarkable resemblance to a certain new Transatlantic Politician. I was dismayed with his plans and decided to resign my position, but I felt that many of the plans had been designed with that aim in view. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to hang around.
A little later, I was back on the buses – working for a coach company that was based in a town that bore more than just a passing resemblance to Middlewich. Two of our coaches, carrying football supporters who had been to watch Northwich Victoria, and they pulled into our yard. By the time that I had caught up with them, they had been parked in a really difficult position in an alcove and I was amazed at how the drivers had managed to park them there. Only one coach was able to go on to drop off everyone so some folk had to be left behind, and this led to all kinds of confusion and anguish in the depot amongst the passengers.

Two families were ahead of me at breakfast, and one of them was sitting in my place right in the window. I had to sit somewhere else.

Back up here, I had the opportunity to go to meet Sean in Gent but I wasn’t up to it and was obliged to decline. instead, I had a good relax on my bed for a while.

bellini ship harbour oostende belgium march mars 2017After all, the weather wasn’t fit for anyone to be outside. The wind was whipping up quite a storm and there was no-one on the promenade.

You can see exactly what I mean by looking at how the waves are pounding away on this ship as it was trying to negotiate its way into the harbour. And there weren’t any other ships around in the vicinity as there usually are.

It really was rough out there.

bellini ship harbour oostende belgium march mars 2017But I couldn’t stay in my stinking little pit all day – I had things to do. And it was on my travels that I saw the aforementioned ship, the Bellini coming into port.

She’s another Luxembourg-registered ship, and stands much more chance of sailing up the Moselle River because she displaces just over 2000 tonnes. She’s a chemical tanker and was built in 2000.

But I can’t understand how it is that just recently Luxembourg has now acquired a merchant marine.

It is rather reminiscent of the story about when Austria joined NATO and was introducing its officials to the other members. One of the officials was described as “our Minister of Marine”.
“Don’t be silly” said Solana, the NATO President. “Austria is a landlocked country. How come it has a Minister of Marine?”
“Well,” replied the Austrian President. “Bulgaria has a Minister of Culture, Belgium has a Minister of Justice, so we are going to have a Minster of Marine”

I had a look around the other hotels here to see what the prices might be like, but there was nothing that might give me much of a better deal, and I ended up at the Delhaize to buy lunch. Grapes were on special offer, two punnets for the price of one and that was cheap too, so I stocked up.

On the way back I went for a prowl around the shops to look for a new bag to replace the suitcase on which the handle broke on the way here.

gluten free gelatine free sweets kruidvat oostende belgium march mars 2017I ended up in a shop called Kruidvat, and this all caught my eye. Weigh-your-own sweets, but with allergy labels. When did you ever see that? I had to buy 100 grams as a gesture of solidarity.

They also had a suitable tote bag thing with wheels. The cheapest that I had seen, and it looked it too, all at €12:99. But needs must when the devil drives so I liberated an example. If it does me until I return home (where I have a choice of several) it will be fine.

Back here, I was dismayed to discover that they hadn’t cleaned my room. but not to worry – I made myself some butties seeing as it was lunchtime. Baguette, tomato and vegan cheese followed by a bunch of grapes.And then I … errr … closed my eyes for a couple of minutes.

At 15:30 a banging on my door awoke me. The cleaners wanted to do the room. I went out for a coffee – to that good place where I was yesterday, and watched the people on the promenade (because the wind had eased) being blown all around.

After that, I had a good walk and was back here for 17:00 in my nice clean room.

la margarita italian restaurant damas restaurant oostende belgium march mars 2017This is my restaurant from last night, the La Margarita where I had my good Italian penne last night.

But I’d noticed the one next to it. This certainly wasn’t here last November, so today I went to check it out. And sure enough, it’s a Syrian restaurant called the Damas and advertises falafel.

As a result of this exploration, I decided that this would be my port of call for tonight.

falafel schotel damas restaurant oostende belgium march mars 2017And wasn’t that a good decision? Here’s my falafelschotel and this little lot cost me all of a mere €8:50 and if there is better value for this anywhere in Oostende, I’d love to be able to find it.

The people who run it are Syrian refugees from Aleppo, and it nails the lie that these people are coming to Western Europe to sponge off the State.

Hard-working people who can cook meals like this should be welcomed anywhere and everywhere.

So there’s no-one on line to chat to tonight, so I’m off to bed for an early night. My hectic weekend starts tomorrow at about 12:30 so I want to be on form.

0

Sunday 11th August 2013 – “WELL I’LL BE …

… a suck-egg mule”, as the legendary Arthur Hunnicutt said to John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan in the magnificent El Dorado.

As you all know by now, I used to work for a major pan-National organisation and I used to keep my finger on the pulse of what was going on.

As many of my former “workmates” are constantly in the news and as I know their fashion of thinking, I can usually have a pretty shrewd guess of which way the wind is going to blow.

Many of my predictions on these pages (although not all of them, I have to say) have been proved right and have truly come to pass.

And as you know, I’m going back through my blog right to the very beginning in order to tidy it up, and I discovered that back on January 1st I had made the prediction that you see about three quarters of the way down this page.

What price my predictions now, heh?

Anyway, I’m glad that I had to get up and go to ride the porcelain horse this morning, otherwise I would still be in bed even now.

Mind you, 10:45 am is a decent time to heave myself out of my stinking pit. However, I haven’t done a tap today, except to work on bringing another few early pages of my blog up to current standards and to correct the shortcomings in the importation.

I have however had to amend yesterday’s blog entry.

Annie, who lurks in the background, finally burst into the public eye today (hello, Annie!) to point out that Edith Cavell is actually buried at Norwich Cathedral. Yes, it was only the funeral service that took place at Westminster Abbey.

And so for tea, I had the usual Sunday offering of pizza and garlic bread, followed by humble pie for dessert (and we aren’t talking about Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton either).

In other news, Cécile and her mum might be coming to visit.

There’s tons of small stuff littering the apartment that is too time-consuming to sell and much too good to throw away.

It’s basically free to anyone who wants to come here and pick it up as long as they give me a hand to move stuff and load Caliburn with what’s coming back to the Auvergne.

Cécile’s mum has never been to Brussels and so it seems like a good idea for them to come, take away what they want, and give me a little hand too.

And in other other news, last night’s dream has mostly flowed away out of my memory but I do remember someone stealing the washing machine in mid-wash with all my clothes in it.

That prompted me this afternoon to have a shower and do a machine load of washing. That needs to be up-to-date too if people are coming.

-16

Sunday 4th August 2013 – YOU’VE BEEN SPARED …

… another discussion and more photos of the parking around here – not because of the fact that there was nothing to report (there was in fact even more than in the last few days) but because I’ve had other things to do.

I told you last night that I would go and visit Marianne today and give her a progress report, which I duly did. Her grave has been restored from the last time I was there, and it’s grown a basket of flowers – obviously someone else has been to visit her.

Her headstone hasn’t arrived yet though, but then again what I have ordered for her will not be the work of 5 minutes.

On my way to her grave I pass by the military section of the cemetery, where soldiers who died during the defence of the city in August 1914 and May 1940 are buried.

There’s also a section that deals with the civilian victims of the two World Wars and I went for a wander around that part of the cemetery today.

Many people, mostly British and Americans, tend to criticise, sometimes vehemently, the citizens of many occupied countries for what they see as their collaboration with the occupying powers during the wars.

They also criticise those in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who are standing their ground and fighting the occupying powers, but that is by the way of course.

But these British and American critics of the civilians in these occupied countries are being extremely naive. They simply have no conception of what was going on and what it must have been like to live in these countries.

Nazi execution victims Ixelles cemetery Brussels belgium august aout 2013Here are a handful of the hundreds of graves in this part of the cemetery – people who died after falling into the hands of the occupying powers.

If you enlarge the photo you will notice the legends thereupon – “FUSILLE” (shot), “EXECUTE” (executed), “DECAPITE” (decapitated) and all of the hundreds of graves here, of both men and women, bear similar legends.

And none of these legends tells you anything about the sufferings that they must have undergone at the hands of the Gestapo before the Gestapo tired of amusing itself with them and sent them on their way.

Yes, it’s easy to criticise people for collaborating with the enemy when there’s a whole ocean or a sea between you and the enemy. The British and Americans would think twice then.

I don’t seem to recall the British inhabitants of the Channel Islands putting up too much of a fight when they were occupied by the Nazis – in fact they even sat on their hands for 10 months, slowly starving to death, after the war had passed them by.

They couldn’t even seize the initiative then when the Germans no longer had anything to fight for.

civilian victims world war 1 Ixelles cemetery Brussels belgium august aout 2013There’s also a section for civilian casualties of the Germans in World War I.

Back then in those days the Germans made no secret whatsoever of their policy of “frighfulness” towards the civilian population. All kinds of atrocities were committed upon the civilian population.

All kinds of people were caught up in the dragnet during World War I and in this photo you’ll see graves of a couple of British civilians and a couple of French civilians, as well as some Belgian civilian graves.

The flat at Boulevard Reyers where I lived for a few years, that backed onto the Tir National – the National Firing Range – and that was where people who were singled out for “special attention” by the German occupying forces were executed, and subsequently buried.

Edith Cavell was shot there, and many famous people from World War I and II, and many SOE operatives who were running escape lines across occupied Europe and who fell into the hands of the Gestapo are buried in there.

Even more poignant are the graves of the “unknown” – no-one knows who they were and why they attracted the special attention of the Gestapo. From the one or two survivors of this kind of treatment, the suffering was appalling and death was often a merciful release.

Leaving Marianne’s grave, I heard a familiar sound in the distance – yes, a referee’s whistle. The football season has restarted here in Belgium and it seems that there’s a football club here in Ixelles – the Royal Ixelles Sporting Club.

They play at the sports ground down the hill from the cemetery and today, they were at home to La Hulpe in Division 3b of the Provincial League of Brabant, so I was informed.

Royal Ixelles Sporting Club de football La Hulpe belgium august aout 2013And so I went for a nosey around, like you do … "like SOME of you do" – ed …

The standard was pretty dire, I have to say. FC Pionsat St Hilaire could have defeated both these teams without drawing too much breath, but at least it was football and so that cheered me up considerably.

I was wondering what I was going to do for my weekly football fix while I’m living here, and now I know. It’s played on artificial turf, but I don’t suppose you can have everything.

Reminds me of that gridiron player asked by a television reporter if he preferred grass or astroturf, replying “hey man, I ain’t ever smoked astroturf”

local authority social housing Ixelles Brussels belgium august aout 2013But never mind the stadium itself. That’s quite a modern edifice, but it’s surrounded by Council Houses and Council Flats and not just any old council houses either.

If you’ve seen my page onthe houses built by the Peabody Trust in London, you might recognise the influence.

Brussels was also a slum-ridden city at the turn of the 20th Century and a great deal of effort was put into rehousing some of the inhabitants of the worst areas.

The earliest social housing was in the centre of the city but by the 1920s the city was building out in the suburbs and I reckon that this might be one of those

So there you are – 4 photographs and 1002 words. You really ARE having your money’s worth today, and on my day of rest too.

Still, back to work tomorrow.

-5

Friday 1st January 2010 – I’m blogging early this evening.

Yes, I won’t be up much longer as I’m going to have an early night – I’m shattered. Last night’s major revelling kept me awake until all of 00:45 before I crashed out, and I had a leisurely morning in bed until about 10:00. So I’ve no idea why it is that it’s just after 22:00 and I’m ready for bed.

It’s not as if I’ve done very much either. I’ve managed a stroll across to the barn to check on things over there but that involved dodging a deluge of snowy rain that’s been falling all day. Apart from that I’ve been up here doing not very much at all.

Christmas is of course not complete without watching “The Great Escape” on television. And for me, New Year always involves watching old westerns on DVD. You may recall that I bought a copy of John Wayne’s Fort Apache the other day but it wasn’t that I was watching. In Brussels at the Media Market in April I bought a boxed set of vintage westerns from the 1940s and 50s – 9 old hand-coloured “forgotten classics” and so I’ve been watching Vengeance Valley, Abilene Town and The Bells of San Angelo this afternoon.

The Bells of San Angelo is a “Roy Rogers and Trigger” western featuring a whole pile of singing cowboys. It’s as cheesy as anything you can imagine and I’m not sure whether, looking at it from today’s perspective, you could distinguish it from anything that Mel Brooks might put out. I’m not sure who might have ever considered it as being anything like a “serious” western but we are talking of the days before the idea of a parody had ever been set into anyone’s minds and when people were still scratching their heads trying to figure out what Hellzapoppin’ was all about.

On the other hand, Vengeance Valley is a much more interesting film. The plot revolves around an unmarried mother giving birth to a child out of wedlock and how much of a risque topic was this for that period? Especially as the film treats her with sympathy and reviles the doctor who refuses to treat her until he “has a request from the father”. But it’s quite interesting from my point of view as the film opens with a narrative about the loneliness of being high up in the mountains with nothing but the eerie wind whistling through the pines. Now have a read of this page that I wrote in 2002.

The prize for the most significant film however nust be given to Abilene Town. It’s an early Randolph Scott film and features a conflict between homesteaders and the cattle-barons. it introduces the concept of the “good” and “bad” sides of the main street – an idea that was developed in Kirk Douglas’ Gunfight At The Ok Corral. What is even more interesting is that there is a scene inside a music hall with a dancer and chorus line and as soon as you see it you will immediately say Blazing Saddles. Not only that, the film ends with a confrontation between the pacific citizens and rowdy cattle hands, just as in the aforementioned. And when towards the end of Blazing Saddles Cleavon Little invokes the name of Randolph Scott, it all becomes clear and you know precisely on which film Brooks based much of Blazing Saddles.

Not only that, in another one of those moments that can only be described as coincidence, I mentioned the music hall scene, that was absolutely horrendous, and a perusal of the full cast list reveals that the choreography (if that is what it was) was by Sammy Lee. No wonder he only lasted a handful of games as manager of Bolton Wanderers if that was the best that he could do.

And there are three items of news that have caught my eye today. Firstly, relating to the mysterious affair of the underwear bomber, we have an announcement from the UK Government. Now who reading this blog is surprised? Of course you will be saying that the British Government had no connection at all with the supposed detonation or not of this weapon (although if course anything is possible in this modern age) but you can see that they cannot pass up an opportunity to remove some more civil liberties from their citizens. What do you do if you need a gipsy’s towards the end of your flight? Of course the Brits will take it lying down as always – no-one in the UK has any backbone any more. It reminds me of the OUSA Executive Committee meeting when they learnt that I had been elected to a position within their august body, and a shiver ran round the whole meeting looking for a spine to run up.

But you’ll note that the UK Government targets Yemen in its prognostications. Those ideas are developed further elsewhere. So having targeted Iraq and having a good go at Iran they are now having a go at a third state in the area. No wonder the whole of Islam feels under threat from the west. All they really need to do is to have a good go at Syria, which will no doubt be forthcoming in early course, and they will have ringed and surrounded the chief culprit in the whole of the Al-Qaida network – namely Saudi Arabia. Of the 19 hijackers of September 11th, 15 were Saudis. They were trained by a Saudi, led by a Saudi and financed by a Saudi (who just happens to be a big pal of the Bushbaby’s daddy) and so the western world invaded …. errr …. Afghanistan. Of course with the west getting half of its oil from Saudi Arabia it was never likely to tackle Al Qaida and Bin Laden on their home territory in case Bin Laden’s dad, the fourth-richest man in Saudi Arabia, cuts off the western supply of oil. And as more and more of Iraqi oil is sold to the likes of China and Angola, then the west’s dependency on the spiritual home of Al Qaida for its oil is not likely to end any time soon.

Thirdly, it appears that the UK National Health Service is about to collapse underneath the weight of the drunks and binge drinkers in the country. So sozzled has British society become that the Brits are totally shameless about it. Someone on a certain Social Networking site not so long ago posted with pride that she didn’t remember anything after 11 o clock on one particular and woke up next day at 1:30 in the afternoon still in her clothes and shoes, so she must have had a good time, and she can’t wait to go out and get wrecked again. In fact so sozzled is the UK right at this moment that the answer is staring them in the face and they are too p155ed to see it. All you do, to solve the crisis is to put an extra 50p tax on the price of an individual drink, or £4:00 on the price of a bottle, and give all the extra tax raised to the NHS.

Problem solved.

Mnd you, knowing the NHS as I do, what they will do with the money is to engage thousands of extra consultants to advise on how to spend the money, and when they send in their bills the total will be about exactly the amount received, so nothing at all will reach the front line and the NHS will be back where it started.

No surprise there.

-6