It takes an hour and five minutes to walk there, as I now know for I timed it. <\/p>\n
Yes, off I went on foot. I seem to have much more exercise when I’m here in Brussels than when I’m at home in France. When I’m out I do a lot of walking. <\/p>\n
Bit of a shame that the walkman went flat after just 400 metres but then you can’t have everything.<\/p>\n
The notaire didn’t come up with anything that was unexpected – well, yes she did, but what I mean is that nothing in Belgium is unexpected, if you see what I mean – it’s all par for the course.<\/p>\n
So I left the building, straight into another rainstorm, and walked into town. <\/p>\n
Belgian drivers are the worst in the world, and so it’s no surprise to see that the coppers have no room to be complacent. <\/p>\n With driving like this from the police farce, no wonder that they can’t recognise poor driving whenever they see it and so the standards go down and down. This column, extremely controversial in its day, was designed by Joseph Poelaert and erected in the 1850s. <\/p>\n It is meant to commemorate the people who “ont fix\u00e9 les destin\u00e9es nouvelles du pays, apr\u00e8s la fondation de son ind\u00e9pendance”<\/em> – “gave the new country its new direction and future after independence”.<\/p>\n 47 metres high, there is a spiral staircase of 193 steps inside and in the olden days it was possible to climb to the top.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that’s not possible these days. Like much of Belgian infrastructure, it’s in poor condition. And it was badly-damaged by Hurricane Cyril on 18th January 2007. One unidentified Belgian soldier was taken from each of the battlefields on which the Belgian Army fought in World War I and a blinded Belgian veteran made the choice of which one was to be interred here.<\/p>\n He was laid to rest here on 11th November 1922 and an eternal flame was lit. After a mega-ramble I ended up at Elak, one of my favourite shops in Brussels. It’s an electronics shop and I buy my 12-volt LED warning lights and 12-volt piazzo buzzers from there. <\/p>\n I’m running a little low on the aforementioned and so I need to build up my stocks. No red lights in stock, and the blue ones are flaming extortionate, so I stocked up on a few green and yellow, and a couple of buzzers.<\/p>\n I’ve also found (well, remembered) a shop, P\u00eale-M\u00eale, that buys second-hand books, CDs, computer equipment and that sort of stuff and so I can move on a pile of Marianne’s stuff without too much effort and that will make even more room here.<\/p>\n I caught the bus back here, and once more crashed out for a few hours, but this isn’t doing any good. I’m going to have to start focusing myself so much better on what I need to be doing.<\/p>\n In other news, I was listening to one of the new CDs that I had bought the other day just before leaving. Warren Zevon’s superb Stand In The Fire<\/a> A magnificent album, it really is, and it features, apart from “Excitable Boy”, “Werewolves of London” and “Send Lawyers, Guns and Money” (which will be my theme song for Canada-2013 of course) – to name just a selection of good music, a magnificent mickey-take of “Sweet Home Alabama”, entitled “Play It All Night Long”<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I was in North Carolina in 2005 I remembered these Classic Rock radio stations that played nothing but “Hotel California”, “Free Bird”, “Bohemian Rhapsody” and, of course, “Sweet Home Alabama” non-stop. I wish that I had had a copy of “Play It All Night” back then.<\/p>\n![\"poor](\"http:\/\/www.erichall.eu\/images\/1307\/1307030.jpg\")
<\/a>And you’ll see what I mean about nothing being unexpected when you see the fine example of Belgian police parking in the city.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n<\/a>I walked into town past the famous Colonne de Congr\u00e8s<\/em>.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n<\/a>At the foot of the Colonne<\/em> is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n