{"id":15106,"date":"2021-10-15T18:55:34","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T18:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=15106"},"modified":"2021-11-06T16:34:16","modified_gmt":"2021-11-06T16:34:16","slug":"friday-15th-october-2021-just-for-a-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=15106","title":{"rendered":"Friday 15th October 2021 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …"},"content":{"rendered":"

… I actually had a reasonable night’s sleep last night and I can’t say how much I appreciated it.<\/p>\n

The night was reasonably early for a change and despite waking up once or twice during the night I slept right the way through to 09:50. And having left the heating on during the night, for once, the place was warm.<\/p>\n

And despite everything, there was plenty of activity during that night that I didn’t realise. I must have travelled miles.<\/p>\n

I was at a football match. Crewe Alexandra had drawn some team really exotic in the cup so I went there with Xavier. When we went to find a place to park we were right up to the gates and Xavier said that we were with the radio and let us in. We had to fight our way through the crowds to enter the stadium and I was trying to interview people from the away side and so on to find out their story but he wasn’t interested at all at interviewing anyone. he just wanted to watch the game and listen to the music but I thought for the radio that the people there were much more important than the game.<\/p>\n

Later on I was watching another game of football last night – TNS v someone else. One of the players passed the ball back to the left-back of TNS but he wasn’t looking at the game. He had his back to it. The ball went out for a throw-in. There was a whole series of throw-ins and corners from that incident into the TNS penalty area. I was intrigued. There was bound to be a goal scored from this but for some unknown reason I switched the computer off. I then realised that there was something I hadn’t done so then I had to switch it back on again. Of course I missed the crucial moment of that game.<\/p>\n

Later still I’d been seconded to the Customs and Excise and was going through the suitcases that had arrived on an aeroplane. I picked one out at random and it turned out to be Dominic Raab’s. he came wading over saying “you can’t do this to me. I’m a Government Minister and I shall report you” so I took out my notebook and asked him to repeat those words while I wrote them down. Then I went through his suitcase and found a dozen bottles of wine, everything. He was forced to stand there and try to sell them as passers-by to take through Customs. later on I went into the restaurant. It was someone’s birthday. I looked at all the food that had been laid out by the caterers. There was nothing there that I could eat. I went to find the kitchen supervisor. I asked the Security Guard where she was and he took me back into the meeting to speak to someone else. I said “this isn’t what I wanted. I wanted the kitchen supervisor”. The kitchen supervisor came with someone else who said “I know him. He’s been complaining about this for ages, telling me about this disease that he has and I know that he’s talking nonsense because I know someone else who has it and they don’t have to deprive themselves of anything like he says he has to” so the two of them just walked away and left me sitting there. In the end I was fed up of waiting for some developments so I walked off as well thinking about what my next step would be. All these people suddenly turned up on bicycles, hordes of them. Some were on tandems and some on these things that you sea in Blackpool where you can put 12 onto a bike, something like that.<\/p>\n

After the medication I sat down and chose the music for the next batch of radio programmes and by the time that I’d finished later on in the afternoon I’d actually chosen the music for 5 programmes.<\/p>\n

This included a pause for breakfast and a pause for lunch as well as a couple of coffee pauses.<\/p>\n

Some of the stuff was quite complicated to do because I have several discs of all kinds of assorted music, several tracks that I wanted to use in order to break up the run of groups, and so I had to track down the songs, who recorded them and on which album they appear.<\/p>\n

\"building<\/a>This afternoon I went for a good walk around the city centre to stretch my legs and to see what else was going on around the town that I had missed yesterday.<\/p>\n

In the Tiensestraat there are several sites currently being redeveloped. On a couple of them there has been no activity since we last looked but at this one next the the chemist’s that I sometimes use, they are pressing on.<\/p>\n

They have now added the cladding to the concrete front of the building – some white bricks or tiles which while not in keeping with the rest of the street are not as bad as they might otherwise have been.
<\/p>\n

\"herbert<\/a>Down the road in the Herbert Hooverplein they are slowly preparing for winter.<\/p>\n

There’s usually a street market here but I’m later than usual going for my walk so they have all cleared off and gone home, leaving me all alone.<\/p>\n

The fountain is switched off and the outside tables and chairs from the cafes have been taken back inside to hibernate until next Spring.<\/p>\n

But what caught my eye was the spiral tree in the background just left of centre. If must have taken them a while to train that.
<\/p>\n

\"festival<\/a>It looks as if we are going to be having another festival pretty soon.<\/p>\n

All over town there are signs and advertising publicity like this large balloon outside the University Library advertising “The Town’s Festival Of The Big Bang”, and I’ve no idea what that might be because I’ve yet to discover a description.<\/p>\n

All that I do know is that if it goes on for as long as they say, it won’t be much of a festival so I don’t imagine that i’ll be missing all that much.
<\/p>\n

\"installing<\/a>Further on down the Koning Leopold 1 Straat and the Bondgenotenlaan, there’s yet more excitement.<\/p>\n

They have a cherry-picker just here and they seem to be installing all kinds of decorations, like the skeletons for example. They must be preparing for Halloween because it’s far too early to be thinking about Christmas decorations.<\/p>\n

But then again, I probably give some thought to Christmas decorations usually round about Christmas Eve. In fact, thinking on, I haven’t taken them down from last year yet.
<\/p>\n

\"building<\/a>In the Bondgenotenlaan there’s some building work going on.<\/p>\n

The brick building in the centre of the image has had all of its rear swept away – there’s only the facade still standing and that’s propped up with a big yellow steel framework.<\/p>\n

That’s quite a common way of working in Belgium. It keeps the character of the street and of course, no-one can see what’s happening behind the facade.<\/p>\n

There was quite a scandal about this in Brussels about 25 years ago. They slapped a preservation order on a building because of a magnificent spiral marble staircase but the developers simply kept the facade and swept away everything else.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, that’s a common misconception with the Whitrope Tunnel on the old Waverley Line near Hawick in Scotland. Everyone in the area will tell you that it has a preservation order slapped on it, but the preservation order only applies to the facades or portals.
<\/p>\n

\"building<\/a>There’s more rebuilding work going on in the Diestsestraat as well.<\/p>\n

last time that we were here we saw them making a start on a vacant site and over the past few weeks they seem to have pushed on quite rapidly with the job – not something to which I’m accustomed in Belgium.<\/p>\n

This is the street where all of the cheaper shops might be found but there wasn’t anything in there today that interested me. I was looking for a plunger-operated coffee percolator but I was out of luck.<\/p>\n

Well, I wasn’t, but I’m not going to pay \u20ac39:99 for one.
<\/p>\n

One of the things that I did was to buy a new rucksack. The big one that I have is starting to fall apart after all of the rough handling that it’s had for the last four years and this one that I bought was on special offer at \u20ac50:00. It’s of a reputable make and has a capacity of 65 litres.<\/p>\n

All in all, I managed 5.7 kilometres without stopping for a breather. I know that the town centre is comparatively level so walking around isn’t as difficult as it is in some places, but even so it’s an impressive achievement considering the way that I’ve been feeling just recently.<\/p>\n

This evening I finished off the last of the veggie balls with pasta and vegetables, and since then I’ve made a start on packing my things ready to leave tomorrow. I have a train leaving Brussels at 08:43 so I need to be up at 06:00 and well on my way down the road by 07:00.<\/p>\n

It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.<\/p>\n

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… I actually had a reasonable night’s sleep last night and I can’t say how much I appreciated it. The night was reasonably early for a change and despite waking up once or twice during the night I slept right the way through to 09:50. And having left the heating on during the night, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[162,8630,44,4507,12191,3371,7906],"tags":[1673,12140,13133,8632,10855,13315,212,2560,12118,10934,5918,14985,462,8372,11966,6327,14984],"class_list":["post-15106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-belgium","category-condo-gardens","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-herbert-hooverplein","category-leuven","category-sports-direct","tag-belgium-2","tag-bondgenotenlaan","tag-bouquet-granvillais","tag-condo-gardens","tag-dekenstraat","tag-diestsestraat","tag-dream","tag-eric-hall","tag-herbert-hooverplein","tag-ladeuzeplein","tag-leuven","tag-new-rucksack","tag-shower","tag-sports-direct","tag-tiensestraat","tag-vegan-meatballs","tag-whitrope-tunnel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15186,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15106\/revisions\/15186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}