… night that I’d spent in a single room for a while so I was determined to make the most of it. But having crashed out earlier in the afternoon, I was awake by 02:00 and spent the rest of the night drifting in and out of sleep.<\/p>\n
And drifting in and out of nocturnal rambles too. I started out by leading some kind of commando pack and it was the evening of the invasion of Europe. Our HQ, such as it was, was a landing craft anchored offshore and it was from there that all of our missions were taking place. But after a few hours, a green light came on, somewhere in the sky over the land, and that was the signal for us to move our headquarters onto the shore, to a place known as Home One. Once we had established ourselves here, we checked over our radio equipment and picked up a television broadcast which was an advert for a quiz programme and which featured a young girl who was part of our team – a very fair girl with a blond pony-tail (and, incidentally, someone with whom I’d worked for a short while in Stoke on Trent once). She had made an unbelievable gaffe in this programme and when she had realised, she went a glowing shade of red and the television commercial was showing her changing colour, which we all thought was unfair to keep on broadcasting it. And at the same moment, another one of our female commandos had been manhandled by a group of civilians and one of our male crew who was quite keen on her immediately sprung up to go and give these people some retaliation, and we had to hold him down to prevent him, because this would surely blow our cover and we were not ready for this yet.
\nLater on, because by now I was having endless trips down the corridor, a friend of mine put in an appearance. He’d been doing car repairs and was making something of a reasonable profit but we were warning him that very soon he would start to get out of hand with this and the authorities would pick him up if he wasn’t careful.<\/p>\n
Breakfast looked to be something of a disappointment. We had bread and coffee, and that was really about that. I was having a little curse to myself about that, especially as it was only about an hour later, after everything had been cleared away, that I discovered where they kept the jam and the speculoos biscuits.<\/p>\n
D’ohhhh!<\/p>\n
But I’m far from well – there’s no doubt about that. After breakfast I wasn’t up to too much and stayed in my room. So much for all of my plans to get out and about. It’s a beautiful city, Leuven, and would have been even more beautiful too except that the Germans burnt it down in 1914 and again in 1940. The former was the saddest of the two though because Leuven had been declared an “open city”, but the Germans of World War I had a policy of “frightfulness” in 1914, committing all kinds of atrocities on the civilian populations for no good reason other than to terrorise them into submission. Burning down the University and its magnificent, unique library was just one of many atrocities committed here in 1914 by the German invaders.<\/p>\n
I made it as far as the Carrefour, which was a long way short of the Delhaize and much smaller so it didn’t have anything like the same amount of stuff on sale, and I ended up making a mistake and buying soup vegetables instead of salad. It made no difference anyway because I couldn’t eat all of my baguette.<\/p>\n
And when you hear that I’m off my food then you really know that I’m not well. <\/p>\n
from about 16:00 I crashed out again and I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep ever since. It’s now 23:30 and for once I’m wide awake, but I hope that it doesn’t last. I really need to sort myself out somehow.<\/p>\n
