Thoughts of the day.

  ‘About Town’. Cycling around town during the Corona ‘semi-lockdown’ is like a dream.  A lot of the Cafés are doing their best to accommodate people with ‘take away’ coffee, snacks, and such, but there remains a problem when it comes to the bladder -as the Cafes cannot offer toilet facilities, and Belgium isn’t really well known for its public toilets, but I must admit living in Antwerp gives the extra advantage of being able (as a man) to legally pee against the wall of the Cathedral in one of those enclosed by a wall, ‘old-school’, pee gutters that used to be all over town (in the old days' Women never used to pee I imagine). Cycling over the main pedestrian shopping street you see people collecting ordered items from shops (the minority) but also people just staring at closed shops like consumer junkies in ‘Cold Turkey’- or pigeons expecting to be fed, listening to the regional accents many come from out of town just to walk through the closed shopping area which see...

  Lockdown Diary.  7:00  De wekker loopt af, ik sta op, ‘vroeg begonnen is half gewonnen’ nooit vergeten.  7:30 Gedoucht en al aan de koffie, mijn eerste gedachte ‘Waarom ben ik om 7:00 uur opgestaan in godsnaam’.  8:00 Samen met mijn derde tas koffie beluister ik het nieuws op de radio, ik besef dat ik alle nieuws over Corona kotsbeu ben, idem Trump - Brexit - en de meningen van iedereen die geïnterviewd wil worden ’s morgens op de radio na het nieuws van 8:00 uur.  8:30  Ik plan mijn dag en merk dat ik weinig plannen heb, ik denk dat ik veel ga lezen vandaag.  9:00 Mijn plan is aangevuld, ik ga wandelen en nu onmiddellijk, als ik het Coronavirus wil overleven als oudere man moet ik fit blijven, in beweging blijven, ik schrijf ‘it’s harder to hit a moving target’ op een papiertje en pin het tegen mijn prikbord.  10:00 De wandeling viel tegen, het regende, ik besefte dat één van mijn wandelschoenen lekt. Het oorverdovende geluid v...

  Diary,15th of November, 2020. It’s Sunday again, these weeks of waiting, staying indoors, and trying to find ways to encourage creativity, fly past, whereas the plans I had to fill the gaps that have opened- up due to lack of employment- remain in the ‘planning’ stage. The ‘never to be done’ tray of my idler brain.  The lack of planning leads me to panic because of days and weeks racing by without anything to be shown for it, had to be taken on, head-on. These past three days I have tried to plan a schedule and keep to it.  The morning would be spent ‘out and about’, the afternoon divided between writing, reading, and my podcast. The evening was left for the idle consumption of Netflix ‘Scandinavian-crime’ series or other such time fillers. This planning has worked and made me feel more contented this weekend.  The morning plan today was to visit ‘The British Shop’ called Stone Manor, not far from Brussels. The drive would only be about forty minutes...

  House of Lard.   The American elections are a thing of the past and the judicial outcome is a thing of the future, Biden won but Trump wants to have another go, and this time through the courts. At the moment Trumps only evidence seems to be ‘There was Fraud because I say so’.  I take it for granted that ‘sleepy Joe’ Biden will be the next President and Donald- the ‘stable genius’-Trump will be resigned to a reality show or a mental health care facility for the next four years, maybe he can try again then, by that time he might have become an adult.  So there he goes, the first ‘Celebrity Culture President’, like it or not, this election got the biggest electoral turn-out in the history of U.S. elections, so if you are living in a country where there is a huge divide between the populace and politics, get yourselves a celebrity as candidate, and bridge that gap.  Looking at both Candidates I can’t help thinking that a lot of people must have been voting...

  Another one of those days, one of those days without a goal or the capacity to create one.   He asks himself what to do.  ‘It can’t just be like this, the emptiness, the total lack of passion or creativity’. ‘There must surely be yet more to come, I read and study about the self, about creativity and finding my own ‘uniqueness’ and yet all I want to do is sleep, watch films - the dumber the better.’ He feels tired and unloved.  The frustration builds.  ‘After all, the last 30 years I have had a career, maybe not the best in my chosen field but I certainly didn’t go unnoticed’. ‘How can it be that this is what is left, no calls, no new projects, not even an old friend or colleague calling for a chat, nothing, was it all just fake? Am I really that unpopular among my peers?’ ‘Or is it just a case of me no longer being relevant, it was just work, just business that I misinterpreted for friendship.’ Then the self hate.  He despises the person he...