Brussels at Christmas time was as attractive as
ever, no snow or rain and the temperature quite convenable as some of the
locals would say. In fact as my Eurostar emerged from the tunnel after a slow
and slightly delayed journey through a Kent landscape that looked awfully like
Siberia in Dr Zhivago, we came into a
smiling French land all blue sky and with not a trace of snow. Being protected
from French weather is another of the
benefits of BREXIT I suppose.
Mind you there is a downside to the EU as far as I
am concerned and that is that the metro station
I use to get to the Defence College is appropriately named Schuman but
right underneath the EU headquarters. When they have a lot of big wigs coming for
meetings etc they tend to close it at the last minute and without warning. This
is nuisance as it means a much longer walk for me and the really nice Starbucks
where I have my breakfast (much more convenient than the hotel) is in the
station. Otherwise things went pretty much as normal, goggling at the simply
amazing son-et-lumiere in the Grande
Place, getting the customary chocolates for Christmas, dining with the students
(Belgian, Dutch, German and Portuguese) and patting the stuffed horse in the Roi d’ Espagne, as I have been doing once a year for several
decades. I was pleased to gey my favourite widow tables in both the restaurants
I frequent. A glass of Leffe Bruin over my e-mails and then a light supper.
Perfect.
Getting home from Paddington wasn’t so perfect
though. My taxi driver got stuck in awful traffic on the Hammersmith flyover
and I had to wait 90- minutes or so
before he made it. Worse, both my phones were on low charge and Paddington is a
big beast of a place to be picked up from. One needs to be able to talk people
into the RDV point. Fortunately I had my charger handy and was able to locate
an ordinary plug in one of its many exit hallways, so stood by until I got
enough charge to communicate.
Once home all was not well. It had been very, very
cold and in some mysterious way which I totally do not understand frozen
external pipes had caused a couple of leaks. The first was a slight drip from
the tun dish of the water-heater, which wasn't a serious issue. The second,
apparently unconnected, leak happened the day after I got back, the Sunday
evening after our friendly and effective plumber Pete had sorted out the first
one. I was cooking in the kitchen (well, doing what I call cooking anyway) when
I realised I could hear running water, and in fact saw it was coming in under
the kitchen door. Weirdly, the water was pouring up out of the plug hole in the
washbasin in the downstairs loo, not the tap. It was rapidly flooding the
kitchen, hall and advancing on the dining room. Panic. Another phone call,
Sunday evening or not. Turning the water softener off seemed to stop the flow
for some reason. That was a mercy but it meant I had to spend the next 4 hours
mopping up and the next 4 days drying everything out. Not ideal !
Then there was a short gap, where I was supposed
to go down to Dartmouth to stay with some old friends, attend a funeral and do
some business at the naval college, where my career had started. It sounds
dreadful to say that I was really looking forwards to a package of events around a funeral but so
I was. The day before, though, all packed up for an early morning start I could
feel a cold coming on. It arrived with a bang the following morning and turned
out to be a real stinker. I was not nice to be with, though it wasn’t Covid.
The weather was foul too, so I called the whole thing off. The following day, I
was much better, and the day after that the cold had practically disappeared.
And then of course, all of the carefully
articulated plans for a family get together on Christmas day got seriously
dis-articulated when Covid struck the host and hostess. Disappointed but
resolute, the survivors put Plan B into effect. This involved one party coming
to me on Christmas (despite the fact that I had deliberately run supplies down
to a minimum because of projected absence elsewhere and to make room for a big
order coming in for a planned new year celebration. That was a nice interlude
of course, if much quieter than anticipated.
The following Boxing Day morning we were to depart
early to separate Boxing Day festivities. They made theirs, but I didn’t.
Halfway down the A303 one of those worrying warning lights saying ‘Engine fault-
garage !’ came on and I pulled into a large and convenient lay by. There were
dire warnings of imminent disaster in the handbook, if I just carried on..
Cutting a very long story short, an RAC chap came to my rescue had a couple of
goes at sorting the problem out both there and later at a service station a
couple of miles down the road. He couldn’t fix it, thought it probably wasn’t
serious but all the same advised me to
drive home. He said I should follow him so he could keep an eye on me. The
warning stayed on, flashing away. We stopped at Ludgershall. He said If I
hadn’t noticed anything else wrong with the car's performance by then I should
be Ok to go home on my own. So that’s what I did, arriving home mid-afternoon,
and tracked by the family all the way.
At this point I began
to think that Christmas was starting to feel a touch over-rated. But hope springs eternal....
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