Fading Memories

Legends from our own lunchtimes

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

FOUR KINDS OF PEOPLE
- MONDAY 7TH JULY - BRUGES


There were four kinds of people down in the heart of town today.

There were people queueing for a ride on the tour boats, people already on the tour boats, people who, having completed their ride on the tour boats were drinking coffee and eating waffles, and finally there were people walking back to their boat with their new vacuum cleaner.

We mostly tend to stay away from the parts of town where the other kinds of boat people are when they are running rampant, but we do admit that we just might have been tempted to join the coffee and waffle set had we been there before the crowd, which is actually not joining them at all when we think about it.   

While normally being there before them would not be a problem, our body clocks are set in “super cruise” mode at the moment while we wait a few more days for the collection of radio and fuel injector bits to arrive.  We’ve not just lost track of the days, but also the hours in them it would seem.

“It’s good to be out earlier” one of us was heard to remark as we happily zigged and zagged through the throng in the bright sunshine carrying our shiny new box. 

At midday. 

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Tuesday, July 08, 2025

THE FORCE JUST MIGHT BE WITH US
- MONDAY 7TH JULY - BRUGES


We slept so late this morning that when we woke it felt like a public holiday, so we had a vote and unanimously decided to have the rest of the day off.

Admittedly this is becoming a bit of a habit, so we did pretend to attend to some outstanding paperwork over our morning coffee, but became distracted when to our astonishment we discovered a note in our email inbox confirming that following receipt of our application yesterday (Sunday) our Ship’s Radio License has been approved and the original is already in the mail to our home address!  

Sadly with no digital copy, we did not have access to the information we required, so we replied, pointing out our situation and asking if it would be too much trouble to send us a copy by email.   There wasn’t even time to take another bite of biscuit when the reply arrived complete with the requested attachment.  

My wish it seems, is someone’s command!

This of course leaves us in a quite pleasant quandary.   Not wishing to outlay significant sums of money on equipment in the absence of a license, we may have perhaps mistaken on the application form, the words “installed in your ship” for “will buy one shortly if this application is approved”.   

We’d better get shopping then, lest our friend arrives in his uniform and discovers that our vintage VHF radio does not do the things the license says it does!

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Monday, July 07, 2025

REGULATION
- SUNDAY 6TH JULY - BRUGES

 


If there’s a greater oxymoron than “European Union” then I’d like to know what it is.

Far be it for me, a guest in any one of its member states at any particular time, to criticise the well meaning bureaucrats who have to administer any regulation across any of its borders, nor anyone at all who speaks to me in my language rather than their own.  On this rainy Sunday, we were expecting a knock on the side of the cabin from our friendly waterways inspector, who each year turns a blind eye to the fact that we don’t have a proper ship station license for our radio.

Over a coffee and cake we usually regale him with the impossibility of being Australians with a French vessel plying the waters of Belgium (or whichever other country we may visit), and he very kindly skips the box that is supposed to have a tick in it.   

After contacting the communications departments from several countries in “the Union”, we thought the latest letter from one of the French Authorities might provide him with at least a giggle.

“Dear Sir,” the letter began kindly, in English. 

So far so good, but then in the very next line we had the old sinking feeling.

“Unfortunately this Office does not have competency for riverboats.”

Perhaps it could have been left there, but sadly it went further to elaborate on this lack of “competency”, setting out in some detail and an enormous number of acronyms, that while a riverboat is required in some jurisdictions to have a VHF with ATIS, in France it is not, and unless you have an MMIS you can’t have an ATIS.  Furthermore a riverboat can’t be issued with an MMIS unless it has an AIS and it certainly can’t have a VHF with DCS.   It concluded with the hope this has been helpful and provided details of how we can make an application should any of the above make sense.

It didn’t, but we did make the application.  They are going to mail their response to our home address and we have forty days from the date of the decision to appeal it, which we suspect will be about seven days fewer than the delivery will take, but at least we have another piece of paper which may stop that little box from being ticked for one more year.

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Sunday, July 06, 2025

OUR VIEW FOR THE DAY
- SATURDAY 5TH JULY - BRUGES


When we opened the curtains in the galley this morning it was vaguely reassuring in an “I need coffee” sort of way to note that we were still in Brugge.   

It’s still out there waiting, and if the lack of change in our view is anything to go by, it will be there tomorrow too.

With that in mind we thought a bit of housekeeping might be in order.  Then we thought that housekeeping will still be there tomorrow as well, so in the absence of a phone call telling us our vacuum cleaner had arrived, we picked up our books and decided to be retired for a day.

Fred and Els had kept us up a bit late last night, catching up on each other’s headlines from the past year even if in just one night we didn’t have time to get into terribly much of the finer detail, but they had to be off today with the nine o’clock flotilla so we had to cover as many bases as we could.  

The least we could do was wave them off, which of course we did with all the aplomb we could muster then retired to do so much nothing for the rest of the day that we didn’t even have time to have a nap.

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Saturday, July 05, 2025

HOME IS WHERE
- FRIDAY 4TH JULY - JABBEKE TO BRUGES


Twenty-nine thousand tourists visit the Market Square in Bruges every day.   That’s fifty percent more than the total population of the town, and yes, it can be a little overwhelming to be among them in the middle of the day.

They are easy to spot.   They are the people forming the queues outside the waffle shops, across the cobbled streets, oblivious to the trotting horses and carriages bearing down.   They are oblivious also to the cyclists struggling to make their way through laneways meant for cars but filled with pedestrians.  They are in groups of walking tours, headphones sprouting commentary in seven languages.  They seem to be pretty much oblivious to everything other than their relentless pursuit of something to remember about the place.

They queue to board sight seeing buses, boats, carriages, to meet their guides, to eat ice-cream and buy lace souvenirs from China.   They stand in gaggles around the square, just generally getting in the way of anyone foolish enough to have some normal day to day business to attend to.

“Them”, not “us”, because for now we live here.  

We are visitors, but we are not tourists.  We don’t take the place for granted, neither are we blasè about it’s undoubted attractions, but our home is here, just a few blocks from the square.

We are shopping in the Market Square too, but we are buying a vacuum cleaner.

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Friday, July 04, 2025

BIG MARKS WHERE THEY’VE BEEN
- THURSDAY 3RD JULY - LEFFINGE TO JABBEKE



It’s seventy-something kilometres from Diksmuide to Bruges, and last year (twice) we travelled that distance in a day.  To achieve that requires stamina, persistence beyond doggedness, a bit of luck, and all that the spirit of cruising is not.

We are not of a mind to demonstrate any of those qualities at the moment. With the throttle stuck in “C” for “cruising”, the three hours and thirty-three minutes that it took to cover seventeen kilometres today seemed about right to us, the delays merely served as practice for all we had planned for this afternoon.  

Our intention was to spend some time lazing around in a tea house we’ve passed many times, always noting it as a “place we should stop one day”,

It’s exactly opposite a public mooring where one is able to stay for a maximum of twelve hours per day, connected by a giant lifting footbridge.   By arriving just after midday, with something less than twelve hours to run this day, we figured that tomorrow’s clock will start again at midnight, so we should be sweet to stay the night if we work our shifts back to back.  

To our astonishment, there was a vacant berth exactly where we had hoped to stay barely fifty metres from the establishment in question, and even more astonishingly against all odds the place was open for business.   

That sadly is where fine sunny glorious day took a turn for the worse.  

The “foot” and “bridge” parts of the structure connecting the two canal banks were missing in their entirety, after what a local resident described as a catastrophic structural failure.  The swing mechanisms stand on each side as a reminder of what once was, and what will be again at some time in the future, but for now they simply taunt, and pointing two fingers at the sky as if to tell us in no uncertain terms that we can go anywhere but across the river.

Yes, it’s only a few kilometres to walk around the long way, and it might have been a lovely gentle exercise with an indulgent reward at the end, but when we thought about it, no part of the few kilometres that we would have to walk back seemed consistent with anything we had a desire to do.  

So we stayed home, had a day off, and lazily dreamed of what might have been. 

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Thursday, July 03, 2025

COOL!
- WEDNESDAY 2ND JULY - DIKSMUIDE TO LEFFINGE

 


There are two ways of telling when we are finally on our way.

The first is pretty obvious, we wake tomorrow morning and we have new neighbours in an entirely different neighbourhood to the one we woke up in today.  Secondly we can be certain that everything in town will be closed on account of our presence.

We didn’t really have an early start, unless you count early afternoon, and in a completely uncharacteristic move, decided to press on anyway despite the forecast for rain and other inclemencies.  

With one of summer’s extraordinarily long pleasant evenings ahead, we thought we could make some gentle miles once the heat of the day had been spent.  At that point we hadn’t really come to terms with the fact that the heat of the day had actually been spent yesterday and today we were facing a twenty something degree reduction in temperature with more than enough wind chill and rain to make things feel a bit as one imagines one might feel if one is silly enough to jump from a sauna into fresh snow.

No more than a few minutes before we cast of our lines, our friendly harbour master arrived with the news that all the lifting bridges on our route were closing today between 18:00 and 21:00 for maintenance.  A quick calculation said that we could get as far as the Leffinge Bridge, which probably not coincidentally bisects the lovely little village of Leffinge, twenty or so kilometres away, and by way of consolation for the shortened journey there is a waterfront pub right beside the bridge, where long pleasant evenings can be spent.

All went swimmingly.  The lock and bridgekeepers to a man were extraordinarily chipper, the rain just enough to make us grateful for when it doesn’t,  the chill enough to warrant long trousers and even socks, the wind not enough to cause any harsh words when docking.

But it turns out the pub is closed on Wednesdays.  So is the Bakery, and in case we had any ideas of actually buying fresh bread in the morning before setting off, it closes Thursdays as well for good measure.    

So here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go, finally on our way.

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