We are an hour ahead of you – it’s amazing what a difference that makes

I hadn’t noticed before how certain things structured my day. Specifically to be showered and sat down to eat breakfast in time to listen to pop master; preparing the veg for the evening meal whilst listening to the afternoon play and washing up the evening meal whilst listening to The Archers – and what a shocker that’s been; sorry, I digress. Saturday was always a bummer as, if I didn’t get up early, I’d miss the beginning of Brian Matthews’ Sounds of the Sixties. Most of my TV watching tended to be the drama on the 9 – 10 pm slot.

Morning Radio 2 and the afternoon play has gone – it cuts into the day too much when there are so many new things to see and it all uses precious internet. We eat later and so I still wash up to The Archers (or just leave it for a bit). Saturdays are glorious as I can stagger out of bed at 8.45 am and hear all of Brian’s show – that’s my weekly Brit treat now (sad, I know but we’ve let go of most ‘stuff’ now). We’ve abandoned most TV as drama now finishes at 11.00 pm and, by the time we’ve sorted dogs and read in bed for awhile it’s just too late. Holby is still good as that’s now 9-10pm

The Motley crew set off again yesterday to ‘do’  the outdoor monuments, but it was expensive and didn’t seem much different to those we’d already done so we went into town to get our bits of shopping only, of course, it was long lunch and everything was closed. I can’t seem to get it into my thick head that everything shuts down from 12.00 ’til 2.00 or, in some cases, 2.30pm, so we had to go and get a beer whilst we waited for everything to re-open. Except it didn’t,  ’cause Thursday is early closing; even places like Lidl. So we had another beer.

The pretty canal-side frontage

We were going to go to the Colruyt supermarket today to stock up on wine as recommended by our European boating friends but it was a long way out and the wind is horrible today so we abandoned that, and my kayak trip was also a right off due to the weather. Instead Debbie and I just walked into Lidl ( via Jimmy Hillfit – or something like that – Debbie despairs of me I think). To summarise prices; I think beer is about the same, perhaps a little dearer; wine is loads cheaper for a much better quality. Meat and salad is cheaper; vegetables much more expensive – the quality though is superb. Eating out is very  expensive (8 – 10 Euros for a cheese omelette) but, so far, we have been exclusively on the tourist trail so we don’t have much to compare to – quantity and quality have, again, been excellent.

Now I need a little help here please from my fellow bloggers. Would all of you with Facebook accounts, that aren’t doing so already, please please please accept the link to Facebook – it’s free for you and we can read your blogs for free on Facebook.

Secondly, does anyone using WordPress know how to reduce the size of the photographs? They are coming up huge. The only way I can make them smaller is to crop them down on my camera first. On Blogger I could chose the picture sizes but I can’t suss it on WordPress