Pinch in a punch and a punch and good riddance to February. Thank God that's done. It's March. All is good in the world. I'm in Belgium again, which is my happy place.

Standing in the middle of a very quiet square, just outside the main building of the Catholic University of Lurven, looking at a cafe which has not changed one bit since I came here in the very early 1990s escaping some obligations that I had

back at home. I just jumped on a train and ended up in Leuven, which is something I've done

throughout my childhood, my adult life, borderline childhood at times.

I remember once pitching up in Lurven with my friend Sean, who lived in Paris and was studying

at the Sorbonne at the time, and I was living in Hamburg.

And I caught a train all the way down from Hamburg to Paris, spent a night with him, and

then we ran out of money and hitchhiked

from Paris to Germany, where I would drew my very small salary from being an assistant teacher.

And then once I'd got all the cash that I could out of the bank, we jumped on some other trains

and headed to Lurven because we like Lurven, where we spent a few lost days playing pinball and drinking overly strong beer back in the day.

Anyway, you may know Lervin for a number of reasons. Not least, if you are a fan of the Ardennes classics, it's outside the Statues, the town hall that the flesh bravinsons

the brabantsopille gets underway every year one of the one of the Ardennes one-day

races which will be upon us before we know it because it's now March and the

season is already up and running it is the second day of the so-called opening weekend,

and I arrived in Belgium yesterday, headed straight for Ninova, and for a couple of reasons.

One, to scratch away at my connections with that little town that I forged when I was writing

1923, Ninoover being the town in which

Teufil Beikman, the mysterious figure from the 1923 film, was born, lived and died, and I wanted

to catch up with his past and talk to his living descendants, Therese as well which I did and

if you want to read about that it's my latest post on my substack which up until

midnight on Tuesday is discounted as well so there's a little bit of an offer on

...