Update from Ghent

Yippee! The generator is up and running. The water separator (home made) is not 100% effective yet but there is plenty of room for modification. The machine itself provides the output required, and promised, and is remarkably quiet. We can hardly hear it at all in the wheel house or on the back deck with the engine room hatch closed and the only room below which really suffers a mild thrum is the bedroom which is right next to the engine room, but who goes to bed with a generator running? The rest of the rooms below are totally unperturbed by it!

What a relief though – the mishap has probably ONLY! cost about £330 and of course a lot of hard work, but for us retirees that is for nothing. And we are now self-sufficient where electrical power is concerned. The fuel to power it is, of course, another story, but diesel is a bare necessity of life for us.

Another plus is that the free-sat dish and other paraphernalia which we brought across with us appears to work. It took a couple of attempts to tune the dish into the correct satellite but second time lucky and Lo and Behold! We have dozens of absolutely awful TV channels to view with a very few that are actually worth watching: viz BBC1 and 2, sometimes ITV and Film 4. otherwise we have seldom encountered in our protected lives, such a load of drivel and hush hush, sex channels!! Amazing! Who watches this stuff? (Saddos of the world unite we suppose.)

But the most important thing is that we can now get Radio 4 and The Archers six nights a week (Now who are the saddos we hear you ask!) and all for a mere £100 plus the gift of a Sky Plus receiver from kind sister Julia who had a spare.

Sorry to be so money-oriented again but with our income now at nearly zero due to the bank rate and the downturn in the economy we are having to spend the next year or so living on capital rather than income from capital. It was tight enough before but it is even tighter now. Fortunately both Alex and Louise thrive on thrift – Louise in the past by some necessity, Alex (always) by nature (it’s the Scots blood!).

We made another sortie to Terneuzen, however, in the car while we have it here and bought among other things a car load of cheap but OK Chilean wine and this time we had promised ourselves a rare treat – mussels in garlic and white wine in the lovely restaurant overlooking the Westersheldte. And of course the bloody place was closed for renovation – typical! What a let down. So we had to lower our sights and settle for a popular café in the central square where we had cucumber and basil soup! Sounds disgusting but it was actually lovely: but of course there were no big barges to watch passing back and forth. (Alex wanted to add here that there were plenty of big bottoms to look at, but Louise said he shouldn’t really say that!)

We have been entertained by the owners of the €1.3 million boat in front of us, along with the French/Flemish couple from the boat behind. We have returned drinks (well actually we started with a typical English tea complete with home-made scones, jam and cream and went on to drinks!) with the Dutch couple from the gin palace, and we have had the only other English couple, Derek and Erica from Star of Destiny, round for coffee. We also had our friends Suzanna and George from Waspik to stay after we had all visited the Ghent Boat Show. So all in all a pretty sociable few days and very nice it has been.

But while Alex has been busy rebuilding and fitting the generator Louise has been charging round Ghent taking lots of photos, some of which we show here