We're having a change of plan about this apartment.

The idea was, as you know, that we would come here, spend a couple of weeks tarting the place up, and then sell it on without putting a great deal of effort into it. I've a rough idea what the place might be worth and I would be happy with that.

But Terry, Liz, Marianne (yes, Marianne came round to lunch and it was nice to see her after all this time) and I went for a walk around the area after lunch and we noticed a couple of apartments for sale around here, exactly the same as mine. They were quite nicely finished and some amount of additional investment had been made in preparing them, and we could see what the estate agents were hoping to get for them. And if I could sell mine for a figure approaching that I would be absolutely delighted.

So we've decided to put some more effort in to the place - basically work until next weekend as planned, go home to do our chores as planned, and then come back and carry on doing more stuff. With that in mind. Terry ripped the toilet and the sink out of the WC and ripped all of the tiles off the wall in there. Liz finished off the painting in tha bathroom while I washed down the walls and part of the ceiling in the living room and while Terry was tiling the WC floor we went to the tiling place in Schaerbeek and bought some wall tiles for in there, with some nice glass mosaic tiles to make a pretty border like we did in the bathroom.

Yesterday, as I said, Marianne came round for lunch, and afterwards we went for a walk in the woods to look for the wild parrots who live there. You probably think I'm joking, but it's true. There was a small zoo near the Atomium and it had a collection of exotic birds. The area was bombed by the British in World War II and the zoo was badly damaged, allowing the parrots to escape.

They have established themselves now in the wild and there is one very successful breeding colony in the woods just down the road from here. The Government does what it can to encourage the birds and they have their own schools - the Polly-techniques, their own hospitals, the Polly-clinique, and their own cemetery, the Polly-gone. Gilbert and Sullivan wrote an opera for them, called the Parrots of Penzance, and the council encourages citizens to make life easier for the birds by installing parrakeet flooring in all the council houses.

Life is extremely interesting, if not exciting, in Brussels. You never know what you are likely to encounter next.