Weather’s shoddy, so there’s no chance to get outside. No choice but to stay in and live through my laptop. Write it all down, I should, so’s I don’t forget anything.

Should have started at the start, though. A new blog. Got to write about travel every day. Like a dear diary, but much more technologically advanced: self-indulgent digital documentation at its finest. Will try to keep it interesting.

I live in Maastricht, seventeen paces from the oldest pub in the Netherlands. (For more riveting information like this About Me, see the About Me section.) And that’s seventeen stillettoed-boots- on-cobblestones paces, which is effectively next door but one.

Beyond that is the town square, called the Vrijthof. This translates to ‘cemetery’.(I realise I could have come up with a most excellent quip as to why it’s called so, but I’ve gone and spoilt the moment now.)

Down the lane on the other side is the markt. That means – well, you can probably figure that one out yourself.

How quaint, you say – a market!

Let me stop you right there. This one’s a fish market. That means fishy eyeballs underfoot and the stench of guts in the air till midweek. The man in the middle stall on the west side, the one who wears a grubby white apron and a Viking helmet, sometimes throws me a live one as I pass by on Saturday mornings (and no, that’s not a figure of speech).

Blast. I should have come up with comical yet plausible explanation for the Viking garb. But that’s the thing. I live seventeen paces from the oldest pub in the Netherlands, between a graveyard and a fish market, yet it all seems perfectly explicable.

That’s Holland for you.