Me: We have a new government, I heard it on the radio on the way home.
Him: We who?
Me: We Belgium. And there’s a woman Minister for Foreign Affairs, Karen something or other.
Him: Karel De Gucht?
Me: Yes, that’s it.
Him: He’s a man and he’s the one who was Minister for Foreign Affairs before.
In other news, the Princess and all her little friends wore their pyjamas to school yesterday and got dressed and had breakfast in the classroom. It was the best thing ever.
Over the weekend in our ongoing quest to entertain our children, we went to a farm. I picked up a flyer at some event and stored it carefully for a day when we were at our wits’ end.
We piled them into the car and took ourselves off having taken the initial precaution of ringing the farmer to check that the farm was open. When we arrived, there was a deer family grouped in front of the farm house, an ostrich and some ducks. So far, so delightfully inauthentic.
It was when I saw the duckpond that I began to suspect that this might be a real proper farm and not just a petting zoo. It was made of polythene with old tyres holding it in place. A trip into the farm yard confirmed my worst suspicions, it was a working farm.
It was slightly dilapidated and there were a lot of cows. There were also a number of dogs running about, in my experience, the mark of a real farm. The children did not like the dogs though they were unusually quiet for farm dogs and very well trained.
The farmer told us to stroll around (the grounds until we felt at home) and didn’t charge us. This was definitely a real farm. There were an extraordinary number of bunnies in cages which, I suppose, is not a standard farm feature but the rest was quite authentic, just that bit too authentic for our two boys who clambered into our arms and refused to get down. I was astounded to see the Princess patting a horse on the nose but the boys were too terrified even to approach it. She also inspected the pigs and boars (yes, really) with interest. There seemed to be a lot of bulls in reasonably enclosed spaces only separated from us by a number of troughs and I was a little concerned by this, especially since they seemed a bit annoyed.
At one point a rat sauntered across the yard. Unlike its city cousins which, in my experience, are always decent enough to scurry, this rat seemed to be in no particular hurry although there were two terriers on its tail. It may have been that its enormous bulk stopped it from moving at any speed. This may also have inhibited the terriers from trying a little harder. They sniffed lackadaisically at the shed it had strolled into but I didn’t feel that they were trying hard enough.
We decided to go to farm shop. This was a proper outhouse (no tasteful wooden decorations here) with a large vat of milk presided over by a Polish woman who spoke limited French. I was hoping for some local cheese or a loaf of rustic artisanal bread, ideally untouched by ratty, but the price list she handed us was heavy on butter and buttermilk. We bought two litres of milk from the vat, happy in the knowledge that we had met the cows that produced it and their friend the rat.
You know, I can’t help feeling that getting too close to the production processes takes from the romance of food. Also, those farmers, they deserve everything they get from the CAP.
Since Daniel acquired glasses, we have been spending a lot of time and money in the opticians. I’m glad it’s a nice one near home. Mostly we are served by the owner’s daughter, an efficient pleasant woman about my age. The other night, I went in to get Daniel’s glasses repaired (he and Michael had tugged them apart at the creche, it’s nice to think of them having fun) and her father was there. He was dealing with some other people and I settled down to wait, conscious all the same that Mr. Waffle was at home with three cranky children who needed dinner and bed. Finally, it was my turn.
Me: Hello, I wonder could you fix these glasses, I think you have a file on us.
Him: That’s not a Belgian accent.
Me: Er, no, it’s not, I’m from Ireland.
Him (heavily accented): Ireland, Ireland, then we can speak English.
Me (proferring deformed glasses): Mmm. Yes, if you like.
Him: Do you know Hertfordshire?
Me: Um, no, never been, I’m afraid.
Him: My father was in England during the war.
Me: The first world war?
Him (misunderstanding, I think): How old do you think I am?
Me: Um, the second world war?
Him (at cross-purposes): He died in the war.
Me: I’m sorry to hear that. In England?
Him (baffled): No, he was in England in the first world war; when he was 13.
Me (not wanting to be unsympathetic but feeling we are getting nowhere and also conscious of my loving husband and children, home alone): I see, well, I wonder, have you got a file on us?
Him (not to be deterred): He learnt to be an optician and then set up in Dendermonde when he came back.
Me: Oh Dendermonde.
Him: No, in England.
Me: Yes, I see.
Him: He died in the second world war.
Me: I’m very sorry to hear it.
Him: Yes, I was only 10.
Me (mind reprehensibly fixed on the glasses): That must have been very difficult for you.
Him: Yes, he was betrayed.
Me (surprised): By whom?
Him: He joined the résistance straight away immediately and he was betrayed by [not clear, some local perhaps]. They ask me why I do not live in Dendermonde but I know they are traitors and I can smell corruption and racism. Though, his daughter [I think the daughter of the man who betrayed his father] is a very nice woman.
Me (genuinely interested and having put the glasses to the back of my mind): How did your father die?
Him (producing formal black bordered mortuary card showing a handsome midddle-aged man): My father was taken away by the Germans and died of typhus in the camps in March 1945. I went to see him once in prison in Ghent before he was taken away. It was a hard time, the English were very good to us, an English Major and his daughter, she is an old woman now, June, but she is godmother to my daughter.
Pause.
Him: I think we’ll have to send those glasses away to be fixed.
I forget how much these things are just below the surface in Belgium where two world wars were fought. Coming from a country that was neutral in the second world war and where (aside from Northern Ireland which is a long way from Cork and, after all, another country), the last major conflict occurred over 80 years ago, I have never, in living memory, lost a relative except to illness, accident or old age. Sometimes I forget how very fortunate that makes me.
They have scabies in school. Scabies?! The school doctor has examined the Princess and declared her scabies free, but for how long we ask ourselves.
On Sunday, my loving husband minded the sick children leaving me to attend mass alone, something I haven’t done in years. This gave me the leisure and the high moral ground to criticise others. Usually I am too busy being mortified by my progeny.
I went to Notre Dame au Sablon where the nice beggar kindly asked after the children and sent the ill mites his regards. The church is having work done on most of the nave and is cut off at the transept by enormous, ugly chipboard panels. It makes the church tiny with one entrance rather than relatively large with two. As I sat there near the door a constant stream of people came in to look around ignoring the large sign in four languages asking them not to do so during mass.
They looked around, they took photos, a family ensconced themselves in the row behind me and looked at their map. An elderly man sitting beside them put out his hand to shake hands for the sign of peace and they were baffled but gamely shook hands with all and sundry.Â
Would it kill them all to wait until mass was over?
Yesterday evening at 6.00, I had to take the train to England. At 3.00 with two sick children (welcome to the Leper House) who were responding well to paracetemol and one hyper girl who hadn’t been out in days, we decided that we needed to get out, but where?Â
I found this very nifty website which lists all the museums in Brussels by various search criteria including by theme and by area. On Rue Paul Spaak no 7, is the Fondation Raymond Leblanc. It is five minutes from the station and it is a comic museum. Well worth a visit we felt.
As we circled around the exceptionally dodgy area (you know, adjacent train and bus station, drunks, louts, nervous visitors scurrying in the opposite direction) looking for parking we would have been sure that we were in the wrong place had it not been for a large neon Tintin and Snowy on the roof of one of the buildings.
We parked the car and navigated the children round the various hazards and made our way to no. 7. All around were closed, barred shops, internet and cheap telephone shops, money transfer places and suddenly there was a very swish comic shop but it looked closed. Beside it was an open door to what looked like a smart residential building in a very spartan style, maybe 1940s. Closer inspection revealed that this was the Fondation building. We went in, it was deserted. We pushed the button for the lift. It didn’t come. We stood there alone, baffled. I went back and checked the front door. There was a small postcard pinned up. It advised climbing by foot to the second floor. We all clumped up the spiral staircase of the beautiful empty building.
On the second floor, a pug dog emerged to greet us. The Princess fell upon him, the boys nervously asked to be lifted up. A chic young woman emerged and swooped up the dog and smiled graciously upon us. Her equally chic colleague positioned herself behind the blond wood desk, reassured us that we were in the right place, lamented the quality of the quartier and sold us two adult entry tickets (children free) for the princely sum of 6 euros. Did we know the history of the place, we did not. This building is, I think, still a working publishing house, it was there that the Tintin magazine was made for many years and it was also the home of the Belvision studio which made animated films.Â
The museum consists of various comic strips, information about the publishing house and various other bits and pieces that I, alas, didn’t get a lot of time to examine because, the piece de resistance, or at least as far as my family was concerned, was a miniature working cinema with plush red seats which we had to ourselves. It was showing Asterix and Cleopatra which I think was originally made there in that very building. The seats had names on the back (Herge,) and I think they must have been original because the plush velvet was faded in places. We were all entranced. Mr. Waffle and I wandered about the exhibits outside a little bit but mostly we stayed and watched.
At about 4.45, I suggested that I would go and get my luggage from the car and come back and give him the key (you will recall that I have lost my car key and refuse to fork out for a new one as I know it is somewhere in the house) before going to the station. I went and got my luggage and came back. I stayed until about 5.15 and decided that I’d better trot along to the train. I left them all entranced with the film and indifferent to my departure (a delightful contrast to the howlfest that ensued last time I went away overnight).
Off to queue for the train, passport, baggage control, then my mobile started ringing. It was Mr. Waffle, had I taken the car key with me? Yes, I had. Back through the various layers out on to the street back to the building, up the spiral staircase, hand over key, renewed goodbyes to puzzled children, back down the staircase etc. etc. And I still had loads of time to get the train because despite two sets of passport checks and x-ray machines, it’s still a lot faster than the airport and also because this place is exactly five minutes walk from the Eurostar terminus. I know because I have recently done it three times.
If you have children, or even, if you don’t, may I enthusiastically recommend this place to you, if you find yourself in Brussels by Eurostar (or, I suppose, even if you don’t though it is supremely handy for the Eurostar). I found the whole experience to be quintessentially Belgian from the deserted beautiful building, to the pug dog and the high seriousness of the comic strip. It’s fabulous and, for my money, better value than the much more famous comic strip museum. True the latter is housed in a spectacular building but the art is more difficult for children to appreciate, since they have to muscle their way through a crowd of spectators to see it and, as far as I know, it certainly doesn’t boast a private family cinema. 6 euros well spent.