MikePadgett.com

I attended a seminar last night that represented the Belgian contribution to World Usability Day.

The conference was hosted by interactive agency Emakina and the theme set by the global organisers Usability Professionals Association was Transportation.

The agenda consisted of presentations on traffic congestion, user experience in online airline booking and social networking.

Usability and traffic congestion

The opening presentation from Joannes Vandermeulen, concerning how usability could contribute to the resolution of traffic congestion, was both curious and interesting.

Vandermeulen compared the current, systemic approach to traffic management with the possibilities of adapting Swarm theory, wondering aloud how direct communication between car drivers might resolve jam situations.

The online airline

So far, so good. Next we heard about an Emakina case study in which the latter had presented client Brussels Airlines with what it called a “user experience mission”.

The idea is to method act the process of booking and taking the flight, from website to take-off, so that the user experience can be considered not as an isolated online transaction but rather in the context of a larger process in which users engage with the brand. Hence the trip to Lisbon.

Of course I appreciate the sincerity of the thinking here, yet it does sound nevertheless like a marvellous jolly too - pity I’ve never had an airline industry client (though some orgs would be more preferable than others: could you imagine doing a user experience mission for SkyChefs?).

Feeling unsociable about the social web

After the break, there followed two presentations on the subject of social networking. Unlike Laurent Goffin, who was riffing enthusiastically about the “social web”, I’ve been unable to retain quite the same level of enthusiasm lately.

And here’s why. As far as social networking’s concerned, I’m right in the middle of yet another perennial cycle in which:

• I have embraced change;
• I have seen opportunities;
• I have accepted that it will have implications for my work;
• I have begun to implement it;

All good. But now, two or three years later, the cycle has predictably evolved:

• My clients have now heard a few acronyms and buzzwords;
• My clients can talk of nothing else;
• My clients call me in and tell me that I must embrace this new and exciting change, discover its opportunities, accept that it will have implications for my work and start to implement it;
• My clients insist on a [insert the social network du jour that's très à la mode] presence

Don’t misunderstand me, I love my clients: they do their thing, they pay my bills and they fill my day with endless amusement. But sometimes they behave like kids. This is the result of having baby boomers in senior management.

In a way, you could visualise this cycle in the same way as Joannes Vandermeulen described wave theory in traffic jams. Think of me as the blue car and it makes perfect sense.

Rant over, but what does social networking have to do with transportation?

And finally

There’s always a risk that this type of event, managed by a company, can end up being a glorified advertising campaign for the host. Whilst Emakina made reasonable efforts to avoid this situation, I did find myself wondering about what other contributors - myself included - might have offered, especially since we were told there had been numerous submissions.

Perhaps with a wider range of contributors there might have been more focus on the theme of transportation, in which I was particularly interested after the recent issue of UX. There might also have been some discussion of media other than the Internet.

Fundamentally, what’s most important is that this event - the Belgian edition of the global initiative - continues to grow. This year’s audience was quite impressive and very encouraging. If I’m around next year, the UPA’s designated theme matches my competences and I hear about it soon enough, then I’ll certainly consider making a submission!

This is the first of two articles, written five months to the day since we arrived in Belgium, in which J and I compare the experience of living in Britain with that of Belgium. Having discussed a range of subjects, we divided them between us. In this first part, I cover some of my thoughts:

Beverages

Two sups that are axiomatic to English life are tea and beer.

Whilst it isn’t impossible to find a box of Taylor’s Yorkshire Tea in the European quarter¹, Fortune has yet to smile on us with the decaf variety. Deepening our reputation for bizarre eccentricity among our European friends, we still prefer to have the grey stuff shipped in by relatives from Blighty.

Chez Moeder Lambic in Forest / Vorst

On the other hand, if you like your brown stuff strong and varied, there is no better country in the world in which to be. It would be grossly understating the case to say that Belgians are rather fond of their beer and they would never tolerate the buying up of pubs by hungry “leisure” corporates.

Accordingly, you’re unlikely to find your choices limited here to the usual four pumps of watery fizz. Indeed, you could easily find yourself having to select from a menu of over two thousand.²

(Still) choking from smoking

Of course, even if the dizzying variety of beer will have most English folks pleasantly dizzy within one or two glasses, the noxious fug of fag smoke still clouds most bars in Belgium.

As any Briton will tell you, a rare piece of political bravery in the last decade led Parliament to ban smoking in all public places. Thus, though British bars have yet to replace the residual aromas of accrid piss and stale ale, the characteristic complexity of the law in Belgium means passive smoking is still as ubiquitous as dog turds. For the time being at least, you’ll still be sharing your nights out with the risk of lung cancer from passive smoking.

Lost on the highway

Seeking any excuse to outdo one another, the two principal linguistic regions of Belgium maintain aesthetically different road signs. And whilst one can debate the merits of typography and layout until the mussels come home, in a metaphor for the wider political situation here, the real issue with signage is actually something totally different.

You’ll have no problem with the text on the signs. It’s where they put them that’ll baffle you. If you have to get off the Brussels Ring, you can put your Grand National stake on the sign being right on the sliproad. No forewarning is forthcoming. You’ll be halfway to Luxembourg before you realise that was your exit. Meantime, if you’re looking forward to a day-trip to Brugge, plan on spending most of it on the E40.

The tailback starts long before the warning of roadworks. The Belgians are honking their horns like they like to do, as if doing it would go any way to parting the River Jordan. They have a point, even if it’s a needlessly loud point.

You know it’s an outrage when the stolid Germans in the next lane start to get narked. Only the bus full of Brits up ahead is oblivious, as the back window starts to fill up with empty cans of Fosters.

And when, after four or five kilometres of creeping standstill, you finally espy the warning of roadworks up ahead, what form does it take? An unrepentant sign? No, it’s much worse. Only the most macabre sight known to man, a shopwindow mannequin wearing a hard hat, its traffic-facing arm waving slowly and arthiritically. Abandon all hope ye who pass this point, though in truth you lost all hope ages ago.

In a weirdly resonant, art-imitating-life sort of way, these dolorous dolls started their careers constantly in the public eye, modelling the very best of Prada, Moschino and Tommy Hilfiger. Now they have fallen so low to wash up here, wigs astray and straddling the central reservation in deeply unchic orange overalls.

It’s the same story on that other highway, the information superhighway, that is. It’s bottlenecks in virtual space, as the creaking infrastructure of Belgian broadband struggles to cope with increasingly massive downloads of porn and music being perpetrated by its citizens when they’re not busy doing something better than sitting in front of a computer.

Civic pride, civic administration

Belgian citizens, or the Flemish, Walloons and that other German bit, have much better things to do than sit in front of computers. Every week or two some bizarre and fascinating event is going on somewhere here.³

If the ongoing conditions of fervent regionalism can be harmful to political progress, they certainly help to maintain the strong attachment to custom that is everywhere in evidence in Belgium.

Where local events such as parades, galas and street parties have fallen foul of fickle fashion in Britain, or worse have descended into cynical commercialism, the noble spirit of self-identity is central to civic life here. Annual festivals, ritual consumption of local produce, the continued existence of guilds into the modern era and prideful cycle races such as the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Ronde van Vlaanderen are all celebrated and serious matters.

It is however relatively easy to live in a particular city, town or district in Britain. You pay your taxes, you choose whether or not to be on the electoral roll and you can get on with making a profit from your boring job, worrying about your enormous mortgage and trying to bring up your kids safe from the latest bogeyman.

In Belgium, you’re on an umbilical cord to the nearest gemeentehuis or maison communale, your local town hall. It’s not enough to pay your taxes - indeed you’ll be lucky to receive a bill in good time without prompting for one - you have to be registered and parking your car, maintaining a household and proving your existence all involve frequent and regular trips to the town hall to tell them when you last farted. And, to borrow from Harry Chapin, you’ll spend a week there one morning, in the labyrinthine halls that are one commune’s shrine to Franz Kafka.

Even if it costs you a lot of time to live here, it’s not as painful on your wallet. Even a respectable apartment in an upmarket area of Brussels will cost you less to rent than a corner cupboard in Britain.

And you’re often going to get to live in a pretty nice building to boot. Brussels, Antwerp, Brugge and Ghent are all justifiably famous for their numerous examples of excellent architecture.⁴

Outside the cities, good buildings are equally important in a different way. In common with their Dutch neighbours for example, the Flemish like to build their own properties. This typically results in a wider spread of housing instead of concentrating upon and therefore stressing urban areas.

Occasionally, these personal pioneers of their own plot grasp the opportunity to erect the very model of bad taste but more often than not, the product is very satisfying indeed.

Political correctness and liability paranoia

It’s only when you leave Britain that you come to realise how pervasive political correctness has become in British society.⁵

It can be quite shocking at first to listen to Belgians do something we Brits seem to have forgotten to do, namely speak our minds. How it is for people here, you can be ignorant and you can be wrong but you are always entitled to voice your opinion. The only eyebrows raised are yours.

In a similar way, there’s something strangely liberating about seeing Bruxellois/Brusseleir kids kicking a football around in the street when you’re on your way home. And you know as well as they how adults tear-arse around these same streets in their cars with little concern for other drivers or (crap) road signs, let alone defenceless people. The kids didn’t seem to mind even if I did and so over time, I find myself giving less and less airtime to these things. That doesn’t decrease the risk of an accident of course, but neither did being privately concerned about it.

The other week, I was conducting a meeting with a colleague. My office is on the sixth floor of a tall building surrounded on two sides by a respectable residential quartier. I happened to glance out of the window and below me, on the steep roof of a four-storey house, two kids were scrambling around like it was a playground climbing frame. It had been raining consistently all day and the tiles of the roof were shining wet.

Needless to say, with my colleague being a nervous sort of person, my meeting was curtailed right there in favour of staring incredulously out of the window. Within a few minutes, a small crowd had gathered around us. But no-one was calling the police or the pompiers. Indeed those now in attendance had more in common with a crowd at a sporting event than those who gather with horror, dread and anticipation below some fool intending to jump off a building.

Nothing happened. Eventually the monkey-kids climbed back inside their skylight, close enough for us to see the complex expression of late afternoon boredom on their faces. People melted away back to their desks, some muttering how they had seen better examples on YouTube.

Another of my colleagues, a Frenchman, expressed similar bewilderment to me and it felt comforting to know that I was not the only one who mistook such behaviour for a deathwish. I’ve seen the same thing happen with cats, whom as we all know, are much better handlers of heights and the roof environment in general.

Kids are also the subject of one of my other private horrors, the bread slicing machine. At the Delhaize supermarket, there is none of the prepackaged pap you get at Tesco, reassured in the emollient of a Lancashire accent that it is bread and it is good for you. Instead everything’s fresh, often still hot from the oven and usually unsliced.

In Britain, the country that invented caveat emptor, things are different. Provided that the buyer has shown her queue ticket together with proof that she is over sixteen and lawfully in charge of a shopping trolley, the bread slicing process would require the services of a vacant-looking trained operative holding a current health and safety certificate in possession of a brand new, rust-resistant and totally sterile knife obtained from a double-locked shatterproof vacuumed glass cupboard and who had previously shaved and disinfected his entire body in a blue antiseptic solution the colour of a toilet block. And that person would himself be supervised.⁶

But instead that’s exactly where, as an ordinary, educated, taxpaying Belgian, your ordinary in-the-process-of-being-educated kid comes in handy. While you select a week’s worth of wine - a difficult but entirely necessary task - you send your kid to get a couple of boules of bread. And you make sure they know it has to come back sliced.

I’ve watched jaw to the floor in amazement as these expert bread slicers, distant relatives of those little Dickensian chimneysweeping urchin types, go to work on a loaf or three. They’re all business. Meanwhile what I’m thinking of is the meat aisle and a deli packet of fingers au petit bruxellois.

Buy now, don’t pay later

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I despise The Great British High Street plc.⁷ Dull, uninspired homogeneity meets the corporate cynicism of odious little oiks like Philip Green and Friends.⁸

I wouldn’t lose any sleep if Green’s entire number of outlets burned down overnight. The noxious smoke from the all the smouldering of the cheap, nasty, wafer-thin synthetic materials would be worth it just to see some sort of liberation from that fashion-finance slavery the yoke of which most British kids seem to happy to bear ad nauseam. It’s nothing less than legalised human cloning.

Fast food dives would have to go next and along with it the strangely palliative stench that wafts around high streets every day. Brussels has its own problem in a similar vein: the authorities need to clean up Anspach and the streets around the Bourse. I simply cannot believe there exists the kind of demand that would be required to justify so many pseudomeat kebab joints as there are polluting the air around that greasy part of town. Perhaps at the same time, they could also tackle the unsavoury characters on the Bourse steps who mingle among those who are genuinely using the place as a meeting point.

References

1. Gourmet Food & Gifts, Rue Archimède 59, 1000-Bruxelles
2. Delirium Café, Impasse de la Fidelité, 1000-Bruxelles
3. See, for example, the speeches and masquerades of the quasi-religious Carnival of Binche, Dinant’s International Bathtub Regatta, the gay European Big Men’s Convergence and the not-gay Waiter Race (who needs Slow Food) in Brussels and the three-yearly Cat Parade in Ypres to name but a very few
4. For an overview, a good place to start might be Prof. Jeffery Howe’s pages on the Boston College website
5. There are plenty of arguments for and against political correctness out there, of course
6. For more information, see the Health & Safety Executive’s bread, cake and biscuit manufacture page
7. Others have written more on this matter that affects all British urban areas, not just the crap towns: the Telegraph, and more optimistically, the Daily Reckoning; furthermore the sarcasm of a lowly wit such as myself neglects to address what should be on the Great British High Street - in that area, we could do worse than look at the suggestions of Mark Rowe
8. Green, nominally a knight of the realm and possibly among the least deserving of that title, recently claimed that the British youth’s insatiable appetite for his cheap, crap clothing was keeping his business from losing sales during the current financial squeeze

In this the second of two articles, written five months after our arrival in Belgium, J compares the experience of living in Britain with that of Belgium:

We miss…

Source: Jeremy Keith (Wikimedia)

Fish and Chips, say no more

J will be “forever nostalgic about the many nights I feasted on portions of hot vinegared and salted chips, swathed in newspaper, as I wandered aimlessly the bitter cold streets of her Yorkshire village. As a child of the 70’s with chapped lips and cheeks, I could still feel like a Nordic princess nibbling on my prize battered white fish and intoxicating myself with the delicious aromas.

“Even the queue at the local ‘chippy’ held joyful anticipation for the Yorkshire folks in it; the cheery heartening chatter of the inky-fingered ladies serving mushy peas in polystyrene cups and wrapping your prize with a smile, talking of local galas and the weather. Fish and chips was more than ‘fish and chips’; it was the heart and soul of the community.

“We have friteries here in Belgium so we are not without ‘chips’, and in some squares you can take them into bars to be offered serviettes by the bar staff and a hearty beer to wash it down. However, it is only a partial swap for the infamous Yorkshire fishcakes, battered fish, scraps and mushy peas. And they’re really not as great as they make out.”

Veggie pleasures in the UK

“Without that much research into the evolution of the Western vegetarian,” J observes, “I can still say that the UK has contributed much to the concept. While the beginning of vegetarian convenience foods could offer no more than ’spiced up’ veggie lasagne or ‘cheese and tomato pizza’, this soon changed into the 90’s.

Pink Giraffe, Oxford

“The explosion of multicultural foods meeting the British staple menu has created a fusion of very interesting morsels including: Vietnamese-style soya chicken with cashnew nuts, the ‘Caprese salad’ (tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, basil leaves), aubergine moussaka, chickpea dahl and a flurry of sun-dried tomatoes in everything ‘panini style’.

“The UK is no longer the laughing stock of European cuisine, especiallly for vegetarians – it goes beyond Europe with its cocktail stick and jabs into many cultures to have its fill; you can certainly now find veggie sushi and probably soya kangaroo!”

J also wanted it written down that she misses “Pink Giraffe in Oxford for their innovative use of soya and sauces, and the infamous Aagrah (Yorkshire) for the British curry – and yes, we have yet to find a curry worth eating in Brussels, let alone writing about :-/   May our adventures continue to seek one out…”

To cross or not to cross, that is the pedestrian question

“As children we learned the ‘green cross code’ in the UK,” says J, “which in short means once the ‘green man’ lights up you can cross the road safely; in the UK many a parent can be reassured that every driver knows they MUST have stopped, handbrake on, by the time the ‘green man’ appears.

Looks harmless enough, but…

“So, imagine what happens when you have patiently waited for the ‘green man’ and you start to cross in dreamy oblivion, when a car continues to tear across in front of you , or behind you, or screeches to a halt with the driver glowering. This is the Brussels concept of a ‘controlled’ pedestrian crossing - as terrifiying as the Krypton Factor’s assault course, against the clock with a potential loss of limbs and life, but supposedly friendly enough for public viewing.”

We won’t mention the zebra crossings, then…

What is that English that we speak?

Ask any non native English-speaking person in the heart of Brussels’ European Quarter how they rate their languages and most would point to a CV that claims “excellent” or “very good” English.

However, put one native English-speaking person amongst a flock of non native English-speaking people and see what happens when the meeting Minutes are produced!

Says J: “the interpretation of what was said between the non native English-speakers will be very different from the native Englisher-speaker’s undertsanding. Why? Because if your mother tongue is English, your standard of English here is considered ‘poor’ to ‘average’. There is only one solution to do well here, and that is learn a second language fluently and then translate it directly to English. That’s what makes for excellent English.”

Voilà.

We don’t miss…

Not being able to get from A to B in a jiffy for the cost of a Jiffy lemon

Buy a one-journey ticket and hop aboard a Metro train, then take a tram, then a bus to cross the width of the city. All of that can be achieved on the same ticket at a cost of less than €2 (and you can save more if you buy a STIB 10-journey ticket or an annual travel card). Note here that the ticket is described quite accurately as one-journey, not ’single’ or ‘return’ as in the UK.

“You are also responsible for purchasing and ’stamping’ your own ticket in the orange machines,” says J, “and if checked it should reflect your activities within the hour…that is, if you pop into Anspach to make a quick purchase of a book and return home to Schuman you can do it on the same ‘one journey’ ticket if completed within the hour.”

Cheap and convenient public transport

J smiles knowingly and continues: “compare this to a journey around Oxford, where your ’single’ or ‘return’ Stagecoach bus ticket cannot be used on a Oxford Bus Company service, or used with the Arriva bus company… not to mention train services to the next villages/towns a few miles outside, which require different tickets again… We saw many tourists in Oxford looking perplexed as the bus driver explained their tickets were not valid on their bus.  Small tip – Oxford city is small so hire a bike or walk!

London, as you would expect, fleeces the unwitting tourist with the underground travelcard; the cost of which seems to fluctuate increasingly with the price of rising property!  Take a tip from us, use the red London buses – fixed cost (around £1 for single trip) and you see a lot more of London life!”

Fair to say, then, that we don’t miss public transport in the UK.

The very unnecessary 4×4s and SUVs

J never understood why the average family ‘next door’ bought a 4×4 and a SUV.

“The guy mounted his 4×4 to go to his Leeds city job every day, not a welly or mud splatter in sight on his return.  His partner, after packing their small children into giant entertainment consoles,  headed to her office job via the school gates.  At weekends they would all mount the 4×4 and power steer themselves to Sheffield Meadowhall to buy replacement iPods and eat tuna and mozarella paninis.  Besides the fuel consumption of these public JCBs, it doesn’t set a great example for a ‘greener’ planet or prepare their kids for the reality of life outside the DVD-embedded car seat.”

As J says, we don’t miss the attitude that goes, “we have a 4×4 and SUV because…. er, doesn’t everyone have one these days?”

Dress to kill a profit

I mentioned in Part 1 that I’m not a fan of Philip Green. J’s not either. She warns: “in one word, Phillip Green and his ‘entourage of clothes donkeys, are NOT welcome across the Channel!  This newly ‘knighted’ mountebank peddles the fashions of a tramp, a tramp who wears the contents of a charity bag, all in the name of making a profit (but that isn’t stated on the FCUK label of course). Britain has never ‘looked’ worse for it’s credit card debt, especially at summer when Brits are encouraged to ‘let it all hang out’.  J states that if we wanted to see your reproductive organs we would visit Body Worlds again…”

Fortunately, most boutiques over the channel serve all purses and styles without expecting people to remortgage their homes.  “The only requirement you need here,” says J, “is the imagination to build up your own wardrobe since most boutiques sell either collections, like ladies leatherwear or mens wool suits, or one specific genre such as perfume, bags, dress jewellry or hats, for example.

“Piecing it all together as you wander about the cobbled streets of Lille, the modern Scandanavian touch of Uccle or the alleyways of Brugge, for example, make dressing an ‘art’ again.

You can have a lot of fun wearing anything you want here, because it’s the fashion to be yourself however unconventional that may be. I may smile at a 50-something professional lady in a kilt mini-skirt with green tights and red wool jacket, but she arranged it herself with the liberty that she won’t be laughed off the streets! And I tell you, it is liberating to not have the British High Street rammed down your throat from ASDA to M&S, via FCUK and New Look.”

The British High Street has the same shareholders in every city and town. Accordingly to J, that monopoly must come to an end of the British want to look good again. Until then, we won’t miss it.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor? Doctor who?

J is comfortable sharing her experience of GPs in the UK to explain why we don’t miss British GPs.

“It happens that you need to see a GP one morning and you call your local surgery to explain.” says J. “The curt receptionist says the next appointment is on x day of y month at whatever time. You quickly count how many days away that is, and it’s always at least 10 days away. You say that’s not quick enough but it’s fruitless to argue with a medical receptionist…  So, your alternative is to head to A&E (Accident and Emergency), which we have done a few times in the last 6 years to seek medical attention.”

On the occasion where we have chosen to wait to see the GP, J has been asked about her use of contraception when she had an ear infection, had a GP diagnose her with something that was impossible to have, been prescribed medication that she is allergic to, and has had to pay for private consultation just to skip a 6-month waiting list to see the same consultant.

“Speak to any British person about medical care and there will be lots of interesting stories! By the time we left the UK we were paying our ‘National Insurance’ for the NHS, as well as paying for private BUPA care, private dental treatment, private eye care and private prescription for medication.”

Here in Belgium, you subscribe to a health organisation, of which there are many to suit all tastes, religions, and so on, for a family cover which amounts to much less than what we were paying before.

“Hospitalisation is covered through our work contract, but again covers services similar to BUPA without the high costs,” adds J, “you have the choice to put your money where you want, instead of the State imposing a mandatory national stamp, and you can shop around.”

One less hop

J is particularly pleased to be more ‘green’ by not flying, sailing or driving across the Channel everytime we begin our journey to a holiday destination :-)

Recruitment ‘bounty’ agencies

J doesn’t miss the recruitment agency culture that now controls the job market.

“Whether you’re an UNIX administrator, a plasterer, a nurse or a legal executive, it’s always the same thing,” she says, “and being at the mercy of another profit-driven organisation, like bounty hunters, they are interested in your head at the best price and don’t care too much what happens to you (or the client) once they have ‘bagged you’. I hope they have this covered on the curriculum so British school leavers know how to apply for a job these days…”

The Benelux governments today announced a package of over 11 billion euros intended for the bailout of Fortis, the now ailing bank that just last year bought a stake in ABN Amro.

And if that wasn’t enough on a gloomy day in Europe, Fortis’ competitor Dexia will now receive aid in a deal being hammered out this evening. Both banks lost between 24 and 30% of their value in the day’s trading on the Bel-20, the net result showing an almost 8% loss for the index.

Across Europe and the United States, there can be little doubt that 2008 has been an annus horribilis for the financial sector. Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers have already imploded, whilst Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are in freefall and today it was announced in the UK that Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised having become dangerously overstretched on its loan business.

As ever, it takes time for the headlines to filter down to street level. Nevertheless, people are tightening their belts and fretting about mortgages and redundancies. Food and fuel prices are higher than ever. Consumer confidence has plummeted in the States.

Meanwhile the debate rages on about the merits of using taxpayers’ money to prop up banks that have openly been accused of irresponsible greed. Fortis welcomed its new “state partnership”, but the three governments are unlikely to be too forgiving. The bank has already agreed to cede its stake in ABN Amro, with boss Filip Dierckx admitting with remarkable understatement that the purchase had been made at the wrong time.

Where will it end? If that question cannot be answered with ease, what seems certain right now is that there is more to come. Something has snapped in global finance and throwing money at the problem isn’t likely to fix it.

We’re both working now and an embryonic daily routine has started. Some kind of normality, albeit a new and fresh one, is creeping into our daily lives. And to function effectively in our daily lives, we need to have a solid grasp of the basics.

Supermarkets

As an Information Designer, I’m used to working with hierarchies. Hierarchies help information consumers to understand the relationships between distinct data.

I learned that, here in Brussels, you can make quick value judgements by applying a hierarchy to compare day-to-day options. All you need is a pencil, a sticky note and a native Belgian:

Coming from Britain, possibly one of the most class-conscious nations in the world, these comparisons are helpful!

Plugging in

As daily life in our new country now starts to take shape, we realise that it’s time to make another small break with Britain: electrical plugs.

There’s only so far you can go on a couple of converters bought in the airport lounges of the past!

Belgium uses CEE 7/7 plugs and given that J is a major fan of both electronics and toolbelt DIY, I let her rip on some of our “business critical” connections.

It was pretty much impossible to get information from the Internet about rewiring UK plugs to European formats.

Typically, Wikipedia boasted an overwhelming volume of information about the various international standards, but nothing whatsoever of practical value.

That’s why, if you dear Reader, should need to convert your British plugs to Belgian or French plugs, I have prepared this nice diagram.

It really is as simple as that - just apply the normal wiring to the plug as shown and you’re away.

You shouldn’t need to worry about fuses and that sort of thing, everything worked fine in our tests.

Language means many things to many people. When starting a conversation in Brussels, where over 30% of residents are foreigners, language is the topical hors d’oeuvre to a main course of holidays, family traditions and cultural differences.

Anodyne it may be, but language is a talking point that includes everyone.

Taking it on the chin

At the national level in Belgium, language is also a political issue, driving both debate and dissent in a complex cultural dispute that often baffles foreign spectators.

Flanders speaks Flemish, Wallonia speaks French. A few folks in the bottom right corner speak German, but they tend to be sidelined in favour of the bloody boxing match between the two giants.

They’re going the distance and no-one can say where things will end.

Brussels stands between them, a rather partial referee that ignores all blows below the belt. The capital occupies Flemish turf but mostly speaks French. Having won the early rounds, francophony marches on spreading ever outwards in a fight for the periphery in which both boxers want to be king of the Ring.

Source: Wikipedia Commons

If you as a foreigner arrive without skills in either language, Flemish might sound like a cart rattling along to market, or the peculiar, Belgian-accented French as an unpolished brass band, as blissfully unaware as an animal.

You’ll quickly make firm friends out of both fighters, then perhaps witness their strange and tangled struggle with a twist of self-satisfied pity.

Yet as soon as you start to communicate in one tongue or the other, you’re a partisan. The boxing bout transforms into tag team wrestling. You’re the talisman of one and a traitor to the other.

The dastardly deeds of the devilish Doctor Diction

Meanwhile, you need to watch your own back. Creeping up on every Anglophone is the nightmarish figure of Doctor Diction. This pernicious predator lurks everywhere. He’s perilous to the unsuspecting native English speaker.

His preferred moment to strike is carefully chosen to coincide with the preoccupation you have with making yourself understood. When you’re at your most earnest, he’ll be waiting to infect you, the latest victim of his diabolical disease.

Following an incubation period which lasts around two months, the insidious initial symptoms of Doctor Diction’s premeditated malefaction are difficult to diagnose, but as the sickness grows severe, in the hapless hero(ine) the effects are manifest.

Within just a few weeks, your sentences will start with adverbs. There may be a trace of double negatives.

Between four and five months, your adjectives will follow your nouns instead of preceding them. Your tenses will be slackened, your pronouns perished.

Eventually, when hope is all but lost, you will start to exhibit what they call Doctor Diction’s Crippling Cacophony. In disbelief, you witness yourself gibbering gobfuls of abject American.

Your case is terminal: you have contracted the Euroaccent.

What treatments are available? Regular doses of English prose containing a brew of such restorative herbs as alliteration, metaphor and latinate vocabulary. This is available under the counter without prescription from your nearest Dickens, Shakespeare or Hardy.

These remedies can help in the short term, but let it be said that the Doctor’s grip is as notorious as his grimace.

With continued exposure to the spores of badly translated signage, forcibly decelerated speech and a peculiarly pestilential strain of Second Language Stagiaire’s Disease, a terminal case is inevitable unless the patient can be quarantined to his or her country of origin as a matter of emergency.

There’s an urban myth that Doctor Diction’s unfettered frenzy can be fairly frustrated. This is a house of cards of hearsay, you understand, but persistent whispers describe an underground resistance movement operating from a base deep in the tunnels of the Brussels metro, whose members never surface during daytime and feed off rats at nighttime.

Rumours gathered pace about a possible cure when a correctly stated advertising message was recently discovered in Arts-Loi station. They said it showed poetic perfection in slogan and strapline.

But Doctor Diction declares it a fiction
Tears it down to avoid the friction
Covers the spot with a different lot -
Posters for modern art exhibits
That exist not

As you can see, I have yet to suffer the worst of this illness. But be assured, dear reader, that I am surely sick.

Already I am not having so many problems but I think - in the future - there is going to be for me somethings that were not working incorrect.

Every year on the first weekend in April, the Ronde van Vlaanderen cycle race files through the lanes and villages of Flanders.

If this sounds like a Sunday idyll to you, think about the heavy, freezing rain permeating your clothing whilst you’re buffeted by strong crosswinds from the North Sea.

Then contemplate pulling your bike through 264 kilometres of slippery roads and up steep, cobbled climbs harangued by deafening crowds.

Sometimes it’s hard to recognise the winner as he crosses the finish line, his every feature covered by a thick layer of mud.

Muur van Geraardsbergen

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The great Wall

The little town of Geraardsbergen straddles the river Dender in a quiet corner of East Flanders. Today around 30,000 locals call it home, yet in 1068 it was one of the first places in Western Europe to be deemed a city. In 1381, the Hainault nobleman Walter of Enghien sacked and burned it after the residents showed defiance toward his siege.

You might be forgiven for wondering just what is all the fuss about Geraardsbergen?

Well, the answer might not be the town itself but what it stands on, in these parts a rare thing and a continued source of fame today. For unlike most other towns and villages in Flanders, this one has a hill.

The Muur (”Wall”) of Geraardsbergen is 110 metres high. A mere adolescent pimple by Alpine standards, of course, but in a land of uninterrupted plains and pancake flat polders, a major strategic advantage. In the kingdom of the blind and all that.

And whilst ancient warriors no longer do battle on it, a cohort of bike riders has replaced them, followed by a legion of cycling fans.

No pain, no gain

Geraardsbergen’s other peculiarity is the Mattentaarte, a strangely familiar sort of cake that’s baked locally. The Mattentaarte bears some resemblance to the Muur itself as it rises stoutly but suddenly from the plate like a shallow sided volcano. The view from the top of the cone covers several miles of the Flandrian countryside in all directions.

During the race, the riders will never see the view. The crowds at the summit form several bodies deep beside the road and up the steep verges on either side. Like the mountain stages of the Tour de France, here they part at the last moment in a peristaltic wave as the riders thread their way through to the top.

The Muur is almost always the penultimate climb of the route and it can often decide the race, thinning a larger group and splitting up breakway companions. Reputations are made and sealed here. Edwig van Hooydonck made the final cut in 1989 and broke away to win, establishing himself on the professional circuit. In 1995, the Flemish Johan Museeuw tore away alone on the Muur and never looked like being caught again. This was the second of his three wins in the race. Meanwhile, the ever-controversial Franck Vandenbroucke fell on the Muur in 1999 and could only manage second at the finish.

J’s sister came to stay and after trying the lambic and gueuze at À La Bécasse on Rue Tabora the previous week, she fancied a visit to the Cantillon Brewery near the Gare du Midi.

Cantillon is the last active brewery in Brussels and it is still a family business, occupying the same building on Rue Gheude. Several products are brewed: lambic, gueuze and a small range of the latter re-fermented with fruit.

Cantillon Brewery

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Gueuze is arguably Cantillon’s best known output. It is a blend of three vintages of lambic, a flat type of beer in which most or all of the sugars are used up during fermentation. The overall taste is sharp and bitter, significantly moreso than other famous brands which tend to be rather softer.

August is the month during which fruit gueuzes are brewed at Cantillon. Just entering the main door, you could smell the fermentation process going on in somewhere in the dark, cavernous interior just like it has throughout the last hundred and odd summers.

Cantillon’s most typical fruit gueuze is kriek made from cherries. Also suitable for fermentation are peaches and, to produce the brewery’s famous Rosé de Gambrinus, raspberries.

I have waited several years to see this painting, on display at the Royal Fine Arts Museum in Antwerp. It depicts a resplendent, charged image that somehow escaped the censure of conservative times despite being, to modern eyes anyway, a deeply irreligious religious painting.

Dominating the composition is the heavenly Virgin, whose allure is altogether earthly and betrays nothing virginal. She is aloof, composed and self-aware, with the baby’s presence on her lap languishing somewhere between ambivalence and burden.

Since Byzantine times, the established motif requires her gaze to express wonder and love for her offspring. Instead she draws attention to that perfectly rendered shape above the child. Is it a vital source of spiritual nourishment or a worldly source of attraction?

Her dress is sumptuous and cleverly calculated to show her untypically feminised figure. She is luminous, flawless, almost diaphanous. Her pale glow contrasts elegantly with the vivid, fleshy cherubic host at her flanks. These Christian symbols of Heaven, of course, had classical beginnings as symbols of love.

Jean Fouquet, the majority of whose surviving oeuvre consists of richly decorative book illuminations, shows himself here to have been a painter of notable skill. His experience in Italy and later in Flanders influenced his mature, unique style.

This painting boasts remarkable colours which, even when placed among the works of a Flemish tradition renowned for vibrant tones, still dazzle the viewer today.

Perhaps in a reflection of his art, the Frenchman walked in worldly circles. Though little is known of his life, it is recorded that he was court painter to the Crown of France late in his career.

The Virgin in the painting is thought to be modelled on Agnès Sorel, a favoured mistress of King Charles VII. Sorel’s intelligence and extraordinary beauty seems to have been offset by, in the opinion of her enemies, profligacy and excessive influence on the King. She died suddenly, perhaps having been poisoned by mercury, in 1450.

The painting is actually the right portion of a diptych, the other half of which can be found today in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. If the two portions were reunited, St Stephen and Étienne Chevalier would both be gazing upon the ‘Virgin’ Sorel with a mixture of contemplation and solemn admiration.

Chevalier was a lover of Sorel whilst the Saint, who according to the church was the first Christian martyr, lost his life because of blasphemy.

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.