MikePadgett.com

The story goes that Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero played in a thrash metal band in their native Mexico. Presumably having failed to thrash the charts the band split, jettisoning our nimble-fingered duo to Dublin, the buskers’ paradise. There they were spotted and snagged by the festival circuit. Massive success followed, with an album produced by none other than John Leckie.

At times it seems as if Rodrigo and Gabriela pick and strum faster than a hummingbird’s wing action. So given that tonight’s the last date on their world tour, their overworked digits must be pretty sore by now. Heedless, they tear through their set with an engaging gusto.

Personally, I prefer these guys in small doses. Something of the miracle of how they coax an extraordinary, polyphonic array of sound from two simple guitars tends to get lost after half an hour of driving rhythms. Every track’s got the same high energy - they cite Megadeth and Slayer as influences after all - but that perhaps removes some of the focus on musicianship that should give them the longevity they deserve.

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…”

At the time of writing, the Cuban singer is seventy eight years old and when she wants to, she can still belt them out. There just wasn’t much cause to do so this evening.

Before a rather small crowd in Brussels’ crummy Cirque Royale, which these days shares more in common with Morley Con Club than it does with the Big Top, Portuondo tried to raise the temperature to lukewarm and more or less succeeded to the relief of many slightly embarassed spectators.

Her band, who could have well have done a residency at the Morley Con Club, was very patchy and seemed unrehearsed. Consistently incapable of matching Portuondo’s improvisational approach to standard songs, they struggled as individual musicians to pull together. The pianist bashed away at his Steinway, not without skill, but hopelessly without context; the guitarist and percussionist were equivocal at best; the double-bassist, to be fair was a swan surrounded by ducks. The gum-chewing drummer, plucked from Ipanema and probably handy with a beach ball if not a drumkit, was so self-absorbed that he may as well have been playing at a different gig.

Omara Portuondo, wearing what looked like a pink dressing gown and pyjama combo, seemed so disconnected at times that it felt like visiting your slightly mad granny. Either the star of Buena Vista Social Club was coasting through a tough night and a wooden crowd, or she needs to sack the band and take a well-earned holiday. And I for one wouldn’t blame her at all.

Before I saw the band in concert, I would never have called the music of Lambchop romantic. Somehow, within a couple of tracks from their new release OH (Ohio), I found myself feeling the lurve. It could have been the semicute gaucheness of singer/guitarist Kurt Wagner, though he is rather an acquired taste. It could have been the rather bizarre album cover, on which is reproduced a painting by Wagner’s old professor depicting a couple of folks making whoopee.

It probably has more to do with the gentler pace of Lambchop’s odd little curio shop songs, the lyrics to which are usually about the simpler things in life. Like love, for example. Shaded by the peak of his trademark cap, Wagner puts a lot of effort into his performance yet in a charming sort of way, everything comes out softly.

The band’s rapport is familiar and well-rehearsed, though their number has been somewhat reduced over the last few years, arriving at an evidently natural balance. For much of the gig, they ambled through the new material and their audience was genial and patient: it always takes a few listens to get into a new Lambchop album anyway, so there weren’t really any big expectations.

Rounding off with a few comparatively rousing numbers from the back catalogue, I almost felt like I wanted to see Wagner and co stretch themselves a bit more, but it would be wrong to impose on them. People who love each other need to give each other room to grow.

Seun is the youngest son of the late Fela Kuti, the politically active leading light of Afrobeat. Having grown up in the thick of that scene, Seun now heads Africa 80, the second incarnation of his father’s band, playing the same energetic mix of funk, jazz, rock and highlife that electrified West African music in the 1970s.

Cheerfully arriving onstage after a characteristically long prelude, it becomes rapidly clear that the tall, young Kuti has every bit of his father’s innate cool. The band, taut and heavy on syncopated percussion, rattles along effortlessly and from the get go, no-one in the audience is left standing still. Kuti is comfortable as a frontman, swapping between voice and sax parts, contorting his body and throwing shapes during the solos of his colleagues.

The music ebbs and flows and there are no gaps between tracks. The rhythm of a hot, dry African evening descends upon the Ancienne Belgique, a special sense of time and place that can be felt, indistinct yet insistent, in the spirit of the rhythms and the brass punctuations.

Kuti’s socially aware lyrics, often delivered in mantra-like repetitions, remind us of the family legacy: to effect change through music. “Let me tell you something about the financial crisis,” admonishes Kuti during a brief interlude, as the band continues its incessant rhythm at half volume in the background, “the rich tell us that if we don’t save their banks, we’ll all be poor. Well, most of us have already been poor for a long time.”

All too quickly, it was over. Even if the pace was admirably hectic throughout, with its appetite piqued the crowd was still expecting more than a single, one-track encore. Indeed as the house lights went up, there was a palpable feeling that the climax of the night had still to be reached but the damp streets of Brussels were all that was left to us.

H, the son and nephew respectively of eccentric singers Jacques Higelin and Brigitte Fontaine, is something of a musical lacuna himself. Throughout the course of thirteen albums, the Frenchman has pinballed between jazz, rock, pop and disco and on L’Homme du Monde his latest effort he’s done all of them.

Looking like the bizarre offspring of Joe Strummer and Columbo, H sidled loose-limbed onto the stage in a shiny gold jacket several sizes too small. He was instantly recognisable as the comic book kid who dances without care or co-ordination at school discos, going full circle with uncool and winding up cool. Everything in extreme contrast. A rasping, chalky voice and a rabid, cartoon falsetto; a sense of humour and serious funk.

Despite occasional minor slips, H’s band was game enough to rise to the occasion. The bassist (as in double and guitar) and drummer were tight, keyboard and electric were inventive and effective. Though many people in the crowd took time to “get” H, he managed to get two encores out of them.

And he was comfortable in his monologues, joking about Belgian liquidity, singing the Marseillaise and coming onstage midway through his set in a terrific super hero suit as seen in his video for the shameless I Wanna Dance With Madonna. Arthur H clearly has the balls to experiment in pop, even if his suit shows a bit too much of them.

The art of the Ancient Greeks and of the Renaissance shares a common concern for anatomical accuracy. It comes as no surprise, then, that these were also periods in which anatomy itself was the subject of much study.

Anatomy by dissection

The dissection of human cadavers for academic examination was recorded in Alexandria in pre-Christian times. The works of Galen, originally written in second century Greece and extended by pre-medieval Islamic scholars, are the definitive examples of a considerable oeuvre.

Both Leonardo and Michelangelo are widely known to have participated in, or even led, such dissections and the results of these examinations are plainly visible in their artistic output.

Perceptions of death

As Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition tells visitors, death was not always a taboo. In centuries past, when the importance of sanitary conditions was not understood and the basic ingredients of medicine were  herbal or mere superstition, death was a part of daily life. Plagues, wars and endemic disease meant that people maintained a comfortable familiarity with their own mortality.

If modern science generated a kind of empirical predictability about the human body and its environment, it also removed death to a space outside of our immediate vicinity, such that its impact on our lives today tends to be shocking and personal. Ironically however, death remains just as unfathomable now as it did to our ancestors.

Science goes public

Modern science, with all its complexities, has also been the exclusive province of a trained, professional and academic élite. We are expected to trust our doctors and surgeons in a way that our predecessors would never have done with travelling mountebanks and barbaric local physicians.

Yet ours is an unusual period, in which monopolies of craft, expertise and information are starting to explode into commodities with as yet uncertain results. Just as the Internet provides us with a wealth of data (of varying accuracy) or we can buy our furniture of the shelf and put it together (if we’re given the right screws and bolts), so too can we begin to learn more about ourselves. In a world where the forces of supply and demand were never more obvious, the thirst for information engenders more information.

There is nevertheless a considerable leap from Gunther von Hagens’ development of his plastination technique to his thoroughly modern decision to open a public display of human bodies preserved in plastic.

Plastination

Von Hagens patented plastination in 1977. The embalmed body is first dissected then bathed in an acetone solution. As the body is cooled, the acetone replaces the water, and boiled in a further bath of plastic solution, the acetone evaporates to be in turn replaced by the plastic. Finally, the plastic solution is hardened, after which the “plastin” can be posed.

The plastin and the visitor

The original purposes of von Hagens’ plastins were academic, their accuracy being invaluable in the modern study of anatomy.

However, von Hagens decided to take his specimens to the wider public with the Body Worlds exhibition, reasoning that we had only to overcome our modern taboo of death and then we might learn something.

Following a preface that consists of elements of philosophy, art and science, I found myself eventually standing in front of a plastin for the first time.

Actually I felt relatively unmoved by the fact that this complex sculpture of pink, taut fibres and white cartilage had once been a functioning human being. After all, von Hagens (rightly) maintains strict anonymity with regard to the former owners of his exhibits.

As time progressed however, the issue of identity began to press upon me. The effects of smoking, drinking and various other diseases were engaging and in no small part instructive, but perhaps because I am rather more right-brained, my mind wandered off into the realms of the subjective in a way that had often also happened when I used to study common law cases.

The identity of a missing person

Who were these plastins? It was a forbidden question, of course, and not at all part of von Hagens’ intentions. Each plastin had been posed in such a fashion as to display the relationships between muscles, organs and limbs, but each frozen state resembled a life situation and in me, encouraged reflection about the living being.

The exhibition explained that contemporaries of the Renaissance considered the human body a fragile, vulnerable receptacle of the soul. The soul was the real identity of the person, rather than the body. In the same way, we would be assured that a plastin is not a person, for the person has left us.

Such thinking inspires the obvious question, where did that person go? And of course, those religions that have decried Body Worlds for, among other complaints, a lack of respect for death and the dead, have their own, often facile answers to that question.

Make the most of now

Accordingly, along with the exposition of some of the complexities of the human body, Body Worlds succeeds in at least one other of its aims, which is to demystify death by reminding us of its proximity.

I arrived at that point from general sentiments of sadness. All of the plastins had indeed once been people. They had laughed and cried, they had felt pain and they had probably suffered, some almost certainly terminally. Death had come to them all eventually, sometimes prematurely, just as it will for each of us who still occupy our bodies.

Ascending from the Cureghem Cellars - where the Body Worlds exhibition is currently being held - the cold air was clear and bracing. Back in the pale autumn sunlight at Delacroix station, with J beside me, we awaited the métro back home. I resolved then in some small way that we had better make the most of now, while we’re still here. As von Hagens successfully showed us, the human body is a marvellous thing - skin on or skin off - and we can achieve remarkable things with it. Since death is never far away and we can’t know for sure where we’ll go next, we need to be grateful for what we have now.

After an awkward warm-up from studenty noodlers Wixel, who might be the Flemish answer to Sigur Rós, the stage of Brussels’ Ancienne Belgique was quickly cleared and rearranged for the main event of the evening. Matthew Herbert, renowned for the idiosyncratic music he records under a schizophrenic array of monikers, led on his jazz band and calmly started to work his electronic equipment.

Herbert comes across live as something like a cross between Charlie Chaplin, John Cazale and Doctor Frankenstein. At times, he tricks his audience into thinking he has little control over the output of his machines, but this is pure modesty, given the extraordinary task he sets himself. For, as his band hops smoothly through jazz numbers led by quirky singer Eska, Herbert limits himself to sampling only what is played by them.

The contrast between buzzing, grating feedback and rich brass ought to have been more than a little painful, but the odds between these two unusual bedfellows were evened by Eska’s marvellous voice. Herbert’s past work with Björk is analogous.

So if some spectators seemed rather bemused at first by Herbert’s noisy and very occasionally jarring trickery, the obvious bonhomie among the players was endearing and the head of steam gathered by each track could have left no-one in any doubt that this had been a fascinating display of twenty-first century cabaret.