The Belgian non-government led by Yves Leterme has announced a plan to tackle public debt by the issue of public bonds. Leterme was quoted in Thursday’s Le Soir as saying:

« Vu les difficultés sur les marchés financiers, nous voulons davantage faire appel à la capacité d’épargne des Belges pour financer la dette »

Given the present difficulties on the financial markets, we want to appeal to Belgians’ capacity for saving money.

Government bonds are supposed to be risk-free – this is their principal attraction – and Belgian people are indeed notable savers among Europeans. The government is now offering the incentive of a 4% interest rate for Belgians willing to fill the coffers in support of financing their burgeoning national debt.

There are however a couple of problems with the proposal of Leterme et al.

Firstly, we have embarked on a unique period in Europe, in which the economic landscape will almost certainly look rather different in five years’ time. So while Belgium is not in the same fix as Greece, there is no longer such a thing as a risk-free investment.

Secondly, Belgium is a strongly divided nation which still lacks a government after another recent breakdown in talks (indeed the political crisis itself is thought to have cost €1.8bn so far) and many potential investors may question how their money might be used.

Today we all dined out at lunchtime for a nice change, to mark the departure of our colleague Jamila (centre in the picture above).

I was required to say a few words and I realised that this was the first time I’d ever had to do so.

Jamila is moving on to another client and she’ll doubtless be a great asset when she gets there.

وداعا لك Jamila!

A malfunctioning cash register inadvertently brought us some good advice with this morning’s cup of java lava. They should set this up as a proper service.

Thanks to Uncle Luc for the photo!

In my early teens, during the obligatory antisocial period, I used to listen intently to DJ tapes and collect flyers folk handed out at the doors of nightclubs all over the north of England. The flyers promoted fantastic nights to which I was much too young to go. The tapes were usually very poor quality recordings made at a rave here or a club there, featuring a DJ spinning electronic music.

Back then I wondered how these DJs could cut and scratch records as well as they did. Now I wonder how many of them ever paid tax.

At the end of their sets they unplugged their headphones and their flunky picked up their record boxes. They left the club having shaken a lot of hands and they got into the back of a car and sped off home or to other gigs. Out into the yellowy orange night. Until they faded out of the scene.

Laurent Garnier was at the Haçienda before they knocked it down. He played Ibiza before all the Creams and the Manumissions turned Mecca into Disneyland. Unlike many of those DJs however, Laurent Garnier is still around today. And he’s almost certainly paying tax.

Having been at his live gig with Stéphane Driaux (Scan X) and Benjamin Rippert, I’m unable decide whether or not the Garnier sound has mellowed. Or maybe it’s me. I was too young for that scene and now I feel too old for today’s scene.

Certainly the crowd reflected that split. For every fortysomething ex-raver dropping in for a bit of nostalgia, there was some Abercrombie & Fitch kid with his pants round his knees. Lots of people nodding politely but otherwise pretty uninvolved. Not so many giving total commitment to the sound. Nobody at all with E face on.

Even so, I did enjoy the ‘live machines’ experience. Indeed the flattest moments of the night seemed to be when Rippert or Driaux skulked off for a piss, leaving Garnier to his decks and headphones for a bit too long.

When I used to listen to all those tapes, I longed for the day when I could get down the front and have it large, so to speak. I certainly don’t anymore.

By Brasserie de la Senne. On tap at Moeder Lambic, Brussels. 4.5% ABV, served cool.

After some years in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, the Senne guys have moved premises to an otherwise fairly unprepossessing quartier of Brussels. The distribution of their beers is quite limited, but the bottles themselves are easily recognised thanks to distinctive artwork.

Stouterik is a Belgian-style stout made with English hops and trying it on tap – a first of its kind for me here in Belgium – was an interesting experience.

Aromas included burnt toast and charcoal with a very slight hint of alcohol coming through on the nose. Pleasantly bitter to taste, the brew also featured citrus and plum flavours and a longlasting sourish aftertaste.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When I came to work in an international environment here in Brussels, I made a very British choice.

It will be remembered that Britain drives on the left, uses different plugs and spells English words correctly.

My choice was to stick with a qwerty keyboard while everyone else works with the azerty version.

The trouble with azerty you see – apart from the fact that the order of some alphabetical keys is different – is that punctuation and numbers all require a shift key. Indeed, getting certain characters frequently used in programming can require a special talent for finger gymnastics.

Of course, when it then comes to writing emails in French, the qwerty lets us Anglophones down. No sign of any fancy accents and graves and circumflexes and unless we want to borrow everything one by one from a character map, we’re a bit stuck.

My solution requires a good memory for patterns. It’s basically a cheat sheet of codes usable in Windows, because all those fancy characters are actually accessible via simple combinations of the Alt key and a numeric code:

I printed off the list and then fixed it to the side of one of my screens. When writing text in French I didn’t need to look far for the appropriate combination. Over a period of time and use, I actually memorised many of the most common ones.

As often happens in the European district of Brussels, a protest took place right in front of us yesterday afternoon. On this occasion, the protester was Greenpeace and the subject was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In front of the Berlaymont building – home of the European Commission and perhaps the symbol of the EU in Brussels – activists smeared themselves in a substance resembling oil and carried yellow banners.

In late May, I’d noticed the banner for the Commission’s Green Week, held barely weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The logo seemed stylistcally reminiscent of Greenpeace’s own.

The purpose of Green Week was to highlight the effect of climate change on biodiversity and the Commission’s intent was to discuss policymaking in that domain.

The Commission sees Europe as a leading contributor to global environmental policy. Indeed, the current college of Commissioners, in office from 2010 to 2014, is the first to feature a Commissioner with a portfolio specifically dedicated to climate change.

A concerted response from world governments to environmental problems has been famously slow, but the scale of the Deepwater disaster – the massive leak is still not secure – also illustrates the responsibility and accountability of corporate businesses operating on a global scale.

Predictably, on these issues governments seem even more reluctant to intervene.

When Confucius developed the concept of junzi, he imagined this ‘exemplary individual’ existing within and contributing to, a culture of mutual respect. When Confucius taught his vision of a peaceful, rational and carefully ordered society, Brussels was still a damp marsh.

Meanwhile the earliest taximeter, a device for the calculation of cab fares, was probably already in use when the oldest surviving Confucian text was written.

Confucius devised a philosophy for increasingly sophisticated and populous civilisations, while the taximeter was devised to profit from them.

As the capital of Europe, Brussels has plenty of sophistication and a fairly large population. It is also the twentieth most expensive city in the world. [1] If Confucius were to arrive here today by Eurostar, he might discover some familiar patterns, but he would balk at the cost of the taxi ride.

And if he expressed his dismay to the driver in passable French, more than likely he would receive in return the idiomatic cold shoulder. The Brussels taxi driver is not one to indulge in conjecture.

On the last announcement of a general increase in fares in 2008, Pascal De Smet – who as a chauffeured Minister for Transport has no need of taxis – claimed by way of excuse that equivalent services in Paris, London and Berlin charged more. [2]

Brussels taxi drivers are hardly trying to make fast money. As a potential customer, I have been turned down on several occasions because the bored-looking driver considered my destination not worth the effort. When my partner left hospital recently following an operation, the taxi rank suggested she walk home instead.

Is it then a question of quid pro quo: are we paying more for higher standards? Probably not. For while London hacks must enlarge their hippocampus in order to serve the city, [3] the acuity of their Bruxellois contemporaries consists only of watching a GPS device instead of the road ahead. And if the pedigree of the German cars they drive suggests a class apart, their interiors smell as if the rest of the world has already been there.

Perhaps Brussels taxis could learn a thing or two from our wise Confucius. His legacy certainly lives on in modern China, if the stories from the Beijing Olympics are to be believed. With the five rings in town, gloves, ties and suits were required garments. Beards, shaved heads and ‘radical hairstyles’ were proscribed.[4] The penalty for non-compliance was a two-day suspension consisting of “rectification and reform”.

Update: 11 May 2011

Brussels taxi drivers are not allowed to pick up ad hoc fares from the airport at Zaventem without a prior booking. The airport patch is held by different cab firms. On 10 May 2011 however, a Brussels taxi driver took such a fare and the unsuspecting passenger got in.

What happened then is extraordinary. According to a report in Le Soir the following day, a police officer attempted to stop the cab and the driver sped off with the officer hanging onto the bonnet of the vehicle. After two kilometres, the officer decided enough was enough and managed to aim his gun towards the dashboard and fire it. The driver was hit in the shoulder and stopped the vehicle. The passenger, stuck in the back seat all this time, was unharmed.

Footnotes

1. UBS Prices and Earnings (2009), p.8 ↑
2. Prendre le taxi coûtera plus cher à Bruxelles, Le Soir, 03 March 2008 ↑
3. Taxicabs of the United Kingdom, Wikipedia ↑
4. China to ban Weird Asian Stinky Cab Drivers, Weird Asia News, 23 April 2007 ↑

Ashton’s speech today in Strasbourg – on the External Action Service – was just too much and I’m not talking about her proposals.

It’s rather that I’m not sure I can stomach the rollout of another new outfit. As Ashton’s star rises, the palatability of her personal style plummets.

So far, I’ve been unable to work out who’s responsible for these outrages but I’m keeping a close eye on the situation.

Below you’ll find my Fashtonometer, a scale that I’ve thrown together to enable me to measure the status of each new abomination:

Catherine Ashton’s dress sense should give all Member States cause for concern and is, I believe, a strong candidate for regulation at the European level.

Oude Kwaremont

The day after the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Juan Antonio Flecha’s thrilling victory in Gent, the weather turned decidedly foul. The riders set out from Kuurne to be buffeted by strong winds and heavy rain.

Undeterred we headed for Kwaremont, an arty Flemish village through the centre of which runs the famous Oude Kwaremont cobbled hill.

The Oude Kwaremont is a staple of the Flemish Classics. It is not especially steep in comparison with other climbs but unlike the others, it is significantly longer at over two kilometres from end to end.

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Kuurne Brussel Kuurne

A cold, windy Sunday afternoon on the Oude Kwaremont watching the 2010 Kuurne Brussel Kuurne.