Reflections on Relocation: Part 1
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
- Gourmet Food & Gifts, Rue Archimède 59, 1000-Bruxelles
- Delirium Café, Impasse de la Fidelité, 1000-Bruxelles
- 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
- For an overview, a good place to start might be Prof. Jeffery Howe’s pages on the Boston College website
- There are plenty of arguments for and against political correctness out there, of course
- For more information, see the Health & Safety Executive’s bread, cake and biscuit manufacture page
- 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
- 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















