An old man in a slightly steep city; some time with the Belgians....
I’m
not sure when I first felt a longing to visit Belgium. Probably after I saw the
family oriented romcom C'est Arrivé près de Chez Vous (or as it was
called in English, Man Bites Dog), so that’ll be at least 30 years ago
I’d imagine. This vague wanderlust was further reinforced once I’d read Harry
Pearson’s A Tall Man in a Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians
(1998). Of course, rather typical of me, I then proceeded to do absolutely
nothing about the urge, other than listening to the odd bit of Jacques Brel,
putting mayonnaise on my chips and quaffing as much Cantillon beer as I
could afford, so not much then…
Like much else good that has happened to me of late, turning 60 provided the motivation for actually getting off my backside and visiting the place. That and the retirement bounty I received from Teachers Pensions, which has also enabled me to lash out on a new kitchen, a new bathroom, a Vox 50-watt combo (how loud?) and to finally get the jungle of my back garden tamed by a chainsaw wielding professional (not Benoit Poelvoorde, in case you were asking). However, enough about the grown-up stuff, here’s an account of an oldish man in a slightly steep city.
Before I go any further, I have to thank my young’un Ben for not only being the best possible company I could have asked for during our trip, but for navigating the internet and the city itself in a way that kept us fed, watered and moving in the right direction at all times, though much of our activities were based on a secret dossier of pubs and cafes in the St Gilles district, prepared for us by Harry. Merci mes braves!
When planning the trip, the first important consideration was finding somewhere to stay. Fresh from his recent trip to Bologna with his beloved Lucy, Ben was fully conversant with Airbnb’s subtle nuances and, with Harry advising us that St Gilles was the most interesting and appropriate suburb for the likes of us, we booked a 3-night stay in a modest but comfy apartment on the catchily named Overwinningsstraat, which turned out to be the only word of Dutch we heard in that area all weekend. In fact, I probably heard more Arabic than Dutch in St Gilles. Considering 59% of Belgians claim Dutch as their mother tongue, compared to 40% who opt for French, it was remarkable how little the former is spoken in the capital. English, in contrast, is almost universal, though I did attempt my own version of Le Bon Usage as often as possible, with generally favourable results. You know it’s amazing how far you can get with a 44-year-old A Level Grade D, when circumstances demand it.
Once we’d got the digs sorted, we then needed to find an appropriate weekend. This involved consulting the Jupiler Pro League fixtures and, on discovering that local lads Royale Union Saint Gilloise were playing host to K.A.A. Gent on Saturday 19 October, we simply had to make it that weekend. Further investigation allowed me to discover that on the Sunday, a Challenger League (second division) local derby between Anderlecht’s Under 23 side (known as RSCA Futures) and the magnificently named Racing White Daring Molenbeek (2015) would be taking place at the Stade Roi Baudouin/Koning Boudewijnstadion, the ground formerly referred to as the Heysel Stadium. A two-game weekend is heaven on earth, especially when mixed with Belgian beer, frites and waffles…
I’ve been to Brussels main airport several times before; using it as a transit point for flights onward to places such as Bilbao and Vienna. However, it is no longer somewhere you can fly to directly from Newcastle. Having investigated the other options, involving flights to either Amsterdam or Dusseldorf, and from either Edinburgh or Manchester to Brussels, we opted for the latter, with Ben agreeing to drive. We did break our journey down on the Thursday night, staying with his grandparents and my former in-laws in South Yorkshire, which allowed us to reach Manchester with time to spare. An easy check-in, an expensive coffee and a three-quarter full plane, populated mainly by what I thought was a sex offenders outing, but turned out to be adult Pokemon game players on their way to a convention in Lille (I kid you not), saw us landing 20 minutes early in Charleroi Brussels Sud.
As the name suggests, this is Wallonia at its most Francophilic, but it was well-organised and dead easy to find the shuttle bus to Brussels Midi from outside. During the 90-minute journey, as an endless loop of banal covers of copyright-free soul jazz, europop anthems from Smooth Operator to It’s My Life droned endlessly over the coach PA, it occurred to me that while Belgium may be home to Jacques Brel and Front 242, you never get to hear any of that sort of stuff in public. Thankfully, most pubs we frequented seemed to prefer a soundtrack of low volume Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, which went well with the ambience they sought for.
To be perfectly honest, the main sounds I’d associate with Belgium that weren’t made by Modern Talking copyists would be emergency sirens (I’ve never heard so many ambulances in my life) and car horns, which Belgian drivers seem to prefer over indicators when signalling an impending turn. Almost ironically, despite the jarring soundscape, I found Brussels to be a very relaxed and indeed safe city. Even near the apparently notorious Midi/Centraal Station, there was little sense of unease or tension and no visible street crime. Women were able to walk freely and alone late at night, without any palpable sense of fear. That’s the sort of city I want to live in and frankly I don’t feel that safe in central Newcastle after dark these days. Perhaps I’m just a nervous person.
On the Friday night, I was an excited and then an intoxicated person. Ben directed us from Brussels Midi to Overwinningstraat on foot, collecting the keys from a dull looking pub called Café BJ that I never even set foot in, even though it was directly opposite. On the way we’d seen a grown-up version of Manneken Pis, or Vir Mingens if you’re a classicist, emptying his bladder in Porte de Hal Park, just across the road from where we were staying. Lovely, but not as lovely as the Vlaamse Karbonaden(Flemish Beef Stew) and Braadworst met Stoemp (pork sausages with potatoes), washed down with a stunning Chimay Blanche that Ben and I enjoyed in La Porteuse D’Eau, a glorious Horta-designed art deco Belgian restaurant.
From
there, we slogged it uphill to the best pub in Brussels, Moeder Lambic
Original and settled down for a fine session of Cantillon Gueuze,
Cantillon Kriek and several other beers I no longer recall, apart from the
stunning bottled Oud Bruin that is one of the finest and most punishing
astringent ales I’ve ever supped. Harry has this to say about Moeder,
which describes it more eloquently than I could ever manage; it is the most
famous bar in St Gilles, rated as the best in Brussels. It serves about 350
different beers and a range of Belgian cheeses from small producers https://www.moederlambic.com/?lang=en Just to
show we were still capable of speech, we headed back down the hill, past a
collection of Portuguese bars and restaurants, with customers supping Sagres
and Super Bock, dropping in on a newish bar just round the corner from
the digs, L’Ermitage, to enjoy an almost English IPA, before a knockout
12% Grape Saison that really put my lights out.
Next morning, feeling rough, we decided to do the tourist trail, but with one eye on a trip to the Cantillon Brewery that shut at 4 and wasn’t open on a Sunday. We needed to take one for the team. So, fortified by a stunning vegan breakfast of Soya Latte and a massive lentil and feta salad, we visited Manneken Pis, noticing the magnificent slogan: Boire! Manger! Pisser! on a café opposite and had a nose around the central square and palace. All very nice, but as Ronnie Drew said about a guided tour round Dublin, sightseeing’s grand but it’d give you an awful thorst. Hence, equipped with an awful thirst, we made our way, across the tracks, to Cantillon, to enjoy three of the finest bottled beers I’ve ever had. It's not perhaps a traditional tourist spot, hence the signs insisting NO FOOD outside the bar area, and it is blessed with some of the most uncomfortable seats I’ve sat on outside of non-conformist places of worship, but the slogan painted on the wall is one you can’t disagree with: Lambic Gueuze Kriek. And so say all of us…
Three
bottles between us was enough to provoke somnolence and we took a rapid Metro
ride back to the digs for a siesta. I fell asleep just as news of Percy Main’s
4-3 win over Great Park was confirmed, waking to news that Newcastle had lost
1-0 home to Brighton and Hibs 3-2 away to Dundee United. Perfect for putting us
in the mood for our game. With a 20.45 kick off, we had plenty of time to make
our way to Stadion Joseph Marien to see Les Unionistes at home to Koninklijke
Atletiek Associatie Gent, who are also known as De Buffalo's and have an
American Indian headdress as their logo, ostensibly because William Frederick
Cody supposedly brought his Wild West show to Ghent at the turn of the last
century. We stopped on the way for some traditional Belgian frites, which I had
with curry and which Ben, for the second day running, had with Vlaamse Karbonaden.
You can see their website here: http://www.friteriedelabarriere.be/ This did give us another
awful thirst, which we slaked with regular 33cl cups of Jupiler at €2 a
pop, once we arrived at Stadion Joseph Merien. Outside the ground, thousands of
fans milled happily, chatting, drinking and chilling out. The evening was warm
but brought with it a great atmosphere, like any game under lights, apart from
the couple in front of us, sat on blue painted railway sleepers that lay on top
of solid cement blocks in the visually pleasing West Stand. Clearly on a date
night, it wasn’t going to plan. They arrived on 15 minutes and left on 75,
didn’t speak to each other all game and while he drank prodigiously, she was
welded to Snapchat. Hello Young Lovers.
We’d
had trouble getting tickets. Initially, it seemed sold out and then only
disabled tickets were available which Ben, unschooled in the French
language, bought a pair of that the club subsequently cancelled. Thankfully,
after I’d already grabbed two for the Anderlecht Futures v RWDM (2015) game, a
whole load came on sale for Union. Just as well, as frankly our stand was only
75% full, with home bit behind the goal half full and the away end similarly
occupied. The only packed part was the home ultras side opposite us, from where
the Union Bhoys gave an incessant and impressive vocal backing to their
team all game. Probably the only Unionists I’ve ever enjoyed hearing from. Fair
play to De Buffalo’s; they were even more manic, with pyrotechnics aplenty at
the start. Then after that ferocious overture, sadly, the game didn’t quite
live up to it, ending in a fairly tame 0-0 draw. Good standard though; Gent are
second top and RUSG are in the Europa League. Both of them would give the likes
of Wolves a run for their money. Or Newcastle probably.
Full time, we took an impossibly full bus back towards St Gilles (RUSG play in the neighbouring district of Foret), stopping off in the home pub of RUSG, Brasserie Verschuren, where the saison beer was truly the only disappointing one of the whole trip. Saturday was much quieter than Friday all over the city, so we ended the night with a couple of quiet ones in L’Ermitage and turned in just as Match of the Day was finishing. We’d managed in our secondary task of avoiding seeing the Newcastle headlights, thankfully.
Sunday seems a busier day in Belgium, or certainly in the morning and afternoon. As we took a long Metro ride from the South East to North West of the City, the train was quite full. Strangely, there were no obvious football fans on the train, though there could be geographical reasons for this. Anderlecht, whose first team had lost surprisingly 2-1 away to Beerschot on Friday night, play their first team games at the 22,000 capacity Constant Van Der Stock Stadium in West Brussels, but take their support from the whole country and RWDM (2015) are from the West of the city. Hence, our journey was not from the historic areas of RWDM support. However, even dafter than the Pokemon nutters on the plane, were a load of weirdos heading for a Heroes convention, dressed mainly as Disney characters. The fact this gathering was taking place in the National Balloon Museum, opposite the location where 39 innocent Italians were killed at the 1985 European Cup Final, was a sobering vision that did not sit right with me. However, it seems as if there has been a conscious decision in Belgium to erase brutal memories of the past, not just Heysel but the Marc Dutroux case and the infamous Brabant Killers have been airbrushed from collective public memory.
While the Heysel Stadium Disaster was almost 40 years ago, it seems to have been explained away by the fact that stadiums were all unsafe in those days. I’m not so sure if that’s an adequate response to the events of 28th May 1985, and I do feel it is appalling there isn’t any memorial to those who lost their lives that night, other than the ornate main gate of the stadium, which is all that remains of the original ground in the functional, antiseptic 53,000 capacity home of Belgian football.
There
were more than 50,000 empty seats for this one, begging the question why
Anderlecht Futures opt to play here, as the crowd was split evenly between
raucous RWDM (2015) fans, waving huge flags, and quiet family groups of
Anderlecht fans, bolstered by loads of their junior teams and coaching staff in
club outfits. It was a bottom versus top contest, and it went the way of form
in the first half, with RWDM scoring the first goal we’d seen on Belgian soil.
It should have been 2-0 before the break, but a wildly miscued header would
prove costly. In the second half Anderlecht were on top the whole time as RWDM
(2015) made terrible errors of technique and squandered possession. The two
home goals were predictable, deserved and celebrated lustily, possibly as an
excuse to get up from the typically uncomfortable Belgian seats. Certainly, the
diving header for an equaliser had me punching the air in appreciation.
Come full time, we were starving, so a huge tuna baguette and a naughty custard croissant from a local boulangerie filled a hole until we sat down to eat in Bistro Waterloo just across Porte de Hal Park in the early evening. Ben went for meatballs while I had hoped for rabbit stew but ended up with pork knuckle in a mustard sauce. So much for my linguistic competence, eh? Whatever we had, it was excellent and a superb prelude to another night in Moeder Lambic Original. We got home for midnight and enjoyed watching Belgian football highlights on a Dutch language channel. A proper treat.
Monday morning, it was lashing down. With a quick farewell, we left St Gilles behind. A baguette and a waffle in the station, then a bus to Charleroi. Another quick flight and expert driving by Ben saw us in the house for 8pm. Forest v Palace. The one you’ve got to come back for? No, actually.
All in all, this was a wonderful trip to a wonderful city with wonderful company. I’d love to do another euro weekend with Ben, and I’d love to take Shelley to Brussels, for the culture and food, more than beer and football I must say. Let’s hope my aging limbs can stand another trip away in the near future.
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