3) Uit het Verleden van de Gemeente Oud-Heverlee, by Erik Martens

( local history )

38) Escape Velocity, by Colin Brake

Well, well: a Doctor Who book partly set in Belgium! Aliens, companions and the Doctor wandering round the Grand' Place, the Atomium, Waterloo and the European quarter (one character practically walks under the windows of my office). Of course, I did the inevtable thing of checking for mistakes (it's Boulevard Adolphe Max, not Rue Adolphe Max, and anyway I think he means the Boulevard Anspach; the EU district is described as southwest rather than east of the city centre, but otherwise the geography is right) but generally I liked being on familiar territory. The book was written in 2000 and is set in early 2001, so it is a time when we were already living here, and I imagined how I might have brushed past the characters on my lunch break (in those days I occasionally wandered down from CEPS in the Place du Congrès to the city centre for lunch).

The story: is a pretty standard alien invasion of Earth story, combined with introducing new companion Anji, which is always interesting, and a partial resolution of continuity I haven't read with the Doctor apparently recovering from amnesia after causing some major catastrophe (I shall eventually get to whatever novel that happens in, but am not rushing to it). But I quite enjoyed the scenery, with different factions of aliens squabbling over their human allies, and some nice character sketches; the French millionaire perhaps a little too one-dimensionally villainous. There is lots of horrible slaughter, but that is often the way with alien invasions.

There were also a couple of nice nods to other parts of Who. Anji's boyfriend is revealed as a big fan of the cancelled long-running TV show "Professor X", whose more civilised British fans are disturbed by the arrival of Americans in their fandom via the internet. <irony> I wonder what Brake could have had in mind? </irony> And at the end of the book, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji leave the present day to materialise on a prehistoric landscape, and a shadow falls across the sand. Nice.

Fails the Bechdel test, I'm afraid; every one of the few conversations between female characters ends up being about a man.

I was at a breakfast meeting this morning (ugh! Getting up at unaccustomedly early time) and found myself sitting (as Facebook folks will have noticed) next to one of the numerous living former prime ministers of Belgium. Although the meeting was on entirely a different topic, I could not resist asking him what he thought of the current crisis situation. He said that he felt the big mistake had been to allow the federal Belgian electoral cycle to get out of step with the regional elections: everyone was now positioning themselves for the 2009 polls for the various sub-national parliaments and Europe. I asked if there was now a chance that the federal elections could be brought forward to help resolve the crisis. He pointed out that the root cause of the current crisis is precisely the nature of the arrangements for the elections to the federal Belgian parliament, so unless that is sorted out first, the legitimacy of any new federal elections is not clear.

Leterme's government lasted longer than I predicted (since I actually predicted he wouldn't even get to the start of his term, never mind the end). My prediction now, in full knowledge of my previous inaccuracy, is that his party - whose new leader lives in the next village to ours, and used to be one of our numerous record-breaking female local councillors - will dump him and either find a different potential prime minister, or (more likely) opt to back someone else's candidate while licking their wounds, as they did last December. And Belgium will muddle through for another few years.

( dentistry )

( phone arrgh )

( the other bit )

This made me laugh.

How much do you know about the Netherlands? (Warning - Flemish quiz.)

Hat-tip to juleske.

Full disclosure: I got 5 out of 10.

I make no excuses for being an sf fan, and a Doctor Who fan. My day job requires me to engage with people trying to extricate themselves from long-running conflicts; when I get home and turn on the TV, or get out my book to read on the train, I want escapist entertainment, not intellectual stimulation - I think this is why, for instance Gene Wolfe and M John Harrison don't really do it for me, ad why I prefer The Third Policeman to At Swim-Two-Birds.

New Who has been catering for my needs: smart scripts, decent special effects and a reasonable but not obsessive respect for the programme's past. Indeed, my impression is that the current season has had more links to Old Who than ever, yet not so intrusively as to make it incomprehensible for those who are new to it. I wonder to what extent that will change when RTD hands over to Steven Moffat?

In fairness to Davies, he has not only revived the programme to beyond its previous peaks of popularity it hadn't had since the 1970s, he has also lasted longer at the top than anyone except Barry Letts and JNT. Change is inevitable in human activity, and New Who has already surmounted the more visible challenges of changing Doctor and companions; I expect Moffat will build on the foundations in his own way.

I've enjoyed the first half of Season Four more than any of the others. Each of the previous seasons had a clunker among the first seven stories (Aliens of London / World War Three, The Idiot's Lantern, the Dalek two-parter) but this year that hasn't happened. While I didn't object to the romance of Rose/Nine, Rose/Ten and Martha/Ten, I find the sparks between Tate and Tennant tremendously refreshing - not to say that there is no UST at all, but the change of emphasis is nice; and Bernard Cribbins is great as her grandfather (I fear that Jacqueline King as her mother is rather similar to all RTD mothers though).

I already wrote up Partners in Crime, but here's my take on the rest of the season so far, in the absence of this weekend's episode due to Eurovision.

( The Fires of Pompeii )
( Planet of the Ood )
( The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky )
( The Doctor's Daughter )
( The Unicorn and the Wasp )

( The trailer )

Edited to add: The Doctor and Donna go to Belgium! But in 800 AD!

We've spent the morning at the town hall, applying for Belgian citizenship. If you've lived here continuously for seven years (and we've been here for over nine) it's pretty much automatic; you just need to get your birth certificate officially translated into the local official language. After handing those over, and then a lot of hanging round in the foyer, we were given a declaration to sign and told that the procureur would get back to us in a few months with instructions on getting new ID cards and passports.

I've always felt instinctively libertarian about nationalities. I already carry both UK and Irish passports, as all people from Northern Ireland are entitled to do under the Good Friday Agreement (ten years old yesterday). I occasionally wonder if my father's birth in Malaysia, or his mother's in the USA, might give me a shot at another citizenship or two. But the Belgian state has served us well over the last few years, especially with our family's special needs, and it seems appropriate to deepen our relationship with it. We don't have to give up our existing citizenships; the most serious obligation is that voting in Belgian elections will now be compulsory for us in all cases, rather than optional for local and European elections. But spending a few minutes in a ballot box once every couple of years is not exactly onerous.

There is, I must admit, a slight factor of ameliorating certain doomsday scenarios at the back of my mind. Neither of these is hugely likely, but to get a little more insurance against them is not a bad thing. The first case is, what if the UK leaves or gets kicked out of the EU? I already observe the frustration of my internationally-minded Norwegian and Swiss friends, wanting to pursue the same sort of career that I am in, but fundamentally hampered by the decisions of their countries to stay out. Sure, the EEA agreements are meant to take care of that sort of thing; but psychologically, it just isn't the same. I don't think a referendum on anything positive to do with Europe could pass right now in the UK, and until the situation is resolved (preferably by the British body politic catching itself on about Europe, rather than by leaving) we are on borrowed time. I have Irish citizenship anyway, but my wife does not.

The other doomsday scenario is the much discussed potential breakup of Belgium. I'm less inclined to feel that it will happen now than I was a few months back - we now have in place the government that won the elections last year, and it is to be hoped that the educative effect of working with his Francophone counterparts on day-to-day issues will mellow Yves Leterme's approach. But in the context of the continuous hollowing-out of the Belgian state, citizenship rights are bound to go on the list at some point - there are plenty of examples of states with different internal citizenships around the world - and already our children's care provision is dependent on our continued residence, not in Belgium, but in Flanders. Presumably if the crunch ever comes, existing Belgian citizens will be transitioned into the new arrangements fairly automatically, so it makes sense to consolidate our own position now.

Those two issues probably are not worth thinking about even to the extent of reading (let alone writing) two short paragraphs about them. There are lots of positive reasons to embrace Belgian-ness: the quiet and subversive liberal ethos; the excellent (if occasionally bureaucratic) public services; the diversity and quality of food and beer. But what really pushed us to take the step was young F. He was born a few months after we moved here, and knows that his mummy is English and his daddy is Irish; but he goes to our local village school, watches Flemish children's television as readily as CBBC, and stunned us one day recently by coming home and telling us what he had been learning about "our six kings" (Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin/Boudewijn and Albert II). He feels Belgian more than anything, and has no reason not to. Once the procureur has finished with our papers, the legal state of affairs will be brought into line with his perception.

Prompted by juleske here and jenmarya here we went up the road to try La Rusticana in Heverlee last night. Well, on the good side, the food was indeed excellent, the complimentary starters fantastic, my penne boscaiola really heavenly. On the less good side, Anne's after-dinner cup of tea was made with heavily salted water ("Sorry! We used the wrong kettle!"), they initially forgot to bring our tiramisu (which was indeed delicious when it finally arrived), and two euro were mysteriously added to the bill (I don't normally check, but I couldn't actually read the total, added the numbers up for myself, and discovered the mistake). So good marks for food, and considering what juleske and jenmarya have said, we may just have been there on a bad night for service.

Assisting Mr Stroehlein with the 40 beers at 40 project.

Thanks, Andrew!

Any fans of Iain Banks in or within reach of Brussels may like to know that he is speaking at Scotland House, Rond Point Schuman 6 (top floor) on Tuesday 29 January at 13h. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance from brusselsevents AT scotland.gsi.gov.uk - thanks to aeglefinus for the heads-up.

As luck would have it, that is the same building as my office, so I will certainly be there!

(And I suppose in a way this continues the theme of Scotch whisky from my post yesterday...)

Apparently we have a new government after 191 days; Verhofstadt was able to turn the key where Leterme was not. But will we notice the difference?

An old article but a good one on the expat life here. (Actually the Guardian's pieces on Brussels generally are worth exploring.) I don't think I've met the author of the first piece but he has interviewed me by phone.

here. (Hat-tip to burkesworks.)

See also the same author's guide to Belgian beers.

1) William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange 1533-1584, by C.V. Wedgwood

Bought this on impulse the other day; it is a very interesting and passionate biography of the leader of the successful Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the mid-16th century. I had not appreciated how central present-day Belgium was to the Netherlands as a whole up until then: the capital at Brussels, the main trading port being Antwerp. And although there was always a gradient from Francophone to Dutch-speaking, and increasingly from Catholic to Protestant, as you go from south to north, it's easy to imagine how a slightly different set of historical circumstances could have led to a very different border between today's Netherlands and Belgium, or even no border at all; the military balance was always fragile, and local allegiances in the extensive boundary zone volatile.

Wedgwood's book was published in 1944, and there's clearly an implicit parallel between the Dutch fight against Spanish oppression and the second world war, with William the Silent being portrayed as an almost Churchillian figure; also, of course, his descendant Queen Wilhelmina, exiled in England and Canada during the war, would have been a well-known personality to the British reader of the time. I have to say that I felt a bit suspicious of Wedgwood's nuances on a couple of occasions, given the likely didactic intent of the book. William was possibly the first political leader to be assassinated with a handgun - apparently Lisa Jardine has a book out about that, so I've ordered it from Amazon, and maybe it will give a slightly different perspective.

The story is contemporary with a couple of other historical episodes I'm interested in as well; though Irish history is not mentioned here, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre is a major incident, with William's last wife (of four) the daughter of Admiral de Coligny. Anyway, all very interesting and helps to build up the context.

A: All states are artificial, my dears. They are all human constructs.

If you look around Europe for international frontiers that "make sense" on historical, geographical, ethnic and linguistic grounds, you will find that pretty much the only one satisfying those criteria is the border between England and France.

Most European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and the borders of Belgium are not unusual in that respect.

rfmcdpei has been tracking a number of the recent posts about the future of Belgium, including this one at Crooked Timber - though I have to say I don't really agree with the other article he links to which blames the euro!!! I am inclined to expect that this current political crisis will be resolved. It's a classic political question: you have the mathematics for a coalition government, but the coalition partners have irreconcilable negotiating positions. One of them will back down, and it will probably be Leterme (the hardline but flaky Flemish Christian Democrat leader) who appears to be being gradually abandoned by the elders of his own party. Though if you want to have a go at forming your own Belgian government, the Gazet van Antwerpen has a little pacman-style game to help your imagination. The slang for the likely coalition, referring to the traditional colours of the Liberals and Christian Democrats, is the "Blue-Orange", which also evokes one of the less-known adventures of one of Belgium's best-known heroes:

(Picture from Wikipedia, which suggests that the original concept appears to be a poem by French surrealist Paul Éluard.)

Belgium will survive this year, but I was talking with a friend during the week, a former Belgian government official who resigned a couple of years back, and he reckons the writing is on the wall. Two things in particular emerged from our discussion. First of all, the mediation structures for Belgians to resolve their differences do not work well, and are reaching their sell-by date. The crisis of the last few weeks have seen the personal engagement of the King (who is not unpopular, but is not rated by anyone as a great intellect) and old men from former governments before the country had become as federalised as it now is. In ten or fifteen years time, none of them will be around any more for the next big crisis. International mediation in the Balkans has often been very successful by the way in which it has created an external locus of dialogue; parties to the dispute have been forced to explain their positions to outsiders who know nothing of their country, not just to their own electorate, and the result I think has been a certain amount of internal reflection on the limits of what is achievable. There is no such process for Belgian leaders; the Dutch and French are not very interested in the incomprehensible squabbles of people with funny accents (rather in the same way as the Northern Ireland issue leaves most people in Great Britain and the Republic cold).

Second, the role of the media is particularly serious. What is striking is that francophone Belgian and Flemish media don't appear to be reporting adequately on each other's perceptions. Checking teletext the other night we discovered completely different versions of the latest steps in the government crisis being told to the viewers on either side of the linguistic divide. (Which, officially at least, lies about 5 km from here; though it is in reality more porous.) agirlnamedluna was the first source I saw for the infamous Leterme interview, in which he was doorstepped on his way into the cathedral in Brussels and failed to sing the national anthem. What strikes me about the clip, watching it, is that actually this is really dumbed-down, crap journalism from RTBF. If you want to know Leterme's views on the future of Belgium, you sit him down in the TV studio and ask him detailed questions. The fact that he performed badly when doorstepped does say something of his ability for office (poor reflexes when faced with journalists, among other things) but asking a senior politician to sing a song on his way into church is not really a fair test of anything. RTBF had an opportunity to explore the fears that many Francophone Belgians have that Leterme really wants to break up the country, and they just ran a cheap stunt instead. (Leterme, of course, is not innocent in all this; but he'll be gone in a few weeks, and RTBF will still be there.) Unless the media acquire some maturity, and start to explore their own societies' neuroses rather than exploiting them, the country probably is doomed. On the whole the Northern Irish media, while far from perfect, have performed much better in this respect; the fact that everyone speaks the same language back home helps but I think (based on what I've seen elsewhere) is not crucial.

Having said all that, we as a family are likely to nail our colours to the mast of the sinking ship of state. Young F was saying a few weeks ago that his mummy was from England, his daddy from Ireland, and he is from Belgium; and of course he's right. You can get Belgian citizenship fairly easily by some standards (and once we've been here for nine years, which will be early next year, it is practically automatic, without loss of any other nationalities you may have); and given that we depend so heavily on the Belgian state for helping with our family situation, it seems only reasonable to put our loyalties in the mechanism that is helping us. (Plus, of course, if there should at some stage be a more comprehensive re-jigging of citizenships in this part of the world, it will put us in a stronger position.)

I am fortunate enough to read many interesting things on my friends list. Here are some of them from the last week to share with you all:

John Scalzi is right (about Catcher in the Rye).

homais in Yemen.

wyvernfriend finds wisdom in MASH.

peake on mild fame, and on online vs printed reviews.

rozk's TLS review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (spoilers).

Speaking of which, mizkit has been fortunate enough to receive the "Best Fanmail Evar".

bellatrys has been reading Norman's Gor books, and finds that they have no redeeming features.

Top tip from slimmeroftheyea: don't leave small children within reach of the handbrake, especially if you have parked on a slope.

lizw on tea.

smhwpf discovers a personal link with Freema Agyeman.

And finally, agirlnamedluna is worried about Belgium.

It's only because I am on holiday that I have the time to acknowledge all these pieces of wisdom (and there are a couple more in unlocked posts which I have really enjoyed reading but won't link to here, including a fascinating piece about the pros and cons of getting married, and a really offensive cartoon from the Daily Mail). Keep it up folks; I enjoy reading you all.

As previously noted, I work right on the Rondpoint Schuman in the heart of the European quarter (hence, indeed, the name of this blog, though that actually dates from my previous job which was further away).

For once all the train connections worked better than usual this morning, and I got to the office early; but I had skipped breakfast at home, so I decided to have a quick bite at the cafe on the ground floor of our building, sitting outside at one of the tables overlooking the square.

Normally a rather unpleasantly bustling hub of activity, it's a bit quieter today because of the EU summit, which is taking place literally next door to my building. The whole square is blocked off by barbed wire and you can only get in with a special pass pre-signed by the Chief of Police, backed up by your passport. But the sunshine was mellow, and my croissant/coffee/juice hit the spot.

And now it's time for work.

Coming in to the office in the middle of the morning, I saw a radiantly happy newly wed couple emerge from the lift.

Since I moved into the building in January, my fellow residents have expanded to include the permanent representation of Sweden to the EU, the mission of Norway to the EU, and the embassy of Norway to Belgium. The last of these explains the wedding party, I suppose; presumably Norwegian citizens living abroad can get married at their local embassy.

My working day is filled with bureaucrats, diplomats, and countries in crisis. It's nice, if sadly unusual, to see people being radiantly happy in my workplace.

A fascinating 10-page paper from www.brusselsstudies.be on linguistic diversity in Europe and especially in Brussels.

In particular, check out this graph from page 6:



English is more widely spoken than Dutch in both Wallonia and Brussels, and almost as widely spoken as French in Flanders. The paper then gives 1999 figures, and reasonably extrapolates from them to conclude that fewer than half of Brussels residents are now native French speakers (fewer than 10% native Dutch speakers, and very few indeed native English speakers). The author is upbeat:

...the spectacular spread of English is not only inevitable but also desirable, especially in Brussels. In Europe and the rest of the world we absolutely need a common language, one that is not monopolized by a small elite but is widely spread amongst all sections of the population. Through accidents of history this role has fallen to English. For us Belgians, what a stroke of luck! Whether our mother tongue is French or Dutch, of the 6000 languages spoken in the world today, English is one of the 10 to 15 languages that lie closest to our own. Even better: if there is one language in the world that can claim to lie precisely midway between French and Dutch, it is English and only English, which is after all but a dialect very similar to Frisian, which the Angles took with them when they crossed the Channel in the fifth century and which was later made unrecognisable by some Vikings who, after a few centuries of French lessons in Normandy, crossed the channel in turn to simplify its grammar and graft 10,000 French words onto it. Some inveterate narcissists will perhaps still manage to complain about the fact that the chosen language is not precisely the same as the one in which they were rocked by their mum. But this should not stop us rejoicing at our incredible luck.

Worth reading the whole thing.

I work here at the heart of the EU district in Brussels; I tend to conceive of the geography of the area in terms of international politics - my own office building is home to Belgium's permanent representation to the EU at the bottom, and Scotland's EU office at the top. If you pull out a bit, you can see the distinctive four-pointed star of the European Commission's headquarters, the Berlaymont, building on the northwestern side of the roundabout, and (less clearly, though it is pretty unmissable in real life) the EU Council Secretariat, complete with helipad, across the Rue de la Loi.

Move southwest a bit and you can see the green space of the Parc Leopold, intruded on by the oval shape of part of the European Parliament's complex (the "Caprice des Dieux" building). But look for a moment at the three buildings between the Parliament and the ponds in the park. The southernmost of the three I know well - the former Solvay library, it is now a conference centre where I have attended many events (and even organised one). The other two are typical Art Nouveau buildings, rather beautiful to look at but not part of my daily life.

Well, I shall look more closely at the northernmost of the three buildings next time I go through the park. Now a school, it was built as the Institut Solvay by the Belgian industrialist and philanthropist in 1895, and from 1912 hosted the Solvay Conferences. It was in this building in 1927 that Einstein, mocking Bohr's attachment to randomness in quantum mechanics, asked him sardonically "...ob der liebe Gott würfelt?" (usually translated as the flat statement, "God does not play dice"). Bohr's reply, that it was not up to Einstein to tell God what to do, tends to get lost in standard accounts of the exchange.

See pictures and a home movie of the conference, here.

20) The Book of Proper Names, by Amélie Nothomb (.co.uk, .com)

Reading this was partly a result of impulse buying in Vienna, but also partly feeling that I should be getting to grips with the great writers of my country of residence. Especially those who were born in the same year as me.

It's a very short book (126 pages) that combines moments of some depth with moments of utter silliness. Most of it is a sparse but sympathetic study of a girl who is adopted by her aunt after her parents die horribly, is a bit of a misfit at school, goes into ballerina training and develops anorexia. Which is all OK; a bit wrenching to read in places, but engaging. Then she is wonderfully cured of anorexia, falls in love withe the Right Man, and shoots the author. Yes, that is how the book ends, and I do not apologise for spoiling it; it is such a stupid ending that it deserves no respect.

I see that LibraryThing users tend to also have her Fear and Trembling and Hygiène de l'assassin, her first novel which has not yet been translated into English. Might give the first of those a go some time.

One of those days when I really should have just stayed in bed. Kept on missing train connections both going to work and coming home again; and when I stopped for a snack in Brussels North railway station, I went to pick up my laptop after I had finished eating, and realised it was gone.

My brand new laptop, nicked.

Bastards.

It could have been worse. I think of blonde222's experience last year, which was considerably worse - at least mine had only two weeks of work on it, and most of the emails are backed up elsewhere. And in any case, it was not as bad as what happened to me in April 1999, shortly after moving to Belgium, when I was mugged at gunpoint in a different railway station - less material loss, but much more of a shock to the system.

Still.

Bastards.

communicator links to a fascinating YouTube diary presented by a woman with autism. The behaviour patterns she shows to us are very familiar to me.

A Doctor Who fan-vid using "I'm Gonna Be" by The Proclaimers - hilarious and uplifting.

George R.R. Martin's pizza crawl.

Brian Aldiss is on Desert Island Discs tomorrow.

( last three people )

( Where I live meme )

( Egoboost: What kind of cook am I? )

( Spectral analysis - green and wavy but also looking at you )

The famous spoof broadcast last week is still stirring up trouble here. There has been a fascinating exchange of open letters between the chief editors of two leading Belgian papers, Le Soir for the Francophones, De Standaard for the Flemings. I may rise to the occasion of doing a translation into English (including pointing out where the respective translators have not done their job accurately), but meantime here are both originals and translations, originals (Le Soir's letter in French, and De Standaard's letter in Dutch) on the left, translations on the right.

( The Belgian debate )

I think De Standaard wins on points.

I am now spending a lot more time on the tram than I did before the car died. This evening on the way from work to Brussel-Centraal I overheard the couple sitting opposite talking English. They came from Somerset, in Brussels for a couple of days' holiday, and they were lost; expecting to get to the Grand'Place, but sitting on the #93 as it bowled along the Rue Royale, so they were in danger of going seriously off course. I took them off at the Palais stop, and walked them down the steps, past the site of the Brontës' sojourn in Brussels, down more steps through the Ravenstein and the railway station, instructing them to keep going downhill and veer to the left. I hope they had a good time; it was her birthday treat, and it was raining very heavily, but if they end up in the Roi d'Espagne as I recommended they will probably be OK.

Mysteriously didn't show on my f-list first time I posted this, so here goes again: This is the second of two sets of interview questions. I know I owe questions to a number of you; if you wish me to owe interview questions to you as well, say so in the comments.

From grahamsleight:

1. Which would you most like back in the BBC archives in its entirety - Evil of the Daleks or The Daleks' Masterplan? ( answer )
2. What's your preferred electoral system for the UK - STV or AV? (Or, indeed, other?) ( answer )
3. How easy do you think it is for the person-at-home-with-a-TV-and-internet to grasp the complexity of (eg) the Bosnian conflict? ( answer )
4. Do you have any personal preference between sf and fantasy as genres in general (as it were)? ( answer )
5. Is it worth visiting Brussels if you can't stand moules? ( answer )

From bugshaw:

1. Crosswords or Sudoku? ( answer )
2. Three countries you've never visited but would like to? ( answer )
3. Tell me an anecdote from your schooldays. ( answer )
4. Where did you find fandom? ( answer )
5. Assume the Daleks have been purged from this space-time continuum. Who would you like to be your new overlord(s)? ( answer )

From secritcrush:

1. I've only watched the Baker and Davison years of the old Dr Who - what would you recommend as the essential episode to watch that I've never seen? ( answer )
2. What is the most frustrating aspect of your job? ( answer )
3. What is the first book you remember reading? ( answer )
4. Do you play any musical instruments? ( answer )
5. Pirate or robot? Defend your choice! (and none of that robot pirate nonsense.) ( answer )

From despotliz:

1. How do you manage to juggle things and find time for a family life, a demanding job, reading hundreds of books, and posting to LJ? ( answer )
2. Which of the regular cons you've been to is your favourite? ( answer )
3. Best book you've read this year? ( answer )
4. Do you find learning languages easy, or is it something you have to work at? ( answer )
5. Where would you like to live if you weren't in Belgium? ( answer )

9) Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars

Enthused by my recent reading of Villette, I ordered this little book from the Brontë Society last week and it was waiting for me on my return from Moldova. I must be in the very small minority of readers who bought it more because of Brussels than the Brontës; in my last job, I often went for a sandwich lunch in the Parc de Bruxelles, and even now I find myself trying to thread my car through the relevant streets a couple of times each month as I head to the north of the city centre. Plus there is something very fascinating about vanished streetscapes; the school where Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived in 1842, and to which Charlotte returned alon for a year in January 1843, was demolished in 1909 as part of the development which has resulted in today's Palais des Beaux-Arts, built in the 1920s. As well as that, of course, the sense of place in Villette is so well developed that there is a certain fascination in reading more about the reality on which the fiction was based.

One does feel, however, for the unfortunate Hegers, who had taken the unattractive, reserved and disconcertingly intelligent Brontë girls under their wing for a few months as an act of kindness, and then found themselves and their country portrayed in Villette in a way they simply could not have anticipated. Ruijssenaars has attached to his own text a half-dozen glorious accounts from Brontë fans between 1871 and 1916 coming to gaze at the Pensionnat and its inhabitants, reverently plucking leaves from the pear-trees in the garden, and generally harassing the Hegers. That is not to minimise the interest of Ruijssenaars' own work, bringing together the archives and published architectural history of Brussels with the accumulated lore of a century and a half of Brontëology.

( pictures and maps )

I must admit that, time and ianmcdonald permitting, I would love to do a guide to the Belfast scenes of Sacrifice of Fools. (Isn't there a book somewhere out there about Philip K Dick's California?) If I could do half as well as this I'd be very pleased.

4) Villette, by Charlotte Brontë

With my ancestral home being near where the Brontë sisters' father was born, and having trudged through Jane Eyre for my O-level in English Literature (one of my two B grades, along with Religious Education), I have always had a vague interest in them. But this was the first Charlotte Brontë novel I have read as an adult (I did read Wuthering Heights a couple of years back, prompted by the BBC's Big Read).

Part of the attraction (apart from it being part of my Unread Books Project) is that Villette is Brussels, and the small largely Francophone kingdom of Labassecour (which still retains its impenetrable aboriginal dialect) is Belgium. There's not a lot of English-language fiction set in my adopted homeland. (Even less sf or fantasy.) The only other bit that leaps to mind is the couple of glimpses in Heart of Darkness. So it was interesting to read the book and try and match description to location. In fact, I have ordered a wee book called Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars, from the Brontë Society website, to slake my curiosity.

Having said all that, unfortunately Villette is not a very strong example of the sisters' genius. There are too many unlikely coincidences, and I was very uncomfortable with the way in which the narrator reacts to being emotionally abused by one of her axcquaintances by falling in love with him. It was not at all clear to me why she did not end up with the nice doctor chap. In addition, though this is supporting evidence rather than crucial, I don't think the book does well on the Bechdel Test. Anyway, interesting to see the Brussels of a century and a half ago through someone else's eyes.

Spent much time yesterday looking around two day-centres for children with learning disabilities. B is finding school too much for her, won't participate in group activities and comes home bruised from banging herself against walls in frustration. I thought they were both nice places; one only a few km away, but I thought its facilities marginally inferior (apart from the garden) and anyway they don't have any vacancies; the other about 20 km east of here, with a nicer interior atmosphere but not as much outside space (oddly enough, within spitting distance of the church of Our Lady of the Stone where the local saint consoles those with mental disorders). The second place does have a vacancy, so if we take them up on it, poor artw will get to know the motorway between here and there rather well as their bus service doesn't run this far west.

I spoke more Dutch yesterday than I do in the average month (also when I finally got into work had to go straight out again for a meeting with a Dutch MEP) and was musing on one or two words or phrases which are particularly pleasing in that language. We were asked at both daycentres to give them our gegevens. The word gegeven is the past participle of the verb geven, "to give"; but in English you don't ask people for their "givens", you resort to Latin where the verb "to give" is do, dare, dedi, datum and the plural of datum is "data". Wouldn't it be nicer to talk of "givens" than "data"? Also there was much discussion of the prikkels which would be experienced by our daughter at each place. Although the word is pronounced identically to the English word "prickles", in Dutch it has a wider range of meanings, including in this particular case the concept conveyed by the English word "stimuli", which of course comes from Latin stimulus, meaning "goad", the diminutive of stilus meaning "stick". On the one hand, the English language has been enriched (as james_nicoll has famously pointed out) by its use of vocabulary from many sources. On the other, it does mean that we can lose touch rather easily with the resonances of what words actually meant originally.

Also after almost eight years here I am still getting used to Flemish rather than Dutch. The use of ge rather than U or jij to mean "you" still throws me - when I learnt Dutch a quarter of a century ago we used gij and ge only to address God. Not so different, of couse, from the use of "thou" in rural Yorkshire, but I have never spent much time in rural Yorkshire. Also I noticed, more than previously, people not pronouncing the letter "h" at the start of a word - is this a general Flemish thing, or something more restricted to areas within spitting distance of the taalgrens? And of course the diminutive form of nouns being -ske or -ke rather then -tje or -je. I wonder what else I miss because people are trying to speak clearly to us foreigners, rather than talking as they normally would?