So hello there! Back from our travels, at least for a few days. Enough to collect the cat from the cattery, get her settled, then send her back.
Went to Brussels! That's right - home of the European blogging industry, or at least of the glamorous Zed. We wandered around amid a sea of warm chocolate and cold beer, admiring the medieval, or mock medieval, frontages. The big secret is that Brussels is a bit mad, but isn't really prepared to let on. Its condition is what psychiatrists call 'encapsulated'. As a tourist the Bruxellois don't really care what you do or where you go. It's a very cheap city to get around - a good tourist point - but they don't let you know where to go. They don't even have signs, like in London, to let you know when you are close to a tourist opportunity. And because of this you don't find crowds, or crowds of beggars, or trails of litter you can follow as a clue to bring you to a juicy touristical feast. We walked all around the outside of the (really very good) Autoworld, while there were no visible signs to tell us it was in there. There was a sign directing us to its café, but not to its front door.
The maddest thing in Brussels, and possibly the entire world, is the Atomium, a model of something very very small (an iron crystal) blown up to be something very very big. I did not dare ask the brusque young woman who let us in what, exactly, was the point of the whole thing, though I longed to be told. The whole structure is so well proportioned that, although you can tell it's very large, you do not realise quite how large the globes that make up the exhibition space within it really are. They are the size of four storey buildings, suspended hundreds of feet up in the air. We climbed up and down, and eventually took a trip in its glass-topped lift, which apparently was the fastest vertical thing in Europe in 1958. While we were in our large crystal palace there were several seasons' worth of weather going on outside, which kept us in it for long enough to have lunch, about 100 metres up in the air, in a large metal ball that, from the inside, resembled something between a submarine and the gondola under a dirigible airship. All quite, quite mad.
The sad downside to the escapade was that the kitchen staff in Phileas Fogg Towers seemed to have had their own little side project, which was to take something else very small - possibly a bacterium - and turn it into something really big, i.e. a bout of food poisoning. Because twelve hours later the fastest vertical thing in Europe was my lunch, reappearing with some force in a hotel bathroom.
In the interim I and my entire family were treated to a raclette supper at the Maison Zed, which, I can now definitively confirm, is not triangular. That is a strange rumour started by some irresponsible idiot. (It was you. Ed.) I can, however, now reveal that you can only get to the Zedderie through a magic wood filled with pixies.
Such a lovely evening was followed, for me, by a hang-dog day trailing round Brussels, not being able to walk freely, feeling like I had been kicked down every single one of the steps of the emergency staircases in the Atomium. I could not face either chocolate or beer, or waffles. Or even mock medieval frontages. Defeated and thirsty, I made us stop at what turned out to be a properly rough pub in a run down quartier near the station, which contained a toilet that could have been created as a tribute to nameless explorers of the darkest Congo. Perhaps it was another secret gem, an under-advertised theme park called Bogland. The darkness, slime and flies were astonishingly realistic, according to those who braved it. Me? I had scoffed some newly purchased Imodium and was in no need of any kind of bodily relief, apart from a large tumbler of morphine. This they did not have so I sipped a lemonade - the first of many that day.
We moved on. The flea market brought me out in a nauseous sweat. As did the busker that approached us during lunch in a streetside bar, who then sang 'Yesterday' for ten minutes of world class tedium. There was a poignancy in the song though. Yesterday all my troubles were relatively understated too, and I felt a flicker of empathy. However, where me and the singer fell out was that since his arrival I had begun to suffer a new, unforeseen discomfort that had got me longing for any time in my entire life before he showed up. After the third reappearance of the middle eight, desperation was no longer going to narrow me down to particular times and dates. Yesterday be damned - it was hardly far enough. He left empty handed. Why he had to go I don't know - he wouldn't say. But if he had stayed much longer I would very likely have thrown up on his shoes.
Nevertheless, do try Brussels. We will probably go back and do all the things that no one told us about till we were already there. Like the extraordinary puppet theatre right in the middle of the town that we only found courtesy of Zed and Quarsan. It serves beer and looks like either an English country pub or a medieval coaching inn. Now, where could I find that in Peckham?