More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. Schuman station was opened almost forty years ago (in December 1969) as part of the first axis of what has evolved into the Brussels metro system, between there and the De Brouckère station in the city centre. But I was surprised when I came across a Baedeker map of 1910, almost a century ago, which appeared to show the Schuman station in situ six decades early:

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All trace of the old station has now gone. ( Read more... )

But we can get an idea of what it might have looked like ( Read more... )

I am left with one rather minor nagging mystery. ( Read more... )

More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were killed by Leopold's regime. He got away with it by a cunning combination of concealment of the amount of wealth he was extracting for his own private hoard, wishful thinking from the white world about the heroic civilising mission of European colonialism, and the conspiratorial silence of the officials involved. For any European, and particularly for us Belgians (as I have now been for a bit over a year), it is essential reading as a reminder of the atrocities of our shared past with Africa.

Hochschild's subtitle is "A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa". The heroism described is mostly that of the few investigators who dared to tell the truth of the mutilations, murders and slavery that characterised Leopold's Congo, the likes of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. Hochschild regrets that there are very few accounts available from the African perspective. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is about the destructive moral effect of the Congo experience on Europeans like Kurtz; the Africans in the story do not speak, and they were rarely allowed to tell their story in real life either.

My office is a stone's throw from the Parc du Cinquantenaire / Jubelpark, created in the suburb beyond Etterbeek by Leopold II from his vast Congolese profits. It contains a rather disturbing monument to the Congo enterprise, as well as the pretentious archway which frames the end of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat. A favourite excursion for the children is to the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, where the stuffed animals are cute but the historical record is, in more than one sense of the word, whitewashed. As Hochschild points out, the legacy of the colonial enterprise is visible in the streets of Belgium today, if you know where to look, or indeed if you just look with your eyes open.

I am not surprised that Herman Van Rompuy, who has been prime minister of Belgium since the turn of the year, is the front-runner for the first EU presidency now that Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty.

First of all, Tony Blair was never really a candidate. He got backing from people who hadn't really thought about it much, including I suspect himself, but once it became clear that the centre right wanted one of their own, he was toast. In any case, the small states were always going to be unenthusiastic about a leader from a large state taking on the role. So, of the 27 member states, the heads of government of Austria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK are ruled out for being in the wrong political family. That leaves 13 countries. But we can also rule out France, Germany and Italy because the small states are unlikely to agree to an EU President from a large state (and anyway Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi are not interested). That leaves 10. But we can also rule out the newest member states, who are not sufficiently known quantities as yet; there will in due time be a Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish or Romanian candidate, but that time is not now.

That leaves only four countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden. The Swedes' stock is high, but they have the disadvantage that they hold the EU presidency at the moment and it looks really bad if you are chairing the meeting which selects you for promotion. That leaves the Benelux prime ministers, Balkenende, Juncker and Van Rompuy. Juncker is the longest serving PM in the EU (since 1995), and is personally well regarded, but his country is not; where France, Germany, Italy and the UK are too big, Luxembourg is really too small, at least for the first holder of the post. That leaves Balkenende and Van Rompuy.

Balkenende is the second-longest serving PM in the EU (since 2002), which has given him time to put a lot of people's backs up; the then Belgian foreign minister, now European Commissioner, Karel De Gucht described him with brutal accuracy as "a mix between Harry Potter and a rigid bourgeois without charisma" (and this is not a linguistic problem as they share the same native language). Van Rompuy on the other hand is rather sweet and writes haikus on his personal website. More to the point, in his ten months as prime minister he has rescued Belgium from the point of institutional collapse which it reached under his disastrous predecessor, and thus has a proven record of getting people with different native languages and very different political perspectives to work together. He won't be a tremendously high profile EU president, but he will be a consensus-building figure who will make his bits of the institutions work and not interfere with other people's turf - be that member states or other senior EU officials.

I'm not a fan of his party, but I am rather a fan of Van Rompuy, and although most of the reasons why he will get the job are actually bad reasons - there is really no good justification for excluding non-Christian Democrats, or anyone from big, tiny or new member states - I think he will actually do it rather well, which is the best reason imaginable to give it to him. The downside is, of course, that Belgium will then need another prime minister, which raises the depressing prospect of Leterme coming back to screw things up again.

This also improves the chances of David Milliband getting the foreign policy job, whose fate matters much more to me. Again, most of the reasons why are bad - the Socialists get the foreign policy job if the Christian Democrats get the top spot, and then there is a real shortage of Socialist foreign ministers that a) anyone has heard of and b) would be personally and politically acceptable (Bernard Kouchner being the best example of someone who clears the first hurdle but not the second). However, while Milliband may have pulled his punches a bit in the current vicious Labour internal struggle, he is a credible at European level (and not tainted by Iraq to the extent that Blair would have been). The question really is does he want it?

(See also discussion here. And you'll note that many of the above links go to the excellent blog of the Economist's David Rennie, which is syndicated to Livejournal, though with technical difficulties, as econ_charlemgne.)

We got a bulletin from CD&V, the prime minister's political party, through the door yesterday. This was supposedly targeted at the needs of our small village (where the party's national chairman happens to be a resident). Now, I am rather charmed by the current PM, but his predecessor, who was from the same party, struck me as a total disaster (and now, God help us, he is our foreign minister; maybe he will be more mellow when not dealing with his fellow Belgians). On the other hand again, I have met several other CD&V ex-prime ministers (Dehaene, Tindemans, Eyskens) and been impressed by them (though all three predate the party's most recent name change). So I was prepared to be open-minded about the CD&V.

Not any more, I'm afraid. The second page of the leaflet boldly proclaims their new legislative initiatives - not as part of the government, but as proposals from individual CD&V senators. The first of these was to make it compulsory for cyclists to wear fluorescent clothes. Not a word about punishing bad driving more severely, or even doing something positive to increase road safety like build more bike lanes; no, legislate against the victims, that is the CD&V answer.

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But the offensiveness of that proposal is far exceeded by the other one that caught my eye, to make it illegal for women to wear face-covering clothes in public, one reason given being that it makes "many people" (ie CD&V voters) feel insecure. It's difficult to know where to start; I am aware that this is a deeply contentious issue, but as far as I am concerned, if it was wrong for Ireland's English rulers to ban the wearing of Irish traditional clothing in 1367, it is wrong for the Belgian state to oppress its own citizens (and residents) in that way in the 21st century. Perhaps the CD&V will equalise their proposal by also banning the wearing of face-covering masks at Carnival time, but I am not holding my breath.

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With any luck the other parties in the senate will kill these proposals off before they even get near the lower house.

This is regarded as the great work of Belgian fantasy (at least in the novel form: there are loads of Belgian comics and films with sfnal content). It's quite difficult to get hold of and I eventually picked up a copy of the 1998 Atlas Press translation on eBay. It appears at first to be about the peculiar inhabitants of the house of Malpertuis, in a city which is presumably Ghent in the dying days of Francophone supremacy; but in fact it turns into a peculiar confrontation between the organised Catholic church and the gods of ancient Greece. My edition makes the inevitable link with H.P. Lovecraft; I would add James Stephens' The Crock of Gold as a potential source, and I wonder if Neil Gaiman drew on it, consciously or not, for American Gods (and likewise, for the nested narrative structure, David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas). Ray is not quite as terrifying as Lovecraft (though fairly gruesome in places), and he is certainly not as cheerful as Stephens, but he does add a certain level of surrealist incomprehensibility to the mix that is appropriate for a slightly older contemporary of Magritte, who like Magritte stayed in Belgium and wrote this book during the German occupation. Certainly an essential read for sf fans interested in Belgium, or Belgians interested in literary sf.

cassave is one of several people who have recently shifted completely from Livejournal to Facebook, but now I know where he got his name from while he was here.

There are a number of theories explaining where the name "Leuven" originates from. The frame on the right illustrates one of them: that it commemorates a Scottish nobleman of the era of Julius Caesar, himself named "Loup", who founded a settlement called "Lupolin" on the site of the future university city. Note his drooping bagpipes, perhaps a subtle reference to the future importance of beer in the city's economic development, a theme to which the book returns over and over again.

There are a number of other stories about the history of Leuven, all retold and illustrated here by François Stas, all in Dutch (which I can at least read) with commentary from the characters in local dialect (which I have a lot more trouble with). I'm still a bit confused about the stories of Fiere Margariete and Paep Thoon, but at least I now know the details, even if I can't quite see the point. I was enlightened to discover the origin of the city flag - which is identical to the Austrian flag, but it seems this is just coincidence; it commemorates the battle of Leuven of 891, when Arnulf of Carinthia defeated the Vikings and afterwards the river Dijle flowed clear between two bloodstained banks.

There have been a lot of invaders around here. I had forgotten that one of them was Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, he of the Bodleian Library. Most of the others were Germans, French and Dutch (with the odd incidence of Spanish in the 16th century). It's quite difficult to make war and massacres funny, and on the whole Stas skates around the historical details rather delicately, apart from the rather unavoidable matter of August 1914. It's entertaining enough, and I certainly learned from it.

Well, I'm inclined to vote the Open VLD ticket on Sunday. Their election literature arrived yesterday; they have what look like a sensible enviromental approach on the economy, and the law-n-order stuff which worried me in the summary on De Standaard's website was simply not there. (So either De Standaard got it wrong, or Open VLD aren't terribly serious about being hardline on those issues; I'm happy either way.)

Most strikingly, Open VLD are explicitly in favour of the right of same-sex couples to adopt; and this is a campaign promise which can actually be implemented, as we are electing the Flemish parliament which decides these issues in Flanders. Dear reader, would it be possible for a potential party of government (Open VLD held the prime minister's position from 1999 to 2008) to run on adoption rights for same-sex couples in your country?

(Of course, here in Belgium we've had same-sex marriage for years - none of this "civil partnerships" compromising - and the world has failed to end; once you've got that far, it's obviously an anomaly if some married couples can adopt and others can't.)

Yesterday being a public holiday (and I'm doing the pont today) we did the trip I have long been wanting to do, to Wéris in the Ardennes, fêted among enthusiasts as Belgium's answer to Stonehenge. Now that I've been and come back I find this guide to the site; on this trip we located only the Wéris I dolmen and the nearby menhir, but it was well worth the visit anyway.

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Now that I have a better idea of where to look, I'll certainly go back.

( same result as the other one )

The test itself is here. I was rather shocked at how few of the questions I actually care much about, especially the ones about Antwerp. (NB though that question 8 out of 36 is about recognising English as an official language in Brussels.)

Long, long ago, I remember reading a mocking article in The Bulletin (the English-language weekly for expats in Belgium, which I haven't myself picked up for years) about the Belvue Museum in Brussels: who, it asked, really wants to pay 15 to look at the genuine spectacles of the late King Baudouin? I sniggered and marked it down as one of those things I would never willingly visit.

Then about a year ago, I was invited to a reception by the King Baudouin Foundation held in the museum foyer. (As well as running the museum, the KBF funds a number of projects in the Balkans which I have been loosely involved with.) I teased our hosts about the €15 to see the king's possessions, and they pointed out to me the (relatively) new admission rates: €5 for adults, €4 for pensioners, €3 for students and free for under-18s. Duly humbled, I apologised to the representatives of King Baudouin, and made a mental note that I should go and look at the museum properly some time.

Last week I noticed that it has an exhibition on about gender roles throughout the history of Belgium, set up by the Women's History Archive Centre (of whom I know nothing more than that they set up the exhibition). It had a nice poster which looked as if there would be fun and consciousness-raising things to look at: I showed it to young F on the website and he agreed to give it a try. It's conveniently located on the same block as the Royal Palace (where the King, of course, does not live, this being Belgium) just where the Rue Royale / Koningstraat doglegs into the Place Royale / Koningsplein.

Well, it wasn't quite as gripping as I expected. The main bit of the museum has some nice artifacts - and I admit that after reading a bit more of the history, I found the sight of the late King Baudouin's spectacles oddly moving - but it is a bit cluttered, and the narratives about Leopold II and III are rather airbrushed. The exhibition on gender history was a bit above the nine-year-old audience I had brought, and had fewer interesting exhibits than I had expected. (Though I did have to explain to my son what a typewriter was.)

However, the unexpected hit of the day was the Coudenberg ruins, also attached to the BELvue museum (as it prefers to be spelt). This is basically the excavated foundations of the old Coudenberg palace, burnt down in 1731 and buried by urban redevelopment thereafter: a lovely set of underground chambers, including most amazingly of all the buried Rue Isabelle, now a road to nowhere, an empty pathway covered by a concrete roof that was open to the sky three centuries ago.

I remembered having visited the Coudenberg cellars twice before many years ago, once with Anne to see a small exhibition, and once for yet another reception (this time for the European Liberals); the acoustics for speeches, especially with a large crowd, are terrible but that may have been just as well. On a quiet Sunday morning, just a few weeks after it was reopened and with our audio guidebooks in hand, it was enchanting.

They are still getting their act together - the Wikipedia entry has more information than the official site. But I strongly recommend it for those of you with an hour or so to spare in the middle of Brussels.

Anne picked up De Morgen this morning, and we have been discussing a peculiar article by one Luc Van Doorslaer about how evil the Francophone Belgians are. Van Doorslaer has two pieces of evidence for his thesis, one being an academic survey of Belgian media that demonstrates that Flemish journalists read more English-language sources than Francophone journalists do, the other being - get this, folks - Wikipedia.

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The trains are haywire again this evening; I waited for my connection in sub-zero temperatures for an hour and a half in the Brussels North station before I finally escaped. But I used my chilly wait profitably. Jeff Dudgeon has, once again, done me the favour of drawing my attention to the Dublin Review of Books, and I've been reading several of the essays in the latest issue.

My eye was immediately drawn to Martin McGarry's piece on the future of Belgium, written before last month's crisis which brought down Yves Leterme's government, but very insightful as to how we got to where we are - in particular, he describes the infamous BHV problem perfectly adequately in a single sentence, and he enlightened me as to the peculiar dynamic between the N-VA and the CD&V. (A lot of Belgian politics revolves around acronyms.) McGarry is much more readable than Witte, Craeybeckx and Meynen, the authors of the only one of the books he is ostensibly reviewing which I have myself attempted. He's pessimistic about the long term future of Belgium, but doesn't quite explain why.

A little-remembered historical linkage between Belgium and Ireland is that Daniel O'Connell was given a vote in the choice of the first King of the Belgians (who, if his first wife had lived, would have been Prince Consort of the UK instead). Paul Bew and Patrick Maume review Patrick Geoghegan's new biography of O'Connell, and achieve the task of both disagreeing with it and making you want to read it (though I may wait until the second volume comes out - the first takes us only to 1829). I had in fact read MacDonagh's biography when it came out almost 20 years ago; it sounds like Geoghegan has found more humanity than sainthood in the man, with a more realistic assessment of his religious beliefs, his sex life, and his tendency to go over the top in his oratory. Bew and Maume ask, but don't answer, the question of whether Parnell or O'Connell was the more significant figure. There's no doubt in my own mind that it was O'Connell, and frankly I find his large-hearted liberal nationalism much more attractive than Parnell's somewhat neurotic and narrow ideology.

Leaping forward a hundred years or so, the essay that is closest to my own work and experience is Eunan O'Halpin's review of Paul McMahon's book on British espionage in Ireland between 1916 and 1945. From the narrow Irish perspective, this books sounds like a useful corrective (and even in part an explanation) for the Sinn Féin obsession with "securocrats". But it is also a good set of case studies of how intelligence services operate successfully (eg the collaboration between the RUC and the Garda Síochána on keeping a lid on Republican dissidents in the late 1930s and early 1940s, despite the fact that their respective governments were not on speaking terms) and unsuccessfully (the "German Plot" allegations of 1917-18, uncritically accepted by key British ministers despite the lack of actual evidence).

There's a wider lesson as well: if, as a government, you keep open the official channels of communication with your neighbours and potential rivals, you are less dependent on the particular idiosyncracies of a small number of intelligence agents, at least when it comes to dealing with actual governments. It is rather extraordinary that there was no British diplomatic presence in Dublin until 1939! And I can think of a good dozen contemporary examples of this sort of short-sightedness. I will stop here.

I blame Paul Cornell for my late arrival at home this evening.

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BTW I think I have managed to fix this so that it only appears on Facebook as a Note on my Wall, but is a full status update on Twitter. Howver, I'm going to sleep now, and shall check in the morning.

Dear God, a Doctor Who story set in Belgium, featuring Marcel Proust??? Why did nobody tell me about this before????? ( More )

I can't imagine how I missed this story at the time: several weeks ago, Nathalie Lubbe Bakker, a Dutchwoman working in a Belgian bar in New York, wrote a blog entry about the atrocious behaviour of the Belgian defence minister who dropped in one evening after a particularly pointless taxpayer-funded transatlantic flight. Nathalie then mysteriously got sacked a few days later, after a mysterious phone call from the Belgian defence ministry to the bar owner, once the story had hit the Belgian press.

On the one hand, if you are working in any industry and write blog entries about your dealings with your customers, identifying them by name, it is a clear violation of professional confidence, and you can expect to lose your job. (Had she just been a fellow customer, that would be a completely different matter, of course.)

On the other hand, if you are the Belgian defence minister and you turn up stinking drunk in a New York bar and start singing bawdy Flemish folk songs, you can expect that the story will get back home. There is some justice in the fact that De Crem lost his job, along with the entire government, last week; with any luck, he will be among the ministers who don't return once the new government is formed, whenever that is.

The entire government has now resigned (BBC link). Good riddance to Leterme; let's hope they (meaning the political class as a whole, and the Flemish Christian Democrats in particular) choose better next time. This crisis - indeed, the continuing uncertainty since the elections of last year - was largely a result of his political incompetence.

We now return to our usual scheduled commentary on Doctor Who and linguistics.

The Minister of Justice has resigned. The president of the Court of Cassation did indeed send an expanded note to the Speaker of the House today. It concludes that "bearing in mind that my investigations have been somewhat limited, I have not found legal proof of an attempt to impede the course of justice, but there are undoubtedly important indications in that direction." The letter is scathingly critical of the Minister of Justice, and almost as directly critical of the prime minister. It's difficult to believe that Leterme can survive; but it's also difficult to believe that he is still there!

Astonishingly, prime minister Leterme is still in office this morning. His bacon was saved yesterday after further correspondence arrived in the Belgian parliament from the judicial system, this time from the prosecutor in the court of appeal, which seemed to give some hope that there were good if technical legal grounds to challenge the original decision to suspend the BNP Paribas takeover of Fortis.

I'm more than a little amazed. These technicalities were conveniently discovered by precisely the judge who Leterme is accused of influencing; and the prosecutor's letter, though only publicised late yesterday, is dated earlier in the week. It seems reasonable to suppose that the president of the Court of Cassation was also aware of these issues when he wrote his stinging note to the speaker of parliament yesterday; he has promised an expanded report today.

Who knows? Maybe it is just a remarkable coincidence that the one judge in a three-judge panel who discovered technical flaws in a judgement inconvenient to the government also happened to be the one judge in the three-judge panel who had been directly contacted by the prime minister's office. Stranger things have happened.

It will be astonishing if the president of the Court of Cassation does not substantiate the allegations he made yesterday about political interference in the judicial system. It's a pretty serious thing when the head of the highest court in the land accuses the prime minister of violating the separation of powers. But then, I find it also astonishing that Leterme is still in his job this morning, after the way he keeps changing his story.

The president of the Court of Cassation, the highest court in Belgium, wrote a private and confidential letter to the Speaker of the lower house of parliament today, in which he basically says, in a somewhat roundabout way, that the Prime Minister attempted to exert political influence on the judicial process concerning the BNP Paribas takeover of Fortis. This private and confidential letter, not surprisingly, rapidly became public. The Belgian federal cabinet has been in session for the last two and a half hours; apparently they are not discussing if Leterme will resign, but how many other ministers will resign with him.

There is no coverage of this whatsoever in English-language media. If you can read Dutch, http://www.hoofdpunten.be/ is a pretty good resource though the fact that you get the same agency story several times over is annoying. I don't know of anything similar in French.

It looks like our prime minister's time is finally up. I have always thought that Yves Leterme had a tin ear for the highest politics; it now turns out that he doesn't quite grasp either the principle of separation of powers, or telling the truth.

If he goes, as I think he must in the course of today or tomorrow, I think he will be the first actual head of government in Europe to lose his job because of the financial crisis. And weirdly, it's not because of the crisis itself, but because of the way he handled it. Several months back, a bailout plan was devised for Fortis (which happens to be my own bank); it was to be sold to the French, specifically to BNP Paribas. Last week, a Belgian court ruled that the transaction would have to be suspended for two months pending consultations with existing Fortis shareholders. Not especially good news for BNP Paribas (or for the bailout plan), but there we are; the courts are independent and make their own ruling.

Or are they? It seems that Leterme's office, and Leterme himself, was in contact with the judges in advance of the court decision. Granted, the decision they made was not the one Leterme wanted, but the perception that the prime minister was attempting to interfere in the judicial process is hugely damaging. What is worse is that Leterme's story kept changing over the course of the day yesterday: he wrote a letter to his own Minister of Justice laying out a chronology of his contacts with the court, which was then contradicted by other evidence and then indeed by his own account; he stunned the Belgian parliament yesterday by reading out correspondence between the Minister of Justice and the wife of one of the judges from his Blackberry. His coalition partners are threatening to revolt against the government, and the murmurings from within his own party are gathering pace.

And I see in the news just now that BNP Paribas has pulled out of the Fortis deal. I think that seals Leterm's fate.

As luck would have it, I have an appointment this afternoon downtown in the Belgian parliament. An interesting day to be there, I suspect!

Edited to add: Not very surprisingly, my meeting was cancelled. And the prime minister is still there.

From this month's comic in DWM, part one of The Stockbridge Child (by Dan McDaid, art by Mike Collins with David Roach, James Offredi and Roger Langridge):

I'm a little early, since it isn't quite the 23rd of November yet by Belgian time, but I thought some of you would be amused by this little collection of pictures and video clips that I have put together:



The online story I mention starts here.

Today there is a general strike in Belgium in protest against inflation, demanding that the government do something or other about it in this month's federal budget.

Being a child of the Thatcher era, who witnessed the taming of the unions in the UK, this seems to me extraordinary. While I support anyone's right to join a trade union and to go on strike to improve their circumstances of employment, I don't believe that the unions should be allowed to call a strike over an issue that doesn't particularly concern their relations with their employers. The people inconvenienced by today's strike are, on the whole, not those responsible for the recent increase in the prices of food and fuel; indeed, very few of the latter reside in Belgium, so the strike completely misses its ostensible targets.

As you know, Bob, Belgium has not only Socialist trade unions, but also Christian and Liberal unions, each organised into a separate national federation. Aha, you are perhaps thinking, the strike today is presumably called by one or two of the three sets of unions at least partly in protest against their rivals being more closely linked to the government. Well, no. First of all, the current government includes the Liberal, Christian and (Francophone) Socialist parties (the Flemish Socialists are in disarray). Second, all three national federations are supporting the strike. So the federations essentially appear to be striking against their own political allies in the government.

Or are they? I think this is really a manifestation of the cosy, collusive nature of Belgian politics. One or both Socialist parties have been in government solidly since May 1988, indeed for two-thirds of the last half-century; in that same time frame the Christian Democrats have been in government for all but the eight years of Verhofstadt's premiership. In a political system where you can't really vote the bastards out, indeed where layers of government proliferate so that a party, and a party leader, who lose one election can pop up again almost immediately elsewhere, the occasional general strike may be a useful safety valve to fool the workers into believing that they have more impact on the system than they really do. Of course it infuriates those of us from the ranks of the self-employed and small businesses, for whom today's action has no obvious benefit and for whom it causes immense and (what seems to us) avoidable inconvenience. But the system has other ways of buying our allegiance.

Edited to add: I am fundamentally hostile to the idea of a general strike bringing down the entire system of government, for reasons local to my birthplace.

In answer to various questions asked on Facebook:

Victoria: yes, it was an easy procedure; once you've lived here for seven years (if you have an unlimited residence permit or authorisation to settle in Belgium) you just bring a translation of your birth certificate to the town hall and fill in a form. They charge you a tenner for giving you a new ID card (see illustration below, with my ID number and signature chopped out). There are various other more bureaucratic mechanisms, but it was pretty painless. See here for the full list, and here for the specific mechanism we used.

Svetlana: Obviously I understand why you, as a proud citizen of your own country, would never do such a thing!!!! But I explained it all here. The only practical difference in our lives is that voting in all elections is now compulsory.

Andy: Flemish. It doesn't say so officially, of course, but you'll notice that the card is basically in Dutch and English.

Tineke: I believe that it is an electoral district!!!!! (And I'm never home in time to watch that programme, but maybe I'll start buying the comics.)

Peter/Howard: Ha ha, very funny.

Catie/Eleanor/Amadeo/Mark: Thanks!



The photograph isn't very flattering, but such things rarely are!

One of my regular google alerts is for news stories and blog entries naming our village. Usually this just throws up stories about the football team and newly posted Wikipedia pictures of the railway station. This weekend, however, it flagged up for me this rather sweet account by a blogger of her aunt's wedding in our local town hall.

It wasn't until I clicked on the photo album at the end of the entry that I realised there was something about the happy couple which would have made their marriage impossible in a lot of places.

Sometimes I really like this country.

They are handing out more free yoghurt in the Metro stations!

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.