PYJAMA LAMA

Last weekend was no-car Sunday in Brussels, and a number of the more commercially minded establishments of this parish were maximising on the footsore and weary wandering the streets to draw attention to their services with the offer of a sit down and a beer or a cup of tea. One of the local pubs organised a street party with barbecue, beers on tap, raffle, bouncy castle, etc.

Even the local Tibetan Buddhist temple was at it. Really. I wouldn't normally have gone in, but as everyone else was having a nose around, I poked mine in too. It was very jolly inside, all bright colours, a bit like the Jackanory studio. It's situated in Olmstraat, which seems very appropriate. There weren't any Tibetan monks in attendance, they may have gone off on one of their weekend jaunts. I saw them piling out of their house into a luxury tour bus a few weeks ago, presumably to go and see their boss who was visiting Paris. Quarsan saw a bunch of them in Media Markt shopping for electronics (MBIAT of 3 September). The centre was being minded last Sunday by a number of nice elderly Belgian ladies, the Buddhists seem to have a joint venture going with the local WI. I ommed and ahhed around for a bit, picked up a few brochures, and departed with my most beatific I've-got-my-own-zen-garden-thank-you smile.

Om-megang? Nalanda Institute in Brussels

Now that Aunty Marianne has buggered off to Central America, I am angling to replace her as Domestic Goddess-in-Chief of Brussels. I was out sourcing material for curtains, and discovered THE most fabulous fabric store, dahlings. Les Tissus du Chien Vert is a veritable Ali Baba's cavern of cotton, linen, pure wool mixes, organza, taffeta, silks, satins, tweeds, ginghams, voiles, chintz, jersey, plaids, gabardine, and all manner of warp and weft. I am not much of a seamstress myself, but Brussels is full of little sewing shops where you can get everything done from a quick hem to a wedding dress, all you need to do is buy the fabric and throw in your own creative touch. The Chien Vert, or Green Dog, has two sister stores - Les Puces du Chien (the dog's fleas) or bargain basement, and Le Chien du Chien (the dog's bollocks!) where the very high-end stuff is to be found for evening gowns, wedding dresses etc. The inside of the posh store is worth a visit even if you're not shopping for cloth - it's quite a surreal experience in itself, with statues, boats hanging from the ceiling and floors designed like the decks of a sailing ship.

Le Chien du Chien - your dog would like it

I have something of the Nigella Lawson in me as well as Anouschka Hempel. My candlelit dinner parties used to be the high point of the Umbongo social calendar. Of course the conditions were much easier then, we had an army of servants to prepare, cook and serve the meal, and to clean up afterwards. Godwin was such a treasure. I wonder what happened to him? Tonight I am relaunching Daphne's Dinners, ably assisted by my Chinese cook Lee Ho McFook, although he has drawn the line at wearing the satin pyjamas I ran up for him with the leftover curtain lining, since, he says, pink isn't really his colour, and anyway he's making a point about Chinese militarism. If he wears his C.U. Jimmy hat while he's serving dessert, I'm sure my guests won't notice that the hundreds and thousands in the sherry trifle spell out "Free Tibet".

SIN CITY

Last weekend I went to Amsterdam, to meet some Polish friends who were there for a big TV industry fair. Apart from a brief stopover when backpacking 35 years ago and a long afternoon in the transit lounge at Schiphol, I had no knowledge of Amsterdam, and was looking forward to a frisson of fresh air after stuffy old Brussels.

Due to the massive influx of TV people for the fair, the only hotel room I could get was out of town on a sort of trading park, and although clean was pretty basic. It was also full of Poles. Even the receptionist was Polish. The other guests looked quite at home crammed into the refectory for a cold breakfast served by sullen waitresses. The what's-on magazine left in my hotel was quite different from the usual tourist advice. Several pages dealt with "sex", "drugs", "tattoos" and other off-beat tourist activities, and even told you where to hide your hard drugs if you were afraid of being searched by the police (no, not there. In your shoes, apparently). Amsterdam's city flag (above) calls to mind a zipper, or a bodice, or simply all the taboos which can be broken here.

However, it's not all sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. We took a boat tour of the canals, which are extremely picturesque, and then a tram down to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. Unfortunately it was late in the afternoon and they were both closed, but it is a pleasant city to meander around. We got a bit lost around the area where ladies sit in their windows, and had to take refuge in a coffee shop, where the coffee wasn't very good but after a while we got the giggles. The longer we stayed in there, the more hilarious we found it all. We rolled back to the hotel holding each other up after looking in the windows of sex shops.



Our hotel reception recommended a restaurant for rijsttafel, the Indonesian cuisine which has become to Holland what curry is to Britain. We must have got the last free table at Kantjil & de Tijger, so I would recommend booking in advance if you choose to go there. It is a smart, modern restaurant with no kitsch Indonesian decor. Not having the faintest idea what we were ordering, we picked out a selection of meat and vegetarian dishes, two kinds of rice and one bowl of noodles. The dishes that arrived were very diverse, ranging from fresh fruit to blow-your-head-off chicken, but on the whole very tasty. With three beers and a bottle of house white, we came out for just under 25 euros a head, with full tummies. A full rijsttafel menu can be had here for 26 euros, without wine.



On Sunday we set off on the train for Haarlem, a small town 15 minutes from Amsterdam, where we shuffled around looking at windmills, canals, churches and shop windows. As a globetrotter of some experience, I made sure I didn't go in ermine and pearls. Haarlem is quite charming, with narrow cobbled streets, picturesque canals and even a working windmill. On the Grote Markt we had lunch at L'Anders, which serves extremely good filled rolls, salads and soups. I think my Polish friends picked out this place in honour of General Anders who was a heroic cavalry officer during the second world war. The Polish cavalry is known, albeit apocryphally, for leading a cavalry charge on horseback against German tanks, and for being somewhat surprised when the Germans most unsportingly retaliated with machine guns.

If the Dutch army had resisted invasion (which they didn't to my knowledge), it would have attacked on bicycles. There must be more bicycles than people in Holland. How anyone recognizes their bike in a pile like this beats me.



The shops in Haarlem, which were unfortunately closed due to it being Sunday, looked rather better than what we have in Brussels. Shoes (leather, not clogs) and lamps were of particularly good design.

Very unusual lamps

A number of Amsterdam's shops are open on Sundays but are rather alternative, generally targeting consumers of herbal substances. It was mushroom season, to judge by the amount of shops advertising them, I expect it's a result of all that wet weather we've been having. I wondered if one of the pungent nostril-pierced scruffbags working in these shops might be my erstwhile protégé Scrumpy who had a great interest in agronomy - he was always bandying around scientific terms like "hydroponic". He set off for India a couple of years ago but I suspect never got past Amsterdam. However, I wasn't going to besmirch my white gloves to investigate under the dreadlocks. I toyed with a lovely Delft china pepper pot, but decided I didn't have room in my luggage. It had a lovely feel to it, though.

I was somewhat relieved to return to boring old Brussels on Sunday night after my trip to Sodom and Gomorrah, but strangely unable to stop thinking about that pepper pot.

EVE OF DESTRUCTION

A most peculiar spider

Wednesday morning came and went, and the earth was not sucked up into a black hole due to the Large Hadron Collider being switched on. Although I gather a number of kettles in the Geneva area blew a fuse around 8.30. If you want to know what it's all about, and have seven or eight minutes to kill, check out this BBC Horizon podcast LHC for dummies, where they explain how your front room is made of treacle (which increases the chances of the moon being made of cream cheese) and they're looking for some bloke called Higgs. Anybody could have told them he was in Guantanamo Bay but has gone back to Australia now. The bloke with the Russian accent had the best quote: "Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing". So reassuring.

It appears, however, that if a baby black hole was created, it would not hoover everything up in a fraction of a second, but might take as much as four years. I bet David Cameron and Barack Obama are not looking so smug now. How would you like to be the man (or woman) who leads your country into a black hole. What kind of policies would you need to instigate?

If I were in charge, I would immediately issue a copy of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to every member of the population. It's tag line "Don't Panic" is the only sensible thing to say under the circumstances. In fact, the Hadron Collider almost sounds as if it could have been invented by Douglas Adams, the man who gave us the Total Perspective Vortex, the Heart of Gold, and Deep Thought, the second most powerful computer ever invented, which produced the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. All right, don't all shout at once, we all know what the answer is.

They could of course abolish income tax, which would make them very popular. But if we were really heading for a black hole, I suspect most people would give up going to work anyway, let alone voting. It's now-or-never time, your last chance to try something you'd always wanted to do but never dared or could afford before. Even if it's illegal. You could kill your boss, for example. Or your husband/wife. You'd go to jail, but the world would end before your case came up. Some people might try heroin, or have sex with a total stranger. The Sun, ever one to reassure the public, gave some helpful suggestions as to how you could pass the time, which included trying out all 64 kama sutra positions, or eating 27 Big Macs.
I might start having a second small sherry before dinner.

If the world is really going to go phut in four years, it's not the best time to start a diet, or take out a mortgage. There will of course be idiots who will take out life insurance or put a bet on at William Hill at 1000-1. D'oh. It might be worth signing up to do a degree in astrophysics, there's an outside chance you could head this thing off at the pass. Building a rocket won't help, the rocket would be sucked into the black hole too. Although you can bet your bottom dollar Jeremy Clarkson will try.

Religious groups will have a field day. People who can translate "I told you so" into obscure languages will be much sought after.

Either way, I'd put money on three of the most popular names for babies next year being Gustav, Ike and Hadron. Nothing catches people's imagination like looming oblivion.

How will you while away the next four years waiting for the end of time? Well, you could start by seeing how the young boffins at CERN choose to explain the experiment, here:

CRIPES, SIRE!

Still hanging by a thread

Belgium, as you know, is divided into three autonomous regions - Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Flanders is Dutch-speaking and represents about 60% of the population of Belgium. Wallonia is French-speaking and represents about 30%. Brussels is in theory bilingual, but de facto French-speaking, and represents about 10% of the Belgian population, of which almost 40% are Eurocrats or native speakers of other languages.

It's complicated a bit by Brussels being geographically an island in the middle of Dutch-speaking Flanders and also being the capital of Flanders. But basically, the problem is that Flanders wants to absorb Brussels, with its high-profile European institutions, failing which it threatens to go for total independence, although in that case it would presumably have to accept to move the capital to Antwerp. A pure case of "if I can't keep the ball I don't want to play any more".

If Flanders breaks away, effectively forcing Wallonia to become a reluctant independent state too (think Czechoslovakia), the King will have no Belgians left to reign over and will have to go into exile. Portugal is quite accommodating to exiled kings. Brussels would become a landlocked city-state, which might be no bad thing, since it can get rid of the archaic and stupid web of regulations designed by the Francophones and the Dutch-speakers to tie each other up in knots, and start afresh.



The first thing to do would be to find a new King. A possible choice would be Jose Manuel Barroso, current President of the Commission and very well preserved man for his age (52). with a regal demeanor. His job is up for grabs in 2011, which would fit in quite well. He hails from Portugal, but would obviously have to become a naturalized citizen of Brussels. Perhaps he could do a house swap with King Albert. Brussels would obviously become officially English speaking, thereby causing great annoyance to the French, and Peter Mandelson may have to be discouraged from applying for the position of Queen. What should a citizen of the new anglophone Brussels should be called - a Brusseler? Brussellian? Brussie?

On the other hand, perhaps it might be a better idea to parachute in a real blue blood, as the British did back in 1830 with Leopold I von Saxe-Coburg. And who better than someone with a truly noble European pedigree dating back to George II of England, who was schooled in Brussels, and is related to most of the royal houses in Europe? The perfect man for the job.

All Hail King BoJo the First