MUSSEL SHOALS

I get a ridiculous amount of paid leave which I never manage to take, and so it accumulates year on year. I can't sell it back to the firm, so it's a case of use it or lose it. I took three weeks to use up some of the backlog. I had all sorts of good intentions, but .... the weather changed for the worse and somehow I couldn't galvanize myself to visit the war cemeteries .... however, I read a few books and watched or re-watched a few films, and with the help of Belgian railways' advantageous summer tariffs and the wonderful economical Cambio car-sharing system, I did manage to make three visits out of Brussels, to Antwerp, Ostend and Namur. So I think I can just about hold my head up off the sofa.


Antwerp never disappoints. I even managed to find some merit in the modernised part of the railway station this time, especially the train tracks on three levels, although I never bypass the ticket hall which is like a cathedral.




Feeling a bit peckish, I headed for Wagamama, it's the only one in Belgium, but ended up by mistake in one of those sushi bars where you sit at a counter and help yourself off the conveyor belt and then they count up the dishes afterwards. An amusing way to have lunch and those sushi things are surprisingly filling. But I really wanted noodles.

The Meir is a great shopping street, with majestic buildings, sculpture, C&A and everything. I browsed around the Stadsfeestzaal, the old municipal concert hall, which has been turned into a shopping mall. A sell-out to Mammon it may be, but a lot more people get to see the beautiful interior this way.

At least you still have M&S

Inside Antwerp's Stadsfeestzaal

Crisis, wot crisis? Shopping always gives me a thirst for champagne

On what is now my third or fourth visit to Antwerp, I finally visited the Rubens house, where Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked in comfort, being quite the 17th century celeb. Rubens is known for painting fat ladies, hence the term Rubenesque.

The chubby-chaser's house

Rubens: The Birthday Cake

After a meander through the delightfully kitsch old town, I pitched up on the banks of the Scheldt where one of the tall ships was berthed, the Port and City of Antwerp being sponsors of the Tall Ships Race since 2004 and one of this year's four race ports, along with Aalborg, Kristiansand and Hartlepool, where the last of the four races should be happening around now. Of course if I'd been paying attention I might have known that the tall ships would be sailing majestically down the Scheldt in mid July, but there you go, I missed it.

Poland's Fryderyk Chopin

I wandered back through the Antwerp's new docklands development, which is not exactly Canary Wharf, but give it time. Antwerp's growing reputation as trendsetter and fashion capital may mean that the overpriced shoeboxes will soon be selling like hot cakes to the likes of Dries Van Noten and his pals, and the redundant wharves may be rivalling San Francisco's Pier 39 before long. Antwerp is still a working port, but the new modernised docks have been moved downriver a few miles.

Last manually-operated crane on the old Antwerp docks,
with new docklands museum in the background

I spent a very wet Saturday afternoon in Oostende, a seaside town which I thought I'd been to before, but once there, realized I hadn't. I had probably been through it in the old days when the only way to get to Germany was by ferry. (Yes I was born way before budget flights. I even pre-date Freddie Laker). There is still a car ferry operating between Ramsgate and Ostende. It is a busy resort, seemingly very popular with Belgian chavs. There's something about seeing three generations of a family, grandma in a miniskirt with a tattoo on her lower leg, mum in tracky bottoms with four inches of black roots showing and fag ash dripping into her chips, that makes you want to snatch the baby out of the pram and leave it on the doorstep of one of the glitzy villas of Knokke-Heist, except it's sucking on what might be a crack pipe and you don't know the etiquette in these situations.

James Ensor "Intrigue"

Oostende has two claims to fame: Anglo-Belgian painter James Ensor lived and worked here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in 1981 it was briefly the home of the late Marvin Gaye, who wrote Sexual Healing here. The album on which Sexual Healing featured was also recorded in Belgium - at a village called Ohain, near Waterloo, south of Brussels, in Katy Studio which was the birthplace of many a chart-topper. The chips are so much better than at Abbey Road.

Adopted Belgian Marvin wondering whether to put ketchup or mayo on his frites





Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing