OUT WITH THE OLD

I'm not optimistic about 2009. I feel the financial crisis has hardly shown the tip of its nose yet. It will be not so much a question of make do and mend, as do without altogether. Maybe even sell something.

*Takes long meaningful look in McChe's direction*

THE MOST EXCITING WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Two great monstres sacrés left us during the Christmas holiday. Hot on the heels of the great Harold Pinter, the divine Eartha Kitt sashayed through the Pearly Gates, where she will be met and stroked by 72 bronzed and oiled male models. Orson Welles described her as "the most exciting woman in the world".

She certainly liked a Young Man or three. If this is the future of care for the elderly, sign me up.

GAWD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!

Come inside, pour yourself a glass of my best cooking sherry, and warm yer cockles by the fire. You're never alone with a blog!





A peaceful Christmas to all my readers. I'm off to Blighty to investigate whether Mrs Pouncer is, in fact, me, and to benefit from the pound/euro exchange rate. It'll stop me worrying about the Belgian Prime Minister who has resigned for the FOURTH time since he took office.

I am going to advise King Albert to accept this time.

WITH MY BANJO, ON MY KNEES

Scouse Doris and I did a brief tour of the Brussels Christmas market on Monday but it was exactly like last year's and the year before that. Peruvian knitted alpaca eco-warrior bonnets, handmade soap, headscratchers, fake pashminas (2 for 10 euros), big wheel, Polish dolls, ice rink, flavoured gin, British tourists on weekend shopping trips (God knows why when a euro costs a pound), wooden toys, a refrigerated portakabin ambitiously labelled an "ice bar", the usual craft market rubbish. The trouble with Christmas markets is, when you've seen one, you've seen them all.

Andrea's roundabout, by La Machine: photographed by Jilou

The main, dare I say only reason for visiting the Brussels market again is the annual reappearance of two wonderful roundabouts, made by La Machine, those clever and ever-so-slightly mental French people who made the giant mechanical elephant, the giant little girl, and the 50 ft walking spider recently seen in Liverpool. They are like something out of a Jeunet & Caro film, magical and strange rides with no electronics or flashing lights, just whimsical barrel-organ music. The kids look quite at home on the back of a cicada, inside an octopus or riding up into the sky in a Tintin-type rocket which goes through the canvas roof of the carousel and right up into the sky, giving the wondrous tot a view right across the market. A magic roundabout, indeed, which never fails to make me smile in a whimsical Amelie-like way.


It was extremely cold on Monday night, too cold to stand around getting drunk. After a few banjos, a whizz round the stalls and a plastic plateful of tartiflette we were still stone cold sober and frozen to the bone and had to repair to the pub. I couldn't even get any good photos, as my gloves made it difficult to find the button. I'm going to the market at Grimbergen on Sunday, and I hope that will be a bit more exciting.

What's a banjo when it's at home, I hear you ask. In German it's Glühwein, in English mulled wine, in Polish grzany wino or grzaniec, but since Vera Slapp's first visit to Brussels with her deaf hubby Cyril, "vin chaud" became "banjo", and banjo it will always remain. In Wallingford, anyway.

Many years ago I attended a very posh pre-Christmas cocktail in Paris, where mulled wine was served by the English hosts. The French guests were flummoxed at being presented with a punchbowl of hot steaming grog, when they were expecting champagne. They grinned and bore it as well as they could, but one confided to me that there were only two occasions when you drank mulled wine in France - one being when you have just come off the ski slopes, and the other being when you are ill. The warming libation was, to them, like going to a party and being given a glass of Night Nurse.

In Poland they serve hot beer on the ski slopes. This is not as horrid as you might think, especially as you can flavour it with a dollop of fruit cordial to sweeten it. The custom has perhaps arrived with the influx of Poles, as the organisers of the Brussels Christmas market were offering hot "Kriek" cherry beer in a mug.

I always try to visit several Christmas markets during the month of December and get the first Banjo of the season in early. No two Banjos are alike - some stalls heat up the cheapo supermarket stuff straight out of the bottle, whereas others prefer to customize their brew, adding cloves, ginger, cinnamon and citrus fruits. The essential ingredient is cheap red wine. Needless to say, after several Banjo-stops on a tour of a Belgian Christmas market, you will be singing "Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer" and speaking fluent Flemish.

If visiting a Flemish Christmas market, beware of the real advokaat, which is what custard would be like if Ferrari made it. I still have half a jar in my fridge from last Christmas, I keep it in case the heating breaks down. In Antwerp last year it all went pear-shaped, and consequently an 8 p.m. curfew has been decreed this year.

Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar.

IS IT BECAUSE I IS BLACK?

The squeals of excited Belgian and Dutch children will fill the air tomorrow night, when Sinter Klaas (Saint Nicholas) will distribute their presents. This year the Antwerp authorities have kindly allowed him to keep the cross on his mitre, after some discussion that it might upset the minorities, but the PC lobby lost. However, in a trade-off for the cross, he might have to lose his sidekick, Zwarte Piet, a kind of black-and-white minstrel.

Claims that Piet's face is black because he shimmies down the chimney - not because he's a caricature of an African - didn't impress the Moroccan street kids in the rough end of Amsterdam, who gave Sint a hard time, so Moroccans were hired to play Zwarte Piet and chase them off in Arabic. In 2005 Dutch broadcaster NOS changed the story and made Piet slide down a rainbow instead of a chimney, to explain the multi-coloured Piets who replaced the black ones that year. How long before Piet is carrying a gay umbrella and openly flaunting his civil partnership with Niklaas? It's political correctness gone mad, I tell you.