There are several things that will forever be destined to get up my nose. One of them is invariably my finger, on one of its many hunter-gathering sorties. Another is the London Underground, an archaic institution that operates along the lines of an evil cartel, or a totalitarian state. It is the bane of London life. It is a daily hell from whose borne travellers do indeed return , albeit with only fragments of their soul remaining. Samuel Johnson spoke too soon when he exclaimed that to be tired of London is to be tired of life - had the Northern Line existed he would not have needed to consult his dictionary to find words to describe it. Apart from being the oldest and most expensive public transport system in the world, its employers seem to give only scant regard for those who have little choice but to submit themselves to its mercy day in, day out, thus adding to the clouds of resentment that hang gloomily above every Londoner but never actually rain - how un-British that would be.
Yet my second year students, on a recent trip to my beloved hometown, could not praise it enough. 'Wonderful', said one, naively. 'Always on time, you never had to wait more than a couple of minutes for the train to arrive.' I beg your pardon? This was London you visited? 'Except the people are cold - nobody talks to anybody, they are like robots'. This is more like it. I had shown them, before they left, the famous picture of Tony Blair on the Jubilee Line Extension immediately after trying to strike up a conversation with a young black woman - who ignored him, preferring the honest tones of her Walkman than the prepared statements of the Grinning One. He must have forgotten where he was. He sank back into his newspaper, standing up for good measure, despite the plentitude of seats behind him. Never mind, Tone. Now, this is not to say that Belgian trains are a social whirl to rival internet chat-rooms, but in England much more than in Europe there is a greater sense of personal space, and respect for the fellow person. As another student explained : 'People do not touch one another, even in crowds. And on the escalators, everybody stood on the right ; they are so disciplined in England.' It is certainly true that the concept of queuing is certainly alien to Belgians - except in Post Offices which are little more than places where people who enjoy this 'queuing' idea go to practise - as is courtesy on escalators, in fact I got the impression that these Belgians were rather proud of this, but whether it is English discipline is debatable. They however remain convinced. 'What I noticed,' complained one, 'is that there is no way you can get on the bus or train without paying, like in Belgium.' I see your point, monsieur, but less than a week earlier I myself was given a fine on the Charleroi tram for not buying a ticket - a habit probably picked up in London!
The students had plenty to say about London and its people - and to be fair, most of it was highly positive. The British Museum was, despite being called 'dirty' by one young woman, one of the highlights, full of 'great mummies' and 'buddhist treasures'. However, the character of the Londoner was again called into question when it came to the roads themselves. 'I saw a cyclist, and he was riding fast,' recounted one aggrieved student. 'There was an old woman crossing the road, and he didn't even stop! He just went around her!' This coming from a Belgian was bad enough, but another agreed : 'I did not feel safe on the pavements when there were English drivers on the road.' You can imagine my double-take. Two words sprung to mind, pot and black, and I was not thinking about that 147 break I missed out on on one of my many holidays on fantasy island. I had to look out of the window to check I was still in Belgium. Yep, sure was - in fact what I saw was the Square Hiernaux roundabout, which is also known as the Vicious Circle. Belgians are famously bad drivers, having only reluctantly introduced licenses in the late sixties - available simply by application - and driving tests a good decade later. Priority on Charleroi roads is given to Those Who Dare. The peculiar thing is that if you walk near the road here, a car will stop to let you cross, despite it being far easier for them to carry on and save them time and you embarassment - felt only if you have grown up in England, mind. If you are already on the road, on the other hand, you place your life in their steering-wheel-unfriendly hands. Crossing the road here has for me become a time when I metaphorically get an email alert from Death with the message, game of chess, sometime?
It was not the roads that caused their biggest problem in London, and I knew what they would complain about most. The Englishman's reputation for food always goes before it whenever a Francophone visits the Sceptred Isle. 'The food…ugh!' This was a common reaction whenever I nervously quizzed the students on the subject. London is a multicultural mélange of cuisines, notably the curry-houses of Bangla Town in the East End, which I would list among the top five necessities in any afterlife. So, if they were so disgusted, what did they eat? 'I could not believe what my host family gave me,' one exclaimed. 'Carrots!' Carrots? Never, what torture they had to endure! He went on: 'Spaghetti, cooked in vinegar. And on another day, orange sauce, on everything.' Everything? 'Yes, on meat, on pasta, everthing.' This was clearly bizarre. I had to ask them if they hadn't actually dreamed it, and it transpired that they were actually talking about marmalade, although quite how it ended up on the pasta is anyone's guess. Heaven knows what they were doing with it. And vinegar soaked spaghetti? On reflection, I think I know what happened. Either they had gone to London full of the fear of English food that had been drilled into them in exactly the same way that we in the United Kingdom have grown up around stories of funny foreign food and habits (people still ask me back home whether the Belgians have proper indoor toilets yet), and had simply closed their eyes and fashionably laughed at an Anglo-Saxon culinary faux pas, or, and this seems to be the most likely, someone had slipped some LSD into their milkless tea. Vinegar remained their bugbear. 'They put vinegar on chips! Can you imagine it?'
Belgium invented chips. This is something young Belges learn in primary school. A Belgian introduced chips to Britain, via Scotland (an Italian brought the fish aspect into it, incidentally). So therefore, if another country has chips, they will only ever be inferior. One student expert complained that they were not cooked at the right temperature in England, for example. 'And they are too big and greasy.' Personally, I prefer English chips, because they taste like they once used to be potato, whereas the skinny frites evolved into the yellow items found in McDonalds. The Belgians would not have it, and staunchly attacked every aspect of British eating, as if afraid that, like the French are about the language, it will eventually encroach and take over. Nothing escaped the onslaught. Beef, chicken, chocolate (naturally the Belgians are again the masters), mint sauce, roast potatoes, gravy, vegetables, salads, jelly, even that time-honoured traditional rustic dish, mini-pizza. It should be remembered that this is a country which freely serves mussels with, of all things, fries, which bases its cuisine on that of the horse, frog and snail munching French ('Does it move, monsieur? Well drown it in garlic and put some parsley on it, cordon bleu!), and prefers to hide the fresh milk away for those special occasions when, say, Belgium wins the World Cup.
There is one area in which they truly and undeniably rule the world - beer. They have hundreds of different varieties, each with its individual character and potency. So what did they make of London's nightlife? 'We did not go out to central London often, but we went to the pubs in Beckenham every night. Very expensive!' All in all, it seemed they were happy enough with english pubs. 'A great ambience, people are friendly,' one told me. 'Except, we were dancing and the English were just sitting hunched over their drinks.' Ah. They did not judge everybody to be like this, thankfully - it would be like coming to Belgium and only going into those beery over-lit cafés full of local old smokers that sit there for twenty-four hours. 'Then, the place closed! At eleven o'clock!' The British isles are unique in Europe in that it does not allow people to drink after certain hours - such a thing would be unthinkable in Belgium - and this has given rise, in my opinion, the culture of heavy drinking, get the rounds in before eleven, don't relax…we therefore have vastly inferior beers and lagers and anyone coming to Belgium from England will freely admit that. The students did venture to the Centre on one night, going to the Voodoo Lounge nightclub - and it seems that the males at least will have a lasting impression of our capital's women from this. 'They are hot!' grinned David, who was very enthusiastically motioning what it was he liked about them. 'They are not like here. They grab you all the time and get you to dance up close to them.' I have lived there twenty-four years, I don't remember this ever happening! He made it clear which women he liked best. 'The Pakistani and Indian girls, they are the hottest.' I never thought he was talking about the sportswear clad, Arsenal supporting English girls you see in pubs in the suburbs. 'Oh no,' one Flemish student, who was visiting Charleroi on an exchange, butted in. 'No, the English girls themselves are ugly.' The Walloons who make up my class looked at him, and I could see on their faces that what they were thinking was, You're no oil painting yourself mate. Van Gogh perhaps. This was getting into the territory of Belgian politics, however, so I hurriedly changed the subject.
All of which got me thinking. One of the things that gets up my nose is the way people prejudge other countries' manners and ways based on hearsay, or a simple brief visit. A week in London can give you a taste but you can never know a place fully in such a short space of time. I have been in Belgium for six months and believe I can at last comment on the country, yet my own views of it change from day to day. However, it is something that all of us do, and cannot help. Mention Belgium to anyone in Britain and they will think of grey bureaucrats working away in Brussels hives to undermine what Jeremy Paxman, in his book The English, calls 'the true thousand year Reich, that of England'. Yet Belgium is so much more diverse than that, and far from being grey, its people seem to display a beautiful characteristic - a complete lack of irony, found in the comments about how we drive, how much beer we drink, the strange way we mix foods, and in the way we keep our houses, as one student summed up: 'I found the English houses bizarre - everyone has huge great big cars, but tiny houses, which are kept so dirty, as if they are never cleaned.' In Belgium, they do not have Wheely Bins - it is common practice to dump your rubbish in bags in the street outside your house. Next they will be telling me that in London, it rains too much ...
Belgium in Pictures - Quick, I'm gonna be Sick
