Antwerp

Caroline and I set off for Belgium last Thursday at about nine in the morning. I was all for a much earlier start, coming from Aus where you have a day’s drive just to get to the next city, never mind crossing borders. Caroline just gave me a funny look and said: "we’ll be there in good time for lunch even if we leave at ten, and you don’t have to take your passport".

She also told me I would know when we crossed the Belgian border because (a) everybody’s mobile ‘phone would ping as the server changed from Dutch Telecom to Belgecom, (b) the cows would change from black-and-white to white and caramel (c) the roofs of the houses would not have the pointy bit above the front door, but the slopey bit instead. And so it turned out. Amazing how many people carry a ‘phone about their person. Ping, ping, ping, up and down the train.

I was totally gobsmacked by Antwerp Centraal railway station. Forget St Pancras, Grand Central and the Gare du Nord, they come a poor second. I don’t know why they bother with whatever excuse for a palace the Belgian king lives in – they should move the royal household straight into the Antwerp station, they will be the envy of every crowned head in Europe. Save a bit of the taxpayers’ money too, living at the railway station: there are some good snack bars – be a lot cheaper than the royal chef, and the souvenir stalls are handy sources of gifts for visiting dignitaries. All those keyrings and teaspoons.

Antwerp’s main drag reminded me a lot of Regent Street: lovely buildings, here and there a fountain, a few benches and a statue. I like the guys the Belgians put up on pedestals: all artists, none of your warlords.

We saw the Rubens House where he lived and worked most of his life; he must have been pretty affluent b/c it is a beautiful house and garden, and no shortage of marble pillars, statues and sweeping staircases. As I visited the various churches and art museums in Belgium, I could see how he got to be rich – he certainly had a lot of work. Such enormous canvases, too – if he charged by the sq foot he’d be a millionaire.

Walked down to the river Schelde where there is a castle and a huge statue of the jolly giant, Lange Wapper, who protects the harbour. The sculptor added two Lilliputian citizens who, through an unfortunate error of placement, are gazing earnestly up at his crotch.

The Cathedral of Our Lady in the town square is stunning. They started it in 1352 … I am always amazed at these wonderful edifices that they erected without benefit of modern technology. This one is gigantic: it has seven naves and 125 pillars; the vaulted ceiling is so far above that it makes you dizzy to look up. The windows are lovely but I have to say the Goudse Glazen in Gouda’s St Jans Church are better.

There are three huge Rubens masterpieces – the one I liked best is a triptych: The Descent from the Cross. He also painted the backs of the two side panels, so the whole thing is really a bit like Douglas Adams’ "trilogy in five parts".

Each of the panels refers to the carrying of Christ: in the main centre panel he is being carried down from the cross, the two wings show 1. a pregnant Mary in a picture hat arriving at an Italian villa, (for a Jewish peasant girl, she certainly got around a lot and had an extensive wardrobe) and 2. St Simeon carrying baby Jesus in his arms. The back of the left wing is a beautiful painting of St Christopher in a swirling red cloak fording the river carrying the Christ child on his back, to my mind the best of the five. But then Rubens got bored with the whole carrying theme and for the fifth panel he gave us a guy in a brown habit standing on a rock. I took this to be St Francis because he has a few assorted small animals milling round his feet.

Click here to see St Chris in a cloak and the V. Mary dressed for the races.

The next morning on our way to catch the train for Ghent, we stopped in at the Fine Arts Museum, a building that could have been designed by Cecil B de Mille. You can just imagine Peter Ustinov as Nero on the top step playing his fiddle while the peasants eat cake.

Once again we saw the regulation quota of Rubenses, plus some assorted Dutch and Flemish masters – they lean heavily towards Antoon van Dyck, another son of the city. But they also have a modern wing where we saw, inter alia, some lovely stuff by Rene Magritte whom until now I had always thought to be a Frenchman. But no, like Hercule Poirot and Tintin, he is Belgian.

Ghent

In Ghent, we went up the bell tower (in a lift!), 215 feet high, to see the great bells and a spectacular view of the city. The walkway is very narrow, but widens out at intervals to allow people to pass from the other direction. The parapet is waist high and unfenced: they don’t seem too worried about anybody chucking themselves or a loved one over the edge.

It was a cold and windy day, so there were not many people up there. At one of the wide spots, there was a pigeon sitting on a nest. One of her eggs was broken: I suppose somebody stepped on her nest, poor thing. Anyway, the bells made me think of Dorothy Sayers’ "Nine Tailors", and she was right: bells are scary. You wouldn’t want to be up there when they ring. They all have names and inscriptions and they are very old.

Checked out the cathedral, not as spectacular as the Antwerp one, but it had its share of Rubenses and a remarkable Bernini pulpit in white marble. The showpiece here is a 24-panel polyptych called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, for a sight of which you had to stump up three euros, but luckily we had seen the postcards: the painting is of a crowd standing round a manky sheep on a platform with light radiating from it, so we passed on the mystic lamb - spent the money on coffee and a waffle at a canalside café instead.

Paid a visit to the Gravensteen, a grim castle built in 1180 by Philip of Alsace, the Count of Flanders, when he came back from the Crusades. The very look of the place instils fear and awe: it seems the citizens of Ghent were a rebellious lot and needed keeping in line.

Just off the assembly chamber / dining hall, there is a manhole in the floor down which they put potential troublemakers in need of preventive detention. This move certainly prevented any trouble they may have made, as they promptly died from the cold and insanitary conditions. I peered down there and it is just a stone chamber shaped like a giant bottle, no way out that I could see. Personally I would have chosen a site a bit further removed from the dining room: the wailing and gnashing of teeth that came wafting up must have been a bit distracting, not to mention the smells.

As you may expect, Phil did not neglect to have a state-of-the-art torture chamber installed – it has everything that opens and shuts, including a small guillotine and a special kind of pitchfork to make sure those burned at the stake stayed the flames.

Lovely man, Phil, and a great Crusader – he also built a nice little chapel and had a couple of full-time priests on the payroll. The stake-burnees were roasted for their own good, to free them from evil demons. (Why does that have such a familiar ring?)

Brugge

Brugge is a delightful litle town. Cobbled streets, lovely old buildings and lots of picturesque little squares with outdoor cafes. The enticing smell of coffee and stroopwafels wafts forth. The whole town seems to live at a leisurely pace.

We took a round-fart, known here as a boot-fart, round the canals on a beautiful sunny morning: spring flowers, swans, quaint little bridges, the works. You could hardly hear yourself think for the clicking of shutters.

This is lace-making country … I watched a few of the lace-women do their magic and I can see why their lovely product is so expensive. I couldn’t afford so much as a doily. Makes you wonder about those society brides who trail yards of Brugge lace behind them while we peasants eat cake. I’ll be checking out all wedding pictures in Womens Weekly more carefully in future.

Popped into the Groeninge Museum to check out The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch. I fully expected it to be a large canvas, but it is quite small and you have to get right up close to see all those nasty little figures going about their horrid business. It is behind a sheet of thick glass, so the reflection also hampers the view. I am glad I saw it, but I shan’t lose much sleep if I never see another original Bosch, he really had a nightmarish imagination in his own surrealist way. I blame his parents: can you imagine the hell he must have had at school with a name like Hieronymus?

Staying with the theme of the weird, our next stop was the Church of The Holy Blood. Its main claim to fame is the Relic of the Precious Blood: a bit of cloth stained with what purports to be the blood of Christ, which was brought back from the Crusades by the Count of Flanders.

It is kept inside a rock crystal vial the size of a Hungarian salami, with an elaborate gold stopper at each end. We arrived just as the priest removed it from its reliquary and displayed it on the Throne of the Holy Blood for veneration. Interested to see what 2000-yr-old blood looks like, I joined the veneration queue but Caroline said firmly that she has seen the Holy Blood once already, thank you.

Inexperienced in the protocol of these matters, I observed my fellow-venerators closely. It seems you drop a curtsey, cross yourself and then you kiss the glass vial. I absolutely drew the line at the kissing part. After each person kissed it, the priest wiped it with a white hankie, without even a drop of Dettol, thus collecting the Aids, Sars and assorted Gum-rot germs together so he could wipe them back on again after the next punter‘s slobber. When my turn came, I omitted the entire bob-and-cross routine, just bent my head down to get a good close-up of the holy bloodstain, and then I moved right along.

What I saw, was a swatch of gauzy material with what looked like half a glass of Ribena spilt on it. Or maybe port. I wouldn’t have thought blood stays that colour for a week, much less twenty centuries, but what do I know. Maybe it’s a miracle.

Far be it from me to disrespect the sincere beliefs of others … I know people who believe that "workshop" is a verb and people who believe that that Elvis is alive. In the sixties a lot of people believed Paul McCartney was dead. (And who’s to say he isn’t? I suspect all the Rolling Stones have been dead for years, you only have to look at their complexions. It probably pays them to be dead, for tax reasons.)

But I digress – what I would like to see is for the Fathers of the Holy Blood to take the Holy Bloodstain round to Police HQ down the road and let the forensic lads there have a look at it. They understand bloodstains and how they differ from Ribena stains.

Then we had a look round the church treasury, where they have some really beautiful chalices, vestments and paintings. They also have another relic, four vertebrae of some saint, which I excitedly pointed out to Caroline, but she is quite blasé about relics, having seen a lock of John the Baptist’s hair (blond, strangely enough for a Semitic middle-easterner) as well as the armbones (radius and ulna both) of Charlemagne, in Aix-la-Chapelle, a.k.a. Aachen.She says the bits of Baptist and Charlemagne are just the star attractions in the Aix cathedral, but they have heaps of supporting-act relics there, bits of bone and body parts of assorted holy men, all in bejewelled golden reliquaries.

The question that leaps to mind is: how do they obtain of the bits of bone? The mind fairly boggles. It could have been a nice little earner for a medieval abbey, mind you: the minute the venerable abbot dies, the ‘phone starts ringing off the hook:

"Hallo, this is Father Baldwin calling from St Marzipan’s in Cornwall … I hear the abbot passed … deepest sympathy … any chance of a relic?"

"Yes, certainly, Father, they are boiling him down in the backyard as we speak. Shall I put you down for a nice thighbone?"

"Oh, dear no, we can’t afford a thighbone! I was hoping for something more modest – maybe a few vertebrae or a finger?"

"No worries, Father, I can give you your choice of an index finger or two metacarpals. And tell you what I’ll do for you, I’ll throw in a clean white hankie and a pint of the stuff Brother Cadfael brews up from Dettolbush leaves. It does wonders to limit gumrot among the pilgrims."

"That is very kind, we’ll take the finger and the hankie, but never mind the potion: our own Brother Andrew makes everybody gargle with some stuff he brews up from Listerine bush leaves and we haven’t had a case of gum rot in years."

"OK, then, the finger it is. Pax vobiscum to you and the lads."

Still agog with relics and miracles, we went along to Onze Lieve Vrouwenkerk round the corner, where we saw a real miracle, one that needs no forensic lab to authenticate it.

White marble that has come alive. An exquisite Michelangelo Mother and Child, the only one of his works to leave Italy in his lifetime. The Christ child is not a baby, but a little boy about three years old, and he stands between his mother’s knees, the way a mother would hold a lively three-year-old who may dash off at any moment. Her delicate features are full of expression and the little boy has a mischievous look – if I am to drop any curtseys, it will be to Michelangelo and not to a dodgy bit of textile.

Brussels

Next day we were off to Brussels, where we gave all churches a miss. Admired the stately town square – no matter which side you look at, it is lined with imposing and very beautiful buildings. The Town Hall façade has dozens of beautiful statues, each and every one a work of art.

By now I was a bit exhausted after five hectic days and my dodgy leg was playing up, so we took it easy and didn’t do too much. We went to see the Manneken Pis, of course, but there was such a throng of tourists snapping away that we couldn’t get close. He is very small, only about two feet tall.

We went to the town museum to see all his costumes. They dress him up in appropriate garb on different days. He has 600 costumes. The oldest one was given to him by King Louis XV of France in 16-something, very fancy courtier dress. I like his Elvis outfit and his Santa suit and his tennis outfit. The day we were there he was in the uniform of one of the Belgian regiments - it must have been their regimental day. He is so cute, I think the Austr Govt should send him a Croc Dundee outfit. Oh, yes, and I love his Prof Higgins tweed suit that Rex Harrison gave him when My Fair Lady won the Oscar.

We stood in the street and stared at the statues on the Stock Exchange, trying to pick which are the Rodins, but it was not v satisfactory because none of them looks like his work at all, they are all v finicky and full of twiddly bits.

For our last night in Belgium, we had a slap-up dinner at a v nice restaurant. Caroline shouted. The Belgians understand food.

Back in Haarlem after five lovely days, for a bit of R&R before heading off for three days in London.

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