Time for a mini holiday, ostensibly between finishing the book and starting the Edinburgh show. I am gigging almost every night from Monday until the end of July, so this is almost my only chance to have some fun. It was an early start (6am) to get the Eurostar to Brussels, especially given that last night's gig didn't finish til after midnight, but all ran smoothly and we were in our hotel by lunchtime.
We headed for the Grand Place, the extremely impressive and expansive main square, built in the late 1690s and ate chips and drank beer in the sun in an overpriced cafe overlooking the Hotel de Ville, which is a town hall and not even a hotel - those crazy Belgians! There was a balcony half way up where a presumably newly married couple were waving to the throngs below, pretending they were royalty. The bride threw her bouquet. I didn't see who caught it. Hopefully it didn't knock anyone out.
Brussels may have the reputation of being the dull centre of European government, but the old town seems to have survived the various conflagrations that Belgium has been involved in and the gilded buildings are something to behold. We went for a walk, popping into a slightly disappointing and small Museum of Chocolate, in which a chocolatier showed us the dull process by which chocolates are made. He spoke in French but then translated the pertinent part of each sentence into English in a rapid monologue that he maybe has to do ten times an hour. I wondered if it was slowly driving him crazy and if one day he would pour his vat of molten chocolate over some unsuspecting tourist's head and then smash all the little chocolate models that he had on display before telling everyone to fuck off.
I hope he does.
It would be about all that would make the museum interesting (and I really like chocolate).
We then headed up the road to see the Manneken Pis, which the people of Brussels are inordinately proud of, judging by the number of souvenirs that have his image on them. It is a small statue of a pissing boy. I saw something similar when we were in Sicily and have just written in my new book about how such things still made me laugh even now I'm in my 40s, but somehow, because the Belgians are making so much of this similar image and people are crowding around it having their photos taken and someone has dressed him up in a little costume, it seemed a bit too desperate and I didn’t find it funny at all. Even when I noticed that whoever dressed him was forced to make a hole for his weeing acorn penis in the middle of the T shirt because they had misjudged where the tiny imp's genitals would be. You can buy corkscrews of the Manneken Pis where like some kind of pig human hybrid the bottle opening device emerges from the little boy's groin in what might be considered poor taste. Especially in a country with such a poor record with paedophilia. Later on a bus we saw what looked like an advert for a Paedophile film, with a blurry picture of an adult holding a child’s hand and the word "Pedophile" in large letters blaring out at us. I was a bit shocked by this, until I realised it was actually a warning to parents to look after their kids. It was anti-paedophile, rather than pro, which was a relief. Even Belgium hasn't gone quite that far as yet.
I drank a few more beers after dinner, which made me feel even more sleepy than I had been already. Much as I love drinking beer in open squares in European capitals I think that my tolerance to the stuff is getting so weak that I might soon have to stop. Three glasses had me more or less knocked out and I was soon snoring away (another effect that beer seems to have on me), so at least one of got some sleep.
