GHENT LETTER:There's no pulse of Herman Van Rompuy beating here this afternoon. No weight exerted by Lisbon, writes JOHN FLEMING
IT’S A Flanders field. A gang are wielding sticks and emitting jets of Dutch as they slap the wood against percussion instruments. Standing on a patch of faded green with batons, the outdoor drum class bangs out a beat that fills the park in Ghent.
Belgian sociolinguistic schisms seem miles away from this riverside glade where a philosophy doctorate student has invited his pals to celebrate his birthday. Sturdy iron bikes and prams seek the magnetic shade of a tree. Blankets are spread and there’s cava, water and wine.
Speech switches between Dutch and English; a soft football awaits mockery of faded World Cup memories; the food is being decimated.
The drum class goes on: repetition, repetition, repetition. The music floats off a few minutes downriver to a music shop selling those drumsticks as well as modern S-shaped purple electric violins and a brooding skeletal cello. Bikes glint past lazily, the heat of the day being politics enough.
Sitting over a coffee at a bare table outside a wooden bar, I stare across at the dubious delights of an adult cinema. French subtitles?
Down in Brussels, dry-cleaned suits and diplomatic smiles are well into a six-month tour of duty as Belgium occupies the EU’s rotating throne.
Too easily misread as sterile source of good and bad directives that crawl this way, Brussels presides as symbolic heart of the whole social, monetary and cultural EU affair. And as though the capital were the eye of a needle, Flanders and Wallonia frown through it across linguistic, economic and political borders.
There’s no pulse of Herman Van Rompuy beating this afternoon in Ghent. No weight exerted by Lisbon. No talk of underwriting the dry rot of Greek debt.
Ailing common currency? Mutterings about submitting economic budgets? Nah. It’s all drowned out by Chilean music and a girl ordering a Hoegaarden, her friend smiling to reveal a dental brace.
Let’s head south, across the bloodstream that might boil occasionally and find form in barbed internecine wit.
Traverse a courtyard party in the capital’s Moleenbeek region, where someone with the “Van” prefix in their name spews vitriol at the leeching weight of jobless Walloons. Ignore late-night music that pounds African, rap, reggae and techno in a shared syntax of youth. Pass the Moroccan local whose merguez sausages sizzle on Molenbeek’s rue de Ribaucourt. He stares as a girl in a bikini passes, scant in everything including her regard for the Muslim area’s fundamentalist values.
An hour down from Brussels is Binche, a medieval walled city and proud Walloon exemplar. Surrounding slag heaps testify to its mining past and are now protected structures. The famed mask museum has a half-dozen visitors wandering around its storehouse of world folklore and mardi gras festivals. It houses a signed document from Unesco bestowing world heritage status on Binche’s annual raison d’etre, the fête des gilles.
Someone in L’Arlequin bar remarks how the summer has slipped past. Most of the photographs in the estate agent’s window are fading. A clownish man in a sailor suit waves a trumpet, hoping you’ll pay him to go away.
The place feels fallen from grace, awaiting an upturn. But Binchois and Ghentois share one timeless and booming industry: the manufacture of jokes at each other’s expense.
Wallonia was once wealthy from heavy industry. Now its coal-transporting wide canals seem stagnant. An empty refinery perches like a dead heron on the horizon. The jobless rate is far higher than in the north. Flanders fares better with service industries: such economics add weight to the argument for separation.
History’s mill wheel keeps turning – Ghent was once the third-biggest city in Europe. Until the 13th century, it dwarfed London and Moscow. Today, it has one-quarter of a million people.
While right-wing Flemish parties such as Vlaams Belang have boomed, socialism lurks in its past.
By Dampoortstation, a 1928 corner building proclaims the logo Vooruit (forwards) – a relic of the unions that emerged from its linen, cotton and metal industries. The word flutters now as a linguistic flag, addressing a cluster of Turkish shops.
Istanbul music blasts from a dangerously driven car. The old men outside a kebab restaurant freeze for a second, caught in a Northern School painting of perpetual mingled still life.