So it was half term for the kids, the older one was busy studying for her GCSEs and the smaller one and I were lucky enough to spend a few days in Bruges/ Brugge. We arrived via Eurostar in the late morning, slightly delayed by industrial action that impacted on the trains from Brussels, but in time for the market where we bought the lightest and best waffles ever tasted and some delicious strawberries. The market is on Wednesdays and finishes at 1.
It was interesting to take advice about languages from the waffle seller, I explained I spoke French but not Dutch, and she made it clear that in this area they would forgive me for speaking French because I am foreign, but that I might be better off just speaking English. And having known there was some tension but not really known what it was all about, I was not much clearer when she said we are a country that shouldn’t be a country. It always interests me just which bit of history people chose for their loyalties, their sense of belonging or nationality. You realise that the stability that we have in Europe within our nation States is fragile. We know about Britain and Spain and the devolution arguments there, but they are common across other countries in Europe, and then our own current EU UK in or out. While these things are discussed and decided democratically then at least we have peaceful methods for this change. So we discussed how a Belgian would know how to speak both and would know who to speak what to, so a linguistic sophistication in the end.
The “best” chocolatier in the world The Chocolate Line is meant to be in Bruges and we did visit the shop. It was full of very expensive chocolates in green tea and other oriental flavours. Interesting and pretty to look at but so expensive you might not wish to buy there. There were chocolate shops every where and most of them chains but there are meant to be about 5 shops which make thier own, we visited another one where we did buy and taste some lovely chocolate it is in the shop where the mother of the current patron still has the shop she started when she was young. Its called Dumon, and though fairly expensive, delicious.
The tunnel at the base of the clock tower
Brugges is a beautiful medieval city, that is a pleasure simply to walk around. We went to the wonderful groeninge museum where the real power lies in the earlier galleries. It is a wonderful exposition of the beautiful skill with which oil paints were used in very early times, and the technical abilities of those very early painters here. (The Januszczak BBC Dark Ages series which has been shown recently starts here on the steps behind the tower of the Markt, through this tunnel in fact.) It also struck me for the first time that Stanley Spencer was really a medieval artists who situated his biblical stories in his surroundings: So that most prosaically English of artists actually a decended culturally of van de Weyden. The city recognisable as it is today is the visible back drop of the bibilical imagery here. Previously I had always found the imagery in these landscapes fantastical, perhaps because in my mind they were associated with H Bosch. But there I was walking through those streets… These earlier galleries show 15th and 16th Century paintings of incredible beauty and skill.
Interestingly the Groeninge Museum holds a painting by Jan Provoost which is an example of ealry censorship: “The Last Judgement” 1525. He had painted mostly clergy as his religious souls who were damned. The council of Brugges ordered 25 years later, that this was painted over in line with Charles V decree that would not allow for the depiction of the religious clergy as disreputable. It was only uncovered in 1965. Click on the link above for a little taste, but go there if you can.
We also went to the museum of torture, a reminder of the duality of the society at the time. I had learnt about this in school but forgotten a lot of it. This small museum had a pan European theme, linking the use of torture to classical roots in Eqypt, Greece and Rome and including law from all over Europe including Britain. The exhibition made clear that most of these tortures would never be used on the noble classes, and a disproportionate number were for controlling women. The way force and fear were the main means of control became clear, but it was quite difficult to make that sit with the beauty all around. Here is one of life’s truths, that the producers of beautiful things are not always the producers of beautiful societies.
I suppose what I am thinking is that the best of the developments of the late 20th and Early 21st Century are those based on notions of rights rather than on fear. Because this is where we go when fear wins out. And the truth is fear is a powerful tool and therefore tempting for the powerful. But it did strike me as we came out of that museum just how much hate there was floating about under the surface of the human psyche. So how that fear is manipulated now, and (if the progress we have made is to mean anything) the erosion of the rights gained has to be resisted.
And then we went to the chocolate shops to buy chocolates for the people we love at home.
