Brussels
From my diary: Got to the city late. The streets were deserted. Hard to believe. Tram to Gare du Nord, missed the first one, saw skinheads, or maybe irony-skinheads. First thing I see outside the deserted station is a fresh pile of human shit and some prostitutes freezing in the night. Feels like home. Walk around the following morning. The design of the underground, art on the ceiling, space, colours, clean though grubby. Grote Markt is amazing, I could stand and stare for hours. A chef in a window, like the picture in an advent calender. Blue sky, chilly and lovely. Walk to the park, see backstreet tourist restaurants setting up for the day on grimy pavements, the crazy biscuit shop (huge wooden moulds), ghostly lacemaking automaton. Magpies in the park. See the Belgian media clamour around the parliament building (later see the report on TV). Lovely architecture and crappy architecture.

Noses
Train to Brugge is busy. The land is similar to that in the UK, boxy houses, plain gardens. Differences: horses in muddy backyard paddocks, old man cycling by the canal. I doze, mesmerised. Old ladies sitting opposite share around sweets that look like noses.

You say Bruhhuh not Brug
Clear black water in the canals, jumbled up roads, grand squares, medieval courtyards, cobblestones, bicycles. Spookiness everywhere.

Plastic sheets
Sweat all night and wake up angry. Fuckers! Cheapskates! Rip the plastic sheets off and stuff them in a cupboard, Hotel is designy, but populated by English wankers. I guess they’ve had sweaty, sleepless nights too. Men at breakfast stinking of stale beer. Annoyed about staying in a tourist town, hate the cynicism of the visible tourist industry, feel like an idiot. Outside the sun shines through gaps in a wall down an empty street misty with the morning, bright illumination, golden building sparkles. Magnificent.

Flemish Primitives
I like old paintings, very old paintings, very much. I like medieval paintings, especially Flemish paintings. The things that I like best about these paintings are as follows: they are very old and give you ideas and notions about the distant past, they are not very realistic, they depict fantastical faraway lands, they are colourful, they portray funny-looking people according to standards of beauty and righteousness that have long gone, they are finely detailed (there’s always something new to notice every time you look at the painting), they mix up time and narrative, they required great skill and patience to produce, they show religious themes yet show the man-made nature of religion, they are weird and imaginative, right and wrong is strongly delineated. But the thing I like best about medieval European painting is that it often presents extremely graphic gruesomeness. In Bruges we saw crucifixion upon crucifixion, nails driven in, wounds, blood and gore, demons grabbing sinners and dragging them to hell, torture, death and mayhem. This is the kind of thing I like to see when I am on holiday.

The Flayed Man
The painting that I will never forget is The Judgement of Cambyses by Gerard David, who was born in 1523. It depicts a legend in which a corrupt judge is flayed alive so that his skin may be draped on the judge’s throne as a warning to others considering straying from upholding the law. It’s a diptych really, one painting shows the judge being arrested, and also his sin, but it’s its sister painting that is so completely compelling. You can’t not look. Your eyes and your brain are out of synch, eyes say: “the man is being flayed, that’s his skin they are cutting off,” brain says: “what’s that drapey white stuff that looks like fabric? And why is that man’s leg red? And so on. It is the most cruel and brutal painting I have ever seen, painted by someone who knew what agonising pain looked like. The judge’s face is unbearable. Every cut of the flaying knife shows upon it. His eyes are almost dead, his jaw is clenched, he is suffering obscene awfulness beyond comprehension. A crowd stands around him and you look at their reactions to the atrocity. Some are impassive, most are trying to get a look, many are grim-faced too. The flaying men go about their business, untroubled. The judge’s arms and ankles are tied to the table, there is no escape. It’s very SM, very first couple of chapters of Discipline and Punish, and the weird perspective, bright colours and clarity of the painting make it very dreamlike too. Or nightmarish.

Holy things
We see holy bones, a pope’s shoes, a saint’s casket (with hankie attached to a chain for wiping the surface after you’ve kissed it), holy paintings, lots of churches, and the life-sized head of St John the Baptist cast in silver with a tiny window on the crown, inside which is a note and seal of authentication from some ancient holy scrote.

The Holy Blood
The Basilica of the Holy Blood is home to a vial of Jesus’ blood. A few times a day the vial is presented to the public for veneration. A priest comes out and sits on a special throne. He says a few words and prays for a bit. He holds up the vial of holy blood. It’s in a glass tube within a bigger glass tube that is decorated with gold. The basilica is also heavily decorated with gold and fine art and tapestries, its treasures must be priceless, paid for by… who? Who pays for this? The priest invites us to form an orderly line if we would like to venerate the holy blood, so we do. This is the thing to do in Bruges, it’s a bit of a tourist event, but there are real believers amongst us in the queue. The priest ignores the tourists and concentrates on the believers, after they have knelt or kissed the vial, he wipes it over, asks where they are from, and hands them a prayer card in their language of choice. I touch the vial when my turn comes, hoping to have been proved wrong about god, hoping for some kind of electricity from the vial. There’s nothing of course but I must have looked holy trying to feel something because the priest gives me a prayer card. Outside, I tell Simon that I’ve had a revelation and that now I believe. He doesn’t fall for it. That blood isn’t real either.

Ghent
In Ghent it’s a freezing day. We get the wrong tram, we get turned away from a café – why? I don’t know. But eventually we get to see The Mystic Lamb, a painting by Jan van Eyck, a stunning painting. We pay some money just so we may look at the painting for 15 minutes. It’s a wonderful painting but man, those christians know how to scam money out of people.

Frans Masareel
In Ghent, quite by chance, we get to see something that really is holy. Simon has a book of woodcuts by Frans Masereel, but it’s never occurred to me that the artist might have been Belgian. There’s an exhibition of his work, so we trudge over town to see it. Masereel was a communist/socialist, his work appeared in newspapers. We see his prints in newspapers, we see the woodblocks he made, we see his prints, his tools. He hated censorship, but was often censored. He created a series of woodcuts called The Idea in which he depicts an idea as a beautiful naked woman that climbs out of a man’s head, she runs naked down the street, she will not be clothed and she cannot be killed, people try to suppress her but she will not be held down, she lives on, long past the man’s death, her image is spread around the world and her beauty shines. The idea is holy.

Galatasaray
The tourist board is well organised in Bruges, they offer leaflets for this, maps of that, useful information of all kinds. We pick up a What’s On booklet and are drawn to this description: "two drummers, three-piece horn section and electronics wizard." Electronics wizard! Like Brian Eno! It turns out to be a band called Galatasaray. There are so many people in this band – the description neglected to mention the three guitarists - that they barely fit on the stage. They play in a muggy bar. They play very loudly but by god they are good. We get a CD and some stickers, feel like fans, can’t quite believe something we’ve come across so randomly could be so good. That listing in the tourist booklet must have been written a long time ago.

The card I made for Simon
The original painting hangs at the Groeninge Museum. It’s called Death and the Miser, it was painted between 1465 an 1529 and is by Jan Provoost. It looks like this:


When I got home I made a xmas card for Simon. It looks like this: