Hunger

I recently went to see Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and more particularly about Bobby Sands, the first of the men to go on hunger strike and the first to die.

For me at least the film was unsatisfying. The hunger strikes had been such a large part of my own life at the time that I learned nothing new, either factually or emotionally. I know what happened, and I knew the passions on both sides - passions I shared, I would have been at Bobby Sands funeral if it had not coincided with my university exams.

The most strange thing about the film is the way it completely ignores everything that happened outside the prison, with the exception of the assassination of one prison guard. By doing so, it gives the impression that the hunger strikes were an intimate action that happened only within the secrecy of the prison, when in fact they represented a massive explosion of popular anger and activism. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, organised, agitated, and voted in support of the hunger strikers, but this was ignored in the film. The fact that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike was relegated to a mere title at the end of the film. Yet this is a fact that remains significant in Northern Irish politics a generation later.

Clearly the producer (Steve McQueen) set out to present only the intimacy of Bobby Sands life and death in the prison, but to an audience ignorant of the background this could have the effect of making the whole thing seem irrelevant. I watched the film in a Brussels cinema surrounded by Belgians who, in all likelihood, did not even recognise the voice-over of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps believing her entirely one-sided statements to reflect a 'neutral' narrator. The bilingual subtitling did not make clear that the drawling voice was one of the main protagonists in the story.

The Beach, by Alex Garland

I got (gently) criticised for piggy-backing on Amazon.com reviews when I blogged a few of the books I have read recently, so this time I'll ignore Amazon, and try to use only my own words.

My first thoughts on The Beach, before I started it, were slightly negative. My copy (shown above) has Leonardo di Caprio on the cover, as he starred in the film version of the book. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know what it is like, but when publishers use a film to retro-sell the book, it worries me. In addition, the group of figures on the cover (on Leonardo's chest!) look like an ad for Lost.

The book was not what I had expected, though.

Richard, the main character and narrator, is a credible example of the kind of rich western youngster that is seeking ever more extreme excitement in south-east Asia. His characterisation is fairly moderate - Garland resists the temptation to make him either heroic or anti-heroic. He just is what he is, warts and all. The cover blurb refers to Generation X, and in some senses Richard is a classic example of the stereotype - well-versed in TV and film culture, but largely uninterested in the actual cultures of the countries he is travelling in.

The plot is a strange mixture of utopian fantasy and The Lord of the Flies. Again, the cover blurb refers to The Lord of the Flies, but I had had that feeling even before I succumbed to the temptation of reading the cover reviews. The similarity, though was clear to several of the reviewers. Initially, though, I was more interested in the sense that Garland was trying to describe a type of Generation X utopia - an isolated beautiful spot inhabited by young people from all over the (western) world, where food and dope are free and plentiful, modern problems like illness and boredom are absent, and everyone is cool. Curiously absent is any mention of Generation X's other recreation, sex.

The utopia gets strained, though, and the modern world intrudes, ultimately destroying paradise. Perhaps Garland was trying to make some deep point, but it gets lost in the plot. Ultimately the book is simply a good read, retaining all the reader's attention right up to the end, which in typical Generation X style is a bit of a blur. Richard, the narrator, tends to take both the life and death of paradise fairly stoically, as if such things are expected by the jaded 'traveller'.

Garland's style is fairly sparse but effective. You are drawn into the book slowly - there are no clever literary hooks to grab you - but before long you want to continue reading simply because the book is interesting and readable. You don't really identify with Richard - he's too shallow for that - but you follow him nonetheless.

All in all, a good book, and Garland is a writer with talent. I have also read The Coma, his second book, and I would really ecomment that too.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

This morning I finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It is a lovely book and should probably have won the Booker Prize, instead of only being shortlisted (though, since I haven't read the 2001 winner, I cannot be certain). I entirely agree with the newspaper reviews quoted on Amazon which say:

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .
'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book - A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .
'... a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

And Amazon's own review, which says:

'Atonement, McEwan's first novel since the Booker-winning Amsterdam, is an extraordinary achievement and possibly the finest work he has yet published. It is a engrossing book, full of narrative suspense and wonderfully defined characters. It is also a consciously literary novel, with allusions to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James, but with none of the ponderous self-importance that label often suggests. Atonement confirms McEwan's great talents and well deserves its place on the Booker shortlist.'

Atonement is a classic Booker novel, in that it deals with powerful events and their effects on a small group of people, in a style more commonly associated with a number of Irish writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Ann Enright, John Banville and Willian Trevor.

It is hard to believe that Atonement was by the same author as Amsterdam. The latter was a weak book, I felt, and not a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

A small unnoticed extinction in East Congo

The tragic situation in East Congo is outside the scope of this blog. The scale of death and suffering is unimaginable in modern Europe, and nothing I say below should take away from the misery of the people who have suffered for years and who are still suffering in Congo.

Apart from the humanitarian situation my interest in north-eastern Congo is due to the fact that it is - or was - the home of many variants of the great African game of Mancala. In the brief period between the colonisation of central Africa and its decolonisation several anthropologists collected tantalising glimpses of the richness of the region in terms of variants unknown elsewhere. Many of the writers said that many other variants existed, but had not yet been documented. Decolonisation, and the collapse of civilisation in several important mancala playing regions, mean that they may now never be collected. The widespread disruption and death in the region now means that much of the memory of these games is being lost. A displaced people is likely to lose large parts of its culture, through loss of artifacts (game boards), loss of the people who know the rules, or the homogenising effect of mixing with other peoples in refugee camps.

Men are the main players of mancala, but the war has separated many men from their friends and their children, and the knowledge of the games may not be passed on. The children will be more likely to play football or cards - these effects were visible even before the war. So by the time the war ends, as it must some day, there may have been a widespread, unnoticed, unknown, extinction of many mancala variants.

In 1977 a young anthropologist, Philip Townshend, published the biggest study of Congolese mancala games ever: Les Jeux de Mancala au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Les Cahiers du CEDAF, Cahier 3, 1977)(Not on the internet - I got it via the library of the ULB in Brussels). In it he gives details of dozens of games played all over the region, many of which are threatened with extinction. How many more there were, we can only guess. In his conclusion, Townsheld says that "this study does not claim to be exhaustive. There are undoubtedly a large number of other games that are unknown to us, and it would be interesting if other researchers could complete this preliminary study" (my own translation from the original French). Unfortunately those other researchers never materialised, but instead war came, and amongst its sad unfortunate casualties may be a large part of the regions gaming culture.

Whether additional knowledge exists in the Africa Museum in Tervuren just outside Brussels is hard to know. The Museum only allows accredited researchers access to its collections, and provides no real information on its website. Townshend, in another publication in 1979, stated that the Africa Museum has a good collection of boards, but whether it has also the playing rules that they need, is unclear. In any case, boards and rules in cold wet Belgium do not compensate for the death of games in their natural habitat. If the games are lost in Congo, they are lost as real games. Our diversity as humans has probably just shrunk in this, as in so many other, aspects.

Janggi - Korean Chess

A short time ago I bought a set for Janggi, the Korean version of the great chess family. Janggi is more closely related to Chinese chess (Xiang Qi) than any other version, and it is generally believed that Janggi derives from an earlier version of Xiang Qi.

Janggi is played on a board similar to that of Xiang Qi, but without the river, which obviously affects some moves (in Xiang Qi the elephant piece cannot cross the river). The pictures below show the two sides set up in a conventional arrangement, and the empty board (paper, as is also common for Xiang Qi):

The pieces used in Janggi are flat, as in all other East Asian chess variants. They have the name of the piece written on the flat surface, in green for one side and in red for the other (or, at least this is the commonestcolour combination -modern Korean sets use other clours, such as blue). The pieces are usually hexagonal, as shown below, but again, modern Korean sets (and one reported from 1895) can be circular as well:

My set are basically cheap plastic pieces - I would like to get better wooden ones, but they seem to be unavailable in Europe. Most games shops are unaware of even the existence of Janggi - I asked in Just Games in Camden Lock (London), a long established games shop, and the owner has never heard of Janggi, despite selling nice wooden sets of Xiang Qi pieces. In Korea, though, you can get lovely sets, but I cannot figure out how to buy them, as the sellers website is in Korean only.

There are a few good websites that explain the rules of Janggi, including (of course) Wikipedia, and the Chess Variant pages. Written information in English is quite scare, and quite recent. The original source was the great games historial Stewart Culin, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions in his 1895 book Korean Games:

Unfortunately, Culin's book is not easily available - Amazon.com has some copies available second-hand, but at a price. I don't remember where I got my copy, but I think it was not too expensive at the time. It is a Dover Publications reproduction from 1991 (ISBN: 0486265935).

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

I recently read The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel. For the first half of the book I was pleasantly expecting it to be like Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani, a book I really enjoyed. (Incidentally, when you put "Londonstani" into Amazon.com as a search word, the second item on the list of 18 hits is The Buddha of Suburbia - by a different author, and with no obvious connexction. Obviously I'm not the only person who saw the similarity!).

The Buddha of Suburbia is not, unfortunately, anything like as good as Londonstani. It starts with promise, but the characters fail to develop, the plot never really comes together, and the story quickly becomes unbelievable and, frankly, silly. Although Kureishi may be drawing on his own experiences (though I doubt this), it certainly doesn't resemble what I know of the lives of Indians in England in the 1970s (and I was there during that time, and knew Indians).

The book's publisher, Faber and Faber, on their website say that "The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain".

Oh dear ... they haven't even read their own book. One of the recurring threads in the book is Karim's annoyance at being called a "Paki" - he is, of course, Indian (the frequent references to Bombay may also give this away). Like this little fact, the rest of their self-serving review is also wrong - it is not a tour de force - more of a forced first novel. Read it if you want, but it isn't worth the price of a new book (I bought mine second-hand, of course).

Culling my MP3

I usually run for an hour every Sunday morning in the Bois de la Cambre/Terkamerenbos in the south of Brussels. While running, I listen to my MP3 player. When you're running there is, of course, very little else you can do, so you tend to concentrate more on the music.

So during this hour or so I get the opportunity to really re-listen to my supposed musical tastes. Out of a large number of CDs I have had to select only 194 tracks to put on my MP3 (it is not, of course, an iPod); these 194 tracks should, therefore, represent those I like most; and to a great extent they do. But inevitably, the constant repetition of the same tracks over and over (I also listen to my MP3 on the way too and from work), makes clear that I don't, in fact, really like some of them. Some tracks I look forward to, and other I skip when they start playing. This has been a small revelation to me, as I had thought I liked them all.

So which are the winners and losers?

The tracks I skip past tend to be from Brian Ferry, Prodigy, and one or two from New Order. The current 'winners', that I look forward to, are also from the same era, and include Blondie, the Ramones, REM, and odd tracks by Black Sabbath (Paranoid, of course), The Buzzcocks, Tracy Chapman, and Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels. Newer stuff includes NWA, Motorhead, The White Stripes, and the Cranberries. Some tracks by New Order and Prodigy remain among those I look forward to.

It's time for a cull. My MP3 is full to capacity, so I have to cut some tracks in order to make room for new ones. I think the old crooner, Brian Ferry is going to almost disappear. But who will replace him? I don't like a lot of the recent music, which I find fairly tuneless and dull (the Kooks, Coldplay, Radiohead, etc, though I increasingly like the Kaiser Chiefs), so I might have to go back and look through my CDs again.

Siren City

I live quite near one of the main arteries in Brussels. This means that, apart from good transport links, I am exposed to some noise from the sirens of the police, ambulances, and fire brigade. I don't mind this, as I reckon that the faster they get to where they're going, the better. It might be me that needs one of them one day!

But the other day I was crossing the road, when a car with a loud siren came racing down the road. Like everyone else, on foot or in cars, I made way for the emergency vehicle, only to see, as it passed me, that it was a vehicle from the water service! The water service .... ? What possible emergency were they in such a hurry to get to? A dripping tap?

So maybe all those sirens that provide the backing track to my city life are not as important as I thought. How many other non-urgent services have sirens on their vehicles? If they do not have a real life-and-death reason to be able to over-ride normal traffic rules, and demand privileged treatment, then they should not have sirens.

I was a millionaire

I own property in Ireland. Thanks to the enormous bubble in house prices since the mid 1990s (see Figure 2 on page 4 of this paper) I became a paper millionaire for a few years. It was, of course, only a 'feel-good' fortune - I had no intention of ever selling my home, or even using it as collateral to fund an affluent lifestyle. Now, thanks to the inevitable reversal of the Irish property boom, I am no longer a millionaire. But so what? Since I wasn't ever going to sell the house, and since I continued to enjoy the same level of pleasure from it when it was expensive as when it was cheap, am I any worse off? The answer, clearly, is no. I was lucky to have the house when it was worth next to nothing, I was lucky to own it when it was worth a fortune, and I will be lucky to own it in the future, regardless of the state of the property market.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

This book won the 1998 Booker Prize, so I expected great things of it. I had recently read, and greatly enjoyed, the 1997 Booker Prize winner - The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy - and I usually find Booker Prize winners and shortlisted books to be excellent.


I was surprised, then, to find that it read more like a short story than an important novel. I kept waiting for its genius to shine out, but then it just went and ended. Without any genius. Or any shining. In fact, it was so forgettable that I've already almost forgotten it.

Admittedly, the 1998 Booker Shortlist was not a particularly strong one, though it did have Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto on it - a much stronger book which, with the benefit of my recent hindsight, probably should have won.

Ian McEwan was short-listed again, in 2001 with Atonement, which I have yet to read (its on my shelf at home, though). I hope that turns out to be better. The film of Atonement is currently in the cinema but I am reluctant to go and see it before I read the book. By the time I do read it, though, the film will have disappeared from the cinema, and I'll have to wait for the DVD. Such a dilemma!

Another World, by Pat Barker

Almost by chance, I read a few of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy books last year and found them unexpectedly good. So when I found Another World in the Oxfam Bookshop in Uccle recently I bought it.

It was a disappointment. She returned to her First World War theme, but indirectly through the memories of an old man who is, himself, only one of the charachters of the book. But all the characters are shallow and undeveloped, and the book ends up being an uncoordinated clutter of clichés without a convincing central plot. Even the dénouement, when it finally comes, is a damp squib, because by then the reader (well, this one anyway) has long since stopped caring.

Indian summer

At the moment in Brussels we are enjoying an Indian summer (this is somewhat like an Irish summer, only warmer, drier, and more pleasant!). Yesterday it was a pleasure to be out and about in Brussels, and many many people were enjoying that pleasure. Town was thronged with locals, tourists and day-trippers from all over. Every pavement café was full, and the parks, streets, and squares were full of people sunning themselves, reading on park benches, cycling, walking, playing with their kids, and so on.

In the morning I was in the Bois de la Cambre, the green lung in the south of the city. Although normally its internal roads are full of speeding cars, on Sundays half of it is closed to traffic and becomes an oasis of calm and relaxation. It is full of walkers, joggers, kids learning to ride bikes, older people learning to roller-blade, dog-walkers, pick-nickers, and amateur footballers.

In the afternoon I cycled around the city; the canal area, Place Flagey, the Bourse, Place Royal, the Park van Brussel, Matonge, the Cinquantenaire Park, and many places in between. What is immediately obvious when you cycle, is just how small Brussels is (geographically), but how much it squeezes in. There are so many different areas, so much to see, so many beautiful building, and so many grotty ones. By turning a single corner you can go from the grottiness of the poor housing near the canal to the trendiness of the Saint Catherine area. And everywhere, in every quartier, there are hundreds of cafés and restaurants, each looking (and smelling) very inviting - some get mentally noted for a later and more leasurely visit!

On days like yesterday it is truly a pleasure to be living in Brussels. Lets hope thee are many more like it.

Brussels No-public-transport Day

Following on from the (limited) success of Brussels No-car Day on 20 September, today, thanks largely to the trade unions representing well-protected public sector employees, we are enjoying No Public Transport Day.

Yes, today is either:

• Brussels 'walk-to-work' day,
• Brussels 'drive-to-work' day (thereby negating the good you might have done on no-car day),
• Brussels 'cycle-through-the angry-cars' day, or,
• Brussels 'have-an-involuntary-long-weekend' day

At least it isn't raining!

Since there are neither trams, metros or buses, I chose to walk to work. I hadn't ever done it before (and to be honest, hadn't intended to try it today, but someone took the key of the bike-lock to work with her ... ). It took me a little less than 30 minutes, and wasn't unpleasant. Given that it can take 20 minutes door to door using the metro, that isn't bad.

I saw several cyclists who looked like they were not used to the traffic, and on a few occasions looked as if they were a danger to themselves. I suppose no-one will publish a comparison of the figures for cyclist or pedestrian casuaties today compared with a 'normal' day. If such a comparison showed a doubling of the death/injury rate due to the lack of public transport, what effect would that have on the strike-happy 'workers'?

Of course, as a good tolerant liberal, I support every workers right to strike. But still, it is a bit pointless of the rail, metro and bus workers to (as usual) punish their customers! Surely, if they want to make some point to their employers they could continue to work, but refuse to gather fares.

Toxic Resto

I have added a link (over there on the right) to my friend Dudley Salterton's new blog - http://toxiresto.blog.co.uk/. Well, OK, Dudley Salterton isn't really his name, but I guess libel laws force all of us to tell little white lies once in a while.

The aim of the blog is to act as a kind of anti-resto.be (http://www.resto.be is the site that lists all the restaurants in Brussels, indeed all of Belgium, but to Dudley's annoyance only allows you to give them a 'good' or 'great' score). His point is that many actually deserve a 'bad', or 'awful' score, so he has set up Toxic Resto to name and shame them. As he says, the blog is 'A real guide to the worst of Belgian restaurants!'

So, if you've had a bad restaurant experience in Brussels, share it. And if you are thinking about going out, check out Toxic Resto first.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

While I was in Pecs I also read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. What a disappointment! What a load of rubbish, frankly. I had been led to believe that he was a brilliant writer, and the cover blurb tells you that this book "is a transforming novel", and that Coelho has "the power to inspire nations and to change people's lives". What a load of tripe! The book was shallow, predictable, and frankly silly. However, what it seems to do (and maybe his other books too?) is to push a kind of silly spiritualism that borders on pseudo-religion. And maybe that is why some people think he is brilliant - maybe they are believers in the silly modern pseudo-religion of 'spiritualism'. Well, I'm not, and this is my blog, so my message is clear - don't bother with this short, shallow, and uninteresting pseudo-religious load of rubbish.

And will I look for more books by Coelho? No, I won't.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

I finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy while I was in Pecs. It is a brilliant book, and well worth its (1997) Booker Prize. When I started it I was afraid that it would be heavy going, but it wasn't. Despite the unfamiliarity of the names (in, I presume, Malayalam) they quickly became familiar, and the prose was beautiful and fluent. She captured and portrayed the mind of the children, who are the central characters, brilliantly.

Although ultimately a sad book, it didn't leave me with a bitter taste, because of the simplicity of the narration, and the depth of the story. If the measure of a book's worth is whether you would recommend it to a friend, then this book scores highly. For me, another measure is whether I will look for other books by the author. I will.

Pecs, Hungary

One of the disadvantages of a Brussels bureaucrat's life is that you sometimes have to leave the comforts of the Capital of Europe and go and visit the rest of Europe. Actually, I'm joking of course - it is one of the pleasures of our lives!

Last Sunday I headed off to Pecs in southern Hungary, to attend a meeting of ceramic producing cities. Pecs is the home of the Zsolnay Porcelain Manufactury, a high-end porcelain maker, and a partner in the network.

Pecs itself is an attractive small city, a UNESCO world heritage site, a historic place, and in 2010 European Capital of Culture. Ceramics are everywhere in the city, not just in and around the factory. The roofs of some buildings are made of porcelain tiles, there are porcelain sculptures and monuments, and a lovely museum. I'll load pictures here when I download them off the camera.

One evening in Pecs we were taken to a very wierd avant-garde theatre production by a Bosnian theatre company from Tuzla. Indescribable is the onle description I can give! We in the west think that we are the cultural trend-setters, but I'm afraid that the east (or the centre, at least) is a stranger place than we think. I'll add more on it when I (re-)find the URL of the theatre company.

Brussels Ekiden

Last Saturday I participated in the Brussels Ekiden. What is an Ekiden? Well, wikipedia describe it as a a marathon relay, and say that it originated in Japan. Basically, a team of six runners run the full 42 km marathon distance, but divided into sections of 5, 10, 5, 10, 5 and & km. I ran the second 10 km section for my team.

We were disqualified.

I don't really know why, except that some of our runners times were wierd, to say the least. I suspect the timing system (automatic recording of runners starting and finishing via a chip that they attach to their shoes) messed up. One of us was shown as doing 5 km in 10 minutes! That is better than Olympic standard. So, rather than admitting they screwed up, they disqualified us. Still, I got my nice shiny medal, and a day out in sunny Brussels.

Where is this?

Is it Tokyo? Is it Beijing? Is it some obscure monastery in the Japanese mountains?

No, it is Brussels. The Japanese Tower, and the Chinese Pavilion in Laken, to be precise. Both are real eye-openers - beautiful examples of pseudo-oriental buildings, merging genuine Chinese and Japanese building techniques, carvings and decorations with early twentieth-century Belgian Art Deco. The result is sometimes wierd, such as the interior of the Chinese Pavilion, where the grand (European) interior style has has an oriental layer added, or in the stained-glass (actually painted rather than stained) windows of the Japanese Tower.

The sheer opulence of both buildings shows the relatively enormous wealth of the Belgian monarchy at the time, and its ability to splash out on the fashion for 'chinoiserie'. Now, luckily, the buildings are open for all of us, and well worth a visit.

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis

One of the reviews of this book on Amazon sums up exactly what I thought, after having just finished it:

"Interesting, but did I actually LIKE it???,

Brett Easton Ellis doing what he does best: social commentary with a plot which twists and turns, and rants and raves, and gets bloody and gory and disgusting in parts... it definitely made me dizzy but did I like it? Still not sure. This one is more intellectually challenging than his previous novels and I couldn't put it down while I was reading it, but I doubt I'd ever want to read it again."

I've been a Bret Easton Ellis fan since I read American Psycho, which I thought was a brilliant book. Lunar Park, on the other hand, I found confusing. It started as a straight autobiographic narrative, which I found too self-referential and self-congratulatory. It gradually morphed into something that still seemed autobiographical but clearly wasn't. Where the book started veering off into supernatural territory I started to have doubts, but towards the end I think it started to all make sense, in a weird way. Like American Psycho, you are left at the end wondering how much of it actually happened and how much was the product of a tortured mind. Since Bret Easton Ellis is not that tortured, I think he has done a great job of writing from the perspective of drug-induced madness. The autobiographic start of the book leaves you with no clear dividing line between what you know to be true and what you wonder about.

Almost up to the last few pages I was convinced that I would give this book a poor review, but now I'm not so sure. One thing is certain, though; the reviewer (on the cover of my copy) who found the book 'funny' had clearly not read it. It is a tale of Generation X all grown up, and living in suburbia with money, children, and responsibilities, but none of the coping skills that are needed. The story is filtered through a haze of drugs and drink, which clouds the distinction between fact and fiction in a clever and seamless way.

Comfort food?

Today is the Belgian national day, 21 July - the day the first King of the Belgians took his oath of office in 1831. Despite working for an international institution, I also get the day off, which is always welcome. I had intended to go in to the centre of town and watch the festivities, which include a military parade. However, the weather was so bad that I couldn't face it - it was cold, wet and windy. More like October than July. So I stayed at home, and enjoyed one of my indoor passions - baking bread.

I baked a couple of loaves of sourdough rye bread - OK, I lied a bit, I started the process yesterday, before it became obvious that today would be so bad weatherwise. But since sourdough is such a slow process, I would have had time to go into town during the 'rising' periods. To make sourdough rye is fairly simple - first catch yourself a wild yeast, which you keep, by partially using and replenishing every week or two. To catch the wild yeast, leave a batter of flour and water in the open air for a day or so, until the wild yeasts in the atmosphere colonise it - it will start to bubble a bit. Keep this captive yeast/batter mix in the fridge until you need to use it - this is then your 'sourdough starter'.

When you want to bake the bread, take the starter out the day before, and replenish it with some flour and lukewarm water. Do this in the morning, and in the evening of the day before you intend to bake. On baking day, in the morning, take some of the (now expanded) sourdough and put it back in the fridge for next time. With the sourdough you intend to use (about a cup-full), mix the flour (rye and wheat in roughly even proportion), and a teaspoon of salt, and warm water to make a fairly wet dough. Mix it well - I use a handheld mixer with dough-hooks. Leave it to rise for a few hours - it will be a slow rise, as sourdough starter is far less potent that fresh or dried yeast (this would have been the time to go into the July 21 celebrations). When the dough has risen somewhat (a doubling is too much to hope for), re-knead it a bit, and form into loaves of whatever shape you want. Place these on wooden boards dusted with fine cornflour (to avoid sticking). After another few hours, depending on how fast they rise, turn on your oven to 250 C. I bake directly on a tile placed low in the oven, to similate a 'real' brick bread oven. When the oven it up to temperature, quickly slide one of the loaves onto the tile, and bake for about 20 or 25 minutes, until the crust is brown. Remove the loaf, and repeat with the next one, if there is one. And here is the result:

An unusual mancala game board

Yesterday I bought a Mancala game board in a small 'ethnic knickknacks' shop in Brussels. Most such boards on sale in Brussels come from Africa, and are designed for playing the common West African variety of the game called Awalé. The board I bought, however, is from Indonesia, where the game is played on a slightly different size of board.

In Indonesia the game is called Congkak or Dakon, and is usually played in boards with two rows of seven holes (2x7), plus 'store holes' at each end. The board I found, though, is rarer – it has two rows of only five holes, plus the store-holes. I have never before seen such a board on sale – in fact it is rare to see any boards other than the mass-produced 'two rows of six holes' Awalé boards; so much so that many westerners think that this is the only real form of Mancala. They could not be further from the truth – there are over 400 varieties of the game, spread from South America and the Caribbean across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as far as the Philippines and the Marianas Islands.

The rules of play for Congkak on a 2x5 board may be the same as in the larger versions (boards of 2 x 9, plus store holes, are also known), but the game may be shorter and quicker.

The game was sold along with a set of 40 pieces, which were Nickernuts, or seeds of the Caesalpinia bonduc shrub. These are the traditional playing piece in West Africa and the Caribbean, but not in Indonesia, so it seems that the shop added them to the board.

In Indonesia, and much of Asia, the game is played with small Cowrie shells:

In fact the holes in the board would be too small for Nickernuts, which are much bigger than Cowrie shells. In Congkak there are usually as many shells per hole at the start of the game as there are holes on each side of the board, i.e. 5 shells per hole, or 50 in total for the game. The fact that the shop gave me only 40 seeds showed that they didn't really understand what they were selling.

Upon request, the shop also gave me a simple photocopied sheet of 'rules' for the game I was buying, and this proved beyond doubt that they didn't have much understanding of the game, because the rules were for Awalé, and a board of 2x6 was specified. No harm was done though, because I already have rules for most of the known Mancala variants, including Congkak. The board joins my collection of Mancala boards, mostly home-made, which already includes all of the main sizes of boards – 2x6, 2x7, 2x12, 3x6, 4x7 and 4x8.

Redemption Falls, by Joseph O'Connor

I have just finished Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor (brother of Sinéad O'Connor, a frequently controversial, and frequently brilliant, Irish singer). The book is a historical novel following, in time, the events covered in his earlier novel Star of the Sea. Some see Redemption Falls as a sequel to Star of the Sea, but I don't agree - the characters are different, and there is no real connection between the two except that they both deal with Irish immigrants to mid-nineteenth century America.

If a measure of a book's worth is how much you want to get home from work in order to get back to it, then this book is worthy.

The novel centres around an Irish revolutionary, latterly Acting Governor of the Mountain Territory in 1860s America, called Con O'Keeffe. The novel comprises legal documents, ballads, poems, interviews, narratives and a host of other paraphernalia associated with O'Keeffe. Some reviews see this as too complicated, but for me it worked.

An excellent book - get it and read it.

Luzhanqi

This is a curious little game that goes under a variety of names: Tezhi Luzhanqi, LuZhanJunQi, Luzhanqi, or Chinese land army chess. It is claimed to be popular in China, and various sources describe having bought the game there. But it is entirely absent from the classic western source books on games (HJR Murray, RC Bell, DB Pritchard).

The game is one in which two armies of rectangular block pieces, each inscribed with the name of the rank of soldier or piece of equipment it represents, face each other on a board inscribed with lines of movement, some of which are railways. The picture below shows the two armies facing each other:

This one shows the red army from the perspective of its player:

And this one shows the black army from the perspective of its player:

I bought my set on the internet, from http://www.ancientchess.com/ in the US. It cost very little, and it came with a cardboard board and rules in English. The same rules can be downloaded directly from Ancient Chess. The pieces are small plastic blocks, with their ranks painted on one side only (the enemy remains ignorant of which piece is which, as the picture above shows).

The history of the game is obscure, and probably not very old. The soldiers and the equipment refer to a 20th century form of warfare, rather than the medieval form found in Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). Nonetheless, the game has been around for most of the 20th century, judging by the 1950s version from Taiwan shown here.

The object of the game is to capture your opponent's Flag. Fights are resolved based on the rank of different pieces. High ranking pieces such as the General or Lieutenant General defeat pieces of lesser rank such as Engineers or Captains. There are two special pieces; a mine which destroys anyone who attacks it (with the exception of a Engineer), and the grenade which can kill any unit but in the process destroys itself.

Number 9

No 9, Rue Aviateur Thieffry, in Etterbeek:

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

I've just finished reading If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, by Irvine Welsh. It’s a collection of short-ish stories, the last one being actually quite long (a 'novella', some reviewers call it).




The first few stories I thought were quite poor, to be honest. My opinion is shared by some of the reviews on amazon.co.uk: "The short stories are all rather flat and dry and without soul", "this just didn't hit the mark for me …", "this is his worst work yet- a waste of time …", and so on. Ouch!


The glowing reviews on the cover of the book: "Vigorous, stunningly funny, whimsical, warm, surreal, grotesque and brilliant" (The Guardian), seem a bit wide of the mark. A real example of why you should not judge a book by its cover!

A few of the stories are based in the US, but Welsh just isn't convincing as an American. He only becomes convincing when he returns to his roots in the last story, Kingdom of Fife. It is Welsh at his gruesome best – a fest of drink, drugs, sex and violence, narrated largely in the Scots dialect of the main character. Not for the faint-hearted.

By pure coincidence, an hour after finishing the book, I came upon an article in the property pages of the Irish Times – Irvine Welsh is selling his house in Dublin, in order to buy another one nearer to the airport.

"A house with a history always has cachet but for "Generation Xers" the ultimate trip is to lay claim to a house that was once a hero's home. Number 41 Grove Park, a quiet residential street just over Rathmines bridge, is the place novelist Irvine Welsh calls home and should spawn many dinner party conversations for house hunters.

The creator of Trainspotting lives in Dublin 6 but travels weekly to the US and UK, and the round trips are taking their toll. The writer wants a base closer to Dublin Airport than his present address."

"The writer's office is on the second floor with views of the Dublin mountains. It's a great space for creative thinking. "When I need to take a break from pounding at that intensity, I kick back my chair, which is on wheels and look out the window," he says".


The article notes that If You Liked School, You'll Love Work was written in this room.

Welsh has picked a bad time to move house, as the Irish housing market is crashing at present. However, since he intends to stay in Dublin, he'll be able to buy a new place cheaper too.

Tramspotting (part I)

Although I take the Metro to work every day, my favourite mode of transport is the tram. Sure, the Metro is quick and direct, but it lives underground and isn't such a visible part of our day-to-day life. The trams are more diverse and have much more character. They can be little old metal boxes rattling along a city centre street (the PCC 7000 series), or they can be long sleek snakes gliding between avenues of trees (the T4000 series), or they can be something in between (the PCC 7700, PCC 7900, T2000 or T3000 series). They can go underground or on the surface, or even on bridges over the ring.

The picture below shows one of the new generation of trams, the T3000, near to where I live:



I'm not the only tram enthusiast in Brussels (not by a long shot), and there is plenty of information, and plenty of pictures, on the web, and there is also a lovely tram museum in Woluwe, from which you can take rides in the old trams out to Tervuren and back. I have added links to two of the best web sites on Brussels trams in the links section – http://www.mivbreiziger.be/ (that is 'MIVB Reiziger' or 'user of the MIVB', the Dutch-language acronym for the transport system), and http://www.b8756.be/, which has a large collection of pictures of Brussels trams. There are also hundreds of pictures on Flickr (use 'Brussels trams' as a search term), some very nice, and finally, there are a number of videos on Youtube, mostly of dubious quality (most of them are probably filmed with a GSM)

Trams are a subject that I will return to regularly on this Blog. In later entries I will include some of my own pictures of the different types of trams to be found in Brussels, as well as whatever technical information is available. When the Tram Museum re-opens (it is currently closed for rrenovation) I'll add some pictures and information from Brussels long and interesting history of trams.

Island, by Aldous Huxley

I've just finished reading Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island, which he published in 1962, shortly before his death. There are books you cannot put down because they are so good, and then there are books you just want to get finished because you started them. This was the latter. I found it stilted, predictable and shallow, with no real story or plot. It is basically just a vehicle for Huxley to promote his weird ideas on societal organisation, drug-taking, and spiritualism.

The plot is a simple one ­– a western journalist gets stranded on a 'closed' island in the Indian Ocean, which he finds to have evolved into a utopian society as a result of the use of drugs, meditation and free love. So far, so good. But the book is thoroughly unrealistic – for example, in this 'closed' society the people are all bilingual in their native language and public-school English! They are familiar to the point of obsession with Western society, Western Philosophy and Christianity. In fact, everything about the 'closed' society is remarkably similar to the 1930's ideal of the English middle class, and entirely dissimilar to any known Asian society. The book continues with a series of artificial situations in which the protagonist is shown how the society arranges its education, health system, agriculture, child-rearing, and so on. It reads like a catalogue of utopian naivety, lightened only by the sheer silliness of Huxley's attempts to impose the Home Counties on south-east Asia, with added Hindu mysticism and narcotics.

Thank heavens I've finished this book, because now I can move on and read something better.

Shogi – Japanese Chess

Shogi is the Japanese version of chess. To know more, see the Wikipedia article on Shogi. Although it is recognisably part of the same family as western chess, there are also significant differences. The most obvious ones are that it is played on a 9x9 board, the pieces are flat wedges (all the same colour – each player knows their pieces by the direction the wedges are pointing), there is no Queen (but rather two 'Gold Generals' on either side of the King), captured pieces may be re-entered by their capturer to fight alongside his army, and pieces may be 'promoted' to a higher rank when they reach the last three rows on their opponent's side of the board (the 'promoted' rank is written on the underside of each piece).

Shogi boards and pieces are not easily available in Europe. A few shops may stock them, but they are few and far between. Here in Brussels, Marchand on Rue de Belle Vue, near the top of Avenue Louise, claims to stock Shogi boards and pieces, but when I asked them they did not have any in stock.

So I turned to E-bay, and was very pleasantly surprised. There was a very good 'E-bay shop' selling chess-related articles, including Shogi pieces, at reasonable prices (and not ripping the customer off via inflated 'postage' charges). I placed an order (using Paypal, of course), and waited to see if it would work. And it did! Within 3 working days of placing the order, the pieces were delivered from Japan to Brussels!

The picture below shows my new Shogi set, arranged on a board that I made myself:

This picture shows the 'promoted' sides of the pieces, which are always written in red ink). As can be seen, some pieces do not promote – the King and the Gold Generals:

This picture shows the shape of the pieces more clearly:

Stonemanor second-hand book sale

One of the regular events in my annual calendar are the second-hand book sales that are organised at the Stonemanor shop in Everberg, to the east of Brussels. Twice a year, in June and September, the shop car park is taken over by volunteers from ActionAid, who collect and sell English-language books in aid of their charity.

The books on sale range from pulp fiction up to unread copies of recent prize-winning novels, as well as all sorts of non-fiction. The prices are extremely low; the books are priced by the centimeter, so that a brilliant find costs the same as a dog-eared trashy novel - the price is around 1 Euro per 1,5 cm. Over the years I have bought hundreds of books, many of them in perfect condition, many in hardback, and many of them otherwise unavailable except through Amazon.

This June's book sale was yesterday, and as usual I came away with a box of books, including;

• Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
• Louis de Bernieres, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord
• Louis de Bernieres, The War of Don Emmanuels Nether Parts
• Pat Barker, Another World
• Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm
• William Trevor, Felicia's Journey
• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
• Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls
• Alex Garland, The Beach
• Alex Garland, Coma
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
• Barry Unsworth, After Hannibal

In addition I picked up a few non-fiction books, such as;

• Richard Taylor, How to Read a Church
• Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History
• Thomas de Waal, Black Garden - Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War
• One Hundred Years in Egypt - Paths of Italian Archaeology

My partner picked up about the same number of books, all equally interesting, and we also bought a handfull of books (mostly Douglas Adams) for our son who wasn't there. All in all, a very profitable trip out to the suburbs, and one that I'll repeat in September. In the meantime, I have enough books to keep me happy over the summer!

The Island of the Day Before

I have just finished reading The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco, and although I should be able to write some sort of a review, I feel that it would be better to wait until it sinks in a bit. Some books are like that - you don't know what you really think of them untill some time affter you have finished them, and after they have swirled around in your sub-conscious for a while.

Suffice it to say that the reviews the book gets on Amazon are far from complimentary: 'Eco becomes Narcissus' says one, and 21 out of 24 readers agreed; 'Eco needs a stricter editor' says another, and all four readers who responded agreed with that; 'Self-indulgent intellectualism' said a third, to which remark 11 out of 15 people agreed. Basically the readers found that the book failed to provide enough of a story, and wallowed in self-indulgent intellectualism. Hmm ... maybe they are right, but I'll let it settle in my head first. The comments on the US amazon site were slightly less critical, but still not good: 'Less Than I Expected', 'Weakest of Eco's fiction -- not that that's a bad thing', and so on.

The book is the tale of an Italian nobleman shipwrecked in the South Pacific in 1643. As part of a cabal instigated by French Cardinal Mazarin and his protege Colbert, Robert della Griva has been traveling in disguise on an English ship whose mission is to discover the Punto Fijo, the means by which navigators can plumb "the mystery of longitude." The rest I won't give away, in case the bad reviews don't put you off!

The Steep Approach to Garbadale

I've just finished reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks. Although it is fairly readable, I just did not think that it was up to his usual standards. The cover blurb, of course, would have you think that it was a masterpiece, but I don't think I will remember it in six months.

Out of interest, I looked at the readers comments on Amazon, and was reassured to see that I was not alone. The following comments pretty much agreed with me:

"... we know that Banks is capable of a lot more, and this book seems 'light' in comparison to some of his meatier work."

" the resolution feels somewhat rushed and in many ways too neat for the complicated network of familial relationships that Banks spends the book depicting."

All in all, I'd say it is worth the read, but it isn't in my Top 10 (or Top 100). Out of Banks' books, I'd score several much higher, with The Bridge being my favourite of his novels.

Skál - Icelandic drinking horns

The Bozar (Beaux Arts, for those who don't get their pun) has an exhibition of Icelandic drinking horns on at the moment. These are - literally - cows' horns that were used either as drinking cups, or enclosed at their wide end and used as containers to carry alcoholic drinks (medieval hip-flasks, in a sense). The ones in the exhibition are all inticately carved, often with images as well as inscriptions indicating the owner.

















Apart from the intrinsic beauty of the horns, the exhibition provoked two thoughts:

Firstly, why have these objects been preserved so well in Iceland, when elsewhere in Europe where they must have also existed, they are entirely absent? Who had them? Were they prized family possessions in the bottom of a chest in a remote farmhouse?

Secondly, how different Iceland is from most of Europe! A society that produced such works, and valued them enough to preserve them, for up to 500 years in some cases, is so different to the rest of western Europe. How little we know of Icelend, yet we believe it to be just a marginal offshoot of Scandinavia.

I have been fascinated by Iceland for some time, and the more I see of it the greater the fascination grows. Skál is only a small glimpse of what this great little country has produced, and we're lucky to have had this glimpse in Brussels. I hope more will come in the near future.

On blogging

Sooner or later every blogger feels the need to philosophise on the significance of blogs, and on why he or she has a blog. I might as well do my bit of philosophising now, and get it over with.

What is a blog? Well, there are probably as many answers as there are blogs. This blog seems to me to serve several purposes:

1. A self-assessment of my life, as it is being lived. Many of us are obliged to complete an annual career self-assessment as part of our performance review. In it we are challenged to look back and consider what we did, whether we did it well or not, and what can be improved.

2. A very small element of Maoist self-criticism. In the cultural revolution many years of people's lives were wasted in continuous and destructive self-criticism (too often aided by other people, of course, and under severe pressure). I guess the modern fashion for self-assessment is a very soft version of this , though during the interview part of the normal annual performance review it sometimes doesn't seem so soft.

3. Finally, and most importantly, the discipline of keeping a blog will probably push me to live my life a little fuller. Life in Brussels is easy and comfortable, and people like me with a permanent and well-paid job can have a tendency to go with the flow. That flow can often go for weeks or months, with a regular rhythm of work, home, and fairly ordinary social pursuits. Keeping a blog about life in Brussels encourages me to look at your life through the eyes of the reader - you - and this can make me very aware of what I am not doing. So, the very act of keeping this blog may have the effect of filling the blog. I will be more inclined to go to that event, to take that picture, to notice what is happening, in order to be able to blog it.

That's it. Philosophy over. Now I'll get back to living the life!

The 20 km of Brussels

Last Sunday I ran in the 20 km of Brussels - the largest event of its kind in Belgium. Over 25,000 runners took part, following a route around the leafy southern parts of the city. It was my second time participating - after several years of watching and cheering on my wife (and once my son) I decided that I too wanted one of those nice shiny medals (and I got one - see the picture!).

At this point I must admit that I didn't win. I didn't even get close to glory. In fact, at 2 hours 25 minutes my time was quite poor, but at least I finished (and without a pulled muscle, unlike in 2007). I came somewhere over 19,000th, which means that at least some people were less fit than me. But it gives me some room for improvement next year.

The race is great fun, and the experience of being part of the human tidal wave sweeping through Brussels is brilliant. Much of the southern part of the city is closed to traffic, and a large organisation of stewards, first-aiders and water-stations is set up. Congratulations to the organisers, and especially to the runners, young and old, fit and fat, from here and far afield. See you all again next year!

Welkom nieuwe Brusselaar

Yesterday in the post I received a 'Welcome Pack' from the Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie of the Brussels Region, containing information about services and cultural activities available in Flemish in Brussels. It was a nice touch, and gave a good impression of the Flemish side of the city administration. 'Welkom nieuwe Brusselaar' means 'Welcome new Brussels resident', which, since the beginning of the year, I am.

Luckily for me, I'm not so new to Belgium, though, and understand Flemish. I'm not sure what nieuwe Brusselaars who do not understand Flemish might think, but hopefully the warm welcome will make them more inclined to learn the language, and thus to be able to get more out of their time in Brussels.

As for me, thanks for the welcome, and I most certainly intend to enjoy my newly urban life. Some of the things I come across will find their way onto this Blog, which I hope will become a record of the pleasures of life in one of Europe's best little cities.