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!