Ambre Solaire and lager

There's another mini-break looming on the horizon this weekend.  The missus and I are off to Belgium tomorrow for a couple of nights.  We're heading east to catch a bike race, Liège-Bastogne-Liège.  I appreciate that this is some (i.e., most) people's idea of hell, and I understand and celebrate that stance on the subject.  Imagine what the world would be like if we all enjoyed the same things: that's right, even duller than it currently is.  I'm all for diversity of opinion.

Anyways, I'm really looking forward to it.  Belgium is the spiritual home of road racing.  It is to them what football is to the English, or rugby to the Kiwis.  Everyone there understands the sport, and has forthright opinions on it.  No such thing as neutral in these matters.  The Scottish pro rider David Millar once observed that he particularly enjoyed racing in Belgium because "it's so damn...well, Belgian."  

I concur.  Yes, Belgium isn't the most beautiful country on Earth, or the most exciting, but it is its own man.  It's happy in its own skin.  It cares not two hoots if you enjoy or even understand its ways. But if you take pains to study the place and understand its people, your efforts will be met with open arms and a winning smile.

It's strange how difference nations hold different opinions of each other.  Apparently the Dutch think the Belgians rather "other" and exotic although they only live about 50 miles away.  For example I was once on a cycling holiday in The Netherlands and spotted a Belgian restaurant.  I couldn't resist a closer look, so that evening Mrs O and I booked a table.  We didn't know what to expect.  I'd never been particularly bowled over by the cuisine in Belgium, save for the hand-wrought chocolates, which are rather good. 

The food was fairly workaday if I'm honest: fine but not brilliant, but the decor of the restaurant was a work of art.  It was kitted-out in dark wood panelling, heavy 19th century furniture and doilies, billions of doilies.  It was like being inside the drawer of a giant Welsh dresser.  This is at odds with the prevailing Dutch aesthetic, which is functional and easy-wide.  This contrast in visual sensibilities and the tradition of dangerous monastic beer gave the Belgians a romantic and wild-eyed quality that the Dutch felt they rather lacked.  I couldn't see it, myself.  

I suppose we're all guilty of this to some extent.  The English tend to think of the west of Ireland as a cross between Middle Earth and Cornwall.  The truth, I can tell you from family experience, is rather more prosaic: ill-fitting jeans on ill-fitting buttocks, sat in Hiace vans outside supermarkets, and drizzle...plenty of drizzle.

Tempus Fugit

We had drinks in the office last evening.  It was to mark the fact that one of our number had notched up 50 years' continuous service.  You heard me right, friend - 50 (five-o) years.  He's a charming chap, our demi-centurion, so it was a well-attended gathering.  The powers-that laid on food and strong drink in our boardroom, and a dozen or so  of us went at it.

We sat around the boardroom table and swigged from bottles of ale and swapped war stories.  I was probably in the mid-range of generations represented in the firm currently.  Despite the good humour and nascent drunkenness, I'm certain I detected a certain sadness in the room.  This was I think due to the feeling that 50 years in the service of one company, even one as broadly benign as this one, was probably one of the most unromantic ways in which a man could spend is tenure on Earth.

Now, we all of course will see out our careers in this way, i.e. as jobbing functionaries in uninspiring buildings around the capital.  But one never sees oneself in this role forever.  When one changes jobs every few years, there is always the possibility, albeit a VAGUE one, that something dramatic might intervene - relocation to the tropics perhaps, or retraining as a trapeze artist.  Our colleague's career starkly illustrated to us all that this probably won't happen.  Shit.

I left after an hour, the rest of the room moving on to the pub.  I couldn't face any more.  This morning I awoke to a partially-crushed spirit, so I phoned the office and pulled I sickie.  I didn't lie; I told them I woke up feeling terrible, which is quite true.

I spent the rest of the day painting the chimney breast in the front room, hoping that a romantic seque in life's journey might fall into my lap.  It's 7:30pm now.  The chimney breast is roasted red, but I am as-was, staring down the barrel of another dull day at work tomorrow.  Oh, well, I tried.

"Pass the Quavers, would you?  How 'bout those Gooners, eh?"