Tuesday 8th April. Slow unloading on the boat the following morning too. It could be that this boat, The Pride of Bruges is getting rather too old for modern levels of service, it’s second-hand, it was a Norwegian ship, a small cruise ship, called Norsun, when built; and it may be that P&O are waiting before replacing it until the docks at Hull are upgraded so that the Zeebrugge ferry no longer has to pass through a sea-lock, which it does now, slowing the journey time quite a bit and meaning that any replacement boat cannot be any longer or wider than the existing one, which just fits in the lock. The Rotterdam ferry, by contrast, berths on the sea side of the lock and is a notably bigger and more modern-looking boat altogether.
The unsmiling car-deck staff on the ferry are not Filipino, they are either British or Belgian, and the captain was Belgian, though the boat is essentially British, in addition to serving beer in pints it charges for everything in pounds sterling and has British-style electric sockets.
Quite what those who shout from their bar stools about British jobs for British people would make of all this charming Filipino coupled with stroppy indigenous staff I don’t know; perhaps such people never travel from Hull to Zeebrugge, so they don’t need to make anything of it. Or no, possibly they do but do not see the irony of the situation, I rather got the impression that few if any other passengers on the boat were pondering on irony, or even noticing.
We pondered such things while waiting for the direction to drive off the boat. Alzheimer’s does not appear to affect the ability to ponder, or not yet anyway thank goodness.
And so into Belgium where the roads are less busy, less frenetic, than those in the UK. People from overseas who stayed with us when we were at Oakdene often remarked how fast and aggressive the driving seemed to be in the UK. It isn't particularly fast, and it is relatively aggressive, but the main point about it is that it's much busier. This will be a little bit to do with population density, though not especially, as Flanders and the Netherlands are if anything more densely populated. My guess is that the main cause is that the number of roads in the UK is relatively fewer, though we have never read anything about this.
Belgium has good food and chaotic organisation. A bit like Italy.
We missed a signpost and took a wrong turn and ended up driving through Brussels, which we discovered has practically nothing by way of signposts to get you out again. Interesting place though, very multicultural and quite French-looking in many ways. French is spoken in Brussels, whereas all round especially on the east, north and west sides, the people speak Flemish, and mostly profess not to understand French, as the people in Brussels refuse to understand Flemish. A strange country, Belgium.
Eventually we found our way out of the city, missing a fair few turns on the way. Hilary had the map, but the difficulty in leaving Brussels was nothing to do with Alzheimer’s, it was to do with lack of signposts.
There is a book called 'How England Made the English' by Harry Mount in which he puts the idea that parachuting yourself into England you know you could not be anywhere else, which is true enough, but he says that doesn’t apply to other European countries and in that he is just manifestly wrong.
One country that disproves my every-country-distinctive theory, however, might be Luxembourg, I would find it very hard to know when I was in Luxembourg, as indeed we were on our drive south from Zeebrugge and only really knew so from the map.
As I drive the car through Europe, Hilary keeps the map on her lap and follows where we are, also giving directions when there’s a choice of ways to go. No problem there as regards the Alzheimer’s, no problem at all.
By contrast to Luxembourg, you know immediately when you have crossed the border into France. On this drive we did that from Germany, just a few miles south of the town of Zweibrucken, which looks like many a German town, with industry and heavy-faced architecture, we were parachuted (metaphorically) into Zweibrucken and knew immediately that we could be nowhere but Germany; we then drove uphill past neat houses and woodland for about five or ten miles and suddenly you know you are in France, it just could not be anywhere else, it is so immediately striking, the country opens out, with big skies and endless fields growing, seemingly, not very much, though cultivated so they probably will be growing something. And roads with no hedges, and an open winding road across the undulating countryside and the inevitable school bus bouncing along in the distance. Could only be France.
This particular part of France, though it looks archetypically French, is Alsace, which was part of Germany from 1870 until 1919; the French were particularly aggrieved to have
lost Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war and were determined to get them back again. But though this area is now part of France, the poorer people - presumably the more authentically indigenous people, speak German. You hear the poorly-dressed and overweight people who are sitting stirring a coffee at the tables outside the patisserie, speaking German, and the cleaning staff in the hotel were speaking German to each other.
Had Alsace not reverted to France after 1918 it might have stayed German, and it is intriguing to wonder whether, that had that been so, it would now look German, not French. And if that is right then that would contradict Harry Mount's contention, it would say that it is not the landscape that makes the people, so much as the people that make the landscape. That second theory seems infinitely more plausible, based on what we see around us.
There we go again, wondering about things. And wondering, whether all this wondering is a good thing or a bad thing, vis-à-vis the Alzheimer’s.
Possibly the language remnant of German in Alsace will be dying out as the young people who live in Alsace speak only French at school. The Saar region of Germany, though, which includes the town of Zweibrucken, has recently introduced a policy of becoming bilingual in German and French, since it borders France this seems a sensible idea; in Alsace by contrast I doubt there would be such a policy, rather the French hope that German will determinedly die out there. It is nigh-on inconceivable that this attitude will lead to the spread of the French language however; more that the Germans will do the selling, and the French the farming. As usual.
We stayed in the town of Niederbronn-les-Bains. Most of the towns in this region of Alsace have German-sounding names and they look a kind of mix, many Germanic-looking buildings but the people and the street layouts and the shops and bars and restaurants lead you to know without doubt that you are in France. We did not know it before going there, but Niederbronn is the 18th-century equivalent in France (where it was located in the 18th century) of Telford and Ironbridge in England; the place where the country's industrial revolution is deemed to have started. In Niederbronn, like Ironbridge, this was essentially due to iron foundries.
Niederbronn now has a large convent, plus tourism, which specifically includes the thermal baths and the casino.
The Mercure hotel, where we were staying in Niederbronn, turned out to be owned by the casino, so we were invited to eat in the casino restaurant and to make use of the bars there. We thought to give this a try and walked into the glitzy casino entrance, to be told by a slim woman in a purple silk trouser suit and with dyed hair that we could not go in unless we produced our passports or id cards, which we had mistakenly left in the hotel bedroom. I asked to see the restaurant menu, and she kindly obliged, and we looked at it and thought, no, not unless there isn't anywhere else. Too artificial. Too casino.
The bars in town looked a bit rough, but I opened the heavy door of the Bar Centrale and it looked fine inside, families were sitting having a drink, so we went in there. Spoke French, and the barman-manager after some obvious initial concern that he might struggle with these foreigners, finding that I could hold a brief conversation in French, became extremely friendly and smiling. A good choice. A pox on these glitzy glorified betting shops.
On our brief walk round town before trying the door of the Bar Centrale we had seen a hotel with what looked like it might be an OK restaurant, and not wanting to get there too early and so be rattling around inside we made our way towards it at about ten past seven, to find the place full, we were lucky to get a table. Obviously this is the place to eat.
And so it was. Hilary saw that there was a Menu Vegétérian - unusual for France - so she had to try that. €19. I went for the Menu Terroir with a main course of choucroûte de poissons. €30. Hilary's starter was good, based upon some tasty large tomatoes with a pungent goat's cheese; her main course disappointing, all it was really was a plate of vegetables. I started with a plate of smoked salmon nicely presented and my fish course was good in parts - some tasteless salmon, salmon is often tasteless, but a flavourful kind of fish paté and a couple of pieces of white fish that were OK. Desserts were good and we were in the restaurant for well over two hours, as this being France the service was slow, very slow, slower even than trying to board a P&O North Sea ferry - slow service in restaurants is a French characteristic, just one young woman was doing nearly all the waiting on, she was slim on top with enormously fat legs. But the food was good and there were all manner of people to watch - never forgetting the waitress' fat legs - so we did not get bored or irritated or anything negative really. We felt that our noses had led us to the right place, as we prided ourselves they so often do.
We quite took to Niederbronn, it kind of grew on us. Though we wondered, as we do about so many places, whether its economy can be sustainable, but then again it's in driving distance of Strasbourg, though that is an attractive town itself, with a sizeable tourist industry, so why go to Niederbronn?
