All Change.

  

On the edge of Astridpark

Change is in the air!! The weather is unseasonally sunny and relatively clement. Sunshine smiles everywhere; underfoot, crunching carpets with a further tsunami of technicolour leaves racing to reach the pavement first or the tables on busy cafe terraces set, alas, to disappear tomorrow on November 15 by the usual decree. The first Christmas tree, tall and proud in the Burg, has been in place for a week now while Jan Van Eyckplein awaits the departure of the fast food emporium-on-wheels to make space for its own lordly Christmas tree to sprout. Chalets are already built on Simon Stevinplein and nearing completion on the Markt where the ice-rink-to-be is under construction. The Christmas Market is thus on schedule for the opening in two weeks’ time and for the festive crowds to arrive with eager faces and appetites.

De Witte Pelikaan on Vlamingstraat has a wondrous major window display of snowy animals and glittering branches while inside innumerable Christmas trees plus countless Father Christmases and stockings filled to overflowing with gifts and berries and tinsel, jostle for space.. So, parts of the

townscape speak of Christmas while others sing of Autumn. It can seem frenetic at times in Brugge but to walk along the canals at 7.00 in the morning with the first sun promising or with the golden leaves reduced to rainy ochre slush or with a faint mist greying out lamp posts and gables into a Bruges-la-Morte kind of start to the day: then any variation in the weather is welcome in the solitude of the city.

Last Sunday was the Brugge Urban Trail; hundreds of runners were organised to run, in carefully-controlled sections, through the city, beginning and ending in the Markt. Somehow the whole show enjoyed a carnival air with much shouting and singing among the waiting runners, carefully choreographed by a strong, rhythmic disembodied voice. There seemed to be fluorescent-jacketed marshals every few metres and crowds of enthusiastic supporters and observers cheering on anything that moved. It was all great fun to see and hear as a slowly-moving watcher who need not exert herself at all.

Urban trailers queueing in the Startbox in readiness for 

the Start Box!

Irrationally it reminded me of the amateur Olympics I had tried to stage in the wood and field next to our childhood home. Excitement had been high in the run-up to the first Games since the void of World War Two and we children were caught up in the anticipation of the unknown. I can’t remember the details save the pain of the marathon [down the lane to Waterson’s Farm and back] and the publicity material which I painstakingly produced in red, mock-italic writing and which I was secretly thrilled to learn had been praised by the local chemist’s wife who lived nearby and whose two sons were in Our Gang. Would that have been 1946 or 7? Oh dear, how clear some of these old memories are bearing no comparison to very recent memories here which have been almost greyed out!

Die Swaene Hotel interior

One half of Duo Aron

A week ago, a visiting friend here for English conversation suggested I go with her an hour later to Die Swaene on the Predikerenrei, a lovely-looking hotel which I have never visited. Apparently there are four Wednesday afternoon free concerts of classical music during November so I was eager to see and hear. First, the hotel inside did not disappoint; lots of gilding, mirrors, candles and statues, chiefly of the Virgin Mary. But the concert itself was a delight; Duo Arion comprising Alexander Declercq on piano and Hoat Nguyen, viol, played Dvorak and Mendelssohn in a splendid gilded, candelabra-d high room filled with shoulder-to-shoulder comfortable chairs. Heaven!

And below, two more shots of Autumnal Brugge which seems more fulsome and prodigal this year than normal.

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