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On the road

Peter Phillips

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Peter Phillips travels between music festivals

There is much talk in Belgium at the moment of how they and their kind are finally about to break the country in half, with the French half voting to rejoin France. That would really be something; but for the moment these people of the future object to any official word which is not in Flemish. Imagine their discontent, then, when it became clear that Brussels Airlines, a Belgian-run company, has decided to do away with the whole wretched Belgian language problem and speak only in English. The safety briefing was in English, the pilot came over in a strongly nuanced English and the food was advertised in English. For my companions, noisy with incomprehension and complaint, English is the new French.

Travelling from Evora, a Portuguese town near the Spanish border where the temperature has been 27°c, to Lille and thence to St Omer near Calais, where the temperature was 5°c and the rain unceasing, made me wonder why it was just that unbelievably depressing low-country landscape which was so fought over, and not somewhere worth possessing. Then I remembered how many of my composers were born in the mud of that featureless paysage. In St Omer alone they count Jean Mouton, Antoine de Févin and Pierre de Manchicourt: not bad for a small provincial town. The next morning I found I had to change trains (at 0710) in Mons, where Orlandus Lassus was born. I just had time to leave the station and pay my respects, before resuming the journey to Brussels airport and reflecting on the extreme oddity of Belgium as a country and culture, the fact that it may soon vanish altogether, unloved, as if it had never been, not the least of it.