Back in Highgate after an impromptu mini holiday in Bruges, and feeling much better.
I’d woken up on Wednesday morning, grumpy and ill from a headachey virus that’s apparently doing the rounds, and wondered what it might be like to just run away and leave the country for a spell. I had moments like this all the time while on the dole.
This time, I could actually afford it. Couldn’t face a plane with the headache. Had to be a stylish and Decadent location reachable by Eurostar.
Been to Paris before, but not Bruges. Always wanted to go there after reading those books by Georges Rodenbach: ‘Bruges-la-morte’, ‘The Bells Of Bruges’, and ‘Bruges 3 – This Time It’s Personal.’
Then there’s the recent Colin Farrell movie about two gangsters escaping there: ‘In Bruges’. It’s got everything you could possibly want from a movie: comedy, morality and extreme violence.
I’m also aware – after the event – that Bruges is where Stephen Fry ran off to when he had his mid 90s nervous breakdown. And I’ve just found it was the setting for ‘The Nun’s Story’, that Audrey Hepburn film that always seems to be on TV at lunchtime.
So by 3pm I was sipping champagne with free refills on the Eurostar (Leisure Class wasn’t much more than Standard). By tea-time I was in a 60% off four star hotel room in Bruges, courtesy of one of those ‘we find you the cheapest deal’ websites.
So: Bruges. Cobbled streets, medieval brick houses, Gothic churches, canals and bridges, bicycles, every other shop either selling chocolates or Mr Farrell’s ‘gay beers’, one Tintin shop, one Phial Of Holy Blood, and one enormous tower with a belfry, The Belfort, which plays a pivotal role in the Farrell film.
I spent most of the three days trying to think just what The Belfort reminded me of. One of the Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings? Not quite.
Then it hit me. It looks like one of those rotating gun-like industrial machines that puts buttons onto clothes. A massive, sinister, Gothic button machine.
Tags: Bruges
