I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe Brussels Notes newsletter. For the month of August, while I try not to go insane from spending my holidays in Brussels - I’m writing about my summer staycation in the Belgian capital. Here’s to quiet drinks and card games with the kids.
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It was N’s idea to go to Billie for a drink and escape the afternoon sun. Well, it was her idea to go to Billie, and my idea to go for a drink. It was the penultimate Saturday of the holidays, and the last one before the childrens’ final summer camp before the new school year. We had errands to run downtown, and they needed airing after being cooped up in our one-bedroom apartment for the morning.
And the best way to convince them to leave the house is with the promise that there is something - or several things - in it for them. At stop number one at the paper shop on Rue des Eperonniers meant a new pen or notebook or both. At our final stop at the KY Asian supermarket on the corner of Rue Saint-Catherine I had said they could pick out a box of mochi for dessert later in the evening. And our pit stop between the two, somewhere we could escape the surprisingly oppressive late-summer heat, was a drink somewhere. Over the course of our month-long staycation in Brussels, with excursions to Rotterdam and Ireland, there had been a lot of “drinks” and a lot of “somewheres”. But on this final chance to relax together before the rentrée, I had not become much better at navigating the delicate challenge of choosing the right place with the right drinks that satisfied both children and me. Get it right and we will all have a relaxed time enjoying ourselves and each other's company. Get it wrong and it will be complaints about there being nothing to drink and can they have a snack and how long we are going to stay and it smells here and I’m bored.
This was the subject of our conversation as we inched down Rue Des Brasseurs, swerving between the terraces of the gyros stands, the tourists spilling over from the Grand Place, and a pair of young people recording what looked like football stunts for social media. N and Z were both beginning to shrivel under the noonday sun and we were all struggling to come up with our next destination. Our usual haunt in similar such scenarios - the Café Mokka in the royal galleries - was a winter place better suited to slurping hot chocolates amid piles of scarves. I flicked through my mental rolodex of venues both proximate and child-friendly but my regular haunts were either not yet open, in the case of Le Coq, or materially unsuited to the task at hand. It was when we’d reached the bottom of the hill, next to the plaque marking the spot where poet-lovers Rimbaud and Verlaine had their violent contretemps 150 years ago, that N suggested “the place that does the bolo”. Billie, formerly the Monk, in other words, where we’d been to several weeks before, albeit not for spaghetti but for drinks in a not dissimilar situation. I told her it was a perfect choice, as weren’t we going in that direction anyway and wasn’t it close to the metro home too. The idea seemed to stick and the notion of it taking 10 minutes or more did not seem to appall the pair of them, so we quickened our pace under the shadow of the Stadhuis.
The walk takes longer than 10 minutes and their will is just about cracking when we reach the terrace outside Billie. It is full, a mixed crowd of men and women in their early 40s with at its centre perched on a high stool but wobbling precariously, a woman in a canary blazer with her sleeves rolled up. It could be her birthday judging by their excited manner, or the birthday of one of the several children scrabbling around at her feet, it’s unclear. They might also just be day drunk in the heat. We go inside, where the sweat on the backs of our necks turns quickly to condensate and we secure a table several rows over from the big window at the front of the café. In these scenarios it is my job to get the drinks in and theirs to unpack their stuff, an operation that involves us spreading out bloblike to occupy the surface area of our table with whatever junk they’ve been carrying in their handbags.
Z decides to roadtest her new new pen, the one she was bribed with from the paper shop, a stubby cylinder of glossy black plastic, girthy like a lipstick tube. She’s transcribing an address of a school friend onto a postcard we picked up on a detour to Plazey, an unremarkable sunlit photograph of the Kunstberg gardens. Insofar as she doesn’t need our help we might as well not exist so concentrated she is on her task. She does keep her sweating bottle of Cecemel within arm’s reach.
N is restless. I know the look well enough after this summer. She needs a distraction. The Uno deck is out before she has the chance to object. We have taken to carrying it around with us, her in her fake siberian tiger print shoulder bag or me in my USG bumbag. The original packaging has long since disintegrated, replaced by a series of progressively more industrial rubber bands. The cards are frayed at the edges, some of them with bent dog ears and others peeling apart from water damage after any number of café session quarrels. I can, I think, chart their short lives in this deck of cards. Games on the beach at Santa Susanna before we even had a notion of children and L calling me a fuckface for cheating. A pristine set of Uno junior left in its plastic wrapping because one of them had already received it as a present for one of their toddler birthdays. They never really liked that underpowered version of the game, and were only too happy to graduate to the real thing, even if in those earlier years they struggled for a firm grasp of the rules and the concept of losing.
This summer we’ve made another step up, shifting from a winner-takes all approach to our games to totting up the scores of each round. N has been the score-keeper, filing them in a makeshift ledger in her little imitation Moleskine notebook after games in the Mutton Lane snug in Cork and in the sunken dining room at the Sijf in Rotterdam. There will be no score-taking today because it is just the two of us playing and she doesn’t have her notebook and anyway I win the first game. It is quick and I pull out a killer +4 my penultimate card. She still does not like losing. She also does not like her drink, which is more dangerous, a glass of water which at €2.50 is the cheapest thing on the menu. She doesn’t like it because it’s the Spa brand, and she doesn’t like Spa. I haven’t told her what brand it is, but she has a good palate for that sort of thing. She will go far.
Facing me and with her back to the bar, N can’t amuse herself by monitoring the passing trade, but I can. A Scottish woman is leaning towards the bar and asking the barman about the beers they have, which he describes by going down the line of taps in patient English. ‘All Belgians, then,” she says when he has finished. I cannot see his face, nor do I catch his muffled reply. She says that she can’t make a choice herself and has to consult her daughter who is waiting out in the sun on the terrace. Everyone in the bar can hear the woman shout out through the front door “he’s going to give us samples”. The daughter is clearly nonplussed judging by the woman’s declining of the proffered samples when she comes back in. “She trusts my judgement.”
A troupe of blonde tweens file out of the toilets in the wake of their blonde mother, who directs one of her brood to collect an empty packet of Haribo tangfastics one of them had discarded on a nearby table. Going in the opposite direction a woman in a ribbed purple tanktop stops momentarily at our table on noticing the children busying themselves with their writing and card-playing, leaning in ever so slightly and smiling in their direction. I can see that a mauve bullseye of sweat has stained her shirt, but only on one side. I am daydreaming.
“Nog een potje Uno, papa?” Another game? I nod and pick up the deck to shuffle. I’ll keep playing as long as you keep asking, I think but do not say. I don’t want to embarrass her. I’m sure she knows anyway. I hope she does.
Time to introduce the family to the "Show 'em no mercy" edition of UNO? (https://shop.mattel.com/products/uno-show-em-no-mercy-hwv18) It's a great way to upset your family score (or bury your chances forever).