There was a report published last week claiming Belgium was the third most stressful country in the world to live in. A bold claim for sure, but anyone who’s ever lived in Brussels can attest to the city’s capacity to induce anxiety in its residents. Air pollution, noise pollution, street pollution, chaotic traffic, sometimes-unreliable public transport, a harried populace, and even just the uncertainty of not knowing which language your interlocutor speaks all add up to make Brussels at least a very stressful place to live. And any other week I’d be manning the barricades shouting to whoever would listen that yes, the findings of this report were true, and no, I’ve never lived anywhere that has tested my fight-or-flight instinct more than Brussels. But last week something odd happened. For two short days, a brief kind of tranquility descended on Brussels. Because of a bit of snow.
All the talk around the dinner table last week had been weather-related. Was it really going to snow? How long was it going to snow? Would the snow stick around or would it melt? How much was it going to snow? By Wednesday afternoon we’d answers to most of these questions. Yes it was really going to snow. For most of the day, starting to drift in around noon before coming in strong the rest of the day and relenting just before dinner. And this snow was not melting. It couldn’t, the temperature barely creeped above 0℃. About 10 centimetres, the most measured by the meteorological observatory in Uccle in years.
Walking through Parc Elisabeth on the way home from work on Wednesday evening, there were already intimations of the effect the day’s blizzard was having on the city. It had deposited great white quiffs of snow on the parked cars, cars their owners had wisely left at home for the day rather than risk inclement conditions on the road. The cars that had ventured out had drawn thick, dark automotive desire lines in the snow, marking out their territory and leaving what was left for residents to mine for snowmen and snowballs. The park itself, never an inviting place to linger on dark winter nights, was eerily bright, thick snow drifts as yet untrampled reflected back the light of an almost-full moon. At home, this luminescent effect was amplified; after putting the bins out, my wife asked me if I’d left the back garden light on. I had not.
In the morning, it was clear the snow had had an overnight soporific effect on the city. The streets were quieter, because many people had left their cars at home and of those that were out on the road many had temporarily abandoned their instinctive aggressive carelessness in favour of something uncharacteristically cautious. The buses were having trouble with the roads, and the binmen too were stranded in their depots.
That snow was doing something else too. It hadn’t just tamed Brussels’ notorious traffic chaos, it had also cleansed the street of some of its stubborn grime. Because the binmen weren’t running there weren’t rubbish bags discarded higgledy-piggledy outside houses, nor were there birds to pick at the bins and spread their contents around the footpaths. Brussels can be a grey old place, something that’s made worse on wet winter days. And we’d had a lot of those in December, one of the darkest and wettest months in recent memory.
Rain shows Brussels at its worst, shows up its dilapidation and its dysfunction, and makes people miserable. Dull and grey and wet, everyone damp and irritable hustling from inside to outside and back in again as fast as they can. Loose footpaths splash inattentive walkers with their hidden wells of rainwater. Drivers harry and nudge their cars along the road, splashing pedestrians and cyclists alike in their intemperate efforts to get somewhere, anywhere, just a little faster than the car in front. Sour faces, gritted against the rain. Not weather to linger out of doors.
But snow is different. Snow can hide a multitude of sins. The clump of untidied rotting leaves taunting me for months in the garden were now vanished under a thick layer of snow. The footpaths were free of dogshit, or if they weren’t the dogshit was buried where it wouldn’t be found until the temperature rose. Even the boarded-up pavilion covered in graffiti in Parc Elisabeth looked a little less grim with a fringe of snow on its sagging roof.
And where rain makes Brussels’ residents choleric, the snow was clearly having a mollifying effect on their moods. When they weren’t mincing around on unsalted footpaths looking to avoid the slick tamped-down sections of snow, they were reclaiming the outdoors for themselves. It was lucky the snow fell on a Wednesday, when the schools break at noon. Not long after lunchtime, kids and their parents were sledding down the steep slope at the foot of the Koekelberg basilica, on whatever makeshift sled they could fashion. Writer Gareth Harding captioned a photo on Twitter of a snowy Parc Wolvendal in Uccle full with people sliding on their arses downhill, “Brussels goes full Breugel”.
And there was something primitive to people’s reaction to the snow, giddy as if they’d never seen snow before. They lingered outdoors when they otherwise might have avoided the biting cold, enjoying the unexpected and exhilarating spectacle of their city under cover of snow and exuding a sort of after-ski chic in their puffy jackets and oversized woollen scarves. My kids were not different, spending an hour out front of our house making snow angels and throwing snowballs, the usual tired moaning about homework and the day’s injustices abandoned.
The city didn’t just feel different. It looked different too. I mean, obviously it looked different, there was snow everywhere when there usually wasn’t. But it was the changing of the light that struck me the most, not just in the park that evening, but the following morning walking into work. With a bright blue sky and the sun just coming up over the Kruidtuin, it was a clear, true crisp light, suffused to the east with soft reds and oranges. Around the green lampposts along the footpaths in the park there were opalescent haloes, gentle lavender circles of untouched snow. The muddy brown trunks of the large oak trees splintered the light from the rising sun, casting shadows of a deep Yves Klein blue over the dilapidated kiosk. And it wasn’t just the light but the sound too, a delicious crunch of unblemished snow compacting underfoot, a noise amplified by the quiet of an empty park untroubled by commuters sticking close to home for the day, it was enough for me to pull out my phone and take a few photos, knowing that what I was seeing, and what the city was experiencing, was at best a transient serenity.
By Friday morning what snow hadn’t been gritted away by the city’s winter maintenance crews had curdled into mounds of slushy mush at the side of the road. The temperature was creeping back up and by the evening the footpaths were clear. As the ice and snow receded the dirt and the decrepitude reasserted itself. Grime in Brussels is inevitable. As is Brussels’ chronic anxiety. Cycling to the swimming pool on Friday evening to drop the kids off for the class, and the park didn’t glow like it had two nights ago. The spell was broken. On the downhill run to the pool a driver tooted his horn at us to move from the centre of the road, normal service having resumed.
It was still arctic hout, mind, and I was glad to get out of the cold and into my usual spot in In Den Hemel next to the gas fire, its blue flame warming up my extremities and a shimmering glass (two, actually) of Zinnebir to warm the rest of me.
I hate the cold, but I don’t mind when it snows in Brussels.
Miscellaneous notes
On Monday I had an article published in the Irish Times on what trying to raise Irish kids in Brussels has done to my own relationship with my Irishness. You can read it here (paywall), or listen to me talk about it in an interview with RTE here.
Went to see Poor Things at Cinema Galeries at the weekend. Yorgos Lanthimos is a gas man. Emma Stone deserves every award thrown at her.
By the time this article goes out, I’ll probably be under general anaesthetic getting three wisdom teeth pulled. Depending on how I recover, newsletter service will continue as normal next week. Cross your fingers.