#107: Take me to my beach

It's too hot in Brussels right now. I need the sea.

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!

This week, I am mostly grousing about Brussels’ distance from the sea, and why I’m struggling with zeezucht…

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I will forgive Brussels for many things, but I will never forgive it for being so far from the sea.

I come from a temperate climate, and I am a man of temperate humours, and this past week in Brussels I have been suffering under the year’s first official heatwave of the year. It seems to come around earlier and earlier every year, that first furnace blast of heat that reminds me, again, that I am not a warm weather person, and that Brussels is not a warm weather city.

It is hot. Too hot. During the night it is too hot to sleep. During the day it is too hot to stay awake. It is certainly too hot to write. Our new kittens Filou and Cheddar have the right idea, lolling by a window opened just enough to let some air in but not so much that they can escape. When the evening comes they slink into the kitchen to warm themselves from below on the concrete floor. I cannot do this. I have a job and other human inconveniences.

Brussels and I are not equipped for temperatures above 25 degrees celsius, nevermind anything beyond the 30 degree threshold that formally signals a heatwave. We have no air conditioning; we don’t even have a fan. I have no warm weather clothes - why should I, when they’re only useful two or three weeks in a year. Everything stinks. The streets stink. The air stinks. The bus stinks. The metro stinks. I stink. The kitchen stinks, of cat. The heat in Brussels isn’t a dry heat, it’s a close, muggy heat that sticks to your skin, refusing to release you from its suffocating embrace, a dead heat, oppressive, with no air in it or wind to soften it.

The city is febrile enough right now without throwing a heatwave into the mix. I painted a picture to visiting friends recently of Brussels as a modern day reimagining of New York in the 1970s, and when the mercury rises like it has this week I feel more and more like Adrien Brody in Summer of Sam, sweaty and paranoid and living in a city on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

A Balkan colleague of mine chided me for complaining at work about the heat, but what could I do, I said. We were both coastal people, I said, surely she could understand that if only the sea wasn’t so far away, then it would all be more bearable. But the sea isn’t close, or at least not close enough. I grew up with the sea always there just beyond the horizon, in a town on the estuarial mouth of a river where the tide brought in not just brackish water but a salty, cooling tang in the air and seagulls in the river. The best that Cork smelled was when the tide was out and Beamish and Crawford had just put on a fresh brew and the city hummed with the sweet, salty smell of beer and exposed seaweed.

The only seagulls we see in Brussels are poor lost things who’ve accidentally hitchhiked on a barge coming down from Zeebrugge and don’t know how to get home. All the best Irish cities are on or near the sea (sorry, Kilkenny). The best global cities too. Of course there are the boring meteorological reasons why being by the sea is good in a heatwave, but there’s more to it. There is something about the presence of open water, the knowledge that the wide calming expanse of the ocean is down the end of the street, the tantilising anticipation of a post-work open water swim, a chance to slough off the day’s annoyances, a salty rebirth.

On hot summer days when we were young, the sea was always an outlet for us if our town got too staid. We knew we could get the bus at the stop on the bridge and in half an hour be sitting on the sand in Fountainstown (no fountains), Myrtleville (some bog myrtle, presumably), or cadge a lift from someone’s mother and be sitting among the rocks at Rocky Bay bracing for the first ball-shrivelling dive into the Atlantic.

Belgian author Hugo Claus, another city dweller seduced by the sea - not Ireland’s wild, rambunctious Atlantic coastline but Belgium’s more melancholy North Sea - captured the longing he felt for his adopted Ostend. He called it zeezucht, “sea-longing”:

We still have the memory

of roses, of Ensor’s beard

the scent of lilacs

the rumour of the long-eared owl

the scent of raspberries

the flower parade

a lithograph by Spilliaert

the Iceland voyage

Longing?

Zeezucht

But there is no seabreeze in Brussels, no lilacs, no raspberries, nowhere to swim, and no quick escape to the beach. No respite. Only the two hour train to Ostend or Blankenberge, Knokke or De Panne. By the time you are reading this I, along with half the country, should be on one of those trains, escaping oppressive Brussels across the Flemish plains to the North Sea, to Ostend, to the salt wind, and to satisfy an itch that Brussels can never scratch.

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Postscript

I first came across that Hugo Claus poem while researching an article for Belgian Smaak on the Belgian coastline - for which I travelled the length of the coast on the Belgian Kusttram (the world’s longest single tram line).

You can read a snatch of the article below, with a link to the rest of it here.

Flavour Track — A Culinary Crawl On Belgium’s Coastal Tram

The tram hadn’t pulled away from the gaudy lights of the Blankenberge kermis fun fair before the empty seat next to me is filled. On the outskirts of Wenduine, its occupant starts talking to me. Burly, with a thick neck and a beefy hand holding onto a leashed German shepherd, he introduces himself and apologises for his girth. Or at least, that’s what I can pick up from his dense Flemish dialect.

He still has the glow of the kermis and a day at the beach on him, the bright strip lighting of the tram accentuating his neck’s tanned creases. He tells me his name (Daniel), his wife’s (Sylvia), and the dog’s (Wolf). He tells me they are taking the late-night tram back to their holiday apartment just outside of Ostend. He tells me he’s a trucker, a freelance driver midway through a 10-day holiday on the Belgian coast—the first of his professional career.

He finds out I’m Irish—because I tell him—and his sun-weathered face betrays confusion at how he’s ended up talking Flemish to an Irishman on the late tram from Blankenberge to Ostend. So he asks, what am I doing here?

A good question, and one I’d been asking myself throughout a day that’s just leeched the last of its light into the sea on the horizon. I could tell him I don’t really like the Belgian coast, that I might even hate it. That I find it cold and grey and frigid. That I don’t like it in the winter when the north sea winds whip sand into your eyes and cold into your bones. That I don’t like it in the summer either, when all of Belgium descends on an overcrowded 100 kilometre strip of beach and promenade. That its straight lines and dull palette makes me pine for a real coastline, for the earthy greens and browns and yellows of the Irish beaches of my youth.

READ THE REST HERE

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