#147: Tempered City
A slow, cold start to 2026
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It’s the first post of 2026 - from a wintry Brussels.
It has been a cold start to the year in Brussels. Even before this week’s blizzards dumped their snowdrifts across the city, it feels as if we have been suspended in an unceasing purgatorial midwinter for several weeks now, with the air outside barely above freezing and the boiler constantly rumbling in the cellar. An extended cold snap has a curious impact on Brussels, all the more so when it is accompanied by several centimetres of snow. The city’s metabolic rate seems to slacken. With snow piled up on the footpaths and treacherous ice hidden underneath, walks that might have taken 10 minutes now take 15. Buses and trams shunt each other along the roads as waiting times between them stretch out beyond the acceptable. There are fewer cars on the roads, and those that have ventured out appear tamed, navigating the perilous conditions with something approaching caution.
It’s not just their speed and their behaviour that is altered but their sounds too, revving and screeching supplanted by a sloshing and whirring. The parks are quieter too, as if the low gloopy, peach-hued sky is acting as a great sound damper, blocking out everything but the distant splashing of traffic, the hooting of winter birds in the trees, and the odd crunch-crack of fresh snow underfoot. Walking through Parc Elisabeth on Wednesday morning, snow-heavy clouds had descended and were only just beginning to release their cargo to replenish the dense covering of snow that had already gathered on previous days on the park’s footpaths and grass lawns, hiding for a few days the empty and rotting fireworks boxes and discarded bottletops left behind from the year’s end bacchanal. The incipient blizzard obliterated the skyscrapers on the city skyline to the south, and of the Basilica to the north only the gaudy neon red cross on the roof of the dome was visible through the flurries of snow. All I could hear were my own crunchy footsteps and my laboured breath and for a moment it felt as if I was walking through a snowglobe and that the whole city had shrunk to my little pocket of green and white.
It being such a rare event, Brussels can take on a magical quality in the snow and its residents utterly transfixed by the cold, transformed themselves into bit part primitives in a wintry Brueghelian tableau as they slide down slippery paths on makeshift sleds and drag their children through the park three-abreast on wooden sleighs. The light is different too, Brussels’ dour grey replaced by pristine meringue whites, warm tungsten oranges, and drifts of evening snow of an almost luminescent violet.
It’s not just the city whose metabolism has been impacted by the cold; 12 months ago I had already been to the cinema and enjoyed by first cafe visit of the year before the first day of the year had ended, but in 2026 I have still yet to have my first beer away from home, and only managed to drag myself to the cinema on the year’s seventh day. I have barely been outside at all, and when I have ventured out my resolve to remain indoors away from the cold has been confirmed by the sheer misery of slipping and falling off my bike on a patch of deceptive black ice. My hands, the skin cracked and bloody and my knuckles swollen and blue from exposure to the cold, type with difficulty and my brain provides them with thoughts more slowly.
But this morning I woke up to find the snow gone and rain replacing it. The city has resumed its noisy chaos once more as cars zoom through ice-free streets and people trudge more confidently across waterlogged footpaths and the wind batters and sways the trees in the park and unrelenting rain hammers at the window. Any wintry magic has been washed away by the coming storm, the streets have been given back their grey monotony, and finally it feels as if the year can begin.
“… transformed themselves into bit part primitives in a wintry Brueghelian tableau as they slide down slippery paths on makeshift sleds and drag their children…” Well-wrought image.