I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my Brussels Notes newsletter (if you’re not already a part of the community, you can subscribe here). This week I’m talking about waiting around bars for your children to finish whatever it is they’re doing, and the effect this can have on a person.
I wait. That’s what I do.
When you’ve got kids you do a lot of waiting. For them to get their shoes on, to brush their teeth, to eat their dinners, for them to finish their after-school activities. Football training. Birthday parties, Art class. There’s a lot of waiting in a week. On this particular Friday there was a dance recital, with a child needing to be dropped off two hours before the start of their end-of-year show in an auditorium in Anderlecht, which the whole family was going to attend.
There was a time I might have panicked about what to do between drop off and doors opening; there was no point in cycling back home because I’d only have to leave again shortly afterwards. And I didn’t want to hang around the venue because I might run into someone I know. But these days I know what to do when I find myself with time on my hands. I’ll do a little research. I’ll find a café in the neighbourhood. I’ll order a beer or two, and bring my book with me. And anyway, I don’t mind the wait. Maybe something interesting will happen.
It’s quiet when I arrive at the Chapeau Blanc, during that interstitial lull on a Friday when the work week’s over but the weekend hasn’t quite got itself going yet. The tables on the right as I walk in are set for dinner, and a waiter says I’m not allowed sit at one even though the kitchen doesn’t open for another hour. But there’s a pair of tables in a small alcove facing the entrance without any cutlery, and I’m welcome to sit there if it’s just a drink I’m having.
The kitchen mightn’t be open yet but the air in the bar is already thick with the smell of hot grease. Probably that smell never goes away, it’s baked into the place, resistant even to the deep clean it must have received as part of a recent reinvention under new ownership. It doesn’t look as if the new owners have fiddled with the place very much. The decor is generic Art Nouveau, though it could just as easily be a midcentury pastiche; there’s a polished, sanded feel to the wooden tables and chairs, the mirrors sparkle, and there isn’t a hint of yellow tobacco stain anywhere about the place. The rectangular glass panelling on the wooden entrance, with its curved, bevelled edges, looks more imitation brutalism than original Victor Horta. There’s a chalkboard on the bar advertising the football but I don’t see a television anywhere and the only other concessions to contemporary taste are the words “Chapeau Blanc” painted in a jaunty two-tone font on the window and the absence of any kind of clutter. The drinks menu, too, suggests a changing of the guard both behind the bar and in the leather banquettes. The beer list is a couple of entries short of spectacular, but is sprinkled with enough interesting choices and old reliables to keep me occupied for the few minutes it takes for a barman to come and ask for my order.
Waiting for the beer to come, it’s not long before the entrance door opposite my table is pushed open and a slow trickle of reservations begin to file through. It’s families mostly, Dutch-speaking ones, though they do the Brussels thing once they are in the bar and address the staff in French. But once they’ve been directed to their seats behind me they lose their object permanence, the cries of their restless children and their muffled conversations coalescing into ambient white noise, and I might as well be alone save for the staff behind the bar.
I don’t begrudge the children this loose time. When they were younger, and especially during the pandemic, I used it to take rangy walks around the marshlands near our house in Ganshoren, or along the canal. As they’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten lazier, the walks have become less frequent and I’ve gravitated instead to seeking out new places in the neighbourhoods in which I find myself while I wait. Places like the Chapeau Blanc where I can sit by myself, with little to do other than keep an eye on the time until I’m needed again. Maybe something will happen, maybe I will be hit by a gust of inspiration, and scribble something useful in my notebook. Or maybe nothing will happen. If there’s any stress to the experience, it comes towards the end, when I might have to engage in some temporal arbitrage over exactly how long I can leave it before I absolutely have to go, and whether that gives me enough time for a one last quick one.
And I’m good at waiting, so long as I’m alone. I don’t like waiting in the company of others because the longer we wait the greater the conversational imperative, and I find that difficult to negotiate. On my own the only company I have is my inner monologue, and I can just sit in a nice bar like the Chapeau Blanc where no one knows me and just be with myself for a little while. Maybe I’ll spend all the time on my phone. Maybe I’ll read and reread the same three paragraphs of my book. Maybe I’ll put my inner monologue to good use and scribble something useful in my notebook for later. I am master of my own destiny.
But sitting there with a beer and a half onboard, the thought strikes me that maybe I’m too good at it. That my natural state is one of inertia, that I am myself inert, someone that things happen to rather than one of those people who makes things happen in their lives. When I start to think like this, alone in places like the Chapeau Blanc, I start to wonder whether I’ve approached my whole life as if it is some kind of empty lot, that I’ve embraced waiting because it allows me to treat my life as if I’m really just a placeholder, a necessary firebreak between the echoing chaos of my parents’ lives and the fragile promise of my childrens’. It’s a seductive way to go through life, thinking about yourself in this way. It allows you to abrogate, or at the very least, mitigate, any agency I might have over the choices I have made in my life (or the choices that have been made for me). Maybe after another beer and if I’m not careful, this line of thought might encourage me to indulge in a kind of indolent martyrdom that isn’t very attractive, and certainly isn’t very productive.
And I don’t think it’s true either, at least not any more. There was certainly a time not long in my past when I would have been too intimidated to cross the threshold at the Chapeau Blanc, anxious to the point of inertia about the unfamiliar experience that might be waiting for me on the other side. That’s why I used to go on those long walks. Too afraid to take that next step. But here I am, sitting with my beer and looking out the windows of the Chapeau Blanc as the afternoon creeps across Rue Wayez. I chose to wait here when I could have gone somewhere else, or gone nowhere at all. I probably would have been plagued with the same ruminative intrusions either way, but at least this way I’m doing it with a beer.
When my beer is finished I order another one. I watch more families come through the door and disappear behind me. I listen to the staff discussing the night’s work to come and who’s doing what. I overhear them scolding a couple who booked a table for two but should have booked for three if they were going to bring their child with them. I take out my phone, and I put it away. I write something down, and I stop when the barman arrives with my drink. I look out onto the street and I see, through the refracting glass of the front door, a giant lumbering past.
It casts a long late-afternoon shadow across the footpath and over its chaperones, a huddle of older men and women in matching white outfits, each one of them wearing a black sash around their waist. The giant itself is wearing a beige shirt and large floppy hat that obscures the gaudy makeup they’ve painted on its face. It’s not clear how they’ve managed to push their papier-maché colossus as far as they have down the street. Is it on wheels? Is one of their company hidden in the folds of the giant’s tunic? They’ve come to a point in the street where the path slopes down to the tram tracks, and I can see even from a distance their strained faces and sweating brows. They’ve all come to a stop now, waiting, gathering themselves together for the next stage of their journey.
They don’t look in much of a hurry, and neither am I. The dance show doesn’t begin for another half hour, and I still have one more beer to get through.
Here’s to waiting.
Miscellaneous Notes
*with apologies to Jonathan Glazer. But, good things do come to those who wait…
The book I wasn’t reading in the Chapeau Blanc was Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place. I just finished it at the weekend, and it’s gotten me thinking about what might be my own flat places in Brussels, and more specifically how much I miss the variety of landscape back home, and how claustraphobic the city can sometimes feel. Fuel for a future newsletter entry no doubt…
Brussels’ Géant culture is one of those curious early modern folk traditions that Brussels is full of, but which like its sibling marionette theatres, doesn’t get as much attention as Manneken Pis, or the Ommegang.
I forgot to mention it in last week’s newsletter, but this year’s edition of Le Fooding Magazine is out now, with a huge directory of the best restaurants and food shops in Brussels (and Belgium, but whatever) - and an article by me about underground food producers. I had a great time romping around Belgium interviewing mushroom farmers, cheesemongers, and cider makers about why they spend their working days in caves and cellars, including Brussels’ own Osma. I also got to visit the “coolest place in Limburg” - but you’ll have to buy the mag to find out where that is.
Newsletter is nearly reaching it’s 6-month anniversary - how should I mark that? Suggestions in the comments please!