#79: Batten down the hatches
A chaotic end to a chaotic 2024 in Brussels. Enjoy it.
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 - in fact, for the whole month - we’re celebrating the holiday season in Brussels. Here’s to 2024
No end-of-year round-ups from me, no most-read-articles lists or best/worst of Brussels in 2024. Just a simple message to say thank you to you and every other one of the 920 people that have signed up to receive this newsletter in their inbox more or less every week. I do not hold myself much to new year’s resolutions - the only one I’ve ever largely kept was when I committed in January 2023 to going to the cinema more often - but I do promise the newsletter will hit a more regular stride in 2025. But more of that in a future post.
I want to wish everyone a happy, and safe, New Year’s Eve, whatever your plans are for the evening ahead. It feels from where we are up in Koekelberg that Brussels has already been celebrating for several days. Fireworks have been going off in the streets around us since Christmas, quieter or louder depth charges exploding in the park or down the road, each one feeling out the resolve of the - largely invisible - local police force. Going to pick up a Cambio in Ganshoren this morning we passed a pair of young men - in their mid-20s? - laden down with fireworks walking through Parc Elisabeth, one of them carrying an armload of roman candles in the crook of his elbow. Later, we queued up for 15 minutes at the local fireworks shop for a packet of sparklers to make our planned night in with the children tonight a little more festive. The queue was out the door, and after standing in it for 15 and finally reaching its head, L was told by the friendly bilingual man behind the counter they’d sold out only half an hour previously.
So far, so expected. It’s New Year’s Eve, after all - Christmas for fireworks shops. Only, The use of fireworks in the Brussels region is banned until 3 March. Not just the sale, but the possession, transport, use, and exhibition. Such is the way of things in this city lately, though; just yesterday Belgium’s constitutional court ruled that a 7pm curfew on under-16s being outdoors in Anderlecht tonight was illegal but could still go ahead. We’re finishing out the year as we’ve lived it - chaotically. Six months on from the regional elections and we’re no closer to the formation of a regional government, in fact we seem further away now than we did back in June. The drugs- and gangland-related shootings have continued right into the dog days of the year. Houses are catching fire and people are suffocating themselves in their apartments as they try and keep warm. The city’s metro stations will tonight, as they do every night, function as informal accommodation for Brussels’ homeless community.
On a last minute dash to the supermarket this afternoon, the air was already thick with the wailing of sirens distant and close by. Traffic was jumpy and the people were too, anxious it felt to get in and out of the shops and off the streets as quickly as they could. The harried aisles of the Delhaize were in stark contrast to the calm of the Colruyt I ducked into on the morning of Christmas eve, when what shoppers there were were outnumbered by the staff getting on with their busywork. I can read on Bruzz that already young people are being picked up on the streets of Kuregem as the curfew deadline approaches.
It could get hairy out there tonight. But it’s been a pretty hairy year, so we should be used to it by now.
Whatever you’re doing tonight, I hope you enjoy it. We’ll talk in 2025.