The Fishwhacker Swindle?

If a latter-day Dick Whittington were to go looking for a city whose streets were paved not with gold but with dog shit, he’d be well advised to head for Brussels. The pavements are slathered with the stuff. Christ knows what they feed their dogs, but I suspect it might be the same praline spread you see on breakfast tables as the faeces are of the same colour and creamy consistency.

Vampirella and I spent two days there, and a terrific Easter weekend it was too. The beer is fabulous. I sampled some nine varieties but barely dipped into the pot as there are over 500 kinds. My favourite was ‘Judas’, an apparently innocuous brew which, true to its name, bites you on the figurative arse once you’ve had a bottle and suddenly can’t stand up. The food’s pretty good too, though I started to tire of mussels after the first meal. I mean, they’re all very well, but they do look like detached vulvas and they don’t really fill you up. Rabbit stewed in cherry beer was a better bet.

As with most continental European cities, the public transport system is excellent and cheap, and puts our own British travesty to shame. Brussels is not a beautiful city by any means, and while its cathedral and Grand Place square are mighty impressive, there’s an air of drab seediness hanging over the place, as though all the money there has gone into the trough feeding the hogs in the EU area which it probably has. That said, many of the buildings are decorated with enormous murals from comic strips, Belgium being one of the comic capitals of the world, and you can go on a walking tour of comic mural sites as we did.

There’s a weirdness about the place that I found fascinating and unsettling at the same time. Bizarre statues – of stooped old ladies, of busty cartoon rabbits riding bicycles, of dogs cocking their legs – appear all over the city free of any apparent context. Going back to my earlier remark about dog turds, there are places where an emblem of a squatting dog appears on the pavement, without a line through it, as though this is a designated canine toilet area. And, of course, the city’s most famous landmark is a pint-sized statue of a urinating little boy, which says a lot.

The night life is excellent. We wound up in a cheesy jazz bar and got to sit up on a balcony where we could watch the super-slick bartenders mixing drinks with dazzling speed and elan. At one point I was buying a round and the lounge singer was belting out Hey Big Spender, which was entirely apt considering that I was handing over a 20 Euro note for two drinks and getting a couple of coins as change.

Worth a visit, especially since there are very few Brits there. Those people are awful on holiday.
May they step in dog shit up to their waists.