Step Out of Christmas...

So, how was it for you, she asked a week later than everyone else. You could say I hit the ground running a little last week in the great Return to Normality - perhaps it's not so surprising that the week following Christmas and New Year is always one of the busiest in the Therapist's Diary, as people need to disgorge the emotional impact of too much booze, spending, anticlimax, and enforced family time. Of course I'm not immune from any of it myself. There'll be whole post coming up about my own Annual Family Row later, just so you can see that we therapists basically have no answers whatsoever to deep-rooted family discord (not our own, anyway. I could sort out yours in a flash though.).

Given my own longstanding dislike of Christmas and New Year, we resolved this year to play it all down again, which more or less works, and to sneak off somewhere else for a couple of days in that 'dead' period in between, when everyone seems to sit around snacking fitfully on leftover Stilton, fretting about not being at the gym while simultaneously feeling too lethargic to drag themselves over there. We got on the Eurotunnel instead, very early on the 27th, and we headed for...Belgium!

Belgian culture is much-maligned, but I've been there several times now and always had a blast. As well as being the place that spawned Eddie Merckx, Jacques Brel and Plastic Bertrand, it also nursed the baby Bradley Wiggins, who was born there. The food is good and hearty, the beers are among the best in the world, and the language is comically impenetrable to the Anglophone ear, despite so many of the words being similar. And it's a great country for little cities.

We've been to pretty, chocolate-box Bruges a couple of times, so this time we headed on up the road to its larger neighbour and cultural rival, Ghent. Ghent views Bruges as a fey fop of a little brother, while seeing itself as more sturdy, robust, and practical. Which it very much is - it's a very handsome, less manicured, busy working city. And it takes the prize for being the friendliest place I've ever been to in Europe, which I certainly hadn't expected. In every bar we entered, we'd get a 'hello' from any locals packed round tables or choosing their selection from the 280 offerings on the beer menus. Shop staff were smiley and helpful, restaurant staff were relaxed, amiable and personable. In a town which gets its fair share of tourists, they certainly weren't fatigued, irritated or indifferent to us. People wanted to know where we'd come from, how things 'are' there, and how we liked their city. There was real civic pride around, but no sense at all of preciousness or smugness. The good humour and good will were striking.

We spent two days just happily wandering the cobbled streets with their gabled Flemish merchants' houses, crossing and crisscrossing the canals that lace the city together, and didn't even get to the huge museum quarter on the Northern edge of town, as we were having such a good time and wanted to leave ourselves something for when we go back, which we'll definitely be doing. There's a certain bar where I lost my heart to a terrier called Juliet, for a start.

We brought back beer, Rhubarb gin, and fresh advocaat - a delicious semi-solid, lightly alcoholic custard which I'll be making trifle from this weekend. It all seemed suitably quirky and idiosyncratic. Belgium hasn't had a functioning government for nearly two years now. And it seems to be doing absolutely fine on the back of it.