Belgium in spring

Vignettes of la Belgitude

I was in Brussels Eurostar terminal on a Saturday night when I saw her. It was late, the train from London was delayed, and I was stood up top alongside four men I jokingly called to myself ‘The Good Boyfriend’s Club’. They all had the look of men who wouldn’t have dreamt of going home before their squeezes arrived.

Down below there was a piano – there’s a lot of them in train stations these days, one of those small good ideas that nowhere seems to find an objection to. The sounds of it being played floated on up and as it went on I realized the person playing was good and her playing drew me in.

Looking down on the hall, I saw a young girl, East Asian I think, and thought I could just about place the song she played. I only identified it definitively when she got to the chorus; it was ‘Eye of the Tiger’.

But she wasn’t playing it as I’d heard it before, it was reconfigured, she wasn’t playing it as a triumphalist song. She was playing it with melancholy fortitude, like a sort of stirring 18^th century battle hymn. She was playing it like you’d play it to old soldiers for whom it brought back the deep sad pathos of war. She played it like she was facing the world with her music the only barrier between her and it.

I filmed it. When she stopped, the hall ringing out with the last small notes, I led the applause on behalf of the whole Good Boyfriend’s Club. I wanted to tell her that it had been wonderful, that she had introduced a note of the sublime into the unpromising surroundings of a late-night train deferral.

We should stop being so derisory of culture, of its potential to transform and elevate even ordinary human experience, like waiting for a train. Maybe she wasn’t pessimistic about that for her part for as she finished, I saw her adjust a camera on a stick which she had had propped up on the piano the whole time, filming herself for the world’s delight.