Yesterday, in the Flemish town of Tongeren, 26-year-old school teacher Els Clottemans was sentenced to thirty years in prison for the murder of  fellow-skydiver, 38-year-old married mother-of-two Els van Doren.  Both women belonged ... Read more

  It's great fun trying to find your way when you're driving round Belgium: the names of the towns can be very confusing. In Dutch-speaking areas, the signposts are in Dutch, and in French-speaking areas, they're in French.  Fine if you're... Read more

‘Our employees are unauthorized to speak any language other than Dutch.  If you don’t speak Dutch, bring an interpreter.’   Those words, more or less, are written in four languages on the notice board of the swimm... Read more

I have four Dutch language certificates. The last one even has something like a distinction.  But does it mean I can speak Dutch?  Not at all.    First of all, my certificates date from the eighties.  When we first arrived ... Read more

    With a population of a quarter of a million, Ghent is the fourth largest city in Belgium and the largest in East Flanders.  Its medieval centre is beautifully preserved, and when I was there last week it happened to be... Read more

‘Two hours on the train to Eupen then twenty minutes on the bus,’ the lady at the ski place told me over the phone.  My friend Kris and I had decided to go cross-country skiing at Signal Botrange in the Hautes-Fagnes, at the ... Read more

‘I’m going down to the shops to get some mozzarella for tomorrow’s risotto – I forgot when I was at the supermarket earlier.’   ‘Would you get me some antihistamines while you’re at it?’ &n... Read more

You may remember that when I arrived I asked a friend's driving instructor husband to give me a lesson (although I'd passed a Belgian driving test in about 1987, I'd been so long out of the country that I thought it would be a good idea to have a bit... Read more

Today, almost a year after we moved into this apartment, I unpacked the final box. My life is now box-free - for a while, anyway.  This was the longest lasting single move of the dozen or so moves in my adult life.  Worthy of a mention in L... Read more

I may never have discovered the 1000-people-strong village of Aische-en-Refail, in the province of Namur, about thirty miles from where we live.  But I did.  Thanks to ADEPS.  What is ADEPS, you may well ask?  Well, it&... Read more