I had two reasons to feel a little superstitious about our Ghent trip: firstly, we’d planned to go in March 2020 days before lockdown at home – Belgium got there before us – and secondly the last time I travelled on Eurostar we both caught covid. H and I gathered our courage and set off on a glorious April Monday having packed for a summer break.
On Tuesday morning we ambled over to Patershol, the city’s medieval heart, full of picturesque step-gabled buildings. Two streets in the old port on opposite sides of the quay are lined with grand houses erected by merchants grown rich on the city’s grain trade. Those of us lucky enough to be on holiday soaked up the sun stopping for coffee at one of the area’s many cafes.
Sadly, much of what was on display in the city’s contemporary art museum (S.M.A.K.) left me unmoved but there’s a poignant sculpture of a young refugee boy, Issam, vainly looking for his friends, accompanied by a voice counting the 51,000 child refugees missing in recent years, one by one. Commissioned by the Dutch Council for Refugees, it’s both arresting and very effective, but, oddly, the explanation of the piece didn’t credit the artist. We walked back through a park packed with sunbathers, hardly believing it was still only April. A lovely day and hearing swifts as we strolled back to our hotel after supper made it even more so.
I’m always keen to visit botanical gardens and with the weather more midsummer than late spring it seemed a good choice for Wednesday morning. Our favourite bit was the palm house where we enjoyed the lightest of rain showers and a breeze thanks to the garden’s clever irrigation system.
Just a stone’s throw away from the gardens, Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts was our next stop. It’s currently home to a team of conservators working on Hubert and Jan van Eyck‘s vast, twelve-panelled Ghent Altarpiece (also known as the Mystic Lamb) which began in 2012 and is due to complete in 2026. There’s a glass panel through which you can watch them at work which I’d find distinctly off-putting, but they seemed used to it. You can read about it here. Of the permanent collection, Gustave Van de Woestijne‘s Deeske was my favourite piece. Something about his subject’s expression. By the time we’d finished our (late) lunch the temperature had hit 27°, hot enough to keep us in our nice cool hotel room for a while.
We’d booked a slot to see the van Eyck altarpiece at St Bavo’s Cathedral on Thursday morning and were lucky enough to see the opening of the panels now done electronically but in the fifteenth century, when it was installed, there would have been a slow unveiling to an awestruck congregation. Amazing to think that the many layers of past restorations’ paint had preserved such vivid splendour.
In celebration of working people, May 1st is a public holiday in Belgium, as it is many countries. Ghent seemed much more crowded as a result and with temperatures soaring even higher than the day before we let coffee segue into an early lunch watching the Labour Day march pass for what felt like a half hour or more, a cheering turnout.
It seemed appropriate after that to visit House of Alijn, Ghent’s museum of twentieth-century everyday life, housed in what was the children’s hospice. It’s full of artifacts, donated by citizens, arranged around significant days of the year or in life. An interesting collection that reminded me of Glasgow’s People’s Palace which we visited on a similarly hot day a couple of years ago.
We headed home on Friday after a very enjoyable break. Just one regret: we forgot to revisit the fabulous wisteria we’d stumbled upon on our way to Patershol on our first morning.
And the book? I finished Tim Lott’s Now We Are Forgiven on our last day. I’ve learnt not to take books requiring much thought on the kind of holiday we have, and this one fit the bill nicely. It’s the third instalment in a loose series following a set of friends through trials and tribulations which, this time, included the pandemic. Not one I’m likely to remember much beyond next week, I’m afraid, but if there’s a fourth instalment, I’m sure I’ll read that, too.
Back to books on Friday…
