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There’s nothing like a bookshop, I always say, for giving you the opportunity to feel superior to your fellow man. We English-speakers here in Brussels are spoiled in that regard, since the bookshops we have are still occupied with the sale of books, while sundries are limited to cards, books-on-tape, diaries, bookmarks, ex-libris stickers and Moleskine notebooks – all of which are either book-related or at least made out of paper. The last time I visited the land of my fathers you’d have had a hard time finding a book among the CDs, DVDs and Harry Potter merchandise; and if you did succeed it would inevitably be some rubbish by Lynne Truss, or something unspeakable about or by Dan Brown.

The other day I had the chance – not one that comes along often in real life anymore – to look down my nose at someone. I was in one of our city-centre bookshops whose name I’m not allowed to mention, as it might make you think of a kind of silver. There in front of me was a bloke in a corduroy suit chatting up the young woman behind the desk, in itself no reprehensible thing, except not only had he tied his hair into a wispy sort of ponytail, and not only was he boasting of having gone to university with Richard Hill, he’d also come to pick up books by AN Wilson and Alan Bennett.

If you want to make a good impression on a bookseller, I reflected, make sure you’re buying the right kind of books, and nothing says Stud less than either Wilson or Bennett. Psychologists have done the definitive study, and told us what we already knew: books are far more important as accessories than they could ever be as cultural artifacts or, in this electronic age, as repositories of information. What that means is this: you need to be very careful when you’re planning on buying a book, and more careful still if you’re planning on going out in public and pretending to read one. We all know because we did it ourselves when we were young: the fact that I used to swan around Glasgow’s West End carrying Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and smoking St. Moritz fags (the favoured tab of Bryan Ferry) tells you more than you need to know about my youth.

The aforementioned AN Wilson is quite clearly Out, although Alan Bennett could in some cases be In. Other fogeyish authors like George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh are Out, while Henry Green is so obscure as to be perfectly In. Uber-fogey GK Chesterton is Out, therefore so is his modern-day reincarnation, Stephen Fry. Books by anyone on the TV are Out, as a matter of principle.

Old titles are reliable winners, though not if there’s an adaptation about at the time. So for now there’s no harm in being seen around town with a Trollope, though you’ll come a cropper with Dickens and Austen, since you’ll look as if you’ve been watching screen versions of Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice. As is quite likely to be the case, be honest. Foreign books are always a good bet, which is why my copy of Don Quixote (in the Edith Grossman translation, naturellement) would easily have trumped the bloke in front of me in the queue even without the ponytail. It should go without saying that there’s no need to get carried away and read foreign books in the original Foreign.

Which brings me to mention of Nicola’s Bookshop, just opened in the Rue Stassart near Place Stephanie. The shop is tiny, but has quite the most unusual selection of titles I’ve seen anywhere, arranged not by genre but by continent of origin. And the range of foreign titles translated into English is remarkable, with names such as Bohumil Hrabal, Naguib Mahfouz and Ismael Kadare. I took away a small volume from the little-known Pushkin Press consisting of two exquisite stories by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who took British citizenship before moving to end his life in Brazil. I know a match-winner when I see one, and no mistake.

The question arises more and more these days, after Naomi Campbell, the supermodel, took Mirror Group newspapers to court to protect her privacy. Similar action has been taken by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and they will not be the last. Top stars these days, it seems, don’t want anyone to know.

It didn’t used to be this way: in the past celebrities were open about their fame, and were happy to appear in magazines and on billboards, and invite the public prints into their lovely homes. Now, though, the very cream of the celebrity world are more concerned about their privacy. The result is you may not even be aware someone is a celebrity at all.

It’s hard for parents. In this age of fractured family relationships, parents often don’t know what their children are getting up to. In my day things were simpler. You’d leave school on the Friday, and first thing on Monday morning you’d be walking with your Dad, sandwiches in hand, to start work at the film studio or TV production company where he worked, and where his father before him had worked. Celebrity ran in families: the trade-papers were full of the story when Kirk Douglas took little Michael to his first job on the lot, and when Richard Dimbleby brought young David and Jonathan into work, their overalls all starched and clean, ready for their first shift at the journalistic word-face.

Nowadays it’s all different. And parents are worried their children could be celebrities without their knowledge. So what signs should parents look for? The first thing to point out is that celebrity isn’t in itself something to worry about. Of course, we’ve all heard the stories of hidden offspring emerging from the shadows of the past, bodies found floating in swimming pools, attacks by crazed psychotic fans and illicit love-affairs with the adopted daughters of life-partners. But many celebrities, like Tilda Swinton, Reece Witherspoon and Rene Auberjonois, manage to lead almost normal lives.

The main signs your child may be becoming a celebrity include:

Taking longer than usual to get ready in the morning. Most adolescents become fixated on personal appearance, but this could also be a sign of activity by a hairdresser and makeup artist, and is especially suspicious where boys are concerned. Does your child blow up because you bought shampoo on special at the supermarket? It could be a sign they’re under contract to represent another brand.

Is your child surly and uncooperative? This could be normal teenage rebellion. On the other hand it could be that those little jobs you’re asking them to do are not included in writing in their contract, and they’re holding out for a renegotiation, or more money, or both.

Do strange boys wander out of your daughter’s room in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning? Normally, this is nothing to worry about. But if the boys in question include one or several of the following — Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson or the Gallagher brothers — there could be cause for concern.

Other warning signs to look for: correspondence from expensive plastic surgeons; Max Clifford hanging about the house at all hours; invoices from The Priory celebrity detox clinic; Loyd Grossman wandering about describing the furniture and fittings to a TV camera.

If you have noted any of these warning signs in your teenage child’s behaviour, you need to take action before things get any worse. You may think it’s a phase, part of growing up, but today’s blockbuster movie role or Calvin Klein advertising campaign with photos by Mario Testino could turn rapidly, tomorrow, to appearances on afternoon gameshows like Call my Bluff, or winter seasons in panto with Sir Frank “Gentleman Frank” Bruno.

You need to sit down and talk to your child to nip this dangerous condition in the bud. Have your people call her people and fix up a meeting, before it’s too late.

So Germany is not going to withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest in a fit of pique at being voted into last place with a measly quatre points in Kiev last week.

The mind boggles, it really does. The Big Four Eurovision countries – France, Germany, Spain and the UK – have been whining and crying like despicable sissies since last Saturday just because the rest of Europe thinks their songs were rubbish. Somebody needs to apply to the European Clue Agency for a shipment of clues from the European clue mountain to be delivered to Madrid, London, Bonn and Paris.

There’s not actually a conspiracy at all, though who could blame the thrusting new statelets of Eastern and Central Europe if they did decide to band together? Better than slaughtering each other, surely. I take my conviction from what is probably the only scholarly article on the Eurovision Song Contest, published by Victor Ginsburgh and Abdul Noury of the Centre for Operations Research and Econometrics of the Free University of Brussels in November last year.

Ginsburgh and Noury conclude, “Though the votes cast may appear as resulting from logrolling, we show that they are rather driven by linguistic and cultural proximities between singers and voting countries.” And they go on using mathematical equations that cannot be reproduced on the human keyboard to argue their case: that cultural proximity plays more of a role than politics ever will. Hence, Turkey gives Greece 12 points; Ireland gives the UK eight points. People of similar cultures like each other’s music. People with similar languages are biased in favour of each other when compared with utter gabbling barbarians. Our own Urban Trad were pipped at the post, but they inadvertently hit on the secret with their entry in 2003, by writing the lyrics in a totally made-up language. Now we see why the competition has been littered with hits like Boom Bang-a-Bang, Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley, La La La and Ding-a-Dong.

But there’s one important factor our ULB academics have overlooked:

The Eurovision Song Contest forbids people from voting for their own country’s entry. Whatever its justifications, this has two results:

One, a Belgian can’t vote for a Belgian even if you think it’s the best song there is.

Two, the votes from each country’s population (I think only Albania still has a jury as such) all have to go to other countries. What this inevitable means is, that voting bloks within Belgium are competing to maximise their votes for other countries. Expect, therefore, votes from Belgium to go to Turkey, Portugal, Italy and so on, assuming those countries are taking part.

So who voted for Greece? Answer: not the Greeks in Greece, because they’re not allowed to. So it must have been Greeks in other countries (I believe there are one or two) or quite simply fans of the song (the only ones who get the point, let it be said). So does this explain why the UK, France, Germany and Spain came last? Well, ask yourself how may French expats there are living in countries like FYR Macedonia or Latvia. And of those, how many would pick up their phone to register a vote?

I think you see the problem. The Eurovision is like a French presidential election, only the French people can’t vote, and the people of Moldavia, Germany and Ireland can. And then there are complaints when they fail to elect a Frenchman.

So there’s the answer. Be nicer to your immigrants, allochtones, gastarbeiders, whatever you want to call them. If you want to get their votes when May comes around, you’re going to have to be nicer to them the rest of the year. Create some of that all-important cultural proximity.

And if it doesn’t work, and they still won’t vote for you because your entry is pants? Well then get better songs, or at least stop grizzling about it. It’s only a Song Contest, for heaven’s sake, not the bleeding Congress of Vienna. Nobody dies. And nobody, other than the ULB and the EBU and me, even cares.

Not that I’m thinking of popping off anywhere anytime soon, but it would be hard to pass up an offer currently running at Antwerp’s Schoonselhof necropolis, last resting place of such luminaries as writers Hendrik Conscience, Gaston Burssens and Marnix Gijsen, composers Peter Benoit and Armand Preud’Homme, and artists Pol Mara and Vic Gentils.

The deal is, for a mere €800 you get a burial place for two people, to be used within the next 50 years. The one draw-back is that you have to move in, as it were, beside what we shall refer to as a previous occupant. In fact, it’s not even as ghoulish as that, since when your time comes, and you are gathered to your Maker, they’ll open up the plot, take out the bloke who’s in there and who can hardly be said to care by this time, and make a space for you.

It is, as graveyard guide Jacques Beurmans pointed out, a more democratic system than the one operating at the turn of the 19th-20th century when the graveyard was opened. Then, the biggest and the fanciest stones, the statuary and the cellars (a kind of marble lining for the hole, which will incidentally push the price up to € 1,600) were the preserve of the rich alone. Now, the price is the same for everyone, and they’ll stick you under someone else’s stone. In return, while awaiting the day when you cash in your chips, you get to keep the place looking trim and tidy, which is actually the secret plan behind the whole scheme.

If you’re a bit strapped for eight C-notes, I did discover that you can adopt a gravestone for a mere €7.50, which brings the privilege of keeping the monument clean and maintained until you die, when you can go and be buried somewhere else, cheapskate. That could also be an option for those of us who don’t intend to die within the next 50 years. Though frankly the way medical science is going, we’ll all have life expectancies of 250 years just at the moment the asteroid strikes, so you have to wonder if it’s all worth it. But I digress.

So much for being buried. If you’re going to be cremated, meanwhile, try not to fill the air with too many dioxins. That’s what happened at the Antwerp crematorium a week or so ago, when the dioxin levels were pushed up to three time their legal limit. The director said a filter had accidentally fallen out, but my question is: what do we need dioxin filters at crematoria for anyway? Well, it turns out the evil-sounding emissions are produced in many forms of combustion, like volcanoes and forest fires. When I tell you another major source is meat being grilled on a barbecue, I trust I need explain no further.

When I die, I hope it’s in summer, so that the crowds who were unable to be accommodated in the church don’t get cold and wet standing outside. Some people, on the other hand, want to go out of the world as they came into it: as a pain in the butt who keeps everyone waiting. That’s why a Dutch funeral entrepreneur is now offering the possibility of being taken to your last resting place – whether that’s a fancy second-hand grave or a nice warm barbecue – in a caravan. So you’ll be able to die as you lived: creating long lines of traffic behind you. The caravan in question, funeral director Dick Mijnhart said, only has room for the coffin. So, considerably more spacious than most caravans, then.

Finally, the city of Nola near Naples in Italy (where Caesar Augustus died and Giordano Bruno was born) is giving a free funeral with casket and hearse (though not those ostentatious wreaths of flowers formed into words associated with Italian funerals in Francis Ford Coppola movies) to deceased persons who have been organ donors. Sign up to hand over your kidneys, heart or cornea (and whatever other offal the science whizz-kids are transplanting these days) and the city administration will pick up the tab for your transport into the World Beyond. And none of your cheap one-previous-occupant rubbish, either.

Gelukkig nieuwjaar and bonne année, and isn’t it wonderful to be living once more in a land with a government?

Well no, not so much. I’ve been saying all along that we’re better off without the buggers, and the first thing they do when they finally get their act together is ban the fireworks, close the Christmas market, shut down the Big Wheel and drag the little kiddies screaming from the arms of Rudolf, well okay maybe not the last bit.

Meanwhile the factional differences that created the six-month schism have been papered over, as we saw with the ordeal of Alizée Poulicek, who was booed after she couldn’t understand a question put to her in Dutch. Part of the reason was that the crowd resented the way she had been elected and then took power without waiting for the courtesy period of half a year, and didn’t even give the chance to Jean-Luc Dehaene or Herman Van Rompuy – both considered great beauties in their day – to try for her job.

The other reason was her lack of language skills, which might seem a little extreme to outsiders – the story made international headlines – but is even more extreme to us insiders. It illustrates once again the ambivalence at the heart of the Dutch-speaking soul.

The reason for the inability of foreigners to speak Dutch is often said to be the Dutch-speaker’s unwillingness to let you practice on them. They speak better English than we speak Dutch, the excuse goes, so you never get a chance. That’s perhaps true with your cosmopolitan Dansaert-Kaaitheater élite. It’s hardly the case with your average market-trader, say, or communal functionary, or the cop behind the desk.

It’s my observation that Dutch-speakers don’t actually want you to speak their language, and go to a lot of trouble to learn English just so they can steer you away from any attempt to do so. Why do you think it is that while other countries in Europe pay bad actors to put terrible dubbing over the dialogue of films, Holland and Flanders don’t? That’s right, they’re making sure even the couch-potatoest and ill-educatedest still pick up a smattering of the language of Ricky Gervais, even if it’s only “Fork handles, eh-oh Tinky-Winky, e’s bleeding snuffed it!”

It’s my considered opinion that they don’t want you to learn their language because it’s their last hold-out in the face of the crushing weight of being surrounded by bigger countries in this European Union of ours. Gone are the days when Dutch ships could sail up the Thames to bash the English in their moorings. Gone are the days when Netherlandish painters ruled the world. Gone are the days when scientists from the Low Countries like van Leeuwenhoek, Huygens, Bidloo and Tulp enlightened half a continent (the half above the Rhine, give or take). Nowadays Holland has coffee-shops and chocolate sprinkles you put on your sandwich (allegedly) while Flanders has some ridiculous fashion and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Ah yes, but they can still talk about you behind your back, even when you’re sitting right there in front of them. And that’s an enviable ability, as any Macedonian or Estonian or Finno-Ugric or Geordie will tell you, though you won’t know that’s what they’re doing. It’s something I used to think we could do in Glasgow, so that when I hitch-hiked to the continent with Pat Barrett, and we were getting tanked up on tiny 20cl glasses of foamy Heineken on top of a stomachful of chips with mayonnaise, we cheerfully made rude comments about our neighbours at the bar, thinking ourselves incomprehensible (in the way a baby thinks he’s invisible if he can’t see you) when in fact those guys most likely not only spoke perfect English, but also knew all of Stanley Baxter’s Parliamo Glasgow routines into the bargain. There we were laughing at them, and all the while they were laughing at us. An illustration of European relations that’s as valid today as it was then, you might say.

Toodle-pip, and tot ziens!

It was a beautiful sunny morning, but a second after I awoke, I was filled with a feeling of dread, as if I’d been drenched with a bucket of cold water. And the terrible thought struck me: Ad Melkert won’t be around anymore.

It’s a sign of the times that the name will mean something to half a dozen of my readers, instead of none at all, as before. Melkert is, of course, the head of the list of the PvdA in the Dutch elections, who was unceremoniously booted up the arse by the collective clogs of a nation. On the evening of the result Melkert resigned, although nobody yet has been able to tell me what his position actually was.

He owes his fame to Pim Fortuyn, who is the reason why the world’s media were in Holland last Wednesday to cover elections none of them had even known ten days before.

That was before Pim was murdered, achieving in a stroke what generations of Dutch politicians were unable to achieve in their entire careers: world recognition. He was following in the footsteps of the likes of Jim Morrison or James Dean, by dying before his potential could prove to be a disappointment. Pim lived fast, died (relatively) young and though he didn’t exactly leave a beautiful corpse, he did leave one that was plastered all over the newspapers’ front pages.

And so a legend was born; but the Dutch weren’t content just to visit his grave (he’s been buried once, and he’s soon to be buried again in his mausoleum in Italy) and leave angst-filled graffiti. No, they had to go and bring down Ad Melkert.

My second thought on that fateful morning-after was: “What the bloody hell do those stupid cloggies think they’re playing at?” The Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), took 26 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, up from a total of, er, none at all in the last elections, or indeed ever. The list moved into second place, above the party of Prime Minister Win Kok. Which means that the Dutch electorate came within a hairsbreadth of electing a dead man as their leader.

That’s no exaggeration. Although the list was stuffed with living people for appearance’s sake, Fortuyn dominated it in every way. In the nine days after Pim’s murder, I saw two list-members mentioned by name on the TV, but only once each. I couldn’t tell you what the names were, and I’m convinced the Dutch voters couldn’t, either. And yet they’ve sent 26 of these shadowy, faceless, anonymous creatures to Parliament. It’s hard to imagine anything more dim-witted.

So the world is asking the pressing question: is the rise in stupid voting a threat to democracy? Never mind the menace of the far-right. The voters in France showered Le Pen with votes in the first round to send a rocket up the establishment, then two weeks later elected Smilin’ Jack Chirac with a landslide that would have given Saddam Hussein a red face. Now the Dutch, boiling over with grief for a flamboyant dandyish homosexual with two lapdogs and a bug up his butt about Islam, have expressed their sorrow by voting into government a bunch of nobodies.

The threat to democracy is clear. The values of Big Brother have entered the political arena, and I’m not talking about George Orwell’s creation. A new recipe for political success has been created: take one outrageous media-savvy personality, preferably with some outlandish character traits. Put into his mouth some saloon-bar platitudes so the man in the street will feel his voice is being represented. Have him dominate his party completely, leaving everyone else in his shadow. Then, at the last minute before polling, arrange to have him whacked (animal rights nutters are cheaper than Sopranos-like hitmen, I hear). And hey presto! Your placemen are inside the gates of power with never a moment’s scrutiny being aimed at them.

For obvious reasons I’m not too amenable to becoming such a figurehead myself, although I have some of the media profile. But if you think you have what it takes to lead a new popular movement to electoral success, get in touch and we’ll install you at the head of the Sour Grapes List in time for next summer’s Belgian elections.

The lights are going out in voters’ heads all across Europe, and a wave of bone-headedness threatens to engulf the Continent. It’d be a shame not to ride the wave for fun and profit while we can, don’t you think?

As a high-profile media figure and well-known parent, I’m often asked: “How can I tell if my child is experimenting with fluoride?”

Last month, health minister Magda Aelvoet took the drastic — but some say necessary — step of banning the sale of fluoride drops, pills and supplements for children. Too much fluoride, she said, can damage the nervous system and increase the risk of osteoporosis.

Sour Grapes is now in a position to reveal the extent of the deadly trade in this drug. According to a dossier of damning evidence we’ve been collecting for some time now, the Drops of Death have been given out to children as young as toddlers by pushers known as “dentists” and “paediatricians”. The little users would then have an adult dupe (called a “mother”) carry a coded note to their local “pharmacy” — as the street-dealers are called — where they’d be given their dose of fluoride, also known as “Zyma”, which would maintain them in their habit until their stock was exhausted. And then the whole sordid, terrible cycle would begin again.

Other evidence collected by Sour Grapes shows fluoride was even openly sold in corner-shops in its popular guise as “toothpaste”. The devilishly sadistic cunning of the international fluoride cartels is obvious, and chilling: little did parents realise, as they yelled at their little ones “Get upstairs and brush your teeth this instant!” that they were in fact driving them into the arms of an insatiable addiction.

The most prominent of the international cartels is known as the European Union. According to documents obtained by Sour Grapes’ investigative team of hghly-trained humorists, the cartel was planning to introduce a list of products it approved of in January next year, and foremost on the list was fluoride. Ms. Aelvoet bravely stepped up in the nick of time, to stamp out this vile trade once and for all, and send fluoride into the same dustbin of history as heroin, cannabis and cocaine — never to be heard of again.

In the meantime, a black market in fluoride is expected by top police investigators to spring up to satisfy the deadly urges of those already hooked. And make no mistake — children are the primary targets of these heartless fiends. “Get ‘em early and you’ve got ‘em for life,” Sour Grapes was told in a secret interview with a “dental hygienist” — as the foot-soldiers of this despicable trade call themselves. “Adults prefer “stuff” like Listerine and Steradent. They don’t respond so well to fluoride’s deadly lure. Now spit, please,” she said, slyly polishing the thingy with the sort of hook on the end of it she no doubt uses to torture her doomed “clients” like some latter-day Laurence Olivier in a real–life version of Marathon Man — with YOUR CHILD in the Dustin Hoffmann role.

So how can a parent know if their teenager has been caught in the grasp of these Enemies of Innocence? The main one is a set of sparkling teeth, free of caries, defects, deformities or unsightly gaps. Parents may have trouble spotting the signs, however, since as everyone knows, teenagers rarely open their mouths unless it’s to spew out abuse or consume vast quantities of hamburger-type substance.

It’s important to gain your child’s confidence, though, and learn to communicate with them. Because the later stages of fluoride addiction are damage to the nervous system and osteoporosis, sometimes known as “brittle bones disease”. Again, central nervous system damage is hard to detect in teenagers, who are mentally unbalanced at the best of times and practically immobile for days at a time. Does your child use a Zimmer frame to go to the “disco”? Does he or she lie still for extended periods as if waiting for a secret fracture to set? Have you noticed doses of your Hormone Replacement Therapy drugs disappearing for no apparent reason?

If so, you could be dealing with a serious case of fluoride abuse. And at that stage, there’s nothing a magazine columnist can do for you. Consult a doctor, or better yet, turn your child over to the police without delay.

Sometimes tough love is the only kind that’ll do any good.

I think I’ve struck on the Next Big Thing, and since I’m currently on my own for a week, I’ve got time to do something about it.

What it is, see, is a murder mystery, set in the Grand Place of Brussels, something to do with medieval counts and beer-brewers, and the clues are in the statues on top of the buildings. You’ve no doubt seen them, pointing this way and that. Well I shall make something of that coincidence, throw in a bit of Gothic intrigue and away we go.

I know it sounds a bit vague at the moment, but that’s not a problem. I have a week to bash it out, which should be more than enough. I mean, it’s not as if the plot has to be particularly robust, and the writing certainly doesn’t need to be all that good. Characterisation and description needn’t detain me long either. It’s all down to typing speed, really.

That, at least, is my impression of these matters, culled from a detailed study of the work of Dan Brown, a celebrity best-selling author. Mr. Brown made his name (which to be honest sounds like a made-up pseudo pen-name de plume) with The Da Vinci Code, a mystery novel dressed up with a load of historical mumbo-jumbo and some lurid religious speculation. A great part of the book was nicked quite shamelessly from previously published work, most notably Holy Blood Holy Grail, a 1982 book by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh which speculates that Jesus faked his death and moved to southern France with his wife Mrs. Jesus, better known as Mary Magdalene, before spawning a brood we shall refer to as the Christlets, whose descendants were such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Sir Chris Wren and John Palmer.

That book was codswallop masquerading as non-fiction. Dan Brown had the clever idea of turning out a book of codswallop masquerading as fiction – but apart from that there’s precious little difference.

Not that the Vatican was deterred either way. Dan’s book led them to release one of the most extraordinary statements in human history, when the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said, “The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.” He was of course referring to the book by Dan Brown, and not any other best-selling book which is “everywhere” and contains “fables” people may think are “true”.

I applied to the office of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, primate of all Belgium, for a condemnation of my work on Belgian brewers, intrigue at the Spanish court etc, which can never be bad for marketing. A spokesman for the Cardinal (considered by many as a potential Pope when the present incumbent pops off, which will of course never happen, God forbid) said, “This is a work of fiction, right?”

“Yes,” the Sour Grapes acolyte replied.

“And you want me to attack it for being made-up?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, Father.”

“All right. Consider it attacked. And I’m not your father. A, I’m not a priest I’m a PR professional. And B, I’m only celibate for want of opportunity, haven’t got a sister, by any chance?”

So there we have it. The last link in the chain. By the time you read this I’ll probably be sitting on a best-seller, and fighting off movie, TV and merchandising spin-offs. Mrs. McD will come back from her trip to Rome to find a few things changed around here.

Come to think of it, I never did explain why she was going off and leaving me for a week to write the best-seller of the second half of the Naughty-Oughties, did I?

Well it seems that thanks to a huge conspiracy dating back to Constantine, half the College of Cardinals are actually women, undercover obviously, and half of them are married women, and nearly all those those are married women with children, more than you’d expect from Brussels. And they’ve all been called to Rome for a conclave sort of thing. Or something like that, I kind of zoned out while I should have been listening.

“Very nice, dear,” I said, as she packed her bag. “Havimus tripus pleasantibus,” I went on, before turning my thoughts to more important subjects for a magazine, like my new book about the Grand Place, in a bookstore near you, soon. Ish.

Schaerbeek town hall

Image via Wikipedia

I believe you’ve been introduced in these pages previously to My Daughter the Agitator, aged 11. You remember when she started a clean-up protest at school and forced them to change their policy on litter – it was all over the papers, or at least this one.

So there we are standing at a stall at our local rommelmarkt recently, trying to shift some of our household rommel, which is essentially other people’s rommel we bought at the rommelmarkt last year, when who should come walking by but Bernard Clerfayt, the burgomaster of Schaerbeek, and one of his trusty sidekicks, Jean-Pierre Van Gorp, alderman for the middle classes and for anything that resembles a party, it seems, but more of that later.

I put on my best Samson voice, as in the dog puppet from Samson and Gert, do pay attention I’ve written about him too. “Dag mijnheer de burgemeester!” I said, most amusingly. Well, damned if he didn’t hear me (politicians have ears like dolphins, who have the best sense of hearing among animals, fourteen times stronger than ours, though no ears as such, but I digress) and home in on me like a cruise missile, but not one of those softie Tom Cruise missiles that you can shoot down with a water-pistol. I was trapped, with nowhere to run, and I was forced to shake hands with the pair of them, as we considered how surprised we all were at how nice the weather was, and shared a moment of delight at how many people had turned out.

And then they were gone, or so I thought. “Did you talk to him about the donkey?” my daughter asked me, once I’d convinced her my acquaintance really really was the burgemeester. Because you see here in Schaerbeek we have our own donkey, a female named Siska who lives in the Jumping Jehosaphat sorry Josaphat Park, and who symbolises our commune because donkeys used to carry the cherries used to make kriek or something.

The trouble is, Siska is very lonely, and I know this because I’m a lover of all things asinine, as you may have guessed, and I once visited a donkey-zoo near Tours in France, where they told us a donkey should never be kept alone, but should always have a friend, not necessarily another donkey, and never a horse, but a sheep or a dog or something. Incidentally, you won’t be able to find that donkey-zoo if you’re looking for it on the Internet, because it’s in Tours. Try it and see.

And I’d been meaning to protest to the commune about Siska’s plight, but had never quite got round to it. The Rosa Luxemburg of MacDonald Acres registered disappointment for only a second. Then she grabbed her brother (he’s seven, and into Zorro and football, and so doesn’t yet have an agenda, but then he’s a younger brother of an older sister, so obviously he went along) and raced after the two dignitaries. That’s right. She chased the burgomaster and the alderman down in the street, and buttonholed them, and gave them a piece of her mind.

And the upshot of it all is, the Park is about to undergo some reconstruction work, and Siska is to be moved temporarily, but when it’s all over she’ll have more space, and they’re planning to get a partner for her. Thanks to my daughter, And when they do, my daughter can choose a name.

I call that a result for People Power, and I tend to believe it. We saw Mr. Van Gorp a couple of weeks later at another party in the Park, and he was taking Siska for a walk. He recognised my daughter, and repeated his promise, and even gave her a card for her to contact him with name suggestions.

Which just goes to show the power of the press. Because now he has no escape. It’s in the Sour Grapes column of The Bulletin now, so it shall come to pass, just like those other things what I wrote about, like an end to dogshit on the pavements, the canonisation of Baudouin, peace on Earth, all that stuff. Watch this space.

Petra Kelly

Image via Wikipedia

As The Bulletin’s best-known family man after Geoff Meade, people often ask me: “What are you going to do to ensure your children don’t follow in your footsteps, for the love of God?”

Well, it looks as if we’ve created our own little activist in the Grapes family. If everything continues the way it’s going, we’ll have one member who sits around doing nothing but complaining about stuff in print, and one who gets out and changes the world.

Allow me to explain. Several weeks ago, Miss Grapes, who’s eight-and-a-half, came to me in the morning and wanted a plastic bag to take to school (she goes to a communal, Dutch-speaking primary school not far from home). What for? I asked. Never mind, she said, in her enigmatic way. Accustomed to not having my questions answered, I let it go.

Later in the day she came home and told us how she and her friend had finally had enough of the rubbish thrown around in the playground, and had picked it all up. The teacher had asked what they were doing, and when she found out, she sent them both around the school, into all the classes, to preach the gospel of keeping the playground tidy.

I should have seen the signs. But frankly I was puffed-up with pride that a child of mine should have had the initiative, the get-up-and-go, the can-do attitude, to take matters into her own hands like that.

That was only the beginning. A couple of weeks went by and, she said, things were as bad in the playground as ever. So out came the plastic bags again, only this time she’d recruited more friends to join the campaign, and they hand-drew some posters with rhyming slogans on them, to dot up around the playground. The school head was brought up to date on the latest development, and now Miss Grapes and her original campaign partner are to join the School Council to discuss the problem of playground litter and find possible solutions. Not bad going for eight years old.

Do you suppose Joan of Arc started this way? All right then, let’s not exaggerate. Petra Kelly, then? Come to think of it she’s not such a terribly good role model either, seeing how she ended up murdered by her Army boyfriend, but at least up to that point, she’d taken a movement from the fringe of politics and forced it into the very centre of the agenda. Now, we’re regularly told, environmental concerns are at the top of the list among young people of issues that need to be tackled. While the young are abandoning traditional party politics in their hordes, they’re taking up the cudgels instead for the environment — and of course for schoolchildren, the playground is pretty much all the environment they have, for most of the week.

It’s very exciting to be there at the birth of a political consciousness, even though there’s a slight possibility she might turn not into a respected figure playing a notable part in saving the planet, but stop somewhere along the road and settle for being one of those dreadlocked scruffs with nose-rings and a bandanna-ed dog. Stumpy the tree-dweller, if you like, rather than Alvin Toffler or Jonathan Porritt.

Not that I have any say in the matter, either way. I suppose it’s a truism that political activists have that healthy skepticism for authority possessed by all revolutionaries, otherwise they wouldn’t bother, would they? I’m not only an authority figure — in my own household at least, intermittently — but I’m also a lickspittle running-dog of the hated media hegemony.

It seems like only yesterday I was teaching her how to rant about people who park on crossings, or let their dogs crap on the pavement, and now look what’s happened. I’ve turned myself into the enemy. The torch has been passed to a new generation, and this time — be warned — the thing is lit. I have seen the future, and it’s armed with a plastic rubbish-bag, and has a look of stern disapproval on its angelic face.