Leontyne by Richard Goodwin

to leave when a coach party of old-age pensioners arrived from Brussels. As I left, my friends were giving the pensioners a blast of ‘J’attendrai’ on the big organ, which had the old boys and girls in each other’s arms on the minuscule patch of floor in no time.
    They make delicious chocolates in Bruges, mostly by hand. The process is not at all simple. The biggest drawback to making them at home is getting the chocolate to shine. This only happens if the temperature of the chocolate is very, very precisely controlled. A tenth of a degree centigrade can make all the difference between a glistening triumph or what looks like a dusty old choc from last year’s Christmas boxes. The other closely guarded secret these
chocolatiers
pass through the generations to each other is the exact blend of cocoa beans. The buying of these beans takes place at the London Cocoa Market and the right blend of bean at the right priceis all important. Once the beans are bought they are sent to an outside factory to be turned into chocolate, as the plant required is far too expensive for the small trader. The chocolate is then melted down to exactly the right temperature and poured into moulds. Once the thin layer of the walls of the chocolate has set in the moulds, the centres are filled with all sorts of delicious things and then another layer of chocolate is poured on the top. Though this may sound frivolous, in Bruges it is a
métier
that is taken very seriously indeed. But alas, chocolates and chips go straight to the hips.
    The other major pastime in Belgium is drinking beer, of which there are untold varieties – some stronger than Scotch whisky, or so it seemed. After a glass, I found myself talking to the most beautiful girl in the land as she leant across the counter at the Café Vlissinghe, where she was helping her mother who had been running the place for the last forty years. She was well over six feet tall and built extremely neatly. Her husband, who was an engineer on a supertanker, was due back the next day after six months at sea and she was positively purring with expectation. ‘
Leontyne
, what a beautiful name’ she sighed, when I told her the name of my boat. I fell for her, her pub and for Belgium at that moment, which was probably what the mischievous monks who brewed the dark and dangerous beer I was quaffing had in mind.
    The elegant carillon towering over Bruges has forty-seven bells and is the biggest in the world, according to the carilloner, Aimé Lambaert. Aimé also confided that his friends called him ‘Lovely’ – odd, as he looked like Abraham Lincoln and was a muscular man from playing his carillon and climbing the 365 steps up to the loft two or three times a day. He sits at his machine, which looks like a loom, and hits the keys with the sides of his hands. He told me that he heard the music through the vibrations in his arms, because his loft is below the belfry. When he plays, the keys that hehits pull down wires attached to the clappers inside the bells. He obviously felt extremely powerful up there in his loft, spreading his magnificent peals over sleepy Bruges. In the belfry itself there is a huge bronze drum made in the seventeenth century, with small pegs in its perforated surface like an enormous musical box. Aimé Lambaert changes these pegs every two years so that the bells play a different tune on the hour. When the drum plays, the bells are struck by hammers on the outside, which makes a subtly different sound to that made by the clappers.
    It all sounded powerfully perfect to me as I watched Bruges’ big parade on Ascension Day. The parade itself was a pleasantly homely affair which had attracted thousands of tourists from all over the world. Religious in content, it revolved round the usual tales and the parading of an authentic relic. This was carried in turn by a group of elderly high priests, who were only able to carry the heavily