When Chris and Meg invited us to accompany them on a little excursion today, we checked our calendar and apart from a few repairs to be done, bookings to make, and general packing up of things to be undertaken, we were completely free. Of course we accepted without hesitation, and happily folded ourselves into the back of their little car for a day of sightseeing and adventure.
Our first stop was an interesting little castle nearby at Beauvoorde, which is open for visitors throughout the year except if those visitors include us. It will re-open two years from now apparently. If we’d like to come back then we'd be most welcome. A chance discovery of a little art studio just around the corner brought about a much more enlightening interaction for a time, and set the tone for what turned out to be a bit of a gallery crawl, ending in Dunkirk at the LAAC - the museum of contemporary arts, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
One of our main objectives was to visit the Museum of renowned Belgian Artist Paul Delvaux who’s biography on sale in the museim gift shop, is titled simply “The Man Who Loved Trains”. The museum housed an enormous number of quite impressive works of the artist who had enjoyed a long and distinguished career, and one or two of his very early and by no means best pieces were indeed sketches and impressions of railway yards. Over the years however as his style evolved it became apparent to us that his idea of what a train looked like and his depiction of them for the duration of much of his life, was identical to what many would consider to be a delightful impression of a naked recumbent female.
By lunch o’clock we weren’t far from the beach at Koksijde where we thought we could find somewhere to eat. The weather on last day of summer was in stark contrast to our earlier visit, with the beach almost deserted and an unnecessarily chilly wind doing its best to put the sand in our sandwiches, and generally make things less pleasant than one would desire.
We did find a nice sheltered spot to dine and generally take in the view as we did, but disappointingly perhaps, the weather was such that not a train was to be seen.
No comments
Post a Comment