America had Christina, the hurricane. We got the full blow of KPN, the digital outage, on a few lines.
The dependence on technology is not new. At the Opel Olpympia from 1959 that my father drove as a company car, there were three cars in the entire street, from October onwards the distributor hood had to be brought in every night to spend the night on the chimney.
But even then the family went to the Ardennes in the fall. That had a lot of reasons and was always an adventure for my brother and me. The first day to Liège, the second day to get out of Liège, and then another hour to the place of destination.
The Ardennes are now that piece of hill country that you race through on your way south. But you do it to yourself. We still go there regularly, not through booking.com, but with the experience of years and sometimes still just on good luck.
In the meantime we have made friends there. And friends lost. We feel connected to the Ardennes.
Ardennes suffering
The main means of existence in Wallonia? Those are euros. And those euros are richly provided via Flanders and Brussels. Edu lives on it. We first met him about ten years ago. He lives in an inexplicably inhabited home outside of a small village. No gas, water or electricity. There is a large, antique, wood-burning stove in the garden.
Edu rolls and rumbles. In addition to the ruin with his basic equipment, he has two shotguns. One juxaposé specimen with the barrels next to each other, a superposé with the barrels under each other and an FN pistol that was known to the Dutch officers in the fifties for the fact that the thing was good for a free throw like the case again. once blocked.
In addition, Edu has access to the mother of all Suzuki DR400s. Its range is around thirty kilometers around its cave. That is enough. The Honda can't handle much either. When we see each other, the standard deal is that we provide four bottles of red wine. Two bottles for the poached roast. And two for the cook while cooking. This time we had a magnificent bottle of cognac to celebrate our ten-year friendship. Via Wally, who acts uninhibitedly in spirits and cigarettes without bands. Wallie rides a very nice Harley-Davidson from his small wins. Four polished cognac glasses had been acquired at the Kringloop. Old, stylish and yet only two duppies each.
Edu was genuinely happy to see us. Mainly because two bottles plus two bottles are always five bottles through us.
He had just released a pig of the size of a middle-class dog from his suffering just yesterday. Moving around in a forest must be unbearable for such an animal. It would be boar. Edu started to fire his colossal Flinstone stove with whole pieces of Ardennes, decapitating the first bottle of wine with a bang on the edge of that stove.
We went to browse around for dinner. The meal was as always: simple, honest and delicious. With self-shot forest mushrooms on the euthanized piglet. After the meal we conjured up the megabottle twenty-one star cognac and the glasses.
Edu picked up a glass. Visibly dreamed away and burst into a deafening snotter. When he was okay again, we carefully asked him what and why.
Edu said he was from a good family. Had been married once. Such glasses were just as ever in his wife's turnout. His son had run over in a drunken mood. Had a blackout. When he came out of the hospital, read 'the institution', he was a pariah for his family. His wife and two children were gone. His wife had applied for and received a divorce. The efforts of her well-to-do family had accelerated that action. Edu had never seen his family again. We poured again. Toasting on our sad friend Édouard de Beauraing. He was smiling again.
RIP: Édouard de Beauraing, 1962 / 2012