Sat 30 July

You can find out a lot about a place just by spending time waiting for a bus. In a 10 minute period I managed to see the usual bottleneck of traffic on the road of my favourite supermarket. The cause? A man getting out of his car in the middle of the road to have a chat with his friend in the car behind him. I also saw a big group of girl guides marching past and a young girl carrying what looked like a baby fox in her arms.

This carrying animals in their arms is a big thing here. You often see people walking around cradling their dogs, obviously oblivious to the fact that a dog can actually walk on its own.

But my favourite observation on this miserable, grey, damp Saturday afternoon, was the sight of two men tying rope around an armchair, which was then hoisted up in the air by just one guy in the flat above. As is the way in Mons when moving furniture in and out of buildings not on the ground floor, the window to the room in the flat had been taken out. The fact that the rope could have broken, resulting in an armchair toppling onto a passerby on this busy street, was obviously not uppermost on their minds.