This week’s unique selling point is that I read A Tall Man in a Low Land about three months ago, lent it to somebody, and can’t remember an awful lot about it, apart from that I was impressed.

It’s about a man (Harry Pearson) and his wife and child, who take an extended holiday in Belgium. They stay in various towns, and visit various others, and eat very well.

Pearson writes with affection for Belgium. There may or may not have been some family connection. He writes poignantly about the road to Flanders being historically one way for a lot of Brits. Belgium is not somewhere that you necessarily return from.

In the muddle of my memory, he didn’t like Charleroi. He said it’s not the kind of place you’d like to be after dark. He liked Liège. Brussels gets only a fleeting mention, and he suggests that the Walloons bring their dogs, under cover of darkness, to shit all over the capital before the sun comes up.

He leaves his baby daughter in the care of a museum curator, who then disappears with the baby, but has only gone into the garden. He recounts an anecdote told to him about the difference between the Dutch and the Flemish. (It involved Holland having only one type of cheese, that has made it famous all over the world, and Flanders having hundreds of cheeses and remaining obscure.)

There are cycling stories. In fact, I think the book may be the product of more than one trip to Belgium. If I had it in front of me I’d check.

Comparisons with Bill Bryson are inevitable, and Pearson holds his own. A very good book that I can remember more than one thing about.

Recommended.

But I can’t wait that long to be showered with gifts. Here’s what I want:

1. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
3. How NOT to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman
4. How to Sell by Clancy Martin and
5. The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey

I’d also like the motivation necessary to get off my fat arse and:

1. Get to the gym
2. Write a novel that begins with the line “At the end of his garden, in a shed no bigger than his daughter’s new car, Charles Lamb Goodley reflected on his first experience of auto-asphyxiation, which on assessment had been rather underwhelming, and left him with a welt on his neck that reminded him of Australia.”
3. Develop innate musical ability
4. ->insert middle-class arriviste cliché here<-

Can you help?

The article says “Ecumenical Council by Salvador Dali, is inspected by Tim McKew, right, at an exhibition of the Spanish artist …”