Time as a spiral and new eyes
Reflections from a visit to a former home.
This email is quite long, so if you’re reading it in your inbox and it cuts off you can read it in full here.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent 6 days in Brussels — a city I know well, having lived there between the ages of 10 and 13, then again from 16 to 18. I’ve been working with a group of restaurants over there for a year or so, and it has offered me welcome opportunities to revisit this city that for many years I called home, but that I have since spent many years away from.
It’s a unique experience, revisiting a place you used to live. I feel a version of it when I spend time in Canberra and Paris, but for some reason in Brussels it feels more potent. Maybe it’s because both times I lived there, I was at formative life stages — the first, I moved from child to teen, and the second from teen to young adult. Both held their own learnings and challenges, and both stick very strongly in my mind, even 20 years after first landing at Zaventem airport.
On my last two visits, I stayed in a hotel right in the centre of town, and the satisfaction of navigating its streets with little help from Google Maps didn’t wear off. On this particular visit though, it brought two trains of thought to mind which I have been mulling over ever since, so I thought I’d work through them here.
The first was the idea of visiting a former hometown as a type of time travel. Perhaps this is easiest explained with a few examples.
My hotel was right opposite a long arcade called Galleries Royales Saint Hubert. It’s a very popular tourist spot because it’s so jaw-droppingly beautiful, and I can remember walking through it not long after we first moved to Brussels in 2005. Gran was visiting and at the end of the arcade closest to the Grand Place is a Häagen-Dazs where we stopped for ice cream.
Getting Häagen-Dazs became a tradition for us each time Gran visited, and on my first trip back last year, it was this ice cream shop that I held most clearly in my memory of the area. It was as if I could see my family through the windows, and my younger self ordering “two scoops, please, one chocolate, one mango.”
Another example, this time from my teen years, came to me while I walked down the hill from Gare Centrale and passed the street that was, and still is, home to my childhood nightclub. A dingy place called Le You which, to 17-year-old me, felt the image of glamour and excess. My mind is flooded with flashbacks when I’m anywhere near the place — queueing up in cold weather and short dresses, taking a little vomit break after too many vodka Red Bulls, my 18th birthday.
Endless flashbacks like these came up on this latest stay. Trudging to the school bus in the dark, shopping for rotisserie chicken at Flagey market on the weekend, eating McDonald’s and going to the cinema with friends age 12, drinking cherry beer at Delirium and getting up to all kinds of mischief at 17. When the memories hit me, it’s like I am right inside them again, reliving them as if it were 2006, 8, 11, or 13.
On Saturday morning, I walked from my hotel to our old family friend’s place — about a 40-minute walk — and decided to take the long route to visit the first street we ever lived on. The nostalgia was so strong that I had to call my sister Zara to tell her about it. That first year in Brussels was a tricky one for both of us. Two Aussie gals, used to riding their bikes to school and having quite a lot of freedom, dropped in Northern Europe where there was so much dog poo and it was so cold and we weren’t that good at French yet. But all that came through in our phone call was fondness.
My experience of memory during these few days made me think of a conversation I had with my friend Gigi a few years ago which, luckily for this newsletter, I have a written record of because it was featured in my last zine. We were talking about a solo walk she had done along the Camino de Santiago, a walk she had done a few times before at different times in her life and with different people.
“I was thinking about life as if it were a spiral, and that I had done this walk for the first time eight years ago and it felt like in parallel I was re-visiting myself when I was twenty years old and also kind of going through a transitional moment in my life. It was so beautiful to reconnect and visit myself then and along the way also visit my future self.”
It’s a feeling that rings particularly true to me as I reflect on these memories that are so rooted in place, but that I can revisit out of time. It reminds me as well of this sketch by John Berger that I have used in a newsletter before, but which fits so perfectly in this topic that here it is again:
The second thing that I thought a lot about while I was there was perspective, or rather, seeing things through new eyes. Whilst at 10 my focus settled on ice cream and at 17 on beers and boys, at 30 — thank god — I see and notice things differently.
I wrote a bit about this in a newsletter last November after my first trip back, but this most recent visit was a particularly visual one (I was there for a two-day photo shoot at the restaurants) and it made me all the more sensitive to my surroundings.
It’s a common misconception that Brussels is boring. I’ve met people who have visited it briefly and “didn’t get it” or more harshly, hated it. But when you aren’t tied to the distraction of a map and can walk around with your eyes free to wander, it’s almost impossible not to notice the preservation of history, the forward motion of art and design, and most delightfully of all, the little dashes of humour all over the city.
I loved the overlap of old and contemporary — the antique Belgian lace shops and wood panelled brasseries next to the art-house cinemas and terraces full of young, cool people. The palace and manicured Royal Gardens with its Kiosk bar/DJ booth/radio station nestled in the trees. The town squares of art nouveau and classic Flemish architecture with newly planted garden beds of wild grasses and pollinators where once there were cobbles and concrete.
What stuck out to me the most though was the typography and signage. It came in such a diversity of styles that every shop, café, and restaurant had its own distinct identity. There was a uniqueness, a historic specificity, a sense of experimentation to it that felt very ‘Brussels’ and that, as a younger person, my eyes weren’t open to.
In short, what I was seeing was a different version of a familiar city, and it made me consider the value of revisiting old haunts as a creative exercise. An exercise in noticing what you remember and what you never noticed before. In peeling back the layers and seeing things as you never saw them in an earlier life. An exercise in opening your eyes.
Alright, that’s enough from me. See you in the next one,
Annabel x
Cherry bum post-script which got taken down on Instagram so I’m putting it here:
