It was a crisp and ruddy-cheeked Friday afternoon, the last weekend before Christmas, and Ghent was glowing with that cosy chocolate box cheer that British cities are never quite able to replicate. It was a classic European Christmas scene: the smell of Glühwein and spruce wafting through the air,

Belgium is home to some 180 breweries, producing hundreds of different beers in myriad styles and strengths. A typical pub offers the adventurous drinker a choice of cloudy wheat beers with a hint of coriander, fruity farmhouse-style saisons, lemon-sour lambic beers, foaming golden ales and deceptively strong Trappist

Belgium enjoys a peculiar place in the British collective imagination, pilloried as a flat and featureless non-country stuffed full of joyless Eurocrats. It’s a divided nation that looks, Janus-like, towards the Netherlands in the north and France to the south, leading to the accusation that it has