Brussels diary: Everyday story of surreal folk living out the Magritte experience

THE pipe that is not a pipe (because it is a picture of a pipe), day in night, and the other bizarre juxtapositions which characterise the work of Rene Magritte are drawing crowds for a centenary retrospective. Coach parties of bossy Dutch women jostle with noisy school groups outside the Fine Arts museum for a chance to see the largest collection of works produced by the Thirties surrealist master.

It's the talk of the town and a great boost to Belgian pride, mainly because the French are coming in droves. Parisians who would not have been seen dead in a Brussels musee before are taking advantage of the new Paris-Brussels high-speed train, which has cut the journey time to 1 hour 25 minutes.

But you don't need to go to a Magritte exhibition to experience the surreal in Brussels. Why, for example, is there a discotheque in the dreary metro station at Schuman, the stop nearest the European Commission's now empty Berlaymont headquarters.

Other cities would have a newsagents or a flower shop, but here it's a discotheque. The oddest thing is that nobody seems to think it's strange.

Deep in the bowels of the next tube stop down the line, also used by commuters and EU officials, is the ambitiously named Le Manhattan, striving for the ambience of New York with a set of flashing Christmas-tree lights around a fake Statue of Liberty at the entrance. One European civil servant I know of meets press contacts there for lunch. Which would be fine, except that its also a topless bar.

An even odder collection of establishments is juxtaposed beside avant- garde designer clothes shops near the Stock Exchange in the dilapidated centre of town. Patrons of a bar called La Metro Valdee always seem to be having more fun than anywhere else I know. They are mostly women "d'une certaine age" dancing with young Turkish men who could be their grandsons. An occasional child roams around yawning, presumably waiting to be taken home.

The music comes from an electric keyboard played by a cheerful medieval- looking woman with no teeth and wild scraggy hair.

NEW EU statistics show the Brussels region is one of the three richest in Europe. Income per head is 72 per cent higher than the EU average, thanks mainly to the presence of the EU institutions. The opening up of borders with Eastern Europe, however, has also shaken things up at the other end of the poverty scale. Local beggars have been forced to smarten up their act to compete with buskers and children from Romania or Albania who now work the public transport, system playing accordions. The other morning a smartly turned out man of about 70 with a neat moustache startled everyone by standing up in the tram. In French first, then Flemish, he delivered a carefully prepared speech explaining that he was one of the "real sans abri [homeless]" and if anyone would like to give him a cigarette, he'd be eternally grateful. The doors opened and a young woman with a baby wrapped in a shawl and carrying a plastic cup looked in. Seeing she 'd been beaten to it, she turned back sadly to wait for the next one.

Acertain doggedness about rules here can turn the simplest excursion into an ordeal. I found this out when I took my sister's little boy to the municipal swimming baths recently. I was vaguely aware of a rule about men's swimming trunks but thought as he's not even three and so tiny they couldn't object if he's wearing the wrong type. We were barely in the water when M le Maitre Nageur, a man resembling a walrus, came over shaking his head and wagging his finger. "Madame," he began, (one always maintains a great deal of formality on these occasions) the child would have to get out of the pool unless he was prepared to adopt the correct mode of swimming costume. "Look," I pleaded "We're not staying long. He'll cry if we take him out". The rule apparently has a twin aim: to preserve public decency (although why men who want to expose themselves would be put off merely by a closer fitting design is a mystery) and, secondly, to prevent boys swimming in the same shorts they wear "a exterieur".

Very sensible, but a toddler, and in winter, is manifestly not going around outside in shorts. While we were arguing, anarchy was taking hold in the pool as older boys dive- bombed into the kiddies' section, spreading terror among the little ones with impunity. The inconsistency of the zeal to apply the regulations seemed lost on the master- swimmer. The crisis was only resolved after we negotiated the "hire" of an approved pair (rental 75p) and surrendered an item of value as a hostage. Everyone except my nephew left the pool in a heightened state of stress.

On the way out I noticed the signs. A drawing of a man wearing a skimpy pair of men's briefs with the inscription "Maillot Classique" and a smug tick of approval beside him. Underneath, a drawing of a baggier type of swimming shorts and a stern cross drawn through that. "Ceci n'est pas un maillot classique," it said or something along those lines. The spirit of Magritte lives on.