Painting Hotel Bloom

UPDATED with larger gallery


Brussels' Hotel Bloom encourages young artists by working with art schools to give promising new talent their first commission, to design and paint a hotel bedroom.

The artists have to go through a selection process, explain their concept and then implement it to a three days schedule and they get paid.

I went along to take photos of the artists working.

On the shores of a placid lake

Don't make waves on still waters

There is a school of thought that says evolution went downhill as life crawled out of the waters, others disagree of course, but coming from an island, unlike our poor landlocked European neighbours, we Brits have always gazed out over the seas.

Like pretty much everything else we do, we don’t really know why, but we know that we rather enjoy it.

It is no coincidence that it is not just our coast that fulfills our aquatic affections, the most glorious part of England is the Lake District, which in a moment of eccentricity only has one lake. There are many large bodies of water, but because of our diverse culture, aided by various invasions the only Bassenthwaite is an actual lake, the rest are mere’s or waters.

So, for almost fifteen years, I lived and worked on the Cumbrian fells where I enjoyed the calm, peaceful views, and inhaled the pure mountain air.

Then I made an appalling error. I came down from the hilltops into the world inhabited by humans. Worse than that, I came to Brussels, where I now sit going through an avalanche of press releases that basically fall into three categories; People saying that the EU should give more money to people like them; Invitations to events so excruciatingly tedious that reading the email is enough to induce suicidal thoughts; and mass mailings from people who nobody has ever been interested in.

With this in mind, we should all salute a humble and heroic figure, Steve Feltham.

Steve has been on the shore of Loch Ness watching for Nessie, the local monster, continuously since June 1991, and no, he’s not a lunatic.

He was working putting up burglar alarms for his family business in Dorset. Being a friendly and likeable fellow he often got chatting to his often elderly clients and noticed that many told him, that they wished they had done something, like go to America, climb Everest and so on at his age.

Not wanting to have regrets in his old age, he asked himself what he really wanted to do with his life, and deduced it was Nessie hunting. He left his home and partner. He bought an old ambulance and drove to the lake and began his lookout. After a while the van packed up, so he resigned himself to a stationary watch for the next decade.

He’s still there, still hasn’t seen a monster but has no regrets. He has managed to get his own postcode and the local council decided that he could join their ranks of taxpayers, but he lives without electricity or running water, although he made the happy discovery that the local pub has an outside tap.

He gets an income from selling Nessie models that he makes during rainy days.

He is always welcoming to journalists and tourists, but although everyone is interested in monster sightings, he thinks they’re missing the point. “If you have a dream to do something, no matter how harebrained others think it is, then it’s worth trying to make that dream come true, I am living proof that it might just work.”

Asked about retirement, he says that if you’re spending your time looking at a large body of water in such superb surroundings, “it’s hard to see what there is to retire from.”

Make Europe work: Give MEPs more space

Even on the Moon, Aldrin was closer to planet Earth than many MEPs

Many of us were inspired by last week’s visit to Brussels by Buzz Aldrin. He is hoping to inspire another generation with his plan to put a spacecraft, the Mars Cycler, in permanent Mars/Earth orbit, shuttling between the two planets as a sort of galactic park and ride scheme.

It makes sense, simply because you only need the huge engines and fuel supplies to escape Earth’s gravity, after you’ve reached orbit, the rest requires little effort. Not only that, but the ship can be much larger than the tin can Buzz was sat in and lobbed at the Moon.

The US are still the pioneers, and one of many ways they have benefited from space exploration is by having people like Senator John Glenn elected to high office, where this man of immense courage can continue to make a contribution to public life.

If only Europe could be so forward thinking, you may think, but we could be, if we just had a little imagination. Well, we do. We could start by sending an MEP to the International Space Station for a visit and, of course, lots of publicity, but it’s a bit of a limited concept and, how do we choose the Euro Space Cadet? Given the complex mixture of nationalities and political groups in the parliament, it won’t be easy. Add in the egomania and it all starts to look impractical, a foolish dream.

But let us dream, for there is a solution, a way both out and upwards. We must send the entire parliament into space. But not for a plenary, that would be too costly and inefficient.

We’ve got to pack them all into the Mars Cycler for the full five year term.

I call it ‘Horizon 2019’ or the ‘Heavenly Hemicycle’ if you prefer. Now this innovative project is not without risk. The commercial space sector, will undoubtedly get a huge boost, but there could be some lobbyists who would abuse this important technology sector by hiring rockets to launch themselves in their ‘stealth satellites’ to the orbiting plenary, hoping to ply their sordid trade.

But it would be much more difficult for them, a rare victory for transparency and ethics. It would also help the members. The pressure/air mix can, like flying, lead to a slight deadening of the taste buds, which can only help as the parliament’s cuisine remains relentless in its pursuit of British culinary standards.

The plenary would also raise the profile of the institution and it would be much more watchable when there’s the chance of seeing a dozing Roger Helmer float serenely across the chamber, for example.

It will also put an end to the ludicrous two seat arrangement and almost certainly cost less. There is also that intangible sense of comfort citizens will get from knowing their representatives are ‘out there’ The cycler also means that the ship can be regularly cleaned etc as it orbits Earth by a crew of cheap-labournauts and a refreshment of interns can also take place. Nothing new there.

Of course there’s a downside. There is a chance, the merest hint of a possibility that the craft could go off course and head towards the Sun or Betelgeuse.

But that could be the price of being innovative; a price citizens would feel was worth paying.

The secret chief of Europarl TV

A chance encounter in the European Parliament shocked the author

A short while ago, I was trying to recover from attending the Legal Affairs Committee, drying away the tears by spraying Deep Heat onto my face while reciting the names of the saints; Spinelli, Monnet and Schuman. 

But I took a wrong turn somewhere on my way back to the press room. I noticed a corridor that looked slightly out of place, being more like the plush offices on the top floors, rather than the more functional below ground areas. I wandered down, playing the vaguely inquisitive journalist until I saw a door marked ‘Europarl TV Executive Director’.

Just as I was taking a sneaky photo of the sign, the door blasted open and slammed into me, knocking me to the ground. I picked myself up to see an elderly gentleman looking down at me. “Why are you here?” He barked at me in a German accent, “Why? Tell me, I demand to know.”

I stuttered an explanation that I was looking for the press room. This made him even angrier, “No! I asked, why are you here?” Feeling disorientated, I suggested “because of a great cosmic joke?” This seemed to delight him tremendously. He picked me up, embraced me like a long lost brother and said, “This is completely correct, I can see that you are my fellow conquistador, together we will discover great truths.”

This is how I started working for Werner Herzog at Europarl TV.

He explained that he had been brought in to Europarl TV, “I am not interested in politicians, I will only show the reactions of the audience, this is much more revealing. The soundtrack will be not words but a solo oboe. I have a real affection for the oboe, I was befriended by one as a child in Bavaria.”

We went to the Mickey Mouse bar, but Herzog stopped at the closed Hemicycle where he harangued a passing official with a monologue on the utter futility of all existence, a conclusion he drew from noticing the plenary chamber was closed for repairs.

It took some time before he fully appreciated that the poor official’s explanation, that the roof had collapsed, was not a metaphor but real.

Things didn’t improve when he bumped into Nigel Farage and insisted that he explain the meaning of ‘independence’ in “a complex, nightmarish universe where our fate can be in the hands of a random gamma ray burst that will extinguish all life,” or when we wandered into a meeting where he terrified the translators with his demand that “there are too many words” and the solution was to translate everything into Sumerian “and leave it at that.”

The only area where the Director was willing to show flexibility was press conferences, “I insist, most seriously, that those giving such ‘performances’ must be hypnotized, for this is how we can find the underlying truth.”

It’s best not to mention his assault on Joseph Daul because he had, in Herzog’s opinion “Kinski’s eyebrows,” nor his attempts to burn the Gym down on the grounds that “running machines are a pitiless, inhuman crime against the nature and the essential, unwinnable struggle that is the overwhelming sadness of human existence.”

He was last seen trying to enter the Parliamentarium with a dirigible.