Ostend Weekend (5/5) By John Allbones

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After dinner, the hotel managed to come up with a perfect antidote to the Bruges experience. My day, which had been filled with sunshine, breathtaking beauty, windmills, lace and omelettes, was hijacked by Dirk, a keyboard playing Walloon. He had been booked to entertain our party, who were enjoying the free bar on our all-inclusive trip. Dirk opened with Fly Me To The Moon. Not so much a song, as a cry for help. He bore all the hallmarks of a man honouring a long-standing commitment.

He didn't want to be there, he knew it and we knew it. His sense of duty, if not his voice, was to be admired though. His keyboard was quite something. He seemed to play only the two notes all night, but all these different tunes kept coming out of it. I was tempted to clear off after one drink, but a morbid curiosity kept me in my seat a little longer. His morose version of I'm So Excited was worth the price of the trip alone. But, when it came to watching a Belgian singing Spanish Eyes to a group of Brits, it started to get a bit weird for me. It was time to sup up and away from my dutiful Walloon.

I didn't get far. Just a few doors down the road there was an Irish bar. Now I'm one of those people who scoff at people who do the same things abroad as they could do at home. You know the type. They want bacon and eggs for breakfast, they want to drink Tetley bitter. My heart sinks when I see a travel programme on the box about Benidorm, and you see a bar with a sign outside, written on which is the legend Ian and Pauline from Castleford welcome you to the Drop Inn. That said, I really fancied a Guinness, so in I went.

The landlord was a drunk. The landlady, a potty mouthed gossip, with a twitch and a penchant for filthy jokes. Perfect. This is what I want from Mine Hosts. I'd love to send a memo to the people who run large brewery chains. Stop employing faceless managers whose job it is to dream up endless gimmicks like happy hours and karaoke in a bid to get people in and drinking your under-whelming beer. Just put a couple of nutters behind the bar, and they'll queue round the block.

He knew he had a drink problem. Well, we all did. I saw him serve someone a cheese toastie and his hands were shaking worse than Captain Oates when he went for his last stroll through the snow. But, he kept it hidden from his wife. Not very well as it turned out, because it was her who told me he was an alcoholic. Me. A total stranger! I told you she was a gossip. He thought she was in the dark, and I'm glad, because this made the floor show that much more entertaining. The choreography of him pouring himself a drink as she turned to use the till was something to behold.

He could get his bottle out of the fridge, pour himself a glass of wine, return the bottle, and hide his glass behind the wooden pillar at the end of the bar just before his wife turned round again. Every subsequent transaction she was involved in allowed him to take a swig and return the glass to its clandestine position.

I had a great time that night. Enjoying a few pints, reading the jokes, stories, and sayings that covered the walls. But most of all watching the interaction between our genial hosts, and the seemingly ever more eccentric punters who came in for refreshment throughout the evening was better than any cabaret. Indeed, the next day when it started to rain curtailing a rather pleasant, if pointless, walk around Ostend, I headed straight back there for a drink and shelter. I even tried a cheese toastie. Shaken not stirred.

It may have only been a cheap and cheerful weekend away, but it was very enjoyable, and much needed. It was hardly in the Phileas Fogg league, but a strange thing happens to me whenever I go abroad. When I return, suddenly I become a different animal. I managed to order a beer in a foreign language, in a foreign country, so suddenly I'm a new European, a polyglot of the highest order. I'm a world weary intellectual. Euronews is never off the telly. In the car I've become magically tuned to Radio 4. People ask me How was your weekend? To which I reply, 'Never mind that, have you heard Book of the Week'?

I suppose the change of outlook and freshening up of the mind is the whole point of the exercise. And, what a marvellous feeling it is. Like having your brain vacuumed. What a shame then, that within five minutes of being back at work, it's like you've never been away.

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