Any other business | 1 January 2011

In the land of my Flemish forefathers, I draw a key lesson for 2011: always have a Plan B

To Ghent, in the land of my ancestors, to address a conclave of ‘risk managers’. Though the mother tongue of most participants is Dutch or French, the conference is in English — and I feel obliged to explain that despite my surname that’s what I shall speak too, because it’s 200 years since my silkweaving Flemish forefathers moved from Antwerp to Norwich to take advantage of a tax scheme for migrant craftsmen that would no doubt now be banned by EU ‘single market’ rules. I spare them the detail that I did in fact learn a few sentences of Dutch from a Belgian girlfriend when I worked in Brussels 30 years ago, beginning with telling the time — of which all that remains seared in my memory is the elementary question ‘Hoe laat is het?’, literally ‘How late is it?’, which one day elicited the answer, in English, ‘Too late for you, my new German boyfriend’s waiting outside.