Winter makes us happy! (Geert Poisquet - Luna)

“Winter makes us happy” is the title of the new single and eponymous album of Tom Pintens. A nice song by the way, which I heard on the radio somewhere last week. At first I was panic-stricken, a feeling that vanished as soon as I realized the song was all about winter and not about a Flemish politician with the phonetically-similar last name. I confess, winter – the season – turns me into a merry person. How I love this genuinely beautiful winter stuff. The romantic in me has a weak spot for winter sceneries and my heart skips a beat at the combination of a thin airy blue sky and temperatures far below zero. However, I’m afraid there are precious few fellow romantics in Belgium who seem to share this feeling. Why? Well, it showed in the incessant whining, groaning and complaining that rolled over our country for a few weeks recently. We finally were enduring a ‘harsh’ winter. And by God, did we receive the message. Loud and Clear. It had snowed! True, the timing was a bit off because it did happen during rush hour. Just a few inches of that heavenly relaxing stuff. A small dose that unfortunately did not relate by far with the buckets of bullshit one had to endure in the hours and days that followed. Car and truck drivers wagged their finger at the guys from the road service department. They had not done their bloody job! The road service people immediately pointed as one in the direction of the Weather Forecasters. What an appalling forecast, huh? Something the forecasters (Frank Deboosere and Sabine Hagendoren and alike) denied vehemently. Endlessly was the palavering in a total waste of air time and printed paper. Everyone, and his brother and sister, had an opinion and spoke at length about the wintery conditions in this monkey country. For a brief moment I feared that a state of national emergency would be declared, urgently recalling Dr Beaucourt and his team from earthquake shattered Haiti.

Indeed, a very sad affair over there, but what about the poor wretched souls of hard working taxpayers who would not turn up at work on time due to the record tailbacks, ho! To say nothing about the humongous economic damages! I was braced for a new combined show by the public broadcasting company and its commercial colleagues to set up yet another must-do “Music for Life’-like event to shield many a company from going under.

And even Parliament turned up the sound. It rained – or snowed – propositions, revolutionary road salting procedures were dug up, planning and other commissions stood on the drawing board. One MP even dared to declare that new snowfall should be forbidden in this country. I dare hope he had a stroke of satire or at least meant it in an ironic way. In brief, the entire country was in uproar because of a layer of fine powdery snowy stuff. Where on earth did I get the idea that Belgians were the people who could see the relativity of it all. Heck no. I was so disappointed. Just to make sure that in the future I will be able to enjoy the peace and quiet and beauty of winter snowfall I’ve come up with a novelty: the complaints shaft. There are numerous idle mine shafts in this country. Let’s turn them into our very own Belgian version of the Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. Feel like whining? Put your helmet on, whizz down the shaft, get all the bad stuff out of your system and Bob’s your uncle. But please, one by one and don’t shout too loud. The reverberations could induce a collapse of the shaft and we’d be yet again full circle …emergency plan, etc, etc …

Now bring on springtime, please, because I’ve just about had it with Winter!

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