Judging Le Frascati on the quality of its cuisine alone wouldn’t do justice to the place. Decor-wise, Le Frascati is pretty much your quintessential Brussels brasserie, all wood panelling, mirrors and warmth.  The clientele blends trendy southerners (that’s south-of-the-canal) with regulars, although it’s difficult to tell; everyone seems to receive the mine host treatment. On the food front, however, it’s a textbook example of quality and quantity – and then some.

It was legitimate to assume that, for Madness, 2012 had peaked already, what with playing the ageless Our House first on the roof of Buckingham Palace (“in the middle of One’s street”) for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee then at the closing ceremony of the Olympics. Their annual Christmas jaunt – which this year features a four-day House of Fun weekend at Butlins, no less – was meant to provide the usual chirpy coda to the calendar year, and that was that.

But the real beauty of A La Mort Subite lies deeper: it takes us back to our early childhood, when beautiful bars like this were still abundant. Mort Subite is the name of a beer and means “sudden death”. But, contrary to what many Flemings think, it has nothing to do with the percentage of alcohol in the beer that would make you black out instantly.

Sunday lunch is not – heaven forbid – meant to be a symbolist experience, but we could have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. It was election day across Belgium, and we were in Sint-Genesius-Rode – one of the most notorious linguistic minefields of Brussels’ suburbia. Our only request for lunch was “somewhere neutral”. Oh, and can the – mostly lethargic – dog come too?

A collection of short stories revolving around Brussels, The Meantime is a welcome addition to the scattered literature in which Bruxelles-la-Grise plays a leading role. Which is not to say that a reader without the urge to indulge in fantasies about this city will be disappointed: the tales penned by these nine young cosmopolitan authors vary considerably in style and form and tackle a range of themes, from the trials of multinational relationships, to the tribulations of a Commission employee, to the lot of Brussels’ underclass.

The Road Gets Darker From Here is only the band’s seventh album (barring compilations, live albums and the Derek Raymond spoken-word album), but this is easily explained by the number of side projects Johnston and Edwards have been involved with over the years: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Faust for the former, The Scapegoats for the latter.

Literary purists are understandably reticent about electronic publishing. On one hand, the e-book—that disembodied parcel of brute digital content displayed on a standardised reader—precludes the fetish experience of reading. Gone is the grainy texture of the page, the faint scent of the stacks. Proust would not be happy. On the other hand, technology has made books are more accessible now than ever before, particularly those in the public domain.