Been walking through Belgium for four days and am currently only one day from Brussels. A different kind of walk this week. Weathers sticky hot, which when walking in cycling shorts under a thick woolen kilt makes me regret shaving anything except my face…lesson learned…

This new country feels entirely different again. A lot of walking through forests, which was nice at first but begins to feel like a samey darkened corridor that never ends, not much to look at, still at least it means I’m out the sun…The high pitched buzzing from the young people’s scooters in France has been replaced by the constant whir of chainsaws. There’s deforestation everywhere here, but it barely seems to be making a dent in hundreds of miles of the dense greenery. My favourite are the ‘Fluffy trees’. (Forgive my horticultural ignorance) They look like your average tree but when the wind blows through them, the road ahead looks like a snow-globe as a gentle shower of tiny white specs of fluff floats down all around me.  I love Christmas…I’ll be in Latvia for the next one…I wonder how much I’ll like the thought of snow by then…

The people here seem a lot more aware of me. I’m wondering if they heard me on the radio as every other car here toots and waves at me as the pass. In Luxembourg folk politely ignore me. In France they just ignored me but within an hour of passing the border into Belgium, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I had been marching earphones-in, listening to the Janey Godly Posdcast, when a couple began asking me about the claim on the back of my t-shirt that I have ‘walked here from London’. My French was enough to explain the purpose of my trek but luckily my pockets are filled with French flyers explaining the rest. Walking as we talked, we reached their front door and they invited me for lunch. If I hadn’t already stopped for lunch just a half hour before I would have accepted but it’s hard to walk when you’re over full, and I do need to keep on schedule. They insisted that if I’m ever passing here again (Em…) I was to join them for a meal, and then they handed me 10 euro. Bless them. I had a feeling I was going to like Belgium.

Later, walking down another quiet road, a car came up behind me and started waving me to stop. I wasn’t in his way, I was on the path but then he pulled up beside me and said ‘Stop!’  I wasn’t sure what the problem was but he jumped out and said ‘I call my wife. She is coming with camera. Can please you wait two minutes?’ We then stood and chatted for those two minutes until he and she had their picture taken with the skirted walking guy…Bless them too…

I’m quite amused by Belgium, so far…When my phone died in Arlon, I found a small bar and went in to ask if they could charge it for half an hour. The girl stared at me with a look I’ve become quite accustom to already. A kind of bewildered ‘What is this going to be?’ look people give me as I approach them (in my high-vis get-up and blue ‘Jupe’…) To begin, I handed her a flyer. She read it and then simply handed it back saying, ‘No.’ I just laughed, which didn’t help her confusion. ‘Mon Battery Mort’ and showing her my charger was enough to get smile out of her. Problem solved and then I got to sit and Belgian-people-watch while I waited. I was the only one there not drinking beer (at  11am on Thursday…) but  I was pleased to see the first young gay couple walking down a main street holding hands since I left Glasgow.  Good on you, Belgium!

And on I went…

Perhaps I lived in London for too long but it gets really tiring walking through all these wee towns and villages and never finding a shop open. Belgium’s shops are closed at equally illogical times as every other country I’ve walked through but here they have an ingenious solution. 24hour vending machines, inside their own wee secure cage, can be found on the main street of nearly every wee village. I’ve even seen one outside a bakers that was full of fresh bread and another beside the florists full of ready wrapped bunches of flowers. It’s really efficient, I wish everywhere had them, but unfortunately the Road to Change can’t expand its focus to encourage other countries to introduce vending machines as well as reviewing their child protection laws…

It feels like a different country but the actual scenery hasn’t changed dramatically from northern France. It’s the small things that remind me I’m in a new place. Like: the sheep here have long tails, there’s lots of wee snakes on the road and license plates are a different colour again. You know how in the UK, the plate on the front of the car is white but the one on the back is yellow? In Luxembourg they’re both yellow. At first I wasn’t sure which way the cars were travelling. Here in Belgium they’re both white…hmm…Perhaps I’ve just been walking so long that I’ve lost my ability to discern what is interesting content for a blog and what’s not…

I’m loving being on this adventure with my brother Mojo, though. We have the same laid back attitude, so all the wee hiccups with Yvonne or the funding never seem like the mini-disasters they might otherwise be. He’s eighteen months older than me so we’ve been getting each other in and out of scrapes for over thirty years. Although we both know why we’re on this journey, we don’t talk about it much. Not like other folk don’t talk about it, we actually don’t need to. We could if we wanted to but really we’ve been through all that for years and so this adventure feels like our chance to take back a little of our power, and be happy. We laugh a lot and end most days with an episode of South Park (or something) on Mojo’s laptop. I couldn’t have gotten this far without him. Not only did he created and maintain the Road to Change website, he’s a really creative chef (on a small budget) and not scared to take an engine apart. Mojo (Like all my siblings…and Tom Urie) is endlessly and effortlessly kind. Plus we have three decades of funny memories to reminisce. We were talking last night about ‘The best day ever!’ The most incredible event of our childhood that we still recall with wonder to this day…

It was back in 1991, when I was eight and he was nine. We were walking to the Westwood Square (Local shops) with two Bru bottles each. An empty glass Irn Bru bottle was worth 15p at that time, so we had enough for a Chomp, some Space Raiders and a 10p-mix-up from the Chippy, each. An epic night already but on top of that, a new episode of Rosanne would on be later… Just before reaching the shops, we spotted a wallet on the ground beside an empty car. It had bank cards, driving license and cash in it. More cash than I’d ever seen at that age. (About £15…)You might be thinking we pocketed the cash and bought Super Soakers but we were good wee ‘catholic’ weans…We looked at the address on the license and realised it belonged to someone in the flats near where we stood. We took it to the door and the guy’s wife answered. Wondering what two wee boys with four empty glass bottles could want, we just handed her the wallet. Amazed to find that we hadn’t nicked any of the money, she disappeared inside and returned with a whole shinny pound for us. Each!  We couldn’t believe it. We had just quadrupled our gross-worth! We could now get all the stuff we were going to get AND a whole bag of chips! Each! Which we immediately did…Walking home again, stinking of salt and vinegar and still glowing from our great fortune, we saw an old guy talking to some kids. They walked away from him despondent but then he approached us and asked if we were the boys who found something. We said yes, we found a wallet but we had given it back to the address where it belonged. To our everlasting amazement, he then handed us another shinny pound, each! I nearly fainted. We already had a week’s worth of coloured sugar weighing down our pockets and a tummy full of chips and here we were walking home with more money than we left with only half an hour before. We watched Rosanne that night and felt like kings. Indeed, the greatest day ever…(Incidentally, Rosanne Bar was the first major celebrity to retweet the Road to Change website…Bless her enall…)

That’s the kind of shite we talk about every night in Yvonne…Just trying to give you a taste of the actual Road to Change experience…

Anyhoo…back on the Road yesterday, about a kilometre after Neufchataeu, I was trekking along as usually when noticed a pile of colourful paper and stuff next to a sodden black leather purse. Under closer inspection, I realised it was the bank cards, ID cards and a medical card of an old lady called Norma (but no cash). The way it was lying looked like it had been thrown from a car but I can’t imagine how this old dear could have accidentally chucked her purse out the window so violently that the contents flew out all over the grass. I don’t know how difficult it is to replace a medical card here but I hear they’re important, and the Padre Pio prayer cards and pictures of grand children (and I presume her possibly late husband) felt like things Norma would want back. I gathered it all up and stuck it in my pouch. Immediately worried that I’d now be stopped by the police and discovered to be carrying an old lady’s purse that was reported stolen a few weeks ago…When I reached Mojo and Yvonne for lunch, we went through the wet papers and found her address. The Sat Nav told us her house was just two miles on up the road. So, while I carried on walking, Mojo went off to return these curiously found items to the wee walking-sticked Norma. Mojo said she opened the door and gave him one of the confused looks I usually get, and he quickly realised she didn’t speak a word of English. He just held up her own ID card and she gasped as her eyes widened. He figured she was asking where he found it so he handed her a flyer and, in his best broken French, (and mine actions) he explained that his brother was walking up the road from Neufchateau and found it all lying on the grass. She seemed deeply relieved and grateful to get it all back and thanked him repeatedly. Bless her. No shiny Euros tho…Really, it didn’t take much for us to get it back to her. I could of course have just walked passed her stuff when I saw it. Suspecting an old lady has been mugged, some would prefer not touch the ‘evidence’…Best not get involved…(Like the 87% in a national survey, who say they would NOT report a child being sexually abused even if they had good reason to suspect it)…I could have brought it to Mojo and he might have suggested we hand it in at the next shop, probably just ending up in a bin eventually…well, I guess I’m glad me and Mojo haven’t much in twenty-odd years…

So these are the wee events that make up my days. Wee village then long stretch of road, then another wee village then another long stretch of road etc etc…You’ll occasionally find a car parked at the side of the long roads between civilisation. Behind the car is often a parent waiting to the pull the trousers up of their peeing child. Seen that twice today, which seems appropriate in a country famous for a statue of a wee boy peeing…

As I’m walking, I generally listen to the ‘Janey Godley Podcast’ or sometimes just listen to my thoughts…I have no thoughts on Brussels yet obviously. Literally no got there yet, so my mind usually floats back to Luxembourg and the wonderfully kind people I met there.

I was invited to people’s homes for dinner four times and taken out for a meal twice. In five days. I’ve spoken a lot about Jac and her daughter Miriam but I also met Margaret Lupo, a Scot who I overheard talking at the Irish concert. I turned to her and asked ‘You Scottish?’ and she said ‘Aye’. I can’t tell you how much that pleased me. She invited me over to her beautiful home for a Scottish-ish breakfast and then we chatted all day. I hadn’t realised how much I missed talking in my own accent and at my normal pace. Been slowing down and articulating for over a month but me and ‘Magrit’ were gabbin away like two wee wumin in a steamy. She then took me to an import store called ‘Little Britain where I saw food that I also hadn’t realised I missed. I was quite prepared to pay 20 Euro for six bottles of Irn Bru when the kind shop workers suddenly donated them to the walk. (Huge ‘Bless ya’ to Jennifer and Dave Stephenson!) I also met some of Margaret’s children who also live there in Luxembourg. They all speak four languages, which isn’t uncommon there but never fails to impress me. I witnessed a fascinating (If bewildering…) conversation during dinner at Miriam and David’s last Sunday that spanned English, German, Luxembourgish and French, sometimes in the same sentence…I makes sense to know all these languages if you live in Luxembourg but speaking to Margaret’s cheery wee multi-lingual son made me ashamed to be thirty and barely have a grapes on English…Margaret is introducing me to some of her friends in Brussels and I get the feeling that this how the Road to Change might work. I like making new friends and meeting people who actually live in the cities that I’m trying to understand really helps the cause in so many ways.

Another lovely new friend I made in Luxembourg is Viviane Metz (and her husband Janott) A survivor herself, she runs a website to encourage others to speak out. https://www.facebook.com/pages/G%C3%A9int-physesch-psychesch-an-sexualis%C3%A9iert-Gewalt-u-Kanner/154522601281600 The day I arrived she bought me lunch but before I set off again she invited out to her colourful home to meet here family and pets. She has more cats than I could count and a dynasty of Tortoises. I’d never seen a baby tortoise before but she has a whole room full of incubators, filled with new arrivals and soon to be hatching eggs. Her two wee kids didn’t speak English yet and gave me some cracking funny looks when I arrived but I gathered Viviane was explaining the kilt as evidently the Luxembourgish word for kilt is ‘Kilt’…

For Viviane, healing has come through creativity. Every wall in her home is a celebration of her art and also every creation her children contribute. To look at it just makes you smile. Her childhood was clearly a dark time so she makes sure her own kids lives are filled with colour. I was so pleased to have met her and her lovely family and I’m inspired by her warmth. With paint and brush she redefined the tone and feel of her surroundings. In this way, and in nurturing and caring for all those animals, she reconnects with her inner child and makes what she calls ‘Happy things’. Heading back to the empty Yvonne I suddenly realised how much I miss my guitar. I’ve been writing songs since just after my uncle stopped touching me. The early stuff was quite raw and morbid but as I grew up, writing and singing became a useful way to process and examine things. I even managed to make a happy wee song about my Gran dying. For me, music can change or enhance my mood like no other medium. That’s why film makers use it so deliberately under the dialogue of any film you like. I can’t actually remember the last time I sat down with my guitar. I left it in London over a year ago…Ah well…Perhaps Santa will bring me one in Latvia…

So Luxembourg was fun. A lot of ‘Happy’ times but I could see a lot of change beginning to happen too. Survivors finally pressing charges, Physiologists seeking out training with Blue Angel that I met in Paris (but that they hadn’t heard of before) Jac got a meeting with a commissioner from the Ministry of Families and Integration to discuss the case with her son Robi (Which only served to confirm how powerless the authorities are there to act on Robi’s known offender but gave Jac a chance to reconnect with her fighting spirit) and Miriam, who is the sister of Robi that created the facebook page about his offender ‘Bring Leslie Woodhall to Justice’ said I was going to turn her into a campaigner. Before I headed off to Brussels, they all began to talk about actually forming that petition against the Statute of Limitations and gathering the thousand signatures required to have its reform discussed in their parliament. I was glad to have played even a small part in their decision to create change and will continue to support them with whatever advice and contacts I can to guide them through the process. On the Road to Change, I can’t fight every individual battle but I like the idea that I could go around these countries and encourage the people who live there to take charge of bringing about the change their country needs. On top of all that, the good people of Luxembourg donated a hugely generous 700 euros and their British Ambassador, Alice Walpole, walked with me the first hour towards Belgium, bringing about even more press and our first TV coverage. The Ambassador has already contacted all the other European British Embassies asking them to support the Road to Change as I reach their country. Happy daze…

And on that note…my thoughts turn to Brussels…I feel an incredible pressure to replicate the events of Luxembourg and build on the contacts made in Paris. I have just one more days walking then a week of engaging with as many people in the city as possible…so, I better get some sleep…

Thanks for reading…

Matty x

‘Bless ya’ to Jennifer and Dave Stephenson :)