After the Mediterranean sun and sea of yesterday, today I experienced the very different beauty of the Belgian Ardennes in all its green and grey and gritty splendour. We went to pick up N° 1 sprog from her summer university at Libramont. Like the ADEPS summer camps, the summer universities are something the gregarious Belgians do very well. The idea is simple; courses of a week or more bringing together people of all ages, from teenagers to pensioners, to study and work in various branches of the arts, from painting through to photography, from music through to sculpture. With commendable generosity, the Communauté Française offers some thirty fellowships to students from la Francophonie, mostly from African countries such as Burkina Faso and Senegal. These fellows brought their own very special atmosphere with them (we couldn’t help but wonder how hard it was for them to swap the African sun for the low, grey cloud of the Ardennes). Though almost none of them could read music they were all prodigiously talented on a range of instruments (I thought of Paul Simon’s Graceland). N° 1 sprog showed us a block of classrooms, each with its own piano, and then told us that one of these African fellows, from Senegal, had deeply impressed her because back home he was a music teacher in a school. He had sixty pupils and one, just one, piano.