AT LEAST one year of good luck is what I’ve been promised, and the local guide book tells me I’m in good company. Napoleon, Charles V and Emperor Hakyitos’ hands have all preceded mine, which proves there are many ways to interpret ‘good luck’.
For earlier in the day, one of those gloomy days in the “lowlands” when the mist is so heavy church spires disappear and distant figures are ghostly shadows, we had passed the pyramidal mound, topped by a lion, constructed from the battle mud and earth of the British position at Waterloo. It was commissioned, after the great defeat of Napoleon in 1815, by William I of the Netherlands to mark the spot where his son, William Prince of Orange, was wounded. Wellington is said to have remarked it ‘ruined his battlefield’ and Victor Hugo claimed it as ‘a sepulchre for France’. But, as a vantage point from which to survey the flat fields below, where almost 50,000 men from both sides died on a single day, the lion fading in the fog was a poignant reminder of how inglorious war actually is. Cruelly ironic, that almost a century later, near the same Belgium lowlands, man-to-man combat would kill so many young men again.
But I digress, for we were headed a few miles further south to Mons, a place more famous for its battles than the tiny medieval brass monkey, around two feet high that sits beside the door of the Hotel de Ville. The top of its head has been shined silver by those who with their left hand have rubbed it to gain good fortune.
Of course, it’s probably an eighteenth or nineteenth century tale constructed to lure and detour travellers, like the Blarney stone or the Trevi fountain, but as I take off my gloves on this cold dank day and caress the little fellow’s head, I do start to feel lucky. “You make your own luck in life,” my grandmother would always tell us, and maybe, she was right.
For, after the battle of Waterloo whilst imprisoned on St Helena, Napoleon was said to have written, “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” This made me reflect this week, having seen the extraordinary performance by Meryl Streep of Margaret Thatcher, which will surely define, at least for a while, how the Iron Lady is remembered, and Sarkozy, once described as ‘Bonaparte in a suit’, is being lampooned for backing plans to build a Napoleon theme park on the outskirts of Paris, that one might make your own luck in life but it is others who create it for posterity.
I look forward to my lucky year. Whereas, with such tasteful rides planned as, a dry ski slope littered with corpses, enacting the retreat from Moscow and the Battle of Trafalgar in a giant water tank, it looks like Napoleon will have to wait a little longer for that luck of the monkey’s head.
