In the last ten years, Emma Russell hasn’t been standing still: she moved from Scotland to Belgium, enrolled in a cooking course, opened her own bed and breakfast Chez Spoons, started up a booming cake business and is planning to open a cooking school. Five years after obtaining the Belgian nationality, she gives us an insight into the remarkable course of her life, the process of becoming Belgian and some of the most striking differences between Scotland and Belgium.
Karen Beheydt: You’ve lived here in Belgium for about ten years now. Why did you choose to come to Belgium? Did you have a personal link with this country?
Emma Russell: I originally came to Belgium when I was fourteen years old. My mum got an opportunity for a job here, just for three months to begin with. The decision was made for me and my brother to come with her for a couple of months, because it was a great opportunity to learn French, and she put us in a French-speaking school. I ended up staying in Belgium for a year and three months, and in my fifth year, at sixteen years old, I went back to live with my dad in Scotland to finish off my education. Then, I went travelling around the world for a year, and afterwards I went to Stirling University for four years, studying French and Religious Studies. Throughout all of that, my mum lived in Belgium, as she still does. When I was at uni, I would come back every year during the summer to work in a bar at Place du Luxembourg in Brussels. This meant that I had that connection where I was still coming back and forth. After I graduated, I found a job as a teacher trainer in an advanced graduate programme for teacher training in London.
KB: Why did you leave that job and your life in London?
ER: I had a huge accident eleven years ago. My mum was driving – we were in France, where we’d had Christmas – and it was the 27th of December 2011. A drunk driver went the wrong way on the motorway and we had a frontal collision, in which I broke my back and collar bone. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t dress myself, I couldn’t do anything, and that at thirty years old. At that time I had not long broken up with my boyfriend, so I was by myself in London. The decision was made that I would go back to Brussels and live with my mum, just for a couple months to recover. As it so happened, I realised that I still had a life here, and that I was fed up with London in a way, as I was already looking for where to move outside of London. Because of the accident, I thought to myself, “Do you know what? I’ll move to Belgium for a year for the recovery, and after that we’ll see”.
KB: But obviously you stayed for longer.
ER: I stayed for longer, but my initial plan was for one year. My friends – and this is how good my friends are – packed up my whole house in London, because at that time I was semi-paralysed and couldn’t get back to do it myself. They put it all into storage so that I was able to rent out my apartment in order to have some money coming in for the year. Then, I managed to find a job over here in Belgium, as a project manager in IT, which allowed me to work from home. I was doing télétravail, the working from home that everyone is so used to nowadays because of Covid-19, ten years ago. At the end of my self-assigned year in Belgium, I met my husband, Ced. That’s when I decided, “Well, I’m just gonna stay. My mum’s here, I’ve got friends here, and the guy I love is here”.
KB: So you stayed in Belgium, started a bed and breakfast and began selling cakes. Did it ever cross your mind to move to Scotland with your family, setting up your business there, or just doing something completely different?
ER: When I married Ced, he was very clear that he would never move to Scotland. I knew then that my life would always be in Belgium, and I’ve accepted that this is the way it is. What does help is that my mum is here, living twenty minutes away. And I have friends here that I’ve known since I was fourteen years old.
KB: Having family and old friends near you makes your expat situation quite unusual, and probably more bearable.
ER: Yeah… Do you know what? I don’t consider myself an expat. Not anymore. I don’t have any expat friends, and I have only one Scottish friend. I stopped making friends with expats, do you know why? Because they’re only here for one or two years, and then they leave. I am not leaving, my life is here in Belgium, I’m Belgian. And it’s not to say that I don’t miss speaking English, or miss the British sense of humour, and the British innuendos… There are things that I do miss, I won’t deny that.
“When it rains in Scotland, there’s deep green and deep purple coming out of the mountains, and there’s light coming through the grey. It’s full of emotion.”
KB: Could you be more specific about the things that you miss or that are different here, and that took you some time to adapt to? That you would, if you could, readily implement in our society?
ER: One of your questions [as a preparation for this interview] was about the differences between Scotland and Belgium. I had the conversation with my husband and my brother, and we literally came up with three pages worth of differences.
KB: Three pages?
ER: Yeah. Three pages of differences. And then I wondered, “What are the similarities?”. I’m making up half a page of similarities [laughs]. And I said, “Guys! We need more similarities! It can’t be that bad!” [laughs]. But the biggest difference for me is the countryside, and the sunlight. When it’s raining and it’s grey in Belgium, I just find it very grey and very flat. There are no emotions that come out of the countryside. Whereas in Scotland, it can be raining – and honestly, most of the time, it does rain – but there’s these colours that come out of the mountains that are deep green and deep purple, and there’s light that comes through the grey, and it’s full of emotion. Just beautiful.
KB: Is there something else that you miss?
ER: Well I obviously miss my friends and my family [laughs]. But what I also miss is the banter, the chat, the conversations that you have in a pub during a night out. You’re having a drink and you can talk to friends about TV programmes, cultural references… Over here, when Ced is talking to his friends he’ll sometimes talk about, for instance, old French movies that I’ve never seen, and it goes like whoo [gestures above her head]. They’re all mimicking the accents, the phrases from the films, and I can’t join in, you know, because I haven’t seen these things.
The other thing I miss of Scotland is the live Scottish music in pubs on a Friday or Saturday night. There’s almost always a band playing. The atmosphere when you get a good live folk band is just brilliant. And it’s a general thing: there’s always some kind of live music going on somewhere. Whereas over here, that’s not really the tradition. You go to a bar, you’ll have a beer (and it’ll be good quality beer), but you don’t get the live music.
KB: There are some bars offering live music, but it’s more of an attraction. It’s not something that happens naturally.
ER: Yeah, and that’s the big difference. There are definitely things I miss, but despite all of that, I prefer my life over here. My husband is here, my friends and my neighbours are absolutely fantastic, and I love the sense of community here. I’ve actually been surprised that, despite me being a foreigner, I’ve managed to properly integrate into the community. To be accepted like that has been really special to me.
“It’s interesting, the kind of the journey that you make in order to get to where you are. It’s not always the one that you planned.”
KB: The interaction with guests staying in your bed and breakfast has probably helped with your integration in Belgium. What prompted your career change from being a project manager to having your own bed and breakfast and selling cakes?
ER: I was a very passionate cook from a very young age. My mum used to work abroad and was away during the week, and my dad couldn’t cook, so he encouraged me in the kitchen and we learned to cook together. When I was fourteen, I was on BBC Junior Master Chef, and cooking remained my passion during and after university. I would give massive dinner parties for all of my friends.
Many years later, a friend sent me the application to go on Master Chef for adults. I said I was not that good, but I still applied. In the end I came sixth out of 20,000 applications. But right before it aired, that’s when I had the accident, and therefore I wasn’t able to take up any of the opportunities that came along with it. I wasn’t able to do the interviews and the pop-ups to promote myself, which is what it’s made for.
These missed opportunities were hard to swallow, but that’s just the way life is. My plan was always to open my own café, and after the accident I decided to go for it. In the UK I could have started up a café straight away: you do a two-day health and safety course, and you can start up. But over here things are a bit more complicated, so I had to go back to school.
KB: What kind of course did you do? Was it patisserie, as a preparation for the cakes you make now?
ER: It was restauration, which is restaurant cooking. It wasn’t pâtisserie. I came to that decision because I had to make a choice between pâtisserie or restauration, and the chefs said to me, “Well, what do you want to do?”. And I told them, “Well, eventually I want to run my own café, which is like a tearoom over here.” And they answered, “Do you think you’d do chips? If you serve chips here in Belgium, you need to have a diplôme de restauration.” So then I learned that, if you go to restaurants and they don’t have chips or potatoes on their menu, it means that they don’t have a diplôme de restauration. But I wanted a proper coffee shop with lunch menus, so cakes, salads, quiches… And potatoes.
KB: How do you go from cooking to having a bed and breakfast and making cakes?
ER: When my husband and I got engaged, we started looking at houses to buy in Brussels with the idea that the coffee shop would be down the bottom and we’d live upstairs, but the prices were just crazy and the state that the houses were in wasn’t liveable. Because we wanted at least one child, we started thinking, “Is that the kind of life that we want?”. So I changed my idea and thought that maybe I could run a cooking school, allowing me to combine cooking with my teaching experience.
We then found the house that we live in now, but during the renovations I fell pregnant and we realised that it was impossible to start a cooking school with a small child. So we started up the bed and breakfast instead. And when my son Aaron was a little bit older and went to school, that’s when I started doing the cakes.
KB: Did you change your nationality right when you bought your house, or was there something else that made you decide to become Belgian?
ER: It all started with the Brexit. That was the reason that I had to apply to become Belgian, otherwise I wouldn’t have the same rights over my son as his father. Ced would be a Belgian with a Belgian son, whereas I would be a non-European living in Belgium, which meant that in order for me to leave the country to go to the UK with my son Aaron, I would need a permission letter from Ced. As much as I’m in a very safe and secure relationship and I love my husband, there’s something about that that’s just not right [laughs].
KB: It’s not just a matter of integrating into society, it’s to be able to do what everyone else can do without any further thought.
ER: Yeah, it’s about having equal rights. And that’s why I felt betrayed and abandoned by my country with the decision for Brexit. Because it’s bittersweet, and anybody you talk to who has gone through that same process will probably say the same. Yes, we made the choice to live in Belgium, but when we made that choice, we did not make the choice to no longer be British. And although at the moment we can have dual nationality, which I have, things change easily, and we don’t know how much longer that will be the case for.
KB: When did you become Belgian?
ER: When Aaron was born, which means that it’s four and a half years since I’ve become a Belgian national. There are certain conditions you have to fulfill: you do need to be here for five years before you can apply. I was lucky I had been here for five years when Brexit happened.
KB: Was there something about the process of integration that surprised you?
ER: I find it interesting that when you apply for Belgian citizenship, the police come to your house and they check that you live there. But they don’t just check that: they actually come in and they ask you questions. One of the questions I remember was, “Who are your friends?”. And I asked them, “What do you mean, who are my friends?”. And they said, “Yeah, where are they from?” And I just told them, “Oh, all my friends are Belgian. I have one Scottish friend. The rest are all Belgian or naturalised Belgian. And I speak French to them.” And they answered, “Oh…”. And I told them, “Yeah, I know. I’m quite particular” [laughs].
KB: I didn’t realise they would actually come to your house to check on you. It’s quite something to go to your door and asking you very personal questions.
ER: Yeah, that’s what they did. But what was also interesting is that at that time I was married: I had a Belgian husband, and a Belgian son. You would think that me being married and having a Belgian son would be the most important criterion, and what would give me access to becoming a Belgian citizen, but actually it wasn’t. What they considered most important was the fact that I went to a Belgian high school for one year when I was fourteen, and that I went back to school when I came here when I was thirty. That was what gave me the right to Belgian citizenship. Because by doing that, I had proven that I had integrated into Belgian society. And that’s what you have to prove in order to become a Belgian citizen, which meant that I didn’t need to do any of the exams, because I had a diploma that I’d done in French.
KB: So you didn’t need to do the exams, because you had already shown that you were a ‘model example’ of integration?
ER: Model example… I wouldn’t go that far [laughs]. But I would say that it’s shown that I tried to integrate as much as possible. And I ticked all the boxes: I had been here for five years, I had studied in Belgium, and I’d married a Belgian citizen.
“My first response to ‘Emma, are you alive?’ was, ‘I’m fucking over 2011’” [laughs]
KB: You already mentioned that you have been the victim of a horrible traffic accident when you were thirty years old. Can you describe its impact on the course of your life?
ER: It was the turning point for me. The accident happened in 2011, which was a really hard year for me. My gran passed away, I had a difficult breakup, problems at work and I also got mugged, like properly beaten up in the face. That year I literally felt like I was this punching bag, emotionally and physically going through all of these things. And then on the 27th I had had the worst Christmas ever with my mum, because it was the first one since my gran had passed away. Emotions were running high.
The moment the accident happened I remember my mum shouting at me, “Emma, are you alive? Talk to me. Are you alive?”. And my first response to “Emma, are you alive?” was, “I’m fucking over 2011” [laughs]. That’s all I could say.
But in some respects, I’m really pleased that the accident did happen in 2011 and not at the beginning of 2012, because I am Scottish and that’s when we celebrate Hogmanay, which is more important to us than even Christmas.
KB: What is Hogmanay exactly?
ER: It’s the Scottish version of New Year’s Eve. We have a big party where everybody comes out in the street and hugs everybody. You don’t know anybody, but nobody cares. Everybody hugs strangers, and we all wish everybody well for the new year. We have these traditions of going around to strangers’ houses with a lump of coal and whiskey, where we greet people and we go, “Lang mae yer lum reek.” It basically means ‘long may your chimney smoke’. It’s the idea that, as long as your chimney is smoking, it means that you’ve got money to put the coal onto the fire, which means that you’ve got wealth and you’ve got health, because if you’ve got heat in the house, you’re gonna be healthy. Hogmanay is extremely important in Scotland; it’s a new beginning for us.
So, I feel very pleased that the accident and everything else that happened stayed in 2011 and did not cross over into 2012. Because I was able to say, “Okay, the accident happened in 2011 and 2012 is not going to be the year that I have planned, but still, it’s not going to be a punching bag year like the previous one.” Mentally, I was able to compartmentalise those feelings. If the accident had happened to me in 2012, it would’ve been a lot more difficult to overcome.
KB: The accident, and every decision that you took afterwards, did also change the course of your life in a way that you could never have imagined.
ER: Yeah. It’s interesting, the kind of the journey that you make in order to get to where you are. It’s not always the one that you planned. And in all respects, I’m happy with the choices I made. There were some bumps along the way, but they were definitely the right choices I made for me.