The water at Portus Ganda before eight is the colour of old pewter. Not grey — pewter, with something greenish underneath, like the light is coming from below rather than above. The tour boats were still docked and dark. I sat on the stone embankment with my sleeves down, which felt wrong — too composed for water that old — and waited.

A cormorant worked the same stretch of current three times. The same line, the same dive, the same pause on resurface. I watched all three. The fourth time it didn't come back up where I expected and I missed it.

That was most of the morning.

The Graslei facades read differently from the water than from the quay. From the quay you see the composition. From the water you see the weight — how much stone, how long it's been holding. The Leie was moving but not urgently. The wind came off it in gusts that did something to the fabric at my ankles I couldn't correct, which felt appropriate for a street that has looked exactly like this for six hundred years.

Sint-Veerleplein in the afternoon. I put a layer on at the old fish market and immediately felt like I was dressed for a trial I hadn't been told about, which seemed right for that square. Something happened there. Many things. The square holds it without explaining.

I didn't go in anywhere with a queue. I had a coffee standing at a bar near the Vrijdagmarkt — no modification, wrong order of milk, correct temperature — and watched two pigeons disagree about jurisdiction.

By four the light had changed its angle without changing its quality. Flat all day, then suddenly raking across the guild facades and catching the joins in the stone. Still no shadows exactly. Just depth, arriving late.

I went back to the confluence before dinner. The cormorant was gone. The water was the same.