Belgium's Tom Boonen won the Tour of Flanders for the third time yesterday, beating Filippo Pozzato and Alessandro Ballan in a three-way sprint.

Happily married to the same lady for 70 years, Lance Errington – it did not occur to us to call such an unpompous and witty man Lancelot – was a hugely effective civil servant who devoted his working life to welfare and his social life to keeping friendships in first-class repair.

Belgium hit a new milestone today — 450 days without a government — but still no one appears to be in any big hurry to resolve the situation.

Reading this epic dissection of 19th-century murder and the fascination it held for the Victorian public, you are reminded of the odd ways in which the names of perpetrators and victims continue to resonate. The expression "Sweet Fanny Adams" stems from a grisly case of 1867 when the dismembered body of nine-year-old Fanny Adams was found near Alton, Hampshire. Myles-na-Gopaleen, the pen-name used by Flann O'Brien, was a character in Dion Boucicault's drama The Colleen Bawn - derived from the real-life murder of 15-year-old Ellen Hanley, drowned in 1819. Thomas Hood's poem "Eugene Aram", repeatedly used for comic effect by PG Wodehouse – in Bertie Wooster's mangled recollection, it goes, "Tum-tum tum-tumpty mist (I think it's mist),/ And Eugene Aram walked between,/ With gyves upon his wrist" – concerned a Knaresborough man hanged for the murder of a shoemaker in 1749.

The Belgian Nick Nuyens stunned pre-race favourite Fabian Cancellara to prevail in a three-man sprint and win the Tour of Flanders yesterday.

What would be a humiliation for many turned into a party for Belgium today as the country's citizens marked 249 days without a government, a figure that they are treating as a world record in political waffling.

Every week we invite competing companies to give us their best deal for a specific holiday. Today: a luxurious pre-Christmas weekend break in Bruges, departing on Friday 17 December. Prices are per person, based on two people travelling together for two nights.

Wolves defender Jelle van Damme is returning to Belgium in a £2.5 million move to Standard Liege.

The wearing of poppies, like the preparations for Christmas, seems to start a few days earlier every year. The artificial red flower was already adorning many a BBC presenter's lapel on Saturday, more than three weeks before Remembrance Sunday on 14 November. By then, almost no public figure will want to be seen without one.

The Flemish separatist N-VA party claimed victory after yesterday's general election in Belgium, as projections showed them on course to gain the most seats in the lower house.

Belgians are going to the polls today in general elections that are widely seen as a vote on an orderly break-up of a country where 6.5 million Dutch and four million French-speakers are locked in a quarrelsome union.