Chelsea yesterday insisted that their fans will "restore some English pride" at next week's European Cup-Winners' Cup quarter-final first leg against Club Bruges in Belgium. The match - an 18,000 sell-out - is the first overseas excursion by English supporters since last week's events in Dublin.

Local power has made some countries more affluent, writes Leonard Doyle

The 11th Bruges Antiques Fair begins next weekend, and visitors to the Belgian city can qualify for half-price air travel. If you book a two-night package, price pounds 86, you are entitled to a 50 per cent cut in economy or business-class fares on Sabena to Brussels.

Bill Bryden's The Big Picnic is a moving experience in more ways than one. A technically audacious First World War spectacular, it's performed in the vast abandoned engine shed of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan, Glasgow. Here, in the apposite atmosphere of a bleak industrial machine, the audience literally follows the young Pals Brigade of Govan volunteers to Flanders and through the inhumanities of trench warfare to their massacre in 1917. You go on the journey either as a promenader or as a sedentary passenger on the mobile seating that slides back and forth down the 250ft nave of scaffolding within which the designer, William Dudley, has recreated the muddy, smoky wasteland of the Front.

BELGIUM will erupt in a co- ordinated celebration of '50 years of peace' this weekend as lesser British royals, veterans and the Belgians themselves re-live the arrival of Allied troops in 1944.

Dennis Flanders, artist: born London 2 July 1915; ARWS 1970, RWS 1976; RBA 1970; married 1952 Dalma Darnley (one son, one daughter); died London 13 August 1994.

AROUND 550 BC, in a philosophical treatise known as the Bhavisya-Purana, an anonymous Indian sage gave the first known description of a game called Chaturanga (later known as chess) and explained that it was a reflection of the battles men fought in the real world. Five centuries later, Omar Khayyam compared our life to a game of chess. Life as a game that must be puzzled out; life as a combat whose outcome depends on deliberate moves: these are the convictions chess shares with that other game, the detective story. There, too, a pair of opponents - the criminal, the detective - plot against each other according to the laws of logic.

THE KING of the Belgians has offended half his kingdom by singing too loudly. On 11 July Flanders, which since constitutional reforms last year enjoys partial autonomy in Belgium, celebrates Flemish cultural day with speeches, songs and revelry. The Flemish flag, a lion on a yellow background, flies above Flemish town halls; schools are on holiday; entire villages take the day off.

YOUR leading article 'Small country, not many celebrities' (26 June) omits to mention one of Belgium's most important sons, Adolphe Sax, the 19th- century instrument maker after whom the saxophone was named. No Sax, no Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, et al.

WHY DO we not like Belgium? Frequently over the past week it has seemed that the principal objection in Britain to the appointment of Jean-Luc Dehaene as president of the European Commission has been not his politics, nor even his wide girth, but, for some reason, his very Belgian-ness.

Belgians are happy for an excuse to party. Yesterday, on the only sunny day of the year, about 800 party-lovers in this small town squeezed into a tent, bent on enjoying the traditional rites of summer, sing-along music, beer and the chance to win on the tombola. But it was not fun for fun's sake. Unusually in a country with little appetite for politics, this was a party for Europe.

A search was launched for a 50-year-old man believed to have fallen overboard from the the P & O vessel the Pride of Flanders crossing from Zeebrugge to Felixstowe. The alarm was raised after one car on the ship remained unclaimed.

THE ROYAL Academy of Music was, in a manner of speaking, Schnittke'd this week when the star of its 1994 composer-in-residence festival cried off. He was unwell; and after weeks of preparation it must have been a terrible disappointment to the organisers. But the Schnittke Week went on regardless, and did very well, effectively presented by student performers and providing audiences with a portrait of Schnittke's life and works that was at least as valuable as past professional retrospectives.

Donald Ibrahim Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30 September 1923; married 1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison Smith; died London 23 March 1994.