The cartoon trail leads to Brussels

You can lead a child to art but you'll have a terrible time trying to make him go inside. Not all the blandishments of a modern art gallery - shops, café and interactive displays that mean you don't even have to look at the damn pictures - will work if you have a pair of philistines like mine. Certainly not when you're in Brussels, which as far as those two are concerned is all about chocolate shops. So while my wife popped into the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts for Bosch and Brueghel, I frogmarched our barbarians back to the hotel past that obnoxious little Manneken Pis.

We were just turning into Rue de l'Etuve when I spotted something odd on the exposed gable end of a house. It was two men and a dog coming down a fire escape. "That's Tintin! " said John. And, indeed, it was. A life-sized Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy, all making their way down a two-dimensional fire escape that had been painted on to the side of the house.

Turning into Rue du Marché au Charbon, we saw another one. Not Tintin this time but a Richard Hannay-type character guarding a heroine in hat and gloves, painted on to the gable end of a bar. Strangely, the street behind our moustachioed cartoon hero in the mural was the exact same street that we were looking down now - but as it might have appeared 100 years ago. We were in effect looking at the same view twice, once in reality and once in a cartoon.

Across the road there was another huge mural. Down the side of a café someone had painted an aerial view of the road we were standing in with a cheerful character I recognised as "Broussaille", crossing it in the company of his girlfriend. In the background of the mural we could see the very building we were looking at now. It, too, had a mural painted on the wall above the cafe. For a moment I almost expected to see us standing in the cartoon staring up at the cartoon.

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