This incident may be trivial, but it is one that most Flemings recognise only too well. It illustrates the difficult relationship between the north of the country and its capital. There is the language issue, of course, but there is more. Flemings do not feel very welcome in Brussels. Admittedly, they are also not very fond of the city, which they associate not just with arrogant waiters but with overcrowding, dirty streets, hectic traffic and crime. And, when it comes to politics – yes, that’s a mess, too, according to many Flemish.

Over the past decades, the Belgian state has been reformed a good few times. Brussels was never a priority in this process. In fact, its institutions were often constructed as a bit of an afterthought. The result? Brussels is one region with two communities (Dutch and French speaking) and a jumble of institutions. When you add the 19 municipalities, it becomes clear that getting things done in Brussels is even harder than in Flanders, with its multitude of medium-sized parties.

Pascal Smet (Sp.a), a Flemish politician in the capital, started off his Brussels career by denouncing the institutional chaos. Yet last week he fell victim to exactly that.

Smet, who is Brussels minister for mobility, hopes to introduce a public system of rental bikes called Villo! based on a model that is successful in Paris and Barcelona. But the commune mayors put their foot down. They have not been consulted, they say, and they fear the system will not bring in the taxes they had hoped. There is also an electoral element: why let Smet claim this success, so close to the regional elections?

In Flanders people roll their eyes at such a story. Typical Brussels, is what they think. Brussels politicians, including most Flemish ones, do not agree. Brussels politics is indeed hard to understand, they admit. But you do not have to understand how a clock works to realise that it does, argues vice-minister-president Guy Vanhengel (Open VLD).

In this case, though, there is no ticking to be heard and no Villo! bicycles to be seen on the streets. Pascal Smet is tearing his hair out. And so is his fellow socialist, Patrick Janssens, mayor of Antwerp, who gave his own sound bite on the Brussels clockwork mechanism. “How can Antwerp ever become Barcelona when Brussels refuses to be Madrid?”