Letter from Eupen: If you came across a group of speeding muscular bikers a few years back on the roads of Belgium you could have a fair idea of who they were, says the historian Paul Belien. "They could be either Hell's Angels or the king and his bodyguards."
As he moves towards his 72nd birthday Albert II is beginning to favour four wheels over two. But the elan of the monarch, which contrasts so strikingly with the quiet, obsessive piety of his brother, the late King Baudoin, whom he succeeded on the throne in 1993, still makes him a hit with many of his subjects. And nowhere more firmly than in this special corner of his realm.
"I'm a devoted, enthusiastic royalist," says Dorothée, a local woman with a small business. "He and Queen Paola have been here on official visits and for all I know he's been here on his bike, incognito. He's just great."
Some 68,000 people make up the constitutionally recognised German-speaking community of Belgium on a strip of land which abuts the country's frontier with Germany and Holland. They are splendidly free of the mutual recrimination and backbiting which have put their 10 million compatriots - Dutch-speaking Flemings, the French-speaking Walloons and the officially bilingual inhabitants of Brussels - at daggers drawn with each other for decades.
These tensions could, if pessimists are to be believed, still lead to the break-up of Belgium which the great powers of Europe, led by Britain, brought into being in 1830.
Speaking German and French, the people of Eupen seem to be free of the political correctness about language which decrees, for instance, that announcements on trains must be made in the language or languages of the area through which passengers are being carried. (The traveller on a train for the two-hour trip from Brussels to Eupen will successively hear the ticket collector make announcements in French and Dutch, in Dutch, in French and lastly in German.) Absent in this town is the Flemings' bitterness which comes of a century of Walloon cultural and economic dominance over and disdain for them, and the equally bitter Walloon distaste for those whom they consider jumped-up nouveaux-riches potato eaters from Flanders.
In 2006 the 68,000 German speakers have their own little council of 25 elected members and a three-person government who are lodged in a couple of fine houses in this town. They have their own budget and control such things as education, health, culture and broadcasting.
Round the corner a former convent has become the rathaus or town hall and there the mayor, Dr Elmar Keutgen, expresses satisfaction that his fellow German-speakers have, through the liberal farsightedness of the government in Brussels, avoided the mutual antipathy which plagues Flemings and Walloons.
This hilly town with its fine baroque church sits prettily along the River Vesdre, where the Ambassador hotel serves food of celestial excellence.
Beside the charity shops, the patisseries and the banks is the Bosnian club, where the small group of eastern European workers quietly gathers. The Jacques chocolate factory and museum now offers the employment which was once available from the now silent textile mills along the river bank.
The quiet and harmonious civic life of the sort enjoyed in Eupen would be a surprise in any part of Albert's bitterly divided kingdom: it is all the more of a surprise given the history of Eupen's German-speakers over the last nine decades. Eupen and the neighbouring territory of Malmédy became part of Belgium only after the first World War, having over the centuries successively belonged to Luxembourg, Brabant, Burgundy, Austria, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Prussia.
In 1919 the Belgians claimed it as a prize from the kaiser, who had violated Belgium's neutrality in 1914. Belgium went on with France to occupy parts of defeated Germany. But Hitler claimed Eupen and Malmédy back during the second World War. Thereafter the males went into the German forces - a few, it must be said, as volunteers. During the Battle of the Bulge of 1944, when Hitler launched his last great offensive against Allied forces in the Ardennes just to the south of Eupen, local commanders of each side were at times in a quandary about the loyalties of the locals.
"My four uncles were all killed in the German army in Russia. It was a great tragedy," says Sandra, the hotel receptionist. After the war, when Eupen returned to Belgium, a number of inhabitants had to wait years to recover their Belgian nationality.
There is no appreciable anti-Belgian or pro-German feeling among the townspeople. Quite the reverse. Manfred Dahmen, a cheery local marketing executive, underlined the sensitivity with which Belgium's central government has dealt with Eupen's affairs: "Brussels is near. Berlin is a long way away."
One elderly German-speaking lady confessed: "I'm Belgian and when I go abroad I never speak German, I speak French.
"People could take me for a German and that'd be unfortunate. You realise that, well, the Germans have a reputation for being a bit, you know, pushy."