Board games are awful

It is winter, it gets dark at 4 and I have spent all our money on jumpers and Picard Surgélés eclairs, so we have been playing a lot of board games recently. Yeah, like the nineteenth century or something, I know, it's almost unbearable, I might as well just send the children up a chimney and have done with it. So they tell me.

This has given me ample time to develop a grudge on every game we own, for a variety of reasons. Board games are awful*: most of them are just a fight in a box. In French, they are called "jeux de société", which suggests society is full of rampant individualism, untamed aggression, vicious reprisals and sulking, which is completely .. oh.

I give you here the fruits of my research, so that you do not need to suffer needlessly. Say no to board games people, make this madness stop. Read a book. Send your children to their bedrooms. Wash the kitchen floor. Do anything, but do not suggest brightly "shall we play a game?"

Dominoes

Are you ninety? Are we appearing in an episode of The Archers? Are we in a half-timbered country pub with a fat labrador dozing by the roaring fire? Are you of an age when being able to count to six is a cause for celebration? If the answer to all of these questions is no, none of us has any place playing dominoes. Step away from the spots, punk, no one gives a shit and winning doesn't even feel good since it's PURE DUMB LUCK.

Uno

For a game so apparently innocuous, Uno creates a fugue state of hysteria in my children far worse than any food colouring, Nintendo game, violent Japanese cartoon or Haribo. I think it's the colours and the potential for minor acts of cruelty to your nearest and dearest. Do I know if you can keep putting "plus 4 cards" down infinitely, eldest child? No, I do not, nor do I care.

I want no part of it. Fuck off, Uno and take your pointless, expensive derivatives and variants (Robot Uno, Uno Extream, iPad Uno, Uno themed cheese strings for all I know) with you.

Scrabble

A Scrabble board is no place for the bilingually semi-literate. I love my children dearly, but their vocabulary and spelling renders this farcical: I end up playing for all of us, and getting progressively angrier as their proudly placed 3 letter words close the board down catastrophically.

Lashes asked me to buy it and told me he "loved Scrabble". I can only assume this was one of our many linguistic misunderstandings. He must have said "I love taking off my dirty socks and throwing them into the corner of the room" or "I love fighting", or "I love being bought enormous boxes of Lego". At least no one ever asks to play Scrabble anymore after my last strop about the use of "Yo" as the starting word.

Memory

This is a source of great sadness to me. I used to love Memory. When I was a biddable, bookish, shadow of a child, much preoccupied with death and ponies, we had a tragic but much-loved French Memory game with pictures of several kinds of nougat de Montelimar, champagne corks, pieces of the Eiffel Tower and stinking wheels of Brie. It was like a great, seventies middle class game-gasm. Best of all: I usually won. Imagine, then, my bitter disappointment that (a) our Memory game features Diego, Dora the twatting Explorer's overachieving, sloth fondling cousin; and (b) that my children DESTROY me at it.

"I've seen that damn coatimundi!" I hiss, staring angrily at the grid of cards. Then I jab at one, hopefully. It is not a coatimundi. It is fucking Diego riding a fucking turtle. My children fall about laughing, not wholly unkindly.

"Mais non, maman" they say, with infinite condescension, patting my hand. Often Fingers is cackling with joy and rubbing his long, long digits together as he swiftly locates the two sloths AND the two Diegos riding turtles. I start every game in high spirits, confident of victory this time and end every game contemplating mortality, my inevitable decay, loss of critical faculties and undignified death, or at least where I can find a draught of hemlock. Which is nice. If I want a memento mori, I'll find a more aesthetically pleasing one, thanks, Diego. Lo siento, and all that.

Monopoly

I don't really need to go into it, do I? We all know about Monopoly and how it's an interminable, conflict generating, heap of old toss. It is the original "fight in a box". I don't know why they don't just put that on the side. "Monopoly: a rancorous fight guaranteed every time". How do you play, reader? Fight, or get bored and abandon? I favour the second option, but I am always outvoted.

Pictureka

I like you, Pictureka, but you try too hard. Four different "rounds" in a single game? Teams? Miming? Eh. I'm exhausted just thinking about you. Two specific pointers for you, Pictureka: First, how the fuck do you expect me to mime "singing nurse?" And second: a board game shouldn't involve physical exertion, so don't go asking me to "jump like a frog". JOG ON.

Cluedo

In our household, we all believe we like Cluedo, but I am here to tell you that we are labouring under a massive delusion. Here is why:

1. Modern Cluedo seems to be set in some kind of low rent Champneys crossed with an episode of the Young and the Reckless. "A soirée at a millionaire mogul's mansion", says the description. It is monstrously vulgar: hitting people with a dumbbell? A trophy? A SPA (I don't think you hit people with the spa, but you get my point)? What was wrong with the candlestick, for pity's sake? What of the noble lead piping? Why does Miss Scarlet look like Stephanie Beacham circa 1982? I feel like a high court judge when I look at the board, furious and confused.

2. Again, this is a game my children are shit at. The youngest often forgets to show us his cards when he's supposed to. The eldest likes to show us all how clever he is by expounding his deductive reasoning out loud. Both of them forget to write anything down. Nevertheless, Lashes is convinced from about five minutes in that he knows all details of the horrible crime and hastens to the swimming pool (I TOLD YOU, vulgar) where he is proved wrong, and retires to sulk. After that, the youngest and I continue in increasingly mutual confusion until one of us decides to give it a punt. We will also be wrong. Then the last person tries and is also wrong. At this point what usually happens is that we realise that one of the cards is missing, probably under the dog.

1000 Bornes

Does this piece of shit even exist in English? God knows, I hope not for your sakes. It is, I am assured, a French classic, though it used to just be a card game and they have only recently introduced the board version for extra "fun". You are a small plastic car. You must travel 1000 kilometres before the other cars, by playing cards with varying kilometre values, that you pick up from a central pack, while the other players try to stop you by giving you cards with flat tyres, red lights and empty fuel reservoirs.

Ok, my main problem with this game is that you need a green light card to get started. I never, EVER get a green light card. The whole shagging game is usually over before I get a green light card. On the odd occasion that I do manage to limp a few hundred kilometres, one of my children blasts me with a red light and I get stuck again for the remainder of the game. Do I sulk? Yes, yes I do. I am thirty seven years old and I want to win 1000 Bornes for once in my life. Is that too much to ask? (Yes)

Bazaar Bizarre

This is like a visual acuity and deductive reasoning test and unsurprisingly, I fail every single time. There are 5 wooden figures: a red chair, a green bottle, a grey mouse, a blue book and a white ghost. There is a pack of cards. On each card there is some combination of some of the figures, but the colours are mixed up. Or they might not be. You have to find EITHER: the thing that is missing, OR the thing that is accurately represented on the card. Confused? Yes, that is normal, you are supposed to be if you aged over 10. I have stopped even trying to play: it is hopeless, I am far too slow to ever win a round, and the risk of injury from my children's fingerclaws is too high.

I think I nurture a particular prejudice against this, because it is one of those really wholesome Germanic board games that cost a million Euros and which your children tire of within 30 seconds because they are both boring and complex. Though at least this one comes with extra violence, I suppose.

Which board games do you play, gentle readers? Do you hate them all? Am I missing some gem which will reconcile us all?

(*Any suggestions that I am prejudiced against board games because my redundancy leaving present after 11 years service was a board game called 'Anti-Monopoly' are frivolous and unfounded.)

Why French Masterchef is better than English Masterchef

It is the season of sackcloth, ashes and tax returns, I have sworn off booze, chocolate, Jaeger sale breton jumpers, St Aulaye lemon loaf cakes and anything that smacks of fun. All that remains is watching the endless hours of blanket coverage of the French presidential election campaign until François Hollande's neck wattle haunts my dreams, shifting and dancing like Salome's veils. For light relief, I sometimes look at the back of cupboards and try and locate bank statements from 2008.

I have, however, also watched a couple of episodes of the new series of British Masterchef (as well as a few of "The Professionals" in the autumn) and I am sorry, but it is a load of old rognons. Greg Wallace with his ventouse-baby head, demented enthusiasm and lubricious facial expressions, that man Torode with the made up accent who is composed from humanoid silicone and manufactured irritation = horrid. Michel Roux, cadaverously displeased, is the only one I have any respect for and he just looks resigned and intermittently embarassed. There is no point in being needlessly emphatic, Michel, I can see defeat in your empty, empty eyes.

No: what you need is FRENCH Masterchef and I will tell you why.

1. They cook better. They just do, I am sorry. This has the potential to be boring, I grant you, what with no one going to pieces over a slimy, curdled puddle of espuma, but actually it just means you end up watching in forensic detail and getting shocked to the point of hyperventilating if someone presents the judges with a slightly undercooked quail, or an underseasoned jus. They are more attractive too, I think, but that is my fatal weakness for French men speaking.

2. It is more "rigoureux" (rigorous, thorough, exacting). Great attention is paid to things like: naming 400 varieties of cheese and locating the various cuts of hoof. Identifying four species of near-extinct root vegetable. Filleting sea creatures that look like they are laughing at you. Trussing things up in the right type of string with the right type of masonic knots. On one of my favourite episodes of the most recent season, live angry crayfishes pursued the candidates across their worktops, nipping them cruelly. The judges are obsessed with cleanliness of work stations and are constantly chastising candidates for failing to scrub them down properly. You are not here to emote about your "journey", is the subtext. You are here to use a fucking j-cloth, repeatedly, and with vigour. It looks NOTHING like anything that would ever happen in your own kitchen, and as such, it is far more fascinating.

3. The judges are filled with righteous anger that is wonderful to behold. The judges number two chefs and a critic. First, there is small, Southern fury, Yves Camdeborde:

(he NEVER makes this kind of face during the programme, however fucking great your brandade de morue is). Yves Camdeborde refuses Michelin stars and spits in the face of a cluttered worktop. He looks like he is probably very handy with his fists. He could fillet Greg Wallis and his vegetable fondling fingers. With his TEETH.

Then there's proud, perpetually disappointed culinary monolith Frédéric Anton, hewn from some kind of adamantine, Alsatien rock:

I love Frédéric Anton. His angry disappointment at a poorly executed sauce béarnaise is Shakespearean in its intensity. Very movingly, there are a couple of points each season where Frédéric Anton puts on his special "meilleur ouvrier de France" chef's whites and sash and medal and prepares something complex and classic for the candidates to copy, the tip of his toque trembling with pride as he spatchcocks a thrush with a gigantic sparkling knife.

The third judge, Sébastien Demorand, is a food critic. He is the kindest, but also very, very cutting.


And sometimes he wears a cravat. Really, what more could you want?

Together, they are like three culinary furies, swirling in a black cloud of disapproval around the kitchen. How DARE you overcook this beef says Yves Camdeborde, puffing himself up like a courting pigeon. You are disrespecting the cow, mother France, and me. Frédéric Anton stares bleakly at a poorly filleted sole as if it represents a personal assault. On his MOTHER. He simmers with incandescent anger like Brando in On the Waterfront. Demorand doesn't need to talk. Or taste. He pushes his plate away with heavy disdain.

Of course, this makes the few occasions when something satisfies them all the more magical. There is nothing as touching as watching Frédéric Anton's granite features soften with real pleasure at a well glazed confit. I can see how you would do anything to see that smile again.

4. Which is a good thing, because the tests major on gladiatorial cruelty, such as cooking on the flat black roof of a New York skyscraper in 40°C heat, or having to wade through the rising - and, indeed, notoriously dangerous - tide at the Mont St Michel, holding cloched plates. Brilliant. Finger tips are severed with abandon and viewed only as distasteful foreign bodies sullying the produce. On the British version last night, a man cried about his black forest gâteau failing to set, and another had a panic attack when faced with a cod. MAN UP, Britain.

5. Just as a bonus, there is always one week - one only, as a concession to, I dunno, the twenty first century, perhaps - where the candidates are required to get to grips with "foreign" food. Thrill, as the poor soul who has drawn the courte paille of British cuisine is reduced to preparing a lamb chop and some peas in a "reduction" of tarragon.

"But" says Demorand, appalled, poking a pea. "You could have done something really playful and refined with le fish and chip!"

You need to see it, really you do. I know you probably can't, but you must: you will never look at a crayfish in the same way again. I am willing to do the subtitling, BBC. Call me.

Now with 100% the same old toss

You will note that nothing has remotely changed here: not the layout, not the content. It's almost as if - can it be? - I have done ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL in the three months I have been absent. Well. I have and I haven't. I have done nothing productive or quality enhancing, this is correct, but I have done lots of agonising, it has been tremendously fun*. (*guess what, it hasn't).

First I was genuinely quite busy, then I was blocked and uninspired, and during the whole time I was thinking circular thoughts about whether there was any point in the blog, whether personal blogging was in fact, dead, whether I hadn't said everything I could interestingly say and that kind of thing. I also developed some kind of low-level internet phobia: the exposure! The permanence! The potential for people to tell you what a twat you are! How had I even survived this far?

The other side of the argument that trotted around my head was that in any event, all the hideously embarassing things I had put here over the last three years were still floating around the internet in perpetuity making me unemployable, so I might as well keep going, since god knows what else I could do. "There are pictures of the inside of your nostrils on the internet" M reminded me at one point, shortly before uploading a picture of a buttock encompassing hole in my tights to Facegoop (we have revived that too! Our cranky, furious, lipstick fondling corner of the internet is BACK). The other - and more persuasive - argument was that I missed you and your funny, dark, kind, erm, weirdness and I missed writing poorly punctuated, possibly litigious, self-indulgent posts about whatever the fuck I like.

(I do not expect you to give a flying fuck about this, it is merely by way of explanation of the prolonged absence and lack of shiny, dancing, blog makeover action).

Anyway. Here I am, back, with only my poor personal grooming, irascible parenting and still-stupid pets to offer you, same as usual. I have half a mind to also do some comparative reviewing of British and French TV, but it will probably come to naught.

Highlights of the last 3 months:

1. We went skiing. The children mocked my slowness, my trousers kept popping open since I am far fatter than the last time I skied, I was subjected to constant electric shocks (I still can't touch a door knob without pulling my sleeve over my hand for protection) and on the last day, we got snowed into a ski resort full of Dutch giants. The prospect of cannibalism preoccupied us greatly. We lurked around the breakfast buffet, casting anxious glances at our dairy-loving overlords.

"They're going to eat us, aren't they?"

"Wellll. It looks bad. But don't you think there's a good argument to be made that we're a bit .. scrawny? I mean, you'd have to eat three of us to make up one of them"

"They're way stronger than us though. They'll just overpower us and gnaw our limbs off".

"But we could eat for a week on one of their forearms!"

"Why did I ever agree to this?"

There were no normal television channels in our chalet, so I now know a great deal about several esoteric documentary topics including: social engineering in post-Katrina New Orleans, the death of Pierre Beregovoy and capucin monkeys. Go on, ask me a question. (Don't).

2. It was my 37th birthday. The children made me a CAKE, which was a thrilling first and Prog Rock bought me a challenging Estonian CD and I bought myself some new boots, and we went to Rabbit Island for the now traditional birthday chips and salted caramel sundae (not at the same time) and met Gertrude, the duck with learning difficulties who is in love with the Rabbit Island boatman.

Dear lord, but 37 is making me twitchy. I have a new, gnawing consciousness of how incredibly unimpressive my achievements are. 'What the fuck have you been doing for the last few years?' I ask myself, unhelpfully, late at night, like a tactless but well-meaning relative at a funeral. I don't know. Treading water? Floundering? On Friday night I saw some ex-colleagues and had to explain what I was doing at the moment: what came out of my mouth just sounded ... lame. "I've written some .. bits and pieces. No, nothing you would have noticed".

This has, at least, resulted in some interesting conversations about failure. M doesn't believe in failure, I discovered. "It is not failure you fear" she told me "It is the judgment of others".

"Well, yes, I suppose you are right. But why is that any better?"

"You try something. It does not work. So you try again. Or you try something else". She was a bit like Yoda. Yoda with giant spiders in her hair (have you seen M's new blog, Fat Ponies?)

I am working on this (and have started working on a new writing project, leaving my shitty novel to rot in a drawer until I can face it again), but it does not come naturally. Why be optimistic when you can enjoy a full three months of sterile self-flagellating? I have been working with this gentleman again recently and he had all manner of problems and knock-backs and disappointments before finally getting five star reviews in the broadsheets, so I have been trying to take inspiration from that. Having some core of self-belief seems to be important. I am trying to locate one.

Sorry, this is preoccupying me, but it is fantastically boring and I really need to shut up about my luxury problems. No one gives a shit, just send me down a Nigerian sawmill already. Next!

3. The alarming discovery that neither of my children could remember the word "thirteen". Their foreignness continues unchecked.

"I want you to be able to speak to me properly, dammit!" I flounce at them.

"Ca va maman, on va mettre Kid Detectives, ne t'inquiète pas" they reassure me, unreassuringly. Kid Detectives is on one of those cheap Freeview digital channels made out of Dairylea triangles and string. It is an Australian import where minor "crimes" are investigated by a crack team of child forensic technicians and deductions of guilt are made on the kind of shonky premise that even West Midlands Serious Crime Squad might baulk at.

"Sherina has soil on her shoe ... so SHE must be the one who dug up Mrs Smith's flowerbeds!"

The whole thing is unutterably sordid, but at least contains dialogue. Usually when the children appease me by watching English TV, I find they are watching a cartoon about a lizard that is entirely silent. Also, I quite like Lashes's comments (in French, you can't have everything), which are usually along the lines of "if this was a real crime that would be blood/brains/blood again".

4. Christmas in 140 characters: 2 vegetarians, 1 extra dog, 80000 cups of tea, a red plastic puzzle cube triumph, 2 sister credit card débâcles, gin, gin, rillettes, gin.

5. And now, here we are in January. My teeth are falling out and I smell of Old El Paso Fajita sauce. All my clothes have been eaten by the mothbastards, and I have put my unkempt nails through several relatively nice pairs of tights. It has not stopped raining for approximately three weeks, Satan the rabbit has dug up and eaten all my bulbs, and stands at the back window pawing furiously for more nourishment, the dog has descended to a new plane of psychological disturbance and developed an obsession with slippers, which he collects furtively from the basket in the hall and then hides under his scrawny body. The children treat me with a sort of amused condescension most of the time and have homework I no longer understand. I spent yesterday writing about inflated pig bladders. ALL IS WELL, my friends, and I will try and write here from time to time.

How are you?

Erm

See, in my head, I had already told you I needed to have a short sabbatical because I was in a froth with work. And because I had told you in my head, I forgot to actually tell you, on my weblog. I do this kind of thing all the time: my head is a vivid mass of conversations that I am planning to have, or think I have already had. It causes me all sorts of problems in my personal life, as you can well imagine.

So: let me attempt to rectify this, here if nowhere else. I am very busy with stuff that mysteriously does not appear to be making the slightest impact on my bank account. This may or may not be responsible for the downgrading of Belgium's sovereign debt status (though do note, that we are now a mere speculoos's breadth away from having an actual, living breathing government! It only took the total collapse of the Eurozone, well played Belgium). So. I am taking a short leave of absence from the internet (well, this part. Not the part with youtube videos of porcupines eating sweetcorn), until after Christmas. I sort of have in mind to come back with a slightly rejuvenated format, but I expect technology will get the better of me, and it'll just be more of the same ill-tempered whining, animals and occasional outbursts of boring clothes lust. I do miss it, though, so I will definitely be back. It's lonely up there the attic with only the harsh call of the local seagulls, and the odd porcupine video, for company.

In the meantime, I have uploaded some new stuff to my Scribd page, including recent Red and Metropolitan features, and a couple of pieces I have read (yes, 'read'. Or possibly 'muttered'. Definitely not 'performed') at Tall Tales (last week's A Child's Christmas in Belgium and the older Kiss and Ride and Keywords). There should be other, odd bits and pieces over the next month or so and then hopefully I will be back, returned to my usual state of semi-unemployment and desperate for the sweet balm of the internet. I mean, we're all going to be bartering freeze dried rats and rudimentary weapons made from toenail clippings soon, so there's not much point in me trying to earn any money, is there?

On that cheery note, here's what you can all buy me for Christmas.

Handbag decontamination

I have done my annual handbag clear out. It wasn't anything like as disgusting as it usually is, just medium shameful. If it wasn't for the squashed cake, it would have been fine. Visual evidence:

Acorn

Cinema tickets (Le Monstre de Paris, whimsical animation with Vanessa Paradis and a giant mutant flea, quite tolerable)

Pile of old tissues

Purse with only English money and cards in

About 11 centimes

Orthodonist/usurer's appointment card

British Gas pen despite not being a British Gas customer since 2005

Bratano stickers to be lost and never redeemed

Squashed chocolate "cup cake" (misnomer) - 4 for €1,30 which was an unmissable bargain even though they were a bit dry

School menu for November (highlights: seitan balls and the horrific DRIED FRUIT DAY, November 24th)

Tangerine, approximately three weeks old

Pointless empty plastic ball

Fifty euro gift card from Diane Von Furstenberg, for whom hope plainly springs eternal, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that I never buy her wares since cleverly taking up this new career that pays me approximately -€123 a month after tax and professional charges.

Several leaflets for stables

Lanolips lip ointment in Rhubarb, like a figleaf of normality

Found these in a side pocket: Lego mummy and tuft of some kind of animal fur. Oh, and I've just found some Nurofen 400 in the useless purse of English money, so that's a bonus.

On top of this catalogue of crapness, I went to a meeting today, having carefully got dressed in nearly clean clothes and worn foundation and everything, only to get home and realise my "hair" was full of toothpaste. Properly, an alarmingly large quantity. I can't even work back to any kind of understanding how on earth it happened, I'm just fixated on spending the morning talking to the exquisitely dressed manager of an exquisite modernist hotel, with a head full of Sensodyne. I am 37 in three weeks time, I earn less money than when I graduated and my future employers paid me to go and listen to tort lectures 3 times a week AND I have toothpaste in my hair. Which is not even my hair. What is the moral here, hmm? No, don't even tell me.

"Uccle Verité" shots of the week:

1. Hallowin

We tried to go trick or treating, with limited success (Belgian tv halloween coverage was limited to "how many chrystanthemums have florists sold this year for placing at cemeteries"). The boys wore fitted cot sheets, like so, in yet another triumph of parental can'tbearsedery:

In my defence, I should say that neither of them wanted to dress up at all, but I said that if they wanted to extort confectionery door to door, they had to make some degree of effort, and this was our compromise. In my FURTHER defence, I should say we hosted a Hallow-win party last weekend at which I did all sorts of try-hard stuff, like apple bobbing and pacman ghost shaped biscuits and crap carving of squashes and wrapping small children in budget loo roll. Anyway. I think we can conclude that another year has passed without Belgium quite getting the hang of Hallow-win. There were many non-carved pumpkins simply placed in front of shop doors again, like so (these still make me laugh).

2. Sad Stuff on the Street candidate

I'm trying to find a narrative that fits, but I just can't. "That looks like one of your shoes, Maman!" said Fingers. I sent him up the chimney shortly afterwards.

3. Autumnal supermarket display

I love my eldest child's expression of hooded distress and bewilderment here faced with Angry Stuffed Fox. He hasn't spent enough time at his grandfather's Yorkshire hangout, which is full of crap stuffed creatures of many varieties.

What's the nastiest thing currently in your handbag? Alternatively make me feel better and tell me about a time when you unwittingly looked a complete arse.

Muttering, fire

I have become less tolerant of the tram recently, partly because I use it less, tending to lurk at home in the manner of some kind of pale, furtive trogolodyte, partly because I get more furiously intolerant by the week and partly because sweet baby jesus, they really are so SHIT.

To be scrupulously fair, only half my local trams are shit. The other half are like shiny, silver visitors from the future with a semi-reliable timetable and only a light, mysterious scattering of sunflower seed shells on the floor every time I get on one. But the shit ones, my god, they are sent to smite us, like wheeled scorpions. Lurching, rickety yellow wagons of death, they appear randomly every half hour or so with cavalier disregard for the "timetable". I hate how they're always packed. I hate how they smell. I hate the way, when the traffic is heavy, the drivers delight in accelerating, then braking really heavily, causing my peri-arthritic ankles to buckle, throwing me onto the nearest tramp or supercilious teenage girl. I have become a tram mutterer, fulminating into my sleeve about Youth of Today and the like.

Today, in a beautifully farcical turn of Brussels events, my tram caught fire. It was one of the old, crap ones, decorated in green with the logo of the tram museum to make it look even crapper and older. I had to wait about a half an hour for it to finally show up, packed to the gills with demob happy teenagers celebrating the start of half term. Which was all bad enough, but then the bloody thing caught fire. FIRE, I tell you. I confess I didn't notice, I was too busy glaring at the teenagers like the bitter, furious pensioner I have become. Nor did anyone else, until the back half of it filled up with acrid black smoke.

The teenagers tried to tell the driver.

"Euh, monsieur, monsieur?"

He didn't even look round.

"Monsieur? Le tram? Ca fume".

Stony, eyes forward. A nattily executed sadistic accelerate/brake combo.

"Serieusement, monsieur, il y a de la fumée, là"

Nothing.

Eventually, the doors decided to open by themselves (they had been doing this on and off for ten minutes, which perhaps should have alerted me to the imminent peril) and we all escaped, then stood on the pavement admiring the giant billowing clouds of acrid tram smoke: a combination of rubber, greasy tram seat fabric coated with tramp effluvia, smouldering abandoned Quick frites boxes, and the sloughed off skin of the be-mulleted man who wears the John Galliano vest top in all weathers. The driver stayed, squatting in his cab like a furious, uniformed toad, refusing to react. He's probably still there now, lightly smoked.

To add insult to (near) injury, Place Stéphanie, in the throbbing (or possibly decelerating) heart of Brussels's "uptown" (hahaha) now has a LUSH.

It is right next to Annick Goutal, purveyor of beautiful, subtle scents. If I were Annick Goutal, I would totally sue.

My loathing of Lush is a matter of public record, at least on Facegoop, where despite the blog having been dormant for the best part of a year, fanatical hippies still come and tell us we are mean and unfair and ignorant witches for dissing their favourite purveyor of olfactory WMDs.

I am unrepentant. Indeed, I understand there is an ancient Chinese curse that translates as "May you live next door to Lush for all eternity".

I think what I need is this axe-wielding bird, found via Mimi Smartypants, to sit on my shoulder. He has given me much joy today.

I am going off to mutter in a corner now.