Belgian Waffle

Always eat pudding

2012-02-10T23:23:00.013+01:00

I have gone off on a tangent in the thing I am attempting to write, and that tangent has, for once, not involved staring into space and googling 'tarsiers', but has taken me to go and look up the psychiatrist I saw for a year when I was twenty one. It's ok, it's not supposed to be that kind of thing I'm writing: god, that would be amazingly boring and awful. Mainly it's about cake, honest.

Being twenty one, self-absorbed and miserable, I don't think I really gave him much thought at the time: Once a fortnight I took the train from Waterloo East out to grimy Hayes in Kent, and wrangled with him about whether porridge with water, a pitta bread and steamed vegetables was enough food, or whether I was chewing too much chewing gum for its laxative properties. Then I would go back to my rather solitary existence between the chilly beauty of the Radcliffe Camera library and my neat college room and read novels and scrutinise my hips, or go driving around the unlovely Oxford ring road, distant and distracted, in my tiny car. I would write a minutely accurate, neat diary of everything I ate for him, and bring it in the next time, proud not to have "cracked" and binged; proud of the meagre, controlled, ricecakes and apples existence documented in my green squared notebook. I had kept to the rules; I liked rules.

But he was there, and he was a safety valve of sorts, and the thought of him kept me going for the remainder of those fortnights. More than that, I liked him: he was tough enough, but he was also kind, and pragmatic, and he had a dry, understated sense of humour. I got the impression he was never terribly worried about me; that he thought this - the bulimia, my very shut-down, tidy unhappiness - was just a hiccup, it was all going to be fine. Maybe that was part of the way he operated, part of the therapeutic process: from my perspective it was both helpful and hopeful. Soon, his demeanour seemed to say, your life will crack open in unimaginable, thrilling ways, you'll escape this shell of caution and there will be other, infinitely more important things in your life than the shape of your thighs.

In reality, it took me a very long time to shake most of those habits I was stubbornly encoding in my mental hard drive. I have now, I think, 16 years later, but for years I could still find a rather sterile sort of comfort in cutting down on food, drinking too much coffee, feeling the hard reassurance of the prominent bones of my sternum. It did get better, yes. Life happened, and things changed and my priorities shifted. Even so, I still had occasional relapses as recently as 2008 and it's only in these last, what? Three years? (such a short time!) That I have felt largely free of food anxiety, neurosis, oddness. Even now, I'm not completely complacent: I got fat (or rather, fat for me) this summer, from being anxious and sedentary and drinking too much, and it ate away at me. I felt lost, worthless, not myself. Eating disorders are opportunistic: when you're low, they can creep back. They're hard to shake completely.

Anyway, the point is, the seeds of shaking mine lie with Gerald Russell, and I was thinking about him, and I looked him up. He's retired now, as you'd expect, at 84. I knew already that he was rather venerable, and responsible for the clinical definition and first description of bulimia, but I knew nothing more, so I had a poke around the dusty corners of the internet. I came across this rather extraordinary interview with him, which I think gives a small sense of the fantastically humane and lively person I met back then. He was born in Belgium, which rather delighted me, for obvious reasons. He fled to France in 1940 with his family and was evacuated via Dunkirk ("a horrible experience"). He describes a vicious air raid before they left, and uses the rather memorable, and very particular, phrase "it was the first time I personally stepped on a body".

(I also rather like the deadpan description of why he ended up specialising in eating disorders:

"When I moved back to the Maudsley, all the dyslexics seemed to be living north of the river in London and they wouldn't cross the river. Whereas the anorexic patients did cross the river".)

Anyway. He seems to be a rather extraordinary man and I am exceptionally grateful to have stumbled into his consulting room: I would have crossed a lot of rivers to see him. You would have thought he might have better things to do than treat yet another tightly wound middle class perfectionist, but he gave no hint of it. I remember almost nothing we talked about, but I remember he was practical and funny. He didn't seem much to care about my childhood or my inner torment: he was very much about fixing, and that seemed like oxygen in my suffocatingly careful existence. I only remember one specific piece of advice, or instruction he ever gave me, and it was this:

"I think you should always eat pudding. I always eat pudding".

There was some rationale to it, I recall: it was punctuation: a full stop at the end of a meal, to tell your brain that you had finished. But mainly I liked the glorious, happy simplicity of it. Always eat pudding.

So I do. Because I still like rules, maybe more than I should. But now I also like puddings.

Trop choux

2012-02-09T00:03:00.008+01:00

I owe you a fuller explanation of the religieuse making. This post and the process of making religieuses have something in common, which is that they are both outlandishly long, and by the end, you will be wondering why you bothered. This post will not be surprisingly tasty for breakfast, however. Let us plough on, regardless.

Are you ready to make religieuses, people? That rather depends how you feel about weighing water. How do you feel about the weighing of water? I was a water-weighing sceptic, but that was before we got to the weighing of egg yolks. Anyway. If Pierre says we weigh water, we weigh water. He knows.

So.

Choux pastry ingredients: 280g of water. 1/2 tbsp of caster sugar. A pinch of salt. 130g of softened butter. 160g flour (I love how he doesn't give a shit what kind of flour you use. He's terse. 'Flour. From a shop'.) 5 eggs. An egg for .. what do you call that? When you brush the top of something with an egg wash? Doesn't much matter, I totally forgot about it.

Here's the water and the butter and the sugar and the salt. It was all going ok at this stage.

You heat it to boiling point, then you put the flour in. Then you're supposed to "dry the dough" with a spatula, to "roast the dough". No, me neither. How would that work exactly? I moved it around a bit.

Then you put it in your mixer at the slowest possible speed to cool it down.

Once it's cool you shove 5 eggs in one by one until your dough is "smooth and supple". This is slightly tense because of eggs being unpredictable little shits. It went fine though. I was feeling superhuman at this point.

Obviously, I do not have a "poche à douille unie" (piping bag with, uh, a plain tip. Like a normal circle one, I suppose). I have a freezer bag. An honest, sturdy freezer bag.

Slightly too sturdy. This was the first bad moment, when I had to shout Lashes for some scissors, because someone had taken the kitchen scissors and in their place were some kind of round tipped infant scissors that could not cut the bag.

"Hein?"

"SCISSORS! You must have some in your school bag?"

"Hein?"

"SCISS. ORS"

"....."

"OH FINE, NEVER MIND".

I tore the corner off somehow with a blunt knife and the infant scissors. Then I was supposed to put 6 centimetre blobs and 3 centimetre blobs on a baking tray. Oh yes, this is the bit I forgot. "Dorer le dessus des choux avec l'oeuf battu". I didn't bother with that. It didn't seem to matter unduly. I put them in at 190°C NON FAN ASSISTED. This seemed to be important. Are you bored yet?

(yes, I made some eclair shapes too. The less said about those the better)

Around now the children materialised in the kitchen.

"What are you doing?"

"Making religieuses".

"Why?"

"I have, quite literally, no idea any more. It seemed like a good idea".

"Can we have some breakfast?"

"Must you? Can't you just forage for twigs or something?"

By the time I had ungraciously fed my children, the choux buns were all risen and puffy and gratifying. This was the best bit of the whole process.

I stroked them lovingly.

After that there was a lengthy break for cooling, as instructed by Pierre. He probably goes off to compose a symphony or make love to a dozen beautiful women. We went to the park where the children frightened me by walking on the pond, like the "before" shot in a doom-laden seventies safety information video.

"But, mum, it's only 5 centimetres deep. And it's frozen solid".

"It doesn't matter! Terrible things might happen! I HAVE SEEN THE FILM ABOUT THE BUILDING SITE".

It was a relief to get home until I remembered I had to tackle the incredibly terse instructions on the religieuse filling.

Filling ingredients: 140g cream, 1 Nespresso "Dulsao do Brasil" coffee capsule (it's a Nespresso tie in book, the one I got the recipe from. "83 astonishing ways with a used Nespresso capsule", if you will), 35g of egg yolk, 25g caster sugar, 1 sheet of gelatine, 90g of cream beaten 3/4.

First, I was supposed to open a Nespresso capsule and put the granule bits with some cream. Obviously I did not do that, (a) because it sounds weird, and (b) because the children would not eat coffee eclairs, which would potentially leave me with twelve to eat. Feasible but unwise.

I did not understand the next instruction. "Make a custard with the cream and the coffee", it said. "Réaliser une crème anglaise". There was no further or clarificatory instruction for that bit, but then it said "Add the beaten egg yolks, and the sugar". Add them to what? Also, 35g of egg yolk is a puzzling instruction, but someone helpful on Twitter indicated that an egg yolk is approximately 17g, so I used three. Yes, I know that doesn't actually make 35g. Or anywhere near. And that 2 would have been more accurate. I don't really know what to say, I was working on the "more is more" principle, I suppose.

It was getting a bit desperate at this point. I consulted Trish, who gave me wise advice I was slightly too late to use but would totally follow if I ever did this again (ha), so I ploughed on.

Using my excellent knowledge of basic culinary techniques, hem hem, I tried to make a normal custard by, like, heating the cream I had not added the coffee granules to, then adding the egg yolk and sugar mixture. I used more sugar than Pierre. It was a mistake.

"Chauffer à 84°C" said the instructions. Without a thermometer or indeed any information or experience at my disposal, I decided 84°C was probably somewhere just around unbearable to touch, so I kept putting my finger in to test the temperature. Extremely accurate. It did not curdle anyway, and I did as instructed and sieved it into a cold bowl. It was far, far too sweet, but at least looked a bit like custard.

"Blend with the gelatine leaf, that you have previously softened by soaking in water".

Now. The obvious problem here would have been forgetting to soak the gelatine. But I totally ACED that, despite the instruction appearing far, far down the page in an act of culinary trickery. I added the gelatine and blended, not wholly assisted by a series of ill-timed phone calls and interventions from the children inconsiderately demanding food, again.

There are no photos of the following phases because I was getting cross by this point.

I put the bowl in the fridge to set. I whipped my cream"3/4". I was ready.

I allowed several hours to elapse, as instructed. Boring, twitchy hours during which I cut all the choux buns in half, and still had time to watch several episodes of Inazuma Eleven. There is no excuse for this.

Finally, I went to poke my custard. It was almost entirely liquid.

I waited another hour. It was still largely liquid. I decided to whip the cream I was supposed to whip "3/4" all the way to the full 4/4 whipped. Then I took my eye off it momentarily to resolve an argument about the full moon and it turned into cheese. I started again. During all this time the custard remained stubbornly liquid.

I made some royal icing. It was no time for fancy. In a fit of defiance, I tried to make a small subset of the icing coffee flavoured by putting a teaspoon of coffee granules into the already mixed up icing sugar and water. It did not go well.

I gave up and mixed the second lot of 4/4 whipped cream with the runny custard and shoved it in the choux buns. With a spoon. I only did 6 in total because I was heartily sick of the whole process by then, and I was not sure whether the extremely volatile cream/custard mixture would stay in them.

Then I put some royal icing to sandwich them together, and an inelegant blob of icing on the top. I added hundreds and thousands, to distract the eye, and attract the magpie attention of the children.

In fairness both to M. Marcolini and to me, the children really enjoyed them, which was a good thing since I was far too broken to make any kind of decent dinner. But then they enjoy paprika crisps and Knacki hot dogs, so I wouldn't call them high priests of culinary discernment.

Finally, when I had chased the children up to bed with sticks and fallen over the dog and had a small gin, I cleaned up the kitchen and found, stuck to the bottom of the my bowl of water where I had been soaking the gelatine, approximately 9/10s of the gelatine sheet. Which explained a lot.

So there you have it: Pierre Marcolini's Religieuses aux Café sans café. Lacking some .. gelatinousness. Even so, and astonishing to me, I could probably be convinced to make them again.

Food, giant insects and despair

2012-02-07T20:39:00.003+01:00

This is a poor excuse for a post, apologies, and I will go through the Religieuse Challenge in more detail when I have located my will to live, but just as an initial comment: choux pastry? Ridiculously, gratifyingly easy. The rest? Not so much.

Fuckyeahreligieuses

(Sort of)

(Depends who's asking)

(No one tell Pierre, right?)

(The children liked them anyway)

I think the global sum of mental health in the world has been depleted by this exercise and would have been better served by me deciding to spend Sunday under a blanket with a nice book, but there we have it. Also, when I came into the kitchen on Monday morning, I realised two cupboards had somehow been broken during the religieuse-arama. I think I was in some kind of higher, shamanic pastry-based state because I have no idea how it happened. Maybe the children did it when I was begging specialist advice on the terse Marcolini instructions? Or possibly I just leant especially heavily on the hob in my custard thickening despair. That could definitely have happened, there were several periods of custard related despair. Doesn't explain what happened simultaneously to the shelf in the shower though. Maybe my heavy, heavy head came to rest there for a moment.

In other household disintegration news, I have spent the last three days in pitched battle with the fire, like a particularly ill-trained and feckless parlourmaid. The fire has decided it does not "do" flames anymore. No, the fire - which is one of those ones with a glass door, I do not know what they are called in English, a poêle, here - is quite content to swallow any quantity of kindling, firelighters, wood, coal or strange briquette things, and transform them all into an Anthony Gormley style box of dense smoke. When I open the door, there is definite evidence of smouldering, and eventually whatever fuel or live sacrifice I have despairingly thrown into its depths gets transformed into a pointless mound of pale ash, but there is no discernible heat, and no flames. The only time in the last ten days when I have raised a hint of flame from its inky depths was when I entirely forgot about it for a few hours on Sunday due to excess shouting and pâtisserie. This feat has not been repeated. I find the whole thing particularly galling, because I was raised setting fires in icy, damp Yorkshire grates with little more than some Seabrook crisps, one hopeful shard of kindling and a sodden Yorkshire Post to aid me. This thing is supposed to be modern and labour saving, but in fact it is just mocking me.

In fairness to the religieuses, the empty choux that I couldn't be bothered to fill came in handy for nibbling when I realised this afternoon I hadn't eaten for 24 hours. I have been worrying disproportionately and appetite-destroyingly about a relatively minor work crisis. The crisis has resolved itself without death or litigation, but I feel a bit bruised. I can't remember if I was always this bad at dealing with mild disagreement, or if I've got even softer and more pathetic with all the time I spend in the attic by myself watching Youtube videos of small primates. Either way, my friends were lovely and supportive and generally amazing with my pathetic whinging, so thank you my friends.

In particular Madevi and I calmed our various neuroses by listing foods we would eat on our planned Facegoop trip to Paris at Easter. I say 'Facegoop', though in fact there is no beauty planned, just eating and possibly chasing a fat pony round the Tuileries to rub our faces on it. I realised this week that most of our conversations revolve around food (after some discussion, we concluded that if we subscribed to Klout, which neither of us understand, we would be authorities in the following categories: "food, giant insects and despair"). The food listing was a very calming exercise, I recommend it, if you are greedy and Tuesday is kicking you in the face.

Our combined Paris eating list:

Du Pain et des Idées croissants with beurre aux cristaux de sel

Lebanese galette "oozing with cheese and fresh mint"

"A really good saucisson with some very good cheap red wine"

The famous cappucino eclair from Cacao et Chocolat - except OH GOD IT HAS GONE BROKE WHAT NOW? I will substitute with the Ladurée St Honoré aux framboises, but M will disagree.

"A good roast chicken, with potatoes roasted in the chicken fat".

Sadaharu Aoki .. anything, really. Petits fours. A Bamboo. Whatever. Three of everything will do nicely.

Tomato salad with a chèvre frais and a baguette.

Frisée and lardons

Everything from Pierre Hermé's Infiniment Vanille range.

Panini from a place M knows near St Eustache, dusted with parmesan and drizzled with good oil.

A really caramelised, chewy palmier biscuit

The mythical Délice Café that I ate nearly every day when I lived in Paris, even though I tried it when I last went back and it is Not All That.

What would you eat today and where, if you could?

An inordinate fondness for bathmats

2012-02-03T22:34:00.011+01:00

I have been away for the night, reviewing a hotel (bloggist's note: I know this sounds incredibly fortunate, and it is, but let me just say that I have been doing this particular job for four months and this is the first time I have actually managed to persuade a hotel to let me stay there in order to review them. Allow "asking for things" to be added to the list of things I am bad at. Admittedly I also got free some beef cheeks last week but I neither wanted, nor asked for them).

It was wonderful, but of course now I am staring angrily around me and wondering where my aperitif and fluffy bathrobe are, whereas in fact I am surrounded with the following: 8 assorted novelty slippers, an empty Actimel carton, a mysterious wizened half lemon on the coffee table, 4 glasses, several miles of cabling and a copy of 'Le Big Livre de l'Incroyable' (which I despise and the children love, as it is basically a 21st century freakshow: spider babies, 5 legged calves, and pictures of people lifting aeroplanes with their earlobes). Hidden just out of view, I feel confident in predicting, are at least 7 socks of assorted vintage.

It was ridiculously beautiful. A baby chateau in the middle of nowhere in the Ardennes, an aesthetically pleasing dusting of sparkly snow, huge fires, and a deserted, elegant spa where I splashed like a toddler, and floated, silently on my back, watching the snow gather and drift on the glass roof. Ridiculous. So much so that I took 41 fuzzy iphone photographs of the bath and another 23 of the view (endless miles of Ardenne forest, frosty pale red sun), then four of the floor and one of large onion in my excitement. Shortly after that, I got accidentally drunk on two glasses of wine and the strangeness of eating alone in an entirely deserted restaurant and spent the remainder of the evening nearly blinding myself on the artful arrangements of twigs when I tried to look out of the window (I NEED TO LOOK AT THE BEEYOOTIFUL VIEW! Oh! It's dark! Ouch, twig! Rinse and repeat).

(My actual view from my actual bedroom. Twigs not included)

Also, compulsively moving the bathmats here and there. I only know I did this because I kept finding them this morning. Bathmat on the windowsill. Bathmat under my pillow. Bathmat on the desk. So many bathmats. I didn't know I felt so strongly about bathmats.

(Bathmats)

Mmmm, I miss the bathmats now I am home, where no one has offered me pink prosecco, or lovingly placed a small card with weather forecast on my bedside table, and where there is unaccountably no roll top bath with a view of snow dusted pines.

All is not lost, however: I do have a view of snow. Depending on the window, I can choose from: snow dusted Ikea bargain corner garden chair with a bin bag as a makeshift rabbit feeding shelter and a kilner jar of abandoned worms courtesy of eldest child, or snow dusted old kitchen sink, with three pots of dead hyacinths. Both of these views are intermittently accessorised with snow dusted furious gigantic rabbit. Snow makes everything pretty, even Satan. I also have a reserve of Peanut Butter Chunky Kit Kats that I suppose I could slice and place on my own pillow. I am only limited by my own imagination, really, and by not possessing an exquisite château in the Ardennes and a private income.

Also, I have the most barbaric hangover for a person who drank two glasses of wine. Two! It's like a medieval punishment for having a nice time. This hangover was calibrated by John Knox and refined on a lengthy journey on a rail replacement bus with several of the smelliest men in the Ardennes and a furious two year old. It peaked after my return home during a dual bill of Inazuma Eleven, topped off with "New Zealand World Records" featuring some Kiwis trying to shove 16 people into a Smart car, accessorised with some light DS related thumping from my beloved offspring. It is now gently declining, since I have sent everyone to bed in disgrace, including myself.

As a result of the foregoing, I have nothing else to offer tonight. However! This weekend I want, and intend, to challenge Pierre Marcolini's assertion that "the best patisserie is the patisserie you make at home" by attempting to make something out of his new book. I think we will all enjoy that, except, possibly, Pierre Marcolini, but we can just agree not to tell him, right?

Should I make:

A soufflé ("you will succeed every time with this soufflé" says Marcolini, a shade over-optimistically, I fear);

A flan ("revisited for the greater happiness of flan lovers"); or

A religieuse (this recipe includes the casual instruction: "réaliser une crème anglaise" as if this were a thing I did daily. I have a carton of crème anglaise. Will this do?)

Answers on a postcard.

(Belgians, rich ones with Commission salaries and an advantageous tax status, the hotel was this one. I would weep with joy if someone took me there, really.)

Good/bad

2012-02-01T19:36:00.010+01:00

Goodness, all the old gang are back blogging: Antonia, Mrs T, and, I have only just realised, the Bendicks Bittermint brilliant Non-Working Monkey. There is nothing more pleasurable than realising someone whose blog you love has been industriously churning out posts for the last few weeks with their small, simian paws and you have a delicious backlog to read. The NWM and I met once in Paris early last year and it was very very funny. The memory of that makes me quite angry that we don't live on the same continent. Anyway, she is back. Vive the internet circa three years ago.

I liked the Non-Working Monkey's television reviews particularly (re. Julianna Margolies in The Good Wife: "She has won over 142 Emmys for her performance which remains exactly the same from episode to episode") and her list of things she is good and bad at. I would like to read other people's, I think. What are you good and bad at? Mine, after some thought, goes:

BAD AT:

1. Arguing

Poor grasp of logic, take things too personally, uncomfortable with all forms of conflict, even purely theoretical ones undertaken for "fun". It is not "fun" for me to have to argue about anything, even about which is better, a KitKat or a Twix (I DON'T KNOW. Whichever you prefer). It distresses me. Imagine for a second what a great lawyer I was.

2. Maths

Astonishingly bad. Get nine year old's homework wrong bad. This wouldn't be quite so shameful if my father didn't have a motherfucking theorem/equation/thingy named after him. I tried to go and look at it experimentally, but it fried my brain. God, he knows proper stuff, that is useful to the universe. I have slightly depressed myself.

3. Parking without panicking and crying and breaking wing mirrors.

4. Driving without panicking and crying and breaking wing mirrors.

5. Painting my nails.

6. Games. All of them. Ones with balls especially.

7. Complaining. See: arguing.

8. Thinking up meals. Ugh. Let's have fishfingers again.

9. Going to the Post Office even though it is actually fine and there is almost never a queue.

10. Accepting criticism.

11. Talking to strangers.

12. Using the telephone.

GOOD AT:

1. Reading aloud to children

2. Spelling

3. Touch typing

4. Compiling Christmas stockings

5. Meeting deadlines. I put this down to all those years of being shouted at by boggle eyed bankers to produce 9000 pages of pharmaceutical industry due diligence on time.

6. Writing work emails that sound considered, and thoughtful, when in fact they are written in 5 seconds while watching You Tube videos of sloths.

7. Maintaining steely indifference in the face of spiders/mice/rats/ferrets/snakes/earwigs/wormy things/pretty much anything living.

8. Maintaining a strong stomach in the face of dog or child effluvia of all kinds.

9. French.

10. Remembering shop or restaurant names and addresses.

11. Remembering the ridiculous ephemera the children are supposed to take to school on particular days. I am basically extremely cowed by all forms of authority and thrive on mindless deference to rules. This is not a good thing in the wider sense, but the remembering is, I suppose.

12. Drawing Pokémons to order. Want a Jigglypuff? Form an orderly queue.

What are you good and bad at? Please add yours in the comments.

Devil

2012-01-31T23:11:00.010+01:00

I have had an odd day. All that wotthehell defiance of yesterday evaporated and was replaced by one of those heavy stones in the pit of the stomach, you know the kind, the ones that are made of a thick matted pelt of ferret hair and melted down lead piping, stolen from an outdated Cluedo set. That was somewhat improved by having a conversation with M, where we both started out really quite serious and gloomy and hand-wringing, and ended up pretending to be dogs.

"HELLO! YOU LOOK NICE, HUMAN! I LOVE YOU! DON'T GO! I'LL JUST SIT HERE AND WAIT FOR YOU!"

"I'LL JUST SIT HERE AND LICK MY BALLS WHILE I WAIT, OK?"

"BALL! SAUSAGE! BALL! MY OWN TAIL! SAUSAGE!"

"WOW, THAT PEE SMELLS DELICIOUS ON YOU!"

I was sort of half-laughing, half-crying, snotty and hysterical by the end, as I often am with M. This is why we are friends, I suppose.

Then I went to a presentation about a diet meal delivery service, and after that I went straight on to a presentation by Pierre Marcolini where I ate three puddings. Which was nice and not remotely contradictory. He was absolutely charming, and the chocolate sorbet was like shooting cocoa straight into your eyeballs. In a good way, in that it did not cloud my vision or involve needles. Ok, FINE, I mean it tasted nice.

Finally, on my way home, after this unprecedented day of leaving the house and speaking to people I am not even related to, a group of approximately six unconnected passengers on my tram started CHATTING, as if no one had ever explained the basic rules of public transport behaviour to them. They were discussing the new, zealous breed of ticket inspectors, who, from what I heard, are creatures of stark ferocity. One of the women involved in this outrageous cross-tram discussion actually worked at the STIB and she said they were allowed to fine you €100 even if you were in possession of a valid monthly or yearly 'Carte Mobib' (our folklorique version of the Oyster card) but had not touched it to the reader. You know, like in most other countries. But we have been used to never having our tickets scrutinised here in Belgium and most of us just assumed public transport was free. Combined with a message from Beatrice on Sunday who had to text me in shock to tell me her ticket had just been examined, I feel it is incumbent on me to present you with this awful warning (well, the four of you who actually live in Belgium): we are now to look forward to more frequent inspections. You might want to consider buying a ticket and so on. I believe you can buy them at, erm, stations? And possibly in machines. I will investigate and report back, if I am not incarcerated by the forces of transport law.

That is possibly the most boring thing I have ever written on my weblog and god knows, there is some very significant competition. Apologies.

Then I got home and dragged the dog out in his pissy, ridiculous whippet coat to throw the ball in the park strewn with frozen dog turds in the -9°C dusk, until I could no longer feel my hands. The children were already cheerfully in their pyjamas at 4pm with the babysitter, as is their wont, currently. They get home, put their pyjamas on, make themselves a selection of snacks and sit under a duvet on the sofa, refusing to do anything. Genetics is a wonderful thing.

Dutch words I have learned courtesy of my children this week:

Sheep

Hamster

Godfather

Goldfish

Parrot

Tortoise

Grandchildren

Canary

The phrase "Concentrate, this is my father". (?)

I am building up to an excellent vocabulary, slowly but surely. I can sing a song about sandals, tell someone I live in Mons and boast a very sizeable menagerie, all of which will surely come in handy at some point. This current conflation of family and animals pleases me greatly in a Gerald Durrell kind of way.

Also, as a sort of thrilling homework bonus, Lashes went on a "history walk" round the neighbourhood today and has been reporting back. Notably, he told me a fascinating, if garbled, tale about a bar just round the corner being five hundred years old and the King of Spain calling the owner a devil. He also mentioned Victor Hugo, who I am quite confident he has never heard of in his short life. I have untangled the story slightly. It is this place and apparently the owner was very rude to Charles V, caretaker manager of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburg jaw. It is comforting to know that Brussels service has not changed greatly in 500 years, and that being King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor does not make a shred of difference, so I might as well renounce my claim to the throne. There appears to be some other story about a group of travelling players all getting massacred* there whilst performing a play (the Spijtigen Duivel - something devil - of the bar name) parodying the Duke of Alba. Do not mess with the Duke of Alba, I suppose, is the moral of the story. The bar was also, apparently, frequented by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire and it has taken my nine year old, who probably thinks all these people are characters in Galaktik Football, to tell me about it. Shame on me. I will go soon and find out more.

Wigs on the Green did finally make me laugh last night, in a scene where reprobate youth, Jasper, goes to Peersmont, the "special sort of bin for lunatic peers .. built on the exact plans of the House of Lords, so that the boys should feel at home" to try and extort money from his incarcerated grandfather. He meets the "curator", a jolly young man, who explains that his grandfather is:

"deputising for our Lord Chancellor, Lord Rousham, who is on the sick list again - no, nothing at all serious I am glad to say. He has just nipped up to the top of a big elm tree and is building himself a nest there".

Where would you build a nest? Mine would be very, very far from the Duke of Alba.

(*Did this thought cross my mind during the English-language-performed-by-French-speakers Oliver Twist I saw recently? I suppose that is possible)

Life Skillz

2012-01-30T16:39:00.007+01:00

As a struggling freelancer writer, one of my new skills is dealing with constant rejection. I say "skill". I haven't really mastered it yet, but this kind of thing used to knock me for a week, now I just feel slightly sick for half an hour, so I am claiming it as another shitty personal growth opportunity (who coined that phrase? I love them). You too can battle your tiny sense of self-worth and triumph! These are my current top coping strategies:

1. Delete any rejection email so quickly it as is if IT NEVER HAPPENED. Then empty your deleted items folder. Then your sent items. If necessary, forget your password. Or emigrate. Whatever it takes, really. What email? If you can't show me it, it never happened. Nope. Not me.

2. Elaborate a pleasant deferred gratification fantasy scenario for yourself, ie. "When my book is fabulously successful, and I am the acknowledged wunder-non-kind of Anglophone Belgian literature, you will be BEGGING me to write for you". (Do not, whatever you do at this point, go and look at your book manuscript as this may catapult you into terminal decline. Just let yourself think you have a gem hiding in your documents folder. Don't have a book in your documents folder? Doesn't matter! If anything, that's better, because the fantasy of its planet-dominating success will be easier to maintain).

3. Pretend to yourself you sent the pitch in error. 'Oh god. Did I send that? Did I? SHIT. Thank god that person didn't say yes, that would have been awful'.

4. The way of M: "There is no such thing as failure. You try something. It does not work. So you try again, or you try something else". I find this mantra works best recited with a Chunky Peanut Butter KitKat clenched between your teeth, and a YouTube video of a sloth on screen. Messy, but restorative.

5. Remind yourself of your blessings: 'I have a wonderful family, two beautiful and kind, if somewhat scornful, children, a scavenged rabbit the size of Geoff Capes:

an incredibly stupid dog:

several of my own teeth, my health, some nice Frédéric Malle body cream and a collection of really great shoes from when I used to earn decent money. I am doing great. Why do I need external validation?*'.

(*The answer to this is mainly: money. But also: craven need for approval.)

6. I can often distract myself for up to quarter of an hour by looking over here, at my weblog, and trying to think of ways to 'monetise' the fucker. This has always been a catastrophic failure in the past, but hope springs eternal.

7. Remember that rejection is very good for the soul. With each rejection, my soul looks less like a blackened, blighted raisin, and more like, erm, a UNICORN. Possibly. If I put it in caps it become true, apparently.

8. Think of another publication which you haven't humiliated yourself by approaching yet, and TRY AGAIN.

9. Laser eyes.

How do you deal with rejection? Any hints?

I want to live in a nice magazine

2012-01-28T23:42:00.006+01:00

I like nice things to look at on a Saturday. I miss the proper, British Saturday papers, back in the day when I could read them without my simple pleasure being faintly but consistently undermined by career envy. Here in Belgium, I read 'Victoire', the lifestyle and fashion magazine which comes with Le Soir. It is a pleasing, if utterly eccentric read. Last week was pubic hair themed. This week it is all about Japanese sexuality (and an unrelated bonus feature discussing the etymology of euphemisms for blow job). I wish I could write for Victoire, but quite apart from being ten years too old and not having a waxed moustache and a fixed gear bike, I don't think I am comfortable enough with FILTH.

I could, of course, go to Waterstones or similar and buy the proper British Saturday papers, but that feels a bit shameful, somehow. Like 'I embrace your culture wholeheartedly, Belgium, oh yes, just as soon as I have picked up this Guardian, four Crème Eggs, some overpriced paperback middlebrow fiction and 90 Yorkshire Teabags'. Oh, hang on, that is exactly like me, as you were.

Anyway. This is my lifestyle edit (ahahahhahahahhahaahaha "lifestyle edit". Going up: bruxism (so chic!), accountant's bills, frowning and extra chins. Going down: cerebral capacity, time management, personal grooming) for the weekend, since I do not have a magazine to do it for me and I am too lazy to go to Waterstones, and even if I did, I would end up lusting after things that are not even in the right country for me.

Shops:

I have just discovered My Table in Rue de l'Aqueduc, a sort of kitchen and fripperies shop. It ticks several of my pervy, lizard brain shop boxes. Esoteric cake decorations: yes. Good, large tea cups: yes. Bizarre household items that look like animals: yes. Same sex Barbie and Ken couples in catering sized boxes of Quality Street: yes.

Pleasing. Also: lovely man running it.

It is opposite Moss & Bross in front of which I often linger, admiring the gorgeous array of Porselli ballet flats. Yes, yes, ballet pumps, so fucking boring but these ones are so pretty and so soft. I think I love the violet best, but the real delight is seeing them all together - racing green and hot pink and sunflower yellow and silver and leopard. It reminds me of the agony of buying Converse for the first time, some time in the mid '80s. How can you choose just ONE colour?

I actually went in there today, which was probably a mistake because the lady made me stroke some kind of ultra luxe goat tummy stole of catastrophic softness, in actual goat hair colour with the prettiest deep green border. It was entirely without function, cost something hilarious like €390 and the moths would have devoured it in less time than it takes to say "filing for personal bankruptcy". Nevertheless, I aspire to a life with cashmere stoles and jewel coloured ballet slippers of many colours and NO MOTHS. Also, she had a good line in telling me how very rarely they get the good colours of Porselli in, and how if I see a colour I love, I should snatch it up. And that they wear them at Le Scala, vous savez. I am the ideal candidate for this kind of flannel.

Beauty:

I finally bought myself the Heeley Menthe Fraîche scent I have lusted after since the summer, with my leftover Senteurs d'Ailleurs birthday voucher. I love Senteurs d'Ailleurs but Senteurs d'Ailleurs does not love me back: I am always stared at with undisguised suspicion, as if I might start stuffing testers down my pants.

This is my new scent, which as I explained recently on Facegoop, is supposed to make me smell like "Patrick Bateman in Psycho" or, possibly worse, "young, sexy fashion models". Hmmm.

I aspire mainly for it to take off the edge of fox shit and rancid towel that is my natural perfume. I am sitting on the sofa next to the dog, and he absolutely reeks. Also, he is sleeping with his eyes in Full Zombie:

.. which is convivial.

I am also wearing Essie Clambake on my nails, but I cannot show you, because even with 2 coats you can still see the frankly revolting state of my claws beneath. However it is a nice hot coral, and takes me at least three days to bugger up. Approved.

Gluttony:

Christine Ferber rhubarb and mint jam and a quart Poîlane for breakfast.

Ah, Christine Ferber. Why are you so delicious and so expensive when your raw materials must cost pennies? Perhaps it is because handling hot sugar is dangerous? Is that it? Do you have to pay your staff - presumably all apple cheeked grandmothers of great kindness - danger money? Are there jam maimings? I do not even care. You taste good. Send the rosy cheeked old ladies back down the jam mines to boil MORE RHUBARB.

Services

The Most Talkative Cobbler in Europe, who I love to distraction even though he is foully disapproving of my shoe-knackering ways, has found a way to fix my dog eaten Anya Hindmarch shoes. Look!

That heel was the same crackle effect silver leather as the rest of the shoe until El Stupido decided to chew them to a slobbery mess of €300 leather. This was a mistake he did not make twice, happily (that sounds like I beat him senseless, or dominated him in a Cesar Milan mind melding fashion. In reality I do not even have any memory of when this happened - it was several years ago - or how he went off shoe chewing, btu I am certain it was nothing to do with my powers of persuasion. His brain probably just short-circuited). Anyway, "we" (he) has constructed me a contrasting heel, and now I can wear the least comfortable shoes I own again. Welcome back to the fold, Tory shoes! You fit so perfectly with my lifestyle, with your 5 inch spike heel and your disco colouring! This is what my fleece/tracksuit botttoms/grey jumper with holes in combo has been missing.

(My cobbler: Rue de Livourne 27. Quite slow. Hates cruelty to shoes. Talkative. Genius.)

Books

This week I have read:

An appallingly written, dreary book about the 17ème arrondissement that I found on the shelf, for 'research'. It has a couple of ace pictures of Communards with cool facial hair standing nonchalantly around Batignolles considering what to shoot to fuck next, but apart from that, no redeeming features whatsoever. Called something inspiring like "L'histoire du 17ème Arrondissement". I told you.

Wigs on the Green - I thought I would love this, Nancy Mitford's light, frothy fascist satire (oh yes) re-released a couple of years ago, but it is failing to engage me. It feels a bit Wodehouse by numbers but without the simmering menace of Roderick Spode. Perhaps it will perk up.

Also, in retro-reading corner (tonight we're going to read like it's mid 2010), I have just finished both The Hare With Amber Eyes (oh, so beautiful, so vivid, so luxuriously indulgent, but wonderfully so. In places, it quite undid me. Seems unfair that De Waal can be brilliant at writing books AND making pots) and Freedom (I was expecting it to be Hard Work. It was not remotely Hard Work, though I skipped several pages of environmental longeurs in the middle).

Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet - What should I try to make out of this, my Christmas present? I have limited attention span and skill and require a very favourable effort/reward ratio, but also, I am wary of baking something that only I actually like, because then I will get monstrously fat again, and I am only just starting to slough off the monstrous skiing fatness. Maybe bread. I have an excellent track record with bread. Do you remember my last attempt?

Yes, of COURSE it was supposed to look like a medieval gargoyle. Tsk.

Oh, also highly recommended in my imaginary magazine are my friend's beautiful baby quilts which you can buy here.

And if you want a bit of fiery online op-ed with your Saturday trivia, can I recommend you go and read Peter's post-slash-rant, here on lame ass commercialisation of online food writing.

Travel section? Here's M's very very funny guide to surviving Cambodian spiders. "Don't come crying to me when one of your eyeballs hatches spider babies".

God, it is exhausting half-heartedly pretending to write a lifestyle supplement. I am going to go and load the disher (red hot for Feb) and grind my teeth a little (so chic!) with my fox-scented companion and try and forget that my eldest son told me at length tonight how Richard Hammond is his favourite person in the world, and that my younger son has developed some interesting form of toe leprosy.

Board games are awful

2012-01-27T16:45:00.004+01:00

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

2012-01-25T16:07:00.013+01:00

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

2012-01-25T10:15:00.007+01:00

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

2011-11-30T21:37:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-03T16:13:00.005+01:00

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

2011-10-28T18:29:00.002+02:00

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.

European Affairs

2011-10-27T10:02:00.010+02:00

As the elected heads of Europe were corralled in some unpleasant Brussels conference room with, as Mrs Trefusis calls it, "Trusthouse Forte décor and individually wrapped speculoos" to prop up the Eurozone with a packet of Mikados and several cubic metres of emissions tested hot air, I am posting something Relevant and Timely.

Because yesterday, so that you don't have to, Beatrice and I went to the shiny new European Parliament visitors' centre. It is called the "Parlamentarium", presumably reasoning that some kind of pseudo-Latin name was the best way to avoid tetchy, language-based unpleasantness. Good luck and godspeed, Parlamentarium, you big old pile of money rendered into touch-screens on qualified majority voting!

The Parlamentarium is made of glass, flags, pulped Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee position papers and the iced, sculpted, tears of interns*. You enter through a door made from Jerzy Buzek's old ties* and smiling, be-scarved, moonie apparatchiks greet you, multilingually. Then you have to go through the security barriers that are, reassuringly, staffed by the same grumpy, disapproving bastards you find at the entrance to any European Union institution.

Beatrice asked for the Latvian version of the interactive, iphone based multimedia guide. One of the many hundreds of smiling, be-scarved moonie apparatchiks handed her a guide. She frowned at it.

"This is Lithuanian".

"Oh!" said the scarf lady taking it back with a cheery laugh and arsing around with some buttons until another flag appeared on the screen. "Yes! I always get those confused".

Undaunted by this slur to Latvian, we continued, first examining a (frankly rather dull) scale model of the Strasbourg parliament, then sinking deeper into the bowels of the glamorously named "Willy Brandt building", past many, many, many screens. I tried to listen to the audio commentary, but I couldn't get my CTU Jack Bauer earpiece to stay in my ear. I mean, I really couldn't, it was technically, biologically, physically impossible. Are my ears in breach of the Directive on External Auditory Biological Equipment Proportions (EC/2011/159)? Will enforcement proceedings be launched against my ears? Would I find out at some point in the Parlementarium?? In the first instance, I had to resort to just sort of lamely holding it against the side of my head when I could be bothered. Images appeared on our touchscreens as we walked along, as if by magic. Slightly boring magic.

On the mezzanine, we were able to see some pictures of the Second World War, and some pages from the actual, original EU treaty. Or maybe not. It might have been the the Potsdam Agreement. I was a bit distracted by the fact that all the text on walls and freestanding panels was sort of blurred, with all the different language versions of the signage displayed in a sort of overlapping, confusing, liable-to-induce-epileptic activity fashion. You can see it here, on the heading to the website. Also, if you touched your exciting multimedia toy to the key icon next to exhibits, it told you stuff, in a language of its choosing which might or might not be the one you had selected. Or it might be Lithuanian. They are easily confused. There was other stuff, but we were going quickly, in the hope of bigger and better interactivity. Down the stairs again, about a thousand miles under the Place de Luxembourg, we reached a room full of pictures of MEPs, and brochures for the political groupings. It was looking intensely promising.

Next, there was a bank of screens featuring pictures of the heads of the political grouping, each with some kind of artefact of their choosing, displayed in a glass box. We particularly liked Martin Schulz, leader of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and his piece of rock. We stared at it for a long time.

"Why he has a rock? To show he is tough like rock?"

"Could it be a bit of the Berlin wall? Is he even GERMAN? I'm lost"

"Eh".

Rebecca Harms had an old wallet. We didn't know why she had that either since, by then, my multi-media genius pod was threatening "low battery", we could only get the text in Latvian. Instead, we watched Guy Verhofstadt on mute, fascinated.

"The teeth!"

"You could fit several member states into that gap".

After that, we entered the Exciting Multimedia Area, where you could push around a sort of .. trolley over a map of Europe and watch small factual films on the trolley screen.

The ceiling was my favourite bit of the whole place, featuring what I think must have been a map of Europe in pretty, spherical blue LEDs.

"Move sensor to capture zone? Eh?" We were a bit bewildered by the Highly Informative Trolley, and a Scarved Operative had to explain to us. We rolled over to Riga to check it out. A short film about the integration of economic migrants kicked off. B and I watched, B frowning more and more deeply with each image.

"That's not Riga".

"What the fuck? That's not Riga".

"Ok, that one's Riga".

Next we went to play an interactive legislation game in a round room entirely surrounded by a bank of screens showing action shots from the "hemicycle" (why?) of the European Parliament. This was my other favourite part: it was quite hypnotic being entirely surrounded entirely by parliamentarians, trying to spot the ones that were yawning when they were filmed (several, mainly Brits). In the interactive game, I managed to engineer a compromise over some tricky environmental legislation by pressing a random combination of buttons, whilst Nigel Farage's ruddy face was looming at me from a full 360°, and I can tell you, this is no mean feat. I have a new respect for our European lawmakers. I was very pleased with myself, actually.

Beatrice pointed out her favourite MEP, an elderly lady with slightly Fabiola-esque hair and a floral jacket, to me on the screens of sensory overload.

"She is Luxembourgeoise. She loves bees. Whenever bees are discussed she must be present".

There was another circular room featuring what appeared to be a selection of chairs from the whole of Europe and The People Of Europe telling you about their lives. We were having major audio difficulties at this point, so we did not get to hear about the man whose life changed when he had his second child, or test out the quite comfortable looking leather sofa (we were not sure which member state it represented, but we quite fancy moving there).

We failed to find the special children's section, and we did not have two and a half hours to take part in the role playing game. Instead, we found ourselves directed to the final screens where we could express our wishes for the future of the European parliament.

Me:

Beatrice:

Both our ideas rendered in pretty colours on a large screen:

The shop was tiny but quite good, though singularly lacking in Euro-kitsch and majoring to a bewildering degree in candles. There were also a great deal of starred scarves, which were actually rather nice and soft, but also €55. I bought four miniature advent calendars made to look like pills, Beatrice bought a passport cover. Then she cast an expert eye over the café and declared it non-subsidised (but quite cheap, at least).

Really, the Parlamentarium is probably the best, shiniest, most informative visitor's centre you could make with such profoundly unpromising material and with the heavy weight of responsibility to make everything fair and balanced and representative. You can feel, viscerally, leadenly, the hundreds of man-hours, the weeks and months of debate and compromise that has gone into each exhibit and predictably, this doesn't make for the most fun of experiences (though arguably, that does fairly accurately replicate the EU lawmaking process). I mean, a 'whack a mole' style exhibit featuring MEPs might have helped. "Would my children enjoy the Parlamentarium?" ask the Frequently Asked Questions on the website, touchingly. Their answer is:

"Yes. There is something for children in each section of the Parlamentarium".

My answer is:

"Possibly, if they have been kept in a darkened cupboard for a week with only the Works Directive for company".

If my own children are very, exceptionally bad one day, I might take them.

I suppose, if you are fourteen and your school forces you to go there on a trip (this is the only plausible target audience I can identify), it will be better than double maths.

The verdict: Better than double maths. Unless you really enjoy quadratic equations.

The Parlamentarium

Batiment Willy Brandt

Rue Wiertz 60

Free Entry

Open 7 days a week, more hours than you could possibly imagine. Or want. Ever.

*Disclaimer: may contain lies.

Lies, damn lies, horse lies

2011-10-25T16:36:00.008+02:00

The problem, I think, with a blog like this is that if you update it really regularly, you can fill your posts with pointless fripperies and inconsequential trivia, whereas if you inadvertently fail to update for nearly a week for no better reason than autumnal inertia, you feel a heavy burden of responsibility to have something worthwhile to say about the Eurozone, or about the nature of intimacy, or at least, I dunno, offer a half decent recipe. I have none of the above unless you want to know how to make my signature Old El Paso Tacos.

(Open Old El Paso Box. Put virulent orange taco shells in oven. Fry a packet of mince. It is very important, when frying the mince, that the whole mince portion falls out of the packet into the pan with a heavy thud, ideally lightly splashing you in cooking oil. The bloody paper from the bottom of the packet of mince should still be adhered to the raw meat, requiring you to peel it off, perhaps retching gently if you are not in the américain mood. Add Old El Paso MSG Special Delicious "Seasoning". Put on plates with bad grace and serve with ketchup and shouting. Open a tin of Géant Vert sweetcorn kernels if you're feeling fancy. Drink heavily to forget the smell. )

However, I must write something or the responsibility becomes heavier and heavier to turn myself into Alain de Botton. With that in mind, and throwing off the tyrannous yoke of content expectations, I can tell you the following, fairly humdrum developments:

The dog required four stitches yesterday, after opening his muzzle grotesquely in a wildly improbable 'running too fast in the undergrowth at dusk' scenario. After an overnight stay at the vet's, he is now sporting the infamous colerette de la honte, or cone of shame, thus:

Whilst he has been fairly stoical about the general indignity of it all, he is having difficulty judging his new width, and keeps bashing into things, then staggering back in confusion to general amusement. Poor weepette. He has to keep the Cone of Shame for ten days, until his stitches come out.

I read The Family Fang (that review I have linked to is rather odd, and underplays the humour, I think), which I recommend highly. It is about a couple who are situationist performance artists and how they force their children Annie (Child A) and Buster (Child B) to become part of the "work". It is dark and funny and quite lovely on sibling relationships. I don't think it's the absolute best book that could have been written on this, it's actually quite restrained, when I could see it with a bit more of a fractured, demented, explosive ending, but I really like Kevin Wilson's style, and it's hugely enjoyable. Another stellar recommendation from Irretrievably Broken.

I tried to steal two separate sets of small fat ponies this weekend. The 'Poneys de la Cambre' really are a stellar selection of the fat pony genus, in particular the tiny chestnut whose weeny legs seem impossibly small to carry his vast stomach. He challenges the laws of the physical universe in the manner of a bumble bee, basically. Sadly the ponies are only accessible to 3-7 year olds and neither of my children could be bullied into riding one so I could nuzzle it. Kidnap it. Bundle it onto the tram. I went to look at a couple of stables too, because I'd really like to find somewhere to ride. They were hilariously unchanged from the stables of my youth - loads of teenage girls milling around a yard with very little going on, and some kind of brooding, golum like elder stateswoman in an office-cum-tack room-cum-nest of hoof oil and pony nuts, terrifying everyone. I was torn between a mad desire to jump right back in, standing outside a stable and sniffing manes surreptitiously, and a strong awareness that I am no longer 14.

Speaking of horse lust, and my younger days, I found my Domesday Project entry online, after my friend Violet forwarded her sister's (which majored on descriptions of looking after her stick insects. "Thank god" said Violet "I can't find mine, talking about all the joy to be had from dissecting owl pellets"). If you are my age and lived in the UK, I think you must have taken part in this .. thing. You had to write some stuff about yourself and then the BBC kept it somewhere in a big vault. I am not sure what the point was. Were we recreating the Domesday book? Anyway, whatever. It is now on line, I have found my entry and it is a WEB OF LIES. I am shocked. Shocked! See for yourselves:

HORSERIDING. EMMA BEDDINGTON. AGED 10

In my free time I enjoy going

horseriding. I have my own pony and

my friend and I ride together. We go

in a car to the riding school. On a

typical day our riding teacher might

be taking a pony into the stables when

we arrive. One of the girls who works

there taks Tommy, my horse, out of the

stable and helps me mount. Our

instructor gives me hints as we ride.

Usually towards the end of the lesson

we jump our fences. When we do Tommy

takes firm charge and goes over the

jumps TWO AT A TIME! He is a golden

colour called Palomino. We ride for

an hour, then dismount and return our

ponies to the stables. I remove

Tommy's saddle and bridle. Often he

tris to squash me against the wall.

I never, ever, had my own pony. I think maybe I wanted one so much I thought it counted. I love how I have basically invented a fantasy existence - not merely a pony, but one who jumps two jumps at a time AND some kind of servant girl slave/groom - for myself, then used it to skew the data of a nationwide BBC project. Something to be proud of, right there.

Please, if you are of a similar age to me and British, go and find your Domesday Project contribution in the bowels of the internet, and see if it is as disturbing as mine.

PS: Oh! And if you are in the UK or otherwise able to get Radio 4, you MUST listen to Warhorses of Letters tonight at 11pm, because as epistolatory, gay, equine, romances go, I'd say it was one of the better examples of the genre.

The Wednesday Whatever

2011-10-19T22:22:00.003+02:00

Meanwhile, back in this particular corner of Belgium:

1. Fingers came home from school with a torturous story of schoolyard high jinks that ended, unconvincingly, with the deathless line "So I didn't bite him, I just fell on his arm with my mouth open". Since then every time I go into the gulag, children stare and point and huddle, making that finger across the throat gesture in our direction. Oh dear. It was all going so well this term. I await his imminent report with some trepidation.

2. I have been wrestling with a bag of Daim pieces given to me - along with a whole box of amazing goodies - by a very, very kind reader. I will take a picture tomorrow because it is BEAUTEOUS and includes dainty liquorice owls of great loveliness.

The seven phases of Daim:

- I'll just have one. They're only tiny and that won't fuck up my stupid-asshole-diet-which-is-basically-just-no-puddings-and-no-wine.

- One is so tiny, though. Three is a sensible number.

- Did I say three? I meant five. Five is, like, the size of a normal snack. Sort of.

- My finger are no longer under my control.

- DAIMDAIMDAIMDAIMDAIM I'm not even enjoying this anymore DAIMDAIMDAIMDAIM

- Bleeeurgh. Sick sick sick regretful and sick. Gum ache.

- This one, offered by someone on Twitter and adopted wholesale by me: "Aching void of withdrawal, disconsolate excavation of molars for remnants".

I tried taking the box downstairs, but then it became a battle royal between sloth and greed in which there could be no winner and many losers, including my productivity, concentration, and chins. Or perhaps, by multiplying, the chins are winning. Who knows.

Yup, it's all go around here.

3. We tried to make sort of custom rabbit seed balls for Satan, in ice lolly holders, after buying such a thing in the supermarket for a rapacious €3,50 for 3. It has been an unmitigated disaster. There are now six malevolent rock solid lumps of ... THING, still in the lolly holders, abandoned outside. Not even weepette will eat them. Not even the birds. Nothing. I am imagining Terry Nutkins shaking his head at us, more in sorrow than in anger. Also, we won't be having ice lollies any time soon, but that's ok, because it's freezing.

I become fonder of Satan by the day, incidentally. Things I like about Satan:

- mute

- lives outdoors

- small, manageable excrement ('manageable' = can ignore entirely/allow dog to eat)

- "lawn" maintenance

- Comes to the back door every morning looking for food, but without the high pitched whining noise that characterises same demand from Oscar.

- Looks pleasing, if slightly ominous, especially when he is chasing weepette around the garden in the manner of Benny Hill.

In short, I am coming round to the Way of the Rabbit.

(However: I have still not learned my lesson about looking up pet stuff on the internet. If you believe the internet, the hedgehog will get some kind of horrendous parasitic infection if it eats too many slugs and die of internal bleeding, the rabbit needs a hutch the size of Blenheim, and let's not even mention the numerous indignities I am apparently heaping on the dog)

4. Learned the provincial capitals of the Belgian provinces in Dutch with Lashes. Forgot most of them. Namen. Luik. Antwerpen. Hasselt. Some others. If this continues I will soon understand both Belgian politics and Belgian geography, and then what can I be "amusingly" obtuse about, hmmm? Stop this influx of actual knowledge. Other gulag tasks this week:

- poem about the "Flipper Centre" (no, me neither)

- Capital (Kapital?) Ks. Bizarrely complex, as all French capitals seem to be.

- two days of the unending evil that is packed lunch - I have told them they have to make their own now. I am all about the delegation. It's empowering. Or something.

5. Did whole days of work on jobs that will earn me about 30 pence. I'm quite sanguine about this kind of thing, now that I have basically decided that the financial apocalypse of all Europe is imminent. "Rat kebabs", I say cheerfully to M. "Grass. Slug pesto. Bartering". Then I add "You will help me with the bartering, won't you, because you remember how shit I was at it when we did Craftacular?" Then there is a pause as she thinks about what a dreadful burden I will be to her, come the apocalypse, always being too shy to demand a squirrel carcass in return for my pile of dandelions. Also, I believe working hard for no money is my payback for all those years spent sitting on my arse in a luxury office miscalculating exchange rates, looking a stuff on Net à Porter and sending waspish emails to my friend, the BMF.

Anyway, I have worked quite hard this week. My eyes sting and my spine looks like a Bionicle. I need to get out. I don't have much planned, so any suggestions for thrilling, yet cheap activities in the greater Brussels area gratefully received in the comments.

Belgian News

2011-10-18T16:44:00.006+02:00

As Belgium nears the point at which it will be terminally embarrassing still not to have a government, I have FINALLY found an explication of the current state of Belgian politics that is pitched at the right level for me. It is here, on the Elle Belgique website, and headed, "The Belgian Political Crisis for Dummies". I admit it, this is my level.

I give you my own reduced, translated version here, in case anyone quizzes you on the Belgian constitutional crisis and you DON'T have any vegetables to hand. I realise this is only useful for like, seven people, but I am determined I will understand it, and step out of my insular bubble of staring at pigeons and eating soup, so you must suffer along with me. I have placed bonus animal photographs at crucial junctures through the explanation, as a teaching aid, as it were. Mainly small primates.

1. The habitual bad-tempered truce gives way to total chaos

Elections were called early in 2010, because the Flemish liberal party Open VLD pulled out of the coalition over the issue of voting and administrative rights for French speaking residents of BHV, Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde. I do not know why they pulled out. They were cross, I suppose, at the failure to resolve the whole ongoing BHV ridiculousness.

(In verrrry brief: BHV is part of Flanders but the population includes a majority of French speakers and officially considered bilingual. In Flanders, you can only vote for Flemish parties and access public services that are Flemish speaking. In BHV, French speakers are allowed to vote for French parties. This was judged unconstitutional in 2003, because Flemish voters in French communes do not have the equivalent right. The Flemish parties want to split the area into 2 separate voting districts. The Francophones don't. If I say any more I'll get confused again. Let's steam ahead, ignoring all subtleties )

You survived a paragraph! Here, have a pygmy jerboa:

Those are the ears of government.

2. The Patapoufs and the Filifers both win, causing chaos.

In those elections a large percentage of votes in Flanders went to portly Flemish separatist Bart de Wever's N-VA. The other big electoral success was the Francophone socialists, led by dapper bow-tie wearing elf, Elio di Rupo.

Two down! Here's a baby tapir:

3. Lots of politicians get "eur" jobs.

A succession of politicians were appointed by the king and given names ending in "eur". Their role was to try to broker agreements between the many, many, MANY parties.

Bart de Wever - Informateur

Elio di Rupo - Préformateur

André Flahaut/Danny Pieters - Médiateur

Bart de Wever - Clarificateur

Johan Vandelanotte - Médiateur

Didier Reynders (who my friend once interpreted for, or at least in the same room as and described him as "quite the silver fox") -Informateur

Wouter Beke - Négociateur

Elio again - Formateur.

Who are all these people? Does the king draw their names out of a hat? Does he know who any of them are? Do they get to choose what "eur" name they get? So many questions.

The slow loris is anxious about the fate of Belgium.

Let us plough on with this singularly joyless exercise.

4. A bewildering number of people start to actually negotiate

Elio put together a proposal - a "note" - in July of this year. Bart de Wever's N-VA didn't like it and he took his ball and went home, basically. Because of the budget, and because they couldn't reach an agreement on BHV. This meant that Elio needed another party in his coalition negotiations: CD&V, the Flemish Christian democrats. CD&V finally agreed to take part, and the negotiations started with 8 parties, many of which have odd names, that sound like diseases, or medical procedures, or desperately trendy design consultancies:

PS (French, headed by Elio)

CD&V (Flemish, Wouter Beke)

sp.a (Flemish social democrats, headed by Caroline Gennez)

MR (French moderate right wingers, Charles Michel)

Open VLD (Flemish liberals, headed by Alexander de Croo)

Groen! (ridiculous name, Flemish Green Party, Walter Van Besien)

CdH (French centrists, led by Benoit Lutgen, formerly Joelle Milquet who is one of the only ones I ever recognise on TV, because she looks like she's escaped from a dreary French police procedural on TF1. I mention her name for this reason and this alone)

"Yah, the CEO of sp.a had an MR so they've taken him in for an Open VLD".

(Are you bored yet? I am. I've forgotten why I started doing this so I went off and had a nice read about okapis on Zooborns. They are pretty, okapis. I met one once. I'd quite like a biscuit too, but I'm not allowed. Maybe I'll watch Made in Chelsea instead, for a glimpse of Mark Francis and his pocket handkerchief and deep tan, and blazer, and compelling eyebrows. I am obsessed with Mark Francis. I want him to be my friend and make his maid Gianna bring me champagne. Did I just admit that out loud? I blame Belgian politics, I am losing my mind. Sorry, I will take a break to read a chapter from this Iris Murdoch novella whilst working on Catalan's Mersenne conjecture)

Oh yes, your animal. Here you go. This might be another slow loris. I do not know. I like its toes.

5. They agree, at last, on something

On 8 October last, an agreement was FINALLY reached between the 8 parties.

Key elements:

- greater regional autonomy, particularly in the areas of health and employment

- the right for regional governments to collect a proportion of direct taxation

- child benefit will be administered regionally, as will the Highway Code (WHY IS THIS WORTHY OF MENTION. It keeps being mentioned, but no one can explain to me why on earth it matters).

- Most of the Francophone special rights in BHV will be withdrawn.

This marmoset is sad to hear that:

The crowd are on the pitch. They think it's all over. But it isn't, because this is BELGIUM, suckers.

6. We still don't have a government.

Although it looks almost certain that Elio di Rupo will be able to form a coalition now, he hasn't actually DONE it yet and there will doubtless be a few more rounds of unseemly squabbling before that actually happens, predicted to be in November. Also, they all still have to vote the budget through. And of course, now they have to try and sweep the charred remains of Dexia under the carpet, so it's not all speculoos and Leffe, and unicorns yet.

Oh god. That was EXHAUSTING. I feel despairing and confused, and humble and somehow diminished as a person. Imagine if you'd been locked in a room talking about this stuff for over a year, it's more than flesh and blood could stand.

Here's your last animal. I'd totally vote for him.

(Tomorrow normal service will resume and I will try to dredge something entertaining from another week of sitting at my desk and muttering, I promise.)

The shops

2011-10-15T20:14:00.003+02:00

OH GOD I AM SO HUNGRY, DEAR LORD. I might just gnaw the dog's leg off. He's being specially annoying this week (constantly whining to go out so he can steal Satan's food, which is stuff he would stare at in blank disdain if I offered it to him, like cauliflower leaves). Dog eating is in, according to Hugh Faintly Ridiculous Perm, so I would be in good company.

Actually, I'm not so much hungry as headachy, and obsessed with eating, and more particularly, the idea of macaroni cheese and palmier biscuits and flan patissier. Not together. Though if that was the only way I could have them, I suppose I would deal with it somehow.

Ok, we will not speak of this further, I promise, it is boring, I fully accept that. I am not even doing some kind of entertainingly bonkers restrictive diet filled with mad diktats about egg whites and cayenne pepper, I am just trying not to shove everything in the house that is not actually still alive in my mouth. It is surprisingly difficult. I suppose all the previous times I got thin, I had lunacy (or indeed, money for shopping, which I always found a massively effective appetite suppressant) to distract me.

I have been pottering round the shops this afternoon, like on a proper Saturday, back in the day. The children were gainfully (hmm) occupied at science club, aka nerd school. They LOVE nerd school, it has been the most improbable success in the history of all extra-curricular activities, though I suspect this is because it is total, complete anarchy once the parents leave. I am basing my theory on the fact that they seemed to be practising cage fighting, unsupervised, in a corridor when I got back today. I tried to work out what they had been doing but they sort of waved at me, airily dismissive.

"We made something turn blue, then white" said Lashes, happily.

"I lit a match by myself!" Fingers was incandescent with excitement.

I am not sure of the pedagogy, or how completely the "science" element has been absorbed, but they are delighted to go, and do not want to leave, so I am happy. Incidentally my elder child returned from the Dutsch seaside work camp and has told me virtually nothing about it, as is normal. We got a three line postcard from him written in Dutch, that says that the staff were horrible, and "P.S. SOS", but he assures me it was a joke.

Anyway, in my THREE HOURS of Saturday freedom, I:

1. Pottered aimlessly around the many many discount stores around Rue Bailly, and saw some horrendous, awful shoes and some disappointing, expensive boots and many many many many remaindered Superdry hoodies. Amidst all the nasties, I saw one lovely soft cashmere/silk mix cardigan for €35 that I would definitely have bought, and one pair of fake Tory Burch flats I might have bought, if I had been buying.

2. Stared in the window of the Caprices du Bailli patisserie like a woman possessed, admiring the beautiful Debailleul chocolates, and the palmiers, as mentioned above. They looked to be precisely the right mix of crunchy and chewy, which is important in a palmier, which tends to boring dryness in the wrong hands. Sorry, did I drool on your window? Sorry.

3. Bought a small carton of coconut water from the nouveau-hippies at organic/raw/ridiculous food store Tan, where even in my "starved" state, almost nothing looked appealing. Actually, most of it looked like rabbit treats. Had a bet with myself how much the bottle of maple syrup cost (€15) and lost (€27, dear lord).

4. Admired many, many light fittings that I do not need but nevertheless covet in a home type shop I had not seen before.

5. Went and stroked things in the bonkers shop on Rue du Page that sells giant pinatas and miniature folding Atomiums and also, today, a knitted anglerfish. The shop's name is its street number but I cannot remember what that number is. If you live in Brussels you probably know where I mean, and if you don't, this will make no sense, but you won't really care, will you?

6. Bought some star shaped Japanese paper cake cases and stroked beautiful tea caddies in the tea and coffee shop on the same street.

7. Admired many coloured Italian soft, soft, leather ballet pumps with the purest shoe lust in Rue de L'Aqueduc.

It was brilliant. Hooray for nerd school, and for Saturday. Now it is time to prepare a small plate of bitter herbs for my delicious dinner.

What have you been up to today?

Sigh

2011-10-14T10:48:00.012+02:00

I have decided that even though I am almost certain to go mad in the process and end up eating paper, licking apple cores and dreaming about custard, I do need to lose a little weight. Because nothing fits and because I can't buy any more clothes and because I am sick of wearing the same seven unflattering things over and over again, as evidenced in the sidebar of sartorial catastrophe. The prospect fills me with gloom, of course. I am not filled with much else today, since that's sadly the point. Don't tell me to exercise, I'll ignore you. I already walk the dog, which is "sport" enough for me and my dodgy knee. I'd rather just get a tapeworm.

So yesterday I had watery porridge for breakfast, spinach and broad bean soup for lunch and a fajita (this is my household's favourite dinner, the freaks. Trish, don't read this. Chicken breast, Old El Paso burrito mix, cucumber, red pepper, "eisbairgue" lettuce, tinned Géant Vert super sweet sweetcorn, avocado, though not for the children who would rather eat their own fingernails, and as a bonus, "hair" that smells lingeringly, deliciously of Old El Paso until you fumigate it) in the evening. NO PUDDING. None. God, it was dull. Working from home means that you put attribute a disproportionate amount of significance to your meals, I think. Well, I do. Without it, well. Let's say I had to watch several more internet baby animal videos than usual.

As a result, I am already scrutinising the children's school menus with the demented fascination of the hungry and slightly mad. They are a far cry from the spam fritters and cornflake topped jam tart (GOD, I loved that. Did you have that? I loved all of the puddings, except the ginger sponge, but cornflake tart was the holy grail of school meals) of Park Grove primary, or indeed the iceberg lettuce on Mother's Pride that I had for lunch every single day for about 6 years at secondary school. The menus come with a chatty message on the back for each month. This month it's: "mastiquer, c'est la santé":

.. which is jolly. I do like a reminder to chew, it would be terrible to forget.

I interrogate poor Fingers, alone and at the mercy of my whims whilst his brother is at Dutch gulag. He is trying to play Mario et Luigi Frères du Temps on the DS in peace, but casts a patient, expert eye over the menu, which is full of oddness. Quorn bolognese, after last month's Seitan Con Carne? Puréed sprouts? And the perennial question: what are Côtes Holly? (not even the internet has been able to help me with this. They appear to be an invention of the Belgian school system)

"Soupe de poireaux (leeks).. yeah, I like that. Soupe de cerfeuil (chervil)? Hmmm. Ooh! Purée de potiron! J'adore".

I give him a hard stare - I mean, who on earth could like puréed squash? It's baby food. And what are all these purées when we have just been told the importance of chewing, hmm? But he seems sincere. I quiz him further.

"Poêlée de navets! So .. sautéed turnips? Really? How .. interesting. What's that like Fingers?"

"I don't know".

"And when it says "biscuit" for pudding, what is that, exactly?"

"Speculoos".

"Of course it is. How about when it says 'purée de choux de bruxelles', does that mean JUST mashed sprouts, or are they mixed with potatoes?"

He just looked bored at this point, as well he might, so I put him to bed, and watched nearly three hours of French Masterchef, the lingering shots of plump veal chops, the forensic analysis of the depth of flavour of jus, the caramelised seared scallops, the disastrously melting - but apparently delicious - ice cream from the Pêche Melba, the live crayfish escaping all over the work surfaces and nipping contestants cruelly. I would even eat one contestant's attempt to make an "English" meal, which is viciously, but I think correctly, penalised for crapness: tarragon lamb chop, with pea and mint salad and two of those droopy, etiolated baby sweetcorns. "You could have done le feesh en cheeps" suggests one of the judges, helpfully. "You can do absolutely sublime things with le feesh and cheeps!". Instead, I have a floury Cox and a cup of tea and go to bed to grind my teeth at phantom Michelin starred dinners, or more likely, phantom steamed syrup sponges.

It will be a long, hard road back into my target 35% of my wardrobe, but I am determined to try and do so with some shred of sanity. So, you know, send me lots of owl videos please.

Bemused in Belgium

2011-10-13T14:03:00.002+02:00

You know how people say "only write when you have something to say" about blogs? Yeah, well. I'm ignoring that at the moment. God knows what happened to yesterday. Did you see me? Can we piece it together? I remember buying a purple cauliflower but I can't quite establish the thought process that might have led to this. I know that in the evening there was some high pitched panicky screeching about the most terrifying junction I have ever encountered which had no rules whatsoever and just CARS, coming at me from all directions, in the dark, like a video game. Now there are women posing "façon streetstyle" with their IRONS in my inbox. It's all too much, bloody Wednesday. Soon, I'll be able to blame the government again, because apparently we might have one in a week or so. Can you believe it? Can I? Can they? Do they even remember what they agreed after 18 months of negotiating? They must be hallucinating with despair and fatigue and speculoos poisoning.

Belgian Politican 1: So we're all agreed? We're shutting Belgium and rolling the Atomium to Greece, ball by ball, providing subsidised genièvre for the over-sixties, and turning the Dexia headquarters into a Magritte theme park?

Belgian Politician 2: Hang on, I thought we were selling the Atomium to Mr Berlusconi for his summer residence?

BP3: Tired .. so tired...

BP4: I NEVER agreed to that. We were going to turn the Atomium into a massive disco ball to house the federal parliament.

BP5: No! We were going to use it as a wrecking ball to flatten Charleroi!

BP2: And I thought it was free ugly, curly-haired, white, semi-balding dogs for the over-sixties?

Who knows. Elio di Rupo, he of the bow tie and very soigné slightly bouffant hair, who I am dressed up as on my "About" page, and who may finally be allowed to form a government, looks fatigued beyond imagining. His bow tie is drooping at the corners and now everyone is hatin' on his Dutch. Bart de Wever - the furious, quiz winning, ultra Flemish separatist is hiding in a dark corner of the Rue de la Loi sulking, ready to pounce and eat him. All in all, he has a thoroughly unenviable job ahead of him and they haven't even agreed a budget yet.

I tell myself this in the mornings, when Elio is probably already in the gym. Though I bet his internet connection works at his sodding desk. I am writing this in the spare bed. It has been moved away from the wall so I am leaning backwards against the very low bed head, then craning my neck forward. It is perfectly disastrous, physiotherapists would cry to see me. Then ask why I have stolen their trousers, probably.

The other dregs of yesterday:

- Inveigled into making chocolate chip cookies to replace Monday's M&Ms cookies that were already finished. I do not even much like cookies, unless they are quite salty peanut butter ones, on the cusp of being completely disgusting, but I do like baking, endless baking, at the moment. I could make cookies in my sleep, but what I really want to make is the lemon loaf in the Hummingbird Cookbook. Apparently it's gorgeous, but I am fat and none of my clothes fit, and must not make baked goods that I might actually be tempted to eat.

- Watched a man in Pain Quotidien eat two gigantic slices of lemon meringue pie, one after the other, in about 30 seconds. I took a photograph of it, surreptitiously, but it looks really unimpressive.

- Ate some very disappointing Coxes. I am really, really missing my dad's Spartans at the moment. I want my apples to taste of mist, and autumn and sharpness. Actually, I can hardly bear to admit this to myself, but I have started to get really homesick for my dad's Tetanus Manor at this time of year, with its brambles and tiny sharp apples and low-lying mists obscuring the sheep. The Ardennes gave me a tiny taste of it, when we were off time travelling to 1991 for the space weekend, and now I am pining for wet walks and fires and crumble (and dead badgers and only the Oxford Mail in the newsagents, and no coffee) like a CRAZY person, because I do not like the country. This is old age, isn't it? I might as well stop fighting it and buy some Marks & Spencers Classics Range wool mix slacks. I could also eat steamed puddings with impunity, which is exactly what I want to be doing this afternoon.

- Watched Fingers climbing, at high speed, like a rat up a drainpipe. Miles up. It was quite impressive, in a terrifying sort of way. He reminded me of my childhood friend who got caught scrambling to the top of one of the Abyssinian lions in the British Museum. However, climbing walls are sordid places that smell of old sweat and gym mats and are populated with wiry uber-mensches. Scary.

- Some light speculative Euromillions spending, revolving around exotic livestock, mainly. My co-speculatee (word? Non-word?) said "you could print millions of copies of your manuscript and just flood the market with them!" and I got slightly hurt and sniffy, and said that even if I was a multi-millionaire, I still only wanted my manuscript to succeed ON ITS MERITS. Then we had to talk about less contentious topics like who we each wanted to employ as a private chef, and how many ponies was too many.

Incidentally, things I do not get which the rest of the internet gets:

- Feminist Ryan Gosling (because I do not actually know who he is)

- Lana del Rey (I dunno, it just doesn't work on me)

Please explain them to me in short, loud words, as if to a difficult elderly relative.

Bonsai cat, crisp injury, books

2011-10-11T15:06:00.005+02:00

Normal service has resumed. I am nursing a cruel, disfiguring gum and palate injury incurred eating crisps too fast. It is raining. I am wearing the special trousers of psychological unhinged-ness. Most of my mental energy is going on thinking about eclairs.

Intrusive eclair thoughts

I entered a competition to win some Marcolini eclairs this morning. 16 eclairs "for you and your colleagues", courtesy of the Belgian Post Office. Of course, if their delivery were dependent on the good offices of the Belgian Post Office, the likelihood of them being fit for human consumption on arrival would be vanishingly small, but hope springs eternal. Now all I can think about is WHEN ARE MY ECLAIRS COMING. I mean, come on. Surely I can win? Surely? How many people enter this kind of competition? As each hour goes by, my sense of injustice at not having won the eclairs yet grows. Why I think it would be a good idea for me to win 16 eclairs is a whole other story. My excuse is that it is so wintry, my entire psyche has reoriented itself towards winter survival, which mainly translates into thinking obsessive, repetitive thoughts about custard. Who was it said they had a really easy steamed pudding recipe? Please provide it, instantly.

Whilst my mind is filled with suet, I have little else to report.

Mug

There is this:

I had to physically restrain myself from buying this in WHSmiths (DO NOT JUDGE ME) in Paris. My bag was already so heavy I ended up with a bruised shoulder, but it took a lot to leave this behind. I will ask for it for my birthday, though it's actually slightly smaller than I would like and the china seemed a bit crap. I used to have two lovely Quentin Blake bird bowls, but I'm not sure what happened to them. Broken, probably.

Bonsai cat

And there is this:

We went to a Bonsai shop at the weekend because Lashes has developed a new, slightly boring obsession with bonsais. I'm not complaining, it's better than Japanese fighting stars, or something paramilitary, I suppose. I really, really, dread being the parent of one of those teenagers who wears fatigues and reads "Guns and Ammo" magazine, I would be mortified.

So. He has decided he wants one for Christmas, which seems - assuming he doesn't mean one of those ones that cost 3 grand - a reasonable request. Anyway, in the bonsai shop we met this brilliant cat. It stalked, precariously, between rows of 700 euro mini trees, and then sat, posing stonily for me.

Domestic animal farce

In other news, Oscar's behaviour towards Satan has hardened into a clear pattern I would describe as "petulant toddler". I have caught him in the last week stealing the following: 5 carrots, 2 heads of chicory, a stick of celery, an apple core. Of course, he does not like any of these foods, but will sit stubbornly in the garden chewing them without enjoyment until they are thoroughly coated in nasty dog saliva. Then he comes inside and sits on the sofa, all pleased with himself and farting. It is entirely obnoxious, but also funny. I almost felt sorry for Satan, then I looked at the garden again. God, that reminds me, I have to plant bulbs now, don't I, so that Satan can gorge himself all spring on my daffodils.

Book club corner

I didn't read at all much when I was doing my first draft of my stupid stupid manuscript, because I tend to soak up and parrot written styles maddeningly. Now I am stuck as stuck can be, I have resorted to reading as much as I possibly can in the hope of inspiration. Things I have read recently (I can't be arsed to hyperlink. Amazon paid me the sum total of about 4p for my sidebar link, so I have deleted it in pique):

More Edward St Aubyn. On the Edge, this time, which is all about new age weirdery. I love his white hot cleverness at anatomising the infinite oddness, little unworthinesses, weaknesses of people.

Sarah Winman - When God Was a Rabbit - I did like this, a lot, it's thoughtful and nicely characterised, but in the back of my mind I was constantly asking myself, in the manner of an irascible high court judge "but what is it ABOUT?" The book group notes by the author at the end say she describes it as "a love story between a brother and sister", but it's also obviously about chance and fate and the arbitrariness of events and catastrophes and how they shape people. Hmm, I dunno. For some reason this need to put a label on it kept interrupting my enjoyment of what is a really accomplished piece of writing. I like the talking rabbit, of which very little is made at all. It's a sort of throwaway gift to the reader.

Louise Welsh - she of The Cutting Room and The Bullet Trick, both of which I really liked - Naming the Bones. This is the slowest burning thriller of all time about an academic researching a promising poet who published a single volume, then drowned. Will anything ever happen? Does it matter? It's profoundly, dreich-ly Scottish, like Rebus without the murder. I think the murder is coming, eventually. I hope. I'm over halfway through.

Chartbusting amnesia thriller Before I Go To Sleep (S J Watson) which was very good and clever but I kept getting anxious about how the author would maintain the INCREDIBLY FIDDLY conceit throughout. The answer is: pretty well, with some necessary and timely 'oh good, the amnesia is getting slightly better' business.

Monogamy by Adam Philips - This is a reread, in the 'research' category. See, this book "121 aphorisms" puzzles and faintly enrages me. Is it profound, or is it basically a series of fortune cookie fortunes? "A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime". "Fidelity shouldn't always be taken personally". I DO NOT KNOW. I always put it down mildly enraged, but also engaged.

Let me know if you've read anything good recently, ideally something that might motivate me to get my head out of my arse and finish this dumb book.

(Now where are my fucking eclairs, more to the point).

Food. And some more food. And minor social awkwardness.

2011-10-09T14:51:00.017+02:00

For once I actually have some stuff to tell you, because I have been on my micro trip to Paris. If this all sounds a bit over-excited - and it does - bear in mind that I spent most of last week nit-combing and doing my VAT. In the rain. I never leave the house! I am now experiencing sensory overload! There will be too many adjectives! Normal jaded service will resume tomorrow.

First, I left my Sadaharu Aoki green tea eclair - that I had waded through the ten deep crowds in Galeries Lafayette to obtain - in a bar and a man had to chase me down the street waving the small phallic parcel, to return it. I wanted a "Bamboo" really, which is a cake of criminal, insane, deliciousness, but it was too fragile to transport. As it is, the eclair is still in my bag, getting sadder and more squashed by the minute. It's a desecration. Of course, I should have eaten it, but the problem was that I had not factored:

(a) Large lunch at Mamma Roma

The condemned man ate a hearty meal before his séjour linguistique in a Nissen hut on the North Sea coast.

(b) Salted caramel ice cream from Capoue (despite the torrential rain); and

into my patisserie purchasing equations. A sad truth revealed itself: I was not remotely hungry. This did not stop me from buying a small selection of Pierre Hermé macaroons, since I was passing the front door of the shop and there wasn't a queue and it actually seemed CRIMINAL not to. I was very glad of this for reasons to be revealed shortly. I also bought some matcha salted caramel truffles, which are strange, but compelling - somewhere on the frontier between delicious and repulsive. I think I can only eat one at a time, but then actually, I need a second one to check whether I still feel the same about them.

Next, I ended up on my own at a reception at the American ambassador's residence for 40 minutes without the person whose 'plus one' I was supposed to be, which was not at ALL awkward, especially as:

- I realised too late my dress was sort of squalidly sweaty;

- I was holding a bag of semi-squashed cakes;

- I actually tripped over on my heels in the cobbled courtyard from the front porte cochère to the main entrance. I did that carefree laughing 'oh! how amusing! I am on my arse!' kind of performance, then got up and tried to pretend it hadn't happened;

- it turned out to be a very SMALL reception and all I knew about the whole event was a cryptic text from Trish that read "Nathan Mirth Void modernist cuisine book". No one could work out what on earth I was doing there, being neither a chef or food writer or otherwise remotely great or good. I exchanged frantic texts with her.

E: Ambassador's speech starting. I am sweating.

T: Nearly there, just moving car.

E: Pleeease hurry. Am staring at garden and pretending to be mute.

T: They are letting me in!

E: THANK GOD. Have eaten all petits fours and on second wine. Danger zone.

"Nathan Mirth Void" turned out to be a moment of autocorrect genius. His name is not actually Mirth Void, but Myhrvold and he is some species of culinary uber-geek and savant fou who used to be chief technology officer at Microsoft and has produced a six volume meisterwork 'Modernist Cuisine' on every kind of food and cooking in the world ever*. I had ample time to study it, because I was entirely paralysed by social embarassment and could not really cope with starting a conversation, where I would have to explain that I had absolutely no place being there, so I stood in a corner turning the many, many, many pages and accepting any small snacks that came my way (tiny hamburgers, some kind of miniature possibly pork meatballs, spring rolls. Not massively amazing, I am sad to relate). The book is .. encylopaedic. It is an extraordinarily large and comprehensive tome of frightening erudition and I thought I would fracture a wrist just trying to pick it up. I am definitely not the target audience being (a) not male (this book is infused with food-nerd testosterone on every page) and (b) as culinarily talented as a lame weasel. I would no more go in for 'spherification' than I would sprout wings and fly.

When I was telling Mrs Trefusis (who is blogging more at the moment, I hope you have noticed) about it, first she said "So it's like your dad, if he started cooking?" and then "Aha! So it's Microsoft XP Cooking?" which is very accurate. I did like the pictures where he had cut all his saucepans and other kitchen equipment - including a barbecue - in half to show what was happening on the inside. All the photography was completely extraordinary, in a sort of "take it apart to see how it work" way.

Anyway. It was lovely and rather astonishing to be there. Because the book is epic. Because the building is exceptionally beautiful, with exquisite (repro, the ambassador said, the originals are in a museum) gold moulures and a huge garden in the middle of Paris. Because the number of evenings in my life where I have ended up at an ambassadorial reception numbers precisely NONE prior to Saturday. Because I got to "meet" (stare at covertly and wordlessly shake the hand of on departure) the US ambassador who is like a tiny, perfect elf of a man like a Sèvres ornament and blow my nose on a US embassy crested napkin. And because, most excitingly of all, I MET PIERRE HERME.

Let us pause for a minute to think reverently about Pierre Hermé, the high priest of patisserie and his unearthly genius with vanilla and rapsberries and sugar and almonds and the like. There he was, the dolorous man mountain of cake, looking very, very grave, perhaps because the full six volumes of Modernist Cuisine do not contain ANY patisserie. Trish - who had finally been allowed in despite not having her passport - introduced us, even though I could barely speak for patisserie fan love and general social inadequacy. I told him I had a box of his oeuvre in my bag, like a cakey stalker. He nodded, seriously, and said that he never tired of people talking to him about cake, then he said he had to go because he was having dinner with Heston Blumenthal. How wonderful.

When I told M, she said "I bet he smells of Ispahan. Did you lick him?" Then she went on to steal my thunder by telling me she had fed a manatee a potato (video here, I am so so jealous). I forgave her though, because she also filmed a mouse deer licking its own face for me, which I think you will find is the dictionary definition of what friends are for.

After that, we ran away, I dumped my torture shoes, and we went for dinner (here, charming beautiful waiters, nice wine, MASSIVE amounts of food for not much money) with the lovely BB and we ate gigantically fat frog's legs/buttocks and squid and artichokes and prawns and a slightly dubious octopus saucisson, drank lovely Languedoc white wine and laughed a lot about the worst things we had ever stolen, among other things. No, I am not telling you. I tried not to think about cakes all evening, but then they brought us this:

It's what Pierre would have wanted AND the coulis pattern matched my dress AND it was a gift, so obviously we had to eat it, even though I thought cream would start coming out of my ears by the end of it.

(Incidentally, Trish said as we were driving across Paris that she thought her writing was workaday, functional, not brilliant, and I need to tell her how wrong she is. No one evokes the comfort of ritual, the reality of cooking for a family, and the poetry in both better than Trish. You need to go and look at her lovely new blog and you'll see exactly what I mean. She takes the most ordinary kinds of cooking, the plainest foods that ACTUAL PEOPLE eat, and turns them into something beautiful and desirable with her writing which is simple and sensual and full of humour. She's the anti Mirth Void, actually, and I know whose writing I'd rather take to bed with me. So there. )

*Description may not be wholly accurate

Incidentally..

2011-10-07T11:41:00.009+02:00

... the current batch of delousing fluid smells very much like Ricard, or Pernod, or some other anis based drink. I like this. I like to imagine, when I am pest-controlling my progeny, that I am in fact on the terrasse at the Colombe d'Or in St Paul de Vence having a small apéritif as the sun sets over the arrière pays niçois. Come, let us cast aside this nit comb and play a short round of pétanque, then maybe Yves Montand will dance with us! Yes, it is still infestation o'clock in Waffle Towers. I suspect neat ouzo might be the answer in more ways than one.

... I have small pieces in both Red and Elle this month. The Red one was written with an interweb friend, which makes it even more lovely. Hurrah for the internet and the meeting thereon of like minded, clever, funny, wonderful people. Does that sound like I am saying I am clever funny and wonderful? Jesus. Obviously that is not what I mean. And hang on, does "even more lovely" sound like either:

(i) I think my article is "lovely"; or

(ii) The Red one is better than the Elle one?

OH GOD. I DO NOT MEAN EITHER OF THOSE THINGS.

This is hopeless. I'm never mentioning anything I've done ever again. I'm just really grateful anyone gives me any work.

... Once again my child is being removed from my care by the Belgian authorities (well, the gulag) and taken to the seaside for a week, this time for "Classe de Mer Néerlandophone". Crucial vocabulary for the North Sea in October that I hope he will be learning:

1. I think I have hypothermia.

Ik denk dat ik onderkoeling.

2. No thank you, I would not like to go for a swim, it is minus five degrees.

Nee dank je ik zou niet graag gaan zwemmen, is het min vijf graden.

3. I am very sorry about my handwriting. Please let me go home now.

Het spijt me zeer over mijn handschrift. Laat het me nu naar huis gaan.

... Conversations with my brain twin:

M: Do you think we will look back on 2011 and think it was ace?

E: Erm, no. No, I don't think I will.

M: Well, from the perspective of the apocalypse, it probably will have been ace.

E: Oh. Yes, I suppose from the perspective of the apocalypse. If I am living in a cave and eating rat carcasses, maybe I will look back nostalgically on these happy times.

M: Juicy juicy rats.

E: En brochette. The brochette stick made from scavenged iron railings.

M: Rat satay. With peanut sauce made from ground up seagull beak and possum feet.

***

E: I really wish we were together, punching seagulls in the face.

M: Oh god, I would love to punch a seagull. Or maybe thwack it across the face with a packet of crisps?

E: Yes. Spicy Doritos. I bet they're really hard to hit though.

M: Oh, I don't know. Dangle a pizza in one hand? Hit with the other?

E: Yes, lure it in with a KFC bargain bucket.

M: Yup.

... I have slightly less than 24 hours in Paris this weekend. I need to plan out a careful itinerary, which basically means taking in as many cake shops as possible. Both Sadaharu Aoki AND the choux bun place, Popelini are absolutely essential. I defy you not to click on the flavours tab of the Popelini website and spend ten minutes drooling gently. I reckon I can do both Lafayette Gourmet and Popelini in the time available, but I might have to sacrifice Pierre Hermé. We shall see. I like a (cake-based) challenge. I will attempt to show you my spoils before shoving ninety three choux buns into my mouth simultaneously, ideally whilst running down the street, because Parisians love nothing more than people eating inelegantly in public.

What are your weekend plans? What would you do with 24 hours in Paris? And most importantly, how would you catch a seagull?

Things

2011-10-05T15:11:00.008+02:00

Some things:

1. I am once more living in the house of pestilence. Daub a primitive cross on the door and stay far, far, clear. No sooner had Lashes come up to me joyfully in the "Extrême Bowling" in Libramont (a long, space camp related story which I am not yet ready to tell) brandishing something between thumb and forefinger which turns out to be a headlouse he has caught off his own head, but the dog started scratching ominously. I do not know what to delouse next, but it is one of those moments when alopecia feels like a distinct blessing. On top of that, Lashes also has a stomach bug, which has turned his face a pretty grey-green colour that looks very Farrow & Ball and causes him to mope around the house in the manner of a consumptive nineteenth century heroine whilst I clean up after him, and the rabbit has a cold. I do love how living with children and animals brings you back to the Dark Ages. I think, in the manner of Horrible Histories, I should probably just make the sign of the cross in toad's blood on their foreheads and say a quick prayer, modern medicine seems to have very little to offer me now that Nurofen Plus has been withdrawn from circulation. I am trying some poor substitute called "Nurodol", but I do not believe in it and neither does my exhausted, constantly grinding jaw.

2. It is very hard, it turns out, to write about infidelity whilst making your characters sympathetic. I dunno. Do they have to be sympathetic? Maybe I can make them all hateful. Oh lord, it is too late even to do that. That burning smell you may be able to detect is my brain surreptitiously setting light to itself to escape from this conundrum. I wish I had chosen to write a book about crime fighting cavies now. Maybe I can just crowbar some crime fighting cavies into the weakest bits of characterisation? Is cavies the plural of cavy? Or are they cavys? All the important questions, right here.

3. I have read some excellent things on the world wide webs recently, notably:

AL Kennedy, whose writing column for the Guardian is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, wrote this nice essay on insomnia and illness and writing for Granta.

A furious Maurice Sendak in the Guardian calling Salman Rushdie a "flaccid fuckhead". I have no particular opinion on Salman Rushdie, but I think this is a world class insult.

The lovely Miss Jones writing about Strictly Come Dancing. I do not really watch SCD, but I did see Russell Grant and her description is bang on and terribly funny.

4. My second hand Dutch is coming on a treat. I can now have a conversation with myself where I ask myself where I live, then say that I live in Mons, then ask where Mons is, then explain that it is in the province of Hainault. This is fabulously useful. I could not, however, say that I am Emma and I live in Brussels and I do not know what region that is in. I can, however, name a large number of sports in Dutch which is also very useful given my passion for all forms of exercise.

5. In order to compensate for my current blogging inadequacy, I have introduced a new sidebar novelty feature, where I tell you what I am wearing every day. It gives me the illusion of productivity and allows you to feel superior since nearly everything I wear is either broken or dirty or just really, really wrong. We'll all get bored of it pretty soon, but for now, it is a scrap of new daily content. If you have any other sidebar suggestions now that I have given up on my feeble attempts to "monetise", do throw them across. I used to do polls - they were quite fun. Maybe I could bring that back? Ooh, maybe a "would you rather.." poll in the manner of that John Burningham story? Hmm. For further thought.

6. What I would buy if I had some money right now:

- some nice flat boots to escape from the tyranny of the M&S patent flat. There are loads in stock at the dodgy discount shoe shop at the Place du Châtelain, including some excellent Prada Sport ones.

- Some of the beautiful black/nude trim flats I saw in Ferragamo.

- some Armani Luminous Silk foundation because my skin looks like, what? Porridge? Porridge with goji berries in, representing the myriad insect bites and burst veins.

- Two new boring black bottoms and two new boring shapeless tops, plus a new sack dress to stop myself being sad about being fat.

- The book recommended here by Irretrievably Broken, because her recommendations are invariably BANG ON, as she is a woman of exquisite taste.

- Lots of scent: Menthe Fraîche from Heeley, because my sample has run out and I miss it terribly, some Frédéric Malle Portrait of a Lady scented body cream because it is massively sensual and delicious, some Serge Lutens Bois de Sépia for more serious days.

- Some Elemis SuperSoak, to eliminate the need for Nurofen Plus.

- A syrup sponge. Ok, I can afford that, but I can't actually FIND it here, and if you think I'm going to start arsing around with suet, you are very much mistaken.

Oh, sorry, hang on, this list is infinite. Why not add yours in the comments.

Leave the house, idiot

2011-09-30T20:08:00.014+02:00

Last night my friend R and I went to a slightly bizarre event on the Brussels equivalent of Bond Street. I have showed you a picture of this place before, noting carefully how on the Brussels equivalent of Bond Street, Tiffany is opposite tawdry fast food chain Quick, and next to the dropping off point for the vans of beggars who sit around the town centre. There are at least two, sometimes more, waffle vans parked on the street corner. It is very aspirational.

I nearly backed out, even though it was my idea. Firstly, because at the moment I look like I have been living in a skip and eating squirrel carrion and empty KFC boxes for months. I have a vague notion I need to wear "clothes", which worries me. I used to have some, I think. Now I just have pyjama trousers and sacklike Cos dresses that make me look like a mid '80s suburban pottery teacher. Secondly, I am fatter than I would ideally like, so even if I had any of these "clothes" I hear so much about, I would not fit into them. Thirdly, I'm having a moderately agoraphobic spell at the moment. Both of the people who used to regularly drag me out of the house have left Brussels, leaving me stagnating in my cosy nest of self-loathing and sagging confidence. On top of that, the freelance thing means I spend my days watching my double chin in my laptop screen as I fail to make any money and it's leaving me a bit .. broken.

(Yes, I am lame, and pathetic, and need to grow up. I can provide a signed and notarised affidavit to this effect if necessary. I got a comment saying something broadly along these lines recently and it was as if the contents of my own head had ghostwritten it themselves)

Anyway, I had a babysitter booked, and I was thoroughly sick of my own company, and R had made her husband come home early so we could go, so I put on a nearly clean sacklike Cos dress and off we went.

This is not a story with a moral, or an amazing redemptive tale, whereby within half an hour of arriving at the party someone had offered me a job sitting next to the tapir enclosure at Antwerp Zoo, writing wry monologues and occasionally testing lipsticks; thereby turning my whole life around.

No, it is more of an aide-memoire to myself to remember that leaving the house is broadly speaking a good thing. It was a rather odd concept, this event: each shop was supposedly serving a different wine, but since you - we - were only invited by 2 shops, we could only, theoretically try two, whereas it would surely have made more sense if you could wander around more. But we had an amusing time, admiring some gorgeous Ferragamo flats (I have tried and failed to find you a picture, and just ended mad with shoe lust) and staring at other attendees, who were extraordinarily dressed up, and included a couple wearing co-ordinating natty shoes pushing four chihuahuas around in a customised pushchair, like so:

It was so peculiar, their writhing nest of tiny dogs in the middle of a high end shoe shop where everyone was drinking champagne in their finery, though no one else seemed to find it anything out of the ordinary. I like to think of this as the Brussels "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple": "When I am an old woman I will take my dogs to luxury boutiques in a buggy and not give a shit what anyone thinks, then I will take them to the Cirio and sit them on my knee and feed them biscuits while I drink seven half and halfs". I aspire to it, though not with chihuahuas. Perhaps ferrets.

There were also some enjoyable dreadful outfits and some very very short men, or possibly my alcohol induced height dysmorphia, where I think I am far taller than I am, had kicked in. R not only charmed us into a shop we were not invited to but which looked more fun, but also proved incredibly deft at hearing the click of a champagne flute at 400 paces and drawing waiters into her orbit and there were some quite nice mini bagel type things and raspberry tarts. When I started to think that placing a sub-par canapé (a sort of cheese biscuit with a grape sliver and some white ... ugh. Stuff) in the matte black box of (matte black) pop socks in the Armani shop would be hilarious, we went home.

It was good fun and my conclusion is that I must go out more, without my adored and terribly missed human crutches. Brussels is full of funny, strange, occasionally disturbing things to do, and when I'm not being a dickhead, I love to go out and find them. It's a bizarrely entertaining place, this city. Even the New York Times says so, innit, so it must be true.

This weekend I am starting well by going to the European Space Center, deep in the Straw Dogs heart of the Ardennes, for a "Mission Discovery" weekend of space themed activities. The Space Center's address is "Rue devant les hêtres", which amuses me. "Street in front of the beech trees". Why not "Rue derrière Pâcquerette et devant le Massey Ferguson de Jean-Henri" while we're at it? Turn left at the one horned Friesian, by the gorse bush that looks like a banana. There is no trace of this street on Google maps, I note.

We are building micro rockets, testing zero gravity, erm, things and sleeping in "space design themed" dormitories (bring your own sheets). "The grey crumbling replica space shuttle looks so much better in harsh sunlight", says Dee, who lives nearby, encouragingly. There is even a bowling trip. I think the children think they are actually going into space, which may prove awkward. "There are no words" said BMF, darkly, when I explained it to him. I promise to report back.

Further mushroom thoughts

2011-09-29T12:03:00.004+02:00

If I had been rewriting the stupid mushroom song for our risk averse times (and yes, I know about the Horse Whisperer guy and I agree mushrooms are a GREAT PERIL, worse than cars and honey badgers and crack cocaine), I don't think I would have gone for the lame picking, then replanting angle. I think my version would have gone something like:

"I met some mushrooms

Big/small/thin/fat/yellow etc etc"

"They were in the market garden of my uncle who grows edible mushrooms for the organic co-operative

Big/small/thin/fat/yellow etc etc" .

"And you must never pick the ones in the forest if you value your kidneys

"Big/small/thin/fat/yellow etc etc"

"And, indeed, are committed to the preservation of woodland bio-diversity

Big/small/thin/fat/yellow etc etc".

"We cooked an ate them as one of our five a day according to WHO Guidelines

Big/small/thin/fat/yellow etc etc"

Why on earth I have not been offered a job writing right-on lyrics for primary school songbooks I have NO idea.

Prog Rock, unsurprisingly, is a mushroom picker. You are not astonished, are you? He would emerge from the dank mist on our rainy Lake District holidays, his hands full of fungi, and place them on the kitchen table. Then he would then get out his "Mushrooms and Toadstools of England and Wales" and pore over them for several hours, before usually declaring them "edible but boring", which I believe was one of the stock phrases the book using in taxonomising mushrooms. "Edible and delicious", "edible and good", "edible but not good", "inedible but not fatal", etc etc. I have asked him to clarify as a matter of urgency.

("Edible but boring" is a good description for everything that emerges from my kitchen, I think)

UPDATE:

Prog Rock responds with typical elegance.

"Actual rubric was less explicit, just "edible", leaving reader to interrogate its silences. This, when read aloud, would be unequivocal".

Mushrooms: non-edible

2011-09-28T21:06:00.005+02:00

I forgot, when discussing mushroom things earlier, that both children have been required to learn a mushroom song whose pleasing stupidity I have been greatly enjoying this week. I say song, but it's more of an incantation, since the "tune" seems only to feature three notes.

"I met some mushrooms", it goes, improbably. "White ones yellow ones small ones fat ones thin ones long ones short ones". Etcetera. All the mushrooms, quoi. We get the picture.

Then there is some prolonged business about picking the mushrooms and taking them home to maman in a panier followed by another jaunty taxonomy of mushrooms (big, small, yellow, very small, zzzzzzzz). Whatever. The whole thing is unspeakably sordid. What you do in your spare time with spored fungi is of no concern to me, mushroom song protagonist.

The bit I like, though, comes at the end, and I strongly suspect to be a recent health and safety inspired addition.

C'est défendu de les manger alors je les ai replanté!

It is forbidden to eat them, so I planted them again!

Oh? Ah bon? So why did you pick them in the first place, you utter sap? AND WHY ARE WE SINGING ABOUT THIS, THIS ABORTIVE NATURE DESTROYING MISSION?

It is a far cry from Park Grove primary, where if memory serves, we mainly learnt Flanders and Swann numbers.

In other news, rabbit/canine tension is in a period of uneasy détente for the moment. Initially when weepette ventures into the back yard, Satan chases him around. He is most insistent about this, the chasing, even when weepette has only come out for a quiet pee. Weepette runs away, looking appalled, then comes back, as if drawn, against his will, into Satan's orbit, only to be chased away again. Occasionally they try and sniff each other, an enterprise which is entirely doomed to failure due to their height difference, and once, in an act of astonishing daring, Weepette stole Satan's carrot and sat with it defiantly between his front paws for 30 seconds before giving up in terror and slinking back into the house. When they are not busy with this farcical routine, they seem to have settled into a fairly amicable cohabitation, thus:

Sweet, though personally I would not allow the dark lord that close to my defenceless, recumbent form.

This is all I have for you today, pet drivel and an impotent rant about mushrooms. However I can now spell 'young woman' in Dutch, so it wasn't an entirely wasted day (it was, really it was).

Secret

2011-09-28T00:28:00.012+02:00

Another day in thrall to my pre-pubescent overlords, due to an entirely spurious school closure. Ok, it's in the calendar this time, but fête de la communauté française? Eh? As my friend R noted, pertinently, the actual French community of, you know, France (and its Belgian representation, the Lycée and the embassy) was still at work. Indeed, only a tiny fragment of Brussels seems to take this holiday and as an ignorant outsider and a layperson, I would have thought that a public holiday only celebrated, and celebrating, one half of the highly sensitive linguistic divide wasn't the most brilliant idea, but you know, whatever. What do I know? Nothing, except how to say that I live in Mons in Dutch (which I don't, but Angélique Dupont, Robald's new tormentor in the Dutch textbook, does).

Just as an aside, do you know what Mons is called in Dutch? Bergen. It's not even within wild guess-hazarding distance, is it? It sounds like it's in Norway. Perhaps it is. This means that if you are looking for Mons, you might quite credibly end up completely lost in some bit of Flanders, unable to find ANY signs for Mons because they all say "Bergen". You can see why Belgium struggles for common purpose and cohesion when it can't even call medium sized towns a name recognisable in both languages. I do realise that these things were probably not decided by committee around a table in Laeken sometime in the 1840s shortly after the European Nation State Creation Sub-Committee invented Belgium, but for my own personal pleasure, I like to imagine that is precisely what happened.

"And this blob here, in the middle to the right, the one with doing the marvellous things with steel and so on? What are you calling it, Walloons?"

"We thought, 'Liège', your majesty".

"Liège. I see. And you, Flemings?"

"Luik".

"Hmm. A bold choice, but I'll allow it".

Whilst I am complaining about that, an honourable mention for Mechelen, a beautiful medieval town with a fucked up name. Firstly, Belgium, two separate towns called Mechelen and Machelen in vaguely the same area? Asking for trouble. Have you ever been on a Belgian motorway in a tiny, failing Japanese lawnmower-car in the general area of Mech/Machelen looking for the Mechelen exit? Because I have, and it sucked. Secondly, calling Mechelen "Malines" in French. I don't know what Leopold I was smoking in my imaginary Laeken naming scenario, but this is almost as terrible as the Mons-Bergen conundrum. I mean, really.

I interviewed someone from China a few months ago who said he spent a miserable, frightening half hour at Brussels station on his arrival from Shanghai trying to work out how to get to this "Mons" place he had been told to find, when the only thing on the timetable was some frightening hybrid called Mons-Bergen. It's ok, the story ended happily, he's been living here for thirty years now (probably because he can't work out how to escape due to the impenetrable multilingual signage, but nevermind).

Simplistic geo-politico-linguistic digression over.

Things we have done today:

- Printed out many pictures of mushrooms for some ill-defined school project. Wondered why a an edible mushroom should be called Trompette de la Mort and whether the Tuemouche in fact tues mouches. Fingers also taught me the word for a mushroom's roots, but I have already forgotten it, not to mention being somewhat puzzled since I did not believe they had roots. I liked this part of the day since it involved me lying on the spare bed and occasionally right clicking on an image, while they fluttered around the printer, thrilled at the miracle of the rickety HP occasionally deigning to spit out a lightly chewed sheet of A4. The wonder of childhood.

- I undermined a rant about the correct use of capital letters by attributing the wrong gender to the word "majuscule", drawing generalised ridicule.

- Bought 4 cactuses for €4,60 and made them "clothes", out of old socks. Beatrice, this is basically your fault for knitting your cactus a jumper, and mine for mentioning it to my highly suggestible children. Not only is the floor covered in sock offcuts, but I am covered in cactus lacerations. It turns out getting a cactus to wear a balaclava is harder than one might intuitively imagine.

- Went to Ikea for no good reason at ALL. Left with 2 alarm clocks and a plush head of broccoli. There were no Daims. Let us pause for a second. NO. DAIMS. Has Ikea fallen out with Kraft, or whoever produces the Daim bar? How can this be? Why have there been no riots on the streets of Stockholm? Or is this simply an Anderlecht supply chain issue? That seems, on balance, more likely.

- Made the worst bread in the history of bread (and we have previous on this), bread so horrible we had to throw it away. Bread that looked like the ghost of my past come to haunt me, an eery amalgam of an Alligator (York's premier hippyshop) wholemeal loaf from 1983 and a misshapen stone gargoyle from York minster. As heavy as the latter. As dense, and full of what appear to be woodchips, as the former.

- Discovered Fingers has a tooth growing at a jaunty angle out of an improbable part of his palate. HAI ORTHODONIST.

- Watched the worst, cheapest most pointless programme on Guinness World Records, which seems to be ancient clips from across the world of people being underwhelming at pointless things. None of them dates from after about 1992 and they all feature lame-tastic voiceovers because of the language issues. It is really very, very bad, a close second only to "Hilarious Home Videos", which is like all the worst clips You've Been Framed rejected during the '80: fuzzy, frequently boring, terrible clothes. The children adore both of these programmes but they reduce me to the full high court judge in seconds.

"WHY? Why is that person jumping in and out of a pair of pants? What is the POINT? This is the most spectacularly stupid thing I have seen since ... well, since you made me watch the man breaking lavatory seats with his head yesterday".

The secret (that I hardly dare whisper) about these boys at the moment, is that they are lovely. Ok, they tease each other, and they don't listen, they lose their coats every sodding week and they spread pants, and Lego and biscuit wrappers and mangas wherever they go, but I love this phase, these ages. They are full of humour and curiosity and they seem to learn exponentially, like that thrilling phase when babies first start speaking and every day floods of words start pouring out, startling and wonderful, revealing a whole person you didn't quite know before. They have ideas, and they go off and execute them with an exuberant, blokeish confidence I'd love to have, even if they do leave a trail of water and iron filings, soil and shrivelled conkers behind them and show an unhealthy interest in Stanley knives. They need me far less, but they still like to have me around and so far, I don't mind being edged, ever so slightly, out of the centre of their world; I'm enjoying watching it all unfold. When it all starts to accelerate, I won't be as sanguine, I know.

Even so, I am quite excited to find out what they get up to next.

Tea making, perhaps? I could get behind that.

Rabbit don't care

2011-09-26T13:13:00.012+02:00

On Friday the children were chucked out of the gulag unjustly early, in some kind of unofficial wildcat day off type action, and we were left to roam the streets getting bored of each other. Having exhausted board games, a trip to the horrible toy shop and some light bickering, we washed up at around 3 in the parc du caca. Just us, a gang of truanting teens with a tiny joint between eight and a couple of semi-feral Staffies, an unfortunately garrulous lunatic, the entirely silent, sad man with the Great Dane, and a liberal sprinkling of dog turds. The usual crowd.

Slouching ten paces behind me as ever, I hear Lashes call out with unusual animation (he's very languid at the moment).

"Un lapin!"

"Where?" We look round. He's pointing to one of the scrubby parc du caca "flower"beds. I go closer, squinting.

"There, look!"

Sure enough, a gigantic black rabbit is methodically chewing its way around the decrepit herbacious border. It seems entirely indifferent to the fact that it is surrounded by canines that would have been banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act in the UK and bored teenagers. Indifferent to the certain peril that surely awaits it at the hands of the slavering Great Dane.

"What on earth is it doing there? Has it escaped?"

"Hmm. I wonder if someone abandoned it?" On closer inspection, the gigantic black rabbit does not appear to be in the first flush of youth. Under its gigantic jowls the black fur is greying, and its eyes are slightly rheumy. Not that this seems to bother it in the slightest. It is making an excellent start on the beech hedge, working on the overhanging branches.

"Noooooon, pourquoi?"

"I don't know, really. Maybe they had to move and they couldn't look after it?" I'm trying to put the best possible complexion on things. Maybe he has a HIDEOUS, expensive disease? That seems more likely. He looks a pleasant enough old gentleman, really though, I think. Not sure why I'm assuming it's male. He just seems quite .. blokeish. I could be entirely wrong. Maybe it's just a butch female.

"We can't leave it here! It'll get eaten!"

I'm not wholly convinced that it would be that way round. The rabbit seems to have the eating thing pretty much sewn up around here. Even so, they have a point, regrettably.

"No, I suppose you're right".

We catch the rabbit without difficulty. It doesn't really try to escape, just sort of sits, world-wearily, as I pick it up, scratching me a couple of times just to show me it can, if it wants to. We sit down on the grass and examine it. It is a rabbit, without many distinguishing features, we conclude. It lunges, suddenly for Lashes, and bites him twice.

"Ow!" He's laughing, but also slightly shocked. I'm not shocked. I am recovering memories of my own rabbit, a miserable, bad tempered bastard who spent its life trying to rape the guinea pig, and methodically lopping the heads of all my mother's flowers. My attempts to get it to show jump over garden canes, or walk to the park on a lead, were doomed to failure from the start, since all Big Ears (he was inherited already named. My father's rabbit was called Heraclites). Instead, it just sort of lurked in the back garden, a looming, furious presence, for a ludicrously long time. I am sorry to say that the prevailing emotion in our household when it finally died, aged, what I can only imagine is about 350 in rabbit years, was relief.

The rabbit gives up on its escape attempt and starts to eat my trouser leg.

"Oh god, we're going to have to take it home, aren't we?" I'm not thrilled at the prospect, but it doesn't seem fair to leave an obviously domestic animal to fend for itself on the mean streets of Uccle.

"OUUUUAAAIIIIIS!" The children, however, are thrilled the afternoon has taken a turn for the .. peculiar.

"We'll put up some signs to say we've found it, in case anyone is looking for it". I'm not hopeful.

We carry our prize home, well, I do. He sits in my arms, indifferently, like a medium sized sack of potatoes. He is moulting like fuck, and my entire nose seems to be full of fine, sneeze-inducing hair. I am reminded of the story of my father, then living in the Highlands, giving my mother a rabbit to take home with her on the bus to Glasgow, to the puzzlement of all the (many) drunks on her route to Coatbridge. I am genetically pre-destined to end up with an impromptu rabbit, clearly. Rabbits are the perennial disappointment of the pet kingdom, I think, possibly unfairly. My sister-in-law had a gigantic house rabbit for years. It was sold to her as a dwarf lop-eared. It turned out to be neither.

We put him in the garden, where he hops straight over to the most decorative of all our fairly crappy plants, and starts eating it.

"Ouuuaiiiis! He's happy!"

The children lie rapt in the garden for several hours staring at the rabbit, and offering it things from the kitchen. Carrots, celery, rice cakes, cornflakes. It eats everything, and refuses all gestures of affection, loping just out of reach, dragging the carrots with it. The weepette looks on, appalled. Occasionally, when our backs are turned, he makes a sort of run for the rabbit, as if some vestige of instinct is emerging. When he gets closer, however, he entirely loses track of what he was doing and just sort of stares at it, hopelessly, fearfully. We tell him off and he slinks back into the house to stare out of the window at the interloper. The rabbit reacts to the occasional dog peril by hopping neatly under the bench where it sits, looking superior and not remotely bothered.

"Rabbit don't care!" says Lashes, laughing. He's referencing the honey badger, with whom I feel the rabbit would feel some kind of spiritual kinship. I do quite like its total indifference. It's the anti-dog; self-contained, entitled, with a capybara-esque expression of utter superiority. I don't think it likes us, though it will grudgingly accept the contents of our fridge.

So it continues throughout the weekend. My whole respiratory tract feels like it is full of rabbit hair and I can't stop sneezing. Every, but every, time I look out in the garden, the rabbit is eating. He seems to have an astonishingly dedicated approach to eating: everything that used to have a stem now no longer has one. Everything that had a flower is now trampled down. Bare stalks litter the flower beds as a stark reminder of our new tenant. Even when I look out at nearly midnight, the rabbit is there, sitting in the middle of the grass, chewing methodically. He's so big and black, and implacable, it's a little bit unnerving. I am starting to fear we have adopted some kind of demon pet, who will not give up until the garden is reduced to scorched earth. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and .. Satan. He's probably immortal. I bet he outlives me. And probably eats my corpse.

No one, unsurprisingly, has responded to our appealing notice, devised and written by the children and posted around the neighbourhood.

"Rabbit found. Big. Black. Old" it reads, enticingly. The picture they have taken to accompany it makes the rabbit look piebald, which is also helpful.

Warning: does not ressemble actual rabbit

We go to the pet shop and buy hay and rabbit food. It is unsurprisingly far dearer than I remember, from my days at the Minster Pet Shop, staring wistfully at the chinchillas and buying hamster after boring hamster. I refuse requests to buy a rabbit leash. Once bitten, twice shy: rabbits do not walk to heel.

"Oh!" says Lashes peering into the pet shop cages. "The baby rabbits looks so cute!" There's a sort of note of regret in his voice, I think, at introducing Kali the dark destroyer into our garden.

"Well you can't have one, I'm afraid". Satan/Kali would probably eat them. "No more animals until you're ten. And not a reticulated python then. I haven't changed my mind".

So. It appears we have a rabbit living under a bench in our back garden. We are not really calling it Satan (or Kali). I'm resisting giving it a name at all, actually, in the faint hope that someone will have second thoughts and reclaim it.

Warning: photograph may present distorted impression of benign cuteness

What would you call a gigantic, elderly, ravenous, supercilious rabbit?

Oh my god it's a double rainbow

2011-09-21T21:19:00.003+02:00

My neighbour took this amazing picture of our street. Ours is the one swathed in green polythene, which is always reassuring when the sky looks like that.

The smooth, smooth silicone baking sheets of home

2011-09-21T12:16:00.010+02:00

Wednesday rarely brings much productivity, and today is no exception, so I wrote this while I should have been doing other things. Ready for further adventures in freelance inactivity? If not, save yourselves while you still can, and study the mating habits of the leopard slug (courtesy of Simon).

1. The dog waited until I left the house and ate my Caramel today. I only went to the post box and came back to find him licking the wrapper with the most perfunctory, token display of shame. I can only imagine he was quite literally sitting and waiting for me to leave, having already worked out where I had hidden my afternoon treat. He's a bit like having the worst flatmate ever. "Oh, I thought it was mine, sorry". "Oh, you weren't saving that were you? I'll get you another. When my giro comes through. Oh, just leave the washing up, I'll do it later. I'll have a tea if you're making one, thanks. We're out of milk though".

I was less furious, however, than I would have been, say, on a day when I hadn't eaten ten salted caramels with that demented "if I eat them all, there will be none left to tempt me" logic.

2. I tidied my baking supplies last night (yup, wild times). This is a classic soothing activity of mine. I love nothing better that a neat pile of paper cake cases, graded by size and theme. The chaos of the world, the state of the Eurozone, the plight of the ginger seal; all recede momentarily. Anyway, it transpires that far from evoking a calm, frugal orderly world of fresh scones, my baking cupboard is evidence of a dangerous compulsion of Elton John proportions. I discovered: 13 types of edible glitter. 57 novelty biscuit cutters. 4 loaf tins. 14 types of food colouring. A whole box of Christmas baking supplies, including: special paper cases, the rancid plastic pine trees and Fimo snowman of my childhood Christmas cakes, a silver robin, three sizes of reindeer cookie cutter, plus the normal bell/angel/star/bauble/holly leaf cutter selection. I kept expecting to open a box and find Jane Asher in there, where I had imprisoned her some months earlier. Except for the fact that she is all over the papers at the moment, so either she has her Blackberry in the cupboard with her, or the newspapers are full of LIES, and that surely can't be, can it?

I wonder about this baking equipment thing. I bake about once a month on average, I reckon, habitually using the same four recipes (Nigella brownies, Trish's sponge, random cookie recipe from the interweb, Hummingbird Bakery stupidly delicious and easy cupcakes even though admitting to liking cupcakes is as bad as, I don't know, liking James Blunt or something). I watch the Great British Bake Off much as I might watch someone trying to ascend Everest solo - fascinating, but not remotely relevant. 'Cor, a croquembouche cone. Hard core'.

On some level, then, this hoarding of supplies is plainly Not About Cake. Rather, I have imbued baking with some kind of ritual importance, so that in my head it is a proxy for all manner of nurturing, and organisational skills. A bit like my friend the barrister telling me that if you had house plants they wouldn't take your kids into care. If I have baking supplies, I must be a Proper Mother. Things I have an unearthly respect for that also fall into this category:

- sufficient numbers of pairs of scissors

- not just sellotape, but parcel tape AND masking tape

- a sewing kit which is more than just one of those stolen cardboard pieces of crap from a hotel

- a selection of wrapping paper and cards

- many Christmas decorations of great antiquity and most importantly, one of those Scandinavian fabric advent calendars with pockets, where you put sweets in each pocket. I gave mine away in a competition on here a couple of years ago and have been trying desperately to replace it.

The only one of these I actually have is the scissors, but in my head, this is what a "proper" home should have. It doesn't come from my own childhood, where the only scissors were Prog Rock's left handed ones, and no one baked except on birthdays. Ok, Prog Rock did own, and use, a darning mushroom, so perhaps he has left quite a deep imprint of what a real home looks like. I don't know, the inside of my head is an oddly reactionary, 1950s sort of place sometimes.

3. Whilst making terrible, halting progress on my edits of doom (which basically amount to: DO IT ALL AGAIN, BUT LESS SHIT THIS TIME, KTHXBAI), I did at least work out what my absolute ideal career would be. I have been having a considerable amount of professional angst, recently, but I now know what I should be doing, so I can call off the pitiful self-flagellation. What I need to work towards is becoming a writer in residence in a zoo. I have found little evidence that such a position exists anywhere in the world, but I don't really see why that should stop me. Having recently discovered real positions both as an intern for "EUROPATAT, representing the interests of the fresh potato industry" and as a reporter for Poultry World, reality seems considerably stranger than fiction. Moreover, I would happily do it for free, in return, perhaps, for the occasional cup of tea and slice of coffee and walnut from the cafe and a pile of straw in the tapir house to sleep on. Go on ZSL, you know you want me.

Let's throw this open to the floor. Either:

- What arbitrary thing makes a house/flat a Proper Home for you?

- What is your dream job that does not actually exist?

Eurostar Helpful Suggestions

2011-09-18T15:25:00.011+02:00

Kapibarasan, beady with disapproval

Eurostar have just texted me asking for comments on their service, which is nice as I have many comments, which I outlined at dull length to them.

(My message went on in this vein for several paragraphs).

I basically love the Eurostar, it seems like a small miracle of the modern world that it only takes me two hours to go from Brussels to London, in great, peaceful comfort. The seats are starting to look quite shabby, yes, and their pricing is out of control, but apart from that it is an astonishingly good and efficient service 90% of the time. The remaining 10% is a black hole of catastrophe as the last two winters have demonstrated, but I did not dwell on those dark, dark times in my response, because I am British, a fact Eurostar relies upon to keep anarchy from breaking out entirely when it is keeping a train full of Christmas travellers prisoner in a metal box in a hole in the ground with only half a stale waffle and a sachet dehydrated Carte d'Or coffee granules between 300.

I also resisted the temptation to ask for one coach to be turned into a petting zoo in the Bompas & Parr 'rabbit café' mode, or indeed to text them the single word “owls”. Instead, these are my suggestions:

1. Segregate the middle managers

A “no corporate bullshit speak” coach where no one is allowed to cock on to their companions or down the phone about how well the kick off meeting went and how busy the next three weeks are looking, or how they've set up a call with the Dusseldorf team because they really need their arses kicking. Maybe seat pockets in these coaches could be equipped with a laminated card you could hand to corporate miscreants that would read “No one gives a shit about the third quarter sales results”. Perhaps they should also have a "corporate espionage" coach where you can listen at luxuriant length to details of the third quarter sales results, and the problems in the Swindon office.

Other coaches needed:

(i) The chatty American senior citizen coach

(ii) The stag/hen party coach

(iii) The bile-inducing beautiful, glossy haired, glamorous job, Euro-fillies coach. I imagine this one would prove popular with gentlemen travellers.

2. Self-opening doors

Because I hate that thing where I’m the person nearest to the door as the train draws into the station. The train always does this ‘I’ve stopped, no actually, I’ve nearly stopped, I’ll just shuffle forward a little. Ok, now I’ve stopped but I haven’t actually done that thing where the whole train sighs and the door release button works’. So Either I wait, and worry that everyone behind me believes I am a halfwit who does not know how to open the door, when in fact I am just WAITING for the moment when the door release button works, or I press it pre-emptively and look like a tit. Take door release out of the hands of passengers, Eurostar. It worked for London Underground, it can work for you.

(This, I realise, is the kind of anecdote people in group therapy were always telling, and I would nod along knowing EXACTLY how it feels to agonise internally about how the way you nodded when the man in the shop asked if you needed a bag could be interpreted as cold and dismissive. Group therapy was good for confirming that you are not the only one experiencing those kinds of thoughts, albeit the others are in the basement of a private psychiatric hospital in north west London).

3. Decoration

Give us something to look at in the tunnel when we cannot even play with our telephones and are alone with the thought that a gazillion tonnes of water sits a few feet above our heads, ready to crush us at any moment. Maybe a nice illuminated mural of fish outside? Some kind of son et lumière? Get Jean Michel Jarre involved. Actually, don't.

4. Get rid of that fucking statue

A ballot box into which we can drop suggestions for something to replace that godawful statue at St Pancras that looks like Jack Vettriano decided to try his witless hand at sculpture. I HATE IT. It is irredeemably naff. I would suggest a gigantic, deformed pigeon in its place, angled so it looks like it is swooping towards your head in low, erratic flight. What would you like?

5. Lavatory matters

Remove shelves from onboard loos, so that I cannot forget my possessions in there like I usually do. Also, what is it with that odd mirror configuration in the loos? If I wanted a slightly vertigo inducing view of my own arse, well. I don't know what exactly, but I DON'T and nor do most other people, I think. Confine such mirror madness to the Euro-filly coach.

6. On-board parlour games

Once passenger per train - selected randomly on the basis of seat number - should be required to dress up as Hercule Poirot and parade up and down the train asking the others searching questions.

7. Improved retail opportunities

Less crap shops on the post-passport control side of the terminals. No one wants to go to Caffe Sodding Nero, it is foul. At least the old Waterloo terminal had a bagel shop. Bring one of those back. As for Brussels, Pierre Marcolini is all very well if you are, say, Peter Mandelson and you have forgotten to buy presents for your serfs, but you need to sell a kidney for an 80 gramme bar of Peruvian Civet Grand Cru. Cheap and cheerful gift corner please: less Edition Limitée ganache, more Manneken Pis corkscrews (yes, you can get a few in the paper shop, but I want MORE) and sickeningly sweet Leonidas Type 2 Diabetes selection boxes.

8. A proper bloody loyalty scheme for the Eurostar lumpenproletariat

Even though you do not let us, the regular passengers who do not pay your ridiculous full-whack business rate ticket prices, earn enough points to reach Lounge Nirvana, the place where you serve roasted swan on a bed of shredded stagiaires, and celestial harps play the Ode to Joy, I think we deserve some recognition. So, I am suggesting that after 20 trips, we should be allowed to have a badge that reads "Regular traveller. Do not stand in front of me and faff for fifteen minutes looking for your passport or I WILL TUT".

I think that covers it. Anything else, Eurostar travellers?

I pine for the simple summer days of being bored witless (I don't)

2011-09-16T11:17:00.005+02:00

I swear (inaccurate granny talk alert) when I was at primary school, the full extent of my mum's involvement in my school life was putting an orange Club biscuit in the pocket of my Clothkits pinafore and restocking my supply of Pullein-Thompson pony-lit at the library once a week. Now, my evenings and early mornings are spent running around in small circles trying to satisfy the gulag's stringent requirements.

It would be fine if I was comfortable with minor failure, with 'just about good enough'. But my inner joyless harridan and overachiever wants it all to be PERFECT. We control what we can, I suppose, when other things are chaos, and I like to sharpen the pencils and put the right things in the right envelope on the right day. The gulag always manages to outsmart me though, blind-siding me with a last minute demand for 17 used stamps and a 3 metre length of unpatterned oilcloth. I am very relieved the weekend is coming and we can revert to our natural state of lying around watching Steve Backshaw over-enthuse at wildlife and eating crisps and ignoring each other. Though who knows what fresh hell the homework diary may bring? A request to invade Holland, perhaps, or to construct a particle accelerator from cereal boxes and empty washing up liquid bottles.

This week:

1. Another 8 cahiers to be covered in the plastic film of parental punishment. We have run out of plastic film. I am not going near any stationery shops because the last time I tried, the queue stretched right to the back of the shop, filled with furious women searching for cahiers sans marge and farde à glissières and other esoterica. It's a film plastifiant stand-off.

2. A 7 stanza poem about a monster called Arthur for the whole family to learn, which Lashes has drawn as a sort of dumpy purple depressive, like Barney the dinosaur on Mogadon. He got 0/10 for copying the text off the board, which was an excellent start.

"Ses grandes cornes

Ses griffes pointues

Son nez crochu,

Tout lui donne un air morne".

"Do you even know what morne means, Lashes?"

"Non"

"Well, it's that face you're making right now".

The poem rote learning experience is, I find, greatly enhanced by your children making fun of your accent.

3. A much shorter poem about a pelican with toothache, plainly written by someone on crack.

4. A request to draw an apple, and a rabbit, with a ruler. Why would anyone do that?

5. Request for €42 for textbooks, €15 for Tutankhamen exhibition, advance request for €250 for seaside language gulag in October for Lashes (how do you say 'second stage hypothermia' in Dutch anyway?) and twice €65 for skool dinners, chiz. This week, I note with interest that my children had Satan meatballs. Oh, alright, Seitan. Either way, I think this is culturally insensitive to children of French origin, for whom meat substitutes are indeed the work of the dark lord. Their father is horrified and heading off into the woods to kill a horse for them to gnaw on, I think.

6. Persistent anxiety about the curse of Tutankhamen, prompted by Howard Carter video. Impervious to all arguments about how far Uccle is from the tomb of the boy king.

7. Barrage of "facts" about the Nile crocodile, also gleaned from a video. The staff seem to be easing themselves gently into the school year with lots of videos, and frankly, who can blame them.

"It weighs 50 kilos! Or 500. Or 150. I might have got that wrong, the zeroes".

"I see. Anything else stick with you?"

"It has warm or cold blood".

"Good stuff".

8. Request to provide 2 swimming hats, a passport photo, three kitchen rolls and a plant pot. No further elucidation forthcoming.

9. Ninety thousand spellings to learn in two languages.

10. Some maths. I just ignore that, especially when it involves the freakish lips. "Yes, that looks right to me. Have you checked it? Good, good".

11. I can now introduce myself to someone in Dutch, and say I am pleased to meet them, but only if their name is "Angelique Dupont". This would be perfect if I only ever met characters from French textbooks.

12. On top of this, Lashes is causing me great mortification by insisting I find him someone to teach him Japanese (for manga watching/reading purposes, obviously, rather than the simple love of learning). You can't imagine what a pushy parent twat you look trying to find a Japanese tutor for your nine year old. Of course, I know that within about a week of me finally finding someone, he will go off the idea, but who wants to be the parent who refuses their child's bright eyed, lisping request to learn a language? He could probably shop me to social services or apply for his emancipation or something.

Ah, modern parenting. Fill in your own anecdotes about a childhood spent sharing one copy of the Sporting Post and a clog between seven in the comments.

Mystery

2011-09-14T09:20:00.015+02:00

I went to meet Beatrice for lunch yesterday, passing through courtesy of Michael O'Leary's airborne celtic Megabus. I was wearing: grey woolly tights, red patent shoes, grey woolly jumper with t-shirt underneath, black wool shorts, short thick black wool jacket, and black pashmina (I know, I know, but every year my stepmother buys me a scarf, and this is just one of the many, from the foothills of the Ukkel scarf mountain. Also, it is cosy, I have a cold and I feel fairly sure no one will ever mistake me for one of those patrician, long-limbed, Middleton-esque sloaney pony types of girl, since I look like I have escaped from a particularly troubled period of the Dark Ages, before the local farrier took up dentistry. Today I also looked like a local mammoth had taken up residence on my head, since I have lost my straightening irons). I was, basically, keeping the European sheep and goat industry going. The Wool Council should have given me a loyalty card. The Moth Council already have.

I spotted Beatrice on the other side of the Place St Boniface and shouted her over. We kissed hello and then paused, stood apart and appraised each other incredulously.

"You're wearing a winter COAT!".

"Oh my god, you're wearing SANDALS! Are you mad? And a t-shirt!" She was. Strappy, open sandals, a t-shirt, jeans. She was all ready for the rosé-terrasse-salad kind of lunch, whilst I was very much thinking steak-frites, verre de rouge - dark feutré brasserie.

That is the kind of week it is. Mi-figue, mi-raisin (which makes no sense in this context because both those things grow at the same time). We compromised on inside at a Thai place. By halfway through lunch, I was sweating into my tightly knit wool cocoon, and she was covered in goosebumps.

Anyway, apart from this gripping disquisition on the weather, which I know is precisely the kind of thing you were aching to read, I need to share a Mystery with you.

A little over a year ago, I received this, posted through the letterbox without further explanation or information:

It says something a bit like "you need to build on solid foundations".

This bit says "a ninety two year old lady made this card, hoping you would like it. Have a nice day".

Last Friday, my friend Valérie, who lives on the other side of town, got this:

Hers says something like "nothing is impossible if you believe".

I viewed it as faintly sinister, Valérie as a random act of kindness, which says everything you need to know about our relative degrees of cynicism, sadly. However, I would note that in my post on the topic I made some unrelated but prescient remarks about John Galliano. Sort of.

WHAT IS GOING ON? Who is the mysterious nonagenarian benefactor with a large collection of stickers? How has she not aged since last July? Or is there some kind of pensioner sweatshop in Woluwe St Lambert churning them out? Have any other Brussels residents received similar? I need answers. Please assist in any way you can.

Alternative reasons to move to Brussels

2011-09-12T22:25:00.004+02:00

There are many reasons to move to Brussels. Shut up, there are.

1. Economic performance of Belgium in percentage growth terms is currently oustripping that of the US, UK, Germany, etc. This is attributed by several reputable commentators to Belgium not having a government. Go figure.

2. Get THE owl mug of the season before it's even in stock at the V&A.

(courtesy of Hunting & Collecting, Brussels premier fey hipster destination retail outlet, where I once saw, and surreptitiously photographed, this:

a "hairbrush", as in, a brush topped with hair. Bleeeeeh.)

Do not be too harsh on what I accept is my entirely unnecessary cup buying. I literally haven't bought anything but food, household cleaning materials and fournitures scolaires for about three months. I will be returning to my Cif and cornflakes ways immediately.

3. Excellent quality universal health care, including, in my personal experience:

- ambulance collection when you faint on a tram, thus: fall over, nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw, gurney, oh, you're fine now, nevermind.

- arse x-ray when you fall over in the street. Technician will do relatively well at not laughing as they 'position' you and your damaged cocyx.

- amazingly nice hospital café where you might actually go voluntarily and which sells Pierre Marcolini chocolate. For health reasons, of course.

- A&E departments which can rapidly, cheerfully, fairly brusquely restitch your child in under an hour or your money back (not the last bit).

- compensatory morphine when they leave you in the fracture room by mistake for 7 hours when you are too immobile to escape and too British to call for help.

- Benzodiazepines prescribed as a little treat for migraine sufferers.

4. If you have a child, it will be sent to the Côte d'Or factory for patriotic indoctrination purposes. They will admire giant vats of melted chocolate ("the size of that HOUSE. Turned on its side") and watch a "really boring" video about chocolate. They will design their own chocolate wrapper to put on their own bar of chocolate. But! Then, better still, they will be sent home with "a gift package to discover with your family". Clearly, this is the kind of cynical, brand building exercise one would expect from the evil Kraft empire. However, I am now in possession of a family sized bar of Côte d'Or's Sistine Chapel of industrial chocolate, the mythic Chocolat au Lait aux Amandes Caramelisées avec une Pointe de Sel so my ethical objections are temporarily set aside. (Incidentally, I am led to believe that having a baby in Belgium is something like spending a fortnight at luxury spa, in the manner of Chewton Glen or similar, though sadly I have no experience of this and am willing to be contradicted)

5. Bobbi Brown is finally arriving at Cosmeticary, which means no more bulk importing of Caviar Ink gel eyeliner.

6. The collection of anatomical wax models at the Université Libre de Bruxelles medical museum.

7. Hours of fun imagining alternative Mannekin Pis outfits, viz:

- velociraptor

- Maman from Chez Maman (actually, Maman should probably get an entry all to herself in 'reasons to move to Brussels 'see a grumpy middle aged man in American Tan tights stumping around lip synching half-heartedly on top of a bar in a tiny sauna where you may be imprisoned against your will')

- Darth Vader

-Pygmy jerboa

(Though frankly, nothing I can come up with would be more bizarre than the real ones. Nelson Mandela, anyone? "Tibetan monk?")

8. Excellent employment opportunities in old age as a dame pipi

9. You can always be vague about where you live. "Europe", or "on the continent" are good answers, I find.

How would you lure someone do move to where you live?

Desk

2011-09-09T10:17:00.001+02:00

So, I have a desk now. Look, here it is.

Deceptive professionalism

I can't actually use it at the moment because Prog Rock is asleep in there, so I am sitting at Lashes' desk, on a tiny, hard, Ikea spinny chair, surrounded by Lego, mangas, Nerf pellets and discarded socks. It is horrible in here, horrible. I also suspect there must be a bag of rotting conkers in here somewhere, given the smell.

The view

Even so, I thought I might tell you what's on my tragically inaccessible new (ish) desk.

This was a gift from my adoptive gay son (go and look at his beautiful website, I have just spent twenty minutes clicking around it dreamily). It is a small fragment of a Grayson Perry pot in a sort of reliquary. I completely love it, it is almost as good as an ACTUAL DRIED OUT SAINT'S FINGER in a reliquary, which would be my dream possession (along with a miniature Shetland pony).

These are the only books I felt I really needed on my desk at all times. There is a stack of ancient, orange spine Penguin PG Wodehouse next to the desk too, but there were too many to actually fit on it.

This tin - now full of boring cables and other techno-rubble - was the cake tin of my childhood, so I can almost taste the jelly diamond topped lemon curd sponge when it catches my eye. Look, you can still see traces of sellotape from the last time Prog Rock made me a birthday cake and carefully transported it across the channel in a Sainsbury's bag for life. I love the pattern, love love love it. It reminds me of my mum's Biba babydoll nightie, which was like that, but trimmed with a wide band of black lace. We never saw her wear it, it lived in the cupboard admired and occasionally taken out for fancy dress, a relic of a time long before we existed.

My great friend Violet gave me both of these beautiful birds at various times. She is the best present giver of all time. The big Palo Samko bird, I had coveted for a million years and stared at daily on various deco websites. The little fat bird, who is beautifully round and heavy and sits in your hand in a very comforting way, is made out of Thames clay.

My mug came from the Cotswold Farm Park, which qualifies as one of my happy places, filled as it is with furious goats and small strokable things. The stapler, well. it is a stapler with eyes, I'm not proud, but I do like it.

The glass puffer fish has no special significance, it is just a tiny glass puffer fish from the local hippy toy shop, where Fingers does cutting and sticking classes on a Wednesday. I have been repeatedly ruined by that place and its desirable tiny fripperies. There was an owl too, but I'm not sure where it went.

While I was sorting my desk out (proxy for work), I found something Lashes had made for me, which made me smile.

'Birds for mum'. It's a sort of handmade envelope, decorated front and back with cartoon birds, filled with bird stuff.

It includes "le perroket" (sic):

Perroket

And these, which were on a sheet headed "Fout du scait", which is a very approximately spelled "Mad skaters". I love them.

My boy knows what I like. Also, it reminds me of Albie the Skateboarding owl, which is how I met B, when he sent me a link to this ridiculous Folkestone-based, low speed avian comedy clip.

Ok, I hear Prog Rock stirring, I am going to try and reclaim my space.

What do you have on your desk?

Five tiny triumphs

2011-09-06T14:13:00.003+02:00

1. I defeat the forces of calcium carbonate

For the first time in several years I am drinking a cup of tea without each mouthful coming with a teaspoon of suspended limescale. Man, if I had known the obscure satisfaction of descaling the kettle before, I would have being doing it obsessively.

2. I reclaim my Saturdays

Despite it claiming to be full, I have, by dint of pleading and flattery and prayer, managed to enroll both my children in DORK SCHOOL on Saturday afternoons. It isn't called Dork School, of course. It is called something seductive and science related. I can't pretend they were white hot with enthusiasm but I do not much care, particularly since Lashes's only other suggestion for an extra-curricular activity was a faintly insolent "golf?" followed by some Muttley style sniggering. It is three hours on a Saturday afternoon and they will learn about circuitry or the water cycle or something. Perhaps they will love it, perhaps they won't. We all have our cross to bear. I will go and buy the English papers and go to "boring" shops filled with soft furnishings and clothes rather than mangas and Bakugans. I will go to exhibitions and drink cups of tea peacefully. Imagine, I'd even have time for a FILM, or better still, I could finally go to the Plasticarium. A hundred and fifty euros for a year of peaceful Saturday afternoons is an even bigger bargain than that time I got an 800 quid pashmina from Pickett for 80 quid, back when it wasn't shameful to admit to having a pashmina. This is transformative stuff (until they get expelled).

3. I accomplish ninja level administrative fuckwittery

I have tackled the complex Electrabel telephone "help"line ("si vous avez votre numéro de dossier à portée de main, tapez 1 et attendez jusqu'à ce qu'on vous remet tout au début du menu téléphonique, mais cette fois en néerlandais, crétin") without giving in to my impulse to throw the phone out of the attic window AND with alleged success (doubtful). AND I finished "plastifying" all the exercise books (AKA the world's most futile task) with only one complete catastrophe) AND I finished my VAT. AND I to the Post Office, AND it was empty AND I remembered to stock up on stamps andzzzzzzz. Ok, you can wake up now. Boring admini-boasting over.

4. I plan to leave the house

Later today I am going to assist my cleaning lady with a photo shoot I have roped her into. Mainly my rôle will probably involve saying "I am very sorry I roped you into this, please do not sack me", but it's an outing. On Thursday I am going to a dishwasher sponsored fashion show. This is deeply mysterious but my FREE tickets say they are worth €68 each (how???), so I can only assume there is a shred of entertainment, or possibly a free drink, to be had. Then next week I am going to London by myself like an adult for a couple of days (including to a party with an '80s dress code, I am thinking this) which is always cause for rejoicing, and planning how much Marks & Spencer's convenience food I can fit into my wheely case.

5. I walk the dog without simmering resentment

I have spoken before of my fundamental misunderstanding of the "walking" bit of dog ownership. In my head, pre-dog, I had assumed that the dog would come with me, in the manner of an elegant accessory, on nice walks to the shop and cafés. When we both got older, it could sit on my knee in Le Cirio and eat biscuits apéritifs while I got gently sozzled on 'alf en 'alf. I was soon disabused of this notion by weepette's intense fondness for running fast, pulling me along obnoxiously, entwining himself with my legs, grossly licking up puddles of other dogs' pee, barking at wastepaper baskets and other idiocies. Instead, I found myself condemned to daily trips to the park, a place I ordinarily avoid at all costs, due to having a head that is a ball and frisbee magnet. Occasionally, however, against my better judgment, I find myself enjoying it. Today was one of those days. We went to the wood and it was cold, with a pale wash of autumnal sun. On arrival a large fox trotted casually past us, jogging along the line of trees and ducking under the fence. Have there always been urban foxes? I don't remember ever seeing a fox in York growing up. I like them, anyway, them and the screeching green parakeets and the chipmunks I keep seeing in the Bois de la Cambre. All this odd, displaced fauna going about its business.

Weepette did not even notice the fox, anyway, nor did he harass me endlessly with vast, inappropriate half trees dropped at my feet every twenty seconds. The ground was littered with perfect fat conkers it was hard not to pick up and fill my pockets with. Annecy, the cold blooded attack terrier did not try to kill either of us. I did not have to talk to the Italian guy with the obese labrador. My ipod did not insist, as it usually does, that I listen to endless The XX tracks (I tired very quickly of The XX). It was a good morning.

Tell me your five tiny triumphs of recent weeks?

Virtue

2011-09-05T10:45:00.007+02:00

I am currently leading a life of modest virtue. Nothing actually virtuous, you understand. No good works, saving kittens from trees, curing pernicious diseases, donating organs. Just the occasional vegetable, spending no money, drinking less, not going out much (except to the dump with dreary regularity), limited "screen time". I am living through it resentfully, like a teenager with really mean, arsehole parents. It is quite boring: "It is a strange, lonely world when you are GOOD" as Molesworth says.

Advantages of a life of relative virtue

Enjoyable sensation of mild smugness. "Wow, look at me, putting on all this washing, I am such a grown up. Now I will put some pieces of paper away, and maybe sharpen some crayons. I might have a cod liver oil tablet later. I rock". I know, it's pathetic, you don't need to tell me.

Better skin - though still horrendously freckled (my virtue does not extend to locating and using sunscreen) I have lost the full Dot Cotton raddled face. I did manage to get a sunburnt shoulder today though. In the rain. Also, I think I am STILL harbouring Lashes's dreaded suppurating skin disease, even though he shrugged it off about a year ago and has that luminous, glowing, poreless nine year old skin that makes you feel like Methuselah. And I have a cold sore. Ok, maybe not better skin.

Managed to read several books in the time I would normally be falling asleep face down with my glasses on after too much gin, or staying up all night staring fruitlessly at dusty corners of the internet. The only problem is that the books are GOOD, which casts me into further career despair. My "book" is languishing. It needs stuff done. Even if I do the stuff, I am not sure it will work, which is a shame because there are at least 14 words in there I like. Maybe I could just make fridge magnets with those words on instead and sell them on Etsy? I would probably make more money that way.

Slightly - very slightly - improved Chopin playing. This one go plunk. This one is very dusty. This one segue alarmingly into Regina Spektor because it is easier.

Slightly reduced sense of fiscal foreboding. This is completely wrong headed, because I have basically NO money coming in at the moment. Even so, although I am not actually working, I have convinced myself that the mere fact of having opened all the ominous envelopes and tidied them away neatly in hanging folders will be my salvation.

Have managed to lose about 3 ounces in weight. I still can't wear 97% of my clothes, but it is to be welcomed. I got a bit over-excited and decided to try on a thin era bra yesterday. Big mistake. BIG mistake. I can't really describe the full effect without straying into obscenity (suffice to say it reminded me of this post, which taught me another meaning of the word 'pasties'), but it was a whole universe of wrongness. I will attempt to continue losing 3 ounces a month and by the time I am ninety five, perhaps it will fit. Though of course, by then, the moths will have despaired of me ever buying any more cashmere and eaten it.

Disadvantages of a life of relative virtue

Becoming very boring indeed due to total lack of external stimuli. Head entirely empty of thoughts.

Faintly aggrieved sense that surely I ought to get a medal for all this starter level virtue.

Unhealthy attachment to stationery, and the correct arrangement thereof. The correct arrangement of everything, actually. What, you cannot discern the important - though I conceded subtle - distinction between 'mugs that are nice enough to go on the shelf' and 'mugs that are ugly and must be hidden in the cupboard'? Never darken my kitchen again.

A related incredibly low tolerance of stationery related mishaps (see: unpleasant Pritt Stick incident, VERY unpleasant plastic film incident, moderate shouting about 4 colour Bic incident). In my reduced, health and safety checked, U certificate universe, the thought of anyone not having the requisite number of highlighter pens appalls me. Anything could happen. The plastic book covering has bubbled! I have failed! I have started stockpiling supplies in a drawer and instigated a cruel system whereby if the children lose any of their two hundred quid's worth of school fripperies they have to BUY the item back from my drawer of child punishment. I do not like what I have become.

My joyless emporium of child punishment

Forming an unhealthy attachment to French Masterchef. I could claim my interest is anthropological, part of my fascination with the dark, peculiar corners of the French psyche, but that would be a lie, I just like to watch them all suffer and weep and emote over their brunoise and espuma. Anyway, French Masterchef is fascinating and I commend it to you. The jury is composed of Sébastien Demorand, Yves Camdeborde, and Bald Guy Who Never Speaks. Demorand, lanky and pale, with a neat beard and glasses and a penchant for beige toned formal wear, is like your enthusiastic young geography teacher gone very badly wrong. Rather than rhapsodising about oxbow lakes, he is filled with the white hot heat of fury at under-seasoned oyster tempura, and insufficiently "abouti" (they like these abstract adjectives. This might be translated as something like 'complete') reinterpretations of blanquette de veau. Yves Camdeborde is a chef. He is full of Southern down to earthiness and machismo, whilst also being a man who spends his working life arsing around slicing things on a perfect 23° angle and putting teeny weeny dots of sauce and edible flowers on plates. I like this chef dissonance. The other one mainly looks thunderous and doesn't speak much but when he does, he's furious about a lack of "respect" for ingredients. All three of them are very much in the 'more in anger than in sorrow' mode of culinary mentoring. None of them is a hundredth as revolting as Greg Wallace, so as far as I am concerned it is a televisual win.

Still do not know more about Belgian political situation. There was a rumour of progress over the summer, but that optimism seems to have receded somewhat. This week may be "decisive". Or it may not. "How many times have we declared that it's make or break time, only for nothing terribly spectacular to happen?" Well, indeed. Bart de Wever hasn't eaten anyone yet, so as far as I am concerned the negotiations are still quite dull. B minus, Belgium, for your constitutional crisis. Things that would improve it:

- BdW eating someone

- Jean Claude Van Damme getting involved: why on earth has this not happened yet? I am frankly appalled that he hasn't seized what would be a career crowning opportunity to bellow senselessly about "rigour" and "discipline".

- Secession of Belgian state to the European Union, renaming of country DG BELG, everyone given a nice fonctionnaire job with 800 days holiday, 3% tax and retirement age of 36.

In conclusion, I think a life of modest virtue is not working out for me. Once everything is tidy and tranquil, I sit in the middle of it feeling faintly empty, and waiting for something interesting to happen. Which of course, it doesn't because I am spending all my days categorising Lego bricks and date sorting my invoices. I should return to my rat's nest of chaos. Just let me finish this spreadsheet first.

Gloomy (with consolation owls)

2011-08-28T16:38:00.008+02:00

(I started this on Sunday and ran into a wave of indolence, but I can't be bothered to change it. Here, have an owl).

We are back home from our northern coastal mini break. In order to ease our acclimatisation, Brussels is under several inches of water, and the post has fallen out of the letterbox with an ominous flop, where I am ignoring it. Repeated messages from my accountant, "Mr Fox", tell me not only that I owe him five hundred yuros, but also that the third quarter VAT return (a shameful heap of scrap paper in a brown envelope) is due, joyous news. For the last few hours, Fingers has been telling me jokes while I try to rebuild a broken light fitting with 800 removable parts that keep falling, like heavy perspex confetti, on my head as I try to secure them. It is Sunday. Belgian Sundays are very .. Sunday at the best of times. They are like the Sundays of my childhood, with afternoons that stretch out grey and featureless in front of you, to the horizon and beyond, with nothing but Songs of Praise to look forward to. In August, the Sunday feeling is multiplied by a hundred,because four houses in five are empty and shuttered, their inhabitants living it up on the Belgian "riviera", at Knokke La Zoute, St Tropez of the North Sea, immortalised in the Jacques Brel song, and already quoted on these pages. It bears quoting again however:

Ce soir il pleut à Knokke La Zoute

Ce soir comme tous les soirs

Je me rentre chez moi le coeur en déroute

Et la bite sous l'bras

Tonight, it's raining in Knokke La Zoute

Tonight, like every night

I'm going home with my heart defeated

And my cock under my arm.

Quite.

I have reached the point in the school holidays where I am waving a white flag - a dirty, crumpled white flag that someone has wiped their nose on, probably - but no one has even noticed. It seems to me that the children entirely stopped hearing the sound of my voice some weeks ago; they have simply tuned out whatever frequency I broadcast my constant litany of martyrdom, complaints and occasional outbreaks of maddened, incoherent shouting on. I have become invisible, presumably because I am ALWAYS HERE. Over here, bitterly picking up the Lego zombie I have just trodden on. Over there, colour coding the felt tips like a mental and muttering to myself about Pritt Stick lids. In the kitchen staring blankly into the fridge.

I should say, that in very many ways, it has been a total, and rare, treat spending five solid weeks with my offspring. It really has. They have been, in the main and in defiance of my attempts to portray them otherwise, a delight. On Thursday, they spent a whole (mercifully dry) afternoon sitting on the beach in absolute peace and absorption, making an elaborate sand monster and accompanying man trap. There was no thumping, no gratuitous provocation or meanness. They have been generally enthusiastic about the ridiculous activities we have been involved in. Last night, they were so touchingly excited about the frankly rubbish "European Night of the Bat" walk in the industrial wilderness of Anderlecht, I could have cried. I could have cried anyway, after the minutely detailed explanation of the foraging habits of all five types of bat native to the Brussels region but passons.

But oh, in other ways, it has been very very tricky. Here we all are, every day, all day, annoying each other in a circular fashion, like a nuclear neanderthal tribe, confined to our cave (with the exception of the demented outings described in the previous post. These have slowed to a trickle, and I am stretching "a trip to the opticians" into a whole day's activity tomorrow). Meanwhile, there are things I should be doing - boring, but necessary things that require the correct set of pieces of paper, quiet time, a brain - that I simply haven't done, must do, will get into more trouble if I don't do very soon. There are things that I must do for money. There are things that I would like to be doing - writing, for fuck's sake, the only way I can see of ever getting myself out of the career mess I am in - that I haven't been able to do either, because they are there, here, all the time and what do you say when a delightful (and easily crushed) seven year old asks if you want to play Uno with him again? You say yes, of course you do and you feel very thankful he still wants to do anything with you when you are such a screeching harpy most of the time. And it's fun. But it's not paying the bills, so I lie awake when they finally go to bed and wonder how on earth I'll ever emerge from this unproductive fug, whether I'll ever leave the house, or wear clean clothes again. Or I channel the anxiety into small, futile attempts to try and impose order on the chaos, usually involving the minute categorisation of toys.

Because I have no brain, none, it is broken. I think the various fragments of it have spent so long chasing each other round my skull cavity in crazed anxiety that they are exhausted and are having a lie down. So there is no blogging, there are no clever, or funny, or lucrative ideas, and I am not keeping up with current developments in any sphere except the biscuit aisle at Colruyt, and Pokemon evolutions. On top of that, two of my very best friends left Brussels over the summer and I am feeling a bit bereft. Bleurgh.

HOWEVER.

I do finally have more photographs from the horticultural show earlier this month. Are they worth the wait? Hmm, I will leave it up to you to decide.

Actually - and not entirely surprisingly - I mainly have photos of owls. I will save Oscar's triumph for another post. There is only one fuzzy photograph of it, and I think it requires more building up than I am capable of today.

Owls. Expressing disdain for you since time immemorial.

This is Holly.

Displeased

Holly could not have given a shit about my puny problems. She bit me several times when I mistakenly touched her whiskers.

"Whiskers, bite. Whiskers, bite" the man from 'Owls Galore' explained to me patiently, demonstrating, but I kept getting distracted by her great beauty, and touching the forbidden beak whiskers, to the amusement of many watching children.

I could easily have got into an abusive relationship with Holly. She can bite my finger any time she wants.

Whiskers, bite.

Fingers chose an owl that looks like it was designed by Nintendo.

Anime-owl

Contemplative

(contemplating clawing your face off)

Lashes chose one called Oscar.

In no way like a weepette.

Could probably eat a weepette if so inclined.

There were not only owls, of course. There was also woodlouse racing. Lashes won 50p on 'that pale one that's really fast'.

And hamster roulette ("catch us before the RSPCA do!"). We weren't as good at that. The hamsters were wildly unpredictable, the devious little bastards.

Also, you will note there is evidence here of the sun. It rained intermittently, but I am glad my owl memories are bathed in misleading, but entirely appropriate, British sun. We have had some very very funny times these holidays, and this is a good reminder of them. It was an alright summer really, a sweet, quiet, relatively uneventful summer: if only I knew how to relax and enjoy it, everything would be FINE.

How has your summer been? Are you good at relaxing, or do you harass the Pritt Sticks like me? Do you think you could fit a Little Owl into your pocket? Tell me all.

Stuff what I done to amuse my offspring this summer

2011-08-21T18:14:00.014+02:00

(or Supine Parental Abnegation, the summer edition)

1. Dressed up in an outsized canvas sumo suit and "fought" their father (a minute of self-conscious, feeble 'amuser les enfants' shoving, then we both got a taste for it and started really laying into each other).

2. Had my hand hammered by a plastic mallet by a man in a woad tunic in a place called Neder Over Hembeek.

3. Fought a Dutch grandmother with a polystyrene sword. On one leg. Lost. Still in Neder Over Hembeek.

4. Driven to an obscure corner of Vlaams Brabant, put on a swimming costume (otherwise known as The Ultimate Sacrifice) and sat in a tepid soup of human effluent, patrolled by uniformed security guards WITH DOGS.

5. Been to 5 Science Museums: London, Bristol, Mechelen, Paris and That Shitty One In Bourse Metro Station With The Strobe Lit Mannekin Pis. Seen enough optical illusions to induce a year's worth of migraines.

6. Played 29 games of dominoes, 17 Cluedo, and two of some shitty German thing called Suleika that none of us understand, featuring complex Germanic rules, tiny carpets and a missing dice.

7. Played 35 games of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, the answer to 34 of which was "champignon atomique" (mushroom cloud).

8. But only played one round of terrible game based on a manga invented by Lashes, as it was so extravagantly boring, none of us could be arsed.

9. Confronted 5 groups of goats with consequent goat inflicted injuries to property and person. Petted: a snake. A giraffe. Seven chicks. 3 rabbits.

10. Seen The Smurfs. In 3D. As if two dimensions weren't enough.

11. Listened to 14 monologues about Bonsai trees, 23 monologues about Plants Vs Zombies, 800 monologues about various mangas.

12. Refereed 814,000 arguments. By "refereed", I mean snapped "I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT, THIS IS BORING, COME BACK WHEN ONE OF YOU IS MISSING A LIMB. OR NOT. AS YOU WISH. ARE YOU DEAD? NO? THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE".

13. Oh god, I nearly forgot. Went to the Museum of All Despair (And Some Old Comics) and sat in the BD "Reading Room" repository of all the teen angst and sexual frustration OF THE WORLD. Or at least of Belgium. Lashes enjoyed this very much. Fingers was faintly appalled and kept flitting over to me to whisper loudly and indiscreetly "C'est nul, quand est-ce qu'on peut partir?" (It's rubbish, when can we leave).

14. Bought an intricate, expensive mountain of school supplies, including the specified brand of set square, because one must accept no cheap generic imitations of a flimsy plastic triangle, for lo, that way anarchy lies.

15. Encountered sand. Repeatedly (also known as The Other Ultimate Sacrifice. I have massive sensory issues with sand).

And now, we are in Le Touquet, in the very north of France, on a short break. There is a very great deal of sand. We are staying in a Novotel on the beach that resembles a decaying Soviet bunker intended for a small city in the Urals. The sky is the colour of lead and bruises and the wind is sufficient to cause small dogs (of which there are a great number) to take flight. I have seen the following on the seafront:

(a) Pop art horses

(b) The most frightening window display of stuffed kittens in the history of stuffed kitten window displays:

Gangs of errant children roam feral through the hotel armed with entrenching tools and packets of Carambars, as their parents hide in dark corners of the bar, furtively lining up garish cocktails (yesterday's "Bond Martini" featured watermelon liqueur and a pink plastic stirring stick thing). Everyone fears a three year old called "Adrien" who has the balanced, peace loving personality of Attila the Hun, and very sharp nails. The only thing that can rival him for savagery is the seagulls, larger than ponies, who whizz past every few minutes, fangs to the wind, to see if they can make off with an infant, or a jumbo moules-frites. Every few hours the dog goes quietly into a corner to vomit a pile of sand it has ingested through sheer stupidity. We are mainly staring at the sea from a respectful distance and eating chips. Oh, I made an intricate shell fish today. The children ran the gamut of reactions from lukewarm, to indifferent, to embarassed for me, in the hour it took to construct.

(Stage 3: Shame)

It's great, actually (the holiday, not the fish. Obviously). I could pretend it's terrible, but that would be a big fat lie. However, I think I - and they - will be ready for school to start again in 8 days (counting? No, definitely not counting). I might even be ready for a "Bond Martini".

Holiday Funtimes continue

2011-08-16T21:27:00.005+02:00

I have had a minor revelation today. The reason I spend the holidays in a state of chest constricting anxiety and high alert is because of having been, to all intents and purposes, an only child. I do have siblings, but the age gap between us is so great we never had the opportunity to spend long, absorbed months honing new forms of psychological torture for each other, or even experienced the simple pleasure of thwacking one another over the head with coal shovels. It's sad, really.

Thus, the current sounds of riotous, what I can only assume is "fun" from downstairs just alarm me. To my untrained only child ears, sibling interaction always sounds dangerous, messy, and liable to end in tears. Possibly tears of blood. Supervising sibling interaction seems to me very like being a UN peacekeeper in a highly volatile, complex regional conflict: you don't know when to intervene and when to keep your distance, you don't know, and can't possibly guess at the rights and wrongs, or origins, of any given flare up, and whatever you do decide to do will be greeted with universal fury.

I imagine that if you were raised with siblings of a similar age to your own, as opposed to a coven of highly evolved hippy-slash-academics and a stack of age inappropriate reading matter, you would view these kinds of shenanigans with a sort of benevolent indifference. I do not know, I can only speculate. I would like to feel benevolent indifference. Mainly I feel flooded with cortisol. I can't regret my tranquil childhood in the tweedy embrace of Dorothy L Sayers and P.D. James, but it's doing me no good right now. The basic problem is that I would like them all to be reading and occasionally playing clock patience, and they would like to be sitting on each other's heads and calling each other "minus" with occasional breaks to kill some zombies.

Aaanyway. Today's 'deflect the children from killing each other' activities kicked off with a trip to Belgium's most inauspiciously sited attraction. Can I even say that? I am suddenly lacking confidence in this broad statement, there may be others I am still to discover. It's a science, erm, exhibit, located in the bowels - actually it smells more like the bladder - of one of Brussels's less salubrious Metro stations, Bourse. Bourse metro, where I have shared a platform with so many disturbed individuals, stalkery pervs and stag parties over the years that I now enter it with a sort of shiver of dread. One particular dickhead followed me all the way home from there, and on another occasion I got within a nanosecond of punching someone. All in all, the perfect place for a child friendly science activity centre! Another Belgian civic planning triumph.

Look, here is an extremely wobbly photograph of the entrance. Charming, no? Not at all like a still from a disaster movie set in a post-apocalyptic ex-Soviet state.

I can't actually be too mean about it. It looks like the exhibits were made by an occupational therapy group in the mid '80s, but (a) the girl working there was utterly charming and kind and did a ridiculous mirror image routine where she "made a stick come out of her nose" purely for my children's entertainment; (b) it was almost empty which was a mercy (if not entirely a surprise); and (c) my children, children of the Nintendo age, children who have been to four high tech, glossy, amazing science parks in the last 2 months, were MAD FOR IT. I was not allowed to sit down for a minute, as they marched me from exhibit to charmingly decrepit exhibit, exclaiming with touching enthusiasm at the shonky optical illusions.

The absolute highlight for me was this replica Manneken Pis in a shower cubicle. Once every three minutes, you could add 5 seconds of strobe lighting to the tableau.

Epic. I am sorry this is so dark. That is because it is very dark in there, what with it being, oh yes, in a windowless bunker in a metro station.

I think that's enough excitement for the day. I'll save our (return! Thereby breaching my solemn promise to my offspring never to make them go back there) trip to the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée for another time. Soon you'll be begging me to go back to pictures of shonky vegetable sculpture.

Holidays, part 2

2011-08-14T12:16:00.007+02:00

Belgium is not really on best behaviour this week. We are on our fourth day of unrelenting rain, the dog is sporting a fine layer of mildew, as are the children, who are intent on finding new and exciting ways to kill/cause irrevocable psychological damage to each other. We have played 14,000 games of Cluedo, which they SUCK at, and watched too much TV, Fingers has perfected his flouncy teenage "Oh nooooooon, pas ça" at any suggested activity and I have had no time to do anything except sweep dust into small piles on the floor and shout, occasionally. By the time evening crawls around, I am only fit for watching gloomy Danish drama in bed. I am slightly worried that my sleep routines are now entirely dependent on the soothing sounds and muted palette of The Killing, which usually lulls me into a deep state of somnolence around the 45 minute mark. God knows how I will cope when I finish watching it. Anyway, I would like to do blogging, and, you know, earning MONEY and shit, but I have no childcare organised for the next two weeks, no new work coming in, and no plans, so please pray for me, hard. Or babysit. Or give me a job. Or send me a cake.

In the brief hour of free time I have whilst the children are at the foul swimming pool, hopefully exorcising some of their vast reserves of natural aggression, I think what we really need is a heart warming tale of triumph over adversity, with cute (if neurotic) animals. A story like Weepette's (SPOILER) cinematic triumph against overwhelming odds and a dastardly professional Afghan in the Cherington show. Sadly, I can't give us one. I can't tell you that story yet, because I don't have the pictures, and without the pictures, it is as nothing. Nor do I have the photos of the woodlouse racing, the hamster roulette, or my attempt to secrete a selection of owls in my handbag. Soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I can at least tell you about the vegetable animals. As you may know, I have previous with vegetable sculpture myself. Before this blog collapsed into, well, whatever it is now, we used to have vegetable sculpting competitions and everything. Who can forget the Angler Fish? Or the grape bee? Ah, happy, innocent days.

Keen to recapture the sense of unalloyed achievement that comes from ineptly hacking a vegetable around with a blunt knife for absolutely no valid reason, then adding 800,000 pointless and ineffectual cocktail sticks, I was insistent all the children entered the veg animal competition at the fête. They were relatively willing to humour me, possibly to escape further chores on the grandparental work camp. By this stage in the week, they had already experienced the 18 hour power cut, which had gone some way to breaking their spirit, and I had successfully compounded their gloom by droning on about my own childhood holidays, sitting in a hollowed out lightning blasted tree in a cagoule with a slice of Lyles Ginger Cake and seven books by Josephine Pullein Thompson. All in all, they were ready for some low-tech entertainment.

We selected vegetables and sat down at the table outside in only a light drizzle to sculpt. My father hovered, ominously, commenting on the profligacy of our unnecessary marrow sacrifice. I was, of course, forced to reign in my control freakery.

"Don't you think it might be better if...? No, sorry, ignore me".

"How about .. ? No? Really? Ok. If you think that's best".

"I don't think that will work darl .. oh? Fine. Give it a try".

"Would you like me to do that? You wouldn't? Oh. Ok".

If I had had my way, I would have been intricately carving dung beetle antennae at midnight, but thankfully, no one would let me have my way. Instead, they came up with these:

Lashes went with this artichoke "tortoise" (?):

It caused me considerable angst in the leg department in transport, and required in situ corrective surgery. You can see that one of its forepaws is listing dangerously in this picture, but it managed to limp through the judging intact.

My niece did a sheep:

I liked the sheep a lot. The carrot leaf wool pleases me greatly.

Fingers, I must relate with sadness but very little surprise, was profoundly indifferent to the whole activity, but finally deigned to make this "hedgehog":

It would have just been a featureless artichoke/potato combo if he had had his way, but I put my foot down and insisted on legs, at least. He submitted with the resigned demeanour of one who is forced to humour a mad woman. He's getting very good at that.

Finally, whilst I was upstairs sacrificing a goat to British Telecom, my nephew was executing his audaciously brilliant "Rattlesnake and sea urchin" combo:

After a tense overnight stay in the fridge (tense for me, not the vegetables), we transported our, sorry, their work product to the show ground, and after some last minute UHU action, we left, to wait out the judges' verdict eating "Mr Whippet" ice creams (Lashes really believes this is what they are called) and humiliating the dog in new and exciting ways.

When we were finally allowed back into the produce tent, where to our delight and amazement the rattlesnake/sea urchin combo had triumphed.

Look, here we are, marvelling. I was too over-excited at this point to take a decent, photo, but if you look closely, you can see it has a red card thingy, which I believe entitled my nephew to the princely sum of ONE POUND. Possibly one pound fifty.

We won! Sorry. He won. We celebrated with pint glasses of Pimms, and tat from the car boot sale and more Mr Whippets all round.

The end.

Here are my children staring into a barrel. They were discussing whether they could transport the sheep carcass home in it, but sadly, the car was still convalescing from its catastrophic gasket injury in Woodstock, so it was impossible, which was very sad. Ahem.

When I was young this, in and of itself, would have constituted a whole day's holiday activity (etc etc etc, continue until whole audience unconscious)...

Holiday, Part 1

2011-08-10T22:29:00.005+02:00

While the world has been spiralling into irrevocable chaos and doom, I have been in the Cotswolds, with my beloved offspring, Lytton Strachey

and, er... James Herriot?

Making his own entertainment

It's ok, global economy. Mummy is back. You can relax now. Yes, I have finally returned to Belgium, and the clammy embrace of masonry dust, official envelopes and an ominous wet black patch on the wall, which has destroyed my limited edition Rob Ryan bird print. I have never been sadder to leave the primitive, dangerous weirdness of the countryside (yes, the Cotswolds. Shut up, it is dangerous. You could get flattened by a pristine Range Rover, or a wheel of artisan cheese at any time). Either:

1. I am getting old; or

2. I am homesick for a place where bagels are (relatively) freely available (if you get to the Co-op early) and milk does not come in long life UHT containers; or

3. Everything here is so chaotic, I would rather take my chances with the badgers (incidentally, Fingers seemed uncharacteristically scared at my father's cheery assurance that his garden was regularly raided by a gang of ASBO badgers. It turned out that Fingers had not realised that the European badger and the Honey Badger are not the same creature. He was expecting cobra head ripping off action every time he left the house).

The countryside was relatively well-behaved (ie. I was allowed several trips to the Co-op in Shipston on Stour and even more trips to the pub). My father refrained from suggesting any trips to see rotting carcasses, being more concerned to put his descendants to work tilling the land and so on (he is a pioneer of the 'Summer Sodium Adventures' residential salt mine camp school of holiday parenting). I think he felt additional corpse action was unnecessary, as a sheep had kindly died just outside the house, presumably for our vacation entertainment (see above). My children came racing to see me the morning after Sheep Carcass Fiesta,as I was skulking behind some marrows trying to avoid detection.

"We kicked the head off!"

"I see".

"It's in the garden now! Fingers held the spine down, and I kicked the skull, then we rolled it up the hill".

"I do hope you didn't use your hands"

"No, we kicked it ALL THE WAY". Proud looks. I glanced at their open toed sandals, mired in the by-products of ovine decay.

"Lovely. I'm delighted for you".

"So can we keep it? It's only got a tiny bit of skin on the scalp. I've already tried to scrape it off with a stick, I reckon we can shift it".

"....."

"Weepette is going mad for it. Maybe he can eat the scalp off? He keeps peeing on it though".

"Awww, he must think he killed it himself" said my sister in law later, laughing, as the dog sat, feebly exhausted in the only comfy chair in the kitchen looking as mournful as ever. "He thinks he's a brilliant hunter". Instinct got the better of Weepette once or twice, and he chased a few rabbits, only to catch them up, hover apologetically around them with an expression of faintly agonised social awkwardness as they went to ground, then trot back, looking defeated.

Otherwise, the danger levels were sadly reduced, since the Tetanus Dreamland Castle was out of bounds due to some dangerous bale stacking. We did not even see any badgers. Any deficiencies in wildlife outside, however, were entirely remedied by the fauna in the shower. My ablutions every morning was like this scene out of Snow White:

... except my companions were a happy band of spiders the size of house cats, giant fighting moths with wings missing, dozy wasps, a selection of no longer attached legs, mandibles and other detritus and on one occasion an astonishingly frisky earwig. They would draw close to listen to my enchanting song, which went something like:

"OH THE FUCK WILL YOU EVER FUCK OFF OUT OF MY SHOWER GEL, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU, EWWWWWWWWW".

Catchy.

Apart from that the holiday was distinguished by:

- an 18 hour power cut. "This is like ALL my holidays when I was little", I kept telling the children, who plainly did not give a shit as long as my iphone battery held out and no one was making them go to bed. "Except then it was FAR COLDER, and granddad locked me and your uncle in an outhouse because we were annoying him" (true).

- An amazing triple village show triumph extravaganza which I will save for another post when I have the photos, which include me trying to sneak a little owl from the "Owls Galore" display away in my pocket, and a woodlouse race.

- Many games of Cluedo, or "Cluédo" as my peculiar children called it. Cluedo has gone terribly nouveau, and appears to be set in Champneys, distressingly. There is a "Spa", "Theatre" and "Swimming Pool" now, and the lead piping has been replaced with a dumbbell and a "trophy", which looks like something you might get if you were BBC personality of the year or similar. Sad times.

- Quizzing my stepmother extensively on the neighbours, to check for any stealth celebrities, what with Chipping Norton being revealed to be a sort of Mayfair on the Wold in recent months. The best she could come up with was:

- a man who takes his rabbit to the post office on a lead

- a woman who walks her dogs wearing a scuba mask; and

- a man who enters all twenty classes each year in the village show and turns up on the day with his hair in pigtails and blue eyeshadow, whilst still in his regulation tweed jacket and cord trousers.

- The mortal wounding of the car, leading to many gloomy trips to bring it grapes at a garage in Woodstock while it languished, between life, death and several thousand quid of repairs. Something unspeakable happened to it involving a head gasket, or something equally sordid, with the net result that we have had to leave it in intensive care in Woodstock. The message is clear: I should never be allowed to go on any motorised holiday, ever.

- A trip to Aardman in Bristol to draw germs.

I imagine this is exactly what a sheep's head looks like when you get close enough. Actually, scratch that, I KNOW that's exactly what my kitchen looks like when you get close enough.

All in all, a full and frank holiday. Tell me how yours are if you have been on any. If you haven't, tell me what it was like in civilisation, before it got broken.

Vacances

2011-07-30T16:36:00.002+02:00

I shouldn't be here, I should be looking for the dog-eared piece of faxed paper from DVLA, circa 1995, that is my excuse for a driving licence. Or something. The summer "holiday" (aka family trip to the Beddington Cotswold Tetanus Theme Park) is imminent and I am downloading shitty scrappy maps and forging the dog's passport. I am looking forward to it a great deal, which is only partially indicative of just how shit things have been recently. Not big shit, you understand. Just the kind of aggravating, financial/admin/work shit that makes you long for a minor bout of lockjaw, some dead baby mice to examine and those extra-special leaden British holiday skies. I am also looking forward to it in a more straightforward way, because of the possibility of reading a book. Possibly sitting in a chair and drinking tea. I am hoping to do each of these things at least once in the course of our 8 day stay. Baby steps.

Good things about the summer "holiday":

- absence of masonry dust

- unlimited wine

- seeing my amusing, frequently furious nephew who hates animals/farms/farmers/the country

- and my niece, who likes all that stuff, and is a total peach.

- possible trip to the Cotswold Farm Park to have clothing eaten by aggressive escapologist goats

- Can wear the same thing for 7 days and no-one will notice/care

- Access to leaden, stodgy sponge cake offerings from Shipston on Stour

- Rumoured existence of a coffee machine in Shipston on Stour (unconfirmed)

- Children thankfully too old for Bourton on the Water Fundays playbarn.

Bad things about summer "holiday":

- the eery quiet and poor television/mobile phone reception of rural England

- strong likelihood of being very cold

- strong likelihood of being woken very early

- no suitable footwear

- children will get bored and violent after 48 hours and come over all Lord of the Flies

- dog will continue its descent into pathological neurosis, and probably pee on something antique or get savaged by a badger

- large amounts of driving

- many great big fuck off objects to incompetently drive into

- no money

- access to stodgy Shipston on Stour sponge cakes will make me even fatter than I am already

I think on balance, however, being away from the current home environment of dust, financial terror and builder angst is beneficial, but it could go either way. We shall see.

I went to Paris this week, anyway, where I recovered my children from their grandparents. They were happy to see me and pathetically grateful not to be required to fold their pyjamas for the first 24 hours, then reverted to mainly requesting regular cash injections and hitting each other. Lashes, in particular, has grown again over the last 3 weeks and reaches nearly to my nose, and treats me with a sort of kindly condescending manner that is by turn amusing and maddening.

It was a good trip, with some full and frank science park action, and a Lashes-enforced trip up the Eiffel Tower which ended with both he and I queasily clutching each other in the second floor gift shop in the grip of Hereditary Pathetic Vertigo. Fingers, who did not want to go in the first place, waltzed around like a slightly sulky moutain goat, entirely unaffected. Apart from that, I did not have time to buy any tiny choux buns or eat cold udon noodles and tempura in the 2ème, which saddended me. However, I did observe two Paris phenomena:

1. Tourist idiocy

In the - admittedly massive - queue for metro tickets at Gare du Nord, I listened to the following conversation between two - youngish American guys behind me. Not teenagers. Distinctly old enough to know better. I swear I am not exaggerating this conversation. Several times I turned round and openly stared at them, but they were entirely unmoved.

Idiot 1: This place sucks. This would NOT happen back home. This is a disgrace. Man, Paris is a disgrace.

Idiot 2: Yeah! Is it always like this?

Idiot 1 (authoritatively): Yeah. France sucks. They do not give a shit for anyone. Paris is a shithole.

Idiot 2 (reverently): I guess I didn't realise how lucky we are.

Idiot 1 (magnanimously): Yeah, coming from the best place in the world, I suppose everything else is gonna suck. Man, I hate this place. I hate France. I hate Europe.

Idiot 2 (tentatively): London was ok?

Idiot 1: London SUCKED. I hated London. I hate the English. The French hate the English too.

Idiot 2: They do? Why?

Idiot 1: (portentously): It's historical. They always have.

Idiot 2: I shouldn't be wearing this shirt then! (Union Jack polo shirt, very fetching)

Idiot 1: You wouldn't last two hours in London anyway. You can't stand the food! You wanted hamburgers and hotdogs!

Idiot 2 (conciliatorily): Yeah, that's true. But apart from the food, London was ok.

Idiot 1: It's a dirty shithole. Like Paris.

This discussion of the general suckage of Europe continued for a full fifteen minutes until we reached the front of the queue. Welcome, messieurs! May your pockets be picked repeatedly!

2. Senior violence

YET AGAIN, within hours of arriving in Paris, I was beaten by a furious, slightly mad, elderly lady. I did almost nothing to provoke her. I tried to walk across her path in the metro station, but at a sufficient distance ahead that it did not require her to slow down or alter her trajectory. She zoomed towards me like a thing possessed and started thumping me, shouting "Dégage, dégage, dégage" (get out of the way). I swear, once more, that improbable as this sounds, it is absolutely true. I was not even surprised. I am a magnet for Parisian geronto-violence. I remember getting beaten with a walking stick once at the market on rue Poncelet, to my tearful horror. The cultural image of the elderly lady in England is of someone kindly, who is likely to give you a dusty extra strong mint, and possibly tell you your baby needs a hat. This is all wrong in Paris (and according to my Czech colleague, also in the Czech republic, where old ladies are viewed with appropriate fear and caution). This time, at least, I found it irresistably funny, which is evidence of at least some limited degree of personal growth in the last eight years. My laughing just made her more furious, of course. Whilst I do not condone venting your irritation with your fists, I have some respect for this kind of naked display of aggression. Madame will not be dying of an ulcer, at least, will she?

What I would really like to see, obviously, is crazy old hitting lady take on the two tourists. Perhaps with a son et lumière production by Jean Michel Jarre. Make it happen, Paris!

I had better get on. Once more unto the Dunkerque ferry, and so on. I suggest you keep the roads of Belgium free tomorrow morning.

National Day

2011-07-21T20:15:00.003+02:00

It is the Belgian national holiday. Happy .. DAY Belgium! Who needs a government, eh? It's your party and you can cry if you want to.

Things Belgium is very good at:

- Not taking itself too seriously

- Bizarre, moderately wrong folklore type events (Ypres cat throwing festival, Doudou de Mons, the horrible, eery Gilles de Binche). I am desperate for someone to let me write at length about all this medieval wrongness, but it creeps every commissioning editor in the universe out, and who can blame them.

-Endive rehabilitation

Belgium's national day is a fairly mysterious event. In an infamous investigation a few years ago, Belgian television reporters discovered that most of the political class had no idea what the 21 July was the anniversary of. It was during this same report that head potato, and current caretaker prime minister, Yves Leterme, sang La Marseillaise when asked to sing the Belgian national anthem, La Brabançonne. I will not deny that La Marseillaise is a vastly superior tune, but if you are Prime Minister of a country, knowing the national anthem seems to be a fairly basic requirement. I know it - though not the words - as it is always played, solemnly, at gulag prize giving. Whenever I try to sing it, it morphs mysteriously into 'Hail to the Chief', so I would have some sympathy for Mr Leterme if he were not such a witless tuber.

Seriously, play one, then the other. You'll see what I mean.

La Brabançonne

Hail to the Chief

Now I defy you to try and hum La Brabançonne without morphing into De Souza. Go on, try it. I should turn this into a Belgian National Day drinking game, probably.

Anyway. The streets - already empty for the summer - are completely deserted. When I took the dog out earlier, it was eerily silent and the only sign of life was a scrawny fox, hanging around a dustbin. I feel it should be a holiday for me, even though no-one I work for currently is based in Belgium, so unilaterally declaring that I will be having a day off, thanks, to commemorate Leopold Saxe-Coburg taking an oath to become - lucky man! - first king of Belgium is unlikely to be a good idea. So I am doing the next best thing and being moderately inefficient and resentful. I based a whole career on this, so I am an expert.

Part of the problem is I am living in a dustbowl at the moment. There are Works. Travaux. The kind that feature monosyllabic men with schedules as elusive and rapidly changing as Madonna's and giant, great, fuck off pieces of plant. ("Plant". That is what it's called, isn't it? As in the sign, "Heavy plant crossing"? I mean pneumatic drills. Lots, and lots of pneumatic drills). Works are always fun, aren't they? Everything is dirty, I am dirty, the dog is dirty. The dirty dog is so distressed that whenever I sit down, it jumps onto my knee, even though it is plainly too big to be on there, and cannot get comfortable once it is up there. So it circles sadly around my knees, leaving dusty pawprints all over me, then jumps down, then regrets its decision and jumps back up and the whole dismal cycle continues until I throw it out of the kitchen window (soon, at this rate). Look, here he is, preparing for his 98th leap onto my knees today.

The paler patch on my jeans to the right is a series of dusty paw prints. He looks quite sweet from that angle, but I assure you, he is hell-bent on ensuring my total psychological collapse.

My main observation is how fast one becomes (ok, I become) entirely feral. Once the kitchen is reduced to a heap of rubble, there is little point in doing anything. Why wash, when within minutes I will be covered in masonry dust? Why wash clothes, or dishes? And HOW? Why wear make up? In fact, why get dressed - or indeed, get up - at all? I might as well fester in bed, gnawing on an arbitrary selection of frozen foods without bothering to defrost them first. This will happen, I am sure of it. I would say I am, at a conservative estimate, three days away from eating out of bins and wearing a pillow case. By the time the Works are finished (supposedly a month, I do not believe a word of it, the builder has the weary, devious look of someone who is working on 43 jobs at once), I will probably have been placed in protective custody.

Given the immense (canine) strain on my sanity, and the surprisingly large amount of law I STILL have to do before the children return (they have been away for ages on some far flung campsite with their grandparents, and I am missing them painfully), you will forgive me if the only other thing I have to offer tonight is this, the CFO's leaving present from his au pair:

An oven glove and three packets of moth repellent.

What was your worst ever present? Can you beat moth repellent?

Kawaii-bara

2011-07-19T23:37:00.006+02:00

"So ... that picture you just sent me. Is that three severed plush Capybara heads?"

"No. It is a capybara that is 94% face. It has tiny legs underneath. I was going to get you one but they only had the giganto-bara left and they wouldn't sell me the display one".

Also, there is one that is like a cloak for children, so they can have a hood like kapibarasan's head, but then on the packaging it says that it can be used as a blanket/hand warmer by crazy women like us".

"I see. Reading this, I am filled with the strange, soothing certainty that everything is going to be alright".

"M? Are you just walking around Seoul stalking giant rodents?"

"YES".

Bodies

2011-07-17T19:16:00.002+02:00

You know that 'life is passing me by' feeling? I have that at the moment. Which is plainly ridiculous since I have cleaned the bathroom cupboards out. I mean, how much more viscerally alive is it possible to be, than spending Sunday afternoon throwing 7 year old vitamins and multiple tubes of rancid Protect and Perfect serum out? I blame social networking. I'm sure I would have been satisfied with my day of wondering why I have seven tubes of Caudalie Crème de Corps Nourissantes when I have never knowingly bought one if I wasn't exposed to other people's weekends, the parties, the festivals, the aspirational shopping. It's engineered to create dissatisfaction, isn't it? Well, unless you are preternaturally well-adjusted it is. And no-one will ever accuse me of that, I fear.

Actually, I blame social networking AND my slightly too tight trousers. Everything looks wrong in too tight trousers: the world is leached of all joy. My waist and I are cinched into a perpetual loop of grumpy recrimination with each other. Also, I think, tight trousers leave me slightly oxygen deprived, the symptoms of which include "drowsiness, shortness of breath, anxiety and tension". I think "desire to eat more cheap chocolate" must also be a symptom and so the cycle continues. You may quite rightly wonder why I am wearing too tight trousers (or, far more likely, you do not remotely care why and wonder why you are still reading this, which is like your annoying auntie telling you about her gynecological complaints at length, without the slightest provocation). I am wearing them because I have mislaid my trusty Gap physiotherapist's trousers and I can't leave the house in turquoise tracksuit bottoms. Should I buy more trousers? Yes I should. But buying trousers when you are over your fighting weight and have no money is not fun. I'd go on the rob to buy myself new trousers, but I am too tired and breathless, it's a tight trouser Catch 22. My only hope is eventually the money gets so short I can no longer feed myself, and I get thin enough to fit into the trousers again. I do not actually see this happening in my lifetime. I'd wear dresses, but it keeps pissing down and the average temperature is about 12°C.

I am thinking about body shape today, because I tried to buy a swimming costume yesterday. Is there any more dismal experience for the generously torso-ed lady than trying to buy a swimming costume in a non-specialist shop? I think not. Ok, if I thought long and hard, I could probably think of a couple. But it's pretty wretched. I did it yesterday in Spa.

Spa is a small town in the Ardennes attached to a motor racetrack and a droning chanson française festival. If you can avoid both of these things, it also has a most excellent Sunday market where I found a stuffed squirrel string quartet once, and, reason for my visit, the spa. The spa is bracingly municipal, but it is a good, cheap way to sit in various temperatures of water and doze in public. There is also a series of benches under heat lamps, so you can bask like a lizard. I am very much in favour of those things.

What I am not in favour of is buying a swimming costume, but sadly it was necessary. I do not have one that fits at the moment, partly because I seem to have lost several, partly because I am expanding alarmingly (see above) and try as I might, you cannot wear a M&S minimiser bra with a swimming costume. People look at you strangely. Also, it is surprisingly hard to find a full length Victorian bathing gown. Harder than finding a stuffed squirrel string quartet, actually, which I think shows a skewed sense of priorities among the citizens of Spa.

I went to Spa's ladies underpinnings shop and found a couple of unlikely, but just conceivable, black, matronly contenders on the sale rail. I tried them on. They looked horrific. One of them got stuck around my ribcage and made those worrying "material stretched to breaking point" noises. The other one had a sort of unwisely deep 'v' in the décolleté out of which 98% of my chest was trying to escape. I tried to adjust the straps, and one of them pinged farcically off across the changing room.

The saleslady - size 6, bra size approximately 28AA - came in to offer me a couple of extra horrors. There was a purple one, and one with a hideous geometric pattern, like a dog had eaten, then vomited up, an Escher drawing. They were both over €100. I tried to suppress a sob and forced my defeated body into the Escher vomit one, which made me look like the Queen mother from the neck down, a nightmarish optical illusion. Impregnable. Shaped like an unwisely upholstered pouffe.

"How is it?" she said through the curtain.

"C'est môôôôôôche, it's HIDEOUS". I couldn't even muster enough British reserve to lie.

"Vous faites du 38, 40?" she said drawing back the curtain to look at me. She meant dress size. I was so distressed by this point, however, I thought for some reason she was talking UK bra sizes and nearly wept.

"Non! Je fais du 32! Du 85 quoi! But with a large cup size". This was not a conversation I ever wanted to be having with anyone. Ever. There should be some system where you step into an unmanned booth which scans you, then provides you with a humane, appropriately sized swimming costume. Make this happen, inventors of the world.

She tried to sidle away before I could get any more unhinged. She had nothing else to offer in any case, so she went back to folding negligées. An awkward silence fell over the shop as I muttered and struggled in the cubicle.

In the end I had to buy the one with the stupidly deep 'v'. I had come all the way to Spa, I was not going to let this put me off. It was a Large, which meant it was saggy over the body, whilst barely covering my chest. I looked ridiculous. I fiddled with the straps. Then I went up to the baths and stood in the damp, echoing changing rooms and had a little cry.

I have been at war with my body for most of my adult life. Once it started dicking me around with alopecia, I opened hostilities on the damn thing. I starved it, beat it up, filled it full of crap. I was never satisfied, never liked it however hard I worked on it or how much I deprived it. I suppose everything else became so much more important when I lost my hair; once that was wrong, I couldn't bear for the rest not to be "right"; not to be the way I wanted it. Anyway. A few years ago - I suppose around 2008, perhaps not entirely coincidentally when I started this blog - I finally got too tired, too sad, too damn bored, to fight with my body anymore. I thought of all the time I had wasted being pointlessly dissatisfied, or worrying about food and cellulite and stretchmarks, and it horrified me. Also, genuinely terrible things - illnesses and accidents - happened to people around me which made me profoundly grateful for the basic fact of my body; it worked. It allowed me to enjoy things and to look after the people I loved.

I stopped being the person who couldn't find a single thing she was prepared to eat in a motorway service station, who wouldn't eat chips to save her life, who didn't drink alcohol, who ate spinach every day, who obsessed and fretted, and body brushed, and calculated everything, even on holiday. I relaxed. I ate chips, and it wasn't a big deal. I drank wine. I had a sandwich for lunch if that was what there was for lunch. I simply stopped caring. I ate whatever was put in front of me, and if we had to find lunch in a motorway service station shop, I'd eat a Snickers and a packet of crisps and not agonise for a second.

For a long time, this felt like the most amazing revelation. It was - still is - wonderful not to be "fussy" any more, not to attach such fetishistic importance to food. But of course, you can't hit 36 eating exactly what you damn well want (and being naturally very greedy) and doing no exercise and stay as skinny as I used to be. So I am bigger. Lots of my clothes - bought when I was both rich and thin, back in London - don't fit any more. I've mentioned it here in passing quite a few times and I can't pretend it doesn't bother me a bit. It does. There are whole sections of my wardrobe that I know not to even try, and others I approach with increasing trepidation. But even so, I remember what it felt like to have a constant hunger headache, to keep a running tally in my head of everything I had eaten in a day, to feel genuinely panicky at the thought of someone else cooking for me. I remember I remember bingeing mechanically, joylessly on ice cream, knowing it was the easiest thing to throw up again afterwards. It was horrible. I know what's more important, and actually, I'm not that unhappy with my body. It's a perfectly ok shape, really. Would I like to be 10% thinner? Yes. Am I willing to go insane again to get there? Hell no.

But sometimes, and it's partly a reflex, I think, a learnt way of channeling anxiety and strain that never quite left me, I find I want to wage war on my body again. I want to cause it pain, deprive it, make it suffer. And standing in the changing rooms at Spa, I felt like that again. I felt revolting, disgusting, angry. I wanted to hurt myself. I walked into the pool hunched and weepy in my towel, sick of myself. I stood in the water, blinking back tears and picked at the dry skin on my lips until they bled.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the spa was quite full. All around me people wandered around in their swimming gear, all shapes and sizes and ages, going from pool to pool, lying reading the paper, several of them having a crafty beer and a fag outside, this being Belgium. There were babies, floating luxuriantly fat and serious in their rubber rings. There were several cadaverously thin, pale, ginger youths, their bodies almost luminously blue white. There were solidly barrel shaped women in their forties and fifties in sensible one pieces, and other women of the same age, lithe and tanned mahogany with layers of waterproof mascara, string bikinis and elaborately bleached peacock coiffures. There were men with vast bellies in tiny trunks, unselfconsciously lying legs akimbo on loungers, reading the sports pages. There were frail, stooped elderly ladies in floral swimming caps and costumes with frilled skirts, carefully negotiating the steps down into the water. There were lots of larger chests than mine, including some on men, and lots smaller. As I looked around, I could feel myself ever so slowly uncurling, the tension starting to dissipate.

There were some really beautiful bodies too. Gorgeous leggy teenagers in tiny bikinis with impossibly perfect honey coloured limbs. Bony, angular ten year olds with peach soft skin that reminded me of Lashes zooming around and getting reprimanded by the lifeguards. There was one woman of about my age with amazing red hair, who was absolutely beautiful, tiny and completely compelling, impossible to take your eyes off. But there were lots and lots of completely ordinary, unexceptional bodies. Bodies with the odd sagging bit, a few thread veins, bruises or stretchmarks, bodies like mine. There was an endless variety of tattoos, some luxuriant back hair, a range of Caesarian scars, and some ludicrously clear tan lines (particularly cyclist's ones. The Ardennes is full of serious, iron-calved cyclists in lycra). There was one man, about my age, with alopecia, like me, though he wasn't wearing a wig, of course, and a girl with a large port wine stain on her face, joking with her boyfriend in the hot tub. The hot tub was ferocious. It wobbled away lots of my anxiety. I sat next to three generations of, I think, a Japanese family, who kept laughing and taking pictures of each other.

And everyone was just getting on with it. They were just bodies, doing what bodies do. Wobbling bosoms in the jacuzzi, prominent hip bones under the heat lamps, pregnant bellies and knobbly knees, old ones, young ones and somewhere in the middle ones, all soaking calmly. After a couple of hours I fell asleep in my stupid new swimming costume, lying on my lounger, soothed by the constant sounds of the water. My tits probably looked a bit odd, determinedly trying to escape out of the sides of the idiotic swimsuit, but whatever. By 6 that evening I was deeply, deeply relaxed. Well, until I had to put my stupid tight trousers back on.

I wish I could go back there every week. Failing that, I am committed to buying a couple of cheap pairs of trousers that fit. Also, if anyone can suggest where I can find a decent swimming costume for the generously torsoed, for god's sake PLEASE let me know.

L'Odeur Fraîche des Poneys*

2011-07-12T12:36:00.004+02:00

Hello. Speak quietly please, I am struggling with dreadful insomnia and the insistent sensation that I have been swimming in, and binge-drinking, embalming fluid. My suspicion that my gin was switched with formaldehyde at Brussels' premier (only) (unless you count Homo Erectus, and really, who would) transvestite cabaret bar last week is apparently inaccurate, however, according to the mighty forces of Science, or at least Mr Cookblog. Apparently "our bodies produce aldehydes as part of metabolising alcohol", so it is my own fault I feel like a long dead thing.

I am currently in London, international city of glamour and so on. This is demonstrated by the following facts:

1. Shopping

I have purchased two Marks & Spencer minimiser bras for the modish sum of 14 of your British pounds. I am very delighted with my newly crushed chest, it is everything I hoped for and more. With the sterling elastic assistance of my new bras, I can probably fit into almost 20% of my wardrobe, progress indeed. I also went to Londis for deodorant and Maplins for an adaptor, but then I had to stop before I became overwhelmed with retail opportunity excitement. The latter was an excellent retail experience for a Belgian resident, since it:

(a) took 30 seconds; and

(b) was very cheap; and

London 1, Brussels 0, but Brussels doesn't care because it has a lift museum, and popular music in the metro.

2. Romance

An elderly Irish gentleman smelling strongly of Tenants Extra chatted me up on the 31 bus. Actually, he offered me his seat but I am fairly sure he did not actually think I was pregnant.

3. Livestock

There has, apparently, been an escapee peacock down my father's street in recent weeks. "The neighbour's dog barked at it, so it flew onto Ivo's roof (ed's note: if you live in Notting Hill, there is a strong likelihood that one or more of your neighbours will be called Ivo) and sat there".

I caught a tiny frog in Beckenham which tried to jump into my cup of tea.

The CFO, who is also in London just called me. "I am in an office in Sussex Place", he said. "And I am watching a fox in the corner of the room scratch its ear. There is another one sleeping next to it".

Which was odd.

4. Social events

I went to 52 Betty's book launch last night, in posh sex emporium Coco de Mer. There is nothing like nervously sipping pink Cava and waiting for someone you recognise to arrive in a forest of high end vibrators and jade dildos to make you feel like a bit of a tool, but thankfully the Harridan arrived and I attached myself to her side, like her mute, black, parrot. We made an excellent double act, I think: her telling everyone whose paths we crossed that her "stroke face" was due to her root canal work rather than a stroke; me getting people's names wrong and knocking over flogging paddles and god knows what else at every turn.

Betty's book, The 52 Seductions, based on her former blog of the same name, is about Betty and her husband Herbert's year long mission to revive their sex life by seducing each other every week. It is not a how-to manual, and it's not self-congratulatory or likely to make you feel inadequate. It's warm, often thoughtful and frequently very funny. Actually, it's at least as much about love and vulnerability and the meandering course of long term relationships as sex. It feels a very brave book, actually. I would no more be able to speak of such things than I would be able to do particle physics, so I am particularly awed by her candour.

Most importantly, it was an excellent do, with mini sandwiches shaped like pants and pink Cava. I took a picture of the pants-wiches, reasoning, why be classy when you can make an arse of yourself.

Speaking of arse, there were also biscuits with chapter headings on them, very similar to my own arse biscuits, but larger.

Now I must return to Brussels, but not before I have walked around Marks & Spencer in a fugue state.

*The title of this post comes from today's chat with M, which also covered our respective attitudes to various geometric shapes.

"So, you're saying a disc is ok, but a circle is bad?"

"I don't know. Am I? I have nomenclature problems. I am saying bagel bad, biscuit good".

"Noted. Cheese: ok, elastic band: not ok. How do you feel about squares?"

"I associate them with caramel shortbread, which is positive".

"How do we feel about half circles? Like, a rainbow? Or half a reblochon?"

"I am against them".

This did not even arise in the context of Google Plus, it was just common or garden stupidity. How do you feel about circles?

The Chipping Norton Set

2011-07-07T11:16:00.007+02:00

I have a pressing question on the phone hacking scandal, and it is this.

What the fuck are the Chipping Norton Set doing in Chipping Norton?

I mean, have you been to Chipping Norton? Because I have. I got my first and only speeding ticket to date trying to leave Chipping Norton, actually, and that's no coincidence. Ok, it's very pretty. The Cotswolds is, generally; I must concede that it is exceedingly attractive If You Like That Kind of Thing. If, however, the tunnel from Barbican tube to Silk Street is your idea of beauty, you may, like me, struggle. I suppose the fact that there's a Londis AND Co-op helps (actually, scrupulous fairness requires me to disclose that there's a Sainsburys, which I will admit is the height of Cotswold sophistication. I often find myself weeping tears of gratitude when I get as far as the rubbish Tesco in Broadway). And yes, there is a nice hotel and two delis. But the discovery that Chipping Norton is a nexus of News International evil baffles me. Do they perhaps get up to such depraved, horrible things because there is arse all else to do?

Even before the current brouhaha, I kept hearing about the London-on-the-Wold side of the Cotswolds, how it's lousy with celebrities - Liz Hurley Kate Moss, Damian Hirst, Kate Winslet.. And other people I have just looked up on this handy list. Well. I have never spotted ANY of them. Not even at Brailes Agricultural show, where they have a live pensioner fruit machine (this, magnificently, is three old people sitting in a row with a basket of fruit each, no word of a lie, I promise this is true) AND ferret roulette, so I am deeply sceptical. What on earth could they possibly find to do which would beat that?

The reason I know so much ("so much" = virtually nothing) about the Cotswolds is that my father, the Bearded King of Science lives there, has done for years. He used to live in Blockley, which was supposed to boast a more reasonable selection of notables: Alan Rusbridger, Will Hutton, Joanna Trollope and The Fat One From Lovejoy. Not quite premier league, but you know, enough for a little frisson. We never saw any of them. My stepmother did once claim to have seen Sting in the pub, but we didn't believe her. Our idea of Cotswold celebrities remained the homicidal goat at the Cotswold Farm Park (pictured here, that man in the flat cap doesn't realise he's dicing with death).

Now he has moved to a remoter corner of the Cotswold firmament and I have yet to spot so much as an extra in Hollyoaks. I am not saying there are not compensatory delights. Regular readers may remember the dizzying array of activities on offer for small children: the opportunities for fishing dead mice out of storm drains, chasing spiders the size of ponies out of the shower, the cheery parlour games of 'guess the cause of death of the small mammal', the hours of fun dicing with death or amputation in The Tetanus Adventure Playground TM (barn full of rusting agricultural machinery). Well behaved children may be offered the chance to go down to the stream and poke a decomposing fox corpse with a stick. If I am very very good myself, I may get an hour's free pass to go to the nearest market town while my children roam free range near the septic tank, whining about the absence of digital tv. Until recently it had largely escaped the gentrification of most of the Cotswolds and a good day out involved wandering round the hardware store, then buying a lardy cake, that tasty traditional Oxfordshire blend of diabetes, heart disease and raisins. Sometimes, if were feeling lucky, we would beg the depressive café-gallery owner to turn his coffee machine on, though this rarely ended well. Now there's a proper hotel and everything, with reading material other than Cotswold Life. Maybe next time I go I'll see Lily Allen or something? I live in hope. I did once go to Daylesford, but it was terrifying, filled with women in Tod's loafers assaulting each other for the last jar of plum compôte. I'd rather take my chances with the horse sized arachnids and the badger carcasses.

I do not understand The Country, this has been long established. But this whole Chipping Norton set thing has piqued my curiosity. What do they do? Presumably they just go to one another's houses for cocktails all the time, and none of them have to deal with the queue in Londis or negotiate the challenging journey to the Costwold Motoring Museum to see Brum. I am quite certain none of them have ever been to the "Fundays Play Barn" in Bourton on the Water (it is hard to type those words, the scars are still fresh). But I am going back there in the first week of August (children and dog have tetanus boosters scheduled) and I will investigate. Maybe Brailes will be throbbing with paparazzi? Goodness, I am almost looking forward to it.

Wednesday, no brain left for a title

2011-07-06T19:44:00.003+02:00

All is well in law jail. I have progressed speedily (ish), and been exceptionally annoying all day. Thankfully I am the only one here to witness my own annoyingness, but it will be reflected in the dreary tone of the following. Just be thankful I haven't added footnotes.

The answer

Finally, after years of vague unease, I know what has been missing from my life. This.

It is perfect. Perfect, I tell you. I would not care about my inability to make any money or be any good at anything if I had one of those in the back yard quietly grazing. I would just sniff the tiny pony's neck and feed it Polos and be filled with contentment.

Well.

So I tell myself. In fact, once I had the tiny pony I would, indeed, be briefly ecstatic, but then I would start to tire of the constant manure shovelling. The pony might well be bitey and evil-tempered, and prove less than co-operative when I tried to put my neck-sniffing plan into action. It might bankrupt me in polos and carrots. I would become ever more resentful of the embarrassment the tiny pony caused me when the neighbours complained about it eating their sturdy perennials. There would be difficulties about what to do with the minipony when I wanted to go away for the weekend. I would start to complain about it on this weblog whilst entertaining oft-repeated fantasies about some OTHER kind of tiny animal.

Self-knowledge is not always a good thing.

Weekend happenings

I realised that in order to counter the - fairly accurate - impression given on these pages that I never leave the house, I should really have told you I went to a festival this weekend. So: I went to a festival this weekend. This one.

I am not, um, a natural festival-goer. It's not the mud, or the discomfort, or the sitting in a nest of discarded plastic beakers and condoms, but I do have some trouble controlling my gag reflex around "challenging" foods and I had particular trouble this time with people eating chips with not only ketchup and mayonnaise (the twin sauces of satan), but also a sort of lumpy brown meat poured on top ALL THREE AT ONCE in the stifling heat. Imagine, if you will, that these people had been at a festival for three days already at that point and several of them had white dreadlocks and you will have some notion of my discomfort. I found the latrines less troubling, actually, than the rivers of ketchup and mayonnaise and unspeakable Brown Sauce and the wafting scent of a thousand rancid spring rolls ALSO served with mayonnaise. Brrrrrr. Make this madness stop.

Apart from the slight nausea issue, however, all was lovely: there was sun, we* did not have to walk fifteen miles to get to things as you usually do at festivals, there were several excellent sets (Kaiser Chiefs, Fleet Foxes - complete with their herbal teas - and crazed disco pixie Robyn especially) and we successfully avoided hearing more than a few seconds of a two hour ear-bleeding drear-fest from Iron Maiden (apart from the piteously horrible noise, some of their coiffures were intensifying my nausea problems). Also, and this is crucial, we went straight back to Brussels afterwards and there was none of this unspeakable, rolling around in a canvas coffin surrounded by halfwits business (yes, I am filled with festival spirit). Actually, I was in my nice clean bed and intensively, vigorously showered by midnight, which is proof of how exceptionally rock 'n' roll I am, oh yes.

I resolved the food problem by eating PLAIN chips and drinking many tokens worth of nasty rosé. I was quite entertained to see that there was a mussel stand, from whence many people emerged with large metallic pots of mussels. Mussels: the obvious festival food. So there. Proof that I occasionally leave the house. Before the festival I also went to a birthday barbecue and a nice man showed me round his beehives, which was fun. See? I have a social life. Of sorts. Sporadically. On current reckoning I might do so again around mid -October.

(*"We"= me and the CFO reprising our excellent festival going exploits of a few years ago, where he tried to smuggle soap flavoured vodka into the venue in a recyclable shower gel container hidden in his pants and passed out at 9pm)

Collar of Calm

This picture, requested by commenter Beccy, might suggest the Collar of Tranquility is working:

I do not know why the dog is bathed in a greenish light. Maybe that is an aura of pheromones?

Booktrauma

I despatched my overdue edits on Monday night, praise be. Now they can languish, unread and unloved, on someone else's desk for a while ("while" = anything up to another six years, I should think). I have lost all belief in this book business; I do not think I am any good at it and I am filled with renewed admiration for anyone who can string a semblance of a plot together. Goodness knows what I am good at, except carving marrows and catching spiders. It doesn't matter though, because one day I will have a tiny pony.

Or a sugar glider.

Or .. something.

What are your obscure talents?

Human Appeasing Pheromone

2011-07-05T23:07:00.001+02:00

Tuesday already. My inbox is bulging with temptation. Can I review 60 50 page judgments on subjects as crucial as equipment for electricity substations and butadiene rubber? Would I like to test some washing powder? Submit missing documents to my accountant? Scan these official pieces of paper? Get even more dates wrong? Try to establish the reasoning behind the current spate of mysterious demands from incompetent electricity supplier Electrabel? No. No, I would like to curl up in a small dark cupboard - under stairs would be ideal - and make loud retching noises like a cat with a hairball. My right ear has developed an unsightly, itchy rash and I nearly kicked the printer down the cellar stairs today for being an ink-guzzling ingrate twat with poor communication skills. The better news is that I am no longer looking after a canary. I am at a loss as to what the point of a canary is. It is like a car alarm, but even more boring.

After a bit of early morning puny impotent techno-rage I settled down to an exquisitely boring job of the kind I used to rather like when I was being the world's most half-hearted solicitor. I still rather like it. It's the kind of job where you make nitpicking notes in nice handwriting in the margins of things without having to actually do or achieve anything. I have been arsily marking up all day whilst tutting and muttering superior comments to myself. I become extremely hateful when I do this job, so it is a good thing I only do it for 2 weeks every six months. Any longer and I would start correcting people's grammar in the supermarket queue and sending back personal emails offering me videos of puppies marked up with 'please see my comments in bold square brackets' and track changes. The amusing thing about this outbreak of twattishness is that I am mainly amending and correcting work I did myself six months ago during my previous outbreak of legal pedantry. See? Pointless.

Better news: yesterday, in an exciting development for humanity, and possibly even my sanity, the CFO's au pair bought the weepette what she claims is a pheromone diffusing calming collar. The box claims that it gives a sense of calm and wellbeing and diffuses anxiety.

The Collar Of Tranquility is very large, and he has to wear it looped twice around his neck. It looks rather chic on him, like one of those Hermès double strap watches. He seems as neurotic as ever, but I suppose we should give it a few days. "It also comes as a plug-in diffuser" she told me.

"What, like Glade?! AMAZING".

"Yes, I suppose". She was wearing a 'humour the nutter' expression at this point.

"Mmm. Calming Glade. Glade Prozac Plug-in. I need one of those". The au pair had disappeared by now, closing the door firmly behind her, but the germ of an idea was born.

My entrepreneurial mind (ahahahhahaha. If anyone locates that, do send it my way) started to work overtime. Surely mankind is missing a trick not developing these for humans? Mrs Trefusis and I, always on the look out for good business propositions (when we are not refining our plan to move to a Bulgarian hill village and breed pygmy goats) brainstormed around this idea extensively when we should both have been doing other things.

E: I so want one. I mean, why? Why would dogs get them and not us? We need them MORE.

H: It's perfect. Every office in the land would buy these.

E: Yes, it's a winner. I think this might beat even www.philanderers.com as a business proposition. AND www.mycurate.com. Possibly even our plan to write pulp romance novels à deux to sell in Tescos with big "Selected by idiots" stickers on the front.

H: Imagine, when I have difficult meetings, I could simply Plug in a Prozac air freshner and clients would go 'marvellous, simply marvellous' and wave their hands airily.

E: I suppose there might be minor legal issues, but I'm sure we can get round them somehow.

H: How about a collaboration with a fragrance house, slipping 'mood enhancers' into scent? Because if you bought it for yourself, then it would be fine.. it would be forcing it on others that would be a problem. Just imagine:

"I like to spritz on a little [insert catchy name here] in the morning - it's an active chypre, which combines the scent of success, with the cognitive enhancement effects of modafinil"

E: What I like about that is how it's less a long-term commitment to your mental health, and more an accessory. See, I am already aching to buy this and it DOESN'T EVEN EXIST.

What nonsensical business propositions have you come up with? And consider yourself on notice, I will think about stealing them for a moment, then be overcome with indolence and not bother.