Five Essential Bits of Advice

1.  Always carry a spoon.  The number of times I could have done with a spoon is ridiculous.  In a pinch you can improvise one using the lid of a yoghurt pot, but this is presuming you have an open yoghurt to hand.

2.  Take every possible opportunity to go to the toilet or have sex, provided that neither of these activities offends or upsets anyone. 

3.  Carry a rainproof hat.  Small children will laugh in your face but your mascara will not run.

4.  Carry nailclippers.  I can strip electrical wire with mine and open tubs of hummus with the pointy bit.

5.  Rehearse ninja moves in your head in case you get mugged.  This may prove fruitless but it gives you such a bad-arse attitude that casual criminals will pale as you pass.   Oh and keep your bag zipped and in your lap.

Being Joan Collins

Popular literature has it that in times of strife, some women invoke Madonna rather like an oracle.  Of course, the question "What would Madonna do?" has only one answer, which is very likely "Flash her gristly flange."

I don't think I've ever asked myself at moments of great moment what Madonna would do.  However, I have referred to a small icon of Joan Collins pinned up in my head, on occasion.  Joan Collins has a past that started before I was born.  She is just shy of 79 years old, and still espouses a glamour at which I can only raise a tired eyebrow.  When asked how she has coped with life so successfully she said something like "I never look back".  I used to think this was the mark of someone shallow.  An unexamined life, and all that.  But as my past starts to get bigger than my future, I can see it's more of a survival mechanism. 

Does it really benefit anyone to pick the scab of unhappy childhood, repeatedly?  Does it help to amass all the things you've done, and not done, and things you've fucked up, like some temporal car boot sale and think this is the sum of who I am?  It may be better just to put on some lipstick and brush everything under the carpet.

My school's motto was Respice, Circumspice, Prospice.  Look back, look around, look forward.  (I think.  I never did Latin).  All very laudable advice.  However, I drove without a rear view mirror once for six months, and I don't think I missed much.

You have to admire someone who has optimistically launched herself into marriage five times.  The last time Joan married, she was nearly 70, and her husband 32 years younger.  ('If he dies, he dies', she remarked...)  It shows a wonderful reluctance to learn from experience, and an insane belief that this time it will work.  Ten years on they are still together.

I don't agree with Joanie's politics, or many of her views, but I love that she chats to her daughter on Twitter and posts photos and retweets.  She is one of the last Rank starlets, yet there is nothing old-fashioned about her.  She's a sort of sequinned heat-seeking missile.  Steely, camp, and ridiculously preserved.  When I grow up I'd like to be Joan Collins, but I hope there won't be a vacancy for a while.  In the meantime I will practise not looking back.

 

Charlotte's Ebb

One of the few benefits of hundreds of books being tossed arse over tit in the wardrobe is that some come to light I don't remember buying, let alone reading.  One such little treasure is The Brontës by I. Cooper Willis, first published in 1932.  The copy I have is almost fifty years old.  I started reading it recently because I was interested to find out more about the Brussels period, but the rest of the book is fascinating too.  It's full of intimate detail about their life in Haworth.  Portraits of Emily, Anne and, particularly, Charlotte are strong and feel very immediate.  Letters and reminiscences inform most of the book, although the author does witter on a bit with psychological theory.

Rather uncomfortably, I can see myself in Charlotte.  She refers often to a lowness of her "animal spirits", which I recognise.  'She says somewhere in Villette, speaking as Lucy, that she could never resist the impulse to like anyone who was kind to her.'  This was in reference to Charlotte's unrequited love for M. Heger, who ran the pensionnat in Brussels.  Oh, you and me both, girl.  It's like the sun suddenly coming out, just for you.  It's like a safe haven somewhere dangerous.  And it's really really not good if you mistake kindness for something else.

Charlotte married her father's curate, got pregnant soon after and then died, probably from extreme morning-sickness, following all her siblings to a very early grave.  She did appear to be very happy though, in the few months of her marriage.  So a happy ending of sorts.

I'm also reading about British serial killers, a much more healthy subject. 

Married to the MOBIB

It is, almost literally, as if I have married Brussels and have had a little honeymoon and am now settling down to work out how I live with this strange, moody creature.  This is known as: the end of the honeymoon period.  Although to be fair, it's not exactly been very honeymoony, unless you find administration and transport strikes and poo of various varieties romantic.  If you do, please get help.

What worries me a little is that I haven't really been excited yet.  I get the odd vertiginous surge that culminates in a tiny whoop, but mainly I'm doing a sort of plodding slalom around the doggy caca, and forgetting to buy toilet paper.   Not for the dogs - they are long gone. 

My work hours have been all over the place this week, and the upside of this was that I found myself in the Place du Chatelain on a Wednesday afternoon, where a small but glorious market happens.  And although it was lovely, and I promised myself that that was where I would live next, there was no feeling, no excitement, no pleasure.

Have I, in fact, married the wrong city?  I have been looking at jobs in Paris, Luxembourg, even Florence, for fucksake.  Now that I have to really start making a life, I plead boredom and look for escape routes.  And this tetchy old cow will be there, wherever I go.  Perhaps this is a normal part of settling in.

There are probably quite a few things I can do.

1.  Stop being such a mardy introvert and go out.  There are nice people out there.

2.  Similarly, go on a few dates, if possible.

3.  Treat the weekends as if they were a holiday.  Be a tourist in my own city.  Have lovely dinners.  Bugger about a bit.

4.  Ignore, as best I can, the well-meant but depressing comments about crime and taxes and the dreadfulness of everything here.  This is very important.   


That will do for now.

Deep and Crisp; Uneven

I had a fleeting visit to Fleet to see family, came back and promptly got sick.  It is my sincere hope that I did not pass this on to anyone else.  Last night, radiator full-on, clothes on, in bed, shivering like winter.  The only way to stop was to put my socked feet directly on the radiator.  This morning the polar opposite.  Thankfully I was not working this morning, so I slept till about 10, at which point I woke in gallons of my own sweat, feeling that the fever had left.  It hasn't quite though.  I just ravished three oranges as if my life depended on it.  Hot cup of tea to scare the sore throat into submission and I'm done for the night.

Nothing much else to report.  I'm afraid life here is being a bit dull.  When I'm fully better (which might entail ravishing several dozen more oranges) this needs to change.  Tired and sick; not sick and tired, but it's much the same thing.  I didn't move all this bloody way to be bored.

That old bastard Friedrich Nietzsche (or possibly Kanye West) said 'That which does not kill us makes us stronger'.  This is, of course, complete bollocks.  That which does not kill you can wear you down by degrees until you don't really feel anything at all, and you are just sort of an automaton that eats crisps.  The eating of crisps is all well and good but the automaton part, not so much.

What I'm thinking is that I have to keep working the same routine steps as if I'm learning a dance, and once I am confident that I have that bit down, I'll move onto the next combination.  Or something profound like that.  
 

 

Doing More Bird

It is, apparently, possible to wake up at 8.11am and still make it to work by just after 9.  Out the house in precisely fifteen minutes, I'm afraid some important morning rituals may have been overlooked.  Never mind, I'm sure there were worse-smelling people than me on the tram.  This sudden-jolt start to the day (known as the OH SHIT method) is not to be recommended.  But until I can make myself go to bed at a reasonable time, it's bound to happen at least once more. 

It's been a week of some frustration.  I'm mindful of the fact that the internet has eyes and ears, so there is little I can safely say.  I'll leave it at this: family members who are not an everyday part of the household, while meaning well, can tighten my jaw, somewhat.  If you'll just pass me that jack, I'll get it open again.

No other job, with the exception perhaps of that programme Bill Oddie used to do, would allow me magical experiences like those of this morning.

The Boy fell asleep very quickly so it was down to me to cater for the assembled birdage.  Crows are incredibly good at catching.  I can lob a crust towards A85 only to have it intercepted mid-air by a numberless crow, who hardly even changes flight course.  They do fight like buggery though.  It's a bit like Top Gun.

Three swans came today (the fourth was lazy and late, and all the bread was gone).  I love having them standing around me, even if A85 does snort and look at me a bit sideways.  I think he knows I could take him one-handed, so he doesn't try anything.  Besides, I'm the Bread Lady.

Later, by the litter-rich lake in the Parc des Sources, we came upon a family of coots.  Quite possibly the cutest (or indeed, cootest) thing I've seen for ages.  The four babies all have orange fluffy heads and weird little stumpy orange fluffy wings.  I sat very quietly for about fifteen minutes just watching them being all cootish and adorable.  I did consider stuffing one in my pocket, but I haven't got a pond.

Sorry, I'm going on about birds again.  Just think of it as bringing my work home with me.

Somebody else's photo - must remember my camera!

Raining Pouring

I appear to have moved to the wettest place in North Western Europe.  It is as if all those years of my saying that I really like rain have come home to roost.  I still do like it, although would prefer not to be pushing two children in a soggy buggy through it, in a stupid but effective hat, pulling my wet cardy sleeves down over my wet knuckles.  It comes to something when you think "oh well at least it's vertical rain and not that bastard diagonal stuff!".  It would not surprise me if Belgians had 50 words for rain.

Occasionally it still very much surprises me that I am here.  Because I don't do things like this.  I stay within a five mile radius of where I was born.  I cling to security.  And then I didn't.  Unsurprisingly, or perhaps surprisingly, life feels pretty much the same here as it did in London, despite the shifting of tectonic plates. 

There is a feeling that I'm waiting for something.  Whether this be an event, a person, a change within myself, I am not sure.  What is certain is that the only sensible thing is to ignore that feeling.  If one waits for an event, or a person, or a change within oneself before engaging with life, life will trot on anyway.

Don't wait for the rain to stop.