The Red Dragon worries about male social health

I've got the same reluctance to commit to movies that most people seem to have to committing to reading a book - I just resent bad movies so much, as such a massive fucking waste of my time, that it takes some doing to make me actually sit through any of them. I was even a little reluctant to sit down to Hot Fuzz, and finally I told myself I owed it to Shaun of the Dead to watch something by some of the same people.

So I saw it last night and it was fuckin' adorable. Can't think of a better adjective for it than that. The absolute cutest movie I've seen since . . . well, since Shaun of the Dead. I would watch more comedies if there were more comedies like that. Though maybe there are and I'm just not watching them. Hard to tell. Timothy Dalton chewing the shit out of the celluloid and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being so funny. There are so few movies where a scene ends and it's only then it sinks in what's happened and the helpless belly laughs start - like the 'fascist'-'hag' scene. Dear oh dear. The constant Point Break references - 'ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?' - fucking hell.

And something so very sweet about the friendship of the Pegg and Frost characters. Sometimes I worry about boys, you know. In general. Some of them seem to have so many difficulties with social communication compared even to socially retarded women and sometimes it strikes me that the male gender might be, occasionally, a very lonely gender to be, especially as they age. So there's something extremely sweet in seeing such a touching - seriously! - picture of manfriends.

Speaking of friends, car update - San Francisca has volunteered to teach me herself. And she taught driving to work out some community service back in her, you know, community-service serving days, so she knows what she's doing. Her car is automatic and I'll be taking lesson-lessons on stickshift. Will that confuse me or only make me stronger? We'll see.

The Red Dragon will ride the wicked road

I've got many ambitions, which you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at me. Looking at me, you would figure I've got one ambition (a nice nap) and lack another that I should have (a comb). But in fact appearances are deceiving and I'm an ambitious, ambitious piece of work. My new ambition: to get my full driving license before I turn thirty on November 25. Failing that, before my 31st birthday on November 25, 2009.

I already know how to drive, you know. I learnt, more or less, when I was an undergrad, from a lovely Romanian bear called Liviu who would greet me each lesson with 'Hello, Menace to Society!' but I kept leaving the country or going through very druggy phases, and then finally I decided I'd wait to get my license until I moved to a country that didn't have a graduated licensing system so it wouldn't take me two fucking years.

So in a very real way, I'm in the right country for it now because judging by the quality of the driving a chimpanzee can get a permit here if they shave before the test. In another way, I'm scared shitless. Like most North Americans I learnt how to drive automatic and here, like any normal European resident, I'll learn how to drive stickshift. And I'm doing that in Brussels – the city where people drive with their ids. Honestly, I don't even think the problem is these fucks wanting to get where they're going in a hurry; they just want to make up for how little their mother let them suck her tit by being a massive goddamn Freudian slip to everyone else on the road. But the benefit of learning here, of course, is twofold; first that it will be fast-ish in terms of getting a full license – four months or so – we'll see how quickly the gears of Belgian bureaucracy grind for me and how often I choke at the tests. And second, once I can drive here, I can fucking well drive anywhere. Like, Italy-anywhere.

The lessons will be pricey but I must think of it as an investment. Because if I waited until we went to Australia, that would be another two years of graduated licensing, but this time in a small rainforest backwater where employers insist on licensed employees, and where I want to hatch my young, who will be heavy. So now, now is the time to carpe diem, grasp the nettle, take my medicine and like it, daddy, like it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tired of playing the game as they fuck up again and again

My new fucking anthem, at least for today, at least until I manage a good night's sleep:



Not much news today. It will be the first day I get an editorial published through work. With my real name and my photograph and everything. Obviously it will revolutionize the industry and I will be in international demand, especially in warmer sunnier countries. Vanity google searches will become just that little bit more rewarding. And probably I will sleep through the whole thing, or at least want to.

Elsewhere - remember the Belgacom fiasco? I was reminded of it incidentally yesterday whilst making an effort to resolve a new fucking fiasco, this time with our former bank Fortis, another near-bankrupt Belgian corporate monster of incompetence. They sent our unpaid house insurance bill to a collections agency, which I found mortifying, by the way - I worked for a collections agency for a week once before getting a real job, and I hate collections agencies, and I had always resolved to not have much to do with them. And to be fair, the bill was unpaid, because they hadn't been sending us any bills, at least at this address - the address that

1) I live at
2) The F-word lives at
3) The insurance coverage is for
4) Our statements and promotional material came to.

No. Instead they'd been sending the bills to a defunct address (the shitty school we'd stayed at when we arrived). For the last four months. Willful fucking stupidity. Fucking pig ignorance. It's not even a scam, because the collection agency is only charging us an extra 10 euros or something - they're not making money off it - and in fact, Fortis is probably losing money off it because of selling the debt to the collections agency. A collections agency who obviously took one fucking look at the addresses involved and could somehow figure out that they could probably reach us for our house insurance bill at our house where we live and receive our correspondence.

And the cherry in the virgin is that just a month ago, the F-word had been to Fortis and inquired into the terms of our house insurance, and the very helpful cretin he spoke to took the time to print out our contract for him and explain some of the finer points. Without noticing, or at least saying, that we owed the bank over 200 euros and they'd been trying to get payment since April on that contract.

I was talking about this last night with San Francisca and her Dutchman who were all a-twitter with excitement and I was all a-twitter with excitement for them, actually, as he's just found a massively excellent job in Amsterdam and they are going to move there soon, fulfilling one her dreams. That means when the F-word and I buy our bit of rainforest we can house swap anytime they want some sort of Crocodile Dundee experience and anytime we want a bit of Olde Worlde Culture and legal marijuana.

I haven't met a nationality that wasn't happy to mock the intelligence of Belgians, but I've never met people who do it with more dedication and detail than the Dutch. The Dutchman was in full fucking flight last night - I'd set him off by innocently asking why he'd been concerned that Dutch employers might not place any value on his Belgian work experience. Apparently the idea, for the Dutch, isn't that Belgians are stupid in the flat sense of the word, but that they're utterly incapable of communicating with each other or other people once they're part of any sort of organizational structure, and utterly incapable of seeing any sort of broad, abstract purpose to that organizational structure in terms of what customers were using it for or in terms of money generally. It's a broad and uncharitable conclusion but I haven't yet found any evidence to contradict it.

Anyways, if anybody who is obliged to move to Belgium for work stumbles across this: quick word of advice, don't use Fortis; it's been a never-ending comedy of errors with them. ING has been great, and has the lowest fees as well, as in none, which may be unique here - I'm not sure.

Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser

To follow up on yesterday's banana bread recipe, adding a smashed-up bar of rich dark chocolate worked as well as it sounds like it would have worked. It pleased a birthday table of 6 different nationalities so I'm going to recommend it.

Anyways, I've found the strangest little book in a bargain basementy used bookstore shop here, from a series I'd never heard of before, Teach Yourself, which I suppose is the British answer to Whatever for Dummies, except the little thing I found was published during the second world war, so it's vice versa. I boldly splurged 50 centimes on Teach Yourself Geology not because of an overwhelming interest in geology - I just wanted to see what a self-ed book published in the middle of one of the most brutal conflicts in human history is like. The answer is fucking brilliant.

It's so excited about what it's about and, since it was only 1943 and I suppose no one had told them that the world is a fucking terrible place where men are no better than vicious, murderous tomcats with opposable thumbs and revolting imaginations, that kill babies in factories by the thousandweight, it's so excited about progress. About evolution and the aging of the planet as a progress towards - what? - something bigger and better - as well as about the expansion of human knowledge.

That caught me off guard a little bit. Does anybody still believe in this idea of progress? Of natural evolution, or of the evolution of human knowledge, as a process that's going somewhere, from a modest place to some sort of abstract but obviously much better - what? Conclusion? Surely not. Just to something obviously much better, I suppose. What beautiful optimism. I don't think it exists anymore. Was it just so obviously wrong, in the face of the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist hecatombs? In the face of war photography? Or have decades and decades of advertising campaigns for everything from cars to breakfast cereal simply inured us to it, until the idea that tomorrow will be better than today just rings in our head like a fatuous jingle?

The Teach Yourself series was and is published by these people - religious types back in the day - and apparently each Teach Yourself book they published back in the day had the title of this post, Proverbs 9.9, printed in the frontispiece. It reminds me that old optimism, that blind, enthusiastic faith in progress - in the idea that natural evolution and the evolution of human knowledge was an ever upwards and onwards type thing - was the natural reaction of a Christian society to the theory of evolution. The Christian society could accept that things hadn't happened like in Genesis when faced with the evidence, but it still needed to believe there was something profoundly God-y about existence - maybe even believe there is no God, but still clinging to the belief that somehow everything makes sense, and everything is getting better. Things 'evolve'. Things 'progress'. Things, in general, are couched in the language of a people who earnestly believe, without necessarily making it explicit and without thinking that it must mean they have some sort of abstract mystical faith, that there is a direction for existence.

Documentaries, not dishes

Nasty hormonal dragon has been in the process of unfurling itself over the past few days any my mood has been chancy at best. So yesterday I cooked and watched David Attenborough documentaries to calm myself down. Mock me if you will but it works better than marijuana, which as much as I love it only delays the bad mood instead of nipping it neatly off the branch. I mean, look at this shit:



And did you know there are rhododendron forests in Nepal? How can you stay mad when there are rhododendron forests in Nepal and lyre birds are so fucking awesome? Quite easily probably but that's not the rhododendron forest's fault, nor the lyre birds'.

So yes, I also cooked, and for once deigned to bake a dessert though I'd always figured that for women's work. Of course if was only banana bread but it still turned out divinely, and considering I had to alter all recipes out of recognition to manage it with the ingredients we had on hand I'll put it here:

100 g whole spelt flour
200 g white flour
1.5 teaspoon baking soda
sprinkle salt teaspoon
cinnamon
100 grammes butter
4 large scoops creamy honey
2 beaten eggs
4 (over)ripe bananas

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (6 on my oven). Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and honey. Smush in bananas with hands. Whisk in beaten eggs; mix until well but not completely blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just to moisten. Pour batter into loaf pan. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, until fork inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Let the cake cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

Moist and lovely. Top marks. I made another for a friend whose birthday it is today but smashed up a Côte d'Or dark chocolate bar and put that it too, so we'll see how it turns out.

Also baked bread - same process as last week but remembered the salt this time and the rising consistency was still good, so looks like we have a winner. Put diced bitter olives into two of the loaves at the shaping stage and it was great. And made a heavyish lentil pasta dish because summer is apparently over here, from this book, Tuttopasta, by Franco Marenghi. First recipe I've used from it - the F-word bought it last week, I think - and it was great. It looks like a great book altogether - simple recipes, good process instructions, pretty pictures.

I'm half-guinea and I've been a hungry university student, so one would think I know my pasta by now, and I do more than most Anglos, certainly. But it's only in the past five years, being a skinflint, not overfond of meat, and and then living with a man who wants to be a vegetarian, that I'm really exploring what can be done with pasta that hasn't been deeply animal flavoured. In my parent's home, we would eat meat twice a day. Three times on weekends. That's a lot of animal, especially considering how comparatively little animal Daddy's family eats in Calabria and Mummy's parents eat in Yorkshire. But it's such a predictable pattern, you know? Europeans are happy to condemn the over-consumptive lifestyle of Americans, but most Americans are just a bunch of Europeans who went to America because they wanted to eat more, and most Europeans are just Americans who were either too scared, snotty, or skint to make the jump. So what the fuck does anybody expect?