Marchons, marchons qu'un programme economique impur abreuve nos sillons

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm a bit of a francophobe. I challenge anyone to spend three years working and studying in Paris without following suit. Since I moved away and started visiting France bit by bit - especially Marseille, where people were beautifully kind - on a rational level I know that Paris is not France, and France in general is a lovely country full of lovely people. On an emotional level - because of that time in Paris, France is a just a big rat-infested city full of snotty assholes who think they're clever because they know a lot but who can't analyze or synthesize their way out of a stubby paper bag. I'm trying to get over that. A few more trips to Marseille would help.

Anyways, emotionally revolted as I am by the French, one thing I will say about them: at least they're not a bunch of snivelling baby pansy-ass motherfuckers who are content to be swept into pauper's graves by the overwhelming tides of history, modern Anglo-Saxon style. "€36bn for the bankers and we get screwed" indeed. Yesterday as I read up on the strike I was sort of passingly impressed by the demands of the unions and bodies staging the strikes and demonstrations - in that it wasn't just a demand for social support, but for business support, in a real concerted effort to make sure labourers, who hadn't contributed to the economic crisis (not even indirectly through their retirement funds in France, as pensions still function as pensions there - they haven't been basculated into throwing all their scrimpings and savings into the stock market through mutual funds, like Ango-Saxons have), aren't the ones who pay for it.

But this morning I was extra-impressed by way of comparison when I read this in the Independent, a 'leftish' British paper, which treated the demonstrators, and the other much more serious and desperate demonstrators in southern Europe and the new EU entrant countries, as recalcitrant, incoherent children complicating an already complicated situation. Honestly, it makes me want to vomit. Let me put it like this: there's a reason that I, a British citizen, chose to work in Belgium, and looked for jobs in France, Germany, anywhere in northern Europe, basically, besides Britain. And it wasn't because I was anxious to fight with banks and utility companies in a language that isn't my first - that was just a fringe benefit. It was because the standard of life in Britain is absolute shit compared to the rest of northern Europe. Job security sucks, benefits suck, public services suck, the cost of living and average salaries are wildly unbalanced, and only rich people can afford to live close to their offices if they work in London; it has execrable wealth distribution even among normalish people.

And there's one reason for this: northern European governments get kept on their toes by their people. Elections don't come frequently enough to communicate effectively with them that way, and northern Europeans know you have to hit the streets when they do something that's not in the people's interest between-times. It's not rocket science - it's the purpose of public sector strike, the purpose of a demonstration: to act against the government in a way that isn't illegal when the government is acting against you in a way that isn't prosecutable. But not in Britain anymore, it seems, and hence their awful quality of life. I wonder why. I think it's because the Thatcher years saw the media managed so well during the strikes in the early 80's - really managed to present the strikers as Britain's problem, rather than the symptom of Britain's problem - and the media is still playing the game even today. That's what happens with you let Rupert Murdoch in. A national assfucking.

Dreams of sheds and projectors

Home again today. My lungs are just too disgusting. The F-word says I smoked too many joints this weekend; I say I'm a victim of society; the reality is that my co-workers look queasy when I come close to coughing up my lungs. Fair enough.

Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.

My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.

Our Woman Wishes She Was in Havana

Really not well yet, but will trundle off to work to make deadline, it being Wednesday. Caker work ethic, me, but then I have a sneaking suspicion I'd take more sickdays if my apartment was heated better relative to my office. Brussels is dry and freezing again - pleasant in terms of the sun, difficult in terms of keeping this Art Nouveau den of vice and iniquity properly heated, bloody horrible in terms of how the abscence of precipation makes the heavy particles of pollution hang visibly in the air.

So John Updike is dead. I always hated his books. Couldn't write a believable female character if you held a gun to his head, and yet he tried so hard, like that bit in the Witches of Eastwick about Sukie taking a piss. Well, lots of people liked him. And he gave Cher a pretty good role. Poor old Cher. And the thing is, he tried. All that generation of manly manly men writers, Americans trying to live up or live down or live something post-Hemingway and just looking dangerously Freudian instead, are dying out, and as a rule I don't care at all, but John Updike tried to write the woman believably instead of as a succubus or an obstacle or whatever. And now what do we have to replace that sort of effort? A generation of Anglophone writers whose books are a trial to read because they're thinking like scriptwriters instead of novelists, with the consequence that neither the men nor the women are believable. Oh well. At least we have the Europeans, Japanese and post-colonials. Very sorry the poor man is dead, in short.

Finished Our Man in Havana yesterday whilst trying to keep still and let my lungs heal. Pretty adorable but not my favourite - that's still The Quiet American, or possibly The Heart of the Matter. Yeah, probably The Heart of the Matter. In Our Man I think there was a little slap-out at Orwell's blistering 1948 review of The Heart of the Matter - uber-Catholic Milly suddenly reconciling herself to her father's romance by saying he's a pagan, so he's allowed to do whatever he wants, lucky him. But who knows. Anyways, I've enjoyed it but I'm getting sick of Graham Greene. Pattern is too dominant. Stagnation, intrique, woman, and then ambiguous ending that isn't really ambiguous. I'll give it a rest for awhile, I guess.

Pleasant to read about Havana. Cuba has a special meaning for Canadians because it's so cheap for us to go and to stay there, what with the Americans not being allowed, and obviously it's quite a bit warmer. Elvis invited us over to holiday with them, but it's extremely expensive to get there from Europe, so no can do, we'll have to get our bakingly hot vacations in North Africa this year. And Cuba's not just important for Canadian holidays. I think the first time international trade politics ever blew my mind was when I was nine or so, and I realized that Lake Ontario - downtown Toronto, actually - had a massive new Redpath sugar refinery, as well as an artfully decaying old one that had been abandonned long before.

'What the fuck?' I asked Magnum, I think it was. 'How the fuck is there a sugar refinery here? This is Canada. It's cold.' At that time of my life, I thought sugar only came from canes - wasn't familiar with beets - but in any case, a great deal of Canadian sugar comes from canes. And he told me, I think it was him, that evaporated cane juice or canes were brought in bulk from Cuba to the Toronto deepwater port, processed there, and sold to the Americans, because the Americans couldn't buy it directly for refining there, because of the embargo. And for Canadians, that was great, because it was cheap, because the American buyers were kept out of the market by their embargo, and that if the embargo ever ends it will be a problem for people who work for Redpath in Canada. I tell you my jaw dropped. It just seemed so silly. But interesting. And my attitude to our society's economic organization has not changed much since.

The private life of plague carriers

I don't think there's a limit to the number of sickdays you can take in Belgium; at our office there certainly isn't. Just as well because in this city everybody is a little sick all the time. Today I actually feel quite good, mood-wise and everything, but I'm hacking like an autistic Englishman, those clever influenza germs agitating my respiratory system in a quest to become airborne as I cough all over potential new colonies, ergo est my colleagues. Well, fuck you, germs. I went to work yesterday and you had your chance.

Besides being a plague carrier I have too much to do today - bully the banks, write to young family members about the Netherland's land reclamation strategies, sew some diapers for the legions of friends who've started breeding, and basically be better at keeping in touch. I don't understand how I can love my friends and family so much and be so crap about keeping in touch.

Wanted to point out something though: David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants might be one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen. Even more exquisite than the Life of Birds. And better suited to drrrrrurrgs. There aren't many people who I don't know personally that I love, but I reckon I love David Attenborough. Imagine if he was your uncle or something, and read to you. Wow. That would be the best uncle ever. Even now I like to watch his documentaries last thing before bed - brush and floss before they start and go to sleep with his enthusiast-calm voice still in my ears. Watched P2 of the Private Life of Plants last night and what he said about the conifers, carbon dioxide and light gave me the same soothed, sleepy feeling as The Paper Bag Princess did when I was little.