Plantentuin

Have discovered the botanical gardens here. It's not just that peice of shit downtown, they have something that'll really be world-beating out in Meise, just outside of Brussels, when it's properly established. Right now the greenhouses are just a cacaphony of young plants and the grounds are full of babies too . . . but also have a metasequoia . . . and when I went last weekend everything was juuuuust about to burst into leaf. By the time I get back it will have. Buds are pregnant with promise everywhere and I've started eating nettles again because the air is about to be full of plants having sex and making hay fever sufferers sneeze.

So it's very exciting, it means I've survived another damn winter, and now I'm moving to Australia so I've almost made it . . . Seriously, winter, fuck yourself.

Also love botanical gardens because they are the Mistress La Spliffe versions of five-star hotels, in that they keep out the riff-raff. You can pay several hundred euros for a night in an institution which keeps out poor and middle class assholes, which just leaves you with rich ones. Or you can go to a botanical garden, where nobody goes unless they're the sort of people who like botanical gardens, who are the sort of people who don't make me feel crowded, which keeps out rich assholes as well as poor and middle class ones. In Madrid, for example, when we came across some kids who were getting high in a greenhouse in the botanical gardens, they didn't just play loud annoying music or speak in awful high-pitched voices, they shared. Mind you that's probably just Spain. God, I love Spain.