Chirping nerves

The birds are going apeshit. Crazy loud in the morning and you can hear them in the middle of the afternoon too now, even over the city ruckus, trying to get laid and -gulp- set up lifelong relationships. It's rather inspiring to see them go at it, actually; 300 million years of seperate evolution and so many of them have come to the same conclusions about how to love and live life that we have. I wonder what birds the F-word and I would be if we were birds. I like to think magpies. Magpies are cool. And I do like shiny things.

On my mind of course because, birdlike, preparations for my own migration continue apace, thoug rather more paper-shuffling involved than stuffing myself with high-protein food to build up fat reserves for the long flight. This morning, feeling really nervy for the first time about moving to Australia. Maybe it's partly watching my pile of euros magically shrink relative to their dollar. Thank god I hedged my currencies when the euro is peaking. I appreciate my own paranoia when it comes to money; being scared of heights has really worked out well for me these past couple of years. That's how granddad got rich late in life, Mum told me, betting on the dot com boom and then pulling out when he was in his late eighties and realized he didn't totally know what was going on, which happily took place shortly before the bust.

Anyways. Doesn't matter. Hedging aside, things'll calm down; just have to wait for the Chinese to decide commodities have got too expensive and shut down buying again, crash boom, Aussollar'll crash. I'm hoping it'll happen before the end of the year but it doesn't matter, I'm not in a rush.

No. I think what's really making me nervy today is understanding what Australia entails - the rest of my life. Semi-retirement, children, and finally - but also intimidatingly - being thrown upon my own creative resources. And I don't know much about the country all that will be taking place in, except that dealing with Australian bureaucrats after three years of dealing with Belgian bureaucrats feels like getting a tongue-bath from a gentle Brad Pitt. So I'm a little nervy. But I'll tell ya, it makes a fucking nice change from being a SADdo, so - good.

The Physical Possibility of Springtime in the Mind of the Chronically Pissed Off

In England, there were crocuses and tonnes of little erithacus rubeculae flirting around. The trees were getting that reddish look of being thinking about bursting into leaf, there was no snow, and the sun didn't go down insultingly early. Back in Brussels, and back to absolutely shitty atmospheric conditions, but I think you can take me off of seasonal-topping-myself watch this year. I know I'm calling it early but since it is hopefully the last nordic winter (off to the Antipodean Embassy in a mo to wrap up the documentation for the fucking-off-forever visa) I am pretty damn optimistic.

And it really must be said . . . I make fun of inselaffenanity all the time because it does drive me mental . . . but England makes a lovely break from Belgium. Belgium is just too damn crowded. And now that I'm middle class I eat way better in England than I can in Belgium - oh yes I can, wipe that smirk off your face. Unless you've got a root vegetable fetish Belgium gets old because there are, to quote the sole decent line in The Witches of Eastwick, 'not enough orientals.' The feed I had in London and Oxford over the past few days - oh god, the fucking dim sum alone - will morally sustain me until such a time as I finally leave this potato-heavy porkroast of a country behind forever.

Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the way back at Rodelinda's suggestion. Maybe I just don't read enough modern thrillers or detective novels or something so I don't understand how relatively good it is - and I assume it is relatively awesome judging by the amount of fuss that's being made about the trilogy. It was quite likable, and it made me curious about what it would be like to have friendly, loveless sex with Swedish investigative journalists in chalets without electricity, but really - not Dorothy Sayers. Still, a healthy helping of very enjoyable revenge porn that made it more than tolerable even though I could guess the ending about 500 pages before the ending. I suppose I reccommend it if you like that sort of thing, and you're out of Dorothy Sayers.

But really - what the fuck is with Anglophone publishers, man. Changing the title from Men Who Hate Women, which makes sense - actually it's quite a good title - to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is lame lame lame? Such an incredibly shitty titling decision makes me think that the translation of the book itself was probably completely cack-handed too.

On the way there, read Three Bags Full, at B's suggestion. I guess I was a little disappointed, because I had worked myself up to hoping I'd be reading some sort of Perfume-of-sheep-psychology tour de force and it wasn't quite that. But still very engaging, and if you're high or running a temperature, both of which I was at the time of reading, by the end of the book you can imagine what it might be like to be a clever sheep. I reccommend this one too. A little more whole-heartedly maybe. Tops points for the effort, certainly.

Decompression crumpeting

In downtown Oxford, this land of crumpets and organic food and spooky churchyards and libraries, like some film version of England with no poor people in it. I wonder if there's some sort of contractual obligation to keep this place all Merchant Ivory for the benefit of the foriegn students paying 20 grand a year to be here in tuition alone. No wonder Rodelinda's been able to live in the UK for seven years and still like it, even down to stupid, stupid institutions like the House of Lords; I keep expecting someone called Algernon to poke his head through the window and ask if I'd like to play some tennis, and I definitely don't expect a teenager who thinks he's got bugs under his skin to poke his head through the window and then steal my laptop.

I'm not complaining. And I'm also. Not. Working. And feeling humanity starting to ooze back up to my brain . . . starting to be nice to people again. Give me time. I'll retire next September and then I'll start being a fantastically awesome person again, I promise.