DPJ will not be writing a book on graciousness anytime soon

We have houseguests at the moment, as I believe I mentioned, and it is a little odd. Living at the end of the world, of course when people come here they have to come for awhile, even though I think generally these sorts of things should top out at a week.

It's okay. It's practice for when there are kids in the house, I suppose, since I'm not taking any time off and had been studying for the Chinese exam - just a great deal of constant fluster, dealing with moods, and not having enough sex. But I think I'm gonna tell everyone who comes here to rent a car, from now on. It'd be one thing in a city, but the L--- region really needs a car to be appreciated with. Especially now that it's started raining, and will keep raining for the next three months, and neither the F-word nor I have time to hand-hold and babysit.

Well, okay. Maybe it's not okay. Reading that last paragraph over I guess I'm getting a little frazzled. The world's leading hostess, I am not. It doesn't help that it started raining yesterday and is likely to continue for the next three months.

But fuck it. I'm going to Delhi in two weeks, and Brisbane tomorrow, and looking forward to both changes of scene. We're also thinking about Angkor Wat or Tasmania for Christmas, now the the F-word's family doesn't seem likely to come here to celebrate. My preference is Angkor Wat, since I think Australian holidays should probably be reserved for when we have children and greater imperatives to travel places people and I can understand each other, which Australians and I can do, as long as I use shorter words than usual and they actually make the effort to incorporate some lipwork into their "speech" instead of just mumbling like sleeptalking drunks. 

Especially the case that I reckon we need to keep Australian vacations in reserve since there are exactly two places in Australia - Alice Springs and environs and Tasmania - that I have the least fucking interest in going to. Otherwise, I reckon we live in the prettiest part. Tasmania's pretty big, though. I reckon that'd need a good three or four visits to appreciate.

By the way, since I seem to be making it a habit to discuss other people's business on here and I feel like I'd be doing him an emotional disservice if I didn't mention it now; Squidsy is going for joint custody after all. That changes my perspective a lot. I reckon they're both still fuckups and it hardly makes things cleaner but at least he's stepping up as a parent instead of a pseudo-uncle.  I reckon I'm just going to delete all this shit about other people soon because as much as it bugs me it's not my lookout. But I feel it'd be doing him a disservice, albeit anonymously, albeit unknowingly, to not point that out now.

Kablooey

This morning, completely unexpectedly, our issue with Belgacom was resolved, in a grown-up manner, that actually saw them act like a company instead of a demon spawn and saw us come out ahead a little bit. I sat and stared at the letter for a good three minutes, realizing this Belgian utilities mess was now behind me forever and all I'd had to do was write one angry letter, and suddenly all the excitement involved in an imminent two-week Italian vacation followed by emigration to Australia has hit me like a tonne of bricks. I may puke with happiness. Even the prospect of the etat de lieux de sortie tonight, while not filling me with glee, suddenly doesn't seem overwhelming anymore.

Wow. The imposed depression has lifted. That was all of a sudden-like.

Time and forgetting

Oh argh. Had a lovely fortnight of vacation with a niece and nephew, who had never seen Europe before and needed to while I was still here, and now I'm back - missing them, working, facing the mountains of tasks involved in leaving Brussels, and apparently coming down with a cold despite the two-week heatwave. Oh well. I still feel better for it. And have discovered something I didn't know or understand at all in the past: time works differently for children. I should have known that because I can actually remember time working differently for me back in the day. But it was not something I understood on a practical level until now. Two weeks would have been a ridiculously short time for them to do all the stuff we'd done even if they'd been adults . . . at their age I'm shocked we survived. Luckily they're good kids.

Whilst whizzing around the continents on trains, managed to read two books: Middlemarch and King Leopold's Ghost, both awfully good in their very different ways. Middlemarch was a hell of a tasty treat. I don't think I could have read it when I was any younger though . . . back to conceptions of time. It would have defeated me at the first chapter. George Eliot takes a special kind of patience, or a special kind of conception of time, which is basically the same thing as patience - not one that is encouraged by modern patterns of entertainment. It invites you in, and then she talks to you - George Eliot's narrative voice discusses the state of her characters, which could seem long-winded to the impatient, but to the patient, it's the smartest and most understanding person ever having an awesome conversation with you. And this is the case in Middlemarch like in no other book of hers that I've read, though I still consider Adam Bede as the finest piece of ass in literature.

King Leopold's Ghost was wonderfully well-written and interesting, though shocking how the blurb on the back had so little to do with the contents, somebody should tell the author. I recommend it absolutely, even if you know or care nothing about the Congo; it's a good way to start, and it's a fine piece of journalistic writing. What is staying with me the most about it this morning, though, is how it seems - while discussing a hideous episode and worldwide humanitarian movement that rolled out just over a century ago - like it's already a work of semi-archaeological history. I can't remember when I first heard about Leopold II and the Congo, but I think it was well after I should have - probably when I was at school for my masters in IR. And I can't remember when I realized the Congo was having a brutal, never-ending war - I think a couple of years before that, or maybe even around the same time.

How could someone like me - a reasonably informed person who read the papers and who minored in history in the undergrad, etc., have no fucking idea for so long? How is it possible that in cultural terms, Europeans and North Americans are better informed about the abuses of the Chinese government in Tibet than of past colonial abuses, present post-colonial economic dealings, and the jaw-droppingly brutal wars they feed and finance in Africa, where so much of our population has came from by hook or by crook? Why has Africa made our collective eyes glaze over? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.

Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.

I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste

Yesterday was my first solo drive ever. And it was to the beer store to pick up a plank of 50, in my brother's pickup, wearing a home-made Wonder Woman singlet, Uggs, 30 visible blackfly bites, unwashed hair, and a miniskirt. I considered it a beautiful synthesis of hoser and bogan; indeed, possibly the creation of a new subspecies of easy livers: the Great Northern Ontario She-Bogan.

I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.

Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, fuck!

Last night I thought of a really good reason why it would be okay to fail the exam today, but this morning it's just fucking gone. Oh wait, here it is again: part of the pressure I'm feeling to pass is feeling like a fucking gonad because I'm 30, and most people get their permit when they're 18 or something, which makes me a retard in quite a literal sense. But what that means is that even though this is my first time taking a driving exam, I've been 'failing' the exam for the last twelve years by not taking it. And that means that if I fail again today, it's just par for the course. And if I pass it's about fucking time.

It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.

Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:

-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen

-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes

- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car

- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country

Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.

***UPDATE***

Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.

The old fog/lost your number/didn't want to wake you up excuse

Just back from vacation in Bordeaux. It was a good vacation, though brief. I think I even pulled down a bit of a tan, or at least a spot of darkening, in the sense that the sun no longer shines directly through me. But one thing about it was really bad, and me being me, I'm going to accentuate the negative at the moment, and let it be a cautionary tale tieing into my confrontational inabilities.

I love kayaking, and I love sea kayaking most of all the kayaking, and voted for Bordeaux as our destination in part because in a nearby town some fucking cockwanks calling themselves Arcachon Kayak Aventure started excursions earlier in the spring than anywhere else I'd seen, and I was able to book us an excursion date for this past weekend. Here was the sequence of events:

- called the night before to confirm reservation. No answer, left message
- called that morning to confirm reservation. No answer
- got on the fucking train for Arcachon at 7:41 in the morning. The morning of our fucking vacation, when I just wanted to stay in bed forever possibly
- get a call halfway to Arcachon from Arcachon Kayak Aventure, 45 minutes before it was due to start, saying the excursion has been cancelled, because other people who were going on it had cancelled the night before, and it was no longer profitable enough for them to carry it out.

When I pointed out we were already on the train heading towards the RDV, three bullshit excuses followed for not having cancelled, oh, say, before our alarms went off at 6:30:

- his computer wasn't working so he couldn't find my number (which was on his cellphone, as I had left a message)
- there was a touch of fog that morning (which had burned off completely by the scheduled departure hour, leaving an insolently hot and sunny spring day - fucking perfect, perfect for kayaking)
- didn't want to disturb us by informing us the night previous the other party had cancelled (which would have disturbed us so much fucking more than waking up at 6:30 in the fucking morning and getting on a train for some podunk bourgeois resort that stank of the neighbouring Smurfit Kappa pulp mill)

I was so bloody furious that as soon as he seemed to be wrapping up the final bullshit excuse I hung up. And here comes the cautionary tale: I stayed pissed off for hours afterwards. Part of it was an unavoidable sadness, of course, because a spot of sea kayaking was half the point of us going to Bordeaux at all, as far as I was concerned. But another part of it was sheer fury with the thoughtlessness and incompetence of the company concerned, and that took me a long time to shake off, because instead of roaring down the telephone, I hung up and let it fester.

Lesson of the story? Confront, don't hang up. Pass your bile onto the thing that provoked it. It's easier than trying to swallow it. Hanging up may feel satisfyingly rude, but it's not as satisfying as yelling at an asshole.

It didn't help that I didn't like Arcachon. Besides the revolting fart-stink of the nearby mill, which faded as the day wore on and the prevailing wind changed, it's the sort of artificially created upper-middle-class watering spot that makes me dislike European coasts as a generality. Lots of expensive boats and extravagant villas and overpriced restaurants. Lots of knick-knack shops. Casinos and a twee little 'market' selling artisanal goods at about four times the price they'd fetch here in Brussels, for example. 'Forests' with provokingly sandy walking paths (for keeping cars out, I suppose, with the corollary that it was a real pain in the ass to hike through - for hiking is what we did instead of kayaking, in the end) that were full of people and refreshment stands. My mood didn't lift until we got back to Bordeaux - which really is a tremendous city. More on Bordeaux later, when I'm more in the mood to accentuate the positive.

Re-read A Passage to India on the train. Liked it both better and worse than the first time I'd read it. I don't know how I'd ever got the idea in my head that the Indians in it were presented more like proper characters than a collection of archetypes forcefully combined to make a POINT than the Italians in Where Angels Fear to Tread, but I'd imagine it has something to do with me being Italian, and defensive. In fact, generally all the characters in A Passage to India started seeming wooden to me, relative to the first reading - and that's aside from Aziz suddenly coming off as a massive, hysterical stereotype. But in this second go, as much as the characterizations suffered, the descriptions of the landscape and the overarching ideas about friendship, love and nationality benefited. Still, I feel I'm hitting a wall with these Big Gay Brit Lit books I've been indulging in so heavily of late, what with the Maugham and whatnot. Their female characters are alienating - harridans, frigid, fluff, or Mother. I must look elsewhere at the moment for my fiction.

Die Flederbond

Dear oh dear. What a hilariously disastrous weekend. Well, it's hilarious now that it's over. Simply: the way the cookie crumbled meant that I spent Saturday night in an Amstelveen shell watching Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan instead of Die Fledermaus, which I'll watch next Sunday instead in a a return visit to Amsterdam. Qualitatively, both Quantam of Solace and You Don't Mess with the Zohan were ridiculous, obtuse, and/or offensive in two or three ways each, but You Don't Mess with the Zohan actually made marginally more sense than Quantam of Solace.

Nonetheless I enjoyed Quantam of Solace more. It was funnier. The product placement was, once more, hideously intrusive, and combined with a two-hour search for cinematic grittiness that's just hilarious. The Jack-White-and-whoever-the lady-was-theme was yelpy, silly and helpfully reminded me why I don't like the White Stripes. And Daniel Craig is a peice of ass, which is always a pleasure.

God, what a silly weekend.

The rake's lack of progress

Saw the COC's Don Giovanni whilst in Toronto and honestly, it was one of the low points of my vacation. You know the climax of that opera? When the rake is confronted by the stone statue of the man he killed, and the stone statue demands he repent, and the rake refuses, and then gets dragged off to hell? You're quite likely to know it, rather likelier to know it than the climax to most operas, both because Donny G is awfully famous and because it was featured in Amadeus, as the thing that showed Salieri how to get to Mozart.

Anyways. The COC staging was repellent. They'd obviously broken the bank on War and Peace, which my opera boyfriend told me had actual trench digging in it, so they staged the ending cheap, as a conspiracy to scare Donny G to death by the other characters. The timing was thoughtless; the character had just plowed through a massive dinner so it looked like he died of indigestion. Holy. Fuck. COC. People notice when you cut corners. You're not a businesswoman who can get away with picking up a new blazer at Winners from time to time. You're a fucking opera company staging fucking operas. If you can't show Donny G getting carried off to hell, don't show Donny G.

All that having been said, the actual singing was charming, Donny G looked like a peice of ass, and Zerlina and Masetto were delightful. I did enjoy it, after all. Obviously. It's a great opera. But the only thing I got out of it that I wouldn't have got out of listening to a CD at my opera boyfriend's swanky new condo on the Esplanade was a sense of vertigo from sitting at the fifth ring railing.

They're all laughing at you because they're scared

Home again home again. It was hard to leave Marseille because after the conference ended, or rather after my patience ended and I did a runner, I fell deeply in love with the city.

I've never been so relieved in my life to do a runner, I think. You have to understand, and I consider it a problem beyond the credit crises and political brouhahas (but I'm being paid in euros and most of my savings aren't on the stock market), that our Kings of Industry are damnable cunts. They know some things are right and some things are wrong in moral terms, but they choose to do the wrong things. That can't be pointed out often enough. I think they're often presented as being the agents of the invisible hand of the market that really wants to help us all out . . . but the way the international financial system runs in terms of companies with publicly traded stocks is a deeply flawed one - very deeply, very fundamentally flawed.

In terms of my industry, that means a complete disregard for sustainability as anything but a half-hearted marketing tool, and even that wouldn't play any sort of part in their thoughts unless consumers weren't getting more clever about entire life-cycle, chain-of-custody issues (so you are making some sort of difference, angry people, just get angrier, and keep being angry). . . but of course the most illustrative example was the Yes Men prank re Dow Chemical and Bhopal. The text in the link is interesting for the omissions Routledge lawyers demanded, but for me the whole key to the story, the whole interest is here:

"We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of $2 billion on the Frankfurt exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day. Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow make its share price rebound by mailing out a more formal retraction on its behalf . . ."

I love the Yes Men. They do brilliant things. Seriously, Morgan Fucking Spurlock, you may be more famous but eat your heart out in terms of quality. That is, if your kitchen slavey vegan girlfriend will bend her principles enough to cook it for you they way you reckon women should.

Anyways. I did a runner from the conference and fell in love with Marseille because the final speech on Friday started sounding like a Yes Man prank, but I knew it wasn't as I'd heard the guy before at conferences. The level of contempt for consumers, for the people these companies rely on to keep the profitable, is just staggering, just repellent - I don't know if that's because the link is indirect or not but I'll tell you it even makes me miss the moral bankruptcy of television - at least television execs care what you think over time, even if they are willing to exploit the very worst parts of you.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how lovely Marseille was, and how lovely the sea kayaking was, and about how I reckon I'll have to sea kayak even in Australia despite the sharks because it's just so fucking awesome. But now I have to go to the office and do a monumental amount of work. Let's just say that part of Marseille faces west over the sea and the sunsets are tear-jerkingly magnificent from the promenade; when I arrived back in Brussels, happy to be heading home to the F-word but inestimably sulky to be away from the raawk that is Marseille and saw the sun setting over the repellent Gare de Midi, it was like some sort of covenant between me and the world that I would keep being able to see beautiful things.

Acc-en-tuate the positive

This weekend was just the ticket, though not a rest. . . too much to do, like study for my driving theory test (was going to do it this morning but still flunking the practice tests so it will have to be tomorrow), proof another country report, cook, clean, etc. . . but on Saturday the F-word succeeded in kicking my ass sufficiently to get us out to the Ardennes with a group of friends and acquaintances to kayak down the Lesse river.

Very much kayaking à la Belge, which meant the 'rapids' were very slow indeed, there was only a 5% chance of falling out of our big plastic shells, and we followed the direction of the current from point A to point B - when we felt a bit tired all we had to to was steer away from the gravel banks and the flock of incompetents who'd descended on the river. Doesn't matter. There's an incredible fucking charm to tiring yourself out by propelling yourself over the water - even more like flying than cycling - and it was very, very beautiful down there in the Furfooz-y area. No Canadian savagery or even British haunted broodiness, but lots of trees and staggeringly big cliff faces, lots of 'holy fuck would you look at that'. And of course, since this is Belgium and everybody is an organizational idiot, no life jackets or loud warnings or other intrusive safety features - just the sun (thankfully, amazingly) and wind on the skin as we merrily rolled along.

Which is tied to a realization on Saturday morning as we went to meet the group. Yes, I live in Belgium. Yes, these people are incompetent organizational idiots with absolutely no fucking notion of how to do anything in a reliable and systematized manner. And yes, that's going to annoy the fuck out of me time and again and again and again. Yesterday it was Fortis, awhile ago it was Belgacom, before that the maison communale, before that ING, before that Fortis on a different occasion, and tomorrow it's going to be the people I have to deal with to get my driver's license. There'll be no end until I leave, and Belgium being Belgium, I fully expect a year or two of hangover annoyance after I leave . . . they'll find a way, the fucking cunts . . . this place is like a Roald Dahl short story.

And, just like I enjoy Roald Dahl short stories, I have to enjoy Belgium. Part of that enjoyment will have to be negative in its nature, as my boss instructed me when the Fortis fiasco almost had me weeping with rage on Wednesday - I must simply accept the stupid things they do here as the status quo, and then be very happy, even overjoyed, when they manage to pull their thumb out and something goes right.

But another part will have to be, since we plan on moving back to a litigious, Anglo-Saxon, stick-up-its-ass society, that I need to enjoy the irresponsible, unregulated fuckery that Belgium is to the greatest extent possible while I can. And the driver's licence is a case in point; here, it will take a minimum of three months, while in Canada or Australia I'd be looking at a minimum of two fucking years. Unpasteurized dairy is another case in point. If I wanted raw milk in Canada or Australia, I'd have to set up some sort of illicit operation with a farmer; here, I walk to the street market and point. With the corollary that I can buy delicious cheese that smells like Death Herself and tastes like blue heaven at any supermarket, while in Canada or Australia it's all sanitized to the point of tastelessness.

And if I wanted to kayak in Canada or Australia, even in a river that I could wade along for its entire course, I'd have to have a life jacket; here, I can spend the entire day on a river with about 200 people without seeing one. Rock. And. Roll. I think I'll take Friday off and that we'll head back to the area - the park looks incredible, so it'd be good to spend a day there - running up and down the Roman ruins, playing amateur archaelogist, and spelunking in an irresposible, dangerous, and oh-so-Belgian manner. Wheeeeee!

God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland

Amsterdam is the thinking grownup's Disneyland. We started our vacationing there because I had a conference to attend, so work paid for my transport and the first couple of nights in our lovely B&B on a houseboat. Yes. You read that right. Fuckin' houseboat. What's more, because this fuckin' houseboat was just outside the city limits on a lake next to the huge and beautiful Amsterdamse Bos, where trees race up to the soggy gentle sky, a kind man rents you lovely bikes at great daily rates, and Schilpol's aeroplanes fly so low in anticipation of landing that their cocks are in danger of hanging out (fun because you can race them along the bike paths), it was cheaper than that revolting partitioned boiler room we slept in last September.

If you're considering a trip to Amsterdam, email me by clicking through on my profile, and I'll send you the owner's contact information - I'd post it here but I don't want to give them that much publicity, or else it will always be booked when I want to stay there, which will be often. The owners are in situ and were kind, chatty, interested without prying. I think ever so slightly disappointed that we were Canadian and Australian and not American. They had a real love for the States I've noticed in a lot of Dutch people - not only an appreciation for the personal, hospitable warmth of the typical American which otherwise isn't common in Europe, but also a love of the notion that you can do whatever you want there, make all the money you want, don't have to fight against any regulations. But then in the next breath they'll tell you how great their Dutch regulations are. And Dutch regulations are great. God, I wish the Dutch ran the world.

The conference was frightful and professionally useless; the focus was much more on marketing and it was like a flashback to my days in advertising. I skipped out on some of the more obviously useless portions of it and at one point struck up a very long and interesting conversation with the lovely woman who runs the business centre at the Hotel Okura. During the course of it she explained why Dutch organization and regulation tends to be so successful, though also frustrating to Dutch people themselves: the Polder Model. She explained it rather more concisely than Wikipedia by saying it meant that all parties concerned in a debate accepted the fact at the outset that they wouldn't be able to get everything they wanted. Imagine that . . .

The Hotel Okura was otherwise uninspiring, besides the doorman and his cat. The hotel has its own cat, a black and white tom who sprawls on the ground close to where the doorman stands, lazily watching him haul people's bags around, lazily inspecting the rich and the businesslike who go through the doors. It's a five-star hotel, but I would not call the tom a five-star cat, although he was great. I'm quite sure he still had his balls; he was a huge monster of a thing - more than twice the size of my Lexie, and less of it fat. And while his comfort with people means he's well-loved, none of that lovin' has been done with a wire brush or a pair of scissors; his healthy coat had some wild-looking clumps in it. Obviously he was the most charming thing I saw at the conference.

Another great thing about the conference was that it gave me a chance to be an Amsterdam commuter, as I rode my rented bike from the Bos to the hotel. I could have wept with the pleasure of it, as hundreds of bikes rode silently around during 'rush hour' and the number of cars on the road hardly changed. Not a helmet in sight - not on the grown-ups, not on the buckets of children in front-mounted baskets that their mums or dads were biking to daycare. The wind, for once, in my hair - wind largely untainted by the mufflerless effluent of shitboxes which so plagues my lungs in Brussels. Oh, it was lovely. How jealous I was of the people who get to live and work in a place where commuting is like that.

No complaints about riding our bikes around for fun, either, on the succeeding two days, except shockingly there still seems to be a certain class of tourist who does not understand the concept of bike paths. What a great, fun city. In terms of our touristy things, we went to the Rijksmuseum, again for hours and hours and hours . . . I don't get museum exhaustion in Amsterdam, it seems. And no, it's not the reefer. I usually get stoned before going to galleries and museums no matter where I am in the world. I don't know what it is. Great museum - my favourite bit, though, was a painting currently mounted close to the entrance showing the Dutch and Spanish signing a treaty concluding the Dutch revolt, which seemed to show the Dutch participants solemnly delivering the two-finger salute to their former overlords. Classy.

Also touristy: we went walking around Java Island, where there have been beautiful modern residential architectural things installed over the past 30 years - pictures and exclamations to follow.

God. Dutch people. The F-word pointed out to me that they had to be that good about organizing their space - making it that livable and that congenial - because if not they'd have all eaten each other by now, what with that little land being so crowded and the weather being so shitty. All the same though. How have we not ripped some serious pages out of their books yet?

Further notes on my vacation

Despite Paris making me feel like a revolting little cockroach, obviously my feelings about it are mixed as you can tell by past posts. Our brief stay there Sunday/Monday, at Carmen's sans Carmen again, who was working nights, was unpleasant; I was riding the dragon, exhausted, sad to have left Barcelona, pissed off that I'd purchased the wrong Thalys ticket to get back to Brussels, and oh yes, experiencing constant false sightings of Bluebeard. That does not seem to have slowed down with age. The strength of the nervous paranoia inspired by the idea of him greatly exceeds any pain the man himself is likely to inflict on me, especially considering that we contrived to be something like civil in our last communiqués.

It seems I've managed to compress and squeeze a lot of my neuroses and guilt issues - because there is some me-guilt involved, and not just that ridiculous, conceited guilt of the Heartbreaker ('how oh how dared I be so very lovable!') - into the physical boundaries of the city that saw the worst years of my life to date. Is that a reasonable strategy to use to deal? Probably not. And certainly not, when I spend bits of my vacation there.

Luckily, however, it seems that the neuroses and the guilt issues are centre-ville-ers, and when we spent a few days with Mlle Pariyorker in her new digs in the swanky western suburbs in between time in Amsterdam and time in Barcelona, they did not get on the RER and follow me out. Mlle Pariyorker has stumbled onto a good pasture. Her new place is about four times the size of her abandoned marital apartment and half the price, for one; her professional prospects are singin' along, for two; she has her own substantial garden and barbeque now, for three; and her new man is a fucking brilliant cook, for four. And the important thing is that she seems much, much happier.

Do I think she dealt with her former situation with all the wisdom in the world? If I consider her actions, they were fine, even her only choice in the circumstances - it was her explanations that made me angry, and I don't know if she was being completely honest with herself in those explanations. Sometimes people'd rather look like a bastard than look like a patsy, and will take steps to do so even if the risk of looking like a patsy isn't that high. Oh, Pride, you naughty naughty Mortal Sin. Our capacity for it probably has some evolutionary advantages, but all the same I think the world would be a vastly better place if we chose just one day a year - say, Kwanzaa - when we strove to be humble. Or we could all take turns.

Anyhoo. We mostly stayed in the far west suburbs having a great time, and touristically we visited not only the Chateau's gardens and my absolute favourite thing, the Hameau de la Reine (god, that poor idiot Marie Antoinette - how women were the slaves of their circumstances back then, no matter what class they belonged to!), but also the vegetable garden of the King, which I think went up under Louis XIV. It's close to the Chateau and well worth a visit, as is the attached shop where the sell produce from said garden.

As far as agricultural techniques go, it's not anachronistic, or rather it is extremely anachronistic, in the sense that it looks like Louis XIV's garden but is pumped up like crazy on the modern plant 'roids. But it's very beautiful, particularly the clever way they get the pears and apples to grow on trellises, which the F-word and I resolved we'd try out when we become property owners. I liked the look of them but I think the F-word was more enchanted by how much easier it would be to pick the fruit than it had been in his early youth, when he had to scale ladders and reach under the heat of the southern Australia sun. Pictures to follow - though not of the F-word under the hot Australian sun - that's strictly for my fantasy file.

She's back, and this time, she's rested

It would be a big lie to say I'm happy to be back, but we had the good fortune to spend a night in Paris on the way home, so at least I'm happy to be in Brussels, which for all its imperfections is not and never will be Paris. Thank god. I'm not necessarily opposed to big cities, but I suppose because of my history there Paris makes me feel like a cockroach struggling through a pile of cockroaches. If we had gone straight from Barcelona to Brussels, it would have been torture. Like 90% of the adult population that's visited, I fell deeply in love with it - swallowed every one of its clichés hook, line and sinker and was hungry for more.

There were a lot of things I loved about it, but especially I fell in love with Gaudi, that beautiful batshit crazy man. Up at the Park Güell, I had a little cry as we gazed over the magic-mushroom-and-crucifix-ornamented houses to the city beyond. I think I was upset that the whole world couldn't live in Barcelona, or maybe that every city in the world didn't have an architect like Gaudi in it who could make such lovely spaces with such commonplace materials. There's just something so friendly about what he built - so welcoming and so sympathetic - that I couldn't believe it. Really called to mind that other batshit crazy man who I love, Hundertwasser. Though I suppose Hundertwasser didn't have Gaudi's sense of structure, and Gaudi didn't have Hundertwasser's sense of nonsense.

I know there's a cost factor involved, but it made me hate most modern designers and architects for their apparent inability to build things the people who use them find pleasant. Catalan modernists had an aesthetic humanity, or humility - they didn't seem to want to seem clever so much as massage your tired eyeballs, and cater to your need for something beautiful to look at. Domenech too - we couldn't believe our happy eyes when we saw the Saint Pau hospital. And as Robert Hughes wrote, unlike Sagrada Familia, that was finished in the architect's lifetime, and has done and will do far more good for the people of Barcelona than Sagrada Familia is ever likely to. Sagrada Familia is a can't miss, though . . . it's fascinating to see the work being carried out before you, and a real bafflement to try to figure out how the fuck it has been permitted to install some of the things that have been installed since Gaudi's death.

By the way, I sincerely recommend the Robert Hughes book I was going on about before I left, whether you intend to go to Barcelona or not - it's a great read. But if you do intend to go to Barcelona it's indispensable - like having a clever, sarcastic, enthusiastic friend whispering in your ear as you go from place to place. And he goes on about Gaudi better than I could. But there was one thing I wanted to mention that Gaudi did, to help him get those strange angles that make his arches and elements look weirdly alive - catenary string models. He would hang weighted arcs of string, appropriately connected to each other, photograph the intricate result and turn the photo upside down to get an approximation of what he could do to a roof that would allow it to bear its own weight. Fucking - fucking - genius. Pictures to follow.

Jerusalem syndrome

"They attempt to reconcile Jews and Palestinians, speak to God and genuinely believe he answers them.” Hmm. Sounds like every American president for the last 50 years.

Joking, joking. I don't think they were really trying to reconcile the Jews and Palestinians at all. But seriously. Not to sound all Scientologist but sometimes I get a little freaked out when I reflect that if the Messiah did come, we'd certainly try to slap him or her (I'm banking on a her) in a mental ward. It's not crucifixion, certainly, but over-medication to the point of vegetation would be a rather more effective way to deal with her. No memorable martyrdom involved, no screaming at the sky about how her Dad should forgive her murderers because they don't fucking know what they're doing. Just some sort of firebrand transforming into a gently smiling lump. Gives me the willies . . . maybe I only think this because I'm slightly mad, but I think society needs a little madness to help people keep things in perspective.

Anyways, as far as Jerusalem Syndrome goes, I hope we can trust the doctors to tell the difference between faith-fuelled American yokel fatties who get too much sun and history and actual Messiah Candidates. It doesn't seem like such a difficult distinction to make, but who knows.

Speaking of madness, I am about to go all Al Pacino because tonight I am off to Stockholm to spend a little less than a week going around Sweden and Finland on a boozy press tour. The sun is out here in Brussels until after 10 and up ages before I am, even though my my internal clock wakes me at 6:30 every morning so I can make a nice café latte, blog, take care of my investments, stare out the window, think about funnies I want to Reclaim for the People (that is, rip off) from my business associates and conservative politicians (usually Boris Johnson; thank god the people of London were stupid enough to jettison that boring socialist mayor for a wise-cracking right-wing drunk), and generally ease myself into the day. So there I don't expect to see dark.

And with any luck at all I won't even have to look at a computer until next Wednesday, so I'll bid you all a happy week and leave you with Nick Cave's take on Messiah Wards.

Bonntastic

No time to write as I'd like to, but I'll try to gradually get everything I would like to get out over the week, including a little blogasm over the May Day Bad Seeds concert, whose imperfections only rendered it more lovable. We went to Bonn and had a lovely time over the long weekend - I relaxed muscles that I thought had turned into bone by this point, I've been so tense, and I feel like I got a bit of perspective on my high-pressure yuppie life and how to end it without physically destroying myself.

It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.

However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:





The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.

Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.