The toilet that is Brussels

Or black hole? I don't know. I do know 90% of the jobs advertised in my field are there. I guess the cheap cost of living - cheapest west of Germany, until you get into places like Portugal and Spain where they don't have enough trains - and the tax regime for expatriate workers has helped them sew it up. There are the odd jobs advertised in my field in warmer places. I saw one in Barcelona the other day and almost drew tears from myself, resisiting applying. The truth is I'm not looking for a job. I have a really splendid job. I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to think of how this job I have could be improved. I don't even really want a raise. And I'm going to India soon, for heaven's sake. It's an awesome job. It's just . . . Australia and I are really not bonding.

Malcontent is an ugly word, but it's me. I have a lot of ingredients for happiness here - splendid man, splendid job, some friends - more friends than a malcontent like me deserves, to be frank - nice house, big garden. And I'm not unhappy. I have been this last week I've been sick, because being sick here feels a bit entombing, especially coming off a two-month jag of being with my family, who cluster around and fill me full of pills and concern when I'm sick. Now I'm not unhappy. But I'm malcontented.

I think if my 30s have something to teach me - and I reckon they have a shitload to teach me - one of the things will be how to live well as a malcontent. A year ago today, when I was in Italy with the F-word and we were preparing to move here, I thought moving here would teach me to be contented; that when I had a huge paycheque, a nice house, fresh air and my best man by my side I'd stop being such a bloody little strop. Well, no. Now I'm accepting it's not outside factors that are going to content me. Being a bloody little strop is just who I am and I could be ensconsed in a fucking 50 foot statue made of gold and I'd still be a bloody little strop about it. 

I think I'm leaning towards returning to Europe for a couple of reasons, and these days the dominant one is certainly that Australia is too far away from my family. Europe's far too, yes I understand that, and I understand that with the life I've built for myself here I'm probably going to end up seeing more of my family than I ever did in Europe. But I can't tell you how unsettling it is to know I can't just pop home for the weekend if there's an emergency. Not because it's financially impractical, not because of the jet lag (though there's no arguing with that) - but I literally can't. The journey home is a minimum of 24 hours, if everything runs swimmingly, as it so rarely does. 24 hours is radically different from 8. My parents are getting old. The prospect of those extra 16 hours and what could happen in them just makes me want to vomit.

So there's that. There's also - okay. I haven't let go of the importance of externals. There's also just missing the piss out of Europe. During the F-word's and my time in Rome I think we were both already realizing that we'd confounded our utter impatience with Belgium with an utter impatience with Europe. Rome is dirty and uncomfortable and inconvenient like Belgium (though actually in those days I'd say it was rather cleaner, which surprised us) but people were so different, and rather warm. I don't want to move to Rome - the F-word would in a heartbeat but I won't raise Italian children - but I guess it was lovely and different enough that it was a reminder that getting sick of Europe is pretty much getting sick of life. It's all so strange and different.

Anyways. Blah blah blah. I have a lot to think about these days. And it's all thinking. We're not going anywhere for years. Except I'm going to India in December, that's pretty awesome, and we're planning trips to Cambodia and Bali soon. Yay! Why am I such a bloody little strop when life is so exciting?

High social standards

Conscious now of doing a lot of things here for the last, or maybe the last, or the second last time, etc. More than half the time that's a cause for joy. But going to Amsterdam and having no idea when I'll go again, if ever (I've promised myself a few days exploring the Hague before we go and I have some ephemeral plans for spending a month kayaking the Netherlands' industrial waterways someday but who knows what the future will bring) actually really hurt.

Not least because the last time I went was the time I first discovered their lovely botanical gardens. Really small, the size of a postage stamp! Much smaller, I think, than the gardens they've abandoned here in Brussels for the Plantentuin in Meise. And yet they have so much good stuff there. It was a lovely combination of the uncanny Dutch genius for organizing space over time to the best effect, and of lots of butterflies and plants and things. And naturally me being high. Butterflies and lovely plants and being very high is a hell of a combination, I don't care how macho you are.

Speaking of being very high, all the marijuana is not even very high up on the list of things I'll miss about the Netherlands. However, it is sort of symptomatic of what I'll miss most about the Netherlands - a microcosm, if you will, or an ecological marker; in the same way that really awesome sex isn't the most important thing in a relationship, but it is a sign that you're doing something right, and not having any is probably fatal. And it's a marker, or a microcosm, of what seems to me like a sort of well-organized moral honesty that is really appealing.

Let me explain: last time I was in Amsterdam, I was with a bunch of visiting Canadians, one of whom remarked that the front curtains of people's houses were always open. So I told her something that could just be bullshit but which several Dutch people have told me: you always leave your curtains open so people can see that you're not doing anything wrong. And her response - natural from a Canadian perspective - was, well, what if you want to do something wrong?

But the thing about the Netherlands is, what is doing something wrong in a country that tolerates so much? When your most unpleasant, virulent right-wing, xenophobic intolerance is based on a conviction that the problem with foreigners is that they're not tolerant enough - when even the politicians who make it into the international press looking like white supremacist fascist zealots are still about twenty degrees more socially liberal than anything on the market in the Anglophone world - when you have not only legalized but commodified soft drugs - what would count as the sort of wrong behavior that you'd want to close your curtains and hide from the world? All it leaves is actual bad behaviour, because you've basically done away with the idea of 'naughty' being wrong, and there's a sort of honesty in that which is very, very appealing - as though they save moral energy/outrage for things that are actually worth it.

And here's the kicker. Belgians are tolerant too - tolerant to a fucking fault. They'll tolerate the most ham-brained stupidity from their institutions and from each other. They'll tolerate streets caked in dogshit, the horrible, horrible driving on and condition of their roads with the attendant high death rates, and all sorts of inexcusable inconveniences in their public life. The F-word thinks it's an unconscious national conspiracy to universally lower the bar of what is required in terms of being a responsible member of society. Maybe he's right. I don't care, I'm through analyzing; basically, fuck this fucking place; fuck its weather, fuck its landlords, fuck its city halls, fuck its utility companies, fuck its tax department, fuck its retard drivers, fuck all the old ladies who look the other way while their ugly little fucking dogs befoul the sidewalks, and fuck pretty much everything about Belgium that involves more than three of these fucking people congregating for a single purpose, which almost invariably involves the creation of some fucking Lord of the Flies-type pig fuckery.

My point is, not only are the Dutch tolerant - any lazy asshole can be tolerant - they're also sensible. To bring this all back to reefer, not only am I allowed to walk past a police officer sucking on it and smiling (which legally and theoretically I can also do in Belgium), but also that police officer is not going to react in some arbitrary fashion (police arbitrariness is actually enshrined in the drug laws here), and I will have purchased that reefer from an institution at least as much a part of the national taxation system as a bar. And then I can sit down and enjoy it on a clean public bench overlooking a biologically viable canal (Brussels' one river, the Senne, is almost completely covered over, biologically dead, and oh, by the way, apparently the sewage treatment plant they fired up THREE YEARS AGO has already gone offline again, so they're dumping their shit into it unadultered again, which is a major driver of North Sea pollution), and unless I'm in Rotterdam (which has compensatory charms) I'm not likely to step in any dog shit while I'm doing that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in love with the Dutch; particularly in the north they have these atrocious loud, strident voices that makes them sound like some unholy cross between a donkey and a rooster. And as the product of a middle-class English mother I instinctively find their complete lack of tact horrifying. And that whole Black Peter thing is beyond the fucking pale, man. But still. I find their social, moral efficient honesty just so damn refreshing and special and I'll miss it a lot.

Confusing canicule

Belgians, man, they're fucking helpless. At least when it comes to the weather. A few weeks of freeze and snow this past summer and the world comes to a fucking end, and now another canicule, and not a fucking horrible one at that, and suddenly it's all heat rashes and sunstroke. For fuck's sake. Just fucking equip yourself - like so:

1. For fuck's sake, if you don't want your fucking apartment to be all hot at the end of the day, draw your curtains on an windows that receive direct sunlight

2. And think about the fucking air you're letting in, man, at the most fucking elementary level just think about it: the air is super hot in the middle of the day. Is that the air you want to come into your apartment? Or do you want the cooler nighttime or dawn air? Probably the second, right? Well, look, there's a fucking relationship between when you open your windows and what sort of air you let into your flat.

3. Following on heat at different times of the day: if you're lucky enough to have air conditioning at work, when do you think it would be best to use it? The morning, when it's cooler? Or right after lunch, when it is both hottest and most nap-timey? For fuck's sake. You'd think that one would be fucking built into the matrix but I work in one of the prime office buildings in the city, and it's fucking not.

4. Baby powder on the heat rash. Or corn starch. For fuck's sake.

5. Carry water and drink it. I know you don't want to look like a tourist, especially a tourist with the poor taste to come to Brussels, but suck it up.

6. Wear a fucking hat, you people look like lobsters who fucking escaped from the pot at the last minute.

7. And now you've got fucking water shortages? This is like the wettest place in the fucking developed world. How fucking incompetent do your processes have to be for three weeks of dry and hot to give you fucking water shortages? Well, that's not really advice, more abuse, but seriously, you've got it coming.

The invisible line between incompetence and fraud

In a reasonably foul mood this morning. Have been subject to a bout of incompetence or petty fraud (always hard to tell the difference in Belgium) from a local ASBL, the Partenariat Marconi, over our organic drop-offs. There is something unutterably repellent about grown-ups lying like naughty children who've been caught in the act, and something infuriating about them then using the fact that they're non-profit as some sort of excuse. Anyways, I've been having a hard time walking it off, probably because it was combined, yesterday, with a few other pieces of egregious Belgiousity, notably from my old bugabear Belgacom, the very first full day I'm back from vacation . . .

Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.

Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.

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.

The Shoddyssey part II

It would be an exaggeration to say things are coming together, but at least they're starting to seem a little less entropic.

1. My X-ray has been found. It turns out the hospital - instead of sending it to my doctor on the other side of town, a task for which I gave'em five euros in postage, and doctor about whom we had a little gossip at the front desk - instead took the initiative to pay about fifty euros and send it to the department of immigration in Sydney or Canberra or some such.

Luckily somebody there noted the Belgiumness of it and all and contacted the Berlin embassy (Belgian visa requests go through Berlin, the embassy here in Brussels is teeny-tiny) and the Aussies sorted it out between themselves. Not until after, however, the hospital had told me they'd probably sent the X-ray to a bunch of other Belgian doctors with the same name as my doctor and I should call all of them to track it down - I did of course, including one very friendly and very confused dentist - fuckers.

Anyways, the upshot of it all is that I'm irritated and amused in equal measure, and thrilled that I'll be moving to a country where the civil servants are able to successfully complete "If . . . then . . . so" statements.

2. Now the only pending documentation for the visa is my Canadian criminal background check and the fuckers of Mounties don't even know if my request is in their building yet. Fuck me, in excess of four months in my homeland vs a week in Belgium and France, two of the stupidest countries in the developed world. Brava, Canada, atta play with the big dogs. Would like to go back to Canada for a week or so to just get the three-day electronic request one, but unless I do it, like, next week, there's no fricking time until the end of July, in between work, travel for work, and people coming here to visit. In fact we're so solidly booked until the end of July that I caught myself feeling a touch of relief one of our visitors got a staph infection and had to cancel her trip. What kind of monster am I turning into?

3. Lexie finally got her rabies test. I'm starting to hesitate about taking her again. We have got an offer now from a very dear friend in Canada to take her in, Sugarplum of yore, and it's hard to imagine a better home for her, especially if her family decamps to the country house they're moving to buy. And a 24 hour plane ride in the hold followed by a month of quarantine, versus nine hours in the hold, a car ride, and then a warm loving permanent home . . . But I'm her human, she's my cat, and I reckon she'd like Australia, where we can get a biggish house and a garden. Sigh. It's all very confusing. I think I will judge as the months wear on on the basis of her health.

The Red Dragon tells a non-PC parable

Last night the F-word had a friend over for dinner and to take my mind off of the monstrous situation at work, I decided to make us some muffins a little late in the evening. So off to the small Turkish shop at the top of the kitty corner street.

A little background. Halfway up the kitty corner street, there's a residence for retarded adults. Sorry if 'retarded' is a bad word now wherever you live. The residents have a spectrum of conditions - a few people with Downs' and lots of others with problems that are quite physically obvious but not quite so obviously diagnosable during a casual stroll down the street. The one unifiying factor, as far as I can tell, is that they're all dealing with physically obvious brain problems.

One of them, an older lady wearing pyjamas and drooling ever so slightly, pushed into the store in front of me muttering a bit. She zipped off to the soda section, carefully counted out four large bottles of Fanta, and zipped up to the single cash register, pushing in front of the small line that had formed there, to pay with the exact change that she was clutching. All of this was fine with me despite me, at that point, standing in said line, indeed being the next person in it that was pushed to one side. Good for her, I thought. She's on a mission for the Fanta and she's carrying it out. Everybody's relying on her and she's coming through for them. It reminded me of my maiden solo drive to the beer store in Canada a few months ago, when I had parked like a retard, so preoccupied was I with safely getting the plank of Molson back to Magnum and his buddies.

What wasn't so fine with me is that seconds after she pushed up to the cash, a second line suddenly materialized behind her. In fact I even think a couple of people lining up in my queue dropped out of it to queue behind her. She even had to push past them on her way out of the shop with the precious Fanta.

Now, there was little enough practical annoyance for me in this. I'm half guinea, I've spent years of my life in the rudest cities in Italy, the fucking international capital of illicit line-cutting, and I've done years of jeet kune do; nobody buds in front of me without my fucking consent, and I simply manouvered my elbow in front of the solar plexus of the man who'd started the second queue to hand my money to the rather bemused cashier.

But as I walked home afterwards it dawned on me: that was Belgium. That was a parable of what Belgium is. Belgium is a place where people will queue up behind a retarded lady who's drooling a little bit who pushes her way past an existing queue to pay for four large bottles of Fanta with exact change if they think it will shave 30 fucking seconds off their trip to the corner store, and then they'll act surprised and wounded when you gently but firmly elbow them in the gut to get them out of your way.

This is a very silly place.

Riding the moronic road

Practicing waking up early in preparation for my upcoming second-go-round of the driver's exam, which is scheduled early in the morning later this week. I'm nervous, but it's not as bad as last time - different rather - thinking that I'd be a real asshole if I failed twice, rather than thinking it's going to be very hard to pass. I feel a great deal more ready than last time, and honestly think I'm better than most of the other drivers circulating around Belgium, which sadly is saying very little (and is far from a guarantee that I'll pass the exam, as they tightened up their giveaway policies a lot over the last 20 years). For example, I don't box intersections and if there's a t-junction immediately preceding an intersection I brake a little earlier so I don't block that either. As far as I can tell about 1 in 3 Bruxellois drivers are intellectually capable of such a feat. They are real shitheads on the road - oblivious motherfuckers - and haven't really kept up with the changes in their own driving laws.

Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.

Three examples:

1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.

2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.

3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.

I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.

The limits of the zoological approach, redux

Today's the anniversary of Dutroux being sentenced. It chills my blood, that case, that Nihoul is already back on the streets, that Dossier X was let slide the way it was . . . This country chills my blood. There's charm in surrealism, but the surrealism here is more late Goya than the Marvellous Adventures of Amelie Fucking Poulain, that's for sure. The Lie Gaenen thing tipped me over the edge, that demonstrated a little too aptly the tolerance in this legal establishment for recidivist paedophilia despite all that street-hitting over Dutroux. The king (himself accused of paedophilia in the 70's) has apparently rejected his demand for clemency, but nobody knows if the public prosecutor has actually done its job and got him into prison yet to serve the 2/3 of his sentence that recidivist paedophiles are obliged to serve here (he was already condemned for paedophilia in the 70's, and then went on to have a successful career as a children's author and television presenter).

Well, it's not just paedophilia, there's a lack of proportionate consequences for actions generally speaking that allows the proverbially stupid national spirit flourish. Everybody complains about the wild-boars-on-the-rampage traffic and everbody drives around drunk, but what can you expect when there are no traffic cops and no penalties for drunk driving? I've got an acquaintance here who got pissed, totalled his car in a busy downtown tunnel, waited for the cops to come, they didn't breathalyze him and the whole problem went away. Why not? Nobody got hurt, miraculously; he was insured, the insurance company paid, because in the official documents he wasn't drunk. Simpler for everyone.

Especially because anybody here who gets a prison sentence under three years doesn't have to go to prison, they're too crowded. The F-word mentioned the other day that he'd like to teach in a prison, rather than a private school, which is a sentiment I can understand but I got rather insistent he not do it here, where they're over-crowded in a hellish manner and apparently you have to be the bastard of all time to actually get sent there if it takes that long to get a recidivist paedophile in. But my guess is that if Gaenen'd been a Maghrebin paedophile they'd have scraped together some room. Jamioulx in Charleroi is 50% over capacity, more depending on the source, and apparently with the latest wave of inmates coming in they had to stick a bunch directly into the tank - 2.5mX4.5m rooms without a window and just a concrete slab for a bed . . .

And how are they dealing with the situation at the administrative level here? Paying the Netherlands Euro 30 million to take 500 prisoners off their hands. Because the Netherlands doesn't have enough crime so they've got all these jails sitting around empty. Fucking embarassing.

Of gas factories and titties

Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.

While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.

The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.

And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.

The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.

The Green Dragon pouts through her civic duty

No big trips with my mother this weekend, because I had to vote in the Europeans on Sunday morning. It's obligatory here and I'd registered in a fit of civic duty a few weeks ago. I generally have some hesitation about voting in places that don't belong to me for whatever reason, but Jesus on His stick knows I spend enough time complaining about the special calvary that is living in Europe, and I pay a tidy chunk of taxes, though being a nom-dom not all that much, really . . . nonetheless, I voted.

Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.

So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.

But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.

The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.

Sigh.

At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.

The Red Dragon hears unhealthy mental voices

One day, this coming year I have left in Belgium will seem like a mere iota, like a speck of dust, like a tiny tiny sliver of time I'd nonetheless give one of my eyeteeth to get back on my deathbed, or when I have exhausting children and familial responsibilities, or when my vagina stops working. But right now, at its beginning, the enormity of it all is pretty fucking exhausting to contemplate. Making it more enormous at the moment are two things: my suck at driving practice last night, and a growing pessimism and nervousness about Monday's test - it has a 70% failure rate, because this fucking moronic nation I live in has decided the best way to make the roads safer is to crack down hard on the young drivers, instead of stick a bug up their cops' asses to get them on the road cracking down on the execrable, and I mean fucking staggeringly execrable older drivers who got their license back in the days when you didn't need a license (not obligatory until the 60's here).

Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.

The good news is that last night when we drove out to the country to practice my manouevres, we busted a couple canoodling on an isolated grassy bank. They turned bright red, jumped into different cars, and sped away in different directions. Spread the fucking misery, man.

The second thing making the coming year enormous is chronic illness. My parents, who are hardly anxious for me to move to the arse-end of the planet where they'll have to sit their frames on aeroplanes for 24 hours to reach me (I foresee a great deal of meeting partway in Vancouver, which I'm already fucking excited about) and who probably worry about my finances even more than I do, are nonetheless all for me getting out of Brussels as soon as I can manage it because I'm always sick. No headaches, thank god, which the F-word seems to be maintaining his own constant of, but I feel like I've had the same flu for the last two years. Anyways, my parents still have the power to make me reframe debates in my head, and right now part of my head is saying to the other: 'who cares about money? Who cares about your career? Who cares if the F-word needs a chance to learn French? Who cares about all that when you're going to get fucking leukemia or something if you keep living in this filthy miasmic cesspit?'

This is not a healthy way to think. I can only hope I have a better perspective after I pass my driver's license exam. Actually, I can only hope I pass my driver's license exam.

Confessions of a shopophobic

Guilty Noodles mentioned the other day an idea I knew I once had, that Europe is a wonderland of shopping. I can't speak for the whole of Europe anymore because now it's been TWO FUCKING YEARS in Belgium (having a hard time getting over the enormity of that, especially as after frank talks at home and at work we're aware there'll be another year now - three years of my life in Belgium - fuck - but it's all good, I'm happier than I've been since Christmas), and after all this time in Belgium, shopping has become less of an activity I do to satisfy my physical needs or material desires, and more an odyssey. A quest. 'Fucking mess' is another descriptor that springs to mind.

The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*

The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.

The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.

I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.

*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.

Call me a prude but I don't give fishing until there's a ring on my finger

Ugh. Can't sleep this morning. Atrocious dream about watching a pessimistic volcano survival documentary while a murderer broke into our holiday flat. At least that's made me too tired to be very nervous about today's meeting.

Speaking of, nerves beat parsimony and I ordered four extra hours of driving practice. The ex-cop who guides me during the sessions seemed to know that means I really don't want to fail the exam in a week in a half, so he cracked down and got all martial with me. 'Alright - scan the intersection - scan, scan - pedestrian sign changed - take your foot off the brake - relax on the clutch - release - give it gas! But don't hit that black guy!* Okay, now more! More! More! Second gear! More gas! Pretend your husband has been kidnapped and he's in the car ahead! You can't lose them! Pretend that adorable puppy in the car is your husband! Hit the gas! Third! Gas! Give it some fishing!* Fourth! There, now you're driving like a normal person. Scan! Scan the street! Why are you slowing down? WHY ARE YOU STOPPING? It's priority from the right, my cabbage!* Don't hesitate! You check the priority and you go, go, go! No, no, first gear! Now step on the gas!" It was stressful but fun and I feel marginally more ready for the exam. And it was nice to make the car go rrrrrrr. Nine more hours of practice to go.

Baywatch commented yesterday that all the rigmarole associated with getting your license here hasn't seemed to make Belgians better drivers than in places where the test I'm shitting myself over is a non-event, and he's right. People are really atrocious drivers here - getting into accidents all over the place and doing jaw-droppingly stupid things on a secondly basis. In view of their monumental suck I admit I wonder how hard the test can possibly be. . . but it's probably quite hard. My feeling is that learning how to drive here is just like the general French/Francophone Belgian educational system; you're not training people to not be retards, you're training them to pass an exam. Also traffic police are a complete non-presence in town. There's nobody checking up on you - just some speed cameras and blaring horns - so people have full rein to drive with their ids*.

*Belgian ex-cop, not a French one, obviously
*Belgian idiom for 'do it with balls'*
*Continental French idiom for 'sweetie'
*Freud is only good for traffic

*Just had a chat with my perfectly bilingual boss, who exlained the expression 'mis de la pêche!' makes slightly more sense than my translation 'give it some fishing!' - 'pêche' there is actually 'peach', homophonous with 'fishing' in French. I still don't get it, but there you are.

The Revolution will not be televised; it'll be on Youtube, demonstrating how to sew a flat felled seam

I'm still sick but have to go to work today to make deadline, find out what's up with my market reports, and prepare to be confrontational, because that's how awesome my life is. It's hard to resist the urge to whine. If there's one thing psychoanalysis taught me, it's that annoyance isn't relative. So while I can tell myself 'stop being fucking whiny, if you were still in Canada you'd only get 15 sick days a year, a fifth of which you would have used last week', I'm not surprised that it's completely ineffectual as a consolation. . . also in Canada, I never got this fucking sick all the time. Probably because this place is a filthy fucking hole.

There's some positive annoyance at work too, because though I continued rather sick this weekend I was able to get things done, in particular these two patterns from my hero the Media Tinker for pants - one pair in some gaudy silk Mum brought from Canada for the F-word's birthday on Thursday, and then a pair of the Thai fisherman's pants for me in the same impractical ivory cotton-linen blend I made the F-word's first pair in - and now I want to stay home and keep sewing - in part diapers for the plethora of babies who are getting born to my friends in June. For the moment, both pairs of pants look a treat. Somebody gave me a pair of the Thai pants before I understood I could find instructions for things on the Internet, and spatial relations eccentric genius though all that testing in grade school revealed me to be I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they worked, and ditched them. A shame. They're cute, and it's a fucking thrill to make something for myself that's cute. And the ivory won't be too ridiculous anymore once I get a tan, which, despite living in a photochemical puddle of eternal November called Brussels, I do guiltily hope of getting again one day.

God bless the fucking Internet and its content providers, by the way. It really only came home to me this weekend while I was going through it for patterns and sewing tips (BTW, for the none of you that are interested, here's a great directory of free clothing patterns) how good people are. How many conversations have you had, how many newscasts have you seen recently, about the dangers of Modern Life, the alienation of the Individual from the Group, the menace of Online Predators/Bullies/Rip-Off Artists . . . and yet the Internet is overwhelmingly full of free information willingly shared by people about how to do things, and that's so easily lost sight of in all the paranoid rhetoric. People want other people to know how to do things, and they go to a fair amount of trouble to show them how to do it. Like the lady who taught me how to do French seams, or the other who taught me how to do a flat felled seam.

I suspect people who are scared of the Internet of being baby boomers who only know how to use it for really filthy porn, and then who just assume that's what it's for, or else television executives who see their medium tanking. At long fucking last. But it's a way to learn, and because it exploits visuals it's a way to learn for people who don't like books, too. Powerful, and, if you're the sort of asshole whose livelihood is dependent on people staying useless consuming couchlumps who can't darn a fucking sock (which, BTW, I also learnt how to do from the Internet), frightening.

Pink Mitfords and white pyjamas

Two things I'd like to share from this lovely weekend, so soon over. Well, there's more, but there's no time for them. First, Nancy Mitford, the pink Mitford sister, is a fucking lovely author to read and I recommend her Louis XIV biography without hesitation. It's written with such an adorable style, in an extremely-clever-dilettante way rather than an academic way, with phrases like 'she would try and persuade the King' and 'Mme de Maintenon was loving the humiliation of Mme de Montespan'. Full of good stories and gory details. Top marks. Jessica, the red Mitford sister, wrote in a punchier (though still amusing) vein, and there's no doubt Jessica's my hero on many levels. But Nancy is nicer when your brain is close to breaking, as mine is at the mo.

Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.

For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.

As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

The Red Dragon doesn't like big dirty whores and nasty cunts

It's that Belgium time of the year that makes me want to die, and will one day be something I look back on in such a way that will make whatever sun-soaked paradise I move to in a year or two seem that much more paradisaical. Dark. Frigid. Rainy. Infectious. Like an extremely untalented dirty whore. I have my first cold of the season - made it to October this year. Fuckin' great. At least it's now, before next week's driving lessons and TRIP TO FUCKIN' CANADA! Wheeeee!

Speaking of big dirty whores, check out this story about Italy's Equal Opportunities Minister. Sometimes there are just no words. It did get me thinking about what constitutes being a big dirty whore, though. Ask me a year ago and I would have said letting people fuck you for money. Okay. But what about Craiglist handjob artists who only let you come on their tits to help them pay their university tuition? Still whores, obviously. There's an orgasm some sad sack of a man has to pay money for in there somewhere. But what about people like Mara Carfagna, who sell men's mags photographs of their tits and to help 'readers' prep for dates with non-whores through a quick 18h30 rub-a-tug? How's that qualitatively different from being a Craigslist handjob artist, besides knowing you're not going to get pinkeye from any splashback? Well, it makes it one degree less scandalous when you get your ministership by sucking off your goddamn penis of a prime minister. Fuck, what a big dirty whore.

Oh, and here are some more words. You know what I hate the most about hypocritical, filthy Italian bitches like Carfagna, besides the unhygienic way they shit on other women? That they make the male gender look like a bunch of fucking useless morons when they get involved in a nice mutual exploitation sting with nasty cunts like Berlusconi. And nasty cunts aside, I love the male gender. They have sexual organs that compliment my own, and they can open jars really well, to name just two uniquely wonderful things about them. But now there'll be a generation of Italian girls who'll look at the self-described antifeminist their penis of a prime minister has chosen as an Equal Opportunities Minister, and that'll either make them think that men are too moronic to bother with, or that men are too moronic to have any relationship with except as credit card holders. And that will continue the Circle of Life that has become gender relationships in post-modern Italy - massive mutual disrespect. And then everybody will have equal opportunities to be miserable and unfulfilled in their emotional and sexual lives. Brav-fucking-a, Carfagna.

Refreshing a tired businesswoman's brain

Lots of quite nice things happened this weekend, only a few of which I'll write about in the interests of space and decency. After getting such a lift from the preceding two weekends of countryside and kayaking, we see we have to use our weekends, and use ourselves on the weekend. My own conclusion is that I need to spend more time staring at trees and birds, and less at people, as my misanthropy threatens to become unmanageable. I'm not unhappy these days, either in my personal or professional life, but I'm starting to feel a bit like an extra-terrestrial. Not in the sense of being above it all, or being a super-evolved intergalactic voyageuse, but in the sense of just not getting it a lot of the time.

Anyhoo. Weekend extended backwards by a staff trip to an adventure park on Friday - one of those places you chain yourself to security lines and swing around the trees. I lasted three hours before my vertigo insisted I sit down and start drinking, which is three more hours than I'd been expecting to last. Not one panic attack, though I did consider it as a possibility at one point. Out in a town called Wavre, which was lovely, green and much cleaner-smelling than Brussels - helpful, considering the sudden onset of warmth and summer. I like the people I work with well enough. The ones who I'm not actively fond of don't demand too much of my attention so it's all good.

Yesterday dealt with the continuing warmth and green by going to Tervuren for some fresh air, where we had a nice picnic in the grounds of the African museum. The F-word went in to draw some of the weirdo stuff they've purloined from the Congo and I went for a long walk in the woods, reflecting on my misanthropy (set off hard by the allegorical statues in the entrance hall of the Spirit of Europe rescuing the Spirit of Africa from the Spirit of Barbarism and Arabs; I've never seen such an elegant and unabashed translation of murderous hypocrisy into expensive kitsch, but then I don't listen to American political speeches), and then settling down to read about half of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. A neat little book, suitable for tired businessmen's brains, which means it's suitable for mine. It'd be perfect for a three hour flight. Opens a window on a time when our societal paranoia was the same, but with a different object. On a time when academics and scientists were just as territorial and bigoted, but in the sphere of Royal Commissions instead of universities, broadsheets and books for pop audiences. Oh, the humanity.

So enjoyed both Wavre and Tervuren, though my enjoyment of all that fresh air in Wavre would have been tempered if I'd known there'd been a radioactive gas leak from a facility close to Charleroi (Wavre is halfway there) which the government has been falling all over itself about after trying to cover it up or downplay it for a week or so. Fuck, Belgium is a mess.

Anyways, lots of other nice things happened. For example, I invented a new technique for making tomato sauce which is so revolutionary and so delicious I think it will become a Spliffe Family Secret. I also made rhubarb upside cake in the skillet for the first time, which is a work in progress - it was good but it could be brilliant, and when it is I'll release the recipe. And custard. I've never been the world's biggest fan of it, but I discovered that if you whisk it continuously as you heat it, adding the corn starch as you go, it gets all foamy and ethereally exquisite. Expect that to be posted soon, under some charming name like Fairy Cum or Mermaid Corpse.

Up at the Vilification

That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.

Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.

Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.