The dream is over, or at least adjusted to suit local conditions

I've been busy with Haiti and Monkey!, and thus this morning was my first real opportunity to take the theory exam, and also my last chance to take it before the 3-month point preceding my 30th birthday, and thus the last date on which to do it and still achieve my goal of getting my full license before inaugurating the beginning of my 4th fucking decade on November 25th, baby. No dice. Instead:

-15 minute bike ride downhill through industrial district
-found office
-sat down to wait my turn
-DMV worker yells 'there's no theory exam Fridays!'
-I say 'oh!'
-he yells 'there never has been a theory exam on Fridays! It doesn't exist!'
-I say 'what days?'
-he yells 'Tuesday to Thursday!'
-30 minute bike ride uphill to the office, 15 minutes early.

At least I didn't fail. Oh well. Will have to adjust the goal to getting my full permit before turning 31.

By the way, this incident is a prime example of why Belgians have a reputation for being morons, despite, if I'm honest, being no more organizationally inept than any non-Dutch Europeans. Things are at least a little inconvenient all over the continent. But here, when faced with a deficiency in the system, participants tend to say something like 'it doesn't exist'. When obviously, if you have a modicum of imagination or education, you know it does. Just not in this shithole. The same thing happened to me last night at the petstore when I wanted to buy a toothbrush for my cat. I admit it sounds like a made-up thing, but Sugarplum and San Francisca both have had good results with them, and I knew the petstore stocked toothbrushes for dogs. So I asked a lady who worked there, who looked baffled, and who asked her manager, who insisted that such things didn't exist.

What do you say to that? Nothing. That twitch that's starting over my right eye when I get annoyed is just the cost of doing business here.

Mistress Aware of Vacuity

Again, too busy to blog. Too much Haiti to edit for the Quakers. Just two questions.

Number one: if I had spent my childhood glued to the television watching reruns of Monkey! instead of Magnum PI, She-ra, and The Dukes of Hazzard, would I be any closer to enlightenment now?

Number two: at what point did watching reruns of Monkey! now stop being about humouring the Australian F-word, who did watch it as a child instead of Magnum PI, She-ra, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and be about Monkey! being fucking awesome?

Check out the theme music. I think it's up there with Doctor Who's and, speaking of, Magnum PI's.

Too busy to blog

And not even with my driving exam yet. Everything else. For a lazy person, I sure am fond of overstretch. Just wanted to write one thing: I fucking knew it.

Writing about banks and naming names, bitch

Fortis is still a thorn in our sides. Looks like the beginning of the problem was one lone idiot there and then a crappy system around her that's proved itself incapable of dealing with the consequences of her idiocy. Oh well. Maybe someday Fortis will stop fucking up and I'll be so happy I could cry. See? I'm accentuating the positive and it's not even here yet! And then at the end of our contract, I'll rush to another provider so fast my head will spin. I lay into Belgians, I know, but besides some minor trouble last December (which they compensated me for) I've had no problems with ING -I've even been very happy with what I've got, considering I pay basically no fees. And while my colleagues, who almost to a man do business at KBC, are annoyed by the high fees and crap service, they've had no remarkable problems there. Fortis seems to be an especially incompetent institution (and an expensive one too - their rates are high). If you're ever in the position where you must live and bank in Belgium, I strongly advise against Fortis, and in the same vein reccommend ING.

But then the problem with Belgian banks is that they're very branch-based. I have a feeling all banks everywhere used to be like that, like when my grandfather was in the biz in northern England - he retired about 40 years ago. Back in the day when you talked to your neighbours and the bank manager could make decisions instead of a centralized computer saying yes or no, that made really good sense, I think. The bank was some sort of part of the community and has some familiarity with it. I'm making it sound very idyllic - I'm sure it was frustrating as hell at the time, but back in the day branches being the base of the system made sense.

Today it makes no sense. When your eligibility for a mortgage is calculated using defined evaluation tools, when people are tearing all over a city getting money from dozens of different machines, when everybody has a telephone and half the people have a computer in their home to allow them to reach some sort of centralized authority, and most importantly, when you've stripped bank managers of their non-petty power and when the branch is no longer part of the community - just another office people commute to - it makes no sense at all to force customers to have a 'home' branch. All that results in is situations like ours, wherein we had the bad fortune to use the Rue de l'Hotel des Monnaies branch of Fortis and be served by a bloody idiot who continues to fuck things up named Sonia Declerck, simply because our landlord took us there to create our deposit account. And now we have to clean up the problem with the same incompetents who caused it. Who knows? If we used another Fortis branch, things could have been different. We'll never know, because we'll never use Fortis again in any circumstances.

And with ING, I remember I had a problem with my card whilst Christmas shopping last year and popped into the branch at the top of Avenue Louise (Saint Gilles-Porte Louise branch) where the teller refused to help me in the flattest, rudest terms I've ever heard from a white collar worker in the private sector. Luckily I was just a 15 minute walk from my home branch, Bruxelles-Jardin du Roi) where they are all beautifully polite and helpful. But it did make me wonder if I'd be all 'yay, ING!' if I had to deal with the bitch at Saint Gilles-Porte Louise on any sort of regular basis. San Francisca, who also banks at ING, I think out of loyalty to her Dutch husband, used to bank at another Avenue Louise branch. She found it so dreadful that she switched to mine. She is from the States and does have rather slavish notions about customer service, but she's very happy now.

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!

Enough to give you the shits

You wouldn't believe what's happening at my office. Or maybe you might. I don't know how typical this sort of thing is. I'll keep my account neutral as possible, just in case some sort of magical filter picks up the fact I have a blog (which I don't update from the office, of course), but I'd like to start by saying I'm fucking shocked.

The European branch of my company used to operate out of the entire floor of a prestigious high-rise address in this city - classy yet silly, since there are so few of us working there. The cubicles were punctuated by long empty stretches that were occasionally pressed into use for some sort of ball game, interpretive dance, or emotional scene, and since my department is on a flexible schedual we could go for months - really, months - without seeing some of our co-workers. Very sensibly, a couple of months ago the Powers That Be sublet half the floor to another company and lumped us all together on the other half; it still isn't crowded, by any sensible measure. But I remember the Powers That Be worrying that there could be some sort of mounting personality conflict dynamic that would be unleashed by crowding us all together. And I remember scoffing at the idea. Ha-ha, I said, we're all grownups and it's not like we'll be crowded anyways. Right?

Wrong. Or rather, I don't know how the men are doing but the women are in a state of crisis over the bathrooms. It started with a calm, objective email from the Powers That Be about how now that we had reached something like normal office density we would have to be a little more careful not to let our food start to rot in the single communal kitchen, or to crowd co-workers out of the sink by leaving all our dirty dishes there instead of in the dishwasher, and not to filthify the bathrooms too much . . . you know, standard office stuff.

This was followed by a flurry of emails from the women about the bathrooms; about how people should change the roll when they finish it instead of leaving the sad little cardboard tube on the holder, about how it was gross to leave replacement rolls sitting on the bathroom floor, about how it wasn't rocket science to refill the paper towel dispenser, about how we should turn the lights off as we left the john, about how we should make sure there was no one still in the john when we turned the lights off as we left the john, about how we should wipe out the sinks after use, and - most contentious of all - about how we should use the toilet brush to efface any traces of poo from the sides of the bowl if we took a remarkable shit.

Now, I'm of the opinion that once people reach our age - youngest 23, oldest at some point in her 60s - their bathroom behaviour is pretty much defined. Sure, you can encourage people to be more thoughtful about sharing a communal space, and sure, they're kind of rotten or bitchy if they don't make an effort in that regard once it's brought to their attention that their behaviour is grossing people out, but if they're not going to make the effort they're not going to make the effort, and what are you going to do, fight against their entire scatological selves and pursue the issue?

Yes.

Despite the flurry of emails (which were phrased with varying degrees of formality, shall we say) empty rolls were left to languish, the paper towel dispenser was dispensed with, replacement bog rolls continued to be stored on the floor next to the bog, and little poo tracks continued to show the progress of Turds Past down the side of the bowl. Cue a second flurry of emails, this time exclusive to female staff members (though I would love it if the situation was being caused by a wicked male co-worker trying to sow dissent in the ranks of Eve by slipping into our privy and fucking it up when all our backs were turned - but the men at our office are pretty well-bred, and I'd be surprised if any of them had such a scatological sense of naughtiness), and this time more exasperated in tone.

No change.

Cue a list of printed-out demands posted on the door of each cubicle of the ladies' privy, as well as on the mirror and over the paper towel dispenser, enumerating in point form the demands listed above. I'll admit at this point I was getting a little annoyed by the petty maternalism of it all, but whatever. People feel very strongly about how things should be in bathrooms so I didn't really care. Someone else, however, did, printing out a confusing, angry rejoinder about how such things are the cleaning man's job, and that if he didn't do it he should be sacked; the rejoinder was taped up above the list of demands.

Now a colleague, the colleague who I'm quite sure posted the list of demands but of course I didn't ask her because I just don't want to be talking about this, told me she'd taken them down because she felt like they were causing hostility, and another colleague who overheard this conversation joined in and said she was picking them out of the garbage and putting them back up directly, and then there was some general confusion about whether the first colleague had taken them all down herself or whether someone else had torn down at least one of them and crumpled it up in a fit of pique, and the upshot of it all is that now, in the interests of clearing out the cloud of general suspicion lingering over the gentler sex at the company, there's a sting operation in place at my office to work out who the Miss Messer is.

The thing is, everybody already has a pretty clear idea. There are two offenders whose historical behaviour has convinced all concerned that one is responsible for the poo track type offenses and the note about sacking the cleaner, and the other for all the bog roll offenses, but the sting operation is nonetheless in place because, I suppose, these two miscreants need to be confronted with the evidence of their malfeasance.

Fuck, do I ever wish I could telecommute.

If Grusinskaya was a graceless Canadian . . .

Dear oh dear, I'm in rather a bad way. I don't seem to have the same skill in shrugging off frustrations that I flatter myself I once did and anger is finding a way to bake inside me; last night I went to bed angry, angry, angry, congratulating myself for the small victory of restraining myself from kicking Lexie across the apartment after she left a big juicy hairball on the exact part of the floor we'd walk across when coming home tipsy late, far too late . . . Poor girl, obviously it's not her fault, and poor F-word, obviously it wasn't his fault when he horsed around a little too playfully by digging his finger into my ribs just as I'd gone into some closed-eyed-deep-breathing-get-it-together-get-it-togetherness whilst reflecting on the strains of the day, but in both cases I could have decapitated them and walked away smiling.

Counterintuitively, because I think a part of my frustration comes from being away from my family a little too long - it's been well over a year since I've seen them, besides Mum and Dad - I want to be alone. Just for a couple of days. Just a couple of days of not having to talk to anybody or do anything in a different place where I can be quiet, and not see any news, and not have to have an opinion, and not have to do a goddamn thing but sit and think and nap. Not have to struggle to express myself in a second or third language, and not have to listen to people struggle to express themselves to me in my own language. What I really want is to be utterly taken care of by someone I don't have to be grateful to, just for a couple of days. But I'd settle for just being alone.

I get it in a month when I go to Marseilles for work. It's the one conference I go to where there's absolutely no question but that I'll stay in the super swanky five star hotel and dine on the finest cuisine man has to offer. The conference itself won't be restful as I'll be obliged to network but then I'll have two days in Provence to chill and not have obligations. Hopefully it will be warm and sunny. Hopefully I can find myself a patch of something nice. But it's a month away, and by then I probably won't want to be alone anymore.

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.

The naked every day he clad when he put on his clothes

Bought the complete works of Somerset Maugham this weekend, after finding them in a very handsome 15-volume set selling for 14 euros at a charity shop. Snapped them up, I think partly on the basis of their handsomeness. It's hard to say - hard to say how I feel about Somerset Maugham. The Moon and Sixpence is among my favourite books, with its repulsive central character being driven through life by his vocation the way normal assholes are driven through life by their ids. No romance to that book - no romance to the idea of dedication to the artistic process - just a lousy fucking asshole who paints and dies of leprosy because he can't do anything else. I love it for the author's descriptive powers, but I think what I like best about it is the way it strips away the romance from the idea that an artist, like any dedicated person, must be something of a masochistic prick if they're going to have time for it.

But then I think that's Maugham's shtick - stripping away the romance from things - and it can also be wearying, as in Of Human Bondage. I enjoyed that one as well, but not nearly as much as The Moon and Sixpence; in fact, proportionately less than The Moon and Sixpence by the measure of Of Human Bondage's greater length. While The Moon and Sixpence's insights were couched through the first person narration of an acquaintance of the protagonists - saving the narrating voice from being too God-dy - Of Human Bondage read like a cold biopsy of human weakness - a loooooong, cold autopsy of human weakness. But you know, I still liked it. Sort of.

So anyways, I purchased the complete set, and read The Painted Veil lickety-split so I could imagine Edward Norton being something besides a corporate shill in the shitty new Hulk movie. I liked it mid-way between Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. More biopsy than autopsy compared with Of Human Bondage, though still with that God-dy voice, so not as smooth a read as The Moon and Sixpence. Slightly more sensible description of female sexuality than one is used to from male writers of the time, though not setting any records certainly.

But what I enjoyed about The Painted Veil in particular was the way it explored injury and forgiveness, and the cold necessity of forgiveness if one is to recover from an injury. It explores how and why forgiveness for emotional damage is a two-track train; the need to forgive the person who hurt you is tied to the need to forgive yourself for allowing the hurt, and one without the other hasn't really got you anywhere yet, but both are very and seperately difficult. In my experience it's a way of thinking about forgiveness that rings very true indeed and it's an admirable focus for a book; especially one that is also enjoyable for the author's skill in describing the physical backdrop of the emotional action.

And it's why I don't think I'll be able to bear to watch the movie. It looks like they totally punked out on the lovelessness of the plot and while that makes sense due to Edward Norton's presence (who wouldn't fall in love with that piece of ass if you were stuck together for a few months?) it doesn't fit in with the central theme of forgiveness in the book. The movie looks like some sort of artsy love story aimed at chicks who enjoy crying. But in the book, by the time Walter Fane died, he and Kitty were no closer to loving each other than they had been when he discovered her infidelity. The book wasn't about love, not a bit about love, except about how love becomes something you are obliged to forgive yourself for if you loved the wrong person.

In case you doubt me, here's the Oliver Goldsmith poem whose last line was Walter Fane's last words after Kitty begs his forgiveness. I know some readings see it as a tacit apology from the dying man - that he is sorry he was the dog that bit her and now he is dying for it - but that interpretation misses the unmistakable sarcasm of the poem (the dog died because he bit the 'mad' or unwholesome man, giving the lie to the townspeople). There is no forgiveness here. Walter, dying, didn't hear Kitty's plea, or it wasn't enough for him. Typical cold, clinical, bleak Maugham. Do I like him? I still don't know.

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.

In Islington there was a man
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran—
Whene'er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.

Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wond'ring neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost its wits
To bite so good a man.

The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light
That showed the rogues they lied,—
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died!

On Holes (too many and too few)

I love when American politicians are caught with their dick in the wrong hole. Right wing, left wing, I don't care. You know why? In that country once they have any stature whatsoever, they're all part of a juggernaut of suits struggling and struggling to pretend their penises have nothing to do with anything. You know why? Because ideologically speaking, that country's political scene is a black hole whose destructive powers are controlled almost exclusively through the industrial groups that quite legally pay them off. And so to keep a country that continues to be influenced by its insanely idealistically God-dy settlers engaged in the 'political process', they have to fetishize their preternatural sexlessness, with similar disastrous consequences as with Catholic priests, who are also operating in a destructive ideological black hole and also distracting their adherents with hocus-pocus.

The focus of the hocus-pocus needs to go off the cock and on to the ideology. We need another Obama to come along, but this time, instead of turning the weed and the blow into a non-issue before the campaign even starts, he'll have to admit to fucking everything that didn't run screaming in the opposite direction before the campaign even starts. Arnold, I'm waiting for you . . .

But not to ruin another Batman franchise. Got high and saw The Dark Knight this weekend; it was the greatest superhero movie I've ever seen. I was hesitant to watch it, after liking the first Christopher Nolan a good bit and then hating the new Hulk movie so much after looking forward to it so much . . . but the new Batman surpassed all my repressed but very high expectations. My disbelief was suspended; that never happens anymore, at least not with superhero movies, no matter how much reefer I suck into my lungs. By the end, when Batman said 'set your dogs on me,' I was into it enough for the Bad Seeds' 'Ship Song', ordinarily one of my least favourite, pop into my head and play for the rest of the day without irony. Goddamn, Christian Bale is a piece of ass.

And you know, the first 30 seconds Heath Ledger was on the screen, I thought 'it's such a pity that poor boy's dead, he's really great!' But then I didn't think about it again for the rest of the movie. Now I'm back to thinking it's a crying shame. I haven't enjoyed his past performances besides in 10 Things I Hate About You, which was otherwise stupid, and I thought Brokeback Mountain was also rather stupid (though I did cry when he sniffed the shirt), but he always struck me as a boy who was going to grow up into something worth watching, maybe not Spencer-Tracy-worth-watching, but probably Robert-DeNiro-worth-watching. Now I figure he would have been Spencer-Tracy-worth-watching, and was, for one glorious super-hero movie. Poor, poor boy. Boy, whatever, a year younger than me. That counts as a boy.

An aside on the poor dead boy: last week, San Francisca and my boss, in commenting on the movie, said no one would be talking about an Oscar for him if he hadn't died. How prestigious do they think the Oscars are, for fuck's sake? This is the awards ceremony that recognized Titanic as a contribution to anything besides making me want to puke. This is the awards ceremony that recognized Russell Crowe's Gladiator as anything but a marketing concept successful at being both a wank fantasy for girls into butch and boys . . . well, boys. And that's not even the most embarrassing things that have happened at that mighty industry circle jerk.

I guess that aside was more about the Oscars than the poor dead boy. Sorry. It's just that I really hate the Oscars, and I can't bring Heath Ledger back.

Already can't wait for the third Batman movie . . . it will be a bitch without the Joker character but writing-and-casting-wise those Nolan boys haven't let me down yet. Memento was awesome and I even liked The Prestige, despite Hugh Jackman not being the most convincing actor in the universe, and despite the fact that David Bowie managed to fuck up a Nicholas Tesla cameo - holy shit, how can someone suck that bad? That's like Madonna-bad. Anyways, they've never let me down with the writing, and they always cast male leads who I want to have pile on top of me like duvets on a cold winter's night. After the first Batman movie I dreamt of a Christan Bale/Mistress La Spliffe/Cillian Murphy sandwich, but throw in Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger too, and heavens, they'd all have to take turns. Even the fantasy would last for hours, and I'm a premature imaginator. But now, sadly, I must go to work instead.

The Red Dragon worries about male social health

I've got the same reluctance to commit to movies that most people seem to have to committing to reading a book - I just resent bad movies so much, as such a massive fucking waste of my time, that it takes some doing to make me actually sit through any of them. I was even a little reluctant to sit down to Hot Fuzz, and finally I told myself I owed it to Shaun of the Dead to watch something by some of the same people.

So I saw it last night and it was fuckin' adorable. Can't think of a better adjective for it than that. The absolute cutest movie I've seen since . . . well, since Shaun of the Dead. I would watch more comedies if there were more comedies like that. Though maybe there are and I'm just not watching them. Hard to tell. Timothy Dalton chewing the shit out of the celluloid and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being so funny. There are so few movies where a scene ends and it's only then it sinks in what's happened and the helpless belly laughs start - like the 'fascist'-'hag' scene. Dear oh dear. The constant Point Break references - 'ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?' - fucking hell.

And something so very sweet about the friendship of the Pegg and Frost characters. Sometimes I worry about boys, you know. In general. Some of them seem to have so many difficulties with social communication compared even to socially retarded women and sometimes it strikes me that the male gender might be, occasionally, a very lonely gender to be, especially as they age. So there's something extremely sweet in seeing such a touching - seriously! - picture of manfriends.

Speaking of friends, car update - San Francisca has volunteered to teach me herself. And she taught driving to work out some community service back in her, you know, community-service serving days, so she knows what she's doing. Her car is automatic and I'll be taking lesson-lessons on stickshift. Will that confuse me or only make me stronger? We'll see.

The Red Dragon will ride the wicked road

I've got many ambitions, which you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at me. Looking at me, you would figure I've got one ambition (a nice nap) and lack another that I should have (a comb). But in fact appearances are deceiving and I'm an ambitious, ambitious piece of work. My new ambition: to get my full driving license before I turn thirty on November 25. Failing that, before my 31st birthday on November 25, 2009.

I already know how to drive, you know. I learnt, more or less, when I was an undergrad, from a lovely Romanian bear called Liviu who would greet me each lesson with 'Hello, Menace to Society!' but I kept leaving the country or going through very druggy phases, and then finally I decided I'd wait to get my license until I moved to a country that didn't have a graduated licensing system so it wouldn't take me two fucking years.

So in a very real way, I'm in the right country for it now because judging by the quality of the driving a chimpanzee can get a permit here if they shave before the test. In another way, I'm scared shitless. Like most North Americans I learnt how to drive automatic and here, like any normal European resident, I'll learn how to drive stickshift. And I'm doing that in Brussels – the city where people drive with their ids. Honestly, I don't even think the problem is these fucks wanting to get where they're going in a hurry; they just want to make up for how little their mother let them suck her tit by being a massive goddamn Freudian slip to everyone else on the road. But the benefit of learning here, of course, is twofold; first that it will be fast-ish in terms of getting a full license – four months or so – we'll see how quickly the gears of Belgian bureaucracy grind for me and how often I choke at the tests. And second, once I can drive here, I can fucking well drive anywhere. Like, Italy-anywhere.

The lessons will be pricey but I must think of it as an investment. Because if I waited until we went to Australia, that would be another two years of graduated licensing, but this time in a small rainforest backwater where employers insist on licensed employees, and where I want to hatch my young, who will be heavy. So now, now is the time to carpe diem, grasp the nettle, take my medicine and like it, daddy, like it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tired of playing the game as they fuck up again and again

My new fucking anthem, at least for today, at least until I manage a good night's sleep:



Not much news today. It will be the first day I get an editorial published through work. With my real name and my photograph and everything. Obviously it will revolutionize the industry and I will be in international demand, especially in warmer sunnier countries. Vanity google searches will become just that little bit more rewarding. And probably I will sleep through the whole thing, or at least want to.

Elsewhere - remember the Belgacom fiasco? I was reminded of it incidentally yesterday whilst making an effort to resolve a new fucking fiasco, this time with our former bank Fortis, another near-bankrupt Belgian corporate monster of incompetence. They sent our unpaid house insurance bill to a collections agency, which I found mortifying, by the way - I worked for a collections agency for a week once before getting a real job, and I hate collections agencies, and I had always resolved to not have much to do with them. And to be fair, the bill was unpaid, because they hadn't been sending us any bills, at least at this address - the address that

1) I live at
2) The F-word lives at
3) The insurance coverage is for
4) Our statements and promotional material came to.

No. Instead they'd been sending the bills to a defunct address (the shitty school we'd stayed at when we arrived). For the last four months. Willful fucking stupidity. Fucking pig ignorance. It's not even a scam, because the collection agency is only charging us an extra 10 euros or something - they're not making money off it - and in fact, Fortis is probably losing money off it because of selling the debt to the collections agency. A collections agency who obviously took one fucking look at the addresses involved and could somehow figure out that they could probably reach us for our house insurance bill at our house where we live and receive our correspondence.

And the cherry in the virgin is that just a month ago, the F-word had been to Fortis and inquired into the terms of our house insurance, and the very helpful cretin he spoke to took the time to print out our contract for him and explain some of the finer points. Without noticing, or at least saying, that we owed the bank over 200 euros and they'd been trying to get payment since April on that contract.

I was talking about this last night with San Francisca and her Dutchman who were all a-twitter with excitement and I was all a-twitter with excitement for them, actually, as he's just found a massively excellent job in Amsterdam and they are going to move there soon, fulfilling one her dreams. That means when the F-word and I buy our bit of rainforest we can house swap anytime they want some sort of Crocodile Dundee experience and anytime we want a bit of Olde Worlde Culture and legal marijuana.

I haven't met a nationality that wasn't happy to mock the intelligence of Belgians, but I've never met people who do it with more dedication and detail than the Dutch. The Dutchman was in full fucking flight last night - I'd set him off by innocently asking why he'd been concerned that Dutch employers might not place any value on his Belgian work experience. Apparently the idea, for the Dutch, isn't that Belgians are stupid in the flat sense of the word, but that they're utterly incapable of communicating with each other or other people once they're part of any sort of organizational structure, and utterly incapable of seeing any sort of broad, abstract purpose to that organizational structure in terms of what customers were using it for or in terms of money generally. It's a broad and uncharitable conclusion but I haven't yet found any evidence to contradict it.

Anyways, if anybody who is obliged to move to Belgium for work stumbles across this: quick word of advice, don't use Fortis; it's been a never-ending comedy of errors with them. ING has been great, and has the lowest fees as well, as in none, which may be unique here - I'm not sure.

Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser

To follow up on yesterday's banana bread recipe, adding a smashed-up bar of rich dark chocolate worked as well as it sounds like it would have worked. It pleased a birthday table of 6 different nationalities so I'm going to recommend it.

Anyways, I've found the strangest little book in a bargain basementy used bookstore shop here, from a series I'd never heard of before, Teach Yourself, which I suppose is the British answer to Whatever for Dummies, except the little thing I found was published during the second world war, so it's vice versa. I boldly splurged 50 centimes on Teach Yourself Geology not because of an overwhelming interest in geology - I just wanted to see what a self-ed book published in the middle of one of the most brutal conflicts in human history is like. The answer is fucking brilliant.

It's so excited about what it's about and, since it was only 1943 and I suppose no one had told them that the world is a fucking terrible place where men are no better than vicious, murderous tomcats with opposable thumbs and revolting imaginations, that kill babies in factories by the thousandweight, it's so excited about progress. About evolution and the aging of the planet as a progress towards - what? - something bigger and better - as well as about the expansion of human knowledge.

That caught me off guard a little bit. Does anybody still believe in this idea of progress? Of natural evolution, or of the evolution of human knowledge, as a process that's going somewhere, from a modest place to some sort of abstract but obviously much better - what? Conclusion? Surely not. Just to something obviously much better, I suppose. What beautiful optimism. I don't think it exists anymore. Was it just so obviously wrong, in the face of the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist hecatombs? In the face of war photography? Or have decades and decades of advertising campaigns for everything from cars to breakfast cereal simply inured us to it, until the idea that tomorrow will be better than today just rings in our head like a fatuous jingle?

The Teach Yourself series was and is published by these people - religious types back in the day - and apparently each Teach Yourself book they published back in the day had the title of this post, Proverbs 9.9, printed in the frontispiece. It reminds me that old optimism, that blind, enthusiastic faith in progress - in the idea that natural evolution and the evolution of human knowledge was an ever upwards and onwards type thing - was the natural reaction of a Christian society to the theory of evolution. The Christian society could accept that things hadn't happened like in Genesis when faced with the evidence, but it still needed to believe there was something profoundly God-y about existence - maybe even believe there is no God, but still clinging to the belief that somehow everything makes sense, and everything is getting better. Things 'evolve'. Things 'progress'. Things, in general, are couched in the language of a people who earnestly believe, without necessarily making it explicit and without thinking that it must mean they have some sort of abstract mystical faith, that there is a direction for existence.

Documentaries, not dishes

Nasty hormonal dragon has been in the process of unfurling itself over the past few days any my mood has been chancy at best. So yesterday I cooked and watched David Attenborough documentaries to calm myself down. Mock me if you will but it works better than marijuana, which as much as I love it only delays the bad mood instead of nipping it neatly off the branch. I mean, look at this shit:



And did you know there are rhododendron forests in Nepal? How can you stay mad when there are rhododendron forests in Nepal and lyre birds are so fucking awesome? Quite easily probably but that's not the rhododendron forest's fault, nor the lyre birds'.

So yes, I also cooked, and for once deigned to bake a dessert though I'd always figured that for women's work. Of course if was only banana bread but it still turned out divinely, and considering I had to alter all recipes out of recognition to manage it with the ingredients we had on hand I'll put it here:

100 g whole spelt flour
200 g white flour
1.5 teaspoon baking soda
sprinkle salt teaspoon
cinnamon
100 grammes butter
4 large scoops creamy honey
2 beaten eggs
4 (over)ripe bananas

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (6 on my oven). Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and honey. Smush in bananas with hands. Whisk in beaten eggs; mix until well but not completely blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just to moisten. Pour batter into loaf pan. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, until fork inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Let the cake cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

Moist and lovely. Top marks. I made another for a friend whose birthday it is today but smashed up a Côte d'Or dark chocolate bar and put that it too, so we'll see how it turns out.

Also baked bread - same process as last week but remembered the salt this time and the rising consistency was still good, so looks like we have a winner. Put diced bitter olives into two of the loaves at the shaping stage and it was great. And made a heavyish lentil pasta dish because summer is apparently over here, from this book, Tuttopasta, by Franco Marenghi. First recipe I've used from it - the F-word bought it last week, I think - and it was great. It looks like a great book altogether - simple recipes, good process instructions, pretty pictures.

I'm half-guinea and I've been a hungry university student, so one would think I know my pasta by now, and I do more than most Anglos, certainly. But it's only in the past five years, being a skinflint, not overfond of meat, and and then living with a man who wants to be a vegetarian, that I'm really exploring what can be done with pasta that hasn't been deeply animal flavoured. In my parent's home, we would eat meat twice a day. Three times on weekends. That's a lot of animal, especially considering how comparatively little animal Daddy's family eats in Calabria and Mummy's parents eat in Yorkshire. But it's such a predictable pattern, you know? Europeans are happy to condemn the over-consumptive lifestyle of Americans, but most Americans are just a bunch of Europeans who went to America because they wanted to eat more, and most Europeans are just Americans who were either too scared, snotty, or skint to make the jump. So what the fuck does anybody expect?

God is a gentleman

So. Wading through the Graham Greene compilation, slowly-like; treated myself to a re-read of The Quiet American, read the Stamboul Train (that's one of his light books? Jesus, depressive fucker), and really enjoyed The Heart of the Matter. Well, enjoyed might be the wrong word. It struck a chord and locked me in, that's for damn sure - one of his Catholic books, and the most defensive, the most lapsed of them all . . . it seems he dedicated it to the very Catholic wife (and their children together) that he abandoned, the very same year as the abandonment. Charming fucker. Such a fucking selfish thing. How else is one supposed to see such a dedication as anything but 'I'm already under such mental and moral torment over my choices that I risk suicide, so don't try to make me feel any worse about leaving you for tail.'

Anyways, if artist's personalities mattered I wouldn't even want to make eye contact with a Michaelangelo, right? The heart of the matter is that it's a good book for Catholics, though not a good Catholic book. What's staying with me now in terms of the Catholicism of it all at this point is the George Orwell review I read soon afterwards. I found it very strange - very angry - very hostile, even offended. Full of little factual errors in his outline of the story, and so very literal in its sarcasm - 'he had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation out of pure gentlemanliness.' Ignoring the point that Scobie had not been a pure gentleman; that Greene had obviously not been trying to draw a portrait of a pure gentleman, but rather of a fatally weak man who could drive himself to suicide over a love affair. But then George Orwell was always so literal in his writing - sure, Animal Farm was an allegory, but have you ever read another allegory that was so laboured in making it clear who it was attacking?

Take this point: 'The central idea of the book is that it is better, spiritually higher, to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan.' What an interesting reaction. As an ethnic Catholic reading the book, I have no idea how a non-Catholic could draw this conclusion. There's an idea that Scobie himself believed this perhaps - that Scobie believed his very Catholic pride and his pity for others distinguished him from the people around him. And yet Scobie, who hated the idea of suicide on an ideological level, drove himself to suicide through this pride and this pity. I couldn't think where you draw the idea of the book arguing a bad Catholic is better than a good non-Catholic unless a non-Catholic reader resents the degree of attention that Greene focuses on the process of a bad Catholic driving himself to destruction.

It seems like an offended review - Orwell suggests Greene is snobby, that he subscribes to the idea of hell being an exclusive nightclub; he sarcastically suggests that Greene's 'Catholics retain their superiority, since they alone know the meaning of good and evil.' (And he somehow maintains this defensiveness alongside an attack on Greene for making his underclass characters too thoughtful, too pre-occupied with notions of right and wrong!)

But what seems to offend Orwell is that which is the charm of the Catholic novel, and a sign not of the superiority of Catholicism (oh no, I won't way a word about their superiority, I did a runner to the Quakers and I'm glad) but a sign of what makes Catholics special: an obsession with guilt and redemption on a daily basis that other ethnic Christians have not managed (to their benefit no doubt) to hang on to. Catholics, if they're good Catholics, centre their faith around the notion of being imperfect and of apologizing adequately to God for their imperfection. The Catholic God is a forgiving and just God, but only if you can present your sins before Him, only if you can repent from the bottom of your heart for those sins; only if you want to be perfect.

And this is the tragedy of Catholics, and the tension at the heart of the Catholic novel: nobody is perfect. And believing you know what perfection is, or at least being faced with your own imperfections on a daily basis, becomes an intolerable burden. Because feeling guilty about knowing you're imperfect and pitying the victims of your imperfection isn't going to make you more noble - less tempted to lie, less tempted to fuck around, less tempted to accommodate the people you care about even if doing so is not quite kosher. It takes nobility and goodness to be a noble, good person - not guilt, not pity - and frankly I had thought it was obvious that was the point of the Heart of the Matter.

So it was interesting to read the Orwell review, which seemed to ignore that entirely. Is the tragedy of wanting to be perfect but usually managing no more than guilt and pity a particularly Catholic mental problem whose exploration would really be so offensive and alienating to other people? And how do other ethnic Christians manage to avoid this mental problem? Do all those American born-agains whose sins are washed away all of a sudden in a fucking fantastic baptism face this problem, or can such a powerful event when you're a grownup make you feel so close to God that you can ignore your imperfections in the glow of His glory? It would certainly explain the Bush presidency . . .

Well, I'll tell you

Last night I had a remarkably bad night's sleep, and I'll just share one of the markers of how bad it was. At about three in the morning, I half-woke-up from a doze utterly confused. The room was backwards. The window was where the door should have been and vice versa; there was an inexplicable drop between my side of the bed and the F-word's, and when I stretched the headboard had disappeared. I lay there wondering just how status quo this all was and didn't realize what had happened until I got up for a drink of water: I had occupied my boyfriend's side of the bed, and had been lying feet-to-the-headboard. I'm sure both that that hadn't been the case before falling into a doze, and that I have never. Ever. Done anything like that before.

It would be a lie to say I'm under more stress than ever before. Obviously that was the wrap-up of my thesis, or its actual defense, or the French oral exams, or something else to do with France. But one thing I can say is that I've never been with a man who I loved as much as I love this one while being under this much stress, and it adds a whole new dimension because I don't want to subject him to it, but we have a degree of intimacy that gives the illusion of giving me no choice. When I was single or indifferent I could come home and be a miserable asshole without thinking it a problem. But now I have to keep it inside, or express it differently, or walk it off, or something. I know I need to find some way to deal, because while I was lying there utterly confused about why the room was backwards and the headboard had disappeared, I obscurely but honestly blamed the F-word for it.

The truth is I like my job more than any other job I've had, but my brain is turning into a first-grader who's tired of math class and wants to go back to the craft table. Why go to all the trouble of educating me and giving me books and an imagination and some sort of aesthetic sense if at the end of it I was going to be the efficient cog in a corporate machine I know does more harm than good? And it throws me to the navel-gazing, middle-class, but thus far irrefuted conclusion - what the hell else did I think it was preparing me for? What else do I think the people who loved me and educated me wanted for me besides this sort of security and upward mobility? And what else do I expect unless I grow a pair and risk hurting them with my choices?

And these are my problems, my decisions, my rhetorical questions to answer; it's unfair to take any frustrations from it out on the F-word, or even on the people who loved me and educated me right into the situation I'm in today, and for whom my unconscious seems to be making the F-word the proxy. They were all doing their best, and the F-word didn't do any of it; in fact, he's the right partner for the woman I want to be.

Cheating death, deliciously

Following yesterday's themes of severe icky condiment aversion, I should mention there's one other that I object to with better reason; I'm one of those people who die when they eat peanuts, so my acquaintance with peanut butter has been, shall we say, brief and violent. But before the collapses into infirmity, which haven't happened with peanut butter since I was 6 or so, peanut butter being an easyish thing to avoid, I enjoyed the texture, the neat-o way it stuck to my teeth and the top of my mouth. I'm not saying a lifetime of not being able to eat peanut butter is as bad as the fact that I can only go to Thai restaurants when I want to play a delicious, delicious game of Russian roulette. But I am saying it's been a lingering sadness in the back of my mind - no peanut butter for me.

Until this week, that is. An old friend who works for one of the big international organizations here (who, by the way, provided me with the juicy tidbit that Sarkozy is only 5'5 - in lifts), and who suffers from the same infirmity as me - though it came later in life, so her attachment to peanut butter is rather stronger - told me about this.

To really appreciate this discovery, you need to understand that speculoos biscuits are the best thing Belgium has to offer. I'm serious. The beer in Germany is better than here; the fries at North American burger joints are better than here; the mussels in northern France are better than here - there is nothing, culinary-wise, to miss about this place besides speculoos biscuits, which I already know I'll miss like crazy when we move on. Rich but dry crispy little cinnamon things that soak up your coffee in an instant and taste like paradise . . . And now they've turned it into a spreadable paste. With the same consistency as peanut butter.

Gazpacho Soup Day

After almost three decades of avoiding gazpacho soup, yesterday I had it twice - first from the premium brand, and then from this recipe. Yeah, I know I linked to it yesterday, but I'm linking to it again today, damnit, because it was good. A taste sensation unlike any other I have ever experienced, and yes, it does add a whole new dimension to Almodovar movies. And I had the good fortune to have Gazpacho Soup Day on that rarest of all Bruxellois days - a hot one. Definitely hot weather food.

I confess I hesitated both at lunchtime and at dinner to raise the gazpacho to my lips. I've found a way to love most of my old bugabears - eggplant, beetroot, brussel sprout, spinach, cabbage, zucchini. But there's one bugabear that I have no plans to rid myself of - a lifelong hate, a pathological phobia of ketchup, or catsup, or whatever the fuck you call that shit is that looks like blended bloody diarrhoea. The last time I accidentally put it in my mouth was a couple of years ago in Toronto when we went to a fantastic Tamil place in my darling Cabbagetown, Rashnaa - highly recomended. They brought out French's mustard (can't eat that shit either) swirled together with ketchup to dip our appetizers in, but the lighting was romantic, so not noticing the gross I dipped one of my ulunthu vadals - yeeurgh. I still mourn having to spit out a mouthful of ulunthu vadal. Anyways, I don't know why I hate ketchup and French's mustard and (now that I think about it) relish so much. It's not the snotty guinea in me because my clan uses that crap at barbeques. Probably more to do with societal distrust issues - I can't eat anything with a texture that fucking gross and scatologic if some corner-cutting company made it. God knows what they'd have put into it. Ugh. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. About.

So I hesitated to try the gazpacho both in the afternoon and evening yesterday because it was processed tomato served cold, reminding me vaguely of ketchup or Bloody Marys, which I've always considered a shocking waste of cold crisp vodka taste. But I got over it and I'm glad I did. I recommend the pants off gazpacho in terms of helping you get through the heat of the summer, if you're lucky enough to have any.

Gazpacho Soup Eve

Desperately domestic weekend. One of those weekends where carrying out onerous household tasks feels like spoiling yourself. Maybe it was sparked by getting the first washing machine of my independent life. Before, it's been trips to laundromats or friends' houses or to some sort of communal piece of shit in an apartment complex's basement, but now it's ours and that means I can do the laundry naked. It's used, because we're cheap, we don't need it for the rest of our lives, and I have no wish to add to the world total of lingering white goods, but lovely.

So. Did umpteen loads of laundry, baked bread, scrubbed down the kitchen and bathroom, fleshed out our library from the charity shop (big Graham Greene compilation - presently reading Heart of the Matter and loving it - as well as Little Dorritt and The General in His Labyrinth, as I haven't read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez in years and years.)

And then another bushel of tomatoes from the back-of-the-truck market, which had a three-fold destiny: first, a great sauce cook-off for freezing and consuming over the next week or two, second, a smaller sauce for pasta alla norma for a dinner party, and third, gazpacho.

The pasta alla norma was really good and I adjusted the recipe from the typical slightly, so I'll record it here so I don't forget:

tomato sauce for five people
3 small eggplants
lots of salted bread crumbs
lots of olive oil
3/4 cup ricotta salata
1/2 cup basil

Chop the eggplants into one inch cubes, salt, and leave to drain. Rinse them off after an hour, toss in the breadcrumbs, and roast in a very hot oven on a preheated, olive-oiled dish until the right shade of brown and crispy enough to snack on. Heat the sauce while boiling enough pasta for five people, drain, oil so it doesn't get sticky, and stir roasted eggplants, ricotta salata, and basil into the sauce. Serve.

It's pretty normal besides the roasting of the eggplant, which I liked - not only because it takes less supervision and work than the usual semi-deep-frying, but also because it added a sweetness to the dish that went well with the salty-sourness of ricotta salata. It was also the first time I'd made the dish with ricotta salata, or even tried ricotta salata. It's a strange but charming cheese - sourish, as I mentioned, and with dense, chalky, moist consistency - and it changes the whole character of the dish from your standard rich cheese-and-veg binge to something altogether more interesting. Still bingey though.

For the gazpacho, I used this recipe, because I love soups based on roasted vegetables. The great hurdle in me constructing a gazpacho is that I'd never had gazpacho before so I'm not sure what it's supposed to taste like. But then in a remarkable episode of serendipity, the guests brought a premium brand of gazpacho over for an appetizer this weekend, which should at least give me an idea of what people think it should taste like when I get around to trying it, which for some reason I didn't at the dinner itself.

The gazpacho was inspired, by the way, from the heavy frequency of its mention and consumption in Almodovar movies. We watched another this weekend, Matador, and that starred gazpacho too. I didn't like the movie very much - thought it was a silly excuse to string together some good performances (Antonio Banderas impressive, again, as a neurotic little twitch factory, and Assumpta Serna absolutely perfect as an absolute carnivore) and some really effective images of violence, sex, and death with a childish story and other, cringeworthy performances. But afterwards I decided I'm just not going to appreciate Almodovar as he should be appreciated if I don't eat some fucking gazpacho.

Also, I'm going to write down the process for the bread I made, which turned out better than the last few batches - these things are a process of experimentation and it will take awhile before I find a process that I can settle down with, but this went very well indeed:

700 grammes whole spelt flour
500 grammes white wheat flour + extra
2 packets dry yeast (about two tablespoons)
2 cups hot water
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 heaping tablespoon cane sugar
1 teaspoon chunky salt

Mix 700 spelt, 500 wheat flour, and yeast. Mix water, olive oil, and sugar. And then mix them together with a spoon. When practicable, dump on the counter and knead for 15 minutes on a white-flour covered counter, adding white flour if it seems too sticky - end product must be smooth and stretchy without being sticky. Mix in the salt at this point, as you knead. After 15 minutes put it back in the mixing bowl, cover it with a clean cloth, and let double in size; cut into four pieces, shape them into loaves, and let those double in size in the loafpans; then bake at medium heat until the right colour and the right sort of hollowish sound when you tap them.

For the first time - maybe because I'd used spelt for the first time, or maybe because I usually use fresh yeast instead of dry yeast - the consistency was just right. Next time I'll do largely the same thing but with a loafpan inverse on top of the loafpan with the bread in it, as someone told me that makes the bread get a lovely crispy crust. The F-word thinks we can get the same effect by spraying the oven with a little water before putting the bread in, which sounds like rather less of a balancing act. We'll see.

And as you can see, the recipe above is very, very simple, in terms of ingredients and process, and it made me realize that the only point of a bread machine (which I've never had, so I could be completely wrong about this) is that it saves you the 'trouble' of kneading. But the kneading is my favourite part! What the hell is the point of making bread if you're not going to knead it? It makes the muscles under my tits feel bloody fantastic, not to mention my shoulders and triceps. I suppose most people have busier lives than I do, of course, especially when children come. But my parents had four kids, and one of them always found time to bake bread once a week, and they think bread machines are the height of capitalist domestic corruption - well, they would if they were a half-baked Marxist like me - I think what they actually called them was more of a waste of money.