Impeccable asses and geographic regrets

The trip to New Zealand was, well, compensatory for Christmas and more. Except now I'm starting to suspect we should have moved to New Zealand instead of Australia. I did actually push for it back when we were still in Belgium, but it's too cold for the F-word's thin Australian blood, and I suspect he also subscribed to some ideas about New Zealand probably being even more backwards than Australia, as it's more isolated, and smaller.

Well, maybe it is, for all I know. But staying in Christchurch and then camping and kayaking in some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, I saw the country from a terrific angle. And that angle communicated to me that people in New Zealand are much better than people in Australia at living at the end of the world. Despite a great deal of Christchurch having fallen down or threatening to (we missed Saturday's 4.9 earthquake camping) it has a richer cultural life than Sydney, even though it has only 300,000 people in it. And the food, sweet Jeebus. In town and out of it. They eat a lot better than we do here.

But something of even more primary interest to me was how people lived with their country in New Zealand, which seemed a great deal less oppositional than how Australians live with Australia. The weather there is crappier in the sense that it's colder and wetter, but that permits New Zealand people, I think, to spend more time outside than living in a 40 degree desert does, or else there's a difference in the national character pushing them outdoors. I haven't seen so many fit, active old people since I was in the Netherlands.

And the young people - shit. I spent a lot of time in a mild state of excitation. Men there were fucking gorgeous. I don't know if it's the rugby or the constant physical activity or what, but I didn't see a single pair of chicken legs there, despite their propensity to wear short shorts in whatever weather. I mean, fuck. They were really nice looking.

Anyways, I'm off for a run now so I can lure some kiwi into my tender trap someday if the F-word ever dumps me. Because the women there are fucking machines of awesome muscle and health too. We went to a rock climbing gym my second night there, which was a minor achievement for me, since I'm generally deathly scared of heights, but found when I was puzzling out holds and being competently belayed by Romola and her old man that actually it was just really, REALLY fucking fun to climb really high up. My arms sort of gave up toward the top of my fourth climb but I was hooked. I think I've found a gym near here I'm going to start going to as much as possible.

But that's not my point. My point is that women in New Zealand were fit as all hell and in this rock climbing gym I got a real testament to what being fit as all hell and rock climbing gyms can do for your ass, which is fundamentally to make it look impeccable.

The Red Dragon self-flagellates

Sick as hell. These past couple of months have taken me and broken me, and my fucking body has decided to punish me for not getting pregnant yet by getting rid of my dragonly cramps and replacing them with nausea; I'd really prefer the pain . . . I have a degree of paranoia that I'll be one of those pregnant women who spend the whole nine months puking and the present situation isn't helping me deal with that paranoia. But the lovely Rodelinda, that gem among women, sent me Marks and Spencers chocolate-covered gingersnaps and those have fixed allllmost everything. No wonder men all lose their fucking minds when she dumps them. She's so awesome.

In the meantime, my Christmas vacation has now started. Luke Duke sent us a couple of books on Spain as we're flying out tonight - luckily throwing up all over aeroplanes won't be breaking any new experiential ground for me - which means I am going to go get busy reading them, now that I'm done with Stalin's Children. Which was fine. The first half was really good and the second half wasn't, so, altogether, fine.

Luke Duke's gifts: Ghosts of Spain and ¡Guerra!. They look pretty good. You know what I love about Spanish? The fucking upside-down exclamation points and question marks. That is really awesome. You know right away at the beginning of the phrase if it's going to be exciting or interrogatory. I love that. And yesterday I was given to understand that our Asian division is haemmoraging money so the odds of me being able to continue my job without interruption whilst moving to Australia are poor - but honestly work has stressed and exhausted me so badly over the last little while that I had to welcome that news - especially as it means the F-word and I get to pursue one of the more attractive Plan B's we've ever had: before moving to the Antipodes, we go spend a few months in Spain, doing the Camino and learning that awesome language. I don't speak a word of it of course, but I can usually figure out what they're talking about if they want me to because of its similarities with Italian, so I think given three or four months there I'll be able to pick up a lot of it.

In the meantime, my sweethearts, I'm not going to be posting on this blog; will return the week after Christmas, hopefully stuffed to the brim with tapas and ham, ham, ham. Very lovely holidays to you all; may your indiscretions be discreet, your pleasures shameless, your carbon footprint smaller than mine, and you and yours very very happy above all.

Rotterdam mijn liefde

We just spent the weekend in Rotterdam - pictures to follow. For weeks all and sundry who were aware of our destination, which I chose to go to with some passion to celebrate my 31st birthday on the basis that passing through Rotterdam on our way to and from Amsterdam was driving me crazy because I wanted to get out and look at the beautiful modern buildings, warned us we were heading into a grey shithole that everybody hated.

Now it may be because I'm incurably contrarian, but having spent a couple of days there I have to say anybody who doesn't like Rotterdam is a fucking asshole. Rotterdam is fucking awesome, I've never seen anything like it. I could compare it to Dusseldorf or some other German city that got completely wrecked in the last world war and rebuilt in a reasonably interesting and livable way, but Rotterdam leaves them behind: Dusseldorf and similar German cities were rebuilt in a very reconstructive fashion, comparatively, with an eye to recreating past glories and conditions: but in Rotterdam, somehow the clipboards ended up in the hands of people who had decided they would do everything they could to make their City Mark Two very fucking human.

Of course they had the natural advantage of it being a port town full of canals and the river, so it's a very watery town, and that makes for a sort of default pleasure for the eye: I don't know about you but I find it pretty hard to maintain a bad mood when there are lots of boats and pretty diving birds all over the place. And then there's the typically brilliant Dutch organization of circulatory space: bike paths coupling and outnumbering roads, ubiquitous footpaths, roads all nicely arranged to keep the cars out of everybody else's way, and comprehensive public transport that we didn't bother to use because this was very much a walking weekend: outside of meals, drinking, a couple of pitstops at the quick serve windows of coffeeshops, and a long visit to the terrific Van Beuningen gallery, we spent the entire weekend looking around the city at the startling architecture.

Take the cube houses, for instance. The cube houses remind me of Venice or the Guell park in Barcelona because they're something that can't be appreciated until you're in them. When I saw the pictures I thought they were a rather neat if ugly idea, but I wasn't particularly excited to visit them. However, when we ended up there on our Rondje Rotterdam stroll, seeing the way they were arranged, took (or failed to take) up space, and where they were on the Oude Haven (where, when I'm a multi-millionaire, I will definitely be buying a pied a terre) - why, it was just fucking lovely.

And the relative goodness of the food, ready availability of kibbeling, the friendly student/multicultural vibe, the utter lack of American tourists pretending they were being dirty by getting high, and the exciting fact that it only rained for about 1/4 of the time we were circumnavigating the city (the sun actually came out twice) sealed the deal. Fuck, what a great town. I loved it so much that while we were there I actually got my first pangs of panic at the prospect of leaving Europe. I haven't fallen for a city so hard since Barcelona.

In which beauty cures recreational poisoning

The weekend in Germany was nice, and has produced the desired effect back-to-back with the weekend in Dordrecht: I really want to stay in Brussels next weekend. Saturday was Unity Day, a stat holiday there, which was good because we were town-bound and if the stores had been open I would have shopped - I'm feeling flush at the moment - even though I don't NEED need anything, because Dusseldorf is a marvellous city for shopping and, whilst expensive in German terms, is damn cheap compared to this price-controlled, socialimistic country I live in.

So we went to Wuppertal, a very pretty industrial/valley town that reminded me of the formerly industrial bits of Yorkshire. The difference is, of course, it hasn't fallen into complete neglect since its heyday ended - not the West German Way, I suppose. It has a suspended monorail, which is awesome and hardly takes up any space since most of its run is over the Wupper (which is full of birds, I think we saw maybe 15 herons or cranes going through the city). A very pretty, efficient thing. Testament to human lack of affiliation with prettiness and efficiency that there aren't more of them elsewhere.

Sunday morning I managed to shake of the effects of far too much drink and smoke and consequent poisoning (and disappointment in it being far too cold for these thin-blooded Europeans and my Antipodean to kayak, though I was in no shape for any kind of physical effort) to join the others at the Hombroich museum island close to Neuss. I don't know the last time I've seen something so lovely. Everything about it was superb - what they had on display, the lunch (included with ticket), and the willows next to the cafeteria with branches drooping to the ground, under which they'd set out tables we could enjoy with the early-winter sun, that kept popping in and out. We'll certainly go back in another season before leaving Europe. It was something that touched me in the same way was the Guell park in Barcelona: so pretty, such a good idea, and a sort of yearning that everybody everywhere in every city have a the chance to have something like that there, something so goddamn lovely.

Mustang Spliffey

Driving last night was fun. All except the point where I was accidentally in fifth gear and the bastard nearly stalled. My exam is in less than three weeks, and last night was the first time I thought I might pass it. And strangely, or strangely to me, anyways, my incredibly bad mood made me a better driver, or at least made me feel like a better driver. Speedier after intersections. Less veery. Also there was a big electrical spring storm, lightening all over the place, rolling thunder - and somehow that helped too.

Quite a lovely spring here. Up until the big storm last night, very sunny and warm, everything getting green and flowery at once. The young men are all full of stares and lust and jissom. I wonder how it will feel in ten years or so when I'm invisible to that sort of thing. I swing between thinking it will be fucking awesome, and that it will bring on some sort of existential crisis. But you know what, there are worse things than existential crises.

Speaking of worse things, I'm being confrontational this afternoon, which I must go through before we go on vacation in Bordeaux. Maybe if I'm confrontational enough it will be an eight-month pogey vacation. Cross your fingers for me. The last week or so has demonstrated to me that I need to work on my confrontationality a little more. Fuck, you can pay through the nose for years of fucking analysis but it's just in one ear and out the other with me; we were talking about my confrontational inabilities four fucking years ago.

Springtime creeps along

It’s spring. I’ve been saying that for the last month without believing it myself in a desperate attempt to drag my brain out of the doldrums of the black Scandinavian winter and into the gladsome brightness of the Scandinavian sunrise (maybe, maybe this will be the year that summer doesn’t absolutely suck in Belgium – third time lucky – oh fuck, have I really been here that long?).

But now it’s true, for the moment at least . . . there are some flowers in the parks besides snowdrops now, and the waxy pink buds are swelling on the shrubs, and tiny baby leaves are slowly unfurling . . . the sun, she is a’shining, the birds, they are a’singing/fucking/nesting . . . sorry if my language is twee but it’s just so fucking great. There were a lot of reasons I moved to Europe, but a very big one was that it hurt to wait until April for the springtime. And now that it is here – now that there’s a new mildness and dirt-smell to the air, even in the middle of this fucking smoghole of a city – it’s such a relief. Soon the days will be so long . . . soon it will still be daytime for hours and hours and hours after work. Oh fuck, what a relief.

And now we’ve arranged for our Easter holiday too, something more to look forward to, in that it will be an escape from the city – sort of. We were thinking of Aachen and of the German/Belge national park next to it, but some people who we want to do that with couldn’t make it, so instead we’re heading to Bordeaux. I’ve just finished putting together an exhaustive feature on the storm there so we’ll be seeing less trees than we otherwise would have, but we did find a company that runs sea-kayaking even in April. Fuckin’ A.

I guess I’m clutching at such small things and small escapes at the moment. A couple of nights ago I was telling the F-word about how people spend a lot of time yelling at me at work – not colleagues – contacts. It doesn’t get my goat in the normal sense but I do come home rather fagged, and a little cranky, and much more tense than is healthy for our relationship or for me. I’ve been dropping weight – okay, I could have stood to lose a few pounds, but frankly I don’t wholly like losing weight; it makes me feel small and less powerful – I’m the colour of a dirty sink, and I’ve started crying when I see trees get cut down.

Anyways, I told the F-word people yell at me a lot. And he told me he wanted me to quit as soon as possible, and hearing that from him was just so nice – such a relief in itself. I won’t, at least not for awhile – I’m hoping to goodness they sack me in December so I get a payout – but it was so good to hear him say that was what he wanted me to do. And yesterday he learnt how to make Lebanese bread at home. Fuck, he’s great.

Waxing days

Today I know what I'd like to write for you, and I can't, because of the penury of time I've got now that I'm back at work, and though there was time enough whilst on holiday I was too busy being, shall we say, happy, to park myself anywhere to write that wasn't off on some mountain or train or beach or ruin, and one doesn't take a computer to such places, thank God.

So instead, I'll briefly lament the difficulties involved at this time of year with getting along. It was good to head to the Med for the solstice and the recovery from it, and the days are now already so much longer up here in Scandinavia Sud than they were when we left. It was good for us - for me and the F-word. No particular troubles in paradise but yesterday I was reminded what a shitty time of the year this is for couples, with our closest friends here informing us they'd broken up over the break, and other crack-ups being widely reported. This is really the attrition time - the cold, dark morbid time when the cycling of the seasons gets too obviously painful, and mortality too painfully evident; if 2008 can die, why not you? And if you're going to die someday, why are you with person A anyways? Is this the person you want to miss you after you're dead? Is this the person you want to hold you as you go? Is this the person you're willing to mourn for? And if the year can be born again, well, why can't you?

Maybe if the F-word and I moved to a place that was always summer, I would never lose him, I thought as the girl tearfully told me she's ended it, maybe if we lived in a place that was always summer, I could always be nice to him. Rather too pat as the formula for a neverending love, but even as I tried to get her to stop crying my mind ran through the possibilities, comparing a couple aging with these lousy, shitty seasons turning over and over, rubbing their faces in the passage of the years and the deterioration of their bodies and patience, versus the same couple cheerfully and obliviously aging under a semi-tropical sun.

I don't know, I don't know. I just know that even though it's being Canadian-esque here with the cold, after the two weeks in the mezzogiorno with its irises and flowers and third season of citrus fruits, I do understand that someday it'll be spring again, by hook or by crook.

Merry Christmas (Income is Over)

Hatchet fell at work yesterday in preparation for the next financial year. Nine Americans gone, one girl here, where it's much more expensive to sack people. It was serendipitous it was that girl, who was planning to quit in January anyways, and who now gets a great big payout instead of possibly having to work through her looooong European notice. Nonetheless, it hardly fills me with emotions of security, or affection and attachment to my company. She was a good friend of mine, who's already been locked out of her computer - she just won't be back - and I'm going to miss her being around. Oh well.


This is one of the really fucking charming things about publicly owned companies. Their share price rises and falls in part by function of their quarterly reports, and the financial planning they announce in each quarterly or yearly report. Take the present quarter and year – Q4, 2008. It's a bad quarter, all over the world, and turning out to be a bad year. Companies are losing sales. As companies report losing sales, their share price falls. This is unacceptable, because the company is run by shareholders, or a board of directors representing shareholders, and of course their raison d'être is to maintain a high share price. Not to run a quality company, in terms of ethics or even good production standards, but to maintain or improve the value of the shares.

So, our company, like most, is having a bad quarter. Last quarter was also bad, and there isn't much prospect of next quarter being better in terms of making money come in. That means that to maintain share price, or at least stop it from sliding too much, the only thing to do is announce that in the next financial year, starting January, you're going to stop money going out. And that means firing a bunch of people a couple of weeks before Christmas. That is, right before the most successful consumptive holiday season in the history of capitalism, that whole industries rely on. And then retailers complain because they're not making the Christmas bonanza they usually make, because of course when you're sacked two weeks before Christmas, or see your competent colleagues sacked two weeks before Christmas, like literally millions of people are this dismally unsuccessful year, you don't buy shit. So retailers sack staff and cut their orders in an effort to stop their own cash outflow, and then manufacturers, who were already fucked enough to fire a bunch of people, are more fucked, and then our customers, who tend to be manufacturers, are fucked, and then my company is fucked, and next Christmas a bunch more of us will be fired in an effort to shore up the share price for 2010.

And in the meantime, we who see the hatchet come down swiftly disabuse ourselves of any notion that the company we work for will have any regard or loyalty to us as employees, so we should feel free in every way to jump ship at any attractive opportunity. And this means the company loses assets it's spent time and money training to do very specific work, and must hire more, and waste thousands and thousands of dollars training them, and those thousands must be saved somewhere, so come December, if you've been at the company for a few years, long enough to get a salary management feels might be disproportionate to the amount of money you're bringing in . . . merry fucking Christmas.

You know, capitalism works, but so do guillotines.

I am become Woman, the Comforter of Worlds

Today I am WOMAN. Numerically. There are some womanly milestones I hit years ago, like giving up faked orgasms, and others I've yet to reach, like being able to keep mittens in my possession without running a string between them and threading them through the sleeves of my coat. But today I'm 30 years old, and I've lost any excuses for bad behaviour on the basis of immaturity, and I've gained status in society for making it this far without poking one of my own eyes out or getting addicted to crystal. I'm mature. I'm robust. I'm drinkable and my Beaujolais days are behind me though I'm still quite fruity.

And yet thinking about it - which I do, as 30 is an important birthday - despite the two degrees and the international travel and the reams and reams of material for my biographers veering from the salacious to the pornographic to the administrative over my 20's, I don't feel there's much difference between the Me now and the Me yesterday, brain-wise. 30 is a marker for the rest of the world, and the day I ditched girlhood for womanhood in my brain was the day I realized the prospect of fucking only one man until I died was more attractive than tragic. But as a generality, the last decade, which happens to have been my twenties, did teach me five valuable lessons that I didn't even dream were on the curriculum when I was nineteen:

1. Play nice.
2. The 'nice' is more important than the 'play'.
3. The 'play' remains imperative.
4. The 'play' is not the same as 'act'.
5. The 'nice' is not the same as 'likable'.

Those were occasionally hard-learned lessons, and I'm trembling with anticipation and a degree of nervousness over what my 30's will teach me. Hopefully how to sew, and perhaps how to grow my own. Happy Mistress La Spliffe's birthday, everyone!

Mmmmmmm Bacon

Super quick trip to London these past two days and it was just lovely. Well, the Tuesday conference, for which I went, wasn't. I won't go into it. You know the drill. Putatively about sustainability, really about how to present the appearance of sustainability, and deeply depressing. But yesterday at least was a wonderful day.

We started it with a trip to the Francis Bacon exhibition, as planned, and that was marvellous. They'd got nine rooms of his paintings from museums and collections all over the world and I found it revelatory to see them all, together and themselves close up; there were so many things I'd never noticed from reproductions and visits to individual works at different galleries. And the F-word was like a pig in shit, of course, loving Francis Bacon as he does in that special cannibalistic way artistic types love each other. And in just the sort of thing my archivist brain likes, a tenth room had pictures and notes and sketches from his studio, showing crumpled figures stuck and painted back together, prefiguring the ghastly shapes on the paintings in the other rooms. Photos of his circle there, and I was interested to see that George Dyer was a piece of ass. Exactly the sort of aubergine-nose thuggy looking type I go for and then feel guilty about, just like Francis Bacon. Ah, lapsed Catholics and our rough trade . . . thank God, in all seriousness, I've found an aubergine-nosed thuggy looking type who's also the kindest man in the world. Anyways, it was a really well put-together exhibition. Not to be missed, if missing it can be avoided.

And then, after the F-word departed, a lovely afternoon and evening with Rodelinda, who I hadn't seen for an embarassing number of months - 1.5 years, really. We went on a trip to a lovely big bookstore next to the university, and I bought three - a Stephen Jay Gould book about the millenium, Robinson Crusoe, and Oliver Twist. Now this post is long enough and I have to run to the office and deal with being a professional so I can get home in time to let the vet tend to my cat, so I won't go into books on trains, much. Just let me tell you this one absolute fucking horror story. On the way to London and during the non-pertinent bits of the conference I read Nathaniel's Nutmeg, which I'd picked up in the Oxfam shop here on a whim, since I didn't know much about how all that shit in Indonesia and how everything had worked out with the spices and the Dutch and the British. It wasn't the most academic book ever but it was an excellent and compelling read, and left me in a Boy's Own Adventure sort of mood.

So Rodelinda recommended Robinson Crusoe while we were book shopping, and after bidding goodbye to her and to her neuroscientist darling at the train station - more on him and his fascinating projects later - I dove into it. Rollicking good read, so eventful - so many things happen apart from getting stranded on a deserted island, at the beginning. And finally, just when I got to the moneyshot 40 pages in, when the brutal waves have pushed-pulled him to the shore of his island, the edition skipped to page 198, and was all fucky order-wise after that, and completely missing pages 41-89. I was so angry I could have shat myself. Instead I started reading Oliver Twist, which was compelling enough to distract me from my fury. But the sting in the tail is that Robinson Crusoe had been the only book I'd paid full price for at the shop, Oliver Twist and the Stephen Jay Gould book having been marked down to less than 50% of their normal price. Ugh. I'm still pissed off.

You've got to think, oh geez, would I do that?

Got the papers for my provisional license yesterday. Took them to the maison communale so as to get my actual provisional license - this thing is a Byzantine complex of complexity. But the maison communale was closed. Not because yesterday was a holiday - because today is a holiday, and they do the 'bridge' here to get four day weekends. And you know what? It didn't piss me off one little bit. I shrugged and walked on. It's like my boss told me once upon a time: when something in Belgium goes right (qualifying for the provisional license), celebrate it; when something goes wrong (incompetent, bloated civil service not showing up for work because nobody feels like it) accept it as the status quo, and walk on . . .

Today isn't any old holiday, but Remembrance Day. Actually, Armistice Day is what they call it here. Commemorating the end of the first world war, rather than the war itself, which is reasonable. In German (which is an official language here, as well as French and Flemish/Dutch - little known fact to help you at your trivia nights), it's Waffenstillstand. Isn't that adorable? Waffenstillstand. Hee hee hee. Who knew people who talk a language that adorable could murder millions of ethnic types so soon after the waffenstillstand of the first world war. Waffenstillstand. Precious. I guess it didn't stand still for long.

Anyways, I'm not doing much to celebrate. I keep thinking, living in Belgium as I do, that I should visit some of the nearby killing fields, get devastatingly high, and spend an hour or so mourning those millions of young men who were maimed and slaughtered in the interests of their ruling classes. Today's certainly not the day for that, though. It's raining, I'm working, and the killing fields will be choked to the gills with visitors.

But last night, we did watch some more Australian television, Four Corners this time, doing a special on how the first world war has been used and abused by politicians and different kinds of historians. I recommend it if you have a spare hour or so. One thing I like a lot about Four Corners is that the documentaries have an arc . . . 20, 25 minutes of the proceedings, and then around minute 30 there's some sort of fucking punch to the gut that alters the entire philosophy of the thing at hand. In this case, it comes from Garth Patten, an Australian teacher at UK's Sandhurst military academy, who after more than half an hour of war historians making more or less wanky arses of themselves - acting like the scarier kind of nerdy child who gets really excited over toy soldiers - sketches out why the first world war continues to be important in the training of the officer class. And it's fucking devastating, what he says.

The whole extended interview with him was fascinating. It was interesting to hear what all the interviewees had to say in the context of a discussion about how the first world war has been used, wankers included, but I would have liked to just listen to Garth Patten talk for the full hour. Whenever anybody asks me from now on why I went into the military strategy concentration for my international relations degree, I'm going to send them to that interview. Military strategy and its history tell you the horrible secrets about humans' relationships with each other. My undergrad, with all that literature, music, philosophy, language and art, was about the romantic secrets of how people relate to each other; the grad degree was about the ghastly, ugly, irredeemable secrets. And you know, it's the grad degree that prepared me for business journalism. Sigh. Off to the wars now.

Dealing with the décalage: a Red Dragon story

Home again, or here again, anyways. I was pitching a bit of a sulk on the way back as there was nothing I was happy to be returning to after the lovely time with my family and with the great city of Toronto besides the F-word, who's mobile. But now that I'm actually here, where for the moment at least things are green (Toronto was still orange and red as well, but North Bay was in the grip of an early winter when I'd left), and my cat is happy to see me, and my coffee is made with unpasteurized milk, and people can walk places instead of taking cars without starting rumours about their financial ruin, and sex is even better than I'd remembered, and we have meals without animal flesh in them so maybe, possibly my weeklong intestinal bricks will soften somewhat, and my boss is so lovely and accomodating that when I blearily called from Paris at 8:30 in the morning moaning that I'd be late because I'd got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because of a security scare while I'd been sitting in the middle of a gaggle of Italian 14 year olds - yeeeeeurgh - he told me to not bother showing up until today.

Wise of him. I was barely functional yesterday - just happy to be back with the F-word. Didn't sleep a wink in between the time I woke up in my neice's bed at 8 in the morning on Sunday in Canada until I finally collapsed last night at 6:30 in the Belgian evening - kept myself awake all day yesterday after scraping my sorry self into the apartment around 11 in a desperate bid to cope with jet lag in one fell swoop, despite increasingly frequent and heartrending hallucinations about my neice, nephews, Luke Duke and consort still being present in the room/vicinity. The bid seems to be working so far; eyes popped open at 7:30, unbleared as two little daisies.

We'll see how things go as the day progresses, and tomorrow maybe I'll wake up in time to tell you about the seven movies I managed to watch on the Air France flights. I love that about Air France, those lovely screens in the back of the chairs. Too bad their stewardesses are such bitches. I got up to change my rag on the flight back during the constant fucking turbulence only to get a peremptory 'non!' from one of them, as the seatbelt light was on; not ready to start spitting out the cursed Gallic language once more after two glorious weeks of Anglo-Saxonia, I wordlessly flashed her my unwrapped menstrual pad in front of the aeroplane, and enjoyed watching her face turn red as staining panties while she shrugged and gestured me onwards towards the can.

Planning a vacation south of Gomorra

I just booked our vacation. Two weeks in Italy, one in Calabria with the family and one in Sicily. That will be very nice as I've never spent that much time in Sicily - just long laborious daytrips down from Aspromonte on those monumentally shitty roads the damnable parasitic mafia has siphoned all the money off from, and then across the legendary straits of Messina on one of the damnable parasites' damnable ferries.

Goddamn them, if God will pardon the imperative which I'm using for metaphorical purposes, in the understanding that God will damn only those who He in His wisdom judges it right to damn . How many people have died on those third world roads in Aspromonte? How many people have died in Aspromonte because emergency services couldn't get there fast enough? Lousy money-grubbing rapists, burglars, murderers, and motherfuckers. No wonder some southern Italians still miss that fascist maniac murderer Mussolini: he's the only leader that country's had with enough balls to line them up against the wall and give them the killing they deserve. And that's the most fucking pathetic thing in the fucking world. God, Italy's fucked up.

Anyways, that's where we're going at Christmas and New Years because one of my cousins is getting married, and I need to brush up on my Italian badly, and it will be nice to see the rest of my family there, and we both very much want to spend a good chunk of time exploring Sicily. We'll be staying in Syracuse, where I've never been before, but which sounds fucking legendary. And yes. We'll be going kayaking. Rock. I had to book this early because at Christmastime about a kajillion southern Italian economic migrants head home for the holidays - frankly I'm not pleased to have left it this long - the tickets cost almost 400 euros each and we were lucky to find that.

Not much else to say at the moment because work is so insanely busy and stressful. Yesterday, after finishing a fucking Homeric effort of a market report, my brain was so fried that I had to think about it for three minutes or so before I remembered my home phone number. Dear oh dear.

Taking a Cézanney view of the world

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had declined to cherchez l'homme, as they say, and if I had moved from Italy to Marseille in 2002 instead of from Italy to Paris in 2002, I would have completely different prejudices regarding French people today. Much nicer ones. In fact I loved Marseille so much that now I'm going to have to oblige us to go back for a week next summer so that I have time to at least scratch the surface, instead of lightly brush against it, and hence be able to explain to myself for the rest of my life why the hell it is I don't live there.

Brushing against its surface revealed a few faults: most of the city smells like pee, there's obviously a lot of indigents, and considering it's not a rich town everything except accommodation was Switzerland-expensive; it is a tourist destination on the Mediterranean. Otherwise I was shocked by how fucking awesome it was. Everybody who I met, outside of one cabdriver and one hotel receptionist, who don't count because they have shitty jobs, was cheerful, warm, friendly and helpfully polite - striking up conversations, sharing food, proud of their city and wanting to talk about it in a way that didn't come off as chauvinistic . . .

And the men were gallant. It was a bit strange after the dead fish-face quality of Brussels, where men only eye-fuck you during the week or two of summer weather we get, to suddenly be back on the Mediterranean where they all look so appreciative all the time. But during my peregrinations and during the day of sea-kayaking, when I was the only female in a group of seven, they combined that appreciativeness with this sort of nonthreatening helpfulness that frankly I'd got to thinking only existed in books, at least when it came to French men. I've known for some time, since spending time in Alsace and Brittany, that I'm very wrong to judge France by Paris. But now I really know it; I've been pleasantly punched in the face with the fact.

Anyways, the sea kayaking - this is where we went:


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Except by water rather than by road, of course. Around l'Estaque, which Cézanne liked to paint. It was beautiful. Cool, crystalline water that was fine enough to swim in during our lunchbreak, little black fishies swimming around, hot white beaches, breathtaking views of the savage limestone escarpments jutting out of the sea, little anenomes, caves, mussels, this whole shoreline ecosystem we could bump ourselves around. Birds. Silence.

And the lovely relaxed-swimming feeling of pushing yourself along, as fast or as slow as you wanted, in one of those fucking great boats. I love the feeling of kayaking. And then when we were coming back to the launching point in the late afternoon, the wind picked up a little bit, and there were waves that seemed big to me, who'd never kayaked on waves before, and that was fun. Kayak goes up, kayak goes down. Enough to give you motion sickness but since you're right on the surface of the water, which is moving more or less the same way you are, there doesn't seem like a point to that. I think it will be necessary to sea kayak in Australia. Sharks and saltwater crocodiles notwithstanding.

Anyhoo. Off to work again. They promoted me yesterday - I'm going to take that as permission to tell the Yankee executives to fuck themselves when they need it. In closing, I didn't take my camera to Marseille as I was going on the water but this Cézanne gives you a pretty good idea of what the land looked like from the sea:

Evil under the sun

To paraphrase the proverbial Irishman's foreplay, brace yourself, Marseille, I'm coming! Two days of the same event I attended last year that gave me my first glimpse of the way the rich and powerful tick pleasantly along. Looking forward not to it, per se, but to Marseille. I won't have a vast amount of time to explore the city, aside from where our event will be shuttled to - another series of beauty spots, judging from the brochure - because though I'm staying in town afterwards, it will be on the water for my first foray into sea kayaking. Fuck, I'm excited!

Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.

Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'

Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.

Why the birds are singing

Feeling gloriously pummelled by our two day escape to the sticks of Dinant. Same area as the weekend before, but this time we brought our bikes and went a little further afield. On Sunday we arrived in Dinant, and then rode the 15 minutes or so to Anseremme, where we got a super cheap hotel room at Ansiaux; that was the same place we rented kayaks from the next day. After buying a picnic at the Spar underneath the giant motorway bridge, we rode our bikes to Furfooz:


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The bit where it goes down from Anseremme along the river was nice and quite flat, but the bit where it goes back up again into the little peak was uphill, and there were several times I caught myself panting for air like an overexcited Jack Russell. But I enjoyed panting for air there. It was clean and pure and didn't smell like anything except trees and/or cowshit. And it was a series of beautiful views and vistas, what's more - forests, one castle, and those fantastic limestone cliffs that water and time have sculpted in the most 'whaaaaaaa?' ways.

Speaking of, a bit attraction of Furfooz Park are its strange caves. Strange stories attached to them - of a golden fleece, of a race of mortal but magical dwarves called the Nutons who would do work for the villagers in exchange for sweets - and a long history. The park had been continuously occupied over several thousand years and had some Neolithic burial grounds in it. A creepy, beautiful place, to which we didn't bring cameras, because of what we got up to the next day - more kayaking - and this time, rather wetter.

We took the five hour trip (from Houyet to Anseremme) instead of the three hour one (from Gendron), and I believe we stretched it out to six or seven. Fewer people on the river this time and we each got a monoplace kayak, so we could arse around a bit until we started feeling like we knew what we were doing. I was continuously challenged by my disabilities in discerning right from left, as I will be when I hit the road with a driving instructor - oh boy - but very quickly it started feeling like second nature. So manoeuvrable, so comfortable, so soothing. I think when we move back to a country with space we'll buy a couple of real kayaks and be serious about it.

But in the meantime, in this country without space, it was very beautiful. Most of the route was clearly inhabited, with chip stands and caravans and little dogs barking, but in the first two hours especially, from Houyet to Gendron, we often had the feeling of paddling our way through a wet, primeval forest, much like our predecessors might have.

In Canada as well, during any sort of nature adventure, that is a feeling that stays with me and makes the experience charming - going across the lake on a canoe, hiking through a forest, sitting next to a fire - thinking 'this is much like our predecessors might have done.' It's as much a part of the experience for me as the beauty of the nature itself, because as I look there's the knowledge that I'm seeing it from the physical perspective that people have been seeing it from for thousands and thousands of years. And it casts me onto wondering about how perceptions of beauty may have changed, or, before that, if they came into existence. It's hard to believe that they didn't always exist.

Part of thinking about that was looking at the beautiful birds on the way, including two I hadn't seen before, the European kingfisher and the little egret - both very beautiful, and I don't know if there's a more dramatically coloured bird in northern Europe than the kingfisher. At first I only noticed them as electric blue flashes darting over the river, like massive dragonflies, but as I learnt how to stop being so damn splashy with the oar I saw them roosting or waiting to kill fish - saw their bright gold bib as well as their insane blueness. And the whole way, without all the screaming Wallonians of last weekend, was filled with birdsong.

And it made me ask myself: when we think of male-to-female display in the the natural world, and most dramatically in the bird world, doesn't it make rather more sense to assume the lady birds have some abstract notion of 'ooo, that's a lovely one' than some concrete notion of 'ooo, that plumage/trilling indicates that the male bird is in a fine state of health, which means if I let him fuck me our offspring will be in a good competitive position in regards to the offspring of less well-plumaged/trilling male birds'? Doesn't it make rather more sense to assume, that is, that a well-developed aesthetic sense is probably innate in many, many species?

If you consider people, for example; men have cocks that hang outside their bodies even when they're not using them, although all our closest relatives do not - chimpanzees keep them nicely tucked in, as do gorillas (who are hung like crickets, by the way). I believe the consensus is that this is because cocks are instruments of male-to-female display in our species, wherein men and women are rather closer to the same size than they are in our relative's races, making straightforward rape an untenable reproductive strategy more than some of the time.

And considering the scientific idea of natural selection is only a century and a half old, and that the similar idea of animal husbandry is probably only about 17,000 years old, but that cocks have been awesome for at least 200,000 years (I expect that the ancestors of homo sapiens also had awesome cocks, but for some reason this is never mentioned in the speculative scientific literature *cough written by male scientists cough* that I've read on the subject), I think the assumption that women, at least, have had a well-developed abstract aesthetic sense ('ooo, that's a lovely one') since the dawn of our species can be taken as true.

And I think a corollary of that is that you can expect a sense of beauty in any species where the sexual dimorphism is slight enough to make reproduction about the female response to beauty, rather then big males competing with each other for the privilege of mounting their little sisters. I wonder what sort of poem a bird would write if it could. And I wonder if we would be so casual about killing them and taking their stuff if we believed that they would write it if they could.

The Red Dragon does not feel the new Carla Bruni is the most anticipated French album in decades

You know one of the things that's hilarious about the French? Any jerk on the street there can spend a good 15 minutes telling you everything that's wrong with American media in terms of 24 hour 'news' channels and Rupert Murdoch and Paris Hilton all the rest of it, but then one of their best selling broadsheets publishes this. The Figaro, never much of a paper to rock the boat as far as Sarkozy's Elysée goes, kisses its winsome way so far up Carla Bruni's ass it must look like she has four lips on her face. And that more than a month before her album comes out, and on the front page, just at the time preparations start up for yet another general strike, which I'll tell you had fucking better be over by our vacation time. So pathetic, it's emetic.

Finally finished that Cantor book and not recommending it. It got sloppier towards the end until his opinionation and sweeping statements didn't sync up with each other anymore, let alone with his source material. Even with marijuana, the final chapter about the Rinascimento was painful. It's all very well for traditionalists to whine about post-modernism, but they need to react, not just reject. Whatever else it is, a post-modernist approach to history is a valid criticism of the traditionalist approach. A traditionalist is subjective, horribly so, in that he approaches historical subjects with an obvious personal theory or agenda. Name me one traditionalist who hasn't. And it's usually a fairly sentimentalist theory or agenda at that, explaining or excusing things happening in the present day via the vagaries of a bunch of Roman assholes or something. And then all sources are interpreted, sometimes clumsily and labouredly, through the lens of that theory or agenda, and yet with the language of absolute certainty.

Not that such subjectivity, sentimentalism and pulpit-bashing isn't the case with post-modernist approaches but there is an effort to strip that tendency bare, or at least acknowledge it. And if that means less certainty - well, who needs to be sure of everything all the time? I'd rather get closer to a faraway truth than get well convinced by the hot illusion living next door.

I left my heart in Anjalakoski

I'm in love with Finland. It's hard to know where to start in terms of describing the place and all I loved about it, so I'll say this: having spent this past week there, I understand the desire to be rich. I would like to be rich and spend May, June, and July on an island in the Finnish archipelago close to Turku. I would sit in the sun for 22 hours a day, I would live in an outdoor hammock occasionally cursing the rain, chill, and mosquitoes, and I would never be sad again, because after those months were over I would follow the sunshine somewhere else.

It was a press tour so we drank and didn't sleep much, having to leave each town or area early each morning to go to the next facility. That was rendered easy by that sun, that perpetual sun . . . anti-drugs campaigners don't have much pull with me because they're never honest about the great things involved in smoking reefer, like fantastic sex and television being so much more interesting. In the same vein, all that struggling and neat-o sunlamp marketing at the SAD crowd always fails to mention that the other side of the coin is the fucking Scandinavian summer. I have slept about ten hours in the last seven days, had my tits bored off by what felt like hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and hours of conversation with men who were incapable of mentally handling any subject outside of their own mighty prowess as human beings, and drank roughly 10 times more than I drink in the course of a normal week. Yet I feel monumentally refreshed.

And it was beautiful, and the people were so kind, and their grim, unsmiling humour so bloody appealing. I have anecdotes about the random kindness from absolute strangers there that rival and surpass any anecdotes of mammoth stupidity and incompetent bad intentions here. I know I've got the rose-coloured glasses on: I needed a change of air, a break, and I got it over a sunny week courtesy of a flourishing industrial company that was happy to spend thousands and thousands of euros to impress me - and oh yes, I'm fully aware that being made to feel awfully important and clever by the organizers might have something to do with my brimming goodwill towards the place. Doesn't matter. I love the pants off it.

Also doesn't hurt that the food was fucking marvellous. They eat salmon the way Americans eat pork, except salmon is probably cheaper there than pork is anywhere. And so many wild mushrooms; it was morel season - and then the sturgeon, the fish eggs, the piles and piles of fresh lake perch - and then the berries - the strawberries, currants, blueberries, the sea buckthorn . . . Frankly, I'm pissed off to be back.

Bouncing around

I think the F-word's father really wants him to move back to Australia - he sent a bunch of tourist brochures and stuff from the area we're thinking about. It's rather sweet. I don't like being so far from my own parents, but they have three other kids and then the grandkids - the F-word's father only has the F-word.

But that is for the future. In the present, we're trying to work out our summer holiday, which now looks like it will be an Amsterdam/Hamburg/Copenhagen trifecta. We thought about the south of France, but I think work may send me to Lyon in August when the F-word can come, and I know work is sending me to Marseilles in September, when perhaps the F-word can come. Better to get the tourist destinations subsidized whenever possible, especially during their peak summer seasons. The Copenhagen thing is a bit strange because I'm going on a week-long work binge/tour through Sweden and Finland - fuck - really soon actually. I never expected to spend that much time in Scandinavia, certainly not all in one summer. And now it means I have a moral obligation to get my arse to Norway so that I will have seen them all.

But delving far, far back into the misty past of Mistress La Spliffe . . . call it hubris but I have to strip back a full eleven years to find a real regret, or at least one I can remember, and it has to do with turning down the chance to live in Copenhagen for awhile. When I first left home as a teenager, it was for London, for a live-in job I'd accepted from Canada so my parents wouldn't worry about me too much. It was crap, so I went to an agency for such things once I got there. They offered me two options on the spot: another live-in in London, or else a contract in Copenhagen, where my 'work' would consist of looking after two dogs in a downtown flat. At the time I thought I was allergic to dogs, and I wanted to stay in London, so I made what I now conclude was the wrong decision. London is just a big fun city that's more expensive than other big fun cities, and the year or so I spent there didn't teach me anything that spending a year or so in some other overpriced big fun city would have taught me. And Copenhagen . . . well . . . anyways, we're going there now, and I don't have to look after dogs to do it this time.

Less tangled-webbedly, I think it will be really great to go to Scandinavia in a couple of weeks and then again in early July so I can enjoy freakishly long days. I have SAD, so I can't wait to get fuckin' sun-bombed for 20 hours at a stretch. Wheeeeee! Bring on the amphetamines. And giving Brussels its due, I'm really enjoying the freakishly long days here too - we're farther north than my part of Canada, so in proportion to the degree I wanted to shoot myself all winter, I want to giggle and play outside now.