Cabbage soul

Kayaking on Lake Ontario was pretty nice. No wind but some interesting waves from all the big boats. Lots of birds. Passing right under the landing path for the abomination of the island aeroport, which was neat. And of course it's such an incredibly beautiful view of Toronto coming back from the Islands. The CN Tower may be a big awful eyesore, but the Toronto skyline taken as a whole is better for it. More depth.

Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.

Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.

I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

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

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

Catharsis

So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).

But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.

First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.

Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).

This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.

The ones I've loved the longest

Actual dialogue from this weekend:

Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.

The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.

Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.

Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:

Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.

And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:

Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.

I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste

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

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

Air Canada next time, perhaps

I've been kayaking rather than blogging since getting to North Bay, but this morning I'm respecting my aching muscles and taking a little break. I could chill your blood with photos of my legs and the revolting farm of mosquito and blackfly bites bursting out of the skin there but tonnes of other disgusting things are happening in the world, so why subject you to mine . . . and I'm trying to be stoic and take it as preparation for moving to a country where everything bites.

Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.

What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.

I also believe in communication

Our company, I may have suggested some posts back, is having some issues, whose seriousness or lack thereof I’ll decline to comment on specifically; it’s way outside of my knowledge. But what has been interesting is the flurry of communications and meetings and reassurances and invitations for questioning from management, which yesterday annoyed me a little more than they ordinarily would because of our mag’s deadline and my squandering of time this past little while, when I’ve been dreaming of cottages and family and rural outdoor living and any number of things, actually, that aren’t the dramatically listing and tanking industries I’m being paid to study.

So as I was sitting there being annoyed in a (lunchtime, with no food) please-don't-do-what-all-those-guys-just-did meeting, I suddenly hit on a cure for being annoyed in such situations; playing mental spin the bottle for all the other people in the room. Randomly choosing two meeting participants and imagining what they’d look and sound like getting ridiculously into each other – erupting across the table holding raging boners or erupting out of their clothes. It was so awesome I had to keep struggling not to burst into hoots of uncontrollable laughter - no judgement on my colleagues’ humour value as sexual beings but you do get some frightfully unlikely combinations in there – and before I knew it the meeting was finished and I was in a good mood. The only lingering annoyance is not having thought of the measure years before to make conferences, lectures, and church services move along faster.

And if you hadn’t thought of it either, dear reader, there it is – my gift to you.

Whaaaaaa?tsing Matilda

Strange to have two Daddy-age Australian men who have never been to Europe before staying with us.

They're both terrific, much to my relief; that nervousness I wrote about just got nervouser as yesterday wore on, evolving into stomach-churning at the aeroport. But they're quite disarming and the F-word's dad has already touched my heart by reminding me of my dad, which is a touch incestuous in its implications, though nowhere near as bad as a friend's girlfriend who keeps insisting the F-word looks like Adriano Celentano, and he doesn't, right, because Elvis looks like Adriano Celentano, and I'm not boinking my brother. Stupid woman.

Anyways, it's strange to have the Australians staying with us because it's strange to be imagining what Europe looks like in their eyes - it's an experience of Europe that's completely outside of my experience, since my parents did most of their growing up here. It's also strange to realize how far the F-word is compensating for his natural accent when he speaks to me and most other people; I've already noticed he sounds different when he's phoning home, but now that I'm listening to non-expat Australians talk I realize I only understand 85% of what they're talking about.

There will be a learning curve even in moving back to Anglophonia, it seems.

That pasta gave me herpes

So the F-word’s dad is arriving this evening, and I believe I mentioned on Friday I was a bit nervous. Last night I was boiling some pasta, some darling little witches’ hats the F-word constructed that are so good at scooping up a light brothy sauce, and forgot their efficient cupping action whilst trying to eat one to see if it was cooked. The boiling water therein dinged my lower lip, hurting like hell and now – well, it doesn’t hurt anymore, but there’s a small blister, which makes me look like I’ve got a herpes sore.

There are a few achievements in my life that I’m really proud of. One is grad school, another is functional polyglottism, and the third is having made it through three decades and vast tracts of men without getting herpes. And now the F-word’s father is visiting, and he’s going to see this little blister on my lip, and he’s not going to know who awesomely, incredibly herpes-free I am.

C’est la vie.

The Red Dragon is incapacitated

Ugh. Drunk too much crappy wine last night, headachey this morning, and going to Canada in a week, exactly. Awesome, but shit. I have to . . . do . . . stuff. I haven't even thought through what I fucking need to do yet . . . let people there know, I guess . . . and the F-word's dad gets here Monday, and I haven't met a boyf's parents since 2002, and I'm not quite sure - possibly I'm nervous.

The good news is that the F-word has found my camera cable and I can put pictures on this blog again. Since I'm in a touch of a panic - no, I'd say more a touch of an anxiety - by testament of feeling like having a headache this morning is throwing some massive wrench into the delicate process of getting me safely to Canada next Friday, let's put up something lovely and calm - the Michaelangelo that makes going to Bruges the way I do everytime anyone comes to visit (thank god, I'll have left for Canada before the F-word takes his dad there, because I think I've been there six fucking times in two fucking years) fairly worthwhile:

Mary and child, Bruges
Originally uploaded by Mistress La Spliffe

I could stare at her for ages, and have . . . it's my favourite representation of Mary, and while I've read commentaries saying it's compositionally remarkable for how sad Mary looks, how 'distant' from her son, and how Jeebus is about to rush out to his cruel but heroic destiny in the world, for me the remarkable thing about this statue (and the Pieta, bizarrely) is how infant-motherly Mary looks - that sort of pre-occupied, hasn't-slept-enough-for-months look, but at the same time, how tender, how protective, and still how nurturing - one arm steadying her kid, the other poised at the ready in case he tumbles, but letting him move around; you have to, and anyways, you can tell looking at the kid he'll be a whiner if he isn't allowed to.

I've seen this woman and her kid hundreds of times in waiting rooms. Which is what makes Christianity Christian, I suppose.

Say what to who, buddy?

This post is about work, so it will be brief, and vague.

With the past 12 months, a couple of dozen people have been sacked. Unimportant people. Single mums and all that. And then within the past week, half a dozen more have quit. Important dudes. All of a sudden. Together. If you know what I mean. Not completely important people, in fact the sector they were working on is not exactly our money-tree and I’ll be shocked if it is for them in the present economic climate. But there you are.

Now our CEO is sending us angry daily emails about how this doesn’t mean the company is going under. Fair enough. He has also sent an email to all of our clients, including the ones who are in no way involved with the non-money-tree that has just walked off the job, assuring them of the same thing.

I don’t know what the case is and I wasn’t thinking at all (or not much) about our company going under until he started sending daily emails about it. But what is pissing me off so badly now is that I’m SURE that very few of the clients purchasing my products would give a flying fuck about the non-money-tree on a different continent that has just walked off the job, and nonetheless they’ve got a strange message from our CEO in their inbox about how my company isn’t going under, when maybe they weren’t thinking about it at all.

So I’m not sure about some of what’s going on, and I’m pissed off about what I know is going on. This is what happens when you let men out of the battery farm and into the CEO seat, it’s like constrant pre-menstrual syndrome with a fucking megaphone.

UPDATE

Keeping this online as testament to my wrongness. I approached the CEO to ask him to clarify what exactly he'd done, and he explained he'd only sent the external letter to staff and the clients using this particular money-tree - not everybody, as I'd assumed when it showed up in my inbox without explanation. Obviously I still think he needs to calm down in terms of his staff emails but he's definitely not ready to be sent back to the battery farm yet. My abstract apologies for the abstract criticism he will never, ever read. One hopes.

Lusitanian English Television Bodice Ripping Craptacular

So a fun thing about Portugal is that almost everyone we bumped into, city and country, spoke at least a smattering - usually more - of French or English, so we weren't at a loss to communicate and indeed to have good fun. And as in Spain, in those situations where they didn't, an awkward but clear conversation could be had by speaking sloooooowly in Italian and listening to them respond sloooowly in Portuguese. But usually they were polyglots and while that has a lot to do with tonnes of them going off to France to work, I think at least on the English side (considering how much complaining I've heard about the Portuguese school system) that has a lot to do with their television being subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike France, Italy, and Spain, where people are absolutely crap at English in comparison).

And a fun thing about that is that we got to see television we'd never seen before. Not much of it because we were so excited about being somewhere it wasn't raining, and there were so many summer festivals, that we were outside most of the time. But a good bit. The upshot is that I saw three new shows I'd only heard of before, and liked one of them:

1. 30 Rock. This was the one I liked. It's no Arrested Development but worth the price of admission for revealing that Alec Baldwin, like Nick Cage, should never have ever pretended to be a dramatic actor, ever, and just concentrated on being funny. Good strong ensemble and Jane Krakowski used to much less annoying effect than in Ally McPuke; laughed out loud and made a conscious effort to watch it a second time (Portugal, like a sensible county, airs TV episodes on consecutive days rather than consecutive weeks so one doesn't stop caring in the interim) at which point I laughed out loud some more.

2. The Tudors. The worst thing in bodice-ripping historically tarty boring bullshit I have ever seen, and I've seen Elisa di Rivombroso. I can't think of a single excuse to watch this stinker except to marvel at how Jonathan Rhys-Myers' neck has ballooned out from the birdlike tininess of Velvet Goldmine, so that it looks like his head is sitting on top of an identically circumferenced tube. The kicker is - you know how I feel about Henry VIII. And I honestly believe there would be no better television than showing him for the monstrously fat, suppurating, revolting, ginger mess he was by the time Anne Boleyn started holding her nose and boffing him, and instead they've got the cute little brunet tart from Velvet Goldmine and inflated his neck. Snore. Snore. Snore.

3. Dexter. I had my doubts going in; it looked like a one-trick pony that had already collapsed in the saddle in the spate of copy-cat follow-ups to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was far, far worse than I'd been expecting. The flat voice-over revealing everything going on in the protagonist's mind and the excessive use of flashbacks drained the events of the episode of any interest they might have had, and any incidental watchability went down the shitter through the excessively bad dialogue writing.

You know, I loved the first four seasons of The Sopranos, I loved the first season of Deadwood, I loved Oz flat-out, but those sorts of shows have a lot to answer for; after they took off as they did TV Land figured out that it didn't actually have to compete with that calibre of writing (indeed, the shows in question could rarely sustain it themselves); it could just show similar levels of titties and exceedingly macabre violence and filthy fucking language and neat camera angles, and people would still think it was cool. Okay. Scratch that. Those sorts of shows don't have a lot to answer for. Audiences have a lot to answer for. The Fucking Tudors, for fuck's sake. Just go download some fucking porn and see some actual penetration shots, and skip over the literary urination on the works of Shakespeare, Robert Bolt, and generations of engaging and competent historians. Fuck.

Houses built on sand

Amie had her baby a few days ago, Lady (who was married a few weeks ago in Benin) has got one in the oven, and I remain a fallow money-making machine. After Lady told me she's incubating, I had a biological moment wherein I was convinced I was the only one of my girlfriends who remained unreproduced, which was bizarre because after my brains snatched the reins back from my cunt, I realized that's not true at all - most of my girlfriends, the vast majority in fact, haven't. But it was a dizzy five minutes. A dizzy five minutes wherein, if our birth control apparati had been in front of me, I would have felt morally justified sabotaging it. Yeesh. Gross.

We've got a timeframe in mind - we've got an amount of money we need first in mind - and the bastard of it all is that 80% of me is convinced that all the money flooding in to bolster up the pillars of our ubiquitous decadent economic temple will result in the thousands of euros I'm so painfully socking away devaluing completely by the time I want to spend them. I'll tell you one thing, though - I'm glad they're euros. When you're sharing your currency with economic shitteries like Italy and Spain there are some major worries attached, but I'm 70% reassured by the fact that fiscal stability is basically written into the genes of the EU . . . the only way the euro will go to shit any faster than all the various dollars I care about is if the EU itself goes to shit. Of course it's a possibility but the awesome thing about Europe is the governing structures are too scared of their citizens to bugger their money. I hope.

I remain a worried, fallow money-making machine.

On no longer being in Portugal

Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.

Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.

Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.

Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.

A word to cities considering bikeshare schemes

1. Congratulations for having such a great idea. Not only will it cut down on traffic and maybe even persuade your denizens to drop a few pounds, but it will help shut people up about transport strikes, high gas prices, and how you're doing fuck-all about environmental issues only regional and national governments are in a position to do anything about

2. Sadly, bikes are not enough. You need to sink a bit of money to the infrastructure for them at the same time, as has been done in Paris with the Velib scheme, and has not been done here with the Villo scheme, and has not been done in Amsterdam because they don't need to.

3. But most of all - and this is what I really came here to say - and it's bugging the hell out of me, because I can't find the Dutch site - don't go the Velib and Villo route, and set up your city with ten-speed monsters with squeeze brakes. Go the Amsterdam route and get the simplest possible city bikes - no speeds, and backpedal brakes. They'll be cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and less annoying for the users overall. And it will be less expensive and provocative when brainless young trogladytes push them into the canals/traffic/rivers/up their own useless asses.

Three rotten things happened last night

1. The Chaser's War on Everything ended forever. Australians apparently have the same habit of axing television programmes before they run out of ideas and turn into painful, undead farce (seasons 5-7 of the Sopranos, anyone?) that the British have. And that's one of the few things I admire about the British. But as a North American, that's foreign to me (every season following the first of Sex and the City, anyone?) and so I'm still so sad they're gone. They say they'll be back with something else, but who, oh who, will embarass themselves with Australian politicians in the meantime, giving me an indirect study of that country's political firmament?

Two fave moments - one from the first season, one from the last:






Sigh.

2. I finished Adam Bede. There's no more, it's over. Heartbreaking. But I'm still chuffed that I've got four more Eliot monsters to wade into, and after finishing the book I opened it again at random and all the words were still there, thankfully. It will be a good re-read, and a frequent one. Being a stoner I love re-reading books. On the second read, after a few pipes, it's like a fucking private cinema in my brain. And any cinema featuring my new crush Adam is going to be hot.

3. Lexie fell off some boxes. I think her leg is broken. Unutterably distressing, but she doesn't seem to be in distress, she's putting some weight on it, and I'll take her to the vet this afternoon. If she needs some focussed attention I'll have to put off my departure for Lisbon until Monday, and that will be on the fucking overnight coach - there are either no planes left, or they're prohibitively expensive. Oh well. I won't care if she'll be okay. I was absolutely distraught until she started purring, and I realized cats aren't horses, and we won't have to shoot her if it actually is busted. So all will be well, I hope.

In which I get a better hero

Almost done Adam Bede. I fear Eliot jumped the shark in part six, but Adam Bede has officially become my new literary wank-fantasy. What a man. Much better than that leering shitheel Rochester, or that conversationally-challenged Wentworth in Persuasion. In my brain, Adam Bede is like a guy in a less-murderous Bad Seeds song. Like celebrity wank-fantasy Nick Cave with a chin and muscles and no heroin - and instead of music, carpentry. Hehhehheh. Wood. Sweet.

Do I make sense? No, but I bet the Adam Bede miniseries currently playing in my brain is more amusing than the 1991 minseries, when Patsy Fucking Kensit, of all people, played Hetty. Yeah, that's it, get a fucking chiselled albino to play a blooming, round young brunette. Stupid fucking BBC.

Big wah

Working from home today. Sniffly, coughy, and fucking frightened of getting sick before going to Portugal. Mind you I was coughy and sniffly before going to Croatia, and the minute I stepped off the plane there everything seemed to clear up. Sometimes I wonder if the flu actually exists as a virus rather than our bodies demonstrating their misery at us making them live in a Neanderthal climate. And once in awhile it turns into a pandemic and a kajillion of us die. We're not Neanderthals, for fuck's sake, we're fucking savannah monkeys. What are we doing up here? What the fuck are we doing up here?

In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?

In which the biking, kayaking, fishing and boating goes some way to undoing all the smoke damage

Amsterdam has a bit of a reputation of being a tourist hole and I understand that on that basis some people have been disenchanted with it, as in fact I remember being after my first couple of stop'n'smoke visits. But the thing that never stops being so remarkable for me is how the deeper you dig, the more you uncover layers of charm and organization.

We spent the weekend doing stuff, and very little of it in downtown Amsterdam. Well. Hours of it in downtown Amsterdam, but not really, because the San Franciscas have bought a boat, and we tooled around on that for an afternoon, the F-word getting the opportunity to steer - wow. It was a beautiful way to see the city, and really cut down on the number of high Americans we had to listen say beastly things, like 'yeah, we can just walk on the street, you're allowed to do that in Amsterdam' or, worse, 'I feel so dirty'. It was awesome.

And then we went out to where they live, in Amstelveen, and went fishing, and biking, and kayaking - much of it in the Amsterdam Bos, which I've enthused about before. And I've enthused about the sheer Dutch genius for spacial organization, so I won't go on about that too much either. But I was amazed - flabbergasted, if flabbergaster fits in with a deep sense of peace and enjoyment - about how we could spend a couple of hours paddling through the park next to such a huge, densely populated capital on a rare sunny, warm day and feel x1000 times more alone and in the wild than the Lesse River in September . . . and I must also say that, as we cycled back to the San Francisca's home after the day in the park, I had to keep asking "are we still in the park?" because the entire suburb was green and quiet and full of birds. Lovely.

Of course, it helped that it was sunny. Amsterdam in the sun is, I verily believe, the loveliest place on earth. Even without the sun . . . wow. Good on you, Dutchies, that's some fucking good urban planning. Aside from that, read about half of Adam Bede on the slow train and whilst too twitchy to fall asleep Saturday. I've been dancing around George Eliot for as long as I can remember, and Silas Marner really made me decide I'd have to go for her wholesale, but this is my first big bite and it's yummy and plummy. She puts a suspicious number of similes in the mouths of her characters, but I'm getting over that because from memory northerners do have a certain facility of metaphor which their more repressed cousins in the south lack. Anyways, more when I'm done.

I'll sing down that cucumber, baby

The lemon cucumber plant has been putting a lot out there. I'm not sure why I planted lemon cucumber instead of a normal kind, I think I'd been given to understand that they take up less room. But they're taking up a fuckload of room, and it's been a struggle to keep them from overwhelming the tomatoes; the fuckers grow so fast. They're growing only slightly less fast now as they fruit, and we ate the first one yesterday. Fucking awesome. It might be because it was fresh off the vine but it was way better than any of the cucumber varieties I've ever bought, and I'll even daresay better than the standard big green cukes Dad drew in the back garden, which were seedier. These lemon cucumbers are real fleshy motherfuckers, and picked young, not too seedy - just a lovely tennis-ball sized lump of cucumber flesh with a slightly richer taste than the long green ones.

(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)

Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.

Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.