Interim

I'm going through a tricky period right now. I've been having these feelings, disturbing ones, and I need time to deal with them. The thing is...I might be starting to like Brussels. This has come as quite a shock, and and has made me question the very fibre of my being. Revulsion when I step out my front door has been such a large part of me for so long I'm scared about what might happen without it: will I technically cease to exist if it is replaced with mild appreciation, or even a cosy warm feeling?

You'll understand that all this is very difficult for me to deal with. Have a video to be going on with; it's an old one, but it never fails to penetrate my hard bitter shell, and I've even been known to tear up a little if it's been a hard day.

Look out for the joy on the grannys' faces, above all

Three months later...

I been gone.

I had ever so much to say whilst I was gone, but I never managed to coordinate having my own laptop and internet at the same time, and I am a secret blogger so no desire to go faffing around on other people's computers. Computers with histories I can't wipe without them thinking I'm a closet porn junkie who can't spend a pleasant weekend away without creeping away into a corner for a fix.

But now I am back, and my mind has gone blank. Today I managed half a day's work (read 2 hours) before going home for lunch and my key getting stuck in the door. It was an unfun afternoon, remarkably unfun, and even after the excruciating call to work saying, er, I can't come back, someone else must be called in on their afternoon off and please don't hate me or stop giving me work please, even after enlisting the help of the corner-shop man, and calling the landlady, and two locksmiths, even now I am still sitting here at 9pm with two extra keys wondering if the couple below are even coming back tonight, but how miserable would I feel if it were me coming home at 1am and finding the locks had been changed...

I realise it shouldn't strictly be up to me to play concierge, but the landlady is otherwise quite quite wonderful. I just couldn't quite remember closing my window before the summer....I was sure I had, but just couldn't....quite...remember. She popped over to check. She also popped over when I couldn't find the fuse box. And when I'd run out of hot water. In fact, she's probably the one who changed the locks on me in the first place.

On the plus side, I just got lent the first series of The Wire, and I don't work tomorrow (or possibly ever again), so staying up for the kids below might just fit in with my schedule.

July in Paris: notes to self

things I have achieved:

a window box. It is the smallest one ever seen, and we have lavishly and optimistically strewn the compost with beetroot, broccoli and radish, as these were labeled as July sewing. A rational man might point out that given the size of our box we will most likely reap two square beetroot, one rectangular broccoli, and six runty radish, but rationality doesn't really come into it when you sew your crop outside two weeks before trotting off on holiday and leave them in the blinding reflected sunlight of an inner courtyard. Hurrah for sustainable living!

Emmaus. I now own lots and lots of pots. For stuff, and things. And a teapot with mismatching lid. And a broken desk with fold-down lid. We also have a pot of gold paint. The possibilities are endless. May go back next Saturday, sucked in by the job lot of Claude François postcards, portraits, mugs and WATCHES I resisted this time...

Open-air cinema. Perfect. Blow-up screen (oh yes. it's inflatable, kids. A miracle of modern engineering), beautiful soft grass, surround sound, and picnic of figs and melon and cheese and all together now I-i-i-i-i-i love Paris in the sprrriinngg time (but sing summer-time instead, like I am in my head. Better).

One broken camera, so no record of my endeavors.

Two pairs of stretched jeans, ergo no weight-loss. Sod it.

Listening to French podcasts (2000 ans d'histoire) hour after hour after hour and in the process becoming scarily knowledgeable on obscure points of history, and satisfyingly competent at French.

things I have made:

chicken-liver pate and onion jam. Hundreds of little pots, which were liberally distributed wherever I went, to whoever was kind enough to welcome me. Some no doubt also slipped down back of sofa or the like and will be devoured in straitened times come December.

Moules. My first time. Very exciting, if a little tedious to prepare, and a little unnerving hearing the mussels muttering to themselves in the bag. Muttering brought to abrupt halt, as in fit of pique I handed preparation over to the man after a kilo's worth, and he washed the rest in hot water. It was terribly sad, death by torture almost. The rest tasted lovely, though

courgette, green bean, mozzarella salad, with toasted almonds and lemon dressing.

courgette, mint and feta fritters

sweet potato and fish cakes: born out of idiocy and laziness (10 euro minimum on card; instead of branching out into world of delicious prawns and whatnot, I panicked and asked for 1.2kilos of generic 'white fish'. Similarly, when desperately trying to use up last of the sodding coley or whatever it turned out to be in fish cakes, the exotic veg store is 100m closer than the supermarket and their more standard potato-potatoes. I am special)

watermelon, mint and feta salad. Deemed a success, personally not a fan of sheep or goat cheese with fruit. Funny vomity taste, anyone?

croutons. Millions and billions of them. It's the frugal Northern-Irish in me balking at the profligate French baguette-a-day habit and sweating over a hot stove into the small hours, hair awry, furiously churning out the oily crispy goodness, thinking all the while of my potato-less forebears.

Tummy-tuck for all budgets

I have discovered my magic jeans.

About 20 years after I last wore a pair of Levis, I finally tracked down the high-waisted skinny number I was after. But WAIT! The 8os throwback that is my lower half is not all. The true genius is that by deluding myself that I have a 20" waist, and by desperately trying to stretch the the jeans so no one catches me out for the nutcase I quite obviously am, I am physically unable to eat to excess. Or, indeed, eat much at all. Willpower and self-control not being familiar concepts chez Monk, having been shouldered out to make room for gluttony and self-disgust, this is a welcome turn of events. I just have to mummify myself in denim 24 hours a day, and all will be well. You are MOST welcome.


I'm pretty sure this is what's known as a healthy relationship with food, no?

Cooooeeeeeeee, I'm hooooo-ooome

The move to Paris continues apace, involving mainly sitting in the sun glass in hand talking earnestly about the pros and cons of different social security systems and how yah like it's going to be completely wonderful ooh la la bif bof, then going back home and staring wild-eyed at the URSSAF freelancer's form before taking to my bed in despair.

Despite this momentous lack of proactivity, or indeed of any activity at all, the gods appear to be smiling on me in the shape of a colleague who passed my name along to a FINE contact in Paris, completely unaware that I was jumping the Belgian ship. Fruit was born left, right and centre, and I have my little toe in the door of hopefully regular work. Possibly the best part of this is that the whole process has been conducted in French, including "phone me on this number bofbofbahbofoignons or on this email address bahbahbahbuh@baguette-point-com", leaving me immensely pleased with myself (ignoring the fact that a mere 3 hours later I was frantically scouring the interwebs for the actual genuine email address, not the frankly improbable one I had written down). It was like GCSE listening exams, except without the awkwardly formal friendship between Peter and Astrid or holidays in the Schwarzwald (I was in the German half of the year, and a fat lot of good it's doing me now).

To celebrate my skillz, we took off for the weekend to a Franco-Mexican wedding in the depths of Drome-Provençal, near a fine village called Dieulefit. This translates roughly as 'It was God wot done it', and looking at field after field of lavender with a sprinkling of medieval castles and a dusting of nougat and goat's cheese, I think he might just have slipped out the the workshop on the 7th day when he was meant to be tucked up in bed with a nice book and knocked up a little extra helping of heaven on earth. I forgot my camera, but we knocked back the rosé and the guacamole, prowled hyena-like around the roasting sheep, ate a 1m2 clafoutis, and spent the next day at the pool. We oohed and aahed and got sunburnt like the good townies we are, and were back for work on Monday. Well, all except me. I was back for my fancy-pants French course I'm doing in the mornings and alternating between excessively high spirits at the thought of free afternoons in the sun and deep mournful depression at how very little I achieve in these afternoons. Bof.

Speaking of penniless on the Seine (which I was in the previous draft. Curses to my substandard editing skills, but I can't think of a link to put in here), National Geographic France for June had a great article on homeless people around Paris, well, actually people who live on the river in general, but a focus on those who have made their homes under the arches of the many bridges over the Seine. One man said he had been living there for 10 years, since he split up with his partner. He is currently employed, but still completing a training period after which he will have a permanent contract and be able to get an apartment. What struck me was that he has electricity and a TV (although no running water). He was even able to get his 'address' registered with La Poste to give to his employer, who has no idea he lives rough. The river police pop by every now and then for l'apéro.

This is something that has always struck me about Paris, the way in which the homeless are so entrenched, so permanently, hopelessly part of the cityscape. Take the bank opposite the terrace bar 25' Est, on the bassin de la Villette, for example. Here, there is a semi-permanent camp of sorts, where drinks are drunk, drugs are sold, and fights are fought: all of this 10 feet from children and their bikes and young professionals supping kirs in the late afternoon sun. Prime real estate, especially in summer. I'm not saying the poor or the homeless should be hurried out of my cosseted sight, but there seems to be no concern, no attempt to do anything. They just are.

I've got a lot to learn about my prospective home.

A moveable feast

"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
Ernest Hemingway

I know many people are ambivalent about Paris, bordering on hysterically hostile. I know many people would give all the croissants in the world never to have to set foot there again. I know this in the same way that I know that if someone told me I had to go and live in Leeds again, I would gnaw off my own arm and fashion a getaway canoe out of it, even though, objectively, it is a fine city full of lovely people. The same way that I have friends and colleagues who want to marry Brussels and have little grey-suited pissing mannekins with it, whereas no amount of wannabelges could ever make me accept that I do both live and work here. It's odd, one man's foie gras, another man's fatty liver, and once the decision is made, it cannot be undone. Rio de Janeiro was my first city love, which is possibly why I'm so outraged at the world for having me live here instead.

Now I want Paris. I'm not going to go off on one about the city, as the world and his little yapping lap dog have already done so and will continue to do so till the Eiffel Tower rusts through. What I can do, however, is move there, and gosh darn it if that isn't just what I'm going to do. The first steps have been taken (if by first steps you understand checking up the necessary paperwork, photocopying my passport and birth certificate 20 times, and then throwing myself theatrically onto the bed in despair). In a step of quite mind-blowing impracticality, I will keep working in Brussels. Quite how this will pan out remains to be seen, but it is pretty much what I'm doing at the moment anyway, and in the last five days I have travelled Brussels-Paris-Brussels-Lisbon-Brussels-Paris and all the fun has been drained out of me till I'm a little rocking foetus with a giant carbon footprint.

I'm tired of telling myself "I just have to live here/like this/with these people for a few more months/years until I've done xxxx and am able live where I want and with the people I love for ever and ever amen". Life's too short, and it's raining in Brussels.

The Graveyard of Forgotten Books

I have been resolutely chipping away at the coal face of half-read books, striving to reduce the stack of abandoned literary corpses reproaching me from the window-sill. Some degree of success, in that I finally turned the last page of Cien años de soledad; less so, perhaps, as it was through gritted teeth and shame-faced skim-reading that I finally declared victory (the joy of reading, anyone?). I have also triumphantly, and a little sadly, finished Jan Morris' Pax Britannica trilogy, as well as Los crímenes de Oxford, which means I don't have to read anything in Spanish until at least 2012 and La sombra del viento is going to have to pull out all the stops to warrant a place on the bedside table. Oscar and Lucinda is seemingly a lost cause, and Wiener Passion has been sent into semi-permanent exile, along with the entire German language (with all due respect).

Young upstarts elbowing their way into my hands include The Clothes on their Backs (Linda Grant), which I loved. It is marked for rereading, as I think it contained a good deal more wisdom than the Eurostar allowed me to absorb first time round. A surprising delight. I liked The Secret Scripture (Sebastian Barry), but not enough to read it again, or recommend it to anyone. A bit of a meh from me.

Français dans tous les sens is as dusty as it has ever been, but as far as French goes I think I can pretty much be admitted into the Académie Française right away as have just finished the last book in the Millenium trilogy. Yes, ho yes, in FRENCH. FRENCH, I tell you. Just call me Mlle. Birkin. It was partly because I had finished my book and had nothing else to hand, partly because it's not out in English till October (also, the boyfriend was coming to the end of the second book, and I have an ugly dog-in-the-manger streak which more often than not trumps commonsense). It's just the right kind of practical, unadorned language that I need right now. Balzac will not help me fill out my tax return. Nor will Stieg Larsson, admittedly, but I have at least learned the basics of cybercrime.


An unexpected joy came in the form of Kitchen Essays by (Lady) Agnes Jekyll, a collection of her essays written for The Times during 1921-22. Maybe she is horribly well-known to all, and I am 80-odd years late jumping on the fanwaggon, but how can I not applaud someone who dispenses such strikingly practical advice as this:

"George Herbert, in his poem beginning "Content thee, greedie heart!" reminds us with superfluous cruelty that we cannot "both eat our cake and have it," and although to try is as human as to fail, we should at least ascertain what our cake is made of and weigh carefully all its ingredients before deciding which we will do with it"

She is slightly further off the mark when recommending "a packet of the American cereal Puffed Wheat" as a substitute for salted almonds "in the best regulated dining-rooms", and I balked somewhat at the instruction to pass a salmon through a wire sieve, but I will nonetheless keep the book at my side to consult for all my future entertaining needs.