Brussels - Week 1 - Making Friends With Ducks

So, I live in Belgium now.

 

Let’s catch up: three weeks ago, I accepted an offer to work for a large international organisation in Brussels. I’ll be here until I go back to university in September, working in publishing reports on international politics, which is very much my jam.

 

Work is fun, people are nice, there’s a proper coffee machine with a milk-foamer, and I have a lovely view from the office. I am learning a lot of things. So far I have learnt that if you look at a page of text, and think it looks fine, you’re wrong. The text looks terrible. You need to move the text. There’s too many spaces between the characters. Or maybe not enough. The text is ‘loose’. This means something, apparently. I have started calling text ‘loose’ a lot, and I’m pretty sure if I keep using it I’ll eventually figure out what it means.

 

I have also learnt WAY more than I ever thought I would about the ups and downs of local conflicts in Tajikistan. Don’t even get me started on Tajikistan, we’ll be here for weeks.

 

The work offer happened pretty last-minute, so I didn’t even have time to find a place to rent. Fortunately, I stumbled arse-backwards into a housesitting position in a wooded, quiet suburb on the edge of Brussels, and will be here for the next few weeks until I find somewhere more permanent. I like it here, but I’m looking forward to moving somewhere a bit more central. I’m sure it’s a lovely place to raise small children, but the height of excitement here is going to Burger King.

 

Having said that, living in the middle of nowhere - and when I say ‘middle of nowhere’, I mean ‘a convenient thirty-minute tram ride to the city centre’ – does have its perks. I’ve lived in city centres for most of my adult life, and while you can’t deny the benefits of always being within walking distance of everything you need, it does get a bit tiring. Last weekend, I took a midday stroll through the MASSIVE local park, smiled at the many cheerful dog-walkers, and made friends with ducks. (I’ve only been here a week, I don’t have many other friends here yet). I’m also near the Flanders border, where mainly Francophone Brussels drifts into Dutch-speaking territory, so it’s fun to hear Dutch become more and more common the further east you walk. (Also, as it turns out, those ten years I spent learning French weren’t a total waste of time! Who knew!)

 

I can’t say I ever had desperate childhood dreams of living in Belgium, but now I’m here, I’ve been surprised by how much I like it. I’m aware that six months can sound like a lot but be very short in practice, so I’m going to try and make the best use of that time that I can. ‘Best use of my time’ here means speaking French, going to museums, and drinking large amounts of beer. My god, the beer. I had my first a few days ago, picked at random, and it smelled like a bouquet of fresh fruit and flowers.

 

Here’s to many more.

Calm The Shit Down About Free Speech on College Campuses

The furore around “free speech on college campuses” is the dullest, most inconsequential political topic of the last five years and I would rather put kebab skewers in my eyes than listen to another discussion about it.

Young students – people who have just come out of school, are still discovering politics and their place in the world, and whose brains are still not even fully developed yet – sometimes do politics in a way that is counterproductive, or overzealous, or crude. This is not new. This has been the stereotype of students since students have existed. If anything, the ‘overreaching’ activism seen on today’s campuses is utterly mild compared to previous decades – go look at how much bombing, rioting and property damage happened on college campuses in the early 70s. In the 1920s, the Klan tried to hold a rally in a mainly Catholic college town and the students responded by beating the crap out of them en masse and ripping the clothes off them. In comparison, inventing a couple of new pronouns and yelling at the occasional demagogue is really nothing to be shocked about.

Even if you don’t agree with every decision made by every young political group, this is the normal process of becoming politically aware; you are pretty much guaranteed not to get it right first time. This is the double-edged sword of youth radicalism; it has its ups and downs, its good ideas (which stick around) and its bad ideas (which fall out of favour)…and twenty years down the line it generally turns out they were ahead of the curve and right on 90% of whatever they were on about, even if they were ridiculed by the ‘sensible’ media of their day. To act as though the students of today are some new threat – and not just a new threat, but the hot topic that we apparently have to discuss over and over again – suggests an ignorance of history and a cheap intellectual laziness. The more I think about it, the more I become convinced it's nothing more than the regularly scheduled moral panic about young people we are required to have every generation. 'Kids these days' dressed in the language of Sensible Discourse.

Honestly, I just wish certain media outlets could find another hobby horse and talk about one of the fifty other issues that matters more at the moment. Even for those whose pet issue is free speech, there are so many other free speech issues – prisoners’ voting rights, anti-protest laws, restrictions on the speech of non-citizens, libel laws, kettling, anti-union measures, protection for whistleblowers, government clampdowns on criticisms, elevation of marginalised voices – that never get a look-in, because people would rather talk about the 19-year-old pink-haired boogeyman. I am very, very bored of it and would like to move on to the new Thing, please.