Excerpts from a family reunion

After five years away, I am back in Ireland.

My mother gives me instructions for the bus from the airport, twice. She is unsure I will remember where my grandparents' house is. To be honest, I am too, but as the bus approaches their housing estate I recognise, with a child's heart, the walls and the curve of the roads. My mother tries to meet me at the bus stop with my grandmother, but is delayed because my grandmother spends too much time putting on lipstick. I find my way to the house through a hole in the wall, which I find by muscle memory.

We're preparing party food for a family reunion. My family has taken two shopping trips, multiple phone calls and two days of discussion to organise making a single bowl of guacamole. My fingers are raw under the nailbeds from de-heading four punnets of strawberries.

I ask my grandmother if she has any tights I could borrow. She hands me a pair, which I put on and thank her for. She then hands me an entire ball of tights, perhaps six or seven pairs, and asks if I would like these as well.

I am full, to the point of delirium, with milky tea.

My aunt wants to put chives in the guacamole. My stepdad suggests chili and garlic. My aunt is confused.

The World Cup is on television. I am deeply troubled by how attractive Gary Lineker is these days, as is my mother. My great-uncle is getting on in years; he speculates on the sexuality of the French football team whenever they hug each other. When the party is over, all of us stuffed with food, my grandmother inexplicably brings in piled-up slices of sultana loaf.

My family recounts the entire history of the estate over breakfast (oily sausages, bacon, eggs, buttered toast leaving crumbs in the wrinkles of the tablecloth). My grandmother is keen to point out that almost everyone who used to live there is dead now. My grandparents seem to have a general tendency to point out when people are dead, in the same way that cats have a general tendency to push objects off the edges of tables; not in a joyful way but more with a sense of obligation.

I try and find the spot in the garden where I spilled a paint-can as a child, but it's gone now, for whatever reason.

Today was a really good day.

Nothing special happened today, I just had a really productive day. I got all my work done, when I didn't expect to. I cleaned up the place. I went to the gym and, whereas I usually run for fifteen minutes, I ran for longer. I ate healthily. That's all. I think it's nice to make a note when you have a good day! Maybe you should do it too.

Pictures! Nature!

Brussels Week 4-6 - ART/FLOWERS

First point of discussion on the agenda: April is the month of cutting all your hair off. Do it now. I did it. It's great. I keep touching the back of my head where the remaining inch or so of hair feels all sharp and fluffy. I can see more of my face. Paradoxically, I actually feel like I have *more* hair, because it looks thicker and more defined. So, turns out cutting off all your hair is a good thing. Let's all cut off our hair. Hair is a scam. Hair is banned now.

In other news: Brussels is moving into spring/summer transition with elegance and dignity. It turns out that Brussels has a lot of cherry blossoms lining its streets, and they are giving a magnificent performance right now. Their burst into colour has transformed the streets nearly overnight, from grey and functional to exquisitely pleasant. The petals are luminously pink, and range in intensity of colour, from a delicate champagne to the vibrant Barbie pink of a ten year old girl's backpack. They're just starting to fall right now, resting in the gutters like the aftermath of a party. You can pick them up in fistfuls and feel their softness in the folds of your fingers.

(I'll say this very quietly - they're much better than the ones in Japan.)


I will be sad to see them go.

Some other, more minor points of information:

• I started making soups again. The place where I live has quite a bit of kitchen equipment, including a soupy stick. You know, a blendy thing. The soupy blendy.

One of these!

So far I've been pretty unadventurous, sticking to French onion and tomato varieties, but I've got an interesting-looking recipe for broccoli and peanut butter waiting in the wings. I've actually done pretty well in Brussels in terms of not living solely on chips and beer, and I've even lost a couple of kilos. I walk a lot, and eat fruit. You can see me at the gym, using the two machines I know how to correctly use.

• I found this bar at the bottom of the road where I work. It specialises in gin cocktails. This one has raw egg white in it and it wasn't even disgusting. There's a lot of green light in this bar. I like it.

• Some friends and I spent last week at this forest just outside the city. It's a small spot famous for its bluebells. Look how nice:

• Brussels has a Magritte museum. Magritte, as it turns out, is really really good. His work is really striking in its use of colour and shape, he messes with perceptions of society and gender and interaction, and he also made this cartoon that I find really funny. I know it's about philosophy of language and ontology and stuff, but it's also a cartoon of a man pointing at a horse and saying 'horse', which is inherently funny. I highly approve of this 'Art' thing and would like to see more of it in future. I predict big things for 'Art'.

• I have been trying to meditate. It is not going well. Meditation makes me intensely uncomfortable. Every time I am reminded to focus on my breathing, I remember that my body is essentially a sack of meat and sinew kept conscious by constant consumption and expulsion of gas, which is unpleasant. I've no idea why people find it relaxing. On the other hand, if I push myself through it (I can manage two or three minutes, max), I do find that I feel more focused for a little while afterwards. Still a bit unnerved by the whole meat-bag thing though.

That's it for this week. Bye

Brussels - Week 2/3 - From Ducks, to Cats, to Humans

It’s spring!

Belgium is blooming. And by blooming, I mean ‘it was slightly warmer for one day’.

If you recall my last post, it was at the end of my first week, and I had made friends with some ducks in my local park. Well, I’m now easing my way into my fourth week, and slowly moving up the evolutionary chain of friendmaking. Last Thursday I visited a cat café near my office, and had a beer with a new acquaintance:

(The drink was only okay, sadly – a rather unmemorable Radler. Mind you, literally the only beverage I’ve had so far that wasn’t fantastic).

At Easter weekend – only a three-day holiday here, which is unconscionable – I decided it was time to start making human friendships, humans being much less adorable but slightly better at sophisticated conversation. I attended farewell drinks for a colleague after work on Friday night, during which someone said the word “shots!” and I, in some kind of Pavlovian reaction, also said the word “shots!”, so we ended up doing shots. This is, as far as I can tell, the only way that anyone ever does shots. No-one actually wants to do shots. The word ‘shots’ just gets…said, somehow, and at a certain point in the night, you assent to doing the shots. I mean, someone said the word, so you have to do them. That’s how it works. Obviously, by the end of the night I’d ended up in a kebab shop, requesting falafel and garlic sauce in appalling French. They clearly knew I was British, because they put chips in my falafel wrap. Angels.

Saturday I recovered; Sunday I went out to meet people. There’s always an aspect of artificiality to making new friends after moving, but the awkwardness tends to be dispelled if you just embrace it – be honest that you’re looking to meet people, ask questions, be open to new experiences. I went to brunch with some other foreign girls in a florist-slash-café (apparently this is a thing) and then went on to a writer’s meetup in the centre of town. We introduced ourselves briefly, and then wrote in silence. I’ve never written with other people before, but I found it helped me to focus (and to feel guilty whenever I got distracted). I worked on some short-story stuff, which I haven’t done for some time, and which I might eventually publish on the blog if I’m not too embarrassed by it.

On Monday I rounded out the Easter weekend with a massive walk around my sleepy, wooded neighbourhood. It was actually warm enough to take off my coat (for a bit), and at one point I saw an exhausted dad asleep in a hammock, which pleased me. More nice spring weather, please. I would like to see more dads in hammocks.

So concludes my first month in Brussels.

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.