If you think I'm tired now.

This is literally nothing on how I was on Saturday. If you need a little example of how bad I was, then I saw a billboard for Les Mis on the way into Leeds (I can't find a picture of it, which will make this story more difficult for everyone, but stay with me), which had on it the word 'Unmissable'. But in my tired and evidently fairly stupid mind I read the first few letters and assumed it said 'Unmiserable' to which I thought 'Oh wow, that's a bad review' and didn't really realise how stupid that was until about an hour later. 

If you ever need to feel better about yourself, I am right here.

 As I was leaving Brussels I also saw a car with some carpet attached to it wrapped in a Carpet Right bag...is Carpet Right still a thing? (I've googled it, apparently it is very much still a thing, my bad).
 But this along with the amount of laundrettes and internet cafes, the dress code in clubs and the lack of appliances in my kitchen sometimes leaves me feeling a bit like, rather than moving to Belgium, I've moved to the early nineties.

And that's pretty much it, apart from sitting at Calais for like an hour checking everyone's passport because someone decided to be a maverick and get on the coach without having their name ticked off the list, so it looked like we'd gained someone between Brussels and the ferry port.

It also occurred to me that my preferred method of travel is also probably the preferred method of travel of organised crime because there aren't any baggage checks at customs...so that's good.

But my weekend at home was excellent, I got a job for the summer out of it and it was just so nice to be at home. Also I have to mention the amazing coordination between myself, Elle & Lucy. Managing to all come home on the same weekend without forward planning is a feat we should be proud of.

Oh, and to the guy who was so distracted by me being startled by a pigeon that you walked into a bin?
You got what you deserved.

Fun fact: Women in some cantons in Switzerland weren't allowed to vote in local elections until 1994. 1994. I had already been born by then. Switzerland, what were you doing?

Life Lessons

But don't worry, not the-'I can achieve anything if I try'-kind.

Not that I can't achieve anything if I try, just, you know, this isn't Tumblr. 

1. I would rather wash my clothes in the sink than get up and take them to the laundry. Really, I would rather take 4 days to wash/dry my dirty clothes than leave the house and go to the laundrette, pay 3 euros and wait for 2 hours.  I can't decide whether this is impossibly lazy or brilliantly  frugal.

2. In the same vein, I would rather drink black tea than carry milk to the office every day.

3. I cannot be alone. Now, this one I already sort of knew; but after 3 days of self-imposed quarantine this week when I was ill it became painfully clear that I either a) really like other people, or b) can't stand myself. But it did give me a lot of time to hand-wash my clothes...and paint my nails...and put on a face mask...and apparently to have a break down.

4. Almost a year after I left my job, turns out the music they played wasn't so bad after all. If you haven't heard Jamie Lidell or Mayer Hawthorne, then you should. 

5. I don't hate Brussels. Even with its impossible-to-navigate streets, and its weird weather, and that one missing bit of pavement outside the European Parliament that I fall into EVERY TIME. 

 I don't like it either, but the move to indifference has proved much more relaxing.

I also dislike it for very different reasons to the reasons I dislike Bath.  I don't like Bath because it's so nice. It's like if Zooey Deschanel were a small English city; it's incredibly lovely. 

It's so lovely that it bothers me.

I'm going home tonight, have a good weekend everybody.

xx

I'm definitely going to be hit by a car.

I've lived here too long and now I'm just strutting across the roads like they aren't filled with 1000kg metal blocks coming towards me at 40mph, with only a raised arm and the hope of eye contact with the driver to defend myself.

It's the combination of the metric and imperial systems in that sentence that I enjoy the most, welcome to Britain everybody.

A couple of months ago I was walking to a meeting and I dared to cross a road before the lights had changed (because it's not like the cars pay any attention to them, so why bother), and a traffic warden (I didn't even know they had these here) stopped me and asked if there was something wrong with my eyes. At first I thought he'd just asked me if there was something wrong and I just presumed I'd been looking particularly miserable, so I smiled and said no, I was fine. Then he repeated himself, and I wanted to say no, no there wasn't anything wrong with my eyes, but there were serious flaws in Belgium's application of traffic legislation, and that was the problem here. But I don't speak French that fluently, and it was early, so I just shook my head and walked off.

Last week I was actually nearly hit whilst crossing the road (define 'nearly hit' as you will, but he looked shocked to see me on the pedestrian crossing, put it that way), and as fate would have it, he parked on the road I was walking down. I just couldn't let this opportunity pass me by, so I felt the appropriate course of action was to point and shake my head in disgust as I walked by.

Anyone who knows me will know I would never do this even remotely seriously, but sometimes I forget not everyone I meet day-to-day knows me. This is one of those times.

He definitely tried to mime an apology to me from inside the car but I wasn't having any of it.

Read as: I definitely don't speak French well enough to lip-read it. Therefore I actually couldn't have any of it, because I have no idea what he was saying. He looked apologetic though.

In less life-threatening news, we discovered a really cool band this weekend when on a night out in the bit of Brussels near the canal - yeah, I didn't know there was a canal either - and you can hear them here:

https://soundcloud.com/mustacheeosapaches

Oh and I'm going home this weekend, which is pretty exciting.

See you soon Leeds.

xx

Claire talks about love?

No, of course she doesn't.

I'm not even going to talk about the finer points of being single or in a relationship on Valentine's Day because I can't remember the last time I cared.

This shows I'm doing really well with my New Year's resolution though, because it means I've managed not to be riled by (or even read) any of the 10,000 articles Huffington Post have tweeted on the matter.

I spent the majority of Valentine's Day in meetings, encountering my age old nemesis once again; the coat wardrobes. I seem to be the only person who goes to these meetings who doesn't have a photographic memory of which one they put their coat in, but needless to say I'm the first one there and everyone after me must think someone's kindly opened all the wardrobe doors for their ease of access.

They haven't, it's just me, and it's just because I'm that one idiot who can't remember where she put her coat.

It would seem however, from the overwhelming smell of bleach on the streets of Brussels, that other people spent it cleaning. Or murdering their husbands for forgetting the date. Either way it's always nice to have a clean house.

But we weren't the only ones struggling with romance, Delhaize didn't seem to know what it was doing either, I'm not sure they even had any chocolates or wine on display until the day itself. They did however, for weeks in advance, have Valentine's themed signs above a display of cod fillets and baskets of crisps that were on special offer.

This is why you're single Delhaize, your idea of romance is just...weird.

I did spend the better part of the day having dinner with the girls though, I say dinner, we went to a pizza place (the kind with stools rather than chairs) on Place Luxembourg to avoid being surrounded by couples. I've never really understood why you'd want to go out for dinner on Valentine's Day anyway. I wouldn't want to be surrounded by half the population of any of the cities I live in at the best of times, least of all when I'm trying to have a romantic liaison.

Apparently a 'liaison' is also a mix of yolk and cream used in soups (it actually said 'by soups' on Wikipedia, but I'm going to presume that's not what they meant).

Well, that was off-topic.

Also I've decided I much prefer this when it's centre aligned, but I'm just not going to go back and change the last however many posts. Sorry guys.

And here are some cool things I saw last weekend when Francine was here.

xx

No wonder Colin Farrell hated it.

Bruges I mean. I'm not surprised he wondered if that's what hell was like. After my experience this weekend I'm very much inclined to agree with him.

It started with a waffle. We wanted to share one, but obviously being two people we wanted to eat using separate apparatus. It quickly became apparent this would not be possible. When I first asked for the second set of cutlery I was greeted with 'no'. I thought it was perfectly deadpan, I didn't think he actually meant 'no'. So the very British part of me decided continued to pursue my request, only to be greeted with 'no', again. I looked confused, he stared blankly back and replied with 'If you're sharing the waffle you can share the cutlery'. I wasn't completely convinced that this wasn't a joke until we'd finished our meal alternating with the one set of cutlery we had. Maybe I haven't been in Belgium long enough after all.

Then we had lunch at a place where you can order only drinks but not, it would seem, only food. As we were told 'this is a restaurant, you have to order drinks if you're eating'. Now I've been to plenty of restaurants,in plenty of places, and I'm not entirely sure this is how it works. In fact I know it isn't, because I routinely don't order drinks, especially not in Belgium, because water is very rarely free and I'm yet to start bleeding money. I am however, not routinely thrown out of restaurants.

I think the most depressing part of this story is that even with the €4,50 each we paid for water, the bill still came to less than it would of had we eaten anywhere else.

I also hit an old woman in the face with a door. Although I initially thought I'd knocked over a small child, so breaking an old woman's nose was actually a fairly positive outcome.

Once you get over the emotional trauma though, I guess it's alright. It's really pretty but I was too busy being furious to take any photos.

Oh, and whoever walked past my office on Monday and pressed the intercom button. You pressed it too hard, it got stuck and subsequently set off the doorbell for a good 5 minutes before I worked out what the hell was going on and why all these white plastic phones on the wall were making noise. Some of those phones are in parts of the office I don't have a key for. You better hope I don't find out who you are. You are mine.

On a more serious note, for everyone who has read this, and for all the nice things you've said, thank you very much, it is very much appreciated.

xx

All the doors in my life

are really hard to open. I mean, they're like horror film hard to open. If someone were to chase me into either my office or house, they'd just kill me as soon as I reached the door. People have actually stopped to help me open my office door before (it's just heavy and I'm tiny), and the keyhole on the door to my house just...it's just difficult to get the key in there and I'm not totally sure why. Even the lock on my room seems to require a very weird combination of terms. Basically what I'm saying is that I live in a very boring version of the Crystal Maze.

Moving house has come with so many exciting new experiences, like working out that the taps for the shower are on the wrong way round (it took 15 minutes and a great deal of swearing, but I got there), I don't know how this happened, I don't want to know how this happened, I don't know who installed the shower and I don't want to find out who installed the shower. I think it's for the best that we just forget what happened and move on.

Being too scared to open what I think is a door to the attic on my ceiling. Because when your house looks this much like the house at the end of the Blair Witch Project, you don't just go opening doors willy nilly.

Having a fully-fitted but completely non-operational shower in the corner of the room is a new one too, although it has made for the perfect place to keep my suitcase, so that's something.

Oh and the shelf above the sink is only fixed to the wall in the middle, so it falls to one side if you put something down on it too hard.

But I really like my new place, like really I do. Once I have a kettle I'm sure I'll like it even more.

Other exciting things are happening, mainly Francine is coming to visit me tomorrow, I'm going home in 2 weeks time and various other plans which should make February a very very good month.

I also went to Aldi. It was cheap, but you pay for the low prices in confusion at the lack of order and being served by people who scan things like their lives depend on it. Maybe they do. Maybe every month the person who scans the fewest number of items in an hour is shot. That would certainly cut costs.

Have a good weekend everybody.

xx

I guess I didn't hate January.

The never-ending saga of my moving house has finally come to an end. This also means I've achieved probably my only really serious New Year's resolution: to stop putting up with things that annoy me. Which unfortunately meant my landlady had to go. Or rather I had to go. Because she owns where I was.

I'm failing spectacularly with the other ones by the way, although I am now mentally berating myself for forgetting my glasses every time I leave the house, so that's something.

This victory didn't seem so sweet on Tuesday however; because cleaning nine flights of stairs rarely screams 'I've won!'. Being told to clean the last flight again even less so. And no, I'm not the sort of person who cleans stairs just because someone tells them to, but this woman has my money, and without a common fluent language between us, argument is just too tiring.

That doesn't mean I wasn't angry, and it certainly doesn't mean that I didn't vent to everyone I know. I mean the stairs, why do the stairs have to be so clean? Also why is it such a surprise that they don't look that great even after I've cleaned them? They're covered in years old linoleum and 5 people walk up and down them every day, how nice are they ever going to look. They're not even covered in the same linoleum all the way up. And the bottom flight are just badly painted. I'm not an interior decorator, and unless you're planning on using the stairs to eat from then I'm pretty sure they're fine.

But my new place is so nice I don't really care. It still doesn't have an oven though. Why do I never live anywhere with an oven? It's near an Aldi too, so maybe I'll be able to afford to eat all 5 food groups now.

Claire, I wouldn't eat meat from Aldi, you'll get ill.

Yeah well I've already had food poisoning since I've been here and I haven't cooked red meat in about 4 months. So quite frankly, Aldi can come at me.

I also have a double bed for the first time in my life, so I can now sleep alone in more space than someone of my size could ever need. Hurray.

This is all sounding a little bit too good isn't it? Probably a good time to mention that the walls have that 'distressed' look about them which makes it look ever so slightly like the house from The Blair Witch Project.

But I've got my own sink so, you know, whatever.

January didn't just mark the end of everyone listening to me complain about my landlady though, it involved planning things to look forward to, some really good films, some really great nights out, a lot of The Sopranos and it shouldn't be forgotten that I spent the first week of it at home with a lot of the people I love.

Oh and Justin Timberlake released a new single. So you know, it was a pretty good month actually.

Happy February everyone.

xx