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

Merry Christmas and well done...

...on surviving the end of the world. We totally showed that calendar system which never predicted the end of the world in the first place. Nice work mankind.

I'm not ashamed to say I've eaten and slept my way through the last week and a half. I also love the fact that we only really 'do Christmas' with my immediate family i.e. the people who live in my house; because it means my Christmas shopping is done within an hour and Christmas Day is a genuinely relaxing time where no one has to cook or eat turkey and we don't have Christmas cake. No one really likes those things and you're just lying to yourself if you think you do.

That doesn't mean that after a week at home I'm not already craving independent living again, because I am. I know my mum reads this but I think she's heard me say the words 'I'm just going to kill all of you' enough times in the last few days for this not to be a particular surprise - they know I love them, it's fine. But I also am loving the people of Leeds, I haven't even been gone that long but I'd forgotten that everyone is so damn friendly here, I must have chatted to like 5 people in M&S alone on Saturday morning. Special thanks to the shop assistant in Tesco who skipped the song that was playing in the book department after I said it was making me lose the will to live. You deserve to have an extra nice Christmas.

So have a lovely Christmas and tell the people you love/like that you love/like them, because that's what this time of year is for.

I will be doing; so if you don't hear from me in the couple of days you can take that as a sign that I can't stand you.

Merry Christmas :)

xx

I was ill, but then I got better. So it was fine.

Private Jones: Mitch, I fucking got one!

Corporal Mitchell: What you want a fucking sweetie? Keep shooting you cunt!

This is why all horror films should be British; none of the ridiculous puns of American films, just lots of swearing. That's basically all I've done whilst I've been ill, I watched The Exorcist on Friday for about the 100th time, and no matter how many times I see it I can't help but feel a little annoyed that it kind of has a happy ending. Not that I'm against happiness, it's just not how horror films should be. Definitely not as annoyed as I am at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre though, in which every character is so irritating, I'm actually rooting for the silent serial killer. Seriously if you start walking when the killer is within grabbing distance of you, you deserve to be chainsawed(?) to death.

It's also come to my attention lately, that I have really weird taste in fictional men. Just stay with me on this, this isn't going to be about how hot the cast of 90210 are, I promise.

I've already proclaimed my love for Ryan Howard from The Office, and I know, I know he's emotionally void and he kind of goes crazy when he gets promoted and starts doing shit loads of drugs and embezzling money...but in the 'Grief Counselling' episode instead of telling a story about the death of someone close to him, he tells the story of how Mufasa dies in The Lion King -  and if your approach to grief counselling is to tell part of a Disney story, then we need to get married.

Nathan from Misfits is another one, because apparently if your one goal is to annoy other people and make ridiculously inappropriate jokes, then I will think you're the best thing that's ever happened to the world. He has completely irrational reactions to everything, and is therefore the love of my life.

Nathan: Are you asking me out on a date?
Simon: No... I meant all of us.
Nathan: Did you? ... I am not your whore!

Guy Secretan from Green Wing is probably the most prominent and unreasonable adorations:

Dr.  Dear: It is for a good cause.

Dr.  Secretan: I don't do good causes, OK? A charity shag maybe, but certainly not to raise fucking money for medical equipment.

It's not like I don't know what terrible 'real life' partners these people would make, they basically live to be infuriating and find it impossible to take anything seriously and/or be emotionally capable, and to be honest that's really not what I should be looking for. BUT, they are about 20 million times more interesting than Edward Cullen/any male lead in those films where the someone dies/I don't even want to talk about (500) Days of Summer.

In other news, the key that has the comma on it fell off my keyboard, so I keep accidentally typing full stops instead, I've tried to correct all these grammatical errors, but sorry just in case. Oh and I broke a mug, fused the lights in my room, and spilt tea on my floor. The last two I did within the space of like an hour. I expect a serious injury within the week.

And I'm more than a little frustrated with living here right now; all I've wanted is blueberries and cookies from a supermarket bakery, but to afford the former I'd have to sell my organs and the latter just don't exist apparently. Way to go Belgium, way to go.

But good stuff has happened too! I received confirmation that I'm getting my Erasmus grant at some point in time so I'll be able to afford food (but still not blueberries) and stuff which will be a nice change. I successfully changed the light bulb in my room and overall everyone's been really nice whilst I've recovered from being poisoned by some food. So that's nice :)

I went to a lovely event hosted by my friends at CBI, and today I went to a seminar where the John Harris, editor of Politico, spoke. Politico is basically the nearest Washington gets to un-partisan journalism, so that was pretty cool. And I was persuaded to go out on Saturday night, so we danced on tables for a bit and the learned played chess in a bar until it closed.

I haven't really chatted about work so far, and just as a warning that's probably not going to change because I'm absolutely convinced I'm going to accidentally let something really important slip and initiate a crisis/lose my job.

Au revoir!

xx

I get paid tomorrow...

...I have €7.17 in my purse, and £0.66 in my bank account. So it would be safe to say I'm pretty excited.

I went to Bruges! Despite the crazy weather (hail, sleet and sun...seriously?) it was by far one of the best days I've had since I got here. Even at the end of October it's just a beautiful and tourist-filled as you would imagine - but don't even bother imagining, there are photos at the bottom. The hot chocolate we had when we got there was probably the best I've ever had, and when your table is the one in front of a log fire in the cafe, it probably couldn't feel more like Christmas.

That's pretty much the only noteworthy thing I've done this week, apart from very stupidly, and unintentionally, use up all €15 of credit on my phone by calling home for 20 minutes (Mobistar...is this about what I said last week? Because that feels like an unnecessarily high tariff to me).

I'm beginning to get really annoyed at the woman on my French learning audio course - she just gets everything wrong all the time, I've never known anyone be this bad at repeating something they've just heard (I should point out that these are on my iPod and she is a 'student' who repeats back what the guy leading the course says, I'm not just getting really angry at some woman who's genuinely trying to learn French). As I'm only 9 lessons in, this is probably a bad sign - there's like 80 more to go, and by the end I'll either be able to speak French, or I'll have spent 10 hours yelling at my laptop. Maybe even both.

I'm also inadvertently following the X Factor, so I know Jade went last week, Union J and District3 are basically One Direction but...no that's it, they're just basically One Direction, and Rylan appears to only still be in the competition to frustrate everyone who watches it. All this horrendously useless knowledge has been gained through my Twitter feed, so thank you Twitter, for making me incredibly well-informed about a programme I have absolutely no interest in, and have never watched.

Finally,

I just had to share this site : http://www.lovepanky.com

Now coming away from the fact that 'panky' should never ever be used as a word (even when preceded by 'hanky'), there is just so much more that's just plain wrong with what they're suggesting.

For starters some of the stuff they suggest is just contradictory, I'm probably going to find it pretty hard to play with my hair if I'm not allowed to move my hands, and that's all gonna look pretty weird if I'm constantly shifting around on my feet at the same time, in fact I'll come out of this less of an attractive young woman, and more of a Weeble (Google it). I'm personally going to find it pretty difficult to express myself full stop if my hands have to be clamped by my side, but then with advice like 'speak softly' and 'barely speak at all', expressing myself clearly isn't the aim here. I think the worst thing is that if this actually works and his heart is suitably melted to the point where we start dating, he's going to get the shock of his life when I stop being cute, and start being myself. And then I'll have to start all over again, although maybe this time I could take their advice on being sexy, and the advice on that one is basically just 'LOOK AMAZING', which might require a lot more prep work, but at least I won't have to put on a voice.

Their first date advice is equally as frustrating, to be fair the article is entitled '14 Signs You're Ruining Your First Date Unknowingly'. It may as well be called '14 Ways Everything is Wrong With You and You'll Die Alone'. And the advice itself is a lot like being yelled at by a maniac - 'be yourself - but not too much like yourself, speak a lot, but not too much, show an interest, but don't be too interested, or friendly, definitely don't be too friendly don't smile too much, dress appropriately and under no circumstances agree to seeing him again,  - oh, and BE PERFECT IN EVERY WAY'.

If I actually read this before a first date I'd probably be a nervous wreck by the time I arrived and sit in silence for the whole date, convinced that even the slightest movement or sound would ruin everything.

It's probably wrong of me to direct this purely at lovepanky.com, I just happened to stumble across it this week and it brought up a lot of the anger I feel about dating advice more generally. I'm not even going to give alternative advice, because I never give advice, and even if I did it would be just as useless. Just behave like a normal person and you'll probably be fine.

This is my last post before I go home on tomorrow night for the Bank Holiday weekend, so if you're in Belgium, enjoy your days off, if not, then enjoy your normal-length weekend.

xx

Thanks to Ash and Francesca for their help in inspiring this post, I hope it's every bit as ranting and angry as you expected.