A Senecan Sort of Day

I have visited a few of the ‘big cities’ in Europe so far – Paris, Barcelona, Venice – so it was inevitable that at some point I would be drawn to the internationally renowned charms and splendour of…

Cardiff.

Some of you will no doubt react to that with the same muffled enthusiasm I did when my sister Laura suggested it to me. But for those of you who grew up somewhere on the Persian rug of Europe*, you will probably react the same way the Persian rug-bred fellows of my acquaintance did: by raising an eyebrow, peering at me carefully to see whether I meant to say ‘Casablanca’, and then adding, with a hint of Persian rug schadenfreude, ‘Why?’

For all of my sunblushed Australian tomatoes, apparently if you want to go to Wales – especially South Wales – Cardiff should not be high on your list. Through snippets of conversation and between bow-and-arrow onslaughts of taunting, my Persian ruggian friends led me to expect a concrete jungle where nothing ever happens apart from a thrice monthly ten minute community dance to celebrate breaks in the rain.

So lesson 1 in the Cardiff saga was: don’t go to Cardiff. Lesson 1b, to be learned shortly afterwards, was: if you are going to Cardiff from London, don’t make it a day trip.

In both cases Laura is to blame for not doing her research. And I am even more to blame for saying, ‘A Day trip? To Cardiff? Why not?!’

The bus trip from London to Cardiff takes three hours, so it turned out that we had less time to explore the city than the time it took to get there. We had 1 hour, to be precise. 1 hour to explore the entire city of Cardiff. We spent almost as much time at the rest-stop on the motorway, poking around the Waitrose and looking at squidgy travel pillows shaped like elephants, pigs and frogs.

I don’t know why such a tour exists at all. I can only guess they are cornering the market for that rather large group of people who don’t know what they’re doing, but only have a day to do it in.

And so it was that at 8am on a bright London morning, two girls from the market of people who don’t know what they’re doing (but only have a day to do it in), boarded a bus bound for Cardiff, soon to learn lesson 1a and 1b.

Now, when the curtain of European wisdom is pulled back and you find yourself peering at certain misery in the form of grey buildings and lengthy bus rides with other members of this elite squad of ignorant travellers, you can either:

(a) Turn into a droplet of Welsh rain and be cold and incessant all day, or

2.) Decide that idiocy should be celebrated, and try to find the humour and the joy in each new nail hammered into your travelling coffin.

Luckily it didn’t take too long to put plan 2 into action, as tour buses being tour buses, there were many curious specimens of humanity to keep us chortling the whole way. (Funnily enough, at the time there didn’t seem to be anything ironic in our feeling of superiority…).

First off, there was our British tour guide, who I shall call Pierre (because I like French names, and setting up poseurish alliterations). He quickly earned himself the nickname ‘Pierre of the perplexing pauses’ because he punctuated his pontifications with perplexingly prolonged pauses. When he spoke, it went something like this:

‘When you go to…………………. (a full minute later, which is quite a lot when someone’s talking) Birmingham, you have to………………….. (another full minute) go to the………………… (one minute) unique shopping centre.’

Of course I completely understand nerves and ‘mind blanks’, considering I would rather hold a live tarantula in my mouth for ten minutes than speak in front of a group, but I had never heard pauses like this before. Pierre’s perplexing pauses kept us entertained for at least some of the way, and even without him there were:

The Tourons. Thank you to Marc for introducing me to this term; a mixture between a tourist and a moron. When we reached the tollgate on the motorway entering Wales, some of the people at the front of the bus pulled out their handy-cams and started filming the bus’s progress from behind the tollgate to that mysterious and untouched patch of motorway on the other side. Presumably they were doing this for the benefit of their home-schooled children, who only leave the house to attend quilling classes at the local Plymouth Brethren ministry. “Please Daddy! Play the bit where the gate goes up again!”

Once in Wales, we stopped to pick up our Welsh tour-guide. He was a short, stout little man with a white beard who looked like Thomas Kenneally. Unlike Pierre, he did not pause at any point throughout the day. He chattered about any little thing that we passed, only hesitating to figure out which joke was next in his well-oiled repertoire. I found him immediately likeable. He explained early on that he was ‘Welshman born, Welshman bred, strong in the arm and weak in the head,’ and when we were driving by the Cardiff markets he said that here you could find the ‘Three Fs’: ‘Fruit, Flowers and Vegetables’ (apparently in Welsh the word for ‘vegetable’ starts with an ‘f’). God help us, Laura and I thought this little man was hilarious.

Thomas Kenneally took us around the main sights in Cardiff by bus – the Bay, the Millennium Centre (which is actually quite a striking building), Cardiff Castle, the City Hall and the National Museum. All of this was crammed into about half an hour, and then – just as the rain decided to introduce itself – we were deposited onto the sidewalk and told we had one hour of free time before we had to meet back at the bus to move on to Caerphilly Castle.

A word about Welsh rain (or Cardiffian rain at least). It does not obey the rules of gravity. Bored with ‘conformity’, it turned on the TV one night and now models itself on what it saw there: lotto-ball machines. It goes up and down and all around, floating and swirling and managing to lick your hair even when your umbrella is only one inch from the top of your head.

By the time we’d found a bathroom and I had bought a cup of coffee swill, we had 50 minutes left. The rain was still practicing its lotto-ball machine dance routine, so we decided to head to the National Museum (or Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd), because it was indoors and it was close by.

Perhaps it was because by this point each new nail in our travelling coffin really was hilarious that I decided that there was no use in trying to take the Museum seriously. There was nothing sad about it; I just turned to Laura and proposed the following:

The Speed Museum Tour

Rules

1. See every item in every room

2. No stopping allowed

3. Finish in thirty minutes

No time for discussions, no time for clarifications. We trotted from room to room, past paintings and sculptures and stuffed animals and mounted insects and ancient porcelain:

I hate clichés, but in this case I think our whole day was an exercise in stoicism, or ‘accepting the things you cannot change’. People had told us Cardiff was boring. We had to spend six hours on a bus with people who had either speech or brain impediments. We had a ridiculously small time to explore the biggest city in Wales, and when we finally got there it was raining. What can you do?

You can leap around like morons (or Tourons, even), pretending to be Mary Poppins in a town square:

I had a really great day. I would encourage people to do this. Whether it’s Cardiff or another place you know nothing about. Just go there, laugh at any restrictions, see how ridiculous you can be, and go home again.

That said, when I go back to Cardiff, I would like a little more time to see it properly.

That’s right. I just said ‘when’…


* I am aware that Persian rugs are not ‘European’. It was just the first thing that popped into my head when I was trying to think of something beautiful, complicated and ‘plush’ to compare my wiser-than-I-am friends to…

Two Flibbertijibbets in Salzburg

There are two types of people in the world (I hate it when people start things like this – with the ‘two categories’ that always end up with more holes poked in them than a kitchen colander because they forgot about the people who prefer ferrets to cats or dogs, or the people who prefer Samurai Pizza Cats to Tintin or Asterix – but I am using it anyway. The lure of the cliché is pulling me in!):

1. The people who can think of nothing worse than a long car trip with an enforced soundtrack of The Sound of Music.

2. The people who can think of nothing better than an entire weekend of singing The Sound of Music and immediately turn into high-pitched, overzealous bags of pistachio nuts upon seeing the gazebo where Rolf and Liesl danced.

Sadly, on a recent weekend trip to Salzburg, a person of the first variety became irretrievably entangled with two people of the second variety. Well, I should say ‘sadly’ for him, because for us it was fantastic (even if it was cheesier than the Brady Bunch family sitting down for Brie, Gruyère and Double Gloucester sandwiches served on a bed of grated Parmesan).

My lovely boyfriend Marc had, rather short-sightedly (but incredibly generously), decided to book a surprise trip for me and my sister Laura to the land of Mozart, strudels and, most importantly, the snow-topped mountains that tend to sing thousand-year-old songs underneath Julie Andrews’s nimble feet: Austria. When the mystery location was revealed at Stansted Airport, we launched into ‘I Have Confidence’ and literally didn’t stop singing for the next three days. I ate my muesli in the pauses between verses of ‘So Long, Farewell’ and kept everyone up all night with my somnambulant ‘Adelweiss’ (I just wanted an excuse to use the word ‘somnambulant’ there…). The one song we didn’t sing to an early grave was ‘The Lonely Goat Herd’, because no one apart from the good lady herself can pull that one off.

We arrived on a Friday morning, and our Sound of Music tour wasn’t until the Saturday, so that gave us the Friday to wander around Salzburg discovering the Salzburgers’ homage to their musical prodigy in the form of chocolate balls filled with marzipan and nougat (I’m not sure how chocolate immortalisation really connects with musical genius, but gold-wrapped Mozart balls are available in every second store in the city. Apparently the silver ones, which are harder to find, are the ‘originals’), the cute little tunnels with names that have very different meanings in English/Yiddish (see picture below), errant apostrophes aplenty (see other picture below), and plenty a beer-hall serving schnitzels and sachertortes.

If the shoe fits...

The Hot Dog's what?

As a side-note, I have learned from Marc that German is a language where you can smush all the ‘qualifiers’ together into one long word, so you end up with signs like this:

That long word means something like ‘Store that sells Christmas balls and gifts and related paraphernalia’. Most of the cafés we went to assumed that you could do the same thing in English, so you would end up menus boasting ‘applestrudelwhippedcream’ or ‘hotchocolatemarshmallowwhippedcream’.

After laughing at the ‘No Kangaroos in Austria’ t-shirts and clocks and pencil sharpeners and erasers and underwear and thimbles and teapots, and scratching our heads when we learned that Salzburg’s ‘New Town’ area is actually older than colonised Australia, it was time to stop wasting our time with shameless touristy knickknacks and focus on eating our deliciously cheesy Sound of Music sandwich.

If you are a person of the first variety, the following will make perfect sense to you. Everything became a ‘the’. We saw the gazebo, the house, the graveyard, the mountains, the gardens, the bridge, the Abbey and the Church where Maria and Georg were married. With each new sighting of something familiar, me and Laura set off on a long chain of ‘And this is the part where…’ or ‘And she does this then, and then Gretl says that, and oh yeah I forgot about that bit when Rolf is throwing stones at the window! And what was the point in the pink lemonade?’ Marc was doubtless listening to Cannibal Corpse and wondering why in the name of Rodgers and Hammerstein he didn’t arrange a trip to Vladivostok instead.

Of course I know admitting to a fondness for The Sound of Music automatically makes me fall a few rungs on the ladder-of-enviable-coolness-and-flawless-taste (although people who appreciate these guys might disagree), as it is so saccharine it would make a pot of melted jelly babies coated in white chocolate, dusted with icing sugar and served with a side of millefeuille and grape bubble-tape taste bitter in comparison, there is still something interesting about visiting a place whose landscape you have known inside out and backwards since you were six. I hope this doesn’t sound too sentimental, but the movies I watched when I was little seem so much more ‘full’ than the ones I watch now. Not because they were ‘better’, but because I used to watch the same movies so much that I knew the layouts of houses, the patterns on the dresses of the drop-in characters and the exact intonation of the line, ‘Well how about that, Mr Doubting Mustafa?’ I think kids tend to put themselves ‘in’ movies, so seeing the gazebo and the fountain and the house – all completely unchanged from 1965 – was almost like déjà vu.

Two pistachios at the gazebo

I guess Marc, as a person of the first variety, can only really understand how we felt when he becomes a person of the second variety in relation to a different movie. Perhaps when he re-enacts scenes from ‘Anchorman’ in San Diego, while I wonder what’s so exciting about a dog sniffing a wheel of cheese…

Moving

This morning I got up with the intention of being very nostalgic. I spent the night sleeping next to everything I own packed up in boxes and bags, and after having some toast this morning decided that I would walk to my favourite place from my front door one last time. My sister Laura was still asleep, and I thought it was actually fitting to do this alone.

So I walked out of my front door, past the rubbish the cats had strewn all over our walkway, down the little 'short-cut' alleyway with an unkempt park on one side, past the faded orange 'Gent's Hairdressing' storefront, past the black graffiti and painted slogans on Greatorex Street and up past the first of the curry houses and Indian wedding supplies stores along Hanbury Street.

You know how some days just have that feeling of 'anticipation'? Like the last day of school in summer and everyone has their shirts untucked and water fights break out mid-afternoon and teachers just put on music or movies because they don't care and the air seems full of the wishes of everyone that the day will end quickly and the wait for the last school bus is long and friends wave out of car windows and you know when you come back everything will be a little bit different? That is how I felt. Like a change was coming and all I could do was walk around and pre-emptively reminisce.

I have a favourite coffee shop on Brick Lane that I like to write in. It has a hodge-podge of vintage lounges, colourful table-tops, condiment containers made out of lego, little plastic dolls stuck to the cash register, big windows that look out onto the street, perfect laid-back indie music, a resident black Labrador that comes and goes as he pleases and sometimes comes and looks at you with his big dark eyes while you're writing, and decent (but not mind-blowing) coffee. I planned to go here and write for a bit one last time, but when I got there I discovered that 'my café' wasn't in the mood to comply with my floating, bittersweet nostalgia. It was closed for maintenance. So instead I walked to the end of the street and back down again, noticing little things that I hadn't before: a collection of beer cans wedged between two walls near the school, a broken lamp above a doorway, a tree growing out of a building.

I was a little annoyed that I couldn't do what I wanted, and I knew everyone would think I was silly for being all 'so long, farewell' about a place I can still visit easily enough, but it just felt like the end of something this morning.

Despite the spit on the streets and the chip packets and empty bottles and half-eaten bagels and scrunched-up paper plates stained with brown sauce and oil and the heavy smell of alcohol lurking everywhere on Saturday and Sunday mornings, I have a big squidgy soft spot for Brick Lane. I will miss being able to consider it 'my neighbourhood'.

January 23, 2009.

Spot the difference

Since my last post about my ‘flat-o-curiosities’, my sister has arrived in the country. We had decided before she arrived that we were going to look for a new place together, so I have quickly found myself in the position of having to ‘pitch’ this tiny Whitechapel dive with its wacky wiring, silly shower and barren kitchen (sorry, I couldn’t find a suitable ‘k’ word to make that alliteration aeroplane fly) to the hapless fops on Gumtree.

As if my post below doesn’t make the place sound unbearable enough, I didn’t even mention that the neighbourhood Tom-cats are in continual competition with one another over whose particular interpretation of the infamous ‘eau de cat’ is the most covetable, staging their ‘scent-offs’ near our front door; there is no light in the kitchen apart from a tiny bulb behind the ancient yellow toaster, making it difficult to judge whether that little brown blob on the table is a delicious chocolate-coated peanut or a jaw-breaking, indefinable material that could in no way be interpreted as food; and our ‘backyard’ could be used as an example of what the world would look like six to eight years after humans have been wiped out*. And, to put the half-decomposed banana on top of the colossal compost heap, our next-door neighbours are squatters. Squatters who enjoy a good disco followed by a plate-throwing brawl at 3 in the morning.

Okay. All of these things haven’t really been that bad. I have been able to put up with all of this for 8 months, after all. I have even come to think of my little defective slice of Whitechapel as ‘quaint’ rather than what others might term ‘a hole’. My room also seems to be the most immune to the sounds of squabbling squatters, so usually I sleep right through.

But after I had written my advertisement talking about our ‘two bathrooms (1 shower), combined kitchen and living area and a backyard simply perfect for summer BBQs’, I started wondering whether and when to lie to the people who came knocking. I had to make up my mind quickly, as one of our first visitors – a Canadian girl – almost immediately asked the most difficult question to weasel my way out of: ‘How do you find the neighbours?’

The pause preceding my response should have given her a clear indication of ‘how we find the neighbours’ (‘We usually just knock on their door…’). She didn’t seem to notice my hesitation, however, so I quickly stammered something about how we don’t really know them that well and that they like to party on occasion, but it doesn’t really disturb me.

Before you say, ‘you squawking Lyre-bird, you!’, I actually told the truth to the people I thought were decent. This girl already seemed a little ‘off’, so I figured there was no harm in only sharing the tasty details of our neighbours and our interesting light-switch situation with people who were ‘quirky in a good way’. I thought that these ‘quirky in a good way’ people might look at this flat as I have come to: as a story they will tell for years to come.

At this stage I have found two potential candidates to pray for watery salvation from the moody shower-head and learn how to make-do with cake tins instead of pots, and it is only up to my flat-mates to decide which one they could bear to live with. By now I know that one wrong choice in the flat-mate department can sometimes prove worse than a painfully ineffective shower, lack of cooking utensils, noisy neighbours, dumpy backyard and cat pee combined. But both of these girls seem fine, so hopefully the bubbly Australian or the laid-back Brit won't prove to be as good at omitting off-putting details in their self-advertisements as I am on the 'flats offered' section of Gumtree.

I hope whoever succeeds doesn't retrospectively hate me forever. You see, I didn't tell them about the shower head. And to some, that is much, much worse than the occasional sounds of Italian profanities and shattering crockery at 3am...



*On a related note, my flat-mates tell me that a short walk from our front door there is an area used in the film 28 Days Later. No doctoring or special effects were needed. It already looked like it was torn apart by zombie-humans who had been infected with a potent virus that induces a murderous and destructive rage.

Flat lining

I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as ‘poor’. I have a job that pays above minimum wage, somewhere to live, I can eat out or buy new banana-print tights on occasion and as yet have never found myself in the position of having to ask my landlord whether he would accept charcoal drawings of cheese graters and ‘keep left’ signs in lieu of actual cash.

That said, one of the reasons I can afford to eat out and keep up with new trends in fruit fashion is because my flat is quite affordable (by London standards). And of course, as any real estate agent or flat-hunter will tell you, ‘affordable’ is usually code for ‘riddled with unique and curious problems no one knows how to explain, let alone solve’. Whereas I am now used to having a fridge in the hallway, flipping TV channels manually with a McDonald’s straw and think nothing of the tiny wooden block hammered into the kitchen wall with a picture of a completely-unknown-to-anyone-who-currently-lives-there brunette in a petite love-heart shaped golden frame perched on top, my flat can be an interesting place to newcomers.

A couple of connections:

1. The light in the upstairs bathroom has married the light in the downstairs toilet, and clearly wears the pants in the relationship because whatever it does, the downstairs light emulates like an obedient puppy. The light is on in the downstairs toilet when you walk into it, and you innocently sit down with your copy of Fruit Fashion – Fall 2008. Just as you are sinking your teeth into a fascinating article on the social advantages of a papaya-flavoured scratch-n-sniff cardigan, the light snaps off and you are encased in sudden blackness. This never fails to elicit a little scream, and since the light-switch is too far away to reach from your porcelain perch, you have to forego your riveting read and reach for the paper.

This has startled quite a few visitors, who naturally assume that the bulb just happened to blow out while they were marvelling at your choice of bathroom literature (not that the light above them is the switchy equivalent of a 1950s housewife following her husband’s every whim).

Three flights of stairs separate this light-switch couple, and I have always wondered why it shouldn’t work in reverse: why the comings and goings of the bulb downstairs have no impact on her husband up top. It would be entertaining to re-wire this fault so that she could sit on the bathroom throne barking orders for once. A light going off when you’re in the shower could provide a good two minutes’ entertainment for bored flatmates on a Tuesday evening. Which leads me to my next marriage in the flat, between the:

2. Kitchen tap and the shower. This is not unusual in itself. Practically everyone has experienced the sharp sting of hot water needles when a toilet flushes or an urge to scream ‘stop using the f*%king water, you pillock!’ when you find yourself sprayed with tiny ice-cubes. What may be unusual about this long-distance pipe relationship is that whenever anyone uses the tap in the kitchen, the shower completely ceases to function.

You have worked up a good lather in your hair and suddenly the stream dries up. Since the kitchen is three floors down you can’t really call out, so instead you stand there, hands clasped in front of you (almost in prayer), eyes fixed with a pathetically sad expression upon the tiny holes in the shower-head and mind envisioning soap suds bubbling up through kitchen mugs and luxurious hot watery waves washing over potato-skin encrusted baking trays. ‘They have to be nearly done,’ you think. ‘I’m pretty sure all that’s left is two spoons and the apple peeler.’ And then the real taunting begins.

A ring of water beads appear under the shower head, and they pulse one or two times before spurting out a few lines of watery salvation. Hallelujah! Your eyebrows relax and the stream returns. But then there’s the glass they forgot about in their bedroom, and the vase they just emptied that dead rose out of and wouldn’t it be a perfect time to scrub my bike chain and wash down the vacuum cleaner? And now after all that work I’m pretty thirsty, but what’s this? The kettle’s empty! Ah, easily solved. Drink up, my stainless steel friend. There’s plenty more where that came from. Oh, and would you look at that! The filtered water jug could use a refill too. Come to think of it, my orchid could do with a little splash. What the heck? Why don’t I just leave the tap on and invite the neighbourhood cats around to have a different drinking experience?

After all of this you feel a bit bipolar, a bit confused (that a shower-head could add or detract so much to your day-to-day happiness) and just the slightest bit homicidal. You start making all sorts of showery resolutions: I will always tell people when I’m about to jump in, and I will hang a tea-cosy over the tap so everyone knows that now is not the time to make friends with thirsty felines. You have also planned out exactly what you are going to say to your tap-happy flat-mate, down to the very last expletive.

But instead when you go downstairs you end up sheepishly enquiring about what’s on TV, then shoot a death-stare at the gleaming dishes and smiling orchid (as if they themselves were to blame) and watch Never Mind the Buzzcocks until Simon Amstell makes you forget about the whole debacle.

3. Apart from these two connections, anyone I invite over for dinner may be perplexed by my modified recipe book. A problem that has followed me from flat to London flat has been the dearth of basic kitchen tools. Here in Whitechapel, instead of 1 cup of Arborio rice or 350g butternut pumpkin, my modified recipe calls for ‘That mug with ‘Hoff’ on it about ¾ full of rice’ and ‘about 7/8 of that green plastic bowl full of pumpkin’. 320° becomes Gas Mark 9, and ‘placed into a large pot and covered tightly with lid’ becomes ‘placed in cake tin, covered with foil and fingers crossed the ingredients don’t overflow.’

You may ask why I have not just gone out and bought the muffin trays and mortars and pestles our kitchen so desperately needs, but there are two very good reasons why I have yet to get them:

(a) When I have money left over at the end of the month, I prefer to blow it on mango brooches or coconut-themed gloves (white and soft on the inside, brown and hairy on the outside!), and,

(b) When a previous flat-mate left, he took all of the kitchen implements he had bought with him, and the current flat-mates have resented him for it ever since. Apparently all they were left with was a napkin dispenser and one rusty sieve. Naturally when I move I will want to take my mortars and pestles with me, so I refuse to buy them in the first place to save myself the loud conversations regarding my cheese-gratery greed and odd fascination with fruit fashion that I fear so much after I leave.

Not so Rum and Raisin after all...

For those of you who have been following this blog as closely as a dog’s eyes follow a piece of camembert cheese from the cutting board to the cracker (or for those of you who are so technologically savvy you can perform the impossible feat of scrolling down), you will know that in Paris I felt sort of ‘out of place’. I was a Bubble-o-Bill in a land of Rum and Raisin Gelato.

Once in Brussels I was expecting more of the same. I thought I would meet some Tiramisu or possibly Pistachio flavoured people, so it came as a surprise that my Couchsurfing host turned out to be what the French might call ‘une Bulle-de-Guillaume’*.

It only took a quick scan of his bookshelf for me to realise that, although we’re all made in different factories with different ingredients and different lazy managers who sometimes put strawberry labels on people who are clearly double-chocolate-fudge crunch, deep down, we’re all made out of ice-cream.

This analogy is rapidly falling off the rails, so I will stop. Julien’s bookshelf was full of all my favourite books (only with French titles like Sur la Route) and I had only been there an hour before we were listening to John Coltrane and quoting Monty Python sketches. If I had known that it was possible to say ‘This parrot is definitely deceased!’ to a Frenchman and have them laugh and throw in ‘I’m Brian and so is my wife’, I may have found the people in those Parisian cafés a little less impenetrable.

Julien (who also has a blog, as all of my new friends seem to do (if you speak French you can access it here: http://www.oeuillet.be/)) and his girlfriend Salomé took me to second-hand bookstores, introduced me to French comics (Arthur De Pins is a new favourite), led me around the Tin-Tin bedecked streets of Brussels, had tea and philosophical discussions with me in a tiny pub off the Grand Place, and let me indulge in one of my favourite foreign destinations: the supermarket!

But the icing on this tub of ice-cream was a discovery I made in their flat on the first night I arrived. Attached to their tiny baby-blue TV was an object out of my own childhood: an integral part of my upbringing: the source of my renowned ability to jump over turtles and collect coins with my head: a Super Nintendo. And, if it wasn’t already enough that they owned this grey box of dreams, they also had the game that I probably spent more time on than my honours thesis: Mario Kart.

And so it was that in a little flat above a Brazilian shop in central Brussels, I played 26 rounds of Mario Kart battle-mode with a Monty-Python loving Frenchman.

At the risk of sounding like a marketing ponce for Couchsurfing, I am happy that there is a website out there that can put you in touch with people like this.

We called it a draw at 13-13 (apologies for the bad photo quality).

A more traditional Brussels image.

*many thanks to my personal translating service, JMRAK, for providing this one.

Instead of travel tales, some nonsense about a rebellious paver...

Around the corner from my house there is a piece of pavement. It looks just like any other paver* in this area: grey and rectangular, with a black smudge of old gum on its back. But this paver is different. This paver uses its ‘ordinary’ looks to disguise a mischievous temperament. This paver is tired of being stepped upon and has discovered a way to wreak revenge.

He enjoys doing it (you can tell from the bricky ‘kerplunk’ of his laugh) because it is both immediately destructive and yet so ‘tiny’ an irritation that the victim almost immediately forgets about it. Looking identical to his innocent cousins (who adhere to the paver status quo), he is able to outwit the same set of forgetful feet again and again.

On rainy days, when most pavers close their eyes, put on a grim face and let the water drops fall on them and then roll away like clear marbles, he wriggles and shimmies between his neighbours, opening up his borders and letting the rain tickle his sides and work its way down to fill the grubby pots and pans he keeps underneath his belly.

Once the rain stops and the other pavers get on with the job of waiting to be stepped on, he stops wriggling and tries to blend in. He pretends that he is waiting to service a suede-booted foot with a compliant solidity, but really he is quietly manoeuvring a series of pumps and spouts into his pots and pans.

He is well practised. Even his neighbours can’t tell that he’s doing anything, and the approaching suede boots (or sometimes the ballet-flats with inadequate border patrol) assume that this upcoming patch of pavers will exercise their civil service as quietly and uncomplainingly as the last.

He is also helped by his position. Somehow he was able, years ago, to negotiate his way into the enviable (yet long-winded) real-estate position of ‘Central Paver on Well-Frequented Corner of Street Leading to/from Tube Station’. He is popular because of this location – like an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet at a tiny airport where the only other option is cold sandwiches of questionable freshness at a newsagent.

So the suede boots and under-prepared ballet flats tramp his way. He is the most convenient option.

He sees them coming and readies himself. He stiffens his back and lowers his hand to the pumps in the pots. The feet clomp closer, stepping without a care in the world across the obliging grey backs of his cousins. Once they are two pavers away, he sucks in his breath, swirls his stockpile of water marbles and then, when the foot lands on him, he releases his breath, opens all of his borders and squeezes his pumps, spurting a backwards waterfall of brown liquid up into the air. His technique is so well perfected that this waterfall never fails to perform three or four quick somersaults before landing – with the same inevitability that Wednesday follows Tuesday or regret follows a rampant Terry’s Chocolate Orange binge – squarely on the unsuspecting shoe.

He realeases his kerplunk of a laugh at the same time: his pavery equivalent of a criminal’s calling card: letting those suede shoes know they’ve been had yet again.

It echoes in the ears of the boots, and they curse their rickety memory and vow to themselves that next time, next time, they will remember this anarchist paver and re-route their steps.

But here they come again, on their way home from the shops, and the paver stiffens his back, shakes his head and chuckles.

It’s always just too easy.


*Apparently the British don’t say ‘paver’. I have had arguments over whether this word can mean ‘a piece of pavement’ alongside ‘one who paves’. Well, one argument. According to the infallible yourdictionary.com, both meanings are correct, so I’m going to stick with my colonial language perversions and sprinkle ‘pavers’ all over this blog entry with my giant pavery salt-shaker. Paver.