"You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you want to fart. You’re heading for a breakdown, better pull yourself apart. " - John Cooper Clarke
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Todd in 3D
Originally uploaded by zoeinbrussels.
Todd was showing us what he’s going to wear for an oral exam this week and then saw the Twat’s 3D glasses on the table. When he put them on he looked so ‘cool’ that I got Q to take this photo of him.
Very Madness.
>Recently I seem to have been sleeping in an odd position and waking up with a stiff arm so this morning I did the usual and positioned myself under the shower so that the stiff area would get a good blast of hot water. As I passed the soap over that area it really hurt but thought nothing of it until I got out of the shower and caught sight of what looked like a burn.
How could I have burnt myself in one specific area only under water that isn’t hot enough to burn? Realising that I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I checked again, bespectacled, and it was the same, just rather less blurry. The ‘burn’ mark is right under the pathway of my bra strap so I’ve been swinging around knocking things left, right and centre today. It is amazing how much my massive bosom gets in my way; it’s a good job that I don’t own anything expensive. I’d be like a bull in a china-shop were I to visit my parents.
Bra-less.
Having said that, I was looking at the photo of me and my daughters. Where did my waist go? I appear to go up from my hips like a tree trunk whereas my daughters have such lovely waists.
I must do something about those glasses too. They are dreadful.
>
8-8-09 the girls
Originally uploaded by zoeinbrussels.
There are my daughters, on August 8, 2009. A later photo than I had hoped for and one that looks like I am falling through my chair. The damn slats are giving way and I happened to be sitting on the first one to fail us all.
So that is a picture of me and my daughters. I know I look so much younger but there again, cameras are so deceptive, don’t you think? Looking at the photo, it is Tatiana, moi, sans tiara and Coralie. I think that both my daughters are incredibly beautiful – Tatiana in her sporty way and Coralie in her smaller, thinner frame. I love them both to death.
And finally, I have put up a picture of my book translated into Serbian (I formerly thought it was Latvian – I’m going bonkers). I am thinking of changing my name again.
How does Zoi sound to you? Original, methinks.
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Some ‘hats’ or pennes. I couldn’t find a larger picture.
I’ve decided to stop being a miserable cow for the time that it takes me to type up this post which is all about Belgian history. You can’t wait, I know as I get the feeling that fewer and fewer eyes are reading this.
Over the past few weeks tourists have been baffled by young students wandering around Brussels wearing a white coat covered in grafitti and a really stupid-looking hat with a huge ‘beak’. If you’ve been in Brussels recently you may have been hassled by these students begging for money in huge beer glasses. But why are they begging for money?
Because they are students.
And what is the money for?
Not Children in Need, believe me, but for…beer.
Oh yes, for today is Saint-Verhaegen/Sint-Verhaegen, a day that the students celebrate the founding of the Université Libre de Bruxelles/Vrije Universiteit Brussel by Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen. (At the time it was one university but split in 1970 because Belgium has some linguistic problems, it appears.) He wasn’t really a saint or anything but anything is good enough to go out on the piss, and that is exactly how the students celebrate this day.
Very often, the students start the day by going back to their secondary school and pelting the children still at school with eggs and flour during their morning break. Each time my daughters would come home on 20 November, covered in eggs, flour and whatever, my first reaction was to put them in the oven as they were covered in enough ingredients for something to cook.
Then the students start a long procession towards Verhaegen’s tomb and monument in his honour, although there is more concentration on drinking in the streets than anything else.
I remember blogging about Coralie going through le baptême last year although after walking into a tree and ending up with a black eye, she decided that it wasn’t worth it. Neither Coralie nor Tatiana have been ‘christened’ and are therefore not ‘allowed’ to go around in a white coat and silly hat. The baptême is performed by the older students who basically do nothing but humiliate the younger ones. If you can survive it, you end up with a daft-looking penne, all of which are different according to which faculty you are in, and a white coat.
And that’s a very brief lesson about Saint-V.
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I’m not sure when I’ll be back – soon, I hope, but I have had to attach wheels from one of my roller-blades onto Hermie as he can be a bit slow, especially if he starts getting hungry.
There’s bound to be something to post.
>It may take a while but the clues have been there since the summer. I’m not going to give up just yet, but give me time.
xxx
>If this person really is Belle de Jour, then good on her.
She’s not, as many suspected, a male journalist, just a young woman trying to pay for her PhD. I bet Nicholas Hellen is having a big tantrum that he never managed to ‘out’ her.
The good old Times – trying to ‘out’ everyone, except this time, Belle went to them due to her harshest critic – India Knight.
Whodathunk.
Updates: A better article by India Knight.
A different take on the revelation by Paul Carr. I couldn’t agree more when he says:
And like all good stories, hers ends with a wonderful lesson… That the only way to truly remain a successfully anonymous blogger is not to have any success whatsoever. Because the moment people start to pay attention to you, it’s inevitable you’re going to get screwed.
>If I remember correctly, Friday 13th is considered lucky in this country which explains a lot.
I woke up at 2 in the morning and couldn’t sleep again so ended up getting up and catching up with the online news. Knowing that my cleaning-lady was due at around 9am, I quickly had a shower at 7am, dried my hair, dressed and took various mugs from around the house and put them by the sink. I carried on clearing up a bit and just as I was putting my clothes away in the cupboard, the light flickered and then went out.
Bugger, I’d blown another fuse.
I checked the fuse box and not one single switch was down and so when I caught my next-door neighbour having an early fag at 8am in his dressing gown, I decided to knock on my window and shrugged in a way that would be understood as “are your lights out too?”
It worked. My neighbour made a ‘scissors’ sign and it soon became apparent that the entire road was without electricity.
Great.
But power-cuts never last long in this country unless you are expecting your cleaning-lady to pop around or perhaps your handyman. Or maybe you haven’t had your shower yet in which case you are well and truly stuffed.
An hour later and Martha turned up but I had to tell her that there was no point as there was no hot water or electricity, making her job quite difficult – but she was delighted!
“Oh, then I am free today – I will come back tomorrow, is okay?”
“Well, are you sure? I thought the electricity would be back on by now, but I’m afraid that there’s nothing that I can do. I can’t even offer you a cup of coffee.”
“No problem, no problem, tomorrow at 1pm?”
“That is very kind of you Martha – I’ll see you tomorrow.”
That woman will be tipped for sure tomorrow, even though her ironing is crap.
The house got colder and colder and finally, at 1.15pm, the lights came back on. As each hour clocked by I was wandering into the garage to check that there was no water leaking out of my freezer, and thankfully, I was lucky.
Friday 13th.
Pfffft.
>Even though yesterday was a Public Holiday, here, in the Heart of Europe, the Twat still found reason to go to the European Parliament (which, like the European Commission, is open on Armistice Day so as not to upset the Germans. Personally, I think they would prefer a day off just as much as any other person). Still, when you write for a paper you have to come up with the goods.
The Twat didn’t.
He did his normal thing, mixing with the wrong parties so as to upset the other parties (his latest being upsetting the neo-Conservatives after a night on the booze with Nigel Farage. The Twat did apologise for coming home after ten, but I doubt those neo-Conservatives are going to give him the time of day again, ho hum).
At this rate, I doubt Christmas day will be spent together as the Twat’s job appears to be more important.
And before anyone dares even think it, no, I am not jealous that the Twat has a job and I don’t. I am very pleased that he does, but I tend to be spending more and more time alone; time that we could be going out together – anything. So I suppose that that is where the “Domestic Goddess” in me has crawled in, although I still can’t do much housework in case my back gives way yet again. I feel pretty useless, to be honest, and when the Twat comes home asking how my day was (bless him – he never asked me that when I was working and he wasn’t – but then, he is a twat), I feel that he is being sarcastic.
“Great, thanks Q. I got up, made supper (in the slow-cooker), fed Hermie, made a cup of tea, looked at the 6 sites online for a job, made another cuppa, watched the news and settled down to an afternoon of Jeremy Kyle, finished making the supper, washed up and checked my emails. It was great.”
“Fantastic, Hon, glad you had a good day.”
I am annoyed that I didn’t use my 30 days holiday plus all the over-time that I clocked up at my former job, but when you work part-time it is almost impossible to take time off. I thought that I would use that time to relax while looking for a job once my contract ended, and then thought that it wasn’t fair for the Twat to go out to work all day without me doing something. So I started cooking and cleaning the kitchen surfaces – it’s an ideal home to come back to.
Except that the Twat is putting on an awful lot of weight from his nights out at the pub and then his bottle of wine at home on top of food.
We barely speak.
I know that I am to blame, but apart from a size 10/42 up my arse, or seeing a doctor (please, no more meds), I’m not sure what to do. Make Q happy with a healthy meal each night – or what?
I do have to go to the post office. That will help.
>Last Sunday afternoon Todd came around for the last of his things as the children went back to school yesterday. As I was on the phone to my father I decided to pass the call on to Todd, seeing as he was there. They had a good chat and Todd finished the conversation by saying:
“It was a pleasure speaking with you, Grandpa.”
Shocked by my son’s courtesy I didn’t have much else to say to my dad so ended the conversation on a slightly more affectionate level, shall we say. I was proud of Todd, he has obviously remembered some of the things that I have brought him up to say, but that didn’t hinder him from leaving the house and slamming the door loudly. I did notice one thing though, and that was his missing piercing. As Todd was on the phone at the time, he didn’t say anything to me about it, so I called his dad.
It appears that his father told him to remove the new ring that hindered Todd’s ability to speak, looked ridiculous and no doubt got caught when brushing his teeth. Whatever I thought of Todd’s piercing, I really wanted it to be up to him to remove it and realise what a stupid idea it was, but that opportunity is now lost as the hole will have closed up by now and Todd has just thrown away €50, plus the new ring. For me, realising the mistake he’d made and then removing it on his own accord would mean growing up a bit, and I wanted that.
Oh well, you can’t always get what you want, preached the great Mick Jagger.
Apart from that, I’m bored. I applied for another job that has confused me greatly. It was listed on their vacancies page so I applied, and was asked on the page what my motivation and expected salary was. Not sure as to how many characters or words I was allowed in the little box, I kept it to a bare minimum, attached my CV and wonder if I’ll ever hear from them again.
Cooking seems to be the only valuable pass-time, but that only happens when the Twat is here. He no longer eats on Sundays as he goes elsewhere for most of the day so I settled for a CuppaSoup last night. It’s vegetable tart, spuds and glazed apples tonight, which is a bit of an odd pot, but we’ll see.
And for the first time, I actually feel sorry for Gordon Brown.
Whatever he does, he’s faulted.
>I didn’t get the job.
They have no idea what they are missing. Or perhaps they do and that’s the problem.
Mmmm, food for thought.
>Oh dear, that horrible, big cloud of hormones has descended upon Todd again. Living with that boy is worse than living with a woman and I do happen to live with a couple aswell as myself. Yesterday he left the house without a word, came back hours later for his clean washing that I said I’d fold and put back into his suitcase, but oh no. He was obviously in a rush to get somewhere and was just grabbing clothes off the clothes-horse and shoving them into a small back-pack. I wanted to protest but I value my doors slightly more these days and so let him get on with it.
Today he came back banging on the front door – OH NO, my newly varnished door – for the rest of his stuff. I knew full well that he was also here to re-charge his phone as he lent his re-charger to a friend at his boarding facility, which although kind, was a little silly of him to leave it with her all this week as he’s home for half-term. The only person with a re-charger that fits his phone is me and I certainly didn’t want him running off with it as I know that I’d never see it again. Todd tried talking to me but had trouble with his new piercing (a ring, this time – eww) and it is once again fashionable to lisp.
I ran upstairs to get his suitcase with his remaining clothes in it, came back to find that he had gone and that there was a large footprint on my front door. I’m managing Todd’s mood-swings much better these days as after a bad day I always know that there will be a good day, a bit like the sun coming out after the rain. I’m also doing a facial-hair-growth dance because when he starts shaving…
that bloody piercing will come out.
>For some incredibly obscure reason, the lime-scale in this Commune is going to double, or something, next year. It was hard to understand what and when this atrocious atrocity is going to take place as the piece of paper that I found in my post box was entirely in Flemish. I managed to pick out some words, such as ‘gratis’, ‘platsing’ (?), ‘€80′, ‘kalk’ and quite a bit more, and with the help of my mate down Tony down the road, understood it fully. Our pipes are going to be ruined. My kettle will have a nervous breakdown. My washing machine will churn out clean clothes covered in lime-scale. My dishwasher will give up. My loos won’t flush and my heating bill will treble.
I’ll give those Flems one thing: they really know how to scare the shit out of you. The water here is bad enough as it is – the pipes at the bottom of my 16 year-old dishwasher, despite pouring salt into the salt hole, are white. Tony says that this hinders the water from getting hot enough and just costs me more electricity-wise. This is like Hallowe’en all over again.
Aha and but! IF I order a water softener before 7 November, it will be slightly cheaper than normal. Is this a scam? No, the company works with the government which makes it sound all the more dodgy, but I nevertheless called the very friendly man.
“Why is the lime-scale going up so much next year?”
“Ah, Madame, that is a technical question. There are three reasons: 1. The source of your water, 2. …(I forget.)”
“And am I correct in thinking that you will install it for free?”
“Yes, although that depends on where your pipes are and an electricity outlet is needed. You will get free maintenance – “
“For how long?”
“Forever.”
And so it went on.
Looking at the options: all my appliances huddling together for lime-scale therapy before divorcing me for death – I mean, is death really better than me? – I have decided to get one.
Stop laughing, it’s not funny. Spending so much money when I am jobless is a bit silly, but these things cannot be bought in the sales. I am already buying it at a reduced rate and it apparently cleans your pipes. And I have plastic pipes which is a Good Thing, although how on earth I remembered that is beyond me. I just did. But where my water comes from should be the Commune’s fault, surely, so they should pay.
There again, they do give me a free roll of bin bags each year.
>The Twat offered me a toddy of his precious whiskey tonight. As I sat here, having cooked two meals, done the washing-up and feeling quite miserable after it all as I tend to spend more and more of my time on my own (when not watching Jeremy Kyle who keeps me ever-so entertained in a perverse and sick way), I realised that the toddy wasn’t coming.
(And I don’t mean my son.)
So I emailed Q, knowing that he had his Uber brick with him downstairs and all of a sudden, FLASH!, I heard him fly out of the living-room and into the kitchen to get a glass.
Here’s to emails, whiskey and thanks, Q.
Best European Blog For Three Years Running -
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Tell me I'm gorgeous. All you need to know about me, and more, if you ask.
About the Blog
This blog is mainly rants about my household, which has been described by a friend as a mixture of 'The Osbournes', 'Absolutely Fabulous' and 'My Family'.
People who have said this weren't smiling. Let's face it, it's bleeding obvious.
The household is made up of myself, Zoe, an oasis of calm, Coralie, a 21 year-old stroppy little cow, her twin sister, Tatiana, who bosses the Twat and me around and winds up their brother Todd, a seventeen-year old with the attention span of a goldfish.
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(The) Aardvark Speaks -
Clever, funny, captivating.
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Life with 4 kids and Len.
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A bit of this and a bit of that.
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Family life in France.
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A police-blog. It keeps me captivated and is well worth a read.
Bart -
Another Belgian. Another excellent blog.
Bibil -
She cooks, she's smart and she gets me talking French again.
Big n Juicy -
Random mumblings about random things in a random way.
Blaugustine -
Nathalie's cartoon alter ego.
Blogeois -
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Blog from Abroad -
New house, DIY, a dog, a husband, two toddlers and a baby. Oh, and Lisa, who can cook.
Blogzira -
Lucy versus Portugal. More fun than the World Cup - well, we'll see this year.
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Ellen, RIP.
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Satire at it's best.
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Quirky sketches from a quirky guy.
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I chased, I read, I laughed.
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Everything you need to know about London - and more.
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An amazing blog; funny, sarcastic and very tongue-in-cheek. It needs dusting though.
Family Affairs and Other Matters -
A continuation of a blog plus a huge picture of her arse.
Foilwoman's Diary -
When the going gets tough the tough gets going ....
F:lux -
If he does it, she blogs it. Makes good reading, not to mention the photography.
[from fuck-up to] fab! -
Female, frazzled, very kind. I'd say bonkers, too.
Gemmak -
A biker girl with a soft heart.
Goat Food -
An excellent blog written by somebody really quite lovely.
Gordon McLean -
All round genius. I owe him a Lada.
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Stories from South America.
Homo Escapeons -
He's from Canada and manages to come out with more than science and kittehs. Give him five.
How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons -
A gay couple coping with foreign languages.
Invader Stu -
An English bloke stuck in Holland, drawing great cartoons, getting married (sort of) and having accidents.
Inspector Gadget -
The first police-blog that made me realise just what else is out there. Incredible, fascinating - read the others.
John Strain -
Sense and sensibility with a touch of sparkle.
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Life and musings of an English teacher in Japan.
Jonny B's private secret diary -
Life. In Norfolk.
Kaliyuga Kronicles -
He claims to be witty, urbane and handsome. Trouble is, he's not.
Krimo's (cookery) Blog -
An interesting and funny insight into the cooking world. Full of humour, love and compassion.
Life is a Pig! -
Life after 70 and several beers.
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A simple blog that captures each moment perfectly. She also loves making lists.
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Scott Pack's blog.
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A Brit in the US.
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He's flown back.
(The) Red Mist -
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A duck with a passion for Belgian buns.
Sim -
Sim's blog - powered by Girlpants and a small child.
Smaller than Life -
This blog makes my day complete.
The Mommy Blog -
A 21st Century Mom.
Tine -
Another Belgian, a great photographer.
Troubled Diva -
I love this blog which contains
the best photo of 2002.
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Lisa and Cameron back in Blighty, with yet another daughter.
Vallalar - In the Eye of the Beholder -
A photoblog from another lovely Belgian.
VeryVeryBored - The produce of someone who is incredibly bored.
Walls Come Tumbling Down -
Kenny. He's mad.
(The) Wrath of Dawn -
A Canuck. With a chainsaw.
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A family blog living in Wales which never fails to surprise, no matter what faces Honey.
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He's absolutely off his head.
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Daily photos of Brussels by Quarsan. An excellent photoblog.
Naked Blog -
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s e v i t z d o t c o m -
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Quickos Daily News - An update on Quickos' exciting
life with the Twat !
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That's the way Life is ... -
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Watski's World -
Whacky humour.
Flowers that I'd love to receive
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Thanks To...
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Andy Hopkins for hosting and helping hugely to set this up.
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