"You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you want to fart. You’re heading for a breakdown, better pull yourself apart. " - John Cooper Clarke

Monthly Archives: January 2010

TQOTD

Thursday, January 28, 2010 – 8:11 am

“Andy, have we got any imodium?”
“I dunno, but if there’s something wrong with your botty it’s best to let it all out.”
“Oh christ – how long for?”
“Well now, how full of shit are you?”

Said with true love. Pfffft.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (8)

There are pros to unemployment.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 – 8:25 am

I miss Coralie terribly these days and keep calling her sister ‘Coralie’ which must be driving her batty. (Tatiana, that is, not Coralie.) So far, I have heard via Coralie’s boyfriend and father that she had arrived safely and is sharing a room with a friend. Her boyfriend added that as of yet she has no internet connection so everytime Tatiana comes home from college I ask her if she has any news or if Coralie’s FaceBook page has been updated.

So far, nada :(

Going to Tenerife is a good thing for Coralie, but I did think that we’d be able to communicate somehow. I wonder how many hours a day she’s working – maybe she’ll surprise me by sending me a postcard, although that really isn’t her style. We’ll see.

I do hope everybody is voting for the blogs that I mentioned further below in this year’s Bloggies and if you don’t, then I shall have no other option than to put up a photo of me squeezed into my SLN (Sexy Little Number), a sight that you really don’t want to see unless you get kicks out of white velcro, white plastic and bright yellow foam.

That was a threat, in case you didn’t get it.

And as I am a lady of intolerable leisure I have decided to go out today. I’m taking Tatiana out for lunch. Hell, it took me 2 months to save up for this and Tatiana is great company.

Those sandwiches had damn well better be good.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

When I sleep-talk, please do not reply.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 – 9:20 am

That Twat has done it again. There I am in the land of slumber, occasionally spurting out the odd phrase to which the Twat takes great pleasure in replying to. Apparently I was yapping away quite a lot the other night but only half-consciously remember saying “Oh, he’s pretty harmless really – in fact he’s quite cuddly.”

I remember that part of the dream perfectly until suddenly ‘somebody’ replied “well thank you.” That wasn’t what the person in my dream said so I can only presume that the Twat was up to his old tricks again and trying to converse with a semi-conscious woman who just happens to be talking a load of rubbish. Strangely enough, when I woke up, I told the Twat to leave me and my dreams alone.

“Yes, hon, but it’s not often that you compliment me.”
“There’s a reason for that. I was dreaming about Ian Hislop.”

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (5)

Dancing with wolves.

Monday, January 25, 2010 – 10:29 am

Todd told me that on Saturday night he was going down to our local as they were celebrating their 25th anniversary. I called up my mate Tony down the road to see if he was going as I was thinking of going just to keep an eye on Todd.

Ok, I wanted to piss Todd off for no real reason whatsoever apart from the fact that he hadn’t come home the night before.

Tony called me to see if I was still going and I finally found a top, some jeans and yes, my kitten-heels that I have never worn before, but are so comfortable. That is not what my body is telling me two days later as dancing in shoes with heels that look more like spikes is Not A Good Idea.

Tony and I arrived at our local that was in full swing, grabbed a beer and searched for anyone that we knew. I spotted Todd at a table talking to a very pretty girl and her dad – it turned out that she goes to the same school as Todd. Todd and I were soon dancing together although he was making some rather suggestive moves during “Billy Jean” that I thought inappropriate when so close to me (due to the small dance floor – he didn’t do it on purpose) that I stepped back. One of my heels made contact with a man’s foot and I saw him limp away whilst glaring at me furiously.

We danced for hours which was good as I switched to orange juice so as to be able to stay upright in my spikes.

Somebody, however, was very impressed with Todd’s dancing and he and his wife were applauding him – and buying the boy beer. Well, he’s 16 and I couldn’t really say no. It turned out that the man, who Tony has known for years, works at one of the Flemish TV stations and was suggesting all sorts of things to Todd, such as hiring him as a dancer at parties etc. It all seemed very respectful.

The man drove his wife home but came back and carried on talking to Todd, right next to Tony and me. I noticed the beers had switched to Barcardi and coke, but Todd was still fine. I guess he has hollow legs. At one point I was asked to dance by some jerk who obviously thought he was far too good-looking for anyone else and offered to buy me an orange juice. I sat down with his friend and 15 year-old god-daughter who made it very clear that she couldn’t stand the man.

We got chatting and at one moment I had to pee so went off to the toilets. I chuckled to myself as I passed the men’s urinals only to see that the jerk had followed me in. But Tony was standing right next to him. If he hadn’t been having a wizz I’d have kissed Tony for being such a silent but excellent body-guard.

We carried on dancing until the early hours of the morning and finally Todd and I left with Tony. We saw the man from TV pull out in his camper-van and then Todd confessed to Tony that the man had tried to get it on with him. It was pretty harmless, just a stroke of the thigh, but enough to wake Todd up. The man had also offered to let Todd sleep in his camper-van…..

I felt shocked. I was never far away from Todd – the bar is too small, and Tony has eyes and ears in the back of his head. It was obvious that Todd wanted to talk to Tony so I let him carry on, and Tony gave him advice which I think made Todd feel better. The man in question also gave Todd a visiting card but on reflection, it didn’t say much about the well-known Flemish TV channel.

I should have gone to the police then, but Todd didn’t want to. He finally told his dad last night who will definitely go to the police, but as the parent who was there, I think that they may want a statement from me. I have no idea what to say as I am racked with guilt – but then no one else saw anything either.

Screw parenting manuals – all you need to do as a parent is to be there for them.

But sometimes not even that is enough.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , , | Comments (25)

And so she’s gone.

Saturday, January 23, 2010 – 9:56 am

Well, Coralie came around yesterday to grab a few of her belongings here to take to Tenerife and then said goodbye. She is 20, a young adult and therefore I should be pleased that she’s going to work in Tenerife for 4 months to improve her Spanish so that she’ll get her degree at the end of this year, but somehow, I feel as though my heart-strings are being tested.

Her boyfriend is visiting her in March and I mentioned that that would be a good time to visit Morocco because if she doesn’t go there while so close she’ll kick herself forever afterwards.

“But why can’t I go on my own?”

I looked at her boyfriend who told her sweet things about attractive, single women visiting Morocco from abroad that end rather unhappily. Did I mention that Coralie is studying tourism? The idiot.

However, I got plenty of hugs before my daughter left to pack and then go to her farewell party, as well as promises of keeping in touch which will definitely test her communication skills with the rest of the family.

Coralie is on her way to the airport now and I hope that she has a good time. I miss her already but she’ll be home sooner than I expect.

I’m off in search of comfort food now.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

That was a surprise.

Friday, January 22, 2010 – 8:48 am

The Twat woke me up this morning by poking me on the nose and then telling me that I’m a finalist for the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 Bloggies. Pretty cool, I thought and decided to get up and see if any of my nominations made it to the finalists and yes!, 2 or 3 are there so please do go and vote for:

Naked Blog in the best GLBT,
Cake Wrecks in a couple of categories,
3Limes in the best Latin-American category despite my having put them in the Best African category. Trinidad and Tobago sounds African, doesn’t it?
Belgian Waffle for the Best European and so many more.

I did nominate others that are finalists too, but there’s a start. It’s also a good way to find other good blogs and there is already one that I am thinking of stalking….

Ok, this is shameless promotion, but I thought I’d give it a try.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (15)

Pathetically miserable for no reason at all.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 – 10:41 am

On Saturday, Coralie leaves this country to work in a hotel in Tenerife for 4 months as part of her degree in tourism.  I was jumping for joy at one point – the stroppy little cow will give me some relief for a while, but somehow, as a parent  wishing your offspring to leave the nest as soon as possible, the joy is short-lived.  Especially as Coralie is at her dad’s this week and won’t be home on Friday as there is some sort of a farewell party with her friends.

Coralie’s plane is at 1pm.  Neither her father nor her mother are allowed at the airport (Charleroi), and she insists that her sister, Tatiana, drives her there along with Coralie’s boyfriend, her best friend and someone else.  My first-born (of the twins) is about to start leaving the nest, and that saddens me greatly,  far more so than I thought it would.  Four months is nothing.  I’ll be glad to have the house back without her nicking our clothes, my hair-dryer, make-up remover, etc.

And yet I will be sad to see her go, and it will no doubt affect her sister even more so.  I wonder what she will be like when she returns, apart from shockingly tanned.

Oh hell, it’s not as if she’s off for a sex-change.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Who’da thunk.

Sunday, January 17, 2010 – 6:10 pm

Seven years ago I was dared to start a blog called ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’ by my very own twat of a partner.  Several thousand comments and several thousand posts later and here MBIAT is, seven years on after two makeovers, a book and a move onto WordPress.  Last year was a bit of a mish-mash and MBIAT almost came to a standstill, but I decided to carry on despite the odds against me.

My daughters were 13 when I started, my son was 9 and I was a spring chicken aged 39.

Time.  It goes by so quickly.  Enjoy each and every day.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (24)

A Zoeism.

Saturday, January 16, 2010 – 5:00 pm

“Everybody has a squeezy ball except me.  I had a heart but now it’s gone.”

The Twat looked at me and repeated,

“I had a heart, but now it’s gone….”

“I don’t even have to work for it anymore.”

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (7)

Zoe isn’t a very nice person.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 – 10:02 am

Last week, when I went shopping before the Domestic Goddess kidnapped me, I got annoyed with the woman in front of me, slowly making her way out of the shop.  As she meandered along at a pace that even Hermie would find slow, chattering away to her son, I found myself getting more and more frustrated.  Suddenly, about a couple of metres from the exit door, my trolley ran into the back of one of her ankles.  I didn’t do it, my trolley did.  They have a mind of their own, I tell you, and this trolley had a really mean streak in it as I saw the poor woman’s face, wincing in pain as she looked over her shoulder at me and said under her breath “the stupid cow”.

Time always stands still in moments like these, when something or someone for whom you are responsible goes and attacks another person.  I garbled an apology in French when suddenly a rush of air passed by close to my ear…“the stupid cow”.

Now that was an extremely silly thing to say out loud in the supermarket near me as there are a lot of English people who go there, as well as Belgians, Germans, Greeks – well, quite a lot of varied nationalities.  And then there is me.

I come from Planet Nasty.

The woman, who my trolley rammed, limped out and sat down on the bench just outside.  Having been rammed into by several trollies – mainly under the complete supervision of my own off-spring – I know just how much it can hurt.  But when I heard the woman speaking English that sudden rush of air went passed my ear again…“the stupid cow”.

Well, wasn’t that a mistake?  Nobody should insult another person (unless it happens to be your partner, husband or child) in that supermarket, full of expats – mainly English and Germans – in their mother-tongue.  No matter how much pain you may be in.

I put my trolley-with-it’s-mind-of-it’s-own to one side, hoping that it wouldn’t attack anybody else and approached the woman in pain looking as sympathetic as possible.

“I am so sorry – is there anything at all that I can do for you?”

The woman stared at me, even more shocked than before because behold! I am a native English-speaker.

She blushed and whispered that she was perfectly fine now that she realised that I had heard her lame insult and even spoke the same language rather fluently, I must say.

I hate shopping trollies as trying to control them puts my back out, but if you want to call me “the stupid cow”, then you are really, really going to have to try harder.

Because that is simply pathetic.


Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Famous Belgium.

Saturday, January 9, 2010 – 10:42 am

Belgium does have celebrity status, especially these days when we have Herman van Rompuy as the Head of the European Council.  Yes, our former Prime Minister had to give up that job to fit in his new, busy schedule meaning that Yves LeTerme had to take up the job as Prime Minister again.  A job he tried to worm out of at least once previously.

Edt tells me that Yanina Wickmayer, someone of whom I had never heard of, has just won the ASB Classic Tournament in Auckland, another tennis tournament that I had never hear of as I thought they were all in Australia where we shall have another Belgian winner, either Justine Hénin or Kim Clijsters as they are both playing in the tennis final today.

But my favourite winners are dead.

However, they did manage to win the 2009 Darwin Awards by trying to grab a substantial amount of money from an ATM with the help of dynamite.  A bit too much dynamite, it appears.  Dinant will never be the same again.

Don’t ever tell me that Belgium is boring.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (20)

I want me back!

Thursday, January 7, 2010 – 12:42 pm

That Domestic Goddess has got hold of me again and yesterday, after I did the washing-up, I made a huge pan of spaghetti bolognese sauce, washed up again and cleaned the kitchen, fed myself and decided to be a couch potato for a while.  When I had had enough of that, I returned to the kitchen, removed two portions of spag bol sauce and put them into a smaller pan and then filled 4 tubs with the remaining sauce which resulted in total of another 10 portions.  Each tub was labelled mentioning the content and the number of portions and then put in the freezer.

But the person who has stolen me didn’t stop there.  She went on to wash up again, clean up, again and then go through the entire house emptying all the bins to add to the large bin bag to prepare for the Twat to take out.

Fortunately, the Domestic Goddess who has stolen me thinks that 6pm is a good time to sit down with a glass of wine and play online Scrabble.  She has also found a way of getting to my letter box that doesn’t involve walking around half of my house as she obviously knows that I am allergic to the cold.  I simply went into the garage, opened the door and voilà, my post box just happens to be beside the garage door.  This DG obviously has all her screws tightly in as for some reason, I had never thought of fetching my post via the garage – which may or may not say a lot about me.

If this DG could be as successful at finding a job as she is at cooking and cleaning then I wouldn’t really mind.  And seeing as I haven’t seen my parakeets for a couple of days I think I’m going to go and veg out in front of the TV.

Or search the garden for a penguin.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (15)

Erm, I think I’m turning into my Ex

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 – 7:00 pm

Parakeet

No, I haven’t grown a penis or started to shave my face, but I’ve suddenly become incredibly interested in birds. Birds have always fascinated me, more so perhaps, because I lived with an ornithologist for around 10 years.

Last week, while glued to an episode of Desperate Housewives I was suddenly distracted by a large green thing outside. The light was fading but I was determined to take a photo of the green thing, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a parakeet. It was just on the other side of the hedge – normally they stay up high in the branches of the silver birch trees nearby – I’d never seen one so close.

Finally it flew off to join a couple of others that were in the cherry tree at the bottom of my garden, before flying off elsewhere. I was checking to see if it would come back the following day which it did, and is now a regular amongst the great tits, chaffinches etc.

Yesterday, as I was waiting patiently for my green friend to pop by I glanced down at Hermie’s snow-covered garden only to see the parakeet in my garden. Yes, MY garden. Then it struck me that the green bird below doesn’t feed from the ground and that although it was green and more or less the same size as the parakeet, it’s tail was shorter, it had a bright red head and a very long beak.

A woodpecker! A green one! I once had a great spotted woodpecker (although I suspected, from the noise it was making, that it was a white-backed woodpecker) hacking away into one of the cherry trees, but had never seen a green woodpecker until yesterday.

I took about 20 photos of it but the overcast sky and lack of a good zoom lense meant that it didn’t look like much at all. I’m all a-flutter with my new friends and I wonder who will visit next.

I’d like an owl. Or a penguin.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged | Comments (18)

What is it with black eyes in my family?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 – 10:40 am

Coralie came home one night and went straight to bed. The next morning I scolded her for not having taken off her make-up.

“It’s not make-up, Mum, it’s a black eye.”
“A black eye? How?”

It took a while to get any sense out of her but finally she told me ‘her’ version of the truth.

Now she may be on the smaller side of the scale, but would you believe your daughter if she gave you this answer?

“I walked into a chair.”

Her boyfriend looked at me and raised his eyebrows, while I was trying to visualise a chair high enough for Coralie to walk into.

Nope. I still don’t buy her story.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Thank god it’s over.

Monday, January 4, 2010 – 10:00 am

The christmas bug bit me so hard this christmas just gone that I couldn’t even be bothered to go to the christmas market in Brussels. I’ve been enough times and everything is terribly over-priced. It used to be fun, but now it’s more of a chore. Perhaps I’ll feel more christmassy next year, but I highly doubt it. It may have been our last christmas spent with the girls, although I can still imagine Tatiana hanging around next year. We’ll see.

It’s time to take down the decorations which involve the removal of 3 candles, although, knowing me, they’ll stay there all year unless the de-cluttering bug gets the better of me. The Twat is no longer wallowing in Deep Heat and my hands no longer stink of the stuff. The poor man was in so much pain that he couldn’t take his inhalers for his asthma properly, but he seems to be well on the mend.

The new year was spent eating and watching TV until some silly time in the morning, the children were out and at midnight we did a tour of the block to see the fireworks going off in people’s gardens. Only we were a bit late and missed them all.

The girls start their exams this week and Todd goes back to boarding school. Before I know it, it will be 23 January, the day Coralie goes for her stage, working in a hotel in Tenerife for 4 months, the lucky girl. I hope that her boyfriend gets to visit her and they use the chance to visit Morocco, because if he doesn’t, I may very well empty my money box and get there myself.

As for me, I’ll be job-hunting. It kills time, if nothing else.

Share/Bookmark
By Zoe | Posted in Belgium | Tagged , | Comments (3)