Entries from June 2006 ↓

I’ve got 48 hours left before my final final exam is finished and I’ll be on the plane to the land of short people and loud voices. I’m in study mode, which is increasingly difficult with the football and the hot weather and fact that I’m home alone.

My front yard (above) is looking like Calcutta. Broken glass, beer mats, receipts and vomit. My front yard, I should explain, is one of Brussels’ finest public squares, just in front of the European Parliament and encircled by previously stately, Belgian and reasonably peaceful bars. In the space of six months, it’s turned into a grim, Ibiza-like Spring Break convention for Eurocrats and business-card hunters.

I thought of this when I read on a better blog than mine, that the place was turning into a disco-bar collective with awful music. The worst thing is that once the revellers have gone home, the staff parties begin. I’ve got all the bars on speed-dial, but they don’t hear the phone ring above the noise. So I trot downstairs, befuddled (what a word!) and affect my hardest “you’re inconsiderate, disrespectful and interrupting my sleep nightly” face, which is one step from my “I’ll pay you to go away” face. That normally works for five minutes or so.

With the World Cup on, it’s all day as well as all night. There are even open-air TVs, for God’s sake. I’m only glad to be leaving the country.

To the very distant backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon presidential race, On Green Dolphin Street is a nuanced, delicate tale of love, death and martinis.

Mr and Mrs van der Linden are stalwarts of the American diplomatic community during the Cold War. He is a haunted, exhausted career diplomat with a penchant for a breakfast drink. She is a model of reserve, who loves her husband unconditionally, even through her affair.

This a book without villains. Every character is flawed but sympathetic. Faulks’ writing is tight and nuanced. It keeps you reading. There are no great surprises, no cliffhangers, but it’s a grown-up book that demands your exclusive attention and is the better for receiving it.

Buy it or read more at Amazon.co.ukor Amazon.com

We have a noisy bar downstairs from our apartment. Every now and again I have to go down and ask them to be a bit quieter. Similarly, when a naff Chinese restaurant charged my Dad’s credit card seven times, I had to go and have a chat.

On both occasions, my mother suggested that it might not be a good idea to go and speak to them, afraid that they would either “set the rottweilers on me” or “punch me in the face”.

A couple of websites have been doing the rounds recently, this one about a stolen phone, and this one, about a fraudulent eBay sale. Both are examples of virtual have a go heroes, using the internet to gain massive popular support for their being hard done by. They’re naming and shaming the perpetrators and cataloguing their progress. Mum says, watch out for the rottweilers.

In other news, I caught Chris Evans, the former celebrity, on the BBC last night. The programme sent a bunch of cricketers to India to get drunk and highlight the poverty our subcontinental cousins have to deal with.

I’m not convinced that the best way to do it is by sticking an overweight white man in a slum classroom and have him cry ostentatiously through the lessons, distracting and embarrassing the kids.

The Sun covered it with four close ups of a tear-streaked, snot-nosed Evans, “dignifying human suffering with his tears” (quote courtesy of The Friday Thing).

In an interview, filmed after his blubbing, he summed up his reaction to the “juxtaposition of sport, fun, devastation, upset” with the conviction that “I’ve got to be as good as I can as a person, but I’m sure that feeling will fade …”

Incidentally, he’s cried in public before, when he got himself fired from Virgin Radio for being a drunk:

“Evans could not stop crying and kept repeating the phrase “don’t get rid of me because I have not done anything wrong”.