Not big, not clever

Lily - blanked meLily Allen rocked Brussels last night. She didn’t recognise me, even though I was close enough to smell her. She smelled alright. The guitarist was a kid I went to school with. He’s been all over the world playing a guitar. Not a bad job, I thought.

The past couple of weeks I haven’t been writing much because I wanted to be a spook, and thus discrete. But the intelligence service I applied to wasn’t intelligent enough to notice that I didn’t meet all the eligibility criteria from the off. Months and money have been wasted going to and from interviews for a job I wasn’t allowed to apply for. So now that’s a definite no, I can post naked pictures of myself on the internet computer and not worry about them falling into the hands of teerrrrists.

So to celebrate I got myself a MySpace account and am hooking up with various people I haven’t even thought about for ten years, including guitarists for famous pop stars. Reckon that’s a job I could do.

02/28/2007 | Belgium | No Comments

Big girl’s blouse

Bad Ass MoFoI’m often uncomfortable, as in fear for for my safety uncomfortable. Sitting in passenger seats in fast moving cars, sitting in passenger seats in slow moving cars, walking through Eastbourne town centre at eight on a Friday night, scuba-diving, drinking milk that’s a day out of date … that sort of thing.

But around guns I’ve always reckoned myself pretty cool. Apart from the time at school a four-foot psycho called Wingnut explained to me that with his blank-firing cadet’s rifle that if he got really close and discharged it directly into my ear then the force would be enough to evacuate my brain out the other side. (He went on to be expelled for disabling a milk-man with a high-speed ball-bearing.)

I’ve hung out with former child soldiers in Cambodia (see picture) and fired off automatic machine guns. Didn’t even flinch.

But I was particularly uncomfortable on Friday night when, as the first arrival at Tippler’s Bond party, somebody went the whole hog and discharged some sort of fire-arm about three feet away. And it wasn’t a cap-gun. So I was the first departure as well.

It was, apparently, a starting pistol. Don’t care. Call me old-fashioned, but I remember the days when you could walk into a bar in Brussels and the only danger came from paranoid drug-dealing Albanians with sharp knives and big fists …

12/05/2006 | Omphaloskepsis | 2 Comments

The Good Samaritan, part 2

There I am, standing in the queue for a taxi outside Brussels’ south station. It’s late on Sunday night. Sat on a bench thirty feet away is girl speaking on her mobile phone. A tall, trenchcoated man ambles up slowly behind her, peers into her handbag, which is placed on the seat next to her, puts his hand in and steals her wallet.

Like a slightly arthritic Superman (pre-disability), I leap to her defence. Well, meander really. I walk towards him, then walk slightly towards the door, wary of the fact he might have a knife. Or a Rottweiler. Or a large gun.

He stops. So do I. He takes a few steps sideways. So do I. He takes a few steps towards me. I almost run away. I get on my phone. Not really on it, like a horse, but on it like put it to my ear. He makes eye contact. Then starts to walk back the way he comes. I follow him (with my gaze) and he appears to put something back in the handbag.

A better Samaritan sees this and misconstrues it as the original theft, shouts “stop thief!” and gives chase.

I walk towards the girl on the phone, who’s still oblivious, and ask her if anything’s missing. She shoots me daggers and tells me to fuck off.

Who’d have thought? Me, a superhero.

10/20/2006 | Belgium, Omphaloskepsis | No Comments

tha sound of the police

I left work on the scooterino. In front of me there was a car jumping. It jumped three times and stopped. Then jumped again. The tailbacks were increasing, the horns honking, the tempers rising.
This Good Samaritan left his bike, key in the ignition, in a bus stop. In the poorest district of Brussels. With the highest gun-crime rate of all of Belgium. He offered his help. The East European lady in the driving seat smiled an uncomprehending flash of gold teeth and moved over. I jumped in.

I couldn’t start the car either. It had no clutch, but wasn’t an automatic.

I stalled twice.

Then the police arrived.

As getting out of the car and asking nicely if there was a problem, Robocop pulled up beside me and the Gypsy Queen, blue lights flashing and rolled out the loudspeaker. “Vous ne pouvez pas arreter ici! You cannot stop here!”

Wary of the implications of committing a traffic offence whilst driving without insurance in a stolen car in the company of an illegal immigrant, this Good Samaritan jumped out of the driving seat and ran away.

Happily, the scooter remained uninjured.

10/02/2006 | Belgium, Omphaloskepsis | No Comments

My neighbours are stunts

The bar next door don’t like to disturb their customers, so they only turn their music up to earbleed volume once they’ve all left. This is normally around half-past midnight, but can occasionally be as late as three in the morning.

Because I’m a walkover, I normally wake up, scratch my eyes and call them on the phone. If they hear the phone, they apologise and turn it down for a bit. If they don’t hear the phone, I get out of bed, get half-dressed and knock on the door.

This has been going on for a year.

The owner is charming, if thick, and offers me beer, which I refuse, and says he’s sorry and that it won’t happen again. Then it happens again. So I phone, get half-dressed and etc etc.

This happens three to four times a week.

Now, if Buddhism had patron saints, I’d be the patron saint of Zen. My patience is glorious, my wick never-ending and my fuse not connected to the mains. I’d rather trot sleepy-eyed to work for a year than risk falling out with my neighbours. This is disgusting. I makes me a pussy, a coward afraid to stand up for his rights and suffer for somebody else’s selfishness.

So I was as surprised as anybody, when at half-past nothing this morning I stormed, fuming, through their front door in my slippers. They looked afraid and asked if they should lower the music.

“NO, YOU CAN FUCKING TURN THE WHOLE FUCKING THING OFF ALTO-FUCKING-GETHER!!“

A moment’s silence, then some daft bitch I hadn’t met before shouted back, “Talk to me like that and you can get out.”

“Fine,” I said, a bit deflated. There were eight of them.

I heard them laugh as I walked out.

So I called the police who came and told them off. It’s not the first time I’ve done it, but this time I hung around to see the result. The result was the daft bitch standing in the street, giving me a sarcastic round of applause and mouthing off. So I mouthed off back. The police told her to shut up and get inside while I got an apology from the owner.

Then I double-locked the front-door and worried all night about the consequences of falling out with your neighbours.

Hard as nails, me.

08/31/2006 | Belgium | No Comments

The Jumping Frog and Babel

Welcome back. It’s been three weeks now and a lot has been going on. I’ll update in bite-sized chunks. It’s only four days now until I fly back to Brussels and start work again after a leave of six months. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it very much.

Mark Twain wrote a short story once about a jumping frog. He included it in a second anthology as a translation into English from a translation into French, with an attack on the Gallic language and its literary reviewers. I noticed that somebody in Italy had recently used Google to translate this website into their language. So I translated that version back into English using the same software and got:

As to kill time to Bangkok

It has been of five days of it appeal to-pleasure-hunting with Gus, posterior part still from the Laos. We have been to the restaurants Headquarters-Orientals and Japanese, the Irish banns and the Korean bars, the barbecue of the way, the bookshops, the cinematografi and the uneven place with a name like “Spanky” or “one night to Bangkok” in order to watch the human traffic.

  • Squali of the blow to the world of the ocean of the Siam.
  • They contemplate to go to the church to sing the carols, then change idea when, on I consult of the website ones of the church, you do not see nothing but the photos of small army of Institutors of the women white women-haired who ago the good actions.
  • It carries out immense, a study detailed and comparable of the malls of shopping de Bangkok. Vibration chair is based in a store of electronics in one while watching one television $60000. It admires Ferraris and Bentleys on the concourse (you do not obtain that one to Bluewater) and eats the pastry shops imported cream cooked from a chef French with a famous face.
  • It reads something from Paul Theroux (witty) or Michael Palin (verbose.)
  • It drinks the tea of the mint and smoke one sheesha in little Arabia.

Beer or three is met me with Jerry Hopkins for one. Jerry has written the biography of Jim Morrison, nobody exits alive and is hour here a resident of long duration de Bangkok. It possesses a house upcountry with its moglie but it passes the greater part of its time in the city, that it has telephone lines. After a brace of the beers in its appartment we have gone to one bar. It was empty beyond we but there was traffic through the bar. Salt-job bar is transparent was one. “they do not sell the a.lot of beer,” Jerry here said. Therefore, been born them happy.

Mrs K will arrive after tomorrow so as to the free-time to modernize this will be to a prize. It will control or two times once within, however. I have of I have of I have and all that one.

01/09/2006 | Asia 2005 | No Comments