Guess what? ME

Or, more specifically, me singing the praises of the PeleMele bookshop in Ixelles (which is defo worth a visit if you're Brussels-bound at any point) in the Eurostar magazine. 

Things you may not realise about bookshops:

1) Bookshops are inordinately busy at a time when you may think they're going to be deserted - oo, say 10am on a Saturday morning. 

2) People in bookshops at 10am on a Saturday morning get seriously narked if their browsing is impeded by a massive tripod and an arsey French photographer barking instructions to his uncooperative subject (err, me). 

3) The presence of people in bookshops is not at all conducive to one looking natural or relaxed. Not does it help one to 'look cheeky' or 'look fun' (look FUN? what do you MEAN?) when they're directed to by aforementioned photographer.  In fact, it makes the whole process excruciating in the truest sense of the word which, if my Latin A-level serves me well (AND BY GOD IT HAS), has some connection to torment of crucifixion standards. 

This is the best of a bad bunch. Really. And it's going up here as a counterpoint to the horrendously awkward you-want-me-to-look-WHAT? hunchbacked one that they'll probably actually run. 

I think I've gone off the idea of fame and fortune. Seriously, how do Miley and Ri-Ri cope? Jesus, I'd have a breakdown. 

Cinquantenaire Parc

I've lived in Brussels for a year and a half. It took me until just before Christmas to climb up to the top of the Cinquatenaire arch.  

Alternative title for this post: Stop Taking Pictures With Your iPhone And Persevere With The Fancy Lens. 

Or perhaps: I Am Turning Into My Mother And The Terror I Feel Climbing An Enclosed Spiral Staircase Is Ridiculous.  

BERLIN LOVES YOU

Berlin. Who knew you were such a pretty boy under all of that glitter and grime?

God, it was cold. Biting sunlight through webs of black trees. Sunglasses and fur coat weather for the lipsticked ladies clip-clopping along Charlottenburg’s streets. In the cobbled square home to Opera Berlin and an enormous Norwegian fir brilliant with white lights, we took in the sights of Berlin’s fanciest Christmas market. The air was laced with sugar and gluhwein and all of a sudden I was a long way from the tower blocks, Toto. 

But the tower blocks are only one side of Berlin. It’s a city of two sides, two stories, and it’s not even the predictable East/West divide of highrise and sleazy dives that might first come to mind. Visit the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe and pass a solemn moment. Play ‘spot the bullethole’ in a Pankow district wall. Then turn a corner and it morphs into a mirrorbox of seedy dreams: pushy drug dealers; tattoo parlours offering ‘intimate piercings’; 1970s instant photo booths glowing like neon shrines; a crooked finger beckoning. Even the TimeOut guide talks cheerfully of the plethora of sexual deviances Berlin caters to - the mucky pup. 

It’s a city that’s faced its past and made its peace. Berlin’s grown-up now, baby, and it’s all concrete and clubs and flick-knives and rebellion. But it’s also cobbles and bistros and oysters and ermine. 

In short, it’s bloody brilliant. 

We stayed in an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, once a gritty working-class district and the old Jewish quarter but now a thriving alterna-culture hub which is apparently, you know, a thing. The action centres on the Kulturbrauerei, or Culture Brewery, a former - you’ve got it - brewery and now a veritable village of cultural stuff, like music venues and galleries. Draped in twinkly Christmas lights, it looked pretty special. The square, Kollwitzplatz, is named after controversial artist and feminist icon Kathe Kollwitz and is bordered by a beautiful Jewish graveyard, the oldest in the city. So far, so good.

I wanted history, really; wanted to wallow in some 20th century misery (I've been reading a lot of Plath for my A-levellers' coursework, what can I say). Bleak Luminal dreamscapes and long faces of Nazi murder in monochrome fastforwarding to the Wall Death Strip and daring Eastern Bloc escape stories. Berlin, you didn’t disappoint. The Topography of Terror is the former site of the Secret Police Headquarters, although only the foundations remain. After the war, the Allies puzzled over what do with these cenotaphs of cruelty. Some, like in Cologne, became council offices and spent years hiding behind civic anonymity. This one was bulldozed in the 50s, and instead the Visitors’ Centre tells its tale of the Volk-myth, hatred and murder. Photographs everywhere. Shiny-shoed SS cadets and smiling Auschwitz guards smoking cigarettes and photographs of people other people loved, Jews and gypsies and homosexuals. 

Berlin sprawls. We walked and walked and walked. Round to Checkpoint Charlie for a peek behind the Iron Curtain. Then to East Side Gallery for an open air graffiti exhibition of peace and tolerance slogans. To Tante Emma for an Erdinger. A saxophonist playing Careless Whisper at the Reichstag.

You get a feel for a city seeing it on the move I reckon, and we got caught up in the rush hour crush: edgy girls with blunt platinum fringes and interesting knitwear line the platforms; boys decked in Soviet fashions sporting tattoo sleeves and open beer bottles; hard-faced women in headscarves; posters for club nights with names like Suicide Circus and Deep Inside; sallow faces and trembling hands; metro trains scuttling like bright yellow bugs from and into the dark; halls of mirrors on wheels; unpronounceable station names and glorious, glorious Art-Deco turquoise tiles. 

Berlin, you were a total thrill. 

Have you ever been? Would you? 

The Story of Furniture

"After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and lustre of different woods, their colours, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents - "sometimes, when you're not sure what you have, it's easiest just to take a sniff" - spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood..."

"Downstairs - weak light, wood shavings on the floor - there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of the pieces as 'he' and 'she', in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he'd taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands."

"To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries - lives longer and gentler than human life - sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the glare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was." 

***

I'm still reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

On the morning that Theo Decker is due to have a meeting with his school Principal, possibly about to be excluded for standing with his friend Tom Cable as he smoked a cigarette on school premises, an explosive device tears apart a New York art gallery. For the second time that week, Theo find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He escapes unscathed; his mother is killed. 

At his feet in the ruins of the gallery, he spots a painting his mother admired: Fabritius' The Goldfinch. Miraculously, it's completely intact. Dazed, shaking, he slips it into his bag and picks his way through the debris to the outside world. 

The good stuff thus far: well, the description of the blast is bloody impressive; and written before 9/11, h'apparently. And the grief of a teenage boy - the injustice and impossibility of it - "there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently" - is beautifully rendered. Some days his whole body rings like a tuning fork and he watches film after film, numb. Other days, he turns the shower up to full power, gets in and howls. 

And I mean, who couldn't love passages like the above? 

Buuuut - and I'm resisting the urge to say that there IS a but, but there is - look, there it is, just there, three of them, in fact - I'm now just about 300 pages in and things are getting a bit strange. Theo, having been reunited with his dear old Pa and shipped out to Vegas to live with him, seems to have hooked up with a new friend, Boris, and is turning into a bit of a wastrel. There's been a lot of bloody fist fights and throwing up in swimming pools. 

Anyway. I shall persevere and let you know. 

***

In other news, the furniture passages above reminded me of a kiddies' book I bought ages ago in Sedbergh and inspired me to dig it out and make a framed print a bit like my Swimming, Swimming, In The Swimming Pool project. Guess what I'm doing this weekend? Apart from watching series 2 of The West Wing and making a voodoo doll of Donna/Dana, obvs. And Mandy, if I have the time.  

National Stress Awareness Day

So, a certain lovely blogger brought this Blog Something Every Day in November challenge to my attention, and for one crazy moment I thought, I can do that, YEAH MAN, bring it ON!

And then I remembered that I'm a fan of of the Blogging Disappearing Act (see here, here and, well, pretty much every third post on this blog for further evidence). 

Foolish Laura. Overestimating your productivity once again, I see.

But then today's prompt was National Stress Awareness Day and I thought, well, surely I have something to say about that. I mean, I have a marking pile that deserves its own postcode, an exhaustion-induced twitchy eyelid and the seven worst weeks of the academic year in terms of slog-value ahead. Oh, and an ongoing IBS saga (glad you checked in tonight, eh?) 

Are you a stresshead? I am. I wrote a poem when I was eight and I can still remember one of the lines: 'I really am a worrier/I hate a telling off.' Laureate-worthy, I know. It's not so much the telling off that bothers me now, but the worrier bit's still true. I'm a people pleaser. I want everyone to be OK. I'm utterly obnoxious in the way that I believe that it's only me - no one else - who's capable of doing it, whatever 'it' is: marking the essay, putting up the wall display, whatevs. But in the meantime I'm smiling at everyone and trying not to offend them and worrying that I've trodden on their toes and....argh. It's a 'mare. I wish I didn't care so much - about an email to a parent, about my crooked teeth, about the phone charger being on the floor and not in the phone-charger-box (Hello Anal-Phone Charger-Obsessives-Anonymous, are you there?) in the drawer - but I do. 

And actually, that's a lie about wishing I didn't care so much. It's important to care. But not to the point of going completely bonkers, eh? 

So what words of wisdom do I have? Well, I'd start with DON'T follow the advice of a Deputy Head I worked with onceuponatime who said of another member of staff, "I mean, she said she was stressed. STRESSED? Pfft! I mean, every member of the Senior Leadership Team's got a prescription for beta blockers MINIMUM! It's how you get promoted in this school!" 

Um. Okaaaay. Life doesn't have to be like that, you know. 

Be strict with yourself. Have a cut-off point. Take a breath. Be appropriately selfish. Say 'no' when you need to so that your 'yes' means summat. Make a sign for your office door that reads 'DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - GO AWAY' for when you want some uninterrupted time - you know, for marking, or staring agape at Buzzfeed. Make time to do something you want to do - paint your nails, write a blog post, go to a dogs' home and take one of those poor buggers for a walk - anything to help you come back to what you normally do with renewed vigour. 

And, in desperate times, make sure you have a well-scheduled trip somewhere - oo, say to London - to meet up with friends, go to the theatre, eat Mexican food in Soho and drink cocktails until it's the wee hours and an eye-rolling waitress tells you to DUFO*. 

And there you have my weekend plans. Eek. Can't wait. Hope you have something similarly lovely planned?


* It's an acronym. Got it?

**pictures from vhmckenzie here. 

Holiday-ay

I mean holiday-ay in the manner of a Madonna singalong. Thinking about it, though, personal gusto reserves are pretty depleted after an eight-week half-term and I have a bit of a sore throat so if I were to sing it I'd probably sound more like Robbie in The Wedding Singer than Lady Madge. 

Everybody spread the word
I live in my sister's baaaaaasement....

We've had two training days (two!) Thursday and Friday this week, which was a blessed moment of inspiration on somebody's part. Nothing puts a body of staff in a collective sunny mood like wearing jeans, eating free pain au chocolat and having some time to climb down from the top of one's tree and have a bit of a tidy up. My office is spotless and the world is MINE for the taking!

We also had the obligatory pre-half-term training session, except this one was really rather good. The speaker (this guy, formerly of The Bill and Casualty, ooo) won me over pretty quickly when he began with a Hamlet quote on self-doubt - "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams" - and continued by using Henry V as an example of inspirational leadership. 

Henry V. Worrrr. The good stuff. 

Lots was learned, including the Important Soundbite that sometimes people need to unburden themselves - also known as whinging - and THAT'S OK. I mean, if they're genuinely trying to derail fundamental ways of working then it probably needs dealing with, but everyone needs a good old moan now and again. If instead you vow to hate them forever and record their spiteful words in your Little Book of Personal Grudges, you're actually being more of a Macbeth than a Henry V AND WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT TURNED OUT, DON'T WE?

So I've had two days of sort-out time and inspo and I'm currently busying myself by making a sign for my office door which reads 'DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - GO AWAY' for when I'm having a night-before-Agincourt moment. 

We're up at 3:30am tomorrow to get a flight to Spainland. A week in the company of leathery 11am brandy-loving Brits awaits.  I cannot wait to be one of their number.  

Baby, baby, baby you should see me now

So when you build your house

then call me

home

***

So no great shakes here. 

Work and that. Busy busy.

Oh, apart from I went to see Fleetwood Mac. You know, Fleetwood Mac. No big deal. The greatest band of all time (ssh, no one tell Jarvis).

Let me list the trials involved in seeing Fleetwood Mac midweek in Antwerp:

1) Getting the tram back INTO Brussels from work and getting train back OUT of Brussels to Antwerp (trial admittedly eased by a cheeky Kriek and a weirdo cassis dessert)
2) Staying in a shabby budget Ibis which smelt of fags and the lobby of which was full of men wearing knock-off sportswear carting about hundreds - hundreds - of black binliners. 
3) An ill-advised burger at midnight. Stevie does whet the appetite somewhat. 
4) Getting the 5:44 train back to Brussels the following morning after four beers and ill-advised burger to go and teach and think and work all day. 

The final verdict is, however, that all trials were completely Worth It. 

Here follows my thank you letter to the Mac:

Dear John McVie, 

You didn't say a right lot (um, that would be nothing), but you did wear a very nice white flat cap. 

*

Dear Mick Fleetwood,

You look more and more like Santa Claus as the years go by. 

Your drum solo was brilliant. 'Are you with me?' YEEEEEEEAH!

*

Dear Lindsey Buckingham, 

I thought you were rather dashing, if a bit skeletal-faced. Then you started to sweat quite a lot (I appreciated the sweat.)  

PS Tusk was wicked. 

*

Dear Miss Nicks,

I'm so in awe I can't bring myself to write 'Dear Stevie'. 

You blew me away with your tambourine and your ribbons and your dress like a medieval bat. 

You owned that stage like a luxe version of Goldie Hawn. 

And the hair; the impossible mermaid hair. Just wow. 

I think that bit where they take the mick out of your voice on South Park is a bit cruel, to be honest. You are a cathedral of quivering awesomeness and I bow before your greatness. 

*

Dear Stage Designers, 

All of the stuff in the background was brilliant. 

Spinning worlds and exploding stars and rising smoke and snarling bears and blinking eyes and swirling psychedelica. A+ for everything.

Geometric waves and the like

What's that? You want a poor quality video of the last 36 seconds of Landslide? Well, you've come to to the right place! Enjoy.