I keep thinking of houses I've spent time in - not even lived in, just visited - and wanting to cry because I'll never go back there. I've left too many houses behind. I remember that one in Italy that was open to the cicadas and the night and the spotlights in the garden. The pieces of pottery she showed us, Roman jars hauled up from the sea bed yesterday, bubbled with casts of sea creatures, limescale. The quiet emptiness of the inside, with the modern art and modern sofa. Everything around the hearth of the outside world. The garden. Spotless and quiet and new. And sitting outside eating pasta and smelling the lemon that's supposed to get rid of mosquitos.
Does trying hard count?
I don't know any more - or don't think I know - what good writing is. I've seen it and it's not like mine. I don't know what I'm doing. I throw handfuls of clay together and I think it's a vase until I see a real vase. I'm a monkey playing with a typewriter. I have lost everything.

so this is how it feels to be lonely

got a friend who does everything ten years before everyone else. Even her name was odd at school, now it's trendy. she's doing Valley of the Dolls style now, it'll be the next big thing.
walk through a suburb, watch the pretty small houses in the slanted autumn light, the sharp shadows of fallen leaves. catch a leaf. make a wish. see all these places, the chalet with the withered ivy and the small terrace garden in the back, the brown and orange seventies block, the deco 20s block in smart contrasting brick, the sensible shoe of a forties solid pad. all these places I could live could have a life in and none of them would be right none of them would work. they only work when I can't have them.
in other worlds there are versions of me who live in all these places, who are happy. who fit in and have a community and have friends and aren't lonely and see a shape to their lives.
I feel as if there is nothing inside me.

Agnosticism

Doubt is like being a fish in three dimensions of transparency, with no plant called faith to hide behind.
I changed my fish’s water the other day. I put in a new filter which circulates the water, drawing it through a sponge to pump it out again, clean. It hadn’t struck me that this would mean the fish, which had spent its entire life with me hanging simple in still water, or lying supine against a leaf, would suddenly find himself beset by steep currents, which whirled him around his tank and sucked his food (red mosquito larvae) away from him anti-clockwise.
As soon as I put him into the moving water, he panicked. He shot up to the surface, slapping the meniscus with his body, then nose-dived to the gravel. For a fish whose most strenuous daily activity usually involves proceeding slowly around his tank with the air of a grave abbot moving from refectory to chapel, this was startling stuff. I turned off the water filter, and he sagged in a corner, metaphorically clutching his heart and panting.What must it be like to feel your world, your reality, suddenly move in a way you could never have expected, could not have credited or understood if it was explained to you? To see the locus of your time and space, the base material of your reality, begin to move as if it were a train pulling out of a station? For the fish if not for me, the bush was burning, the atom was split.

On ugliness

Ugliness: even the word looks ugly. It sounds ugly. Say it. Ug, ug, it's a caveman throat-choke, a gag-reflex. The awkward ending, -ness, is glued on there as if it might fall off. A hack job of a word. Beauty, by comparison, is, if not a beautiful word, then a graceful one. The B leans back as if to admire its odalisque tail, the down-stroke of the y swings like a cat's tail, balancing the stretched ballerina arm of the B's up-stroke. In between is eau, water - pure and clean, a tasteful colour, like eau-du-nil. A word composed purely of vowels seems to vanish into its own transparency. Eau is a sigh, a zephyr breath.
Maybe it would be different if ugliness meant beauty, and vice-versa. Maybe then I would be admiring the mirror back-to-back symmetry of the gl, that in Italian is transparent as eau. I might admire the curling fronds of the ness, its curling over itself, its hissing train. But it still begins with a grunt, not a sigh. Maybe if ugliness meant beauty, ugliness would be beauty.

Writing is work, a lot of people say so. I say so. Writing is hard slog, nose to the grindstone stuff, it's technique, you work at it, you're not born with it. Talent doesn't exist, persistence does. Remember this is hard work, lad, tha'll have to put in the elbow grease if tha wants to be a writer. But is it really this much hard work or are a lot of people embarrassed about how easy it is? Male children's writers, in particular, adopt hard frowns, talk about paring down sentences, talk about people not realising how difficult it is, how they are in for a nasty shock. Women are more likely to talk about how much fun it is. I think it's okay for it not to really be that hard either. Don't hate yourself for being a writer, just forget about it and write.

Other people are searching for Robbie Williams

It means a lot to me, new windows in an old house. Not sure how. It has meaning, accumulated through days and years of watching net curtains shiver in the up-heat from radiators beneath. Stretched spines. Each house is sandwiched together with wires and pipes, contains a veining of enabling material, buried in walls, floors and ceilings. I know this network only as a hot point on the floor, a plug point.
The new windows are plastic, blunt and ugly. The old house is wooden, gracious, harmonious. Yet never rich enough to be protected.

Thought for the day: It is quite possible to have friends you really don't like at all, in fact it is possibly more common than otherwise.

Two women, one a mother with a toddler, one without. Both English speaking, but not as a first language. Both relatively affluent in appearance. In the children's section of a bookshop.
The toddler played with the books as they tallked. The non-mother was intent on buying presents for the toddler - picking up books, "Look. Don't you think this would be nice? He could play with the wheels. Or this. It's lovely, look at the flaps..." The mother resisted. "You have already bought him all these presents, and it's very nice, but..." The non-mother over-rode her, refused to listen. The mother's voice rose, quavered, not quite daring to openly revolt. "Too expensive," she protested. "But we see you so rarely," the other replied, "we would buy you more if we saw you more often."
The power struggle tensed the muscles in the air between them. One had something that challenged the other: the toddler, a baby, motherhood. The other had money, power - and somehow, back in the unknown mists of their shared history, a social ascendency that made her friend defer to her. Lady Bountiful. She didn't or wouldn't hear the genuine anxiety in her friend's voice as she tried to resist presents she didn't want. Now and then the mother tried to offer something, say 'Well, then, I must buy you something. I will get this and you can get this, cheaper one." A blank negative met her. There was persistence, atttrition. They were polite to each other, as two horses straining at the rope of a shared social plough. Relationships betwene girls turn very easily into relationships between women. Moebius band leads out of school, and no-one sees where the twist comes. We're back where we started, in the first year. And if she's going to buy your toddler presents, take him over, maybe that's the first and only time you can say no. Because she did say no, that woman, in the end, and it was hard, but she did it.

Balconies (pt.1)

We're constantly surrounded by buzz, by hum, by electric undercurrents of sound. There's no silence in a city night, no dark either, just a dirtier light. I hear my radiator ticking, my fridge humming, my computer whirring, cars outside keening, a faint hiss from the light bulb in the extractor hood above the cooker. That's all I can hear, if I turned them off I could hear more, I expect.
Outside, in the light well, the pigeons groom, bustle, hustle, push and sidle. On the cranes as you walk past, sometimes you hear squawking from above you - twittery squawking, harsh as gossip, a whole collection of it - and you look up and the crane, the swing arm that salutes the sky, is dotted with black spots that are birds. They must think them the tallest barest trees in the city. Sometimes you look up and it;s the parakeets. YOu have to squint against the light of the sky - white, grey, marble - to see them, but then you see the flash of green and there it is, the parakeets.
I want to tell you about the balconies, how there are so many of them. Brussels has the same weather as London, more or less, but it behaves as if it has a Medterranean climate. That's why I like it. London says 'We have rain all the time, let us not build balconies as we shall never sit on them.' Brussels says 'We have rain all the time. Let's build lots of balconies - elegant balconies, balconies with screen doors, balconies for Italian grannies to lean upon and fan themselves on, for mothers to hang out washing strung across the street on little pulleys, for children to play on tricycles on, for cats to peer over, for flags to be hung from when football games are on (or the country is in crisis), for strings of garlic and onion to be hung up to dry. Let us allow our facades to crack and crumbles in that nice interesting way they have, let us string electric wire haphazardly on the outside of buildings, let us put up a neon sign upon a neo-classical facade to advertise a Wok Shop.' Same premise, different conclusion. These balconies are the opposite of a raindance, they're a sundance. And so Brussels acquires a little Mediterranean laissez-faire, while London bites its nails and tries to get to work on time.
You can be happy in an art nouveau house, even if it's not very tasteful.

Christmas lion

My flat is so silent and new. Not new, new, just got a new skin on underneath the old one. The arches are gleaming wood, very Brussels, the echo of deco on lino. An anagram of lino is lion. I tread on fresh lion, I notice the smell: clean, plastic, pleasant.
Last night to a Greek cultural event in Place des Martyrs. Brussels is made for Christmas, the squares with their shadows thrown by the elegant balconies, wrought iron or swelling white plaster balustrades, the cobblestones (in my part of town, pigeon-coloured) shining that brazen sodium rain-dissolved light. Coals burning above us instead of in our hearths. The cracking plaster offering a Victorian interpretation of the night. The boarded up cinemas, and beneath it all, us in scarves and coats, feeling special.

What makes someone move to a new country? Wanting to be someone else, wanting to put on a new past? What do I get out of it? I get a return to childhood, where I was a comfortable, cushioned foreigner. I get to walk down the street and look at the leaves and not have to understand anyone. I get to not have to worry about not fitting in, for there's no way I could fit in. I get to be a ghost. I get to be an onlooker, understanding no-one, nothing. I get to be a bystander. Is anything that happens to me here real?
What does she get out of it? The same thing, it's a way to hide. Maybe we're more alike than I'd like to think. She gets to run away, to pretend. I wouldn't say that's what I want, but perhaps bystanders on my pavements, in my country, would disagree.
The light is different, you know, in different countries.

Well, I can't find it

There was a video on Youtube of the Belgian royal palace exploding. A spoof, but I thought it was well done (not experienced in these things...). You see so much of this on the news and what gets me, all the time, is the un-heard moment before it explodes - whatever it is, a car, a bin, a person, a building - the suck-in of breath, then the bang, and the shrieking valkyrie chorus of car alarms. The Big Bang we're all looking out for, with one eye, when we walk down city streets. The reason we don't walk past rubbish bins without thinking about death. The big bang that ends life, rather than begins it. The big bang that defines so much of our life, so we wonder all the time if we're living in the suck-in of breath, the moment you only know about after it's happened.
They say cancer asserts itself. It is there, present, latent, passive in the body until something triggers its land mine, lights its fuse. Then, bang. A slow, soft bang. Spreading out through the body in waves of gentle destruction, that gather and gather like waves in a rocky cleft. I've sat on a rock and watched gentle waves roll in, catch in the throat of the cliff and slap each other to foam.
What is it like, living under a death sentence? Do you sit and think: "This moment, this drop of time will never come again." Do you stay awake late so as not to miss a moment of the dark room, the sound of traffic in the distance, the streetlamps yellowing the curtains, your partner sleeping beside you - does all this become addictive? Do you ever again wish time away?
I want to keep everything inside me, remember everything, drink it with my eyes, but I realise that I'm impermanent. I'm not a museum for light, I am a glass with no base, and the world pours through me, and light pours through me, and everything seen is not remembered, just filtered through and lost.
Light is time: become invisible, live forever.

mist

it's cold. the street lights are suspended across the road on wires that are invisible in the evening so they look like little golden UFOs hanging in the air.

red, yellow, black

England's papers watch the monks in Burma burn and the Pakistani border explode. Meanwhile, a quiet crisis, close to home. Parliament reconvenes and Belgium still has no government.

I ask a Belgian what the big deal is, are there somehow two cultures or is this, honestly, just about languages. After all, you can learn a language, well enough to be fluent. But you still would have an accent, he says. You would still be a French-speaker, or a Dutch-speaker.

There must be lots of people who are part Flemmish and part Wallonian. What if the country splits and you live in Flanders and work in Brussels? Would you go to work in a different country every day? Could you choose where to pay tax? That might be quite good.

Everything goes on as usual. The only sign that anything is wrong is the unseasonal spring: a steadily increasing bloom of red, yellow and black across the communes. Flags . A silent demonstration, upon Brussels' most beautiful, varied and extraordinary feature - its balconies. (Must write more about balconies, the Mediterranean trust of them, so unlike England). Three T-shirts, extra-large (from Wibra?), pinned together: red, yellow, black, a washing line demonstration. On Bvd. Lambermont, three fiberglass humans, red, yellow, black, stand upon a balcony garlanded with three fiberglass hearts, red, yellow, black. In Britain you'd run from the Union Jack, it's a sign of anger, violence - here the national flag is a sign of moderation, of not wanting any trouble.

It's a fragile spring, across the border in Flanders it's too chilly for the flags to blossom. The country is like a couple, struggling between breaking up and making it work. Like the children in the relationship, the flag-seeding Belgians make their feelings known silently, by sideways demonstration.

Maybe it's all hot air, and they'll never split up. Maybe they'll split up tomorrow. I have no idea. This is all so like my relationship. Maybe my emotional country is Belgium, where everything has at least two names.

About

This is not an informed blog. It has no meaning to anyone except me. I do not want to stimulate debate or be of interest to anyone. The only requirement is that I update it daily. I shall stop whenever I feel like it. Hopefully updating it daily will encourage me to think more and learn more about the country I live in.

Thought for the day: Where there is a pencil, there must also be a rubber.