New Bed

My new bed arrived! The big, beautiful womblike bed I have been waiting for since October.


This bed.

Fantastic news!


Oh.

Hang on.

What, seriously?

It would seem so.

I have none of that shit on your drawing, Habitat. It's science fiction to me. I have a thing called a ratchet screwdriver that I can't operate, and a hammer.

Hmm. Let's look closer.

Really, Habitat? No scissors, Stanley knives, sharp cutting things? How would you like me to open the box? Shall I stroke it open? Tickle it? Use interpretative dance to terrify it open? Also, in what way is an umbrella a good illustration of a thing that is fragile? Next time, use a DikDik. They're prettier and way more breakable.

I opt for trying to rip the box open with my hands. It hurts. I find this in the box:

Those smug little bastard men, just like the Ikea ones. Two of you fuckers? In overalls? 1-2 hours? What the fuck is this bed, the Large Hadron Collider? Note the reddish smear. That is blood. I cut myself OPENING THE BOX. Does this tell you everything you need to know about whether I am qualified - me and my twin, in or out of overalls - to build a flat pack? I think it does. I bleed on one of the side panels, and have to try and rub it off. Out of the corner of my eye I read on the leaflet "If your piece of furniture becomes stained DO NOT try to rub. Dab clean with a damp cloth". Fuck you, Habitat.


I empty the box, just to see what's in there. Pieces of bed lie everywhere, taunting me. The most appealing thing in the room is suddenly the empty box. I have never seen a box this large. The obvious thing to do is to get into the box.



It really is an exceptionally roomy box. Definitely a two person box. A double box, if you will.


I arrange myself like a 15th century stone nobleman on a tomb in York Minster. It is very restful.




There is plenty of room for the faithful hound to curl up at my feet in the box tomb, in authentic fifteenth century style. Mystifyingly, the faithful hound prefers the mattress.




Note that I STRIPPED THE BED. I truly believed I was sleeping in my new bed tonight. I had picked out clean sheets and everything.



I snuggle deeper into my box, making a pillow out of polystyrene film.




I think I might just stay in my cardboard sarcophagus until, say, May. That seems the safest solution. Just wake me up when I'm solvent and sane and the sun has come out. Ok?

Moscow, again

A wind of slavic melancholy is blowing across the frozen steppes of Uccle today. I feel I need a large, droopy moustache to do it justice. Maybe a pipe. Certainly vodka. I imagine it looks a little like Antonia's fantastic film. If you are in the mood for uplifting, feeling a little fragile and in need of light entertainment, click away now. Maybe go and read this article, which I really enjoyed. That lady would not allow herself to get mired in moustache wearing gloom.

The icy spiritual chill is probably partly attributable to my deciding I need to lose some weight this week. Yes, just this week, I find the urge passes very rapidly regardless of whether I obtain results or not. I bought Elle Belgique on the strength of its quixotic cover promise of a one week detox, only to cast it aside at the first mention of 'bouillon'. Screw bouillon. I favour more radical methods, like, having a bath at dinnertime so that I get too sleepy and dazed to bother with food, or not leaving my desk all day. No, you are quite right, voices of reason. This is not sensible behaviour for a former bulimic. But then neither is mainlining cupcakes and peanut butter Chunky KitKats, which has brought me to this point. And to these chins.

Is this a sign of poor mental health? Yes, probably. It usually is. I am a little sad and a lot anxious. Work is tricky, family members are distressingly far away when I want to be round the corner and of some use to them, progress on writing projects is nil and the future seems to sit on the horizon like an ominous Brussels raincloud. On top of that, I had such a hard time saying goodbye to the boys today, especially as half term means I won't see them for a fortnight. Things have been so busy and fraught over the past few months, that I haven't really had time to miss them. I do now, even though things haven't really calmed down that much. A bit like coming off anti-depressants, the effect of spending less time with them didn't hit me immediately, but it has crept up, insidiously. I am in withdrawal and it's hard. I'm in London for most of this week, and that's a quick, radical fix - busy, gregarious, with time spent squeezing my niece and nephew. But I live here, and I will for the foreseeable future. I need to find better ways of coping. I need to get out and get over myself, and I sort of am. Just, not on Siberian Mondays.

I looked at my hand this morning when I reached the office and saw this:

Not the mysterious blue waffle infection.

The pattern of green dots that Fingers for mysterious reasons all his own, drew all over his hand and arm this morning, had transferred to me. Transferred because he won't let go of my hand, nor me of his. He barely let go of me all weekend, and today I feel like I have a limb missing.

God, how depressing (incidentally, I am very sorry but I am too much of a miserable chaotic bastard to cope with Cruel biscuits this week, so Vicious Valentines are off). I'll try and perk things up a little soon, rather than dragging you down in a swirl of Tchaikovsky's 6th and facial hair. If I'm still this miserable tomorrow you have permission to brain me with the nearest samovar.

(And no, I don't know what the fuck is up with the oddly large font.)

Placing an ad in The Belgian Lady

I'm amusing myself in my squalid pit tonight by adding refinements to my rent-a-person (mother, wife, unjudgmental general factotum). I am bent and crotchety like Richard III in a hoodie. It's quite, quite charming. I would definitely have to pay someone to keep me company. I wouldn't really want staff, although the idea is quite seductive in the abstract (and a frequent shared fantasy with M and Mrs Trefusis). I would find it weird and oppressive, I expect and spend my time in an agony of guilt, awkwardness and mild irritation. Mrs Woolf and The Servants is brilliant on this (I did like that book). Anyway, since we are firmly in the realm of fantasy, the list of duties stands currently as follows:

- Come round and have "a quick tidy up" (twice weekly, Marigolds provided)

- Stroke my forehead and say 'there there, it's ok, you're doing fine' (ad hoc, as required)

- Discourage me from eating 7 cupcakes in a row by their mere presence

- Make cups of tea (constant. It's one of my very favourite things about having my sister or Prog Rock to stay, the endless stream of hot beverages not made by me)

- Walk the dog when bits of me fall off (about twice weekly again)

- Tell me when I am wearing food stained clothes (this would have to be daily - a quick 2 minute outfit check)

- cook a proper meal (once a week is quite sufficient for this. More and I would implode with pathetic gratitude. Noone needs to see that)

- Collect me from the station. I have become bizarrely obsessed with this in recent months. It seems the height of luxury to have someone collect you from the station. Apart from trips to York, when Prog Rock is almost always standing somewhere on Platform 3 smoking a sneaky B & H, noone has collected me from a station or airport since dinosaurs roamed Uccle. Yet lately, when I get off my Eurostar, I find myself casting a wistful glance at the waiting huddle, knowing there can't possibly be anyone waiting for me, and yet bizarrely hoping there might be (who? God knows). Not the corporate ones with misspelt name signs, but the actual people, coming to collect their actual people, carry their bags, give them a hug, spirit them away.

I remember coming back from my first proper trip by myself (a month in Morocco aged 16) and my mum meeting me at Heathrow. When I came through arrivals, at first I couldn't see her, I recall. I remember scanning the barriers to try and see her, and almost getting to the point of being a tiny bit anxious, when she stepped out from behind a pillar. It was, she told me, a trick my father had taught her - to hide for a moment. He's a wicked tease, my father. I think I probably started romanticising being met from a train or plane at this point, and I have never stopped (I've never tried the hiding trick myself, though. I'm not good at deferred gratification). I used to collect the CFO from Heathrow all the time during the Oxford Misery Years, dashing up the M40 at suicidal speed and standing in Terminal 2, sometimes with a silly handmade sign. I want someone to do that for me sometimes, especially the late trains, when I am carrying five plastic bags of cheap chocolate and paperbacks and wearing unsuitable shoes. I want to walk along the dingy, grey, striplit corridor of the Gare du Midi and actually see someone who is (paid to look) glad to see me. There's a French novel that I haven't read, but that was in all the bookshops I ever went into for a while called "Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelquepart", and it seems to be lodged in my psyche. I want someone to wait for me somewhere.

- bring me my toothbrush when I accidentally get into bed too early in the evening and can't get out again (I want one of those buttons on a string round my neck for this, like those "Mrs Hope knows help is coming" adverts from the back of the Sunday supplements c1985. "Uuuuugh! I have a dental hygiene emergency! Help! And, er, can I have a hot water bottle now you're here?").

What do you think? Am I likely to get any applicants? I can pay, oooh, thirty centimes and all the bowls you can carry. Place your own personal ad for staff in the comments box.

Some stuff. Too tired for a title.

Saturday evening in Brussels. The unjustifiable but necessary takeaway is on its way. The children are playing babyfoot before I despatch them to bed (it sounds more like they are constructing the successor to the Hadron Collider. Blindfold. But no matter). The dog is moping on the Ektorp, a sulky pancake of resentment under one of my nicest blankets, after being subjected to a bath. Queen Fabiola's butter effigy lies reproachfully in the fridge, untouched since last night. I have deleted the photo of Stalin. Some faint tinny echo of common sense tells me that posting a picture of my children's headmaster without his permission, admitting to a sinister crush on him and calling him 'Stalin' is liable to end in tears.

Good things today:

The fiery ball has returned. It remained in the sky all day, making my 7am wake up call, and the endless walking around today has required, much more bearable. This evening at 6 when I walked the idiot dog, there was bird song, and light. The weepette leapt in a pond to celebrate. Twat.

Watching the weepette outrun everything in the park with its effortless galloping. I do love to watch that thing run. It has a physical intelligence you could never guess at having encountered its pealike brain in other contexts (see above). It confers instant Park Superiority. Not that I walk around looking faintly pitying and smug and judging the other less attractive, slower dogs. Nope. That would be mean spirited and more than a little pathetic. No, not me.

Watching Lashes run around the Bois de la Cambre, shedding layers as he ran, mad with the sunshine and the joys of late winter. He doesn't often cut loose, so it was lovely to watch him trying to roll down a muddy hill.

Taking a boat out on the lake on a whim (for all of ten minutes). Not capsizing the boat. Having celebratory ice cream with salted caramel sauce.

The endless hugging from Fingers, which I get an odd feeling is for my benefit rather than his. He even sat on my knee and looked at baby animal pictures on Zoo Borns for twenty minutes even though he is largely indifferent to baby animal action.

The warm, flat vodka tonic I am currently drinking. Oh! It's all gone. Boo. No more left.

Bad things:

Perma-headache. Inability to form sentences in either appropriate language. I think I needed flashcards today. The flashcards would have said "No". "Give me 5 minutes" and "I will confiscate that if you don't listen to me". I think that would have covered it. Oh, maybe a catch-all one for non-family members that could have read "Désolée".

Only realising at 12:15 that my trousers were very badly stained all down one leg - possibly by an errant teabag - and that my flies were open. Nice, Emma. Hobo chic.

There is a very large, mouldy cardboard box in my kitchen that I must address as 'Dinobot' and not throw away. It is a health hazard. I can't wait for the moment when I am allowed to open the cellar door like some kind of evil Kathy Bates figure and kick Dinobot down there, to the cardboard graveyard.

I ache all over like a person twice my age. With every step, my joints squeak "knee/hip/ankle replacement". What the fuck? It might be something to do with Lashes's insistence on sleeping with me last night. Which roughly translates to 'kicking me in the solar plexus every half hour, and asking if it is morning at five minute intervals from 4:55 onwards'. Tonight, because of course fairness is all, Fingers is taking his place. I am looking forward to the regular eye poking from him, and we can grind our teeth in unison.

The trudging backwards and forwards up and down the Chaussée d'Alsemberg on endless errands, the trailing around at the mercy of public transport or worse, the vague sadists at Taxis Bleus. Saturdays break me. I am starting to think I need a car. Fuckitall. I would quite like a car, but oh, the endless ball-breaking hassle, and the expense.

Finishing the vodka.

The terror of the kitchen table. So large, so hideously cluttered, so little wood visible. I can't bear it.

Good/Bad from your Saturday?

Modern life is lovely

There are so many reasons why living in the age of the internet is awesomely wonderful. In recent weeks, I would particularly single out the following (and thank you to those who provided some of them):

Single Ladies dance tutorials (these got me through the low points of Christmas)

Evil seagulls (not suitable for those of a sensitive disposition, or pig lovers)

Owl in a fridge (the almost-worthy successor to Owl In A Box)

A DikDik with no sense of personal space.

And last night, in a blaze of feathery, dairy glory, Butter German Shepherd.

The City Road noted, very perceptively, that it looks oddly like Lionel Richie. Especially Lionel Richie sculpted by the blind chick in the video for 'Hello' (also available to you thanks to the awesomeness of being alive in 2010)

As a result, and in a fit of ill-judged enthusiasm I have agreed to sculpt Queen Fabiola, the Belgian queen mother, in butter. She of the unfeasibly high Mekon forehead and giant cloud of purple hair.

Look, here she is:



I think hair accounts for approximately 63% of her by volume and weight.

It might take me a while. So far I have managed this:

I will post the finished masterpiece later. My blood alcohol level is too low for this degree of creativity.

I need all the ridiculousness the internet has to offer. I am headachy and self-loathing and unproductive in all fields but cupcake eating. Some stupidly expensive tickets I should never have bought have been misdelivered meaning that I can't fucking well resell them. So that's cough-nearly three hundred quid-cough worth of my own idiocy staring me in the face. No, please don't tell me what I could have bought with this money, I am suffering enough. Instead, I am telling myself I have bought a valuable lesson about not being a total dickhead. Self-knowledge is, after all, a prize beyond rubies. Or something. This Saturday will be tinged with regret that Cruel Tea can't go to this mad event at Liberty - we applied, but the short notice and our being several hundred miles apart has prevented it. Shame, since it sounds potentially very hilarious. If anyone goes along, can they tell me about it? Ah well, at least it is 2010 and I can sulkily watch DVDs in bed tonight with a vodka tonic rather than throwing myself under the wheels of a train. And the children can play Nintendo rather than hanging themselves in cupboards because they are "too menny".

Right, I am going to stop whining and try and hack a path through the piles of strip cartoons, dinosaur magnets and baking supplies to the kitchen. Let's reconvene later for sophisticated butter sculpture AND, Artichoke Queen, finally, a photo of Stalin rien que pour tes beaux yeux.

On maize peanuts and parent rental

I was going to write something chin-strokingly earnest today I think, but it's all gone. I do know it was going to be about the frontier regions between solitude and loneliness and fervently wanting to be alone. And how an online presence, existence mediates it. But bugger it. You can read this, which is lovely and thoughtful, or this (which brought me out in a cold sweat). They are both interesting. I might even come back to it when I have a functioning brain, if I can find a way of doing so without sounding like a sad, pathetic bastard (ssssh). Right now, I have an incipient migraine, the house looks like a crime scene, targeted by vicious, sadistic burglars with a penchant for shredding paper*. The children are wandering round with maize peanuts stuck to their faces.

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Incidentally, can I make a brief public service announcement? DO NOT BUY MAIZE CONSTRUCTION PEANUTS. I can go into the details if you wish, but please believe me. A thousand tiny pellets of insanity in each container. Thank you.

(Thought I must say actually even maize peanut facial hair was a mercy, compared with the collected works of Nickelodeon's online games showcased here tonight, which seem to largely feature belching.)

Tonight, yes. I do want someone else around to let me have a twenty minute lie down while the Migraleve takes effect. And maybe make me a cup of tea. Actually, I think what I really want is a mother. A Rent-A-Mother. Better than a lover, a friend, a co-parent. Even better than a cleaning lady. I bet I'm not the only one who would pay for this service and it wouldn't be the worst job in the world ever. All you need to do is a little light clearing up, spoil some children, make tea and toast and stroke my forehead for ten minutes whilst saying "there, there, it will all be alright". I wouldn't feel bad about paying for that. Obviously, if she felt compelled to tut at my ironing pile and go at it with a can of spray starch and a vigorous elbow, I wouldn't stand in her way. And if she happened to feel the urge to fill the freezer with balanced nutritious meals, well, it would be churlish to protest. But mainly I want my forehead stroked and someone else to have a quick tidy up last thing at night. The quick late night tidy up seems to trail on for hours, sucking the last dribble of sanity out of me, as I remove 18 maize peanuts from the dog's mouth, 80000 plastic figurines and a bowl of orange slime from the bathroom, and a fistful of hula hoops from my purse.

I might get her to just quickly finish off this post too, since I don't seem to be able to. And maybe she could think of a jokey title using the word 'parental'. Yeah, that would be handy. Ok, where do I place my ad?

(*The CFO wondered whether I would be hideously messy or OCD tidy in my new house, saying it would definitely be one or the other. Um. I think I can now confirm I am not OCD tidy. But it's not terribly easy to be tidy with no furniture! And, er, my bedroom is still very tidy. Most of the time. )