That is all.
I was taking the metro back from the town hall to the office after spending far too long waiting to only be handed a form and told to come back another day. As I left the station next to the office a woman's voice thanked all the metro travelers for not going by car and polluting the atmosphere. Apparently yesterday was a special pollution day in Brussels. It may have had something to do with the temperature being significantly below freezing but I'm not sure.
In any case, the word "pollution" resonated with me and made me think about New Tree's Tranquility bar.
What can I say about it? The chocolate is good. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's very good. It's smooth and creamy. It melts well but isn't overly sugary. If it were left unsullied it would be an exceptionally good milk chocolate bar. But it is sullied. It is polluted. In fact - it has been desecrated.
I'm sure the lavender used in this bar is very high quality and comes from the finest organic lavender bushes. But it still tastes like pot pourri smells and is a fragrance I associate with clothes that have been left in storage for too long. It does not work well with chocolate and it didn't help me relax although it did remind me of a time when I was about five and spent 10 minutes locked in a friend's wardrobe.
This was certainly new and interesting but I doubt many people will be buying a second bar and so it is unlikely to be on the shelves for long. The other bar in their Relaxing range probably will stay, though. Who can say "no" to the bitter orange and crisped rice of their Serenity bar?
I've never had a Christmas tree at home as I'm not Christian and never fancied all the effort in buying it, decorating it and recycling it. The offices I've worked at in the past have only had plastic trees or tinsel and paper wall decorations but office here in Brussels has a real fir free.
I just walked past it and noticed that it smells of fir scented Frish toilet bleach. I'm not sure if that means that Frish toilet bleach has a particularly realistic smell or whether the tree in the entrance has been anointed with an artificial fragrance.
I've just watched a great movie: Network. It's such a great movie that it is the only movie for which an actor has posthumously been awarded a best actor Oscar. Peter Finch's performance as Howard Beale trumped all other performances for 1976.
The rest of the movie: the plot, the characterisation, and so on was OK but it was Peter Finch's oratory that made the film. And what it reminded me of was something I learned in English class when we studied Shakespeare.
Elizabethan England wasn't Hollywood and there were no sets or special effects. The focus was on the way the actors spoke the lines and not on their costumes or physicality. Texts from the time talk of people going to the theatre to listen to a play rather than to watch. Hence the fantastic soliloquies and speeches.
Listen to these two speeches with your eyes closed and you won't miss a thing. Network was about the oratory and it would make a great radio play.
One December I worked in an office that was next door to a café. The lady who ran the café had a 45 minute tape of Chas & Dave singing a number of seasonal songs. She played it on a loop all day long until mid-January.
If you'd asked me about Chas & Dave during that November I'd have said that they were quite fun and told you that I liked them and might have given you a couple of bars of Snooker Loopy or Rabbit. By the second week before that Xmas I'd have quite happily murdered Chas, Dave, the lady who ran the café and anyone who tried to play a vaguely yule themed song. I'd probably have tried to justify it based on the very seasonal and ersatz nature of the bonhomie in the songs - but on reflection it was probably related to hearing every one of Chas & Dave's songs more than fifty times in that first week.
So it's really quite weird that I'm going to praise an Xmas mashup from dj BC. I found it on mashuptown.com and it's really pretty good. A bit of John Lennon and a bit of Santa Claus is Coming to Town. It works.
Brussels' streets have been full of pissing English yobs, lately. It's all on paper and in celebration of the improved Eurostar service to London. The journey is now faster and goes to St Pancras International, which is a more convenient station for me. So I ought to be saying how wonderful things are now.
But I'm not.
Most of it is really good. The Eurostar terminal at Brussels Midi is as good as ever. The faster journey time is excellent and the seats have mains power, which is superb. But the new St Pancras station isn't as all-singing and all-dancing as everyone's been making out.
The problems aren't the half finished Eurostar terminal, though. It's the way it's linked in with the other forms of transport at the station: badly. Most people coming taking the Eurostar have rolling luggage with them. But unfortunately, the station's designers have ignored that and decided to use lots of stairs.
The connection between the Eurostar terminal and the tube is a fairly steep set of stairs with a tiny lift for wheelchairs at the side. No ramp, no escalator, just stairs. This is the sort of poor integration that you'd hope would have been caught in a fairly early planning stage. It's also the sort of thing that's fairly typical of London.
For instance, when the T4 station at Heathrow was closed earlier this year there was a shuttle service to Hatton Cross which also has no escalators or ramps for everyone's luggage. Using the tube was still encouraged and I never saw any publicity about the problems with carrying luggage up the stairs.
After I'd traveled through Hatton Cross several times I eventually saw two chaps with bright yellow jackets who offered to carry people's luggage up the stairs. But frankly, they should have put in some escalators before they closed T4. Too little; too late.
The other problems with the Eurostar terminal are related to it having been opened before it was finished. There are almost no shops and the market-style stalls don't have chip'n'pin machines, so you have to pay in cash. After you've checked in you can sit down and plug your computer into an outlet and do some work but there's no WiFi service, so you need to use your mobile phone for a data connection if you need to do anything on the network.
These are the sorts of niggles that should be easy to fix but should also never have got as far as inconveniencing paying passengers. But it's London, so what do you expect?
If your Vox Neighborhood had a potluck dinner tonight, what dish, drink or dessert would you bring?
If I could cook it there then I'd like to serve something like this.
but if I just had to bring a ready cooked item them I'd take something like this.
I got a pack of purple carrots at the supermarket, yesterday. This morning I ate a raw carrot and cooked a couple for breakfast and decided that I like them. They aren't quite as sweet as regular, orange carrots but they are tasty and healthy. According to the web site of the university where they were developed they are "a potent antioxidant, right along with blackberries, blueberries and cherries" and "prevent cancer". Which is nice.
As you can see, they look a bit rough around the edges. But despite this they aren't classified as organic. For some reason I always associate organic produce with bits of grit and little holes where insects have laid their eggs. These weren't sufficiently ratty to get a full-up organic classification from me, though.
I just gave them a quick wash and chopped them up into bite sized pieces. Very tasty.
I'm obviously glad that these carrots will extend my life and I enjoy eating them raw or cooked. I'll be buying them again.
Douglas Adams was right.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.
This was the opening of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and it must have been written after flying through Frankfurt airport. Frankfurt has consistently been the worst hub airport in Europe. It's actually worse than Paris Charles de Gaulle and London Heathrow.
Every time I have passed through the staff have tried to point me away from the direction I need to take. Of course, the only reason I need to ask the staff is because the signage is so poor. When it's there at all.
Of course, you can only be misdirected by the staff when they are there. This morning the immigration desk was closed and I had to join a queue waiting for it to open.
I also visited the toilets and would have photographed the... mess in there but it wasn't quite a vile as the stench. And in any case, I expect most people don't want to see pictures of last night's spattered excrement.
Frankfurt is worse than LAX, IAD, CDG, LHR and MAD. My advice: if you need to transfer at a hub airport then try and make it a different hub than Frankfurt.
Rain was also predicted for last night and so I was a little nervous about eating outside, by the river, but was reassured to find that our table was under cover. And less reassured to find that it was under observation. It remained resolutely balmy and breezy until we'd had coffee and deserts and were walking back. And then the skies opened and we huddled under cover while the rain came down. It looked like movie rain.
It was also raining this morning when I drove to the airport. Unfortunately, the rain seems to have been fairly localised as the chap who noted the mileage on the car said he'd not seen a drop.
I don't think this rain is going to help them ease up the water restrictions but every little helps.
