Channel your inner smurf

I just passed a woman in the street who was wearing knee-high bright blue stockings, a blue top with a white vest top over it, a white skirt, and pale blue shoes. It says something about the nature of Dutch fashion that I can't work out whether this is a genuine "outfit" or if she's on her way to a fancy-dress party as Smurfette.

My water tank, it has sprung a leak

I've occasionally heard the worrying drip drip drip of a leaky pipe but haven't been able to track it down -- until now. The bad news? I don't think I can fix it. The good news? It's finally prompted me to call a plumber about repairing this and doing two other jobs for us, ones we've been planning to get done for the past five years.

Job 1: replace a radiator in the bathroom. This will also involve helping us figure out where the stop-cock [snigger] is.

Job 2: rehang a radiator in our front room. This will mean drilling holes, filling them with plaster, and realizing that a spirit level doesn’t help much when your flat has a significant lean.

While we "could" do them ourselves, we’d rather pay someone else to do the work and then complain/blog about it afterwards. Our requirements are simple: Ideally, the plumber in question will speak English and be tolerant of idle foreigners. In return, we will provide tea and biscuits during working hours.

I just called one recommended by a friend; I think he was at the beach, enjoying the sunshine. His pen didn't work, so he couldn't take down my number to call me back when he has his diary in front of him. I need to call again at 8 this evening.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

UPDATE: The only tub that I could get to fit under the drip is filling in less than 2 hours. I've got a plumber coming tomorrow morning at 10.30, which is 14 hours away, which means I'll have to get up at least 4 times during the night to empty it. Bugger. Unless the entire tank drains out before then. Let's hope so.

Mulch

The council workers were hard at it this morning in the park, but this time using an enormous and noisy wood chipper to dispose of unwanted trees. Every time I see them doing this, I'm reminded of the excellent Season 5 episode of CSI where Grissom asks someone how long it would take to push a human body through one of these. The answer: 15 seconds. Luckily, I don't recall if they then did one of their patented TMI graphics shots of a body going through the chipper -- messy!

Anyhow, I see the chipper, I remember the 15 seconds, and then I idly speculate on who I'd like to put through it. It's a great way of passing the time.

Goddamn this infernal heat

It's another beautiful day; blue skies, sunshine, lots of little boats pottering along the canals, and hundreds of idle welfare scroungers lazing around in the park. Truth be told, I'm getting a bit tired of this: My heels are rubbed raw and blistered from wearing shoes without socks; shirts and t-shirts only last one day before needing a wash; and there are only so many bright green thongs worn under cheap white linen trousers that you can see without starting to wish that people looked in a mirror before heading out.

With luck, it will start raining again tomorrow.

Oh dear

I've just watched most of "How to lose a guy in 10 days" -- quite possibly one of the most appalling films ever made. I have no excuse. It was on 5Net after Friends and I simply couldn't be bothered to turn it off.

I feel soiled.

Kids today

Fancy spending all that time chalking this onto a pavement and then playing outdoors in the sunshine, when they could be holed up in a darkened room with a game console. I don't know what the world's coming to.

Barefoot in the library

I dropped in to the library last night before heading off to a very pleasant dinner with a friend. To my utter astonishment, a middle-aged man was sitting in the fiction section with his shoes off and feet up on a table. I know it's hot at the moment, but shoes off in a public place seems unacceptable to me. If you want to take your shoes off, go home. I don't need to see (or smell) your gnarly toes.

I just don't get it. Has some public proclamation been issued, stating that anything goes? Am I totally out of touch with the zeitgeist? Since when did barefoot in public buildings become okay?

Right: got to go shout at some kids to get off my lawn.

Food, glorious food? Not really

I take very little active advantage of PJ's absence. No wild parties, nights on the town, or trips to the Banana Bar for me. During these long trips, I'll line up a few things for the weekend, but I quite enjoy having the place to myself. In particular, it's a time to catch up on my reading -- and I've been remarkably slack about this for the past few months -- and crappy romcoms.

Where I do "suffer" most is the food. While I'm a strong advocate of cooking well for yourself (and often do), PJ's absence has coincided with a bout of good weather, and nothing kills my appetite like the heat. I end up grazing for an evening, picking at this and that from the fridge or the cupboard, finishing up tubs of ice-cream, or just having a bowl of cereal. Last week before PJ left, for example, I made calzone on Monday and then a truly stunning fish dish from Nigel Slater on Tuesday, consisting of red mullet fillets marinated in olive oil, Noilly Prat, saffron and mint and then gently baked in the oven. This week, I've had hummus with veggies (Monday) and more hummus with veggies, accompanied by Indian rice flour spicy pancakes with mango chutney and the remains of a pack of nacho cheese bugels (Tuesday). I'm thinking of it as a temporary health regime -- a way of losing those stubborn kilos that have attached themselves to my thighs -- although the home-made gingernut biscuits (top recipe from Delia) and the mini Bounty Bars are working counter to my aims.

Oh well, just one more week to go. In the meantime, I'm reading my cookbooks and noting recipes that I want to try when my chief tester and dishwasher-loader is back home. Normal restaurant service will resume shortly.

Ode to the chap cycling ahead of me through the park this morning

Oi! Clapping your hands loudly to the rhythm of the no-doubt bangin' tunes you were listening to via your oversized headphones while cycling does not make you: look cool, hip, or a musician. It does make you look like a tosser. If that was your aim, well, derision accomplished.

The filth and the fury

The filth: theirs; the fury: mine.

 

Now that the weather has improved, this is the scene that greets me every morning as I cycle through the Vondelpark. Disgusting! The city council does a great job of clearing up each day, with swarms of workers descending on the park to collect the tide of beer cans, crisp packets, and plastic bags that have been left behind by the sun-seeking scum. But why should they have to do this? Surely they would be better served by positioning snipers in trees around them park and having them pick off anyone who leaves rubbish behind? Leave the corpses where they fall with warning notices pinned to their chest: Litter lout (or whatever the Dutch equivalent is). After a few days, cleanliness will be restored.

Too harsh? I don't think so. 

Yay! The boys are back

Top Gear. BBC 2. Sunday evening.

I should hate this, but it's probably the best hour of TV per week. And Richard Hammond is SO cute.

Watching "The Impressionists" on BBC1

"Hello there, Monet! Lend us 20 francs, there's a good chap!"
"Ah Manet, no can do. Poor Degas and I are both broke!"
"Poor Degas? Pah! I despise Degas!"
"They just don't understand us, Claude. It's not about painting a seascape; it's about capturing the impression of the seascape on the subject"
"The impression? Why, that makes us . . . impressionists!"
"It'll never catch on, y'know."

It's like watching a Monty Python episode. Hysterical!

While the cat's away

One summer, many years ago, my mother went back-packing round Thailand with a friend. As soon as they'd set off for the airport, my father lined my sister and me up in the kitchen and said "Right! Let's start clearing things out!" We'd soon created a huge pile of old ice-cream tubs, manky tupperware boxes, and the various bits of everyday flotsam and jetsam that my mother couldn't bear to throw out. She was (and still is) a firm believer that "it might come in useful one day." My father, on the other hand, held to the principle that if you hadn't used it in a year, you were never going to use it and it should be binned. The result was a constant battle between hoarder and chucker, one that I've managed to replicate with PJ. I bin; he keeps.

And, just as my father took advantage of my mother's 6-week South-East Asian adventure, so I'm making the most of PJ's 2-week West Coast sojourn. Piles of magazines? Gone to recycling! Two bags of clothes? Off to the second-hand shop! The contents of the bathroom cabinet? Bagged and binned! This latter task was somewhat archaeological in nature, delving down through the accumulated layers of half-used moisturizers, greasy bottles of sun-tan lotion, and soaps -- lots and lots of hotel soaps. While they represent a history of holidays and business trips over the past four years, I'm not convinced that keeping several hundredweight of Aveda bath soap from the Hotel@MIT is better than taking pictures. Neither is hanging on to the plastic packs of Virgin Airlines amenities, or even the rather flashy but utterly useless Oswald Boateng cases that you get in Upper Class.* And it is a blessed relief to see a huge bag of this detritus ready to go out in tomorrow's garbage collection.

Heh: That'll teach him to go away!

* PJ: I haven't binned the Boateng stuff. Or most of the soaps. Promise.

Murdering sleep

Ah, Sunday mornings: A time for catching up on sleep and long lie-ins, undisturbed by the beep beep beep of the alarm clock.

Usually.

This morning, however, I was woken by the sound of two pigeons competing to produce the loudest, throatiest coo. Either that or they had some kind of nasal infection -- if pigeons have noses or nasal equivalents. Impossible to sleep through and they've tucked themselves away on the balcony upstairs, so I can't throw something at them.

7.30 on a Sunday morning and I'm wide awake. Great; just great.

Pigeons: Vermin with wings.

Time for a break

It's not that I'm feeling abandoned, but I would like to point out that both PJ and Bill, my (fomerly) steadfast colleague, have buggered off this week -- leaving me alone at both home and office. This has meant that I've had to make my own "real" coffee, rather than relying on Bill's skills with the cafetiere. I must confess that it's turning out to be a rather soothing experience. There's something very zen about going through a simple ritual of measuring out the coffee, adding water to the pot, waiting for it to brew, and filling the cup rather than just hitting a button on a machine and waiting for the noxious fluid to emerge. I could get used to doing this more often.

And yes, Bill, I will buy some more coffee to replace what I've used.

Three things I've learned about parties in the Netherlands

1. Secondhand smoke gives you a far worse "hangover" than alcohol.

2. Gin makes Pepsi taste vaguely pleasant.

3. Always leave while you're enjoying yourself and you can still walk down the stairs unaided.

Young Parisians are so French

Isn't this gorgeous? And by my extremely talented sister Miss Katie!

The (psuedo)vegetarian's lament

Does swallowing a fly while cycling home from work negate my non-meat-eating lifestyle?

If we took a holiday

On the other hand, I do get 5 weeks of paid vacation per year -- far more than most. The question though is what to do with it? Last year, we embarked on a series of weekend city breaks: Leeds, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Lisbon. These turned out to be ideal holidays for us: A couple of days of ambling round a city, doing a little bit of design-led shopping, lots of drinks in bars, and some good meals out. We're not really the sight-seeing type, and museums need to be very interactive to entice my beyond the obligatory shop/cafe. Does this make me a bad person?

So, thoughts for city breaks this year:

Aberdeen (largely to use up some BMI points) and the surrounding countryside.
Italy: Milan, Venice, or Florence.
Berlin.
Oslo.
Rekyjavik.

As you can see, we don't do hot countries and prefer flights of about 2 hours max. Some culture, decent architecture, and good food help. And we've done Nice/Paris/Barcelona/Madrid to death. All suggestions gratefully received.

It's not fair

We don't get May 1 as a public holiday over here. Apparently, celebrating the working man/woman is not seen as a priority -- largely because there aren't that many of them, I suspect. Cycling through the Vondelpark during the day reveals large numbers of people lazing around, not all of them tourists. The Netherlands has a very high proportion of part-time workers in the workforce, and some of the most generous sick leave in the world. It used to be back problems that dominated this area, but now that they can test more accurately for that and provide ergonomically sound work areas, "stress" has become very popular. The result, of course, is higher tax bills and a culture of loafing off the state. I know I should be more sympathetic, but there are some things about this country that drive even the most socialist-minded to Economist-style right-wingness.

But at least I'm not letting it get to me.