The shambles caused by Eurostar will fortunately not affect me – although I live in Brussels we are spending Christmas here and thank goodness.  My heart goes out to all those who were stuck Friday under the sea, in a train with no light, heat, food or water … I think I would have freaked out.  Many friends here were planning to go back to England for the holidays, and of course they use Eurostar.  Their tickets have been booked months in advance (the only way to get a reasonably priced ticket) and now it looks as though they will be rushing around desperately buying up turkeys and various bits and pieces in order to have some sort of a Christmas.  And the organised people who ordered presents online to be delivered to their address in England – a lot of unhappy kids on Christmas Day.

My rant is not in fact with Eurostar, but with P&O Ferries, who this morning said they were going to help Eurostar out of their quandry of 55,000 people who are trying to get away, by bussing them to Calais in order that the holidaymakers can catch a ferry to Dover.  This is probably okay if you live in Brussels or Paris and don’t mind being dumped in Dover – what do you do on arrival?  Have British Rail (although they are now called something else) put on extra trains?  I doubt it.

We went to England for the day last Thursday – easy trip – up to Calais in the car (2 hours), an hour and a half crossing to Dover, do our shopping and back on the 1930 to Calais – home by midnight.  We do this often and it’s very straightforward.

BUT …

Thursday morning the first snowflakes are falling in Brussels so we leave at 8H, get to Calais at 1030 (30 minutes more than usual), check in and then the fun starts.  You are hemmed in on all sides in your car, there is nowhere to waste a bit of time, apart from a dirty loo and a coffee vending machine, and you are then told that the boat is two hours late … you cannot escape as no-one can move.  So you are stuck.  Eventually we set sail and arrive in Dover at 15H.  It is cold, very cold, the wind is icy and there is a couple of centimetres of snow around.

We do our Christmas shopping and while in Sainbury’s I hear a child talking about the snow that has started to fall again … anyway, we rush around, and get the hell back to Dover for the 1930 boat.  Same thing – check in, get in queue and no boat.  No messages.   No information.  Nothing.  We freeze in the parking lot with a million other people.  We go and get a coffee at Costas, we buy a crappy book at WH Smith and are even reduced to eat a burger at Burger King.  No boat, no info, nothing.  At 22H the shopping/food area closes.  There are now hundreds of cars and trucks waiting.  No boat, no info – sod all apart from a message bellowed over the PA system every ten minutes ‘For your safety please use the black and white walkways’.  We load at about 1 in the morning.  We get home at 645 exhausted and so Friday is a total non-day.

This was due to adverse weather conditions – don’t make me laugh!  It was cold and there was the wind chill factor.  The sea was Force 6 (I asked).  It was snowing (lightly).  Sorry … have I missed something?  Does light snow stop a boat from sailing?  We arrive in Calais – it is snowing but not a lot and there is about 1cm of snow on the ground but the roads have been salted so there is absolutely NO problem.

The most desperate thing was that no-one complained … apart from an American lady and myself.  Are we so resigned to being treated this way?

I am sending a nice little email to P&O today and putting in a link to this post.  I will NOT be treated like cattle.

Rant over.

Have a lovely Christmas – we have a lot of snow here in Brussels with more forecast.  I hope you all manage to get to wherever you may be going and if not just open a bottle of Champagne and forget about bloody Christmas!

OMG, OMG, OMG … over six months since I wrote a post.  Where has the time gone?  And suddenly Christmas is almost here and I have done absolutely nothing about it – haven’t bought any cards, presents, tree or planned delicious food …

Actually for the last six months I have been wasting my time reading blogs and have come to the conclusion that they are many talented people out there writing about a wide variety of stuff, and that in fact I should just quietly stop rabbiting on and clear the ether waves (which I shall probably do!).  It is so long since I blogged that I can’t even remember how the system works for links, photos etc.

My non-blogging excuse is that after six months of wedded bliss with the New Husband, our life was turned upside down with the arrival of the daughter (la Fée Verte) aged 27, the Bébé Fée Verte aged 3 and my son, the Rock Thrower aged 18.  Now our house is fairly large (for a house in town that is) but 5 people and Angus, my Scottie and bestest friend, turns the whole thing into an enormous juggling trick.  The washing, ironing, shopping, cooking – just when I thought it was all over and the New Husband and I could chug along serenely, the maëlstrom arrived!  So the FV and RT get themselves jobs and I become official, unpaid babysitter for BFV, the New Husband becomes the taxi, as they find their feet in Brussels and become used to the public transport system (thinking they could get to work in ten minutes, when in fact it takes forty!).

Apart from a weekend in England to attend a wedding, we didn’t go away, and joy!  the weather  here this summer was marvellous – I think we ate out in the garden every day for two months, so that made life a little easier.  If it had rained all summer, I would have probably left home!  So we meander along and in September the BFV starts school full time – talk about getting your life back.  I had fogotten how demanding small people are and am definitely out of practice – not that I was ever very good at it!

And now the FV  has just found a ground floor flat with a garden round the corner from our house and her work and is moving in this weekend, so that is two less in the house!  The poor old house has been trashed with a 3 year old trying out his drawing talents on all available surfaces, but a bit of housework will remove all that.  My wonderful, wonderful Polish cleaning lady is no longer with me as we have had to make concessions financially and even if I could have kept her on, there is absolutely no point with my totally messy and disorganised family – any room that she cleaned would have been destroyed within 30 minutes.  So now we are here with the RT, who is the most organised one of the family and most definitely the tidiest.

I have now taken to getting up at 4 a.m. as from that time until 6 a.m. is the only totally quiet moment to be had – Angus has his breakfast, I have loads of coffee and he then goes off to see what is new in the garden.  I think even the dog has been traumatised by recent events as he now seeks refuge in our bedroom at night – no fun, as he leaps on and off the bed all night or dreams or scratches or stares at me deeply until I get up to let him out and feed him … hey ho!

Time to struggle back to bed and hid in a cowardly manner until my son has gone off to work so as not to be on the receiving end of his morning groans!

Have a lovely Christmas everyone and I’ll be out of hibernation in the Spring!

Good. Living in the city, I now enjoy Bank Holidays. Although our area is quiet normally, it is almost dead on long weekends and the builders working on the house two doors down who are obviously deaf and shout at each other all day will be off for four days, so we can sit outside for lunch without the impression we are holding a street party in our garden.

The dog woke me at 4 a.m. which was quite annoying – for some reason he has now decided to sleep in our bedroom rather than in splendid isolation in the drawing room and as we have wood floors there is a terrible click, click, click of claws as he changes sleeping positions (approximately 100 times a night), followed by odd scratching of imaginary fleas, whimpering noises as he chases (or is chased) by something terrifying in his dreams, shaking of head which make his ears resound like gun fire, and eventually when truly bored, sitting and staring at me intently until I wake up and go down and feed him. Plan B was to shut the door at the top of the stairs – that failed too as he flops down against the door with a mega sigh which awakens me instantly thinking that someone has just broken into the house.

The blackbirds are now screaming at each other and it is almost light, so my day has started. The good news is that it is already 18° outside so another warm day awaits us. I knew it didn’t rain all the time in Brussels … only about 320 days of the year.

As we are not joining the hoads traffic-jamming it to the coast this weekend, we have decided to have a fun weekend sorting out mountains of bills and scrappy bits of paper to go to the accountants. It looks as though we shall be having a truly fulfilling time.

This will be our last weekend of ‘freedom’ – next week La Fée Verte and the Bébé Fée Verte are moving up to Brussels and to start with, into the house … well, I suppose this will cure the dog’s nocturnal habits, as he will be gathering up his belongings into his red spotted handkerchief and set off tearfully up the road … he actually rather likes small people as they invariably have food of some kind oozing out between fingers that are more or less at his height or are chucking it around – on the negative side they do tend to walk on paws and tails on their quest to get somewhere in a straight line regardless of obstacles, or dogs, that may be in their path.

The thought of the panic to come has suddenly made me tired, so armed with my second cup of coffee I shall retire back to bed and hopefully the dog will now stay in his basket, having been fed, been out to inspect (and pee) on the New Husband’s latest Blue Peter Project (growing of potates in what was meant to be my herb garden) and had a good sniff around to see if there are any cats lurking in the bushes.

A note to Chairman Bill (http://ttocb.blogspot.com) whose blog I follow faithfully every day.  For nearly a week I can’t load your home page and as there is no way of contacting you I hope you might see this!  When I click on my bookmark link the page loads but I can’t scroll down as it doesn’t totally download.  I don’t know if any other of your readers have this problem … I don’t have a problem with any of my other blog bookmarks … have tried all sorts of combinations, but nothing works.   Oh, and once the page has downloaded the bit it wants to download, Firefox freezes, so I have to force quit the application.  Anyone else having this problem?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US1gfk1ynP0Belatedly, as usual, here is the link to the video of Angus going to the Poodle Parlour. Film directed, edited and voice-overed by the New Husband, trying to speak French with a Scottish accent … no, don’t ask. He does these short videos for his web site, although the Angus one is more of a joke, although the Star didn’t think so – notice the wild eye during clipping and a moment of panic. On our way out of the PP we met the Dog with Goggles sitting on his motorbike seat who obviously hadn’t been to the PP as he was an exhaust fume off white colour. His owner thought the New Husband was weird when he asked to film his Dog with Goggles … again, no comment!

My God!  It is sunny in Brussels – I hope it is going to be like this for the rest of the week and the weekend as at last we are escaping to France for three days of golf.  No … I don’t play golf but I am very good at sitting in the sun with a book and a cold beer whilst the others battle it out in the bunkers.  This weekend is the New Husband’s 36th birthday … oops, typo there, so I hope he wins a silly prize the golfers are going to award each other – one for longest time spent in a bunker, one for hitting a tree, one for the most number of shots to a hole, one for falling over … the list is endless and New Husband stands to win quite a few!  We are taking the wee Scottish gentleman with us as the hotel we have booked are intelligent enough to accept dogs (and this is definitely cheaper than kennels). However, the thing that is meant to be a square, very angular and clean-cut Scottish terrier looks more like a large ball of wool on four paws and stinks of whatever he has rolled in recently.  Thursday he is to be whisked off to the Poodle Parlour to be clipped and bathed, so that a) the hotel accepts him and b) he can strutt his stuff along the promenade at Wimereux where the canine competition is fierce.  However, an hour or so on the beach I fear he will look very much as he does now with the added tang of rotting fish.  Therefore I shall take a before and after photo on Thursday so that all you dog lovers can see what can be done with a shapeless dog.

The Rock Thrower slouched back to France and the Lycée from Brussels last Saturday, leaving The Doting Mother heartbroken for a few hours.  He has his first round of Baccalaureat exams in a couple of months which he is pretty slouchy about while I work myself into panic mode.  I am paying the school fees after all.

Now the weather is good I must tidy up the garden which is looking pretty flowery at the moment – might even mow the grass.  I have one extravagance in my life – my brilliant Polish cleaning lady who comes one day a week and transforms the tip back into a lovely house again.  It takes the New Husband about 48 hours to destroy her hard work, so we always have people round on a Friday and a Saturday when the place still looks fairly smart.  She is away in Poland at the moment and has been for the last three weeks, so I have had to knuckle down and fight my way around the house and the ironing mountain, and other horrid jobs – this woman deserves every euro I pay her – apart from the house no longer looking like a squat after she has been, she is definitely responsible for my sanity!  Ironing when the sun shines – forget it!

‘They’ say that as you get older you need less sleep – this is not true.  I still need about seven hours sleep a night and preferably starting no later than 11pm.  With the New Husband, being in bed at a civilised time is impossible.  He is totally unaware of time and even getting him a ridiculously expensive watch has had no effect.  His only rapport with time seems to be food-related.  Anyway, my sleep patterns were totally messed up when I moved to Switzerland with La Fée Verte and the Rock Thrower, when RT started at the Lycée.  Posh ski resorts do not have mudane things such as Lycées, so this meant getting up at 5.30 am so RT could catch the car postale from the centre of town to the train station where he caught the St. Bernard ‘Express’ to Martigny, changed trains and then on to Sion.  An hour and a half to get to the Lycée – pure hell.  I didn’t have to get up in the morning to give him his breakfast, being a grown-up child, but I couldn’t just send him out in the cold and dark, especially in the winter when it was often -10° and we had had a foot of fresh snow during the night.  I had to make sure he wore more than a tee-shirt, had got his rail pass, school bag, telephone, keys, and yet more money.

Two years of this lark and we were both gibbering wrecks and I had been reduced to total zombiness.  Then life changed, I moved to Brussels to be with the New Husband and RT was safely installed in his old Lycée in Toulouse.  Over the last year sleep has returned and I can now get through to about 7am.  However the New Husband is away in England this week and suddenly I am up again at 5am.  So although I moan at his non-existant hours,  I at least sleep better when he is around!

Yesterday’s excitement was the collecting of ‘monsters’ – our garage contains everything apart from a car but twice a year the ‘commune’ organises ‘monster’ collections, where you put all your huge junk on the street.  I missed the last collection, so yesterday with the help of RT we disposed of the oldest sofa on the Planet, a couple of mattresses, crappy flat-pack that once assembled must never be taken to pieces again and various strange things that the New Husband had squirreled into the garage.  Being away, the New Husband was desperate I would throw all his crap rubbish out in a fit of Spring cleaning and kept phoning to ask what we were doing in the garage.  Now this man may have helped me get back into normal sleep patterns but I am definitely living with a Squirrel.  He is totally incapable of throwing anything away – even the junk mail we get through the letter box.  RT and I have collected all his tons of papers and put them in a corner of the garage – he has, at the moment, 3m3 of old papers, files, scribbled notes – and we haven’t yet finished.  A quick glance at some of the files shows letters dating back to the ’80s.  Does anyone have a cure for this?  Apart from chucking it all out, I can’t see a solution … he actually gets quite nasty when I suggest we tackle this paper mountain.  I was feeling decidedly unloving towards him yesterday when the space cleared of monsters was filled with boxes, and boxes, and boxes of papers that serve absolutely no purpose apart from taking space.  Perhaps an ultimatum – me or the papers.  Might be sticking my neck out there though!

His office is still full of boxes so by the end of the day we should have about 4m3 stashed away.  Perhaps I should put a box a day on his desk and lock him in the office, not allowing him out until it is put into rubbish bags – although we need an industrial shredding company to deal with this efficiently.  I would take a photo to show you, but he has taken the camera to England and my mobile ‘phone doesn’t have a camera on it.  One good thing – RT and I rediscovered the wine cellar/room … no wine in it though as it had been used as one of the New Husband’s paper storage areas so for the last year we have never even seen the wine racks.  Do you think he is desperately insecure?  I’m beginning to wonder!

PS  I got quite annoyed yesterday with neighbours … the ‘monster’ collection is organised in advance – you ring, they give you a time and date and send you an SMS the night before to remind you they are coming.  For collecting the junk, the first 2m3 is free and you then pay €19 for each supplementary cubic metre.  RT and I stacked everything neatly on the pavement, hoping that it looked no more than 2m3, putting all the flat pack neatly on the sofa, etc.  A neighbour goes past and takes all the stuff off the sofa to have a look – I go out and see her and ask her nicely to put it back in order afterwards – no problem.  I go out 10 minutes later and the bitch has just left the stuff lying all over the street.  I am responsible for the pavement outside my house – imagine if someone had fallen on this stuff?  Soooo cross.  Reorganise the stuff and suddenly a couple from over the road appear with a mattress and just dump it with mine.  Explain politely that if I go over 2m3 I have to pay extra … think … I’m not paying for your crap to go out.  They then have the cheek to tell me that I am lying and that it is free.  Stood my ground and said no but told them to keep an eye out for the lorry and then ask the guys themselves to take it away.  So lived up to my nickname of the Dragon yesterday, and am probably hated by half the street now!

I have been beavering away for the last few days setting up the new website … for me this is a whole new world and being untrained in all this sort of stuff, it is a long and complicated process – no, long and very logical, needing total concentration.  After three hours I find the brain just closes down and smoke starts coming out of my ears (instead of my mouth!!).  Fortunately the New Husband has gone out into the big city of Brussels for the afternoon so the house is quiet – his office is at home and apart from sneaking into the kitchen every now and then, he does manage to stay in his office most of the day without bounding into the drawing room where I work to tell me of his zillionth brainwave of the day – however when he does, all my work has to stop as I can’t work and listen at the same time!  So I should be continuing with the site, but I need a break!

Gardening would be good but the lovely weather of last week has been replaced with cold and unrelenting rain, so we’ll give that a miss this afternoon.  Saturday we took a trip up to the Belgian coast in glorious sun – I am getting quite fond of these enormous sandy beaches – shame about the wind though.  That wretched dog of mine, Angus, disgraced himself totally on the beach.  The beach is about 4km long and about 1km wide when the tide is out (it was) … the dog rushes round like a demented soul (he is) and then spies the only kids making sandcastles on all of the beach.  He rushes up to them (being a very sociable  sort of dog and fond of small children who invariably have food in their hands which are approximately the same height as his mouth) and there and then craps on their sandcastle … embarrassing?  Not for him – he just rushed off to chase gulls or some other stupid thing, leaving me to rush up, apologise and whip out a doggy bag to clear up after him.  Fortunately the man with his two grandchildren was very nice about it – thank goodness it wasn’t in England – I would probably have got a £200 fine, a 6 six month sentence and the dog would have an ASBO.  By the way dogs are allowed on the beach apart from mid-June until mid-September.  Anyway the walk continued and I spied hoof marks in the sand – do riders stop and pick up their horses’ offerings?  Probably not.  However, if one had to choose, I don’t mind walking in horse droppings but hate walking in dog poo (who does?).  Sat outside a café having a drink and when we walked back along the beach, guess what?  The sandcastles had been abandoned!

The Rock Thrower will be up here in a couple of weeks, shuffling around, talking text speak, emptying my purse and asking when supper is ready – he doesn’t know that the day after his arrival the council are coming around to take way all my monsters in the garage – everything has to be on the pavement by 2pm, ready to go.  As the New Husband will be in England, RT and I have to empty the garage and I might well chuck out some old stuff belonging him when he isn’t here!  La Fée Verte and the Bébé Fée Verte might be coming up too over the Easter weekend, so I should be working hard on the website now as the next couple of weeks will be out of the question – especially as my children are computer junkies and need mega daily fixes on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc.  The only time I get near my computer when they are here is around 4am and then it is so cluttered with their junk I need an hour to get it back into some sort of working order.

This is about the only house left on the beach front – the rest are horrid blocks; the only advantage – between the front and the beach there isn’t a road, just a promenade.

Gigi (see link on the right) asked for the recipe for Poulet au Citron – the only recipe that the New Husband has as yet mastered.  We shall therefore assume that you can prepare and serve this without absolutely no knowledge of cooking whatsoever.  Don’t expect photos as 1) during the preparation the kitchen takes on Hiroshima proportions and 2) I am not that sad to take photos of the completed dish before eating it!  The recipe is originally in French so I have vaguely translated it so if there are funny words use your imagination.  It is easy, cheap and seems to be idiot-proof.  It will take 30 minutes and is enough for 4 people.

You need

700 g chicken breasts (I bought organic)

1 bit of fresh ginger (1cm or 2cm)

2 shallots

2 lemons preferably organic

20cl of oil

3 soup spoons honey (acacia is best as fairly neutral in taste)

3 soup spoons rice wine (we left this out as we didn’t have any)

3 soup spoons of soy sauce

5 cl chicken stock

Salt

Coriander leaves (chopped)

Rice to accompany – the cooking of which I will leave to your imagination …

How to go about it

Cut up chicken breasts into 3cm squares, dry them on kitchen roll so they don’t spit at you during cooking.  Peel ginger and cut into thin strips.  Peel shallots and dice finely.

Wash your lemons in hot water and dry.  Peel one of them finely leaving behind the white inside which is too bitter.  Cut into very fine strips.  Juice the two lemons.

Heat up oil in wok or a pan – when hot fry the chicken for about 3 minutes until golden – take it out of pan and put on kitchen roll to absorb excess fat.

Empty pan of fat, just leaving 3 soup spoons of fat; quickly fry up ginger, shallots and lemon rind in the oil.  Add honey and leave it to melt, then add lemon juice, rice wine, soy sauce and stock.

Let this bubble away quietly until it starts to thicken slightly.  Then add chicken, salt to taste and at the last minute the chopped coriander.

In the meantime you have cooked the rice – just put all this together on a plate and serve.

As easy as that!

Today I am totally pissed off and bored, so perhaps it is time to have a little blog therapy.  Firstly the weather is totally awful – damp and dark and sad – I had forgotten how depressing weather in northern Europe can be … I left England thirty-odd years ago and lived in the south-west of France where the sky is lighter in the winter and then I moved to Switzerland high up in the Alpes above the clouds so in winter if it wasn’t snowing, we had brilliant sunshine.  Since my move to Brussels a year ago, apart from May last year, the weather has been overcast and gloomy.  Added to which for our holidays last year we decided to do a rain theme – 10 days in Brittany and 10 days in Co. Mayo, Ireland – both met our expectations!  One day of sun in Brittany and one in Ireland.  I like to think I am not a lying on a beach all day person, but at the moment four or five days of sun wouldn’t go amiss.

We could of course just shut up the house and whisk ourselves away to a week of sun and bugger the footprints we would be contributing to the Earth’s demise – unfortunately the recession is starting to be felt quite seriously and although the New Husband beavers away, clients are being sluggish in paying up.  He has in fact just whizzed to the shops to buy supper as I think he is fed up with my menus on a shoestring … however at least it gets him in the kitchen doing other things than raiding the ‘fridge!

A couple of days later …

Although he doesn’t cook, the New Husband turned out an enjoyable dinner of chicken with lemon and ginger – this is his only recipe, so I think in a couple of months’ time, I will hate the sight of it!  We won’t talk about the state of the kitchen after his culinery efforts.

Yesterday, to add to my general gloom, I looked out of the drawing room window and noticed a flat tyre on the car – odd, as the tyres are only a couple of months old.  On going to investigate, found that a second one was flat … some sod had either let them down or slashed them.  Rang the garage who said ‘Unscrew the valve caps and see if there is anything inside’ … bingo! a peppercorn in each valve cap.  Better than having them slashed but a stupid bloody thing to do.  I normally just get in the car and drive and never check the tyres.  I admit to having a large gaz-guggling SUV which I love.  Now that I live in Brussels I no longer need it, but of course it is totally unsaleable so I am stuck with it, and even if I did sell it, the money from the sale would only buy a horrid little car, totally unsuitable for long journeys.  We also have a small car for the town – what makes me so cross with all these idiotic people who take it out on SUVs is that in fact the big car gives off less CO2 than the small, ancient car.

I do try and do my Save the Planet bit – we recycle everything possible, I buy as much as I can food-wise that doesn’t come from the other end of the world, our house is pretty chemical-free, I walk to the local shops and take the tram when I go into the centre – all that kind of stuff, but when some idiot does this it really gets me angry.  If they want to be eco-warriors, that’s fine by me, but do it in a more intelligent manner.  Because of their bit of fun I had to drive to the garage, get the compressor, drive back and then go back to the garage to return the compressor and get the tyres checked and THEN drive home again, and not forgetting the time I had to run the compressor to inflate the tyres.  So how much extra CO2 did I put into the atmosphere?