All quiet on the Western front

That is because I am on the Eastern front at the moment, forgot to say I was off to Bangkok, where I am writing this (struggling with a qwerty keyboard), then Laos and Cambodia. Back on 11/11.

Evocative sentence of the day (2)

"I got to thinking about how much time I spend in my life crashing around like a great gasping fish, either squirming away from some uncomfortable distress or flopping hungrily toward ever more pleasure. And I wondered whether it might serve me (and those who are burdened with the task of loving me) if I could learn to stay still and endure a bit more without always getting dragged along on the potholed road of circumstance".
I just love that last phrase!
From "Eat, Pray, Love" (subtitled "One Woman's Search for Everything, Across Italy, India and Indonesia) by Elizabeth Gilbert.

More Ghent

I love this "secret garden"!

Gorging in Ghent

Had a lovely day in Ghent on Friday, most of it eating and drinking, although we made up for it a little by walking halfway around the city on the way back to the railway station. In particular, we had a very good lunch (thanks, L.!) with scrumptious desserts at the Ghent branch of the trendy restaurant Belga Queen.


Despite being a very upmarket sort of place, the English version of the menu clearly hasn't been checked by a native speaker, so it offers such gems as "cuckoo from Malines" ("coucou de Malines" being a type of chicken) and "lightly smoked piglet chops" with "chips horn" (cornet de frites, or chips in a paper cone) - illustrated in the photo.




Curiously, the English menu on the website, which I recognise as being the one from Brussels, is OK, so presumably the Ghent operation didn't check what had already been done by the Brussels one but sent its own translations to its own printers.




Apart from other aspects of its design, for which the Brussels branch has won prizes, Belga Queen is (in)famous for its clear glass toilet doors. These become opaque upon locking, provided that the occupant turns the handle several times - which apparently some find difficult, leading to numerous complaints (about loos with views??).

Moody Blues - Candle of Life (1970)

In Memoriam

Claire Powell, 1954-2006: big Moody Blues fan. Maybe they'll play this one for you, Claire.

Candle Of Life

Something you can't hide
Says you're lonely
Hidden deep inside
Of you only
It's there for you to see
Take a look and be
Burn slowly the candle of life

Something there outside
Says we're only
In the hands of time
Falling slowly
It's there for us to know
With love that we can go
Burn slowly the candle of life

So love everybody
And make them your friend
So love everybody
And make them your friend

Something you can't hide
Says you're lonely
Hidden deep inside
Of you only
It's there for you to see
Take a look and be
Burn slowly the candle of life

Something there outside
Says we're only
In the hands of time
Falling slowly
It's there for us to know
With love that we can go
Burn slowly the candle of life

The Right Attitude to Rain

Just finished the book of this title by Alexander McCall Smith, and I think it is his best yet. His writing style is deceptively simple and yet he manages to weave into a story full of human feeling and incident reflections on poetry, art, Scottish history, language and above all, philosophy: he was, after all, until he gave it up to write full-time, a professor of medical ethics, and the main protagonist of the "Isabel Dalhousie" series edits a journal of philosophy. Here's a bit I especially enjoyed:

"She had to contend with the preparation of the next issue of the journal and with a number of objections raised to her editing by one of her contributors. He was a professor of moral philosophy from Germany, who prided himself on his ability to write in English. This pride was well-placed in some respects, but not in others. Isabel had tried to tell him that inversions in English had to be handled carefully - otherwise infelicities of style would we encounter. The verb at the end of the sentence could be put, but only rarely. Very seriously must the issue of moral imagination be taken, he had written, and when Isabel had interfered with this sentence in the proofs he had responded testily: Wrong it might be, he had written, but wrong here it is not. That very sentence was technically correct, but was not easy modern English, as she had pointed out in a subsequent note, to which he had replied: Must philosophy be easy? For whom are we writing? For the philosopher or the street person? She smiled at the additional confusion; the man in the street was not a street person, by definition."

Tempus Fugit

Happy New Year! Yes I know it isn't, but I just had a birthday and that always feels like the beginning of a new year for me. I have been a bit remiss in fulfilling blogging duties recently, but some of what I have been up to appears below. Evening classes have started again and I am already behind with my Turkish homework, including listening to a new batch of Turkish CDs that I somehow acquired while looking for Marisa Monte's latest one. I've also been walking a lot, especially along the trails that follow the valley of the Woluwe River - which looks more like a stream, most of the time.

Fêtes romanes, 24 September

Every year the commune of Woluwe St. Lambert organises a festival called "fêtes romanes", featuring a different country, this year, Morocco (last year, Brazil, so not surprisingly I bumped into La Carioca there). I visited with H. and daughter, who kindly bought me a jangly belly-dancing thingy for my birthday. We didn't stay for the concert featuring bands "Jazzeera" and "Marockin Brass".

Marisa Monte, 23 September

Much enjoyed a concert by Marisa Monte, Brazilian singer, at the Cirque Royal - though La Carioca and J. missed it, which is baby Marco's fault for arriving a week late.

Here's an extract from the same show, with the same set, etc. in London - for some reason YouTube won't let me embed it this time.