I intend to write here more frequently than I used to because to be honest, I’m disillusioned with nearly all of the social media platforms at the moment. You’ll occasionally find me on BlueSky, and my photos and drawings are going back to Flickr.
The rest, I retain the accounts but I don’t update.
I had a lot holiday in 2024 – I don’t really recommend December but I spent a week in Grenoble and a week in La Rochelle. Also an eternity in trains but that’s a different question. Thing is, I didn’t really get around to dealing with the photographs so they only went up on Flick recently, straight from the phone. The skating photographs aren’t done yet (shortly, if I get my way).
For Grenoble, I went there for the ISU Grand Prix Final. I got to see a few skaters I really wanted to see in competition. Most of the sight seeing had to be worked around the competition schedule. I was lucky enough to go to the Bastille via the Telepherique on a sunny day and I got to see the mighty Mont Blanc. You couldn’t really see it for much of the rest of the week because the clouds came down so low. December.
It is 9am on a Sunday morning. I don’t feel like making my own breakfast so I open the maps app to find somewhere “new” to have breakfast preferably near the supermarket.
I hate wasting Sunday mornings bot I do it a lot lately. My phone returns a list of breakfast options. The first looks fairly crap so I choose the second one, Frank, which is near the end of the 71 bus route and not too far from the supermarket where I will want to get breakfast supplies for the week. I put on some shoes and socks, and get ready to leave. It’s only then that I notice the dusting of snow on the rooves of the building across the road. Wow. I had not expected that.
The world tells you no one sane is up early on a Sunday morning. I’ve always known this is a lie. A lot of people get off the bus near where I live. They are mostly on their way to the market near Gare du Midi. I went there once and I found it overwhelming. I get on the bus and I am on my way to Frank.
Frank is on the street along side the Theatre de la Monnaie. For me, it’s a short cut street, one I don’t pass through very often. Frank opened 5 minutes before I tumbled out of the bus, trying to orient myself. It’s still got a few tables free and it fills up as I peruse the menu. It’s a mostly youngish crowd, and maybe even a little hipsterish. The café is fronted by window which are maybe 4 metres high. Although the sparkling sun is still hidden behind the theatre, the windows and the corresponding high ceiling give the café a lovely airy feeling. It makes you happy to be in there.
There’s an art deco nouveau style feature ceiling glass decoration. The lighting is otherwise ultra modern. Most of the wait staff are young men. They are friendly and welcoming. There is, at ground level, a communal table and a good few small circular tables for two. While I am there, however, I don’t see one single laptop. I’m writing in notebooks. I guess I am hipsterish too.
There is retro pop playing in the background. I’ve recognised Fleetwood Mac and some Bob Dylan. Is Bob Dylan pop? My sisters had 45rpm singles by him when they were teenagers. I guess that makes him pop.
Gradually, the sound of more and ore voices drown out all but the basslines.
Frank has a good menu. I order sourdough toast. You can customise the toast, so I add a poached egg. A fully naked Eggs Benedict, I guess. I like it simple. I also ask for a guest roaster espresso. A cinnamon and cardamom roll, purely because of the cardamom. Oh, and a fruit juice. It’s not a bad breakfast at all.
The sound of chattering voices is intermittently pierced by a Ding from the kitchen at the back of the dining area. It opens on to us. Soon, one of those Dings will hearld the arrival of my poached egg and toast. In the meantime, everything else arrives to my table without too much fuss, accompanied also by a jug of water. I like that touch. The espresso is less than a mouthful – I think it’s a bean from Ecuador at the moment, I cared enough to order it, not enough to note it. It is fantastic. But I order another hot drink, this time, a hot chocolate which should last me longer.
For the first time ever, my hot chocolate arrives with latte art. A swan. I surreptitiously star at the cappuccino delivered to the woman at the next table to see what she got. Did she get a swan too? Is today’s barista an expert in swans? I don’t know. I don’t have my glasses on, and I really can’t discern what the top of her coffee actually looks like.
The language of choice here seems to be English. Brussels is a melting pot, English comes in many accents, Spanish, Irish, Flemish, you name it. I love that around the place. When the waiters turn away, guests return to their language of choice. Next to me, it’s Flemish.
When the poached egg on sourdough toast arrives, it’s perfect. The toast is still warm. The egg is perfectly poached, and better than I have ever managed to do it myself. I eat it and then turn to the sweet stuff. The cinnamon roll is lovely. It’s slightly stickly and of course, it has that touch of cardamom. I finish the hot chocolate but I’m not really read to leave so I order a pot of tea.
Someone knocks over the overburdened coat stand. I can hear an Irish accent two tables away. I don’t know what he is discussing. Occasionally, a waiter comes and clears away empty dishes from the table. The word “empty” makes me think of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables. It’s not a happy song and it is totally at odds with the gloriously relaxed ambiance in Frank on a Sunday morning.
But it’s 11.30 and I really need to go and get groceries. Sunday may be half over, but I am glad I came, and I will come again.
One of the things I found “great” about Reddit was how there was a place for just about every interest going and today I want to talk about fountain pens.
I own a lot of fountain pens. You could call me a collector (or hoarder) of fountain pens, in particular Lamy AL-Star/Safaris, Pelikan M20x and Kaweco sport shaped pens. I have two of the art sports (the one I wanted I really can’t find any more).
I’ve mixed feelings about all this because I buy pens to write with. Sure there are FOMO colour issues there (man, there is a light pink M200 that I love in my possession now.
When you hang around the online fountain pen community, they are all very friendly. But I’ve realised that not many of them write as much as I do (and I use ballpoints a lot too) and their interest is less in writing and more in owning and trading. Sure, they will speak about grail pens.
But equally, they will trade to and from pens. And for that reason they keep boxes/packaging. Somehow this idea infected me. I am swiming in boxes for pens.
I own a couple of vintage pens too – bought in fleamarkets because I recognised that they represented good gambles (so I pay max 20E for a flea market pen). I understand that in 80 years time, having the packaging will matter.
But they don’t spark joy. I’ve realised with both the fountain pens and the journaling things that I although I have used fountain pens since I was about 9 years old, and I have been writing a journal since I was 19 years old, I don’t actually really feel at home in either community on Reddit. I cannot be too precious about pens – yes they get lost and I’ve lost about six Caran d’Ache Ecridor ballpoints over the course of my life (all of them replaced at one point or another). These things – at the end of the day – are tools. I might spend 114E on a Kaweco Artsport but I expect to be able to write with it too. I’m not interested in trading it/selling it at a profit in a few years’ time. Someone is going to clean up when I am dead because they’ll get a substantial collection of Ecridors in a job lot, probably.
Anyway…all this to say I’m not sure I really fit in online any more.
I promised myself 45 minutes to blog this morning but before I get onto the meat of the next entry (Switzerland and France), I wanted to voice my own opinion on the arguments around remote working that are increasingly destroying my twitter feed.
Look, I get it. You want to remote work for the rest of your life. More power to you. But the world does not revolve around you and your needs. I hated, hated, hated teleworking. The lines between work and not work blurred to the point of being meaningless for me and while I technically have the space for a work desk in the corner, the fact remains that I had other plans for that space.
I’m fortunate enough to have a hybrid option and mostly I work in the office. But the reason that people want remote working seems to me to be because a) they have too long a commute and b) they loathe their coworkers/managers.
I’m utterly disillusioned with the debate. When I see it online, it is clear as daylight to me that the homeworking brigade cannot possibly absorb the fact that they might remotely be limited in their outlook. You cannot accidentally run into someone homeworking. Being stuck on video conference calls all day long is physically exhausting.
Home work if you want but for the love of god stop pretending that the people who hate it don’t matter. or are idiot managers who want to monitor. In my case I just want my bloody sewing machine table back.
I’ve aspired to having a beautiful, tidy, but above all else, windsandbreezes type home. Elements of this have been hard but today, I cleared the dining room table.
I suffer from flat surface syndrome and the dining room table is just inside the door of the apartment. This means that lots of things wind up on the table, post for previous tenants, junk mail, stuff I bought but have not got a home for yet. I resent the post for previous tenants of course; they get far more post than I do although most of it lately has been from their bank. But they seem more popular than me.
But I know deep down that in fact, I sleep better if a) the table is clear and tidy ready for next use and b) the kitchen is tidy and I have not run out of teaspoons.
I confess, I ran out of teaspoons this morning. I am drinking tea that does not require a teaspoon because it has a string and a label. I don’t take sugar. And the dishwasher is on at the moment.
So I’ve cleared the table mostly – there is one cup of tea, and a sketchpad. Sketchbooks and sketchpads are the bane of my life but I’ll come to that separately.
My family laugh when I say things like “I want tor educe the amount of clutter in my life. They are, I think, scarred by just how many different varieties of tea were on offer in my house in Dublin. Most of my kitchen stuff is in storage and mostly the problem is an out of control art supply and stationery problem. And books. I lack self discipline on the book front. It’s probably lucky that because of Apple Music I don’t buy CDs any more; there are 300 plus of those also in storage. I don’t like my life being in storage but this is a thing I may rectify next year. Moving swiftly onwards.
Life is full of small jobs that together, take a lot of time. We let them stack up because ultimately, life is full of some big things that tire us out, sap of of time and energy. Every time I sit down to make a list of the things I do, I get depressed. It is out of control and although one million self help and youtube influencer videos cannot possibly wrong, I am question whether in fact, making a list is exactly what we should be doing. Apart from clearing the dining room table, one of the way overdue jobs which I will start on today is the Great Battery Replacement.
Possibly not obvious to readers of a blog which I broadly neglect, I have a few watches. I own a sports watch because apparently I swim (I don’t have time lately but moving swiftly onwards), although I wear that on my right wrist and mostly I don’t use it as a watch except during the night because well it does light up. I otherwise have two watches that do not require batteries and then there are the various things that I bought at times I could barely afford them, which are definitely not automatic and weren’t, with one or two notable exceptions, manufactured in Switzerland. The last time I did the batteries was before I left Ireland. As the average battery tends to last around 2 years, it’s a safe bet that absolutely all of them need new batteries. As I’m DONE with them all running out at the same time (despite having 3 other watches which do not require expensive trips to a jewellery store) I have decided to stagger the battery replacements. THIS IS IMPRESSIVELY HARD because I work in IT, am quite systematic and would like to do this battery replacement trip in an optimised manner by only having to go to the jeweler once.
In fact, apart from fitness trackers, I have not bought a lot of watches in the last few years. The solar watch I wear frequently now, I bought less than a month ago. The automatic which I wore all the time until I bought the solar watch was a gift 5 years ago. The last watch I remember buying I bought in Paris as a memorial to the job I had just quit and that was 8 years ago.
Against that I own 3 Mercedes Benz promotion watches of which I definitely bought one at least 25 years ago. I have a Fossil which was a gift. I think there is one RipCurl watch which I bought in Tarifa around 12 years ago. Watchbuying seemed to be something I did occasionally but not expensively. Aside from a basic Tissot, none of these watches cost more than around 30 euro or the equivalent in Belgian Francs at the time. IF you watch watchYoutube, I don’t know how they would call them (apart from cheap) because the ones they deride as fashion watches (the ones that are fashion labels rather than watchmakers) aren’t anywhere in the ball park of a 30E watch with a 1999 Mercedes Benz logo on it. I don’t think even Mercedes flog watches that cheap.
But this is not an essay on watches, but on being organised and the sad fact is I cannot possibly wear watches that do not tell me the time. So I need to get my act together and get batteries for them and arranging that is an organisational issue. There is a jeweller less than 50 metres away.
All I have to do is go there.
I am currently listening to the Sibelius symphonies. Very different to yesterday’s U2. And I want to post one thing before I lose it – the very wonderful Gautier Capucon playing Einaudi on piano and cello. You will have encountered this if you follow me on either Twitter or Facebook.
Today did not bring good news on the Covid-19 front which I do not want to discuss. I’m two weeks into mostly remote working and it’s not getting that easy. I find it very lonely for the most part although to be fair, the tools alleviate some of that. I had to traipse in for IT support this morning. I arrived to sign in at the same time as a colleague who on hearing I worked in the IT team was at pains to tell me that he truly appreciated everything my department was doing to enable as many people not to have to come to work as possible. It shines up your day a little and sometimes I think things like that get lost in the pure operational to do list. And we’re not superheroes.
Upstairs appears to be doing DIY. I’m sort of wishing they’d just watch constant Netflix instead.
Anyway, by way of things of beauty to occupy yourself at various times, the skies [in Luxembourg at least] are generally very clear at the moment. This means the night skies are more interesting to look at, and you can see much more. Especially, you can see the ISS flying overhead. It goes very quickly. I saw it at around half past nine last night and it may well be around an hour earlier tonight. I’ll take a look out in 25 minutes and hopefully see it. For more information, try here: it gives the UK times (I cannot find a definitive guide for Luxembourg and the NASA page is unhelpful on that front). This is a useful twitter feed as well. There is something extremely pleasing about looking at the night sky, a sense that there is something bigger than ourselves.
The whole sense of living in a rather bad novel has already waned. Work is busy. I’m inundated with people telling what to do with all the time I don’t have now that I am working from home. And outside the world seems to have vanished. The buses are down to every half an hour; the sound of an ambulance passing is altogether more piercing. The weather has been beautiful – the clear nights being accompanied by clear days. It feels rather vicious that strictly speaking, we should not go out unless absolutely necessary. I did not have time to go walking after work today because work finished a bit later than I would like and I still need to eat. I’ve not cooked so often in the last 3 years as I have in the last 2 weeks.
But I cannot complain. The feelings I have are mixed in with some guilt that I feel I have anything to find hard. I have a roof over my head, and currently, at least, dependable access to a supermarket. I have music. I have instruments and I can still go out without needing a permission slip. My face is not destroyed by surgical masks, and I am not exhausted making life or death decisions. I don’t have to manage small children. When all of this is over, I’m not entirely sure what I will feel and of course, when all of this is over, the world will be a very different place.
Luxembourg is in the process of putting temporary COVID-19 care centres in place. One will be in the biggest pop venue in the country; another in the main exhibition centre. I know there will be drive through testing in Croke Park and Pairc Ui Chaoimh and still my brain cannot get over actually needing these things. We are told they expect the peak number of cases to hit in the next 2 weeks and that the medical supplies are coming. You cannot leave Luxembourg very easily at the moment, if, like me, you are a public transport eco-rat, and anyway, the airport is closed. All of this is weird. I didn’t plan for it and frankly, my disaster prep involved a battery operated radio and some cash. I didn’t bank on having to stay home not waiting for the zombies to arrive, but hiding from a virus which I cannot even see.
In many ways, scary, in many more ways truly unreal. Something which I hear very often lately is that “this too shall pass” and of course it will; they always do, eventually.
I’m very heartened by some of the things happening to give some solace to what is a plainly unnatural existence. Things like Gautier Capucon and Igor Levitt posting daily pieces. I think Renaud Gautier does as well. I cannot keep up with everything. Access to fantastic concerts on YouTube and Digital Concert Hall. It’s impossible to keep up. I’ve always felt that in general, people are mostly good (although my trust is sorely tried by the recent toilet paper craze). I think to some extent, we still have a lot of hope left; and a lot of trust in the passage of time to heal the wounds we suffer, either mentally or physically.
I still don’t get my head around the reality I am living now. I sometimes wonder if I ever will. But if you want a piece of music to remind you that whatever about the weirdness, we are capable of true beauty, I recommend you look for a recording of Sibelius’s second symphony. All of them are worth a listen, but that is particularly beautiful.
This is The Doily.
I bought the pattern and the thread when I was on holiday in Nice in the South of France in 2010. I bought a load of thread at the Bergere de France shop – they’ve discontinued the product since which is a real pity. The doily has been under production since about then as I probably started it while I was still in Nice (bored, hotel room alone in the evening). It went through about 5 house moves, and was lost across one (so I started another one, from a pattern also bought in Nice with more thread also bought in Nice). I finally finished it about a month ago.
I’ve always loved the colour – I call it ballet pink and I like those pastelly shades for some reason. I wasn’t sure I’d have enough thread in the end (but I did, and have some left and now don’t know what to do with it).
I’m really proud of it because it took a lot of work. It’s not the first doily I have finished (there are two others, one of which I’ve lost so I hope it turns up in the storage boxes still in Ireland. In a way, I find it hard to believe that almost 9 years have passed since I bought the thread and started it. Life seems to be flying. But most of all, I love that it represents a simple truth: if you work at something, you will get to the end, at some stage.
I bought a pencil sharpener today.
As my sister pointed out, I probably actually have a pencil sharpener already (just a few) so…uh?
This is an antique/vintage one. It is an FTE Modell 120 – no idea when it was built, but late 1960s is favourite. It is manufactured out of Bakelite. It reminds me of an old telephone. It looks nothing like a phone.
[oh god the new editor is killing me here]
I like the shape of it.
I have a lot of sharpeners. There are various reasons for this a) finding myself caught in flagrante delit of needing to sharpen a pencil, b) losing them and c) hoarding good ones in case I lose them. My definition of good tended to be “Faber Castell”.
This was fine except I have now a lot of pencils and they aren’t all the same size. There are a bunch of pencils which are slightly larger than standard. I could not keep track of which pencil sharpener fitted which pencils but often, it was very much “whichever one fits this pencil is not one of the 7 sharpeners I happen to have to hand”. As an additional problem, I could not sharpen charcoal pencils in any of my handheld pencils without killing both blades and pencils. So in desperation one day I bought the Staedler rotary sharpener. Sure, it was more expensive than the hand helds I had, even the brass ones with the killer sharp blades, but then, so were the charcoal pencils that I was going through like they were going out of fashion. The only other rotary sharpener I could find at the time was the Caran d’Ache Matterhorn, either standard or limited edition, and being Caran d’Ache and solid metal, they were way over the odds for testing.
The Staedtler worked nicely. It’s plastic which I wasn’t so lost on but there’s decent capacity for shavings, and it sharpened the charcoal pencils. A month later I bought a limited edition Matterhorn for no other reason than I liked it. I refuse to sharpen the charcoals in it which is why I have two mechanical sharpeners on my desk. This brings us to today’s purchase of an FTE. I use pencils at work and I wanted a rotary sharpener. I wanted it to be a bit more solid than plastic, but not as expensive as the Matterhorn (which is jewellery level pricy). The vintage fair seemed a possible source and the FTE rocked up at it. The seller knocked 5 euro of the price, and it was much less than the cost of a new Staedler, so I bought it. It works. I’ve sharpened a Blackwing in it. So the FTE is going to work.
FTE was a manufacturer I wasn’t familiar with, so I looked it up. It was a factory in the GDR – and apparently when the sharpeners were sold in the 1960s they cost 13.50DM which by the standards of the time was not cheap.
I see a lot of them on eBay.de and they aren’t uncommon as such – the ex-East block seemed to make a lot of mechanical sharpeners as I’ve seen Czech models on sale too, nearly all Bakelite. I like the shape of this and it put a reasonably decent point on the pencil so I’m happy enough about it.
But
god it is a rabbit hole though, these mechanical sharpening machines. The standard colour of the Matterhorn is grey. I want it. I also want the Red limited edition (no longer available) and the Black limited edition (no longer available). And there are a couple of really nice AW Faber ones of which I want one particular one. I have visions of a shelf of about 8 mechanical sharpeners… and a lot of people going “what is she like?”
My social media sources flooded with IWD, with promotions, with hashtags, with exhortations to talk about the inspirational women in your career who helped you along the way.
I am not a fan of Women’s Day. Its existence reminds me that women are systematically discriminated against and expected to accept whatever small crumbs come our way. There is always some chorus of basses and tenors singing about the lack of a Men’s Day. (it is November 19th by the way; the fact that it appears not to be such a big deal speaks volumes about how much men care about it and campaign for it)
I wanted to think about the things that would make being a woman easier in today’s world. One of those things would be Not Being Embarrassed About Your Period. A sanitary towel or tampon falls out of your handbag? No big deal.
Being on your period? No big deal. You have an accident? No big deal – it happens to us all. For my lifetime, though periods were handled as something to be hidden, something to be embarrassed about. When I look back at some of the men in my life, they could handle discussing contraception; they could not handle me having sleeping problems because my period was due in 2 days.
Plus, as it happens today I accidentally flicked a sanitary towel out of my handbag while looking for a sketchbook. I’m now 46 so I don’t give a damn any more but I also know that for years, I would have been scarlet.
So that’s one thing.
I was also thinking about inspirations, and if I’m honest, one of the women who I wish was around when I was 18, 19, is Federica Mogherini. I think she’s great. But I don’t want to talk about her right now. I want to talk about someone completely different.
I grew up in Ireland and I was born in the early 1970s. I spend a lot of time on Irish social media and I can tell you, young people today really have no concept of what Ireland was like back then. Reeling in the Years does not even come place. I want to sing the praises of one, unknown, not famous woman who changed my life in a very significant way in June 1980. I don’t even know if she is still alive.
The rhythm of life in Ireland came with various rites of passage, of which the second major one after starting school at the age of 5, was, and remains for many people, the First Holy Communion. When I was a child, you got this in First Class.
So at the age of 7 and a half, one Saturday in May, I was clad in a short white frilly dress, wandered up the church, and got Communion for the first time. There was a sort of party in the school afterwards, at which my mother strictly ordered me not to even consider the idea of going near an orange, much less trying to peel it. Part of the deal with being in the Communion class was something altogether more secular. It was a school trip.
We didn’t have many of those in school in Ireland when I was a child, certainly not in most of the small local schools in towns where both major employers had challenges from time to time. But the Communion class got to go away for a whole day. By tradition, it was a trip to Dublin Zoo.
We lived 150 miles from Dublin Zoo, and the most logical way to get 80 or so 7 year olds to Dublin was to shepherd them onto a train into a reserved carriage, and have them picked up by bus in Heuston Station and then shipped out to the Phoenix Park to pay attention to the exotic animals we could not imagine. I had never been to Dublin and to be frank, I don’t think I had been on a bus before either.
Anyway, Ireland of the 1980 had a bunch of limitations which meant I think the sole option for bus hire would have been CIE’s Dublin city bus service. So a double decker arrived to take us to the zoo.
Most of the women I knew at that time were teachers, nuns or nurses. All of the teachers in my school were female. We knew the boys’ school for the Second Class and upwards (ie, older than us) had mostly male teachers but most of the men I knew at that time were mechanics, truck drivers, creamery managers or some such.
We had the Veritas encyclopaedias and in the page describing the kind of jobs people could do, women had just 2 of the 8 jobs described; teacher and nurse. Every other job was a man’s job. People talk about how important role models are in the tech sector today, in politics, and the idea of ensuring that language isn’t exclusionary. Images can be very exclusionary.
Anyway, back at Heuston Station, my all female cohort of teachers discovered something highly unusual about this bus. It was so extraordinary they made a point of pointing it to an army of 7 and 8 year olds who really only wanted to go to the zoo and see the penguins.
The bus driver was a woman. It was, to be frank, unique in any of our experience.
It is nearly 40 years since I made my Holy Communion, but I still think of that moment – almost a Kodak moment in my life; stamped on my memory – when I realised that if a woman wanted she could be a bus driver. That a bus driver did not have to be male.
We talk about the importance of role models. I don’t know who that woman was but frankly, she made a massive change to my view of the world when I was 7. And the impact of that change on my life has been immeasurable.
Anyway, I was busy, yesterday, on International Women’s Day and like I say, I just want periods not to be a subject of embarrassment or shame. But when we talk about inspiration and role models, we need kids to see them, not just teenagers, or early career researchers or students.