VO-DE-OH-DOH

Back home in Brussels, the sun made a brief appearance, and it was even warm yesterday. However, I am busy feathering my nest and am oblivious to the vagaries of nature. It is a truism that whatever the size of the container at your disposal, you will find stuff to fill it up. This is the reasoning behind huge supermarket trolleys. I have been steadily upgrading in living space and location since my arrival in Brussels nearly two years ago, and am now almost back to the level of comfort and luxury that I enjoyed before Harold's sudden demise left me bereft and penniless. I found my ideal apartment in a perfect part of town. Apart from the lack of litter, I could be in Wimbledon. I had been living up to now in furnished accommodation, but I rented the new apartment - 1920's listed building, SO moi - unfurnished, which was an open invitation that my Visa card could not refuse.

The shopping in Brussels is not fantastic, sadly. Especially for furniture. It is either VERY classy and expensive - my favourite shop is Fins de Siecles, which specializes in high quality reproduction art deco furniture, but is way out of my financial bracket - or cheap and nasty. There is Ikea, but both stores are in outlying areas miles from a bus stop or metro, and I'm not hiring a car just to go and pick up a chipboard bookshelf with a silly name. Luckily we have Hema, Blokker and Casa, which are city-centre Ikea-style stores at affordable prices, smaller and easier to negotiate.

However, some items cannot be skimped on. A good bed, for example. And a day bed, or sofa. My new chaise-longue has just been delivered, on which I plan to recline in a suitably diaphanous negligee and caribou-trimmed mules. It has to last me into my dotage so I have not gone for anything too low, in 20 years' time I might not be able to get out of it. The chaise-longue, I mean. Not the negligee.


The 1920's is a decade I would have enjoyed, I would have been a right flapper, dancing the Charleston with George Bernard Shaw, a glass of champagne in one hand and a cocktail Sobranie wedged in a foot-long ivory cigarette holder in the other. Compare the heady but stylish hedonism of the roaring twenties with today's young gels' idea of a good night out: drinking pints of beer followed by alcopops, and ending up vomiting into their handbags if they're ladylike, or into the gutter if they're not. The flappers of yesteryear knew how to dress, how to drink, and how to tantalize. Jade Goody could learn a thing or two from watching some old Mary Pickford movies. Rudolf Valentino could have swept me off to his tent in the desert any time.

The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, managed by the eccentric and excessive Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, a sort of cross between Harvey Goldsmith and Boris Berezovsky, have always fascinated me, being the 1920's equivalent of an Andrew Lloyd-Webber show. As a young gel obsessed with tulle and satin and prancing about on tiptoe, I was given a book called "The Book of Ballet", which contained black and white photographs of the great ballerinas and full stories of all the great ballets. Hence I am a font of knowledge on the history of ballet, even though my own terpsichorean talents are a tad less refined. The names George Balanchine, Maria Tallchief and Anna Pavlova hold no mysteries for me. I am an expert on men in tights. Sadly the book was lost many years ago. If anyone ever comes across it at a car boot sale, I'd love to leaf through it again and turn back the pages of time.

Talking of dance, have you been watching Dance X? Bruno Tonioli is my latest "boyfriend". If I were sweeping down a grand staircase in a gown and feather boa, he would certainly be one of the chaps in top hat and tails who would spring forward to light my cigarette or proffer his arm to escort me to the waiting Daimler, from a chorus line which would include Simon Amstell, Paolo Nutini, that bloke from The Blue Nile, Gorilla Bananas, and Prince Harry.

I must away now to recline, Madame Recamier fashion, on my chaise longue. Peel me a grape, Beulah ...