THE LAST TRUMP

As assiduous followers of the KNOB* will know, the European brass community's four-yearly annual jamboree has been advertised for many years as EUROTRUMP.  The last one I attended as a participant was in 2015, in Paris, before the ascension of The Unspeakable Orange Tantrum to the presidency of the United States.  Ever since 2016 the word "Trump" has become a loaded term.  Literally, it can mean a winning card, or the noise made by air forced through a narrow opening.  The Powers That Be formed a committee and eventually came up with the new name:   BRAS.  I tried to tell them, but they were adamant that it conveyed a modern take on BRASS.  Oh well, don't say I didn't try to warn you. 

Don Spartini

Last year I was dusting off my triangle for my last appearance in a dirndl before retirement, when disaster struck.  Don Spartini, our esteemed and much loved capo di tutti capi, decreed that we should all turn out for a demo on 26 April.  Now I am not a fan of demos, they play havoc with my kitten heels and I hate all that shouting.  I usually just tag along at the back for 100 metres or so, rattle my pearls and take a shortcut back to the office.  However, this sounded a bit more like an order, and nobody likes to wake up with a horse's head in their bed, so I reluctantly got an Uber to place Luxembourg where the demo was starting.

Once the signal was given, the tete de cortege moved off at a dignified pace, in the direction of the Commission.  I and my Spartettes followed, sporting an assortment of windcheaters in red or green, the colours of the two main Spart organisations.  I have to say neither is really my colour, and all the windcheaters had been bagged so it was a red bin bag or nothing.  I just prayed I would not bump into anyone I knew and especially not la Comtesse Fifi de la Foufounette. I tried to remember how to fashion it into an Umbogwan head-tie adorned with some fruit I was going to have for my lunch, and tweaked it artfully to show my diversity credentials.  Together with my gay umbrella, I felt I was sending out the right message.  You can't be too careful at Spart Towers.

Millie Tant

Gonzo from Spain was in the crowd, and waved a cheery "Ola!" from up ahead.  I put my best foot forward to attempt to catch up with him, but kitten heels and Brussels cobblestones conspired together in my downfall, and after a short sensation of being airborne I found myself flat on my face, fruit tumbling every which way and gay umbrella scattered to the winds.  The worst thing was, nobody seemed to notice for about 30 seconds!  They just kept marching around me, engrossed in The Cause.  Luckily my Spartettes saw my involuntary and very short-haul flight and came rushing to help.  

I am stoic by nature and was more concerned about the damage to my fruity hat.  My gels gathered around to preserve my dignity but more people saw the unfortunate incident than I would have liked.  Scruffito came rushing over, and gallantly carried me over to the side of the road.  Someone said an ambulance had been called, but couldn't get through because of the demo.  I brushed it off as a mere sprain, and waited for the pain to pass.  It didn't.  In the end I got my gels to help me to the end of the road where I could call a taxi.   Like the old trooper I am, I didn't go straight to Casualty but went home and rested up on the sofa.  By the evening I was in agony, and Gorbals had to take me to the hospital.  

It was broken.  And not a hairline fracture, either.  The doc said he would operate the next morning, and I would have to stay in overnight.  I immediately sent Gorbals home to fetch my best Prada nightie and bedjacket and matching fruity hat.  He came back with a piece of cheese and some back copies of Private Eye.  He means well, dear boy.  I was duly operated on and confined to a wheelchair for six weeks, from which I directed operations with the help of crutches.  I am pleased to say I am back on my feet now, sporting a matching pair of mended ankles (see previous posts about Portugal for the other one) and taking calcium supplements for me old bones.  Not getting any younger, you know.

  

And so it was that I did not attend the Vienna gathering of BRAS2019.  Probably just as well, just the name Vienna adds inches to my waistline. Cake, cake with whipped cream, hot chocolate and more cake.  And of course the famed Sachertorte, probably the best chocolate cake in the world.  Not to mention Mozart, Strauss and The Sound of Music.    The KNOB wanted to go as the Von Trapp family but then found that almost every other delegation had had the same idea, and anyway, without me they had no Maria.    Dieter was particularly concerned about my incapacitation.  "Aber Daphne, who is going to tuck us ins bett und ein lullaby to us sing?"  he fretted.  I promised to make him a mixed tape of my greatest hits to take with him. 

And so EUROTRUMP is no more.  Would that the same applied to the reason they had to change the name.  I have hung up my triangle for good.  So long Spart Towers, farewell the KNOB*, auf wiedersehen the triangle, goodbye ...  

* Kurt Nachtnebel Oompah Band

NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE

I'm still here.  

Six and a half weeks from retirement.  But to be perfectly honest, this is not quite how I envisaged it.  

I am halfway through week 5 of the corona virus lockdown.  It is 10:40 on Wednesday and I am still in my pyjamas.  

This is how it is.   This is how I suspect it will remain, in retirement. 



All those plans and dreams of bursting free of the chains of indentured servitude at Spart Towers, finally liberated to write, sing, dance naked through the daffodils, were nothing more than fantasy.

I am a lazy bitch.   I am kind of enjoying the lockdown.  It takes all the responsibility off me.      


So much for establishing a routine for my retirement:  get up, shower, get dressed.  Get out of the house every day.  Do a museum a week.  Get to know Belgium better.  Learn Dutch.  Pick up where I was so rudely interrupted with Portuguese.   Get a decent camera and do a photography course.  Write at least one day a week.  Work on that epic novel about my Irish grandad in America.   Walk 4 km every day.  


None of it.  NONE OF IT.   It is 10:40 and I am still in my pyjamas.  

When I do get out of the house to go in search of victuals I am invariably wearing the same tracksuit pants, hoodie and soup-stained T-shirt.  We are in Waynetta Slob territory.  You can take the girl out of the caravan, but ....    

Me and Gorbals before the lockdown.  

My hair is growing longer and thicker.  I have taken to enturbanning my head with a scarf.  I made a half hearted attempt to reconnect with my sewing machine to fashion a face mask, but I am to sewing machine as Gorbals is to hoover.  Never going to form that magical human-machine bond.  I am still working on my fabric prototype, now using knicker elastic cut from old holey knickers that I am now saving.  In the meantime I use my collection of under-hijabs as face masks.  I bought them for 1 euro apiece from an Arab shop behind the Gare du Nord.  I keep one in every coat pocket in case of rain.  If I pull it down around my neck and back up again, hey presto, call me Fatima.  Who's laughing now, eh?

Not much has changed for Gorbals, in truth.  He didn't go out much anyway, dresses in rags, sleeps most of the day and bathes once a week.  He's got more conspiracies to read about on Reddit.  He learned many street survival skills when he was channelling George Orwell on the streets of Brussels (except he hadn't got the gumption to get a washing up job).  He  once showed me how you could clean silver using fag ash and spit, and I always said, when the Apocalypse comes, I'm sticking with him.  At least my best cutlery will look nice.

THE LAST POST

Onward and upward

It may not have escaped your attention that this blog fell silent in June 2016.  Yes, that's right.  JUNE 2016.   Three weeks, more or less, before what I like to call the British Naqba.  After that, there was nothing more to say.  

As of Friday, last day of January 2020, the die is cast.  Alea iacta est.  UK has left the building.  And, coincidentally or not, in 17 weeks' time I will leave Spart Towers and the world of work.  I may or may not have become a Belgian in the meantime.   A new era is starting in many ways.  And so I think it is time for a new blog.  

Chocs Away!  Old Girl  has served to document my time in Brussels, allbeit with a good deal of embellishment.  Fifteen years, one job, four different apartments.    My ex sneered at me in 2005 when I said I was going to Brussels, and implied I would have no friends there.  I had one, as it happened, at the time.  And now I have dozens.  Good ones, too. 

But I feel the Brussels era is nearly over.  It was always about the job.  I have never felt any deep love for Brussels as a place.  It has to be said my view of the city has improved since I bought a car two years ago and can now get out to places like leafy Genval more easily.  But it's never been part of my retirement plan.   I always wanted to go back to France.  For a while I flirted with Portugal, but then reverted to the Perigord.   After a few years the prospect of global warming was starting to make me think twice about the comfort level that far south, and I shifted my focus to Brittany.  However, after ten years of visiting various regions of France, nowhere gave me a burning desire to return.   Paris was starting to be a very distant memory and its rose-coloured tinge was fading to sepia.  The France I knew was changing, too.  It was acquiring all the bad characteristics it used to sneer at the British for - populism, consumerism, poor education, bad food (yes! they even invented a word for it, "la malbouffe"), vandalism, knife crime ...  I started to ask myself the question I thought I would never ask - did I really want to go back and live there?

In the meantime I found myself in Scotland more and more often.  In 2009, and again in 2014, then in 2018 my cousin moved to the Highlands and I visited four times in two years.  It felt strangely right.  Particularly Glasgow.  It ticked many boxes.  I started to wonder, was this The Place?  OK I wouldn't be able to afford the lovely detached house with garden which I would have if I moved to some remote corner of Brittany.  But those old sandstone tenement apartments were very attractive, and there are some fabulous parks, not to mention the breathtaking scenery a short train ride away.  And a garden is a lot of work ...    The weather is not exactly tropical, but with my skin and aversion to taking my clothes off in public, would it really matter?  Weather isn't everything.   What appealed to me was the natural humour of the Glaswegians, their friendly nature, even towards the English, and 24-hour shopping.  Also, in terms of getting the lodger straightened out administratively, it would seem to be the logical, if not the only, choice. 

I'm still thinking about it.  But I must say it's creeping up on France as a retirement option.   It may even be a way of turning Brexit to my advantage - with two-thirds of my pension paid in euros, if the pounds slumps my strong euros could prop up my income.  And if I can persuade Gorbals that it is worth his while, certain sectors will be desperate for workers with British passports.   Always look on the bright side of life ...

The irony being, that if I do get the Belgian nationality, it may turn out to be unnecessary.  But hey, two birds in the hand are worth one in the bush.  Or something. 

RIP Gary Rhodes

1960-2019

MUCH FADO ABOUT NOTHING: PARTE DOIS

FARO FROM THE MADDING CROWD








Finally in the Algarve, we found ourselves with an evening to kill in Faro, and explored the town. It wasn't exactly kicking. Apart from a quite agreeable restaurant which Dr Gorbals turned up on his magic app, and a pleasant little bar where I had a cheeky ginginha, not much to report (although I quietly clocked the modern shopping centre near our hotel).  We were due to pick up one of our guests at Faro airport the next morning, but after he changed his flight times we found ourselves with the best part of Saturday to kill so pootled off to Olhao, a market town recommended by Lucy Pepper, and bought provisions for the villa.

On the motorway towards Carvoeiro, where our villa was situated, the skies darkened and it started to rain slightly.  There were flood warnings in place for Faro and Albufeira. The villa was straight out of 'Sexy Beast' or 'Mad Dogs', a real gangster's hideaway.  We dashed off to the local supermarket to stock up on basics.  The local Intermarché was a shopper's dream, with wide aisles, good lighting, floors clean enough to eat off, and a vast array of British, French, German, and Scandinavian products as well as Spanish and Portuguese brands.  The wine section was rather how I imagine Heaven.  Who knew there was such a vast range of wine in Portugal?  Vinho verde, branco, tinto, vinhos from the Alentejo, the Minho, the Dao, the Douro, the Algarve ...   The ultimate Euro supermarket.   We had to stock up with litres and kilos of stuff, which would no doubt end up with the cleaner - someone should design a Villa Pack of small quantities of condiments and toiletries to last a week.  We returned to the villa with a week's basics, to find The Blonde and Chef waiting outside the gates.

The Blonde used to be a Paris boiler room queen in the 1980s, a kind of Ladyfingers for the overheated financial derivatives sector.  Now retired on her ill-gotten gains, she had acquired a mortgage-default hacienda up in the spaghetti-western lunar landscape of Andalucia, and lived there alone, except for three dogs, two cats and an irascible French chef called, er, Chef.  Chef had some shady history involving Algeria and some missing gold.   He acted as her driver, bodyguard, cook and wine merchant.

As they settled in, I had to return to Faro to pick up our remaining guest, Metro.  Metro was a suave, urbane, metrosexual (hence his nickname) confirmed bachelor and ladykiller from London. He decanted from the plane with a suitcase the size of a house.  "Supplies," he whispered conspiratorially.   It took us half an hour to get out of the airport car park, due to minibusloads of tourists loading up their golf clubs and blocking us in.  Eventually we were on the road back to Carvoeiro, by this time the heavens had opened and I could barely see in front of me on the unlit motorway.  The windscreen wipers were going faster than the car.   We finally made it back to the villa around 9 p.m. to find Chef three sheets to the wind and nothing on the table.  Metro decanted his "supplies" which consisted of several bottles of high-end gin and mixers.  Dinner was served Andalucian style, i.e. around midnight.  Made mental note to remind Chef about the hour's time difference.

Chef was a bad-tempered Gascon who hated everywhere and everyone outside of France, and most of France as well. The only parts of the world he liked was the parts where they play rugby, and even then he bitched about the food in most of them (except in one village in the south-west of France).  He was particularly scathing about Portuguese food. French cuisine was superior to everything else, and was treated with religious devotion.  Thus there was the twice-daily mass, heralded by a short prayer:  "Bon, c'est l'heure de l'apéro,"  followed by the taking of communion, in the form of a cocktail concocted by Metro from one of the many bottles he had brought in his voluminous suitcase.  Then would follow a three-course lunch or dinner, with wine.    As soon as the dishes were cleared away, Chef would start planning the next meal.  He lived from meal to meal.  We started to feel like fatted geese by the end of the week, and didn't get out of the house much. 

Although the villa was perfect and exactly like in the photos, the famed Algarve weather did not live up to expectations.  A weather front was rolling in from the Atlantic, and continued to roll in.  For the rest of the week,  the weather changed from one minute to the next, resulting in Chaplineque scenes around the pool, running sunbed cushions in and out, Metro seizing every opportunity to top up his tan and Chef grumbling that only French weather was reliable.   The barbecue was abandoned by Tuesday, as the charcoal was so damp.   

Cataplana - Algarvian kitchenware

Occasionally the sun did come out and we braved an excursion, to Lagos or up into the hills.  Chef drove us to Monchique, and after a cursory glance in the window of a kichenware shop which was closed, declared the town of no interest and drove us back down.   Food markets and kitchenware shops were the only thing outside the kitchen that interested him, apart from rugby, and if there was no market, he would take a cursory glance inside the church and look at his watch.  He shopped every day at Intermarché, a French-owned chain of supermarkets.  We visited another supermarket, Apolonia, which made Waitrose look like Lidl, but he wrote it off as too expensive, although the real reason was probably that it wasn't French.  

The only thing Chef was not gastrofascist about was coffee. I made a point of preparing fresh cafetière coffee every morning, even though I am a tea drinker, to keep him happy, only to see him return from Intermarché one day with a jar of Nescafé.  He also had a penchant for instant mashed potato, which he admittedly gussied up with cheese, but even so I was shocked. I wondered where he had learned to cook. I believe he was in the Foreign Legion for a number of years. One night he was sulking and went on strike, so I rustled up one of my leftover pasta cheese bakes with powdered cheese sauce. He asked for seconds. 

All in all it was not an unpleasant week, although I have learned a lot about villa holidays and about Portuguese weather.  The pool was used precisely once.  However, my mission to investigate Portugal as the next and final stage of my international wanderings is still ongoing. As Dr Gorbals tactfully put it: Portugal would be a good place to die.