belgianwaffle

Archives for February 2008

Spring is in the Air (a dull summary of our weekend activities for the benefit of loving relatives who have already heard it on the phone)


Posted in: Belgium, Family

The weather was beautiful this weekend.  On Saturday we went to the park; the Princess was on her bike (which is excellent and has really extended our range of destinations on foot) and the boys in the buggy.  Michael objected loudly to this and for the length of our street sobbed and said “bicycle, bicycle”.  Daniel tired of this and whacked Michael on the head, a move which I outwardly condemned while, inwardly, having every sympathy with him.  One of the training wheels loosened on the royal bike and Mr. Waffle was sent sprinting home to get the spanner while the children and I continued carefully.  No sooner had the offending nut been tightened than the chain came off.  Please bear in mind that as all the repair work was continuing Michael was howling determinedly.  By the time we arrived in the park, fine weather or no, we were all a little tense.  Everyone had a lovely time in the park, though, and they were very good when we went to our friends’ house for cake (the Princess even used cutlery) and on the trek home.

On Sunday, we went to Mass where the children were all miraculously well behaved.  Te Princess went to a Sunday school type class – hooray – and emerged commenting that she had no idea that Jesus wanted her to be a good girl and why hadn’t we told her; I feel that this is a very promising development.   Afterwards, we went for a walk around the Etangs d’Ixelles picking up various things in the market.  It felt like being on holidays (a feature of my childhood holidays in France being Mass on a Sunday and market afterwards) and I wondered why we don’t do this kind of thing more often.  Possibly because it is not always wonderfully fine and sunny on Sunday mornings in Brussels.

That afternoon we went to a showing of “The Little Mole” which the children loved.  It was the boys’ first trip to the cinema and they were enchanted.  A bit like an old silent film, the showing was accompanied by two musicians with a range of instruments (explained and identified to the audience) which the kids were allowed to inspect afterwards.  It was described on the poster as 6 short films by Zdeněk Miler which, as Mr. Waffle pointed out, made it sound a lot more intellectual than it actually was.  I did spend some of my time wondering whether it was communist propoganda. The little Mole stole a watermelon from a pile that a man was selling to children; then the Mole cut it up and gave it away to his friends.  The watermelon seller does not come up smelling of roses.  In another of the films, with the help of all the animals of the jungle (except for the mean lion), the Mole digs a well.  Perhaps all cartoons for small children emphasise the value of co-operation and it is only later that we urge them to compete and assure them that they will stand or fall on their own efforts alone.

All in all, it was the first weekend in some time where that hasn’t left me desperate to get into work on Monday morning. Could we be turning a corner?

Parochial


Posted in: Ireland, Reading etc.

Me: Why does the Irish Times Magazine assume that it can refer to Blackrock and everyone will know it’s a Dublin suburb?

Friend in Dublin: Well you did.

Me: There is a Cork suburb called Blackrock.

FiD: Is there?

Me: And this week they referred to Ranelagh with no indication as to where it was.

FiD: But you know where Ranelagh is, you lived there for years.

Me: That’s not the point. And when they referred to Oughterard in the same article, they put Co. Galway next to it in brackets. Is it utterly inconceivable to them that there might be people out there who know where Oughterard is but don’t know that Ranelagh is a Dublin suburb?

FiD (unanswerably): Not Irish Times readers.

As my loving husband says, if it annoys me so much, why do I read it? Doubtless to have my prejudices confirmed, how can they not be by a publication which, for years, put Northern Ireland under home news and Cork news under regional news, regional news, humph.

This weekend, there was an essay on David Marcus in the Review section. It said, inter alia, “But even the first issue of Irish Writing could stand on its own as a tribute to his taste, his instinct for the zeitgeist – remarkable in a young man from the provincial city of Cork – his guts, his determination and ultimately, his brass neck”. “[R]emarkable in a young man from the provincial city of Cork“? I nearly choked on my rice krispies. The discovery that the patronising man who wrote the essay is actually from Cork, quite frankly, made matters worse not better.

The article also says that “many readers may never have heard of him”. I was surprised by that. I would have thought he was pretty well known in Ireland. I know he was thought to be an outstanding editor. I have to say, I’ve only read one of his books (“A land not theirs” about growing up Jewish in Cork) and I didn’t think that it was very good but I certainly didn’t think it was obscure.

I learned also that Marcus’s uncle was Gerald Goldberg a well known and respected Cork solicitor. Many years ago, I met an exceptionally irritating woman in Brussels who told me that Mr. Goldberg was never elevated to the High Court bench because he was Jewish. In fact, at the time he was practising (and possibly still at the time of his death), only barristers were eligible for appointment to the high court and traditionally, minority religions (including judaism) have been somewhat over-represented on the bench in Ireland as they tend to be solidly middle class which, funnily enough, is where most judges come from. I never did manage to get a word in edge ways with her and tell her this, so this is a much delayed and pointless riposte.

There is no Jewish community in Cork now (they all seem to have gone to Dublin to get married) and that is sad. A lot of Lithuanian Jews came to Cork in the late 19th and early 20th century and some of them, including David Marcus who is an exact contemporary, were at my father’s school and he had a lot of friends with exotic and different names; Berkhans and Solomons and Goldbergs. Maybe with this new wave of immigration from Eastern Europe, we’ll get some of them back.

Finally, a classic from the birth announcements:

Brontë Philomena. Born…at the Whittingon Hospital in London to besotted parents David and Lisa.

I have a certain sympathy for “besotted parents” – I haven’t got a heart of stone, you know – but Brontë Philomena? No, really, no.

Misunderstanding


Posted in: Princess

The Princess likes me to make up stories about Dora and Boots. Although these stories feature Dora and Boots, Abuela, Mami, Papi, Diego and, when I think of it, Map and Backpack, they are essentially stories about a little girl in Brussels and the adventures she has. After telling a number of these this afternoon, I was creatively exhausted.

Her: Tell me another Dora story.

Me: Last one then. Dora was sitting on the sofa with her Mummy and the doorbell rang, it was her cousin Diego. Dora was so excited. Diego had a lamb with him [Diego works in animal rescue, so I thought he should arrive with an animal – insert here the kick Dora gets from feeding the lamb with her little brothers’ bottles]. Then Mami invites Diego to stay to dinner but suggests he brings the lamb home first because she doesn’t want it leaping all over her furniture.

Her: But do they have the lamb for dinner?

Me (a little shocked but, you know, we’re carnivores, I suppose, as it happens, we’re having lamb chops for dinner): Well, maybe not that day maybe a couple of weeks later for Easter.

Her: But MAMA WHY, why not now?

Me: Well, you know it would have to be killed and prepared and cooked and Mami didn’t have time to do that before dinner.

Her (aghast): I meant when would they eat with the lamb.

How different, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen


Posted in: Belgium, Ireland, Princess

I was born in Cork and grew up there. I went to school with Cork children. My mother was considered mildly exotic because she came from Limerick (adjoining county about 40 miles away). We had a girl in our class in primary school whose mother came from Dubin and this was considered so exotic that there was an article about her mother in the Evening Echo. As I remember it, the headline was something like “Dublin Woman moves to Cork”; it’s not as though her mother was famous or had done anything very thrilling once she got to Cork. I suppose I’m saying that Cork in the 70s and 80s was a pretty homogenous place.

Obviously, going to school in Belgium, the Princess was never going to be in a class full of her compatriots but what amazes me is the range of nationalities in her class alone: Poles, Belgians, Pakistanis, North Africans, South Americans and one Irish girl. This morning she explained to me that she had a cooked lunch in school yesterday (itself a matter calling for some investigation as she had left the house with a sandwich, but we will leave that to one side) but not the same as the “musulmans” because they don’t eat meat. I explained to her that the English word was Muslims and they do eat meat but it has to be prepared in a particular way. It is amazing to me that she knows more about other religions and other cultures at four than I did at fourteen. I can’t help feeling that there is quite a lot to be said for globalisation all the same.

Partied out


Posted in: Princess

On Sunday, most uncharacteristically, the Princess had a nap.  Eventually, with great regret, we had to wake her as otherwise she would certainly not have gone to bed that night.

Me:  Wake up, sweetheart.

Her:   Ummph, urgh.

Me:  I have great news, while you were asleep I was out and I met L’s mummy and you are invited to L’s birthday party. There’s going to be a magician.

Her (blearily): Now?  Is the party now?

Me (with some trepidation): No, sweetheart, it’s next weekend.

Her (falling back on the pillow): Thank God.