belgianwaffle

Archives for November 2008

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1998 – 2000


Posted in: Belgium

Brussels II

I moved into a lovely bright flat on the second floor of an old maison de maître filled with my own things.  It was delightful.  I loved that flat. It had a balcony big enough to accommodate a table and six chairs and several pot plants in various stages of decay.

I met the man who would become Mr. Waffle.

In fact, everything was perfect, except for my job which was rather tedious.

I was relatively rich but even so, I was very struck by how cheap Brussels was compared to Dublin.  The last time I had lived there, it had seemed terribly expensive compared to Ireland.  The early stirrings of the celtic tiger, I suppose.

I was lured back to Ireland by a promotion and kissed goodbye to Brussels for what I thought was the last time (insert hollow laugh here).

Everywhere I have ever lived – 2000-2003


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

Back to Dublin which was shockingly expensive.   I brought Mr. Waffle with me and he was shocked too.  For about a year I lived alone in a beautifully decorated three bedroom house in Ranelagh which belonged to an architect friend of a friend who was looking for a reliable tenant.  As well as being beautifully decorated, it had a fantastic collection of art and architecture books.  Unfortunately, her son who had been safely living in China for many years wanted to come home and, understandably, I suppose, his mother felt that he had more of a right to the house than I had.

However, fortune smiled upon me and two old friends who lived next door decamped to Bosnia and I was able to move into their house.  Despite regular arguments about the rent (them – don’t bother; us – no, we must; them – well not much then – they were our favourite landlords ever) I was very happy there.  I got married while I was living there and it was our first married home so it has all kinds of positive associations.

When I go to visit my friends now, I always feel very at home in their house which I am sure they welcome particularly late at night when I’m showing no sign of leaving.  In fact, a number of people I know still think it is actually my house and when we came back to Ireland said “you still have your house in Ranelagh”.  If only.

For work reasons, after a couple of years, Mr. Waffle and I decided to move back to Brussels.   With what I can only describe as spectacularly poor timing, my friends came back two months before we were due to move to Brussels.  Furthermore, they wanted to live in their house.

We found a short let in a new apartment block. The flat belonged to a colleague who had yet to live there.  It was small for two and in a somewhat soulless part of Dublin.  It was sub-tropical inside.  We got a printed note from the builders saying that the condensation was, essentially, due to people breathing in the flats and we had only ourselves to blame.  I was six months pregnant, sick and miserable.

Boy were we glad to shake the dust of that place from our feet and move back to Brussels (though at this stage it was getting strangely repetitive).

Everywhere I have ever lived – 2003-2008


Posted in: Belgium

Brussels III

We lived in a beautiful flat which was luxurious for two when we arrived and rather cramped for five when we left.  It was round the corner from my previous flat in Brussels. I often passed it with the children thinking that I never imagined when I lived there that I would some day be strolling past the building with my children.  That is very inelegantly expressed but you know what I’m trying to say here; life is weird.
I started my blog in that flat so it is obviously of great significance – also very well documented.

I think we really have left Brussels for the last time.  Our memories can be constantly refreshed by the truckload of coffee table books about Belgium of which we are now the proud owners. When you leave a country forever, your friends and your colleagues give you coffee table books.  Even when it’s the third time you leave forever.

I’m quite relieved that I have nearly reached the end of my list as I am very depressed by the lack of comments.  No, it’s not like I’m begging you, really.

Working on maintaining the language of Voltaire


Posted in: Middle Child, Mr. Waffle, Princess, Twins, Youngest Child

My poor husband is resigned to continuing to speak to the children in French; he doesn’t even complain any more.  However, when my sister saw him doing the Princess’s homework with her – she encouraged insurrection by saying “this is ridiculous”.

It is true that it’s perhaps a little odd to hear the following:

Him: Lis-le.

Her: “Tá Rírá ag rith.”

Him: Très bien.

Her: Papa, je peux arrêter là?

Him: Non, il faut continuer.  Donc, « Tá Lúlú ag léamh. »

Her: “Ta sé ag léamh.”

Him: Non « sé » c’est lui, il faut dire « sí. »

And so on… I appreciate that it requires a slightly unusual set of language skills to understand the above but I thought you would like that.

I thought they might make some French friends and Irish playgrounds seem to be full of French kids so my children are always running into French people in the park.  Unfortunately, the French adopt a strict protocol of ignoring other French speakers so that can be a little disconcerting but I remain hopeful.

Once, shortly after we returned, when we were in Cork a nice polite English man and his pregnant French wife approached me and said that they noticed the boys were speaking French to each other and how did we manage it. Michael used my moment’s inattention to rush for the pond so I was anxious to be off and couldn’t explain to them that this was due to our recent return from a francophone country.

Now, the boys never speak French to each other.  Sometimes the Princess speaks French to them and they will reply to her in French.  We have hired a new woman to replace our current French childminder (the delightful Aliette).  The new person is, to my great delight, rather poor at English.  Daniel was sick the other morning and she minded him.  By the end of the morning he was resigned to the fact that he had to speak French to her.  Though, as Mr. Waffle points out, it is a little disconcerting that the language of domestic administration continues to be French.  We are getting blinds fitted and I spent many useless minutes trying to remember the French word for this so that I could tell our new woman that there was a man coming to install same. Store, if you care (pronounced differently).

Another string to my bow is DVDs which, where possible, are watched in French.  Dora is hilarious.  She speaks French with the odd word of English in a French accent – allons y – lez’s go!  Dora’s abuela, who has become grandma, speaks French with a strong American accent.  My husband observes that this particular linguistic regime makes the role of the mariachi band more difficult to understand.

God, nobody said that having notions (as the nuns would say) was easy.

I knew it


Posted in: Reading etc.

Remember, I said that I distrusted the influence of the British media in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty?

Sarah Carey had an opinion piece in the Irish Times during the week on this very topic.  Since the Irish Times is still getting to grips with new media and this piece may disappear off into paid subscriber only material, let me give you a few quotes:

“For anyone relying on the Sunday Times for information on its continuing coverage of the Lisbon Treaty, they would do well to ask themselves [who is behind this and what is his or her agenda].

For over three years, I worked for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, which, like other British newspapers the Sun, News of the World and the Times, plus Sky television, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. During my three years with the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, I was only vaguely aware that it was a distant outpost of Murdoch’s empire.

We seemed to be like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. The Eye of the evil Lord Sauron was rarely fixed on our petty domestic issues and we got on with the business of political and social opinion without any comment from Wapping. Except for Lisbon.

Some months before the date for the referendum was announced, I told Irish editor, Frank Fitzgibbon, that I was eager to write a piece in favour of Lisbon. At the time, we seemed to be in agreement on the political imperative that the treaty be passed, though it’s possible I misunderstood his views. We also discussed the fact that Murdoch’s well known pro-US-hawkish views would obviously be the opposite, but we shrugged our shoulders.

Time passed, the date was set and I staked my claim to the pro-treaty column. But something had changed. Fitzgibbon told me that not only would I not be writing a pro-treaty column, but no other writer anywhere in the paper would either. This was not a matter for Sarah’s precious little ego, but a cover-to-cover ban on any pro-treaty comment. Apparently since our first conversation, Fitzgibbon had looked into his heart and discovered the democratic deficit. From seemingly being in favour of Lisbon, he was now cheerfully banning all opinion favourable to Lisbon from the paper.

He argued that only broadcasters were legally required to present balanced coverage, and that as a privately-owned newspaper the Sunday Times was under no legal obligation to offer opposing views. I countered that while this was legally correct, he was under an ethical obligation to provide an alternative view, especially when that view tallied with the extraordinary political consensus that Lisbon was good for Ireland. He claimed he was under no such obligation – and that was that.

I should have written the column anyway and resigned if he refused to print it. But I was in no financial position to go around resigning on a point of principle, and I backed off. So no kudos to me. Part of me accepted that Fitzgibbon had a point: everyone is entitled to their agenda. The problem only arises – which it did in this case – when it’s not really your agenda at all. […]

In whose interests did the Sunday Times campaign against the Lisbon Treaty to the exclusion of all favourable comment? Was it because they really believed that Ireland is best served by wrecking the treaty or because Eurosceptic views were imported, or worse, imposed, from Britain? [….]

If our entire political establishment was dismayed because Lisbon was defeated and the cheers from Wapping were ringing in our ears, doesn’t that make anyone wonder whether No was the right answer to the question?”

Case closed, wouldn’t you agree?

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1996


Posted in: Travel

I forgot (I’m old, I’ve lived in a lot of places), for a couple of months in 1996, I lived and worked in Banja Luka in Bosnia overseeing voter registration.   I went expecting a war torn country and it was war torn but at the same time, the war was over and the tennis club was going as was the swimming pool (though I had a very unhappy incident in the pool toilets with an army of cockroaches), the spa (very authentic this, underground and managed by an old and rather grubby man) and many restaurants (heavy emphasis on meat – vegetarians are not well catered for in the Balkan menu).

I was in the Serb held part of Bosnia.  I had a student interpreter who had lived elsewhere but been chucked out (it’s hard to see the people you are living among as the badies).  Once, when I got the bus to Sarajevo, he asked me to look out for his town and tell me what it was like.  I told him that all the lamp posts had been painted green.

Sometimes in the voter registration halls (school gymnasiums, community centres) there would be groups of Muslim women who had come in from the hills where they had stayed throughout the war. Often people came in ponies and traps and there were lots of long dresses and headscarves.
The countryside was very heavily mined and I was always horrified to see young children 9, 10, 11 coming down the mountains with jars of wild strawberries to sell to us rich foreigners; beaming at us hopefully through rows of rotten teeth (dental care really suffered in the war and cigarette sales went through the roof).

A few of us drove down to the Croatian coast one weekend.  One of our Serb interpreters came with us a decision which she deeply regretted as she became (understandably in her case, one supposes) paranoid that her accent and the odd different word would out her to the Croats as a Serb.  The main difference between Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian is political – it’s very easy to pick up three languages for the price of one.

Living in the Serb held part of Bosnia, one of the things you got a real feel for was that the Croats were the unsung villains of the war in Yugoslavia.  At any rate, they did propaganda better than the Serbs.  This is not a high standard.

Many of the voter registration people were really very expert on the Balkans and the situation there.  It was there that I  first met Nicholas who has based a career on being expert on the Balkans.  There were many very committed and clever Americans.  There was also this (very nice, very pleasant) post-grad student from Georgetown with whom I had the following conversation towards the end of her time in Bosnia.

Ms. G: You should know about this guy, you know, that people talk about.

Interpreter smiles wearily.
Me: Sorry?

Ms. G: Oh I don’t know his name. He’s famous.

Interpreter rolls eyes.
Me: Er.  Karadic?

Her: No, no, this guy is dead. (To interpreter) C’mon, you know.

Her: Tito.

This is the problem with international observers, I suppose.