Travelling is great! Work is . . .

. . . a bit fierce. That said, my lovely jubbly UK working set-up allows me a whopping 25 days' holidays, and I've always been one for taking them. Just as well, because I did something extremely stupid this evening at 8.40 as I planted my ass - none the shaplier, mind you, for having given up the bike in the bucketing rain - on a northbound tube. I worked out my hourly take-home wage. For a forty-hour week, we're looking at around £7.40 per hour. A fifty-hour week drops me to a truly uninspiring £5.90 per hour. Usually, it's somewhere in between. Yes, the books are great and the people are lovely and I'm very lucky, tra la. It's true.

Back to the positives. My pre-Christmas trips -hah! plural!- were to Brittany to see the Babbo do his Swiftian thing, and later, to Brussels. Originally, for the former, the idea was that we'd toodle over to Brest and enjoy the hospitality of the conference at a four-course seafood dinner. Not yer tradish Thanksgiving, but I'm a very forgiving person when it comes to epic quantities of shellfish. Instead, we got stranded in Paris thanks to the strikes, and also because life is hard. Imagine our horror when at midday the man behind the guichet said, 'Baaaaah, ouais. Le prochain c'est à . . . bon, c'est à 19h05.' Ooookay then.
'It could be worse!' piped up the Bearded One with a toothy grin. So we checked the bags and hit the streets.The weather was sunny, the pastries were plentiful, and Paris was Paris. Ok, so Thanksgiving dinner was a greasy turkey galette off my knees in the Gare Montparnasse, and I had to evil-eye a pigeon to keep my meal on its sagging paper plate, but somehow that was alright in light of having just marvelled at the most breathtaking chocolate shop in Paris. I won't mention it by name, as it may well be magic. On a road that cuts the length of the Île Saint Louis, it's a dusty, arty, exotic little cushioned wonder. Run by a quiet, skeptical-seeming chubby French granny and her younger similarly-shaped South Asian counterpart, all glitters and winks. They serve myriad herbal teas with tiny flowers in squat iron pots, tea towels made from sarees and a selection of flat, ganache-drenched tarts. How many could you have? So many. Oh, and, ahem, tartes au citron. They would be my personal favourite.

We sat in quiet awe with a coterie of equally hushed and bemused tea-house regulars. Grown men's eyes sparkled, and one leaned over to confide with no small glee 'C'est magnifique!'. Another chuckled at the disturbingly realistic chocolate dog turds and bought praline tortoises instead.

We got to Brest and an ebullient papa at midnight. The hotel was cuteness and did the job and Brest is French and, well, ugly. True to form, the Allies bombed the shite out of the place at the end of the war. But France is France, and, forgive me, it survives ugliness better than some other places I might mention. Not only that, but these Frogs are Celts, and you can't tell me that doesn't help matters. The people are friendly, the food is astonishing and the Nouveau Beaujolais was in. Life, in short, was good.

Life was equally good in Brussels, for many of the same reasons, with added beauty. Poor wee Brux gets a bad rap for hideous architecture, but dammit, I think it's charming, particularly at Christmas. My hosts, also charming, were somewhat the worse for wear with a shared fierce bout of the winter vomiting bug, but were valiant and successful in their efforts to entertain yours truly. Lots of shopping when we should have listened to the weather and museumed. It was most unnecessary and extremely kind, and we likes kindness here at parkbench. We also likes penne with pesce spada just in from central Sicilian Luxemburg and big bowls of carbonnade and the little squishy hands of friends we miss. Said squishy hands at Advent-time tend to hold squishy bonhommes for Saint Nicolas, and the local ones, the hand-owner told me with authority, were simply not up to the challenge.

Predictably, immigrants were soon on the scene, doing the job better.

Bad writing, good writing, big decisions

Please, please stop what you're doing and read what is now likely to reign as the worst poem ever written in the English language, as reported here in the Guardian. It was unclear from the article who exactly decides the prize-winner or how, but clearly, they're not wrong.

I'd say read it over your coffee break, but it's so laugh-out-loud bad that it might be inadvisable.

Better still is the good-humoured rant devoted to it in the Guardian blog, in which readers wrote in their least favourites and duked it out amongst themselves.

A propos, the Bespectacled Chinaphile was ranting last night about the Poetry Society Café hitting him up for a £1.50 membership fee with his latte; seems to me he should pay up and see if he can't best them at their own game if these are the results of their labours. Not only is the BC not a poet, he's also not a spook, so really I'm a bit disillusioned. That said, we're now going to be freelancing for the same paper, which is quite exciting, though this is but one of a list of absurdly impressive credentials for this all-singing, all-dancing son of a publisher.

Next day, back in my favourite Brity daily, and charming Andrew Motion, (one of whose poems appeared in the aforementioned blog, *eek*) wrote the warmest piece I've seen in 'Writers' Rooms'; he seems to have actually cared about its writing, given it some time and made it count. Others, like Famous Seamus in the same column, have catalogued their bits and bobs, though I love that the boards of his desk were 'polished by the soft shiftings of a century of student schoolmistresses' - yeah, because that would help you focus. You can hear the gabardined bums scoot.

Mum, on her annual pilgrimage of the faithful to the Dublin Theatre festival, reported back that all is not well, that much of it was uninspiring and stale, and that the focus on the working class and immigrants is worthy, though a few pieces that examined something a little closer to home for the audience might be just the ticket - New Ireland needs a kick up the arse, and this was not the Festival to do it. That said, Sebastian Barry's The Pride of Parnell Street was a success. I saw it here in Kilburn at the Tricycle and thought it extremely moving, though weak in places, and so ran most of the reviews. Karl Sheils is a powerful one; I realised that I'd seen him in Beauty in a Broken Place (Abbey), This Lime Tree Bower (Project) and indeed in Intermission - but will someone tell me, is he Brush's son? Also - Radio Macbeth was reported as being thought-provoking on language and expression, so I'm sorry to be missing it.Meanwhile, back at our lovely flat, the kitchen has been ripped up to dry out a leak from next door... long story short, we're looking at rubble, loud, hot machines and eventually, builders, a process that will last until the end of February. This is a major drag, and seriously unfortunate time-wise as it covers the winter months, the ones during which you'd most like to be comfortable at home. No one's fault, and the wonderful landlady has continued to be helpful, supportive, and hand back large chunks of the rent.

This is all well and good, but it's hard in that, sorry, it's another thing that just hasn't turned out as I'd hoped. Granted, I don't need a lot of encouragement in this arena, but really, we have to decide what's going to happen next before I lose me marbles entirely. No need to skip town just yet; I'll give it a year and a bit, as planned. I need a good location, hence photos on this post from our August trip to Brussels. Brussels is a definite contender, a city where they do, at least, have a sense of humour: I do need something to look forward to and plan for, and we're going to work on where we're going next and for how long. Initially, I thought it enough to be somewhere lovely and potter along in our next phase, but maybe that's just not true. I should probably plan to be doing something engaging, and that needs forethought, particularly if you're looking to do it all in a second or third language. Really, I think it's time for me to go home, but I'm up for fantastic master plans, too.

Answers on a postcard to parkbench.