The white elephant in the room

Everyday more of my stuff is going out the door. Cupboards, drawers and shelves are getting emptied. Old paperwork is being trashed and pictures coming off the wall. Five boxes of books that I (mostly) like but also know I won't read again are packed ready for a sale later this month.  

The one thing I haven't yet tackled is the box of 300 or so cassettes under my bed. Yes, they have been gathering dust for four years. Yes, they are of little use to me - especially since i gave my cassette player - with two tape decks for the purpose of um 'copying' cassettes - to the red cross yesterday. But almost every one of them tells a story. Compilations made by me, a lover or a friend, covers made of postcards lovingly cut down to size (CDs were too big to do this :-(.) Many I have already digitised, but I still really don't want to dump them, although I know they are of no economic value. Parting with my cassettes is actually more painful than parting with the remnants of my vinyl collection. They are (were) part of my life and identity. Anyone who has read High Fidelity will understand the importance of a hand-crafted mix-cassette.  

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Picnic the streets

We picnicked the streets of Brussels today, or specifically we picnicked in front of the Bourse- as an attempt to up the ante about extending Brussels’ pedestrian zone into the Boulveard Anspach. I was one of the first to arrive and join the bike ride at 1130. Our group wasn’t that convincingly large.

But after a while a decent sized (maybe 1000?) and very laid group emerged (after clubbing the night away?) to enjoy a picnic in the centre of one Brussels’ busiest thoroughfares. In typical Belgian style even the mayor of Brussels turned up to register a presence and send out the message of ‘yes we’re listening to you’ (Yes, the Belgians do the ‘Polder model’ too!).

Coming home I realise I have a more immediate traffic problem. Boys on quads – who go round and round the neighbourhood showing off their nifty bit of machinery. Every quarter hour. Honestly the quad riders around here are the thing that most piss me off about this neighbourhood. You just don’t want to keep your windows open on a hot summer day with them bussing by every fifteen minutes. You would think that anyone with a nice motorbike would want to be an easy rider in the countryside. But not these boys. They just want to show off to their neighbours. I have tried on several occasions to talk with ‘community elders’ to address the problem. That’s the way that middle eastern communities (are supposed to) solve their problems. But they just shrug their shoulders and say that they are not local boys. So ‘military intervention’ is called for. I call ‘les flics’ and register a complaint abut the noise. Forty five minutes later I’ve only heard one noisy bike go past. Let’s hope I don’t have to do this every hot day this summer.