Cycling to work

Update: now with video!

I cycled to work for the first time today.

When I was a child I probably cycled more than I walked or ran. Cycling was both practical and an enjoyable activity in and of itself, and I was quite the accomplished BMX trickmaster. I guess I stopped using bikes with any regularity when I left the country. The last time I remember using it was to cycle across London whenever I wanted to get from my flat in the far East End to the centre to see a film. Certainly I didn’t use it in Italy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone cycling in Genoa.

When we came to Brussels we bought new bikes, ostensibly to use with the kids, but in reality we go out once in a blue moon, and we tend to walk/jog alongside them as there’s always one who’s small enough to require regular help of some form or another. I guess this will change over time and when they’re all big and independent enough we can go out en famille.

But today we moved office to another part of town, so instead of taking the metro I cycled. I managed it in 20 minutes, although I was puffing and slowing down considerably by the end. I’m lucky enough that my house and the new office are linked by a straight, flat section of Brussels’ “promenade verte“, a network of cycle/walking paths around Brussels, so I didn’t have to worry about traffic and could cycle in silence through forests and past lakes. This does mean that I lose about 30 minutes of reading time per day, but the physical and mental health benefits more than compensate.

Most of the ride looks like this:

Just don’t expect me to start covering myself head to toe in flourescent lycra.

Art of work

I’m starting a new job in September, in a new unit in a new department in a new building. The building I currently work in is the headquarters; the flagship building, and this is reflected in the amount, variety and style of art on the walls in the corridors and open spaces. I’m looking forward to the move, but I might miss seeing some of these on a daily basis.

Then again, some of it I won’t miss at all.

Meme time

Kathleen tagged me for a meme, asking me to write about five topics of her choosing. I can give you five words if you ask in the comments.

Italy

First visited in January 1999. Lived in Genoa for nine months in 2000-2001. Got married there. Go back at least once a year. Have been to Liguria, Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Veneto and Sardinia. Need to get round to visiting the deep south some time soon. Speak the language, like the food, hate the politics. Favourite memory: sitting on the back of my wife’s Vespa, driving along the coast somewhere near Quarto, at sunset.

Children

Never wanted any. Now have three. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? They’re amusing, and have taught me some things about myself (the limits of my patience, for example).

Career

No plan. Have drifted around from one thing to another. Current employment is safe for as long as I want it (assuming the entire EU doesn’t implode). CV? Freelance camera assistant on various film & TV productions, communications consultancy researcher, manager of digital department in a camera shop, teacher of English as a foreign language, EU affairs consultant, EU civil servant. They give me money, plenty of perks and time off, and unlimited high speed internet access, and regular opportunites to change job and move around, so I can’t complain.

Shoes

I wear slippers indoors. I never wear flip-flops. I can’t wear any shoe that doesn’t have a back to it: they just fall off. I have three or four pairs of nice shoes for work and formal occasions, a similar number of casual, a couple of pairs of sandals and hiking boots. When I went into a shop in Genoa to buy a pair of Fratelli Rossetti for my wedding the shop assistant took one look at me and said “Getting married, are we?”.

Contentment

What makes me content? The usual, simple things. Relaxing with friends and a drink. Book browsing. Watching the kids play, when they manage to do so without arguing. Toast.

Machine mugging

I put my sixty cents in the machine and request a Snickers.

(tangential rant: When I was a child this bar used to be called Marathon; a name which conjures up sport and stamina and maybe ancient Greece and war too. Then they changed the name to Snickers; which for me sound likes “sniggers”, or maybe like something you’d use to trim your garden hedge (snick! snick!). And the irony? Snickers have subsequently launched an energy bar called…Marathon!)

The chocolate bar edges slowly forwards, stopping just short of the ledge like a suddenly rebellious lemming, and stands there, immobile. Knowing well the caprices (and weaknesses) of this particular dumb waiter, I start shoving it, rocking it back and forth and giving it sharp slaps. The internal light flickers, the chocolate vacillates, and following one last thwack it finally falls.

As I retrieve it, a metallic clinking is heard. I reach over and retrieve my sixty cents from the change slot. It’s as if the machine is saying “Here! take your chocolate! And take the money back too! Whatever you want, just…stop hitting me!”

[insert name]

On two separate occasions in two different jobs (one fairly recent, i.e. about 20 minutes ago) I have had to deal with someone who thinks that all human communication should be standardized, codified and made as free of variation and spontaneity as possible. For these people, each email sent should adhere strictly to a set format containing pre-defined language, no matter how simple or unambiguous the message. One boss even asked me once, with a straight face, to show him the “script” I used when calling customers, and seemed stunned when I told him that I didn’t have one. That I just, you know, talked to people.

I have two problems with this approach. One, the boss is assuming that I have no communication skills and can only speak/write to other human beings if I can read from a script. What would Turing make of it all?

Two, it fails to recognise that most people would rather have what at least seems like a genuine interaction rather than receive something which is very obviously written by committee. How many times have you zoned out or lost the thread while listening to an automated response or recorded message? Or, more likely, grown frustrated with impenetrable, inflexible, impersonal officialese?

And yet, for some people, this kind of thing represents the height of efficiency.

Susannah York

As you may or may not be aware, Susannah York died over the weekend. Did I ever tell you about the time she held my face in her hands and gazed into my eyes? No?

Late summer 1996. I left university with a respectable humanities degree and no job prosepcts, so I ran away to join the circus film industry. My first job found via a friend led to my first professional contacts and a second job followed almost immediately: lighting assistant on a low-budget British film (is there any other kind?) shooting in London and Norfolk (from which I had only just escaped, having attended the University of East Anglia). The cast included the then-unknown Andy “Gollum” Serkis and one Susannah York in a small role as the protagonist’s mother. Although I was aware of her work in a vague sort of way, for me should would always be Superman’s mum. York’s son Orlando Wells was also working on set as a runner.The title of the film ended up being Loop, although the working title during the shoot was “You Can Keep the Animals”.

The London portion of the shoot went well enough, if you don’t count the complaints, threats, and police intervention during a night-shoot in a residential area for which we didn’t have a permit and which necessitated the use of an insomnia-inducingly loud lighting generator. We ran lots of long cables and hid the generator around the corner so as to reduce the noise interfering with recording of the dialogue. Local kids figured out what we were up to and would occasionally switch the generator off, meaning that all the lights would go out mid-shot, so we had to post one of the runners as a guard.

In Norfolk things were more pleasant. The gaffer (head electrician) left part way through the shoot for another job which held more appeal for him (something about “actually getting paid”, I think), leaving me to take his place, which was pretty laughable. I mean, I got quite good at the spark’s job of setting up the actual lights, but I don’t know my AC from my DC, so making me responsible for the power supply was asking for trouble. Miraculously the only problem I had was one evening when I got something in my eye. I don’t even remember what it was, but it was quite painful and wouldn’t go away, despite repeated attempts at washing or rubbing it away. At one point the lovely Ms York insisted that she take a look, so I knelt down in front of her chair as she held my face and investigated. Unfortunately she was no more successful than anyone else and in the end, as my eye was quite inflamed by that point, an assistant director drove me to the local doctor to have it cleaned out. During my absence the generator broke down. Not normally a problem, apart from the interruption to filming, but for the shot in progress an actor was laid on the floor with the camera on a tripod directly over him. As the whole scene was plunged into darkness various crew members turned on their torches to make sure that no one accidentally knocked the camera over onto the actor’s head, or indeed kicked the actor as they walked past. Needless to say my return was greeted with much relief and enthusiasm.

Still, it was a lovely few weeks’ shoot. The weather was glorious, and the tiny village in which we were staying was very welcoming; the one and only pub was happy to stay open as long as we liked, as they’d never had so much business. Susannah York hung out with us and was happy to share movie anecdotes (her favourite director to work with was Robert Aldrich, she said).

Loop was shown once at a tiny film festival in London some years after it was finished, and then showed up one wet Wednesday afternoon on BBC2 when no one was watching. I have a copy on DVD.

R.I.P, Ms York.

Bonding experience

One thing I’m grateful for about my job: there’s no “team-building”. No enforced “fun”. There’s the occasional social event when, for example, someone leaves the unit and they put out quite a decent spread of food and drink to encourage participation, but no one is obliged to come along, there are no targets and no one writes a report about it afterwards.

I was chatting to a friend on the metro to work this morning and he was on his way to an away day with a bunch of people with whom he ostensibly works but about whom in reality he knows little or nothing. The idea is that they’ll wander around the streets of Brussels, shivering and muttering together. The highlight of the day will be a guided tour of the Palais de Justice.

I can only think of two occasions when I’ve been forced to participate in workplace extra-curricular activities. The first was when I had a job in a supermarket as a teenager one summer, and we went out for a day’s paintballing. That was a lot more fun than I anticipated, although the plethora of small circular bruises covering my body the following day made it look like I’d contracted some rare and exciting form of pox. Also, activities involving simulated violence between colleagues (and/or bosses) are asking for trouble, in my opinion.

The second time was also pretty enjoyable, if not perhaps in the way intended by the organisers. The small company (literally a handful of staff) I worked for when I first arrived in Brussels organised annual away days (or “retreats”, as some call them. That seems more appropriate to me; I love the idea of retreating from work), and the first year I was there they proposed a couple of days in Pisa. They later admitted that they’d chosen the city by simply picking something cheap and close from the Ryanair destination network, but still, it was a nice idea. The only problem was that, this being Ryanair, the flight options were either 5am or 6pm. Considering that “Brussels South” is over an hour’s drive south of Brussels itself, the morning flight would have meant getting up before you even went to bed, so most of us chose the evening flight. The directors had chosen to fly over the previous evening (not an option for us, as they only wanted to subsidize one night in the hotel). Dinner was scheduled for 8pm that evening, so we thought we’d just about make it in time for the nosh.

But of course we were delayed. Considerably. And of course we had nothing better to do to kill the time than sit at the airport bar. So eventually we turned up, three sheets to the wind,  just as the directors were sipping their after dinner coffees. They were not amused. We made our excuses and some small talk before they retired to their accommodation and we continued into town to look for another bar. The team meeting the next day was a rather subdued affair due to the directors’ mood and the staff’s collective hangover. Indeed at one point the office manager asked to be excused due to ill health.

Needless to say the company has, to date, never organised another away day.

TEFL

From Tim Parks’ “Europa“:

The context is that a group of English teachers working in Italy are on their way to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to speak in front of the Petitions Committee about how they’re discriminated against by being offered more restrictive contracts than their native Italian colleagues. More info on this real-life case here. One of the teachers in the novel rouses the troops on the trans-Europe bus with a speech outlining their complaints.

“What he does not say is how little work we foreign lectors do for our living, how long and lazy our summer holidays are, how little some of us are qualified, how many of us got our jobs because we just happened to know the professor with the gift in his hand, and one of us is having a lesbian relationship with her professor and another is taking money together with his professor to fix exams on behalf of rich and incompetent students, and many of us worked for our professors privately in language schools and translation agencies before we got our jobs, so that getting them was just an extension of an already established collaborazione, as the Italians like to put it, and he doesn’t say that many of us have been deeply corrupted by receiving an easy and not ungenerous salary for work that nobody checks or even remotely cares about, and that most of us are terrified by the idea of having to go out and find other work and actually make our money in some way that corresponds, however remotely, to the amount of effort we put in.”

This did make me smile because, although there are plenty of experienced, inspiring, hard-working English language teachers abroad, it’ can also be notoriously easy to get this kind of job with little other qualification than being a native speaker (although sometimes this isn’t quite enough. My students were often keen to establish that I was really English and not, say, Irish or Australian).

I worked as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language for a couple of years in Italy and Belgium. Depending on the students it could be fun and stimulating or a repetitive slog. I taught vocabulary to distracted teenagers, grammar to businessmen and chaired conversation classes for retired ladies. I spent more time than I thought possible trying to clarify the rules of use of the present perfect tense. I even gave a poetry lecture. But I also learnt a lot about my adopted cultures in conversation with my students, and saw my own culture through their eyes, responding to questions like “Is it true that the British eat jam with their meat?” (well, I guess so, if you consider cranberry or apple sauce to be like jam) and “Is it true that you have a party when someone dies?” (ok, if some ham sandwiches and awkward conversation at the bereaved’s house after the funeral can be considered a “party”, yes).

Sometimes I even miss it.

London town

In my imagination as a child, London was a place of romance and glamour. I visited a few times as a child, usually only for a day or two, on school trips to the Natural History museum or the Planetarium,  but it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years and began to think seriously about leaving home that it really began to appeal to me. Whenever I thought about where I’d want to live, somewhere full of opportunities and excitement, I thought of London.

After finishing university and starting a brief career in the film industry it made perfect sense to move there, so I crashed on a friend’s floor for about a week until I found a place to rent. This was a house in Plaistow in the East End, which I shared with another dodgy lodger and a pleasant but troubled landlord. After just over a year there I managed to hook back up with a friend from university and a couple of her friends, and we shared a place first in Gypsy Hill (lovely house, but a boring and remote part of town) and then Peckham (more lively and better connected to the centre).

During the four years I lived there (1996-2000) work was thin on the ground, so apart from occasional months when I had some spare cash to splash, I was rarely wealthy enough to take advantage of much of the dizzying array of temptations and distractions available. Nevertheless it was a stimulating and fascinating place to be, and not working at least gave me plenty of time to explore – I remember regularly making epic bicycle trips across town (back when I was young and relatively fit).

Visiting London again this year, several things struck me. Firstly the change in my own circumstances – now I have the money to enjoy all that London has to offer, but finding the time (and wondering what to do with our three kids) is another matter. I could probably happily spend an entire trip just visiting old haunts; places where I used to live/work/hang out. One thing I noticed is how different the people look in London. Compared to Brussels they’re more visually interesting. Maybe because London is bigger and has been a multicultural melting pot for longer, people seem more willing to express themselves, either in terms of cultural identity or just as a fashion statement, in strong, distinctive ways.

I also find myself comparing London to Brussels in ways which weigh in Brussels’ favour. London is a far more expensive city, its size can be a disadvantage as it takes so long to get anywhere, the transport system’s pretty creaky. On the other hand that size and variety makes it that much more vibrant and exciting. But I’m happy to take it in small doses these days. In fact, of all the places I’ve lived in, I usually end up thinking that they’re great places to visit for a few days but that I’m happy to be living permanently in Brussels.

There’s no place like home…

Are you being served?

While on holiday in Mauritius recently (and yes, I promise that’s the last time I’ll start a blogpost with those words, ok?) I started thinking about the relationship between hotel guests and staff. This was the kind of resort where staff outnumber guests and someone was always nearby to serve you. So how do the staff feel about that? I mean, I’m sure most of them enjoy their jobs and are well paid, but even so, to spend every day waiting on someone who’s relaxing, swimming and sunbathing – wouldn’t there be a little envy there? “Lucky bastard gets to sit by the pool all day while I have to run around getting him drinks and cleaning up after him…”

Thinking back, I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a job serving others where I envied the client. The only service jobs I’ve done were in shops, and I never caught myself thinking “Ooh, if only I were like you, buying that DVD, rather than being me, selling it to you”.

There was also the added complication that being waited on hand and foot by African or Indian people inevitably makes me feel a little…well… colonial, particularly when they’re being all smiley and chatty and eager to please. And particularly when my country has a somewhat contentious and blood-stained relationship with theirs.

Then again, maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe the thought never crosses their mind. I suppose I could have asked one of them, but how do you start a conversation like that? “Excuse me, I was just wondering – do you resent me?”