You think the globe is warming? Which planet are you on?

How cold is this winter? Sitting here, looking out over a clear blue sun-shiny sky on a mid-March morning, I would expect it to be 10° - or better. Some hope.

To provide some perspective, we have a small garden pond, which in a normal winter will usually develop a covering of ice at some stage, kept open with a water jet from an ornamental fish. In a really protracted cold spell the hole will get smaller and smaller, and in extreme cases need extra help with kettles and saucepans of boiling water.

Last winter, which was the chilliest for a while, there was one occasion like that, and another where the ice never reached the critical stage. So far this year there have been three serious freezes and we’re currently in our second non-critical ice-over.

So … winters are measured in Ponds. A mild one is a Half-a-pond, a regular one is a Pond, and a fairly harsh one is a Pond-and-a-half. So how do you classify a Three-and-two-halves?

Every day, you learn something new

For me, Caran d’Ache is a maker of pencils with a name you’re never sure how to pronounce. Well, I learn that the pencil is actually named after a French cartoonist, whose main claim to fame is one single drawing – well, two actually – along the lines of the H.M. Bateman ‘The man who …’ cartoons.

There it is, on the left. The first picture is entitled 'let's not discuss the Dreyfus Affair' and the second is 'they discussed it'.

But there’s more. While Caran d’Ache the pencil is named after Caran d’Ache the artist, Caran d’Ache the artist is named after … a pencil. For karandash (карандаш) is the Russian for pencil, and while the artist, whose real name was Emmanuel Poiré, was of French extraction, he was born in Russia. Now how about that?

One thing leads to another, and I recalled something I was taught at school, that the Russian word for (railway) station is vokzal (вокзал), and this came about because a visiting Tsar was mightily impressed by these new-fangled trains at Vauxhall, in South London.

This, of course, is a myth. Vokzal was in use long before this supposed visit, and it didn’t mean railway station – well it couldn’t, could it? In fact, it meant ‘pleasure garden’. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that an Englishman established a Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Moscow in 1783 – named, of course, after the ones in South London.

You learn something new every day

It was 30 years ago today…

… I caught the first morning flight from Heathrow to start my new life in Brussels. I knew where I was headed – I had visited the offices twice already – but the sense of excitement and adventure was palpable. It was a Monday; they had more sense than to call me in on my official starting day, Friday the 1st.

I don’t actually remember much more about that week. I was lodged in a flea-pit hotel just off the Avenue Louise, by Place Stephanie. I didn’t spend any more time there than I had to, but I don’t recall going out either. I spent a couple of afternoons traipsing around the neighbouring streets looking for the orange and white ‘à louer’ signs, without success. Then I found an ad for a furnished apartment in Avenue Albert, shook hands on it on the Thursday evening, and on Friday headed back to the UK for the weekend.

All in all, not an auspicious start, although the simple sense of ‘differentness’ was enough to keep me on a very mild high. It’s a feeling that I still get from time to time – curious, that. It doesn’t happen around the busy areas, or the sights; it happens around the suburbs and the side-streets.

I’ve been here half my life (nearly), I’ve left my home country far, far behind, and yet from time to time Belgium still inspires a sense of wonderment. Hope it stays that way.

Rara avis

Our weekly bird-food bill during this cold snap is probably around €15. Grains, apples, raisins, cheese, balls and blocks of fat stuffed with creepy-crawlies (where do they get the raw materials from?). Special muesli for birds. We even had a pot of worms in the fridge for a while – yes, they were alive but no, they weren’t moving about very much.

All this virtue has its rewards of course, in the form of a garden full of birds. Nothing very exotic – it’s the pigeons and the collared doves which rule the roost, starlings, blackbirds, chaffinches, sparrows, magpies, tits both great and blue, a robin and the ubiquitous green parakeets which have so successfully colonised Brussels.

They are all welcome at the banquet except one – the heron, with whom we’re at war over the proprietorship of our pond and its fishy contents.

It’s very rare indeed that we see anything outside this community of ‘common or garden’ birds. Very occasionally a wren comes to visit, and last summer a red kite perched on the edge of the pond. Just once I saw a pair of yellow wagtails. So it was quite exciting to find we have been adopted by a pair of fieldfares, at least for the duration of the current snow. I knew what they were because of a BBC report on how this winter they were appearing more regularly in gardens; the fieldfare was described as a ‘large, aggressive thrush, stealing food from the blackbirds’ which fitted them exactly.

As a bonus, the vet was visiting at the time, administering the cat’s annual jab. He didn’t know what these birds were, and was most impressed when we got out the birdie-book and said ‘there, you see, that’s the one!’ Even looked up for him the name in French – litorne.

A further fall of snow overnight means they’ll stick around a while longer. Don’t worry, the blackbirds won’t starve. There’s plenty of grain, apples, raisins, cheese etc to go round – we can always buy more.

Into the home straight

Temperature on the drive in today: -4.5° most of the way. -2.5° in town. On the radio: AC/DC – Highway to Hell; Madness – Night Boat to Cairo; Rod Stewart – Do You Think I’m Sexy. High spot – Madness of course.

Out of mere curiosity (yeah, right) I calculated how many more days I might spend chained to this desk – God and the management willing. And it’s as I’d guessed – I’m into the last thousand. I don’t intend to tick them off like a prisoner chalking on his wall, but it’s a sobering thought that if I count back a thousand days, it doesn’t seem to take me very far into the past.

So I decided to have another go at this blog. To help to fill out those days, to divert my attention from the ticking clock. Will I have the imagination or motivation to keep it up? Remains to be seen.

Today seemed as good a day as any

Penultimate day of my week-long congé de maladie, which translates as ‘illness holiday’.

I'm definitely on the mend, the most evident remaining symptom is a voice that belongs to somebody else.

My tastebuds are functioning at about 25%, which is an improvement, since I haven’t tasted anything since Saturday. Downside of a cold this bad is that everything tastes like mud, upside is that I can eat things that taste like mud anyway and not tell the difference. I'm saving a fortune by subsisting on budget-brand pasta concoctions, with industrial quantities of fruit to counteract the damage.

Everything has to start somewhere

I seem to have established the *where*. Next is the *what*