I inevitably spoke too soon when I told you that I was being incredibly productive in my last diary entry, as it didn’t last. Oh, well; it is what it is, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk. Plus, there was progress in non-work-related areas, so there’s that. I know very few of you read this diary, so I guess I could tell you my big news, but just in case, I’ll keep it a secret for a couple more weeks in order not to jinx it. And no, I’m not pregnant (in case you’ve missed it, I’m 37, so that ship sailed a while ago and honestly, I’ve never wanted kids to start with). Those of you who know know, and the others will have to wait just a little bit longer.
As the wedding saga continues, we’ve now solved the wedding rings crisis by returning the catastrophic first attempt to their maker, as literally nothing was right about them when we finally received them about fifty days after ordering them. They simply were ugly, even for people with low expectations like us. So, last weekend, we did what normal, reasonable people do: we went to a local jeweller and tried on wedding rings. It didn’t take us long to pick a pair that we both loved as, after living together for thirteen years, our tastes have merged in a couple of domains. And they are super cute. We obviously also had lunch, because if you’re going through the hassle of leaving your house, then you might as well get some food too, preferably on a terrace in the shade. It made for a lovely day out.
The invitations have been sent out too, some of them flying across half the continent, which I like to picture in my head because I am a little bit of a romantic like that. My godfather’s wife has offered to pay for one of the accessories I’ll wear with my outfit (since my mum passed away, she’s the woman I’ve been closest to in my family), which was a gesture that moved me deeply, but I don’t plan on wearing that many accessories so I asked her if she could help me make my hat. That way we’ll spend some time together doing an activity we’ll both remember. I’m still missing the shoes, but we’re working on that.
In other news, the last weekend of July, Jon and I went to the big agricultural show in Libramont (in the Belgian Ardennes). Both his father and his brother work in that field (no pun intended), so it is a tradition in their family to visit the show and spend the weekend there. We tried some Champagne from vineyards that we did not know, tasted some local food, and of course, saw all the cows that you can imagine. I personally don’t love the massive meat cows that we have here, and I feel a little sorry for them, which in turn never fails to relaunch me on a month-long debate with myself on vegetarianism.
Speaking of which, we’ve been somewhat unlucky with restaurants lately (which probably is the most decadent of all first-world problems, if I’m being honest). It was a series of two bad experiences that followed one another closely, and now I’m wondering whether it’s due to restaurants being understaffed or to the general Belgian tendency to half-arse things.
The first one was with a couple of friends we hadn’t seen in a while. Because it is the holidays, most restaurants were completely booked weeks in advance, so we picked something that’s a little pricy but has a good reputation, and Jon and I had been there when it first opened a couple of years ago. We first had an inkling that it might have been a mistake when we realised that our waiter had indulged in abundant quantities of coke right before his service (if you’ve seen enough people with the habit, you just know), and it was representative of the rest of our experience. The crayfish salad came without crayfish. The meat and the fish were overcooked. There was a mix-up with the mains. I should probably send my friends flowers or something to apologise.
The second one we went to was with a group made of family members and family friends with whom we have the habit of trying out new restaurants in the region, so we went to that semi-posh local attraction that consists of a pop-up restaurant in the middle of a vineyard that produces a bubbly that’s extremely similar to Champagne (but which cannot be called that because it’s not located in the Champagne region). There, the food was all sorts of bad in all sorts of ways I wouldn’t have imagined until then. The two of us who took the fish simply couldn’t eat it at all as it hadn’t been skinned properly. If you tried to lift the skin (I love fish, he’s a chef, so between the two of us, we should have been able to do it), the only thing that you managed to do was spread the scales everywhere, and especially into the fish meat— which was full of bones anyway. Those who had ordered the meat weren’t any luckier as it was completely undercooked, which when you’re cooking pork requires some sort of special dedication. Then we couldn’t get a hold of a server for about one hour and a half.
I’m sorry to report that nothing really outrageous happened (like that one time the waiter dropped a full tray of drinks on me twice in a row, threw the tray across the room and just… left) because I’m a sucker for terrible restaurant reviews, and we still tipped in both cases, but none of us is in any hurry to return to those places. I guess we’ll stick to our usual haunts for a bit.
These past few weeks have also been the time to reconnect with people we hadn’t seen for a while because of the pandemic. From impromptu drinks with a friend (and her adorable almost-two-years-old granddaughter) I bumped into on the main square of our town to dinners with former-colleagues-turned-friends, plus endless barbecues with cousins, it has been wonderful to feel social again. Of course, we still mainly stay outside, wash our hands a lot, and keep to the implicit rule that if you have a cold, you’d better stay home and we’ll see each other at another time, but it feels great to have those conversations, to experience connectedness through physical touch (even my friend who really doesn’t like hugging gave me a hug when I finally saw her after two years, despite having talked on the phone every month), and to see people face to face without the mediation of a screen. I hadn’t realised that someone as independent as me could crave those things. It’s been a good summer relationship-wise so far.
Oh, and a quick 2004-MySpace-style status update to conclude:
Current read: The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten (1997), a chronicle of how a Vogue food critic overcame his food disgusts and battled with sourdough in his quest to create the perfect loaf in New York, among other things. Joyful.
Current show: Superstore (2015-2021), our lunchtime sitcom set in a supermarket in Missouri with an ensemble cast led by America Ferrera and Ben Feldman. It’s all sorts of cute, and the many one-liners are highly quotable.
Current album: Ben Harper’s newest album, Bloodline Maintenance, which is very, very, very good. At this point, I’d probably still find it wonderful if Ben Harper just decided to read the phonebook while distractedly playing random riffs on his guitar, but he doesn’t; instead, he writes brilliant songs, which is fine by me too.
With love to you all,
J.