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New Editor Paul Morris retraces the steps that brought him to a place as strange as Schuman...For my first experience of expatdom, I have to spool back a baker’s dozen years or so. For ten years I had been living in the Big Smoke as we affectionately call London but despite Dr. Johnson’s tenet, I had grown tired of the place not of Life itself. In 1992, London was burning - politically speaking - and it was simply time to move on.
My partner and I headed due south and kept going, or at least the pilot kept going until he ordered his flaps to be lowered and touched down on the permanently melting runway tarmac of Nice International airport. And then the airport bus whizzed along the coastline, hugging the seductive waters of the Cote d’Azur.
a southern harbour
Our apartment (half the price of the one in cluttered old Shepherd’s Bush) had a terrace and an impeccably kept swimming pool for the sole use of the residents, made up mainly of Parisian retirees, a quiet group until they got behind the wheel of any petrol-driven vehicle. And the TV channels did not employ weather staff as there was no need: the charts read Mostly Sunny.
'Poor you,' you are thinking, or, more likely, 'What in the name of Zeus are you doing here, huddling from the vagaries of Belgium’s weather?' Well, the return road north was a circuitous one, via London briefly for the birth of our daughter, then Dublin, Lille and finally Brussels. Perhaps I’m a salmon heading back upstream, caught in the odd eddy or malicious little whirlpool. But if this is home for now, then it’s not a bad place to be. The downpours are as of nothing compared to the antidiluvian floods that sweep the Scots from their feet, the frites are abundant if smaller than our chips and the beer… well it’s actually beer.
All of this aside, I do admit to being at my most contented when my feet are firmly planted on continental soil and where better and closer than Belgium to look back in anger at an island that is lurching from drama to crisis? I noted the latest suggestion for offshore prison ships to cope with overcrowding. Eventually there would be enough ships that could be connected up to make the long discussed Channel bridge, making it but a short hop for prisoners to escape to the continent. And Britain would once more have offloaded its crims and convicts. New South Woluwe, Botany Brugge?
I share the same sense of optimism as a Lille painter who described how he saw white in the perpetually grey skies. a northern sky
For now I am content to sip a beer Chez Bernard, partake of the frites from Maison Antoine and stare at the firmament in the hope of discerning le blanc dans la grisaille.
Paul Morris
Editor
Expatica Belgium
5 February 2007
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[Copyright Expatica 2007]
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