World Tour of the chocolate-producing bits of Europe

On the personal-and-whining front, I am properly exhausted. The kind of exhausted that means sitting on the floor in the morning and crying cos I can't get up, and having showers sitting down, and randomly passing out all the time like some wannabe narcoleptic. All very attractive. Something to do with working 121 hours straight, then going on a stupid stressful road-trip then going into a job that requires getting up at 6am. So I quit.

This week I am mostly sleeping until I wake up. Oh thank you Jesus. And then in a month's time, I am going on holiday for a month. Somewhere so hot, all I will be able to do is lie around and listen to the sound of my brain baking in its own juice. Mmmmmm...holiday.

The World Tour of Europe was all a convoluted way of getting to Cannes. Cannes is madder than a delusional badger. And it's quite horrible, in it's own wee way, but only if you take it seriously.

Good things about Cannes - lusting after pretty boats in the marina, people-watching, French food, being by the ocean...

Bad things about Cannes - absolutely EVERYTHING else.

See, if you have money or a really successful business or quality product to sell, I'm guessing Cannes is a blast. Me, I was there on a cheapie, but still managed to have (exhausting) fun.

There's a Cinema de la Plage, which is just a million deckchairs and a cinema screen, so we went to see Bullitt and Night of the Living Dead, so that was cool. I met George Romero after he introduced his film, which was also very cool. Bizarrely, he looks like JIM BOWEN GONE BAD - they are so alike!

The market in Cannes (which is mostly held in the Palais) involved going around and around and around and around talking to all the distributors I usually deal with by email, saying hello, trying to make connections. Every conversation revolves around, "here, let me give you my card.." which you end up saying so automatically you might as well hand over Mr Bun the Baker for all it means by the end of day three.

But I got a bunch of free movies (seen most of them - utter mince) and met some good people, although mostly outside Le Petit Majestic which is the bar off the Croisette where everybody ends up at some point or another.

One night I went to a party hosted by my friend Loris' company, Minerva. An Italian company, having a party in a marquee on the beach. Smashing. So I go. Hand over my invite, head inside, instantly get free Champers from the cute Italian waiters - so far so good. I find my friends and my host. Sit down to blether. My host is married to a gorgeous woman called Olga from Belarus who is one of those women (think Sex & the City's Charlotte) who looks immaculate, is intelligent, sweet and effortlessly beautiful. I feel like a sweating hippo next to her, even though she's so nice, and go outside onto the sand to sit on one of the loungers and be near the sea, something which always makes me feel good.

It's then I read the blurb and find out that the party is co-sponsored by an Italian Spa Island, hence the Sheherezade tents and masseurs everywhere.

Near me is a futon mattress and a smiling Thai girlie who catches my eye and asks me if I would like a massage. Yes I would. So I take off my shoes and lie down, and for the next 45 minutes I get treated to a fairly glorious massage at her very expert hands. Halfway through this, bits of my insides are beginning to relax to keep up with the outside bits, when some stuff happens. Picture this. I am lying on a mattress on the sand with my feet pointing out to sea. Into the party comes an Italian "starlet" (I use inverted comma's cos she was older than me) and she starts prancing around with her girlfriends, right at my feet. The next bit of kerfuffle is two photographers (I'm not sure if two counts as paparazzi or just her brothers paid to wear ill-fitting tuxedos and pop some bulbs in her general direction) and they stand at the other end of the mattress, right behind me, kicking sand in my hair, and taking piccies of the half-naked wench.

The lovely Thai girl leans in and whispers 'this isn't very relaxing is it?' I agree with her, and she says ok, 'we start over' so I really got one and a half massages, which was sweet of her. But lying there, I thought, if I see this pic in tomorrow's trades, I'll know that three feet below that photo is me, on the beach, with one knee up by my ears, getting sympathy from an over-worked Thai masseuse. Ah, Cannes. What a crock.

Once I was all done there, I went back inside and sat with my friends, but the "starlet" wasn't done. She went into one of the Sheherezade tents (they were really just a roof with the sides rolled up and a bed and a stand full of yummy oils) and lay on the raised bed to get a head massage. Photographers duly followed suit. Trouble is, from where we were sitting, she didn't have quite enough class (or fame, obviously) to keep her legs shut while she was getting pummelled. The kind of view that would put you right off your kebab, trust me. Specially if it was as badly packed as hers.

At that point, a 40 minute walk by the sea back to the apartment seemed like a fine plan, so I left, got an ice-cream cone at the end of the Croisette (fresh coconut sorbet, if you must know) and meandered home under a spectacular moon by a sympathetic ocean and sat on our balcony and watched the waves and did justice to a rather nice bottle of white and read my book. Parties. Ha.

Anyway, beginning of the trip....as I was leaving Edinburgh for London, crossing at some traffic lights, I heard the best conversation:

Says old lady with no dog to young lady with teeny dog-with-head-cone-on
"Ah, he's so sweet...why's he got the cone, then?"
"Well, he had an abcess behind his eye that grew so big it came out the top of his head. Vet says he's lucky it didn't go through his brain...."

It's cruel to laugh, isn't it?

Just checking.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

What fecking use is a flea cone if a rogue abcess has squirreled through your skull??

Anyway. London. I know everyone gets to a point where they are sick of London but it hasn't happened to me yet, and I hope won't for a while. I arrived on the Friday night and after a quick shower, tried to get changed, but discovered that, worryingly, I haven't grown out of my fantastic knack for 'bizarre packing' which means I have a bag full of really interesting stuff but every time I go for something I actually need, it's not there. Grr. After much growling, I finally headed up West to meet my friends at Camden tube where they were flyering for clubs. A bunch of people turned up and some went clubbing, some went to a party, and we ended up in the Dublin Castle on Parkway. Love this bar. We even got a seat, which is kinda unheard of.

The next night was off to the Bricklayer's Arms off Rathbone Place where we got to sit outside which was a bit lovely. My friend Paolo came out, as did Rob Morgan and Duncan Hopper who'd been at the festival and it was very cool to see them under less stressful circumstances. Much beer was drunk (enough to think hanging out in Soho a good idea) and eventually we ended up in Balans till 4am drinking silly cocktails and failing to get food poisoning from their menu. All very good. I am never going to complain about talking nonsense all night with utterly gorgeous men who are also interesting and intelligent company. Kid in a candy store :) The one thing that would have made it perfect would have been my own beautiful boy there too, but he was already pre-booked that weekend.

The night begins to end with a jolly night bus journey home on which nothing untoward happens, sadly. Sigh. I love it when London gets untoward. It finally ends when I slip into Carrie's bed and she flings one sleepy arm over me and we crash out till the sun wakes us up rather later than planned on Saturday.

Pootling round London later that day, I see "Back the Bid" banners everywhere, all of which say 'Make Britain Proud' on them. Britain? Oh yeah. London gets the Olympics, and suddenly all commentary, focus and attention will be split equally across Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. My arse it will. I say we finally instigate the Stoneybridge Bid. This is the B-side of a rant about the booklet of "British Films of 2004" I was looking at last week, that had a picture of the London Eye on the cover. So that's Britain is it? Anyway, the highlight of my day is finding Mincing Lane :)

After London, I flew to Brussels. I love Brussels. It's not the city that immediately strikes you as being beautiful, but it really is. Also, they make beer and chocolate, so how the hell could you not love them?

In Brussels, my friend Mireille is good enough to come pick me up and she introduces me to her hugely tall rock monster friend Patchouli (seriously!) who is friends with Lemmy and is abandoning us in favour of a trade union party. Just when I think this sounds cool, I find out we have been invited to a Spanish trade union party across town, there to see Mireille's favourite band, PPZ 30 (before you ask, it's a special kind of cement...)

On the way to the gig/party, we pass a shop called (wait for it...) DICK FISH. Hahahahahahaha! I have absolutely no idea what they sell because they are shut, but I dread to think :)

So the gig is incredible - the band are sublime and Mireille and I drink cloudy cider from Asturias (I've had this in Spain and it's bloody lethal) and we dance all night.

The next night I go to meet and talk about horror movies with my friend Thibaut who works on the Brussels International. He is very sweet and seems very quiet but is one of those wonderful people who is just full of surprises. He was all loved up because his new girlfriend turned up at the Bal des Vampires (the Brussels Horror Fest closing party) dressed as Carrie, completely drenched in blood :) A very hairy-and-scary Antonio joined us, and despite first impressions he turned out to be interesting company (owns a mobile recording unit, spends most of his time in West Africa blah blah blah).

Anyway, we go to continue my odyssey of alphabetically conquering all Belgian beers and I have a Kwak. I know this sounds like some kind of deeply unfortunate toilet accident (right up there with "I've quiched myself..." is "I've Kwaked myself..." but actually it's a ludicrous tube glass in a wooden frame and when you are mostly finished the beer and down to just the bubble at the base of the glass, it goes KWAK!!!! every time you take a glug. Well, it made me smile :)

We sit outside at the foot of a gorgeous church until 1am and eat well and drink well, and at some point the conversation turns to dumb pets and horrid childhood-pet accidents. I mentioned that my mum used to have (what until now I thought was) the world's dumbest dalmation, because it could get lost in its own turning circle, but Thibaut decides to share a story that when he was 14 and they lived on the second floor and had a dalmation, his dumb dog one day sees a bird on the ledge of an open window, and, fancying his chances, decides to take the bird out, so runs across the room and launches itself at the bird which promptly flies away, and so poor spotty dog plummets two floors to its untimely (and seriously dim) death.

Now obviously this isn't funny, not least for the dog (not to mention any passers by who may have been a tad upset to look up and see a slightly surprised dalmation hurtling their way) but that doesn't explain why we were helpless when he told us.

When we'd recovered a little, I asked him if he wasn't totally scarred by the whole thing, and his punchline was that, well, he didn't really like the dog anyway.

Those wacky Belgians.

After that we headed into the city and sat outside another bar and got acquainted with yet more beer until around 3 when I was dead on my feet. Thibaut walked me to a cab rank and I went home, managing somehow to have a reasonably complex conversation with the driver, in French, all the way. Now, Mireille has a gorgeous 13 year old Alsatian called Mirti who likes to sleep sprawled across the very dark and very narrow hall. I discover she likes to sleep like this when I trip over her and smack into a wardrobe. Very classy. Mirti just snuffles and turns over. Me, I go upstairs to do the cold compress thing on my face, given that I didn't fancy sporting a black eye for the remainder of the trip, but I needn't have worried - so many late nights I just look like the poster-child for an advanced smack addiction anyway. Only not as thin. So only from the nose up.

In the morning we went to the Brussels festival office to say to everyone and they fed us salami and beer and jaffa cakes for lunch. Mmmmm. Blech.

The train to Amsterdam was a blast, not least cos I splashed out an extra ten Euros and travelled first class and lay across huge, soft leather armchairs in an empty compartment and once settled, it was red wine and chocolate-coated Belgian waffles all the way to the 'Dam.

My friend Jan lives in a typical Dutch house, but even he admits that their staircase is a little terrifying. It's not so much terrifying as fecking vertical. The steps are about four inches deep and there's three flights. Kinda fun with luggage. Getting it back down again is gonna be exciting. In the same way as jumping off a cliff onto a spike is exciting...

Still, the sun was shining and we sat by an open window above a canal, drank good red wine and blethered until finally heading out to a Turkish place round the corner with Jan and Donna and Bart, one of Jan's colleagues I know, and we ate SO well. Yu-hum. Just the yummiest hummous in the world, good Cacik, the tenderest lamb, sweet Turkish bread and spiced veggies. And two more bottles of good red wine. I love my life :) Then everyone else bailed and Bart and I went for a couple more pints and a walk through bits of the red light. The last time I saw Bart was during Sitges last December so it was really lovely to catch up and be sympathetic to tales of someone else's lovelife.

I finally made it home a little after 2am (the scary steps after much wine are enough to induce religious fervour in anyone, trust me) and conked out on the air mattress, only occasionally being interrupted by Boris the cat who decided to get all territorial with the leopard-print duvet cover.

Today is Memorial Day here, and I am off to the Jewish Museum. I really love being in this gorgeous city and indulging my needs to just walk about and go see stuff. Now there are easyjet flights directly from Edinburgh, it just makes me want to come back and spend a ton more time here.

Tonight Jan's presenting a screeninig of DARK HOURS at the Uni so I'm going to that, and Alan's just told me that there's a ska gig tonight cos THE TOASTERS are playing at 1am, so I may have to go to a gig (I never made it, sadly, but next time.)

Tomorrow is Liberation Day, so most things are shut but the entire city will be celebrating, so I have no idea what that entails but I'm sure it will be fun. Truthfully I'm pleased that I have a late flight to Geneva because it means I still have two whole days here, and that means I can just walk until I get lost and find random things. I really love to travel alone.

So. The Jewish Historical Museum. This bit isn't going to be funny for a paragraph or two, so skip to the end if you want the bit about Snurks.

The Jewish Historical Museum is actually four synagogues together, the earliest dating back to the mid 1600's. The museum has displays of all the acoutrements of Jewish life, from daily living to major ceremonial shenanigans and it was all really lovely to have some of the stuff I do automatically explained in terms that I understand, i.e. not crippled with passive-aggressive manipulation and guilt :)

It was a genuinely odd experience partly because I wasn't sure what I wanted out of it, but also because it drew a really straight emotional line for me to certain aspects of how I grew up and actually allowed me to appreciate them in an entirely new light. No major religious conversion, but a clearer understanding of why particular objects and rituals were so important to my parents to continue to use or to host when the only explanation you get as a kid is 'because I said so' which resides in the elegant Excuses Hall of the Chocolate Teapot Museum of Usefulness.

And there were girls in their early 20's davenning (the wobbly prayer thing where people do that action like the bobbing chicken lighter). I've never seen girls davenning. It doesn't happen. It felt so odd I might as well have caught them masturbating I was at such a loss of what to do. I mean, obviously it's good...why the hell shouldn't women daven?

Listening to my friendly audio-guide handset, it said I should stand on the Bimah for the next instalment. Now, the Bimah is the central platform in the synagogue which faces the Ark. Only men are allowed there - that's been a given since I was old enough to know I was being excluded. I couldn't do it. I just sat there, frozen, thinking "I can't go on the Bimah, I'm a girl". And you can probably fill in the blanks of how that left me feeling. I did eventually go up, but it felt wrong and disrespectful and I kept expecting someone to do that Bodysnatchers point-and-scream until I ran away. A really odd experience.

There was also an extensive exhibition of Yevgeny Khaldei's photographs. He was a contemporary of Capa's I think, and was the official Russian war photographer during WWII. His photo's included loads from the Nuremberg Trials in '46, the Reichstag, Berlin as it fell in '45 and so many others. An extraordinary selection of pics and some deeply distressing - images you can't possibly prepare for.

It was a good day. Somehow it's a really positive experience to see close-up an existence that is so much more extreme than anything you are likely to have to deal with, and therefore you are left feeling slightly ashamed of the minor inconveniences you whinge about, how privileged you are, and who had to suffer for you to be so privileged. I went and sat by the water and was glad that I have my freedom, my health, my family and my beautiful and valued friends. I don't know what I did right to get these friends, but it's a constant delight to me that good people find room in their lives for me. So there.

I wasn't remotely in the mood for company before the screening so I called Jan, told him where I was and asked where a non-tourist should go to eat. He recommended Jaare which is over a canal and is really lovely. It's huge, and in one part of the ground floor they have long tables - five by two, if you know what I mean - all joined up, with reading lights right down the centre and a huge armchair at each one. The tables are very wide, and designed specifically so you can spread your Sunday papers over them and read while you have brunch. How civilised is that?! Anyway, without thinking about it, I had smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches (how very Yiddish of me) and a couple of Belgian beers and was eventually all fired up to go to a movie.

Before the film there was 2 minutes of silence across Holland, which of course we observed, and then a screening of Dark Hours which I love.

The next day was Liberation Day and the entire city was on holiday. The streets were crazy-busy, there were open-air gigs everywhere, there were huge things happening that night and for most of the day there is little to do but walk around, drink a beer and people-watch, which I did from the canal cos I figured I was due a canal cruise.

I went walking in the morning, though, and got deliberately lost to see where I would end up. I found the Snurk Klinik!! Huzzar for Snurks!! I don't know what Snurks are, or how you get Snurk or if it's infectious or even dangerous but there didn't seem to be an emergency room there so maybe Snurk can be treated at home with just a bit of string, some cheese, a hot towel and plenty of bed rest...

It did make me want to start a legal practice, though, just so I can call it DickFish & Snurk, Lawyers to the Challenged :)

After that, I went to Vondelpark to the Film Museum, then fed some ducks and went and sat on the balcony and drank good coffee and watched the world go by. Ducks are good (particularly with garlic, Boom! Boom!) but they are also kinda snooty (maybe I had the wrong kind of bread...)

After that I meandered through the park to see some of the gigs and had a hotdog. With much mustard (five kinds!) and I only recognised three, the other two remain an intriguing but slightly worrying mystery :) I can feel the peripheral bits of my eyes still leaking as some of it was so strong but so good! Clears the tubes and all that.

Jan has a couple of friends at UIP (the biggest film distributor on the planet) who we went for curry with, and even though I thought it would be film talk all the way, it was actually much more interesting and much more fun! I was going to surf and see what horror movies they've put out in the last couple years so I could manage not to put my foot in it by talking about how crap all the remakes and studio pics are, then I thought bugger it, I do think most of the remakes and studio pics are unadulterated mince, so let's just have that conversation :) Note to self, drink less wine than everyone else...

After that, I flew to Geneva. On the first night, we spent the evening in a bar called Scandale with four mad lasses from Bristol who were there visiting one of Ol's friends. Much fun. Much beer. Much chat.

We came home around 2 and Ol accepted a backgammon rematch challenge having lost to my mighty backgammon supremacy earlier in the day :) We played a couple games, had a couple more beers, then sat and talked reasonably interesting nonsense until nearly 6 in the morning. Although it's completely glorious having Ol back in my life and to watch this friendship get back on track after a decade of no communication, it's not something we'd actually discussed, so we have now, and it was lovely. His girlfriend is a sweetheart too.

The next day we went exploring Geneva, and went for fondue for lunch. Dear god that's so much cheese! We drank nice Pinot and ate all the cheese in the world. My arteries still feel like they're full of cheese. I didn't eat for the rest of the day (couldn't even manage chocolate, that's how bad it was) and then most of the next day too. For a cheese-holic, I was kinda surprised that it was three days till I could eat cheese again. Don't get me wrong, it was a quantity problem, not quality :)

So...the next day we went to Gruyeres. The sun was blazing and we drove for an hour and a half there to visit both the H R Giger Museum and the castle. Obviously Gruyeres is known for cheese. And when I say cheese I mean cheese on everything, including the soup, salad and desserts. After the fondue adventure, I had had enough cheese to last me a year, so opted for cheese-free soup and salad (a rarity!) as we sat in the sun for lunch.

Now, most countries you go to don't look anything like the postcards but Switzerland is different. The museum was ok (more impressive was the Alien-themed bar and I used Ol's digi camera to take some pics that he'll email to me next week and I can send them to you if you would like to see the coolest bar stools imaginable....). Anyway, it was really the castle that blew me away. Begun building in the 11th century, it is beautiful, grand and impressive. The Alpine foothills all around were so green, and the distant clouds cleared a little so the Alps were visible. All the green fields are infused with yellow from dandelions and other little yellow flowers and it just looks too pretty to be true. There was no wind, just this lush valley that extended for miles and blue sky and a glorious castle and I sat on the ramparts and watched the valley do absolutely nothing for quite a long time. Yes it's beautiful, but it's also where John Howe was inspired by the same view, amongst many others, when he did the conceptual artwork for Pete Jackson for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The drive back was on the motorway high above Lake Geneva and as the sun came off its zenith, Mont Blanc was illuminated and the sun just bounced off the still water and the Alps and it was nothing short of breathtaking. The air here is really clean, it's wide open, green and unbelievably chill and beautiful.

Fun thing though - on the way home we passed by a bunch of spiral concrete staircases laid out on their backs and sides on the grass by the side of the road - the factory was a little way behind - but it just looked like Escher got bored trying to find all the edges in his jigsaw and gave up and went home in a huff.

I went shopping for Swiss chocolate (not the worst time in the world) and tried Swiss beer which is a bit rubbish, but they are excused for their obsession for all things dairy and sweet. I'm incessantly listening to Goldie Looking Chain and my birthday cd for sanity at every available minute, and have remembered all kinds of odd French words and even learnt a new one. Sadly, it's not even remotely rude.

And then to Cannes.