Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Greetings from "Mijn Stamcafe"

Dearest Bloggees

(or whatever terminology they’ve come up with for those people unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of what us bloggers deem interesting enough to put finger to key and share with you).

I know it’s been a while (would you expect anything less from me?) but I thought I’d get in touch because something is burning deep inside of me, and it’s not the Hungarian goulash effort that I just prepared for myself, but something much more spiritual (and hopefully a little bit more healthy).

Just how the hell are you doing?

Are you keeping well?

No really – is everything ok in your world? I mean - are you happy in yourself (to coin a phrase from back home).

As this is a one-way communication medium, I sincerely hope so and will have to assume so, unless you take the time to tell me otherwise.

And this brings me to my point.

It may come as a surprise to you but this medium of conversing does indeed provide an opportunity to make this into a two-way experience.

A little visit to my wee corner of cyberspace (http://www.belgiumisboring.blogspot.com) is all you need to do to make this a two-way interaction by posting a little response to my blogs.

Of course, for the growing numbers of you that have registered with this blog in order to receive my updates directly and conveniently into your email’s inbox, (albeit in a sporadic nature) this is not the case and frustration must surely take over your every waking moment.

And not just frustration about being unable to share your innermost thoughts with a faceless humble scribe that feels the need to share his with you.

For instance, I know that some of you receive these little rants in the form of a close to unreadable lump of text, which I can imagine must be just more than a tad frustrating for you.

But can you imagine just how frustrated I must feel?

I spend time and effort putting the damn things together and no matter what I do to ensure that it arrives to you in the manner that it was intended; you still end up with what is basically a horrifyingly difficult-to-read lump of crap (and that’s even before you decipher what I have decided to share with you)

The fact that you endeavour to decipher it at all is a constant source of wonderment for me and I feel humble as a result of it.

But the burning question for me is - just why do you put yourselves through the heartache and undeniable frustration that this experience causes? I can only hope that it is because you enjoy what I write (as I said – I can only hope) but I have to ask why put yourself through the misery?

I pride myself on the fact that I passed my GCSE English.* I think I know when a paragraph should finish and a new one should start but reading my blogs you’d swear blind that I was incapable of writing a wish list to Santa, never mind something that could (potentially – but why not aim my sites high?) be read by anyone with a connection to the internet.

Of course – for those of you that this provides a (welcome?) distraction from work, it makes a lot more sense to suffer the email in it’s received form, rather than have some nerd in your employer’s IT department finding you accessing a website with “BelgiumIsBoring” in the title.

Especially if you are working in Belgium.

So having said all that – go to the website, leave a comment, share a little bit of love. This blogger gets lonely and it would be great to hear from you.

I think you are all lovely.

This is your chance to prove it.

Thanks for reading.
Your Humble Scribe.

* - Am I the only person amazed by just how many forms of the English language Bill Gates and his cohorts think there are?

In this edition of Microsoft Word that this text has been lovingly crafted on, I am reliably informed that there are 18 different forms of the language, including Canadian, American, Irish, Trinidadian and Tobagan and Belizean.

Is that all really necessary?

I mean – surely it couldn’t have been too much too ask the invading forces of the British Army to at least leave a dictionary behind as they were raping and pillaging?

PS – In case you didn’t know – “Mijn Stamcafe” is Flemish for “My local” – a lovely little bar across the street from where I live.

It’s a real ‘Flemish locals’ bar. This means that men, women, children and pets (of all ages) rub shoulders in a relaxed atmosphere; that Flemish is very much the language of communication, smoke hangs thick in the air, the cold Stella flows indefinitely and anyone of an Arabic persuasion are most definitely not welcome, never mind the quiet Irish computer nerd sitting in the corner beavering away on his laptop.

I brought my laptop into the bar tonight to do some work in an atmosphere I thought conducive to creativity – but not (originally) for this blog – I actually came here to do some work for a presentation I have to give next week but got a little distracted by a combination of the burning desire to get all of this off my chest, the fact that I hadn’t written anything creative for quite some time and of course the aforementioned indefinitely flowing cold Stella.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure? Do you really want to know how "we" are? Well, here goes....
Generally, we're pretty good. A bit spoiled (be honest - a lot spoiled), quite lazy, too solitary (sometimes by choice), too much of a worrier, vain in a way (without wanting ever to seem vain which is in itself a form of vanity), lonely, far too fond of things that do not and can not last forever, way too caught up in pedantic details of life (thereby missing the big picture and large chunks of time), lazy (also prone to repetition), not very good at making decisions of any sort (so we procrastinate until it is no longer relevant or necessary to make said decision), a fast reader, a loyal if sometimes clingy friend, a sceptic, a romantic, a gullible fool and on the whole... a pretty normal and average person. If there is such a thing.
Jeez Louise... ask me the time and I'll explain how the watch works!

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