Weeknotes 288

I spent the week in Belgium: two nights in Antwerp, two in Bruges.

I wanted a less hot and stressful break than last summer, and this one succeeded on both counts. Travelling by train — Eurostar to Lille, trains to Antwerp, Bruges and Brussels, then Eurostar home again — made the journey feel like part of the holiday instead of something to endure. The weather was sunny and cool. I felt very relaxed.

Food was a significant highlight. For example, on Monday I had a mindblowing dinner at Humm followed by an exceptional waffle from IceLab. An absolutely unbeatable combo.

I liked Blackbird so much that I went twice, first for breakfast on Thursday and again for pancakes on Friday. Their coffee and vibes were immaculate.

And on Thursday night I had a fancy six-course meal at Patrick Devos, which was delicious despite (like all tasting menus) overstaying its welcome.

Unphotographed highlights: breakfast at Foelie, lunch at MoMu Café, a burrito at Pura Vida Tacos, coffee at Caffènation and an arepa at Arepa Culture. It was also gratifyingly easy to get alcohol-free beer everywhere.

So, yeah, I really enjoyed myself.

The rest of the time was spent wandering down streets, walking through parks, looking at buildings and going to museums. I saw a good bee and some good fish in the Antwerp botanical garden.

I got home on Friday evening. The train exit opened like an oven door and London hit me in the face. It was still boiling and I’ve struggled with the heat all weekend. Take me back.

Tell you what though, being on holiday’s a bit exhausting isn‘t it? Constantly having to plan ahead to the next meal (I assume this holds in general?, but definitely if you’re vegan) and think of enough interesting things to do until then. When you’re at home you can just chill the fuck out and do whatever.

I apologise for my gratuitous use of the word “Belgium” in a serious weeknote.

I made it to the gym twice, which means yesterday and today because they don’t have gyms on holiday. My primary motivation was to finish my “free” copy of Dogs of War before it evaporates and I just about did. I’m curious to hear more so think I’ll buy Bear Head even though I’ve already got other books waiting.

I finished rewatching Shōgun and loved it this time. It’s really quite an achievement and I wish it hadn’t taken me two viewings to properly tune into the characters and plot.

Speaking of which, I also watched Ran. It was visually spectacular but as usual I couldn’t grasp even the basic details of what was happening, so from a narrative perspective I might as well have listened to a numbers station for three hours instead.

Conversely I watched the first episode of Murderbot which was easy to understand but had all the charm and depth of a toothpaste advert, so that’s the end of that.

For some reason I decided to upgrade my Mastodon instance to Mastodon 4.4 which involved first upgrading its virtual machine to Debian 12 so I could install a new enough version of libvips. Halfway through I became absolutely convinced it would all break and I’d have to spend days repairing it but miraculously both the Debian and Mastodon upgrades worked perfectly the first time. Well done nerds!

Back to work tomorrow.