The effect of alcohol on body and mind.
Women who don't and didn't give a hang.

Continuous drinking and lack of sleep will colour judgements, speech and actions. You become what you always were, but this summer it's a fashion more extreme. There is no real summer, it's raining - and still this is the time in which you are just two sighs away from becoming an alcoholic. Pennies and alcohol from heaven.

You are not not ready to go down that path alone. Someone knows. Someone promises to get you cleaned up. No drinks, home-made Thaifood and talks for a month. You must accept the hand that's holding other cards than the ones you were dealt.

You dive in, head first.

Detox Day. Pineapple for breakfast, afternoon tea.

A slice of profane life: yesterday I discovered an excellent restaurant downtown. Viva Bomma had two outstanding scores on a Belgian restoguide website and I thought I'd give it a go. Since my company owns a restaurant themselves, I was a bit nervous because of the risk I'd taken to invite them to a place I hadn't checked out before.
We soon learnt I could have done so, when the chef told us his place opened a year ago. He had turned his deli into a restaurant for his son, but some three months later the same son confessed to being more into forklift driving and left. So this guy and his wife decided to manage the place by themselves. No staff, no fuss neither, 18 sets of cutlery. As soon as we got to our table I felt we were in for a perfect evening.

The menu at Viva Bomma is brief, with a choice of 6 starters and 6 main dishes, which vary from season to season. The desserts vary on a weekly basis. There is a short selection of wine, which is all sold at the same price. We opted for the menu with accompanying wines, and the apéritif on the house. A chardonnay brut, picon or freshly squeezed orange juice. I had a flashback to the night before of about 5 seconds, but then decided I'd go for the chardonnay anyway. Good choice (bad girl). As an appetizer we got serano ham, olives, feta and some salty cookies. Nothing fancy, but again on the house, honest and it made us feel perfectly at home.

I had been thinking of bouillabaise all day - my favourite meal after my stomach's been washed away by wine - so I was definitely going for the Ostend fish soup. It was not a proper bouillabaise, but close enough. My brother-in-law took another seaside classic, fish cake on local lettuce with fried parsley. My sister the carnivore had carpaccio with baked foi gras and grated granny apple. It's a dish she would order all the time and she couldn't stop saying how well this foi gras was fried, and how all ingredients were cleverly combined. I took her word for it, since I don't eat foi gras myself. And the wine? I forgot to look at the bottle. That's how confident I was. Well, that and the fact that I never remember any wine names while eating out, will account for the lack of information on this particular subject.

Out of general sympathy with kitchen staff (one middle-aged, intellectual looking blonde woman as it turned out), we all took the same main dish: a trio of baked fish. The lucky bastards of the day were cod, sea perch and sole. We had them with mashed potatoes, fresh julienne vegetables and herb relish.

Just as we finished our plate, Betty arrived. She's my friend from Brussels, who drove down to Ostend at the risk of being caught in traffic jams and other horroresque situations. Nothing of that, she had made her way to the seaside easily, at 90km an hour - and was in an ideal state for joining us: hungry.

(I am getting a bit tired of descibing food and drinks - I'll skip the part of the beef and baked late spring potatoes, the desserts I didn't have because I had actually already eaten something at home before we set out - never take the risk of not getting any food while going out - and will conclude: it was a dazzling evening, like the one before that and the one before).

...

In my living room, I have a fuchia and pink flower bouquet to stare at.
Outside there's the sea and the setting sun. I'm out of here!

At the scene of the crime

There was no need for you to be there.

I wanted arms, a head
and other parts of your body,
on the days leading up to today.

But now,
Ribs, knives,
Have cut you out of the centre.

I look down and am not bleeding.
I look again and you are gone.


Some sleep would be welcome now, but I am waiting for the last page in this week's social life magazine: jaunting with my sister and her husband.
This week I celebrated my 1st full year of living in Ostend and for that occasion this town had put on a wonderful dress. She looked like my mother, for the first time it felt like home.

There were concerts and plays, jesters and clowns, music all night long. It's the time of the year on which anyone would come over to hang around the beach and watch some street theater or a band playing for free. You open up a bottle and - - - damn does this water taste sweet!

I had friends over for dinner last night. Old ones, for whom my love is deep, many-splendoured. The ones that love me back in a family way. I feel suspiciously cheesy. And again a bit queasy. Might be I need to get off the wine, the late nights out. Next time, I will be wise.

I've been drinking. Let me just leave the spelling mistakes in, yo give you an ideo af how hard it is to write now and to rethink and reread how sill y drunks can ben. I did not intend to drink tonight and left the house in good spirists (no pun intended), off to see some stand-up comedian, xwith a dfree ticket offered by a god friende. I lvoe my friends and their to-be husbands ors opouses. When I see some I witness happiness in action, becase it is feverywher with htem.

As eit seemes, life gets sweeter every day.

I have left out ehe worst errors in the little text above, and I agree to leave the writing for tomorrow. The tihninking kan be doen with wine in some axons, but trhe distributing electricity,in the brain is intoxitated. Neuron A to B says 'right back to where we started from'.

It's just that I need a break. Goodnogiht.

I woke up right after the first alarmtone this morning and felt a bit queasy. 'Hell' was my first thought. Got to the one table in my flat and found a giant hangover being served for breakfast. I ate it all.

A label reads better, faster than a book. It's junkfood for the brain. Correct, in vino veritas, but now I've had it with what I make of that truth. More about that later, when or if I ever get back from work.