The Bottom Left Corner

Alec, being a typical boy, comes home from work every day, "Hi, honey...", and empties the contents of his pockets onto a convenient horizontal surface. When the coin piles get large, he will find a container. Then a bigger container. When we moved from London to Holland, he had accumulated an entire BRIEFCASE full of coins from various nations. We gave it all to charity — it was only when I was standing in Oxfam with a suitcase full of money in used coins did it strike me that this must have seemed highly dodgy.

As you all will know, on January 1 the whole of Europe started using the shiny new Euro (pron. OOOOO-row), except for Britain, Denmark and Switzerland (who don't count, cos they're not in the club). In the Netherlands, we've got until the end of February to use up all the old Guilders, so I thought I'd better tackle Alec's piles. I sorted, counted and bagged some 300 coins of uselessly small denomination, and took them to the bank.

But none of the banks, I tried four, would touch my guldenmunten. "Not unless you have a bank account." "What about people who don't have bank accounts, such as foreigners and homeless people?" They would look at me strangely, and ask if I perhaps had a Dutch friend. "I did, but he was so irritatingly pedantic, I was forced to kill him." They would shrug their shoulders and suggest I spent my spare change on coffee.

I've battled with Dutch bureaucracy before, and learned to accept defeat quietly. I spent the next three days, pockets bulging with change, buying random small items, one at a time: a potato peeler, a tube of toothpaste, a pastry brush, three Christmas balls marked down 70%, a packet of pasta, six drinking glasses...
posted by Helen Waters at 1/12/2002 01:19:03 AM

NEWSFLASH: PG Tips announced today they have decided to retire the Tea Chimps, their tea-party advertising mascots for the past 45 years.

The timing is most interesting. On Wednesday the BBC aired a documentary called Going Ape where two people followed a bunch of chimpanzees around the rainforest, eating whatever the apes ate, I suppose to see how alike we are to our closest evolutionary relatives. Not much, it turns out, the two humans almost collapsed from dehydration and hunger after about two days. They wandered around with their damp feet turning into cauliflowers inside their wellies, commenting, "wow, the chimps seem much more adapted to the rainforest than we are!" Nevermind, dear, they'd stick out like a sore thumb wearing green wellies in Essex.

The chimps' diet was pretty much as we learned in the Jungle Book — gross looking jungle fruits, nuts, ants-a-la-stick — with one exception: every couple of days, they go out and mug a monkey. Yes, so much for our family of cheerful chimps slurping their tea and cracking jokes that would only make your Grandma smile, in reality they'd be more likely to disembowel a howler-monkey than tuck into a packet of Sponge Fingers.

The PG Tips chimps are to be replaced by a group of animated birds. I have this wonderful picture of a traumatized PG Tips executive coming into work the next day: "Drop the chimps, horrible, vicious little buggers. Let's get ourselves something nice... like birds!"
posted by Helen Waters at 1/11/2002 02:18:15 PM

Spent last weekend in Brussels. Maybe it's because of the new currency, can't say, never been to Belgium before, but we left having the distinct feeling we'd been ripped off at every opportunity.

Our first experience in Brussels was the taxi to the hotel. The cab driver got pulled over by a gendarme for passing traffic where presumably he shouldn't. Did he switch of the meter? No. Did he even apologize? He was French, of course not. We felt sorry for him for getting a ticket, so we didn't press the matter. The next day, we paid 100 Euros for a massive paella for two, when we'd asked for paella for one and two forks, and ripped off by the hotel Crowne Plaza, who charged a whopping 10 Euros for a phone call of under 2 minutes to the UK.

The capital of Europe is certainly impressive -- I hesitate to use the word beautiful, the buildings were gilded, gargoyled and ornamented to the verge of bad taste. I also noticed Belgians had a penchant for taxidermy, I've never seen so many stuffed animals! This gruesome squirrel was my favourite:


posted by Helen Waters at 1/7/2002 07:41:17 AM

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