Bella’s blog

I’m booked to leave New York at the end of the month for Europe. Rome for 10 days where I can write then over to Nice – Cote D’azure for 7 days. We’ll nip across to the Cairns Film Festival too which will be brilliant as it is my virginal foray into the glitz and glam of films – french style. While in Rome it would be awesome to visit Palermo but will see if I can, apparently it takes 12 hours by boat.

I’ve stopped partying for the past five days to give my body a rest – and I have entered the twilight zone – I’ve gotten a flu and am so bored I’m actually cleaning - 

Just done a spring clean of the house… I only wish I could do that with my lungs and liver

My flatmate has left for vacation in Turkey and I’m left at home with The Beast. The Beast aka Oscar is a 6 month old Boxer with scitzoid tendencies. He is handsome, beautifully proportioned with a compacted snout and large expressive eyes – but he is a beast. You leave the apartment for ten minutes and you come back to find hell on earth. He chews everything he can reach. Shoes, make up, clothes, bills, computers. He was once able to start the computer and get Itunes to play a Bob Marley song. Kind of brilliant if you think about it. Yesterday I came home to find my new red Italian shoes turned into oatmeal. He also bites. And he jumps up and tried to have sex with my leg. The house a shambles, my leg being systematically raped, saliva and hair an inch thick on my clothes and I have bite marks that make me look like I’m into hard core sex games. I’m getting kind of desperate. Today I tried swinging his toy duck back and forth across his vision and repeated in a monotone ‘you will be a good boy, you will be a good boy.’ Oscar is turning me into a crazy person. Soon I’ll be hearing him talk back to me. But then in a blink of an eye, he’ll softly patter over to me while I’m working on the computer, and gently nestle into my lap, splaying his heavy paws around my neck as he trustingly rests his head on my shoulder. He does the whole Shrek Puss ‘n’ Boots thing and your heart melts and you feel guilty for calling him the hound of the Baskervilles and other unprintable things. Ah, the love of a naughty mutt, nothing beats it. Kind of.

Spring is breaking through the concrete sidewalks of New York –  Blossoms are coming out and people are out on the streets stepping from sun puddle to sun puddle as they make the most of the bright new rays coming down.

I’m house hunting and weve been plodding through apartments and negotiating balconies and bathrooms and brokers. Greenwich Village seems like the best balance, right near the park, filled with cafes and bars and graceful tree lined streets.

I have to leave the USA soon to lodge my artist’s visa application which is a darned good excuse to visit Europe again. Perhaps back to Berlin, perhaps Rome to visit friends, a maiden voyage to the South of France perhaps? Ah necessity is the mother of all excuses. 

I remember as a child Europe seemed so exotic. So far away. A land with strange and exciting vistas and smells and tastes and people. It didn’t seem feasible for me to see it ever in my lifetime, a dreamland far away from the realities of our kitchen table. I still have those feelings for Europe. But she is more solid in my thoughts now, with her history, her sculpture lined boulevards, fresh summer gardens, wooden cafes – and of course her cute French boys, and Italian ones, and German ones. Ah, traveling is the mother of all excuses.