Today, Sunday, was about winding down my Christmas Season holiday and winding up for work. Yes, tomorrow I return to an employer and do employee things.
I’ve had a good bit of leave. How do I know this? I have a tender spot on my thumb from pushing a button on a Wii U control. A side-effect from playing far too much Mario Kart 8 with my daughter! Yes, we’ve included a gaming console for those wintery Belgian inside days but with motion controls so that Speculoos can jump, punch and generally move and play like a five-year-old loves to!
I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions which I’m hoping should be easy enough to achieve with a little attention to my actions and well-being.
I plan to be more restful and less inwardly angry and resentful. I suppose it’s inner peace I’m after. More Dudeist I suppose.
Blog more and write more. Let that filthy bugger – the arty side of me – out more. I may even allow it to wield some art supplies and see what happens!
More roots and more family traditions entrenching here in Belgium, which I’m really looking forward to.
…but first some preparation for a regular day at work…
This morning I tweaked things that needed tweaking on my ride to work. Charged the batteries for the lights, pumped the tires and tightened the breaks on Mrs. Awesome and my bicycles.
It’s really quite easy unless you have something akin to a spaceship. I watched a YouTube video and followed the instructions.
Unfortunately the fellow in the tutorial didn’t warn me of the dangers to my perfectly groomed hair.
So here we go. Charging headlong straight into 2016 at the full speed of approximately 6,21371 miles per hour or 10 km per hour for our metric friends. Yes, I cycle rather slowly.
Surprisingly, this little lifestyle change was quite easily achievable in Belgium. I dearly wanted to adopt the almost forgotten, largely lost, art of using a straight razor. Unfortunately a regular quality straight razor and the items required for normal maintenance were not to be found in South Africa. Another rare, neigh, impossible to find resource was a person to instruct and tutor me on the use and upkeep of the razor.
The essential items required are a good quality straight razor, a good strop for sharpening, a tensioned honing strop, ointments and pastes to maintain the strops, shaving cream to get a good lather on for shaving. I picked up all these things at a place called De Messenwinkel. The literal translation is The Knife Shop and it’s certainly worth a visit if you’re in Antwerp, Belgium. They even offer courses!
Something German or Swedish made for the straight razor is ideal. The quality of materials used in razors from China or the Middle East are not treated correctly and can lead to difficulty in sharpening the razor and horrible results when trying to shave.
A good strop with a cotton and leather side is ideal. Again, a good quality should be sought. The blade of a straight razor is a delicate and beautiful thing. If you treat it with a low quality strop, you’re going to get low quality results. You may even end up damaging your straight razor!
A honing strop can be useful for six-monthly blade honing can be useful but not absolutely obligatory.
Then there are two tiny tubes of ointment, one yellow for the treating of the leather of the strop so that it stays free of moisture and one red for the honing strop. When I say that I use a pinhead of the ointment every few months I’m being very generous. Absolutely tiny amounts of the ointment are used at a time and it is only applied every few months.
There are copious manly pampering and proper stuff out there from preparation treatments to post shaving treatments. I use the absolute basics of shaving cream and brush for generating a lather.
The initial price was steep but over the long term it’s incredibly affordable and in some instances, beyond value. I no longer use the commercially available multi-bladed rip-offs for a couple of reasons.
Price
The multi-bladed disposable head razors are expensive in themselves and even though you purchase a cartridge with multiple heads supplied, once they’re blunt they’re worthless.
When the straight razor gets a little dull, you can sharpen it yourself in under 10 minutes and at a maximum cost of a few euro cents for each sharpening at most.
Nooks and Difficult Spots
You’d think that with such a broad blade it’d be difficult to get to those difficult nooks on a face.
Not so.
For years I haven’t been able to really get a smooth shaved spot under my nose. The commercial blades have simply been too bulky to get into that nook. I even tried a commercial blade that had a single razor built onto the edge of the multiple razor. It was advertised that the single razor could get into those tight little areas. Unfortunately it couldn’t. With the straight razor? No problem! Those little “difficult spots” haven’t been a problem!
Clogging
Well, it’s a straight razor. It doesn’t clog no matter how much hair you have on your face. The multi blade commercial razors would clog up almost every time. More than one day’s growth and the blades would clog up like custard in a coffee filter. I’m certain this is deliberate in order to force daily use, hence quicker dulling of the blades and forced re-purchase.
My Razor and the Art
I have a Dovo Astrale straight razor which I will hand down to a worthy young one eventually. These razors, if looked after, will last generations. They are delicate, sensitive creatures made for one purpose – the manly morning grooming act of shaving. The movies have portrayed them as cool weapons to be whipped out from a boot or used to slit throats. Yes, they’d do this very well a couple of times but it’s not their purpose. You’d destroy a very delicate creature by not using it as intended.
It’s also a contradiction. A straight razor’s worst enemy is water but it cannot give a beautiful, clean and comfortable shave without plenty of water. Always be sure to dry your straight razor very well after use. The tiniest residue of moisture will rust the blade. I don’t even keep my straight razor with my other toiletries! It lives in my bedroom away from the steam and humidity of the bathroom.
It goes without saying (I hope) that a straight razor is dangerous and should be kept well out of reach of children! The slightest sideways slide can cause serious lacerations. Painless mostly but potentially deep and serious!
After my little Movember face squirrel moment, the removal of the face squirrel was a single-pass affair with the straight razor. No clogging, no multiple passes and no crazy razor burn.
I think I’ll use the Spanish face squirrel next year.
If you think this is something for you, I’d say go for it! I think it’s one of the best personal grooming things I’ve done in terms of cost, comfort and coolness.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 500 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 8 trips to carry that many people.
I’ve struggled with writing this piece. My problem has been trying to put a positive spin on this story. This of course wouldn’t be truthful story then, would it? The truth is I don’t need to add spin to it because it’s my experience. This wasn’t helped much by various blogs and posts advertising how wonderful my land of birth is once I arrived back in Belgium. It only went to perpetuating the feeling that I was somehow wicked and wrong to feel that resentment. It takes a massive amount of motivation to make someone change their circumstances as my little family has. I turned down two offers of an increase and an offer of my dream position in the company before they accepted the reality that I was leaving. We sold our dream house. It took us approximately two years to find our home and we sold it because we were motivated enough (in a completely negative sense) to disassemble our lives, sell everything we could, give the rest away and flee. So there we go. I was forced, through circumstance, to return briefly to my land of birth. The circumstance being the happy union of my little brother and the girl he loves. Horrors – I had to leave Belgium and I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I wasn’t looking forward to this brief excursion for two reasons.
My wife (due to some crazy Belgian red-tape) is not allowed to leave Belgian territory whilst applying for her residency.
I simply wasn’t looking forward to returning to a land I fled.
This blog should have been done on the 24th of August but honestly I didn’t know what to place on virtual paper. I was completely unsure of what it was I wanted to say about my first year in Belgium. Sure it’s an important milestone but I also felt kind of casual about it. Do I draw attention to the anniversary? Do I simply continue strolling down the road and casually ignore the elephant following me?
Belgen mensen zijn stipt – Belgian people are punctual.
Simply two minutes late for an appointment can land you all the way at the beginning of a sequence of appointments. It’s the equivalent of drawing the “back to the beginning” card in a board game. Starting at the beginning most likely involves making an appointment to make an appointment to begin the red tape process all over again.
They’re everywhere! To be Belgian is to own a bicycle. Even if it’s not used too often, a bicycle is a must have to place in the basement, garage or the mud room.
Bicycles are used by many, many Belgians for a variety of reasons such as to get to work, to get to your public transport to get to work, to do work, for leisure, sport, to fetch the groceries, to take the kids, well you get the picture. Of course there are all kinds of bicycle styles, shapes and sizes as well as accessories to aid with all of these functions. One aid or accessory I have not yet found is bum cream for those first days in the saddle. No matter how soft and luxurious your little seat, you’re going to walk like a cowboy for the first few days if you haven’t regularly ridden a bicycle. I’m not ashamed to say it – my ass hurts! Continue reading Fietsen en Velo’s – Bicycles.
Belgen mensen zijn vriendelijk – Yes, Belgians are generally friendly as most people on this planet are but I’ve found foreigners to Belgium to be particularly inclined to find Belgian people friendly. I think they mistake this “over-friendliness” with two other qualities that, when mixed, could be construed as “friendly”.
Belgen mensen zijn harde werkers – well, yes. They are indeed hard workers. They prize hard work both on a personal level in a self-satisfaction way and of course an employer prefers a hard worker.
My earliest memories are of working. I thought it was fun, but I was being taught to work. My great grandparents looked after me during the day from a very early age as both my parents worked full time. Méme Maria and Péter Jerome had a sizable back yard in my land of birth. In that back yard was a chicken battery, pig sty, storage, rabbit runs and a vegetable field, which was probably more a vegetable patch but because I was so small it felt like a field. Continue reading Belgians are hard workers – Belgen mensen zijn harde werkers.