The Nod

Social conventions are a funny things aren’t they?

The Oxford English dictionary defines a ‘clique’ as “a small close-knit group of people who do not readily allow others to join them”  Life is populated with these cliques, and you usually tend to evolve through them gradually, as life passes by.

Entering one of the oldest, most archaic social circles in the world was probably one of the most daunting things I ever had to do in my life. Few societies are more archaic, custom-based and relying on limitless respect for your elders as a Bar Association. Upon my first introduction to this society a few years ago when I joined the Antwerp Bar, I quickly found myself hopelessly lost in the indecipherable ocean of age-old customs, social faux-pas, unwritten rules, and mute understandings. Do I bow? Courtsy? Jump? Bark?!

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Spring cleaning the shit out of your iPhone

Depending on where you live, spring has sprung. This means there are millions of people looking in the mirror right now and realising that their summer body is not en route and that that last piece of pecan pie might have been a bad idea. Not me though, I never regret pecan pie.

If you’re anything like me though, you are constantly running out of iPhone space. Be it the decade-long hamstering of pictures of cats, cats and even more cats that you’ve got in your iCloud, the endless array of downloaded Spotify playlists (320kbps is a BITCH on memory) and a couple of apps and games later you’ll find yourself running out of disk space faster than a Goldmann-Sachs stockbroker running out of coke on a Wednesday.

Amidst a sea of changes, Cuba tries to stay the course of a collective golden future but faces an increased longing for individualism which is bound to make things interesting

Rest assured, the rest of this article won`t be as illegible and serious as this New York Times-worthy headline, and will be accompanied by the usual logorrheic levity of my other blogposts about the slightly surreal experience that is touring Cuba in 2016.

As I sit her typing on my iPad in the lobby of the Aeropuerto Jose Marti, waiting to board the 8mm thick aluminum tube that separates me from explosive decompression plane back home, I realize the extent of my disconnection from modern civilisation the instant I notice that my iPad is still on Belgian time, and that it hasn’t automatically adapted to the timezone applicable in Cuba, which it usually does automatically when first reconnecting to the internet. iCloud is prompting me for the umpteenth time to connect to the internet in order to back up my iPhoto collection, of which it warns me more and more that failing to do so soon might result in ‘lost files’. I don’t know if it’s a legitimate threat or a clever way for Apple to find out where I’ve been hiding for the past two weeks, not that they’d care.