The Oak Tree, The Holly, and Company

THOUGH given the last post, one might well expect to hear of one all too well-fed blogger, lying torpid, immobile and generally stretched out (like the boa constrictor in Swiss Family Robinson) in some less frequented corner of our apartment, I have in fact been reasonably much and well employed.

YESTERDAY afternoon uncle N. took the train back to his home, and the rest of the day was exceedingly quiet. I slept into the evening and feasted on turkey and chicken carcass, along with the remaining cranberry sauce; there is plenty of other food, too, so entering the kitchen is still like walking into an idyllic pays de Cocagne (or Schlaraffenland).

AMONG other things, I looked through the repository of writing on my laptop and found rather a lot of nice things, not only poems but also bits of screenplays and the like.

For one thing I wanted to concoct a musical for home performances based on Lord of the Rings; so I wrote a few rhymes to set to preexisting tunes. The fruits of the endeavour are below, and I hope it is all right that I am posting so much of it.

***

I'll sing a lay of the Shire-land
'Midst the calm rolling hillsides of Middle-Earth
Where all the view that one could command
Spoke of peace and of plenty — no sorrow; much mirth.

For hobbits are a tranquil folk,
Smallish and roundish and fond of a joke,
And near their green subterranean abodes
Not warfare nor danger have made much inroads.

*

Come, ye comrades, pluck your bow-strings,
Whet the blade of your dwarvish axe
Sing of hope until the wood rings,
For of hope the world now lacks.

Ride against the Eye of Mordor,
Ride against the fiendish orcs,
Ride against the goblins with ardour,
Ride 'gainst Sauron's evil works.

Come, ye comrades, swing your sword-blades
Big and small -- little hobbits, too,
So to fight the menace of the Ring-Lords
So to win our peace anew.

*

and:

Ring gently, o Elf-harp;
I bid thee to sing
Of elf-lore so old
Of our great elven-king,
When with his tall warriors
He went through the land
To counter the goblins
With his mighty band.
The sunshine was bright
Though the Mirkwood was deep
And sentries at nighttime
Made safe their sweet sleep;[*]
And one foggy morning
They made taut their bows
And with them they vanquished
Their fell mountain foes.

[A fairly direct quotation from "Away in a Manger," I think.]

***

PROBABLY after that effort had waned, I started this grumpy parody undertaking, with a reckless disregard for due rhyme and rhythm. Whether the fragments are intelligible to anyone who has not seen the film or read the books may well be doubted:

LORD OF THE RINGS
(Set to tunes of well-known Christmas carols)

ACT ONE

Scene One
Bilbo’s birthday party

Divers Hobbits: [To the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”]
"We wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday,
we wish you a happy birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year.

"Good brewings we bring;
We love our drinking.
Let's toast to your birthday
and a happy eleventy-twelfth year!"

Speech, speech!

Bilbo: Thank you, thank you, my friends. This has been a memorable feast, and (he starts fumbling in his vest pocket) memorability has always been one of my favourite virtues, and I do enjoy your company . . . (Drat it, where is it?) . . . I have never been happier to be a hobbit living in this fine land of the Shire. Home, sweet home, and all that. . . . So, farewell, and . . . (He slips the ring on his finger and disappears. This can be represented by cloaking him in a black cloth and then making him exit the stage.)

Everyone in an uproar.

Frodo: Noooooo! (Sheds girly tears. Then finally has an idea, dignifiedly waves off the condolences of his neighbours, and prepares to leave the scene. Before he vanishes offstage, he pauses to say, sotto voce) If I know Bilbo well, this may just be another adventure of his. I shall head home and see if he has left a note behind.

Scene Two

In the hobbit-hole. Bilbo is stuffing his belongings into a bindle. Frodo enters, sees him, then fixes a look of reproach on him.

Frodo: [To the tune of "What Child is This?"]
Alas, dear Bilbo, you do me wrong
By thus discourteously vanishing.
You made me cry; I don't know why;
I had rather not do that again.

Bilbo: Shush, Frodo; it's no big deal
I'm bored and tired; I need a trip
Out into the world beyond
The Shire, which makes me sick.

*

Gandalf: (knocks on door, then opens it and strides in with bent head because of the low ceiling.) [To the tune of "Joy to the World"]
Joy to the world!
So you're not dead
As everyone has said!
I never thought you'd really croaked
But still I am a bit provoked
That you made me quite sad
Till I knew that we'd been had;
What is it that you have really been about?

Why, what's this ring?

Bilbo: Oh, that old thing.

Christmas Eve and Morn in Truly Exhausting Detail

For Christmas Eve we consumed turkey and chicken for dinner. The turkey was a seven-pounder, and something of a find since once we moved to Berlin we've encountered the beast far more often in piecemeal form. As far as its size goes, I did stare at it a little bemusedly, since the last time we had an entire turkey it must have been over 20 pounds as usual; and once we had a real leviathan. But even without the chicken there would already have been a heaping serving of meat for all, and in the inner cavity Papa crammed plenty of his delicious salty bread stuffing. On the side we ate mashed potatoes, the turkey and chicken jus, cranberry sauce, green peas, and Turkish flatbread, and we drank white wine.

During the following night I had a complex dream [Warning: almost certain to be terrifically boring; 'proper' blog post resumes beneath asterisk.] where T. and I roamed for interesting rocks on a low mountain on the Alps, where no trees but grass grew, and I turned over a coaly black boulder of sparkling-grained metamorphic rock to find mugs and other dishes in blue and white china. I thought it was an interesting archaeological find until I saw that one mug had the year "1937" written on it in the watery blue ink, and until the family which owned the land came wandering up for a picnic and reminded me that the terrain and by extension any objects in it were theirs. By that point the funicular which had brought T. and me up the slope had left for the valley again, and as the family informed me, it was the last of the evening. The stars came out and I even saw a meteor, but the rest of the dream took place in daylight; there was a modest beige palace of one or two levels which had been refurbished into a tourist centre and in whose colonnaded courtyard there was a garden, and I briefly peered inside it.

As we walked down to the family's home there was a deep turquoise lagoon among the cliffs which were the colour of dark clay, and one of the children lost his footing and fell off the clifftop into the water. Some of us dove in after him; I was closest but couldn't find him even in the crystal-clear water, since he had settled into the gravel at the bottom. Instead there were other men who had fallen into the lagoon and whose faces poked out from the gravel, as intact and immobile as those of the terra cotta soldiers in the Chinese emperor's grave; when we hauled them out of the gravel they became awake again. So I was reassured that the child was all right and that he would resurface in time. But then I was strangely pulled down into a clay element, to reemerge in a semimedieval kitchen, very dark and vaguely brown-walled, in the middle of a rectangular vat full of sluggishly boiling water, with a somewhat hasty cook flitting between her pots and stirring the water I was in with a big wooden spoon; and I felt doomed and damned.

I woke up in a much-perturbed and weighty frame of mind; and, to tie this all back into Christmas Eve dinner, came to the sleepy conclusion that if I wanted more lightsome dreams it would be better if I did not eat dinner so quickly and if, moreover, I had not eaten that additional slice of flatbread this particular time.

*

Besides we sang Christmas carols and in my case tried to sing bits of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, which I have YouTube'd frequently of late, before which I had nearly gone hoarse singing all twelve of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." Then J. and Ge. and I staged a dramatic reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Around 2004 I rearranged the short story into a three-act play; we kept rehearsing it without much success, and after a while I refused even to try. It became rather a joke as Ge. would needle me at random moments by hailing me with Watson's first line of dialogue, and the scripts buried themselves amongst my other papers. But yesterday I fished them out again and it went reasonably well. Even my "received" British pronunciation was slightly better. Mama came by toward the conclusion of the proceedings, around the time when J. was overwhelmed with giggles at a rather untimely juncture shortly before his character pops a cap at Watson, and critiqued us here and there. Earlier Uncle N. and I hung up ornaments on our Christmas tree; this year we went with straw stars and angels and other figures, brightly painted wooden figurines, gilt-painted stars, three or so metallic balls, a bell, etc., and ranged small animals around the Christmas card which Aunt L. sent us from England.

*

This morning, I woke up after 8 a.m. and

Regal Circumnatal Festivities

On Wednesdays the blog Jezebel provides synopses of the week's events as reported by tabloids; this time I found the portrait of the British Royal Family's Christmas traditions full of comedic merit.

So it inspired the following work of art:


which is much easier to perceive when you click on it to enlarge it.

*

Other than that I baked brownies with salted caramel according to the "Pioneer Woman" recipe.

I was going to take all or half of the brownies to share with my Greek class, which has that kind of atmosphere. (A classmate even generously gave us chocolate Santa figurines on St. Nicholas's Day.) But since I left them in the oven for too long they burned black around the edges and became granulated in the middle, and since they have cooled they have become hard as adamant. (Surprisingly they are still delicious, and can be pried apart by a fork.)

The caramel turned out well by a miracle, since it charred and recrystallized at one edge of the pot. I was dubious about putting in gelatine (I took one package of gelatine and the full quantity of water, which soaked up the gelatine powder entirely but made the caramel generally more fluid than necessary); but I surmise that it is used to prevent the caramel from becoming a thick hard crust or from squelching down into the chocolate cake.

I also washed dishes for the first time in weeks or months; but after one or two loads my enthusiasm tapered off, to no one's surprise. What I am looking forward to in terms of domestic activities is concocting an enormous bowl of eggnog. I have consulted different recipes depending on the year, and this year intend to prepare it according to Melissa Clark's recipe from the New York Times. (I would seek out and post a link to the webpage, but I selfishly don't want to lose more of my 20 free Times internet articles per month.)

*

TOMORROW I have 3 hours (τρις ωρες ?) of Greek, 1 hour and 45 minutes of Islamic history seminar, and 1 hour 45 minutes of Latin (all obligatory). While I have taken to napping in classes (for fun and profit) if I have slept too little and have found that a Napoleonic five-minute catnap can be helpful indeed, it is comparatively awkward in the seminar because it takes place in a small room with people sitting right next to me. Besides Latin is in the evening, by which point even my third wind should have exhausted itself. So I should get some sleep.

*

Today I had a Greek speech laboratory class, which went well. Much to my surprise each time I listen to dialogues from the past Wednesdays I understand a much greater proportion of them. The Vatnajökull — as I will henceforth denominate each laboratory computer since they operate as slowly as glaciers run — which fell to my lot started up fairly quickly. Last week or the week before one of the computers firstly took forever to start up and then secondly refused to transmit sound; I timed the process, and it honestly took half an hour until I had tried and abandoned the first computer and had managed to get the sound file up and running on an alternative computer. The professor has also had a great deal to say, though quite politely, about this masterpiece of technological efficacy. To be honest I rather like navigating the arbitrary waters of computer idiosyncracies, however, and growing up with Microsoft operating systems is a lesson in patience, the helpfulness of workarounds and modest little tricks, and the quiet whimsy of fate.

***

When I went home, I noticed that two orange-vested workers were fixing a slide of planks over the gravel and up the bottom of the embankment where the Fabeckstraße crosses the U-Bahn rails. Further along to the Podbielskiallee station, bright garbage bags were lying huddled at the concrete ledge beside the tracks, and I Holmes-ishly observed that they must be full of the leaves that were raked from the Prussianesquely overgroomed, long beige grasses on the nearby embankments.

At some point in the transit to or from the university, two contractors for the BVG (they tend to wear navy-blue jackets with 'Im Auftrag der BVG' written on the back and a white stripe or two running above the waistband, and hunt in pairs or gather in groups of five or so, and hold little devices like the ones for credit or debit card payments in stores or for signing for a postal delivery) entered the train and asked for our tickets. Sometimes they enter the train, sometimes they roam the platform and ask people to show their tickets, once one of them brigandishly asked us for the tickets as soon as we stepped out the train door and I walked past and thought (and must have looked like I thought) 'You must be joking.' Sometimes I think there are still plainclothes people who hop with somewhat irritating jubilant airs into the train and whip out their identification, then ask to see tickets. Anyway, this time I fetched out my ticket very, very slowly, hopefully in an inconspicuous way but I really wanted to buy time for anyone who didn't have a ticket; and the person wanted to see my photo ID so I took even more slooowwwly.

While my hypothetical moral inhibitions about working for call centers have almost dissipated, ratting people out as a "loss prevention expert" in a shoe store or as a ticket controller in a train or whatever is still infra a lot in my view. Still, I haven't found that any of the security contractors were personally objectionable; though to be honest I would have expected one or two to seem power-hungry or aggressive or condescending.

What I don't understand is whether they are there in case security concerns arise — like beatings or sabotage —; or to ensure that contrary to the words of the Bible the poor, i.e. the homeless, are not always with us; or to drive in cash for the BVG (a Christmas gift to self, as it were); or to provide jobs for individuals who have trained as security contractors; or for other reasons. Anyway, I have already expatiated upon my conjectures and observations to the family, so much of this will seem old news to them.

***

Now: sleep!