Embroidery in the Sewing and in the Imagining Sense

It's a very cloudy day which has pulled torrential rain, lightning, and a winterly brooding quality through the otherwise summery atmosphere.

Around Tuesday T. decided pretty much spontaneously to sew herself a shirt, so on Wednesday she dragged me to the Schlosstraße. This is something of a shopping mecca; it has a touristy ex-West German air and city eclecticism mixed with something of the bourgeois sedateness of well-to-do parts of southwestern Berlin, I think. I felt a little uncomfortable with the architecture, the proportions of the open space and the street, and with the people, but it was something new.

One of the passengers on our bus was a louche but impassive broad-shouldered man in an expensively fine-looking though simple black T-shirt and jeans, who had the lope and air of a bodyguard (for a figure of dubious eminence) or XXX nightclub bouncer in a Jean-Claude van Damme action film. So I was kind of agitated afterwards, like the time where I was in the night train from Munich to Düsseldorf and there was this awful sort of criminal atmosphere pervading it — and where, of course, I'm not entirely sure whether it isn't all in my imagination.

In the Schlosstraße's Karstadt outlet, whose layout felt familiar since the one which used to exist closer to our home had it in compacter form, we descended to the basement. Tucked amongst the islands of bedlinens and pillows there was a sewing corner. The shelves were rife with notions (seam rippers, leather thongs, knitting needles, and an artillery-like array of zippers, thread spools, and beads in a large spectrum of bold colours) and yarn, with a couple of unlacquered sewing-boxes and prepared tablecloth embroidery kits. But we found no patterns or cloth bolts, and the lady whom T. asked confirmed that there were none to be found.

After reemerging through the cosmetics and perfume counters — with their fumes of eau de cotton candy and bubblegum (as I slanderously perceived it) — we went on to a toy and crafts department store on the lady's recommendation. It did have cloth bolts and so on and so forth in stock, which was mainly targeted to a younger crowd, but we found no patterns.

I hauled myself back to university for a corking hour and a half of Latin (T. came along with me to Rathaus Steglitz so that I would find the right bus stop for the way back), and by the time I was home T. had her tailorly ducks — cloth, patterns, and so on and so forth — in a row.

Pudel was there too, so (greatly miffed since I have developed the cleanly or paranoid habit of changing out of the clothes I go out in as soon as I am home, and since my socks were soaked in sweat up to the base of my toes, and I hadn't had a chance to redd myself or whatever the Scots locution is) I was conscripted to play Haydn trios. In the course of the trios I became less miffed, and fortunately I had already had a bite to eat. Afterwards the daughter of my Greek professor telephoned again to say that she was too sick to come in the following day, so since then I have been enjoying an early weekend.