Meditations on the Fourth Advent

It is the fourth Advent Sunday, a very quiet, rainy and grey day, that we spent happily. A breakfast of buns fresh from the bakery: long pretzel sticks, a pumpkin seed bun, curled croissants, and the classic white Schrippen. Eggs, boiled until the egg yolk was barely set; hot cocoa heated in a pot. And a large platter with chocolate covered gingerbread in star shapes, Nürnberger gingerbread coated in chocolate or glaze or nothing at all, wreaths of chocolate with sprinkles, 'domino stones' with their jelly and cake and marzipan covered in chocolate, marzipan also covered in chocolate, and sugar-encrusted squares and stars and circles that are like pâte de fruit except much faker. Coffee and tea, with a lot of bergamot in it and really delightful to drink.

Yesterday evening Ge. had (with a little help) made an enormous lasagne, and we drank the bottle of Spanish red wine with it that I had received as a Christmas present from work. There was still lasagne and wine left today, although I ate the last of the lasagne.

I have been drawing pictures again lately, and after using different media have ended up using mostly coloured inks alongside coloured 'leads.' There is black india ink, but also blue, yellow, green and brown, and they have a more vibrant colour than the pencil crayons and aquarelle crayons I first used. I meant to use watercolour paint, too; and started a collage; but we shall see how that goes.

It has been cold and drafty, so we have needed the coal stove a lot. It was still warm enough that I could sit at the other side of the corner room from the stove, and draw without getting cold feet. I've tended not to watch crime shows and mysteries much in recent years, but yesterday there was an episode of Midsomer Murders that wasn't disagreeable, so I watched and listened to it with half an eye and ear as I was working on the pictures yesterday.

As far as music goes, I've played the violin lately because I felt that I needed a new challenge of sorts. The rudiments are going reasonably badly, which makes sense since I haven't had lessons since I was seven or eight. But after being able to play through the canzonetta movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concert — which is like flying before I can walk, of course —, I am quite pleased. The rest of my proper repertoire, for lack of a more modest word, is Bach's first violin sonata, which I've never played all the way through; and his concert in E major, which is the same situation. But they are intuitive to play and sound good even without a vibrato or many other subtleties of colour that one would need for other composers. (Just like I think that Mozart's easiest opera arias are good to sing in a non-operatic way because they work well if one sings them 'purely,' instead of adopting vocal mannerisms.)

I took the afternoon off of work on December 6th, to celebrate St. Nicholas Day, and played the violin then. I do play simplified versions of other familiar pieces like Dvorak's Humoresque. But yesterday I mostly played Christmas songs, and as far as possible a movement from Bach's Cello suites, from memory; and a Canadian folk song or two that was part of the routine when I was very little. The question is how much the neighbours suffer when I play, but I don't worry about it to a morbid degree, because a beginner's violin practice has certain objective qualities that require a little empathy for one's human environment.

On the piano, I have been trying the beginning of Albéniz's La Vega, but I feel like I'm trying poorly to play jazz. Grieg's piano version of his Dance in the Hall of the Mountain King? has baffled me for a while; it sounds far better when an orchestra plays it than when I try to play it. In fact I gave up on it for a while. I generally slaughter Brahms's first ten Hungarian Dances, too, or at least feel as if I were; but they are such great compositions, in their perhaps excessive, mid-19th-century-esque grandeur, that I've sometimes felt that other music is flat when I turn away from them. The Rachmaninoff C sharp minor prelude that I played yesterday felt, perhaps creepily, dark; but it's not necessarily out of keeping. Part of it is logistically a struggle to play; but it is so brief and compelling that I rarely feel remotely tempted to break it off in the middle. The g minor prelude that I played in 2008 around the time I travelled to New York went better than it did before; I finally have incipient ideas about the phrasing and atmosphere. Beethoven's last sonata, movements one and a bit of two, felt experimental but also better than before, too, when I tried it for the first time in months today.

Trying to play Chopin has not gone better than usual lately. But when I turned from his mazurkas (which I mostly love but can't always do much justice, because my technique is clumsy and besides it's very challenging to infuse intelligence and imagination into pieces which it is easy to play in an elegant but shallow way) to the Heroic Polonaise, it was a nice experience. The rumbling and repetitive octaves, which the left hand plays in a part of the polonaise, remind me of a steam-powered locomotive, which takes me out of the atmosphere. But perhaps ever since I watched the black and white film of young Martha Argerich flinging it off with a tongue-in-cheek air at the Chopin competition, I've felt that the piece calls for a degree of humour and parody. Chopin's 'militaristic' works make me uncomfortable in any case, if one were to take them seriously, especially because I played his pieces to try to work through my feelings about a war a few years ago. They are not abstract entertainment, but a piece of perhaps troubling social/cultural history — but maybe relevant more specifically perhaps to the wars over Poland and nationalist stirrings before the late 19th century, than to every other war or nationalist stirring in history before or since. We do have books of Christmas carols that I also played.

In the U-Bahn, I've finished reading Molière's Tartuffe, and have read instead a part of Alexander Pope's Essay On Man. Where does man stand in the order of animals, humanity, and God? Etc. It sounds very Leibnizian and deist so far to me. (Now I see that the Wikipedia article also mentions Leibniz, so that was obviously a new and far-fetched insight I had!)

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

is one of my favourite quotations. I believe that it is all right to disclaim belief in God, so long as one doesn't believe one is a secular God one's self while being so petty and disagreeable in one's ideas, perceptions and aims, that it's clear that one has no reason other than egotism to pretend greater insight or virtue than any other ordinary human being. (I believe quite strongly in my own religion, though, although uncomfortable questions do arise from time to time about how reasonable and good it really is, so this is hardly an impartial view.) But the problems with the reasoning of the poem, and in fact the ideas behind it altogether — when I last read the poem, it was in search for witticisms rather than in order to wade through Pope's ideas in any persistent fashion, so I didn't begin to think of them — seem numerous and striking.

It's cheeky for a thirty-one-year-old, like me, to say this. But his Leibnizian tendency reflects the kind of buoyancy that does not take into account physical and mental illness, the terrible vulnerabilities (inescapable poverty, defenselessness against cruelty, etc.), and a consciousness of one's own flaws and one's disappointing inability to translate theoretical principles into consistent real practice, that must lastingly wreck one's belief in the perfection of the universe's order at some point in one's life.  To be a little clearer about the consciousness of flaws, every now and then it becomes clear to me that I have genuinely terrible aspects to my personality; they can be papered over like cracks in a wall, and maybe I never enter them, but in certain circumstances they gape. And there have been things that I have done that will have seemed cold and cruel to outsiders, although they had an internal logic. It is not false modesty to say this; but just that as a child I didn't quite imagine what it is like to have a grown up personality, where one grows quite a bit in a lot of directions, some less nice than others. Not that I was a perfectly saintly child, but I guess the imperfections were less sophisticated. That said, Pope never seems to have had an easy life, so who knows how much subtlety there was — after all — in his early worldview?

And that did remind me of the progression that Voltaire went through in the novels of his that I read.  When one considers the bright optimism and belief in justice that shine through Zadig, Candide and his other works come as a shock. Then there comes the brooding and wavering between bog-standard political carping and just (but not as abstract and brilliant as it would have been earlier) social criticism that mark L'Homme aux quarante écus, which is his nadir, in my opinion. A few sentences of his Quarante Écus could have been written in an internet comment today, which perturbed me.

Moliere on the U Bahn

After starting The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, Gulliver's Travels in German, finishing Jan Morris's A Writer's World and a collection of Voltaire's fiction (Zadig, Candide, etc.), and putting a collected works of Alexander Pope as well as Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes into the bag I take to work, I am well into reading Molière's play Le Tartuffe.

Tartuffe has an aftertaste of homework for me. It was part of the reading for a literature course at UBC. But I have found it surprisingly pleasing. It's reassuring that the villain is shut up in the hemispherically sealed world of the play and not running free in reality. At the same time it has also become apposite to foreign affairs. Perhaps it is far-fetched, but as Molière's figure of Tartuffe faces the challenge of pretending to be what people think him to be in order to gain his own ends, and of expressing indignation at the deeds of others while not thereby condemning his own deeds, his challenge seems to me like that of Donald Trump. I don't mean that as an insult, although the implications of it are frankly unflattering. I don't think that Donald Trump is the only politician, by far, who uses hypocrisy to further his career and perhaps to obey the wishes of his supporters. The supporters need to justify their preference for their candidate by pointing to his outward display of virtue. But more than with most politicians, perhaps, it is less his political history and actions, less his qualifications and less his devotion to statecraft of any sort, than his façade, which is relevant to the public.

The play's plot is that a well-to-do father and his mother are both approached by an ostentatiously pious man, whom the father invites into his own home. The family, aside from the two admirers of Tartuffe, abhors the man. But the father of the household is so taken with Tartuffe that he evens disowns his own son in the ostensibly saintly guest's favour. The plot and the conflict are not out of date, I think, when sects (religious and secular as well, I suppose) still prey on people, and fissures still grow in families as a result. In Tartuffe, it's clear to me that the villain's appeal to the father of the central family is less based on piety than on a kind of midlife crisis. Orgon, the father, wants someone to admire and spoil him more than his own wife, children, and servant do. He wants to assert his authority, too. The idea that taking friends, family, etc. for granted is a reciprocal concept — for instance, at the beginning of the play his manners are so bad or his feelings so self-absorbed that it appears that his wife's brief illness could hardly interest him less — is beyond his understanding.

In a complex way, I like that Molière points out how, in fact, all of his dramatis personae are irritating. Orgon for the reasons mentioned above; his brother Cléante for his air of mental and moral superiority and his uninterest in tactfulness to accommodate Orgon's sense of pride; his daughter Marianne for her flightiness and her inexperience with independent thinking; his servant Dorine for being pushy and aggressively critical (she is critical with good reason, but even the best of persons has some feelings that might be injured), and his son Damis for his hotheadedness and his lack of subtlety. Perhaps it is all the worse for Orgon's feelings that despite these shortcomings of judgment or manner, they are all right where he is wrong.

I still think that Tartuffe is the really interesting character, although well described as utterly loathsome, and I wondered how I'd portray him if I were an actor. How slimy? how essentially gloomy? how evidently fake? self-admiring or, more likely, self-despising? And what did he do before he tried 'grifting' for money and shelter with the pretence of religious feeling?

After the American Election

The very last presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was the one that I watched. It left the firm impression that one of them was (however one might disagree with her actions) undeniably endowed with knowledge, wit and seriousness, and without a doubt qualified for office at least in a technical sense. The other, a wealthy dilettante who resorted to humbug where his memory or quickness let him down. Not that Donald Trump is not quick-minded, perceptive, or mentally hardworking; but he is undoubtedly accustomed to using these qualities to different ends than to framing and executing public policy that is supposed to affect and to serve persons who are neither his self nor related to his self.

So I was surprised to wake up this morning (at 6:45 a.m.), and to see as the headline on the Guardian's website that Donald Trump is going to become the next President. I had expected to see that Hillary Clinton won, and then go back to sleep. Instead I tried to go to sleep, sniffling even though it felt like an impotent and weak thing to do, and finding after a while that the hand that was tucked under my cheek had tears all over it. Then I just stayed awake, reading a little election coverage now and then, and exchanging short thoughts with the parents and J.

After a restless morning I went to work before the doors were unlocked because I wanted to do something. At first the work wasn't as absorbing as I'd hoped, firstly because I felt the need to talk about the election, and secondly because it was terribly quiet at work from my colleagues being as shocked and dampened as I was. One American colleague (who, I will mention, had taken the trouble to vote, although he is living here) looked even more affected than the others, and it turned out that he had been awake since 1 a.m. reading the news. Even in the evening, it felt like a balloon had very noisily burst, and we were still plunged in the silence after the blast.

Marooned at Work and Other Tales

For the past two weeks I've been too busy working to write about work much, although somehow I found the time for the first two episodes of the latest Great British Bake Off season, and a prolonged work-related session of trying to find out whether Romanian citizens are on the whole taller, shorter, or rounder than the citizens of neighboring countries. The answer was, that such statistics are complicated by a great deal of methodological and ideological factors, like the time of day at which people are measured, and perhaps also how people who are measured or the people who measure them are inclined to interpret or nudge the results. Or the statistics are difficult to find without a knowledge of Romanian. That was last night, at any rate, so the memory is fresh.

Unwisely I've gotten very little sleep, compared to how long I work, although some six hours per night is nothing to sneeze at. I get home late, bolt down a square meal, then try to stay awake two hours so I will sleep well and not have horrifying dreams based on little more than what a certain Charles Dickens character referred to as a speck of mustard. Then I sleep, get up, bathe, maybe eat or drink something, pick up my tote bag and my handbag, bid my parents goodbye, and go out into the still-daylit streets and the still fairly empty sidewalks to catch the U-Bahn. There I have been reading more Jan Morris and particularly a lot of Voltaire's fictional writings. Voltaire has turned out to be as easy to 'get into' as putting one's feet into a supple slipper, and stimulating to the thought. But I think it's a pity for my purposes that it's abstracted thought; with teeming human nature and human fortunes and different places and different cultures interpreted through 18th century French lenses as Voltaire's novels are, Jan Morris's travel writings are more inclined to make me observe things and (by observing) in a way engage with the places I pass through and the people whom I pass, in the concrete world.

Today I read her writings about New York in the 1970s, for instance, and it has rekindled the ardent interest I had for it before I went there in 2008. (The simile that came to mind is that being there is like drinking a huge, hyperconcentrated cup of coffee that can either be deadly or vitally invigorating.) But I also like being more aware of people right here in Berlin, because the U-Bahn is of course a 'travel' too. Above ground, to me Neukölln and Kreuzberg are experiences diametrically divergent from ones I have closer to home. Although it's hard to put a finger on why I think it has these qualities, the Bohemian, artistic, undernourished, itinerant, mixed modern and almost reactionary elements of the neighbourhood around the workplace is absolutely fascinating because it's foreign to my experience and to a degree to my ideals. The neighbourhood around our apartment seems more settled, middle class, more entirely post-Second-World-War in terms of its businesses and modern conveniences and outlook, and even the hippiedom seems more happily comfortable hippiedom that has survived wild years and come out the other side in triumphant middle age that still embraces some of its old associations and ideals, than the precarious hippiedom in Neukölln.

Whereas I imagine that Neukölln — our corner of it, specifically — is more like Paris: the absolutely antique and archaic in terms of its upward striving cutesy architecture, enormous trees that have survived the 20th century to tower above the street and all four or five stories of the buildings to either side, and a blackened looking building that seems to have been left untended since the Wall fell, all of these useless and impractical and half-failed decorations adding artistic inspiration, alongside the cafes and the Indian bangle and scarf shops and the bookshop; and the Italian osteria on the corner where the waiter speaks in Italian to a customer, wearing a tight and long red wine dark apron that looks like the right thing to wear. A French flag hangs from a balcony nearby; and in a grocery store the front wall has been folded or pushed back and pillows have been set up on crates outside as men gossip on them, in a stubborn attempt to recreate the atmosphere of a kiosk in Turkish or Arabic-speaking countries where the weather permits this kind of open-air living. From more recent years there is a boxy long car from the 1960s or 70s, parked in one of the smallish streets; and a stubbier dented blue car from the 90s or even 80s with a sign offering it for under €3000 on the undented side recently appeared at the curb in front of the bank with the smashed window.

Less pleasantly, I sometimes catalogue the scene on the sidewalks: stubs of cigarettes, a lottery ticket, the garbage apparently only if an itinerant person has been rummaging in the typical Berliner orange trash can possibly in search for bottles to return for their deposit, and a scrawl in black letters across the steely wheelchair access ramp railing at the bank: Die ganze Welt hasst die Polizei. I thought it was a nonsensical piece of graffito, since at least police officers presumably like themselves, and even if they happen to be self-hating, their mothers are likely to like them. 'The whole world hates the police' is clearly a gross exaggeration of the facts.

Speaking of appearances on sidewalks, the city elections for Berlin will take place on September 18th: placards for the left-of-centrist SPD, business-minded FDP, environmentalist Greens, liberal/libertarian Pirates, maybe-still-kind-of-communist Linke and centrist CDU, are peopling the lampposts and other prominent positions on the streets. (Not in Neukölln, but in our neighbourhood at home, they have been joined by a placard for a political party that earnestly recommends meditation as a solution to the refugee crisis.) The crisis is, by the way, a topic that most parties seem to be using as a lever for votes in this election. 'We need more do-gooders,' ('Wir brauchen mehr Gutmenschen') for example, the Linke asserts self-righteously.

As for work. Lunch today was a red or brown lentil curry with spinach, gold cubed potatoes, a chicken curry, and rice. Then we ate the chocolate covered peanuts that are on the table outside the kitchen as snacks throughout the rest of the day; as brightly coloured as Fisher Price toys for infants, they are addictive apparently to most of us, and every now and then the silence is broken by the sound of a hand dipping into a bowl and swirling around the peanuts, and then a loud crunching.

As for the atmosphere in general, I also vaguely heard motor noises, of two-or-four-seater airplanes or loud motorcycles, from the sky over the courtyard, a very summery sort of sound except that I now associate them with drones and war zones and World War II films. Much nicer was the vast silent furrow of white condensation trail that a passenger airplane recently spread across the sky as I was taking a five- or ten-minute walk outside the office. Flies have been buzzing around the office the past few days but, tired and plunged in work as I am, I even barely registered the two of them that often sat on my computer screens yesterday and today.

I was so tired yesterday morning that the feelings of stress — not as great as on past occasions, from an 'objective' point of view — nearly made me burst into weak tears. By way of a 'pep talk,' I reminded myself of the decision to throw tantrums at work if it's absolutely necessary, but by no means to cry. That (pessimistically viewed) would be a sign of incompetence less permissible than simply making myself disagreeable upon occasion, and I think it would unfairly influence the feelings of my colleagues toward not holding me up to a solid enough standard of work, endurance, or both.

But there have been small Adventures. Yesterday I was left last — abandoned, as it were — at work. In the past I had declined the offer to have a key to the office because it might lead me to work disastrously long hours, and therefore I thought yesterday that I had no way of locking things up. So I thought I was potentially doomed to remain until the next day. It was difficult to believe at first that I had been Left, and even I hurried to the window of the next room to look out at the courtyard that leads to the street.

There, under the starkly lit arch between the street and the courtyard, I just saw the contented-looking back and legs of the last remaining colleague, who was pedalling right out of view on a bicycle. So, after recuperating from the natural flutters of anxiety, deciding that I certainly was not 'profiting' by the mishap to 'pull an all-nighter,' wondering if this was all my fault, and trying to ignore the conviction that the vague rollings and cluckings of the dishwasher in the kitchen were creepy, I exhausted all of my avenues of online communication to ask my brother or my sister for help.

Of course it all ended quite well. Gi. kindly went to T.'s place, fetched her key, and brought it to the office. When I got home I drowned my sorrows in fusilli and bolognese sauce with chorizo, and heaping servings of creamy quark with jarred dark cherries. Coming home to a square meal has been a nice regular thing this week, and I will enjoy it while it's possible given all our diverse schedules.

Even there, accidents can occur, making the pleasant routine of dinner less than grandly restful. The night before I also reached home after 9 o'clock (having worked for eleven hours at least, on six-to-sevenish hours of sleep) and gratefully ate dinner. Everyone else had eaten, I think; still, Gi. was keeping me company. But after nibbling almost all the way along my corn cob, I finally saw that there was a dead grub that had halfway emerged from the tip — as intact as a stuffed museum owl (despite its boiling), and grey and with beady black eyes — all the time. Despite philosophical rumination about the consumption of insects in other countries and at other times, that really unsettled me. And that, at least, was far more perturbing even than being left alone at work, after nightfall.

Potsdam, Last Sunday: A Water at Sanssouci

Potsdam, Last Sunday: III

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Beneath Schloss Sanssouci.

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Near the obelisk entrance. ↑ ↓

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Potsdam, Last Sunday: II

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Potsdam, Last Sunday: I

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Ping Pong, Staircases, and Serendipitous Swift

This evening, after a long and aimless day, my sister and I wrapped up our evening at work with a ping pong game — far less a battle than a polite exchange, except whenever the ping pong ball went careering off into the table legs, chair casters, black cords, and cushioned chairs of the office. Then we clapped together the table again, opened the windows now that no ping pong balls could seek freedom out of them, returned to our tasks, in my case gobbled down a slice of quiche that T. had made and brought to the office, closed the windows, turned off the lights, locked the door, and then left out the courtyard in the front.

I went on no proper walk today, since it was 28°C or so and I wore a turtleneck for some reason, and instead I retreated to the staircase every now and then — with its linoleum?-lined treads, thickly painted wood railings in warm brown, old-fashioned turbid white windows with multiple frames and little window hatches inside them, and the dark painted bricks in the pleasantly cellar-cool walls. And I sat down on the steps to cool down again. At times I don't have much need of a thermometer to gauge the weather, since my temperament's temperature rose in rough proportion, and against heat my capacity for stoicism has its evident limits. It breathed a dead, desert-like heat in the morning, and reminded me of beetles that eat carrion and stones that crumbled long ago; but later there were cool wisps of wind that were so chilly in contrast that they nearly gave me an 'ice cream headache.'

Two days ago I did go on walks and stumbled upon a funny thing, which I've already told ad nauseam to my patient family: I was walking along the sidewalk when I saw something hanging from far higher in an apartment building. Once I reached the hanging object, I saw it was a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve with rainbow-coloured writing on it. It looked like something made by children for school. But instead it said: 'Ich sammle für den Urlaub. Freue mich auf jede Spende.' I am saving up for a holiday. Every donation is appreciated.

I passed by the sign a third time — it vanished for a while, as I had expected because perhaps a passerby would pinch the money, or be angry and rip it down to get rid of it, and I saw nothing the second time. I saw as I had expected — I was too dazed to inspect the eleemosynary contraption more nearly the first time around — that there was a coin box attached with the sign. But what I did not expect was to walk a bit further, and then see another venture that had been apparently, if halfheartedly, inspired by the first. It was a piece of yarn, which dangled from one corner of a window in the ground floor much like a cigarette from the mouth's corner of an exhausted smoker, with a plain white plastic drinking cup attached. 'Bitte Spenden' — 'Please Donate' — was written in black letters. It was an odd form of urban fishing.

Hypocritically, though, I enjoyed a huge 'freebie' myself. I walked along a little farther and saw a cardboard box on the sidewalk. 'Zum Mitnehmen' — 'Feel free to take' — was written on a plain sheet of paper above it. Nearer our apartment, I've come across some lovely stuff that people have cleared out of their apartments before, although I rarely (subjectively speaking) take advantage of it, so I was eager to see what there might be this time. Underneath a plain book in a paper sleeve and a magazine of sorts, there were clothbound and leather-bound editions of Herder, Möricke and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. And, to my especial delight, there was a tastefully powder-blue clothbound translation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, from the 1960s. I took it with me back to work, and when reading the preface on the U-Bahn afterward, decided that the word choice of the translation was as exquisitely direct but well-chosen as I had sensed that it might be. I last read much of Swift's magnum opus in 2003; at the time, A Modest Proposal thrilled me more than Gulliver's Travels. At the same time I did not necessarily want to wade through the fussy older English. In short, a translation is just the right thing.

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As for work, there was a lot; but then it disappeared again because my orders changed. And then I was left at sea, unable to do very much because Monday has a heavy workload anyway which it's best not to aggravate the week before. Then work reappeared that I haven't much experience doing, so that will have to wait until Monday. And I felt rather sad about the amount of work I get done. Perhaps not very much? As for lunch, we had chicken roulades with a dark mass of spinach, like the knobbly green background of a medieval tapestry, in the centre, and the spinach had flecks of red pepper and a mighty suggestion of garlic about it. Oddly enough, the garlic did not prevent it from being gentle on the stomach (please pardon the TMI). It lay on a bed of orzo grains in a creamy sauce; and I also took rice from the vegan bin, of course trying to make sure that it wasn't so big a portion that the vegans didn't get any. And the air smelled of kerosene again.

(Also, the repairs on the staircase in our building still aren't being carried out, but everyone who has tried it has complained about the complex arrangements one would need to get in through the back entrance: double gates, button that would cause an alarm to resound through the entire building, locked door at foot of rear staircase near the garbage bins, and need to prop the corresponding door to our floor on the staircase open. Next week should be interesting.)

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Afterward, T. and I walked again to an U-Bahn station — past the trottoirs with their tables, signposting decorations, foliage of potted plants and after-working-hours crowds — I had another of my adventures-that-are-not-adventures again.

On Fridays the U-Bahn is paganishly festive; it is also the apex of the tourist season: people more brightly dressed than usual, with bright red or pink shirts, carrying things whose purpose is amusement — beer or otherwise — and more talkative and inebriated. Only a BVG (Berlin transport authority) worker tootled with a neutral mien up and down the platform, pushing in front of him a brightly orange rotary vehicle that washed the floor. Inside the train later, two women, one in tight black clothing with a slit-back skirt and the other in a festive flowery skirt and red top, were raising themselves in partial chin-ups on the horizontal bars in the U-Bahn. One of them demanded the attention of a pink-shirted tourist of middle age in a voice so high that I was convinced she was a child. A hardboiled-looking young worker with a tough though symmetrical face, in blue garb, watched without much apparent interest. And a shortish-looking middle-aged man sat on the bench and played slap-hands with a boy likely over ten. The boy seemed too big to shriek as delightedly as he did, and accidentally brushed or raked my arm with his fingertips in his enthusiasm. But neither of us minded (much).

As for the 'adventure':
I was fascinated by the sight of a man who was sitting in the fold-down afterthought seat at the end of the wagon, beside the door. The first thing I seemed to see of him was a wheeled dolly that had a dark grey backpack resting in its c-shaped frame, and a pile of empty banana cartons that seemed taller than the dolly was high. Then his feet, bronzed like our Hawaiian cousin's, in green-strapped sandals. The silky-looking synthetic cuff of his black pants — walking pants possibly or simply track pants — and a short-sleeved white and red plaid button-up shirt. His garb, I thought, and his backpack, were those of a tourist. I guessed from elsewhere in Germany.

But when I changed to an empty space beside the door (not for spying purposes but for being-out-of-the-way purposes) and caught sight of him properly, his neat black wristwatch, his eyeglasses, and his respectably cut grey hair and expression, denied the bohemian suggestions of the scuffed boxes and the synthetic sandals. His wedding ring made me wonder what his wife was like, since I thought that he seemed like half of a comradely couple that would be much more likely to be traveling together than apart; and I wanted to imagine her face and what her opinion was of her husband's banana boxes (or if she was the originator of the idea). More to complete the story, as a fictional thing rather than reality — not because I was really hellbent on finagling details about a stranger in real life.

His tiny, leashed dog was a piece of a 'tale,' too. From time to time it lifted up to the traveller large eyes that were fairly pale and yet — of course — profound in their expression. It had white cropped hair all over, and reminded me of a little elderly cousin of Milou from the Tintin comics, crossed with a lady's companion dog from an 18th-century painting. When its owner pulled the banana boxes nearer to himself and to the dog, to make space for new ebbs and flows of passengers in the train, it shifted uneasily from the foot of the tower. By the end it had found refuge under the folding chair, resting with its paw angled sideways under its head, looking thoughtful; and its little tongue (rather disturbingly) perhaps instinctively lapping at what must have been an incredibly dirty floor for a while — until the dog found its repose. I wondered whether the dog would usually walk in the countryside rather than the city, where it would walk (green fields? suburban pavements?), and whether it felt that its owner was dragging it around uncomfortable distances or it was content as long as it wasn't being threatened with being crushed under banana boxes, and if it was in an uneasy or tired mood as it appeared to be.

Long story short, it seemed to me that the banana boxes, the small dog, and the owner were full of stories, and that I had just stumbled into the middle of one of them.

(Of course it also struck me that I might have been staring a bit too much.)

Kohlrabi, Incense, and Ocean Liners

Since on Mondays there is a mountain of work that has piled up over the weekend, I suppose like a new underwater volcano in the vicinity of Iceland, there is nothing of sparkling novelty to tell of the day.

So I will describe the lunch. Lately we have received official catering of sorts, the food being set up in steel bins that are set wigglingly on a pond of water in another steel frame, with blue kerosene flames underneath. At least, one of my colleagues mentioned kerosene as the fuel. The fumes of it are slightly perturbing as they furl through our room en route to the window, but one hopes our brain cells will not be affected greatly by our exposure to them. In one wobbly bin there was the vegan entrée: curried lentils with boulders — or koh-i-noors, depending on one's opinion of the vegetable — of halved or quartered kohlrabi boiled into it. It was actually quite delicious, but I took a tiny portion out of consideration for the genuine vegetarians amongst us, and in any case had no raving appetite for something turniplike.

For the rest of us: fusilli-like pasta, and white rice; and finally a bin of Geschnetzeltes — morsels of meat in a cream sauce. I was too greedy or hungry for a dispassionate inventory, I think, so I do not remember if green peas or other vegetables were part of it. Since I ate early, I took a seat at the vegetarians' table, and liked the conversation — it was more a relaxed everyday sort of conversation, rather than the brut-champagne-like effervescence of dry wit of other times, although I like both — a great deal, even if I was too reticent to take part in it very much. It ran on for longer than usual, and whilst dealing necessarily with the backlog in my work, I did think rather wistfully that it would have been nice to listen to more. (But since our managers are not Dickensian despots in nature, it is my own fault for not sticking around.)

But a colleague also had his birthday today, so he brought along two tortes. So eventually I roamed over to the food table and took a slice of the white cake slathered in cocoa whipped cream and decorated with still darker chocolate sprinkles; and in the evening I had some of the coconut milk rice pudding that the caterers had 'thrown in' with our lunch gratis.

I went on two walks today, both ten minutes or thereabouts, with a fresh wind and sunlight and the smells and sights and sounds of the periphery of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. A shop for 'upcycling furniture' with a lifelike taxidermied fox stretching in the half-light along the top of an upright piano/shelf/dresser like a cross between a stole and a housecat, a gaunt man resting after stripping the paint from the frames of another shop to reach the underlying raw wood, Middle Eastern ladies in flower printed headscarves, a lady not much taller than four and a half feet examining skeins of acrylic knitting yarn that were in bins at the doors of a retailer from a careful distance while gripping her walker, a fashionably dressed young woman chatting on her smart phone, a few tastefully perfumed and besuited entrepreneurs in a dark suit or an Italian-looking elegant pullover who were conversing in American-accented English, venerable bicycles and hand drawn carts folded tightly along the wall around the cellar entry to a bicycle repair shop, bakeries full of customers — especially half-bored seeming men of middle age who were talking amongst themselves or examining the sidewalks with interest —. There was even a whimsical barrel-shaped-like hut of raw wood on wheels with rustic green-painted(?) wooden roof tiles that was arranged sort of like a landlubber houseboat to be drawn behind a car or a van or a truck; it was parked at the side of the street. Then there was construction work that blotted out half the street with white and red barriers and pale dust, and the fascinating conversational fragment, "Well, it's a protected historical building, so never mind . . ."; and hanging from a wall the planter full of thick, dark strawberry plant leaves on a brightly painted and large café that did not appear to be open yet.

There was also the fragrance of sandalwood incense on one street corner; and of course baking smells near the shops. And menacing cracks in the glass of the bank on the corner, which people use rather like a toilet with a grim sort of necessity, where trails of garbage flotsam ran parallel to the edge of the disabled persons' access ramp.

Altogether, it was a remarkable unremarkable day. Work: I was by no means finished with all my tasks, but the really necessary stuff was done, and in the end it looked like I was the second-last person there after all. Last week I had felt very dizzy a great deal of the time, even at home, so I had made great resolves to leave work earlier this week to avoid stress; 7:30ish was not particularly early, but I felt pleasantly liberated. The remaining colleague, with an air of it being very much contre son gré, was tending to the food leftovers, which is a task that's left to the last person standing. I felt slight guilt, but on the other hand had rinsed a few dirty dishes that others had left in the sink and placed them in the dishwasher, a task that also brings out heavy grimaces amongst my coworkers. (Living in a household of seven, one becomes less fastidious, as long as one can clean one's hands properly afterwards.) Then in the subway I had to wait nine minutes for a train, which just seems like a lot when 4 minutes is the customary rhythm; but later, after having thought my own thoughts for a while, I took out A Writer's World and read about the Queen Elizabeth II liner's arrival in New York harbour in 1969.

And during the morning I had meditated happily on the story I was working on writing over the weekend — one of my 'lousy' stories, though, it must be admitted.

Staatsoper Für Alle

An Aimless Prologue, gathering possibly inaccurate facts from the rubbish-heap of memory:

On Saturday I toddled off to Unter den Linden, on foot, to hear the annual concert that the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, presents on the Bebelplatz every year in summer. It is surrounded by history, from the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great with glimmers of green corrosion, linden trees newly planted since the Second World War but literally in a long line of tradition, stretching away toward the Brandenburger Tor. Across the street and flanking the Bebelplatz, central buildings of what used to be the Berlin University, born of the Humboldts and their generation, and later hosting as professors Max Planck and other scientists and learned men of similar or lesser renown. In one corner, almost humbly, the dome of the St. Hedwig's Kathedrale, emblem of a long religious history; down the street, less purely religious, the Berliner Dom which was a bit of a personal ambition of William II. In the centre of the square itself, a memorial to the notorious burning of books by the Nazi regime. And, all along one side, the Staatsoper itself, which is being renovated, so that its musicians and stagehands and set designers and everyone else have been been evicted for years to the Schiller Theatre.

None of this is news to any Berliner, of course, except if one or two details are so inaccurate that I have just invented them.

***

At any rate, I mixed up the way to the German faculty and other faculty buildings of the Humboldt University, with the way I wanted to take to the Bebelplatz, so I arrived there later than intended at perhaps 5:20. The Platz itself (judging from my view) seemed full already. So I set up camp with my back to the staircase at the Faculty of Law or a nearby building, cobblestones underneath me strewn with the detritus of the linden trees. Despite the acute angle of vision, I had a splendid view of the viewing screen left of the stage — especially when I stood up.

An elderly lady with a camping stool established herself to my left. Less to my enjoyment, so did a German tourist family of limited conversational powers: a mother, father, and two children. The father audibly could not get over the fact that the hot dogs he bought for everyone — from the food stall set up in the middle of the street (where the emergency vehicles and staff were also hovering) — were €2.50 apiece. It did not seem terribly expensive. The children were hoisted onto the railing of the stairs, where due to my shortness I had not been able to find a seat, and then ate their hot dogs, one of them dropping a chewed crumb onto my shoe. I tried to flick it off, but due to its soggy consistency that was only half successful, so I felt a thunderous expression settling on my face. One child felt momentarily uncomfortable with his perch on the railing and asked his father to help him off. "Stay there, or else you'll lose the seat!" his father responded without sympathy, reflecting the greedy grabbing of prime and prime-er positions that was going on generally. When the music began and one of the children asked "Is that an oboe?" and the mother answered, "Yes, it is!" I feared the worst: namely, a detailed verbal inventory of every instrument in the entire orchestra. But surprisingly that was largely the bulk of their conversation during the music.

I also felt mean-spirited when the johnny-come-lately portion of the audience filled the sidewalk underneath the staircase. It stood right in my face as I sat on the ground, and in the old lady's face as she sat on her chair. Unfortunately, due to my professional occupations on weekdays, my attention was greatly distracted from the Sibelius Violin Concerto by staring at the shoes unwillingly and mentally attributing them to brands and types. 'Superga — I entered that brand into the database myself. Art of Soule, New Balance — shudder, lots of shoes there — Skechers, and is that Nike or Adidas? — Well, if I can't tell, I can't be too badly traumatized. — Tourist couple is wearing Dolomites. Hadn't heard of those, I think. Blue leather loafers with a stenciled cut pattern there, espadrilles with canvas in blue and white stripes and braided soles, black crocs with a thin strap at the back,' etc., etc. The people kept shuffling past left and right (depending on whether they were entering or leaving the concert), through the entire concert, and so the parade of shoes was interminable, and very gradual because they had to push past reluctant people, and I kept an eye out for ones that reappeared from the right direction eventually.

Winter Landscape in Moonlight,
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1919)
I was remembering another painting, though.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

But I did think of the legs of people as trees, because they did filter out the light when the crowd was particularly dense, and because Sibelius is associated for me with 1. Finland, 2. forests, and 3. a certain painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it put me in the mood reasonably well. But although I liked the sound quality very much, and I thought that the soloist played the Sibelius concert reasonably well, I felt that it was too polished and not as spontaneous as I'd have liked. But it did have the type of spontaneity, from time to time, reminiscent of an enjoyably wild, stubborn session in a practicing room when nobody else is around. On the other hand, when I got home and listened to a recording of Jascha Heifetz, which did appear very intelligent and especially sublime now that I had an already good version to compare it to, I didn't feel that he particularly liked the concert.

Then, after a brief pause, where wisps of musicians tuning their instruments flew on the breeze, the orchestra started the Eroica symphony of Beethoven. At this point, all of the history that I 'wittered on' about at the beginning of this blog post fell into place, and I felt transported into a genteel living room in the very early 19th century, full of clever, cultured, and unnecessarily rich people, quietly listening, in carefully harmonious surroundings. The natural linden trees, the composed blue sky and the grey but smallish clouds, the picturesque but orderly artistic proportions of the buildings, the intellectual history emanating from their stones . . . 'A well of German, undefiled' by nationalism, I've thought; on the other hand, I don't think Beethoven was at all averse to nationalism, so that isn't particularly accurate.

Fiendishly, I left early. I did not want to (hyperbolically speaking) harm my legs irreparably by sitting awkwardly much longer, and I felt that I had gained the maximum of enjoyment from the concert already. So I went leftwards out of the crowd — brown leather ankle boots, unknown brand — to its fringes. There I listened to the Eroica's 2nd movement. Then I went off on the long walk home.

P.S.: In general, musicianship in the open air clearly had its risks. A dog barked in rough rhythmic accompaniment to the percussion, at one point; a lady in the audience yelled, 'Louder!' during the Sibelius — I wondered later whether I should have said 'Unverschämt!'; a baby cried heavily although briefly; and a car or motorcycle driver let his engine roar up the street. But the musicians seemed unperturbed, and after the first movement of the Sibelius, I could hear no hints of distraction anywhere. Also, the audience clapped between every movement. By that point I thought it would be rude not to join in, but I might have to perform penance later.

A Lunch, A Fit of the Vapours, and The Wind

This day began, promisingly, with rain. I decided against taking along an umbrella since powerful winds were forecast. A raincoat still seemed too warm. In the short trip from and to the U-Bahn, I didn't really need it.

At around 9 a.m. I entered the courtyard at work with bicycles wedged in racks, dandelion-yellow plaster, a squarish piece of sky at the top, and a warning that 'roof avalanches' were possible from the good four or five stories' apex of the buildings. Then I climbed the creaky old stairs with a linoleum-like covering to our offices. The door was open, the lights were on, and although absent from her computer at the moment, T. was already there.

There was work from the day before that I finished, and then I agonized a while about an email I had to send with information that a colleague could pass on to clients. And then the full routine began, clicking and going through pictures of hundreds or thousands of products, etc., and listening in passing to dramas with the technical aspects of the work that I don't quite understand.

At lunch we briefly broke off our efforts and sat together. I like being in one of the rooms more than the other because conversations about 'girls never grumbling about anything, wink wink' and 'the national habits of the Finns' are rather too nationalistic and sexist (philosophically speaking) for me not to squirm with discomfort internally; and the vegetarian round has more of the kind of tame, friendly, and politically correct conversation I like. This time I think we were too famished to talk. We had a Turkish take-out lunch. Broth-flavoured bulgur wheat kernels (I think) with thin scraps of noodle mingled in it, served in a large round tin for everybody; another tin of a vegetarian meal that had, as I recall, beans and tomatoes in it; meatballs (köfte) in another sauce that likely had tomatoes and red capsicum in it; and a fourth large round tin that had an iceberg lettuce and cherry tomato salad with a little lemon juice sprinkled into it (I surmise) and tiny spears of shadowier arugula here and there. The köfte were garlicky and therefore flavorful, but the rooms were inconveniently perfumed afterward; and I always enjoy the salads from that take-out place, even if a colleague characterized it as 'rabbit food' and I admit that the tree-trunk-like lengths of green onion that were once thrown into a salad seemed a little impractical.

Although grumbling about the food knows no boundaries, it was a good sign that the vegetarian and vegan colleagues seemed happy today, too. There was no significant injury of the delineation between vegetarian and non-vegetarian food — such as meaty burritos being mislabelled for the vegetarians or the emergence of ham in the vegetarian pasta — In general, the great partitioning of the workforce into those who partake of the general meal and those who want to order food more to their liking individually — a partitioning suggested on Friday — has not taken place after all.

The wind 'wuthered' so powerfully this afternoon that it repeatedly slammed shut the windows, which were tilted open at their tops, until the colleagues near the windows closed them. (The fact that they were shut was also why the lunch's garlicky aroma lingered.) Right after lunch I went for a short walk up and down half the block in front of the workplace, which I generally do to reattain a state of equanimity or just because it's nice to be out of doors, and the wind had raked up a mixture of dry leaves* and an embarrassing 'find' of garbage into the middle of the sidewalks. But I like this weather, and the surprisingly chilly air leafing through my hair and taking away the tepid warmth and any trace of the sedentary, and perhaps taking away some of the grumpiness that accumulates too in the course of a tangled working day, was a real restorative.

* Although the linden trees are shedding their early petals, as usual, so they are perhaps not as unseasonal as they seem. And golden seedheads and pollen have sown themselves over many car hoods I've passed in the streets and even, I think, foamed the street gutters in recent rains.

I had tasks until after 9 p.m., and T. was there that long too, so I fetched sugary fruit candies from the table outside the kitchen and consumed them one by one in the last minutes. To be honest, I still haven't figured out the proper balance of water, food, exercise, and stress, because I appear to get more woozy feelings from drinking or from eating something sugary, when under stress (at home I am far less sensitive), than I would if just not eating except at lunch. When I feel stressed or angry or particularly ill I have sometimes also climbed around three or so flights of stairs up and down in the building, so as to get the effect of a longer walk in a brief time. The good news is that I haven't really turned into a hypochondriac, because there have been two days without wooziness that have pointed out the difference between my normal perceived state of health and this. But in general I am not too worried about it, because to be honest I've never particularly objected to enjoying trifling physiological ailments as they arise and measuring symptoms, etc., like a four-year-old child playing doctor.

When T. was satisfied with her work, we left together. So I shut down the computer quickly. She made sure that all the windows in the other main room were also closed, although colleagues of ours were gathered in the Conference Room, so that they would not have to do much housekeeping-style checking before they left.

We walked from work to the Südstern U-Bahn station along broad residential sidewalks, shaded under leafy trees, brightened with rosebushes and perhaps oleanders and other flowers in beds and flowerpots, a few modern shopfronts but also formal elderly buildings in brick that were once (apparently) benevolent institutions, and one soccer-pitch-turf-green television screen after the other transmitting the noise of Wales vs. Portugal's soccer match for the UEFA European Championship semi-finals in the shade of restaurant and cafe awnings. It was noisy enough that we could hear it down and across the street.

Not as many football spectators, perhaps, as in gentler weather or for a German game — but patrons were gathered, sitting on benches and at tables on the sidewalks. It was 0-0 at that time in the first half of the game, and since I have little enthusiasm for Portugal as a team whose joint effort makes it worthy of a championship, or Wales as an exemplar of excellent football (though this may be unfair), I surmised that a tedious match was being realized.

In the end, then, I only watched the last ten or fewer minutes of the game, since my parents were watching it at home.

Note: I forgot to mention the U-Bahn trips. Jan Morris's descriptions of Peru were my reading on the way to work, and on the way from Südstern station I was in the middle of the part of The Quark and the Jaguar where the author describes how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. There are more frequent U-Bahn ticket patrols, by the way, and I never really like them. A few Berlin political parties have proposed that public transit be made free, and I like that far better than trying to catch people out. I also find my conscience inconveniently tumbled about, since every single U-Bahn ride in the evening so far seems to have meant a panhandler asking passersby for money. I don't know quite how to come to terms with it especially, as I will say self-commiseratingly, at the end of a long day's work.

England at Iceland, in the Stadium at Nice: Live Blog

10:06 p.m. It is already the second half, and it is the first game of the day I have watched. At work I sometimes have a Guardian minute-by-minute report open on a Firefox browser tab, although I rarely get around to reading it. But since there was no game at 3 p.m. today, and there was important news to follow, I had a business liveblog about Brexit open on one tab instead. Once I realized that there was more minute-to-minute suspense in reports of something that affects millions of lives than in an intensive hour and a half of soccer, I was slightly sickened, and didn't read it much longer.

Who do I hope will win in this match? On the one hand, I think England is suffering enough. On the other hand, I do have a faible for Iceland's team. It is 1-2, so far.

10:12 p.m. I do enjoy a nice, glutinously gradual replay of an England player fouling by clutching an Icelandic player's shirt from behind, with the UEFA-mandated motto 'Respect' piously inscribed on the sleeve of his pulling arm. I say to use such mottos only if everyone/anyone actually intends to abide by them.

10:16 p.m. Heavy symbolism in the players' clothing here. England in white and red; Iceland in blue; rounding out the colours of the Union Jack and, at the same time, representing a partitioning.

10:19 p.m. Groan-worthy allusions to Vikings by the German commentator, which I think were about as in-depth as I myself could get on the strength of Bugs Bunny's versions of Wagnerian opera.

10:22 p.m. To indulge in unseemly nationalism, I think that yesterday Germany's team was a clear cut above Iceland's team, though. The difference in agility once they have the ball at their foot is very evident here. Edit: Not to mention Eden Hazard, of Belgium, in the game against Hungary. His goal, partly the result of the aforementioned agility, was delectable.

10:31 p.m. The German commentator, perhaps having dived into longwinded 19th-century prose beforehand, proffers this profound thought, 'Fühlt England schon jetzt den Druck — die Last — sich zum Spott zu machen, für immer und ewig?' 'Does England already feel the pressure — the burden — of making a joke of itself for the rest of eternity?"

10:36 p.m. Icelandic players fouling here, too. Pushing, holding onto people, etc.

10:40 p.m. I think this is the first time I have ever seen a goalie (England's) throw in a ball from the side himself. Here it was probably intended to give England more time to score the equalizing goal, since England did not then have to wait for more teammates to trot so far to the ball in order to throw it in.

10:51 p.m. Iceland wins! 2-1!

10:56 p.m. From the Guardian's liveblog:

It’s all over! England have been eliminated from Euro 2016 by Iceland. For the second time in a week, England suffer an ignominious exit from Europe. They’ve been awful tonight and thoroughly deserved to lose. Hats off to Iceland, though. They’re a limited team, but played to their own strengths and thoroughly deserved their win.

Soccer: Belgium and Italy in France

9:06 p.m. 'The oldest team in the history of the UEFA Euro championships' remarks a German commentator in tones of awe, as we see Italy's team. He alludes to the hoary age of 31.5 as if it were thaumaturgy.

9:18 p.m. An Italian player, defending his half, neatly interrupts a forward rush by two Belgian players by kicking back his heel as if he were posing for a photograph in a skirt, and thereby hitting the ball back toward the Belgian half again. Now that's panache.

9:23 p.m. It's nice to watch Giorgio Chiellini play in an un-bitten state again. The images of the last World Cup and the certain unfortunate event are still so strongly imprinted on my mind.

9:28 p.m. I was thinking of writing, "I think the Belgian players are too polite for this game," when one of them lightly fouled Chiellini by plowing into his legs. But then Chiellini's fouling leads to a free kick, and soon thereafter Italy scores. 1-0.

9:37 p.m. "First corner for Italy." Nothing comes of it.

9:45 p.m. Romelu Lukaku (Belgium) nearly kicks the ball backward into the Italian net. But it hops rather gently, once, and Italian goalkeeper Buffon catches it, looking like he feels that he has had a hair's-breadth escape nonetheless.

9:48 p.m. 'Peep!' for half-time.

10:26 p.m. The second half of the game has been running for a long time now. The charming interaction between the Belgian players, selfless and sharing, passing to each other beautifully, edifies the soul; but the aggressive edge is certainly missing. If Italy were to win 2-1, I think it would be well deserved.

10:29 p.m. So far the volume of derisory whistling by the stadium audience — it is particularly displeased whenever the Belgian defense has the temerity to pass amongst itself, or (ever-gracious) whenever an opposing player has the temerity to be switched out — would be enough to rival two aviaries, I think.

10:32 p.m. A novel technique by an Italian player who wants to impede the Belgian player who is racing with all appearance of future success toward the Italian goal: he scissors his legs around the player's middle à la World Wrestling Entertainment, thereby reaping a yellow card.

10:44 p.m. This has altogether been (often — not always) a relatively edge-of-the-seat kind of game, like Germany vs. Ukraine yesterday evening. . . . 56% possession of the ball by Belgium. Hm.

10:47 p.m. Goalkeeper Buffon catches the threatening ball and rescues his goal again. Afterward he affectionately bears the ball in his palms, in wonder, as if it were the fragile Golden Snitch in Harry Potter.

10:50 p.m. Italy 2-0. Les jeux son faits. Alas for Belgium.

More Football: Polish vs Northern Irish in Nice

After gaping aghast at Vedran Ćorluka's red-tinged head bandages and open rivulets of blood in Croatia vs. Turkey, and feeling quite seasick by the end of the game, I was relieved at the prospect of a new game to weaken the memory of it. I am late at watching the game, however, since I felt hungry and therefore fried a banana pancake for myself.

6:34 p.m. It appears that Northern Ireland's team strategy is to surround any Polish player who has the ball in their half with three players, wheeling madly with their legs and not particularly striving for any economy of motion. I feel that this is a stupid sort of game.

6:42 p.m. Perhaps this might be a decent rugby match, if a) tripping and grasping shoulders and b) knocking bodily into opponents and c) running around were the single aim of rugby.

6:46 p.m. Half-time is whistled and players clap as they walk off the field. Why, I ask grumpily. Why?

7:03 p.m. Fans are tooting horns as if at a truck rally, which in my view illustrates the childish level we are at. The German commentator is condescendingly shocked that a Polish player isn't doing better when faced by two players from a team in the third English league.

7:07 p.m. Poland's team, after 'dominating' with two-thirds ball possession in the first half of the game, finally scores a goal in the second half.

7:10 p.m. I see Chinese advertising on the side of the field. Thanks to my Mandarin lessons, I can decipher Zhong Guo (Middle Kingdom = China).

7:13 p.m. More rugby 'soccer.'

7:15 p.m. In addition to ball possession statistics, for instance, I'd like to know statistics as to how often players were lying on the ground after tripping or being tripped in this game. Opposing player has the ball? No problem, and no need to actually run around him, wriggle away the ball, let a teammate come from the front to kick the ball away, or put forth any kind of effort that requires imagination or skill. Bash him good!

7:19 p.m. This afternoon's Croatia vs. Turkey match is looking even finer and smarter and more congenial (there was fouling and tripping, but polite fouling followed by sincere apologies if the perpetrator felt that he had gone too far, and lots of actual footwork and dexterity during the duelling) by ignominious comparison.

7:31 p.m. Lafferty nears the Polish end and displays a bicycle kick, generally a pleasure to see, as the soccer ball however soars far over the goal.

7:37 p.m. A Northern Irish player defending his goal from his side's box generously kicks the ball straight back to the Polish opponent attacking from the corner.

7:44 p.m. Graceful playing and no foul in the past minute or so, and I begin rueing my mean opinions about this game . . . and then a Northern Irish player is bodychecked again, the aggressor and aggressee sprawl on the ground, and my mean opinions are but confirmed again.

7:50 p.m. At last an end to the ordeal, 1-0 Poland to Northern Ireland. I need ice cream to soothe my aggrieved nerves.

The Angle and the Bear: Football Live

On this second day of the 2016 European Football Championship, Slovakia and Wales have already played against each other to the strain of the Welsh national hymn, Gareth Bale did what he could, and the game was won 1-2.

9:00 p.m. England vs. Russia begins in a Marseilles stadium.

9:07 p.m. I'm not impressed by how either team is playing thus far, but to be fair teams do seem to temporarily capsize through nervousness from time to time in these early games.

9:10 p.m. A player just tripped over his own soccer ball that he was holding between his legs . . .

9:12 p.m. To generalize cruelly, I haven't been impressed by the English team in the past World Cups, and not here either. Not a great deal of finesse or elegance, more crude power. British journalists (well . . . you see the conflict of interest there) have been insisting for years that England Has a Chance to be at the top, and I've never been convinced.

9:14 p.m. When I'm thrilled if a pass is completed . . . it doesn't necessarily say good things about the quality of a game. On the other hand, the game is roaming over a great deal of the field, rather than streaming up to a line of defensemen and breaking apart like waves over a coastal boulder, therefore more interesting to watch.

9:24 p.m. In the follow-through motion after an advance on the Russian goal, an English and Russian player slid along in each other's arms as if they were in a skating rink. The conditions of the ground appear a little questionable. But there is no rain?

9:28 p.m. At last England passes three or four times consecutively, and bounces the ball into the goal as it had tried to do earlier, and it lands in the near corner of the goal. It was offside.

9:35 p.m. The Russia goalie carries out an excellent fist-away (Faustabwehr in German; I can't think of the proper English term right now), as Wayne Rooney fires a fast ball at him and he raises his fists to ping it away as if pulled by a string.

9:39 p.m. England's coach seems 'pleased.' He strikes his hand against the top of the bench roof in frustration as he turns from the field.

9:41 p.m. Another ambitious but misguided English shot at the Russian goal. To be fair, they are often very close, which cannot be said of the generous 'volleys' that are sometimes fired into the stratosphere over the opponents' end of the field whenever desperation strikes a soccer team.

9:44 p.m. Players are being forced by ill-mannered antagonists into performing tumbling rolls, pleasing to the gymnastically attuned eye, but not pleasing to the referee.

9:46 p.m. Half-time! Nobody's happy? It seems to be hot in Marseilles, too. Sweat is puddling darkly on the Russian players' crimson jerseys; forming rills down the forehead of Harry Kane et al.

10:03 p.m. Half-time over. Russia's defense have been passing the ball amongst each other. This expedient is often the death-knell of all watchability. (Although it worked for Spain in past World Cups, apparently.)

10:22 p.m. A goal? A car just honked, in celebration?, outside the apartment here in Berlin. But since I'm watching the slower internet footage, I'll know in a few minutes if anything indeed happened.

10:28 p.m. England gets a goal. Of sorts. The line of Russian defencemen looked terribly young, so my protective instincts were too awakened to appreciate the goal against them — which was still just, since the English team has seemed better throughout the game.

10:45 p.m. Three minutes' added time. We can admire the Russian defence's passing skills that much longer.

10:47 p.m. *Cough* Never mind. Russia just scored by practically running it into the goal.

10:48 p.m. 1 - 1, I guess.

The Dawn of the European Football Championship, Live Blog

8:52 p.m. Being newly employed*, I only found out scant minutes ago that France is playing Romania in the opening game. The Romanian team is distinguished in its way, no doubt, but metaphorically speaking my face fell. I have lower hopes for the dramatic interest of the soccer.

*(i.e. less able to devote time to reading sports news)

9:01 p.m. Es ist soweit! It's time!

9:03 p.m. A commentator for Germany's broadcaster: 'France has a magnificent defense. . . .  . . Romania will do all it can.' (Roughly translated.)

9:07 p.m. Romania nearly scored a goal against France after all. The elegantly French goalie — tall, slender, gaunt-cheeked, and brooding-looking — looks as if he had been harrowed to his very soul.

9:10 p.m. I withdraw my aspersions on Romania's team. One of its players just made a beautiful pass in the air, across the French half, near the goal, despite all the defense. Altogether it hasn't looked bad in general either. (Except for the goalie fumbling the ball at the very beginning, in a situation where it didn't matter.)

9:14 p.m. After the listless presence of France in past World Cups, with Franck Ribéry and a few others doing what they could to salvage the mess, its team looks far more animated here. (As far as I can tell; to be honest, I've spent more time typing than watching.) Patrice Evra, still looks considerably world-weary, however.

9:23 p.m. A deafening near-silence after roaring outrage or excitement after a foul by a Romanian player against a French player, proving belatedly how stirred and loud the audience has really become, followed by a crescendo again as the ball is kicked off again.

9:27 p.m. Olivier Giroud, having been given and missed the opportunity as the lone vanguard of the French team in the Romanian half to score a goal, demonstrates that he is a bit of a ham, acting out his despair and the profound belief that his shining level of skill should have pulled that off. (I'm overinterpreting, here.)

9:30 p.m. Returning to the game in the middle of a commentator's sentence, without knowing the context, I am puzzled to hear of 'a yellow card for the 66-year-old."

9:31 p.m. The ball possession of the teams has been 54% (France) to 46% (Romania) so far. Interesting. But it also doesn't mean much with regard to a team's quality, often, since one team often likes to have the other do the running, I think, based on what their strategy or interest level in the game is.

9:41 p.m. A foul that I missed, which required medical attention for a Romanian player's leg. The Romanian coach, standing in lonely state in front of the team bench on the grassy sideline, looked like an impassively important Soviet potentate — at a tedious event on a visit to a mildly obstreperous satellite state — as it was resolved.

9:47 p.m. Ew. A player spitting with the camera zooming in on his face.

9:50 p.m. Half-time!

A Thousand Thunderclaps

This morning a warm, weltering haze of yesterday's less-than-delightful temperatures remained on the streets and in the U-Bahn. I rushed off to work at 9:25 and arrived, wearing a T-shirt for the first time in a nod to the weather, quite punctually.

I spent much of the morning trying to find the website of a company, which appeared ghostlike to have vanished from the internet proper; and a reverse G***le image search of its logo forked up mostly cryptic links written in Chinese characters and a great deal of humbug.

It set a sad trend, since the next task was no easier. Amateur vendors appeared to have set up fairly arbitrary names for their merchandise, freely translated as it seemed from the English and adorned with mistakes like 'Kahi': like an original and exotic name, it was really a misspelling of 'khaki,' as I suspected and proved after researching that as well. My computer went on strike several times and I had to wait it out. There was one perfidious company that insists on christening its products with two sets of names each. One set is fancy and abstract and the next fancier and more abstract still; these were also far too longwinded for my purposes. And there was no greater indication perhaps of my ungracious mood than, after reading the whimsical moniker of 'Lazy Daisy', I thought angrily, 'That makes me sick!' Marshalling this merchandise into an orderly list was a thankless task. After a while my supervisor took it over; he was impressed (to my surprise) that I had gotten so far down the list already.

In the meantime one of the managers agitated heavily for an absence of mistakes, since several clients are on the proverbial doorsill waiting to be invited in and impressed by our services. My supervisor and I will also be training a new co-worker by the end of the week. My supervisor, already pulling double duty with me, took this with his customary, great composure. I have my doubts.

Lunch was a bright spot: Indian take-out, with a pumpkin-orange curry of green peas and paneer, large squared containers of fried rice that had in it wedges of chicken rippled with its natural grain, extra rice, and other dishes I didn't try. Our drinks bottles have also been restocked, so I had a running supply of carbonated apple juice — a German tradition: the Apfelschorle — and T. gave me peanuts and raisins covered in chocolate for dessert. Earlier the elevator had painstakingly been put into operation so that the toilet paper, paper towels, etc., could be restocked. (I'm sure that was critical information.)

Then (or earlier) the vanguard of a grey weather front, which had been expected yesterday, began to roll in. Thunder, in brief conversational peals, went back and forth; the light grew darker. Then it rolled away again.

Afterward, I went back to work and over another list of product names. Magnificently grumpy still, I was beatific when my supervisor told me at quarter after six that I had done a considerable amount of work on the first list; I could *save* this list and go home.

I was befuddled and *uploaded* the list. I think that therefore we will have a great deal more work in future than is practical. I came to this realization after stepping out of the U-Bahn at the foot of our block, on the way home. (My reading that time was The Quark and the Jaguar.) So I had to send a message to work once I got home. Besides I've spent the remaining evening being gloomy about it, although that is likely not helpful.

The weather, again, this evening: In the German national evening news we heard of the torrential flooding in Bavaria. Here there was thunder and lightning that skirted the southern horizon, in an ostensibly aimless way, until the sky above the street was sheeted in grey. Angled, heavy rain soon deluged the streets, much as might be expected. I was outside, and — besides being soaking wet within one city block (keeping in mind that Berlin's are reasonably large), later having to change my pants and long-sleeved shirt despite wearing a less-than-impermeable raincoat, and even having water run in through my eyelashes stingingly into my eye — one of the closest thunderclaps really felt as if it were boiling up, magma-like, from under the pavement beneath my feet.

It's the nearest thing I expect I'll experience to fleeing amidst thunderbolts that Zeus was firing after me, right and left, like temporary columns — in warning for some infraction of the will of the gods.

(Still, of course, I was hardly solitary on the street, with apartment houses looming over me, trees — thickly and shadowily leaved now — lining the sidewalks and the median, and other pedestrians taking shelter under the balconies and in the doorways or perhaps unwisely stalking along with a spiky umbrella alongside. So any feeling of particular importance would have been entirely imaginary.)

N.B.: I am purposely vague about the nature of my work so as to honour the non-disclosure agreement that I signed. Also, because I don't want to gossip about information that belongs to others, in any case — but share things that are my own things to tell. :c)

The Nine-to-Five

Last week I started work, eight hours per day and five days per week, in a start-up firm that is only some twenty minutes away by subway. Fewer than thirty of us work in three large rooms, dark carpeting white linoleum(?) beneath us and gridded pale ceiling reminiscent of the school ceilings into which some of my classmates once threw sharpened pencils to see the leads stick in them like darts, and windows to courtyards all around. Today a duck quacked loudly, and it was impossible to tell whether someone was listening to something on his computer or whether in fact a courtyard had received a visitor.

The working rhythm begins at some point before 9:15 a.m. This is when my sister usually arrives. We each have our own computer, and I have a laptop on ergonomic stilts as well as a flat screen so that I can see everything on two screens — internet tabs, text files, G**gle spreadsheets and all. The computers are far out on the table so that I am forced (again, ergonomically) to rest my forearms and to look fairly straight ahead. Coming after a lifetime of having screens inches in front of my eyes and hunching over to look at them, this came as a shock, but not unpleasantly so.

A Vignette of Late Spring

Although housework has crept farther into my schedule, I devoted this Thursday to doing nothing much at all, in honour of Ascension Day. The Ascension is a statutory holiday here in Germany, and so it was even quiet in the streets until the livelier afternoon. Summer is nudging in and pushing temperatures to the 20°C mark, while the nights still dip under 10°C, and I think spring itself has been tardy this year despite the warm winter. The new oak leaves, for instance, are still so new that they are almost more yellow than green; and there is a funny mixture of late forsythia flowers, perishing tulips and thriving tulips, bleeding-heart, withering grape hyacinths, long-blossomed daffodils and fresh daffodils, in the streets, and even a late-blooming, violet primrose on our windowsill.

We ordered pizza — tonno with tuna and onion; margherita; and an anchovy-and-salami variety; and Papa cooked smoky Black Forest ham with eggs; and the clay teapot was kept stocked with tea. A bag full of rhubarb (in season at €1,29 per kilo) is still in the pantry, and I have yet to make into a compôte. But we shall have it, most likely, with rice pudding tomorrow. Then I will finally wash up the big pots and pans, too. (Unless Mama beats me to it.) On the shopping list are the ingredients for a generous round of chocolate pudding with whipping cream and raspberries, which are unlikely to be ripe around Berlin yet but apparently are in Spain; and a potful of red lentils with celery root, carrots, leeks and red wine. I suspect that the leeks will be less — well . . . — happy than they were at the height of winter, but are likely still in season. Of course I hate washing and cutting them, but their colour and flavour are agreeable enough that — given enough time to rest and forget the ordeal between leeky dishes — I return to the charge regularly. Asparagus is still in season, and famously at home in the sandy soils of Brandenburg; I think we have devoured but one (half of a?) kilo this year, imported from Greece in early March or February, and green rather than white, so far.

Easter!

Easter Egg, 2015.

The Night of the Little Gold Man (Liveblog)

In past years I have tended to watch the Academy Awards together with my parents and sometimes my siblings. But especially since it is much later and more awkward to fit with a working schedule (well, not mine, but still . . .) in a European time zone than in the Pacific Standard one, I am stuck following it alone on the internet. So I thought it would be amusing to 'liveblog' it this time, so that no inane observation goes to waste!

1:28 a.m. A rather nice red carpet interview with George Miller, who directed Mad Max: Fury Road. I haven't watched it, though it has been so much praised; but my siblings did, and liked it. The interviewer observed that the original film in the Mad Max series had been shot with a small budget, and that it would not go far nowadays. Budget-wise, Miller said, even arriving in Namibia with the crew and equipment — I think my sister told me that it had been too rainy in Australia to film Mad Max there — would have already taken the $200,000 that were used for the first film. The director was clearly pleased by the question, and ruminated as precisely as he could (with the din and turmoil of the red carpet swelling around him) about the changes in filmmaking in general - smaller cameras are being used now, far more film being shot and then cut by the editors. And, in Mad Max, one of the editors was Mr. Miller's wife.

1:34 a.m. Interviewer's standard question, fired at Saoirse Ronan and Henry Cavill: 'Do you like Germany?' Why I'm watching this: to cringe with second-hand embarrassment.

1:41 a.m. Sacha Baron Cohen was asked The Germany Question again, although thankfully the interviewer had additional questions in reserve. But we learned that he likes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for undisclosed reasons; it wasn't a total waste of time.

1:47 a.m. Interviewer speculates about Emily Blunt's pregnancy. Another wave of embarrassment . . .

1:50 a.m. Charlize Theron hurries up the carpet; the interviewer and her associate speculate that the American television network ABC has 'first dibs' on the most important celebrities. They hope that she will return to the phalanx of reporters from other networks later. 'Fingers crossed,' says the interviewer, crossing her fingers literally, with her middle finger straight in the air. Accidental or not, nobody knows.

1:55 a.m. An interview about Jared Leto's shoes, made by Alessandro Michele of Gucci. 'So, did you fall in love with them right away?' . . .

2:06 a.m. An ABC interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. If I didn't have an irrational dislike for him, born of the Titanic years and never shed, I'm sure I'd be enjoying this more . . .

2:11 a.m. In the advertising break (one of many) I am returning to a cowboy book (The Trail Horde, by Charles Alden Seltzer):

Lawler smiled. "I had an agreement with Jim Lefingwell. We made it early last spring."

"A written agreement?"

"Shucks—no. I never had a written agreement with Lefingwell. Never had to. Jim's word was all I ever wanted from him—all I ever asked for."

2:37 a.m. Chris Rock's opening monologue: I guess his argument is that an Oscar nomination isn't a civil right . . . Now he's diagnosing the low-level type of racism that does exist in Hollywood. And saying, "We want opportunity," to relatively un-awkward applause.

2:53 a.m. The Best Adapted Screenplay award is for The Big Short. I guess it was fairly innovative. It did seem like a film I might watch. (Especially since I'm mildly interested in economics and the financial crisis.) To decrease the influence of finance on politics, 'Don't vote for people who take money from weirdo billionaires,' exhorts a writer in his acceptance speech, amongst other things. He probably isn't voting Republican or for Hillary Clinton, since things like her speech at Goldman Sachs have been so contentious recently.

3:15 a.m. After the Best Supporting Actress award, another interlude.

Man and horse were big, capable, strong-willed. They were equipped for life in the grim, wild country that surrounded them. From the slender, powerful limbs of the big bay, to the cartridge-studded belt that encircled the man's middle, with a heavy pistol at the right hip, they seemed to typify the ruggedness of the country, seemed to embody the spirit of the Wild.

3:39 a.m. The cinematographer for The Revenant thanks his compadre, Alejandro Iñarritu. Donald Trump must be grumbling right now.

4:01 a.m. Back to social justice: Here is the Economist's article from a statistical perspective about racial underrepresentation at the Oscars between 2007 and 2013: "How racially skewed are the Oscars?". It looks as if Latino Americans were particularly poorly recognized, and so are Asian Americans. But the article points a finger at casting practices and at drama schools with imbalanced pupils and not even at the Academy in particular.

A further excerpt:

"Blacks really are much more under-represented in the director’s chair, where they account for 6% of directors of the top 600 films, according to the Annenberg study. Black women are nearly nonexistent there (two of the 600, Ms DuVernay being one)."

4:16 a.m. I, for one, could not imagine playing the violin sitting in a chair wearing a black frock above knee height, with a black choker around my neck, but apparently for Oscars music performances, sacrifices must be made.

4:32 a.m. Mark Rylance (of Wolf Hall) wins for acting as a Soviet spy in Bridge of Spies. I'm quite surprised.

5:00 a.m. The Death Montage.

5:50 a.m. Brie Larson is Best Actress for The Room, and Alejandro Iñarritu is Best Director for The Revenant, but I have not much to say . . .

5:59 a.m. Leonardo DiCaprio has his Oscar. I may have to retreat from civilization to places where objectionable people don't get Oscars. :c)

6:00 a.m. Morgan Freeman's Best Picture award presentation is comforting me a little. His voice really is incredible. Spotlight wins. As one of the producers(?) says, three cheers for investigative journalism (which is one of the subjects of the film).

6:03 a.m. Chris Rock: "I want to invite everyone here to the BET Awards this summer!" and "Black Lives Matter!"

The End