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.