A Quiet Christmas Eve

Yesterday the shops were so full that there were many I didn't even want to enter. But today, when I woke up in the afternoon and made my way outdoors, most shops were closed and the ones that weren't were reasonably empty.

I went to a craft store, hoping for beeswax candles but they had little stumpy ones whereas I wanted other ones; then to a yarn store where I bought wool for crocheting or knitting gloves; and finally to an art store with its painting canvases, tubes, and easels. After that I also popped into a bookshop; then an Italian import shop with shelves full of wine, pasta, chocolates, and a display case with antipasti and racks of bread in the rear. One of the import shop attendants was kindly patient as I juggled all of my previous purchases; she fetched out a carton so I could carry things, and also mentioned that the breads were half price. Seeing that she was worried they'd go stale over the holidays, and nothing loth, I bought a small ciabatta bread.

When I returned home, Mama had prepared a salad: leafy green lettuce and radicchio with dressing. T., too, had already graced us with her presence (she went straight to our apartment after her booster anti-Covid vaccination) and ordered a loaf of crusty golden-brown bread with cherry pastries.

Afterward I cycled off to see gardens in the twilight. A few lamps were shining from the arbours and wide snowflakes drifting onto the cold, wet ground. There were very few people around, none in the gardens. On the way back I sang a Christmas carol in a weak little voice since nobody seemed to be around, the snow steaming on lights that were projecting onto a quiet industrial building. An S-Bahn train wheezed by, and I suddenly saw that there were in fact people within earshot: two railroad workers clad head-to-toe in orange, standing by the stone-ballast tracks and raising a respectful arm in greeting to the conductor as the train passed. Hopefully they were not creeped out.

Then we had dinner: lamb filets baked with garlic, sage, and butter; Middle Eastern dips like hummus, dolmades, and two types of tabbouleh; Turkish flatbread; more salad with radicchio; French white wine from the Italian import store; and finally Lebkuchen from a tin that my company sent all of us for Christmas.

Now the Christmas presents are in the living room ready to be opened tomorrow (as usual we have very few, because our household is already tightly stuffed). We're awaiting the visit of one of our uncles tomorrow as well. My mother is watching a Three Tenors concert on television, my brothers were playing the cello and the mandolin, and T. is playing Minecraft. I took a nap and have been spending time on the internet too. But maybe I will finally start knitting or crocheting.

I hope I will feel more truly rested tomorrow. The past year has been hard, like for many others; and it's been a little embarrassing how close I have been to tears almost non-stop for the past few weeks.

Street Marketing in Winter

This morning I ate breakfast — buttery croissants and a baguette that my mother and brother fetched from a French brasserie nearby, eggs and coffee.

I wasn't feeling especially spry and therefore dreaded the bicycle ride to Prenzlauer Berg for my voice/business coaching. But letting go of my pride and going down a gear to make it easier to pedal helped. Along the way I went to a corona test station, to make sure I wasn't putting my coach at risk of infection.

It surprised me that the Christmas market at Potsdamer Platz was open, since I'd thought that the market at Breitenbachplatz was one of the few outliers — a market that opened despite the high Covid incidence.

Back at home, I went grocery-shopping at an outdoor market. The market guards in neon-green vests appeared to be keeping a more alert eye out than a few weeks ago when the corona incidence wasn't as high. One of the guards saw a seller waiting for me to put produce in the shopper bag I'd brought along, and told the man that he should have offered a bag to me. 'She didn't need one,' he answered, and also for environmental purposes I agreed (the plastic bags that are handed out freely at the market strike horror into my soul a little). Still, I was touched by the thoughtfulness.

I had thought that I had arrived so late that most shoppers had gone. In fact one man with a wizened face was dragging a wheeled platform piled high with empty cartons onto the ramp of a truck near the entrance, deepening the impression that it was closing up. But there were elbow-to-elbow throngs of people, one to two rows deep, further in.

Kohlrabi had appeared on the stands since it is winter, alongside Hokkaido pumpkins and a lot of persimmons (sometimes sold as 'Persimmon,' other times as 'Kaki'). The usual bunches of mint and parsley were on sale. Then potatoes, ginger root, lemons, green pepperoni peppers, winter-themed bed linen sets that were surrounded by a throng of interested women, flatbreads, pineapples, pale watermelons, yellow cantaloupes, the customary bolts of cloth, eggs, dried spices, meat, Turkish delight and tahini halva, sunflower seeds and olives in varying colours, cauliflower heads, tons of tomatoes, etc.

It felt wonderful to be amongst so many people. I didn't linger and generally didn't stand too close to anyone, so it still felt safe.

Earlier I bought an amaryllis bulb, and now my youngest brother is the happy owner. Every year I want to put boughs in a vase to celebrate the feast of St. Barbara on December 4th — not just for religious reasons or nostalgia, but also because I like the symbolism of blossoming twigs in winter — and yet I usually forget. But I hope the bulb is a fair equivalent.

Workplace Rant: The Epidemic of Management per URLs

It turns out (referring back to the previous blog post) that I most definitely did not get my manager into trouble, which is good. That said, I had asked for feedback from the head of HR and I got it.

While it was said in a friendly and empathetic manner, I'm experiencing the usual post-feedback crushed feeling.

One piece of feedback is that I write overly long messages, to overly large audiences, and don't just run ideas by individual people whom I trust first ... And some of these messages are totally irrelevant or unimportant.

Anyway, c'est la vie. I also received lots of other advice (a good one was to make sure that my team is an early adopter of new technologies, since apparently we put a colleague through hell when we set up our new laptops at the last moment). And I gained an insight into some of the challenges of HR, which are steep.

***

I was fairly zen for most of the week until certain developments during the course of today, which were genuinely piffling but rekindled my irritation.

For example: It drives me absolutely bonkers that sending links to articles and videos is now the band-aid for every wound in the company.

I don't dislike all of the links and, because the wellbeing of my team is more important than my irritation and I am on the lookout for ways to serve it better, I always save the links for when 1. I am not too busy (a.k.a. overtime) and 2. the bile in my throat and/or feeling of disappointment at getting another gosh-darned link has subsided. I've shared a few myself. But:

Firstly, I still have the very unsettling feeling that a few other people and I are in the situation of Marge Simpson, going through an obstacle course when she was in a fictional police training academy in The Simpsons: she struggled to climb over a tall brick wall, while all of her fellow trainees were walking through a door in the middle of it. The more you try to really fulfill your professional duty instead of finding shortcuts, the worse you suffer.

Secondly, these links are really not that helpful. Rather than giving actual practical help ... here's an article! Rather than carefully listen, observe, experiment, and learn from the context of our company and especially test it on yourself before recommending to others ... here's an article! Rather than have relevant personal experience ... here's an article!

Also: struggling to have enough time to do your work, help your team, and acquire additional skills? Here's an article ... that will take up 5 to (especially if it's several nested articles in one) 50 more minutes of your time! ....... It really makes one despair.

A Cautionary Tale About Not Taking Holidays When One Should

The last week was a little horrifying but not without compensations.

I had a 4.5 hour meeting at the office about the results of a survey alongside a group of 10 others in a similar position, preceded and followed by 45 minutes of cycling to the office, plus a self-administered corona test, plus a bit of work in the morning, and a lunch and a dinner. It was not as stressful as I had feared on the day itself. And it touched me greatly that my mother and brothers had made sure I had marshmallows and chocolate to cheer me up when I was finally home again.

The day after that was likewise sort of horrible, however. I had 8 meetings and a long list of things to get through, and it felt like I barely had time to breathe. And in the end I just kind of sent a message of despair to the head of HR, saying that I really wanted to have regular meetings with a fellow team lead as well because I just no longer wanted to rely on the current manager I have. One thing I absolutely detest is 'telling' on someone, but it sounded rather like she took his point of view. And I am slated to have a new manager in January anyway, due to top management decisions in which I wasn't involved. So probably no harm done and I can do my best to make sure that is still true. The head of HR and I will have a meeting this week. On Friday I had a regular meeting with my manager and just mentioned that I was talking with HR because I did not want to be sneaky about it, and we finally had a reasonably blunt and forthright meeting about fairly small things.

One of the worst things about being a middle manager is being in this work-team-and-top-management sandwich. I can try to take good care of my team, and I can try to take good care of my work. But one thing I have never mastered and likely will never master, is taking care of the people whom I report to, at the same time. One thing I fear is 'sucking up.' There is also the very real risk of the top manager making impulsive changes, based on our conversations, which would adversely affect a lot of people. The best form of this relationship so far has been conversations where we trade observation, news, and advice, in a way that I try to make sure represents the company quite broadly; and the advice feels like a neutral, take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.

On Thursday my appetite finally came back after a two-week absence, because of all the food for St. Martin's (which we celebrated with a much smaller circle of family only, and not even all family, this year). And I no longer look as gaunt as I did. Over the weekend I also caught up on my sleep, twelve hours or so per day.

On Saturday I went for a long bicycle ride on a sunny and slightly chilly day, first to visit the bookshop where my aunt works, then to visit a market hall in Kreuzberg. Unfortunately the bank machines hadn't been in order earlier that day, so I couldn't make a transfer or (apparently) pick up cash, and ended up scrambling for the coins to pay for the persimmons that are now in stock. An orange pumpkin had to go back in the crate with the others due to lack of cash. Then I bought two Christmas presents and a bag of ironwort herbs with my debit card. It's the second weekend of my 'appreciating modern times' project, which will continue until I am out of the 1930s and early 1940s in my historical project.

Although I played the piano over the weekend, I still haven't warmed to the last movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata and apparently have projected some of the frustration and anger from work onto it. But gradually I am beginning to be able to read and listen to online books for leisure again: in a weird form of aversion therapy, I actually began to be stressed just looking at them because of all the times in the past weeks I've tried to turn to books to relax me and they didn't help.

On December 24th and 27th the whole company will have two days off. Aside from all the people in my life who have not inadvertently caused me a lot of frustration lately, and the specks of friendly feeling I feel from and toward even the people who have, this is a big consolation.

To help when books are not enough to relax, I've launched on a new project, which is to try to write something set in the Middle Ages about dragons. So I've created two massive Pinterest boards full of pictures of landscapes, art, historical figures, manuscripts, architecture, animals and food from medieval Iceland and Norway, and will move on from there. That said, I want my dragons to be fire-breathing, which means that some historical inaccuracy is inbuilt into the project.

Ensuring That No One Eats a Dead Mouse

Yesterday was a tumultuous day.

I had many meetings, a new request came in every ten minutes. I changed my messaging status to show that I was busy, which as far as I knew had zero effect whatsoever. Some of the meetings were ambush meetings that I had not asked for, and one of them resulted in a massive new task being heaped on my plate. And one of the meetings was plunked straight into the first half of the hour which I had actually planned to spend cycling to eastern Berlin for a nice restaurant visit with colleagues.

Then it turned out that due to a Covid case, 3 colleagues needed to cancel and the office seemed to have been semi-evacuated. Which meant that I had no idea how to make it to all of my meetings (the conference rooms at the office being my best option for handling the last calls before the restaurant meal) and still materialize at the restaurant in the appointed time. But more importantly it was a little doubtful if it was safe or purposeful to proceed at all. So in the end we called it off.

By the time that was done, I was so tense and frustrated by the bombardment of tasks with massive consequences, and on the verge of tears, that I called in sick for the rest of the day. The team, as always, was lovely, expressed concern, and offered practical help.

I think the analogy for the current way my fellow team leader and I are being treated is this: It's like trying to use a new operating system to get a task done on your computer and figure out if it's working for you. But people are constantly harassing you with advice to use another operating system, or upgrade to this version, or research that tool ... They might mostly all be right. But the task never gets done and you now also have dozens of hours of additional research on your plate, and no real idea how effective your current operating system is. And the lack of respect for time and effort already invested is totally galling.

In one case, the dynamic even feels (and I'm being pretty satirical here, so take it with a grain of salt) like interacting with a two-year-old child who nudges me in the middle of doing something else and wants me to eat something. You have to pay attention, to see if the 'food' they're altruistically offering in their grimy little hand is a dead mouse, a dishwasher tablet, or legitimate food, before someone is poisoned. There are people who specialize in these types of situations. But I'm not a kindergarten teacher.

It turned out that my uncle came over to visit, so we hashed out some of my workplace concerns. Pursuant to his advice, I've tried considering the 'stakeholders' outside my team as clients, and treating them accordingly. Which I think is needed, because in the absence of personal trust I need to make sure that the professional trust is there.

Then I had a long call with another colleague, which calmed me down considerably too.

I stayed awake until after 3 a.m. watching a series of videos released by my parent company, not related to technical things but rather to industry ideals. Then I woke up at 8:30 a.m., I think. My stomach still felt tense and I was so physically exhausted that I was tottering around for a few minutes when getting out of bed, and wondered (melodramatically) if I should pull up my laptop to my bedside and work from there.

But I've temporarily made my peace with things. While I feel that anger is not a nice emotion to have, it is sometimes justified; and if I try to escape it I will wimp out of reacting proportionately. One thing that is not good, though, is actually losing sleep about it.

That said, the things that are happening lately are so absurd that I laughed at them even during the height of the storm yesterday. The colleague of the long video call emphasized that they were not funny ... but I laughed again.

*

In artistic news, at any rate, I angry-played a few German Dances by Beethoven yesterday, but decided not to reach for a Rachmaninov prelude. So things aren't that dramatic.

The Last Day of October 2021

It was the transition day back from Daylight Savings Time today. I'd thought it would be suspended in Germany after the referendum and European Parliament decision a few years ago, only found out this morning that the EU member states had disagreed. Clearly a bit of a gap in my news reading!

After breakfast, Ge. and I cycled to a garden colony again. It was such mild, sunny weather that we regretted our jackets and Ge. took off his helmet. My muscles felt incredibly sore, I was out of breath, and I must have done something to my knee because it twinged; my brother pointed out after a while that my bicycle seat must have slipped down recently — it was far too low for a healthy seated conformation.

But once we turned onto the paths of a park, sunlight pouring everywhere, grass glimmering greenly, leaves forming tapestries on the asphalt, and many pedestrians and cyclists doing the same thing we were, I began to warm to the exercise.

As usual, I scanned the fence lines. Fairly early on I found three apples in a basket hanging off the side of a fence for people to take, and happily selected one. I was going to put a coin into it, but the man who was crouching beside a low orchard tree in that yard, pruning it, as his son kicked around a ball, looked over and insisted that the apples were free. Other than that, the only other fruits we saw on offer were six wormy-looking apples that had experienced their prime at least a week or two earlier, plus three that appeared to have been mauled by a little creature. (It still bore out my idea that the best day to seek surplus fruit in a garden colony is on a Sunday afternoon, when people who are too busy the rest of the week have had time to potter in their plots.)

It was not quite the case that 'the sedge had withered from the lake, and no birds sang' due to the lateness of the season. But small grapes had blackened on the vine, neglected apples were hanging in trees — shining bright ochre-yellow or yellow-green like jewels, or mouldering on the ground in disgrace —, the sedum did not have the dusty pink flowers and thriving aqueous green leaves any more, the few remaining dahlias are tufted at best, sunflower heads brown and downturned, and I think the asters were turning rather pale and overblown.

We liked how the gardens had different characters. A few regimented ones were practically like mini golf courses. A few seem to harken back to vacations or longer journeys in southeastern Asia. A few are just freewheeling, others are a patchwork of little plots that seem like community gardens. And there were one or two that were like forgotten witches' or cottagers' houses in a children's story book, and I felt really compelled to go back and sketch them. A slightly perturbing sight in one of the plots was a massive German flag, although Ge. said it was upside down so might have a self-parodying purpose.

***

In the afternoon I prepared a second bowl of Halloween candy from the stash that Ge. and J. had bought. We have eaten an unconscionable quantity of sour green apple rings and worms, coke bottle gummies, wine gums, licorice snails, licorice all-sorts, gummy bears, and green gummy frogs. What's more, we also have a bowl full of chocolate bars that Ge. already arranged this morning. But we didn't expect trick-or-treaters and we didn't get any.

Instead, I've hopped ahead and have been looking for Christmas present ideas. Due to supply chain issues and ecological considerations, I'm not 100% sure how I will proceed, but presume that I will be ambling around amongst the small neighbourhood shops so that I can see what exactly is really in stock and where supplies are already on the ground. I'm still not really in favour of turning a generation of fellow Berliners into some equivalent to modern-day servants of the 19th century, fetching and carrying for the supine majority, either in the postal services or in the food delivery services, especially because I am worried about the long-term class-psychological effects. But this is my own grumpy 'hot take' — and I won't force anyone to agree!

In terms of healthy food, Mama and Ge. also collaborated on a late lunch of liver fried with onions and apples. The liver was not too bitter, I didn't eat too much, and altogether it was a flavourful and nourishing meal that I'd like to have more often if I didn't lean heavily vegetarian lately. Especially as we had leftover lamb's lettuce on the side.

A Saturday in 1932, Late October

For the year 1932 in my historical experiment I didn't do much, as I felt a little exhausted after a fortunately mellower week at work.

The week before I'd actually finished reading the lists of the year's events in a certain online encyclopaedia. The news revolved around the Great Depression, 37% for the Nazis in the German parliament, and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. It is weird to think how things change and remain the same: for example, May Day in Berlin is still tense in the 2020s (I think I mentioned in this blog in the past how the grocery chain store underneath my employer's office would have its windows boarded up the day before). But! fascists and Communists aren't killing each other at such events any more.

*

I was woken up at 10:45 a.m.ish today because of a telephone call for my mother. It was a good enough time to start having breakfast, so Ge. bought croissants and J. brewed coffee, and we all stayed awake.

It was a lovely, sunny day, although the leaves of oak trees standing in the east wind outside our apartment have gone quite uniformly brown and were drifting poetically through the air today — truly the cusp of November. But as mentioned I felt exhausted and didn't go out at all.

The programme was basically just to avoid doing things that people wouldn't have done in the 1930s.

I tidied my desk e.g. replaced dried-out ink with new ink in the ballpoint pens, put new felt stickers beneath the legs of my chair and attempted to freshen up the leather of the seat with a mixture of whipped egg white and sugar (do not really recommend except if there's a knack to that and you have it).

In terms of books and magazines, I read The Tale of Pigling Bland by Beatrix Potter as well as an educational environmental supplement (about bicycle vs. car traffic, electric batteries vs. hydrogen fuel cells, and the future of ecologically-friendly aviation) to a German fashion magazine. Reading more of Bertrand Russell's autobiography was another idea, because I realized yet again that I am fairly ignorant of the UK after 1910ish — my obsession for Victorian and Edwardian literature did not carry me far past this year. But, after failing to make it through a letter to Russell from Norbert Wiener about geometry because my brain wasn't up to it, I left that alone fairly soon.

On the piano I played the toccata from Bach's Partita No. 6 and tried to sightread passages from Maurice Ravel's Miroirs, and played another page and a half of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, wondering ungratefully when the hell it would end.

Besides I refilled the batteries for my mother's digital radio, after giving up on making any of our analogue radios work. It should come in handy for the later 1930s.

Lastly, I mended clothes.

It all felt somewhat virtuous.

But I'm struggling with both the obvious fact that being realistic at this stage of the historical experiment is both impossible and undesirable, and the less obvious fact that it is hard to find good social history sources online for the UK post-WWI, likely due to European copyright laws.

Tomorrow, at least, is Halloween.

I suppose the last thing to mention is that more Covid-19 disappointment is setting in. Because only ~66% of Berlin's residents have two vaccinations, and incidences are rising to over 100 new cases daily per 100,000 people, the percentage of ICU patients who have Covid has risen above 10% again (even after March 2019, it's been under 3% at times) and breakthrough infections of vaccinated people keep being reported, I don't feel inclined to meet people in person any more. And I am not sure whether my social skills will survive the pandemic, or whether I will start grunting instead of talking, finding a nice cave to live in, and shunning humanity. An early symptom perhaps is 'email depression' — for the past few years I think I've been reasonably good about responding promptly, and now it takes ~5 times the usual interval for me to check my inbox, read the emails, and reply. On the other hand, I can highly recommend having 1-to-1 video calls; talking regularly with my teammates is really bringing a scrap of happiness back into my work life.

I am beginning to conclude that this really is the usual 'it'll be over by Christmas' fake-out. Judging by WWI, therefore, it might actually be over in 1923. Judging by WWII, it might even only be over in 1925.

1929, Hot Chocolate, Autumn, and Soup

In the morning I knew that we were out of cornflakes. So rather than go with anything more typically 1920s Britain, I made coffee, porridge, and boiled eggs for breakfast. Mama is off travelling in Thuringia, and Ge. was working an early shift, so it was just J. and I who ate, drank and chatted.

Afterward, I read a Beatrix Potter story and read a page or two of The Age of Innocence; then came a shopping trip; then it was time to prepare an afternoon tea.

Today the tea was simple: scones, lemon curd, sliced cucumber, and French breakfast tea.

Then it was time for me to meet with three colleagues to go to a nearby café.

Once we'd gathered and had begun walking to our destination, we glanced in the windows of a bookstore and a children's toy shop, lingered near a flower shop, and made eye contact with one or two stooped ladies in headscarves and cloaks who were making their way along the generally busy sidewalks.

We ended up sitting outside in an invigorating (one might also say chilly) breeze that swept from the east. Few of the other guests lingered, probably encouraged to keep things short by the temperatures. Mei. justly commented that lately it's been summer in the sunshine, autumn in the shade, and winter at night. The first burst of brown leaves has appeared in an oak tree near the apartment, for example. Three of us drank hot chocolates from sturdy white porcelain cups, stirring in a paper tube's worth of sugar if we wanted to, while the fourth had coffee.

We ordered crème brûlée, too. The dessert was served atop a coal-back slate: crumbly bits of walnut that had been freshly cracked (little flakes of husk were amongst them) and a thin, dark caramel-coloured rolled wafer that also looked housemade were laid beside a large and low brown ramekin that held the crème brûlée itself.

I took a moment to bask in the happiness of having so many good restaurants and cafés in Berlin, where the people who make the food take a delight in their productions and don't just dish it out apathetically. The custard was a lovely consistency and the crust was warmly flavoured and nicely crackly. —

Admittedly I'm not the hugest fan of using flat slates as dramatic dishware; but, as one of the colleagues might say, it's very aujourd'hui.

We chatted. I felt a little verstimmt because of apparent emotional exhaustion from the last week or two at work (and a renewed onslaught of passive aggression that I'm trying to dig myself out of). But hopefully it didn't come across too much.

Afterward, Ge. and J. were on their trip to Tempelhofer Feld. They had left behind the teapot over a tealight to keep it warm, and plopped our tea cozy over two scones for the same purpose, which was touchingly thoughtful. Before they returned, I made supper. It was a 1929 cauliflower soup recipe from Philip Martineau's Cantaloup to Cabbage cookbook: the water that cauliflower had been cooked in, oats, fried onion and bread, parsley, egg, and (in the original recipe) the sour cream that I had forgotten to buy.

For dessert we had raw figs, passionfruit, and agave syrup: a historically inaccurate salad. It was accompanied by leftover lemon curd from the afternoon tea. Besides we ate the vanilla ice cream and chocolate-covered popsicles that Ge. bought. For the purposes of the 1920s experiment, we agreed to pretend that the ice cream was from an ice cream truck.

The plan is to eat pancakes tomorrow.

I feel lazy in my execution of the 1920s Saturdays lately. I ignored the stock market crash because it only happened late in 1929 and people still seemed to be heavily in denial about it at the end of the year. Maybe I could have gone for a ride on the Die Welt balloon in honour of the Graf Zeppelin circumnavigating the globe, however. Seeing a film in a local theatre, or attending a performance of the Threepenny Opera, ... that would have worked too. To be fair, I did watch an entire Clara Bow film on YouTube in the preceding week: The Saturday Night Kid. But once the 1930s begin next week, I will hopefully be more inventive. I wonder how challenging it will be to figure out what good things happened in that decade.

As for the weather, there have been beautiful red and pink and yellow sunsets lately; my siblings and colleagues have been sharing photos of them often. We have a full shipment of coal bricks in our hallway, so we are well prepared for maybe half a winter, once it arrives. In the meantime: Canadian Thanksgiving is on Monday.

A Day in 1928: A Market, a French Lunch, and Historical Transport

It is early October but only a few trees have begun to be splashed with yellow, a few maple leaves mostly green with spots of warmer colour drifting to the sidewalks, and a few red leaves like beech or alder and Virginia creeper.

I walked to the Marheinekeplatz in Kreuzberg to buy groceries for the '1920s' experiment, which ended up just being cauliflower, gold-green grapes and a wildly expensive set of Provençal candies that looked like pointy macarons. The Bergmannstraße was busy. For the first time I walked behind the market hall and found the open-air market, with its knitted goods, trinkets, antiques and vintage items. A few shoes and dishes looked like they might be from the Twenties, but because our apartment is already so full I didn't buy any. I was mainly here to see a relative who is at the market on Saturdays, and it was nice to find her and have a chat.

On the way back I popped into a French brasserie and bought two filled baguettes in paper wrappers, from a long glass counter full of French cheeses and sausages and a quiche that the salesperson had just popped in. I was willing to be surprised, but the salesperson stuck his head into the kitchen and hollered in French to ask what was in the baguettes, and the chef 'Magalie' answered back. And I asked for a red wine to go with the baguettes, and he gave me a light Pinot Noir after hemming and hawing over the bottles in the shelves.

I've known the brasserie since it opened. It stood right beside the bookshop and they let my mother take over a tray of their china espresso cups plus the freshly baked croissants that she sometimes bought to fuel herself and whoever was dropping by. And often when one passes, patrons are sitting outside it speaking in French, so the shopkeeper clearly knows his business. It does feel a little like knowing someone from their infancy and feeling pleased with how well they're doing.

That said, it still feels weird to have enough funds to be able to buy freely from its more expensive section; my obsession with the advantages and disadvantages of capital continues.

We had a light lunch at home afterward: baguettes (the one with thin slices of yellowy sheep's cheese, beet greens and other greens, sun-dried tomato kept in oil, and garlic-infused olive oil was especially delicious), water, tea, and wine.

Then I telephoned Uncle Pu and we chatted about French fries, how he spent his Friday in Berlin, work, and when we're going to visit him again.

And after that, Ge. and I went to the Technikmuseum in Kreuzberg.

It was the first time I've been there. It would take such a long time to confirm the facts, that I won't write about it much for fear of committing pseudo-journalistic malpractice.

To keep things short: it had plenty of exhibits from the 1890s to the late 1920s, interesting material for my historical experiment. It added puzzle pieces to my mental picture of Berlin across the centuries, too.

Quite footsore after browsing amongst the pre-1918 aircraft (enhanced by Ge.'s professional knowledge of airplanes) and trains, and the sugar industry section, with a few glimpses of antique bicycles and the ship exhibits, Ge. and I were tempted to eat something on the way back home to restore our energy. Families were strolling past — I won't say smugly, because that would be unfair — with ice cream in their hands.

Instead we walked past the red rose hips, tall Canada goldenrod, overblown clematis seedheads, greywacke plant beds, dark autumn berries, bristling nettles, ripening blackberries, etc., of the parks in our neighbourhood, until we reached home. The sun gleamed beneath the gray-blue clouds at the horizon, and one or two photographers with long professional lenses on their cameras were still stalking about to take advantage of today's bright, late summer lighting.

At home we reheated pizza (not very 1920s) and had more red wine and the grapes I'd bought earlier (1920s enough). And had some of the After Eights and the rest of the caramel candies from yesterday. And then I was so drowsy that I took a long nap.

Goodbye to a Week and to Two Colleagues

This afternoon my work team and I marked two events: Firstly, one of our teammates will leave us to join a data science team still within our company. Secondly, and more drastically, one of our colleagues will be leaving the company, and Berlin, altogether.

So we took over the kitchen in one of the company offices and brought food and drinks, and stayed there until past 9 p.m.

We toasted each other in prosecco and white wine, also drank beer and locally bottled fruit juice and water; our Greek teammate had made her first vegan chocolate cake and was typically modest about the delicious result; and I brought in a sponge cake. Then we had After Eights, pistachios, red beet chips and chickpea chips and lentil chips, nacho chips, guacamole, flatbread with hummus and a feta cheese dip and a tomato dip, Portuguese bread buns with caponata, and the soft caramels that we used to always keep in our team's office room.

We learned more about each other (past and present), exchanged gossip, and reminisced about former times and former colleagues.

One aftereffect of social distancing was that a few gatherings I've had with current or former colleagues have felt like 'classics', one-in-a-lifetime experiences that are hard to improve on. It will be hard to forget the walks and meetings we've had, with a feeling of genuine togetherness I think we didn't often achieve before the pandemic. The small dramas (riot police, Brazilian teammate cutting their finger with a knife, etc.) that occurred along the way made them even more memorable. Minus the dramas, it's quite heartwarming.

It sounds — and is — quite cheesy, but one thing I realized after my father's death (when I knew that few people could believe in me as much as he did or lead me as much to try to be kind and honest, but it became clear how many people could be supportive and affectionate and good) is how deep the human capacity to feel platonic love is. I didn't believe in it while I was a teenager or in my twenties; I felt tolerated or endured rather than liked, and I guess that influenced how I felt about others and about human kindness in general. But every now and then the proof of it is hard to miss.

When I returned home after cycling through the early autumn night, my uncle (whose birthday it was) had already left, but sister T. was still there. So we ate chocolate mints and caramels, and chatted, until it was time for some of us to go to sleep. It's been a long week and, for example, I'd only eaten a salted licorice herring and a few crumbs before the evening party. But I am finding little islands of respite.

Talks, the Twenties, and a Tiny Mid-Life Crisis

On Monday I had a rather interesting day where normally the main event would be that I was in a 100-person hipster restaurant get-together with dozens of colleagues, 20 or so more colleagues from another German office, and the billionaire owner of our parent company.

What was far more pressing for me, however, was the meeting I ended up having afterward with the top management team. After at least two weeks of brooding and brainstorming, in which my conscience shook me like an enraged giant, it was a little exhausting to finally present what I wanted to say.

I was thinking, what are the most important problems facing my fellow team leads and me? what things are not the easy thing but the right thing to talk about? how do I speak moderately without minimizing important problems? how do I overcome my superiors' natural resistance to wish and explain away matters that they might not feel they have time to fix? I finally realized that I also had to build in time for rebuttals.

In the end the essential points were raised, and I gave examples of the problems I saw as well as proposals of how to fix them. But I was not very happy afterward; it's only the next morning where I began to admit that I should be proud of myself because I did a very difficult thing.

Still it feels wrong when I step forward about anything, because the fear of confrontation and of people being displeased with me makes me shy even at the best of times.

I also felt like I shot my career in the foot even more, and even if there are more important things in life it's always a little painful to pull the trigger.

The good news is that now I can focus again on finishing my tasks and improving the speed with which we add new clients to our system, with a conscience at ease.

*

For the 1920s programme on the weekends, I got around to playing (on the piano) two Gnossiennes and a Gymnopédie by Erik Satie, since he died in the mid-20s. For breakfasts, I've bought cornflakes to mimic the British trend of American cereals. And I made a baked apple betty in a historically accurate Pyrex dish for dessert, in an autumnal Saturday meal that also included a very un-British pumpkin soup.

(One historical thing I need to do more of, for practical reasons, but haven't done as much, is mend clothes. Two large bags full of ones that need to be mended await, and I'm realizing that a) I have a hoarding problem, and b) I could really use non-holey socks.)

Besides I watched at least fifteen minutes of It with Clara Bow on YouTube. I am still rolling my eyes over the phrase 'the It girl' when it appears in magazine articles today, so it's had a lasting cultural effect. That said, Bow's character's over-the-top languid gazes and the hardcore stalking of her love interest were too amusingly silly in the first place and uncomfortable in the second for me to watch it longer. She is an idiosyncratic actress and I was pretty quickly converted into a moderate fan.

In general I'd be happy to leave the mid-to-late 20s if it weren't for the Thirties, Forties, and Great Depression. Mostly because of the decadence.

Tolerance and freedom are good, yes, but exploitation not. (The prostitution that was rife in Berlin after the First World War, for example, or the biography of Clara Bow and other victims of the Hollywood machinery, are very disturbing.)

Maybe it would make sense, however, to read about all of the international peace conferences that took place in the early 20s, instead, to get a more positive impression of the era.

I bought pump shoes in honour of the decade and, after wearing them for a few hours on multiple days, have begun to trust that I might not fall over whenever I wear them. That said, attempts to apply 20s-style make-up have become consistently worse instead of better. Although, strangely enough given the fact that I've sedulously avoided cosmetics for most of my life, dramatic mascara and lipstick don't look bad on me — at least in a half-lit mirror. Fortunately a lot of YouTube videos have enough vintage clothing, shoes, cosmetics and hairstyles, so that anyone can enjoy 1910s and 1920s fashion vicariously, too.

The visit to a 1920s art exhibition or to a cinema as part of the historical experiment needs to wait another week or two. But I'm looking forward to fish & chips and Jaffa cakes.

***

Lastly, on Monday evening I went to a ballet class for the first time since March 2020 or before.

Two or three of the students and I recognized each other, I think.

The teacher recognized me at once. (The happy glow in her eyes was the same one that I saw in the eyes of colleagues when we greeted each other again in person for the first time in one and a half years, at the work event on Monday morning. It's one of the best side effects of social distancing.) And I almost cried a little when we did familiar combinations at the barré, to the same music as two years before.

***

Altogether, though, it does seem like I am going into a mini mid-life crisis, as my voice coach rather perceptively noted before I figured it out myself.

Not just the specter of the Grim Reaper is at fault; a big swathe of hair has also greyed at each of my own temples, and I realize I'm growing older and will have slightly fewer opportunities to have fun once the blood pressure issues, arthritis or who knows what begin to set in.

Besides, like many other people, being at home so much and not needing to adapt to what I think is expected of me outwardly, has made me discover 'new' aspects of myself — aspects that feel so familiar and homey and 'me' when I indulge them, that it seems like I'd always known that they were there. But it also means I'm departing from the behavioral patterns of, say, a year ago.

And being in mental pain lately has made me more eager to find distractions to forget about it, rather like thumping a fist against a chair to distract one's self from the greater pain of a bee sting — although that might be a poor analogy, as I'm not sure anyone actually does that.

Rather than buying a red Porsche, I'm kind of riding out a new 'darn the consequences' attitude, and on the whole enjoying it.

Vignettes From a September Garden Tour

This afternoon my mother and I went on a cycling expedition to allotment gardens in the southwest of Berlin. Pink bee balm, pale purple asters, and Canada goldenrod were growing in the grass, chestnuts and chestnut hulls littered the setts on one of the roads, and yellow is beginning to show in a few of the leafy trees. In one yard of a house, a threatening set of corn stalks was literally taller than many a one-story building.

In the gardens, traditional quinces were large, green-yellow and ripening on bushes, grapes bunching on the vine, little Japanese quinces in a richer, deeper colour thronging along a fence. Dahlias bristled from one garden, red honeysuckle dipped from another, and the apple trees were full of fruit. Sweet peas had flowered and stopped flowering again, long black seed-husks burst open and shedding their cargo as the plant stalks bleach and begin to decompose. Deep red rose hips were grouped on gracefully curving twigs, white snowberries clinging to the tips of bushes. On the ground, large leaves of zucchini or pumpkin still had trumpet-like yellow flowers, but the gourds themselves seemed to be mostly harvested.

It was cloudy and cool, clearly the beginning of autumn.

Last Weekend's Athletic Feats of Prowess, and a Birthday

It's been a rather rocky time at work as usual, but I also don't really enjoy filling the blog with memories of when I was stressed and unhappy, so I'll try to write about other things.

Last weekend was action-packed. On Saturday my two youngest brothers and I drove out to Brandenburg and visit our uncle P., going for a walk amongst the green grass, red rose hips, beeches and willows that were still green, masses of mushrooms, and tall growths of regular nettles and smaller growths of dove nettles with their soft white flowers. The rim of the path is often like the sward (I don't know exactly what that means, admittedly) in the foreground of — for example — Renaissance paintings, and I like the little speckles, the straight stems, and the broad leaves of the greater plantains that grow along the sides. We also had a talk about family history, which was not always cheerful, then pigeon soup over rice, and for dessert, yoghurt with mango and banana. In the end we also played Haydn trios, then we drove off again toward the city.

On Sunday my mother and I cycled out to Charlottenburg and — together with uncle M. and other colleagues — we walked as far as we could around the Lietzensee, in the middle of apartment buildings, with stately old staircases and fountains and a bridge, park planning straight from the early 1900s or earlier, murky green water, bright sunshine, and a lot of people strolling about. It was very nice.

Then we walked to a café, where we drank cappuccinos, ate cake, and then in my case made a big mistake as I ordered a scone with crème fraîche and jam. A growing colony of wasps was increasingly delighted over this treat, as all of us at the table and a widening circle of fellow diners became increasingly alarmed or at least transfixed. But it tasted good.

Afterward I cycled back out to the city centre to play beach volleyball with colleagues and their friends.

I was quite impressed by my own physical fitness that day, which was a refreshing change. Although my performance in volleyball is never something to boast about. But since then I have discovered, as expected, that cycling quickly to eastern Berlin for two days in a row turns me into a slowpoke with aching legs.

*

Anyway, my birthday also happened last week (I am now thirty-six). Because I felt so sad and tired in general, it was a real comfort to feel the affection from colleagues, former colleagues who happened to write just at the right time, and family.

Croakings of a Bluebird of Unhappiness

The week started innocently enough early on Monday morning, as I cycled off to Charlottenburg and without losing the way once, obtained my second Covid-19 vaccination at a large centre installed in a conference building compound beside the Hammarskjöldplatz. Full of the metaphorical bones and artifacts of West Berlin through the 50s and 60s to the present day, it was one of the most enjoyable bicycle rides I've had in a while. Admittedly the last intersection was a massive pain in the neck that involved what felt like 5 minutes of waiting before an intricate sequence of traffic lights finally turned in my favour. It was good that I was running early.

The procedure was the same as last time, with security personnel outside, a high temperature check with a handheld apparatus, display of the QR code, examination of paperwork, and pointing to the curtained booth where a helper and doctor waited to perform the vaccination.

I took the opportunity to ask about a discussion within my company — whether to mandate a vaccination for all employees or not — that had ended with a top managerial level colleague saying that, since the vaccine could reduce severity of symptoms but not transmission, it made no sense to mandate it. The following is, of course, my synopsis, so should not be taken as final medical advice: The doctor agreed indeed that the main effect of the vaccine is to reduce severity of symptoms; however, she pointed out that the idea is that the less heavy the course of the disease, the lower the viral load, the lower the chance of transmission. And agreed with my conclusion that, after all, with lower viral loads, the chance that the virus would mutate further was also lower.

This time I was also nervous because my little brother had felt some side effects, although cold shivers were (the doctor assured me) not a side effect per se, but just a sign the vaccine was working.

The documents I had to read and sign before, and the doctor, advised me not to do sports for the next five days. Also, not to drink alcohol for the next three to five days.

By this stage of my life I rely on exercise to feel reasonably active and enterprising, but also to stay mentally healthy, as a cloud of something will settle down on me whenever I let it. Generally I don't let two days pass without at least half an hour medium-to-high-intensity exercise, and I gradually regret it if I do. Besides it feels strange but also gratifying (even if I don't want to buy into the humbug about the moral superiority of conventional thinness, and the claim often read on internet forums that thin people are exemplars of conscientious, health minded self-control and thoughtfulness toward the taxpaying supporters of healthcare) to be in better physical shape now than I've been possibly since I was a child.

I tried not to pedal too intensely on the bike ride home, and at the same time I went through a heavy bargaining stage in my mind. (Is it really sports if it's just cycling? just yoga? just beginner's ballet? no intense cardio or strength training?) Then, having arrived at home, I researched it on the internet, and found that exercise is discouraged only because it heightens side effects; it does not reduce the efficacy of the vaccine. That said, I felt weird enough when I tried light exercise that I've given in and just let the exercise slide.

***

The week began to turn sour when I received a surprise invitation, late on Monday evening, to a fifty-minute meeting at 9 o'clock in the morning the next day. I knew the schedule of the organizer was so busy that likely this was the only time slot available to them so was a little alarmed but willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Feeling heroic for waking up before 9 o'clock but definitely not having had enough sleep or breakfast, it turned out that the fifty minute meeting was a generally polite and optimistically framed exchange of views on how I was not helping another team. That team had been tasked with supporting my team 50% of their time, but I had provided totally inadequate technical information, and I was suggesting only small tasks that would not bring about any large or meaningful improvement, was the allegation.

I had been baffled by all the requests I had been bombarded with by a member of that team. They had other tasks to do for themselves and for other teams, a few people in that team know my team's work a little so that some but not a huge amount of technical handholding made sense, and surely they know that my team also has other requests coming in from other corners of the company in addition to our very long list of existing clients to maintain, and a growing list of impatient clients to bring onboard. Also, the busiest time of year is beginning for us and I hadn't shut up about the need to give us more time for client work all year, so that top management, client-facing colleagues, and pretty much everybody else within a 2-mile radius had been informed.

(It turns out later that the 50% figure was surprising to pretty much everyone. So I wasn't the only one who didn't know that their work was so focused on my team.)

Anyway, while now I've been given carte blanche to neglect clients, I feel unhappy because my professional reputation was impugned — that I might be tarred with a reputation for not helping new colleagues and for undermining projects that are planned to increase the output of my team. I don't know how to make the blot on my escutcheon go away without presenting myself as a wronged victim, which is also not entirely true.

Besides I miss the honesty of working to make clients happy. Also, the procedural omission of not asking the client-facing colleagues if all of this is fine, really worries me because I know how they might feel to have their tasks made impossible for them through no fault of their own.

And that was the first meeting of eight meetings on Tuesday.

I hoped today would be better, but it wasn't. I told myself to stop crying two minutes before a meeting because otherwise the tears would be visible on camera, and I've felt nauseated and wobbly-legged to the extent that I'd say work is making me a little ill.

1921 and a Facsimile of the Roaring Twenties

 I spent today in 1921 and considerably enjoyed it.

After grocery shopping and while waiting for Ge. to return from his second vaccination, I baked a Sacher torte, dressed in a purple tunic with my hair in a low sideswept bun (feeling daring and brash if only in comparison to my everyday wear).

I detest The Great Gatsby and didn't think I was a big fan of 1920s aesthetics. But in the context of my experiment, it feels a lot better than the First World War and I actually like the vibrant colours, the freedom for women, and the general comparative lack of people dying. Trying to resurrect something of the careful aesthetics and cultural references of the David Suchet Poirot series that I grew up with does have great charm, too, minus the murders.

(Although there was a lot going on that was terrible. From a labour standpoint, considering also that wages were being lowered massively in the US and UK because the demobilization of soldiers made the pool of workers plentiful and cheap again, it wasn't that great. And 1921 was the year of the brutal Tulsa race massacre, for example. It's really maddening to see how amidst some progress, the seeds of World War II, Nazism and the rule of Stalin were already being steadily sown, and the Ku Klux Klan era of racist violence still throve in the US as well as in Canada and elsewhere.)

To descend to trivialities: For breakfast we had the following menu, adapted from an American menu and served on some of our fanciest plates.

Grapefruit

Bread rolls

Croissants (anachronism)

Pastry with tropical fruit filling (anachronism)

Bacon

Coffee

Hot cocoa

T. visited us for breakfast, and we exchanged friendly insults over the meal, as always.

To rest after breakfast, I played one and a half or so of Brahms's Hungarian Dances arranged for the piano, as well as a few Strauss waltzes, and tried but failed to find Saint-Saëns scores (he died in December 1921) aside from the French horn concerto that Mama has played from. Since I'm still recovering/grumpy from the last attempt to sightread part of Beethovens's Hammerklaviersonata, which is admittedly a 'First-World'-y problem to have, the lovely dark powder-blue edition of Beethoven's later sonatas seemed to look at me reproachfully — in vain; I refused to play more. Besides I sewed: mending part of a pillowcase.

*

To ramble about my culinary mishaps: Although the Sacher torte was burned at the edges, using beaten egg whites as the only leavening agent in a cake generally is not my preferred course of action compared to the reliable lift of baking soda, and beating 10 egg whites by hand after fishing out drips of egg yolk made me perform a few metaphorical Munch screams in my imagination, it turned out surprisingly well.

That said, even the topping made me sweat: the sugar syrup in the chocolate topping also crystallized while I cooked it. But pouring in a little milk and letting the chocolate-sugar rock formation dissolve, then stirring it until it reached a smoother texture and smashing the leftover lumps, turned it into more of what Bob Ross calls a 'happy little accident.'

By fortuitous accident, the Mediterranean cookbook that I recently bought for myself has an apricot jam recipe that, recast as an Austrian 'Marillenmarmelade,' was exactly what was needed for the torte.

It seems to me that I need to make as many summer recipes as I can — the emergence of the first oval purple plums (Zwetschgen) in the stores has made me feel that, like Hannibal with his elephants crossing the Alps toward Rome, autumn too is before the gates.

*

Lunch:

Fish cakes

Bread roll

French breakfast tea

Sachertorte

Because Prohibition was in force in 1921, and the cookbook is American, wine and liqueur pairings are conspicuously absent. We made do with the coffee, cocoa and tea instead.

We are so unused to eating as much as rich people did in the early 20th century that, to be honest, I still feel like I swallowed a cannon ball after the lunch. And none of us could face the thought of dinner.

After playing Galuppi on the harpsichord (probably anachronistic, as I think that the popularity of harpsichords was revived by Wanda Landowska a decade or two later), reading more of Bertrand Russell's autobiography to get an idea of the late years of World War I and the early post-war period, and playing more Strauss waltzes on the piano, etc., I finally gave in and set off on a bicycle expedition to Tempelhof Airfield.

It felt like I should have gone to play tennis or badminton, but the siblings were intent on doing something cozy indoors and were therefore not available as partners; and due to my not having the second vaccine I'm still not too keen on going to see an art exhibition (preferably Dadaist) or a film, which feel like very 1920s things to do.

It was already getting darker, although it was only around 7:30 p.m. I liked seeing my very long shadow in front of me. The sky was still very blue and a few puffy clouds ranged on it; the trees are still very green; and it was so nice seeing lots of people out and about.

On Tempelhofer Feld, an electric car racing track had been set up behind a chainlink fence and concealing posters. The circus set up by refugees was alive with children and music, instead of empty and sad as it is in winter. An outdoor roller skate disco — the first I've seen — was well visited, mostly by onlookers as well as skaters who seemed more focused on staying vertical than on dancing. I liked the 80s beat of the track they were tottering around to.

The thick smoke of family barbecues (always amazingly intense) rose like woodsman's campfires in the foggy early morning hours, or like steam from a 19th century boat's smokestacks, from the grass elsewhere in the park.

The sluggish lift of the few kites that people were ambitiously trying to fly was also peaceful and dozy.

*

The atmosphere reminded me of Richmond, Vancouver, near the international airport, on a lazy summer's day as we returned from or started on a journey: the endless freedom and the feeling of the grass and the sea and lots of homes and forests beyond, as the golden sun poured over everything. Also, the ocean near our grandfather's place on Vancouver Island in the evening, when everything was in its place: the people on the shore, the birds in their nests or twittering a last farewell to the day, the ships in the harbour, Opapa in his condominium with his fluffy slippers on his feet and listening to classical music, and the sea creatures like the crabs scuttling or resting beneath the sea. I was really happy to feel this feeling again.

It confirmed the sense I've had in the past months that I want to visit the familiar places in Canada again. (Even if one of my favourite things about Richmond — the endless chain of rusty-red CN freight trains passing under the highway along old-fashioned railroad tracks that reached from one end of the horizon across to the other — has vanished since we left Canada in 2006, replaced by another highway.) Now that I've saved more earnings than I had in 2018, I feel less nervous about travelling from a financial perspective, and I figure I can offset the CO2 emissions from my travel too.

*

Returning to Tempelhof Airfield, cycling is of course rather quicker and a lot more fun than walking in such a vast expanse of asphalt. Especially since I tend to go with my brothers — who are more long-legged and also more ambitious than I am, and enjoy going on long circuits around the park, while I try not to whine or feel sorry for myself and in the end do enjoy it in a mildly footsore sort of way. It is lovely that I have my own bicycle now; and I felt like the monarch of all I surveyed, the lord of the scene and the route.

A Battle of Capital Against Idealism

Lately I haven't been inclined to diarize much. Probably many people know the mood where either examining one's own feelings or thoughts feels like opening a scab that should heal; or the only thing that could come out is a poison that would be boring and fruitless for others to read.

Generally I'd say there's not much to complain about.

But I've settled down to a rather self-centered and likely unfulfilled material life. While what I say or do is mostly reasonably conscientious, it is somewhat 'going through the motions'. The true source of kindness (the 'charity' of the Corinthians) i.e. the wellspring of happiness and willingness to share it with others, is drying up a little.

For work I am also conflicted specifically. A few things are great. But I've also begun to feel that whatever tools I have in terms of talent, thought, and dedication, are beginning to be used to the wrong ends at work. Ever since the confusion surrounding the short-term work contracts for my team, I've also never entirely stopped feeling bitter and disillusioned. It isn't intentional, but it is just the result of something that I guess in biblical terms would be called the 'iron entering my soul.'

If I still felt that the wellbeing of my colleagues and me were the most important thing in the company, and seen as such by everyone, it wouldn't be so hard. But now it seems to me that whatever the project of the moment happens to be, is seen as more important. Since it's not a large-scale life-saving operation or a grand scheme to improve the future of the world, I find that morally degrading and logically disproportionate.

That isn't meant to 'knock' the company I work at, because there is a lot to admire.

But I'll have to bring up the goody-two-shoes quotation from George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another." I am not my colleagues and I do have my own thresholds and measurements. I was able to work even beyond my strength for five years because it went toward what I feel is a good aim. But I've hit a few lows since then because I've begun to feel doubt: I was downcast for example on my 5-year anniversary: getting celebratory messages just as I felt that work was making me so unhappy I might need to leave it but I don't know where to go, was pretty painful. I need to figure out the moral problem — what good can I still do? what good am I giving up by still being in the company? — or instead just understand if my reasoning is being misled by burnout.

I want us to incrementally work toward things that are good for the human and natural environment, but I also want us to be very truthful about the obstacles that impede us, how many benefits there will truly be, and the fact that we might not be all that important — nor do we have to be.

And, to be honest, I'm enough of a socialist(?) to also just value a living wage for my colleagues and me. Even more, for the sake of my family, and for the sake of the industries and organizations and individuals whom I'm now able to help finance thanks to the wage. A bonus is that it's enough of an income to also do job training or learn things, and that it comes with affordable health care. I think these are the building blocks of human dignity and everything that contributes to quality of life. But the added sum beyond that seems like a buffer that will help with expensive end-of-life care (or, optimistically speaking, university tuition — but only for others, since I am thankful every day I am no longer in academia) for others or for me in future, but not really something I need right now.

This broader ecological goal and the simple fact of seeing people being paid fairly for the services they offer, not 'raising x metric by 30% by quarter y,' is to me a worthy Platonic ideal.

And I still like the basic integrity of the simplest fiscal transaction: a client offers money that is proportionate for a service you can provide with integrity and ethics, and you do your best to earn it.

If that motivation fails, I don't want to explode or really begin to distrust people as Papa did when one of his workplaces went sour. But I'm just wondering how far to go down that road before I bail out.

In between I'm quite happy, but in the 'down' moods... Being unemployed in my twenties was awful — I felt so uncomfortable about meeting anyone outside my own household when I wasn't able to answer the question 'what do you do?' that I really despaired — so that I can barely face the thought of being between jobs again.

I also have to consider my work team and that is, alongside my mental health (although, again, it's a little hard to balance one misery against another), a strong argument for staying. — Not because the teammates can't do without me, but because I've pledged them a service and can only in fairness withdraw it when they no longer find me that useful. And I've had enough valuable relationships to appreciate thoroughly Cordelia's analogy in King Lear: some people in your life are like salt — life is livable (if we ignore for the moment the necessity of sodium for the functioning of the nervous system) without them... but it is never the same and you feel the difference daily. And in the end I just feel that I am going to stick it out, but — again — I need to figure out how to do it without feeling my soul withering day after day.

***

In some moods it reads a little whiny; but I might as well quote some Wordsworth , learned during my school days, to finish:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. 

1918 Rations and Nicer Subjects

My mother didn't break off her walking tour after all! Yesterday, to our delight she finished the first, nine-day stage of the journey from Berlin to Leipzig, took a bus, and returned to grace us with her presence. And this morning we all woke up early (before 9 o'clock, practically unheard of on a weekend!), ate bread rolls and croissants, drank coffee, and talked.

Last evening I'd read that food rations were introduced in the UK in 1918. So for the sake of my history experiment I'd weighed out my day's ration of sugar, butter and tea into little teacups and a saucer that I lined up at my spot at the breakfast table, and resolved to buy a package of bacon. Besides eating an ahistorical croissant this morning, I therefore made porridge, regretfully using water instead of milk, and used a little of the sugar ration to redeem the thin taste.

After tidying the kitchen, and taking out the compost and the regular garbage into the heating atmosphere (it was 24 degrees Celsius or thereabouts at first, reaching apparently toward 30 degrees later in the day) of the courtyard, I went grocery-shopping. Since rations were distributed, apparently, more in shops than in markets, I visited the littler organic food store near our apartment building.

I bought red currants, a melon with lovely deeper green flesh, apricots, early potatoes and carrots there, as my 'civilian ration.' Then I went to a larger organic food store to buy bacon for my 'civilian ration', but also two tins of gulash soup to approximate the tinned beef and turnip and carrot soup that British soldiers would receive, and the only whole grain salty biscuits I could find, to approximate army biscuits.

For lunch, then, I grated the carrots and added celery for a cold salad; boiled the potatoes; fried the bacon using a fraction of my butter ration; and heated the tinned soup. After the soup had boiled, I crumbled the biscuits into items portion, my main complaint being that it was over-salted. For reasons of frugality, I fried most of the potatoes in the remaining bacon grease and they became crispy and flavourful. Besides I mixed cocoa with a little sugar and poured boiling water on it, in imitation of a soldier's ration.

Feeling well fed especially considering what a hot day it was, I also enjoyed talking with my mother and brothers and sister, who had come over bearing gifts: After Eights that had melded together into a semi-solid and intriguing mass, Cola gummies sprinkled with sugar, and orange-marmalade-filled Jaffa cakes. All anachronistic, especially considering that luxury chocolates were banned during 1918, but I did take an After Eight even before my experiment had ended.

A while after T. left again, we had a teatime of coffee, melon, leftover bread rolls, and further conversation.

And, for the sake of my mother's birthday, we ate an anachronistic pound cake. (I ate it with my rum ration, which to be honest I'd rather looked forward to.)

Besides I read part of the Berliner Zeitung, kept knitting my second sock — I am at least 3.5 inches into it — and read books. The Death of Vivek Oji, part of my aunt's gift of a book subscription, is finished. I also read The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck. Reeling from the disturbing themes of women deprived of authority over their own reproduction, predators, forcible confinement and vigilante justice, I realized that I might be overthinking things, or that a few of Beatrix Potter's books are arguably far more child-friendly than adult-friendly. In terms of other children's authors of her time, L. Frank Baum was still publishing Wizard of Oz books in the 1910s; I might read one or two of them after Beatrix Potter, but frankly expect similar 'surprises.'

At 7:30 p.m., I'd finished my 1910s experiment for today, and watched the television news: Not-so-good news: heavy rain is forecast, a little perturbing in view of the recent deadly flooding in western Germany, but not expected to be anywhere near as severe. Good news: the first 'real' Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin since before the coronavirus pandemic took place today.

My First Vaccination at a Bicycle Track

Today it is 1917 according to my time travel experiment. But it is evidently depressing to pretend that extensive battles are going on everywhere from France to Iraq, that the German parliament and a huge (hushed-up) mutiny of French soldiers and pleas from Allied soldiers have all proposed peace or a change in strategy because they were starting to feel that the war was a needless brutality (but in vain), that every food or personnel shipment from overseas is one that managed not to be sunk by a mine or a submarine's torpedo, etc.

So I haven't observed it much — except by knitting more of my second sock, reading a book set in WWI, taking care of correspondence, and cooking a more-or-less historically accurate lunch of rice with a tomato soup composed of leftover leeks, a purple onion, celery stalks, herbs, a regular tin of tuna and a large tin of tomatoes. And I'm beginning to meditate, influenced by a gruesome book by a hospital assistant during WWI that details how soldiers lay around wounded for days unable to help themselves, then turned up in hospital beds with limbs rotted off or ruptured intestines pumping out feces, that I might become at least 95% pacifist.

Back in 2021, my mother has broken off a days-long walking trip because the rural areas of Brandenburg are not really equipped for pedestrians or travellers, and places she could stay or rest in are often closed. My brother Ge. is set to pick her up from Treuenbrietzen (what an elaborate name!) tomorrow morning. I'm sad because she has sounded so exhausted and dismayed. But I'm happy to see her again soon, and hopeful that this trial-and-error will help grow ideas and plans for more rewarding adventures in future.

Another big event today was cycling off to the east of the city to get a vaccination in one of the large centres that have been set up in Berlin. It's a velodrome with an indoor bicycle track that looks even more dangerous up close; and I realized I'd seen it before without knowing what it was. From the streets around it, you can see bare concrete steps that look like an urban park feature. Sunk into it, like one of the enigmatic Ethiopian churches that are built like a cross in the ground, is the oval of the velodrome itself. A trickle of vaccinees was walking out or rolling along in a wheelchair, and an elderly man with the straight bearing of a dignified train conductor and a yellow hi-visibility vest lifted a bar so that I could pass through the security barrier.

I was quite late, tangled in the network of streets at the Volkspark Friedrichshain, already wincing when I heard a church tolling the noon hour and then eventually stopping. But I managed to find the entrance down into the bowels of the velodrome, then carried my bicycle up a few flights of stairs again to secure it, then returned to the entrance of the vaccination centre. It is being staffed largely by volunteers with the Johanniter charity (who kindly reassured me that it was fine that I was late), a medical charity a little like a domestic German version of the Red Cross; but soldiers in camouflage were also guarding the parkade.

After I poured disinfectant on my hands at a lotion dispenser, an older lady with her grey/white hair in a short bob scanned me with a fever-detecting gun at a collarbone. She told me it wouldn't hurt, reassuringly; and instantly the machine gave what must have been the good kind of beep because I was waved through. The three staff members at the next station, which looked rather like a display table at a telecommunications shop, required me to present my vaccine reservation QR code. After that I advanced to a wooden table two tall and burly security men, also in fluorescent vests, asked me to display the interior of my bag. In my view, all this security is probably a great idea.

At the end of a long corridor, also staffed by a few standing people, I was directed me through to two young women, who pointed me to a rather dystopian waiting area where black chairs were placed at least 1.5 m apart on red dots, and we all sat in a sort of sad pretend bus with a Johanniter volunteer and a television screen at the front.

Then I was gestured to the front, after the closer seats in the 'bus' had emptied, and pointed toward cubicles where another young woman led me to a plate-glass-covered booth. A woman volunteer in her 50s or thereabouts, sitting there and tapping at her computer now and then, took time to set me at ease as she looked through my vaccination booklet (still from 1985, it lists all the vaccinations I received as a baby and toddler), my identification card, as well as the information and consent forms I'd printed out and signed at home.

She gave me back a clipboard with all my documents attached, and then a few steps further a cluster of orange-vested teenagers directed me to a curtained cubicle area where a soldier (also in camouflage) waited to conduct me through to Cubicle 15.

After I'd sat down on the black pleather chair and put my things on the ground, a white-frocked doctor with blonde hair in a tight, short ponytail came in and cheerfully asked me to get settled in. Smiling through her eyes above the FPP-2 mask, and altogether giving me the impression that I was a rather tall child at a pediatrician's, she looked through my papers.

She confirmed with me that I didn't have an immune disorder, didn't have blood clotting problems, and wasn't taking medication, with surprised pleasure. Then she listed the statistics of vaccine effectivity (86 to 96% after the second vaccination, or something to that effect) and advice for handling side effects.

When I asked if drinking a lot of water staves off side effects, as I'd heard, she laughed a bit. She said that resting (and, if needed, paracetamol or ibuprofen) would help more, but one shouldn't rule out the placebo effect.

In the meantime, the soldier (with whom she was on formal, Sie-zing terms) was arranging my paperwork. Then the doctor asked me if I was left-handed, ambidextrous or right-handed, and prepared to vaccinate the non-leading arm; asked me if I had a needle or vaccination phobia, whereat I said no; I rolled up the sleeve, and after spreading disinfectant spray on the site, she injected. After putting a little pad over it, she added a bandaid.

She let me know that I'd be staying for 15 more minutes to be observed, smiled, and swept out past the curtain again. The soldier stood there while I put away my stamped immunization booklet, and I felt awkward under the impression that he'd literally have to hover there for the next 15 minutes making sure I didn't keel over.

To make conversation, I asked, 'So, I hear it's been pretty quiet today?'

He picked up the conversational gambit after a pause of surprise and generally agreed. 'Alles nicht so wild,' he concluded, using a German expression I've heard often in the past few days.

After that, he pointed out, 'I'll be bringing you to a waiting area.' Then I realized, with an internal groan, two things: 1. that my question had been badly phrased and therefore sounded especially sensation-hungry (I was intending to confirm if there were fewer people, not really intending ask if anything 'exciting' had happened e.g. a dedicated anti-vaxxer had burst their bonds and hollered 'Vaccines are murder!' until the police showed up). Also 2. he was just waiting for me to pack up, not at all desperate for conversation to help pass the time.

After a short walk with him, I landed at an outer corner of the velodrome. A blue-vested volunteer kindly handed me a plastic cup of cold water, and directed me to wait in a chair until the clock on the cubicles pointed at 12:45. There were more black chairs, equidistant, with around 20 other people of all ages sitting there, not keeling over, as volunteers walked back and forth in a sort of patrol amongst us. The tall, steep curve of the blond bicycle track rose in front, empty spectator seats looming in dark grey at the back; metal framework bars hung low from the ceiling and I could see the skeleton of the roof. Information banners advertised the involvement of the Johanniter and the city of Berlin in setting up the immunization centre. I think there were a few indoor plants and more curtains for ambience.

After 15 minutes of limbo, I waited an extra half minute or so just to be safe; then ambled out past a few more soldiers in camouflage, past a First Aid station, and past a volunteer, past desks where people who were having their second immunizations were meant to check more paperwork; and reached the outer perimeter of the Velodrome again, whose parkade's and staircases' bare aesthetic I didn't dislike as such but which — let's say — would have rejoiced the utilitarian senses of a 1930s architect.

I found and unlocked my bicycle. Before taking off, I took a 'selfie' of my face and arm to send to my sister T. and brother Gi. to let them know I'd been immunized and was on my way home — quite aware that if I were watching myself as a stranger, I'd probably be rolling my eyes at the narcissism.

Then I pedaled off (at first in the wrong direction) into the bright sunlight and the soulless heart of Mitte. Twice I met the same police motorcade + car demonstration of Falun Gong supporters. But then I was finally home and — besides drinking a lot of water because the weather felt so warm — ate a nice bowl of Neapolitan ice cream ... before remembering that a nice bowl of ice cream wasn't very 1917.

A Time-Travel Saturday in 1915

It has been a nice, sunny, market-going day, although the warmth and a hint of humidity have spread profuse eau de garbage into the air.

Landing in the year 1915 of the historical experiments on Saturdays, I started by tidying the kitchen, and then gradually the rest of the family woke up; we ate croissants and bread rolls, drank coffee, and had a long conversation about matters political and other, as usual.

Then I finished dusting shoes that stand in our hallway, but aren't used very often.

I went to the Winterfeldtplatz market again. Peaches, cherries, apricots, figs, and other high summer fruits were piling on the tables, alongside the artichokes and potatoes etc.. I bought red beets, potatoes, a fennel bulb, kohlrabi, English cucumbers, lemons, and eggs, before returning home fairly soon.

Because I lacked corned beef for the planned lunch or dinner of corned beef hash, and didn't want to eat anything heavy anyway, I was happy that T. had taken the initiative and ordered food for us. So we ate dumplings with pork, chicken, ginger, scallions, carrots, peas, and prawns. Then we had Belgian waffles with Spekulatius cream, cherries, and other fillings. I did mental gymnastics, arguing inwardly that dumplings are also British. Even if they're not mentioned in (m)any of the Edwardian cookbooks I've been skimming through.

Then T. and the others watched videos about Japanese cheesecake, the British government system, and the pros and cons of playing in a classical music orchestra on YouTube, in the living room. I listened in, pretending it was the radio, while I re-knitted the sock that I've already attempted to knit twice and had to unravel twice.

After 5 p.m. I prepared lemon curd, scones, and a rooibos-and-papaya tea for teatime. Sadly, T. had already departed and could not partake. Blueberries and strawberries were left over from Mama's breakfast purchases, so we ate those too.

*

Then I began reading an old Merck's Manual: the articles about tetanus, trench fever, and trench foot, which all felt relevant to WWI. Reading about gruesome medical conditions for reasons of curiosity felt flippant, however, and so I stopped.

After reading the detailed and informative Diary of a nursing sister on the western front, 1914-1915 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1915) in the Internet Archive, I have the impression that a lot of lives were wasted not just due to bullets and shells.

When trains arrived from the front for her French hospital, the author writes:

One [soldier] told me he was wounded on Tuesday—was one day in a hospital, and then travelling till to-day, Saturday. No wonder their wounds are full of straw and grass. (Haven’t heard of any more tetanus.) Most haven’t had their clothes off, or washed, for three weeks, except face and hands.

After fighting around Rheims, it was an even more extreme situation:

The train I was put to had 510 cases. [… T]he men were lying on straw; had been in trains for several days; most had only been dressed once, and many were gangrenous.

It's sad to think — although I might be ignorant and unfair by saying so; the nurse certainly doesn't say it — that maybe a salt solution or alcohol might, if applied right after the injury, have prevented infection. Later, I think that liquid oxygen was also used. Or that the trains could have been cleaner. Maybe far fewer people would have died.

I was wondering how a government official could look a bereaved person in the eye, knowing that their relative or friend died because they didn't receive proper care that the government should have organized.

In the meantime it looks, based on an old British Pathé film, as if English stretcher-bearers on the battlefield were taught to wrap a bandage around the wound as it was, tie together the limbs, and lift them onto a stretcher for transportation — that was all.

The Diary reveals that the nurse had tended English soldiers during the Boer War in the late 1890s/early 1900s. She writes that shelling in the Western Front during WWI did far worse damage to the human body than the Mauser bullets in South Africa.

*

At nighttime, in 1915, Britons used 'black-out curtains' to block the light from their windows so that their homes could not be targeted from the air. Per my notes from the Further Back in Time for Dinner television series: 'Zeppelin air raids killed 2,000 people in the southern UK.' I'd feel disrespectful if I played at being potentially air-bombed, however, and I wouldn't have educated anyone by doing so (unlike the TV series). So I left my curtains and windows as they are.

The Lusitania also sank that year and nurse Edith Cavell was executed for helping soldiers escape the German occupiers in Belgium, according to a British Pathé retrospective. It led, as a side effect, to anti-German vandalism in England: windows of German-owned businesses were smashed.

Walking out from the market I reflected that in a better parallel to the war years, I would need to volunteer for social service in my community. It seems like a good thought in general, but there's no way I'd do that for the mere sake of experimentation. So in the end, today has been enjoyably selfish and relaxing. Chatting with the family and looking at the flowers outdoors makes me unsurprisingly, while knitting socks makes me surprisingly, happy.

Sweden vs. Ukraine: UEFA Soccer Liveblog, of Sorts

10:39 p.m. It is nearing the end of the standard 90 minutes of the game in the Glasgow stadium where Ukraine and Sweden are playing.

Yellow card given for a Swedish player who had the gall to swing back his arm in order to run forward, and then accidentally hit the side of a Ukraine player's head. The ARD channel commentators are also perplexed that the price was so steep.

10:41 p.m. The score being 1:1, by the way.

10:42 p.m. A pretty good 'what the hell' cringe from a Ukrainian player who's wondering whom to toss in the ball to, from the sidelines.

10:44 p.m. Swedish player thinking that narrowly failing to score a goal is a great opportunity to have a little lie-down on the grass.

10:47 p.m. As the score is still 1:1, we will see half an hour of extended time.

10:55 p.m. It looks like the exhausted players are being traded out one by one.

11 p.m. A Swedish player lunges with his foot for the ball and unfortunately rams his shoe with cleats into the leg of a Ukrainian player, who is being medically treated. For technical reasons the Swedish player is sent off with a red card: it was such a dangerous move, no matter how innocent the intention.

11:07 p.m. Swedish player accidentally slammed in the head with the ball at a short distance, more medical intervention.

The Ukraine coach was also comforting the player whose leg was badly injured, who has been hobbling about with a huge bandaged pack, supported by two medical attendants.

What a grim game...

11:10 p.m. Another injury, with a player clutching his ankle...

11:20 p.m. I still think the sportsmanship is pretty excellent; players were consoling and caring for each other when they were injured. Here comes a medical team, onto the field, again, as two players fell on top of each other...

11:29 p.m. Ukraine player looks like he's in severe pain but it's not clear what happened to him...

11:30 p.m. Ukraine 1, Sweden 0. A quick ball that was whizzingly head-butted into goal.

11:32 p.m. And it (nearly) ends, fittingly, with another apparent injury, as a Ukrainian player clutches his forehead.

A Journey to 1914: The History Experiment Enters the War Years

Yesterday I reached the year 1914 in my historical experiment. Like anyone who 'time-travels' to the 1910s, there was a dread of World War I — which of course started that year. It was not very cheerful to read via Wikipedia how well prepared countries were to fight the war, or so it seemed: economic measures, military measures, propaganda measures etc. swung into place as if governments had been looking forward to this for a while.

But my experiment was mostly pacific. After tidying the kitchen (and travelling forward in time to do a little 21st-century weekend work), my family and I ate breakfast.

I had the Neue Züricher Zeitung beside my plate, which I'd bought in the Bergmannstraße two weeks ago, and read excerpts of articles — which had an FDP-esque appearance to my half-German eyes — about how little Switzerland is being brutally intimidated by the economic colossi of the world. Papa read its articles online in the early 2000s and maybe later; I presume its editorial politics were less silly-sounding then. Either way, at least it wasn't war news, which would have been a daily obsession once the fighting began in 1914.

I didn't have a pile of paper correspondence to sort through and chat about with the family during and after breakfast, which feels to me like a more early 20th century thing to do and which probably should have been built into the experiment earlier. Instead I checked Facebook, Gmail, Discord and LinkedIn, wrote an email, and filed away a few paper bank statements. Besides I read bits of books, including Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mrs. Moppet.

It was after 1 p.m. when I went shopping at the Turkish street market. It looks like the earliest peaches have arrived; mountains of cherries as well, tons of grapes and watermelons, bell peppers and pepperoni, tomatoes that were being sold cheaply at 2 Euros per carton, etc. What I'm still missing is fresh corn that can be made into corn chowder — which however may be more of an American than a British dish at any point in time.

It isn't clear to me when food restrictions began in Britain during World War I. Panic-buying and hoarding did happen early, according to the Further Back In Time for Dinner television series. But after experiencing and heartily disliking hoarding in 'real life' last year due to Covid-19, it feels needless to emulate that horrid phenomenon again. So while I resisted the temptation of buying fruit that was likely to have been imported to the UK in 1914, I didn't hold back too much otherwise.

And, when I found a large, floppy-brimmed hat in black, blue and white stripes, which I felt matched the pleasantly opulent air of headgear in the early 1900s, I bought it.

For a second shopping trip, I made the rounds of the bank and the organic grocery store. At a knitting store I also bought two balls of sock-knitting yarn. In a 21st-century touch, all the shoppers in the store had to write down their name, address and telephone number for the shop's records, to help with potential Covid-19 contact tracing.

When I returned to the doorstep of our building, my sister T. came up as well. She had ordered burgers and fries on behalf of us all, and was now joining my two youngest brothers and my mother and me to eat lunch together in our apartment.

In the meantime, I was inspired by a few of the Edwardian fine dining menus I've seen, and prepared strawberries and prosecco for the family. I don't think prosecco would have been known much outside Italy in the 1910s; but the organic grocery store didn't have any 'true' champagne. In addition I'd bought lemon sorbet and a watermelon. 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die,' was the subliminal motto.

The burgers and fries themselves I didn't eat, for the sake of the experiment.

Instead, I began knitting a time-appropriate sock 'for the soldiers,' using a four-needle technique for the first time. It was pleasing on a trivial level to become accustomed to it, and I think that many Edwardian upper-middle-class women might have been in the same boat, acquiring new knitting or sewing skills yet not being terribly good at it. At the same time, reflecting on the historical context was not pleasing: the idea of all the men I know between the ages of 18 and 45 going off to war, and of sending them socks and hemmed bedsheets and cookies as a small comfort, was pretty sad.

For next week I'm trying to figure out what to do as 'women's war work' aside from knitting. Probably reading up on First Aid in lieu of nurse's training, or planting a miniature 'Victory Garden' on the windowsill, or beginning to hem bed linen?

Then, in the evening, I departed from the experiment not only by watching two soccer matches on the television and the computer, and by doing more 21st-century weekend work; but also by cycling to Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus to buy books.

Cleaning, Cycling, and Calming Down

This morning I woke up before 8 a.m., which is at least one and a half hours earlier than I'd usually manage on a Saturday. Everyone else was asleep, I closed the windows to shut in the cold night air and closed the curtains to block out the heat later in the day, and then I started a rather half-hearted semi-Edwardian routine. Working all day in the kitchen in 30+ degree weather, cooking, seemed like something no self-respecting Edwardian would have done except in rare circumstances.

Instead I hand-washed a few dishes that don't belong in the dishwasher, took out the compost and the regular garbage, scrubbed perhaps half of the floor in the kitchen, and in the end made a pot of black tea while my mother woke up and went to the bakery for our traditional weekend buns.

I also decided not to go to the market this week. Instead I went to the organic grocery store closer nearby, bought cucumber and tomatoes and iceberg lettuce for a salad, a cantaloupe, and ice cream etc. The ice cream was anachronistic, as nobody or almost nobody would have bought ice cream in a store and have had the facilities to keep it frozen; but we'd run out and I knew the family would appreciate it.

In the meantime I also read the Tale of the Very Bad Rabbit, which was an enjoyable installment of Beatrix Potter's oeuvre (The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher is probably my favourite so far). And then kept reading Weather by Jenny Offill, more of the index notes that keep me from officially saying that I've finished Barack Obama's A Promised Land, more of The Nickel Boys, and more of the essays in Apartheid.

At 3:40 p.m. I hopped onto my mother's bicycle (vowing yet again to get my own; I'm worried about breaking hers and also want to be more of a Strong and Independent Woman) and set off to a nearby park to meet one of my teammates. We circled around a long park, sunny and shadowy and not so terribly packed with people as the strong heat likely kept most people at home.

At least three wedding parties formed a festive assembly line waiting to be married at the town hall amongst the beer garden and the huge plane trees and the sparkling fountain. For once I didn't see any bocce ball players on the gravel terrain. White tents were pitched on the flowered green lawn to shelter others from the heat. Then children's parties were being celebrated further on in the park, with balloons and a happy profusion of people. (So much better than the peak-social-distancing wasteland.)

My sunscreen, helmet, and the tree leaves shielded me from sunburn; but I ran my arm under cold water when I returned just to make sure. More importantly it was tremendously nice and relaxing to meet the colleague again, outdoors with the air and light circulating healthily, without masks.

And I cut short my Edwardian experiment after 6 p.m., because I wanted to watch the Germany vs. Portugal soccer game. Maybe I am finally getting a life again — I've been so miserable lately that I know I have to change something — but I kind of doubt it. An article about legos (an ill-omened leitmotif in our company?) being a metaphor for workplace resources inspired me to flip out at work on Friday, perhaps because I'd already worked 8 hours of overtime that week; and while I know I have reason to be concerned about things, I'm still trying to find a better outlet for my feelings and just to let things go if I've given my honest opinion and it's not my responsibility to act further.