Time Travel of Sorts to 1901

In the past week I've taken to watching Supersizers Go..., Supersizers Eat... and Further Back in Time for Dinner, all educational British television series produced in the past 20 years that are about changing eating, interior decorating, leisure, and other social habits throughout history. Mostly British history, but also sometimes French or Roman. (In these series, hapless modern guinea pigs agree to dress, play, and eat for a few days by the mores and habits of a given decade or era. My sister once called it 'method history' as a nod to method acting.) To be virtueless but honest, watching entertaining videos is less stressful than reading good books.

I also managed to consistently get over 7 hours of sleep. Perhaps this is due to my changed relaxation habits or not; either way, despite working, in one case, until a few minutes before midnight, I feel a little better. That said, during the voice coaching on Friday evening, my voice wasn't where I left it the previous week; perhaps it was because of exhaustion, but in retrospect I'd probably accidentally eaten too little. A banana for breakfast, a bowl of lentils with butter for lunch, and a serving of potatoes with carrots for dinner, with milky coffee perhaps, is I suppose not really all that's needed before a brisk bicycle ride. So the voice coach kindly brought out chocolate and waited until I'd eaten it, worried I think that I was starving myself since I've grown considerably thinner lately (thanks to work stress, methinks). The chocolate and sugar at least restored some of the lower notes of my vocal range. Anyway, all of this can be filed under My Stupidity rather than under Unsafe Work Environment.

As a result of the Supersizers etc., a storm of experimentalism was brewing internally. Besides I had reached the point where I've spent so much time on a computer that I was absolutely satiated. The family failed to notice The Signs — perhaps they were too well hidden — but I showed up at breakfast more formally than usual, in a white button-up shirt I hadn't worn in over 1 year, and made the grand announcement that I would be living in the year 1901 for the rest of the day. To mildly mixed reactions! I'd done the research I needed before going to sleep, reading up on historical events and watching the splendid short black-and-white films you can find on YouTube to get an idea of clothing trends etc. The puff sleeves on women's blouses were definitely very aujourd'hui.

1901 Breakfast and Shopping

At breakfast I ate a tin of sardines with the bread rolls, as eating fish for breakfast seems to be a British Edwardian thing. It was so filling that it took me ages to finish it. After that, I spent a heinous (from my perspective) amount of time handwashing the dishes that don't belong in the dishwasher. Then I read one or two articles in the Berliner Zeitung to reflect the fact that all of the news would have come from print newspapers 'back in the day.'

Then I went to a street market for groceries, as market-going was far more historically accurate than going to a supermarket (popularized in the 1960s).

I like the limited social interaction of shopping in a supermarket. Almost everyone is a stranger, I make only the briefest of conversations with the cashier — it's not clear to me why I find this less awkward, but likely it is because the time pressure encourages laconic interactions — and I avoid the meat, fish and cheese counters like the plague.

But the market was fun, after all, this time. The last time I went there to shop was for a 'living in the 1950s' experiment in 2015.

It's oriented toward the German-Turkish community and you can hear Turkish-accented German where the male sellers shout '1 Kilo Orangen - 1 Euro!' etc. at passersby, and there's more a sense of social curiosity and exchange because people actually want to interact. People stream in, then stream out again with white and salmon-red plastic shopping bags. Crates and pallets and flattened cardboard boxes are piled helter-skelter around a periphery of delivery vans — and there's seemingly always a tattered cauliflower leaf or a fallen banana or some kind of produce afterthought there like a diamond in the rough — parked cars of people who live nearby, and dumpsters to take the waste.

It reflects the way in which grocery shopping probably works for a lot of people everywhere else in the world, whether in China and Vietnam, or Indonesia, Ghana or Nigeria, Iraq or Syria or Turkey, and makes me very slightly expand my mental horizons beyond British Columbian and supermarket-going-Berliner customs. And I guess that because of Covid I've learned to better appreciate the worth of mass chaos that otherwise I'd find intimidating and kind of hate — Christmas markets if they are too crowded and Reunification Day events on Berlin's Straße des 17. Juni etc. give me the heebie-jeebies.

Today, seasonal spring and unseasonal summer produce like fresh herbs, green beans, spinach, oblong cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, lettuces, huge dandelion greens, strawberries, mushrooms, lemons, purple grapes, garlic bulbs, etc. etc. were stacked and heaped on the wooden market tables in most of the stalls, with the cash registers and plastic bag supplies and electronic scales and sellers tucked behind. (The flower stall did have tons of tulips.) At last I found the fennel bulbs I wanted, after worrying that they weren't there.

We were wearing flat surgical or bulging FFP face masks. This time I saw more guards than I remembered the other times I'd passed through the market. They were clad in fluorescent yellow safety vests and likely were tasked to enforce anti-Covid safety regulations; they seemed pretty vigilant. Two police officers from the 'Ordnungsamt' were also strolling around in a circuit, talking to each other.

Altogether the best part of entering the 1901 'headspace', every now and then today, was that these times were Covid-19-free. Mama astutely pointed out, however, that there was no shortage of epidemics in the early 1900s.

Anyway, after finding oranges and fennel bulbs, I went on to get twigs from a florist's: now that florists' shops are open again and spring is coming, I am on a major flower kick.

1901 Promenade and Lunch

When I returned, hot and frankly perspiring after an extra wild goose chase in a warm sweater in balmy spring weather, I was a little taken back when Ge. suggested walking to Tempelhofer Feld with him and J. But I agreed, since walking around the city in a park on a weekend for over an hour seemed a very 1901 thing to do.

Sheep-like billows of white summer cloud were wandering along in a beautiful, intense blue sky at that point, and at the same time the excessive warmth was gone. I was glad about the weather, but wasn't feeling 100% strong and was glad that I'd eaten the breakfast sardines after all, since eventually they'd fortify me.

We walked onto the field; a dark grey cloud mass (spires and tufts at different levels building a gloomy palace of sorts) that resembled the skies of Kansas shortly before Dorothy Gale was transported to the land of Oz was gathering over the former airport terminal. I observed and yet did not draw conclusions.

But a wind kicked up. Ge. was suggesting that I put on the raincoat I'd draped over my arm. I had just pish-poshed that when the first hard little bullets of hail began to drill into our faces.

I wrestled into the coat, the wind flapping it away from me as Ge. documented the photographic evidence on his inconveniently handy smartphone. The flapping and the wind itself was so loud it was hard to hear each other even when we shouted. As we kept walking, the cold precipitation melted onto the back of our trouser legs, plastering the fabric to the skin. On one of the main former runways, we saw gusts of hazy white hail, like the foam on ocean waves.

Everyone seemed to look as beleaguered as we felt except for our new hero: a jogger. The hail was biting his face and his bare legs too; he was only wearing a red sweatshirt and loose athletic shorts. But he was as steadily and easily proceeding along the walkways as if it were a warm summer morning, the hard asphalt were gentle turf, and buttercups and rosebushes were glowing at him from the hedgerows.

After I returned home, our clothing had partly dried but I was glad to change it. I made hot cocoa for everyone and one of the brothers brewed coffee, to warm us up. Cocoa butter is my new 'secret' ingredient — stolen from a recipe for white hot chocolate by Kirsten Buck — when it comes to making hot chocolate, as it makes any warm or hot milk taste more satisfyingly rich; that said, the tub I found is so expensive I wouldn't necessarily be eager to buy more.

Then I prepared a dinner that turned into a supper due to the late hour. The menu was steamed fennel bulbs with browned butter, rice, boiled eggs, and crudités of celery, fennel stalk and cherry tomatoes. This was much lighter than a true Edwardian meal often seems to have been, and I'm afraid I cheated and used electric scales. But these dishes fit with the cookbooks published in 1901 that I'd browsed in the Internet Archive. I brought out a bottle of white wine to drink with the meal, and (mandarin - probably less period-authentic) oranges for dessert.

To make the meal fancier and more period-appropriate, I set the table with plates, knives and forks, and set out napkins and wine-glasses.

I was the only one interested in trying out a finger bowl. I put two slivers of lemon peel into water in a shot glass. After the meal it really was nice to dip my fingers into it and then wipe them on my napkin so that they'd feel less greasy. It was like the steaming lemon-scented washcloths that flight attendants sometimes pass around to airplane passengers. Ge. kept telling me that it was anachronistic, poor etiquette for me to comment on using the finger bowl during the supper — along the lines of 'OK! I'm trying the finger bowl now!' and he was probably right.

In between cooking I read bits of a book and played the piano. As Ge. noted a little snidely (but very fairly!), the music I play is likely period-appropriate anyway. In the end I went for one and a half Chopin waltzes, 2 ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin, and the third movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata. I spotted a collection of Edith Piaf's greatest hits lying at the side of the music rack and thought triumphantly, on the thin basis of playing two of the piano arrangements sometimes, 'Aha! That's definitely not older than 1901.' But of course that's still not evidence that my musical tastes are hip.

1901 Evening

That said, the time after dinner was The Worst. I'd re-read the first chapter of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn earlier that day, read the first chapter of Henry James's The Europeans for the first time, and also read more of the end notes of Barack Obama's A Promised Land, the end of an essay on the militarization of the apartheid-era South African government, and the first chapter of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys. And I read more of Elle Germany.

But, in a disappointing departure from the 1950s experiment, my 1901 experiment shut me out from watching television or even listening to the radio. I was going to read the beginning of a book by Nietzsche (reluctantly, but for historical verisimilitude because his Superman ideas were apparently very 'in' at the time). I hoped that I'd feel more like reading if it had a philosophical element, even better a philosophical element I disagreed with wholeheartedly and that would inspire rage that would make me less sleepy. But my mother kept telling me to turn on another lamp because the light was too dim, and so I thought that rather than give in and do what would probably seem logical to most people, I'd prefer to stop reading and do something else in that case. It was a polite dispute with no real heat, but at that point I just realized in general that I was dangerously bored.

Knitting or sewing would have been an option, although the sewing I didn't think of until it was too late. The scarf I'm knitting has now been dedicated to passing the time during work video calls, however. (A teammate pointed out that multitasking during meetings had made me absentminded and prone to asking for questions to be repeated, and so I've tried to restrain myself by filling my hands with knitting needles and wool.) So I didn't work more on it.

Besides I suspect I have a heady internet addiction after all, and a little online time-wasting really is just the thing when my brain tells me it wants to go on holiday for the rest of the day. So at around 8:30 p.m. I gave in, pressed the Power button on my computer, exchanged my button-up blouse for a 21st-century hoodie (now that was a gratifying feeling), and ever since then have been typing madly to create this blog post.

Covid, Toil, and Breakfast

 On Friday evening I succumbed again to a mistake I'd made last fall, which is sitting in a cold room, developing a mildly snuffly nose and sore throat because of the atmospheric conditions, and then worrying that I'd caught the coronavirus after all. I also had the feeling of not having strength in my legs that I'm reasonably familiar with and had presumed is either a pre-diabetic thing or a symptom of stress or blood pressure problems.

After getting a good night's sleep, I realized that the day before I'd gone on two brisk bicycle rides without the slightest symptoms of shortness of breath, so it was probably wrong to suspect Covid. But to make the rest of the family feel more at ease, and because on top of all the other nonsense lately I did not want to self-quarantine, I went to the pharmacy and bought a coronavirus self-test for 9.95 Euros. I read through the instructions a few times before going through the steps, then waited 15 minutes as recommended for the results, and only got one line on the test strip: the control bar.

Now that I've finally been tested for Covid-19 in one form or another, I feel morbidly trendy.

Later in the day I made potato cakes to go with a less-full Irish breakfast: baked sausage and potato cakes, along with a fried egg, bacon, and tomatoes. As we did not have Guinness, I committed a diplomatic faux pas, and set up water for a more British pot of tea. It was a belated nod to St. Patrick's Day, earlier in the week.

*

In general I don't feel so great.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I'd put in ~4 hours each of overtime, toiling away with a few breaks until 11 p.m. or 12 a.m.

On Thursday I reserved a half day off, which turned into more of a quarter day off...

And I put in overtime yesterday.

But it's all small peas and I'm reasonably hopeful that matters will improve. Two new teammates will join and, for the first two months at least, will reduce my team's severe short-staffing.

I will also need to schedule a pep talk for my team on Monday. The company was bought up just last week, and I want to reassure them that we'll still be valued and employed in the new company order.

*

Today I woke up at 11 a.m., as the church bells were tolling after the morning service. The streets were relatively empty; the sky was grey. Mama popped out to fetch croissants, Schrippen, and other bread buns from the bakery. When she returned, Ge. had begun to grind beans for our morning coffee. And then we had a 2 hour breakfast where we talked about politics and so on.

Three of us then adjourned to the corner room. There Ge. read the Berliner Zeitung and Mama dove further into an academic book about the Visigoths etc., and I leafed through the April issue of Elle Germany and extracted a perfume sample.

Right now I'm about to prepare a batch of boxty, to take up the household trend of Irish cookery again. And I might play the second movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata on the piano, since like vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her far-ranging taste in newspapers, I am taking a completist approach to his later sonatas and trying to play 'all of them.' And J. is playing his mandolin repertoire: a tarantella by Saint-Saëns that does drive us slightly nuts, as a tarantella should; and Baroque pieces by Bach and Vivaldi.

Spring Tempests, Canadian Book Competitions, Etc.

It's a changeful spring day, after a changeful spring week.

Yesterday I was riding my mother's bicycle around Alexanderplatz, minutes after a hailstorm. A grey cloud front barred the sky in front of me, but a huge rainbow with colours straight out of a picture book was arcing across it, and after a while a pale outer rainbow appeared too. In the distance the sun shone brightly, however, on a modern apartment or office tower. And then a minute or two later the sky cleared, white summery clouds heaped in an otherwise clear blue sky, as wispier clouds zipped by at a lower altitude, and a jet streamed its trails.

The crocuses are out — pale autumn crocuses with white stems like fondant and lilac-purple blossoms in the lawns of the Karl-Marx-Allee, deep purple and golden elsewhere. But the last snowdrops, a few of them thriving but a few of them looking as if a passerby dog had gnawed at them, and bleached yellow winter aconites are lingering. The flower buds are thronging on the Oregon grape bushes, but mostly haven't burst open yet, and the lilac leaves and forsythia flowers are (depending on how much wind shelter they have where they're growing) beginning to emerge. Last year's vegetation is still, however, incredibly dead — there's little green undergrowth, likely due to the deep frosts.

*

From a human perspective, I feel that these are uneasy times. I don't feel happy that coronavirus infection rates are rising again in Berlin and in Germany at large. It was nicer when one could feel that there were fewer unnecessary deaths, fewer people offering the lives of others to their own stubbornly stupid impulses.

But the vaccination programme is proceeding; over 7% of Berlin's population has received a single vaccine or more, and half of those have received two doses.

*

Last week I followed this year's Canada Reads competition, in which five Canadian public figures debated five different books by Canadian authors over four days, on television, and at the end one book was declared the winner.

The jurors this year were an actor-director, television actor, chef/musician, Olympic athlete turned radio broadcaster, and a songwriter.

Butter Honey Pig Bread, I'd already almost finished reading before the competition broadcast began. It's a magical realist family novel from 2020, by the debut author Francesca Ekwuyasi.

Its main characters are three women who were born in Nigeria: a mother and twin daughters. The mother is an ogbanje, or 'witch,' who is always torn between her real-life existence and the demands of her Kin, the spirits who torment her in a weirdly comforting analogy of mental illness. Her daughters have a little of her magic, but mostly live like everybody else. They move to London and Canada and Paris and other places, going apart due to a horrible event, but try to find each other again in Nigeria, where their mother has settled.

I found the book good — I told Mama that it was like a cross between Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I felt that some things that I hadn't liked in the two other authors I did like here. (For example, Adichie's sex scenes always made me feel like I was searching through a stranger's underwear drawers, whereas Ekwuyasi's feel much less voyeuristic.) But I don't know if I'd want to reread the book; the themes of death, mental illness, etc., although well handled, were heavy.

Jonny Appleseed was published a year earlier, in 2019. Writing in an engaging, mercurial style, the author Joshua Whitehead represents the life of a young Indigenous man who grows up on a reservation. He returns to the reservation for the funeral of his stepfather. Jonny is gay and proud of it; and he refuses to feel guilty about making his living from sex work. That said, I only read the earliest chapters, so my summary of the plot might be wrong.

Regarding style, I'm not sure if every reader would pick up on pop culture references like Grindr, or Indigenous cultural references like the word kokum for grandmother. I also felt that Whitehead's style was more heterogeneous than Ekwuyasi's, mixing literary phrases that are reasonably good Creative Writing Course, with less self-conscious slang. But Jonny Appleseed really is, as the book's champion said on Canada Reads, easy to read; it flows, and the chapters are brief and to the point.

An idea behind Jonny Appleseed seems to be that gloomy, heavy narratives of Indigenous and gay lives are more depressing than cathartic for readers who know these experiences anyway. (In last year's Canada Reads, an actress argued that Indigenous readers might not want to explore topics like intergenerational trauma due to child abuse in residential schools yet again. This year, the Olympian/broadcaster also pointed out that she was weary of reading about the abuse of Black female bodies.) So this book is meant to be a more inspiring, happy departure.

Like Butter Honey Pig Bread, the book is more graphic and explicit than what I'd usually read in literary fiction. But it is wholesome at heart. I only felt uncomfortable that the book glosses over relationships where Jonny is badly exploited. — Just because fictional Jonny chooses to move on, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem, one that would affect many real-life people very differently.

Anyway, Jonny Appleseed is a 'pain eater,' who tries to take pain and give back happiness in its place; and I guess the book mirrors his mindset.

The other books in Canada Reads were The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk, a feminist fantasy set vaguely in a Regency world if I remember correctly; Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots, a dark comedy about a villain's henchman who takes up a crusade against the overzealousness of superheroes; and Two Trees Make a Forest, a memoir of a Canadian woman visiting Taiwan inspired by a letter that her grandparent wrote, and connecting to the natural landscape. I haven't begun reading them yet, but they all sound appealing.

***

Aside from that, I am still reading other books.

A few of these books are cookbooks: so for the past two days I've been baking peanut butter cookies, blending cherry-chocolate smoothies, and getting a few ingredients for another round of trail mix with dried goji berries and mulberries. It does feel good to be able to afford these ingredients thanks to my job, even if ideally I do want to cook much more local and seasonal food that is less expensive because its production and transport are more sustainable.

I also cooked a Palestinian soup from butternut squash, lentils, onions, etc., flavoured with a lovely spice mix with toasted coriander seeds and cinnamon, and topped with croutons, which I'd bookmarked from the Guardian's food section many years ago. This is a little closer to the ideal of local-ish food; at least I'm pretty sure that the butternut squash didn't travel too far.

I can hardly wait for the springtime glut of local-grown rhubarb and asparagus, then strawberries,... etc.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama is almost finished, and I want to move on to Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys next. It's from a book subscription that my aunt gave me as a birthday present. And after that I still have a few gifts to read through!

And I'm still reading the first volume of Nelson Mandela's autobiography with my voice coach, and listening to/reading other South African books at home, as part of my literary trip around the world. I'm looking forward to reading South Korean books by way of change soon. But reading about apartheid feels important, not so much of course for literary reasons, as for reasons of learning how to be a good citizen in dramatic scenarios: understanding the extremes to which our societies can go if we're not careful.