Shakespeare's Complete Works Reading Challenge: Sixth Day of Henry VI

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? Last year I had a hankering to half-liveblog all of Shakespeare's plays ... in chronological order, onward from Henry VI, Part 1: written by Shakespeare (b. 1564) in 1591. Time travel to Elizabethan Age literature also feels strangely Christmassy, and therefore seasonal again.

Previous Henry VI blog posts

Act I Scene 1: Henry V's funeral | Scenes 2, 3 & 4: French dauphin meets Joan of Arc, Duke of Gloucester clashes with Bishop of Winchester, the Earl of Salisbury is killed in fighting in Orléans | Scenes 5 & 6: Joan of Arc fights Lord Talbot, French celebrate lifting of siege on Orléans | Act II Scene 1: The English reconquer Orléans | Scenes 2 & 3: Charles VII and Joan of Arc are defeated & on the lam. Countess of Auvergne tries and fails to kill Lord Talbot.

***

December 1
10:20 p.m.

Act II.
Scene IV.

Mary would have certainly disapproved of fighting...
La Vierge nourrissant le Christ, miniature d'un livre d'heures paris
by the Master of the Munich Golden Legend (fl. 1420-1460)
via Wikimedia Commons

A squabble amongst English lords takes place in London, in a garden where roses grow, beside the Temple Church that is run by the Knights Hospitaller and serves generations of lawyers-in-training. The future Duke of York lodges in a chamber at the Temple, too. Richard of York (Plantagenet) is the leading figure on one side of the squabble, the Duke of Somerset on the other side.

They want the Earl of Warwick to decide who is right.

Warwick diplomatically (albeit with arguably false modesty) offers a refusal:

Between two Hawks, which flies the higher pitch,
Between two Dogs, which hath the deeper mouth,
Between two Blades, which bears the better temper,
Between two Horses, which doth bear him best,
Between two Girls, which hath the merriest eye,
I have perhaps some shallow spirit of Judgement

...But, he adds elaborately, in this case he doesn't have a clue.

York and Somerset reply heatedly that it's not such a tough question, each one claiming that anyone who has eyes to see could see that they are in the right.

Then, eager to end the dispute, York (who seems the cleverer character of the two) asks the men around him to pluck flowers from the red rose bush to show that they are on his side.

The Bard doesn't make clear which legal matter York and Somerset were arguing about — Wikipedia suggests that the matter was trivial. Essentially, however, the two lords are discussing the line of succession to the throne of England. York's mother's parentage has given him a strong claim; but York's father was considered a traitor, imprisoned, and beheaded when young Richard was fewer than five years old.

It is the rosebushes in Shakespeare's telling that eventually led Sir Walter Scott and his 19th-century contemporaries to refer to the English civil wars of 1455 to 1487, i.e. the fight between the House of York and the House of Lancaster for the throne, as the Wars of the Roses:

At any rate, the men who believe in York's side of the argument are instructed to pick white roses; the men who believe in Somerset should pick red roses.

Warwick begins the selection, picking a white rose from a bush. Next Suffolk picks a red one.

But Vernon intervenes. He says that the lords should only keep up the exercise if it would truly end the dispute: the side that ends up with the fewest roses should concede defeat.

Although at first York and Somerset both agree with Vernon's intervention, the losing side changes its mind. As more and more white blossoms are picked, Somerset and his friend the Duke of Suffolk exchange insults with the York faction rather than give up.

York concludes by telling his enemy,

And by my Soul, this pale and angry Rose,
As Cognizance of my blood-drinking hate,
Will I for ever, and my Faction wear,
Until it wither with me to my Grave,
Or flourish to the height of my Degree.

Suffolk and Somerset flounce off the stage.

Somerset: Farewell ambitious Richard.

Afterward Warwick predicts,

And here I prophecy: this brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send between the Red-Rose and the White,
A thousand Souls to Death and deadly Night.

York thanks his supporters, and as they leave the stage he tells them,

Come, let us four to Dinner: I dare say,
This Quarrel will drink Blood another day.

Rather than plucking flowers to decide whether 1. Shakespeare's version of history or 2. my doubt of Shakespeare's version of history, is correct, I've checked with Wikipedia. In fact the Bard was not very accurate. It is beyond the scope of this blog to properly research the leading figures and events and causes of the Wars of the Roses. But I recommend a quick look at the biographies of Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset, Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, and Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, because they are entertaining tales in themselves.

"Detail on the West Door of Temple Church, London"
by Ethan Doyle White (2018)
Temple Church had to be reconstructed after WWII
but I am fairly certain that Shakespeare might have seen these capitals
in their original state.
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

December 2

6 p.m.

Scene V.

The dying Lord Mortimer, uncle to Richard of York, is released from prison. York arrives for a friendly family visit. In this ahistorical scene, Shakespeare changes a few small details — like the fact that the real Lord Mortimer had revealed York's father's plot against Henry V and later sat on the commission that passed the father's death sentence.

I'm wondering whether to borrow Lord Mortimer's terminology the next time I visit the doctor:

Even like a man new haled from the Wrack,

So fare my Limbes with long Imprisonment:

And these gray Locks, the Pursuivants of death,

Nestor-like aged, in an Age of Care,

Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer.

These Eyes, like Lamps, whose wasting Oil is spent,

Wax dim, as drawing to their Exigent.

Weak Shoulders, over-borne with burdening Grief,

And pith-less Arms, like to a withered Vine,

That drops his sap-less Branches to the ground.

Yet are these Feet, whose strength-less stay is numb,

(Unable to support this Lump of Clay)

Swift-winged with desire to get a Grave,

As witting I no other comfort have.

He later adds, to let his nephew know without ambiguity that he is tottering on the brink of death:

the Arbitrator of Despairs,

Just Death, kind Umpire of men's miseries,

With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence

In real life, Lord Mortimer was sent to Ireland because he had a confrontation with the Duke of Gloucester. There he died of the plague, at the age of only 33 years — three decades before the Wars of the Roses began. That said, York really was his heir.

In Shakespeare's play, York tells his uncle Mortimer of the Duke of Somerset's insults in the Temple garden (Somerset had unkindly mentioned York's father's execution). He embraces his uncle's (fictional) cause to install the House of York on the throne of England.

Lord Mortimer is more cautious, telling York,

With silence, Nephew, be thou politick,

Strong fixed is the House of Lancaster,

And like a Mountain, not to be remov'd.

And so Richard leaves for Parliament, to settle the score with the Duke of Somerset...

Winter Doldrums

ON MONDAY it was my sister's birthday.

In the morning a university class was — if I recall correctly — cancelled due to the professor being sick. Altogether four of my professors have been out sick since the semester started in mid-October. I've been finding (like a child who, after eating ice cream for a week, finds out to its dismay that eating broccoli for a week would have counterintuitively left it feeling happier and more like playing outside) that the missed classes and online classes are actually not that good for my morale. A brisk bicycle ride to campus wakes up the brain, meeting up with my mother over a hot chocolate at the cafeteria lends a bit of comfort and brightness to the day, looking at bulletin boards for event posters and job advertisements is surprisingly stimulating, and I enjoy the sense of fulfilled virtue in having shown up for the requisite 1 hour 30 minutes and then being able to put a lesson behind me. Whereas doing homework for 1 hour 30 minutes at home instead — with recollections of undone housework, business and personal correspondence, job-searching, and literary and news projects swimming in my head like a vast soup — is not very relaxing.

The other problem lately is that the stove pipe in the corner room started glowing red from stove socket to wall socket one day last week. We'd thought that we followed all the proper procedures, especially aeration, to prevent a build-up of creosote. Nor have we used exorbitant quantities of coal. So it's a mystery why the pipe overheated. Long story short, we haven't been able to use that stove, unfortunate as temperatures have dipped below 0°C. An expert will only come by to look at it on December 8th.

This Incident has left my mother's room unheated, indirectly also mine. 'Indirectly,' because given what happened in the corner room, I feel paranoid about using my own room's stove, since no stove expert has taken a look at it in years. My room has been so chilly that I've been pulling a hoodie over my head and huddling in a sleeping bag during the daytime, and sleeping fully clothed under the sleeping bag at night. Besides I wake up at night worrying that the coal stove in the room next to mine has gone out. Then there are cold spots and draughts, despite my clothing and two layers of blankets.

So I feel badly rested when I wake up in the mornings, and not very energetic about studying or about errands or about any challenges whatsoever. When I was younger I just toughed the weather out. But now that I know that cold temperatures raise blood pressure (I've even stopped measuring my blood pressure regularly because it's so chilly when I take off my sweatshirt to fit the cuff around my arm) and I am having trouble sleeping, it no longer feels like a larky adventure.

That said, my mother has been staunch about the whole situation. She uses the heated office room to work and read in during the daytime. And wearing woolly socks is surprisingly helpful.

Today I finally made up my mind to use the electric heater in my room more often — despite the environmental and financial disadvantages.

At any rate, Ge. and I put things in order for T.'s birthday. Then, in the evening, our Uncle Pu joined us for snacks and conversation in the room next to mine.

ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON I had an online class. The professor was recovering from the cold that had led him to cancel last week's class: he was visibly ill and audibly hoarse. (He was dosing himself with cough-candies, and politely requested for us to talk so he wouldn't have to. The other professor-recommended remedy for losing one's voice I've come across is to sip Coca Cola; I suppose honey with ginger is the other option.) Fortunately, the class pitched in, and we had a fairly lively conversation about literary tracts on the role of women from 15th and 16th century Spain.

I felt lucky for being able to keep up with the discussion, since I'd read only 5 pages out of 50 in the scholarly book chapter he had assigned to us as the central text. (But to be fair, I'd also read the poem by St. Teresa of Avila, alongside the first chapters of Moses — assigned because the oppression of women was often predicated on the story of Adam and Eve.) When I mentioned the anomaly of Queen Elizabeth I as a woman in power during roughly the time we were discussing, like Isabella of Spain, the professor seemed to light up; I guess he'd once studied that period of English literature. Anyway, the role of Spanish women was grim; the ideal was for us to speak as seldom as possible, and to be kept at home by means of domestic violence if we were married so that we couldn't 'flirt' by looking at other men. Fray Martín Alonso de Cordoba, who was writing advice for Queen Isabella, was more diplomatic and perhaps progressive than the other tract-writers. Perhaps one might say, a nice Machiavelli. But I wasn't able to figure out if he was hoping to become one of her chief advisors. In other words, I suspected that even if he didn't fudge his ideas to ingratiate himself with the Queen, the power he wanted her to take might have been intended to promote his own ends.

It does feel a little strange that theology is popping up in my university classes, since I usually lead a pretty secular life despite my private convictions, and writing about Sunday church services already makes me a little uncomfortable...

THEN, ON WEDNESDAY, I slept badly and not well enough. I had the instinctual feeling in the morning that I should have stayed at home instead of going to university, but tried to make the best of things. My bicycle's steering has felt wobbly lately, and from experience I know it's not the bicycle but my own physical stability that causes the wobble. So I took the U-Bahn.

At the end of the class, I went up to the professor to apologize for not handing in the written assignments lately. (I've seen too late when the assignments are meant to be submitted online; and this week I was convinced I needed to submit something Wednesday when it was actually Tuesday. etc.) I felt non compos mentis as I was talking to the professor, probably used horrible grammar, and awkwardly used the Italian word finito when I couldn't think of a Spanish phrase. At any rate, the professor assured me that if I had too many other things to do, it was OK if I couldn't hand in the texts. But I had the impression that he was more peeved at my making excuses (in bad Spanish) than at my not handing in the assignments. Admittedly the situation is maybe more disadvantageous for me than for him, because I'll need to write an in-person essay exam in two weeks, and it's best if I iron out my errors with practice texts now. Lastly, I felt guilty: I'm not sure if I do have too many other things to do....

At least the afternoon class was an improvement. I had done 1.5 of 2 readings, and that was already enough to impress the instructor even though I was candid about the missing 0.5. We talked about Crimean Tatars and the Soviet Greek alphabet that was developed to try to put the local Greek (Romaic?) dialect into writing, as well as an author who pioneered Tatar literature. Then we briefly mentioned Vera Ingber's story "Maya" and Alexander Kuprin's tale of (early 20th century?) fishermen near Balaklava: "The Laestrygonians."

THURSDAY started on a better note. The morning class took place, and I had diligently prepared all the Greek grammar exercises that were assigned to us. We also discussed newspaper headlines, and I took the Council of Nicaea as a topic because it absolutely fascinates me that we still care about something that happened well over 1,000 years ago. Of course it's also relevant in that it's the new Pope's first journey abroad, amongst other things important because of the diplomatic implications of his visit to Turkey.

FINALLY, ON FRIDAY I cycled to university for my archaeology class. Unfortunately, I was 45 minutes late because I was waiting for the coal stoves to start up properly and there was nobody else in the apartment to take care of it. We talked about stratigraphy and 'stratigraphic units,' and how to survey archaeological excavations, using examples from Middle Eastern archaeology.

After class I went grocery-shopping: presents for Ge.'s birthday, and fruit and vegetables grown on the farm at the university campus. Then it was off to the zero-waste shop for more groceries. And then I joined the online class about Greek history from the 18th century to the present. We were waiting for the third student to join the video call, so I asked the professor about a book chapter I'd begun to read from the extended reading list. He seemed blissful that we were doing extended reading, and in general was in a good mood this week. He also enjoyed the questions we asked, and went off on an interesting tangent at the end of class about the Ottoman politics at play between the Sultan in Constantinople and Pasha Mehmet Ali in Egypt after the Battle of Navarino.

In the evening, I began looking for books from Italy in our shelves, for my personal reading project, and ended up reading Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons in Physics from cover to cover. Next: Elena Ferrante's My Beautiful Friend.

TODAY I was idling in the apartment in the hoodie I'd slept in, wondering when I'd gather the energy to go grocery shopping, when the doorbell rang. The brothers were playing music, so I went to answer, and found that instead of a parcel delivery, it was an uncle and an aunt! They are visiting Berlin, and we'd been disappointed that tomorrow we have a commitment that won't allow us time to meet up with them. So I was delighted they were there. We had chocolate-covered gingerbread and tea in the office room, beside the coal stove, and talked happily. Afterward (inspired by a discussion about how to cook beets) I made a pot of borsht for dinner. And hopefully I was not too unkempt and fusty-smelling...

Despite the visit, I feel like I want to slip right into the Christmas holidays to rest, read, and recharge my figurative batteries. Also: I'm waiting to hear back about a mini-job I applied for: selling decorations at a Christmas market. But I only got a missed call from an unknown number, which didn't match the number on the job posting. When I called back it turned out that it was likely a spam call (Berlin area code, redirected to a different number with an Austrian area code when I called back). It would also be the lowest-paid job, in terms of hourly wage, that I've possibly ever had.

An Autumn Leaf-Poem

This verse surfaced in my email archives, which I've been sorting and thinning out. Apparently I wrote it when I was 19 years old. Since it's reasonably seasonal, I've tidied it up a bit and will post it...

***

Subtle changes: newly cold
mornings, and shining sun
warmly calling forth the red
and yellow of the trees

Stir of wind, a whirl of leaves;
drifts of sweetly smelling
orange and brown and fading green;

squirrels bending over treasures
of walnuts, buried in the soil:
wetted, it still retains a
morning coolness and the dew.

Drying moss in concrete's cracks:
there grainy soil is dark with rain.
The blurred mud shadow of a leaf
trodden in the driveway.

— Nothing new, since through the ages
foliage has come and gone,
winds of desolation swept
through avenues that are made green
with towering maples and with oaks

— but something that still tells me of
great change and tides of fate and time,
better seasons, bitter years
yet life that thrives in spite of all.

A Kind-of-Naughty Tuesday

Life has gotten better since my last blog post, thanks to a programmed day of indolence: on Tuesday I skipped a morning class, didn't do my university homework, went to Dussmann with a friend and then read a romance novel in French translation for the rest of the day.

My indolence didn't avenge itself too badly on Wednesday: the professor cancelled the afternoon class due to her indisposition, for example, so I ended up being able to do one of the two readings (a short story, "Maya," by the Soviet author Vera Ingber) at leisure. And I feel fresher, and have happily shed the feeling of being stuck on a treadmill.

At Dussmann we ate cake, drank something hot (fresh mint tea for me), and talked, in the basement café. Afterward we roamed around the Christmassy displays on the ground level and first floor, including the English Bookshop section. I bought a book to give as a Christmas present — and a package of plum, passionfruit and pomelo-flavored mochi sweets, imported from Taiwan, to share with my family at home. I was tempted to skim through the first chapters of a few English-language books, since I've been thinking of casting a vote in the best-of-2025 book competition on Goodreads. But this would have forced my friend to wait. Besides I'm already listening to an audiobook recording of one of the contending books, Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai, online.

It was not too crowded in the bookshop when we arrived at 3 p.m. But by the time we left more than two hours later, it was busier. Winter has begun to displace autumn, so daytime temperatures have often been below 5°C in the past few days, and shops feel more like refuges from the elements than like mere capitalist repositories. On Monday I cycled to university gingerly, as I didn't trust the glossy pavement; that said, except at bridges it seemed like there was no black ice, and the main perils seemed to be the smooth or rotting leaves on the asphalt and — as usual — the antics of all of us who were sharing the roads.

The Perils of Being a Social Butterfly, and a Sunday Church Service

I've woken up the past week dreading the day ahead every morning. My schedule has been uncomfortably full, I haven't felt able to sleep in without worrying about preparing things and arriving on time at social or other appointments, I've been having headaches, and a backlog of homework is accumulating. On the positive side, however, I've been able to see more friends and family!

On Friday, the dentist discovered yet another cavity, this time in a wisdom tooth. Immediately after the appointment I cycled to university. There, I realized that my class was cancelled. After cycling back home, I found that I couldn't eat anything since my anesthetic hadn't worn off yet, so went into an online class on an empty stomach. Then I ate, had a second online class, and then had an hour or two to spend before a dinner engagement. In that time, or after the dinner (I've forgotten which) I found out that I should have submitted a homework assignment online earlier in the day, although I'd been convinced it was due Monday. The no eating had been a little awkward, as I'd had very little to eat in the morning: I arrived a minute late at the dentist's and would have been later had I not limited my breakfast to 1 apple and 1 Pfeffernuss.

Fortunately the dinner engagement was relaxing and nice — a meal with extended family at a nearby Swabian restaurant. I ate fried dumplings on a salad and drank a pale beer. Meanwhile, the others had sausage and kale, Spaetzle with herbs or cheese or mushrooms, large mixed salads with sheep's cheese, or a Flammekueche (like a pizza). For dessert, they had half a portion each of Kaiserschmarren.

This morning I cycled through the faint fog and went bouldering with my siblings again, since my aunt has very kindly given me three weekends' entry to the gym. My arms (now unused to climbing) were not in trimmest fighting shape, so I wasn't very convinced of my ability to keep holding the grips properly. I reached the top of one of the climbing courses, and made tentative tries of other easy ones. But it was nice to be able to go again, either way, and to watch my siblings' acrobatics.

BEFORE THAT, I'd adhered to my new tradition of listening to a weekly church service on the radio. The local RBB broadcaster records Protestant and Catholic services alternately, from different houses of worship in the city and in Brandenburg; this time it was a Catholic church in Berlin. Normally I like the music (when it's good), the readings from the Bible, and the sermon; but this time the latter two left me quite perturbed. On the bright side, this meant that I stopped listening to the service after the sermon, and was able to go bouldering half an hour earlier than anticipated.

Last week, the Protestant church had what I remember as quite charming Bible readings, for example about every person having their own fig tree and quietly turning swords into ploughshares. This week, we were treated to Malachi. (I'm quoting the King James version, but of course the Catholic church uses a different translation.)

1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.

2 But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

The Bible isn't the most comfortable book to read anyway, so it's not surprising if it has quotations that I don't like. I was rather hopeful that, although the first reading might seem like a stinker, the next reading and the sermon would turn things around... Not so much.

The second reading came one of Paul's letters to the Thessalonians:

Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: [...] this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.

To me, that sounds like a standard Scrooge comment on the virtue of workhouses for poor people. I was curious to hear how the priest would explain this passage in his sermon. Instead his sermon went off on a tangent, and didn't apologize for the Bible passage in any way.

At least it was ironically funny to hear the congregation recite 'thank you for your joyful message' whenever these dire readings were concluded.

Early Christmas Season Shopping and Descartes

It's been a quiet Saturday. Fortunately, after abundant sleep and adding meat back into the week's diet, I'm feeling a lot steadier again, and yesterday I'd cycled to and from university without incident.

After our usual Saturday breakfast of croissants and baguette from the French shop, I began boiling pear quince from the local allotment gardens for quince-and-almond confectionery. Then I went to the grocery store. In the 1900 recipe book I am reading, the menu for dinner on November 8 is

Cod Cutlets.               Stuffed Mushrooms.
Boiled Rabbits.          Apple Tart.
Onion Sauce.             Devonshire Cream.
Fried Potatoes.

But for practicality's and the environment's sake, I whittled down the menu to roast rabbit with celery root, carrot, leek and parsley in my mind, served with boiled potatoes, fried mushrooms and bacon. I entirely forgot about the apple pie while shopping. Fortunately, we still have the ingredients.

As most shops are closed Sundays, the organic grocery chain store was relatively crowded. I bought apples, milk, bacon, and Christmas delicacies. There was no rabbit at hand, so I picked up a leg of duck instead. There was a long line-up at a single cash register. The school-age cashier handled the stream of customers serenely. The customers were also remarkably patient. Fortunately, from the grocery store's point of view, during our meditative sojourn alongside the shop's shelves, a few of us thought of other things we wanted to buy. For example, staring at Christmas paper serviettes and gift sets, candles, cosmetics, and yoga trousers, I noticed incense cones (these cones have felt rare and hard to find these past few years, and sticks aren't the same) and greedily added them to my basket.

The Christmas delicacies being sold were marzipan potatoes, chocolate-covered gingerbread with cherry filling, St. Nicholas figurines in chocolate and foil, glazed stars with candied lemon peel, Spekulatius, Dominosteine, pepper nuts (Pfeffernüsse) plain or drizzled with chocolate, Nuremberg gingerbread on wafers... Not to mention Advent calendars with different flavours of tea. But I only got two types of specialties, since I am tired of the plastic packaging that comes with store-bought Christmas baking, and sometimes the cookies are dried out and not as pleasant to eat.

On Friday my application for a mini-job on Saturday, moving boxes up to a third-floor apartment,was (somewhat to my relief) declined. So I had no other commitments.

Therefore I've been reading The History of Western Philosophy as background for the Molière-and-Moratín essay that I want to write for university. I don't think it would count as an academic source, but surely I can quote a passage or two to improve the literary value of the essay. Bertrand Russell is describing the beginnings of 17th-century scientific development, summarizing also the work of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Now I've reached the mini-biography of René Descartes.

Likely I read this with Papa already, as this stove passage felt familiar:

It was in Bavaria, during the winter in 1619-20, that he had the experience he describes in the Discours de la Méthode. The weather being cold, he got into a stove in the morning, and stayed there all day editing; by his won account, his philosophy was half finished when he came out, but this need not be accepted too literally.

It reminded me of Otfried Preußler's children's book Die Abenteuer des starken Wanja:

Dieser zweite [Backofen], er füllte die ganze hintere Ecke des Raumes aus [...] außen sauber mit Lehm verstrichen und weiß getüncht. Geheizt wurde er vom Flur her, und das in den Wintermonaten Tag und Nacht. Es pflegte daher auf dem Backofen in der Wohnstube sommers kühl zu sein; und im Winter, wenn draußen der Frost klirrte und die Wölfe ums Dorf heulten, war es dort oben behaglich warm.

A Leaf of a Student's Diary

A few years ago, I read Eva Curie's biography of Marie Curie. When it came to the part where Marie Curie was so preoccupied with science that she didn't nourish herself properly and contracted terrible anaemia, I started practically shouting at her in my mind, Just eat a steak, please!! As the irony of fate has it, I suspect that I've slipped back into anaemia myself through a similar neglect of basic nutritional sense: the past two days have been a bit dizzy and tingly and brain-foggy, to the point that this morning it felt harebrained to go out instead of declaring a sick day.

This morning at 8:50 a.m.ish I arrived rather late for an online Greek class, in which we are reading fiction about the 19th-century master diplomat Ioannis Kapodistrias.

Then it was time to get ready for a Spanish class, in which we were overviewing Gender Studies theory with a heavy emphasis on Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan. Cycling through an autumn tapestry of leaves, sunshine and bright blue skies and all, was rather nice except for my aforementioned anaemia symptoms, so that I pedaled slowly and concentrated on taking no risks.

Then I repeated the journey 40 minutes later, having left class early. Fortunately I arrived on time for a dentist's appointment back near my home. Funnily enough, I ended up waiting quite a while in the waiting room after all, and reading my uncle M.'s gift of a book about Captain James Cook to entertain myself. The appointment wound up soon enough, with the unwelcome news that I have a fresh cavity. (It will be seen to next week. In the meantime, I have regretfully turned my back on the remnants of Halloween candy in our household — except for a piece of chocolate.)

After that, I met up with my aunt. We went to a restaurant where we ate hummus, tzatziki, lavash bread, and a roasted dish of eggplant, zucchini, tomato, and carrot with rice, respectively. We chatted over the food, and sipped coffee and tea.

In my ideal world, I'd be about to eat a nice warming bowl of something sweet (yet dentally safe) while resting my slippers upon a footstool and watching the next episodes of The Wartime Kitchen and Garden on YouTube, then going to sleep. (Having finished the historical/experimental archaeology series Tales From the Green Valley yesterday.) Unfortunately there is homework to do.

On Thursday I sent off an essay about the preterito perfecto compuesto in post-Columbian Iberian Spanish. Finishing it was exhausting, also for my mother and two youngest brothers, who obligingly sat down with printed-out copies and corrected the flow and the German grammar. Now I'm working on my Molière-and-Moratín essay, also left over as an undone task from the summer semester.

An Autumn Meal and a 'German Daughter' Rant

After cycling to university this morning — the city still steeped in yellow and green and brown and red leaves of autumn — and practicing past tenses in Spanish in my Wednesday morning class with six classmates, I went into a cooking frenzy. It had started raining by the time I left class, but it was only light rain.

The manor farm shop at Dahlem was stocking heads of lettuce, a handful of apple varieties, radishes and pears grown elsewhere in Germany, beefsteak tomatoes streaked like heirlooms, clementines from Spain, dusty red beets, yellow onions, raw ginger root with stems, and orange Hokkaido pumpkins.

So lunch was a huge salad of lettuce, radish, chopped celery, tomato, and an olive-oil-and-balsamic vinaigrette. I boiled beets, and an egg for myself, but they were done later.

For dinner, I used a Middle Eastern recipe for pumpkin soup: its ingredients were, amongst others, coconut milk, ginger root, carrot and celery and onion, and spices. I had dropped into a small organic grocery store for additional ingredients. It was wonderful, although yet again I reflected that to have an even finer flavour maybe I need to conquer my inner sloth and start making homemade vegetable stock instead of resorting to bouillon powder. Besides I like using a mortar and pestle for the spices, because it links me to the history of human cooking technology all the way back to homo habilis. Afterward I roasted the pumpkin's seeds in the oven with salt and olive oil. There was dishwashing in between, since a mountain of pots and plastic and other things that would be damaged in the machine had accumulated, but it's only half done (life being too short and all that).

Brother Ge. also made hot chocolate with marshmallows for all of us.

It was a nice distraction from a scholarly article that I was reading and taking notes on for university, about the 19th century Greek diaspora in Odessa. It was also a nice distraction from thoughts of the class presentation I'll have to give next week for Spanish.

*

I didn't catch all of today's Tagesschau (national public broadcaster's evening news). But amongst other topics it reported the further fallout of our Chancellor's remarks about Germany's urban landscape (Stadtbild) being sullied by asylum seekers.When the Chancellor was asked the following day to clarify, he said he didn't have to — people should just 'ask their daughters.' At the age of forty, I might no longer qualify as a 'daughter,' but ...

From my perspective, there is a ton of sexism in German society. I think it's partly a conscious cultural choice (I think it is OK if people make this choice for themselves), but partly also an unwanted imposition on people like me who want to see it reformed.

In terms of workplace sexism, the CDU itself looked more conscious of women's issues under Angela Merkel than it does now, where Friedrich Merz (and the SPD's Lars Klingbeil) don't seem to want to take much trouble when it comes to including women in his cabinet etc. I also think that the fledgling backlash against LGBTQIA* rights (exemplified by not flying the Pride flag at the Reichstag building for Christopher Street Day this year) is part of the conservative right's renewed fervent embrace of stifling gender roles.

So I don't understand why Merz is singling out asylum seeking men as the problem.

Turning to asylum seeking men: I can't speak for every woman's experience. But after 19 years in a Berlin apartment two doors down from a mosque and two blocks away from an asylum seeker apartment building in streets full of German-Turkish businesses, and 2 years of reporting on protests by asylum seekers and refugees, I've personally never been sexually harassed by the demographic that Merz's Birth of a Nation fantasies seem to be projected onto. Namely, young men of Middle Eastern origin/men under the age of 40 who might be German citizens or not, but either way don't look 'Aryan.' I know that there are individual news stories that contradict my experience.

Whereas I do have experiences being sexually harassed by German men: one entered the family bookshop where I worked and talked about how they like to masturbate to me and a 13-year-old female pupil who was doing a work experience programme, another read out sexually explicit poems to me unasked, a third talked in a music shop about how a famous historical female opera singer 'spread her legs for everyone,' a fourth told a university class a 'funny' anecdote about how a letter of the Arabic alphabet resembles the male reproductive organ after making a ton of eye contact with me during the break beforehand ...

I won't go into the less prurient sexism in the workplace, university, shops, etc., and how I get a little creeped out when a few men seem to like if I behave in a meek/submissive way.

If I didn't know so many men who are truly respectful and use whatever privilege they have to try to make things easier for the women around them — like my father, all my classmates at school and university in Canada, friends from the old workplace, etc. — maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much. But, as it is, I have known my brothers who have taken the time to walk places with me when I was worried about being harassed, men whom I didn't know who have looked ready to intervene when a stranger approached me and tried to chat me up in public, a male delivery driver who hustled the man who was being offensive in the bookshop out the door, colleagues who checked in with me regularly to make sure I didn't feel uncomfortable about x or y, etc. (Of course I've also had many supportive women around me, who are a bit off topic here but equally important in real life.) So I know that Merz & co. can do much better.

His rampant racism also leaves totally unaddressed the wellbeing of the women in the lives of the supposedly predatory asylum-seeking men, whom these same men may be supporting, protecting, and caring for, and selflessly loving.

In conclusion, just once, I'd like to flip a CDU advertising poster the bird...

Friday in Inferno and Purgatory, Saturday in Paradise

It's been a sunny autumnal Saturday full of sunshine, grocery shopping, meeting with a friend at a café, cooking, piano practice, reading news and continuing my epic effort to listen to all of the speeches at the UN General Assembly. (I made it all the way through the first day's speeches, including the US president's rhetorical magnum opus. Two servings of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and the 1.25x speed function in YouTube helped.)

There was a large protest in Berlin for humanitarian aid to Gaza and an end to German military support for Israel today. I didn't go, but evidently over 60,000 people did, including a family member who sent photos and reported on the speeches. But in mid-September I went to a different protest — for the first time, I went as a protestor and not as an amateur journalist. It felt like once the legal consensus arrived that genocide is happening in Gaza, and Israeli organizations and public figures reached the same assessment, it's no longer a situation where it's appropriate to sit on the fence.

***

Yesterday was a more exhausting day.

Breakfast was rye bread with jam and a boiled egg, as well as ginger tea, and I chatted with the brothers and my mother. That part was fine!

Then I went off to the volunteering place to sort fruit and vegetables again.

*

The way there in the U-Bahn was stressful.

A smell like mouldy cheese reached me. I saw that a man who had probably been sleeping in the streets had entered the train, and although he was at least four seats away it was difficult not to feel his presence. A few other passengers either went over to the other end of the wagon or prepared to leave the wagon, or pulled up their sweaters over their noses and wrinkled their noses. I did neither because I wanted to be polite, but shifted a little to be upwind of him. (It didn't make a difference.)

Inwardly I felt anxious. Years ago when I still went to the office I'd been in a train with stinky fellow passengers more often — it was habitual in the Ring-Bahn in winter, and one of them in fact looked quite pleased to be épater les bourgeois — and I'd eventually caught a kind of infection, which made me self-conscious and miserable for weeks on end. I still don't really understand if this kind of intense stink is due to not washing often enough, or due to ulcers that require medical attention and rest that is not really possible in the streets. (Even if a doctor takes a look, the ulcers will reopen if the patient is wandering around, from what I understand.)

The man had walked almost to the door when we reached the next station. I was hoping that he'd get out. But he lingered in the wagon, although I thought he looked uncomfortable and miserable. If I left the wagon, I might not reenter the train in time before it pulled out of the station; and given that I was already late for the volunteering, I didn't want to risk it.

Then at the next station he got out to go to the next wagon. It didn't bring instant relief, but at least two windows were open further down the train wagon and the U-Bahn tunnel air was an improvement.

One station after, two young men came running in the door. They smelled the air, and saw the other passengers who still had their sweaters pulled over their noses and disgusted expressions on their faces. One of them asked, 'He's been here too?'.

When I stepped out of the U-Bahn, I breathed in the fresh air on the S-Bahn platform as copiously as I could. I also felt far more philosophical about facing the effluvia of rotten fruit and vegetables than I had during the past weeks of volunteering.

*

When I reached the locker room where the safety shoes and fresh socks are kept, the remaining socks were either singles, a random beanie, or too small. So I wore my own socks, hoping that the shoe disinfection process was working fine.

Since the sorting tables were pretty much full of other volunteers and I felt very shy, I took on the self-appointed task of pre-picking out the truly rotten or superannuated fruit and vegetables from the unsorted crates. Peaches half brown and mouldy, green chives marinating in yellow liquid behind a clear plastic package, lanky celery sticks with crispy dark leaves, squished figs, ... But a lot of the fruit and vegetables looked cheerful and bright, especially the orange-red pumpkins. I also went around and picked up scraps of paper fruit and vegetable labels to put in the paper recycling, from the sorting hall floor.

Eventually I asked to join a table. Then I set to sorting tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, peaches, strawberries, grapes, and nectarines for the remainder of the four hours. Beside and opposite me, two women were sorting lettuces, chicory, and radishes. Behind me, a young crew were sorting, amongst other things, onions; and one of them handed me bananas when he saw I was already working on them. A radio station played 80s hits in the background. Intermittent news snippets informed us that 1. the streets around the Victory Column were closed for car traffic due to today's protest, and that 2. a court has ruled that the AfD party must leave its current Berlin quarters, albeit not as quickly as the building's owner had requested.

The biggest food sorting excitement was that a grocery store evidently 'donated' empty perfume bottles alongside e.g. a few tomatoes. This felt opportunistic and unpleasant, but still less disgusting than the time a grocery store 'donated' floor sweepings — with potato debris, two cough candy wrappers, and a granola bar wrapper, like gold nuggets in an otherwise fairly ordinary huge cardboard box full of potatoes. Sometimes I feel like living in Berlin is an extended experiment about what lengths people will go to in order to avoid properly disposing of recyclable materials themselves.

It looked like we'd almost finished sorting all the food. The sign near the sorting tables says that the work is over at 2:45 p.m., I think. But the official shift time is until 3:30 p.m., and I've often worked up until then, as have others. That said, this time pretty much everyone left long before. And a new wall of fresh, unsorted crates of donated produce arrived. I sorted away stubbornly on my own, feeling rather exhausted. It was a relief when 3:15 arrived, and I could finally put away the last of the plastic and paper garbage, cover the sorted fruit and vegetable crates so that the sparrows don't eat or 'spatter' the produce, clean and disinfect the work surface, sweep the floor, take off my rubber gloves and my apron, close the compost bin, and go off to change into my street shoes.

*

On the way home, I decided to pop by a car museum/workshop/salesroom in a renovated turn-of-the-century old brick street tram depot in the northern part of the Charlottenburg district.

It turned out to have cars predominantly from the 1940s through to the present, with tall hoods or flaring wheel hubs, hot reds or sedate beiges, Alfa Romeo or Volvo, sports cars or even what I'd as a layperson call a stretch limousine from the 1960s, alongside a huge sports boat. I'd been hoping to see cars from before 1930, but if I did see them I wasn't able to identify them as such.

A pungent smell of car exhaust permeated the air even though it was a huge building, since someone had his car running as he and a mechanic conferred over it, and it prolonged the day's rather undesirable trend of strong odours. The way it filled the space reminded me of the scene in the black-and-white film Sabrina where the heroine turns on the ignition of every car in a garage full of her father's employer's automobiles, and then changes her mind about monoxide-poisoning herself.

In any case I was hungry, thirsty, and cranky and decided to return to the car showroom when in a sprightlier frame of mind.

It was a fair walk to the next Ring-Bahn station, but I managed to remember the way without cheating and consulting my smartphone. Just as I arrived, I saw a man relieving himself against the outdoor wall, and lightly breaking wind at the same time, a charming combination that I had not yet encountered in my urban peregrinations.

In a correspondingly misanthropic frame of mind, therefore, I went down to the U-Bahn platform. A train arrived after two minutes, but it looked relatively full. Since I was still antsy after this morning about being stuck with people who cannot or will not practice good hygiene, I waited for the next train after that, which was indeed a little emptier.

During the homeward journey I remembered that I also needed to do a bank transfer for next week. Since I refuse to do online banking, I went to the bank on foot, adding another five to ten minutes to my 5.5+ hour outing.

Thoroughly cranky, I finally did arrive home, lamented my woes to a sympathetic family, drank a glass of sirop à l'eau, ate a sandwich, and then started cooking potatoes to eat with duck gravy. We don't often eat duck — in fact I only remember two other times in my life, aside from Peking duck —, but I'd roasted some the day before yesterday for an elaborate Victorian Age cooking project.

Altogether, it was a rotten day. However, I didn't have the feeling that one sometimes illogically has that I deserved to have a miserable day because I had unconsciously done something wrong. Also, today has seemed delightful by comparison!

Whistling While I Work

This morning I finished the third and last day of helping with the kitchen renovation, in an aerie of a pre-war building, in a neighbourhood where I used to work full-time. When I cycled home again, it was the same route my sister and I took in 2018, when we would sometimes walk home from the office together.

It was an easy half hour: polishing the floor with a cloth while my employer did the other half of the floor, lightly scrubbing a refrigerator drawer, and helping move three bulky pieces of furniture. Then she pressed 20€ into my hands, I thanked her for the excellent organization (she even bought a pair of latex-free rubber gloves for me to use, in case I had an allergy to latex), and we parted ways pleased with each other.

Two days earlier I'd arrived to find that the apartment was on an upper floor. The first tasks largely involved packing the kitchen objects into cardboard boxes, carrying out furniture, scrubbing the refrigerator, and vacuuming the walls and floor.

Walking down and up the stairs was a little exhausting, but I tried to breathe as regularly as possible at the top so as not to seem too unfit. — I was truthful when replying to the job advertisement when I mentioned running and cycling regularly. The problem being that I've stopped the running training because my blood pressure was rising (maybe because the running was making me feel stressed?) and I began to feel short of breath even when I went out for short shopping trips. So am I really fit? I don't know.

At the end of Day One, I didn't feel too bad when I started cycling home, and felt fortunate because ice cream was waiting for me in the freezer ... But a few hours later I felt so tired that I just sprawled on my bed and began to drift off. Then in the evening I had a gouging headache that didn't entirely go away by the next morning, and I began to wonder if I was taking dumb medical risks.

The second day, I cleaned the under-sink cupboard and the gas oven as directed (removing the dials and the paraphernalia around the oven's burners), washed the plank floor with a special wood soap, etc. Afterward I felt dandy, strong as an ox, and had a nice healthy lunch at home. Besides it inspired me to venture more boldly into cleaning my room, because I've learned a few more techniques from my employer that I want to explore further. Thirdly, I feel like I'm finally doing the type of job that I wanted to do as a teenager, but didn't feel confident to go out and ask about — because I've labored under the Eeyore-esque conviction that nobody believes that I can be capable at anything practical.

...I know this is a boring and self-centred summary. But at least in my slightly sleep-deprived frame of mind it's hard to think if ways to describe cleaning at someone else's home in engaging detail without violating their privacy.

Anyway, I earned €200, instead of the expected €150, which was a happy surprise. I have already used some of it to pay off a debt to one of my brothers: years ago, he kindly allowed me to use his credit card for a few subscriptions e.g. to the Guardian. I set up a monthly bank transfer to his card to defray the costs. But due to inflation these subscriptions are more expensive than they once were, and I want to pay him the balance. For the rest, I'm hoping to buy yarn (to mend my socks), ice cream, and maybe fruit and vegetables at the street market tomorrow — and perhaps transfer another payment into my private pension fund.

Elderberries and Autumn

Autumn weather is beginning to drift into Berlin: rusty and golden leaves have been shimmering in the trees here and there, and underripe acorns are firing out of oak canopies like oval-shaped green rockets. Throughout the day the first proper rain has fallen in weeks, beneath a ponderous, grey sky.

Last weekend I went to the allotment gardens, and brought back a harvest for a cake that J. was baking. The damson plums are ripening now, but I've found subjectively that they tend to be either overripe or underripe this year. A gardener handed me a red-and-orange peach that she was about to put out in her basket. Various apple and pear species have already been ripe for a while, while late cherry plums the colour of dusky red wine are still falling off the trees. Elderberries are dropping their berries, too, which look black as they are ground into an indistinguishable pulp on the shadowed path beneath their branches, by passersby. Wasps were out in full force. Hibiscus bushes, sweet peas, early asters, and butterfly bushes, dahlias, and late summer roses added colour. And the Hokkaido pumpkins are plump and bright orange.

On Saturday we'd visited Uncle Pu in Brandenburg.

Returning to today, I went to the supermarket in the early afternoon to buy green onions and eggs for a Denver omelette, and cooked it for lunch. 5 eggs, a splash of milk, with 1 chopped green onion, about 2 tablespoons of onion, and 1/3rd of a green bell pepper — the vegetables all chopped fairly fine; and I melted gouda cheese into it. To replace the omelette's traditional ham, which I didn't want to bother buying, I used a teaspoon of dehydrated onion. With buttered whole wheat toast that I spread with clementine marmalade, the omelette tasted extremely good, likely one of my best cooking improvisations.

Afterward I found out I'd missed two calls from a prospective employer: a lady looking for someone to help out with a kitchen renovation. After I'd emailed her back, she wanted to call me to confirm her address, and I suspect also to get a feel for whether I was going to steal her best furniture and run away instead of actually helping. By the late afternoon we'd sorted it all out, to our mutual satisfaction. I'll be earning around €150 in the middle of next week, and don't need to bring anything along except for shoes with closed toes, clothing that can get dirty, and a German government ID.

It feels thrilling because I was crestfallen after not being able to find a summer job earlier this year. The pre-school where I'd applied to work as a back-up seems to have ghosted me. I also don't know yet if I was paid for my student election work in early June; it didn't appear on my June bank statement, at least, so I've been temporarily neurotic about budgeting. Not finding a summer job might have made July and August more restful, however; so I can see that part as a blessing in disguise.

I'm also progressing in the essays that I still need to write for the last university semester. One scholarly article I've already taken notes on, and I've started (re)reading Descartes's Discours de la méthode to get an idea of a classical philosopher's idea of an Enlightenment man.

Tomorrow I plan to be volunteering again. Last week I was serendipitously invited by fellow volunteers to help at the baked goods sorting tables. It was truly the peak, acme, or paradise — I can't find the right word — of food-sorting jobs. None of the bread or pastries were mouldy or weevil-infested. It looked epically delicious (I'd happily buy and eat it). I left with my appetite intact. The fellow volunteers were cheerfully collaborative; it's truly a skill, and sadly one I haven't developed at the volunteering place yet, to make sure that everyone has a task to feel engaged and helpful. Not only that: when we did have to throw away bread that was stale (or cut open already at the bakery), it mostly went into dry, tidy bins to be fed to sheep later, not into maggot-infested compost bins that reeked of ripe decay.

Anyway, the second-best thing I've been doing lately to feel happier, aside from meeting up with former work teammates, is to play the piano regularly. First I rushed through my siblings' and my old Royal Conservatory of Music programme (to be clear: none of us went to a Royal Conservatory; that's just what the standard programme for Canadian piano pupils is called) pieces. Now I'm playing bits and pieces of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

An August Evening Run, and Carrots Whose Glory Is Past

This evening I waited until my smartphone reported that the temperature had finally declined from 34°C to 29°C, then set out for the next phase of my couch-to-5K running project.

It was the same project I already tried in 2018. The running always felt mildly disagreeable (the phrase 'runners' high' felt like a joke) and then I pulled a tendon or something in my foot on Christmas Eve; hobbling sideways up and down a set of S-Bahn stairs after that convinced me that, as the German saying goes, 'Sport ist Mord'. What nudged me into retrying the programme was watching the women's footballers in the Euro Cup last month. Fortunately, cycling to university regularly has made me feel far better cardiovascularly equipped than I did back in 2018, which makes the running more comfortable. Besides I unearthed an old stopwatch, perhaps from the 1990s, while sorting through old boxes in early July; even despite my general indifference to gadgets, the thought of having a 'new' toy for the pursuit was charming.

This is Week Two of the programme, so I had to walk-and-run 5.6 kilometres. As it was past 8:30 p.m. by the time the weather had cooled from a car exhaust heat to a tepid sauna warmth, I literally ran out of enough light to see my stopwatch after ten to fifteen minutes, except if a street lamp was close by or when I reached a floodlit sports field.

But it was agreeable to see people sitting on the sidewalks at restaurants, as a man lounged in a doorway speaking in Italian. An ice cream shop was still doing a little business. In the park, youths were listening to hip-hop, while a lot of joggers and dog-walkers crunched on the gravel, and someone was apparently poetically singing live to the accompaniment of a ukulele on a bridge. I took a sip from a public drinking fountain on the return trip.

All in all, the outing took 57 minutes, plus a little additional walking. Back in the apartment, I had some of Ge.'s excellent sweet potato and carrot soup, and a boiled egg, to reward and restore my energies.

***

Tomorrow I'll be volunteering at the food-sorting place again.

I've had semi-hallucinations where I superimpose memories of bad food onto the good food at home: A carton of fresh raspberries / a carton of raspberries with a disgusting dribble of decomposed bell pepper that's leaked into it, exuding a vinegary smell that lingers in the nose. Crispy orange carrots / plastic-wrapped carrots with dark grey spots all over them. Etc. To put it melodramatically, I think my relationship to food has been disturbed.

That said, the fellow volunteers are friendly and helpful.

In the meantime I've been beginning to read A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh in the evenings, following up on The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren in a series of revisiting books that I liked as a child.

Besides I've tried out a cleaning schedule from the 1910s. Since I apparently have a low threshold for excitement, I have been quite thrilled about what a difference it makes to 1. wipe down the stovetop, 2. brush the dust off the mat in the entranceway, and 3. make a cup of tea, first thing in the morning; and 4. to make the bed after breakfast, so that it has time to air out.

Lastly I've been watching Netflix, catching up on Orange Is The New Black, which I heard about when it came out in 2013 but never saw until now. Technically I think it's very good. Barack Obama's Our Oceans is very soothing. 

Besides I am watching the British young adult series Heartstopper — only a few minutes at a time, as it reminds me disagreeably of my own school years, and because I'm watching it more to see what 'the kids these days' are watching than for entertainment... It's seemed to me that some of the popular culture for teenagers since 2020 is considerably kinder than anything I encountered back at the turn of the millennium; but as there's also a far-right backlash amongst the younger generation, I fear there is likewise a seamy underbelly.

On the whole, I fear that my social life has gone under during the university semester. It was so important to me to get through the work and get reasonably good grades, but it required putting my personal life on hold and letting my hobbies slide. One reason why I haven't written more blog posts, for example, is that I frankly think I've become boring!

Treading the Rainbow Lane

Yesterday morning, my youngest brothers and I ate breakfast (it was croissants and baguettes; I'm still skipping coffee because of my high blood pressure tendencies, but the others drank it). Our mother was absent as she is still walking along the Camino de Santiago, leading the adventurous life in eastern France, for a few days.

Then I set off on my bicycle to be part of the Christopher Street Day parade. In the end I sat at the roadside on Leipziger Straße, in front of the fraying glass façade of the Bulgarian embassy, which looks to my amateur eye to have been built in the 1970s, near the Bundestag building. The recent rains made the embassy's raised lawns lush and green, and under the Bulgarian and EU flags blood red roses were flowering alongside what I suspected to be yellow, dandelion-like hawkweed and white daisies.

I'd arrived an hour and a quarter early, although police vans were already standing at intervals along Potsdamer Straße. Barriers and fence segments had been put into position to block the streets later. Around Lützowstraße a counterprotest was expected to take place. But from what the RBB website mentioned, it sounds like a few of protestors were already stopped in transit by police for carrying weapons. (Recently Berlin has forbidden the carrying of most knives and other weaponry in public transit, since it seems that a lot of public arguments have ended in knife fights lately.)

The Ministry of Finance hung a rainbow-striped banner on the corner of its building. And, although I missed seeing it, later the evening news mentioned that the Bundesrat (Senate) had also hoisted a rainbow flag. It was a bit surprising because a few high-ranking German government officials lately have been very dismissive of gay solidarity; in fact, that is also why I went to the Christopher Street Day parade even if I'm not that involved in the struggle generally.

(To digress, I don't understand why Germany's political elite seem to want to feel superior to Trumpism at the same time as they are adopting techniques and policies from it. For example, the Minister of the Interior proudly proclaiming that he will ignore a Berlin court ruling about illegal push-backs of asylum applicants. Or European governments eagerly looking to deport migrants to third countries. Or the eager embrace of public litmus tests for nominations to Germany's judiciary. I don't think any of this will look clever or admirable in 20 years, and it's deeply contemptuous of the 'Menschenwürde' that's supposedly enshrined in Germany's constitution.)

In the meantime, the Museum for Communication had signs at its doors saying (in German) 'Free entry' and 'Toilets free of cost.' As the parade neared, staff walked out to stand at attention at the doors, and looked ready and pleased to see visitors.

Further up the Leipziger Straße, protestors were heading on foot, per bicycle and per e-scooter to join the head of the parade. But a few had the same idea I did, and settled in on the concrete edges of the Bulgaria embassy lawn to watch the parade pass later. Some spectators had dogs with them, others just had snacks and drinks. In the hotel opposite, canny partiers had rented rooms directly overlooking the course of the parade. Drinks and a large rainbow flag at hand, they periodically opened their balcony doors. I was touched when a man in a cowboy hat, shorts, and short-sleeved shirt painstakingly attached a garland of colourful artificial flowers to his balcony's railing.

I wrestled with myself whether it's accurate to say that police regalia and formalities are also a little camp. Regardless, I did appreciate the flair that the officers' black and fluorescent uniforms, and the bright twinkly blue lights of their motorcycles and other vehicles, lent to the streetscape.

Because I came so early, and felt tired after volunteering the day before (my feet still hurt), I didn't end up seeing much of the parade itself. I headed home after the organizers' purple party bus rolled past my perch. There were 79 more trucks after that, all of which I missed seeing... Briefly I was wondering whether to walk in the parade itself, when a large gap opened up between sections of the demo. But I was not sure whether it made sense for allies to walk in the parade, except if specifically invited. Besides my bicycle's pedals (not to mention its other hard edges and angles) were a hazard when I pushed it through more crowded areas of the parade and its spectators. Standing to watch the parade pass hopefully already added me to the attendee statistics.

The music I heard was generally techno music, then a few hits like "It's Raining Men" and "Rolling in the Deep."

On the way back home, I felt pleased that I'd gone. Next year, unless a happy revolution happens and LGBTQ+ orientation is left to the personal discretion of the individual instead of being treated as fodder for political persecution, I hope to go again — and this time see more. It made me happy to hear in the evening that this particular, 2025 Berlin parade attracted hundreds of thousands of partygoers and that it was 'the largest in years.'

Grey Cucumbers and Good Intentions

Today I had volunteered to help pack school supplies like pencil sharpeners and snacks into backpacks at a Berlin charitable organization, but even more volunteers showed up than expected and the organization needed people to sort the fruit and vegetable donations that rapidly rot in the summer heat. So instead I wandered off to the other side of the great hall in the Berliner Großmarkt, at the edge of a shipping canal, in the Wedding district.

*

First, after stepping out at the Beusselstraße S-Bahn station and climbing into the urban landscape, I had arrived at the great hall by walking down a narrow entrance, past a now-disused porter's gatehouse, alongside trucks with Netherlands license plates, through the charitable organization's vans and up a staircase and through one of the many berths with blinds acting as a door, before following the arrows to the volunteer assembly station.

There we were asked to write our name, address, telephone number, and email in a form. We were also asked to sign our names to a promise not to eat or take home any food that we'd sort. And we were directed to switch out our street shoes for proper safety shoes, which were made available with a change of clean socks in a nook with a kitchen and washrooms leading off it.

The highlights of the safety instructions were probably
1. that we were not allowed to sort anything if we were drunk, and
2. if we had an accident traveling to or from the charitable organization's location, we were covered by the organization's insurance.

Two cameramen from the local Berlin and Brandenburg TV station were in the hall, too, which made me antsy as a camera-shy private citizen but also greatly fascinated me as an amateur journalist.

But the men were there to film the school supply packing.

Since I wandered off to the food packing area, the 'fifteen seconds of fame' that the charitable organization's volunteer coordinators jokingly promised us were no longer likely for me.

*

So in sorting the fruit and vegetable donations, which are picked up by the organization's vans from grocery stores around Berlin, we worked with plastic crates (the German technical term is Europaletten, I think).

These crates held the produce that was sometimes not, sometimes partly, and sometimes all rotting, and all jumbled together. We chose one crate at a time, carried it over to a sorting table, then began throwing away what had gone bad and sorting into clean crates what was still good. A watermelon, tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, onions, avocados, bell peppers, spicy peppers, lemons, oranges, carrots with and without greens, potatoes, apricots, cauliflower, broccoli, red currants, blueberries, green onions, pak choy, plums, two daikon radishes, regular radishes, watercress, coriander leaf, and chives all ended up on my table.

It was by turns incredibly disgusting work — ash-grey cucumbers and a mushy brown broth of decomposed watercress were likely my least attractive finds — and at other times quite agreeable. Oldies were playing on the radio, until 3 or 4 hours in when the rest of the school supply packing party joined us and the music was turned off, presumably so they could hear the volunteer coordinator's instructions.

The safety shoes were comfortable, and it was only as I entered the U-Bahn in my regular street shoes after 7 p.m. that the soles of my feet began aching.

To be pragmatic, I'm not sure that my volunteering really helped, except to boost the morale of the people at the organization. I was only one person and didn't put much of a dent in the piles of produce; part of the produce I sorted might still go bad before anyone gets a chance to eat it; and a lot of food and other resources will still go to waste. (We had to be conservative in deciding what to keep, because it was possible that the fruits and vegetables wouldn't reach a consumer for another day or two.)

Not to mention that I went through 2 or 3 pairs of rubber gloves because (for example) I didn't want slimy decomposed radish leaf to travel to the pristine apricots I was sorting next.

Besides I took a bottle of water from the supply that we were allowed to take. So to be strict I'd need to deduct the negative environmental impact of bottled water from the positive environmental impact of saving produce that might be thrown out...

But tomorrow I'll return as promised, and we'll see if I feel more useful then.

***

Fortunately my other 'world-saving' enterprise of the past month has been more rewarding.

I've watered three trees near the apartment, a process that takes at least 2-3 hours at a time if done properly. I haul the water in a bucket, using the undrinkable water from a late-19th or early-20th-century street pump so that I don't waste the city drinking water.

But... Now I might not need to make the effort any more: it's been raining a lot. My aching tricep muscles and I are glad if Mother Nature is the one transporting the water, not me.

End of Term Essays, Exams, etc.

It's less than a month before the end of the university semester, so the 3,000-word essays that I will need to write before October are beginning to be discussed in my classes and two exams are looming. Besides I am in the middle of a rewrite of a Spanish language essay.

I can't say I look forward to these academic milestones with great excitement. I am hoping to wrap them up neatly at the very beginning and at the very end of the summer holidays, so that university and leisure don't blur into each other in a psychologically dysfunctional soup leaving me exhausted, cranky and dull-witted next year.

That said, one of the essays will compare a neoclassical Spanish play with one of Molière's plays, and I'm excited about that since Molière is indulgent, fun reading to me.

But what I'd actually wanted to do during the summer is to forget university and work instead, since both Detrumpification and trying to offset Berlin's budget cuts are looking like increasingly expensive endeavours. Lately I've been economizing on mealtimes at university because I'd like to spend my weekly money ration on fixing problems, and I'd rather remain financially independent as long as possible. Today's splurge was donating to the Christopher Street Day parade.

Besides, I wouldn't mind having a steady income so that I can go off of my financial diet after 26 months of (mostly uninterrupted) unemployment. New books, sheet music, museum outings, new clothes, CDs, travel, magazines, sessions at the bouldering gym, concerts, etc. — it would be nice to splurge again, or at least enter stores and feel like I can theoretically buy things again.

Returning to the Christopher Street Day parade, the local evening news broadcast reported a few weeks ago that American companies that co-sponsor the parade have been pulling back this year due to political pressures at home. On the one hand I guess it's nice to know that American companies were supporting LGBTQ+ rights in Germany. On the other hand it's depressing that the companies let themselves be intimidated by a spiritual lightweight like the 47th president.

I watched Barack Obama's recent interview with a historian in Connecticut, in a YouTube video, and more or less agree with what he said: for wealthy and influential Americans who have been reaching out to him for advice about how to deal with various pressures from the current presidential administration, his message is that no one's forcing them to make Nelson Mandela sacrifices like sitting in prison for 28 years. (On another note, my armchair assessment is that Obama still seems seriously burned out and should probably not be spending so much time thinking and talking about his country's morally bankrupt regime until he feels better.)

To give credit to my last and deeply unlamented employer, despite their shortcomings, however, they're not shy about celebrating Pride Month on a certain social media job website.

Anyway, returning to the idea of a summer job, I've applied to do monkey work for an edition of Hannah Arendt's collected works, and I'm quite excited about it. Sending the application is something I'd probably do anyway, but I also like feeling that my father would have been intrigued and delighted by the opportunity and by my giving it a try. My more rational side admits that a 41-hour-per-month job that therefore stretches out to 10 hours per week will probably be quite a drain on time and energy that I need for my homework. That said, I've been calculating the cost and preparing to pay up, and there's little more one can do.

But I think that just sending one application to one job is not enough. I might look into working with pre-schoolers, since I like that curious, squawking, exploring age very much but am not sure if I have talent dealing with them. It's too long ago since I was an overbearing older sister to a kindergartner. So a practicum or mini-job should do.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Six

New Denver's claim to fame so far is, sadly, that it was one of many sites far away from the Pacific coast where thousands of Japanese-Canadians were interned, as supposed enemies of war, starting in 1941.

Entrance of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre,
New Denver, Canada. September 2024.

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre was set up in the 1990s, encompassing three original houses that were built in the 1940s to hold the displaced Canadians, and a community centre. A garden with maple trees and cedar shrubs, ferns, a flowing dry gravel stream, and other features, designed by a former internee, runs amongst the houses and to the street's edge.

The Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver,
where Japanese Canadian internees were held.
There even seem to be bunk beds in the bleacher seats.
As a Berliner, the view reminds me disquietingly of the asylum seeker accommodations
at the former Tegel Airport.

The internees at "The Orchard" had likely been summoned to large halls in, or near, the towns or cities where they lived, with a few suitcases. They were forced to leave homes, businesses, and cars behind; these belongings were 'held on their behalf' and — more often than not — sold, without their consent, for bargain prices. (While the Holocaust went further, the profiteering of a fellow citizens in Canada from racist prejudice against a minority group does feel shamefully similar to expropriation of Jewish Germans' possessions in Nazi Germany.)

After being held, the Japanese-Canadians were shipped off into remote inland villages. The first winter in New Denver was freezing, and the Memorial Centre doesn't leave much to the imagination about conditions: a tan-colored tent like the ones in which many women and children were left to sleep is set up in the museum, with a small oil-fueled heater and a blanket, as a black-and-white photo shows the real 1940s tents steeped in snow.

It was only in the following winter in the 1940s that the cabins were finished. The houses that survive in the memorial centre have thin cedar shingle walls. Tar paper seemed to do most of the remaining work of insulation and waterproofing. Outhouses with washrooms were a later addition. Over time, the houses were customized and improved, but they don't look much more winter-proof.

To make things worse, families were sometimes separated again after the original deportation. Over 1,000 Japanese Canadians were sent to Ontario to work. Women were sent off to work as domestic servants; a sign in the Centre suggests that the women's wages were garnished to pay for their family members' internment. Men were sent to Ontario as well, as labourers to build highways, farmers or foresters.

A few men, at least from other British Columbia camps, were kept in the province but sent to fight forest fires: at the entrance to the museum garden, a section of tree trunk that was found again much later by a logging company shows the names of Japanese-Canadian firefighters from Lemon Creek Camp, engraved into the wood during a mission in 1945.

In the modern day, the houses in the Centre are furnished roughly as they might have been like in the 1940s: beds in rooms that are barely large enough to hold anything else, a few wooden shelves sticking out from the walls, and modest piles of adult and children's clothing, as well as comforts like handheld paper fans. A radio in the entrance, perhaps, and a dining/entrance/kitchen area with a dense throng of waste pail, old-fashioned iron stove on four legs, broom, pots, and cooking ingredients. Then one or two rooms that hold Japanese-Canadian nostalgia: cosmetics and newspapers with Japanese writing, a large rectangular tin labelled "Japanese Crackers." A few of the artifacts are post-war, as the camp was fully dissolved later, in 1957.

Table in one of the cabins at Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre.

Despite the stressful conditions, the exhibits record a sense of community: the community hall amongst the family houses is a literal example, and the building still hosts a Buddhist shrine and a bath house. Photos also capture annual celebrations like a Christmas concert. In the Centre's gardens, a vegetable patch or two shows the gardening skills of many Japanese Canadians who had been farmers in British Columbia before the war, and later grew crops like broad beans in the internment camp. 

At the end of the war, the government — far from recognizing its injustice — told Japanese-Canadians that they were no longer wanted in British Columbia. One or two exceptions were made, but most former internees were ordered to Japan or to Eastern Canada. I was wondering if this banishment was ordered because their Canadian neighbours were ashamed, didn't want to give back the possessions that they had stolen, or still genuinely feared a Japanese invasion, were too steeped in racist stereotypes, or felt resentful of Japan's military actions during the War. Regardless of motivation, the order was revoked in 1949, but I am guessing a lot of damage had been done by then.

A plaque signed The Village of New Denver at the entrance of the Memorial Centre now says, "It is a humbling reminder of the courage of the Japanese Canadians interned during World War II and their contributions to the social and cultural character of the area."

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre is not the only site in New Denver that commemorates the detention of Japanese Canadians. A few private homes in the village are left over from the internment camp and can be identified based on their shape and size, although internment camps were generally bulldozed after the war. Besides a garden was laid out at the water's edge.

I seem to remember the Kohan Reflection Garden was, like the Centre, co-funded by Japanese Canadians. From its shoreline we admired the flights of two remote-controlled model float airplanes over Slocan Lake, the swishing waters on the pebbled lakeside, the wood-shingled red and black tea house, a gardener's work, and the trees and bushes (rhododendrons, hydrangeas, bamboo, ...) and ornamental stone lanterns and bridge of the garden itself.

I wondered why the Japanese Canadians who had been interned didn't just spit in the eye of the oppressor after the war, but instead created beautiful things. Still, I guess they took the wiser path.

Student Elections and the Protest That Went Off on a Tangent

In the weeks since my last post about university, I've been sleep-deprived and overwhelmed, but it's still a far better semester than my last.

The Eurovision Song Contest, a musical flashmob for peace in Middle Eastern politics, an Italian-language lecture about an archaeological site in Italy where many villas have been excavated (no, it's not Pompeii) took up part of my time throughout the month of May.

***

Then in the first week of June I was given a chance to earn money again, as an election helper for my university's student parliament. It was intense, although the earnings were good and we were showered with snacks to feed us through the 6- and 3-hour shifts. Besides it was worthwhile (as I'd hoped when applying for the job) to learn the rigorous procedures, because they are reasonably close I think to elections outside of the ivory tower as well.

It was also a happily bizarre experience. Two fellow students and I were set up in a hallway with large glass façades, doors leading to lecture halls for over 120 people, but barely any foot traffic except for the same librarians and office staff ... opposite a horse skeleton to celebrate the building's second function as home to Veterinary Medicine. I'd thought at first that it was a prehistoric animal, but something felt off (i.e., in retrospect, that prehistoric horses were actually smaller). Instead, it was the skeleton of Prussia's King Frederick II's favourite horse, as I discovered the second day of elections.

For hours I did homework, read a book by Isabel Allende, and chatted with the fellow election helpers. Of course I also helped people to vote, but if we averaged out the daily tally, only about 6 people voted per hour, which left a whole lot of time for lollygagging.

On Day Two, I went over to photograph the horse skeleton. But the glass vitrine and lights made for awkward reflections. Then, an hour or so later, a mildly nervous-looking university staffer turned up with a photographer. He tried a few shots of the horse skeleton with his analogue camera, then profanely pronounced the lighting conditions 'Sch*e.' (It felt validating, as it implied that my technique was not at fault.) He took a few last shots with his smartphone 'to give the client a variety to choose from,' and then left.

It felt again weirdly like I  'mesh' with far more experienced photographers, despite my own lack of experience. I'd suggested removing an election banner that might be in the way of his shots, and it turned out to be exactly what the man had needed.

But in general the vote-counting work was, like the work at the ballot boxes, a mixture of intense activity that alternated with a cosmically nihilist absence of purpose: sometimes as I sat around uselessly, I worried that I wasn't earning the very generous €16+ hour.

*

It's been busy after that as well, but I'm not sure how much to ramble on about it. A university budget cut protest on June 4 turned into a pro-Palestinian protest mixed with a little bit of the original protest, culminating in about 400 people howling at the university president's building for him to come out and show himself, as a serried line of fluorescent-yellow-and-black riot police stood in front of the entrance. The speakers felt inter alia that the university should drop charges against the handful of activists who — a few months ago — had armed themselves with axes etc. and broken into the building...

Regardless of my thoughts about this 'interesting' interpretation of how to help Palestinians, some of the police activity earlier had seemed pretty ridiculous to me. 3 to 5 people had unfurled a Gaza banner from an upper level of a different university building, one of them had a Palestinian scarf swathed around his or her face like a babushka, and someone waved a huge Palestinian flag. (I still figure that if you think your actions are right, you won't hide any part of your face; but either way I didn't feel threatened.) In response, however, a police officer, down on the street where I was, started running a few feet toward the 'scene' and excitedly reporting into his walkie-talkie about 'vermummte Personen auf dem Dach.'

I haven't kept up to date with Berlin's pro-Palestinian protests enough to say so with certainty. But generally it seems to me like Berlin's police's guidelines have shifted, and even things like scarves or flags that have not been ruled unconstitutional by any German court are being considered unwanted at protests. And I think it's a bad development. Public relations and convenience are not enshrined in Germany's basic law, while freedom of speech (even if I would never use it that way) is.

Anyway, the howling at the protest sounds entertaining now that it's written down, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate it at the time.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Five

It's the Pentecost weekend, which means that Monday is a statutory day off in Berlin, so I want to spend time diving back (in my imagination) into last year's holiday!

***

We entered New Denver just before the shops (specifically, the shops that were still open after the main tourist season) began to close for Friday evening. It is, as a man told us later in our journey, a town that looks like it did during the 1960s.

In fact the 1960s were why Uncle Pu had decided to take us there. My paternal grandfather had been a schoolteacher in that decade, and he was assigned to New Denver and lodged in a house just at the entrance to town, at the corner of 6th Avenue. Uncle Pu pointed it out to us immediately: a beige, weatherboarded two-storey house with a peaked roof, kept in a tidy state that preserved its historic appearance.

We parked on 6th Avenue and wandered down the slope to Slocan Lake. I imagined that tourists would throng through the village in summer months, skiers with drawling leisurely voices who would be heading into the 'back country,' mountain bikers, and the kayakers and canoeists. In one yard, someone was advertising vinyl records for sale; in another, men around middle age or older were sitting in a garden arbour at what looked like a café. Further down the street, there was a pharmacy and an art gallery and further up the street and far beyond it, a forested mountain looked blue in the mist.

I popped into a souvenir shop, which sold (amongst other things) postcards, clothing, balls of yarn, books including a copy of the 2022 bestseller Remarkably Bright Creatures that was also circulating in Berlin — as well as books by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese and Eden Robinson, and decorated chopsticks. I ended up getting a card that showed a dark wooden shack with a mountain ash tree in front: it raises funds to preserve the remaining houses from a Second World War-era internment camp. When I paid for the card, the man at the counter was pleased that I'd chosen it; he spoke about the cause with the same respectful gravity that I'd hear from other New Denverites later.

A fabric shop was closed; and the Valley Voice newspaper office had a sign on it saying that the owners had decided to pass the legacy to someone else and were looking for someone interested.

Next I wandered into a back yard from a local museum. The first exhibit, impossible to miss, was a lovingly restored wooden boat, "Lancet," from the early 20th century: it was now sheltered beneath a roof a little way from the sidewalk.

When I turned into the back yard, it was to find a range of forestry and agricultural implements arranged in a semi-circle. Hanging from the rear wall of the house, there were the 'Forest Finds,' everything from oven doors and shovel heads and axe heads through metal ladles to enamel dishes and colanders, some dating back into the Victorian era, that had been found amongst the trees around New Denver.

Nearer the boat, a "Wood shaft bucket" ("used to clear rock from a vertical shaft") whose slats had drawn apart near the bottom and whose iron frames were orange with corrosion, hung from a roof. A black "forge bellows" was hanging above an iron crank. A metal file, and several pincers and shovels displayed beside the bellows could have belonged to a forge, too.

"Forest Finds" around Silvery Slocan Museum, New Denver. September 2024.

It was not hard to picture miners and loggers sitting around campfires or in a woodland cottage, or working, and using these tools, a hundred years ago. I also liked picturing locals or visitors finding these tools embedded in dark, cedar-needle-strewn forest soil decades later, being delighted and confused, and bringing them to an expert who'd tell them what it was and when it had been made.

From there, we walked to another weatherboarded, street corner building that used to house the Bank of Montreal. 'This is,' our uncle told us, 'where I opened a savings account in the Sixties.'

We found out from a signs that it stopped being a bank by the 1970s, when it became the Silvery Slocan Museum.

Now the late 19th-century bank building's windows have been recast as vitrines: mini-collections of everything from an engraved musical brass instrument, through a Lydia E. Pinkham bottle, to a spittoon or two, all of which looked like purest Laura Ingalls Wilder — as well as an electric iron from the 1920s, oil lamp from Hong Kong in the 1940s, and a flower-painted, glass-walled butter churn. The selection paid implicit tribute to the variety of nationalities and backgrounds of immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

On the museum's second floor balcony, we spotted antique chairs rocking chairs arranged in the open air, as if ghosts were holding a conversation. I seem to remember that one of the chairs looked as if it had been burned in a fire.

Below the house, I also seem to remember mining carts rested on a pair of train rails, as a sign commemorated the galena ore extraction industry. (One of New Denver's streets is named Galena Avenue.) It looked like a nice museum to visit in the summer season, when the interior is also open.

— What was disconcerting in several places in British Columbia, admittedly, was that while there was a lot of visible history, little to none of it was Indigenous. Of course that speaks for itself: it shows how long ago Indigenous people were already forced from their land. But it would still be more satisfying to know which cultures did exist there and how they lived in the landscape. —

Slocan Lake, September 2024.
The mist between two of the mountains is
the smoke of a forest fire.
The cedar in the foreground is showing signs of drought.

Then we reached the lakeside.

An Edwardian pump house in white weatherboard with green trim stood beside it, underneath trees. Nearby – and this excited me most of all – there was a rectangular brown garbage can with a bear-proof sticker.

It was sad to see, while standing in the gaps between the trees on the New Denver bank, on the other side of the lake how much Valhalla Provincial Park has been injured by forest fires. Swathes of the evergreen forest were black or red, smouldering steaming smoke was seeping from several parts, and the snow fields above were contaminated and grey, long after the fire was first fought back. That said, the weather held the promise of more rain to help relieve the forest.

On the way back up 6th Avenue, I looked at the signs that described the historic origins of the buildings: one was built in 1894 as a mining office, then used by a doctor, before it was used as a mining office again. Another was a newspaper office that was partly rented out to a carpet and furnishing store, until 1904. A former hotel, milliner's, butcher's shop turned general store, ...

Like a bear near a garbage can, but in a much more appetizing way, we also began to think of food. We saw a restaurant, underneath a huge leafy tree that (in my mind at least) had its own unearthly aura and seemed to have a gin fragrance. A few droplets of rain clung onto the outdoor tables, and autumnal wasps were visiting.

We ordered ice cream and brownies from the dessert menu, and began to chat with the family of owners. It's often said that it's a small world: so it's not entirely surprising that despite the fact that we were in a village of around 500 inhabitants in western Canada, two of the family had lived in Berlin, and could chat about Prenzlauer Berg and the Avus highway with us in German.

In the meantime, the mother of the family (a hard worker who turned her hand to a lot of things, so that I was in awe of her throughout) was tending to the plants around the parking lot, while her grandchild toddled behind her wielding a large shovel. And after our meal, they kindly offered us plums that they had picked themselves. It seemed part and parcel of a neighbourly ethos I likely haven't travelled often enough to see anywhere else, and I hoped I showed that I appreciated it.

The owner family also told us about the summer's forest fires. New Denver had been on evacuation alert (or watch?) after three days of 40°C weather. A thunderstorm arrived, and lightning strikes found the forest dry as kindling — 'jeder Blitz ein Treffer' ('each strike was a bull's eye') our host commented dryly. Then a fire had broken out around Silverton, 5 kilometres to the south.

We decided to stay overnight in their inn: a pastel-blue-painted building with stone elements that looks like it might be from the 1970s or earlier, and flowered wallpaper and what I seem to remember as dark wood wainscoting along the inner hallways.

Uncle Pu absolutely wanted a chance to kayak around Slocan Lake, and this was part of his negotiation with the owners. But I was too timid to enjoy the idea of me or anyone I cared for navigating an unfamiliar waterway, and so was secretly relieved when elaborate plans to take to the water didn't work out after all.

Before we thought of turning in for the night, though, there was the remaining afternoon and evening before us. We walked to the Nikkei Memorial Internment Centre on the other side of town, across the rocky Carpenter Creek.