A Rambling Day in (Imaginary) 1904

This morning I woke up earlier than usual, and prepared to spend another day in Edwardian England, this time in the year 1904.

It began with sweeping and scrubbing the kitchen floor, then took a nicer turn once the brothers were awake and I had a moment to dig out a piano transcription of Edvard Grieg and play the morning part of his Peer Gynt suite, and then we ate breakfast: croissants and bread buns, and coffee.

After that, we walked to the Kreuzberg. It was a pleasant day and not too crowded yet. The grass has grown lusher these past weeks, and is often speckled with starry white daisies and sunny larger dandelion flowers. I also like seeing the purple leaves and blossoms of red dead nettles, which generally accompany dandelion flowers in my mind. Pink, white and yellow blossoms are emerging on trees large and small, especially on the forsythia bushes; and a green haze hovered amongst the trees that are growing their first leaves.

The waterfall has been turned on again in the Viktoriapark, the danger of frost and burst plumbing apparently being past. That said, the brush is still very thin and so dumpsters, garbage and other things that will be screened by leaves later are still evident.

'Edwardian' Marketing

I left my mother and two of my brothers at the edge of the park, and walked on to visit a market hall in the Bergmannstraße.

Past times I've been on that street have made me think it's not my favourite part of Berlin. I feel a bit like I need to eat kale, wear home-knitted sweaters, buy organic, scold 'lowly' service workers for not doing things Properly, over-parent a child according to half-a-dozen different schools from Montessori to Rudolf Steiner, and preferably free Tibet every time I'm there. Not that most of these things are wrong per se, it's just that put together they're a little much for me. But I appreciate what it was like before a lot more, now that I've experienced what it's like during the social distancing era, which is more uncanny and with fewer people.

When I entered the hall, a grey-haired man in an ex-rocker outfit of black leather jacket and skinny pants was holding out a cup at the entrance and asking for money, as shoppers pushed through the narrow entrance of double doors — one side a wheelchair ramp, the other a low set of steps. After the antechamber with its hand disinfectant dispenser and mask warning, we reached the white-walled, much more spacious hall itself.

A florist's stand is at the entrance, and bristly globe thistles in foggy bluish-purple greeted our eyes. So did a fluorescent security-vested young man who was ensuring that the rules were being respected; for example, nobody was supposed to leave through this entrance, so that foot traffic was circulating and no jams of people were causing virus hazards.

There was a newspaper stand that I wanted but forgot to get back to. (Since newspapers seem the most exciting form of entertainment in the Edwardian Age and it's a bit of a pain in the neck to force myself not even to listen to the TV news.) And deli stands with Middle Eastern food — olives and that kind of thing — and cheeses and meats, bakeries. I mostly ignored the shelves of wines, delicious-looking jarred French specialities from mayonnaise and capers to various confits of different meats, pistachio biscuits and teas and pastel-colored bonbons.

Instead I zeroed in on a fruit and vegetable stand, and began trying to work through my shopping list. 

Large lemons with leaves to match imported from Italy and little orange Hokkaido pumpkins from Germany were grouped amongst the latticed plastic bins; honeydew melons and cantaloupes were there too. Then there were leeks, tomatoes (green and red) of which a few were a ribbed heirloom form, thick single white asparagus stems and green asparagus bundles that have become much cheaper since last week apparently, and cucumbers. Then artichoke heads and radishes, ramps presumably culled from the forests near Berlin, fresh dill and basil, chicory, garlic... In terms of fruit, raspberries and blueberries and strawberries, oranges ... the list goes on. I felt a bit nervous adjusting to the indoors market environment, which does sound silly when I write it down, so I forgot to buy a few things.

After I reemerged onto the street, I crossed off everything I already had and then dropped into a grocery store across the street. Outside it had tubs of strawberries for 1.99 Euros from Greece, and I had to wonder who was paying for that low price, and remembered a terrible news story where a strawberry farmer had shot his underpaid workers ... and yet I got one tub, hoping that these had been picked under less gruesome circumstances.

Indoors, beans, leeks, celery, lettuces, cauliflower, etc. were piled up in plastic bins, and I found most of the other ingredients that I needed. Everything was tucked into a fairly compact space, reminding me I think of low-ceilinged stores in old brick buildings in downtown Victoria back in Canada. It was happy and boisterous as one of the employees — a lady in a headscarf — was tending to a little girl while organizing the parsley... What struck me most in the shelves was the Turkish delight selection. I had to remind myself that I wasn't sure how often Turkish delight was eaten in the UK in 1904...

Anyway, hiking the steep terrain of the Viktoriapark with the vegetables and fruit hanging from my arm was a chore, so I decided to sit down for a moment before proceeding, like a Victorian nursemaid in Kensington Gardens. Altogether the kitchen floor scrubbing earlier in the day had also felt like a(n admittedly gratuitous) Cinderella cos-play.

I did appreciate the food more because of the distance and effort of fetching it, and it put me more in touch with the labour that goes into producing and shipping food before it lands on the table. ... Next week I plan to go to a nearby market again, however.

***

Academics and Tea

When I arrived home, Mama, Ge., and J. soon gathered in the corner room, looking over a theological paper that Mama had written for university.

In the paper she explored different hymns, Christmas carols, and other songs in the Christian tradition, to gather popular attitudes toward questions of theodicy (the source and purpose of evil in the world) and of free will.

As usual when we read over her university essays, we picked apart most sentences and aimed for the utmost clarity. The sentences felt shorter than usual, which is probably why — despite a running family joke — Ge. for once backed off on the commas and didn't request that we add more comma-separated clauses on every page.

We were drinking green tea and the French breakfast tea that most of us love (I like most teas, so feel more neutral on the question). I also fetched out the chocolate fudge that I had made earlier in the week as a snack. Fudge was apparently popular amongst college girls in the early 1900s, at least in the US, which is why it felt proper. But I didn't really have time to cook the dinner.

I did prepare an afternoon tea, unfortunately popping out often from the essay discussion and popping back in again always at least half a page behind everyone else, inconveniently reading and making comments on something that had already been corrected...

In the end, the afternoon tea was served very late, at 6 p.m.:

Leftover breakfast bread buns and pumpernickel

Assortment of toppings: Cucumber, radishes, celery, boiled egg, parsley, thin smoked ham, cheese

Scones, with and without raisins

Lemon curd and whipping cream

Strawberries

Leftover chocolate fudge.

Then we finished looking over Mama's essay.

Miniature Supper

Finally, for supper I cooked a potato soup: potatoes, chicken stock (psst bouillon powder), onions, parsley and a little butter.

In addition I made an arrowroot blancmange of milk, egg and arrowroot powder, with a little lemon curd stirred in for flavour. But it still hadn't set properly the last time I checked and therefore hasn't been eaten. (I have a huge soft spot for arrowroot because it's mentioned in Jane Austen's Emma. It still seems to have been a popular ingredient when people were cooking food for sick people, a hundred years later.)

Altogether, my menus are half as large as the ones suggested in cookbooks from the early 1900s, and yet we still often have food left over ... It does make me worry, because I don't want to waste anything.

After Supper

To unwind, I hopped onto the warm coal stove in the corner room and read more of the Apartheid essays book. The latest essay just described South Africa's apartheid government being excluded from Olympic Games in the 60s and 70s for its incredibly racist sports practices (it was a big deal that Maori cricketers were allowed to represent New Zealand in a tour in South Africa...).

Besides I read another page or so of an Irish women's fiction book (I'm omitting the title so as not to malign an author or their efforts directly) that I am wrestling with at present. I see that it's partly very well written; especially the first chapter was more disciplined. But then there are passages like this one that tempt me to slam shut the book:

When I summon my eldest stepdaughter to mind now I see a selfie, a distillation, an expression of joy that makes her look so like her father I am haunted at the thought of her inner life. She seems a more exquisite thing than I, better formed and more protected.

Anyway, I also read more of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which provided great literary relief after the other book.

Besides I read Beatrix Potter's Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. The Tale of Peter Rabbit appeared in 1902 or thereabouts, so I've taken this as an excuse to read her books again. I think I found Peter Rabbit's story too strict when I was a child, and it turns out that Squirrel Nutkin is entirely new to me. The pictures are really fabulous; they make me feel calm and happy just looking at them.

Bertrand Russell also wrote his Principia Mathematica around this time, and being a Russell fan I wanted to give it a try; but I wasn't able to find it in our home library. Émile Zola also died in the early 1900s, so I presumed that an Edwardian person in 1904 might try to read his backlist and I could try to do the same. But the thought of adding Germinal (which I started because it was prescribed reading for a history course at UBC, but never finished) to my mountainous to-be-read pile was too daunting.

As for non-reading historical occupations, I cut my finger during my supper preparations and had daubed blood on my shirt by accident before I noticed what had happened. So I had an excuse to bandage my finger and not to hand-wash more dishes or to keep mending the pyjama trousers I'd started to mend last week... What. a. pity!

P.S.: My small obsession with my fashion magazine subscription continues; the samples are interesting to me, and the very sparse texts that intersperse the fashion shoots and thinly veiled advertisements are helping me gather knowledge related to work (without traumatizing me by being too work-related).

A Weekend in 1902

This weekend is a better weekend for 'time travel.' It's a long weekend because of Easter, of course, and therefore I'm not spending a quarter of my waking hours doing housework before plunging back into work.

I started out the day putting on another button-up blouse that I don't wear often. The shade of pale brown underneath my face makes me look like I've had two hours of sleep, but then I find Edwardian fashion was not wildly flattering in general. I'd thought about putting my hair into the strange bumpy halo around the face with a knob of a bun on top, to suit the style of the time, but I was just too vain to risk it. That said, I could have gone to Kadewe and splurged on a massive hat with feathers, to add a dashing My Fair Lady element to the dour governess hairstyle.

My mother was reading the Berliner Zeitung newspaper in the living room and was quite pleased that someone else was finally awake to add entertainment to the morning. Since the brothers were still asleep, and I'd wanted fresh berries for breakfast, I changed into a woollen skirt, a corduroy jacket and a red crocheted scarf, however, and went to the market to buy groceries.

A 1902 Trip to the Market

Bushes and small trees are beginning to burst, head to toe, into spring flowers in white and yellow. Winter hellebores are thriving in the shade this late into springtime and the chionodoxa are still out in force, but even the later-blooming tulips are beginning to heighten and their petals are growing from green to warmer hues, and the daffodils have fully emerged in time for Easter. The sky was pouring blue again, and yet again fluffy white clouds spoke of May, June — lazy summer days with airplanes carrying travellers to their holidays far above the trees.

This time I went to a market that reminded me of the Viktualienmarkt in Munich. Produce stalls were partly also locally sourced and organic: they carried ramps (Bärlauch), parsley, radishes, red beets, red cabbages, radicchio, varieties of potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, orange Hokkaido pumpkins, and kale that were locally grown. The ones that were not so local carried blueberries, strawberries, oranges, plums, and lemons; as well as green beans, peas that looked like mangetout, garlic, etc. There were clothing stalls, a stall with knitting yarn, a jewellery stand, decorated doughnuts, at least two places with flatbreads and savory pastries, etc., and the flower stands were very tastefully arranged with moss and entwined twigs in springlike arrangements that suggested birds' nests.

I'd felt a not entirely pleasant sense of almost literally going back in time when I was walking to the market earlier and the façade of a late-19th or early 20th-century residential apartment building gleamed in the sunlight. The market and the architecture represented a type of respectable traditionalism of the educated classes — there was an intellectual appeal in the approaches of the stall owners to displaying their wares as well as speaking with the shoppers, as well as a pecuniary and culinary appeal; and the buildings weren't just very solidly and well built, but were partly also showcases of more or less over-the-top sociocultural flourishes — that in my view held late traces of the German imperial time. Even the FFP2 mask that was tucked in my jacket pocket didn't dispel the feeling of atavism. There are quite a lot of reasons why I wouldn't literally want to live in 1902.

Anyway, I ended up finding everything I wanted in the way of groceries, and it was nice to see people chatting who knew each other.

Breakfast

When I returned home, the brothers were awake. We started breakfast with the bread buns that Mama had bought from the bakery. To go with them, I served the blueberries and strawberries I'd bought. Then I unwisely tried to whisk whipping cream by hand. I kept whisking and whisking, and my puny efforts were delaying the breakfast ....  In the end, Ge. helped. After that, with an atypical touch of decadence, I cut a croissant in half lengthwise, and layered in the whipping cream, pieces of strawberry, and blueberries. When I ate it at last, I felt very French — also, like I was going to be in trouble with the Revolutionary Tribunal for eating too much cake. Mama did comment that technically it was not Easter yet! I was a very bad Catholic.

My activities after breakfast were more sober-minded. I played a movement of Beethoven's Sonata appassionnata as well as ragtime pieces on the piano, and quickly checked my messages on the internet so that I wouldn't accidentally be rude during my experiment by ignoring colleagues. I aired my room. And I read an article in the Berliner Zeitung and started a quite good article about the latest former American president in the New York Review of Books.

Then I scrubbed the kitchen floor. I adapted a technique that I'd seen the British historian Ruth Goodman use in the television series Edwardian Farm, during my YouTube session last evening. First I swept the floor with a broom before applying the technique. Then I mentally separated the floor into squares/rectangles. Each square I scrubbed thoroughly with warm soapy water — I used a rough rag instead of a brush — then wiped clean with regular water, and finally went over again with a dry rag.

(I was quite won over by the technique. Because of the dry rag, I didn't need to play the fun-but-risky game of 'the wet floor is lava' when navigating the room. Also, the floor was shockingly clean afterward.)

'Dinner' and Tea

For lunch/'dinner' and teatime I prepared an afternoon tea:

Sandwiches, cucumber, radish, and thin parsley stems,

seasoned with salt and pepper

(kept fresh underneath an overturned bowl)

Eggs, boiled

Scones, freshly baked

Homemade lemon curd

Whipping cream and berries left over from breakfast

Stem-ginger shortbread cookies, toffee and pecan cookies, and chocolate-coated oat cookies

(store-bought)

Espresso

(anachronism, and made from instant crystals; a stand-in for coffee)

Herbal tea

French breakfast tea

Then Mama played a game of parcheesi with me. Last evening I'd rummaged in Ge.'s room to find our board games; after last week's internet-less, TV-less, radio-less disaster I'd vowed, somewhat like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, never to go bored again.

It was quite enjoyable; we rediscovered/reinvented the rules as we went along, without disputing them. The siblings and I used to play it when visiting our Aunt N., I think, so it had been over one and a half decades since we'd played.

But when Mama casually said, 'All right, we can apply that rule in the second round,' during the game, I internally squeaked with horror. At the end I carefully asked her whether she did want a second round, since she showed every symptom of being ready to move on; it turns out that we were both quite satisfied with what we'd had.

*

I'd also thought of a sewing project. While I have tons of holey socks, the prospects of fixing them are dim because the yarn supply is running out. Besides the last time I spent time darning socks, the (literally and figuratively) darned parts were worn through the first time I wore the socks again. It was like a Sisyphus effect with super-speedy boulders. Instead I tried to repair a skirt by hand-stitching a patch onto a hole. It went reasonably well and, ingloriously or not, at least I finished it.

Supper

For supper, I prepared a vegetable broth according to a Dr. Oetker recipe: onion, a hint of garlic, white cabbage, carrots, a leek, parsnips in lieu of parsley root, celeriac and parsley.

There was a ton of white cabbage left over, because I only needed 200 grams of a whole head. So I also made a kind of milky casserole or gratin: salt, pepper and herbs on the bottom, a few slices of garlic, maybe three tablespoons of butter, and then thinly sliced or coarsely julienned or chopped onion, white cabbage, leek, savoy cabbage, and celery stalk, then more salt, pepper and herbs, fresh parsley, and milk mixed with water so that it wouldn't burn. (Unfortunately, half the white cabbage and half the savoy cabbage are still left over, and the savoy cabbage hasn't taken well to the warming springtime temperatures so time is pressing.)

In the end I didn't make pommes duchesse or any of the other accompaniments to the supper that I'd been planning. It would have been too exhausting and I doubt the others would have had enough of an appetite. I just toasted a leftover bread bun from breakfast and sliced it into four pieces, and we ate it with the soup and the casserole.  The casserole turned out to be very, very beige; all the colour had leached out of the vegetables. Perhaps I should make it again on Halloween as a Ghost Vegetable Casserole.

As a dessert, we had leftover cookies from the afternoon tea, and roasted chicory coffee, and I finished the whipping cream left over from breakfast. I found out yesterday that substitute coffee is still period-appropriate, since it was recommended in a 1902 cookbook's recipe as a child-friendly swap-in for regular coffee. The old cookbooks I'm finding online are pretty fabulous, incidentally — although the nutritional advice in them is partly hair-raisingly terrible.

After clearing the table a little together with Mama, I read bits of books again and finished knitting a row in my scarf and reached the end of a second article in the New York Review of Books. Then I switched over to the 21st century at a little past 11 p.m.

Time Travel of Sorts to 1901

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

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

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

1901 Breakfast and Shopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1901 Promenade and Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1901 Evening

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

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

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

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

Covid, Toil, and Breakfast

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

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

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

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

*

In general I don't feel so great.

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

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

And I put in overtime yesterday.

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

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

*

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

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

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

Spring Tempests, Canadian Book Competitions, Etc.

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Aside from that, I am still reading other books.

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

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

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

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

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

Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent...

For a few weeks there were below-zero temperatures in Berlin and Brandenburg that reached as far as -17C.

In longer-distant past years I hadn't heated my room at all in these circumstances: I could barely function because I felt so cold, and walked around in a blanket for weeks. Fortunately this time has ended (although it did give me a far greater historical appreciation of the presence of coal in the Berlin Airlift after the Second World War) and I've been feeding the stove with coals pretty constantly.

A trick that Papa taught us is to prop up coal bricks in a fire so that only one end of the bricks touches the fire, gradually burning down over time instead of blazing up at once. Being a maximalist, he'd use five or six coal bricks for this, while I range from one to three. Either way, it's a good way to make sure that I can sleep or get lost in a fog of work ... and still see embers in the stove by the time I wake up literally or figuratively and think of the stove again.

Aside from tricks for tending fires, another Canadianism that I have retained is a wholesome fear of stepping out onto 'frozen' waterways. A good course of reading Jack London in childhood makes one less likely, I think, to venture out onto unproven surfaces in the wintertime; but other Berliners have been more enterprising about it, not always with good results.

With great dramatic irony, the hyacinth bulbs that Mama has been raising on the windowsill were happily sprouting and heightening in the middle of the cold, as if it were the middle of spring. Now the first flowers have appeared amongst the spear-like leaves.

Anyway, then this week the Great Thaw set in. The snowmen that my youngest brother constructed on the windowsill outside his room began to thin out, bend and topple in agonized Dali-esque fashion, a little horrifying to behold; and soon only the sticks for the arms were left amidst a dark grey tide of meltwater. The rain also 'ate away' at the snow cover that had lasted for days and days.

*

As for work, it appears as if not just our new clients but especially longtime clients are filled with springtime zeal, happily sending us horrendous data that have all the hallmarks of the messy mistakes of a new season that haven't been ironed out yet.

Because we're too far behind deadlines, I suspect that the colleagues who talk with clients have not been smushing the clients' egregious missteps in their faces as I'd like — not just out of an Old Testament love of punishment of the evildoer, but also because it will make our lives so much easier not to chase after and correct these glitches ourselves.

In most years March just means an increase in day-to-day work. But this year February has been so terrible that the mind boggles at the thought of next Black Friday season. This might be because of a coronavirus-related transition from brick-and-mortar shopping to online retail.

I've begun working on the weekends, as well as long hours during the week, and feeling very, very cranky or in a kind of wilted-flower stage that I think is very irritating for onlookers. It's not just me: I've noticed teammates working long hours; the teams I work with most closely are also overloaded. What's pretty unusual is that teams have started pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong, and I wouldn't say that my team or I are innocent.

Yesterday a colleague asked for a quick meeting, which we held today, to talk about how to mend faltering morale. To be honest, I'm out of ideas.

So I can't say that the 'winter of discontent' has been 'made glorious summer' yet.

I think I'd be happier if I felt that we were still in service to each other, not in service to The Idea of the Company as held out by a very small and very distant (I know they take pains to be transparent and accessible, but maybe not the right ones) circle of decision-makers.

Album Leaves

Although I think that poetry is often pretentious and haven't written a great deal lately also because of the fear of hypocrisy, it feels like a good time to cram out verse that I wrote years ago and that I actually like. (Although they're far from remarkable: poems I churned out as 'sketches' for poems I cared more about and kept only because they could be worse.) These remind me of the oceanside and the streams and the forest scenes I'm no longer likely to see any more now that we've moved away from Canada.

Sea Anemones

Through the tea-like, sunlit shimmer of the water in the tidal pool,
colonies of pudgy anemones in moss-dark green, ring and pad the scaly granite:
their tentacles, as meekly pink as earthworms, extend in peaceful concentricity.

***

The sparkling path

In brilliant glee the crescent minnow wends its
tail through water clear to ripple out its minute
breath in bubbles rising to the air. It chases light
and chases shade and casts its faded silhouette on the static
blandness within the pebbled riverbed. 

***

Lastly, a very non-Canadian nonsense poem about rose branches climbing on a castle wall:

Up the castle walls, winding into the air, the tough brown twigs and bright green shoots and dark-scarlet tinged buds, the wings of stipule and hooked long sepals at the blossoms, where (thin and scented) gather yellow petals and a ring of crinkled brown pistils casts its pollen to the breezes: like incense censers to waft the rose's spring in past embrasures to the stony recesses.

Sutton Hoo and the Dig

It's a fact little known beyond my family that I used to want to become an archaeologist. After reading about it intermittently for years as a child, and starting to read The Greek Stones Speak in my gap year, I attended a Classical Archaeology lecture at UBC and wanted to take courses at the Freie Universität here in Berlin. But I wasn't permitted to sign up for the tutorials officially because the schedule was full.

So in the end I attended a semester's worth of introductory lectures to Ancient History largely in the Middle East, and then did a kind of work-study thing, at the Freie Uni, but only for two days because I felt too impostor-syndrome-y.

Older students who had been at an excavation of prehistoric material elsewhere in Germany over the summer sat indoors, alongside the professor. They took a ziplock plastic baggie at a time with groups of excavated materials in them, and cleaned the bones, stones, pottery etc. with water, toothbrushes, and wooden picks. Even toothbrushes were considered a bit too abrasive, though, so we mostly had to content ourselves with the picks. Their finds were not hugely exciting and they grumbled a bit about it, joking that this or that pebble was the Philosopher's Stone. They also gossiped about all sorts of other things — for example, how one of their professors had been appalled when, in an English-language paper, a student had referred to an archaeological 'dig' instead of an 'excavation.' Or about the headache it was as a parent to wait for a bus, if one bus after another is crowded and there is no room for a child's buggy.

I spent hours on an animal bone that had over an inch of hard dry mud packed into the central cavity, and waited for the soil to soften a little from the water, a process which was barely more exciting than watching paint dry. But to be honest I still didn't finish cleaning it out before I pretty heinously put it back where I'd gotten it from, and hoped no one would notice, à la Mr. Bean. A few fragments of pale honeycombed bone also crumbled in my hand as I worked it, and so I thought I'd done enough damage.

We put the cleaned items onto wooden frames, with metal grids across them, on top of newspaper, to let them dry.

When the artifacts etc. were clean and dry, we put a swipe of transparent glue onto each one. Then, in old-fashioned ink, we wrote the numerical code that was on the plastic baggie onto each glue swipe once it had dried. (It was indeed a good surface to write on.) The professor warned us not to put on a thick layer of glue. I ignored this for an unbaked brick-red pottery sherd, only to see grains of pottery — which had survived thousands of years until I got my graceless philistine paws on it — peel off with the glue. The professor had kindly said that the codes that I'd written on a few items in my tiny script (the despair of school teachers when they had to read my homework) were "sehr akkurat"; so I hadn't messed up everything. But along with the disintegrating bone, the crumbling pottery taught me a lesson that perhaps I wasn't ready to be entrusted with handling the history of mankind yet.

I also realized a little of the gate-keeping that exists in the archaeological world. There are of course many reasons, from grave-robbery to the damage of amateur work like mine. Also, naturally, funding is hard to come by.

And that was perhaps the end of my obsession ... until I discovered the British archaeological series Time Team on YouTube a year or two ago, and bored my long-suffering but polite colleagues with my enthusiasm.

***

This afternoon T. visited as I was making three rounds of cookies. As the supply of hot, chocolatey baked goods vanished, she advised watching a TV series or a film. In the end we watched The Dig, the drama based on the 1930s excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, in southeastern England.

Ralph Fiennes enters the scene as a gruff, laconic Briton who — from one of his earliest moments in the film, knocking at the front door to the disapproval of a butler, then standing by awkwardly — is conscious of his low social status in the stratified English society of the late 1930s. Self-taught, Basil Brown works as an excavator for archaeological digs, Roman and otherwise.

A rich widow with a wavy 1930s bob, an Agatha Christie-esque mansion that is all bay windows and wisteria, and clothing that alternates between flapper chic and cardigan respectability, Edith Pretty, has invited him to explore a series of earth mounds in a field on her estate.

She tells Brown, during the first discussion, that she 'has a feeling' about the largest earth mound. (Believing that the shape of the mound shows that its contents had already been looted, Brown declines to take her suggestion at first. But of course that's where the ship is buried.) The film draws heavy-handed parallels between the establishment's refusal to take Brown seriously because he is an untrained amateur from the lower classes, and Pretty's marginalization because she is a woman.

After a while the cast of archaeologist characters expands. I liked the character etc. acting in the film in general. I'm not sure if Ralph Fiennes was also aiming for an Academy Award nomination but his accent, posture, etc. were all conscientiously fitted to the role and consistently kept, and he does stand out.

As for the archaeology, I was a little appalled that the dig excavation wasn't marked off into neat squares and measured, so that each find could be photographed and recorded in context. But I'm not an expert on the evolution of historical methods of archaeology. All I know is that the method of digging a deep trench (and, apparently, neglecting to sift through the soil that's removed from an archaeological site in search of small finds that might be overlooked) is the typical magisterial methodology that was used by many early archaeologists. So the film may have gotten that right, even if a professional nowadays would shake his or her head.

What I did rightly question was that an untried young woman would be taken on at an archaeological excavation by seasoned professionals just because she was literally a lightweight. In real life Peggy Piggott already had experience when she worked at Sutton Hoo; and she went on to have an eminent, decades-long career in archaeology. Instead, Lily James is forced to play a ditsy role as the neglected young wife of a gay man who's the actual respected professional.

Also when a romantic tension is brewed between Basil Brown (who is married) and Edith Pretty just because they're of the opposite gender and inhabit the same movie plot, I wanted to hit my head on my desk. With the romance subplots I altogether had the uncomfortable feeling of prying into private business that I hate. Although the scene where a husband barges in on a bathroom only to see his own wife in the bathtub, and retreats in horror at the impropriety, is pretty funny and almost redeems it.

I felt that the tension of Edith Pretty's fear of dying and leaving her son to fend for himself, just as she and her son had already been left alone, and her son's fear and determination to find closure for her and for himself, were more absorbing subjects than the cringeworthy writerly matchmaking. The idea that a child might have wise ideas about life and death was gratifying, although of course there was a faint hint of kitsch and implausibility.

Carey Mulligan's approach to her character in general also lent interest and tension. She played her as a bit spoiled in her role as a queen of local society, posh in her diction and upbringing. At the same time, she was physically fragile and she also had an entirely different role in her private life: she was also motherly. Through it all she was aware of her vulnerable position as a woman whose father and husband had died, leaving her to represent her own interests in a world that ran roughshod over women or (in the case of the archaeological world) outsiders.

But she was let down a little by the screenwriting. The tinge of widow's desperation to find another man, leaving her to stare at her shattered dreams in a mirror when it didn't work out, seemed like a cheap stereotype. And I also felt that her love advice to Lily James's character was a little out of character.

The film did a fine job (as far as I know without having been there) of capturing the malaise of Britain when grim memories of World War I began to collide with the reality of preparations for a new war — signaled by the radio news, groups of recruits in khaki being ferried around in canvas-roofed automobiles for their training, and hordes of fighter jets flying in formation overhead — just before Hitler invaded Poland. The events end in around 1942, and the reality of air raids is signaled when Pretty is on a visit to a doctor in London.

As far as the cinematography goes, I didn't always find it appropriate. For example, the swooping camera view as Ralph Fiennes pedals his bicycle toward the mansion felt artificial; and then the handheld camera work with the haphazardly composed field of view when Brown first visits the Pretty mansion and the butler opens the door was a little meh. And I thought it was too unsubtle to mirror shots like Pretty's lonely walk down a sunken path to her husband's grave, with her walk down the trench into an Anglo-Saxon noble's grave — a meditation on death and grief across the ages, etc. Not to mention when Brown is curled in the fetal position and Pretty is also curled in the fetal position ... But the landscape looked luminous, warm fields and mists and raindrops on reeds and leafy trees ranged along the fields and meadows. And I appreciated that the flyovers of military aircraft did not look CGI'd.

The props, the farmyard where the Browns live, etc., were also pretty great. I liked the touches like Edith Pretty pouring water into an urn on her husband's grave before sticking in the roses and clearing up the petals that had fallen onto the grass — the everyday details of what people would be doing while talking, moving around, or thinking were well thought through. Although, shockingly, Robert Pretty never seems to go to school.

But I had doubts about the musical score. I found it invariably generic and too pompous: growing dramatic at the smallest touch of a shovel to the soil of Surrey, and not paying much homage to the time, place, or the subject at hand.

Anyway, after the film, I instantly Wikipedia-searched any biographical information I could lay my hands on. Perhaps due to the film and someone's resulting intention of accommodating the viewership with extra material, there's tons of gratifying detail to complete the picture.

Tech Culture and Everyday Sexism

I've finished reading Loathe at First Sight, which is packaged as a romance novel but is really a fictional look at American women in the computer gaming industry.

It's not a bad book. It reflected my own workplace, broadly speaking as a workplace in the technological sector that mainly employs younger people, 'through a funhouse mirror'. The Jira tickets, the 'deliverables' and project managers in charge of them, stand-up meetings, etc. were all familiar.

What I found less believable was that all of the heroine's projects were always ready on time; this is the exception rather than the norm in my experience. That said, I've only worked at one technological company so my ability to compare and generalize is tightly limited.

But as a romance the book rather failed, considering that what the leads know of each other is as much as someone could find out in a 10-minute conversation.

And from a psychological perspective I would say that it's frightening if people in their late twenties — as the main characters in the book are — still have such nuance-free views on personal relationships and professional behavioral standards.

(Note: I've been reading so many books lately that this one has faded in my memory a bit; sorry if I get any facts wrong.)

***

I'm not sure if the book is just written for teenagers and so it makes sense that adults think like high-schoolers, or if the book reflects the culture of the Pacific Northwest.

(I seem to remember that the book is set in Seattle, which I've never been to but is of course not that far away from Victoria and Vancouver.)

Crossroads in January

Work is a never-ending fountain of drama lately, and just as one spring bubbles down, another takes its place. Hopefully all of this is vague enough to preserve the anonymity and credit of the institution for which I work.

I said candidly in the team leaders' meeting on Monday that I felt that we needed to address what happened during Black Friday 2020, with regard to assigning new projects to teams that need to concentrate on meeting our old and new clients' expectations. There was agreement and so the idea was to ask for a 'retrospective' meeting run according to Agile principles, with the team leaders and management. Then we could figure out what to do differently next time. My suspicion is that management will not want a retrospective, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, I felt at last that I'd conscientiously and thoroughly thought everything through. I could pause the hamster wheel of thought, and no longer wake up in the night and not be able to go back to sleep, no longer stay awake until 4 a.m. because I was too worried. I'd just need to tell myself that I'd been over all of these problems and have come up with a few solutions and explanations. This week I've finally begun exercising regularly again, too.

So I thought that I might finally settle down. I had, for a while. But ever since my last 1-on-1 meeting with the now-CEO and a human resources colleague, I'd been sleeping badly because he didn't answer my question if there's a plan to coordinate task assignments during Black Friday 2021 so that my team is safe from Aug. 15th to Dec. 1st. He said that there were plans to have a steering committee, but was vague about what its aims would be.

... Then in a new meeting on Thursday — that's where the next round of drama began. This time it did not involve my team directly, so I'm temporarily cheerful. Besides I'd asked colleagues for 'spoilers' because I had no idea what the meeting was about when it was put on my calendar and I didn't want to be in suspense. After the meeting I started randomly chuckling for the rest of the day whenever I remembered that the CEO had said that I'd 'pushed for' the new teams that have in fact been making me miserable for months; T. (who was also in the meeting) also said that she found that part amusing. Presumably he meant 'pushed forward,' because I have participated in the planning for those new teams?

But hearing how exhausted and disillusioned other team leaders are was saddening. I remembered them being bouncy and resilient and calm, two months ago; but today either they were just having a bad day or there was a major metamorphosis. We talked about their perspective today; and by the evening I was so wound up and anxious that for the first part of my vocal coaching lesson after work, my coach just worked on restoring me to a halfway calm state again. But on the whole this one is a fight I can sit out; I've just thought of a few methods and techniques to try to create positive change in my own sphere of influence.

But, in general terms: If being in the company is ruining my health and I've lost faith in the leadership, I need to face up to what is happening to me and keep asking if it's worth the cost. But it's been so good to me in the past and of course I adore the colleagues ...

What I'm thinking of is gathering more technical skills that are still useful to me now, but also helpful elsewhere. Also, learning data science for journalism, and beginning to build up my competence in a new but semi-related direction.

Vienna New Year's Concert 2021

This year I was going to be less satirical about the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert. Maybe it is because I've grown up and finally appreciate the work that goes into the mini-films that accompany the Philharmonic's music. Or maybe it is because during a coronavirus lockdown I am desperate 1) for an event, 2) for armchair travel. But in the end I think I have relapsed to old habits.

The first glimpse of the orchestra on the stage of the Wiener Kunstverein, the hall itself vast ranks of empty benches, was a shock. Not wearing any masks, not noticeably distanced from each other, I was speculating 1) whether they'd just decided to infect each other, or 2) whether the musicians had been quarantined from the sight of family and friends or confined to a large and precarious 'bubble' like professional athletes, for the past two weeks. Their happy air hinted at a lighter regimen of corona testing instead.

[After that concert Mama was channel-surfing when we spotted another, really distanced concert. Chairs in regimented formation were dispersed across the stage and beyond the stage. A menacing army of masked singers was standing to attention and barking forth in post-apocalyptic form. A few extra singers, looking frankly like Hitchcock's birds, perched up in the loges in black gowns, standing in 3/4 profile for some reason. Everyone had a tortured expression on their faces, in service of the passion of the music perhaps or in general woe. I then felt better about the lack of masks in Vienna — from an aesthetic perspective.]

When the music began, conductor Riccardo Muti — he's said he trusts the Vienna Philharmonic to run themselves, but I suspect that the presence of an audience usually inspires him to greater efforts — looked almost bored at the podium. Then he decided to infuse showmanship here and there, hopping up and down once in a way that impressed me considering he's no longer twenty, and then apparently ducking underneath his music stand to look for cobwebs. But he seemed never to stop feeling weird when he turned away from the musicians and bowed toward an imaginary audience/a single cameraman.

Moving on from corona, I had feminist doubts about part of the way the orchestra was presented. In my view, the surface differences between the female and male musicians could barely have been emphasized more: heavy eyeshadow, the blush on one lady that you can spot from fifty yards, false eyelashes, and ostentatiously styled hair. Whereas a few men displayed heartening symptoms of a 'corona haircut' in the uneven strands draping the napes of their necks, etc. Perhaps they were permitted to concentrate on the music. If it was the women's own choice I sincerely apologize and of course television make-up is never subtle; but I could not imagine focusing on music with that much going on in my face.

The flowers were unusually prolific in the concert hall this year: roses, lilies, carnations, orchids, etc., and unfortunately the anthuriums for which I will uninventively recycle the term 'butt-ugly.' This year the anthuriums were largely pale green, floating around the flower arrangements like lily pads in a garden pond, and pale pink; the pale pink ones were worse and their artificial bubblegum shine highly suggested plumbing cleaning fluid and u-bend pipes to me. Later on, two taxidermied birds were propped in the blossoms. The second one, a nice little yellow bird, was fine; but the first, a larger concoction which looked like a parrot that had been stuffed underneath a couch cushion and had reemerged with a vague tousled stump instead of an identifiable head, was a little disconcerting.

This year there was less Strauss music than usual, I felt, with Franz von Suppé, Carl Zeller, Carl Millöcker and Klaus Komzák compositions mixed in. It had less energy in the first half of the concert, more energy in the second half; I think what also really helped is that the musicians made a little noise at the end of pieces in the second half by tapping their music stands to applaud soloists — the percussionist who handled the cuckoo box and the bird whistle, the harpist, etc. It was less incredibly creepy than the faceless applause that was streamed in from live volunteer listeners. The musicians had to stand and accept this applause at length with pained grins as they stared at the empty auditorium; it felt mechanical and to be honest rather dehumanizing.

***

During the intermission, there was of course the film that annually celebrates Austrian tourist destinations with excerpts of chamber music. This time it celebrated a centenary of the Burgenland state in Austria.

As the start year was 1921, we were led around the Burgenland landscape by a young man who wore early 20th-century motoring breeches, a jacket and goggles as he conducted a dazzlingly clean motorcar (they must have wiped down the windshield between takes to get rid of the bugs and dirt) through the leafy green forests and hilly fields.

Independently, the camera showed gleaming white plastered churches and further landscapes like fields of sunflowers that could barely have been filmed in a cheesier way.

The time setting was a little uncanny: 1921 was of course soon after World War I and I couldn't help thinking that war amputees, shell-shock and poverty would have been a more frequent sight in Austria at the time.

As part of the 'plot,' the young man (it turns out based on the official notes that he is supposed to be an American GI tasked with drawing the new borders between Austria's Burgenland and Hungarian territory according to the peace agreement) would peer through telescopes embedded in land surveyor's equipment, and make stops to photograph farms where peasantry chopped wood for kindling, etc., in traditional shirts and dirndls. This celebration of rural customs was unluckily a little reminiscent of 1920s and 30s homeland propaganda. Anyway, the young man would group together the peasants in doubtful lighting conditions, lift another period camera that must have been kindly loaned to the production crew by a museum, and then make another haphazardly composed photo.

(I might sound needlessly mean by talking about the photo composition, but one thing I've noticed about early black-and-white photography is that there was an artistic ethos to it, where the photographer always wanted the proportions to be accurate in a way that reflects traditional painting and sketching, more than photography as an independent medium. For example, I think — and, yes, this is a bit of a 'hot take' — that Ansel Adams is generally more an Expressionist painter on film than someone who took photographs as photographs. So the sloppy composition of the film's amateur photographer felt like a historical anachronism that I'm willing to be pedantic about.)

Maybe the film production had qualms of their own re. superficial echoes of Nazi propaganda. When the camera glided away to show a crew of five uniformed men trooping up a tower for a ceremony that involved swinging a large gilded white flag from the top (and no I still don't know what that was about), green boughs and red roses were thoughtfully taped to the barrels of their rifles to show that they came in peace.

Anyway, then the film paid tribute to Franz Liszt, who lived in the Burgenland. A trio of a pianist (a lady who wore a bright red gown to keep her apart from the male musicians who were clad in standard, more nondescript professional concert attire ... honestly), a cellist, and a violinist sat or stood on the green sward beside a bland pedestal with an oversized bronze bust of Liszt on top that looked it might fall over at any moment because it was so top-heavy. The music itself was a little... pounding, but that's just Liszt. Haydn's trio that was turned into the melody of the German national anthem, played by a different group of colleagues earlier in the intermission, was a little friendlier.

Then the film ended with a trio on a flat tourist boat on an empty lake, the sun setting in the background.

These landscape concerts always require me to cross my fingers, clap my hands and very strongly believe that a) the instruments are perfectly safe from harm, and b) that the acoustics are remotely like the pre-recorded ones we're hearing.

On the boat I imagine there must have been a loud flapping noise from the ship's flags, a loud roaring noise from the motor and a loud blustering noise from the wind.

Again, I stewed a bit because of my feminist convictions. The lady musician was given a powder-blue blazer that matched the colour of the boat (why?), while the gentlemen as I recall wore regular, monochrome suits. Likely I'm over-interpreting, but this arrangement where the gentleman is the visual stem and the lady is the visual flower is a gendered trope I'd expect more from an André Rieu concert where feminism is a faraway evil banished from this technicolour paradise. (Note: I do not actually have an idea of Rieu's stances on gender issues.) It's true the violinist looked fine enough with the adventure. If the women are going to look differently from how professionals in the Vienna Philharmonic usually look, though, the men should also be wearing crimson apparel or pastel blazers. If that's not going to happen, the film production crew should think why that doesn't make sense to them.

***

Later, in the second half, the dancers appeared. This year the costumes were by Christian Lacroix, acid-colored ensembles that were ruched for the larger dance, a little raunchy but still elegant, cannily adapted the 1920s aesthetic even if Lacroix himself is more 1980s. The ballet dancers cavorted in pointe shoes across closely cropped lawns and gravel paths, which made me shudder; it might be just because I do beginner's ballet but it seems like a messy and risky type of ground to dance on. This year I liked the choreography, however, and the acting.

There were two dances, of course, to illustrate different compositions on the musical programme. One was the more classic dance at the Gartenpalais Liechtenstein in Vienna. Then there was another dance in an opulent 1900s bank/department store house designed by Adolf Loos* with mirrors and wooden panelling: picture a little Edouard Manet and Auguste Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec mixed with a little Alphonse Mucha, and then you have it. The dance had influences of tango in it, the shoes had heels, and the dancers' costumes were drop-waisted and flapperish. Three women flirted with a man and two danced along with each other, and that was the plot; and one woman ended up being chosen while the other two philosophically shrugged their shoulders, and that was it. I was, for once, not offended.

* The Wikipedia article amusingly narrates that "It was said that Emperor Franz Joseph had not only avoided passing next to Looshaus for the rest of his life by using the exit at the Michaelerplatz, but also had to leave the windows of the Hofburg nailed so that he did not have to see the 'hideous' house anymore."

Many arabesques, leaps and pirouettes were performed in risky-looking places. For example, right at a glass platform with a stately carriage in the Gartenpalais. (I thought this was for the Kaiserwaltz, where aside from mustache-heavy portraits of 19th and 20th century Emperors and the burlesque red and gold furnishings of a formal room, we were also treated to opulent portraits of Empress Sissi. But since the Gartenpalais celebrates the royal family of Liechtenstein instead, I must be wrong and I'm probably thinking of images from that were screened without any dancing, later on.) Or, in the 1900s house dance, the dancers were swinging their legs right at thin white freestanding joists in a low roof, or the mirrors and gilt railings ... I almost literally had my hands glued to my cheeks like the scream emoji.

The 1900s house perils recalled the James Bond film The Living Daylights. Specifically, the scene where the American arms dealer who has an obsession with toy soldier battles has a final showdown with Bond in a roomful of glass cases and sculptures. But nobody whistled "Rule Britannia," there were no glass shards or blood spatters, and the dancers were all safe in the end.

***

While a representative of the orchestra also spoke earlier (in German and in English) to offer the music as an emblem of hope, the conductor Riccardo Muti also took the opportunity to address the heads of state who like watching the concert. He said that there was medicine for the body, but also medicine for the mind; music is medicine for the mind. He hoped that governments would recognize that culture — and I was glad that here he was speaking of all forms of music and other culture, not the Vienna Philharmonic or classical music narrowly — is a primary need. I thought it was a brave and helpful message. Then came the Prosit Neujahr! greeting, and the Blue Danube Waltz encore, as it does every year. And then the Radetzky March...

My annual modus operandi for the Radetzky March in the New Year's Concert programme is to drag a blanket or hoodie over my head, dramatically moaning in horror and anguish at this darned March, as one or two family member laugh with a startling lack of empathy.

But this time I was wondering how the concert organizers would handle the clapping that the audience usually contributes to the piece, which is the part I detest most. So I stayed unblanketed, and was rewarded because... This year there was no clapping! (Well, all right, there was clapping from two of my brothers and Mama, but not. from. me.)

At last, after seventeen years of dedicated dislike — and of course I am a misanthrope for preferring the silence of humans there — I almost liked that encore.

***

Disclaimer: I've undoubtedly mixed up many details. Official, but German-language, details of the concert are here:

"Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker 2021: ORF überträgt zum 63. Mal live im TV – erstmals ohne Saalpublikum" [ORF]

"„Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker 2021“ live in ORF 2 und Ö1" [ORF]

"Neujahrskonzert 2021 mit Riccardo Muti" [Wiener Philharmoniker]

Thoughts After an Inception Film Night

When I'd woken up in the morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to see a resplendent masterpiece by J.: it is his annual gingerbread house. This year it is a stave church made of gingerbread walls, cappuccino chocolate sticks as the roof poles, Mikado chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks as the roof joists, and thin slices of candied ginger and Turkish delight as the roof tiles. Dark cranberries and paler candied fruits have been added to brighten the colour scheme, and he has also sprinkled coconut for snow and crumbled gingerbread for a path to the front door. It took him several days to make it. Supportive sister that I am, I looked at his intricate architectural plans sketched on a piece of baking paper and at the delicate process of making things stay in place using the egg-white-and-icing-sugar frosting; and I kept inwardly thinking, 'It'll never work!' It was wrong of me!

*

In the evening, my work team had its holiday event.

The coordination fell into place with surprising success.

We had all received a vegetarian snack box to eat while watching the film. —  (Except, sadly, our Californian colleague. She had received a kind special exemption from the Finance department, and an office manager and I had collaborated to find and send an American snack parcel on behalf of the company 'to arrive from December 17 to 22.' ... But she didn't get it in time.) — It had a bottle of Austrian red wine, a carton of tea bags made of an Ayurvedic blend, a chocolate-covered almond paste bar, chocolate-covered freeze-dried Amaretto cherries, a coconut bar, chocolate-coated almonds, and an orangey chocolate chip cookie. I didn't open it until just before the film, and it was so lovely to have the surprise.

As for the film itself: we surprisingly settled which one to watch in ~30 seconds, at least a week ago, as M. suggested Inception and no one had strong objections.

And everyone was able to attend, our Californian colleague and our shyest teammates and a colleague who recently transferred to another team included, which was a great pleasure.

***

A colleague who has gone to film school theorizes that Inception is based on jottings in an ideas journal that you are encouraged to fill out when you study to be a director. The scenes were all lovingly put together but a jumble: ideas that the director was passionate about but that weren't terribly coherent as a whole, and patched together by the excuse that these are all dreams anyway.

To be brutal, I hadn't made it into the film five minutes before I thought that it was incredibly self-indulgent.

Leonardo di Caprio had his moments of good acting (an accolade because I am a Caprio-skeptic). I also 'believed' Michael Caine as a professor and Elliot Page as a brainy student. But I felt that none of the characters had a personality that sticks in one's mind after the film is over. The psychology was unrealistic and underdeveloped. And wherever I looked I saw a famous actor (Ken Watanabe, Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard) and it always took me a few minutes to get past it.

Altogether to me, the film was aesthetically handled like a comic book. Really quick cuts between scenes just like frames in a comic book; and execution and mood and drama, and a creative satisfaction on the part of the artist, mattered most. Exaggerated reactions defined the characterization (e.g. a dramatic eyebrow raise where a look of mild confusion would be a normal reaction, or a straightforward murderous glare to express hatred). The clothing badly pinpointed any kind of timeframe or continuity: it would shift between a grey shirt without a black blazer, grey shirt with a black blazer, maroon shirt, etc..

In my view this treatment would have been more appropriate for a superhero movie or another comic book or graphic novel adaptation.

And altogether I felt that the film was intended to be about deep themes but it wasn't; it really was just an exercise in transferring mental images to film.

The ideal world that di Caprio's and Cotillard's characters were in was creepy and I could not understand why one would be nostalgic about it. And I felt that a few home videos and a photo album or two would have been a fine replacement for eternal reminders of a lost beloved. So the film failed as an embodiment of, or meditation on, nostalgia in my point of view.

If it was supposed to be a metaphor for an addiction to computer games, book series, television, or comic books, or whatever, then that's not really what came across.

I also didn't think that the way the children were depicted was compelling. In reality a parent would be worrying about all kinds of details (their diet, if they're getting along, etc. etc.) if they were suddenly separated from a child. And the children would have specific needs and personalities. Instead, we just got generic photo studio portraits of towheaded little angels gambolling about. For realism, the screenwriter(s) should also have lined up child therapists by the end of the film to help them cope with the sudden disappearances of both parents. The 'Eh... They'll sort it out' approach to childhood psychological development adopted instead by the screenwriter(s) made me want to bang my head against a desk.

In the end I felt that the children were McGuffins.

The 'searching for the children' aspect of the film might be logical to people whose children are raised by nannies, governesses, boarding schools, or their other parent. But I think it is emblematic of the emotional immaturity and navel-gazing quality of the film that parenthood is so unconvincingly portrayed. Although to be honest I am just judging by the way my siblings and I were raised, so 'your mileage may vary.'

Then there were a few other logical contradictions:

For one thing, if we're working with dreams: are they ever as clear-cut and precise as the scenes in this film? I'd say that they're far more often vague and swimmy like a Salvador Dali painting. There was so much creative work done on subconsciousness and dreams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Spellbound with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, for example — that this glib version is a big letdown.

For another: I also complained to the team when a van drove off a bridge. The van was properly nosediving off a bridge at first, 'properly' because of course the engine is toward the front of the van and is the heaviest part. Then — and this is what I object to — suddenly it flipped upside down and parallel to the water before sinking. But maybe I just fail to appreciate dream physics.

In the end, a high school English teacher whom my sister T. and I both appreciated taking classes from in Canada said many years ago that 'books need to be real, even if they are about dragons.' Let's apply the same standard to films. I do very much appreciate the special effects in Inception, which are cleanly and finely executed, and I guess they do pay respect to reality because the director recognized that they needed to be pretty convincing. But otherwise, by this metric, Inception has very little to say.

*

In any case, the film night was so nice that we hope to have it again. Next time we'll order pizza. And next time I hopefully won't write such an ungrateful critique!

A Rambly Look at the Post-Black Friday, Pre-Christmas Situation

I'm still trying to fight my way out of the mists of the Black Friday season. Things are fine again in terms of workload, but as I was complaining to Mama and the siblings today, it still feels a bit like my self-confidence was doused in gasoline and set on fire.

Even as the team is heartwarmingly kind and friendly and hardworking as ever, I feel like I have messed everything up as a team leader. And whenever I feel like (on top of things I actually feel guilty for) I'm being blamed for additional things that are neither my fault nor my responsibility, then I do feel like it's my responsibility to bring other people to a point where they feel willing and able and eager to tackle these problems.

Besides I've been doing a ton of 'meddling' lately. The impression dawns that these things are often something that should be done by the HR team instead. It's also an unfair world: Some good intentions and a little work mixed with a boatload of tact gain far more gratitude and goodwill than a boatload of good intentions and tons of work mixed with little tact. And I don't want to get more credit for the former than other colleagues get for the latter.

It often feels like having tact is like a sneaky superpower. But I think simple rules do great good even if one doesn't intuit why they're needed. (Whereas intuition hasn't been a problem for me lately: the tendencies toward empathizing with others have become creepily intense to the point that I need to check that I'm not overstepping.) For example: There's nothing people love more than having most of the work prepared whenever they're asked to implement a new idea, and then they can just add finishing touches and leap ahead. (Besides, I think that the best proof that I genuinely believe in an idea is that I'm willing to try it myself; and I like the principle that Papa cited that one should never ask e.g. employees to do what one isn't able and willing to do.) So that's what I try. But instead, a lot of colleagues have great ideas and then dump the work needed to put them into practice onto the person who is benefited by them — unaware that this is likely going to tick off the beneficiary, no matter how pure and helpful the intention is. The beneficiary is quietly working along and then they're being 'helped' by being given more work; the natural instinct is to think indignantly, 'What?!'

It often worries me that a situation where people could easily get along, turns into a butting of heads. And sometimes observing workplace interactions is like watching a collision between two cars in slow motion...

St. Nicholas Morning and Bible-Thumping

Today we celebrated St. Nicholas Day surprisingly well, considering that I'd completely forgotten about it while the shops were still open yesterday.

The table was set with a new saffron-yellow tablecloth, a candle in the centre, and new placemats where needed. We had little saucers for our food, dark brown to go with the faintly 70s colour scheme, and I put out the flower-sprinkled Gmunden tea cups for the traditional weekend morning coffees.

Mama cycled off to the bakery (the one with the nicest people in Berlin) and fetched croissants, Schrippen, and so on. When she returned, T. was just rolling along the street toward us to join us for breakfast.

Fortunately we had general Advent-time supplies left in the pantry. So for breakfast we had plates of fondant and gummy stars, hearts, circles and squares; Printen bars with dark candied sugar and an almond slice in the centre; Spekulatius, in the traditional windmill shape; Zimtsterne; marzipan 'potatoes'; and mandarin oranges. There were three chocolate St. Nicholases that we divided amongst ourselves. Ge. heated milk and whisked it, then poured us all cups of warm café au lait.

A little blasphemously, perhaps, I put Barack Obama's new memoir on the table, because I'd just bought the hardcover paper version at Dussmann yesterday, and it is almost like a St. Nicholas present to us all.

(Due to coronavirus safety measures, a long line of people led from the entrance of Dussmann around the side of the building, and shoppers were being let in gradually by a bouncer. Neither Mama, who had come along with me to look for a Latin grammar to help with her university studies, nor I, wanted to keep the people who arrived after us waiting. So we browsed very swiftly. But of course from a bookseller's perspective she was delighted to see the interest in a bookshop.)

After the meal, T. tried to set up Steam on Mama's laptop, so that Mama could play Age of Empires as a multiplayer game. I've liked playing Age of Empires, too, but it's a 'time-suck' for me and so — like manga and animé — I've decided that it's best to avoid adding it to my list of guilty pleasures for now.

*

My plans for the rest of the day are to listen to audiobooks and maybe begin reading A Promised Land. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Don Quijote de la Mancha and a few other books that I've started in paper form are also waiting for me...

I've already played Christmas songs on the piano, including St. Nicholas songs ("Lasst uns froh und munter sein") because the lyrics are necessarily only relevant for a brief window of time; and perhaps that has filled the musical quota.

A colleague passed on a link to a petition about the Rummelsburger Bucht, a bay on the Spree River here in Berlin that is being redeveloped, and I might do more research about it today.

Then I might take up my art supplies and do a bit of drawing. An HR colleague has commissioned me to make illustrations for the electronic thank-you cards that we use in the company, if I have time and without setting a hard deadline.

Perhaps I'll also do my half hour of daily exercise again; the programme has lagged lately because (probably in a reaction to the high-pressure achievements of the pre-Black Friday season) I feel weary.

Then there are letters that my father wrote in the early 1970s. I don't know if it's good for me to read them or not. They are excellent biographical material, but I don't really like myself for feeling so much self-pity over the last few months for not having Papa around any more.

I need to appreciate the good, feel grateful for having had a father whom one can miss so badly, and keep remembering that he died quickly and on his own terms, so that from his perspective it ended as well as one could expect. During the first months when he died, I felt that I need to honour his memory by taking things well. Inwardly I'm still throwing a few howling tantrums; and I might not be crying in my room every day as I did for a few weeks, but it's undoubtedly a life-changing experience.

***

In the meanwhile, Mama and I got out a stack of Bibles and, for the first time in years, we looked up the Vatican's suggested readings for today. It was nostalgic because when Papa was alive, every now and then Papa, Mama and I would feel more 'Catholic' than usual and do the same thing, in 2017 or earlier. Generally, the Bible being what it is, some of the readings would leave me thinking 'What the hell did I just read?'.

It feels awkward to read the Bible out loud even when the readings are more sympathetic, and I don't manage to do so in a natural way. I don't believe that everything I'm reading is right, and it sometimes feels like I sound like a bigoted Bible-thumper in a Hollywood western. It's also a little overawing to read an old text that has been processed by millions of people over thousands of years.

A Bulletin for St. Martin's Day

It is growing very November-y, as cold seeps in through the windows, the leaves remaining on the oak trees grow brown, and a chilly, hazy mist descends whenever the sun is not shining through the clouds.

Today it was St. Martin's Day, and we had an anti-coronavirus-measure-friendly celebration:

Mama had prepared goulasch soup, and then cut leafy lettuce and radicchio into fine strips for a salad and made a vinaigrette to go with it. In the living room, we had bowls and dishes of faded-green-and-red Boskop apples, colourful oranges and clementines and mandarin oranges, peanuts and hazelnuts in the shell, Pfeffernüsse and Marzipankartoffeln, Lebkuchenherzen and Spekulatius. It was really nice even to work in the living room earlier in the day, with the cinnamon fragrance of the Spekulatius making the atmosphere very warm and homey. Then J. stood at the stove and patiently prepared 2 kilos of flour's worth of Pöfferkes, and sprinkled icing sugar over them when they had finished deep-frying.

Then T. visited us in the early evening. When T. had cycled home again with a small supply of leftover Pöfferkes, and we were just finishing watching the Tagesschau evening news, uncle M. arrived.

I'm afraid I've eaten so much that it's wiser to put off the customary half-hour of evening exercise — which is fortunately happening more often again, as the work schedule has unexpectedly relaxed this week — for another day.

***

"Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" (1875)
by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
via Wikimedia Commons
currently part of a special exhibition on Belgian symbolist painters
in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin