On the Cusp of May

It looks like all four butternut squash seedlings are surviving on my room's windowsills. I am now checking the bottom of one of the plant pots regularly, to see when roots begin to push out of the holes, and at that point hope to transplant to a bigger pot.

My other plants are equally loved if perhaps less abundantly thriving.

One spider plant looks especially happy while the other spider plants don't, but I've planted a runner in the former potato pot, and it looks like it might survive another week.

The lemon saplings that I grew from sprouted seeds are also looking really well and should have been transplanted months ago, two forget-me-not plants are hanging on to life and so is the nasturtium, and the forsythia has broad green leaves now.

The past week has also seen a magical conversion around Berlin, like on the banks of the amusing-sounding Reichpietschufer canal. There the rigid twigs of winter that bristled along the banks like a Prussian parade mustache, have now burst into soft shapes of paler green horse chestnut leaves, as well as crowns and canopies of other tree species. A few almost bare trees, likely plane trees, still appear nakedly along the streets, however.

As I wound around the traffic circle at the Siegessäule this afternoon, I also saw that dense thickets of old lilacs (at least half a century old, at an amateur's guess) are beginning to flower. They semi-incongruously embower the plinths underneath the pale white statues of various tough old generals of the Napoleonic era, with the odd shadowy yew sticking out of the plots.

Yesterday I went to the office. T. and I cycled home together afterward. It was nice to see colleagues again in person. Besides it was nice to know that once I was home, I could disconnect from the thought of work duties entirely. And later on I was so tired I went to sleep before midnight or 1 a.m., again, instead of still being 'wired' and wide awake at 3 a.m.. Maybe I'll go more often.

Today I went on another outing and dropped off donations at the LaGeSo complex in northern-central Berlin. A boyfriend and girlfriend were just being asked in the friendliest possible way if they'd like a coffee, at the entrance. And the other people who were picking up donations were scattered across the small lawn chatting with each other, like the last time I was there.

Altogether I was in and out quite quickly. (I only felt like a brigand when I asked for my bag, which had been used to carry the supplies, back!)

The pleasant atmosphere does not mean there isn't a critical situation for food charities in Berlin in general, however. Food and hygiene supplies are needed badly.

Food hoarding in Berlin also still seems to be widespread. I've seen signs in at least 2 different grocery chain stores, asking customers to only buy 2 packages of flour per household. With all due respect for the genuinely poor who might want to save money with this, I really feel like shaking my head that this is necessary.

From Daffodils to Hot Tea and Vectors

In the past week I've absorbed myself quite deeply in a British television series about archaeology, especially of Neolithic, Anglo-Saxon, Bronze Age, Roman and medieval sites, and have stayed there as much as possible.

It's also spring, however, and although the leaves are still small and shy, almost all trees now have them. I see late tree blossoms and forsythia blossoms, late tulips and daffodils and hyacinths, and a few remaining chionodoxa on my outings. My indoor garden is also doing well. A butternut squash that I left in the pantry a long time began sprouting seeds inside, and I've planted them now and they've gratifyingly split open their leaves (well, three sprouts have — the fourth looks quite moribund). I've had to abandon my attempt to grow potatoes as they were befallen by flies and then I forgot to water the plant for a while; the forget-me-nots are not doing so well except for one that might bring blossoms again; the spider plants are surviving; and a succulent is even looking happy.

In terms of reading, I went to Dussmann to redeem the gift certificate sent over by my kind North American colleagues, and ended up with Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom and with James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk.

At work things are still interesting. The hatchet continues to be buried regarding all my previous disputes with colleagues and my own personal situation is all right.

That said, I still worry about other colleagues: I expect personnel developments in my team.

Outside of the workplace: one Russian colleague who has already criticized her president's policies for years, despite her family's Putin fandom, has just published a long Facebook post trying to express again how awful she finds the war in Ukraine — having read the gory details of the news, and taking on herself a heaping burden of guilt. Which is a bit maddening considering that she for one is not parading around with Z symbols, or closing her eyes and ears to horrible abuses and excusing them on specious grounds.

But altogether I'm having what might be 'compassion fatigue,' in that sometimes in the past few months I haven't entirely reacted appropriately any more when people mentioned difficult situations to me. Sometimes I'm so completely saturated on bad news that any more just pings off me like a rubber ball, and I even more or less find myself smiling. But of course I need to find a way to deal with the feeling, before I seriously offend or hurt anyone.

More trivially: Last Thursday my sister and I met with high-level colleagues from our American parent company.

The highest-level colleague was endearingly shy at odd moments and perhaps a bit exhausted by his speedy tour of Europe. Whether traveling or not, he is an everyman paterfamilias with an uptilted nose and rounded cheeks, settling comfortably into his forties. He is much thinner in person than in video calls — not that he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger there either, but one tends to subconsciously assume that a round face doesn't sit atop a lath-thin physique. He wore a Hawaiian shirt that, running counter to stereotype, loosely concealed a lack of belly rather than the presence of one. And professionally, besides having a fine grasp and pronunciation of German, he was filled with the same genial fire that he exudes in video calls.

We ate at a tremendously cheap restaurant. But I was very much gratified that we all were respectful diners and didn't give the waiters trouble, except for one person who, although generally well-mannered enough, raised his hand for a mango lassi like a Roman emperor in a B movie.

After that, we walked back to the office, where I was one of a series of presenters who explained our teams' work in a slideshow for the benefit of our American guests. It was rather interesting that, considering that 3 years ago I'd become so nervous I could barely talk when presenting to groups of ten colleagues, I was able to present in front of a group of over twenty colleagues plus someone who's been in professional meetings with Jeff Bezos, without really falling flat on my face or feeling uncomfortable about the experience. Out of the corner of the eye I had the impression that even my managing director was a bit of a deer in the headlights, and the chief technical officer had made a rather unsubtle 'pitch' to a magnanimously patient American colleague over our restaurant servings of rice. What really helped is the bonds that have grown between fellow engineering managers and me over the past months, so that I could feel their interest and their willing me to do well as I spoke. Maybe the highest-level colleague's unassuming demeanour also helped.

***

This evening I went on another donation tour for sites that help Ukrainian refugees with supplies, for the first time in a week.

In both places they were very grateful, and again I sensed the strong relief for volunteers if at last new supplies come in that can relieve the strain on their resources for a moment.

It's touching but also heavy when a volunteer is Ukrainian and the donation clearly takes on a different dimension for them: expressing solidarity and care for the victims of war, whom I don't know personally but they certainly do. So I'm not sure whether to feel useful, or depressed.

Next week, I'm thinking of volunteering somewhere, if I can wrangle my work schedule. There are 4-hour shifts one could do on a one time basis to relieve those who have been showing up for hours and hours, even late into the night, as the war drags on.

Right now, returning to the donations themselves, juice boxes and other food are in high demand in some sites; shampoo, deodorant and shower gel for adults and baby/children's food, shampoo, shower gel, toothpaste, and toothbrushes seem to be running low.

Regarding the energy saving situation, it looks like official guidance is finally being released by the German government and European Union bodies on how not to waste fuel, so that we are less dependent on Russian gas and oil and therefore paying less money that can be spent on war. As this guidance largely affects car drivers, which I'm not, and possessors of air conditioning, which I'm not, I didn't really find a silver bullet to apply to my own situation. That said, I think I haven't had a cup of hot tea since I saw the first photos from Bucha, and I'm still eating bread untoasted and always washing my hands in cold water — which is not in the official guidance and is admittedly yet another massive pain in the neck for which I can blame my overactive conscience.

***

Lastly, I've been watching more of an online course on First Nations history and tradition in Canada (while heinously neglecting an Open University course about vectors that could give me a better technical background on machine learning, for my career-related technical development). Now I think it's Week 6 of the programme.

The Grinding of War, continued

As the war in Ukraine keeps on going long after I'd expected it to end, and more and more grueling stories come out, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to be dispirited in general. One or two days I just refused to read any war news. Today I nudged myself to go and donate again (this time back at the Berlin main train station, where hygiene articles and baby food have been especially wanted lately). But especially because there are fewer donations in general — one Berlin organization has reported receiving about 1/3rd as many donations as 2 or 3 weeks ago — it feels more and more like a small drop in the bucket.

Along the way I passed the Holocaust memorial near Brandenburg Gate. The heavy feeling of not doing enough became a bit weaker, as I reflected whatever one does to help people who are at the mercy of some overpowering force, whether war or their own government, is at least a step in the right direction.

What makes donating things that one can buy in a grocery store (or drug store) a bit more awkward is that there has been a trend to hoard food in Berlin, to guard against rising prices due to fuel scarcity and dwindling Ukrainian and Russian agricultural exports. I've become increasingly uncomfortable about buying large quantities of things in stores for fear of depressing cashiers etc. with apparent greed, and of course feeling embarrassed.

Berlin's main train station, glowing in the dusk, was not as busy as at the beginning of the refugee ingress from Ukraine. The white welcome tent definitely had people in it, blue-vested volunteers, and security personnel guarding the entrance in a friendly way; but the blue and yellow flag signs had largely disappeared. Picnic tables were set up in the large hall where food (and hygiene supplies) were made available, and there was less apparent hurry and more of a willingness to settle in for a while, eat and reflect, amongst the people who were there. A friendly English-speaking volunteer accepted the little hoard of shampoo, shower gel and deodorant that I'd brought, based on a request list online.

***

I have a few people management challenges at work, and I'm fairly anxious on behalf of a few colleagues. A higher-up colleague will also be visiting from the States.

At lunchtime I've been playing piano more often: Scarlatti sonatas, a bit of Albéniz and other more modern composers, and passages from Bach's Art of Fugue, which I'm still sight-reading slowly from cover to cover and is less emotionally dry than I thought it would be. My recent theory that being overworked and miserable gives one exactly the right frame of mind to interpret Bach's music better, continues to be confirmed. It's a little relaxing.

In the evenings, the muezzin has regularly been calling to mark the breaking of the fast for Ramadan. The restaurant tables on the sidewalk underneath the apartment are packed at dusk. It always feels nice to know that people are enjoying themselves again in a way they couldn't for a year or two, since Covid-19 began spreading in Europe. So that's also relaxing.

I've been trying to finish listening to the Jimmy Carter biography audiobook (taking a bit of solace from the fact that world politics were crummy then too, but intermittently improve), have read all of Delphine Minoui's journalism memoir I'm Writing You From Tehran, and I'm now in the middle of Bonnie Tsui's delightful non-fiction book Why We Swim.

And I'm also trying to break into 'citizen journalism' again in my spare time. The Ukraine war keeps hitting me over the head with the realization, 'There are really important things you could be occupying yourself with right now.'

Right now it's easy to find story ideas, and to be a bit frustrated that professional journalists apparently aren't picking up on the obvious.

I wanted to research past oil crises in the 1970s, and which lessons they can offer for today.

I also wanted to research European energy independence. But I realized that I don't know the first thing about the science of household energy or about the policy of energy independence: one or two Foreign Affairs articles already left me in the dust with two terms I'd never heard about: blue hydrogen and green hydrogen. It is easy to inadvertently write something so terribly wrong that it is like drawing a Mickey Mouse cartoon to illustrate a serious mouse biology research paper.

So I turned back to doing the readings (in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, various books and articles by Samuel Huntington and Fareed Zakaria etc.) for an old MIT course about democratization, so I have a better grounding in political science. I've reached week 4, and the readings offer Singapore as an example of a reasonably functional government that is only semi-democratic. I hadn't thought of it in that light before and am fine exploring it. But I would also question in Eurocentric, armchair critic fashion how transferable its model is to any other context (e.g. countries of more than 4 million inhabitants, countries less in thrall perhaps to modern remnants of the British colonial worldview).

Besides I'm progressing in taking Ukrainian lessons via Duolingo.

But underneath it all I'm really desperate for the long Easter weekend to arrive.

More War, Less Peace

Work has settled down a bit. More energy has been consumed in worrying about politics and I've reached an entente at least temporarily with every colleague with whom I've had major disagreements. Yet again, colleagues have done something incredibly nice and sent me a generous gift certificate for a favourite independent bookshop.

If I understand the situation, my Cassandra-like concerns about work environment stress are now actually seen as less bothersome by the top management circle. Maybe because I haven't made any lately. Maybe also because since I pointed out that our Russian colleagues badly needed reassurance that we weren't blaming them for the war, and was proven right, they put more faith in my assessments. It was a little bit weird because I put infinite effort and thought into defending other colleagues in other matters, but am being figuratively praised for weightlifting a pillow after being used to handling 25 pound barbells!

We're in the middle of turning off any remaining services to Russian websites, and it doesn't feel very good because it's a slippery slope.

I've read a lot about World War I propaganda, and don't really like the stage where one begins to split the parties to a conflict into good sheep and bad sheep, and also to treat it a bit as a game where we're happy if Zelensky 'whacks the bad guys' and sad if 'the good guys' face a defeat. First we were talking about the Russian president, pro-government media, oligarchs, and other government officials being at fault, and differentiated Russian dissidents and military recruits. Now, all Russian soldiers are being considered as confirmed or potential war criminals.

I'm worried that we'll begin to find all Russians (and Belarusians?) suspect, and begin to dehumanize Russians in general. Such dehumanization generally ends up tyrannically targeting the innocent who have the least defenses against the type of opposition that should be aimed against the harder but culpable target. I don't want us to produce stories like — to leap ahead in time and take an example from World War II — a young George Takei growing up in a Japanese-American internment camp.

But I can partly understand why it's harder to resist the urge to dehumanize. Protests have been quashed in Russia, in the streets and in its newspapers. So there are fewer images of the other face of Russia. Our view of what it means to be a Russian in these times is becoming one-dimensional, either the jowls of varied pro-Putin oligarchs or high government officials, or the dead stare of the head of government, or the frowzy venality of Ramzan Kadyrov.

What I do think is good is that a UN official will still dutifully point out that Ukrainian government soldiers and militias are also accused of sexual violence — in service of credibility and justice to the victims, even if one despises the idea of creating another kernel of truth that a propaganda machine will misuse. I'm not going to blow these things out of proportion to the rest of the conflict. But I think many people who know war, and even those like me who don't, were already pointing out at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine: one reason why it was so heinous of Putin to start this is that it unleashes the scenario that make these actions and abuses possible, loading not just the 'bad' side but also the 'good' side with a burden of guilt and psychological damage that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

That said, I also don't want to argue too far along this line, because I don't want to in any way endorse the narrative of victimization that some pro-Putin groups in Berlin have adopted.

On Thursday I took a half day off in the morning and went donating for refugees again. It was strangely peaceful to meet Ukrainians who were waiting to pick up care packages. Individuals and families were standing or sitting on lawn chairs outside a one-storey Berlin Senate building, waiting for volunteers to register them or call their names with the finished package. It was like a tentative-but-friendly neighbourhood gathering.

But I'm still worried about not doing enough. I saw on Thursday that while the volunteers appeared to have what they needed — thanks most likely to money donations —, there were 1 or 2 people bringing in-kind donations compared to over 20 needing them.

Let's see if my half-holiday on Friday will give me enough time to help out again.

Through the Wringer

It's been an exhausting week: 10 conversations with the teammates who report to me, about their job performance in 2021 and their salaries going forward, reports and feedback summaries, plus the usual workload and a slideshow presentation to 30+ colleagues.

For the presentation I originally did want to organize it jointly with my teammates, and feel residual guilt for not doing so. But in the end decided that it was such short notice that it would just have stressed out everyone. In a lovely gesture, teammates kindly interjected comments and questions during the presentation as appropriate; this helped greatly. They also offered kind compliments afterward.

I endured one 12-hour work day this week, because of the job performance process, and yesterday was also long.

The past weeks have been a Wild West film where a gang besieges a town, which has decided to arm itself and fight back. It was grueling shoot-outs, a few townspeople falling back to nurse their injuries (i.e. fellow team leads taking vacation days to recover) or lurking in the nearby countryside to regroup and return the next day (i.e. fellow people managers postponing part of their conversations to next week).

I was part of a small contingent that managed to keep up the battle all of this week, so now — all my shoot-outs over — I can rest in the hotel/saloon with a big tumbler of whisky.

Much to my surprise, I found out in my own employee review meeting that not only am I not being phased out of the company, I am actually being given a performance-based raise and evaluated as someone performing above average. So now I'm baffled that all the inter-company communication leading up to this point has been so misleading.

From an employment law standpoint I'm not 100% sure if complaining about this process on this blog is the same as disparaging the company I work for ... So legal disclaimer: no disparagement intended.

This Saturday will be the year 1952 in my historical experiment. But as I spent a week in the Fifties in 2015 (long ago, yet the impression remains vivid) and my family has nixed recreating the early post-war British rationing era, and the phantom of the past is looming over us so eerily anyway, I'm approaching it with a little less gusto. Next week I can do something fancy for the Queen's coronation ... although it's an example of the ghoulishness of the monarchy in my opinion, because the reason she was crowned and people were celebrating her in 1953 was that her father died the year before and left her head of state with enormous responsibilities at the age of 25.

***

I have been investigating coping methods for fuel rationing.

This was necessary during World War I and World War II in the UK, because imports were of course challenging.

But it also feels relevant again as Germany should not be importing natural gas, oil, and coal from the current Russian government as long as the invasion of Ukraine lasts.

Which is admittedly not just an altruistic impulse on my part. I also feel stubbornly perverse about it, as I do not like feeling coerced into propping up an amoral regime.

The bigger problem is the effects on German industry of 'turning off the tap'. I'm unwilling to be judgmental here as I do not live paycheck-to-paycheck and therefore don't have enough skin in the game to afford judgment.

But there's also an individual 'civilian' component:

As a family we've stopped heating with coal a little earlier this year. One of my uncles has turned down the temperature gauge on his gas-fuelled heater, which is a popular measure in Berlin.

I've gone masochistically further: eating cold food whenever possible, sipping cold water instead of boiling water for hot tea (this one is unpleasant; hot tea and substitute coffee have been two of my favourite creature comforts for months), turning the tap to cold when washing my hands...

In terms of computer use, I'm less certain about the relationship of activity to energy use. But I've been having fewer internet browser tabs open and watching YouTube videos in a lower resolution, in case that helps.

It's not fun.

But it's been easy to harden my resolve again: reading appalling news about Mariupol and other places in Ukraine, also worrying about sanctions rapidly undermining Russian civilians' quality of life as well as reading prognostications about missing wheat exports leading to hardship in countries like Turkey.

Besides I think it's easy to prove that at least on the household level these attempts to save energy aren't trivial: I could try to check our electricity counter and gas counter to gauge the actual impact.

While love of experimentation might be clouding my judgment, I also feel reasonably happy about using the World War I-era haybox principle for cooking again.

From the 'Daily Mail' cookery book [Hathi Trust archive] by Mrs. C.S. Peel:

How to make a Cooking Box.—Line a packing case (a Tate sugar box by preference) with two or three thicknesses of newspaper. Cover the paper with flannel or felting such as is used under stair carpets. Nail this on neatly. The lid must also be lined in the same manner. Make some balls of newspaper; pack tightly into the bottom of the box to a depth of 3 inches. Place the saucepan or casserole on this and pack tightly round with newspaper balls. When it is lifted out a nest is formed into which the pan is put each time it is used.

To test her instructions, yesterday I cooked rice by boiling briefly & putting it in a 'hay box.' It did keep warm for hours.

But that just tackles part of the problem. I use my laptop, desktop computer, etc. a lot, and I love hot showers and machine-washed laundry. Saving electrical energy to a meaningful degree is tough.

Spring, War, and Expected and Unexpected Reunions

It's been a quiet day — Mama away for a family reunion, Ge. sleeping in until after midday, J. waking up a little earlier. I was up before 10 a.m. because the cycling and walking yesterday made me exhausted enough to go to sleep at a reasonable hour the night before.

Yesterday I did drop off recyclables at a recycling yard after 2+ years of thinking 'I should probably do that'! so: triumph. A queue of five or so cars was waiting to unload, rather blocking the quiet residential street, and both a recycling yard employee and I were pleased that I was on a bicycle instead.

I'm still reading the curriculum for an MIT political science course. Samuel P. Huntington's works still make me want to propel things out the window, as their mild tone is mere window-dressing for massive, deleterious, and slightly gormless ethnocentrism. But reading Robert A. Dahl again has been a blessing, and being introduced to Larry Diamond has been enjoyable too. It is my hope that by becoming better educated, I have better chances at experimenting with journalism if my current employer kicks me out. In the meantime it's been massively interesting; aside from American politics of the 1970s and the Vietnam War, it turns out I've been ignorant of the 1970s and 80s.

My listening to the audiobook biography of Jimmy Carter is a good 'Ergänzung'; and it is lending a lot of colour and perspective to my sketchy knowledge of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

My direct manager asked me to fill out a career development plan last week, so my professional survival until June/July (the next round of performance reviews) is relatively assured. But I'm not happy that it's taken the invasion of Ukraine to make fellow colleagues and me decide that there are worse things in the world than our workplace. We should not be feeling so terrible that war puts it into perspective.

Yesterday brother Ge. and I went for a walk to the former Tempelhof Airport. We dropped off a supply of baby food in a parking lot between Platz der Luftbrücke and the Columbiadamm entrance to the airfield. About five other individual donors or donor groups were there at the time, with a carton of baby diapers and other supplies for Ukrainian refugees travelling through Berlin. Two vans belonging to the Tentaja charity and a truck were parked in the centre of the lot. The red-t-shirted man standing on the platform at the back of the truck cheerfully explained to two donors that his coworkers and he were gathering supplies that would be re-sorted in a hall in the airport, and would then be driven off to various points in Berlin (Hauptbahnhof, Tegel, etc.) if volunteers there requested specific articles.

On the field itself we watched the fairly large masses of people. A DC-3(? Ge.'s the expert here, not I) was standing, pale grey, beneath the roof of the central terminal, quite lost amid the vast architecture. The sun was backlighting large 19th century apartment buildings and factory buildings beyond, and illuminating church spires and the Berlin Fernsehturm behind us.

When we looped back, a colleague whom I hadn't seen in person since 2020 stopped Ge. and me for a chat, looking happy with a big, colourful silk scarf around her throat (an emblem of new extroversion), and clearly enjoying the company of her boyfriend and a friend.

Walking further, I thought I spotted an ex-colleague. He was backlit, however, and I didn't want to be rude by approaching a total stranger. Ge. kept eye contact, however, and nudged me over, so I saw it was indeed the colleague and one of his teammates. It was lovely to see them again. Also a relief in the former case because I'd been worried as hell about how he was doing and couldn't pry without crossing boundaries.

After the meeting, Ge. and I sat down and ate French fries and, in his case, a hot dog. On the way back home we spotted red deadnettle, a tiny white-flowered herb, and deep purple violets along the brick walls of a cemetery beside the airfield. Daisies are also sprouting elsewhere, looking a little tattered and repressed, it is true, but nevertheless atoms of cheer in a gloomy world.

Altogether the spring flowers are profuse.

Snowdrops looking like ghosts of their former bright, white-flowered selves, crocuses in white and yellow and purple, miniature irises, chionodoxa that are the unbelievable fuzzy blue of the sky, forsythia and plum blossoms on trees and bushes, pale yellow buds of Oregon grapes, early yellow-and-red tulips, and finally gloriously large or clustered little daffodils in sunny yellow.

I saw more of these when I cycled to the Kleingartenkolonien this afternoon.

Altogether I still obsess about the war in Ukraine, however, rather than taking a purely pragmatic view of what one can do to help. For one thing I am shocked that Putin's invasion hasn't ended when the reaction of the world has been so definite and strong against it. For another, I am depressed by the report I read today of civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol being 'relocated' by force to Russia. It does strongly remind me of the pages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I had thought we'd passed that point in history.

It seems frivolous in this context, but Shakespeare's phrasing from Measure for Measure (via Wikiquote) comes to mind:

O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

Delivering Donations at Hauptbahnhof; and a Brief Overview of Work

Today I went on another trip to Berlin's main train station after work.

The white pavilion tent that the City of Berlin set up as a welcoming space in the square in front of the station's towering glass façade is beginning to fill with refugees, who were streaming in single file from the station, pulling their rolling suitcases behind them. They rarely have much luggage.

I saw a Ukrainian mother standing with two or three children (no older than twelve) at a glass vitrine-protected architectural model that was stranded partway along a long hallway. It showed the train station in miniature. She was pointing out parts of the building here and there, as if they were a family on a peaceful weekend outing and they had all the time in the world. It was rather touching, a quiet and intimate moment in the turbulent Hauptbahnhof. It was also depressing as hell if one begins to think of where the children's father is (probably voluntarily or semi-voluntarily trapped in his country, conscripted to fight to defend it).

In general the train station situation struck me as more chaotic today.

It felt as if there were three times as many people as on Monday, confirming the idea that the number of refugees is intensifying. Not that many police to keep people safe. Less coordination amongst the volunteers. (Also: One of them, not in an official fluorescent vest, looked pleased to see that I was bringing donations in the food hall. Then for reasons best known to himself passed me his card so that I could call him some time. ... I was seriously annoyed that someone would try to pick up ladies in the context of a humanitarian crisis. But de gustibus non est disputandum. The card landed in the nearest recycling bin after I left the hall.)

Refugees were being pulled essentially in three directions:

First direction: An open area inside the vast station core. This is where the tinned food, volunteer coordination tables, LGBTQIA counseling, the children's play area, and now a silence room are located. A volunteer was roaming around with a plastic bin at her belly, offering wrapped sandwiches to people.

A densely packed queue of refugees runs from this area to the rooms where Ukrainians can buy connecting train tickets, to friends and family in other parts of German or Berlin. Escalators and glass elevators run up and down, and far below rest the tracks of long-distance trains e.g. in the red of the Deutsche Bahn regional train network.

Second direction: A large hall, connected to the open area. It was ringed with tables where refugees can pick up toiletries, fresh fruit, packaged drinks, coffee or tea from tall metal dispensers, etc.  DONATIONS and an arrow were spelled out on the floor in tape.

A volunteer in an orange safety vest was grandly shaking out mandarin oranges out of their net into a plastic bin with apples and other mandarin oranges, not really aware or caring that he was bruising them.

But as the snacks were being picked up like hot cakes by refugees, and the 0.5 L drink bottles I'd brought on behalf of my work colleagues were sorely needed, it's likely the fruit was eaten before the bruises could fully form anyway.

Third direction: The white pavilion outside the building.

Today two ambulances were parked between the tent and the train station. While wounded Ukrainians have been known to arrive in Berlin, luckily it didn't appear as if medical attention were needed for anyone while I was there.

I think this pavilion is where refugees are intended to be able to sit down, rest sheltered from the frosty winter wind, and receive advice e.g. about paperwork and medical treatment and job prospects.

At any rate I was able to drop off the donations and then cycle homeward again.

***

As for work, I don't want to be insensitive by writing dramatically about it right underneath a post about refugees.

But by my own standards and my own life experience, every morning is a little like stepping into the ocean water off Maine and hoping that the shark from Jaws won't attack.

It's depressing, but I have put together a work survival routine to cope with the stresses of my interactions with top management colleagues.

I eat more vegetables and whole grains, and I make sure to stay hydrated. I observe my lunch breaks and make sure not to work too much overtime. I make sure to tend the plants, because that is therapeutic; take sun baths; and pour out my woes on the piano. On Wednesdays I pour out my concerns to my voice coach/psychologist; she has also helped me think through what else I could do if I'm fired from/quit my job after I asked her about it this week.

I try to help colleagues wherever I can. If being depressed and otherwise unhappy in my life has been good for anything, it has been to feel comfortable knowing where one can make things better vs. what would make things worse for other people who are struggling. Even if I don't seem to have power over my own life, I still feel confident about the power not to make other lives worse.

And I mentally repeat two tips I once read about how to withstand torture before I go to sleep, so that I can brace for the next day at work.

Less dramatically, I repeat to myself this phrase from time to time as comfort: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

All of that, and even more importantly the kindness and distractions of friends and family, are helping me cope with the past months at work better than I'd have expected.

But right now I feel like I'll never ask the HR team or the managing director for help ever again; I doubt they can connect the dots from the crisis in our company to its source without assistance, and I have too many inhibitions against tattle-telling to lay out the gory details.

The Scene at Berlin Hauptbahnhof

It's been a long day, but perhaps the most interesting part came in the later evening.

Before noon, a colleague had pled with us to bring food to the Berlin main train station if we could. She had been volunteering, and the tables were almost empty. To help show what was needed, she shared a donation request list.

It was around 7 p.m. when I finally wrapped up work. The following won't be my finest reportage, as I'm tired and there are, as always, other things going on:

First I went to two local stores. I tried to get as many granola bars as seemed decent (I didn't want to buy everything on the shelves), as well as a few deodorant sticks and a set of FFP2 face masks. Besides I was bringing along an empty notebook, for children to draw in, which I'd originally set aside as a gift for a colleague's birthday. My attempt at subtle purchasing didn't really work at the local Lidl store, I think, where the cashier more or less raised an eyebrow at my deluge of granola bars.

Then I cycled off to the train station. It was tremendously strange to be travelling past the German Parliament building, the Chancellor's residence with two policemen chatting quietly on the vast sidewalks (now almost empty of tourists), and then across the bridge to the train station itself, at this point in European diplomatic and political history. I don't come by there that often anyway; the last time was during the Berlin Marathon, for example.

The white pavilion tent of the German Red Cross city of Berlin, set up on Washington Square beside the station to deal with the more serious needs of Ukrainian refugees, was visible from a distance. Its rows of wooden benches in the seating area inside the pavilion were lighted but untenanted, however. Two volunteers in their twenties or thirties were partly sitting, partly standing, and chatting (one wearing a fluorescent safety vest, the other not) in French in front of it.

A few travellers speaking Ukrainian or a similar language were walking out of the train station and arranging their connecting journeys. At the doors and inside the glass hallway, there were quite a lot of fluorescent-vested volunteers.

I knew vaguely where to go. But I was also relieved to see the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag posters with arrows, which acted as signposts.

Mostly the train station was quiet. But the far end of the first floor below ground level, the area which has often been photographed and touted recently, was maybe not noisy but certainly crowded.

Security tape separated me from the absolutely packed area where refugees were thronging along the tables and collections of donated items. It was like a crowded bazaar where nobody had to pay anything, with a line of people coming in and a longer line coming out, almost tripping over each other's rolling suitcases and struggling to get through. The general vibe was of exhausted people in a hurry to be somewhere else.

It was a relief to see a group of black-clad policemen walking through the refugees, too. Recently there have been reports of Ukrainian refugee women dubiously being offered lodgings with single men, and the police are also there to prevent this sort of thing.

A woman, in a bright orange vest and perhaps a Ukrainian accent to her German, kindly let me through the security tape and led me over to where I could drop off the donations. And despite the recent deluge of do-gooders, she and the other volunteers seemed happy to see someone bringing donations and were extremely nice.

Food was handed out from a long series of tables: plastic bins with juice and water bottles, packaged sandwiches, cookies, etc. The volunteers behind the tables were struggling to keep up with the demand of the refugees in front. (While the refugees were keeping track of each other, what they needed from the tables, and their smartphones.)

In another area, baby food, diapers, toilet paper rolls, etc. were being dispensed, with waist-high bins of shampoo bottles and deodorants behind. The children's area was closed off into a safe niche; paper crayons bristled from the table where they could sit down and draw together, and a table held cardboard boxes with stuffed animals and other toys.

Two volunteers also stood over tinned sardines and other goods.

An information booth was also set up for LGBTQIA refugees.

I figured that speed would be most convenient for all concerned. So I figured out where to drop off which items, then hopped out of the building again as soon as possible.

In the end I had better luck than I deserved considering my stupidity: my key was still in my bicycle lock, because I'd forgotten to take it along with me; but my bicycle was still in the parking lot.

And I cycled home toward the stars of Orion, hovering over the canopy of the Chancellor's residence. Quite relieved to have been mildly useful.

That said, the situation in Ukraine does inspire despair.

I haven't caught up on most of the news yet. But the Russian government's suggestion of routing 'humanitarian corridors' straight into Russian territory from Kharkiv (which they've been industriously bombarding), for example, was quite enraging to read about this morning.

Besides I have the feeling that we'll regret not having NATO no-fly zones over Ukraine. — Not because I think they're a great idea, but because I have the feeling that other countries will be drawn into the war later regardless. So we're just refusing to accept the inevitable end of this, sacrificing the safety of Ukrainian civilians in the meantime. But hopefully I'm wrong.

*

Tomorrow will be a statutory holiday in Berlin: Women's Day.

A Snapshot of a Sunday, Southeast of Berlin

This afternoon my two youngest brothers and I visited our uncle Pu in the wilds of Brandenburg. Caught in the grip of winter still, the grass was short and greyish with remembered frost, the trees leafless as ever. Limbs or whole trunks of pine trees were slung over the forest floor where they'd been broken, uprooted and fallen during the storms earlier this year. A haze of ice crystals appeared to shimmer on the surface of a pond. Deep pits in the forest floor beside the road looked to me like potential bomb craters from World War II, which of course made me wonder why we'd opened up another chapter in this unenjoyable history of conflict.

But when we turned into our uncle's driveway, timid little stands of snowdrops were huddling in the grass. The moles had also formed more colonies of earthy hills in the lawns. Early signs, perhaps, of spring even outside the warmer microclimate of the city centre.

When we arrived home late in the evening, we were delighted to find T. there. She had popped by as her food delivery had landed on our doorstep instead of hers. We foregathered in the corner room, J. and then I hopped onto the stove, and T. and Mama were wrapped in sleeping bags while we chatted.

I have a warm mug of substitute coffee beside me, and am just catching up on my evening relaxation routine and doing my best to ignore a tense headache, before going to sleep and waiting for the next work week to begin. (If you know the 'glorious chaos' emoji of Elmo from Sesame Street against a dramatic background of flames, you may picture it here.)

Springtime Outing

It's been colder again lately. But that hasn't prevented the crocuses from blossoming further, the daffodil buds from shooting up, the birds from chirping, the skies from being blue, or the flowers to be coming out on the boughs of bushes

Yesterday I went on a somewhat misguided mission of mercy to drop off donations at a collection point, only to find out that their storage space was full (which of course is a good thing). Trains of Ukrainians continue to arrive in Berlin's main station, two thirds of them on their way to find relatives or friends in Germany, greeted by volunteers handing over food and help in other forms.

Today I had the usual Saturday breakfast with the family, eating croissants and slices of baguette as we all chatted about politics.

Then in the early afternoon T. came over and, after the obligatory Covid test, we set off east to a small café in Friedrichshain. With home-style radiators, shelves of English-language bestsellers from authors like Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, informal woven dark grey couches, it serves meat pies, cakes, and assorted drinks in a menu evidently masterminded by an Australian chef. I had a cappuccino and a satisfyingly large slice of cheesecake with cinnamon, apple, cream cheese, and crumble layers, and we caught up with a former colleague.

It was quite blissful not to talk about work, and altogether I had the nicest few hours I've had in weeks.

After returning home I discovered that a job description that has been released on a career website describes a large part of my work. And I'm agonizing again about a colleague-and-friend who was fired last week. Then occasionally worry about world news takes over.

But I have to think about other things; when there are already so many sources of misery, it would be cruel to add more.

And besides I am focusing on the good things: conversations with family that are silly or profound, the joy of seeing friends, the lifting of anti-Covid restrictions as Omicron variant cases decline, and the ways in which one can still try to help others — and unexpectedly be helped in return. I will also try to think of what my father would have advised.

Two Thousand Five Hundred Years of Occasional Misanthropy

A professor at my Canadian alma mater shared this quotation when George W. Bush was re-elected President of the US. (After well over a year of disastrous wars that many classmates, professors, and I deeply opposed.)

Πολλά τα δεινά κουδέν ανθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

When researching the quotation years ago, I found this translation:

MANY a wonder lives and moves, but the wonder of all is man,
That courseth over the grey ocean, carried of Southern gale,
Faring amidst high-swelling seas that rudely surge around,
And Earth, supreme of mighty Gods, eldest, imperishable,
Eternal, he with patient furrow wears and wears away
As year by year the plough-shares turn and turn [...].

From Sophocles: The Seven Plays in English Verse (1906) [Project Gutenberg] by Lewis Campbell

Leaping to the present day, and watching in the TV evening news the rubble to which Ukrainian apartment buildings are reduced during the ongoing invasion, I think Sophocles was wrong. I doubt whether we rule the Earth, and would propose that the Earth subsumes us.

Either way the word for 'wonderful' is etymologically a twisty word in ancient Greek; looking at the root of it, δεινός can also mean "fearful, terrible." (Ungeheuerlich in German.)

*

Far less ambivalent, this passage from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers:

πολλὰ μὲν γᾶ τρέφει 

δεινὰ καὶ δειμάτων ἄχη, 

πόντιαί τ᾽ ἀγκάλαι κνωδάλων 

ἀνταίων βρύουσι: 

Many are the horrors, dread and appalling, bred of earth, and the arms of the deep teem with hateful monsters.

I think it was as a figurative piece of fantasy; but these metaphorical horrors and monsters we can recognize as the spirits inhabiting our physical landscape today.

From Aeschylus (1926) [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; found on Perseus] by Herbert Weir Smyth 

*

These 2,500-year-old verses make me think again of my Opapa's findings:

As long ago as ancient Egypt, history has just kept repeating itself.

Marching Against War: February 27, 2022

Today, a German Protestant church coalition, environmental groups like Greenpeace, and trade unions organized a peace protest against the invasion of Ukraine. In the expectation that 20,000 people would show up, the streets leading into Straße des 17. Juni were blocked with light barricades from the Brandenburg Gate to the Siegessäule. Cycling down the Frankfurter Allee on Friday, I already saw a warning to motorists that the protest would snarl traffic.

I constructed a protest sign at home: 'Nein zum Krieg' in German written in blue lettering (a nod to the colours of the UN, also a colour that both the Ukrainian and Russian flags have in common) on one side, нет войне in blue lettering on the other side (a nod to the slogan that protesters are using in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg).

Potsdamer Platz was quiet as I walked, half an hour early, toward Brandenburg Gate. But the Tiergarten was already busy and the first glimpses of people wearing the yellow and pale blue colours of the Ukrainian flag appeared. When I reached Brandenburg Gate, a stream of people already flowed down the entire length of the street toward the Siegessäule in the early spring sunshine. Tiny white and yellow flowers and a few early green leaflets were sprinkled in the otherwise stark brown brush.

The austere pale façade and army-green tanks of the Soviet War Memorial, erected quickly after World War II as the trees of the park and the buildings surrounding were still largely in ruins, presented an irony that protestors were quick to grasp. A man in his fifties or sixties in what I remember as a battered jacket gamely stood in front of the memorial's fence for a photo-op, for example. He held a sign that said in German, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall,' captioning a caricature of President Vladimir Putin standing in front of a looking glass and seeing Joseph Stalin. A lot of the people at the memorial and in the crowd in general were German, although the Berlin expatriate community was also represented.

Aside from the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag: rainbow-coloured peace flags, European Union flags, and German trade union flags (IG Metall, for example) were also common. SPD flags and Polish flags and German national flags with the German Football Union logo stamped at the bottom also appeared. One man was wrapped in a Syrian flag; two people at least wore the red crosses on a white ground of the Georgian flag. A group of protestors had taken heat isolation foil blankets that were gold on one side and silver in another, in an eye-catching display that caught the eye of photographers, professional and amateur.

Most signs were homemade cardboard signs. They often bore the peace symbol, anti-war slogans, and declarations that 'we stand with Ukraine,' and were often written in English. A few protesters rightly made the point that we in Germany would rather freeze than depend on Russian natural gas for heating, at high humanitarian cost. (Temperatures at night are still below 0°C and I saw my breath vapor in the air when leaving the apartment around noon, but maybe the signs were a little melodramatic.) A few protesters had not heard yet that the European Union and US had already agreed to block access to SWIFT banking; they called for the access to be blocked.

Professional journalists appeared to be sparser on the ground than they had been for presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech at the Siegessäule in 2008. But eventually I saw people with tripods or with analogue cameras slung around their necks purposefully moving through the crowd. Finally a cameraman with the local Radio Berlin Brandenburg state-funded media also briefly set up his bulkier equipment at the street intersection I was standing at, to capture the gold-and-silver foil flags and then the masses of people streaming toward him from Brandenburg Gate.

In two loudspeaker announcements, the organizers passed on police recommendations to wear masks and keep the recommended 1.5 metres of social distancing. After that, face masks appeared fairly consistently. But social distancing became a problem as the mass of people grew denser.

After standing at a street corner for about an hour, I drifted back up toward Brandenburg Gate. Claustrophobia was also setting in; I felt tight in the chest until I found an opening beside two police vans at the Soviet War Memorial. After staying there about 20 further minutes, also hearing musicians playing John Lennon's "Imagine," I moved through the masses of people again. I swam against the tide with another thin line of departing marchers. Then I could exit the crowd again.

People were still streaming toward the protest as I walked toward Potsdamer Platz at 2:13 p.m. (It also turned out that public transit had been overwhelmed.) A policeman was quietly conversing through a car window with a stranded driver, where a barricade had been extended further than planned along the Holocaust memorial. It turned out later that over 100,000 people had marched in total.

A Vague Commentary on the Invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24 2022

There are years where life runs along its customary paths. 

Children go to and from school, their parents go to work and eat, we tend our gardens literal and figurative, and we bear the pain and losses that inevitably come along — despite the quotidian comforts of life — as well as we can.

Then someone decides that — no matter how hard life might already be, or no matter how much fragile happiness we have managed to gather in life — that this relatively rational if humble state of being cannot proceed, and starts a war.

It is utterly foolish and contemptible.

A Saturday After the Storms

It's the 'year 1947' in my historical experiment, and I didn't dive in too deeply. It was windy again today, although not as stormy as last night. We had three plain croissants and a pain au chocolat for breakfast, alongside hot cocoa.

Ge. went off to help a friend of the family who needed to supervise the removal of a tree that had fallen over in the storms; a crew of firefighters did the principal work.

In the meantime I wandered around the neighbourhood, first visiting the much-frequented bank, where a polite, possibly eastern European man perhaps in his late twenties held open the door. (While people have mixed feelings about this form of begging for money, in my view it allows people who are begging some feeling of utility — especially as it really is hard for elderly people, women with strollers, and cyclists to manoeuvre in and out of the doors without help.)

A few doors down, there's a florist's that I last visited in December. To my dismay, there were no tables or plants in front of it, the display window had been cleared out, a few bare branch wreaths lay in the dimness behind instead of spring flowers. Instead, there was a big blue placard in the window with a poem entitled "Müde" ('Tired'), which a thin young couple were staring at with awe.

After googling, it sounds like the owner of the florist shop supported the anti-Covid-safety protests, to the ire of a few neighbours. It's a pity because professionally it was a great shop: everyone I've met who worked there loved flowers, and also did a beautiful job binding them, even if yes — once or twice when I went there in long-past years, they've been standoffish. To me their closing also proves the severe psychosocial effects of the pandemic.

A fresh shock awaited at the market square. On early Saturday afternoons of course I expected throngs of people. It was empty except for a strolling couple and the market's wooden trestle tables (stacked at the parking lot beside it). It took me a while to stop double-taking, checking if it really was Saturday, checking if it really was not after 5 p.m. ... until I finally realized that, like other outdoor markets in Berlin on Thursday, it was likely shut down due to the heavy winds.

Snowdrops are blooming in a few garden plots now, gold blossoms emerging on an Oregon grape bush, and the crocuses are emerging in greater number: purple and pale yellow. I sent Gi. a snapshot, which took me a while as I am still inept with the work smartphone.

Besides I went to a French brasserie, with its many shelves of white and red and rosé wine, its bottled fig paste and olives, its canned cassoulet, tinned oysters and sardines, crackers, chocolates and biscuits and caramels and nougat, walnuts, and above all a long counter with hams, sausages, and cheese from the hard to the soft (brie). Its stock is not generically French, but instead celebrates the character of different regions. I bought odds and ends for lunch, to be eaten with our weekly Saturday baguette bread — which, I'd forgotten, we hadn't been able to procure this week. (And after that I shopped in the organic food store for lettuces, potatoes, butter, eggs, lemons, radishes, and shampoo.)

We did end up eating the French odds and ends for lunch. We had radishes and lettuce with vinaigrette for the sake of health, and switched in whole wheat toast for the baguette. The tinned mussels in sunflower oil, flavoured with spices, a fragment of bay leaf and a slice of garlic, were soft and tasted like mild sardines. The pesto crackers were mild too. We enjoyed the green olives with the pits still in them as well as the chocolate with fleur du sel, and lentil chips I had also bought at the organic food store.

I figured that returning British soldiers might have eaten French food in the late 1940s, so didn't worry too much about historical culinary accuracy.

It's still lovely to 'travel' via food in corona-y times. (Although fortunately, signs that the Omicron Variant is peaking and we can return to normal soon, are appearing in greater number.)

Midway through lunch, Ge. returned and brought along roasted chicken with French fries that the family friend had sent us. Erasing the planned dinner menu (boiled potatoes, salad, reheated fish and rice) from our imaginations, we dug in enthusiastically.

After that I read part of the New York Times (international edition) bought from a local 24-hour kiosk — these are cultural institutions, the targets of equal opprobrium and adoration, in Berlin — and the T Magazine that arrived in it. T Magazine's international edition also had a nice tribute to Gail Halvorsen, the American pilot who helped spearhead the chocolate and raisin component of the Berlin Airlift in the 1940s. Other reading: more passages of Gogol's short stories. At the same time I listened to a vinyl record of Mstislav Rostropovich playing Haydn cello concertos, and began listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Henryk Szeryng. No clothes mending this week, but I did tend my houseplants and dust more bookshelves and ornaments; and post-experiment I lit another lavender incense stick for relaxation.

On the piano I finished playing three Bach 'Duettos' and made my way through about fourteen pieces in his Goldberg Variations. It was nice nostalgia from the time when I listened to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations (not sure right now if they were the early or late recordings) at Canadian university, and then played them at home regularly in the 2000s. The variations where the left and right hands cross over each other are still rather difficult for me.

The past week at work was, in a phrase, incredibly challenging and turbulent. But it was really good to go outdoors and not use the computer much today. Sanity levels rising!

A Sedate Workday Amid an Early Spring Storm

It's been a howling sort of day, literally rather than metaphorically, as a storm swept (this time literally) over Germany. There was a constant roaring or whistling in the stovepipe, rain from time to time, and at times rattling of the panes in the windows. In the daylight, road signs vibrated on their stalks, and the broom-like trees were being shaken from trunk to twig-tip. The sky was largely grey.

I found it difficult to sleep past 8 a.m. with all the weather excitement, therefore had bags under the bags under my eyes as usual, in all my video calls.

***

It was a pleasant day on the whole.

Yesterday an HR colleague and the managing director kindly sacrificed one of their time slots to give me advice about something, and it was another one of those times where the managing director was helpfully calm and lent me a bit of inner security.

I had two '1 on 1 meetings' today. My direct manager (someone different) is blunt, but it makes conversations with him reasonably satisfying as long as he doesn't go too far. We had almost an hour-long conversation where we openly but politely disagreed on some things, and agreed on others.

Besides I also had a long conversation with the colleague who co-leads my team, always enjoyable except insofar as she is currently working and being worked too hard.

During lunch, I fried an 'egg in the nest,' tended my plants, dusted part of a bookshelf, played more Bach on the piano, and generally felt quite pleased with developments.

Earlier in the day a teammate and I went over a mySQL query, which was fun too; and then three colleagues joined me to take a look at how we monitor things that go wrong with our client service.

At the end of the day we had two meetings: One was a work-related meeting with over forty guests that began well enough but later made me so anxious at times that I purposely multitasked and checked messages until my breathing was back to its normal steady pace. Then there was another meeting where the teammates and I were just chatting.

(Before the meeting, the news had spread in the company that Google is planning to change its privacy policy on Android appliances, which (it is no great secret) is not likely to be particularly great for the company I work for. And I thought somewhat wistfully that our old days of not working for a stock-listed company were less exciting, in a good way.)

Lastly I did my usual evening data quality checks, spent time going through my notes of the day to make sure that everything I promised people I'd do was done as far as possible, booked an evening for our next team event, answered a few final direct messages, checked my email inboxes, and shut down the computer.

***

Having caught up on a few YouTube videos (one of them a ballet video), Twitter, and the Guardian, I have been working on one of the Open University's free introductory mathematics courses and soon plan to catch up on Duolingo lessons. Besides I want to keep listening to two audiobooks: Jimmy Carter's biography and A Knock on the Door, a report about Canada's residential schools.

Jimmy Carter's biography is also funny to read for me personally as a satire on my current persona in the workplace: tactless and overly honest at maladroit times, courageous in a way that closely resembles stupidity, irritatingly convinced of my own moral high ground, and effective but without appearing to be effective.

The 1940s and the 2020s, and Peace

As the years of World War II have ended in the weekly historical experiment, I've picked the experiment up again in the year 1946.

I didn't research it much, however, and therefore mostly spent the day just distancing myself from post-1940s technology in the form of the personal computer.

After eating a breakfast of croissants with Mama and our youngest brother, Ge. and I went for a walk to the Kreuzberg. It was a bright day with a pale blue spring sky, and other park-goers were also taking advantage of it as a police car slowly cruised past us. While the boxwood bushes have new yellow-green leaves and buds, and rosebushes have a few sprigs, and the sight of lawns with sun splashing on them was a pleasant novelty, the trees are still bare and the night frost lingered on the dead leaves and the ground where the sun didn't reach. In the city panorama that radiates from the top of the memorial — the glinting gold sculpture on the Siegessäule, Potsdamer Platz, church peaks, the TV tower, palatial domes of other religious buildings ... — we saw graduated clusters of apartment buildings that are usually sunk in a haze or shut out of sight by tree leaves. We spoke English, and so did most of the other people standing around the memorial.

Pale yellow and purple crocuses, in long bullet-like buds, were the only spring flowers we saw; snowdrops don't grow everywhere, clearly, and winter aconites don't seem to have appeared yet or to be popular either.

After tending to my houseplants, I played the piano: compositions from the 1930s by someone named William Alward, which our Aunt N. had picked up for her sheet music collection; and the beginning of Isaac Albéniz's "La Vega." Hopefully I can explore more of Aunt N.'s mid-century repertoire next week — Bela Bartók is next. Later, in the evening, I finished the project that I started last year: playing Beethoven's 16th through 32nd piano sonatas all the way through. I like the 32nd (and Beethoven's last) sonata, the 'Halloween' sonata with the gothic beginning and the meditative continuation, and had already listened to a Sviatoslav Richter recording and played much of it before. It is easier to do it justice, understanding what the music is supposed to do, than a few of his other late sonatas. So the project ended on a good note.

(The piano project went into its next stage today: The next challenge is playing all the way through a collection of Bach's works. The Italian Concerto is finished and his Ouverture in the French style is in progress; both of these are pretty familiar, especially as the Concerto was part of my daily rotation in the late 2000s. In honour of Papa's preference, I am trying to lay off the damper pedal while still achieving fairly sonorous notes.)

In the evening I took a look at clothes in our mending pile, and darned a sock that had a hole as big as a walnut. (Speaking of which, it's funny that 'whole' and 'hole' rhyme and are practically antonyms.)

The 9-to-5 at a Manager's Peak Season

Today (well, Wednesday) was a long day...

Knowing that a colleague was under pressure to deliver news about something related to my team, I'd told him that I was available (amongst other time slots) before 10:15 a.m. My calendar has a blocker scheduled for 9 to 10 a.m. every morning named "No Morning Meetings," but I torpedoed my own initiative.

At the time where I closed my laptop for the evening, I wasn't aware yet which time he had chosen. When my smartphone ringtone went off before 9 a.m., I suspected and then was able to confirm that in fact the meeting slot was indeed at 9 a.m. Looking in the video call preview, I saw that I looked more or less like night owls look at 9 a.m., and with 3 minutes to go did a few arm circles to get my blood moving and look more alert. The meeting didn't go too badly; and, despite the close relationship between early morning hours and intellectual underachievement, no glaringly absurd things were said.

After that there was one meeting after another until lunch. For lunch, I opened a parcel that a lovely colleague had sent as a pick-me-up: chocolate, scented bath lozenges, and tea. It was a great and most welcome surprise.

Then I had to go for a corona rapid test; it was quiet there and I was the only pokee. It has still been windy today; January has been cloudy to an above-average degree, but the wind swept aside the blanket so that sun rays could pierce through. It also drove specks of sidewalk dirt into my eyes so that I faintheartedly took shelter in the nook of a building until the fiercest gusts had passed.

After lunch there was also one meeting after another.

Meanwhile, like densely flocked storm clouds, the consciousness loomed that I still need to finish coordinating all of my team's yearly self-reviews, peer reviews and company value criteria into a people-manager's overview. I have finished rating every friend, brother, and uncle in my team from 1 to 5, which felt like vivisecting vulnerable little animals one moment and like ripping my heart out the next moment. On Friday I need to join other team leads for a meeting with someone from the parent company, where we calibrate these scores.

(Calibrate = If one team lead believes that all their geese are swans and give them 5s, that team lead will need to lower the scores to match the dourer conservatism of other team leads, and give everyone's teammates a fairer chance.)

At the same time we're still architecting our projects for the next half year. (Which also gave rise to my 9 a.m. meeting.)

After 6 p.m. I went to my voice coaching elsewhere in Berlin.

A police car passed me when I was near the city centre and joined two other cars. They were reinforcement for a group of officers who were clustered around a man, crouched on the sidewalk, who was hoarsely shouting in Arabic. It's always strange living in the city when, absorbed in the most mundane line of thought, you suddenly brush against the deepest dramas and most poignant troubles of someone else's life.

At the Nadir of the Calendar Year

Yesterday I went out briefly in the windy evening, wet with light and drizzly rain that felt like snow on the face, to buy face masks and other necessaries at a drugstore.

Along the way I stopped at a large florist's shop. While the Berlin landscape in general is not strikingly green at the present moment, there at least tulip bouquets were amply bundled along the sidewalk. Winter aconites were deep, bruised yellow and — as they stood in their earth-filled pots bowing their flamboyant, ruffed little heads — resembled a rank of bishop or cardinal that the Catholic church hasn't yet invented. On a top shelf, pale crocuses were splitting into flower. And at the end, early white and yellow daffodils were bristling.

In the end I bought yellow-hearted, pink primroses that had been grown in Germany (Schleswig-Holstein), along with a terra cotta saucer to catch the water.

Indoors, where I paid, large pots of ivy swung their leaves near thriving houseplants like 'mother-in-law's tongue', a few women shoppers were making their selections, and a wall of shelves bristled with teddy bears made of red roses and rectangular towers made of Ferrero Rocher, for the Valentine's Day shopping bonanza.

I've been an Eeyore for most of the weekend. (Not 'Eyesore,' as the spell check option would have it.)

In between other things, the weather has rather depressed me. And even while sleeping, work worries have nagged away at me. That said, it's been worse, so I have a regrettably unhealthy threshold to measure against.

This morning I arose early because my uncle-and-colleague M. had arranged a walk. In the end, I went to get tested for Covid, partly recharged my smartphone battery with a belated realization of its necessity, cycled fairly safely with a few buffeting side winds from yesterday night's storm, and finally reached the exit of the late 1920s S-Bahn station Priesterweg where M. was waiting.

I had arrived ten minutes late when I saw him standing beneath a leafless bush underneath an equally leafless oak tree outside the station. But he informed me — face at first a little pale and grim beneath a warm woolly winter hat — that I was the first one there. We found out ten minutes later that nobody else was coming, which we understood given the circumstances!

In any case, the park we'd partly come to see was closed until noon due to the weather conditions. So the question was how to entertain ourselves. In the end, I suggested that we just both visit the family apartment, and we stepped back onto the train platform.

Part of the view was nice while we waited for our train. The rectangular lattice-paned stair cases and an intact 1920s cabin, with sky-blue tiles and brick moulding and old-fashioned white-framed wooden door and window frames, for example. The old reception part of the train station, with its unassumingly proportioned bare brick, factory-style and briskly rectilinear, a minimalist clock face on a white ground perched proudly on a tower, was also charming.

Right alongside us a tranche of thick old, white-patched birch stumps, leafless trees standing and fallen, revealed birds' nests, and new and old tangles of gold-green mistletoe, beneath the tower of the park we hadn't entered, alongside the railway tracks, lent a touch of mystery.

To the other side of the tracks, the distant ridge of an unbroken line of 19th-century apartment buildings, now painted yellows and pinks but lost a little in the mist above the garden colonies, lent a touch of history and drama.

And the rail platform was clean.

But the wind was howling and draughty. The trains were running at irregular intervals due to the weather conditions. We waited 15 minutes for ours, and some of those '15 minutes' were rather longer than sixty seconds. (Which admittedly would be dramatically long only in places like Berlin, where we're rather spoiled by frequent 10 minute train cycles even on weekends.)

Also, the billboards at this rail station were dedicated to an anti-sexually-transmitted-disease campaign. While the idea is laudable, garish pictures of bare bottom cheeks and the inquiry ARE YOU ITCHING? were staring at us as we walked up and down to keep warm.

The 15 minutes were spent, in short, in physical, mental, and aesthetic discomfort.

But the train arrived, we reached our destination safely, we left the station and walked to the family apartment. We had cookies and tea, hot coffee and bread buns left over from breakfast; and chatted with Mama and Ge. and J.

Then I read a few chapters of Vincent Cronin's 1960s biography of Louis XIV.

We also had fried potatoes for dinner, and T. came over fresh from an active day where she'd met up with multiple colleagues.

Let's hope things become better also in general.

Back in the Figurative Treadmill in January

It's going to be the year 1943 in my historical experiment next week, but so far my research has been light. I'm still going to observe a Modern Times Appreciation Day instead.

In honour of technical advances I did mop the kitchen floor instead of kneeling and using my hands, last week, and it also brought squeaky results with marginally less effort. (I was also unexpectedly domestic during the lunch hour today. It is apparently possible to unclog the bathtub drain with baking soda, citric acid crystals stirred into water, regular warm water, and a plunger. The fizzing of the base with the acid was undoubtedly the best part.)

I still have an unholy hankering after cooking rationing meals, like the Lord Woolton Pie or the National Loaf. But after the combined despair of parent and siblings about my 'Calvinist' tendencies — and due to a fear of being what one would call 'pietätslos' in German by imitating scarcity where no scarcity truly exists — the hankering has been suppressed.

On Saturday, Mama and I went to a bookshop. The line of shoppers waiting for the cash registers was so dense that I'm keeping an eye on my smartphone's corona warning app, but so far there has been no alert. That said, we were all checked for vaccination passes, tests, or proof of convalescence on the way in. Also, I kept moving while browsing the shelves themselves. I've begun reading both the Swedish learning calendar, augmenting past studies in Duolingo, and the memoirs of former German chancellor Willy Brandt, purchased there in preference to the English-language fiction or non-fiction that feels more convenient to read online at present.

Regarding work, I'm anxious and am having trouble sleeping: reading or watching YouTube videos well past 2 a.m., still staying awake after that and thinking of work even when sleeping, and waking up later on weekends. That said, maybe I will eventually adopt the zen attitude of letting go of wishes and wants, and accepting the world as it is. My former direct manager, maybe in a similar boat, has recommended reading the Stoic philosophers.

It was a windy day, intensely so in the late morning, with unpleasant-looking rain and a constant draughty whistling and roaring even last night, which certainly didn't help my sleep.

This evening the TV city news reported that, while pressures on Intensive Care Units in Berlin's hospitals have lessened due to the more benign symptoms of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, hospital waiting rooms are on the contrary seeing a rise in activity. Happily? oblivious as ever, a long quiet queue of anti-Covid-safety-measure protesters illegally walked down the street on which I live, an hour or two before the show.

Anyway, my two youngest brothers ordered Chinese food for dinner, so I am well fed, and I had my daily exercise. Tomorrow we'll be getting Covid-tested and going to a concert with Mama, in honour of Papa's birthday.  Papa would have been 69 this year.

A Quiet Christmas Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street Marketing in Winter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Workplace Rant: The Epidemic of Management per URLs

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cautionary Tale About Not Taking Holidays When One Should

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring That No One Eats a Dead Mouse

Yesterday was a tumultuous day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

The Last Day of October 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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