A Helter-skelter Birthday, and more Lay-offs Aftermath

In the end my birthday was quite good. I feel pretty fragile after the last weeks; and not having experienced lay-offs in a company I've worked in before, the different impacts it's having are especially new, strange and painful.

But the messages from colleagues warmed me, also private messages in chats.

It was still a little bittersweet. There was a thread of tension throughout the day as I didn't get any birthday message from my manager. It wasn't clear if he was angry at me or not. (This morning, a message was waiting for me and I was relieved.)

And I used to look forward to seeing which birthday and work anniversary presents a colleague would send to me on behalf of the company (she chose customized ones). Because she quietly sourced ideas from teammates and in my case family members, I'd also enjoy guessing which person she'd asked. Now that colleague has been laid off.

But even teammates who were out sick or travelling sent affectionate messages, one of them had given me a bottle of limoncello on the way back from Italy.

That said, I have been so full of anxiety about not living up to what everyone expects or needs from me, that it was hard to accept the kindness.

It was a relief to log off at 4:45 p.m. T. had already arrived and Uncle Pu had just rung the doorbell ten minutes earlier. Ge. had, the day before, bought gummy bears, wine gums, After Eights and fizzy gummy strips for my birthday, and I had begun to eat them.

Then we went to a Chinese restaurant in the neighbourhood, where we met Uncle M. and had a family meal of sweet-and-sour pork, chicken with peanuts, aubergines, spicy shredded potato, and cabbage with mushroom. We had two pots of jasmine tea, and of course rice to go with the meal.

Afterward we returned home for conversation, a round of limoncello, the candy as well as mochi ice cream balls that Ge. had also bought because he knows I like them (they were also a tribute to D., in a way, as he first introduced us to them on Hawaii).

All of this made me much more cheerful and 'balanced,' I guess one can say.

The evening also took a more dystopian bent, however, as we all listened to the news of Queen Elizabeth II's death.

*

Today was quite hard, though better because of the mini-reconciliation with my manager.

I've become so uncomfortable about client-facing colleagues and the management level feeling that they don't know what I'm doing when they'd like me to do something for them, that yesterday and today I've constantly been detailing in my Slack statuses what client I'm working on, or if I'm in a meeting, etc.

Today I was supposed to receive my performance review from my manager. But after the disagreements we've had over the past week I was worried that he would feel obliged to re-write it and make it a lot less positive for accuracy's sake. It was a risk I've knowingly incurred all week, but it was really hard.

In the end we just mutually agreed to discuss the more urgent topic of reorganizing my team's workflow. What made it even more awkward, however, was that I was six minutes late to our video call; I had looked at the calendar and somehow seen a blank after the lunch hour instead of a scheduled meeting, so he had to write me a reminder about our meeting. It was, to the unprejudiced mind that did not experience the same brain misfire that I did, an incredibly shady thing for me to do.

That said, my manager seemed a bit more grieved than angry about my requesting vacation on the grounds that my limits were being ignored. As I'd half-suspected, he worried that he'd gone too far earlier this week, and seemed inclined to blame himself — when I'm not sure if I behaved totally correctly. Because he is shouldering so many tasks and burdens, I feel remorse about faulting him for maybe going further than he needs to.

In our meeting I did try to repeat my opinion that it was a natural reaction to the layoffs to overdo; it is just that colleagues like me have had the opposite reaction and have become less responsive — a matter of different styles, not one approach being intentional or correct compared to the other.

Then I attended a meeting, of the team leads of my corner of the company, that intensely dove into two topics that don't touch on my work at all. The management level above mine almost seemed to shout at each other — totally unusual. I wrote to my manager afterward telling him my impression, saying that it wasn't my business to know the details of what's going on with his peers (and that he'd seemed calmer than they did) but that I hoped things were OK, and that I apologized for potentially adding to any chaos. He said that he was taking responsibility for it and would try to improve the next meeting. But while I think he can probably exert a good influence, I also didn't think it was his fault.

*

Anyway, I'm going into a whole lot of detail here. But it does fascinate me how much harm strategic glitches and the decision to fire so many people in a large organization can do to the fabric of a company, even aside from the massive effect on the people who were fired.

Paving with Good Intentions

It's now been enough time for the dust to settle at work.

From what I can tell, over 10 colleagues were laid off from my part of the company, including two whom I'd consider friends and another whom I got along with really well.

An official email was sent around about one of them. So the rest I figured out through devious ways, in consultation with one or two other colleagues who were also worried for friends in other teams. I sent messages to two of them, one of whom answered so I'm especially anxious about the other one.

Last Friday the top management of my part of the company emphasized that we should take our time to digest things, etc. This week, there's a flurry of energy in the office and online.

I've felt guilty for feeling too exhausted and depressed by the past two weeks to go out to extended family events, let alone to the office.

New projects 'to make my team's life easier' are being generated from three different teams (besides my own) and my manager. As my team is in the throes of Fall/Winter-Black Friday season, I suggested that maybe we could coordinate between our four teams and agree on a set of projects per 2 weeks, to give me more time to focus on our regular Black Friday season tasks. But I think this suggestion was misunderstood, so now instead my team has been asked to work in 2-week sprints. I also felt pressured to soothe the feelings of colleagues by affirming that, yes, their projects are being made in a helpful spirit — which is fine, but is also exhausting because it requires me to set aside my own needs further for someone else's benefit.

A few clients have had major glitches: one requires a special feature that keeps malfunctioning and I've devoted a great deal of time to it, one has taken ages to finish working with and the teammate who was working on it directly was too stressed to communicate very well what was going on and where he was at (driving our client-facing colleague absolutely up the wall, so I put some energy into diplomatic efforts), and another has been sending us the same products as duplicates so that I have spent hours reviewing up to 9 times the exact same shoe. A few teammates were feeling sickish.

I'd admitted in an engineering manager meeting that I was overwhelmed and that I felt that I could no longer take holidays because of all the improvement projects for my team etc. I'd asked for support by letting me concentrate a bit on my team and on regular tasks. — But my embarrassing myself in this way was just seen as a rationale for more interference from outside the team.

I asked for a vacation day on Monday, in the end. In the request I wrote that I'd tried to 'set healthy boundaries' for myself and for the team; that I wasn't getting my point across; that this was all right because I understand that after the lay-offs people are stressed and want to get a lot done; so that I'd try just being 'offline' for a day. It was written, I hope, in a spirit of kindness. But I don't know if the explanation will be accepted.

I've also felt as if the campaign to get all colleagues to go to the office regularly is reviving.

I've kept saying I don't feel comfortable with it, but it is still assumed that I don't know what I want. It's not enough to say that I've had bad experiences in the past (maybe I need to go into the gory details e.g. the passenger who tried to attack me with his fists because I didn't open a train door quickly enough? ...). Or to not want Covid to spread further.

—Speaking of which, I generally do not understand why Germans and a few colleagues seem careless about the prospect of another heavy wave of Covid (I'm imagining transit and other functions disrupted because of weeks of sick leave, viral mutations, effects on the elderly and immune-deficient, etc.). I think it will worsen the economic problems that will already mark this fall and winter due to the high fuel prices and the rise of the cost of living.—

There was a period for maybe 3 days last week where top managers emphasized in lay-offs-related meetings that it was really our choice to go into the office ... then this week a massive relapse.

In general I've been under so much stress this Wednesday (also worrying that asking for space will also affect my half-yearly job performance review on Friday, or even more massive interference and pressure by colleagues who will start wanting to take over my job), that I went to sleep unusually early with a stomach-ache, waking up again at 3 a.m..

Thursday is my birthday, but so far it's not exactly happy.

The 2022 Layoff Fashion Trend

Today we were expecting a video call announcement from the overall CEO of the company, but instead we received an email after the lunch hour. It was long and euphemistic, but eventually explained that over 1,000 people will lose their jobs due to The Macroeconomic Situation.

Right after that, we received more specific emails relating to the situation not internationally, but specifically in Europe and then specifically at our part of the company.

It was disgruntling to read that the colleagues who are laid off will already have all their email and Slack accounts shuttered tomorrow. We might not realize for days which of our work friends or acquaintances have 'disappeared.'

I was told this afternoon specifically not to tell anyone in my team if they were fired or not. This was awkward because I was already making exceptions for my team if anyone reported feeling acutely anxious. And I felt that the managing director had been quite fine with my telling people they were safe.

Anyway, this is all standard practice in large companies, so I'm not saying this to complain about my employer.

It's just a terrible situation generally. Even while as someone who's not being laid off or making decisions to fire anyone, I feel I have no right to complain about my part.

Netflix and 1974

The work week became worse, which was a surprise. But colleagues' kindnesses and solidarity were bright spots. Our managing director chatted with me about our overall situation on Wednesday to try to set my mind at ease.

Right now it's probably best to focus on the weekend itself.

Last evening my siblings, mother and I had a sort of carouse to celebrate two of our brothers travelling to Canada. Gi. bought everything from Jaffa cakes to jelly beans and laid it out on the kitchen table, T. came for a visit, we ordered in Kentucky Fried Chicken and watched The Lost City with Sandra Bullock, Mama returned from her latest pilgrimage after 9 p.m., and then we chatted until Ge. drove the two youngest brothers to the airport at 3 a.m.

I liked The Lost City, although it isn't the best film. It was shot in the Dominican Republic, but much distorted with computer-generated imagery; the unreal colours purposefully suggest a game. I've generally grown to detest CGI as the killer of genuine creativity, but I can croak like a Cassandra all I want — it won't influence the cinematic trend. The script really refreshingly undermined engrained colonialist, materialist and Black-best-friend tropes, and gender roles, without being preachy or obvious aside from an exchange about 'mansplaining'. I still thought the dialogue was thin. (Also, a nice town and restaurant were shown on an island, which was then destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Presumably homes and livelihoods and people vanished. That open end was not addressed at all. But I'm biased toward taking this aspect too seriously by having read news about volcanic eruptions in the Canary Islands and Hawaii these past few years.) It cheered me up a lot.

***

For 1974, I ate a second breakfast based on a recipe in a diabetics' food guide published that year in Munich. It was a mixture of cornflakes, milk, yoghurt, apple, and berries that I considered rather hair-raising to eat.

(Besides I practiced my typewriting. Apparently American machines expect typists to use a small l as the number 1 but to use the number 0 for 0, whereas the German machine I have seems to expect typists to use the number 1 — a little difficult as it is one of the keys that requires the pinky finger to strike it — but to use the capital letter O for 0.

And I cooked another round of Grütze with self-made apple pectin, apricots, a peach, and a few red currants and raspberries. Ge., our mother and I went for a walk to the park as well. It was a relief when the walk proved that I was in better health again; yesterday I'd been so wobbly that my legs felt like sticks when I got up to walk around in the apartment, and I didn't dare go on a step stool for fearing of tottering off.

Besides I did some work because I'm so worried about the lag in processing new clients, but stopped due to technical difficulties. At first I was a little antsy that I had been laid off after all and was therefore denied access to my work email accounts, but it was evidently just a poor internet connection ... Those seconds of doubt were not fun.)

Fortunately M. and aunt L. came for a visit later. They brought masses of cake, which we had with tea and coffee.

In the evening L. and we went to a restaurant to eat baba ghanoush, fattoush, falafel with yoghurt dip and more salad, deep-fried sheep's cheese, and lentil soup. We washed it down with a date syrup drink, peppermint tea, and a cold minty drink whose name I have forgotten. The tables outside were mostly full of chatting diners, three mice frolicked around, the waiters were busy but good-humoured. In the grey sky, thunder rolled beyond the white tent canopy. It was happily cool after another humid, warm-ish day. The food was well-prepared.

We also discussed family stuff. There's a series of events happening next week to celebrate the Mendelssohn side of the family here in Berlin.

Let's see...

A Week in Work Purgatory

Last week was terrible after Monday as well. My team is severely understaffed. At times it has felt like half is out due to illness or long vacations. Everyone who does come into work is finding themselves doing the most repetitive tasks we have two or even three times: once for their own clients, a second time for the absent teammate's clients, and if they're unlucky a third time for another absent teammate whose back-up teammate is also out on holiday... There's barely any time to finish any work beyond the routine, let alone pick up new clients.

My anxiety about the lay-offs that will hit my company soon, is reaching painful levels. I don't know if it was just the clinging humidity and warmth of the past two weeks, but I found myself waking up before 9 a.m. multiple times. The last time I woke up that early above 1x or 2x per year, when not travelling, was for 8 a.m. classes for university, eight or more years ago. And I feel a painful compulsion to work harder and harder as a kind of cosmic bargain to keep my team safe.

It was worst on Friday, when I woke up before 5 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep. Before 7:30 a.m. I started working. And working and working and working. I did take lunch between 1 and 2:40ish p.m., but I think intermittently worked after all due to the anxiety. After about 4 p.m. I was totally exhausted, but I had mandatory training videos that I needed to watch by the end of the day to conform to regulations of the Federal Trade Commission in the US. Because the videos were so incredibly boring I kept getting distracted, and finally logged off my laptop well after 9 p.m.

In between, the just-below-top-management circle contacted me in shock and horror about an apparent major incident regarding our biggest client, that apparently showed an utter breach in my responsibility to monitor client traffic. In fact I think they just spotted a problem on the client's side that the client-facing colleagues and my team had alerted the client to a long time ago and that we have been constantly working on ever since. In fact we'd put at least 75 hours of work into it, in July alone.

I had also handed in a spreadsheet to the top management team, following a template they had given fellow team leads and me and asked to fill out. This template had made my fellow team leads and me all suspicious: we were supposed to list our teammates one by one, rate if were likely to leave the company, list what we could do to keep them in the company (fair enough), and then ... select how much we wanted to keep them in the company on a scale of 1 to 3. We (the team leads who discussed this) all thought: What. the. hell., and all mentioned that we'd put 1 for every teammate. With all affection and respect, I don't really rate the top management team highly for honesty here.

I need another day like that, like I need a hole in the head.

A Mopy Evening Ramble

It looks like the economic storm will also touch my company more strongly after all, so after an unhappy and tense meeting of fellow team leads, and the rest of the work day, I ended up listlessly wandering outdoors in the rainy twilight. Then I bought groceries on impulse from a chain store that was still open: smoked salmon, garlic bread, instant rice, a marzipan bar, chocolate-covered marshmallows, a square of mint chocolate, a jar of pickles, and a few donations for refugees.

Current events are a bit of a perfect storm: the weather being humid and hot, droughts, unexplained mass fish die-offs in a river east of Berlin, war, news of Kosovo cutting off electricity imports and introducing rationing as it can't afford energy prices any more. Then there is work: tons of colleagues out on holiday, out physically sick, or out mentally sick, involuntarily leaving a double load behind them that other colleagues must shoulder; news of lay-offs in other companies; and now our own looming news.

In terms of work aside from these broader considerations, the day was also not that great, and because I was worried about something I had done overtime over the weekend that ruined my one-day vacation.

I felt too stunned to know what to do next after the work day was done, also uncertain what will be asked of me in the following months. And I had to tell myself that the important thing is to keep going: to put one foot in front of the other, and to keep doing it.

To borrow an old quotation, 'These are times that try men's souls.'

The Fierce Eye of August, and a Brief Ramble on the News

As it's Sunday, I went on another walk to the allotment gardens nearby. The sun was fierce, and on the way back I saw two smaller clouds in the mostly blue sky, one of which dwindled away in size as I watched in what I presumed was evaporation. But because I had waited until 3 p.m. to set off, the shadows of the buildings, fences, hedges and trees were reasonably deep and — after acclimating to the heat — I felt it was not so bad.

The news and private conversations are full of droughts in Berlin, Brandenburg, the Rhine River valley, France, Spain and Portugal; and it would take a very hardened skeptic indeed not to believe in the severity of global warming.

I saw further berries shrivelled on the bushes, crispy leaves partly turning brown, the silky hay-like grass that is of course however no oddity in August, and smelled the dust in the air.

In the allotment gardens the aspect was greener, of course, due to rather wasteful water sprinkling even in the middle of the day. Growing up in the rain shadow where the coastal British Columbia mountains siphon off most of the moisture before it reaches Victoria, I became familiar early on with drip hoses, which I think should be adopted more often here. My paternal grandfather (who had studied agricultural engineering in Vienna while on leave from the army in World War II) also faithfully watered his garden only in the evening, after the sun's shadows were so long that they reached to the end of the neighbour's yard.

Grapes are ripening and turning purple on many of the vines, the Virginia creeper berries are still green, and a few late roses remain in pale pink and deep red. Spurs of other vines and tree branches create rather pretty arcs of shade at the fences and gateways.

While in the past weeks the fruit trees reminded me of solemn, stern Baroque paintings of fruit, in the style perhaps of Arcimboldo, this week they were splashes of colour. Purple plums with their paler dust, red-cheeked apples and pears bursting on their boughs, paler late apples and quinces still dusty on the boughs, and a few yellowy peaches surviving the thinned leaves on their own trees.

Hibiscus bushes are in flower, often a lilac colour but darker where the overblown blossoms shrivel; sunny echinacea flowers with their brown centres like a little dog's nose; a few of the sunflowers have already been harvested. I also saw a pumpkin hanging on a raised vine, still green and lightly speckled as a pale marrow.

I took home a few apples, underripe, to make another round of jam or Rote Grütze.

Recently I took some of these windfall apples, diced them peel and core and all, boiled them for around 30 minutes with enough water to cover (all of this taken from a recipe in the blog The Spruce Eats), drained them overnight, and then boiled the pectin-laden dripping liquid gently with a little sugar and many blueberries, red currants, strawberries, and blackberries.

When the berry sauce was thicker, I took it off the heat. Then I poured it into a yoghurt tub when it had cooled; and I kept it in the refrigerator, where the aroma of the berries ripened and sent forth a nice scent whenever we opened the tub. It was lovely to eat stirred into yoghurt.

*

In terms of news events, I was shocked to read that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed in New York State. I'm old enough to remember his novel Satanic Verses from the 1990s.

In Britain, the news that Liz Truss is likely to become the next Chancellor is not invigorating either. Her opposition to Brexit originally is evidence of some grains of sense. But Rishi Sunak seems to have a firmer grasp of reality in general.

If what I heard in a news analysis podcast from the British magazine New Statesman is true, Boris Johnson is heavily angling against him using his press connections, out of a sense of political revenge. (Liz Truss has still staunchly defended Johnson, which bewildered me until I heard that podcast.)

What surprises me is that both candidates are now embracing the kind of prolific government spending that the Labour Party was sharply (and from what I could tell, sometimes fairly) criticized for a decade ago.

I'm also disappointed that transphobia was used as a tool against Penny Mordaunt's candidacy, and by Liz Truss. It's never a good sign if one picks on a relatively defenseless minority, when in fact it's the best test of a liberal democracy if minorities have equal rights that suit their specific needs.

Lastly, I hope that the next American presidential election won't be another shocker. I think it was appropriate for the FBI to retrieve files from the golf course of the 45th President. From what I've read, military men and civilians who worked closely with him are pretty much universally shocked with his cavalier approach to national security. So I think it is also important to make sure that he cannot become a presidential candidate again.

Otherwise it's like the Labour Party MPs who were absolutely convinced that Brexit will ruin the British economy for decades to come, but on the basis that a thin majority of their electoral district voted for Brexit, insisted on voting for self-annihilation in Parliament 'for democracy!'

It also seems to be a worldwide trend to be so navel gazing that one blames one's current government for high gas prices and for other phenomena — which, surprise surprise, are actually also problems in most other countries and have no magic solution. Which is I guess a big risk in the re-election of Joe Biden, or of another Democratic candidate.

Saturday in 1971: Macramé and Typewriting

It was another busy day today.

Last week at work was interesting because the tech industry revenue and layoffs crisis is looming closer and closer. I'm beginning to realize that instant karma is probably going to bop me on the head; feeling safely employed has instilled the 'safe world hypothesis' that everything will turn out for the best, whereas I should be thinking more of people who have been laid off and also not be idling in hubris.

For once I woke up at around 9 a.m. despite its being Saturday. Mama was absorbed in the newspaper in the living room, but soon needed to leave to meet her tandem partner. Ge. was awake, too, and when the French shop nearby opened, he went off to buy the morning baguette and croissants. The baguette was so fresh that it was incredibly soft underneath its crispy shell, the croissants also fresh, and we had coffee to go with them both.

The French shop is also closing for 2 weeks' summer holidays, so they had persuaded Ge. to buy a salami and a little round cheese at a lower price, so that they wouldn't spoil. The salami was well worth it based on the slice I tasted: pork with flavourings and with a taste that I felt was genuine and a little goat-y (not in a bad way).

Before breakfast I typed more exercises from the touch-typewriting booklet. The farther I progress in the booklet, the worse my errors become. Pudel explained when he visited last week that electronic typewriters (which allowed you to correct errors a bit!), and then PCs, were also introduced hoping that they would have a good environmental impact: reams of paper used to be wasted on text that had to be thrown into the garbage due to typos. But I still think it's an ingenious machine. My heart sings whenever I hear the mechanical 'ding!!' when the letters reach the righthand margin.

I also played the first pages of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto again, having recently rediscovered it during cleaning, and am not finding it any easier; swept the floor of the kitchen; darned a sock; very briefly listened to the radio; neatened one or two shelves; and skimmed more pages of Maria Edgeworth's 19th century novel Patronage.

(I've become a big fan of Radio France International, was delighted to find that I do understand a few words of Turkish by listening to a Berlin-based Turkish-language channel, and can access a wide range of music genres from hip-hop through jazz and classical and rock to world, as well as BBC World interviews, on a radio I found amongst all the stuff we have in our apartment. RFI has made me aware, through its great international news coverage, that I mostly only hear the news of 20% of the world's inhabitants. What would a news website look like, I've been ruminating, if it covers mostly Indian and Chinese news, very little American news, and almost no European news, based on percentage of population by nationality? wouldn't it inform us far more? - Besides RFI also has interviews that always leave me with a quirky piece of knowledge that I'd never heard of before and that gives me food for thought for a pleasant interval afterward.)

As my first outing of the day, I cycled in appropriately 70s-ish striped t-shirt and wide-leg trousers to Kreuzberg and bought strawberries, purple plums, chard, green garlic, frilly green lettuce, Turkish delight, instant coffee, filo pastry, and a jar of rose jam from a Turkish grocery store. It was the first time I've ever bought rose jam, which turned out to be very soft and syrupy with orangey ghosts of the flower petals floating in the subtly scented jelly. The strawberries were very aromatic and richly sweet.

One of the things I'm planning to celebrate from the 70s is the macramé craze, rather indifferently I'm afraid to the actual precise year of its ascent to fame. Macramé is of course a trend in the fashion industry again, so it was not entirely a surprise that a shop window of a crafts store was dedicated to it. (It was nice to see the apple shop in the neighbourhood doing a brisk business when I walked by as the fruit is coming in season here: a queue of two people was waiting on the pavement.) At any rate I ended up getting a large spool of 3.5 mm diameter yarn and two bamboo circles for the handles of a beach bag, per instructions I found on YouTube. [After my 1971 time ended in the evening, I started on it with Ge.'s help, and have now probably messed up at least two double half hitch knots.] The thought of making wall hangings frankly drives me up the wall, pun intended; my experiment needs to be something useful.

Besides I brought an appliance to a neighbourhood shop for repairs. The two men there were unexpectedly jovial, likely looking forward to their weekend. It'll likely take a month, but if they can repair it, we should finally be able to listen to the TV and to vinyl records normally again!

Besides I went to two more grocery stores: First, a minimal-packaging shop where I bought mung beans, large rolled oats, olive oil, fusilli pasta, a soap, and baking soda — in a tupperware container, a jar, a bottle, and two bags that I had brought from home. Second, the organic grocery store across the street. It didn't have the mint, dill, extra phyllo pastry and extra parsley I wanted for the spanakopita recipe I'd been planning to make on Sunday. But at least I was able to turn up spinach and feta cheese.

Then I went donating soap etc. again — not so much this time, but the volunteer who accepted the donation did still seem delighted that her shift hadn't been in vain. She said that she hoped the war would be over soon.

Ge. cooked sausages, potatoes, red cabbage, and peas, which we ate with beer and a lettuce salad, and I felt pleasantly full. It's also nice to have Mama back from her walking tour. And I'm pleased it's no longer between 34 and 38°C hot, as it was again earlier last week.

I'm wondering how next week at work will turn out. But until then we have Sunday.

Saturday in 1970: A Cashless Bank

It's been an exhausting day at the end of an exhausting week.

It's a bit indiscreet, but no real secret to say that almost any company that relies on online advertising for revenue is not doing well in the current economic climate. The top managers of our parent company have been swinging in wide pendulum curves between profound gloom and peppy optimism ('we've been through this before in 2018, and our fundamentals are strong'); but even when you can metaphorically see the thought bubble 'Oh. My. God.' over their heads in video calls, I will say I've rather admired how our upper echelons have dealt with it. One thing that's certain is that we can't hire new colleagues for the foreseeable future, which badly sucks for my team as the pressure of clients builds and builds.

Fortunately, my direct manager is hugely helpful. He listens to my fears and gives blunt but optimistic answers. He 'manages expectations' in the beautiful jargon of our business, and makes it absolutely clear that if we have fewer people in the team, everyone knows to expect less work from us. He's also showing me here and there where my team can put new emphases in our work that don't impinge on quality but do help us achieve the most effect we can given our resources. To be honest I think that he's supplying 60% or more of my competence.

What he couldn't help with (because I didn't think it was appropriate for me to fish for personal information about a colleague) is that I was slightly shocked that a fellow team lead suddenly went on sick leave for two weeks. We're also friends, so I'm quite worried for her. The former product owner for my team is still out sick after months, and I miss her very much; so I've become a little more paranoid when this happens. (Also, one of my teammates has been in and out of hospital for weeks, a gruelling experience for her and obviously a situation where I've tried to think through how best to offer support.)

There's no Great Resignation at the company, and no mass firing. (Shopify just fired 10% of its staff, for example, and it does feel a bit like guillotines are being set up all around us for other companies and we're all wondering who's next.)

But still, for the last six or so months I feel as if, to use a German phrase 'Da ist ein Wurm drin.' It feels like we're seeing sick day statuses in Slack everywhere and we can't assume they're all purely medical. The merging together of work stress and personal stress is just overwhelming. And while the past week or so has been beautifully harmonious at work, I think that conflict and misunderstandings between colleagues have been thriving. It's pandemic-related and not company-specific, but I really believe that it is in our control: we need to purposely start lots of communication and give more proof of goodwill than would otherwise be necessary, to achieve the same harmony that we would have taken for granted two and a half years ago.

The top managers in my part of the company are however focusing on the idea that luring everyone back into the office will achieve this sense of harmony. It may be true-ish; but I was annoyed when I heard it, because we do pay a personal price for that. The time spent commuting is time lost for family, fitness, and hobbies outside of work; and that time is often lengthened by transit delays due to medical emergencies, railway repairs, etc. And the nasty experiences I've had in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and had apparently systematically repressed, recurred to mind — people passed out, violent, drunk, in need of medical attention; the stranger who smushed his hands all over mine and seemed proud of his molestation, ... If I take the bicycle, I do become physically exhausted. And my colleagues seem too comfortable with and fond of each other to take Covid safety regulations seriously, which is in one way a nice problem to have — in another way, just a problem. At least we're not facing an Elon-Musk-esque dictum that we should return to work if we don't want our CEO to pompously assume that we're not getting anything done. (A notion that has struck a nerve with many people I've spoken with since then!)

I've been listening to a lot of rock and dance-pop etc. music to keep up my energy. I'd had no idea that David Bowie released "Space Oddity" in 1969, having associated him with the 1980s. But it's The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" and "Sunny Afternoon" that I've been playing over and over again (although despite my enthusiasm, digging further into their catalogue also reveals musical self-recycling and a few songs that I don't admire as much), as well as The Beatles. Besides I listened to colleagues' recommendations. On Friday I dialled back and forth between radio channels and ended up snuffling with laughter through Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy." Which is a little unusual after 35 years of listening to classical music, but I think that at this point I don't see as much of a difference between genres: you know the real thing when you hear it, no matter what the instrumentalization and tone and topic are.

***

Yesterday night my mother, who's on her annual summer pilgrimage far away from home, spent another night al fresco. So when I woke up at 5:30ish this morning anyway, I stayed awake for a bit over an hour, just in case she wanted to chat with someone. To pass the time I perhaps unwisely did work, for one of our company's biggest clients. (But my mindset around overtime is changing; I did track the minutes I worked so that, if I feel exhausted next week, I can take a longer lunch to compensate.) And I also did a little light reading in between.

Then I went back to sleep, woke up after ten, and began cancelling the plans I'd had one by one, as my brothers slept in. It turns out that the house key was in the bowl in the hallway all that time, so I could have gone on all the excursions I wanted and I was just being silly. The feeling persisted throughout the day that I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

Either way, it was relaxing to have a morning shower for pure enjoyment and not out of professional etiquette. And I dressed up, wearing a striped t-shirt and short skirt in tribute to the year 1970.

Fast forward through housecleaning. Once the brothers woke up, I heated kidney beans and boiled eggs as a semi-British breakfast, using the haybox again to finish heating the eggs in order to save gas.

In terms of my plans outside the house. ... It turns out that trying to run errands past 4 p.m. on a Saturday is unwise, especially on a day that was only 24°C or thereabouts but was cursed with high humidity. The dry cleaner's was closed, the bulk food store was closed, the little organic store was closing, and in the end I relied on the chain organic food store across the street to buy food. Cauliflower, Persian cucumbers, red beets, apricots, and blueberries, as well as chocolate-covered popsicles and a jar of plain yoghurt, were what I ended up buying.

Despite the worry that I'll be landing myself with orthorexia, I've been even more careful lately to buy regional or low-carbon-footprint produce without (much) plastic packaging, due to the energy crisis and global warming. I know that weather is cyclical; but the 36-38°C temperatures in Berlin earlier this month and the fires near London have acted as acute warnings. And I'm also starting to avoid wheat products because of the shortages in the Middle East. One of my former bosses, who's well versed in macroeconomics, did explain however that it's not good for the wheat industry if demand in countries like Germany dries up in the longer term. Besides I've advanced further in reducing the use of gas, because the political games surrounding Nordstream 1 make me angry.

The trip to the bank was another wild goose chase. Most of the proper ATMs have suddenly been replaced by black machines that are twice as big, look like props from a Sylvester Stallone science fiction movie, and perform half the operations of the previous ATMs. None of these operations seems to be cash withdrawal — which in Berlin is madness, as many small businesses only accept cash. And one of the two proper ATMs would only pay out 50 Euros.

I can imagine the reasons for the ATM switcheroo — the environmental friendliness of cashless payment, the wish to prevent robberies, and likely the remaining trauma of bank personnel who were affected by a hold-up around 2020 and might want less money on the premises as a result. But I was still disgruntled. A few other customers just left.

Back at home, I sliced the cucumbers for a salad and washed the apricots; and then my youngest brothers and I dined just on those, the ice cream popsicles, and later on a bowl of cereal.

My grandmother seems to have bought an Olympia typewriter in the 1970s, and I used this machine today to practice touch-typing. It was a rather lovely form of time-travel, although from an ergonomic perspective, the modern computer keyboards of Linux laptops and Apple desktops are sheer luxury by comparison (quiet and gentle, requiring no pounding, and having keys that never stick except if you spill Coke on them). We have a manual that has a labelled diagram of the most common levers and other features of typewriters, as well as touch-typing exercises, and it was incredibly helpful.

I've been working away at preliminary outline of the plots and characters for a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, since the Netflix film with Dakota Johnson seems to have been such a disappointment to those who watched it, and have also used the typewriter for that.

I'd also wanted to create a shopping bag using macramé techniques to celebrate the 70s, but we don't have a pattern in the book that I'd thought would have one. Also, the twine reels that we have are rather rough-looking.

One of my other historical experiment regrets is not actually reading Doris Lessing short stories, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, or more of Black Rage.

But I've made progress in mending and darning, as well. And found an old package of carbon paper to use with the typewriter. And watered the houseplants that needed it. And my mother ate a good breakfast and found a comfortable-looking lodging to stay tonight. And I really enjoyed the conversations with my brothers. So altogether it felt like a Saturday well spent.

Saturday in 1968: Curried Rice from a Package, and other excessive detail

It was 1968 in my historical experiment today, and I've been struggling with figuring out how to capture the wilder aspects of the Sixties.

Two of my brothers left for a train journey to the Netherlands in the middle of the night (for scheduling and not for dramatic reasons, of course), so this morning was a little quieter. We ate croissants and drank coffee for breakfast, as always.

Then I set off into the sunny weather to the travel bookshop where one of my aunts works. It turns out that pedalling around a still-busy epicentre of post-war Berlin was an excellent idea. The modernist, geometric tower beside the war ruin of the Gedächtniskirche, the old-fashioned splendour of KaDeWe and the fancy entrance to the U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz, and the tower blocks around Zoologischer Garten with the broad streets very much designed to appeal to car traffic, were all in their own way a bristingly prosperous 1960s-esque backdrop.

I also spotted a street party in honour of Berlin's LGBTQIA+ community, with an orange contingent of medical vehicles, a light police presence and white-and-red plastic street barriers, a massive flower stand, and a flurry of white pavilions like a brightly bristling medieval tournament along the side streets. It turns out that at least three of my colleagues were there today, so I slightly regret not passing through. Either way, I felt proud that 1960s movements like Stonewall had helped pave the way for this.

Then I popped into a toy store to buy donations for refugees, and right afterward walked on to the travel bookshop. After my aunt gave me a hug, she helped me find gifts amongst the ceiling-height bookshelves, Earth globe lamps, vitrines of old-fashioned sextants and other measurement equipment, maps, and travel guides. Then I bought a coffee table book for myself: a TeNeues hardcover about the 'golden age of travel' illustrated with everything from 18th century paintings (one of them was unfortunately of my literary nemesis, Goethe) through colourized Edwardian scenes to photographs of skiing glamour from the 1960s.

Then I dropped off the donations at Tempelhof Airport. (Altogether far fewer Ukrainian refugees are seeking help in Berlin now. I think ~200 to 300 arrive at the Hauptbahnhof daily compared to a peak of ~10,000, so the tent there is going to be replaced with a smaller construction; Südkreuz also isn't seeing much activity, so the volunteers there declined my last offer to donate; and one of the other refugee support places that I donate to, is closed for repairs until August.) There was construction at the Platz der Luftbrücke that detoured me through the small park with the 'Hunger Claw' sculptures. But altogether I didn't find the bicycle ride entirely fun, because having a heavy load on a windy day is rather dangerous, glass splinters littered the pavement at times, and I didn't like carrying the bicycle plus baggage down the steps of the park. These were small peas, however.

I was briefly perturbed when catching a glimpse of a materfamilias's bicycle: she had adorned her baby's seat with a round, yellow 'Forced vaccinations? No thank you' sticker on it.

For lunch, I set off again. In the organic food store I found dehydrated packs of pasta with tomato sauce, curried rice with peas, and sweet potato mash, which felt like a good approximation of Sixties food to me. Only the quinoa pack I didn't buy, as it seemed to me that quinoa was exported outside of South America predominantly in the early 2000s.

Next: a music store. I was tempted to buy an album by The Cream. In the end I went for a 1963 jazz studio recording by Oscar Peterson and Nelson Riddle, on a compact disc. Yes, CDs weren't invented in the 1960s, but I can't listen to LPs at home without hearing thumping noises, due to a newly temperamental amplifier.

Next: Turkish street market. The sellers were stacking green plastic crates and packing merchandise being back into cardboard boxes at the emptier stalls; it was already well into the afternoon and as usual some vendors either just wanted to leave or had already sold their stock. Pineapples and pears are big this week, but of course cucumbers, potatoes, dill, cabbages, kohlrabi, etc. were also there — also passionfruit. Then there were kilogram bags of pistachios and raisins, plastic drums of olives green and purple, preserved lemons, two little schools of fish that were stranded in the ice at the fishmonger's stall, and a long, colourful table of bras.

In the end, I popped home again without buying anything from the market; we already had enough food at home. But I did purchase pink biscuits from a French shop on the way; I had hoped that they were pink marshmallows with rose flavouring, but instead they were pink ladyfinger biscuits that tasted authentically but disappointingly of egg.

At home, I read the manufacturer's instructions and 'cooked' the dehydrated foods from the organic food store in 5 minutes by pouring boiled water on top. The curried rice was especially good. I also made additional rice, using the haybox from the 1920s phase of my historical experiment again to save on gas. (For any reader not in Germany: Right now I think Germany isn't importing gas from Russia, at least not through the Nordstream 1 pipeline, due to 10 days' scheduled maintenance. We're not sure if the gas will go back online afterward, due to political reasons i.e. the war in Ukraine.) We had fresh berries — red currants, blueberries — and mint-infused water and the pink biscuits with it. Ge. also made himself green tea.

Then I lit lavender incense, and read a few pages of a fashion magazine and of the 1960s American book Black Rage. I'd be curious to hear what anti-racism experts think of it in 2022.

Aside from housekeeping while listening to the radio and playing 2 or 3 Russian pieces on the piano and researching 1969 in preparation for next week, there's nothing else to talk about. So I'll just end by saying that I wore dark blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater this Saturday, which admittedly was a low-effort approach to period-appropriate attire.

I've taken a day off of work on Monday because I was feeling a little fragile again. But I was also pleasantly startled to hear on Thursday that my manager thinks I deserve a promotion by next year. As I was convinced that I was coming across as a flighty dilettante unworthy to helm any ships in our complex technical environment, I have been metaphorically floating on a cloud since they told me.

A Glimpse of Greek Orthodoxy in Summer; and Perfidious Leggings

This morning I cycled to the southwest of the city, to attend a colleague's father's memorial service at a Greek Orthodox church. Passing through the almost deserted streets, alternately asphalt and cobblestone and a shadowy green footpath, I finally reached a cobbled street sheltered by sunlit plane trees, that was alive with the murmur of voices and children's shrieks. A 19th century brick building with pointed façade and a round decoration looked the likeliest for the church, and a cluster of people speaking German and Greek were sitting there chatting happily. Then I spotted the colleague speaking with her friend at the sidewalk further down.

After their cigarette break was over, we entered not the old brick building but a modern, squared building. Congregants (of all ages: children, teenagers, middle-aged, elderly; in a wheelchair or on their own two feet; a few wearing summery dresses) were overspilling into the lobby, in two queues. We passed through them to enter the church room itself.

Three officiants in robes were standing on a Persian carpet in front of the entrance to an ornate rear room, in the centre of a whitewashed atrium that made me think of stone buildings on a genuine Greek seaside cliff, the sun pouring in and illumining the aisles at the left and right. Nicely carved dark blond chairs were placed singly in rows in the centre — no long pews with kneeling benches, which I felt was a great improvement on the Catholic and Protestant churches I've frequented — and a line of pew chairs that just seated one person was tucked along the wall on each side. Beneath the pillars at one side of the room, the colleague, her friend, and I joined the loose assembly of congregants who were standing.

The sermon was already pronounced — the colleague said it had been about the fate of Berlin to suffer shortages of fuel and food during the winter. The communion had quickly wrapped up. And now there were the services to commemorate the dead, followed by community announcements.

It turned out that we'd come in late. The bearded priest at the microphone (a gilt chandelier encircling the air in front of him, and a delicate inlaid wood table standing nearby) was just wrapping it up in Greek where I caught a few words. He mentioned the name of the colleague's father, as well as one or two others.

People generally crossed themselves, touching the knuckles of one hand to the air near their foreheads, then down, then gesturing either left to right or right to left (I don't remember). Although following the colleague's lead I didn't imitate the gesture, I felt quite at home and wouldn't have minded doing so. Then there was a song that the congregation knew, which I couldn't sing along with because I didn't know it; aside from medical reasons I now had another reason to feel wise for wearing an FPP2 mask (anonymity!). Besides people queued up in the centre of the church to receive bread that had been blessed from the hands of the priest.

As the service ended and the worshippers were saying goodbye to the priest at the top of the centre aisle, my colleague picked up her bowl of koliva: a mixture of plump wheat grains that have been soaked in water a long time, flour, raisins, cinnamon, halved walnuts, pomegranate seeds, and sugar. (Also parsley, but she'd forgotten it when she was preparing it the night before. And she'd set out a cross in almonds on the surface.) With its roots in ancient Greek tradition, it is served at any memorial church service. During the service itself, it was standing near the priest on a prominent table.

She led us out into the beautifully gloomily-lit lobby. There was a dark wood refreshments table where two ladies presided at the rear entrance to the courtyard; a gold-lit staircase that promisingly led up to another part of the building; then a wooden counter that also looked a bit like part of a beautiful Wild West hotel, where a man was selling long golden beeswax tapers in different thicknesses. Right at the doorway through which people could leave the church in front, the colleague served the koliva in paper cups to a line of people. Another worshipper who was marking the death of a relative offered me a plastic cup of koliva, made this time with granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar, and with raisins chopped instead of whole. And an American internet friend of the colleague joined us.

After the koliva was distributed and we left the church, the colleague invited us to eat with her at a café, where another of her friends joined to turn us into a group of four. We had an enjoyable conversation at little blond wood varnished tables over plates of crusty brown bread, leafy greens, bacon, eggs, avocado; cups of coffee; and glasses of water. Instead of savoury food I had a perfectly executed chocolate cake with a thin layer of white frosting, a raspberry coulis that was very raspberry-tasting and not too sweet, and a raspberry on top for garnish. The plane trees at the café — which I thought weren't above fifty years old, but already tall and mighty — dropped seeds on the table, and an insect made its way onto my arm. A little black poodle — my colleague adores little dogs — strolled by, stopping short when it saw another dog.

It feels a little intrusive to describe the topics we discussed; but long story short I felt that this whole outing was an excellent way to spend a Sunday.

In the evening, the last deep yellow sunlight resting on the tops of buildings and trees, I cycled off to allotment gardens to admire the pink sweet peas, hollyhocks, late midsummer roses, dusky Oregon grapes, and intense purple butterfly bush blossom spires; and note that the traditional grapes that drape along a few of the fences are still green and totally unripe, but now larger than green peas. But generally speaking the programme had already ended.

***

As for the historical experiment, small things can have a great effect. On Saturday I'd decided to wear a boldly coloured tunic with leggings as my period costume; the leggings were compression leggings and they were so annoying and uncomfortable and I was so grumpy about them that it ruined my day. In retrospect, I should have picked a stereotypical beatnik outfit of dark trousers, dark turtleneck top, some kind of oversized necklace, loose hair, and intense black mascara around the eyes instead; I think I was too exhausted from the work week to practice common sense.

Next week - 1967 - the Summer of Love. Aside from my puritanism, I'd tend to agree with the assessment that the Sixties were partly very 'every man for himself.' There was genuine commitment and love in the Civil Rights Movement, and compassionate legislation like (as far as I can tell) Medicaid for the elderly. But the Vietnam War was as far as I can tell twice as deadly as the current War in Ukraine, the Six Days' War is also not fun to read about; the Human Be-In in San Francisco no longer  appealing if it's 100,000 people overwhelming a neighbourhood and becoming a dangerous space for the underage teens who joined it; and the fact that Charles Manson was released from prison is not a harbinger of 'peace and love.'

I tried reading a chapter or two of John Steinbeck's Wayward Bus, written in the late 40s but reprinted in the early 60s. At first I found it wonderfully written. But when the narrator began arguing that there were few real men I began to highly question Steinbeck's point of view, when he began describing the flight of a fly I began to highly doubt the writer's literary judgment even if it's no doubt a metaphor, and when a woman character began reminiscing about her husband's domestic violence and finding being brutally hit exciting, I closed the book and returned it to the shelf.

There's also a teenage character who's routinely taunted for his acne etc. by other characters in the book. Steinbeck seems to criticize this behaviour in a notably holier-than-thou manner, but he has no moral high ground: his narration of that character is also snide and humiliating, in my opinion. So he also has poor ethical judgment outside of his toxic opinions of men's and women's roles and his poor literary judgment. Sometimes books are forgotten for good reason.

That book is at least better from a literary standpoint than the passages I endured from The Winter of Our Discontent, which is prefaced by lots of glowing reviews from reputable newspapers and magazines, but which I found unreadable. Next up: The Red Pony.

And at least I ended up having an interesting conversation with my youngest brother about critical interpretations of domestic violence in A Streetcar Named Desire, as a result of mentioning the Wayward Bus.

*

As for work, it's all right-ish, but one night last week I was so anxious due to a personnel development that I wasn't able to go to sleep for a while.

Gravestones

It's the second day of the week back at work, and by Sunday evening I'd resigned myself to it.

This evening I went to a funeral/memorial service in Kreuzberg. It was for the relative whom I'd written about here, who died last spring. It was in a rather lively graveyard: cars and all passing outside the walls, birds, and full of hectic summer elements like tiny beetles that paraded around my finger, wasps, dry leaves and twigs that got caught in hair, butterflies that dove into the papers that someone was just reading from, a minuscule yellow caterpillar that let itself down from a cedar tree, and slightly too balmy heat and light that made one fear a bit for the very elderly amongst us.

It was reassuring to have an opportunity to say goodbye. I've realized after the memorial service for D.S. that it is very hard to have known someone from a distance, to have liked and respected them a lot, and then to just face up to the abstract fact that they've kind of disappeared. To have the chance, instead, to know what they were like through the eyes of their nearest and dearest (I know more about Angi after attending the service, through the texts that people read out), to meet with people whom you know who also knew them, to have it confirmed that the traits of character that you liked about them were not just your imagination but also observed by people who knew them well, to acknowledge one's feelings of loss, and then to have some kind of marker where one needs to move on with life, is a comfort.

I think a consistent sense of pain I feel in connection with Papa is that he was such a good and inspiring figure to me; and it isn't totally clear (at least to an anxious daughter!) how many people apart from my siblings and my mother really saw the same thing, or remember him kindly.

1 Week Holiday, Day Five: Delivery Man Hijinks and Spaetzle

By now I feel so much better than at the beginning of the week that it reminded me of the premise of the children's book Heidi, where a few weeks in the mountain air, drinking sheep's milk and living life outdoors, sets up the heroine for health.

In my case, I have been sleeping well and even rising earlier than usual, aside from small twinges here and there have been headache-free, most of the bags under my eyes have gone, because I've had time to cook for myself I've been eating plenty of fresh and varied and delicious food, and looking into the mirror I generally see a glowing and healthy face. And today, instead of feeling like going out into hot weather would harm my health as was the case a week ago, I cycled through 32°C weather quite nonchalantly. Which makes me highly question the sanity of returning to work.

Anyway, I baked two olive bread loaves, made a Greek salad, and prepared a Mediterranean-style cornbread with feta, green onion and parsley. Besides I bought stracciatella ice cream.

Around midday I cycled off and dropped off the typewriter at last, by the grace of God managing to put the case right-side-up on the counter instead of embarrassing myself by ignorantly presenting it upside-down.

Various pedestrians seemed hell-bent on imperiling their lives for silly reasons, e.g. crossing the street at random when a crosswalk was five metres away. Cars and delivery vans were causing chaos by stopping in the middle of the street. Altogether the urge to facepalm was frequent.

Speaking of traffic and the urge to facepalm, I think it was yesterday, but I don't know for sure: I was riding behind a parcel delivery man on a bicycle, who was so absorbed in his smartphone and other stuff that he'd pulled out of the bicycle lane, then he slowly pulled back in again and pedalled off only to — after a pitiful handful of metres — bump straight into a construction fence in a snail's-pace collision. It was a fairly classic slapstick moment, which I don't feel guilty for enjoying as he seemed unhurt.

In the evening, J. and I visited T. in her apartment, to eat her dinner together. The ingredients and recipe were pre-ordered, so we watched as she carefully cleaned and set up everything and then pulled the recipe together: spaetzle with mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach, and onion in a cream sauce.

The linden trees are not too parched by the summer heat to still be beautifully fragrant every now and then — one definitely begins to understand why the German Romantics appreciated them so much. ('Am Brunnen vor dem Tore,' etc.)

What I don't appreciate so much is the emergence this past week of a host of mosquitoes. I had red badges of their courage bloodlust scattered on my arm, face, and feet this morning.

It's likely an empty promise, but in the next weeks I will need to think strongly about how much I'm willing to sacrifice for my job. One of my great-grandfathers died of an ulcer, only in his forties and leaving a devastated young family behind; and although he seems to have been a nice person, I'm not eager to follow in his footsteps by taking on so much stress that I die early — even if it's well paid and a steady income.

1 Week Holiday, Day Four: River Sports and Blueberry Cake

It's the second day of The Finals 2022 (lamentably pronounced 'FINN-nalz' on the Berlin evening news), a bunch of German Olympic team qualification events in less frequently televised sports like the pentathlon, 3x3 basketball, and kayaking.

The first thing I did today was to prepare a vegan blueberry cake, baking both halves and letting them cool. Later I would layer them with the rich elderflower-flavoured frosting in the centre, without melting the plant butter of the frosting. Although I guessed a bit at the quantity of olive oil and used larger-crystalled brown sugar instead of the soft brown sugar recommended (adding 20g to try to compensate), the cake turned out quite lovely. (Ge. said that it looked like an enormous blueberry muffin.)

Then I cycled off to the Spree River in eastern Berlin. The Oberbaumbrücke with its distinct peaked towers in pumpkin-pie orange was familiar, but I'd never visited the East Side Gallery that turns off from it. The Gallery itself, likely well known to any Berlin tourist, is a fairly slight wall (presumably concrete) with a rounded topping, which is a remnant of the former Cold War wall and is now host to a rotating display of artworks. But behind it is a conglomerate of boho-hipster and traditional middle-class tourist enterprises: from a white-and-blue riverboat hotel of a familiar American chain that twinned the Ukrainian flag with the one it is already flying, to a multi-level restaurant that seemed like the perfect boozy place for anonymous masses of carousing twenty-somethings, and a museum lodged on an upper floor of the same waterfront building.

Today spectator and other facilities for the Finals kayaking races on the river were set up further down from the East Side Gallery. In front of the mixed modern and traditional industrial Berlin waterfront — a spurious-looking stepped façade on a white contemporary building that was clearly intended to wink at olden times, but also a hulking building of time-softened brick (with windows cut out of for utility more than aesthetics) that had something of the mild charm of a massive 17th-century farm house in a Rembrandt-era Dutch painting — stippling lines of buoys were the racing lanes for the kayaks, and inflatable 'pillows' with advertising on it formed a triangular barrier between these racing lanes and the regular, motorized river traffic. A tourist ship like a paddlewheeler floated by, two or three speedboats sped by. I seem to vaguely remember a few trees, for example willows, gracefully breaking up the human artifacts of the scene.

In the athletes' river lanes, the lanes were often empty where I was spectating. At the beginning I did briefly see two pairs of kayakers competing to cross a finish line that I couldn't see, in the distance, and then another pair paddling out to the starting line. A drone that looked like a cross between a biplane and an insect hovered over the surface where it could get a good look at the competitors, and whirred loudly. Loudspeaker announcements from the commentator. Listless music being played from the stands, quieter than the announcements. And, at a bend in the river, race officials importantly tootled back and forth in their own motorized boats.

And on the banks where I was, onlookers sat in loose groups in whatever shade they could find under the few trees in the dry golden grass. — The temperature reached around 30°C today.

I was far away from the scene of the action, as mentioned. So whenever the sports were out of sight, I indulged my curiosity about the camera equipment and the TV producer(?) who was strolling back and forth, wondering how a professional sports recording set-up works.

And because I risked a sunstroke by staying longer, and I didn't want to venture into the official spectator area if it meant that I needed to lock up my bicycle, I soon left again.

Earlier, along the way to the place, I had passed an office machine shop, and popped in to ask if they'd be willing to repair an old Olympia typewriter and replace the ink band for me. A man came out from a room in the back, alerted by a sensor at the front of the shop, and (gnome-like face breaking into a smile) said he'd be fine with doing so — it'll take a week, though, he warned.

Lastly, I popped into an import shop and returned with Kalamata olives and a feta-lemon dip, ready for the next recipe experiments.

I've lost track of all the observations I made during my peregrinations today. (Except perhaps the amazing fact that some pedestrians respected the bicycle lane. — I'm beginning to see that in Berlin there are strong cultural differences by neighbourhood, and beginning to 'stereotype' places where few people seem to care about the rules of traffic and I already know that I can't rely on street markings, traffic lights, etc. to know where cars, pedestrians, or other cyclists will be at a given moment. Because I'd pigeonholed the law-observers today as tourists, I was especially pleasantly surprised that they didn't moon around in the middle of a demarcated zone for vehicles.) But I'm grateful in general that during all of my cycling this week, I've had the time to indulge my curiosity about sculpture inscriptions, the architectural features and religious affiliations of churches, event posters on public bulletin boards, etc.

In Memoriam, D.S., 1935-2022

"Memories of Alhambra" by Francisco Tárrega

*

Further recommendations:

"Asturias" by Isaac Albéniz (John Williams - YouTube)
"Prelude for Lute, BWV 999" by Johann Sebastian Bach (Taso Comanescu - YouTube )
"Cello Suite No. 1" by Bach (Julia Lange - YouTube )

1 Week Holiday, Day One: Rosewater, Ukrainian Books, and a Radio

It's the first day of a whole week off of work — the first time I've taken off more than 1 day at a time since 2018.

My direct manager had been on a work trip for one week, then a week of vacation; we had our first meeting after that on Friday. When I told him something of what had been going on (culminating in finding out that D.S., one of my father's cousins, had died), he said that frankly he himself wouldn't feel able to work under those circumstances, and he recommended a week off.

I put my work matters in order and, already past the end of my tether, took the advice.

So I woke up today, knew that I didn't need to open the laptop, and then realized that there was a feeling that I usually feel on workday mornings that was absent — and that this feeling might be intense self-loathing. It's a relief not to measure myself by a procrustean professional standard for once.

That said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the frantic array of activities I generally take up whenever there's a gap in the work schedule, might not be the wisest approach.

Saturday in 1963: An Invitation, Quiches, and Linden Trees

Today any thought of remaining in the bubble of 1963 was impractical due to the fact that I'd invited over colleague-friends.

But I ended up making a lot of Mediterranean food, feeling very pleased at the meeting of two aims.

After waking up, I made two quiche doughs. One was far too dry, the other too watery. But I put both in the refrigerator and hoped for the best.

Cleaning was 'easy peace lemon squeeze,' to quote a colleague's endearing message at work last week. My mother keeps the apartment visitor-friendly because she regularly invites people over herself, so there was very little vacuuming to do. I did regret not cleaning the stovetop.

(Also, I was unhappy about the plastic recycling overload: the dumpster in our courtyard is overstuffed. It sounds like the plastic recycling pick-up might have missed a week? So we were forced to keep our bags in the kitchen. Ge. reported that he'd noticed dumpsters being demonstratively/desperately wheeled out onto sidewalks in our neighbourhood: I did sight one too. In terms of the massive garbage strikes in Naples and Toronto in past years, however, I guess these are small peas.)

Then I cycled off to the Markthalle at Marheinekeplatz, where I bought San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and blueberries.

Before that, I'd visited a refugee welcome centre. The glass building foyer where it had been hosted was empty, the signs removed, and it was ghostly. (On these occasions I always remember Jane Eyre and the description of Thornfield Hall when she returns after her stay with the Rivers family.) But I found the new volunteer space, asked what they needed, and when I came back with some coffee, they were — a little surprisingly — over the moon.

Along the way to the centre, all kinds of weeds and herbs were flowering: spiky, pale purple bee balm flowers I recognized, many other flowers I didn't; and the linden trees were blossoming and spreading the most wonderful fragrance in the air, and littering pollen that was sometimes intensely ochre-yellow onto the ground.

Back at home, I finished preparing Nanaimo bars, although for the second day in a row the fluffy yellow centre wouldn't fluff properly.

And I bought more ingredients for a vegetarian quiche and for a cake. But I had to abandon the cake: my debit card was declined and so I gave back a few ingredients so I could pay in cash.

But I was quite relaxed about this, only felt sorry for the shoppers waiting behind me in what was generally a tense and exhausted atmosphere — instilled I think by both the weekend rush and the intense heat today.

The reason it was declined was because it hit the limit, and I wasn't entirely unprepared for that. Against the odds, I had just managed to squeeze in another errand: buying a farewell present for a teammate who'll be leaving the company soon. Because of the migraines, ordering online hadn't happened. But this afternoon I found a games shop in Wilmersdorf. Once I'd arrived per bicycle, I needed to repress the feeling that I could browse the puzzles and board games and animal figurines etc. etc., and fulfill unrealized childhood dreams, for ages ... to quickly find what I wanted. The salesperson was interested when I asked their help and outlined what I wanted, and they beautifully wrapped it up.

(I've come to like talking with shop owners, salespeople, librarians, etc., to find good things together and watch them use their expertise.)

Lastly, I went by the usual Covid testing centre I go to, only to find it closed — apparently permanently. Fortunately, I already had a back-up plan, and self-tested at home.

As for the event itself, I will be uncharacteristically? discreet, and only say that it was very good and made up a great deal for a rather awful week.

In Ailing Victorian Orphan Mode

It turns out that after the onsite meeting I did very little at all, because I developed a migraine headache by the end of the lunch hour.

I excused myself from my voice coaching session, drooped miserably at the round table in the stifling heat — the windows weren't open due to the street noise intermittently — and was eager for the meeting to end. Then I cycled home as well as I could even though I was a little worried about falling off the bike or not having enough strength. (But the fresh air was good: the headache and nausea dissipated after a while.) Then I had a nap because I was exhausted.

On Wednesday I took the afternoon off as the migraine returned and I felt like a tight band was pressing on my forehead. Fortunately I was not too sick to finish listening to an audiobook, which is pretty much the most useful thing I could do at the time. That said, that was also the day where my skirt was due to be picked up at the tailor's, so I tottered to the bank and then to the tailor's in the smothering heat (the humidity must have been the killer, as the thermometer was only at 25° or 26° Centigrade), feeling rather sleep-walky.

Since then I've been wavering back and forth between mildly migraine-y and feeling pretty fine.

I've been a pitiful object in general. Today I aired to my kindly concerned team lead colleagues how alone I've felt since one colleague I worked with very closely is out sick due to anxiety, and the other was on holiday for two weeks. And I was briefly on the verge of tears when J. was at the hospital today for what was supposed to be a small operation to fix a stomach issue, and I gradually became nervous at the lack of updates, not because it was really that dramatic but because I've just been that fragile. (And also feeling strong urges to overshare, which really explains this entire blog post.)

The team leads and I also agreed about the toughness of the zeitgeist in the past two quarters. The industry I'm in is battered by a confluence of adversary forces: supply chain crisis, inflation leading to lower advertising revenue, war leading to hardship for colleagues and also leading to lower advertising revenue as the Russian market is debarred and certain types of advertising (e.g. computer war games) now look insensitive, stock overvaluation per my uncle Pu, and slow hiring due to intense market competition for technological jobs, ...

From my lowly perspective, this means that pressure is high to perform, but we don't have the people-power to do it: when colleagues leave, their positions stay empty far longer. We miss them, and those of us who remain need to work harder to stay level with the previous output. If we need to expand, only certain positions in our whole team will even be put on any website to advertise for hiring.

That said, one of my management superiors has made it their mission keep expectations reasonable; so they're currently the Atlas holding up the Earth. And my direct manager has emphasized over and over again not to do overtime.

From a cool-headed, microeconomic vantage point, too, we've been told that this is an excellent opportunity to re-focus on the essential outcomes of our work and figure out ways to make processes more efficient. So we will rise like a phoenix from the ashes when the winds of the market turn in our favour, etc., etc. (Which is sometimes reassuring, sometimes not, depending on my frame of mind at the time.)

Either way, I can still wipe up my tears with Euro bills, so I'm not really the demographic that requires much concern.

That said, the past week feels especially useless as I ended up not dropping off any food or hygiene donations; so the capitalist circus that gives me the opportunity to redistribute the wealth, doesn't even currently feel productive in this minor way.

Saturday in 1962: Mediterranean Marketing, Donations, and the Looming Onsite

Reading of the world events of 1962 and, in preparation for next week, 1963, has been endlessly fascinating; and so has watching YouTube videos of the music and reading about all the books, films, etc. that came out.

This morning my family had the usual Saturday breakfast of baguette, croissants, and coffee, while disputing political questions.

In addition, however, I was determined to perform the 7 to 9 hours of average daily housework that British women apparently still did in 1960. (In the end I managed at least 5 hours, if one counts shopping and other errands.) So I hand-washed dishes before the breakfast, and took out the compost and paper recycling to the bins in the courtyard.

After breakfast I set out through the sunny weather to the street market. I was one of three people whom I saw in the great masses of people who bothered to wear a face mask. I bought red beets, white-green chicory, new potatoes, an onion, celery stalks, strawberries, blueberries, beefsteak tomatoes, and a bunch of parsley. On the way home, I asked in a winery for a French white wine that would go well with a soup of ham, onion, and potatoes ("Soupe Catalane" in Elizabeth David's Book of Mediterranean Food). And I finally bought 50 grams of cooked ham in an Italian import store.

The market stall owners and every cashier or shopkeeper in a store whom I spoke with today were tremendously enthusiastic about the upcoming long weekend — Monday is Whit Monday — and their 'Schönes Wochenende' were especially emphatic and cheery.

In the market, summer flowers throve: lobelias and a pink oleander plant amongst them. There were as always artificially distressed wooden furnishings, woven baskets and carved bowls, incense sticks and holders, jars of honey, skeins of knitting wool, necklaces and bracelets, eggs, Turkish flatbreads, Mediterranean dips, big blocks of Gruyère and other cheeses, vast arrays of spices in plastic baggies and vast arrays of licorice and roasted nuts in plastic baggies, cherry tomatoes, squat dark green marrows, papayas, apricots, peaches regular and donut, nectarines, green grapes, artichokes, lettuces, ginger root, lemons with and without leaves attached, cucumbers, etc.

After eating the blueberries and vanilla ice cream and a chocolate-covered popsicle, I set off again to buy and drop off donations for refugees: as requested, soap, men's shower gel, milk powder for babies, and shampoo for babies. On the way home, still cycling, I detoured to the Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg for a quick reconnaissance, as I want to familiarize myself over time with which books they have in which aisle — not by section, but by title, author, and country.

After drinking a refreshing coffee and cold cocoa, I launched into housekeeping in my orange apron. For that, I deep-cleaned part of the kitchen, lamenting however the patent fact that the kitchen walls and the window frames and doors need another layer of whitewash. The window frames, Mama insists with evident justice, need to be professionally done.

Fortunately I didn't need to cook anything, as the other three concocted an enormous dish of lasagne.

In the evening I broke my ban on computer access and looked online for real-time requirements lists. Then I purchased apples, mandarin oranges, bananas, baby shower lotion, wet wipes, and a package of diapers, to donate to a Ukrainian welcome centre. The Berliner Stadtmission has also asked for more volunteers at the Hauptbahnhof; let's see if I muster the energy and the anti-covid test.

*

On Tuesday there will be a work onsite meeting. While it ends up being nice to see people face-to-face, I can hardly stress enough how much dread it inspires beforehand in a few other colleagues and me to be asked to an onsite meeting.

It means we wake up an hour or more earlier than we usually would.

And to submit to having a corona testing swab stuck up my nose, because I'm still relatively conscientious about Covid & not infecting people with it. But because the onsite meeting will begin earlier (I just innocently arrived late last time) the testing centre I use might not be open in time. The most reputable one, which I've also gone to, is a few minutes in the opposite direction, requires registration in advance and is awkwardly tucked away in a courtyard. A self-test seems less reliable but likely the best option.

Then I'll be cycling for 9 kilometres.

Then I'll be reaching the office and performing about 10 different ceremonies to secure the bicycle and let myself into the building and then let myself into the floor and then check if the internet works and see which room is free and also make sure my hands are washed, because the new building is so sprawling that walking along the central office corridor feels like walking on a treadmill.

Then for 6-ish hours I will be totally unavailable to any colleague who is not in the room and will have no idea what is going on elsewhere in the company. The colleagues who have put together the meeting will face these same disadvantages and will, in addition, have had to plan the agenda and in one case I think commute all the way over from another North German city. (When I compliment the effort and thought they put into it, I do so sincerely; but it's kind of praising the suppleness of the organic fibres that they have interwoven to hang themselves and all the rest of us with.) Many team leads who should be there if we want a decent consensus will be on holiday or unavailable.

Last time we also did a warm-up exercise that forced me to stick my arms in the air even though my t-shirt sleeves were short and I hadn't shaved my arm pits. This is too much information, but so was this situation; so the form of my telling will follow the function. That morning I had asked myself: 'Should I wear a longer-sleeved t-shirt?' and answered myself 'No, there's no possible reason why in a professional context I should be forced to raise my arms high enough for it to matter.' I'm too old and battle-hardened and feminist to be easily embarrassed by this and just did my best to stick my arms up discreetly, and my colleagues are good at minding their own business; but I was peeved.

[Not to mention that we did lots of 'icebreakers' in school and I have mostly only liked the ones we do in my own little work team since then. The school icebreakers implicitly emphasized that some of us had friends who'd twin with and support us whereas others didn't, some of us were cool and could offer great answers and ideas while some of us were not and could not, that our classmates were always secretly judging us, and that teachers didn't see or mind a social hierarchy so rigid that I barely dared to talk to any classmates for years even about things like whether to turn off or on a light switch for fear that I (as a bit of a loner) would seem needy and clingy. What was the most offensive and gaslighting was that something that made me feel uncomfortable and lonely and worse about myself was packaged as light social entertainment. Fortunately work is not high school, but I'm just not very happy to be reminded of those times.]

Then I will cycle partly back home, but not all the way yet because I also have a voice coaching session that day.

Then I will arrive home after 9 p.m.. Then I will catch up on all of the email and Slack messages and meeting notes that I've missed, coming to terms with not having worked on any of my assigned tasks.

The next day I will awaken exhausted to a double workload of accumulated tasks and new ones.

Fun, fun, fun.

***

But first, tomorrow and the day after: no work!

Saturday in 1961: The Joys of the I Hate to Cook Book

It's been cloudy, windy, uninviting, but at times sunny, today.

Last week I picked the I Hate to Cook Book, published in the US in the early 1960s, out of our pantry bookshelf. It was a present from aunt L. when we lived in Canada, and I already enjoyed it and read it repeatedly then. Satirically written, with easy recipes and a few shockingly ready-made ingredients, it holds up quite well nowadays but also works well as an inverted chronicle of the time it was published — it pricks the bubble of stereotypical mid-20th-century female domesticity.

Heading to the supermarket instead of a street market or a little grocery shop, I picked up two TV dinners as well as ingredients for a 'Cheese and Wine Bake' of cheese and other ingredients on toast, 'Oven Carrots' that are julienned and baked with green onion and butter and seasoning, and an 'Orange and Carrot Salad' of jello with grated carrots.

We postponed the TV dinners to tomorrow, but the cheese and wine bake, and the oven carrots, were well received. We ate them for lunch with Riesling wine and a salad of lettuce, mustardy leaves, violet pansies and other greens that I travelled forward in time for (as surely organic food stores were a rarity or nonentity in 1961).

Mama declined with thanks to eat any of the orange and carrot salad. But a few of us did try it and found it a little underwhelming (it does just taste like jello that happens to have carrot in it for some reason), if anything — not thrillingly terrible.

In terms of hairstyle and clothes, I didn't try exciting experiments in the end. A preparatory attempt at a high ponytail and headband hairstyle, which I performed yesterday evening while uncharacteristically giggling like a schoolgirl instead of an adult woman, ended up looking like a dystopian cross between a punk manqué and a nun who had eccentrically vowed never to pick up a hairbrush again.

In the afternoon I went to the library. Fewer than 15 minutes after I settled in with a book — Aus Menschen werden Leute, aus Mädchen werden Bräute, published by the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag — the library closed, so I wasn't able to find out much. The book was just detailing the destroyed state of housing and infrastructure in the immediate postwar years. Women were caring for elderly dependents and children while their husbands were kept in prisoner-of-war camps (or dead). In cities, there were especially great challenges: 20% of housing was destroyed, and the gas and water systems often weren't working. The author argues that this role of women wasn't just inspiring woman-power, but also a grim coercion of circumstance.

The descriptions of German cities then, reminded me of western Ukraine nowadays, aside of course from the context that Ukraine isn't a recently fascist state that invaded other countries. Hopefully Ukrainian cities* will be rebuilt sooner; I know that for example the German government has promised to send developmental aid.

*In areas from which the Russian military has withdrawn; of course I remember reading that parts of Luhansk and Donetsk are being actively bombed and repair is temporarily impossible.

Lastly I washed dishes by hand. Aside from that, a little sock-darning, a little embroidery, a load of laundry, and the cooking, and watering my plants, housewifely duties were greatly neglected. Next week I'm hoping to go to a street market again, maybe also the Turkish grocery store, and dive into more Mediterranean recipes from Elizabeth David's cookbook. And maybe I'll dust a few shelves and read Catch-22, The Art of French Cooking, or another book first published in the 60s.

Saturday in 1960: Flowers, Strawberries, Books and Housework

Yesterday afternoon I picked up the pair of trousers that had been mended by the tailor, and looking at the patches later I was delighted by how much better her fix was than mine would have been. She reported with discontent that the wool skirt lining had not been replaced yet; she was preparing commissioned clothing and this was time-intensive. She was sewing at her oft-gouged, blond wooden table with a hanging lamp overhead, listening to a podcast on her smartphone, stacks of clothing in the open cupboards to the right.

Today was equally analogue. Despite the general dearth of rainwater, it's been interestingly stormy lately: strong alternations of sunshine and rain, heavy grey clouds and gaps, lovely fragrances of roses and other blossoms (amongst them the first elderflowers), a single bolt of lightning and roll of thunder yesterday afternoon. But despite the cloud cover I was out of doors a lot.

After going to the bank, I went to the post office to buy stamps and two cartons — the lady at the desk seemed pleased that I was buying them in analogue fashion instead of from the Automated Teller Machine-like machines in the lobby. Then I walked to the library and had a confabulation with one of the staff about where to begin when reading about daily life in the 1960s. She found a fashion retrospective, a German book about gender roles in the 1950s and 1960s, and a psychological work about the way in which the Nazi era was worked through in the 1960s.

The fashion book was very illuminating. (The book about gender roles I want to revisit with a fresh mind.) But there are different paths I could go down when I dress next Saturday for 1961, and I'm not sure whether to choose, as a distant inspiration, teen-style fashion like Jean Seberg's in À bout de souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo, diva flair like Anita Ekberg's of La dolce vita by Federico Fellini, or minimal elegance like Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffanys. If it's the latter, I might try purchasing and wearing gloves, my prediction being that they will be a pain in the neck.

Afterward I bought a bottle of English dry gin and of sparkling water at a drinks supermarket, then a pot of mint, a terra cotta pot, and potting soil at a florist's.

Then I walked off again to the street market, which was as busy as ever. There I bought strawberries, cucumbers, walnuts, and lemons. Early peaches and cherries were already for sale; punnets of strawberries produced in Germany; lettuces frisée and flat; watermelons; and a ton of apricots — alongside the usual bell peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, etc. I took time, too, to gaze at other things, like börek (filled Turkish savoury pastry), sesame breads, candy, olives, and rolls of fabric.

On the way back from the market, I bought flowers from another florist: white and pink chrysanthemums, pink peonies, one violet anemone.

Finally I went to a train station to ask at the Ukrainian refugee welcome centre what they needed, then popped into a grocery store and returned with their recommendations. There were around three ladies there, sitting at the tables or tentatively looking to see what they'd like to eat or speaking with the volunteers — one of them invited me to go ahead of her to speak to the volunteers behind long trestle(?) tables with plastic bins of food and drinks. And there were three volunteers.

At home, I read Frieda Weekley's introduction to D.H. Lawrence's first version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was first published posthumously in 1944 and then reprinted by Penguin in the 1970s. The pertinence to the historical experiment is that, in 1960, the obscenity trial that was investigating whether to allow an unexpurgated edition to be printed in the United Kingdom, ended in a landmark decision to permit publication.

Weekley's main argument appeared to be that she and her husband led far more courageous, clever and worthwhile lives than 90% of humanity (and she kind of damned her husband with faint praise by saying that it would 'be simplifying things too much to call him a socialist or a Fascist'). I did want to rinse my brain after she remarked how happy she was that D.H. Lawrence was born a "commoner", with his family's healthy miner vigour, as if she were the Queen of England, the monarch of all she surveyed. It was surprising that the introduction did not entirely feel unreadable.

I only made it through a few pages of the actual story of The First Lady Chatterley's Lover before deciding that pretty much everyone was a heinous and psychologically inconsistent character.

[In fairness, the British curator and television presenter Lucy Worsley makes the novel sound a lot better in the mini-series A Very British Romance.]

Afterward I showed the healthy impulses of the archetypal female caretaker, crossing the boundaries of social class to fulfill the needs to the nation did housework: wiping down the dishwasher and the laundry machine, mopping the kitchen floor, dusting in the hallway, and washing a large blanket in the laundry. Fortunately both machines are no longer anachronistic. A sock that I've been darning over multiple weeks has three holes in it, two of them darned and one of them un-darned, and I am beginning to doubt my life choices. But then I started embroidering a do-it-yourself tablecloth with a helpfully marked pattern from a crafting set we bought maybe even two decades ago; the petals of one flower are done, and the centre of another flower is almost done.

For light entertainment, I read two or three fashion magazine pages about menopause and old age for women — a stressful subject the way it was laid out — plus medical advice that looked scientifically adventurous to my layperson's eyes. (Eating two teaspoons of flaxseed per day to reduce the risk of breast cancer ... not sure how much to believe that one.) It still amazes me that a fashion magazine in the 2020s does not seem to accept the fact that men who are interested in [stereotypical] women's fashion exist, and that transgender or gender non-binary people who are interested in women's fashion exist. It's all geared toward people who identify as women, and as I turn the pages I always picture the editorial board as a group of lithe diplodocuses (or some other species of dinosaur) in stilettos.

The last task was to cheer up after last week at work, which did have its ups, however. Mama and I met in the kitchen to eat a bowl of ice cream, and my two youngest brothers and I later had a gin and soda each, with strawberries.

Five Years After

It's the 5th anniversary of the death of my father today, although if I hadn't been reminded of it I likely wouldn't have remembered myself.

Almost every day of the year the loss of him has been weighing on me, and I'm kind of wondering where my trust and belief in life after death and happy resting places have gone. — I think not entirely disappeared, but temporarily crowded out by the feeling that life is a bit worse every day because he is not there.

On the other hand, in the past few days I've been thinking more of the joy I've found talking with him and not holding back my thoughts or feelings, the pride I took in e.g. dropping slang at home until he used the phrase 'Too Much Information' despite his generally proper diction, the fun of trying to wiggle more information out of him about things when he was usually quite reticent, and in general how nice it is to have had a father whom one can miss so badly.

Saturday in 1959: Library Adventures and the Mediterranean

It must be somewhat obvious that I've not been performing my weekly Saturday historical experiments that enthusiastically for a while. For one thing, I've unexpectedly grown to find the 1950s a little bit repugnant. For example, with regard to gender roles: it didn't so much reflect the old-fashioned way of the previous decades so much, I'm tending to agree with the benefit of having 'lived' through these previous decades, as forge a further artificial distinction that seems to still be messing things up today. The Cold War in general, also not great; McCarthyism, not great; the looming presence of atomic war, alongside a plethora of happy little accidents with nuclear warheads etc. (e.g., admittedly in the 1960s, the Palomares Incident) that I think haven't sufficiently been highlighted in history books and that make me facepalm now, also not great.

For another, it still feels difficult to research the UK in the 1950s due to online copyright restrictions on contemporary newspapers and cookbooks, although I recently went to the trouble to purchase a Berlin public library card in order to help. (One cookbook by wartime British personality Marguerite Patten is listed online as being in the stacks of the American-sponsored building of the Gedenkbibliothek, the cookbook's presence apparently being a legacy of the British Council's former Berlin-based library. But it appears to be missing, a mystery that greatly perplexed the librarian with whom I spoke. She gave me an email address with follow-up instructions, which I'd like to take care of soon.)

Thirdly, when there's a contemporary war going on, the appetite for make-believe is a little weaker. I just read in the local news yesterday that over 200,000 Ukrainian refugees are believed to have arrived in Berlin.

That said, today I did 'do' 1959 reasonably well. Inspired by a photograph of the computer scientist Grace Hopper that is part of the lesson material for an Open University introduction to an online computer science course, I put on a flared skirt and a three-quarter sleeved button-up shirt that I even ironed, wore my hair pinned up as usual, and briefly stalked around on the pump shoes that I'd bought 'in the 1920s.' Quoting from the Grimm version of "Cinderella," my mother remarked, 'Rucke di guck, Blut ist im Schuck' when she spotted them. 

Then I went to a market hall in Kreuzberg, Elizabeth David's period cookbook A Book of Mediterranean Food in hand, buying Mediterranean vegetables as well as a bottle of white wine. (If you're wondering, the temptation to wear period costume when shopping for Saturdays is not very strong; this morning I went shopping in jeans and running shoes.) It wasn't that busy indoors, and I felt smug for going before noon. Then I went to an organic grocery store and bought lemons, sheep's cheese, a watermelon, and seltzer water.

Lunch was a salad of fennel, radicchio, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber that was improvised; and the white wine. In addition I made David's recipes for "Carottes au blanc," "Salad of sweet peppers," and "Courgettes aux tomates." Serving the sheep's cheese with the meal made it less overwhelmingly vegetable-y, and trickling olive oil around the sheep's cheese and topping it with freshly ground black pepper and pieces of basil made it look festive.

Later I went to a local tailor's shop, where the doyenne was cleaning the wooden plank floor the old-fashioned way, scrubbing with a rag by hand. A trouser had a hole, a summer wool skirt's lining was becoming tattered; she promised to try to repair both by Friday evening.

Going to a secondhand bookstore in search of 1950s sewing or crafts manuals, or British cookbooks from the 1950s, was less successful. In the end I bought a pocket Turkish dictionary.

Back at home, I attempted to repair a winter sock. It was badly worn through at the heel and sole, and rather than waste good leather by attempting to make it over into a hapless slipper, I resolved to sew parts of an even worse-looking sock over the holes. The outcome, of course, was a Frankenstein's monster of a sock. I will only test it next winter, so the suspense has plenty of time to build.

Another housewifely task was cleaning up my desk a bit. I've amassed old grocery store receipts in a paper bag, waiting for the winter too. It will presumably be an adventurous winter, in the possible absence of traditional sources of heating for 'geopolitical reasons'; but let it not be said that I don't have enough fuel for 1 to 2 minutes of zero-degree weather.

Besides I played music. Chopin mazurkas, excerpts of Chopin's ballades, another counterpoint piece from Bach's Art of Fugue, ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin (since these were 're-discovered' in the 1970s, playing these was doubtless inauthentic), a Scarlatti sonata or two, the beginning of the Bach-Busoni chaconne, a "Seguidilla" by Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados's "Orientale," and so on and so forth.

Let's see what the 1960s will offer!

A Headache Holiday, of Sorts

Yesterday I had a migraine headache after spending the morning volunteering in a clothing donation sorting hall. I spent most of the afternoon crouched over the desk still doing work, massaging my forehead with my fingertips, and eating something despite the nausea.

This morning I awoke earlier than usual, feeling topsy-turvy in the middle too, and decided to take a whole sick day from work.

So on the whole I've been very carefully doing only undemanding things that don't make me feel ill, and it's been sort of nice. Lots of reading, staring at my plants and making sure they are watered; a long nap that might not be a miracle cure but still ...; hanging out with one of my brothers a little bit; watching the British archaeological TV series, eating ice cream; and playing a bit of Scott Joplin, and German dances from Beethoven, on the piano.

In the morning I even read half or so of a Chekhov short story, which has generally felt too grown-up and brooding for my mood. I've also managed to read more of a journalist's account of the 2011 uprising in Syria, No Turning Back. I'd usually read it in smaller rations because I've always felt that reading sad books when I already feel sad is not what I need except as a character-building thing. But in the context of Ukraine and the Palestinian Territories it made me reflect on how quickly the lives of civilians can be devalued in the eyes of the outside world if it's felt that 'war is always going on in those places.' For example I think even Ukraine might be an example: if I understand correctly, much concern and attention have been expended on Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv and its surrounding villages, Lviv and Odesa — when other areas in Luhansk and Donetsk, maybe even Crimea, which have seen conflict since 2014 if I remember correctly, have surely suffered too in the past months.

It has been too dry this spring, and even today the mixture of sun and dark thunderclouds didn't bring forth much rain. But the oak leaves outdoors are growing greenly, my new nasturtium seedling indoors seems to be rising in height an inch per day, and whenever I have gone out it's been lovely to see the columbines and early roses and many, many other flowers at the roadsides and in the plant beds.