A Journey to 1914: The History Experiment Enters the War Years

Yesterday I reached the year 1914 in my historical experiment. Like anyone who 'time-travels' to the 1910s, there was a dread of World War I — which of course started that year. It was not very cheerful to read via Wikipedia how well prepared countries were to fight the war, or so it seemed: economic measures, military measures, propaganda measures etc. swung into place as if governments had been looking forward to this for a while.

But my experiment was mostly pacific. After tidying the kitchen (and travelling forward in time to do a little 21st-century weekend work), my family and I ate breakfast.

I had the Neue Züricher Zeitung beside my plate, which I'd bought in the Bergmannstraße two weeks ago, and read excerpts of articles — which had an FDP-esque appearance to my half-German eyes — about how little Switzerland is being brutally intimidated by the economic colossi of the world. Papa read its articles online in the early 2000s and maybe later; I presume its editorial politics were less silly-sounding then. Either way, at least it wasn't war news, which would have been a daily obsession once the fighting began in 1914.

I didn't have a pile of paper correspondence to sort through and chat about with the family during and after breakfast, which feels to me like a more early 20th century thing to do and which probably should have been built into the experiment earlier. Instead I checked Facebook, Gmail, Discord and LinkedIn, wrote an email, and filed away a few paper bank statements. Besides I read bits of books, including Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mrs. Moppet.

It was after 1 p.m. when I went shopping at the Turkish street market. It looks like the earliest peaches have arrived; mountains of cherries as well, tons of grapes and watermelons, bell peppers and pepperoni, tomatoes that were being sold cheaply at 2 Euros per carton, etc. What I'm still missing is fresh corn that can be made into corn chowder — which however may be more of an American than a British dish at any point in time.

It isn't clear to me when food restrictions began in Britain during World War I. Panic-buying and hoarding did happen early, according to the Further Back In Time for Dinner television series. But after experiencing and heartily disliking hoarding in 'real life' last year due to Covid-19, it feels needless to emulate that horrid phenomenon again. So while I resisted the temptation of buying fruit that was likely to have been imported to the UK in 1914, I didn't hold back too much otherwise.

And, when I found a large, floppy-brimmed hat in black, blue and white stripes, which I felt matched the pleasantly opulent air of headgear in the early 1900s, I bought it.

For a second shopping trip, I made the rounds of the bank and the organic grocery store. At a knitting store I also bought two balls of sock-knitting yarn. In a 21st-century touch, all the shoppers in the store had to write down their name, address and telephone number for the shop's records, to help with potential Covid-19 contact tracing.

When I returned to the doorstep of our building, my sister T. came up as well. She had ordered burgers and fries on behalf of us all, and was now joining my two youngest brothers and my mother and me to eat lunch together in our apartment.

In the meantime, I was inspired by a few of the Edwardian fine dining menus I've seen, and prepared strawberries and prosecco for the family. I don't think prosecco would have been known much outside Italy in the 1910s; but the organic grocery store didn't have any 'true' champagne. In addition I'd bought lemon sorbet and a watermelon. 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die,' was the subliminal motto.

The burgers and fries themselves I didn't eat, for the sake of the experiment.

Instead, I began knitting a time-appropriate sock 'for the soldiers,' using a four-needle technique for the first time. It was pleasing on a trivial level to become accustomed to it, and I think that many Edwardian upper-middle-class women might have been in the same boat, acquiring new knitting or sewing skills yet not being terribly good at it. At the same time, reflecting on the historical context was not pleasing: the idea of all the men I know between the ages of 18 and 45 going off to war, and of sending them socks and hemmed bedsheets and cookies as a small comfort, was pretty sad.

For next week I'm trying to figure out what to do as 'women's war work' aside from knitting. Probably reading up on First Aid in lieu of nurse's training, or planting a miniature 'Victory Garden' on the windowsill, or beginning to hem bed linen?

Then, in the evening, I departed from the experiment not only by watching two soccer matches on the television and the computer, and by doing more 21st-century weekend work; but also by cycling to Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus to buy books.

Cleaning, Cycling, and Calming Down

This morning I woke up before 8 a.m., which is at least one and a half hours earlier than I'd usually manage on a Saturday. Everyone else was asleep, I closed the windows to shut in the cold night air and closed the curtains to block out the heat later in the day, and then I started a rather half-hearted semi-Edwardian routine. Working all day in the kitchen in 30+ degree weather, cooking, seemed like something no self-respecting Edwardian would have done except in rare circumstances.

Instead I hand-washed a few dishes that don't belong in the dishwasher, took out the compost and the regular garbage, scrubbed perhaps half of the floor in the kitchen, and in the end made a pot of black tea while my mother woke up and went to the bakery for our traditional weekend buns.

I also decided not to go to the market this week. Instead I went to the organic grocery store closer nearby, bought cucumber and tomatoes and iceberg lettuce for a salad, a cantaloupe, and ice cream etc. The ice cream was anachronistic, as nobody or almost nobody would have bought ice cream in a store and have had the facilities to keep it frozen; but we'd run out and I knew the family would appreciate it.

In the meantime I also read the Tale of the Very Bad Rabbit, which was an enjoyable installment of Beatrix Potter's oeuvre (The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher is probably my favourite so far). And then kept reading Weather by Jenny Offill, more of the index notes that keep me from officially saying that I've finished Barack Obama's A Promised Land, more of The Nickel Boys, and more of the essays in Apartheid.

At 3:40 p.m. I hopped onto my mother's bicycle (vowing yet again to get my own; I'm worried about breaking hers and also want to be more of a Strong and Independent Woman) and set off to a nearby park to meet one of my teammates. We circled around a long park, sunny and shadowy and not so terribly packed with people as the strong heat likely kept most people at home.

At least three wedding parties formed a festive assembly line waiting to be married at the town hall amongst the beer garden and the huge plane trees and the sparkling fountain. For once I didn't see any bocce ball players on the gravel terrain. White tents were pitched on the flowered green lawn to shelter others from the heat. Then children's parties were being celebrated further on in the park, with balloons and a happy profusion of people. (So much better than the peak-social-distancing wasteland.)

My sunscreen, helmet, and the tree leaves shielded me from sunburn; but I ran my arm under cold water when I returned just to make sure. More importantly it was tremendously nice and relaxing to meet the colleague again, outdoors with the air and light circulating healthily, without masks.

And I cut short my Edwardian experiment after 6 p.m., because I wanted to watch the Germany vs. Portugal soccer game. Maybe I am finally getting a life again — I've been so miserable lately that I know I have to change something — but I kind of doubt it. An article about legos (an ill-omened leitmotif in our company?) being a metaphor for workplace resources inspired me to flip out at work on Friday, perhaps because I'd already worked 8 hours of overtime that week; and while I know I have reason to be concerned about things, I'm still trying to find a better outlet for my feelings and just to let things go if I've given my honest opinion and it's not my responsibility to act further.

Euro 2020: Austria vs. North Macedonia 'Liveblog'

It's apparently the first time that North Macedonia has been able to play in a UEFA Euro Cup, and Austria's team also looks a little less than practiced. But with some wincing and unflattering mental comparisons to the Belgian team's performance in its match against Russia yesterday evening, I'm watching the game on the website of one of the two German broadcasters (ARD and ZDF) who have snagged rights to show the championship; and I am hoping for a little harmless entertainment.

Note: It's still the 2020 championship; it's just been postponed 1 year due to coronavirus restrictions.

6:34 p.m. Berlin time: The score is 1 - 1.

6:35 p.m.: An Austrian player in his own half heroically dives through the legs of a Macedonian player to roll the soccer ball to... another Macedonian player. ..facepalm..

6:37 p.m.: The ball sails far over the Austrian goal; the Macedonian fans are audibly pleased that it at least went in the correct direction.

6:39 p.m.: The coordination within teams has admittedly grown better throughout the first half of the game. Now the players can identify the location of the other players in their own team, and if they try to reach each other, the chances of succeeding have grown impressively high.

6:41 p.m.: A player who ran into another player injured his face by doing so, and is now lying prostrate like a stone knight effigy, refusing at first to be pulled up by two not-unsympathetic other athletes.

6:43 p.m.: An Austrian player got a Macedonian elbow in the face, result: medical attention and the first yellow card in the game. As the ARD commentator noted, there have been too many, although small, fouls in the game; and it's good to draw a line.

6:45 p.m.: The advertising for Lieferando and TikTok is making me feel old. I'm not even sure if these companies existed already during past Euro Cups I've watched.

6:47 p.m.: Half-time!

7:09 p.m.: Not too much to report, except that the game is greatly improved in quality: good coordination, fewer fouls and more reliance on speed and intelligence.

7:35 p.m.: Austria shoots a goal: 2 to 1. It was assisted by David Alaba, captain of the Austrian team and the target of many heart-eyed words of praise from the commentators on ARD.

7:42 p.m. Macedonia's goal has been in danger again. After a corner kick didn't result in a goal, an Austrian player shoved up full-frontally against a Macedonian to block him from being able to run toward the Austrian side, which led to a yellow card.

7:45 p.m.: Reminder to self not to eat while watching future soccer games. Seeing players spit onto the pitch is a little disgusting, methinks.

7:48 p.m.: Austria has won its 3rd goal; also a good goal, but I'm not quite sure if Austria's team is so much better that being two goals ahead feels cosmically fair.

7:52 p.m.: End of game: Austria and North Macedonia have visibly both made their peace with the results, and the energy of the last minutes has been quite relaxed.

Brief Impressions of a Semi-Post-Corona Day

Last night I worked longer than I should. But T. was over for a visit; and so at least I had company while I dug into a long task at the end of another series of long tasks.

But I woke up early this morning because of a serious traffic accident outside the house. As I worked the first half of the day on 5 hours' sleep I was unhappily conscious of the 'scene' a few metres away as ambulance personnel, police officers and crash investigators did their grim jobs with their customary competence; and construction workers watched and commented on the scene, respectful sympathy mingled with the air of having seen it all already.

The weather is beginning to be uncomfortably warm and the air stifling. But at least the leaves of the trees are burgeoning and we're reaching the green-gold-blue-white phase of the year where the foliage, sky, clouds and sunlight dominate the scene. Also, of course, the daylight hours are long, and the lifting of coronavirus-related restrictions has led to a happy, resumed hum: of sidewalk table diners in the restaurant underneath our apartment, and of passersby. Today I also trimmed the dried-out flower heads of the potted forget-me-nots I bought earlier this year; they are not happy with the intense sunlight.

During lunch I played a gloomy sequence of Brahms Hungarian dances, a Chopin mazurka or two, the first movement of Bach's 6th partita for the keyboard, and part of the slow movement of Mendelssohn's most famous Trio in d minor.

In the evening, T. ordered take-out fish and chips, mochi ice cream balls, and other delicacies for our dinner. When she came over to eat them with us, there were two bandaids proudly perched on her upper arm, where she had received her first round of a BioNTech vaccination. She also helped out Ge. with his university algebra homework, while J. strummed on the mandolin in his room.

Mama was out for various fresh-air social engagements. In the late afternoon, she also hosted her friend M. for their usual weekly Arabic session, with chocolate, tea, and biscuits. Meanwhile I joined another work team's planning meeting in a video call, helped put the finishing touches on a new client's integration, and gave up on a quixotic effort to run a small SQL query 1,600+ times to do the task that a large query should do.

Late Victorian Exercise, the Viktoriapark, Etc.

Earlier today, as part of the Edwardian experiment, I went through an exercise routine that early bodybuilder Eugen Sandow published in 1894. For ladies, he suggests 4 pound weights in one of his later books, but after rummaging around the pantry, I used two 1-kilo bags of sugar instead. His expectations of women's fitness don't seem high by contemporary standards: the first round was pretty easy - except the 10 push-ups with resistance bands, which even without resistance bands rather defeated me because I didn't modify by doing them on my knees. And ladies were exempted from the squat exercise. (Also, I cheered internally when he described sit-ups where one wedges one's feet beneath a weight or piece of furniture; since I'm terrible at these, it's my favourite 'technique.') But of course I could increase the weights, and he has planned out how ladies can increase repetitions over time.

I didn't do this in the Saturday time slot that is usually devoted to all things time-travelling, because it required reading an e-book.

*

Yesterday I went to the market hall in Kreuzberg again. It had a ghostlier air about it than ever, probably due to the coronavirus and due to the uncertain weather with the promise of rain and wind to come.

The leafy trees, the blue sky and fluffy clouds and sunshine, and the dandelions (the seedheads already white amongst the lush green grasses and the remaining yellow flowers), however, were quite beautiful. Visitors to the Viktoriapark were photographing the pink tree flower petals that were floating on the dark pools, the waterways were rushing along their landscaped channels — some with coppery-orange beds that showed up brightly against the darker rock, and cottonwood fluff lay in snowy drifts in the grass and tumbled along the path in free-form pillows at one point. The lilacs were blossoming, scentless at midday — the hawthorn trees too... but I felt the scene was uncannily empty.

Earlier, we had our breakfast in which I'd copied an Edwardian menu —

Coffee

Tea

Hot and cold milk

Bread

Toast

Butter

Boiled eggs

Cold ham

Sardine toast

Strawberries or other fresh seasonal fruit

I had done calf raise exercises for 5 minutes while waiting for the food to finish. But I admittedly fudged them after the first minute and a half. This exercising was recommended in an early 1900s ladies' magazine issue, which failed to specify if there should be sets of repetitions with breaks in between or just 5 straight minutes of rising on one's tippy-toes. Either way, to me it seemed like a quick way to get bad muscle cramps, the kind of exercise that leaves you incapable of any other exercise. But although I did feel it today, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared - maybe because I had fudged it.

*

For dinner the menu was Irish-influenced. I baked dark soda bread from a mixture of whole grain and plain flour, Ge. brewed black tea to drink with it, and I boiled cauliflower with carrots, made 'champ' from mashed potatoes and milk and green onion, and cut up fennel bulb and made a vinaigrette for a salad. Of course I regretted not tracking down a few bottles of Guinness beer.

Teatime was similar to all the other teatimes we've had the past few weeks: Scones, blueberries, lemon curd, whipped cream, and nettle-and-fennel tea. This time I added brown sugar cookies that I'd made earlier in the week and saved up for Saturday in a cookie tin.

Supper I didn't get around to at all — and richer Edwardian food does tend to make it harder to sleep if eaten too late in the day anyway.

*

Afterward I spent 20 minutes on a contour drawing of a flower pot, per the instructions from The Natural Way to Draw. And in the afternoon I'd played the piano — Edvard Grieg died toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century, and so I played the morning part of the Peer Gynt Suite in his honour. Besides, the Beethoven sonata project has resumed, and I've reached "Les Adieux." Besides I'd read Beatrix Potter's Tale of two Bad Mice.

*

Altogether the experiment felt too trivial this week, however, and that was why I stopped early. Uncle Pu telephoned us during our breakfast, telling us that our aunt K. had died. I was thinking about them both while I was walking around in Kreuzberg, because that neighbourhood is where they started out their lives together.

Dining in May/1907

Before moving on to the Edwardian Age, I wanted to add an anecdote I remembered yesterday about Angi. I was housesitting in the countryside, feeling intimidated not just because I was far away from my family and other comforts of the Berlin apartment, but also because at different times I was told e.g. about organized house burglars roaming the neighbourhood and preying on large houses, a ferret that might run around on the floor above and making creepy noises, etc. She happened to telephone and was sympathetic when I mentioned that it was a little lonely; and after a moment's thought added (in German, and I'm paraphrasing), 'Well, there's always alcohol.' It was quite funny, especially since I didn't expect the joke, and cheered me up.

*

Last week at work left me squeezed out of energy like last season's orange, and I was writing about it late into the night so that I went to sleep too late and too unhappy. To be annoyingly vague and self-righteous-sounding: I've been reminding myself that if I rely on my surroundings to stay morally pure, I'm never really going to learn to stand up for what feels right to me. And if I stand up for it to the best of my ability, it is no reflection on me if the opposite still happens. I did my duty toward the other person by showing what might be a better course, honestly and directly; and it is not up to me to dictate their actions.

It was nearly noon when I woke up and went to the kitchen. The others had eaten breakfast and I decided to begin cleaning. There has to be a quicker way to scrub the floor; it ended up taking over twenty minutes. But it did look cleaner! And, unwisely, I forgot to eat breakfast. A croissant with my name on it was languishing in the bag uneaten, while my nerves figuratively pulled thinner and thinner.

Then I went to the market, and remembered belatedly a Greek colleague's sage advice to beware the fact that two-thirds of Berlin might be in the streets today to enjoy the return of sunny weather. The shopping streets and the market itself were crowded, and a few market stalls were wiped almost clean, harassed-looking attendants surveying their largely empty bins. It was also a little warmer than I'd like. Another argument for going to the market earlier in the morning.

It looks like asparagus season is beginning: white asparagus and green asparagus; 'local' Beelitz asparagus from Brandenburg and other asparagus from further afield. But they were well balanced by the usual produce instead of forming a massive, uniform wall.

Returning home, I picked up a bunch of orange tulips from the flower shop. And then before lunch, I took the unfortunately uncharacteristic step of taking out our empty jars and a big bag of compost to dispose of them in the courtyard. I feel a little less than intellectually brilliant for being so enthralled by the holes with black flexible flaps that were sunk on two sides of the dumpster lids, to make it easier to dispose of glass jars.

*

Dinner (a little pretentious this week, maybe?):

Mushroom soup

With Kräutersaitling mushrooms and a roux with beef bouillon

Boiled potatoes

Seasonal salad

Spinach, red-and-white icicle radishes, frisée salad, cucumber, and fresh dill,

with simple vinaigrette

Eggs, garnished

Egg halves filled with an egg yolk, cream cheese, crème fraîche and paprika mixture

Bread

*

I had a nap right after this. My brain was still spinning with workplace thoughts as they had during my walks to and from the market. But I felt a whole lot better later, and the traces of tension and the budding headache melted away.

Teatime was scones, lemon curd, blueberries from the market, nettle tea flavoured with fennel, and substitute coffee; brown bread sandwiches made from the leftover egg filling and cucumber slices and dill; and leftover salad.

Afterward I spent most of the evening finishing last month's Elle Germany. The recommendation of a 3,000 Euro leather powder-blush carrying-case shocked me, but I managed to surmount the rage. I was mostly reading it because a new issue arrived today. I thought about doing more art and sketching something instead, but ... Anyway, after that was done, and I'd read more of an essay in Apartheid, I returned to the 21st century before midnight.

Hopefully next week the trip to 1908 will be more experimental. 1906 was nice but 'nothing to write home about'; and I feel like my imagination is letting me down.

Farewell to Angi

It feels irresponsible to write about a woman I barely knew, in a way. But last week one of my father's cousins was buried, and I'd like to pay tribute.

The first time I remember meeting her at length was at her and her husband's apartment in western Berlin. On a quiet street off one of the main thoroughfares of the city during the Cold War, they were on the first floor above ground level, in an 'Altbau' that predated the Second World War and likely the 20th century altogether. It had a little balcony off the dining room, and indoors older wooden furniture, glass, and china sets. My uncle Pu and I sat together with Angi and her husband, in a living room set away from the street.

Angi tended to the family legacy in part (the legacy being for example a social role in the pre-1930s Berlin, and devotion to music). But it felt to me like there was little 'chauvinism' or clannishness about her approach; it was a responsibility like others, and one that fell to her also by default as an eldest daughter. Altogether I did not feel evaluated as a member of the clan. And I also felt that if I went to a restaurant with her, she would not ignore or be rude to the waiters out of a sense of her social status.

At any rate, during this meeting, as far as I remember, we discussed the new German spelling rules introduced in the 1990s, family gossip, and so on and so forth. And at the end Angi took me into a room beside the entrance, with books neatly shelved from floor to ceiling, to try to figure out which German author she could recommend for me to read who'd write in a fairly contemporary style. When I said that I tended to avoid depressing books because life was depressing enough, she didn't insinuate that I was overdramatic or fail to understand, and instead agreed wholeheartedly. In the end she recommended Max Frisch.

In 2006 and later, I felt that our family fit in awkwardly to my grandparents' and parents' circles from the 1980s or earlier. (We were pretty bohemian. Relatives would tentatively ring our doorbell around midnight, then come in and stay to chat, knowing that we were bound to be awake, for example...)

But she and her husband were, in their dry but friendly way, accepting. And when my father died, one of the things that comforted me was remembering how they and others had shown up unexpectedly at our apartment to help celebrate in honour of his 60th birthday.

A Saturday in '1905'

For once in my life, I woke up before 8 a.m. Therefore I spent time wiping down the countertops in the kitchen and taking out the compost, as well as assembling the batter for a pound cake (to be eaten at tea time) and putting it in the oven.

We had a nice communal breakfast once everyone was awake: coffee and bread rolls and radishes and parsley and cheese and marmalade. There was also ham; J. ate it sanguinely, but I decided it would be best not to consume it at this point in its 'life cycle.' I put the sprig of parsley with the radishes under the impression that upper-middle-class Englishmen during the Edwardian period used parsley to decorate everything.

Then I went to the Turkish street market again, which was as lively as last time. Tulips in bold kindergarten-room colours are growing everywhere along the streets on the way to the market, cheerful and welcoming. Adult leaves in miniature are beginning to spread greenly on the lilacs, maples, and alders; and there were crinkly little leaves on the horse chestnut trees. Many well-grown maple trees are still 'sprinkling' their golden-censer-like flowers into the air as they did last week; it reminds me of the red maple tree that grew on the family's property in Canada and where I took a twig or two (along with tulips and a purple 'silver dollar' flower) to my grandfather in hospital when it was his birthday. But a few trees and bushes are still bare.

At the market I bought two smaller Persian cucumbers, three oranges, and eight pale red apples, but there were a few things I didn't see in the market. So I set off to a Mediterranean import shop nearby in search of white wine; a saleslady recommended a German 'Weißer Burgunder' from the Mosel region as a wine that would pair well with asparagus.

Then I went to the organic food shop that I've mentioned before (I think), the one with the air of having been ensconced in the street for at least four decades: an elegant dark green cloth awning, baskets woven of branches with seasonal produce at the sidewalk, and indoors a long wooden counter. There I found raspberries and whipping cream, a piece of poppyseed cake, and fennel bulbs. But the asparagus was eye-wateringly expensive — over 7 Euros for a little 500 g bundle — so I didn't get it.

Lastly, I went to the newspaper kiosk.

*

I've had a long-running one-sided feud against Die Zeit but was going to buy it anyway. Yet when I saw in the kiosk that one issue cost 5.70 €, I went with Die Welt instead. I'd never read it before and wanted to see what it was like. It was amusing to see the election of the Green Party described as the first stage of a horrifying dystopia — the newspaper is politically aligned to centre-right parties in Germany; and I hopped with rage when I read the relentless whining about anti-coronavirus measures by the people who seemingly in every real financial metric are affected least.

*

Lunch:

Macaroni and cheese

Salad

a plate with cucumber and tomato cut into flowers, flower stems and leaves, and grasses

(thanks to YouTube tutorials I'd watched last week)

Pommes duchesse

I think I never want to make pommes duchesse again... Hopping around the kitchen while forcing the potato mixture through the piping tube was highly entertaining for the ringside audience, but a little embarrassing for me.

*

Afternoon tea:

Plain scones

Rhubarb compôte

thanks to Mama

Lemon curd

Poppyseed cake

Pound cake

garnished with lemon leaves

Coffee

Tea

thanks to Ge.

***

After we had eaten our fill, I went to my room and — like a typical Edwardian young lady of means — 'took a drawing class.'

For that purpose, I took out The Natural Way to Draw. It is a textbook started by an American art teacher who died young in the 1930s, Kimon Nicolaides, but finished by his students and published by his family.

I read the introduction and part of the first chapter, found a cardboard box and a large piece of wrapping paper and paper clips and pencils, and began practicing contour and gesture sketching for over half an hour.

For the contour sketch I drew a lamp on the desk; the result looked far from good, but it was less horrible than expected. For the gesture sketches, I looked out the window at the sidewalk as dusk fell. It was entertaining sketching (mostly stick figures of) passersby. It was mind-blowing that there are such striking differences in the way in which people walk, run or cycle — and how many different things (shopping bags, backpacks, disposable coffee cups) people carry — once I really look.

As night fell and it felt better to do something else, Ge. helped me start our vinyl record player. It seems pretty state-of-the-art, but I have been pretending that it is an early 'gramophone' for Edwardian-experiment purposes. I listened to classical music while reading and perching on the coal stove for warmth. It was genuinely nice.

Programme — please excuse the laziness of not finding out the KV numbers etc.:

Beethoven: a concerto

performed by Géza Anda and the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin (fabulous recording quality)

Beethoven: 'Spring' sonata for violin and piano

Yehudi Menuhin and Wilhelm Kempff

Mozart: a piano concerto

Ingrid Haebler

*

At 10 p.m. I had to stop because a work task needed to be done. So I left the Edwardian experiment and turned on my laptop.

A Rambling Day in (Imaginary) 1904

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

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

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

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

'Edwardian' Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Academics and Tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leftover breakfast bread buns and pumpernickel

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

Scones, with and without raisins

Lemon curd and whipping cream

Strawberries

Leftover chocolate fudge.

Then we finished looking over Mama's essay.

Miniature Supper

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

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

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

After Supper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Weekend in 1902

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

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

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

A 1902 Trip to the Market

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

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

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

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

Breakfast

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

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

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

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

'Dinner' and Tea

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

Sandwiches, cucumber, radish, and thin parsley stems,

seasoned with salt and pepper

(kept fresh underneath an overturned bowl)

Eggs, boiled

Scones, freshly baked

Homemade lemon curd

Whipping cream and berries left over from breakfast

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

(store-bought)

Espresso

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

Herbal tea

French breakfast tea

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

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

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

*

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

Supper

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

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

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

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

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

Time Travel of Sorts to 1901

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

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

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

1901 Breakfast and Shopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1901 Promenade and Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1901 Evening

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

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

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

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

Covid, Toil, and Breakfast

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

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

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

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

*

In general I don't feel so great.

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

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

And I put in overtime yesterday.

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

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

*

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

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

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

Spring Tempests, Canadian Book Competitions, Etc.

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Aside from that, I am still reading other books.

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

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

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

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

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

Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent...

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Album Leaves

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

Sea Anemones

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

***

The sparkling path

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

***

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

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

Sutton Hoo and the Dig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech Culture and Everyday Sexism

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Crossroads in January

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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