Turning of the Times

On Saturday morning I woke up incredibly early (by my standards; it was before 6:30 a.m.) and took one of the few bus lines that wasn't affected by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe strikes to the district Moabit, to volunteer at the Berlin charity that gathers and redistributes leftover food from grocery stores.

It was going quite well. First the reddish sunrise at the Beusselstraße station overlooking the shipping containers, train tracks, and GDR architecture, then arriving early at the warehouse and having a coffee before setting off for a drive. I was accompanying a driver who was doing a tour of grocery stores and a bakery shop in Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg to transfer produce and other food into crates, pack the crates into the charity's van, and then bring everything back to the charity's warehouse. There was little traffic early in the day, and as the driver considerately waved tentative pedestrians across the streets, everyone was relaxed and smiling. Hopping out at the stores, checking in with the cashier or going straight to the fruit & vegetable section to find the earpiece'd employee in charge of sorting out donations, etc. went well too.

Two or so hours later, admittedly, the traffic began to thicken and the sunny temperatures to rise. I began to feel hungry for the snacks I'd packed as the driver lowered the windows for fresh air. But I still felt a sense of adventure and achievement, and enjoyed the sunshine.

Then the local radio channel that was playing pop hits from the 80s and 90s switched to a news break, and the rest of the day was ruined... 'The situation in the Middle East has escalated further as the US and Israel have begun attacking Iran,' said the announcer in German. Then the music resumed.

The energy drained out of me, and I've felt pretty weepy. It's worse because Germany, the UK, and even France's governments have reacted in my view weakly; the solidarity and moral clarity that we saw during the invasion of Ukraine isn't there as a comfort. It enrages me to think of the Israeli government plane sitting on the tarmac of Berlin's airport after being evacuated from the Mediterranean for its safety, as missiles hit Israeli residents who are evidently not being treated with the same care by their government. As for the Canadian government's reaction, let's not even go there.

It's not like I care all that much what happened to the Ayatollah, but I don't think that democracy and safety for Iranians will be instilled into Tehran one bomblet at a time. And besides I have such a low opinion of Trump that I think, given the chance to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he'd only have done so in order to build a McDonald's (or an outlet of his favourite US corporation du jour) there and use the camp survivors as cheap labour. Hopefully I'm not trivializing the Holocaust by making this comparison. To put it more reasonably, I distrust his motives — the presence of the Energy and Treasury secretaries in the White House situation room as the war began also suggests to me that a primary post-invasion aim is to annex Iran's oil — and I think that shoddy motives lead to shoddy outcomes.

The strikes on the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, where the girls' elementary school was hit and over a hundred people died according to the local prosecutor, are I think explained though not excused by this New York Times report. The report says that until 2016 the building was part of a naval base, but since then a wall has separated it off from the base. Satellite surveillance would surely have shown small people regularly drifting in and out before and at the end of the usual school hours? During the Clinton administrations I'm quite sure the president would have been asked to resign by multiple newspaper editorials, and likely leading Republican congresspeople, if he had started a war with this kind of gross error.

Besides it's very disconcerting even from a selfish perspective to have a president in power in the US who seems to start wars as often as, if not more often than, he sneezes. What will happen to Cuba (I think the oil embargo is already extremely cruel), Greenland, Canada, and other countries?

All in all I think the last time I felt this badly, and this depressed, about world events was after September 11th. As the ripples of this new war spread and spread, it seems to suck the joy out of life.

At the same time I have to acknowledge that this war doesn't make civilians in the Gaza Strip or Sudan or Ukraine less dead; there are also other wars going on that are no less terrible.

And, finally, not having lived in Iran myself, I also have to acknowledge that the opinions of people who have lived — and do live — there, matter more than my assessment.

Spreadsheets, Fairy Wings and Progressives

After months of largely cloudy weather and subzero temperatures, we've had a few glimpses of sunshine. Today it was warm enough, at around 6°C when I checked my phone, that the snow caps on parked cars have melted away. A wave of days up to over 10°C is impending. So I've felt encouraged to bed out the sprouted flower bulbs from our pantry in plastic pots with fresh soil, and put them into my south-facing window.

I've had my first week of the holiday career preparation course, which will largely be about Excel. Since I use spreadsheets and calendars a lot e.g. to track how expensive groceries are at different times of year, and want to round out the knowledge of spreadsheets from my last job for my c.v., it is interesting and rewarding. That said, I still feel battered from the semester itself, as well as the job search, budgeting, and the weight of international politics. The room where the Excel classes take place is also a little stifling, although the instructor airs it during the 15-minute break half-way through the 3.5 hour class. So perhaps it's not surprising that Tuesday through Thursday I routinely developed a migraine headache after the first hour or so, trotting home in faintly nauseated misery in the equally airless U-Bahn — except during the minutes where I walked between stations to get fresh air and exercise, and felt marginally better.

In Germany's national news: Our Chancellor recently claimed that we Germans of working age have been picking up part-time work as a 'lifestyle,' depriving our Nation of the good ol' 40-hour week that we should invest instead (unless we are caretakers for children). Statistically I think that Germany's job productivity is fairly high if one compares other EU countries, but 'mine not to question why' our dear CDU has decided that the German economy needs to kill our work-life balance, rather than make a concerted effort to remove bureaucratic hurdles or attract foreign skilled workers. Anyway, it's still being debated. There was some equally charming critique with which our Chancellor was trying to drill the delinquent German workforce into renewed Prussian virtue, but I've forgotten it.

The CDU is generally full of ideas lately. Their pension reform I haven't read about in detail, although the pitched battles between the CDU party proper and the CDU party youth organization sound dramatic.

The happiest development, at the same CDU party conference where these issues are being hashed out,  was that Angela Merkel appeared for the first time since she stopped being Chancellor. My cold, pessimistic soul thawed a little when the Tagesschau showed her in the hall.

I'm wondering when the tide in Germany will turn in the direction of Spain's recent pragmatic acceptance when it comes to immigration. Given that the CDU has just decided (in the first days of the holy month of Ramadan) that they want to ban full-body veils, which I suspect are worn by such an infinitesimal percentage of Germany's population that this ban is even more of a mere racist dog-whistle than it would otherwise be, I'm guessing it will not turn yet.

And Merz's oscillation between firm criticism of wilder trans-Atlantic policy announcements, and wide-eyed Peter Pan insistence that the US federal government will grow fairy wings again if we clap our hands and believe, is also making me dizzy. To be fair, judging by the two dignitaries from Germany's business community who commented in the Tagesschau news on US tariffs today, he's not the only one oscillating in that fashion.

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Anyway, I become especially dogged, cynical and resentful about politics if I don't make little positive changes where possible, so I've been trying to nudge ahead my Detrumpification programme.

A main part is tech independence. A former colleague posted a website that lists online services based in the European Union that can be counterparts to US products. Disenchanted with Google's leadership and not eager to send my data into the claws of the Mar a Lago regime, I've been trying out the French video platform Dailymotion instead of YouTube. So far, the content seems to be different, so a 1:1 comparison is impossible. But news organizations like Deutsche Welle do upload worthwhile reports and I am sure there is more to explore. Dailymotion's videos also offer an 'eco' setting, which is even easier than checking for low-resolution 144 or 240 pixel settings; I usually do that so that I don't waste resources streaming high-resolution video that I don't need. ... Aside from video platforms: If I can figure out how the coding works, I'm planning to migrate my Wordpress blogging to Typo3.

In terms of other aspects of my programme, I've also found that Ms. Magazine's website is a motherlode of leftwing intellectual property. Almost every line of every article would probably make the current administration cringe, so I've been reading the articles regularly.

I also visit other US websites because they are doing good work: e.g. the New York Times, the New Yorker, and (admittedly) the YouTube presence of PBS NewsHour. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, and Jimmy Kimmel too, but late night comedy feels more like a Job's comfort than the press's reporting, and — despite their fact-checking — I think the shows' writers do get a few details wrong.

Besides I watched the recent livestream of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's discussion at the Technical University here in Berlin. It was interesting — revealing, too, about German politics, even if Germany wasn't the focus. For what it's worth, I didn't watch video of AOC's panel from the World Economic Forum so I can't speak to how she 'did' there in terms of expertly answering foreign policy questions. Regardless, I've considered her clever and quick on her feet ever since she was first elected to Congress. And her point, made in Berlin, was valid: it is more important to discuss progressive politics in general, also as a way to expound future alternatives to the 47th President, than to speculate if she wants to be a progressive presidential candidate in particular.... Also, I was amused as the university president and the former Mayor of Berlin giggled their way through their introductory speeches — dedicated AOC fans.

My campaign to read Canadian books to support Canada's economy is progressing. I'm reading an audiobook memoir and a contemporary fiction ebook. As both books have a depressing subject matter, I'd say that watching episodes of the comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes (especially the one where the production travelled to Greenland and interviewed Greenlandic parliamentarians, the mayor of Nuuk, and other citizens) has been the happier choice.

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Lastly, not related to Detrumpification, but just to mention Berlin news: this evening the Berlinale film festival ended. I watched livestreams of film press conferences, but didn't take any photos this year.

In other news, the escalators at Berlin's main train station are operational again!

Between the Scylla of the Semester and the Charybdis of the Holiday Course

The second-last week before the holidays is winding down:

Monday's Spanish class was online due to the BVG city transit strike and the icy conditions on the sidewalks. It really was quite dangerous until snow fell in the early morning hours on Wednesday, and laid a layer of soft powder over the ossified ice.

Tuesday we discussed El celoso extremeño by Miguel de Cervantes in the Spanish literature seminar. The subject matter — people exploiting power differentials to oppress women — was not very edifying (even if it was timely). Besides I like Cervantes's arch humour better when it's used on different topics, which sounds a bit worldly and learned so I should mention at once that I never finished reading Don Quijote.

Then, Wednesday, the Spanish class held a debate. Our topic: tourism in Berlin. The discussion ended up delving into the problems or advantages of AirBnBs, whether we should be attracting wealthy tourists or not, the responsibilities of local government and of tourists, and lastly the historical and sociopolitical importance of having people visit Berlin and understand what really happened especially in the 20th century.

Besides I found out that I received a 2,7 mark for my second Spanish essay. — That's not excellent, but it is a relief considering that I felt I was 'getting too big for my britches' after getting a 1,0 on the last assignment. It was awkward when I received the feedback sheet, however... I'd gotten top marks ... except that it was a classmate's sheet that the professor had given me by accident! So a classmate knows that I had a far worse mark than he did, my brief optimism withered, and the professor apologized to him but not also to me for the mix-up! Anyway, the mark should not have been high. Finishing writing the essay in the early morning hours, not proofreading it after a good night's sleep, and disabling spell check on my word processing app had led to spectacular grammatical and orthographical errors.

The essay's topic was cheerful, at least. I wrote about the economic effects of immigration.. and I started off my essay by mentioning the news that the Spanish government intends to 'legalize' around 500,000 undocumented migrants.

In the afternoon, in a different class, we discussed an early 20th-century Ukrainian novel, a Bildungsroman, which I prefer to forget about although the class itself was nice.

Today I had an online Greek grammar class. We struggled with when to use the present, imperfect, aorist, or pluperfect, in the subjunctive mood. The English equivalent would be e.g. 'If he had found a telephone, he would have reported his car breakdown.'

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I haven't had luck with the job search yet. Most recently, I sent off one application to a conversation research study that offered a chance to win a gift certificate, and another application to a law firm that needs help in their office. I'm also wondering whether to try to earn small sums here and there by writing, an idea that I'm sure will inspire a hollow laugh in many a person who has tried to do the same on a larger and more serious scale.

That said, I'd kind of prefer to dive into irresponsibility and have lots of time for journalistic outings. Finally visit the Danish embassy to write a piece about its cultural offerings and the contrast to the geopolitical storms surrounding it. Contact Canadian filmmakers who will be at the Berlinale film festival in order to write up their work. Attend a political protest again. Watch local winter sports and gain a little background knowledge instead of feeding the capitalist monster of the Olympics. Find out more about the Washington Post staff who were laid off in the Berlin bureau. Etc. Unfortunately, I don't think it's looking practical right now due to university commitments — not just the last tasks for this semester, but also the 'Allgemeine Berufsvorbereitung' technology course that I will take into mid-March.

In the meantime, I'm trying to lose some of my anxiety about life by revisiting TV shows about life in the 1950s, 'unplugging' to read print media, and doing more housework. Having already watched the Fifties episodes of Back in Time for the Weekend and Back in Time for Dinner, I've moved on to "The Supersizers Eat... The 1950s". Today I cooked a celery, carrot, turnip, onion and chicken soup from a 1900 recipe, as well as green peas, and baked a jam-carrot sponge with apricot jam for dessert. And, less thrillingly, I cleaned one of our bathroom sinks with baking soda, citric acid, hot water and a little muscle-power; took care of personal accounting tasks; and handwashed a load of dishes...

The pension fund windfall I'm expecting didn't arrive in January and I may be in a sticky situation in a year. But I think the worst part is just not having had a mini-job or part-time job since September; it is cracking my sense of self-sufficient independence. This might also not be so bad, however, if I weren't still uselessly self-flagellating about 'failing' at my previous full-time job.

Fortunately, brother Ge. lent his services to one of our aunts for a technical problem recently ... and she sent him chocolate truffles as a thank-you, and he shared the chocolate with us today! 

Ice in Berlin and Chaos Abroad

It has snowed again, after freezing rain, so after eschewing my bicycle and taking the U-Bahn to university, I walked between two stations on the way home to look at the scenery today.

On the streets and sidewalks, the weather brought us compacted ice, a sprinkling of snow rather like powdered sugar (footprints and tire treads stenciled out of it), and crushed gravel sprayed by the diligent snowplows of the Berliner Stadtreinigung and others. Around the bodies of cars, fringes of icicles were hanging. And where trees and bushes were not gloved in ice, they were frosted white.

I looked at paw-prints of dogs in the snow as I walked parallel to the U-Bahn tracks in Dahlem, and the glowing rose hips and red hawthorn berries in the hedges, the male hazel catkins with dark glossy blots where ice had settled. Two Nordic walkers energetically approached, but the rest of us who didn't wield pointy sticks were a little more careful.

Of course the stairs into the U-Bahn were gritty and splotched brown with the crushed gravel that we were tracking in.

I'VE BEEN a bit psychologically hung over from the weekend, since Saturday was unusually busy and besides my sleep pattern has been disrupted by e.g. a funny burning smell in our apartment keeping me awake past 5 a.m. one day. But part of the activity on Saturday was lunch in Prenzlauer Berg, in good company. To go into too much detail about the more trivial part: French toast served with finely chopped pineapple, kiwi and strawberry slices, halved grapes, lashings of maple syrup, and whipping cream (all of it reminiscent of the summer weather that is currently far, far away). For my drink I had fresh ginger tea with mint leaves and a fragment of orange. And afterward, in a small family evening get-together, we commemorated Papa with music and conversation and food; he would have turned 73 the week before last.

Due to the 'hangover,' I've already skipped two university classes this week. That said, the marks on my Spanish class presentation came in, and the professor was so impressed that he gave me a 1,0. Not very well deserved, perhaps, but it's comforting for academic and professional reasons to edge closer to the official B2 European language level in Spanish.

RETURNING to the café meal: In my budget, there is less room for discretionary spending. At a guess I still power through some €1250 per month, however. Of course the rent that I pay my mother is not extortionate (not to mention that my siblings and mother have repeatedly urged me to decrease the payments), and the biggest other expenditure is health insurance. So some of the rest still goes to fun stuff, like French toast. But I recently received good news: a private pension fund, into which my employer paid for two years, has been dissolved. So I am expecting a windfall of around €2500 after taxes etc.

On the job front, I've been offering myself as a tutor (partly because I've liked instilling knowledge, partly also because I really want to mother-hen somebody again). I also applied to be a participant a.k.a. guinea pig in a medical study. The second possibility has withered a little: when I'd filled out the screening form, they replied saying that my migraines rendered me ineligible.

AS FOR LESS personal events, the news has been despicable.

Firstly, I'm not too keen on the EU Commission's pursuit of new free trade agreements with South America and India as a way out of our dependence on the whims of the Queens real estate magnate in the White House: surely we have learned that free trade needs to be approached carefully. If I understand correctly, one long-term effect of past agreements like NAFTA seems to have been collapsing industries that help keep rural areas or specific towns economically and socially thriving, thereby fuelling populism and unlivable hardship in those areas. Being locked in Faustian bargains with the Mileis and Modis of this world also does not seem much better than being locked in Faustian bargains with the Trumps of this world. But so far those concerns also pale in comparison to the bloodshed in Minneapolis.

As for the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, I was (like many others) especially happy about Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech. Specifically I liked that he acknowledged that international law has not been followed consistently in the past, but embraced the idea of 'middle powers' cooperating with each other, all while quoting Thucydides and displaying considerable backbone. But Chancellor Friedrich Merz's speech was worrying. Merz should have pointed out that the 'brutal new reality' that he describes in world affairs goes against the laws and best practices that Germany is obligated to defend, given the lessons of its own Fascist history. Instead, as far as I could tell, he suggested hopping on the bandwagon, although with an eye to extracting advantages for the EU. Similarly I think that NATO's head Mark Rutte is taking a page out of Trump's amoral book by negotiating over Greenland and Denmark's heads.

If indeed US and EU security experts, as the New York Times reported, agree that Russia and China seem to have little interest in Greenland at present, Merz's suggestion at Davos that Russia is the main threat was also especially toadying and embarrassing. As for the other speakers, I didn't bother watching Trump's speech. Much though I liked aspects of France's president Macron's speech, I felt that like Ukraine's president Zelensky's speech, it represented a descent into a Trumpian style of airing everything that pops into one's head.

Returning to the aforementioned Chancellor, I was reasonably happy with Angela Merkel as chancellor, though rarely ecstatic. I'm also trying to give Merz the benefit of the doubt because the role of chancellor is so demanding, and I'm sure he's trying. But, as a happily irresponsible member of the peanut gallery, I'll just frankly divulge did not expect her successor to fall as short in terms of percipience, charm, and moral stature, as he has.

That said, Davos offered one comfort. Last year I stopped watching any videos from the Forum because the pro-Trump paeans from roundtable discussion moderators etc. were nauseating. It also wasn't surprising to me to read from the point of view a New York Times reporter who has been to Davos repeatedly, that the Forum has lost any genuine desire for sustainable policy and business practices that it once pursued. Instead it has dedicated itself to empty "virtue signalling" (once signalling DEI and climate change reduction, and now signalling more Trumpian 'virtues'). But this year at least there was some intellectual friction.

INSPIRED mostly by the not-at-all-unhinged situation around Greenland, I've been taking notes on how to put together an emergency kit:

I've gotten as far as putting 1.5 L (per the Red Cross it should be 1 gallon) of water in my room. Next up: putting together a supply of survival food, Item #2 on a 31-item list. As I told my brother Ge., at least I haven't gone so far as to consider iodine tablets or a Geiger counter... These paranoid preparations, which I'd admittedly scoff at any other time, should be useful in case someone decides to sabotage parts of Berlin's electrical supply again, too.

And once the university semester is over — 2 or 3 weeks of classes, 2 essays, and 1 class presentation are left before mid-February — maybe I will finally take that First Aid course...

In the meantime I've signed up for another food-sorting shift at the same Berlin charity whose challenging field of work inspired me to write the whiny descriptions of rotten carrots etc. over the summer. The shift should take place next weekend.

The Ominous First Ten Days of 2026

New Year's Eve was much calmer this year in Berlin, so if the U.S. government hadn't decided to invade Venezuela a few days later it would have been a quiet transition into 2026. Even the New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic was, I thought, a pleasing balance between the traditional, modern, and absurd; if the Canadian conductor was a little obsessed with his own presence at the event, I still thought he wove his knowledge of late 19th century French impressionist composers into Strauss and his contemporaries in a way that gave the first half of the concert different nuances. (In the second half I felt he ran out of steam, especially after the Egyptian March.) I liked the first ballet performance a lot, too: elegant dancers pretended to emerge from a diplomatic vehicle, and pranced around a Viennese building in pastel-coloured pantsuits. It felt like a fantasy of a world order where diplomacy isn't Steve Witkoff grinning shyly across a Kremlin table at Vladimir Putin, alongside a poker-faced Jared Kushner.

But as it was, on January 3rd I cycled to a demonstration against the Venezuela intervention, which had been registered with Berlin's police earlier that day. It was an adventurous ride: for the first two minutes it felt like the snowflakes were lacerating my eyeballs, and even after the snowfall lessened, my tires slipped and skidded on the bicycle paths. A few beleaguered bicycle deliverymen were undertaking the same route. Then I decided to switch into the car lanes, after walking partway along the sidewalks while pushing my bicycle, and somehow I arrived in one piece at Brandenburg Gate, beside the U.S. Embassy. A crowd had gathered and police officers were surveilling a line of security fences, set up on two sides of the mass of people, designed to protect the Embassy. I was undecided at first to be part of the protest as a private citizen or whether report as an observer, but since a lot of agendas were mixing in the crowd, I eventually decided for the second. It seemed to me that most of the protestors were German-speaking, and belonged to a coalition of far-left and communist groups. I counted well over 100 people— a police officer told me he'd estimate about 250 — and I felt it was a decent turnout, especially given the short notice.

A massive power outage happened on the same day due to sabotage. It wasn't in my part of Berlin, so I have no firsthand experience to report except that — unlike some politicians and part of the press — I am not particularly scandalized that the city's mayor popped out for an hour of tennis practice on the first day. I will say that in general the U-Bahn seemed less crowded, but that might be because of the parlous state of Berlin's icy sidewalks for the past week.

My youngest brother shared with me an apt meme adapted from Hergé's comics: Captain Haddock sits, exhausted, at a bar while Snowy eyes his glass of whiskey, and exclaims "What a year, huh?" Tintin replies, "Captain, it's January 3rd."

I've been wondering from time to time what to do if Canada is invaded. For some reason my paternal grandfather pops into my head as the person whom I'd ask, if he hadn't died twenty years ago. He of course served on the wrong side in World War II. I feel that he would frown on any idea of fixing the problem by taking up arms myself, but would approve my general tendency to want to get a sound training in First Aid, if not a paramedic's training, and put that training to use. Especially after seeing what home care aides go through, I figure that providing health care is harrowing and psychologically risky enough to count as a dedicated service.

The university semester is picking up speed again. I skipped two classes last week, and two classes were cancelled, so I had one in-person class and three online classes. For Wednesday I need to prepare a presentation in Spanish, which is leading to the usual low-level classroom stress. It will be about the effects of migration on children.

Bookworming in the Last Week of December

This morning one of my brothers went out to fetch the usual Saturday breakfast of croissants and a baguette, telling us after he returned that the pavement had been slippery with black ice. Our mother had also observed pedestrians from the window taking tiny careful steps as they navigated the streets. Yesterday evening I'd heard the whooshing of a Berliner Stadtreinigung snowplow on the larger street, but wasn't sure if the side streets and sidewalks had been sprinkled with salt or crushed gravel this time.

Last evening we had stove-related excitement again, as a while after I'd laid three more coals on the fire in one of our tile stoves, I smelled a 'hot iron' scent. I nervously checked the fire a few times but it seemed all right. Then some minutes later Ge. checked the stove and felt even more nervous, deciding to evacuate most of the coals. Based on the fierce heat that radiated from many of the tiles even for hours afterward, the whooshing draughts, the dry and frosty weather, and Ge.'s googling, we surmised that the draught must have been too strong and the fire too bright, so that old deposits of creosote may have started smouldering in the hidden upper niches of the stove. The piping hot tiles were a comfort insofar as we concluded that whatever deposits were there were hopefully still burning off so that they would stop being dangerous. Overnight we let the stove cool entirely, then in the morning restarted it.

I've been devoting most of my time to 'self-care': an hour of ballet and yoga yesterday, and a lot of reading. Short stories by contemporary Italian writers translated into German, an old romance novel by Mary Burchell translated into Portuguese, news from the New York Times and on the websites of Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg and Tagesschau, and an even older romance novel from the early 1900s that was set amongst tourists in the Netherlands. The Dutch setting, and my Wikipedia searches for locations, were surprisingly relevant to my one university-homework-related enterprise: reading about 17th-century philosophy to figure out what an Enlightened man looks like. I finished the Spinoza chapter in A History of Western Philosophy, and have now hopped over to a biography from the 1960s published by the German house Rowohlt. Spinoza grew up as the son of Jewish parents who had escaped the Inquisition from Spain via Portugal to the Netherlands, and while much of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam was razed during the Nazi occupation, two 17th-century synagogues, a church, and at least one stately house remain.

In turn, the history of 17th-century Amsterdam ties into late 16th-century trade, which is relevant to the Tudor era Beauty-and-the-Beast story that I'm trying to write again. The challenge I'm facing right now is the 'world building,' which is necessary if I want to write an interesting take rather than a thoroughly effete fan fiction. So, taking techniques from my university courses, I've been reading a long and rambling Elizabethan work by Sir Philip Sidney and taking notes on many of the 'topoi' (e.g. sheep: shepherds, lambs, piping, ...) I come across in it, to research Elizabethan Britain. It's startling how much in the English language has not changed over time, for example the colloquialism 'busy as a bee'; and Sidney uses a rich emotional vocabulary, ranging from depression to envy, which feels startlingly New Age.

I've been thinking of making the Beast a Spanish person who is hiding in England during the Armada. First of all, the challenge of being able to see an 'enemy' as a fellow human being is, I think, a very contemporary topic. As the granddaughter of Germany's fascist generation it's always boggled my mind how after World War II there seemed to be a wild range of reactions e.g. amongst American or British veterans toward Germans, ranging from the famous 'Little Vittles' operation (distributing chocolate and raisins to Berlin's children) to the opposite, and I think some of the same challenges are arising for example between Ukrainians and Russians. Secondly I seem to remember that the original French tale emphasized that the Beast didn't even have esprit (wittiness) to recommend himself. I think that the original tale was pressuring women to go along with arranged marriages, even if they are not attracted to their future husbands; so not all aspects of the source material are ones that I'm willing to pursue. But what I'm willing to pick up is the fear of seeming stupid — and few of us can help feeling stupid when trying to express ourselves in a second language, for example, so creating language differences between the protagonists will bring out that dimension. Thirdly, being an enemy of the state would explain why the Beast would need to live in secrecy. Lastly, the Spanish angle will let me weave in literature and history that I'm studying... That said, a lot of difficulties remain. A central problem with that era and its trade is, of course, the birth of colonialism; and it would be silly to write a story about e.g. a nice cozy winter spent at the fireside, if the more salient and less threadbare backstory is that one logged and stole the neighbour's forest for fuel.

Whenever I feel weltschmerzy and guilty, I've been reducing my carbon footprint by deleting old Twitter news digest emails from five years ago. It's disconcerting how much the world has changed since then, and how optimistic it was from my lefty point of view. For example, debates about weaponry that emerged in the German national news often referred to the ethics of exporting German-manufactured arms to countries that don't respect human rights. Xenophobic sentiment was attributed to and espoused by an extreme fringe, instead of a mainstream. And a gay rights activist who supports trans rights claimed, after she spoke out about a political debate, that 'J.K. Rowling never disappoints' ...

In the meantime, we still have a lot of uneaten Christmas gingerbread and chocolate and marzipan in our pantry. The revelry goes on!

Christmas Morning, 2025

Christmas Day is bright and clear, at the expense of the temperature: it was already -7°C yesterday evening, and it hasn't become any warmer. Car traffic is sparse, but more audible now, although one can hear the church bells well despite the layer of sound.

The youngest brothers, my mother and I have had breakfast: bread rolls with or without raisins, cheese, cold cuts, with tea and coffee. We have also started on our Christmas plates: Spekulatius, chocolate-coated gingerbread hearts filled with jam, Nürnberger Lebkuchen, fondant stars and shapes, sugar-speckled jelly shapes, Marzipankartoffeln, Pfeffernüsse, and satsuma oranges. Aside from the poinsettia-patterned tablecloth that my father's mother gave us in the 1990s, we also lighted tapered candles and tea lights. Then we sang two Christmas carols in the living room, beside the tree, which J. decorated yesterday evening.

Early this afternoon, a neighbour rang our doorbell to pick up a parcel, and we've been mildly busy on social media; but aside from that we've had little contact with the outside world.

I've been reading a book and thinking about whether I really feel like going outside again.

At midnight I'd had a little excursion to take photographs and out of sheer curiosity about who is still up and about at 11:59 p.m. at Christmas Eve in our neighbourhood. Frost was forming on the windowpanes and roofs of cars, Christmas lights twinkling sparsely from the apartment blocks, pedestrians were far and few between, but quite a few windows were alight. And at Nollendorfplatz, as always, the fluorescent bands of rainbow colour were glowing on the cupola of the U-Bahn station.

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

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

Previous Henry VI blog posts

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

***

December 1
10:20 p.m.

Act II.
Scene IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

York concludes by telling his enemy,

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

Suffolk and Somerset flounce off the stage.

Somerset: Farewell ambitious Richard.

Afterward Warwick predicts,

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

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

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

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

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

December 2

6 p.m.

Scene V.

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

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

Even like a man new haled from the Wrack,

So fare my Limbes with long Imprisonment:

And these gray Locks, the Pursuivants of death,

Nestor-like aged, in an Age of Care,

Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer.

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

Wax dim, as drawing to their Exigent.

Weak Shoulders, over-borne with burdening Grief,

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

That drops his sap-less Branches to the ground.

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

(Unable to support this Lump of Clay)

Swift-winged with desire to get a Grave,

As witting I no other comfort have.

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

the Arbitrator of Despairs,

Just Death, kind Umpire of men's miseries,

With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence

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

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

Lord Mortimer is more cautious, telling York,

With silence, Nephew, be thou politick,

Strong fixed is the House of Lancaster,

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

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

Winter Doldrums

ON MONDAY it was my sister's birthday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Autumn Leaf-Poem

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Kind-of-Naughty Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Christmas Season Shopping and Descartes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Leaf of a Student's Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Autumn Meal and a 'German Daughter' Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday in Inferno and Purgatory, Saturday in Paradise

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

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

***

Yesterday was a more exhausting day.

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

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

*

The way there in the U-Bahn was stressful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whistling While I Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elderberries and Autumn

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

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

On Saturday we'd visited Uncle Pu in Brandenburg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An August Evening Run, and Carrots Whose Glory Is Past

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

That said, the fellow volunteers are friendly and helpful.

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

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

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

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

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