Have bear, will travel

A week of cities and seas

2011-12-11T19:42:00.001+01:00

Time for a quick overview of things I've been up to over the past week...

This morning saw the arrival of hundreds of Santas, of all ages (and more than one species), on Southsea sea front, running 5k or 10k to raise money for the RNLI. My friends George and Gordon were in the crowd somewhere, though I only found them at the finish line. It was not the most appealing day for running!

The lifeboat crew were there to cheer on the runners.

And they're off!

One of my favourite views: churning sea, grey sky. Wild and fresh - who wouldn't want to live here?

A late starter, racing hard to catch up (rather him than me).

The winner - though I'm not sure if it's not bending the rules to run powered by a reindeer-antlered husky...

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Off to the Barbican last weekend to see Thomas Ostermeier's astonishing German-language production of Hamlet. Earthy, violent, raw, raucous, irreverent, funny - I was entranced. I couldn't even read or listen to music on the train home, my thoughts were so full of it.

Never let it be said that I'm not childish and easily pleased by vulgarity. This excerpt from the programme pleased me immensely. (Yes, colleagues - I did find the right place to work!)

A few days later, and a work trip to London to see two dear authors. I was early, for once, and had time to take pictures at St Pancras. What an elegant clock to arrange to meet under...

...though we had arranged to meet by Betjeman.

Poetry in the floor of the station. I think this quote sums up what I love about being by the sea.

Time to stop now, butit's nice to have had a quick catch-up after all these months of blog silence.I'll be back...

Recipe for a gentle weekend

2011-07-16T20:10:00.000+02:00

Take two slightly worn-out, mildly unfit, bookloving softies, add rain outside along with a handful of jigsaws, DVDs and elderly bears in need of mending, plus a whole lot of cooking, and you get a fairly good idea of our weekend so far. Here are a few pictures of sunny interludes and other diversions.

Sunshine on the balcony on Friday.

Lots and lots of green tomatoes!

The flowers are pretty, too.

A happy place to go for a lazy lunch on Friday.

We did, especially when our all-day breakfasts arrived.

I take so many pictures that I occasionally get a helpful pointing finger coming in from the side.

Or from both sides. *sigh*

The end result: fish curry in a spicy yogurt sauce, with lots of spare peas on the side.

Saturday morning and time for some scones. Mmmmmmm.

We have to get out of the house! Let's try Southwick, with its fine collection of kneelers. Too pretty to kneel on...? RCs never get to indulge in patriotic cushion art, sadly.

The Old Brewhouse in Southwick, where Old Tom made beer for 51 years. Now the beer is made in Gosport, but using barley grown in Southwick, so it's still Southwick beer. We bought some. Obviously.

A view of a certain beautiful city from Portsdown Hill. Even on a cloudy day it looks great (if you were born there and had an irrational local attachment to the place, yes, yes, I know).

Looking north from Portsdown Hill to Butser Hill (to the left of the big valley in the centre of the horizon). I grew up just over there!

Looking north towards Southwick and Wickham, you'd never guess there were suburbs, cities and seaside just behind you.

You'll have to trust me a little on this, but those cranes in the distance are Southampton Docks.

More great things are planned for Sunday, but first I have an important engagement with some pizzas and a DVD. Sometimes a lazy, gentle weekend is exactly what's required.

Jewels and bent corners

2011-07-15T16:54:00.001+02:00

There are two classes of people: those who deliberately ruin their books by folding over the corners of pages, and those who don't. I am one of the corner-bending sinners of this world. I do it because, when I'm lying in bed reading, I often pass through a passage that strikes me as beautiful, true, relevant to me, or simply startling in some way - but I am of course far too lazy to get up and write it down. So I fold over the corner of the page and think that one day I'll return to the book, look at the folded-corner pages and be struck again by the power of those lines - assuming I can remember which point on the page I'd originally been struck by.

And the number of bent-cornered books in the bookcase and the wobbling stack by my bed gradually builds up, and the powerful passages remain unremarked and forgotten, apart from a kind of shadow-memory: there is something important there, something that would stop me from letting those books go to the book recycling bin - though something which, coincidentally, makes me more likely than ever to press them into a friend's hand with an intense look and the words 'but you really must read this book'. But today I finally have the time and peace to look again and see if what seemed so important one night remains so on a second look.

Maybe these important passages are so personal that they won't mean the same to another reader. In any case, I hope they are interesting, and that a little of their magic rubs off on you too.

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JEAN RHYS

I discovered Jean Rhys when we inherited some books from my late parents-in-law. I find it hard to resist slim volumes of fiction, as they fall pleasantly between the intensity of a short story and the daunting weight of a 500-pager, and there were seven old paperback volumes that called to me. I've gobbled up Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark and Quartet, and I find myself wanting to stop people and tell them how incredibly modern Jean Rhys's writing was, and that everyone should find time to revisit her works.

The cruelty of the world towards a woman on her own, with few resources and no true friend to support her, seems to be the main theme in Jean Rhys's work. She writes without sentimentality of the brutal decisions and squalid alternatives facing her protagonists. You suffer her characters' torments, but it's a cold, descriptive suffering. It's not the kind of sadness that weeps on a kind friend's shoulder. It's the kind that gets drunk, dulls itself with sleeping pills, walks in the rain with wet feet and shabby clothes, and heads towards destruction without self-pity.

'She thought again: people are very rum. With all their little arrangements, prisons and drains and things, tucked away where nobody can see.'

Jean Rhys, Quartet (chapter 7)

'Marya listened to the music of the pipe, dwindling away in the distance, persistent as the hope of happiness.'

(chapter 15)

'His eyes were very cautious. He was thinking that it wouldn't do to leave the girl trailing round Montparnasse looking as ill as that. She was lying huddled. As if there were a spring broken somewhere. He felt at once flattered, impatient and pitiful.'

(chapter 20)

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NAOMI ALDERMAN

I've only just begun reading Disobedience by Naomi Alderman, but the sentence below struck me as being very perceptive.

'So I offered to make some coffee, except I realized as he was accepting that I knew how he took his coffee and the idea of making it how I knew he liked it seemed so intensely personal that I thought I'd rather open a vein and bleed into the cup.'
Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (chapter 2)

When you get close to someone, the intimacy between the two of you is not just sexual; it pervades every part of life, from your partner's taste in coffee to their opinion on Laurel and Hardy movies, their views on sleeping with the windows open, their choice of junk DVDs. This knowledge is like the fruit in the Garden of Eden - once you know it, there's no going back. When a relationship ends or is torn apart, this shadow-knowledge persists for a surprisingly long time.

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MARILYN FRENCH

I discovered The Women's Room about a year ago. My Virago edition is plastered with quotes from famous women saying that this is a book that changes lives, an intense and wonderful experience, a shock. And yet I was suspicious at first. Perhaps partly because it's a giant book, well over 500 pages, and I always feel a little commitment-phobic about monster books at first, but also because, well, isn't it about, you know - feminism...? Somehow, feminism seems a subject to be apologised for, hushed up. No, no, we reassure each other, I'm not really a feminist, you know - not one of those comical bra-burners. I just want equality, that's all - I wouldn't call myself a feminist. Ho ho.

And the book was a bombshell and it was a revelation. First published in 1977, it plunges a twenty-first-century reader right into the suffocating climate of 1950s America, where women are sweet dollies and then good wives, with no choices and few rights. We suffer with teenage Mira, the protagonist, as she struggles to comprehend how her 'wild clamorous emotions' can fit into the 'tight, silent place' that is her home. And reading it, I relived my teenage years: 'Mira wondered if the insides of everybody were as tumultuous and explosive as hers.' It seems Marilyn French knew what was wrong with teenage me when I was still a baby.

'Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about what it is you are waiting for.'

Marilyn French, The Women's Room (chapter 1, section 15)

Anyone who has languished in a hopeless job or relationship can identify with that sentiment.

'In a real life, how can you tell when you're in Book I of Book III, or Act II or Act V? No stagehands come charging on to haul down the curtain at an appropriate moment. So how do I know whether I'm living in the middle of Act III and heading toward a great climax, or at the end of Act V and finished?'

(chapter 3, section 2)

This is something else I often wondered about as a child. How would you know when it was time for the big dramas to cease and to begin living happily ever after? Would life's struggles really end when you'd met the right man? Would that be all there was? I decided, when I was a child, that I would write a book that simply contains life, moving on without a big build-up, a climax and a resolution, but ticking onwards from day to day, hour to hour. I haven't done it yet, and I realise it would probably be boring - but really, our lives don't mirror the literary structures we know so well. Perhaps sections of our lives do - but there's no narrator to explain the key staging-points on the journey, and no knowledge of how many chapters are left. Thankfully.

'The assumption that men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that even we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherland and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift . . . well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally.'

(chapter 3, section 18)

Time to end on a full-blown feminist tirade. When did you first notice that history was written not only by the victors but also by the men? When I was growing up, I felt felt pretty confident that I could grow up to be anything, although I'm sure I picked up my fair share of gender-related baggage from society along the way. But as a young Catholic I remember thinking that it really would be very odd to have a female priest. Why? Well, because men are so much more authoritative, of course. I wouldn't take a sermon from a woman. And that was me as a child - nobody had forced me to think that way - I'd worked it out for myself. I'd like to give that childhood self a talking-to now, and ask why it was OK for most of the teachers at school to be female, but not for the priest. Really - why?

Things are so much better now than in the 1970s when Marilyn French was writing The Women's Room. We no longer assume that the doctor will be a man, nor that a person's partner will be female if they are male, and vice versa. But when I look at the images we're still given in the media, I see that we still have a long way to go. Have you ever heard the Today programme presented by two women? It's not unusual to have one female panellist on Have I Got News for You?, but can you image it with four, and a female host? Or Question Time? It's only when we've overcome our surprise at such events that we will ever be able to say that we don't need feminism. And therefore, I would recommend The Women's Room to anyone who wants to understand where we've come from, and how far we still have to go.

A post without a title

2011-07-09T18:58:00.001+02:00

I couldn't think of a good title for this post, as it's about a subject that can't be neatly summed up. I decided to write last weekend about the ragged-ended emotions brought by bereavement and grief, but I couldn't get it right, and so I've waited until today to try again. It's not something easy to put into sentences and paragraphs, and I find when I write that I'm drawn to neat openings, middles and ends - a natural pastiche-maker all my life, I find that writing honestly about deep feelings slips and slides and eludes me. It's so easy to say something that's not really true but just sounds right. Not so easy to express the real experiences of deep emotion.
Recently grief entered my life - three months ago, when someone close to me died after being gradually robbed of his health over three months. The loss of someone, the realisation that this person, this physcial body you could hold in your arms, is simply gone, and gone forever, is too strange to take in. Grief is a physical experience, a weight that sits on your chest, crushing the air from your lungs. It literally winds you. It exhausts you.
But all around me, I see indisputable signs of life and growth. Reminders that lives end and begin all the time, unstoppably. It's high summer, and the first flowers of spring have faded and gone to seed, while roses and hydrangeas are in their full regalia, and all the soft fruits that taste of summer itself are weighing down the bushes in the pick-your-own farm we go to. And, just like every year, by the time I really accept that it is summer, snatches of autumn will be in the air. And it will all begin again and again, whether I'm here to see it or not.
None of these thoughts are new or revelatory. But I think it's only when you lose someone that the truth of the relentless life cycles that surround us strikes home. And when the weight of sadness that presses the air from my body subsides, and I look around me at the world in its uncountable diversity and splendour, I have to lean back, let the sun warm my face, and enjoy what we have, while we have it.

The Southsea Food Festival

2011-06-18T23:42:00.000+02:00

I couldn't think of a clever title for today's posting, but I'm so excited by the prospect of actually blogging about something that happened TODAY instead of events that took place weeks or even months ago, that I'm not going to let that stop me.

Anyone reading this who knows me will not be surprised to learn that my intention to blog always outpaces my ability to blog by at least ten to one. I go through my life taking snapshots on my pocket camera, thinking, 'A-ha, now that would make a great blog entry,' and then I come home and get sucked into the other important tasks of the day: eating, reading, sleeping, housework (OK, not much time goes on that, I admit), and general unfocused vegging-out. I haven't got into the point-and-shoot, web-on-the-move world yet, so I can only email, blog and tweet when I'm at home, or in some other wifi-friendly environment such as a Greyhound bus. (There was a time when I - when everybody - didn't need any time for emailing, blogging or tweeting. What did we do with ourselves?)

My reason for blogging today is to share some pictures of the Southsea Food Festival. Moving to Southsea was like coming home for me, in a strange way. Although I never lived in Portsmouth until 2007, it had been the central point for all major activities throughout my childhood: the cathedral, the hospital, the schools where I played in concerts and music festivals, the shops - everything happened there. And the seaside and the funfair drew me there summer after summer, sometimes with my patient Dad, who went on the rides with me even though they made him feel sick, sometimes with school friends, then later with the university friends who I proudly showed my home patch to. And Southsea was the hub of it all. My brother went to school here, and all the most important things were to be found at Knight & Lee, with its single escalator (just the one floor, just the one direction, ma'am), its elegant 50s-style staircase, and its zone of impossibly grown-up gifts. Gentleman's Relish, anyone? Bath salts? Delicate gloves in every colour, to match your handbag and shoes? Dannimac, Jaegar, Jonelle, and the mysterious 'Never knowingly undersold' discreetly displayed against a background of diagonal dark-green and white stripes. Maybe the truth is that I just had to live close to Knight & Lee - but then Marmion Road, with all its boutiques and charity shops, and Stanley Street with its pastel sash-windowed terraces, are all part of the charm. In short, when I moved back here in 2007 and then again in 2009, it felt just like the right place to be, and it still does.

So, as part of this local pride, I always get very excited about local events, and the Food Festival is a real highlight. Today it was mostly sunny, but incredibly windy, and many of the stall-holders had to weigh down the produce on their tables and even hang onto their awnings to stop them flying away down the street.

The biggest herb stall I've ever seen, with helpful explanatory signs. We bought parsley, oregano, and a 'curry herb' (looks like rosemary but smells like cumin - mmmmmm ...).

A pig roast - one of the few things we didn't get round to trying.

I like so much about this sign: the obvious useful advice, the haste with which it was written and the poetry (not to mention the hyphen) of the explanatory A-BLAZE! I'm not mocking - I really do like it, because it communicates an important message but with enthusiasm and energy. But I do feel a bit of a prat for being so analytical. I guess I just like signs (see my last blogpost for proof).

Lovely fat garlic from the Isle of Wight.

The most delicious goat's cheese from the Goat's Cheese Man who comes to the monthly farmer's market. We came home with an ash-rolled log, pungent but fresh-tasting. Oh, cheese...

Optimistically placed deckchairs in front of the cookery demonstration theatre, where we sat eating a chicken kebab while watching a local fishmonger show us how to gut fish. The empty deckchairs billowed noisily, like ships' sails - but at least half of the chairs were weighted down with other half-attentive browsers and munchers like us. (Sometimes I think my life is the truth behind a new book I'm working on called The British.)

Fish-gutting instruction in place - note the helpful mirror to show the technical details. Another book flashback - or flashforward, as it comes out in July - to Lunch in Paris, in which an American woman learns to gut fish with a little help from Jane Austen, while embarking on a new life in the most romantic city in the world.

So the Southsea Food Festival has allowed me to take you on a journey from childhood nostalgia to local food, shabby seaside chic, and literary fish-debowelling. I hope that partly makes up for an unimaginative title.

Time of the Signs

2011-05-28T23:55:00.000+02:00

Things have been rather eventful since my last post. We've been going through a sad time since Christmas, but seem to be coming out of the woods gradually now. Work is still as busy as ever, and a bank holiday weekend is a welcome break, but I can't complain as I find my job so engrossing and satisfying, and I guess I would have to say I've never been happier in my career. I think that, despite all sorts of reasons not to be, I'm an incurable optimist: things always seem to be better now than they were before, and most mistakes aren't worth too much regretting. At least, I hope my optimism is incurable...

Instead of presenting any sort of coherent story about a particular place or event, I thought I'd offer a smorgasbord, charivari, or Royal Variety Performance of pictures this evening. The theme is that each one contains text. They're not just pictures - they mean something! (Discuss. No, let's not - it's my blog and I don't have to answer philosophical essay questions when I make grandiose and sweeping statements.)

Ever since I was a child I've been obsessed by words. At breakfast I would read the list of vitamins and minerals on the side of the cereal box again and again. (I don't remember exactly, but I think books weren't encouraged at the breakfast table - though perhaps I was just too bleary to think of bringing one into the kitchen at some ungodly hour starting with a 7. 'What's that book by your trough, dear?' was a much-used Dylan Thomas quote in our household. 'Lives of the Great Poisoners, dear.') At the hairdresser I would read the Elnett hairspray instructions backwards in the mirror while waiting for the haircutting ordeal to end, and generally for the rest of the time I would pester my parents to explain words I encountered on television, in books and on signs.

So here is a photographic hymn of praise to words, in all their lettered linguistic loveliness...

Beware of the dog in Totnes...

... and in Old Portsmouth.

I would like bath taps like these ones at Polesden Lacey.

And if I had Grecian urns on pedestals overlooking the ha-ha in my garden, I would decorate them with poetry, too.

(Editors feel a gleeful but at the same time fearful pleasure when they see spelling mistakes on signs.)

Wouldn't you like to live on Ticklemore Street?

Just gloating: pictures of a few new acquisitions during our holiday in Devon. Totnes poetry, Greenway murder, and a very strange graphic novel.

In the car park at Lydford in Devon, where we stopped to visit Lydford Castle. I've never seen a specific ban on dormobiles before.

The English equivalent of 'Owner Lunatique' in a pet shop in Dartmouth.

Dartmouth has the coolest car ferries ever. But nuclear families are advised to be cautious on the slipway, which can be a bit, you know, slipwy, especially when it's been raining...

A key part of Otto Overbeck's patented Rejuvenator, at Overbeck's, near Salcombe. It didn't do him much good, but it looks pretty convincing. Stand clear, now charge up the batteries... bzzzt, bzzzzt. Are you feeling younger yet?

More schadenfreude (there but for the grace of God, etc.): it's blurry, but the BBC News 24 ticker does indeed use the word EXISITING. I realise that pointing this out - and taking a picture, and bothering to upload it to my blog - makes me seem exceedingly petty. I'm not arguing. I am exceedingly petty.

Finally, a happysad, sadhappy note to end on. It's sad to be missed, but happy to be remembered. Sad no longer to be Mr Southsea Show, but happy to be commemorated on a bench overlooking the beautiful Solent with not just your name and dates, but your nickname, too. What would my bench say? 'Ms Fusspot', probably.

I'll end my words and pictures show here, but I'll keep clicking away at the peculiar things that intrigue and inspire me, and I hope to be blogging again soon to share them with you.

Like a Teatray in the Sky

2011-02-13T00:41:00.000+01:00

Ah yes, New Year's Resolutions... I remember them, vaguely...

Well anyway, it's back to usual service here at Have Bear, Will Travel. Perhaps I should rename my blog Have Extremely Busy Job, Will Faff About In My Free Time And Ignore My Blog, though it's not quite as catchy and memorable.

But today, I finally had a day without having to think about work, my tax return or other necessities, and we weren't scheduled to visit anybody, so I gave myself a treat and went to a new cafe on Osborne Road called Like a Teatray in the Sky, just a couple of minutes' walk from Have Bear HQ. It's a lovely place where your cake comes on a lucky-dip vintage plate, where the tables and chairs don't match, and where you can buy the kinds of arty artefacts that make me feel happy and that life isn't all about designer labels and hi-tech gadgets. Having said that, here are a few pictures I took with one of my own hi-tech gadgets:

I always feel a little uneasy when I go into a cafe or restaurant by myself, even though I'm quite old enough to be confident about this sort of thing - and even though it's always nice when I manage to pluck up the courage. Today, my arrival caused a lady at the next table to fix me with a calculating sort of a stare and then say 'Are you a teacher?' This was slightly disconcerting as I didn't recognise her at all, but we fell into a conversation about how she might know me, with us both suggesting possible mutual places of work or study but continually coming up with a blank. She and her friend left with smiles and with the question still unanswered. It's strange: although I've come back to live in my original hometown, I'm still surprised when I meet someone from what I think of as a past life. I expect the places to greet me with their familiar faces, but I don't expect old schoolmates, teachers or musician friends to suddenly materialise before me.

So after the recognition/non-recognition event had passed, I fell into a glorious solo-cafe experience of sipping my coffee, nibbling away at the giant piece of coffee cake on my pretty gold-painted plate, and reading a book proposal I've been carrying around for weeks. Sitting in a cafe while making (obviously highly significant) annotations on a stack of A4 printouts feels extremely glamorous, if, like me, you're a person who finds glamour in ideas and creations rather than clothes and hairstyles.

I think it's time for a few catch-up photographs, from a walk by the sea two weekends ago, as the sun was setting. It may sound pretentious to say 'I find the sea so inspiring,' but the fact is that I do. I always feel invigorated by the sight, sound and smell of the sea washing up on the shore, by the thought of people coming from and going to distant places for business, pleasure or war, for thousands of years. A walk along the seafront at Southsea is a walk through the history of Britain, as you pass ancient defences and monuments, the shabby pier with its rust and its flaking paintwork, and boarded-up ice-cream kiosks, biding their time until the sunshine brings customers once again.

I passed the Beachside Guest House on a round-about walk home, and felt I had to snap it. Perhaps there was a time when its licensed bar saw happy holidaymakers raising a glass together, or when television and 'hot and cold' seemed like something to be particularly proud of, but if so, its glory day seems to have passed a long, long time ago.

I'll stop now before today becomes yesterday.

A new year has begun

2011-01-01T18:57:00.000+01:00

2010 wasn't my best year for blogging but I'm being good and starting 2011 as soon as I can, on 1 January, with a new blog post, hopefully the first of many. Well, it is a time for good intentions, after all. So we're starting with a few teddy-bear-topped mince pies, from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess. They should have had stars on them but I only had a teddy-bear cutter, and nobody seemed to mind.

It was my first Christmas with Jeremy, now my husband. That still sounds awfully grown-up, as if I've suddenly become respectable and set in my ways. I hope I haven't. I don't feel grown-up yet. Like big children everywhere, we were looked after and fed, this time by my parents.

On Christmas Day a towel-covered lump...

...turned out to be a giant turkey with a woven streaky-bacon breastplate.

A unsmiling Christmas cat surveyed operations from her vantage point close to the radiator.

Now on to New Year's Eve, back in Southsea after a trip to Norfolk to see my father-in-law. This year for the first time, I saw the sky full of flying lanterns. They filled the starless, clouded city night sky with points of golden light - it was beautiful.

Fireworks started just before midnight and boomed and crashed all around us.

Inside, all was still, warm and calm, while London exploded into light.

From outside came cheers and applause as yet more fireworks filled the sky and the golden lanterns drifted near and far.

The big day

2010-11-28T14:26:00.000+01:00

It's been a long time since I last wrote a blog entry. Starting a new job and organising a wedding took up so much time and energy that blogging fell right down to the bottom of my priority list. So today it's time to post some pictures of what I've been up to recently! As I have so many pictures, this is going to be a show-and-tell post without too much text. There are most pictures (taken by a real photo expert) at my lovely friend Emily's blog, here.

The wedding took place last Saturday, 20 November. A shockingly cold day in Portsmouth, though Jeremy still managed to pose by the seafront without shivering too much.

Jeremy (my husband-to-be) and Michael (the best man) at Portsmouth seafront. Brrr.

The boys' beautiful Rover P4 wedding car. I had a gorgeous Citroen but I don't have any pictures of it.

We had our reception at Groundlings Theatre in the heart of Portsmouth.

This isn't a super picture, but I wanted to record a bride's-eye view of the event. Seeing so many friends and relatives gathered in one place to celebrate our marriage was wonderful. Although I'd always had an idea of what my wedding might be like, with cousins, aunts and uncles all around, when we got engaged it was equally tempting to just have a few of our nearest and dearest in a restaurant to celebrate with us. But when I saw everyone climbing out of the big red bus, and later when they all clapped and cheered as the registrar announced that we were husband and wife, I knew that all the planning had been worth it. A happy party is ALWAYS a good thing, and being the focus of all the happiness makes it even better.

My bouquet, photographed just after we got home at midnight.

On Sunday, we had a lovely time when our friends who'd travelled a long way to be with us came round for brunch/lunch and lots of catching up. I met Jeremy's friends Eve and Fred from Paris, who he hadn't seen for about five years, and we saw friends from our time in Cologne and Berlin. Sadly, the only visitor from abroad who couldn't make it was our lovely friend Emily - but we're hoping to see her again soon, by hook or by crook.

In the middle is Mark, once in Bonn but now near Bath, and either side are Andy and Cindy, former Berliners who've come home to Hampshire.

Cindy, plus Keren and Anja from Berlin.

Keren will soon be off home to Australia with her partner, and Anja has moved on from the school where we worked with her. All in all it was a marvellous chance for friends whose ways have parted to come together and swap news.

On Sunday we opened our presents and admired all the lovely flowers left over from the wedding!

Macaroons direct from Paris. Strangely, they're all gone now.

The tip of the Southsea Cheese Mountain.

Anja brought us an incredible Advent calendar. She's a very talented crafty person! We're looking forward to finding out what's beneath cone number one on 1 December...

On Monday, we both had a day off work, and we went for a walk by the sea. Everything was drenched in golden winter sunshine. Perfect wedding weather, perhaps, but we didn't care that we'd had grey skies and ice-cold mist on Saturday. In England you have to enjoy the good weather when it comes and you can never bargain on a particular day being particularly clement. And I guess it's a good way of approaching life: accept the good times when they come, and package up your happy memories so you can call on them on a rainy day. I'll never forget my day in the sun with Jeremy, however damp and foggy it was.

Here are some more flower shots. I always get carried away when I see flowers in the sun, and I like to try new angles and close-ups. 'Are you taking MORE pictures of the flowers?' I hear from the other room. Yes, I am! I wish I could eat them or drink them or somehow make them last forever. Taking a few pictures of their glorious colours is the next best thing.

Finally, I got back into baking yesterday, with Nigel Slater's Black Banana Cake. As a small homage to Emily, here are some close-up cake pictures. It's a deliciously moist cake, and really easy. Try it yourself - I promise you won't regret it, and it's a great way to use up bananas that have seen better days.

One last wedding picture before I finish...

Mr Norris Changes Trains

2010-07-29T22:50:00.001+02:00

So, this post begins with two shame-faced statements: firstly, that I haven't blogged for a good month, and secondly that my post title refers to a book I haven't read. Hurrah! But it is appropriate, I promise.
Mr Norris Changes Trains is a book by Christopher Isherwoood, set largely in Berlin. And my picture for this post is one that I took exactly a year ago today, at Hallesches Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin. It's the only picture I took that day, and so it seemed appropriate to post it today.

Hallesches Tor is a place where people change trains, from the west-to-east U1 line to the north-to-south U6. And it's a place where I often waited when I lived in Berlin, coming home from my school on Friedrichstrasse to my home station of Warschauer Strasse. I must have been waiting for the journey home when I took this picture. It's not a special picture, but I know that I took it as part of my mission to capture the images of everyday life in Berlin before I left to come home to England at the start of August last year. I think I was reutrning from my last ever class at Otis, up in the north of the city.

So this picture signifies both changing trains and changing lives, from north-south to west-east, and from Berlin to Portsmouth. And now, this week, I find myself changing trains once again, as I prepare to leave my English-teaching career and start in a new direction. It's exciting. Instead of cycling down the road to my school here in Portsmouth, I'll be taking the train to Chichester, west-east just like the U1 home to Warschauer Strasse. It's good to change trains sometimes.

Football desert

2010-06-23T23:05:00.000+02:00

I haven't blogged for ages (again) but I thought the time was right for a couple of shots of Portsmouth in a football-induced lull during the rush hour. Normally at 4:30 these roads are clogged with traffic, and the pavements thronged with schoolchildren, students and workers all heading purposefully homewards. But today everybody was indoors waiting anxiously for England to scrape its way through to the second round of the World Cup. More stress and more silent streets await the nation this coming Sunday...

A day out in Dorset

2010-05-16T01:03:00.001+02:00

Last weekend was taken up with work and rain, and so we didn't get out to see any new sights. Today, although there is new work to be done, we decided to have a proper day out, and so we drove west on the motorway, across the New Forest, through Wimborne Minster and out the other side to Kingston Lacy. We were given National Trust membership as a present late last year, and now that the houses are all open for the Spring, we're aiming to visit as many as we can. I'm not a forelock-tugging fan of the aristocracy, and I am not ready to swoon at the thought of the wonderful wealthy people who inhabited each of the stately homes of England, but I am deeply interested in history, art and architecture, and the grand houses owned by the National Trust are treasuries of information and artifacts, often presenting a concatenation of eras in a single site. And anyway, the whole point of the NT endeavour is that these houses have been given to the nation, often by the descendants of once-wealthy families, now stricken by taxes and high running costs. We may have to pay something to see them - but they're our houses now, too.

The south side of the house, with one of the ancient obelisks brought back from Egypt by William John Bankes early in the nineteenth century. Over to the left, out of sight, is a huge sarcophagus which must weigh several tonnes. It seems rather out of place resting below a grove of mature English trees in a peaceful country garden.

A recreation of a dessert course from the Edwardian era. Very pink indeed.

One of the beautiful tented bedrooms used by the Bankes children. I half-expected a Punch and Judy show to begin through one of the windows.

William Pitt the Younger, one of my partner's great heroes. I try to imagine David Cameron ennobled in marble, with a toga draped around his Old-Etonian shoulders - but my imagination fails me.

Onto far more wholesome thoughts: happily snoring piggies in the grounds of the house. There seems to be some connection between these slumbering lovelies and the 'Kingston Lacy pork hotpot' in the cafe, but we had chicken sandwiches, so could admire them without too much guilt.

A few flowers from the gardens. Though they're everywhere, now that spring is almost springing its way into early summer, I'm a sucker for flowers and take lots of pictures every time I go to a park or woodland. It seems so recently that we were wondering when the spring would finally arrive, and once again I am surprised to see its end in sight. The outrageous fresh green of new leaves is mellowing into maturity; the apple and cherry blossoms are rapidly falling; and seductive lilacs are perfuming the evening air. Now that I've reached 35, I can almost feel time speeding up on me. We wait for spring, and find summer's glory around us; we enjoy a summer's day and see the leaves beginning to curl and darken into red and brown. Even the dandelion clocks give me a slight sense of melancholy; it's only halfway through May, and already they're ready to spread their seeds and begin again next year.

But I should finish by saying that in actual fact, it's a pleasant melancholy, a flavour rather than a main dish. In reality there is a lot going on: my main job, freelance work, new hobby (knitting - first project almost completed), web design course, blog-writing, multiple books on the go, social plans, wedding plans... There's a lot to do before the new dandelions show their yellow heads next year, and I'm looking forward to it.

An eventful night ahead

2010-05-06T23:39:00.000+02:00

Yes, I haven't blogged for a while; it's been a busy time and I've been adding pictures to my new blog, Pictures from Southsea (NB it's not just pictures of Southsea, lovely though it is here). But today is a momentous day, a day that could change the direction of politics in Britain for the next five years, and so it's time to break my blog silence and get typing again.

A snap of our polling station, at St Jude's Church, Southsea. It's the first time this church has been used as a polling station, which may be a good thing, as Labour voters here need the support of the patron saint of lost causes.

Will our unfortunately untelegenic Prime Minister still be in charge tomorrow morning?

Or will it be the dreadful glossy one?

And will Nick, who wants to show us a new way to do our politics, help either of them to form a government?

As I type, it's just past 22:30, and there won't be any results at all for at least an hour. Exit polls are showing a good lead for the Conservatives, although almost twenty seats short of a majority at 307. But exit polls are estimates, and we'll only know the real picture at breakfast time tomorrow. It'll be a long night...

Something wonderful: An evening of music

2010-03-27T00:40:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from a concert at the Portsmouth Guildhall, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of Kirill Karabits, a man whose joy and energy seem to spread not just through the orchestra but all the way behind him to the back of the audience. It was a programme with two well-known treats, Schubert's eighth "Unfinished" symphony, and Mozart's clarinet concerto, followed by a piece I'd never heard before, Borodin's 2nd symphony.

Going to concerts is a funny thing: sometimes I'm completely absorbed into the music, while on other occasions the music becomes a background for thoughts which pass through many subjects under its influence. I often do my best thinking during concerts, and I realise that this is because I rarely sit still for an hour without a book, film, radio documentary or instrument to entertain me and cushion my consciousness from its own workings. A darkened room filled with still people, united in a desire to simply enjoy what they hear and do little else--of course that would be an ideal place to think in. Maybe it's a non-religious person's brush with the religious meditative experience.

But tonight I was ready to tune into the music itself for the most part, and I was sucked deep into the Schubert. Though relatively short compared to most classical symphonies, it feels complete despite having only two movements. The throbbing horn chords that punctuate the plaintive first subject in the first movement are still sounding in my ears, as are the descending double-bass pizzicato notes of the second movement. Although my seat was way up at the top of the circle, the music actually sounded somehow richer than when I've sat in more expensive seats closer to the action in previous concerts.

The Mozart is another favourite in the classical canon, and in my opinion its popularity must be due to the sighing descending phrases of the second movement, for the bubbling joy which radiates through much of the rest of the work is wonderful but not quite as heart-achingly beautiful as those tender arches of melody. And the Borodin was a complete surprise: by turns elegant, epic, crashing, exotic, rhythmically playful or relentlessly driven forwards. In twenty-five minutes its four movements took us from one sound-world to another, and it ended with the percussionists all shaking or striking their instruments triumphantly. If you don't know it, I would recommend that you listen to a recording, or better still, a performance, whenever you can.

From high up in the circle it's easy to capture the whole orchestra in the frame. (I took this just before the second half began, by the way, not during the performance--you'll see that the conductor hasn't arrived on the stage yet.)

The circle bar has an amazing copper-coloured room emblazoned with astrological figures and this splendid portrait of the Guildhall itself, supported by mythical beasts and part-veiled by wisps of cloud.

The Guildhall was badly damaged in the Second World War and rebuilt in the 1950s. Strangely, the interiors have a communist flavour, with their square columns and high, square-panelled ceilings. This room wouldn't be out of place in Budapest or Berlin if you just changed the EXIT signs. The exterior of the building, though, is resolutely neo-classical and Victorian.

Even the carpets echo the geometric grandeur of the interior design. (The carpets on the stairs to the seats are even better, with bespoke Portsmouth stars and moons, but somewhat harder to photograph due to the crowds of people leaving the concert.)

A morning by the sea

2010-02-19T17:07:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday morning we drove down to East Head, a spit of sand that sticks out from the western end of West Wittering, in West Sussex. It's a beautiful place, very wild and windy, and a magnet for dog-walkers and bird-watchers.

But before showing you the pictures from my morning on the sand, something far more exciting: the view from the window of our spare bedroom. Why on earth would that be interesting? Well, simply because I noticed the other week that if you look in the right direction, you can see our old flat from there, through the rooftops. I'd never noticed before because the room has served as our boxroom since we moved in and it's usually very cold, having no heater, so we don't tend to while away our spare time in there very often. So it was a nice surprise to see our old living-room window; it's the one on the top left.

I asked myself if it was strange to have been away and come back to a spot so close to where we lived before, whether it wasn't a case of staying still and actually going backwards, but I can't feel that way, however easy it is to say that you're not making progress unless you're always moving on to new pastures. This little spot in Southsea is lovely: it's near the sea, near a whole loads of restaurants, cafes and shops, and there's a permanent suspicion of living in a world of fifty years ago, with the swan pedalos on Canoe Lake, the Miniature Village on the common, the time-worn pier, and the clanking escalator in Kinght & Lee that carries ladies with matching gloves and handbags to the fashion department. I'm happy we came back here.

So, back to our trip to East Head. You can see aerial pictures here and here. Now, as I write this on a Friday afternoon, Sunday morning feels long, long ago, but looking at these pictures reminds me of the freshness and the feeling of being cut off from the built-up world we normally inhabit. However, lonely it certainly wasn't, as the world and its spouse had come to join us, to exercise their dogs and children. But there was a friendly, wind-swept feeling between us all on that lovely windy morning.

Wouldn't you love to have your own beach-hut? I would.

I am always fascinated by the complex and chaotic patterns made by nature.

Looking at the delicate strata on the vertical face of this dune, it's easy to see just how fragile it is and how easily it could be washed away.

Ah, twitchers. I know their hearts are in the right place, but personally, I hate the idea of trooping around and all stopping together and looking at the same thing together, and all wearing the same clothes and comparing equipment. When the group's leader decided everyone had looked enough, he signalled for them to pick up their tripods and move on - and they all did. Not my idea of fun on a day's holiday. (Misanthrope.)

A response to Vanessa

2010-02-16T23:23:00.000+01:00

Reading Vanessa's post this evening reminded me of my visit to the Jewish cemetary almost a year ago, on 20 February 2009. That week saw heavy snow fall in Berlin, though it was mild in comparison with this year's weather from all I've heard.

That day, I had no lessons, so I decided to go on a journey I'd been planning for months beforehand. I started at the Gedenkstaette der Sozialisten in Lichtenberg, where many of communism's heroes and heroines lie, and then took the tram over to Weissensee to the Jewish Cemetary. Like Vanessa, I find in the silence of cemetaries a stillness that leads me to think about life and beauty rather than their opposites. I only had thirty minutes or so to walk around the snowy paths before the gates were closed for the evening and I clomped through the snow, along streets named after famous composers, back to the tramstop and home to my warm flat.

Sploshing and tramping through the puddles of Winchester today, and seeing the English red and cream brick houses damply squatting in the rain, I thought of those visitors to Britain who say they love the country but not its climate, and, for once, I sympathised with their position. The landscapes of my country can ravish and delight the soul on a spring morning scented with new growth, a summer afternoon drowsy with ripeness, or a still, crisp autumn evening; but on a wet winter's day, when the cold creeps into your boots in the morning and stays there until you get home in the evening, and the sky remains gun-metal grey all day, the charms of the climate are only evident to the trained eye. Though the joy of coming home to a warm flat and taking off my damp boots, followed by a pancake feast, were probably heightened by the grimness of the day, and in that case, I can't complain.

All cold things must come to an end

2010-01-19T23:28:00.002+01:00

Regular readers of Have Bear, Will Travel will be familiar now with my pictures of Southsea Common, my own personal playground and fresh-airing space--which I share with the dog-walkers, pram-pushers, joggers and other fresh air fiends of Portsmouth. But these ones are a change from the normal views. The cold was truly something when I took these on 9 January - and that's my excuse for the slight wonkiness you might notice in the horizons.

Now the snow has all melted away down here, though it lingers on further north in the countryside. Last week I went to Farnham to hear the wonderful Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and almost got bogged down in the deep snow and slush of the car park, but luckily managed to reverse out before having to ask the nice man two cars in front to lend me his shovel (why didn't I think of bringing a shovel of my own...).
And so now we've got through the much-publicised most depressing day of the year and I'm full of ideas about what this year ought to hold. One of the pleasures always in store is a read of Vanessa's beautiful blog, recently updated with more snowy images, though in her case the pictures are of wonderful Berlin. Another source of joy is our new Nigel Slater cookery book (he is known as Saint Nigel in this household), which has introduced us to the delights of Jerusalem artichokes and holds many more surprises in its pages. Then there's a concert by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on Thursday, a new Body Balance routine at the gym, a pile of Christmas books to get through, and numerous hobbies to catch up with. I realise more and more nowadays how short and how precious our time is, and how important it is to make the most of it while we can. Of course I also intend to lie lazily in bed on Saturday mornings, avoid the gym and watch DVDs till my eyes take on a 16:9 format - but alongside these rather passive pleasures, I intend to do as much as possible and squeeze as many experiences into 2010 as I can.

Snow! Real snow!

2010-01-09T00:04:00.005+01:00

On Tuesday, I drove to Oxfordshire to visit a friend, aware that snow was forecast for the evening. I travelled home through heavy sleet and rain, and shortly after I had arrived safely in our flat, the snow began to fall properly.

Looking north, the sky was an ominous yellow.

Although I wasn't scheduled to work this week at all, I got a call on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday morning I tramped into school. From the balconies, we could see the almost deserted snowbound streets.

On most of the streets, it was safer to walk in the road than on the pavement.

Thursday: glorious sunshine, biting wind. And ice - lots of it. Bruised teachers, absent students, a festive spirit among those who made it to work. And a glass of beer at The Hole in the Wall on the way home...

Finally, Friday came, I said goodbye to my students, and took one last picture of the sunset. We're promised more snow over the weekend. Although it's nothing compared to the north of the country, this is something quite out of the ordinary for soft southern seasiders like me!

December pictures: the last posting of 2009

2009-12-31T23:13:00.003+01:00

Less than two hours left till 2010 begins... The Pirates of the Caribbean is on the television, Keira Knightly is being noble, the wine bottle is mysteriously empty, the beautiful Christmas toaster has made us amazing garlic butter and cheese toasted sandwiches, and I just have time for some last pictures from December 2009.

Portsmouth in the snow.

An unbelievable and yet all too believable section heading in W H Smith.

Ryde Esplanade railway station.

Isle of Wight countryside as seen from the top deck of a bus (almost the only picture I managed to take with a horizontal horizon, as it was a rather bumpy ride).

And finally, a beautiful anniversary rose (goodness, another year - really? Amazing, and still awfully nice).

So soon it'll be a new year, and a new decade, unless you're a pedantic person who insists that the new decade will begin on 1 January 2011, as there was no year zero. I remember looking forward to the year 2000 and thinking about how organised and complete the ancient 25-year-old me would be. And now if I choose, I can anticipate being 35 quite soon, and yet the organisation and completeness seems as far away as it did when I left university. Thank God - who wants to know what they're doing and exactly where they're going. Wouldn't that be boring? So here's to an exciting New Year to everyone who reads this!

Pigor und Eichhorn und der Ulf

2009-12-17T16:00:00.003+01:00

I saw these musicians last Sunday in Berlin and fell in love with all of them.

Long weekend in Berlin

2009-12-16T12:00:00.004+01:00

I've just arrived home from a weekend in Berlin. It was so nice to see old friends again, to catch up and connect once again, as I know from past experience that it's all too easy to lose touch with your friends when the convenience of bumping into them at work - or even of living in the same country as each other - has gone. Although right now I feel a little sad to have participated in my old life so briefly and returned to England again, I had a nice sensation as I left on the Airport Express train out to Schoenefeld: when we said goodbye in August, it felt final, but now I've proved to myself that it's only a two-hour plane-ride away, and that the people and places I knew are (mostly) still available for me to see. So that bittersweet 'is it really goodbye forever' feeling didn't have too great a hold on me.

I often think it's lucky that travelling takes so long and is so utterly tedious and lacking in glamour, because no matter where or why you're leaving, you always feel glad to arrive at your destination, just to finally be there at last. There was nothing difficult or unpleasant about the journey yesterday, but after an hour on the train, two hours for check-in, security and aimless shopping, two hours on the plane, two hours for passport control, the train home and the taxi from the station, I had achieved mental as well as physical re-entry into Britain.

I had a similar package of emotions when I left Cologne in 2006. I guess that every time you move to a new area, you leave a part of yourself behind. And I think that living in two countries, speaking (or trying to speak) two different languages, working within two sets of cultural norms, divides you so that you are no longer one simple entity with one set of practices. Having said all that, I realise I started late and came from a very firmly rooted background in terms of nationality, culture and language. And I would much rather have the churned-up emotional cocktail of today than never to have started my adventures at all.
So now for some pictures. I was admirably restrained this time and only took about twenty shots in the whole four days.

Two shots from the Lucia Christmas market at the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg: boat swings and chairoplanes.

The highly commercial but still rather pretty Gendarmenmarkt Christmas market. You have to pay to enter the main market, but I heard that this year some of the stall-holders had complained about this because of the recession, so the stalls you can see here are in the 'free' zone.

The Deutscher Dom, home to a museum on the political history of Germany (Milestones - Setbacks - Sidetracks, The Path to Parliamentary Democracy in Germany). It's almost impossible for me to imagine that the beautiful Gendarmenmarkt with its concert hall and churches was once a war-torn ruin. It looks so classically pristine that it seems to have always been this way.

Just a view from a tram-stop on Pappelallee on a gloomy morning with silhouetted trees and a DDR lamppost.

Some views inside and outside Friedrichstrasse Station, showing the architecture of parliamentary democracy and communism, trade and transport, motion and waiting. Or to put it less pompously: some pictures of things that interested me as I waited for the train to the airport.

And finally, the last building of my stay in Berlin. I always like to see the serious capitalised airport-name beaming out towards me as I walk from the station.

Time to stop writing now and start enjoying a day off work, in England, by the sea.

Comfort food

2009-10-28T23:10:00.004+01:00

I wrote about our experience of shopping at the Southsea Farmers' Market once before, in the summer of 2007. Last weekend we had the chance to sample the farmers' wares once again. Here's a selection of our purchases - definitely not my most elegant photo on Have Bear, Will Travel to date, but hopefully you'll see at least our enthusiasm to get on with lunch after arriving home! (I'm a little prouder of the close-ups.)

We demolished the cakes, mushrooms and cabbage over the weekend. On Monday, it was time for the sausages and pink fir apple potatoes to meet their maker, along with reinforcements (more mushrooms, taleggio cheese, garlic) from Waitrose. I spent a long time frying the sausages gently and slowly, so they became tacky and succulent, following Nigel Slater's advice. (I found a copy of his Real Food in the Oxfam shop on my walk home from the war memorial last week, which contains the secret of good sausage-cooking.) Some of the following images may be distressing to vegetarians, vegans, or people who try not to drown everything they cook in butter or olive oil...
So, here's a picture of some good things on our kitchen counter to finish off this smug and highly fattening posting. I feel I ought to say that I don't always photograph the dishes I make. That evening I just felt like recording the results of a slow, gentle evening of washing, chopping, frying, steaming, and grilling. After all, if you look in the average photo album, you see pictures of holidays, parties, and weddings, while everyday life, on the other hand, is about work, hobbies, food, sleep, friendship, and so on. These are the subjects I try to capture with my camera.

A walk on Southsea Common

2009-10-25T16:07:00.005+01:00

One day last week, I finished work early and went for a walk on Southsea Common. The Common is a large grassy area between the seaside and the southern edge of the city, and it's used as a park, for dog-walking, kite-flying, barbecues and so on, and also for festivals and live music in the summer. It's a wild and windy place, especially from the autumn through to the spring. While summer evenings will bring groups of people with mini-barbecues and ball games, who sit together gently watching the light fade from the sky, a walk from September through to April will leave you red-cheeked and wild-haired. Even the trees grow at an angle, leaning inland as they anchor themselves against the wind sweeping up from the sea.

But last week as I walked, it was sunny and peaceful, despite the wind, and I lingered at the Naval War Memorial to try to take in the scale of the loss of life it commemorates. The original memorial was a stone obelisk, designed to function as a landmark for shipping as well as a memorial to those who died at sea from the port of Portsmouth. There are identical monuments at Chatham and Plymouth. In Portsmouth, the names of almost 10,000 people killed in the First World War line the walls of the obelisk.

After the Second World War, an extension was built, curving inwards away from the sea and facing the houses of Southsea. A further 15,000 names fill panel after panel. Although it's natural to think, well, this is just another war memorial, I find it humbling to consider all this loss and bereavement gathered in one place: almost 25,000 people who never came home and whose relatives have no grave to visit. I was surprised to see how many fresh bouquets of flowers had been left by relatives and lovers left behind. One note was addressed to a brother from his two sisters, in shaky, elderly handwriting. Thinking of this man possibly not even twenty years old at his death, mourned for so long, into the twenty-first century, made me realise that behind each name lay an individual human story: stories that ended far too early.

I noticed a few instances of people who served under a name not their own, but this one in particular caught my attention. I learned from a website commemorating those lost on the HMS Hood that Robert Christian D'Abry de L'Arves was born in France in 1922, and enlisted as Robert Christian Harrison. I remember a time when I thought nineteen a terribly grown-up age: now nineteen-year-olds seem to be almost children. Just one tragedy amongst the 1,415 who died when the HMS Hood sank in 1941.

A night at the fairground

2009-10-18T00:15:00.004+02:00

I went to the Hollycombe Steam Collection this evening with my mum and dad. Here are a few pictures and a very short movie, showing what life is like Over There.

Pictures for a grey day

2009-10-11T12:52:00.005+02:00

It's a dreary grey Sunday. Autumn has finally shown its face, leaves are turning to gold and yellow, and leaving mysterious ghostly imprints on the concrete pavement tiles, Turin-shroud style. One ought to go out and climb a hill, but I find myself blanketed in inactivity, the mere idea of potential action draining any motivation out of my Sunday-lazy limbs. So it's a good time to put up some pictures of normal scenes - nothing extravagant, nothing exciting. The picture equivalent of a cup of tea and a crumpet (what a good idea - luckily, I have a packet of crumpets in the kitchen just waiting for an application of heat, butter and honey...).

First, a mild-mannered sign in the loos at Corfe Castle, taken somewhat quickly and furtively, moments before the next person walked in to use the facilities. Though would it be so bad to be unmasked as a lavatory-signage snapper?

Commercial Road on a sunny August day, with evidence of a summer shower on the pavement. I love the slogan FAT BOYS = GOOD FOOD. Far more concise and direct than the National Trust's warning in my first photo. You don't see many 'chip butty' signs in Berlin's fast food joints.

Normal signs on normal shops in a normal town on a sunny day.

The same but on the other side of the road. I like the combination of naturalness and artificiality here: a vision of farmland in a suburban setting; a printed image resembling a handpainted sign; an impossibly postcard-blue sky sharing its colours with a matching real summer's-day sky.

A comforting sight: books at my parents' home. A glance at any family bookshelf will reveal the tastes and histories of the different members, ranging through fantasy, spy novels, historical novels, science fiction, books acquired long ago, from charity shops, as gifts, books loved, re-read, started but given up on (I confess, I never did get to the end of Ulysses, though I have happy memories of the Greek ferries and beaches where I began it, and the dark Athens bookshop where I bought it, whose owner clapped her hands to make me leave when I failed to get the point that it was afternoon closing time right now and I'd better get on and buy something so she could shut up shop). Since taking this picture, we've moved into our own flat and assembled and filled nine bookcases, full of our own memories of ideas and places, our own well-thumbed, bath-steam-distorted pages of loved facts and stories alongside the more pristine, dipped-into, books whose ideas remain only partly ingested.

And finally, the first picture of our new flat on Have Bear Will Travel. Our kitchen is twice as long as this, and gives us lots of working surface, and all the drawers and cupboards we need to store our three-lifetimes'-worth of kitchen equipment. From the balcony (our back balcony, darling - we use the front balcony for entertaining, you know), you look north across sloping rooftops, to the Victorian spire of the King's Theatre. Not a stunning view, but all the competing angles, surfaces, windows and doors give something new to see every time.

So it hasn't been an exhilarating photo-tour, just a vision of naturally-lit everyday reality. But after all, the everyday is where most of us live, most of the time, and I believe it has a beauty of its own.

Beside the seaside, beside the sea

2009-09-26T23:59:00.005+02:00

My blog-writing has slowed down once again, though my ideas for things to write here hasn't, by any means.
Every day I see things that inspire me, like the startling contrasts of architectural styles in the city, or a hand-worked pub-sign mosaic offering Victorian passersby and their fellow imbibers of the twenty-first century a drop of brandy, whisky or rum, or simply the many ways by which school children manage to express their personalties through slight variations of their school uniforms: an untucked shirt-tail, a tie worn too long or too short, blazers flapping open despite the chilly autumn mornings, ipods blaring, short socks and bare legs defying or simply oblivious to the cold.
But tonight I don't have much time and so I'll just share some pictures taken a couple of weeks ago of an evening down at the seafront and Clarence Pier.From left to right: the bandstand, the war memorial, and on the far right, the Spinnaker Tower.

Sometimes it's possible to see the buildings over in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, but on this mild hazy evening, the island is just a soft grey line on the horizon.

Hard to believe that people would still want to swim in the sea in September, but I bet it's wonderfully bracing. I had a dip in Dorset in August, which was truly wonderful, as I lay floating on my back, seeing just the bright blue sky above and hearing the strange non-silence of the world beneath the water, but I haven't been brave enough to try it again since then. I bought a new swimsuit for the occasion of my first marine immersion, which had the elegant and sophisticated (and luckily, removable) label 'TUMMY CONTROL PANEL' stuck to its front. Unfortunately no pictures are available to attest to the effectiveness of said control panel, though it did feel reassuringly restraining.

I love this funfair, which has one of Britain's smallest and least scary roller-coasters.

And I love everything about this picture: the colours, the typefaces, the very idea that buying an over-sized sweet candy dummy to suck on is a normal holiday pastime, and the feasting customers. (I'm not mocking them, by the way: there is a very good though less amazingly kitsch doughnut shop just opposite this one, and I've bought quite a few piping hot sugary doughnuts there in my time. It seems to me there must be some link here to my swimsuit comments above...)

And finally, goodbye to the funfair as we walk home, and the sun sinks down into the sea once more. But I still have the plastic flip-flop keyring we won in the arcade to remind me of seaside highjinks - and it's only ten minutes' walk to be back there again, so I expect you'll see more pictures here before too long.

The big picture edition

2009-08-18T21:10:00.004+02:00

A selection of sights from Berlin, on a cool English evening...

Dangling yellow wellies outside the Ostbahnhof.

The end of our street, with the left-wing pizza joint (popular because it's cool and surely not because of the service) in the background.

Yes, me, doing my best bridesmaid's pose in the foyer outside my school in Berlin, with flowers given to me on my last day at work by a lovely group.

The star of Have Bear, Will Travel, sitting on some of our packing while we waited for the removal men to come.

The nice thing about using a removal company is that you have time to take pictures of your boxes piling up three floors below.

A favourite sight on my walks home from the train station. I always liked the reflection of the KIOSK sign on the tiles, and in my last week I finally decided to risk being seen looking strange (photographing a kiosk) and get my picture.

Part of the Bauhaus exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. I don't know what the point of the cushion installation is, but I love the combination of words and colours, and the interest shown by the father and his little son.

The florist round the corner from our house in Berlin, by the tram stop. I often waited there at ten past seven in the morning, while the ladies from the shop set out all the tables and plants; it was reassuring to see that others were up and busy while I waited blearily to be trundled away to my early-morning classes. Then on sunny afternoons, it was a real pleasure to be greeted by the colours and shapes of the flowers, cheering up the street.

Finally, a shot of my last meal in Berlin: currywurst!

Don't let this happen to you

2009-08-17T22:52:00.003+02:00

I saw this sign on a train going down to Erfurt: the dangers of boozing might be worse than you thought... Here's a bigger shot showing that at least some things are right with the world.
I don't know about you, but I think the guy at the bottom is probably having more fun than his friend at the top.

By the seaside

2009-08-10T22:28:00.003+02:00

It was our first day at work in Portsmouth, and I found myself with a morning to spare before my afternoon lessons began. So I started by parking by the beach, looking at the view and then beginning my new book, The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig - a Berlin leaving present from Emily. (Thank you, Emily - it's lovely to have parts of the Berlin life still going on over here in England.)

This is South Parade Pier, a classic seaside symbol, from the arcade machines at the entrance to the inflatable bouncy castle on the end.

Lots of ships on the horizon, not bound for Portsmouth, plus a ferry on its way to France.

After a few minutes' looking and enjoying the warm but fresh morning breeze, I suddenly noticed a group of people swimming. The Solent is chilly even in August - brrrrr.

All the benches have commemorative nameplates, but I thought this one was particularly nice. If I live to be 99, I hope I'll still enjoy strolling along the seafront too.

Back in England

2009-08-09T21:50:00.004+02:00

We came back to England yesterday, ready to start the next stage of our lives and careers - so the travelling of Have Bear, Will Travel is going to be mostly in the UK for the next while. Even though I'm sad to leave my Berlin life behind, it's nice to be home again. Today we went out for a walk on Butser Hill, five minutes away from my parents' home in Clanfield. This is a view to the north, towards East Meon. The church spire of East Meon is just visible about a third from the right , at the bottom of the valley.

A scabious on the hillside.

A battered painted lady butterfly and a pretty black and red beetle that we couldn't identify.

A small tortoiseshell butterfly.

And finally, a view to the south, with the sea visible in the distance - and the Isle of Wight as a mere suggestion of grey waves on the horizon.

Although it's always hard for me to change between countries and homes, it feels good to be in England again. But I still have lots (and lots) of photos of Berlin that I'd like to publish here, so they will be appearing in future posts.

Beautiful flowers

2009-07-06T22:29:00.003+02:00

Two weeks ago, I had a farewell celebration lunch with one of my lovely groups of students. We were celebrating the end of over a year's regular English lessons, although actually, we still have two lessons left before I leave Germany and they take a break from their training. Anyway, it was really wonderful to be sitting together with the students and their colleagues, eating Chinese takeaway food and talking about some of the different things you find in England and Germany. And after lunch I taught my two back-to-back lessons with them, and then at the end, Karin gave me a gorgeous bunch of flowers. I don't think I've ever seen flowers that were so utterly summery and joyful-looking. So I was overcome with a photographing urge at Hallesches Tor U-Bahn station on the way home and started taking some pictures of them. The last one was on the train, between Schlesisches Tor and my home station, Warschauer Strasse.

All shall be well

2009-07-06T20:45:00.004+02:00

I just found myself thinking the above phrase and wondering where it came from: all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. I've always found it a very powerful phrase; the repetition makes it sound as if it must, against all evidence to the contrary, be true. So I had a look on Wikipedia and found that St Julian of Norwich said it originally, and that T.S. Eliot later quoted it in the last poem of his series Four Quartets. I've just found a wonderful online text of all four poems here.

Better

2009-06-21T22:31:00.003+02:00

This is just a quick posting to say that I feel better today! I am still emitting noises a seal would be proud of (I think in Seal I keep saying 'please give me another fish and stop asking me to balance this ball on my nose, this isn't the 1970s anymore you know,' although there's no seal around for me to check this with) but I feel like a human again and have stopped holding my head and whimpering.
Here's a picture from a walk we took this afternoon. It's a view looking westwards from the Modersohn Bruecke, named in honour of the romantic painter Otto Modersohn. As well as the gleaming rails, you can see the O2 World (pop concert venue) on the left, then the strangely absent low-level Warschauer Strasse S-Bahn station, which marks the beginning and end of many of my journeys, and finally on the far right, the TV Tower. Although it's perhaps not the most attractive view in the world, I find it fascinating because it changes each time you see it, as the weather conditions change and various buildings are put up or renovated, and other sites are graffiti-ed or poster-clad. And I find the sinuous glinting of the rails very attractive. You don't need to watch for long in order to see shabby-looking S-Bahns, red double-decker regional expresses, modern grey Inter City Express trains going to distant cities, or the oddly old-fashioned night-trains bound for Ukraine and Belarus, with their signs in English, French, German and Russian.
When I see those long-distance trains pass by, I often wonder where the passengers are headed, and whether their lives are more full of excitement than mine. But then when I'm on an ICE train, rushing through villages and cities I'll never alight in, I wonder the same thing about the lives of the people who live there. Maybe that's why the railway lines seem romantic, because they offer the promise of something more interesting just out of reach.

A self-indulgent and somewhat sickly posting

2009-06-18T21:41:00.002+02:00

I am now officially annoyed with having a cold. It started on Sunday and I am still a coughing, sneezing wreck. But it hasn't been an idle couple of days since my last posting; in fact, I've

coughed approximately 9000 times
sneezed maybe 762 times
used uncountable number of mini packets of Kleenex Balsam tissues
engendered swine-flu-related looks of horror from 37 users of Berlin public transport
successfully out-stared at least 3 of the above 37 fellow travellers
watched Wild Strawberries, lent to me by Emily (thank you, Emily)
finished Vanity Fair (the book, of course the book - what did you think?)
fallen asleep wearing my ipod 5 times
made a post office transaction with an incredibly helpful post office lady helping me very helpfully and restoring my faith in customer service
started and finished Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding and discovered it to be a work of intelligence and joy, rather than a simple crowd-pleasing ur-chick-lit icon
been shocked that Bridget's 9 st 7 is (for her) wildly overweight and podgy, given that I am now a horrifying 10 st, 1 lb and 12 oz
rediscovered the joy of diary fiction once again and the pleasure of lists!
got very very bored of coughing and coughing and coughing

Oh, and I've also been looked after most royally by lovely Jeremy and sympathised with by all at my school, so I can't complain too much. But I want to be better soon!

A spot of natural history

2009-06-16T09:47:00.004+02:00

I'm off sick today (malady: swine flu disguised with the same symptoms as a common-or-garden common cold), and one of the benefits of this is that I have time to update my blog. So I thought I'd post some pictures of some very interesting bird-watching shots I took on my balcony a few weeks ago, in the height of Spring.

I saw that a most unusual nest had been built right in the middle of my flower boxes.

So I waited a few days, watching out for the mother bird. I hoped I would see her sitting on the eggs, but she never came. What kind of eggs are these, I wondered?

And then, one morning, the sound of chirping and cheeping drew me once again to the balcony to see the scene: six multi-coloured chicks had emerged from those strange-looking eggs!

(Obviously, they were moving about a bit, so the last close-up shot is a little blurry.)
Shortly afterwards, they flew off, and now the balcony and the flowers have returned to their original calm state. I wonder what those unusual birds are doing now...

Weekend holiday

2009-06-16T09:21:00.003+02:00

Monday 1 June was a bank holiday here in Germany, for Pfingsten (Whitsun). In fact, this time of year is very good for days off, as we get May Day, then Himmelfahrt (Ascension, but it sounds much better in German), and finally Pfingsten. We decided to celebrate our extra day of freedom with a trip to Hamburg and Lübeck. Instead of putting the pictures here on the blog, I've loaded them onto my Google photo album here.

Posters

2009-05-28T23:25:00.003+02:00

Like any big city, Berlin is covered in posters, for exhibitions, concerts, club nights, political events, you name it, but Friedrichshain seems to have more than most other parts of the city. Some are official and paid for, like this beautiful design for a concert by Hugh Masekela:Others are piled thickly on top of one another, on any available flat surface, forming thick layers which eventually peel off under their own weight. I've written before about the rules that govern seemingly simple activities in Germany like visiting a park: I enjoy the grubby, messy side of life that Berlin's poster-stickers provide. The scenes are constantly changing and there is always something new going on.

Back to beading - and a few sights

2009-05-20T10:33:00.004+02:00

Hello, I haven't blogged for a while, but I've been busy with various things, and I wanted to show a few interesting pictures. There's been some cooking and baking - and, like a very proud cook-blogger, I took pictures to be used as evidence at a later date - but I'll come back to that another day.

First, it's action stations out on the balcony, as you can see.
Chrissie (a friend from my workplace) gave me some Dünger-Stäbchen, or mini fertiliser sticks, to put into my balcony boxes, and now the plants are going wild. It's nice to look up when I come into our courtyard and see the flowers peeping happily over the balcony.

Last weekend I went back to my beading. We visited a huge craft shop and, as always, I came back with a few packets of beads and various half-formed ideas (which, being my usual way of bead-shopping, accounts for my large and growing collection of interesting beads that I might do something nice with one day). But luckily, I had my beading book with me and so had enough direction to buy some 6mm and 8mm glass beads to make this choker. The only tricky bit was tying the nylon thread together so it wouldn't just slip undone immediately. I must get some super-glue - that's the solution, apparently. It's funny: the actual stringing is pretty easy; it's just the finishing up, getting the length right and tying or crimping it so it doesn't fly apart when you wear it, that gets me hot and bothered.

My second project of the weekend was a dangling-fringe necklace. I bought the red glass flower beads from Pearls Planet, a wonderful bead shop in Mitte, a few weeks ago, and then didn't know what to do with them. This is the result:
And a detail, so you can see how gorgeous the beads are:
And finally, a picture of me wearing the finished object. Not the best picture (I don't like having my picture taken) but at least you can see the necklace...

Finally, a few shots of things I've seen recently. I spotted the reflection of flats and balconies in this car's rear window one day and wanted to capture it. It's on a street I walk down fairly often, rushing to the U-Bahn or to one of the schools nearby for work, called Kreutziger Strasse. It is a true Friedrichshain street, containing as it does several brightly painted squat buildings, which were the scene of riots back in the 1990s (I think the squatters won, and why not, as they're always kept very nicely and they have amazing murals all over them), plus new upmarket flats, one big hole which I guess represents a bombed building from the second World War (there are still lots of these gaps in Berlin), and - of course - a great big organic supermarket.
This sign is on the same street, and it always makes me feel happy when I see the three little drivers rushing off in their green vans to fix somebody's window.
And my last picture is a sign that took me completely by surprise: a doctor specialising in 'civilisation diseases'. What could those be? Isn't civilisation the thing that saved us from malaria, typhoid, bubonic plague, and hosts of other nasty life-shortening influences?
Well, of course, if you stop to think about it, a civilised lifestyle brings other risks, such as obesity, high blood pressure, heart problems, stress, tooth decay (from gorging on sweets all the time, not that I'm speaking from experience, of course) and so on. Most of us either suffer from health problems caused by our comfortable lifestyles, or strive to avoid these problems by exercising, stretching, quitting smoking, choosing low-salt and low-sugar options. But to lump all these aspects of our modern lives into an umbrella term - civilisatory diseases, Western diseases, or lifestyle diseases, as Wikipedia.de translates for us - seems needlessly negative. At least the Wikipedia article points out that civilisation itself isn't to blame, but rather our lifestyle choices or environmental influences. I don't like the idea that we have to blame civilisation, which stands for safety standards, cleanliness, regulated working hours, social and financial support for those in need, for all the shoddy and destructive things we do to ourselves. Blame the factors, but don't blame the entire system that supports the existence of doctors with polished brass plaques on quiet residential streets.

Right, I'd better wrap up now as I'm getting hungry and I fancy a chip butty and a pint of lager, with a king-sized Mars bar for pudding. Now, where did I put my cigarettes...

May Day Eve at Boxhagener Platz

2009-05-01T22:43:00.007+02:00

Boxhagener Platz is the square just outside our building. It's normally a quiet, green space, used by parents and their young children for playing, and people with bottles of beer for whiling the time away. On Saturdays there's a wonderful food market and on Sunday a huge and very popular flea market (very good for buying all sorts of junk that you never knew you needed, such as knick-knack trays made from old 45 rpm singles or jewellery decorated with typewriter buttons, not to mention the obligatory DDR eggcups). But on 30 April, everything changes, because the square is the site of a big left-wing party and anti-fascist/anti-police gathering. So everyone who lives here has to move their cars away, and the police arrive in huge numbers.

The entire square and the roads around it were lined with police vans, cars, floodlights and barriers.

I went out at about 10.30 to see what the mood was like. It felt like a big party, with people drinking, strolling, sitting around, or, like this guy, sounding off at policemen (this one looks pretty bored by it). I had mixed feelings about it all: it doesn't seem all that revolutionary to come together and drink beer on the street, but then I also didn't like the fact that the policemen were very seriously armed and out in such large numbers, with their football-stadium floodlights, packs of dogs, video cameras and so on, to make sure that nothing untoward happened. I don't like violence either from drunken crowds or from organised institutions, and being in the middle of the fairly good-natured crowd and seeing the stony-faced policemen, I could feel just easily things could get started there.

At intervals, groups of the most serious-looking policemen would rush by. I couldn't see what they were heading for, but I could tell that something had happened.

Just after the heavy-duty cops went by in the picture above, the ones guarding the square and making sure nobody could enter it suddenly put on their helmets, as if they thought something might happen.

This is where the black-clothed policemen went to (beyond this crowd - I was too wimpy to take my investigative journalism much closer than this).

I have no idea what they had been involved with, but then they all gathered at the corner of this building.
Then the generators packed up all of a sudden, the floodlights went out in a resounding silence, and everybody cheered. Some of the drunker or more aggressive people around me started breaking bottles at this point, and I decided to head for somewhere a little less in the middle of things. Just as I was heading for the pavement and the edge of the crowd, another bunch of black-clad policemen rushed past me in the opposite direction from the previous ones and when I couldn't get out of the way fast enough, one of them poked me in the ribs and shouted that I should make way for them. Not exactly police brutality, but I didn't like it. After that, a helicopter appeared on the scene, and I decided that I had seen enough confrontations for one night, so I headed for home.

Our building is on the other side of the square from where the main gathering took place, and only had a couple of police vans outside. Although the helicopter stayed hovering over the scene for quite a while longer, I didn't hear anything after I'd got into bed - one of the benefits of living in the hinterhof, which makes up for the disadvantage of having no view except for the flats on the other side.

Apparently, a bit later, some people set fire to some of the big bins that had been brought there to collect the party's rubbish, and several policemen were hurt, and several people arrested. The figure given on the websites I've looked at vary greatly: Monstersandcritics.com says 29 policemen were injured and more than a dozen people were arrested, while tt.com (from the Tirol, possibly just a little bit right-wing) puts the same figures at 48 and 57 respectively.

The tt.com story has some excellent pictures of things that happened after I'd headed off to bed:

But, on the whole, I think I took my photo-journalism far enough last night, and I'm happy to leave the rest to the experts.

A few things about me (because Katja asked)

2009-04-09T20:35:00.002+02:00

Katja asked me to answer these questions.
It seems that Elizabeth asked her, and now I'm going to ask Emily/Vanessa, the only other blogger I know. (But at least she has two names.) And I've seen that you should delete one question and add one of your own. I've added the last one.

Who was your childhood hero or person you most admired and why?
I don't know, I've never been into heroes much. Snoopy, perhaps, for being calm and collected and funny, and also having very expressive ears. And for not getting on with Lucy but liking Charlie Brown.

Who was the last person you hugged?
Jeremy.

Do you nap a lot?
Almost never. But at night I sleep like a person in a coma.

What is your current obsession?
As always, drinking in the things happening around me and wondering what makes people tick.

What’s for dinner?
Haven't decided yet. There's a high probability that pasta will be involved.

What was the last thing you bought?
Some chocolate eggs from the new and wonderful Belgian food shop, wrapped up with ribbons and flowers.

What are you listening to right now?
The people upstairs clomping about on their wooden floorboards as they go about their evening activities: a nice sound.

What is your favorite weather?
Cool, fresh, springlike, with drops of dew on the grass.

Say something to the person who tagged you:
Hello Katja, I think your new blog is excellent, and I'm glad to see all the wonderful pictures you've taken.

What would you like to have in your hands right now?
A bowl of pasta already made for me.

If you could have a house, fully furnished and paid for, anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Hard to say. In a town with cafes and bookshops and good weather, with beautiful countryside not too far away. Maybe somewhere in Dorset, the undeservedly forgotten county.

What are you wearing?
My pink-and-purple skirt, a black shirt with a small hole in it, and the new necklace that I made on Tuesday.

Favorite vacation spot?
Tricky. There are so many places I haven't been yet. Anywhere with good food and lots of museums.

What would you like to get rid of?
Every kind of illness.

What is your favorite tea flavor?
Actually, it's coffee usually.

What is your favorite snack?
A "Fitness Riegel" from Steinecke's Bakery, across the road from my school.

Dog or cat?
Both are good but we really want a dog.

What do you always fail to do, even though you think you should be doing it?
So many things: tidy up my heap of admin papers; write invoices; clean the house; do any exercise at all; write letters to friends who won't use emails.

When did you last start a book and fail to finish it?
I used to do this all the time, but actually I think the last time I gave up on a book from sheer unmitigated laziness and general short-attention-spanned-ness was over a year ago, so I feel quite pleased with myself. It was Paradise by A.L. Kennedy, and I plan to go back to it one day when my ewwwww-that's-just-horrible gland is feeling particularly torpid.

You went to... Cottbus...? ... But WHY...?

2009-04-09T20:21:00.004+02:00

The title of this posting reflects the response of most people when I told them that we were going to Cottbus for the weekend. It's actually a very interesting place if you're looking for a portrait of life in what Germans call the Neue Bundesländer, or in other words the former East German states that became part of Germany in 1990. Anyway, I won't write much about it here, but you can see some pictures I took in my Picasa photo album.

New hobby

2009-04-08T14:33:00.011+02:00

I decided just before Christmas last year to try making jewellery, as I've always been someone who reads, writes, and plays music, but not somebody who actually makes things. So I put in some special requests on my Christmas list (yes, I'm 34 but I still have a Christmas list) and found lots of nice beads and tools under the Christmas tree. I am a very lucky girl to have such a generous Santa even after I should have become an independent adult... Anyway,this is my first creation, made on Boxing Day.The beads are full of tiny flowers, and I think they're beautiful.

I made this necklace from a kit containing all the different beads and instructions. It wouldn't be my normal first choice for a project, with the slightly rough wooden beads and the blue shiny sequins, but I was pleased with the result. It looks nice with brightly coloured sixties patterns underneath (no really, it does).

This was my first Abbie-generated design. The three blue strings are plaited together, but every time you cross a new thread over into the plait, you push a shiny bead in the way first. The tension changes a bit around the length of the necklace, and sometimes one of the beads pops into the wrong place, but the overall effect is delicate. In fact, the secretaries at my school liked it so much that we arranged a 'beading afternoon' one Sunday, and made necklaces together. Monika made a black version of my design, and Anja made a black and white variation of my first necklace (the one with the green flowery floating beads). We plan to meet again soon for another bead-fest; I'm looking forward particularly to Anja's Kaffee-und-Kuchen-time cakes.

This one is also my own design, though perhaps less successful. I just wanted to find a way to use the fantastic green shiny bead, but in retrospect it all looks a bit strung together. But the only way to learn is by trying: 'learning by doing,' as my students always say with a wise nod.

Now, an experimental piece of resistance: handmade Fimo millefiori beads! It's the same procedure as in the making of seaside rock: you make various finger-sized sausages, then bundle them together to make a big cylinder containing your desired pattern, and then roll it under your hand until it's a thin sausage again. And the final result makes you feel incredibly clever...
...even if some of the beads are a little bit squidged at the edge where I cut them with the craft knife.

Finally, here's one I knocked up in an hour this week. I saw the dice beads and wanted to make something pink to wear with my newish pink and purple skirt. The white and blue seed beads, and the closure, were all birthday presents from my parents, so I was especially happy to be able to put them into a new creation just after receiving them.
The little dice are so cute.
So that's my beading career in a nutshell, apart from the ones that didn't work, which won't be going on the blog! It's very satisfying, as you can assemble different shapes and colours and see what works, and there are really no rules about what you should do. I also like having a hobby that's essentially rather girly but which requires having several pairs of pliers and the will to use them.

Ordnung

2009-03-17T21:35:00.004+01:00

Germany is a famously well-organised country, and one of the pleasures of living in Berlin is to find the many interfaces between order and chaos. Parks and other green spaces are the perfect places to experience the friction between life as it has been regulated for the good of the citizens and life as the unruly non-law-abiding inhabitants actually live it.

Every green space, however small, however littered, has a sign at its edge similar to this one, seen in a park in Wilmersdorf. It's impressive, isn't it?
Who would have guessed that visiting a park could be so complicated? Here, as far as my German skills will take me, is a translation of what you must be aware of before using the park:
1. Firstly, you should know that this is a protected green space in accordance with law xxx.
2. Dogs must be on a lead. Which is tricky when you consider that some 90% of Berliners appear not to have - or need - a lead for their dogs.
3. No football.
4. No barbecues. In several languages - just in case those naughty speakers of Turkish, Greek and Serbo-Croatian ignore the picture and the German text. Those crazy Balkan types (I checked: part of Turkey is in the Balkans) are clearly always grilling, particularly in public parks.
5. I had to look this one up: automatic irrigation/sprinkling system. I guess you have to be careful in case you're relaxing and suddenly find yourself being watered? Good to know for aquaphobics.
6. No rubbish.
7. Just in case you're still reading and still care: District Council Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Civil Engineering Department, (Sub-)Department Nature.
8. Finally: no cycling and NO MOPEDS!

While writing this entry, I discovered that I am not the first to blog about these wonderful signs: Slab Magazine got there before me. I have to confess that, despite being a fairly well-behaved citizen who enjoys the nice things of life as much as the next person, I always feel pleased when I see graffiti and unauthorised posters on these signs. It would be nice if the authorities could simply trust the public to know how to use a park responsibly.

Here's another sign from the same park which also attracted my attention. It's a little hard to read due to the graffiti, but the message is that this lawn is provided for relaxation from 1 May to 30 September, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. But please note that if the lawn is damaged, especially as a result of ball games, then this permission will have to be withdrawn. Football is not allowed, and dogs are strictly to be kept away. Because they would spoil the relaxation, obviously.
If it was even a nice lawn, I wouldn't mind so much, but it had a huge swampy puddle at one end and was generally muddy and uninviting. But I did see it in February, and nowhere's really much fun for sun-bathing and restoring the soul from a prone position at that time of year.

What's the point of this posting, you might ask. Well, living here, I often find the constant encounter with unexpected and often inexplicable regulations somewhat frustrating, baffling, infuriating, and so on. But these negative and unproductive reactions are tempered and rebalanced by the fact that many nice German people find them equally over-bearing and unnecessary and worthy of a laugh. And laughter, even if it's only provoked by a printed metal sign on a grisly grey day, is always a good thing.

Anti-fascist demonstration

2009-03-08T18:08:00.007+01:00

There are often left-wing demonstrations in Friedrichshain, and although I normally stay indoors until it's all over, or avoid the area involved, I decided to go and see protesters and police in action yesterday. The reason for the demonstration was the recent opening of a Thor Steinar clothing store on Petersberger Allee, near Frankfurter Tor. I've never heard of this clothing label in Britain, but here in Germany it's particularly controversial, as it is one of the favourite brands of the extreme right. They already had two shops in Berlin, one in Mitte and one on the very edge of Lichtenberg, the neighbouring district to Friedrichshain, which is the homeground for the far right. This latest shop, here in generally hip and liberal Friedrichshain, has caused deeply felt outrage since it opened at the beginning of March. There was a heavy police presence at both ends of the demonstration area, as you can see here by Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn station: The shop in question is called Tromso, after a city in Norway. All shops all bear Norwegian names, and the company has used Norwegian flags in its designs, much to the displeasure of the Norwegian government. It's a particularly inappropriate location, as this address was once the site of an SA beerhall, and a place where after 1933, hundreds of antifascists were mistreated and murdered. There is a plaque commemorating this fact only a few metres away. You can read more about this here (in German).
One consoling fact is that the neighbouring building has signs protesting about the sale of Nazi clothing:The demonstration was mostly peaceful, though I saw one man being taken away and put into a van, and there was a lot of pushing and shoving, as the protesters tried to get closer to the shop and the police repeatedly pushed them back. I was only there at the end of the protest, and the police had a van with loudspeakers asking everyone to clear the area, as the official ending-time of 4pm had passed. Eventually, at about 4.30, the announcement said that they would be forced to use stronger measures to disperse the crowd if they didn't move on, and this had the strange effect of making most of the camera-toting bystanders (I count myself among this group) decide that photojournalism was fine as far as it went but maybe it was really time to think about getting out of the cold, while all the hard-core protesters moved eastwards down Frankfurter Allee, pursued by more policemen and vans with screaming sirens. I have no idea how it ended, but there was certainly a lot of shouting and flag-waving, and the threat of violence.

Twice in one day?

2009-02-04T22:25:00.006+01:00

A quick follow-up to my recent posts:

In case you wondered about my reference to the Jeff Koons exhibition, here's a poster advertising it. You can see the giant balloon-dog here. It's actually only about three metres high, but still manages to combine playfulness and menace.
And now the inevitable Trabant, following my small-ad picture. You don't see very many that are still on the road, but quite often they're used as advertisements outside backpacker hostels and other tourist places. This one was in Jueterbog, south of Berlin, where we had a weekend break last autumn.
Finally, a picture I took in the same town. It was a freezing cold Sunday, everything was shut - even the main church - so I had to entertain myself by taking pictures of roads with amusing names: Sausage Court. Is that funny or is that funny? (Speaking as someone whose own home village has a White Dirt Lane and a Farm View Avenue, that is.)

Reasons (not) to feel homesick, Part 3

2009-02-04T10:53:00.004+01:00

The ambivalent title of this blog post will be explained if you watch the video above - or as much of it as you can stand! I love my home and the area around it, far more so since moving abroad than I did when I actually lived there, and when I watch this video, I feel a little thrill of "ah - there's the sign for Port Solent, and the strange sail-shaped thing in the middle of the road," but equally I'm reminded of all the trundling back and forth to school, work, the supermarket, and so on. I particularly like the heavy black clouds and the evidence of extended periods of roadworks shown in the video - it's amazing how much regional information is contained in even a seemingly simple (dare one say boring) scene like this! But despite the undeniable tedium factor, my overall emotion on seeing this clip is a happy one, a feeling of driving purposefully to see friends or accompanying my family on a trip somewhere. I guess you would have to be from Portsmouth to feel the same, though...

In the snow

2009-01-31T16:06:00.004+01:00

Berlin greeted the New Year returnees with lots of snow and freezing weather. Some pictures:

The Hauptbahnhof was decorated by a giant illuminated man, putting stars up on the facade. I don't know if he comes from a German fairytale or if it should just be obvious that he's a Christmas elf. He manages to combine being childlike with being giant and slightly scary. Though perhaps my visit to the Jeff Koons exhibition last week, full of super-sized children's toys, both beautiful and threatening, is influencing me here.

Our local S-Bahn station in thick snow. I love this view: a little chaotic, busy with people coming and going, lots of traffic, trains, trams and buses, industrial architecture, night-trains sleeping in the train hall, ready to go back to Ostbahnhof in the evening and then off to Poland or Russia in the evening. We cross this bridge every morning on the way to work, and the views are always changing.

A view from the 20th floor of the Debis building at Potsdamer Platz, where I teach. You can see the Television Tower and the twin spires of the Französischer Dom and the Deutscher Dom.

Another view from the same building. In the foreground, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy U-Bahn Station, which is rapidly being hidden by a new building project in front of it. The white teepee-like building is the Tempodrom, which hosts concerts and apparently has a salt-water spa inside. The square high-rise beyond it is the Postbank building, where I also teach. Unlike the Debis building, where the top floor is reserved for the CEO, the Postbank building has its canteen on the top floor, so everyone can enjoy the changing views while munching on Riesencurrywurst (as I did last Thursday) or something equally delectable.

A picture of a platform at Gleisdreieck U-Bahn station (surely we have to accept that this means Platform Triangle station) which looks far more mysterious than the scene did in real life.

And lastly, a small ad in our local supermarket. The seller must be an elderly person, and the price is just 120 euros - well, for a car some 20 years old, you wouldn't expect a huge amount, I suppose. But it's just a small reminder of what took place here before the Wall came down. The seller of this car may have waited years to get it, and then been delighted to own it, and now it's almost worthless. At least, in a state that only produced one type of car, that car had a classic design. I had a quick websearch and found that there are proud Trabant owners all over the world. I hope somebody buys it and gives it a little love.

The Shadow Giant

2009-01-31T15:23:00.007+01:00

The first blog entry of 2009, at long last. This is a short video I took one evening from our kitchen window. A man downstairs was decorating, with a bright builder's lamp behind him. I love seeing things like this, where something utterly normal becomes magical. I hope you like it too.

Return of the video...

2008-11-16T15:18:00.004+01:00

The videos in my last post didn't work at first, and I've only just fixed them. So I thought it was a perfect time to present another digital masterpiece: the journey up the stairs. Stay watching till the end - it unintentionally gained an extra shot of tension when I got near to the top.

We arrange for you lump offers for groups

2008-08-30T16:56:00.002+02:00

You see, you have to be careful with translations. The title of this entry comes from the website of the tourist office at Neuzelle, near Eisenhüttenstadt. So if you belong to a group, and your members are looking for a lump offer, this is clearly the place for you. But, as I often point out to my students, when they start saying 'oh but it's so peinlich to speak English in front of other people', the other person will almost always be glad you tried, and will probably be able to work out what you meant anyway. After all, I wouldn't really be sure what Pauschalangebote für Reisegruppen meant, and at least the concept of a lump offer makes you stop and think for a minute.

By the way, you've probably guessed that I'm planning a trip to Neuzelle. There's an incredibly fancy monastery church there which we're hoping to visit. Unlike most of the churches that lie between Berlin and Poland, this one wasn't damaged during the Second World War, which explains the survival of its paintings and general visual pomp. In fact, our guidebook describes the interior as Barock in überschwang, which seems to mean exuberant or flamboyant Baroque. I love the English language, but now that I live in a country whose citizens constantly use words like überschwang, I sometimes feel if that English is lacking in impact. German is a direct language (she generalized), and that can cause problems when Germans deal with people with more indirect ways of expressing themselves, but when you have words that literally bounce out of your mouth like überschwang, it's no wonder you end up being so clear about what you think.

I'm trying to collect my favourite word-discoveries in German, though I usually forget to write them down, which doesn't help with remembering them. At the moment, I'm collecting words that are much more literal in German than the translated word in English. Hmm, well that sounds interesting, Abbie. But really, it is - it ties into the directness thing. If we said hand-surface (Handfläche) instead of palm, and cooking-field (Kochfeld) instead of hob, and then carried this bolted-together say-what-you-mean approach to all our words, we would also find ourselves beating about the bush much less. The directness is at its most startling when you think of medical ailments. After all, diarrhoea could be a girl's name, or a plant, or a type of podium - but there's no doubt about Durchfall. Through-fall could be only one thing. So it's no surprise that the receptionists at my school complain that the air-conditioning dries out their Schleimhäute (slime-skin, or mucous membrane to you and me). I'm generalizing again, but I think most British people would say 'oh, my eyes and nose get awfully dry in here'. We wouldn't say slime, and we certainly wouldn't say mucous! My goodness, I think I shall have to go and sit down with a cold compress on my fevered brow after all that straight talking.

So, it's been a long wait for my latest blog entry, but I'm sure you feel refreshed and revitalized now... Perhaps you even have a bit more Schwung in your step!

A puzzle

2008-07-12T11:13:00.002+02:00

I went to a lesson last week with a lovely group who never like working on grammar or anything that looks like a school exercise, and one of them had a mathematical puzzle, which we translated into English and discussed until one of them came up with the solution - a very clever solution! Can you find it too?

The riddle of the ages

A salesman calls at the door of a flat where a mathematician lives. The salesman shows his wares to the mathematician, and the mathematician is interested in buying something. "However," he says "I will only buy something if you can solve a simple puzzle and tell me the ages of my three daughters." The salesman agrees.

First, the mathematician says "The product of their ages is 36." The salesman thinks about it for a moment, and says that he can't work out the answer on that information alone.

"True," says the mathematician. "Well, let me give you a little more help. The sum of their ages is the same as the house-number of this building." So the salesman runs down the stairs, has a look at the number, and runs back. He tells the mathematician the solution to the puzzle is still not clear.

"You're right," replies the mathematician. "Well, one last piece of information will allow you to give me the right answer: my eldest daughter plays the piano."

With this last piece of information, the salesman solves the problem, and the mathematician makes his purchase.

What are the ages of the mathematician's three daughters?

Cycling on a sunny day

2008-07-05T18:23:00.002+02:00

I went out for a cycle ride yeterday, and impressed myself by getting all the way to Alexanderplatz and back without even being too puffed out. I took some pictures on the way, which I'll show you here.

But first: pie! I made a pie on Thursday for J's birthday and felt so proud of it, and of the fact that the pieced-together jigsaw pastry didn't fall apart, that I had to take a picture. Isn't it pretty? It also tasted rather good, all thanks to Nigella and the Italian supermarket on the other side of town.

Here's a bus parked near the Rathaus. The sign says something along the lines of 'Berliners, would you like to see a wall again?'. It's advertising regular flights to China, to see one of the world's other famous walls.

Here's the Marx-Engels Forum, just west of Alexanderplatz and the television tower. You can read about it on Wikipedia. I can confirm from half-an-hour's observation that lots of people do indeed sit on Marx's knee to have their photos taken. Engels doesn't get quite so much attention.

Behind this famous pair are the remains of the Palast der Republik, the former parliament building of East Germany. The demolition of the building is taking a long time due to the presence of asbestos on the site, and could take until the end of this year.

The other side of the Palast der Republik. I'm sorry I never saw it in its original state, but thanks again to Wikipedia, you can see how it used to look outside and inside.

In the Nikolaiviertel, there's a very nice (and very touristy) teddy-bear shop. These four giant old-timers are not for sale, as far as I know.

But these littler ones are waiting to find good homes. If you squeeze their bellies, they snore! It really is very sweet, trust me.

After my marathon-like bicycle trek (at least twenty minutes each way, you know), I bought an Italian ice-coffee, involving hot espresso coffee and cold vanilla ice-cream, all organic of course, here at home in deepest coolest Friedrichshain, and sat in a tiny park at the end of our street to relax and refuel. A nice shady place to wind down in on a baking hot day.

East Berlin tourism, part two

2008-07-05T17:44:00.005+02:00

I realised after posting my last entry that I hadn't written about any other DDR history visits apart from the Stasi Museum. So, just for the sake of completeness, my week also included a guided tour of the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen, in the north-east of Berlin. I didn't take any pictures, but you can find lots on the web with a quick search. From May 1945, the site of a former canteen was used by the Soviet forces as a transit and collection camp, where about 20,000 prisoners were held before being transported to other Soviet camps, including Sachsenhausen. Conditions in the camp were terrible, and it's thought that more than 3000 people died in the camp itself, before it was closed in October 1946. After this, it became the Soviet Secret Police Prison, the underground cells being built by prisoners. Then, in 1951, after the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the site was turned into the remand prison for the Ministry of State Security. People suspected of any anti-state activities could be taken here, stripped of all their rights, denied access to legal help and forbidden to communicate with or even set eyes on any other prisoners. There are corridors of interrogation rooms, where prisoners would have their only human contact: months and months of recorded several-hour-long sessions carried out by skilled interrogators, who aimed not only to gain evidence with which to convict the held suspects, but also to find out information about the prisoners' friends, colleagues, acquaintances, family members, in order to bring in and try yet more offenders against the regime.

The visit was interesting, troubling, and enlightening, simultaneously. It's shocking to be in a place where so much cruelty was carried out. But at the same time, the fact that this site has been preserved and made into a memorial is a cause for hope. There is far more to Germany than the history of its two twentieth-century dictatorships, as the guide reminded us ('I hope you're also going to go and do something nice while you're visiting this city'), but seeing how the events of the past have been commemorated can teach all of us of the need to observe the use and abuse of state power. Just because we can recognise the unacceptable injustices carried out by the Stasi, this does not mean that our own societies are free from injustice.

On a related note, we read today that the waxwork figure of Hitler in the brand-new Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds was beheaded by a visitor, just a few hours after the opening of the site to visitors. There had already been a lot of debate about whether he should be included in the display. I suspect that he will not be replaced, as beheading Hitler would probably become a regular activity for anti-fascism activists.

Doing the East Berlin tourist thing

2008-06-29T15:39:00.005+02:00

It's been a week of historical visiting for me this week. As you have probably noticed, I'm very interested in the history of the city and the former East Germany. There is indeed more to life than thinking about past dictatorships, but nonetheless, it's interesting to see the places where historically important events took place, and to read or hear the stories of people who experienced them.

On Wednesday, I had no lesson in the afternon, so I took the U5 underground train all the way out to Magdalenen Strasse (it's actually only two stops further than our nearest U-Bahn station) to visit the Stasi Museum. The museum is in the heart of a huge complex of concrete buildings which once housed the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi. On the first floor, you can see an incredible range of devices for watching and listening to people suspected of anti-state activities, and on the second floor you can walk through the offices of Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi from 1957 until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Finally, the third floor gives information on individuals and groups of people who were persecuted, for protesting against the regime, attempting to escape to the west, or failing to conform in some other way.

The building still looks appropriately depressing.

Erich Mielke's office.

A map in the main conference room, showing Chemnitz as it was known from 1953 to 1990. I heard recently on Deutsche Welle that the enormous bust of Karl Marx in Chemnitz has been encased in a white cube containing scaffolding platforms which enable visitors to climb up and look him in the eye. The project is called The Temporary Museum of Modern Marx, as it will only exist until the end of August.

Finally, here's an example of an East German schoolbook showing children visiting soldiers on the Tag der Volksarmee.

To finish with something completely different, I baked biscuits this morning, a process which involved a certain amount of cursing when the super-duper cookie-gun failed to work (the results look an awful lot better on the cookie-gun box than they did on my baking tray). The ones you see here were cut out with a Koelsch glass and decorated using the utmost limits of my imagination. No, really. The trained observer will spot some J's and A's, indicating the likely consumers.

Now it's time to stop blogging and start mentally preparing for the BIG MATCH tonight. Will Germany beat Spain and win the European Cup? Although es ist mir wirklich egal, as they say here, I'd like my friends and students to be happy, and so I'll be cheering Germany.

Brandenburg an der Havel

2008-06-21T15:45:00.003+02:00

Back in May, we visited Brandenburg an der Havel, to get away from the grime and bustle of the big city for a short holiday in the countryside. I actually love living here amid grime and bustle, and I'm happy that we live in one of Berlin's more chaotic and grubby areas, compared to the very polished and exclusive-boutique-laden parts of the city. But variety is the spice of life, they say, and it's all too easy, as an expat, to stay in the city, where there are always hundreds of different things to do, instead of hopping on the train and seeing a new place beyond the zone where all the cool things happen.
I won't try to explain too much about the town, but it's built across a number of islands and lakes, and combines medieval buildings with socialist architecture and the latest post-1990 wave of development that I've seen continuing to sweep across Berlin even in the nine months we've been here.

These three sculptures were on the facade of a shop on one of Brandenburg's main streets. They represent Light, Strength (a man, of course), and Warmth, so I can only assume that this building formerly housed an electricity board office. It's clear from their lines and heroic faces that they date from the DDR period. I'm glad they are still there, looking down on the shoppers, even though the era that produced them, an era of state provision and state everything else, has ended. Even more so than when I lived in Cologne, I feel the presence of the past around me in every place I visit, in the architecture, the memorials, the empty spaces of the old border which are only now being filled with new buildings. It's true anywhere you go, I realise, including Britain, but in Britain the events concealed or commemorated in towns and cities are generally much older, more formalised into stories - and anyway, other people's lives and histories are always so much more fascinating than one's own.

The picture below, however, could just as easily be a British scene. On the left you can see an old mill converted into stylish apartments with balconies and river views. On the right, the transformation is still to come.

Finally, a picture taken nearby the previous one, showing a fairly new recreational area. I like this picture because it shows so much that it good about Germany. Towns invest in nice places for people to play and relax, and in general, the citizens keep things looking clean and pleasant for everybody else to use. It's also good to see that money is being spent on providing good facilities for people who are often suffering from the high unemployment and low wages that are still a huge problem in Germany, and particularly so in the former DDR. But aside from all that, the dark sky, promising heavy rain, and the sunlit Spring beauty of the scene below, also gripped me. A simple place in the midst of dramatic circumstances.

Quick picture update

2008-06-10T22:05:00.006+02:00

Was my last post really in February? I can't believe it was so long ago. Here are some pictures of things I've seen between them and now...

The garden in our courtyard looking parched in the sun a few weeks ago. I often wish I was still small enough to go on the springy animals but so far I've resisted the urge to try them out.

A beautiful flower in the huge park at Potsdam.

And some dramatic horses, not from the Brandenburger Tor, as you might expect, but from the Wellington Arch in London, which I visited in April with lovely Martin.

-----------------

It's been hot here for the last three weeks or so, thirty degrees every day, and I'm hoping for some nice English-style rain tomorrow. I'm not a killjoy - summer weather is nice from time to time - but sometimes enough is enough! I actually like rain: it's cool, wet, refreshing, it makes plants grow and after it everything looks clean and fresh again. It drums pleasingly on roofs and windows and it looks at its best when viewed from behind a book in a nice warm cafe. What's not to like?
Supporting evidence: our street looking all shiny and new after the rain, back in May.

Strange sounds at the park

2008-02-19T13:26:00.003+01:00

My first post in three months, and my first ever video post. I took this video using my lovely new camera at Volkspark Friedrichshain on Sunday. The lake was frozen, and people were skimming chunks of ice out across the surface. I liked the combination of an ordinary scene with unearthly noises, and I hope you will too.

The end of a busy week

2007-11-02T20:52:00.000+01:00

It's Friday evening, and I'm tired but happy that I've worked every day this week - a good start to a career which I know will have very changeable earnings from week to week. It's reassuring to begin, at least, with a week in which I really am making ends meet instead of just raiding my Sparschwein (piggy bank) in order to have a nice time. Having said that, I managed to buy a new bag and two books about Berlin today (but the second book was a total steal, only 1.99 and packed with pictures of lots of the most interesting buildings in the city). So I spent more than I earned - excellent! However, I will enjoy reading the books. And I needed the bag - of course.
As I walked home at about half past four this afternoon, I noticed for the first time just how dark it is, now that our hour lost at the weekend has kicked in. But it was so mild and dreamy, with golden-orange leaves falling from the trees, just like the rain, and carpeting the pavements and streets. The rain was gentle, more like a taste or a cool touch on the skin, and although the streets were chocked-up with traffic, the mood seemed calm and pleasing.
The rain started when I was in the middle of the Holocaust Memorial, near the Brandenburg Gate. I don't have a picture to hand, but you've probably heard of it - a sea of stone blocks that you can walk among. I don't know if I can say that the link to the Holocaust was obvious, that the sculpture itself signified that terrible event to me, but I did find that when I walked through the stones and found myself almost drowning in their midst, the feeling of a cold, grey, regimented system came to me, and I was glad to get back to the edge into the freedom and open space of the surrounding area. It's very cleverly designed, because from the outside, you see that the stones become gradually taller towards the centre, but what you can't see until you enter is that the floor also drops down, so you quite suddenly find yourself surrounded by blocks some three metres high. This is where the feeling of being trapped or disorientated comes from. It's also interesting that the blocks are featureless and seemingly uniform, but they have been set into the ground at ever-so-slightly crooked angles, reminding one of crooked teeth or perhaps the human element of institutionalised cruelty.
One lovely thing about visiting this memorial is that it also becomes a place to explore and play, and you can hear parents attempting to reclaim their children, while glimpsing snatched views of other visitors crossing the many paths all around you and being immediately swallowed up again by the stones. There is a big list of things that you are not allowed to do in the memorial posted on each side, unfortunately only in German, which can't help the foreign visitors much. I know the site was vandalised in the past, and it is currently supervised by security guards, for obvious reasons, but it's still amusingly German to see just how long the list of forbidden activities is. You may not cycle, roller-blade, or skateboard through the stones; you may not spring from one to another; you may not sunbathe on top of the stones; you may not play music, amplified or otherwise, and of course you also may not shout and generally cause a disturbance. And you enter the site at your own risk. It's all obvious and right that these rules should be in place, but it seems a shame that such things have to be so codified and widely broadcast.
This morning I visited Potsdamer Platz, after teaching a new group in one of the many shiny high-rises (documented in my excellent purchase - it was worth it, you see). It's totally astonishing to think that this area, now strangely sterile but covered in glass-and-steel commercial buildings in all different shapes and sizes, was once a no-man's-land between East and West Berlin. There is a good display there, with a section of the wall and information plaques explaining the history that took place before the multi-screen cinemas and huge office blocks sprang up. And also an enterprising young man dressed in East German military uniform, offering you the opportunity to have your picture taken with him for a euro. I hope I don't need to say that I didn't take up this offer. It would be interesting to know his connection to the time before 1989. After all, everything is growing here like crazy, and it feels like a thoroughly up-to-date European city, but it was only 18 years ago, well within most adults' memories, that people lived in a divided city under two very different regimes.
Yesterday I taught a new group, and one of my students, a little older than me, was searching for an English word. 'I know it in Russian,' he said. This applies to many English-learners from the former East Germany, and I imagine that most of them don't have any cause to speak Russian in their lives today, but it interests me to see this history being present in the classroom from day to day. It is, of course, lucky for English teachers that the former Soviet Union created a large number of people who need English lessons today. and on that note, I'll close, and begin my weekend.

Life in Berlin

2007-10-28T21:22:00.000+01:00

It's been one of those weeks where everything changes all around you - a week that seems to last much longer than the ones that fly by when you're in a settled routine. In fact, last weekend, which I spent sorting, packing, and getting my last fix of British TV (Strictly Come Dancing - how will I cope not seeing who gets kicked out this week?), seems absolutely ages ago. Since finding out that Willie Thorne isn't going to make it to the big dance-off final, we've driven half-way across Europe, moved into a new home, and started working in new jobs. No wonder it feels like a long time, then.
The new flat is in what they call an Altbau - an old-fashioned building with very high ceilings - and it's in a little area that's absolutely packed with bars and cafes. This quarter of the city is called Friedrichshain, and I've read that it's one of the up-and-coming places to be. But then, the hippest parts of town seem to change every year or two anyway - and I'm certainly not one of the hippest people, and wouldn't be, wherever I was, I'm pretty sure. It's strange, as when you leave our little network of bar- and cafe-lined streets, you immediately find yourself in the most heavily-graffiti-ed, squatter-inhabited place you can imagine. And yet, walking along with you on your way to the U-bahn, or the organic supermarket, are young families, students, young people with dogs (surprisingly many of these), all being totally normal. The mood is like Jericho in Oxford, but the look is like the most depressed council estate. Berlin seems to be a paradoxical place, where everything is happening, everything is growing, and at the same time, half the population doesn't have enough work or enough money. A Berliner I met today told me that Berlin has the slowest walking speed of any capital, because, he said, people don't have anything to hurry to. It's certainly true that people seem more laid-back here than in Cologne.
Now for some pictures. Yesterday we walked through a park with a fantastic children's farm. You can buy bags of food and feed the animals yourself, and as you can see here, the animals are extremely happy about this.
We crossed the river over the Oberbaum Bridge, which used to be one of the border crossing points between the Soviet and American sectors. It was not a good day for a view! There's a lot of development going on here, and a weird mix of derelict buildings and glass-walled high-rises.
Today we went to another park, called Treptower Park, to see the huge memorial erected by the Russians to honour Red Army soldiers who died in Berlin. Over 7000 are buried there, and there were very many Russian tourists who had come to see it. This picture doesn't really show just how big it is: there are several square grass areas, flanked by stone panels showing scenes of heroic soldiers and workers, each accompanied by a quote from Joseph Stalin, leading to a tower topped by a massive bronze sculpture of a soldier carrying a sword in one hand, with a child held in his other arm.
This is just a small sample of the new things we've been experiencing, but it's probably enough for now. So now it's off to the internet cafe across the road to upload it all - after all, you know that I like my blog to be fully updated at all times...

Off again!

2007-10-15T17:14:00.000+02:00

It's confirmed today: we're off to Berlin! We've booked our crossing from Harwich to the Hook of Holland next Monday, and we should be in Berlin by Tuesday evening. So just one more week here in England before another big change. I'm very excited about it. Lots to do before we go, most importantly sorting out all my boxes of clutter and trying to select just as many essential travel items as will fit in the car. So it's great that I've just bought yet another pair of new shoes and a raincoat. I don't feel like I have a lot of stuff - but every time I've had to move house or country it always turns out to be a different story. Great raincoat, though.

Dreams

2007-09-12T21:15:00.000+02:00

This depressed chap was spotted on a wall in Rotterdam. Despite his message and drooping shoulders, I think he'd cheer up if something nice happened. As Oscar Hammerstein, and subsequently Captain Sensible, said, you gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, then how you gonna have a dream come true?

A view from the other side

2007-08-18T18:56:00.000+02:00

The other side of Southampton Water, that is. If you have a sharp eye or at least a good imagination, you will be able to see the Spinnaker Tower on the horizon. I took this picture from Calshot Castle, on a damp and rainy Sunday about two weeks ago, very like today's creditable attempt at a damp and rainy Saturday. Amazing how long it took us to get there, compared with how close we were to Portsmouth having arrived.
We're dozing and putting off various cleaning, packing and organizing activities, and the lady downstairs is listening to Dido and Aeneas. It's peaceful and quiet, and a very nice antidote to an extremely hectic week.

Beautiful sunset

2007-07-31T22:26:00.000+02:00

This is the view from the steps to our flat, looking west. You can see the spire of St. Jude's Church and the top part of the Spinnaker Tower. It's lovely on a sunny evening.

Hurst Castle in the mist, and a blog debut

2007-06-09T22:24:00.000+02:00

Today we went to Hurst Castle, a fort built by Henry VIII to defend the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, and extended in subsequent centuries. It's an amazing structure on the end of a long shingle spit of land. You have to walk for half an hour along the shingle path, or alternatively take a little ferry, which itself takes a good ten minutes to navigate between all the pleasure boats and out to the castle.
Today, there was a thick mist clinging to the land and sea, limiting the view to 50 metres or so. This made the looming appearance of the castle at the end of the ferry-trip very impressive.
The brick-built sections you can see in this picture are Victorian, but the central grey part is Herny's castle. In November and December 1648, Charles I was held here as a prisoner, before being taken to Windsor and executed. It was strange to be in the same room that was King Charles' home in such unpleasant circumstances. He used to exercise by walking up and down the spit which we walked along on our route back. The castle was also used to imprison a Catholic priest called Paul Atkinson from 1700 until his death in 1729.
The castle was also used for defence in the Second World War, and this picture shows what is thought to be the only surviving WWII garrison theatre.
And finally, here is Jeremy, standing on one of the bastions of the castle and formally making his first photographic appearance in HaveBearWillTravel.
It was a perfect day out.

Why are weekends so short?

2007-05-21T23:09:00.001+02:00

It was a long day at work today, and there's another one coming tomorrow, so I thought it would be nice to see a picture taken from the top of Old Winchester Hill, looking south, with Portsmouth hidden over the horizon.

Bread and Circuses

2007-05-20T20:49:00.001+02:00

Actually, bread is just about the only we failed to buy at the Southsea Food Festival today. This picture shows our hoard: beer, sausages, broad beans, pickles, cheese... And of course the tomato plants.
Then, after a quick stop at Clarence Pier for doughnuts (well, a girl has to eat you know), we went to the Moscow State Circus on Southsea Common. Totally amazing - a troupe of acrobats somersaulting on springboards and pogo sticks, a trapeze team, jugglers, drummers, dancers, clowns and a juggler who kept dropping his balls. One of the trapeze artists missed his catch and hit the net instead of swinging back to his bar, and afterwards they all looked devastated, no matter how hard the well-meaning audience clapped. I suppose they just felt disappointed, but naturally we couldn't avoid making jokes about one-way tickets to Siberia. You see how culturally sensitive I am?

No Skylarking!

2007-05-16T23:27:00.000+02:00

Well, after a break of seven months, it seems only appropriate to post twice in one day. This lovely sign appears in Clarence Pier funfair, by a ride that twirls you round and round, on a thing which is also going round and round but in the opposite direction. No skylarking!

My other piece of advice for this evening is: join Facebook! You will find old friends, as it trawls through your email address book for you, so you don't have to do anything. Then you will be able to write on people's walls, and poke people - even complete strangers.

Not dead but lazy...

2007-05-16T07:53:00.000+02:00

Well, maybe not exactly lazy, but I have been busy, settling into a new life back in the UK, a new job, new home, and so on, and so I haven't blogged for a while. I'm in Portsmouth, teaching English and citizenship in two schools here, and so far I've taught people from:
Hungary
France
Italy
Oman
UAE
Saudi Arabia
Poland
Czech Republic
Russia
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Iraq
Afghanistan
and probably a few other places, as the students change every week and it's hard to keep up sometimes. So, it's funny, but although I've come home from an exciting life abroad, I actually find myself meeting a huge variety of people and learning more about some of the world's cultures than I did in Germany.

And there is another land to visit from here: this is Shanklin on the Isle of Wight - such a lovely place, shakey trains, sandy beaches (unlike Portsmouth), and a feeling that time stopped about 50 years ago.

Sight-seeing

2006-10-29T22:28:00.000+01:00

Hello, I've been seeing the sights recently, with trips to Bad Münstereifel and Siegburg. The first two pictures show Bad Münstereifel, a really pretty town in the Eifel region, which appears to be famous not only for its complete town wall, which is very impressive, but also for the fact that Heino lives there. If you don't know who Heino is, you're probably not German. If you're curious, have a look for him on youtube as it's very funny and at least he seems to have a good sense of humour.
The next two pictures show Siegburg, which we visited today. The abbey is mostly closed to the public, apart from the church, but the view from the gardens down to the Siebengebirge (Seven Hills) and Bonn is just gorgeous. And the last picture shows Abbie in the Abbey gardens, just so you can see that I'm still just the same as before and also still wearing those ancient trousers (I still think of them as 'the black trousers').

October update

2006-10-18T08:53:00.000+02:00

This is just a quick post to say hello to GR 1.75! I hope you find this blog interesting - and maybe you'll want to start your own! Yesterday was a big day for blogging in Britain. Have fun and see you next week!

The rain in Koblenz falls mostly on ... me.

2006-08-27T23:19:00.000+02:00

Today we went down to Koblenz, at the top of the Romantic Rhine (Cologne is located in the much less romantic but at least as interesting northern industrial part), and it rained and rained, forcing us to shelter in various public spaces, including an arch and two cafes. So here's a rainy close-up of the view from the arch to give you a feeling for a wet Sunday at the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel. To my shame I didn't have any wine, but at least this gives a good reason to go back before too long.
Another good reason to go back is the Ehrenbreitstein Castle on the far bank, which looks dead impressive, especially with brooding skies above and behind it.
And here's a fanstastic old sweetshop which now seems to be a fantastic dancing-gear shop. And no, I haven't done any tango in Germany for absolutely ages... But I'm having fun, and enjoying starting to plan the next, 2007 step out of Germany into another country...
(This is what they call a cliff-hanger ending, to make you come back and read this blog another time!)

August update

2006-07-24T21:50:00.000+02:00

So it's been ages again and I wonder if anybody is still reading this blog except me! It's been a lovely weekend and so I thought I would share with my many readers some of the things I find to amuse myself when I'm not teaching or spending quality time with Deutsche Bahn.

Friday: dinner with a new neighbour in my building (a teacher from my school) and Jeremy. Abbie's classic risotto followed by genuine cheddar cheese brought back from England last weekend (now THERE'S something you can't get over here - there"s a cheese called cheddar but it's not the real thing).

Saturday: first, the Turkish market by Florastrasse, where you can buy ridiculous quantities of fruit and veg for not very many euros. It's quite a small market, but absolutely packed with stalls and shoppers, and it has a very friendly atmosphere. I have lots of gorgeous yellow-red plums which belong in some kind of pie. Then, later in the afternoon, it was the local Strassenfest (street-party) for Alexianerstrasse. I was quite excited about it, as I could see the stage from my kitchen window, but by the time I left in the evening to go out, the only highlight had been a large jolly man with a white beard singing 'Linda-loo' (refrain 'oh Linda-Linda-Linda-loo') to a very loud backing track. Some of the other neighbours were really getting into it, but only, I think, because they'd had plenty of Koelsch, which makes even the worst karaoke nightmare singer sound a little better.

Sunday: our planned excursion down the Romantic Rhine was postponed due to inclement weather, and we found ourselves in the chocolate museum in Cologne instead. As everyone says, the amount of free chocolate is disappointing, but the displays and mini chocolate production line are very interesting. And the architecture is gorgeous - a mix of modern glass structures with an old commercial harbour building. Then after the nearly obligatory Sunday brauhaus feasting (really, I don't do it every Sunday, honest), and a siesta (drinking at lunchtime...), it was time to visit the Nippes Nacht, a music festival in a trendy suburb in the north of the city. We heard some great klezmer music from outside a flower shop which was packed with listeners, and after a while (it was a bit rainy out there) we wandered off and heard jazz and other music in different bars and cafes. And then - cultural slumming is necessary sometimes - we finished the evening with (shhhhhhh)...

...McDonalds. Which if you only have it once in a blue moon is okay really! I have promised myself I will do some exercise tomorrow to atone...

We came, we saw, we drew

2006-06-21T21:22:00.000+02:00

Cologne has been interestingly full of loud-mouthed England fans for the last 48 hours, although most have gone now. I kept wanting to strike up conversations with them, but then the following factors would dissuade me from closer involvement:
(a) T-shit emblazoned with 1966 - 2006 THE FORTY YEAR WAR
(b) skinhead + sunburn combination
(c) tattoos showing women wearing bondage gear
(d) first overheard utterance: "ah... fuckit"
(e) second overheard utterance: well, you can guess, I think...
So I saw but I can't say I actually bonded. The square outside the station (called, in true German style, Bahnhofvorplatz, or "the square in front of the station") was covered in spilled beer and bottles and rubbish this morning, but no worse than after Karneval. I think the fans sleeping in the middle of the station amused the locals - this isn't normal here! The whole thing was fairly peaceful although I saw on the BBC website there was a riot-police incident when Brits climbed what the reporter simply called "a fountain" but which is one of Cologne's best-loved city symbols.
I experienced most of the match, or rather, MISSED most of the match from within a tram stuck behind another (broken-down) tram in a tunnel at Neusser Strasse, though at least I received live text-message updates on the score. After the game, I fell asleep to the gentle purr of the supervising police helicopters. According to a report on Deutsche Welle, one fan, when asked if she minded this airborne observation, said “Nah, it makes us feel special!" So that's all right then.

Greetings from FIFA WM-Stadt Köln!

2006-06-18T20:14:00.000+02:00

Oh dear, yet again it's been ages since I've blogged... But now that several thousand England fans are about to arrive in Cologne, I have to do my bit by getting back in touch with the e-world. This morning, outside the main station in Cologne, we found a group of about fifty British police officers. They seemed very friendly and happy to be on a trip abroad (perhaps especially so because it's 30 degrees here and nice and sunny too), and two of them smiled for my camera. There's no sign of any trouble - hopefully there won't be, given that 3000 of the worst troublemakers have been grounded in the UK. There are lots and lots of fans here, especially from the Czech Republic and Ghana (they played yesterday in Cologne). My third picture shows a typical shop window display in the city: absolutely everything is football-themed, even things like expensive jewellery, where the connection with the beautfiul game seems tenuous to say the least.
Finally, here's a picture from the summer fair for my part of town: the Deeperjasse Kirmes. This band was playing Beatles covers and Kölsch pop songs. It wasn't the best band I've ever heard, but they were having fun and everyone was singing along. And when the weather's good, the beer is delicious, and the scent of Reibekuchen (fried potato cakes: hot, fatty, potato-ey, and just plain WRONG in every sense except that they taste amazing, especially in the open air) is in the air, perhaps that's all that matters.

Brühl

2006-03-05T16:59:00.000+01:00

Today we went to the Schloss Augustusburg: here are some pictures. Brühl is a town 15 minutes' train journey from Cologne, and it's one of the sights I see every time I go from Cologne to Bonn or back again, but today is the first time I've alighted to see what it's really like. It's nice to be out in the countryside again: somehow I seem to have been rather city-bound ever since moving here, maybe because there's still such a lot to see and do in Cologne, and also because I'm working so hard (yes, really!) that I often don't feel like going far at the weekends. But the spring is coming, I now occasionally leave AND come home when the sun is in the sky, and so more adventures outside the lovely Colonia Aggripina should be on the cards soon. Finally, here's a picture of me teaching. It's not the best picture of myself that I've ever seen, but the fact that I didn't know it was being taken helps, I think. One of my students (you can never trust these IT people and their gadgets) took some pictures and a VIDEO of me during a lesson, using his mobile phone, and he gave them to me on a disk last week. I think I was reading a longish article to them (I believe this is called a "cloze" text in the business) and so that's why I didn't notice.
Well, it's time to stop and get some sleep before getting the 0756 to Bonn AGAIN! I used to go to work for 10.00 in the old days: now I'm always on the road at a time beginning with 7. But I pride myself on never actually waking up until a time beginning with a 9.

Don't worry, be happy

2006-02-15T23:20:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure which church this is, but I think it's actually a museum of church art, and so this cheering message might be more of an artistic statement than a religious call. The face to the left of this DON'T WORRY face says something in Latin - that's the side I see every work-day morning and evening as I grumble my way to and from work. But it was only today that I decided to explore some of the nearby backstreets and saw this rather cheerful English side. I looked at the next side to see if it said BE HAPPY but either the lights weren't working or it doesn't say anything.
There's acually something slightly discomfiting about seeing a big sign in capitals in an unexpected place telling you not to worry. I had the feeling that I might see a road-works sign or a painted garage door across the street saying BE VERY VERY AFRAID as a follow-up...

Groovy people on pillars

2006-02-12T22:16:00.000+01:00

Düsseldorf has loads of cool sculptures, including various people on advertising pillars, like this woman and child. I suspect the birdy flim is very bad. Lots of lovely art museums in the city - hope to go back soon!
By the way, tomorrow I'm going to take an Engliish-language edition of Cosmo into one of my classes, at the special request of my students... Maybe some interesting vocabulary is on the cards...

So much for resolutions

2006-02-12T22:05:00.000+01:00

Ah well now, it seems to be mid-February and my second posting of 2006. Well, that just shows you my relationship with New Year's Resolutions. I _have_ been thinking about things to put in the blog ever since coming back to Cologne at the start of January, but somehow there never seems to be enough time. There's work, then there's my favourite evening pastime of being-knackered-after-work, and then when I finally have both the time and the energy to go out and play, I usually do. So the blog suffers. But now that I have DSL (German for "broadband"), it should be easier.
Today we went to Düsseldorf, which feels bigger than Cologne somehow even thought it has about half as many inhabitants. So I'm attaching a picture of some nice geese just opposite the Rathaus. (That's the town hall. You knew that. I know.) And a picture of me by the Rhine. There WILL be more soon!!!
Abbie x

New Year!!!

2006-01-02T02:02:00.000+01:00

Hello again. I have had some comments from SOME READERS who say that my blog doesn't have enough entries! Well, I've been BUSY you know!
But to make these people happy, here are a few pictures to bring this blog into a new year in an appropriate style.
Firstly, two fat saggy men posing as chairs in Schipol Airport.
Secondly, a person who JUST MIGHT be the person who complained about lack of blog-activity, looking like a myserious christmas angel outside a hotel in Amsterdam.
And thirdly, Christmas Clanfield with late-afternoon sun and rainbow.
So I hope this will please THOSE PEOPLE just a little.
Happy New Year!!!
(And I promise I'll try harder to keep the tales of the lady, the tefl students and the bear more updated in 2006. Really.)
Abbie xxx

Home again home again

2005-12-24T00:18:00.000+01:00

Hello again - I'm home! It's lovely to be back at home with my family again, even though I love my new life in Köln. It's Christmas, there's a tree, there are mince pies, there will be (best of all) Christmas pudding soon! So here are some Christmassy pictures from Germany. Firstly, a group of teachers on a mission to Siegburg's Medieval Christmas market (Angela, Jenny, Lisa, me), and then Wendy and me at Bonn's Christmas market. The medieval hot drink of choice is mead (or Meth, in German, not to be confused with, well, you know), while in Bonn it's Glühwein, natürlich!
By the time I get back to Germany in January, all the markets will have been cleared away and we'll have to find new ways to entertain ourselves at the weekends. But then, after four weeks of Glühwein, Dampfnudeln, Reibekoochen, Waffeln and crepes, perhaps it's time for a bit of restraint. She says, two days before Christmas...
I'm looking forward to seeing my England-based friends again over the holidays, dancing tango (about time too), seeing Amsterdam, eating lots of my mum's cooking and baking, walking on Butser Hill, and not commuting to Bonn! This is my opportunity to see if all the things I thought about England during the past two months were true...

Honey-honey ram-a-lam-a-lam

2005-12-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

I haven't written for ages because during school hours I don't have much time to do non-teaching things on the computers, and after school I usually feel much too lazy to go to the internet cafe even though it's two minutes away from my flat - but this is because I often leave the house at 7 and get home at 7 (especially on the days when I go to Bonn _twice_, which involves four hours in trains and trams - ah, Wednesdays...).

But this week I have either more or less excuse for non-e-contact, depending on how you look at it, because I've been on the sick list with a cold, and have been confined to base-camp with only The Moonstone, a huge back-catalogue of BBC radio dramas (hooray) and hot mugs of honey-and-lemon for entertainment. Now I know other people's illnesses, particularly minor and trifling ones like colds, are very boring, but let me assure you that my sore throat and mysterious need to sleep twelve hours a day are very interesting. Well, to me anyway.

The title of this blog episode is the title of a song I've just heard on WDR2. Lots of pop music in Germany is American or British, but I was so baffled by this one that I'm not sure if it might be designed for a European market. Or maybe I just don't know enough about life and love yet to appreciate its significance. Normally I listen to WDR3, which is like Radio 3 with more news and politics, but just now they were broadcasting a play with lots of shouting, which is the kind of thing I dislike in English but find even worse when I have no clue what the shouting is about. I love listening to German speech on this station because I know enough about the topic to begin to grasp what the announcer is talking about even though lots of the words are still unknown to me. So the average announcement goes something like this "something something something Schubert something Winterreise something der Leiermann something Peter Schreier". Which is about all you need to know. This technique applied to the news headlines is even better. I can usually understand who has gone where to talk to whom about what, but I don't know what either of them thinks about it. One thing I do know is that there's a Fleischskandal in Germany at the moment - I just don't know whether I ought to be worried about it and watch my Fleisch-consumption more carefully.

A strange effect of being in Germany - and, more importantly, of spending most of my working hours listening to people whose English is not perfect and thinking about the mistakes my students make and how to work on them - is that my English is becoming strangely German. Or at least a bit Denglish (which I hadn't heard before I came here but is the German version of Franglais). So this afternoon I found myself on the point of saying "Do you had that before?" instead of "Did you have that before?". Until last April I didn't even know what an auxiliary verb was. Now, eight short action-packed months later, I've already lost my ability to use them in my own mother-tongue! Soon I'll be getting out of party invitations by saying "I don't can come". It's not just me: one of my friends at the school told me she'd been working "by" Linguarama for two years, the other week. But if you're a person who listens all day, then you are inevitably going to pick up the things your students say... But it's very helpful for learning German, because it shows us (English teachers) that in German you _do_ work "by" your company and you _have_ been working there "since" two years (another regular).

I'm writing this wearing my first non-UK haircut. I had a German-speaking chaperone who told the hairdresser roughly what to do, but it has ended up a bit shorter than I expected. You don't think about learning how to say "layered a bit at the back please but not too short" in the first stages of learning a new language. Actually, I usually feel pretty helpless jargon-wise even in a British hair salon and I'm always surprised by the end result so perhaps the language barrier doesn't make much difference.

I'm aware that the tango-content of this blog is rather low despite promises to the contrary in my mission-statement. All I can say is that I've only had a few weekends here so far (about 4 in my new flat), and there's no way (like, no-way-Jose kind of no way) that I can go out dancing in the week because I'm not a tough enough cookie to do that and still manage to catch the 0738 to Bonn the next morning. But I have been once, to a tango/salsa/ballroom dance night at the university, which was nice, and I will definitely do some more. But I'm also doing lots of other non-tango things, including things I probably wouldn't have done back at home, such as joining a church choir (well I know it's not the craziest pastime but the singing is nice) and going to yoga (it's even Yoga For Women, which cranks the alternative-lifestyle aspect up an extra half-level for me), and going on days out with friends. Oh, and having a flat-warming party and dinners and things, which I would have done at home too. I expect the tango will increase as my German improves and I get more used to my job (all teachers spend the first months of their careers with monster lesson-planning loads, and after you've survived the first six months or so, it gets better - I'm told) and don't have to spend so long on it and don't feel quite so pooped at the end of a day doing it. But don't misunderstand me - I really really like it. Sometimes I doubt myself and wonder if I have enough knowledge (well, it's always going to be tricky starting a new career), but quite often I finish a lesson thinking that it's nice to be paid for making people laugh and generally having a nice time talking about life, the universe and everything. And playing games! To be paid for trundling down to Bonn, taking the glass lift to the 35th floor and playing the "Office Scruples" game (with plenty of well-directed and constructive feedback at the end, and all part of a carefully-structured and goal-orientated course, you know), seems like a rather nice way to make a living. No emails (except from students sending me their homework sometimes), no profit margins (well, there are but they're not my problem), no unexpected impositions of digital print-on-demand for short print-runs, no depressed demotivated dejected griping about how much we don't like our jobs - because I think most of us at the school rather like what we do (even though tefl teaching isn't a path to riches).

Well after all that, it's time to stop, retune the radio, and take my new haircut to bed. Tomorrow's tasks include going to a museum (haven't decided which one yet) and the Christmas Market at Siegburg, which is supposed to be one of the really good ones. Hooray for Germany at Christmastime!

Quick picture update!

2005-12-01T19:44:00.000+01:00

Hello, this is a very quick picture-burst for you...

Here is a picture of Julia, Katja, and their dog Nosey, with in the background a fine view of the Rhine. No, really. I have to find out how to use my camera properly.
And here are the views without the people to confuse the camera.

Here's a sad place I go to every Monday to spread Business English. The people are nice when I get there, but the journey is rather depressing. I don't think the sun ever shines here.
Here's my kitchen!
And here are some very nice teachers drinking Glühwein at the Christmas market outside the Dom. I really must find out how to adjust this camera.

2005-11-13T17:48:00.000+01:00

Here are two pictures of the famous (among Cologne's TEFL teachers at least) Deutsche Post Tower, in Bonn. It's super-high (40 storeys) and is made almost entirely out of glass. So everyone works very hard...
The lifts go so fast that your ears pop, and you have to programme them in advance, so you can't change your mind on the way up or down. It's very efficient, you know! I have to admit to feeling a certain sneaky pleasure whenever I find something that _doesn't_ work efficiently. There's a good English word for this feeling: Schadenfreude.

Soon the Christmas markets will be opening! Now that I've been in my flat for a week, and now that it has lights and blinds (thanks to lovely colleagues who help me drill, wire, and bash), I'm starting to feel properly at home here. And by now I've already met some of my students two or three times, so every lesson isn't such a surprise as I know who will be there and what kind of things they need. But there is still a LOT to learn, about teaching, about business English, about German (I haven't really had much time to learn yet and I always have to guess my articles and plurals, and verb-endings, and...).
And I haven't done any tango yet!

The first visitors

2005-11-09T11:17:00.000+01:00

In haste, because I have to go and catch a train back to Köln now, here are two pictures of Charles and Amina - my first visitors! We were drinking the first cups of coffee and tea brewed using the brand-new kettle and brand-new mugs and sitting on the just-built-by-me IKEA chairs. Sing ho for IKEA, and especially the Kitchen Startbox 1! And now all my belongings have nice names like Räst and Fjällbo and Tanya.

Outside the flat!

2005-11-09T11:11:00.000+01:00

And here are two pictures showing the view from my balcony! This looks out onto the garages at the back of the building but it's nice and peaceful, and actually the view of the backs of the buildings on the next street is very nice on an autumn evening. It will be nice to have breakfast and dinner out there when the weather is better! And when I'm no longer leaving and coming home when it's dark. It's hard to believe that I get up before 7 almost every day now! I used to be Ms Ten O' Clock in the good old days. But every day, although it feels pretty bad struggling out of bed, it's always refreshing and interesting to be on my way to a new class. Especially if I know what I'm going to do with them.

Inside the flat

2005-11-09T11:01:00.000+01:00

Well, I have had hardly any time to email friends or update my blog, and today, when I finally have a long break between classes, I find I have to go back to the school to prepare for a surprise cover lesson! So this will be short once again. But there's time to include a few pictures. This one shows my new flat during the unpacking process...

And here are two shots of "after". But it isn't finished yet! And yes, I do keep banging my head on the ceiling, especially when I get up in the mornings.

Sunday

2005-10-30T14:14:00.000+01:00

Just a quick one today as I have time to post my last few messages here. So here's a picture of my bear in my room in the house where I'm staying.

Wednesday 26 October

2005-10-30T14:12:00.000+01:00

It's hard to believe that only a few days have passed since I wrote the last entry. I have been through several weeks' worth of emotions since Saturday night! Sunday was a dull and very rainy day. The flea market (note: NOT an antiques market) was utterly average and no more interesting than a British one would have been. Then later I went into the city and wandered about, feeling a little worried about the prospect of not being a tourist but a genuine working person here, with long hours and working-person's stresses. So Sunday wasn't any particular sort of a day, a non-day in fact.

Then on Monday I went into the school for the first time as an employee and had a long induction session with one of the Directors of Studies (known in the business and from hereon in as a DOS to save time and typing). That was all fine but I realised that the next morning I would be teaching for four hours in the morning and that there was no more time for me to be instructed on how and what to do! We had spent all day talking about how the school works, how I get around the cities, which pieces of paper have to be ticked, signed, and filled in at different times -- but almost nothing about the teaching! And instead of having a calm time to think about this in the afternoon, I instead went to view a flat. The advert in the paper had announced an open viewing time for this flat from 5.30 onwards, and so when I got there, there were about 20 other people there also looking at it, and each completing a form for the letting agent. After my long day, the sight of an empty studio flat, depressing at the best of times as un-lived-in places always are, seemed even worse than usual, and the almost complete emptiness was also a shock although I knew to expect it. German tenants really do take everything except the kitchen sink when they move out. Perhaps sometimes they also take the sink? I know this is standard across Europe and so I just have to roll with it, but sometimes it's easy to give in and just say "it's not like this at HOME", which doesn't help anyone, because nobody here cares how things are done at home and I can't do things as they're done at home because I'm not there - that's the whole point of going away. And the final straw for me was the form that had to be completed, asking lots of complicated-sounding questions that I had no clue how to answer. By the time I got home (it takes nearly an hour on bus and tram), I was a wreck, very tearful and no good to anyone. So this was my Darkest Hour, and I phoned home and phoned friends to say it's no good, I'm a weak person and I can't do it! And my friends and family listened and said kind things about how it will pass and I can do it, I just have to wait till it all seems less overwhelming.

This is true but it's hard to get a grip sometimes!

The next morning I arrived super early at the school and one of the other new teachers, Kate, helped me prepare for my first class. And of course it was fine. The second class of the morning was in an office block about ten minutes' walk away, also fine though with one difficult class member. Luckily, the other students all obviously had her measure. "Where are your emotions today?" asked one of the class. "I left them on the fourth floor," replied the difficult lady. Ah well, it's fine as long as she comes and speaks English. And she can attempt to resist my group-work activities but she cannot win!!! I explained that we will do a mix of individual, pair, and group work, and that this is good for the group. So there!

And later that same day (we're on Tuesday now), I looked at two more flats. The first was a bit shabby, but the second was just right: it's very close to the centre of town, it has a balcony at the back, it's on the first floor, and it has a kitchen with things in it! Not horrible things but a sink, a cooker, and a fridge! It needs a little love and some hot soapy water but it is just right and I knew that straight away. So tomorrow (Thursday) I will sign the contract, and I should move in on 1 November.

And to top it all, my hosts have offered to lend me some furniture for the year - so all I have to buy is the normal bits and pieces to make the place nice. That's fantastic. To have gone in 24 hours from crying wreck to teacher with own flat is a pretty amazing transition. I wonder whether traversing these emotional peaks and depths makes me stronger for the next time or just gives me wrinkles faster.

Today's big task was to commute to Bonn at the crack of dawn (well, I left the house at 7am, which isn't all that early, but it was definitely still night-time light-wise) to teach a student in the Deutsche Post tower. Again, the journey, the start-time, and the under-prepared feeling all seemed a bit daunting at first, but it's an adventure - yes, even going to a tower-block is an adventure for me. Actually, I shouldn't be defensive about this: it's a very fine tower-block, 40 storeys high, made apparently almost entirely of glass, with super-fast elevators and amazing views out over the countryside. When you go up in the elevator, which is pre-programmed to take you to your floor, you can see in every direction. This time I only went as high as the eleventh floor but one day I hope to go right to the top, to see if my ears pop.

It's hushed and efficient in the tower, and everyone works in a glass-walled office, and I was very impressed by how perfect everything was - even down to the fresh coffee waiting in the room I was teaching in. Until my really sweet student spilled the coffee all over the table and then I remembered they're all normal people underneath, even if they do have intelligent lifts and don't lark about at work quite as obviously as English publishers do. Yet another lesson in my intensive year-long course in Learning The Bleedin' Obvious, for which this TESOL thing is just a front.

Finally, I spent this evening after dinner talking about life the universe and everything (no commas because that's one subject) with a Dutch-Morrocan girl also staying at the house. A kindred spirit despite a completely different life-story of adventurous travelling and business-making, and we talked for hours about why people are as they are, which is probably my favourite topic.

So that brings Wednesday to a close. I'm no longer tearful, and although I'm sure I will be again before too much time passes, I know it will only be something short and that The Big One has been and gone. Tomorrow I don't have to teach!!! But on Friday I have my first six-hour day, all out on the road (as it were) in Bonn, probably involving two different locations. But it will be okay. Now that I remember (because I did actually learn this before but easily forget it) that this new career is not too difficult and that I'm quite good at it, I can just get on with deciding what to do in my classes and then doing it, and adapting it to fit the needs of the students during the lesson.

I think it's too late for me to learn to be relaxed and easy-going about all these new challenges but I hope at least that by taking them on and fighting through the problems I will get better at the next set of changes. I also hope that you're enjoying reading this and not finding it too boring (that's assuming we know each other - otherwise I think you'll just have to take it as it is and be glad I've put some pictures in). You can tell me if you'd like more or less of anything!