It is very hot. We get up very early, pick the raspberries and the blueberries, dig up the last potatoes, fill the bird bath and are greeted by yet another of the Tigridia blossoms that will last for that day. Later when it gets hot and hotter, the hover flies will crowd it, drunk on pollen.

After breakfast on the patio, we move indoors, shut all windows and let down the blinds and stay in the cool old house until sunset, hoping for a cool breeze by then, fresh enough to sleep well beside a wide open window. If not, we move down into the basement for the night. One of us will wake in the early hours when the birds start and open up all windows. 

My brother tells me that in the years to come, this summer will be remembered for being the coldest in history.  

My sister complains that the heat is keeping her from being outdoors, now, in summer, and that it's not fair.

My nephew, a marine biologist, shrugs and says, we made this mess, we better adjust. 

I am glad I don't have to go to work anymore. Instead, I have an appointment late afternoon with outside temps expected to be 40C in a building that most definitely has no airconditioning. I just fixed a thick neckband to my wide straw hat so I can tie it below my chin and it won't blow off when I cycle there. 

For a while we lived on the edge of the Thar desert in India,  R reminds me as he hands me a flask of water to bring along.

I tried to listen to the Peter Thiel interview in the New York Times but gave up, not sure what hit me. seriously, these tech bros, I get memory flashes all the way back to early childhood psychology lectures, John Bowlby's rhesus monkeys and their hopeless search for attachment, acceptance, empathy.

 

In contrast, this sounds like a breath of fresh air in tech sis speak: 

 

island of sanity

. . . for those who choose to awake to collapse, it becomes their duty to put their care and attention into creating spaces and communities of spiritual hope, stability and resilience.

An island of sanity is not a sanctuary; it is where we go to contribute.  

Margaret Wheatley 

      Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Gary Snyder 

I cherish these two quotes and will now use them as my excuse to post a load of garden pictures, all taken after a heavy rain.

this plumeria is a cutting from last year

 

Santolina is taking over the herb bed

 

bedlam

corn and beans and peas

 

there will be wine making

 

 

the sturdy apricot

 

 

 

first fuzzy peaches

 

blueberry hedge waking up

 

raspberries

 

even more bedlam

 

the Covid patch year five

only a step away

It is really hot. And very windy. I should take pictures of the garden, I really should. At least I can report that we had a bumper sugar snap harvest, are now deep into tomatoes, zucchini, beans, peas, carrots, strawberries and raspberries. Blueberries almost ready, stone fruit next week, corn and onions and so on. Also, ants and spiders and a 24 hours house fly infestation thanks to a colony of maggots in an unwashed carton of cottage cheese deep in the yellow bin. We took apart most of the IKEA kitchen before we copped on. The adventures of a retired couple.

We both applied to have our passports renewed. You never know these days. Mr Rutte, head of NATO, has warned that maybe Europeans will need to learn Russian in the near future. He was not joking. 

I bury my head in cryptic crossword challenges. Also helped a friend to write a paper on alternative pollinators, it has been accepted for publication and briefly, we were elated and full of hope for humankind.  After dark, I watch gruesome Scandinavian thriller series, lots of killing and kidnapping and all that snow and ice. 

And stuff happens.

Let me tell you. Europe is not perfect. 

But neither Macron nor Merz or von der Leyen are inclined towards personality cults. The political stage is not populated by billionaires and millionaires alone. As of today, the checks and balances hold, religion is a private matter and anyone who falls ill is not ruined at the same time. Those who lie and agitate will be contradicted. Those who claim to get their politics from God personally are advised to have their souls examined by a doctor.

But it could be worse. All of this could change, what do I know. The fear mongering against migrants, the increasingly violent terminology, the hardening of the them vs us mentality, it's happening.

And yet, we look on, find it difficult to imagine, that the grandson of a German pimp and son of a criminal slumlord is waging a war against immigration in the world's largest country of immigration, which was appropriated by the first immigrants through genocide.

Back then, before the internet, we thought that the reason for human stupidity was the lack of information.
Let me put it this way: it wasn't.

my life in maybe ten objects #1

It's been tough, what with the heat and being cross with the world in general. But needs must. Two weeks to go until the MRI, I try not to think of it or rather I imagine that nothing will come of it.

Anyway, I could and should post pictures of the gorgeous garden and the abundance of blossoms and fruit and goodies we harvest every morning. But needs must. The squirrels come early to drink from the bird bath and the robins are by now so used to us, they mess about in the water when we are close by. This morning we gave away the  grandchild's paddling pool to a very happy young family. 

So I've been contemplating Ellen's brilliant series of life in 100 objects. I don't think I have 100 objects in me. But I'll start with #1. In fact a group of four objects. For several years, these heavy tombs were opened and perused daily, in the days before the internet. 

 

 

I started my bilingual life when I was 21 years old, the year I fell in love with R who speaks English and Irish and French and some Swahili but at the time, not a word of German. A few years into this adventure, I started to get asked for translations, nothing official, basic touristy, small business stuff. Favours really. I did not feel confident to think of it as a career option. 

My first translation job came from an arrogant German business man working for the World Bank while we were living in Africa. He promised riches and success to all and nothing came of it. Of course, he forgot to pay me before he left in a hurry. So, for many years, I stuck to favours and translated for NGOs, small environmental campaigns, women's groups, the odd alternative conference and so on. Until one day, a customer at the food co-op where I was working asked me if I wanted to apply for her job at the university because she was moving abroad. Two weeks later - that is 25 years ago now - I was at a desk with a pile of medical manuscripts to read, translate and/or edit. Learning by doing never felt more real. And urgent. 

Language and science had been my worst subjects in school. While I was pretty much bilingual by now, I did not have any grammar knowledge, no idea about simple present, present continuous, present perfect and so on. I pasted a sheet with the standard proofreading symbols on the notice board above the desk and got myself a nice range of fine coloured markers. This was all in the days before the internets and Microsoft Word and I quickly learned whose manuscripts I could mark in red and who of the hard working researchers had hidden school traumas requiring purple or green marking.

To this day, I know next to nothing about science and medical research in particular. Thankfully, I figured out early on that what matters was grammar and style and that content was none of my business. I suppose it would help to understand the rudimentary concepts of supernatant and precipitate or what PCR stands for and why mass spectrometry is such an important analytical technique but even after 25 years all I can offer are my excellent bullshitting skills. If a long sentence has to be shortened, and that is often the case, it helps to subsitute the big words with simple ones and reading it out loud. Also, living with a science teacher has enormous benefits. 

But as I knew early on that reading English novels, watching English tv series and arguing in English with a teenage daughter and a stubborn husband would not be sufficient, I went back to university to study translation. After some persuasion which included a gruesome conversation exam and two written tests, I managed to skip the first two of a four year distant education degree in business English. I wanted to specialise in science English but I was one of only four applicants and the university did not want to waste funds on such a small number. So for two years I studied All The Grammar, wrote countless essays and sweated through exams. During lunch hours, I studied index cards on vocabulary and comma rules. Throughout the course, we had been expected to diligently read The Economist and The Financial Times to remain up to date on business lingo. I haven't looked at a single page of either of these since. My last exam day was on the eve of 9/11 and the final test was a two hour long oral grilling on current business news items. One day later and I would have struggled with lots of new vocabulary. I got my degree in the post three weeks later.

My translating career came to an end at the right time, I have been lucky to retire just as AI and all its translation tools arrived. It seems so easy - and in many ways it really is - but it also is a tricky minefield. 

I still don't understand a thing about medical research but I have come to respect the detail and care that goes into research, often beginning with minute puzzle pieces that seem to suddenly fall into place with amazing results, like the development of potential MS treatments, groundbreaking insights into our immune system, early detection of pancreatic cancer and DNA sequencing (don't ask, still no idea) and novel treatment in liver diseases.

I can find my name in google scholar and the NHI pubmed database thanks to the acknowledgments some, but not all, authors have generously expressed for my editorial work. I can recite the main rules of the AMA Style Guide probably for ever. Some days, this feels like an achievement. But just one of many others in my life. But it has been a great time. This may sound weird, what with no science background, but it felt I was in my element (get it?).

 

 

 

 

June - already

It has rained and it is getting hot.  In other words, summer.

lily season

This afternoon, I sat in the auditorium of a concert hall and listened to 500+ primary school kids, aged 6-8, sing their hearts out. Not only did they sing, they used sign language and various percussion instruments incl. their hands and feet and heads and it was a most joyful afternoon. This choir is part of a local initiative to bring together children of all backgrounds and nationalities in about 25 different primary schools in our city. In the end, we all sang - three times! - Beethoven's Ode to Joy in German, Kurdish, Arabic, and Urdu. Imagine standing and singing "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" (all people become brothers) surrounded by 500 small kids and try not to be moved.

As I cycled back home in the evening sunlight, my mind was a whirling mess of thoughts. All morning I had heated debates with R and a couple of friends and family about recent political events in Germany and while we are nowhere near the US scenario, there are signs of clear danger and we are experiencing the first open and brazen illegal actions by the government, copying what others so openly do.

It seems that wherever I look, in countries near and far powerful people believe that the best way for them to hold onto power is to hurt other people. And their logic appears to be that the more all of us are afraid of them and of each other - our shared humanity - the more they win. Seeking to dehumanize marginalized communities and anyone who opposes them, attempting to outlaw our active civil society. 

So where do I stand? First, I know that what matters is solidarity. Personal networks, personal relationships, community. Always has been what kept me going. 

And deep down, you can see it in every crisis, in every misfortune, when someone stumbles and falls on the street and someone will run to help. Because we do not believe that this person deserves to have stumbled and fallen, and it doesn't matter whether that person has paid their taxes, how they make a living or whom they love, and if we like them or not. A person who needs help is helped. Big or small. This for me is humanity, this is what I call socialism. We need to make sure that we dig out this humanity again, that we stop people from being turned into wrecks, into ruins by fascists and neoliberals. How nice it would be if we simply lived in a human future.

A lot gives me hope. so many people just get it, so many people show solidarity, are co-operative. If you let people be, nobody wants to be mean to their neighbour. I don't want to come across as naive. But in evolutionary terms, this has been the survival strategy of the human species.  It's not so easy to stop people from being that way, even if it has been successfully attempted, by neoliberalism, which pushes us away from any form of community, and by the extreme right, which pushes us away from any form of trust in other people. Either way, we would be doomed. I think all fascist movements thrive on that death wish anyway but that's another story.

There is a video making the rounds where a mother reads out the first half of sentences she was told by her parents when she grew up maybe 30-40 years ago and asks her kid to complete the sentence. The one that made me cry was "As longs as you put your feet under my table . . " - the eternal threat shouted by my angry father when confronted with yet another teenage behaviour he could not tolerate - and today's kid replied ". . . you are safe."

Also, spelling is really necessary when dealing with AI.

 

 

how to stay engaged

This. Just listen. I am glad I did. Click on the "Last Year's Move to Toronto" heading and then play on the video on his substack page.

 

Last Year's Move to Toronto by Timothy Snyder

And This Year's Politics (video and commentary)

Read on Substack

small talk about the weather

 

things have grown

Before reaching a decision in favour of surgical removal of a gallbladder with neither acute inflammation nor stone formation, the gods have placed another MRI as well as more lab tests and outpatient appointments. In other words, still more waiting. 

When I mentioned that this will cost me at least another kilo in weight loss, the medical expert's eyebrows twitched slightly and he added the word "urgent" to the MRI request. On a scale from one to ten, how is the pain during a colicky period, he asked. Like the final hours in childbirth, I replied and his facial expression flinched slightly. Have you tried painkillers, he asked next. I gave him my most hollow laugh and explained how I alternate between hot showers, distraction and gravity (aka letting my body hang from the nearest doorframe) and he shook his head with a couple of tsks. Look, he eventually said, I am with you, most likely this is a partial torsion of your gallbladder with diffusely thickened wall and pericholecystic fluid built up but we need to see it before we believe it. 

Because where would we be if we remove an unnecessary organ without following the guidelines simply because it could result in a favourable result? Insurance pays you more the more procedures you impose, I added under my breath. 

But reader, I remained polite to the end and only cried when I was back where I had locked my bicycle. Also, I kicked the bike stand hard and shouted swear words. But lucky for me and the world, on the way home, cycling through the lushest of forests, I remembered that distance is the prerequisite for all perception and I turned my mind to better and more delightful issues.

it's the year of the potted potatoe varieties

In fact, I have recently taken a liking to short, not too in-depth conversations about the weather, mainly because of the progressively more worrying state of the world but also because I need to avoid thinking about health and weight loss all the fucking time.

Hence, weather, temperature, wind, lack of rain, and before you know it, birds, insects, pests, weeds, no wait, blossoms, fruit, berries, roots, back to temperature, lack of rain, roots again, this time tree roots, water, watering. watching, digging, soil, dirty fingernails.

Is watching the weather, the garden a way to shut myself off from world events and health issues or is it actually a means of remaining alert, wide awake even in view of what is at stake, but nevertheless also a concern about my own well-being. What use is it if everyone collectively falls into depression?

On top of it, I seem to have developed an almost obsessive devotion to birds. The app that recognise bird calls explains that what some think is a blackbird is actually a blackcap and I feel like a good schoolgirl for having recognised this. And almost 25 years after her death, I still believe that my mother visits me in the disguise of a bird.

I find nothing nicer than being able to sit outside on the patio late at night without a jacket, but there are now days and nights every spring that are so warm that they make you feel melancholy, for lack of another more positive word. At least I do.

I have a brother with extensive climate and weather knowledge, I have a nephew who works on research vessels on far away oceans. The smallest bit of small talk with either of them could send anybody with a spark of a mind into a dark place of despair  feeling melancholy.

But every time I cycle through this forest and every morning when I look up at the sky scrutinisingly, I have to admit that checking the weather and the tree tunnels of a thick forest, relaxes me inwardly. My breath deepens, my pulse slows down, the evil noise of the world falls silent. 

 

 

fast moving sloth

 

 

current scenario upon opening of the patio door

Another couple of quotes I had saved ages ago and which pop up now that I am killing time while waiting, still waiting for the phone call from the surgery department. Instead my lovely GP calls to cheer me on.

It has been heartening to read your comments to the chocolate quote. I could respond and write about the cardiovascular and gastrological health benefits of chocolate, especially dark chocolate (numerous, well researched, click here to read about it) and in particular, the beneficial effects of chocolate on mental health because chocolate contains endorphins, which are the little cousins of magic mushrooms.

But I could also dwell on the fact (FACT) that due to climate change, we are fast approaching a chocolate crisis which is a double sided hardship because not only will the price of cocoa rise exponentially, making chocolate a very expensive and rare luxury before we know it, the people depending on growing and selling cocoa beans are already beginning to suffer greatly as rising temperatures and erratic rainfall dramatically hammer cocoa harvests. So, get it while you can (afford it).

 

Naivety is one thing, ignoring the incontinent elephant in the corner of your living room is quite another.

source unknown  

What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.

Vinay Gupta

 

            Wisdom is chasing you but you are faster.
 
Nigerian proverb 

Like our planet, sloths are actually moving extremely fast all the time, so fast that it seems like they’re not moving at all. We are wrong about sloths; they’re quick and fast. Science will prove this one day.

Michael Kleber-Diggs
 

The fact that people seem happy enough to cite heat as a number of degrees is surely a sign of what Adorno called reification, by which he meant the habitual response in modern culture to abstract and then quantify even lived experience as though it were money. If you do this long enough, the abstraction comes alive and seems self empowered like a person or a god. 

Michael Taussig

 

three more quotes I saved years ago

To know one drop is the first step to know the boundless ocean

Światosław Wojtkowiak

 

 There are two types of women – those who like chocolates and complete bitches.

Dawn French

 

 And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open.

Tomas Tranströmer 

 

The link between the first and the third quote I had saved way back in 2014, is of course chocolate and the lamentable fact that I haven't been able to digest any, not even the tiniest crumb, without painful side effects. Like the fool Iam, and also because I am not a complete bitch, I do nibble the occasional bit - the man has a vast supply - and pay the price and I tell myself, I am open, the ocean of colic is boundless.

patient wait

Things are rough right now, waiting for the next call. I cannot remember when I had the last proper meal. I push myself through my daily schedules, determined to not let this condition allow me to shrink and hide. Soon, R reassures me, soon you will feel better. An elderly woman with a chronic condition has to make way for emergencies, I understand, I smile and nod and act the patient. Also, more tests to keep everybody busy. The old kidney scare resurfaces and I tell the junior radiologist that it's nothing, read the notes from years back. In the end, he thanks me for giving him this learning opportunity.

I do stuff, I walk and I cycle, I visit the library, galleries, parks, gardens, I sit in cafes with a cup of something, I smile and talk to people, visitors, friends, family. Early morning, I walk through the garden, inspect the courgettes and the sugar peas and the lettuce and tomatoes and so much more. I pick strawberries I cannot eat but admire their beautiful shape and colour. We are waiting for rain that will not come. In the evening, we watch mice eating the bean seedlings. I put out flat dishes of water around the garden, R sets traps.

I try to remain attentive, aware and mindful, that magical word, in between distraction. I am tidying up my blog, all these quotes I collected. In 2014, I saved this one. 

Solitude is a description of a fact: you are on your own. Loneliness is a negative emotional response to it. People think they will be lonely and that is the problem – the expectation is also now a cultural assumption.

Sara Maitland

hello May

 

 

 

 . . .  and my point is, there is always something. I think as a species we have a desire to believe that we are living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we are uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millinia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

 

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility 

The weather last week was beautiful, sunny, the kind of not-too-hot warm air that makes me want to spend all day outside. Which is what I did more or less. That and three mornings on the ongoing diagnosis trail which culminated in an endoscopic sonography exam, a most pleasant experience as I was knocked out by propofol. And now I am waiting for the verdict. I must say that everybody has been very nice and pleasant and professional and informative about the usual caveats and risk factors. But seriously, I am so tired of it by now and my face is hurting from smiling and looking upbeat and friendly all the fucking time. Thank goodness, it's May at least.

 

80 years ago

I know the material reasons for the rise of fascism. I also think another reason - which doesn’t get talked about as much because it’s embarrassing that humans can be that naive - is that when you are financially comfortable but bored, abstract cruelty can give you a sense of purpose.

Musa Okwonga 

On 29 April 1945, eighty years ago today, US soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp. Hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned there during the nazi era. They were at the mercy of the arbitrary behaviour of the guards and were harassed, abused and tortured. Tens of thousands did not survive their imprisonment. Dachau is a small town roughly 20 km to the north of Munich. The camp was  built in 1933, the first of the nazi concentration camps. 

The GIs found more than 30,000 people in the completely overcrowded camp, which was originally built for 6,000 prisoners. The prisoners were emaciated and exhausted, many suffering from disease. Typhus and dysentery were rampant in the camp. In the newspapers and on the radio, on tv, today we read and watch and listen to documentaries and eye witness reports and commentaries of this day. This is an excerpt from The Liberation of Dachau by Marguarite Higgins, New York Herald Tribune on May 1st, 1945:

There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their enclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the S.S. men an excuse for mass murder.

But the minute the two of us entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about 16 languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.

Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled.

Yesterday, I walked in a crowd of 20 people for three hours through the center of the city we live in, following a young man with a long beard and many tattoos who guided us from one house, street corner, park to the next, where he carefully pointed out memorial sites and their significance in today's fight against fascims. Because fight we must.

Meanwhile, the garden provides solace.

 

 

dawn chorus

Yes, I know the world is in bad shape, I could go on. Yesterday in the queue at the supermarket, I stood behind two teenage girls who debated whether they will or will not go on the upcoming climate ralley or maybe instead to the anti nazi one and like the old fool I am, I barged in and said, go to both, Very politely, they turned and smiled and said, yeah, but, and then, ok why not. And I smiled back and they pulled out their cell phones and asked for a selfie.

I’ve been in several meetings and conversations these past few weeks about what we will say if we can’t say “climate” anymore. We’ll say “extreme weather.” We’ll say “heat wave.” “Flood.” “Wildfire.” “Drought.” “Coastal erosion.” We’ll say “clean air.” “Clean water.” And we’ll say “cancer,” “asthma,” “birth defects.” We’ll say “cheap, reliable, locally produced energy.” We’ll say “healthy farmland,” “good soil,” “regeneration.” “Animals.” “Plants.” “Life.” “Help.”

And if they ban those words, we’ll come up with more. I loved this earth before I knew the word “earth,” and I will love it the rest of my life.

Anya Kamenetz

And today I spent the best and the longest part of the day with doctors. I set out very early cycling through the lush forest, it was just gorgeous. And for the next eight hours, I was examined by hands and eyes and machines and body fluids were sampled and many questions were raised and yes, answered. And now I will have to stop thinking of the worst outcome which includes but not necessarily will result in necrotising and death. Whereas the best outcome could be regaining my ability to process food - to an extent beyond the current scenario. The diagnostic term is cholecystitis due to gallbladder torsion and one of the surgeons expressed his delight with this relatively rare challenge. I got a handy list of symptoms that necessitate an immediate trip to the ER and otherwise have been told to sit tight and wait for the phone call. After a couple more tests and stuff to properly determine possible causes and risks, the GB will go.

It helps to know more of the why and how and seriously, I already feel so much better. The funniest bit was when I mentioned that I haven't had any coffee for the past four weeks and every person in the room went, oh no, poor you.

Cycling home through the forest was again lovely and a balm to the soul. I pity all of the people who haven't got access to an early morning forest cycle path. So, click here for a link to an amazing soundmap of the world's dawn choruses.

apricots and peaches

Happy Easter. I am a bit late, Easter Sunday is almost over. But in this secular country, we have Easter Monday tomorrow, another public holiday with all shops closed - apart from the bakeries until lunch so people can stock up on buttery sugary Easter baked goods. Wikipedia tells me that Easter. Monday is the second day of the Octave of Easter, which is where I leave it because that's the first I ever heard of. Any excuse, my radical atheist father would say. As far as I remember, the story was like this.

I am looking at the list of stuff I want to do and wonder how did I ever fit paid employment into this schedule. Not that I have done anything from that list for the past week. Yesterday, I spent watching an entire season on the adventures of the Bavarian Voluntary Mountain Rescue team, both in winter (on ski!) and summer and marvelled at various dramatic rescues of ignorant, ill equipped and poorly shod tourists in the Alps. What had me hooked was the strong Bavarian accents of the women and men who go out at any time, sprinting up steep ravines like young mountain goats and the way my inner linguist Franconian, albeit born in Upper Barvaria, was proudly and successfully able to reject the subtitles. 

We had a small bit of rain, nothing substantial. I marshalled my meagre energy levels and watered some of the plants that have not been eaten by slugs and increased the level of warfare against the ants under the patio stones. I told them that there is plenty of safe and comfortable space elsewhere. 

Here are our baby apricots. 

And the furry baby peaches.

 And the vegetable bed, with some extra potatoes in pots in front and two bolted fennels in the back left.

And the last of the tulips, this has been an excellent tulip year but I think I will replace all the fancy ones with a wild variety that bees and other insects actually feed on because the big showy ones here are totally insect free, they could be made of plastic for all the good they have to offer to biodiversity, namely null, nil, zilch.

Health wise I am three steps forward, two steps back, in other words, it's fucking slow. But this an old cranky body, so patience.

And so I have managed to write a post without doom and gloom despite the fact that I could. 

Crazy times don’t have to make us crazy. They can inspire new levels of coherence, meaning, and purpose. There’s nothing like a rocky sea to make people find their best compass.

Douglas Rushkoff

it's a Wednesday

I keep thinking that today is Sunday. Maybe because it's raining and so very quiet outside and many of our neighbours are on holidays. Or maybe because I feel shitty and ill and slow. Earlier I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and I told myself, just stay with it. This will pass. As if that helps.

This morning I read an opinion piece of one of the daily national newspapers, the left wing one from Berlin, with the heading I want to fight injustice instead of breathing it away mindfully. It's all about mock solutions and avoiding responsibility and the cynical appeal of a positive mindset catering to individuals and their fears. The promising balm of kindness and avoiding stuff that is too hard and may disturb our ever so important inner peace. Have the courage to be angry, it ends.

To which I may add, get me the energy. And while I lack that specific item, also the positive mindset is very faint at the moment, all I am left with is reading and watching and listening. Here are some cherry blossoms from a few days ago.

I am reading Werner Herzog's memoirs, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is really a long rambling jumble of the outrageous thoughts and anecdotes and wild insights of a person with an enormous ego. Great reading. Really great.

We dusted off the old record player and connected the ancient tuner system to the big fat speakers and I am now listening to our vinyl collection - the remains of it - one LP a day. Today's one was Dire Strait's Love over Gold, which we bought for 2.99 pounds (Irish) at Golden Discs in the Dun Laoghaire shopping centre in 1982 a week or two before the birth of our daughter. The shopping centre is long gone, but Golden Discs is still around. It was great fun listening to a young Mark Knopfler. I am just pulling the records off the stack as it sits here, without looking and the rule is to play it no matter what. Tomorrow it will be The Inner Mounting Flame, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. That's one of R's records, from long before we met and I have a vague memory that I never really liked it. Back then that is.

And a final thought, something that came up in a conversation a few days ago. You know why we Germans are so pedantic about data protection? Someone around 90 years ago went through all records available, selected people with certain criteria, with the help of IBM, and then killed them all.

spring always too fast

 

the pink tulips

When we lived in the small tropical country we call paradise, just three degrees below the equator, I would tell my small daughter stories about what life is like in Europe, about cities and traffic and shops and playgrounds and most of all, about seasons, lest she forget. When we returned to Europe after a couple of years, the first winter was as I had described, snow and ice and sledding and snowball fights. But spring, I had forgotten to mention that spring happens seemingly all at once and not really in slow noticeable steps - daffodfils, leaves on the trees, roses, strawberries, peaches, sunburns. One day while we were eating strawberries on her grandparent's patio, she actually complained that this was all happening much faster than anticipated.

pear blossoms

 

And I feel it every year. Some of my garden pictures are already old news.

St. Agnes flower/March cups (leucojum)

 

I think I am done with diagnostics for now at least. My pharmaceutical cocktail has been remixed and topped up and I spend most afternoons pleasantly dozing as prescribed. The digestive system is still protesting but there's hope it will calm down and let things be, eventually. Waiting for appetite to find its way home, too.

 

wild garlic

Other than that, life is full of good stuff. Surprisingly. I mean I could write long and extensively about the disappointing and in part decisively inhuman coalition agreement of our new government and maybe a bit about tariffs and presidential insider trading but why.

 

asimina

The biology teacher (retired) in my life tells me that everything alive is evolving all the time.

Also, I read that a single rotation of a modern wind turbine (approx. 10-11 kWh) produces enough energy for an electric car to travel around 50-70 kilometres. There's a lot of hope in such a single finding.

I participated in an online ceremony commemorating the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp 80 years ago and listened to a speech by Marina Weisband, Ukrainian-German politician and psychologist.

We say we are fighting fascism - but what is this fighting actually? And when does it begin? Fascism is not recognised because we secretly expect that the film music will somehow change at the end of democracy. That the sky will turn an ominous grey. That banners will be unfurled. But that doesn't happen. When fascism comes, the sun is still shining. The birds sing. We go to work. Everything is normal. Only trans people lose their rights. And asylum seekers. And immigrants. And disabled people. And Muslims. And Jews. And left-wing journalists. And then other journalists. And me. And you. And nobody realises when it actually became too late.

I don't want to fight. I want to love. I want to be curious about my fellow human beings. I want to listen. I want to be empathetic. I don't want to be in competition, I want to build great things together. Nazis can't deal with that.

I want to open my heart wide to people. To stand between them and inhuman ideas. That's how I understand my place. Not fighting against what I hate, but protecting what I love.

And I know many of you may think that's incredibly naive. Love. It seems like such an inappropriate, unrelated word in light of the news today. But I think it's naïve that we can banish fascism if we don't learn to love ourselves and others.

Even if the worst happens tomorrow - if my whole world collapses and I lose everything - there will still be a day after tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, the world will go on somehow. With me or without me. But then I want to leave something behind. The dream of a world in which we no longer inherit violence and don't see ourselves in constant struggle. That's why I want to sow the seed in the ground today. Even if there is a forest fire. Then it's my job to bury it so that it can germinate afterwards.

the thing about groceries

My first thought when I read this stuff about groceries was a childhood memory. I was five years old and we had recently moved to a new city, or rather a new suburb of the city where my dad had been offered a job. On the corner of our street, a small supermarket cum butcher shop was to be opened, run by a young couple with a toddler, a baby and two cats. We watched through the glass doors of the shop while they were stacking the shelves with the radio on inside at full blast and every so often, they would stop and dance. The Twist! We were floored and full of admiration. Back home, my sister tried to show me how to do the twist but I just hopped up and down.

The day the shop opened, my mother sent me there with a coin in my hand and the carefully practised sentence: one pound of mince meat but not too fat and a small sweet for me instead of change. This sentence has been my memory mantra for new and slightly scary situations ever since.

And then I remembered the endless hours we played shop at home and on the curb in front of the garden gate, selling stuff to neighbours walking past and buying it back with paper money, filling our grocery bags with tiny crumbly apples and flowers and stones and small toys and legos. My child often played shop and shopping for groceries, we, the assembled adults, would carefully select our goods from her wares and buy them and sometimes, she would watch us with alarm and asked for reassurance that we understood that it was only a game. And yes, we sent her to the corner shop, the bakery, the ice cream van with a handfull of coins or maybe a banknote and instructions or a shopping list we drew together. And this afternoon, as I walked down to the river, I passed a table on the sidewalk where two girls, maybe six or seven years old, were selling handmade stuff and I stopped and selected a set of handdrawn playing cards and one chatterbox folding game. When I asked how much I had to pay, they discussed options for a while and then decided I could have it all for free because it was a nice and sunny day.

 

That man who said the stuff about groceries probably, most likely, definitely never experienced the excitement of going to a shop for the first time, bringing home a pound of not too fat mince and feeling amazingly grown up and rewarded and loved. Somehow I don't feel sorry. As it turns out, he thinks that the poor old US has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered" by Cambodia, Lesotho and Madagascar, three of the poorest nations on earth, which must therefore pay the highest tarifs. 

 

 

discuss with examples

An old fashioned term that we use -- groceries. . . . It's such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It says a bag with different things in it.

 

April is here

The last couple of days in a few short sentences.

If you want to make loud phone calls in a doctor's waiting room, no problem. But a short ‘what happened so far’ at the beginning would help us all, waiting is so tedious.

There's only two genders: fascists and anti-facists.

Why is it said that young men are turning ultra right-wing because of feminism and not that young women are turning to feminism because of right-wing men? Are we again blaming women for the mistakes of men?

We are reaching peak magnolia season.

I got yet another diagnosis, a sort of tag along diagnosis, something that gets explained to me as an almost inevitable consequence of what has been going on in my body for seemingly ever, like 10 or so years (?). The doctor was polite and carefully explained that this is most likely another novel aspect of the autoimmune disease and we smiled at each other when I replied, well it seems we can blame this shit for everything that goes bad in my body. I even chuckled. Back home I kicked at the sofa and had a bit of a meltdown. Later, we watched the first episode or two of the apocalyptic Danish series Families like Ours, and what can I say, I feel fine in comparison. (I also have gastritis, so no coffee, no black tea.)

 

A child’s body is very easy to live in.  An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror—that is me? Who’s me? And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy.

Ursula K. Le Guin

apple crumble and partial solar eclipse

Saturday morning, the house smells of apple crumble, R tells me he is using up the jumbo oats. His cooking and baking skills improve with every new step on the road to using up food that could go off. When many years ago, his parents had a nasty stomach bug, he began to silently clear way-past-due-date items from their fridge and freezer every time he visited in an attempt to keep them healthy. They both died of cancer and much too young but not because there was any rotten/rotting food in the house. His mother initially got furious and called it waste but after all, he is a science teacher and they loved each other. Anyway, just to explain why R makes apple crumble at 7:30 am on a Saturday.

This time of the year, the garden is taken over by pansies (which is what we call primulas because family folklore), those little flowering bunches that just sit there in the shadows of the big and famous plants. The thing about pansies is that they spread, like buttercups, quietly and efficiently, so much so that today, I stopped counting at 100, including the ones that have come up between the paving stones. Here's a selection, inconclusive but they are all different in small ways. We could do our own Gregor Mendel pea flower evolutionary research with our pansy fleet.

 

 

There's much to enjoy and be delighted about in house and garden and family and I am trying hard to stay with it, while watching the polls and the way the neonazi column is growing and listening to various government officials on the real danger of what that mad man in Moscow will do next.

 

And then we watched Adolescence, of course we did and when it was over R, bless him, said, will there be a second season concentrating on the women, the girls? I realised that at times I had held my breath in anger. Don't get me wrong, excellent tv and all, but maybe read Rebecca Solnit's review also.

 

And I'll leave this here from poet Hollie McNish. 

And right now, there is a partial solar eclipse, nothing dramatic, the birds did not stop singing, but I can see my neighbours of all ages on their patios and on the sidewalks looking at this celestial wonder through weird googles and there's much whoa and awe.

In the twenty-first century, evolutionary thought shifted to the group and culture as the units of analysis. Discoveries of the cooperative tendencies of young children; our universal inclination to share; our instinct to attach, belong, and be tribal; and the neurophysiology of empathy, contagion, mirroring, connection, compassion, and exploration were revealing a new lens upon human nature: we are hypersocial species who accomplish almost all survival-related tasks, from raising the vulnerable offspring to provision of food, in collaborative, often altruistic groups. 

Groups that collaborate well and build a sense of shared identity, this reasoning would advance, are more likely to prevail and survive. And culture - the system of beliefs and practices that unite individuals into community - is an ever revolving repository of shared knowledge and experience, a collective mind that enables us to adapt together to the challenges and opportunities in our natural and social environments.

Dacher Keltner

 

D Day group chat

 

This is making the rounds here, no idea who started it.

Some background information:

Group captain Stagg was a British meteorologist attached to the Royal Air Force during WWII who persuaded General Eisenhower to change the date of the Allied invasion of Europe from 5 to 6 June 1944. (source Wikipedia)

Field marshall Montgomery was in command of all Allied ground forces during the Normandy landing on D-Day, 6 June 1944 (source Wikipedia, but you all knew that OK?)

Air force officer Tedder was deputy supreme commander under Eisenhower during the Normandy landing on D-Day, 6 June 1944 (also Wikipedia, you all know who Eisenhower was I take it)

Air chief marshall Leigh-Mallory was the air commander during D-Day operations on 6 June 1944 (Wikipedia again)

Admiral Ramsay was commanding the naval forces on D-Day, June 6 1944 (thanks Wikipedia, his name is spelled incorrectly in the image above)

Völkischer Beobachter was the newspaper (aka mouthpiece) of the German nazi party from 1920 until the last months of WWII (take my word) 

Signal is an open-source, encrypted messaging service for instant messaging, voice calls, and video calls, a safe-ish alternative to whatsapp et al., it is non-profit and was launched in 2018. I just did a lot of research on it recently.

 

magnolia week

The greenhouse is filling up.

It's magnolia week in the neighbourhood. 

 

The garden is starting to show off. Most of the seedlings are planted out, the potatoes are in the ground and I did assist in almost all of the work. Now we wait and see and collect kill any snails and slugs.

 

The peach trees are flowering, the apricot is already finished flowering and the plums, pears and apples are about to. This is what's called the vineyard peach, with small deep red furry fruit, excellent for jam.

 

 

Last week, I spent a couple of hours on a guided tour across one of our city's cemeteries visiting the fields where unknown displaced persons and forced labourers from the nazi era are buried. It was long and gruesome, thankfully we could sit down from time to time, and when we reached the section where the children of the young, mostly Ukranian and Polish women, who were forced to work in local industry during the war, were buried, I almost broke down. None of the children born to these women (often as a result of rape) lived for more than a couple of weeks, months and it was nuns who "looked after" them and let them die. I don't know why I continuously do this, go to these lectures and tours but now I have my name down to help with a project digitizing local data of victims and survivors of nazism.

It's been a year now since I retired and surprise, surprise, we have neither gone bankrupt nor tried to poison each other. In fact, it has turned out rather well, I am still not inclined to take on any of the free-lance jobs I continue to be offered and wish it would stop altogether. I also started to enjoy going to bed really late and/or getting up in time to listen to the dawn chorus. There have even been days when I had three cups of coffee. But the dreaded fatigue, together with a couple of other symptoms and lab results has come back, all of which indicating that the current medication has possibly run its course and I have to face the next available magic potion with its side effects. I am seriously fed up with all of this but needs must and always look on the bright side, etc.,

Worse, however, is the decline of my trusted bike, which has me currently searching for a necessary spare part that is no longer commercially available. 

The grandchild has been sharing their reasons for feeling anxious right now.  We counted on our fingers, new house, new school, new friends, loss of old neighbours, growing out of favourite clothes, having to get used to new clothes and several more and we almost ran out of fingers. Then it was time for showing some drawing and cutting-out and reading skills and of course, there's the dog.

. . . when you’re born, you’re born with a big lack. You’ve got this body that needs food, needs clothing, needs shelter, needs medicine, and you’re not born with an entitlement to those things. If you were really entitled to them, they would come on their own. The fact that they seem to come on their own when we’re children is because our parents are looking after us, but that means they have to go out and do extra work just to provide for this big, gaping hole they’ve just given birth to. And so as you grow up as a human being, you not only carry this huge load of needs around with you, but you also carry a big debt to the goodness, the work of other people. It’s important to keep that in mind.

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

to clarify

Thank you for all your comments on my post re secure internet etc. I am delighted that I am not the only one and not a nut case.

I should clarify that the main impetus behind my efforts to investigate my social media/internet use and to initiate any changes I think are necessary is not just a safe internet - whatever that may imply and I don't think I am any way close to it - but to move away from tech companies that are in the hands of very few, very wealthy men who blissfully embrace fascism. I am not even going to discuss this last point.

So, in wake of events unfolding in the US, the desire to shift away from these big tech oligarchs is growing every day in my country and from what I can gather, many other European countries. And with it comes a growing interest in understanding how this internet stuff actually works and who runs what and how entangled and used we may actually have become. I've been to a couple of public lectures on culture wars/fake news, big tech monopolies, data protection laws in the EU, political influence from Russia, China and the US/Musk and all this - there are more events scheduled here - has given me so much to think about, you have no idea. 

Now, I love the internet, I love switching on my laptop and I enjoy my morning routine of reading online news, checking newsletters, blogs and emails, obviously the daily contact with my family far away - I cherish it all and would not want to miss it. During lockdown, we ordered a lot of stuff online, it was a life saver in many respects, especially prior to the arrival of the vaccines for someone like me, with a chronic disease and immune suppression medication. We are lucky that we don't live out in the sticks, have markets and shops and pharmacies etc. within walking distance, so we rarely need to fall back on online shopping now. Occasionally, I order used clothing and second hand books from online sellers and we use ebay/etsy and their German equivalents for some purchases - but also to sell some stuff we are clearing out. And of course, there's online banking and the other stuff like pension, health/car/house insurance, tax office, the various public utilities and on the few occasions when we travel, bus/train/plane tickets. 

I have friends and family who are paranoid of anything online, who would not even check the rain forecast because some evil service will steal their identity or - worse - send them advertising. I have a friend who is regularly predicting the end of the world's water and electricity supply due to bitcoin and yes, there is some truth in that but you can go and read about that yourself. I openly admit that I am ignorant about A Lot of what goes on online. 

But as with so much that is happening right now - fascism, climate change, the threat of (hybrid) war, my deteriorating health and the looming diagnostic detective work - the curse of my curious nature will not allow me to just let it be. I have to stick my nose into it, come what may. 

Having worked in science editing for 25 years, I have learnt a thing or two about checking sources, double, triple checking of "facts", identifying images, figuring out who is paid what to publish what and when and so on. With the rise of AI, this has become more difficult and I am often relieved that I am retired and only need to open up that new can of worms when I feel ready.

Basically, I want to feel informed, always wanted to, I am nosy. I don't want to feel trapped or used or bought. I know it's unrealistic to think I can be morally/idealistically free of any unsavoury influence. I am only human and often lazy. But I want to be On The Ball as much as I can and I think it's Very Very Important for as many people as possible to be that too, no matter where on this planet we are. 

There was a time, sometime in the early 1990s, when R explained computer programs and the internet to me - at least he tried to - and what I remember is that he stressed, it's a tool, just a tool. People use it.

I could go on but I won't. Instead, I would love to continue to hear from other people how they feel about it.

These two blog posts by Australian writer Joan Westenberg have expressed it all so much better. So if you are still reading, I recommend you continue here:

1. How I’m Building a Trump-Proof Tech Stack Without Big Tech

A quote:  Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and other tech companies operating on American soil can talk a big game about their sovereignty, independence, and encryption. But talk may be all it is; there can be no guarantee that an authoritarian U.S. government will not compel American cloud, email, productivity, and messaging providers to open their databases and records to partisan law enforcement.

2. On Ideological Purity

A quote:  You don’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to make every decision a moral battlefield. You don’t have to sever every tie to every compromised system - and you sure as hell don’t have to do it overnight. You have to engage. You have to stay aware. You have to keep questioning the default. If enough people tried—just tried, even imperfectly—things would shift. If more people opted for alternatives when they could, if more people supported independent platforms even three times out of five, if more people put even a fraction of their energy into challenging the defaults, it would matter. A lot of folks don't, or won't, because they think - they've been scolded into believing - that if they can't do it completely, it's not worth doing at all. It is. Every step you take in the direction of your values matters. Every time you make a choice that reflects what you care about—even if it's small, even if it's incomplete, even if it feels incremental, marginal, unimportant—it reinforces something. Not just in the world, in yourself. And that's what counts.