on my way to the fascinating new territory

Greetings from the secret den of the stranded beetle. 

I was booked to fly to Singapore this week, imagine. I got a nice refund from Singapore Airlines and now have neither a date nor a booking to get back home. Also, I am nowhere near the F2F (fit to fly) certificate that would allow me to even book a return flight.  

As expected, we are losing the usual fight with the travel health insurance company. It happens every time I have a claim and they find some clause on page 529 that I overlooked or maybe not or a signature that's missing. Life goes on. 

I could will be here for a while.  

Meanwhile I continue with elevating the cast for 23 hrs a day and freaking out when hopping on the good leg whenever the spirit moves me as I am still in the total NWB (no weight bearing) period and have nightmares of slipping and accidentally using the cast leg. Six weeks of it I've been told, one week down, five to go.

The extremely efficient health services have supplied me with a selection of mobility aides and shower stools and handle sets for bath- and bedrooms and tomorrow I shall try the snazy knee scooter that was delivered today. The hallway is so crowded with all the gear a visitor could think we run a rehabilitation center - oh wait, that's what we do.

On Friday, the Wellington Free Ambulance Service (another example of a visionary community service) will collect me with their amphibian device to transport me down the 43 but feels like 500 steep stairs in my daughter's front garden so I can get to my next outpatient appointment. I have been told that a physiotherapist will come to the house from next week on to show me how to maintan or if necessary regain muscle power and whatever else for a decent recovery. All this is part and parcel of New Zealand's accident compensation scheme as I mentioned before.

Now, before we get carried away praising this free health care (only after accidents), let me explain.  New Zealand is a small country, most of it remote, wild and with poor access to amenities, add to that earthquakes and tsunamis, erupting volcanoes and landslides. In such a setting, regardless of life skills and community support, accidents do happen and the country would go bankrupt if every person who fell down a path or was knocked down by a falling tree in a nature reserve or got hit by falling rocks on a public road starts to sue the state for damages due to poor maintenance and lack of care. Instead, the country decided to provide free health care and rehabilitation after accidents. Cheaper in the long run. 

I feel very old. Really old. The last two days, I tried to take the photograph required for my visa renewal and no matter how I turn and what light or angle I chose, the result is of a scared looking old hag with scrawny long hair and I delete it immediately. One of these days, I'll have to face it.

The grandchild meanwhile thinks this is the best of times and joins me for long reading and singing and talking sessions, preferably before bedtime and before school. I treasure this time. 

But while physical recovery is a given, I now have enough metal in my ankle to keep it together, mobility will most likely never be again what I had taken for granted. I am working on getting my mind ready for this, preparing for the inevitable dark hole I will eventually fall into for some time and the (I hope) recovery of my mind and soul as I prepare myself to take on yet another of these fucking life challenges.

Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin, but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.

Martin Amis 

It’s a Steal

Seema Jilani

March 19, 2026

attention investors / fixer upper oasis on the Med / erected
_________on remnants of sacred souls / complimentary essential
oils / purge the stench of rotting flesh / chef’s kitchen / maqlouba
_________still warm / backgammon mid-game

savor morning kahva / private balcony / overlooking
_________corpses / alarm clock / ocean of weeping mothers /
vintage carnage / plantation shutters / no sage tea burnt /
_________secret passageways / clandestine graves / tick tock

cat cafés / no kittens / fill the hot tub with leftover blood / still
_________warm, frothy / a shattered tibia / found in the
childrens’ playroom / bury the skulls deeper / floor boards
_________don’t lie / DIY skeleton hospitals / schools included

paint the baby room cyan / we have enough red / save the dolls /
_________pink booties too / plant the all are welcome sign / slim
rainbow font / local orphans / available for landscaping / will work
_________for wheelchairs / countertops with genuine human bone inlay

private olive grove / roots endure / relentless / undaunted / inexorable / extermination ongoing

listing price_________30k children_________digital keys only_________non-negotiable

and then this happened

The beautiful, messy, buzzing and welcoming city of Wellington is covered in many walkways, some are easy to do, an hour or two, always with a lookout along the way, others are longer, with much climbing and stepping up and down through housing areas and deep bush, all with birdsong and amazing vistas along the way.

Yesterday, I almost completed the Southern Walkway. As I was slowly making my way down the last meters of a steep path in dense woods, the wide open southern beaches beckoning at every bend, I slipped and fell and broke my right ankle. That day I had spent three blissful hours hardly meeting a soul, just many many birds. And now I was on the ground trying to take in the odd way my right foot was hanging sideways when I heard voices. They came from a playground downhill across a large meadow at the foot of the path. And when I called out, the first person running towards me happened to be an emergency doctor on maternity break, toddler twins in tow, followed by a firefighter who had taken the day off and his partner, who both had just moved into their home across from the play area. Within the next hour or less, I was carried across the field to a bench, where I passed out briefly, was given two paracetamol and much back rubbing and comfort while the firefighter managed to bundle me in his car, drive me to the A&E where my daughter was waiting with a wheelchair. 

The triage nurse saw me 15 minutes later, followed by an X-ray to confirm bimalleolar ankle fracture and after my foot was cleaned (some nasty looking cuts punctuated the heavy swelling), I was given iv antibiotics, a cup of tea and more iv painkillers plus propofol, which meant that I was in dullaly land while the bones of my foot were straightened and plastered in place. When I was back in the real world, the orthopedic surgeon handed me a bowl of lemon icecream, more tea and detailed the coming scenario, a couple of days for the swelling to go down before surgery, hopefully Monday and then several weeks of recovery. All medical staff, from receptionist to surgeon were female and we were on first name terms as is the custom. My wonderful daughter who stayed with me throughout was given a bowl of passionfruit icecream. I only found out later, so missed my chance to taste it.

By 10 pm I was on a bum crawl up the many stairs to my daughter's beautiful house. Where I am now resting with the leg elevated, crawling on all fours to the toilet if need be and otherwise being looked after in splendid luxury. Alfie, the dog, slept by my side all night. I spend my hours dozing off the propofol (vaguely thinking of Micheal Jackson), watching training videos on walking with crutches - I am looking at six weeks of cast and no weight bearing - and marveling at New Zealand's accident compensation scheme which states in the official paperwork: It doesn't matter who you are, where you're from or what you were doing when you were injured, you are covered.

The grandchild is slightly overwhelmed but looking forward to painting on the cast and promised to read me stories. The rest of the family is serving snacks and excellent coffee, sorting out visa extensions and travel cancellationns/changes, while I pray to the gods of the expensive comprehensive flight insurance I bought last year.

It hurts like hell, I could complain a lot about living like a stranded beetle but I leave that for - maybe - later.

 

 Just last week I read this here somewhere and I can confirm that nothing is boring right now.

People have different comfort zones. You can think of it like an onion: inside, in the core zone, you feel comfortable, life is running smoothly, but it's also a bit boring. Around it is the zone of learning and challenge, where you feel challenged but not overwhelmed. And on the very outside is the panic zone.

 

Alfie

 

I think it's a sea horse

bath time

 

along the way

 

about 30 minutes before I slipped and fell

 

brief reminder along the way

t
 

war in Europe

Four years equals 48 months equals 208 weeks equals 1460 days equals 35040 hours equals 2012400 minutes equals 126144000 seconds.

Ukrainians have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but only how. Ukrainians are saving us all, and unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.

Anne Applebaum interviewed in Il Foglio (link in Italian)

briefly

For the past month and the next and the next, I am in a far away place, doing the school run, laundry, gardening, cooking, shopping and lots more in a household where one person goes to school, nature school, gymnastics, swimming club, music and art clubs as well as bath, hairs, teeth etc maintenance not forgetting reading and drawing and playing, another person is about to publish a book with all the deadlines and let's not disturb stuff going on, a third person is organising and chairing a major science conference while on day three after my arrival she sufferef a freak accident resulting in substantial injury to her right hand which means I do a lot of wound care, typing and accompanying her to various medical appointments trying to ease her load because conference is imminent and important to her - and there is the dog and a cat and much more, so no, I don't really read or comment or look for comments on a regular basis. Bear with me if you can. If you can't,  sorry.

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them (Germaine Greer)

The absurdity of being asked to justify the need for feminism in a world where men in positions of extraordinary power were humiliating themselves for access to a convicted pedophile sex trafficker is almost hard to process. 

In that context, the question isn’t whether feminism went too far. It’s how anyone can still pretend it went far enough. It’s difficult to take critiques of feminism seriously in a world where male solidarity routinely outranks basic moral judgment. 

Liz Plank

 

One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.

The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.

The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women. What we see in the files is a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against one of the great revolutions of history: the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.

Fintan O'Toole

 

It’s not all men. It’s not all billionaires. It’s not all power brokers. But it’s a lot of the ones that have been dictating a lot of the terms about the place. It’s not even that it’s a lot of men, it’s the fact that the slippery networking, covering-up, the leveraging and assumed exclusivity of what was a men’s club cult seems so normal, so familiar, so assumed for them all. Like it’s what they do all day, in their outside lives.

Sarah Wilson
 

Kia ora koutou

 

Here I am, where birds the size of a child's fist make the loudest call, where butterflies the size of my hand surround me on my morning walk, where you greet the bus driver when you enter and say thank you and goodbye when you step off, where the sun is hot and dangerous and the sea is freezing, where the coffee is black and stronger than anywhere I can remember, where the wind can be relentless and overpowering, where the city is really a maze of walkways and trails and where every walk involves steep slopes, thick bush, amazing vistas and seemingly endless stairs and every encounter is on first name basis.

 

courage

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a student of Plato, another Greek philosopher who himself had been a student of Socrates, who is often refered to as the first moral philosopher, talked about a concept called hexis. I was first introduced to this when I was, maybe, 15 years old as it was part of the school curriculum to read ancient Greek texts - something I disliked greatly and therefore failed most of the time - add to that that the teacher was a veteran of WWII who, while he never spoke about it and nobody did anyway at the time, was highly suspect to us resulting in various boycotts and other so-called rebellious acts. Anyway, hexis indeed stood out and made me wake up in class as it is actually a reassuring concept if you feel you are stuck and unable to get on with life, something I had experienced as a teenager repeatedly - but who hasn't.

Hexis is more than a habit, more than a skill. Hexis is something we, if we put our mind to it, can cultivate as a state of being. We get there if we stick to an action or an concept, a plan, again and again, not merely as repetition but despite internal resistance until this resistance becomes less and less and the wish to do whatever it is you set your mind to becomes more compelling and eventually a skill set and a part of who you are. Or in the words of Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio, if at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

The above-mentioned Aristotle said that we can become courageous by doing courageous things.  And to develop courage, we all start without it, we may be terrified, we may be doubtful, but if we just behave like someone with courage then we will eventually become a courageous person. Add to that Jiminy Cricket's wise words, always let your conscience be your guide.

(Fun fact aside: Socrates never wrote a single sentence, no texts, books nor pamphlets. What is refered to as Socratic thinking is what his student Plato wrote down in the shape of his dialogues. Having to read and struggle to translate these dialogues made my teenage life quite miserable.)

 

Anti-fascism is the concept and antifa is the courageous stance. It evolved in Germany in the 1920s as a direct response to the fascist threat and it is self-evident in any democracy. Without anti-fascism, there can be no democracy. If you want to live in a free society, a constitutional state and a democracy, you must be an anti-fascist. Fascism is not simply an opinion within the democratic spectrum of opinions.

Fascism is the opposite of humanity, brutalising and dehumanising not only its victims, but also its followers. That is why it must be opposed and all areas of our society must be protected from it.  You can't allow a little bit of fascism and watch what happens. Fascism is like lead in drinking water, even a little bit destroys everything.

 

The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in ‘cyberspace’. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing world-views and alternative visions of the future.

    Marshall McLuhan (Culture is Our Business, 1970) 

We have long memories. We remember what it means to be human, beyond our economic function as a consumer or voter. We have the wild world as our ally and our ancestors stand behind us. 

Charlotte du Cann 

 

And now for the final bits of packing, I am once again looking forward to experience the amazing wall-to-wall carpeting of Changi Airport.

I'll be gone for a while. 

. . . if at some point your eyes look at a video of someone getting murdered in broad daylight and your mind’s first instinct is to say but what if or but what about, I would urge you to stop, because I want you to be a person who understands that you are the only person who loves the way you do, which means that every person you see, whether in a video or in the broad daylight just outside the reach of your outstretched hand, is the only person who loves the way they do, and, honestly, if you refuse to see that, and if you choose instead to attempt to justify rather than mourn the death of someone whose love is a shiny, remarkable gem polished under the light of the same sun where you and I both stand, you are just like the millions of others who have abandoned the radical and wildly special individuality of their love to instead become people who hate other people in exactly the same way.

 

Devin Kelly (please read all of it here) 

concentrate on our ethical muscles

 

Dangerous pavements.
But  this year I face the ice
With my father’s stick.

Seamus Heaney 

 

There is snow, quite a lot of it, something that doesn't happen often here in this big fat river valley. It will all be gone by tomorrow but not before a night of heavy frost and ice. Looking outside, I can only see white and grey and black. 

Yesterday, I had the last of a string of medical exams and imaging tests and have been given the all clear for the long haul flight. Tomorrow I will start packing, summer clothes and bicycle helmet and the high SPF sunscreen lotion. Yesterday, I also deleted my instagram account, my social media activities are now reduced to reading a small number of writers on substack, a couple of blogs and mastodon, where I keep in touch with a group of scientists and climate activists. How weird it now seems, that initial excitement about social media and finding old friends from another lifetime and what has become of it, this strange addiction to scrolling and schadenfreude.

I want to continue exposing myself to the real world, and I know that - like the people whose homes are threatened by rising sea levels - I cannot do this without accurate information and that this involves a struggle with a great deal of dullness and nastiness in today's media world. 

It is so important to avoid seeking comfort in resentment, but instead have confidence in what people can achieve as long as they preserve their humanity as a core value. 

Because ultimately we have no choice but to love our world. We can follow our cynicism and our despair until the cows come home. But in the long run, that will neither change anything nor make us feel better. Seriously, there is no alternative to lovingly helping to shape the world. Otherwise, people who do not love the world will take over.

So, as a always, this means to pool my resources and energy with others to help rescue people from their agony of resignation, from their apathy born of despair - something I myself have known and continue to experience. But instead and without moralising, concentrate on our ethical muscles and our sense of community.

And remember, progressive movements have never been unified movements. We don't need to wait until everybody agrees or is convinced. Debating and arguing is part of the process.

To paraphrase Erich Fromm, without the practice of love of life, societies simply cannot survive.

 

I do wish there was less harshness to endure, less hardness for my soft body to push against, but what they all have in common in their endurance and adaptation is that they remain soft. I, too, plan to remain human, wide open to the heartbreak and despair of the harm being done . . . Let me not harden myself against all this hurt. Let me be owl down, seal fur, nudibranch flesh. Let me bend, give, flex. I plan to endure, and to turn towards cooperative efforts to right the overwhelming amount of wrong in the world.

 

Mary Beth Rew Hicks 

Uncertainty and confidence can exist at the same time.

If I write that I do feel a tiny bit better, I may jinx it and although superstition is not part of my life skills, I remain cautious. At least I was able to change the flight dates without any problems or extra costs. 

 

(At school, this was an often used response to a teacher complaining about not paying attention. It's by Heraclitus, one of the eminent pre-Socratic philosophers, hence extremely valid.)

 

 

As usual, distraction is the name of the game and for me that includes reading and listening to whatever comes my way, often suggested or linked by family members and friends, for laughs, stimulation, discussion and delight. Here is what has kept me entertained in the last week, I am writing most of it as I remember reading it, forgot to take down sources.

First, the obvious:

• Autoimmune disease is treated by immune suppressing drugs which in turn often can result in the body getting infected by all sorts of viruses and bacteria healthy people can fight against. Instead of getting dispirited every time that happens, maybe look at these as a side effect of your immune system trying to protect you. The immune system gets to know us even before our parents do, and until the moment we die, it does everything it can to heal and protect us. 

Next, who'd have thought. 

• The neocortex - the part of the brain that plays a significant role in intelligence - is particularly large in monkeys that live together in large groups. Dolphins address each other by name, obviously in dolphin language and using dolphin names. Goats can recognise and teach each other symbols and bonobos master a previously unimagined form of syntax. And then there's that standard test used by science to detect complex thinking in animal species, namely the ability to recognise yourself in a mirror - or in other words, the ability to distinguish between the self and others. And squirrels and crows hide their food while no one is watching and then make a big show of digging a big hole for their stash while every creature looks on. The proper term for this behaviour is perspective-taking. At least I think it is.

Also:

• There is a reason fascists ban books and not guns. Guns are a tool for one thing, books are tools for everything. 

And a recent headline from the Guardian:

• World’s longest-married couple reveals key to a lasting relationship: ‘We love each other’. 

 

Finally, kids are clever. 

 

 

 

 

perspective taking

It's cold outside.

The last couple of weeks:

After the fairly mediocre head cold and the course of antibiotics and the subsequent restoration of gut health, something else hit me that required a ten day crash course of oral cortisone with the full array of side effects regarding sleep and mood and digestion - again - and still not much better, although, in the words of the doctor, at least not worse. Some of it is very familiar, which means I am hopeful that with all the fucking rest I am taking my body will miraculously realign itself into a shape of recognisable physical fitness. And I am not talking marathon running fitness here, just making it up the stairs at a brisk pace. 

It's a shitty symptom, this lack of energy.  You simply cannot get anything done, no matter how trivial and believe me, I do try. But the man watches me like a hawk and has raised his voice in alarm more than once. Bless him.

Anyway, in ordinary times, I would lean back, listen to some decent audiobooks, read some decent novels, watch some decent movies and let myself be expertly looked after and otherwise entertained by the man in my life. I am retired, I can take my time. Been there, done it before etc.

Only, I am booked to fly halfway across the planet in a few days. Obviously, not possible, also because I am scheduled for a minor invasive cardiac exam in ten days. Every morning I log into the Singapore Airlines app ready to press the buttons for "change flight dates" and then I stop myself. One of these days I'll have to. We are insured to the hilt, it's not about money, it's just about self confidence and limitations and regret and the weeks of preparing and expectations. And the fact that I am holding on like mad to the hope that I'll be able to travel and be healthy enough to be a real granny for a couple of months, eating ice cream while looking across the South Pacific.

In other news, we are celebrating xmas in the ususal fashion, ie not at all. I can recommend it wholeheartedly. However, there is an expensive Veronese pandoro - not pannetone - waiting in the kitchen.  We also watched the live stream of the winter solstice sunlight beam snaking its way into the chamber of the megalithic tomb in Newgrange, Co. Meath, Ireland, and the dedication of the people artists who imagined and built this structure a good five thousand years ago put a sense of perspective back into my muddled brain. It also means that soon there will be a good stretch in the evenings, as the saying goes.

 

 

 

reminder

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted on this day in 1948  in response to the “barbarous acts which […] outraged the conscience of mankind” during the Second World War.

end of November

Last week's offerings:

Limited sunshine, one gorgeous sunrise and the entire remaining quota of grey clouds left for November. (Temperatures are climbing now amid rumours and actual meteorological forecasts of an unusually mild "summer" December. We shall see.) While around me people declare to be seriously suffering from seasonal affective disorder, my version is more of an allergic reaction when facing the various xmas offerings in the shops complete with seasonal music.

Otherwise I am working on reestablishing my gut health after ten days of antibiotics. This is what the gods invented Greek yoghurt for.  

The grandchild continues to read to us, we are working our way through the Dog Man opus, which I cannot praise high enough for style, narrative structure, language and plot climax. I am serious. In today's chapter, Dog Man told us that it's usually darkest before dawn and also that sometimes stuff happens totally random. 

We also went for a long walk and when my hands and feet were more or less frozen solid checked into a nice hotel by the river where ducks and herons and swans woke us the next morning at sunrise.

Reading, listening and watching.

• Reading:  

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. As always, this writer does not disappoint and I stayed up late into several early mornings reading it. And as always, when I have read the last page of any Erdrich novel, I need to sit quietly for a while, sorting through my head and heart and the first thought that always comes to mind is, thank you.  

The Writers' Castle by Uwe Neumahr. All about the famous writers and journalists who came to Germany to observe and report on the Nuremberg Trial against the captured leaders of nazi Germany. I read this for three reasons, no 1, it was 80 years ago when the Nuremberg Trial started and there are heaps of documentaries and reports in all of the media currently, no 2, I spent a large part of my childhood and teenage years in Nuremberg and no 3, the castle in question, where the press camp was set up, sits across the road from the home where my grandmother lived for the last ten years of her long life and where she went for her daily walk in the castle park until one morning, aged 103, she decided she had had enough of it all, stayed in bed and died. 

• Listening:

As I have grown a bit tired of the Blindboy Podcast (but still think the episode "A Psychosexual history of Digestive biscuits and their use as instruments of Physical Force Republicanism", episode 342, season 1, is one of the best episodes ever in the whole podcast world) and cannot really stomach any more true-crime-that-never-really-gets-solved podcasts, I happily switched to Ill advised, the wonderful podcast of the wonderful British actor Bill Nighy. As a longtime fan of Bill Nighy (and long before Love Actually) I am obviously biased but really, there is nothing to complain here, true to his words, it's "for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do" and it comes complete with his well curated weekly playlist and book recommendation at the end of each episode. 

• Watching:

We worked our way through two series based in Northern Ireland, both excellent in our opinion, one for content, historical accuracy and acting and so on, Trespasses, which is based on the excellent novel of the same name by Louise Kennedy. The other, Blue Lights, in more than one way completely unrealistic and incorrect, but great stories and acting and entertaining (but not funny).

As was to be expected, we now have completely unintentionally started to take on the Ulster accent.

 

 

And finally, in his soft Limerick accent, the outgoing and all over the island much admired and loved Irish president Michael D. Higgins said yesterday: 

I see that President Trump refers to the ‘Third World.’ I think he had better realise that the people he’s talking about are the future world and they will believe in universalism in a way that he strongly opposes, and they will make new international institutions that he has destroyed with a respect for international law that he does not have.
The sooner the majority of the world is represented in the decisions that affect all future generations, the safer our planet will be. 

Sunday's child

Today is our daughter's birthday. As always, the events of that day - and the 48 hrs before her birth - are on my mind. And not just today but that's to be expected. 

During the day, we have a little competition of who remembers the most outrageous, funny, sad, and so on, thing about her and our parenting show. It is a cold and grey day, we are both retired, so we are at home, busy in our separate spaces with the doors open as we call out memories to each other in a way that would make our teenage daughter cringe and our grown up daughter and now herself a mother  probably teary eyed. How silly are parents etc., but she is far too busy. As were we at her age.

Three memories.

When she was ten years old, she changed schools and we trained her to come home by herself. This involved her walking half a kilometer from the school to the nearest bus stop, on the way crossing a busy road via a pedestrian light crossing, waiting at the stop where three different bus routes merged and getting off the correct bus after 15 minutes, crossing another road via a zebra crossing, walking through a pedestrian railway underpass and along a quietish street home for maybe one kilometer. All of this during the day, in a busy town, with many other school kids. For about a week, I was waiting behind a tree close to the bus stop near her school, watching how she carefully crossed the road, take her seat behind the bus driver while I sat at the back, unnoticed, and with a serious determined face and stride getting off at the correct stop walking home when, suprise, surprise, I would happen to come along. 

Years later when she set off into the wild night life, we once or thrice, sat in the car parked illegally behind some advertising billboard by the central bus station and watched her in the crowd of happy teenagers waiting for the nightbus after midnight, driving home once she was safely on the bus and seemingly asleep by the time we could hear her key in the front door.

Fast forward a couple more years, with me sitting at my desk at work, reading her email. She wrote that she had just travelled through the night on a bus in Laos, sitting next to a monk, which meant she had to leave her feet firmly on the floor and sitting up straight but how this inconvenience offered a sense of security as apart from the monk, most passengers were armed soldiers. She was writing this email at sunrise on the banks of the Mekong waiting for the morning ferry to Thailand where a group of taxi drivers had invited her for coffee. She was, she wrote that day, extremely happy.

She has been surrounded by invisible guardian angels, helped by common sense and a sharp mind. Always certain that humanity is our family. Long may it last.  

 

 

half way through November

 

A reliable sorce informed me a while ago that the various AI apps can  - depending on variables such as age, habits, career, family and whatever else they have on you - calculate how many more movies and series you will watch, how many more books you will read, and how many new people you will meet before you die. And here I was thinking AI was mindless shit.

In a convoluted way it does bring to mind the much adored (by me) German performance artist/theatre director/filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief who said shortly before his death from cancer in 2010 that he would give anything to lie awake at night and just ponder whether he had taken out the rubbish or not.  

This post is not meant to be all gloomy but it is November after all and today we had the whole programme from stormy winds to sleet and hail and snow and back to briefly sunshine and now frost. And drizzle. Drizzling frost freezing on the roads. The house makes a clicking noise only I can hear.

Last Friday I finally accepted that the headcold symptoms were getting a tad too intesive and that after two weeks there should really be some improvement and not shivers and fever and later that morning, my friendly GP gave me a stern look and a short lecture about immune suppression and risks and ladila and a prescription for antibiotics with rest. To top it, R has set up a regimen of inhalations and keeps putting very large glasses of water within reach and I have watched a couple of Scandinavian thriller series and obviously, read all the internets.

Here is what I found:

• For decades, scientists have been collecting brittle stars, or Ophiuroidea, a relative of the starfish, and storing them in museums and universities. Now, DNA analysis from thousands of these ancient, prickly crawlers shows that family ties extend across oceans, plural. All that deep water is much more interconected than previously thought possible. In fact brittle stars from the South Pacific near New Zealand, for example, are related to those found as far away as the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic. For marine invetebrates, tiny creatures living on the sea floor, the oceans are a connected superhighway.

• While I watched the inauguration of the wonderful new president of Ireland, Catherine Connolly, and listened to her gentle voice speaking as gaeilge (in Irish) not understanding a word, I, for the hundredth time, decided to finally once again have a go at learning this amazing language (I am the only person in the family unable to utter even a few words of it). Obviously, I was running a temperatur and no, it's not going to happen, who am I kidding. Just consider the word for hole: one dug into the ground after dark by an animal is uachas. Or one made by fish in a sandy riverbed for spawning is saothar. One hollowed out by the hooves of beasts and then filled with rain is plobán. And one where a lobster is hiding in is fach and a hideaway by a wild beast is puathais. The Irish word for president is uachtarán and it translates as the the cream that rises to the top and thus the presidential palace in Dublin is called Áras an Uachtaráin or house of the president or to some, the country's creamery.

And then I found this: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the power of novelists

As mentioned a few times here, English is not my first language and since I had been told during my school years that I had no talent for modern languages, I did not waste much time trying to speak or read let alone understand English.

As also mentioned several times here, this all changed dramatically in the summer of 1979 when, at age 21 on the wild Atlantic coast of Connemara, I met R who has been the man in my life ever since. And while he speaks a couple of modern languages, German was not part of his repertoire. And since I can be determined when I want to, my talent for one of the modern languages improved rapidly and the rest is history. (He also speaks German by now.)

I may have also mentioned that I am an avid reader and incorporating English into my life opened the door to a whole new world of literature. At first reading in English was like driving without headlights, I just guessed my way through the narrative, but it did not stop me.

The first novel in English was The Magus by John Fowles. It was quite the rage at the time and had made a huge impression on R and when I asked him to tell me what to read, he got me a copy. To say that I struggled with it would be an understatement but I got the general drift and did read it to the end. I tried reading it again a few years back but just could not get into it.

The second novel in English was The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. There are many ways to read this massive and amazing book and I have read it three times by now.

The third novel in English was Them by Joyce Carol Oates which blew me away with its sharp honesty, describing a world I could only try to imagine - being 21 and living in the safe cocoon of love and affection and happiness. 

I've read a good few of Joyce Carol Oates's books since, did not like all of them but whenever I find one of her titles in a shop or library, I pick it up and have a look. Which is why this little missive by her is such a refreshing, uplifting and to-the-point thing to read:

Other than that I am grumpy and mean spirited since I picked up R's head cold a week ago and while he recovered within a couple of days and is now frolicking like a young deer, I am nursing the worst symptoms in the history of head colds. 
 

my life in ten objects: union card

I don't have an actual union card any longer. The last one looked like a credit card and I had it tucked away somewhere with my work papers. It's all online now but I left the last union I was in when I retired.

The first union I joined was the German Education Union, which organises educators and teachers in schools, universities, early childhood education, vocational training and adult education. 

I joined because my father had urged me to do so. Also, a cousin and various other family members and I had grown tired of the discussions as to why not and so on.  

It was the time when I was a student and trainee teacher and I remember lots of action but mostly fun. And learning workshops on all sorts of stuff. The union financed the interrail tickets that enabled me to travel all over Europe during the summer, visiting festivals and doing voluntary work in many different settings (mixing cement for school renovations, chaperoning youth groups, serving coffee to old age pensioners, cleaning hospital floors, replanting beach grass at the coast, you get the idea). And along the way, I met the man I am still sharing my life with.

When I moved to Ireland and worked in bookshops, I joined IDATU, the Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union, which then was the trade union representing workers in Ireland. I wasn't an active member, not someone who went to meetings and such, but when in 1984, several female workers and one man at Dunnes Stores, one of Ireland's large department stores, refused to sell South African grapefruits as part of the growing campaign against the Apartheid regime, my union branch decided to follow and soon enough, there were pickets all over the country where I spent many hours, my small kid asleep in the buggy or playing with others between our signs and banners.  

This guy tells the story quite well and almost like a joke: 

I found out a bit later that my name, together with all other IDATU members, was on a list of people barred from South Africa at the time. When we moved to Germany, I dutifully joined the next best union and paid my membership fees and helped distributing newsletters from time to time, collected signatures on petitions and funds for people in need. I had nothing to worry about but I had my rep's contact details and the knowledge that any time any place I had the legal protection of my rights at work - as well as being part of a collective muscle for lack of a better word. 

A while back, during one of my father's family dinners, the above-mentioned cousin was explaining to another guest why he, now a well off retired academic, had always been a union member. It's because I never wanted to lose my sense of solidarity, always wanted to remind myself what social responsibility means and why it matters. But also, because I can.

Hallowe'en

In this part of the world, we don’t observe the dead, we just shunt them aside with awkward funerals. In the past and in some corners of the world, however, this day has been celebrated as the ancestral doorway of the year, but since has become a children’s party game. Or an occasion to watch a horror movie. Or both.

I am not complaining. Hallowe'en arrived in this part of the world a few years ago, in the shadow of the coca cola xmas truck. Whatever the marketing strategy, it's not quite catching on - yet. Probably because we have carneval in various shapes and forms, traditionally dating back to the dark ages with a history of defiance during the French occupation of the Rhineland thrown in etc. and then there's the feast of Saint Martin in early November and All Saints/All Souls on first/second of November - that day/night people here light candles on the graves of their deceased and the cemeteries look kind of spooky after dark. 

But thanks to coca cola and social media, who knows, there may be some trick or treat kids calling tonight and if not, the sweets are waiting for the Saint Martin latern singers next week.

I may blog about the Rhineland Carnival another time, it starts on November 11th at 11 hrs and 11 min on the dot and that day it's mayhem in town, and it drags on until pancake Tuesday in February.

More and more of my younger Irish family are seriously into Samhain hoping to recall their ancient Celtic roots, visiting sacred hills for all sorts of rituals. Good luck, I hope it's not raining.

Click here to read a bit about the Celtic origin of Hallowe'en. 

This household is now completely vaccinated against the evil viruses. We have complained about the soreness of arms and muscles and despite warnings of doom and decay by some in our outer circles have survived it. 

The garden is getting ready for winter, mostly. The plumeria has yet to get the message.

 Earlier this summer, the man accepted a horticultural challenge, namely growing an endagered species (not previously known to the area) that for whatever reasons, dedicated gardeners around the world have decided to cultivate, giving it a boost so to speak. Apparently, less than 200 mature trees (yes it will grow!) are currently present in the wild. From my distant observation point I noticed the word cult in cultivation but what do I know. The official name is Global Tree Campaign. 

The plant is Gigasiphon macrosiphon and it arrived in the shape of a single giant seed, which has been carefully nurtured and observed on a daily basis.

Here is what it looks today. It will eventually have the most gorgeous giant flowers I have been promised.

And here is our first and most likely last peanut harvest. It was just something that had to be done in the same way that I would put an orange pip or an avocado stone into a pot with good potting soil.

 

As for horror movies, here's a short one to watch.

 

you are here now, alive and conscious, able to experience the world

 

Stormy weather here, even had some rain. That's how I would have started a phone call to my father. We always talked about the weather first of all, he in more detail in relation to all things agricultural. Anyway, autumn is early this year. I had the flu shot and then the covid shot and for about three days it felt a bit like having been knocked over by something big and heavy but I pretended this was nothing and so we went to the museum and cycled back home through the park where the geese are grazing and one day we went uphill deep into the forest where autumn does its wonders best of all. But still. The downside of autumn is that when it's over, it's winter and that's not a season I am fond of.

The thing is that I feel the cold, always have, always the kid with frozen toes and fingers, hence always the first trudging home when we were out skating or sledging or skiing and whatever stuff kids did during the long Franconian winters. Back home my mother would have to alternatingly dip my feet into bowls of warm and cold water to wake them up from their frozen stupor while I tried not to cry because my mother was of big fan of heroics. Also, I never really liked snowmen and avoided snowball fights if at all possible. 

So the state of things is beautifully autumnal and shitty dark, depending how we look at it. 

I recently joined a small group of people for a listening project. It involves pairing off into twos and going for a walk for 45 minutes. Before we go, we are given a piece of paper with a prompt/question and the task is that first one and then the other person gets a fixed time period each to speak on that prompt while the other person does nothing but listen. The prompt is fairly basic, like "is there something that made you happy, worry, laugh" etc. and nothing but listen means, no eye contact, no nodding, no touching or sighs or whatever, just listening and giving the other person the space and time to talk, no responding, no solutions offered and so on - unless the speaker gives you permission. It's quite a thing to listen without your mind trying to respond or react or having to provide an answer or a solution and it's quite a thing to be able to just talk without interruption yet knowing that the other person is really listening and just that. I realise it's hard to describe and it's something that requires concentration and empathy on a different level than the usual let's-have-a-talk or I-am-here-to-help you scenarios. I never met any of the people in the group before, I only know their first names and it's a different person I get to walk with every time. I think it's a bit like one of these 12-step groups from the movies or at least how I imagine them.

Perhaps this is what we need to do, creating moments of community and loyalty in everyday life and remaining human, not allowing our own indifference or our own self-importance to take hold. Even when it is most difficult, even when we are exhausted. (Maybe this is also the only reliable strategy for confronting criminal politicians and power structures.)

The liberation of insignificance: it lets you focus on what actually matters to you, right now, without the weight of cosmic importance crushing you. You can be kind to people because kindness feels good, without trying to tip the scales of history. You can create art because creation is satisfying, without competing for immortality. You can love people fully, knowing that love will end (one way or another) and that's fine.

There's something deeply wrong with how we've constructed meaning in the modern world. We've lost most of the traditional sources of significance (religion, community, duty) but kept the anxious feeling that we need to justify our existence. So we've turned to careers and achievements and metrics and status, trying to prove our worth to the horizon. We're all performing significance, trying to matter, desperate not to be forgotten.

But what if being forgotten is the natural state of things? What if almost everyone who has ever lived is already forgotten, and that's just how it works? There are about 100 billion humans who have lived and died, and you can probably name a few hundred of them. The rest have vanished into history, and the world keeps turning. 

I think we'd be happier if we could internalize this. Not in a nihilistic way, where nothing matters so why bother, but in a liberating way, where things matter in proportion to their actual impact on actual people, not in proportion to how much astral significance we imagine them having. 

J A Westenberg 

 

reasons to be cheerful

Just like any other morning, I woke up today with a great gift: I have the freedom to make decisions. And today, too, my decisions will shape how I feel, what I believe is possible in this world, and ultimately what I make possible for myself and for those around me and so on.

I could get bogged down by the histology findings of my finally removed and good riddance gallbladder and the conversations I had earlier this week with the experts, which included briefly: "the very obvious and widespread and ultimatively destructive inflammation of the entire mucosa and its blood vessel supply is clearly of autoimmune origin and regretfully avoided detection at an earlier stage as  long-term immune suppressing medication tends to camouflage the necessary laboratory markers" and "in this case, it was only due to the insistent reporting of increasingly stressful symptoms by the patient that resulted in surgical removal" and "due to the patient's history and diagnosis, potential further damage to vital organs including liver and pancreas must be carefully monitored in short time intervals". 

These are the kind of experiences that have rearranged my life for so many years now. And after every blow, and yes, even after so many years and all the ways I have figured out to accommodate and adjust, the blows are big, it takes me a while to realise that my strength extends beyond my misfortune, that while it may look and feel as if I am robbed of so much, I know that even when disappointed for a while, I will once again find that am able to live well. And once again look beyond my little horizon. Which today will include getting on my bicycle and make my way into the forest and see where it takes me. The man meanwhile is making jam, the leaves are turning all of the reds, renewable energy overtook coal as the world's leading source of electricity and the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to María Corina Machado, an outspoken politician from Venezuela. 

 

 

 

 

wherein I praise the work of antifa

We woke to a misty rainy day, summer is definitely over.

Just the day for a good damp walk after breakfast. Hiding under my big hood, I visited the local antifa memorial site. To recap: as we surely all know, antifa stands for anti-fascist and just in case there's still any doubt, below, here is a press photo of antifa fighters landing at the beaches of Normandy, France in 1944. I don't know whether I would be able to write this blog post today without them.

So today - like most days - I walked down to the river and looked at the water and the hills and also at this little model bridge a local business man erected in the small park.

It is a replica of the original Hodges Bridge, built right here by US soldiers in April 1945, enabling allied troups to cross the river Rhine and to proceed towards meeting Russian troups thus ending WWII and the rest is history.

Click here for more info about the original Hodges Bridge.

Let's not allow giving antifa fighters a bad name. 

 

 

October

The solution in today's cryptic crossword of my favourite newspaper was Tiefpunkt, low point, and if I win the competition, the first prize is a weekend in a spa hotel (two nights incl. dinner and massage) in the Italian Alps. Of course I always enter competitions, handing over my name and address to all the advertisers out there. Last year I won a selection box of vegan whole food snacks, so there's hope. My mother in law was a great one for competitions and she won tons of stuff including coffee makers and waffle irons and hair dryers and an entire tea set for six which she gracefully passed on to us. We still have one saucer from it, which I use to cover the porridge bowl in the microwave.

Anyway, Tiefpunkt, or starting point for all-round improvement as the final clue suggested. I should take this to heart. Last night, I went to a talk and discussion about war and peace and whether there is such a thing as a just peace (spoiler: no) and what are the options (compromise peace, victory peace) and where we are in the coming multipolar world order. It was very depressing and cycling home in the dark with my hands getting very cold did not improve my mood.

I really could do with a weekend in a spa hotel, any spa hotel will do.

Life and mood massively improved when the grandchild read both The Gruffalo and The Jolly Postman to us this morning. 

Also, here are our cabernet mitos grapes, such beauties.

 

  

Geography Lessons

When you've reached the peak,
the summit, the end,
you've come to the limit,
let me tell you gently
that the world is round, my sweet,
and it's all a long walk backwards,
starting from here.

Caroline Bird 

 

The grandchild (6) has figured out reading - properly - and has taken to it with much energy. We are now being read to on a daily basis and with great gusto and dramatic effects. All involved have agreed that books are great treasures and while we - regretfully - will never be able to read all the books in the whole world, there will be a new book every day and most importantly, a book can be read again and again.

Today, we were read poems by Michael Rosen and were told that he is surely one the best poets and story book writers discovered by the grandchild to date.

This was our favourite poem of the day (from A Great Big Cuddle by Michael Rosen) we discussed it in detail and found it perfect in every way.

 

Coming Home

Here's a house
Here's a door
Here's a ceiling
Here's a floor

Here's a wall
Here's the stairs
Here's the table
Here's the chairs

Here's a bowl
Here's a cup
Open your mouth
And drink it up.

tomato is a fruit

 

We've been away. It was a good break, great weather, good scenery, mostly no internet, long walks up and down hills and meeting people, old friends, long talks into the night about trying to make sense of the world around us, our place in it and how to handle this whole shit show.

 

There were castles and forests and streams and valleys and vineyards and old towns and tourists. 

There was listening and laughing and also feeling sorry for ourselves and overwhelmed by the tasks at hand but not alone. There were reports on actions and learning and showing up for others, too detailed to share but so very hopeful. That now is the time to escape commodity and replace it with community (paraphrasing Richard Powers) so that our capacity for empathy remains intact. 

 

And so today, after the laundry has been done etc. I am so very tired. It's been a lot. But R made apple crumble and there are still some pears and grapes to harvest.

Somewhere someone mentioned something like this as an approach to the endless feed of news and dystopia and schadenfreude and blaming and told-you-so and well, all of social media especially before sleep:

• Check if what you are reading is facilitating more understanding or more confusion.
• Check if it's adding to your awareness or hindering it.
• Check if it's contributing to your knowledge or making you feel more hostile and out of control. 

Because the biggest problem is actually a very trivial one: we refuse to believe what we do not want to believe, even when we are confronted with clear warnings.

We have suppressed the fact that each and every one of us bears responsibility. We have lived in a kind of paradise for 20 to 30 years, at least 80 per cent of the population. And we thought it would always be that way. We thought we could buy security with money. Today we are learning that we will have neither endless time nor enough money. 

 Jeanette Winterson (not sure, thanks for pointing this out, Steve)

You know what to do. Because as a wise woman said ages ago, knowledge is recognizing that a tomato is a fruit, whereas wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad. 

 

the King of las Bromas de Fartos

If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps. 

George Saunders (Love Letter)  

We should make it a habit to read the complete short story here or listen to the author reading it here. Every morning for a week.

Here's another bit from it:

Every night, as we sat across from each other, . . . , from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened, that we could never have imagined happening, that were now happening, and the only response from the TV pundits was a wry, satirical smugness that assumed, as we assumed, that those things could and would soon be undone and that all would return to normal—that some adult or adults would arrive, as they had always arrived in the past, to set things right. 

And then there's that, from a guy called Mike Monteiro:

Mostly, though, we’re sorry we gave up. It all seemed very hard. We let a lot of stuff go by. We were going to fix it all in the next election. Also, we read something on Reddit about how the best way to fix it was to let it all crash, and then rebuild, and there’s a certain logic to that. We didn’t think about all the people who’d get killed on the way to the collapse. So yeah, I think we might’ve fucked that up. Getting to tomorrow felt like more than we could handle. 

We watch the polls, in the last month we moved from every fifth to every fourth person wanting a fascist party in power in Germany. I sit in my favourite coffee place at the farmer's market and count, one, two, three, four. I wish my parents were alive, just for comparison.

I know I will not be able to just hang around watching and quoting disillusionment beautifully crafted by educated writers, I am working on it. We are grandparents.

In other news, here is a picture of some of the grape harvest, 16 kilo, ready for wine.

 

And last week, I finally figured out how to properly cook tofu thanks to my Japanese neighbour. She just laughed when I told her about cubing and marinating and the resulting somewhat tasteless rubbery consistency.

This is what she taught me.

First you press as much water as possible out of a block of firm tofu by wrapping it in paper towels and putting three to five heavy books on top of it - in Japan, you would use a snazzy tofu press - for at least 30 minutes. 

You prepare a marinade of choice while you wait. Following her suggestion, I mixed equal parts of almond butter (because there was no tahini in the house), soya sauce and apple vinegar, added a dash of lemon juice. 

Next, you tear the tofu into pieces, you do not cut it into cubes. And you totally ignore the marinade for now. Instead, you fry the torn unmarinated pieces of tofu in sesame oil until everything is nicely browned, the browner the better she said. Be patient, take your time. When everything is nicely brown, you turn off the heat and only then do you pour your marinade onto the fried brown torn tofu and toss the lot. If need be, you can sprinkle some roasted sesame seed on top. And then you eat it.