Scandinavia

   Fleshquartet w. Anna Ternheim - Quiet Night 

Thunder rolling outside, on and off. One minute the sky is this startling clear blue with hovering insects in the heat, and then towering black clouds appear out of nowhere, the wind picks up and before you know like a deflating balloon it's all over and back to hot blue skies.

Soon, very soon, my child will be here. This morning on skype I told her that every day I remind myself to not treat her like a 16-year old when she comes. That I have the best intentions to stand back and let myself be overtaken by this glorious and grown up woman with a life and a career and a smart brain. And she laughed at that.

And I told her that R reminded me to not always refer to her coming "home" but she laughed at that, too. And then she said she will write to the bank to sort out the stuff about her missing card so that it will be sent here by the time she arrives and I quickly reminded her that she has been planning this for the last year and that we are now talking about 10 days which may be a bit tight and why not.... yes mum, said my 16-year old. And we could laugh at that.

30 years

There are so many ways to tell the story of this day, today.  And in the shape of things or as some would put it: the bigger picture, it has played only a minor role. So minor that we usually forget it. Or we mention it as a by the way sort of funny anecdote to make people laugh. Which they usually do. And we smile and look at each other.

Of course it all began here, but the story of this day could also start with one over eager official at Dublin airport who stamped a three months visa into my passport despite or maybe because of my claims that I was not a tourist but already living in Ireland. 

Or it could start with the young solicitor who told R that I would get my residence permit - no problem, mate! - if we would just write to the aliens (sic) registration office in Dublin that we were engaged to be married (which of course we were not).

Or it could start with us watching R's mum come running up the hill after a friend had accidently told her that I was pregnant (which of course in itself was not an accident and certainly no reason to get married).

In the end, three things happened:

1. The  good people at the aliens registration office (which by the way was in a crappy old caravan parked behind Dublin Castle and apart from myself, there were only three nuns from Zimbabwe applying for residency in a country with sky high emigration at the time) did not buy our story and in the most un-Irish stubbornness insisted on proof.
2. After the initial shock to their Catholic hearts, R's parents transcended all limits of their faith and traditions and showered us with so much grace and delight and joy and support that we simply had to give something back.
3. Our Kerry friend in London devised a simple cunning plan.

And so one clear and early morning we were walking along the seafront to Dun Laoghaire harbour to catch the morning ferry and by tea time we sat in Kerry friend's flat in London taking instructions while playing with little Kerry baby. There is no need to go into details here, no illegal money changed hands, it was mostly all above board. Let's just say that our version of certain events and addresses of residence in recent weeks differed slightly from the official point of view. 

48 hours after our arrival, this happened:

The two London friends, who had generously agreed at short notice to witness the event, arrived on bicycle. On bicycle?! Of all the days in the year, all public transport in London was on strike. And we were late. And now illegal money did change hands as we had to bribe the driver of a black London taxi to let five adults and little Kerry baby and little Kerry baby's pushchair squeeze into his vehicle. But it was a waste of money because all of London was in gridlock. And we were late. And so we ran, five adults with a Kerry baby in a pushchair running down Marylebone Road and up the steps of  the register office.

Where twenty minutes later we all stood, all five adults and one Kerry baby now asleep in a pushchair. Up there between the pillars, just like some other people and some of them even twice. 

And two of this little group were now married. The bride wore her hair freshly washed and long and a blue Indian cotton dress with bells and tassels which she had purchased less than 24 hours beforehand at Portobello Road flea market. The groom looked extremely handsome with his dark beard, wearing a hand knitted waistcoat sweater (must get it right) and an old pair of maroon leather pants. The male witness did a cartwheel and the female witness produced a small bottle of bubbly. Kerry friend took three pictures of the event, two of which have gone missing since. The remaining photo from my wedding (there, I said it) shows the pregnant bride with drink in one hand, while the other hand holds onto the pushchair with a sleeping Kerry baby. 

The wedding party then proceeded on foot to Regent's Park for an impromptu dance on the empty band stand before continuing towards Queensway in search of a cheap Chinese meal, which the bride was unable to finish.  

The honeymoon had to be postponed due to shortage of funds (until we were offered the job in paradise).  

We would do it all over again, just like that.
But we don't need to now.

last night 10 pm looking NW

 

Sometimes I have glimpses of the woman I used to be. I usually avoid this. But I have gotten better. Not much, just that little bit. Because, you see, it gets all mixed up. The woman I used to be and the woman I always wanted to be and the woman I always thought I would become with age. There are a few coordinates, real things that have not become blown out of proportion by my memory or my self pity. These forces that have pushed and pulled me along my tracks: energy and curiosity. How easy it has been.

Last week I watched an old video from 1988. There we were, the sunshine people, laughing and running on the beach just before sunset. It's somewhere in my bones, deep down in my cellular memory, that effortless feeling of being healthy. How much I want to believe that.

Come on, come on down, you got it in you.
Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes.

I am handed a clipboard and a pen and with one of those very professional smiles I am asked to take a seat and write down any new and prominent symptoms I experienced since my last visit.

And so I start to write

about 

the heavy stone that sits in my chest some mornings

the lonely silence of a sleepless night 

the fear of never seeing my child again, of not growing old and wise together with my man

those sluggish mornings when it seems too much of a task to even get up

that futile anger with myself for being so slow 

my frustrating limits of energy

the way I am moved to tears,  suddenly and without warning, by a song, an image, a smile  

the feeling of loss that overtakes me at times

and how I worry about becoming needy, whinging and even more preoccupied with illness

and that things will get worse

And then I take the sheet off the clipboard and carefully fold it into a tiny square and slip it in the back pocket of my jeans. I get up and with my best professional smile I hand over the clipboard and step into the doctor's office.

nostalgia

There you are. Listening to the rain, oh how delicious.

Sleep was a long time coming last night, too many noises inside the head. 

But now you are here, standing by the open window, watching the rain come down hard outside, smoothing lotion into your hands and arms. 

So many images are racing through your mind like a tape on fast forward: a newborn baby on your belly, a barefoot run for ice cream on a hot wet street after a summer's storm, the blue roofs of Jodhpur, M smiling at you from her hospital bed hello sweetie, give us just a minute, R's hand on your neck, the smooth stones of the reef hotel lobby under your knees as you are tying the pink ribbons of S's straw hat, the Poolbeg lighthouse across the sandy beach at low tide, kids rolling in a pile of autumn leaves, your father washing the dishes on a Sunday, the steam from the cup of mulled wine at a Xmas market somewhere, Vienna?, your piano teacher eating peanuts, toes sinking into the coral sand in paradise. 

You close your eyes and concentrate on the apricot light.

It is all there. And so are you.

"How come all your songs are about water?" the anthropologist asked the Hopi elder, as he sang to his corn on the mesa. "Because water is rare and precious in our land," he replied. "How come all your songs are about love?"

thanks to Charlotte Du Cann.

wet Sunday evening

 

We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal. 

Pema Chödrön

There is a particularly insistent spot of inflamed gum that could drive me up the wall - if I would only let it. I am doing all the right things but I imagine my gum tissue is shot to pieces from the immune suppression by now. One of the medical wiz kids told me recently that science can now pinpoint the specific time period when pain is experienced as most intense and why am I not surprised that this is in the early hours at night?

I am down to sage tea. Gruesome sage tea gargles. Wouldn't be surprised if my sweat smells of sage tea by now. But I cannot stand the other stuff I have worked my way through, all these gargles and rinses and ointments, herbal and bleach things, whatever. My lovely dentist just shrugs his shoulders and tells me that I should not try to reach the ceiling all the time - whatever that's supposed to mean.

20 seconds in the forest

lunchtime yesterday

Those born of illustrious fathers we respect and honour, whereas those who come from an undistinguished house we neither respect nor honour. In this we behave like barbarians towards one another. For by nature we all equally have an entirely similar origin; for we all breathe into the air with mouth and nostrils and we all eat with the hands.

Antiphon the Sophist, contemporary of Socrates, 5th century BC

This happened in another country, at a time of great promise. When people were slowly beginning to accept that happiness was possible. And still, they were cautious, suspicious of their giddy expectations.

I have no memories of the girl that was me in this picture but I remember my mother braiding my sister's hair in the mornings. I can see my sister sitting behind my father on the bicycle carrier, wrapping her arms around him. I remember sucking my thump while watching him mixing our breakfast muesli.

I can see my parents kissing at the top of the stairs, my mother leaning against the bannister, her head falling backwards. I remember a long tanned arm reaching down to stroke my hair, shiny gold bangles jingling.

I remember the smell of my baby brother, holding my breath, terrified, as I watched my father lifting the new baby up higher and higher and then giggling with relief.

I know from looking at this picture that they tried really hard for a while.

But I don't remember the girl on the left at all.

we were young

Once in a while you read a book in one long sitting, well almost. And not necessarily because it is a magnificent work of literature. Sometimes it's just a voice speaking to you from the pages or maybe a melody you hear from behind the sentences. And occasionally this voice, this melody stirs an old memory and you have to hold your breath for a second, listen to your heart beating and then you look up from the pages and it's all good out there, the green hedge with the blackbirds nesting, the flowering wisteria, the cat asleep below your seat, sunlight filtering through the Douglas fir, your coffee gone cold.

Fear is a force like seasickness, you could call it a life-sickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread, that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins again to gnaw at your simple requirements for human peace. Gnawing, gnawing, with long ratlike teeth. No one can live through that without changing.

Sebastian Barry, On Cannan's side

(with quite a handful of clichés on Ireland, but never mind)

I read the news today

99% of the dollar billions revolving around our planet have nothing to do with work, creation of value, goods or services. The glow of money is illuminating the world economy. But this glow is a fake, a will o' the wisp, a fata morgana.

Money, so it seems, transports nothingness into existence. If something has no monetary value, it is worth nothing. There is more money to be made from the buying and selling of factories than from actually producing something in these factories.

Entire countries (and its people and scenery and history and music and poetry) are reduced to a virtual share value. China's is high and Greece's is low, China is a dictatorship, Greece is a democracy, but if Greece sells the Acropolis, Delphi, Olympia and a couple of its scenic islands, it could become as valuable as China.

Stock exchange data are more important than the weather report. 

Because the markets must be kept happy. 

The markets. Those mysterious deities.

They are a sensitive lot and governments everywhere must always check first whether their decisions will find mercy with them. And the markets love offerings: reduction of wages, social security cuts, redundancies. The more offerings, the happier the markets become and then they will make the economy grow a bit. And we can stare in awe at the endless bands of the latest exchange rates tickering through our lives.

The markets' chosen people are those who seek advantages, the venture capitalists, the bargain hunters, big game bargain hunters. With safe deposit boxes where once was a heart.

I am merely doing God's work, said Lloyd Blanfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.

And we are all millionaires, only some of us are experiencing a slightly embarrassing shortage of funds. But theoretically...

We are fools.

we're all in it together

Marx is talking

Some days when the light gets brighter in the West,

I watch the glittering streams of money,

foaming and breaking the banks,

flooding previously barren land.

I am amused by the dictatorship of waffle,

the currently accepted theory of society, according to

what I hear from down there. I am well.

I meet God sometimes. He looks rested.

We discuss metaphysical matters, not without humour and

He comes across astonishingly well versed, dialectically.

Only recently, he asked me for an edition of my complete works.

He claimed he couldn’t find one anywhere.

Not that he wanted to believe in it, he said,

But there is no harm in reading, is there?

I gave him my own copy, the last

of the blue edition incl. commentaries.

Actually, he is more learned than I thought.

Theology bores him; he doesn't agree with

deconstruction; he thinks psychoanalysis is rubbish

and he won’t hear of it. His prejudices are amazing.

For example, he will forgive Nietzsche

even the most foolish thought; Hegel, on the other hand,

he cannot stand. He is too shy to speak of his own project. Please,

he said recently after a long look

down onto earth, please get ready.

Michael Krüger

(poor translation is my own, I am sure he can do it so much better)

If you are biting into a slice of pistachio-walnut baguette on a Saturday afternoon and two of your front teeth hit hard on a bit of nut shell and clash and it makes that sharp sound like a nail grinding along a blackboard so that you gulp and run to the mirror to check that while there's no blood or stuff, and you are sure that two teeth are sort of loose and if you then forget about it until your front teeth hit the rim of the tea cup making it all hurt quite a bit and if you are stupid enough to google dental trauma you end up convinced that your front teeth could be a write off and if you then decide to call the dental clinic emergency service hotline you will be told that unless there's blood with bits of tooth floating in it, you should just stop wiggling it and not chew anything for a while and come Monday morning because right now there is a major league soccer match live on tv and tomorrow is Sunday you are overreacting.

Today I was politely approached by two blond, sturdy young men dressed in ill fitting suits. In an odd mix of German and American English they expressed their intentions to show me the right way to heaven or something like that. They were eager, no doubt. And they were very happy when they realised that I understand their language. That is, I understood the words they were saying, but for the meaning?

It appears that their mission is to bring religion to the heathen people of central Europe. The name plates on their lapels identified them as members of the church of latter day saints.

This happened only a few steps away from the city's cathedral, built in the 11th century.

But surely that church is Catholic, they pointed out. 

Well, how about a trip to Wittenberg to see the church where in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door? I suggested.

Uhm, isn't that in the communist part of Germany? We cannot go there.

Well.

I wished them luck.

If there's anything I'm proud of in my work - it's not that I draw better; there's so many better graphic artists than me - or that I write better, no. It's - and I'm not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.

 - Maurice Sendak
 June 10th, 1928 - May 8th, 2012

 

from here

green

on my way to work

I dive into the magic forest

looking for fairies and elves

middle child syndrome

So off he went and bought himself that new car. And the shit is hitting the fan. In a Big way.

My brother, the one who speaks to my answerphone on birthdays, wants to make selling brand new cars to men over 83 illegal. So I have been told. I am to believe he said this to his face but I have my doubts. I  know he loves his father and he says all sorts of things, but to my sister. 

My big sister. She also loves her father but right now she has to avoid him, she is so mad. She will not say anything to his face, but she writes me detailed emails about The Shape of Things to Come (mounting debts, gambling, subscriptions to Reader's Digest, criminal investment spoofs, jail, lunatic asylum... the slippery slope downhill into disaster) and wants us to get power of attorney to save him from himself. The bad bad boy.

Meanwhile, the man is at a loss as to what is happening and silly me tells him (in as much as one sentence) and, well, the usual.  Oh dear.

A week of carefully adjusting my spirit level, balancing the bubble in my head to a point of near stillness. Checking my hearing much much too often, very noise sensitive. Gently rubbing in camphor and arnica ointment into the bands of steel that once were my neck muscles. Battling waves of nausea , and occasionally an edge of panic, just a hint, really. Every morning waking up full of hope and best intentions and every night before sleep savouring the surprise of having made it through the day somehow in one piece.

Against every rule I haven't told the experts anything. For the moment. We'll see.

The garden has exploded, a sea of lilac, aquilegia, wisteria, rhododendrums, azalea, fuchsia, geraniums on all window sills.

Life really is good, I am so very lucky. 

 

someone wrote that this music is all existentially reflective and shit,  and that the artist is his favourite navigator of the softening grey landscape of the dying brain
I forgot to save a link. Sorry. I think it was one of the Irish music bloggers. One of the multitudes out there.
Anyway, I  sort of agree.

as if

The night before last. The volcano erupted. A little bit. 

Some time back, one of these experts examining bits of me while I - foolishly - opened my soul and with it all my hopes, one of these healthy medical experts told me in his expert voice that he would be inclined to compare heavy vertigo of sudden onset to an epileptic fit. Not that he ever experienced vertigo himself.

Not that it really matters.

The night before last I woke up suddenly from a very deep sleep and the darkness around me was turning. This is such a unique sensation, like falling through space. As if I'd know what that feels like, anyway. Flat out on my bed. At first, I curiously watched the little strips of light from the street lamps that are coming in through the blinds move rapidly across the ceiling and speeding faster and faster whenever I turned my head this way and that.

As I tried to sit up, a heavy wave of nausea washed over me from somewhere behind the bed and I carefully groped my way along the bedroom wall to the bathroom and back. Stupidly noting the time, 4:03, as if it was something crucial.

Eventually, of course, panic seized me. Shit, shit, shit, I whispered holding onto R's sleeping body. 

Just then the dawn chorus set in and obviously, I started to fret about my hearing, which was perfectly ok. And I decided to listen to all this birdsong as if it was the last time. Which is very melodramatic because the top notch expert had told me that with my drug regimen deafness was highly unlikely now.

When I decided to get up some hours later, the world was at rest again. My head was throbbing and the familiar pressure noises were hissing inside my head. Felt as if I had just crossed from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in a winter storm, which I have done in the past more than once, each time expecting to die from sea sickness. And yesterday was such a lovely day, summer, lilac flowering everywhere, R brought fresh green asparagus and the first local strawberries back from the farmer's market. I sat in the deck chair watching him pot the geraniums and the fuchsia and replace some of the raspberries, the cat curled up on the hot stones under the little olive tree and in the evening after dinner on the patio we watched the bats flying low. 

And the phone rang to tell us that a little baby boy was born into the family in Ireland, one of the kids I still see in my mind's eye forever running along the beach. climbing garden walls and pinching grandad's flowers, now a young father. 

Today my muscles are aching as if I'd climbed a mountain. Muscles in my neck and face are slowly relaxing. I no longer have to hold onto the walls. Keeping my fingers crossed.

reading the Sunday papers

Humans have allowed money and its acquisition to over-run and conquer them. The rule of money is itself a dependency culture. Like all dependency cultures, it's an ever-tightening trap, and a con. All you need to do with money is give it velocity - keep it circulating through as many hands as possible, as quickly as possible, going round and round. All people really need to know is that there's more where it came from. Which there always will be, as long as no one breaks the circle by sitting on their profit instead of spending it.
Money is just a cargo cult, one that has been wrongly and wilfully elevated to the status of a pseudo-science. "Confidence" is what economists call willingness to spend, even as they destroy the confidence of so many people by leaving the market to inform them that they are not worth much, and never will be. That's why "globalisation" is stupid, and why off-shoring, hoarding and hiding your wealth is immoral. It's why high-interest lending steals from everyone. It's why high-risk investment is what it sounds like - reckless. It's why valuing only work that generates profit misses humanity's point. It's why we're all in this miserable, needless mess. It's why we are not getting out of it, and won't for some time, if ever.

 Deborah Orr

Lyrics and spoken words in a lovely soft Dublin accent by Paul Durcan

the days of rhubarb crumble

The lilac is at it again, winking at me through a sudden hail shower this afternoon, the black currant bushes are full of promise, the transplanted walnut tree is showing the teeniest bits of life after we had given up all hope, and we moved the figs outside as the weather radar is predicting a warm front by midweek, coming up from Africa.

I have been editing the most gruesome manuscripts, there are dreadful infections out there, twisting and turning the immune response and my heart was aching when I got to the list of side effects of one of the treatment trials. I carefully replaced all "subjects" with "individuals". I have never worked with these authors before and they are fairly young, so I'll push my case.

I had to drop the idea with the choir, rehearsals were great fun, but on most days every time I went away from them in a haze of vertigo and exhaustion. My days of singing and clapping and silly dance steps in a group of jolly women (and one man) are over. It was fun, we did the Timewarp and Blame It On the Boogie. Ah well, that was that.

We decided not to go to the Bob Dylan concert, open air, near us later in July. Not for 95 Euro p.p. standing somewhere way back and beyond. You don't want to know how much they are asking for standing a bit closer, but not much, to the stage and seating costs about as much as a week's holiday in Sicily. We may join the crowds sitting down for a picnic by the river trying to catch the sound from a distance - provided they won't close off most of the area. Obviously, there's costs involved and I am not begrudging anybody a decent profit after covering costs, but why are tickets for the big shots so expensive? Are they all broke like Leonard Cohen? I must be naïve or maybe I am a bit thick. There are people who think I am mad and that I will be missing a life changing event. Yes, there are.

 

I kept trying to rearrange my life so that illness was only a feature of it, and not the whole, but illness insists on its pre-eminence.

Hilary Mantel

so much

I want to sit at an old table outside after sunset, insects, candles, warm, warm air. My arms tired from a long swim in the lake.
I want to wrap an old soft blanket around my legs when it gets cool.

I want to get a bit drunk and later on, some 70s music, something with elaborate guitars and long meaningful harmonies. I want to hum along and get up and throw my arms wide and dance.

Monday morning, get a move on

money is an illusion

The new philanthropists are a rare breed, really they are, not like in the olden days, when condescending rich men (and a few women) built libraries or set up universities or model villages to spread their idea of what's proper, keeping purgatory at bay at the same time.

I just listened to some of the new ones being interviewed, the earnest art collector who buys up department stores to enforce his own labour laws (if you want to compete with China you must work like the Chinese), the IT wizzard who believes in team work problem solving and frustrated with the way this generally is not done just started his own institute, the French noble woman supporting fair trade cocoa growers in Central America so that she can eat chocolate truffles with a good conscience in her gilded salon, the ship owner who believes in educating African villages in his own schools.

How twee, how ever so. How simple and "good".

And then there are these three: the billionaire who eventually realised that he and his entire family will never be able to spend even a fraction of his ever growing wealth in their lifetimes (and maybe that cost him a couple of bad nights with no sleep) and the shiny couple of do-gooders. They are so good, they glow, they decided to pledge half of their wealth to help the poor and make-the-world-a-better-place. Boy scout honours pledge. And so they set up elaborate programs to feed the poor in India and Africa, to vaccinate their undernourished children, to find cures for water borne diseases, etc. with a bit of their money. We can see glossy spreads in the thick and important magazines of how they fly out to the poor unfortunate continents in their private jets to mingle briefly with their victims, all shiny faces, surrounded by nurses or singing school kids, while all this is financed by their wealth which continues to grow and is created, inter alia, by this and this.

And here we have spring and clear nights and the birds are soo loud and active, my cat doesn't know what hits her when I open the door to the wild outdoors for her.
Mustn't be so mad, I tell myself.
Persistence, gentleness and a view of the whole picture as someone said recently.

Werner Herzog's Bavarian accent and existential penguin

from an interview with him in today's Guardian:

"Saving the world is a very suspicious concept," he replies. "I'm as responsible as it gets in my situation. I drive my car less than 10% of what I used to drive 20 years ago. I'm not into consumerism. But when it comes to the end of the human race, there are certain suspects. Microbes can come and wipe us out. It can happen fast. Avian virus or mad cow disease, you name it. Microbes are really after us. Or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption which would darken the skies for 10 years - that's gonna be real trouble. Or a meteorite hitting us, or something man-made. I don't believe we'll see a nuclear holocaust but there are quite a few scenarios out there."

What about a good-old fashioned breakdown of society? "You mean anarchy and cannibalism? Yes but there would be survivors. Maybe 10% would survive, enough to replenish the species. I'm talking about total extinction. We are not sustainable."

Walking through the garden and naming the plants coming up right now is like opening a book of fairy tales:

Männertreu (men's fidelity)   blue lobelia
Löwenzahn (lion's tooth)    dandelion (from the French dent de lion)
Vergißmeinnicht     forget me not
Storchenschnabel (stork's beak)   pelargonium
Tausendschön (a thousand beauties)   daisy
Gänseblümchen (little geese flower)    daisy
Märzenbecher (March's cup)    spring snowflake
Wiesenschaum (meadow foam)    lady's smock
Buschwindröschen  (little bushy windy rose) anemone
Küchenschelle (kitchen bell)   pulsatilla
Rittersporn (knight's spur)  delphinium

               

And my mother would have been able to spot many more (plus she would have reeled off the Latin names just like that). She had no time for children's books or  silly nursery rhymes, but by naming a flower here and a weed there, she could kick start my imagination any time.

yesterday evening's cycle home from work

45 min of going down memory lane
mixed emotions
some cringing
still proud
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fhnt4

I am getting our little baby ready for bed when A calls up the stairs, need anything from the shops? I am driving up to Wilton..  Get me this album by the Waterboys, I shout back. R shakes his head, we are totally skint. But I keep my fingers crossed. A couple of hours later A strolls into the kitchen, no luck with your waterbabies, any dinner left?

It is fine to have opinions about culture; and many people across the world do honestly believe that their culture is vastly richer or better or more noble or more sacred than other cultures. This position implies nothing more than pride and limited perspective. And there is nothing really wrong with it. It is an opinion. But what is dangerous, and morally indefensible, is when opinions of cultural superiority are espoused within a dominant culture about other cultures, and then acted upon; this mix of arrogance and power are the essential ingredients of conquest, colonialism and imperialism.

 

Mitchell Anderson

cycling along the Ruhr river

The bicycle is man's purest invention; an ingenious arrangement of metal and rubber that liberates the body from the dusty plod to ride on a cushion of air, at speed or with leisure, stopping on a whim, travelling for free. Its design is simple and its maintenance inexpensive. Yet for all the ease and economy the bicycle possesses a greater quality. It offers the possibility of escape.

Rory MacLean

Four days, 274 km, no punctures, no real rain, but at times freezing cold, spectacular scenery, odd sights, bone tired.