The last days

There is no wind in Frankfurt. Something about the way the land lies, or the skyscrapers are arranged, means that when it's hot in town, the relief of a cool breeze enjoyed by city-dwellers of other more normally laid-out cities is denied to residents of Frankfurt, making the summer experience a potentially punishing one. The heat sits on you like a sweaty rucksack, and your shirt clings and exposes parts of you you hadn't planned to have on show. Today was an archetypal sweltering and windless day here. My back was throbbing from a sitting marathon that had lasted days and I was lonely, as the top few pals were all variously with partners, in home cities or working. I flip-flopped glumly between computer and piano, neither of which offered me the refreshment I really needed, and eventually decided to stroll aimlessly. The nostalgia is finally starting to set in, as it's hammered home to me by the double-figures-into-August date that I'll be leaving my beloved kitchen in my beloved flat and Frankfurt and Germany in just 10 days. It's not the kind of number of remaining days which can breezily be laughed off; brushed from the conversation with a merry turn of phrase like "oh, it's a couple of months yet". No, I'm really starting to have to work out exactly what's happening with each remaining evening to make sure I see everyone and do everything One Last Time. Anyway, to cut a very long story only moderately long, the stroll turned into the kind of wonderful evening that makes you shudder at the thought that you could have instead sat on Facebook or watched TV or whatever, and that every moment where you do choose to do those things is potentially a great time missed (my mind is always cast back, in self-reflective moments like these, to a particularly punishing scene in the mouse-based epic Fievel Goes West in which his whole family, whom Fievel's been desparately searching for for the majority of the film walk underneath him as he walks across a plank of wood, bemoaning his unlucky lot. This made a huge impression on me and a child, and I've since then had regular moments of thinking as my life as having some kind of audience with a better perspective on things who are screaming at the screen to get me to just turn around, or not log on to Facebook or to go to that party after all or whatever it may be.)

My stroll featured the following happy/fortuitous things which I would have otherwise missed out on, and which will help me to think fondly of the city I'm currently calling home once it's no more than a few folders full of digital photos, and a fast-fading recollection of the German language. The evening seemed to be no less humid than the day had been and I was glad I was myself as I said my traditional friendly hello to the chef working in the restaurant downstairs. It was hard to tell whether he was drenched in dishwater or sweat, but in either case, his job looked unenviable from the position of a man with rolled up trouser legs and a faint scent of sun cream. However hot the city may be, the banks of the river are always a welcome five degrees cooler. People were draped languidly along the length of the bank of the Main (it's pronounced 'mine' by the way, for those knot in the no) and the hushed calm atmosphere of an outdoor classical recital reigned as it always does in Germany when the people come together to enjoy a public space (I could never understand why no one rode their bikes through the middle of such crowds calling people wankers and spitting chewing gum at them. Apparently the young people haven't learned how to do that here.) As I crossed one of the beautiful bridges heading south I came across a jaunty couple of Americans busking some proper old-school rock and roll. I stood casually by with my hands in my pockets, trying to make it not look like I was having such a good time that I'd feel obliged to give them anything generous, when a young girl came leaping up to them and asked in a strong scouse accent if the gents knew any Beatles numbers. The Americans asked where she was from and she replied "Liverpool of course!" with a shriek. They played "Get Back" and she hopped from foot to foot in front of them in crazed excitment. I flipped them 50c as I left and told them I'd had at least 50c's worth of fun.

American Buskers : the Frankfurt skyline looks on aloofly

A young man riding haughtily upon a vehicle changing lightbulbs along the banks of the Main. Only in Germany could this be someone's job.

The sun was pretty low by this point and I headed west along the south bank of the Main and felt jealous of the endless groups of well-prepared folk sitting on comfy rugs and smoking shisha. I treated myself to a doner from a floating kebab shop to make up for it, and felt somewhat better about things. I walked down past the Staedel museum and saw a beautiful restaurant I'd never seen - a huge glass front with pink lights inside, making things look deliciously seedy. I walked though the gate and thought I'd just have a look in at the diners. As I stood there gawping, a tiny child ran up to me out of nowhere making a kind of throaty deep humming noise. He stopped as he got to my legs and looked up at me, my face peering back at him from what, from his height, must have looked like beyond the clouds. He contemplated me silently for a moment and we looked at one another. He then started to run around me in circles laughing with delight as he ran. The Maitre D' turned out to be his mother, and she came running down the front steps embarrassedly and said "Oh I'm sorry. He doesn't normallly do this. I think he likes you!" I remained staning like a grinning maypole for a few more revolutions and then the little boy's orbit slingshotted him off to his mum where he pressed his face into her thighs. I wished her a pleasant evening and walked off, thoroughly delighted.

As so often happens in this city, I discovered some unusual and fantastic architecture hidden unboastfully away around an otherwise familiar corner. I used to maintain that this happened every time I ventured out into the city, but there are physical limits to even the most secretive city's hidden gems. This particular corner of town consisted exclusive of enormous old buildings (this means properly old, not the favourite reconstructed old of these parts). I wandered open mouthed throughout the area and as I looked up at the rickety 3rd story bay windows, bats flew silently from tree to tree.

I crossed back over the river, back into the cooking-pot heat of the city proper, and got the tram home. I picked up my bike and headed to Sachsenhausen, a party-friendly bar part of town where you can always see amusing groups of marauding stag/hen party-goers dribbling kebab sauce onto the cobbled streets or eyeing up the ludicrously proportioned waitresses at Hooters. I went to a favourite little bar of mine, where there's a piano in the corner and patrons are encouraged to entertain. I was disappointed by the fact that there were only about 6 people in the place and no one was playing the joanna, but I needn't have been, since that's precisely what made the ensuing musical feast such a wonderful and intimate affair. It turned out that all the punters were musicians, and we were particularly dazzled by an Irish guy (in Frankfurt since 1987!) who played the guitar and sang traditional Irish stuff most beautifully, and a gruff, broad german man, who turned to a cheeky Puck when a fiddle was put in his hand, and he crept sprightlily about playing the most fantastic fiddle to our Irish friends guitar activity. I pulled out a few of my party pieces and people sang along and said I was good. I left the place at one with a couple of beers in my belly, and a warm glow of music, merriment and a growing nostalgia for a city that's soon to become my ex-place of dwelling. Goodbye Frankfurt, it's been fun.

The kind of silly stuff we often got up to: Flatmate Marcus planing the feet of our kitchen chairs with a hunk of stale bread wrapped in sand paper. What else?

Today is a whole new world

I've been down in the dumps lately. In actual fact, as an opening statement that's fairly redundant, since I pretty much only write on here when I've been down in the dumps (is this true? -Ed).

A confluence of factors has led to a vicious circle of not really wanting to get out of bed or do very much with my days: the easiest to explain of which is most probably my lower back. It's been giving me grief now continously since early April. I've since had an injection into my back muscles (a cure which seems only to exist in Germany!) which numbs the muscle forcing it to relax, thereby giving the affected area time to pull its socks up and sort itself out. The doctor who pressed the plunger failed however to tell me what to do while I was in my little window of suffering-free heaven. Needless to say, I abused the privilege of being able to move freely by proceeding immediately to leap about, play table tennis, chop wood, drive to the countryside and, most flagrant of all, to sneeze in my hayfeverish fashion without first clutching my back in self-defence. What a hussy I was these 4 days, the very epitomy of Sodom rebuilt in Europe's banking heart. When the drugs wore off though, as is so often the case with drugs, my world came tumbling down. I managed to convince myself for an entire day that the imperceptable, gradual onset of cripplement was just a phase in the healing process and that my best course of action was to keep moving. The reality was soon driven home though, and I was driven miserably home while those around me had house-warming parties and enjoyed their youth.

Since then the situation has once again improved, and I'm going to get another injection (delivered under the counter, for free, without a waiting list, by a local plastic surgeon: I know his assistant!) on Wednesday and this time I will show my physical weakness the respect it deserves, and do nothing but stroll and sit up straight in cafes.

Additionally to my back based blues, I've come a cropper in my quest for the knowledge of all things, in that I had a most unproductive meeting with my Thesis supervisor, who told me, when discussing the mini-paper I'd written for him over the previous few months that I need to "do something else". This is as discouraging a piece of advice as one could hope for, and I suddenly felt like the end of the world (by world I mean my Masters) was nigh, and I was never going to be able to get it all done in time.

Secondly and most boringly (I put this in the middle to hide it away: always begin and end well) I've got a lot less money than I'd thought. It turns out that the concept of looking at your bank balance and remembering what you've got works about as well as remembering that Michael Owen is only 19. He may have been only 19 when you first heard about him but now he's a right old bastard and no one outside of his immediate family wants to know - and so it is with my bank balance. I've been safe in the knowledge that I've got x amount of money in my account (don't worry, those of you who don't like maths, I'll keep the equations to a minimum) for so long now that I've actually got x - y euros, where y is a number greater than zero. This discovery shocked me and made me realise that crossing the English Channel on the high seas in a hired van filled with my possessions is not going to be one of those financially neutral activities you hear about like picking grapes in the rainy season.

This, coupled with a long time in Zimbabwe followed by a short pause and then a quite long time in England has left me these past two weeks feeling completely unlike a student and even less like a human being, as I've lain uncomfortably around in my shorts, waiting for my back pain to disperse, and my dissertation to be written. I hadn't seen campus for what seemed like an age, and the thought of me still being part of the great knowledge machine I vaguely knew was still pumping away as I stayed in and drank coffee seemed to be absurd.

But nothing ever lasts forever (to quote Echo and the Bunnymen) and I'm sitting here in the relative paradise of the House of Finance computer room (I refuse to call it a lab: where are the guinea pigs that are supposed to be wasting their hours striving to run in what is really just a wheel leading nowhere... Oh wait) which indicates that several things have changed.

Firstly I'm able to sit for extended periods. This is a major step forward in the slow lumbering healing process of my lumbar and I'm already remembering what it feels like to be a person. Secondly, I had a long moan to my flatmate yesterday about all of the above, even though I knew that, being a man, he would try and offer me advice, which I wouldn't want to hear, and I would just add to the list of people I don't want to talk to. It turned out, in fact, that I am also a man, and heard his very sensible advice with very sensible man ears, and have today acted upon that advice which led me to the radical change in outlook which has allowed me to talk of being down in the dumps in the past tense. Or at least in the present perfect continous (but that doesn't have the same ring to it somehow).

The advice had two parts to it, and was as follows: a) you can choose to change your situation if you want, and b) your situation is easy to change and you could do so tomorrow. That was it: just stop feeling sorry for myself and go to university and get something done. And what a difference a day has made. I'd been in the House of Finance on campus for about one minute forty when a man I vaguely recognised came up to me and asked me if I remembered meeting him one day last year. I didn't but I didn't tell him that, and he went on to tell me that he was writing a paper for an important conference and would I be interested in earning 20€ an hour correcting the English. I told him I would be very much interested.

The next person I spoke to asked me what I'd done with the brilliant idea I'd had for a research project. This is the same brilliant idea to which my professor's response had been "do something else". He told me the idea was great and I should pursue it nevertheless. When the third and final person told me I should ask Prof X, who seems nice and is running a course on the very subject, I could have kicked myself for not having thought of it first. I emailed him a brief summary of my idea and he got back to me straight away saying it sounded "extremely interesting" and could he have a copy of my first draft. Yes Mr. Professor. Yes you can.

What's the moral of this story? I'm damned if I know, but one things for certain: I'm not as happy sitting on the sofa at home as I think I am, and I'm going to try and remember that, the next time I don't feel like getting on that U-Bahn.

See you soon, England.
Rob

Going without

The traditional blog diatribe begins with two seemingly unrelated events, and brings them together with some more or less relevant narrative device. Let me here be no exception to that formula:

A random stumbling upon an advert online for Earth Hour, an hour in which the lights of cities across the globe are supposed to be switched off in a reminder of the supposed power of the people to make a difference, led to us sitting in our kitchen lit only by candles and the staunchly not-switched-off street lights outside ("what's a few dead due to road accidents in comparison to a ruined environment?" said somebody). This led us quite naturally to the idea of reading aloud to one another what each had been reading privately in the cosy story-telling shadows. This is a trend that has, to some degree, been extended into our normal electricity consuming lives. We've read newspaper articles, poems, short stories and bits of novels to one another, and I find it to be totally brilliant. It has that same appeal as has watching episode after episode of Family Guy on the laptop, in that you're entertained without having to do anything yourself, but it's somehow more... well, it's definitely different anyway. There's something necessarily communal about it, which seems to lend it a legitimacy that watching TV seems to lack.

Also this week, I've had one of those things that men seem to have, where their back suddenly decides it's had enough of doing whatever it is a back normally does, and is going instead to shoot the empty beer bottles of ones nervous system with the Colt 45 of unexpected twinges and seize up in the process, forming some kind of unbending kebab skewer of hot, slicing pain. To cut a long story short, I've done my back in. This has led to previously unscheduled periods of lying on the sofa, standing aimlessly in the kitchen, and walking gingerly about clutching my lower back, like a late-in-the-term pregnant woman. This has had various unexpected pleasant consequences however. Firstly and foremostly, I've been forced to think of things to do that don't involve going anywhere or moving in any serious way. I've read the Süddeutscher Zeitung from cover to cover, and also a great deal of my hilarious novel, always either standing propped up against the fridge or lying on the sofa with the afternoon sun shining through the window. I've also found the time to finally paint letters in the German Scrabble distribution on the back of my Bananagram tiles (see photo) and in the process have discovered that the name of the game is supposed to be pronounced with an american accent, making it rhyme with "anagrams", making the name a rather clever pun, rather than the confusing nonsense it is when said in a British accent (try it yourself!).

The fruits of my labour. The nail polish remover and filthy rag were used to correct the many mistakes.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling, is that sometimes going without something (electricity, motor skills) can lead to inventive ways of having fun. And no one can accuse me of not being interested in that.

Yours stiffly,
Rob

What does RL stand for? Because he can't sit down: me writing this blog entry

The Scientist

With the first proper feeling of having really acheived something since the start of this long and sometimes tortuous route through the ins and outs of political economy, the moment has finally arrived where I can call myself something new: I'm officially a scientist.

When I say officially I am, of course, referring to a decision made by the governing body of my own body and self, myself: I have written and sent to the relevant professor a scientific paper in which a new and previously undiscussed theory is outlined, data found for the proof or otherwise of said theory and analyses are made on said data the results of which are presented in serious-looking tables in black and white with enormous margins, double-spaced type and a small number at the bottom of every page, preventing the bewildered and overwhelmed reader from losing his very sense of self and location as he gazes in barely credulous fascination at the argument laid out in words of greater than one syllable in incontrovertable font-with-serif seriousness before him on the leather bound pages.

Ok, I may be exaggerating somewhat for dramatic effect, but the point still stands. I've written a paper. It's not an essay, nor is it a project. It's neither a worksheet nor a take-home test. It's a paper and I know this because it starts with an abstract not an introduction. This is how I know I'm now officially a scientist.

Today, in the style of a Roman emperor, I have lain on the sofa reading a book and drunk two coffees in my tracksuit bottoms, with ne'er a thought that I should have a shower or deal with the serious issues of the day. It's the first time I've been rid of that horrible student sense of having something very important to do which hangs over every moment of unending free time, spoiling the mood but not quite being forceful enough to convince you to leave the lilo in favour of the library. And it feels good. I'm geniunely very relaxed.

Inspired by a book I have been reading in which it is mentioned that an English woman learns French via the Langenscheidt method - by which one learns by heart a minimum of 30 pages of a foreign text - to learn a German poem by heart. It's the kind of thing that, caught in the struggle for higher position (J. Mitchell's words), it's easy to forget to do. Since I was a wee teenager I've wanted to be able to recite at least the first few pages of STC's 'Ryme of the Ancient Mariner' but just kind of assumed that you either can do that sort of thing and hurrah for you, or you can't and so must it ever be. It never occured to me that if you want to be able to do something like that, one option is to just sit down and learnt how to do it; it's just always seemed to somehow take a back seat to the driving desire to write CVs and get a job sitting at a computer all day. I'm sure that by tomorrow this feeling will have left me and I'll once again throw the poetry book into the corner in favour of Facebook and job applications, but today, just for a day, I'm going to use my hours in the service of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I will do so today for as long as my consitution allows...

Edward St. Aubin

They say that the more entertaining your life is, the duller your dreams. This also works in reverse: the last few months have been a nightly rollercoaster of nuclear apocolypse (a few weeks ago now), heart-breaking betrayals and tsunami-based obliteration (last night). These dreams play themselves out in such insanely vivid detail and technicolor that waking up each morning is like being pulled back into one universe having spent an exhausting few days in an alternative one. That period in the morning where it still feels like you have a choice between continuing in either of these two universes, completely unalike but both equally real, seems to be getting longer and longer each morning. I'm bringing my dreams further and further into my waking day.

And the effect seems to be leaking into other parts of my life, too. I could understand it if, after two consecutive hours of watching The Wire (I always watch them in groups of two!), it took me a few moments to realise that Greggs was not really in danger, or that McNulty was not actually drinking himself out of custody of his children, but it's starting to happen now with significantly dummer TV shows like Arrested Development or Futurama. When the episode's over I look around the room, blinking with surprise that the world is still as it was in that seemingly other existence when I switched the episode on in the first place.

The lastest example of this, however, is actually something a little more artistically plausible. I'm reading a book at the moment that, within as little as half a page, can launch me into a world at least as real as this one but with the added benefit that the monologue providing the commentary (a) is not my own, and (b) completely understands the world he's commenting on (a rather unfair advantage a narrator has over an internal monologue). It's the first book I've read since reading George Orwell where I've been consciously reading for the fabulousness of the prose, rather than to find out what happens. I get to the end of the chapter and look up, feeling surprised to find myself still in my room.

Am I slipping into some kind of half-waking netherworld from which I'll never escape, or am I just reading a really great book at the moment?

Damned if I know...