My birthday: a brief chronology

Here, perhaps to compensate for the great length and introspective meanderings of the previous post, is a short history of the last 28 hours or so of my birthday. I will use it as a convenient juncture to introduce a few of the emerging main players in my new life in Germany. Self-indulgent? Well, this is a blog...

8pm Saturday - Bowling with course-mates
Ah, games plus beer. What better way to lubricate those ol' social wheels? Bowling and drunkeness have always gone hand-in-hand for me and this jaunt was no exception. The evening was a lovely advert for booze- and pastime- assisted camaraderie.

It should be noted that, although in this photo there are no women, the course is actually pretty close to 50/50. For some reason competitive games and beer just don't get the chicks in like they used to.

My course-mates are of a reasonably predictable stock. Intelligent, well-bred/read, conventional. This is fine. You need some conventional people in your life and, in the absence of a job, a degree course seems like a fair place to have them.

Which brings me neatly onto my next point:

12am Saturday/Sunday - Partying with flatmates

My new housemates are a total delight: controversy arose at this week's regular Thursday-night student-bar-going slot as it turned out that another girl, a friend of the guy whose room I'm now living in (more on which later), had the audacity to also have her birthday on the 20th. But they got me invited and the English-speaking-only curry evening they had been organising for me is to be next week.

And here they are:

Marcus, Steffi and Romy hold a basket of goodies

In this very blurry photo you see the three people I'm now sharing a flat with. Not present is Günther (known universally as the faintly rude-sounding Günni) seen below in his last moment in our flat.

His departure was something of a heartbreak for Steffi (pronounced, in slightly hilarious German style, with an initial Shhh) and Romy. He seems to have been a celebrity figure around here. He worked for a local underground radio station and had some involvement in a prison-squatting arts organisation. He seemed to know everyone and everyone who speaks about him does so with a slightly starry look in their eye. This made for an awkward first morning in the flat as my new flatmates cried at the departure of the person I'd been brought in to replace. I felt like a new head-office appointed middle manager. This is being forced upon me by the powers that be. It's really not my fault.

Anyway, the three remaining Germans are lovely, as I've said. Steffi is a half-crazed southerner with an odd dialect and a hyperactive personality. She's temping at a half-way house for council-adopted children. Romy is a sweet-natured Social Science student. She works in an continuing-education institution. Marcus is a philosopher. He divides his time between reading the great works and working part-time at a peace research organisation (I'm not making this up).

So, three warm, alternative, interesting people. And they bought me a basket full of German nosh for my birthday. Excellent.

1pm Saturday - Birthday Brekkie at home

A lovely, lazy day ensued with the following highlights: Romy and Steffi made a sumptuous feast for breakfast. I had a snooze. Steffi made me a cake.

Off to uni again tomorrow. This time it's 'Mathematics Part II - Real Analysis' (I have no idea what this means).

Till next time.

Rob (aged 29 and one 365th)

The first 29 years pass uneventfully...

Funny thing memory. It's how I can say "I'm not going to go down this dark alley; the last time I did I was mugged" or, "I'm never playing football again; the last time I did the ball hit me in the face and my glasses flew off to the mirth of all assembled". It tells us which of two potential arrow-targets is the apple, and which our trusting son.

Any yet this Darwinian function, at which the memory so wonderfully never fails to deliver (have you ever forgotten how to walk? No. Who your friends are? Well, possibly...) is not the yardstick against which memory is judged. No, it's all about: "God, I never remember people's birthdays" or "Shit I've forgotten the PIN for my mobile phone". These socially constructed tasks are just not what the memory is good at. Something else it's not good at is measuring time. In the same way the the human eye is a very poor judge of volume (the old "which glass is bigger? this really tall thin one or this really short but very broad one" trick) so the memory makes this morning seem like a former life and Sgt. Pepper's like something you've recently got into.

Turning 29, as I do on Sunday, makes me think about what it has all added up to. If I don't think carefully about it, the tempting answer is "not much". This is characterised by the sense of panic I felt when an old, much-beloved teacher from Secondary school contacted me out of the blue on Facebook. I thought "Christ, I must have been full of promise as a fifteen-year-old. What have I become/done which would do anything other than disappoint this former steward of mine?". Similarly, when I got back in touch with an old friend from Cambridge last week (via Google, ruler of every aspect of modern life) I felt like I could happily bring him up to speed with me and my life in about 6 sentences. Went to Uni; lived in Cambridge; went to France never to return; returned; went to London; went back to Uni. And my memory assists in this perception by its ability to scan over events really quickly. Even when writing those six sentences, it doesn't seem that implausible that someone who knew me when I was fifteen would now know everything there was to know about the 29-year-old me.

But memory is not designed for thinking about a whole life. It's not its default mode. By default, when you ask it "what have I done in my life" it gives you manageable highlights. Flashes of retina-content which accompanied three or four easily memorable events. To try and counteract this default behaviour, I tried this as an exercise: How many times have I felt a surge of endorphin and an unexplained delight at having the sun suddenly break through cloud and hit me in the face? Can I recall the times? Can I remember all the times I sat surrounded by friends and cloaked in a beer haze and felt like everything was perfect?

When you think about the ludicrous expanse of time that takes up a single year, it's mind-boggling. I regularly have weeks where, at the end, I can't even begin to picture what I was doing at the start.

Anyway, in summary. Life is ridiculously long. It's the longest thing I can imagine. A year contains a thousand times more interesting facts, funny moments, tasty bananas, sunny mornings and feelings of mutual understanding than even the best of memories can cope with (let alone my cotton-wool coated effort). Trying to summarise it into a "what have I achieved" is meaningless.

I'm still alive. I'm not yet a mean, intolerant old bigot. That's good enough for me.

Bis später,
Rob

A night in at home

A coherent existence

A close family friend told me years ago that she was moving back to the place of her birth after years of travelling because she'd found that the day-to-day business of life, once it settled down, felt day-to-day and business-like wherever you were in the world and that you might as well live it in the place you know best and be near to your friends and family.

When I heard this conclusion as a 17-year-old I was appalled. I hated the idea of settling in with what you knew best rather than continually taking on new adventures. Now, though, I think I know what she meant - although I don't totally disagree with my former self; life settles into a routine but I think that's a good thing. And a routine in one place may fit you more or less than that in another.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that a kind of existence is opening up for me here. I've got a lovely flat, I cycle everywhere I go (having lost my month travel pass the same afternoon I bought it), I have wine, I make food, I play my piano, I look at books about Macroeconomics. It's not wildly exciting but then it'd probably be awful if it was.

Economics is proving, thus far, to be the right choice. I wanted to stretch my mathmuscles again and so far I've gone to bed most nights needing the equivalent of a hot bath and a Ralgex rub. It seems like a good science to be involved in because, unlike biochemistry, astrophysics or molecular biology, the current state of the art is that we don't really know very much about the world, and the models that we have to describe it aren't very good. The credit crunch is a great example of how poorly defined the science currently is. It's the economics equivalent of the lobotomy as a cure for schizophrenia: the success rate shows that there's lots more work to be done.

In my other great educational frontier, progress seems slow. I'm past the enthusiasm of base camp andclose enough now to the mountain to see how far it really is I've got to climb. Yes, my German has reached the great intermediate barrier (is that the term? I know there is one). The advancements I make seem pitiful in comparison to the task of understanding my flatmates or reading even the simplest brochure. There's just so many god damn words. Still, grinning and bearing it is currently the plan of action. I've been here before with French (although actually I was infinitely further on before I realised the size of the challenge that time). I came through it and now the idea that the language is unconquerable seems laughable. Cela me fait rire.

So - I raise of glass of Apfelwein to a coherent existence in this country or the next. I drink also to the sense of hopelessness that comes from being at the start of two massive educational projects.

Prost!

I'm arrived. Proper like.

My new room. Isn't she beautiful?

Jetzt bin ich in Deutschland

Holy shit, what a five days it's been. Never has a rollercoaster of emotions felt so little like a fairground ride. Sure, the ups and downs have been there (a touch of the round-and-round too) but, unlike the hours of queuing for any fun-tower worth the Alton name, I've not stood still for a second between rising on Saturday morning and collapsing into a sofa on Thursday to write this blog entry...

But I get ahead of myself. The where-am-I is best presented as the gripping dénoument of the how-did-I-get here.


The story, massively abridge as it will have to be for the sanity of author and reader alike, starts on a sunny saturday in N4.

Pippa, as is her infinitely generous and thoughtful nature, was instrumental in creating the carful of life you see pictured above. I left nothing behind save an Ikea bedside table, two defunct electric radiators and a wooden sword. Suffice it to say that we had to lean on the doors to get them to close.

Following an inauspicious start in a hermetically sealed box-room on the outskirts of Ipswich, Sunday saw a mad dash for the ferry due to my taking at face value Aaron's recommendation as to the amount of time it would take to drive to Harwich. I'd forgotten of course that Aaron has a penchant for three-figure mph speeds. I - with one hand on a map, the other hand preventing my possessions from sliding onto my lap at every left turn and a car whose MOT was acheived only thanks to a Greek garage owner "knowing someone" who would pass it - had not a chance of making his 30-minute yardstick time.

Still, as the inevitable last passenger to board the boat, I had a beautiful view of Suffolk as it slid away into the haze.

The rest of the drive was remarkably successful given that I was navigating from an A4 map printed off Google Maps which included both the Hook of Holland and Frankfurt (i.e. basically two circles, one marked Holland, the other Germany). Of some excitement was the first glimpse of Frankfurt am Main on a road sign. It meant that, on some level, in some tiny way, I knew what I was doing. At least cartographically speaking.

After an entirely uneventful evening in a rather expensive Motel on the outskirts of the city and a wholesale move to a somewhat cheaper (and infinitely more threadbare) hotel in Offenbach, a satellite town, I began the search for normality by returning to my flatshare website and making some non-desperate-sounding appeals for housing.

I'd got the pieces of my bike out of the car and assembled them into something resembling its former self so felt a little more at home. I wasn't getting anywhere on the accommodation front though. I had a couple of rather depressing experiences with flats: one held a couple of bankers in their twenties who had a beautiful place but no sense of community. The 'shared area' was a glass-topped table in the hallway upon which they were completing their spreadsheet of prospective tenants (along with a whole A4 side of questions to ask each!). New parqué flooring or no, I was not going to live somewhere where the idea of socialising was that sometimes they were "in the room when someone else is cooking" (their words not mine). This was followed shortly by a room in a beautiful, old, crazy, perhaps even Parisian flat in the trendy student area of town. The other sharer was Rudi. Promising name. I pictured some young bohemian girl with an expressive mien and an espresso on the go. Rudi was in fact a man in his late fifties and the room was actually his living room. The bed was a sofa and the 'en suite' bathroom was the only bathroom in the house. This meaning that if I wanted to lie in past nine o' clock, I'd have to welcome towel-clad Rudi into my bedroom as he made his way to our shared shower. I think not.

At the same time as doing all of this (along with thinking about getting a phone, opening a bank account, buying a monthly travel card (German beaurocracy is not so different to French it seems, surprisingly), getting from my satellite town hotel every morning and worrying about my carful of life on the streets of Frankfurt) I started my Economics Masters on Tuesday. It was straight in with talk of Isoquants, Indifference Curves and Average Fixed Cost Analyses and I was instantly out of my depth.

All of this led, not to panic, but to a general sense of anxiety. I just felt plain nervous for about 3 days. What was I susposed to remember to take to Uni? Where was I going to live when my 3 booked evenings in the hotel were spent? Why couldn't I speak German (or everyone speak English, as I had expected)?

The thing about anxiety is that it breeds anxiety. Although I was increasingly exhausted as the days went by, my head was a whirl of things to remember and things to sort out (never mind cost minimisation formulae and consumer rationality) and so my sleep was light and often disturbed.

Not until today, then, have I really started to feel like a vaguely normal person again. I'm now happily installed (I won't bore you with the details of how) in a 4-person flatshare. There are two girls, one guy and me. All German (aside from the latter) but all with excellent English. They're cool, friendly and relaxed and their flat (despite being on the 3rd floor (no lift) and in a ho-hum part of town) is gorgeous. I'm still somewhat in transit as the guy who's leaving his room for six months to go to Spain hasn't left yet so I'm in the other guy's room, who's on holiday for a few days. I've now got a German phone, a German address and I know my way from my flat to my university without needing a map. I'm getting a bank account tomorrow and did my first supermarket shop today.

I'm arrived!

More as and when there's something to tell. To be honest though, I'm hoping this trip aboard will be a little more dull and uneventful than my somewhat colourful time in France. If that does turn out to be the case, there'll not be too much to write here and I'll just be living happily and quietly in my new setup.

Experience suggests otherwise but who knows... perhaps Levy luck will out.

Love
Rob

London!!!

I recall back in the mists of time before life was wierd and before the phrase voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir was just something from a song, I wrote some ground rules to the blog that went on to be my lifeline to sanity and my spleen-vent par excellence, one of which clearly stated that I wouldn't be using multiple exclamation marks in any of my postings.

But come on, let's be reasonable about this: this is London!!! 3 exclamation marks. London!!!! 4! There's just no limit to the number of punctuation marks a city of this size, this vibrancy and this sheer paved-with-golditude can sustain. And it's where I live.

It's been 48 hours now since I've been in London and the list of fun things I've done is already long and entertaining, like some kind of joke shop shopping list, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Where have I been for the last n months? What have I been up to?

Well: teaching (fun, uneventful, reasonably well-paid given that I was living cheaply at my parents' house) and being in loco parentis to 47 internationally foreign children aged between 9 and 13, which included such non-typical-for-a-serious-professional-20-something activities as: Disco (way more fun with 10-year-olds than with 'adults'), midnight fighting (them, not me), rounders, jelly cosumption, tears, tantrums, tiredness (mine, not theirs), Pleasurewood Hills, hugs, hunger (constant, everyone) and happiness for all involved.

I had a great time and was constantly reminding myself that most of my friends were in offices idling away the hours in front of their emails and waiting for the (even less appealing to me at that time) whirl of drinks, flirting and chat that makes up British evening social life. I forged genuine bonds with some of the kids and was very sad when it was time for people to go home (not a dry eye on the coach). Is it something I'd do again? Not sure. The money's great but it did have it's down sides; I'll not to into them now, you can ask me when you see me.

So, here I am. In Hackney, or as it's known round these parts: Cambridge-upon-Thames. It's wierd that virtually everyone I have ever known from Cambridge is now living within a 2-mile radius of me. Wierd but not unpleasant, which brings me nicely round to my first 48 hours in London:

Yesterday I enjoyed the wonder and splendour of Stoke Newington Church Street, my local high-class High Road. It's actually rather wonderful, with cafes and restaurants at every whirl of the capital-crazed eye. Spent the afternoon wandering and eating and drinking and trying to buy things for my new, utterly empty, undecorated and undecorous room.

This was followed by an evening of the highest pleasure and leisure making decorations at my sister's house for the party they're having this weekend. We ate heartily and played with paints, paper of the size that most normal children can only dream of, and pipe cleaners in luminous, furred hues, to be made into butterflies and monkeys by our skilled fingers (I'll try and get some photos of these to post if I can).

Today was mine and my friend's attempt at the obligatory 'London tourist' montage as seen in Friends, Austen Powers and possibly even the Simpsons, where we donned union jack top hats and rode laughing through the sights and sounds of London on the top of a double-decker bus with the Kinks playing Waterloo Sunset on the back seat.

This is of course just metaphore but we did wander through Picadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Hamleys and Carnaby Street in search of nothing in particular, and finding it all quite wonderful. I've been to all these places before of course but it feels oddly different now I know my home is only a bus ride away.

Things felt more manageable, more comprehensible, more like my own back garden somehow. I also bought a giant wall-poster map of London for poring over and assimilating to wow my soon-to-be new pals (whoever they may be) with my own version of 'The Knowledge'.

So, this is all for now. Life and London rolls by outside at a frantic urban pace and will no doubt continue to do so well into the night and, indeed, a good part of tomorrow, but I? I'm going to cook beef sausages, tidy my room and maybe read a book. You can take the boy out of Cambridge but Cambridge out of the boy? That'll take a while longer yet....

Till next time me hearties,
Rob

The dream is dead, long live the dream

It's a bit like being witness to a horrible crime. You know some bad shit went down and that it wasn't pretty, but when it comes to being asked to recall the order in which things happened you find you can't. Your memory's just a blur of mangled flesh, bloodied machetes and wild grinning faces.

It's thus with the slow, final, horrible fall from grace of my dream of a new life in France. After around 6 months of continuously hearing the murderous footsteps coming up the stairs you'd think I'd be better prepared to recount the final blur of devastating blows that left me with the gory mess I stand surveying this sunny day in Strasbourg.

Yes friends, it's all over. I've finally had enough. I can no longer take the constant disappointment, lonliness, isolation, poor decision making and if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-puke-with-despair never-ending paperwork that have so neatly defined the last stage of my 'dream'.

My bank account in France currently reads -€88.65 and in England -£1,595 and that's it. I'm officially spent. I have not a penny to my name, owing as I do, €130 to my 'flatmates' for the 10 nights I spent sleeping on a matress in an empty room in a (usually) empty flat.

The news is so crushing I can hardly bear to write it, but entertainment is entertainment kids. The audience are baying for more and the show must go on: My mum is going to buy me a flight to London sometime in the coming few days and that's it. I'm out of here.

I feel like the end of Jurassic Park where Laura Dern and Sam Neil are airlifted to safety, leaving the snapping jaws of French unemployment and the tearing claws of French commercial immobility to devour eachother in a bloody but unwitnessed battle. As far as I'm concerned this whole country can (and almost certainly will) go to hell with the following exceptions:

• Sophie and Clair, my delightful ex-housemates from Toulouse
• Alisson, my delightful ex-girlfriend
• Sophie's dad who's unbelievable generosity actually made me feel uncomfortable to be a scrounger
• The pretty girl who lives opposite him who invited me into her flat to share a bottle of champagne with her and her friends.

That's it. That means that sixty million minus 5 can rap about their problems and sing tuneless melodies about acid rain accompanied only by a jingling guitar until they're red, white or blue in the face. I no longer care.

I'm not going to recount it here but for all those interested in knowing my French Social Security Beaurocray vs. Text-based adventure video game analogy, you can ask me in person when you buy me that pint of Carlsberg that from now on will represent the price of that trip to come and visit that you all owe me (H and C, you are discounted from this. We'll settle our scores face to face!).

Just a final word about how a decision is right until the instant you make it and can't change your mind.

Remember how the day I booked my flight to Hungary I got a phone call from a bar I'd applied to 2 months ago and McDonald's who I'd applied to 6 months ago asking if I wanted a job?

Well today, having told the boss of my school that I'd teach the rest of the lessons I have this week (2) and that's it, I got a phone call from the job agency asking me if I want to be a waiter in the European Parliament and another from a random bloke who'd seen my little advert stuck on a bar-room wall and was "definitely interested" in taking private lessons at €15 an hour.

What the fuck is going on here, I hear you ask? Well, I'd like to know too. It seems there is a god, and my twin habits of cigarette smoking and pork eating that I've taken up since being here in order to not be a total social reject (some good that did me!) have angered Him immensely. It is with this fact in mind that I solemnly swear that upon my return to England, I will watch more Woody Allen films and learn to insult the French goyim in Yiddish.

Until such time, here's an effort in French:
Vous êtes la foule des sales cons le plus grosse, le plus laide et le plus degueulasses que je n'ai jamais imaginer dans tous mes pires rêves. J'espère que vous allez vous faire enculer le plus tôt possible et que votre bordel d'un pays va créver d'un coeur pourri.

Lots of love and thanks to all who have followed this blog with varying levels of interest and interaction.

Your faithful soon-to-be-ex-traveller,
Rob

agony and ecstacy

jesus it's been a shitty few days.

Sorry to start in such a negative fashion... let me explain: the cash machine stopped giving me money two days before I moved into my new (and rather expensive) house-share. This means that in the last 4 days, I've lived on the 11 euro that was in my wallet at the fatal ATM visit. This doesn't sound so bad, but the problem with moving house is that you start from nothing.

My room is unfurnished (that's no joke. When I arrived there was literally nothing in it at all) and I had nothing to eat. 6 Euros bought me a box of cereal, some milk, bread, a packet of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce. I already had rice and some onions. For 4 days I've eaten nothing but these 6 ingredients for every meal but I simply couldn't afford to buy anything else. I've walked everywhere because I can't pay the €1.50 tram fare and I've suffered the humilitation of standing in a queue at the unemployment office to use their free internet.

To top it all, today I had the infuriating experience of having to turn down a job on principal. That is the principal that everyone working in the school were a total bunch of bastards and I refused to let myself be bullied (I'm a qualified english teacher. You can't treat me like this!). It's a long story and I can't be arsed to recount it here as the keyboard I'm using is fucked and in French which means the keys are all in different places. Suffice it to say that when I left I was fuming with rage and could only console myself with a meal of rice, tomato sauce and raw onions. Don't ask me why I didn't cook the onions. Sometimes when you're in a really filthy mood you'll do anything to make it worse. Self-flagellation they call it. I'm still suffering from the raw onions. It's not pretty.

But, to lighten the mood a little: I have temporarily escaped my no-money-expensive-rent-to-pay hell-hole by the fact that I have been paid for the first time in 3 months. Yes kids, and in cash too! I have right now in my pocket 6 hours worth of pure hard work to fritter away on overpriced internet costs and blogging...

So misery alleviated and I'm only left with the debilitating loneliness and the furniture-free bedroom to deal with (this is not quite as bad as it sounds. Betrand's son has lent me a z-bed and I have my trusty sleeping bag)

Joy!

See you next time fun-fans.

Rob

On the road (for the last time?)

Strasbourg's poorly named river Ill

To celebrate the nth anniversary where n is a number I'm no longer bothering to count, of my being on the road, so to speak, (by this I mean living out of a suitcase, not really having any friends, not knowing what I'm doing from one day to the next or where my next pay-check is coming from) I'm going to give myself the gift of a shot at stability.

This is to be my last weekend at Sophie's dad's house in a state of flux, temporariness and general disarray. Tomorrow I move to my new flat. And it's great!

Strasbourg in the Sunshine

It's going to be me, a 26-year-old Medical student and a 27-year-old Ethnology student (male and female respectively) and we're slap bang in the centre of town on the 4th floor.

The apartment itself is tout neuf meaning that the other two who have been living there for around 4 months were it's first ever occupants. It's relatively swish, full of great CDs and is west facing (read late afternoon sunshine streaming through living room windows. pure charm!) with a wild cat about 6 months of age stalking the corridors.

For all this fantastickness I have to pay of course. The rent is going to be around 1.7 times that which I was paying in Toulouse but now that I'm a working man (4 hours a week!) I feel I can justify it. Plus I'm in the process of applying for all sorts of state aid, which will start pouring into my bank account just as soon as the form that the British Department For Work & Pensions sent about 2 weeks ago arrives. Am I worried it's been lost in the post? A bit. Do I trust the French postal system? Not in the slightest, those work-shy, strike loving chair-warmers. But we'll see. Never say never.

I'm also in line to get my first real pay check sooner than I thought, as the month of February surprised me by only containing 28 days that sneaky beggar! So a bit of paperwork to do and (6 x €15 - scandalous french tax rates) euros will be winging their way to me via La Poste (uh oh!).

So, the next time I write I will be a man with a job and a home. A combination of things that has thus far eluded me in this difficult, inexplicable and (thus far) entirely pointless journey of mine.

Let's hope it sticks for a while.

Love
Rob

What awaited me on my bed when I got home from Hungary.
I personally found this very moving!