Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: funny how

  • winter blast

    Try to work out whether I can afford to get back over to Ghana to see my sweetheart, I asked a friend: how long will this pretty autumn weather last? We know all too soon it’s going to get misty and grey and damp and bitterly cold – but when?

    Oh well, he said: November is the greyest month. You could go in November and miss the Nieselregen.

    Nieselregen is a kind of drizzly slushy snowrain that gets inside your spirit and rusts it out.

    Or, he said, December is ok because everybody’s looking forward to Christmas – and at least if it rains, it might snow. But you could go in January. January is the coldest month.

    January seems to me such a long way away, I said, in a very small voice. We were sitting under the trees in a quiet marketplace and had large beers in front of us.

    Go in February, he decided. Because by February, even Berliners are sick of it and everybody just wants to stay in bed for the rest of their life. At least in March, the weather is still horrible but you can feel the change approaching. Like, ‘Just sixteen more weeks til I’ll be wearing my t shirt.’

  • I spoke first

    In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,

    “Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”

    Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”

    People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.

    “Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”

    “That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.

    “Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”

    This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.

    Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.

  • transmisogyny

    Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists.

    Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape and have turned an oppressed marginal culture inside-out. It’s misogyny unmasked.

    San Francisco Public Library last month held an ‘art exhibit’ featuring barbed wire baseball bats painting in trans colours and bloodied t shirts printed I PUNCH TERFS. In a women’s online group yesterday I watched in horror as a man calling himself Natalie laid about him threatening rape and boasting about the size of his penis in order to compel us to ‘respect his pronouns’: ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Womanhood is not a costume to be donned by men who are so entitled they want the one thing they cannot have: to be female.

    Native American ‘two spirits’ culture, the Black civil rights struggle, the intersex community, and now lesbians have all complained in turn about the theft of their language and struggle by white males who now claim they are ‘lesbians’ because they sleep with women. The ‘cotton ceiling’, chillingly, is used to convey the crotch of lesbians’ underwear that, like a glass ceiling, must be forced. Small children are encouraged to believe they cannot play with non-conformist toys (dolls, if a boy, trucks if a girl) and still be a boy, or a girl. It’s ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, and corrective homophobia, in pink.

    This homophobic misogynist racist insanity has turned liberal communities upside down and ruined countless friendships between compassionate people as transactivists insist on framing themselves as the ultimate victims. It is happening at a time when more than ever in human history we need to pull together and stand up to the terrifying ecological and social damage wrought by narcissism and power hunger.

    Every time I post about this I get emails from women thanking me for having the courage to speak up. I’ve seen black women told to stand down and check their privilege when they object to racism from white, upper class, trans-identified males. Meanwhile men are never called TERF. It is women who are silenced: same as it ever was.

    I’ve been called Nazi, a bag of shit, bigoted, and phobic because I point out that women deserve our own spaces and that young women, Muslimas, and survivors of rape and sexual assault are unable to safely share changing rooms with men. Convicted rapists are now demanding they be called women and transferred to women’s prisons. It is seen as more important to respect Ian Huntley’s pronouns than to remember the two young girls he tortured and killed. Trans-identified men like Hope Lye, Jenn Smith, and Miranda Yardley who know they are not female are now routinely banned from Twitter and women are becoming too afraid to speak. Meanwhile women are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘vagina bearers’ who ‘chestfeed.’ If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

  • follow milk

    I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?”

    “Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression and messy hair struck me with insight.

    “Is it… what you eat when you are done with drinking only milk?”

    I didn’t know how to say ‘breast milk’ let alone ‘solid food’ so I just said, only milk.

    “Exactly!” he said, and then used that pricelessly dear word Germans have for breastfeeding infants. “It’s for sucklings.”

    We both shifted our stuff along the counter as the person in front moved on.

    “So can you use it for other things, in general, like… I’m just having a beer as a followlunch?” I asked, hopefully.

    His brow clotted. “No. No, that is not right.”

    Learning German. It’s one-third flights of folk poetry, two-thirds ‘that is not right’ and ‘we simply don’t do it that way.’

  • a homemade flower festival

    A woman in my neighbourhood has put up little signs all round the flower gardens in our local park. Her signs are handwritten, but laminated.

    “INVITATION TO THE FLOWER FESTIVAL, JUNE 16. Yeah maybe ‘festival’ is somewhat high flown. But I will bake a cake and hand a slice of it to everyone who feels themselves somehow connected to these plants and who wants to come by. There have been so many lovely engagements and so much enabling mutual assistance taking place locally, I would really love to offer my friends an impression of it all. And in case we haven’t yet met, then this will provide us an opportunity.”

    She writes a smily face, in her own handwriting.

    “It would be practical, if youse (the informal German you) would bring something to sit on and some stuff that goes with cake eating and coffee drinking. I’ll be glad if you come along!”

    Flowerbeds in Berlin are always overgrown, because the city is broke and there’s no money to pay people in fluorescent vests to destroy our every Sunday with leafblowers. Nearby, even more overgrown and underkempt, a tiny meadow has evolved where consistent and assiduous neglect year after year has allowed all the native flowers and butterflies to come back.

    On the main road, when I reach it, a man with a ZZ Top beard has settled himself and his paunch next to my favourite seat outside the writing cafe. He turns the pages of his newspaper with noisy harrumphs. We exchange a few words. “I’m going inside to order,” I tell him, as Berliners do, “are you here a few more minutes?”

    The informal ‘you.’

    “Then would you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?”

    “Either that,” he says, “or I’ll be gone, with your little red rucksack,” and he laughs, and I laugh, as I’m heading inside where it is shady and the bartender on his stool is reading Camus, in French.

  • skeeter mattress

    I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among the mosquitoes (“And the moon,” I reminded, insufferably helpful), at his garden house in its green garden.

    I told him why I can’t stand the sight of the thing and must sell. I bought it brand new for a terrible houseguest who tarnished my last birthday, 2017. She was mean and I had not guessed it. Now I want rid. “Ahh,” he said, breathing out very understandingly.

    So when he rang to say, “Ich bin da,” I am there, I snatched up the mattress deflated in its box with the sales docket sticky-taped to the side and said to my current, far nicer houseguest, “Omigod. Now I hafta run downstairs in bare foots and my father’s pyjamas, to meet this guy, unless I change.” He was flicking Tinder prospects on his phone and I had been dancing round the living room like a wild thing that is not a thing. Who is not a thing. We had got into a game of what songs do you truly really love only you wish you didn’t, they are embarrassing? I playde him Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, whoever they are, dancing a hole in the floor and The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. “If anyone can, you can,” said my houseguest and friend, and when I came back upstairs at a run laughing with joy he introduced me to Feu! Chatterton, just as earlier we had been listening at his behest to the very weird and cluey New Zealander Aldous Harding.

    My mattress bequeathee held out a handful of coins and notes. I brought you your original price, trotzdem, despite everything, he said, and: Oh! you are in your pyjamas, you must be having a good Saturday night. Fireworks exploded above our heads and he said, shrugging, Maifest: the festival of May. The black Europe night was alight with sound. I described to him what kind of an evening my houseguest friend and I are having. Then we hugged.

  • her wild laugh, like birds

    My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh.

    It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its attention. People began to smile at each other over her head. A drunk guy tottered up to her, plump like a teddy bear, his arms comically held out, a skewed fishermen. The one that got away was this big.

    “Can I have a hug?” he asked the laughing girl, somberly. She couldn’t speak for squeaking but held up one hand for a high five. “Hug,” he said, nodding, insisting, reasonable. Drunk. So she opened up her arms and hugged him over the table. All the while her maniacal laugh was rising over his shoulder like a series of photos of the moon. Her male friend said, “She’s allergic to you.” Her female friend giggled. The drunk guy straightened and slowly smiled and only even slower realised, a bit hurt, a bit taken aback, “Really?”

    “Nah,” said the girl’s friend. “That’s really her laugh.” The girl’s shoulder’s shook and her honking squeals kept coming. By now everyone was laughing: the cute girl wiping the bar counter, the drunk guy’s drunk friends, my companion and I holding our sides, leaking tears. The hugged, drunken guy turned a sloppy somersault on his way back to his mates: an unforeseeable magical item.

    There was quite a lot of moon left in the high sky on the walk home but now these cold clouds have dulled it over. The exhaustion that comes from laughing too much is not like any other form of tiredness that I know of.

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • East German joy

    Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.

    I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”

    These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.

    I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.