Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

siren caul

Stopped for an orange juice at a stall where the man squeezes oranges one at a time, by hand, for one euro per glass. Chivalrously he added a straw to mine, not to my male companion’s, though I have not worn nor owned a lipstick since 1996. While we were drinking our juices a string of police vans streaked past, sirens blaring. Instinctively both of us put up our hands over our ears. I squinched my eyes shut too, as if that would help. We were standing on a traffic island in a crossroads that’s surrounded on all sides by cafes and pizza and kebab shops. When I opened my eyes people all round the square had their hands over their ears in unison.

Once I was on a full plane carrying some 90 school children from an outback Queensland town who were travelling to Sydney. When the plane left the ground many of them gave an audible gasp. Seconds later the whole plane was laughing. Inadvertently to share a genuine gesture with dozens of strangers: it’s like accidental dancing.

June 16, 2013
watching over you

I saw a boy cross the road with his little sister. At the curb he made her stop and made her take his hand. I guess she was three; I guess he was four. He looked both ways. A car approaching slowly from two intersections north made him wait, and hold her back. His caution and sense of responsibility glimmered on him like sunlight. They waited and waited. The little girl sagged her head and dreamed, her brother stood alert and concentrating fiercely. The car went past, he lifted his foot, a second car poked its nose around from a side street. He waited again. I stood as casually as possible a few paces away, three times the size of the little steward, not wanting to injure his pride by letting him know I was waiting for them to be safe. I imagined the parent who had sent them on this errand perhaps watching from an upper window too. The corner shop stood up three stone steps on the opposite corner, its plastic flystrips beckoning. At last when the street was empty and still it was safe, according to the big brother’s judgement; they set out.

June 16, 2013
Blurlin

Last night was an event called The Long Night of the Design Studios in which studios threw their doors open and invited people to come look. Cheeses were carved on raw plywood platters and I saw a girl in a filmy white dress carving chunks off an entire pig’s leg. The night before, DMY design festival opened in an old hangar at the abandoned airport Tempelhof. Tonight is the opening of the Poesie Festival. Ordinarily I stay home for weeks on end, writing in pajamas in cafes, undisturbed by anything beyond the books and the birds. I’m proposing a name change: Blurlin.

June 13, 2013
while it lasts

One thing I love about Germany is that you can find local bakeries who’ll treat you like diners in a restaurant. You can choose a bread roll filled with lettuce and cheese, or raw mince and onion (“builders’ marmalade”), or some kind of iridescent preserved meat with cucumber, and order a cup of tea and have it all brought to your table outdoors with knives and forks and napkins and not pay until you leave. You can sit under the bower of greenery and watch a skinny mother with a pram and a cigarette flirt with the shaven-headed dude who just leveled a trigger finger at a passing flock of teenagers. One of the teenagers says to her friend, “Do we look like school students?” Yes, you do. Enjoy it while it lasts!

June 9, 2013
some order

I find Berlin the most extraordinary city. Nothing is regular, not that in my life anything ever is. I guess in an individuality-seeking cult/ure this sounds boastful or false-meek, but I have spent a lifetime hunting the things I have (bountiful, it turns out) in common with other people. Went through the drug-dealer park this afternoon on our dog walk/bike ride to the river. Saw two pale-eyed people sharing a picnic of vodka, a scarfed family of women leaning wearily but free against the fence that divides (we hope) the water from the land, African men lissom in dreadlocks playing music & ball, metalheads holding a metal convention under a large chestnut tree all in black and with slogans and dark music dimly blaring; many couples making out that plenitude is privacy; dogs upon dogs upon dogs upon hounds; and a Turkish family playing cards and smoking spiralling blue cigarettes between thorny bramble bushes, just as though their country were not burning or perhaps as though they were all too aware, and were taking some time off from chaos, placing some orders.

June 9, 2013
beats like butter, baby

Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with an old-fashioned upright pram have their son on their laps, spoon-feeding him. The boy is fat as butter and looks calmly round the shadowy room. In German I read in a gossip magazine how dearly Brad Pitt loves Angelina Jolie and how he was tirelessly by her side during her recent ordeal. Outside, the sun is glary-bright and like snowflakes the fluffy little seeds of some flowering tree pursue their airy way through the day. Things seem slow and sunstruck but with the glimmering promise of sex with a stranger, the inimical glamour and disillusion of city evenings. A thin guy rolls in behind his stack of pallets of soft drinks on a sack truck. A muscular guy whose muscle is running to fat pulls over blaringly in his topless black vehicle, parks at an angle and leaves the engine running with an intolerably loud and banal dance track pumping. I am thinking about running out to turn the volume down, just to piss him off. I’m drinking a milkshake with cucumber and mint. Its clear fresh milky taste pleases my body. Berliners are smokers, people walk by with their head in the clouds. The fat muscleman leaps into his car and pulls out, jerking his hand to let the taxi driver who’s had to screech to a halt know, I am going first. The taxi driver is Turkish: he stretches his mouth whimsically. His hand falls on its back like a cat. He’s relaxed. “If you want to, man. If you have to, dude.”

June 7, 2013
for beer and weed

Two li’l punks on the footbridge to the Warschauerstrasse station, lounging with legs crossed and outstretched, dog lying between them, begging bowl out and a large sign propped on her legs which says in English: FOR BEER AND WEED. He obviously adores her. They have matching frothy haircuts, blonded and shaved up the sides.

June 5, 2013
everywhere at work

Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.

June 5, 2013
Tom Waits for no man

I somehow forgot Berlin’s imaginative beggars. This guy held open the door to the autotellers in the foyer of the bank, with a grand flourish, saying, “Welcome!” He was as confident as though he owned it. And he did! He was wearing a greasy navy-blue pinstripe suit like a boxer and had his hair slicked back. On the way out I gave him some coins and he snipped them up in the hand that was free from cigarette-rolling, clasped them to his breast, “Danke!”, kept rolling, grinning at me salty and devilish as Tom Waits. The joy of life is a great thing to share, if you’re a beggar or busker, if somehow you can manage it. Irresistible!

May 28, 2013
punk snot green

Punker dog in Berlin, his hair matted and scrufflish, his gait insouciant. He has a green streak in his fur, top of the head between the ears, that matches the green quiff on his master. The thought of this dude dyeing his own hair like an old lady in a salon and then tenderly saying, Ok now we do yours, has undone me.

May 28, 2013