Finally experienced the piercing joy of eating ice-cream in the freezing cold, I always used to wonder why people would do that. But tonight I walked into this swanky ice-cream bar where the guy had just taken all the plastic rims off the deep buckets, presumably to wash them, and he was puzzling over putting them back each in its right place. I said, “Do you just take them off sometimes and put them back all different, then, just to confuse people?” And he gave me his slow, shy smile. “…No,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “No,” I said, fondly, “because that would be silly.” Only I think I said “weird” or “freaky” because I always think “komisch” is going to mean “comical” then I remember it doesn’t. He didn’t take it amiss, thank god. There is not enough room in a passing pleasantry to say, I didn’t mean that as a passive-aggressive attack, it just came out wrong because my German is faulty. He had a service-smile and then a shyer, boyhood smile which he gave out only sparingly, from under the shelf of his brows. That was the one I remembered and will carry, which slightly alters everything. We’re in this world together! Each of us, gazing out, going: Wow, far out. We exchanged a look which acknowledged this. So then he gave me my ice-cream cone wrapped in a serviette and I ate it walking home in the cold, cold wind.
Blog
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don’t wink at me
Changing the side of the street I walk home on to avoid having to avoid the strenuously charming guy who always seems to be patrolling in front of his shop – often with a pretty girl hanging on his arm, always a different girl each time – and whose carefully-established friendliness and benign compliments have now veered into lewd winks which topple my thoughts into a far less interesting range of topics than they otherwise inhabit. I now wish I’d not been so friendly and I dislike having to meter my natural warmth in order to evade some stranger’s mild sexual aggression. I don’t like the sensation that he implies he and I are linked together in some kind of secret agreement. We ain’t.
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echt Kinderbilder
I just saw a Berliner sitting with legs planted apart in the sunshine and hugely enjoying his hot dog – or some kind of meat that will never die forced into a large white bread roll. In his opposite hand he held a catering-size bottle of red chilli sauce and was squeezing a gout of chilli into the open end of the roll each time he took a fresh mouthful. Though perhaps ‘fresh’ in this context is not quite the right word.
The sun is shining. Four men spilled out of an art gallery wearing hats and overcoats and one said, “Das sind echt Kinderbilder!” – those are kids’ paintings – and all of them laughed. In unison like an old school barbershop quartet. I caught the eye of a little elderly lady wearing green and she gave me, astonishingly, her mute and carefully guarded smile.
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antiquities vs the antiquated: Abbott’s true agenda
Ok listen up. Abbott wants to forcibly shut down outback Indigenous communities in remote areas of Western Australia that just happen to coincide with a bunch of mining exploration leases. Our government – whom we as a people elected and are responsible for – are about to move off their immemorial lands a people who have been caring for and cared for by this Country of theirs for longer than any other peoples on earth. They are the oldest living civilisation and have survived genocidal intrusion, deliberate and mass kidnappings of their kids and jailings of their men. What is happening is the most ancient traditions on Earth are being shoved aside to make way for a depleting, exploitative mining industry that is rapidly falling into obsolescence. That is, the world’s oldest living cultures are to be replaced by technologies which are merely outdated. Now is the time we all need to be Idle No More. Make yourself heard.
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by appearance
A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book and started to read. I was reading, too, in fact, hearteningly, several books appeared on that ride but the truth is I spent as much time stealing covert glances as concentrating on Mary Stuart’s court. This man was dressed in giant red sneakers, a sloppy, comfortable tracksuit, baseball cap. He was black. In America I imagine he’d have been in danger of being shot for the crime of Being Tall Whilst Black. The expression of gentleness on his face and the shy way he held his head, his utter concentration on the page, made me love him. The temptation to go up and say, Excuse me, you just have such a beautiful, gentle spirit I just wanted to say hello, was very strong. Only respect for his reading and his solitude prevented me interrupting him as I got off. And I didn’t want to make him speak out about himself in front of all those people when he was staying behind and riding further, and I was leaving: it seems aggressive, it would have made him conspicuous in a lifetime where clearly conspicuousness had been a burden. I would so have loved to know what he was reading.
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the cold, the dark, the spots on my apples
So cold outside that I can keep cheeses and yoghurts fresh by stowing them in between the inner and outer window. So warm in my room that I can ripen bananas by just letting them sit on my table. Not that there’s anything at all strange about that, Europe.
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citizen’s arrest
I walked into one of those joyless lunchtime buffets so ill-suited to Chinese cuisine. The name of the place was China-Haus, China-Garten, something like that. They had long ranks of bains marie, tepid with cornflour. Another woman came in behind me, rather young with a lot of glossy hair spilling over her parka, and stood there pulling off her gloves. “Do you have coffee?” she asked the waitress. “Not… not really.” “Oh good. I’ll have a latte machiatto. Do you have aloe vera juice?” I started to laugh. The waitress looked over her shoulder at the kitchen, uneasily. “We basically just have normal coffee.” “Oh,” said the coffee loving yoga monster, dismally. She was so bewildered that I sort of fell in love with her humanity.
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white trash-talking
The term “white trash” is so racist and offensive I cannot believe people ever use it. Like “female doctor” it has built into it the assumption that the norm for trash (for doctors) has been subverted here: that surely the usual condition of trashiness is blackness. It disgusts me that people use this term with almost a smug feeling, it seems, as though they are holding up a sign Look How Broad-Minded Am I, That I Can See How Even White People Can Be Human Trash, Too.
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shopgirl
Tonight I walked into a Chinese restaurant alone and was seated at a tiny table in the centre of the crowded room. The smaller tables were set out in pairs running the length of the long restaurant; the gap between my table and the couple next door was about four inches. Idly I eavesdropped on their conversation, noticing how he invariably talked and she invariably supplied back-up: Mmm-hmm, yep, I know what you mean. Oh, my. Well, that’s fascinating! Good for you.
When their meal was done and my meal had arrived the man picked up his unused chopsticks. He had eaten his dinner with spoon and fork and now wanted to know: Sind diese zum Mitnehmen? Are we supposed to take these home with us? His companion, who was older and had a wise, patient face though she had sat unmoved through his several recitations of what sounded like mind-numbing generalisations and prejudice (“they were obviously gay, or had spent time in prison, ha ha”) said, rather gently, “I think some people use them to eat with.” Some people like the woman at the next table, for example. He tipped the long paper bag to let the bright lacquered chopsticks slide into his hand. Playfully he mimed for her their various uses: scratching his scalp with a single chopstick, tucking it behind his ear like a newspaper man of the 1920s, trapping a long moustache under his nostrils by scrunching his upper lip. After that he bunched the two chopsticks together and slid them carefully back into their paper sachet and laid it back on the napkin on his untouched side plate.
I felt my face squinch into an expression of disgust. The woman was so startled she broke the fourth wall. “What?”
I said, spreading my hands, “Well – if you put those back into their case, they’re going to hand them on to the next customer.”
The man looked blank. “And?” he said.
I gasped a sort of soundless bark of laughter. “And, well you’ve just stuck them in your hair and put them behind your ear and… it’s not very nice, don’t you think?”
He was so mortified he stood up instantly and began fumbling for his coat. He must have been trembling because it took him a long time to work his arms into the sleeves. For many minutes he stood there patting his pockets, clapping himself up the chest and back down and round the backs of his hips with two spread hands. His companion didn’t move and none of us looked at each other. I got on with my dinner and some time later the man reappeared, smelling of tobacco smoke, and slid into his chair beside me as though no time at all had passed. He began once again describing the world to her and she consented, nodding, agreeing, supporting. He slid the chopsticks out from their paper case and set them side by side in front of him. When I got up to leave I said, Wiedersehen, and got a nod from the listening woman but no acknowledgement from the crumpled, authoritative man.