Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: friendship

  • a jeans under it

    a jeans under it

    An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.

    Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.

    Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.

    They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.

    But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.

    H2O HoL opshop manekin

  • a nighttime walk

    a nighttime walk

    It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.

    A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.

    H2O HoL bloom

  • braincloud

    braincloud

    An acquaintance of mine was teasing after he inadvertently tapped into the ideas fountain and could not make it stop. We had brunch and he mentioned some frustrations he has been having with his business. I threw out about a dozen ideas to start with and then four dozen more whilst spooning up yoghurt and fruit. You know how one idea leads to the other. We finished our drinks and went out into the street where I turned to face him, still talking. “OR… you could try this, and that… Have you thought about trying it this other way?” ‘Well, mmm….’ “Another way to look at it would be…”

    Finally he put his hands on my shoulders to make it stop. “You know, it seems to be very brainstormy around here today. Must be a lot of brainclouds about. Now I am going to walk off in that direction and in a few minutes, I’ll be back.”

    So he went off to unlock his bicycle and left me there, standing with my mouth open in the pouring brain, in that chilly kind of sunshine with the icy wind that qualifies as Northern European spring; getting wet.

    H2O HoL glowing trash video bar west end

  • scandinavian tile

    scandinavian tile

    My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way back up the path and plunged back in. That was summer. The living room is populated with artefacts from an adventurous life. The upstairs office has rifles, a hammock, old round-shouldered business cards tacked to the corkboard with extra digits penciled in front of each telephone number. The whole house is filled with swimming trophies, and pennants for tennis. Her son was born in Africa and her daughter in Kalimantan. “I think we helped destroy the rainforest,” said my friend sadly, the first night I arrived when we were reminiscing about Indonesia, our lost homeland. She loves yellow and orange and the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in exuberant 70s clay, handmade tiles, each one of which is different to its neighbour. There is a photo of me and my two brothers and her daughter, average age six or seven, taking a bath together in a maze of these tiles, so small and the white bathtub so generous that it was intimate yet not crowded.

    H2O HoL orange flower on construction fence

  • wedgwood sky

    wedgwood sky

    Afternoon cycle ride down to the shops. I say down, but I really mean up: this is Switzerland. We set off up the side of a steep quarry and my host, who is in her seventies, left me so far behind that I had some trouble once I reached the crest working out which side road she had darted down. She had a basket strapped to the back of her bike and rode upright in deep elegance.

    I would like to think this difference in speed was entirely down to our relative fitness but I suspect a small part of it was also blind tourism. It’s pretty here, pretty and industrial, and the blue and white sky this winter has been a long time coming. A Wedgwood sky, Monica Dickens called it. Or it may have been Agatha Christie.

    Yesterday evening I was prowling with my camera and heard a cheery “Hi!” from behind me as I was crossing the bridge. It was my host, bicycling to her tennis club. She waved and I waved back. Then I stood under the willows and watched her becoming a smaller and smaller pink speck between the green, seamed fields. The evening had just begun to gather and tiny insectivore bats were bombing above the water.

    H2O HoL briefe u zeitungen bouquet

  • switzerland

    My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away from the glaring new terraces with ancient trees felled in front of them to afford the new tenants a view; and concentrate instead on the mountains behind, the green meadows, the velvet of moss in the crannies of birches. I was tired from the eleven-hour train journey from Berlin with too many suitcases full of books. We saw a tree felled by a beaver, its stump whittled to a pencil point, its inner flesh fresh and not yet yellowed. We saw a man turning handstands on a promontory, again and again, his feet falling in front of him and his white shirt dousing his head. We saw a lamb curled in the grass and chewing very slowly, its expression consumed with a kind of passionate ecstasy that made us laugh again over dinner, hours and hours later.

    On our walk my friend waved to a nearby hillside and said, You see: that’s Germany.

  • street friendships

    I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the tribe of people ~ who are poets, and deeply sensitive & reflective, and are peace-loving activists, and like to laugh and dance a lot, and care about the world and all who sail in her ~ find their home?

    So this was not a moment too soon. I’d come out of the Underground and was tramping through the snow which has mounted so rapidly all day today. A woman beside me suddenly spoke. “What? Is this Christmas?” She indicated the white sky, the buried trees, the white-piling pavements. “Yes,” I said, “and I was just noticing, I have never seen these kind of tiny snowballs before – they’re not really flakes – they are like drops of water.” “Stimmt,” she said, musingly, gazing at the tiny white balls crunching underfoot. She is a yoga teacher and teaches art therapy. We reached the snowy markets and parted. There were all kinds of activities this weekend, she said, to celebrate Spring – such as it is – and would I like to have coffee in this gallery cafe her mate runs and go for a wander. Well, as it happens yes, I very much rather would. Thank you, snowboat universe.

    H2O HoL sugarbowl

  • his three favourite things

    his three favourite things

    Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the bookstore that had agreed to trial one of my books in their English-language section. The pile was sitting untouched but I saw this tall man hovering and said to him, unexpectedly, “You should buy this one! I wrote it.” So he did and we have been friends ever since. God love good bookshops, the friendship agency of the civilized world. Today he had on Nick Cave’s new album and was listening to it “over and over.” I said, “He’s Australian! Like, the coolest Australian since… 1975.” In the riverside cafe where I ate dinner afterwards they were playing Olivia Newton-John, who has no use for cool and was singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” as though her heart would crumble. What a song. I and the elderly waiter were both singing it. Two tough-minded Danish women in their fifties walked in to order beers, wearing what seemed to me very insufficient clothing. Outside, the water darkly rippled and a skin of ice extended itself infinitesimally.

  • overheard

    overheard

    Girl on the tram, to her friend: “It made me wanna throw up. And not in a good way.”