Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: SAD

  • a birthday story

    It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

    The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

    “Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

    The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

    “Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

    The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.

  • house of gingerbread

    So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, are so beguiling. They sit and talk a lot, often about what they are reading. Greene soars in like a small eagle who casts a large shadow.

    The world is run by noisy extraverts and tonight three of them had a bang-up row in the Hinterhaus, the building at the back of this courtyard. Glass was thrown. Police came pouring in with walkie-talkies at the ready. Now all is restored and the night has taken possession of the leaves and every sill. Far up in the corner of the highest apartment two facing windows are joined by a little covered bridge, for their cat. I had coffee today with the woman whose apartment I am leasing, who has moved to Vienna to make a film, and she said her cats (who travel everywhere with her – to Berlin and back by train; she takes them on set; she takes them to the beach) have a little case which they climb into so she can carry them down to the garden in the back courtyard every day, to play and explore and pounce and poo. She knows they are ready to go out when she comes into the hall to find them sitting quietly in their windowed carry case – “it’s like their bus.”

    It is beautiful to have a home and to stay home in it. It is a lamplit evening. I have the double doors open onto my tiny balcony – Berliners call this “Balconia.” The land of summer, of lurid sun umbrellas and bright geraniums in pots.

    Recently I passed a guy tenderly polishing his very fancy bicycle, outside the discount markets where junkies drift like zombies underwater. Gee, I thought: that’s a fancy bike he’s got. On my way back the same guy was pushed up against a police van. The beautiful bicycle was nowhere in sight but the back of the van was wide open.

    The dwindling end of the long twilit nights which seem to trail into evening like cloud drifting for the horizon – the endless days, blue and filled with pleasures – I have loved these nights. I have loved all these days. Now when the sun clouds over and the sky bleeds grey I start to panic, just a little, just skimming over it, dipping into it with one wing: is this it, then? is this the last of it? No more blue til May – or June? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies.

    The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the ground and one in the rippling cool water. My bookshelf glows in the lamplight and I feel unafraid of the cold.