One leg in Berlin

I saw the first Brussel sprouts of the season on sale at the market today – no coincidence there though, it’s freezing cold, damp and wintry.

But I have to say - coincidence, it’s a beautiful thing isn’t it?

It just goes on coinciding!

Let me explain.

A few days ago I decided to try and make of this month’s posts, a set inspired in some way by coincidence. At the same time I wanted to write on the 9th (tomorrow) about my personal experience of the opening of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

I didn’t know how it was all going to work out, an unclear idea about one and a vague desire for the other.

Then, coincidence stepped in and suddenly I had a little run of posts all vaguely linked to walls and Berlin, with a photo of a wall each time as a bonus.

So far so good, but how could I keep it going?

I slipped into a scandalously hot bath this morning with only one idea.

I had noticed that on the next page of the photo album - the source of the Stanley photo two days ago - there was this picture of Karl Heinz, a friend who lives in Berlin – and the photo has him sitting in front of a wall.

Ok it’s not The Berlin Wall, but it is a wall in Berlin. And what’s a wall here and there between friends?

Well actually a big deal if you live on either side of the same street!

Which happened sometimes with the wall – in fact – I think I have a postcard showing exactly that – let me look. Yep, here it is.


Anyway, just as Berlin would never be complete WITH a wall, it would never be complete WITHOUT Karl.

Karl, who has the biggest heart of anyone I have ever met – albeit one with an artificial heart valve, something he explained one night as he lay gasping for breath on the floor of his one room apartment.

That was a scary moment, made worse when he confessed that when it had been fitted he had been told it had a four-year life span and would then require another operation to replace.

That had been six years previously.

I first saw Karl sitting in a corner of a gymnasium in Kentish Town London but only spoke to him a year later in the corner of Copenhagen bar. In between he had had one of his legs surgically removed following an accident the year before in London.

I have always believed that the London Transport Public announcement – “Mind the Gap” is part of Karl’s legacy.

So basically Karl (who has been mentioned before in this blog) is a one legged, chain-smoking wonderful human being with an artificial heart valve.

I once asked him if he found it difficult living in a walled city and he replied –“No, I have everything I need (cigarettes, roast chicken, coffee).”

Yes, but what about travelling?

“I fly everywhere.”

Karl is a collector and an archivist, he specializes in the circus arts and more specifically juggling and he travels the world for this. No juggling convention (Kentish Town, Copenhagen), circus, cabaret, street show or TV documentary where something is happening is without Karl.

And he shares his knowledge and collection. Yes, he writes and publishes books and articles but if you are interested and you meet him, and you eventually will, he’ll invite you for a coffee and a visit.

My own invite came in the corner of the Copenhagen bar and a few months later I set off from England by road to visit.

I was ignorant (probably because I hadn’t paid attention at school or ever looked properly at a map) of the fact that Berlin was in the MIDDLE of East Germany and that I had to drive some distance through the East, and then pass through the wall to reach Karl.

At the time the East German Authorities stamped your entry papers and calculated the time necessary to reach the capital, no deviation from the motorway corridor was expected.

Eventually I arrived at Karl’s, found a road near his house that just stopped up against the wall - it was going nowhere - and I parked my van.

I stayed a week, watched every film and video that Karl had amassed from about 1920 to the present day, and ate a LOT of fried chicken and drank a tank of coffee.

Until I began to feel that I too needed a heart valve.

I don’t think I have ever really thanked him enough, and I hope if he ever reads this he will understand what his friendship has meant.

As I soaked softly away in the bath this morning I wondered, is there enough coincidence to justify this story? Stanley on one page of a photo album, Karl Heinz on the next?

And then I suddenly remembered that up the other end of the house are a pile of old diaries and there was surely one from 1989!

Splashing out of the bath I stumbled out into the wet leaves and added my own drips to the puddles that surround the house and set of to the other end – there is no internal connection.

My goal – to find out what I was doing on the 8th November 1989.

1989 was an exceptional year for many reasons, but one that has gone unnoticed until now was that it became my great year of left hand experimentation.

I had seen the film Rainman and had read accounts of so- called Idiot Savants and the way their brain works.

One account had particularly interested me as it described a scientist who had realised that there was a right brain/left brain aspect that may be possible for a non savant to learn. He had set out to learn mathematically the pattern of days of the weeks for any given date at any time in history.

For months it remained a conscious effort but one day he woke up and it had switched over to the other side of the brain (sorry I can never remember if its right or left) and had become something he could do without thinking.

I decided to try something similar and since I was writing a diary entry everyday I thought I should try and use my left hand for a whole year to see if I too could suddenly become natural at something that demanded conscious effort.

All this to say that my Diary of 1989 is pretty difficult to read, but with a little effort I was able to decipher this entry on November 8th.

“A day at Karl Heinz’s”

Now, there’s a coincidence!

.......one giant leap for Loui

It turns out that the downfall of the outdoor thermometer reported yesterday was no coincidence whatsoever but the dramatic representation of the climatic degradation being dumped on our heads -making us pay for a glorious October.

Yep, it’s raining………………………………………….and raining….and raining.

The ground is slowly filing up for the winter and already the fields around the house resemble a giant muddy sponge.

It’s chocolate and cinema time.

Or time to sit at home and think about coincidence – this month’s blog topic.

Coincidence. Think, think.

I decided this morning that coincidence has to have an element of the unexpected, something that is out of your control.

Charlotte, a 14-year-old French/Belgian female currently staying at our house and eating her way through our jar of Nutella is certainly out of my control.

The fact that she is staying is a surprise in itself, announced as it was at 17.30 yesterday evening as she got of the school bus.

However, she is more than welcome.

She was here in the house when Minnie was born, albeit inside her own mum’s tum and Minnie was at her house the day Charlotte popped into the world, and she lived with us in San Francisco for a whole summer.

Actually she didn’t pop into this world, she exploded - and since I had been instructed to catch the moment on camera……..

Well I’m still recovering.

Yesterday evening as we sat down to eat she went all philosophical on us and announced to my son – “In a year and three months you will be twenty.”

Her mum used to be a math’s teacher.

It was an alarming thought for Loui, and for myself though probably for different reasons and when I communicated the fact to Krissie who is sitting in Tim’s apartment in Cologne she too disappeared into pensive backwaters.

This morning I took Minnie to a piano lesson, leaving Charlotte with the jar of Nutella and Loui with his dreams and then drove down to town to buy the paper and check to see if we were financially viable for another week.

By chance I picked up the newest edition of the local cinema programme and as I waited in the pouring rain for my potential female Keith Jarret to emerge I started to see what was coming up this month.

There was something I might go to see, something I really DON”T want to see, something I should see but will depress me, something I have already seen and would hate to see again, something I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but which Minnie and Charlotte have already bought tickets, and then…………

I read the synopsis, and I translate –

“The Mayas, one of the most fascinating civilizations the world has ever seen, made a prophecy that the world would end soon. Since then astrologists have agreed, geophysists have decided it is dangerously possible and even government scientists have also arrived at this terrifying conclusion.”

The year, and name of the film?

2012.

My son will be 20 in one year and three months.

February 2012.

I hope for him the Mayas got it wrong.

A bit of a coincidence eh?

AND, i have an old picture of him leaning against the Berlin Wall which gives me a chance to post a third consecutive photo with a bit of wall on it!

And keep the Berlin connection rolling.

One small step for Stanley.....

I don’t know if this counts as a coincidence (the theme of this month’s posts) but when I finally ventured outside this morning - after two days of wind, rain and wintery autumn greyness – I discovered the thermometer lying on the floor looking battered.

Normally it hangs on the outside wall; today it lies upside down among the soggy leaves permanently recording an extremely optimistic 40 degrees Celsius.

Assuming however that this does not constitute a coincidence, purely a logical sequence to climatic events, I need to look elsewhere.

Vicky, who has been leaving comments on this blog and seems to see coincidences everywhere, informs me that November the 10th is the 138th anniversary of Stanley bumping into Livingstone somewhere in Africa, sometime ago.

(I must have miscounted, I could have sworn it was more like the 136th, but you know how time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.)

Furthermore, Vicky informs me that she saw her next-door neighbour recently and that his name is also Stanley.
Now THAT is a coincidence!

I met Stanley once, though obviously neither the African lost and found officer, nor Vicky’s neighbour, but Stanley Kewalsky ( I THINK that is how he spells his name…..well it’s how I spell his name).

And I have a photo of Stanley jumping over a barrier separating him from Freedom and the Berlin Wall - indirectly the subject of yesterday’s post!

Blimey, what a coincidence!

I’ll go and have a look to see if I can find it.

Wow, another coincidence – I thought it might be in one of the many photo albums straining the bookshelves and I was dreading that it might be in the bottomless box of photos currently residing underneath the bed that need to be stuck in those albums – but the first one I pick up and open (they are not labelled) and bingo there he is!

I’ll scan it now and add it to the blog.

Hang on.



There.

I think you’ll agree with me that Stanley is blessed with some very long legs and I am glad to report that he was not shot seconds after this snap was snapped.

Now wouldn’t it be a great coincidence if the photo had been taken on the 6th November?

Judging by Stanley’s attire it probably wasn’t.

I knew Stanley first as a technician who was working with Krissie but later I shared a stage with him when we both appeared in a production of Jack and the Beanstalk in an upstairs pub theatre in London.

I am afraid to report that it was not my best moment on stage, despite having the lead role (I was Jack, NOT the beanstalk-ok?) but I have a lovely memory of Stanley and I choreographing a song and dance routine to “The Twelve days of Christmas”.

And that’s a HUGE coincidence because the French (where I am writing from) traditionally eat Oysters at Christmas and Stanley Kewalski is an anagram of……….

Santa Likey Welks!

p.s. I hope to do better in future posts.

Un petit d'un petit

(You have to read the title quickly, with a cod-french accent.)

As you may or may not know, this 9th of November is the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall.

As you may or may not be interested to know, today is the second day of the ‘write a post linked to a coincidence’ challenge that I set myself yesterday.

No sooner had I set post to blog, so that all could see, than I started to realise how insanely difficult it was going to be – especially as on the 9th of November I want to be writing about the Berlin Wall.

Then I remembered that somewhere under the pile of flotsam and jetsam settling onto my desk there was a guide to what’s on in Toulouse - that I am sure, explained that this month a piece of the wall had been installed in the square in the centre of town.

So very early yesterday morning, as I was taking my son to the school bus I picked up my camera thinking that there might be time after work to nip in, get a picture and then at least Nov 9th would be sorted.

So at 6.30 am I set off through the rain and dark for Toulouse, an hour and sunrise distant.

I had to work in an office I had never been to before – something to do with the place where I work which is trying to expand activities on the other side of town and i had downloaded instructions from Google maps.

Because it was so early the normally artery hardening traffic jams on the ring road were still in a thousand unopened garages and driveways so I arrived with an hour to kill.

My head was full of the idea of finding the Berlin Wall in the centre of Toulouse later and my stomach was full of the idea of a coffee and croissant now but the area where this new office is, is devoid of café, shop or good Samaritan.

I decided to drive up to the end of the road, a dead end, park and read a few chapters from my new book whilst waiting for someone to open the front gates.

Guess what I found at the only place I could park?

Ok, not exactly the original but of all the things that could have been there, a broken bit of graffitied wall is a pretty big coincidence.

This old heart of mine

Wouldn’t it be a great coincidence if, after the day that I say I have no idea for the theme to the next month’s posts, I found one?

I spend a fair time driving around in a little Clio (no coincidence there) and I either listen to the CD player, the radio or I speak loudly to myself.

The car radio, inexplicably will pick up a British broadcast – Talk Sport – but only very, very early in the morning and after 7 in the evening…and never at all during the summer.

For a long time I believed that these were the normal hours of the programme but it seems that I am wrong and it enjoys a more or less constant air time.

I realised that it was something to do with my car and NOT the programme editors when I conducted experiments and discovered that turning the fog lights on greatly improved reception.

Yesterday as I reached the edge of the small un-forested area where I can discern the talk from the static I switched over to the French radio and stumbled immediately on a report about coffin manufacturers.

The programme featured the sounds of someone knocking on the coffin to illustrate the different tonalities available – something I had hitherto ignored as being important; I can’t imagine how I might use this feature when the time arrives to settle down..

When I got home I switched on the computer and - here is the coincidence – there was an article about “How we die” .

I thought…………that’s a coincidence, and then………..could I make every post in November be based on coincidence?

Then……..probably not.

Then……let’s try!

Anyhow it turns out that my chances of dying from illicit drug use are insignificant and so the pile of mushrooms that I gathered believing that they may be magic could be safe to consume.

On the other hand my chances of dying from heart problems are huge.

And since my dad went like that there’s a coincidence I would prefer to avoid.

I wonder though, does “heart stopping” account for a percentage of the “death from heart problems” statistics?

Seahorses do what?

I was a bit worried this morning when I looked at the Guardian web page; there in small letters was the headline “Brown to tackle chaotic families”.

Mr Brown you may or may not know is the prime-minister-soon-to-be-replaced of Britain and since the French won’t allow me to vote in their presidential elections it is he who represents me.

And boy is my family chaotic.

Only this morning Krissie was threatening to throw away a laundry basket full of odd socks unless someone claimed them and the thought that Gordon would walk in and sort the whole thing out was kind of comforting.

Then I realised that the verb “tackle” has a more sinister meaning and maybe having the man in our house sorting out our laundry problems is not a good idea after all.
And chaotic is probably not what they really mean, otherwise most of the people I know would surely qualify.

In fact can a family, by its nature be anything other than chaotic?

Further investigation of the newspaper throws up some other interesting facts – the sex life of seahorses for example.
Apparently the female stretches and the male finds that irresistible and boof! He’s pregnant.

I feel slightly reassured to learn that I’m not the only species that is attracted by the stretching female form.

There is a lot of other intriguing stuff on the front page – like; “how to dress like a militant homosexual” (advice that might have come in useful the other day) and a “guide to guerrilla knitting” a sort of woolly graffiti.

But nothing, absolutely nothing about my own achievement over the last month (October) to try and eradicate two words from my writing style.

How a national newspaper can ignore such a social experiment at the expense of fornicating seahorses is beyond me.

So I am forced to report it.

The results of the experiment are in, here is the proof and then the analysis.
Well I’m really disappointed that 15 “time”s slipped in, despite my editing. Obviously my editing skills are less than I thought.

But I’m very excited that “one” faded into unimportance and that “two” is dominant.
On the whole I would say that two is better than one.

Especially with socks.

What else?

Well, in September I received (my own included) 100 comments, in October – the experimental period – only 51. Obviously a direct result of hampering my normal style.

So experiment is over.

September brought this blog the sensational improvisation challenge, October the word experiment , and I have a special idea for December.

Unfortunately, in November all you have to look forward to is a lot of this –

TIME passes slowly here in the mountains
I walk beside bridges, walk beside fountains
Watch the wild fishes, that float in the stream
TIME passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream……

…TIME and Tide wait for no man…..

TIME is the simplest thing

Do you remember when we first met, I sure do it was some TIME in early September?

What’s the TIME Mr Wolf?

And…..

ONE ONE was a racehorse
ONE two was ONE two
ONE ONE won ONE race
ONE two won ONE too.

The Day of the Dead

Although it is true that some of the people who live around here don’t need to dress up to look like witches or hobgoblins, The French are not over indulgent when it comes to Halloween.

The main reason for this is that they celebrate today; the first of November by buying big bunches of Chrysanthemums and visiting their relatives in the cemetery.

Try and find a pumpkin big enough to carve a face into on October 30th and you will have a challenge, try and NOT buy a bunch of Chrysanthemums and you will fail.

I made the mistake when I first came to France; I saw all these beautiful flowers at the tail end of an Indian summer and bought some for the terrace.

Faux-pas!

And the French will tell you if you do something wrong, unless it’s grammatical in which case they are annoyingly silent.

Like the witch I bumped into at the market today. I foolishly thought that the crate of tasty apples on the fruit sellers stall were for sale and I started to finger them lovingly, even moving one or two towards my wicker weighing-basket.

She ejected a loud “Non” and proceeded to tell me how impolite the English are.

I told her how racist she is.

Talking of racists I notice that the appeal for blood donors is back in the local town and I am thinking of trying again, just to annoy them. This time I’ll say no when we get to the part about “did you drink any milk”, and add “I ate some chocolate” to see if they claim that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is carried by chocolate.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.

When I was in Honk Kong, lucky enough to be performing with my partner Alex – who finally gets his first mention in this blog – at the Fringe Festival, we needed something to give as a present/reward to a child that would be involved in a moment of onstage public participation.

We wandered off to the local supermarket and were overjoyed to find what looked to us like toy money.

We bought stacks of the stuff.

And we gave it to him, on stage, in front of a packed Chinese audience.

Faux pas!

Money for the dead apparently.

In Mexico today is known as “The Day of the Dead” and I suppose that is how the French see it too.

In the village there will be constant trickle of visits up to the hill where the cemetery lies.

A few years back an American who lived here with his French wife tried to single handily inject the spirit of Halloween into the village. It must have been about 1995.

He converted the cellar of one of the old buildings on the village street into a crypt, set himself up inside looking like something from the-living-dead-creature-from-the-swamp-you-don’t-want-to go-anywhere-near-this and placed a big pile of sweets in striking distance of his bloody and gangrenous right arm.

No one dared go any nearer than the door.

Except Antoine, a remarkable youth known for his advanced reading of political and philosophical tracts, who cleaned up and had a monopoly on all things sugar in the village for the next 12 months.

For a couple of years after the local shopping centres tried to start a campaign of orange and black merchandising but I think it was seen by their clients as messing with tradition.

Faux pas!

So France has returned to Chrysanthemums.