Five Things

I may have done this meme before in a parallel universe, but my new friend Pete, who blogs at Couch Trip, tagged me and since he lives in my favourite city in the world (see his blog header for a gorgeous photograph), I am succumbing. Feel free to avert your eyes if you think you may have seen all this before …

Five Habits Meme

What was I doing 10 years ago?

I had a career! But it was boring. I was a manager! But only a product manager. I flew business class! But had to give up my airmiles to the company. Friends of mine were having babies! But I wasn’t ready yet. I pursued my career some more! But I went off the pill, just in case. Then my life changed forever!

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world:

1. Chocolate

2. Chocolate-covered nuts

3. Bread and butter

4. Pizza

5. Cheesecake

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

All of the above, but rationed. Also:

Nuts

Apples

Rice-cakes (chilli flavour)

Blueberries

Chai tea lattes

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Buy my mother her dream retirement home.

2. Fund AIDS orphans on a grand scale.

3. Build an eco-friendly, sustainable house.

4. Take my family on an awesome holiday.

5. Replace the little sports-car my husband had to sell when he married me - I know how much it hurt him to do so.

Five jobs I have had:

1. Voter registration for the PFP

2. Totally useless waitress

3. Selling dolls that wet themselves

4. Rookie crime journalist

5. Fundraiser

Five habits:

1. Making time to write

2. Making time to exercise

3. Kissing my children

4. Looking at my husband and thinking, “How lucky am I?”

5. Planning real and fantasy holidays

Five places I have lived:

1. Observatory, Cape Town

2. Parktown, Johannesburg

3. St Margarets, London

4. Schwetzingen, Germany

5. Atlanta, Georgia

Five people I’d like to get to know better:

Diane of Martinis for Two (soon to meet in RL), G of BigAppleToBigBear (just met in RL), Tanya of Just Me (know in RL, but interested in her answers), Angela of An Observer Abroad (know in RL and whose blog is yet to be sullied by a meme), and Sandy of Off the Beaten Track (go forth and read her fabulous travel blog - it is the stuff of my dreams).

Things To Do Instead of Writing

You can spend time with friends, with old friends, who because you haven’t seen them for so long, seem like new friends, and with new friends, who because you feel so strangely at one with them, seem like old friends. You can drink wine with them in the afternoon, share your kids with them, wander new streets with them, and make extravagant promises to babysit their kids, once they have some.

You can spend an entire afternoon in Berlin looking for the perfect dress. You can look for something whimsical and floaty, with tea roses and cleavage, that looks like Jane Austen wore it to a party where there was croquet and Indian tea, but finally buy a twenty-first century dress, a little edgy, a little sharp, but with its curves in the right places. Also with cleavage.

You can drive long distances, to places you never dreamt of visiting, take trains where your children press their noses against the windows, ride bikes around the city of your dreams, bump into pedestrians and mutter sorry in two languages. You can float down a river, or down a leafy path in the Tiergarten and hear the white wolves howl at the daylight in the Zoo.

You can read A Quiet Flame and imagine the encroaching horror of Nazism in Thirties’ Berlin, and then read No one belongs here more than you and be swept away into an imagination and a sensibility that leaves you shell-shocked, war-wounded, but glad to be alive.

You can eat the best ice-cream outside of Elba in a glass palace of shops and elegance, merguez sausages and couscous in a leafy beer-garden, white asparagus with hollandaise sauce in an achingly hip urban square and the best rhubarb cake you can imagine in the courtyard of an Italian restaurant where you are introduced to the chef and the hostess by name.

You can climb with your children to the top of the Siegesauele, admire them hanging upside down and learning to swing and slide by themselves in playgrounds, watch them falling in love with your friends and weeping when they part, and see them take part in their lives with such spirit and joy that you want to shed tears of your own.

Instead of weeping, you shout, “Who loves Berlin?” and hear them yelling back, “Me Mummy! I love Berlin! I love it! I do!”

Auf Wiedersehen, Pets

Today I spent at the pool vigilantly watching my threesome, who range from swimmer to paddler to fully paid-up water wings user. Tomorrow I take them to Alsace Lorraine to visit friends who, for their sins, are spending the Whitsun holidays in a camper van in a village that my friend described as “one house” (thank God for satnav). Thursday, we leave for Berlin.

With sunshine and holidays abounding, I bid you a brief Auf Wiedersehen. I am taking a blogging and Internet break for a couple of weeks. I plan to spend the hours that I’m not soaking up the wonders of Berlin and Lübeck working on my novel, which I have been neglecting since the sun arrived in Germany a couple of weeks ago. During my last two runs (six kilometres!), I crystallized the action of Chapter Six in my head and now have to get it all down before it vapourises.

I also plan to look for the ultimate summer dress. If I can’t find it in Berlin, then I can’t find it anywhere!

See you at the end of the holidays. May the sun shine on you wherever you are. Tschüss!

Skiing By Numbers

25 - Blue runs skiied

24 - Public usages of bad language

23 - Age of my skiing instructor

21 - Age of the other person on my ski course

18 - Age difference between her and me

17 - Times I kept the youngsters waiting

15 - Minutes Daisy waited at the bottom of the slope on the day we “skiied down the mountain together”

10 - Red runs skiied

8 - Humiliating fear-related tumbles

7 - Times my children flew over my head in a lift screaming “Look, everyone, there’s our Mummy!” as I tried to lever myself out of the snow on the edge of a cliff

5 - Hot chocolates consumed on slopes

4 - Times I nearly fell off the lift

6 - Days in which I skiied

6 - Nights in which I went to bed early

1 - Night in which I partied

4 - Glasses of red wine I drank that night

6 - Jaegermeisters I drank that night

3 - Songs I sang loudly into the microphone - with dancing - for the listening pleasure of my audience (Sweet Caroline, Mustang Sally and can’t remember the other one)

1 - Time I cried at breakfast

1 - Wonderful new friend made on skiing holiday

1 - Full-body massage enjoyed

1 - Cheese fondue relished

1 - Black run skiied

0 - Disfiguring accidents

Clearly I have this skiing lark taped.

Feeling a Bit Piste

I’m off skiing on Saturday. Not my greatest talent, skiing. However, having stunned both Austria and Italy in years previous with my abilities on the piste, I have decided to share the love with the inhabitants of Switzerland. The good burghers are already preparing the essential cheese fondues and hot chocolates that are necessary to keep a skier of my remarkable and note-worthy skills upright on the piste. In other words, reward! The only reason I ski is so that I can enjoy numerous, sumptuous, guilt-free hot chocolates afterwards. Oh, and to keep an eye on my children whose skills are far superior to mine. Not only do they gloat over their pristine German, but they gloat over their pristine parallel turns while laughing mockingly at my inelegant snow-plough and tendency to spend a lot of time sitting down.

Little buggers. They are so lucky to be learning to ski as kids, while I have to do the same as a not particularly fit nor agile adult who grew up having beach holidays. In Africa, there was not a lot of snow happening. Give me a beach and I fit in nicely: I do the book, sunglasses and towel thing spectacularly well. I even get in the sea and shriek, and have been known to toss a frisbee. But snow is foreign matter, and strapping myself to some planks in order to get down a mountain at high speed with only my muscles between me and disfiguring accidents, even more so.

As a last-ditch attempt to prepare myself, I joined a gym a week ago, and have been there every day, trying to build leg and stomach muscles. I have generated a lot of sweat, but can’t see any new muscles. It may have been too late, but I am hoping they are there, subtly lying in wait under my skin ready to transport me towards the next hot chocolate.

As another form of comfort, I am taking a large pile of books, including Jane Smiley’s wondrous A Thousand Acres, which I have just started and am loving. I will be leaving my laptop behind, but taking my notebook and pens in order to work on Chapter Three of my novel, which is 22,000 words long and showing no sign of stopping. I have started dreaming about one of my characters, which is convenient since the next chapter is about him. In the last dream, he was baton-twirling in a newly-threshed field of corn, which is not entirely relevant to the action, but never mind.

So wish me luck, dear blogging friends. I hope to return intact, having mastered the parallel turn and rewarded myself accordingly. Also if I could be spared jeers and mocking laughter, that would be good too.

National Unity, Pyjamas and Berlin

Today is Germany’s day of national unity - the day when East and West Germany became one. In this house it is also known as the day Mummy Stays In Her Pyjamas All Day If She So Chooses. And she does choose. (By gumminy, she does.) Having just visited Germany’s monument to national unity - the wondrous Berlin - I should probably talk about my trip last week. I’ve been a bit slow about writing about it, because I’m still holding it close to my heart. I’m not sure if I want to let the secrets out or not.

So when two youngish mothers of a total of seven children hit the techno capital of the world, do they go clubbing? Do they stay out all night, drinking ridiculous cocktails and chatting up younger men? Do they totter about in high heels, whooping and kicking over dustbins?

Umm.

No.

We didn’t.*

What they do is that they carefully and responsibly See Everything. They start by seeing the Berlin State Ballet perform Alice’s Wonderland. With the artful use of matchsticks, they manage to stay awake (having just arrived in Berlin after a six-hour drive from Frankfurt) to appreciate the exquisite choreography, staging and dancing. They leave, stunned by all this superlativeness and by the enthusiastic ovation that Berliners like to give their very own ballet, and eat fresh tomato soup at an outdoor restaurant in the Gendarmenmarkt for their supper, accompanied - for one, at least - by Germanically generous glasses of white wine.

Then they leap out of bed, refreshed, drive enthusiastically to Potsdam, and park at the Schloss San Souci (which their guidebook says is the number one sight in Berlin). They repair immediately to a restaurant and partake of one of those large and languid Sunday brunches which is the number one activity in Berlin. They watch the autumn leaves fall. Then they walk around the Schlosspark, enjoying the sunshine and taking photographs, followed by an impromptu skating session in a pair of enormous pantoffel inside the Schloss itself (they avoid the tour, preferring the whistlestop self-guided version in which you can skate really fast on the polished marble and wood floors).

Would we allow our children to do this?

Hell no!

It’s far too much fun.

Then they whizz back to Berlin Mitte for a show at the Friedrichstadtpalast. Slightly disturbed by the amount of pensioners in the audience and the young man next to them with his trousers up under his armpits, who hums loudly throughout the show, they enjoy a spectacle of dance and acrobatics. There are some scary bits - all of the singing

Ho hum. Could you get on with it please?

and a truly terrifying slippery wet suspended fishbowl affair high up above where two fish

Can we call them dancers?

people try alternatively to drown each other or throw each other out of the fishbowl to plunge down down for many metres in a horrible rictus of what the director must have imagined to be erotic but which was really just a live horror show. They watch this through their fingers, sigh with relief when it is over and stop for grilled tuna on the way home at The Hotel That Has The Worst Service In The World But Which Is On The River Spree, So Must Be Good. They have an early night, tucked up by - oh - 9pm in comfy beds with books.

This big sleep is important because Monday is a big day. Monday is the Day of the Bike Tour of Berlin. One of them is an experienced cyclist, having done four-day mountain bike tours, who likes to spend her spare time careering down mountainsides at high speed. The other is not. She can count the amount of times she has ridden her bike as an adult on her fingers.

That’s not a lot, folks.

The bike tour is fabulous. They see everything. They have their photo taken at (what remains of) the Berlin Wall. They see Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the parking lot under which Hitler’s bunker may or may not be, the Tiergarten, all the government buildings on the river, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Brandenburger Tor. They also enjoy an exciting cycle in the bus lane of Berlin and a very rewarding visit to a Biergarten for a late lunch and a large beer. Their tour guide, Ingo, is beyond cute and both cyclists, experienced and not, keep snuggled up close to him in the pelaton, kicking aside any stray New Yorkers or Oregonians who to try to muscle in.

After being returned to the Fat Tire Bike Tour offices at Alexanderplatz

If you go to Berlin, this is the best way to see the city.

It was fabulous.

And the guides are hot fit.

Whatever. You know what I mean.

they consider rest. After six hours of cycling round the city, would two mothers of a combination of seven children head back to their chic Berlin Mitte apartment for a small nap before finding a bijou restaurant for a relaxed dinner?

Actually.

No.

It becomes essential to go to the Haekesche Hoefe for some late-afternoon shopping in the beautiful Art Deco courtyards. Some coffee and cake become of the essence. Some more walking. It becomes night. Still the shops are open. They are shopped. It is dark, and the intrepid mothers decide it’s nonsense to go home when they can go and stand in a queue at the Reichstag for an hour, allow German security officials to accuse them of carrying a sparkly fairy ornament in one of their shopping bags

It was true.

We couldn’t deny it.

and then go up many many storeys in a lift to admire the view from the top of the building. However, they discover too late that they both have late-onset vertigo and an identical urge to crawl the walkway that hugs the glass dome, so they jog down very very fast back to terra firma.

Tuesday is designated shopping day. They head for the Kaufhaus des Westerns (KaDeWe), the Harrods of Berlin, and walk around in a daze for a few hours, testing the loos and fingering very expensive articles of clothing. Then they begin to stroll up the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s famous shopping street, but quickly become exhausted by all the

a. shops

b. tourists

c. beggars

so are forced to repair to a lovely little sidestreet where an Italian restaurant offers to feed them delicious pasta (salmon and pine-nut with a lobster sauce, and rocket and feta) and shelter them from the rain that has so irritatingly decided to pour down. They then retrieve the car from the Hotel That Serves the Worst Tea in the World

A huge, hairy testicle of a tea bag that has clearly been used umpty times before.

to do some driving around the city Because That is Fun. First driving stop is Schloss Charlottenburg. Next driving stop is the chic apartment in Berlin Mitte because they are tired and needing to nap. Later, after the nap

It was good.

So …

… nappy.

they walk around aimlessly, finally landing at the sushi bar under the Sony Centre on Potsdamer Platz for a €12 plate of sushi that they can’t finish it is so huge and delicious beers. They walk home, veering briefly into a lamp-post restaurant to acquire ice-creams.

Next day is Dresden day. This is very exciting because it means Driving Again. It is also very sad because it means Farewell to Berlin. However, they are grown women

really?

and manage to leave Berlin without a tear. Dresden is very beautiful. It is filled with buildings. It also has a river. Most importantly, it has a fabulously luxurious HOTEL where they check in, spend the afternoon sleeping, reading, bathing, lounging around in bathrobes, preening, toenail-clipping, dressing, going to the restaurant, enjoying fine dining and excellent wines and going to sleep again. The next morning they glance once more at the beautiful buildings of Dresden

They are so beautiful.

Aren’t they just?

and drive up the river, passing all the glamorous Communist villas where happy Communists once came to play landlords, to Schloss Pelnitz for a little stomp around the beautiful gardens, sadly muddying the boots that had been polished overnight by the little HOTEL elves. They shop idly for the last perfect present for lucky husbands and children and mothers, and then depart from formerly East Germany back to the West, which, strangely, looks very much like the East except that it has more hills.

It rained.

And the journey took eight hours.

But it was worth it.

* Any irritating tics and verbal asides that may appear in this post are attributable to the fact that I am reading Darkmans by Nicola Barker at the moment.

I am.

And it’s catching.

Really, really catching.

So, I’m sorry. But I can’t help it.

The Mouse That Roared

When Lily was born, seven and a half years ago, she was a tiny little scrap of a person. Less than three kilograms, she struggled to learn how to latch, had furious colic and could only sleep with her nose pressed against my side. Since she was so small, white and squeaky, we started calling her Lily Mouse. That name has stuck, even though she is now tall, leggy and brown.

The name Mouse, while affectionate and sweet, doesn’t actually fit her well. She is a quiet and calm person, but is by no means timid. Her sense of self is strong and over the years, she has shown herself to be very brave. At three, we thrust her into German Kindergarten, having told her that we speak English at home (”inside”) and that out in the world (”outside”) all she would hear was German. She came back from her first day in an all-German environment and told my mother on the phone that she was “a bit disappointed because they were all Derman inside”. That let-down apart, she went back the next day with a smile on her face and was speaking Derman within six weeks. She has also acquitted herself brilliantly in her first year at Big School, getting a great report, and reading and writing Derman far better than most of her Derman classmates. She taught herself to read in English in May, and is already reading her third Harry Potter.

Lily is cerebral and artistic, but this summer has shown that she also has amazing physical courage. During one visit to a theme park, she went on scary rides - rollercoasters and demon drops - that are far too terrifying for me. She swam in the deep end of the pool at our Italian campsite without anyone watching. And then this week at our local pool, and with the encouragement of some big friends visiting from Dubai, she jumped off the small diving-board into the pool. Not content with that, she went and jumped off the medium diving-board. And then, summoning every ounce of courage in her seven-year-old body, chest heaving with adrenaline and fists clenched, she joined the teenagers and leapt off the high board. And then she did that ten more times.

We can’t call her Lily Mouse anymore. I think she’s a tiger. Tiger Lily.

Lucca Revisited

I may be infatuated with Berlin, but I am in love with Lucca. Berlin is for now, for being young and cutting-edge as I am, but I reserve Lucca for my retirement - a place to dream away the hours, watch the world go by and sip upon magnificent cappucinos. The first time I went to Lucca, I had been married for a mere three years, was not yet in my thirties, had a salary and was able to enjoy its many pleasures on a sophisticated and grown-up level. I fell in love with its red-roofed handsomeness,

its alleyways,

and its soaring towers,

where trees grow.

I enjoyed long, drawn-out, rather drunken lunches with my love (I could mention that my mother and my aunt were also there, but I won’t since that removes the romantic sheen of my story), naps on the wide and grassy city walls, strolls hand-in-hand through the alleyways, shopping in the delightful boutiques and coffee in the magnificent amphitheatre, where I bought a beautiful hat which I immediately put on. We climbed the Tower Guinigi with its roof of oak trees. Lucca was glamorous, relaxed, gorgeous. I felt the same way.

Last week, ten years on from my first visit to Lucca, I went back. Things have changed in ten years. I am still married but now we have three children. Children, however sweet, do not make for long, drawn-out drunken lunches. They do not make for romantic strolls and watching the world go by, nor do they make for public naps. I did not wear a glamorous hat, but a backpack containing nappies and a sippy cup. We went to the amphitheatre but our priority was finding a drink and the loo. We looked at the boutiques from the outside but did not go in since one of our children has it as her life’s purpose to separate us from our money in exchange for tat. We climbed the tower but my vertigo nearly prevented me from making it to the top. We held their hands, and not each other’s.

However, Lucca still held its magic over us. In the amphitheatre we enjoyed an icy granita while watching a ballerina dance and a boy play the violin. We viewed the town together from the top of the Tower Guinigi. We walked the city walls instead of napping there. We glimpsed the lovely restaurant Al’ Olivo where we had had our wonderful lunch. We photographed each other, wearing very big smiles,

and then we went back to Parc Albatros on the San Vincenzo road to prepare for bopping to Italian pop music at the nightly Baby Disco. Because when you have children, that’s what you do.

Lucca promised that she would wait for me.

Italy Unplugged

(Written sometime in August …)

I’m writing this post on paper with the plan to transcribe it when I get home in - oh - a few days’ time. I’m not missing my computer or being permanently plugged in to the information tsunami, but I do miss the regular writing.

We are staying in a lovely campsite on the Italian coast, above Rome and below Pisa. The weather is mild - warm enough for beach and pool but not hot enough to require the air conditioning in our mobile home. It’s dry and dusty here - testament to the heatwave we have missed - but the campsite is situated in a lovely forest of parasol pines with tall trunks and gracious canopies that provide shade.

One of the many joys of being in Italy is the food. Why does everything taste better here? A salad of beautiful Tuscan tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella anointed in olive oil tastes like heaven, whereas in Germany it tastes like it’s trying too hard. We’ve enjoyed fine slices of Parma ham, chilled sweet melon, olives with a bite of chilli, olive paste on grissini, baby yellow tomatoes, succulent grapes the size of plums, spicy Tuscan sausages, calamari and daily doses of creamy icecream. Make mine a pistachio.

This part of Italy - Livorno - is supposed to be one of the centres of the Slow Food movement. I don’t have Google so I can’t check that for you, but it certainly feels that way. Aptly enough, while enjoying very slow food, I am also reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a wonderful book detailing her family’s attempt to spend a year eating both seasonally and locally. She defines local as within a 70 mile radius, but in the end the family grow and harvest most of their own food - even chickens and turkeys.

In the West, we have grown so distant from the source of our food, that just to witness Kingsolver’s attempt feels like watching a miracle. Not that I imagine for a second that I could “harvest” my own chicken or remember to water the vegetables that would feed my family for a year, but the work they do in conscious eating is inspiring.

Kingsolver is knowledgeable about the state of the protein production line and it does not make for easy reading, but it does make me want to never buy any factory farmed meat again. She is voiciferous on how farming corporations have undermined American farmers, forcing them to grow single crops in order to stay solvent. She decries non-seasonal eating, saying that food flown from China or other far-off lands merely to satisfy appetites costs not only the environment in terms of fossil fuels but also our bodies, because by the time it reaches our plates it is no longer nutrient-dense. She talks openly about how obesity is a function of capitalism:

No cashier ever held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have an inbuilt weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them.

She makes an interesting point about the gap left in kitchens when women went out to work, and how corporations happily filled that gap with non-nutritious, calorific ready-meals. These full-time jobs that women now gladly have are:

… organized around the presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack - filling the gap between school and workday’s end, doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home - but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance … Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health.

Kingsolver says cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. But the pressure to find the time to select (or as she does, grow) ingredients, plan a meal, cook it with joy and not under stress, and then eat it in a civilised and peaceable way with your family is great. I feel that pressure on a daily basis, and I do malign myself when I slap down another meal of fish fingers and peas in front of my sweetly uncomplaining children. However, what her book is doing for me is making me feel more committed to making better food choices for my family when I get home and continuing the journey of more conscious eating. I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in doing either or both, or who would like to witness one family’s bold attempt to go against the grain. There are also some great recipes, which I am going to try out. I may not actually make my own cheese, though.

Now where’s the buffalo mozzarella? I’m feeling peckish.

In Case You Miss Meez

It’s holiday time here at Charlotte’s Web and I’m taking a two week blogging break. I’m going to be completely offline and I’m looking forward to burying myself in books, musing over my novel and drinking really large glasses of wine.

Here in case you’re going to miss me, is my Meez (like totally copied from Litlove and Ms Tea):

Or, in case you find her irritating, here’s the real Meez, waving at you from behind one of those really big wine-glasses:

Ciao!