You are witty and pretty

Here we go again (speak for yourself, girl!)

2012-02-24T13:48:00.000+01:00

Spring is in the air, definitely - and Yours Truly starts to become restless. Looks out for a new blog (homemade, of course) as others look for a new wardrobe. (Well, she's doing that too - I'm fed up with articles about The Savvy Life, How to Throw out and Streamline your Clothes, etc)
But technology keeps me at bay. Even when I deleted one blog I was not allowed to create a new one - maybe the Google-Watchdog has fallen asleep over my third post about Ol' Frederick... or maybe it is just his springtime lethargy hindering him to read anything "witty" anymore.
Anyway - I skip the idea of a new blog and look at what I have. (A very good idea in Life as such!)
"Gardening in High Heels" slumbers peacefully - it became a victim of my Prussian honesty. I have to face it: my grand beautiful garden no longer exists (for me) - that's why I had the idea to write a blog called "Balcony-Gardening in Kitten Heels". (Sometimes Life reduces me to normal height).
I pondered, vexed. I was upset. No other blog? No new clothes?
But then: I am versatile. One of my best character traits - as I see it - is being able to adjust. Sometimes it takes a little longer - when the grief about a loss is very deep - but even then: Spring will come.
So I use what I have: 'Gardening in High Heels' will take my new kitten heels on board and must accept gardening on a balcony; and on "You are Witty and Pretty" you'll find a new section - to be recognized by the picture above with the happy drawing of Janosch. That signals: just plain Everyday-Life as seen by Yours Truly - not especially witty, not especially pretty, (mind: I'm speaking of the post!) but hopefully as fresh as a daisy.

Ishimoto Yasuhiro: Katsura

2012-02-22T21:55:00.000+01:00

"Dear Corbu, everything we've been fighting for has parallels in ancient Japan culture. The Japanese house is the best and most modern I know and it is truly prefabricated."
Walter Gropius, who visited Japan in 1954, wrote these enthusiastic words to his friend Le Corbusier. As a founder of the Bauhaus School (along with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) he aimed at "standardisation, prefabrication and simplicity" - and was surprised to find all these principles in Japan.
In 1960 a stunning square book, "Katsura. Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture" was published, with essays by Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange and 140 photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, the book coverered in blue silk with a white circle in the middle, intended as a reference to the Japanese flag.
Now the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin shows an exhibition of 50 photographs of Katsura by Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Everything I quote here I learned from this exhibition.
Yasuhiro was born in 1921 in San Francisco and spent his adolescent years in Japan, then returned 1939 to Chicago to study architecture.
Two times he took photographs from the Villa Katsura, a building that Prince Toshihito had started around 1620 at the Katsura River west of Tokyo, on a ground with a particularly good view of the moon.
In 1883 the villa became the property of the Emperor, and was restored in the 1980s. Its gardens extend over 50000 square metres.
The black and white photographs of 1960 are very impressive, almost as if nobody ever lived in the buildings, the three dimensions of a room are reduced to flat patterns. In 1983 Ishimoto Yasuhiro published coloured photos of Katsura with "all of the elements which had been omitted from the extremely purified photography of the 1960 volume" (Kuraishi Shino).
Ishimoto Yasuhiro himself asks:
"I suddenly began to realize that what I had previously sought as beauty was in fact nothing more than a reductive beauty. I sought the extreme where all surplus was completely avoided, and yet the extremely correct form that resulted - wasn't it a completely narrow amount that did not allow any additional baggage?"
A very interesting question. Photography is always a subjective way to see the world, it is an art - you think about your composition, you omit, you choose a special detail, a segment or angle -
in short: you create.
The great photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro died on 6th February 2012.

You're Only Young Twice

2012-02-12T17:27:00.000+01:00

Whenever you get the February-Blues, or start whining about getting older: have a look at this funny little book!!
I adore Quentin Blake - (especially "The Hermit and the Bear", written by John Yeoman).

Look at this:

and then do it yourself:

Feel good again?

That's good!

Frederick the Great and Bill Clinton

2012-02-09T15:57:00.002+01:00

Harry S.Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

Or, if youprefer a more ancient version: Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Victoria, MahatmaGandhi.

What do allthese have in common and share it with Fredrick the Great? Besides beingstatesmen?

I am quiteproud that I found that link all alone, when I looked at a wood engraving ofAdolph Menzel (who in 1840 illustrated the “History of Frederick the Great”written by the historian Franz Kugler with about 400 wood engravings).

What doyou see?

That therelationship between father and toddler son seems to be quite OK at that time –spending ‘quality time’ together?

Well, thatwas not what I meant. Please look at the picture very closely.

Yes: LittleFreddy stretches out his left hand to get the ball.

Right awayI pounded my search into the internet (http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/forms/hand.html) – and it is true. Frederick the Great was aleft-hander. The statesmen mentioned above were it too. As Queen Victoria.

Now thereis a lot written about left-handers. Smart things and absolutely balmy things.

I didn’t enrolour child for the Waldorf Kindergarten when by absolving the required ‘Mother-preparing-courses’(fathers don’t need courses) and by reading Steiner I found out that eventoday they 're-educate' left-handers to write with the right hand (“If the child loves his mother”, theytold me, “it will do that lovingly”),but, even more bizarre, they see left-handedness as a karmic punishment: “One is re-born as a left-hander because onehas lived a debauched, voluptuous life in former life.”

Oh!

They saidthat to me literally in the Hildesheimer Waldorf-Kindergarten – it is possible thatother Waldorf institutions have a more liberal concept, but even now anAustrian left-hander adviser writes:

“Especially cautious parents should be whowant that their child should visit a Waldorf school. Left-handedness was seenin original Waldorf pedagogy still as a karmic problem (…) (www.kindaktuell.at)

My fatherwas a left-hander, whom they „re-educated“. I am ambidextrous (very convenient –though I am very sorry to say I cannot remember my former life). And our son isa pure left-hander – never having any problem whatsoever with that.

I don’tknow what it meant for Frederick II.

I hope at court theyknew this quote by John Donne (1572 – 1631):

„Reason is our soul’s left hand, Faith herright.“

Both are important.

A Beggar's Bowl

2012-02-02T08:08:00.000+01:00

Berlin is a big, big fridge: Siberian temperatures,minus 17°C at night and icy east wind.

But Yours Truly stepped outside (well: mypedometer forced me). My aim was the Castle CharlottenburgerSchloss, to look at a special painting of Freddy’s father (The Horrible).

Well – I abandoned the plan, though I could already seethe castle at the end of a long, long alley. But the frost was biting into mynose and fingers, and a stilled thirstfor knowledge is not worth a ruined complexion. Down these mean streets a manmust go, but as a woman I sneaked into a little backstreet, where I had oncepassed the shop window of a goldsmith.

And there I found it: my Beggar’s Bowl.

“There’s nothinglike going out in style”, my late father sometimes remarked ironically whenhe thought I overdid something. So: I do know that this is a very posh Beggar’sBowl.

But the intention why I bought it is pure.

First: it shall remind me that a day gives us so manypresents – and I want to have and keep a grateful heart. It is so easy to overlook allthe goodness a day puts into our bowl. I had a warm bed tonight. I had awonderful breakfast this morning (really strong hot tea, an egg, porridge withreal blueberries, half a grapefruit) – shelter and food, I am thankful forthat.

And the bowl shall remind me of something else:

As I told you before, I am a person with a very vividimagination. I read the complete “Pamela”(in English) with 15. I read Colette – my absolute favourite (my parents forbidme to read it – too young, they said – an excellent way to create an ardentreader).

Result: I am great in picturing to myself how anexperience will be in future.

And this is not a clever way to live.

The bowl shall remind me:

Life/the Tao/God is putting the events and surprisesinto my bowl – and I shall take them as they come. Without rating “This is good” and “This is bad”.

Difficult for me. Very. But I try. And learn. Sometimes.

(Now comes a bit of stream of consciousness for you. “The bowl is beautiful – but these aredefinitely not my colours. I love pink, I have a problem with orange and limegreen”, I thought. My Inner Voice talked back: “But it is beautiful! If you always walk on ways you always walk – that willbecome boring!”)

The Goldsmith wrapped it up. In (beautiful) orangecrepe paper. (“But I..” Oh, shut up!”said my Inner Voice). And just as if to mock at me the goldsmith put a pinkribbon around it. (“Pink and Orange don’tharmon…” SHUT UP!”)

I gave in to my Better Self (and even put that presenton a lime green bench to take a photograph of it, I told you I exaggeratesometimes)

“Have youalready seen the Lietzensee?” asked the goldsmith. “No.” “If you go to the left on your way back to the underground, you’llpass it by: a little park with a pond – and a beautiful atmosphere.”

“That’s good”,I thought. (I know!)

And went.

And it was a marvellous surprise!

A present in my bowl.

Frederick II: Malaria in Prussia?? Are you kidding?

2012-01-27T13:31:00.002+01:00

One candiscover so much about Fred browsing a bit here and scrolling a bit there!

„As a 15-year-old he suffered from jaundice,with 28 he picked up a persisting form of malaria, which plagued him later againand again with attacks of fever, cold shivers and fits of dizziness“, writesTilmann Bendikowski in his essay „The Eternal King“.

I thought: “What?Malaria? In Prussia?? Where did he get that?“ The internet offered only theStaufer Emperor Friedrich II (1194 – 1250), whose son had died of malaria. ThenI saw that Albrecht Dürer, Oliver Cromwell and Friedrich Schiller were ‘famousmalaria-victims”.

But nothingabout my Friedrich II.

Was theauthor mistaken? (As I in my last post on Freddy: I spoke of his ‘Tobacco-colloquium’– but that was the vice of his father, the “Soldier-King”).

Then Ifound „fever of the marsh’ and ‚alternating fever‘ – (these words used innovels I had never connected to malaria).

“In days gone by malaria was common also incountries with temperate climate, among them Germany. (…) Into the 18^thcentury there were many epidemics. Great parts of Germany were hit hard, butespecially the marsh and moors at the coast. (…) Through river regulation andcolonizing of the moors numerous breeding places for gnats were destroyed. (…)In the developing coastal landscape Anopheles maculipennis typicus ousted thefever transmitting Anopheles maculipennis messea.” (Wiki)

In hisessay about Frederick Mr. Bendikowski wrote:

“Nobody could quite help Frederick, because hedeveloped also in medical issues the inclination to know everything better thanthe experts. As an example: when drinking the vast amounts of coffee in themorning he sometimes used to put some grains of mustard seeds into it – he thoughtthat best.”

After livinga few years on this beautiful earth I do agree with Freddy: one should not relyon the“ experts“ only, but also use one’s common sense.

Coffeebelongs to the same plant family as Peruvian bark, a bark that was used by Peruvianworkers successfully against malaria fever, and brought to Europe in 1640 by the Jesuit Order in form of powder. The medicine fabricated out of Cinchoniawas later later called “quinine”. And grains of mustard seed were used byalternative medicine in foot baths against fever – so maybe Fred was not that daftby using them – though even a placebo-effect would be fine.

Today inEurope malaria has been exterminated. But don’t let us rejoice to early!

In 1997 thecounty council of the little German town Cuxhaven had to deal with the question“Marsh fever – Are there possible risks in marsh counties?”, because they had foundin a cowshed a gnat of the family Anopheles atroparvus, one (!), which is a carrier formalaria. (When you say 'to make a mountain out of a molehill' we say in Germany 'to make an elephant out of a gnat') As Europe is getting warmer it might create a warm and damp climatethat could encourage the spread of these gnats.

Well – therehelps only one thing, even if Mr. B. might blame me that I believe that I do knoweverything better than the experts („I? Me?? Never !!”) :

Carefully I pour a Gin tonic into my glass.

Thatshould, as we all know, help against malaria through its content of quinine inthe tonic water - used regularly. (In India British people were forced to usethe tedious gin only to mask the bitterness of the quinine J.

Why hasSchweppes reduced the amount of quinine? Again a dark conspiracy of thepharmaceutical industry??

Sláinte!

How to Stay Slim in Winter

2012-01-19T19:14:00.000+01:00

I just discovered that my post read most by far is: “How to Stay Slim” from 31^stOctober 2011.

Well, here are some further news:

a) AlexandraStoddard points out in her book “Feeling at Home” (WilliamMorrow, NY , 1999) that there is a link between weight gain and NOT ENOUGHLIGHT in winter months.

Her information convinces me, though I don’tknow if it is scientifically evaluated:

“Do you tend to gain weight in the wintermonths? How much, on average? Most people gain approximately five pounds in thewinter, but people who suffer from SAD or light depression tend to gain twiceas much weight. “

That’sinteresting. I know that in winter I “gain” about 1 kilogram and, as this isnot very much, I always thought: ‘Must bethe sweets and more delicious food on Christmas.” When it is getting cold Ifeel a light craving for a bit more fat (that I dislike otherwise) – and think:“Well, the body knows what it is doing:this might be a sort of protection against cold; and also the body might need itin case of a flu. “

But if yougain more and ‘don’t know where it comes from’, then Mrs. Stoddard’slight-theory might be worth trying. Light the lights!

And you can evenimprove this, she says, by :

- - Placinga mirror opposite a window

- - Keepall wood tones light

- - Paintthe room brilliant white (well, I prefer a very light sunny yellow)

- - Alwayshave clean windows

b) Then Ifound an interesting article on the hormone Ghrelin.

If you seepictures of delicious food, you become hungry although you might be not hungryat all, having eaten your breakfast just an hour ago.

This is thegist of the scientific research they did in Munich: the optic stimulation releases a strongamount of the hormone Ghrelin into your blood – and that does not only control youreating-behaviour but also the way your body utilises nourishment. Your brainstarts to “digest” the optical stimulus and without control of your will thebodily processes get started.

Now:everywhere you see pictures of delicious food: on TV, in your women’s magazines(following the newest nutritional regiment), you see it in cook-shows and books, on advertisement boards and in shop windows.

I would adviseanybody with a weight problem to keep away from such pictures!

In my postabout “How to Stay Slim” I went a step further – I formulated my own advicewithout the help of Munich scientists:

I don’t buy sweets for my home (except Easter or Christmas) or for myoffice – I know that at four o’clock in the afternoon I would become weak. Butif nothing is there – I cannot eat it. And it is highly unlikely that I will goto my colleagues and beg for sweets. In front of the TV I put a plate withcarrots, apple slices etc on the table: you will munch it away if some seriesis really suspenseful.

c c) And now my third advice – I also follow itmyself:

A week ago I bought a Pedometer.

I am a person who likes to walk.

I am often astonished when Husband takes the car to drive to a store,when I would – and do! – walk to that store (if it is not too much, I seecarrying the shopping bags as a kind of weight training).

Even as a youth I loved books about housekeeping (later I wrote a good-selling book about it) and interior design – and I knew instinctively that there wassomething wrong with those “efficiently designed kitchens”, where experts had measured the steps a housewife doesworking in the kitchen - and then showing you how to arrange the furniture to work economical - by saving steps.

But what for???

You have to move, otherwise you will gain more weight!

In summer for most people that is no problem. But in winter? When it is cold outside,getting dark early, and maybe it is even raining? Then it is so much nicer tograb a book, cuddle on the sofa and read.

Normally you should walk 5000steps a day (depending on the length of your steps) – and if you want to losesome body-fat, you should work up to 10000 steps. A DAY!

I was really shocked when I looked at my pedometer after a normal rainyday in the beginning of January. We have a huge flat and I run a lot –BUT absolutelynot enough!

I am a person for gold stars:I do work for them :-) If I have a To-do-list, it is much easier for me to work(because I can tick off things “done”); and I love the card at myweight-training, where I have to put in my notes about how many pounds I workedwith (I am good at that! And proud of it).

And since I have the pedometer I say to Husband: “I have to go out to fetch a grocery/look at a shop window/walk througha park.” “But it is cold – and raining!” he gasps, but I cannot hear that – because I am already outside.

Daily 5000 steps I get now easily – everything more I am proud of.

So, join me:

- Don’t look at too many foodadvertisements

- Light up your rooms

- And walk – at least 5000 steps aday.

You’ll loveyourself for that!

Why not? Frederick the Great and I

2012-01-14T18:26:00.000+01:00

What do youthink of, quite spontaneously and without looking it up on Wikipedia, when youthink of Frederick the Great?

I have toconfess: history is not quite my cup of tea.

I remember all teachers I ever had: in English Isaw in Frau Dr.Mergel what I wanted to become: a real “Lady”. Till this day Iam grateful to Dr. Liebe – French lessons – for his positive view of me (quitein contrast to the monk Mr. Franzen, who broke out of his order and taught usLatin, and who prophesied a dark future for me as wedded wife, adding “And forchildren you are also not suited” which burdened me for a long time – though inspite of him I quickly married. And still am.)

Unforgetable is the ‘shining light’ Mr. Schmädicke, my class teacher in sports and biology. When I was 15 I had such a crush on him that I would have eloped with him unscrupulously –but the crush was only on my side.. .sigh…Forhim I worked so hard that I got the best mark in biology, and in sports Ijumped from the highest diving board andsuddenly was able to do a handstand! Yes – an inspiring teacher lends youwings!

But inHistory: who were my teachers? I only remember the old history maps, and thatfor the umpteen times we started with the Greeks and the Romans, verythoroughly, but just shortly before the National Socialism we had no more time,so sorry – we will do that next term!– but when next term came, we repeated the old Greeks and Romans once again, tobe on the safe side… Although a lot of our teachers at the very posh grammarschool The Barkhof in Bremen were really old so they might have told us from their ownexperiences.

But whythat talk about Frederick the Great?

Thismorning our Berliner Zeitung presented us with a special magazine: F. To the 300th Birthdayof Frederick the Great. The cover was a picture by Andy Warhol from1986.

And Ithought: Well – why not?

When I lookback upon my first year living in Berlin, I see a lot of action, but no common thread.For 2012 that common thread will be Frederick the Great.

Don’t panic:I will handle that very individually.

Till now Iwasn’t very interested in that man. The words that sprung spontaneously to mymind were:

The Old Fritz/tobacco colloquium/ snuff/ Voltaire/ enlightenedabsolutism/ potatoes (of course)/music/ Seven Year’s War/ Sanssouci/ three-cornered hat/ a very tiny potentate (as so often)/ and “The first servant ofhis nation”.

Come tothink of it: quite a lot. Our History teachers couldn’t have been that bad.

So when fromnow on you see an “F” in front of a title, you know: Frederick the Great.

As you might say:

"Let's Blitz the Fritz!" (Softly, please).

The photograph is from the cover of the Berliner Zeitung 'Magazin spezial' 14./15. Januar 2012

A Hat or not A Hat - That is the Question!

2012-01-12T12:30:00.000+01:00

In her new post, Pondside asks whether she should wear a hat or not.
I am a fan of hats - and wear them often.

This photograph is not that convincing - but the hat is fine:

I like them in winter, too (well, this is a mixture between cap and hat):

Of course one has to stay polite: at the cinema or theatre the person behind you still should be able to follow the action :-)

The following hat I bought in Munich, it was made by a very famous milliner, but I have to confess that I didn't wear it that often (Son told me: "If you drive a Pontiac Trans AM like me, you don't have to spray it pink to get attention." Well, he has a very convincing way to persuade me. Though I liked the hat... )

This one is for "Gardening in High Heels".

And this one only for fun ( a picture from Hamburg, two years ago).

A hat is a fine way to change your appearance, and not so drastic as a new hair-colour (NO - I didn't - it's only a funny wig).

If I find a very daring hat and nobody wants to accompany me, I still have this cute 'family man":
so utterly smart!

I Love That Quote! "Up the Garden Path" (and New Year's resolutions)

2012-01-08T09:30:00.000+01:00

Izzy pressed her nose to the glass: the whirling snow had blotted out Earl's Court. Unfortunately the effect would only be temporary. New Year. Time for a little resolution. All right, then, but where to begin? The body, perhaps. Izzy had been feeling so fat recently that it was like having somebody else in bed with her. She would have to shape up. But, alas, so far her idea of exercise was reaching for the chocolates.
Then there was the untidiness. Izzy looked about her. It was only a one-bedroom flat, with a double bed for the vice and a bookcase for the versa, but Izzy had aquired dirty habits early and practice had made perfect. Izzy's mother had got up at the crack of dawn to scrub the farmyeard and fold the cows, but the infant Izzy had ignored this example and played vile games behind the barn in the mud with little John Wilson, her partner in grime. Start as you mean to go on.
Body a wreck; home a foul nest: what about her work? Izzy cast a cold eye on the piles of unmarked essays spilling out of their paper carrier bags. Plenty of room for resolution there. She would use visual aids and things this term, try not to fall asleep in assembly, and urge her class (4C) away from drug abuse and racketeering and towards joined-up writing. Oh yes, and she would open her girls' eyes to the absurdity of Cupid. His arrows would miss their mark. Izzy's girls would sigh no more for Steve Hirst (Upper Sixth, tenor sax and fatal eyelashes). They would be intent on fulfilling careers as plumbers and brain surgeons. After all, what did love bring than dust and ashes?
A tear fell down Izzy's nose and she ran to the cake tin. All right, so she was going to diet, but first she had to get rid of the cake. Besides, she had to eat something to get rid of the terrible taste of dust and ashes. Humble Pie, perhaps. Because Izzy's eccentricities over diet and hygiene, and her inadequencies as a teacher, were nothing to the black depths of her recent record as a lover. She was keeping such a low profile, her nose was practically on the pavement. Maybe she should have WELCOME printed on her back and aspire to the status of doormat. But it seemed a bit ambitious, somehow. Izzy snapped the cake tin shut. She would not eat. She would do her marking.

This is the beginning of Sue Limb's novel "Up the Garden Path", The Bodley Head edition published 1984.
Izzy is a quite normal, loveable and lovely girl - but a victim of exaggeration, in love with a married man.

A Toast to You!

2012-01-05T08:21:00.000+01:00

I'm still in time to wish you all a Happy New Year! I raise my glass and drink to you all, wonderful friends in Blogland. Thank you for your good wishes to my birthday, thank you for your interesting inspiring posts, and thank you for just being there!
I drink to you with a glass of champagne.
A young friend of mine gave me that beautiful birthday present: a bottle of champagne that he has altered in a very artistical way:

This one I will not uncap, against all smart-aleck advice of scientists who nowadays research almost everything. Normally I would like to join Gérard Liger-Belair at the University of Reims, who dips into the honorable study of Champagne.
Did you know that the secret of champagne lies in its bottle fermentation? This is the second fermentation, and here develops the carbon dioxide gas. When you open your bottle you might have to tackle a pressure of 5 bar - which can speed up the cork to 50 kmh!
About 80 million bubbles are in one bottle, and those bubbles carry the flavour of the Champagne.
By the way: it is NOT a question of aesthetics which form your glass should have: in flat champagne glasses the carbon dioxide evaporates much quicker and the bubbles get only one millimeter in diameter. In high slim glasses they become three millimeters and bubble with 30 to 40 bubbles per second - much longer!
And it is important when you pour the divine liquid into the glass, NOT to keep the glass upright! In an upright glass there is more turmoil and the CO2 evaporates double as quick as when you pour it out holding the glass slant.
Maybe the wonderful toast "Slaint!" is a reminder to keep it slant?? :-)
A very unnecessary tip: you should not store a bottle of Champagne longer than 6 years - because a third of the carbon dioxide (which transports the flavour) will have leaked through the cork.
So: go to your larder, grab that bubble bottle, hit the ceiling with the cork - and join me in celebrating the New Year!

My Birthday

2011-12-28T07:18:00.002+01:00

I had to flip through my posts first to see whether I have told you the following anecdote already or not - a sign of getting older? Because I will get older dramatically, a whole year in just one day: on December 29th is my birthday.
When we moved to Berlin, and I sat in the kitchen of our neighbour to the right, humming and hawing he asked me:
"May I ask how old are you?"
"Of course you may", I told him.
And paused.
And then I said:" But you won't get an answer! Hahaha."
No, that's not what I wanted to tell you. (Another sign of getting on in years: not coming to the point straight away.)
I wanted to tell you about my Zodiac Sign.
The beautiful picture above I took in the Villa Stuck in Munich. As you will easily see: it's Capricorn.
Now - there are a lot of prejudices about this zodiac sign. It always sounds so dull (except their sex life, that is interesting, but the rest: phhhh. Ambitious. Rational. Headstrong. Independent. Who wants to meet such a woman? Oh, I forgot: beautiful bones - so: there may be hope :-)
But a dear friend of mine (and that is the story I wanted to tell you) is very learned concerning zodiac signs. So much that she pays for lectures in Switzerland to learn even more about it - she takes it very seriously.
And that dear friend insisted that my zodiac sign MUST BE Gemini.
(If I told you that before, that's why: two persons are in me, one forgetting what the other has already told).
"But I am a Capricorn", I protested.
"Nonsense - everything in your behaviour indicates you are Gemini."
I presented her my passport. Would she say "Forgery"?
"Then what is your ascendent?", she asked unbelievingly.
"I don't know, I'm not much versed in horoscopes..."
We looked it up - better: she looked it up, calculated. Then:
"Wrong. Absolutely wrong."
"What?"
"It's Capricorn too."
We have a poem in Germany, where two lines run:
"... and so he concluded trenchantly/
that not can be what should not be".
(See? I must be a Gemini - a Capricorn would NEVER have been able to make that translation so flippantly and even rhyme!)
So my dear friend did as the poet Christian Morgenstern said: she simply ignored the inconvenient truth.
She decided that my birthday must be between May and June - and every year I get a beautiful birthday card from her - at the beginning of June.
Come to think of it: that is a very convenient time to celebrate one's birthday.
I might choose a weekend in June.
At the third meeting in the flat above ours, my neighbour Heidi asked:
"What is your zodiac sign?"
As capricorn are clever, I asked back: "What do you think?"
"Oh, I'm absolutely sure - see: I am very interested in horoscopes and always guess right - you are a -
Gemini!".
So now I can be sure: I will have two guests in June. At least!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T13:44:00.000+01:00

"We thank you for this place in which we dwell,
for the love that unites us,
for the peace accorded us this day,
for the hope with which we expect the morrow,
for the work, the health, the food
and bright skies which make our lives
delightful for our friends in all parts of the earth."

I wish that in future this prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson might be shared by everyone,
and wish you all a Merry Christmas!

Thank you for your blogs, which I enjoy so very much .
Britta

Circus Roncalli

2011-12-20T10:54:00.000+01:00

Saturday we were at the circus.
I am not a big fan of circus - neither of tigers that an animal tamer whips through the manège nor of clowns (though I don't suffer from "coulrophobia" - fear of clowns).
But when I heard that it was the Circus Roncalli, I came gladly. It is a bit more poetic.

Though in my mind they even here use too much technique - or do you see here a difference to a rock-festival?

There was only one act with animals, though.

A lot of acrobatic work:

... and these was really breathtaking: Artists from the Ukraine.

You have to trust each other completely, to do something breakneck like that!

I wish you beautiful days till Christmas!

Hunting Water Buffaloes in Berlin

2011-12-14T21:06:00.000+01:00

„Point of asword on a button“ – that is an old saying in Germany meaning: Something is ona knife edge.

Now I finallyknow why my gorgeous pink winter coat by Laurel, Escada’s little sister, hasbeen so expensive.

No, thereason is not the cashmere, or the beautiful silver lining, nor the goodworkmanship or the soft neon-pink that like a diffuser says ‘noble’ instead ofshrieking ‘garish’. Also it is not its high recognition value („I already see you at the door when the ICEruns into the station“, Husband says) or its high communication factor,even in Hamburg. (“THAT is a realfabulous colour! It brightens up a gloomy winter‘s day!“, enthuse especially the youngwomen).

By the way:every winter I wear it I get more good value for my money – that is especially importantfor coats, because cheap ones get old very easily.

But theluxury you will find in its buttons.

Last year Ihad lost one. At the Potsdamer Platz, and though I had registered a faint “pling”,I hurried on. After an hour happened a little miracle: I found it again, deeplytrodden into the snow, the top a bit scratched by road salt.

But five daysago it left me forever, without the tiniest „pling“.

What should I donow?

I went hunting on a button-safari through Kreuzberg,an alternative quarter in Berlin,and my Sherpas were, one after the other, an Englishman, a Punk and a Turk.Then I had found it: “Paul Knopf” –(his surname ‘Knopf’ is the German word for ‘button’): A Shop for buttons inthe Zossener Straße 10.

A tinyweeny paradise of buttons! A sea of buttons, and only a real connoisseur hasthe synoptic view about it. His appreciative look diagnoses genuine dark Indianwater buffalo horn, that’s what my buttons are made of. A huge ladder has to beclimbed to reach the highly coveted specimen. There are no angular shaped ones,only round ones – so I willingly learn my little Lesson of Today in “Life isn’tperfect”. Because I know how to help myself and accept Change as Part of Life,I don’t mind to sew them to the sleeves; and now I even have a button in reserve.

And thisseems to be a very sensible investment in these unsettled days – to judge fromthe price of those buttons they are worth more than their weight in gold…

I Love That Quote!

2011-12-13T22:45:00.000+01:00

Izzy snapped the cake tin shut. She would not eat. She would do her marking.

Lynette Taylor 4C My Idele Christmas Pressent
My idele Christmas pressent is, that I would be discovered by a film directer. I would be working somewhere ordinery like a suppermarket on the till and this block would come in, hed be meddium tall with mid-brown hair cut meddium short and hazzel eyes and hed be wering a lether jacked and hed come up the till and say Twenty Sick Cut Please and a box of matchs and then he suddenly lick see me propally and hed sort of blink and look agen and hed say Just a minit have you ever been a moddle? have you ever bin on the front cover off a magerzine? And he woulde look a bit like Jeremy Eyerns only not so olde and not so big bages under his eyes, then we would go to Roam and live in a viller with a sorner and a swiming pull and we would have tow children, a boy called Daren and a girl called Cheryl.

Izzy sighed. 'Why not think of being a film director yourself, Lynette?' she wrote at the bottom, an fought off the temptation to get herself a bit of cake after all. Ten more essays, she thought, and you can have a biscuit. Not till then.

Gary Smith 4C My Idle Christmas Pressente
My idle Christmas presente wolde be a Mazerati. I wolde drive it rite up the M.1. at 120 m.p.h. and the pollice wolde not catch me, then I wolde pick up tow hitchhikerss grils one blond one burnet and big bilt and we wolde drive up to Scortland and wolde have a mixed girll with sosage backon egg and chipes and a larger and lime and a snout.

Izzy felt faint and got herself the piece of cake. (...)

Tracey Field 4C My Idol Chrismas Present
When I think off all the presence Ide like the one that relly stinks in my mind is whorld piece

Oh no, Tracey! Not right now, not on a full stomach. Izzy placed Tracey on the bottom of the pile.

Stephen Masters 4C My Ideale Christmas Present
My Idele Christmas presente is, I would meet an alierne hidding in my wardrobe their would be a grate bright shinning light comming off him...

Stephen's alien went to the bottom of the pile too. (...)
Desperate for something different, she searched through the grubby pile for a particular one. Here it was. Roger Razebrook 4C it read in a small deadly hand (...)

My Ideal Christmas Present
My ideal Christmas Present would be to to the biggest job as as ever been done, it would have to be in America, I plan it on my own but have a hard team behind me, It would be a Bank or a Security Firm, we'd brake in on Friday night, stay the weakend and leave on Sunday night with millions of dollers. Nobody would get hurt my blokes would get fifty grand and I would go off to South America with the rest and live in a little village in the mountains with the Indians. And I would buy lots of things for the village a hospitle a schoole a swimming pool and a libry and in return they Indians would make me a blood brother and teach me all about their drugs and their life.

Ah, dear Razors! Crime and magnanimity so satisfyingly mixed. Izzy was just about to write some words of affectionate encouragement on the bottom of his essay when the phone rang. (...)

Sue Limb: Up The Garden Path

Lateral Thinking sounds so much better than Muddy Thinking ...

2011-12-11T14:34:00.001+01:00

Surprise, surprise: I really didn’t think straight. As everybody else Iam trapped in my own little world – and though I sometimes dream in English(don’t ask the Grammar Godddess!) and read very much in that beautiful languageand (if Husband would come with me, which he doesn’t) would pack my things tolive in London, Hythe or Edinburgh (see: I’m versatile), I told you that youhave to wait for the beautiful cookbook I translated, because the German publisher DuMont puts it inApril 2012 on the market.

What I hadn’t thought of is THAT MOST OF YOU read my articles inENGLISH!

So you will not need a translation. And so you don’t have to wait. Thebook is in your bookstore since autumn.

Claire Ptak and Henry Dimbleby: Leon. Baking and Puddings.

www.octopsbooks.co.uk

Fairy-tale!

2011-12-04T11:39:00.001+01:00

As everyyear the KaDeWe, Berlins luxury store, that seductively is only six minutesaway from our flat, decorated its shop windows lavishly for Christmas.

This timethe motto is ‚Grimm’s Fairy Tales‘ – though very liberally interpreted.

I amespecially fascinated by „The Princess and the Pea“.

I own agenuine ‘Hügel‘ with this theme, priceless because from a very early period ofhis work.

A Portrait of the Artist as a very Young Man – and if you think that‚portrait of‘ has been used here in the wrong way: not at all. You onlyshould ask: portrait of whom?

Here is agame that can give much insight into the character of another human being: askhim/her, which fairy tale s/he loves best. Very often you will be surprised –even more so if you ask for the reasons of the choice.

It canhappen that the gusto for a fairy tale changes in life. After being fascinatedby The Fisherman and his Wife for many years, (the woman would make a career atall costs and was never content) I believed that Mother Hulda rewards thehard worker and punishes the lazy buggers (hehe – they are not called fairy talesfor nothing!). Now I like The Town Musicians of Bremen with their winning motto“You will always find something betterthan death“ so much that I have a little silver sculpture standing on mydesk.

Doubly appropriate as I come from Bremen.

One fairy talein the KaDeWe was difficult. Who do you believe is this?

Lindenstraße

2011-12-03T10:40:00.001+01:00

If you are interested in Berlin, you might like to read my post "Lindenstraße - but not the German Soap" on www.brigittahuegel.de

I Love That Quote! (Mavis Cheek: Mrs Fytton's Country Life)

2011-12-01T20:02:00.001+01:00

When little Angela Lister, ardent reader, went up to Cambridge to read history in the late summer of 1976 with her Kate Millett and her Germaine Greer and her Andrea Dworkin tucked under one arm, and her nineteenth-century novels and Virginia Woolfs tucked under the other, and the bib of her dungarees containing the latest copy of Spare Rib and Honey Magazine and the Guardian, she felt she could conquer the world. And she might have done, had she not, a little later in the term, attended an informal debate between a large-hipped young woman in a loud floral frock (always a statement about something) and a tall, aquiline, golden-haired, scarf-flinging young man - no, God - in rusty curduroy. (...)
"Shall we go or shall we boycott?" she asked her friend Rosa.
Rosa said, 'If we don't go we won't know.' As Angela knew she would.
Honour satisfied, off they went to greet another piece of enlightenment in the new dawn.
Angela Lister leaned forward on her pew, her chin in her hands, and gazed at the God. And he struck her so beautiful, so eloquent, so very right on, that she forgot to remember the point of principle involved, and instead, like so many of her sisters before her, she listened enraptured and did not interrupt him once.
(...)
'Women have always been able to get what they want without aggression,' shouted the hips.
Angela scarcely noted the outrage. She was trying very hard to keep her face perfectly good-natured and still. Which, she was well aware, was how she looked her best.
Someone with very short hair and an androgynous mien called out and asked why the God felt obliged to argue the woman's cause (...)
'Fine words!' said the short-haired androgyne.
'I mean them!' said the God.
'Pah!' said the short-haired androgyne.
At which point Angela Lister stood up and said, 'You wouldn't be so down on him if he had long hair, a beard and sandals...' Which was, alas, quite true - since the men's support group to the women's circle comprised, entirely, doe-eyed men with a remarkable resemblance to Jesus as seen by the Pre-Raphaelites. Unfortunately, though they did much for feminist solidarity, they did not do a lot for female desire.

from: "Mrs Frytton's Country Life by Mavis Cheek

Well... that was from the Prologue... but in Part One we find ... changes...

Here you are, world, she said to the mirror reflection, pulling and releasing the elastic which slumped rather than snapped back into place. I'll draw no analogy from that, she thought, as she watched it sag. Oh no. This is the new me and it is comfortable, she thought, very comfortable.
She had one last pull at the elastic. No restrictions, no constraints. After all these years of wifehood, workhood and motherhood, Mrs Angela Frytton let it all hang out. (...) And taking her slight hangover carefully down the stairs (she had stayed up late, writing her last will and testament, which seemed, last night, to be a wise and holy thing to do, requiring much thought and Rioja), she prepared to venture forth.

Which she does - hilariously!

Sweets for my Sweet, Sugar for my Honey...

2011-11-25T08:49:00.001+01:00

It’s funny:as a child I envied Karin, a classmate with whom I often walked back fromschool home, because she always had money to buy sweets at the kiosk. Karin’s parentshad a drugstore, but no time.

Karinbought soda-sweets, and little eatable sponge rubber dolls that held handendlessly like those garlands you cut out from tissue paper; she bought Salinos;Ahoy!-effervescent powder-sachetswith a blue sailor on the waxen paper, that grew so strangely limp when youlicked the last few small crumbs out of the edge with your tongue. Pipes fromliquorice with a pink or lime green foamy filling on top, that stuck in form ofa cone in the pipe bowl and had to be unhinged in one piece by a skilfully biteof the molars; rolled-up liquorice- ribbons that you held with your teeth andreeled off to your waist, and then gobbled up with lightning speed. And stickytoffees, which sometimes pulled out a filling from the tooth (Karin had a lotof fillings, it was a time when the dentist gave you sweets as a recompense forthe suffered torture).

My parentsdisapproved of Karin, who was the first in our class to wear nylon stockings,and they disapproved of sweets before dinner – as a quite well-behaved child Iabided them, mostly.

In the drugstoreMeissner stood huge cans, filled to their neck with salmine pastilles (tinyrhombes of very salty liquorice) – a cockaigne, into which Mr. Meissner dippeda tea spoon and laddled the boot into a pointed little paper bag – Mr. Meissnerwas a friend of children and sold a teaspoon of salmine pastilles for twopennys. You sticked them in form of a star with saliva onto the back of your hand,and licked them off till they became wafer-thin. Then there were sweets thatone could never suck to their end: nibble-thaler had to be bitten through tillthe cracknel splintered among the teeth; gobstoppers hid under their hardvanilla or powder pink shell a tiny sugar kernel and must be bitten through, and cristal raspberry sweets did not onlycolour your tongue excitingly red but also cut your mouth with glassy needles.Round went the horrible rumour that genuine liquorice sticks were made out of realox blood. Highly interesting were the very personal mixtures that one createdoneself: „chocolate&salmine pastilles& tiniest sugarywhite peppermintpastilles“: aaah! Even better: “chocolate, sour raspberry sweets and salminepastilles“ – that was heaven!

Today Ihave the money to buy all these treasures – I could put rows of huge glassesfilled with sweets onto the shelves in my rooms. Nobody would admonish me, Icould downright bathe in them!

And do I doit?? No!

But yesterdayI did a breach of my own rules. Did, what I never would do with the men in mylife, because I want to keep them treasured in my memory as I have them in mymemory – will say I never am tempted to look after 10 years what has become ofan Old Love – because: am I beingstupid?

With sweetsevidently I am: there they stood saucy tantalizing in look-through sachets onthe counter of ‘Manufactum’: “Sweets of Yore”.

In mynostalgic brown paper bag with the slogan “Theystill exist, the good old things!” piled up cannon balls (devilishlysalty!), golden nuts, crunchy thalers, rhubarb-vanilla clumps, raspberry sweetsand sorbet pillows.

The resultwas predictable. In a German film of the Sixties, “Zur Sache, Schätzchen”, (“Let’sdispense with the preliminaries, cutie!”) depicting the slack life ofstudents in Schwabing, a young Werner Enke always nagged his running gag: “The old spunk has gone!” (He was abouttwenty).

Let it beunderstood: the sweets have lost it.

I: not by along chalk!

Celebration!

2011-11-23T11:11:00.001+01:00

It wasexactly at November 19^th the year before that we moved into our flatin Berlin. And I am happy to saythat I greet every day in this wonderful city anew.

I open thedoor of the balcony, no matter how cold it is, take the first cup with steamingtea from my little breakfast-table (Husbandis still sleeping), and step on the balcony in my nightie. “Good morning, Berlin!” This ritual Ibrought with me from Hamburg, where once a craftsman stood on the roof of ahouse in the neighbourhood and called „Goodmorning, Hamburg!“

(Of courseI say that “clandestinely”, as Lotta from Rascal Street would say –and till this day the neighbours don’t line the streets and greet back – tillnow there are trees with a lot of leaves in between – though that changes atthe moment, it’s autumn…)

I loverituals (as long as there are not too many, and as long as they don’t becomeobsessive).

Afterbreakfast I often write into my diary, sit a while at my computer, then I loadup one of my photos for “Britta’sHappiness of the Day” (which now you can find together with a quote or poemunder www.burstingwithhappiness.blogspot.com - I have it on my blog-list too, but it's the last title there and I don't know why it doesn't move to new photos). Then I get bogged down in detailson Facebook (though I have reduced that drastically), look up my emails and(hopefully) into my pink Filofax to plan my day.

And that’sfor sure: there is always something to discover.

Around 9:00 a.m. the first visitors arrive: 5 great titmice do gymnastics on my plants on the balcony;at the moment they gratefully take a bath in the bird bath (here it hasn’trained for a long time). Shortly after 9 something bangs onto the floor of thehall: the postman has thrown the mail through the flap in our door – we don’thave mailboxes here (and he will be glad that after a complete overhaul theelevator has not become more beautiful but hopefully safer: the neighbour fromthe highest floor has told me that he spent – before the repair – a “funnyhour” captivated in that elevator – at two o’clock in the morning – tillfinally the emergency service arrived to free him. Till that repair one saw Yours Truly (who mostly takes the stairsanyway) using that elevator only with a mobile in her hand...

But as Isaid: most of the time I run.

As I haveto now.

I Love That Quote!

2011-11-16T15:34:00.001+01:00

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christoph Robin. It is, as far as he kows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh."
A.A.Milne

Well, sometimes I feel just like that: there really must be another way, if only I could stop bumping for a moment...
I do love children's books immensely - often they are very wise, and I grasped the opportunity to read to Son such a lot of British and German fiction, and Tove Jansson, that nowadays he sometimes still quotes by heart from it. I remember one occasion when I read to him in the garden, and suddenly I felt a stare - from five pairs of eyes: behind the garden fence stood the children of the neighbours, different in age - and of course I invited them to come over, which became a one-summer-tradition. I am sure that some of them never heard a life-read story before.

"Good morning, Eeyore," said Poo.
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt."
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."
"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush."

Blogging Game

2011-11-09T11:07:00.001+01:00

Well, you often surprise me, dear Suze from Analog Breakfast! I'm honoured to be invited to a Blogging Game - see her post: "Seizing the moment which is now slipping past". Suze writes: "I am supposed to extend the invitation to three other bloggers and their identities will be revealed at the end of this post." And one of them is me, thank you!

These are the questions.

1. If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be?

Having our baby in my arms the very first time and looking into his eyes .

2. If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?

Maybe I would study Law instead of Literature. Though I know Edith Piaf's song "Je ne regrette rien" by heart and act upon it, remembering that old Chinese story: a thing is never only good or only bad - and that gives life it's spunk!

3. What movie/T.V. character do you most resemble in personality?

Being Legally Blonde I took out my pink fountain pen and did a quick research. This is what my dear sorority sisters of Delta Nu answered their president ("Quiet, Bruiser!"):

-Two sisters see me as Michelle Pfeiffer in "Chéri", one as Michelle Pfeiffer in another title I could not grasp. One sister, an addict of 'Sex in the City' mumbled something that was NOT Charlotte nor Miranda. Two men said Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, and I can live wonderfully with the answer of a third: "A mixture of Danny Wilde & Lord Brett Sinclaire in The Persuaders". (Come to think of it, mate: that answer could be mine) To cut a long list short: I work hard to resemble - in a few decades! - Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude".

4. If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would you choose?

I'm neither a judge nor a clairvoyant. And what does "and get away with it" mean: no prosecution of the Law? or no pangs of conscience about having taken the life of another living being? To push someone off a cliff is not the same as: I was attacked life-threateningly. So I wouldn't.

5. Name one habit you want to change in yourself.

I'm working to minimize my longing for perfection - a habit that is daft, tiring and unnecessary.

6. Why do you blog?

First I blogged because I wanted to see if I can do it in English (Are you ready to read on when you come up from the floor where you fell due to laughing too hard?)

I love to write, love different topics, and, last but not least: I love your blogs, your ideas and view of the world, your comments and the way you come to life by what you have written.

Which makes the last question so difficult, because I would like to choose you all!

7. Name three other bloggers you wish to pass this memo onto.

Pondside, Through the Sapphire Sky and Prufrock's Dilemma. Being not always able to understand a question in a foreign language quite right, ("Three? What means: Three?") I ask Flan'Elle et Prune and Vanity Moments, too. And - hey: give me back my fountain pen!!!

Detectives in Fiction and on TV

2011-11-06T15:24:00.000+01:00

"@Britta: You like George Gently?" asked Tony Van Helsing in a comment on a comment (see: we read them).
Do I? Do I like George Gently? About the person I'm not quite sure. I like the TV-series very much, discovered it just recently. I see and read a lot of detective fiction, above you see a little choice fom the DVDs I have.
We endowed 6000 German (written by Germans, no translations) detective novels to the Schiller Literaturarchiv in Marbach. Normally they only harbour "High Literature". But our books were very old German detective novels (the first written before Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story), and they are double valuable because nobody ever collected them - the fate of "Low Literature", though produced in masses, is to be thrown away. Lots of them date very easily,

some become classics.

Though even a classic can be modernized:

At the moment I delve into "A Touch of Frost", interspersed with the umptien times meeting with "Inspector Morse".

Had you asked me: "You like Inspector Morse?" my answer would have been a clear: "Yes! I love him!"

PS:

If anybody of you will recommend a detective TV-series I might not know, PLEASE do it! The winter evenings will be long...

PPS: Thank you for your P.D.James tip, dear Anonymous: of course I should have mentioned Commander Adam Dalgliesh (and a few others :-)

I LOVE That Quote!

2011-11-03T15:35:00.000+01:00

"Then the fridge flipped its lid and started making ice like it had just bought shares in John Curry.
Twenty phone calls later I raised a sleeping beauty in the repair department who said she'd send a man but couldn't promise an a.m. or a p.m. You mean to say, I said, that I have to stay chained chez moi from nine to five to suit the whims of your repairman? If Dr. Finlay could make appointments, why can't you? (...)
So all Tuesday I stayed in but I did, once, go to the loo. I have this weak bladder. When I got downstairs again, there was the card on the doormat. 'Your repairman called but could not get an answer.' Printed, it was, all ready for him to stuff, quick as a flash, through the letterbox and run off, chortling. Back on the phone to sleeping beauty, confined to barracks another whole day and the repairman finally cometh, regardeth the fridge and tutteth. Tut, tut, he says. Nasty, that. Haven't got the tools in the van for that. Oh, yes? I said. Has this fridge broken down in ways no fridge has ever broken down before? Is this a First for Fridgedom? A breakthrough for Fridgekind? Has Dutch Elm disease struck again, is there dry rot in its private parts? (...)
I'm on the phone again, this time to some man called Customer Liaison Officer. That's a very strange story, madam, he says, very strange. Strange to you, maybe, I shout, but deeply familiar to me, mate, and I'll bet it's familiar to your wife, too. Shall I tell you why we never see appliances break down on Coronation Street or Crossroads or even Soap? No, madam, he says. Because you can't keep an audience on the edge of their seats by showing them women on the edge of their seats, waiting for repairmen. That isn't what is called good telly, but that's what half of England's wives are doing half of the time in what is called real life."
Jill Tweedie: Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist (1982)

Yes, dear Bloggers - I had to wait for the electricity meter reader. And suddenly I remembered Jill.
And now there is a note in our elevator: "Due to repair work you will not be able to use this elevator from 7 - 18. November. Thank you for your understanding." Eleven days! Has Dutch Elm disease struck again...?

How to Stay Slim

2011-10-31T15:24:00.000+01:00

Husband knows the signs: when I buy Brewer’s Yeast, wheat germs andblackstrap molasses it is Gayelord Hauser–Time again.

I do love this man. His most important book was “Live long – lookyounger.” Written in 1950, it says almost everything that modern nutrition and healthgurus preach nowadays. He stresses the blessing of good nutrition. Vitamins from real food, (especially thevitamin B family), lots of protein and lesser carbohydrates are important. Hetells you to eat yoghurt withwheat germs and black molasses, eat yellow and green vegetables and avoidsugar.

I have always been slim, but I see women with beautiful rounder figures and like that too, and I see too haggard women. This famous model I think is looking sick and poor:

And I am very concerned that male models now start to become anorexic as well.

I do not want to sound smug. In other times women wore three ample skirts one over the other to appear thicker - which was the fashion then. As long as one feels well in ones body it is unimportant whether one has the 'ideal weight' - that differs from generation to generation.

My aim is to remain strong, flexible and agile. And for that aim I dosomething, or even: quite a lot. 2 – 3 times a week I go to Kieser – a no-nonsense fitness-studiowhere you lift weights (that supports the back, is good against flabby arms andwobbly legs and gives you a taille). I do Tai-Chi with my dear friend StephenRussell’s method (he is the Barefootdoctor) - that means: quicker and moreenergetic than the normally very slow movements. And I walk whenever I can - which is often the case.

I try to eat healthy. Gaylord is very rigid when it comes toexplanations why people don’t get thinner. Of course sick people are exempted –but he believes that very seldom the glands are the culprit, but eating toomuch and moving too little.

I often look aghast at the monstrous portions a lot of people devour. And I seldom see that the gobbling person seems to be happy: in thetube a young lady ate a whole chocolate bar – and looked as if she waspunishing herself. Why not relish that treat? A packet of crisps is automatically finished off: grip, grip, grip, cram, cram, cram – while looking atsomething else. At the cinema they sell those elephant-leg-sized popcornbuckets! And call their restaurants “All you can eat”!

If I eat ice cream, I take one scoop – not four. And I do not eat it every day - a treat should remain a treat. Often heavy people eatvery hastily – they give their stomach no chance to say: enough. In Japan thereis a saying that you should fill your stomach only to three quarters – thatmakes sense to me. They use smaller plates – good! Much, much better than theweird example of Mrs. Osborne who had an operation where they put a steel bandaround her stomach. Now, I read, her daughter will follow her example.

Health Government is very strict upon smokers. That is OK – but IF you think you have to tell your citizens what to do: why not be strict on sugar too? Fat? Additives in convenient food? In Germany we all have to payfor the back problems, overburdened joints, diabetes of sick thick people. You don’thave to jump onto the scales every day or week – just feel if your favouritepair of trousers still fits. If not: do some walking, cut back on a drink orCrème double or whatever (I do not believe in diets) or eat less for a while. I did just that when half a year after the birth of my son I didn't like the size of the T-shirt they offered me in a shop.

I think it is the question of self-motivation and discipline. Having asweet tooth I like a lot of sugar in my coffee – but I can resist and take only one teaspoon. When I see alarge cream cake I can image what it will become in time. That does not meanthat I don’t eat cake – I do, and with cream – but: I only eat a little bit.

From your 30th birthday on you should eat 10 calories less a day each year - when you are sixty, you should eat 300 calories a day less. I do not count calories - it should only persuade you to eat less - and then: high quality. I prefer almonds to marshmallows. (Most of the time - I am not strict).

I often think that there must be another motive behind eating too much: boredom, not really loving oneself (Victoria Moran wrote an interesting book "Love Yourself Thin").

From birth on we got a body that has a special form - round or slim, both can be beautiful. I don't like the extremes on both sides (Dear Gayelord also wrote a chapter: "Don't get too skinny" and gives you tips for changing that).

I believe in good nutrition – that even includes 2 tablespoons of oil a day –lots of protein and vegetables and fruit. I love to cook – and my guests and Ilove to eat my food.

And when I bake: I share it. So we all have fun - and stay healthy.

Happy Birthday, Telephone!

2011-10-27T20:16:00.000+02:00

In our street in Bremen it were my parents, who often were the first to have a new technical innovation: a car (the grey Volkswagen with the divided rear window); one of the first TV-sets, and of course: a telephone.
But if I wanted to telephone with my friend Jutta - which took hours (I still remember that my ear grew hot and red from the pressure of the receiver) - I was friendly but firmly asked to go to the telephone box, two streets further.
It was also a time when it was considered rude to call people between 1 to 3 p.m - they might take a nap. (Today they are utterly impudent: when I told a woman from a call-center friendly but firmly: "No, I don't want to answer your questions", she asked aggressively: "Why?" as if it were my duty to answer silly questions of an advertiser!)
I also remember nervous people banging at the glassdoor of the yellow telephone booth: "Hurry up, how long will this go on?" Later Telecom invented the pink booth that only protected your head, so that - especially in Bremen - wind and rain howled around your cold knees and you were very interested to keep the call short, even those with Jutta.
The mobile is wonderful (though I remember my first one: I felt so awkward speaking into it outdoors, and till today I cut the calls in a tube or train short, and am still a bit irritated by those people who speak very loudly into the air (you don't see their mobile): when I was a child only the mentally disturbed in our city did that...
150 years ago, on 26.October 1861, the teacher Johann Philipp Reis demonstrated his invention, named by him the "telephone", in Frankfurt's Senckenbergischem Institut to an audience. "The horse doesn't eat cucumber salad" he had to say through that phone. It was not a full success: the speech vibration were not changed into analog power oscillation (physicists, don't laugh at me!), but into power surges and pauses - thus the speech was hacked and barely understandable.
On 26.October 1877 the German post director Heinrich von Stephan (see his picture above) made the first long telephone call in Germany, Berlin, and Werner von Siemens quickly bought the construction, invented by Alexander Graham Bell. 1881 the first inner city telephone for private and commercial users was ready: right from the very beginning there were 99 participants and 193 places to telephone.
Might be that my great-great-grandparents were among the eager users?

I Love That Quote!

2011-10-23T17:31:00.000+02:00

November 7th. - Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoals, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.
Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September, really, or even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes, I do know, but think it my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room later and say: "Oh, Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworth's?" (...)
Lady B. enquires after the children. Tell her that Robin - whom I refer to in a detached way as "the boy" so that she shan't think I am foolish about him - is getting on fairly well at school, and that Mademoiselle says Vicky is starting a cold.
Do I realise, says Lady B., that the Cold Habit is entirely unnecessary, and can be avoided by giving the child a nasal douche of salt-and-water every morning before breakfast? Think of several rather tart and witty rejoinders to this, but unfortunately not until Lady B.'s Bentley has taken her away.
(E.M. Delafield: "The Diary of A Provincial Lady" 1930)

So: out with your Empire bulbs in time - and please: avoid that unnecessary Cold Habit!

That Obscure Object of Desire

2011-10-19T08:49:00.000+02:00

"Who of you", Son asked in a wondering voice, "reads 'Men's Health'?"
Coming back from their Honeymoon in the USA he had found a forgotten magazine in their flat in Munich.
"Me", I confessed.
A few days before Husband had associated me to the minority of 8% women who do just that: read the magazine with a male target-group.
And now I added That Touch of Pink to a crowd of males - a dark mass of fascinated men, staring with glittering eyes and only one hot desire in their - um, well, their eyes were glued to the
Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport L'Or Blanc.

I admit: I do love cars!
And this Bugatti is a dream car: uniquely high performance of 1,200 hp, a maximum torque of 1,500 Nm and a world-record top speed of 431,072 km/h.
If you still marvel whether you should use your "good" porcelain every day, innovative minds have already gone one step further: Die Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin has designed "the quickest porcelain of the world" and put 12 elements into this Beauty (e.g. the centre console and the petrol cap).

"Bugatti: Art & Perfection" is an exhibition in the Automobil Forum Unter den Linden.
Bugatti was founded 1909 in Molsheim, France, by Italian-borne Ettore Bugatti. (His father Carlo was an architect, silverware designer and furniture maker; his brother Rembrandt a sculptor; his son Jean an automotive designer).
"Bugatt is an ultra-luxury high performance automobile brand" -
The Brescia Type 13 was the first serious race victory for Bugatti at Le Mans in 1920 (it pioneered the 'powered-to-weight ratio'; the legendary Type 35 was the most successful racing car ever created, winning over 2,000 races -'the only automobile of its age that could be driven both on the road and on the racetrack'; the Type 41 Royale "The best luxury car in the world, a car for kings and royalty'

Sadly only three of them were ever sold.
Oh, Ladies - I see you stiffle a yawn - your eyes glaze over...
Maybe this will wake you up:
If you win the lottery you might buy a Type 57 SC Atlantic - "the most valuable automobile in the world. An Atlantic sold in 2010 for more than 30 million dollars."

Let's speed up!

Just for fun: Paranoia lies in the brain of the Beholder

2011-10-15T09:14:00.001+02:00

" Baa - sometimes I have the feeling of being surrounded only by black sheep, my dear - - baa."

Leaving my Comfort Zone...

2011-10-14T12:12:00.001+02:00

I left my comfort zone - on the spur of a moment.
(And gosh: Berlin is a real bewitching comfort zone!).
Just like that - off I went. To the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Because I thought: I cannot complain to be in a rut, when the Tao is handing me every thing on a silver platter - but I don't take it.
See: the night before I discovered on Facebook, that DuMont, (a big German Publisher) was chosen for having published in Germany the best cookbook of 2011.
They got it for the first (!!) volume of "Leon. Naturally Fast Food" - you see the cover on the photograph above - a beautiful book.
As I said: for the first volume (translated by two people - mind: that one not by me).
I'm absolutetely sure other volumes will follow :-).
As an author and translator I had a free ticket for the Book Fair, but I was kind of lazy. (To be correct and honest: I was bone idle).
But when I heard of the prize - I thought twice.
Yesterday morning I awoke at 5:30. Thought again. Wrote into my diary. Looked into the computer - 4 hours by train to Frankfurt. The award presentation was at 17:00 a.m.
But my hair wasn't washed!
I washed my hair. Put on my make-up (the Amy-Winehouse-eye-liner takes long...) Ate my breakfast...
And then I printed a ticket. And hurried off.
And thought of IG's advice (The Idiot Gardener - great blog!): expect nothing and you will not be disappointed if there is - nothing.
Otherwise you'll be amiably surprised.

I Love That Quote!

2011-10-12T07:12:00.000+02:00

After the tristesse of the last photographs, the horror of losing my template (and new followers - I don't see a function here to follow this blog?), and a full moon shining right into my room, I thought:
"Enough! You can bathe in self-pity - or just DO something - e.g. shift your eyes from that betwitching subject (Me) to something else (The World)!"
Which I did. And read some of your latest posts. Saw Suze's remark on "Nothing new under the sun" (don't ASK for it, Suze! If you want something new, just try the "Dynamic template"!), and that reminded me of a quote I discovered in Alexandra Stoddard's book "Living a Beautiful Live", first published in 1988.

"The telephone is off limits during meals, but I often catch up on phone calls while rinsing spinach or making a sauce. Measure out your kitchen and determine how long your kitchen telephone cord should be, so you can open the kitchen door, reach into the refrigerator, go to the dishwasher and reach spices and bowls while you are on the phone. My kitchen telephone cord is eight feet long. The phone company will change your cord for a nominal fee. If you make a lot of calls while cooking, perhaps your kitchen phone should have the dial located in the receiver, so you don't have to be restricted while you talk."

I am not making fun of the restrictions while you talk (some don't seem to suffer from that), or the spices in the dishwater - far from it. I just stare at the publishing date:

1988

Not that far away (to me). Was there a life before the mobile?
How did we manage - always on a cord, even if it was eight feet long?

The Ultimate Luxury (more photos in the post)

2011-10-11T11:10:00.000+02:00

That moment -
when you step out of the mausoleum -

and the warm sun caresses your shoulders.

You are thankful because the light is mellow and you can see and feel the sunshine;
the scent of the last roses and dark buxus wafts over the tiny garden, and you are thankful that you can smell;
You hear birds, and a tiny leaf slowly sails down to the ground.

I think: King and Emperor, Marble and Gold, and Cold and Death.
The ultimate gift that we have, the ultimate luxury:

We are HERE.
We are ALIVE.

And I am deeply thankful for that.

Lost In Blogland - And Shocked!

2011-10-08T07:52:00.002+02:00

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!
I just played around a bit (see!), I just wanted to look if there is something new under the sun (see!) - and now ... REMORSE! Can't get back to my old template (hope there is no deeper moral in that).
I put so much effort in my old template - but that is not the point. (By the way: what you see here is only an intro - you have to scroll to read on)
The point is: I had to fumble, grumble till I at last found a way even to write a new post.
I have an eidetic memory - but at the moment I don't have your posts on my blog. That's what I really, really miss: the thread with the announcement of the posts I follow. (I found them on the working page - but I like to see them at a glance).
AND I lost the list of my followers. (I have a good memory).

What will Life tell me by that?

Everything changes? I knew that before, thank you.

Don't get stuck in your old ways? (I do a lot not to.)

See the bright side? (The only good thing I see is that there is less "judgement" by counting followers or grieving about not been included on other bloggers blog-rolls with charming headings like "Important/Interesting/Great Blogs I love/follow" - I repeat: and not find mine, though I had their important/interesting/great blog on mine :-)
Hahaha - as the Germans laugh - Hehehe - as others do.

Well - I am one who can easily adjust to new circumstances - and I'm thankful for that.
Can see the funny side.
Protest and fight (I wrote a feedback to Blogspot - but have my doubts whether they will restore it), but know when to give up and look foreward.
Well - Halloween comes nearer, maybe some witch worked on my blog...
But you outside there in Blogland: be warned - think well before changing your template.

And: if I don't get helpful hints by you, my friends - I have to live with this new tattered outfit.

Luxury is - Clever Advertisement, Sometimes

2011-10-04T16:26:00.002+02:00

Sometimes it is due to the advertisement of a good raconteur that you want something very much.
When I was six, in my fist year at school, my friend Sigrid (the one with that mysterious German plait around her head) after the holidays depicted so thrillingly her stay in Kuhsiel, that I was utterly impressed. Putting it mildly. I must have been green with envy (a feeling that, I'm glad to say, is otherwise not often a character trait of mine).
My parents were very adventurous people who travelled in the Fifties, when I was a toddler and my sister a baby, to foreign countries with us, a tent and (in the first years) no car.
When I was six it was Italy again - on the photo above you see two strangers, and my sister and I, on our way to the beach in Rimini. It was still very rare that Germans were there, and I remember that the friendly Italians always touched our white-blonde hair in wonder, especially in Venice.
It was an utterly beautiful holiday.
And now it comes:
my parents still chuckled when they spoke of Sigrid.
"You know", they told me, "how you complained to us? You said:
"Sigrid was allowed to go to Kuhsiel - and I HAD TO GO TO Rimini!"

PS: Please do not misunderstand: I think that Sigrid was as happy in Kuhsiel, (a little one-horse town with 14 inhabitants 3km from our city Bremen) as I had been in Rimini - it was only the picture I drew in my imagination of that divine place that was not congruent to the one I saw when I walked there. Dickens wrote "Great Expectations" - and I am one for "High Imagination".
And so it became a family-saying: "Might be a Case of Kuhsiel", when one expects too much.

PPS: And sometimes, dear reader, I think that a lot of so-called "luxury" is just that: a dream.
Sometimes in a jar. Sometimes wafting around us as a scarf. Sometimes hanging on our arm as a bag.
Exclusive Brand: Kuhsiel. (TM)

That Touch of Mink

2011-10-01T08:32:00.002+02:00

In one of her last posts The Hostess of the Humble Bungalow discussed whether one should use a luxury good everyday or not.
It is such a difficult decision.
To use your finest porcelain each and every day - means: you have to wash it by hand. The other option: putting it on display in a cabinet, as my late parents did, allows to give the full number of cups and saucers to your children - but you very seldom felt the pleasure of finest thinnest porcelain on your lips.
(By the way: am I the only one who thinks that coffee tastes better in beautiful cups?)
Does one get weary if one uses something special every day?
I fear that might be so. The eye gets lazy, the mind gets lazy, even the heart might get lazy...
In the 19th century the servants living at the Rhine went to Court and won their lawsuit: the sentence confirmed that no master or employer was allowed to let them serve salmon more than twice a week.
Think of that!
If something is rare, people hunt for it. If something is there in abundance, people often say derisively: "Oh, that old thing!" or "Weed!" (I think of the utterly beautiful dandelion).
On the photograph above you see This Woman with "That Touch of Mink." Good value for very little money. The previous owner (wearing it in the Fifties? The Seventies?) must have used it very, very rarely - it is utterly well-kept, made by a fine furrier (Gerson International) - and has such a wonderful warmth that goes deep down into your joints.
Of course you can wear it only at very special occasions.
Not with jeans.
Come to think of it:
Why not?

I Love That Quote!

2011-09-26T20:11:00.000+02:00

This morning, I read Victoria Moran. I liked her thoughts on "Outgrowing Intimidation":

"One of the more satisfying aspects of growing into ourselves in midlife, however, is coming to know our worth relative to everyone else's, and finding that it is absolutely equal. We neither have to intimidate another nor be intimidated ourselves. "

Beautifully expressed: "growing into ourselves".

Days Flew Past - And Sparks Flew (Hopefully)

2011-09-25T08:07:00.000+02:00

Yesterday in Berlin they ran a big marathon (evidently it is so important that they mention it as a special word in the dictionary, "Berlin Marathon").
Well - I did my own. The Great Translation Race. And am proud to announce: I reached the goal in time. Over 300 pages in less than a month (OK - there are photographs in the beautiful book - but also much more text on every single page as one normally expects). Above you see some of my printed daubs. (There are more).
A lot of scribbling paper for the next year. :-)
Of course the ultimate MCA almost happened: when I was preparing to send the first part of the "Portable Document Format" to the publisher, "Word" squeaked: "Hi, there is something wrong. We are trying to rescue some of your contents." - or something like that. When I woke up from fainting (well - almost fainting), I thought: Now I have a good excuse for that printed pile you see above. (You know: my Green Conscience - but I am of the old generation that still believes in (and knows) dear old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Denn, was man Schwarz auf Weiß besitzt,/ Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen." Mephistopheles in Faust, Part One: "Because, what you have on paper in black and white/ you can bring home quite confidently". (I had it at home - I just wanted to send it through the Aether). Well - Word managed it. Rescued everything. Good!
Oh - I did it again. Quote dear old Johann instead of telling you about my feelings.
It was so interesting: I lost a month!
In one way - because I gained a LOT of experience and Fun and Flow, too.
A beautiful September, mild, crisp and golden, passed in front of my balcony. It tried to lure me - it tickled me - I was adamant (once in my life). I only jumped three times from my treadmill: once to go with Husband to a beautiful Art exhibition, once I met my dear old friend Marianne who came from Bremen to see her daughter,and one evening I went to a new Literary Circle in Berlin (have to meet real people, not only on Facebook).
And that was IT. (Oh, and my fitness studio, two times a week - I needed that, sometimes slouching eleven hours at my desk).
But I enjoyed it! learned so much. And I want to thank my family and friends for their support - and their patience.
And for that - Your patience - and Your lovely comments I want to thank You too:
THANK YOU!!

Busy!!!! I'm so Busy!!!

2011-08-30T09:54:00.000+02:00

Come to think of it, the song by Tommy Roe is "Dizzy" - http://www.myvideo.de/watch/6357560/Tommy_Roe_Dizzy_1970
At the moment I translate for a great German Publisher. Of course from English to German, not my adventurous Pidgin English you see here...
I love that work - though it is very, very much and sometimes quite tricky - but happily I am in a "flow".
I have a deadline: 20th September - and till then, dear friends, you will read nothing new from me, though I read your posts when I want to relax - but I won't comment, because my poor fingers are tired from typing. As a perfectionist I try to control the texts I translate, bringing them from theory to practice - one of the results you see above - and all neighbours in our house, among whom I distribute most of it, think that my work is very - substantial.

I'm back from Munich

2011-08-21T10:26:00.001+02:00

Dear friends,

I'm back from Munich - where I wanted to stay much longer, but I got an important new task to complete - which I enjoy.
I didn't want to tell via Blogger or Facebook that I am not in Berlin - not with a scaffolding in front of the house... because it made me think of that wonderful parody, "The Little Book Of WRONG SHUI' by Rohan Candappa, where he writes:

NICE TO SEE YOU
Attract visitors to your home by placing stereo, video and computer equipment where they can be seen from the road.

No: everything was alright when I came back. The scaffolding - but nothing else - has gone, and the front of the house looks very nice now.

Munich: wonderful! So sunny, so charming, so friendly!

Watching :

... and being watched:

Munich's architecture: so international!

... and yet: so down-to-earth!

In short: I LOVE MUNICH!

German Women Don't Get Fat

2011-07-31T11:05:00.000+02:00

... and are always chic!

Well? WELL???

I bet that you thought: now dear Britta went totally gaga. German women? Chic??

May I try to look into your head when you hear the word "German"? Do I see Gretel with Zöpfen, Dirndl, munching Sauerkraut and Strudel??!? ("Sauerkraut", says husband and grins when I tell him of this post, "Sauerkraut makes slim!" True. Strudel not - but that's imported from Austria.)

Then why, I ask - WHY? - are a lot of women, millions of women, buying a book with the title "French Women don't get fat"?

I am often in France, have an ex-brother-in-law there - and let me tell you: the average French woman is short, practically dressed, and often a bit - stout. As she is in Italy. Or in England. Or Germany.

Of course I see in Paris exceptional beautiful women, very elegant and very chic. But I see them in New York, in in London, in Florence and in Munich too, and though I never have been to Brisbane I expect to find there also chic women.

The French have been very clever in building up an image. A cliché.

The same is true for the image of lovers - head up, Englishmen, no need to hide your light under a bushel! - err- purely (!) scientifically spoken, of course.

Clichés are nice, they give you a sort of orientation, but beware: you should not believe every fairy tale that dear old grandma is telling you.

Now I go to eat my Pretzel. With Kraut. Slims like mad - as does my daily dance of Schuhplattler. Hahaha.

Karl Foerster's Garden in Potsdam-Bornim

2011-07-24T19:04:00.001+02:00

Today wevisited in Potsdam-Bornim the garden of the Great Master, Karl August Foerster(1874 – 1970). I use the words “Great Master” without irony: he was anexceptionally gifted perennial cultivator and garden-book author. Powerfully eloquent. Visionary. Asorcerer.

Born in1874, (his father was Professor Wilhelm Foerster, an astronomer from Silesia, Director of theBerlin Observatory, his mother Ina Paschen). After his A-levels he was apprentice in Schwerin CastleNursery, then developed his first own nursery in Berlin-Westend 1903 – 1907. 1906first publications in the press „Panund Psyche“, 1911his first book, „Hardy Flowering Perennials and Shrubs from theModern Era”. He writes for journals and givestalks on radio, founds the garden design department in Bornim with Hermann Mattern,creates a pubic garden on the „Friendship Island“ in Potsdam. Among his friendsis the pianist Wilhelm Kempf. 1927 hemarries the singer Eva Hildebrandt from Stettin.

Foerster becameGermany’s most famous cultivator of perennials: 1920 First cultivation of Delphinium elatum(1939 Member of the English Delphinium Society), 1932 first of many Phloxpaniculata cultivations, and Heliopsisand 1940 Helenium.

The book Ilove best is „Garden as a Magic Key“ (Rowohlt 1934). It is much more than agarden book – a book with a philosophy of living and an ode to beauty:

„Beautyopens up and evens out roads between the visible and invisible world", he writes, and: "Where there is too little beauty, there is quarrel!"

Here anexample of his gift to fabulate:

„Man canbecome like a half-god to us, music gets one with the breath of the world’s history,a moving animal can become almost fleeting by ravishing beauty, a blossom a light jewel, age can become the morning of theearth and winter’s scantiness the treasury of a million-voicedmusic.“

1940 publishing of „Blue Treasure of the Gardens“ (from which I quotein my post „Blue Gardens“ on Gardeninginhighheels.blogspot.com).

The Sovietmilitary administration 1945 takes over protection of the nursery for ‚cultivationand research into herbacious perennials‘. 1950 Honorary doctorate awarded by HumboldtUniversity in Berlin, 1959 freedom of thecity of Potsdam, 1964 nominated as professor on the occasion of his 90^thbirthday, 1966 First honorary member of the ISU, 1969 Certificate forOutstanding Achievement awarded by Latvian Horticultural Society.

1968 publishingof his book “Es wird durchgeblüht!” („It must be flowered through!“)

I canimagine that Gertrude Jekyll (born 1843 in London) and Foerster would haveunderstood each other beautifully. “If something is worth to be done, it isworth to be done well” was Getrude’s philosophy, and she was it who putgardening back into the rank of Fine Arts.

Foerster’sgarden in Bornim is separated into different sections after the English rolemodel: spring path, natural garden, autumn borders, rock garden of seven (!) seasonsetc. The heart of the garden is a “sunken garden” with a waterbasin planted with waterlilies.

All overall spilling abundance of plants and stern geometry, architectonicaland natural principles of design are completing each other. The differentlevels allow to look very attentively at the plants and to look from above onto the sea of flowers of perennials, shrubs and grasses.

Visitorsare welcomed. The garden and the house are under protection of a country’s historicalheritage since 1982, and since 1998 a vast reconstruction of the sunken garden, thespring path, the rock garden and the autumn path was done.

If you cometo Potsdam and love gardens, I recommend you to take the short drive to Bornim!

And youmightl agree with me that Karl Foerster remarked so rightly:

“Search – and youwill find (together with that; my words) something quite different !”

I'm Grateful for Role Models!

2011-07-13T14:33:00.144+02:00

(Joanna Lumley)

I found a wonderful blog: "Advanced Style" http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ which I want to share with you.
I see on many blogs that women of a certain age have problems with their concept of self when they get older.
Of course nobody is utterly thrilled when looking into the mirror in that awful sunlight in March, only to find that the neck is suddenly covered with tiny little wrinkles -
(By the way: here I can offer you three solutions:
1. I always carry a very little creme pot with me and put on a tiny dot every four hours - that's as long as the 'pump up' effect works
2. I sometimes wear a beautiful scarf (something I hated before, because it makes me nervous, even if Hermés or Bulgari is written on it)
3. I read Nora Ephrim's hilarious book "I feel bad about my neck", laugh and don't mind so much)
Not for me the "I-promise-you-the-fountain-of-youth"-creme for 600 Euro - I use Nivea, keep fit, brush my skin, eat not too big portions - and do all the things recommended in the wonderful book: "Look Younger - Live Longer" by Gayelord Hauser - and believe me: there is nothing new under the sun: he wrote it in 1950!
20 - 30% of the way you get older is predetermined by your genes. Of course it is a huge privilege when you had not to do too much physically hard work, have a good health (and care for it) and serenity, have never been made redundant, have a harmonious partnership and be grateful for all that.
Beside these aforementioned important things there are other secrets for staying young, (because I know a lot of women in the same social conditions who don't):
- Be curious about Life (Think: "He who lives for himself alone lives for the meanest mortal known")
- Be interesting
- Laugh (and cry)
- Be sexy (I mean the feeling - not the outward appearance - and believe me: one can tell the difference!)
- Wear colours (Yes! You can! Don't let Bobbi Brown tell you you should wear beige, brown and pastel)
- Don't stay too much in a rut or on the safe side - be bold and daring, you are as important as anybody else
- Love young people, love old people, love life - and tell people about it!
- Be grateful and forgiving
- Love!
And don't fix on your wrinkles or your age on the passport - I compare it to being 16: you thought the whole world would look at a pimple (though people had other things to care for - preferably themselves) -and now we seem to change that fixation for the belief that everybody notices our wrinkles or muffin top...
My photographs on facebook.com/britta.huegel (except one) are not older than a year.

No Botox, no surgery, turning silver slowly and loving it - though good illumination definitely is welcome :-)
Role models I had even when I was very young: Colette, Elisabeth Flickenschildt, Ninon de Lenclos, to name a few.
So I am utterly happy to discover that there are many, many more around:
just cast a glance at http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ !!

A Secret of My Past

2011-07-07T17:51:00.001+02:00

NO - I won't show you the pictures I recently got when we divided the photo album (can't find your plural) of our parents. Those pictures (not the one above) that show why I have a very special traumatic relationship with hairdressers.
Husband is always in nervous anticipation when I have an appointment with such a "Creative Director", as they are called nowadays. Because I know exactly how long my fringe should be - and the possibility that the hair artist might cut 1 millimeter off too much - or even more - sends shocks of horror over his spine, because the days that will follow will be full of 'Sound and Fury'.
That's childish of me, you might say.
And I agree. But that's where my trauma stems from: childhood days.
Even now I can understand my early frustration!
WHY did my parents allow my little sister to let her hair grow long - but I was not - will always remain a secret to me. (Well: one of her ears was standing apart - later fixed with a tiny operation - but why thought my parents that a pony-tail could hide that?) Or if: why had I to wear my hair short? In that very unbecoming Prinz Eisenherz (Prince Valiant) cut??
That was not the best cut for my face - which was, lets face it bravely, a child's round face - and when you cut a fringe in a bow and cut it very, very short, it makes you look like a pumpkin - or a full moon.
Every time when I came back from the hairdresser, I cried. And with good cause: it objectively looked awful. For which now I have THE PROOF. But that I will keep in a little safe chest :-)
But for every ailment you also get a blessing. Among those pictures I found others, earlier ones - you see one at the beginning of the post.
That was a perfect cut - why didn't they leave it like that?
Life's little secrets - now never to be solved!

NOISE, Lärm, Krach, BANG, Crash!

2011-07-02T16:51:00.002+02:00

You must be patient with me, PLEASE!
We are living in a sea of noise, a vale of uproar, for approximately 6 - 8 weeks. Because they renovate the fassade of our house. And it's high time to do that ... so: I try to learn to suffer without complaing.
But sometimes I have to - complain, I mean.
Today is Saturday. No day for working craftsmen, normally.
But what is rumbling this morning at 7:15? Right you are: the noisy workmen. When everybody is wide awake, they have a break. That's an international custom, I think? The one on the photograph is wearing a T-shirt with "Lust for Life" printed on it - mine he cannot have had in mind.
Though, to be fair, they are working quick. Yesterday they did plasterwork (and today, and Monday, and...and... it is a very big house).
In mid-June we all had to scoop out our balconies - they were just so lovely! the flowers all in bloom! - and now we have to live - or vegetate - six to eight weeks behind high windows that were pasted with sticky foil (sort of thick clingfilm) all over - and we are not allowed to open these windows.
Now, in summer! Six to eight week! Are we broilers?
Well - at least we can open all the windows to the back yard - and we have to: the dissolver in the glue they used to stick the new tin windowsills under the windows stinks - easily you can become a glue-sniffer by accident (but we are on the safe side: the neighbour above us, she is a public prosecutor, and she will get under arrest as we all, if they catch us :-)
So: if I am not that quick as usually in answering your comments, our commenting your posts: have pity with me! I might be sitting in the kitchen (the only nice place at the moment), looking down into the back yard, and singing with Cat Stevens: "When I speak to the flowers in my backyard/ They tell me to leave you, leave you behind" - of course not meaning you, dear reader, but this flat - at least for a while...

Stake and Support

2011-06-24T17:07:00.000+02:00

New post on "Gardening in High Heels"

The Quickest Facelift Is A Smile

2011-06-18T16:19:00.001+02:00

You might know my opinion about facelifts and Botox: I'm against it. Fullstop.

But that is not the theme I want to write about today - I just thought that the headline "Haughty Faces" might not be that attractive :-)

The older I grow the less tolerant I get to endure haughty faces. It's bad when you meet them in the street. Very often they belong to very young women, who, dressed to the nines, are unsure and fight back any possible advances that they actually want so much.

Then there are "famous" people. Here I show you one of Germany's most famous hairdressers.

He is doing the hair of Chancellor Angela Merkel - if that is a recommendation. He has been on TV recently - but I don't know why he is looking at us like this.

I mean: he is a hairdresser - and not the Queen of Sheba?

And here you see the poster I see when walking past the Russian ticket office.

This is a conductor - whom I don't know, but he might be quite famous.

Be it as it may - if he looks at me like that I would prefer not to make his aquaintance.

There is an American psychologist, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who suggests that, if you see such a face at the breakfast table, over the long run you will become clinically depressed. I would.

And now let me show you the worst case: shop window dummies.

What were they thinking of when they created these???

Do they think that I will buy anything these - well: DUMMIES - are wearing? ?

You bet - I don't!

Comments - Vanishing into Blogger's blue, blue Sky?

2011-06-13T14:59:00.000+02:00

Jinksy said...

Blogger has just lost my comment! I shall resort to an email!!!

Oh dear, oh dear - how often in the last weeks have I myself written that (IF there was an email-adress), or have given up after writing an (hopefully) emphatic comment - witty and pretty :-) - only to see it vanish in the haze, and that damned (sorry) sign comming up: Ooops - something happened (or words like that, I was too furious to remember them...) It started when Blogspot made new gadgets and I could not enter at all - for days - everytime they asked me for the password to my Google account - and, though knowing I was absolutely correct (having it written down) - I thought: Well, then I will change it.
A lot of correspondence went to and fro - like correspondence with -mmmh, who is the maddest madman of all times being?
"Utterly absurd" is the nicest word I can find for it - because the damned (sorry) answering machine of course couldn't even understand the problem!
A student in Germany helped me - I changed from Chrome to Firefox - then it worked most of the time, but not always - especially risky are comments to The Hostess of the Humble Bungalow, The Idiot Gardener and Annie. If I think of it I get cunny: copy my w&p-comment and laugh triumphantly when Google starts to heave its "Ooops!" - because I can try it again, on Chrome maybe, or Firefox - whatsoever.
And now I have to read that some of you have the problem to enter comments on my blog - see dear Penny's comment above.
I say!
We are not amused!
Do any of you ingenious bloggers can offer an advice? What is happening? Do you have the same problem too? What shall - and can - I do??

Trees

2011-06-09T08:20:00.000+02:00

When I sit on our balcony and look out, I don’t see much of the calm little street in summer – I see the top of trees. And wonder: which sort of trees they are? Their leaves definitely look like oak. But their “flowers” were so strange. I‘ll have to wait till autumn (and I hope that waiting will take a long time!) and then I might be sure.

Or maybe I get that interesting App that Janet, the Queen of Seaford, mentioned on Facebook. (I will put in a quote later, because she will write a post on that).

Berlin has lots and lots of trees – it is a green city with many parks, meadows and alleys.

At this time of the year the car drivers are unhappy: most have to park under the trees, and especially those ‘oaks’ drop little flowery things on their cars. At the moment it is even getting dangerous for pedestrians: the city complains that an invasion of oak procession moths (Thaumetopoea processionea) entered the city, polishing off most of the leaves.

a thousand hairy savages,
sitting down to lunch,
gobble, gobble, gulp, gulp,
munch, munch, munch

(Spike Milligan)

Yeah – that poem comes very near the truth: the caterpillars are very greedy, and very hairy. Some trees only have fifty caterpillars, other have nests with more than thousand. And they are poisonous. If you come in contact with the hairs your skin starts to itch for days – so the City magistrate sends out people who have to get rid of the nests of the caterpillars – clothed in protective suits with breathing protection masks. In Berlin they are not allowed to use insecticides – on an auto hoist they use a sort of vacuum cleaner, and to “free” a tree from that plague costs about 900 Euro – for one single tree.

Zehlendorf, Grunewald and Wannsee are hit mostly, our street in the Bavarian Quarter is still green.

In the next street they have lime trees – which I would prefer: I love their mild coloured heart-shaped leaves and the sweet scent when they are flowering – and they look so lovely!

The Germans loved that tree so much that Schubert’s Lied: “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, da steht ein Lindenbaum” became a folk song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJMqE17Gy1I&feature=related

At this time of the year the car drivers are unhappy: zillions of aphids sit in the lime trees – when you walk under them, your shoes stick to the ground, it is really weird: the sugary shit of the aphids drops on the cars, too, and very quickly they are covered with a smeary sticky crust.

And then Berlin has a lot of planes (sycamore trees?). Those are especially beautiful, because the light, falling through their leaves, makes you think you are in Paris.

I walk along the Spree and think:

Sheer bliss! Thank you, Berlin!

The Painter Max Liebermann At The Sea

2011-06-02T16:09:00.001+02:00

The day before yesterday we had 30°C in Berlin, today 25°. It is sizzling hot, and the Sightseeing boats on the Spree are sparsely used.

Well: who will be in the mood to sit on the upper deck of a steamer for hours in these dog days of summer and let themselves be sprinkled by the stream of words of a tourist guide?

No, I know something much more refreshing.

In the Liebermann-Villa at the Wannsee there is a special exhibition till the 15^th August: “Max Liebermann At the Sea”.

Since 1872 Liebermann visited each year the Dutch North Sea Coast at Scheveningen, Noordwijk, Katvijk and Zandvoort.

I think it interesting that he painted for 20 years the life of the common farmers, but never the sea.

At the end of the 1890s the influence of the French Impressionists becomes noticeable: now Liebermann sees the Dutch landscape in a different light, he paints more out of the moment and uses much brighter colours.

He possessed a wonderful collection of modern French painters, and advised the new director of the Berlin National Gallery Hugo von Tschudi at the acquisitions of paintings – 1896 they travelled together to Paris and they bought Manet’s “Winter Garden”.

“At the Dutch seaside the change from Realist to Germany’s most important Impressionist was fulfilled“ they say at the exhibition.

He painted the famous Beach scenes and discovered the open-air painting, fascinated by the play of light.

This picture of the Bathing Boys is seen as the first real beach painting by Max Liebermann. 1875 he had painted that motif before, but there as a Naturalist – after twenty years he discovers it anew, painted the sea and created from 1899 ten pictures of bathing boys.

But nevertheless I prefer pictures like these:

By the beginning of World War I in 1914 the visits in the Netherlands end.

Here is a link for a short tour through the exhibition (in German) bei German TV ZDF: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1313490/Liebermann-Ausstellung-zum-Meer-eroeffnet

What You Focus On Grows

2011-05-26T07:33:00.000+02:00

What You Focus On Grows!

This is the title of a great new song by my best English friend Stephen Russell ( the one with the jacket and pink guitar) aka Barefoot Doctor, and Leakster. You can see and hear “Get Spanky!” on Youtube,

you can buy it on i-store, and you can utterly enjoy it: it’s really uplifting music that makes your heart happy, your eyes bright and your body moving!

As I have told you I “lost” my garden when we moved to Berlin - but I gained a wonderful city, so: no complaining about that, especially as our beautiful flat has a large balcony – where “Gardening in High Heels” is so much easier. :-)

We moved in the middle of November 2010, and you can imagine that I had other things to do than garnish my balcony. But while unpacking many chests, I dreamed of spring and summer.

What you focus on grows.

At least: it hibernated. On my balcony stood some refugees from Hamburg: five pots with roses, and clematis, lavender, catmint and Cranesbills. In the cold, cold winter my fugitives shivered in ice and snow. I protected them with that air-cushioned foil nervous people like to crush between their fingers – we had lots and lots of it from padding the moving chests.

All winter I doodled plans of what I would plant on my balcony – till Husband reminded me gently that once in a while he wanted to sit on the balcony too, without using a machete to chop through the roses. I, sleeping beauty, refused to lend my ear. But I threw out the over-dimensioned teak-table we had imported from our terrace in Hamburg. I changed it by mere wishcraft: I detected it in a shop-window of the KaDeWe: an unusual oblong white French table – “No, sorry, Love: this is not to be sold – it is decoration!”

So I focused on it – every time I passed the shop windows. And by chance (and courage and persistency) I got it: What you focus on grows!

The first new plant on it was a pot of beautiful horned violets that Stephen bought me on the farmers market at the Winterfeldplatz. It was very early in March – but: What you focus on grows.

And then the roses started to grow leaves, “Gertrude Jekyll”, “Abraham Darby”, “New Dawn” “Auguste Luise”, and a dark red Austin-rose just start to bloom!

That proves it: What you focus on grows!

Summer Forecast

2011-05-23T08:29:00.000+02:00

Now I can no longer kid myself. Just a moment ago - I am sorry to say - I have seen him quite clearly: a simple Cabbage white butterfly who sleightly and namby-pamby fluttered above the rose hedge.

No, I don’t have anything against the simple beauty of this butterfly, but here we speak of the weather forecast of a whole summer! And there – as everyone knows from the Moomin-books of Tove Jansson – only a golden butterfly promises that we will get a tremendously beautiful summer. A normal pale one only means – well: a “normal summer”. As we are used to in Germany.

But two hours later I am utterly content with the cabbage white butterfly. The alternatives gave me even less cause for jubilation. A little Orange-tip butterfly with bright wings on which sits an orange coloured dabber – that I can only interpret as: the summer will be normal, with some fiery-hot days – but short! And after that I saw a little periwinkle coloured butterfly (a “Common Blue”, Polymmatus Icarus – thanks dear John from Hedgeland Tales!) – now: blue would have caused concern, because this colour only allows one prognosis: rain of course.

And that is what we don’t want, a rainy summer – today for the first time we are spoilt by the sun and can eat outside in the garden! That is a promising offbeat for the month of May! And under a big white parasol on soft garden cushions we celebrate the delights of “The Day of Work” (in Germany 1^st May is a holiday – “To honour Work”).

... and keeping it orderly...

2011-05-22T16:40:00.000+02:00

In my eyes this is much more difficult than creating order: to keep it up.

Not to let the piles of newspaper, books, letters - to name a few - grow.

The advice to change to order is simple. I quote from a very funny book "My Home is my Castle" that I once read:

"If you make a cup of tea..."

"Well?"

"Do you then take always one teabag for one cup?"

"Yes", we both answered in one voice (and thought she would give us now an exotic recipe for tea).

"So", she continued, "If you take for one cup of tea one bag of tea, why are there standing innumerable teabags on your kitchen sink?"

Dumbstuck we turned our heads into the direction her forefinger pointed and saw a lot of wet, shrinked teabags.

"Well yes...?" we asked.

"So listen!" she continued, "what you have to do is: prepare the cup of tea and then throw away the teabag!"

Of course we all know that! But do we do it? Always??

In the beginning, after creating order, I bring back every thing to ist place. A week later I am suddenly in a hurry. I made a mistake: the blue T-shirt does not feel quite alright - I need a more dishy one - I grab the pink. And then I see that the jeans are not ideal with that T-shirt. I drop the one I'm wearing, choose the white ones and have to hurry. Out.

So - good intentions. But: not always kept up :-)

Getting Things Done

2011-05-18T12:04:00.000+02:00

I simply LOVE organising. And, as you may guess, I love pink. Organising gives structure and makes me feel in control (haha). Everybody knows the effect of To-Do-Lists (I love to cross out a task that is done) - and I possess more than one Filofax (though I only use one now - otherwise it would get very complicated). Especially at the beginning of a new year I have the feeling to start afresh - though on a minor scale I get that virtuous feeling every Monday (not for me the song "Tell me why I do hate Mondays").
Nowadays I have my To-Do-List almost everytime in the same room where I am. Before that I had splendid ideas in the bath/kitchen or living room - and then I forgot them easily.
A big item creating disorder are newspaper - Daily newspapers, and Good Housekeeping etc. Now I have started to read a newspaper or journal with a pen in my hand - I mark what I think is worth keeping, cut that article out AT ONCE or write the interesting web-address on an index card.
I don't know how long this system will be used by me - at the moment it works nicely.
One tip from a very old household book I really appreciate: they wrote that you should put on your make-up before starting to do housework (or paperwork).
I do - it makes me feel better ( as does making the bed in the morning) - and you never know: the postman always rings twice :-)

Mamma Mia, here I go again!

2011-05-15T08:06:00.000+02:00

My, my, how can I resist you?

Thank you all so very much for backing me up!
So I decided to carry on :-)
Because
- I would be missing your comments
- I think Life would become a bit less interesting. Or better: it will stay as interesting as it is - and it is! - but maybe I would become a little bit less attentive or eager to look things up. When I look at something that I want to put into a post, I am more attentive than otherwise. Because I have to put what I see into words - meaning: I have to differentiate. Put form over content, mind over matter. I have to look with "new eyes", and try to see what might interest you.
- I have to confess that I like to sit in a Café, sip my coffee (or, since I reread Gayelord Hauser, my Café au Lait), and write my post. (The quick ones, those without research).
So that's what I decided:
- to mix my posts (not always high-brow -- some posts will be VERY superficial :-)
- I love to read your comments - and I will write comments to your posts, but (most of the time) not write answers to comments
- I will write directly in English (or what I think is English) - so I don't have to translate - and you'll have a good laugh
- OH - and I forgot a very important reason to write this post:
I wanted to show you my hat!
It is said of Capricorns that they are people who plan a lot in advance. (Though one friend of mine, deeply into astrology, always insists that I MUST be A GEMINI, no doubt about that. Well - she is the one who takes lectures from famous Swiss astrologers and reads all the books about it... Hopefully she asked me: "And what is your ascendant?" We had to look it up, because I neither knew nor cared. Oh - oops: Capricorn again... THIS CANNOT BE! my friend insisted. And so stubbornly she sends me birthday cards in June, and, maybe being a GEMINI in heart, I can live with that and actually think about arranging two birthday parties, one in December and one in June...)
So: I bought this gorgeous hat in Hamburg in 2008, love at first sight - and said: I will wear it at the wedding of our son.
And: I did!
Last Saturday I became a happy, happy mother-in-law. The young couple insists on privacy, that's why I can only show you a photo of Husband and I.

And my hat! :-)

Ghost Busters!

2011-05-13T20:12:00.002+02:00

Now this is weird!

First time ever I wrote a post without translation (meaning: without notes of any kind) typing just into this field - and putting some photos into it. And you wrote so lovely, lovely comments - thank you for that! I had titled " Mamma mia, here I go again! How could I resist you?" and told you my reasons why I will continue and what I will change.

Well - and this morning: just wanting to say Thank You to you all, I saw the note "Blogspot currently not available". They promised to restore the posts. But they didn't. Mine vanished in the air!

But not from my heart! And I haven't dreamed it up, did I, dear Isobel - "bagging Mr. Britta" - I am not able to find such hilarious vocabulary.

First I thought: I'll call Ghost Busters! How could this happen?

Then I saw the date: Friday, 13th May. But I am not superstitious.

I found another explanation: the Tao shows me not to take things too seriously! That was your advice too. To write when I like, and to grin when it disappears, all of a sudden.

Well: That's "Leela".

The Sanskrit word for "God's Play".

"When everything seems serious and quite a bit omnious, when we feel a lot of fear and carry a lot of tension, we're way out of touch with "leela", the sense of humour of the universe" writesVictoria Moran

So I'll smile. And think of your comments. They are not lost.

Thank you!

To blog or not to blog - that is the question

2011-04-30T09:58:00.000+02:00

'I must put up in large capital letters over my bed "I am fifty", she thought (...), 'and that will remind me every morning and evening that I've done nothing yet which will be remembered after I am gone. I've been busy (I will say that for myself) but beyound giving others a few hours of enchantment at the piano, and helping them to keep supple, I've done nothing for the world or indeed for Tilling. I must take myself in hand.'

My dear readers, you might guess from that quote of E.F.Benson's 'Lucia's Progress' that Yours Truly is in a conflict, as are so many bloggers in this month of April. After a year of blogging I ponder the question whether to blog further or not.
Some of my followers decided to stop, for example Edith Hope and The Blogger Formerly Known As - I miss them. And I miss dear GeraldG, who died. Other bloggers like The Tranquil Townhouse think about reducing their writing. Others are just silent.
Beside my work as a civil servant career counsellor I am an author. And I have a brilliant idea for a new book - but for that I have to research a lot.
So I will either end this blog (but keep it to inform you about the snippets I write for my own website), or reduce it.
Till I have made a decision I hope to entertain you with a bit of Lucia. And please - take that passage with a grain of salt! (That is a request I make to all of you: if something in my posts seems offish to you: I always translate it myself - but maybe you put it through the strange Google translator into yet another language - and the result may be even stranger than my own translations :-)

"But since then, Lucia sometimes felt, she had not developed her undoubted horse-power to its full capacity. She had played innumerable duets on the piano with Georgie Pillson: she had constituted herself instructress in physical culture to the ladies of Tilling, until the number of her pupils gradually dwindled away and she was left to skip and flex alone: she had sketched miles of marsh and been perfectly willing to hold classes in Contract Bridge: she had visited the wards in the local hospital twice a week, till the matron complained to Dr Dobbie that the patients were unusually restless for the remainder of the day when Mrs Lucas had been with them, and the doctor tactfully told her that her vitality was too bracing for them (which was probably the case). She had sung in the church choir; she had read, for an hour every Thursday afternoon at the inmates of the workhouse till she had observed for herself that, long before the hour was over, her entire audience was wrapt in profound slumber, (...)she had given a lecture on the 'Tendencies of Modern Fiction', at the Literary Institute, and had suggested another on the 'Age of Pericles', not yet delivered, as, most unaccountably, a suitable date could not be arranged; but looking back on these multifarious activities, she found that they had only passed the time for her without really extending her. (...)
'I fear', thought Lucia to herself, 'that the Recording Angel will have next to nothing in his book about me this year. I've been vegetating. Molto cattiva! I've been content (yet not quite content: I will say that for myself) to be occupied with a hundred of trifles. I'ver been frittering my energies away over them, drugging myself with the fallacy that they were important. But surely a woman in the prime of life like me could have done all I have done as mere relaxations in her career. I must do something more monumental (monumentum aere perennius, isn't it?) in the coming year. I know I have the capacity for high ambition. What I don't know is what to be ambitious about. Ah, there's lunch at last.!

Royal Hair

2011-04-27T09:36:00.001+02:00

We all invest time and money and care into our hair. We use it to express ourselves – to attract, to protest, to belong to a group. If it doesn’t look as we want to we are unhappy (and it seldom does) – a whole industry thrives on ‘bad hair days’. Often the advertisements we see are blatantly lying: if you look hard enough, you can see the retouch of the receding hairline, or even the half-wig they oh so often attach at the back of the hair of a star (you can even see where her own tresses end). Very funny are those little baby-toupees they put on the poor little sods who have to smile for baby-zwieback.

Well, but mankind wants to be betrayed. So you buy mousse for the hair – a great invention, because you have the feeling you got so much substantial – and the merchant snickers because he put air between only a third of the solution he sold you as liquid setting lotion before. Now they add the valuable ingredient ‘sugar’ (which they had almost for free when they used beer as a setting lotion). And if you have hard water in your region I can only recommend a cup of warm water with a dash of vinegar – makes you hair sparkle like a diamond.

The best you can do for your hair is eating the right food – vitamins (especially the B family), oil (did you know that you should eat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, preferably safflower or sunflower oil which has more than four times the linoleic acid that olive oil contains – and you should eat it even if you are on a slimming diet?) and of course enough protein. See that the blood can transport all those goodies to your hair roots – and don’t use blow dryers that are too hot.

That was the general, now follows the special (though I could – and will – go on and on on the topic of hair – as women do for centuries).

At Easter we visited Palace Britz – a rural refuge in Berlin City.

The had an exhibition on “Sisi – Mythos and Truth. Empress Elisabeth of Austria”.

When I entered a special room I screamed when I turned: behind me stood – a monster. Oh, no – it was the back of a dummy, incorporating the Empress, who had been 1.72m high, very slim, very beautiful, and very vain. You could only see its feet and a seam of the dress: the rest was hair, abundant hair that fell in cascades from the head, down over the knees. (I was not allowed to take a photograph).

Sisi – short for Elisabeth, and known to Germans as “Sissi” by Ernst Marischka’s film he did in the Fifties with Romy Schneider – had real abundant long hair. It took her (or better: her lady’s maid) – each day two to three hours hours to fix it.

(I can hear my best friend Barefoot Doctor say: “Repeat that one”.)

TWO TO THREE HOURS EVERY DAY!

That’s what I might call an obsession. It was a procedure that resembled a cult. Her hairdresser, “Fanny” Feifalik had to show her after the three hours a silver plate on which she had collected those hairs that had fallen out. They washed it with egg and cognac (nothing new under the sun) – but of course they had no blow-dryers…

The Empress used the time for learning languages and understanding the culture of ancient Greece.

Well dears – I have to leave you now – have to wash my hair… Will see you again in three hours…

Au reservoir!

E.F.Benson and I

2011-04-20T11:56:00.000+02:00

Isn't he handsome?

And I am so proud that the E.F.Benson Society printed 'one of my little daubs' ...

Detectives in Berlin

2011-04-17T20:49:00.000+02:00

PSST!!! PSST!!! Don’t be that loud!

Quick – hide behind this advertising column, so he cannot see us! Who “HE” is? Well – the man with the bowler hat! Mr. Ground-Ice of course. Mr. Ground-Ice is a bad man.

“Now it is said that one should believe of every man, as long as it has not been proven that black is white, the very best. But I want heartily to warn you to be a bit prudent in this respect. Because prudence, as the saying goes, is the better part of valour (in Germany we say: Prudence is the mother of the porcelain chest). The human being is good, it is said. Well, maybe that is right. But one should not make it too easy for him, the good man. Because otherwise it can suddenly happen that he becomes bad.”

This man has during a train ride stolen money from a little boy. 140 Mark, to be exact. That was a lot of money in those days. Emil follows him desperately from the railway station Zoologischer Garten.

Ah, now you know where we are! In the middle of Berlin – in 1929. In a moment Gustav with the hooter will flit around the edge and ask Emil: “You are not from Wilmersdorf, I guess?”

I am too with one foot in Wilmersdorf, but in the year 2011. On my way to the shops at the Prager Place I discover a little yellow house that harbours a kindergarten and a surgery for children. The artless façade in bright yellow is decorated with the scgrafitto you see above, that was made after the wonderful illustrations of Walter Trier, and at the right a commemorative plaque shows that the author Erich Kästner has lived here for a few years.

Maybe you have read „Emil and the Detectives“ in Great Britain or in the USA – it has been translated into 59 languages. And it was picturised eight times; the first script was written in 1931 by the then still unknown Billy Wilder. The film became a huge success – and they played it even in London and New York for a whole year.

„Emil and the Detectives“ was the only book by Erich Kästner, that 1933 was not indexed or thrown into the book burning „Against the Non-German Spirit!“ In 1936 even this children’s book was forbidden, but the film was so successful that it still was shown on Christmas 1937 – when long before the National Socialists had forbidden Kästner to write, and Billy Wilder had emigrated to America.

Those of you who want to join Emil and his friends into the chase through the Old Berlin – and Yes: they run through the Motz Street and the Victoria Luise Place – should look at this link which - with the help of old post cards - gives you a lively impression of the Old Berlin, an address book of Kästner’s locations: http://www.zlb.de/projekte/kaestner/emil/10.htm

So, here we go!

„Password Emil!

Gardening in High Heels: Modest, Demure and Pure...

2011-04-13T16:06:00.000+02:00

I have found the first violets! You need a few secret places, and eyes like a lynx, because they are still tiny.
Husband disapproves deeply of plucking flowers on a stroll. Of course I don't pluck protected flowers or dig out anemones, but from violets I cannot withstand: from a little dark lilac patch I cautiously take here one violet from a group of seven, there one of four - so the impression of a 'carpet' remains, I am never greedy, never ripping holes.
My friendship book monishes me to remain "modest, demure and pure" like the violet, "and not like the proud rose, which always wants to be looked up to". Even in those old school days that advice has never made sense to me - I had other aims, and was already too tall for the violet metaphor. But what I only sensed then was confirmed later in the garden: those seemingly modest ones often are from a rather prepossessing sort; silently and persistently they overgrow wide spaces, push aside others which maybe "proudly" giving up... What will The Poet tell us by that? Or Life? Be careful if someone is too modest, who clings to you till you cannot breathe anymore? And you are not even allowed to whinge, because they are so in need of protection, those Little Ladies who coquet with their diminutiveness but are bursting with life force under this tender wrap?
The violet does not love shade as many people believe, recalling the poem's line of "the violet in the moss" - and then think of darkness. Of course we find violets at the feet of hedges, but the violets that almost run riot in my garden have spread over the warm gravel walks. You have to read closely and be a gardener to let Christopher Lloyd's subtle sentence: "Sweet violets in purple, mauve, pink and white make themselves very much at home" melt on your tongue like a candied violet. Vita Sackville-West recommends violets as carpet plants, they embroider every lawn violet on many patches.
That much to modesty...
But the perfume of those few little deep lilac flowers is so intense, so dark and spicy, that one forgives them everything. Nine little violets succeed to fill up the almost four metre high room to the stucco with odoriferessness - for that I will forgive them even their overmodesty...

Once and Now - Drawings and Pictures

2011-04-06T08:23:00.000+02:00

When you look at the last entry on my website www.brigittahuegel.de > Berlin in High Heels > Child's Diary: "The Highest Day for us Evangelists", says Aunt Käthe", ( in which the very young protagonist embezzles 2 diary-entrances (you needn’t know everything, dear audience), but visits a church, and gets the first inspiration for HomeBasics (content and marketing: removal of blotches on golden garments, and potential book-customers in a bachelor-high-rise building), also germinates the love for English Gardens - in High Heels)
you'll find a few drawings I did as a child when I was on holiday in Berlin - decades ago.
I drew them by heart then. Now I went to the same places again - for the first time since that entry - and took a few photographs. I think one can still recognize what I drew.

The Siegessäule (Column of Victory):

The border in the English Garden:

And the tower of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche:

Bio-waste Container - "Gardening in High Heels"

2011-03-31T09:12:00.000+02:00

Thursday is the day when they empty the green bio-waste containers. That is so important, that Husband puts it out on the eve – the green binmen are early risers and often I hear the rumbling of their van in the morning before sunrise. If we have forgotten that, in the early morning Husband dashes out in white bathrobe with slippers on his feet and hauls up the container on the street - to the utmost joy of the binmen.

I sit at the breakfast table and think dreamily of old times when, as the fairy tale goes, not only wishing had helped but also the waste collectors: once upon a time the strong guys came and put the containers out themselves.

Today I’m not amused with what I see: the dust cart rumbles along, and the binman fetches the container that is full to the brim with chopped branches and liana-like loop branches of the polygonum. I have finally bought an electric hedge trimmer. After I had cut off moutains of brushwood I recognized that given the bio-waste containers size and the two-weeks-cycle of the waste collectors our terrace eventually might become visible again in early summer...

That’s why I phone the composting plant. Ask for the green bags announced by the newspaper, in which you can get rid of extra garden waste. The Lady on the Phone explains that Green Bags will be sold from May on. Cannot suppress flabberghasted cry and croak like a parakeet: “In May?!” The Lady confirms it. Indicate with shrill voice that then everything in garden will be too late – there are not only the branch cuts lying out there, but also plenty of leaves that until now protected the little plants against the rigours of frost. And even if only for paedagogical reasons I have to try to give the weeds that already raise their ugly heads a good dressing down. In short: a lot of waste that cannot go into my compost heap. Insensibly the Telephone Lady couldn’t care less – evidently she has no garden. So the last resort remains the bio-waste container.

The binman rolls it to the dust cart, it is automatically transported high up, you hear: “Klapp”, and the container comes down again – still full. The polygonum clutches obstinate and very attached to our garden to the container wall. This play is given four times. Then the binman presses a red button at the van – the container is hauled higher, but the polygonum couldn’t care less. Now the binman lashes out and grabs with his gloved hands the upper balls of lianas. The container, now only two third full, is hauled up high, klapp – nothing happens. The second ball of lianas is dragged out by hand – the rest remains in the container that he puts back to the pavement, thinking: That will teach you not to cram your container that full!

And I cry pathetically: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!“ – err – „A green bag, a green bag...

Please, do come in - you're welcome!

2011-03-25T22:00:00.000+01:00

You asked me to tell you how we live in Berlin now.

Please, do come in – you’re welcome!

Oh, I’m sorry – I have totally forgotten that there are no electric bells beside the entrance door, and no name plates.

There is only a brass button – you press it, it purrs – and then you have to fight against the really heavy door.

If it is not after 6 pm, that is. Because then we have a problem, at least when you have forgotten your cell phone, and you came around spontaneously (if you have rung me up before, of course I will look down from the balcony). Decades ago there has been a concierge here (another vocation that almost became extinct!) who after a sharp glance let vistors in. But you came in the afternoon and now you are standing in the entrance hall of our house.

An estate agent has told me that in the Bavarian Quarter of Berlin there existed a directive that the entrance hall for the staircase had to be built in marble.

What I like is another directive that said that ‘even’ in the rooms of the servants there had to be a stove (that was not at all common in 1900 – when we looked for a flat in Berlin we sometimes saw tiny rooms formerly built for servants: the high walls were divided with a sort of intermediate floor – so that two servants could sleep on two levels one above the other).

Even though there are no bell plates next to the entrance door, you can find out on which floor we live: in the direction of the atrium you’ll find a big old wooden frame with carefully drawn names of the inhabitants.

Yes, there are many: the house is built like a U – the front house and two wings, the rear buildings.

We live in the front house. When an unknown neighbour rang to fetch a delivered parcel and I introduced myself and said: “Sorry, I haven’t met you before”, he said apologetically: “I live in the rear building only”, and I asked quite aghast: “Why ONLY?” Today I know that the expensive flats are those in the front house, in the rear wings live young academics, artists and the janitor.

On the staircase of our house lies a thick carpet – so the sound of the steps are absorbed.

But let us take the elevator! I have the key for it and will come down.

The elevator was built in 1900 – that was a special luxury at that time, in which the building tycoon Haberland built all the houses of the Bavarian Quarter – all equipped with electrical light (normal houses had gas), warm water and bathrooms – and it is said that the houses also had a central vacuum cleaner station, but that station I cannot discover ;-)

The elevator was modernized in 1977 –I feel a little bit ill at ease when I gaze at the metal plate which reads: “Dear user of the elevator! (…) In case of an entitled emergency call with good cause you will be connected with the control centre (…)”

See, I wonder: Who decides what is ‘an entitlement with good cause’?

Gardening in High Heels: Crocuses II

2011-03-18T08:29:00.000+01:00

Crocuses II

Since I discovered that crocuses will keep at least two days in a vase, I am no longer that cross with the blackbirds and carry the wounded, when they are not too dishevelled, from the battle-field into my house. And then I have the joy of looking at them at eye height – so delicate the chalice, so glinting the golden colour of the enamel, so beaming the light that passes through! In the vase you also notice the infatuating smell of honey that vanishes outside so easily…

For Cream Beauty, especially early and especially tiny, I have filled my miniature bowl glass vase with water and put the victim inside. When I look at it half an hour later, a miracle has happened: in this little goldfish tank swims a pale yellow “water lily” with a bright orange pistil!

The banner of crocus tomasius even elates my neighbour from the right, who has the best view from her terrace on the first floor. “You can do anything you want in your garden”, she cries from above, “as long as you keep your crocuses!”

These crocuses have been already there when I got the garden.

Fairy crocuses, tiny and transparently tender: a mellow lilac moonlight glows in the chill of the early spring day. But these tiny creatures are of an unbelievable toughness: like the snow drops they push through the ground at frosty temperatures, and as tender lilac chiffon scarves allure with their wide open calyx the first bees. They easily propagate – and in summer, when they have drawn in their leave long ago, it might happen that while digging one suddenly finds some little corms covered with a sherry coloured dry-sack. But other than the unfortunate tulip bulbs that one has also forgotten and divides with a forceful cut with a spade through their heart into two white halves, the little agile crocuses rarely get hurt. They roll to another place, lay down beneath the soil and wake up next year to new life.

Every year, although I should know better, I make the same mistake: I try to photograph the large flower area. And every time I am disappointed when the delicate creatures amidst the old yellowed leaves are not showing themselves as light saturated as I saw them in reality. Close-up views with my giant macro, that works, but wide angle isn’t worth the try.

Small things will be looked at close, otherwise they loose their spell.

GeraldGee

2011-03-17T22:20:00.000+01:00

Gardening in High Heels: Crocuses (I)

2011-03-17T13:20:00.000+01:00

I am confused: I thought that I had translated some of the garden texts that will follow before, in March 2010 - but I cannot find them, nowhere. So maybe I have only dreamed it up?
Anyhow: here is the first of a few that will be continued.

On my way to the farmers market I see my neighbour from Duke’s Wall, who hunkers over her gorgeous crocuses with a tin in her hand. I praise the sumptuousness of her blooms, but the neighbour seems unhappy nevertheless: too many of the crocuses had toppled down by ground frost. I don’t believe in ground frost but suspect the blackbirds that always jump at yellow crocuses with heavy aversion and celebrate real butcher’s feast there. The ‘Why?’ will remain incomprehensible to me – I presume that they see rivalling spiky yellow beaks in the tender slim chalices. On the other hand I do not put it past the quarrelsome disposition of the black bird that it rages by sheer lust to kill. I have read umpteen tips how you can put them off that ‘fun’ – in her weekly column the great Vita Sackville-West served tips from readers that came from black powdered pepper to black thread as invisible tripwire.

I imagine a sneezing blackbird stumbling over invisible tripwire and am sorry to say that I find it extremely exhilarating.

You are witty and pretty

Here we go again (speak for yourself, girl!)

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You're Only Young Twice

Frederick the Great and Bill Clinton

A Beggar's Bowl

Frederick II: Malaria in Prussia?? Are you kidding?

How to Stay Slim in Winter

Why not? Frederick the Great and I

A Hat or not A Hat - That is the Question!

I Love That Quote! "Up the Garden Path" (and New Year's resolutions)

A Toast to You!

My Birthday

Merry Christmas!

Circus Roncalli

Hunting Water Buffaloes in Berlin

I Love That Quote!

Lateral Thinking sounds so much better than Muddy Thinking ...

Fairy-tale!

Lindenstraße

I Love That Quote! (Mavis Cheek: Mrs Fytton's Country Life)

Sweets for my Sweet, Sugar for my Honey...

Celebration!

I Love That Quote!

Blogging Game

Detectives in Fiction and on TV

I LOVE That Quote!

How to Stay Slim

Happy Birthday, Telephone!

I Love That Quote!

That Obscure Object of Desire

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Leaving my Comfort Zone...

I Love That Quote!

The Ultimate Luxury (more photos in the post)

Lost In Blogland - And Shocked!

Luxury is - Clever Advertisement, Sometimes

That Touch of Mink

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Days Flew Past - And Sparks Flew (Hopefully)

Busy!!!! I'm so Busy!!!

I'm back from Munich

German Women Don't Get Fat

Karl Foerster's Garden in Potsdam-Bornim

I'm Grateful for Role Models!

A Secret of My Past

NOISE, Lärm, Krach, BANG, Crash!

Stake and Support

The Quickest Facelift Is A Smile

Comments - Vanishing into Blogger's blue, blue Sky?

Trees

The Painter Max Liebermann At The Sea

What You Focus On Grows

you can buy it on i-store, and you can utterly enjoy it: it’s really uplifting music that makes your heart happy, your eyes bright and your body moving!

Summer Forecast

... and keeping it orderly...

Getting Things Done

Mamma Mia, here I go again!

Ghost Busters!

To blog or not to blog - that is the question

Royal Hair

E.F.Benson and I

Detectives in Berlin

Gardening in High Heels: Modest, Demure and Pure...

Once and Now - Drawings and Pictures

Bio-waste Container - "Gardening in High Heels"

Please, do come in - you're welcome!

Gardening in High Heels: Crocuses II

GeraldGee

I'll miss you, your humour and your wonderful paintings.

Thank you for all that, GeraldGee.

Gardening in High Heels: Crocuses (I)