On my own account: I have a new blog

                                                    "Britta's letters from Berlin"

my blog starts today under www.berlinletters.blogspot.de 

It has the title: "A little premature, isn't it?" - that doesn't need an explanation...
See:
my Landlady in London has failed me. First she wrote: "Everything is OK - please book your flight" - which I did. Then she found a long-term paying guest, who stays from September 1st.
I am not angry with her, because I can understand that as an artist she needs the rent for living, and it is better to know you get it six months and not only one month - but nevertheless: I cannot give back the flight tickets, have no travel cancellation insurance, and cannot even give them to someone else, so on Tuesday they will run out.
Well - it is as it is. No use to cry about spilt milk.
Instead I have a little bit more time (though we go on holiday next month, too).
I thought a lot about my blogs.
I love burstingwithhappiness - poem and photograph - so I'll keep it.
My blog gardeninginhighheels will remain - but mostly get posts in the garden seasons.
But 'Youarewittyandpretty' - I wasn't that happy with it. Too long, too vague. So I thought: what do I really like?
I LOVE writing letters.
(I have a technical problem with Blogger's Dynamic View: I can only write posts for 'Britta's Happiness of the Day' by entering over the blog address of Youarewittyandpretty. So I will have to keep that blog, but will not use it).
                              Britta's letters from Berlin shall be short (hopefully), about my everyday life, sometimes with a photograph, sometimes without. Letters from Berlin - but not necessarily about Berlin.
Your comments will be your letters that come back to me.
I'm looking forward to them -

Wait, oh yes wait a minute mister postman!

Mister postman look and see
If there's a letter in your bag for me???  

"I'm just sitting on a Fence" - seeing you again in October, I hope!

Dear Followers,
thanks to you all! You gave wonderful advice - and made it clear that you like my blogs.
Thank you for that! 
At the moment I feel that I moan a bit too much - which I think neither witty nor pretty :-)
And gardening on a balcony has its limitations - even in ballerinas.
So I will take a creative pause - or whatever the term is. From now on till the end of September I'll let the above mentioned blogs rest (I'm not one who recklessly throws things away :-), and keep only 'Britta's Happiness of the Day' on www.burstingwithhappiness.blogspot.com - though in a reduced form: two or three times a week should be enough.
So I hope you remember the ol' Tom Jones Song "Try to remember the kind of September" - the important thing is the refrain, of course:

Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Discussions

Good arguments. On both sides.
"I will stop blogging.", I told Husband. "I think it is the right thing to do. I will have more time to write Something More Substantial. You see: it frays out my time - looking for photos (each day one for 'Burstingwithhappiness), looking for poems, sometimes translating them from German into English (a very unprofessional thing to do). Waiting for comments, looking at the stats (oh, they roar at Happiness - while the comments that come on Youarewittyandpretty are manifold, but not the stats. Best results concerning price-earning ratio is Gardeninginhighheels). And I don't want to increase the number of followers, though I know how to do it - but that would mean more attention and re-commenting, and..."
"I don't think it is a good idea to stop now", said Husband. "You are a bit tired now - normally you are strong and positive but at the moment your spirits are a bit low, understandably..."
"But that is why I want to do it - I don't want to be on the lookout for comments anymore, don't want to lose a single moment by thinking about how my 'readers' might like or dislike it, I..."
"I don't think it is a good idea. You have a bit much on your plate at the moment" - "That's why! I need my strength!" - "... and blogging takes off your thoughts of the very tragic and sad blow of fate that happened to your best friend's child three days before. You are brooding too much."
"You are right. So you don't think that it would be a wise move?"
"No, definitely not. You love your blogs. You love your fellow-bloggers. You get inspiration, feed back, ideas and tips and..."
"Yes, you are right. Forty: love."

Vice versa

Today: everything done in another way. Breaking the routine. Strong coffee first thing in the morning instead of tea, rolls instead of porridge, no grapefruit and the egg can wait. Still in my nightie, and yes: it is later than usual, because yesterday evening I cooked dinner for friends. We sat long on the balcony, so sweet and warm the air, and raised the first Pimm's No. 1 of this summer to the stars above. 

Too many Churches...

It might be the churches.
Too many of them - in a town that is allowed to call itself city, because they counted (very generously) more than 100 000 inhabitants.
Hildesheim is a Catholic diaspora. In Mainz, where I studied, I became aquainted with Catholicism in the form of "laissez faire" (we call it: To let five be an even number) - Hans' aunt Maria, for example, surprised me by saying laughingly: "Who often goes on a pilgrimage will seldom become sacred" (that in the matchless dialect of Mainz). And I, coming from the Evangelic Church of Bremen, indulged in the sheer sensuality of Catholicism in Bavaria: gold and jewels in abundance, Saints for every wish and woe, relics and baroque splendour and frankincense.
Hildesheim has a strange form of Catholicism, Puritan almost - stern, rigorous, austere.
But the churches are beautiful.
Take St. Godehard - the Basilica, which belongs to the biggest buildings in the Romanesque style of Northern Germany, stands on a little hill near the island where our house is.  

Godehard was Bishop of Hildesheim from 1022 to 1038 - an art-lover, church-builder and adherent of the reform of Cluny. On June 16, 1133 A.D., Bishop Bernhard laid the foundation-stone of the St.Godehard Church.
I will spare you the many 'Strokes of Fate' - and prefer showing you some pictures of this really beautiful church: the lucidity of its architecture, the structural abundance of the column capitals and the cube and scaly friezes.

The more than life-sized figure of St. Godehard is from 1450. The huge wheel chandelier over the altar was a present of Mary, the last Queen of Hanover, 1864. 

By the way: the Basilica is more idyllic than you might have thought from the first glance above: 

And the vicarage always reminds me of Jane Austen: 

As you know, I take wisdom and solace from where I can find it - so maybe the lighting of a candle and for sure all the good wishes and prayers from friends have helped:

we are very grateful that Hans, being an athletical man, recovers so well that maybe he might leave the Rehab center on coming Friday - and be finally in our flat in Berlin. 

"Our house...in the middle of our street..."

These weeks I had time to live in our house again.

Here we have lived as a tiny family: father, mother son - for 19 years. Longest time of my life in one place.

Our house was built in 1902. It lies in one of the best residential areas in Hildesheim: a little (half-) island, surrounded on one side by the river 'Innerste' and the 'Kalenberger Graben' on the other side. We have streets that are called "Great Venice" and 'Little Venice' - which says all.

The whole street was the result of an architectural contest - and shows some of the very few buildings that survived the war. 

Six years after we had bought it, the complete street was put under "protection of historical buildings and monuments" - which was not always a joy for us, because I had a lot of 'interesting discussions' with the curator of monuments - an out-and-outer for others (in his house of the 17th century he pulled inside down every wall - but at this point, dear reader, Husband would roll his eyes and say: "Have you to keep on and on?" Eh - YES ).
On the photo below the left one is our house: around the windows in the shade you might guess the yellow sandstone I was not allowed either to let paint or sandblast(!). Three floors, every room about 4m high, stucco and beautiful carved doors:  one big flat on knee-high ground-floor (175 qm where we lived, now let), 4 little flats (Hans' library-and working-flat is on the first floor, 3 others are let). The four streets of rows of houses form a square full of gardens. 

These are houses around us (to be honest: I'm not a big fan of wooden framework) :

On the other side lives the Lord Mayor of Hildesheim:

We left Hildesheim almost 8 years ago, and now I asked myself: "Why did we leave?"  
Son went to study Law at the University in Freiburg. Hans and I went first to Hamburg, then moved to Berlin - he always working at the University of Hildesheim, commuting, me working in Hamburg, and now trying to skive off to free-lancing translation and writing in Berlin. 
I think I found an answer to: Why did we leave? 
(to be continued :-)

"Do as the Sundial - count only the happy hours"

This quote was written ump-teen times into friendship books in scrawly pupil's writing.

Husband is recovering, in tiny steps, and we are thankful.

I have not much access to the Internet at the moment, so I could not read the post which 'Pondside' mentioned (I might have got it all wrong) - but it seems that 'Friko' remarked about bloggers who always write about their happy life instead of showing 'life as it is'. 

First: look at the 'Idiot Gardener' - he uses the hyperbole, exaggerating misfortune and crudeness to make you laugh. 

Second: as I posted about our misfortune to inform you why I can't comment on your blogs I hope I was not wallowing in self-pity. 

Because I am convinced that seeing the world negative (in their eyes = Realism - being positive they call "seeing life through rose-tinted glasses", meaning daftness) is not an expression of 'thinking' and 'being realistic'. In (modern) literature awful unhappiness even seems to be a synonym for being ART. (I am partaking in a Literary circle in Berlin - and every book we read is more depressing than the one before). 

I like to be entertained and amused, superficial as this might seems to the gloomy people without the trace of a smile on their faces - life is so hard! I can't grasp it: they have friends, shelter, nourishment and so on - but nineteen out of twenty look discontent and disgusted.  

I found out that even in the eye of the cyclone I am able to notice a bit of beauty: the shrill chasing of the swallows, the soft smell of the sweet peas, the sun on my skin. Though I feel pain or grief I still have a part of the Tao or God in my soul which thankfully notices that Life as a whole is a miracle and beautiful. 

To notice this, I think, is a sort of discipline that one can learn. 

Lamenting, moaning, complaining - in short: the full monty - can be an unhealthy addiction (the body produces adrenalin in doing so - you give yourself a kick to which you really can get addicted). 

I don't speak of denying pain or sorrow. They exist, and one has every right to be unhappy and full of anxiety. But there are people - who are not even afflicted - who wallow in 'Think what might have happened!' (on the first day after Husband's accident one woman told me -well-meaning, of course - that I might claim a wheelchair for Husband! She also knew that all the hard-working doctors were fools, doing everything wrong, the nurses were lazy, the social system is going down the trubes, and that other people had experienced REAL misfortune (which she depicted in a litany of heard-of gruesome pictures). 

After that I almost needed a hospital bed too :-) 

Such negative people are often also very rude in other situations - they "call a spade a spade" - well, well, well... 

Now give me my rose-tinted sun-glasses again!  

Here and now I want to thank our lot of lovely, helpful, wonderful friends and acquaintances, want to thank you for your support: we are very, very grateful for that!