last walk

On my now officially third-to-last Sunday in London today, I went on my last London walk.  The last weekend will be filled with the packing of moving boxes and the shifting of the chunky stuff I haven't been able to sell or freecycle.  (Anyone in need of a sofa?)  By the end of it, I might collapse, but the flat will be empty and clean, ready to be handed over the next day when also, if everything goes according to plan, my boxes will be picked up and shipped out.  Next weekend I'll meet with friends to say good-bye.  So today was the last walk.

Initially I had planned to go from Limehouse by the Thames to the Olympic Park because I like the area along the Lee navigation, with the locks and the mill and the canal intertwined with the tidal river.  When the sun's out, this is a blissful walk, out in what feels like the countryside (shaped to serve the city) but with the towers of Canary Wharf looming close.  For some reason, I went to Greenwich instead.  There was no excuse; the tube was running just fine.  I think what took me to Greenwich was the chance to see something new while at the same time saying good-bye to an area I've visited so many times.

Royal Greenwich is famous for the zero meridian and the observatory where accurate global time keeping was developed.  The observatory sits on the high point of a lovely park, a proper English garden.  At its foot is the Maritime Museum, free and recently expanded, and the Old Naval College.  Then there's the tea clipper Cutty Sark, badly damaged in a fire a few years back but since restored and now floating on a glass pedestal, with a café underneath.  There's so much to see and do, one afternoon doesn't do it justice.  In my years in London, I've gone to the observatory half a dozen times.  The story of marine chronometry is too fascinating and between visits, I always forget the details.

Today, I didn't stray from town though.  After a quick diversion across the market, posh and wholesome, with organic sausages next to vegan raw food, with hand painted t-shirts and cosmetics made with "no noxious chemicals" at all, I gave in to my fondness for murky waters.  I dropped down to the river where the tide ran high.  My walk began here, on the Thames Path, heading downriver.

By some measure, I was circling the Isle of Dogs.  To my left, across the heavy river, rose the steel and glass of condominium complexes and the skyscraping headquarters of financial institutions.  Traces of industry and trade have largely been obliterated.  Heritage is provided involuntarily, by council housing built in the dirty bricks of a grim past, but it's dwarfed by the storage facilities of international property investors' wealth, i.e. shiny flats lying empty.  This doesn't interest me much.

It was good then that by another measure, and by my intention, I was circling the Greenwich peninsula.  To my right, in touching distance, were what was left of decades of shipbuilding, gun making, oil milling and the twining of submarine cables.  The site had been so successful that no one asked about consequences.  Men came home black and the earth and water died, but negative externalities were considered academic curiosities.  When most factories closed in the 60s and 70s, a wasteland remained.  Environmental regeneration and economic redevelopment has been ongoing for nearly 20 years.

It was a cold and grey day, and the path was often muddy.  I had walked to North Greenwich three years ago and much of the abandoned industrial structures that I saw back then are now gone.  It was quite striking.  Lots of housing developments under construction and more where they've just broken ground.  The Amylum starch refinery, which was quite imposing three years ago, is now completely gone.  This place will be unrecognizable in another three to five years, unless a meltdown of the London property market kills off these projects.

The part down the river from North Greenwich was new to me.  This being the other side of the same peninsula, it was more of the same – barbed-wire fences and rotting hoardings, tumble-down sheds of mysterious purpose and construction sites displacing ruined industry.  I was quite elated by the beauty.  On the other side of the river was now the massive Tate & Lyle factory with its slightly desperate "Save Our Sugar" banner, which demands, on an acre of tarp hanging off the side of the office building, "a fair deal for cane refiners".

I passed the Thames Barrier, which I have still not seen in action, and continued towards Woolwich.  Here I was on familiar ground again, having dragged my mom along this section many years ago.  The warehouses, repair shops and fading industrial ventures looked unchanged.  Back then we crossed underneath the Thames in the Woolwich foot tunnel, which is much longer than its Greenwich counterpart and rather spooky.  This time I came to take the ferry.

The ferry runs above the tunnel, connecting the same points on either side of the river.  That may sound superfluous, but the ferry carries cars as well as people.  It's kept alive by a perennial lack of infrastructure funding.  There are no bridges east of London, except the motorway, which is a toll road.  The ferry is free.  The top deck quickly filled with cars, but the passenger space downstairs remained empty.  The ride across took less than ten minutes.  I had forgotten how unimaginably grim the other side was, run down, deprived, too sad even for me.  I hurried to King George V, hopped in a DLR for possibly the last time, and rode back home.

freedom to offend

You know my opinion.  The freedom to offend shall always prevail over the freedom from offense.  This topic has been aired here before.  I haven't much to add, but in light of recent events I had to sit down to write again what needs to be written.

If you don't like what someone says, you have two options: Argue your point to convince the other or don't listen.  If you don't like what a book is about, don't read it.  Think a film will offend you?  Don't watch it.  Cartoons mock your prophet?  Have faith that god "is about to gather hypocrites and infidels in Hell together".  (Verily, I've taken this straight from the book itself.)  Violence is never an appropriate response to words, images, song or music.

Violence and Islam have entered a dangerous alliance.  That's the kind of sentence that flows off smoothly after Wednesday's horror.  Islam is an easy target because it's so vast, diverse and decentralized.  It's also an obvious target because some Islamic countries are rigidly illiberal and gangs terrorizing Syria, Nigeria and Libya in its name are all over the news.  To some it even seems a valid target because many of the grimmer atrocities over the last decade or two have been committed by Muslims.

But what makes someone a Muslim?  My tenuous understanding of the underpinnings of Islam don't permit me to answer this question with any sort of confidence, but I think it has something to do with submitting to the word of the Quran and announcing to the world that there is no god but god and Muhammed is his prophet.  Anyone can do that, and more than 1.5 billion have.  Most live peaceful lives, like you and me.  Alarmingly, some have their brains pulped with nihilism.  They fly into parched backwaters of the planet, learn the operation of assault weaponry, and then go mad on defenseless targets.

When two savages did exactly that in Paris the other day, spraying bullets without restraint and then blaming their god, there was no one to contradict them.  In Islam, there is no central authority on questions of faith, no one with the power to excommunicate.  The murderers' words stand.  They are presented everywhere as Islamists.  The only thing this does is conflate, in the public's mind, Islam and senseless violence.

The Paris attack was not about Islam.  It was mindless, deranged, void.  The enormity of the crime is numbing, but past terror attacks have caused the death of even more innocent victims.  What truly shocks me is what the violence was in response to: A bunch of cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo, a niche magazine with a run of 60,000.  Imagine how good the cartoonists must have been, the power they drew from their little pens.  As if this were the dark ages, four of them were killed because their scribblings displeased.

Charlie Hebdo has a history of causing offense.  This is not surprising.  It's  a satirical magazine.  The day it stopped  causing offense, it would lose its raison d'être.  This reason to exist, it is important to point out, was given to the magazine and any publication of similar bent, by the French people.  Their constitution puts the highest value on freedom of speech.  Charlie Hebdo has a constitutional obligation to cause offense.  By killing a dozen cartoonists, journalists and policemen, the nihilists didn't attack the magazine.  They attacked the French constitution and thus the French people.

To express solidarity, many publications have designed covers celebrating the superiority of the pen over barbarity.  The Economist's shows a defiant fist (which looks as if it had been borrowed from Black Power) holding a bloody pencil.  I would like to write something equally poignant, but I am feeble with the pen.  My affirmation will have to suffice: This blog is designed and expected to offend.  Je suis Charlie.

Grüezi

Over the last half year, to continue the previous post, my boss has changed, but my job and my situation in London have stayed pretty much the same.  When I walked into my new boss's office the other day, a bit out of the ordinary because there are no weekly meetings, and told him I'd quit, he wasn't surprised and he didn't suggest bargaining.  This is not the only reason that the decision will stand this time.  I'm as determined as I was last time, but this time, it's a decision Flucha and I made together.  In addition, the excuse of "just a few little things to finish up" is no more.  A paper of my work has been published and another has got positive reviews at last.  Projects never end, but my involvement has.  I'm out of here, and no one will notice a difference.

The facility where I work is stable, operating with minimal intervention.  Equipment that was defective for years is working again, procedures have been implemented to make the latest developments in crystallization methods available, as much as is possible with a limited budget.  Everything is working as it should.  It's a good time to leave.

It's a particular good time to leave because I've just signed a new contract, something different, geographically and topically.  I'll be leaving academia and the UK.  Nominally I'll still be a scientist but I'll be working for a company, and it's not biotech.  I'll be helping make equipment better and to get said equipment in the hands of researchers.  Sounds like flogging magazine subscriptions, but it isn't.  Or at least I think it isn't.  It will involve a fair bit of traveling, all over the world, if I understand things correctly, mostly to scientific conferences but possibly also to customers.  It will also involve building a lab to test the equipment, to find ways of using it to better effect or more efficiently.  The latter is where the scientific aspect lies.

The company is located in Switzerland, and living there has long been a dream of mine.  It's not just the mountains but also work that pays, public transport that works, order in anything that happens.  It will be a drastic change from London.  No more lifts that stop working whenever it rains, monthly scheduled emergency steam shutdowns and mild weather as a valid excuse for massive travel disruptions.  If it had been just me, I would have signed the contract in a second.  But Flucha was thrown off by the prospect of small-town life and rigid rules and regulations.

The fanaticism with rules and the happy adherence to them might come as a shock even to me, a normally law-abiding and organized German.  The Swiss take it to extremes.  On my journey to the interview I noticed that the biggest display board at Zurich airport did not advertise watches or financial services but the house rules, take your shoes off and don't spit on the carpet and things like that.  On the side of the train from the airport was a yellow sign warning that this was a self-check area.  At three percent unemployment, the absence of conductors is understandable, and it might be an economic necessity to ask passengers to check the validity of their own tickets.  The sign read further, "Please buy and validate your ticket before boarding the train.  A CHF 100 fee applies to those traveling without a ticket."  As there was no honesty box and no account details to facilitate a bank transfer in case you catch yourself without a ticket, I can only assume that no Swiss would ever be found in such a situation.

But it goes further.  In Switzerland, working on the day of the lord is banned to an extent that would cause Jewish fundamentalists to look twice.  Granted, you can drive a motorcar to your place of worship, but you can't do laundry or hang it up to dry, and you can't do gardening.  Don't even think about firing up the lawnmower.  For Flucha with her Latin sense of freedom and improvisation, this is bound to be a struggle.  Nevertheless, weighing the facts – those laid out before and those that haven't been revealed – we decided to go ahead with it.  We'll be saying Grüezi to Switzerland soon, first me then her.

leaving soon

With the stage set, in yesterday's post, for unexpected developments and posts largely at odds with their listless precursors, here's the story that really started it.  It happened a few months ago (and might thus not be appropriate for a blog post, but as the story unfolds, it will get more current).

In March one morning, I walked into my boss's office for our weekly meeting and bantered my way to an "I'll be gone by June" statement that didn't exactly go unnoticed.  "Is there anything I can do to change your mind", was her response, reassuring in the appreciation it conveyed for my work but entirely in vain.  I had made up my mind and hadn't come for bargaining.

There's a lot in my job it would be worth bargaining for:  a salary that's not pitiful, desk space somewhere quiet and less arctic, maybe even a proper office, more involvement with students, a career perspective that goes beyond the day-to-day, and stronger support from the administration for the facility I run.  All of this is frequently on my mind but because of more important things like my immediate future leads to no actions.  All it does is cause frustration.

That is not to say that I don't like my job.  I do.  Most of my efforts are targeted towards ensuring the smooth running of the biomolecular crystallography facility and I see with pleasure that things work well when before they were a big mess for the most part.  Besides, I enjoy a large degree of freedom and drive collaborative scientific endeavors when maintenance and administration are done.  There's a good vibe in the department and I am surrounded by great people.  After seven years, Imperial feels a bit like home, and yet I'm leaving.

Back in March, when this story unfolded, I was mentally on my way out, had packed my bags in my mind already.  The weekend before my resignation, I had started clearing out my flat.  First to go were items of absolutely no use to me.  A hand mixer I'd inherited when a friend had left London, mom's old laptop, minor parts of my stereo, a spare steam iron – all freecycled to a new owner.  I felt liberated and ready to throw myself into the next stage, gumtreeing those possession that others might see value in, furniture mostly.

I want to move back to continental Europe, and I want to make the move simply and in one go.  At one point, I contemplated renting a van and driving across, as I had done from Grenoble seven years earlier.  But then I'd have to get the van back to the UK and it'd all be more complicated than necessary.  Instead, it will be boxes.  Boxes that a company delivers to my flat where I stuff them with whatever fits.  At a later date, the boxes will be picked up and delivered to their destination, a new home in Germany or wherever.  There will be no room for a sofa or a mattress or even Billy, the habitat of my books over the last decade.  The dining table will stay behind, as will the shelf on which my projector currently thrones.  No matter how much I get rid of stuff, I'll still be ten times as loaded as the world's average, and a hundred times as loaded as the bottom half.

With these thoughts in mind I prepared myself for departure – for about a week.  In those seven days, Flucha and I had a few deep discussions and hard-fought arguments.  The surprising conclusion was that I would stay in London.  We agreed that it would be silly for me to quit with no job lined up.  Why give up something less than optimal for something with no benefits besides proximity?  Why not try to finish up various collaborative projects, get results published and leave when the balance of for and against is a bit more on the for side?

I wasn't entirely convinced.  Did I mention that I was ready to leave?  So I did what I do best – I dithered my way to a solution.  Two weekly meetings later, my boss asked if I had properly considered the ramifications of what she felt was a bad decision, and whether I was still sure I'd want to leave.  This was the clue I needed.  I sent an email to HR and unresigned.  And I'm still in London.

back to London

This blog is comatose.  The entire last year passed in fewer posts than two average months in 2009, my most loquacious year.  There hasn't been anything new since August.  The problem was one of motivation.  I didn't see a point in writing.  It's not that nothing has happened, but London has worn off a bit.  The excitement of the first few years is gone, and the stories, outside traveling, that I felt like sharing often turned out variations on a theme developed earlier, and I left them unpublished.  Routine and repetition had set in.  Away from London, distractions blurred my mind and shifted my focus, pressing questions of career and life.  These things are now getting sorted – for reasons that will be revealed over the next few posts.  But before I start with a story that developed more than half a year ago when I resigned from my job, let me get back to London.

On the first day of the new year, I'm returning to London for the last time.  Thanks to the limitations of bank holiday travel, I was forced to take Ryanair, fly into Stansted and take an Easybus into town, three names that evoke cheap in the worst way, dearly paid discomfort mitigated by no cheerfulness at all.  The ridiculous clapping upon landing was sustained by only half a dozen hands and died quickly.  Normally, Flucha travels like this when she comes to London, and I pick her up at Baker St.

Tonight our reversal of roles was incomplete.  When I alit at Baker St., she wasn't there to pick me up at the bus stop.  There was no one to ride in the front of the 74 bus with me, past the Chess Store and into town; no one to point out the sights as if I were a first-visiting tourist – Harrods, Hyde Park Corner, the Hilton Hotel – the running joke of so many, and so many too few, visits.

It is clear already that this year will be different.  For one, I had made a conscious and clear new year's resolution.  It was one resolution only, one short phrase, but it was enormous in its circumstances and frighteningly world-shattering, at least regarding my own world.  Before I say more, look, on the right there's Winter Wonderland, its blinking and blaring in brutal contrast to the true winter wonderland where Flucha and I had spent Christmas.  The Black Forest was covered deep in fresh powder, with quiet towns and magical forests.

There's nothing magical about arriving in London, unless it's the first time.  Most outer boroughs of London are truly depressing.  For me, tonight meant one last time through rows of cellulitic houses with splotched and stained façades, businesses with spelling mistakes in their neon signs and sad betting shops.  One last time through the world's most expensive deprivation.

In Central London the glow of Christmas prevailed, with ambitious shoppers on Oxford Street and tasteful lights down Sloan Street.  Then the French flavor of South Kensington gave way to the Chicken Cottage in Earl's Court, and ten minutes later I was back home.  I pulled the contract that had been promised to me by email from my mailbox, and signed it.  Happy New Year all around!

late summer

To me, the term bank holiday always had a slightly absurd ring to it.  I understand Christmas and Easter, First of May and Independence Day.  Even Pioneer Day.  Why not commemorate the arrival of the first settlers in Utah, celebrate the delusion that turned a desert valley green?  But what is is about banks?  What have they done to deserve not just one but three holidays?  There's one early in May, a second one late in May and finally one at the end of August.  That one's popularly known as late summer bank holiday.

I'm sitting on a bus into town, on the upper deck but not in the first row.  There's room, but there's no point.  There's nothing to see.  Water washes down the front window in a flood, and only the driver downstairs has wipers.  It is August, but it doesn't feel like summer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I started listening to 2fm, an Irish pop station.  My stay in the Republic a few weeks ago got me into it.  It was the station we were listening to in the car.  Back in in London I started listening to it in the hope of catching the Irish farmers' road safety appeal again, to give my travel piece the authenticity that comes with getting detail right.  When this wasn't happening, I stuck around for the voices.  The Irish have their own way of speaking English, and it's very pleasing to my ears.  There's also a dash of disconnect that gives drab programs spice.  Words and meaning have different trajectories sometimes.  There was talk about the Rose of Tralee and much time spent on the hurling scores.  It was all done in flawless English, but I could make neither heads nor tails.  It's like a different country.

As I'm getting closer to town, the bus gets fuller, rescuing the unprepared from shelters by the road.  It's still raining.  The queues into the Natural History Museum are long and frayed like old rope.  The weather's wearing good manners thin.  It looks as if the most determined will get to see the dinosaurs first.

Last week there was a giveaway on 2fm that didn't seem quite right.  If you've turned the heat on this week, the radio host tempted, give us a call and tell us the story.  You could win a full tank of heating oil.  This was in August.  A woman called and said her living room was arctic.  It wasn't a joke.  Two days ago, Radio 4 reported Northern Ireland's overnight low with considerable incredulity.  It was -2°C.

The bus's side windows remain largely clear.  Outside, tourists scuttle through the dreariness of a day with no hope.  Traffic is denser than it should be on a public holiday.  The driver is not in a good mood.  He's honking his way through the jam with considerable irritation.

The seats in the front row are all taken now.  You can't visit London and not sit up front at least once.  It's part of the experience.  I hear American, Spanish and French voices.  The paths in Hyde Park glisten.  A few people walk colorful umbrellas.  Speakers' Corners is abandoned.  This is not a day to be outside.  I leave the bus at Oxford St.  The big Metro Bank, a tasteless aggregation of bright red and equally bright blue, is doing good business.

more signs

Fat drops are hitting the metal box underneath my window into which the internet café on the ground floor rolls its shutters when it's open.  The rain comes down at a sharp angle.  In the middle of August, this doesn't surprise anyone in London.  Summer is relative.

Last weekend, I went away for four days, the closest to a summer vacation I will take this year.  My destination was Ireland.  I went in full possession of my senses.  A longer account of the time spent there will soon appear on my website.  Here, I want to revisit a topic that fascinated me the last time I was in Ireland, a few months ago.

Ireland has some of the most hilarious signage I've ever seen, what with no removal of rocks from the beach warnings or mind the step signs in Braille.  My friend had later sent me a find he had made while getting on the train in Dublin.  Under a printed "Days without accident" by the ticket barrier someone had proudly scrawled a big 1 – not exactly something I would advertise to my customers.

My recent trip to the west coast didn't offer the same rich pickings in that regard.  There was a post with three highly creative signs that, once you'd interpreted their unusual nature, might have warned of the dangers of the sea.  The bottom one agreed most with that interpretation.  Rather conventional, it showed a crossed-out diver about to hit the water.  The middle sign was harder to read, but became clear together with the one below.  What looks like deep pools, the sign seemed to say, might have submerged rocks protruding that are invisible from above.  If you jump you might hit them and get hurt.  That's a long message for one sign to convey.

The sign at the top showed a stick figure bodysurfing a mighty wave.  There seemed to be more excitement than danger in this sign, and I started to reassess my initial interpretation.  Maybe the signs weren't warnings at all but invitations?  Next to the post, a narrow trail led into the cliff.  At the end of it someone had installed a competition diving board on top of a proper concrete foundation.  A local business sponsored the operation.  It's name was on the diving board in capital letters.  There was no more talk of submerged rocks, though with the tide out they were clearly visible below.

The sign I liked best was leaning against a shopfront in Limerick.  J.T.Spratt's advertised washed roosters, ten kilograms for only €3.99.  The shop was closed and its shutters drawn.  I was left with many questions.  Was the business selling washed roosters or offering a washing service?  How do roosters react to being washed?  Why would you want your rooster washed in the first place?

"Do you have dirty cocks?" – "No, we have washed roosters."

There was no one to answer these questions.  We continued our walk on King's Island, increasingly hastily, as heavy clouds bunched up above us.  Three days of summer had come to an end.  Before long, we hit the motorway east, hydroplaning back to Dublin through rainbows, sun and storm.

masterclass

Yesterday after work I went up to Kensington High St to unwind – have a coffee maybe or a drink and spend insane for half a burlap sack of groceries at Whole Foods, every aspiring epicure's first port of call.  The air was hot after yet another week of un-English summer and with a protest march in full swing.  Fists, slogans and shouts rose where the usual disturbance is Lamborghinis accelerating out of the Royal Garden Hotel.

This is not a place for protests.  Nothing kills prime real estate like noise and masses of common people.  But it wasn't the first protest down that street.  Fridays are for marches, ever since Gaza exploded, the numbers of protesters swelling with the body count.  I had forgotten about this and now wondered whether I'd get through at all.  The T.K. Maxx on the other side of the street seemed a world away.

The protest wasn't a march anymore.  It had come to a halt as close to the Israeli embassy as possible, not threateningly close in other words but probably in shouting distance.  The embassy sits in Kensington Palace Gardens, together with many other embassies and assorted billionaires' mansions.  Lakshmi Mittal has a second home there, as does the Sultan of Brunei.  The street itself is owned by Her Majesty – who locks the gates when things might just get out of hand a little.  It was probably at the southern gate that the speeches were made, out of my sight but within earshot.

It was it this point that I wanted to intertwine my own thoughts on the conflict, but I find this impossible to do in a coherent and balanced way.  I would never broach the subject with Israeli friends.  It's easy to dismiss what's unacceptable when you're not always on the lookout for rockets, when you didn't grow up with suicide attacks.

But I have to write something because I don't understand.  When rooting out terror is your objective, killing children and bombing homes seems a questionable strategy.  If it weren't a hundred times more powerful, the response would mirror the terror that triggered it.  It could be read as a legitimization of the means, and the last thing Hamas needs is encouragement.  If you know the enemy takes civilians as shields, you can either not care about life or adapt your approach.

The protest didn't address these issues.  It didn't present solutions either.  The protest was a gathering of like-minded people, a demonstration of dissatisfaction with something out of control.  It was ill-focused and inconsequential and wonderfully epitomized by the Stop the War Coalition whose signs were everywhere.  I couldn't figure out whether they were a coalition to stop the war or whether the War Coalition needed stopping.

It easy to be a cynic.  There's incredible suffering all around.  Hotspots flare up periodically, if not regularly.  You can read, discuss, raise your passions, fight – live active democracy, if you will – and nothing will change.  Or you can close your eyes and enjoy the benefits of living in a democracy:  pretend that sun and the sales and your salary are all that matters.  I know what the right approach is, but conscious powerlessness is hard to endure.

I went into Uniqlo to buy pajamas.  The air conditioning was turned up so high that I almost froze solid.  Outside the fight continued.  Ill-defined fundraisers sold Palestinian flags, sweatshop-made somewhere in Asia, for five quid.  Socialist workers paraded placards that mostly advertised themselves.  The call for the death of Israel was verbal only, from a man with a megaphone whose accent clearly identified him as a disinterested party.  He didn't draw a crowd.