going south

Tomorrow, my career as a detectorist will begin.  Tonight, fashionably late and enveloped by the darkness of a painful farewell, I hopped onto the train to Basel.  Thanks to the poster with schematics of every long-distance train from that platform, I had waited in the right place and got straight into the restaurant car, the best aspect of railroad travel.  Before the train had even left the station, I had ordered dinner and a beer.

Dining on the train is a pleasure from a different age.  Sitting on a proper table with a white tablecloth, a meal served on a porcelain plate and eaten with silverware, beer in a glass, and space for arms and legs – this degree of luxury can be achieved in the air only at irresponsible financial expense.  On the train it is within the reach of even those not traveling on expenses.  I opened the Borges purchased in Mannheim and waited for my order.  The train rolled through the night.

The man at the neighboring table wolfed down a bowl of chili con carne in a manner that belied his appearance.  He was tall and lean – and, in brown nylon pants and orange sneakers, dressed in the way of those who value their physical shape over the elegance of their appearance.  When he was done with his chili, he ordered rolls and Nutella in a curious two-two-three ratio.  I leaned back and glanced around, securing the beer against the kicking of the train.

In improv comedy and other jocular banter, there's a rule for the maximization of humor:  Never dissent.  Whatever the other person says or asks, agree and take it from there, inflating the ridiculousness of the initial proposal if possible.  Social interactions follow a similar paradigm; they are fueled by agreement.  When my neighbor stated with interrogative inflection that the car was rather hot, my reply that I didn't find it disagreeable at all killed our nascent conversation at once.  At this point, my meal arrived.

My neighbor wasn't fazed.  He picked up the telephone to speak to what I deduced to be his nutritionist, a late-night call out of the ordinary made necessary by his binging.  The conversation was brief and cordial, but not all was good.  My neighbor seemed thrown off-balance by words or actions unseen.  He pulled a book from his bag, leaned over to show me the cover of it, big and blue, and opened a page for me to inspect.  Sections were highlighted in neon yellow, the entire page glowed.  Then he stood up and pontificated, for everyone in the restaurant car to hear, about the tribulations of a recovering alcoholic, starting with the fact there is no such thing as a recovering alcoholic.

Alcohol never loosens its grip.  Its memory sits in your brain, ready to come back and bit at every opportunity.  And even if you're strong, even if you drink water when your neighbor enjoys a cold beer, the obsession within you might get out, making you pig out on carbs as if they were vodka-colas.  He wasn't embarrassed in the least about his performance or his confessions.  He was used to speaking up from countless AA meetings.  I was less experienced and not sure how to react.  I nodded and asked a couple of hushed questions but felt a bit out of place.  In Freiburg he got off, saying goodbye as if we had just chatted about the weather for five minutes.  The train continued south for another half hour.

Swiss German

Approached from the north, Switzerland looks a lot like Germany.  It's not as close as Austria, which came into its own only 150 years ago, but still, Switzerland shows more similarities with Germany at first glance than differences.  Radio, TV and street signs are in German, trains leave from platforms shown in the timetable, thus avoiding the scrum when they are finally announced, five minutes before departure, at Victoria Station or Gare de Lyon, and bakers sell tasty bread that the locals proceed to have for dinner with cheese and cold cuts.  To a German, it looks as if it could double for home.

The Swiss would probably disagree.  They are known for their independence and the pride they take in their idiosyncrasies.  Their love of local specialties and a good meal out couldn't be further from the German cheap-is-good mentality.  What they speak among themselves is probably more distant from German than Dutch and certainly more than Yiddish.  It is entirely incomprehensible to me.

The border region is intertwined to such a degree that it's hard to discern what's one country and what's the other.  On my trip to my future home this morning, I had to change trains in Basel.  Basel is in Switzerland, but one of its train station is on German territory.  I hopped onto another train that noisily rumpled along and up the thinning Rhine, on the German side.  I was in Germany all the way until the last regional train, a commuter towards Zurich, but the border patrol checked passports before Basel already.

Plenty of Germans work in Switzerland but reside on the German side, never mind the suffocating taxes and mandatory insurances in Germany.  Cheap rent and money saved on groceries make up for that.  The Swiss, in contrast, come to Germany to have their cars repaired or their teeth.  The recent revaluation of the Franc has only intensified that.  To foreigners, prices in Switzerland are extortionate.  Paying the largest coin in common circulation for a double espresso is all right in the EU and a bargain in the US, but if that coin is worth nearly five euros, it hurts.

Once I've lived in Switzerland for any amount of time – I presume a few days will suffice – the differences between Germany and Switzerland will come into focus.  But for now I cling to what I read in Swiss Watching,  a collaborator's parting gift in which an Englishman describes his impressions after living in the country for a few years.  Almost every time he contrasts Switzerland with England, I feel at home – because I've contrasted Germany with England in the same way.

last day

On Monday, the population of London rose to its highest value in history, 8.615 million.  On Tuesday, it was one fewer.  I jumped onto a plane towards the continent and was gone.  As the plane rose over my former home, I felt relieved, probably mostly due to the dissipation of the tension of previous day.  When East London came into view and then, increasingly distantly, the Thames Estuary, a pinch of loss spiced my farewell, but my heart wasn't heavy.

The day before had been exhausting.  I didn't do much all day, but I had never been so tense over such a long time.  I'm not one to grind teeth, but when I sat in the pub at the end of the day with the last Doom Bar in front of me, my jaws hurt.

In the morning, I carried a third of a metric ton of belongings down to the ground floor and stored them in the hallway that is the building's fire escape.  Collection was promised to take place between 9 and 5:30.  That window was a bit wide for my taste.  Around ten, I called the local office of the shipment company to see how they were getting on with the job.  The lady was responsive to my predicament but of little help.  I'd like to have the collection time narrowed down a little because I have no food in the house and need to step out to eat, I explained.  She said 1 to 4 but there was doubt in her voice.

In the morning I had to stay in the flat anyway.  I needed to finish cleaning kitchen and bathroom.  According to the gospel of Perl, laziness is a virtue.  The desire to minimize work makes one efficient, leading to better code and a better life.  I see the value of laziness, but my philosophy is procrastination.  Doing things the last minute avoids unnecessary work.  Something done prematurely might be superseded or become obsolete.  Something done when it's due is done at the right time.  The later one starts with a task, the less time it takes to finish it, simply because more time isn't available.

I had finished taping up all the boxes only the night before.  I had hoovered the living room and the bedroom, but the rest was a disaster.  At noon, the property administrator was supposed to stop by to inspect the flat and give his verdict on the likely distribution of the deposit between me and the company.  In the half hour before noon, I started seeing real progress.  The bathroom came to life, the kitchen looked better.  With ten minutes to go, all was done.  It would have been a wasted ten minutes, except I had nothing else to do but wait.  And then the admin was two hours late.

Neither cleaning nor the admin had anything to do with my tension.  The tension came from the slow ticking of time and the immobility that this forced me into, waiting for something to happen while hoping that it hadn't happened yet.  The tension was then exacerbated by what I saw outside my front window.  North End Road runs a market every day except Sunday, with fruit & veg stalls all the way from the Lillie Road roundabout to St. John's Church.  With the stalls, wheelie bins, rogue parking and deliveries to local businesses, there's hardly any parking in the street during the day.  Where would the lorry fit?

I had booked the move on the cheap, through a third-party company that collects payment and then tenders the shipment to companies more suited to the task.  I was told that the driver would not carry a phone.  Be by the door at all times, I was warned.  If the driver cannot get to you, if the driver cannot park, I understood, he would abandon the collection.

My doorbell was broken, but I had left a note on the door with the request to bang hard and my phone number just in case.  Upstairs, I left my door open and got worried every time I turned the vacuum on or the hot water with its explosive boiler.  When the cleaning was done and the admin had come and gone, all that was left for me to was pace between door and window like a tiger in a cage.  Looking outside was not uplifting.  Parking spaces opened up from time to time, but only momentarily.  And with every minute that passed, I got more convinced that I had already missed the collection, that the driver had gone by and seen that there was no way of stopping in front of my building and just continued driving.  It was way past two, five hours into the initially specified collection period.

It got so late that I made peace with the failed collection attempt.  No need to get worked up, I told myself.  Won't change a thing.  Better come up with a plan B.  I dug up my car sharing membership card in case I'd needed a van to move the boxes myself.  It should be possible the next morning to find storage and leave the boxes there before rushing to the airport to fly out, I schemed, before running back to the window to not miss the collection lorry, should it drive by that very moment.  The fruit sellers were praising their produces by the price, as always.  A pound a bowl, a pound a bowl.

By three o'clock I couldn't take it anymore.  I went outside and stayed there.  It was cold, but there was no point staying inside.  I remained a tiger, pacing from the Goose along the bus stop next to it on one side of the road and back on the other in a neat rectangle, watching traffic, counting vans and buses but never getter further than one before abandoning the task due to preoccupations and fogginess of mind.  By half past three I was getting cold.  By four I started to shiver.  Then I got a call.

It was the driver, who had just driven by.  I directed him back and occupied a double parking spot that had mysteriously opened just a few moments earlier.  It was the only time during the day that this much space was available, and it was dearly needed.  When the driver arrived, he didn't do so in a van.  It wasn't a moving van either.  It was full-size lorry, and it barely fit into the spaced I had claimed.  I moved a wheelie bin into the road, which was half blocked by the parked truck.  Five minutes later the boxes were loaded and the driver on his way.  All worries fell off.  I needed a beer.

In the Goose, the late afternoon crowd was having a good time.  I got my last Doom Bar and joined two tiny octogenarian ladies who bantered and laughed, a wheelchair parked inconspicuously next to the table.  One table over, a rough-and-tumble couple, with stained clothes, wild hair and an acrid smell, were having their beers like everyone else.  Further back, three Chelsea fans in blue garb a few days away from the next game had their eyes on the TV screen that followed the inaction of the closing of the winter transfer window live.  The ubiquitous loner with a smartphone, a pensioner with white hair in this case, couldn't care less.  He stared at his little screen as if mesmerized.

trust and consequences

An hour from now, I'll be out of work. With the end of January, my employment at Imperial ends. At almost the same time, my five-year tenancy at North End Road is coming to an end. Getting my life into boxes turned out less difficult than I had feared. I don't have all that much stuff after all, despite the best efforts of my friends who kept giving me leaving presents.

Getting rid of furniture took a while but wasn't all that difficult either. Some things I put on Gumtree. People then called me and offered not only to pick them up from my flat but also reward me monetarily for the privilege. That was good, but it didn't work for everything. Other things I put on Freecycle. This community might be rather small, despite even me heaving heard about it. My shoe rack and my stereo rack were picked up by the same person, about a week apart. I wonder if she'll react to the ads I've posted just now.

Much to my relief, the most difficult sell wasn't the sofa I had brought over from France. It was already broken when I bought it second-hand nearly ten years ago and then almost broke Flucha's back when we hauled it up the stairs to my flat. I dreaded the effort of getting rid of it, but a couple who had just moved into a flat were happy to give me a hand and then drive off with Klippan to make their new home homelier.

My dining table, solid wood and with four matching chairs, was more persistent. The ad languished on Gumtree for a good week with no response. Then, today, there were two expressions of interest. Heather was quicker and definitely more eager. She called, asked for my bank details, and five minutes later an amount matching the asking price showed up in my account. In return, I gave her my address and told her when to pick up the set.

The speed of the banking transaction should be enough to take my breath away, but what really stunned me was the trust this woman put in me. On Ebay, at least there's feedback. You can have some confidence that the person behind the ad is legitimate. With Gumtree, there's absolutely nothing. I could be a complete scam. There might be no table, or at least not at the address I gave.

And yet, this woman was ready to part with her money on nothing more than a phone conversation, nothing more than my word, essentially. In times when religiously confused nutters rampage through Paris to fight the pen with guns, it's most comforting to know that civilization has not died. Maybe I should buy Heather chocolates for being such a good neighbor.

boxed up

With seven boxes filled, I can see the light.  I spent all day today transferring the nice things I own from their assigned places in my flat to the insides of large white cardboard boxes.  The pattern was always the same.  Some padding (blankets or sheets) for peace of mind, a thick layer of books as a foundation and random stuff to make volume.  Seven boxes are filled now.  I didn't write down precisely what I put where, which is going to come back to bite me, but at least I can now imagine an end to this process.  When the boxes were delivered earlier this week and I set the first one down on the carpet and started contemplating their eventual content, I almost started crying because it was too much.

How did I do it last time?  I don't remember the move Grenoble to London seven and a half years ago, except that I drove a van through France and then was blasted across the Channel by a supersonic ferry.  Or something like that, it's all been written down.  What hasn't been written down is how I packaged my stuff and what I took.  I remember that I gave a lot away, but I also rented a van and I filled it with junk.

Back then, I think, I just went to the ATAC grocery store and collected produce boxes that they didn't need anymore.  Into these boxes, I piled me stuff.  There was a box for shirts, a box for CDs, a bunch of boxes for books, and a box or two for khakis.  My stereo and speakers had their own boxes – how convenient.  The bike, mattress and furniture were piled on top.  It was easy.  By first approximation, I just threw everything I had into the van and drove off.

This time around, this won't do.  I'm not driving, even though a friend volunteered in case I needed company.  But it would be too much of a hassle.  I would have to get the van back to the UK and then fly to Germany.  Might as have someone else do the driving – and save money and time in the process.

This someone else is a company that does shared-load removals.  I'm supposed to fill the boxes they delivered, and they will come to pick them up when they're ready.  They will go on a lorry when there's space.  To Germany, this should only take a few days.  The catch is that I pay by the box.  Thus the task is not to put kitchen utensils into one box, socks into another and tools, easily retrievable, into a third.  The challenge is to fit 30 kg into each box, and mix and match heavy and light items to get away with the fewest boxes.

I ordered twelve boxes.  Filled to the brim, they will hold 360 kg.  This is a third of a ton.  How can one person have a third of a ton of possessions?  It makes me dizzy to even think about this.  I stupefies my mind that I will only stay below the limit if I, well, limit myself.  I'm not talking about the furniture, which is too big to go into the boxes anyway.  But Oxfam will take a special delivery of books, my clothes with make the poor in Africa happy – and destroy the local textile industry – and most small electrical appliances will go.  Even so, the first seven boxes are full already.  Each one of them weighs at least 28 kg.  Leaving room for error in the bathroom scale that I bought a few days ago, this is as far as I dared to go.  Now there are five empty boxes left – and so many things in my flat.

radio four

When I started college, way back when, I purchased a CD radio to keep myself entertained.  Those were simpler times.  The mp3 algorithm had just seen the light of day, but it hadn't made music ubiquitous yet, and I didn't have a computer anyway.  Sitting in front of one at the university computing center for the first time, I was quickly foiled because I had never encountered a scroll bar before.  I had no idea how to get the content of the window I didn't see.

The CD radio was compact, white and had womanly curves, presaging the resurgence of Apple by style by a good five years.  It was beautiful, but I realized quickly that I didn't like radio all that much and that I'd like my CDs with proper sound.  A month of two after I bought it, the CD radio was on its way to the bin when I crammed my HiFi footprint stereo into my little dorm room.

The radio got a second lease on life when my grandmother's aging system died a few years later.  I was glad to part with it, and she happy to have music.  She even started buying CDs.

Years passed.  I went to the US, graduated, and moved to France.  My grandmother had upgraded to something more sophisticated that could, inexplicably, play DVDs.  I took the CD radio back but didn't use it much.  French radio didn't agree with me, and for music I had the stereo.  Then I moved to the UK.

It was at that point, when the little sound cloud was almost twelve years old, that it started to shine.  Sitting in my kitchen atop the fridge, it was and still is, playing Radio 4 for me in the morning and when I get back home from work.

From looking at the program, you'd think that Radio 4 couldn't be more boring.  It's full of news and talk and reports from Parliament.  It's politically correct, ostentatiously impartial and painfully inclusive, catering to a zoo of disenfranchised minorities, like the blind, women and gardeners.

Maybe I've grown old, but I don't mind the slowness of the programs.  And I positively enjoy the quirkiness   Racing tips, any one?  The shipping forecast?  The self-deprecation and the feeling that everyone is a big family because most programs have run for decades, the voices of the anchors engrained in the audience. The replacement of a retiring morning show host with someone new a while back wasa jolting experience, like bumping into a stranger of menacing conduct in a dark alley.

I don't think it's too much to say that Radio 4 is the soul of Britain, more essential to the nation than the Queen.  Radio 4 is such an integral part of society that if Radio 4's Today program is silent for three mornings in a row (and superiors on land can't be reached), commanders of the Trident submarines are instructed to bring out the nukes and strike for there must have surely been a murderous attack on Britain.

I take a pass at the Archers, though some say it was only to broadcast this "everyday story of country folk" that the BBC was established in the first place and that everything else   Doctor Who, Top Gear, various talent shows, you name it   is afterthoughts, but listen to almost anything else.

Used to listen, anyway.  My time in the UK is now coming to a definite end.  With the move only weeks away, it was time to say goodbye.  I put the CD radio on Freecycle and handed it over, earlier this evening, to a recently arrived immigrant with a colorful clothes and a patchy command of the English language.  He could do worse than listening to Radio 4.

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.