You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2007.
I got rained on heavily from a very great height today, had my clothes thoroughly drenched and rediscovered, as if through repressed memory therapy, that raindrops falling on your face from tall trees can really hurt. Nevertheless, I have been cycling to work for a week now and have decided that it is the best thing EVER — including episodes of Bergerac. Racing cars, boinging on to pavements — legimitately! — crossing tramtracks, generally whooshing around… it’s just wizard.
And the beauty is that the fun is open to everyone. Simply resign from your job with immediate effect, travel to Bonn and hire a bike. Cycling funness will then be yours. Actually you don’ t even have to resign. Just tell your employer/partner/primary care giver that your lower left wolf tooth premolar has erupted painfully and you will be out of action for a few days. If said employer/partner/primary care giver knows that (a) humans do not have wolf teeth and that (b) you are not a horse, use the alternative excuse that a criminal whose lengthy prison sentence for stealing valuable works of modern art and then submitting them as entries by “Jessica, aged 9 and a half” to the children’s gallery sections of Hart Beat and Art Attack was decided by you during jury service has just been released with only vengeance on his mind, forcing you to go to ground.
If I haven’t convinced you, here are some ideas for some alternative fun holidays:
- visit the open-air landmine museum of western Angola
- spend two weeks on a skiff learning to gut fish with Faroe Island fisherman
- go snorkelling in Manchester Ship Canal
- support sustainable tourism: go spearfishing with members of the Blind Association of Sri Lanka
- enjoy active holidays? Relive the Land Girls spirit with a week on an intensively-reared turkey farm!
- on a budget? Try camping in Chernobyl (watch the midges!)
- visit the Buddhist wonders of Taliban Afghanistan (limited availability)
- get back to nature on a bushcraft retreat: seven nights sleeping under a bush with Ray Mears and five former special forces officers…
Sorry, that’s offensive. How can I mock Ray Mears?
Ooh, I read something that made me optimistic about our chances for arresting global warming today. Which is nice. The UN General Assembly is holding two days of discussion in New York about climate change, urged on by Ban Ki-moon, who seems to be a good egg where climate change is concerned. A summary of the first day’s business can be found at the UN’s website, but the comments that struck me in particular were by Jeffrey Sachs:
‘Jeffrey D. Sachs, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals and Director of Colombia University’s Earth Institute, said that there was “good news and some tough news” about the climate change issue. The good news was that the costs of addressing the challenges were within reach of most countries. “If we can stop the panic”, targets could be reached well within 1 per cent of world income, he said. The bad news was that the international community had the capacity to fight tenaciously –- and endlessly –- over percentages of income, he went on. The fight for “who’s going to get off the dime” might be less important than everyone once believed. “It’s not as much money as you think.” Clearly, rich countries must pay for adaptation programmes and must make research and development available for developing countries. [...] He said he believed that the intergovernmental negotiations in September and December were going to succeed because Governments were finally going to use the one tool that could provide a breakthrough: the spreadsheet. Once negotiators started doing the arithmetic, and looking at what needed to be done in specific sectors like deforestation and to address specific industrial concerns such as power plants and automobile factories, they would find out that financing climate change was “utterly affordable and a tiny fraction of the cost of inaction”.’
The suggestion that governments might start making pragmatic decisions, weighing up costs of action against costs of inaction, is exciting. It might be repulsive that decision-makers need notional spreadsheets to persuade them that it is worth their while saving the planet, but somehow, I find a reduction of the debate to financial terms reassuring — and hopeful. When slowing climate change is expressed as a matter of investing in a certain energy source or a certain land management policy that will be more expensive in the short term but less expensive in the long term than the non-climate-friendly alternatives, it is obviously a less painful nettle for governments and business owners to grasp.
From the same report, there is a tremendous quote from an attendee from a small island developing country: “Are we just to sit around and have more luncheons on funding and public-private partnerships?” Quite so: less yak, more action. (If you haven’t read Sponge, X and Y yet, I urge you, Ban Ki-moon-like, to do so.)
Aaaargh, that reminds me: I have discovered that it costs 50 cents — that you HAVE TO PAY – to borrow a single, measly book from the library in Bonn. Gott in Hímmel!
“It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.” (anon.)
“Riding: the art of keeping a horse between you and the ground.” (anon.)
Readers, I am a wimp: after skiving last week’s lesson through ‘illness’, on Saturday I cycled to the Stables of Unluck at Pech to cancel my riding lesson scheduled for that afternoon. (Un)fortunately when I told them I didn’t think my German was good enough to continue, they happily told me they had teachers who can instruct in English instead, so I am booked in for another 30 minutes of fear and loathing next Saturday. Actually, I am pleased: I am one of life’s quitters, so it is good that at least I won’t be able to give up horse riding so easily.
On the way back I saw two animals going to the toilet. Which is nice. The first was a big brown bird. I learn that it could have been a red-throated loon or even a ferruginous pochard (I think if I ever met a man called Ferruginous Pochard I would like to marry him immediately), but I have looked at the website of a German nature group (AGON Schwerte, where I got the following photo from) and I think it might have been something called a Rotmilan:
Whatever it was, it allowed me to get quite close before it shat disdainfully and flew off. Super cool.
The second animal was a cow, which seemed to have got lost in a lane and was trying and failing to reach over barbed wire to get at some grass. It looked quite distressed (hence the going to the toilet thing, though I imagine that with cows, going to the toilet isn’t so much an indicator of stress as an indicator of a pulse), so I hope it found a way back to its ungulate friends (I keep wanting to write unguent instead of ungulate, which is extremely distressing, as you can imagine. I also like the words ruminant, enteric and belch). The cow was scratching behind its ear with its hoof, which made it look just like a bony, spotty cat.
By the way, I got back to my new home in Bonn’s Musikviertel (so called because all the streets are named after German composers) to hear, ironically, some quite awful music. It was some evil hurdy-gurdy organ stuff; the kind of creepy fairground music that is prone to give you a nosebleed even if you don’t go on the dodgems. There were some workmen outdoors and for a minute I wondered if they could be listening to this Germanica Horrifica on the radio. Suddenly I spotted an organ grinder, complete with a horrible black toy monkey, walking excrutiatingly slowly down the street. Families had come out on the pavement to pay him, presumably to get the hell away from there as soon as possible. Apparently there is a tradition for such hurdy-gurdy in Swabian folk music, but I really don’t want to know any more about it. I imagine if there is a hell, this would be the music played in the lifts on the way down.
I used to dread Sundays in Bath, they felt so dreary and suffocating*. Luckily, I don’t feel that here at all, hurrah! Technically there should be less to do, because not one shop is open on a Sunday, but I think this liberates you from the inexplicable compulsion lodged in the subconscious by clever marketing people that you really, really need to go to Homebase.
I think it also has something to do with the topography, if that doesn’t sound too stupid. Unlike Bath, it’s so flat in Bonn that it positively demands exploration: I have hired a bike (to get to work and back now that I have moved), and it’s like cycling around the corridors of an enormous hotel (not in The Shining sense, so far at least).
Yes, my weekends are my oyster (washpot?), which causes much liberal self-disgust. A few years ago I read an article with Jack White of the White Stripes, in which he said, expanding on the kinda strict philosophy behind his music, clothing etc (
), that sometimes he’d see people walking in the street eating an ice cream and think to himself, ‘what, exactly, have they done to deserve an ice cream?’ He might not be tremendous company on a trip to Blackpool, perhaps, but nevertheless for some reason I often think of that quote. It’s probably what one half of my brain asks the other, because I struggle to accept consumerism, especially in myself. Sadly, I am an ascetic trapped in a corrupt friar’s body. It is a lonely furrow.
Thus I really would like to be studying, volunteering and saving money at the weekend, but instead I am taking advantage of the fact that I have a disposable income and no dependents to live like Marie Antoinette. Well, my salary doesn’t quite stretch to ladies in waiting. Or diamonds. Maybe living like Judith Chalmers is more accurate. I read in the Guardian that, “[in the UK] the affluent middle classes have seen earnings grow more than twice as fast as inflation over the last ten years and have pulled further ahead of ordinary workers.” I don’t know how things are in Germany yet, but a quick google reveals that, “while income inequality in West Germany has generally not altered in an economically relevant way over the period 1985 to 1996, inequality in East Germany has increased after reunification. Despite this increase, inequality remains substantially higher in the western part of the country.” This does not feel right to me, but needless to say, I am happy to talk the talk but would prefer to get a taxi than walk the walk. Perhaps being less hypocritical should be my next goal.
In the meantime, realising that my weekend has been particularly slothful, I have donated some money to the Red Cross Asia Floods Appeal. So that’s all right then.
*This is not to damn Bath**, it just doesn’t ping my particular pants.
**Nor indeed to dam a bath.
(The buildings are sold separately.)
Bonjour, Somewhere-just-as-pretty-ville!
