A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 5

It has been 17 months since I last posted on this subject, which perhaps gives you a sense of how thoroughly I have been pursuing this particular personal goal.

Well, let me tell you how I have been getting on in the meantime:

1. Since my iPod packed up, I have transferred all my Michel Thomas German CDs onto my iPhone. I haven’t listened to any of them yet. By the way, Amazon are offering me £15.90 to trade the course in – and yet, I have it all in electronic form now! HA HA HA.
2. While we were in Barcelona last weekend, Elvira and I went to see Rammstein...who are German.

One of the problems I always experienced with language learning at school was that learning to read and write something is in no way a guarantee – or even particularly helpful – in learning to understand what someone is saying to you.

That made the marks I achieved in different exams somewhat erratic: explaining the C I got in AS Level French – back when that was a proper exam, not just a certificate for getting through the first half of sixth form - as the outcome of my inability to do French listening with any degree of accuracy.

So I have been honing my German listening skills by playing a lot of Rammstein. This has expanded my vocabulary into many areas left out of the pre-GCSE syllabus, like cannibalism. 

As a parent, one has to be careful about the rock music one exposes one’s kids to. I was horrified to hear Tancred sing back some Turbonegro lyrics to me after I had been carelessly murmuring them to myself.

But Rammstein have the advantage of singing in German – so that with a handful of exceptions, one can relax about the lyrical content: my kids are ENGLISH! They will NEVER speak a foreign language properly! And it is frankly hilarious to hear 2 and 4 year olds impersonating Till Lindemann booming “Amerika ist Wunderbar”.

Anyway, on to the gig review.

• Rammstein live – Awesome. Especially the keyboard player’s treadmill. I was transfixed.
• Rammstein’s audience – Old and very respectable. Lots of neatly tucked in tour t-shirts (which, I might add were priced from a minimum of 25 euros). Somehow, we ended up with tickets in a section that had been sold exclusively to middle aged Germans. The thoroughness of their jaunty familiarity with Rammstein’s more gruesome lyrics was disturbingly at odds with their general appearance.  
• Palau St Jordi – Great concert venue. It’s got balconies you can get outdoors on. Ample toilet facilities (although not as ample as La Sagrada Familia). Weirdly, the seat numbers on our row went 13, 15, 14, 16 – this was a relief as for three months I had been a little anxious about having asked for seats together but in fact getting tickets for seats 13 and 15. In the end though, I was just relieved they were real. 
  
  
  
  
  

Barcelona: It was the first time that we met

Elvira and I have just come back from a long weekend in Barcelona, which has just leapt to the top of my list of favourite cities in the world.

Here are some of my pensées arising.

More whining about airports

As I mentioned last week, coming up with blog material is – for me – dependent on having time and space to mull over an idea continuously, until it has been mulled out of all proportion.

This is why I have written so thoroughly on air travel before. There is always a lot of waiting, and there is always something absurd happening or about to happen to think about.

For example – is the whole “take your shoes off to go through the scanner” now a permanent thing? On the basis that once ever – 12 years ago - some fucknut put a bomb in his shoes, which failed to go off?

I know that real life terrorists tend not to be the brightest, but is anyone really likely to try this again – when everyone’s shoes have to go through the scanner?

As if the superiority of pretty much every other culture to the British was in need of any evidence, Barcelona airport has accommodated this state of affairs by carpeting the walkway through the scanner. That, my friends, is a real sign of civilisation.

La Sagrada Familia

This, for those of you who don’t know, is that funny looking church.

Seriously – I thought it was the most impressive building I have ever seen. It is like nothing else on earth. And it’s not even finished yet.

The exterior is simply astonishing. From a distance it looks organic – like something HR Giger would have drawn or HP Lovecraft would have written about. The towers in particular look unchristian, like something that has risen out of a crack in the ground during an earthquake. I was particularly struck by how they have "Sanctus" written around them in exactly the same font as hotels have "Marriott" written on them. 

Plastic martians come out of it

Close up though, it is as ornate and religious as Notre Dame or Chartres cathedral. Above is a picture from the Nativity facade. This is presumably the first and only turkey featured on a major religious building.

For all its organic, sensuous curves, the Nativity facade is recognisably a more-or-less conventional church door. Contrast that with the modernist Passion facade, which is terrifying in its own way. 

I have to say that, while it was still very impressive, the interior of La Sagrada Familia didn’t move me like the exterior did. My first impression was that is resembled the set of a 1960s sci-fi, particularly when I saw the lifts going up and down the towers.

But what impressed me more than anything was the sheer ambition of it. Gaudi and everyone else who has worked on it knew they would not live to see it completed. Yes – that is true of cathedral builders throughout history, but to think that 20^th century people thought like that as well? The work, I suppose, is itself a collective act of devotion – very difficult for us individualists to comprehend. And yet there it is, being built with the money from the hordes of visitors paying 13 euro 50 a head to go and look.

If you go to Barcelona, you MUST go and see La Sagrada Familia.

Barcelona itself

It’s never a fair comparison to put somewhere you go on holiday alongside somewhere you live and/or work.

But let’s do it anyway.

Barcelona has a warm welcome for sailors

The weather was beautiful. Everyone we spoke to was friendly and helpful – despite my having gone there with the belief that it was simply a matter of time until we were pickpocketed. Everything was clean. Families were doing things together. Generations and nationalities were getting along just fine together. The food was good. Nothing was overcrowded. Even the many dogs seemed polite and relaxed.

I saw none of the waddling, tracksuited urban peasants one sees everywhere in the UK. Maybe they were all at home watching “Javier Kyle” instead of wandering about public spaces like grotesque overweight zombies.

LOL: "Quim"

OK, we did see a fair sample of that uniquely Iberian phenomenon - the man with long hair up in a bun - but then even the beggars were picturesque... ;)

No-one seemed to be doing anything purely for the sake of pissing everyone else off – apart from the (mostly, but thankfully not exclusively, British) stag and hen parties.

It almost made me think that living in a city need not be a hell on earth. And the scooters!

OK, on the last night on the way home we saw (i) needles, (ii) vomit on the Metro and (iii) a broken bottle on the station steps – but the fact that this was remarkable rather than entirely commonplace seems important.

Like I say, it’s probably not a fair comparison. Tourists who jet in and do the sights for a few days only see the theme park Barcelona. I’m sure it has its problems. But my god, its best side is so much better than the best side of any city I’ve ever seen in the UK.

So THAT is where I am retiring to.

¡Visca Catalunya!

A Block of Ice

Most of my ideas for blogs come to me while I am riding my scooter. My commute gives me a good 25 minutes or so of chewing a thought up, swallowing it, digesting it through my many stomachs before finally regurgitating it to chew a bit more.

And so I feel I must blame the recent sparsity of my posting on the dismal weather we have had for WEEKS ON END NOW.

Following the ghastly experience related in The White Caterpillar trilogy earlier this year, I have become rather more wary of taking my bike out in snow and ice. And being older now than I ever have been in the past, I am finding myself less and less willing to get cold or wet unnecessarily.

So I have been taking the train a lot more recently. And I can’t just sit and think on trains. So I read.

Reading is all very well and good, but it hasn’t furnished me with that many ideas for blogs. Not ones I can pass off as my own, at any rate.

I’m on a train home from London as I write this, and I am experiencing what I suppose proper writers would call writer’s block – insofar as, in spite of having a few basic ideas for posts, I haven’t had the opportunity to masticate them properly; to grind them up between the molars of my mind into the pulpy, glutinous paste I need in order to make the ODHSNM magic happen.

I’ve started writing a couple of things, and then deleted it after a hundred words or so.

As long-time readers will attest, considerations of quality have never stopped me writing before. And so I am writing this instead to tell you all about it.

Perhaps the weather has turned and we are finally going to get some kind of spring, which will in turn see the green shoots of things to write about begin to poke their heads out of my frozen brain-soil. Or maybe I’ve just run out of decent ideas. Or maybe I’ve lost the ability to express them. Or maybe I just don’t want to do this any more.

I need to get back on my bike and find out. 

Mystery Pants

As a dog-walker, I spend a lot of time looking at the ground. On the one hand, I am trying to avoid stepping in anything unpleasant. On the other, I am trying to avoid tripping over a deranged, half-blind, half-deaf whippet who is unable (or unwilling) to walk in a straight line.

This means that I see a lot of litter. And dog shit.

Better to see it than not to see it.

But I never cease to be surprised at how many discarded items of clothing I see.

Right now, from my office, I can see a lost glove on the street. Yawn. Everybody loses gloves. That’s just carelessness or bad luck.

For someone to lose a pair of underpants (pictured) there must be a real story.

Whose pants were they?
How did they come off?
Why did they get left behind?

Here’s another pair I found on the same road.

These are not worn grey emergency pants. These are prestigious, name-brand pants (the ones at the top are Calvin Kleins, in case the waistband is unreadable). What fall from grace led to their being cast adrift?

Abandoned single shoes are commonplace in city centres. Staggering screechy lady-drunks lose them falling off kerbs. Bellowing violent man-drunks lose them misplacing a wild kick at a prone rival’s head.

But here is a woman’s leopard print top – the pattern is still just about discernible. Actually I think that's what it is. It could be another pair of pants. Possibly belonging to Tarzan. 

Whatever it is, this has been sat in the gutter at the top of a residential street I often pass along for months. 

What is the history of this lonely garment? How did it end up cast out on the street, never to be returned for? Is that the face of Jesus at the bottom right?

Oh, but that these pants could talk - the stories they would tell us. 

A Tribute to Dora the Explorer

We seem to be at the stage now where neither of my kids want to watch Dora the Explorer any more. 

Despite Tancred being a mere two years old, he has decided that it is too babyish for him.

He’s probably just copying Roger Jr on that, but it raises the prospect of waving goodbye to one kiddie programme I’ve become quite fond of.

To begin with, I was just as horrified by Dora as I was by all the other offerings of CBeebies, Nickeloden and whatnot. And yet, it soon grew on me enormously.

Not to the point where I would choose to watch it by myself obviously.

To the point where:

• It doesn’t do my head in completely.
• I will happily sing along with songs on it, even in the presence of adult visitors.
• In general, I find myself hoping that there’s another episode on next, rather than something else.

In all seriousness, Dora is a brilliant role model for all kids:

• She’s a minority-ethnic character but that’s just one aspect of her. It doesn’t define her completely. This is how kids think about “difference” and it’s how we should encourage them to carry on thinking about it.
• Similarly, she’s a girl doing traditionally non-girly things. That she’s a girl is just a fact about her, unlike 95% of other girls in kids’ media, where being a girl necessarily entails adherence to some kind of pink princess-fantasy. We have two boys and if you don’t have kids, you’d be astonished at how quickly little boys can become raving sexists. I think that Dora has had a positive on their perception of “geee-uuuuuuuurls”.
• My god, it took some getting used to, but she’s so bloody NICE! Dora never gets angry, she’s never rude and she always wins over baddies by being reasonable. I wish I could say that she’s influenced our kids in this way as well...

Of course, the voices are tremendously irritating and I’d rather my kids were a little older before the American cultural blog absorbed them fully - although having said that I don’t think the five voice actors who overdub EVERY SINGLE non-UK produced kids TV programme with British accents need any more work.

And yes, we have occasionally found ourselves in the odd situation of our kids knowing the Spanish word for something and not the English. It’s pretty weird to be told “Daddy, look an arco iris!”

But I will genuinely miss Dora the Explorer if the kids are giving up on it. For myself, I will continue to say “Oh Maaaaan!” in the manner of Swiper the Fox until the day I die. 

Post-Industrial Yorkshire

Walking my dog this weekend, I ended up in the ruins of an old mill.

It was called Buck Mill and it was on the banks of the River Aire. Seemingly, a mill of some sort had been there since the 17th century, but it fell into disuse in the late 1800s and was demolished in the 1930s.

Now, it is a half buried pile of stones, overgrown with moss and vegetation at the side of a footpath where nobody would even take a second glance.

For hundreds of years, this was where the people of the local area brought their wheat for grinding into flour. So it was the economic heart of this little corner of West Yorkshire.

By the time of the industrial revolution, it looked much like UNESCO World Heritage Site Salt's Mill a couple of miles up the waterway - but in what turned out to be a really crappy location.

The late Victorians built a bridge but it was too late for the mill. The bridge is in excellent condition for something of its age.

This is what Buck Mill looks like from the pathway to the bridge. You would not know it was there unless you took the trouble to look at the sign situated a strangely long way away from the actual site.



Buck Wood is full of huge chunks of rock (millstone grits, as it happens) and old bits of drystone wall. Apparently, there was a neolithic settlement in there thousands of years ago - although the evidence thereof today is pretty much restricted to the sort of post-holes and thoroughly mundane-looking bits of stone that archaeologists seem to get so excited about.

So it would be easy just to imagine that this ruined mill was nothing more than a natural phenomenon or yet another wall people stopped giving a toss about at some point in the past.

And yet it isn't. This is what happens to industrial heritage that stops being useful before people become nostalgic.

Working in the supremely ephemeral field of online marketing as I do, it was quite eerie walking around the practically invisible aftermath of a former phase of the UK's economy. Will we even leave this much of a trace a hundred years from now?

More to the point, what is down this mysterious hole? I didn't get any closer than this, but there is clearly a subterranean structure down there...

It was at this point that I was cursing my iPhone.

Sure, it takes good pictures, but why no zoom? Jesus, phones I had three or four years ago had zooms on their cameras!

Which is itself quite ironic, in terms of how quickly we come to take things that are quite miraculous in their own way for granted, and how unimaginable a different way of life really is.

Look at the state of the river if you want a lesson in taking things for granted.

This is a little side channel off the main Aire. When it's high, the water flows through. When it's low - as you can see - it's just a depository for all the crap that has fallen in or been thrown in upsteam.

Plastic bags look like being our generation's main legacy to future archaeologists.

And there are people living down here too. This was not actually at the mill, but a few hundred yards away.

We like to sneer at the Victorians and their class snobbery, their disregard for the poor, the squalor hidden away from respectable people. We are much more civilised, aren't we?

And yet here is a duvet in a reedbed.

Here are some burned cans of beer. This is within walking distance of my house (obviously).

I don't really know where I'm going with all this.

It was pouring with rain. It was freezing cold. That might have heightened the overall melancholy of the experience.

I just found the whole thing extremely sad. We like to think that society progresses, and yet here was evidence of it going backwards. Of traces of civilisation just being left to rot.

The only evidence that anyone is remotely concerned about what goes on down there once the joggers, dog walkers and cyclists are safely tucked up in bed was this. A fitting metaphor, I thought.

In the Night Garden of the Soul

If you are not a parent, you are unlikely to have watched even more than a couple of minutes of “In the Night Garden” – if you are even aware of its existence.

If you are, you may – as I have – sat through hours of seemingly identical episodes of this bizarre and yet (for toddlers) utterly compelling programme.

Over the years, advertisers and even programme-makers have every so often proclaimed that they have produced some sort of televisual material “for dogs”, “for cats” etc.

Supposedly, these offerings have been based on research into how the minds of pets work, so that they will appeal to them.

Quite why anyone would want to create television that appeals to creatures that (i) do not have any money to spend on goods and service advertised and (ii) have better things to do than watch TV, such as sniffing the ground or licking their testicles, is unclear.

And yet it was nevertheless done, no doubt bringing to bear the kind of “science” that makes shampoo capable of increasing hair shine by 80% and inventing Bifidus Digestivum.

Over the years, I have watched some of these programmes “for animals” and my overriding memory of them was “what the hell was that all about?” – much as I expect the reaction of most dogs and cats to have been.

The argument as to why it made no sense to me, I suppose, would have been that these things were designed to stimulate the brains of animals, which in cognitive and (presumably) phenomenological terms are very different from mine.

That then, I suppose, explains the complete incomprehensibility of “In the Night Garden” to anyone older than three and its narcotic, addictive effect on toddlers. It has been carefully designed to interface with the brains of the undeveloped in a way that leaves the adult confused, bored and liable to drift off themselves into flights of WTF? fancy.

Which is what you are about to get right now, after I watched an entire episode of this with Tancred at the weekend.

Perhaps the Night Garden is in US

It occurred to me at the outset that ITNG features a lot of Freudian motifs.

First of all – the whole thing is a dream. Each episode starts with IgglePiggle going to sleep. The Night Garden is not a place; it’s a dream state.

Take the little sail down 

Light the little light

This is the way to the garden in the night

The “way” is the method of the dreamer, a psychical roadmap not a geographical one. It is only by taking his sail down – by ceasing to resist and to strive – that IgglePiggle can approach the Night Garden.

IgglePiggle then is a figure of tragic proportions. In reality, he is:

Out on the ocean 

Far away from land

He has – like Borges in “The Circular Ruins” – dreamed himself a whole new existence. No wonder he doesn't want to go to sleep at the end - to sleep in the dream world is to return to the utter isolation of the sea. 

The three central characters – or archetypes – correspond to Freud’s tripartite division of the mind: 

• IgglePiggle is manifestly the Ego at the centre of consciousness.
• Upsy Daisy is the Id – her phallic, erectile hair; her skirt which pops up wantonly at the pull of a string; her wandering bed which “only Upsy Daisy is allowed to sleep in”; and her overwhelming desire to kiss everyone are surely proof enough that she represents a raging whirlwind of sexuality and unconscious desire.

• MakkaPakka, by contrast, with his stooped, gnomelike body and obsession with “cleaning the faces” of the other characters is clearly the Superego – the force of repression, conscience and self-control.

The Ninky Nonk, moreover, is clearly Thanatos or the death instinct. Every journey on the Ninky Nonk ends up as a terrifying hellride which all are lucky to survive and yet the characters KEEP GOING BACK ON IT.

"An unconscious sense of guilt"

At this point, my analysis begins to break down. The opposite force to the Ninky Nonk is – as everyone knows – the Pinky Ponk, which ought then to represent the life instinct or Eros. The only way I can give any justification to that theory by pointing out that it looks like a big, green, flying tit.

Eventually, one’s knowledge of a subject matter and willingness to stretch an already ridiculously overtaxed metaphor becomes exhausted and the maddeningly disorienting power of the programme drives one’s thoughts along a new track.

Tombliboos are clearly the immature form of Teletubbies. The Tombliboo larvae and hatch out after a couple of weeks as adult Teletubbies – at which point, they are carefully relocated from the night garden to Teletubbie land.

Terrifying, bloody slaughter

The principal predators in the Tombliboo ecosystem are Fimbles. A hungry Fimble that breaks into a Tombliboo bush: a bloodthirsty tornado of fang and claw ensues, which – trousers or no trousers – the Tombliboos are helpless to resist. It is one of nature’s most shocking scenes, which has yet to have been captured on film.

As you can see, it is bewildering for an adult human to watch an entire episode of “In the Night Garden”. I haven’t even touched on the Pontypines and the myriad potential meanings of “wave to the Wottingers”. Is Mr Pontypine’s detachable moustache an emblem of castration-anxiety? And what are the Tittifers really?

Beware the Night Garden – once you have been there, you may come back a different person altogether.