Tag: Germany

Fade into love. Repeat.

Fade into love. Repeat.

Another month, another plane ride to Germany. Like the George Clooney film “up in the air” I pretty much know exactly how to get through airport security without ever getting my bag (or myself) searched. But, boy, can I spot those who are going to get caught out. Like a clockwork mouse I know exactly where to go, the quietest and best place to get a coffee at the airport and exactly what time to get on the plane and the best place to sit (3A if you must ask). I know exactly what the Ryan Air air stewards are going to say, they stick to their script like robots. Once we land I head to the EU only section wave my Irish passport through in Germany so avoid all the hassle of passport control interrogating non-EU British people (why are you here? where are you staying? show me your return ticket?) . In actual fact I can’t be bothered to renew my British passport, I’ll stick to Ireland. In another country I effortlessly slip into my other life – my German life, where it’s just me and two teenage boys, causing havoc in the controlled German cities with only a spaghetti eis to keep our dreams alive. Late nights, early mornings, walking walking walking looking for fun wherever we might find it.

Then, before I know it, I’m home again and life is stable. it’s school runs, drama and music clubs, baking cookies, reading Haffertea hamster books and nursery rhyme records spinning with crazy girls dancing and stepping on lego. Days off school because “it’s boring” as life moves pretty fast….when you’re 6 years old.

Meanwhile and mysteriously there’s still music and books and art and love. Driving home from the airport the other month the radio was playing an incredible song by someone called CMAT. It caught me off guard and I had to stop the car to experience the full blazing effect. I’ve now bought her cassette, it’s rad. She’s rad. Everyone should support her. This is the song

The Welcome Wagon are one of those special bands, so beautiful and tender yet as they have only released 3 albums in about 15 years, any new release is to be savoured and appreciated like the piece of art it is. I was lucky enough to get given a copy of their latest album – Esther – on my birthday. Every song is magnificent. It was hard to pick one, but I went for this

Another song by somebody I’ve never heard of is I can’t get my head around you by Billie Marten. This is another song I heard on the radio late one night driving home fro the airport, it’s perfect for late night confusion – something I’m prone to – and I just dig the gentle breeze and laidback vibes I get from this track.

The final song is a gloomy as hell, it’s probably one of the most depressing albums of all time. All about a broken marriage. Old Frank Sinatra is stuck in a boring town trying to raise 2 kids on his own and his wife has left him. There is no happy ending in this album, only more heartache when Sinatra realizes he will never see his beloved wife again and life aint got much meaning anymore. So, if you’re feeling kind of emotional it might not be the best time for this music, but sad songs are my friends. Enjoy…if that’s the right word…each song is a masterpiece, and I guarantee you won’t get through it without noticing your eyes getting a little bit moist. If you thought you knew Frank Sinatra thing again….

I’ve been reading a couple of quite extraordinary books recently. First one is Summer before the Dark, a snapshot of a little seaside town in Belgium where writers and intellectuals (including the brilliant Stefan Zweig and the hopelessly flawed Joseph Roth) spend one last summer together in 1936 with the world falling apart around them and their dreams of a united liberal and free Europe evaporating day-by-day. It reads like a novel, it makes you feel you’re sitting their at a cafe watching Roth get drunk and Zweig pretend everything will be ok. Throw in a few crazy eccentrics thrown in too for good measure. Best book I’ve read for quite a while. After this book is done I’m going to finally start Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss”

Zweig (l) and Roth (r) frenemies

Back in the early 90’s I got really into Star Trek – the next generation as a tween kid, I liked the weird kind of intellectual aspect of it, and the slightly odd romances and loneliness of the characters. I also dug the little fun things like a machine that would make you any meal you wanted instantly appear, and a virtual reality holiday deck. So I was strangely happy when I saw old Picard was back on tv. I’m a bit slow as it’s been out a couple of years now, but I’m starting at season 1. It’s really very much in the spirit of the star trek stuff and it’s pure escapism at it’s best.

That’s all. Keep on dreaming of a better tomorrow 🙂

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Adventure is waiting

bbIt’s been an incredible tough few months not being able to excitedly jump on a train or plane (like Betsy here on the left!) every month to go and see my kids over in Germany. I was just about getting use to them moving over there back last August when this pandemic struck in March here in the UK. So whilst I’ve cautiously booked a trip next month i’m still getting through the days. Still there have been some special moments – sending typewritten letters to each other, telephone calls, silly postcards, fun little parcels, skype calls and I’m now recording a book on cd I hope to finish next week to send accross to them. It’s a Betsy Byars novel Craacker Jackson, and I’ve loved recording it so much it’s made me realize just how fortunate I was to discover this fantastic author back when I was 12. If 16 is the perfect age to read Catcher in the Rye, then 12 must be the perfect age to read Betsy!
I was lucky enough to not just have a bookshop at my school, but also to have my parents put in fen pounds every term onto my account there – easily enough for a choose your own adventure book and a Garfield comic which was pretty much all I got. Still, once in a while I’d try something different. I think I just thought this Betsy Byars book Cracker Jackson had a cool cover with a kid on a bike, and I thought the author had a cool name too. Those days it didn’t take much to impress me. The book itself blew me away, I’d never read anything like that before – it was nbb2ot just that it was funny and story was believable and exciting, but the way she wrote! Wow, it blew me away. I’d never read anyone writing about people like me, kids whose parents were divorced, who felt like a loser and had a kind of odd family, and who felt always slightly out of the loop with the cool kids but who worried about being cool and funny a little too much. Her dialogue is spot on, and even now reading it for the first time in 30 years it feels as fresh and real as ever.
My school bookshop didn’t have any other Betsy Byars books, for all I know I got the only copy. But over the next couple of years I got a few more – at libraries and birthday and Christmas presents –  The burning questions of Bingo Brown. The TV Kid. The Computer Nut.  The cool thing is that no matter what the subject was about – you knew it was going to a fantastic read because it was a Betsy Byars book. I remember ripping open The Computer Nut on Christmas day “Oh cool, a Betsy Byars book!” and I always experienced that same adrenaline rush opening the book and reading the first few paragraphs.
We never read anything like Betsy at school in my pre-teen years. We read things like Day of the Triffids and Animal Farm, which whilst enjoyable to a degree never really got my heart racing. I was always suspicious of anything we had to read at school for it meant you’dbb3 not only have to read it out loud in turns in class, but write some essay about it too. Betsy was someone I could read – or even better persuade my mum to read to me – and it was like reading about people I might know and hang out with.

I was just doing a bit of research for this blog, and I found out Betsy died in Feb at the age of 91. I had no idea she was still around and writing books. She seemed a tad eccentric, living in a cabin on an airstrip so she could just fly off on her plane whenever she felt like it. I guess that’s cool, even if it sounds a little crazy! Anyway, she was a very rare writer, not many can actually write for the pre-teen market with such style and wit. Literary critics say she is one of the best children’s writers of all time. So, go and check out her books now, read them now or give ’em to your kids. Let’s keep her books in print, for recording this book for my kids now I tell you the books haven’t dated at all – those themes of vulnerability and confusion on the cusp of teenage life will never fade no matter what the world looks like these days, and kids today need her as much as I did back at the end of the last Century 😉

lockdown love

Well, last time I wrote this in January I said it’s been the strangest year I’d ever known, so seems likely this one will easily top that! Before all this craziness I was about to start a new blog about my little life here looking after three wild kids under five, and my trips to Germany to see my other two slightly bigger but just as wild kids. So that kind of got scrapped, because nobody – and I mean nobody – wants to read a weekly blog with some jaded guy going on about missing his kids in Germany, and listening to a scratch Larry Norman “I wish we’d all been ready” every day crying into his burnt porridge….

So instead, I’ll just stick with wordsandguitars , but yes it’s absolutely heart-breaking to lose hopping on the train (boo to nasty airplane pollution!) pretty much every month to spend a glorious few days with my kids across the channel. Every day when I wake up it’s the very first thought in my mind. I can’t even write a throw-away poem about feeling sad because I just don’t have the focus. So…with that in mind :-

I cherish the simplicity of life here now. Having nowhere to go. No plans. No work. We are lucky to live in an extraordinary secluded little spot, surrounded by countryside on our doorstep. Writing this looking out from the bedroom window at the rolling hills, it calms me and thrills me. Spending all day with three little children is intense but I’ve never seen them so happy.

Here are my highlights, in no order

Tblog1he cool quranatine – this is a ridiculously long radio show put together by the always-entertaining Henry Rollins. It’s pretty much 4 hours of stories and rare gems and music by little punk bands I’ve never heard of. You can dip in and out of it whenever you feel like, I tend to put it on when I’m baking yet another batch of peanut cookies!

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newspapers – I no longer bother to really listen to the news, like I use to in the “old days”. I’d go crazy if every hour I was reading the latest updates. I tend to listen to a bit of the one o clock radio news but that’s about it . However 3 days a week we get a a delivery of either The Guardian or The Times. The newspaper girl drops it off into our letter box as the morning birds start singing, and what could be better than starting your day with a cup of coffee and flicking through the paper. Of course I don’t get to actually read it properly until the kids are asleep…

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Letters – sure sure, I use skype and facetime and all that to chat away to friends and the kids in Germany, I also love using the landline telephone but nothing quite beats a written letter. Most of the time I use the typewriter, and the post being a bit slower these days somehow just makes the whole experience that much enjoyable. Somebody says “hey, I wrote you a letter and posted it today” and then for the next week or so you’re checking the post to see if it’s arrived. Simple pleasures.

Reading – so many great books around, at the moment I’m reading the swirling “around the world in 80 trains” by the awesome Monisha Rajesh, Anne Tyler’s latest “redhead by the side of the road”, peanuts comics, and Carrie Brownstein’s (sleater kinney) “hunger makes me a modern girl” All well worth checking out this spring.

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Baking/Cooking – In the good old days, just weeks ago, I tended to do a bit of baking ever so often with my little 3 year old who always loves baking but these days it’s become pretty much part of the daily routine. I guess we go to the supermarket so infrequently we don’t really have biscuits and cakes in the house anymore from the shop, so we are just baking them. Making our way through the be-ro cook book. We get a lot of vegetables too from a nearby farm, so always cooking something healthy too.

blog5Games – when the kids are tucked away, and dreaming of little bear or star wars it’s time for scrabble and music quizes with a candle flicking away by the board, and a record spinning in the background and if you’re lucky a cup of filter coffee and some organic chocolate.

Stay safe and do the right thing.

Peace xoxo

 

 

 

The politics of hate

No music today, instead I’m going to write a little bit about the American election funfair. It’s so silly, it’s a joke isin’t it? I mean Donald Trump, the “anti-establishment figure” promising a “revolution”. Are you for real? Since when did this become the message? This nutcase was born with the silver spoon, inheriting somewhere between 40-200 million from his dad. We’re not looking at the American dream now. He’s not Bill Clinton, who grew up in poverty white-collar trash to become president.

Trump has spent his life making dodgy deals after dodgy deal, gone bankrupt and exploited others, including the government. He’s riding the capitalism freak-storm and treating people who don’t agree with him like shit. He’s paranoid, unpredictable and plays the aggressive guy to “make America strong again”. Even though America is one of the richest and most successful countries in the world, and still has staggering global influence and prestige. Oh, let’s not forget his views on immigrants, banning Muslims and Mexicans. That’s before we even get to the allegations of rape from his x-wife,  whom he seems to have paid off. Want to know more? Try this.

it goes without saying I’d vote for Bernie Sanders. I love that line “Nobody working 40 hours a week should be living in poverty”. It’s powerful but the fact I’m for Bernie is so obvious I’m not going to write about him, but instead I will write about the Republican candidate John Kasich.

If you’re right-wing, Trump isn’t going to help you. Ted Cruz is frankly insane and unstable so forget him. No, you need to get out there and campaign and vote for John Kaisch. Ok, this guy met Richard Nixon when he was back at college, but don’t hold that against him. He’s centre-right I guess, on board with lots of cool Obama polices, and the Tea Party crowd hate him as he’s too liberal for them. He talks a lot about helping those with mental illness and addiction, and he seems to generally care for vulnerable people.

Ok I can’t help it, there are many things I think he’s wrong. His idea of energy, oil, cutting welfare, lower taxes for the wealthy. But then that’s why I support Bernie, but you know, the left doesn’t always win. I’m into discussion, not blind opposition. I think Kaisch is the guy for the “other side”, he’s certainly impressed me. I guess for us living in Europe, he’s like a John Major type. I guess that doesn’t sound very exciting, but I’d rather have him as president than that clown Trump.

Sad news to end about the Independent newspaper closing down next month. I’ve been buying it for years. I’m slightly concerned now the only choice for left politics is the Guardian. The Independent had some great articles, some great writers. I still pick up the “I” paper from time-to-time, but I do like the more substantial articles and in-depth analysis you got in the Independent. I won’t bother with the “internet only” version, and I doubt many people will. Huffington Post is more than enough for me.

If you’re still wondering about the US election, there was a fascinating radio program this week on BBC radio 4 by PJ O’Rourke, it’s funny and O’Rourke is as always brilliant at this stuff.

It’s half term now and I’m off to Germany.

xo