A Pleasant Saturday for a Peasant in Disguise
I had one of those days today that is wonderful without any reason.
Absolutely nothing happened. I woke well, refreshed, and showered. I ate breakfast in the kitchen, and played a game of chess with my brother, accepted my resounding defeat with equanimity, and then I read the news.
I like the German news – especially Die Zeit, and Süddeutscher Zeitung – I like the way they write, and I like that they have long, in-depth articles, and will express an opinion but do so without being polemic. I fumbled through the politics and then got engrossed in an article about a man – a history teacher from the US – who has been searching for pirate’s treasure in the Seychelles almost all his life, an obsession he inherited from his father. The bounty is hundreds of millions of euros, and he has the cryptic clues that the French pirate threw to the crowd at his beheading two centuries ago. The pirate was real, the loot stolen from a real ship, the encrypted maps are authentic, and the story of the search quite fantastic.
By this stage it was lunch, so I lunched. Then I left the house. The day was balmy for March, the bright blue sky that feels higher than it does in Australia, and the bright European sun of spring that is completely harmless, magnanimously imparting energy and warmth, not peeling the skin from the bones and parching vitality into lethargy, as it does back home. On the way to the city, I walked past the trees in Katharinenviertel whose trunks are covered with ivy and which always reminds me of Papua New Guinea, and makes me feel incongruous for being here in Germany at all.
I walked past people and people walked past me. A young kid with long hair and a skateboard, androgynous, and oblivious to the immensity of the world. An elderly lady hobbling along, almost bald, thin wisps of white hair and the permanent worried expression of the aged who struggle to walk, struggle to get into the bus, struggle to shop, struggle to hear what people are saying, to read the writing on the box, to talk into a smartphone without taking a picture of their ear.
There were many other people, the small-city-weekend-crowd of anonymous well-to-does, dressed in a comfort-zone of fashion where plaid jackets and scarves are so well matched with good quality leather shoes that the whole outfit is instantly forgettable – they are the sensible, comfortable, established masses of petite bourgeois which is so easy to scoff at but to which I of course belong, unemployment and lack of fashion notwithstanding.
Scoff, though, I did, as is my arrogant wont. I was detached from the people around me, but happy – they were a benevolent scurry around me. It occurred to me that many people may have had exactly the same thoughts about me. I got a coffee and found a spot by the river in the sun, under the grand old trees lining the avenue, bare limbs branching into the sky and newly sprouting flowers – a spot down below the mill, just up from a bridge where the pissing statue used to stand. I sat on my bench and savoured my coffee and I read a book and I wrote a few little thoughts to my family on a couple of old postcards I’d found. After some pleasant hours, I walked home.
An uneventful ordinary middle-class weekend day in which I felt – with no real reason – entirely contented.
I like the German news – especially Die Zeit, and Süddeutscher Zeitung – I like the way they write, and I like that they have long, in-depth articles, and will express an opinion but do so without being polemic. I fumbled through the politics and then got engrossed in an article about a man – a history teacher from the US – who has been searching for pirate’s treasure in the Seychelles almost all his life, an obsession he inherited from his father. The bounty is hundreds of millions of euros, and he has the cryptic clues that the French pirate threw to the crowd at his beheading two centuries ago. The pirate was real, the loot stolen from a real ship, the encrypted maps are authentic, and the story of the search quite fantastic.
By this stage it was lunch, so I lunched. Then I left the house. The day was balmy for March, the bright blue sky that feels higher than it does in Australia, and the bright European sun of spring that is completely harmless, magnanimously imparting energy and warmth, not peeling the skin from the bones and parching vitality into lethargy, as it does back home. On the way to the city, I walked past the trees in Katharinenviertel whose trunks are covered with ivy and which always reminds me of Papua New Guinea, and makes me feel incongruous for being here in Germany at all.
I walked past people and people walked past me. A young kid with long hair and a skateboard, androgynous, and oblivious to the immensity of the world. An elderly lady hobbling along, almost bald, thin wisps of white hair and the permanent worried expression of the aged who struggle to walk, struggle to get into the bus, struggle to shop, struggle to hear what people are saying, to read the writing on the box, to talk into a smartphone without taking a picture of their ear.
There were many other people, the small-city-weekend-crowd of anonymous well-to-does, dressed in a comfort-zone of fashion where plaid jackets and scarves are so well matched with good quality leather shoes that the whole outfit is instantly forgettable – they are the sensible, comfortable, established masses of petite bourgeois which is so easy to scoff at but to which I of course belong, unemployment and lack of fashion notwithstanding.
Scoff, though, I did, as is my arrogant wont. I was detached from the people around me, but happy – they were a benevolent scurry around me. It occurred to me that many people may have had exactly the same thoughts about me. I got a coffee and found a spot by the river in the sun, under the grand old trees lining the avenue, bare limbs branching into the sky and newly sprouting flowers – a spot down below the mill, just up from a bridge where the pissing statue used to stand. I sat on my bench and savoured my coffee and I read a book and I wrote a few little thoughts to my family on a couple of old postcards I’d found. After some pleasant hours, I walked home.
An uneventful ordinary middle-class weekend day in which I felt – with no real reason – entirely contented.
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