Years ago we drove across Belgium, through what was then, West Germany and East Germany and on into Czechoslovakia.  Back in that time, we were scarily behind the Iron Curtain as soon as we had left behind the jolly 'oom-pa-pah' music blasting out from one of the offices at the West German border-point.  The East German border guards gave us a span of time to travel across their country so we had to arrive within the specified time at the exit border in order to transfer into Czechoslovakia, otherwise they came looking for you.  That was pretty nerve-wracking, and we prayed we didn't break down, or have any other kind of adventure during our frantic drive across.
Up to that point, our trip travelling with our three year old daughter had been sunny and exciting.  I remember us deviating from the auto-ban to try to find somewhere to buy lunch, and subsequently driving towards a beautiful Bavarian chalet restaurant, set a little way from the road surrounded by shrubbery and tall trees.  It's frontage was completely festooned with scarlet geraniums, cascading in froths so wonderful that even now, I have only to close my eyes to conjure-up their ruby delight-fullness.  We clambered stiffly from the laden car stretching out our achy limbs to wander inside. The place was empty of people, but all the tables seemed dressed for a feast.  Presently we were attended by two lovely ladies, who gently informed us that the restaurant was closed that day for a wedding party.  However they were so kind, taking my little daughter by the hand they motioned for us to follow them through into a small back room just off the kitchens.  There to prepare a delicious pork schnitzel for the three of us, even though they were closed and must have been really busy.  Just as we were leaving the bridal party arrived, amazingly, a stunningly beautiful bride in the most gorgeous wedding dress,  all billowing and rustling carried by an ecstatic bridegroom, both of them surrounded by a gaggle of laughing,happy people, it was so romantic!
 Imagine then the contrast, between that friendly and welcoming sojourn and the frightening experience of us reaching the East German/Czechoslovakian border.  Darkness had fallen by the time we drove up to the metal barriers and we were dazzled by the starkness of the massive overhead  arc-lights.  Snow was falling, an icy wind catching the flakes, swirling them about like swarms of midges below the blue-white, starkly beaming lights.  A soldier in a grey-blue worsted overcoat strode up to the car and ordered my husband to get out with our papers.  Meanwhile another soldier angled a heavy, long handled mirror beneath the car, whilst two others, both in their bulky worsted overcoats,  fur edged hats and heavily armed with guns, accompanied by Alsatian dogs snarling at their leashes, moved this way and that peering into the car.  This being not that long after The Ipcress Files film and James Bond it was mighty intimidating and later we were told they could have made us empty the whole car of its contents, searching for contraband goods or stowaways.  Most likely because it was late at night, midnight, in a snow storm and maybe our small daughter being asleep in the back of the car made them show a little compassion, who knows?   Eventually after a long wait and anticipating all sorts of scenario's.... would we disappear into some dungeon to be brusquely interrogated? Never having been to an Iron Curtain country we weren't used to being in the vicinity of guns, never mind soldiers! However, thankfully we were handed back our passports and papers and motioned roughly on through the striped metal barrier.
 How can I explain what was on the other side?  I still clearly remember my first sight of that steely-blue-grey moonlit strip of concrete road, either side lined with massed rolled up barbed wire and wooden barriers, whilst beyond deserted buildings loomed in the night, their window's glass-less, dense black pits in broken-down abandoned dwellings.  Great pot-holes and rubble strewn everywhere and not a soul in sight.  Just the moonlit empty concrete-blocked road stretching ahead of us into the darkness.   No street-lamps, no sign-posts nothing to point us in the right direction, and no-one anywhere to ask.

-Taking it All In
  by Karen Offutt-                                                                                                                                                   

"For last year's words belong to last year's language,

And next year's words await another voice,

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

-T.S. Elliot-

I do hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas, and wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

Artist:- Edward Robert Hughes, 1851-1914

'part of doing something is listening.

We are listening

to the sun

to the stars

to the wind.'

-Madelaine L'Engle-

 I've been doing this for the month past...reading and listening to the wind plucking the leaves from the trees.  Time whirls about us all and our lives move inexorably onwards.  I hope to return to writing soon.... 

That face in Edward's painting is so hauntingly full of beauty.

'The News Reader'
Photo:- Llse Bing,
Paris 1947

later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole

world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.

-Warsan Shire-

In memory of those killed in Kenya and Pakistan this week.

'Our world is like a silent film on which we each write our own commentary.'

           -Mark Williams/John Teasdale-

                                                 
                                                   Miltenberg,Germany.  1900
                                                                    photogamma-keystone/getty images.   Visit: mezzaluna.me.

'Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll work out.'  -David Niven-

           

When we moved from the big house it was because someone forgot to check on things and suddenly the lease on the land which had been 99 years long was...up, so the house and land reverted back to the descendants of the original owner.  Drastic news for my parents, they had only a couple of weeks to rehouse their family, so we ended up in a terraced cottage with no electricity connected, no bathroom and cockroaches carpeting the floors like shiny black linoleum.  It was a massive shock for my mother as she struggled to make a home for us.  My dad chopped-up the piano to make her a display bookcase and every Friday evening the zinc bath was unhooked from a wall outside in the yard, brought in by the fire and filled with buckets of water heated in an old boiler, for her to take the first bath.  It can only have been huge disappointment to her, she'd been brought up in a family who had been used to servants.
My sister who was twelve years older than me and was used to her own room in the big house, now had to share her space with me, a five year old.  But, how glad we were of each others company, on those first few nights when the candles were blown out, leaving only a night-light in it's saucer of water flickering in the cold darkness and there began a wailing and crying coming through the walls from our next door neighbours.  Banging on the adjoining wall was our neighbour's adult son suffering, we were told later from schizophrenia, he couldn't sleep because of the voices, but in the dark strangeness of this old cottage it seemed like we had moved into Bedlam itself.  The stairs ran adjacent to each other in the terrace and we later heard the old man from the other side stumbling up his staircase talking and talking to himself, we were hemmed in by people who had lost their minds its seemed.
 Some weeks later after he had been taken away to a hospital we learnt the story of our neighbours son, he'd been jilted at the altar by his fiancée, and back in 1954 they knew very little about schizophrenia and the connection severe stress can play in its development.
We never did find out anything at all about our neighbour the other side, apart from the fact that he was an old man living alone, who shunned contact, he never spoke to anyone except his imaginary companions.  His garden was a complete tangle of raspberry plants, so dense, that one day when I'd illicitly climbed over the wall separating our gardens so I could gorge on his luscious raspberries, crimson and jewel-like and all the more delicious in their pilfering, I was completely invisible to him when he trundled along the path with not more than a couple of yards between us, still having an animated conversation with his invisible companions.