loneliness

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Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me. It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old […]

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Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, […]

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Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this […]

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Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring […]

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Christmas can be excruciating. All this talk of love and family throws heartache, loss and loneliness into relief. A woman I used to know killed herself this week, from sheer isolation it seems. In German it’s called self-murder. It happens sometimes that the people we love are not within reach, or they have died, or […]

Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, […]

Dear God, if there is a god. Save my soul, if I have a soul. Today grew miserable and I cannot say why. It was silly really. Guy in a cafe was rude. So rude! We grew happy again. The way bean stalks grow beans. Who cares about him. Anyway I set out on some […]

Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling […]

I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I […]

A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once […]

To turn the tide of a rainy & dismal afternoon I started reading. Beryl Bainbridge’s elegant eloquence has cheered me up no end… as her characters in this novel might say. This is from Master Georgie: “It began to rain before I reached the Washington Hotel. I hadn’t my shawl, but a spot of damp […]

When I went to Copenhagen on my own it was cold and windy and there were times I felt very lost and alone. When I felt lost and alone I would take refuge in one of two places: the library, which has free wifi and a cafe and people clustered around low tables on Eames […]

Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up […]

I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the […]

Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the […]

Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into […]

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Just now walking down the street the most miraculous small experience. It’s growing dark and the shop windows glow like lamps. I came out of a side street full of bars and cafes onto a shopping strip thronged with parcels. Among the clots and clumps of other people approaching from the opposite direction I met […]

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First date in a cafe. “They always play such excellent jazz here,” he is saying. “Try the cakes, they’re always good.” “Right,” the girl says lightly. He has over-ordered, wanting to induct her into his routines. “I think heaven must be an eternal breakfast,” he says. The girl is drinking coffee as though it were […]