I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes […]
I was cycling along the river where the water meets the trees, there is a little grove there which is sacred to me and it seems to be a forest in a parallel universe. It is a dreamy Spring day, grey like the winter but unlike Winter, studded with flowers; and I had just finished […]
Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, […]
I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not […]
I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me […]
I’m alone in the house and my heart feels filled with love. It’s a feeling like glass-slippered waves coming in over your feet on the sparkling, rough sand, so shallow you barely get wet but the softness of the water is inexpressible. Like water from stars, I mean light, I mean starlight, the salt water […]
Climbed a mountain today in a steep mist. We had to cross a lake to get to it, this was from Lucerne, shared a table on board with a godfather and grandfather and their little charge, who had unbelievably long eyelashes. After his biscuit and orange juice he grew sleepy, the godfather pointed, showing me, […]
I find Berlin the most extraordinary city. Nothing is regular, not that in my life anything ever is. I guess in an individuality-seeking cult/ure this sounds boastful or false-meek, but I have spent a lifetime hunting the things I have (bountiful, it turns out) in common with other people. Went through the drug-dealer park this […]
Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with […]
I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the […]
Two li’l punks on the footbridge to the Warschauerstrasse station, lounging with legs crossed and outstretched, dog lying between them, begging bowl out and a large sign propped on her legs which says in English: FOR BEER AND WEED. He obviously adores her. They have matching frothy haircuts, blonded and shaved up the sides.
I somehow forgot Berlin’s imaginative beggars. This guy held open the door to the autotellers in the foyer of the bank, with a grand flourish, saying, “Welcome!” He was as confident as though he owned it. And he did! He was wearing a greasy navy-blue pinstripe suit like a boxer and had his hair slicked […]
Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and […]
