Huge Bag Found on Street!

SURELY THIS IS A SIGN! I found an enormous sports bag ~ almost big enough to hold golf clubs and hence lots of German books and clothes ~ with trundlesome wheels on the bottom at the end of the next road along from me yesterday afternoon, so I thoroughly enjoyed trundling it behind me, imagining I was on the way to the Saint Pancreas International for the beginning of my Berlin expedition.

I know what y'all are thinking: Let's wait and see what actually happens. I've heard enough bluster and guff from this blogger to keep a fleet of hot air balloons afloat!

Well I am going to Berlin. Berlin is one of my top three "most want to see" cities on earth, along with New York and Tokyo.

I don't know how on earth I'm going to get there, by the way. Not a single website I've found will sell me one all-in ticket London to Berlin return. I don't know why. Only last month I heard a government minister blustering about high-speed rail infrastructure. What's the point of all those whizzy trains and new tracks if you can't go where you want? I am NOT going by plane, unless I really have to. It's the stopovers along the way (and it's looking like Paris at the moment, with a €50 sleeper "couchette" each way, which would push the cost of tickets up to £170) that are half the fun. If I took the Eurostar out of London on a Sunday, I could see the Paris bird-market, which is amazing. All those feathery little pixies tweetling away on the pavements...

Today I found a book by my illustrious old German teacher, who (I found out years later) was being tipped as a potential Nobel laureate ~ until he died in a car crash in 2001. Austerlitz by W G Sebald. He was known to us at UEA as Max Sebald and he taught my German grammar class. OK, I seem to recall it might have been just once when the ordinary teacher was sick, but he did teach me German grammar!

Click here for a beautiful blogger's writeup on the marché aux oiseaux in Paris ...

Strange flashes of life ...

I KEEP HAVING THEM. Strange flashes, where I feel, or I imagine, that I'm actually living. Flash-backs or flash-forwards? I don't know. I smell things. I feel things. I feel anticipation. Not the anxious-tinged waiting for a dealer... Unless I know them really well I cannot trust them. I mean, in the most basic way. I've only been properly ripped off a couple of times. But every time I score, the reality is there: it might happen. Then I would be doomed. Not that I'm not doomed already, I can hear you say.
Doesn't it happen to us all? The magical feeling we only get on awakening after a vivid dream? When present situations are bathed in a new light. When new things seem possible.
I dream of France. Repeatedly. Paris.
In my head I wind backwards to Morocco. My blogospherical friend Gattina was posting from Morocco last week. This was the first place I went to on my own, off my own back, for no particular reason except that I had the chance to go. I went by train (and boat) all the way from Wales. Through London, down to Dover, crossed the Channel. Calais to Paris Nord. Metro. Gare d'Austerlitz to Hendaye. Hendaya (as it's known on the Spanish side) to Madrid. Madrid to Malaga. In a little urbanización called Mijas Costa I spent a week over Xmas with my Mum. Then I took the train to Algeciras, a boat to Tangiers ~ where I saw an old man smoking hashish on the street, who looked like a wizard from a Rupert Bear story. I got out of Tangiers as soon as I could, on the night train to Marrakesh. Waking up first thing in the desert, an oasis went floating past our windows. It was an old-fashioned compartmentalized train with tourists lined up along the corridor, just gazing at the views.
The sights and sounds and smells of Morocco constantly come back to me. Arabic cigarettes and black coffee first thing in the morning. Tangerine juice and hot flat bread for 15p. Courtyard hotel rooms for less than £3 a night. The view from the window was like a scene from Arabian Nights.
Sunrise in Rabat. The burnt colours of earth: umber, sienna, ochre were flooded in gold. I wandered the entire perimeter of the palace walls, gazing at tangerine trees in the first light, thinking over and over: Wow I'm in Africa! Later that morning I found the Royal Gardens, which were open to the public. There were storks' nests up the palm trees. I wandered down a lush pathway, alone. It was like an Islamic paradise.
All these things come back to me still, with the golden dream that they could happen again. And I don't feel trapped any more in an eternally revolving present, between drowsiness and despair.
Somehow, I know, I won't always be like this.

4:24am: Chogstable the nightingale, who shares the cherry tree with Flapper, is chirruping her head off as we speak. She's amazing...!

04:24 Uhr: Chogstable die Nachtigall, die oben im Kirschenbaum mit Flapper die Ringeltaube lebt, zwitschert laut! Sie ist wunderbar!