Talk about reaching out to you..

Having found what I've found and am about to share, I'm not sure any proper introduction is necessary. Needless to say it touches me and sums up my own feelings on the subject to a T.


My finding this is down to the excellent Shaun Usher on Twitter and his Letter Of Note, which is a wicked, wonderful thing and keeps me supplied with tidbits of behind the scenes literary gossip and points of interest. Cheers Shaun. 


This is, of course, on the subject of books, one of the few things I believe strongly about. (Do forgive the editing, I was more bothered about conveying the sentiment).

'[...] it isn’t for the money. I’m doing it for love. 

I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

[...] The public library, again. Yes, I’m writing a book, Mr Mitchell, and yes, I hope it’ll make some money. But I’m not praising the public library service for money. I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.'

- Philip Pullman speaking at a meeting concerning the proposed closure of many Oxfordshire libraries.

A little update.

Life seems really exciting at the moment. I love that I always seem to have something to do or look forward to. I've already made my way to Bremen and briefly to Düsseldorf, Bayreuth and to visit a long-neglected friend in Hamburg. I was also in Dresden a few weeks ago for a friend's birthday, where I met up with most of my classmates, some of whom I hadn't seen for nearly a year. I should be going to Cologne for a friend's birthday this weekend and a very good friend is coming to see me next week. As soon as I've seen her off, some friends and I are off to Venice for the weekend. At the end of March I'm spending a long-overdue weekend in Budapest with my mum which I'm really looking forward to, equally for the city as for seeing my mum and then during the Easter holidays my Granny and sister are coming to visit me here. I'm also hoping to make my way to Amsterdam in the second week of the holiday to mooch around on my own with my camera, or some friends and I may go away together. THEN I might have the chance to breathe. Busy has never felt so good :-)

Excited as I am about everything going on, the thought of returning to the UK in the summer is niggling away at the back of my mind and I'm dreading it. I always feel the same when I have to go back to England. My entire demeanour changes for the worse the closer I get to the place, the opposite happens the further away I get. HOWEVER, I'm trying to keep these ideas in check and enjoy the ride while it lasts...

In other news: I'm slowly making my way through the glorious Joe Simpson's back catalogue and Berlusconi is finally being taken to court for his vile immorality and self-indulgence.

The shame...

Okay, so I've been outrageously lazy over the last few months. It's like giving your teacher the unbearably lame excuse of not having had enough time to do your homework: as if I couldn't have found time once a month since September to update this. I have written some blog entries, but I've only been inpsired to write them when on the move and away from a computer. So, I shall endeavour to copy them up, edit them and submit them tomorrow, hopefully with something new to add. A lack of things to report there certainly are not. Plus, it's kind of weird and a bit Anne Frank-y ominous to say 'I'm tired now, I'll continue tomorrow..' and never write again, so I have to.

So I thought I’d run with a Shelley, Bysshe-Shelley, Byron vibe to get my blog started as I feel inspired by this thunder and lightning storm (albeit that this will be nowhere near as ground-breaking as a science-obsessed bloke creating life from nothing). In all honesty I feel generally inspired by Dortmund and my situation; I’ve lived alone before and I’ve lived in Germany before, but never in quite this way with so much freedom and a proper purpose. A friend actually suggested I do this so she could keep up-to-date with my progress but I’m doing it for myself as well; this year is going to be pretty instrumental for me, and in all probability the most important in my life so far, so I want to document it (do forgive the drama: I’ll be 22 next week and feel justified in milking the fact that I’m ‘getting on a bit’).

        My journey to Germany began somewhat eventfully in my managing to haul my 20kg+ suitcase and Grandmother from one side of London to the other, onto a coach and successfully to the wrong airport (not my finest hour). Upon doing this, for anyone who may need to know, I found that it is (without a helicopter) impossible to make one’s way from Stansted airport to Gatwick airport in one hour. Had I in fact been travelling from Stansted, this hour would have given me plenty of time to check-in and have a coffee with my dear Granny before boarding. Instead, I spent that hour online in the airport trying to find an alternative means of transport, which at £1/10 minutes, didn’t best improve my mood.

        And so, in the light of price and my schedule, I ended up travelling by coach (a prospect I did not relish) – thank goodness for Eurolines. I left at 8.30 that night (11.9.10), and after a first ever, surprisingly pleasurable ferry trip from Dover, travelled through France (sadly not a scenic or in fact particularly visible route) and into Belgium (which I made a mental note to definitely visit at some point), then on to Cologne, where we arrived at about 10am. A 13-hour trip did not initially seem a very enticing idea but turned out to be quite pleasant. I then had the delight of lugging the aforementioned suitcase from the station to my hostel and up 8 flights of stairs and tired as I was, the mere 24 hours in which to explore Cologne enticed me away from the beauty of my Ikea bed and into the city.

        As anyone who has been to Germany before will know, it’s not exactly a hub of activity on a Sunday (as virtually all shops are closed), so I wandered aimlessly, forked out an extortionate amount for a tin of soup and some bread at a railway station shop and returned to the hostel. Here, as fate would have it, my Britishness for once did me a favour and whilst pulling faces at a cup of tea which was impossible to brew with the hostel’s supply of lukewarm water, I met two other girls (entirely sympathetic towards me beverage predicament) also here as language assistants, and thus some English-speakers to cling to. Thanks to the religion that is Facebook, I found that they were also ‘friends’ with a language assistant ‘friend’ of mine and we decided to all meet up for dinner that night.

        At dinner, being as it was virtually an obligation to my host country, I had Schnitzel and chips (also a German delicacy...). Afterwards we headed back to the hostel, via a kiosk to purchase ridiculously cheap beer (and cigarettes), and thence to the gloriously continental smoking lounge. After half an hour’s chatting and drinking, one of the guys from the table next to us came to sit with us, citing his friends as boring and proclaiming himself in need of new conversation, and within five minutes they were all sat with us. In this way we came to make some new acquaintances (I’m none of us would describe any of them as friends); an Australian guy, another Brit, a New Zealander and an American, all of whom, it turned out, weren’t friends at all, just lone travellers who had met that day. Needless to say, the night wasn’t an early one and involved people being drawn on; the asking of and refusal to answer questions on bra size; people nearly falling (up and) down stairs; a second trip to the kiosk for more beer; superficially deep ‘so what’s your story..?’ questions; a 3am excursion to the Cologne Cathedral; a worryingly cheap bottle of spirits that tasted like Parma Violets and more cigarettes than should be smoked by one person in the space of a week. I think all involved would agree it was a great start to our stay in Germany, and also that an Asian-American named Jason (with his OCD theories on symmetry) should be avoided at all costs.

This is a bit of a beast already and I'm finally tired, I'll pick up where I left off tomorrow.