Double line

OK, 2010. Get thee behind me. Line yourself up over my shoulder and watch stalkerishly, fire flares over my head of the moments of joy that you offered, pinpricking my pupils and tripping me over against the loose cobbles of the just-about-to-happen, fold your sweaty dog-eared lesson-pages into the pocket at the back of the Moleskine, tug my diaphragm with my failures and broken promises and long aimless reaching, but Please Stand Behind The Yellow Line.

Tail end

Snow, graupel so small it blows in coils of impossible wind-mocking vectors like stomped polystyrene. A family walks the other way, kids in snow-suits with reinforced knees and banana-bunch gloves. More families. Where are they going? Something is happening, as it often is. I don't know what it is. As I often don't. At the supermarket there are tall pyramids of beer on display and peanut-flavoured snack foods. Chocolate Weihnachtsmänner on sale at the back. Shops are selling fireworks for tomorrow, the snow outside dredged with foil confetti hearts and stars. And hats. Tall striped caricature top hats. Sombrero-type things with boa trims. Ones with bells. Hats are a thing.

I abandon the shopping in the hall and curl my frozen red-violet hands into the sheepskin on the living room floor, ow god ow ow while my fingernails stubbornly wrest the blood back from the ice. I pack away the oats, the smoked trout. The fillet of pork, the noodles and split peas and the vegetables that fix me with their Proper Meal gazes. The year trails in after me with the cold, rapid-fire edits, Saarlacc. Triffid. Dead Hyacinth. Castaway, Lost in Translation, sheets of the masterpiece blown in the wind, the crunch of warm ashes underfoot, birds in the wrong clothes. I lean forward against the pull, hem of the coat in the doorjamb, and close my eyes but it has the advantage, damn it and its physics-of-my-mind, and I am afraid because the leaning is a comfort, somehow, like being on a train so crowded you no longer have to hold yourself up.

In the morning I talk to my brother, wit and warmth and dangerous perspicacity like hot glass just in reach, popcorn eyebrows and diegetic chords for DRAMA from the keyboard to his left. So real, for the love of god, so real the snap-chilled windows seem like fictions.

Later I make blueberry muffins out of a cookbook with muffin-shaped pages. The bell rings and they are kitsch-defying, golden purple-stained munch-fests, nutmeg-scented and smug in their satisfaction of the archetype. They look at me butterishly. I arrange them in a dish.

The blueberries were from Guatemala.

Lids

I slept most of the day, hiding in and out of the shadowy watercolour of daytime unconsciousness with my nose pulled under the quilt. I put out water and seed for the tits and sparrows, settling half-cup soufflé dishes into the snow in the balcony planter. They don't like the tiny black ones, sprinkled delicately around the birdily-stomped snow later in the afternoon. I wash my hair and twiddle suds idly between my toes as though it matters that they are clean, which I suppose it does really. Malt toast and vegemite, a cup of hot fennel tea, two pairs of socks. I look at the snow in the clefts of the wet black chestnut outside the kitchen window, as though it is collecting it on purpose, gathering up the strange exploded ice-popcorn with the sly expression of a prankster snowball-bandit. My hair dries slowly. The tea is good. Nothing happens. It is a cold day.

Snow

The snow came last night, piling into windscreen-wiper blades of frost on my balcony railings, white-on-white winter blaze through the window at dawn, jumping on your eyelids with a handful or three of unexpected lux. People tug wooden sleds with backpacks or kinder perched on them, everyone a pair of eyes superheroed with scarves and hats. The inside of my skull blows on its hands. Isn't it cold, isn't it cold, it's so COLD. Mum sent a parcel of Vegemite and biscuits, Australian chocolate macadamias and her wonderful mad scrawl, passed on to me by my next-door neighbour, utterly St Nickly in his bonny Deutsch roundness. His name is Herr Birth.

Advent

I've been and I've come back, been and come back, lungs full of salt and kelp from riding the precarious lip of the wave of boxes and suitcases, loss and history, things and no-things. The legion trite baggage metaphors lounge around under the legs of chairs like smug marmalade cats with double-cream bellies. I scrabbled against the chaos for a sick, irritable week-and-a-half, moodily eating toast and winding string, silencing bat-winged badnesses with cups of coffee. It is calm now, settling into its orbits and heat sinks, entropic corners and tidal tabletops.

The winter came suddenly, earsplitting white cold like yesterday's overboiled milk saucepan. I iron pillowslips to keep my hands warm, casting myself into the pull of these things, my things, sort of, and watch old Christmas movies.

Suitcase

My mind has been curiously blank this past week, a fat white expanse of plane-smoothed chalk mattely pin-pricking thoughtful pupils and coating curious palms with calc dust. Which might be calming, perhaps, if not for the unsettling half-heard sound of a thought or two, not one of those little caltrop-shaped ones that might drop out of the subsidence cracks if you shake your skull just so, but staggering, towering, silent ones like walking a corridor of ice and realising that for hours you have been staring at a mammoth, ear-splitting in its frozen forever.

Tomorrow I am on a plane for a week in England, breaking out the brand-new visa, to celebrate Pluvialis' birthday. We are going to see Hamlet. I will breathe English autumn, and drink terrible English coffee, banking around dodgem emotional corners with glee.

I'll send a postcard.

Ten things I found out this week

1. The most money you can make on Plants vs. Zombies is $999,900.

2. Nicole Richie's second novel has been published, and it apparently contains the lines:

It felt incredibly loud and hot in the club. The pulsing bass lines could be physically felt in every pair of panties ...

3. I did actually break my nose.

4. Advent is a big deal in Germany.

5. Some women call their lala 'sixpence'.

6. I don't call it either of these things.

7. The German vernacular for fellatio is Presidentensex.

8. Gotye's Like Drawing Blood is all award-winning and blah-de-blah, but the underappreciated gem of the album is 'Night Drive'.

9. My day can be made by the gift of a Kaiser's Einkaufswagen chip keyring with the Berlin bear on one side.

10. I really can't believe the whole Jonathan Franzen thing.

Ovenproof

Today I have poached damsons with spoonsful of sugar, sliced celeriac into unnecessarily pretty slices for stock, put the bedding out to air in the sunshine, wandered the floorboards with my soles close, pressing my feet to the wood as if traces will someday be found in the grain, in the chocolatey-swirl knots. Berlin is outlandishly dusty as though it is the moon, fine greyish white dandery film covering everything, shiny cameos of book or tea cup lifted off the bedside table. Bladerunner bought two dozen brace or so of different safety pins for various rarified long-distance running purposes, and I find them about the place, wheedled in between the sofa cushions, in the kitchen drawers and one deep in the grey sheepskin rug, hibernating like a ladybird.

Last night I drank tequila and danced, and wondered.

Meanwhile

Some days I do nothing but talk myself off ledges; dusty, cracked and narrow with stonework slipping like shale, peeling windowframes at my shoulderblades and the balls of my feet jacked to 90 degrees, madness lying disinterestedly between the paving slabs on the street below. Ledge-logic shears away from the face of stability in gritty, burning scatters of brimstone like fireworks that got mocked a lot at school.

Hostage-negotiator voice. Outside the mental door in a bulletproof vest and the marriage-on-the-rocks eyes. Give her the pizza and tell her that we're working on the helicopter.

< blank >

Saw Bladerunner off yesterday morning and the house seems quiet and blank on the ebb of last week's tide of boyish backpack and biohazards. He ran 3'15 on Sunday, in spite of a mild case of whatever the hell it was that I had steeped him in every morning over coffee.

I'm blinking and sleepy and eating Lebkuchen in the shape of little behatted Clauses -- the sainted kind, not the one you have in a contract. They strike a variety of oddly emphatic festive poses. Lined up they look like sugar-glazed Village People. YMCA, cinnamon-style. Chocolate on the bottom, what are you looking at, VOGUE. Stale crumbs of pumpkin-seed bread in one of the balcony planters, and a great tit hops in gingerly. And then a sparrow. My mind is full of tissue paper. New, clean tissue paper, to be sure, which is an improvement on the grody scum two days ago. Still muffly in there. The thoughts are all like hostages gagged with duct-tape in the boot of the getaway car. Mmfmmfmmmfff. MMMMmFFFF!

I can't hear you.

Xtin v The Virus: Deuce

Better, thank all the small gods, thoughts barely managing to glance around the corner into clarity in time to S-Bahn it to Friedrichstraße and pick up Bladerunner from the marathon, smiling his curly-eyed smile and damp with rain, salty and bedazzled with exhaustion and a medal. I chomp huge breaths of cold, dropletty air, delighted to be able to breathe and I am outside, outside, outside! Noises and birds and buildings, voices and run-off in the gutters, people, people. They've all got leftover coughs, too. Still the velvety desire to sleep muffles me all day, tideline of tissues and ibuprofen around the bed and my god, I want to boil the sheets and take the kind of shower that washes off the dirt that plans to be on you next week.

Tissue balls

Head still all biological hazard and not an untwisty thought. Blink slowly at fall premiere television and the spoonful of lentil soup, butter curling over the edges of a slice of pumpkin seed toast. Cup of coffee and crack throat nineteen to the dozen on the phone to generously patient mater about god knows what-have-you, music and abandonment and family and the gluey spidery sticky-fingers mythical level of competence that would stop the darts thrown blindfolded. Bladerunner returns from carb-loading and we discuss bullshit extended mind arguments nothing if not apropos, or perhaps not if you've naught to extend in the first place. Go to sleep, tiny dancer.

Next, something or other

Fennel tea with honey and lime, because I forgot to buy lemons when I went to the shops earlier. I forgot other things. Some things ... I forget now. Boiled-egg sandwich. Check Google safe-browsing diagnostics. Blog not listed as malicious. Well, that's nice then. Internet banking. Pray stupid febrile brain pays relevant bills and does not transfer net worth to online poker system currently starring in today's pop-unders. Wash socks. Strepsil. Cuprofen. Did I have a cup of tea? Put kettle on. Check mailbox. Kennebunkport postcard from Pluvialis! Yay. Cough. Cough cough cough. Sniffle. What the hell is that sound? Like a really agitated whistling. What ... oh the kettle is boiling. I need a cup ... here's one. It has cold tea in it. I should make another cup.

Later ...

Where are all the cups?

Non-linear

The viruses are still running the party around here and my day has become a puzzling sequence of disconnected moments where I stand on the spot and try to remember why, by God, I am staring into the cutlery drawer, where usually my brain would be handily triaging and cueing up What Next while I'm thinking about more interesting things like ... those interesting things that I can't remember now.

An old philosophical friend of mine arrived today, he of the recently sharpened Japanese cleaver of a mind and plan to run the Berlin marathon on Saturday. Even squinting blearily through my mental service outages my voice eventually cracked on the muscular delight of talking in my own language, the larger one and the oh-so-many smaller ones, the watercolour hints of register and tone and gifts of the given that tenterhook the best of conversations. Bladerunner will be here another eight days.

Rejoice! And viruses: SILENCE! I KILL YOU.

Toddy

In best Lazarus fashion, my laptop staged a merciful recovery this morning and I have been hoppity-skip with the delight of the internets full-throttle. Possibly in minor Faustian bargain, hoppity-skippiness has been limited to fervid imagination, as I have been laid pathetically low with headcold hilariously incompatible with my run-in with Implacable Glass Door earlier in the week. Wield handkerchief, exclaim in surprised excruciation, wield handkerchief more gently. Rinse, repeat.

Made hot toddy just now upon tweet-suggestion of fabulous @doraexploring. There's a fuckton of viral RNA conducting a cinema discussion group in my skull right now so I have forgotten every adjective and um, all the other parts of speech but, hot. Whisky. Honey. Whisky. Hot whisky.

Yep.

Bzzt

My laptop has spent the last couple of weeks living a comfortable existence on the footstool which matches my new sofa. I've been curled up on its dunkelgrau splendiferousness with a couple of lambskins while I pluck jute-rug shedding from around the Macbook. I moved it today -- people for dinner, you know. Uncool to be sporting the laptop nestled among the soft furnishings. I lined it up in its nominal real home in the study, and later, full of trulli carbonara and bonhomie, I pressed the on-switch.

Idiot, thought I, into the deafening silence. You haven't even plugged it in. (Because, mais bien sur, its ability to draw power from the battery is long since a memory). I looked over the side of the desk and then I looked at the power cord firmly slotted into the wall. Then I looked at it some more. I looked at the laptop's irrevocable plugged-in-ness for a while. Then, because apparently our reptilian brains are unable to resist these dead-end impulses, I pressed the on-switch again.

I realise that laying my hands on a replacement power supply can't be a peak-scaling enterprise. And mercifully I am not cut off entirely -- I mean, I'm posting from my iPhone. How bad can things be? But looking at the dark once-glowed-friendly-and-green power lamp in my magnasafe powercord, I hear a small voice with nonetheless excellent projection saying,

Why must everything be broken?

Maiden bake

The first chocolate cake of the new house. A new box of peaty dark dutch cocoa, Deutsch on one side, Nederlands on the other and a recipe for Russian tea-cake on the back. German cooking chocolate outrageously called Schwarz Herren and the red cake tin I bought from Ikea. The smell as it bakes is like a memory of everything and nothing, mercifully absent sudden evocations of anything in particular but a stone path many-step-eroded in the middle for it has risen in every oven I've ever had, many times, große dinner party ones and kleine tea party ones, ones for birthdays and ones split through the middle because there are too many strawberries at the market.

Later I'll be carrying this one, smacked like my life with German-inflected sameness, to Mitte on the S-Bahn, covered with a striped tea towel. People will look, and they will smile shyly, because the smell is so good and because someone carrying something from their kitchen to someone else's is like a pregnant woman or someone drawing on the pavement in coloured chalk, ducklings crossing the street, fireworks suddenly visible over the trees and a bunch of strangers stand to look. And smile at one another.

Scouting nose

So there we are last night in the dark dancy flicker at NBI and on account of the Exile Wardrobe™, I am wearing the usual suspect which is black, basic and glues to me like mustard on steak, which is how it got into The One Suitcase in the first place. But, for the first time it was cold enough to forgo the black Lulu Guinness peep wedges with the toe-tufts and stomp the beats with my black Hobbs ankle-buckle knee boots, dubbed by Pluvialis The Stormtrooper Boot which I should probably not say too loudly here in the motherland.

This digression into footwear, dear reader, because I suspect that had I carefully and gracefully teetered in Lulu Guinness, I'd never have walked into a glass door, drunk on the leggy freedom of kick-ass boots, stable as sports bucket seats in spite of towering heels. There may also have been some drunk on tequila.

I have spent the day in a crumply duvet-and-codeine nest with an almost musical thrum in my head while my hangover duets with the crashed-and-burned aristocratic bridge of my nose.

In small mercies, it isn't broken, and the crowd of witnesses maintained resolutely straight faces. Germans are so civilised.

Tide

I have wandered the day with the wrench and screwdriver and scummy sandpaper of adulthood, sorting out yet more bank-related things, next-week related things, the vaguely benign orbit of today-tomorrow things, dishes and laundry and wet clean hair, punched sofa cushions and sorted recycling tanged lemony with the sadism of the everlasting and inexorable.

I am so dog-tired coasting the wash and pull of heartbreak, the most of me dragging the future flinty-eyed toward my chest, hauling stubbornly with my back to the coil of slack rope so I cannot be reminded how much remains, but the least of me tiny, fervent and vicious in not letting go, screaming doggedly at the top of its voice with unhysterical, single-minded resolve combing my insides with nails and carving out spoonsful of my lungs with technicolour scenes of reconciliation.

My shower leaks.

Coffee pot

This is a corner of my kitchen. I love my house. Not this house in particular -- although my affair of the heart with this airy eyrie in Berlin unfolds fern-frondily -- but whatever house is the one I'm calling mine. The language of inside spaces is the only one I speak softly and with my eyes instead of loudly, presto and with my hands, which is how I speak of everything. Everything else. A tension pulls at me over my fervour, as though it's empty or misdirected somehow, only right for a backdrop to the Really Things.

I love shelves and floors, glasses and windows, door handles and light switches and the hum of the refrigerator, the personality of chairs and the soothing no-nonsense you get from tables, any table. Even the one whose leg needs a folded napkin under it. Mixing bowls, scissors, saucepans and cabinets on castors, painted pools of lamplight, a cushion, another cushion, a blanket, a curtain, a book wherever you've left one which is everywhere, soft rustle-rustle leaf-litter layers of textiles and paper.

Piles of dishes and platters on the shelves and spoons and whisks leaning on their one foot against the edges of jugs, humming the sounds of your cooking and the chink and clatter and laughter of people, others always the happy token of massed plates and your motley crew of glassware. Quilts and too many pillows on the bed and something snug over a chair, the quietly euphoric sense of governed oversupply that launches your house, your small temperamental body and strange social customs half a step from satisfaction in the second drawer down on the left.

Twine and pencils in the study and postcards from not here, ziggly things to hold your paper, rugs that fight and marry and a reading lamp. The doors open to let the world in and when it gets late it folds its walls and floors and lets your world of idiosyncratic craziness be the only way things are.