Information Theory

I keep running into German official motorcades - one crossed my cycle path while their President was visitng Dublin and I was en route to buy train tickets (and the proverbial hundred thousand welcomes to him and all his outriders).  Last week I think it was also he who went whizzing by me and my camera phone while I was  on holiday in Berlin - at that point, apparently, he was hosting the Polish Prime Minister...  Busy week for all, but one which certainly inspired a bewildering panacea of emotion in me.  Berlin is a fascinating place: people there are friendly, charming and inclined to go right out of their way to help a tourist.  Their big city bustle is charged with youthful exhilaration and über modernity cheek-by-jowl with old world chic and  magisterial beauty...  Cranes are everywhere: in front of your very eyes the city is growing.  But, dear god, then there’s its terrifying history, and if ever a fable on the perils of extremism existed, it's Berlin, meticulously spelling out from every brick and block, blade of grass or memorial pond ghastly tales of  not one, but two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century  in locations which are oppressively familiar... 

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After a few days in Berlin, we took a train  to Dresden, and that raised a whole different set of questions...25,000 people bombed in one night by the allies as the war was all but over - a night which inspired Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse Five...  Then came the DDR, the Berlin Wall and, amongst many years of other horrible, cruel and pointless events, a twenty-year old kid being shot dead for trying to cross a river just before the wall came down...

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Enough to make anyone despair, you'd imagine, but evidently they keep going...they really  haven't had much choice...  

Back in Berlin, I began to notice an unusual phenomenon about wifi in our hotel – some fellow users were called Einat, Avi and Ibraim... I asked an Israeli friend and she said, “Yes –  young Israelis are flocking to Berlin… they all want to go - being there is very cool these days”. 

As a sometime knitter, I can't help searching for patterns, so I got thinking that if the fact that we're all bearers of inherited DNA is true; and if I know from my own experience (and I do) that paths cross an awful lot (viz me and German motorcades), couldn't oblique intergenerational encounters occur too?  Same DNA, different carriers?  Proving that then there may well be justice on this earth after all.  For instance, how demoralising for any remaining frgaments of Nazi DNA to witness quite how badly they failed as precisely what they strived so hard to obliterate returns to live their lives exactly as they choose.  For the vast majority, heartening, but for that tiny cross section of arrogant, evil, uncontrolled narcissism, a real sickener..   Or so I hope. I really do.      

Light through the open dome of St. Hedwig's Cathedral - After Kristallnacht, its canon, Bernhard Lichtenberg, prayed publicly for the Jewish people.  He was sent to Dachau, but died on the way there.

Old Dog For The Hard Road

I went to see the Asif Kapadia documentary about Amy Winehouse last night and I recommend it...  It's engrossing, and features new material - family movies as well as friends' footage of teenage Amy and friends as she sets out on a promising musical career.  Her talent is a naturally occurring phenomenon in an otherwise fairly unexceptional North London teenage existence. It shows her family as flawed as the next, but also that she was clearly loved.  It shows that she was funny, clever and had several good close friends who cared about her and are clearly still devastated by how things turned out.  It shows that she had problems which were never addressed too, certainly, which is why the movie got me thinking about that and the merits and demerits of hindsight vision

Lack of acceptance of the nature of addiction is widespread - even healthy - because an addict is sick and healthy people generally can’t bend their heads around sickness, especially of the mental variety - it's as hard to imagine, as how to dress for ice and snow when you're on a beach. When confronted by an ugly symptom, someone healthy is likely to say “No, that’s not the real person - this nice thing I always knew is".  The addict will show the face that best pleases until the inevitable loss of control, making it easy to cherry pick....  And, let's face it, who doesn’t hold back here and there?  Who doesn't opt for an easier life?  Tracking the development of a mental illness in medical terms is one thing, but "ordinary" person thinking in the general rough-and-tumble of life is something else entirely.... 

Some addicts are lousy, some charming; some sweet, some vulnerable; some super smart, some too far gone; some creative, some never had a chance in the first place;.  Some have more resources to resist for longer than others, but the one thing they all have in common is illness, and being on a steeper countdown than the rest of us. “Every junky’s like a setting sun”, Neil Young spoke the truth, only I would definitely infer alcoholic in that statement too, because in my opinion it's the worst drug of all.

Addiction runs amok, and family and friends are not just destined to be steam-rolled by its force, but can also end up living in a perennial state of if-only, which opens the door to blame and judgment.... which in my opinion can be hurtful and pointless when the person is gone…  

Nobody knows exactly what went on... 

Who can be summed up by people who only partially knew?  Is there really always someone to blame?  I'm not so sure.... It's very tidy to imagine a finger can be pointed, but I can point to text book cases of pretty close to identical circumstances where one sibling went one direction and the other did not...  

I had a friend who was an addict…

I used to say “Half of you knows the score but the other half cancels it out…you’re an oxymoron!”

“No”, he’d correct me; “I’m a poxy moron”, because like Amy, he was clever and funny, and tortured... why?  I really don't know.

A panel discussion from London followed the screening last night and I liked best of all a pre-recorded message from Amy’s friend and collaborator, Yasiin Bey (who expressed himself much more eloquently than I'm about to paraphrase).  

He said (broadly) – there, but for the grace of god go any of us; celebrate her best aspects and be thankful to have brushed up against them. 

After-Knitting Life

Announcement:

I'm now defining as an ex-knitter, rather than a knitter. The whiplash injury has won and for the immediate and short-term future I've taken up gardening to fill the gap in my life left by an awful lot of knitting  - gardening, because the effects of recent drought on some fresh planting need to be counteracted.  However, gardening is not a long-term situation for me because I'm allergic to pretty much everything about it.

A garden centre I visited recently is pictured above... it's there because it's self-evidently gorgeous, but I'm also too busy watering, sneezing and squinting through swollen piggy eyes to  be bothered trying to photograph my own.   It's clear that I'm blighted with my hobbies because  fresh planting now seems like a rash move (arf) in terms of watering duty.  It hasn't really rained here for nearly six weeks, so to keep them alive I need to pour a few buckets over them through the swirling pollen at dawn or dusk..

...but dawn and dusk are the absolute worst  in allergy season and now apparently I can add bark to the litany of what sets me off on different weeks, and the only real solution to protecting my eyes from goddam bark is swathing my whole face in a thin white chiffon scarf....   As I water, I often wonder to myself what blundering about at anti-social hours with a bucket and my face covered in a white chiffon scarf is doing for my reputation locally... 

However, I mostly went to the garden centre to get a tree as a memento for a friend who died.  Years ago Bobby Goldsboro singing "Honey" came across to me like a cheese farm of cheese, but now I find something incredibly comforting about dedicating a tree to the memory of someone gone on to the great wherever-after (whatever about the song).  So  I put quite a lot of time into choosing, and eventually settled on a lovely deep red, straight-standing acer with delicate yet all-encompassing foliage.  It's now been delivered and I hope it offers soothing shade on a sunny day and becomes a place where occasionally a glass might be raised to the memory of a convivial, entertaining, if periodically rambunctious, man to whom many people (including my family and myself) owe much...