Wednesday, 9 September 2009
To Berlin
A day at home to turn around and this morning C and I on to Berlin, via Amsterdam. Fourth or fifth time in Berlin? I'll be curious to see how this two-part city, which struck me as physically unhealed (the centre was hard to locate, though nominally Alexanderplatz I suppose), has glued itself more firmly together.
The festival is long and grand and international and in German. I don't speak German. Chose Latin at my suburban state grammar school as the alternative because of ambitions (less mine than my parents') regarding medicine. Sorry I dropped Latin before O Level. Sorry I didn't do German at all. In fact sorry that my French isn't better.
That's three 'sorry's. Is that enough? Not sorry I dropped the idea of medicine, or it dropped me. Another life I'll learn at least five languages properly and refine my bedside manner.
H and R here. Their house hunting done, it seems. Grey, overcast outside. Hardly a whisper of a breeze. So much work knocking at the front door. Some of it will come with me, as it always does.
However, did finish five football poems (for children? supposedly) and a nine-part poem on Rosehill Theatre. The tone and technique are related to the Palladio poem in The Burning of the Books. It has been a smoking brain weekend. I'll put the little football poems up/ The Rosehill one may follow.
I hear we are out of the recession. I'll take an extra ten quid to Berlin and live it up.
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2 comments:
You were right about the medicine. I have just retired from general practice to study languages at the OU. Trying to put right the wrong turn I took all those years ago. (Parental ambition again. The Latin did not help but I wish I had kept it up.) All those years pretending to be not god exactly but non doubt-ridden, perhaps competent.
It has always been the god-part that has bothered me in my dealings with doctors. I have no objection to being healed.
There must, I imagine, be a small legion of medics, who have been guided that way by well meaning families, who might otherwise have been artists, lawyers, mountaineers or perfectly healthy layabouts.
As far as I understand it, the demands and pressures of contemporary medicine - in the UK anyway - leave the doctor with very little time to deal with the patient as a fellow human. I deeply sympathise with that predicament - on both sides.
I'd have been a useless doctor, partly because of natural ineptitude, and partly because of an equally natural tendency to engage people in conversation.
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