I Uncover A Souvenir

One of the anomalies of my teenage years was that I had two penfriends: one Swedish, and one German, but the languages I learnt at school were French and Italian.


With my own children, I've tried to break the inheritance of linguistic mis-match.  So my younger son who learns French went to France on a school trip.  And my elder son, who learns German, has had a German penfriend, and been to Germany twice on school trips, and to Berlin with his father.  So when I found a souvenir brochure about East Berlin when sorting out my books today, I did the new thing, and showed it to him.


I went to East Berlin in 1980 as a guest of my German penfriend's family, after taking French and all the other O levels, when the DDR was at the height of its pride. 36 years later, finding the brochure I've kept since then was a surprise.  I had forgotten all about it, and about its tone.  "Take a good look around our city," it reads on page three.  "It is plain to see  that no one here has any fears about what the future has in store.  Young people know what they are learning and studying for."  I remember feeling slightly ill-at-ease leaving West Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie and having to account for myself in a few halting phrases to an East German border guard.  If only I'd learnt German, or gone to France instead, I too would have known what I was studying for - life would've been clearer.  According to page five, the vague sense of dis-ease I experienced must've been one I brought with me - "There are no crises here ... though ... much remains to be done in order to overcome the legacy of capitalist tenement building ..."


That German holiday was wonderful - for the first time I flew, sailed a dinghy, ate black cherries straight from the tree, gargled the national anthem and played tennis indoors.   I was to have another wonderful holiday in 1982 in Sweden - the souvenir that remains from that trip is an absurdly giant yellow comb which I won at the Gothenburg funfair.  There, I felt completely at ease.

I Pay To Be Waxed

I dreamed last night that I am going to die soon - in the next few weeks if the people I assumed to be experts were to be believed.  The strange thing was that I felt perfectly well.  I was pretty upset about the prognosis because I love being alive and, amongst other things, I have a party to look forward to.

It was a relief to wake up.  I checked my body for signs of imminent demise.  None.  I mean, there are many imperfections, but most of them aren't, as far as I'm aware, fatal.

In the past, the things I don't like about my body have stopped me from living fully.  I remember being 17 in a heatwave in Sweden and refusing, despite my Swedish friends' incredulous protestations (it was Sweden for goodness sake!) to wear shorts.  I spent two wonderful weeks of blue skies, islands and boating trapped in dungarees in a strange closed-circle of self-consciousness.

Since then, I've learnt to look at my body square-on, to experience it for what it is.  It's been a sort of existentialist awakening - taking on board what Sartre calls le vécu,which is something to do with the validity of lived experience as a form of knowledge.

So, on waking this morning to find that I am (as far as I know)  perfectly healthy, I thought about whether to keep my appointment at the salon.  Reason argued that subjecting myself to pain in an effort to reach a constructed ideal of female beauty would be a trivial way to spend half an hour of the time that remains to me.  Experience has taught me that acting on the knowledge I have about what gives me the confidence to take my clothes off leads to a freedom to engage with life more fully.

I may go for a swim later.