Journal kiekies*

Some notes I found in this year's journals

*kiekie (Afrikaans) Noun.

photo; photograph (usually taken by an amateur photographer)

figuratively - brief but very vivid description through writing or spoken words

Neue National Galerie, Berlin

I am sitting on a (very comfortable) Mies van der Rohe-designed black leather chair looking out at the rain and the St Mattias Kirche. I’m sleepy. I want a snooze, but I don’t think that would be okay here. I’m writing because it’s more active than reading and might keep me awake better, but I am losing the battle and I stare at people and things for ages before realising it.

There are two men sitting opposite me. They are either brothers or lovers. The have that ease with one another. Maybe they are lovers who look like brothers. Same height. Same colouring. Same, baggy, pocketed trousers. One has his hair very short but he has wild orange brows that stretch over his glasses as though they are trying to out-see his eyes. He has taken off his expensive-looking walking shoes – obscure brand – and put his feet on the buttoned black settee. Is that what that thing is called? A kind of a couch but flat?

Here comes the other one now. I think he went to the loo. Nervous, head-forward walk. White postboy cap. Blue T-shirt under a long-sleeved open shirt. He is also taking off his shoes. His socks are the same blue as his T-shirt.

Their friends have arrived. White-haired smiling man, grey-bobbed smiling woman. Now that they are talking, I see Mr Blue T-shirt has a slight lisp. He drinks water. Eyebrows drinks Coke.

I’ve just remembered how it feels when you drink Coke that isn’t ice cold. How it makes your teeth rough. Like velvet when you rub it the wrong way.

Kaštel Kambelovac, Split

Very early swim today. No one there. The sky thick with thunderclouds. The sea the colour of the tip of a pencil.

Bus from Hackney to Bankside, London

Cash machine, beggar, underground station, Tesco, Sushi Dog, Subway, ancient dirty brick, boarded-up windows, boarded-up archways, buses and buses, tall glass foyers with designer chairs where no one sits, bollards and bollards, banks, bins and bins and banks of bins, currency exchange, Pret A Manger, bridge, little Waitrose, big Waitrose, bridge, bus station.

On the train in Slovenia

Sam says maybe it is so satisfying to travel because it is hard and you don’t know much. You’re like a child. And then you do something difficult and you feel competent for doing it and that is a reward so great, you feel good and you want to repeat the experience.

Nollendorfkiez

The change of seasons always brings this strange combination of nostalgia and expectation. And a feeling like change is not just a thing happening out there in the world, but is making itself known to you inside yourself too. You live every day without thinking you are older or different. And then a certain slant of light, or a smell, or a bird call, makes you feel like you’re standing outside the kitchen door in Queenswood in your grey summer school dress wondering whether you should go back inside for your scratchy grey jersey.

I like the feeling of longing for something without any of the rational stuff.

No, I can never smell Ollie’s baby head again and Jules won’t ever rub my earlobe to soothe herself to sleep again. I can never again attend the hobby fair at Rietondale where Dad won first prize for his wooden toy train and I was so proud. I will never read stories to Peter again. I will never wait for the signal from Ma when I can jump up and pull the rope that activates the bell to tell the bus driver to stop at the next stop. I will never lie and read on the spongey grass in the backyard again. Or walk down to the waterfall at the farm with Sandra and Max and Duncan. Or see the fireflies there at night. Or watch the Milky Way from there.

But in the moment when I become aware of some sensation of environmental shift signalling the beginning or the end of a season, I feel like I wish I could briefly time travel.

But maybe those memories that erupt so spontaneously are the time travel.

Autumn skies in Berlin. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

Wales

Walking. Walking and working. Absence of thought.

Teufelssee, Berlin

What is that sign? It’s a huge, thick tattoo at the top of the spine of a man whose magenta hair is shaved down the sides. He has a single stud in each lobe. Oh, wait! It’s an eszett. Done in Gothic script (I think). Nice!

This is an eszett. It signifies a double ‘s’ in German.

A woman with big boobs and big nipples but dainty everything-else has a tattoo of two Keith Harding people dancing on her shoulder.

Ringbahn to Tempelhof

A little girl came to sit opposite us with (I think) her au pair whose name is Nina. I know, because the girl says it often, almost every time she starts a new train of thought. And it comes out like a question. ‘Nina?’ Is how she starts every observation.

She watched out the window sitting on her knees the whole time and made comments all the way.

She said, ‘Nina, do birds fly at night?’

Nina said birds slept at night, like us. Except owls. They fly at night and say ‘hoo hoo’.

The girl looked out of the window dreamily and then she said, also dreamily, ‘It’s because owls have lights inside their eyes.’

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Making my own mini newspaper

From a very young age, I hoovered up magazines and the Sunday paper. As a journalist, the day started with a newspaper opened up across my desk with my builder’s tea in a styrofoam cup. Some part of Saturday and Sunday, for years, involved taking apart a newspaper for me and my ex-husband to share.

The advent of the internet made more copy from more news outlets from around the world available but you know what? It totally undid and bamboozled my reading habits.

Newspapers and magazines are finite, contained entities, expertly and often lovingly put together, shaped by minds and stances, and arranged in logical ways. I knew more or less how long they would take to read, I could see at a glance what did not interest me, I knew how to get immediately to what served or interested me most.

News on the internet feels like a never-ending hellhole of moving bits, flashing distractions, thousand-tentacled link sinkholes, and bewildering infinity. There is never a last page. There is never a ‘finished’ moment I can coordinate with the last sip of my tea.

My era of haphazard reading might finally have ended. My new Berlin friend, also an ex-newspaper journalist, told me he saves articles he wants to get back to on a specific app.

I downloaded it a little sceptically (this is not my first attempt to try and work out a comfortable way to read non-book material), but it changed everything immediately and the past two weeks have felt like some knot in my brain has been undone.

Now when I click the share button on any article, the app comes up and I can save it in there. It means I have all the long-form pieces from different publications in one place and don’t have a thousand tabs open to try and remember to get back to (and eventually just close in a moment of defeat). I can also read off-line. And I can mark favourites and tag articles, so that I have begun to keep an archive that makes sense to me.

It’s not often a life-changing something-or-other comes along, but this tiny thing has completely altered the way I read. I am back to that feeling of sitting down in the mornings with a large broadsheet spread across my desk that I can read while I sip my tea. I don’t miss the styrofoam at all, but now I also miss the paper a little less.

It was using this app that I read a series of longer articles in The Economist on handwriting (and old obsession of mine), an article on The Problem of Trauma Culture and another on different styles of thinking. I can recommend all of them.

Sam and I have finally got around to watching The Morning Show, and bar one major irritation that almost derailed it for me, I thought it was well-scripted and nuanced. But the real lasting effect of the show for me is the number of new songs I’ve added to my current playlist. Most especially this powerful cover by Rozzie of an favourite oldie (‘Creep’ by Radiohead).

Lots of love,

K.