Been quiet here, I know. Partly because I spent nearly two weeks without looking at a computer. I’ve just returned (well, last Sunday anyway) from a holiday in Bochum, helping to lead a Woodcraft Folk exchange trip, taking a load of kids to visit our partner organisation in Bochum. It was the 20th anniversary of these trips, so we got to do lots of celebrating & meet the mayor of Bochum & stuff like that. Also visited a few sights in the area, such as they are, went to the Ludwig Museum in Köln, which was amazing: by far the best modern art museum I’ve seen outside a capital city, a ridiculous number of Picassos (though mostly sketches), an excellent collection of German Expressionist art (probably my favourite type), and some good surrealist stuff (I got to see my first Paul Delvaux since reading all about him in Antwerp). It’s a shame I hadn’t finished my current read, Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin, otherwise I’d have hidden this somewhere in the Surrealist Section, it would make a nice objet trouvé for somebody.
Also, Rowan got to spend a day away from her parents, playing “Scotland Yard sucht Mr. X”, with a group of 5 older kids hunting for Mr X across the whole of Bochum, Essen and Gelsenkirchen. Her team won, and I think she really enjoyed herself & benefited from the freedom.
The other thing I bin doing, coincidentally, is learning lots more Germunn. German & English Literature were my only failures at O-Level I’d always assumed myself kind of crap at languages, but this and my previous trip to Bochum last November have made me realise I’m not actually all that bad. I still don’t understand German all that well, but I can usually express things pretty well, and my vocabulary grew quite noticeably each day (mainly due to the copy of Doktor Langenscheidt’s wonderful wörterbuch secreted in my trouser pockets, which I whipped out and used to translate virtually every public sign, poster, shop display, cereal packet that passed before my eyes during my time in Germany). I’m really keen to learn more, and might engage myself in some lessons or other practice in preparation for hosting some of our German friends this November & next Easter. What I’d really love to be able to do one day is confidently read the two German language novels that I bought myself in a fit of hopeless optimism, although at the moment it takes me around half-an-hour, with dictionary at my side, to get a very rough gist of a single page.
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