Tag: writing

DAS WAR LECKER

Leave a comment

“DAS WAR LECKER!”

Compared to its much softer English equivalent: it was delicious, the hard consonants make it so aggressive, or as I like to think of it, passionate. The louder you say it, the truer it is.

It’s my favourite German phrase (out of the 6 I know).

I learned it to make sure that when I’m eating and drinking out I can use it to compensate for my lack of language knowledge of everything else.

Restaurants and bars are where it started, but it’s also wonderfully applicable to cold showers on hot days, fresh morning walks and my time so far with Dan in Germany.

I haven’t worn make-up in a week. No one does here. My beautiful boots are gathering dust and I’m living in trainers. My hair has been treated to bountiful and cheap conditioning treatments and is softer and shinier than ever, rolling down my shoulders like silk. I’m fitting in. Not because I want to change myself, but because my mindset has been purely ‘explore and embrace’. It’s not a question of why, as much as why not?

40243176_264188997553368_4234830263433035776_n

For a few hours each day, I visit Sophie’s Brauhaus. The waitresses bring me coffee and help me with my German (just this minute she’s told me we’re only speaking in German from now on). I write and write.

My new book is brewing, bubbling and steaming at the back of my head. It’s gradually making its way forward. I’m doing the research and prep I can to coax it closer to the front of my head, so I’ll be able to shut my eyes and watch it play out.

Quitting my job and giving up our lovely flat was really difficult. For the few weeks after when the whole ‘I’m voluntarily unemployed what am I doing??!’ doubts were loud and harsh, I was so worried I’d not made the right decision.

Now I’m here and so totally happy and relaxed, eating, drinking, reading and writing all day, I’m still just a tiny bit worried because it’s so perfect and what on earth have I done to deserve this life? Will I wake up to discover it was just a few too many glasses of wine that lulled me into a long delirious dream? Even now, writing this, I’m beaming.

Stress has always been a driver of mine. Heat and pressure have made me thrive. Before I arrived I was terrified of boredom and slowness to the point of stopping, but Germany has even given me an answer to that: there are wasps everywhere. I just moved my bum further backwards onto the bench I’m sitting on and felt a sting. Happily it was just a prickly hedge.

Granted, the goosebumps I get when I can feel a wasp land on my hair aren’t quite of the same calibre to when I get a tricky brief and a tight time limit from a client, but goosebumps are goosebumps (right?).

But the very best part of being here? Every day for the last seven years Dan’s asked me the same question ‘how was your day?’

And every day for the last week and a bit, my answer has been truthful, instinctive and unfaltering.

‘Lecker. Absolutely bloody lecker.’

 

Advertisement

The first U-Bahn

Leave a comment

Our rooftop apartment is metres away from the U-Bahn stop. It means we can go from sitting on the sofa to sitting on the train within less than a minute. It also means that when the first U-Bahn of the day rattle-hums past, I can hear it from bed. At 5am in the morning, it wakes me up.

I don’t mind. I’m sleeping very lightly here anyway. I’m still getting used to sharing a bed with another human.

I’ve often been a passenger on the last train home. With a high thirst for night-time adventures and a low figure in my bank account, I’m always coming home from London or Manchester at midnight.

Fond is perhaps too strong but I’m accustomed and comfortable among people who have shirts stained with sweat, who have swapped high heels for dirty heels in pursuit of comfort, and where the carriage smells of alcohol and thickness and drowsiness.

It’s the U-Bahn that wakes me up, but as with a lot of things, it’s my imagination that keeps me up.

There’s something about those renewed-by-dawn carriages and their occupants – knowing they’re there, knowing their day has begun, while I’m still warm and only half conscious, that makes me feel something.

The apartment is my safe place here. Particularly bed.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never had the inclination to designate a safe place before, (I’ve started getting a little bit of anxiety exploring Stuttgart with my poor language skills, and returning to the apartment always feels like a small achievement).

I don’t know if I’m explaining this in the right way (but then I don’t quite know what I’m trying to explain either).

In a place and a time that feels right (living with Dan, figuring out my next move), yet still feeling anxiety (what is my next move? Where is it? Oh my god my German is so bad); that 5am train meters away from me pressed up against my best friend, our summer duvet, sweet from the smell of vanilla and lilac fabric softener, is so close, but so far, and in every sense of the word, so foreign.

Today’s Germany has started. And I’ve missed the train.

That frightens and inspires me.

I’m reading lots. This morning I read a character saying to her daughter that to beat fear, you must walk slowly and steadily towards what scares you. That resonated with me because it sounds wonderful, but even more so because after some thought, I realised I had been agreeing with it and living by it since I’ve been here.

My future scares me, so every day I walk slowly and steadily towards the next one.

Not knowing the language scares me, so I walk slowly and steadily into conversation with locals.

It scares me that it’s so hard to make it as an author, and that perhaps my dreams now and always have been too big, but every day I look my dream straight in the face and I just keep typing.

And one day (if it’s not tomorrow, it’s not tomorrow), I’ll leave bed at 4.59am and jump on that first U-Bahn with bed hair, sleep still in my eyes, and my laptop under my arm.

 

Runaway

Leave a comment

On Saturday I ran away.

I packed a bag, called a taxi to the railway station, and didn’t stop moving until I was at the sea.

With a notebook on my knee, a pen in my right hand, and a loaded chip fork in my left, I listened to the waves and I wrote.

After a couple of hours, my handwriting became unrecognisable and I needed a new notebook.

A short walk, £2.99, and 200 fresh pages later, I checked into a hotel. It was dated, with stained ceilings and soft, gold fabric. They had Margaret Atwood books on the bookshelf and The Phantom of the Opera played in the lobby.

It wasn’t until my muscles melted into the clean white sheets of the bed, I realised that I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t tense. The sun came in a triangle through the window and warmed my feet. I wrote until I fell asleep and when I woke up, I wrote some more.

With an alive mind and an exhausted body, I opted to eat dinner at the hotel. At my corner table for one, I was brought farmhouse pate and melba toast, mushroom soup, roast lamb and strawberry cheesecake. It took me several hours and a carafe of chenin blanc to get through it all. I never eat that much, but I didn’t struggle.

On Sunday morning, I walked for miles across the empty beach. I walked until the first beach cafe opened, bought a cup of tea and sat down for more hours still, to write some more.

37161163_1861739797229018_5962766220171149312_n

And then, just as quickly as this flow of writing had started, it stopped. I had emptied myself of words.

When I stood up, I felt it. Lightheadedness wasn’t just the sensation, it was the reality. The morning sky came through even my closed eyelids as an orange light, shining into my uninhabited mind.

What needed to happen had happened. I checked-out of the hotel and travelled home.

When you start to feel consumed (and I mean that in the very sense of the word: eaten up, bit by bit) by everything that your everyday is, sometimes you have to run away and not stop until you’re at the sea. Sometimes you have to host a controlled word explosion until there’s nothing left to come out.

Self-care, self-love, self-compassion. Always, always, always.