Der Himmel über Berlin

Tomorrow is a holiday in Germany, and a rather special one. Most of Berlin will be assembled along Oranienstr (where blog HQ is) and the surrounding streets, listening to live music, having fun and eating and drinking like only Germans can.

The atmosphere will be very relaxed and calm for most of the day, but as soon as darkness starts to fall, the mood will noticably change to one of aggression and anarchy.

Yep, tomorrow is May 1st, and Berlin is getting ready to fight.

Last year was one of the quietest May Days in years, with only 234 arrests, 43 policemen injured and 58 incidences of vandalism, of which 17 were damage to or burning of cars. (Source: Die Welt)

It's is clearly just an excuse for aggressive idiots to riot, without any of the traditional political motivation. Last year I hung out until dusk then scarpered off home. This year will probably be the same, provided people don't expect me to be a vandal now that I look like one, thanks to my bloody nose.

Still, if anyone tries to vandalise blog HQ, they'll have Angry Rampie to deal with...

Of course I saw a football match when I was in Sweden over the weekend. None other than Sweden's biggest game, the Stockholm derby, AIK Solna v Djurgårdens IF. One of my buddies that I was visiting, one of two brothers resident on the outskirts of Stockholm, is a rabid AIK fan and procured tickets for the four of us.

Three minutes in, AIK scored. The guy sitting between me and my other pal simutaneously elbowed me in the face and pushed my friend two rows down before jumping on him. I was just picking myself off the (seemingly lifeless) body of another prone black-and-yellow clad supporter when I was landed on from somewhere else. And then somewhere else.

Three minutes later, we examined the damage. The two Swedes were utterly unhurt. I had a broken pair of glasses and a nose that was spurting alarming amounts of blood. My poor Welsh pal that had been jumped upon was, unsurprisingly, completely immobile with severe back pain.

Never mind. I wiped the blood onto my jersey (red looks great with black and yellow) and continued singing except half hoping they wouldn't score again. End result: 1-1. Dodgy penalty ruined it all. Bloody good fun though.

Apart from all that, it was nice and relaxing. Was rather surprised that Swedes are not all as attractive as a glance at the avatars on blogs.se would suggest. Pictures on the internet telling lies? Never!

I was amazed at my friends' family life. Their parents are so wonderfully liberal, accomodating and generous. It was no problem for any of the four of them to change the language of familial discourse to English for four days, or to allow two greedy islanders to ravage their fridge when stumbling in after a good old-fashioned Swedish boozing session at four in the morning.

It was also perfectly normal for them to show each other lots of affection and speak freely about any subject (we had frequent conversations about sex and maturbation, in which everyone happily participated) - it stuck me that their interaction with each other was more like that of friends than that of parents and offspring.

In my family, things aren't like that. We get on well, and I love them all very much, I would just never tell them that. I would also never sit snuggled up with my dad, or kiss my mother for no particular reason, or, under any circumstance EVER, discuss sexual matters with them. Not cos it would bother me, it wouldn't, but because it would bother them very much indeed.

Anyway, I had fun. Sweden, or, more specifically, Swedish people are wonderful.

A couple of years ago, I had a few brief encounters with a young Swedish female.

She was an unusual one. She refused to speak to me when she was sober. When drunk however, she became, well, a rather obliging young lady. Still didn't speak to me, but I didn't mind so much then.

She also spent rather a lot of time trying to convince people that I was gay. Usually at the top of her voice. In public places.

Once she locked us both into my bathroom as I was having a St. Patrick's Day party. She was, at that point, both drunk and obliging. Her boyfriend was, at that point, drunk and crying in the arms of my best friend just outside the door about how he couldn't make her trust him.

She ate my credit card too. I don't mean that in the metaphorical sense of her spending all my money, I mean it in the literal sense of her actually consuming my credit card. The whole thing. Which was made of plastic.

Tonight I'm flying to Sweden. I'm really looking forward to it, but I can't figure out if it's because of, or despite the reasons outlined above.

...if you're German that is.

Because it's Spargelzeit. Asparagus time.

Those disturbingly phallic, evil tasting little sticks of devil-hate will be thrust into every Berliner's face for the next three months.

The most worrying thing is that most people are happy about that. Nothing like things being available for a limited periods of time to make people not care about whether it actually tastes good or not. Right, Cadbury's Creme Egg?

I just want to officially state that I am boycotting Spargelzeit this year. If anyone invites me to dinner and there are goddam aparagus on my plate, I will fucking throw them at you. You survived the last nine months without them, didn't you? So get a fricking grip!

I'm not quite sure why I am blogging this, apart from the fact that I found it to be one of the most moving things I have read in a while.

It's an interview with a well-known Irish writer, Nuala O'Faolain, who was recently diagnosed with lots and lots of incurable cancer.

I find her attitude to be pretty close to how I think mine would be if I was in her situation. Why torture yourself with treatment that will only prolong the misery? I have watched someone very dear to me waste away over the course of a year. I wish he could have died without putting himself through the misery of trying not to. I think he only did it for those of us around him who didn't like the idea of our lives without him in it. We were selfish.

It's pretty long but very much worth reading. Excuse the punctuation and spelling errors, it's a transcript of a radio interview.

MF: Nuala O'Faolain you've been on the programme a number of times in connection with your writing and you wrote your memoir "Are You Somebody" in a way that it seemed it explained yourself to you and now you're doing this interview in a completely different context and I understand that it's to explain yourself to yourself as well as to us as well.

NO'F: Yeah, it must look as if I'm an awful divil for publicity altogether and, in a sense, since I wrote "Are You Somebody" and it reached what is truth to say was a huge response, I have in a sense put myself out there. And the interviews I gave back then 10 or 11 years ago are like one bookend in which I presented myself and lots of people didn't like me and lots of people did.

But one way or another it was company for me who happens to be a childless middle-aged woman.

Now I am actually dying and I have Metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body.

And, somehow or another, it helps me to set up the other bookend and to say to those people who were interested in me and did care about me to say to them 'well this is how it is for me now for what its worth'.

Read more!

The Rules -
1. Link to the person's blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself
4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

Wow, only seven? Should be a walk in the park after the '100 Things' marathon of a few weeks ago...

1. I despise Coca-Cola and cannot understand why people drink it
2. I am petrified of cotton wool. Even writing it down makes my skin crawl
3. I am really bad at shaving and always leave little tufts of fluff all over my face. This is probably because I usually shave without my glasses on
4. I moved apartments at the weekend. It was the thirteenth time I have moved everything I own from one place to another in two and a half years in Berlin
5. I made my first ever support call in German two days ago, and it went better than I could have ever expected
6. My parents are coming to visit at the weekend and I am very excited about that
7. My bike tyres need to be pumped pretty badly

Hmm, let's see...
I tag:
1. denzil85
2. Berlinlights
3. hebburndelboy
4. NotBob
5. subville
6. stella_jones
7. anyone else who fancies it.

You may have noticed from my post below that I am currently sporting a little beardy-type beard thing.

There's a problem though.

The hair on the left side of my face grows noticably faster than that on the right.

I can't think of any logical reason for this. The best that I can come up with is that I sleep on my left side, so while I'm asleep the left stubble doesn't have to battle against gravity like the right stubble.

Also, I have never met a less hairy male than me. I have three hairs on my left nipple and five on my right. There are a couple of rogue hairs on my left shoulder, and that's it. A slighlty blubberly Irish pale chest is what I have. Which is good though. Hairy chests are nasty.

All this is leading me to think I should just shave the 'beard' off.