Der Himmel über Berlin

My finger has been confirmed as broken. Sine my whole left hand is bandanged up, I am typing with my right hand and my left thumb only. It's surprisingly efficient.

I wrote some haikus while waiting for my x-ray this morning. If you can't be bothered clicking the link, they are short non-rhyming Japanese poems, consisting of three lines. The first line has five syllables, the second seven and the third five again.

THE FINGER
An innocent fall
Punished without a crack, but
Shit! now it's gone blue

LANGUAGE
Rasping in the throat
Difficult simplicity
Humbling every day

UNTITLED
Sick, the lot of you
Expectant and demanding
Doctor's waiting room

Here's one a kid wrote about me on camp last week:
Stephen has brown hair
That's cool oh yeah yeah yeah yeah
He's an Irish man.

I'm planning on writing one for every year if my life, so watch this space. It's going to be amazing. Give it a try, it's fun!

I and those around me are aware that I have quite a few quirks (to put it nicely) and neuroses (to put it bluntly). Generally, it is pretty easy to avoid situations where they come to light, which allows me to present the illusion of being (mostly) and normal and functional member of society.

However, when stuck on a tiny boat with a group of horny and noisy and dirty teenagers last week, I simply had no chance to disguise the sides of my personality that no-one needs or wants to see. Maybe this was a good thing, and the transparency forced by the cramped living quarters was responsible for how well I got on with my colleagues - either that, or they humoured the neurotic grumpy guy for a week so that he wouldn't flip out.

Anyway. I'm here to talk about my little quirks.

1). I don't like it when people stand over me when I am sitting down.
The solution (standing up) is a pretty easy one, except when the bench you are sitting on and the table you are sitting at are all bolted down so they don't fly around the room every time the boat his a wave. Hence me telling kids to sit down or go away quite a lot.

2). I don't like it when I can't suspend the sounds of normal life for a couple of hours every day.
This is very easy to do when not on a boat full of kids - throw in my earphones and suddenly I am as alone as I need to be. Add kids into the fray and you'll have to tell every single one of them what you are listening to and why, who that band is, if they are good and why, whether I play any instruments and why not, etc, etc, etc. And probably not even in English.

3). I don't like it when I can't shower and wash my hair at least once a day.
It makes me feel nasty and yuk, and I will whinge about it. Relentlessly.

4). I don't like it when I can't get rid of the vast amounts of energy that built up within me. I need to run and jump and frolick.
Which you can't really do on a boat.

5). I HATE having to repeat myself.
What's wrong with your finger, Stephen?
What's for dinner?
When will dinner be ready?
When do we have English?
When are we docking?
All x239472365089246508247 per day.

I think there are more, but I can't write about them because I have to hop seventeen times on my right foot and thirty-eight times on the left because someone just rang the doorbell more than twice. I hope they get to the door within fifteen seconds, otherwise I'll have to spend the day with a pink sock sellotaped to my nose.

I am back from six days on a boat sailing around the South Danish Sea, hopping from island to island with thirty-one teenagers.

Since I came back late yesterday afternoon, I have barely spoken to anyone. It's been wonderful. Silence was in very, very short supply all last week, as you might expect if you cram the aforementioned thirty-one kids, my two colleagues and I, as well as the five crew members into an area smaller than blog HQ. Privacy was also completely suspended, as only a very thin piece of wood separated my bunk from the kids, with two tiny and showerless toilets (cleaned most unwillingly by the youthful ones) to provide for all of us.

I also bust my finger five minutes into the only bit of physical exercise I had all week - an ill-advised game of football on a very rough patch of triangular field. It looked pretty broken despite not hurting very much, not even when a grizzly Danish doctor pushed and pulled it for a few moments, seemingly delighted to have the chance to practice his charming English. Delighted enough, in fact, to treat me for free.

So, all in all, a marvellous week. I say that while trying my best to repress the memories of hours of constantly harassing kids, trying to get them to wash up after dinner, before just giving in and doing it myself along with my equally-stressed colleagues; pining for an hour to myself, not to mention feeling nasty and dirty after far too many showerless days.

No, instead I am thinking of the boat's gentle to-and-fro motion rocking me to sleep even during the daytime (motion that still assaults me when standing still on solid ground - nearly fell over when brushing my teeth this morning); the fresh wind ruffling my almost-curly-again hair, the sun massaging colour into my pale skin; the crew, who were the friendliest and most laid-back Germans I have met in my four years here; my colleagues, with whom I got on famously because they are wonderful, and of course the kids, who, now that I have had a few hours of quiet time away from them, were challenging yet adaptable, raucous yet respectful, annoying yet somehow still charming.

I threw some photos on that other social networking site, feel free to have a look.

Yesterday, herself, myself and some other friends went on a bike trip to Grunewald, a big forest to the west of Berlin.

The trip had a grand total of three punctures, something that would normally have frustrated me greatly were it not for the fact that the repair breaks allowed for beer breaks for those of us with fully functioning vehicles. I am on a pseudo-holiday after all, at least until school starts again at the end of August.

So, eventually we arrived in the forest, and found a small lake to go for a little swim/paddle/flounder (the latter being by far the most accurate, for yours truly at least...), armed with more than adequate supplies of beer, crisps and cake. With the sun finally making an appearance and a football bursting to get out of my bag for a kickaround, what could possibly go wrong?

Not much, you'd imagine.

But then again, we were in Germany, and there were fat elderly people walking around COMPLETELY NAKED. And skinny elderly people. And fat young people. And mildly attractive young people. All shapes and sizes, all naked as the day that they were born. Some seemed even more naked than that, but that was probably down to how indecent the whole thing was, especially with other clothies like us around, as well as little kids and doggies and cyclists and even wild boars.

My friends and I were all a little shocked and a lot repulsed. We're not by any means a prudish bunch - Irish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swiss, French and Swedish, (for the most part all forward-thinking nations), mid-twenties, liberal, adventurous, energetic, fully clothed with no intention of changing.

So what has happened? How can it be that our parents, heck, even our grandparents are less prudish than us? Is it simply because we have spend our formative years watching them gleefully releasing their globs of blubber from the constraints of clothing, bouncing around our public lakes with little regard for the extreme aesthetic tragedy they are inflicting upon us, and have therefore, in an admirably sensible move, decided to learn from the mistakes of our forebears?

How remarkably European of us.

Please excuse me, I have some eyeballs to scrub.

Answers in a comment, please.

If you have further questions, please direct them here.

Last week I held a Creative Writing workshop with the kids (no-one else was willing to do it...). One of them wrote about AtmosphereBall, the sport they play on Mars, another wrote an interview with himself as the director of the well-known film Toilet Paper while another complained vociferously about having to write in the first place.

This is what I scribbled down.

THE HUNTER

The grass moved so imperceptibly that it could have been the wind.

The briefest glimpse of pale speckled skin set the hunter's instincts running wild. His shoulders tensed, his eyes narrowed. He readjusted his grip on his weapon, and then relaxed slightly.

A clean shot was absolutely imperative. Anything less would waste already-depleted ammunition and inflict vast amounts of unnecessary pain on his prey. Not that a certain amount of unnecessary pain would make any real difference, he thought grimly, considering how much absolutely necessary pain would be dealt out once things got going.

The hunter barely noticed night falling. He never did. He had been in this position too many times and enjoyed the vegetables of his labours too often to bother with such trivialities. The rustling in the grass had grown more frequent over the last hours, but not enough to make him take any action beyond tense and anticipatory readiness.

After so many hours perceiving the barely perceptible, his quarry's sudden and violent rush out of the undergrowth in his direction seemed like an apocalyptic event. Unfazed, he readjusted his aim minutely and pulled the trigger, catapulting a platoon of tiny blades horizontally from his weapon. As they made contact, shrieks of pain reverberated through the forest, causing a group of colourful birds in the nearby trees to flee with indignant squawks. The hunter had already smoothly switched weapons, and now sent a jet of clear fluid directly at the lacerated creature. The screams of pain increased, anguished and tortured, before dying out completely, leaving only ominous sounds of crackling and sizzling. It had all happened so quickly that a shocked silence was only beginning to emerge from the shadows.

The potato hunter extracted himself from his hiding place, strode forward and picked up an impeccably sliced, deliciously greasy potato chip, popping it into his mouth with a sigh so satisfied that it chilled the other observing potatoes to the depths of their soon-to-be cooked souls.

I am back from the second of three weeks on camp, and have some camp-related stuff to blog about, provided someone else hasn't already exceeded the quota of camp posts already...

I've done around twenty weeks on camp since moving here, all with the same company. Most kids were mostly forgettable. Some stick in your mind for being little dickheads who never should have been born. But then one or two stick in your mind for being absolutely amazing, the sort of kid you wish you were yourself and the sort of kid you hope to end up having at some point.

I had a large number of those kids on my camp last week. One of them had already been on camp with me a couple of times, and it truly is a pleasure to be able to trace what a wonderful person she's becoming. She's thirteen and oozes enthusiasm for learning, for communication and sociability. She had no qualms about being the writer, director and star of a little theatre piece for my English group, and only a small number of qualms about standing up in front of the whole group to sing a song for us, all by herself.

On most camps, there's a teenage boy who likes to think that the smaller kids looking up to him means that he is the boss of the camp. On my first week there was such a figure, and he took every opportunity to push me to see just how far he could erode my authority. (Ha! Not very!). Last week, though, the oldest teenage boy was adored by the smaller kids and teachers alike. True, he was immature and silly, but possessed such undeniable charm and was so fundamentally interested in each and every person on the camp, be they a whiny eleven-year old or a football-obsessed camp director who feels more comfortable behaving like a child.

Great kids, no doubt. It made me think what would my teachers or camp directors have written about me when I was in my early teens. I think they would barely have known I existed. I would have been the quiet one sitting in the corner, getting all the work done efficiently, wanting more but being too afraid to ask. There would have been a couple of moments when I surprised everyone with a smart comment in the middle of class, retreating back into my corner before the laughter had died down.

And what about you? What sort of kid were you?