Bonn

Kulturkampf

Gott und die Staat features in the neat bookshop window frieze
Suggesting that Bonn has not lost all of its politics
With the reunifying right hand shift back to Berlin.
Because old-school Marxist analysis never said seize
The day and raise pedestrian downtown for an Adidas fix
And, here, class action isn't in pursuit of a plasma screen.

It's weird now, news, a café password and the world undresses
At the tourist table, and the unlikely urban tales
Of literal carpet bombing and god-driven primary
Infect the body-politic reading die local presses
With the ordinary disease, and my mobile betrayals
Alienate further the chance of serendipity.

Bauhaus Less is More, that revived spartan revolution
(requiring less Spartan credit facilities) that's passed
Away again with counter-revolutionary
Inevitability, poses the intuition
That a simplicity can help shape how our lives are cast -
And yes, pared down are the Apple products that I carry.

Somewhere nearby there's a Beethoven thing, claims Google
With a little luck I can walk it in eighteen minutes
From here - using GMaps - but there's a live feed, Adele...
And Test Match Special where Anderson's bowling is frugal;
Rolling updates on the acting commissioner's regrets
While across the street, for all I know, Icarus just fell

Couples reconcile, plan pregnancy, consider divorce.
Maybe...their narratives beyond my basic Goethe-trained drawl
Do I gain from the comment page of no firm conclusions?
And this pause for thought - head up, screen off - now reveals the source
Of what politicians always name the wake up call:
My battery is dead, ach, total social exclusion.

Ich habe keine Ducati

So, two intensive weeks at the Goethe Institute and I am linguistically charged ein bischen.

I can now count to a thousand and name all the countries in the EU. Still have some problems translating Heine.

Anyway, the final leg begins next week from Koblenz...My only new fact about the city is that Albert Speer came often to the archives when writing his autobiography; Gitta Sereny's book was better. In fact amazing.

Still walking, no Grayson Perry motorbike for me. A last few days in the BL, writing dissertation on Elizabethan terror, and sneaking a glimpse of old Tom's Crudities, just to remind myself....

Coming Shortly

One year short of the 400th anniversary of the “first” tourist’s journey across Europe, Robin Hunt follows in the footsteps of one of Shakespeare’s drinking mates, Thomas Coryat, armed with the latest communication technologies (and an online computer database filled with 400 years of European history, rumour, culture, scandal and stories of exile) to create a twenty-first century mosaic that considers travel, identity, pleasure and place, in words, sounds and pictures.