Travelling, and working, and having a cup of tea, in Munich central station, which is so huge that you go two stops on the S-bahn train before you actually leave its awnings. I found my little corner of it for a time. A decent trip to Germany, but time to go home.
The reason I came to Germany was to come to a conference here, at the University of Passau, right in the bottom right-hand (south-east) corner of the country. The best experience I had at it was to get plugged in for ten minutes to an amazing virtual reality rig — created by students — which replicated, and rather well, the experience of being in a zero-gravity environment, specifically an abandoned space station. Once I got over the dizziness and tried to forget that my legs were relevant in this place, it was very effective. I wish I could somehow have photographed my own immersion, but that didn’t prove possible, so here’s fellow delegate Reni playing with it, after me.
And so off I go to Germany for the second time this year, after Berlin in August. Munich was not my final destination, but I passed through this afternoon while changing from plane to train. It seemed appropriate that my best chance to take a representative picture came in this beer hall, for after all, that is probably the city’s most famous product. However, being honest, I don’t particularly like Munich — a couple of previous visits have suggested to me that the place is rather overrated, I just don’t find it a very interesting or exciting city. Anyway — that’s why I was just passing through.
Sometimes I have to work on Sundays, though always at home. Today, a sudden desire for soft-boiled eggs was one unexpected consequence.
Fridays are my teaching days at the moment, not every week (hence my ability to bugger off to the Lakes last Friday) but most of them. And it’s an all day thing. So visual variety is not a characteristic of my average Friday, my apologies. Things kick of at 10: the pre-lecture cup of tea from the cafe in the Bridgeford Street building is an essential preliminary.
The town of Burnley has nearly 75,000 people in it and lies less than a dozen miles from my house, so one might have expected it to have appeared on the blog more than three times in the last seven years — and all three of them (6/4/12, 1/19/12 and 22/11/15) were taken at Turf Moor, the home of Burnley FC. Is there much other reason to go to Burnley? Not if the evidence of my life is anything to go by, but I did find cause to visit today for non-footballing reasons. The garage was nothing to do with it, but I do like the scene, even if there’s not quite the desired symmetry to the shot.
From the late 1950s when the Sputnik was launched my mother-in-law Carol kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings related to the space race. These are fabulous archives, frankly. Many things are interesting — firstly the equal amount of column inches given to Soviet achievements as much as US ones — and the sometimes outrageous sexism (Valentina Tereshkova is described as ‘the first girl in space’ and the male astronauts and cosmonauts do not escape being treated as brainless sex objects either). Why did I choose this shot? Well, I guess I just like the relaxed pose of the chimpanzee. Let’s face it, he did more orbits of the planet than the rest of us have ever managed.
Perhaps it was early to be in the pub but I was fed up with work by 4pm today. But perhaps not as doleful as this beer pump appears to be. An inanimate object with a secret inner life? Quite possibly.
Having eulogised the plums and blackberries already this year — and for good reason — let us also add the glorious amount, and richness, of 2018’s apples as well — not to mention a second good crop of rhubarb. In this aspect, no one can complain about the year.
In the time I have been doing this blog, I have made two previous trips to this place, but it has not been documented here for some reason or another. Strange, actually, considering what The Forbidden Corner actually is, a gloriously imaginative folly, a labyrinth where (the first time I visited, at least) I had genuinely no idea what might be around the next corner (forbidden or not). The third trip today was made with my students from Manchester as I had decided that the FC would be a good place to start developing some team-building skills. Better than leaving them up on a moor somewhere, particularly on a rather dull and rainy day like today. Better than being stuck in an office on a Friday, too.
Being 42 