With daylight lasting considerably longer now than it did only a few weeks ago, I have started to walk home again whenever I have enough time and the weather is right. This week, this was the case twice; I walked home (not directly from work, but getting off the train in the small town next to my hometown, one stop before I'd have to) the 5 km or so both on Tuesday and yesterday.
On Tuesday, it was nearly 6.00 pm by the time I reached this crossing on the fields, and the light had the particular mellowness I like so much about that time of the day. I had this beautiful sunset to my left for a while until I decided to take a picture of it (with my mobile phone, which really doesn't have a good camera).
Yesterday, I left work a lot earlier (at 4.00), and there were many other people out and about, so I did not take any pictures.
We're in for a beautiful weekend with plenty of sun and temperatures are expected to reach 20 Celsius! What a difference to this time last year, when I still had to wear my padded winter coat, scarves and gloves in April.
Unfortunately, though, I'll have to be careful about weekend activities. On Wednesday, I woke up with a sore throat, and it has become worse over the last two days; can hardly speak now (which maybe isn't too bad for some, he he) but generally feel alright, not ill as such.
Were you wondering about the headline of today's post? Let me get to that now.
On this recent post I showed you pictures from the Old Cemetery. One picture I did not show you was this one:
A large family grave (when do you actually say "grave" and when do you say "tomb"? I honestly don't know the difference), such as a wealthy family would have back in the days when this cemetery was not yet the "old" one, but the only one of Ludwigsburg.
What intrigued us at first when we walked up to this grave was the small, simple stone cross, just visible behind the rusty iron fence in the left corner of the plot. Why was this one seperate from the others? It certainly wasn't for lack of space on the large stone tablets against the wall, because on there, a name was added as late as 2001, when actually the cemetery had long ceased to be used officially, and the stone cross was much older than that. Who had been close enough to the family to be buried on their plot, but not close enough to have their name added to the headstone?
My imagination was captured in particular, though, when I saw one person's name and dates:
Look at the middle panel, where it reads (in the lower half of the panel):
"Dolly Höring geb. Dick" (meaning Dolly Höring, née Dick), followed by
"geb. in London, 23. Juni 1873" and "gest. 23. Febr. 1933 Schlachtensee".
Now, who was Dolly Dick? How did a lady from London end up marrying into a family of doctors in Ludwigsburg? Which one of the men named on the headstone had been her husband?
Three cheers for google! I managed to find out a few things about "Dolly". First of all, Dolly was her nickname - unusual for that to appear on a tombstone, isn't it? Her full name was Kate Anna Dick. Her father was one Charlos (I imagine this to be a transcription error; isn't it much more likely that the name was Charles, not Charlos?) James Adolph Dick, a London merchant who had married a German woman, too: Anna Scriba from Darmstadt.
Kate ("Dolly") had four siblings. In 1899, when she was 26, she married Otto Höring from Ludwigsburg. The wedding was in Frankfurt. Otto was 33 and, unlike most of his male relatives, who were doctors, worked as "Regierungsbaumeister". Today, I suppose that would be a Civil Engineer.
A typical bridal couple of around this time would have looked like this:
(These pictures are not mine. I nicked them from various places on the web.) Possibly, Dolly had a hairstyle like this around that time:
And maybe one of her day dresses looked like this:
Anyway, it is entirely left to my imagination as to how she met Otto, and what her life with him was like. Her father died 4 years after the wedding, her mother died in 1913 in Oslo (then called Christiania), Norway - another intriguing change of scene. The person underneath Dolly's name on the tomb, Adolf Höring, was probably her son, born seven years after she married Otto.
Dolly was only 60 when she died. By then, in 1933, people dressed and lived differently from when she left her parents' home in London to live in a foreign country with her new husband. It was the beginning of a new era for Germany, one that would lead to terrible atrocities commited by many of my countrymen and -women, the extents of which are still very much in our minds today.
She did not live long enough to know about any of this. Her husband died in the last year of WWII, by then back in his hometown. Whether Dolly ever lived in Ludwigsburg at all, or was merely buried here because it was her husband's hometown, I don't know.
Another free ebook from the Kindle shop, "Dora Deane" was not always quite what I had expected.
This novel was first published in 1859, written by Mary Jane Holmes whose short biography you can read here. Isn't it funny how all of these authors I've never heard about before are said to have been bestselling in their days? Without the kindle shop and its many free editions of old books, I'd never have known about most of the writers I have been mentioning here on my blog.
Dora Deane, orphaned at the age of twelve, is grudgingly taken in by her aunt; on the surface, as a family member, but reality soon shows that she makes a very convenient servant, especially for her cousin Eugenia, who has high ambitions.
These ambitions lead Eugenia to plot and deceive, all in view of the coveted prize: To one day be Lady of the Manor at Rose Hill, the Big House in the small town where the Deanes live in comparative poverty.
Dora does not suspect anything until years later, and without complaint does all the menial tasks set on her, although she'd much rather go to school, having developed a fondness for books and learning.
How the owners of Rose Hill get to meet Dora, resulting in an improbable friendship and, eventually, her finding love and happiness, is told over the course of several years. Everyone gets their reward in the end - there is some moralising in this book, but it is more out of a deep sense of justice than the overly pious attitude of Charlotte M. Yonge, making for a read not unpleasant, and not without its moments of tension (especially when Eugenia is about to find out that she has been found out).
Places and people are described clearly enough for a good mental picture without dwelling too much on every little detail of ladies' hairstyles and attire. Several times, I had been expecting something else to happen, but the overall outcome was not surprising.
Neither particularly recommending this book nor advising against it, I found this a relatively pleasant read, not overly challenging - and not too long :-)
When I went visiting my Yorkshire family last summer, my mother-in-law gave me a pile of books she had enjoyed reading to take home with me. Because I was in no hurry to read them all, I have only now finished reading the next-to-last one of the pile:
"The Tennis Party" by Sophie Kinsella, writing as Madeleine Wickham (her real name).
I have read several of her books before, and I know I am repeating myself here, but it never fails to astonish me how much the characters in these books drink. Of course, my previous Kinsella-read (Cocktails For Three, reviewed here) had drinks in the title and therefore was no surprise in this respect. But in so many books of this genre (I suppose it is "Chick Lit"), the ladies (and sometimes the gentlemen, too) drink, and drink, and drink. They don't just have a nice glass of wine to accompany a good meal, or the occasional glass of champagne to celebrate some special occasion or other. They drink like buckets, and seem to be quite proud of it. Now, don't get me wrong - I am certainly no teetotaler; after all, I throw a cocktail party for my birthday every year, and hardly ever say no when offered a glass of champagne at someone's birthday. But to drink for the sake of drinking, and that being the only way to make a gathering worth attending, is absolutely not my style. I can have immense fun (and be very, very silly) on nothing but tap water, if I am in the right mood and good company. I also don't want to get into preaching mode here (I leave that to YP, who is a lot better at using ecclesiastical sounding language than I). But I can't help finding this amount of drinking puzzling, no matter how often I read of it.
Enough of that, now to the story:
Several couples are invited to spend a weekend in the country at the mansion of rich self-made man Patrick, his wife Caroline and their horse-loving daughter. The reason given is to play a tennis tournament among the party guests, who are Stephen and Annie (their neighbours back in the days before Patrick and Cressida became rich), Charles (who used to be just as averagely poor as the others before his marriage) and his aristocratic wife Cressida, plus new rich neighbours Don and Valerie. Stephen and Annie and Charles and Cressida also bring their children, and it looks like everyone is set to enjoy a great weekend with plenty of sunshine, barbecues and - of course - drinks.
Rather soon, though, the true intention for inviting them begins to emerge, and a surprise guest turns up - very welcome to some, most unwelcome to other members of the party.
Temptations of various kinds are thrown at Stephen and Charles, while Annie and Caroline are determined not to let anything come between them to ruin their long standing friendship. Cressida and Charles have troubles of their own to sort out, and the children are not just there to make up numbers, either.
How new and old friendships, as well as love, prevail in the end, is interesting enough to read and not quite as predictable as this type of story sometimes is. So, if you don't mind to read about a lot of drinking (and I mean a LOT), you can enjoy the well-depicted atmosphere of a sunny weekend in the country, where not everything (or everyone) is as it appears on the surface.
Am I the only one to feel as if we've only just been celebrating New Year's Eve? And look - it is already March! Of course, looking back at everything I did over the past two months and at all the things that have been happening around me and on a larger scale, the two months become entirely credible.
Let me start this month with a random collection of pictures I took during January and February; pictures that (in my opinion) do not merit their own post but which I did not want to delete without sharing them, either.
In January, we often had rather mixed weather. It was the mildest January I can remember. One afternoon, sleety rain was falling straight out of the sun - or so it seemed:
It lasted mere minutes, and afterwards, the light was exceptionally brilliant, as you can see from my kitchen window. Everything appeared to have sharper contours than usual.
Of course I was hoping for a rainbow - and there was one, but it was too pale to show up properly in a picture.
An outfit I favoured during that month (not for work, only for play) was my dear old Fuchsia dress:
(Yes, that's right, I have Hello Kitty bed sheets. They were a gift from my sister, if I remember correctly.)
February saw some beautiful sunrises. I must confess I rarely get to see a sunrise in summer, because I sleep until 7.00 on an average working day, but winter is a different story.
Some February mornings, my kitchen was sunlit when I came in to have my morning coffee. Seeing this made for an even better start of the day!
A favourite business outfit during this month was my black knit dress. You can't see it in the picture, but it has a small knitted collar with black shiny "jet pearls" (of course they are fake) sewn on to it. At the office, I wear a tailored jacket over it; I'd soon get too chilly with short sleeves at this time of the year.
There is a lot lined up for me this month; for one thing, it'll be my birthday towards the end of the month, and the day after, I'll be travelling to Ulm (about 120 km from Ludwigsburg), to start the course for my certificate for Data Protection Officer. I've been working in this field for over a year now without a certificate, but since Germany is quite obsessed with official documents and regulations for each and every little thing, it will be better for our business when not only RJ has the official stamp on his job.
I have no idea how I am going to fare at the course - three times a full week, with each day being an entire day of lessons - after I have not been in a proper learning environment since my last day at Librarian School in 1988. Learning does not become easier with age, but I have two advantages: first, I really want to learn all the theory that is behind my actual work, and second, RJ has kindly lent me the study material he used when he took the same course some years ago, so that I won't arrive totally unprepared.
Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823 - 1901) was an immensely prolific author, producing around 90 novels, plus writing or editing 150 biographies, textbooks, (natural) history books and translations. Many of her books were bestsellers in their day, and apparently she "is cited more times than Jane Austen in the Oxford English Dictionary’s
most quoted female sources (sixth overall, with George Eliot top of the
list)." (I found this information, as well as pictures of Miss Yonge, her house and the room where most of her writing took place, here. She is said to have been held in high esteem by Anthony Trollope and Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf and Barbara Pym, among others.
"Henrietta's Wish; or, Domineering" was published in 1853 and is very much a typical example of Victorian girls' literature. If you can't stand constant reference to Christian morals, you better not read this book. But if you like family stories about friendship, and how different members of a family deal with changes in their lives, and don't mind the (to our ears) rather silly-sounding dialogues that sometimes go on a bit, you'll probably enjoy this book. (Mine was of course a free kindle-edition.)
In short, Henrietta and her twin brother Frederick grow up fatherless, but with no financial worries. Their mother was widowed one week after their birth, and saw only one way of coping with the untimely loss of her beloved husband: moving away from the village where everyone and everything reminded her of their happy years together.
The book starts when the twins are sixteen, and Henrietta makes it her goal to have the three of them move back to the heart of the family, much against her mother's wish at first. Eventually, she succeeds, and involuntarily sets in motion a chain of events that lead to much unhappiness, some danger and even death.
Until the more dramatic events begin to unfold (more than halfway through the book), all seems bright and beautiful: the twins get along greatly with their cousins, like their aunts and uncles and are very fond of their grandparents. Their mother seems to settle in well, and takes interest in buying a house in the village and having it renovated for them. The plan is to stay at the big house with her parents-in-law until their own place is ready.
In the meantime, there are walks, visits, ice-skating, charades, church-decorating, singing and all sorts of innocent entertainment deemed appropriate for young people from wealthy families. The boys have school matters to discuss, and the girls are forever rushing upstairs to fetch their bonnets before going out.
I must confess I was getting a bit bored with all the merry-making (of course sprinkled with moralistic hints all the time), but then an accident happens that changes things for everyone involved.
From then on, I began to care a bit about the characters. Sometimes, I would have liked to shake them and scream at them for being so set in their Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Altogether, the story left me with mixed feelings. I do agree with many of the values Miss Yonge outlines, but I can not abide the moralizing.
By the way: you are still very welcome to contribute to our blovel!
That is exactly what we had yesterday: A Sunday of sunny blue skies and the typical early-spring mixture of warmth once you were in the sun and chilliness as soon as you were in the shadow of a building or behind trees.
My original plan had been to go for the same walk described here, but then my sister convinced me that it was a much better idea to have a look at the first flowers in the palace grounds than to walk on the still rather bleak and featureless fields.
We arrived to much beauty, and thankfully, not too many people in the park, since it was lunch time.
The carp living in the fountain of the palace's inner courtyard are very old, and very big - some of them have about the length and width of one of my thighs! Sometimes in the summer, I put my arm in and give them a little stroke. They come up and look at you and you wonder what goes on behind those eyes.
This building (which never really was anything but a ruin, put there on purpose back in the days when it was fashionable for members of the aristrocacy to have a few "ancient ruins" in their landscaped parks) is where my Mum will have her 70th birthday celebration in August. Weather permitting, we'll have champagne out on the lawn in front (not visible here) and a posh dinner inside.
One of my recent posts showed the trailer of an exhibition about the connection between the Royal House of Württemberg and the Russian Tsars. In that post, I said that we did not get to see the exhibition because we would have had to queue about an hour for the tickets alone, and nobody in our group of friends was willing to do that. But my sister went to see the exhibition last week, and told me about it. We talked about some of the people from that time and were not quite sure who was the one who had a monument to his closes friend erected on the old cemetery, so we decided to walk over there and have a look.
I wrote about this monument here in 2010; it was Friedrich, the first king of Württemberg.
We also paid a visit to the tomb of the last king of Württemberg (Wilhelm - not Friedrich; thanks to my sister who pointed out my error) and were amazed at how neglected it looks. Couldn't the state of Württemberg afford to pay a gardener to take care of its last king's last resting place? Not a single flower in sight!
Generally, the Old Cemetery (as opposed to the New Cemetery next door, which is still in use) is a park today. There are the tombs of some locally famous people there, plus monuments to the dead from the two World Wars and the 1870/71 war between France and Germany.
The oldest tomb still identifiable (there must have been some older ones, but their stones and exact locations are lost) is this one from 1768, for a man who was born in 1688. The town itself is not much older, the foundation for the palace having been laid in 1704 (and it took a few decades because anything resembling a town formed around it).
We met this little fellow on the way out and back to the park. He was not in the least bothered by us, and we were really close.
All in all, we walked for about 3 hours. It felt so good being out in the sun!
This is a three-in-one post, plus an appeal for more contributions to our blovel; so far, there are only 2 contributions, which is not very exciting and makes me want to think about ending the experiment.
Back to business: A film, a "book" and a walk. What first? The "book", I suppose. Why do I keep putting the word in speech marks? Because "1980 - 1982 Memories of an '80s Kid" by Louise Gilpin hardly qualifies as a book. It is very short (Amazon gives an estimated 31 pages on the kindle shop product page), and, as the title says, not a novel but a succession of memories of the author herself.
Louise Gilpin was 8 years old in 1980 and loved pop music. She remembers the entire decade mainly for its songs, or rather, any event she can think of is somehow tied to a particular song. I suppose we all have such memory-triggers that work like tiny time-machines, instantly taking us back to certain places and events from our past when we hear a certain song. It was interesting to read what a lot of those well-known songs from the early 1980s mean to the author. She writes about her home life, about school and her first time at a youth disco, how she longed for a particular type of haircut, the roller-skating with her best friend, and most fondly of all, about her grandparents. We see what Christmas was like with this family, how the relationship with her older brother worked, and can relate to how upset the little girl was when the family dog had to be put to sleep.
It is, all in all, not an unpleasant read, but more often than not, the author digresses a lot, not having much of a chronological order. If I were to advise Louise Gilpin (who, by her own words, means to publish her memories of the rest of the '80s), I'd say:
Dear Louise, why don't you start blogging? You could write a seperate post about each of the events or people you remember so well. You could easily incorporate your favourite '80s songs by embedding youtube videos in each post. And you could digress as much as you like - nobody would expect any order to your posts. I am sure you'd soon have many followers, who'd love to reminisce with you.
Now for the film: I was in the mood for the telly last night instead of playing my Sims, reading or writing, and found that "Night at the Museum" was on. Now, I knew about this film but had never watched it; plus I have to admit I am neither particularly keen on Ben Stiller nor on Robin Williams. But the mere idea caught my attention: Who has not, at some stage or other in their childhood, imagined being on their own at night in a place where usually you were supposed to be only during the day and under constant supervision? Who has not wondered what it would be like, what discoveries were waiting in the nightly place, so different in the dark and without people? Well, I know I have often imagined this about the palace here in Ludwigsburg, which has featured several times on my blog (for instance here.) When I was little, I used to imagine how I would get up at night, taking the exact amount of the bus fare from my pocket money, and walk to the bus stop not far from our house. I knew which bus to take and where to get off. I never thought about how I'd actually get inside the palace; somehow I simply assumed some door would be open. I imagined myself walking along the silent corridors, entering the beautifully furnished and decorated rooms I'd seen so many times on guided tours. I would look at everything but touch very little; I knew everything was old and rather fragile. Ghosts? That idea did not scare me; I didn't really think there were any ghosts at the palace, but I would not have been surprised if a few statues came alive and roamed the moonlit place.
Now, that is exactly what happens in "Night at the Museum": The exhibits come alive! At first, the new night guard (Stiller) does not want to spend another night there and quits his job. But circumstances make it necessary for him to go back, and this time, he rises to the challenge and prepares himself. He gets help from Theodore Roosevelt (Williams), but after initial success in dealing with the exhibits and their tendency to create havoc, things take a turn for the worse, and the guard is fired the next morning. Of course, the movie would end there if the guard had not pleaded with the museum's director for one last chance, and he finds himself back on the job for a third night.
The classic story-telling loves "threes", and so of course the third night is the night that decides it all, and where mysteries are solved.
The film is fast-paced, the living exhibits are well done in my opinion, and there is not too much cheesiness. It is a fun, feel-good film which I enjoyed watching, but I will certainly not buy the DVD (or the computer game).
And the walk: Ever since the famous summer of 2003 (the hottest and driest in my memory, as well as statistically, I think), whenever possible, I have made my way home from work not only by train, but included an hour-long walk. To do that, I simply get off one stop before my hometown, and walk the rest. In winter, I can't do that, because it is dark by the time I leave work, and stumbling across pitch black fields (in my business clothes) is not my idea of after-work fun.
But the hours of daylight are already considerably longer than what they were a few weeks ago, and yesterday was a beautiful sunny day which promised even longer-lasting daylight.
So I spontaneiously got off at the small town bordering my hometown and walked, the setting sun to my left. It took me 50 minutes to get home, and a pleasant walk it was: blackbirds were singing their beautiful melancholy songs, a buzzard sat on a grassy field so close I was tempted to take a picture with my mobile phone but was afraid he'd fly away if I stopped; few people were walking or cycling along the same path, and the church bells rang in the evening at 6.00, twenty minutes into my walk.
I took this picture (with my mobile phone, which explains the bad quality) on the tree-lined avenue that connects the two towns. It is a road I very much like and have walked often. There are mistletoes in nearly every one of those trees, but this one has the most.
That was my three-in-one post for today. And now, back to work (home office today).
