Autumnal Woodland, Part III

The last of three posts about our walk two Sundays ago shows you where we were actually headed: Birkenkopf ("birches head"), one of the highest hills around Stuttgart. It is not only a fantastic viewpoint and popular spot for people to visit, but also a memorial.

Birkenkopf today is 511 m high. Until the late 1940s, it was 40 m less high. Where did the additional height come from?

Stuttgart was heavily bombed in WWII: during 53 raids (25 of them in 1944 alone), nearly 1.5 million bombs landed on the city, destroying more than half or up to 70 % of all buildings (numbers vary, depending on where you look for information). After the war, the more than 260.000 people then living in Stuttgart did what they could to clear the rubble and rebuild their lives and their city. Far into the 1950s, many buildings were still ruins. 

The rubble had to go somewhere, and Birkenkopf was chosen. Lorry after lorry rumbled up the hill which was steadily growing in height.

It was decided to leave parts of buildings and street pavements visible on the very top of the hill, so that people would never forget those terrible times.

The plaque reads: "This mount, piled up after the Second World War out of the ruins of the city, stands as a memorial to the victims, as a warning to the living."

The view from Birkenkopf across Stuttgart and the surrounding wooded hills is truly spectacular, especially on a day like that:

It was my first visit here, and I had not expected to be so deeply touched by looking at all those parts of buildings and bits of pavement. I couldn't help but think of the incredible waste of lives; once people lived, worked, loved and argued in these houses and walked those streets, until Germany so stupidly and misguidedly brought the horrors of war upon itself.  What a tragedy!

To see this beautiful butterfly resting on a broken column in the middle of a pile of rubble somehow had a highly symbolic character:

It was one of most touching places I've visited in a long time.

Read in 2015 - 31: The House of the Wicked

This was my second read by D. M. Mitchell. My first one was "Max", reviewed here in September. While I did find "Max" a good overall read, this book was better.

There were more layers, more characters, a more complex plot behind it all, and I kept guessing (sometimes right, but by no means all of it) until the very end.

The setting is a small fishing village on the Welsh coast, although we are briefly taken back several times to events in France and England.

The year of the main narrative is 1880, but developments which began centuries before and more recent happenings from 13 years ago are at the base of present events.

When a young painter out of the blue receives an invitation by a friend he has not seen in years to join him at an unknown, tiny village on the Welsh coast to start an artists' colony there, he has no idea what awaits him at Porthgarrow.

As the characters are introduced, it soon looks as if everyone is following a hidden agenda.

But what or who is at the heart of a nearly unsolvable tangle of love, murder, business interests and superstition?

What does it all have to do with the scene on Porthgarrow's cemetery one stormy night 13 years ago?

I found the book intriguing not just on a rather clever "whodunnit" level. It also deals with change:

The fishing industry has always been the village's only real income. New technologies are being introduced, but people in the village stubbornly stick to their old ways.

The richest owner of fisherboats has the next generation ready to take over the family business but refuses to allow any changes, in spite of economic difficulties.

The village's Reverend is keen on photography and has a scientific approach to things, but struggles against the deeply rooted narrow-mindedness of his flock who believe ancient legends rather than facts.

All these conflicts form part of the story and make people's acts believable.

There wasn't any character I grew particularly fond of, but that wasn't necessary to enjoy the book and wanting to know what was going to happen next.

Editing and proof-reading could have been better but was overall OK.

If I come across another book by this author in the kindle shop, I'll definitely download it.

Autumnal Woodland, Part II

In my previous post, I told you about the boar enclosure we came past on our walk.

Much to my surprise, there were little ones there - even VERY little ones -, and there was a lot going on: the little ones play-chasing the very little ones, the middle-sized ones sunbathing and enjoying people scratching their ears and patting their backs through the fence, and the adult ones looking on, sometimes as if shaking their heads and muttering "kids..." to themselves.

I really had not expected to see such young boar at this time of year, but there they were, very active, the smallest of them not even the size of an average cat!

Several other people, some of them families with children, stood near the fence to watch, as did we. It wasn't boring for a second:

Please let me know whether these videos (taken with a mobile phone) work for you - it is the first time I use such videos on my blog.


Eventually, we moved on; we were only about half way to the place we were actually headed to. That will be the subject of my next post.

Autumnal Woodland, Part I

Two Sundays ago, we were once more out for a walk in the woods around Stuttgart. This time, we parked the car near the place we went to shown here, but took a different route through the woods.

The colours, the light, the air - it was all very beautiful:

This sign says that the oak tree next to it is "Wilhelm's Oak" - referring to the very same Wilhelm I told you about here and here.
The oak itself is an estimated 350 years old (not all that old for an oak, actually), and was King Wilhelm's spot of preference to lie in wait for any unsuspecting boar that would come his way when he was out here hunting.

We had a particular place in mind for this walk, and on our way there came past an enclosure for boar - nowadays, nobody hunts in these woods anymore, and the boar are there not for the questionable pleasure of shooting them, but to live in peace and be looked at by anyone who walks by and cares to stop and look at them.
You'll see them in all sizes in my next post :-)

Last Month

October was often sunny, sometimes grey and mostly cold enough to require a coat and gloves on my way to work. There was very little rain.

A good example of what the overall atmosphere of last month was like are these two pictures. The foggy morning one is from the 21st, the sunny one from the 31st of October (which would have been Steve's 47th birthday).

I have been wearing my new coat nearly every day:

The coat was what I consider a great find: My sister, my niece and I went shopping in Harrogate back in August. It was in Miss Selfridge's that I came round the bend from the staircase leading to the upper floor, and my insides did a little exclamation mark the moment I spotted The Coat on a rack: My type of cut, my type of colour (pale blue comes second to yellow as my favourite colour) and my kind of detail (the fake fur collar and the silver-rimmed pale blue buttons).

I tried it on... and loved it. But I thought of the two padded coats I already own and which are warmer (one is warm and one is VERY warm) and more robust when it gets really cold in winter, and also of the limited space in my suitcase. The voice of reason won, and I put The Coat back on its hanger. 
Not much later, we left Selfridge's and went for coffees, teas and cakes at a nearby café. Much as I enjoyed the cake and conversation, my mind kept going back to The Coat. When we paid and left the café, I asked the others if they'd come back to Selfridge's with me... Of course they didn't say no, and not only did I end up buying The Coat, I even managed to fit everything into my suitcase - the 3 dresses I had already bought (I showed them to you in earlier posts) and a small pile of books included.

For comparison, here is Selfridge's own picture. I don't think the model's shoes really match the coat, and her bare legs make for an unconvincing look: at temperatures low enough for a coat with fake fur collar, you wouldn't walk around without tights, would you! (Unless of course you were wearing trousers.)

Anyway, you are welcome to ridicule me for being once again so shallow-minded about something as unimportant as what to wear. But believe it or not, having something nice to wear for cold weather helps me to cope with this time of the year much better. So far, I can't complain - we've not had any snow yet, and November has started as mild as if it were the middle of spring. But mornings and nights are cold, and will get colder. Christmas Market will start here in my town in less than 3 weeks, and I am really looking forward to that!

Read in 2015 - 30: The Paying Guests

Once before, I have read a book by Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger. You can read my review from 2011 here, if you like.

"The Paying Guests" is different - set in a different period and different place, with different characters and an overall different plot - and yet there are parallels I could not help but notice:
Just as in The Little Stranger (TLS), once again there are a family and a house at the heart of the story, both exposed to drastic changes which eventually lead to developments out of their control. 

In TLS, the family is incomplete in that the mother is widowed, and her two grown-up children live at the family home with her, both single in spite of being old enough to have families of their own. In The Paying Guests (TPG), the family is even more incomplete, practically mutilated through the death of two sons during the war, and the mother also a widow, leaving just her and her grown-up daughter behind.

TLS is set after WWII, when the era of many wealthy families in big houses each dominating their part of the country has well and truly ended, and they are forced to adapt to the change in circumstances and society.
TPG is set after WWI, which is often overlooked for having brought about changes just as dramatic as the second World War. A new "clerk class" has been established, men, husbands, brothers and sons have died or returned from the war as invalids, money has been lost and old life styles have to be abandoned nearly as much as three decades later.

This is what happens to widowed Mrs. Wray and her daughter Frances: They still live in their once comfortable house, but there is no money left to pay for even a cleaning help, and so Frances does all the house work - and actually enjoys it, although her mother, clinging to the old ways, is mortified by the thought that her still relatively wealthy neigbhours will see Frances handling the dustbin or putting up the washing.

Of course, neither of the ladies has ever held a job, or learned anything by which they could earn any money. And so there is only one solution to save them from absolute poverty and having to give up the house: To take in lodgers.
But even that is too much for the sensitive mother - she insists on calling them Paying Guests.

When Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young couple of the "clerk class", take the rooms made ready for them, they provide some financial relief to Frances and her mother. But they also mean big changes in their lives. How big and irrevocable those changes are going to be is something neither of the characters can foresee. But one thing is for sure: After that first summer with their Paying Guests, nothing will ever be the same again for Mrs. Wray and her daughter.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot, although I never really warmed to Lilian. But everything is told so well, described so vividly, that the book's lengthiness (which is, I suspect, all part and parcel of the story) is forgiven. Sarah Waters' style of writing is one I very much like. Let me give you an example:

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail, or else, like a battery, to become charged. [...] She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these [...] moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous. She never felt [it] when she walked with someone at her side. She never felt the excitement that she felt now, seeing the fall of the shadow of a railing across a set of worn steps.

Leave out "through London" at the beginning of the paragraph, and replace the last bit about the shadow of a railing with anything that one may see during a walk, and you have a rather good description of why I like my lone walks so much and need them in order to keep sane and a decent human being the rest of the time when I am not alone.        

The author talks about "The Paying Guests" in a 4-minute video clip here on youtube.