THE FORTUNE COOKIE OF DOOM

Fröhliche Weihnachten & Gelukkig nieuwjaar !

(For those without the energy to click on Google Translate, that's Merry Christmas in German and Happy New Year in Dutch.)

(I hope.)

Christmas in Berlin 
Another year, another white Christmas.Yay!

After making a drunken promise at my mate's wedding in Italy to spend New Years and Christmas with two Aussie girls I'd only just met, we all surprised ourselves by actually following through with the plan. J was living and studying in Amsterdam, and already had plans to spend Christmas in Berlin visiting friends. E was living in London, not too far from my place, and like me was up for a spontaneous adventure, so we decided on Christmas in Berlin and New Years in Amsterdam.

J had organised a Berlin apartment in the very trendy area of Freidrichshain, and was already there to greet E and me as we arrived from London. It had been snowing on and off in London for the past month (a hyperventilating British media were calling it 'The Big Freeze'), but that was nothing compared to what awaited us in Berlin.

PROPER SNOW! It was gorgeous, at least a foot deep in most places. Despite our being Antipodeans - and thereby most charitably described as 'a bit useless' in snow - it proved no deterrent as we hit the streets to explore bars, check out squats and visit the usual tourist hotspots. We also spent half a day on a brilliant free walking tour that showcased Berlin's vibrant street art scene. Despite my outrageously poor choice of footwear (note to self: wearing gumboots in deep snow will turn them into mini freezers) I thoroughly enjoyed this walk and would recommend it to anyone interested in street art and the cultural history of Berlin.

The Holocaust Memorial from above...

...and from inside

On Christmas Day, we went to a local restaurant to feast. It was lovely and atmospheric, candlelit and wood- panelled. We felt very happy with ourselves for finding such a gem. This happiness was shattered about twenty minutes later when my earmuffs burst into flames.

Perhaps I should explain.

I love(d) those earmuffs. Only a day earlier I had been talking about how wonderful they were, making the other girls try them on so they too could experience the warmth and toastiness that only my very special favourite earmuffs could deliver. Walking into the warm restaurant, I placed my earmuffs on the table in front of me while we perused the menu. One minute my earmuffs were fine, they were having a good time, soaking up the Berlin scene, as you do. The next minute...well, do you remember how I said the restaurant was candlelit?

Somehow my earmuffs migrated close enough to the candle to catch alight. J was the first to notice it, and started flapping her hands in front of her face and saying "oooh, oooh, oooh" while leaning back in her chair to create distance between herself and the burning earmuffs; E gave a little squeak of surprise, but otherwise remained still, captivated by the increasingly impressive flames in front of her; while I just stared, open-mouthed, my heart sinking as I witnessed the demise of my most favouritist winter wardrobe item ever.

Luckily for all of us, a quick-thinking waitress standing nearby reached over E's head, picked up the flaming earmuffs, and ran into the kitchen to extinguish them under a tap. A minute later, she returned to present me with the charred remains of my beloved. It was a very sad sight to behold on a wintry Christmas day.


I must say, the girls were very supportive in my time of bereavment. And, adopting the classic tactic used by parents across the world after the loss of a loved pet, they went out the very next day and bought me some extremely-similar-but-not-identical earmuffs. The new ones were purple instead of blue, so I felt that I could wear them without betraying the memory of my original earmuffs. RIP, little blue earmuffs, RIP.


Who needs art galleries, when you have stuff like this around the corner?

Roa

Despite the flaming earmuff debacle, the trip to Berlin was absolutely fantastic. I was now questioning the wisdom of having agreed to spend New Years in Amsterdam (a city I'd already visited twice before) instead of soaking up more Berlin goodness, but onwards we went.

New Year's Eve in Amsterdam

After having such a great time in Berlin, it was somewhat reluctantly that we boarded the train for Amsterdam. Still, the fact that two of my very best London buddies would be joining us there had me excited and enthusiastic again soon enough. And, as I should always have expected, we ended up having a great time.

We went to two places I'd managed to avoid on my previous trips to Amsterdam: the Van Gough Museum (culture schmulture) and the Anne Frank House (too depressing to visit alone, and my Dutch friend wasn't keen to go a second time). They were both fabulous in very different ways. The Anne Frank House is haunting, and quite confronting. I defy anyone to go in there, really pay attention, and not have tears well up in their eyes. It's shocking.

When it came time to see in the new year, we tagged along to a house party with J (who, if you remember, was living and studying in Amsterdam at the time). The house was amazing, with wooden floors and big glass windows overlooking one of the main canals. The party was fun, but by golly gee those Dutch sure do go mad for the firecrackers. The streets were full of people, rugged up in their winter clothes, igniting these loud and flammable devices from well before midnight until quite a while after. At various stages of the night, people from the party went downstairs to get a closer look at the merriment and, not wanting to be too much of a spoilsport, I eventually went down too.

Now I'm not a huge fan of firecrackers. As a young whippersnapper I took very much to heart the warnings of adults about the dangers of firecrackers and their tales of children who had blown off arms and/or legs when attempting to light them. In fact, firecrackers were illegal in my home state and even when I moved to  places where they were allowed I had absolutely no desire to get anywhere near them. So it was with trepidation that I succumbed to peer pressure and followed my friends downstairs, out onto streets full of dozens of people shooting off firecrackers in all directions. I was being very brave, and trying to get into the spirit of the festivities, but I'd still jump and back away every time I heard one go off. Which was roughly every 60 seconds.

So I was naturally feeling jumpy, when suddenly somebody threw something at me from behind and I felt it bounce off my jacket. I turned around but couldn't find the culprit. That was all it took to send me and my nervous disposition scurrying back down the street and upstairs into the relative safety of the apartment (I say 'relative' safety, because even the people at the party were letting off firecrackers out the window, and one of them had already blown back inside the apartment. You can perhaps see why I was so nervous?) It was only the next day, when I grabbed my winter jacket from the back of a chair, that I noticed a hole had been burnt completely through the thick hood and part-way into the layers of jacket beneath it. Using my amazing powers of deduction, I realised that the thing I'd felt hit me the night before had been a goddamn firecracker! Two inches from setting my hair on fire! Aaaaaahhh! What was it with me and flammable objects on this trip?

On the first day of 2011, my London buddies and I wandered around streets that were blanketed with paper from exploded fireworks. We discovered a very cool place in De Pijp for a leisurely Prosecco-enhanced brunch, and met the girls in the afternoon at another funky cafe for more eating, drinking, and relaxing. The next day, it was time for four of us to set off on our train/ferry/bus trip back to good old London town. Despite the memory of my flaming earmuffs, and having almost being set alight myself by a firecracker, it had been a marvellous New Years. And, as I noted most ineloquently in my diary, it "sure beat the hell out of New Years 2010 in Glasgow."

Happy New Year everyone!!!

CHRISTMAS IS COMING...

Much as I abhor cold weather, there really is something special in the lead up to a northern hemisphere Christmas.

Bright skies and Christmas tinsel

Trafalgar Sqaure

Somerset House

Boris Bikes are less popular in winter

In Hampstead, even the snowmen are posh

Frosty Florence Nightingale

The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square

NANOWRIMO ATE MY SOUL

Hello stranger. Remember me? I used to be someone you saw or heard from now and again. You may have been wondering where I've been. Or, you may have been rejoicing in the freedom of not having to read, listen to or deal with me and my stupid crap. If the latter, well, screw you. But if you're actually interested - here's the secret to my almost complete absence from your life this last month: NaNoWriMo.

Wondering what on earth that is (and feeling too lazy to exercise the 5 muscles or whatever it would take to click on that hyperlink)? Well, it's a completely ridiculous global challenge that asks participants to write the first draft of a novel, from scratch, during the 30 days of November. That's 50,000 words in 30 days. If you divide the total number of words required by the number of days in the month, and divide again by the average typing speed, what you're left with is...pretty much no social life whatsoever for the whole damn month.

I first heard of NaNo when I stumbled across the book that started it all, No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, when I lived in Edinburgh in 2007. I thought it was a cool idea, but it was already part-way through November so I didn't do it that year. And being the very driven, goal-oriented, disciplined person I am, what I immediately did was to forget all about its existence. Two years later, I found the book in a bookstore in London. It looked vaguely familiar, so I bought and (re-)read it. Once again, my timing was impeccable, as it was already part-way through November. A great excuse to procrastinate for another year - hurrah!

l ran out of excuses this year, though, so I duly committed myself to the ridiculous and almost-impossible task of writing the first draft of a novel - with no plot, characters or outlining done in advance - in 30 days. The first week was awful. My boss left the country, dumping on me the organisation of an event in Nigeria in a week's time. I was crazy busy trying to sort that out, and ended up having to go to Nigeria myself for five very hectic days. I was thousands of words behind the daily target and utterly exhausted, but as I had a friend signed up to do it with me this year, I reluctantly resisted the urge to scrap the whole idea and start saying yes to invitations to meet real live people who didn't live on my computer screen.

The second week, too, was awful. That was when I realised that the NaNoWriMo philosophy of writing fast, without planning, and for quantity over quality, was resulting in my story turning out to be - how to put this delicately? - a big steaming pile of crap. It was (and still is, thanks to the 'no editing' rule) without any semblance of artistic merit by even the loosest of standards. It had no perceptible plot, nothing linking one moment to the next, except for the semi-coherent narrative ramblings of my main character, and no potentially redeemable features of any description. Even worse than all this, was the realisation that I needed another 25,000 words to stretch this tale out to the required length. Enter the third week.

So the first week was awful, and the second was also awful. The third, however, was...actually it was awful too. By now I was really feeling the lack of a social life. Hitting the required word target meant allocating about two hours per day to the novel, which essentially meant not being able to do anything else apart from work, commute, eat, shower and sleep. By now I hated my main character, and was getting frustrated at his complete inability to do anything remotely interesting. At the suggestion of a friend, I wrote in a scene where a dwarf dressed as a clown was thrown through the glass window of the bar in which my main character and his friends were drinking. That would surely spice up his life and force him to finally do something that would pique the interest of a reader. Instead, as the dwarf clown stood up - uninjured - and ran out of the bar, and crowds gathered outside to look at the mayhem, my characters simply picked up their beers, squeezed past the gawping crowd, and wandered off down the street. I hated them.

For this, I was forsaking nights out with friends, use of social media sites, the purchase and preparation of fresh food, and even the joy of reading a published book written by someone who wasn't the talentless loser that it was increasingly evident that I am. The weight of churning out pages and pages of rubbish each day was wearing me down. I was, however, determined to finish. And once I hit 35,000 words at the end of this week, I began to see light at the end of the tunnel. Cue week four, where I wrote like a maniac. I had a flash of inspiration that led to something remotely akin to a plot development. I started typing well above my required word count each day, and was finally seeing some progress. Once I reached 40,000 words, it was pretty much smooth sailing up until the final few thousand, where I had to find a way to end the damn thing.

Which I have now finally done, earlier tonight in fact: two days earlier than the deadline. Oh the relief. The sweet, glorious relief. There's a spot on the NaNo website where you upload your novel in order to get the final wordcount verified. If it's at least 50,000 words then you get the tag 'winner' appended to your profile, as well as access to all these blog badges I've been posting here. Am I aware that they're cheesy and ugly? Of course I am. But I don't care.

I'm proud of the fact that I stuck with something difficult, and saw it out to the end. My "life's too short to waste time being miserable" philosophy has served me well over the years, but has tended to mean that I bail out of commitments that seem like they're too much effort for too little reward. This time I didn't run away, and I'm very proud of myself. You should be proud of me too. Unless you're one of those people I mentioned earlier, who have failed to notice the absence of my delightful and uplifting presence in your life. In which case I reiterate: screw you! I'm a novelist, now, so I'm allowed to be self-centred and obnoxious, and to pass it off as the caprice of a creative personality. So there.