Oxford, Paris, and other things

  Burgundy in Paris                                                You taught me how to cut it                                  first the skin         silk paper that was (but not long enough to roll a cigarette with) a game of chess with the knife                 deep in squares            then across                  mind your thumb with the blade                     ...

 At last, after months and months refining the Ethics forms, I have obtained permission from the University to interview Wantage and surrounding villages residents.  The VDM Vale & Downland Museum Wantage has just advertised the project in their social media. The local library has also agreed to show the poster about the project.  So here we go! And here is the poster. Looking forward to listening to all the wonderful stories residents will tell me! So if you are interest, contact me at l.desligneres@surrey.ac.uk  

 How dare do I say 'my'?! hm? Oh well.  I will not speak however of friends as they do not like to have their picture taken.  One of my favourite Hamburg bit was 'the beach'... can you say it's a beach if it's near a river? I'd say yes, after all there are many beaches near the river Loire in Nivernais where my French family comes from. You have sand, you have people lying down on the beach, you have swimmers... well not so... it'd be a bit dangerous unless you really know the place... its shallow and then very deep as boats come and go there, and cargos as well. Opposite you have the port of Hamburg, looking a bit like the machines in War of the World. I absolutely loved it, especially after walking under the sun and visiting around, what great pleasure it was to ask for bubbly water and a bit of wurst and kartoffelsalat (sausage and potato salad), and then watch people go by or read my book.    My second favourite place was an art gallery in the most p...

 Yes, why? Why this interest in this country? I realise that, apart from my two home countries, this is the country I have most visited... why? Why did I go to big and small places such as: Schweinfurt, Bonn, Berlin, Lübeck, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Rheine, Hamburg, Köln (Cologne), Tübingen,  Sierksdorf, Nuremberg, Waldenbuch and many others!  Well, there was the question of education in France... if you were studying German as first language in highschool, you were going to a class with a higher level compared with English as first language. But then why not Spanish or Italian? Well it seems a lot of work was done to reconciliate France with Germany starting in the 1950s. Who would have thought that after years, centuries! of wars between the two countries, they would become close allies and even partners in Europe.                                        ...

 As I'm still trying to remember and make progress in German, I'm watching a lot of ARTE programmes . (I just searched for ARTE in my ROKU device and it appeared! It's not however the live television programme that you get in France or Germany) and I watched the documentary "Stockholm 1975 terror at the embassy" about an assault made by the  RAF (Red Army Faction) on the West German embassy . They took embassy staff hostage and asked for the liberation of all RAF members. I was 6 years old then but I do remember my mum speaking about 'la bande à Baader'. Terrible events, terrible violence. Two embassy staff murdered and two terrorists blown by their own explosives. One remained alive, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, served his time I suppose, and is now in charge of an art gallery in Hamburg. How strange.   But Karl-Heinz Dellwo puts the blame on having been raised in a nazi environment, that West Germany, after the war, did not do enough to purge itself from its nazi ...

 This is my second part of my (brief) reflection on Germany after my travel there (Rheine and Hamburg). It's called 'de l'Allemagne' after Madame de Staël's book. I have always wondered about the difference between a state and its limits and the official language of that state, during conversations made with complete strangers in trains or other places, I've discovered there are Swedish speaking communities in Norway and Finland - not to mention the USA, Hungarian speaking communities in Slovakia and Serbia, Russian speakers in Ukraine and Belarus (and of course Paris!), and so many others. But the one European speaking community that I have found a bit everywhere is... the German speaking one. They are, or they were, everywhere: Belgium, France, Russia, Ukraine, most other countries in East Europe. Some were invited by countries, some invited themselves. This is well explained in MacGregor's Germany: memory of a nation (chapter 3: lost capitals) Walking in ...