Edinburgh: finally seeing the home town of a grandfather I never knew

Sometime back before the turn of the century we had the vague idea of visiting Scotland to see where a chunk of my family’s history played out.  I’m a Canadian with Scottish roots on both sides of the family.  My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a fishmonger in Edinburgh before he emigrated to Canada with his children, my grandfather among them.  He died not long after the photo with me on his lap was taken.

Then when we were mulling over the idea of visiting back then a distant cousin, whose hobby was geneology, sent me a hand-written letter full  of details about my great-grandfather and his times back in the late 1800s in Edinburgh.  She had visited Scotland in the early 1970s and had tracked down many details of our Scottish roots going back a few generations.

One thing interrupted another as life happened to us in the meantime while we were making other plans, so we never did make it to Scotland.

I’d bought a guidebook we never used, but because we’re now definitely going to be there in one month, the other day took it off the shelf where it’s been sitting for the past dozen years.  I was thinking there must be some interesting stuff about Scottish history in it even if the practical information must be hopelessly out of date.

As I took it off the shelf it opened to the page where I’d stuffed a letter my cousin had written me so long ago, and quickly forgotten.  It’s better than any guidebook is going to be.  It’s got a little wander all laid out for us.   Here’s an excerpt:

Your great-great grandparents John and Isabella lived on Leith Street near Register House.  Your great-great grandfather John was a lithographer.  Your great-grandfather was a fishmonger and had three fish shops before coming to Canada.  Your grandfather James was a bank manager in Saskatchewan.  Your grandparents were married in the Tron Kirk, High Street and South Bridges.  (hmmm. they must have gone back to get married?  Must check this.)

Your Granddad and my mother lived as children in a house on Warrender Place (or Park) Edinburgh near Marchmont Road.  She and your grandfather were pals.  Most of her childhood memories were with him.  It is a lovely street, wish I had known the address.  Your great-granddad James (their father) had a fish shop on the corner of Warrender and Marchmont.  Mother and your grand-dad played on the Meadows nearby, and spoke of the huge jawbone they played under.  I found it, not so huge, must be a whale bone, would appear very big to a child.

Your grand-dad and my mother walked the Royal Mile every day because James had two other fish shops. They used to ride under Canongate Tollbooth, driver had to pay.  They lived in Duddingston for a while and attended school.  I have since been told that the school might have group pictures with them in it.  My mother always wondered what she looked like as a child.

Suggest you walk the Royal Mile.  Your great grand-dad sang in choir at St. Giles Cathedral.  It is beautiful.  Sundays the Pipers are there for church service.

(…) My mother’s memories of her fourteen years in Scotland made my visit to the homeland memorable.  I felt as though I belonged.

Another family detail gleaned from a photocopied Scottish newspaper clipping was their war record.  My grandfather had six brothers.   All seven of them fought in France during World War I.  They each fought in a different unit and never met the other during the whole conflict.  Astoundingly, all seven survived that most murderous of wars, which the clipping mentions must be a record for the whole country.

A clipping of my great-grandfather’s obituary was also among the papers stuffed in that guidebook.  Apparently I have another place to pore through: Carisbrooke cemetery.  Would the gravestone still be there?  It will take a visit to the Isle of Wight to find out for sure.

Where does all the water come from?

We’ve been thinking a lot about life lately.

A couple of weekends ago K and I went by ourselves to Sylt, an island in the far northwest corner of Germany just below the border with Denmark.  The sea was roiling and we got doused with rain on our first long walk along the seashore, but the air was invigorating, the light changing with the pace of the wind.   When we finally reached a nearby town we took a long time warming up in a cozy inn over luch.

We’d been walking back to our hotel for about two hours along the cliffs and beside the crashing waves.

I looked out over the water and started to wonder about things.

“I’m going to ask you a child’s question,” I said.

“OK…”

“Where does all the water come from?”

“It came out of the formation of the earth four and a half billion years ago,” she said.

“You mean all that heat and pressure caused a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen on a massive scale, and that’s why we have all this water?”

“Something like that.”

We walked on a little more, watching the endless barrage of waves and feeling the cold North Sea wind on our faces.

Then she said, “but you know, when I look at the world and the incredible things in it, and I think of life and how we can create life – like the life of our daughter – it’s incredible, really.  And how life can end, too.  I’ll never forget being there at the moment my mother’s life came to an end.  Sometimes I think about this world and I can’t believe it.”

Once again my thanks to readers near and far who left their kind words.

1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

If Rudyard Kipling were blogging today

From out of the draft box – and in true web style, apropos of nothing – we hereby add to the enormous pile of parodies purloined from Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem: If.

If…Rudyard Kipling had published his most famous poem in 2011 instead of 1910, here’s what it might have looked like:

If you can keep on blogging when all about you
Have moved to Facebook and say that you should too;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you
Just keep on blogging – they can get one too;
If you can bait, but not get caught troll-baiting,
Or if on Twitter, don’t tweet no lies,
Or, being hated, don’t be swayed by haters,
And yet don’t Photoshop.  Don’t change those eyes:

If you can scream — and not post screams thereafter;
If you can think — while playing an online game;
If you can post both triumph and disaster
Most will click on Like just the same;
If you can bear to find a post you’ve written
Copied on a hate site to invite comments by fools,
Or watch the blog you gave your time to, ignored,
And stoop to build up hits with SEO tools;

If you can make one heap of online winnings
And risk it online gambling in one toss,
And lose — because they shut down full-tilt poker
And never tweet a line about your loss;
If you can rip off poems from mouldy dead guys,
Remember that it’s merely an exercise
To keep your brain in tune for the next time
You’re stuck for something to post that’s half-assed wise;

If you can source from crowds yet keep your virtue,
Or walk with Queens – nor lose your iPod Touch,
If neither trolls nor falsehood friends can hurt you,
If you can laugh at yourself — that counts for much;
If you can fill the neverending download minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of YouTube fun –
Yours is the Net and everything that’s fodder,
And – which is more – you’ll be a woman, my daughter!

Hamburg car burnings hit close to home

A wave of car torchings that started in Berlin a couple of years ago and spilled over to Hamburg hit close to home over the weekend.  This burned out lump of charred Mercedes was sitting just around the corner from our place when I came across it this past Sunday afternoon.

There have been well over 300 car burnings in Hamburg so far this year.  It’s even worse in Berlin, where more than 500 have gone up in flames.  Police are powerless to do anything about it because it’s completely random who’s doing it and for what reason.  Putting an extra 200 Hamburg police on night patrols didn’t work out, so now they’ve scaled them back to 20, with just as much effect. 

Some say there’s a political motivation behind the attacks, that it’s the marginalised of society roving around getting their kicks watching fat-cat Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches reduced to scrap.   But there’s no pattern to the burnings or their timing, and there are never any notes left behind.  A couple of yahoos here and there have been charged and thrown in jail, but it just keeps on happening.  

We always thought we were living a decent life in a safe and modern country.   But having once again been the victims of theft and adding up everything that’s going wrong right in our midst, sometimes we get the feeling we’re living in some besieged Middle Ages village, its citizens left to fend for themselves and wondering when the next attack will hit.

Soak, rinse, repeat! How to get rid of those brown stains

It’s great to be back in Germany.

Best thing I’ve seen in the two weeks since our trip to Canada is this great T-shirt idea.

A man gave away 250 T-shirts at a recent gathering of neo-Nazis in eastern Germany.

The message on it was the usual crap you’d expect to see them wearing, so the sluggos lapped it up.

Problem for them is that a different message appears once you put the shirts through the laundry.

The message tells them to drop their Nazi ways with the help of an organisation of those who’ve already left. 

What your t-shirt can do, so can you.

This is such a brilliantly executed idea, but there’s only one problem: the assumption that the people wearing them actually wash.

Time to confess an addiction

Before we set off for a long-awaited three-week trip back home to Canada, I’d like to confess something. I only confessed it to myself the other day, and after much contemplation, am now doing it here: I’ve started up a habit I’d thought I’d grown out of long ago and let go for good.

Back in my teens it was all so easy. By the time I was 15 I had pocket money from a few odd jobs, so I’d sneak away at lunchtime to buy some from one of only two sources in town, savouring the anticipation of school’s end when I could enjoy my purchase either by myself or with a couple of close friends. Because the subjects I took were so stimulating, I was always a good student, so the time spent on my habit didn’t affect my grades at all. That was a good thing, because my parents during one phase in Grade 11 became really worried I was spending far too much time alone in my bedroom.

Growing up in my little village perched on a mountain sliding into the sea, there was no chance of getting some closer to home unless friends were offering, so I’d go into Vancouver, where there was a lot of choice. Granville Street, seedy back then and not much better today, held good possibilities to score. I didn’t feel bad about it because I enjoyed it so much, and besides, a lot of my friends were into it way more than I was, and they were doing OK.

It didn’t end with High School though. When I started to earn some real money on summer break while going to university I’d buy even more, branching out into different varieties as the possibilities – and my wallet – broadened. I remember thinking each time I shouldn’t, but was unable to resist the urge.

Then all of a sudden in the early 80s – just when my enthusiasm for it was peaking – my addiction was no longer cool. Even though there was still tons of it going around out there, the world was moving on, and I figured that if I didn’t change, it would move along without me. Then, little by little, the supply started to dry up.   What had once been so easy to find was no longer on every streetcorner.  So, facing reality, I slowly let it go, relegating that period in my life to the musty reaches of the back shelf. I think the last time I bought some was in 1986.

But then a couple of years ago, I came across a dealer in downtown Hamburg, some guy in a back alley of the university quarter near where all the students hang out. I’d always known there were dealers in this city, and that it would be so easy just to go out and get some, but I thought: no. Leave it in the past. You’ve got a family now, a steady job you’d like to hang on to, and the money could be put to such better use, like one day putting your growing daughter through university, for example. When you get older, frivolity should be left behind, right?

But I can’t help myself. I go back every once in a while and pick up some more.  In Paris three weeks ago across the street from Gare St Lazare I spied a dealer and thought of an Oscar Wilde quote – the great man buried only a few dozen blocks east – that the best way to rid oneself of a temptation is to yield to it. So with what bit of cash I had  left over from my trip, for the first time in 25 years I bought three brand new slices of that lovely stuff I just can’t seem to get enough of.

Vinyl.

Is there any cure once you’re hooked?

Routers, rug doctors, and getting inside my head

Have you ever had your router die on you?   I spent hours and hours on the Netgear user forum last month just trying to get some help on how to get it working again, because it was running perfectly for two months when suddenly – nada.  After re-setting and reconfiguring and calling my own ISP and being told that no, they can’t help me because I don’t have the router that THEY sell – I just gave up on them and ordered up a new ISP.

That’s the prelude to the apple story.

Midst that hassle I at least had two weeks off work, time enough to drag some dusty power tools out of the basement for a thorough sweep through the apartment taking care of various odd jobs that I’d neglected and were long overdue – a laundry list of sanding, varnishing, hole-drilling, screwdriving, stuccoing the ceiling, sawing, hammering, spackeling, painting – even rug shampooing.

Anyway, March 9 I took K. to the airport because she had a flight to Nice.  Little holiday by herself with a retired friend who goes there every year around this time.

She loves France and French culture as do I, and it would have been nice to be there with her, but as I said I had all these jobs to do and quite frankly all I wanted to do was stay in Hamburg and do some stuff with the little red-haired girl.  We ate at Mickey-D’s twice, made pizza, spareribs, popcorn and french fries, went to the zoo, the world’s largest model railway – yes, it’s right here in Hamburg -  watched a few movies, listened to music and generally hung out.

After taking K. to the airport I went home, turned around and biked off to a clinic for an MRT scan – I don’t know if that’s a CAT scan in real English but you’ve probably seen photos or even had one yourself.  They’re trying to find out why the smell of metal – more like copper – keeps wafting through my head since we got back from New York.

They put you on a narrow bed on a sliding tray, coo soothing words into your ear that it’s going to be a wee bit noisy, but not to worry dear, you get some ear protection and are shown a button to push should you find you just can’t stand one more second of its screaming, scraping, throbbing, grinding, pulsating bursts of pure aggravation.  It goes on for 20 minutes and my head was ringing even more than usual afterward.

Biked home from the scan with printouts showing bizarre slices of my head for the Ear Nose and Throat guy to hum and haw over some time later, plopped them down on the desk long enough to go to the router forum and get some more info, try it out only to bang my head on the chair in frustration.  Routers!  Why are they such a hassle?

But by then it was near closing time at the hardware store where I’d reserved a rug shampooing machine, so I dashed off to the car and fought rush-hour traffic to pick it up.

Paid for the rug doctor, packed it in the car, drove back through the narrow streets into our building’s underground parking lot so I could unload the thing right close to the lift instead of hauling it from a parking spot several streets away.  We don’t rent a space, you see.

Anyway, I took it upstairs, went online to the router help forum because something I thought of asking on my way home I didn’t want to just forget, had some dinner, kissed the little red-haired girl and headed out that evening to meet a friend from the writers’ group who’d invited me to join her weekly improv theater workshop.  I had a lot of fun, even participated in a couple of sketches, then went out for beers.

During the improv the little red-haired girl phoned three times, a little annoying but she said she was afraid, being all alone in the house and having someone first ring the doorbell and then knock on the door 10 minutes later.  I told her that because we weren’t expecting anyone, not to open the door.

Got home after midnight, hit the sack, and woke up around 5:30am for some strange reason asking myself how far I’d have to go to pick up the car again when I brought the rug shampooer back, because I could just carry it to the… OH FUCK!

Suddenly it dawned on me though a late lingering beer buzz that I had absolutely no memory of driving the car out of the underground parking garage after unloading that damn rug doctor.  Pulling on some clothes I threw myself downstairs, flung open the door to the garage – and the car’s gone!   At least it’s not in the spot it should have been.  Oh man…

I head around a corner and to my enormous relief it’s only been pushed a few yards down the way a bit.  Must have left it unlocked.

I get in, turn the key and it doesn’t turn over, because – cue Simpsons’ HA-HA -  I’d left the hazard lights on.  So I go upstairs and haul the little red-haired girl out of bed – it’s before 6 am – because she’s got to help me push it into an empty parking bay.  We struggle to edge the car through the crowded garage without scraping any BMWs,  I lift up the hood, disconnect the battery and pull it out.  I’ve got a charger and want to get it hooked up right away, because who knows how long it’s going to take to get the thing juiced up again?

So I’m downstairs carrying this heavy car battery with my daughter beside me and we’re waiting for the elevator to take us back up to our plac when my downstairs neighbour – a big, beefy guy with 3 kids who’s kind of the unofficial Hausmeister – comes lumbering down the stairs followed closely by two Hamburg cops – a police man and woman – who all look down at me from the stairway above.

My neighbour stops and, looking straight into me while taking a deep breath to pause for effect, slowly says: Huge problems in this house yesterday evening, Herr InHamburg.

Uh, yeah, well, you know I was just, uh, well…. you see it’s…. God, I wanted to melt to a puddle and trickle through some crack in the floor, never to be found again.  I apologised the best I could and he accepted it very well, adding that beyond the immediate problem of moving the car away so that neighbours could park theirs for the night, they were all worried about what it could all mean.

Was I somehow injured?  Had I suffered a sudden heart attack or stroke and for that reason could not answer the door?   You don’t just park a car in the middle of the garage and then leave it – it doesn’t make sense!  It could have been really serious, so that’s why he called the cops.  It also explains my daughter’s hearing the doorbell ring and the knocks late the night before.

I consider myself lucky nobody had the beast towed away, the router works perfectly with the new ISP, and that I’ve had a chance to take my own little holiday in the meantime.

We all get to play the terrorist on the security theatre stage

You never know when you’ll be called upon to play a minor role in life’s ongoing stage of security theatre.

I found that out yesterday morning after printing out a boarding card at my hotel the morning I left Nuremburg, where I’d been sent for a seminar.  I’d asked the front desk if I could use the lobby computer terminals, but they told me that before they could give me the access password, they’d need a copy of my ID.

OK, I thought – maybe they think I’m going to damage their computer, stuff the wide-screen monitor into my back pocket or cram the desktop tower into my carry-on – whatever.  I just needed to print out that boarding card, so I handed them my passport to copy.

After five minutes online I returned to the desk to say I was through, and could I please have the copy of my passport back.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” said the cheery young woman behind the counter.  “Under German law, we’re required to hold on to it.”

“But I’m finished,” I said.  “Why do you have to hold onto it?”

With a big smile and a double head-bob, she cheerfully said, “Because just now, you could have been planning a terror attack.”

I was stunned.  Flabbergasted.  I’d say blown away, but the slaughterhouse floor scenes from the smoke-filled Moscow airport terminal suicide bombing are still too fresh in the mind.

“I beg your pardon?” I said. “My passport contains vital personal information.”

“Your document copy is safe with us,” crooned her male colleague.  “We have a locked safe.”

“That’s not the point,” I said, but decided not to press it further, leaving for the breakfast buffet shaking my head.

But while gathering my plateful midst the morning crowd I couldn’t just forget it.  I got to wondering if somehow my information might be stolen sometime over the next 10 years.  I wondered how long they’d hold onto it, whether it would one day be destroyed, and whether I’d receive any notification of that.

So I went back to the desk and asked them how long they intended to keep my passport copy.

“We have to keep it for 10 years,” she chirped.  “It’s the law.”

Stunned again.

“Do you mean to tell me that for five minutes of online time you are going to keep a copy of my most important personal document for 10 years?”

What seemed like farce to me they took as routine.  “It’s the law,” she repeated. “We have to do it.”

“Good,” I said, not wanting to debate the existence or strict interpretation of a law I’d never even heard of.  “In that case, I think you should inform your customers before they use the terminals that their personal information is going to be on the files of your office for 10 years.  If I’d known that, I’d never have bothered.  Never.”

I returned to my breakfast – chewing over the screenplay and script of yet another production of security theatre and how I could have played my role better -   and suddenly realised that I had no proof that I’d logged out.

Carrying out their absurd scenario to its bizarrest extreme, I wondered: what if someone were  sitting at that terminal logged in under my login and password – the one with a hard copy of my passport copy attached to it – and were in the process of sending coded messages to fellow cell members to blow up another airport?  I had no physical proof that my session was over, nor that I’d logged out.  What if nine and a half years from now someone stumbled upon the connection and I’m hauled before a judge and sent to prison for the rest of my life?  Hey, and what if there were some sanity in the way we live our lives, and is it any wonder people my age get nostalgic for times when we all weren’t assumed to be guilty before proven innocent?

Overcoming my desire to just forget the whole thing, that it was nothing but trivial bureaucratic bullshit and really doesn’t matter anyway, I went back to the front desk and said, “Look, I don’t want to belabour the point, but about the Internet thing, could you please print me out some proof of when I actually used the computer, and confirmation of the time I logged out?”

The woman with whom I’d mainly been dealing overheard my request got up from her desk in the tiny office off the main counter.  As she turned to face me I could see her face was bleeding red with rage.  “All right,” she said. “If that’s the way you feel about this, we’ll do it a different way.  You can have your passport copy back.  I’ll just take down its number.”

As she was searching for my passport copy she added, “Never before have I had to deal with anyone who objected so vehemently to this procedure.”

I resisted the urge to remind her that Germany is full of people who put up with crap simply because someone in authority is shovelling it.  But picking up on the word “vehemently” I pointed out to her and the other two desk employees  looking on that I had dealt with them throughout in a calm manner, never once raised my voice, spoke with them in even tones, and was merely asking for something that I felt was my right to possess: my personal information.  “Data protection and privacy is a two-way street,” I told them.

International Day to Bite Me

I don’t know whether it’s because I stopped drinking coffee a few months ago, or passed the half-century mark a few months earlier, but nothing seems to bother me much anymore.   Not that I just let everything slide, but in dealing with obnoxious people or situations I’ve become a lot more mellow.  What’s the point of getting all in a lather anyway?  In most cases where you get all pissed off at someone or something, there two things at work: the situation and your reaction to it.   Only one of those is entirely in your control.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said about venting, in real life or right here.  So here goes.  Thank you, Deutschland über Elvis, he of the carefully worded, well-researched and always entertaining  posts on matters personal and cultural: may the third annual International Day to Bite Me be the success it deserves to be.

Ahem.

To the driver who honked and brayed at me from his rolled-down window because I was cycling with the traffic on the road instead of dodging pedestrians, spaced-out shoppers, dogshit and various obstructions found all too often on Hamburg’s laughably inadequate cycling path “network” – BITE ME!  Where the hell did you get your license, anyway?  It’s legal to ride on the road unless there’s a circular blue sign with a bike on it telling you otherwise.

To the pedestrian who yelled at me because I wasn’t on the cycling path but on the sidewalk because the cycling path is covered in tons of slippery grit left over from Hamburg’s spectacular failure to remove the December snows, not to mention the piles of filth left over from New Year’s Eve fireworks mayhem: BITE ME!

To the millions of brain-addled Germans who in an annual three-day orgy of mindless, wasteful consumerism spend upwards of 120 million frickin’ euros on fireworks for New Year’s leaving a heaving mess behind for weeks, months and years afterward – they NEVER clean it all up: BITE ME!

To the driver who assumed I was a jobless bum simply because I was cycling at noontime on a weekday: don’t you know some of us work shifts, full-time?  BITE ME!

To the grocery store nitwit who feels it’s his duty to tell me to put the items back in an orderly fashion on the shelf because “es gehört dazu” – BITE ME!  Do you have a cellphone?  Next time you see a federal crime in process, call a cop!

To the awful, pinched-faced cow supervising security at Gatwick Airport: lose the psycho bullshit!  Yes, your minions discovered a battery-powered iPod charger in my hand luggage and they -  in their ignorance of modern consumer technology – have every right to take every soiled piece of underwear out to inspect, rifle through every book, test every cranny for explosives and take apart and run the charger through a scanner a third time, but please: don’t stare at me for minutes on end while assuming some sort of accusatory tone when you ask me the routine questions.  Oh, and I almost forgot: BITE ME!