The end of a shopping era

To kill some time before my Saturday morning massage appointment, I nipped into the German library to read the papers and was stunned to read that the newly merged Karstadt and Kaufhof department store groups were going to close about one third of their stores throughout Germany - including the two big department stores on Wehrhahn/Schadowstraße, which will close their doors on 31 October.

That means that we've gone from 2 Karstadt stores to zero and from 3 Kaufhof stores to 1.

I remember, as a child, the large department stores in Berlin, such as Hertie. For a child from an area where the largest town now has around 21,000 inhabitants, a department store in Berlin was like entering Ali Baba's den. They offered a glittering cornucopia of goods.

When I moved in 2008, I was in Karstadt every Saturday morning purchasing more items for the new flat. Sadly, however, one by one, the various departments were whittled away, to be replaced by more clothes. The first to go were the pet and gardening departments. They were gradually followed by the camera and printer departments, the curtains and lighting departments, books, pens and stationery.... Slowly, the shop increasingly resembled a clothes warehouse rather than the glittering den of all sorts of wonders - a place where you could get anything you wanted and for a range of prices, too.

At least I could always comfort myself with the fact that Karstadt's haberdashery department still kept going. Now? Heaven knows. Where will I get material to make teddy bears from? Where will I buy fabric for cross-stitching? Embroidery threads? Needles? Cloth and patterns for making clothes - something that I want to start doing again after a very long hiatus.

Shopping is getting ever harder to do. Don't tell me that there is online shopping. I heard a day or two ago that about 75% of all clothes ordered online in the UK is returned. How many don't even bother to return them but just pass them straight on to the charity shop?

Online shopping is nice in an emergency, but no substitute for the real thing, where you can actually see and feel the quality of what you are buying and get invaluable advice from the people working in the shop. These two closures - on one of D'dorf''s main shopping streets - mark a sad end to what was a splendid era of shopping.

Thank heavens for little pleasures

Today, I was at a loose end. No-one to meet up with - all busy - but I wanted to get out of the flat and see some other walls instead.

I checked the municipal library website and saw that the 30-minute rule for a visit to the library had been relaxed. Now, 100 people can enter - registering with their library card and taking a basket - sit down and read. I therefore scooted there as fast as I could.

Oh, what a delight it was to sit at the counter in the 'reading window' at the front of the building, watching the people in the courtyard outside come and go, and to catch up on the papers and journals, with a cup or two of ghastly vending machine coffee: Stern, Der Spiegel, Brigitte, Psychologie Heute, Reader's Digest (German version), The Financial Times, The Times... all in three hours. With a face mask on all that time, mind you.

Back in Wales, my family is feeling the strain. All they are allowed to do is food shopping, banking, go to the pharmacy and a walk a day - and not move more than 5 miles from home.

Thankfully, being in Germany, I can appreciate the little things that go towards making life pleasant again: I've been back at the gym a couple of times a week in the mornings for the last 4 weeks; I had a haircut two weeks ago and a shiatsu massage last week; I can change my books at the English library (yes, even libraries are shut in the UK); non-essential shops have been open for over a month now; I was at the University Library yesterday - returning one book, getting two out; using public transport to get outside town for very early morning walks at the weekend; and now being able to sit and read newspapers for as long as I like.

Yes, there are restrictions and rules: face masks at all times in enclosed spaces; you need to take a basket in the libraries so they can see how many people are in the building at any one time (if all the baskets are taken, then that means the place has the maximum permitted number of people in it); and often disinfecting your hands when entering a place (such as my gym).

I read comments in the UK press about how British people are totally indignant that they are now being asked to wear face masks on public transport and in shops ("Don't you tell me what to do, mate!"), and yet by agreeing to do this, Germans have a lot more freedom and enjoyment in their life than the poor old deluded ("We're world beating") Brits.

Thank heavens I live in Germany. Thank heavens for the little pleasures we can now enjoy again here. We can appreciate things once more.

Freibad Flingern ain't so 'frei' any more

Last weekend, I checked the weather for this week and it seemed that it would rain all week - bar Monday afternoon. On Monday morning, therefore, I reserved a place for me in the 'after-work' slot at the newly re-opened (after 2 years of re-building) Freibad Flingern. I had to show my reservation code when entering and leaving the place.

As the rebuilding work also included re-erecting an indoor pool, the place is now no longer called a 'Freibad' (literally 'free bath', i.e. outdoor pool), but 'Allwetterbad' (all weather bath).

Sadly, it seems that the designers got a fair bit wrong outside. Don't they ask people what they want or like about the pool before they go in and change things? Don't they even try out the complex for a day or two to see how things work?

In the past, the children's corner (paddling pool and play area) was tucked away in a corner near the entrance, far, far away from the adult pools and separated from them by a long stretch of lawn and some shady trees.

Now? Now the paddling pool (between 5 and 25 cm deep) and a strange play area (no sand) which presumably will have water jets coming out of the weird sculptures there are right next to the adult pools. Right next to the diving pool and shallow end of the not-so-serious swimming pool (1 m in depth). A few flat 'benches' separate the two areas. I have visions of children running and slipping into an adult pool.

Why do I say that things are no longer so 'frei'? So free? Because the children's area is fenced off and placed precisely where I used to sit on the grass, watching the swimmers. Right there, where you could leave your stuff, go swimming and still keep an eye on things from the pool. A huge chunk of lawn has disappeared.

And the rest of the lawn is surrounded by flower beds, forcing people to go through two areas of flower beds to get onto the grass. Do the designers really think that adults and children are going to meekly walk through a 'corridor' of flower beds to get to the grassy area? Hah. I predict people trampling across the flower beds in no time.

Where the fences are, there's just one small access to the lawn and that's via a shower. People would have to squeeze past, getting wet and possibly bumping into anyone standing under the shower.

The place feels so restricted now. No longer 'free and easy'. Such a shame compared to how it felt in 2017, when I was last there.

WHAT WERE THE DESIGNERS THINKING OF???

Having said that, even though it was an overcast day, only 23 C at 5.30, it was extremely pleasant to be outdoors and in a pool again. It'll be interesting to see how things develop when it gets really sunny and hot again and people are there in droves.

I know just how Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged felt

In the marvellous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books, there is one character called Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.

As the Guide says, he was not born immortal but had immortality thrust upon him:

"Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands."

Naturally, a bit like the character in Groundhog Day who cannot kill himself no matter what he does as he always wakes up the next day alive and kicking, Wowbagger takes all sorts of risks with his life and 'cleans up' on 'high-yield long-term investments'. He then decides to insult every living creature in the universe...in alphabetical order. After all, you've got to have a goal in life. Right?

Now, obviously, I am not immortal, so how come I sympathise with poor Wowbagger? It's because at one point in the radio series, he asks his shipboard computer if there is any film he's not seen over thirty thousand times. The computer answers: "There's Angst in Space: you've only seen that 32,803 times."

When I settle down to do some sort of needlework or crochet, I scour the UK TV channels that I can watch online for anything to amuse me while working. Almost invariably, I end up on ITV 3, which broadcasts old series - mostly crime series - non-stop. If I've only seen an episode of some good crime series only two or three times, I count myself very lucky. 

A polite flick of the forefinger

Yesterday was a public holiday here in Germany, so after waiting for a shower (hurray!) to clear, I shot off to Kaiserwerth for a quick walk to Angermund in the morning.

The first part went along the narrowish path along the Rhine heading downstream, i.e. northwards. After that, I swung eastwards and was in farming country. The land to the north and west of Düsseldorf is as flat as a pancake and ideal for farming. We are, after all, close to the Netherlands.

The roads between fields are like the roads in the hills of North Wales: only wide enough for one car to travel along comfortably. As I grew up in a rural area and learnt to drive there, I know that drivers are often nervous when they approach walkers.

The polite thing to do as a walker is to stand aside a little and wait for the car to pass. This way, you're signalling to the driver: "This is where I'm going to be. I'm not going to get in your way. You can now calculate how best to drive around me."

One's patience is then rewarded by the driver raising a forefinger off the steering wheel in polite acknowledgement of your gesture, accompanied by a reciprocal nod of the head. Or at least it should be.

What I noticed about all the cars that passed me on my two hour walk yesterday was that it was only the older drivers who raised a polite finger and nodded at me. The younger drivers drove by as though I weren't there.

All I can think is that they aren't 'country folk', because whenever e been in a rural place and have stood aside to let a car pass safely, drivers have 'flicked a finger' (politely) and nodded their head in acknowledgement.

And those little gestures makes me feel all cosy inside - because it means that country folks are generally the same wherever they are.

What pigs we humans are

Is it really so very, very hard not to litter?

Is it really so difficult to ensure you don't leave anything behind you when you go for a walk or sit on the beach for a while?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/08/more-masks-than-jellyfish-coronavirus-waste-ends-up-in-ocean

As that Guardian article states, even in the swanky south of France, the sea bed and beaches are now littered with disposable face masks, gloves and sanitiser dispensers.

I quote from the article:
In France alone, authorities have ordered two billion disposable masks, said Laurent Lombard of Opération Mer Propre. “Knowing that … soon we’ll run the risk of having more masks than jellyfish in the Mediterranean,” he wrote on social media alongside video of a dive showing algae-entangled masks and soiled gloves in the sea near Antibes.



And also:

In the years leading up to the pandemic, environmentalists had warned of the threat posed to oceans and marine life by skyrocketing plastic pollution. As much as 13 million tonnes of plastic goes into oceans each year, according to a 2018 estimate by UN Environment. The Mediterranean sees 570,000 tonnes of plastic flow into it annually – an amount the WWF has described as equal to dumping 33,800 plastic bottles every minute into the sea.

Imagine that - the equivalent of 33,800 plastic bottles chucked into the Mediteraranean Sea (a pretty small sea at that) EVERY SINGLE MINUTE!

Also in Hong Kong:

Earlier this year the Hong Kong-based OceansAsia began voicing similar concerns, after a survey of marine debris in the city’s uninhabited Soko Islands turned up dozens of disposable masks.

“On a beach about 100 metres long, we found about 70,” said Gary Stokes of OceansAsia. One week later, another 30 masks had washed up. “And that’s on an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere.”

We humans are disgusting creatures. 

Outdoor creativity

This year has been a pretty good year for my balcony, too.

This was how it looked like today...

Here are 'The Four Pots' (not to be confused with the group called The Four Tops).

If I ever feel like having my very own Prince Charming, all I have to do is kiss the frog wearing the crown. (Can you see him?)

 Five of my geraniums made it through the winter - flowering all the while. The rest were bought this year. The rule with them is 'no two colours alike'.

What I like to call The Clash.

Every day or two, I pick another cherry tomato and eat it.

My lovely little Christmas tree that I 'rescued' from the supermarket 3 or 4 Christmases ago. It even came with tinsel and baubles. I have had to re-pot him. At Christmas time, he stays outside but is decorated. This also happens to be the view through the glass door of my kitchen.

Relaxing during lockdown?

A lot of people who are getting paid to stay at home have said how relaxing it is.

I'm afraid I can't agree with that. Reading is about the closest I get to doing nothing at home. (Outside the home, sitting in the cinema eating a small portion of popcorn is the closest I get to doing nothing.)

When I feel like watching something on YouTube or on UK TV, then I have to do something. Here is a selection of things that I've been doing since the restrictions have been in place. If you want to see a bigger photo, click on one of the photos and you can just use the mouse wheel to 'flick' through all 51 larger photos.

OK...this lot was all done by the end of February, but they were too nice to leave out. A mix of 'reading blankets' and 'baby blankets'.

And by the end of March, I had completed this lot. 

This is often the state of my table. Mind you, this is neat compared to what it can look like.

In mid-March, I started embroidering cotton shopping bags. The patterns all came from old issues of Labores del Hogar.

 I'd like to add that each bag took 8 to 10 hours to embroider. It's not something you can do in a hurry.

 I was using up odd bits of wool to make what I call 'spectacle cocoons'.

 And here you see me making face masks out of two old M&S pillow cases. I had planned to turn them into bags. Wasn't it lucky that I am so lazy that I hadn't got round to it in the last two years or so. All in all, I made 5 face masks from this stripey material and 2 from the pink material I made the bags with. See below. And all sewn by hand, I might add.

Then I decided to embroider a bag for a French acquaintance of mine whom I hope to meet again on Mallorca this year. Shopping is much more fun with bags like this. Again, the patterns came from Labores del Hogar - from various issues, combined by me.

Then I got the sewing machine out, for about the 4th time in the 20 years I've had it.

And this was the result. I've had the material in my sewing cupboard for at least two years. Thanks to these restrictions, I've finally got round to doing what I originally intended.

And then yesterday and today, I got round to making two new teddy bears for the twin granddaughters of my old Japanese boss in London. The one on the right, in red velvet, is one of the first ones I made around 20 years ago. He lives in my wardrobe and looks as fresh today as he did when he was 'born'. All bears are sewn and stuffed by hand and I crochet their scarves, too.

The hardest thing is ensuring they have a friendly, smiley face.

What a cutie!

And these are the things I've completed this year. Other things are in the making. Oh, I forgot.. there were some cross-stitch pictures. I shall have to make photos of them, too.

Edit: This morning, I realised that I hadn't photographed these three blankets that I made when non-essential shops re-opened and I could get three more big balls of yarn from Woolworth. These have all been made so my eldest cousin can give them as Christmas presents to elderly people in care home who don't have family to give them a present on Christmas Day.