Autumn is like one long fireworks display

Sitting in front of my PC on the second floor at work all day, whenever I look out of the winter for at least half the year, all I see just leaves. Leaves, leaves, leaves of the lime trees that line the street.

It's lovely when you see new buds forming after a long, dark and dismal winter, and the freshness of the new leaves is delightful, but autumn is when the trees really 'shine'.

Every day, the colour of the leaves changes - from dark green, to light green, bright yellow, light yellow, pale orange...and these are just the lime trees. Other trees bring forth more reddish hues. Fantastic. And as German streets nearly all have trees in them and one third of Germany is forested, autumn is a wonderfully colourful time of the year. It's some compensation for what we are about to be subjected to: winter.

The environment seems to be a feminine issue

Yesterday evening, to see something than my own four walls, I went to a local art-house cinema to see the film I am Greta all about the young Swedish woman who started the Friday school strikes for the environment.

I counted about 22 heads (including mine) there. Most of them young teenagers, only four men among us all. Four men. Two were with their female partners so had maybe been dragged there by their girlfriend or spouse. Only two single men there.

Is the future of the environment predominantly in the hands of women?

It was a very emotional film and I started to blub silently in my seat when she got her first invitation to speak at a large environment event in Poland. She's such a diminutive figure surrounded by all these soberly dressed adults. She stands quite still most of the time and all the action revolves around her, the quite pole.

It's a film everyone should see.

I just have one criticism to make about her, which was mentioned in the film. Basically, what she says is too general. As someone mentioned, she never specifies what she wants. She should make demands of the politicians she speaks to. Detailed demands and not just along the lines of "you should do better" and "stop lying to us". I also got the feeling that a lot of the young protesters around the world didn't know exactly what they could be doing apart from saying that politicians should be doing something.

Of course my hair looks great - it's raining and I have to go outside

 There are some things in my life which are inevitable.

One is that whenever I wear a clean white blouse, I'll end up with stains on it from eating either chocolate or something with a bright red or orange sauce.

Another inevitability occurs when I wash and blow dry my hair so that it looks great. Today, when I looked in the mirror, I had to admit to myself that the end result looked fantastic: glossy, sleek and nicely shaped.

Then I had to go food shopping and I stepped outside...only to find it raining. Even with the too-small hood up, my hair got wet and I still ended up looking somewhat bedraggled. Typical. Typical.

I'll get round to them some day...

I went away for a short walking holiday east of Frankfurt am Main last week. After three to four hours of non-stop walking in hilly countryside in the morning, I then flop around in my room, reading.

As I didn't have enough time to go to the public library and pick two new French books for this month, I rooted around my shelves at home and came across two books I'd brought back from Wales with me a year or two ago.

One of them was a copy of Moliere's play Les femmes savantes; the other was Colomba by Prospere Mérimée. The former had been printed in 1962, the latter in 1904; both had been bought by me in Chester when I was a schoolgirl and both had notes at the back to help learners understand the grammar and vocabulary.

Yes, I'd bought them when I was 17 or 18 years old, in the pre-Internet days, when buying books in foreign languages was no easy feat if you grew up in a Welsh village of fewer than 4,000 residents. In those days, the family would travel for an hour and a half to Chester to go shopping for clothes you couldn't get in our area then. 

I would nip into bookshops to try and find foreign books I could use to practise my skills on because Chester was practically a metropolis in comparison with my village and you were more likely to find some educated person there. And this was the result all those years ago. Over the years, I'd made desultory attempts to read them, but they had always been a bit too dry and difficult for me. 

Finally, however, I managed to settle down and read them from beginning to end. I knew I'd get round to them some day.

A bit of Wales in Woolworths, Germany

 Today, on the way to my sketching and drawing classes, I had occasion to pop into Woolworths for something. 

On the way upstairs again, I happened to notice some new front door mats on display. One of them had 'Welcome" printed on it in various languages, with the words in different fonts of different sizes. 

And right at the top of one mat, a little small, but plainly printed in bold black, was 'Croeso'. I wasn't expecting to see a Welsh word in Woolworths today - or anywhere in Germany for that matter. 

What a pleasant surprise!

"Mother cake" - the cake you really don't want to eat

A lot of the time, German words are easier to understand than English words. Take, for example, the word 'eulogy', which in German is 'Lobrede' or 'praise speech'. No need to know Greek. Or the strange animal that is a 'duck-billed platypus', which the Germans call 'Schnabeltier', or 'beak animal'.

If you came across the word 'Mutterkuchen', literally 'mother cake', you might be tempted to think it means a cake that is presented to mothers on Mothering Sunday, rather like the traditional Simnel cake in Britain. 

Or you might imagine it's a cake that is presented to new mothers shortly after having given birth. Nope.

But it is related to birth. A 'mother cake' is actually a placenta, and both the German and English words are based on the Greek word plakous, plakount- ‘flat cake’, based on plax, plak- ‘flat plate’.

I don't know if it is still the case, but there was a time when eating one's cooked placenta after giving birth was quite the thing. I suppose if you called it a 'mother cake', that  might make it more palatable.