The new year is already two weeks old and life has settled
back into its usual routine. No sooner
had the streets of Berlin been cleared of firework debris than they became
strewn with discarded Christmas trees (although I am always amused to note that
many remain fully decorated and illuminated weeks after the event). I had another teaching session with the two
girls last week and tonight the language exchange starts again – my theme will
be ‘resolutions and new starts’. I’m
hoping for a better turnout than I had for my last session which I’d spent two
days and six Euros preparing for only to have so few people turn up that it
wasn’t worth running. If it’s a washout
tonight I’m going to stop doing it.
On Sunday we went on the ‘Lenin Liebknecht Luxemburg’ march
in Friedrichshain which was every bit as rousing as last year’s, but the camera
on my phone packed up just as we reached the Socialist Memorial so I’ve
unearthed the one I brought over with me and have decided to take that wherever
I go. It’s not the greatest piece of
equipment but I hate to be without some means of taking photographs as there’s
always something in Berlin worth pointing a camera at.
In general, life has been fairly low key. I’ve spent much of my time working on one
particular writing project which has now reached 57000 words. Last weekend I noticed a chronological discrepancy
so I decided to plot a detailed time line.
Although I had worked out a rough chronology and made notes about what
happened when, I found it massively helpful to create a calendar and mark the
particular dates on which the incidents in the story occurred. This was more involved than I realised and it
took up an entire day but without it I felt that I was trying to paint the
walls of a house before the foundations had been properly laid. This exercise was especially useful as I have
two parallel story lines and some of the events happen simultaneously. It also helped me to impose control on my
story; everything I write now has a proper place to fit into.
My goal is to have the whole thing completed by the
summer. I’ve not devoted as much time to
it as I’d have liked because something always seems to crop up that needs
attention. Also, the open-plan layout of
the flat is at times not very conducive to writing and I sometimes miss the separate
kitchen we had in the other flat because it was a nice quiet haven for me to
write in. Still, disruptions aside, it’s
coming along and possibly the only positive element to being unemployed is that
I’m never too tired to work on it!
