LSB, our friend and I took a walk in the Volkspark in Vienna last month. We came across a pretty white building, called the “Theseus Temple.” Inside it was empty except for hundreds of thousands of tiny bronze discs. First we didn’t know what to do but then some other people came in and started playing with the discs. They grabbed handfuls of them and showered each other with bronze. It wasn’t long until we did the same. Art can be anything you want it to be.
“Keep your gaze fixed at the back of the room,” LSB had said, against the conventional wisdom of imagining your audience naked.
I instinctively disregarded his counsel, and fixed my eye creepily on a number of individuals I believed would be sympathetic. I looked most often at my mother, who had abandoned her high-heels in favour of a pair of sensible sandals.
Given that I often fail to entertain myself, the prospect of commanding the attention of the entire Schultz family and even attempting a few quips along the way was rather daunting.
My mama’s letter to the Christ Child
However, there I was standing in my black graduation dress with all the Schultzs staring at me, desperate to figure out what the Irish contingent had come up with this year. I decided the best thing to do was to start speaking.
“When our mother was a little girl,” I began (in German) “and adults asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer was always the same.”
I paused for effect and a Schultz baby (third generation) began to cry. Unable to decide whether it was in empathy or disgust I continued:
“She wanted to be a martyr.”
The baby wailed again. My sister clicked the next slide and a picture of my mother as a child beside a stock image of Martin Luther (the reformer) appeared.
I regaled my audience with a hilarious anecdote about my mother challenging an irate nun in class. The Schultz family laughed politely. The baby demanded to leave the room.
Before I knew it, it was time for the first theatrical performance.
As part of the research into our mother’s past, we had stumbled across a letter she had written to the “Christkind” when she was a little girl.
While the Christkind fulfils the same role in Germany as Santa Claus does in this part of the world, there are notable differences between the two. For one, the Christkind is an angel, rather than a Coca-Cola-inspired fat man, and according to my mother, genderless. He/she flies from the heavens on Christmas Eve and deposits presents under the trees of good children.
My mother made modest demands of the Christkind. She asked for a pair of tights, a bottle of Rotbaeckchen juice and a fountain pen.
The Christkind
I acquired these items in Regensburg and decided that a cameo appearance from the Christkind simply had to feature as part of the presentation. Having mentally auditioned the entire younger generation of Schultzs, I finally cast my 17-year-old cousin in the role. She is a natural Child of Christ, waif-like with long blonde hair and an angelic countenance.
She fashioned herself a golden costume featuring an enormous pair of glittery wings and to complete the transformation, LSB had the ingenious idea of covering our Frisbee with tinfoil to make a halo.
Shortly before the presentation (we were interrupted by the Family Song) the Christ Child and I briefly rehearsed what cue she would need in order to fly to my mother at just the right time. She had prepared to hide in a little adjoining room until the time was right.
Up to that point –all things considered — my performance had been without major hitch. I was fair-minded enough to put the baby’s reaction down to the stress of his first ever introduction to the Schultz family and accounted for his disappointment at the standard of my opener by diagnosing a case of precociousness.
When I spoke the Christ Child’s cue (“To show our mother that dreams really can come true, we have invited the Christ Child here today to lavish her with gifts”), nothing happened.
No Christ Child flew in, bearing fruit juice, a pair of tights and a fountain pen.
I paused and spoke again.
Still no Christchild.
The Schultzs were quiet. No baby cried now.
I paused a while.
In spite of my meticulous preparation for this event, I had not tested the acoustics of the room next door.
I became increasingly desperate.
“Christchild,” I yelled. “CHRISTCHILD.”
There was a flutter of wings at the door and the Christchild flew in to a great cheer from the Schultzs.
My mother was overwhelmed by her winnings and immediately asked the Christchild to pose for a photograph.
The public’s positive reaction to the Christ Child’s appearance was unprecedented and I relaxed in the confidence that the next theatrical performance would go down just as well.
It did.
My Greek cousins re-enacted my parents’ first dance with rare and delicate sensibility. My research had revealed that my father and mother had communicated in French when they first met and that my father was an exceptionally poor dancer. My male cousin, dressed in an afro wig similar to my father’s hairstyle of the time, grabbed his sister around the neck and stepping on her toes, misdirected her in an unfortunate and entirely graceless waltz around the room. She, a method actor in turn, called out “Oh la la,” and “Fais les petits pas” in what came across as very genuine desperation.
Here’s a picture of us all that Onkel Fritz took it just before the presentation. Do we look nervous?
Having completed the first section of the presentation, I breathed a sigh of relief, let my sisters take over and took a seat in front of the laptop. On my way, I managed to catch LSB’s eye. He couldn’t give me the thumbs-up because he was holding his camera at arm’s length (much to the mortification of my sisters) but he winked encouragingly at me.
At this point in the story, perhaps I should offer some insight into the background to this curious presentation. This might be of particular interest to my mother, who at time of writing, remains in the dark.
The Ferguson sisters are like any series of collectables. We are essentially the same but we each have some nice individual characteristics to recommend us to the peculiarly attentive.
When we were little, our father used to invent stories featuring my sisters and me in a parallel ancient Greek world. So that they don’t beat me up, I’m going to refer to them by the names our dad invented for us. My oldest sister, Penelope is the DIY extraordinaire and one not to libel, the middle child, Hermione is the scientist and bag-maker in Philadelphia and you all know me, Persephone as the youngest, least accomplished one that isn’t quite sure what she’s doing with her life.
In preparation for the presentation, Penelope scoured the family archives (dusty boxes in the basement) for photographs, Hermione compiled them into a Powerpoint file and I, Persephone wrote the accompanying text.
In the weeks leading up to the Familienfest we encountered a series of artistic differences, which were fortunately tempered by the great physical distance between us.
On the day however, as I watched Penelope and Hermione present our mother finally with a magnificent home-made medal (a speed limit sign with the number “60” within it) and I closed our speech with reference to her love of etymology (the word “martyr” is related to “memory…”) I realised that no matter how far apart, the Ferguson sisters are a bizarre force to be reckoned with.
Belated Happy Birthday, Mama. Hope you liked the juice.
Familienfest 2012 was officially opened by my mother, who clinked on a glass, rose to her feet and recited some charming verses of welcome, which she had penned herself. As one of the five “Gerburtstagkinder” (birthday children) celebrating a combined age of 320, she dazzled the crowd not only with with her rhymes, but also with a stunning pink floral dress, and her first ever pair of shockingly high heels.
image source: pinkandgreay.ca
This year’s seating arrangement was even more strategic than last and reflected the openness of the Schultzs to including non-family members in the celebrations. LSB and my sister’s boyfriend sat beside each other and compared their recollection of Schultz names in loud whispers. LSB was making an excellent impression and things were going rather smoothly until the first course arrived. The menu had advertised “tomato consumé” soup as a starter but certain family members were dismayed to find several balls of beef swimming in their bowls. It was a moment of glory for LSB and me, who, far from being bound by the set menu, could enjoy the full range of choice from the vegetarian menu. We ordered tomato and basil soup. It was delicious.
Conversation meandered from the mundane (the current economic climate) to the sublime (what is the best German beer?) and took place in both German and English.
The family song had been rehearsed the night before at Onkel Fritz’s house. My father, LSB and my sister’s boyfriend had taken the opportunity to check out Regensburg’s beer gardens. Details of their evening remain scarce: the three arrived home late and LSB has made himself unavailable for comment.
The family choir outnumbered the audience members. LSB, who knows all the words, was tasked with videoing the performance. Those interested in viewing it should feel free to approach me with a small fee, which may cover the medical cost of recovering from my sisters’ silent threat of beating me up for publicising any material related to the Familienfest.
LSB and I in the run-up to Familienfest2012
Schultz birthdays come with the associated and thinly-disguised responsibility of nuclear family members to pay tribute, in a performative art of their choice, to the Birthday Child. My aunt’s children composed and recited poetry and sang a song. My uncle’s daughter presented a series of themed photographs to a soundtrack of topical songs. Previous years have featured tap dancing, the Ferguson sisters’ violin trio and a song about toiletpaper.
Regular readers and personal friends will know that I have two older sisters. One is a scientist in America and makes nice cloth bags and the other lives in Dublin, is a super hand at DIY and definitely not one to libel.
Months ago, the three of us convened on Skype to discuss the tribute we would pay to our mother.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I juggled my TV internship, job applications, flat searches and LSB, while they battled with commitments to fat samples, single nucleotide polymorphisms and legal wranglings. Tradition and common sense dictate that the Birthday Child should be ignorant of the nature of the performance until the day of celebrations. After weeks of competing visions and frantic conferences on Skype, we came up with what we considered a fitting tribute to our mother.
After the waitresses had brought in a large selection of cakes, it was time. Onkel Fritz tapped a glass, set up the computer, and, as opener of the presentation, I advanced to the front of the room to face the scores of expectant Schultz faces before me.
To be continued…
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Regular readers: I’ve been nominated for an Irish Blog Award 🙂 and need your help! Do you have a favourite blog post at katekatharina.com? If you do, please email me so I can enter it into the “best post” category. It’s a public vote, so if you do enjoy the blog, it would be lovely if you could vote for it. I’ll put more info on my Facebook page later.
The first words I heard when I landed back on Irish soil came from a lady sitting behind me on the plane. “I’ve told Nuala to put on the spuds,” she said.
If the impossibly green landscape I’d just flown over hadn’t been enough to convince me that I was finally back home, Nuala making spuds was. I was delighted.
Terminal 2 makes Berlin Schoenefeld look like it’s stuck in the dark ages. Although a new airport is due to open in Berlin soon, an unexpected delay of several months was announced to much controversy just a week in advance of its proposed opening. The new date is amusingly, St Patrick’s Day 2013.
Terminal 2 features walls of photographs of Irish people, some prominent figures, some not. I noticed Enda beaming at me to my left and a chiselled, greying Pierce Brosnan to my right.
Some of you will have noticed my appalling attendance in the Blogosphere in the past while. Rest assured that I have been collecting Blog Fodder along the way. LSB and I spent the last two weeks in my mother’s hometown of Regensburg. I blogged about it before, when we visited my grandmother and the Christmas markets two years ago.
Regensburg
This time, my whole family was together, which is sadly a very rare occasion since my sister and I emigrated. Familienfest 2012 was a momentous occasion, which deserves (but might not get) a whole series of posts to itself. It was my mother’s and two aunt’s 60th birthday, my Great Uncle’s 90th and an uncle’s 50th. The combined age was 320, so the celebration was suitably large.
The Ferguson sisters pulled together from Philadelphia, Vienna and Dublin in an attempt to entertain the scores of guests with a presentation about our mother’s life. It featured cameo roles from my cousins, who re-enacted scenes from my mother and father’s courtship and a special appearance of the “Christkind” (the German version of Santa Claus), who lavished my mother with gifts.
The last while has also seen a return of my Quarter Life Crisis, so those of you nostalgic for more uncertain days will be relieved to know that they are not behind me yet. After much indecision and emotional turmoil, I decided to move back to Berlin. More on that when it happens, in two weeks’ time.
For now, I’m sitting in my suitably messy room under three quilts and a heavy blanket, delighted to be home. I found a little spider in my wardrobe and wondered how long he’d been there. Last night I had to turn on the immersion before I showered. The fridge is empty so I’m off to buy milk and organic eggs and Dairy Milk chocolate and potatoes and soda bread. There’s no place like home.
After spending four months in Berlin, I took a holiday in Vienna.
If, as some claim, Berlin is a city going through puberty, then Vienna is its older, more responsible sibling. On the surface the family resemblance is clear: the beautiful Altbau (literally “old building”) style of architecture, much of it restored since World War II, can be found in both cities, though it dominates more in Vienna, where significantly less of it was destroyed.
Altbau houses are typically painted in tasteful shades of blue, pink or green and are decorated both outside and inside with elaborate plasterwork. They are tall but not imposing and, while very pretty, not particularly remarkable. In Berlin, in the fortunate neighbourhoods where Altbau buildings dominate, their charm contrasts reassuringly with the gritty Soviet blocks, which are usually within sight. In Vienna, on the other hand, where every street corner boasts yet another impressive feat of architecture, they merely add to the provincial, sophisticated feel which characterises the city.
Altbau in Berlin
While both cities boast an efficient underground transport system, in Vienna the stations look like Duplo models. They are easily navigable, childishly labelled, pristine and absolutely identical. In Berlin, they are different colours, often garish and grotty and full of musicians and homeless men with long, wild beards rooting through bins.
Both places are made for easy living. You can get around quickly until late at night and you can visit galleries and museums or lounge comfortably in the vast open spaces which surround them. In the summer, both cities set up rows of deckchairs beside their rivers. Little kiosks selling peanuts, crisps and beer pop up nearby. In Vienna you can fill your bottle with ice-cold water at Trinkwasserstations, which occur at regular intervals throughout the city. In Berlin, both the young and the old prefer to travel with a bottle of beer in their hand.
While Berlin and Vienna might share roots, their character couldn’t be more different. Vienna is stylish and self-contained, while Berlin is anarchic, vigorous and care-free.
Viennese Coffee Culture
In Vienna, the sophisticated coffee shop culture and well-dressed middle-aged lady reign supreme.
In Berlin it’s the punk bars and anybody inside themthat claims to want to fight the system.
In Vienna, most of the art is kept in museums which charge a high entry fee. In Berlin it’s all around you and changes at the whim of the latest anarchist movement.
The street-corners in Berlin are alive with fire-breathers, hip-hop dancers and human statues covered in body paint. In Vienna, the police politely ask the street musicians for their papers and the latter move on without complaint when they fail to produce the right ones.
Vienna is a city that no longer has much to fight for and whose history has been tastefully, expertly painted over. Berlin is attacking its raw wounds with an aggressive, momentous vigour.
Berlin is growing up. If it develops like Vienna, in a few years it will mourn the loss of adolescent ideals, which many of us too grow up to grieve. And there’ll be fewer beer bottles for the homeless men to collect.
Tonight, LSB and I went to Prater, an amusement park in Vienna. A highlight of the evening was my violent struggle with this charming man.
Check out my Facebook page to find out what happened next.
At the G20 summit last November, Obama and then French president, Sarkozy, were having a chat. The Israeli Prime Minister came up in conversation.
“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar”, said Sarkozy, to which Obama replied, “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day!”
The problem with the conversation was that their mikes were on. A couple of journalists heard the whole thing. Instead of rushing to their editor with their enormous scoop, they stayed quiet in the belief that this was a private conversation which would be damaging to report.
Nothing was said for a few days until the French website Arret sur Images published their remarks. As soon as international journalists got wind of the interchange, it went global and the mainstream French media reported it too.
image source: privateinvestigations.blogspot.at
The media treatment of the exchange triggered an important discussion: what matters to the public and what doesn’t and how entwined are the public and private lives of our politicians?
In all walks of life, the idea that our private and professional selves are separate entities is a myth. Our behaviour might differ from one situation to another but our values do not.
Research suggests that people vote for politicians based more on their personalities than on their policies. They do so in the reasonable belief that the two are unlikely to be widely removed from each other.
Political decisions, like any other are made on the spur of the moment, and under the influence of powerful personalities. If your leader is more eager to be liked than to do what’s right, it matters. If they are impulsive or inexpressive or icy, it will affect their governance. Personality counts.
Since it’s the first responsibility of a politician to act on their values, their behaviour outside of work cannot be logically divorced from the decisions they make on the job.
Take for example Dominique Strauss Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund. Notwithstanding the allegations of sexual harassment against him, which have been well-documented by the media, he’s admitted to several affairs and to attending lavish parties featuring naked girls, who may or may not have been prostitutes. Strauss Kahn chose the institution of marriage and failed to live up to its requirements. Assuming that values do not change fundamentally from one situation to the other, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to question his commitment to other institutions, such as the IMF and the state of France, to which he also pledged allegiance.
Whether or not such speculation is justified, the more we learn about the kinds of people our politicians are outside of work, the more sophisticated our interpretations of their motivations and performance become.
While some might suggest that such a hunger for private lives only encourages the cultivation of a “public” personality, to assume that this wasn’t already the case would be naive. Furthermore, the challenge for journalists is to convey the personality of a politician as it is, not necessarily as he or she would like it to be.
The media have a choice to make between objectifying and subjectifying. Objectifying is talking about Hillary Clinton’s bum, while subjectifying is telling us how her mouth twitched when her daughter failed a maths test.
The future of journalism is uncertain: the overwhelming speed at which news now travels has eliminated much of what the job used to entail.
There is a new opportunity though and it requires us to slow down, to reflect and to write with insight rather than haste.
Demanding of our journalists to be emotionally astute as well as politically sharp will lead to a more complex picture of what is anything but a straightforward job: making decisions that affect millions of lives and the future of our planet.
Journalism may sustain its integrity into the future by maintaining a fine balance between the personal and the political. When it comes to reporting from the private realm, it must replace sensationalism with psychological realism.
It’s what’s missing in the constantly updated, hyper-evolving virtual media landscape.
Unless we begin to privilege the mundane everyday, politicians will stay “out of touch” with it, and the public will continue to see them as little more than worn out political machines; inanimate and inept.
So if Enda Kenny announces that he’s turned vegan, Eamonn Gilmore squabbles with his neighbour about the position of a garden fence or Joan Burton runs off with her secretary, I want to hear about it.
I was slumped on a bench in Vienna Stadtpark a couple of days ago, hungover, watching ducks in a pond. A black coot swam over to a drake and unprovoked, nipped it in the buttocks. The drake spun around to face his aggressor, then thought the better of it and glided away.
On the bench to my left, a girl was sitting alone, smiling to herself. She was waif-like and innocent-looking with long brown hair and large eyes. She seemed unusually still.
Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, two girls clutching tiny pads of paper approached her. They began very quietly, to question her. All the time the girl murmured her answers, she kept the little otherworldly smile on her lips. The others were noting down her answers and nodding sympathetically; their faces full of vivid reassurance. I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying.
The air was cooler than it had been the last few days.
Image source: http://www.boingboing.net
Suddenly a gust of wind snatched some sheets of paper from the girls’ grip. They flew up into the air and landed in the pond. The girls gasped, turned, stretched out their arms, laughed, then gave up and pointed helplessly at the white specks as they dispersed across the water.
I forgot about them for a while because I was distracted by a lady on the other side of me playing with her grandson. He was bouncing on her knee and laughing. I caught the lady’s eye and smiled. She had auburn hair and an elegant face. After a little while, her daughter came back. “Look,” she’s back, the older lady told the baby, turning him so that he faced his mother. He beamed and she sat down beside him and rubbed his nose.
I looked back at the three girls beside me. They had closed their eyes and were speaking to God. All I could hear was the address “Herr.” Soon it was over, and the two girls disappeared. The original one remained on the bench, sitting bolt upright, her expression and posture unchanged. Though it was pasted to her face, her smile had an ephemeral quality. She had been touched.
The grandmother and her daughter laid the baby between them and together changed his nappy. They couldn’t have looked any happier. The pleasure they took from the task was nourishing.
As I was leaving the park, I passed a man wearing a red plastic nose, a pair of plastic glasses and a floppy hat. He was dipping a folded piece of rope into a bucket of soapy water and blowing giant bubbles. A little girl was clapping her hands and chasing them before they disappeared into the gravel on the ground.
I wandered home and some of the guilty hollowness left by the hangover was gone.
LSB and I are bookish types. We met in a library, not on a sports field. While he gallops through the classics, I canter along beside him, skimming paragraphs to keep up. Altogether we’re contented.
But ever since our arrival in Vienna, we’ve been committed to a course of self-improvement. When we’re not saving ladybirds or relaxing in the museum quarter, we’re exchanging skills. I’m teaching him German (his progress is remarkable) and he’s introducing me to chess. I now know my rook from my knight and he can distinguish between the genitive and the accusative case.
LSB in a coffee shop off Mariahilfestrasse, where he began teaching me chess
It’s all well and good to study a new language and familiarise yourself with chess; for bookish types like us, both activities qualify as recreational. To really test our commitment to self-improvement, we need to tread outside our comfort zone.
Conversation turned to that very theme last week, while we were walking down Mariahilfestrasse.
“Let’s buy a frisbee,” said LSB.
How could I resist?
We went into a sports shop. I saw some kids trying out the treadmills so I did the same. A shop assistant came over to reprimand the children, accusing them of breaking the machines. Then she came to me wearing a large smile and asked if she could be of help. I said I was just “looking” and ran away as fast as I could.
Eventually we found the section we were looking for. In between snorkels and body boards, we found some large plastic discs.
“There we are,” I said. “How much is that?”
LSB picked it up and gasped.
“20 euro! Forget about it.”
“Sure we could use a paper plate for free!”
We continued down Mariahilfestrasse.
We passed a stamp shop, a furniture store and a hat shop.
Finally we found a toy store.
We found some frisbees inside a basket of Barbie beach balls.
LSB pulled some out.
“Grey or green?”
“What a toughie! Go grey.”
He did. We bounced to the till and paid €2.49.
Since then, LSB and I have discovered talents we never knew we had.
We may have started out unable to toss the bloody disc in any direction at all, and we have certainly hit a good number of beautiful Viennese park-dwellers, who thought they were out for a relaxing afternoon in the park, but you should see the beautiful arcs in the air that we can now achieve.
While I’m content to continue shooting long backhands, which I have mastered, LSB is keen to make swift improvements. In recent days, he has become intent on mastering the forehand. Unfortunately up to now, all attempts in that direction have landed far off target. I swear he’s doing it to make me run.
A few minutes ago, I looked up at LSB, who is sitting at the window with his laptop, looking over the Danube. A strange sound was coming from his computer. It sounded like a chorus of sea gulls.
“What are you doing?” I asked LSB, who is supposed to be preparing for his future life in Edinburgh.
“Just watching an Ultimate Frisbee Game,” he said.
The sun is beginning to set, casting a beautiful orange glow over the water. There’s just enough light left for a quick game.
Update: We played frisbee in the dark outside the national library.
Also, as regular readers may have noticed, I have a new picture as my header. If you become a fan of Katekatharina on Facebook, you can see the complete album of the photo shoot, which I’ll be posting tonight.
I once started crying in a falafel joint in Philadelphia because I saw a father upbraid his son for not doing well at school. He spat when he spoke, his wife pursed her lips and his sister said “I’d help you if I were in big kid school.” It was too much for me to watch. A couple of tears landed in my hummus.
And on Tuesday night, just outside the opera house in Vienna, I gave money to a woman on a crutch who told me she had lost her wallet, had already reported it to the police and just needed a fare to get the train home. I suspended disbelief.
If that wasn’t enough, when I went to see the King’s Speech with LSB, I was in such a state afterwards that I refused to leave the cinema in case I met somebody I knew.
You see, I have a delicate sensibility.
I also like ladybirds, a lot.
So you can imagine my reaction when one landed on my toe last Sunday afternoon. I was sitting on a bench in a beautiful Viennese park. The sun was scalding me, my eyes were closed and I felt something brush against my toe. I was preparing to flick the offending creature away when LSB said “Look, Katzi!”
The ladybird that landed on my foot
I looked down and squealed with delight. There it was – a beautiful, well-rounded specimen with chunky spots and a confident crawl. I watched it and asked LSB to take a picture to preserve for posterity.
After some time, it ambled away contentedly to a stretch of pathway. I watched it go a little sadly. Then all of a sudden a wave of people passed by directly in front of me, completely obscuring my view of the ladybird.
“Oh no, no, no, no!” I cried.
LSB winced. “Don’t look, Katzi.”
I had to.
It had been trodden on but it was still alive, flailing.
I rushed to it. Some of its legs were crushed. I tried to encourage it onto a newspaper in my hand. It would not move.
I stayed there a while. I felt I was being watched but I didn’t feel like looking up.
Then a woman’s voice said to me, “The newspaper won’t work. Try your finger!”
I looked up to find a middle-aged lady with brown curls and a loose blouse peering down at me.
I took her advice but it didn’t work. I told her that the ladybird had been stepped on.
“Oh well that’s the end of him then,” she said, smiling apologetically before walking away.
I returned to the bench and watched the bug. It had stopped moving.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Katzi,” said LSB sadly. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
I got down on my knees and looked at it again carefully.
The lady came back. She licked her finger, scooped the ladybird up and plopped it in my hand.
“That’s how you do it,” she said.
I was startled but grateful. LSB laughed a little.
The ladybird moved.
“It’s alive!” I cried.
It began to push forward with its two undamaged legs.
I set it down on a leaf at the edge of a lawn. It moved forward a little and then toppled over onto its back. I turned it back over.
This happened a few times. Then LSB said, “Katzi, this time let it try on its own.”
That was wisdom and my first insight into my shortcomings as a future parent.
It managed to turn itself over. There was no guarantee that it would master the concrete ledge onto the lawn. But it was time to go.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said LSB again.
Spinning in my ladybird costume, Halloween 2008 with a charming Tinkerbell
Since then I have seen several crushed ladybirds on the pavement.
But yesterday, while I was swimming in the Danube, I spotted a ladybird in the water.
Without thinking, I scooped it up into both my hands and brought it to safety.
Even more impressively, today I ate a falafel sandwich and nothing about it or my surroundings offended my sensibilities.
Kate Ferguson 