Last week I finished with the excavation in York, leaving my undergraduate team, the house and the cat in the incapable hands of Alex. I'm not worried about Cleo, as she knows how to keep Alex in his place.
I cn red latin plz LOL
I left York on Thursday evening and reached Hull without a hitch, except when my GPS tried to send me into a field, which was technically my fault. The ferry was full of Yorkshire scooter nuts, bikers returning from the Manx TT and lots of people determined to get very drunk. We arrived next morning in a blue-skied Rotterdam and the top decks were crowded with people feasting their eyes on its beauty.
Rotterdam cathedral
There followed 250 miles of driving into central Germany. Once I got used to driving on the right hand side and reached the German border I put the famed awesomeness of the Autobahn to the test. It turns out that the Autobahn is indeed awesome. In fact it should be renamed the AWESOMEBAHN.
Even in my dinky little Peugeot 106, which has a 50cc engine or something, it was great fun cruising at 90 mph in the slow lane with BMWs and Mercs still screaming past like Valkyries. Thanks to the Awesomebahn I reached my destination two hours ahead of schedule.
The place I'm staying is the ground floor flat of a house owned by a certain Herr and Frau K in the 10-house metropolis of Friedrichsaue. They have a huge garden, a pond, two dogs and lots of bees.
Herr K said I'd brought the fine weather with me from England (ho ho). It was a bright, breezy day, with a sky full of light and shadow. Once my hosts had showed me around the place, I took my camera and went for a wander along farm tracks towards Zierenberg, the nearest town.
On the Saturday, Herr and Frau K and their neighbour took me on a tour of Zierenberg and its environs. It's a local type of place where everyone seems to know everyone else - especially so in the case of Herr K, who's a teacher at the local primary school.
Anyway, this is the real reason I've come here. Friedrichsaue lies at the foot of these twin peaks, called Großer and Kleiner Gudenberg - Great and Small Wodan's Hill. The names suggest that they were somehow connected to the Germanic god Wodan before St Boniface came and stirred up a hornets' nest in the eighth century by telling everyone to become Christian.
I climbed up the Gudenbergs on Sunday, wandering from the paths and spending about four hours getting happily lost and found again in the dense woodland. At the very peak of Großer Gudenberg, which is never visited except by deer, are the ruins of an old medieval fortress - a huge double rampart surrounding what looked like the remains of a motte built on a natural outcrop, all of it smothered by trees and fern. No path, no signs, nothing at all to suggest that any human has ventured to the summit for centuries - at any rate, I didn't see another living soul the whole time I was up there.
There are lots of similar sites scattered around Hessia. Some of them are linked to old folk tales that root them deep in a half-imagined pagan past; many survive in name only and are virtually forgotten. Over the next three months I'll be writing a book about them, and giving regular status updates here...
Booooring.
ReplyDeleteI have been starving Cleo since you left. She used to run around the house begging for food, now she's to weak even to lift her head.
I told your team all about you today. They hate you now.
Did you like that I told them you'd spent four years in prison?
ReplyDeleteMr. Sotheran,
ReplyDeleteIf you harm a hair on the divine Miss Cleo's charming head, I shall come and visit my nondivine and very pregnant wrath upon you...and at the moment, that is almost certainly going to involve an inordinate amount of sick. You've been warned.
Dr. Clay,
I'm sure the undergraduates know better than to believe Mr. Sotheran...but as you SEEM innocent, they probably did believe you. Nice work. So, are the house dogs anywhere near as good as Kim the Wonder Dog?
Mrs. Lily Roth
Well, the dogs are called Charlotte and Kira, and they're both disappointingly friendly. None of the highly-strung, paranoid smarts of Kim the Dog, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteI told your team you were a Holocaust Denier.
ReplyDeleteThat cat has to be the most blogged entity of 2009, apart from maybe Barack Obama.
ReplyDeleteI used to tell people that Alex edited a magazine called "Coprophile", but I think he started making friends off the back of it, so I stopped.