time has run out but never say good-bye

Posted on 26/04/2012 by red shoes across london

There is so much I own to London. And now time has run out.

But never say good-bye. A while ago, I said good-bye to my favourite London musicians. However, everything comes back – in a new shape. I’ve always loved a particular song by the bearded singer with the cowboy hat whose warm voice sounded through the tunnels of the tube; recently I discovered it was a song by Jackson C. Frank, Carnival. So the song has returned to my world.

And this is how things meet in life. They are torn apart and yet connected through time. So I trust that London will come back in my life, in a different but nevertheless delightful shape.

deserted home

Posted on 25/04/2012 by red shoes across london

It is strange to think that life in London will carry on without me. As if there was a double universe in which I could be too – but while everything and everyone else is still here, instead of me, there is an empty bubble.

never ever

Posted on 22/04/2012 by red shoes across london

Miraculously, after having been through the last wonderful, intense weeks, I am developing some confidence that my life will just carry on being exciting – and I am realising that it might be less about the place where I live than about me and my ability to take up on the world around me and get excited.

being at the end of the world

Posted on 20/04/2012 by red shoes across london

I wish I could discover the awesomely raw music by Jackson C. Frank again and hear his song Marlene like I did the first time. The song seemed to come from the unknown, unfolding like a long ribbon. Although listening to it repeatedly, I could not remember the tune just the atmosphere. Someone has written about Marlene on Youtube I’m stunned. Blown away like you can only be when you discover beauty for the first time. The moment I realised that the song is not a about a love story but a trauma in which Frank nearly burned when being a child, now being haunted by the girl he liked back then but died in the same fire made me just crying.

being a stranger

Posted on 03/04/2012 by red shoes across london

I’ve liked being a foreigner. I’ve always felt as a stranger and living abroad amongst so many other strangers just seemed to be the right thing. It helped clarifying my identity. There is no country I could go ‘home’. It was here in London watching the Chinese film Summer Palace that I realised what it had meant to me that the country I am from did not longer exist. I am not looking for a home anymore but wonder how it will feel to live in a country that is supposed to be my home.

panta rhei

Posted on 28/03/2012 by red shoes across london

What departing really means is that everything that is significant now loses its importance in the future. It is the nature of change that things one cares about now will become less relevant and drift from the centre towards the edges of one’s life. Once I’ve left the stream of London, the city will never be the same again. It will become a stranger and one day I might even wonder what I’ve ever found so appealing about this place. It is most likely that soon, I will never find MY London back. It will be a mere piece of memory, getting smaller and smaller.

No man ever steps in the same river twice (Heraclitus) – and no man ever steps in the same city twice. How much I fear what is going to happen.

wistful

Posted on 16/03/2012 by red shoes across london

I would give everything to go back to this night five years ago when I arrived in a shabby hotel room in West Hampstead right by the tracks of the overground, nervous, anxious, exhausted, having spent a day paralysed in the armchair of a home I didn’t know that night would never be my home again. I didn’t know that night that I would exchange a home for a whole city. I didn’t know that night what the city would mean to me very soon. I didn’t know I would have to leave the city five years later without having offered me a home or any permission to stay other than as a bohemian.

a suitcase containing London

Posted on 08/02/2012 by red shoes across london

When I first visited Germany after I had moved to London, I survived the tediousness of Bremen by singing the then recently discovered songs by The Libertines. I proudly went through the streets thinking that I had the London feeling in my head which wouldn’t leave me wherever I went. I cant’t tell how much I am hoping it will ever stay with me like a suitcase I carry with me through the world.

a cold song

Posted on 24/01/2012 by red shoes across london

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow
See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath
Let me, let me freeze again to death.

Klaus Nomi’s disturbing interpretation of Henry Purcell’s The Cold Song.

a way out of here

Posted on 21/01/2012 by red shoes across london

“There must be some kind of way out of here,” / Said the joker to the thief, / “There’s too much confusion, / I can’t get no relief. / Businessman they drink my wine, / Plowman dig my earth / None will level on the line, nobody offered his word, hey” / “No reason to get excited,” / The thief, he kindly spoke / “There are many here among us / Who feel that life is but a joke / But you and I, we’ve been through that / And this is not our fate / So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”. Jimi Hendrix: All Along The Watchtower