out of season 4

I had visions of renting a bike to pootle up and down the Mosel. Apparently the river is unusually high. Here's the bike path.

out of season 3

In the early 90's, those go-go days, the egregious Esther Dyson together with some other overpaid theoreticians, proclaimed 'the overthrow of matter'.

Here it is the Year of our Lord 2008 in a bold new century, and we're still pushing coal laboriously upstream in order to fuel the power stations that move our electrons around. Watching these barges shoving along, it looks like they are going uphill. In several senses they are I suppose, but it's still odd to watch.

out of season 2

Since I can't find a way to format the layout of pictures in Blogger (always get slapped up on the top), my carefully-conceived layouts get bloggered. I give up, one post per picture.

Mosel vine, showing evidence of a moister climate than is usual for winegrowing regions. I expect a stony feel to the wine. No country for cotton socks, this.

As it turned out, everything was still closed until Easter weekend. Eventually found a place to taste wine in Zell/Mosel, but they had run out of trocken wines. All the sweet ones tasted identical to me. I could not distinguish any character, only sweetness. At dinner in Reil, I'd had a sweet Riesling, but it had lots more going on than just sweetness, rather a delicious gulp in fact. I figured I'd get a Beerenauslese just for the fun of it, but they'd run out of that too and I had to settle for a Riesling Eiswein.

In the hotel, I was going to drink the half-bottle of white in the minibar, but it turned out to be French. According to mine hostess, there are only 3 vineyards on the whole Mosel that produce half-bottles: they bottle in late April, so by March there's usually none available. Extraordinary.

out of season

Back in Germany on company business. Notes from a previous visit are on a different branch, but still apply for the most part.

Currently in a little hotel in Reil on the Mosel river. The Mosel itself looks more like the Big Muddy, and it's raining as is usual in March. My hotel is exactly as it appeared in the brochure, a small converted house, quite charming - except for the scaffolding all over the outside and blocking my view of the river. Humph. Oh well mine hostess is sweet, the town itself is quaint, I'm sure I can find some wine to drink here.

Upon arrival at the airport, they had no cars at all. I took the first one offered, ein plutokretz-mobil. Shown above at the graveyard outside Lotzbeuren, a town I had not planned to visit. It has a fine old cobbled town square with a church big enough to house the entire town. The graveyard is possibly the best-maintained in all Christendom. See picture above, in 'out of season 6'.

Corinne Ellen Kretzmann

September 13 1925 to January 17 2008

We pray.. for rest to the soul of the departed in a place of light, in a place of repose, in a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, sorrow, and suffering.
- Orthodox Memorial service.

We the living can do nothing for the dead but remember them. In time all the memories of my mother will be perfected, in the single remembrance of God or oblivion.

Until then all I can do is remember to celebrate her life, a life that did good in the world; a faithful life; a merry, kind-hearted life. I never knew all the stories of my mother's life. By now, some of them have traveled past the boundaries of forgetting. This looks like the end of the tale, but of course it is not. Ma lives on in the families of her children, and in the greater family of all those who loved her. It is only the closing of a chapter. All of the new stories run back into this story, and beyond.
I will remember this merry, kind-hearted life.

nunc est bibendum

"Running out into the summer rain with mouth wide open to catch the heavy raindrops; drinking milk from the ladle in the cowshed down on the farm during the long vacation; later in life, searching for truth in a wineglass - those are just a few of the stages in the evolution of a being.

To blame, of course, is that thirst which befalls poor mortals as soon as they see the light of day and which never lets up again afterwards. Feeling its intensity rise, our smallest contemporaries emit an appropriate acoustic signal (the primeval yell).

To blame too is the thirst for knowledge which fires our ingenuity in devising ever more thirst-quenchers (monks showing the way with holy glee)."

This appears to be a translation from the original German, on the Hotel Schloss Zell website. Marvellous, whatever language it originated in.. holy glee indeed.

Image from the inimitable Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

Edit 2010: for some inscrutable reason this post shows up on the second page of results for Googling "nunc est bibendum translation": but I do not in fact provide a translation. Sorry folks. Here's a good one, from a Pharyngula comment: 

"Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus

Now is the time to drink, now the time to dance on the earth. Horace goes on to explain that there will be no drinking or dancing in the afterlife."

Children's Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R.S. Thomas