Britta's Letters from her life divided between city-life in German's capital Berlin and life in a Bavarian village

Saturday 15 November 2014

Thing T. Thing - or: "Che Gelida Manina"

Brigitta Huegel


You know my enthusiasm for hats - the bigger, the better. (And I wear all of them, in real life).
And I had a shoe-tic, tamed by now (hahaha). 
When I still wrote my blog "You are Witty and Pretty", I carried the torch for the fashionista - but soon I got bored tired by all these blogs counting up what they bought here, and then there, and you had not to be Einstein to calculate that their armoire, (never a simple cupboard), must be as big as our posh emporium KaDeWe in toto - and the blogger's gloves and scarves they had to put on the Tauentzien & Kudamm together for want of room.
So the "pretty" gave way to the "witty" - at least I tried, till at last I gave up.
But back to fashion:
I now add gloves (sort of) to my passions.
Aren't the lacy-ones above beautiful? (And practical: you still can write an SMS).
The painters and artists among you know: nothing is as difficult as drawing hands - and photographing them - on your own - isn't easy either. So please don't look with a too critical eye at the way my arm looks in the photo- and no, I didn't overdo my weight-training, I only stem the wall...
These one - manufactured by Karl Lagerfeld - were a present from my young Hamburgian friend:

Brigitta Huegel

When I wear them - especially in Hamburg, the city of the very mighty and very rich - some older gentle(?)men in Brioni-suits get a certain glitter in their eyes - as if Gabriella Cilmi sings in their mind  "Nothing's Sweet About Me".
So hastily I counter-trill from Puccini's La Bohème: "How icecold is this tiny hand" -
and wait for even colder days to carry my newest trove:

Brigitta Huegel


PS: As I joined Joanne Noragon's brand-new Facebook-site which shows the beautiful scarves she weaves, their might be a new mode en vogue for me...
https://www.facebook.com/JoanneNoragonWeaver?skip_nax_wizard=true&ref_type





Saturday 8 November 2014

Sir Roger Moore (and I) in a Short TV Interview



Five years after its taking, I've found it again: the lost video above - with a snippet of a TV- 'interview' of me that was made in Hamburg when Sir Roger Moore presented "My Word is My Bond: The Autobiography". You have to be patient (though I only give you a shortened version), because it is mostly in German - except a few words in English by me (you might have read Tom's comment on my accent :-) - and a bit more by Sir Roger Moore - so wait for the Lady in Turquoise and you might get a fleeting impression of me.
It was shortly before our move to Berlin. I had plucked three especially beautiful different roses from my garden for him: Roger Moore - the actor I'd always admired.
I had missed him a few years before when husband made the catalogue/anthology for an exhibition in Hildesheim - "James Bond. Schauspieler und Spion" (James Bond. Actor and Spy") - he couldn't come, though at that occasion I had the honour and joy to dine with Desmond Llewelyn, the inventive engineer "Q" (who sadly died a short time after in a car crash).
When I find the black&white photo of us I will show it to you.
But back to Hamburg.
Sir Roger Moore introduced his book charmingly and witty.
Then the reporter chatted with me. With her last question (in German) she almost knocked me out of my silken stockings (and High Heels): she asked with the impertinence of (not that fresh) youth, in an incredulous voice: "Do you think he is still a sexy man?"
Rude in oh so many ways: the question in and of itself, then in his vicinity, but most of all: how odd to think that sexiness depends only on age?
I was so glad that I was not too shocked to answer (I seldom am - shocked or silent).
And the answer came from my heart -  I meant as I said.

PS: (And if not I wouldn't have answered otherwise).







Tuesday 4 November 2014

Spreewald and Bliss

Brigitta Huegel

 On a very sunny (!) 2nd November (!) with 19°C (!) husband and I drove to Schlepzig in the Spreewald, where I had never been before. Above you see a women in a traditional costume - worn for the tourists now - who punts a boat with up to 20 guests on the many rivulets and rivers. 
The Spreewald (the Sorbian word for it was 'Biota' = swamps) is a huge area with bogs and marshes, protected as a biosphere reserve, in Brandenburg, which was formed in the glacial period.

Brigitta Huegel



Brigitta Huegel

Brigitta Huegel

One and a half hour we were punted by a nice man (who viewed the wild woods merely with the eyes of a treefeller: "Here I was allowed to axe a broken tree - there I collected five trees... which brought me fine fathoms of stovewood for my 'Bullerjahn'.. ." (a special sort of oven - and I think they really need the heat in winter - even in Berlin we have Siberian frost sometimes).
Inwardly, I believe, he thanked his silent little helpers: about 50 beavers live around Schlepzig, and they are working hard. Over hundred years there hadn't been any (only being thought of in the social-critical comedy "The Beaver Coat" by Gerhart Hauptmann, for which the Berlin Board of Censors predicted in 1893 : "Petty painting without any plot of relevance...that dull pathetic effort will not see many enactments" - and thus erred enormously: it became very, very famous).
So  in 2003 the first beaver immigrated back to the Spreewald - hailed by environmentalists, while the LUVG printed a little brochure "How to live with the beaver".

Brigitta Huegel


After dinner in the beautiful Landgasthof 'Zum Grünen Strand der Spree', which is very proud of its Private Brewery from 1788 we went back - finding out that my Knut, as you can see clearly in this picture, hadn't been idle either and had used his time by transgressing boundaries to flirt with a(nother) beautiful Italian,..


So: A wonderful day for all of us! 
(or in my four new words of Italian): 

Una Festa Sui Prati! 









Saturday 1 November 2014

Autumn, and Berlin's Leaves Fall

Brigitta Huegel

Brigitta Huegel

Brigitta Huegel


Dear You, 
here you see my problem. Better: you don't see it - because I couldn't find it.
I was looking for a special photo I took: beautiful yellow leaves on a shining turquoise engine cover - it looks really lovely and I can recall it before my inner eye - but I forgot: when did I take that photo - in 2013? 2012? Couldn't have been in 2011 when we moved to Berlin..?
Yours truly has written a book about order. I love order. I love systems to get the chaos into a sort of order - but though I have entitled my photo-files, these titles are not always totally enlightening - I mean: one title for my 10 days stay in England this year - with over 1000 photos - and what might hide under "miscellaneous/ October 2012"?
So above you get substitutes - not bad, but not what I wanted as an illustration for "Autumn".
Though I should better use the word "Fall". Because the leaves fall.
In the Berliner Zeitung I read that in Berlin each year the trees throw down 70.000 tons of foliage.
Can you imagine that?
Seventy-thousand tons! 
(And they are not counting the leaves of the forests as the Grunewald).
Berlin has about 438.000 trees lining the streets. In summer one often thinks one is walking through an aquarium - a deep shadowy green wavers up to the third floor of the houses, no need for sun protection at the groundfloor - better buy a torch - and with mixed feelings I look from my balcony on the second floor at the oaks in front of our house: they grow, contrary to folks belief, rapidly, and in autumn you hear their funny plop, plop when they throw their acorns on the cars. The car owners don't laugh, but the squirrels and the jays do.
And each of these 438.000 trees has about 50.000 leaves.
The main trees are limetrees/linden trees, followed by plane trees, oaks and chestnuts (in Berlin, the newspaper says, each year they get almost 5.800 tons of acorns and chestnuts for feeding deers etc), maple/acer, robinias/ locust and birchtrees. If you add on the trees from our parks and city-gardens, Berlin has about one million trees.
A very, very green city.
You think I ramble? From the photos to the trees?
Oh no - I follow abundance.
Both - photos and leaves - have cumulated.
One has to get rid of some (the chestnut leaves that are infected by the leafmining moth; the photos which are blah or not pretty).
60.000 tons of the leaves are changed into 40.000 tons of compost (the remaining 10.000 tons of leaves they experiment to change into briquetts form).
Might be a good ratio for my photos?


Saturday 25 October 2014

'Herbstbild/ Picture of Autumn' by Friedrich Hebbel

Brigitta Huegel



Dies ist ein Herbsttag, wie ich keinen sah!          This is an autumn day as I have never seen before!
 Die Luft ist still, als atmete man kaum,                 The air is still, as if one almost doesn't breathe,
Und dennoch fallen raschelnd, fern und nah,        And yet fall rustling, far and near,
 Die schönsten Früchte ab, von jedem Baum.        The loveliest fruits from every tree.

O stört sie nicht, die Feier der Natur!                   O don't disturb it, nature's feast,
 Dies ist die Lese, die sie selber hält,                       This is the picking that she does herself.
Denn heute löst sich von den Zweigen nur,              For today from the branches only drops  
 Was vor dem milden Strahl der Sonne fällt.         what falls by the mild rays of the sun.

Friedrich Hebbel (1813 - 1863)                               (rough translation by me)



Britta says: You might wonder whether you stranded on my blog "Happiness of the Day" http://www.burstingwithhappiness.blogspot.de/ , my playground for poetry.
No - I just love that poem of Friedrich Hebbel very much - even though I just read an elaboringborate interpretation of these eight lines - on 12 (!) pages, very learned, and very critical, (didn't find a name, only the link http://mpg-trier.de/d7/read/hebbel_herbstbild.pdf)
"The title 'Autumn Painting' might lead you astray - the poet isn't painting" the little crocodile critic says (sorry to fall into Fielding's titulations). Well - as a translator one stands (?) always on wobbly ground - but I would dare to maintain that 'picture' might be used in more than one way.
But I do not want to bore you - this I leave to another person, who rigidly comes to the conclusion (on page 12!) that poor Hebbel, being a dramatist, "forms the whole too much by coming from thoughts", "explains the depiction with too much logic", "doesn't espress himself spontaneously enough, speaks in a too reflective way".
Well, well, well, -- be that as it may --- I pick up an apple and dream myself into this beautiful picture poem. In Germany we say you "put a maggot into something", when you want to run something down.
I find this apple poem perfect.

(Though my translation is not - please feel free (as ever) to correct me!)



Wednesday 22 October 2014

Studio l'italiano!

Britta Huegel

Dear You,
I did it - for the fourth week now each Monday evening you find me sitting on one of the dwarf-chairs of an Italian-German primary school in Berlin, trying to "parlare - parlo, parlai, parla" in that beautiful language, Italian.
I have to confess that I always looked with a sort of prejudice at women who started to learn Italian when advancing in life and years - those that I know were always at the shady side of forty
(hopefully reading books like "The Tao of Turning Fifty" or "Younger by the Day" - the latter an excellent book by the way, written by Victoria Moran). They were always members of a posh tennis or golf club, flirting somehow desperately with their coaches (insegnante for tennis or Italian - it was the same to them - only young he had to be, and beautiful).
Of course now, when I signed in at the Italian cultural institute, one of my acquaintances thought it illuminating and helpful to remind me of my beautiful Italian massage therapist.
'Innocent until proven guilty' will hopefully apply to me, too (and by the way: he speaks German, so why bother?)
Why bother indeed? 
(It is not that I have a trauma as the photo above might indicate, taken at one of my youthful stays in Italy, entitled : "All dressed up and nowhere to go" - in German we say "booked and unclaimed", which doesn't sound better). 

My reasons: 
- I love the language
- I want to train my brain, yep
- maybe we will at one stage of our life live in Munich, and then Italy is oh so near
- I want to read Fruttero & Lucentini in Italian

Those of you who know my deep passion for E.F.Benson might fear of having a "déjà-vu", entering my salotto:

'Georgie found Britta Lucia very full of talk that day at luncheon, and was markedly more Italian than usual. Indeed she put down an Italian grammar when he entered the drawing room, and covered it up with the essays of Antonio Caporelli. (...) 
"Ben arrivato, Georgio," she said. "Ho finito il libro di Antonio Caporelli quanto momento. E magnifico!" 
Georgi thought that she had finished it long ago, but perhaps he was mistaken. The sentence flew off Lucia's tongue as if it was perched there all quite ready. 
"Sono un poco fatigata dopo il - dear me how rusty I am getting in Italian, for I can't remember the word," she went on. 
(from: Make Way For Lucia)  

If you think, as many of my friends do, that it must be EASY- PEASY for me to learn Italian, because I'm quite fit in French, and less fit in Latin, and know those beautiful English words that have Latin roots, you are wrong. It isn't.
Take the word: "to repeat". In French: répéter. In Italian: ripetere.
See it at one glance? "ripetere" - but the French é instead of the Italian i is not easily erased from my mind.
But though I have to cram hard, it is fun - our (female!) teacher is an Italian who writes her dissertation on Kierkegaard here at Berlin's university, and she and my classmates are very interesting and funny.


Friday 17 October 2014

Excuse me, Mr. Wordsworth - today it's Albert Bridge.

Britta Huegel

I do love bridges oh so much - and when I am in London I have the chance to really indulge myself. And always - always! - I walk over this bridge. Of course that means a lot of walking - but who will complain on a day like this?

Britta Huegel

Will you join me? You are welcome! And don't be a coward when you see this sign: all that walking has kept us fit and slim.

Britta Huegel

And the beautiful painted bridge pillars look quite solid to me.

Britta Huegel

But of course I must ask you to put your sneakers on, as so many of you want to march across my absolute favourite bridge. Ah, and please remember: break step!

Britta Huegel

 Glorius sight!
Britta Huegel

 I LOVE when engineers start to become poetic! (I once even loved... - but that's another history).



Britta Huegel

 So this is Albert Bridge. (A German friend of mine thought it necessary to correct my pronunciation of "Albert" - there are two versions, I know - but as my dear late father's name was Albert, too, I pronounce him with the German accent, and 'Albert Bridge' stubbornly with an English accent - correct or not. ..)

Britta Huegel

You feel a bit tired? Oh no - just think of what I plan to do with you in my next post - we'll walk through Battersea Park, Oh yes, we'll do... 

Britta Huegel