Monthly Archives: July 2013

Summer in the city and beyond

This time last year we were about to hit the road north, towards Rostock and the Baltic and a ferry that would take us across the water to Sweden. During those four weeks, we put Under a Grey Sky on a break so that we could spend all our time relaxing, enjoying our experiences in Sweden, and to re-charge the batteries for the start of term feeling that always comes with the end of the summer. This year we have decided to do the same, although our journeys this year are slightly more fragmented, to the Lower Oder Valley on the German-Polish border, and then across to England, to Yorkshire and Northumbria, giving us the chance to discover a couple of new places both here and there.

Once again we would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has written for, subscribed to, followed and read Under a Grey Sky. And if any of you out there have some particular adventures beyond the front door that you would like to share on these pages, then please do not hesitate to get in contact at paulscraton (at) gmail (dot) com.

Have a great summer.

Paul

The Ghost Bike

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By Phil Scraton

I remember walking to Moreton Cross with my mum to catch the 77 bus to Landican Cemetery on the Wirral. I guess we went once or twice a month. Mum knelt on an old towel clearing weeds and trimming the edges of the flower bed that marked Aunty Mary’s grave. I was off running between the headstones with my invisible friend, Ben – like Calvin and Hobbes. Neither Ben nor I ever stepped on a grave. The souls might have ascended to heaven but the interred bodies had to be respected. Back from my imaginings I’d find mum silently weeping. I hugged her so hard thinking how she loved her older sister. Only recently did I discover that Mary was, in fact, her mother.

Cemeteries house the dead, their neat avenues and walkways are like miniature housing estates. A reverential solitude accommodates remembrance, grief and, on occasion, celebration of a life well lived. Having renewed the flowers on Mary’s grave we would drop by the ice cream shop and take the bus home. As an altar boy in a Catholic family I regularly served requiem mass and stood alongside numerous gravesides. I suppose I accepted memorialisation as part of life. Death was not an end, but a beginning. Not a proposition that endured into my adult life!

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The Squire of Ribbeck, Havelland, Germany

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By Anja Ahrens:

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still a child, my Grandfather attempted to teach me Theodor Fontane’s poem Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in his original tongue – Plattdeutsch, a dialect of German from the north of Germany – as I spent my summer holidays with him in the countryside. I did not understand the poem then, and try as I might I was unable to memorise it. That was the summer before my grandfather died.

Years later I remembered his wish for me to know this particular poem, and knowing that he had died soon after, and having finally come to understanding the story, I always felt as if he had been trying to tell me something… that in some way he wanted to leave something behind in a different way than the Herr von Ribbeck:

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Saturday afternoon in Volkspark Friedrichshain, Berlin

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It is early afternoon on Saturday and we follow a cobbled road into the Volkspark Friedrichshain. It is a driveway to the hospital, twisting one way and then the other, flanked by ornate lamps. The park was laid out in 1848 and the hospital, the first of its kind in the city, was opened twenty years later, and it is not hard to imagine a rudimentary ambulance pulled by horses, rolling clackety-clack across the cobblestones towards the brick entrance gate and the hope of the hospital beyond.

So many of Berlin’s most interesting sights are tied up in that period of rapid growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, and walking along with the park on one side and the high walls of the hospital on the other, it is very easy to picture how it might have been, the city growing rapidly, swallowing the fields and villages surrounding it through rapid growth… until the spell is broken by a gang of orange-shirted “stags”, who turn the corner pushing a stolen shopping trolley laden with beer bottles and dripping from melting ice. We will see them again, in the beer garden, and then later, a few of their number AWOL, hanging out in a bus stop and singing German football songs at the cars passing by in the street.

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Konrad-Wolf-Straße, Berlin

Farewell to the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable

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It was with some sadness that I read the news earlier this week that Thomas Cook are closing the publishing branch of their business, which means the end of the legendary European Rail Timetable, which only this year had celebrated its 140^th anniversary. Having worked on the last couple of editions of the Europe by Rail guidebook – which is also a victim of the closure – I had cause in recent years to reacquaint myself with the timetable in all its glory. It seems hard to imagine now in this era of extensive internet access and smartphones – in itself a reason why travel publishers have been having a hard time of it – but when I first when interrailing at the end of the 1990s, the printed timetable was the most important part of our luggage. Checking down the columns for the next train from Budapest to Ljubljana, or Florence to Milan, and making sure that it was not subject to any exceptions, or perhaps even a supplement on our rail pass, was an essential part of the routine as we crisscrossed Europe.

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