The laughing woman in the picture is my grandmother. She was born 1923 on a farm in East Prussia as one of eight children, so she was 16 when the Second World War started. She lost one brother who was shot down as a fighter pilot on his first flight, and two more were executed for opposing Hitler. In 1945, she was kidnapped by Mongols in the vanguard of the Red Army and spent the next five years in a labour camp in Russia. She then returned to West Germany and met my grandfather. I’m quite sure that I’ll dedicate a lot of my time this year to research her story and try to write about it.

Stolen from the boss.

Here’s a little video from that night – see for yourself how it went down:

I’ll catch up with my writing soon, in general and about Berlin – for the beginning I already scored a few writing gigs. Watch out for a guide to renting in Berlin and more coming on Slow Travel Berlin this week. More soon.

I live behind the workshop. To get there, I have to unlock the front door that was set unto its hinges in the year when the French started guillotining aristocratic heads, with the lower part of the brass letter box flap almost completely erased by 219 years of letters slipping through. I walk through the corridor, past the fin-de-siecle pantry where the tenants collect the post and past the 1930s bust, either a relative of the landlord or a find in a bric-a-brac shop on the quays. Descending three steps, I open the door to the workshop, a longish room filled with old wooden tiles, metal shelves filled with boxes full of screws, nails and bolts, disused fans and hairdryers, mirrors, wooden wine crates, paint-splattered paint pots and dusty cutlery. There’s a small path through this cemetery of DYI, which I follow to another door that leads to my yard. On three sides are the rising grey backsides of Georgian Dublin, and in front of me a gate leads to the small lane behind my house. To my right, there’s a yellow wall, covered with overgrowth from the neighbours hedge and with flowerpots in different colours in front of it. Some days, there are some stray cats from the empty house down the lane lurking through the leaves and flowers. On the left is my home, an apartment that has once been the servant kitchen and the coal shed at a time there were still servants around. It’s a nice place with wooden flooring and a low ceiling with roof-lights, so I can hear the rain and the footsteps of the cats when I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes, there’s also the crunching sound of the black cat devouring a pigeon behind the flowers.

We kick off with the video for Mark Knight vs. Underworlds’s Downpipe, filmed with the help of Liberty Hall a.k.a. Playhouse.

Then we’ve got a full Dublin timelapse, kicking off at the airport:

Dublin Time Lapse 2011 from Richard Twomey on Vimeo.

And then there’s this night-time-lapse, set to a punked-up version of “Molly Malone”.

Last but not least, here’s a drive through Dublin in 1982.

Driving Through Dublin from Robert Manson on Vimeo.

Approaching Paris from the air on a clear day, you can make out the Montparnasse tower, Sacre Coeur and the Eiffel Tower; like giant toys knocked about on a playing carpet of white and grey rooftops.

I often forget that terminal one at Charles-de-Gaulle-airport is one of the ugliest airport terminals in the world. With the building sitting there on the tarmac, round and grey and illuminated by a band of red neon lights on its equator, I expect a squadron of Tie-fighters to accompany my airbus when it lands, protecting this French outpost of the Galactic Empire.

Taxiing towards the terminal, I see the decommissioned Concorde on her stand, on guard duty like so many old Spitfires at the gates of Royal Airforce airfields. But this machine only reminds me of another Concorde, also frozen in time, ascending on a tail of flames on its way to inevitable doom. Maybe Air France should have chosen another make of plane to guard their airport.

The last time I landed in CDG was in 2008. Then, there was a dead pigeon lying on the safety nets covering the open inner courtyard of the terminal. Three years later, there’s another dead pigeon lying in the exact same spot. Traveling on the escalator, I wonder if it’s the same.

“In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.”

“Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt.”

Image: Kai Mueller

But the main focus of this post is the drinking of wine. Especially the drinking of wine at my launch night in Dublin this Tuesday. There will be a get-together of sorts in the holy halls of the Loft Bookshop in the Twister Pepper-building, I will read a few stories and you can buy the book and have me draw a picture of my penis on the first page. If you’re into that kind of small thing.

Here’s more info on the Loft Bookshop homepage, and you’ll find the official Facebook-event here.

I would also like to kindly ask you to become a friend on Facebook – I have a Smashwords-e-book promotion running at the moment, so if you live in Kazakhstan and want to buy my e-book extra cheap, that’s the place to go.

Last week, a kind train driver drove me through the brown and red-leafed centre of Germany while I was eating Swedish meatballs; met Hitler-impersonator Bruno Ganz sitting on a bench in a subway station, looking like a bum; dined on Ramen soup in place that looked like the set of Blade Runner complete with Japanese pop music playing in the background; drove 200 kilometres with public transport to look at house built by the German Kaiser, the Nazis and the Socialist Party and ended up being an extra for the videoshoot of German trobadour Olli Schulz, impersonating a drunk guy hitting on my friend Lisa during an imagined and ever-repeating new year’s party in an old bar in Kreuzberg; and had another train driver drive me back through still brown and red-leafed Germany, in a compartement that looked like an outdated sci-fi set from the 80s.