Snow

Back to this bedraggled carcass of a blog after a long time away from it. I prefer not to say anything thank to try to write when I've got nothing to say.

What do I have to say now? Not much. Except that it's snowing. The school is covered in snow, and it's coming down in big thick flakes outside my office as I write. The Mercedes Benz garage across the road has big thick sheets of snow falling off its slanted roof that only just miss the repair guy every time he circles round the car to have a look from another angle. It's all muffled now. And so are the babies who stare up at you in prams, mummified by their mums, and silenced by the snow.

I think the snow is part of why I like being in Stuttgart. This city has a reputation for being a mitteleuropa sh*thole. A bombsite barely recovered from World War II with a decent football stadium and a Christmas market. Actually it's full of gorgeous parks, incongruous statues and architecture you wouldn't expect to find here. I'll get a photo album book together for my millions of readers, if requested. When you can get over being sneered at by the shopkeepers for daring to step into their shop while being foreign.

I'm going to start posting pictures of this city with each post, if the blog can hold them. They'll hopefully represent my state of mind at the time of writing. If photographs can ever do that.

The snow makes my thinking more powdery too. It helps create silence, it muffles footsteps and deadens the grumbling of cars and trams. In the morning, everybody pads through the layer of snow to get to public transport, and ends up thinking their own thoughts. Conversations are hard in the bitter chill of the morning air.

Does the snow force us all to introspect, however hard the metropolitan primate tries not to?