Thoughts and words

Conspiracy theories, fiction and corona

Fictional narratives and conspiracy theories are rather similar in that they usually involve clear causes and effects. In other words, there is a reason for everything and if the reason is not immediately apparent, it is because someone or a number of "someones" are deliberately hiding the truth for their... Read more →

Strange meetings of the normal kind

While out biking today, I met a couple of men I see regularly in my gym but to whom I have never spoken. I stopped to pass the time of day. As we talked about this and that, I noticed a narrowing of the eyes of one man and creases... Read more →

Inspiration from newspaper obituaries

If you take 2000 obituaries from the same international newspaper, what do you think the obituaries might tell you about the lives of the deceased? Lux Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Unmetric, a social media intelligence company based in New York and India, asked this very question and by examining... Read more →

Inspiration-through-conflict-who-we-are-and-who-we-were

It seems to me that posting comments on Facebook, writing and sending emails and getting yourself tattooed have a couple of things in common. All three mark a moment in time - an angry email, a hurtful comment on your newsfeed or a late-night visit to a tattoo parlour that... Read more →

Ich hab' noch Sehnsucht nach dem Sudetenland

In yesterday's blog - Ich hab' noch Sehnsucht nach Schlesien - I mentioned the lady who wrote the comment at the top of the article. "Schau mal: koennte das nicht Oma Rosa sein?" "Just look: couldn't that be grandma Rosa?" The Lady who thought to have recognized her own mother... Read more →

Ich hab' noch Sehnsucht nach Schlesien

An inconvenient truth swept under the carpet? An inconvenient truth that after World War 2, ten million ethnic German civilians were subjected to deportation, compulsory labour, expulsion and, sometimes starvation and physical attack? An inconvenient truth that a minimum of 470,000 of those ethnic Germans expelled from Russia, Poland and... Read more →

Inspiration from beginnings and endings

I am so very happy that I kept most of the first drafts of my novels and short stories. The temptation to shred them I managed to ignore, and these early efforts disappeared in big black shelf files and lay there for many years. Reading these first drafts again, I... Read more →

Inspiration from food and what it might say about you

Look at the pics below. I posted them because these images have one thing in common. I will tell you about that later, but first look at the pics again and think for a moment. Who might be more likely to eat the food depicted? A child or an adult?... Read more →

Inspiration through theft

I have to admit that were my books about me, the characters would consist of ageing, middle-class men with a background in education and who like to talk for hours about philosophical and political issues. What is more, these characters would have travelled a great deal, have a penchant for... Read more →

Inspiration through asking: "Why?"

Why is blue a boy's colour and why is pink a girl's colour? Who said so? Why on earth should it be this way? Ageing has few consolations but asking questions like these is one of them. Why is the weekend on Saturday and Sunday? Why isn't it on Sunday... Read more →