Silver Wedding PARTY

July 14 2007 from 12 noon

Celebrate our Silver Wedding Anniversary

     at a Summer Party at Model Farm

There will be lunch, tea and supper, and camping space and local B&B’s.

Tell us which meals you hope to be here for.

Reply on the blog, or to camillakeeling@hotmail.com. Hard copy invites to follow.
Click Read more for comments

Belated happy birthday

I am SO bad at birthdays,

I am SO bad at birthdays,

Happy birthday dear georgie boy,

Happy birthday to you.

My new flat

I am now the proud owner (for a year and if I don’t get thrown out) of a flat in the heart of Schöneberg. Schöneberg is Berlin's equivalent of Soho. I got the keys on Tuesday. On the 4th floor, it has a nice south-facing balcony and a large kitchen with all units installed and a gas cooker. Both are rare in a flat in Berlin. My stuff should come over from the Jacobs before May. There's plenty of room. Ruth is booked in for May 4th, make your bookings now! It needs a new floor, lots of lights and furniture. So there’s a lot to do. I bought the floor (imitation parquet – cheap as chips) in Bauhaus yesterday.

And this is the living room / balcony.

The German language

I’ve been learning German these last few weeks. I’m at German lessons three hours per day + homework and five days per week. Its very amusing and interesting. We are doing prepositions. It seems that most German prepositions can be translated into most English prepositions. You just have to know the right context to do it. For example an English preposition is ‘at’. In German it can be an, auf, bei, für, in, mit, nach, über, um, von, vor, zu. That covers about half of common German prepositions. I have made a small matrix to map German prepositions against English ones. There's a dot where one can mean the other.

Yesterday we studied a short passage about Grunewald, which is a huge wood in Berlin and is ‘beloved of Berliners’. In the six year war (Weltkrieg II) it got bombed to bits. (God knows why the Brits an Yanks were bombing a forest.) The Berliners replanted it and also build ‘devils mountain’ (Teufelsberg) with the rubble from the destroyed city. As homework we were asked to write a short essay about Grunewald. I am proud to say that I invented a new word. It’s Weltkriegschutt. That means world-war-rubble – quite an important natural resource in Berlin! When I read out the sentence: Der Teufelberg war vom Weltkriegschutt gebaut, my teacher looked up and nodded in agreement. Hurrah.