Another day in Paradise

 

 

Peaceful morning by the river and on the river. In moments like these, it's easy to forget that this beautiful country is being run by people who couldn't assemble a Lego set in kindergarten.

Mind you, the Opposition has finally — finally — dragged itself away from the catastrophic Net Zero fraud. But simply announcing a change of heart won’t undo the economic vandalism already unleashed and end the madness. If the Opposition is serious, it must go on the offensive and tear down the Net Zero Scam brick by brick.

No other country on earth is stupid enough to try powering its grid mainly with unreliable, weather-dependent "renewables" made in Chinese factories. No sane country bans itself from using its own resources while shipping those very same resources overseas. Net Zero tells us: You can't use your own coal. You can't use your own gas. You can't power your own industries. But China can have as much of it as they want. Australia is the world's biggest woke experiment.

The scare campaign is about carbon dioxide, the clear gas that plants love and makes champagne fizz. So, alarmists deleted "dioxide", hoping the gullible will picture black soot. Never let them get away with this. When they say "carbon," correct them: "Do you mean carbon dioxide?"

Whenever someone shrieks about "taking action on climate change," ask one simple question: By how much will this change the global temperature? To the nearest 1/100th of a degree. They won't know. They never do. Here's the real answer: Even if Australia went full Net Zero; no gas, no petrol cars, no planes, no cows, and CO2 is the control knob for global temperatures, by 2100 the effect on global temperature would be 1/100th of 1°C. That's all of Australia's "climate action".

I discussed all this with my resident king parrot on the jetty this morning. He shrieked with laughter at the gullibility with which those rented scaremongers parrot the old mantra "Stop climate change!"

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Wild Pork and Watercress

 

 

There are not many swimming pools in New Zealand because everyone who can swim is already here! Today I met two more who claimed to be Kiwis even though they can't, so I tested their authenticity by asking them if they knew of Barry Crump. They did and so we talked about his many books, including "Wild Pork and Watercress" which was made into the movie with Sam Neill, "Hunt for the Wilderpeople".

 

 

Barry Crump wrote dozens of semi-autobiographical comic novels; the first one I read in the late 1960s was "There and Back". His first novel, "A Good Keen Man", became the most popular in New Zealand history.

 

Click here to read the book

 

He was married five times and had six children, and died in 1996 of a suspected aortic aneurysm, just 61 years old. One of his sons, Martin Crump, is now a well-known radio broadcaster.

 

 

Not many of us can claim to have had a postage stamp issued in our honour. Barry Crump can.

 

 

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The real estate deal of the millennium

 

 

The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the Indonesian archipelago. Just two miles long and half a mile wide, it is remote, tranquil, and, these days, largely ignored by the world.

Yet 370 years ago, Run's harvest of nutmeg — a pound of which yielded a 3,200 percent profit by the time it arrived in England — turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown.

The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded the small island of Run to Holland but in return was given the island of Manhattan. This led not only to the birth of New York but also to the beginning of the British Empire. Historian John Keay believes Run is to British imperial history what Runnymede, where King John signed the Magna Carta, is to British constitutional history.

At the time of the swap the Dutch were adamant they were the victors. "Few would have believed a small trading village on the island of Manhattan was destined to become the modern metropolis of New York and the once valuable nutmeg-growing island of Run would sink into obscurity", writes Ian Burnet in his book "Spice Islands" (page 164).

 

 

Fast-forward to a book written with the flair of a historical sea novel but based on rigorous research, Giles Milton's "Nathaniel's Nutmeg - or, The true and incredible adventures of the spice trader who changed the course of history". It's a true tale of high adventure in the South Seas.

 

Read it online here

 

Padma's watching Joanna Lumley's Spice Trail Adventure prompted me to get Giles Milton's book from my library and, having started, I couldn't put it down. Not a bad way to spend an overcast Sunday except, as I've just realised, it's Wednesday - but then again, every day is a Sunday at "Riverbend".

As for Run Island, while my travelling days seem to be over, if I ever get back to Indonesia, I'll immediately make a run for romantic Run Island!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Stop reading the news

 

 

The news is an addictive substance that rewires our brains. We are too weak to dip in and out. The only option is ‘radical abstinence’ and the books suggests an initial decontamination period of thirty days to see the effects. The result is a calmer mental life, more time, and the chance to be truly educated and empowered.

 

Click for a preview

 

This book consists of 33 very short chapters - although the above audiobook preview stops at Chapter 3 - most of which make a separate argument for giving up the news, completely. The titles are things like ‘News is to the Mind What Sugar is to the Body’, ‘News Kills Creativity’, ‘News is Invented by Journalists’, ‘News Encourages Terrorism’.

By all means, stay informed – just not through the news. Read books – twice. Read textbooks! Seek out investigative journalism and analysis of current affairs in periodicals. Make time for conversations with intelligent people. We’re even encouraged to use the internet, as long as we can avoid news sites. The news feeds us context-less facts but says little about the slow and hidden processes that really shape the word. The news obscures these truths. The news makes us stupider.

I leave the final word to the author of the book, Rolf Dobelli:

 

 

That's it from me. It's seven o'clock in the evening. Time for the news!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Ooops! A quick postscript: I just heard on the news that $45 billion was found in a Nigerian man's apartment. He had spent the last ten years trying to get rid of it, but no-one ever answered his emails.

 

Out of Africa and into Europe?

 

 

Kevin Myers (born 30 March 1947) is an English-born Irish journalist and writer. He is known for his controversial views on a number of topics, including single mothers ("How many girls - and we’re largely talking about teenagers here - consciously embark upon a career of mothering bastards because it seems a good way of getting money and accommodation from the State? Ah. You didn’t like the term bastard? No, I didn’t think you would."), aid for Africa and the Holocaust.

In July 2017, The Sunday Times announced that Myers would no longer be writing for them following an article he wrote on the BBC gender pay gap, for which he was accused of antisemitism and misogyny, although the chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland stated "Branding Kevin Myers as either an antisemite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts."

In July 2008, Myers wrote an article arguing that providing aid to Africa only results in increasing its population, and its problems. Under its headline "Africa is giving nothing to anyone – apart from AIDS", it continues, "Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the Begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us out of Africa, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since the famous Feed The World campaign began in Ethiopia, and in that time Ethiopia’s population has grown from 33.5 million to 78+ million today. So, why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none." Read the full article here.

He sums up his assessment of Western aid thus: "How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them. Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity!

But that is not good enough. For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed. It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates’ programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating. If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts.

Oh good: then what? I know, let them all come here (to Ireland) or America. (not forgetting Australia!) Yes, that’s an idea".

Instead of criticism, he ought to get a medal for being so truthful about what is a huge problem on a continent that is said to double its population by 2050 - click here.

And here's my final contribution to the subject: remember gumballs? When I was a kid, gumball dispensers were everywhere but there are gone now, having been displaced by what? Syringe disposal containers? Journalist Roy Beck has found one last use for them in this colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau:

 

 

This demonstration speaks for itself and should be required viewing for every politician trying to catch votes through constant virtue-signalling.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Mit der Reife wird man immer jünger ...

 

Altwerden

Hermann Hesse

All der Tand, den Jugend schätzt, Auch von mir ward er verehrt, Locken, Schlipse, Helm und Schwert, Und die Weiblein nicht zuletzt. Aber nun erst seh ich klar, Da für mich, den alten Knaben, Nichts von allem mehr zu haben, Aber nun erst seh ich klar, Wie dies Streben weise war. Zwar vergehen Band und Locken Und der ganze Zauber bald; Aber was ich sonst gewonnen, Weisheit, Tugend, warme Socken, Ach, auch das ist bald zerronnen, Und auf Erden wird es kalt. Herrlich ist für alte Leute Ofen und Burgunder rot Und zuletzt ein sanfter Tod - Aber später, noch nicht heute.

 

I'm also still looking for my ticket

 

 

There's this cute little story about Einstein when he took the train from Princeton University. As the conductor boarded the train to check the passengers' tickets. Einstein began to search his jacket pockets for his ticket but couldn't find it.

He then looked in his trouser pockets and in his small carry-on suitcase, without success. Finally, he started looking on the seat next to him ...

Seeing this, the controller said to him: "Dr. Einstein, I know who you are, everyone knows you, and I'm sure you bought a ticket. Don't worry".

Einstein nodded in gratitude. The conductor continued punching the tickets of the other passengers, but as he was about to leave the carriage, he saw Einstein on his knees, searching under his seat for his ticket. Intrigued, the controller turned to him and said: "As I told you, we know who you are. Forget about the ticket; it's not a problem!"

Einstein looked up at him and replied: "Thank you, young man, I too know who I am. But what I don't know is where I'm going! That's why I keep looking for my ticket!"

I'm certainly no Einstein but there are days when I'm also on my knees still looking for my ticket to find out where I'm going - although, with advancing age, the destination seems to become ominously clearer.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The must-have desert island read

 

 

Your ship is sinking, you’re about to be stranded on a desert island, and instead of salvaging something sane like food or materials for shelter, you rescue one book to read on the beach. What would it be?

To me it's what people these days like to call a no-brainer: Tom Neale's AN ISLAND TO ONESELF. It's the story of a life well lived, and even though the book owes a lot to the practised hand of some professional writer (possibly Noel Barber), it is so well executed that it recaptures the childhood thrill of reading "Robinson Crusoe". Here we go:

 

"I was fifty when I went to live alone on Suvarov, after thirty years of roaming the Pacific, and in this story I will try to describe my feelings, try to put into words what was, for me, the most remarkable and worthwhile experience of my whole life. I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking; but though I came to know most of the islands, for the life of me I sometimes wonder what it was in my blood that had brought me to live among them."

 

I found this book many years ago in an old second-hand shop that has since disappeared. For the sum of a couple of dollars I held in my hands one man's South Pacific island dream, lived out in just under two hundred pages and perhaps a dozen black-and-white photographs.

The eccentric author was a humble 51-year-old New Zealander, Tom Neale, former navyman, storeman, and world-famous hermit. He has never written anything else except for this singular work of a lifetime.

I always keep my copy of the book nearby, and every once in a while when I need some solitude I open it up and go back with Tom to his shack perched on Anchorage Island. And so can you by clicking here.

To read the full book, SIGN UP - it's free! - then LOG IN and BORROW.
Why not also make a donation to keep this amazing online library alive?

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

My family tree is more like a bonsai

 

My parents in Berlin in 1948

 

I blame two wars - the World War from 1939 to 1945, and the domestic family war which led to my parents' divorce in 1952 - for not having much of a family tree; in fact, the only "branch" there ever was and which I climbed were my grandfather's knees shortly before he died in the early 50s.

 

Moi in der Augustastraße in Berlin in 1948

 

I was a less-than-welcome "Peter-come-lately", born at the end of the war - after my "big brother" (1932), and three sisters (1934, 1940, and 1942) - in what was then the Russian-occupied "Ostzone" which in 1949 became the "German Democratic Republic". We had already escaped the "Workers' Paradise" the year before, during the Berlin Blockade, and joined the long queue of destitute refugees in West Germany waiting for anything, including housing. Back in the East, my father had been a "Volkswirt" (economist) with his own large entry in the telephone book; in the West we didn't even have a house, let alone a telephone.

 

 

For the first two years we lived "on the edge" in an unheated metal shack without toilet, kitchen, electricity, or running water, literally on the edge of town, that town being Braunschweig in the more benignly British-occupied Lower Saxony from where I eventually emigrated.

That was still fifteen years away. In the meantime, it was an ongoing battle for adequate housing, enough food, and warm clothing. Nothing like today's claimed "poverty" sitting in front of a flatscreen television; that was real hunger and cold nights and shoes with cardboard soles.

 

My first day at school in 1952

 

If this photo is anything to go by, things must've got a bit better by the time I entered school in 1952. Not that schooling ever interfered with my education: all I ever did were the compulsorary eight years of "Volksschule" (primary school), after which even the few Deutschmarks I earnt as an articled clerk helped to keep our bodies and souls together.

 

"Mein erster Schulgang" - My first day at school / Wouldn't it be fascinating to
know what happened to those forty-one eager faces in the past seventy-three years?

 

Ask me about geometree, symmetree, and treegonometree, but not about my family tree which is more like a bonsai which is like Chinese foot-binding except it's applied to a tree. Like foot-binding, my family tree kept me hobbling along for nineteen years until I hit my stride in my adopted new home Australia.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The sun had barely risen ...

 

 

The sun had barely risen when I took this photo during this morning's walk past the turn-off to the Old Nelligen Road. There can't be more than a handful of properties along this road or hidden away in the forest, and three are for sale.

It's all very well to turn one's back on the world and live a life of self-imposed self-sufficiency, but when the money runs out or the wife or whatever else one runs out or low on, it's time to rejoin the 'real world'.

I suspect that the start of another ominous bushfire season may have something to do with it. After the disastrous bushfire on New Year's Eve six years ago, we drove up that road to see if an old friend who lived there was all right. We were stopped by burning trees that had fallen across the road. We couldn't get in and, of course, they couldn't get out.

The fuel load in the surrounding forest has only increased since then, and the smallest spark could see a repeat of that horrific event when we all thought the world had come to an end. Our walk hadn't yet, and we walked across the bridge and past the River Café which was already full of perfectly sane people who paid $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few cents - and don't even get me started on bottled water!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten

 

 

Die andere Möglichkeit Erich Kästner   Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, mit Wogenprall und Sturmgebraus, dann wäre Deutschland nicht zu retten und gliche einem Irrenhaus. Man würde uns nach Noten zähmen wie einen wilden Völkerstamm. Wir sprängen, wenn Sergeanten kämen, vom Trottoir und stünden stramm. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, dann wären wir ein stolzer Staat. Und pressten noch in unsern Betten die Hände an die Hosennaht. Die Frauen müssten Kinder werfen, Ein Kind im Jahre. Oder Haft. Der Staat braucht Kinder als Konserven. Und Blut schmeckt ihm wie Himbeersaft. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, dann wär der Himmel national. Die Pfarrer trügen Epauletten Und Gott wär deutscher General. Die Grenze wär ein Schützengraben. Der Mond wär ein Gefreitenknopf. Wir würden einen Kaiser haben und einen Helm statt einem Kopf. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, dann wäre jedermann Soldat. Ein Volk der Laffen und Lafetten! Und ringsherum wär Stacheldraht! Dann würde auf Befehl geboren. Weil Menschen ziemlich billig sind. Und weil man mit Kanonenrohren allein die Kriege nicht gewinnt. Dann läge die Vernunft in Ketten. Und stünde stündlich vor Gericht. Und Kriege gäb's wie Operetten. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten - zum Glück gewannen wir ihn nicht!

 

I used to be a comic book character once

 

 

Charles Atlas's advertisement used to haunt me when I was still in Germany and still in my teens. I was the one who said, "The big bully! I'll get even some day" - in German, of course! - but I never became the 'Hero of the Beach' as I stayed skinny and self-conscious of it for most of my life.

Without Mr Atlas's workouts, that 97-lb. (44 kg) weakling from sixty-fifty years ago now weighs 72 kg and is still skinny but not self-conscious any longer. Every time I go to our beautiful warm-water pool to join those other geriatrics, I'm delighted to be still as skinny as a rake because the other alternative would be the grotesque weight and shape they are in.

Today's unselfconscious visit to the warm-water pool was followed by a roast-beef lunch at the Moruya Bowling Club and my usual support of the local charities by 'rehoming' an armful of their second-hand books.

I am always amazed what turns up. Today it was two in-mint-condition books by Douglas Murray, both of which I already have but still bought as they make a great gift for someone else who may also be interested and concerned about the fate of Europe. Then there was a well-read copy of "The White Divers of Broome", "A Shorter History of Australia" by the famous Geoffrey Blainey, Tim Flannery's "Here on Earth", and Robert Ardrey's "The Territorial Imperative - A personal inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations". All I need now is time to read them!

 

Click here and feel young again

 

Stacked away in a dusty corner were boxes full of old vinyls, including one by the "Two Beards and a Blonde", Peter, Paul and Mary. I spent my first pay cheque on this album and practically 'grew up' with them and the Seekers after I had come to Australia in 1965. I will never forget "Lemon Tree", "If I had a hammer", "500 miles", and "Where have all the flowers gone". Where indeed have they gone, and where have the days gone when even folk singers wore collar and tie? Some of today's diners at the Moruya Bowling Club wore baseball caps and rubber thongs.

 

 

One of those diners, wearing the same baseball cap as shown in the photo above but, thankfully, no thongs but shoes and socks, was Giovanni Carrus - and what a small world it turned out to be! He was born in Italy but moved to Berlin in the early 1960s where he married his German wife Ute and where his two children, Manuela and Claudio, were born in 1965 and 1967. All of them migrated to Australia in 1969.

 

 

At age 87, he's still fighting fit and living south of us just an hour's drive away in Tilba where we plan to visit him soon to look at his paintings.

You can already do it here and here.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The power of words, imagination and Charles Dickens

 

 

You cannot pretend to read a good book. Your eyes give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames." [From "Mr Pip", page 155]

 

 

With his rumpled tropical suit and wide-eyed look of perpetual concern, Hugh Laurie's Mr Pip – the only white man on the island – could be a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel. But it's 1991 and he has been caught in the midst of a civil war in Bougainville, where he's trying to lighten the spirits of the village children with readings from Dickens' "Great Expectations".

This unlikely but beguiling idea was dreamed up by New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones after he covered the conflict between Papua New Guinea and Bougainville over the closure of Rio Tinto's copper mine in the 1990s. And it gave him a prize-winning novel, which has done more to expose the sufferings that the war inflicted on Bougainville's people than all the reporting done at the time.

It's not often you get a book - and a movie - that sings literature's praises so eloquently. Set it against the background of the conflict in Bougainville where my own career really took off and shaped everything else I did later in life, and you finish up with a brilliantly nuanced examination of the power of words, imagination and Charles Dickens.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The internet is for people who can't sleep

 

Back Row (left-to-right) Volker Kluge / Wolfgang Ihlemann / Joachim Schumacher / Helmut Ullrich / Ulrich Schäfer / Andreas Morgenroth / Helmut Bolle / Volker Wisse / Hendrik Heinemann / Jürgen Kreul Middle Row (left-to-right) Klaus Kratzenstein / Herbert Becker / Dagmar Kroll / Jutta Veste / Heidi Werner / Christa Funke / Wenzel Tappe / moi / Joachim Stut Front Row (left-to-right) Gudrun Otto / Heidi Nabert / Petra Küster / Sigrid Röseling / Herr Sapper, teacher / Barbara Ziegert / Margret Brandenburg / Ingrid Behrens / Waltraud Häupler / Karin Käsehage
(No prize guessing where I am in the photo!!!)

 

I was still wide awake when this email came in late one night: "Ich hoffe Du bist etwas überrascht eine E-Mail zu bekommen, aber wir sind in die selbe Klasse in der Heinrichschule gegangen, auf dem Klassenfoto bin ich unter dem Namen DAGMAR KROLL. Würde mich freuen etwas von Dir zu hören! "

Let me translate before you rush out and enrol in a Berlitz German Language Course: "I hope you're surprised to receive this email because we attended the same class at primary school. My name is Dagmar Kroll and I'm the third from the left in the middle row in this photo taken on the last day at school. Would love to hear from you!"

What a surprise indeed! Dagmar found the photos another schoolfriend had sent to me previously and which I had put up on my German blog - here and here - and she's busy scanning some more to send to me. This seems to be a case of "good things come to those who wait" - for over fifty years! - because we were refugees from East Germany and had little money, and none at all for such frivolities as school photos.

Of course, she also asked the obvious question, "Why did you leave Germany?" Well, no one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.

Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of 14.

Being the youngest solo-migrant on board the migrant ship FLAVIA, a television crew had asked me the same question before it left Bremer-haven. I had no answer in front of the whirring newsreel camera and still have no answer today. I mean, how do I explain the sense of dissatisfaction and frustration that affected me at the time?

We can't choose our parents and are born into the prison of our race, religion and nationality. I had no problem with my race which, being blond and blue-eyed, helped me to slip into Australia under its "White Australia" policy, but I'd already renounced my Lutheran upbringing and joined the German Freethinkers, and many years later also changed my nationality by becoming an Australian. Two out of three isn't bad, is it?

True to her word, Dagmar sent me three photos of a class reunion in 1983 which, come to think of it, I could've attended as I was at the time working in Jeddah and Athens. Another missed opportunity? Perhaps not, as my life had moved in a completely different direction from those stay-at-homes with whom I had little in common during my school days and would have had even less in common twenty-three years later.

 

Class Reunion 1983 - for names see last photo

Class reunion 1983 Get-together at Teacher's house after the reunion
from left to right: Joachim Stut - Dagmar Kroll - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) -
Barbara Zieger - Gudrun Otto - Volker Kluge

Class Reunion 1983
from left to right; back row: Volker Kluge - Herbert Becker - Wolfgang Ihlemann - Wenzel Tappe - Helmut Ullrich - Ulrich Schäfer; middle row: Heidi Werner - Ingrid Behrens - Jutta Veste - Dagmar Kroll - Christa Funke; front row: Gudrun Otto - Petra Küster - Sigrid Röseling - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) - Barbara Zieger - Waltraud Häuptler

 

However, I would've liked to have met "Herr Sapper" again before he passed away sometime in 1987. He was a great teacher who helped me overcome my lack of a tertiary education by giving me this personal letter which helped me into my first job after completing my articles.

My favourite author, Somerset W. Maugham, wrote a story entitled "The Verger" about a man without formal education who ended up more successful than he might've been with the right kind of schooling.

I count my blessings every time I watch the movie as I count my blessings to have had such a wonderful teacher, a real "Mr. Chips".
Rest in Peace, "Herr Sapper"!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Wir sitzen alle im gleichen Zug

 

 

Wir sitzen alle im gleichen Zug und reisen quer durch die Zeit. Wir sehen hinaus. Wir sahen genug. Wir fahren alle im gleichen Zug. Und keiner weiß, wie weit. Ein Nachbar schläft, ein andrer klagt, ein dritter redet viel. Stationen werden angesagt. Der Zug, der durch die Jahre jagt, kommt niemals an sein Ziel. Wir packen aus, wir packen ein. Wir finden keinen Sinn. Wo werden wir wohl morgen sein? Der Schaffner schaut zur Tür herein und lächelt vor sich hin. Auch er weiß nicht, wohin er will. Er schweigt und geht hinaus. Da heult die Zugsirene schrill! Der Zug fährt langsam und hält still. Die Toten steigen aus. Ein Kind steigt aus, die Mutter schreit. Die Toten stehen stumm am Bahnsteig der Vergangenheit. Der Zug fährt weiter, er jagt durch die Zeit, und keiner weiß, warum. Die erste Klasse ist fast leer. Ein feister Herr sitzt stolz im roten Plüsch und atmet schwer. Er ist allein und spürt das sehr. Die Mehrheit sitzt auf Holz. Wir reisen alle im gleichen Zug zur Gegenwart in spe. Wir sehen hinaus. Wir sahen genug. Wir sitzen alle im gleichen Zug und viele im falschen Coupé.