List-making from a listless and tired voyager.

With Karl and Jack in Freiburg-

Making our own fun in glowing red stockings and striding though the town, heads high.

Christmas Eve-

Shaking the boughs of a frost covered black forest to make good absentee snow. Finding and surrendering holly.

The white Egon Schiele hill, four desolate trees and electric fencing.

A delightful christmas dinner spread and the best stuffing ye fashioned. A face full of leftovers

Christmas day-

Heidelberg- the freezing philsopher’s way and numbly eating cous cous looking out from where Hegel had pondered. A snap-happy Jack. Glimpsing a paint-bombed Verbindung residence from the red castle ruins.

Bratäpfel and Kate Bush.

Basel and an exhibition of erotic art on Jack’s Birthday. The beautiful modernist Basler Fondation, laying its art out in a rolling swiss landscape.

Colmar, sugary, ‚bunt’ germanic houses plopped square in France, Weihnachtsmärkte, water towers. Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim altar met with my gob-smacked delight.

Paris:

Karl’s apartment with its view of the pulsing eifel tower, its servants quarters and its gravity defying shoes and plant boxes. Lovely house-mates to boot.

Getting into the contemporary art mueum, Louvre and Musee d’Orsay gratuit on twenty-year-old privleges. Counting down the year in Sydney in front of Bonnard.

Bringing a dazzle of Sydneyside camp to staid parisian New Years Eve festivities.

Rodin’s house, gardens, sculpture and marvellous temporary drawing exhibit. Authentic algerian in bellevue.

Ness, Hannah and Bek at the pyramid. Spending the sucessive days in the Marais in their friendly embrace. Getting parisian essentials for the German winter.

Making Galette, drinking champagne and talking german with Karl’s housemates and friends for sunday lunch.

The awful trip back. Sleeping at the station in Offenburg with the other fringe elements of society. An epiphany of Rilke in this seedy context.