Festival of pants...

Love Neuenheim's christmas lights, celebrating the importance of pants at christmas...

"Just because something has happened to you, doesn't mean that it matters."

Ernest Hemmingway

Late Christmas.... part 2

took this, love it, hope you had a good christmas

Late Christmas....

Have been wandering around Heidelberg again today, took a couple of pictures, the second of while I really love, which I'm thinking of using for christmas cards next year....
The Lynched Santa is one option....

Heidelberg wanderings

More Heidelberg pictures

Things I've missed....

Not (just) cold, dark and full of ugly fat girls in short skirts...

Spent christmas in Yorkshire with Kat's family. Managed to do a little walking, mainly around her parent's house and Almscliff crag (close to their house). Its nice to be reminded that Yorkshire countryside is beautiful....

Several Pictures here

Wrong side of the world...

Got back to europe a week ago. Got on the plane and it was 32C and sunny, got off in Frankfurt and it was -5C and snowing. Quite a bit of shock to the system.... Just spent the last week doing a flying tour of england, christmas with Kat's parents, dropped in on my granny for lunch, then had dinner with my brother and sister. Got back to Heidelbery yesterday, have a few days of sitting still here, then off to Italy to eat for a few days.... Pictures to follow

Comments welcome...

feel free to comment, don't be shy (or feel obliged)... I might even remember to read them

Currently Reading....

Borrowed 'Plan B' by Jonathan Tropper from mum while she was visiting. Its quite a light, entertaining book about disfunctional thirty year olds (aren't they all). A group of friends decide to help their famous Hollywood friend kick his cocaine habit by kidnapping him.... Great fun, very easy reading, and quite entertaining... Quote of the day:



"Sex is like air, it isn't important unless you aren't getting any."

Crocs....

Saw this great little exhibition of kids' art by the Esplanade yesterday. A group of school kids were given a pair of Crocs to do with as they pleased... Here's what they came up with.

Crocs Art

Orchid Fun

Pink Orchid
Originally uploaded by adam.cliffe

Went wandering around the Orchid Garden and the Botanical Gardens today with mum. Had lots of fun taking pictures, some of which turned out pretty well.... Here's the evidence

Child labour...

Was wandering around Vivo City today and I had a sudden nostalgia flashback in the form of Girl Guides selling cookies. Haven't seen anyone do this (outside American sit-coms) since the 1980s... Had to buy some, if only to encourage the use of child labour...

Beardy fun....

For anyone who hasn't seen me over the last few weeks, I've been growing a (taliban like) beard. Not particularly deliberately, but more because I didn't feel like shaving (this coincided strangely with Kat going back to Germany). I Finally got rid of it yesterday (an event which has nothing to do with my mum visiting tomorrow)... Had lots of fun using clippers to kill it. Went through lots of dubious facial hair styles on the way back to respectability, including favorites of a fetching 1980s detective mustache and some rather dashing Mr Darcy sideburns. I'm sad to say that I'm not shameful enough to take or post pictures, you'll just have to imagine them...

Things I'd love to learn to do (but probably shouldn't)

Parkour, a french 'sport', kind of a mix of free running, free climbing and stunt-man stuff... v.cool

Currently reading...

One of the things I'm reading at the moment is 'Persepolis' by Marjane Satrapi. It's a great, moving graphic novel about the author's life, growing up in Iran during the revolution and Iran-Iraq war. Like Maus, it is a serious, often very moving novel, which tells a gripping story. I've just seen that they have made a movie of it. (Trailer)

Unusually personal

A glimpse into my mind….

I’m not sure what prompted me to write this. I think, perhaps, that it has been washing around inside my head for a couple of weeks now and seems to get more agitated when I’m walking around. So here’s my attempt to drain out some thoughts on madness. This is my experience of (officially) having bi-polar disorder, or manic depression, or simply being quite, quite mad (sometimes). If you’ve spend more than a few weeks in the same little goldfish bowl as me the outward behaviour won’t come as a huge surprise.

Lets start with the ‘up side’. The manic phases often feel quite disconnected from real life. For me, it is often a mix of physical and mental energy. It feels like an adrenalin shot to the heart. I want to run, jump, fly, anything, just to move faster. Life feels turbo-charged, I imaging this is how Superman felt when he was acting as Clark Kent, huge amounts of strength and speed all wound up and it takes concentration not to release it. Often combined with this is a strange feeling of mental acceleration. The rest of the world seems to drop into slow motion, not very slow, but enough to feel like it can’t quite keep up. There’s a huge rush of ideas, thoughts and raw creativity, often completely random in direction. It can be an amazing feeling, its like my brain is actually working properly, as if the rest of the time I was half asleep. I end up sitting around in the middle of the night scribbling the outline of a project, drawing strange contraptions or thing that I would like to build, but probably never will….

….and here’s where things usually start to dip. These huge bursts of activity and planning tend to create piles of plans. Most of these bursts seem to involve projects which can’t be achieved with the things I have, so I end up ordering strange tools, bits of electronics or other gizmos. At work I’ll set up a pile of experiments that I realistically could never deal with at once (in a weeks time when they are ready). I find myself surrounded by so many examples of things I have failed to do. Its an icy shock back to reality, then usually a bit further. The low side often starts like this, or as a huge overreaction to something minor, the kind of thing that would normally bother you for a few seconds, then you would forget about. The sinking continues and expands into a more physical sensation. I walk around drained of energy, feeling like someone has turned the gravity up. Lifting my head up takes noticeable effort and simply moving around becomes almost painful. Emotionally I end up surrounded by either intense grief and hopelessness or just completely numb. The numbness is in some ways harder to understand, it is quite distinct from sadness, it is a complete disconnection from the world. I end up in glass tank, able to see and hear the world, but separated from it somehow. Everything feels relayed or processed, in the same way that the watching the world on television doesn’t feel like being there. The hardest part is to explain to everyone else that it isn’t rational, it isn’t personal, it isn’t that I don’t love you all, I’m just numb.

The low points often last longer and fade away, rather than simply stopping. The local anaesthetic wears off and I start to feel things again. Simply clicking out of it happens much less often, whereas when I’m flying it usually ends with a quick, hard crash. After the lows, normality re-grows.

This isn’t intended to worry, more to try and explain.

A

Please, someone, give Sylvester Stalone some money

Damn... they've just made another Rambo film! Sly Stalone must be desperate for some cash. There's nothing more desperate than an old age action hero.

On Chesil Beach

I've just finished reading 'On Chesil Beach' by Ian McEwan. I really enjoyed it. The story is set in a small seaside hotel, where a young couple spend their wedding night. The description of the awkwardness and embarrassment with which the couple approach their first sex is painful to read. It's quite strange, I read the first chapter of this in The Guardian, and it felt like it could have been set in the 19th century, but in fact it is placed in the early 1960s and shows how different things were before the sexual revolution of the swinging sixties. I found the story somewhat depressing, especially how sexual innocence and lack of communication can damage things so easily.