This weekend

Once again real life intrudes...  This long weekend I thought I would get around to lots of writing, and maybe even some playing around with pictures on photoshop which I find sometimes helps kickstart some writing (Streams & A journey, for example)

But the weekend hasn't really panned out like that so far; for good reasons, like actually getting involved in life for a change.  Spending time with friends, spending time sorting things like christmas shopping out.  Wandering through the town in search of ingredients for tea so that I didn't have to get into the car and go to an out of town supermarket, where I would end up sitting in a queue of traffic of people trying to get into the town to go to the mediaeval christmas market, fuming, knowing I would have to do it all again in reverse when I wanted to drive back into town to get back to my flat.  Luckily after visiting the Metzgerei, the Asian shop and Kaisers in town I had all I needed (Lammgoulash, ginger, yoghurt) to make Mughlai Lamb.

Yesterday I did write my second chapter in the Storymash thread that I am working on together with a friend; he'd completed his second thread within minutes (poetic license - I guess it was a few hours really) of me posting my first; and was feeling slightly guilty at not being able to match his pace.  However, since one of the reasons I am making more of an effort to write at this time is to stave off lethargy and depression, this sense of pressure or urgency is quite a good thing.

And today, meeting a friend for a late breakfast and catching up on the gossip, the sky is bright with white and grey clouds, the wind is strong and bitter, the cold finally fits the christmas markets and I almost feel like drinking Glühwein, but it is too early in the day.  Wandering through the market, trying to imagine what it would have been like in the middle ages, much harder to do by daylight.  It is easier to believe in the dark, and tomorrow I will go there again hopefully with my imagination fully functioning.  Today I came back after visiting only one stall, the baker with stonebaked cumin bread.  Clutching it to my chest, it is warm through the paper bag, but surely paper would have been too precious in former times to make into bags?

Some of the sense of wonder at the market coming to town must have come from having a small town attitude; global travellers are jaded, not really entering into the spirit I suppose, or maybe that's just me.  It is of course on one level quite a spectacle, but as it is only "for show" I find myself wondering what all the players, the jesters, the stall holders do for the other eleven months of the year when the sun shines late into the evening.  I guess I'm not very good at suspending disbelief...