Then I’m going to nail my 2011 wish list to a tree trunk in the garden as that’ll mean during the night when Elves, Pixies, Fairies and Foxes feel safer from us earthlings and come out to lark around, they’ll see my list and stuff will happen or it won’t.

I love a good Magical Belief. I know I know, you’ll all laugh even guffaw at my simple mind, but how do you explain the mystery of the disappeared yellow sock which turned up mysteriously in the arm of an old army sweater? Hey?

During my life I have been greatly comforted and cheered by a whole host of Magical Beliefs. I’ve dipped into them when the going was tough and they’ve seen me through some rough old times when the only friends I seemed to have had wings and lived in Bluebell woods – Fairies.

Far from being at the bottom of my garden, and a million miles away from Danny La Rue, I believed the little creatures were on my doorstep. Every dark glade of every forest could support a whole eco-system of Fairy Folk. Worker Fairies, Queen Fairies, Fun Fairies and whether or not I seem bonkers and create comforting illusions, I don’t really care.

Angels! Angels are controversial. If you are tolerant of a good old conversation about Angels being around and doing their bit to alleviate the gloom and doom of life, from finding you a parking-slot at a busy supermarket to making you the sole survivor in a multiple traffic pile-up, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. However if the very word ‘Angels’ sinks like a stone in your heart as being one of the world’s most boring and bonkers and unscientific ideas, you’ll probably have zero tolerance.

Re-incarnation! I want to hold on to re-incarnation. I just love the idea, but will only agree to come back as something glamorous. At the moment my reincarnate of choice is a Roman Centurion or a Medieval Monk. Both outfits are quite manly and fetching, but my girlfriend tells me I’ll come back as a Night Soil Attendant in Blackburn or a worm in a mouldy apple.

Does anyone ever imagine they’ll come back as something worse than they are now or do we always go up the ladder of glamour? And if we do always go up the ladder of glamour, why is that?

I am someone who used to follow many rules for living that promised much, Magical Beliefs that were accessible and controllable. Not just ‘eating little and mainly plants’ and ‘being kind to children and animals’, but also the rules of gurus, masters, avatars, saviours, priests and philosophers, but oddly enough never really the Ten Commandments much.

I moved into Magical Beliefs pretty early on in life and with considerable gusto and have kept them bubbling in my life soup ever since. I embraced loads, though never quite fitted into crystals and Feng Shui, but have given the rest of them a good shot – personal development groups, spiritual healing lodges, mystery workshops, round and square tables, spiritualist circles, enlightenment seminars, you name them. All of them turned out to be so many magical mystery tours.

And yet, life’s mysteries feel good to me, though not making me tremble with hopeful anticipation anymore as they did in the past. More and more, I appreciate the freedom of delicious chaos, but not always. The rules of the masters seem so beguilingly certain, so irrefutably logical. And it’s so easy to submit things to the authority of their magic, to surrender one’s entire life to their Magical Belief Systems. Why? Could it be that we are often too frightened to stand alone, to be our own masters?

The question I ask myself is, do Magical Beliefs diminish and constrict me by their very nature? Do Magical Beliefs impose their own brand of authority on my mind, which destroys the discovery of reality? I know they can cheer and comfort me when I’m fed up, but they can also keep me in zombie-like mental suspense, before the penny finally drops – the wish list I nailed to the tree trunk in the garden didn’t work. What have I done wrong?

There is magic, yes, and for me, it’s the magic of the moment, which is the mystery of life – chaotic and random, often cruel and surprising,  with all the gods we serve daily, anger, hatred, greed, jealousy, envy, fear, but also love, forgiveness, mercy, empathy, compassion. Aren’t these human qualities the channels through which we realise our Gods, in ourselves?

Through every action we energise our God of the moment, the God we believe in and serve then and there. These are the living Gods, living in and through our deeds, dissolved in the ultimate mystery, which cannot be captured in the net of human language or, to put it in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

It felt good being German, coming from such a varied cultured people who have such rich history and for a few hours I could lose myself in the media without being worried that the spectre of Hitler would rise up and slap me round the face and prevent me from openly enjoying all things German.

I read with wry amusement that British ‘History’ taught in schools largely concentrates on the ‘aitches’ Hitler and the Henry’s – the heavyweights of British history. I wonder why that is? Why does the UK keep Hitler alive and well in the public mind rather than letting him settle into the slot next to Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Pol Pot, Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Khan?

What is it about Hitler and the Third Reich that so intrigues people? As a German I can’t take the xenophobic anti-German jibes in the press too seriously, I actually have to find them funny and laugh, if I don’t want to be seen as your stereotypical humourless ‘Teuton’. I’ve lived here for 50 years now and love it, but it seems to me that everytime I open a popular newspaper or switch on the TV, I begin to wonder if Hitler is dead, and if he is, why he won’t lie down?

Is it all really ‘lest we forget’? In every bookshop in the UK there seem to be extensive World War 1 and World War 2 sections.  War memories abound. Lest we forget? As far as I know, most people in Germany were so-called ‘Mitläufer’¹, an easier option than being sent on an extended vacation to a Nazi brainwashing camp, a torture clinic or the gallows. They secretly hated the Nazis and loathed what was happening and have lived with great shame and torment of the holocaust ever since.

My girlfriend was surprised when she couldn’t find similarly extensive WW2 sections in bookshops in Düsseldorf recently. ‘Is it because you lost the war?’ she asked innocently. I don’t really think that’s it, I think it’s more that we see the Nazis as a horror that we must learn to accept as part of our history, but at the same time we must move on and away from our past.

In December 2010 I noticed the freeview channel ‘Yesterday’ broadcast programme after programme about Concentration Camps et al. Why? Perhaps someone out there will help me think about this in a new way. What are these programmes for? ‘Lest we forget’? Most people in the UK were born after 1945 and have no direct experiences of the horrors of war. What is there for them to forget? Could there be other reasons?

Some people believe we can learn from history, that by looking at the horror images of world wars often enough and long enough, we will be deterred from solving our political differences with tanks and rockets and concentration camps. What evidence is there that by looking at past wars will stop us starting a new one? 

I believe the past can teach us nothing, but that we repeat patterns of war and hurt people. It’s in the here and now we actually live, and that is all we have. That’s where we must feel whether we are going to hurt people or not. As far as I can see, it is only from working diligently and sincerely with the givens of the present that we can learn anything at all and perhaps create a better future.

As a German toddler in the war, I was no part of it, I can’t remember a thing. I 100% accept the horror and mindless cruelty of the might of Germany having been used for evil, but is there a danger of keeping these images of past horrors in people’s minds? If so, what could these dangers be?

I set foot in London at the beginning of the Swinging 60s. What a place it was to my stiff and very formal grammar-school-tutored German mind! It took 5 minutes to shed any of my ‘good-boy’ inhibitions and to get down the pub and sink a few pints and meet a few girls.

What was fantastic then was nobody ever mentioned the war other than my late-teenage colleague in the City of London shipping office where I worked. Every morning he beamed a big smile at me across the table, stood up, clicked his heels, gave the Hitler salute and sang ‘There’ll always be an England…’ Of course, I laughed. It was funny then. It’s not funny now, why?

Hitler seemed to emerge from the textbooks of history under the reign of Margaret Thatcher.  She didn’t favour ‘Europe’, even though, forgive a German for pointing it out, isn’t the UK part of Europe? Often Europe and Germany were mentioned in the same breath, as if they were synonymous. A new jingoism raised its head, born perhaps from old WW2 fears?  And maybe belonging to Europe was felt to be tantamount to being annexed by Germany?

All of a sudden there seemed to be a rash of TV programmes based on the war and how funny the Germans were.  I must point something out, dear readers of this blog, Germans aren’t really funny at all, if you haven’t noticed.

‘Dad’s Army’ didn’t feed any prejudice about Germany, that is to say that Britain equals Good and Germany equals Bad. It was based on unadulterated British self-irony, a superior brand of humour that seems to have died out. ‘Fawlty Towers’ made me laugh, too, and I wish ‘don’t mention the war’ was real and not a joke. I could already detect signs of self-congratulatory, self-righteous, xenophobic spirit insinuating itself into this humour, which was completely absent in ‘Dad’s Army’.

When people mention Hitler or the Holocaust or the war, I feel a sense of deep shame for being a German, and for having a father who fought the Russians and a mother in the Hitler Youth. Talking to them of their experience in the war you get a sense of the sheer power of Hitler’s propaganda machine. They knew what they had been told, knew better than to question it and were glad when it was all over. To raise their hands and salute the Führer with a cheeky ‘Fawlty-Towers’ kind of ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’ ² would have meant their certain death.

We were lucky to live in the British zone after the war and my one enduring war image is of British soldiers giving kids playing in the streets lumps of butter, oranges and chocolate from their own rations. I remember them as quiet, serious men for whom my heart will always be full of thanks.

¹ ‘Mitläufer’ literally translated means ‘with-runners’ or ‘running with them’ or simply ’paying lip service’ to the regime.

² Before Adolf Hitler was Adolf Hitler, he was Alois Schicklgruber. 

I live daily with the noises that produce those manicured lawns and straight hedges and smooth pathways and shiny cars.  I hear the many hives of a strange new service industry buzzing outside my window.  No errant blade of grass to be left, no peel of paint, no blip of mess, no overgrowth of gardens or rampantness of nature.

I see the results of all this human labour and I wonder why anyone bothers.  How often can you improve things?  How much can your house be shinier and newer and cleaner and neater than your neighbour’s?  How many Lamburghinis Porsches Bugattis do you need to show your neighbours who you are and what you are?  What are you again?  How smooth has your driveway your onsite parking area your pavement got to be to let your neighbours know you’re not something from the bottom of their garden?

I live in a town hell-bent on improvement.  Property here is a clear indication of which rung of the ladder you’re on.  So are the cars in the driveways.  When you make a few bob you don’t say a word you just get the building contractors, garden designers, path layers in, again and again and again and park two three four limousines on your driveway, silver silver silver silver.  There must be no peace.  Peace equals inertia in the eyes of those hell-bent on improving.

Leafy avenues must shed their leaves but their natural carpets lie for a short time removed quickly and relentlessly with great big noisy leaf-sucking hoovers ploughing backwards and forwards across the Stray, not leaving the tiniest of islands for wildflowers and wildlife.  I wonder if the seasons get as confused as I do.  Where is winter’s slush and spring’s havoc?  Or summer’s dust and autumn’s must?  All swept away and polished off every surface with spray and shine.

Is that verdant even green really attractive to the human eye?  What is grass for?  Grass is the world’s most successful plant but it’s beaten into submission here, cut down and down until the brown soil shows through.  Where are your curves, nature?  Where is the cheeky weed or the fallen log?  Where do you go to find the beauty of the surprise?  Where is random’s refuge?  Where is entropy’s hiding-place?

Perhaps everyone who lives or wants to live in this town, where I dread the sound of the strimmer, models their ideal ‘look’ on plastic grass and dolls houses.  If only things didn’t grow and change. If only the weather didn’t mark the windows.  Though not a pigeon lover, I appreciate how they do at least leave messages from randomness on the window panes, terraces and garden paths for everyone to see. 

I walk along the lawns and under the trees so coiffured and finished that I feel as if I should pay more attention to my appearance.  My hair needs a bit of strimming, my face could do with resurfacing, my clothes need re-shaping and I could do with remodelling generally.  Call in the improvers.  Pay money for more nonsense.  Make me smooth and bland and safe and plastic.

The dogs have fancy collars here and are called ‘Hugo’ and ‘Poppet’.  They gambol and frolic on the wide green open spaces and I wonder if there’s any good sniffs around for them to enjoy.  Or are the very trees sprayed with ‘Eau de Acceptable’ and not other dogs’ bottoms?  The supermarkets have a touch of the Truman Show about them.  You know when you go to Ikea and you get the feeling that lots of people are caught up in making a day of it?

Supermarket shopping here seems like that.  I don’t believe the women haven’t had their hair striped and their clothes pressed to glide round Waitrose with their trolleys full of exotic but safe foods that their neighbours would approve of.  Boxes with photographs of wonderfully successful food, some day soon maybe that’s all we’ll have to do to live here.  Glide about neatly with pictures of food on display in our trolleys.  I can’t help thinking of the Stepford Wives.  Or is all as perfect as it seems?

Well my house is up for sale and I’m playing the upkeep game along with all the rest – shiniest windows and brightest surfaces.  Outside my window the strimmers, the lawnmowers, the hedge cutters waken from their night’s rest.  The paint strippers are turned on and the hot-tar machine plies its trade.  Keep up with the Jones’s or die!

I’d rather live and breathe somewhere a bit untidier and looser round its edges.  Here the flowerbeds of identical flowers in serried ranks march towards the centre of town and gather round the war memorial, squadrons of yellow pom-poms.  Every shop seduces your eyeballs with its painfully tidy boutique-ish chi-chi-ness.  If the tidy-town inspector calls, we’re ready. 

If the heart-and-soul agent is around, don’t bother with us.  We bought the wipe-clean low-maintenance version of that a long time ago.  It sets a stone to my heart.  Maybe I need to consult a specialist to have my eyes tested, an ophthalmic optician who can provide me with magic spectacles through which I see this town more benignly.  Then again, moving somewhere a bit untidier and looser round its edges may be the only escape.

It wasn’t just the consultant at the hospital shaking hands with me while still holding his ballpoint pen.  Of course that didn’t help to start the day feeling normal.  I asked him ‘Is there any significance in the way you shook my hand while still holding your ballpoint pen?’  He looked perplexed.  We were there to talk about my oesophagus and he obviously thought this was a trick question.  Handshake?  Ballpoint pen?

In my mind I felt a surgeon who’s not aware he’s still holding a pen in his hand when he shakes mine might be just the person to leave a pair of scissors, four needles and a few clamps in my gut and look perplexed when after a few weeks of rattling around doing no good at all they show up on the x-ray.  Scissors?  Clamps?  Needles?  Who me?

From the worry of Pen-in-hand-land I drove to the warm soft seductive Sainsbury’s with its lovely offers and gleaming cleanness.  I emerged unscathed with a minimum of shopping, not one item on special offer and no buy-two-for-one gimmicks.  The plastic bags went in the back of the car, the coat came off and joined the shopping on the back seat, this day was warming up.

Automatic window goes down for a cooling draught, window shudders up again and then down from its own volition.  Wind whistles past head building to crescendo, shopping bags and jacket on back seat lifting up from gusts.  The car’s just been fixed and garage what done the deed is but a roundabout or two away.  Windows go up and windows go down, all on their ownio. 

Eardrum is wind blasted and all sense swept from right side of face plus right hand.  Sainsbury’s bags now resembling Ha-hoos from the Night Garden.  Miss my roundabout as wind-whipped face now affecting my powers of navigation.  I know the garage is near Knaresborough, so why not go for a spin with the howling gales right round Knaresborough instead of taking that little turn left into the garage forecourt just before you get to the roundabout?

Windows go up and windows come down.  Sometimes they glide and sometimes they shudder.  Ballpoint pens jabbed into hand seem more agreeable to me at this stage than windows with a mind of their own.  I finally park in front of the garage and the windows miraculously close and even when I’ve glared at them through narrowed eyes, stay shut.  The garage laughs and books the car for a good talking-to on Thursday.

After a lunch of is-it-me or is there something funny about this doggone day? I tackle my broadband account.  O woe is me, click-click ring-ring friendly voice we both speak English but do we?  Is it me?  Why is it called a helpline?  After many a long click-click ring-ring round of phone calls, after an afternoon of talking to random people in this and that random department who know the right answers if only I could ask them what they know already, but I want to know what I want to know and it isn’t helpful to be transferred and start again and again and again, password place of birth date of birth post code first line of address, a saint would get tetchy let me tell you, o great helpline of all helplines! 

I will try from now on to ask only questions that they can answer.  It isn’t actually a helpline in the traditional sense of helping people.  Not many left of those, come to think of it.  They’re all pretty much the same nowadays, more like Chinese whispers, lines of technical gobbledegook and polite reassurance.

That was my yesterday and now this is my today.  I sit and write and think and wonder at that doggone day.  I realise there’s nothing I can do but accept with a laugh the numerical probability that unplanned events will occur in the randomly ordered plan of life.

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My travel anxiety (or Reisefieber) which takes the form of a mild sense of unease when I think of going anywhere, probably has its roots in my mother fleeing from the bombs at the end of the war, she had to keep me safe, whatever cost to herself. 

OK….. My travel anxiety perhaps started then, but this amateur psychology of mine doesn’t help at all when I’m faced with the big ‘J’. The Journey. 

At one level I know I’m not in the grip of a hopelessly uncontrollable ever unfolding nightmare of tickets, planes, trains, cars, roads et al. But even as I’m writing this I know that what I’ve done all my life is translate my feelings of unease into an anxiety language that helps me bear it. 

I have methods and approaches, oh boy do I have methods and approaches to help me cope.  

The List!  My list is a good friend. I know that without a clearly delineated list I can achieve nothing. Often it is bullet pointed but preferably numbered as numbers give me a sense of priority. For example, ‘timing’ would always be number one and ‘bottle of water’ way down the list at perhaps seventeen. 

Note: bottle of water is for emergencies only, the secret is to drink as little as possible on journeys involving public transport so you never have to vacate your seat. 

The Timetable is central to my equanimity. I like to start early and get cracking. I’m happy to sit, bag at feet, a’watching the dawn come up rather than risk being ‘last minute’ in my approach. Anything I can have control over I control, but what can I do about trains not arriving on time? Missed connections? Late arrivals? Fire, flood, famine, attack by vagabonds or little green men? 

I take a professional attitude to thinking about what might occur on the journey. I worry. You name a natural disaster to me and I can already see it happening, even on the slow line from Harrogate to York. Pestilence? Plague? Meteor showers? Nothing would surprise me because I’ve been there in my head. People look out of the train window and see the rolling countryside. I look out of the train window and see fields drowning in a flood. 

I must leave a sense of order behind me when embarking on a journey. My flat must be pristine. Of course I double-check locks, windows, plugs and water supplies. I like to know that all appliances are turned off. This has worked to my disadvantage as I helpfully applied my methods to my girlfriend’s house when we were going away for a few days. She was unhappy about the defrosted freezer and fridge that we came back to and I had to eat a lot of defrosted peas without complaining. 

Rye bread is my way of settling my stomach for a journey. No spiced foods, no beans. I can think of nothing worse than queuing for a toilet in an aeroplane with diarrhoea or being subjected to bursts of flatulence sitting next to a stranger on a train. 

But do you know what? I quite enjoy travelling my way. It makes every journey so eventful! 

Do you associate ‘surrealism’ with the visual, like a Salvador Dali painting or that French silent movie where a razor blade cuts across an eye? Do you think that ‘surreal’ means just ‘more real’? But does it?  I’m interested in those times in our lives when emotions are heightened. When as an adult you feel you’ve arrived somewhere and it makes you uncomfortable. You’re doing the right thing but it’s the wrong thing for you.

What if the natural order of life and death was unnatural for someone and he was trapped by the life he was in. What could he do? How do we break out of patterns that are destroying us? Do you run away in your mind or with your legs? I looked to surrealism for guidance. What if you jump out of your life, away from your wife, away from day, night, wrong, right, and let what will befall you befall you?

The surrealism you find in my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal is a device using words to explore one man’s fall from his conventional life.  I wasn’t using words to describe odd or surreal events. I wanted the events to read as surreal and unsettling. So the reader wouldn’t be sure if it was happening in someone’s mind or in actuality. To my mind, it’s immaterial. My words came out as the opposite of an easy read. It’s not just words that conjure up surreal images. It’s also using words in new iconoclastic ways.
 
So how can a novel or parts of a novel be made into a fish just as Dali created a phone from a lobster? Or how can a portrait not contain a face, like Margritte’s?  How do you write like that, so it’s not just a description of something extraordinary that’s visual? 

Why not write in a way that to the reader seems like random episodes? Who is to say how we should write? Things happen chronologically or do they?  Things happen one after another or do they?  Can the day begin at night or can a saucer grow a furry coat?  Saucers grow fur if you leave milk in them for long enough.

Time is just a concept we’ve imposed as a pattern on the universe. In the extreme north there is no night and day as we know it.  ’As we know it’ excites me.  Do we all know things the same way? Experience life the same way? Is your pain like my pain?

As for someone like André, the protagonist of my novel, he looks to other people to give him a clue, a glimmer, an insight into familiar behaviours that he could adopt or imitate to gain a sense of certainty or even peace of mind.  But does it work?  Can it work?
 
Surrealists attempt to express the unconscious and sort of mix and match this with the conscious mind.  They use the familiar as a frame of reference and mess it up, turn life as we know it on its head, distort it, show us images we recoil from as they don’t follow our expectations. The visual arts work immediately, a painting of the back of Margritte’s head makes us stop in our tracks. 

Writing is a different thing.  I struggle to combine, to synthesise the unconscious and the conscious and weave my words between the two.  I find beauty in the random, I feel it takes precedence over the pre-conceived.  That’s a huge freedom, step out of the box and see what forms on the page and what meanings can be made.

• wordkit offers a unique service – we keep things simple
• wordkit doesn’t reinvent the wheel but uses what’s good in you already
• ‘What can I say?  It was fantastic!’ Penny Roberts (Windows for Peace)