Four

Zhoen tagged me for a meme (actually, Pronoia tagged me first but I didn't see it until this afternoon), and I can never refuse an invitation (at least not online, in real life I do manage to say "no" on occasion).

Four jobs I have had.

My first paid job was as assistant to my father's textbook-writing-partner, a prof in the Department of Education at the University of Toronto. I was dogsbody for a few summer sessions, running the Gestetner offset machine (does anyone remember those? the chill of the still-wet paper, the smell of evaporating alcohol) and generally fetchin' and carryin', yassuh.

While studying architecture, I spent two summers working night shift on a commercial printing press. It was loud as hell, conversation was impossible, and the work was physically tiring but utterly monotonous. I enjoyed it greatly, because after the first hour or so my body did the work by itself without involving my mind, I could dream about holidays or review the book I was reading. I learned about quality there, about the importance of taking one's own work seriously. There were two night-shift bosses, Smith and Jones; and Jones was a lazy bugger, he would get the machines running well enough and go to sleep on the paper bales. The crews bitched and moaned if they were assigned to work with him, because "he just runs crap": the output wasn't up to their personal standards. Now, they were talking about differences that I could not see (didn't know how to look for). I found that very interesting.

My first job as an architect was for the wrong company: I misread the name on a doorway. I was walking down the street with my portfolio, and thought I'd arrived at a young and fashionable crew, but landed up in a very staid and proper old-school-tie company that did mostly government work. However, they had computers (and a computer in 1984 was a very far cry from what you are looking at today, dear reader) and they taught me to use them, which (to cut a long story short) is how I came to be writing databases in Germany.

Between architecture and Germany, I spent five years at the company that made the systems I'd been using in that old-school-tie office. It was fascinating work, I spent half my time teaching (wonderful) and the other half writing software, customizing the systems to meet particular needs.

My favourite experience in a customer's office, was with the police force of a county in northern England. In such hierarchical systems, your status as visitor depends on the status of the person whom you are meeting. The first time I went there, nobody knew who I was visiting, so the cops spoke to me cheerfully and without undue formality, which I enjoyed. Well, I was there to meet the Chief Constable - a fine English understatement of a title: the CC is king, he is the direct owner of every police station, every jail and every single cop in his county. There are exactly three people in England who can tell a CC what to do: his wife, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister; and the CC had his driver take me to my hotel after work. The next morning, word had gotten around, and the atmosphere was very different: the oldtimers stood up straight as I approached, the young ones turned pale and their knees began to tremble if I looked at them. It was really quite funny.

Four movies I can watch over and over.

Nobody's Fool a minor but well-made film starring Paul Newman, which nobody has ever heard of. Call it the coming of age of a 60-year-old man, or the story of a man who is surprised to discover that he is happy.

Alice in der Städten (Alice in the Cities) Wim Wenders' early masterpiece of laconic filmmaking.

It's a wonderful life every Christmas, like clockwork. It gets better each time.

Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. Why are so many of the best stories about betrayal?

May I invent a category?

Four movies I've only seen once, but would love to see again.

Man of Flowers, by Paul Cox. A wonderful, funny, heartbreaking film about sadness, loneliness, ageing and coming to terms with one's childhood. I identified strongly with the protagonist; take that as you will.

The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky. In my humble opinion, one of the finest films ever made.

Stand der Dinge (State of things), by Wim Wenders. Filmmaking at the end of the world.

Heimat, by Edgar Reitz. The history of Germany in the twentieth century, in eleven episodes and 16 hours. Truly magnificent.

Four places I have lived

I realized when compiling this list that I haven't really moved around much at all; although I have lived away from "home" for well over half of my life, I have only lived in four cities in 47 years.

Saskatoon, the Paris of the Prairies, where my sister and I were born, and where we lived until I was six. One of the coldest and windiest cities in the world.

Toronto, until I went to university. My parents still live in the house they bought 41 years ago. It was known then as "Toronto the Good" because only the churches were open on Sunday; these days it describes itself as "like New York run by the Swiss" meaning clean, safe, punctual and not too exciting.

London, to study architecture. I expected to be there for the length of the five-year course plus a month for sight-seeing, but stayed seventeen years.

Stuttgart, for the last ten years.

Four TV shows I love to watch.

I hardly ever watch TV since the cable service was cut (they doubled the price for the World Soccer Championships, and I said words to the effect of "no thanks"). Without cable I can only get one channel, and even that only has a steady image on rainy days. I haven't yet missed TV enough to have the cable reconnected. When I did watch TV, I was a fan of:

Married, with Children

The Simpsons

Space Night. Hour-long unedited, uncommented film from satellites and the space station, showing the Earth slowly turning. Every now and then, at long intervals, a caption appears: "Cairo", "Nile delta". It's by a large margin the most popular programme on German TV after midnight.

Long, glacially-slow-paced, beautifully-filmed documentaries about odd subjects on ARTE. (Typical scene: the camera looks out across a river estuary; there is no "focus of interest" or active centre to the image, we just look at the water, sky and land. After twenty seconds, a seagull sails across the screen.)

Four places I've been on vacation.

Newport, Rhode Island - lovely in winter, only a few brave tourists listening to the Atlantic waves breaking.

The south of France.

Mainland Greece.

Fuerteventura and Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Tenerife has the one of the most frightening airport approach paths in the world: the airport is on the flattened-off top of a mountain, you fly along a valley below the peaks left and right, towards a vertical wall of stone.

Four blogs I visit daily.

There are a dozen that I read daily, and many more that I check at least once a week.

Four nine favorite foods

My mother's Beef Wellington.

Petit Balun oysters, in the restaurant across from the Gare de l'Est in Paris.

Bacon and farm-fresh eggs over easy, in a cafe in Southey, Saskatchewan.

Kässpätzle (think of it as German macaroni-and-cheese, but with homemade noodles, particularly tasty cheese, and fried onions and bits of ham mixed in), in a very nice family-run restaurant around the corner from Princess' home.

Sushi, in a restaurant on Bloor Street West near the Jane subway station in Toronto.

Chicken tikka masala, in a basement restaurant in Wardour Warren Street in London.

Züricher Geschnetzteltes (think of it as Swiss Beef Stroganoff), in a restaurant high (literally) in the Alps, at the top of the Brenner pass in Switzerland.

Fish and chips, takeaway from a shop that no longer exists in a street that no longer exists, where my grandmother lived in south-east London.

Tramezzini (tiny overstuffed sandwiches) at the bar of a café in the university quarter of Venice, just west of the Accademia bridge.

Four places I'd rather be

Um, nowhere actually. I'm quite content where I am as long as I can get away from time to time. More money would be nice.

Well, OK, there are many places that I would like to transport myself to when certain moods strike. There is a specific field near the Forks, where the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers come together, where I will build a small house with tall ceilings and high windows for watching the moon through, when I win the lottery. Venice is always nice for a time, as are Manhattan, London, Paris and Vienna. I would like to go back to San Sebastian in northern Spain and sit on the beach for a day or two, and just listen to the waves breaking.

"Where I would rather be" is best answered as a question of spirit rather than of place: I would rather be relaxed and calm, not in a hurry, not under pressure to perform for myself or others, not grindingly aware of deadlines past and future.

Four albums I love.

What, only four?

Richard Wagner: Parzifal

Lori Carson: Everything I touch runs wild

Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto featuring Tom Jobim: Getz/Gilberto

Beethoven: The Five Piano Concertos, Glenn Gould at age 25 playing like a young god.

But ask me again tomorrow and you'd get a different list. Apart from Parzifal.

Four vehicles I've owned

I have never owned a total of four vehicles in my life: I'm one of the last living non-drivers. Never had a driver's license, never even taken lessons.

I had a red tricycle with white wheels. I remember being intimidated by the size of that front wheel, feeling that I would be unable to control it and that I would cause a dreadful accident.

My first bicycle weighed more than I did, but it had three gears! Graduating from riding around the "small block" to the enclosing "big block" was a huge step.

My second (and to date last) bicycle was what we called a "ten-speed": racing frame, thin wheels, saddle like sitting astride a pool cue, weighed less than the stack of books that the wannabe med students took home every weekend. I rode all over the city, going down the long thin park of the Don River valley to the Toronto Islands every weekend in summer.

My vehicle of choice these days is the ICE-3 train. Fast, comfortable, smooth, quiet, with canned radio and a plug for the laptop at every seat, it's like being in a nice club. Serves the second-worst coffee in all of Europe.

Four others, to pass the chain on...

Well, who hasn't done this yet? Let's have Noorster, SirBarrett, Sass and She.