GERMANY 1989, SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR!

Everyone seems to be asking 'Where were you when the wall came down?' By sheer fluke, my uni course meant I was sent to live in Germany, or rather West Germany, from March till August of 1989. Daily I watched on the news as more and more people trickled across the DDR border into Czechoslovakia then over to the West, not realizing that what I was witnessing firsthand was about to be one of the most important historical events of my lifetime. It was exciting, but none of us knew at the time whether it was a temporary situation that would be stopped again by some Soviet tank or whether the DDR would simply end up empty! Even in the August it wasn't obvious that the wall had to come down. It seems unimaginable with hindsight that we didn't see it coming! In August I moved back to France (Besançon) where I stayed till October. I must have returned to the UK around 5 October to matriculate for my last year at uni. I must say I was kicking myself when the wall came down that week - if I'd known how close I'd come to witnessing in the flesh the demise of the wall I'd heard so much about from my dad throughout my childhood (he often worked in Berlin), then I'd have jumped on a plane to Berlin rather than Glasgow!

ONE SMALL STEP...

Isn't today's Google cute?
There are some events in history that we all feel bind us together in our humanity (through joy or through horror) such as the JFK assassination, the moon landing, the Berlin wall coming down or 911.
I, of course, have been teasing my toy boy all day given I actually sat and watched the moon landing live on TV and he wasn't even a glimmer in his parents' eye back then. Of course at 18 months (Anna's age) I don't remember a thing about it... but I don't have to tell him that, do I? ;-)

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY

Auschwitz II entrance
Originally uploaded by vm_ramos

As the living generations become fewer, we must make it our duty to educate our children about the past.

GOODBYE LENIN

A few months ago Thomas showed me this sweet movie. Isn't it so refreshing to come across something that isn't American!? I must show it to my kids some time once they are past the we can't be bothered with subtitles stage. Marcel would cope already but Lots would definitely find subtitles off-putting. It will be interesting to watch their reaction given the events of '89 feel like very irrelevant ancient history to them, when they feel like yesterday to me - especially given I was living in Germany in '89.

DISAPPEARING JOBS

young gran
Originally uploaded by PhylB

From time to time Thomas and I find ourselves discussing jobs that disappear or get outsourced - sometimes in the context of what best to advise the kids to study, sometimes just for fun. Today, it occurred to me that a job that no longer exists is one my grandmother did. My grandmother played piano. She gave lessons and played in a nightclub even when I was a child, but a job she did earlier was a shop job. But not a shop job as I did in my student days! In the olden days when people often bought sheet music, especially as a gift, and often when the buyer didn't play an instrument, people had no way of telling what they were buying. My gran's job was to play sheet music to prospective buyers in a department store in Glasgow. When the buyer liked what they heard, the music was bought, otherwise she'd play piece after piece until they found something that suited their purposes! What a quaint lost world!

OH NO - THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN RESTRUCTURED

It's a sign of the times when the universe gets restructured and even poor little Pluto is made redundant.

I guess that's the thing about science - things are always changing. When I was a little girl my Gran used to tell me how at school she had learnt that we'd never split the atom and I used to laugh. I guess my kids will now be laughing at me when I say I learnt there were 9 planets in our solar system - how old-school is that!?