Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind (video).

I ended up working from home on Friday, hanging out with [[Oliver]] on a chilly, rainy Berlin day while Catherine made her way up to Mitte to hang out with knitters for the afternoon (she got very, very wet in the process, but her spirit persevered). We suffered the rain for a block and a half around noon to go to Schönes Café for a late breakfast of chocolate-banana pancakes (for Oliver; very good), muesli (for me; also very good) and coffee.

We spent the rest of the afternoon tweaking an iPhone app that’s under development (me), and colouring pictures of Berlin and playing Scribblenauts (Oliver).

Catherine found her way home through the rain around supper time and rather than cooking in or making our way out into the rain again we opted to just go down one floor to Primo Maggio, the Italian restaurant that, when the windows are open, we drift off to sleep listening to the hustle of.

As it happened, Friday night was a special night at Primo Maggio: the American singer-songwriter Xoe Wise was playing live, and much of the restaurant was taken up with a seemingly-infinite entourage. Fortunately we were able to carve out a little space for ourselves, and had a fantastic meal: I had pasta serve with cauliflower and chili oil, which sounds bizarre but was knock-socks-off fantastic. Catherine reported her pork was perfectly cooked, and Oliver inhaled his truffle ravioli. Along the way we were treated to this:

The lo-fi rendition doesn’t really to justice to Wise; visit her website for higher fidelity. Around 10:00 p.m. we ambled upstairs and fell quickly and soundly to sleep.

Saturday: more rain. Undaunted we decided to head to the the “vegan festival” at Alexanderplatz. Why, I’m not sure, as the prospect of soggy vegans doesn’t seem appealing; but we’re here to collect experiences, so.

Arriving at Alexanderplatz we immediately decided an emergency coffee and breakfast diversion were in order and so hopped back on the U8 and rode one stop up to Weinmeisterstrasse walked through the rain (did I mention it was raining?) to Barcomi’s Deli which is cleverly hidden in Sophie-Gips-Höfe, which I take to mean “the court that exists between Sophienstrasse and Gipstrasse.” Which is where we (cleverly) found it.

If Berliners know how to do one thing it is “laze around on the weekend,” and so we found Barcomi’s packed to the gills with people doing exactly that. Oliver and I approximated a Charlottetown Saturday morning by ordered smoked salmon bagels and Catherine had a BLT. The coffee was decidedly good. Then back out into the rain.

At this point I acquired an umbrella (Catherine and Oliver already tucked safe into their rain jackets were much less affected by the ever-present rain). It cost me €2.75, which is the best €2.75 I’ve ever spent. And it’s amazing how much umbrella you can get for €2.75, especially when you go for the full-length model.

Full and happy – and dryish – we decided to walk our way back to Alexanderplatz. At which point I remembered reading about Buchstabenmuseum, open perhaps only on the weekends, and only for a couple of hours, and right nearby, and managed to convince Catherine that this would make for a fun diversion.

Buchstabenmuseum is a museum of rescued neon signage, arranged by colour and style and with helpful documentation. For me it was among the greatest museums ever. That Catherine and Oliver allowed me 30 minutes to wander around and take photos is a testament to their love and patience. I will have to remember to be more patient at the wool and Phineas and Ferb museums when we end up there.

Happily full of neon goodness we headed back to Alexanderplatz where, as predicted, we found the soggy vegans going hard at it. We weren’t quite hungry enough to line up for food, and not quite engaged enough to watch the inhumane-treatment-of-pigs videos, so we made a quick once-around and then got back on the subway to head east to Frankfurter Tor.

The allure of Frankfurter Tor was that Tiffany, the weekend previous, had told us it was the go-to place for used clothing at a large outlet of the Humana chain. Sure enough we found the Humana there, but before we could brave it we needed to eat again (see also “lazing around”) and so found our way down the street to Goodies, which, it turns out, may be a vegan café. Regardless, the food and especially the smoothies were good; Catherine and I both had the “ginger cooler,” which was a wall of ginger, albeit a pleasant one.

Fed (again), we walked back to Humana and discovered it to be four floors of Salvation Army Thrift Storesque goodness. Had we had more time, more fashion imagination, and more ability to withstand the vague stench of death that infuses all such stores we might have emerged victorious; as it was we quickly breezed through and escape unencumbered.

We’re obviously not cut out for the upcycling boho vegan eurolifestyle.

As such, we headed to Potsdamer Platz, thinking a movie – Larry Crowne at the Cinestar at 4:15 p.m. in this case – might be just what we needed for a rainy day.

What we hadn’t factored in was (a) that every other English-speaking person in Berlin had the same idea and (b) Potsdamer Platz is a barren simulacrum of urbanity.

And so, still in the ticket line at 4:30 p.m. and growing evermore uncomfortable at the lack of shawarma shops we ran back to the subway and headed back to warmer ground, ending up, instead, at the 5:15 p.m. showing of Beginners at the Babylon Kreuzberg, a movie that passed Oliver’s movie filter, but that might have been one-too-many “complicated family dramas” for his kidfulness. When I asked him what the movie was about once it was over he said “struggles,” so he obviously got it. But it may be time for The Smurfs next.

Emerging into the (damp) Berlin evening we walked the short walk home, picked up a couple of €2,99 pizzas at the place up the block, and settled in for the night.

Here’s a video of Ólafur Arnalds in action shot by a member of the audience from the same venue (but the next night’s concert) as I saw him on Monday. This gives a good taste of the “audience participation” as well as the music that results. Remembering, he’s making this up on the spot.

On Sunday afternoon I started to think about what I might print this week on my Tuesday letterpress printing day at Druckwerkstatt. I had an idea that I wanted to make a simple alphabet book, both to try out the geometry and spacing of printing a book that could be cut and folded from a single print on a single sheet, and also because I love the collection of wood type that the studio has, and I’m eager to take it out for a ride as much as I can.

You can see where my imagining led me in the bottom of this photo: there’s a little paper mockup I made from a scrap of paper that shows how, by arranging alternating rows of letters right-side up and then upside-down, and making a few cuts and folds, I could achieve what I wanted.

Also in this photo you see the wood type I started to assemble in the studio to see if this would actually work. Fortunately, under a pile of paper in the corner of the shop, I found a really nice sans-serif face with every upper case letter present.

What followed amounted to 90 minutes worth of jig saw puzzling: I needed to find a way of arranging the letters on the bed of the proof press so that they were evening spaced and each centered in their own box. To do this I divided a 30cm by 36cm piece of paper into a grid of 6cm by 6cm squares, placed this sheet on the bed of the press, and then arranged the letters on the grid:

I found, to my surprise and delight, that a piece of 24 point spacer placed between each letter handled the “up down” spacing perfectly (all except for the letter Q, which had a descender so needed special handling).  For “right left” spacing I simply using spaces as required, eyeballing the centering inside the squares penciled on the guide sheet. It took a while to get everything just right, and more than a few test prints to get it all really just right, but in the end I was very pleased with the result.

Once I’d perfected the layout, I spent another hour or so on makeready – making sure every letter printed equally black – and getting to understand the right amount of ink to roll onto the letters for a good print (the proof press is only partially working, so the inking, which would normally be handled automatically by the rollers on the press, had to be done manually for every print pulled, using an ink brayer).

Once I had a good print ready, I ran it through the press again between two blank sheets of paper to “quick dry” the ink, and then manually folded and cut to match my original mockup:

Magically, when I folded it all together, it actually did make a book. You’ll have to imagine that, though, because in my reverie I neglected to take a photo.

After making 40 prints – which took about an hour because of the whole “ink the roller, walk across the room, ink the type, print, walk print over to the drying rack in the hall, repeat” process – I took lunch and then returned to see what I could do about getting the printed pieces ready for my subscribers to turn them into a book.

In the book bindery down the hall there’s a giant paper cutter that I used to trim the excess off the right and bottom of each print:

Next I needed to fold the prints along the 6cm by 6cm lines surrounding each letter. Fortunately, right beside the cutter I found (and figured out how to use) a machine purpose-built with this in mind, a “scoring machine”:

After a few sacrificial runs to figure out how the spacing worked, the machine made quick work (well, quick work times 40…) of the 9 scores on each sheet that needed to be made.

When I was all done I had 31 copies of this, ready to fold and mail:

On the way home I stopped in at the Grúne Papeterie, an excellent stationer on Oranienstraße and picked up 50 envelopes recycled from topographic maps and once I got home I spent an hour hand-addressing an envelope to each of the 31 subscribers.

This afternoon I folded each print along the scored lines so that it would fit in a small envelope, and when I was done this, here’s what I had:

To my surprise and delight, to mail a thick envelope like this anywhere in the world costs only 75 cents, and so a visit to the post office and €23 later, the alphabet-books-to-be were in the mail to Taiwan, Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany, the USA and Canada.  I’ll be emailing subscribers a little more detail about the “how to turn this into a book” process shortly.

I’m pretty sure that I came to the music of Ólafur Arnalds through Sigur Rós, the gateway drug for Icelandic music (I came to Sigur Rós on an Icelandair flight; I fell asleep listening to their music and when I woke up I was a diehard fan).

Even thought Arnalds’ music has been in regular rotation on my iTunes (and as my mobile phone ringtone), I knew little about him other than his Icelandicism, and so when I saw a notice in Tip Berlin that he was playing this week here in Berlin, the fates seemed to be organizing me to see him live. With a little bit of web jujutsu I was the owner of a ticket for Monday’s show (the “official” ticket site was closed to orders and I ended up at HekTicket, where I got a ticket cheaper and more easily that I would have otherwise).

In my enthusiasm I tweeted:

A little while longer came an unexpected reply:

Which, of course, led me to this description of the solo tour, which says, in part:

Each night Ólafur will be taking these small audiences on a journey around his creative world. While explaining the details and techniques of the creative process, he will also be actively involving them in the dynamic decisions related to each composition. Alongside a continuous dialogue with the audience, there will also be an attempt to include them in the composition. People will be asked to clap their hands and stomp their feet while Ólafur records these sounds as an ingredient for loops and beats. Likewise they will be invited to sing like a choir and have their voices electronically manipulated into the composition and thereby fabricating a unique collaboration between artist and audience.

Rather than being disheartened – who can be disheartened by the lack of music you’re only peripherally aware of anyway! – I was excited by the prospect of seeing music not only played live, but also made live.

And so I found myself in the Roter Salon on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz at 9:00 p.m. on Monday night with a crowd that included, it seemed, everyone from patches-on-elbows professor types to earring-lipped young rockers. It could have been a Joni Mitchell concert except there was more beer and everyone was much better behaved. The Roter Salon – “the red salon” – is, indeed, very roter:

About 9:20 p.m. Arnalds took the stage and the festivities began.

Is there any sweeter music to the conversational ears than that of native Icelandic speakers speaking English? It’s like taking a North American English speaker and applying equal amounts of capers and molasses to the vocal chords: the result is reedy, sweet and minimalistically musical. And we audience got much opportunity to hear it, as Arnalds really did provide a “continuous dialogue with the audience,” full of wit and music wisdom.

The conceit, if you didn’t catch it above, was that Arnalds was to perform a concert of songs composed on the spot based on a day’s worth (or perhaps a lifetime’s worth?) of pondering. To carry out this mission he equipped himself with an array of musical gizmology, ranging from a Mac laptop to a Roland keyboard; indeed step one for the night was a walk-through of what each device did. Here’s what it all looked like:

And then began the music.

I’m not enough of a musician nor enough of a student of music to put a finger of what you call Ólafur Arnalds’ music – in SoundCloud it’s tagged everything from “classical,” “post-classical,” and “neo-classical” to “pop.” He said, partway through the night, that he had recently realized that he “makes sad music for a living,” and there is no doubt that several of the pieces he composed an played on Monday were capable of bringing tears to your eyes.

But it’s not sad in a New Orleans kind of way, it’s sad in a way that is, well, hopeful. Here, have a listen for a second: Lynn’s Theme, Hægt, kemur ljósið.

To watch Arnalds do what he does close up – one of the benefits of going solo to a concert is that you can cherry pick a single seat right up at the wrong – was priceless: I’m as much of a techno-skeptic as the next guy, and I’ve always had my doubts about whether music made of bits is really as musical as that made the old analog way (this coming from the guy who accompanied his high school band’s performance of the main title to Chariots of Fire on a Commodore 64).

But watching Arnalds all that skepticism melted away; indeed it was hard to tell, most of the time, where he ended and the technology began.  It was like watching – and I mean this only in the most positive way – a member of the Borg make music: man wedded to machine. That guy was inside that gear.

What resulted was the most transcendent, beautiful music. That it was being “made up on the spot” made it ever more so.

And so went the evening: some music, some stage patter, a guest appearance by the cellist Anne Müller (who plays a mean cello), some more patter, some more music. For an encore – for which there was an enthusiastic call from the audience – Arnalds played one more improvised composition followed by Erla’s Waltz from his 2009 album Found Songs (itself another feat of songwriting, in that case one-song-a-day for seven days).

And my ringtone? Well, as it turns out, he did play it, perhaps unaware that he was fulfilling my original tweet:

My expat sources here in Berlin tell me that everyone has a washing machine in their apartment, which explains why there are so few laundromats for such a large population. But our apartment happens to be one of the ones without a washing machine, so for our weekly wash we’ve got to load everything up in our suitcases and head over to Waschhaus 38, about 10 minutes walk from our place.

This week was my first week in the laundry rotation, and so first thing this morning Oliver and I packed up the clothes, sheets and towels and headed out.

Waschhaus 38 is extremely bright and clean; I remember laundromats as dingy places full of the smell of smoke (from the ever-present smokers) and dryer sheets. This one, though, is completely neutral in smell, without a hint of dinginess; there are even brightly-coloured couches and chairs upstairs to relax on. When we arrived at 9:00 a.m. the place was deserted:

I haven’t done laundry in a laundromat for a long time – not since the days of the Laundromat Café on University Avenue in Charlottetown – but it strikes me that it’s awfully expensive to do laundry here at €4 for a wash. That said, if you use the super-high-speed 1400 rpm washing cycle clothes emerge almost completely purged of water, which cuts down on dry time.

At Waschhaus 38 all the washers and dryers have names. Among those we used today were my favourites, Frieda and Gerda (Gerda’s “G” has been chipped away at so she looks like she’s Cerda now, but she’s not):

To pay, rather than putting money in the washers themselves you go to the far end of the room and use a touch screen to select your washer or dryer; you’re then prompted to enter the right amount of money and then told to go back and press “start” on the unit itself. It’s all very sensible and efficient, and the machine takes both coins and bills and you can use it in five languages.

The wash cycles were between 30 and 45 minutes depending on the “program” selected (my selection of program was random and based on my mostly-wrong conception of proper laundering techniques). The dryers were €1 for 10 minutes of time, except for Anton, who costs €1,50 because he’s bigger; I ended up sending most of the dryers through 3 cycles, except for the load I’d washed with a high-RPM spin cycle, which only took 1 cycle (live and learn).

We were in and out and home in about 2 hours, and although laundry isn’t something you’d wish on anyone, it was a pretty painless way of doing it. I might even volunteer to go back next week (don’t tell Catherine).

On recent trips to Germany I’ve been using a pre-paid CallYa Vodafone SIM in my [[Nokia N95]]. For voice and SMS it’s proved just fine, and once I figured out that I could recharge it online, it was easy to top it up. Data, however, was a killer; although I was never sure just how much it was costing me for data, I had a visceral sense that it was a lot, as even just firing up Google Maps to fine out where I was seemed to drain €5 or more from my account.

While I naively thought that I could deal with this limitation on this trip to Germany, going back to old-school paper maps and chits of paper in my pocket, this system has proved ineffective: stumbling around looking for ones destination is all very well and good until you overlay cranky family members (and/or cranky self). Then you just really, really want to find the sushi place in a non-serendipitous way.

Getting information, in English, about pre-paid SIM options in a different country is always a challenge: long-term expats and bona fide locals are no help because they all have real mobile contracts and no nothing of the pre-paid world. Mobile shops are seldom help because they either don’t deal in the pre-paid market at all, or want to steer to you a contract because it’s better financially for them. And because the pre-paid market is mostly a local or national one, pre-paid provider’s websites, even for the big players like Vodafone, are usually not available in English.

In the past I’ve turned to Telestial, a U.S. company that specialized in helping travelers deal with the exact problem: they sell pre-paid SIMs from their website for a variety of countries, complete with English-language instructions and support. This has worked out well for me in Croatia and France on previous trips. But it’s not always the best deal, and Telestial SIMs don’t always include data.

So one is generally left to Google for help, and in this case the CCC Camp website proved an excellent pointer; in response to an FAQ about mobile data they write: “according to teltarif the cheapest prepaid options are NettoKom and Blau.de.” As it happens, NettoKOM happens to be the mobile offering from the Netto grocery store chain, and they have an outlet a block from our Berlin apartment.

So this morning on my way into the office I stopped by, found pre-paid SIMs boxed up by the counter for €5, and picked one up. I was able to activate the SIM from the Nettokom.de website through judicious use of Google Translate and some good guessing (note that you need the receipt from the Netto purchase to activate: you’ll be given a Kassencode PIN number that you’ll be prompted for during activation).

Once I activated online I had to wait 30 minutes, then turn the phone on, enter the PIN I received with it, and make a first call; at that point my balance online (or via the *100# service code) showed €5 and I was ready to go for voice and SMS.

For data the best option for me, with a North American phone that’s only EDGE-data capable, is the Internet-Flat S, which costs €4,90 for a month, and includes 100MB of data at “full speed” and then throttles the data back (to some unspecified degree) after that.  As I’m never going to get “full speed” anyway, the throttle is of little consequence.

To add the Internet-Flat S to my account I needed to phone 1155 from the phone, press 8 for “service options” and then, listening carefully in German, navigating through to Internet packages and then the Internet-Flat S. I wish I could relate exactly which numbers I press, but I was fully focused on listening for keywords and numbers (and thankful for the German numbers practice [[Oliver]] and I did over the weekend – eins, zwei, drei). About 10 seconds later I got an SMS confirming the package had been activated, and I’m off to the rates: essentially unlimited data, 9 cents a minute for voice and 9 cents an SMS. For some reason I cannot fathom I can also make calls to the US and Canada for 12 cents a minute.

As a result of all this my mobile number in Germany has changed; if you happened to have the old one on file and I haven’t texted you an update, let me know.

One of the things that dramatic, if temporary, relaunches of living arrangements allow for is dramatic, if temporary, changes in habits.

For example, back in my regular everyday Canadian life, I’ve a longtime habit of working on Sundays. It’s not, to be honest, that there’s actually 6 days worth of work to day (although the quietness of Sunday working does allow for super-productive working, usually). It’s just that absent church, hockey or family, there’s not that much to do on a Sunday in Prince Edward Island, at least in the winter, and rather than face the endless drear, I seek solace in the arms of another.

In the grander scheme of things this isn’t a good thing, per se, and my more balanced European colleagues (okay, just [[Olle]]) have been known to point that out. But habits die hard.

At least until you relocate to Berlin.

I made a conscious choice not to opt for the €25 “24/7” access here at Betahaus in part to make it impossible to work over the weekend. And, of course, there’s much more to do in Berlin on the weekend, and much more of it has the potential of Maximum Fun, so this really wasn’t a hard decision to make. Oliver too has helped in this effort, insisting at every turn on the importance of “nobody feeling left out” if we don’t do things together as a family.

This Saturday’s version of “not going to work” went something like this:

• 9:00 a.m. – Household slowly wakes up.
• 10:00 a.m. – We all head downstairs to Kaffebar, the coffee shop under our house and over a few storefronts, for a languid breakfast of bread, cheese, fruit salad and coffee.
• 11:15 a.m. – On the U-bahn (subway) we head north to Bernauer Straße where we join the throngs heading toward the Mauerpark Fleamarket (as I described it in an email to G., “think of the 70-mile coastal yard sale crammed into Hillsborough Square in Charlottetown”).
• 12:30 p.m. – Abandoning the idea of a family-wide amble given the crowds and different amble-pacing, Oliver and I head off to the distant multi-coloured playground while Catherine continues on. The playground proves formidable, both for the physical feats required to climb up it, and for the swarms of kids “in the way” (as Oliver describes them).
• 12:45 p.m. – Catherine’s had enough of the crowds; Oliver’s had enough of the other kids fighting for playground supremacy, so we rendezvous and Catherine and Oliver share a fresh waffle with Nutella.
• 1:00 p.m. – Walk around the corner to Bonanza Coffee for more (very good) coffee.
• 1:15 p.m. – Wander about the neighbourhood. Break into temporary argument about “wandering without a purpose in mind” (I am the purposeless wanderer, Catherine is not; I probably didn’t need to tell you that).
• 1:30 p.m. – Argument still simmering, we head to the U-bahn again (thankful for the “day tickets” we purchased, which means we don’t have to worry about finding change for the ticket machines every time we want to move). Our (purposeful) destination is Café Garbáty in nearby Pankow which I’ve come to believe, thanks to Google Translate and Zitty, is having a special family afternoon with cake, sausages and family fun.
• 2:00 p.m. – Argument waning: arriving early we head to nearby playground and Catherine and I watch Oliver make himself completely and utterly dizzy (to say nothing of filled to the gills with sand) figuring out how to make the spinning-around playground equipment spin around. Our experience of Berlin playgrounds to date is that they are way, way more fun than stock Canadian ones.
• 2:30 p.m. – Head to Café Garbáty. Not sure what to expect. We are greeted at the door (of an otherwise empty bar) by very friendly owners and ushered into the back garden where we are offered drinks and provided with crayons, markers and paper for colouring fun.
• 2:45 p.m. – Challenging conversation with one of the owners, an older woman who speaks very little English to match our very little German. We both appear to be under the impression that if we speak with conviction in our native language the other will somehow figure it out. This is not true.
• 3:00 p.m. – After 30 minutes of colouring fun, still no other kids in evidence. Wind is picking up and rain is threatening so we head inside.
• 3:10 p.m. – Cake is brought to our table; wonderful, fresh cherry cake. And hot tea. And more colouring materials. Another family arrives! Other family turns out to be half English and half German and their two kids, younger than Oliver, bring a much-needed “family fun” element to the family fun day.
• 3:30 p.m. – Velcro darts. Play with balloons. Conversation about kid-friendly places in Berlin, contrast between Canadian and American border guards (was there ever a more useful conversational fallback than that one?).
• 4:30 p.m. – After more colouring, distribution of gummy bears, and a full album’s worth of Joni Mitchell on the stereo, and with still we two families holding up the “family” part of the equation, we think about heading off, but then there is word that the barbeque is on and steaks and sausages will soon be on offer.
• 5:00 p.m. – Steaks and sausages; very good. More balloon fun.
• 5:30 p.m. – Finally ready to head off; Catherine goes over to the bar to settle up: total bill for everything, for all three of us, comes to €10, which seems like the family fun deal of the century to us. We say our good-byes to everyone and head off.
  

Part Two of the “old habits die less hard” continued this morning when Oliver and I headed off to do the laundry together; but that’s another story.

[[Oliver]] has developed, of his own accord, very strict rules for what types of films he will watch: no violence, no horror, no vampires. On occasion he will add new items to the list, like “no dark magic” or “no boring movies,” the latter a hedge, I think, against the possibility of me taking him to non-violent movies that are otherwise of no interest to a 10 year old.

If you add the requirement that films be in English – I’m still reeling myself from sitting through The Band’s Visit with Danish sub-titles, to say nothing of watching Pirates of the Caribbean dubbed into French, which almost killed me – this narrows down our film opportunities here in Berlin somewhat.

Last night, with [[Catherine]] off drinking tea with the knitting hackers, we were left to our own devices. It was raining out, and yet too early to go to bed. What to do? A Google of Berlin Showtimes started us off on an extended father-son filtering session out the end of which came Win Win, playing in English at the nearby Babylon Kreuzberg.

The trailer suggested it was a feel-good story of redemption, but what about the possibility of violence. Or horror. Or vampires. These days one doesn’t know when a vampire might suddenly pop into an otherwise regular everyday movie after all.

Thank goodness for the BBFC – British Board of Film Classification – and its shockingly thorough ratings, like this one for Win Win that says, in part:

WIN WIN is a comedy drama about a small town attorney and part-time high school wrestling coach who spots star potential in a troubled runaway. The film was classified ‘15’ for strong language.

The film contains multiple uses of strong language and so exceeds the terms of the BBFC’s Guidelines at ‘12A’/’12’ which state ‘The use of strong language (for example, ‘fuck’) must be infrequent’. However, the uses are permissible at ‘15’ where the Guidelines state ‘There may be frequent use of strong language’.

The film also contains some mild violence, in the form of high school wrestling matches, and infrequent mild sex references as a character worries about who his ex-wife is ‘having sex’ with. There are references to one character being a ‘druggie’ and a moment of natural nudity as a character takes a photo of his bare bottom. There are also some references to and scenes of smoking, including some by a 16 year old boy. However, the boy quits when he realises smoking is incompatible with his sporting ambitions and the film as a whole does not endorse or glamorise smoking.

So, violence limited to mild wrestling. Some smoking. And a fuck or two. It passed my filter and Oliver’s both.

The BBFC rating of “15”, by the way, is interesting in contrast to the rating of “6” here in Germany.

In the UK the “15” rating means “No one younger than 15 may see a ‘15’ film in a cinema,” where as the German rating is “Released to age 6 or older.” Different cultural traditions, I suppose. (In Ontario, by contrast, it’s rated 14A, which means “Suitable for viewing by persons 14 years of age and older. Persons under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.”)

We walked up to the Babylon for the 8:00 p.m. show, bought our Ritter Sport chocolate bar and green iced tea, sat through a seemingly-endless run of advertisements and coming attractions, and watched the show.

There was nothing at all in the movie that concerned me as regards Oliver’s eyes, and when we emerged 2 hours later he seemed to agree: “good movie,” he said.

It took almost 36 hours for the blue ink to really dry (the last thing I wanted to do after all that work was to have Berlin smear in transit). And so 20 postcards went into the Andere Postleitzehelen slot this morning on their way to Germany, Sweden, UK, USA, Canada and Taiwan.