Portrait of a trip - Bonn February 2016

It was a weird visit. It wasn’t just the penguins on the tram or the clown on the bicycle, there were other things too!

You never quite know when you launch off from home what you will find at the other end of your trip or what will feature during your time away. Very often work takes me overseas, sometimes into continental Europe, sometimes further – as this blog shows – but I have been to Bonn many times and pretty much know my way around, so surprises are expected to be fewer. 

Bonn hosts the striking twenty nine storey building of the United Nations Environment Programme. This in turn hosts the Convention for the Conservation of Migratory Species and many of its daughter agreements – including the ones dedicated to whales and dolphins – hence my visits! On this occasion I was in town for two back to back workshops one on climate change and the second on bycatch,

UNEP HQ looks down on the huge River Rhine which runs North-South across the suburban landscape. (I have shown pictures of the amazing river and its transport here before.) However, last Monday morning I was looking down on the river and it looked wrong. The light was bouncing off the river surface showing curls and flats of light that did not belong. Several hundred meters of sheen oil divided into several streamers was travelling up river. Someone must have had a fuel leak or maybe washed out some oily bilge. The oil would probably have been invisible in any other view from the river sides apart from that provided by the UNEP skyscraper.

The Oil on the Rhine is All Mine All Mine!

Thirty minutes after I spotted it, it was gone, carried off by the fast moving river. Hopefully it vaporised swiftly without causing any major harm. (We did of course report it.)

Oily streamers travelling north.

The next few days passed without event, although major warnings of a storm heading in from the west towards the UK started to be heard with increasing volume.

Thursday morning breakfast in my little hotel in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg started as per earlier ones. Coffee, bread roll, egg; view out of the window. Locals in big coats and hats, muffled against the cold, striding by making their way to work. The day was dull; the colours drab. Then suddenly out of the corner of my eye a splash of red and yellow, blue and green; a full-on old-fashioned red-nosed clown in a big  red cap riding down the street on her bicycle.

Then, on my way to the tram, I passed a group of young folks wearing furry animal onesies on a street corner at 8am. But youngsters do that kind of thing! The vampire and cowboy on the No. 16 tube were less easy to ignore and two stops further along we were joined by about twenty penguins.

The penguins were all about twelve years old and came complete with a teacher who was handing out their feet – bright orange cut-outs to be tied over shoes. These complimented their black clothes and penguin heads – black woolly hats with orange beaks and big sewn on felt eyes. The penguins also had a huge sack of pop-corn and, more mysteriously, a second big plastic bag of washing-up sponges.

More folks in fancy dress joined the carriage until, by the time, I got to my stop  there were more of them, all heading north to the centre of the city, than those of us in civvies. As I left the carriage, a witch and a demon got on board.

Of course I did know what this was about. We had been warned. Thursday was he first day of carnival in this part of Germany – a six day festival of fancy dress and mayhem leading dramatically to the contrasting period of abstinence of Lent. We had been warned to expect revelry on the streets and possible disruption to transport.

A workshop with party hats

There was little fancy dress in UNEP HQ…. apart from the little party hats that is that were provided to workshop participants! And little mayhem… apart from the ritual sacrifice of my tie. This, it seems, is another tradition of carnival. Gentlemen wearing ties during the time of carnival are at peril of having them amputated. And so it did come to pass….

There goes my tie!

Finally, Thursday night witnessed the remains of ‘Storm Doris’ – which had previously brought chaos to British air-space – crashing by, scattering bits of tree and other debris. I too became a piece of debris in the satellite departure zone later that afternoon as Germanwings left me stranded for many hours before finally finding a plane that headed from Carnival-land back to the UK. 

The Badger Ways

It is cold, very cold, this mid-February. We are in the heart of winter. Everything had died-back and the animals that are active are struggling to find food and warmth. The badgers have a good strategy. They 'semi-hibernate' - staying in the warmth of the den when it is cold and living off the fat they put on during the summer and autumn. Then, on warmer days when the earth is soft enough to yield a few tasty worms, they venture out to snack. 

The die-back allows some of the regular badger paths to be more easily seen:  

here is one:

Here another - passing under barbed wire:

And caught on the wire a little tuft of wiry badger hair: 

Another path and another tuft of fluff:

And finally a strong signal of growing day lengths - some snowdrops. 

Whaling - poignant parody point.

Except that, today, there weren’t any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the international oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere.

The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research materials . He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honourable thing."

This is from the 1990 fantasy novel ‘Good Omens’ by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – a wickedly funny story of the apocalypse (and hence oddly topical) - and the excerpt above is one of many odd little peregrinations that they take around the world away from the main story, as the world is prepared for its end.

There is a little more to this whaling-themed aside – which you are encouraged to read for yourself – but it conclude with another wonderful one-liner (and you can imagine the fun that Pratchett and Gaiman had playing off each other’s wonderful wits):

‘And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance’.

(Kappamaki, by the way, appears to be a reference to cucumber sushi!)