I wrote “We see, but we don’t see’, which was prompted by my almost daily trip to make survey calls (I only do about 3 hours a day at the most cos I get phone crazy after that point. Good job it’s calls to Ireland at the moment where crazy is a national trait! Gotta love the Irish.) I travel by train, well, foot, tram and train, which takes about an hour each way which is plenty of time to observe the scenery, my fellow passengers and my surroundings. As my writing skills get forced, kicking and screaming, back into full working order, I find I’m taking more time to really observe things.

The tram part of my journey offers nothing very different from a car journey in terms of scenery, but that’s not to say it’s dull and dreary. The tram always has passengers; sometimes a few, sometimes it’s packed. Alot depends on the time of day. German schools start early and finish early so soon after lunch the trams are packed with kids of all ages going home. And I mean all ages. German kids do not get taken to and from school by their parents (well a few do but they’re the exception, a real exception). There is no school run, the concept is alien to German parents. You’ll probably find that any parent who insisted on taking their children to school after the age of 6 or 7 would be investigated for being over-protective! Result! So the tram is sometimes mobbed by kids; noisy, shouting kids weighed down by backpacks but not yet pummelled into submission by life. Along with them you get pensioners, helping each other on and off with care. And mums with toddlers and pushchairs; men and women making their way to and from work – Germans start work early too. Seriously. Alot of them are at work between six and seven AM! I’m not even contemplating waking up at that hour, let alone up, dressed, breakfasted and at work! So, of course, they finish early too – maybe there is some sort of method in their early morning madness after all? The entire cross section of life is there, on a single tram. It’s a heavily used and popular form of transport, especially when you combine it with cheap and easy rail travel too. Throw in a tram station that is directly under the main train station (with the main bus depot right outside the front door) and you have a recipe for transport success and use. Which is deviating from the point I was going to make but that’s ok, wandering and being deviant is good. Remember that; normality bad, deviance good. Within reason. Or behind closed doors and curtains.

So, (must stop using that word to start sentences) the tram part of my journey is usually taken up by observing people rather than scenery. This is due, I should say, in part to the tram route which is mainly down the centre of the road and two lanes of traffic on either side does not a pretty picture paint – unless you like industrial carbon monoxide spewing boxes on petro-chemical wheels. The train however brings not just new sights but a totally different perspective on everyday life. People and businesses live with their backs to the train tracks. It’s almost a matter of out of sight, out of mind, or possibly a lack of care due to the simple fact that no one stops and looks from the railway track side. Any one who does see gets merely a glimpse at high speed and has little or no reference to place where they saw it. So you see things you wouldn’t normally see, catch glimpses of the real life behind the facade that faces the street and the illusion of respectability; brief, intriguing glimpses that sets your mind wandering and narratives spilling through your brain trying to be the one that grabs your attention and result in the creation of a blog entry, a short story, even a random bit of writing – just as long as that idea is the one that gets written down so it, even if for only a brief moment, lives. The difference I suppose between an ordinary person and a writer, is that we make ourselves write down these impressions, these moments; we capture them in words – just like a photographer captures them in pixels (film is so last century!). Maybe what is captured will turn out to be rubbish, but, the thing is, we capture them and record them regardless. It is another step, or another block, in what it means, in my opinion, to be a writer.

PS. Today’s picture was again taken in Hattingen. Alleyways and lanes are always fascinating; do you walk on by or follow your curiosity?

We see, but we don’t see. We look and imagine or fool ourselves into thinking that we actually take in what we’re seeing. Our eyes see, they record images, but most of the time our mind is elsewhere, focused on something else or drifting aimlessly. We see, but we don’t see.

But what happens when we focus and concentrate on what we’re seeing?

What happens when we cease just seeing and start observing, start actually actively processing the huge amount of input that we receive from our eyes?

Do we just get overwhelmed, does our mind refuse to accept or process after a certain point or does it just reach the point where it has taken so much in it all blends into one jumbled mess?

When was the last time you really saw and concentrated on taking it in?

For me, I suppose it was when I moved to Germany. Everything was different and yet familiar at the same time – and my mind, my brain, saw all these differences and focused on them. Why now, though? Had I been visually asleep in the UK or had familiarity lulled my mind to the point where it didn’t bother anymore? Whatever the reason, suddenly I was seeing again; really seeing. It also had a strange effect on another aspect of ‘me’. This one. I wanted to write again. I wanted to record the things I was seeing and experiencing. I wanted to write down the minutest detail and then expand and expound on its meaning, letting the words flow out, allowing them to breathe and run amok on the page; to go where they chose regardless of which path that was. Filled with this new enthusiasm for writing I put finger to keyboard (which really doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘pen to paper’) and caught up with work blogs – well, started to anyway but that damn Gina the Giraffe has been a major travel junkie and demands I write about her before anything else!. Not quite what I had in mind but my writing skills were not so much rusty as stagnant. A few weeks of forcing myself to do work related blogs and even sneaking in some about revealed something else I’d forgotten. Writing, any sort of writing, is hard work. It wasn’t just my writing skills that had fallen into disuse, my brain was reluctant to get back on track too! This could have been a major problem; it would have been so easy to slip back into writing torpor except for the intervention of complete and utter boredom from a part time job. In a sort of call centre. Maybe a survey centre would be a more accurate description, but one where they call out and conduct phone surveys in dozens of languages. Unfortunately the auto phone dialer is, at times, very very slow which means that you sit there, sometimes for up to tent minutes, waiting for a connection. And then they hang up. So you wait again. What to do during the waits? Write of course! Not just write, but write letters to friends and family, rediscover the joy of filling a page with a pen. Or in my case, fill a page with almost indecipherable scribbles with the occasional identifiable letter thrown in for confusion. Another skill that had been severely neglected to the point of being lost – I could no longer form letters properly! Oh woe is me! (I love that phrase!). So back to the old adage “Practice makes perfect”. I wrote. I wrote some more. And then I wrote even more. Letters to that wayward runaway daughter of mine, letters to friends that were years overdue and I discovered something, or rather I re-discovered something – I enjoy writing. I enjoy tapping away at a keyboard. I enjoy putting pen to paper even if I do struggle to read my own writing when I come to transcribe it (like now). The mere act of writing gives me personal satisfaction even if no one ever reads the results but me. It calms me. It centres me. It fills a void that i didn’t even realise had been lurking and growing within me. I now find myself writing stuff in my head when I see things; making up stories and giving people character and reasons for why they are there (usually some nefarious reason too). Which brings me neatly back to my starting point (in my deranged mind anyway) – We see, but we don’t see. I am now seeing again. Here’s a question and a challenge for anyone who does read this: What do you see? Name just one thing, one detail and describe it. Make it come alive in words so that the reader, any reader, can also see what you see. I suppose the real question is: Can I do it myself? I look forwards to finding out.

PS. The picture is of Hattingen by the way, a very pretty German town near to where I now live. No reason for adding it other than I took and like the picture!