One of my all-time fave races. I love the sand chaos of Koksijde and I love the intense racing period over this time of year. And I also love deeply Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado slowly coming back to her best after a very long illness and injury. With all the young ones coming up, she does not get enough love. UCI World Champion, European U23 Champion, Netherlands Champion, 1st in DVV Trophy and Superprestige, and 2nd in UCI World Cup, all in the same year and all when she was twenty-one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado to ride like she did in 2019 / 20. The pandemic and all the shit it intensified wasn’t good for her. And this season, she’s been riding like I remember, the one who won the World Championships. It’s more than a week since that first win, and she did it again at Superprestige Merksplas, leaving everyone in the mud behind her. Still and always my favourite rider.
I planned to bike along Saatwinklerdamm like I used to do before cyclocross fun in Flughafen Wald. But, realistically, two days after getting booster vacced, 16km of riding and 2 hours of walking felt a little ambitious. So I biked 15 minutes to Plötzensee, walked the east side of that, through the park to Schwarzer Graben and along to the NFL field and Hall of Fame Wedding, back the way I came alongside the canal, back the other way again between the Kolonie Plötzensee, with its garden houses bigger than the places I grew up in on one side and the cemetary on the other, back along Schwarzer Graben and did some random loops of actual Volkspark Rehburg where I got myself lost / turned around and got to walk both of the “I really want to go that way,” paths, which was pretty clever of me, and got back to Uferhallen just as the sunset was lighting up the chimney. Blue sky and sun too, everyone standing around pointing their faces at it like they’d forgotten what it was.
I used to blast through Volkspark Rehburg on my way to doing cyclocross in what I always called Flughafen Wald — which is actually Jungfernheide Forst, but people confuse that with Volkspark Jungfernheide on the south side of the canal, and there’s a lake called Flughafen See at the eastern end of the Forst, so … Flughafen Wald. There’s an enclosure for wild boars at the western end of Rehburg, before the track goes through the Kleingarten (quite a few of which are bigger than my apartment and sitting on land bigger than the whole building I live in). I didn’t see any there, but the bare trees and drizzle and dim light were enough to feel I was out in the countryside and not a 15 minute walk to Müllerstraße.
I’m staying in Wedding for a few days, at Dasniya’s studio in Uferhallen, where I lived with her for five years. It’s nice being back (except for the upstairs neighbour, which is a whole other convo about why older white cishet German women are so much work), and the closest thing I’ll have to a holiday this pandemic. I planned to bike to get vaccinated, but it’s been raining and it’s easier to wash shoes than hose down and re-lube a bike. Walking then, the one thing I can still do four months into some weird round of chronic fatigue symptoms, which could be anything from a fucked neck to depression to just needing a month of getting fucked.
This is so very Berlin, dim overcast light, grey and washed-out colour that has an austere intensity, not raining but damp and the air is soft with drizzle. It feels like being in the mountains or heath, far from people, walking and walking. My home is my International Orange hardshell, the brightest and most vibrant colour on the airport field, warm and dry and shielded from the wind. This, with tramping boots and a backpack, is something I miss and something that works deeply in calming my hectic inner life. I like the vastness of the land reducing me to this small, solitary thing, walking, walking.
Kestrel finally allowed me to take a video of them hunting.
Heaps windy and fresh after the storm last night. Me doing my usual wobbly lap along the southern pavé saw a crow having a go at a Kestrel. Kestrel was not having that and making a right racket. They both ended up perched on the bird sanctuary fence as I was walking past. I asked the crow, “Why you being such a cunt?” Kestrel flew off when I was between them and crow, and crow didn’t want to fly through me to get at them so hauled off in the other direction. Probably gonna have to give that one a feed so they don’t tell all their mates to shit on me next time.
On the gravel by the old airport ground this one was on the hunt. Maybe the same one. There’s a few of them there. Actually hung around long enough for me to get my phone out and then came up right over me for a long hover before diving at a mouse or something.
Really not blogging much since the utterly brilliant pandemic response murdered all the fun and way too many good people. Everyone I know has been experiencing highly abstracted perceptions of time. Did we talk last week? Last week was last year.
Tempelhofer Feld has been giving me some low energy pleasure. The resident kestrels even took a perch near me for long enough I could photograph one the other day.
The only thing not giving me energy are the white cishet couples where the woman does the “Oooh it’s a tranny!” to her man. Big sucking the dick of your oppressor energy there, hun. I was wondering if they do this because if I respond to the woman, she can use the “It’s a man!” defence to have her man do the physical violence. All fun, no consequences for these cishet women.
Yallah, a month ago, when it was still autumn-ish, I enjoyed the plant life around the southern perimeter road, just up the rise by the trees. I was going to prettify them a bit, but a month later obviously that’s not happening.
Not even going to pretend I have any chance of blogging anything other than photos of Tempelhofer Feld. Sunday and the first day of “might as well pretend we’re all fucked until Spring ’22” clocks went back and it gets dark before 17:00 now. Saw the Kestrel / Peregrine / Hawk / whatever the little one is out hunting again.
Sunset at Tempelhofer Feld under a tree along the perimeter road west of the north-east entrance. The blue sky was endlessly deep blue and the leaves a fractal hallucination for bare minutes as the sun went below the horizon.
Went for a walk yesterday afternoon, ended up at Tempelhofer Feld, ’cos of course, and got my insides blown clean by the incoming storm and listening to Kemistry & Storm’s 1996 Brighton Metalheadz set. Got soaked on the way home and bought a loaf of caraway bread which is the closest thing to Glick’s bagels in Balaclava I’ve had in a long time. Love me some proper weather.
