"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered."
Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University
No more London. This is a song about another city...
We flew into Berlin in the tail end of December 2010, the plane dipping beneath the cloudbank just a couple of minutes before coming in to land, giving us time to see what Christmas really looks like; pine trees and Hansel and Gretel houses with their roofs covered in snow, snow and more snow.
Coming in to Schönefeld airport soon set us straight on that score.
Berlin doesn’t shut down under snow like Britain does, it just reverts back block by block to the cold war. Dark and thundery apartment blocks under ice lockdown, people scurrying off the streets to find warmth in the nearest bar. The river Elbe not quite frozen over but massive sheets of gray cold across its surface. Walking along the route of the Wall in the middle of the day with visibility zero, bikes frozen in place and temporarily abandoned to the darkness.
Me and Melissa arriving at checkpoint Charlie like spies coming in from the night, hoping that every rumour we’d been spreading turned out to be true as the border police checked our passports.
...
So somehow I wrote this song about that holiday. Most of the verses are from about 2 years ago and written in a warehouse in Manchester, and I finished it off when I moved to London last April. When the Berlin Wall finally comes down I like to think that someone like David Hasslehoff might sing it as West Germans joyfully throw off the oppressive yoke of capitalism.
No comments:
Post a Comment