‘We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon’ – part of the lyrics of Joni Mitchel’s Woodstock, made famously popular by messrs Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970.
Could that explain why our human characteristics can often seem to be a reflection of ‘what’s out there’? Moon-like night owls; all day sun worshippers; needy binary stars revolving around one another; argumentative asteroids, colliding with anything that comes their way; Jupiter-like charismatics having a strong gravitational pull; timid plutonians that prefer to stay hidden for as long as possible; is that why twins are carbon copies?
Since retirement kicked in we’ve been behaving like a couple of comets, our elliptical orbits enabling us to see what’s out there, destined to do the rounds.
Today’s round, Strasbourg, is much larger than we realise. 18,740 steps worth. Even though we venture no further than the historic tanner’s centre of La Petite France. We gate crash Gabriel’s ‘free’ English speaking walking tour. He doesn’t mind. He earns from tips. His comic spiel aids our failing memory banks. Talks us through the siege of Louis XIV, when Strasbourg became French; the healthier than water properties of beer; Strasbourg in it’s day, being the European centre for a certain type of highly transmissible STD; the fact that Sauerkraut did not originate in Germany, but during the building of the Great China Wall – much to the horror of the Germans in the group.
An after lunch walk through, what we thought was its famous cathedral of Notre-Dame, turned out to be a non-event. Then on exit we spied the real spire and its indulgent facade.
Many street performers enhanced the holiday vibes. This particular two-stringed Kokyu player, the pick of the bunch.
I should have recorded more . . .