That sounds like a line from a cheap novelette

Moogface came for a visit last week and we went about doing things in Vienna, kicking off an action-packed few days with a craaazy two-hour seminar with visiting medievalist Prof. Philippe Buc at the Institute for Medieval Research. I know how to treat a lady!

Then we took the subway to Prater, site of a big funfair which promised craziness without bounds. Unfortunately everything was closed because it was the middle of fucking winter, something which had escaped my notice. We shuffled about in the snow for a bit and Moogface made full use of the only form of entertainment available by sticking her head in this thing, which killed an hour or so. She is easily amused.

It's probably a good thing that Dizzy Mouse was shut.

But the fun didn't stop with medieval seminars and closed funfairs, oh no! We also went to Latin mass in the undercroft of the cathedral, which was like normal mass except more penitential due to the lack of cushion kneelers and comprehensibility. Mel Gibson was actually standing in the corner inviting people to whip him.

And we watched an old black and white film in a musty little cinema. (It was The Third Man of course, so mustiness is part of the experience.) This necessitated a trip on the Riesenrad, although our plan to re-enact the famous scene from the film was thwarted by the old couple sharing our cabin, and the locks on the doors.

"Or do ghosts only fly by night, Dr Winkel? You got an opinion on that?"

Moogdroog also managed to use some kind of secret healing powers to fix me, or at least I made a sudden improvement on the day of her arrival, which meant I was actually able to take her around the city and we didn't have to stay in my flat watching badly dubbed episodes of Friends and repeats of The Weakest Link, which is about the only show broadcast on BBC Entertainment.

I saw my physio for the last time yesterday and she ran out of things to do to me. With luck I'll be fit enough to try a short run in a couple of weeks. Six weeks of crippledom has taught me two things: 1) be careful when sledging; 2) Vienna is a good place to get sick. There are so many doctors here, chances are your next door neighbour will be one. The doctor I went to was actually called Dr Galen. You don't get any more highly qualified than that. I was half expecting my radiologist to be called Dr Xavier Ray.

Tomorrow I have to go to the Institute for a project meeting to discuss an article I've written for their latest edited volume. It's the first time the people here will be giving direct feedback on something I've written, and I'm fairly shitting myself at the prospect of their hardcore Viennese historiographical faces staring at me.

"So, Herr Dr Clay, please justify your academic existence."

That photo is from 1892 I admit, but the only thing to have changed is the intimidating facial hair. My only consolation is that nobody at the Institute is really an Anglo-Saxon expert, so they might not notice all the glaring historical errors I made.

Stick

A British academic was visiting the institute this week and gave a lecture on Thursday evening. As she's one of the leading people in her field (I think she actually invented the entire Carolingian period), I was determined to attend the lecture.

To make sure I'd be able to get to the institute that evening, I went exploring the city for a walking stick. I found one, too, in a tourist shop in the centre which has an entire basement dedicated to hats and cuckoo clocks. When moogdroog comes I intend to take her there, as she likes hats and as far as I know is not hostile to cuckoo clocks. I might even buy a hat myself, then grow a moustache and parade the streets of Vienna with my walking stick looking like this chap.


Unfortunately I must have managed to snap another vertebra during my expedition, as by the time I got back to the flat my old friend the gorilla was tagging along, clutching at my leg. I took painkillers and tried to get to the lecture that evening, but, having wrapped myself up against the snow and hobbled five storeys down to the street, I could walk about twenty yards and could go no farther. I spent most of today lying down. I hope it's better tomorrow, as I'm running out of food again and everything shuts here on a Sunday.

Ha! Crippled by trying to buy a walking stick. If there is a god, I do not appreciate his sense of humour.

At the corner shop

Each day my stupid back is feeling a bit better, which is good. I just need to let it, not me, determine the tempo of my recovery. Today I left the flat for the first time in four days, mostly because I had nothing left to eat except rice, pasta and a tin of herring.

I shuffled rather inelegantly into the English Supermarket across the street and perused the goods on offer. They seem to have everything except perishables, so I could shop there all the time as long as my diet consisted almost entirely of McVites biscuits and Marmite.

At €8.30 a jar? You're testing me, brother

At the checkout it transpired that the girl serving me was not even English, but from Düsseldorf or somewhere. I was so disgusted I was going to throw all my shopping on the floor, but I didn't because I'd bought a bottle of Old Peculiar which would have smashed very loudly and of course I didn't want to cause a scene like some damn European. So I gritted my teeth, said a firm "Thank you very much," and shuffled back out with equal inelegance.

Stupid body

My health deteriorated quite quickly last week when I made the mistakes of sitting down for too long and sneezing, both of which did something bad to my already-injured spine and caused the nerve damage I was hoping to avoid.

It still isn't as bad a couple of years ago (not yet, anyway), when I wrote that full-on sciatica was like having an angry gorilla grab onto your leg and twist it in two opposite directions. In comparison this feels like, say, a marmoset monkey doing the same. But it's still damn uncomfortable and forces me to spend a lot of time lying on the floor.

The worst thing is that I've watched the three classic WW2 movies I brought with me on DVD, so now when I'm lying on the floor there is nothing to watch but Austrian cable TV, which is like having a really annoying gorilla shouting at you in a silly accent to buy things.

Thinking about it, I was probably due for another spinal injury. Over the last six months I'd gradually stopped doing my regular torso exercises, the whole point of which was prevention rather than cure, and I was starting to take having a fully operational body for granted. I shall look on this latest episode as a polite reminder not to do that again...

I write cheap novelettes

Arrived in Vienna on Tuesday evening. Went to apartment. Slept. Wednesday everything was shut for some reason, or at least the small shops. Bought food. Went to Institute to work. Worked.

I love this flat. It’s just the right size for one person, not too pokey, not so big as to make me feel like Vlad’s marble of a brain bouncing about his skull. The walls are hung with paintings by the regular tenant, who seems to dabble mostly in landscapes, with some impressionist and abstract stuff thrown in, and this gives the place a cosy, lived-in feel.

The resident PC took a little grappling with, as it is a) slow and b) in Spanish, but I eventually managed to get Skype and YouTube working, which is all I really want from it. (Apparently connecting my laptop to the internet in the flat would involve phoning up the network provider and arranging with some German-speaking IT technician for the connection to be transferred over from the existing PC and installed on my Mac, which, not least because I don’t have an Austrian phone, sounds like a recipe for two expensive hours of mutual incomprehension and annoyance.)

Aside from that, nothing interesting has happened. Sorry. It is cold. There is snow lying about like albino horse shit. Tomorrow evening everyone in the institute is going for a meal with an academic from the USA who is applying for a professorship here. From what I have learned of academics so far, it will probably end in an orgy of drunken violence, with prominent scholars swinging from banisters and smashing tables over waitresses’ heads.

Zentralfriedhof

I went to the Central Cemetery today. It was rather rainy and miserable, so it seemed a good time to go. The cemetery is huge, at 2.4 square kilometres more than twice the size of the area within York's medieval walls, and with a (dead) population of well over 3 million. It's so big, stretching two kilometres along one of the main roads out of the city, that it has three separate tram stops and its own internal bus service.

I advised moogdroog, who has been busy lately organising resistance plans in the event of a zombie apocalypse, not to bother with Vienna. The city would be lost within hours.

Since the dead haven't yet risen to feast upon the brains of the living, I thought I'd go and take some photos while I had the chance. I gave myself a theme to make it more interesting: neglected or forgotten graves.

I thought this was an interesting contrast: in the background a grave drowning under fresh, colourful bouquets; in the foreground a grave neglected for so long that it's been torn apart by a tree trunk. Somebody must have come to cut the tree down, but not repair the grave.

This looked like a little girl's tomb, but the inscription was in Russian. No, I did not knock over the potted plant and stuffed toy for dramatic effect.

This was the oddest and saddest thing I saw - a marble cross inscribed "Beloved and Unforgotten" casually dumped on another grave by the side of the path. There wasn't a name on it, so I wondered if it even ever belonged to anyone.

New flat

Yesterday I signed on the dotted line for the flat I’ll be staying in from January until the end of April. I’m subrenting it from a retired Uraguayan painter who’s spending the winter with her relatives back home. Because she was having a hard time finding someone to fit this precise four-month window, which through sheer good luck happens to be my four-month window as well, I’ve got a pretty good deal.

It’s in an neighbourhood I’ve never been to before, but it looks interesting. There are students everywhere, a couple of small bookshops, a chocolate shop which sells confectionary of such extravagance that the first time I walked past the window I thought it was a jewellers, and some traditional-looking cafés and restaurants alongside the compulsary kebab shops and trendy bars.

Best of all, there’s a British/Irish pub with quiz nights on Tuesday and across the street an English supermarket. Well, it’s not really a supermarket, it’s just two rooms, but it sells all manner of English culinary specialities. Not just your Marmite and your Worcestershire Sauce, either. These people have gone the whole way. Tyrrell’s crisps, Lyon’s golden syrup, custard powder, an impressive variety of teas and real ales.

The main ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce: Englishness

It’s pricey though. A box of Yorkshire Tea, RRP £2.99, will set you back €5.70. A £1.29 bottle of Worcestershire Sauce costs €2.40. That’s a 100% markup. The question is, how much will I be willing to pay for a taste of home? In other words: just how much do I love my country?

Squeaky floors

My two flatmates are recluses. I’ve spoken to each of them twice in the last week. The first is a PhD biology student from Norway who doesn’t speak much German, but he gave me a can of beer when I first arrived, so he’s okay.

The second is a short, middle-aged German called Jürgen who walks about with an inadequately buttoned-up shirt. The first thing he said to me, after telling me his name, was ‘If you have a can, it goes in the white bin,’ pointing at the black bin. Then I saw him this morning. He said ‘hello’, I said ‘good morning’, and that was it.

The kitchen floor is also really squeaky. It has a lino covering, but the floorboards beneath squeak like crazy. It’s like walking about on the face of a giant angry mouse.

I need to go to the university library this afternoon, which will be exciting since I’ve never used it before. I get confused in the main university building because it reminds me so much of York campus.

The University of York

The University of Vienna

Vinegraveyard

Since I was having a highly unproductive day today, I decided to cut my losses and go exploring some of the hills on the northern edge of the city. I hopped on a tram which took me to the endearingly-named suburb of Nussdorf, ‘nut village’, which has its own suburb of well-to-do houses nestling on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald.

Some of these houses were more like mansions, complete with security gates and German Shepherds dozing in the yard. I walked past the home of the Moroccan ambassador to Austria, which was most impressive. I thought better of standing outside and taking a photo, so you’ll just have to trust me.

This man has a much nicer house than you

Above the mansions, overlooking the distant, misty metropolis of Vienna below, was an entire hillside of deserted vineyards. I followed an old cobbled path up the hill, passing one or two people walking their dogs. A vineyard is a haunting place in the winter, a cold, colour-drained hangover to the bacchic excess of the summer.

Bacchus, who knew that no party was complete without nude, drunk infants peeing on the floor

There was a woman sat on a bench with a thermos and a book; I would have asked out of curiosity what she was reading, but for that unfortunate social norm which would compel a woman sitting in a deserted vineyard to regard any strange male who approached her as a potential rapist or worse.

I walked on. On each side passed row after row of naked vines, clinging to their poles and wires like frozen snakes. The only trace of life was an occasional clutch of grapes hanging limp and shrivelled in the still air. Empty holiday chalets, which no doubt sat in a bucolic paradise of green and purple in July and August, now looked like tombs in the middle of a graveyard. Anyway, here are some photos.

It was very peaceful, and I hope to go back up there for some hill running.

Tell me baby, do you recognise me?

It seems I am developing a habit of returning to Vienna every three years.

I first came here on a German course in the summer of 2003. I remember the heavy heat which left the entire city weary and breathless for weeks on end; our landlord, who owned a family bakery on the ground floor and every week brought up a tray of unsold loaves and sweet pastries, and once asserted that northern Germans had no culture because they ate schnitzel with mustard. I remember walking back from class with my roommate the day I turned 23 and telling him how much I hated having a fuss made on my birthday, minutes before we entered the flat to the extravagant surprise party he had arranged with our other flatmates.

Three years later I was back, to a different flat and a better school. This summer was even hotter, bad enough to kill off thousands of old French people and bring the rest of Europe to its sweating knees. I had a flatmate who had fled the USA as a teenager and spoke a curious, half-remembered kind of English, and sometimes used my laptop to arrange gay intrigues in the city. I visited the opera and the famous Heuriger, the wine taverns that cluster on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald, and stayed at the parochial house of a village called Pinkafeld, whose Indian parish priest happened to be a classmate of mine.

Now it’s 2009 and I’m back again, this time for three weeks, then from January to April. I went for a wander into the city last night to watch the city tugging on its Christmas finery. Most of the decorations are already up, well before the real tourist season of December. I was also here for a conference in early December 2006 and found the place heaving, its Weihnachtsdörfer, Christmas Villages, packed with heavily-wrapped tourists clutching cups of Glühwein in their mittened hands, the air booming with the songs of those great Viennese composers, George Michael and Bing Crosby.

Last night George and Bing were at the Christmas Village on Maria Theresa Platz, but the tourists weren’t; that is, not in anything like the numbers that December will bring. It was good to walk between the rows of huts without being crushed, thinking about buying a hot drink or a crepe of a piece of Christmas tat, maybe a hand-carved Santa or a little wooden nutcracker, and deciding not to because Christmas Villages are not designed for solitary enjoyment.

Instead I moved on, pausing only to take a snap of Maria Theresa - a kind of Austrian Queen Victoria - squatting graciously and approvingly above us.