Poll (non-)result & a dual celebration

Hello subscribers,

First of all: last week’s theme poll had a very low turnout and no real result, with all four options on a par, namely at two votes each for DT & nuclear power stations, DT & reflections, DT & furniture and DT & hands. It’s a bit disappointing that there was so little interest in the poll so I may not have another attempt at running such a poll for quite some time. As for the (non-)result, I will just field all four options one after the other over the coming months in no particular order.
  

Anyway, today’s poll in Germany is much more important of course. The general elections are to decide who will succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor after her 16 years in office. It’s looking very tight, a three-party coalition is likely and there may be a number of possible constellations. It’ll probably take a long period of tricky coalition negotiations, quite likely accompanied by plenty of mud-slinging in the media (both social and traditional).
  

On a more positive note, last Thursday, 23 September 2021, I had two reasons to celebrate, which I also marked with a new Blog post. One reason was that it was the day that my book was released in Germany (and Austria and Switzerland) by LK Verlag. In the UK and the US (and the rest of the world) the release date remains 26 October (interestingly that also applies to German Amazon). But by ordering direct from LK Verlag you can get your copy now, provided you’re in one of the three countries they ship to.

It so happened that that date was also my and my wife’s 15th wedding anniversary (apparently it’s called “Crystal Anniversary”), so that was the other reason for celebrating. We kept it low-key, though, I just picked my wife up after work and we went for a couple of nice craft beers in town and then to an Italian bistro we had found has some Venetian dishes on its menu. And since we had gone to Venice last summer and discovered some of the distinctive cuisine of the region (very different from the global pizza-pasta formula!) we were curious. The food was delicious but a slight disappointment was that their mixologist wasn’t working behind the bar that evening so none of the rather intriguing list of cocktails were available. But we had a nice bottle of white wine from Friuli instead.

In Thursday’s Blog post I included a few photos pertaining to the Gothic wedding we had on 23 September 2006. I didn’t post any pictures with any of our guests in the frame, as I felt that was against privacy considerations, but I included a photo of the remarkable venue, of the equally remarkable wedding cake and of the theatre-prop coffin we had hired for part of the ceremony. It was quite unusual and I would say rather spectacularly theatrical, in that goth sense. We all had a fab day, even those normally not so into anything Gothic. For my wife and me it was indeed the best day of our lives.

In the post I also included a few of the pictures taken at special photo shoots before the wedding for which we picked two suitably Gothic-y-looking locations for backgrounds to pose in front of wearing our goth outfits, namely the Central Cemetery here in Vienna and Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire (a ruined Cistercian monastery administered by the National Trust). I then colour-treated the photos to further enhance their goth appeal and printed some in a larger format. Those prints we then used as part of the decorations at the wedding venue. The image above is one of those, and is one of my favourites of the whole series. It was taken in the well-preserved vaults of Fountains Abbey. In it my (then still to be) wife is wearing some outfit she had acquired from a very quirky designer shop in Stockholm …
  

What was not so much a reason to celebrate was/is that on that date of 23 September 2021 I also received a notification and several forms from the Austrian postal service concerning a shipment of three of my books in the Spanish version that was sent by my publishers, apparently from the UK (instead of from their German warehouse). The postal service now says they can’t deliver the package to me because of customs regulations (“unplausibler Warenwert” it says on the form, ‘implausible value of the goods’ - huh???). Basically I’d have to tell them what the parcel’s contents are worth and then pay import tax and duty (otherwise they either return or destroy it), and that’s because it’s come from a “Drittland”, meaning from outside the EU. Or put another way: it’s Brexit again, the gift that keeps on giving!
  

For my main website I’ve almost finished a number of new or revised chapters about places in eastern Poland and will probably upload those in the next few days. I’ll provide the links in the next newsletter.

But for this time that’s it.

Have a good week and, as always, stay safe,

best

Peter