Day Two

Leipzig again.  Thought that I would be more tired following what I assumed would be a hard slog in the car the day before, but see above (below?) about how easy a journey it was.  I probably didn’t need the rest day in the end, I could have very easily kept moving and been in Poland by now.  

Bit frustrated by consequence; being in Germany doesn’t really feel like I’ve got started yet, I’m still on familiar ground, communicating in a language I understand.  I even ran into someone I knew in the afternoon!  Pretty hilarious - a music contact with whom I’ve always been friendly in a peripheral kind of a way.  She and her husband are planning exactly the same sort of journey I’m on in a week or two as well only longer - they’ll be going into Scandinavia, which was the original plan for me, but I decided to shelve that for next year.  

There was practical stuff today, too.  A financial advisor who has been looking for my business rang and had a chat with me.  I did some singing.  Spoke to my wife.  Sent a couple of emails.  I could have been just around the corner from home.  I did visit the Thomaskirche though, where J.S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn worked, and took a selfie or two by their statues.  I’ve sung a truckload of their work and would have told you that Bach was the be-all and end-all until quite recently (and it’s not as though I still don’t think he’s pretty awesome), so that was good to do.  I visited the Bach Museum later on too, which was good to tick off.  Looking at his family tree, it would seem that all his relatives going in both directions were called either Johann Christian or Johann Christoph, by the way - family reunions must have been really confusing.  

I’m going Poland tomorrow.  I’m visiting an old stomping ground first in Görlitz, which is right on the border of Poland and Germany.  I have been there many many times and it was the scene of many a misadventure so there’ll be a fair amount of nostalgia and regret there.  I didn’t actually mean to put it on the itinerary, but I decided on Leipzig as a stop-off into Poland instead of Berlin because I’ve been to Berlin so often, and to get to Wrocław from Leipzig you pretty much have to go through Görlitz.  

I worked for far too long for far too little in Görlitz, for a really pretty despicable director.  The friendships and relationships I had there were complicated too, and some of them didn’t end well.  There is a mixture of shame, regret and nostalgia about the place, but also satisfaction that my career has moved on from needing to be there.  But, me being me, that makes me sad, too.  I don’t always deal with letting go well.    

I didn’t mean to put it on the schedule, but maybe it’ll be a really important part of the trip - to show me what I was, what I don’t want to be, and that I’m moving on to something else.  A quick trip down memory lane, a coffee with a friend, and then onward.  We’ll see.   

The Alan W Memorial Tour

My father died last year.  It has been...... quite a thing, as I guess it is for everyone when they lose a parent.  My situation is made somewhat more complicated for lots of reasons though, being that I lived on the other side of the planet from him for some seventeen and a half years before he died, and that he was actually my adoptive father.  He was my mother’s second husband and adopted me at the same time that they got married.  I had zero contact with my biological father from the ages of about two through sixteen, so when I talk about fathers and dads I definitely mean my adoptive father, being that he was the man that brought me up.  He’s also the only man I would dream of calling “Dad”.  It’s complicated, and I might get into some of the whys and wherefores of all of that over the next few weeks; we’ll see.  In the interim, go and watch Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise.  It’ll help provide context.  

Dad died at the tail-end of a tour I had in Australia, just before I was about to head into a really hectic period singing in an opera in Cologne.  After the opera finished, things got very complicated with legal stuff, and then Covid hit.  There has been..... a lot on the table since he left us, much of it related to him and much of it not.  As many of us have  (I guess), I’ve been putting out a lot of fires lately, and I’ve wanted to spend some time on my own thinking about him, listening to his music, trying to come to grips with his legacy (financial and otherwise) and what sort of a man I want to be moving forward in his absence.  My life is going to change hugely in the next few months, I’m not allowed to work anyway, and it seemed to me to be a a good time to spend some time alone, go on a long-ish journey, and think.  The subsequent posts will be the results of that.