Last weekend’s Berlin trip was my first night away from Ingrid. It quite naturally became the end of night-time breastfeeding for us, without too much complaining.

Things would have been different even just a few months ago. Breastfeeding has been an important source of comfort and security for her. Whenever I have tried to cut out night feeds (and I’ve tried this every few months or so) she has been very upset. Sometimes she understood what I wanted and tried her best, really tried, but she couldn’t go back to sleep – she just lay there, tossing and turning and whimpering, for close to an hour. (After which I gave up, fed her, and we were both asleep within minutes.) As a result, both of us got even less sleep than usual during those nights, which is why I didn’t repeat the experiment too often.

This time she was upset the first night I wasn’t there, and then she accepted the new deal. For several nights she still woke once or twice, but didn’t even ask to breastfeed: just rolled closer to me, confirmed that I’m still there, and went back to sleep. The last 2 nights she’s had a cold, slept worse, and missed breastfeeding again, but now that I know she can do it, it’s a lot easier to refuse.

I was slightly concerned that this might be the end of breastfeeding for us. I feared that a 2-day separation plus no more night feeds would cause supply problems, and then she’d be less interested, leading to even lower supply, and thus even less interest. But that hasn’t happened – she’s still breastfeeding at least once a day, and generally both morning and evening.

You might think that 2 years of breastfeeding is enough, even more than enough. Somehow it’s become the cultural norm to wean as soon as you can, and definitely before the child’s a year old! (I have my theories about why this may be so, but that’s a separate topic.) Had you asked me two years ago how long I’d breastfeed, I would never have guessed that I’d go on for this long. But that was then. That was before I knew how enjoyable these moments would be for both of us – and before I had seen how natural and right this feels.

In another world, some humans stand out from others – they all have some sort of deformity (which is why they’re called Tesques, short for Grotesques) as well as an extra opening in their body. A minority of them also have a healing ability, which allows them to draw out the sickness from a human body and turn it into a physical “concretion” which is expelled through that opening.

Unfortunately Tesques have no rights to speak of, and healers are treated as no more than valuable slaves. They have no say in how their gift is used, and most are drained in less than 10 years.

The book is the life story of one such healer called Payne. Unlike most healers, Payne doesn’t seem to be affected by the Drain, and he manages to complete more complex healings than most of them. He is young, overconfident, and tries to do the impossible: to heal the Drain of another healer. The healing goes wrong, leaving the other healer in a worse state than before. Nevertheless both survive, which is enough to make Payne into a bit of a legend.

He starts out an idealist, as most young people do, wanting to help humans, caring for them. But as he is excluded from their communities – even a church in which he invests a lot of his energy – his optimism wanes, his alienation grows and slowly turns into rebellion.

This was a strange book: distant and dreamy. Payne remains distant from both his world and from the reader. There is no real engagement, and hardly any emotions. The story is a seemingly random selection of episodes from Payne’s life, with no clear overall path. Neither the external events nor Payne’s personal development have any clear direction. At the end, rather unexpectedly, the story turns into myth. This doesn’t fit the preceding 95% of the book at all, but somehow it still works quite well. Perhaps it’s just because I like myths, powerful in their unreality.

But taken as a whole, the book was an interesting and satisfying reading experience. Well-written, and distinctive enough to be worth reading.

Here’s the review at SF Site that made me want to read this book. I agree with just about everything in that review except their opinion of the ending.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

We had a company offsite/conference this weekend, in Berlin. My first overnight trip without Ingrid.

The weekend was an interesting experience in many ways.
Interesting to spend almost three whole days in only adult company.
Interesting to be out on town after dark.
Interesting to sleep alone in a bed.
Interesting to meet my colleagues outside of work. Some of them turned out to be not at all like I had expected, in a very positive way.

On Friday we flew to Berlin, had a sightseeing bus tour, and dinner together. Saturday morning we had the official “conference” part of the weekend, and then a free afternoon, and then dinner again, plus nightclubbing for those who were interested. Sunday, a few free hours and then flying back home.

The free afternoon and morning were meant to be spent together, but 3 days of constant socialising would have been more work for me than my actual work, so I skipped that and wandered off on my own. I felt a bit guilty at first but only for a short while – I really enjoyed exploring Berlin on my own. (I suspect I wasn’t the only one doing that, there’s at least one other odd guy in the company.)

Mostly I did a lot of walking. The highlight of the trip was Hackeschen Höfe, an area with eight small linked courtyards, filled with small shops and cafés. I also had time to see

• quite a lot of the S-bahn
• the Holocaust memorial (which was sort of impressive but didn’t feel like much of a memorial)
• the park of Tiergarten
• a few remaining bits of the Wall
• the Siegessäule (that landmark pillar with a golden statue of Victory on top – the one in Wings of Desire), including climbing up to the top of it (285 steps)
• the quarters around the parliament, Brandenburger Tor, etc
• one nice church (St. Hedwig’s) and another nice church (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche)
• a replica of the world’s first traffic light

One afternoon and one short morning is far from enough to get a good feeling for a city, of course. But from what I had time to see, Berlin as a whole wasn’t really my kind of town. Too large, too flat. It’s full of broad straight boulevards, lined by flat facades. There were some interesting houses but even those had been placed in straight lines. And too much grey stone, too little colour.

The one thing that struck me about Berlin is how full it is of history. There are monuments, plaques, exhibitions in parks and along streets. There’s the Wall, of course. There is history everywhere, and it is so present, so close to the surface. I could not walk through the city without thinking about all that has happened there. I wonder if Berliners think as much about history all the time. After all, what’s history for me is just “the past” for many of them – they’ve lived through it themselves.

PS: Photos here.

The downtime this weekend was due to an unfortunate failure in communications. Even more unfortunately the problem coincided with me being away for three days, so I didn’t even notice it myself until just recently.

I’m back now, anyway.

I recall posting some time ago about how becoming a parent hasn’t really changed me. I have to modify that statement a bit. I have changed. I have developed patience.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

For the record, the weather here is now officially freezing. Yesterday we woke up to a frost-covered lawn. I am starting to realize that I will need to buy some sort of winter boots and a winter coat.