Brides

My camera and I walked round Bonn for an hour and a half this morning trying to get under its manicured and carefully protected skin and we couldn't. I found postcards and I found beggars, neither of which I want to photograph.

Half an hour on the train and we were in Cologne which is completely different: brides running round street corners, workers striding along railway tracks, kitchen workers leaning on bins for a quick smoke, a mournful accordion player behind the cathedral, Mark Rylance standing at one end of the bridge quietly holding a pile of papers under his arm and smiling enigmatically at passers-by as he waited, and waited...

Or maybe it was his doppelgänger.

And now I'm home and straight back to work. Like, I mean, this evening. The employer who, in an unsympathetic email on the day I went away, forced that deathline on me received their very last pound of flesh at 23:58 tonight. Before that email I'd intended to concede some blood, maybe even some future sweat but that will not now happen.

The extra is the Kennedy Bridge in Bonn.