Needles in Haystacks
On Tuesday, some rather useful documents were inadvertently placed in a container that the office cleaning personnel rightly regarded as trash, so out they went that evening with lots of other paper, and yesterday at dawn a giant garbage truck came along and swallowed the lot up. The vehicle spent the remainder of the day trundling around Munich, stuffing itself with waste paper and then compressing the ever-increasing contents of its belly into a compact mass.
The first reaction to the absence of the papers was shock, but there was still the hope that they were waiting to be taken away. The curtain was pulled on this sliver of optimism, however, when the head of the cleaning staff arrived and, full of sympathy for our plight, confirmed that they were definitely gone. For a moment, doubt clouded the picture. But only for a moment.
Next stop was Wittmann, the firm that operates the garbage trucks, and the people there turned out to be enormously helpful. They quickly identified the one that had collected the papers earlier in the day and were able to pinpoint where it was later scheduled to disgorge its contents. Thus informed, with colleague and friend Birgit Roberts at the wheel, we set off to Garching in the north of the city and the premises of M?r Recycling GmbH.
We were welcomed there by David Ward, who arrived in southern Germany from Scotland as a two-year-old, and now sports an authentic Bavarian accent. With so many trucks arriving and so many machines processing their contents, we'd have about half-an-hour to search for our documents, he said, wishing us good luck. Sure enough, at 3.30 pm, the white monster we were expecting arrived and unloaded a cube that was soon broken down to hill of cardboard, a field of newspapers and a river of shredded paper.
Because yesterday was a day when the sky rained fire and the temperature neared 30 degrees, the heat, dirt, dust and noise in the delivery area would have delighted any Dante. In this setting, and with the help of a pair of very decent men from the fringes of greater Europe, we set to sorting. To the delight of all present, what we were looking for, was found. Crumpled, crushed and traumatised they were, to be sure, but they emerged relatively well considering all the pressure they'd been under during the day.
The moral I draw from the story is that when you put your hand into a haystack, faith, or hope, or whatever you wish to call it, will guide it. But only if you believe that the thing you're looking for is in there — otherwise your search will be in vain. So if your day has started badly today, don?t despair. Things that appear to be lost are just waiting to be found.
Diarist of the day: Robert Musil, 5 June 1913"The motion of a woman on a horse has — seen from beneath, from a bench — an immense sensuality about it. As if, with each step, she were being seized from below by a wave and lifted upward."
