The favorite sin: sitting outside
Once a week, I meet my friend Stephan Bartels from the ChroniquesDuVasteMonde for breakfast at half past eight in the morning. Every Thursday, for about four years, and we always sit outside. In front of a coffee shop that is also popular with our colleagues. In the summer they like to sit down with us, in the autumn they start to complain, in the winter they walk shaking their heads past us into the inside and show through the side of them, one has to say: fogged by their exhalations with the gloved fingers on us. But we are sitting outside. The woman behind the coffee counter knows us by now, she also sets us a table and two chairs with ice and snow in the open air (rain is not an issue, there is a canopy, and even if there was none: we are, as you at says us in the north, not sugar).
That's what I think now, when I'm on the road and in front of every sidewalk café, in front of every bar I have to deal with the question: Are we staying outside or are we going in? This in connection with the standard formulation: When the sun is gone, it will quickly "quite fresh". Luise once even suggested that it was "too windy" to eat outside. That is, it was a breeze, not that in the storm, the lasagna would have worked off the plate like a bad toupee from the head.
Being outside is good, but being inside is not like that. That's actually consensus. For example, there is the word "couch potato", but not the word "outdoor stool". That is, until just did not have the word. Now it's there, and I can say, I'm an outdoor stool. I extend the summer for myself into infinite by just always staying outside, especially when the summer is over for the others. For, as I have already suggested, sitting outside becomes exciting only when others freeze. The others think: being outside is good, sometimes in wind and weather, but only if you move. But I just sit there.
This is no longer reasonable from October, because from several years of experience, I can say: sitting outdoors does not harden, it makes you more likely to catch cold, but colds are better tolerated outdoors than indoors, in dry heating air. Especially the humidification of the respiratory tract is the alpha and omega when it comes to wearing colds, and what could better moisturize than the wet and cold northern German climate.
Most of us are born in confined spaces and then spend most of their lives there, a life behind double-insulated windows, tilted at best. This is not good. Man wants to breathe, it does not work any other way. I do not want to be a houseplant, I want to feel that I'm a plaything of the elements. I have to go to the office early enough. I do not feel cold. In the evening I warm myself under heated mushrooms and woolen blankets provided by enterprising restaurateurs, in the morning, in front of our coffee shop, the uncomprehending glances of the others warm me.
There are even more favorite sins of Till Raether here.
