IN A COFFEE CUP

Moving up to the Drive Thru window, I order my regular soy cappuccino.
“Would you like a Wallfahrt with that? Some Bohemia? A Warsaw Pact? Honey? Bread? Or perhaps Red or White Main Water?”
With no knowledge of the ingredients, I consider the options.

A pinch of Bohemia requires a crash course in Kingdoms, Reichs and Republics, of noblemen and Nazis. Are the Germans, Hungarians and Austrians in or out? Can the Sudeten and Egerland Germans stay or must they go? We’d have to draw some lines around Bavaria, Saxony, Silesia, Austria and Moravia, moving them multiple times over. Ultimately after an age, with a final declaration of surrender to the Czechs and Slovaks everyone gets to go home.

The option of a Wallfahrt comes with a list of considerations and a demand for commitment to a pilgrimage not always comfortable. Purpose, places and paths form the framework for determination. Bombastic baroque delights, jewelled skeletons and effervescent angels await via Volkenroda to Waldsassen. The twelve stations of the cross, quiet Capellas with warm glowing candles along the St James Way, offer up space for contemplation and reflection. Protestant, Catholic, Ecumenical or Unitarian, a shedding of self, a discovery of God, grace and greatness. An ultimate surrender to the Sovereign and realignment with reality.

For a piece of Warsaw Pact, we bite down into Cold War ideology rather than arm up with infantry and ammunition. A ‘red collective counter weight’ for NATO is formed, to determine who’s in the Eastern ‘socialist sandwich’. From the Fichtelgebirge mountains of Schneeberg and Grosser Kornburg, German surveillance bust open secrets, uncover cohorts and collusion, stabilising security in the Western Alliance. Battle lines are drawn as in a game of Risk, with readjustments and the 1989 reunification the final roll of the dice.

To choose ‘Bread’ in this context of offerings requires explanation and is unquestionably unappetizing. Through the Fichtelgebirge, Steinwald and Fränkische Schweiz, along the Fränkische Gebirgsweg, the dark towering, fairy-tale provoking Spruce is the most stumbled over, slipped on and stood under tree. Earning the moniker from its economic metrics; the fast growing, quick harvesting, profit yielding, ‘bread tree’ generated funds for the payment of repartitions, delivered sustainably to the rebuilding efforts of WWII and continues to dominate forestry practice. With the realisation that “Man cannot live by bread alone”, a transition away from monoculture to a ‘multi-culture’ is outlined in the German Forest Act and commemorated on a 50-cent piece. Ultimately confirming that amongst the diversified ecosystem objectives and benefits, forestry is still all about ‘coin’.

A spoonful of honey requires a significant quantity of bees. Amongst the bounteous corn and sugar beet plots, (successfully used for biogas/ biomethane production), and beneath colossal wind turbines, the “Insect Protection Action Programme” is hiding. Along the edges of ploughed fields, in small patches of otherwise farmed and fertilised soil, a government subsidised glad array of corn flowers, yarrow, poppies, sunflowers, daisies, clover, dandelion, and other bright coloured flowers stand boldly beguiling bees. There’s a magic in embracing the classic and ancient, an exit from agricultural hubris to botanical mélange. The benefits of biodiversity if we just, ‘let it bee’.

To wash this all down, there’s the option of Red or White Main. Running over granite in the Fichtelgebirge, straight from the spring at the foot of the all- seeing Ochsenkopf mountain, the White Main water washes clear towards Red. The Red Main, rising in the hills of the Franconian Switzerland Jura mountain range, runs red over clay soil. In a quest for something stronger the two headstreams trickle, meander, then surge downstream, uniting to form the mighty Main, taking all they have seen and heard deep into the Rhein.

Upon careful consideration, contemplation and rumination, I reach out, grab the coffee and realise, “I got all of that in a take away cup”.