It’s a strange word, and a strange thing to do. Not for nostalgic reasons, but to see if I could refresh some memories, I went up to the attic the other night to see if I could retrieve old letters from the time in Mannheim. I did. Not all the letters though. And it struck me what a different time it was, being young in the 90s. Before mobile phones and social media. That’s been talked about before, but looking at myself and my behaviour I could see what a interesting kind of contact-collecting mode I was in. I collected addresses and I wrote letters to anyone – to quite an extent for the chance of receiving letters. Funnily enough I seem to have been exchanging letters with people for no apparent reason, there was nothing about them I found interesting, other than them being girls perhaps. Or maybe it was some kind of loyalty to the kinship of having shared something, if but a few weeks on a location? Or simply a way to hold on, refusing to say goodbye? There’s something beautiful about the last idea. I’ll think more about it.

I also found some old city-maps of Mannheim. The city centre has an interesting design that goes back to the baroque epoque, I believe. All blocks are named according to a coordinate system. A,B,C, D… and 1,2,3… etc. So, my address when staying there was D4-4. I lived on fourth house on the block D4.

I have pondered the possibility of having this fact influencing my songs. So far, I haven’t found any interesting idea.