About

This blog is just one of many, painting an anecdotal picture of life in London.
It is a purely private project and therefore extremely subjective, just the way personal experiences are.

Who is behind this blog? Is it anonymous?

I don’t have any ambition to remain anonymous, yet I don’t want to water down the web identity based on my real name. So I leave it up to you to figure out who I really am.

I aim to take privacy serious, my own and that of others. In some cases I may publish photos of people, but I will only rarely identify people by name. Should anybody object to anything I am doing here, may I kindly ask to contact me.

Contact me also to get access to photos that are not shown here, if you have a reason to do so. I have quite a few event photos (yes, including people pictures) in restricted areas.

Why are so many articles in German?

Because I am German. I started writing this blog in German because I wanted to keep practicing my German writing skills. Makes sense, doesn’t it? In 2010 I decided to blog in English.

Didn’t you write anything in 2008/2009?

That is slightly tricky to answer. I actually started this blog in 2008 and planned to write about my London experiences from Day 1: 4th January 2005. Over time I would catch up with the present. That was the plan, but after two years of continuous blogging about a distant past, I realised that it would take me many more years just to catch up. But who wants to read articles about the past? Well, a surprising number of people do, but I personally prefer to write about things as they happen, or not too long after.

Anyways, after thinking the whole thing through, I decided to revamp the whole blog without giving up my past efforts: I am now blogging about more or less current things, and I am doing it in English. And I am continuing to catch up in German. Yes, this blog is now bi-lingual:

• German articles cover the years 2005 until 2009 (well, they will eventually).
• English articles cover the years 2010 onwards.

Perhaps I’ll write German summaries for current articles or English summaries for the odd old article. Don’t know yet.

Where does the name commonliner come from?

Isn’t it obvious? From this domain!

commonline.org had a history before this blog. In the old times, the name did make perfect sense. Some old content is actually still lying around on several subdomains for archiving purposes, which is why I didn’t want to give up the domain name. After lying dormant for about three years, I resurrected commonline.org as my official London-blog in 2007. Quite fitting, as I have become known as commonliner. Not sure if this is a good thing.

Why do you emphasise the first ‘on’ in commonlondon?

The domain name commonline.org used to be a pun, open to multiple meanings. This kind of works for commonlondon as well: I can think of three or four (perhaps more?) interpretations, some of them are rather awkward, though.

My current favourite is: Communication on London

What about the yellow rucksack?

It’s a Manhattan Passage Climber; a brand which is apparently marketed primarily in Japan. Purchased ages ago in Frankfurt/Germany for only 7.77 DM, about £3 at that time. I would never have thought that this thing would survive all these years. Into the washing machine every now and then, and it’s yellow as on its first day.

I actually don’t like this filthy rucksack too much, but it became a very useful identification tool – especially when meeting up with people I’ve never met before. So, should you see a man with a yellow rucksack on his back, talk to him. Maybe it’s me, but even if not, I’m sure it will be an interesting person!