[HD-2] A couple people and some rooms
Oh hello! You have made it to Bonn. You have walked along the Rhine from your hotel for half an hour, along the stunted trees and the old churches, and walked up the hill. You have passed the glitzy hotel and stood in line and taken off your belt at security and now you are in the Bonn World Conference Centre. You are at the Bonn Climate Conference. Welcome! I am Bernard Soubry, of course, and this is your second email.
Are you intimidated? Do not be intimidated. A conference on climate change is just a bunch of people and some rooms. Here, let me tell you about the rooms:
The Plenary Hall is a blue whale's stomach. There are long tables spanning the width of the space, clean white ribs. There is an impossibly tall ceiling, recessed with little cupolas lit with a low blue glow. You will sit here for six hours today to hear the chair ask countries to limit their statements to three minutes (they will not), and then for any objections to the programme of work (oh, there are). Oh, Lord! You will cry, like Jonah. Deliver me. So warm and cozy, this room is, you will not notice you are being digested.
But here is the main hall! Someone has taken the sky and fractured it into a hundred strutted shards. It is like you are walking on a frying pan and some TV-novelty cook has set a fractalled lid over you. “Look at how beautiful this sucker is,” they say to the camera, which is zooming in on hundreds of masked delegates wandering the hall for a single coffee cart between sessions. “It’s so nice in there, they don’t even know they’re cooking.” The main hall’s function is sky gone weird.
Big neon lights in the side rooms, set in a square over the negotiating tables and their big empty central space. Everyone here can see everyone else picking their nose. And those behind, in the observer seats, crane their necks to look past the giant screens that detail the next day’s schedule. Neon and blue light, angles and talk: side rooms are the inside of a copy machine, and you are either the toner or the thing being copied.
I see you are uncomfortable now. Here, let me take you to the Chambers - the second biggest room. Huge screen. A wonder people don’t buzz off and watch a movie on it, yes, but they are busy - the G77/China country group coordinates in here in the mornings, presumably over orange juice and waffles. The IPCC gives its warnings here, the screen showing a line of wildfire eating up the California coast. But it is a pleasant room for these things, because the room is made of glass and curves, and in the early afternoon the sun diffracts across the wall in white and colour such that you feel like you are sitting in a crystal egg. You can almost imagine the old German politicians who came here—this used to be the Bundestag—closing their eyes and saying, yes, let my words become light. Oho! Already I am being optimistic.
You are still uncomfortable, I see. Maybe you do not need the rooms. Maybe you need to duck into a part of the venue that, incredibly, no one seems to use at all. Through another security checkpoint and behind all the meetings, there is Outside: a little courtyard that connects the conference centre and the UNFCCC offices.
You can sit here, as opposed to perch. Soft sunlight that does not ask anything of you. Freshly mown grass blooming in your nose. A poplar’s leaves, fifty feet up, soft-scritching in the light wind. A Japanese maple whose roots form a perfect nestling spot. In the distance, a flash of blue Rhine, joggers and old people and coal barges cruising along. Wordless, badgeless, no agenda. Outside you can sit and eat a muffin in between three sessions, and think about nothing; let your eyes adjust to magpies and robins, your hands relax, your blue polyester suit litter with bark and grass clippings.
Oh, but the joint plenary is starting! It is time to go back in. What’s that? You don’t want to? Hey, where are you going? Come back, please. Come back!
Outside/inside,
B
PS: I have heard that it can be a lot to read these emails day after day. My suggestion: do not try to read them day after day! Just create a little folder in your email programme. Call it "Hofgarten Days". And when you get these messages, drag it in there and forget about it until you have an hour or so when you can read a bunch at once. It can be very pleasant this way.