Since I moved to Mainz two years ago my wife has remained in Berlin and we have been searching for a suitable place to live in Mainz or its surroundings. The original plan was to buy a piece of land on which we could build a house. This turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. The only land within our financial horizons was in small villages with almost no infrastructure or had other major disadvantages from our point of view. Eventually, after wasting a lot of time and effort, we stopped searching in the surroundings and looked for something in Mainz itself. Of course this was not easy but eventually we decided to buy a house (still to be built) within a small housing scheme in the district of Mainz called Bretzenheim. There is very little land available in Mainz and the scheme where we will be living is an example of the way in which the few remaining open spaces are being filled up, driven by the high property prices. The house was finished in March and I moved in on a provisional basis on 1st April, giving up my appartment, exactly two years after starting my job in Mainz. (Goodbye Jackdaws! The first birds I saw in what will be our garden were a Carrion Crow, which I am not taking as a bad omen, and a Black Redstart.) Our belongings left Berlin on 16th April and arrived in Mainz on 17th. Eva came to Mainz definitively on the 16th. So now there can be no doubt that a new era has begun for us.
The new house is conveniently situated. From there I can walk to the mathematics institute in 20 minutes and to the main train station in half an hour. It is near the end of a tram line coming from the station. Very close to where the houses have been built a Merovingian grave was found. When the garden centre a little further up the hill was being built the grave of a Merovingian warrior was found who had been buried with his horse. It is just as well for us that the archeologists did not dig too deep or we might have had to wait a long time before we could move in. Whenever you dig a hole in Mainz you are in danger of encountering a distant past and potential problems with the archeology department of the city. To show what can happen I will give an example. In the district of Gonsenheim there is a small stream, the Gonsbach. At some time when progress was fashionable the winding stream was straightened. Later an EU directive came into force which said that streams like this which had been straightened had to be made winding again, for ecological reasons, within a certain number of years. By now the deadline has been reached, or almost reached for the Gonsbach, and the city has started measures to attempt to comply with the directive. They started to dig and found … a Roman settlement. The work had to be stopped, for archeological reasons. So now, as far as I know, the archeological and ecological regulations and the city officials representing them are in deadlock.
Since I am British it is a curiosity for me that one suggested origin of the name Bretzenheim is that it is named after the Britons. It has been suggested that it could be identified with a certain vicus Brittaniae where the Roman Emperor Severus Alexander was murdered in the year 235. The evidence for this seems limited and an alternative hypothesis says that it was named after a locally important man called Bretzo. I cannot imagine what the Britons would have been doing there. Another theory is that the emperor was murdered in Britain and not in Mainz.
Hydrobates 
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