Tight-Fisted Auld Git..

...is what you might call me, but I don't care!

I was looking in the fridge for something to have for lunch...opened the freezer and found...this!!

Yes, a bottle of Augustiner...frozen solid. Amazingly it hadn't cracked - but this is still a potential disaster. At the moment it is thawing in the kitchen and later I will simply have to try and drink it.

This happened to me once before, many many years ago, and the bottle had actually cracked but the beer was still frozen. It took me many hours of creative thinking before I finally was forced to admit that I would have to sling it because the danger of swallowing glass splinters was too great even if I poured the thawed out beer through a fine sieve...

It still rankles that I had to throw it away.

Body Clock Alarm

It's 9.55 and according to a programme I saw the other day about the body clock, I have about 2 more hours to go before I am out of the heart attack danger zone.

It seems that in the morning hours from waking till midday, first of all your blood vessels are less flexible than at other times, secondly you have more likelihood of fatty deposits building up inside them and, thirdly, as if that were not enough, your blood is actually thicker than later on in the day...presumably after it has been watered down by intakes of alcohol following a lunchtime pint...

As if waking up isn't bad enough!

On the tele they underlined my newly postulated vulnerability by showing endoscopic views of blood vessels sort of contracting and heart valve-looking things sort of labouring away at pumping thick viscous blood on its ponderous journey.

I HATE those kind of pictures! Just looking at them makes my heart start straining and complaining as if it's suddenly realised what a hard job it has to do and I get into that mentality of "listening" to it, listening to it beating away...almost taking conscious control of it - like I used to with my breathing as a kid...an awful situation where you end up desperately trying to stop thinking about doing it ...breathe in, now breathe out, in again....out - hey, heart! ...keep beating! Breathe...in er.. out ...BEAT!!

90 more minutes ...

Odysseus Becalmed

It has been rumoured, not without just cause, that, like Odysseus on his way home from Troy, I have been becalmed. And indeed, 'tis true!

I have been drifting aimlessly in the bloggy doldrums, the sea gurgling idly around my soggy timbers and slapping gently against my bows, here in the midst of the Sea of Apathy.

But now I sense the faint stirring of a breeze somewhere off over the horizon, the slightest ripple of the sails...could it be that my journey recommences at last...?

Baaaaaaah, Humbug...

Off the Ale

One of the clever functions of new religions is taking over the festivals and traditions of previous religions, adapting and adopting them and fitting them into the new system. The Romans did it with the Greek gods and goddesses and then took over the various divinities of the tribes they conquered and renamed the deities with Latin names. And then there's the intermingling of traditions and fables which link lots of religions - just take the Osiris story and its biblical parallels as an example.

Anyhow, one more example of this is Lent, of which we are in the middle just now. 40 days of fasting and stuff to prepare for Easter. The word Lent comes from the Saxon word lencten which simply means spring and the tradition itself of giving up eating or in some way "purifying" yourself goes way back into the darkest depths of our ancient common past.

In deepest Bavaria this time is called Fastenzeit where the emphasis is on fasting - this was the inspiration for the monks to create their Starkbier (strong beer - with about 7% alcohol content upwards) which I have referred to in reverent terms in other previous posts!

When I lived in Greece back in the last century (ARGH!!) they took this period fairly seriously (seriously in Greek terms at least, i.e. more like "seriously") and if you went into a restaurant during that period the waiter would ask if you were fasting, in which case you would be given a separate Lent menu with unleavened bread and all sorts of other special Lent-conforming meals most of which tasted brilliant!

Well, coincidentally to Lent, I decided to give up alcohol for a while ...this did not come as a consequence of any religious epiphany but after a particularly boozy weekend on the Guinness Tour with my Irish band which left me feeling decidedly wasted. I am now coming up to 4 weeks during which time barely a drop of alcoholic beverage has crossed my lips.

It got me thinking whether it might not be a bad idea, in these days of luxury and excess, to give up for a while something which we believe we cannot do without ...say, TV or the mobile phone, or driving, etc., etc. When I was living alone in the early 90s I didn't have a TV. As a result I experienced a huge sense of liberation and suddenly discovered that I had a whole lot of time on my hands which I could use for different, more productive/enjoyable things ...

Hmm, I am even thinking of suggesting this to my kids ...

On the other hand maybe lack of alcohol has completely addled my mind...?

How Could Anyone Go By Car...

...when you could travel by the Munich branch of
Siberian public transport?

It was minus 18°C this morning at 7.00 as I was on my way to teach and there was a razor breeze which slit open my cheeks and froze the contents of my paranasal sinuses along with most of the frontal lobes of my brain.


Up there on the left you can see the u-bahn station, cold, depressing, concrete, functional... and turning to the right (below) the welcoming warmth of the open plan bus shelter and the 172 bus in cool blue and a pale pink stalag-style block in the background with a few lifeless trees to give you a last little psychological flash-freeze treatment.







It's days like this when sitting at home in bed translating seem so very appealing...

How Windows Make You Sad...

I mean windows windows, not Windows windows. Everyone knows how Windows windows make you sad. And angry, and frustrated, and computer-cidal.

Changing our window windows - 1934 original, beautifully designed, draughty, energy-profligate windows for brand new, 2009, double-glazed, energy-efficient but totally anonymous windows.

3 steps:

From this...
to this...and finally this...
Yes, I know the old windows were, well, old... and rusty and broken and draughty and they HAD to be replaced but I still feel as if we did a lobotomy on the house.

Shed a tear or two I did (yes, I agree - I am going totally nuts).

Still, Biddy made the brilliant suggestion that I keep some of the old pieces of stained glass so that she can make something from them, so we will have a reminder.

While the work was being done I was talking to a neighbour who told me that our local, the Sefton Arms, is going to CLOSE DOWN in about 4 weeks!

Shock, horror!!

Another lobotomy...

And I know I would much rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

Chrissy Pud

There will be seven of us at the table for Xmas Dinner this year and I went round everyone asking if it would be a terrible disaster if we didn't have a Chrissy pud just this once - this being due to the fact that I had cancelled my trip to Liverpool in November when I would have brought a pud back and not knowing where I could rustle one up in Deepest Bavaria. The reaction was more or less what I expected; no one was really bothered, in fact hardly anyone really liked Chrissy pud anyway.

I hated it as a kid. It's just not a kids' dessert - all those dark and spicy tastes - but I ate it because there was money in it!

Literally.

Deep inside the inner darkness of the pud threepenny bits and tanners (sixpenny bits) were lurking and if there was one in your dollop of pudding you could keep it. I actually had a love/hate relationship with that tradition too. I loved the money of course but hated biting into a piece of pudding and nearly breaking my teeth on the hard metal coin and having that taste of ... erm, coin (didn't you put coins in your mouth when you were a kid??). In the end I used to eat my Chrissy pud without completely closing my jaws.

Look, there's a threepenny bit - weren't they brilliant? In fact, wasn't that nutty pounds, shillings and pence currency brilliant too? There is just something wonderfully anarchic about having a currency where 12 pence make one shilling and 20 shillings make a pound. The fun we had at school adding and multiplying all that lot!

Pound notes, ten bob notes and then the coins... I am (believe it or not) too young to remember farthings but the concept of having a coin worth a quarter of a penny - great! And then threepences which where a quarter of a shilling and sixpences which were of course half. Then there was the half crown, worth two shillings and sixpence (2/6) - half of something that didn't exist any more (apparently crowns were minted until the sixties but I never saw one in normal day to day transactions nor did I ever hear of anyone who had seen one). Eight of these half crowns of course made a pound. Eight!

And all this calculating in base 12 and base 20 never seemed strange or difficult. You could buy, say, three things in a shop which cost 3s 6d, 10s 4d and 15s 9d and quick as a flash the shopkeeper would know that it came to 1 pound 9s 7d - without electric tills to add it up.

Ah, and the abbreviations... yeah - more anarchy. Lsd... yep, it was called lsd, pronounced, "pounds, shillings and pence". For shillings, not unreasonably, we used "s" but for pennies we used "d" and for pounds "L" which was elaborated into the pound sign (which I can't get to work in blogspot). Why L and why d? Cos it's Latin of course! L was short for librum, a Roman unit of weight, and d was for denarius, a Roman coin.

Now, the pound was related to the value of a certain weight of a certain quality of gold. Unfortunately in Guinea the Brits found a gold of a higher purity and so the same weight of that gold was worth more than 20 shillings... consequently we also had the "guinea", as an even more eccentric member of what was already a pretty wacky family of currency denominations, which was worth 21s. As a kid I remember that prices for cars and furniture were always quoted in guineas. This was a brilliant double whammy. The prices would be something like "899 guineas" so that you had the standard 99 trick to make you think, "duh, it's only 800, that's cheap!" coupled with the fact that each of those 899 guineas was one pound and one shilling... so another 5% more than you thought!

So you don't just have a currency, you have multibase mathematics, history, geography and metallurgy all mixed in together... a bit like a Chrissy Pud... ah! Yeah... so, anyway... I managed to get one, a Chrissy pud, because... well, because Xmas just wouldn't be the same without eating something that no one likes!

Merry Christmas!

Run Down

It's strange - every time I go to cross a road at the moment I have a curious feeling at the back of my mind that I am going to be run over. It doesn't matter what kind of road it is - wide or narrow, busy or deserted...

Maybe I have just been on the road too long - the Diddly Tour 2008 came to an end last Sunday morning at about 06.30 when we got back from...somewhere. Over the last few weekends alone we have clocked up nearly 4000 kilometres driving the length and breadth of Germany.

From the north in Stade (above right) near Hamburg to the far south-west in Freiburg and through Mainz (below left) in Hessen to Regensburg in the east we have diddle-skiddly-idled all over. From hotel to hotel, location to location with the result that most of the time we didn't know where we were.


Anyhow, that's it for now - no more of this until next year; and the good side is I have the perfect reason for feeling run down.



(CD available from the band's website!)

Buzzy Anesti! Malista Anesti!*

You may have noticed a certain silence on the Buzzy front recently since we broke down last September near Aachen... well...

Buzzy has ARISEN!!

This is where he has been recuperating this last year having had a motor transplant and exhaust pipe implant.

But finally on Wednesday it was time for him to get back to work.

One sort of 'drawback' about living in Deepest Bavaria is that the authorities get concerned from time to time with the environment (normally when they think they can make money on the deal). The latest fad is with what they call over here Feinstaub which translates as 'particulate matter' and so from next year if I want to drive into the centre of Munich - where I happen to live - I will need a sticker to show that Buzzy is not a Feinstaub criminal.

Now keep an open mind when you watch this and tell me honestly how could anyone think that Buzzy could be a danger to the environment...



*The title is in Modern Greek and an adaptation of what people say to each other at Easter, 'Christos anesti! Malista anesti!" It means 'Buzzy has arisen! Indeed he has arisen!'