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!'

Birthday on Guy Fawkes' Day...

...and so my mother said there would never be an excuse to forget her birthday!

We will be drinking a gin&tonic (or 10) to her memory later on.

Book Mess

I was at the Frankfurt Book Exhibition last week courtesy of Pearson Education Germany, one of my translation clients.

In German it's called the Frankfurt Buchmesse (for the xenolinguistically-challenged among you: Buch = book and Messe = exhibition) which is why one of my more misguided English students described it to me as, ze biggest book mess in ze world!

I remember thinking at the time, 'you haven't seen my bookcases mate!'

Anyhow, I went on behalf of my book - did I mention that I had written a book? Ah! There it is...

I was there about 6 or 7 years ago too when the book was just sheets of A4 stapled together and I thought I would try again now that it is such a lovely tome.

(What do you say to a book maker when he visits you?

Make yourself a tome!)

The Buchmesse has got bloated since I was last there it seems. For example the catalogue I bought last time was a bit less than half an inch thick and this year's was split into two volumes which put together are about 2 inches thick. It also seems to have become more slick and impersonal.

It's still fascinating to stroll through hall after hall and marvel at the sheer immensity of the exhibition and the mountains of publications but wandering round hawking my work I felt a bit like an anachronistic peddler with a hand cart creaking through a swish concrete and glass shopping arcade.

Anyway, they'll be sorry... Harry Potter - where are you??

Fall Back

Now that my computer remembers for me I don't have the problem with clocks going back or forward any more - well, I don't have a problem remembering but I do have a problem adjusting. It's amazing how for a couple of weeks after one of these 'equinoctial' clock changes everything seems to be earlier or later that it "should be".

Maybe I rely on my inner clock more than most as I don't wear a watch or carry a timepiece and so I notice it more...

What??! You don't wear a watch?

No, haven't for years.

That is partly due to the fact that in deepest Bavaria the clocks on bus shelters, buildings, stations, etc. all actually work so I found I didn't need one and I hate wrist bands and chains and necklaces and rings and all that stuff so I did away with my misted-up Sekonda when it finally ticked its last and relied on my instinct (ok, plus all the aforementioned clocks too).

Anyway, spring forward, fall back was my method of remembering what happens when the clocks change. In spring you lose an hour whereas in autumn you gain an extra hour in bed, which would be great if I could actually sleep!

Off the Road Again

Back from the latest section of our German Tour! This time it was the states North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Würtemburg, and more precisely the cities Siegen, Düsseldorf and Mannheim which were provided with doses of the diddlies.

In brief:

Siegen: ugh

Düsseldorf: wow

Mannheim: erm, ugh

Little bit less brief:

Siegen: reminded me of the centres of those English cities which were "redeveloped" in the 60s and which consequently gave birth to the expression "concrete jungle". Apparently Hitler was made an honorary citizen of Siegen - although I don't suppose they had much choice. Fittingly, and tellingly, the city is twinned with Leeds!

Düsseldorf: bloody hell, really nice! There were elements which reminded me of Liverpool and others which reminded me of Thessaloniki! Mad night life in the Altstadt, which was still going on as we trooped back to our apartment at 4 am, and, despite the copious amounts of alcohol which seemed to have been consumed, all very peaceful and good-natured. I would definitely go back for a weekend for some proper research.

Mannheim: heavily bombed in the war and rebuilt on a doughnut-brain, American 'grid system'; giving rise to romantic street names such as K7 or A3. Maybe it's psychological but it seemed to me for this reason a sort of windy, soulless city - however I have to admit the people we met were very hospitable.


We got back on Sunday and I am still exhausted.

But at least I have another day before putting off my rock star head and putting on my author head to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday and Friday.

Ah, and there was time, as we were driving in and out of the Altstadt in Düsseldorf lost, for me to get in another Sparwitz.

We had heard the news that the shares of Magners, the Irish cider company, had fallen dramatically.

"Oh yeah, I know what that's due to...", I said to the other 3 guys in the band who looked at me in astonishment, knowing my gossamer grasp of stock market ins and outs.

"Yes, indeed... that's a clear case of insider trading..."

....oh, COME ON ! ! !

Confluentes

I am not obsessing about Koblenz but it is bugging me that I didn't remember that statue, which I have subsequently found out is of the emperor William I on his horse, as I mentioned in my last post.

There is something quite splendid about the fact that the Mosel to the right or top of the picture flows into the Rhine along the bottom and that the city grew from this.

I love rivers anyway. I grew up on the mouth of one , the Mersey. And I love the idea of them - that they just find their own way to the sea, either meandering quietly or gushing directly... or both!

I used to push Biddy along a little river, the Würm, near where I used to live in Munich and I couldn't get over the fact that we could have jumped into it and been slowly swept to the Black Sea, via the Isar and the Danube.

Anyway, I was talking to the barman in the place where we played on Friday night and he said that the statue had been destroyed in the war and not replaced until the 1980s, which would explain me not remembering it cos it wouldn't have been there in the 1970s when I was there last!

Justification!

But, subsequent perusal of Wikipedia dashed my short-lived hopes. The statue was indeed destroyed by American bombs in the 2nd WW, but replaced in the 1950s... ho hum.

On the other hand what I did kearn from Wiki was how Koblenz got its name. It is a corrupt form of confluentes, the Latin for 'flowing together' which is what they called this place where the 2 great rivers meet.

You may, one day, look back and thank me for that information!

(... or you may not)