A little while back, I blogged about the Squealing Wheels Problem of the little railway that connects our valley to civilisation (even if it is Hanau, which I am told technically counts as civilisation). The problem was no so much the squealing wheels and a host of other problems, but the unforgivable fact that the railway is run by the Hessians.
This morning, the newspaper reported that the man in charge of running our little line had been summoned to Munich to answer a few awkward questions regarding the reliability of the line. If you read only the headline and the first couple of paragraphs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that criminal proceedings and possibly a public hanging were in the offing. At the very least, the CEO of the company would be tarred, feathered and hauled over hot coals. Finally, retribution. Even Amnesty International, normally so squeamish about torture, would turn a blind eye to this one.
Anyone who actually read the entire article, though, would come away with a slightly different impression. While it is true that, of the dozen or so privately run railways in Bavaria, ours is the worst rated, the verdict of the commission looking into the issue was that the situation was “bad, but by no means catastrophic”. To the chagrin of those who believe the Hessians are rank somewhere between Neanderthal and chimp, half the problems that beset the railway are not the operator’s fault at all, but the fault of the company responsible for the infrastructure — a Bavarian company. And as for the commonest complaint, that since the Hessians took over the trains have always been late, our railway is the most punctual of the Bavarian private railways, with 98% of trains running on time, about the same rate as it was when the Bavarians were in charge.
It’s one of those strange facts in life that it is our immediate neighbours we despise the most. This is just further proof of that.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Feline update
As I privately predicted, I failed relatively early on in my bid to blog every day in February, but I’d had a slightly fraught day and didn’t get home until 9.30pm. And I had a bottle of Scotch to open (a classy one, too, with a cork stopper instead of a metal screw top).
Allow me, therefore, to update everyone on Bonnie and Clyde, our fine furry feline friends. As some of you who have been with me for some time know, Bonnie and Clyde are brother and sister and used to be pretty much inseparable.
That changed last autumn, though, when they had a bit of a falling out. The Middle East was playing out right there in our living room, and eventually we had to separate them. This actually didn’t prove all that difficult: Bonnie, who values her freedom, could go upstairs in my office with 24/7 access to the stairs and the cellar and from there to the cats’ secret exit to the outside world; Clyde, who is philosophical enough to stand being incarcerated for several hours at a time, could go downstairs and resign himself to sleeping indoors at night. It worked surprisingly well, although at first some sleight-of-door was required, and my wife and I had to communicate via Skype as we had to make sure only one cat at a time went out into the garden. (We relaxed that rule a bit later.)
It seems that this sort of thing is a common problem with cats of their age, and what you need in these situations is a nervous system of steel and a whole lot of patience. It takes, in our experience, months, but eventually you may, if you’re lucky, discover that things start to improve.
Now we’ve reached the point where Bonnie seems to have got Clyde where she wants him, which is cowering at the other end of the room. Basically, Clyde is a well-meaning gentle sort of cat, but much bigger than Bonnie and would get carried away playing with her, sometimes hurting her unintentionally. Bonnie had to first overcome her fear of him, then assert her authority over him, which is what she appears almost to have accomplished. She needs to know he won’t pin her to the ground. He needs to know he mustn’t run after her all the time.
Bonnie has been working to her own timetable. She’s now started coming in downstairs, and this afternoon even dozed off in the living room, just to prove how relaxed she’s become.
We still can’t have the cats in the same room. But things are moving in the right direction.
Allow me, therefore, to update everyone on Bonnie and Clyde, our fine furry feline friends. As some of you who have been with me for some time know, Bonnie and Clyde are brother and sister and used to be pretty much inseparable.
That changed last autumn, though, when they had a bit of a falling out. The Middle East was playing out right there in our living room, and eventually we had to separate them. This actually didn’t prove all that difficult: Bonnie, who values her freedom, could go upstairs in my office with 24/7 access to the stairs and the cellar and from there to the cats’ secret exit to the outside world; Clyde, who is philosophical enough to stand being incarcerated for several hours at a time, could go downstairs and resign himself to sleeping indoors at night. It worked surprisingly well, although at first some sleight-of-door was required, and my wife and I had to communicate via Skype as we had to make sure only one cat at a time went out into the garden. (We relaxed that rule a bit later.)
It seems that this sort of thing is a common problem with cats of their age, and what you need in these situations is a nervous system of steel and a whole lot of patience. It takes, in our experience, months, but eventually you may, if you’re lucky, discover that things start to improve.
Now we’ve reached the point where Bonnie seems to have got Clyde where she wants him, which is cowering at the other end of the room. Basically, Clyde is a well-meaning gentle sort of cat, but much bigger than Bonnie and would get carried away playing with her, sometimes hurting her unintentionally. Bonnie had to first overcome her fear of him, then assert her authority over him, which is what she appears almost to have accomplished. She needs to know he won’t pin her to the ground. He needs to know he mustn’t run after her all the time.
Bonnie has been working to her own timetable. She’s now started coming in downstairs, and this afternoon even dozed off in the living room, just to prove how relaxed she’s become.
We still can’t have the cats in the same room. But things are moving in the right direction.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Try, try again
It’s an exhausting business, writing stuff. Any writer will tell you this, and I don’t even count myself as a writer (although I’m on Day Five of my Let’s-See-If-I-Can-Blog-Daily-For-A-Whole-Month experiment): it’s not just a simple process of typing a few well-chosen words in the correct order. It’s about realising that most of the stuff you do get around to writing probably won’t be seen by anybody who hasn’t taken up residence in your wastepaper basket.
Earlier today, one the ultra-sensationalist free papers that get thrust at us whether we want them or not carried a story about some residents who were “up in arms” and “about to man the barricades” having received the news that a funeral parlour was setting up business in their street. Clearly, this was a failed tabloid journalist’s attempt to make a scandal out of molehill, but I found there was no way of writing about it in a humorous fashion without making it seem as if I was making fun of people who found dead bodies a bit creepy. For me, humour can be as black and as morbid as you like, but not cruel.
I could have written about the cold weather, and especially about how Britain has gone into panic mode again, but I’ve flogged that horse to the point where even a German would wave me to silence and say, “Okay, we’ve got the joke now, try something else.” There’s nothing much to be mined comedy-wise from the fact that we’ve been doing our taxes this weekend; and the fact that Clyde twice walked into the house covered in so much dust that great clouds of it flew up when I tried to pet him is one of those “you had to be there” moments and not enough for an entire blog post.
So instead, I am writing about the difficulty of writing (and the same goes for videomaking) and emphasising the golden rule which is: Most of what you write (or film) will be garbage, but that’s no reason not to do it. Write, write, write and write (or film, film, film and film) and eventually, you’ll strike gold. Maybe not much, but enough.
Not that everyone is a born writer, of course. But I get a bit testy when I see somebody posting to the YouTube Creator’s Corner forum disappointed that success doesn’t come instantly and gloomily concluding that they’re no good at videomaking. A lot of them post this because, in their Eeyore-like view of the world, they have at some point decided that the only thing they can do is post illegal music videos and have just been dinged for copyright infringement. “I’m no good at videos,” they say; but usually, if they have tried, they gave up too quickly.
My advice: Make original videos anyway. Post them. Then watch them over and over again, and identify as many mistakes as you can. Then make more videos, avoiding the mistakes you identified. Then watch those… and so on. Keep doing that, and eventually (if you do it right) you’ll have a video that’s actually halfway good.
And then anything’s possible.
Earlier today, one the ultra-sensationalist free papers that get thrust at us whether we want them or not carried a story about some residents who were “up in arms” and “about to man the barricades” having received the news that a funeral parlour was setting up business in their street. Clearly, this was a failed tabloid journalist’s attempt to make a scandal out of molehill, but I found there was no way of writing about it in a humorous fashion without making it seem as if I was making fun of people who found dead bodies a bit creepy. For me, humour can be as black and as morbid as you like, but not cruel.
I could have written about the cold weather, and especially about how Britain has gone into panic mode again, but I’ve flogged that horse to the point where even a German would wave me to silence and say, “Okay, we’ve got the joke now, try something else.” There’s nothing much to be mined comedy-wise from the fact that we’ve been doing our taxes this weekend; and the fact that Clyde twice walked into the house covered in so much dust that great clouds of it flew up when I tried to pet him is one of those “you had to be there” moments and not enough for an entire blog post.
So instead, I am writing about the difficulty of writing (and the same goes for videomaking) and emphasising the golden rule which is: Most of what you write (or film) will be garbage, but that’s no reason not to do it. Write, write, write and write (or film, film, film and film) and eventually, you’ll strike gold. Maybe not much, but enough.
Not that everyone is a born writer, of course. But I get a bit testy when I see somebody posting to the YouTube Creator’s Corner forum disappointed that success doesn’t come instantly and gloomily concluding that they’re no good at videomaking. A lot of them post this because, in their Eeyore-like view of the world, they have at some point decided that the only thing they can do is post illegal music videos and have just been dinged for copyright infringement. “I’m no good at videos,” they say; but usually, if they have tried, they gave up too quickly.
My advice: Make original videos anyway. Post them. Then watch them over and over again, and identify as many mistakes as you can. Then make more videos, avoiding the mistakes you identified. Then watch those… and so on. Keep doing that, and eventually (if you do it right) you’ll have a video that’s actually halfway good.
And then anything’s possible.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Not quite Siberia
It’s cold. One newspaper reporting on the cold weather explained that this was due to cold air coming in from Siberia, before helpfully adding: “It is, however, not actually as cold here as it is in Siberia.” Or, indeed, Romania, where it’s almost at the stage that if you sneeze, it hits the ground with a thud.
The weather here can be summed up as “cold, but not that cold”. It is, of course, colder than in Britain where, as is the custom every year, the emergency services are on high alert and the tabloids full of horror stories involving “patches of ice” and “up to two inches of snow”, but I have written enough on that particular subject in one form or another that I really don’t need to bang on about it now.
It’s cold enough that even Bonnie is reluctant to go outside. This is a problem, because she has far too much energy for a cat her size (Einstein, had he known her, would have been in serious doubt as to whether E=mc² could come close to describing the number of ergs represented by her mass), and so she’s constantly begging me to play with her. I wouldn’t mind, but “Sorry I couldn’t meet the deadline, I had to teach my cat to juggle toy mice” doesn’t really cut it.
But at least I have a warm jacket. My wife bought it for me some time ago, and at last I have had a chance to try it out. It’s a nice jacket, and very warm, but includes a whole range of mysterious features. Like a digital camera that has too many software menus for you to memorize, this jacket, once you have removed all the tags (itself a daunting task, and there’s always one you don’t notice and so it dangles down your back to the amusement of passers-by), boasts a range of zips, velcro strips, toggles and studs to put the flight deck of a 747 to shame. Putting it on is like donning a spacesuit, except that in a spacesuit, there’s less chance of getting tangled up in what turns out to be a removable lining.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s just that in the 21st century, you shouldn’t be spending more time putting on and taking off an item of clothing than you do actually wearing it.
But still, I do appreciate it, because the weather is cold. Not quite Siberia, but cold.
The weather here can be summed up as “cold, but not that cold”. It is, of course, colder than in Britain where, as is the custom every year, the emergency services are on high alert and the tabloids full of horror stories involving “patches of ice” and “up to two inches of snow”, but I have written enough on that particular subject in one form or another that I really don’t need to bang on about it now.
It’s cold enough that even Bonnie is reluctant to go outside. This is a problem, because she has far too much energy for a cat her size (Einstein, had he known her, would have been in serious doubt as to whether E=mc² could come close to describing the number of ergs represented by her mass), and so she’s constantly begging me to play with her. I wouldn’t mind, but “Sorry I couldn’t meet the deadline, I had to teach my cat to juggle toy mice” doesn’t really cut it.
But at least I have a warm jacket. My wife bought it for me some time ago, and at last I have had a chance to try it out. It’s a nice jacket, and very warm, but includes a whole range of mysterious features. Like a digital camera that has too many software menus for you to memorize, this jacket, once you have removed all the tags (itself a daunting task, and there’s always one you don’t notice and so it dangles down your back to the amusement of passers-by), boasts a range of zips, velcro strips, toggles and studs to put the flight deck of a 747 to shame. Putting it on is like donning a spacesuit, except that in a spacesuit, there’s less chance of getting tangled up in what turns out to be a removable lining.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s just that in the 21st century, you shouldn’t be spending more time putting on and taking off an item of clothing than you do actually wearing it.
But still, I do appreciate it, because the weather is cold. Not quite Siberia, but cold.
Friday, February 3, 2012
A nation of animal-lovers
Traditionally, it’s us Brits who get the reputation for going all sentimental about animals. It is sometimes said of British drivers that they would rather swerve into a lamp-post than risk hitting a squirrel. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, it is regularly pointed out, was originally formed as an offshoot of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And note that the former never received the honour of being allowed to call itself a “royal” society.
But the British love of animals is as nothing compared to the German obsession with all creatures great and small. Only the Germans could really make a media sensation out of a polar bear, for example. When Knut died, I almost expected there to be calls for a state funeral, so great was the outpouring of grief.
But Knut was soon forgotten, because along came Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum. I don’t know how many opossums there are in German zoos at the moment (the results of the latest opossum census are not currently available to me, chiefly because I can’t be bothered to look for them), but I’m guessing that it’s a few. None of them ever get any attention (they’re the sort of animals you politely look at on your way to the lion enclosure), except for this one Heidi, on the grounds that she looks — or rather, looked — as if she was trying to look up her own nostrils.
She was put down last September, suffering from the effects of old age, and at the time Leipzig Zoo promised that she would be stuffed and mounted so that — get this — members of the public could “express their grief”. Maybe that’s the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy: a dictatorship is where a deceased leader lies in state so that people can shuffle past and pay their last respects; in a democracy, it’s the same, but with marsupials.
But now comes heart-breaking news: the announcement that the zoo has now given up trying to stuff the ex-opossum. It wasn’t just the “technical scale” of the project, but that the zoo wanted to “preserve positive memories” of the creature.
The mind boggles. Was the taxidermist really that bad?
But the British love of animals is as nothing compared to the German obsession with all creatures great and small. Only the Germans could really make a media sensation out of a polar bear, for example. When Knut died, I almost expected there to be calls for a state funeral, so great was the outpouring of grief.
But Knut was soon forgotten, because along came Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum. I don’t know how many opossums there are in German zoos at the moment (the results of the latest opossum census are not currently available to me, chiefly because I can’t be bothered to look for them), but I’m guessing that it’s a few. None of them ever get any attention (they’re the sort of animals you politely look at on your way to the lion enclosure), except for this one Heidi, on the grounds that she looks — or rather, looked — as if she was trying to look up her own nostrils.
She was put down last September, suffering from the effects of old age, and at the time Leipzig Zoo promised that she would be stuffed and mounted so that — get this — members of the public could “express their grief”. Maybe that’s the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy: a dictatorship is where a deceased leader lies in state so that people can shuffle past and pay their last respects; in a democracy, it’s the same, but with marsupials.
But now comes heart-breaking news: the announcement that the zoo has now given up trying to stuff the ex-opossum. It wasn’t just the “technical scale” of the project, but that the zoo wanted to “preserve positive memories” of the creature.
The mind boggles. Was the taxidermist really that bad?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Border control
There’s an article in today’s paper about how badly run the little railway is that goes through our valley. The rot set in, apparently, when a company from Hesse took over. Never mind that half the problems catalogued existed before the takeover. Never mind either that half the remaining problems aren’t the operator’s fault at all. The important thing is that the operator is from Hesse, and so is responsible for everything that goes wrong, including the stuff it’s not responsible for, in stark contrast to the pre-takeover days when any problems that did occur were part of the rich tapestry of life. The Squealing Wheels Problem used to be just one of those things, and since there are no trains at night there was no point in getting worked up about it. Now that the Hessians are in charge, the Squealing Wheels Problem is an unbearable assault on everyone’s ears and mental health.
You see, we’re in Bavaria, but only just. We are right at the most northwesterly corner of the most northwesterly part of Bavaria, and everything to the north and west is Hesse. The attitude of the locals to all things Hesse is best summed up in this joke:
The local train (the same one that now has the Squealing Wheels Problem) derails. A local journalist interviews the driver. “There was a Hessian on the track,” says the driver. “Then why,” asks the journalist, “didn’t you just run him over?” The driver looks at him and says, “Well, he jumped off the tracks, so I derailed the train and I still missed.”
Talk to anyone from around here, and you quickly get the impression that the Hessians are bad at everything: they’re badly educated, badly behaved, bad at driving (especially the ones from Offenbach), bad dressers, bad lovers and bad at building houses. Their cities are dirtier and noisier, their police ruder and more violent, their speed traps more plentiful and less forgiving.
The local dialect, incidentally, is continually confused with that of Hesse. It’s an easy mistake to make, of course: the dialect is most definitely Franconian, despite the fact that it sounds completely different to the Franconian spoken in other parts of Franconia. Under no circumstances whatsoever can it ever be described as “Hessian”, because it is a completely different dialect with absolutely no features in common. The fact that it sounds exactly the same is just one of those great, unsolved mysteries of life (there’s a rumour that the Higgs Boson may yield an explanation).
One linguist tried to make a point some years ago by placing a large stone monument at the place where the Hessian pronunciation of the German word for “apple” gave way to the Franconian pronunciation. This stone is several miles east of here, roughly halfway between Aschaffenburg and Würzburg. This was reported in all the local media as the border between two subtly different variants of the Franconian dialect.
You see, we’re in Bavaria, but only just. We are right at the most northwesterly corner of the most northwesterly part of Bavaria, and everything to the north and west is Hesse. The attitude of the locals to all things Hesse is best summed up in this joke:
The local train (the same one that now has the Squealing Wheels Problem) derails. A local journalist interviews the driver. “There was a Hessian on the track,” says the driver. “Then why,” asks the journalist, “didn’t you just run him over?” The driver looks at him and says, “Well, he jumped off the tracks, so I derailed the train and I still missed.”
Talk to anyone from around here, and you quickly get the impression that the Hessians are bad at everything: they’re badly educated, badly behaved, bad at driving (especially the ones from Offenbach), bad dressers, bad lovers and bad at building houses. Their cities are dirtier and noisier, their police ruder and more violent, their speed traps more plentiful and less forgiving.
The local dialect, incidentally, is continually confused with that of Hesse. It’s an easy mistake to make, of course: the dialect is most definitely Franconian, despite the fact that it sounds completely different to the Franconian spoken in other parts of Franconia. Under no circumstances whatsoever can it ever be described as “Hessian”, because it is a completely different dialect with absolutely no features in common. The fact that it sounds exactly the same is just one of those great, unsolved mysteries of life (there’s a rumour that the Higgs Boson may yield an explanation).
One linguist tried to make a point some years ago by placing a large stone monument at the place where the Hessian pronunciation of the German word for “apple” gave way to the Franconian pronunciation. This stone is several miles east of here, roughly halfway between Aschaffenburg and Würzburg. This was reported in all the local media as the border between two subtly different variants of the Franconian dialect.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
I am not a morning person
Comedy writer and tutor Sally Holloway has some advice for people who want to write comedy. According to her, the trick is to get up an hour earlier than normal and, before you do anything else, use “your morning energy, your first flush, your get out of bed and face the world vigour”.
Dear Ms Holloway: What is this “get out of bed and face the world vigour” of which you speak? This is a concept as alien to me as fact-checking is to a tabloid journalist. It’s all I can do, first thing in the morning, to prise my eyelids apart, much less string a coherent sentence together, as my wife will unhappily confirm. My first flush is the one that sends the former contents of my bladder into the sewers; after that, the only flush I can expect to experience before lunchtime is the hot one that comes with the realization that I have blearily trashed the mail and mailed the trash.
My wife has long since given up talking to me before I have at least had one coffee, and even then she takes care never to tell me anything important. Not for fear of destroying my creativity, you understand. At that time of day, I don’t have any creativity, which is why my wife knows better than to engage me in conversation.
Perhaps, Ms Holloway, you’re a morning person; and all I can say is, I envy you. It must be bliss to wake up to glorious sunshine, sweet birdsong and Bill Withers singing Lovely Day, to throw off the fluffy duvet like people do in adverts for low-fat yoghurt, throw open the windows and greet the day with the kind of carefree smile that the rest of us can only hope to achieve by smoking something illegal. We in the rest of the human race aren’t like that.
The most creative morning I had was the one after my cat Clyde had woken me up in the middle of the night and tried to persuade me to get up, which wasn’t like him at all. I successfully ignored him until he gave up, but when six o’clock came round, I found out why he’d been so keen to get me out of bed when I put my hand into a cold puddle of cat sick. There was comedy gold right there, Ms Holloway, but I was too busy using up my creative energy stripping the bed to actually write about it. I believe I may have tweeted the event, but like most things that happen a.m., it’s all a bit of a blur.
Also, I don’t know what kind of e-mails you write, but mine don’t use up any creative energy. They usually say things like, “Please find invoice attached.” Unless I write them less than hour after getting up, in which case they are far more likely to read, “Plesdr find innvoice attacked.”
By all means, give the masses the benefit of your get-out-of-bed-and-face-the-world-vigour. I think the masses would appreciate it if I didn’t give them mine.
Dear Ms Holloway: What is this “get out of bed and face the world vigour” of which you speak? This is a concept as alien to me as fact-checking is to a tabloid journalist. It’s all I can do, first thing in the morning, to prise my eyelids apart, much less string a coherent sentence together, as my wife will unhappily confirm. My first flush is the one that sends the former contents of my bladder into the sewers; after that, the only flush I can expect to experience before lunchtime is the hot one that comes with the realization that I have blearily trashed the mail and mailed the trash.
My wife has long since given up talking to me before I have at least had one coffee, and even then she takes care never to tell me anything important. Not for fear of destroying my creativity, you understand. At that time of day, I don’t have any creativity, which is why my wife knows better than to engage me in conversation.
Perhaps, Ms Holloway, you’re a morning person; and all I can say is, I envy you. It must be bliss to wake up to glorious sunshine, sweet birdsong and Bill Withers singing Lovely Day, to throw off the fluffy duvet like people do in adverts for low-fat yoghurt, throw open the windows and greet the day with the kind of carefree smile that the rest of us can only hope to achieve by smoking something illegal. We in the rest of the human race aren’t like that.
The most creative morning I had was the one after my cat Clyde had woken me up in the middle of the night and tried to persuade me to get up, which wasn’t like him at all. I successfully ignored him until he gave up, but when six o’clock came round, I found out why he’d been so keen to get me out of bed when I put my hand into a cold puddle of cat sick. There was comedy gold right there, Ms Holloway, but I was too busy using up my creative energy stripping the bed to actually write about it. I believe I may have tweeted the event, but like most things that happen a.m., it’s all a bit of a blur.
Also, I don’t know what kind of e-mails you write, but mine don’t use up any creative energy. They usually say things like, “Please find invoice attached.” Unless I write them less than hour after getting up, in which case they are far more likely to read, “Plesdr find innvoice attacked.”
By all means, give the masses the benefit of your get-out-of-bed-and-face-the-world-vigour. I think the masses would appreciate it if I didn’t give them mine.
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