It was 1983 or 1984 (almost 30 years ago I realise to my horror as I write this), and I had just moved into my own house, a small two-bedroom house in a small close of 33 houses in Kings Heath, Birmingham, and was coming to terms with splitting up with my girlfriend (Sian, Pete, though I’m sure you already guessed), the first I should have married. I was living alone in the sparsely furnished house and generally feeling down in the dumps, smoking quite a bit of dope (though I now realise that as I wasn’t officially ‘a smoker’, I was regularly lighting up joints as much if not more for the nicotine rush as anything else) and drinking quite a bit of cider.
Every Sunday I used to tune in to Robbie Vincent’s soul show on Radio 1 as he was the only DJ on Radio 1 playing the kind of music I liked, and that’s where I heard for the first time a lot of the singers and bands I came to like: The S.O.S band, Cameo, Freddie Jackson and a lot of others.
One night, I heard a song which was just great, which hooked me immediately. I didn’t hear the title but just caught that it was by someone (or as I first thought some band) called J Blackfoot. And I heard if only once. But once was enough. Years later when we got the internet and you could look up such things, I tried to track it down by googling one or two of the lines I remembered from the song but got nowhere.
Once, a few years ago going through a bin of old cassettes in Trago Mills, near Liskeard, I came across City Slickers by J Blackfoot, bought it and found out it wasn’t a band but he was a guy, though not a singer who also played guitar, but just a singer. One of the songs on it was his hit Taxi, but that elusive song wasn’t on it. Damn.
Two days ago, I found it, and as I had got through the best part of a bottle of port (horribly moreish, is port), I can’t even remember how. But we were reunited after all those years. And here it is, a great, great song.
Then there’s Taxi, J Blackfoot’s hit. See if you like it.
Around about the same time I got to hear Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and bought several of his albums. He did a lot of touring in Europe, but I don’t think he was well-known in Britain. But he should have been. He is one of the best unknown guitar players I know. He also has a wicked sense of humour and a great voice and died in some style: suffered a heart attack on stage in Japan (so up yours, John Lennon).
I might well have heard him for the first time on Robbie Vincent show, but I really can’t remember (too much dope and cider?) But like him I did. I had about four or five of his albums but they got lost over the years and I have no idea where they are. You can still get one or two of them on CD, but not all. See if you like this track. And listen to the guitar at the end of the song: it’s not for nothing that this guy’s reckoned to be one of the great guitarists. Blues or straight pop guitar it ain’t.
Telephone Bill
First Timothy Six
Sunday 29 September 2013
Tuesday 24 September 2013
Who wants to buy a new motor? Not me, though I might well have done by now when I tot up the dough my cars have cost me in just under a month
It is a standing joke in my family that I have a fatal attraction for duff motors (as in cars). There is a some truth in that, but I would like to plead mitigation. Admittedly I don’t have much of a track record with cars, and, as I shall soon reveal, the little escapade of a several weeks ago when the starter motor on my ‘good’ car failed while I was in Germany and I was trapped for several days in a Bierkeller (or something like that) is not, in fact the end of the story.
Perhaps it would soften the rather critical view you might have of my facility with cars if I tell you that the world is firmly divided into two camps: those who will mortgage themselves up to the hilt, then borrow some more just to be able to buy the latest flash motor and cut a dash in town; and those who regard a car as merely a means to get from A to B in reasonable comfort, who always buy secondhand (which usually means fourth hand, of course) and who regard those in the first camp as living proof that fools and their money are always parted at the first opportunity.
Yes, I know the rationale that a brand-new motor, or one that is only a year of two old is less likely to break down, but I am certain that if one were to analyse the breakdown figures (assuming, of course, that you are bored shitless and really have nothing better to do), you’ll find that just as many new or nearly new cars break down as do the kind of jalopies I prefer to buy. OK, my kind of motor is perhaps more likely to suffer from the effects of old age, but how many times has a friend bought at top dollar, then been hit with some ongoing niggle or other which sees his car ‘in the garage being sorted out’ for longer than he or she has had the joy of driving it. But what I am about to relate does rather undermine my argument.
At present I have three cars. My own, a V –reg (1999/2000) Rover 45 bought for £800 from Rob Gibbons of Davidstow (and at the time a bargain – he could have got a lot more for it); the car my wife drives, a 2005 Chevrolet Matiz which cost £1,600 and was paid for with ‘Ken’s money’ (and the tale of ‘Ken’s money’ can be told another time); and my ‘good car’, Ken’s old car, an automatic Vauxhall Astra Club, which might be a 1998 model, but which only had 38,000 on the clock when I took it over – and still only has 47,000 on the clock – but, more to the point, was ‘tidy’ as the good folk of South Wales say. It is in remarkably good condition, that duff starter motor notwithstanding. Ken had left it to my brother when he died and as my brother lives in deepest London and decided he had no use for it, he gave it to me. Nice brother.
The ‘good’ car is my back-up and will be my ‘first car’ when the Rover – already more than 150,000 miles on the clock – finally gives up the ghost. But that moment is, as you will agree in a minute or two, I hope still a while off. About six weeks ago it was obvious she needed attention (cars, like ships, are always she. Why, I don’t know). Starting was becoming difficult and for the first four or five miles of any journey one cylinder was not firing.
It was off to the garage with her (though not Rob Gibbons, I have to say, because the last time he did something to her, he or one of his men, didn’t tighten the nuts on the nearside rear wheel enough so that when I was driving at 60mph down the M3 the wheel came off. It was partly my fault in that it had been making a hell of a racket but I assumed it was simply a
duff bearing and postponed having it seen to. It wasn’t a duff bearing.) Time was once when replacing spark plugs and possibly the coil was a simple matter which could be undertaken by most idiots in an afternoon, usually a Saturday. But no longer. Now cars are so fucking ‘sophisticated’ that such simple tasks are impossible.
So it was off to the garage, Atlantic Motors in Camelford, who did the job while I waited, which rather impressed me, but which set me back £172. While I was there, Alan, the proprietor and the guy who did the job – replacing all four spark plugs and installing the new-fangled coils the Rover 45 uses – told me that it was high time the cambelt was replaced. It should really be replaced every 50,000: mine hadn’t been replaced for 100,000 and was showing signs of fraying. And if it did break, it was curtains for the car. So I had it replaced. It cost the best part of almost £300.
When a few days later I again broke down, checked the cooling system and found I was out of water, I knew, though I dared not admit it to myself at the time, that I had blown my head gasket. An expensive job, getting a head gasket done. But after spending more or less £450 in a matter of days and for one other reason I shan’t go into here, I decided to go ahead and have the work done. In for a penny, in for a pound. All I’ll say is that the car is back on the road, but getting it there has cost me more than I paid for the car in the first place.
So you might now understand what the phrase ‘fools and their money are soon parted’ doesn’t necessarily just apply to folk who get into goddam awful deep debt to cut a dash in the latest model. It might also apply to dicks like me. Only time will tell whether or not it does.
Perhaps it would soften the rather critical view you might have of my facility with cars if I tell you that the world is firmly divided into two camps: those who will mortgage themselves up to the hilt, then borrow some more just to be able to buy the latest flash motor and cut a dash in town; and those who regard a car as merely a means to get from A to B in reasonable comfort, who always buy secondhand (which usually means fourth hand, of course) and who regard those in the first camp as living proof that fools and their money are always parted at the first opportunity.
Yes, I know the rationale that a brand-new motor, or one that is only a year of two old is less likely to break down, but I am certain that if one were to analyse the breakdown figures (assuming, of course, that you are bored shitless and really have nothing better to do), you’ll find that just as many new or nearly new cars break down as do the kind of jalopies I prefer to buy. OK, my kind of motor is perhaps more likely to suffer from the effects of old age, but how many times has a friend bought at top dollar, then been hit with some ongoing niggle or other which sees his car ‘in the garage being sorted out’ for longer than he or she has had the joy of driving it. But what I am about to relate does rather undermine my argument.
At present I have three cars. My own, a V –reg (1999/2000) Rover 45 bought for £800 from Rob Gibbons of Davidstow (and at the time a bargain – he could have got a lot more for it); the car my wife drives, a 2005 Chevrolet Matiz which cost £1,600 and was paid for with ‘Ken’s money’ (and the tale of ‘Ken’s money’ can be told another time); and my ‘good car’, Ken’s old car, an automatic Vauxhall Astra Club, which might be a 1998 model, but which only had 38,000 on the clock when I took it over – and still only has 47,000 on the clock – but, more to the point, was ‘tidy’ as the good folk of South Wales say. It is in remarkably good condition, that duff starter motor notwithstanding. Ken had left it to my brother when he died and as my brother lives in deepest London and decided he had no use for it, he gave it to me. Nice brother.
The ‘good’ car is my back-up and will be my ‘first car’ when the Rover – already more than 150,000 miles on the clock – finally gives up the ghost. But that moment is, as you will agree in a minute or two, I hope still a while off. About six weeks ago it was obvious she needed attention (cars, like ships, are always she. Why, I don’t know). Starting was becoming difficult and for the first four or five miles of any journey one cylinder was not firing.
It was off to the garage with her (though not Rob Gibbons, I have to say, because the last time he did something to her, he or one of his men, didn’t tighten the nuts on the nearside rear wheel enough so that when I was driving at 60mph down the M3 the wheel came off. It was partly my fault in that it had been making a hell of a racket but I assumed it was simply a
duff bearing and postponed having it seen to. It wasn’t a duff bearing.) Time was once when replacing spark plugs and possibly the coil was a simple matter which could be undertaken by most idiots in an afternoon, usually a Saturday. But no longer. Now cars are so fucking ‘sophisticated’ that such simple tasks are impossible.
So it was off to the garage, Atlantic Motors in Camelford, who did the job while I waited, which rather impressed me, but which set me back £172. While I was there, Alan, the proprietor and the guy who did the job – replacing all four spark plugs and installing the new-fangled coils the Rover 45 uses – told me that it was high time the cambelt was replaced. It should really be replaced every 50,000: mine hadn’t been replaced for 100,000 and was showing signs of fraying. And if it did break, it was curtains for the car. So I had it replaced. It cost the best part of almost £300.
When a few days later I again broke down, checked the cooling system and found I was out of water, I knew, though I dared not admit it to myself at the time, that I had blown my head gasket. An expensive job, getting a head gasket done. But after spending more or less £450 in a matter of days and for one other reason I shan’t go into here, I decided to go ahead and have the work done. In for a penny, in for a pound. All I’ll say is that the car is back on the road, but getting it there has cost me more than I paid for the car in the first place.
So you might now understand what the phrase ‘fools and their money are soon parted’ doesn’t necessarily just apply to folk who get into goddam awful deep debt to cut a dash in the latest model. It might also apply to dicks like me. Only time will tell whether or not it does.
Saturday 31 August 2013
An unexpected but very, very pleasant sentimental journey. I won’t say ‘to my roots’ because that would be bollocks, but there was something of that about it. And a rather odd tale as to why my father was nicknamed The Spy (Der Spion) by my many relatives in that part of the woods.
I don’t think I’ve yet really done justice to my trip to Germany in what I’ve written. OK, so my stay there was extended from just three days to eight days through a piece of expensive bad luck (and what cost me a total of €573 to have put right would have cost me here in Cornwall around £180, according to my friendly Vauxhall dealer. I told him I like to think - I prefer to think that costs are just higher in Germany, which is why I paid more. Don’t you believe it, he said, they knew you were a visitor and upped their prices accordingly. Surely not, I said. Well, he replied, I could give you the names of ten garages here in Cornwall who do just that whenever a holidaymaker breaks down and needs emergency work done.)
As it turned out the trip became more than just attending my niece’s wedding and reception and meeting up again with my sister’s family and some of their friends. When I was told that the car (the starter motor needed to be replaced) would not be ready until the following Monday afternoon, I was invited to stay with a distant relative and her family. Her grandfather and my grandmother were cousins. Then, after I had rung the garage and was told - in German, of course - ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir (a sentence with which folk the world over will be familiar), I had to ask whether I could stay another night, and there was no problem at all with that.
The plan was originally that I would pick up my car and drive north to the Emsland, the area my grandmother and grandfather came from. My sister and her husband have bought themselves a renovated farmhouse for his retirement of which my sister is very proud, and she was keen for me to see it. I was hoping to stay for three nights and two days, but what with ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir’, it became just two nights and one day.
There was a second problem when I was taken my my cousin (as I like to think of her although if truth be told be are cousins several times removed) and two of her sons to pick up the car. I handed over my credit card to pay. ‘Is it an EC card?’ they asked. ‘We only take EC cards. It wasn’t as were my other three debit cards. But my cousin kindly offered to pay and get the money back from me. (‘EC cards’ are almost wholly unknown outside Germany and only available in Germany. And a few hours ago I was looking them up on the net - ‘researching’ as they say when they want ‘looking up’ to sound a tad more important - and it seems you can only get one once you have opened a current or savings account with a German bank and then only after showing you are a straight-up sort of guy by making regular deposits for nine months. Daft or what?) Then it was off to the Emsland.
. . .
The farmhouse my sister and brother-in-law have bought was a bargain. It is in a remote area right in the district of Bunde on the west of the Emsland and less than a quarter of a mile from the Dutch frontier. And when I say remote, I do mean remote. There is a small village a mile or two away - it’s called Ditzumerverlaat, and a German village with a Dutch name shows you quite how remote it is - which has a mini supermarket where you can buy most of what you might need in the way of food - particularly fresh Brötchen for breakfast - but otherwise the only surrounding houses are other farms. I don’t know the history of the farmhouse, but I gather it was renovated by an architect and then bought by a Dutchman, a painter and decorator, who eventually sold it to my sister and brother-in-law.
It is big, and I mean big. There are three separate apartments and the downstairs apartment where my sister will live could easily be split into two separate apartments and none of them would be cramped. Then there’s a huge barn at the far end of the building. And bizarrely it also has a sauna. What was astounding about it is that the asking price for somewhere that large was comparatively low, probably because it is remote. I shan’t give figures (I know them, but these things are private and I don’t suppose my sister would be too chuffed it I did), but my brother-in-law offered around 10 per cent less, but this was turned down. A few days later it was accepted.
It is typical of the area. The rooms are large, but have Kachelöfen in them which can keep a room toasty warm. It is surrounded by garden and lawns (though not in the pristine and to my mind rather soulless British sense) and what is especially nice about the whole set-up is that it will be a paradise for young children - as in grandchildren - to visit. And as my sister had just seen her oldest daughter now married and has two sons and another daughter who are likely to have children, she is rather pleased.
The one full day I had there was spent visiting, separately two aunts (and I say ‘aunt’ but they are again several times removed, though that doesn’t bother them and most certainly doesn’t bother me. Their father was the chap I mentioned above who was a first cousin to my grandmother). They are sisters, although one is now 88 and the other 78. However, the 88-year-old could give many a 55-year-old a run for their money. She’s a real livewire.
I spent a few hours with her, then took off from her village to a town a few miles to the north to have Kaffee und Kuchen (although it was, in fact tea as this is the one area of Germany where they drink tea rather than coffee) with my sister’s mother-in-law. And the second aunt, who I had earlier contacted met me there. It was good - Lord, that sounds lame - it was great to see them both again and I am very fond of both, especially the second aunt. After homemade apple Torte and Sahne, I went back to her house where we sat on her balcony and chatted. And then, coincidentally, a cousin - her nephew - also turned up.
Both aunts are now widowed and lonely, but you wouldn’t know it. I know it, because we spent a long time chatting and both, in the least dramatic way rather let their hair down. The first aunt keeps herself busy, but really there is not a great deal for her to do. The second aunt is also busy but she, too, finds living alone a pain. As, I should imagine, do many widows and widowers. I don’t feel I am especially romantic and rather loathe a rather overblown way many, both here in Britain and in Germany, but most certainly everywhere else as well, and get rather sentimental and fanciful.
Yet driving up to my sister’s farmhouse, for several miles along dead straight roads surrounded by huge wheat fields, now harvested, I had the oddest feeling of coming home. I have only mentioned it to my sister and mention it here because no one else reading this, with two exceptions, actually knows me. But I did, and I wasn’t pretending or indulging in some silly fanciful fantasy. And I don’t really know why.
The feeling was, and this is the oddest bit, that this is where I belonged and where I should end my days. I almost certainly will not. But I should very much like to. It has as much to do with the kind of people who live up there as the countryside (a word which seems wrong, in fact, and Landschaft would be better, although by using it I might well come across as not a little pretentious and I really don’t want or mean to do so).
In a sense the people are almost as much Dutch as German and most certainly not German in the way many imagine Germans to be. (The cousin in Langenfeld I stayed with told me that when, as a young girl, she went to stay with a family in America, they were very surprised that she didn’t arrive wearing a Dirndl. To explain that, for the folk up there to wear a Dirndl would be as odd, not to say outlandish as for an Italian to wear tartan trews as a matter of course.)
I like, and very much relate to, their more relaxed, laid-back manner, their hospitality, the way they socialise, their sense of family. I look forward to making many more visits to my sister there, hopefully sooner or later surrounded by her grandchildren and their cousins, before I pop my clogs. I took several pictures of the farm but don’t have them with me at present, so here is a picture I dug up on the internet which might give you a flavour of the area. It’s not actually the Emsland (named after the river Ems of telegram notoriety) but of Ostfriesland, but it will do.
Oh, and it is all about three or four metres below sea level: the land was reclaimed several hundred years ago and is surrounded by dykes.
. . .
One very odd story I came across several years ago was that my father was known among my mother’s many relatives in Papenburg and Lathen as Der Spion (the spy). I do happen to know that he did occasionally help out with MI6, although what his relationship was with the good folk in real-life 007 country I have no idea and now no way of finding out. I’ve always thought he was a BBC man first and foremost but that he - well, as I say helped out. There have been suggestions that it was pretty much the other way round, but who knows? I most certainly don’t.
He started his World War II service, after spending two years at Cambridge, in the infantry, but very soon his rather special gift for languages, especially French and German, saw him transferred to Intelligence. (One of the aunts mentioned above assured me that he spoke German completely without an accent. I can’t vouch for that, but merely pass on what she said.)
Once the war ended part of his duties were to seek out Germans untainted by Nazism to build the framework for a potential resistance movement who could be relied upon by the Allies if and when the anticipated Soviet Russian push westwards began. This, most probably through my mother, who he married in 1947, brought him into contact with August Löning, my mother’s mother’s cousin.
August Löning was quite special: he would have nothing to do with the Nazis when having nothing to do with the Nazis was not at all easy and even insisted that his daughters, two of whom were the aunts I mention above, were not allowed to join the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BdM), the girl’s equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (HJ). One aunt, the 88-year-old, born in 1925 was rather upset by this as the BdM was sold as nothing more than an innocent Sportsverein. All her friends were members and she a young nine-year-old, felt rather left out and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t join. But August wouldn’t, he simply wouldn’t, let her.
I have no idea what he did for my father and the British military authorities, but my aunt tells me that every so often - she would by now havebeen around 22 - a mysterious ‘Mr Warner’ (here, left, is the only picture I have been able to find of the man) would turn up for meetings with her father and everyone was told to make themselves scarce while they discussed whatever they discussed.
And that, dear reader, is it. I really can’t tell you any more, except to repeat that as no one can keep secrets for long my father was jocularly known as Der Spion. The most curious part is that at my niece’s wedding reception was one very nice (and attractive) woman, a student friend of hers from Peru who spoke impeccable German. And when she was introduced and told who I was, said: Also du bist der Sohn von dem Spion (you’re the son of The Spy). This, from a total stranger, took me aback, to put it mildly.
As it turned out the trip became more than just attending my niece’s wedding and reception and meeting up again with my sister’s family and some of their friends. When I was told that the car (the starter motor needed to be replaced) would not be ready until the following Monday afternoon, I was invited to stay with a distant relative and her family. Her grandfather and my grandmother were cousins. Then, after I had rung the garage and was told - in German, of course - ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir (a sentence with which folk the world over will be familiar), I had to ask whether I could stay another night, and there was no problem at all with that.
The plan was originally that I would pick up my car and drive north to the Emsland, the area my grandmother and grandfather came from. My sister and her husband have bought themselves a renovated farmhouse for his retirement of which my sister is very proud, and she was keen for me to see it. I was hoping to stay for three nights and two days, but what with ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir’, it became just two nights and one day.
There was a second problem when I was taken my my cousin (as I like to think of her although if truth be told be are cousins several times removed) and two of her sons to pick up the car. I handed over my credit card to pay. ‘Is it an EC card?’ they asked. ‘We only take EC cards. It wasn’t as were my other three debit cards. But my cousin kindly offered to pay and get the money back from me. (‘EC cards’ are almost wholly unknown outside Germany and only available in Germany. And a few hours ago I was looking them up on the net - ‘researching’ as they say when they want ‘looking up’ to sound a tad more important - and it seems you can only get one once you have opened a current or savings account with a German bank and then only after showing you are a straight-up sort of guy by making regular deposits for nine months. Daft or what?) Then it was off to the Emsland.
. . .
The farmhouse my sister and brother-in-law have bought was a bargain. It is in a remote area right in the district of Bunde on the west of the Emsland and less than a quarter of a mile from the Dutch frontier. And when I say remote, I do mean remote. There is a small village a mile or two away - it’s called Ditzumerverlaat, and a German village with a Dutch name shows you quite how remote it is - which has a mini supermarket where you can buy most of what you might need in the way of food - particularly fresh Brötchen for breakfast - but otherwise the only surrounding houses are other farms. I don’t know the history of the farmhouse, but I gather it was renovated by an architect and then bought by a Dutchman, a painter and decorator, who eventually sold it to my sister and brother-in-law.
It is big, and I mean big. There are three separate apartments and the downstairs apartment where my sister will live could easily be split into two separate apartments and none of them would be cramped. Then there’s a huge barn at the far end of the building. And bizarrely it also has a sauna. What was astounding about it is that the asking price for somewhere that large was comparatively low, probably because it is remote. I shan’t give figures (I know them, but these things are private and I don’t suppose my sister would be too chuffed it I did), but my brother-in-law offered around 10 per cent less, but this was turned down. A few days later it was accepted.
It is typical of the area. The rooms are large, but have Kachelöfen in them which can keep a room toasty warm. It is surrounded by garden and lawns (though not in the pristine and to my mind rather soulless British sense) and what is especially nice about the whole set-up is that it will be a paradise for young children - as in grandchildren - to visit. And as my sister had just seen her oldest daughter now married and has two sons and another daughter who are likely to have children, she is rather pleased.
The one full day I had there was spent visiting, separately two aunts (and I say ‘aunt’ but they are again several times removed, though that doesn’t bother them and most certainly doesn’t bother me. Their father was the chap I mentioned above who was a first cousin to my grandmother). They are sisters, although one is now 88 and the other 78. However, the 88-year-old could give many a 55-year-old a run for their money. She’s a real livewire.
I spent a few hours with her, then took off from her village to a town a few miles to the north to have Kaffee und Kuchen (although it was, in fact tea as this is the one area of Germany where they drink tea rather than coffee) with my sister’s mother-in-law. And the second aunt, who I had earlier contacted met me there. It was good - Lord, that sounds lame - it was great to see them both again and I am very fond of both, especially the second aunt. After homemade apple Torte and Sahne, I went back to her house where we sat on her balcony and chatted. And then, coincidentally, a cousin - her nephew - also turned up.
Both aunts are now widowed and lonely, but you wouldn’t know it. I know it, because we spent a long time chatting and both, in the least dramatic way rather let their hair down. The first aunt keeps herself busy, but really there is not a great deal for her to do. The second aunt is also busy but she, too, finds living alone a pain. As, I should imagine, do many widows and widowers. I don’t feel I am especially romantic and rather loathe a rather overblown way many, both here in Britain and in Germany, but most certainly everywhere else as well, and get rather sentimental and fanciful.
Yet driving up to my sister’s farmhouse, for several miles along dead straight roads surrounded by huge wheat fields, now harvested, I had the oddest feeling of coming home. I have only mentioned it to my sister and mention it here because no one else reading this, with two exceptions, actually knows me. But I did, and I wasn’t pretending or indulging in some silly fanciful fantasy. And I don’t really know why.
The feeling was, and this is the oddest bit, that this is where I belonged and where I should end my days. I almost certainly will not. But I should very much like to. It has as much to do with the kind of people who live up there as the countryside (a word which seems wrong, in fact, and Landschaft would be better, although by using it I might well come across as not a little pretentious and I really don’t want or mean to do so).
In a sense the people are almost as much Dutch as German and most certainly not German in the way many imagine Germans to be. (The cousin in Langenfeld I stayed with told me that when, as a young girl, she went to stay with a family in America, they were very surprised that she didn’t arrive wearing a Dirndl. To explain that, for the folk up there to wear a Dirndl would be as odd, not to say outlandish as for an Italian to wear tartan trews as a matter of course.)
I like, and very much relate to, their more relaxed, laid-back manner, their hospitality, the way they socialise, their sense of family. I look forward to making many more visits to my sister there, hopefully sooner or later surrounded by her grandchildren and their cousins, before I pop my clogs. I took several pictures of the farm but don’t have them with me at present, so here is a picture I dug up on the internet which might give you a flavour of the area. It’s not actually the Emsland (named after the river Ems of telegram notoriety) but of Ostfriesland, but it will do.
Oh, and it is all about three or four metres below sea level: the land was reclaimed several hundred years ago and is surrounded by dykes.
. . .
One very odd story I came across several years ago was that my father was known among my mother’s many relatives in Papenburg and Lathen as Der Spion (the spy). I do happen to know that he did occasionally help out with MI6, although what his relationship was with the good folk in real-life 007 country I have no idea and now no way of finding out. I’ve always thought he was a BBC man first and foremost but that he - well, as I say helped out. There have been suggestions that it was pretty much the other way round, but who knows? I most certainly don’t.
He started his World War II service, after spending two years at Cambridge, in the infantry, but very soon his rather special gift for languages, especially French and German, saw him transferred to Intelligence. (One of the aunts mentioned above assured me that he spoke German completely without an accent. I can’t vouch for that, but merely pass on what she said.)
Once the war ended part of his duties were to seek out Germans untainted by Nazism to build the framework for a potential resistance movement who could be relied upon by the Allies if and when the anticipated Soviet Russian push westwards began. This, most probably through my mother, who he married in 1947, brought him into contact with August Löning, my mother’s mother’s cousin.
August Löning was quite special: he would have nothing to do with the Nazis when having nothing to do with the Nazis was not at all easy and even insisted that his daughters, two of whom were the aunts I mention above, were not allowed to join the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BdM), the girl’s equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (HJ). One aunt, the 88-year-old, born in 1925 was rather upset by this as the BdM was sold as nothing more than an innocent Sportsverein. All her friends were members and she a young nine-year-old, felt rather left out and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t join. But August wouldn’t, he simply wouldn’t, let her.
I have no idea what he did for my father and the British military authorities, but my aunt tells me that every so often - she would by now havebeen around 22 - a mysterious ‘Mr Warner’ (here, left, is the only picture I have been able to find of the man) would turn up for meetings with her father and everyone was told to make themselves scarce while they discussed whatever they discussed.
And that, dear reader, is it. I really can’t tell you any more, except to repeat that as no one can keep secrets for long my father was jocularly known as Der Spion. The most curious part is that at my niece’s wedding reception was one very nice (and attractive) woman, a student friend of hers from Peru who spoke impeccable German. And when she was introduced and told who I was, said: Also du bist der Sohn von dem Spion (you’re the son of The Spy). This, from a total stranger, took me aback, to put it mildly.
My how time passes (or from baby poo to first driving lesson)
Altogether now: aahhh, isn’t it sweet. Well, it is for me. Not many months ago, it seems, I was wiping my baby daughter’s arse, then putting on a new nappy. And not many weeks ago, I would pick her up from primary school as she struggled, all twiglet legs and pink gingham summer uniform, to carry a cello twice her size from the playground to my car.
She is utterly without a musical ear and only asked for cello lessons because her best friend at time had also started cello lessons. She never once touched it at home, except when on one occasion I mentioned this and said lessons were a waste of money if she wasn’t interested, that I didn’t give tuppence either way whether she had them or not and that she should at least be honest with herself on the matter. A few minutes later, as though, incidentally, she went up to her room and scratched about on it for a minute or two then came downstairs again.
At the end of term she informed us that she wasn’t particularly bothered about carrying on with lessons, so she didn’t, and as the cello had only been hired from school, there was no great loss. Then, just a few days ago, it seems, I drove her off to some disco in some village hall where they supped Coke and came home again at ten. And this morning I gave her her first driving lesson.
She turned 17 on August 7 and immediately applied for her provisional driving licence (which has to be replaced because there is a spelling error in the address). A friend gave her a Cars keyring and my wife gave her a front door key and the spare set of keys to the small Matiz she drives. I can’t afford the £1,000 odd it would cost to insure her to drive either that car or my car. It’s that expensive because of her age.
For myself, my wife, my brother and my cousin comprehensive insurance on my V-reg Rover 45 (nothing modern or young for me, I’m afraid, is just £198 a year. But I drove her up past Camelford to Davidstow where there are two runways left over from the war and their I initiated her in the intricacies of changing gear while rolling a joint. Actually, that’s a joke, but I’d better point that out for fear of real misunderstandings.
My reasoning is that as she is not driving on the road (‘a public highway’, no doubt, in officialese) she doesn’t have to be insured to drive the Matiz. I suspect that that is complete nonsense and that she most certainly
should be insured whether she drives on a road or into the Tamar at full speed, but that was going to be my story and I was going to stick to it should, for some reason, we have been stopped. There was, of course, no chance or that because we were more or less in the back of beyond. I tried her out in first gear, then second gear and then, tentatively because the runway we are on is anything but smooth and has the occasional hidden pothole, briefly in third.
Then I got her to reverse, which was an interesting experience as she has real trouble understanding ‘doing things backwards’ as she put it. But there you go, a sentimental first. I should like to claim I shed a quiet tear in private at how my little babby (sic) is suddenly on the verge of womanhood blah-blah, but cynics everywhere will be pleased to hear I did nothing of the kind.
She is utterly without a musical ear and only asked for cello lessons because her best friend at time had also started cello lessons. She never once touched it at home, except when on one occasion I mentioned this and said lessons were a waste of money if she wasn’t interested, that I didn’t give tuppence either way whether she had them or not and that she should at least be honest with herself on the matter. A few minutes later, as though, incidentally, she went up to her room and scratched about on it for a minute or two then came downstairs again.
At the end of term she informed us that she wasn’t particularly bothered about carrying on with lessons, so she didn’t, and as the cello had only been hired from school, there was no great loss. Then, just a few days ago, it seems, I drove her off to some disco in some village hall where they supped Coke and came home again at ten. And this morning I gave her her first driving lesson.
She turned 17 on August 7 and immediately applied for her provisional driving licence (which has to be replaced because there is a spelling error in the address). A friend gave her a Cars keyring and my wife gave her a front door key and the spare set of keys to the small Matiz she drives. I can’t afford the £1,000 odd it would cost to insure her to drive either that car or my car. It’s that expensive because of her age.
For myself, my wife, my brother and my cousin comprehensive insurance on my V-reg Rover 45 (nothing modern or young for me, I’m afraid, is just £198 a year. But I drove her up past Camelford to Davidstow where there are two runways left over from the war and their I initiated her in the intricacies of changing gear while rolling a joint. Actually, that’s a joke, but I’d better point that out for fear of real misunderstandings.
My reasoning is that as she is not driving on the road (‘a public highway’, no doubt, in officialese) she doesn’t have to be insured to drive the Matiz. I suspect that that is complete nonsense and that she most certainly
should be insured whether she drives on a road or into the Tamar at full speed, but that was going to be my story and I was going to stick to it should, for some reason, we have been stopped. There was, of course, no chance or that because we were more or less in the back of beyond. I tried her out in first gear, then second gear and then, tentatively because the runway we are on is anything but smooth and has the occasional hidden pothole, briefly in third.
Then I got her to reverse, which was an interesting experience as she has real trouble understanding ‘doing things backwards’ as she put it. But there you go, a sentimental first. I should like to claim I shed a quiet tear in private at how my little babby (sic) is suddenly on the verge of womanhood blah-blah, but cynics everywhere will be pleased to hear I did nothing of the kind.
Monday 26 August 2013
The joy of breaking down and needing a new starter motor while abroad, but thank the Lord for relatives, even if most of them are several times removed
In Germany, though as things have turned out, in Germany for rather longer than I had planned. My niece, my sister’s oldest child, was married on Saturday, and I caught the ferry from Dover on Thursday afternoon to get to my hotel in Dusseldorf at about 9pm. I should have got there about and hour and a half earlier, but was caught up in commuter traffic on the Antwerp ring road, which can give London’s M25 a run for its money any day. I came in what I call ‘Ken’s car’, and there’s the rub and the reason why a planned four-day break has become a week-long break.
I call it Ken’s car because a chap called Ken, who died a year or two ago at the age of around 80, left it to my brother in his will, and my brother – god bless his soul – gave it to me because he lives in London and said he had no use for it. It is not young – a T reg (i.e. registered in 1999) – but it had only 38,000 odd miles on the clock when my brother gave it to me, and still has only 45,000. So it seemed a better bet than my Rover 45 which is a year young but already has 149,000 on the clock and is due to have its cam belt replaced. Bad move.
On Friday I drove over to see my sister at their base in Langenfeld, and then in the afternoon I set my heart on sitting in a Lokal somewhere in the country, supping Bitburger, smoking a cigar and doing absolutely fuck-all. Unfortunately, the ares around Dusseldorf, Langefeld, Leverkusen and Cologen is as built up as it is around London and finding such a Lokal in a rural setting seemed improbable if not impossible, until my sister suggested a place called Diepental, which is more or less just a few Lokale on a small lake. It was perfect, and I stayed for three hours, eventually, as one does, falling into conversation with four German pensioners.
What was not quite as perfect at eventually getting into my car, turning on the ignition and being greeted by nothing more than a slight click from the engine which is a sure sign that something is amiss. It wasn’t that my battery was flat, but the the starter motor had decided to bugger of to the great car park in the sky and needed to be replaced (although I found all this out only a few hours later).
To cut a long story short (not so say an increasingly tedious narrative which is beginning to more even more, so Lord knows how scintillating you, the reader, are finding it, after a great deal of hassle – I stress a great deal – finding the number for the German equivalent of the RAC who came and read the last rites over the starter motor and arranged to have it towed away. This happened 90 minutes later at a cost, as I was told later of 145 euros (which for the sake of convenience and as everything is always more expensive than the estimate. The garage rang a minute or two ago and informed me – I’m sure regretfully – that there were problems, it was more than the starter motor and would cost around 500 euros.
Fuck. Remember, please, in your prayers.
. . .
Last night I went out for a meal with relatives (in the neck of the woods where they all originally come from they like to claim more or less everyone as a relative. In fact we are all cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews several times removed, but I like it. And they are all very nice. What’s more relevant is that I hadn’t seen some of them for at least 20 years and some for much longer.
The plan was that I would pick up my car this afternoon and drive north to stay with my sister in the old farmhouse she and her husband have bought. Well, that will now be tomorrow night (and I might even post some pictures – it’s right on the Dutch border and a rather nice, if isolated and very flat neck of the woods.) But one thing I shall do is visit an aunt (see note above about the Emsland attitude to relatives – they’d rather you were one than not) who I haven’t seen since I was about 22, perhaps even before then.
. . .
The Germans don’t usually drink tea, but they do in the Emsland and are a very down-to-earth people who I rather like. They call a spade a spade and have a dry sense of humour. Ironically, for one reason or another, many of them now live down here in this town, Langenfeld, are nearby. It just happened that way. I must say that I far prefer German food and dishes to British food and dishes and also like the way they socialise. Some Germans have a tendency to sentimentality (and the Americans caught that particular disease from their German and other immigrants) but not all, and the folk from the Emsland are among those who don’t.
When I was young, my mother spoke to us in German, so to this day to me German is as much not a foreign language as English is. When I hear Italian, Spanish or French etc spoken, it is foreign. German isn’t. But I didn’t learn German until I went to school in Germany for four years, and eventually I spoke German like a German. I was rather proud of that because it was the one thing I – an Englishman – could do: speak German so that Germans thought I was German. In most other ways I didn’t shine, except, perhaps, talking bullshit. That, I’m sorry to say is no longer the case.
German is still not a ‘foreign language’ and when I hear people speaking it, it is just people speaking rather than ‘people speaking a foreign language’. But my command of the language has slipped rather. I like to think that it is still better than your average Brit, but it is not as fluent as it once was. I know that it would be just a matter of time to regain the command I once had, but I can’t see myself living in Germany at any time in the future. It is also rather frustrating in that I can’t express myself as fully as I should like. It’s not that I don’t have the vocab and phrases, it’s just that some are tucked away somewhere and aren’t readily available.
Oh well, at least I’m not being gassed to death as some poor Syrians are now.
. . .
The situation there is looking dire and doesn’t seem likely to improve at any time soon, especially as the US and Britain seem to have made up there mind that the fuck-ups that were Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Suez weren’t enough and a new fuck-up must be added to the list. Granted that Assad’s forces used poison gas – although it is all very strange as to why they did it (and I can’t quite buy the notion that the gas was used by the rebels in order to try to discredit Assad’s government) – but if it was Assad and his side, it was all rather badly timed (thought ‘bad timing’ is the least obejectionable thing about the affair). Granted all that, but the wise old dictum Never Take Sides surely to goodness should count here.
Perhaps the wiseacres in the Foreign Office and State Department have some sophisticated wheeze up their sleeves and bombing Assad’s forces is just a ploy in some greater scheme – though I don’t beliveve it – but backing the once side rather than the other seems to me to choose between cancer of the bowel and cancer of the stomach. Never take sides: I learnt that years ago when I was working in a bar and intervened when a drunken man started knocking six bells out of his equally drunken wife – who immediately turned her husband to turn on me.
Never take sides, the pub manager told me later, and never was a truer word spoken. But Obama and Cameron seemed intent in getting the West more involved. What with the betrayal the Muslim Brotherhood are feeling in Egypt and the standard scepticism many Middle Easterners feel for the West, its interference in the matter there, however much the handwringers proclaim ‘something must be done’ is not going to end well.
I call it Ken’s car because a chap called Ken, who died a year or two ago at the age of around 80, left it to my brother in his will, and my brother – god bless his soul – gave it to me because he lives in London and said he had no use for it. It is not young – a T reg (i.e. registered in 1999) – but it had only 38,000 odd miles on the clock when my brother gave it to me, and still has only 45,000. So it seemed a better bet than my Rover 45 which is a year young but already has 149,000 on the clock and is due to have its cam belt replaced. Bad move.
On Friday I drove over to see my sister at their base in Langenfeld, and then in the afternoon I set my heart on sitting in a Lokal somewhere in the country, supping Bitburger, smoking a cigar and doing absolutely fuck-all. Unfortunately, the ares around Dusseldorf, Langefeld, Leverkusen and Cologen is as built up as it is around London and finding such a Lokal in a rural setting seemed improbable if not impossible, until my sister suggested a place called Diepental, which is more or less just a few Lokale on a small lake. It was perfect, and I stayed for three hours, eventually, as one does, falling into conversation with four German pensioners.
What was not quite as perfect at eventually getting into my car, turning on the ignition and being greeted by nothing more than a slight click from the engine which is a sure sign that something is amiss. It wasn’t that my battery was flat, but the the starter motor had decided to bugger of to the great car park in the sky and needed to be replaced (although I found all this out only a few hours later).
To cut a long story short (not so say an increasingly tedious narrative which is beginning to more even more, so Lord knows how scintillating you, the reader, are finding it, after a great deal of hassle – I stress a great deal – finding the number for the German equivalent of the RAC who came and read the last rites over the starter motor and arranged to have it towed away. This happened 90 minutes later at a cost, as I was told later of 145 euros (which for the sake of convenience and as everything is always more expensive than the estimate. The garage rang a minute or two ago and informed me – I’m sure regretfully – that there were problems, it was more than the starter motor and would cost around 500 euros.
Fuck. Remember, please, in your prayers.
. . .
Last night I went out for a meal with relatives (in the neck of the woods where they all originally come from they like to claim more or less everyone as a relative. In fact we are all cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews several times removed, but I like it. And they are all very nice. What’s more relevant is that I hadn’t seen some of them for at least 20 years and some for much longer.
The plan was that I would pick up my car this afternoon and drive north to stay with my sister in the old farmhouse she and her husband have bought. Well, that will now be tomorrow night (and I might even post some pictures – it’s right on the Dutch border and a rather nice, if isolated and very flat neck of the woods.) But one thing I shall do is visit an aunt (see note above about the Emsland attitude to relatives – they’d rather you were one than not) who I haven’t seen since I was about 22, perhaps even before then.
. . .
The Germans don’t usually drink tea, but they do in the Emsland and are a very down-to-earth people who I rather like. They call a spade a spade and have a dry sense of humour. Ironically, for one reason or another, many of them now live down here in this town, Langenfeld, are nearby. It just happened that way. I must say that I far prefer German food and dishes to British food and dishes and also like the way they socialise. Some Germans have a tendency to sentimentality (and the Americans caught that particular disease from their German and other immigrants) but not all, and the folk from the Emsland are among those who don’t.
When I was young, my mother spoke to us in German, so to this day to me German is as much not a foreign language as English is. When I hear Italian, Spanish or French etc spoken, it is foreign. German isn’t. But I didn’t learn German until I went to school in Germany for four years, and eventually I spoke German like a German. I was rather proud of that because it was the one thing I – an Englishman – could do: speak German so that Germans thought I was German. In most other ways I didn’t shine, except, perhaps, talking bullshit. That, I’m sorry to say is no longer the case.
German is still not a ‘foreign language’ and when I hear people speaking it, it is just people speaking rather than ‘people speaking a foreign language’. But my command of the language has slipped rather. I like to think that it is still better than your average Brit, but it is not as fluent as it once was. I know that it would be just a matter of time to regain the command I once had, but I can’t see myself living in Germany at any time in the future. It is also rather frustrating in that I can’t express myself as fully as I should like. It’s not that I don’t have the vocab and phrases, it’s just that some are tucked away somewhere and aren’t readily available.
Oh well, at least I’m not being gassed to death as some poor Syrians are now.
. . .
The situation there is looking dire and doesn’t seem likely to improve at any time soon, especially as the US and Britain seem to have made up there mind that the fuck-ups that were Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Suez weren’t enough and a new fuck-up must be added to the list. Granted that Assad’s forces used poison gas – although it is all very strange as to why they did it (and I can’t quite buy the notion that the gas was used by the rebels in order to try to discredit Assad’s government) – but if it was Assad and his side, it was all rather badly timed (thought ‘bad timing’ is the least obejectionable thing about the affair). Granted all that, but the wise old dictum Never Take Sides surely to goodness should count here.
Perhaps the wiseacres in the Foreign Office and State Department have some sophisticated wheeze up their sleeves and bombing Assad’s forces is just a ploy in some greater scheme – though I don’t beliveve it – but backing the once side rather than the other seems to me to choose between cancer of the bowel and cancer of the stomach. Never take sides: I learnt that years ago when I was working in a bar and intervened when a drunken man started knocking six bells out of his equally drunken wife – who immediately turned her husband to turn on me.
Never take sides, the pub manager told me later, and never was a truer word spoken. But Obama and Cameron seemed intent in getting the West more involved. What with the betrayal the Muslim Brotherhood are feeling in Egypt and the standard scepticism many Middle Easterners feel for the West, its interference in the matter there, however much the handwringers proclaim ‘something must be done’ is not going to end well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)