I Have Nothing to Write About

Well, that's how it feels at least. I just can't get started. I find it difficult to focus on material for this blog. Self doubt has started to creep in.

I could write about the goings-on in the garden, the in-fighting greenfinches, the cheeky squirrels, the blackbird splashing in the bath, the new bird feeder stand in black metal and preying cats, but I don't.

I could write about the progress of the book I am trying to write (in Swedish), currently at around 100 A4 pages after a lot of editing (deleting mostly), how I struggle sometimes to write anything for long periods of time, the joy of actually achieving something, but I don't.

I could write about my part-time work at a boarding house where I sleep in an uncomfortable bed, supervise spotty teenagers and drink lots of tea, but I don't (partly because of confidentiality).

I could write about how I invigilate GCSE and A-level exams, but that would be plain boring, so I don't.

I could write about life as a civilian dependent in a NATO community in Germany, the imminent relocation of half of this community to the UK, the many second-hand cars in the main car park people are trying to sell before they leave, the anxiety of many colleagues because of an uncertain future, knowing the whole garrison will close in a few years' time, but I don't.

I could write about our own situation, where to move next, where to settle and eventually retire, Sweden (where only I have lived), France (where we only have a holiday home) or the UK (where both of us have lived), but I don't.

I could write about my health and the complication of doctors trying to establish which type of diabetes I have got, type 2 or 1.5 (LADA), but I don't.

I could write about the joy of still having my mother (87), my son and two grandchildren, other family and friends, but I don't.

Why don't I?

No, Not Usain Bolt, Useless Bolts!

What I am on about? Just look at them!

And then look at these!

The bolts are too long!

I have just had the winter tyres fitted by the garage. They store the set of tyres not in use, and also switch them at a reasonable price. Since last year we have got a new car, but of the very same make and model. And then the hub caps won't fit. How is that possible?

I was so drowsy early in the morning (Germans start early) that I didn't protest or question the situation, but my wife told me off at lunchtime for having been too compliant and soft. Thinking about it in retrospect I agree. Where is the logic? Another trick to squeeze money out of you?

The thing is that I think the naked winter tyre looks so ugly, I insist on having hub caps although most people don't seem to be bothered.

So I had to ring them back this afternoon and spoke to the sales guy, who promised to speak with the service people. I want new hub caps "kostenlos" as the Germans say.

To make it worse, when I checked the car afterwards I could not find the special key for the lock nuts. The young mechanic, who got a little embarrassed and nervous about the nuts-and-bolts situation, had forgotten to put it back in the car. Although I hope never having to use it for a flat tyre, it needs to be in place just in case.

So now they have to send a driver tomorrow to deliver the special key to me.

BTW - I laughed, just like last year, at the little sticker they put on the dashboard saying not to exceed 210 kph ( 130 miles per hour!). Remember, we are talking German motorways here, with sometimes no speed limit. Vrooom!

Ride My Pony

Some of my long-standing readers might remember that I played in a band in my youth. Originally there were five of us, but when this picture was taken one member had left. We, the remaining four, tried to re-launch ourselves and went on a photo session all over town for promotional purposes. So we had lots of photos with us posing in front of interesting old doorways, derelict buildings and all sorts of backgrounds typical of the time.

As we were moving between locations we came across this Ford Mustang, a sixties icon among cool cars if there ever was one (sorry Mini fans!), so naturally we did not want to miss the opportunity, but had to snap a shot in front of the car we could only dream of. To be honest, I would not really want to have one, because it was a bit of a poser's car to be blunt.

I was nineteen at the time and can be seen in white on the left. A few years later I could afford an old Ford Cortina, having saved some of my earnings from taxi driving when I was at university. It wasn't until the following year that I had the opportunity to sit in the back of a Ford Mustang; that was when I visited my sister in Washington DC and had to be her chaperon when she did not know how to handle this guy who had asked her out on a picnic or something. Only time in my life I rode a Mustang!

Have you guessed yet which year this might be? Judging by the glasses I and the bearded one are wearing, it could have been today. That goes for the way we dressed as well, I might add. Fashion recycled you know. The year was 1967, when some of my readers were hardly born.

I still wear glasses; as I am typing this I have the same ring which my parents gave me when I graduated from school, and I am very nearly as slim as in the picture. Then I am quite a lot wiser of course!

This Could Only Happen in Germany!

This is the time of year not only for Christmas shopping of presents but parts for your car too. In recent days I have sorted out our cars, winter check/service and also bought new winter tyres for the new Volvo. As can be seen in the photo, the hub caps are not on yet, but will be tomorrow. I was surprised when they were not included by default and insisted they got me some, because I think the tyres look pretty ugly naked like this.

So I went for the low-energy, lazy option of letting the garage do it all, even storing the summer tyres for a modest fee. Why get dirty and sweaty if you don't have to? So there I was, on my way home behind the wheel, thinking how sensible I had been to get some winter tyres, looking possibly slightly smug but most of all relieved that it was done before they were really needed. I tried to detect any difference to the driving with these tyres and I believed I could sense a slight stiffness, hardness in them, but nothing much. As I was doing this my eyes swept across the dashboard routinely and a little sticker just below the hazard light button caught my attention. It showed the recommended top speed with these winter tyres.

210 km/h is roughly 130 miles per hour! That is the maximum speed the car can do anyway according the manual I believe. I wonder what the sticker might say for summer tyres? 300 km/h? I could not stop laughing. This could truly only happen in Germany!

Memory Lane – Frankfurt Trip Continued

You might remember from an earlier post that I and my friend R went to surprise my sisters who were meeting up in Frankfurt in the late sixties. (My older sister flew with Pan Am based in Washington D.C.). R had this old Ford Anglia with a souped-up Ford Cortina GT engine in it, which he managed to get into pole position on the ferry, as you can see in the picture. I had never noticed (or possibly forgotten about) the number plate on the little Fiat on the right until I started organising the old slides, turned jpg:s. “Stau” in German means traffic jam, which has always been a dreaded word in German motorway traffic reports. I don’t know if the owner was just lucky, lived in the right area or had to pay for what looks like a personalised number plate. But would an owner of such a small car be likely to be able to cough up extortion money for some letters? Maybe the registration number was worth ten times the value of the car itself, who knows? (Click on photo to enlarge)

After disembarking we sped down the Autobahn (via a stop-over in Hamburg which I mentioned in an earlier post) to Frankfurt am Main where we put up our tent on a camp site by the river Main. This beautiful view greeted us when we unzipped the tent in the morning. (Sorry, but I have not had time to clean it up.)

Then it was time to surprise my sisters, so we found their rather posh hotel and boy did their jaws drop! All crew members posed very willingly and thought it was all a wonderfully crazy idea. Here they are with my younger sister and friend R. Not only was R a good car mechanic, he had also sewn the trousers he is wearing in this picture. He has since made a good life for himself, starting out as a plumber and ending up owning more than one company, mostly based on his clever hands, but most of all he was what George Bush did not think the French had a word for, an entrepreneur.

In the next picture my sister can be seen on the right and her Swedish flat mate on the left. Pretty young women in uniform seem to have a certain attraction and influence on young men’s hormones. Just look at the smooth operator on the right in the suit! Does he look interested or what!

We had a lovely reunion after many months of not seeing each other, and then it was time to wear out the tyres on the German motorway again. All went well until all of a sudden we started losing speed, and my friend uttered a few words not suitable for children’s ears or this blog. Mechanical problem! The car came to a stand-still on the hard shoulder and I started going over my German vocabulary from school in anticipation of having to deal with a rescue situation. But oh no, R knew instinctively what the problem was and quickly figured out how to sort it out himself. It turned out that the accelerator wire (Sorry, but I don’t have the correct vocab here) had got disconnected from the engine. Does that make sense? So, a little stopper thing with a screw in it had come off and disappeared on the motorway. He needed to attach the wire again somehow.

R goes to the boot, opens his case, finds his toiletry bag, gets his electrical shaver out and I just look on perplexed. Next he gets a screwdriver out from the toolbox and starts disassembling the electrical plug. I am none the wiser. He takes one of the two pins from the shaver plug, disappears under the bonnet, puts the wire through the accelerator lever, attaches the little shiny pin on the end of the metal wire, thus securing it to the lever, which makes the engine go vroom, vroom, revs the engine up.

And rev it up he did, and off we went. We got home safely without any more adventures of the unforeseen kind, but I always knew that R’s clever hands would always rescue us if needed. I have heard of green fingers, but I can only think of “clever” hands for somebody who is so versatile. What if he had used razor blades for shaving? I am confident he would have come up with another smart idea, Mr Clever Hands.

Memory Lane

When my dad passed away a little over two years ago, he left behind a rather large collection of old slides. Many of them were from his trips abroad with my mother to do research for a number of travel guides that he kept on writing well into his seventies. That was at least the purpose of the trips he declared to the taxman to make the holiday cheaper; clever man! Others were your typical family slides from birthdays, holidays etc. My mother did not know what to do with them, but I had an idea. I wanted to transfer them to digital, i.e. jpegs, to store on a PC. I wanted to make sure they did not just sit in a dark cupboard forever.

So once when I visited my mother, I got the old projector out, selected the family photos and brought it all to Germany. When I got home I dug out my own old slides from “the dark cupboard” and took the whole lot, several hundreds of them, to a photo dealer. It would still be cheaper to let them do it than to buy the machine to convert them to digital myself, according to the guy in the shop.

So now I had a treasure of old slides on my PC, but some of them had not fared well over the years; there were scratches, cracks in the colours, dark spots, minute hairs, fluff and so on. This is where the newly acquired Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (too long to say!) comes in handy. I have started working on some photos, cleaning them up by using mostly the Scratch Remover tool, with stunning effect.

I have also learned how to add watermarks to photos, so I thought I might do that with some of my most precious pictures. The first picture is of my dad when he was not yet forty, I believe. He is standing somewhere on the south coast of England, probably Bournemouth, where he taught English to summer students in the late fifties and early sixties. I think he looks really handsome in his cricket-inspired outfit, and those cool clip-on sunglasses!

The second picture is of yours truly in the late sixties. It was taken at Rödby ferry port in Denmark. My friend and I were on our way down to Frankfurt to surprise my two sisters. My younger sister had travelled to Frankfurt to meet our older sister who was an air-stewardess with Pan Am, and was stationed in Washington D.C. So my friend and I tossed a tent and a few things in the boot of his Ford Anglia (I think), which had a souped-up Ford Cortina GT engine under the bonnet. He had done a few other things to it, which I don’t remember, but was not overly concerned with the exterior. Looking at that picture now I think, was the car small, me big (183 cm) or was it just the angle?

Our first stop-over was Hamburg, where we obviously had to look at the Reeperbahn. There we were pulled into, literally, a bar of some sort, and then quickly thrown out when we said we did not have any money (to speak of). We only wanted to look at this sinful place and were not even used to drinking beer. Sweet innocence! I actually found the postcard I sent from Hamburg to my parents, among my dad’s belongings. OK, I’ll throw that into the blog as well then. I just might tell you later about our continued adventures in Germany. Auf Wiedersehen!

Double Vision?

Last Sunday we went for a stroll in Düsseldorf, along the Parisian-like Königsallee, into the Altstadt and along the Rhine; our usual, gentle walk-about. It was, as always when the weather is good, heaving with people. Everybody was watching everybody, us included. Düsseldorf is very cosmopolitan and you hear all sorts of languages and see people of all colours, shapes and forms. Great entertainment! Then of course there is all the river traffic to keep an eye on, from very slow, semi-submerged barges to show-off blokes on jet skis bouncing up and down, very much aware of their big audience on the banks of the river. What prats they are!

Then came the highlight of the walk. Just as we had reached the camper van car park and were thinking of turning back, we saw the sight of the day. Luckily I had not had my beer yet, so I knew there was nothing wrong with my vision, I did not see double. The camera came out quickly to secure the evidence. Have you ever seen a cooler vehicle than this? Fantabulous!

Sleeping Beauty or Not

Just had the phone call from the garage and spoke to a bloke who actually could speak Swedish! His Swedish was much better than his English, and possibly better than my German. It turned out he had relatives in Hagfors in Sweden; I assume he has spent holidays there and kept his Swedish going. It was a bit weird, just like the time when we came across a Swedish chef, noooo, not the muppet one, in Brittany. He was married to a French woman and ran a restaurant on the south coast of Brittany and one in the Alps in the winter.

The Swedish-speaking German said that something called a "Body Sleep Module" in the computer did not "put the car to sleep" but stayed on and drained the battery. I suppose from now on I will have to read a story to the car when I leave it in the garage and say good night properly, stroking the bonnet gently. I'll pick it up in the morning, if it is awake, that is.

SAAB Arrrrgh!

That's how I feel about it, arrrgh! Don't get me started; you buy a technologically sophisticated and powerful car, and it lets you down big time. The car is similar to the new Euro Fighter, Typhoon, which is completely computerised. In fact it is more or less impossible to fly manually. Well, SAAB have for many years made fighter jets and used some of their aviation knowledge in their cars, and I am very much for modern technology, when it works!

But the other day I went to the lock-up garage to get the car, opened the door and pressed the button on the key, as one does. No response. Tried again, nothing! Dead. Luckily I had not parked it too close to the wall on the passenger side, so I could use the skeleton key, good old-fashioned key, which you can pull out of the rubber cover. Inside the car I could not even open the driver's door despite the fact that I pulled up the lock lever. No light came on inside, and I realised that the onboard computer had crashed somehow and flattened the battery. The car was completely useless!

Man in yellow rescue vehicle could not make it work. Even if he got it started, it cut out after thirty seconds or so. Sooo, I had to have the embarrassing experience of having the SAAB pulled up, backwards, onto a "Schleppwagen", and parading it through our neighbourhood on our way to the garage. They replaced the battery and will need the weekend to reset the computer. Although the warranty provides me with a replacement car, I feel inclined to go back to the old, trusted, 17-year-old Astra. It's a simple creature, but easier to understand.