A Bavarian Farmhouse

Monday brings with it a great deal of faffing around to makes sure money is transferred from here to my account in Britain. In Germany there are no queues in banks (or anywhere else that I can remember!) and there is no real way of knowing where to stand and wait. Susi points to a neat line of people. "See they're queueing quite nicely. There is a big poster advertising the banks relationship with the winners of the talent show Das Duel which I cannot restrain myself from commenting on. "We're the bank that backs a bunch of talentless losers" I want to know if it is better to be served by a man or a woman, this is because men tend to lecture customers as part of an extension of the German National pastime. "They are working in pairs," observes Susi. "So you can't win." "Yeah, one can read and the other one can write." Just to completely squash this predjudiced remark, a very polite bank woman walks up to us and invites

It's quite late in the afternoon in Blaustein and I am working on O'Connors website, which though not as woeful as some, it has many of the design mistakes you shouldn't expect anymore. Underlines being the most annoying! I have been resting since the 19th and so have a lot of time to catch up with everything including this log. I have redesigned my old website using DWT files for speed and simplicity and I am planning to move all to a paid for host who provides perl. The problem with blogging is that none of it is really up to Sam Pepys and I'm often concerned and reflective that this is just a set of idle and fairly unimportant notes. Spending time making this more descriptive, more literary and more purposeful seems to involve a great deal of effort!

Susi’s father, Klaus, spent a long time dying. Where an average person would’ve lasted a fortnight, he, such was his lust for life, hung on to the bitter end and managed to last five weeks in the hospice. He, was Susi assured me, not terribly keen on fuss, on people making a show of him and so it was no surprise when he decided to leave this world early in the morning of Sunday, August 17th. Even though, the hospice had called and Mary Lou had told us that the signs were not good and we should come early, Susi and I were discussing which books we should have brought as we walked into through the grounds in what was already 24° C of summer heat-wave. In the corridor of the hospice, outside his room, we could clearly see that a small table had appeared with a vase of flowers and a solid red candle burning bright enough to splash the walls with flickering yellow. “That’s not a good sign,” I said, thinking out loud deliberately, in the absence of having any purposeful thing to say. If

Time can move so swiftly when you work as freelance, moving from one project to the next and for this reason I have not blogged for a while. But life and death in South Germany will continue when I write up my visit to Heidelberg.

A day spent working on class materials and dreaming of long holidays where no one is learning how to use the phrasal verbs in the correct manner!

Yesterday we rose early at 6:30 am because we had to drive to Memmingen to see and photograph the Fischertag. The Fischer tag is one of those fantastic festivals that has been preserved from the medieval times and like so many other German towns and cities, the festival is special for the people of Memmingen. “We can go to the Fischer tag and it can be a photojournalism feature for you. It must be worthwhile – only happens once a year,” Susi had said the previous day. “So it’s only the men born in Memmingen who can take part?” I asked Susi, probably for the fifth time. “Only if they are born in the Memmingen Hospital,” she said. I was tempted to ask what the situation was for home births, but before I could she added “and they have to be a member of the fischer club as well.” The basic principle is quite simple. On a specific day in July the men of Memmingen who fulfil the above criteria, having spent the entire previous evening drinking until dawn, line the banks of the riv

Last night it rained so hard here, just outside of Ulm, that you could feel the pressure front as the lighting storm moved across the valley. It was so high that my head hurt for a few moments and then it rained as long and as hard as one can imagine. Just hours of solid rain, pounding on the shutters. Every so often I would wake and think how happy the pumpkings would be. In the morning Susi told me that one of the cucumber plants had been blown over. So no much fun for ghurkin. Today I we are off to Ottobeuren and apologies if I spelt that wrong. Tomorrow, we hope to photograph the Fischer Tag, in Memmingen, when all the men dress up and jump in the river. More anon

Well, after a few difficult hours working on the idea of a Blog, I have finally found the perfect place after reading a Reuters report about Google buying Blogger. Despite the fact that I am on line at the moment and not thinking correctly, I shall keep this up to date.

I will fill this in tomorrow