A Bavarian Farmhouse

Same Procedure as every year. Liebe Mieterinnen und Mieter, wie jedes Jahr, bitten wir Sie, in der kalten Winterzeit, die Kellerfenster wegen Frostgefahr , geschlossen zu halten. Wir bitten Sie auch, Ihre Kehrwoche und den Schneeräumdienst mit alley Sorgfalt zu erledigen, denn wenn jemand zu Schaden kommt, könnte für Sie eine unabsehbare finanzielle Situation entstehen. Wir wünschen Ihnen und Ihren Familien frohe und besinnliche Weihnachten und ein gesundes neues Jahr Viele Grüße Ihre Familie McLean-Campbell

He thought he had bought and Austrian Horn on ebay.de. Germany: World Importer of Didgeridoos . Well it does look a bit like an Alpine horn, and in much the same way as all those nob ends at Stirling High used to carry around a dog eared copy of Lord of The Rings, the same nobends here carry a didgeridoo. I had to pay this layabout 1 euro to take this snap and I promise you, whatever sound was coming out of that pipe, Paul Hogan had never heard it. Another one of the professional busking scam artists pretending to be, in some way ethnic, third worldy and educational. Notice that he has a spare in case of a blowout.

So what part of ethnic authenticity don't you understand? 

A Native South American, from the lost tribe of Govan. It's hard not to think about that episode of Rab C Nesbitt when it turned out that the Peruvian Indians turned out to be a bunch of Scammers from Govan. These "Peruvians" above do a remarkably succesful job of spoofing the locals into thinking they are fresh from the Andes. However a few moments of Rational Thought helps when you remember that every non-euro citizen has a limited stay visa and that people who perform on the streets require a license or schein - probably in triplicate. So it is hard to imagine that a bunch of illegal aliens would have no problem at all busking on the streets of Ulm. Wrong! The other thing is that the names and costumes are a weird combination of a) everything off the telly and b)The Stereotype of indegenous North American peoples. I mean, doesn't that headdress style sort of stop around Wyoming and the Sioux Nation and isn't that guy at the back wearing a sporran? Shouldn'

A Lost Spoiler Ever since I looked up a spoiler for the intensely stooooopid movie The Butterfly Effect, I am sort of considered the font of all wisdom on which movies to watch - well with the help of Sean McBride at rottentomatoes.com of course. Even more so since Sean said War of The Worlds was great and he was so right. So with all my obvious googling abilities on the subject of movies, Susi asked me to look up a spoiler for Lost - and anyone reading this is invited to try googling that, but while you do, here's the answer. Lost isn't about anything Lost isn't about anything. They aren't dead, they aren't in purgatory and they aren't Lords of the Flies. They are in La La Land. La La Land is the place where movie and tv companies make money and stars large or small go crazy or become weird. David Lynch demonstrated all this very stylishly when he made that weirdly marvellous show, Twin Peaks. Who the hell was Bad Bob? Again the answer is very simple, Bad Bob

Don Colione 

What are those European poster stands called? If you ever woke up with amnesia like Matt Damon in one of those Bourne movies, and you saw a poster stand, you would almost certainly a) know you were in Europe and b) have a good chance of it being Germany. They are called Litfaßsäule which has no proper English meaning but I guess poster column is close. The interesting thing is that, certainly here in South Germany they are always used and the City doesn't appear to have the sorts of fly-posting problems that Edinburgh and Glasgow have. I suspect that the German penal code allows retribution across the entire distribution chain and no doubt printing firms have to take names and addresses and have a valid set of id cards before any transaction takes place. I don't have a problem with this and it is quite pleasant to observe that there doesn't appear to be a poster mafia in this part of the world. The Liftßsäule are rather charming although I guess I notice them a lot more th

Who will win the German Elections? Germans are of a frame of mind we last saw in Britain and USA in the late seventies, just before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became leaders of their respective nations. It is hard to properly remember what Britain was like before the Thatcherite revolution, moribund, old fashioned, leaderless and heavy with bureacracy in both state and capitalist industry and burdened with high taxes and ridden with the class system. At that time no one could imagine the unimaginable, no one could do anything but wince at the thought of Mrs T devasting the old inefficient heavy industries and throwing millions of people on the dole. Nor could they cope with her decision to create a propertied class by selling council houses at a discount to the tenants. But she did all of that. I know because I was there in the forefront of many campaigns against these Tory policies. Despite this, by the end of the century, I owned my council house and I had gone to universi

A Romantic Wedding in Scotland. German gossip magazines are surprisingly numerous and like television no one actually admits to reading them. I realised this when were in the Doctor's surgery a few days ago and Susi said there was nothing to read. Well there was quite a lot to read including Bunte ( a woman's name?) and Goldene Blatt, which I think means Golden tongue but I could be wrong. Another curious thing is that these magazines are distributed by a small army of semi- retired people who sell subscriptions. More importantly they have a special distributors dust cover so that no one can tell whether you are reading a gossip mag or the Harvard Business Reveiw. I can't really understand that sort of labour intensive business model but it fits in well with all the other strange methods of newspaper and magazine distribution. I happened to mention to some participants among many things, that Kylie was the most famous Australian in the Known Universe, after the koala bear.

The storm that blew away a President. It is a fairly popular misconception that people, parties or presidential candidates win elections. But this isn’t true. History demonstrates that where Western democracies are concerned, it is regimes who lose power, lose support and lose the confidence of the people. The Soviet Union collapsed when there was no longer a single soul capable of wielding power or making any practical use of the available resources of the state. Mrs Thatcher’s conservative government in the hands of her heir, John Major, collapsed spectacularly when the corruption, the immorality and the straight forward arrogant stupidity left them exposed to the mob. George W Bush was a man who won, because Al Gore was so stupid and arrogant that he firstly wasn’t prepared to take advantage of the democratic voters affinity for Bill Clinton and secondly that he was incapable of making his mind up. What were the democrats thinking supporting a preppy, money lawyer

At the drowned campsite of La Rochelle. Camera Teddy's very first proper adventure was the typical near-penniless trip around France. After consulting the rough guide we ended up on the fantastic Isle de Re which is just off the coast of La Rochelle. One morning, very early an Atlantic rainstorm surged ashore and pounded the campsite for about an hour or two. I simply reached outside to pull all the stuff into the tent, zipped it up and went back to sleep. Our French neighbours in the next tent couldn't believe were still dry. It's designed for Scotland I told them proudly. Nae chance of getting wet. The entire campsite was drowned. No exceptions apart from us. Notice all the wet clothes hanging on the fence. Camera Teddy is visible just, in my shirt pocket.

Camera Teddy This is big close up for fans of Teddy Bears or more likely it is his compulsory ID photograph as demanded by all German institutions. Camera Teddy used to have some sort of attachment which held him to my T90 strap, but once I quit photojournalism he ended up sitting on top of my pc monitor. Course it was inevitable that one day, Einstein would get hold of him and chew his ear off before I sprang to the rescue. He now sits on top of the television and has a substantial collection of dvds. The last exotic place he visited was Florence in Italy where he subjected us to a re-enactment of the scene from Hannibal in the shadow of the dome.

Here we are now, entertain us. At the Copa Earlier today, I was talking about the remarkable amount of food in a standard American portion and just to demonstrate that there is substance to this tale of drinking and hedonism in Miami, here is a snap of me (far left) with some of the show, Chris, the director, with Cheryl, Mark and Ruth, some of the dancers. This is us at Anthony, the Production assistant's party. I remember coming home from this at about 4:00 am to find Cheryl and a different Chris making burgers in the kitchen.

Camera Teddy at the Four Ambassadors pool in Miami. My daughter went on the proverbial school trip to Edinburgh Zoo and when she came home she gave me this teddy bear, in fact she hung him on my camera strap and christened him Camera Teddy. Camera Teddy has been all over the World and here we see him lounging around at the pool in the Four A's in Brickle, in Miami. The Four A's was a condominium and hotel then, but now I think it is a complete condo with all the hotel part gone. The Restaurant, Porcaos is still there I think, but I guess the Copa Club is not. Notice in the background, my Life's A Beach towel. My daughter has this towel, she confessed to me recently and I am very tempted to visit Scotland just to get my towel. Well, Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy and all that.

What the hell am I doing drinking in Miami? Miami City is the kind of place where most residents don't get up until about 2pm. Well the residents involved in the entertainments industry anyway. Life was just one long round of drinking until 3am or going to a nightclub until 5am and sleeping until the afternoon. To get a tan, you really had to force yourself out to the pool at about 11 am, cos it would rain around 2pm. I used to love that Nirvana T-Shirt. Our Damo got me a new one for my birthday about three years ago, but I went and left it in Scotland. This was one of those weekends where Anthony called us and asked us if we wanted to go to the liquor store with him. Just sounds too American to resist. So we bought this 2 litre bottle of Smirnoff Black Label Vodka - but not to drink tonight! No, we'll keep it for later on this week. Yeah!

We have to have one of these on site! This is clearly a fine example of a Scottish Drndle. Note the Lutheran neckline.

At the Oktoberfest Despite being Scottish, I rarely drink in the afternoon. Make Mine A Mass - oh and get us a packet of vinger crisps too. People have often asked me, when is the Oktoberfest and the surprising answers is the last two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October. This is such a popular festival that Bavarian television broadcasts the beer festival all day and then fills the news with Oktoberfest material. Now I would have thought that a tv broadcast about people drinking beer and eating Brezeln, Weiswurst and Senf (that's pretzels white sausage and mustard, although to compare any German Wurst to a sausage is a bit like comparing The Parthenon to a sandcastle) would not gather a large audience. But apparently all those elderly citizens, of which this country appears to have an inexhaustable supply, watch the fest on the telly. The broadcasts have a straightforward formula. Interviewer (who could be anyone as long as they are Bavarian) " Hello every

It`s a small world I often tell my friends and German relations here, that back in Scotland there were so many members of my family that I couldn't walk along the high street without bumping into one of them or someone would say "Oh your Margaret's son, aren't you?" One of my cousins mentioned that she suspected we had at least 70 cousins and so to test this theory, I started to build my family tree on Genes Reunited. Hilariously the first person I found on it was my daughter, the second person was my neice who I think is living in England and the third person I found was one of my cousins living on the other side of the world. I you add this together, we could go on one of those round the world tickets now, cos I have an uncle in Hawaii, my best friend lives in Hong Kong and we have another Uncle in San Francisco. Just need some relatives in New York now and we are made!

Curiosly, this morning I had an email allegedly from Blogger telling me I had forgot my password. Not I think. Is this a new version of phising where people steal your blog? Weird.

To Bot, or not to bot. That is the question. Whether it is noble in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous bottery... It appears that my blog has been featured on some blog that looks at other blogs and therefore I am in some small way, almost totally Andy Warholled. I guess that the Booker Prize is not too far off, provided they actually get around to awarding prizes for mindless rambling. When I read the email, I have to admit that it does read as if written by a bot and the mention of my other web site - well that read as if it had been written by a bot too. Now pardon me if I am a cynical journalist (official) but I really wasn't impressed by any of it. I have a photo montage created by Chris Struthers from Merit magazine (-it's the last image) and the slogan from JFK's desk, but the review-bot seemed to think that this was a reference to space travel rather than the great mystery of the Lord's Creation. Hmmm. The message about my other blog read as

once more 

This would have been the cd insert! 

Well, Jamesie, this looks a bit like... New Youth. Back in 1979 I used to manage the remants of The Fakes - New Youth and although I took lots of snaps, I gave the negatives to Jamesie when they split up. I do however have at least this pic taken in the backyard of some slum in Falkirk where they rehearsed and a couple o Johnny singing perhaps during their gig a le clique.

The 16th at Gleneagles 

Linda Barr feeding the Fire brigade 

Elizabeth feeding an elephant, same one I guess! 

Miss Scotland Feeding an Elephant obviously 

Frank McChord & Michael Forsyth MP in full flow 

Mop Week - Breaking News Last week was our Mop Week, that marvellous institution created to save people money. As a fully paid up member I went ahead and swept the apartment foyer, the front path and the backyard. Susi mopped it later demonstrating how we Euro-Couples can easily work as a team. Now some of the neighbours on our side have taken to kehring for only half the area, as if there was a big checkpoint Charlie line down it. This is because they believe the other half of the apartment aren't as kehring as our side of the apartment is ( I guess we're not included in that group!). Now it is all very amusing to come down stairs and observe that one half of the foyer has been mopped, swept, tidied - but it is only funny once. After that it is just plain childish. So needless to say, I swept all of the area not just half. Of course I did spend at least five minutes extra doing this and I guess I will never, ever be able to recover the vast sum of lost wages. I am seriously co

Set the controls for the heart of the sun I have lost count of the number of times I have installed Linux and then sadly uninstalled it. Last week, frustrated with MS Windows, I looked for anything new and exciting in Linux distros. It would be nice to put something on my old laptop that dovetailed nicely with all the open source software I already use. So, having tried Knoppix on a cd, I went ahead and tried to install Kubuntu. All went well and it all looked great apart from the fact that my wireless lan card would not work. Cue one week of reading crap about Ndiswrapper and a legion of other material. after lots of attempts I started to lose interest. Okay lets try installing Scribus. Hmm just exactly how many versions of Scribus installation packages are there? So I tried two Result: Failure. Surprise surprise. The biggest problem with Linux is that the whole process is geeked up to the max. Instructions for installing anything are often an experience similar to what used to happen

Someone called me about three four months ago, and asked me how much I wanted for the pix of Jack McConnell reading the Beano. I quoted him a three figure sum - fairly reasonable I thought and he said he would call back... Guess I can stop holding my breath. So how does one get a photo of Jack McConnell, The First Minister or whatever is the odd name for the Scottish Prime Minister holding the Beano? Well this was one of the earliest photos I ever took for the Stirling News, back in 1987 or 1988 and that was when Jack was just Chair or vice chair of Leisure and Recreation so he had to be in all the photies. I think Eddie was the Chair at that time or it might have been John Hendry. Basically if you were an office bearer in L&R at Stirling District Council in those days you would be in at least five press releases per week minimum. So Jack was there with the big L&R Playbus and I managed to prize a Beano off one of the kids - no actually I took my own copy of the Beano just to b

The First Minister reading the Beano. That little kid at the back was n't really grumpy honest. I could name him if only I had access to the old database. I told him to look like that. And Jack probably hasn't ever read the Beano. Well not the editorial section. I remember he mentioned the pix after it appeared in the paper and told me someone had suggested it was a bad idea. I'm not sure if it was one of the press officers - sorry can't name them or Mike Donnelly but you know, my suspect was closer to home. Anyway I told him that it was an excellent picture, that I had already made a 20 by 16 for my book! I had too.

Whee! Having identified exactly where the camera was on this ride at Euro Park, all we needed was bit of Austin Powers co-ordination. I am completely buttoned up (the back even!) because earlier, both me and Myriam were almost drowned in the Nordic Rafts. So not taking any chances this time. f8 at 60th of a second is my guess. Sort of wraparound lighting too. What do you expect for 6 Euros? Bailey?

Mop Week and Mob Week: The subtle difference. Well the our marvellous friendly neighbours (OMFN's) are oficially known as the Stolochnayas although I can't guarantee that the spelling of that famous international brand of vodka is correct. When it snowed heavily in February, they helpfully pointed out that our version of Mop Week (seriously, Kehr Woche, how can that be the description of an activity?) was NOT what they would call Mop Week. Actually only one of them said this and the other one stood as stiff and as quiet as someone would if they listened to this sort of crap day in, day out for more than forty years. Still being Anglo-Bavarian we are maintaining the farming version of the stiff upper lip (that's a potato in each cheek, I guess.) and paying no attention to them at all - well that's not completely accurate because one of them lost a pair of tights the other day, ( I'll leave it to your imagination to decide which one!) - they must have fallen from wh

January - The Official Season of petty minded complaints Perhaps it's the lack of certain green vegetables, but January seems to be the period when moaning reaches 747 noise levels here. Having spent the best part of a week preparing the sort of English exam that a five year old child could past, and despite providing them with all of the material prior to the exam and having an open book exam - some of them were still moaning. Of course, no student in my experience in Britain ever complained to me personally that an exam was more difficult than it should have been but that's because students only complain when they believe an injustice has taken place - here students complain when they suspect they have failed - in fact any student who complains probably has failed and they are performing their own version of historical determinism in order to make it clear that it must surely be apparent, only the teachers can be responsible for failure. Someone else always has t

All over Europe, people with difficult parents are confused by the disaster. Well, our neighbours aren't lying dead somewhere on a distant Indonesian beach, they're upstairs back to their normal Christian ways, you know being on a permanent retired holiday, taking advantage of third world economies as tourists and complaining that we haven't cleaned the apartment common stairwell (kaerwoche a subject guaranteed to create mirth in the nearest Bavarian.) So it would seem that they didn't tell one of their children when they would return and it was that poor forgotten sould who kept on ringing and ringing for two weeks. Still, despite their abominable manners and petty-mindedness, as I said to Susi - still very mad at them - the fact that we felt some compassion for them simply demonstrate where our hearts lie. We simply forgot that they were buggers and extended to them the same regard we would have for everyone.

All over Europe telephones are ringing in empty rooms. The phone in my neighbours apartment remains unanswered. Every day it rings in the morning and then in the evening. It rings more in the evening than in the morning and I guess - although I can't be sure - that different relatives are ringing before they go to work and after they return. The ringing continues way past the average eight rings that people normally do and two things are becoming clear: The neighbours should have been home by now and people are expecting to hear from them. Other rather sad deductions can be made, namely anyone alive in Thailand would be in contact with their relatives to let them know they are safe. Anyone who was calling would be bound to call another relative and hear this news. Sadly none of this seems to have happened. I searched the internet hoping to find a list of people, but again like so many other searchers it quickly became clear to me that the one thing that you won't fin

The unanswered phone. I guess I only really noticed the ringing phone about two days ago. It was then I realised that our downstairs neighbours did not have an annoyingly regular unanswered phone call in the morning and in the early evening. I suddenly struck me that it was my upstairs neighbours phone ringing and just to be sure, I went upstairs to listen. Sure enough it was ringing, just like it has been for the past ten days. My neighbours are on holiday in Thailand and I was sure that they were hillwalking types and wouldn't be anywhere near the beaches, but then I remembered something Susi said they had told her. That they hoped to spend their first Christmas on the Beach. With luck they meant German Christmas - which would have been Friday 24th. They were supposed to have gone for six weeks so I'm not sure when they are scheduled to return. The neighbours above them have been leaving the mail on their doormat so I guess and hope they know something we don't.

Oops! I did it again. Today, or rather very late last night I discovered that while I had been sick yesterday I manage to miss one of my classes. Oh, oh!

The January Sales Despite today being a Bank holiday in the UK it isn't a bank holiday here in Germany. Bank holidays which fall on a weekend are still holidays and by some curious process still count as holidays. In the UK, when Christmas falls on a weekend the country usually closes down for three weeks because of the two additional days off the working week. Not so here - if the public holiday falls on a weekend - tough. It just means all the shops are closed and since they are all closed on Sunday anyway there's no loss. Monday the 3rd is not a holiday and the January sales sort of begin. Well not really - they don't need to because the entire nation in the South appears to turn up at either Media Markt or Ikea for the bargain of the year. Now why anyone would consider a little air filter a bargain stumps me. What will they be filtering out of the air - no one smokes in the house here and South Germans certainly despise carpets so there doesn't seem to be a

Follow The Yellow Sack Road Yesterday was the first time that I really spent any amount of time thinking about how much effort goes into recycling here. Well, it's a sort of recycling. I'm sure a great number of people are rather surprised when I tell them that the Gelbe Sack is not systematically sorted by the small hands of indigenous third world children. It's taken to a special Gelbe Sack-burning-electricity-generating unit not far from here. Now don't be surprised but as soon as I mention this to any of our German friends a lengthy discussion entails about how it can't be true, Germany has laws about burning stuff and it must be happening in another country - Poland or even China. No, honest it is just around the corner (figuratively speaking) and they burn the stuff at a very high temparature. In fact when it first opened they had to import rubbish to burn to keep it operating at optimum performance. Unusually - well from a British perspective, there

It is Saturday morning and last night Chris did happen to mention that there had been no blog here since June. Blogging falls into that category of things that seem like a good idea at the time and then you wonder why you don't make it like Sam Pepys. Of course, it has all been done before and making any attempt to digitalise a great diary is bound to fail. It simply lacks narrative structure. Pepys diary has, almost by accident, a structure - well it certainly has the middle part any way, just no real ending nor any real begining. I guess it's obvious that I have been reading Claire Tomlin's excellent biography. Of all the entertaining things that happened yesterday or possibly failed to happen, I guess Susi enthuisatically putting out the Gelbe Sacke along with all our other trash cans. You have to appreciate that here in Germany it looks as if we are recycling everything. We have six different bins - one for paper, one for biological material (er.. food) and one