A Bavarian Farmhouse

It is Tuesday afternoon and here in Neu Ulm at the Edison it must be almost 26 degrees and set to get hotter still. My class of information managers are all trying to decide which fictional employee to give a job too and hopefully the whole exercise will take up the rest of the afternoon. Having to type on a German keyboard means my educated British fingers keep thinking that z is y or rather y is z the keys are transposed and of course all the punctuation is a mystery so no contractions in this blog. It is so hot that all I am thinking of is getting home sitting on the balcony and watching Voyager now that Sky re runs have reached series four. Cool For tomorrow my British and American TV class at the Uni will be watching The Office, Sex in the City and Queer Eye for the straight gu (UK) so they will be studying the pink pound and surreal docucomedy.

I can't avoid being irritated that we didn't visit this one either. I shall post a blog soon called all the places we didn't visit in Ulm. Gemeinde Steinheim am Albuch

All the time we were in Ulm with the college and we never went here. I mean, for goodness sake, Eugene Shoemaker Platz! Ries Crater Museum Noerdlingen

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. We landed at JFK ahead of schedule and took the shuttle bus to Grand Central Station. That way we could see everything as we travelled into the city. The Ticket guy sold us two $13 dollar tickets and we got on. We were followed by an obnoxious Oxford Don type with his blue checked Land shirt and his comfy corduroys but worse was his Australian girlfriend who spoke with such a high pitched whine it sounded as if she had been gargling on nail varnish remover. They bitched the whole time. They bitched at the driver for not leaving when they were ready and then they bitched at him because the bus was too hot! At each terminal we picked people up and a different ticket dude would come onboard and sell tickets to the new passengers. At terminal one the driver announced that every one had to have their tickets ready, because the guy that collects them would come on. A rather hysterical American woman student announced that the tic...

Today I spent the morning, from eight until half past nine teaching Hans on his own at my clients. This was a fairly pleasant affair, Hans is very talkative and interested to a certain extent in both science and etymology so he contributes a great deal to the conversation. He drew my attention to the concept of Hoch Deutsch although I may have spelt that incorrectly. High German is considered the best German to speak although I think almost everyone is automatically excluded from that. The interesting and mistaken comparison is of course Oxford English which never fails to amuse me although I guess the students have never had the good fortune to watch a single round of University Challenge. Five minutes of the rich mosaic of accent present at Oxford these days, should produce near absolute befuddlement in the average German student of English. And Lord alone help them if the ever happen to find themselves shipwrecked on the shores of St Andrews University. Come to think of it ...

Wednesday is the day I teach my class on British and American TV. There appear to be three sorts of student in my class. Those who are very interested in media and movies, those who think it won’t be too hard a credit for their English module and those who think that a class where you get to watch television for an hour can’t be all bad. I suspect that the last category is the one that won’t quite achieve the standard for a pass, but you never know. Today I went over Michael Hauge’s essentials for a story concept and while some students were very interested and took notes, there is always the class’s answer to Krusty the Klown, yearning for his (and it is always a his) own fifteen minutes in the limelight. There are quite small vestiges of early man who are so out of touch with reality that they don’t want to even imagine that women go to see movies like Troy just to catch a glimpse of Brad Pit’s butt. And it then goes without saying that there are even smaller remnants of early...

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