A Bavarian Farmhouse

ON PATROL WITH THE KEHRWOCHE POLICE. Or how the Schwaben Journal Almost Caused a War. If you have the misfortune to live with very kind neighbours who undergo the daily trials of OCD and a have an inordinate fondness for the clearest products of the former Soviet Union, you could very well find this in your mail box. It says: " This is not old paper and therefore cannot be regarded as part of the official criteria of the weekly cleaning orders" This isn't ours, our downstair neighbour got one too and he has written on it "If this isn't junk mail - what is?" I found the same thing written on my copy of the local free magazine -The Schwaben Journal - it is just like those dreadful local authority publications from Scotland and you might be surprised to discover that the German version manages to be more worthless and pointless than our home grown stuff. However I have asked Susi to call them and to remove our name from their mailing list on the grounds that ...

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.