Rearranging All The Things
After an extended game of e-mail ping-pong between three people, one of whom’s only function seemed to be the person that talks to the ship’s computer and relay messages, I am no longer returning to Germany the week after next. Everything has skidded a couple of weeks. That game of ping-pong resulted in another game of ping pong with a different client. I’ll be getting good at ping-pong at this rate. They have been hassling for me to visit for a few weeks, but guess what – as soon as you give them some dates in the near future, they can’t make them. So I’ll be visiting in about twenty five thousand years time.
It turns out lots of things seem to “go on” in Frankfurt. I scouted out the hotel rooms over the next few weeks while panicking wildly, and discovered that while some weeks are remarkably reasonable, other weeks are either not available at all, or cost about the same as a Vogon Constructor Fleet (read: a lot of money, but not much use because the earth gets destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass anyway).
While trudging back and forth from Germany in recent months, it has struck me that the whole “thing” about German people having no sense of humor is completely wrong. They have a fine sense of humor. They’re just not as good at dicking about as some other countries seem to be. The English have a fine history of dicking about, as do the Americans. You might argue that the French and Spanish don’t so much dick about, as do nothing instead. While we’re all dicking or sitting about, the Germans are getting on with their life – and strangely none of them wear lederhosen, and very few of them drink beer. I haven’t seen a single knee slapping dance or accordion so far – it’s quite disappointing to learn so many of your preconceptions were actually prejudices.
Maybe my view of Germany so far is skewed by visiting Frankfurt, which has a 50/50 population of German and Turkish people – oh, and a few Chinese people running restaurants which purport to serve traditional German food, but serve you chinese dishes instead. No, I have not forgotten yet. I’ll turn the menu over next time.
Anyway. I should be getting on with very important things instead of writing this codswallop. No doubt I’ll find something to complain about soon, and type furiously for several whole minutes before posting it. Or scribble notes in the bullet journal I’m still trying to convince myself is a good idea, even though I’ve already stopped decorating pages with twee flags and doodles. Maybe that’s it – maybe I should calm myself down of a lunchtime by filling the bullet journal with pointless lists that I won’t update, but make them pretty enough to take photos of, which I can then post to Instagram in the hope of luring unsuspecting hipsters into my web of mundanity.