Bsketti

“Lewis advises Mike and Roy on the planning and building regulations necessary for the house conversion. It’s going to be a few months before the work can start. Mike’s disappointed that a connecting door is impossible, for fire safety reasons, but Lewis talks them through the plans.”

There is a hole in my heart where this sort of passionate drama should be.

Have just donated some money to Christian Aid’s emergency Burma cyclone appeal so I can blog about nonsense without feeling guilty.

So that’s all right then.

I have been thinking about the part in Roald Dahl’s The Witches where the hero is turned into a mouse. Er, sorry, spoiler alert! In children’s books, transformation = molto scary, a case in point being Dahl’s creepy The Magic Finger, in which a horrible family that liked shooting things swapped bodies with ducks and got shot at themselves. But what happens in The Witches is far more terrifying: bad enough that the hero will never be turned back into a boy, thus breaking the rule of a happy ending for every story, but worse, we learn that he can only live for a few more years, given his newly mouse-sized life expectancy. He will die around the time that his grandmother, his last remaining relative, will. Their stoicism about their impending not-existing-ness was incomprehensibly bleak to me, and scarier than the prospect of 100 Vermicious Knids.

Y I K E S

We had another book, this one about a real mouse called Ralph who used to zoom around a hotel at night on a little boy’s toy motorbike. This too was pretty freaky: full of vast, empty, silent and worst of all super-dark corridors. Just like The Shining. Actually, worse.

“Ralph had a scary feeling he was on the threshold of adventure. There were no beds or chairs for him to dart under in case of danger. The floor creaked. Someone was snoring in Room 214 across the hall. Outside in the pines an owl hooted, sending prickles up Ralph’s spine.”

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

And don’t get me started on Tom’s Midnight Garden, in which some idiot used to creep around the house in the dead of night (fool!) with some creepy grandfather clock ticking in the background. Yeurgh.

There was something about being shrunk or otherwise removed from the world that gave me a horrible jolt in the stomach, like peering over a cliff or the first bit of the Doctor Who music. I suppose transformation is easy to relate to when you’re young because you live in a kind of liminal world anyway, being smaller than adults and mostly separate from their world. Obviously children’s authors like Lewis Carroll knew how to play on this to freak us out. All I knew is that it sounded super scary, but at least if I got smaller, custard creams would get bigger - a mutually beneficial relationship.

Am not quite sure why I have been thinking about this so much. Perhaps I should stop eating mouse sandwiches before bed?

In other news, I realised today that I have not had to think about the term “Web 2.0″ for 11 months.

1:45 pm. Room A-148. The ping-pongian fortunes of my department hang on the outcomes of my next match. I’m facing the sweet German woman who belts her jeans too high. She’s got her game face on.

As someone French-sounding announces our names, making me feel like I’m playing at Wimbledon, my boss hands me his Special Paddle. I am too intent on success to note the potential for smutty euphemism.

It’s ping pong time.

Win, and we will be propelled on to a stage worthy of my teammates’ wunderschoen skills.

Lose, and our efforts will be consigned to a footnote in the pages of history.

…

Still, at least United won.

As excited as I am to have found my vocation, albeit 15 years later than would have been optimal, career-wise, I still find the subject a bit boring to read about for more than a few hours. Perhaps I could be a world-leading ecological economist part time?

Suppose I shouldn’t get too carried away. I have also thought my vocation was to be a primary schoolteacher, a historical monument, sorry, historical monument inspector, an archivist and a manta ray. And I don’t seem to be any of those.

Anyway, I escaped studying this afternoon to watch Unsere Erde at the cinema. This is the BBC’s Planet Earth, minus Whispering Bob, er, Richard, Attenborough and plus smoothie German narrator who rolls his ‘r’s, needlessly, in my opinion. It is quite marvellous, all the same. Awesome, in fact. I think my German fellow audience members were knocked out by the polar bear scenes. Am looking forward to similarly naturetastic events in the coming weeks, as Bonn is hosting a conference on biological diversity this month. [Listen to the meeting's theme tune here!]

Helpfully, the film alerted me to an important point related to my possible karmic future. I realised that, much as I admire the bigness of our more generously proportioned mammalian friends the walrus and the humpback whale, if I am reincarted as an animal, I think I would prefer not to be in a body that has lichen actually growing on it or has fish constantly hanging around its genitalia. In fact, if I could be a manta ray that would be acceptable.

I stood under a manta ray in Western Australia Aquarium (thanks to an observation tunnel, fish watchers!), and I could not spot any barnacles at all. Just a mouth that appeared to be where its belly button should be. Well, that’s evolution for you.

… an ecological economist.

Hurrah!

How do I get to be one of those, then? And will I need to be good at maths? Maybe I could blag that part. “As you can see from this diagram, the optimum extraction rate is, well, a lot per cent, and production volume has increased by at least, I’d say, 4 quadrimillion, er, walloons since, ooh, quite a long time ago. Look, everyone! There’s a hot air balloon!”

I have made it through to the knock-out stages of the ping pong tournament.

Chumps. They’re all chumps.*

Either our expectations are too high, or all football managers are rubbish. To be precise, within English football there are only ever four good managers: dour genius Alex Ferguson, flawed genius Arsene Wenger, domestic-genius-on-a-shoestring (a role shared on rotation by David Moyes, Steve Coppell, Thingy Redknapp and Martin O’Neill) and foreign genius, the position currently filled by Juande Ramos.

All other managers are rubbish.**

A gratuitous photo of Roy Keane.

This is a phenomenon exclusive to English football, which explains why acclaimed managers from elsewhere such as Benitez, Houllier, Ranieri and Jol are jetted in, suddenly start managing like chumps and then leave, only to rediscover in somewhere like Zurich or Lyon or Turin that they’re quite good, actually.

The latest foreign manager to reveal his inner chump is Fabio Capello, the new England manager from Bracknell Southend San Canzian d’Isonzo. Now, the football writers don’t want to admit that he’s a chump. They have an enormous collective crush on him, like they did on Jose Mourinho. It reminds me of women in Regency novels simpering over the local doctor. Nevertheless, Capello has been displaying undeniably chumpish qualities, such as playing Wayne Rooney as a lone striker up front and suggesting (according to the hacks, anyway) that Beckham can be Rooney’s Ronaldo. (By which I mean he can supply Rooney with inch-perfect crosses, not with high-class call girls.) Capello has no chance - he may have been a wonderful manager once, but he’s in England now, and he can’t be good until Ramos displays a loss of form.

It strikes me that it would save an awful lot of money if clubs and the FA stopped employing managers altogether. It’s all about local empowerment. I have been reading about capacity-building and ‘development by people’, in which local communities are encouraged to participate in the decision-making process towards sustainable development footballing success. In other words, let the fans manage the team. They might not have been professional footballers, but I bet none of them would have played Jamie Carragher as a holding midfielder.

I propose the fans form a mini United Nations, in which representatives of each supporters faction meet in a General Assembly once a week to decide on tactics. The risk, of course, is that any decision would be delayed by a last-minute interjection from the Hong Kong Supporters Group and not be resolved until the match had finished, but that’s consensus politics. The national team would be managed by the country’s most recent lottery winner: “Today’s team was picked by Mr Dave Newt from Trowbridge.” Far better than giving Mr Newt £5.2 million just so he can pay off his mortgage and go on horrific cruising holidays for the rest of his life.

I realise this would narrow the career opportunities for professional footballers. But given that (a) all managers apart from Ferguson are eventually sacked anyway and (b) all managers like golf, I propose that every single football manager works at Leeds United Football Club. The position would rotate every week, which would give each manager a chance to shine before revealing himself as a chump, and afford him plenty of time off (approximately 13 years) to work on his handicap.

Of course, it is just possible that most managers only appear to be rubbish because expectations for their teams are simply too great. There can only be one winner, people! Maybe there should be joint first place in the Premiership for the top seven clubs, just so that Newcastle and Spurs and West Ham and Everton and all the other clubs who think that the national title has been overdue for 87 years can stop whingeing. Another solution might be to forbid a team from losing, so that if the score is 2-0 at the end of normal time, the goalkeeper hands the ball to the striker on the other team and invites him to pummell the ball into an empty net.

It always annoys me when there are calls for a national enquiry into The State of British Tennis or Why We Didn’t Win the World Cup or Our Shocking Olympics Medal Haul or whatever. We can’t be good at everything - our cup runneth over already with cycling and darts, surely? Perhaps I don’t entirely understand the competitive spirit, but why can’t we just say, “Golly, Serbia, you’re awfully good at tennis, aren’t you? Well done you!”

Or, “Hello, Ethiopia - bit of a dark horse at this long-distance running lark, aren’t you? Made us look like right plonkers!”

Or, “I say, Finland, isn’t is lucky that you can produce some of the world’s best rally drivers when you’ve got so much muddy forest all over the place!”

Each to their own, I say.

* Except Roy Keane.
** Ditto.

It has been snowing non-stop for about seventy-eight days now. Woo hoo! Who’s laughing now, Flopsy? Come, friendly low-pressure cold fronts! Down with springtime! Death and destruction to the Amaryllidaceae family of perennial flowering bulbs!

Truth is, I’m a bit disappointed by the snow. It seems that, like me, it doesn’t want to settle in Bonn. Actually, I’m more disappointed for it. After coming down all this way, snow deserves a better fate than instantly melting on contact with some snotty piece of pavement.

I wish it would stay longer, because Germany looks good in white. Even the most objectionable pieces of local architecture are rendered merely gut-sinkingly bleak with a light dusting of snow. Yesterday I went for a walk in the forest during a snow storm and it was pretty frickin wunderbar. Reminded me of the first times I visited Germany, before the foreign had become familiar.

Here’s a photograph*:

Oh, all right, my camera’s still broken. It looked more this:

This inspired to write some haikus as soon as I had regained the feeling in my fingers. To wit:

Flurry of whiteness
Trees surrender to the snow
I’m missing Countdown

Snow falling
Means only one thing
Wet socks

A bit pretentious
To walk around in the snow
Let’s face it

If you go down
Pigeon Street here are the people
You could meet

Harder than it looks
This haiku-writing business
Bloody Zen buddhists

etc.

*Spanks, Roblisameehan and blacklord**
** Though I nearly didn’t credit you because of your stupid Flickr names

Addiction to the internet is an illness. I’ll say!*

Constant peeks at GoFugYourself and the Guardian’s minute-by-minute football coverage are making me quite ill. Evidently I have been “exhausting emotions that I could experience in the real world”. Yeah, emotions like scorn, schadenfreude, impatience with strangers… The webosphere is a bitchy place, isn’t it? In fact, I’m a bit sorry about being mean in my blog about Easter bunnies yesterday. The nice man at the petrol station gave me a free marbled egg this morning when I went on an emergency toilet roll sortie (bloody flatmates). So things aren’t all that bad.

Anyway, the good news is that I have managed to turn off the computer for long enough to learn what Keynesianism is. And anti-utilitarianism. And New Contractarianism. Marvellous(ism)! My new course in sustainable development is going swimmingly. I have been doing so much study, I am surely nearly ready to swim 25 metres with a float. No? Ah, it seems that I’m supposed to be doing eight hours a week, not eight minutes. Rats. Well, I’ll soon catch up now that I’ve found out how fascinating economics is. No, really!

It turns out that all those stories about Bear Stearns and recession and the death of irrational exuberance (again) are super interesting. Who knew? There are some particularly thought-provoking bits in the comments section of this story about chickens coming home to roost. Quite a bit of schadenfreude on show.

On the subject of debt and overspending and the like, I realise that I am not YET an international expert in economics (though surely it’s a matter of months), but I wonder if the Goings-On will change the Chinese government’s attempts to change the culture of saving in the country so that people spend more? I read about this a while ago and thought it sounded a bit shifty. Now it definitely sounds shifty, as do some of the eggings-on by the Americans and innurnashional financiers, such as:

“This parsimony now threatens to slow the country’s economic growth. If consumer spending is to keep pace with business investment, China’s middle class will need to shed its caution and learn to spend more of its income.”
McKinsey

“We certainly hope that China changes from a saving society to a consuming society. Right now, because of the lack of a safety net, many Chinese save for what we call a rainy day. What we want is the government to provide more of a safety net so they start buying more US and Australian products.”
President Bush

Well, I’m sure they know best. Blimey! Is that Arsenal one nil up?

*Not to belittle genuine sufferers or anything.

It would be quite easy to develop a phobia of anthropomorphised rabbits around here.

No sooner had my memories of all the malevolent clowns unleashed during Carnival faded than someone decided to send in the Easter Bunny. FOIL WRAPPED.

Can you imagine buying your grandson one of these instead of a nice Chocolate Buttons Easter Egg?

If he didn’t eat it all at once, it would sit grinning at him from his bedside table, waiting for it to get dark so it could chase him around the house and stab him in the heart with an, um, egg. A very pointy one.

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh.

Easter is with us, and Germans seem to be making up for their rather feeble offerings to the great retailer in the sky at Christmastime by entering into an orgy of consumption. Of course, if this were orgiastic consumption of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs I would be right there with them, but as we know you can’t get proper chocolate in Germany, so the shelves are shuddering instead under the weight of aforementioned bunnies, rubbish praline eggs and a veritable smorgasbord of pastel horrorphernalia for the home and garden. Y’know, pale yellow egg-cups, mint-green baskets, pink sawn-off shotguns (probably). There’s no sign of Jesus, just legions of creepy porcelain rabbits dressed in overalls or pushing prams… They are coming to kill us.

I do hope England hasn’t submitted to this craze for Easter rabbits in the same way it has bowed down before The German Christmas Market. Not that I’m averse to a bit of folky Black Forest tat, yuletidedly speaking. I mean, my life’s ambition is to live in a wooden chalet surrounded by gingham material and wooden spoons with hearts carved out of them. That’s the only reason why I’m here. But foil-wrapped bunnies made from inferior chocolate are another matter altogether.

I shall be eating my one remaining tin of Heinz spaghetti hoops this weekend in protest. Happy Easter!

nb: The full Osterhase horror show is at the Reber confectionery website. And don’t think that the hands of Messrs. Milka and Lindt are clean over this matter either, no sir- they are decidedly chocolatey from their work fashioning evil bunny voodoo dolls.